11-03-2023

  “I am suspended... Now is nothing, a void...

  "When there are no more shadows, then one is ready, one no longer weaves a line to cast into the future. One of the shadows in that future must be myself; sometimes it seems to turn to gaze back at me, to reach out and lay a hand on me that I can feel in a way that no words have been invented to describe. 1 reached out to myself as a child, dancing at the edge of the lava fields, touched the child I was, reassured the child I was. Did I as child sense a shadow from the future? I don't know.

  "And that's the final frustration: we don't know; we can't be certain; there is no proof ”

  Books by Kate Wilhelm

  City of Cain

  The Clewiston Test

  Fault Lines

  The Infinity Box

  Margaret and I

  Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  Kate Wilhelm

  PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK

  Contents

  I

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  A Timescape Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of

  GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright © 1977 by Kate Wilhelm

  Published by arrangement with Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-26282

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book

  or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information

  address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street,

  New York, N.Y. 10022

  ISBN: 0-671-82288-0

  First Pocket Books printing September, 1978

  Trademarks registered in the United States and other countries.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For Carol Brandt

  I

  Eight miles from the center of San Francisco there is a fracture in the earth's crust—the San Andreas Fault The fault line is six hundred fifty miles long and thirty miles deep and the mass on the west of it wants to slide northward while the land on the east tries to drift south. About fourteen miles to the east is the Hayward Fault Between the two zones and on the outer sides of them are many lesser faults, sometimes paralleling them, sometimes radiating out from them, and in this area the land lies in a state of disequilibrium; it can find relief from the inexorable pressure of opposing forces only through violent movement That is the beginning of an article I have been reading in manuscript. I paraphrase, of course; I didn't memorize it. The author lives in Chicago and has knowledge about earthquakes and faults and fracture zones from an intensive education that has spanned fifteen years of college life. I had already decided to return the article before I came out here to the shore. Facts, facts, facts, and no truth. No real truth.

  You are awakened by the sound of china jiggling softly, as if someone has bumped into the cabinet, set the shelves in motion, or as if a ghostly pressure is signaling its arrival. There is a deeper sound, booted feet running across the wide porch, a cracking noise as something hits and passes through the carved redwood door; inside the house the pressure expands to fill all available space, as gas does in a container. It races across the floor, brushing the walls, rearranging pictures, setting the chandelier adance, stirring the ashes in the fireplace, as if searching for a scrap of paper inadvertently burned. The deep sharp breaking, cracking noise is everywhere, yet is without a source. In the basement a beam groans, in the attic rafters twist and unburden themselves of a decade's collection of dust In the kitchen crockery slides on Formica surfaces; copper pots on the chimney wall beat a tattoo; in the bathroom the door of the medicine cabinet flies open, mouthwash slides out and crashes into the sink, and the fragrance of mint is in the air. Your bed rocks and you wonder why babies find this soothing, and all the while you are counting; ... 27 hippopotamus, 28 hippopotamus . . . 75 hippopotamus . . . There is a rifle crack on the terrace—one of the French doors has broken again. You count because you believe, as everyone else does, that if the earth relieves itself of the unbearable tensions by shivering and trembling for a minute or two the real quake won't come... 87 hippopotamus...

  Sometimes it happens too fast to count, and that's how it was this time. I came wide awake with the roar and thunder still in my head, reverberating in my bones, and I knew. Earthquake, I thought, almost deliberately; I should get out of bed, stand in the doorway, or get under the bed, or run out into the open. I should not simply lie here. But my bed was shaking, and I clung to it, and around me the house was breaking up. I could bear glass shattering, wood snapping and groaning. I started to roll over, thinking of open ground away from the beams and roof; before I could leave it, the bed dropped, and the crashes were very close and sharp. The bed came to rest at an angle, but something had fallen on top of me and I was wedged in place. I found that I was holding my breath, that I was light-headed from holding my breath so long, and I let it go. The bed shuddered once, twice more. Everything became still again. It was over.

  If I had managed to get up, I realized, I probably would have been killed when the house fell. I was content to lie without movement, waiting for terror and nausea to subside, recognizing them both as strange and somewhat distant feelings that were mine and yet apart from me. At last I felt I should do something else, and I tried to rise, and found that I could not move. The bed that had saved my life now held me fast, and I could not move at all.

  I tried each muscle in turn, following the relaxation method in which you first tense and then relax yourself, starting with the left toe, then the right, the left calf, right, left thigh . . . Always before, somewhere between the abdominal group and the fingers I fell asleep. I can tense and relax all my muscles now, but I can’t lift my feet or raise my hands, or roll over or turn my head. I am not really uncomfortable, lying on my stomach, nothing doubled under me, something on me that doesn't feel like a beam or a wall—perhaps the chaise turned over on me, and now, with the mattress below and the cushioned chaise above, I am like a salami in a sandwich, placed here without consent, helpless to protest. I am not hurt, I think, although I may be in a state of shock that has somehow severed my consciousness from the distress signals my body may be sending.

  If you become lost in the woods, sit quietly and wait for help. Do not panic. Do not run. Help, I'm waiting for you I am lying here quietly just waiting for you. I am lost, Help, even though there are no woods here.

  I was holding my breath again, bracing myself for the aftershocks that would shake my house from its precarious perch, shake me with it into the sea, which sounded close enough now to indicate that my cliff had fallen to pieces on the beach. Even as I expelled my breath I thought of the earth gathering its forces to make the minor adjustments its new alignments demanded.

  You ran away, I told myself severely, and this is what you deserve, instant punishment. You should have leveled with them, there were chances, plenty of opportunities, and you didn't have the guts to face them. I was listening to the sea again. Resolutely I forced myself instead to remember the chances I had passed up, when I could have faced the truth with my family and friends.

  Dinner, ten of us in the dining room eating Dome's shrimp gumbo, home-made bread, home-grown salad, Tony’s wine. Sometimes it was beans and rice, sometimes pot roast, occasionally chops, not often, not with ten or more to share them each night. We could almost manage the food bills, I thought, and tried not to think of the gallons of milk we drank each day, the gallons of coffee, tons of flour, sugar, butter. ... I pulled away from the revolving thoughts, back to Kenneth.

  . . so I made Warren pull me along in the wagon and I snapped pictures of shoppers, passing cars, trolleys. It’s amazing, you’ll love it”

  Kenneth has bushy hair, not quite black, tinged with gray now, but still out of control. He has a scar on his right cheek, from falling on a beer bottle when he was a child, and being afraid to go home until it was nearly healed, too late then for stitches. He is six feet tall, about one hundred eighty pounds. I can’t visualize him scrunched down in a wagon, being pulled through town.

  A lovely series of pictures passed through my mind, with text by Johnny Berio maybe. He does children very well. Johnny sent me an article once that was cut into narrow strips of text So I wouldn’t have to do it myself, his bitter little note said.

  “You’re not listening,” Kenneth said, touching my hand.

  “I am. A Child’s Eye View of the World. It’s a grand idea. I can hardly wait to see the pictures.”

  “Most of you wasn’t listening,” Kenneth said knowingly.

  “It’s frightening, looking at the world from only so high off the ground,” Regina said, glancing at her son Brucie, who was playing with his shrimp, making his dinner of bread and butter and milk. He could do worse, I thought.

  Homer began to tell about the school he had attended in Oklahoma—a corrugated shed with a tin roof where the temperature climbed high enough each afternoon to cook the goldfish in the aquarium.

  “Why did they have an aquarium in there if it got that hot?” Katherine asked.

  “So we could take pictures of it and send it to our congressman periodically.”

  “Oh. Is it true that Indians used to be afraid of blondes and find them irresistible?” Katherine is blond.

  “Sure. Blondes, redheads, brunettes, brownettes, yellow gals, black gals, you name it”

  She blushed and ducked her head.

  “Thought I might start painting the trim, if that’s all right,” Jepson Dollard said. He is Dorrie’s friend who moved in at her invitation five years ago and stayed. We don’t pay him anything, can't afford to pay him, but he stays anyway and does things. He tends the salad garden, and paints the trim, and fixes the dishwasher or oven or whatever goes wrong, and he watches Dorrie with soft eyes and teaches Brucie about carving, and sometimes goes fishing and provides us with fish for a month. He is about sixty, retired, with a small pension, and wants to call my house home. He has his meals with us, the family, but If there is company he vanishes. I wish he would fix the plaster in the dining room, but I can't ask him to.

  “What’s wrong?” Kenneth asked me softly while Homer told another story about an archaeologist who dug up bits of Sean Roebuck pottery and pieced them together night after night while the Indians sat in a circle watching silently, solemnly.

  I patted Kenneth’s hand and turned my attention to Warren, who never took his eyes off Kenneth. Warren is my great-nephew. Warren has the same hungry, yearning look that seems to run in my family, but he doesn’t want gold, he wants to be Kenneth Cruze the world-renown photographer, or if not be Kenneth, at least be near him at all times. Kenneth is kind to him although the boy must nearly drive him crazy.

  “Jack Black called,” Dorrie said, “and he’ll call back. I told him to drop a note, but it’s urgent, he has to tell you himself."

  I groaned. Jackson Black is screwy, with a new conspiracy theory each week, new evidence of UFOs each month, new proof that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and half a dozen municipal police forces are having him followed. He thinks he can get an article in the magazine if only he can write it smoothly enough, with enough elegance to suit me, and enough hard evidence to suit the lawyers he knows are hovering in the wings waiting for him to slip up so they can sentence him to jail forever.

  Everything was unnaturally sharp—the ring of silver, the tinkling of ice in glasses, ruby wine by candlelight, the white tablecloth that is getting so threadbare that Dorrie has to place the flowers in strategic spots, hide the thin places with the bread board and self-adhering daisies, the murmur of voices and the laughter as Homer finished his story about the archaeologist and his tape-recordings of ancient tribal chants that translated to something like Higgeldy piggeldy worms are so wiggeldy.

  Homer is writing a suspense novel set in Oklahoma on his reservation, with a Kiowa detective using his own in-scrutable methods to uncover the criminal. It will sell to Hollywood and make him rich and I wonder if the money will kill him. I almost wish he had not shown me the chapters, had not outlined it for me, had not come to me in the first place. Homer is broad and heavy and laughs easily, but his eyes do not laugh. Sometimes late at night I can hear his typewriter tapping away, then nothing, and often during those times of silence I find him stalking shadows through my house, perhaps the ghosts of my parents, or their parents.

  “I can’t do it,” he says then, despair and hopelessness thickening his voice. “It's no good.”

  “You’re stuck, right? Let’s have a look.” And we go to my study, my father’s old study, and sit before the fireplace, where I read the pages while he squirms and mutters evil things.

  Homer knows many things I don’t know and can’t know because my brain won’t admit that my eyes can see what his eyes see. We meet and talk in a narrow area where his reality and mine touch.

  The twins, Karen and Katherine, cleared the table and brought a bowl of fruit and a plate of cookies, and coffee. The phone rang and Regina left and didn’t return. Her ex-husband threatens her with all sorts of terrible things— he will take Brucie away from her, he will make her pay his doctor bills, he wants the car back and is going to send someone after it. ... I wish she would call the police and have him arrested, but she won’t, and she tries to hide the fact that she is afraid of him, for Brucie more than herself. Brucie knows and he pretends he doesn’t and it is all very unpleasant, but I can’t tell them to leave. She is Gloria Woodson’s daughter and will have a home with me as long as she wants it, as long as I have a home.

  Kenneth brought his pictures to the study and I looked at them with him, with Warren hovering in the background. 'They’re fantastic,” I said, and it was true. They are marvelous, and frightening. The world the child sees is different, a scary world of distorted people that changes as adults sit down, or stand up, that makes common buildings with short flights of stairs become imposing, looming structures that threaten to smother a small child. Hallways become nightmares of shadows and distances that seem endless. That explains our own nightmares a bit, I thought staring down the hallway of the public library that I knew so well, but that was now strange and menacing, caught from this angle, three feet from the floor.

  “They are very good,” I said finally, “better than I imagined they would be. What a horrible world!"

  'The little bastards accept it all right," Kenneth said cheerfully. “But it reawakens something that's been dormant awhile, doesn't it?"

  I could only nod, unable to shrug away the pictures and the strange world children view. I could see how an issue could be shaped around his photographs. The Golden Gate Review is a literary magazine, and I seldom use any illustrations, but Kenneth Croze doesn’t do illustrations, he reveals our world as surely as any poet or prose writer, and the impact of his photographs is immediate and visceral.

  He wanted me to say, 111 buy them, well use them in the Christmas issue, or early spring, or something. He waited. He could never say will you take them, or make any move to indicate that he wanted me to buy his pictures. I stared at them until they blurred, and finally mumbled, “I can't buy anything right now, or I would take them."

  The tension vanished and Kenneth laughed and began to gather them together once more. “I thought you didn't like them,'' he said. Everyone else knows he is a genius, but Kenneth is always surprised again when others are forced to admit to seeing bis visions frozen in photographs. “Actually the series isn't quite finished yet There are other things I want to do like this, amusement parks, animals, you know, all the usual children's fun things.*’

  I nodded, and then, aware that the implications of what I had said would finally surface and he would start asking me questions, I fled to my room. After a few moments Dorrie followed.

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong?*’ she asked.

  I was sitting before the fireplace, where no fire burned that pleasant evening. I shook my head. “The colonel is dying. He didn't know me when I went to visit"

  She nodded and sat down also. “Warren and the girls are doing the dishes. It won't last long, but while it does I intend to take advantage of their willingness to lend a hand."

  “I’ve been thinking, we should post rules—so many hours of labor in exchange for room and board."

  Dorrie laughed and didn't comment. We talked easily, as old friends, with no strain usually, but that night I had something to hide and she sensed it, and the tension that had evaporated downstairs had followed me upstairs. That was when I decided to go away for a few days, to go to the beach house alone to think.

  “I have to get away," I said. “There’s trouble with circulation, they want some changes in format, and I have to be alone to think.”

  Dorrie nodded. We shared almost everything except the magazine, and very early she had told me she would stay out of that. She was a poor reader, found no pleasure in books or articles or stories. She liked to look at -the pictures, she said, and that was all.

 

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