The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (32 page)

Maxwell remembered his sleep, and said. “Ohnly a momenth. A briefh momenth.” 

“Pardon me?” 

Maxwell shook his head to say “nothing,” but he was thinking, “He wouldn’t understand at all.” 

“One last bit of intro information. The reason you were revived so late was not because of your need for a synthetic heart. We’ve been installing hearts for a long time. The problem was the process for unfreezing all of the cases like yours. It’s a delicate operation, and we only developed it ten years ago.” 

“How longh hav ah bin asleep?” 

The Introducer opened his mouth to answer, but a door snapped open suddenly behind him. By raising himself on one elbow, Maxwell tried to look past the man to the doorway, but fell back when his strength failed. The weakness scared him. His eyes wanted to close, but his mind’s hatred of the thought of sleep pricked them open and kept them quivering. 

“I want you to meet,” the Introducer said, “one of your multi-great-grandsons.” A green-eyed boy in a soft loincloth and baggy shirt appeared by the side of Maxwell’s bed. “His name is Benji-tom Saphim. His father will be your guardian.” 

Maxwell’s mind raced into happiness. This boy, his mind shouted, will show me the green of a hundred hills and the warm palette of all the flowers I’ve missed for so long. 

The Introducer said something garbled to the boy. It sounded to Maxwell like nasalized English, chopped but softer than German. The boy said something equally strange to Maxwell, and smiled. 

I don’t understand their language, Maxwell thought, and there is so little time. 

The boy took Maxwell’s hand as they left the cottony white corridors of the hospital. It had taken the old man three hours to learn to walk again, but now his legs flowed under him as if the long sleep had only been a dream, and the desire to see green things had not waned at all. 

I was an English teacher, Maxwell was thinking, but this drive in me to see the green of grasses and the ripples of ponds and the lace of pastel flowers seems more poetic than academic. Perhaps the long sleep did this to me, or perhaps I should have been a poet back then. Maybe Lana would have been happier with me, had I been a poet. 

They took a vast empty elevator down to the ground level and stepped out into the quiet city, the boy still holding his hand. Perhaps, Maxwell thought, his father told him to hold my hand—“Take the old man’s hand and be careful with him.” 

The streets were like clean gutters, rendered Lilliputian by the towering cement walls on either side. Maxwell was afraid to look up, afraid that the buildings pierced the clouds; so he kept his eyes at street level, and the boy was silent, a flicker of smile playing across his lips when the old man looked at him. 

Something seemed dead. A color was missing. Maxwell stopped suddenly and looked around him. The color green was absent. Maxwell laughed at himself and resumed walking. On many streets of the New York of his time there had been no green at all. He should expect even less green in a time when population increases would have spawned miles and miles of cement structures for housing and business. 

At the end of an hour’s walk nothing had changed. The same buildings and streets seemed to jump from block to block, keeping up with Maxwell, making the walk monotonous. Still no green. And soon an irrational fear popped into existence in Maxwell’s chest, making his synthetic heart beat faster. Was there any green anywhere? Even the green of a man’s shirt or the green paint of an automobile would have helped, but the few people on the street wore only drab cloth, and the only traffic was the intermittent passing of gigantic trucks. 

Another empty elevator let Maxwell and the boy out on the dark fortieth floor of an apartment building. Maxwell still only understood a word or two when Benji-tom’s father and the fifteen members of his family—parents, sisters, brothers, infants, and aged—greeted him with the pale smiles of people who were never touched by a sun that had been exiled past towering cement walls. 

Maxwell sat on his blanket, the squall of babies to his left, and to his right the rustle of Benji-tom’s mother in the kitchen-bedroom. After a week of learning to understand the sectional dialect of Benji-tom’s family, Maxwell’s heart had begun beating even faster from his one fear. In the language of these people never once did he hear the words “green,” “flower,” “hill,” or “grass.” 

Benji killed a cockroach that had just flashed across his floor-blanket. Maxwell watched him, thinking, “God, poetry is dead. There is no green.” He had asked Benji a month before to take him to the nearest park, and Benji hadn’t understood him. Maxwell had then asked Benji’s father, who said that he didn’t understand either, that buildings and streets and food-trucks were the only things in the city. And the city, Maxwell realized with a sick thumping in his chest, consisted of seventy-five regions; a region meant one hundred sectors; a sector was one hundred sections, and a section, as Maxwell understood it, was about twenty miles square. “What is a ‘park’?” Benji’s father had asked, and Maxwell was now afraid to mention the words “tree,” “grass,” or “flower.” 

The absence of green was one part of Maxwell’s agony. The first two nights with Benji’s family, he had screamed. The pull of fatigue had advised him to sleep, and his mind had bellowed in revolt. He had slept too long and too cold, and he remembered the acid of that sleep. The colorless, dreamless, icy sleep. And the three apartment rooms containing Benji’s family were crowded, stuffy, and lightless at night. The cockroaches scuttled, the babies whimpered, and the only clear sound was the buzzing that issued briefly in the morning from a black knob on the wall, meant to waken Benji’s father in time for his job at the market. Maxwell knew the market, too, and he hated it. He had visited the market once with Benji’s father, hoping to find green vegetables for sale. Something green to look at. But there was never any sale. There were only government coupons that allowed husbands and wives to obtain boxes of yellowish biscuits, dried fish, sometimes dried meat. The market was housed on two floors of an apartment building where the walls had been ripped out to permit the flood of sweating individuals flowing in with their coupons and out with the food supplies from the massive food-trucks—those lone members of street traffic. 

Compared to the masses, Benji’s father was well-off. He could afford to house and feed his wife’s mother, father, brothers, and sisters, in addition to his own. As Maxwell had discovered the day before, two of the old people in Benji’s family were sixty-nine and would be put to sleep like animals in a year. 

In the dim room, where Maxwell slept on a blanket beside Benji, Maxwell watched the boy pick up the cockroach carcass and play with it, pretending it was alive, pushing it across the floor, flicking it with his finger to make it slide away “in escape.” Maxwell had watched the boy’s play before, and the loneliness of the vision made the loss of nature’s green things even worse. Mother Nature, Maxwell thought to himself, reached the magic age of seventy and was then put to sleep—by cement rivers of human fish. 

Maxwell tried not think of his own son. Many people had died during his long sleep, and he knew, were he to think of all of them, of his sixty years of life with them, that he would fail to live in this new present. Maxwell said, “Benji-tom?” 

The boy looked around, his pale face the only clear light in the room. The cockroach dropped from his fingers and lay still by his blanket. 

“Yes, Great-father?” 

“Are you ever sad?” 

“Yes. Sometimes.” 

“When?” 

“When the food-trucks break down.” 

“No, I mean sad about living here.” 

“I don’t understand.” The boy was smiling, but confused. But he wasn’t dumb at all, Maxwell knew, and that made everything a little sadder. 

“I mean, what do you do to be happy here?” 

“Lots of things, Great-father.” 

“Does it make you happy to play with that roach?” 

“Uh-huh.” The boy poked at the insect and smiled more surely. 

Maxwell was silent. Something that felt like optimism was suddenly nagging at him, asking him to talk to the boy. “What do you do with the roach, to be happy?” 

The boy looked embarrassed, confused again, but he said, “I think that the roach is like a food-truck. I push it around. M’father says that food-trucks can run even faster than roaches. He likes food-trucks, and I’ve seen a lot of them when I go down on the street.” 

Something in the boy’s words sounded familiar to Maxwell. A vague memory of his own youth flickered at the back of his mind. Maxwell persisted, “Do you ever dream about food-trucks?” 

“Dream?” 

“Do you ever see pictures in your head at night? Pictures of food-trucks.” 

“Oh! Sometimes, yes.” The boy was happy with this. “I once saw a picture of myself, and I was a food-truck running down the streets taking food to everybody. I never broke down because . . . because . . . I just never broke down.” 

My God, Maxwell thought with excitement. Sitting down quickly beside the boy, he said, “What do you like as much as the food-trucks? Anything else?” 

“I like the elevators. When they don’t have to stop on a lot of floors, then they go fast. They go fast like food-trucks go fast. M’father says they do. Just
like
food-trucks go fast.” 

Maxwell’s heart stopped. The word “like” pounded in his mind, and he remembered happily that “like” was one of the two key words of a simile, and that a simile was the most common sign of poetic thought. Maxwell thought to himself with growing contentment: “Grass is like a blanket . . . an elevator is like a food-truck.” It wasn’t the poetry Maxwell was used to, but it was poetry. Poetry, he realized, is not at all dead here. 

Maxwell wanted to hug the boy, but Benji had picked up the cockroach again by its legs and was staring at it closely as it dangled from his fingers. 

“And dead cockroaches,” Maxwell said anxiously, “are they like broken-down food-trucks?” 

The answer was slow in coming, but the boy said, “Yes,” and smiled. 

With the aftertaste of dinner biscuits in his mouth, Maxwell lay still on his blanket, hoping that Benji-tom was still awake. The darkness and threat of sleep was much less fearful these days, and the compulsion for seeing green things had been supplanted by a desire to know the poetry of Benji’s world. Maxwell remembered his long, cold sleep, and that naked memory told him again: There is little time, just a brief moment; the night is coming. 

Benji stirred beside him, and Maxwell wanted to begin another murmured night conversation with the boy. The daylight hours were always occupied with Benji-tom, but Maxwell didn’t want to stop there. He wanted to speak to the boy now, but thoughts stilled his lips for a moment. 

“How easy it is,” Maxwell thought to himself, “to forget the real persons of a past time when you are busy in the present.” He had often thought of his wife and son, wondering how they finally died, but those reflections were rarely heavy with sadness. How much does one pine for a far historical past, was the question. 

Maxwell was busy in this world. There was no green poetry to know in this world—no flowers or grass. But what mattered was that poetry did exist, and Benji’s mind held it. Maxwell was busy—and he knew it—trying to capture the poetry of this time; and as he thought about it, he remembered a prediction made by a great Romantic poet of the distant past. 

“Benji-tom?” 

Calm silence. Breezeless air. Then: “Great-father?” 

“Before you go to sleep, I want to tell you something. Sometime soon I want to read you some words written a long time ago. I’ll have to find a library first. Do you—” 

“A ‘library’?” 

Maxwell sighed. There must be libraries, he thought, filled with books or tapes or whatever would fill libraries in these times. Someone would know. Perhaps the hospital. 

The nearest library had been five sections away, packed with microfilm and tapes, and the search for the piece of writing Maxwell wanted had taken a year and a half. Seated now on his blanket, Maxwell began reading to the boy, with a hand-copied version of the poet Wordsworth’s words rattling nervously in his hands. He knew that an explanation of the poet’s prediction might take months, considering Benji’s mind; and, even though time was so short, Maxwell knew that the explanation would be the main thing to be accomplished. 

“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labors of men of science should ever create any material revolution in our condition, and in the impressions we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present . . .” 

Maxwell had left Benji crying in his room two sections away, and the tears had been the first Maxwell had ever seen on the boy. Escaping from their presence, the old man hurried from the apartment on his own, and faced the long street walk to the “chamber.” He was exactly seventy years old now, and the brief moment for finding poetry was over. But things were fine. 

When he arrived on the twentieth floor and passed through the blank door that opened onto the waiting room of the chamber, Maxwell saw a cushion on the floor and sat down beside another old man. In all, there were five old people in the room draped in off-white cloth. They remained quiet, eyes on their hands or on the floor, allowing Maxwell to think proudly of the past ten years with his grandson.