Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (36 page)

I tried. I remembered a room with a couch, a Freud-like couch. It stood by a big fireplace and looked like a great place to take a nap.

That image flashed onto the screen. Black-bordered: true.

"That's it," said the tech. Excitement warmed him up. "That's Freud's consulting room."

My aunt—the woman I was going to grow up thinking was my mother—stood talking to a girl. Freud had already left for England, apparently, was what the girl said.

"There it is!"

The tech focused in on the back wall. A small, crappy watercolor hung there: a church, some trees, some mountains. The perspective was off but the signature was right. A. Hitler, in black script, bottom left.

You'd have to be nice to buy a painting like that, I thought. You'd have to feel bad for the artist, want to make sure he got some money and had something to eat that night.

Anyway, the tech was happy. We found it. Everything was proven, authenticated.

In the buzz after the authentication, I asked the tech to let me throw up one more memory.

The one about my mother, dead, from the tainted mushrooms.

Black-bordered. True. Of course.

It wasn't me. It was never me.

The woman I grew up with, who kept me safe with her husband's relatives in Munich? The one I called mother?

That was my aunt. A small shift, genetically. A big one, mentally. There aren't any psychiatric complexes named after aunts, for a reason.

It's easier to love her now. She killed her kid for me. Not that he wouldn't have been killed anyway, sooner or later. But. It takes a certain clear-eyed coldness to get that done.

Preserved by the refrigerator mother. I like that.

Lillie thought that part of it was nonsense. Said who wouldn't be cold after being forced into an act like that?

Anyway, Lillie's happy with me. For one thing, I had to say I was wrong, and to a wife of fifty-plus years, that's as good as a diamond. I didn't start to talk to save my life. I'd always talked just fine. I just wasn't who I thought I was.

So, therefore, Peter's staying where he is. At the nice place, the coddling place, the quiet place.

They gave us printouts of the memory pictures. The next time we visited, we took him one of his grandmother, my aunt. A serene-looking one, from when she's sitting next to me on the bench in the clinic, looking contemplative.

He seemed to like it. He took it and put it on his board. He didn't say anything, though.

And that's okay.

Joe M. McDermott is the author of five novels and two short story collections, including
Last Dragon, Never Knew Another, Women and Monsters,
and
Maze.
His first story for
Asimov's
takes a look at the complex persona of...

My earliest memory was waking up with my arm aching from the new shunt, and a cat was at the foot of my bed giving birth to kittens. I sat up and watched the cat. Dolores, my step-grandmother, had more cats than anyone could count, plus a small herd of goats. We lived with her as long as I could remember, but I know we didn't go out there until after my mom shot my dad and he went to prison. I don't remember that. I remember waking up and Dolores' cat was having kittens at the foot of my bed. It was a grey tabby cat, nameless and lean when it wasn't pregnant, and I watched the cat, mesmerized, while the kittens emerged from it. The mother cat licked their faces clean, and even swallowed much of the afterbirth. I was too young to be horrified by it, because I didn't really know what was happening. It was this scary, bloody thing happening, but it was slow and calm and the cat was purring.

It made a mess of the bed, and my mother told this story more than I did because after a cat gave birth on my bed, my mom was able to convince her step-mom to keep the cats outside from then on, because it couldn't be good for me to have cats giving birth in the bed.

I think the other reason I remember this before anything else is because this was when I had just come back from the hospital where the shunt was cut into my arm for the steady transfusions. I had the shunt replaced a few times when I was growing up, but once I got about fourteen I stopped growing, and I still have the shunt under my factory coverall.

Dolores was a dairy farmer before she got too old for hard work and retired. She still kept miniature goats. My mom's mom had married my step-grandma after my real grandfather was arrested and put on death row. My mom's mom had brought my mom out here, once, from the city, to live on a farm, and at first people thought it wasn't that she was really a lesbian, even though she always was, but that her man had left her sour. Her man had kept her from being who she really was, is all, by force. Then, when my real grandma died my step-grandma raised my mom, alone. Then, after I was born and my dad was shot and arrested, my mom and I moved back out here, away from the city and the city lights. I don't remember any of that stuff, because it was all before the cat gave birth at the foot of my bed, and I was scratching at the bandages from the shunt that had just been installed, but there's plenty of pictures around.

I think my mother assumed that Petey was my boyfriend because we have a family history of very bad, very violent, or very stupid men. She had assumed that I had inherited the attraction to them, and never considered I had inherited their side of things, instead.

I tend to simmer quietly, then unexpectedly burst into a furious flood. Out here, where I'm staying in a factory dorm near Rockaway Beach, the other girls of the line give me room because I broke a chair over the head of a foreman at a different factory, and I had also stabbed a man with a pen on the subway, once, when he was bothering me. I had had enough. There was no warning. I was fine, calm, and quiet. Then came the flood.

The most trouble I ever got into, growing up, was this one winter I had had enough and I opened the gate and got all the goats to run out of the gate and I was so glad to see them gone. I went inside and got cookies and milk and thought I had gotten away with murder. Our neighbor had seen it, and called my mother's cell phone. She left work early, raced home, and beat me red with a leather belt like Dad used to, and then I still had to go out there with her and with Dolores, and I had welts coming up in my skin in the cold. The goats were on the roof of an old, abandoned office building near the highway. My mom had to get a ladder and get up there and try to get them down without falling through. The neighbors were helping. Everyone was yelling at me. The goats were scared and skittish and they didn't want to go anywhere. An icy, freezing rain came down like little razor blades, and Dolores was whistling and hollering and waving carrots in the air trying to get the terrified goats back into the yard.

I was beat again inside, and then I had to lay down with my step-grandma and open my shunt for her and it hurt to sit down, I was bruised so bad.

Dolores was sweaty and shaking. She had her own shunt open, and was having trouble breathing and keeping her hand steady. It took her a few tries to get the tubes attached and flowing between us. Then, my arm ached from the blood pouring out of me, into her; out of her, into me. She took some of her medicine and caught her breath. She was too tired to yell at me. I watched TV while my mother was out calming the goats down, checking them for damage. Parkinson's was a disease of the blood, not the brain. She needed better blood. I gave it to her.

Dolores never beat me like my mom or my dad. So, that was something. She brought me out on the porch, later that week, and asked me to help her with the milking for a while. I spit and said I didn't want to. She didn't make me. She didn't have the strength to make me do anything. She asked me if I was all right.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Because that was a mean thing you did," she said.

"So?"

"If you want to hurt me, you come after me. You want to hurt your mom, go after her. But you don't take out your hurt on the animals. They don't know better than what they are. They didn't do a thing to deserve you nearly killing 'em like that, setting 'em loose in winter with all the dogs and wolves hungry and the cars on ice slicks. You want to hurt me, girl? Is that what you want? Well, you hurt me head-on, and you leave my animals alone. No more of this passive aggressive shit. Got it?"

I sneered and said nothing. I went inside, poured a glass of milk. I refused to feel guilty. She was shouting at me, "
Got it? I said, 'Do you got it, girl?'
"

I called her Dolores, or Ms. Dolores, or Ma'am. I never called her grandma. I think she would have liked to be called grandma, but Mom didn't call her Mom, so I didn't. Even with the shunt in my arm, that's what I called her, she was always Dolores to me—
Ms. Dolores, Ma'am.

When I was younger, before I set them all loose, I helped her with the goats. They were stubborn things, just smart enough to get in real trouble but not smart enough to get out of it. I learned how to milk them by soothing them and stroking their sides and cooing at them, and then hooking them up to the machine pump. They had to give birth to make milk, and the baby goats were sold off every spring. I hated the goats. They were everywhere. They ate the laundry on the line. They stank and shit everywhere. I woke up and I smelled them. I went to school smelling like them. I came home and the smell hit me at the gate and snuck into my dreams. Dolores stank. Dolores smelled like a barn and a cat lady and stale marijuana smoke.

I close my eyes, now, and I can make out her shadow in the dark, silhouetted against the security lights at the edge of the fence. Dolores was out there, sipping tea in the security lights, with goats nestled into her legs, and cats everywhere. She stroked all their backs, cat and goat as if she was the lion with all her lambs in the night. She had names for all of them, but I never cared to learn any of their names. I called them all
Cat
and
Goat
and refused to touch them if I didn't need to. They congregated on the porch, where they got fed from big bags she kept in the pantry. Dolores sat on a rocking chair and watched the sunset, smoking the weed Petey brought her from the illegal dispensary. She had one of the kittens from my bed in her lap and hummed to it. She never fixed her animals. She gave away kittens, and let them run away into the woods. She sold goats all year to keep the milk going.

Dolores was a big woman. I mean, she had a back like a steel beam. She had a big, thick neck like a man's. She kept her hair short. She really looked like a lesbian's lesbian. I have this picture of my grandmother and Dolores on the day they got married, and my petite, thin grandmother, with her big smile and Asian eyes is grabbing on to this white woman that looks like a bear in a tuxedo. Mom's standing next to them both, confused but happy, no older than I was when I woke up with a shunt in my arm.

I tell the girls in the plant up here on Rockaway, when they ask about it, that I will never, ever live on a farm again, in my life. I won't even touch goat to eat it. Too many of them dream about it—some land, some animals, and a garden big enough to feed their whole world. Not me. I like the factories better. They don't smell.

I still have the shunt in my arm, but I keep it hidden. It's two inches on each side, square, and medical plastic. It opens up like a tiny cupboard. Inside, part of my arm-muscles are pushed around to make room for a tube that unspools. Beneath the plastic, it attaches to a vein. There's an in and an out that open when it unrolls. The inner lining of the shunt is clear plastic, so we can keep an eye out for problems underneath—failed veins, infection. The tubes and veins get replaced every few months, and when I'm showering, I open up the shunt and rinse it out with antibiotic soap.

My mom said we were so lucky I was the same blood type as Dolores. Our house's resident giant was rotting out from the inside, where her blood wasn't strong enough to hold her mind steady and clear out the plaque against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and I had to open my arm and feed her my blood. Not even a universal donor could do it. It had to be a perfect match. We weren't related by blood, just marriage, but I matched. I matched. My Mom was a B. Her mom was a B. Dolores was a rare type called Duffy, and so was I. It was an African-origin mutation not discovered until the late twentieth century. We both probably had the same African great-greatgreat-grandmother in that little upstate town, but you wouldn't know it to look at us with me Hispanic and Asian and Indian and anything else that came along that was brown, and her as Caucasian-looking as anyone of such old New York bloodlines. The blood type we had was going to make transfusions difficult, and like my mother said, wasn't Dolores so lucky I could shunt my arm for her to keep her Parkinson's back, and the Alzheimer's from kicking in. Honestly, even if Mom had matched, it wouldn't have worked. The younger the blood, the better. So the shunt. Every night, when I watched TV, I was plugged into that tree trunk woman, my step-grandmother. The blood passed between us, and it kept her hands from shaking and her mind from going, going, gone.

My blood wasn't the only medicine Dolores took. There were vitamins, pills, and prescription-strength weed. My mom filled prescriptions at the store in town when she was running errands, but the pharmacy weed was expensive and taxed up to make it more expensive. We had a kid pick it up for us from a speakeasy dispensary, illegal and under the table but we were safe about it because we never went out looking for it, and no cop came hunting us down on our own land over weed. The boy who got it for us, Petey, was a skinny thing, riding out from town in his mom's pickup truck. Everyone thought I had a crush on him, or that we were an item, and we never were. He'd come in the front like he owned the place, throw his backpack on the table with the week's weed in it and make a cup of coffee. Pastorius was his Christian name. People only ever called him Petey.

He was years older than me. He was a high school drop-out. One of his odd jobs was scoring the weed for Dolores and a few others that couldn't afford the pharmacy rate. He bought it at the speakeasies, and drove it out to our goat farm, among his other deliveries.