Nest of Worlds (21 page)

Again the medical van came and the ambulance. Dr. Nott examined Ra Mahleiné and promised there would be an operation if the patient’s condition remained stable. Gavein didn’t believe her.

He looked at the blinking lights of the retreating ambulance. Why still use the siren, he wondered, if there is no more traffic?

At breakfast they sat around a picnic table set up in front of the house. The day was warm, and there was no wind. Spring had come to stay in Central Davabel.

Ra Mahleiné suddenly began acting strange. “Get back to that book, the one with the beads on the cover!” she shouted.

He still had on the plate before him a piece of spongy bread; crackers with three slices of ham, salted in the Davabel way; a half-synthetic cottage cheese made of powdered milk; a hard-boiled egg; and a generous blob of ketchup. Breakfast in Davabel was made up of such oddments, much as the main meal of the day was always pasta and pizza.

“In a minute. Let me finish eating first,” he said coaxingly, wanting to draw the full brunt of her wrath. Perhaps feeling, irrationally, that if she still had the strength to scold, there was hope.

“You eat so slowly,” she said, building up steam. “I’ll get the stabbing again below my belly. When you’re in that book, nothing happens to me. I can read for hours, take a nap, watch TV, and nothing.” She was spelling it out, finally. “When you’re eating or talking . . . or when we talk together, that’s when the pain comes, the Red Claw that grabs me between my legs.” The Red Claw was her latest euphemism. For two days now that was how she spoke of her disease. “You tell him too, Lorraine. When he reads, isn’t it peaceful for us? We can gossip for hours, knit, lie in the sun.”

Lorraine didn’t look well. She had always had a fair complexion, but now her pallor revealed new blemishes on her face and chest. Short and small, she could hardly be seen at the table. She blinked. Although her lashes were red, she carefully blackened them.

“It’s true, Dave,” she said. “Magda doesn’t feel the pain, doesn’t faint, while you’re reading.”

Ra Mahleiné’s complaining might have had its nonsensical charm. But when a third party repeated her argument, the absurdity ceased to be amusing.

He did not dignify what Lorraine said with a response. Instead, he swallowed the last bites of his meal.

The only wife in the world, he thought dourly, who prefers to have her husband read rather than listen to her. All right, then, she’ll get what she wants.

Without another word he went to his armchair and opened
Nest
of Worlds
.

The day of the move came quickly. Despite his promise to Gary, Spig called several other moving companies as well. It turned out that Emigrant indeed offered the best terms.

The Bolyas sold nothing, since the purchase agreements they had signed clearly stated that if the object was disowned by the buyer, or if the buyer attempted to return it, it became the property of the seller and the sum of the installment payments made by the buyer could not be recovered.

The rig, with two enormous red trailers, pulled up in front of the house. Spig and Suzi carried their furniture out piece by piece. It was hard work. Gary helped them with the bigger pieces. Normally one hired movers to do this, but the Bolyas, after their latest shopping spree, had reached their credit limit, so they had to manage on their own. They paid Gary with two cases of beer, which were put in the cabin of the truck.

The disadvantage of doing it themselves soon became apparent: Gary and Spig had to move some furniture that needed four men to carry it. Spig was out of breath; his face grew hot and red, and it was covered with sweat; his movements became like those of a man in a desperate struggle, violent, jerky. Suzi pushed rather than carried the junk to be moved.

Finally it happened: the Bolyas’ dresser hit the doorframe, plaster fell, and a strip of molding splintered off. Spig caressed the wounded dresser, anguish in his heart.

“Use some putty and brown shoe polish. No one will know,” Gary advised him. “In Tolz half the people have damaged furniture.”

Spig stared, his mouth open.

“Because they were moved from Mougarrie,” Gary explained.

Spig guffawed.

The dresser was only the beginning. The massive dining room table smacked into an edge of the truck’s loading door, taking off some red paint. Spig despaired over the nick.

“The table, that’s nothing,” Gary told him. “If the door doesn’t close now, Emigrant will sue you for the damage.”

Spig blinked his round, frightened rodent eyes. But Gary had said that only to avoid having to listen to more bellyaching. He took a hammer and banged the metal back into position. More of the paint came off.

The little glass doors fell off the great credenza, and one of the panes broke. By some miracle they loaded the giant hutch. The doors of both trailers got dents in several places. Hammering the metal didn’t help much.

The Amido was neatly driven into the dark cavern of one of the trailers. Spig, exhausted, couldn’t keep his nerves under control and turned the wheel the wrong way. A hollow thud broke the right headlight and turn signal and twisted the fender. It was a spike through his tender heart: the Amido would no longer be like new. He had the criminal thought of going back and buying another car.

Gary looked at the fender with a flashlight. “An easy part to replace. It’ll be fine,” he said, comforting Spig. “A good thing you didn’t hurt the truck.”

The rest of the loading went without incident.

“You’re taking empty beer cans?”

“They’re worth something. In Tolz maybe the deposit is higher . . . It’ll help pay Emigrant for the dents. And there’s room, isn’t there?”

“Don’t take newspapers. In Tolz they don’t recycle.”

The sun sank in the west. It was a pleasant, bright evening after a lovely day. In the east the blue of the sky slowly deepened. Against that blue you could see the exploding copter from General Thompson’s squadron. Yesterday evening it burned, but today—since morning—it was exploding. Gavein, leaning on the windowsill, watched how pieces of metal separated, how the hull expanded into a cloud of fragments, how the growing bubble of ignited gasoline formed a yellow-red sphere. Judging by the speed of the explosion, the pilot had taken the craft to an altitude considerably above seconds. Help was not coming to him—no other aircraft had approached the unfortunate copter over the past few days. Gavein was certain that the experts in the Davabel Air Force had carefully calculated the odds against rescue. Taking the copter to such a height had been the pilot’s mistake, or perhaps his hand had slipped on the control stick. Military machines couldn’t fly at that altitude: the heat would blow up their fuel and ammunition. The copter’s engine had burst, and the fuel from the torn lines had carried the fire to the fuel tank. Gavein wondered if the crew’s agony would also be dragged out for hours. If they were high enough above the altitude of seconds, their death might take days.

Ra Mahleiné wound her yarn into a ball as Lorraine held the other end. They conversed with animation. Ra Mahleiné turned in her seat and said to him, “You’re not reading? Lorraine will heat up dinner as soon as we’re finished winding. The food’s already made.”

He didn’t feel hungry. He stood and watched her.

She interpreted that as disapproval.

“We conducted an experiment,” she said. “We didn’t interrupt you, to see if I would have pain again.”

“And?”

“Can you imagine, nothing, absolutely nothing hurt. Those hours passed like a single moment. I can describe it now only in general: I sat here, in the sun, knitted, made dinner . . . The details are all gone from my memory.”

“The same happened to me,” said Lorraine. “It was without details . . . I sat, I did this or that. I can’t remember anything concrete.”

Ra Mahleiné turned pale. “The Red Claw,” she groaned. “It has me again.”

“I’m to leave, so that you feel better?” he said.

“Eat now, for your strength. But you must read, read as much as possible. I love you, very much—but you must read,” she said, seeing his confusion. “When you read, my disease doesn’t advance. Your reading gives me relief.”

“What happens when I finally finish the book? What will stop the Red Claw then?”

She took the pills that Lorraine brought her.

“I don’t want to think about it. But read, you must read, because it helps.”

He ate his food quickly and returned to the book. This was a delusion, no doubt, but what other way did he have to help his wife?

This time the run went normally, without adventure. The ink blots contracted or expanded, but they kept their distance from the road.

Daphne, stretched out on a love seat behind the armchairs, reached for
Nest of Worlds
, a book that had little colored stones set in its cover. She drank herbal tea. On a quiet day like this, she could sink completely into a book. Gary didn’t mind driving; he could be at the wheel for long stretches. In uncertain weather both stayed in their seats: one driving, the other a supporting presence. Today that wasn’t necessary.

Daphne took a swallow from her mug, its glass thick and cloudy. The bitterness made her mouth pucker. For a bookmark she was using a canceled check. She loved Jaspers, the main hero of the book: a likable man and, from the description, much better looking than Gary.

Jaspers stretched until his elbows cracked and the bunk squeaked. He put his hands under his head, but then drew them out, because they began to get pins and needles. The best was for his arms to lie extended beside his head, the hands hanging over the edge.

Always after the required evening shower in cold water, his feet took forever to warm up. They were covered with fermenting sweat.

“Jaspers, stop that thrashing! The damn straw is falling on my head,” growled Crooks, who lay on the bunk below his.

“His balls froze off, and now he’s looking for them in the straw,” chuckled Lee, who was curled up on his bunk and shivering.

Crooks and Lee were the two most important men in the hall. Crooks because he was strongest, and for that even the guards respected him; Lee because he was longest here—a whole two years—and filled the function of hall elder.

Both had finished work an hour before, but Jaspers had dragged himself in only fifteen minutes ago, completely exhausted from his murderous shift on the assembly line. Crooks had been made Monitor, whose job it was to supervise all the workstations in the hall and yell at the men. His muscles were sufficient; he didn’t carry a stick, as the guards did. He never overtaxed himself. Every evening he looked for a victim among the harassed workers, someone to pound before he turned in; it improved his opinion of himself, assured him that he was still in shape.

Jaspers’s hands, when they began warming up after the ice-cold shower, throbbed with pain. They had been burned from twisting lids all day onto still-hot jars that contained pasteurized vegetable products. When he worked, he wore the required rubber gloves, but they didn’t protect him from burns or lacerations. The small of his back ached from sitting rigid for hours on end. If he bent or slumped, he received a whack across his shoulders from a guard. And the guards could appear at any moment. Nor was there time to look around, because the jars kept coming in an endless line, and one lidless jar getting past him could mean a no-food and eight or even twelve whacks with the stick. A no-food was a day of liquids only. That was why Jaspers sat like a rod, straighter than he had to, for twelve hours, and why his back was in such agony now.

The hall was long and dim; to either side were rows of bunks. On his hot plate Chung boiled water for bitter tea. He hadn’t gone to work today because of a fever; the medic gave him pills to take. Jaspers envied Chung his fever.

“Blast it, Jaspers, stop that turning. I’m getting straw in my face,” came the rumble from below. This meant trouble, because Jaspers, warned once already by Crooks, had not moved a muscle.

“Straw or something wet?” Bennett put in. “After looking at those broads, maybe he’s jacking off.”

Jaspers despised Bennett, the ass kisser.

He occasionally saw women when he was assigned to load boxes of jars onto the collection cart, which came to take the vegetables to the hall where the women worked. Sometimes he helped push the large pasteurizers on wheels: enormous vats of hot water in which dozens of layers of pickles were immersed. Jaspers remembered the stench that filled the halls and the warehouse under the hard sky.

The women he encountered were not pretty. They were sexless. He remembered one with the face of a grandmother, wrinkled like a dried pear, her long black greasy hair tied back in a braid. She told him she was forty-five. The other women either looked like her, shriveled before their time, or were grotesquely fat.

Crooks apparently believed what Bennett had said, because after the time he needed to make the mental connection, he howled:

“You poke a hole in the mattress over my head, you scum, and I’ll break your dick off!”

He aimed a powerful kick in the middle of the upper bunk. The springs squealed, and Jaspers went flying up.

Crooks groaned with pain, yelled, “Shit!” He must have hurt his bare foot on the metal wires that held the mattress. He began coughing and gagging from the dirt and dust that descended on him from the kick.

“I’ve had it with that pervert over me,” he said with unexpected calm and got out of his bunk. He examined his injured foot. “The lousy bastard, I try to quiet him down, and this is what he does to me,” he went on, spitting on his finger and wiping the blood from his cut. With the skill of a connoisseur he was building the suspense, destroying his opponent psychologically before he went to the trouble of climbing up. That he would go to that trouble was beyond question now. “He spoils the air, that one. He ruins the mattress, poking holes in it with his dick,” he said to his victim with studied calm.

Jaspers was not puny, but fighting Crooks, who had the build of a gorilla, was like getting hit with a truck. Jaspers never backed down from a fight, did not allow Chung or Trub to strike him with impunity. That may have been the reason why he got into trouble more, why Crooks went after him more. Today Jaspers was not defenseless: he had managed to smuggle into the sleeping area a half-meter-long piece of gas pipe. He kept it under his pillow.

“That was a good kick. You must have broke his pecker, because he doesn’t say anything,” said Bennett.

“Be glad it wasn’t you, because such kicks come in pairs! When one comes, the second follows!” Crooks said through clenched teeth, and Bennett shrank back with fear. Crooks’s foot still hurt, apparently.

“All right, to work,” Crooks said, getting up and reaching for his clogs. He wasn’t sure yet whether he would use his fists or the wooden clogs.

Jaspers gripped the pipe. He wrapped it in a shirt, in order not to kill. For killing you got the rope.

With the agility of a bear, Crooks climbed the little ladder and stood on Jaspers’s bunk. Jaspers was calculating the swing of the gas pipe: a tight arc to crack the giant’s shins.

Exactly at that moment three guards entered the hall with someone in the outfit of a worker.

“Crooks!” shouted one of the guards, spreading his legs and smacking his palm with his stick. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Crooks scrambled down as quickly as he had climbed up and stood at attention, nervously straightening his gray pajamas. Beside him Jaspers also stood, taut as a wire. Before the guards, the two were equal.

“What was this about?” barked the guard.

“We, uh, we . . . ,” Crooks began to stammer. Providing quick answers was not his forte.

“Mister Guard Lasaille, Worker Jaspers begs to report that Older Worker Crooks climbed up on his bunk to look at his damaged hand and give him medical assistance,” Jaspers sang out, and Crooks’s eyes grew rounder and rounder.

“That right, Crooks?” Lasaille gave him a stern look.

“Yes, sir,” said Crooks, finally answering correctly.

“Where is the hall elder?” Lasaille looked around. He was convinced that both men were lying.

“Hall Elder Lee reporting, sir.” The thin, small Lee was buttoning up his pajamas. He could hardly be seen alongside the bearlike Crooks and Jaspers, who was less massive than Crooks but no shorter.

“What happened? Speak, Lee.”

“Worker Jaspers said the truth,” Lee lied without blinking. “Worker Crooks went to give him medical assistance.”

“And why didn’t you? That’s the job of the most senior in the hall.”

“Worker Crooks wishes to develop his medical knowledge, and I am allowing him.”

“All right,” muttered Lasaille, seeing that he had lost. “Return to your bunks.”

When all three were again lying with their blankets pulled up to their chins, per regulations, and with their feet together and their eyes on the ceiling, Lasaille revealed the purpose of this unannounced visit:

“Here is Younger Worker Lepko, your new colleague. Make him feel at home. He’ll have the bunk above Jaspers, which is free.”

The new person always got the bunk at the top, so that more straw would fall on the others and aggravate them.

The guards turned off the main light and left. In the dimness, the new man stood uncertainly and trembled like a leaf. He was crying. In his hands he held a bag with his belongings. His fat belly shook in time to his sobs.

Jaspers noticed that Lepko had been given old slippers that were coming apart and needed sewing.

“They took my career card. How can they do that?” Lepko blubbered. “In Darah I was a bookkeeper, a good one.”

“They do that with everyone,” Jaspers whispered. “Climb up and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll start working early.”

The new worker continued to weep, his belly bobbing.

“Did you hear what my colleague said, you little turd?” boomed Crooks. “Get up there! Or I’ll give you such a kick in the ass, you won’t need a ladder!”

That he had called Jaspers a colleague meant that Jaspers had gone up a notch in his opinion, that he wouldn’t torment Jaspers now, until he forgot.

“You would kick an old person? I am almost fifty-two.”

“I guess I’ll have to put the poor bastard to sleep. Otherwise he’ll be boo-hooing all night . . .” Crooks began his usual preparations for assault. He evidently needed a little exercise.

Fortunately for himself, Lepko finally climbed the wobbly ladder to the bunk that was right under the ceiling.