Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (4 page)

As the boys slide under us toward the bay, they struggle to untangle from the Charging Ox position, but in this narrow residential lane, they cannot burst apart out of the position as they are trained to do and they used too much force in too small a space.

As they slide toward the bay, Doi Liang and I change in mid-air from the Leaping Rabbit position to the Charging Ram position. We curl our arms to form the ram's horns and channel the rest of the Chi from our downward trajectory to batter into the boys.

Our impact, the remaining Chi from the boys' Charging Ox move, and the boys' own weight combine. The momentum is too much for them to stop in time. We send them crashing through a grove of false cherry blossoms planted by the water. They go flying off the edge of the boardwalk in an explosion of pink petals straight into Aroma Bay, ending in two splashes so far away that they look like little plumes of dolphin spray.

As soon as we see that we have defeated the boys, Doi Liang and I untangle our limbs and push each other away as fast as we can.

Sensei Madame Tong and all the other girls catch up with us. They gaze in astonishment at the third year Academy boys in the sea, swimming back toward us. The girls look at each other and then bow to us. Doi Liang bows back to them as if they were honoring her. Her! Make me die of laughing!

Then that Doi Liang bows to Sensei Madame Tong, reaches into her skate, and gives her the scroll that I signed! Sensei Madame Tong reads the scroll and says, "Good."

She bows to Sensei Madame Tong again and says, "I have waited three months for a day of quiet."

If she thinks I am going to let her talk about me like that in front of everyone, she is even stupider than I thought! I skate up to her. "Do not think that they were bowing to you! Your stupid crippled arm almost lost us—Ai!" Doi Liang's hand shoots out at my head, grabs a fistful of hair, and squeezes! Aiyah, she has creased it! Three months of sleeping with a rolled cloth under my neck to allow the hair to grow back straight, and she has ruined it!

I start to do the double-bladed mantis chop move on Doi Liang's arm, but Sensei Madame Tong shoots me an iron stare. She is taking that Doi Liang's side! Piss me off to death!

Doi Liang releases my hair. It is still only at the level of my chin, so I cannot see how badly she injured it, but I toss it side to side and can feel from how it swings that that passage of hair is permanently creased and ruined.

"You stupid, ugly, low-grade—Ai!" Doi Liang's fist is suddenly in my hair again, squeezing and crushing! "Do not do that, you crazy dog fart, you are going to—Ai!" Her other fist shoots into my hair! Her crippled arm is still strong enough to bend my hair. "Let go, you evil, insane—Ai!" Both her fists tighten and twist in my hair!

Out of the border of my vision, I see the two Academy boys climb out of the water onto the boardwalk. Oh, no, I cannot let them see me like this!

"Not in front of boys! Let me go, you stupid, stupid—Ai!" Doi Liang's hands perform the ten-spoked churning maw move right in my hair!

The boys come and join everyone to watch.

I think I am going to faint.

When she finally releases my hair, my hands reach up, afraid to discover how terrible the injury is.

My hair is so creased and crooked and matted and frizzed that it feels like I am wearing a giant bird's nest on my head.

I think I am going to vomit.

Then the boys laugh and applaud.

Why me, why me, why always, always me! I want to die!

I receive my Certificate of Successful Penitence from Pearl Colony. The victory against the boys finished us in first place. But I feel no victory.

For that Doi Liang and I are not done.

We are not equal.

We are not even.

We are tied

So now, you ask us all to write this stupid essay to our parents about what we have learned during our sentence here at Pearl Colony.

Well, I will tell you what I learned here.

Nothing

Not one stupid, stinking thing.

You tell me that I am a wicked girl, but you just hate me because I am more determined to be myself than you were ever strong enough to be.

You cannot shame me. You cannot deny me. For I am Her Grace, Radiant Goddess Princess Suki. I will take the entrance examination for Pearl Opera Academy and I will prevail.

Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will have skated out of here and forgotten you, and you will still be nuns, ugly, talentless nuns.

Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will battle this evil girl again and I will prevail.

Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will win the lead role in the Drift Season Pageant and in Beautymarch, and I will be crowned Super Princess of Wu-Liu.

Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will make my stupid parents so sorry that they ever sent me away that they will beg me to forgive them, but I will not care because I will have already forgotten who they are, as everyone under Heaven will have forgotten them, as the nobodies that they are, while my name will live forever in glory.

Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will be a Legend.

Credit for this tale's first breath goes to the author's eldest daughter, who informed him of the news that started his storytelling engine. As he says to students in his high school literature and film classes, though, "Inspired by a true story" means "We made up 99 percent of this." Bill is also currently making up the final two stories in his Old Man sequence.

The head in the zippered bag wasn't an actual human head. Having climbed onto the seat arm so she could reach into the first overhead compartment, Karen tilted the sack toward her. Why, she wondered, shape a face yet not make it more attractive? Lips and puffy cheeks too red, as if the man had come back chapped from an Arctic expedition; blue eyes too large, even under half-lowered lids, like the cows' eyes she had dissected in biology class; the nose and chin both outthrust unreasonably far; and sparse, erratic hair: combined, these features produced in her a surge of pity for a face that had never drawn breath.

In the rear of the plane, Brenda, the crew chief, bent to retrieve trash, her hips touching the seats on either side.

Karen zipped the sack shut, then slid the sack into the tote bag slung over her arm. Maneuvered beneath a sweater, it joined her purse and the current airline magazine. She climbed down from the seat arm. Some airlines still had height requirements, but being short hadn't kept her from landing this job two years back.

Brenda waved. Three weeks ago, when Karen's husband, Chris, had run off, probably with a woman he met through an online game, Karen had confided her woes to the older woman. Chris's handwritten note had said only that he would send divorce paperwork eventually.

Brenda had a live-in boyfriend and a child from a prior relationship. "I'd kill the man who did that to me," she had said, convincing Karen with a steady glare. "And I'd make it slow. One body part at a time. And you
know
where I'd start."

Though the women had shared this flight route several times since then, that had been their last substantive conversation on the matter.

In her standard goodbye gesture, Karen flapped her hand like a clam's mouth.

The copilot stood in the cabin door watching the captain's back. He turned as Karen approached. "All good?"

"All good," she said, loud enough to make the captain turn.

She resisted the impulse to hurry, steadily leading her wheeled suitcase up the ramp, her other hand on the shoulder strap of the tote. She imagined the face with in, then tried to not see it. Once away from the gate, she studied every aspect of the concourse—the bookstore, the restaurants, the children nearly her height—as if everything except for her were worth someone's interest.

In the parking garage, she hefted her suitcase into the hatchback's trunk, but the other bag she kept up front, snugging it against the passenger's seat back. She'd bought this car when she started college, before she'd known Chris. He'd gone off in their beige sedan, which smelled of cigarettes from a previous owner.

It must have rained at some point. The highway shone violet in the twilight. On her twenty-minute drive home, she sang songs she hadn't thought of since high school, her reed-thin voice sounding loud in the car. She pulled up to her house's kitchen entrance, under the carport roof.

The sack felt altered, heavier, more alive and alert, tensed like a bomb, so once in the house, urgency led her to deposit it on the closet floor of her former bedroom, where she hadn't slept since Chris's departure. Suddenly mired in exhaustion, she staggered to the spare room and shoved the blankets aside, her black shoes still on her feet and her legs dangling from the bed when she fell asleep.

When she opened her eyes next, the glowing curtains told her it was morning, but she couldn't think what that meant. She knocked off her shoes, then pulled the covers over her; she breathed in her own hot air and felt she was a child again. Shortly, she came fully awake and, realizing she hadn't yet been called for another flight, dug down deeper under the blankets, hunting more sleep.

When at last Karen uncovered her head, in the late morning, she lay still and wondered what she had done and why she had done it. She saw again Brenda waving from the rear of the plane. This time, Brenda pointed one well-manicured purple nail in the direction of her tote bag. "What'd you do?" Brenda asked this time. "What you got in there?"

To avoid inspecting the sack was to sequester her actions in an unreachable, imaginary realm—in a past that might have no connection to the present. She made the bed, opened the living room curtains, started coffee, and showered. The head's presence dragged at her like a phone distantly ringing, but she let it ring. Uninspected, it might not exist.

Eventually, having breakfasted and run out of tasks, she wandered into the other bedroom without plan. She pressed her top lip between her tongue and her teeth. What was she frightened of? She opened the closet door, but only extracted her purse and the airline magazine from her bag before making a disapproving face at the other shape within and quitting the room.

Afternoon television no longer delivered the expected pleasures of mild surprises and comforts. Nevertheless, she turned it on just in case, flipping between a local all-news station and repeats of crime dramas. Throughout, she stood. Then restlessness drove her to fill the sink with sudsy water for the few soiled dishes and the coffee pot.

She shut off the sink faucet and listened. The doorbell rang. Now they would arrest her. Unable to face the door, she blinked slowly and repeatedly into the suds. A bird's whistle pierced the window over the sink, and she thought how, in prison, there might be a single window through which came light and air and the sound of birds. She counted backwards from ten, but when she reached zero, she'd forgotten her purpose and began counting forward. Around eight, the bell double-dinged again. She groaned, giving in.

Through the frosted glass in the door's upper half, she saw a familiar head. Jonah, a friend of her husband's since community college, had been checking in on her every few days. Given her unpredictable schedule, he stopped by often when she wasn't there, then left messages on her answering machine. He worked from home, doing something mysterious with computers.

He'd stepped off the brief porch by the time she opened the door. Unlike her husband, he was lanky; his full beard was thin, with an unaccountable, permanent gap on the left side. "Hey, there you are!" he said.

She threw up one arm like a performer receiving accolades. "Still here. Or...
back.
"

Jonah and Chris had been part of the same online gaming communities, and though Jonah's place had a bigger screen and better speakers, he had sometimes visited to play on Chris's system. Karen didn't miss the system or the screen he'd kept in the second bedroom, though she'd played sometimes; she also didn't much miss the computer he'd taken, since she blamed it for likely connecting Chris with some other woman.

"Busy?"

"Just doing dishes."

"That's cool," he said, nodding to himself, and she wondered if she could have said something that would have resulted in a different response. "Don't let me interrupt."

She wondered whether she was being rude, but she didn't want a visitor, and she knew from experience that simply sitting to talk with Jonah made him incessantly rub his thighs and look anxiously around, so she returned to the kitchen and pushed up her sweater's sleeves. He pulled out a chair behind her at the circular table.

"I heard from him the other day." Without purpose, but as if pushing aside crumbs, he swept his arm across the table.

"Christopher?"

"He's in Idaho. Wait." One finger hovered over the table, then touched its tip down. "Yeah. Idaho."

"I don't need to know."

He compressed his lips to suffice for a nod, but she didn't see this. He gestured toward the living room. "You still don't have a computer?"

"I don't need it. If they take me off reserve, I could start picking flights online, but they haven't done that. So I don't need it." Karen didn't own a cell phone, not wanting to be constantly checking it, worrying whether it were on or off; she relied instead on the dependable land line and answering machine. She did have an e-mail account that, by now, had likely accumulated piles of spam. She had rarely used the account in any case, disliking how a casual conversation took on permanence in type.

She realized she had taken a plate from the drain and was rewashing it.

"That's cool," said Jonah. "I think about people who go off the grid. No electronics." He vaguely waved his hands before him, fingers spread, as though turning machines into mist. "Obviously, I need computers for work. To program. But some day. Home could be sort of Zen. Right?"

Then she remembered what she couldn't believe she'd forgotten.

"Would you," she said, turning as she thought how to phrase it, "would you look at something electronic for me?"