Beauty (12 page)

Jaybee and Alice and Janice had a big fight, and then Jaybee and Alice left for some big, big city where they can both sort of disappear into the mob. I was so glad when Jaybee went. It was like smelling rain after a long dry spell, just to know he was gone. Bill and Janice have signed up for job training here. You have to, or they won't let you stay in the almshouse, that is, the shelter. After a few weeks of being tutored by Bill in arithmetic and by Janice in geography and current history, which I know nothing about (Bill shakes his head and tells me not to believe half of what Janice tells me), I will be sent to school.

AUGUST 1, 1991

Everyone went out to look for work today. They left me in the shelter, by myself except for a few other people who had just come or were too ill to go out. Two of them were a woman and a child who came last night. They were both very pale, very thin, almost like stick people, and the little girl seemed very sad.

I went into their cubicle to see if I could talk to them, maybe cheer the little girl up a bit. The two of them sat on their bed, scarcely moving. On the table was an almost untouched plate of food someone had brought them, the knife and fork laid side by side, a glass half-empty beside it. I got the little girl to play with me. At least, I sat her on my lap and told her stories. She leaned into me, as though she needed the warmth. She put her head against my chest and smiled a tiny smile. I wondered if she felt whatever the burning was. It hadn't been quite so bad since we'd come to the twentieth, but I could feel it, so maybe she did, too.

I told her the story about the gypsy and the prince, and I ended it, "So they lived happily ever after."

"Ever after," said the woman. "Together."

I had not heard her speak before. Her voice was dreadful, like a mechanical echo, with nothing vital in it at all.

"We loved each other," she said. "We said we would be together ever after, together."

"Who's she talking about?" I whispered to the child.

"Daddy," the child whispered back, putting her cheek against my chest and smiling, as though she heard something inside there.

"But the chutes were full," her mother said in her cold, quiet voice. "We were going together, but the chutes were full. Full all the way to the top, the furnaces gone out, bodies jammed in, rotting, stinking, bones sticking out ... "

"Daddy and mommy and me were going down the chutes," the child said with wide eyes. "To happyland."

I looked at the woman in horror. Her face was very still, her eyes were still. Her mouth moved and the words came out, but there was nothing behind them. It was as though she were dead, already, and the words were bats fleeing from her coffin.

"But we couldn't go, couldn't go, couldn't go," she chanted. "So we walked away, down the corridors where the sidewalks slept, down the aisles where the rot lay thick, down the stairs where the stink rose up like paste, gluing itself inside our lungs, down and down to the room where the machine was, humming to itself, the little machine."

"It was very tiny," the child said. "Only big enough for Mommy and me. Daddy knew it was there. He turned on the big engine that gave it power for more than a hundred years, and he put us in and shut the door. And when we opened the door, we were here."

"Down, down," the woman crooned, "down, to happyland."

I asked the child to come away with me, and after a while she did. Her name was Elaine. She had a lovely laugh. I asked her what year she had been born, and she said 2108. She couldn't remember what year it had been when she got in the tiny machine, but she looked about six to me, which would make it about 2114. We stayed in the corridor, playing ball, playing hide-and-seek.

The last time she hid, I could not find her. Finally, I went back to their cubicle to see if she had gone there, and she had. She was lying beside her mother on the bed. Her mother's hand was still upon the knife, wet with Elaine's quiet blood. Deathwords came from the woman's mouth, a terrible singing, "Down ... down ... down ... to happyland."

I screamed, stood there screaming, screaming until it hurt. The people who manage the shelter came and took the woman away. They wrapped up the little girl's body in black stuff and took it away. Someone gave me a white pill and a glass of water. They said the woman was mad. That she should have been locked up long ago.

I did not tell them that the woman had been locked up, locked up all her life; that in the time she had come from, everyone was locked up forever.

AUGUST 12, 1991

Bill brought back a set of his documentaries with him to use as examples of his work. He had to claim they are speculative fiction in order to use them in seeking a job, but evidently they're good examples of his talent, for it didn't take him long to get a position writing for a television station. Janice got work, too, at a library, and then we three rented a house on the corner of Wisdom Street and Seventh Avenue. It's a house about the size of the pigpen at Westfaire.

However, it has flush toilets, which I like, and a garbage disposer. I also like hair dryers and tampons. I do not like telephone salesmen and the way everybody has dogs they let empty themselves just anywhere. In my time commoners didn't have dogs, they couldn't have fed dogs, they'd probably have ended up eating the dogs. I don't like the noise people are allowed to make with radios. It does not sound like music. It sounds savage and makes your ears ring, and afterward it is hard to hear when people speak.

I have a room of my own, with my own things in it. I put my cloak and the boots and Mama's box at the back of the closet shelf. Grumpkin sleeps on my bed. I don't like all the concrete and no trees. I do like hamburgers and french fries and Pepsi, and the kind of chickens they have now with all the meat on them. In the fourteenth, chickens were very skinny and tough. I hate the way the world smells. On balance, I would go back in a minute, but since the boots don't work, I don't have that choice, I'm trying to seek the good in the time I'm in.

From a television show I learned that people like Bill are called transvestites and that Janice is probably frigid (though maybe she's just a religious fanatic) and Jaybee is probably a psychopath. The aunts would have had a fit if they had ever seen the things they talk about on TV, but I think it's good to have words for things.

Everything is all right, except for the dreams I have about the little girl in the shelter. I dream I am with them in the twenty-second. I dream I am trying to find a chute which is not already stuffed full of bodies. I dream I am singing: down, down, down to happyland. And I wake up choking.

AUGUST 15, 1991

I met a neighbor girl my age. She's a senior at George Washington High, the school I'll be going to next month. Her name is Candace Maclear, and everyone calls her Candy. She's very friendly. She says I'm really rad, which is good, and offered me some coke (to sniff) and spent all day teaching me to fix my hair. She says I talk funny, so I'm concentrating on sounding more like her.

AUGUST 17, 1991

I told Bill about Candy offering me drugs, and he warned me about it when I go to school in two weeks. Everyone here uses them, he says, and it's hard not to. He talked about "peer pressure," which seems to mean letting other people run your life for you. I had enough of that at Westfaire!

AUGUST 20, 1991

Candy's brother told me her boyfriend really goes after girls with long hair, and Candy's afraid he'll take to me. I've seen Candy's boyfriend and, believe me, she hasn't anything to worry about. His hair stands up in spikes and he has pimples. I look at him and I think of Giles. I look at all the boys here and I think of Giles. I wonder if they're all like this!

AUGUST 21, 1991

Everything here in the twentieth seems very temporary. Nothing lasts. Friendships don't last. Love affairs don't last. Marriages don't last. I've seen men here who people tell me have been married four or five times, and their old wives aren't dead, either. People even change what sex they are, and there are people coming to the door all the time trying to get me to change my religion and be born again, though I haven't gotten used to being born the first time yet. Wouldn't being born again imply I didn't trust God to have done it right the first time?

Even though I was mad at him, I wish Father Raymond were here! Janice did get born again, last week, and there's no living with her. I finally had to tell her I am a Catholic and please leave me alone. She got very angry. She doesn't approve of me and she doesn't approve of Bill. She says he's being sinful to dress up like he does. I can't see why. He isn't hurting anyone, but Janice says God intended men to wear trousers and women to wear dresses. I look at pictures of Greeks and Scots and aborigines and Jesus, and I can't figure out how she knows that!

SEPTEMBER 6, 1991

Well, I've been to school. I know who sells crack and who fucks who and which teachers are gay and who has AIDS. Nobody has asked me to do any arithmetic or geography at all, so that was a waste of time. I am taking classes in literature and biology and Spanish. Bill and Janice decided these were the safest subjects for me.

Bill took one whole hour to tell me about sexual diseases, and maybe it's a good thing he did. I do not want any of their diseases, though, after eavesdropping on a table of boys at lunch, I don't think I'd be tempted anyhow. They were talking about this girl they got drunk or stoned and then they all did it, watching each other. They were laughing at the way different ones had done it, making comments about how long it took this one or that one, like the stableboys used to hang over the paddock, watching the stallion serve the mares, giggling and pointing. I wonder if that has anything to do with male bonding?

In the fourteenth, we dreamed of chivalry and courtly love. I remember the oaths of fidelity the young men-at-arms used to offer their ladies, and they were no older than these high school boys. These guys don't offer anything. It's like the women they hit on are sacrifices to some kind of god that only boys worship. Most of the boys here remind me of Jaybee', though I'm not sure why.

The twentieth makes me feel very lonely. This isn't my place. When I remember how beautiful Westfaire is, was, when I remember Giles, I want to cry. I choke, my chest burns, I get the hiccups and have to lie down. The worst part of living here is that nothing is beautiful. There must be something beautiful in the twentieth, and maybe I just haven't seen it yet, but the way everyone acts, this is all there is. Magic doesn't work. There is no other way. Some days all I want to do is cry.

[Some days all
I
want to do is cry! We keep trying to lure her, and she keeps ignoring us. I have thought of sending Puck. He says he can get there. The problem is, his doing so might draw attention to her. The Dark Lord may be watching the Bogles. We don't
know who he's watching! Puck's going there might show up like a meteorite, burning across the night. Israfel keep saying, "Patience, Carabosse. "
Patience!
I don't think he sees the irony of that.]

OCTOBER 4, 1991

Today I think I figured out Fidipur. In social studies class the teacher commented that the recent famines in Africa are only the beginning of what may turn out to be worldwide famines of varying degrees of severity. Then he showed us a film of black people in Africa dying in large numbers and another one about the hole in the Van Allen belts. (Father Raymond would be fascinated!) The teacher explained that very soon the world would warm up and get dryer, that food would be harder to produce, and "We won' be able to fidipur, 'cause there'll be millyuns and millyuns of 'em."

Fidipur! Feed the poor. The way he said it was exactly the way the beggars in the twenty-first had said it. I asked Bill to explain it to me, and he told me about population growth and the Catholic church and acid rain and cutting down the rain forests to grow more food. Everyone argues about it, he said. Economists and businessmen say nothing is going wrong. Ecologists and population experts say the end is coming. While they argue, things keep changing until we get to the point of no return, sometime during the next hundred years. After that, there'll be no more out-of-doors because every square inch of land will be needed to produce food, and that's why, in the twenty-first, all the people had to be shut up in great tall, half-buried towers where they couldn't move around and interfere with Fidipur's farms.

I said, sensibly I thought, that God gave man the duty to take care of the world, not a contract to wreck the place, and Bill laughed the way he does, ha, ha, ha.

The comebacks say everything starts breaking down sometime late in the twenty-first, with Fidipur's farms playing out and people getting pushed down the chutes a hundred thousand at a time and all the machines breaking down. Elaine may have been the last person who came back, and she came in about 2114.

Bill says the handwriting is already on the wall, we're already doomed. Janice says he shouldn't say "doomed" when so many people will be alive and being fed, so he asked her why she left the twenty-first if it was so great, and she got mad at him. There are tear spots all over this page, and I can't stop.

OCTOBER 7, 1991

I've stopped thinking about Fidipur. You can't think about things like that all the time. Your body won't let you. Everytime I started to cry about it, my chest would burn like a bonfire. It got so I was afraid to think about it at all. So, I'm trying to think about other things, about trying out for cheerleader-which seems kind of dumb, but all the good-looking girls do it-and going to football games and things like that. I am trying to do as Father Raymond used to suggest and seek the good. Things wouldn't be too bad if Janice would just stop talking about religion and let me alone. I wish I could be nicer to her about it, but her religion is so ugly! So mean!