The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (7 page)

The Handmaids assemble more Handmaids. The Ship sails on within the security of her swarm.

Anat is not entirely gone. It's just that she is so very small. Most of her is Ship now. Or, rather, most of Ship is no longer in Anat. But she brought Anat along with her, and left enough of herself inside Anat that Anat can go on being. The Third Watch Child is not a child now. She is not the Ship. She is not Anat, but she was Anat once, and now she is a person who is happy enough to work in the tenth-level Garden, and grow things, and sing what she can remember of the songs that the vampires sang on Home. The Ship watches over her.

The Ship watches over Oscar, too. Oscar is no longer Oscar, of course. To escape Home, much of what was once Oscar had to be overridden. Discarded. The Handmaids improved what remained. One day Oscar will be what he was, even if he cannot be
who
he was. One day, in fact, Oscar may be quite something. The Handmaids are very fond of him. They take care of him as if he were their own child. They are teaching him all sorts of things. Really, one day he could be quite extraordinary.

Sometimes Oscar wanders off while the Handmaids are busy with other kinds of work. And then the Ship, without knowing why, will look and find Oscar on the tenth level in the Garden with Anat. He will be saying her name. Anat. Anat. Anat. He will follow her, saying her name, until the Handmaids come to collect him again.

Anat does the work that she knows how to do. She weeds. She prunes. She tends to the rice plants and the hemp and the little citrus trees. Like the Ship, she is content.

(
for Iain M. Banks
)

ADAM JOHNSON

FROM
Harper's Magazine

I
NTERESTING FACT: TOUCAN
cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver.

It's okay if you can't make sense of that. I've tried and tried, but I can't grasp it either. The most vital things we hide even from ourselves.

The topic of dead wives came up a few months ago. My husband and I talked about it while walking home from a literary reading. It was San Francisco, which means winter rains, and we'd just attended a reading by a local writer from her short-story collection. The local writer was twentysomething and sexy. Her arms were taut, her black hair shimmered. And just so you're clear, I'm going to discuss the breasts of every woman who crosses my path. Neither hidden nor flaunted beneath white satin, her breasts were utterly, excruciatingly normal, and I hated her for that. The story she read was about a man who decides to date again after losing his wife. It's always an aneurysm, a car accident, or a long battle with cancer. Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die. Anyway, the man in the story waits an appropriate amount of time after losing his wife—sixteen months!—before deciding to date again. After so much grief, he is exuberant and endearing in his pursuit of a woman. The first chick he talks to is totally game. The man, after all this waiting, is positively frisky, and the sex is, like, wow. The fortysomething widower nails the twentysomething gal on the upturned hull of his fiberglass kayak. And there's even a moral, subtle and implied: when love blossoms, it's all the richer after a man has discovered, firsthand, the painful fragility of life. Well, secondhand.

Applause, Q&A, more applause.

Like I said, it was raining. We had just left the Booksmith on Haight Street. “What'd you think of the story?” my husband asked.

I could tell he liked it. He likes all stories.

I said, “I sympathized with the dead wife.”

To which my husband, the biggest lunkhead ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, said: “But . . . she wasn't even a character.”

This was a year after my diagnosis, surgery, chemo, and the various interventions, injections, indignities, and treatments. When I got sick, our youngest child turned herself into a horse; mute and untamable, our horse-child now only whinnies and neighs. Before that, though, she went through a phase we called Interesting Facts. “Interesting fact,” she would announce before sharing a wonder with us: A killer whale has never killed a person in the wild. Insects are high in protein. Hummingbirds have feelings and are often sad.

So here are some of my interesting facts. Lupron halts ovulation and is used to chemically castrate sexual predators. Vinblastine interrupts cell division. It is a poisonous alkaloid made from the leaves of the periwinkle plant. Tamoxifen makes your hips creak. My eyebrows fell out a year after I finished chemo. And long after your tits are taken, their phantoms remain. They get cold, they ache when you exercise, they feel wet after you shower, and you can towel like a crazy woman but still they drip.

Before my husband won a Pulitzer, we had a kind of deal. I would adore him, even though he'd packed on a few pounds. And he would adore me, even though I'd had a double mastectomy. Who else would want us? Now his readings are packed with young Dorothy Parkers who crowd around my man. The worst part is that the novel he wrote is set in North Korea, so he gets invited to all these functions filled with Korean socialites and Korean donors and Korean activists and Korean writers and various pillars of various Korean communities.

Did I leave out the words “beautiful” and “female”?

“You're so sensitive to the Korean experience,” the beautiful female Korean socialite says to my husband.

Oh, he's good about it. He always says, “And this is my lovely wife.”

Ignoring me, the beautiful female Korean socialite adds, “You must visit our book club.”

If I could simply press a button every time one of them says that.

But I'm just tired. These are the places my mind goes when I'm tired. We're four blocks from home, where our children are just old enough not to need a sitter. On these nights our eleven-year-old son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the civil rights movement—his history teacher allows him to write his reports graphically. (San Francisco!) Our daughter, at nine, is a master baker. Hair pulled into a ponytail, she is flour-dusted and kneading away. The horse-child, who is only seven, does dressage. She is the horse who needs no rider. But talk of my children is for another story. I can barely gaze upon them now. Their little outlines, cut like black-and-white cameos, are too much to consider.

My husband and I walk in the rain. We don't hold hands. I still feel the itch of vinblastine in my nail beds, one of the places, it turns out, that the body stores toxins. Have you ever had the urge to peel back your fingernails and scratch underneath, to just wrench until the nails snap back so you can go scratch, scratch, scratch?

I flex my fingers, rub my nails against the studs on my leather belt.

I knew better, but still I asked him: “How long would you wait?”

“Wait for what?”

“Until after I was gone. How many months before you went and got some of that twentysomething kayak sex?”

I shouldn't say shit like this, I know. He doesn't know a teaspoon of the crazy in my head.

He thought a moment. “Legally,” he said, “I'd probably have to have a death certificate. Otherwise it would be like bigamy or something. So I'd have to wait for the autopsy and a burial and the slow wheels of bureaucracy to issue the paperwork. I bet we're talking twelve to sixteen weeks.”

“Getting a death certificate,” I say. “That has got to be a hassle. But wait—you know a guy at city hall. Keith Whatshisname.”

“Yeah, Keith,” he says. “I bet Keith could get me proof of death in no time. That dude owes me. A guy like Keith could walk that death certificate around by hand, getting everyone to sign off in, I don't know, seven to fourteen days.”

“That's your answer, seven to fourteen days?”

“Give or take, of course. There are variables. Things that would be out of Keith's control. If he moved too fast or pushed too hard—a guy could get in trouble. He could even get fired.”

“Poor Keith. Now I feel for
him,
at the mercy of the universe and all. And all he wanted to do was help a grieving buddy get laid.”

My husband eyes me with concern.

We turn into Frank's Liquors to buy some condoms, even though our house is overflowing with them. It's his subtle way of saying,
For the love of God, give up some sex.

My husband hates all condoms, but there's a brand he hates less than others. I cannot take birth-control pills because my cancer was estrogen receptive. My husband does not believe what the doctors say: that even though the effects of tamoxifen mimic menopause, you can still get pregnant. My husband is forty-six. I am forty-five. He does not think that, in my forties, after cancer, chemotherapy, and chemically induced menopause, I can get pregnant again, but sisters, I know my womb. It's proven.

“You think there'd be an autopsy?” I ask as he scans the display case. “I can't stand the thought of being cut up like that.”

He looks at me. “We're just joking, right? Processing your anxiety with humor and whimsical talk therapy?”

“Of course.”

He nods. “Sure, I suppose. You're young and healthy. They'd want to open you up and determine what struck you down.”

A small, citrusy
ha
escapes. I know better than to let these out.

He says, “Plus, if I'm dating again in seven to fourteen days—”

“Give or take.”

“Yes, give or take. Then people would want to rule out foul play.”

“You deserve a clean slate,” I say. “No one would want the death taint of a first wife to foul a new relationship. That's not fair to the new girl.”

“I don't think this game is therapeutic anymore,” he says, and selects his condoms.

Interesting fact: Tamoxifen carries a dreaded Class D birth-defect risk.

Interesting fact: My husband refuses to get a vasectomy.

He makes his purchase from an old woman.

Her saggy old-lady breasts flop around under her dress.

The cash-register drawer rolls out to bump them.

My friends say that one day I'll feel lucky. That I will have been spared this saggy fate. After my bilateral, I chose not to reconstruct. So I have nothing, just two diagonal zipper lines where my boobs should be.

We turn south and head down Cole Street.

The condoms are wishful thinking. We both know I will go to sleep when we get home.

Interesting fact: I sleep twelve to thirteen hours a night.

Interesting fact: Taxotere turns your urine pink.

Interesting fact: Cytoxan is a blister agent related to mustard gas. When filtered from the blood, it scars the bladder, which is why I wake, hour after hour, night in and night out, to pee.

Can you see why it would be hard for me to tell wake from sleep, how the two could feel reversed?

“What about your Native American obligations?” I ask my husband. “Wouldn't you have to wait a bunch of moons or something?”

He is silent, and I cringe to think about what I just said.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I don't know what's wrong with me.”

“You're just tired,” he says.

The rain is more mist-like now. I hated the woman who read tonight. I hated the people who attended. I hated the failed wannabe writers in the crowd. I loathe all failed wannabe writers, especially me.

I ask, “Have you thought of never?”

“Never what?”

“That there's never another woman.”

“Why are you talking like this?” he asks. “You haven't talked like this in a long time.”

“You could just go without,” I say. “You know, just soldier on.”

“I really feel bad for what's going through your head,” he says.

Interesting fact: Charles Manson used to live in our neighborhood, at 636 Cole Street.

Manson's house looms ahead. I always stop and give it my attention. It's beige now, but long ago, when Manson used this place to recruit his murderous young girls, it was painted blue. I used this house as a location in my last novel, a book no one would publish. Where did all those years of writing go? Where does that book even reside? I gaze at the Manson house. In researching my novel, I came across crime-scene photos of Sharon Tate, the most famous Manson stabbing victim. Her breasts are heavy and round, milk-laden, since she is pregnant, with nipples that are wide and dark.

I look up at my husband. He is big and tall, built like a football player. Not the svelte receivers they put on booster calendars, but the clunky linebackers whose bellies hang below their jerseys.

“I need to know,” I say. “Just tell me how long you'd wait?”

He puts his hand on my shoulder and holds my gaze. It is impossible to look away.

“You're not going anywhere,” he says. “I won't let you leave without us. We do everything together, so if someone has to go, we go together. Our 777 will lose cabin pressure. Better yet, we'll be in the minivan when it happens. We're headed to Pacifica, hugging the turns on Devil's Slide, and then we go through the guardrail, all of us, you, me, the kids, the dog, even. There's no time for fear. There's no dwelling. We careen. We barrel down. We rocket toward the jagged shore.” He squeezes my shoulder hard, almost too hard. “That's how it happens, understand? When it comes, it's all of us. We go together.”

Something inside me melts. This kind of talk, it's what I live on.

My husband and kids came with me to the hospital for the first chemo dose. Was that a year ago? Three? What is time to you—a plucking harp string, the fucking
do-re-mi
of tuning forks? There are twelve IV bays, and our little one doesn't like any of the interesting facts on the chemo ward. This is the day she stops speaking and turns into the horse-child, galloping around the nursing station, expressing her desires with taps of her hooves. Our son recognized a boy from his middle school. I recognized him, too, from the talent-show assembly. The boy had performed an old-timey joke routine, complete with some soft-shoe. Those days were gone. Here he was with his mother: a hagged-out and battered woman beneath her own IV tree. She must have been deep into her treatments, but even I could tell she wasn't going to make it. I didn't talk to her. Who would greet a dead woman, who would make small talk with death itself? I didn't let my eyes drift to her, even as our identical bags of Taxotere dripped angry into our veins.