The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  “Stop that. That’s just Baywatch,” Mother said.

  “I don’t care what it is, I want to go to the beach!” He meant he wanted to go out in the world and consort with jiggly girls.

  “That show’s so old those girls are probably dead.” Mother said, “Girls aren’t like that any more.”

  “Prove it.” Oh my gosh he was ogling me.

  I started to cry.

  Mother smacked him. “You leave your sister alone.”

  The next morning he was gone.

  It’s amazing how Billy got out. He made it through the airlock and out of the De-con box. I tried but I was growing hips and boobs and they were getting in the way. Every once in a while he would try to phone but Mother wouldn’t let me pick up. “That was your brother,” she’d say. “He wants to come back but remember, he made his choice when he left us for the germs. Now I’m warning you, NO MATTER WHAT HE DOES OR SAYS, DON’T LET HIM IN.”

  It’s OK, I didn’t miss him too much. I went out on the Internet and met a lot of cool guys. Amazing what people will tell you when they can’t see you. Amazing what you tell them.

  Then Mother got sick. Except she didn’t call it sick. How I knew there was something bad the matter was, she started teaching me how to run the world: where the money was, the PIN numbers for all our accounts, how to make e-transfers to keep the De-con service and how to pay for the food and the clothes she ordered for us and how to accessorize. The jewelry she’d gotten from the Shopping Channel, she divided into two heaps.

  “This is for you.” She swept one pile my way. The other, she kept. “I’m going to be buried in this.”

  “What’s buried?” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not contagious. And wherever God takes me, I promise, I’ll protect you to the grave.”

  I did like she wanted. I took the DigiCam and after I did her makeup and laid her out in all her jewelry and the Melissa Rivers caftan with the solid gold trim, I took lots of pictures and I posted them in the right place on the Web. Then I did like she ordered and put her down the Dispos-Al a little bit at a time. The bones I left in the De-con box and the De-con company took them away. He said through the intercom, “Are you OK in there?”

  “Never better,” I said.

  Except it’s really quiet in here.

  After she died everything was pretty much the same. Stuff kept coming—clean and safe. But safe turned out not to be enough. Except for the necessaries, I left off shopping. Nobody to dress up for, nobody to care. It was quiet as hell. One day at delivery time I left the airlock open and when the De-con signal went off to tell me the outside box was opening, I stuck my head in the hole so the delivery guy would hear me direct. “Come on in!”

  “Lady, you shouldn’t do this. You could catch something.”

  “You’re bonded,” I told him. “It’s OK.”

  “You got no idea what’s out here.”

  “Cute guys,” I said. “I saw them on TV.”

  “But some of them are carrying terrible diseases. Women too!” He sounded muffled; OK he was talking through his De-con filter mask. In the surveill camera, he looked like he was wearing a gigantic rubber glove. Since Mother died I haven’t talked to anyone direct and I was starved for it. Just me and one other, naked face to naked face.

  “No problem,” I told him. I was wearing Mother’s Pamela Anderson outfit from QVC. “I’ll stay away from them.”

  “Precautions,” the delivery man said. “No telling what you might run into out here.”

  “At least I’d be running into SOMETHING,” I said but I took his word for it and let it go by. Along with the days. Along with a lot of other days.

  Until I found the ad on the Web. SEX AND GLORY, the header ran. SAFE AND TOTAL LOVE WITH THE PERFECT PARTNER—GENDER APPROPRIATE.

  I read the disclaimers. I gasped at the down payment. I sold everything I had on eBay and took all the money to do it.

  I ordered a guy.

  The De-con truck pulled up on the morning appointed. The assistant driver ran a forklift around and unloaded the crate. There were air holes in the crate, it was strapped with warning tape: DO NOT BEND. THIS SIDE UP. I saw it on the surveill TV.

  The driver said through the intercom, “I got a questionable delivery.”

  “No questions. I ordered it.”

  “It won’t fit in the De-con box.”

  “You can set it down out there and leave.” Mother taught us to be cautious. “I’ll bring it in.”

  “You shouldn’t come out.”

  “OK, OK,” I said. “You can just open it and leave.”

  “No way! The crate’s been damaged. De-con guarantees protection and no way am I going to be liable. God knows what could have gotten inside.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Lady, anything that happens to you comes out of my hide. I can’t leave you alone with this thing. You could sue the company.”

  “I’ll take the responsibility.”

  “Sorry, Ma’am.” The De-con guy gestured to the assistant and they started to put the thing back on the truck. I armed the defense missiles and blew both of them away.

  It took all the tools in the basement to blow the airlock and get the front door open but I finally managed. I pushed it aside and I came tottering out. Me, Dolly Meriwether, alone out in the world. It was weird! The box was sitting right where the delivery men had left it. I thought I heard thumping. It seemed to bulge.

  My guy.

  There were air holes, all right, and there were plastic kibbles dribbling from one corner where the crate had smashed. There was also a warning label. MANUFACTURER NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGED GOODS OR CONTAGION INCURRED IN TRANSIT.

  I put my mouth up to the hole. “Can you hear me? Are you in there?”

  I thought I heard a voice.

  Oh Mother, I was so excited! I could almost hear Mother hissing, “Leave it alone, Dolly. That thing is full of germs!”

  “I don’t care!” I opened the box with the crowbar. The sides fell away. Plastic kibbles cascaded down. He was standing there smiling in his orange coverall. “Hello.”

  Mother hissed from beyond the grave. “Don’t touch that thing, you don’t know where it’s been!”

  My guy stepped out of the kibbles. He was nice and apologetic. “I’m here on approval. Truth in advertising, I have to tell you this. If the seal on the box is broken, your product may be contaminated. You can return it and get your money back.”

  I looked at the corner of the crate. “No problem,” I said.

  “Look,” he said. “I was in a warehouse with a bunch of. Um. I’m sorry, I might of caught something.”

  “No problem,” I said. I grabbed his arm and yanked him inside with me. “Kiss me,” I said.

  “Even if I’m … ?”

  I shut his mouth with my mouth and it was the best thing I ever tasted in this world. Then sirens started blatting and guns I didn’t even know were in the walls around us slipped out of their slots—the automatic firing squad Mother had planted in the middle of some long-dead night. I heard a hundred clicks. The weapons arming. I heard her voice. “I TOLD YOU I’D PROTECT YOU TO THE GRAVE.”

  “I love you,” I yelled at him as a hundred triggers drew back. “Get out!” But I know it is too late for both of us.

  —F&SF, 2000

  Journey to the Center of the Earth

  Jerome is in Nebraska to visit his father.

  His dad lives in a model community located in the middle distance, at the point in the road where you think the line of shadows you see ahead is just about to congeal. At this juncture on this particular highway, you think the murky violet ridge along the horizon may be your first sight of the Rocky Mountains, but you can’t be absolutely sure. Stay here and you’ll never know; drive ten miles and the outline becomes clear.

  This is where you make the turnoff for Bluemont. Take a sharp right on the two-track road through the foothills and in forty miles you’re there. A
ccording to the literature his dad has sent Jerome over the years since he left them, it’s going to be some kind of Jerusalem—We are the future of the world; to Jerome it sounds crazy, but … exciting? His dad would never admit this, is firm in his use of the words model community.

  It isn’t much of a model.

  The snapshots show a ring of outsized mobile homes beached on cinder-block foundations, an assembly hall that promises more than it seems to deliver and a nineteenth-century house restored and painted like a wedding cake, and as for the rest? Half-finished foundations and a couple of huge, raw places in the earth, as if from excavations hastily filled and incompletely healed. Is this all? Jerome’s dad says that when it’s finished they will all live in contemporary houses with jutting redwood decks and crashing expanses of glass, but this will have to wait. Except for the self-styled mayor and leader of the group, the colonists are all stashed in those trailers, waiting for the town to rise. Their money always seems to be going into something else, but on the phone Jerome’s father is vague about what. If it isn’t the real thing, he thinks, then what’s the point?

  It’s a strange place for Jerome, but here he is.

  He has brought this on himself. Mostly he lives a normal life but when he goes home to visit he runs out of things to say. Caught short at Christmas, fresh out of words, he accidentally showed the brochure to his mom: mistake; the clouds around her head turned brown and started to boil.

  “Lord,” she said, squinting at the pictures as if she expected to find Jerome’s dad walking around in them, this high, “what do you think is going on?”

  Who was Jerome to tell her they were getting ready for the end of the world? He should have known she would figure it out: the prose, the strange device on the Bluemont sign.

  “My God, he’s in a religious sect.”

  “It’s his life.”

  “He’s your father,” she said. So his mom has sent him to see about it. Although his folks have been divorced since he was ten, Jerome’s mom can’t stop worrying.

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “It’s never over with a person, no matter what you tell yourself.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I just want you to go.”

  What is he supposed to do, talk his dad out of this thing he’s joined and bring him back to life as they know it? He doesn’t think so. Is he supposed to be his mom’s advance man, preparing the way? Certainly not. She is with Barry now. They’re getting married in the spring.

  “So, what?”

  “A sect,” she said, dispatching him. “I just …” She was at a loss. “I just want you to see if he’s all right.”

  Maybe, Jerome thinks, she wants to find out if he’s being held against his will.

  He doesn’t think so. The place isn’t jail. It doesn’t have to be. Jerome reasons, perhaps because he was brought up Catholic, that all religion is a captivity, souls held tight against their will.

  So, hey. It may be what they want. And hey, what if they turn out to be right? A strange, almost sexual undercurrent draws him to this outside possibility. So he is here for his own reasons. Probably he spends too much time trying to make sense of things.

  The last thing he did before he got here was to check with her. Stopping at a diner outside Ogallala, he’d called his mother collect. “What if these people are right?”

  “God is God, but this is crazy,” his mother said.

  Still. But before he could raise this or demand marching orders she broke his heart with the good mom’s farewell formula. Good old Mom, dismissing him: “Be good. Have fun.”

  Jerome wants to see his father, is afraid. It’s been so long; what are they to each other now? Although they have talked, phone calls from pads on the other side of town and in Maine and Morocco and San Francisco, he hasn’t seen his dad since the divorce. After years of bopping around, his father has finally landed in one place. After a lot of confusion, his dad seems to be focused on one thing. Jerome is going to feel better about things if it turns out to be the right one.

  Will his father be glad to see Jerome?

  At least he’ll be surprised.

  Jerome is less anxious than depressed, driving in. Bluemont does not look good even in brochures; in person, in mud season, it’s worse. In the waning spring light it looks not so much deserted as abandoned, the kind of place a reasonable God would turn his back on as too shabby to figure in any divine scheme. The tinny-looking pastel trailers are listing on their foundations, the assembly hall windows are boarded up against the winter cold and the wedding-cake house looks bedraggled and smirched. If these people are really onto something, there are no outward signs. Unless hardship is the whole thing.

  My kingdom is not of this world, Jerome thinks. Yeah, right.

  Negotiating the guck, he’s grateful for the use of Barry’s well-kept Jeep Cherokee, which has four-wheel drive. At least he’ll be able to pull out of the mud when it’s time to leave. Getting out of the car, he’s also glad nobody’s around. He really doesn’t want to have to talk to anybody until he’s seen his dad. It seems important to meet this place on his father’s terms. He would like to wander around until he runs into his father, like, accidentally? Oh, hi.

  When he gets out of the car, he’s surprised by a watery feeling in his shins. It turns out Jerome is scared to death of meeting the other colonists, or whatever, is afraid of what he’ll see rattling around behind the eyes. Flickering beyond this encounter with his father is the outside possibility of an absolute; the truth of this place, or his dad’s life in this place, is strictly between the two of them. Somebody is coming out of the assembly hall—a woman in a big plaid jacket, quilted pants; she has her wool hat pulled way down, so, good. Jerome slouches along the board sidewalk with his chin buried in his shoulder, trying to look as though he comes here every day. He is so preoccupied by the mud squelching between the boards and over the rubber toes of his Nikes that when they pass, he doesn’t even know whether the woman speaks. Automatically polite, he says hi and hurries on.

  Finding his father turns out to be no problem. He is out behind his trailer splitting wood; at the right time Jerome just looks up and he’s there.

  “Dad!” The wind, emotion, something takes his voice away. His big moment and he can’t make enough noise for his father to hear.

  He looks the same, even from behind. In spite of the weather Justin is working with his coat off and his head uncovered, his fine hair is blowing, and where the drooping neck of the sweatshirt exposes it, the skin on the back of his neck is fair. Jerome is unsettled by the change. When he was little his father was too big for him to see whole; now they are the same size.

  Then. It is humiliating. Argh. Ghah. Jerome hears himself gabbling, “Hi. Bet you don’t know who I am.”

  His father turns. “Oh, Jerome,” he says, as if it’s only been ten minutes. His face goes through a number of changes as he considers possible reasons for this visit. Stabbing Jerome in the heart, he lights on the wrong one. “What’s the matter, are you in trouble?”

  “No, Dad, everything is fine.”

  “Oh, son. Don’t look like that.” His father drops the ax and advances, thumping him into a hug.

  Jerome is surprised by the force with which they collide. “Oh, hey.”

  Probably his father wishes he’d said the right thing to him.

  Justin grins his same grin. “Come on in.”

  Inside is reassuring; the trailer is like a captain’s cabin, everything trig; his dad’s things look the same: books marching across the desktop, clipper ship bookend Justin took with him when he left, baby picture of Jerome. He has added a laptop and a decanter set. Jerome touches one of the crystal stoppers.

  “Your mom never forgave me for liberating the Waterford.”

  His mom never forgave him period.

  In the old days his father used to be much heavier and wear a suit. Now he is skinny, mellow, aggressively laid back in the worn, silvery jeans and the baggy s
weatshirt. He commands this space like the captain of a submarine. He is watching Jerome.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Nice,” Jerome says, “but isn’t it kind of small?”

  “We’re getting used to functioning in tight quarters.” Without explaining, his father pulls out two lead crystal glasses Jerome remembers from his childhood. “Port?”

  It’s like the class reunion of a very small school. They are having alcohol because it’s a party; because his dad still thinks of Jerome as ten years old, they are also having candy. The ashtray between them is filling up with little tags and silver foil.

  In a strange way this seems perfectly right to Jerome—lounging on the neat convertible sofas with his dad in the late afternoon, eating Hershey’s kisses and getting a buzz on. He focuses on the laptop, thinks it’s a good sign. In case it turns out these people are crazy, his dad’s probably here writing a book about them. Unless something better comes up, it’s what he’s going to tell his mom. But he stops his mouth with melting chocolate and doesn’t ask. For a long time all they talk about are things they both remember from ten years ago, the dog they had, Jerome’s troubles learning to ride his first two-wheeler, but the whole time Jerome is sitting with his eyes cracked too wide and his mouth open, listening for something he may not recognize.

  He wants to come right out and ask his father, Where were you when you left us? He doesn’t mean, Where did you go? He means, Where were you in your head? But hard as he tries to phrase the question, he has to get semiblitzed before he can ask Justin anything, and when he does, all he can come up with is, “What happened to your house?”

  His dad turns bland eyes to him. “What house?”

  “I thought you guys were building modern houses.”

  “In time,” his dad says. “Right now, there are more important things.”

  Jerome is just drunk enough to say, “The end of the world?”

  Justin does not answer. “Supplies, for one.”

  Then while he slouches in the cushions with his mouth full, letting the chocolate melt and run around in there, his dad lays it out for him: how many of them there are in this community, what the arrangement is. They are pooling funds. The houses are not as important as laying in supplies. Like a materiel officer he numbers the things they have shored up against destruction, whether of society or the earth he does not say. At no point does his dad say anything crazy. The plan as he describes it is not religious, but pragmatic. He names some of the things they have: generators, enough food and water for sixty years, medical supplies, weapons, radiation detectors, a shopping list for Armageddon, but: what makes these people so sure it’s coming? Jerome is afraid his dad will say God came down and told him. But he doesn’t. He just goes on about hydroponics and subsistence farming and the division of chores.