2016

Logo Draft 1

Short Stories Needed to read

Short Stories Provided In This Pack: The Moth by H.G. Wells There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry Images by Alice Munro The Enormous Radio by John Cheever In The Aisles by Clemens Meyer The Wintersongs by Kevin Barry Sez Ner by Arno Camenisch The Telescope by Danila Davydov Robotville and Mr. Caslow by Kurt Vonnegut Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
The Moth by H.G. Wells Probably you have heard of Hapley — not W. T. Hapley, the son, but the celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of Pertplaneta Hapilia, Hapley the entomologist.
If so you know at least of the great feud between Hapley and Professor Pawkins, though certain of its consequences may be new to you. For those who have not, a word or two of explanation is necessary which the idle reader may go over with a glancing eye if his indolence so incline him.
It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really important matters as this Hapley—Pawkins feud. Those epoch-making controversies, again, that have convulsed the Geological Society are, I verily believe, almost entirely unknown outside the fellowship of that body I have heard men of fair general education even refer to the great scenes at these meetings as vestry-meeting squabbles. Yet the great hate of the English and Scotch geologists has lasted now half a century and has left deep and abundant marks upon the body of the science. And this Hapley—Pawkins business, though perhaps a more personal affair, stirred passions as profound, if not profounder.
Your common man has no conception of the zeal that animates a scientific investigator, the fury of contradiction you can arouse in him. It is the odiumtheologicum in a new form. There are men, for instance, who would gladly burn Sir Ray Lankester at Smithfield for his treatment of the Mollusca in the Encyclopaedia. That fantastic extension of the Cephalopods to cover the Pteropods... But I wander from Hapley and Pawkins.
It began years and years ago with a revision of the Microlepidoptera (whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new species created by Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied by a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins. Pawkins in his Rejoinder suggested that Hapley's microscope was as defective as his power of observation, and called him an 'irresponsible meddler' —Hapley was not a professor at that time. Hapley, in his retort, spoke of 'blundering collectors', and described, as if inadvertently, Pawkins's revision as a 'miracle of ineptitude'. It was war to the knife. However, it would scarcely interest the reader to detail how these two great men quarrelled, and how the split between them widened until from the Microlepidoptera they were at war upon every open question in entomology. There were memorable occasions. At times the Royal Entomological Society meetings resembled nothing so much as the Chamber of Deputies. On the whole, I fancy Pawkins was nearer the truth than Hapley. But Hapley was skilful with his rhetoric, had a turn for ridicule rare in a scientific man, was endowed with vast energy, and had a fine sense of injury in the matter of the extinguished species; while Pawkins was a man of dull presence, prosy of speech, in shape not unlike a water barrel, over-conscientious with testimonials, and suspected of jobbing museum
appointments. So the young men gathered round Hapley and applauded him. It was a long struggle, vicious from the beginning and growing at last to pitiless antagonism. The successive turns of fortune, now an advantage to one side and now to another — now Hapley tormented by some success of Pawkins, and now Pawkins outshone by Hapley, belong rather to the history of entomology than to this story.
But in 1891 Pawkins, whose health had been bad for some time, published some work upon the 'mesoblast' of the Death's-Head Moth. What the mesoblast of the Death's-Head Moth may be does not matter a rap in this story. But the work was far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley an opening he had coveted for years. He must have worked night and day to make the most of his advantage.
In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters - one can fancy the man's disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went for his antagonist — and Pawkins made a reply halting, ineffectual, with painful gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his will to wound Hapley, nor his incapacity to do it. But few of those who heard him — I was absent from that meeting — realized how ill the man was. Hapley got his opponent down, and meant to finish him. He followed with a brutal attack upon Pawkins, the form of a paper upon the development of moths in general, a paper showing evidence of an extraordinary amount of labour, couched in a violently controversial tone. Violent as it was, an editorial note witnesses that it was modified. It must have covered Pawkins with shame and confusion of face. It left no loophole; it was murderous in argument, and utterly contemptuous in tone; an awful thing for the declining years of a man's career.
The world of entomologists waited breathlessly for the rejoinder from Pawkins. He would try one, for Pawkins had always been game. But when it came it surprised them. For the rejoinder of Pawkins was to catch influenza, proceed to pneumonia, and die.It was perhaps as effectual a reply as he could make under the circumstances, and largely turned the current of feeling against Hapley. The very people who had most gleefully cheered on those gladiators became serious at the consequence. There could be no reasonable doubt the fret of the defeat had contributed to the death of Pawkins. There was a limit even to scientific controversy said serious people. Another crushing attack was already in the press and appeared on the day before the funeral. I don't think Hapley exerted himself to stop it.
People remembered how Hapley had hounded down his rival and forgot that rival's defects. Scathing satire reads ill over fresh mould. The thing provoked comment in the daily papers. It was that made me think you had probably heard of Hapley and this controversy. But, as I have already remarked, scientific workers live very much in a world of their own; half the people, I dare say who go along Piccadilly to the Academy every year could not tell you where the learned societies abide. Many even think that research is a kind of happy-family cage in which all kinds of men lie down together in peace.
In his private thoughts Hapley could not forgive Pawkins for dying. In the first place, it was a mean dodge to escape the absolute pulverization Hapley had in hand for him, and in the second, it left Hapley's mind with a queer gap in it. For twenty years he had worked hard, sometimes far into the night, and seven days a week, with microscope, scalpel, collectingnet, and pen, and almost entirely with reference to Pawkins. The European reputation he had won had come as an incident in that great antipathy. He had gradually worked up to a climax in this last controversy. It had killed Pawkins, but it had also thrown Hanley out of gear, so to speak, and his doctor advised him to give up work for a time, and rest. So Hapley went down into a quiet village in Kent, and thought day and night of Pawkins and good things it was now impossible to say about him.
At last Hapley began to realize in what direction the preoccupation tended. He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to read novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face and making his last speech — every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley. He turned to fiction — and found it had no grip on him. He read the 'Island Nights' Entertainments' until his 'sense of causation' was shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to Kipling, and found he 'proved nothing' besides being irreverent and vulgar. These scientific people have their limitations. Then unhappily he tried Besant's 'Timer House', and the opening chapter set his mind upon learned societies and Pawkins at once.
So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping ineffectually against checkmate, and Hapley decided to give up chess.
Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be better diversion. The best rest is change of occupation. Hapley determined to plunge at diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes and Halibut's monograph sent down from London. He thought that perhaps if he could get up a vigorous quarrel with Halibut, he might be able to begin life afresh and forget Pawkins. And very soon he was hard at work in his habitual strenuous fashion at these microscopic denizens of the wayside pool. 
It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a novel addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the microscope, and the only light in the room was the brilliant little lamp with the special form of green shade. Like all experienced microscopists, he kept both eyes open. It is the only way to avoid excessive fatigue. One eye was over the instrument, and bright and distinct before that was the circular field of the microscope, across which a brown diatom was slowly moving. With the other eye Hapley saw, as it were, without seeing. He was only dimly conscious of the brass side of the instrument, the illuminated part of the tablecloth, a sheet of notepaper, the foot of the lamp, and the darkened room beyond. 
Suddenly his attention drifted from one eye to the other. The tablecloth was of the material called tapestry by shopmen, and rather brightly coloured. The pattern was in gold, with a small amount of crimson and pale blue upon a greyish ground. At one point the pattern seemed displaced, and there was a vibrating movement of the colours at this point. Hapley suddenly moved his head back and looked with both eyes. His mouth fell open with astonishment. It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion!
It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were closed. Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when fluttering to its present position. Strange that it should match the tablecloth. Stranger far that to him, Hapley, the great entomologist, it was altogether unknown. There was no delusion. It was crawling slowly towards the foot of the lamp.
'New Genus, by heavens! And in England!' said Hapley, staring.
Then he suddenly thought of Pawkins. Nothing would have maddened Pawkins more... And Pawkins was dead!
Something about the head and body of the insect became singularly suggestive of Pawkins, just as the chess king had been. 'Confound Pawkins!' said Hapley. 'But I must catch this' And looking round him for some means of capturing the moth, he rose slowly out of his chair. Suddenly the insect rose, struck the edge of the lampshade Hapley heard the 'ping' — and vanished into the shadow 
In a moment Hapley had whipped off the shade, so that the whole room was illuminated. The thing had disappeared, but soon his practised eye detected it upon the wallpaper near the door. He went towards it poising the lampshade for capture. Before he was within striking distance, however, it had risen and was fluttering round the room. After the fashion of its kind, it flew with sudden starts and turns, seeming to vanish here and reappear there. Once Hapley struck, and missed; then again.
The third time he hit his microscope. The instrument swayed, struck and overturned the lamp, and fell noisily upon the floor. The lamp turned over on the table and, very luckily, went out. Hanley was left in the dark. With a start he felt the strange moth blunder into his face.
It was maddening. He had no lights. If he opened the door of the room the thing would get away. In the darkness he saw Pawkins quite distinctly laughing at him. Pawkins had ever an oily laugh. He swore furiously and stamped his foot on the floor. There was a timid rapping at the door. Then it opened, perhaps a foot, and very slowly. The alarmed face of the landlady appeared behind a pink candle flame, she wore a nightcap over her grey hair and had some purple garment over her shoulders.
'What was that fearful smash?' she said. 'Has anything-'
The strange moth appeared fluttering about the chink of the door. 'Shut that door!' said Hapley, and suddenly rushed at her.
The door slammed hastily. Hapley was left alone in the dark. Then in the pause he heard his landlady scuttle upstairs, lock her door, and drag something heavy across the room and put it against it.
It became evident to Hapley that his conduct and appearance had been strange and alarming. Confound the moth! and Pawkins! However, it was a pity to lose the moth now. He felt his way into the hall and found the matches, after sending his hat down upon the floor with a noise like a drum. With the lighted candle he returned to the sitting-room. No moth was to be seen. Yet once for a moment it seemed that the thing was fluttering round his head. Hapley very suddenly decided to give up the moth and go to bed. But he was excited. All night long his sleep was broken by dreams of the moth, Pawkins, and his landlady. Twice in the night he turned out and soused his head in cold water.
One thing was very clear to him. His landlady could not possibly understand about the strange moth, especially as he had failed to catch it. No one but an entomologist would understand quite how he felt. She was probably frightened at his behaviour, and yet he failed to see how he could explain it. He decided to say nothing further about the events of last night. After breakfast he saw her in her garden, and decided to go out and talk to reassure her. He talked to her about beans and potatoes, bees, caterpillars, and the price of fruit. She replied in her usual manner, but she looked at him a little suspiciously, and kept walking as he walked, so that there was always a bed of flowers, or a row of beans, or something of the sort, between them. After a while he began to feel singularly irritated at this, and, to conceal his vexation, went indoors and presently went out for a walk.
The moth, or butterfly, trailing an odd flavour of Pawkins with it, kept coming into that walk though he did his best to keep his mind off it. Once he saw it quite distinctly, with its wings flattened out, upon the old stone wall that runs along the west edge of the park, but going up to it he found it was only two lumps of grey and yellow lichen. 'This,' said Hapley, 'is the reverse of mimicry. Instead of a butterfly looking like a stone, here is a stone looking like a butterfly!' Once something hovered and fluttered round his head, but by an effort of will he drove that impression out of his mind again.
In the afternoon Hapley called upon the Vicar, and argued with him upon theological questions. They sat in the little arbour covered with brier, and smoked as they wrangled. 'Look at that moth!' said Hapley suddenly, pointing to the edge of the wooden table. 
'Where? said the Vicar.
'You don't see a moth on the edge of the table there?’ said Hapley.
'Certainly not,' said the Vicar.
Hapley was thunderstruck. He gasped. The Vicar was staring at him. Clearly the man saw nothing. 'The eye of faith is no better than the eye of science,' said Hapley awkwardly.
'I don't see your point,' said the Vicar, thinking it was part of the argument.
That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat on the edge of the bed in his shirt-sleeves and reasoned with himself. Was it pure hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled for his sanity with the same silent energy he had formerly displayed against Pawkins. So persistent is mental habit that he felt as if it were still a struggle with Pawkins. He was well versed in psychology. He knew that such visual illusions do come as a result of mental strain. But the point was, he did not only see the moth, he had heard it when it touched the edge of the lampshade and afterwards when it hit against the wall, and he had felt it strike his face in the dark.
He looked at it. It was not at all dream-like but perfectly clear and solid-looking in the candlelight. He saw the hairy body and the short feathery antennae, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was rubbed from the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being afraid of a little insect.
His landlady had got the servant to sleep with her that night, because she was afraid to be alone. In addition she had locked the door and put the chest of drawers against it. They listened and talked in whispers after they had gone to bed, but nothing occurred to alarm them. About eleven they had ventured to put the candle out and had both dozed off to sleep. They woke with a start, and sat up in bed, listening in the darkness.
Then they heard slippered feet going to and fro in Hapley's room. A chair was overturned and there was a violent dab at the wall. Then a china mantel ornament smashed upon the fender. Suddenly the door of the room opened, and they heard him upon the landing. They clung to one another, listening. He seemed to be dancing upon the staircase. Now he would go down three or four steps quickly, then up again, then hurry down into the hall They heard the umbrella-stand go over, and the fanlight break. Then the bolt shot and the chain rattled. He was opening the door. They hurried to the window. It was a dim grey night; an almost unbroken sheet of watery cloud was sweeping across the moon, and the hedge and trees in front of the house were black against the pale roadway. They saw Hapley, looking like a ghost in his shirt and white trousers, running to and fro in the road and beating the air. Now he would stop, now he would dart very rapidly at something invisible, now he would move upon it with stealthy strides. At last he went out of sight up the road towards the down Then while they argued who should go down and lock the door, he returned. He was walking very fast, and he came straight into the house, closed the door carefully, and went quietly up to his bedroom. Then everything was silent.
'Mrs Colville,' said Hapley, calling down the staircase next morning, 'I hope I did not alarm you last night.'
'You may well ask that!' said Mrs Colville.
'The fact is, I am a sleep-walker, and the last two nights I have been without my sleeping mixture. There is nothing to be alarmed about, really. I am sorry! made such an ass of myself. I will go over the down to Shoreham, and get some stuff to make me sleep soundly I ought to have done that yesterday'.
But halfway over the down, by the chalk pits, the moth came upon Hapley again. He went on, trying to keep his mind upon chess problems, but it was no good. The thing fluttered into his face, and he struck at it with his hat in self-defence. Then rage, the old rage—the rage he had so often felt against Pawkins came upon him again. He went on, leaping and striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly he trod on nothing, and fell headlong.
There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on the heap of flints in front of the opening of the chalk pits, with a leg twisted back under him. The strange moth was still fluttering round his head. He struck at it with his hand, and turning his head saw two men approaching him. One was the village doctor. It occurred to Hapley that this was lucky. Then it came into his mind with extraordinary vividness, that no one would ever be able to see the strange moth except himself, and that it behoved him to keep silent about it.
Late that night, however, after his broken leg was set, he was feverish and forgot his selfrestraint. He was lying flat on his bed, and he began to run his eyes round the room to see if the moth was still about. He tried not to do this, but it was no good. He soon caught sight of the thing resting dose to his hand, by the night-light, on the green tablecloth. The wings quivered. With a sudden wave of anger he smote at it with his fist, and the nurse woke up with a shriek. He had missed it.
'That moth!' he said; and then: 'It was fancy. Nothing!'
All the time he could see quite clearly the insect going round the cornice and darting across the room,and he could also see that the nurse saw nothing of it and looked at him strangely He must keep himself in hand. He knew he was a lost man if he did not keep himself in hand, But as the night waned the fever grew upon him, and the very dread he had of seeing the moth made him see it. About five, just as the dawn was grey, he tried to get out of bed and catch it, though his leg was afire with pain. The nurse had to struggle with him.
On account of this, they tied him down to the bed. At this the moth grew bolder, and once he felt it settle in his hair. Then, because he struck out violently with his arms, they tied these also. At this the moth came and crawled over his face, and Hapley wept, swore, screamed, prayed for them to take it off him, unavailingly.
The doctor was a blockhead, a just-qualified general practitioner, and quite ignorant of mental science. He simply said there was no moth. Had he possessed the wit, he might still perhaps have saved Hapley from his fate by entering into his delusion, and covering his
face with gauze as he prayed might be done. But, as I say, the doctor was a blockhead; and until the leg was healed Hapley was kept tied to his bed, with the imaginary moth crawling over him. It never left him while he was awake and it grew to a monster in his dreams. While he was awake he longed for sleep, and from sleep he awoke screaming. 
So now Hapley is spending the remainder of his days in a padded room, worried by a moth that no one else can see. The asylum doctor calls it hallucination; but Hapley, when he is in his easier mood and can talk, says it is the ghost of Pawkins, and consequently a unique specimen and well worth the trouble of catching.

There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry It was deadening winter, one of those feeble afternoons with coal smoke for light, but I found myself in reliably cheerful form. I floated above it all, pleasantly distanced, though the streets were as dumb-witted as always that day, and the talkshops were a babble of pleas and rage and love declared, of all things, love sent out to Ukraine and Chad. It was midweek, and grimly the women stormed the veg stalls, and the traffic groaned, sulked, convulsed itself, and the face of the town was pinched with ill-ease. I had a song in my throat, a twinkle in my eye, a flower in my buttonhole. If I'd had a cane, I would have twirled it, unquestionably.
I passed down Dorset Street. I looked across to the launderette. I make a point always of looking into the launderettes. I like the steamy domesticity. I like to watch the bare fleshy arms as they fold and stack, load and unload, the busyness of it, like a Soviet film of the workers at toil. I find it quite comical, and also heartbreaking. Have the misfortunes no washing machines themselves, I worry? Living in old flats, I suppose, with shared hoovers beneath the stairs, and the smell of fried onions in the hallway and the awful things you'd rather not hear late at night... turn up the television, will you, for Jesus' sake, is that a shriek or a creaking door?
And there he was, by the launderette window. Smoking a fag, if you don't mind. Even though I was on the other side of the street, I couldn't mistake him, he was not one you'd easily mistake. Steel- wire for hair, a small tight mushroom-shaped cloud of it, and he was wizened beyond his years, owlish, with the bones of the face arranged in a hasty symmetry that didn't quite take, and a torso too short for his long legs, heron's legs, and he was pigeon-chested, poetical, sad-faced.
I walked on, and I felt the cold rise into myself from the deep stone centre of the town. I quickened my pace. I was too scared to look back. I knew that he'd seen me too, and I knew that he would flee, that he would have no choice but to flee. He was one of my oldest and most argued with friends. He had been dead for six years.
I didn't stop until I reached the river. The banks of the river were peopled with the foul and forgotten of the town, skin-poppers and jaw-chewers, hanging onto their ratty dogs for dear life, eating sausage rolls out of the Centra, wearing thin nylon clothes against the seep of the evil-smelling air. The river light was jaunty, blue- green, it softened and prettified as best as it could. I sat on a bench and sucked down some long, deep breaths. If I had been able to speak, the words would have been devil words, spat with a sibilant hiss, all consonants and hate. Drab office workers in Durmes suits chomped baguettes. People scurried, with their heads down. People muttered; people moaned. I tried to train my thoughts into logical arrangements but they tossed and broke free. I heard the oompah and
swirls of circus music, my thoughts swung through the air like tiny acrobats, flung each other into the big tent's canvas maw, missed the catch, fell to the net.
I was in poor shape, but slowly the water started to work on me, calmed me, allowed me to corral the acrobats and put names to them. A car wreck, in winter, in the middle of the night, that had done for him, and there is no coming back from the likes of that, or so you would think. The road had led to Oranmore.
I tried my feet, and one went hesitantly in front of the other, and they sent me in the direction of Bus Aras. I decided there was nothing for it but to take a bus to the hills and to hide out for a while there, with the gentle people. I walked, a troubled man, in the chalk- stripe suit and the cheeky bowler, and this is where it got good. A barrier had been placed across the river's walkway and there was a sign tacked up. It read: 
NO PEDESTRIAN ACCESS BEYOND THIS POINT 
Fine, okay, so I crossed the road, but the throughway on Eden Quay was blocked too, with the same sign repeated, and I thought, waterworks, gasworks, cables, men in day-glo jackets, I'll cut up and around, but there was no access from Abbey Street, or from Store Street, everywhere the same sign had been erected: Bus Aras was a no-go zone. I saw a man in the uniform of the State, and he had sympathetic eyes, so I approached and questioned him. 
'I am sorry, sir,' he said. 'There are no buses from here today. There are no buses in or out.' 
I stood before him, horrified, and not because of the transport situation, which at the best of times wasn't great, but because this  man in the uniform was undeniably Harry Carolan, a.k.a. Harry Cakes, the bread-and-fancies man of my childhood. The van would be around every day at half three, set your watch by it, loaves of white and loaves of brown, fresh baked, and ring doughnuts and jammy doughnuts and sticky buns too. The creased kind folds of his face, the happy downturned mouth, eyes that in a more innocent era we'd have described as 'dancing'. Eclairs! Fresh-cream swiss rolls! All the soda bread you could eat, until 1983, when Harry Cakes had dropped down dead in his shoes. 
I went through the town like a flurry of dirty snow. This is a good one, I said to myself, oh this is a prize-taker. Now the faces of the streets seemed no different. It was the same bleary democracy as before. Some of us mad, some in love, some very tired, and all of us, it seemed, resigned to our humdrum affairs. People rearranged their shopping bags so as to balance the weight. Motorists tamped down their dull fury as best as they could. A busking trumpeter played 'Spanish Harlem'. I took on a sudden notion. I thought: might a bowl of soup not in some fundamental way sort me out? 
There was a cafe nearby, on Denmark Street. I would not call it a stylish operation. It was a fight cramped space, with a small scattering of tables, greasy ketchup holders, wipeable
plastic table cloths in a check pattern, Larry Cogan doing the just-a-minute quiz on a crackling radio, and I took a seat, composed myself, and considered the menu. It was written in a language I had no knowledge of. The slanted graphics of the lettering were a puzzle to me, the numerals were alien, I couldn't even tell if I was holding the thing the right way up. No matter, I thought, sure all I'm after is a drop of soup, and I clicked my fingers to summon the waiter. 
You'd swear I'd asked him to take out his eyes and put them on a plate for me. The face on him, and he slugging across the floor, a big bruiser from the county. 
'What's the soup, captain?' I asked. 
'Carrot and coriander,' he said, flatly, as though the vocal chords were held with pliers. He seemed to grudge me the very words, and he did so in a midwestem accent and as always, this drew me in. 
I considered the man. A flatiron face, hot with angry energies, mean thin mouth, aggravation in the oyster-grey eyes, and a challenging set to the jaw, anticipating conflict, which I had no intention of providing. I looked at him, wordlessly—you'll understand that by now I was somewhat adrift, as regards the emotions—and the café was on pause around us, and he grew impatient. 
'Do you want the soup or what?' he said, almost hissed it, and it was at this point he clarified for me, I made out the childhood face in back of the adult's. 
'It's Thomas, isn't it? Thomas Cremins?' 
Sealight came into the oyster-grey, he gleamed with recognition, and it put the tiniest amount of happiness in his face—even this was enough to put some innocence back, too, and thus youth. He clarified still further: detail came back for me. He'd been one of those gaunt kids, bootlace thin and more than averagely miserable, a slime of dried snot on the sleeve of his school jumper. I remembered him on the bus home each day, waiting for someone braver to make the first move at hooliganism. A sheep, a follower, no doubt dullminded, but somehow I remembered kindness in him, too. He said: 
'Fitz?' 
We talked, awkwardly but warmly, and with each sentence my own accent became more midwestern, and his circumstances came back to me. I remembered the small house, on a greystone terrace, near the barracks. Sometimes, after school, I would have been in there for biscuits and video games, and I remembered his sister, too, older and blousy, occasional fodder of forlorn fantasies, and of course there was his younger brother, younger than me but... ah. 
Alan Cremirts had been killed, hadn't he? Of course, it all came back. It had been one of these epochal childhood deaths some of us have the great excitement to encounter. He was caught in an April thunderstorm, fishing at Plassey, and he took shelter in a tower there and was struck by lightning. I remember the shine of fear on us all, for weeks after. Hadn't we all been fishing at Plassey, at some point  or other, and hadn't we all seen the weather that day, it could have been each and any of us. It was about this same time I noticed girls. I liked big healthy girls with well-scrubbed faces. We had any amount of them in the midwest. 
Should I mention it?
'I remember,' I said. 'Oh God, Thomas, I remember the time with Alan. When he, you know...' 
'Al?' he smiled. 'You remember Al?' '
Of course,' I said, though in truth it was vague. I remembered a slip of a child, a pale face, hadn't he, blue-veined I think, one of those cold-looking young fellas 
'Sure isn't he inside,' beamed Thomas, and he called out: 
'Al! Come here I want you!' 
Alan Cremins, in chef pants and a sweat-drenched tee-shirt, with a tureen's ladle in his hand, stepped through the swing doors of the kitchen and he smiled at me, a somewhat foxed smile. 
'Fitz?' he said. 
Grotesque! Horrible! A child's head on a full-grown man's body! I legged it. What else could I do? Away into the winter streets, these malignant streets, and I raved somewhat at the falling skies: you couldn't but forgive me for that. 
By and by, anger overtook my despair. Frankly, I'd had enough of this messing for one day. I raised the collars of my jacket and dug my hands into the pockets of my trousers. I hunched my shoulders against the knifing wind. The sky was heavy with snow, and it began to fall, and each drop had taken on the stain of the town before it hit the pavement. Chestnut sellers huddled inside their ancient greatcoats. Beggars whittled the dampness off sticks to keep the barrel fires stoked. The talkshops sang in dissonant voices. Tyres squealed angrily in the slush. Black dogs roamed in packs. We were all of us in the town bitten with cold, whipped by the wind, utterly ravaged by this mean winter, but we stomped along, regardless, like one of those marvellously tragic Russian armies one reads about. 
Of course, yes. The obvious explanation did present itself, and as I slipped along the streets, heading north out of town, I considered it. If the dead were all around me, was it conceivable that I myself had joined their legion ranks? Was this heaven or hell on the North Circular Road? A ludicrous idea, clearly—I was in far too much pain not to be alive. I soldiered on. I began to wind my way slowly westwards and the Streets quietened of commerce and became small terrace streets, and toothless crones huddled in the sad grogshops, and from somewhere there was the scrape of a plaintive fiddle. A man with a walrus moustache came along, all purposeful, and he passed a handbill to me. It announced a public meeting the Saturday coming: Larkin was the promised speaker, his topic predictably dreary. 
I made it to the park, and it was desolate, with nobody at all to be seen, and it calmed me to walk there. I came across some of the park's tame deer. They were huddled behind a windbreak of trees, and I stopped to watch them. The tough-skinned bucks seemed comfortable enough in the extreme weather, but the does and the fawns had to work hard at it—there were rolling shudders of effort along their flanks as they took down the cold air, and the display of this was a symptom of glorious life, and my heart rose. 
Fawns! I was clearly in a highly emotional state, and I thought it best to make a move for home. Jesus' sake, Fitzy, I said, come on out of it, will you, before they arrive with the nets. 
I went into the northwestern suburbs of the town, the patch that I had made my home, and I allowed no stray thoughts. By sheer force of will, I would put the events of the afternoon behind me. I made it at last to my quiet, residential street in my quiet, residential suburb. I rent there the ground floor of an ageing semi, and the situation I find ideal. I have a sitting room, a lounge, a neat, single man's bedroom, and a pleasant, light kitchen from which French doors open to a small, oblong garden, and to this I have sole access. I turned the key and stepped inside. I brushed the dirty snow from my shoulders, and I allowed the weight of the day to slide from me with the chalkstripe jacket. I blew on my hands to warm them. I went through to the kitchen area and drank a glass of water. I then pulled open the French doors and stepped outside. 
I stepped into glorious summer. The fruit trees were full in bloom, and it was the dense languor of July heat, unmistakable, and I unfolded my striped deckchair and sat back in it. The transistor was by my feet and I turned it on for the gentle strings, for the swoons and lulls of the afternoon concert. I removed my galoshes and my shoes and stockings, and I stretched ten pale toes on the white-hot concrete of the patio. I unfolded my handkerchief and tied it about my head. I turned up the sleeves of my shirt, and opened the top three pearl buttons to reveal an amount of scrawny chest. I listened: to the soft stir of the notes, and the trills and scratchings of insect life all around, and the efficient buzzing of the hedge strimmers, and the children of the vicinity at play. They played crankily in the sun, and it was my experience that the hot days could make the children come over rather evil-eyed and scary, beyond mere mischief, and sometimes on the warm nights they lurked till all
hours around the streets, they hid from me in the shadows, and played unpleasant tricks, startling me out of my skin as I walked home from the off-licence. 
Drinks were all I was required to provide for myself. Since I had begun this lease, I found that the shelves daily replenished themselves. Nothing fancy, but sufficient: fresh fruit and veg, wholemeal breads, small rations of lean meat and tinned fish, rice and pasta, tubs of stir-in sauce, leaf tea, occasionally some chocolate for a treat. I had a  small money tin in the kitchen, and each time I opened it, it contained precisely eight euro and ninety-nine cent, which was the cost of a drinkable rioja at the nearby branch of Bargain Booze. Utilities didn't seem to be an issue—no bills arrived. In fact, there was no mail from anywhere, ever. 
The phone, however, was another matter. Sometimes, it seemed as if the thing never stopped, and it rang now, and I sighed deeply in my deckchair, and I lifted my ageless limbs. I went inside to it—summoned! The power of the little fucker. 
'Uphi uBen?' said the voice. 'Le yindawo la wafa khona?'
'I'm sorry,' I replied, wearily. 'I have no idea what you're talking about. Didn't get a word.'
'Ngifanele ukukhuluma naye.'
'No,' I said. 'Not getting this at all. Thank you.' 
I hung up, and waited, for the calls always came in threes, and sure enough, it immediately rang again. 
‘Chce rozrnawiac z Maria! Musze powiedziec jej, ze ja kocham!' 
'Please!' I said. 'Don't you speak any English at all?' 
'For sure,' he said, and hung up. 
The third call was promptly put through. 
'An bhfuil Tadhg ann? An bhfaca tü Tadhg?' 
'I don't know any Tadhgs!' I cried. 'I haven't seen any Tadhgs!' I'd complained several times to the Exchange, for all the good it had done me, but I thought I may as well try again. I dialed the three-digit number and was quickly connected to a faceless agent. The Exchange was part of the apparatus of the State that seemed to be a law onto itself. I gave my name and my citizen tag-number. 
'I'm getting the calls again,' I said. 'It's been a bad week, it's been practically every day this week and sometimes at night, too. Can you imagine what this is doing to my nerves? There's been no improvement at all. You promised it would improve!' 
'Who promised, sir?' 
'One of your agents.' 
'Which agent, sir?' 
'How would I know? I wasn't given the agent I.D., was I?' 
'No you were not, sir. We are hardly permitted to enter into personal terms with citizens of the State. It would be untoward, sir. This is the Exchange, sir.' 
'Well how can I tell if...' 
'Please hold.' 
A maudlin rendition of 'Spanish Harlem', on trumpet, and I whistled along, miserably. I had fallen into melancholy—the drab old routine of these days can get to a soul. But I was determined not to hang up. They expect you to hang up, you see, and in this way, they can proceed, they can get away with their thoughtlessness. The music faded out, and I was given a series of fresh options. 
'If you wish to hear details of the Exchange's new evening call rates, please press one.' 
I threw my eyes to the heavens. 
'If you would like a top-up for your free-go, anywhere-anytime service, please press two.' 
I refused to carry one of those infernal contraptions. 
'If you wish to discuss employment opportunities at the Exchange, and to hear details of our screening arrangements, and of our physical and mental requirements for operatives, voice engineers and full-blown agents, please press three.' 
I'd rather work in the sewers. 
'If you seek an answer to the sense of vagueness that surrounds your existence like a fine mist, please press four.' 
I pressed four. A happy voice exploded in my ear. It was the voice of heartiness. It was the voice of a resort manager at a mid-priced beach destination. It was a kind of stage Australian.
'Watcha!' it said. 'Feelin' kinda grooky, mate? What ya wanna do, ya wanna go down yar garden, ya wanna go down them fruit trees, and ya wanna find the ladder that's hidden there, right? Then what do ya do? YA BLOODY WELL CLIMB IT!!!' 
The phone cut out—dead air. I proceeded directly to the garden. I put on a pair of plimsolls. I removed the handkerchief from my  head. I walked down to the dense, summer tangle of fruit trees. I pulled back the hanging vines, parted the thick curtains of growth, and I could see nothing, at first but then my eyes adjusted to the dappled half-light and I made out a dull, golden gleam, and yes, it was a ladder. I pushed my way through, thorns snagging on my trousers, and I began to climb. Slowly, painfully, I ascended through the thick foliage and I came to the treetops, and a view of my suburb, its neat hedges and mossy slate rooftops, and I climbed on, and I went into the white clouds and I climbed still higher, and the ladder rose up against rocky outcrops. I found that I was climbing past the blinding limestone of a cliff-face, and at last I got to the top, and I hauled myself up onto the salty springy turf. 
I walked. The marine breeze was pleasant, at first, after my sweaty efforts, but soon it started to chill me. It was a bright but blowy spring day, and the first of the cliff-top flowers were starting to appear: the tormentil, the early orchids, the bird's foot trefoil. A milky white sea lapped below, it had latent aggression in it, and I looked down the stretch of the coastline and oh, I don't know, it may have been Howth, or Bray, or one of these places. There was nobody around. Black-headed terns battled with the wind and rose up on it, they let it turn and throw them: sheer play. I walked, and I concentrated on clearing my mind. I wanted to white out now. I wanted to leave all of it behind me again. 
Yes I walked, I walked into the breeze, and after a time I came to one of those mounted telescopes, the kind that you always get at the seaside. I searched in my pocket, found a half-crown, inserted it, and the block slid away on the eyepiece and I looked through. There appeared to be a problem with the telescope—it was locked in place, it wouldn't swivel and allow me to scan the water, the shore, the sky. It was locked onto a small circle of grey shingle, just by the water's edge, and I saw that it was a cold and damp day down there. It was winter by the tide-line, it was springtime on the cliffs.
I kept looking, and she appeared. She crouched on her heels and looked out over the water. She wore a long coat belted, and a wool scarf about her throat. It wasn't a close-up view but even so, I could see that age had gone on her. I could see the slump of adult weariness. The view was in black and white, flickering, it was old footage, a silent movie, and I knew that the moment down there had passed, too, and that she herself was long gone now. If I was to find her again, it would be pure chance, a random call coming through the Exchange. And I would try to explain, I would. I'd try to tell her why it had happened the way that it did, but my words would sink beneath the waves, where shock-bright colours surprise the gloom: the anemones and starfish and deadman's fingers, the clam and the barnacle, the brittlestar. 
The eyepiece blacked out and I walked back the way that I came. I descended the ladder to an autumn garden. Russets and golds and a bled, cool sky: turtleneck weather. My favourite time, the season of loss and devotion.

Images by Alice Munro Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, "If you don't remember me you don't remember much," but let the matter drop, just once adding, "I bet you never went to your grandma's house last summer. I bet you don't remember that either." 
It was called, even that summer, my grandma's house, though my grandfather was then still alive. He had withdrawn into one room, the largest front bedroom. It had wooden shutters on the inside of the windows, like the living room and dining room; the other bedrooms had only blinds. Also, the veranda kept out the light so that my grandfather lay in near-darkness all day, with his white hair, now washed and tended and soft as a baby's, and his white nightshirt and pillows, making an island in the room which people approached with diffidence, but resolutely. Mary McQuade in her uniform was the other island in the room, and she sat mostly not moving where the fan, as if it was tired, stirred the air like soup. It must have been too dark to read or knit, supposing she wanted to do those things, and so she merely waited and breathed, making a sound like the fan made, full of old indefinable complaint. 
I was so young then I was put to sleep in a crib—not at home but this was what was kept for me at my grandma's house—in a room across the hall. There was no fan there and the dazzle of outdoors—all the flat fields round the house turned, in the sun, to the brilliance of water— made lightning cracks in the drawn-down blinds. Who could sleep? My mother's my grandmother's my aunts' voices wove their ordinary repetitions, on the veranda in the kitchen in the dining room (where with a little brass-handled brush my mother cleaned the white cloth, and the lighting-fixture over the round table hung down unlit flowers of thick, butterscotch glass). All the meals in that house, the cooking, the visiting, the conversation, even someone playing on the piano (it was my youngest aunt, Edith, not married, singing and playing with one hand, Nita, Juanita, softly falls the southern moon)--all this life going on. Yet the ceilings of the rooms were very high and under them was a great deal of dim wasted space, and when I lay in my crib too hot to sleep, I could look up and see that emptiness, the stained corners, and feel, without know- ing what it was, just what everybody else in the house must have felt— under the sweating heat the fact of deathcontained, that little lump of magic ice. And Mary McQuade waiting in her starched white dress, big and gloomy as an iceberg herself, implacable, waiting and breathing. I held her responsible. 
So I pretended not to remember her. She had not put on her white uniform, which did not really make her less dangerous but might mean, at least, that the time of her power had not yet come. Out in the daylight, and not dressed in white, she turned out to be freckled all over, every- where you could see, as if she was sprinkled with oatmeal, and she had a
crown of frizzy, glinting, naturally brass-colored hair. Her voice was loud and hoarse, and complaint was her everyday language. "Am I going to have to hang up this wash all by myself?" she shouted at me, in the yard, and I followed her to the clothesline platform where with a groan she let down the basket of wet clothes. "Hand me them clothespins. One at a time. Hand me them right side up. I shouldn't be out in this wind at all, I've got a bronchial condition." Head hung, like an animal chained to her side, I fed her clothespins. Outdoors, in the cold March air, she lost some of her bulk and her smell. In the house I could always smell her, even in the rooms she seldom entered. What was her smell like? It was like metal and like some dark spice (cloves—she did suffer from toothache) and like the preparation rubbed on my chest when I had a cold. I mentioned it once to my mother, who said, "Don't be silly, I don't smell anything." So I never told about the taste, and there was a taste too. It was in all the food Mary McQuade prepared and perhaps in all food eaten in her presence— in my porridge at breakfast and my fried potatoes at noon and the slice of bread and butter and brown sugar she gave me to eat in the yard— something foreign, gritty, depressing. How could my parents not know about it? But for reasons of their own they would pretend. This was something I had not known a year ago. 
After she had hung out the wash she had to soak her feet. Her legs came straight up, round as drainpipes, from the steaming basin. One hand on each knee, she bent into the steam and gave grunts of pain and satisfaction. "Are you a nurse?" I said, greatly daring, though my mother had said she was. 
"Yes I am and I wish I wasn't." 
"Are you my aunt too?" 
"If I was your aunt you would call me Aunt Mary, wouldn't you? Well, you don't, do you? I'm your cousin, I'm your father's cousin. That's why they get me instead of getting an ordinary nurse. I'm a practical nurse. And there is always somebody sick in this family and I got to go to them. I never get a rest."
I doubted this. I doubted that she was asked to come. She came, and cooked what she liked and rearranged things to suit herself, complaining about drafts, and let her power loose in the house. If she had never come, my mother would never have taken to her bed. 
My mother's bed was set up in the dining room, to spare Mary McQuade climbing the stairs. My mother's hair was done in two little thin dark braids, her cheeks were sallow, her neck warm and smelling of raisins as it always did, but the rest of her under the covers had changed into some large, fragile, and mysterious object, difficult to move. She spoke of herself gloomily in the third person, saying, "Be careful, don't hurt Mother, don't sit on Mother's legs." Every time she said "Mother" I felt chilled, and a kind of wretchedness and shame spread through me as it did at the name of Jesus. This Mother that my own real, warm-necked, irascible, and comforting human mother set up between us was an
everlastingly wounded phantom, sorrowing like Him over all the wickedness I did not yet know I would commit. 
My mother crocheted squares for an afghan, in all shades of purple. They fell among the bedclothes and she did not care. Once they were finished she forgot about them. She had forgotten all her stories which were about princes in the Tower and a queen getting her head chopped off while a little dog was hiding under her dress and another queen sucking poison out of her husband's wound; and also about her own childhood, a time as legendary to me as any other. Given over to Mary's care, she whimpered childishly, "Mary, I'm dying for you to rub my back" "Mary, could you make me a cup of tea? I feel if! drink any more tea I'm going to bob up to the ceiling, just like a big balloon, but you know it's all I want." Mary laughed shortly. "You," she said, "you're not going to bob up any- where. Take a derrick to move you. Come on now, raise up, you'll be worse before you're better!" She shooed me off the bed and began to pull the sheets about with not very gentle jerks. "You been tiring your momma out? What do you want to bother your momma for on this nice a day?" "I think she's lonesome," my mother said, a weak and insincere defense. "She can be lonesome in the yard just as well as here," said Mary, with her grand, vague, menacing air. "You put your things on, out you go!" 
My father too had altered since her coming. When he came in for his meals she was always waiting for him, some joke swelling her up like a bullfrog, making her ferocious looking and red in the face. She put un- cooked white beans in his soup, hard as pebbles, and waited to see if good manners would make him eat them. She stuck something to the bottom of his water glass to look like a fly. She gave him a fork with a prong missing, pretending it was by accident. He threw it at her, and missed, but startled me considerably. My mother and father, eating supper, talked quietly and seriously. But in my father's family even grownups played tricks with rubber worms and beetles, fat aunts were always invited to sit on little rickety chairs, and uncles broke wind in public and said, "Whoa, hold on there!" proud of themselves as if they had whistled a complicated tune. Nobody could ask your age without a rigmarole of teasing. So with Mary McQuade my father returned to family ways, just as he went back to eating heaps of fried potatoes and side meat and thick, floury pies, and drinking tea black and strong as medicine out of a tin pot, saying gratefully, "Mary, you know what it is a man ought to eat!" He followed that up with "Don't you think it's time you got a man of your own to feed?" which earned him, not a fork thrown, but the dishrag. 
His teasing of Mary was always about husbands. "I thought up one for you this morning!" he would say. "Now, Mary, I'm not fooling you, you give this some consideration." Her laughter would come out first in little angry puffs and explosions through her shut lips, while her face grew redder than you would have thought possible and her body twitched and rumbled threateningly in its chair. There was no doubt she enjoyed all this, all these preposterous imagined matings, though my mother would certainly have said it was cruel, cruel and indecent, to tease an old maid about men. In my father's family of course it was what she was always teased about, what else was there? And the heavier and coarser and
more impossible she became, the more she would be teased. A bad thing in that family was to have them say you were sensitive, as they did of my mother. All the aunts and cousins and uncles had grown tremendously hardened to any sort of personal cruelty, reckless, even proud, it seemed, of a failure or deformity that could make for general laughter. 
At suppertime it was dark in the house, in spite of the lengthening days. We did not yet have electricity. It came in soon afterwards, maybe the next summer. But at present there was a lamp on the table. In its light my father and Mary McQuade threw gigantic shadows, whose heads wagged clumsily with their talk and laughing. I watched the shadows instead of the people. They said, "What are you dreaming about?" but I was not dreaming; I was trying to understand the danger, to read the signs of invasion. 
My Father said, "Do you want to come with me and look at the traps?" He had a trapline for muskrats along the river. When he was younger he used to spend days, nights, weeks in the bush, following creeks all up and down Wawanash County, and he trapped not only muskrat then but red fox, wild mink, marten, all animals whose coats are prime in the fall. Muskrat is the only thing you can trap in the spring. Now that he was married and settled down to farming he just kept the one line, and that for only a few years. This may have been the last year he had it. 
We went across a field that had been plowed the previous fall. There was a little snow lying in the furrows but it was not real snow, it was a thin crust like frosted glass that I could shatter with my heels. The field went downhill slowly, down to the river flats. The fence was down in some places from the weight of the snow; we could step over it. 
My father's boots went ahead. His boots were to me as unique and familiar, as much an index to himself, as his face was. When he had taken them off they stood in a corner of the kitchen, giving off a complicated smell of manure, machine oil, caked black mud, and the ripe and disintegrating material that lined their soles. They were a part of himself, temporarily discarded, waiting. They had an expression that was dogged and uncompromising, even brutal, and I thought of that as part of my father's look, the counterpart of his face, with its readiness for jokes and courtesies. Nor did that brutality surprise me; my father came back to us always, to my mother and me, from places where our judgment could not follow. 
For instance, there was a muskrat in the trap. At first I saw it waving at the edge of the water, like something tropical, a dark fern. My father drew it up and the hairs ceased waving, clung together, the fern became a tail with the body of the rat attached to it, sleek and dripping. Its teeth were bared, its eyes wet on top, dead and dull beneath, glinted like washed pebbles. My father shook it and whirled it around, making a little rain of icy river water. "This is a good old rat," he said. "This is a big old king rat. Look at his tail!" Then perhaps thinking that I was worried, or perhaps only wanting to show me the charm of simple, perfect mechanical devices, he lifted the trap out of the water and explained to me how it worked, dragging the rat's head under at once and mercifully drowning him. I did
not understand or care. I only wanted, but did not dare, to touch the stiff, soaked body, a fact of death. 
My father baited the trap again using some pieces of yellow, winter- wrinkled apple. He put the rat's body in a dark sack which he carried slung over his shoulder, like a peddler in a picture. When he cut the apple, I had seen the skinning knife, its slim bright blade. 
Then we went along the river, the Wawanash River, which was high, running full, silver in the middle where the sun hit it and where it arrowed in to its swiftest motion. That is the current, I thought, and I pictured the current as something separate from the water, just as the wind was separate from the air and had its own invading shape. The banks were steep and slippery and lined with willow bushes, still bare and bent over and looking weak as grass. The noise the river made was not loud but deep, and seemed to come from away down in the middle of it, some hidden place where the water issued with a roar from underground. 
The river curved, I lost my sense of direction. In the traps we found more rats, released them, shook them and hid them in the sack, replaced the bait. My face, my hands, my feet grew cold, but I did not mention it. I could not, to my father. And he never told me to be careful, to stay away from the edge of the water; he took it for granted that I would have sense enough not to fall in. I never asked how far we were going, or if the trapline would ever end. After a while there was a bush behind us, the after- noon darkened. It did not occur to me, not till long afterwards, that this was the same bush you could see from our yard, a fan-shaped hill rising up in the middle of it with bare trees in wintertime that looked like bony little twigs against the sky.
Now the bank, instead of willows, grew thick bushes higher than my head. I stayed on the path, about halfway up the bank, while my father went down to the water. When he bent over the trap, I could no longer see him. I looked around slowly and saw something else. Further along, and higher up the bank, a man was making his way down. He made no noise coming through the bushes and moved easily, as if he followed a path I could not see. At first I could just see his head and the upper part of his body. He was dark, with a high bald forehead, hair long behind the ears, deep vertical creases in his cheeks. When the bushes thinned I could see the rest of him, his long clever legs, thinness, drab camouflaging clothes, and what he carried in his hand, gleaming where the sun caught it— a little axe, or hatchet. 
I never moved to warn or call my father. The man crossed my path somewhere ahead, continuing down to the river. People say they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have al- ways known was there that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hurry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying. All my life I had known there was a man like this and he was
behind doors, around the corner at the dark end of a hall. So now I saw him and just waited, like a child in an old negative, electrified against the dark noon sky, with blazing hair and burned-out Orphan Annie eyes. The man slipped down through the bushes to my father. And I never thought, or even hoped for, anything but the worst. 
My father did not know. When he straightened up, the man was not three feet away from him and hid him from me. I heard my father's voice come out, after a moment's delay, quiet and neighborly. 
"Hello, Joe. Well. Joe. I haven't seen you in a long time." 
The man did not say a word, but edged around my father giving him a close look. "Joe, you know me," my father told him. "Ben Jordan. I been out looking at my traps. There's a lot of good rats in the river this year, Joe." 
The man gave a quick not-trusting look at the trap my father had baited. 
"You ought to set a line out yourself. 
No answer. The man took his hatchet and chopped lightly at the air. 
"Too late this year, though. The river is already started to go down." 
"Ben Jordan," the man said with a great splurt, a costly effort, like somebody leaping over a stutter. 
"I thought you'd recognize me, Joe." 
"I never knew it was you, Ben. I thought it was one them Silases." 
"Well I been telling you it was me." 
"They's down here all the time choppin' my trees and puffin' down my fences. You know they burned me out, Ben. It was them done it." 
"I heard about that," my father said. 
"I didn't know it was you, Ben. I never knew it was you. I got this axe, I just take it along with me to give them a little scare. I wouldn't of if I'd known it was you. You come on up and see where I'm living now."
My father called me. "I got my young one out following me today." 
"Well you and her both come up and get warm." 
We followed this man, who still carried and carelessly swung his hatchet, up the slope and into the bush. The trees chilled the air, and underneath them was real snow, left over from winter, a foot, two feet deep. The tree trunks had rings around them, a curious dark space like the warmth you make with your breath. 
We came out in a field of dead grass, and took a track across it to an- other, wider field where there was something sticking out of the ground. It was a roof, slanting one way, not peaked, and out of the roof came a pipe with a cap on it, smoke blowing out. We went down the sort of steps that lead to a cellar, and that was what it was - a cellar with a roof on. My father said "Looks like you fixed it up all right for yourself, Joe." 
"It's warm. Being down in the ground the way it is, naturally it's warm. I thought, What is the sense of building a house up again, they burned it down once, they'll burn it down again. What do I need a house for any- ways? I got all the room I need here, I fixed it up comfortable." He opened the door at the bottom of the steps. "Mind your head here. I don't say everybody should live in a hole in the ground, Ben. Though animals do it, and what an animal does, by and large it makes sense. But if you're married, that's another story." He laughed. "Me, I don't plan on getting married."
It was not completely dark. There were the old cellar windows, letting in a little grimy light. The man lit a coal-oil lamp, though, and set it on the table. 
"There, you can see where you're at." 
It was all one room, an earth floor with boards not nailed together, just laid down to make broad paths for walking, a stove on a sort of platform, table, couch, chairs, even a kitchen cupboard, several thick, very dirty blankets of the type used in sleighs and to cover horses. Perhaps if it had not had such a terrible smell—of coal oil, urine, earth, and stale heavy air —I would have recognized it as the sort of place I would like to live in myself, like the houses I made under snowdrifts, in winter, with sticks of firewood for furniture, like another house I had made long ago under the veranda, my floor the strange powdery earth that never got sun or rain. 
But I was wary, sitting on the dirty couch, pretending not to look at anything. My father said, "You're snug here, Joe, that's right." He sat by the table, and there the hatchet lay. 
"You should of seen me before the snow started to melt. Wasn't nothing showing but a smokestack" 
"Nor you don't get lonesome?" 
"Not me. I was never one for lonesome. And I got a cat, Ben. Where is that cat? There he is, in behind the stove. He don't relish company, maybe." He pulled it out, a huge, gray tom with sullen eyes. "Show you what he can do." He took a saucer from the table and a mason jar from the cupboard and poured something into the saucer. He set it in front of the cat. 
"Joe, that cat don't drink whisky, does he?" 
"You wait and see."
The cat rose and stretched himself stiffly, took one baleful look around, and lowered his head to drink
"Straight whisky," my father said. 
"I bet that's a sight you ain't seen before. And you ain't likely to see it again. That cat'd take whisky ahead of milk any day. A matter of fact he don't got no milk, he's forgot what it's like. You want a drink, Ben?" 
"Not knowing where you got that I don't have a stomach like your cat." 
The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap, and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch. 
"Joe, you keep that up, you're not going to have a cat." 
"It don't hurt him, he enjoys it. Let's see, what've we got for the little girl to eat?" Nothing, I hoped, but he brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the colored stripes had run. They had a taste of nails 
"It's them Silases botherin' me, Ben. They come by day and by night. People won't ever quit botherin' me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waidn' for them." He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. "Got a shotgun too." 
"Maybe they won't come and bother you no more, Joe." 
The man groaned and shook his head. "They never will stop. No. They never will stop." 
"Just try not paying any attention to them, they'll tire out and go away." 
"They'll burn me in my bed. They tried to before." 
My father said nothing, but tested the axe blade with his finger. Under the couch, the cat pawed and meowed in more and more feeble spasms of delusion. Overcome with tiredness, with warmth after cold, with bewilderment past bearing, I was falling asleep with my eyes open. 
My father set me down. "You're woken up now. Stand up. See. I can't carry you and this sack full of rats both." 
We had come to the top of a long hill and that is where I woke. It was getting dark. The whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us—greenish-brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw- brown fields and the others, darker from last year's plowing, with scales of snow faintly striping them (like the field we had walked across hours, hours earlier in the day) and the tiny fences and colonies of gray barns, and houses set apart, looking squat and small. 
"Whose house is that?" my father said, pointing. 
It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come around in a half circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind. 
"That's no more'n half a mile away and downhill. You can easy walk home. Soon we'll see the light in the dining room where your momma is." 
On the way I said, "Why did he have an axe?" 
"Now listen," my father said. "Are you listening to me? He don't mean any harm with that axe. It's just his habit, carrying it around. But don't say anything about it at home. Don't mention it to your momma or Mary, either one. Because they might be scared about it You and me aren't, but they might be. And there is no use of that" 
After a while he said, "What are you not going to mention about?" and I said, "The axe." 
"You weren't scared, were you?" 
"No," I said hopefully. "Who is going to burn him and his bed?" 
"Nobody. Less he manages it himself like he did last time." 
"Who is the Silases?" 
"Nobody," my father said. "Just nobody." 
“We found the one for you today, Mary. Oh, I wish we could've brought him home." 
"We thought you'd fell in the Wawanash River," said Mary McQuade furiously, ungently pulling off my boots and my wet socks. 
"Old Joe Phippen that lives up in no-man's-land beyond the bush." 
"Him!" said Mary like an explosion. "He's the one burned his house down, I know him!"
"That's right, and now he gets along fine without it. Lives in a hole in the ground. You'd be as cozy as a groundhog, Mary." 
"I bet he lives in his own dirt, all right." She served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat. For Mary, that was enough. 
"A man that'd do a thing like that ought to be locked up." 
"Maybe so," my father said. "just the same I hope they don't get him for a while yet. Old Joe." 
"Eat your supper," Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. "Look at her," she said. "Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she's been and seen. Was he feeding the whisky to her too?" 
"Not a drop," said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

The Enormous Radio by John Cheever JIM AND IRENE Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naive. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts — although they seldom mentioned this to anyone — and they spent a great deal of time listening to music on the radio. 
Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio — or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them — and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came. 
The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to the instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her
children came home from school then, and she took them to the Park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio. 
The maid had given the children their suppers and was supervising their baths when Irene turned on the radio, reduced the volume, and sat down to listen to a Mozart quintet that she knew and enjoyed. The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began. A crackling sound like the noise of a burning powder fuse began to accompany the singing of the strings. Beyond the music, there was a rustling that reminded Irene unpleasantly of the sea, and as the quintet progressed, these noises were joined by many others. She tried all the dials and switches but nothing dimmed the interference, and she sat down, disappointed and bewildered, and tried to trace the flight of the melody. The elevator shaft in her building ran beside the living-room wall, and it was the noise of the elevator that gave her a clue to the character of the static. The rattling of the elevator cables and the opening and closing of the elevator doors were reproduced in her loudspeaker, and, realizing that the radio was sensitive to electrical currents of all sorts, she began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner. By listening more carefully, she was able to distinguish doorbells, elevator bells, electric razors, and Waring mixers, whose sounds had been picked up from the apartments that surrounded hers and transmitted through her loudspeaker. The powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensitivity to discord, was more than she could hope to master, so she turned the thing off and went into the nursery to see her children. 
When Jim Westcott came home that night, he went to the radio confidently and worked the controls. He had the same sort of experience Irene had had. A man was speaking on the station Jim had chosen, and his voice swung instantly from the distance into a force so powerful that it shook the apartment. Jim turned the volume control and reduced the voice. Then, a minute or two later, the interference began. The ringing of telephones and doorbells set in, joined by the rasp of the elevator doors and the whir of cooking appliances. The character of the noise had changed since Irene had tried the radio earlier; the last of the electric razors was being unplugged, the vacuum cleaners had all been returned to their closets, and the static reflected that change in pace that overtakes the city after the sun goes down. He fiddled with the knobs but couldn't get rid of the noises, so he turned the radio off and told Irene that in the morning he'd call the people who had sold it to him and give them hell. 
The following afternoon, when Irene returned to the apartment from a luncheon date, the maid told her that a than had come and fixed the radio. Irene went into the living room before she took off her hat or her furs and tried the instrument. From the loudspeaker came a recording of the 'Missouri Waltz.' It reminded her of the thin, scratchy music from an old-fashioned phonograph that she sometimes heard across the lake where she spent her summers. She waited until the waltz had finished, expecting an explanation of the
recording, but there was none. The music was followed by silence, and then the plaintive and scratchy record was repeated. She turned the dial and got a satisfactory burst of Caucasian,music — the thump of bare feet in the dust and the rattle of coin jewelry — but in the background she could hear the ringing of bells and a confusion of voices. Her children came home from school then, and she turned off the radio and went to the nursery. 
When Jim came home that night, he was tired, and he took a bath and changed his clothes. Then he joined Irene in the living room. He had just turned on the radio when the maid announced dinner, so he left it on, and he and Irene went to the table.
Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene's interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man's voice break in. 'For Christ's sake, Kathy,' he said, 'do you always have to play the piano when I get home?' The music stopped abruptly. 'It's the only chance I have,' a woman said. 'I'm at the office all day.' 'So am I,' the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again. 
'Did you hear that?' Irene asked. 
'What?' Jim was eating his dessert. 
'The radio. A man said something while the music was still going on — something dirty.' 
'It's probably a play.' 
'I don't think it is a play,' Irene said.
They left the table and took their coffee into the living room. Irene asked Jim to try another station. He turned the knob. 'Have you seen my garters?' a man asked. 'Button me up,' a woman said. 'Have you seen my garters?' the man said again. 'Just button me up and I'll find your garters,' the woman said. Jim shifted to another station. 'I wish you wouldn't leave apple cores in the ashtrays,' a man said. 'I hate the smell.' 
'This is strange,' Jim said. 
'Isn't it?' Irene said. 
Jim turned the knob again.' "On the coast of Coromandel where the early pumpkins blow," ' a woman with a pronounced English accent said, ' "in the middle of the woods lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. Two old chairs, and half a candle, one old jug without a handle 
'My God!' Irene cried. 'That's the Sweeneys' nurse.' 
' "These were all his worldly goods," ' the British voice continued. 
'Turn that thing off,' Irene said. 'Maybe they can hear us.' Jim switched the radio off. 'That was Miss Armstrong, the Sweeneys' nurse,' Irene said. 'She must be reading to the little girl. They live in 17-B. I've talked with Miss Armstrong in the Park. I know her voice very well. We must be getting other people's apartments.' 
'That's impossible,' Jim said. 
'Well, that was the Sweeneys' nurse,' Irene said hotly. 'I know her voice. I know it very well. I'm wondering if they can hear us.' 
Jim turned the switch. First from a distance and then nearer, nearer, as if borne on the wind, came the pure accents of the Sweeneys' nurse again: ' "Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!" ' she said,' "sitting where the pumpkins blow, will you come and be my wife? said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo .”,
Jim went over to the radio and said 'Hello' loudly into the speaker. 
'I am tired of living singly,' the nurse went on, 'on this coast so wild and shingly, I'm aweary of my life; if you'll " come and be my wife, quite serene would be my life...
'I guess she can't hear us,' Irene said. 'Try something else.' 
Jim turned to another station, and the living room was filled with the uproar of a cocktail party that had overshot its mark. Someone was playing the piano and singing the 'Whiffenpoof Song,' and the voices that surrounded the piano were vehement and happy. 'Eat some more sandwiches,' a woman shrieked. There were screams of laughter and a dish of some sort crashed to the floor. 
'Those must be the Fullers, in 11-E,' Irene said. 'I knew they were giving a party this afternoon. I saw her in the liquor store. Isn't this too divine? Try something else. See if you can get those people in 18-C.' 
The Westcotts overheard that evening a monologue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game, running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank. They turned off their radio at midnight and went to bed, weak with laughter. Sometime in the night, their son began to call for a glass of water and Irene got one and took it to his room. It was very early. All the lights in the neighborhood were extinguished, and from the boy's window she could see the empty street. She went into the living room and tried the radio. There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. 'Are you all right, darling?' he asked. 'Yes,' a woman said wearily. 'Yes, I'm all right, I guess,' and then she added with great feeling, 'But, you know, Charlie, I don't feel like myself any more. Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week When I feel like myself. I don't like to go to
another doctor, because the doctor's bills are so awful already, but I just don't feel like myself, Charlie. I just never feel like myself.' They were not young, Irene thought. She guessed from the timbre of their voices that they were middle-aged. The restrained melancholy of the dialogue and the draft from the bedroom window made her shiver, and she went back to bed. 
The following morning, Irene cooked breakfast for the family the maid didn't come up from her room in the basement until ten braided her daughter's hair, and waited at the door until her children and her husband had been carried away in the elevator. Then she went into the living room and tried the radio. 'I don't want to go to school,' a child screamed. 'I hate school. I won't go to school. I hate school.' 'You will go to school,' an enraged woman said. 'We paid eight hundred dollars to get you into that school and you'll go if it kills you.' The next number on the dial produced the worn record of the 'Missouri Waltz.' Irene shifted the control and invaded the privacy of several breakfast tables. She overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair. Irene's life was nearly as simple and sheltered as it appeared to be, and the forthright and sometimes brutal language that came from the loudspeaker that morning astonished and troubled her. She continued to listen until her maid came in. Then she turned off the radio quickly, since this insight, she realized, was a furtive one. 
Irene had a luncheon date with a friend that day, and she left her apartment at a little after twelve. There were a number of women in the elevator when it stopped at her floor. She stared at their handsome and impassive faces, their furs, and the cloth flowers in their hats. Which one of them had been to Sea Island? she wondered. Which one had overdrawn her bank account? The elevator stopped at the tenth floor and a woman with a pair of Skye terriers joined them. Her hair was rigged high on her head and she wore a mink cape. She was humming the 'Missouri Waltz.' Irene had two Martinis at lunch, and she looked searchingly at her friend and wondered what her secrets were. They had intended to go shopping after lunch, but Irene excused herself and went home. She told the maid that she was not to be disturbed; then she went into the living room, closed the doors, and switched on the radio. She heard, in the course of the afternoon, the halting conversation of a woman entertaining her aunt, the hysterical conclusion of a luncheon party, and a hostess briefing her maid about some cocktail guests. 'Don't give the best Scotch to anyone who hasn't white hair,' the hostess said. 'See if you can get rid of that liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars? I want to tip the elevator man.' 
As the afternoon waned, the conversations increased in intensity. From where Irene sat, she could see the open sky above the East River. There were hundreds of clouds in the sky, as though the south wind had broken the winter into pieces and were blowing it north, and on her radio she could hear the arrival of cocktail guests and the return of children and businessmen from their schools and offices. 'I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning,' a woman said. 'It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs Dunston was wearing last night.' 'We'll sell it,' a man said. 'Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell it. Mrs Dunston won't know the difference, and we could use a
couple of hundred bucks...' "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,' the Sweeneys' nurse sang. '"Halfpence and farthings, say the bells of St Martin's. When will you pay me? say the bells at Old Bailey " ' 'It's not a hat,' a woman cried, and at her back roared a cocktail party. 'It's not a hat, it's a love affair. That's what Walter Floret' said. He said it's not a hat, it's a love affair,' and then, in a lower voice, the same woman added, 'Talk to somebody, for Christ's sake, honey, talk to somebody. If she catches you standing here not talking to anybody, she'll take us off her invitation list, and I love these parties.' 
The Westcotts were going out for dinner that night, and when Jim came home, Irene was dressing. She seemed sad and vague, and he brought her a drink. They were dining with friends in the neighborhood, and they walked to where they were going. The sky was broad and filled with light. It was one of those splendid spring evenings that excite memory and desire, and the air that touched their hands and faces felt very soft. A Salvation Army band was on the comer playing 'Jesus Is Sweeter.' Irene drew on her husband's arm and held him there for a minute, to hear the music. 'They're really such nice people, aren't they?' she said. 'They have such nice faces. Actually, they're so much nicer than a lot of the people we know.' She took a bill from her purse and walked over and dropped it into the tambourine. There was in her face, when she returned to her husband, a look of radiant melancholy that he was not familiar with. And her conduct at the dinner party that night seemed strange to him, too. She interrupted her hostess rudely and stared at the people across the table from her with an intensity for which she would have punished her children. 
It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. "How far that little candle throws its beams," 'she exclaimed.' "So shines a good deed in a naughty world." ' She waited that night until Jim had fallen asleep, and then went into the living room and turned on the radio. 
Jim came home at about six the next night. Emma, the maid, let him in, and he had taken off his hat and was taking off his coat when Irene ran into the hall. Her face was shining with tears and her hair was disordered. 'Go up to 16-C, Jim!' she screamed. 'Don't take off your coat. Go up to 16-C. Mr Osborn's beating his wife. They've been quarreling since four o'clock, and now he's hitting her. Go up there and stop him.' 
From the radio in the living room, Jim heard screams, obscenities, and thuds. 'You know you don't have to listen to this sort of thing,' he said. He strode into the living room and turned the switch. 'It's indecent,' he said. 'It's like looking in windows. You know you don't have to listen to this sort of thing. You can turn it off.' 
‘Oh, it's so horrible, it's so dreadful,' Irene was sobbing. 'I've been listening all day, and it's so depressing.' 'Well, if it's so depressing, why do you listen to it? I bought this damned radio to give you some pleasure,' he said. 'I paid a great deal of money for it. I thought it might make you happy. I wanted to make you happy.' 
'Don't, don't, don't, don't quarrel with me,' she moaned, and laid her head on his shoulder. 'All the others have_been quarreling all day. Everybody's been quarreling. They're all worried about money. Mrs Hutchinson's mother is dying of cancer in Florida and they don't have enough money to send her to the Mayo Clinic. At least, Mr Hutchinson says they don't have enough money. And some woman in this building is having an affair with the handyman — with that hideous handyman. It's too disgusting. And Mrs Melville has heart trouble and Mr Hendricks is going to lose his job in April and Mrs Hendricks is horrid about the whole thing and that girl who plays the "Missouri Waltz" is a whore, a common whore, and the elevator man has tuberculosis and Mr Osborn has been beating Mrs Osborn.' She wailed, she trembled with grief and checked the stream of tears down her face with the heel of her palm. 
'Well, why do you have to listen?' Jim asked , again. 'Why do you have to listen to this stuff if it makes you so miserable?' 
'Oh, don't, don't, don't,' she cried. 'Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we've never been like that, have we, darling? Have we? I mean, we've always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven't we? And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives aren't sordid, are they, darling? Are they?' She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. 'We're happy, aren't we, darling? We are happy, aren't we?' 
'Of course we're happy,' he said tiredly. He began to surrender his resentment. 'Of course we're happy. I'll have that damned radio fixed or taken away tomorrow.' He stroked her soft hair. 'My poor girl,' he said. 
'You love me, don't you?' she asked. 'And we're not hyper-critical or worried about money or dishonest, are we?' 
'No, darling,' he said. 
A man came in the morning and fixed the radio. Irene turned it on cautiously and was happy to hear a California-wine commercial and a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, including Schiller's 'Ode to Joy.' She kept the radio on all day and nothing untoward came from the speaker. 
A Spanish suite was being played when Jim came home. 'Is everything all right?' he asked. His face was pale, she thought. They had some cocktails and went in to dinner to the 'Anvil Chorus' from Il Trovatore. This was followed by Debussy's 'La Mer' 
'I paid the bill for the radio today,' Jim said. 'It cost four hundred dollars. I hope you'll get some enjoyment out of it’ 
'Oh, I'm sure I will,' Irene said. 
'Four hundred dollars is a good deal more than I can afford,' he went on. 'I wanted to get something that you'd enjoy. It's the last extravagance we'll be able to indulge in this year. I see that you haven't paid your clothing bills yet. I saw them on your dressing table.' He looked directly at her. 'Why did you tell me you'd paid them? Why did you lie to me?' 
'I just didn't want you to worry, Jim,' she said. She drank some water. 'I'll be able to pay my bills out of this month's allowance. There were the slipcovers last month, and that party.' 
'You've got to learn to handle the money I give you a little more intelligently, Irene,' he said. 'You've got to understand that we won't have as much money this year as we had last. I had a very sobering talk with Mitchell today. No one is buying anything. We're spending all our time promoting new issues, and you know how long that takes. I'm not getting any younger, you know. I'm thirty-seven. My hair will be gray next year. I haven't done as well as I'd hoped to do.And I don't suppose things will get any better.'
'Yes, dear,' she said. 
'We've got to start cutting down,' Jim said. 'We've got to think of the children. To be perfectly frank with you, I worry about money a great deal. I'm not at all sure of ' the future. No one is. If anything should happen to me, there's the insurance, but that wouldn't go very far today. I've worked awfully hard to give you and the children a comfortable life,' he said bitterly. 'I don't like to see all of my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers and — ' 
'Please, Jim,' she said. 'Please. They'll hear us.' 
'Who'll hear us? Emma can't hear us.' 
'The radio.' 
'Oh, I'm sick!' he shouted. 'I'm sick to death of your apprehensiveness. The radio can't hear us. Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?' 
Irene got up from the table and went into the living room. Jim went to the door and shouted at her from there. 'Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What's turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother's jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her — not even when she needed it. You made Grace Howland's life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? I'll never forget how cool you were. You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau. If you'd had any reasons, if you'd had any good reasons — ' 
Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping that the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeneys' nurse. Jim
continued to shout at her from the door. The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. 'An early-morning railroad disaster in Tokyo , ' the loudspeaker said, 'killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.'

In The Aisles by Clemens Meyer Before I became a shelf-stacker and spent my evenings and nights in the aisles of the cashand-carry market, filling shelves, fetching pallets from high on the storage shelves with the forklift, now and then helping one of the last customers of the evening and getting to know all kinds of food, I’d been working on building sites for a couple of years.
I hadn’t given up of my own accord but I wouldn’t have kept it up all that long, even if the boss hadn’t fired me. I was a builder’s mate, lugging sacks of cement and plasterboard, gutting flats – that meant I knocked the plaster off the walls, tore out fireplaces and chimneys with a big sledgehammer we used to call ‘Rover’, until I was covered in soot and dirt and spent hours getting the soot and dust out of my nose at home. The firm didn’t even pay well and the boss was a bastard. The guy came from Bavaria; I’ve met people from Bavaria who were actually OK though.
I can’t remember exactly when all the fuss with the boss started, but I do know we were demolishing an old roof that day. We found a big pigeon’s graveyard, two pigeons still alive and perfectly still in among all the bones, piles of feathers and pigeon shit and decomposing and mummified corpses, and we could only tell by their eyes and their heads, moving slightly every now and then, that they were waiting. We fetched the Portuguese guys and they killed them with a blow of a spade. Then we tipped lime over the pigeon graveyard and shovelled it all into buckets and tipped them down the rubbish chute fastened to the scaffolding outside.
And after that we didn’t feel much like hard work any more; the pigeons had got to us. We took the tiles off another section of the roof, not exactly motivated, removed the roof battens with wrecking bars, and then we took a lunch break.
We usually had our lunch break at eleven thirty, and when the bells of the church just round the corner rang at twelve we went back to work.
But when the bells rang that day we were still sitting with the Portuguese guys. They were drinking red wine out of cartons, passing them around. The Portuguese guys spoke very bad German and earned even less than we did and lived in tiny basement flats in one of the buildings owned by the boss. They drank red wine at work because they knew the boss wouldn’t fire them – they worked too well for too little money. They did bricklaying and plastering, and sometimes they were builder’s mates like us, lugging sacks of cement, gutting flats until they were covered in soot and dust.
And then when the fuss with the boss started and I’d slapped him round the face on both sides with my cement-encrusted glove, they all came to me one after another and shook my
hand, pressed it and pumped it, said, ‘You did good thing’ in broken German, laughed and said, ‘You find new job, you good worker,’ and patted me on the back.
‘Lazy bastard,’ the boss had called me, and I hadn’t even been holding a wine carton any more, I was just sitting on an upturned bucket and leaning on the wall and trying to think of nothing at all.
And I wasn’t a lazy bastard, even if I had overdone it a bit with my lunch break.
And when I started the job as a shelf-stacker in the cash and carry they noticed straight away that I wasn’t a lazy bastard. I’d got the job through someone I knew, a guy who’d been working there for four years.
I’d got him a job seven or eight years ago and he knew I’d been out of work since the fuss at the building site, so when a job came up in the ‘Shelf-filling/Night’ department he’d put my name down for it. I made a real effort, stacking the stock on the shelves where they showed me, pulling a large barred cart along behind me to put empty cartons and packaging into. They explained how to use the little manual pallet jacks for lifting and moving pallets of stock around. They had electric pallet jacks too, called ‘ants’, for transporting several pallets stacked up, but I wasn’t allowed to use those ones yet.
It wasn’t one of those cash-and-carries that anyone could shop at. The customers had to have a special card; they had to run a company, self-employed people and that kind of thing who were buying for their businesses. We had a food section and a non-food section, but I was only ever on food and beverages. It was a huge market, on two floors with clothing and electronics upstairs. The food section was on the lower floor, and made up of different departments like Processed Food, Confectionery, Frozen Food, Delicatessen, Fruit and Vegetables and a couple of other ones I can’t remember now.
The aisles between the shelves were very wide so there was space for the forklifts. The forklifts operated all day long, even when the market was open for customers. The forklift drivers fetched large pallets out of the storage shelves, which went right up to the ceiling on top of the normal shelves where the customers took the stock from and put it in their trolleys.
To start with I was always wondering why there weren’t any terrible accidents, why no pallets tipped off the forks and crushed ten customers to death, why no feet got squashed under the large iron wheels of the forklifts. But later, when I had a forklift licence of my own and whizzed along the aisles in my yellow forklift, fetching pallets of beer or milk or sacks of flour down from the shelves, I knew it was all a matter of relaxing, taking care and judging distances right – and routine. But the most important thing, I thought, was that you had to be absolutely convinced while you were transporting pallets up or down that you were the very centre of the market.
It took me a while to learn how to drive a forklift. They let me do my practice after opening hours, when the only people in the aisles were from ‘Shelf-filling/Night’. One of the longterm staff was a registered examiner, but another long-term guy gave me practice lessons until I’d managed to learn all the secrets of driving and operating a forklift. Actually it was just the half-hour before the end of our shift at one a.m. Under his supervision, I drove his forklift – which I shared with him later – slowly along the aisles, stopped in the right position parallel to the shelf, positioned the fork and moved it upwards. Then when the fork was at the level of the pallet I steered the truck until the ends of the fork were just above the openings in the pallet. Then I pressed a lever on the control panel in front of me, and the fork lowered and slipped into the openings in the pallet. Then I pressed the other lever and the pallet rose slowly.
‘You’re doing well,’ said Bruno, his big hand next to me on the control panel, ‘just don’t raise it too quickly or you’ll bump it at the top.’
Bruno was a pretty tall, stocky man, actually more stocky than tall, probably in his midfifties with white hair, but when you saw him from a distance he looked like a wrestler or a heavyweight boxer. He had a big block of a head that perched directly on his shoulders, almost no neck at all between the lapels of his white overall, and his hands, one of which was now resting on the forklift control panel next to me, were the size of plates. He wore a broad leather cuff around his right wrist to protect his tendons. He worked in the beverages department, where they fetched the largest pallets down from the shelves – crates of beer and juice and other drinks, which were roped together but still swayed ominously to and fro on the pallet as we lowered them out of the shelves.
Bruno had been working in the cash and carry for over ten years, always on beverages, and even though he wasn’t the department manager it was him who kept the place running.
‘You’re doing well, Lofty,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon have your licence.’ He called me Lofty, like most of my workmates did, because I was nearly six foot three.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I know I’m making a mess of it.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry. The longer it takes, the better for me. I have a nice quiet time with you. Better than all that hard graft.’ He pointed a thumb over at the beverages section. I heard bottles clinking through the shelves. Another workmate was lugging the last crates of the day.
‘There was one time,’ said Bruno, watching me attempt to get a pallet of salt boxes back onto the shelf, ‘one time I dropped a load of beer. Couple of years ago now. The rope tore. Shit happens.’ He reached into the pocket of his overall and took out a couple of ropes. He never threw them away when we cut them off the big beer pallets with our Stanley knives once we’d got them down in one piece. ‘Always come in handy.’ He had a little farmyard outside of town, with a stable and a few animals. He lived there with his wife; she took care
of the animals and everything else while he was at work. Bruno always had this special smell to him, of animals and manure, but it wasn’t as if he stank; he just smelt faintly, and there was something else in the mixture that he brought along from his farm, something strangely sweet, more like bitter-sweet, but I never worked out what it might be.
‘Bring her down now,’ said Bruno, checking his watch, ‘time to clock off.’
‘OK,’ I said. I’d finally managed to get the salt pallet in the right gap. I extracted the fork, moved the truck back slightly, then pressed one of the levers and the fork came down very slowly from the very top, with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics. I waited until the fork touched the tiled floor and then positioned it so that the forks weren’t parallel to the ground. ‘Only drive with the forks tipped, never with the fork raised except when you’re stacking.’
I’d had to watch a couple of instruction films where they listed all these terrible accidents as a deterrent and then showed some of the consequences. Lopped-off limbs, flattened feet, people skewered on the fork, and the more I saw of this forklift inferno, the more often I wondered if I’d chosen the right job. But the other staff at the cash and carry were nice enough, and I didn’t intend to skewer them on the fork or drive over their feet.
‘Are you coming, Bruno?’
‘No, you drive it on your own, you know how to do it now.’ Sometimes Bruno stood on the tipped forks, even though that wasn’t allowed, and rode back to the recharging station with me. I drove off and saw him walking down the aisle in the other direction. He walked slightly hunched, his arms splayed a little way from his body as if he expected a surprise attack from one of the shelves at any moment. I tried to imagine him working on the building site with me, me explaining everything to him and showing him how to do the job, but I just couldn’t imagine the man demolishing a roof. Maybe it was his white hair, and that smell of his animals didn’t go with the dust.
I drove to the recharging station, right at the back of the warehouse by the delivery bay. I drove along the empty, brightly lit aisles, past the freezers and the long rows of refrigerated shelves against the walls. Ours was the last shift and I only saw a workmate now and then. They were standing in the aisles, doing their last chores, standing at the blue wheeled desks and writing lists of the damaged or torn-open stock we always found on the shelves; others were getting their forklifts ready for the night at the recharging station. I didn’t know all of their names yet, and even later, once I’d been working at the warehouse for a while and had scraped through the forklift test (‘It’ll end in tears, Lofty’), I took a shifty look at the name tags on their overalls when I talked to them or needed help.
‘Thanks, Ms Koch,’ I said, and she smiled and said, ‘No problem.’
I saw her looking at my overall, but I’d lost my name tag and hadn’t got a new one yet.
‘Christian,’ I said and gave her my hand. ‘Marion,’ she said. She’d lent me her forklift because a customer had asked for a bottle of Wild Turkey just before closing time. I’d fetched the whisky pallet down from the shelf, given him the bottle and then filled up the empty compartment. Bruno was using our forklift over in the beer section. It was a Friday, it was summer, and people were buying beer by the crateload.
‘Shall we have a coffee? It’s on me.’
‘OK,’ she said, and then we went to the vending machine. There were two coffee machines in the warehouse, one at the delivery bay and one in front of the cold storage room, and that one was closer.
I’d come across her in the aisles a couple of times before and we’d nodded hello, and seeing as she was quite pretty I’d smiled every time.
She wasn’t there every night, she worked days as well; only me and five other guys were always on nights.
‘You did your test quite quickly.’ She sipped at her coffee, and then she blew into the little clouds of steam. She smiled; she’d probably heard about how much trouble I’d had with it.
‘Bruno was a good teacher,’ I said and looked at the name tag on her chest again. ‘M. Koch, Confectionery’.
‘Bruno’s a good guy,’ she said. ‘You can always go to him when you need help, or when you’re fed up and you fancy a coffee and a chat.’ She smiled and blew into her coffee, then she drank a few mouthfuls.
‘Get fed up often, do you?’
‘Don’t be so cheeky, rookie.’ She held her coffee in front of her name tag and tapped me on the shoulder with the index finger of her free hand. Then she laughed, and I couldn’t help joining in. There was something about her and the way she talked to me that I liked a lot. When I’d sat down in her forklift (‘But don’t make a tour of it, I need it back again’) I’d felt the warmth on the seat where she’d just been sitting.
She seemed to be a couple of years older than me, maybe in her mid-thirties. She had quite short hair that was always kind of messy. We drank our coffee and talked about this and that.
We stood at the vending machine for a long time, and I kept putting more money in and refilling our cups. We were standing behind the piles of crates and stock so the only people who could see us were people who wanted to take a coffee break of their own. ‘Be right back.’ I went to the shopping trolley containing food just coming up to the best-before date. Sometimes there were three or four trolleys, and sometimes it was my job to take the
trolleys to the ramp by the delivery bay where the rubbish bins were. Bread, chocolate, meat, milk, all still good for a few more days, and if I was hungry I tried to sneakily stuff myself with as much as possible of the best things before I threw them in the bins. Chocolate truffles, ciabatta with Serrano ham, Kinder chocolate. If one of the bosses caught me I could take off my overalls and leave, but I just couldn’t resist it. The stuff was being chucked out anyway, and I think most of us took the odd sneaky helping.
I tore open the packaging of a chocolate cake, cut two large slices with my Stanley knife, put them in the pockets of my overalls and went back over to Marion.
‘I thought you’d had enough of me.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all. Hold out your hand.’ She gave me a questioning look but then held her hand out flat, and I took a piece of cake out of my pocket and placed it on her hand. ‘Hey, rookie,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit of a daredevil, aren’t you?’
It wasn’t until later that I thought I’d actually put her at risk. If they’d caught us … but we were safe behind the crates, and anyway the big bosses had left ages ago and the boss of ‘Shelf-filling/Night’ was pretty relaxed and often disappeared to the toilets for a quick smoke, even though it wasn’t allowed, and I’d seen him with his mouth full and a big salami in his hand before. And Marion seemed to have gauged the risk; she smiled at me and said thanks and ate the cake.
‘Got a bit of a thing about her, Lofty, have you?’
‘No, rubbish! I’m just asking, that’s all.’ It was after eleven and we were stacking large cartons of juice packs on the juice shelf. Bruno leaned against the forklift and said, ‘She’s married. He’s a bastard though. Met him a couple of times, at work parties and the Christmas do. He used to be a nice guy, I heard, but he’s been a right bastard since he lost his job. There’s your chance, Lofty.’
‘Hey, leave it out,’ I pushed two cartons onto the shelf. ‘I just think she’s nice, that’s all.’
‘Oh yeah, she’s nice all right, Marion is.’ He nodded. We carried on working in silence until twelve, then I had to go over to Processed Foods; there was only one woman there, Irina Palmer, and the twenty-kilo flour sacks were too heavy for her. Irina was very nice and she showed me around the processed food aisles once we were done. She smelled quite strongly of cold smoke and she coughed quite a lot, and while I was lifting the flour sacks off the pallet and lugging them to the shelves she’d disappeared in the direction of the toilets.
‘Right,’ she said and led me along the pasta aisle, ‘it’s all a question of practice, you’ll see for yourself after a while. It’s important if a customer asks you.’ She coughed and stroked the lapels of her overall. She was about the same age as Bruno and just about as stocky too,
and I’d seen them heading for the toilets together a few times; Bruno liked a quick smoke now and then, but not as often as Irina, and he didn’t cough like she did either.
‘Right, here’s the normal spaghetti, then comes chitarra, that’s kind of straight pasta, we only have one brand though and hardly anyone ever asks for it.’ She was moving quite quickly to and fro in front of the shelf, touching the packets and cartons with both hands. ‘Here’s the fusilli, they’re like spirals, penne lisce, penne rigate, tortellini, tortelloni, macaroni, macaroncini, pappardelle, wide fettucine, then here’s the trenette, the same only thinner, rotelle for soups, orecchiette, they look like little ears, and if someone asks for vermicelli they want spaghetti and they’re from Sicily.’ She pronounced the names of the pasta like a real Italian, moving faster and faster in front of the shelf and showing me all kinds of pasta varieties that I’d never eaten and never even heard of. And then, when she showed me the ‘farfalle’ and the ‘rigatoni’, she suddenly said in the same tone of voice, with the same roll of the R: ‘You like Marion from Confectionery, don’t you?’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘All I did was get her a coffee.’ And when she nodded and rocked her head like an Italian mama and opened her mouth to reply, I said, ‘Yeah, she’s really nice.’
‘Listen, Christian,’ she took a step closer to me, and because she hadn’t called me ‘Lofty’ like most of the others – funnily enough they’d often called me that on the building site as well, even though there were a few guys there even taller than me – well, anyway I knew right away there was something important coming now. ‘Listen, Marion’s very fragile, I know she doesn’t look like it, I mean, she’s, how can I put it, she’s never at a loss for words, but you mustn’t hurt her, do you get me …?’
‘No,’ I said, not laughing any more. ‘I don’t want to.’
She nodded and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but I like young Marion a lot.’
Then the boss’s voice came over the loudspeakers, telling us we could clock off now; actually he was only the boss when the other bosses weren’t there. I walked over to the staff exit with Irina Palmer, coughing even as she held her cigarettes in her hand ready for the next one, and then we went to get changed.
A couple of weeks passed until I next saw Marion from Confectionery. She’d been working days for a while, but when I didn’t meet her in the aisles or at the vending machine after that Bruno told me she was off sick. ‘Anything serious?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ he said, but I could tell that wasn’t true.
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘If you like her, don’t ask.’
And then we stacked six-packs of alcohol-free beer on the shelves.
Twenty minutes before the end of our shift – we were on our last round of the beverages aisles – he said to me, ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’
I followed him. We heard Irina coughing in the pasta aisle but Bruno carried on until we came to the fish and shellfish and then he stopped.
We called this section ‘The Sea’. There was a large sales counter behind a roller door. Next to it and behind it and all around it were tanks and small pools of live fish, live crabs and prawns, and crates filled with ice and cooled with the dead fish and shellfish in them. The roller door was already halfway down and we ducked underneath it. Inside, the lights were dimmed, only a few strip lights glowing yellow on the ceiling. He took me over to a large tank with a couple of tubes running in and out of it. ‘The water has exactly the same salt content as the ocean they come from,’ he said. ‘Just a tiny bit more or less and they’d die sooner or later.’
They were large crabs, lobsters or something, lying next to each other and on top of each other in the tank, packed so tightly they could hardly move. I went closer up and saw that their pincers were held together with rubber bands.
‘They stay in here,’ said Bruno, ‘until somebody buys them.’
‘But their pincers,’ I said, and I saw a particularly large crab moving its arms with the tiedup pincers and touching the glass.
‘So they don’t hurt each other, you see, and so they don’t hurt anyone who wants to take them out.’
I squatted down in front of the tank, my face directly in front of the glass. They had strange long eyes, dark telescopic eyes that came out of their little heads like tiny fingers. The lobsters moved around in the water that flowed in and out again through the tubes, but they didn’t have much space and some of them looked as if they were dead already or just about to die, lying still between the others. Their long, thin eyes; I don’t know why, but their eyes really did my head in. ‘Jesus,’ I said, standing up again.
‘Yeah,’ said Bruno. We stood in silence by the tank for a good while then, looking at the water bubbling and the big pile of lobsters.
‘Look at that one,’ I said. ‘The one right at the back, the big bugger. He’s got one arm loose.’
‘Where?’ asked Bruno, and I went round the glass tank and showed him the lobster, which kept opening and closing the one pincer it had managed to get free from the rubber band, opening and closing. It wasn’t moving anything else, as if only its one arm was still alive. ‘If he’s clever …’ I said.
‘You mean he could cut the others …’
‘Imagine it though,’ I said. ‘They’d have their work cut out tomorrow morning …’
Bruno laughed, then he shook his head. ‘I told you, Lofty, they’d just hurt each other.’
We heard the boss’s voice over the tannoy – the end of our shift. We ducked out again under the half-closed roller door, Bruno took the forklift to the recharging station, then we went to the staff exit and the changing room. ‘Shall I give you a lift?’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind the detour.’ I usually took the last bus but Bruno gave me a lift home now and then, even though he actually had to go in the other direction. We hung up our overalls in our lockers, put away a couple of other things, had a bit of a chat with the others, most of them looking tired, we swiped our cards through the machine, and then we walked past the boss, who shook everyone’s hand goodbye, down to the staff car park.
‘About Marion,’ he said in the car.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘She has it pretty tough sometimes,’ he said, but I just nodded and looked out into the night.
We were standing outside my house. We’d already said goodbye and as he started to get back in the car I said, ‘How about a beer – you’ve got a quarter of an hour, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ he smiled, locking his car and coming back over to me. ‘My wife’s asleep anyway.’ We went inside and sat down in my little kitchen. I took two beers out of the fridge and opened them. ‘Lugging beer around all night,’ he said and clinked his bottle against mine, ‘makes you thirsty, doesn’t it?’
‘I get hungry as well sometimes with all that lovely stuff we carry around at work.’
‘You were pretty daring, that thing with the cake. That impressed her, that did.’
‘How do you know that then?’
‘It does her good, Lofty, someone treating her nice like that.’
The kitchen window was open slightly and I heard a train crossing the bridge. ‘Help yourself to an ashtray if you want to smoke.’
‘I will, thanks,’ he said. I went over to the fridge and put the ashtray on the table, and he lit up. ‘When you get home from work, can you go to sleep right away?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not usually.’
‘Me neither. I’ve got this bench, out the front, and that’s where I sit then, even if it’s cold out. I have a wee drink there and I can look at the fields. I like looking at the fields. It’s never quite dark, all the lights from the city, you know?’
‘Have you got kids?’
‘No, we haven’t.’
‘Sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘It’s OK.’ We fell silent, drinking and both looking out of the slightly open window into the night. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and drank up his beer. ‘I’d better go.’
‘I’ll see you to the door.’
We said goodbye out the front. ‘We could do this again, eh?’
‘Yeah, let’s,’ I said. ‘That’d be good.’
He nodded and walked to his car. ‘See you tomorrow, Lofty.’
‘See you.’
He was very quiet the next day and the days after; we worked in silence and he disappeared straight away after our shift, and I took the bus home. I was usually the only passenger; the bus drivers knew me by now and said hello or ‘Home time at last, eh?’ And if I wasn’t tired already I got tired on the way, leaning my head against the window, and sometimes I even fell asleep but the drivers woke me; they knew where I had to get off. Then at home I perked up again and spent a long time sitting on my own in the kitchen, drinking beer and looking out into the night and waiting to get tired again.
‘So you’re doing OK are you, rookie?’ She stood in front of me, hands planted on her hips, and gave me an angry stare, two small creases above her nose. Her hair seemed to be even shorter now, and her face had somehow got slightly less angular, but perhaps it only seemed that way to me; I hadn’t seen her for three weeks.
‘How long do I have to work here until I stop being a rookie?’
‘If you help me for a minute I’ll think about it.’
‘Marion …’ I said.
‘So are you coming or not? I asked Bruno but he’s busy.’
‘I’ve got things to do as well, but …’
‘I can ask someone else.’
She turned away and went to leave, but I was standing behind her and said, ‘Don’t run away, Marion, I’m coming, this crap can wait. I’ll always help you if you want, you know that.’
‘Rookie,’ she said, turning to face me. She pressed her lips together, so firmly that her mouth was a thin line. ‘Marion,’ I said. ‘You talk too much,’ she said. ‘There’s work waiting for us. Well, come on then.’ She looked around but the aisle was empty, then she took my hand and set off. She held my hand quite tightly pressed, and I felt her warmth, remembered the warmth on the seat of her forklift, then she suddenly let go and I walked along next to her.
‘Bruno says you’re doing well.’
‘Oh, does he?’
‘If he says so it must be true. Irina was singing your praises too.’ I wanted to turn off into the confectionery aisle but she took my hand again for a brief moment and pulled me further along. ‘I’m standing in on Delicatessen and Frozen Food today.’ We went through the open roller door to the cold storage room. I saw her looking over at the vending machine. But when she saw me looking at her she turned her head aside. ‘We’ve got to go to Siberia,’ she said. ‘We’d better wrap up warm.’ She went to one of the lockers and came back with two thick padded jackets and two hats. I helped her into her jacket, then put one on myself. She handed me one of the hats and I put it on her head carefully, pulling it over her short hair. ‘Hey,’ she said, and I tugged the hat down over her ears. ‘I need to see, you know. I’ve got a list, we have to get loads of stuff for the freezers.’ She tugged at her hat, then pointed at a couple of trolleys. ‘You go and get two trolleys, or better three, we’ve got quite a lot to fill up outside.’ We put gloves on too, and once we were wrapped up as warm as Eskimos we couldn’t help laughing.
And then we were in Siberia, twenty degrees below freezing, our breath came in clouds, and we took large hunks of frozen pork and beef and threw them in the trolleys; it sounded as if we were throwing stones.
‘Imagine if they locked us in here, by accident I mean.’ I was standing on the little ladder, handing down a large venison loin to her. I could feel the cold even through my gloves.
‘You wish.’
‘Hey, now you’re the cheeky one.’ I climbed down from the ladder, folded it closed and leant it against the wall. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I guess we’d have to lug meat around all night to keep ourselves from freezing.’
‘I guess we would.’ We pushed the three trolleys over to another spot. We’d already filled two of them. Our faces were red, our skin felt really tight, as if it were about to tear. ‘Brass monkeys in here,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so soft, we’re nearly finished.’ We were standing close together, the tiny clouds of steam mingling between our faces, and as we were piling crates of frozen pizza in the trolley she suddenly turned to me and looked at me, her hat down to her eyebrows. I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. It seemed as if I could feel her breath through the thick padded jacket. ‘Nice,’ she said, ‘it’s nice of you to help me.’ We stood there like that for a while in silence, then I said, ‘Do you know how Eskimos say hello?’ And I was surprised how quiet my voice sounded in the big cold storage room, as if the cold was swallowing it up. She looked at me, and I bent my head down to her and rubbed my nose against hers. She stayed still and quiet, not moving, and after a few seconds I felt her nose moving too.
At some point we turned back to the shelves. ‘Now I know,’ she said. Then we put the last of the pizza cartons in the trolley.
When I got to work the next day I went straight to the beverages aisles. Bruno always came a bit earlier to fetch the forklift from the recharging station, but I couldn’t find either him or the forklift.
There were more customers in the aisles than usual for the time of day. Perhaps there were a couple of good special offers on, and sometimes there are just days when people want to go shopping; I’ve never understood why that is. And I walked along the aisles; perhaps Bruno had something to do in another section, lending a hand, but actually they always gave me that kind of job, and then I saw the boss of ‘Shelf-filling/Night’. He was leaning against the whisky shelf, the customers passing right by him, but he seemed not to notice them at all as he stared at the tiled floor. I went up to him.
‘Hi boss,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for Bruno.’
He looked up and stared at me in surprise. ‘Bruno?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m on Beverages today, aren’t I?
‘You’ll have plenty to do on Beverages for a while – Bruno’s not coming back.’ He gazed past me and I suddenly knew Bruno was dead. I felt like I had to vomit, and I leant against the shelf next to the boss. ‘He just went and hanged himself. That stupid bastard went and hanged himself.’ I felt a fist in my stomach; it wouldn’t let me go.
‘No one knows anything. I’ve known him for more than ten years. No one knows anything. Get your forklift and take care of the beverages.’
‘OK, Dieter,’ I said. I had trouble walking straight, and I kept thinking, ‘Bruno’s dead. Bruno’s hanged himself.’
I met all sorts of workmates as I wandered down the aisles and then realised I had to go to the recharging station. They seemed to know already and we just nodded at each other, some of them looking at me as if they wanted to talk about it with me, but I kept walking until I was at his forklift. I pulled the big charging cable out of the socket. I’d forgotten to switch the power off first; that was pretty dangerous, all it took was a touch of the contacts. I held onto the forklift and gave a quiet laugh: ‘One down’s enough for now!’ I got in, put the key in the ignition, and then I drove back to the aisles.
There was that smell, of animals and stables. His smell was still in the little cab, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the seat had still been warm. I drove the forklift to Beverages and worked with his smell in my nostrils all night long.
And that smell again, country air, it was fertilising time. I stood on the narrow road leading to the graveyard – I could see it ahead, a little gate, the roof of the chapel – then I turned around and walked back down the road. The funeral would be starting any minute; there were a few workmates there and the bosses, and I’d brought flowers especially, but I walked back through the little village a couple of bus stops outside of town.
I stopped outside his house. It wasn’t far from the bus stop; he’d described it to me a few times. It was a perfectly normal two-storey detached house, like you’d find in lots of villages, not one of those old half-timbered ones or anything. The road was empty and I climbed over the fence. Maybe the gate wasn’t even locked, that’s probably normal in the kind of villages where everybody knows everybody, but I kind of felt inhibited about going into his place through the gate. I walked around the house. A stable, a couple of sheds, chickens pecking away at the ground, further back I saw two cows in a fenced-in field. At first I wanted to go in the stable, but then I saw the bench. It was against the back wall of one of the sheds. I went over to it. I sat down and looked out at the fields. There was a tractor with a trailer in one of them. It seemed not to be moving, and I could only tell by the couple of trees at the edge of the field that someone was driving it. A couple of birds flapped up around it. Why should I go into the stable? I didn’t know which beam it was anyway. I watched the tractor.
‘Raise the fork right to the top,’ said Marion.
‘Why?’
‘Hey come on, just do it. Bruno showed me it. I don’t know, I like it.’ I raised the empty fork as high as it would go. The forklift made its usual sounds, a humming and a metallic pling, then I let go of the lever. I tipped my head back and looked up at the fork, still swaying slightly. ‘And now?’
‘Let it down again, but really slowly. And then keep quiet.’
I moved the lever a tiny bit, and the carriage with the fork lowered itself down again slowly. ‘And now? I don’t understand.’
‘You have to be quiet. Really quiet. That sound, can you hear it, it’s like the sea.’
And she was right; I heard it now too and I was surprised I’d never noticed it before. The fork lowered with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics, and it really did sound like the wash of waves in the sea. The fork came lower; I sat in the forklift, my head slightly inclined. She stood right next to me, one hand on the control panel. ‘Can you hear it?’ she whispered, and I nodded. Then we listened in silence.

The Wintersongs by Kevin Barry The train pulled into a country station and they piled on board with country groans and country winces. There was hard wheezing and there were low whistles of dismay, as though they were half crucified from the effort of it all. They carried raw November on the breath. They carried phones, food, magazines. They eyeballed seats and shuffled towards the seats, they asked were the seats taken, for form's sake, but they didn't wait for an answer—it would take shotguns to keep them out of the seats. The girl tried to project belligerence or even menace but the old woman sat opposite just the same. She was bony and long and turkey- necked, ancient but with a fluency in the features, a face where age surfaces and then recedes again. She wasn't at all shy. 
Good morning, miss, she said. And I'll beg your pardon, because the sweat is drippin' off me. It was touch and go whether I'd make it at all. We have tar taken off that road coming up from the quare place. I'm after getting a lift off the younger one of the Canavans. The small fella, with the arm. Of course you might as well get a lift off a stone but I suppose the Canavans were always odd. He sitting there, bulling, you'd think he was after donating an organ to ma But anyway, I'm here, and I'm in the one piece, just about. What have we? Nine o'clock. Nine, and I've half a day put down. What did you say your name was? Lovely. And is that with an 'h'? 
A slow rumbling, then the sullen build of momentum, and the countryside was unpeeled, image by image: an old house with its slate roof caved in; magpies bossing a field; on higher ground, a twist of grey trees in the grudging light. The girl made a broad mime of adjusting her iPod, and she assumed a dead-eyed glaze, but the old woman smiled, shuffled to rearrange her bony buttocks for comfort, entwined her thin fingers and clasped them about her middle, then rotated one thumb slowly around the other. 
Would you believe, she said, that I was up for half six? Sitting in the kitchen in front of a two-bar fire, with the jaws hanging open. You see I didn't want to miss Canavan. And it's not as if I had sleep to distract me. Sure there's no more such thing as sleep. Do you know the way? Of course you don't. What age did you say you were? Hah! So you were born—I'll do the maths—you were born in 19... 88? My God. The Seoul Olympics. What was his name, with the big eyes? Ben Johnson. Only a mother could love it. Of course I lost a kidney in 1988. But yes, four o'clock in the morning, and I'm staring at the ceiling... when it's springtime in Australia, it's Christmas over here. Did you ever hear that one? No, well, it's before your time I suppose. Here, above, watch—new road. This is the by-pass they're after putting down. Look. Look! They're going to cut out Nenagh altogether. No harm. 
If there was a heat-seeking device high up, mapping all movement by the glow of the blood, it would pick them out as two pulsing red ovals—tiny dots on a vast map. They moved
eastwards at ninety rickety miles an hour and the old woman leaned across as though to confide and the ovals conjoined and pulsed almost as one. The girl took out a book and made a display of it. She peeled a clementine and looked to the passing skies. She tried to put a fence up, but the old one was a talker. 
What if I told you, she said, that I can see how it'll work out? What if I said it's written all over your face? Pay no attention. I'm rambling. I'm only fooling with you. You'd think someone would come along and throw a shovel of earth over me. So would you head up often yourself? I go regular. Not that I'd have a great deal of business but I have the pass. Shoes, occasionally. I pick up shoes for a woman in Birdhill. There's a shop above that specialises in extreme sizes. She's a fourteen. I know, but we have to try not to be cruel in life. That's the most important thing. And it's an excellent shop. They'll do you a practical boot, or a runner, or something dressy. Or as dressy as you're going to get if you're a fourteen. Don't! This is a poor woman, the first thing she thinks about of a morning is feet. You step out of the bed and there they are. Always and forever, clomping along beneath you, like boats. You run for a bus. You step onto a dance floor. You try to pull on a pair of nylons. I'm a three myself—look. A three. Dainty. 
Through and on, North Tipperary, weary hedgerows, and chimney pots, and the far-out satellite towns of reason, all of it stunned looking with the onslaught of winter, as if winter was a surprise to the place, and there were frequent apparitions—heavy- set men rolling tyres and twirling wrenches, stepping down from lorries, giving out to phones—and it darkened, as though on a dimmer switch, the morning became smudged and inky. 
Losing the wheels, she said, was rough. When you've no wheels, the options are limited. You'd be inclined to pack it in altogether. Of course if I had sense, I'd be driving still but I rode my luck and it gave out. I turned it over outside Tullamore. They'd every right to take the course of action they took. The startling thing was there wasn't a mark on me and the car a write-off. They threw the book at me and they had every justification. It was eight in the evening, for God's sake, it was summer, it was still daylight and I'm on the Tullamore Road after making shit out of a Fiesta? I ask you. I defended myself. I said, your honour, please don't take this event in isolation. I went back forty years. I told him how it all turned crooked on me. How you can't run away from things, you only store them for later. I gave him chapter and verse. Not that I thought I was going to walk out with a licence in my hand. I just wanted to explain. I just wanted to say. Of course, the eyes rolled up in his head. As a matter of fact, your honour, I said, I have no intention of ever driving again. And he looks down at me, over the top of the glasses, and he says, Madam, I am here to facilitate your wishes. Lovely deep voice on him. A gentleman. 
The haggard verges of a town put in an appearance. Motor factors, light industry ribbon development, new-build schemes, the health centre, an Aldi. Here was sweet life, and the common run, also the shades of mild hysteria. Here was... 
Templemore, she said. I can never pass through without thinking of poor Edward. My cousin. The misfortune, you see this is where they train guards, and he was mad to get in. It's not the case now. I understand there's a shortage. But Edward was... you could only say... OBSESSED! He nearly went out of his mind. You had to be five ten in your stockinged feet and he was five nine and a half. Just that fraction shy and it sent the poor creature to his wit's end. All he wanted in life was to be a guard. I have nothing against guards myself, despite what happened to me in Thanes. Of course that was my own fault as well. But Edward? A half inch. And what happened? His father, my uncle, Joe, God rest him, a very intelligent man, though lazy, Joe got up out of the chair and he got two sheets. With one of them he bound his son at the wrists and with the other he bound him at the ankles. He tied one end to the bumper of the car and he tied the other to the back axle of the tractor. I think it was a Belarussian they had. A powerful machine. And he climbed onto it and he looked out back and he called down, Edward! EDWARD! 
Heads swivelled in the carriage. Newspapers were raised just a little bit higher They said it with their eyes—we have one across the way, watch? Careful now. 
Edward, he said, son, there's no pressure on you. And Edward looked up at him and he said, Da? Start that engine. That same day Edward strode back into Templemore. He took off the shoes and he stood up against the wall and he said MEASURE ME! And he wasn't five foot ten. He was five eleven. If you want to talk about dedication. If you want to talk about a man with hope. He would always say after it was an extraordinary length to go to. That's as true as I'm sitting here, Sarah, even if the guards didn't work out great for him in the end. And by the way, would you mind taking that thing out of your ears while I'm talking to you? 
The light was scratched, molecular, the sky about to give in on itself, about to break up, a mist descending already, and they went slowly through and on, at a creaking rumble, then it built up on a straight stretch, and there was a descent to the midland plain, where confused-looking ducks sailed a small drowsy lake. The trolley went past—flattened vowels, lazy wheels, scalding drinks—teascoffees, lads, ladies? Teascoffees? By a tiny grey village there stood an enormous pink funeral home. 
Death, she said. Would you think about death much, Sarah? Of course you wouldn't. I dare say you have other things on your mind. I've been meaning to ask, actually, have we a boyfriend on the scene? No? Come off it! Who are you trying to kid? I'd say they're like flies around you. I'd say they can barely keep a hold of themselves. No? Well I suppose you could do with weight. Excuse me, what muffins have you? I see. I'll chance a blueberry. 
They outpaced the weather, by and by, and the arcs of a weak sun swung across the waiting fields, and the country eased into itself, and there was woodland passing. The girl considered changing seats but she didn't want to be rude. Some days you suffer. 
Trees, said the old woman. What's it they call it? Photosynthesis. Amazing what you'd remember, for years. Is it chloroform or chlorophyll? Or is that toothpaste? Or is it tap water? Or is it what the dentist put on rags? I'm dating myself. Trees! Calming, apparently. Or so they'd tell you. I wouldn't be too sure. Would you believe it if I told you I was walking through a wood one day—this is in Clare I'm talking about—and I saw a man buried to the neck? Only a young fella. This time of the year It would have been mulchy underfoot. Whatever way he managed it, he scratched out a hole in the ground and dragged the earth in after him. Buried to the neck. Some job of work. Now the young fella wasn't well, obviously. It turned out after he was known around the place. It wasn't his first time at this kind of messing. Of course it was just my luck to come across him. Who else would go out for a breath of air and walk into the likes of it? And what are you supposed to say to someone? You'd want nerves of steel to deal with that kind of situation and do I look as if I have nerves of steel? Trees! Arbour. Isn't it? Arboreal. There's a word for you. Lovely Photosynthesise. Come on we all go and photosynthesise. Trees can give you a sore throat. Something in the sap I think. Put me near trees and I find the throat goes septic on me. I come over class of hoarse. I come over husky. On account of trees, Septic. Sceptic. Anyway, tell me, Sarah, what's it you're reading? Go 'way? And would you be much of a one for the reading? 
Her face seemed to slip, her features came loose, disintegrated, and then rearranged. She was slippery. She was skinny, tall, sharp angled and grey skinned, with ash-coloured eyes and green-mottled hands, and now it was a pretty blowy day, with screensaver skies. They made it to the flats and paddocks of the Curragh, a watery expanse it seemed, a lightlyruffled sea. 
Horses, she said. Sweet Jesus don't be talking to me about horses. The worst thing that can happen with horses happened me. The first time I set foot on a racecourse, I went through the card. Limerick meeting—there were seven races, I picked seven winners. The whole cruel world of work and bosses and punching clocks at seven in the morning was revealed to me as a sham, Sarah, a world for fools. Who needed it? All you had to do was have a go at the horses. 
She wiped muffin crumbs from her chin. She lifted her rueful heavy eyes to the heavens. She smiled. 
Of course I wasn't the first eejit to come up with this idea. It took no more than six months and I was wiped out. I found myself in desperate waters. The bank pulled the shutters when it saw me coming. My name was doing the rounds in faxes, twice underlined. I was blacklisted by every credit union in South Tipp, North Waterford, East Cork. But there's always someone you can turn to and they showed up, soon enough. Two brothers, from Thurles, serious operators, hair and eyebrows, big shoulders. These boys were beef to the heels. If I'd sense, I'd have run a mile but do I look as if I have sense? I missed a payment and they showed up for a polite word. I missed a second payment and I was backed into the comer of a lounge bar. Oh, a monster! Did you realise, Sarah, that monsters are all
around us? You've come to the right woman. I missed a third payment and that was it, I had to clear out of Tipp altogether. If I didn't get out, it was looking like a boot-of-the-car job. I drove off late. Night-time, cold, and there were dogs somewhere, howling. I rang the boys from a payphone, I couldn't resist. I said d'ye call yereselves men? To threaten a poor single woman? Spittin' feathers down the phone he was. I'd have to be careful to this day about setting foot in Thurles. But that's no great loss to me. Of course the nerves weren't right for a long while. I was edgy, Sarah. I was drinking against nerves. It wasn't long after I lost most of the teeth. I missed a step on an embankment. Would you believe it if I told you these are nearly all screw-ins? They're some job, aren't they? Thank you. Of course I paid for them in tears. I was six months on soup and custard. And if the horses were bad, you should have seen me the year of the poker machines. I still get a shake in my right hand when I hear one. 
They were by the last stretch of countryside, above the surging drag of the motorway, and the exurbs crept out west, and a squat grey building sat high on a windy rise, and she pointed, and winked. 
Do you see this place? she said. Do you know what that used to be? Chained to the walls, Sarah. Which end is the sleeves? Are we coming or going? Here's one you'll not have heard, I guarantee it. Nachtmusik! Have you ever hear that word? It's a good one, isn't it? Out of the Germans, and faith they'd know all about it. Going loco down in Acupulco. The soft room. The slow-shoed shuffle in the corridor. The hair stood up on your head from shocks. If the walls could talk in the likes of that place! El Casa des Locos is what a Spaniard would say. They've apartments made of it now. Best of luck to them all inside. 
She simmered with happiness. There was great calm about her. There was no reserve about her. There was none of the wistfulness proper to old age. It was clammy on the train, and she opened her coat and loosened the collar of her blouse, and there was a cheap chain and cross on her neck—it flashed with trinket menace. For a while, she was silent, and the silence was unbearable. Her gaze went to the carriage roof, all to be seen were the whites of her eyes. She hummed to herself, crossed over, then returned. 
What about yourself? she said. I wouldn't go so far as to call you the chatty type. What's your own situation? Do you want me to take a run at it? 
She rubbed her hands: lascivious. She made as though to sketch in the air. She took on a high-toned expression. She drew broad strokes with bony fingers. She cupped her chin in her palms. 
Let's see what we've got, she said. The eyes are outside your head, so you were up at a dirty hour yourself. You got dressed in the dark, didn't you? Yes, with a big brazen head, very sure of yourself. The case was packed since last night, you did it on the sly. You had it hid under the stairs. You went down the stairs and got the case and you opened the front door, very quiet, and you stepped out into the street. It's a terrace of houses, isn't it? Familiar as
your own face but unreal at that hour: parked cars, frost, moon, not a cat on the road. You pulled the door out after you. You could hardly breathe.
And the light was starting to come through then. She went down the steps by the grotto. She went down into the bowl of the town. There was yeast in the air from the brewery. Some early workers were eating eggs in the café on the corner, lost in newspapers, winter, the steam of their tea. She went inside to get cigarettes from the machine and the men looked up, and they looked at each other. There were affectations of great sadness-a pretty girl in a pencil skirt can bring that on easy enough. A dozy smile from the plump familiar waitress, but nobody asked any questions, nobody asked where are you going so early Sarah, and what's with the case, girl? She went down McCurtain Street and she watched herself as she went, she painted in the drama of it. She bought a ticket at Kent Station. A single: she stressed the word. She sat on a high stool and sipped coffee and a tic of anxiety surfaced, a bird-like flutter beneath the skin. The man from the kiosk was on his knees cutting a bale of newspapers with a penknife and its blade was a blue gleam. 
You'd be mistaken for angelic, said the old woman. Peachy- creamy, oh lovely, look—petite! But there's awful distance in you. 
She smiled but it was sardonic, ironical. 
There's coldness, isn't there, Sarah? You were going to get out as soon as you could and not a word to anyone about it. To hell with it—let 'em suffer! 
The world around withdrew from them. The woman reached across the table and took the girl's slate-cold hands in hers. The pulsing ovals weakened, faded, and disappeared. There was no sound except for a soft, lone breathing. There was no way to reverse from this, or to pull back. 
Listen, she said. I have news for you. Brace yourself, child, 'cause here it comes. There is no such thing as forgiveness. Everything has a consequence. Would you believe that? Years later, you'll still have to answer the question: was the right thing done? 
The girl looked away, abruptly into the steel glimmer of the morning. She bit on her bottom lip, so prettily. It would be hopeless to try and find a flaw on her. 
I wouldn't fret about it, said the old woman. Maybe it was the right thing. He didn't have the courage, did he? He wouldn't say how he felt. He wouldn't tell you how he felt, Sarah. You see you have to stand up for it. You have to declare it. 
Then it was the Clondalkin yards, mostly disused, and the dust and seep of the city had fallen on them. The train stopped to take on maintenance workers. Another train was stalled alongside, it was headed in the opposite direction. Passengers from each stared wearily across to the other. Movement, and she felt as though her train had eased slowly forwards but it was the other, pulling away west. The old woman went out through the
yards. She threw no shadow in the white sun. She went over the sidings and past the rusted trailers. She went in among the carriage-building sheds and vanished, left no trace. She became light, air, dust. 
Now it's Heuston and here she comes. A thin girl in a pencil skirt, pulling a trolley-case behind, and the midday crush parts before her like a miraculous sea. She flips the keyguard of her phone and scrolls her texts. She moves on again, straight-backed and hard- eyed, with world-class invulnerability. She doesn't know that every step from now will change her. She is so open, so fluid. Every conversation will change her, every chance meeting, every walk down the street. Every walk; every street.

Sez Ner by Arno Camenisch The dairyman’s hanging from a paraglider, in the red firs below the hut on the alp at the foot of Sez Ner. You can hear him cursing from the hut. He has his back to the mountain, is facing the range across the valley where, shoulder to shoulder, peak after peak rises, Piz Tumpiv at the center, all 3,101 meters of it, that amazing presence it has, outdoing the other—snowless—peaks. He’ll come down when he’s ready, his farmhand says. Let him wriggle for another while, just. That’ll teach him not to clear the trees.
The cheese is swelling. During the night, the stone weights crash to the floor, wakening everyone. The swineherd and the cowherd carry the over-ripened cheeses through the clear night, across the square, through the cowshed, to behind the cowshed, and dump them in the slurry. Neither the dairyman nor his farmhand budges to help. They stay where they are in the doorway, their hands in their pockets.
The farmhand has eight fingers, five on his left hand, and three on his right. His right he keeps mostly in his pocket, or resting on his thigh beneath the table. When he lies in the grass outside the hut, next to the pigpen, fast asleep with his boots off, and socks off as well, the swineherd counts his toes. The farmhand sleeps in the afternoons because, by night, he’s out and about. He vanishes when everyone’s gone to bed, comes back at some point during the night. He takes the dogs with him, to stop them barking.
The swineherd has a bad conscience. A pig’s lying in the pen and won’t get up. Its cold snout, the swineherd knows, means the pig’s a goner, but he pokes the lump of ham with his steel-toed boots anyway. It could still get up, sure. Quel ei futsch, ti tgutg, the dairyman says. Just nineteen pigs now. Twenty, counting you, the swineherd thinks. The dairyman returns to the cowshed, his one-legged milking stool around his waist, and the swineherd takes the pigs back up to the pigsty, willing that stool to collapse. In the pigsty, he counts the pigs, makes it eighteen standing and one lying down. That one’s a goner, too. That’s how quick it can be, the swineherd thinks. Keep going at this rate, and there’ll be none left in the morning and I can take myself home. The evening sun’s already sinking behind the mountains, Piz Tumpiv dark yellow in the dusk, when the vet arrives, your man Tscharner with his beard, fat stomach, and fat son, who doesn’t acknowledge the swineherd, just the dairyman. They’ve eaten too much, the vet says to the dairyman, their insides have burst.
Clemens’s cow, the dark one, head-butts the fence-post, knocking it over. Clemens’s cow gets out, and his other five cows trot after her. The vet says cows are bright, much brighter than horses. With horses, it’s all about status, he says. They might look elegant, but, basically, they’re thick. Cows may well be more intelligent. Right now, though, the cowherd’s scouring the forest, hoping to find Clemens’s cows before the sun goes right down.
Later in the evening, the cowherd from the alp bordering with Stavonas comes by in the car. She’s just back from Glion, apparently, where she had her dog neutered. It all went smoothly, it seems, but the thing’s totally dazed, still. She opens the rear door of the red car —where the dog’s been allowed to lie, just this once. Whimpering and whining, it is. He doesn’t seem to want out, she says, and the dog lies where it is, just. It’ll be fine, the farmhand says. Takes a bit of time, that’s all. The cowherd says to come with her, to help her carry the dog in, up at the alp. The farmhand does so, takes his own dogs too. They run along behind, there’s no space in the car. He whistles out the window to make them keep up. Make sure they don’t turn back.
In the morning, on the bench outside the hut, the dairyman’s out for the count with a halfempty bottle of schnapps in his hand, while the goat’s up on the divan, up in his room, admiring the view of Piz Tumpiv, maybe; peeing on the bed, for sure.
Every day, the pigs get out of their pen, down from the hut. They dig beneath the electric fence and head across the pastures, down to the trees where the dairyman was hanging. The swineherd doesn’t care, knows—come the evening—they’ll be back. The dairyman does care. Show them who’s boss, he says, thrusting the rod with the rings into the swineherd’s hand, and packing the farmhand off with him. In the pigsty, the farmhand takes the rod and the rings, and the swineherd picks a pig, grabs it by the ears, and jumps on its back, making it squeal even louder. He pulls back its ears and digs his knees in its ribs, to help the farmhand get the rod in its snout, and press. Once the ring is on, the pig bolts to the opposite corner, to hide behind the other pigs who lick the blood from its snout.
Tourists arrive on the dirt road, improved last spring, stop their beautiful cars at the fence outside the hut, and toot the horn. Seeing Cowherd and Swineherd sprawled on the grass on the slope above the hut, they toot again. They keep tooting until—finally—they give up, get out of their beautiful cars, open the gate themselves, and drive on. Twenty minutes later, they’re reversing back down as the road doesn’t go much further and doesn’t have a big enough turning place. They have to stop at the gate again, the gate they left open, but is now shut again, to reopen it. This time, the herdsmen, sprawling on the grass still, wave to them.
You hear him before you see him: the priest rounds the corner on his moped, sending dust flying everywhere. He’s wearing a helmet in the afternoon sun, and his cassock flutters in the wind he’s creating. Seeing this, the dogs bark and leap at the priest, send him spinning down the slope, nearly, and into the roses. The priest parks his moped beside the hut and is given a coffee before he asks them all to gather in front of the hut that looks onto the mountains; gives the dog jumping up and licking him a slap; then invites them to pray to God Almighty, Lord of all they see before them, for the summer they’ve not yet had. A wind comes up, and the herd moves down in front of the cowshed as the priest, now with a stole around his neck, hands out prayer books from among the cows and beasts. He announces which page it is, then reads it to them. The pigs have got out too, and come up to the priest and snatch at his cassock. The parishioners repeat whatever the priest says, like parrots. A
good half hour it is before the final Amen, before everything’s been blessed that needed blessing, and, a wheel of cheese and five kilos of butter richer, the priest gets back on his moped, pushes his way through the waiting, already grumpy herd, and—in the last of the light—vanishes.
The black ram with the white patch on its head is bang in the middle of the cowshed when the cows come crashing in and break its legs. Both front legs end up in plaster. The black ram is anything but tame. Normally, he wouldn’t let you pet him. In plaster, he does: he can’t get away. One time before, when he was tied to the cowshed—his legs, at that point, were still in one piece—he snapped the rope in two when the swineherd tried to go up to him, and ran away. There’s no need to be afraid of the swineherd, the farmhand says.
The rooster isn’t afraid, it doesn’t run away, is one aggressive bastard, the farmhand says. When the farmhand gets too close, it jumps up at him. Your man’s steel-toed boots it takes, to shoo it away. The rooster, a handsome beast, guards its hens, covers them constantly. Any time, any place, anywhere.
Kneeling at his bed, the cowherd shows the swineherd the projectiles he found among the edelweiss and roses. The length of your lower arm, the projectiles are, all twisted and bent, some with, some without heads. The swineherd turns them all the way around, throws them in the air, and catches them. They end up back under the bed, with the cloth over them. On one occasion, when the dairyman—for once—goes into the pastures, he finds a projectile too. He orders the two herdsmen to put a fence up round it right away, a good distance away, then puts the cowherd on sentry duty, and drives down to the village in his Subaru Justy. Early that afternoon, a military convoy rounds the corner, three huge vehicles with specialists in them, wearing gloves and special uniforms. They’re careful not to touch the projectile, crawl up to it from different angles, have instruments they note down readings from. Finally, they dispose of the projectile, and walk, in step, back down the pasture to outside the hut again, the officer out in front. Not a word is spoken as they climb into the camouflage vehicles. And disappear, in a cloud of dust.
The dog’s jumping up, and licking away at the cowherd, the other dog, the older one, is trotting ahead, in front. The young dog jumps and sinks its teeth in the cows’ tails, gets a free ride until the cow gives it a kick, and the dog, with a whimper, lets go. Its tail between its legs, it gives the cows a wide berth on its way back to its master. They get on well, the young dog and the old gray one. They only ever fight over food.
The one with the limp doesn’t want to move, the one with the limp trots behind the others, stopping time and again. The cowherd takes his stick to her, beats her on the back till the stick breaks. The herd’s vanished, long since, into the trees.
Late in the evening, at the side of the hut, the dairyman’s at the wheel of his gray Subaru Justy, the bottle of plum brandy in his hand. His farmhand’s beside him, in the passenger seat. The cowherd and the swineherd and the dogs are behind him, in the back. The car’s
the safest place, the dairyman says. Each time the lightning strikes, ruins the cowherd’s fences, or sets the firs at the edge of the forest alight, he winces. The rain sweeps across the alp, giving both it and the filthy Subaru a good clean. TRANSLATED FROM RHAETO-ROMANIC AND GERMAN BY DONAL MCLAUGHLIN

The Telescope by Danila Davydov Ippelman was extremely lucky. The explosion killed everybody on the bus, the driver, the passengers, everybody except him. His good fortune must have been due to the fact that he was standing by the rear doors intending to get off in a few minutes’ time, and the bomb (if it was a bomb, rather than something else, something even more improbable) was at the front of the bus. Just at the moment Ippelman was thinking about the spirit of competition, there was a sound too loud to be heard, a blinding blaze of light, and the bus evidently toppled over. Ippelman saw green and orange ellipses, felt a stinging pain in his eyes, and fell but did not lose consciousness; instead he submitted to an instinctive craving for survival, his hands found an escape hatch that appeared to have opened specially for him and which flung itself into his arms. Ippelman still had little idea what had happened as he crawled out but, when there was a second explosion behind him (the fire had reached the fuel tank), he saw with extraordinary clarity that he was blind. Most likely slivers of glass had cut his eyes a moment after the explosion, although he wouldn’t have argued if told that his blindness was simply a symptom of concussion; he wasn’t clear about the effect of the blast. I may just be in shock, he told himself, and when I get over it my sight will come back. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that this wasn’t going to happen. He tried to find out if anybody else had survived, although he was all but certain they were dead; he called out three or four times but there was no response. It was cold. It occurred to Ippelman that he shouldn’t stay there. He should get away. The town limit was about two kilometers away, but without visual clues, walking there wouldn’t be easy. The simplest thing would be to keep to the road, but when he crawled out of the burning bus Ippelman had no idea which side of the road it was laying on. I just need to walk, Ippelman thought, and either I’ll reach the town or a village along the road in the other direction. The main thing was to move, because otherwise he might die. Ippelman had no idea what he might die of, but suddenly thought of blood poisoning and decided that that was what he had to worry about. He tried to stand up, swayed, lost his balance, and sat down; he tried again, got up, took one step and then another. Apart from his eyes the rest of him was in one piece. I’ve got to go, he said out loud to himself. He liked the sound of that and repeated it, as if responding to applause from an imaginary audience which had taken its seats in twilit bushes he could no longer see. He walked for half an hour or so in total silence until he found he was exhausted. He sat down in the middle of the road in the hope of getting a lift from a passing car, but no car passed, there was only an owl looking for prey hooting in the darkness. Not surprising, Ippelman thought, you won’t get a lot of passing cars at two in the morning on a weekday in the middle of the countryside. Now there were two owls, they’d discovered each other and started arguing. Ippelman wasn’t sure whether owls ate human flesh. He knew crows did, but owls didn’t seem to have much in common with crows, and besides, they only came out at night. It got colder. Suddenly he heard a vehicle approaching. It stopped, a door slammed, and the driver crossed to
Ippelman, grunted, and gave him a hefty kick that sent him rolling into a ditch, then the driver got back in the car and drove off. Ippelman dragged himself back onto the road and staggered on without knowing which direction he was going in. He walked for a long time, a very long time. On several occasions he collapsed helplessly on the asphalt before resolving again to go on. To his surprise the pain in his eyes was not unbearable, but neither could it be ignored. Ippelman reckoned it would be daybreak soon and, even if he was walking in the wrong direction, a passing car would stop sooner or later not to taunt an injured man but to help him. The thought came to him that news about the explosion on the bus must already have reached the forces of law and order, they would certainly be searching for survivors, and he would shortly be found. For some reason, however, he could hear no cars, only small animals squeaking or whimpering in the grass by the side of the road. Ippelman now relaxed and felt an inner calm. Like getting your second wind, he thought. The freshness of the morning, if, of course, it was already morning, seemed paradoxically in harmony with the stinging sensation in his sightless eyes, which, predictably, showed no sign of stopping. He heard a cock crow far away, so it was morning and there must be a village nearby. He felt no joy, only emptiness, of which there was so much that Ippelman overflowed with it and lost consciousness without even noticing. He didn’t notice waking up either, only why—a wet hand touched his forehead. What’s happened to you, a thin voice asked, seeming neither surprised nor scared. Where am I, Ippelman asked, or didn’t so much ask as just say. Here. Ippelman tried to get up but realized he no longer had the strength, and in any case the hay under his back was very comfortable. Lie there, the voice laughed, I’ll bring you some milk. The person ran off. Ippelman heard it clearly, the person was soon back. Drink it. The cold milk was just what Ippelman wanted. You need a bandage, you’re covered in blood. What’s your name? What’s yours? Ippelman, said Ippelman, for some reason very proud that his memory had so clearly registered that he was indeed Ippelman and not anybody else, and then, a moment or two later, he realized he had been thinking aloud and had exultantly shouted out his name and been behaving like a lunatic, a complete lunatic. You think I’m a lunatic, don’t you? I’m Lyokha, the voice said, laughing again. No, do you hear what I’m saying, Ippelman was embarrassed at his loud, unrestrained self-naming. It hurts, that’s why I’m a bit odd. It’s okay, everything’s fine. The boy called Lyokha suddenly put his arms round Ippelman, hugged him, and laughed again. How old are you, Ippelman asked? Granny went off to town yesterday, and then something like this happens. Something like what? You should answer when a grown-up asks you a question. Ippelman’s voice didn’t sound menacing, it wasn’t, you couldn’t have found a hint of schoolmasterishness in it. There was some gauze, I’ll see if I can find it. He ran off again. His grandmother went off to town yesterday, Ippelman thought, and then something like this happened. What does he mean, something like this? He began picturing all kinds of horrors, perhaps even an alien invasion, but not really, lazily, the way he might think back over the latest episode of some low-budget soap opera in bed, just to get bored and fall asleep. Hold your head up a bit, Ippelman hadn’t noticed the boy coming back, I’ll bandage it for you, oh, I forgot the iodine. Have you got iodine? Well, maybe just herbal disinfectant, I’ll go and look—he ran off again, and very soon, unnaturally soon somehow, he was back and lavished a stinging
liquid on Ippelman’s eyes. Ippelman swore, but why, he immediately wondered, something stinging on something stinging should have been like a double negative. Do you know what two minuses make? he asked Lyokha. ’Course I do, the boy said, offended by this doubting, and began wrapping a bandage round Ippelman’s head, but without saying it made a plus. What are you doing here? Well, I took a bus to do some stargazing. Why couldn’t you do it in the town, aren’t there any stars there? Ippelman thought for a moment. Well, how can I explain. You can see them there, of course, but there’s a lot of light around, even at night, streetlights, light from windows, that sort of thing, and quite near here there’s a mound with open fields all round it, no trees, no houses, you can see to the horizon in every direction, it’s a good place for looking. What do you want to look at the stars for? The boy’s question might have seemed stupid but Ippelman didn’t think so, quite the opposite. He thought for another moment. You see, I’ve got a telescope, at least I did before the explosion. Do you listen to the radio? Ippelman asked, suddenly anxious, Granny’s got a television. Lyokha stroked Ippelman’s head: how is it, sore? No. It was sore but Ippelman preferred to pretend it was just the iodine stinging and not him demonstrating manly stoicism. What do you need a telescope for? It’s a hobby, something I enjoy doing, I like looking through the telescope, on Saturdays I go into the countryside and look at the stars all night, it makes you feel very peaceful. I’ve discovered a planet, he added proudly. You did! I did. Really? Yes, really. Lyokha pressed up against him once more and kissed him on the forehead. It’s only a little one, of course, five kilometers across, just a large rock in space, but I was the first, so that’s why they called it Ippelman. You know what? Lyokha said, there’s something going on out there, it was on the television, and then you turned up. Space invaders? No, the boy’s voice was very serious, a war, I think. He kissed Ippelman hard and started pulling his pants off. What are you doing, stop it, it’s okay, it’s okay. When they woke, Lyokha said, you lie here in the barn—Ippelman was pleased, he had been sure it was a barn—because Granny may have come back, if she didn’t get hurt like you, or something worse. He ran off. Ippelman decided to think about the stars. The information about a war didn’t upset him, he felt like someone who’s fallen on the field of battle and could now afford to let his thoughts be detached and unworldly, dealing with astronomical magnitudes, but his reflections on astronomy immediately ran off in the wrong direction and Ippelman unintentionally found himself picturing an armada of space invaders, the armada rather than the invaders themselves, because now he was thinking even big individual aliens seemed insignificant compared to a whole galactic flotilla. Granny’s done for, Lyokha said, coming into the barn, want some sausage before they get here? Before who get here? You know, them. What do you mean them? The enemies. Come on, tell me what you heard. Well, they said it was a war. You know, Ippelman struggled to lift his back from the hay, I was just thinking and realized there’s something behind all this. What? The war, the explosions, your grandmother not being back yet, me lying here. What? I think, Ippelman said, getting into his stride, it’s not just a war, it’s a special kind of war. Why? Nothing is ever that simple. Let me change your bandage. Wait will you, there’s time for that later. Ippelman was carried away by the image of global cataclysm and talking with his mouth full of sausage: it’s a takeover, you see, a takeover from space, it’s a very simple plan, nobody will believe it’s happening until they’re here as large as life, taking
over everything, and it’s only then people will start coming to their senses, but by then it will be too late. He swallowed the last of the sausage. I think they’ve grabbed everything already, I mean, all the major urban centers, they’ve taken everything into their control. The boy burst out laughing and leaped on top of Ippelman. Hey, take it easy. Helping Ippelman to dress, Lyokha kept saying, you’re weird, you’re really weird, what do you mean aliens, it’s enemies, what are you going on about, there’s nobody in space, I heard it on the television, I bet it’s the Chinese. Yes, Ippelman thought aloud, maybe it’s the Chinese. But, and this he thought just to himself, aliens would make me feel more heroic, so let’s stick with that, and anyway who cares, I’m blind anyway, if they kill me I won’t see it. Lyokha, are you afraid of dying? What, yes, of course. Me too, only I don’t care anymore. He started crying, in spite of the bandage, in spite of his hurt eyes, and it only struck him an hour later or maybe more that crying must mean his eyes were still where they should be, just not working, so there was hope, although, of course, he was no ophthalmologist, he didn’t know the first thing about these things, and he doubted aliens would have field hospitals for treating earthlings. Lyokha pulled his bandage off, licked his tears away, and then the aliens came and took him by the arms and legs and carried him off and put him down somewhere, Ippelman was a bit surprised they just laid him down, very carefully really, and didn’t throw him like food for their extraterrestrial dogs, and then drove away with him, because the place they had taken him was a vehicle, it smelled of fuel, it bumped over the unevenness in the asphalt and then Ippelman started crying again and wanted to know where the boy was, Lyokha, where are you? I love you, don’t you know, I love you. Take it easy, the voice was unexpectedly human, be brave. They were Chinese, Ippelman thought, feeling humiliated because if they had been aliens there was nothing to be embarrassed about but if they were Chinese it was a different matter altogether, they were like us, not cosmic. What, have you conquered us? Ippelman wailed. This guy’s not right in the head, the voice said. In shock from the pain, said another. No problem, we’ll take him to the district hospital, they’ll sort it out. You bastards, Ippelman wept, you bastards, usurpers, rats. The boy had hidden from the orderlies behind the barn until the ambulance disappeared around the bend and now ran home. Granny, what’s a telescope? You should be given a good beating, that’s what. No, it’s true. Well, I’m sure I don’t know. Granny, is there going to be a war? You’ll get your answer sooner than you think. Granny! Go milk the cow. Granny, who’s stronger, us or the Chinese? Us, of course, what do you think, and if you’re going to be bad I’ll tell your dad and when he comes back he’ll give you a good beating. Granny! But seeing the expression on his grandmother’s face, Lyokha fled from the hut and headed, needless to say, not for the cowshed but to the barn where, hidden under the hay, was that thing that looked like he didn’t know what.
TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY ARCH TAIT
Robotville and Mr.Caslow by Kurt Vonnegut Editor’s Note: The following is an unfinished science-fiction short story. While setting up a potentially fantastic tale, the story ends in mid-action, at the top of a typewritten manuscript page. It is not known whether an ending exists; to date, none has been found.
You return to your old public grade school on a gray day, just about sunset, when only the principal, the night janitor, and a child in trouble are there. You are passing through town by chance, and return to your school on an impulse born of rootlessness. You have been away from the town for fifteen years, away from the planet itself for five. You have been on Mars. The grade school is one of the few places in the town of your childhood where someone may remember you still.
The concrete cornerstone of the school, roughed up to look like granite, says that the school is Number Fourteen, The Amos Crosby School. It takes you a moment to remember who Amos Crosby was. He was a whaling captain. The town was a whaling port once. Its nickname is still “The Harpoon City.” It is mean and poor. Your father worked in a shoe factory here. The shoe factory closed. Your father and thousands more had had to move away.
You decipher the Roman numeral on the cornerstone, calculate that the building was sixtyone years old at the start of World War III. The brutal pile of brick is seventy-six years old now. A big, bright new sign, shaped like an arrow, points away from the school, beguiling the eye with pictures of atoms and spaceships. “New Industrial Park,” the sign reads; and, below that, “The Harpoon City Takes Its Rightful Place in the Age of Space.” A vandal has been at work on the sign, writing big and scratching deep with something like a screwdriver. “Robotville,” he has written in letters four feet high.
You already know about the New Industrial Park. The clerk at your hotel has told you about it. It is a vast tract of empty land, blessed by the mayor in a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It is supposed to tempt new industries into building there. So far, no new industries have built.
The wintry air lies still in the flat, thin light of sunset. It is not bitingly cold. Yet, what cold there is goes to the marrow of your bones. You gradually understand that it is a sense of desolation that makes you cold. Nine out of every ten houses along the street are dark, empty, for sale.
You wonder if your old school is still a school. You see that it is, for there are long bicycle racks on the playground. There is a single bicycle in the racks, the bicycle, surely, of the boy
kept long after school. It is the bare skeleton of a bicycle, without fenders or chain-guard or handlebar grips. The skeleton is rusty.
You go to the front doors, find them locked by the same crude method used in your own day. A padlocked chain is strung through the brass handles inside. You shake the door, rattling the chain. You remember this as the customary way for calling the night janitor.
You already know that the janitor won’t be Mr. Pensington, the janitor in your day. You know that Mr. Pensington died in the war, in the Home Guard stand against the robots at Louisville. You remember him fondly as a giant who had majestic contempt for any child who did not please his teacher.
Now a new janitor comes up the iron treads from the basement. You feel an unfair dislike — disliking him for not being Mr. Pensington. He is in his thirties; lean, hawk-faced, balding some. He comes up the stairs eagerly, expecting someone else. He shows disappointment when he sees you, doesn’t want to let you in.
“You from the committee?” he calls through the glass. He lets you know with the tone of his voice that he doesn’t want to be bothered by anybody who isn’t on the committee.
“No,” you say. You try to impress him with a name that, for all you know, may be meaningless to him. “I want to see Mr. Caslow,” you say. Caslow was the school principal in your day. The probability of his still being principal is low.
This makes the janitor furtive, suspicious. “You on his side?” he says. Obviously, Caslow is on one side of a dispute, and the janitor is on the other.
“I used to go here,” you say.
“You come back some other time,” he says. “Caslow can’t see you now. He’s waiting for the committee.” He starts to walk away.
You are furious. “Hey!” you shout at his back, and you make the door chain rattle. He stops, looks at you uneasily. You think he must be a moron. It isn’t his face that tells you so. It is the fact that he is wearing proudly what you have not seen in years — a discharge button from World War III. Not even in the first months following the war did anyone but a fool wear his discharge button. It was no distinction to have served in the armed forces — not in a war in which the old men and the women and even the children had turned out to fight robots. Yet, years after the war, here is a queer duck who seems to think his discharge button is a great badge of honor.
You yell a big lie at him. “Better let me in!” you say. “I’m a friend of the mayor!” The hotel clerk has told you that the mayor is a hustler, a comer — but you’ve forgotten the mayor’s name.
Your yell hits the janitor harder than you expect. He is afraid to believe you, afraid not to. He touches the crown of his head as though there is something magic up there that will tell him what to do. The gesture is a dead giveaway. It is the gesture of an ex-prisoner of war. The janitor is touching the fine, silver-wire antenna that enemy surgeons put under his scalp. The antenna used to tell him exactly what to do. The antenna used to take radio signals out of the air, send them into his brain. The antenna, during the war, was what made him be a robot.
***
You do not hate him for having been a robot. He could not help himself. His life from the time the wire was installed until the war ended was a blank. He simply woke up one day to be told that the war was over, that he was free. No one was going to radio-control him any more. While radio-controlled, he had done prodigies of work and killing for the enemy. He could not be blamed.
If the sight of him makes you slightly queasy, it is out of pity for him. The few ex-robots you have known have hated themselves for what they did in the war. Worse than that, they have had to live with the knowledge that they might at any moment be turned into robots again. Tampering with the apparatus the enemy put in their minds would result in certain death.
Laws protect them. It is a crime of the most serious sort to send out radio signals in the range of frequencies known as “the robot band.” That band is not to be used until the last ex-robot is dead.
Now the ex-robot school janitor decides reluctantly to let you in. He unlocks the chain, opens the door. “You really a friend of Mayor Jack’s?” he says.
“Mayor Jack and I are like that,” you say, and you waggle crossed fingers under his nose.
You step inside, are filled with nostalgia by the faint school smell. It has not changed. You wonder what its ingredients are. Chalk, soft coal, and children’s breaths? You remember what a glorious old fortress of freedom the ramshackle school really was — is. The place is still vibrant with brave, lovely, childish contempt for anyone who would not be free.
“The mayor’s late,” says the janitor.
“He’s been held up,” you say with a knowing smile.
“The mayor’s gotta come,” says the janitor, “or the old man will just tie up the committee in knots again.”
“Old man?” you say.
“Caslow,” says the janitor, surprised that you should ask. “Who else?” His hand goes to the crown of his head again. “The mayor is gonna fire him tonight, isn’t he?” he says. “They really got the goods on him this time.”
You nod, become worried and watchful. Something sinister is going on.
The janitor comes closer, so you can hear him whisper. “I know who’s been tearing down the posters,” he says. He shakes his head. “It isn’t the kids. It’s the old man himself!” He goes to a trash barrel by a bulletin board, pulls out two rumpled posters. “I saw him tear these down with his own hands an hour ago.”
You examine the posters. “Ex-prisoners of war are human, too – ” says one, “respect their special needs.” The quotation is credited to Mayor Harlan Jack. The accompanying picture shows an idealized family that appears to be seeing God. They are looking, however, at nothing more supernatural than a radio mast. The other poster shows a tragically handsome man. The fingers of his right hand rest lightly on the crown of his head. Like the janitor, he wears his discharge button proudly. “He only asks to serve to the very fullest.” reads the poster. Mayor Jack is supposed to have said that, too. And both posters, you see, have been published by something called The Committee of Friends of Ex-Prisoners of War.
Your feeling of nightmare increases. It makes no sense that the ex-prisoners of war would have such active, passionate friends. To the best of your knowledge, they have never been discriminated against, have never been treated in any way that would make them feel in a class apart. The few thousand that survived the war dispersed very quickly, became ordinary citizens with ordinary ups and downs. You can’t imagine why they should gather, why they should draw attention to themselves as a group.
You grope for more clues. “I — I see you’re wearing your discharge button,” you say.
“Mayor Jack said to, didn’t he?” says the janitor anxiously. “Did he say ‘Take ’em off now’?” His hand goes to the button, ready to yank it off at the mayor’s command.
“No, no — ” you say, “you keep right on wearing it till the mayor tells you different.” You overplay your hand, thinking mistakenly that Mayor Jack is staging a general patriotic revival. “Dressed in such a hurry this morning,” you say, “I forgot to put my button on.”
He claps you on the arm, loves you like a brother. “You’re an ex-POW, too!” he says.
You nod. It isn’t true.
“How come I never see you at the meetings?” he says.
“I’ve been out of town,” you say.
“Have you signed the petition — the latest one?” he says. Plainly, your answer is important to him.
“Not yet,” you say at last.
He pulls a petition from his overalls’ pocket, forces you to take it and a pen. “Sign,” he says.
You read the petition. “We, the undersigned ex-prisoners of war,” you read, “respectfully urge the immediate passage of Public Bill 1126, the Morris-Ames-McLellan Bill, permitting the use of robot labor in industry.” The janitor’s petition, a very dim carbon copy, has perhaps thirty signatures on it.
Your disgust is so profound that you simply let the pen and petition fall to the floor. You walk away, mount the stairs to the first-floor hallway, go down the hallway to Mr. Caslow’s office. You understand now that the ex-prisoners of war, the ex-robots, are begging to be used as robots again.
***
You come quietly to Mr. Caslow’s office door. His office is unchanged from your day. There is the same public-building shabbiness — battered furniture, exposed pipes, chipped paint that lets dirty beiges and greens show through from years gone by. And there are the same old relics of freedom and nature and civilization — a framed replica of the Declaration of Independence, a plaster bust of Shakespeare, a portrait of George Washington, an oriole’s nest, gay curtains made by the home economics class.… The Third World War, you note with pleasure, has not necessitated the addition or subtraction of a single relic.
A ten-year-old boy, owner of the lonely bicycle outside, sits in a wooden armchair. He is unused to arms on chairs, runs his moist palms up and down them, seeking a resting place, finding none.
Mr. Caslow sits at his desk, paying no attention to the restless boy. Mr. Caslow is gravely signing certificates of some sort. He does not seem worried about the coming of the mayor and the committee. You clear your throat loudly, and he is not startled, does not look up at once. You remember him as a game, stocky, decent man in his forties, as poor as Job’s turkey. He is remarkably unchanged physically, save for his hair. His hair is white now.
“Yes?” he says, looking up at last. “Are you the advance party?”
You smile. “Of what, sir?” you say.
“Of the committee — of the bleeding hearts society,” he says.
“No, sir,” you say. “I used to go to school here. I just wanted to look in and say hello.” You tell him your name.
He seems amazed. He blinks several times, then stands, welcomes you in. “You’ll excuse me if I seem a little rusty at welcoming a student back,” he says. “Not many come back these days.” He turns to the boy. “Aaron,” he says, “go down in the basement and see if you can’t help your father. When the committee comes, you and your father come up with them.”
“Yes, sir,” says Aaron respectfully. He leaves.
Mr. Caslow waits until Aaron is out of earshot, and then he says to you, “Not many graduates come back since they took over the neighborhood.”
“Who?” you say.
“The ex-prisoners of war,” he says. “That’s all we’ve got here now, you know — children of the robots. One hundred percent.”
“Are — are they any different from other children?” you say.
“No,” says Caslow. He gives a bitter grin. “Unfortunately for their parents — no.” He looks at his watch. “That’s what the committee is coming to see me about tonight. They’re late. I should know by now that it’s a mathematical impossibility for a committee to do anything on time.”
You ask Mr. Caslow about the seeming series of unrelated mysteries — the committee, the petition, the posters, the gathering of the ex-prisoners of war, the boy in trouble, the Industrial Park, the wearing of the discharge buttons — and he tells you that they are all one.
In explaining this unity, the good old man gets only as far as the case of the boy, of Aaron the janitor’s son. “It was Aaron,” he says, “who defaced the new sign outside, wrote Robotville on it.” He smiles ruefully. “It is an eight-hundred-dollar sign,” he says, “erected at public expense. And now a child with strong wrists and a fifteen-cent screwdriver has made the sign say exactly what the mayor and the committee can’t stand to have said.”
And then the mayor and the committee arrive.
***
The chain rattles at the front doors below. The janitor exclaims greetings as he unlocks the chain. He is a new man, garrulous and merry, now that his friends are here. When the doors open, School Number Fourteen is filled with self-important grumbling, and with the barking sounds committee members make as they congratulate each other on every step they take.
Someone in the entourage thinks there ought to be more of a reception. “His Honor the mayor’s here!” he shouts.
“Now, Stan,” says a liquid tenor voice that surely belongs to the mayor, “let’s not come in here acting like the mayor is the Queen of France.”
“Is this the boy?” says a woman’s voice. She is ready to cry, if the answer is yes.
The woman does cry — or makes crying sounds. You guess that she is embarrassing the boy with hugs now. “You didn’t know what you were writing on that sign, did you?” she says. She answers for him. “Of course you didn’t!”
Other voices agree that the boy couldn’t possibly be so wicked as to know the full, awful meaning of what he wrote.
Now the group mounts the stairs, approaches Caslow’s office.
Caslow sits at his desk again, so as to be found as you found him — gravely signing certificates. He realizes that you are in an odd position. He wants you to stay. “You can pretend to be my lawyer,” he says, and he means it. “That will absolutely stupefy them — set them back six months.” He chuckles. “Imagine a grade-school principal insisting on legal rights, just as though he were a parent!”
You are flattered. And the ham actor in you makes you think that you may give a surprisingly good performance as a lawyer.
The mayor appears in the doorway, heading the procession. He has young Aaron by the hand. The mayor is himself boyish — and pink and porky and beautifully dressed. He has the radiant look peculiar to bullies. That is, Mayor Jack assumes that he is lovable because so many people go to so much trouble to keep on the right side of him.
He startles you by studying you for a moment, then calling you by name. You really do know him. You were classmates at School Number Fourteen. His Honor, Mayor Harlan Jack, is the man a boy named Happy Jack became. The boy named Happy Jack, you remember, had a stunning talent for putting noble interpretations on his endless acts of greed. You note that Mayor Jack the man is now massaging young Aaron’s neck, doing his best to dull the boy’s lively mind.
“My lawyer,” Mr. Caslow says of you.
He is correct in his prediction. The committee shows dismay at his having legal counsel.
“Now he has a lawyer!” says the woman who cried over Aaron. She says it as though Mr. Caslow had pulled a gun. You catch a glimpse of her over Mayor Jack’s shoulder. She looks like a turtle, with the addition of steel-rimmed spectacles and a bristly tweed coat.
Now the head of a black minister bobs into view, tragic with the sufferings of a minority that no longer suffers as a minority. “This isn’t any question for lawyers,” he says. “This is a question for God.”
“That’s right!” says Mayor Jack hotly. He marches on short, thick legs to Caslow’s desk, separates you from your supposed client, glares at you. “We’re not here to fuss around with legal technicalities,” he says. “We’re not here to weep and wail about an eight-hundreddollar sign being ruined, either! We’re here to talk about what that sign business is a symptom of! In the area surrounding School Number Fourteen, parental authority has broken down completely. And we’re here to do what we can,” says Mayor Jack fervently, “To pull those families back together again.”
Mayor Jack orders the local chapter of The Committee of Friends of Ex-Prisoners of War to come in. And in they come, the people Mr. Caslow has called “the bleeding hearts society.” You fight an impulse to laugh. The people, taken together, are a wild satire on all bleeding hearts societies from the beginning of time. You ransack your mind for an apt description — think of living statues and discard it. The solemn folk haven’t the roundness of statues. And then you get it right — they are comporting themselves as a living letterhead. Every decent element in town is represented, so graphically represented that the group seems to be almost a costume drama.
After appreciating their flamboyant differences, you look for things the members have in common. You find three such things: at least moderate prosperity, eagerness to be led by the noblest emotions, and an undiscriminating pity for underdogs, a pity that is plainly as big as all outdoors.
Above all, their hearts are in the right place.
Ten of them crowd into the office, followed by a cigar-chewing aide to the mayor, the janitor, and finally a man who does not belong in such company, or even in such a town. He is sleek, elegant, superior, and shrewd. His nostrils indicate that the school smells bad. His presence makes the mayor look like a bumpkin, an oaf.
Mr. Caslow immediately singles the man out as the only person worth talking to. “I don’t believe I’ve seen that gentleman back there before,” says Caslow.
“Merely an observer,” says the man, and makes himself small.
“Will you introduce us?” Caslow says to the mayor.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you the gentleman’s name at present,” says the mayor. He likes the sound of these words, thinks he has handled the situation with grace.
The man thinks the mayor has handled the situation stupidly. “Ansel B. Rybolt is my name,” he says curtly. “No secret.”
“Are you an educator, Mr. Rybolt?” says Caslow. “Is that why you came to observe?”
Mayor Jack, attempting to regain the floor, now blunders in the opposite direction, tells too much about the man. “He’s a manufacturer,” he says, “and I may say he’s thinking very hard about putting up a sizeable plant in the Industrial Park.”
Caslow claps his hands. “Aha!” he says. “Now everything is crystal clear!” He nods to you. “Now we know exactly what it is Mr. Rybolt has come to observe.”
Rybolt is so fed up with the mayor’s blundering that he attempts to stalk out. But he finds the doorway blocked by the janitor.
“You really thinking of building here?” says the janitor.
“I’ve made no commitments whatsoever,” says Rybolt, wanting to get by.
“You wouldn’t be sorry!” says the janitor. His voice is harsh because he is wishing so hard for the new plant. “I’d work like hell for you!” he says. And he launches himself into an almost delirious account of the prodigies of work he accomplished during the war as a robot.
Ansel B. Rybolt rolls his eyes, begging the mayor or someone to get the creature away from him.
“I’m no good to anybody the way I am,” says the janitor to Rybolt. “But you radio-control me, and I’ll do the work of ten good men, and charge the price of one!”
“Now isn’t the time to discuss that,” says Mayor Jack. “Just shut up about that for now.”
The janitor subsides. Rybolt
Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.
Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.
But old habits die hard, and it’s not long before she’s casting an appraising eye over her fleece-clad fellow-travellers dithering with their wheely bags in the lobby of the first-night airport hotel. Passing over the women, she ear-tags the male members of the flock. Some have females attached to them, and she eliminates these on principle: why work harder than you need to? Prying a spouse loose can be arduous, as she discovered via her first husband: discarded wives stick like burrs.
It’s the solitaries who interest her, the lurkers at the fringes. Some of these are too old for her purposes; she avoids eye contact with them. The ones who cherish the belief that there’s life in the old dog yet: these are her game. Not that she’ll do anything about it, she tells herself, but there’s nothing wrong with a little warmup practice, if only to demonstrate to herself that she can still knock one off if she wishes to.
For that evening’s meet-and-greet she chooses her cream-colored pullover, perching the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too low on her left breast. Thanks to Aquacize and core strength training, she’s still in excellent shape for her age, or indeed for any age, at least when fully clothed and buttressed with carefully fitted underwiring. She wouldn’t want to chance a deck chair in a bikini—superficial puckering has set in, despite her best efforts—which is one reason for selecting the Arctic over, say, the Caribbean. Her face is what it is, and certainly the best that money can buy at this stage: with a little bronzer and pale eyeshadow and mascara and glimmer powder and low lighting, she can finesse ten years.
“Though much is taken, much remains,” she murmurs to her image in the mirror. Her third husband had been a serial quotation freak with a special penchant for Tennyson.
“Come into the garden, Maud,” he’d been in the habit of saying just before bedtime. It had driven her mad at the time.
She adds a dab of cologne—an understated scent, floral, nostalgic—then she blots it off, leaving a mere whiff. It’s a mistake to overdo it: though elderly noses aren’t as keen as they may once have been, it’s best to allow for allergies; a sneezing man is not an attentive man.
She makes her entrance slightly late, smiling a detached but cheerful smile—it doesn’t do for an unaccompanied woman to appear too eager—accepts a glass of the passable white wine they’re doling out, and drifts among the assembled nibblers and sippers. The men will be retired professionals: doctors, lawyers, engineers, stockbrokers, interested in Arctic exploration, polar bears, archeology, birds, Inuit crafts, perhaps even Vikings or plant life or geology. Magnetic Northward attracts serious punters, with an earnest bunch of experts laid on to herd them around and lecture to them. She’s investigated the two other outfits that tour the region, but neither appeals. One features excessive hiking and attracts the under-fifties—not her target market—and the other goes in for singsongs and dressing up in silly outfits, so she’s stuck with Magnetic Northward, which offers the comfort of familiarity. She travelled with this company once before, after the death of her third husband, five years ago, so she knows pretty much what to expect.
There’s a lot of sportswear in the room, much beige among the men, many plaid shirts, vests with multiple pockets. She notes the nametags: a Fred, a Dan, a Rick, a Norm, a Bob. Another Bob, then another: there are a lot of Bobs on this trip. Several appear to be flying solo. Bob: a name once of heavy significance to her, though surely she’s rid herself of that load of luggage by now. She selects one of the thinner but still substantial Bobs, glides close to him, raises her eyelids, and lowers them again. He peers down at her chest.
“Verna,” he says. “That’s a lovely name.”
“Old-fashioned,” she says. “From the Latin word for ‘spring.’ When everything springs to life again.” That line, so filled with promises of phallic renewal, had been effective in helping to secure her second husband. To her third husband she’d said that her mother had been influenced by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Thomson and his vernal breezes, which was a preposterous but enjoyable lie: she had, in fact, been named after a lumpy, bun-faced dead aunt. As for her mother, she’d been a strict Presbyterian with a mouth like a vise grip, who despised poetry and was unlikely to have been influenced by anything softer than a granite wall.
During the preliminary stages of netting her fourth husband, whom she’d flagged as a kink addict, Verna had gone even further. She’d told him she’d been named for “The Rite of Spring,” a highly sexual ballet that ended with torture and human sacrifice. He’d laughed, but he’d also wriggled: a sure sign of the hook going in.
Now she says, “And you’re . . . Bob.” It’s taken her years to perfect the small breathy intake, a certified knee-melter.
“Yes,” Bob says. “Bob Goreham,” he adds, with a diffidence he surely intends to be charming. Verna smiles widely to disguise her shock. She finds herself flushing with a combination of rage and an almost reckless mirth. She looks him full in the face: yes, underneath the thinning hair and the wrinkles and the obviously whitened and possibly implanted teeth, it’s the same Bob—the Bob of fifty-odd years before. Mr. Heartthrob, Mr. Senior Football Star, Mr. Astounding Catch, from the rich, Cadillac-driving end of town where the mining-company big shots lived. Mr. Shit, with his looming bully’s posture and his lopsided joker’s smile.
How amazing to everyone, back then—not only everyone in school but everyone, for in that armpit of a town they’d known to a millimetre who drank and who didn’t and who was no better than she should be and how much change you kept in your back pocket—how amazing that golden-boy Bob had singled out insignificant Verna for the Snow Queen’s Palace winter formal. Pretty Verna, three years younger; studious, grade-skipping, innocent Verna, tolerated but not included, clawing her way toward a scholarship as her ticket out of town. Gullible Verna, who’d believed she was in love.
Or who was in love. When it came to love, wasn’t believing the same as the real thing? Such beliefs drain your strength and cloud your vision. She’s never allowed herself to be skewered in that tiger trap again.
What had they danced to that night? “Rock Around the Clock.” “Hearts Made of Stone.” “The Great Pretender.” Bob had steered Verna around the edges of the gym, holding her squashed up against his carnation buttonhole, for the unskilled, awkward Verna of those days had never been to a dance before and was no match for Bob’s strenuous and flamboyant moves. For meek Verna, life was church and studies and household chores and her weekend job clerking in the drugstore, with her grim-faced mother regulating every move. No dates; those wouldn’t have been allowed, not that she’d been asked on any. But her mother had permitted her to go to the well-supervised high-school dance with Bob Goreham, for wasn’t he a shining light from a respectable family? She’d even allowed herself a touch of smug gloating, silent though it had been. Holding her head up after the decampment of Verna’s father had been a full-time job, and had given her a very stiff neck. From this distance Verna could understand it.
So out the door went Verna, starry-eyed with hero worship, wobbling on her first high heels. She was courteously inserted into Bob’s shiny red convertible with the treacherous Mickey of rye already lurking in the glove compartment, where she sat bolt upright, almost catatonic with shyness, smelling of Prell shampoo and Jergens lotion, wrapped in her mother’s mothbally out-of-date rabbit stole and an ice-blue tulle-skirted dress that looked as cheap as it was.
Cheap. Cheap and disposable. Use and toss. That was what Bob had thought about her, from the very first.
Now Bob grins a little. He looks pleased with himself: maybe he thinks Verna is blushing with desire. But he doesn’t recognize her! He really doesn’t! How many fucking Vernas can he have met in his life?
Get a grip, she tells herself. She’s not invulnerable after all, it appears. She’s shaking with anger, or is it mortification? To cover herself she takes a gulp of her wine, and immediately chokes on it. Bob springs into action, giving her a few brisk but caressing thumps on the back.
“Excuse me,” she manages to gasp. The crisp, cold scent of carnations envelops her. She needs to get away from him; all of a sudden she feels quite sick. She hurries to the ladies’ room, which is fortunately empty, and throws up her white wine and her cream-cheeseand-olive canapé into a cubicle toilet. She wonders if it’s too late to cancel the trip. But why should she run from Bob again?
Back then she’d had no choice. By the end of that week, the story was all over town. Bob had spread it himself, in a farcical version that was very different from what Verna herself remembered. Slutty, drunken, willing Verna, what a joke. She’d been followed home from school by groups of leering boys, hooting and calling out to her: Easy out! Can I have a ride? Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker! Those were some of the milder slogans. She’d been shunned by girls, fearful that the disgrace—the ludicrous, hilarious smuttiness of it all —would rub off on them.
Then there was her mother. It hadn’t taken long for the scandal to hit church circles. What little her mother had to say through her clamp of a mouth was to the point: Verna had made her own bed, and now she would have to lie in it. No, she could not wallow in selfpity—she would just have to face the music, not that she would ever live it down, because one false step and you fell, that’s how life was. When it was evident that the worst had happened, she bought Verna a bus ticket and shipped her off to a church-run Home for Unwed Mothers on the outskirts of Toronto.
There Verna spent the days peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors and scouring toilets along with her fellow-delinquents. They wore gray maternity dresses and gray wool stockings and clunky brown shoes, all paid for by generous donations, they were informed. In addition to their scouring and peeling chores, they were treated to bouts of prayer and self-righteous hectoring. What had happened to them was justly deserved, the speeches went, because of their depraved behavior, but it was never too late to redeem themselves through hard work and self-restraint. They were cautioned against alcohol, tobacco, and gum chewing, and were told that they should consider it a miracle of God if any decent man ever wanted to marry them.
Verna’s labor was long and difficult. The baby was taken away from her immediately so that she would not get attached to it. There was an infection, with complications and scarring, but it was all for the best, she overheard one brisk nurse telling another, because those sorts of girls made unfit mothers anyway. Once she could walk, Verna was given five dollars and a bus ticket and instructed to return to the guardianship of her mother, because she was still a minor.
But she could not face that—that or the town in general—so she headed for downtown Toronto. What was she thinking? No actual thoughts, only feelings: mournfulness, woe, and, finally, a spark of defiant anger. If she was as trashy and worthless as everyone seemed to think, she might as well act that way, and, in between rounds of waitressing and hotel-room cleaning, she did.
It was only by great good luck that she stumbled upon an older married man who took an interest in her. She traded three years of noontime sex with him for the price of her education. A fair exchange, to her mind—she bore him no ill will. She learned a lot from him, how to walk in high heels being the least of it—and pulled herself up and out. Little by little she jettisoned the crushed image of Bob that she still carried like a dried flower— incredibly!—next to her heart.
She pats her face back into place and repairs her mascara, which has bled down her cheeks despite its waterproof claims. Courage, she tells herself. She will not be chased away, not this time. She’ll tough it out; she’s more than a match for five Bobs now. And she has the advantage, because Bob doesn’t have a clue who she is. Does she really look that different? Yes, she does. She looks better. There’s her silver-blond hair, and the various alterations, of course. But the real difference is in the attitude—the confident way she carries herself. It would be hard for Bob to see through that façade to the shy, mousy-haired, snivelling idiot she’d been at fourteen.
After adding a last film of powder, she rejoins the group and lines up at the buffet for roast beef and salmon. She won’t eat much of it, but then she never does, not in public: a piggy, gobbling woman is not a creature of mysterious allure. She refrains from scanning the crowd to pinpoint Bob’s position—he might wave to her, and she needs time to think—and selects a table at the far end of the room. But presto, Bob is sliding in beside her without so much as a may-I-join-you. He assumes he’s already pissed on this fire hydrant, she thinks. Spray-painted this wall. Cut the head off this trophy and got his picture taken with his foot on the body. As he did once before, not that he realizes it. She smiles.
He’s solicitous. Is Verna all right? Oh, yes, she replies. It’s just that something went down the wrong way. Bob launches straight into the preliminaries. What does Verna do? Retired, she says, though she had a rewarding career as a physiotherapist, specializing in the rehabilitation of heart and stroke victims. “That must have been interesting,” Bob says. Oh, yes, Verna says. So fulfilling to help people.
It had been more than interesting. Wealthy men recovering from life-threatening episodes had recognized the worth of an attractive younger woman with deft hands, an encouraging manner, and an intuitive knowledge of when to say nothing. Or, as her third husband put it in his Keatsian mode, heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. There was something about the intimacy of the relationship—so physical—that led to other intimacies, though Verna had always stopped short of sex: it was a religious thing, she’d said. If no marriage proposal was forthcoming, she would extricate herself, citing her duty to patients who needed her more. That had forced the issue twice.
She’d chosen her acceptances with an eye to the medical condition involved, and once married she’d done her best to provide value for money. Each husband had departed not only happy but grateful, if a little sooner than might have been expected. But each had died of natural causes—a lethal recurrence of the heart attack or stroke that had hit him in the first place. All she’d done was give them tacit permission to satisfy every forbidden desire: to eat artery-clogging foods, to drink as much as they liked, to return to their golf games too soon. She’d refrained from commenting on the fact that, strictly speaking, they were being too zealously medicated. She’d wondered about the dosages, she’d say later, but who was she to set her own opinion up against a doctor’s?
And if a man happened to forget that he’d already taken his pills for that evening and found them neatly laid out in their usual place and took them again, wasn’t that to be expected? Blood thinners could be so hazardous, in excess. You could bleed into your own brain.
Then there was sex: the terminator, the coup de grâce. Verna herself had no interest in sex as such, but she knew what was likely to work. “You only live once,” she’d been in the habit of saying, lifting a champagne glass during a candlelit supper and then setting out the Viagra, a revolutionary breakthrough but so troubling to the blood pressure. It was essential to call the paramedics in promptly, though not too promptly. “He was like this when I woke up” was an acceptable thing to say. So was “I heard a strange sound in the bathroom, and then when I went to look . . .”
She has no regrets. She did those men a favor: surely better a swift exit than a lingering decline.
With two of the husbands, there’d been difficulties with the grownup children over the will. Verna had graciously said that she understood how they must feel, then she’d paid them off, more than was strictly fair considering the effort she’d put in. Her sense of justice has remained Presbyterian: she doesn’t want much more than her due, but she doesn’t want much less, either. She likes balanced accounts.
Bob leans in toward her, sliding his arm along the back of her chair. Is her husband along for the cruise? he asks, closer to her ear than he should be, breathing in. No, she says, she is recently widowed—here she looks down at the table, hoping to convey muted grief—and
this is a sort of healing voyage. Bob says he’s very sorry to hear it, but what a coincidence, for his own wife passed away just six months ago. It had been a blow—they’d been really looking forward to the golden years together. She’d been his college sweetheart—it was love at first sight. Does Verna believe in love at first sight? Yes, Verna says, she does.
Bob confides further: they’d waited until after his law degree to get married and then they’d had three kids, and now there are five grandkids—he’s so proud of them all. If he shows me any baby pictures, Verna thinks, I’ll hit him.
“It does leave an empty space, doesn’t it?” Bob says. “A sort of blank.” Verna admits that it does. Would Verna care to join Bob in a bottle of wine?
You crap artist, Verna thinks. So you went on to get married and have children and a normal life, just as if nothing ever happened. Whereas for me . . . She feels queasy.
“I’d love to,” she says. “But let’s wait until we’re on the ship. That would be more leisurely.” She gives him the eyelids again. “Now I’m off to my beauty sleep.” She smiles, wafts upward.
“Oh, surely you don’t need that,” Bob says gallantly. The asshole actually pulls out her chair for her. He hadn’t shown such fine manners back then. Nasty, brutish, and short, as her third husband had said, quoting Hobbes on the subject of natural man. Nowadays a girl would know to call the police. Nowadays Bob would go to jail no matter what lies he might tell, because Verna was underage. But there had been no true words for the act then: rape was what occurred when some maniac jumped on you out of a bush, not when your formal-dance date drove you to a side road in the mangy twice-cut forest surrounding a tin-pot mining town and told you to drink up like a good girl and then took you apart, layer by torn layer. To make it worse, Bob’s best friend, Ken, had turned up in his own car to help out. The two of them had been laughing. They’d kept her panty girdle as a souvenir.
Afterward, Bob had pushed her out of the car halfway back, surly because she was crying. “Shut up or walk home,” he’d said. She has a picture of herself limping along the icy roadside with her bare feet stuck in her dyed-to-match ice-blue heels, dizzy and raw and shivering and—a further ridiculous humiliation—hiccupping. What had concerned her most at that moment was her nylons—where were her nylons? She’d bought them with her own drugstore money. She must have been in shock.
Did she remember correctly? Had Bob stuck her panty girdle upside down on his head and danced about in the snow with the garter tabs flopping around like jesters’ bells?
Panty girdle, she thinks. How prehistoric. It, and all the long-gone archeology that went with it. Now a girl would be on the pill or have an abortion without a backward glance. How Paleolithic to still feel wounded by any of it.
It was Ken—not Bob—who’d come back for her, told her brusquely to get in, driven her home. He, at least, had had the grace to be shamefaced. “Don’t say anything,” he’d muttered. And she hadn’t, but her silence had done her no good.
Why should she be the only one to have suffered for that night? She’d been stupid, granted, but Bob had been vicious. And he’d gone scot-free, without consequences or remorse, whereas her entire life had been distorted. The Verna of the day before had died, and a different Verna had solidified in her place: stunted, twisted, mangled. It was Bob who’d taught her that only the strong can win, that weakness should be mercilessly exploited. It was Bob who’d turned her into—why not say the word?—a murderer.
The next morning, during the chartered flight north to where the ship is floating on the Beaufort Sea, she considers her choices. She could play Bob like a fish right up to the final moment, then leave him cold with his pants around his ankles: a satisfaction, but a minor one. She could avoid him throughout the trip and leave the equation where it’s been for the past fifty-some years: unresolved.
Or she could kill him.
She contemplates this third option with theoretical calm. Just say, for instance, if she were to murder Bob, how might she do it during the cruise without getting caught? Her medsand-sex formula would be far too slow and might not work anyway, since Bob did not appear to suffer from any ailments. Pushing him off the ship is not a viable option. Bob is too big, the railings are too high, and she knows from her previous trip that there will always be people on deck, enjoying the breathtaking views and taking pictures. A corpse in a cabin would attract police and set off a search for DNA and fabric hairs and so forth, as on television. No, she would have to arrange the death during one of the onshore visits. But how? Where? She consults the itinerary and the map of the proposed route. An Inuit settlement will not do: dogs will bark, children will follow. As for the other stops, the land they’ll be visiting is bare of concealing features. Staff with guns will accompany them to protect against polar bears. Maybe an accident with one of the guns? For that she’d need split-second timing.
Whatever the method, she’d have to do it early in the voyage, before he had time to make any new friends—people who might notice he was missing. Also, the possibility that Bob will suddenly recognize her is ever present. And if that happens it will be game over. Meanwhile, it would be best not to be seen with him too much. Enough to keep his interest up, but not enough to start rumors of, for instance, a budding romance. On a cruise, word of mouth spreads like the flu.
Once on board the ship—it’s the Resolute II, familiar to Verna from her last voyage—the passengers line up to deposit their passports at Reception. Then they assemble in the forward lounge for a talk on procedure given by three of the discouragingly capable staff members. Every time they go ashore, the first one says with a severe Viking frown, they
must turn their tags on the tag board from green to red. When they come back to the ship, they must turn their tags back to green. They must always wear life jackets for the Zodiac trips to shore; the life jackets are the new, thin kind that inflate once in water. They must deposit their life jackets on the shore when landing, in the white canvas bags provided, and put them back on when departing. If there are any tags unturned or any life jackets left in the bags, the staff will know that someone is still ashore. They do not want to be left behind, do they? And now a few housekeeping details. They will find laundry bags in their cabins. Bar bills will be charged to their accounts, and tips will be settled at the end. The ship runs on an open-door policy, to facilitate the work of the cleaning staff, but of course they can lock their rooms if they wish. There is a lost-and-found at Reception. All clear? Good.
The second speaker is the archeologist, who, to Verna, looks about twelve. They will be visiting sites of many kinds, she says, including Independence 1, Dorset, and Thule, but they must never, never take anything. No artifacts, and especially no bones. Those bones might be human, and they must be very careful not to disturb them. But even animal bones are an important source of scarce calcium for ravens and lemmings and foxes and, well, the entire food chain, because the Arctic recycles everything. All clear? Good.
Now, says the third speaker, a fashionably bald individual who looks like a personal trainer, a word about the guns. Guns are essential, because polar bears are fearless. But the staff will always fire into the air first, to scare the bear away. Shooting a bear is a last resort, but bears can be dangerous, and the safety of passengers is the first priority. There is no need to fear the guns: the bullets will be taken out during the Zodiac trips to and from shore, and it will not be possible for anyone to get shot. All clear? Good.
Clearly a gun accident won’t do, Verna thinks. No passenger is going to get near those guns.
After lunch, there’s a lecture on walruses. There are rumors of rogue walruses that prey on seals, puncturing them with their tusks, then sucking out the fat with their powerful mouths. The women on either side of Verna are knitting. One of them says, “Liposuction.” The other laughs.
Once the talks are over, Verna goes out on deck. The sky is clear, with a flight of lenticular clouds hovering in it like spaceships; the air is warm; the sea is aqua. There’s a classic iceberg on the port side, with a center so blue it looks dyed, and ahead of them is a mirage —a fata morgana, towering like an ice castle on the horizon, completely real except for the faint shimmering at its edges. Sailors have been lured to their deaths by those; they’ve drawn mountains on maps where no mountains were.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bob says, materializing at her side. “How about that bottle of wine tonight?”
“Stunning,” Verna says, smiling. “Perhaps not tonight—I promised some of the girls.” True enough—she’s made a date with the knitting women.
“Maybe tomorrow?” Bob grins, and shares the fact that he has a single cabin: “No. 222, like the painkiller,” he quips, and comfortably amidships. “Hardly any rock and roll at all,” he adds. Verna says that she, too, has a single: worth the extra expense, because that way you can really relax. She draws out “relax” until it sounds like a voluptuous writhe on satin sheets.
Glancing at the tag board while strolling around the ship after dinner, Verna notes Bob’s tag—close enough to her own. Then she buys a pair of cheap gloves in the gift shop. She’s read a lot of crime novels.
The next day starts with a talk on geology by an energetic young scientist who has been arousing some interest among the passengers, especially the female ones. By great good fortune, he tells them, and because of a change in itinerary owing to ice pack, they’ll be making an unanticipated stop, where they’ll be able to view a wonder of the geological world, a sight permitted to very few. They’ll be privileged to see the world’s earliest fossilized stromatolites, clocking in at an astonishing 1.9 billion years old—before fish, before dinosaurs, before mammals—the very first preserved form of life on this planet. What is a stromatolite? he asks rhetorically, his eyes gleaming. The word comes from the Greek stroma, a mattress, coupled with the root word for “stone.” Stone mattress: a fossilized cushion, formed by layer upon layer of blue-green algae building up into a mound or dome. It was this very same blue-green algae that created the oxygen they are now breathing. Isn’t that astonishing?
A wizened, elflike man at Verna’s lunchtime table grumbles that he hopes they’ll be seeing something more exciting than rocks. He’s one of the other Bobs: Verna’s been taking an inventory. An extra Bob may come in handy. “I’m looking forward to them,” she says. “The stone mattresses.” She gives the word “mattress” the tiniest hint of suggestiveness, and gets an approving twinkle out of Bob the Second. Really, they’re never too old to flirt.
Out on deck after coffee, she surveys the approaching land through her binoculars. It’s autumn here: the leaves on the miniature trees that snake along the ground like vines are red and orange and yellow and purple, with rock surging out of them in waves and folds. There’s a ridge, a higher ridge, then a higher one. It’s on the second ridge that the best stromatolites are to be found, the geologist has told them.
Will someone who has slipped behind the third ridge be visible from the second one? Verna doesn’t think so.
Now they’re all stuffed into their waterproof pants and their rubber boots; now they’re being zipped and buckled into their life jackets like outsized kindergarten kids; now they’re turning their tags from green to red; now they’re edging down the gangway and being
whisked into the black inflatable Zodiacs. Bob has made it into Verna’s Zodiac. He lifts his camera, snaps her picture.
Verna’s heart is beating more rapidly. If he recognizes me spontaneously, I won’t kill him, she thinks. If I tell him who I am and he recognizes me and then apologizes, I still won’t kill him. That’s two more escape chances than he gave her. It will mean forgoing the advantage of surprise, a move that could be hazardous—Bob is much bigger than she is— but she wishes to be more than fair.
They’ve landed and have shed their life jackets and rubber footwear and are lacing up their hiking boots. Verna strolls closer to Bob, notes that he hasn’t bothered with the rubber boots. He’s wearing a red baseball cap; as she watches, he turns it backward.
Now they’re all scattering. Some stay by the shore; some move up to the first ridge. The geologist is standing there with his hammer, a twittering cluster already gathered around him. He’s in full lecture mode: they will please not take any of the stromatolites, but the ship has a sampling permit, so if anyone finds a particularly choice fragment, especially a cross section, check with him first and they can put it on the rock table he’ll set up on board, where everyone can see it. Here are some examples, for those who may not want to tackle the second ridge. . . .
Heads go down; cameras come out. Perfect, Verna thinks. The more distraction the better. She feels without looking that Bob is close by. Now they’re at the second ridge, which some are climbing more easily than others. Here are the best stromatolites, a whole field of them. There are unbroken ones, like bubbles or boils, small ones, ones as big as half a soccer ball. Some have lost their tops, like eggs in the process of hatching. Still others have been ground down, so that all that’s left of them is a series of raised concentric oblongs, like a cinnamon bun or the growth rings on a tree.
And here’s one shattered into four, like a Dutch cheese sliced into wedges. Verna picks up one of the quarters, examines the layers, each year black, gray, black, gray, black, and at the bottom the featureless core. The piece is heavy, and sharp at the edges. Verna lifts it into her backpack.
Here comes Bob as if on cue, lumbering slowly as a zombie up the hill toward her. He’s taken off his outer jacket, tucked it under his backpack straps. He’s out of breath. She has a moment of compunction: he’s over the hill; frailty is gaining on him. Shouldn’t she let bygones be bygones? Boys will be boys. Aren’t they all just hormone puppets at that age? Why should any human being be judged by something that was done in another time, so long ago it might be centuries?
A raven flies overhead, circles around. Can it tell? Is it waiting? She looks down through its eyes, sees an old woman—because, face it, she is an old woman now—on the verge of
murdering an even older man because of an anger already fading into the distance of usedup time. It’s paltry. It’s vicious. It’s normal. It’s what happens in life.
“Great day,” Bob says. “It’s good to have a chance to stretch your legs.”
“Isn’t it?” Verna says. She moves toward the far side of the second ridge. “Maybe there’s something better over there. But weren’t we told not to go that far? Out of sight?”
Bob gives a rules-are-for-peasants laugh. “We’re paying for this,” he says. He actually takes the lead, not up the third ridge but around behind it. Out of sight is where he wants to be.
The gun bearer on the second ridge is yelling at some people straying off to the left. He has his back turned. A few more steps and Verna glances over her shoulder: she can’t see anyone, which means that no one can see her. They squelch over a patch of boggy ground. She takes her thin gloves out of her pocket, slips them on. Now they’re at the far side of the third ridge, at the sloping base.
“Come over here,” Bob says, patting the rock. His backpack is beside him. “I brought us a few drinks.” All around him is a tattered gauze of black lichen.
“Terrific,” Verna says. She sits down, unzips her backpack. “Look,” she says. “I found a perfect specimen.” She turns, positioning the stromatolite between them, supporting it with both hands. She takes a breath. “I think we’ve known each other before,” she says. “I’m Verna Pritchard. From high school.”
Bob doesn’t miss a beat. “I thought there was something familiar about you,” he says. He’s actually smirking.
She remembers that smirk. She has a vivid picture of Bob capering triumphantly in the snow, sniggering like a ten-year-old. Herself wrecked and crumpled.
She knows better than to swing widely. She brings the stromatolite up hard, a short sharp jab right underneath Bob’s lower jaw. There’s a crunch, the only sound. His head snaps back. Now he’s sprawled on the rock. She holds the stromatolite over his forehead, lets it drop. Again. Once again. There. That seems to have done it.
Bob looks ridiculous, with his eyes open and fixed and his forehead mashed in and blood running down both sides of his face. “You’re a mess,” she says. He looks laughable, so she laughs. As she suspected, the front teeth are implants.
She takes a moment to steady her breathing. Then she retrieves the stromatolite, being careful not to let any of the blood touch her or even her gloves, and slides it into a pool of bog water. Bob’s baseball cap has fallen off; she stuffs it into her pack, along with his jacket. She empties out his backpack: nothing in there but the camera, a pair of woollen mitts, a scarf, and six miniature bottles of Scotch—how pathetically hopeful of him. She
rolls the pack up, stuffs it inside her own, adds the camera, which she’ll toss into the sea later. Then she dries the stromatolite off on the scarf, checking to make sure there’s no visible blood, and stows it in her pack. She leaves Bob to the ravens and the lemmings and the rest of the food chain. Then she hikes back around the base of the third ridge, adjusting her jacket. Anyone looking will assume she’s just been having a pee. People do sneak off like that, on shore visits. But no one is looking.
She finds the young geologist—he’s still on the second ridge, along with his coterie of admirers—and produces the stromatolite.
“May I take it back to the ship?” she asks sweetly. “For the rock table?”
“Fantastic sample!” he says.
Travellers are making their way shoreward, back to the Zodiacs. When she reaches the bags with the life jackets, Verna fumbles with her shoelaces until all eyes are elsewhere and she can cram an extra life jacket into her backpack. The pack is a lot bulkier than it was when she left the ship, but it would be odd if anyone noticed that.
Once up the gangway, she diddles around with her pack until everyone else has moved past the tag board, then flips Bob’s tag from red to green. And her own tag, too, of course.
On the way to her cabin she waits till the corridor is clear, then slips through Bob’s unlocked door. The room key is on the dresser; she leaves it there. She hangs up the life jacket and Bob’s waterproof and baseball cap, runs some water in the sink, messes up a towel. Then she goes to her own cabin along the still-empty corridor, takes off her gloves, washes them, and hangs them up to dry. She’s broken a nail, worse luck, but she can repair that. She checks her face: a touch of sunburn, but nothing serious. For dinner, she dresses in pink and makes an effort to flirt with Bob the Second, who gamely returns her serves but is surely too decrepit to be a serious prospect. Just as well—her adrenaline level is plummeting. If there are northern lights, they’ve been told, there will be an announcement, but Verna doesn’t intend to get up for them.
So far she’s in the clear. All she has to do now is maintain the mirage of Bob, faithfully turning his tag from green to red, from red to green. He’ll move objects around in his cabin, wear different items from his beige-and-plaid wardrobe, sleep in his bed, take showers, leaving the towels on the floor. He will receive a first-name-only invitation to have dinner at a staff table, which will then quietly appear under the door of one of the other Bobs, and no one will spot the substitution. He will brush his teeth. He will adjust his alarm clock. He will send in laundry, without, however, filling out the slip: that would be too risky. The cleaning staff won’t care—a lot of older people forget to fill out their laundry slips.
Meanwhile, the stromatolite will sit on the geological samples table and will be picked up and examined and discussed, acquiring many fingerprints. At the end of the trip it will be jettisoned. The Resolute II will travel for fourteen days; it will stop for shore visits eighteen times. It will sail past ice caps and sheer cliffs, and mountains of gold and copper and ebony black and silver gray; it will glide through pack ice; it will anchor off long, implacable beaches and explore fjords gouged by glaciers over millions of years. In the midst of such rigorous and demanding splendor, who will remember Bob?
There will be a moment of truth at the end of the voyage, when Bob will not appear to pay his bill and pick up his passport; nor will he pack his bags. There will be a flurry of concern, followed by a staff meeting—behind closed doors, so as not to alarm the passengers. Ultimately, there will be a news item: Bob, tragically, must have fallen off the ship on the last night of the voyage while leaning over to get a better camera angle on the northern lights. No other explanation is possible.
Meanwhile, the passengers will have scattered to the winds, Verna among them. If, that is, she pulls it off. Will she or won’t she? She ought to care more about that—she ought to find it an exciting challenge—but right now she just feels tired and somewhat empty.
Though at peace, though safe. Calm of mind all passion spent, as her third husband used to say so annoyingly after his Viagra sessions. Those Victorians always coupled sex with death. Who was that poet anyway? Keats? Tennyson? Her memory isn’t what it was. But the details will come back to her later.