The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 29

  I have never seen him happier.

  This poses a terrible problem. Is the catastrophe outside a real raveling of society and the city as we know it and, perhaps, the universe, or is it something Father manufactured to keep us in his thrall?

  My sisters may be happy but I am uncertain. I’m bored and dubious. I’m bored and suspicious and lonely as hell.

  The others are in the music room with Father at the piano, preparing a Donizetti quartet. I looked in and saw them together in the warm light; with his white hair sparkling in the halogen glow of the piano lamp, he looked exalted. As if there was a halo around his head. Now, I love Father but I was never his favorite. There’s no part in the Donizetti piece for me. Why should I go in there and play along? Instead I have retreated to the lounge where I strain at the window in hopes. For hours I look out, staring in a passion of concentration because Derek is out there somewhere, whereas I …

  If I keep at this, I think, if I press my face to the glass and stare intently, if I can just keep my mind on what I want, then maybe I can become part of the glass or pass through it and find Derek.

  With my head pressed against the fabric of our rushing host, I whisper:

  “Oh, please.”

  Outside it is quite simply desolate. Mud and worse things splash on my window as the giant beast that hosts us lunges over something huge, snaps at some adversary in her path, worries the corpse and takes a few bites before she rushes on. God, I wish she’d slow down. I wish she would stop! I want her to lurch onto a peak and let me out!

  Can’t. On autopilot.

  Odd. The glass is buzzing. Vibration or what? I brush my face, checking for bees. If I knew how, I’d run to the galley at the base of her skull and thump on the brushed steel walls until she got my message. Crucial question: do alligators know Morse code?

  No need.

  “What?”

  My God. She and I are in communication.

  “Lady!”

  The windowpane grows warm, as though I have made her blush. It’s Perpetua.

  “I know!”

  I thought you did.

  “Oh, lady, can you tell me what’s going on?

  Either more or less than you think.

  In a flash I understand the following: we are not, as I suspected—hoped!—being duped. Father has his girls back all right, he has us at his fingertips in a tight space where he has complete control, but this is his response to the warnings, not something he made up. Although my best-case scenario would confirm my suspicions and make it easy to escape, we are not captive inside a submarine in perfectly normal New York City, witlessly doing his bidding while our vehicle sloshes around in a total immersion tank.

  There really is a real disaster out there.

  Soon enough tidal waves will come crashing in our direction, to be followed by meteorite showers, with volcanic eruptions pending and worse to come. As for Father’s contrivances, I am correct about one thing: the cablevision we watch and the Web we surf aren’t coming in from the world outside, they are the product of the database deep in the server located behind our alligator’s left eye.

  “But what about Derek?”

  I don’t know.

  “Can you find out?”

  You have to promise to do what I want.

  I whisper into the window set into her flank: “What do you want?”

  Promise?

  “Of course I promise!”

  Then all that matters is your promise. It doesn’t matter what I want. “I need to know what’s happening!” Maybe Mother is right, maybe it really is the hand of God. Wouldn’t you get sick of people like us and want to clean house?

  Not clear.

  “Whether God is sick of us?”

  Any of it. The only clear thing is what we have to do.

  “What? What!” She lets me know that although I left him in Rangoon, Derek is adrift somewhere in New York. Don’t ask me whether he flew or came by boat or what I’m going to do. Just ask me what I think, and then ask me how I know.

  You have to help me.

  “You have to stop and let me out!”

  I know what’s out there because, my God, Perpetua is showing me. Images spill into my head and cloud my eyes: explosions mushrooming, tornadoes, volcanic geysers, what? In seconds I understand how bad it is although Perpetua can’t tell me whether we are in the grip of terrorists or space aliens or a concatenation of natural disasters or what; she shows me Derek standing in the ruins of our old building with his hand raised as if to knock on the skeletal door, I see looters and carnivores and all the predictable detritus of a disaster right down to the truck with the CNN remote, and I see that they won’t be standing there much longer because the roiling clouds are opening for a fresh hailstorm unless it’s a firestorm or a tremendous belching of volcanic ash.

  You won’t last a minute out there, not the way you are.

  She’s right. To survive the crisis in the city outside, we have had ourselves made very small.

  You got it. You don’t stand a chance.

  “Oh, God,” I cry.

  Not God, not by a long shot.

  “Oh, Lady!” I hear Father and the others chattering as they come in from the music room. I whisper into the glass. My mouth leaves a wet lip print frosted by my own breath. “What am I going to do?”

  Our saurian hostess exits my consciousness so quickly that I have to wonder whether she was ever there. My only proof? I have her last words imprinted: Find out how.

  Chef brings our afternoon snack trays and my sisters and I graze, browsing contentedly, like farm animals. Father nods and he and Chef exchange looks before Chef bows and backs out of the room.

  It comes to me like a gift.

  Passionately, I press my lips to the glass. “It’s in the food.”

  Find the antidote. Take it when you get out.

  “Are you? Are you, Perpetua?” I am wild with it. “Are you really going to stop and let me out?”

  She doesn’t answer. The whole vehicle that encloses our family begins to thrash. I hear magnified snarling and terrible rending noises as she snaps some enemy’s spine and over Vivaldi I hear her giant teeth clash as she worries it to death.

  We bide our time then, Perpetua and I, at least I do. What choice do I have?

  But while I am waiting her history is delivered to me whole. It is not so much discovered as remembered, as though it happened to me. Sleeping or waking, I can’t say when or how Perpetua reaches me; her story seeps into my mind and as it unfolds I understand why she and I are bonded. Rather, why she chose me. Rushing along through the night while Father plots and my sisters sleep, our alligator somehow drops me into the tremendous ferny landscape of some remote, prehistoric dawn where I watch, astonished, as her early life unfolds under a virgin sun that turns the morning sky pink. Although I am not clear whether it is her past or a universal past that Perpetua is drawing, at some level I understand. She shows me the serpentine tangle of clashing reptiles and the emergence of a king and she takes me beyond that to deliver me at the inevitable: that all fathers of daughters are kings. I see Perpetua’s gigantic, armored father with his flaming jaws and his great teeth and I join his delicate, scaly daughters as they slither here and there in the universe, apparently free but always under his power.

  So you see.

  I have the context, if not the necessity.

  Then over the next few days while we float along in our comfortable dream world she encourages me to explore.

  While the others nap I feel my way along the flexible vinyl corridors that snake through Perpetua’s sinuous body, connecting the chambers where we sleep and the rooms where we eat and the ones where we entertain ourselves. The tubing is transparent and I see Perpetua’s vitals pulsing wherever I flash my light. Finally I make my way to the galley—quietly, because Chef sleeps nearby. It’s a hop, skip and a jump to the medicine chest, where I find unmarked glass capsules sealed in a case. I slip one into my pocket, in case. From the galley, I d
iscover, there are fixed passageways leading up and a flexible one leading down. I open the hatch and descend.

  Yes, Perpetua says inside my head and as I get closer to her destination, repeating like an orgasmic lover, yes, yes, yes!

  I have found the Destruct button.

  It is located at the bottom of the long stairway that circumvents her epiglottis; opening the last hatch I find my way into the control center, which is lodged in her craw. And here it is. Underneath there is a neatly printed plate put there by Father’s engineers:

  IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.

  Perpetua’s great body convulses. Yes.

  Trembling, I press my mouth to the wall: “Is this what you want?” I can’t afford to wait for an answer. “It would be suicide!”

  We have a deal.

  “But what about me?”

  When it’s time, you’ll see.

  The next few days are extremely hard. Perpetua rushes on without regard for me while Chef bombards us with new delicacies and Father and my sisters rehearse Gilbert and Sullivan in the music room. I can’t help but think of Mother, alone in the ruins of our penthouse. Is she all right, is she maybe in some safe place with my lover Derek or did she die holding the Gutenberg Bible in an eternal I told you so? Mother! Is that the Last Judgment shaping up out there or is it simply the end of the world? Whatever it is, I think, she and Derek are better off than I am trapped in here.

  Father asks, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  My sisters say, “Is it Derek? Are you worried about Derek? This is only the beginning, so get over it.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Of course you are, we’re terribly lucky,” they say. Father has given them jewels to match their eyes. “We’re lucky as hell and everything’s going to be fine.”

  I can hardly bear to be with them. “Whatever you want,” I whisper to Perpetua. “Let’s do it.”

  When it’s time.

  Relief comes when you least expect it, probably because you aren’t expecting it. Perpetua and I are of the Zen Archer school of life. She summons me out of a stone sleep.

  It’s time.

  The alligator and I aren’t one now, but we are thinking as one. Bending to her will, I pad along the corridors to the galley and descend to the control room. She doesn’t have to explain. Predictably, the Destruct button is red. At the moment, it is glowing.

  I use the hammer to break the glass.

  Now.

  I push the button that sets the timer. The bottom falls out of the control room, spilling me into her throat and she vomits me out. I crunch down on the breakable capsule that will bring me back to normal size.

  My God, I’m back in the world! I’m back in the world and it is terrible.

  As I land in the muck Perpetua rushes on like an express train roaring over me while I huddle on the tracks or the Concorde thundering close above as I lie on my back on the runway, counting the plates in its giant belly as it takes off. I have pushed the Destruct button. Is the timer working? Did it abort? Our alligator hostess is traveling at tremendous speeds and as she slithers on she whips her tail and opens her throat in a tremendous cry of grief that comes out of her in a huge, reptilian groan: Noooooooo …

  Rolling out of her wake I see the stars spiraling into the Hudson; in that second I think I see the proliferation and complexity of all creation dividing into gold and dross, unless it is light and dark, but which is which I cannot tell. A black shape on the horizon advances at tremendous speeds; it resolves into a monstrous reptile crushing everything in its path. The great mouth cracks wide as the huge beast approaches, blazing with red light that pours out from deep inside, and all at once I understand. This vast, dark shape is the one being Perpetua hates most but she is helpless and rushing toward it all the same, and the terror is that she has no choice.

  This is by no means God jerking her along, it is a stupendous alligator with its greedy jaws rimmed with blood, summoning Perpetua and its thousand other daughters into its path, preparing to devour them.

  The thought trails after her like a pennant of fire. The father is gathering us in.

  So I understand why the alligator helped me.

  And I understand as well the scope of her gift to me: in another minute I will become an orphan, as the monster alligator lunges for Perpetua and she stops it in its tracks, destructing in an explosion that lights up the apocalyptic skies. And because I am about to be free, and free of Father forever …

  I understand why I had to help her die.

  Scared now.

  It’s OK.

  I’ll be fine.

  —Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, 2004

  Pilots of the Purple Twilight

  The wives spent every day by the pool at the Miramar, not far from the base, waiting for word about their men. The rents were cheap and nobody bothered them, which meant that no one came to patch the rotting stucco or kill centipedes for them or pull out the weeds growing up through the cracks in the cement. They were surrounded by lush undergrowth and bright flowers nobody knew the names for, and although they talked about going into town to shop or taking off for home, wherever that was, they needed to be together by the pool because this was where the men had left them and they seemed to need to keep claustrophobia as one of the conditions of their waiting.

  On good days they revolved slowly in the sunlight, redolent of suntan oil and thorough in the exposure of all their surfaces because they wanted the tans to be right for the homecoming, but they also knew they had plenty of time. If it rained they would huddle under the fading canopy and play bridge and canasta and gin, keeping scores into the hundreds of thousands even though they were sick of cards. They did their nails and eyebrows and read Perry Mason paperbacks until they were bored to extinction, bitching and waiting for the mail. Everybody took jealous note of the letters received, which never matched the number of letters sent because mail was never forwarded after a man was reported missing. The women wrote anyway, and every day at ten they swarmed down the rutted drive to fall on the mailman like black widow spiders, ravenous.

  Most of the letters were for the wretches whose husbands had already come home, for God’s sake, whisking them away to endlessly messy kitchens and perpetual heaps of laundry in dream houses mortgaged on the GI Bill. Embarrassed by joy, they had left the Miramar without a backward glance, and for the same reason they always wrote at least once, stuffing their letters with vapid-looking snapshots of first babies, posting them from suburbs on the other side of the world.

  At suppertime they all went into the rambling stucco building, wrenching open the rusting casements because it seemed important to keep sight of the road. Just before the shadows merged to make darkness they would drift outside again, listening, because planes still flew out from the nearby base every morning and, waiting, they were fixed on the idea of counting them back in. Most of their men had left in ships or on foot but still they waited. To the women at the Miramar every dawn patrol hinted at a twilight return, and the distant Fokkers or P-38s or F-87s seemed appropriate emblems for their own hopes, the suspense a fitting shape to place on the tautening stomachs, the straining ears, the dread of the telegram.

  They all knew what they would do when the men came back even though they had written their love scenes privately. There would be the reunion in the crowded station, the embrace that would shut out everybody else. She would be standing at the sink when he came up from behind and put his arms around her waist, or she would be darning or reading, not thinking about him just for once, when a door would open and she would hear him: Honey, I’m home. There would be the embrace at the end of the driveway, the embrace in plain view, the embrace in the field. None of them thought about what he would be like when they embraced, what he must look like now, the way he really smelled, because their memories had been stamped with images distilled, perfected by the quality of their own waiting, the balance they tried to keep between think
ing about it and not thinking about it. If I can just not think about it, Elise still told herself, then maybe he will come.

  Watching the sky, even after all these years, she would be sure she heard the distant vibration of motors drumming, or maybe it was the jet sound, tearing the sky like a scythe; she had been there since Château-Thierry, or was it Amiens, and she knew the exact moment at which it became too dark to hope. “Tomorrow,” she would say, and because the others preferred to think she was the oldest and so was the best at waiting, they would follow her inside. They all secretly feared that there was an even older woman bedridden in the tower, and that her husband had sailed with Enoch Arden, but nobody wanted to know for sure. They preferred to look to Elise, who kept herself beautifully and was still smiling; she had survived.

  They were soft at night, jellied with anticipation and memory, one in spirit with Elise, but each morning found them clattering out to the chaises with Pam and Marge, hard and bright. Pam and Marge were the leaders of a group of self-styled girls in their fifties, who had graying hair and thickening waists. They liked to kid and whistled songs like “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” through their teeth. They shared a home-front camaraderie that enraged Donna, who was younger, and who had sent her husband off to a war nobody much remembered. She and Sharon and a couple of others in their forties would press their temples with their fists, grumbling about grand-standing, and people who still thought fighting was to be admired. Anxious, bored, frazzled by waiting, these two groups indulged in a number of diverting games: who had the most mail and who was going to sit at the round table at supper, who was hogging all the sunlight. They chose to ignore the newcomers, mere slips of things who had sent their men off to—where was it—Nam, or someplace worse.