Archive for August, 2010
Of Few Words
Friday, August 6th, 2010
Esme only speaks once every ten years, on the first sunny day in October, usually in the middle of the morning when the light’s still gentle. At other times she’ll smile or shake her head or point or make a disapproving noise or even sing wordlessly, but only on those rare October mornings does she speak.
It’s traditional for the family to gather for these times, piling into the old house Esme shares with her daughter Julia and Julia’s girlfriend, Mish: all six of her children with their spouses or lovers, their children and dogs, sleeping in every available space in sleeping bags or on cots from the old hunting cabin. Mish makes Austrian pancakes in the mornings, and they have barbeques and softball games and they play canasta whenever it isn’t morning and sunny.
Most years a family or two is missing, but this time everyone is there, and even by-the-book Marshall has pulled his kids out of school, because Esme is dying. They all know it. This will be the last time.
It has rained for three mornings in a row, but today came up crisp and bright, and frost silvers the brilliant leaves on the maple outside the kitchen window. They make their way into Esme’s room early, bringing their plates of Austrian pancakes with confectioner’s sugar and preserves, their coffee and grapes and cranberry juice and scrambled eggs with paprika. When the room is full, more of the family settles down just outside, in the hallway.
Esme sleeps for a long time this morning, restlessly. When she finally opens her eyes and hush spreads across the room and out the door, she smiles so joyfully that the room seems to get brighter.
It’s Jackie she motions to, her youngest grandbaby, only eight years old. Jackie squeezes through to Esme’s bed and climbs up to lie down next to grandmama.
When Esme speaks, her voice is so soft and cracked, no one can make out the words except for Jackie.
Esme says: “You always ask me why, but it’s just that nobody used to listen. You see?”
And Jackie nods seriously. She does see.
Cumulus
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Night bled to day. The glare off all the chrome of the buildings and the cars shifted from reflected and redoubled neon to a blazing ultraviolet-edged glare. Still a day and a night to go.
She tinted her lenses down darker than the night had been. The road so flat, so straight, she was glad the car could do its own driving. It sang to her as it went, airfoils and antennae on its metal skin vibrating with the wind, an app in its wiring turning all the swooping downdrafts from the mile-high arcology towers and all the little traffic-spawned crosscurrent eddies into a choir of susurrant near-voices, howling and humming, a unique irreproducible unplannable chaos tune.
She had a vintage neoDAT running, told herself this would be the soundtrack for her summer. She resisted the urge to number the tapes as they filled, just tossed them in a paper bag. She put a title on the bag, “The Road to Stellavista.”
The app distracted the climate control; she could tell it was getting hotter. Mouth dry, she stretched on the passenger couch and didn’t think about what she was leaving, or how many of the lives in those towers were reflections of her own–how many were there in the metacity her age, her gender, with the same schooling, same tastes in work, furniture, clothes, music, friends, lovers… She had the time on the trip, she could have run the stats, worked out how unique she wasn’t.
She rolled over, restless. How many had wanted to get out? She knew the number of applicants for the colony to the nearest million. The others were finding other exits even now–immersion in family, community, intoxicants, viddies, all the distractions, destructions, constructions of life. She would have applied herself to her organitechture work, breeding new buildings. She didn’t know what she’d do in the desert where nothing would grow.
When she arrived at last, she saw a single cloud beyond the low reach of the apartments, beyond the sandflats, a curl of white dissolving in the heatshimmer a long way away, and she looked at it hard, a long time, thinking it might be the last one she saw for a few months, trying to think what it looked like, but metaphors failed her, and then was gone to blue. A sign, she decided, although she couldn’t say of what.