Little Camp

The wind screamed at them, balled up its fists and battered them for hours. Their little camp was under attack and couldn't take another night of this. The canvas that Cready had nailed over the entryway was torn and streaming and Sullivan was trying to keep his blackening fingertips from the doc. Frostbite was feeling into every crack and Sullivan was its favored target.

Having the dogs inside with them was a help—to man and dog—but then there was the food problem. Rations for one more month, if all went well. And that meant cutting everything very close. The weather didn't look kindly on men with rigid schedules. The weather delighted in taking men like that down a peg or two. Calling forth an avalanche, turning up the volume on a gale. But proper organization was the only thing that would get them out of here and back home.

The entire expedition was in disarray. Two dead (James and Fitch), two wounded, not including Sullivan's frostbite, the extent of which was not yet known, and several on the precipice of apathetic rebellion. Everyone needed to be sharp, each man a harpoon, direct and sure. The weather, the relentless wind, the driving snow, and above all the hellish cold, honed some men's spirits and blunted others. If only there were a way to tell one from the other, before inserting them into the jaws of a place like this.

The dogs slept so placidly Markham thought once or twice they had all frozen solid during the night. They came alive in conditions like this, each one keen for the challenge, each one full of hope and the prospect of pleasing its driver. Those sterling dogs. The canvas covering tore down the middle and Cready was up with a curse, orders all around. He hammered it back down and added extra rope on the posts. Then he deliberately cut three inch slits along the face of it. A sailor's the man for any tight spot. Cready knew their home would come apart if they tried to stand pat against this wind. Yield the battle to win the fight.

Bad Luck

With all the doors and windows gone, the house looked toothless. The house was an old man. No one knew why I did it. They said that day and night as they walked and drove past. They didn't use words to say it, but it was plain as day that's what they were thinking. How they'd grab little looks at the house before they turned the corner.

I can't explain it, really. The house was plugged up. Do you know how many bad things happened in that house? Not just regular bad, like arguments and broken dishes. Bad things. Sickness. Sadness. Some people think it was Lana passing that did it to me. I don't know. Could be right. She was not even three years old. How can anyone "come to terms," as they say? That's a puzzle. She was fine one day and two weeks later, gone. She'd stopped crying out. Her mother was, of course, gone. She passed a year before from fever.

Once I was all alone in there, I got to thinking. No time to think before that. I started to wonder if maybe the bad luck inside was swirling around and around, like paint going down a drain. And maybe that bad luck had no place to go. Seemed reasonable. Still does, if you want to know. So I took all the windows out, first thing. Started with the second story. I didn't break them or anything. I'm not crazy. I'm not a mountain man dazed by solitude. I was just working out a theory. I kept having bad dreams, so the doors went, too. The bad luck needed a little help to get on and find someplace else to be. I'd have knocked over a wall if I'd thought that would help.

With the doors and windows out, things cooled off a bit. The house breathed a little. My dreams cleared up. I don't have to worry about burglars. You'd be surprised how few people want to come inside a house with no doors. Makes them uneasy. Nervous. Not me.

Hands

Every time he went back to the doctor's he got worse. The doctor would ask him into the little dark room with the light-up panels, x-rays of his bones on display, and show him important details with the tip of a pencil. This darkening here, this lightening here. What this indicates, my diagnosis, it appears from this.

The bones in his hands were getting old. Refusing to work properly. The doctor couldn't do anything except tell him how bad it had gotten. And that wasn't something he wanted done anymore. So he stopped seeing the doctor. It had been once a month, and then once every two weeks. Before the doctor asked him to rent a cot in the hospital, he stopped going.

The doctor called once or twice. He sounded unhappy to lose his audience. Or maybe it was more like a sculptor losing his model. Because without his hands and his bones that thinned and thickened improperly—every time the doctor said "improperly," he thought of small children—the doctor was helpless. The doctors want you only to think of the transaction working in the other direction. Yes, yes, without doctors, where would we all be then, and so on. But without patients, without sick people, without people whose bones are improper, where would the doctors be?

He stopped going. He went to the park on Monday afternoons instead. He went to the park and watched children and birds. They were innocence and laughter. Even the birds laughed. He tried not to think about his bones. He tried not to think about his doctor. He tried not to think about anything. One morning, he couldn't hold his coffee cup. His fingers wouldn't close the way he told them to. They misbehaved. They had minds of their own now, and couldn't believe that the old people knew more than they did.

The Boar

If they had only known how unhappy he'd been for the last dozen years, none of this would have been necessary. The vigils every night, and the young people wriggling over the gates like seals, only to be dragged onto the grounds and beaten.

He had tried to put an end to that, at least, but the Minsiter of Internal Affairs had said that would be the gravest mistake of all. Any softening, any loosening of the hold on power, would be taken for weakness. And when your enemy found a weakness in you, he feasted on it and became stronger. He talked like he was Minister of War, always drunk with metaphor.

It bothered him no end. He was weak. And tired. This was wrong. This. Everything. The young men at the gates. What they said about him in the dissident newspapers that grew like mushrooms. His aide-de-camp brought them home after his clandestine trips through the darkened streets. "The Boar" they called him, and savaged him with caricatures. Always, tusks curved from his jaw. He looked at himself in the mirror every time to try and find it. Hoping to find why they hated him so much.

His father had dismantled much of the previous century's oppressive apparatus. And hadn't he undone most of the rest? He would be remembered as the weakest of them all, but it wasn't enough. It was never enough. They hated him with their blood, with centuries of grievances pushing them on, choking them full of bitter wind. When the crowds had first gathered outside the palace three months ago, he had tried talking to them, from the balconies. They jeered and spat. They didn't care what he had to say. Internal Affairs wouldn't let him say anything now. "Strength is your ally." More ancient wisdom. Fire couldn't help a drowning man.

The Therapist

She wanted him to talk about his childhood again. It wasn't that she thought childhood was especially meaningful. She wasn't that kind of therapist. It's just that after all the testing, she knew that his peritemporal region was hot when he talked about his childhood. Perhaps because of the memories he reassembled. Didn't matter. She didn't care why. All she needed to know was that the region was hot, densely active. And that meant it was a gateway.

While he leaned back on the couch, his head almost lost in the cheerful pillows, she asked him about elementary school. The PET-cap was feeding his brain's innermost responses to the computer mounted on the arm of her chair. The process was seamless and simple. She could have told him the close-fitting cap was designed to enhance relaxation. And the three-inch square monitor in front of her? An appointment planner. "It's not even on."

He started to talk about some school play, and being chosen for a smaller part than his better-dressed, more well-liked rival. The activity on the monitor was ferocious. She had tapped a rich vein. The Neural Index was already up to 6.5, and he'd only been talking for a couple minutes. The oranges and yellows on the monitor painted a picture of intense involvement with the memory. As soon as the first reds appeared and the NI topped 8.0, she'd have him. And then administering the drug was all that remained. The PET-cap contained three microscopic PTUs—particle transfer units. The drug would be forced through the scalp without him even knowing it.

His voice became thick and slow. He was crying. Should she have been listening? The night of the play. He forgot his lines, froze in front of parents and teachers. Oranges crowded out yellows. Neural Index, 7.9. He was almost ready. She found the button on the underside of the armrest and rested her finger on it.

The Kolo

He knew how he was supposed to feel about the Kolo tribesmen. He was supposed to think they were savages, but a step up from the savages of the plains. Savages with potential. This sentiment was practically an official chapter of the officer's manual. He had heard the expression so many times from his superiors—our kind of savage—that it had come to sound like law.

He didn't dare—yet—tell anyone, but he was coming to see that the conventional wisdom re: the Kolo was quite incorrect. Not the part about their potential, but the part about their savagery. These were the same men who designated one among each party to club the timi fish they caught, so only one man would need to seek atonement. The same men who offered up a tenth of their omotu harvest to avoid war with neighboring tribes. Yes, when war came anyway, they were ruthless. But these were not savages. These were citizens, as god-fearing and law-abiding, in their way, as any Englishman.

Conley knew this now, and the knowledge was interfering with his duties. Unclear to begin with, his duties—it had been suggested by his ever-helpful superiors—involved drawing the Kolo into line. Seducing them, as it were, with a vision of British salvation. Cooking pots, machetes, metal arrowheads, mass-produced sandals: the Kolo would have a near-endless supply of these and other things, if they would only act as the King's emissaries and help the King claim the outlying regions. Everyone would win. A true bargain. No rape of the savage here.

Conley knew he wasn't the man for the job, his knack for the language notwithstanding. He knew the Kolo deserved every bit as much sovereignty as the British. They were not a people specially made for colonization. They were proud and upright. Allies, perhaps. Subjects, doubtful. Conley could not betray them.

The Waiting Room

Waiting was the worst part. The chairs had crooked legs. You wouldn't know it but someone checked them every night. Made sure they were sufficiently uneven, unthreading one a few turns. That was a whole job. So was Doorknob Greaser. The staff all wore gloves for a reason.

The waiting room was as inhospitable as the Sahara. The waiting room was a masterpiece. An hour in the waiting room felt like five. Five crooked hours with nothing to do but watch the clock that hadn't worked in years. Truthfully, it hadn't ever worked. Before they installed it, they deactivated it. Then there was the plant. Clients—as they were patronizingly called, officially-speaking—could content themselves with watching the leaves cling to life. Crisp, withered casualties speckled the floor around the pot. It leaked water. A pale brown stain spread out from the pot and left a loathsome flim, a scum the color of dried blood. The stronger-willed in the waiting room could use the stain as a springboard: How long had it been there, Who would clean it up, Didn't that look a little like Florida? But even the strong-willed didn't last long. A few hours, maybe.

Legend has it that one tenacious old crone stayed all day once, then went home and died in her sleep. No one was surprised to hear that. They didn't care one way or the other. The waiting room ground on, flattening everything in its path. Just the way the waiting room was. You couldn't fault it for that. No one faults the shark for its appetites. No one worth taking seriously.

Last year, someone introduced a buzzing hum into the waiting room. The staff thought it was working out well. It kept clients uneasy. They looked around, shifted on their sticky chairs. They tried to zero in on the sound. But it moved. That was the brilliant part. A computer turned micro-speakers off and on randomly.

So Jealous

She couldn't say it out loud or even quietly in her mind's corridors and sealed rooms. She was so jealous of Caitlyn she sometimes couldn't be in the same small space with her. A car. The kitchen. The porch. No one knew she felt that way. She hoped no one knew she felt that way. She had told herself when she was a girl that it would be different one day when she had a daughter of her own.

Her mother hadn't understood anything. He mother had sailed through her own life six inches above the ground. She left no tracks. When her mother had landed in adulthood, she was unscathed. She knew nothing of her blindfolded journey. She was an incompetent mother. Childhood was lost in the fog of her near-perfect amnesia. She never said, "When I was a girl" or "Oh, I remember what that was like," some hurt, some pang of regret. Because her mother didn’t remember.

So she had told herself many times how things would be different. She imagined long talks about the things that can flatten a child's outlook and weigh on her shoulders. The low, muttering magic that can unlock unwelcome places inside. The quicksand. She saw herself in the future as a wise mother, of infinite patience and empathy. She would learn from her own mistakes and her mother's. But almost as soon as Caitlyn was born, she felt things whose shape she didn't like. Caitlyn had a sunny hand at her back. She was born with it.

Caitlyn didn't suffer. Caitlyn had a reflex for landing on her feet. Caitlyn didn't need help from anyone. Caitlyn loved learning, on her own. Setbacks thrilled her, because she felt this was life talking back. Occasionally she would ask her mother for her opinion, or some token of her girlhood. But she didn't need it. She would never say it out loud, but Caitlyn almost pitied her own mother.

Murmuring

I thought I'd heard it several times before, only at night, and last night, I heard it for sure. Not whispering, really, but murmuring. Low, wordless, and—from my vantage point—unbroken. A steady stream of distinctly human sounds.

The thing that makes the hairs on my arms stand erect is that I heard it coming from my basement. I was in the bathroom. My aging bladder had gotten me up at four o'clock again—its latest trick—and when I turned the tap off after washing my hands, I heard it. There was no mistaking it this time. Those were human voices, heard through the bones and skin of the house. I couldn't make out any words, and as I walked slowly around the room, to find a spot where I could hear better, my heartbeat filling my ears, something in the floor creaked and the murmuring stopped. I stood, hands dripping like water clocks, and a few minutes later the sound returned. Someone was in the basement. Someone was living there, murmuring. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to leave the bathroom. I was afraid to leave Mary alone in bed, soft and sleeping and helpless. I was trapped. My feet were lead weights.

Finally, after two or three hour-long minutes, my hands still wet, my heart still jumping up and down in my chest, I left the bathroom noisily. The murmuring people already knew I was up here. There was no reason they had to know I knew they were down there.

I went into the bedroom and shut and locked the door behind me quickly. I had to grab Kong roughly by the scruff and drag her back inside with us. And then I fell into bed and strained for the murmuring until I drifted into a murky sleep a couple hours later.

Dandy

Place is falling hard, falling apart. The kids, they come up to the front door, want to know can they play with Dandy? Dandy all supersonic tail making a blur of the air. Stirring it up like a pot of honey. They stroll right up on that busted-up brick walkway, none of them offered to fix it ever. They could have, too. Would have taken them a couple hours, they all worked on it together. They don’t have bad backs. But they don't care about any of that.

Place needs paint, too. I get up on a ladder, I'm liable to fall and break my head open. Be a paint can spilling out Royal Sky and my head spilling out my brains. Do the kids care about that? They do not. Not one lick. And what about the window I know they broke with their football or soccer ball or frisbee plate or what have you? They never said nothing about it. None of them did.

And still they want to borrow my dog for a run in the park. Old pig in dog's clothing needs it, I can't deny that. I say okay, let me get the leash 'cause you got to have the leash. But it's only for the old fat dog's sake. Dandy needs it, I know that. He's hanging low. He's scraping by, just. Got to get some air into his lungs. Got to let him stretch his legs. All he's doing in here is eating my house down to the pit. Breathing on me.

This one little kid, he's down with his hands on his knees, looking in at Dandy through the screen. This one can't wait to take that one out for a run. Would it kill them to help out around the place once in a while? I bend down and hear it in my back and hook the leash onto Dandy's collar. And open up the screen and give the kid the leash. Take him. And don't you forget to bring him back.

Carlos

The whole place stank, to hear Carlos tell it. Roaches as big as your thumb. They'll fight you for the last chicken leg. He thought he was being funny. Which was better than him trying to be tough. Every time I went over there I wound up thinking if the place is awful why does he still live here?

This had been going on for over three years, him complaining about the apartment and the neighborhood he was forced by God to live in. Or else, why else would he be living there? He talked like this was his cross to bear. Like he was putting in the time. The penance. Paying a debt. But he loved it. Made him sag with real style. Place wasn't clean, that was true. And at least part of that was Carlos, and not God. I mean, was God supposed to wash the dishes instead of piling them in showy stacks on the arm of the sofa? So I'm not saying it was a bed of roses and hundred dollar bills, because it wasn't, but he could have moved out.

Connie had offered to give him a room, pretty reasonable, for as long as he liked. Connie was lonely and had not one but two extra rooms he was always trying to rent out. Not a bad place. Had a good-size tree in back, which he claimed produced edible fruit. But Carlos would have to leave his personal hell with the dirty dishes balanced on the arm of the sofa, so try competing with that. Plus there was Connie's sister living there. Unmarried, nothing too rough to look at, so I didn't understand where Carlos was coming from at all.

Still, every time, it was Do you believe this place? and See what I have to put up with? He was in his element, battling it out with the roaches for control of the remote every night. Maybe he thought it excused the shitty way he treated everyone.

The Pitchman

This invention was supposed to change everything. Whatever you wanted changed, it would change it. You didn't want something changed, it wouldn't even touch it. This is what The Pitchman said. He called himself The Pitchman. Always put his hands around what he said, like he was framing it for your memory. Like it deserved its own box in your head. So when (hands up, framing it for eternity) The Pitchman told you about (hands) The Product, you listened. This was important. This was worth remembering. And it was going to change everything.

Someone raised a hand in the back row. Guy in a turtleneck. Sandy brown hair coming over his bulging collar. The Pitchman points to him and click-clicks with his fingers in the shape of a friendly gun. Everything about The Pitchman is friendly. He drives friendly. He sleeps friendly. Takes a leak friendly, is a good bet. The guy in the turtleneck says, from right where he's sitting, doesn't stand so everyone up front—who got to the auditorium on time—“How will this address matters of our worsening environment?”

The Pitchman smiled. He loved that question. He loved the guy who asked it. And he loved the turtleneck he was wearing. The Pitchman loved everything. "I am so tickled you asked that!" And, you know, he looked like something, like, maybe an elf or a little penguin, was tickling him right there. He wanted to laugh, but it was all too serious for that. But he looked happy.

Folding chairs squeaked against the linoleum. The Pitchman was working up to the something and people were shifting around to see it. “The Product” (make a snapshot of that for your mind to enjoy for years to come) “was inspired by that very” (hands) “predicament!” His voice rose up to “predicament” and took everyone's spirits with it. The guy in the turtleneck felt like he was a key player in a very important moment.

The Shop Window

Their shop window. All washed like that, every damn day. With the ladder. It made me sick. It wasn't good enough to hire the kid to come by on Fridays with his bucket. No, they had to wash that window every single damn day. God forbid someone should come to stare at all that crap and find a smudge on the window.

I hated him and his little round glasses so much. I'd go out there after closing—I mean, after I closed, late, nine o'clock, not after he closed—and smudge his damn window up myself. Drag my hand across it. Once, after I watched him drive his little sedan away, I reached up and patted the window with a banana peel I found in the gutter. Oh, he must have wondered about that the next day, up on his ladder, making everything just-so and perfect. Every day. He should thank me. Giving him something to do up there.

I thought the kid was fine. What's the big deal. Spread it around, that's what I say. Ten bucks a month doesn't sound like too much to me. Kid's got initiative, but Mr. Morton's Fine Jewelry wouldn't know anything about that. All he knows is wash-the-window, wash-the-window. I can see him from behind the counter, every day, noon.

I'm ready to grab a bite at noon. That's what people do at noon, or hadn't you noticed, Mr. Up-on-a-ladder? I have to wait 'til he's done. His window's right between me and Oscar's, where I go, so I have to wait. I'm not walking past him when he's up there. Him and his little lift-his-cap-up when you pass by. The kid always did right by me. And my window's bigger. But every night, I showed him. He wants to climb that ladder every day, and look down on all of us, that's fine by me. I'll give him something to clean up.

Hummingbird

She didn't move. She didn't talk. She didn't do anything. Just sat there. All the parents said things about psychiatric malfunctions, or something. They said Don't tease her, and Leave her alone, and If I ever catch you... But they did tease her.

She never knew it, even though they did it right in front of her face, but they did it just in case. Just in case she really could hear them saying Retard and Crazy Girl and Lump. She didn't go to school anymore, of course. She hadn't gone since the second grade, and that was eight years ago. She just sat on the porch, or on her bed, or at the table, wearing whatever her mother dressed her in that day. Whenever the neighborhood boys would walk by, they were sure to say something mean. If it wasn't about her clothes, it was her hair. Or her eyes, which they always found something wrong with.

They knew someone was inside. They didn't think of her as, say, furniture, like the porch swing she sat on when the weather was fair. She never moved on it, though the temptation to swing back and forth should be a natural and unavoidable thing, but they still knew someone was inside. Maybe they just hoped, because it gave their words a sting. Otherwise, it was just them and the whole big world they didn't understand, the world they were told every day they weren't ready for. More ready than the Lump, they could say. More ready than her. She doesn't even move.

But that's the thing. On the outside she didn't move, but inside, where no one saw, she was a hummingbird. She was flying rings around the world. Not ready for the world—she had already seen every secret the world held dear, and she was ready for more.

The Well

We found it when we were digging a well for the Briers. We weren't more than three feet down when my shovel hit something hard and brittle. We heard a snap. JP dropped to his knees and reached in like he was hauling up crab pots. He opened his hand and there was a human rib in it. He held it like you’d hold a robin’s egg. We looked at each other with eyes like cups. Down in the hole was a man. He'd been in there a long time, by the looks.

He was all bones. I said something about the police, and JP said this wasn’t exactly what you'd call an emergency situation. Man must have been dead twenty years. Mouth open to the world. All his spaces filled up with dirt. I could see all the bones of his wrist. Everything was still there. Except a couple ribs, courtesy of us.

We didn't know what to do. The Briers would be furious. Anything that slowed down work made them furious. A three-day rain last year had Mr. Brier yelling and cursing and calling us cowards. You can't explain that painting fences in the rain is a poor idea. So we made a big show, loading up cans of paint and brushes. We ended up sleeping in the truck, under the trees.

So this. This would send Brier over the edge. But how could we keep quiet about it? I thought maybe we could phone it in anonymously, but JP pointed out that no one but us would have been up there to find him. He was right. Brier be damned, we had to tell someone. He could still have his people waiting on him, watching windows and trying to hold back the clock.

What Still Works

The list is bigger than all my midnight pains suggest. My inventory of efficiency—of success!—is extensive. My other leg is fine. No tenderness, full range of motion: a shining example of the body’s golden design. My temples do not ache. All but three of my teeth are sound. My hearing—not counting the higher frequencies—is excellent. My sense of smell has dulled recently, but my sense of touch has never been keener. Even grit in my shoe triggers temblors of irritation.

The catalog of working parts is not limited to my person, either. Every light bulb in the house still works. Three fourths of all chairs in the house have even legs and do not rock. The front door does not squeak. (The back door, just a little.) Faucet drips are minimal. The roof does not leak. My paranoia, my suspicions, my superstitions (notably problems associated with being able to see inside the house from the street) are all functional. The many fears, of headlights, searchlights, the blinking lights of planes—the many fears are robust.

Words still work. Numbers still work. Pictures… Well, can anything kill a picture? The Image stands atop the mountain peaks, all its flags fluttering. Emotions work. Ever since they first blossomed inside lizard brains, emotions have churned and spoken with many voices, rude and gentle, conniving and cajoling. (Those puppetmasters!)

Still, let us not forget the many—shall we say—issues facing us. Apart from the rib, the wrist, the demonic finger, and the toe, the headache and the nausea: cowlicks, warts, pimples, cricks, cramps, blisters, and rashes. An eyelid that twitches. A sore ankle (and even sorer shin). A touch of tinnitus. A hangnail. One abscess (underneath the tongue). Foul dreams (note: no insomnia). Assorted twinges and pangs. The eternal questions: Is it a stabbing pain? A dull throb? Yes and yes.

James R. Terry's Cameras

They were all there, in the "furnace of the world," as the papers had started calling it, and they were getting annoyed with James R. Terry's cameras. First, this was supposed to be a scientific trip, not a photo shoot. Everywhere you turned, there was Terry with his cameras, and his direction. "Can you just walk up that ridge again?" and "Can I get you to sort of crouch right there, with the smoke coming up behind you?"

It was easy to be annoyed with him. Him and his thin mustache. No one had caught him at it, but he had to spend some time every couple days in front of a mirror with tweezers, or whatever. He was underfoot. And he wouldn't carry any supplies. Any trip supplies. He always his hands full with camera stuff in bags.

But the thing that got to everyone, even if they weren't totally aware of it, was what the cameras implied: someone would be seeing these pictures. Sometime. Later. When they wouldn't be able to explain for themselves what they had seen. He was writing their epitaph, one click and flash at a time. That was unsettling.

All around them, volcanoes stirred. The air was filled with plumes. They had meters to tell them when the concentration of poison in the air was too much. In other words, they were all walking through poison every day. The question was, Is there too much poison today? This was the kind of thing that each man needed his mind on. It was unpleasant, but distraction could kill faster than sulfur in the air. And James Terry's cameras were a distraction, a reminder that someone might need to tell their story for them, that they would unable to. And he wouldn't let anyone forget that.