Lathe of Heaven, The (14 page)

They had to divide everything in half, even the fifth egg.

"You are a very kind person," he said.

"Me? Why? Coming here, you mean? Oh shit, I was scared. By that world-changing bit on Friday! I had to get it straight Look, I was looking right at the hospital I was born in, across the river, when you were dreaming, and then all of a sudden it wasn't there and never had been!"

"I thought you were from the East," he said. Relevance was not his strong point at the moment.

"No." She cleaned out the tuna can scrupulously and licked the knife. "Portland. Twice, now. Two different hospitals. Christ! But born and bred. So were my parents. My father was black and my mother was white. It's kind of interesting. He was a real militant Black Power type, back in the seventies, you know, and she was a hippie. He was from a welfare family in Albina, no father, and she was a corporation lawyer's daughter from Portland Heights. And a dropout, and went on drugs, and all that stuff they used to do then. And they met at some political rally, demonstrating. That was when demonstrations were still legal. And they got married. But he couldn't stick it very long, I mean the whole situation, not just the marriage. When I was eight he went off to Africa. To Ghana, I think. He thought his people came originally from there, but he didn't really know.

They'd been in Louisiana since anybody knew, and Lelache would be the slaveowner's name, it's French. It means The Coward. I took French in high school because I had a French name." She snickered. "Anyway, he just went. And poor Eva sort of fell apart.

That's my mother. She never wanted me to call her Mother or Mom or anything, that was middle-class nucleus family possessiveness. So I called her Eva. And we lived in a sort of commune thing for a while up on Mount Hood, oh Christ! Was it cold in winter!

But the police broke it up, they said it was an anti-American conspiracy. And after that she sort of scrounged a living, she made nice pottery when she could get the use of somebody's wheel and kiln, but mostly she helped out in little stores and restaurants, and stuff. Those people helped each other a lot. A real lot But she never could keep off the hard drugs, she was hooked. She'd be off for a year and then bingo. She got through the Plague, but when she was thirty-eight she got a dirty needle, and it killed her. And damn if her family didn't show up and take me over. I'd never even seen them! And they put me through college and law school. And I go up there for Christmas Eve dinner every year. I'm their token Negro. But I'll tell you, what really gets me is, I can't decide which color I am. I mean, my father was a black, a real black--oh, he had some white blood, but he was a black--and my mother was a white, and I'm neither one. See, my father really hated my mother because she was white. But he also loved her. But I think she loved his being black much more than she loved him. Well, where does that leave me? I never have figured out."

"Brown," he said gently, standing behind her chair.

"Shit color."

"The color of the earth."

"Are you a Portlander? Equal time."

"Yes."

"I can't hear you over that damn creek. I thought the wilderness was supposed to be silent. Go on!"

"But I've had so many childhoods, now," he said. "Which one should I tell you about? In one both my parents died in the first year of the Plague. In one there wasn't any Plague. I don't know. . . . None of them were very interesting. I mean, nothing to tell. All I ever did was survive."

"Well. That's the main thing."

"It gets harder all the time. The Plague, and now the Aliens . . ." He gave a feckless laugh, but when she looked around at him his face was weary and miserable.

"I can't believe you dreamed them up. I just can't. I've been scared of them for so long, six years! But I knew you did, as soon as I thought about it, because they weren't in that other--time-track or whatever it is. But actually, they aren't any worse than that awful overcrowding. That horrible little flat I lived in, with four other women, in a Business Girls Condominium, for Christsake! And riding that ghastly subway, and my teeth were terrible, and there never was anything decent to eat, and not half enough either. Do you know, I weighed 101 then, and I'm 122 now. I gained twenty-one pounds since Friday!"

"That's right. You were awfully thin, that first time I saw you. In your law office."

"You were, too. You looked scrawny. Only everybody else did, so I didn't notice it. Now you look like you'd be a fairly solid type, if you ever got any sleep."

He said nothing.

"Everybody else looks a lot better, too, when you come to think of it. Look. If you can't help what you do, and what you do makes things a little better, then you shouldn't feel any guilt about it. Maybe your dreams are just a new way for evolution to act, sort of. A hot line. Survival of the fittest and all. With crash priority."

"Oh, worse than that," he said in the same airy, foolish tone; he sat down on the bed. "Do you--" He stuttered several times. "Do you remember anything about April, four years ago--in '98?"

"April? No, nothing special."

"That's when the world ended," Orr said. A muscular spasm disfigured his face, and he gulped as if for air. "Nobody else remembers," he said.

"What do you mean?" she asked, obscurely frightened. April, April 1998, she thought, do I remember April '98? She thought she did not, and knew she must; and she was frightened--by him? With him? For him?

"It isn't evolution. It's just self-preservation. I can't-- Well, it was a lot worse. Worse than you remember. It was the same world as that first one you remember, with a population of seven billion, only it--it was worse. Nobody but some of the European countries got rationing and pollution control and birth control going early enough, in the seventies, and so when we finally did try to control food distribution it was too late, there wasn't enough, and the Mafia ran the black market, everybody had to buy on the black market to get anything to eat, and a lot of people didn't get anything. They rewrote the Constitution in 1984, the way you remember, but things were so bad by then that it was a lot worse, it didn't even pretend to be a democracy any more, it was a sort of police state, but it didn't work, it fell apart right away. When I was fifteen the schools closed. There wasn't any Plague, but there were epidemics, one after another, dysentery and hepatitis and then bubonic. But mostly people starved. And then in '93 the war started up in the Near East, but it was different. It was Israel against the Arabs and Egypt. All the big countries got in on it. One of the African states came in on the Arab side, and used nuclear bombs on two cities in Israel, and so we helped them retaliate, and. . . ." He was silent for some while and then went on, apparently not realizing that there was any gap in his telling, "I was trying to get out of the city. I wanted to get into Forest Park. I was sick, I couldn't go on walking and I sat down on the steps of this house up in the west hills, the houses were all burnt out but the steps were cement, I remember there were some dandelions flowering in a crack between the steps. I sat there and I couldn't get up again and I knew I couldn't. I kept thinking that I was standing up and going on, getting out of the city, but it was just delirium, I'd come to and see the dandelions again and know I was dying. And that everything else was dying. And then I had the--I had this dream." His voice had hoarsened; now it choked off.

"I was all right," he said at last. "I dreamed about being home. I woke up and I was all right. I was in bed at home. Only it wasn't any home I'd ever had, the other time, the first time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn't remember it. I mostly don't. I can't. I've told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn't. This is. This isn't real. This world isn't even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams."

She believed him, and denied her belief with fury. "So what? Maybe that's all it's ever been! Whatever it is, it's all right. You don't suppose you'd be allowed to do anything you weren't supposed to do, do you? Who the hell do you think you are! There is nothing that doesn't fit, nothing happens that isn't supposed to happen. Ever! What does it matter whether you call it real or dreams? It's all one-- isn't it?"

"I don't know," Orr said in agony; and she went to him and held him as she would have held a child in pain, or a dying man.

The head on her shoulder was heavy, the fair, square hand on her knee lay relaxed.

"You're asleep," she said. He made no denial. She had to shake him pretty hard to get him even to deny it. "No I'm not," he said, starting and sitting upright. "No." He sagged again.

"George!" It was true: the use of his name helped. He kept his eyes open long enough to look at her. "Stay awake, stay awake just a little. I want to try the hypnosis. So you can sleep." She had meant to ask him what he wanted to dream, what she should impress on him hypnotically concerning Haber, but he was too far gone now. "Look, sit there on the cot. Look at ... look at the flame of the lamp, that ought to do it. But don't go to sleep."

She set the oil lamp on the center of the table, amidst eggshells and wreckage. "Just keep your eyes on it, and don't go to sleep! You'll relax and feel easy, but you won't go to sleep yet, not till I say 'Go to sleep.' That's it. Now you're feeling easy and comfortable. .

. ." With a sense of play acting, she proceeded with the hypnotist's spiel. He went under almost at once. She couldn't believe it, and tested him. "You can't lift your left hand,"

she said, "you're trying, but it's too heavy, it won't come. . . . Now it's light again, you can lift it. There . . . well. In a minute now you're going to fall asleep. You'll dream some, but they'll just be regular ordinary dreams like everybody has, not special ones, not--not effective ones. All except one. You'll have one effective dream. In it--" She halted. All of a sudden she was scared; a cold qualm took her. What was she doing? This was no play, no game, nothing for a fool to meddle in. He was in her power: and his power was incalculable. What unimaginable responsibility had she undertaken?

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

But she was caught in a role and couldn't back out of it now. "In that one dream, you'll dream that . . . that Dr. Haber is benevolent, that he's not trying to hurt you and will be honest with you," She didn't know what to say, how to say it, knowing that whatever she said could go wrong. "And you'll dream that the Aliens aren't out there on the Moon any longer," she added hastily; she could get that load off his shoulders, anyhow. "And in the morning you'll wake up quite rested, everything will be all right. Now: Go to sleep."

Oh shit, she'd forgotten to tell him to lie down first.

He went like a half-stuffed pillow, softly, forward and sideways, till he was a large, warm, inert heap on the floor.

He couldn't have weighed more than 150, but he might have been a dead elephant for all the help he gave her getting him up on the cot. She had to do it legs first and then heave the shoulders, so as not to tip the cot; he ended up on the sleeping bag, of course, not in it She dragged it out from under him, nearly tipping over the cot again, and got it spread out over him. He slept, slept utterly, through it all. She was out of breath, sweating, and upset He wasn't.

She sat down at the table and got her breath. After a while she wondered what to do. She cleaned up their dinner-leavings, heated water, washed the pie this, forks, knife, and cups. She built up the fire in the stove. She found several books on a shelf, paperbacks he'd picked up in Lincoln City probably, to beguile his long vigil. No mysteries, hell, a good mystery was what she needed. There was a novel about Russia. One thing about the Space Pact: the U.S. Government wasn't trying to pretend that nothing between Jerusalem and the Philippines existed because if it did it might threaten the American Way of Life; and so these last few years you could buy Japanese toy paper parasols, and Indian incense, and Russian novels, and things, once more. Human Brotherhood was the New Life-Style, according to President Merdle.

This book, by somebody with a name ending in "evsky", was about life during the Plague Years in a little town in the Caucasus, and it wasn't exactly jolly reading, but it caught at her emotions; she read it from ten o'clock till two-thirty. All that time Orr lay fast asleep, scarcely moving, breathing lightly and quietly. She would look up from the Caucasian village and see his face, gilt and shadowed in the dim lamplight, serene. If he dreamed, they were quiet dreams and fleeting. After everybody in the Caucasian village was dead except the village idiot (whose perfect passivity to the inevitable kept making her think of her companion), she tried some rewarmed coffee, but it tasted like lye. She went to the door and stood half inside, half outside for a while, listening to the creek shouting and hollering eternal praise! eternal praise! It was incredible that it had kept up that tremendous noise for hundreds of years before she was even born, and would go on doing it until the mountains moved. And the strangest thing about it, now very late at night in the absolute silence of the woods, was a distant note in it, far away upstream it seemed, like the voices of children singing-- very sweet, very strange.

She got shivery; she shut the door on the voices of the unborn children singing in the water, and turned to the small warm room and the sleeping man. She took down a book on home carpentry which he had evidently bought to keep himself busy about the cabin, but it put her to sleep at once. Well, why not? Why did she have to stay up? But where was she supposed to sleep....

She should have left George on the floor. He never would have noticed. It wasn't fair, he had both the cot and the sleeping bag.

She removed the sleeping bag from him, replacing it with his raincoat and her raincape.