Eating Memories (12 page)

He hesitated, then put his hand in mine. It was warm. I could feel the pulse in his wrist.

“Okay,” I said with relief. Releasing him, I closed my eyes and slept

Lubenov woke me up. It was late afternoon of a polar summer day when the light is stretched so long, so thin, that day itself seems brittle. The lounge was silent except for Chee snoring in the corner.

“The storm is over,” the Russian said.

“Yeah.” I wiped my eyes. They stung.

“We will go search for Martin.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

He helped me up. We got our helmets and went out the airlock to the Soviet creeper. We tugged the tarp off, brushing away mounds of sand and a scattering of ice. Lubenov and I clambered up into the chilly cabin. The creeper started with a roar and a jerk, picking its way north over the stones.

“How do you know which way Martin went?” I asked him.

In the protection of the cab he’d taken his helmet off. Loose skin bagged under his eyes. “Martin is from Vermont,” he said as if that explained everything.

Dry air, prickly and perfumed with the stench of heating coils, beat against my face. Ahead of us knife-edged shadows ran straight as plumb lines from the russet rocks. To the west the sun was a blood spot in a bruised and purple sky.

“Have you ever thought,” he asked after a time, “how much Mars looks like just any desert?”

I looked out the cab window to my right and stared at the sharp, blue edges of a mountain. It seemed that there should have been predatory, birds wheeling the updrafts above it.

“Did it ever seem to you,” Lubenov asked, “that if you simply kept walking that you would finally see trees and then houses?”

“New Mexico,” I whispered. Suddenly I saw myself in Albuquerque, the way I used to be. I’d kept a scrupulously neat office filled with painstakingly neat files. There had been a place for everything but ghosts; and everything that was ordinary had been in its place. Tears of nostalgia welled up in my eyes. I turned my head hard to the right so that Lubenov couldn’t see.

“Afghanistan,” he said.

I dared a glimpse at him.

He wasn’t looking my way. “When I was seventeen my troop transport was shot down over Afghanistan by an American rocket.”

“Sorry,” I muttered.

He shook off
my apology. “When I climbed out of the wreckage I walked a long way. And while I walked I kept thinking . . .” Lubenov stopped as if he had simply run out of words
.

“What?”

The creeper clambered and slipped over a crumbling ridge. Lubenov held the steering wheel steady. “I thought that if I walked far enough, I would get home. I was right, of course, but I pictured not arriving in Uzbekistan, but in Siberia, instead. Isn’t that strange? I thought that if I kept walking north, I would come to the snow, and there I would find the hunting cabin that my grandfather had built. And I imagined that I would walk up to find smoke drifting out of the chimney. The ponies would be tethered in the front yard, the dogs sleeping beside them.”

“Yeah. Strange,” I said.

“I could smell the tang of wood smoke so . . . vividly. In the air I imagined I caught the scent of snow.”

We were quiet a few minutes. The sun dipped lower but didn’t set. The day slipped into the lingering, dull twilight that passed for evening. Lubenov turned on his headlights. They were a warm yellow in the blue haze. “What happened?” I asked.

“The helicopter they sent found me,” he shrugged.

“So?”

“So I am thinking I understand what our people are looking for when the Coyote calls their names and they walk out into the rocks. I am afraid that if I hear the call of the Coyote, it may be a voice I already know.”

Lubenov stopped the creeper. I could feel the thrum-thrum of the warm engine under my legs and hear the ticking of the heater.

“What?” I asked. He was staring off to his left. I looked left with him and saw the blue-clad leg sticking out from under a new dune.

I put on my helmet. My hands were shaking. We clambered down from the creeper and walked over to Martin. There was no sense now in hurrying. Getting down on our hands and knees, we scooped the sand from around the rest of his body. Martin had taken his helmet off and it lay beside him. His eyes were open. There was dust clotted in them. His mouth was ajar and sand trickled out of it in a stream.

With an oddly maternal gesture, Lubenov lifted the body up by its shoulders and cradled the head in the crook of his arm. He wiped the sand from the staring eyes and closed them. For a moment I thought he was about to rock Martin to sleep, but he whispered, “Help me lift him.”

I got Martin’s legs. He was heavier than I would have expected, but I supposed the weight was from all the sand he’d eaten; all the Mars he’d breathed. We carried him to the back of the creeper. Lubenov opened the boot with one hand and we settled Martin behind the heavy glass. The boot hadn’t been designed for bodies. Martin was too long. So Lubenov coaxed him into a fetal posture on his side: Arms crossed over his chest; legs
tucked to his middle.

If seemed as if we should have said a few words over Martin, but all Lubenov did was gently close the, boot.

We got back in the cab. I was shivering, so Lubenov found me a blanket and tucked it around me. It smelled of wool and rich human oils. He turned the creeper around and set off south towards the American mine at a slow, funereal pace. I closed my eyes and in the heavy-machinery beat of the creeper’s engine, drifted off to sleep.

I woke up with a jerk. The sun was peering over the horizon to my right, turning the sky and rocks pink. The creeper was stopped, its engine still throbbing but Lubenov’s captain’s chair was empty. The headlights were still on.

Ice granules fine as snow filled up the low spots in the sand around me. They blew in smoky drifts against the rocks. “Nikolai?” I whispered.

In the glare of the headlights I could see the corrugated tracks of a set of boots. A single walker, heading north.

Snatching my helmet from the floor, I stuffed it on and climbed outside. “Nikolai!” I shouted.

Even though I knew he wasn’t there, I walked around the cab to the back. Martin was still curled in the boot. The sun edged into the dark space behind the glass and lit up his face with peach light, so that he looked like a transfigured saint in an Eastern Orthodox icon. Sand still leaked from his open lips. St. Martin, the patron saint of sand-drowned men.

“Nikolai!” I screamed and then listened hard. In the rose-pink dawn I thought I should have heard the wake-up calls of birds, but there was only Mars’ huge silence.

I stumbled a couple of yards after the mute tracks of Lubenov’s shoes and wailed to him again. “Nikolai!”

I listened for the only living sound possible, but heard the empty hiss of the wind; the soft clatter of the ice. I struggled back through the ice-blown sand, clambered up in the cab, put the creeper into drive, and started after him.

The sun had freed itself from the horizon by the time I saw the Soviet. Ahead of me in the glaring white was one tiny spot of red, as if something had pricked the ground and brought out a bead of blood.

As I drove closer I could see the lowered helmet bob with the rhythm of his walk. Lubenov was making good time towards nothingness.

When I drove abreast of him, I opened the door of the cab and shouted his name. He didn’t look up.

I put the creeper into neutral and scrambled down the side. “Nikolai!”

I knew he could hear me, but he didn’t stop; he didn’t answer. He kept going as if over the very next rise he would see his grandfather’s cabin, the fire banked in the hearth. “Goddamn it! Nikolai!” I reached for his arm, but my thick glove slipped off his sleeve.

It was clumsy in my suit, but I sort of tackled him, coming down with my spread arms on his shoulders. He dropped hard to his knees, one hand out to stay his fall. We teetered there for a moment, two beasts of differing species in a brutal coupling: A red creature and a blue. I bent far enough towards him so that our helmets clicked. “Don’t you leave me alone out here, you bastard.”

He turned his head a bit. Frost had grown skeletal, grasping fingers up the outside of his helmet. The inside was fogged. With an angry movement, he shoved me off him. “Our resistance. It will never work,” he said.

“Jesus, Nikolai. Lenin would be disappointed.”

The opaque faceplate of his helmet snapped towards me. On the glass I could see the reflection of Mars’ weak sun. It made a eerie Cyclops of him. “You make fun of me.” Even through the filter of his speaker and my receiver, I could tell his voice was tight.

“No, man. I’m not making fun of you. But think about it for a minute. The Martian revolution is upon us. What would Lenin say?”

He grabbed me by the arms and shook me. My teeth clicked together and I bit my tongue hard. “If Lenin could speak, he would call me traitor!”

He let me go suddenly. I was dizzy. Maybe Chee was right, I thought, and the only totem who got to Mars was the Coyote. If he had, if he were the god here, then it would make sense that we’d think we could walk out of Mars’ desert and somehow find it home. In the blue mountains beyond I thought I caught a glimpse of a swiftly moving shadow.

“What do they do with the diamonds?” Lubenov asked quietly.

I looked away from the shadow and towards him. The Soviet was featureless: A red rag doll with a black bowl for a head. The playful Martian wind chortled in my helmet.

His voice rose a notch. “Answer me! What do they do with the diamonds?”

“Precision drill bits.”

“What else?”

“Screw it, Nikolai. I’m no metallurgical engineer. I don’t understand all the new technology.”

“What do they do with the rest? Why do they continue the expense of keeping us up here during a world-wide recession?”

“I don’t know.”

His padded glove hit me hard on my padded shoulder with enough force to drive me backwards. I fell with a crunch in the ice.

“Think! You may be crazy and irresponsible, but you can think!” Then he answered the question for me. “They hoard them! Just like OPEC used to do with oil. Just as De Beers used to do with their own diamonds. Our two nations hoard the diamonds to drive the price upwards. And then they dole them out in little bits and pieces to other countries. That is where they get their power. So, if the Soviet Union gets to us first, that will mean the end of the American empire; and if the Americans reach us instead, they will drive the Soviet Union to its knees.”

That was the most ironic trick of the Coyote, I decided, that he would give his idea to the very one of us to whom the consequences still mattered.

“Let me go and I will walk home. The revolution is over. I don’t know how I could have ever believed they would let us get away with it. The cartel will work it out between themselves and let us starve.”

“There,” I said, looking out towards the denuded mountains that burst up like knives from the white ice.

Lubenov turned to where I was pointing. “What?” he asked.

The shadow was closer, nearly upon us.

“There,” I said and started to laugh.

I couldn’t tell if Lubenov saw it, too. He may not have gotten to the point of hallucinations yet. But he jerked, it seemed in recognition. And he stared out into the mountains for a long, long time.

Finally he shivered hard as if something with a cold breath had whispered a secret into his ear. I started to get up, but Lubenov whirled and pushed me down again. He leaned over and the dark globe of his helmet was above me; his fingers were pressed to either side of my faceplate release.

“Dawson,” he said. There was a little manic giggle in his voice.

I started to struggle. Any moment I figured I’d feel the pressure of his thumbs at the edge of the polarized acrylic. There would be an anticlimactic pop. A hiss.

“Listen. Dawson.”

He held me tighter and brought his faceplate right down to mine, so close that there was a light tap as the two helmets met. Behind the dark screen I could finally see his expression. There was a glint in his eyes, a grin on his lips.

“Let’s call Japan,” he said.

Author’s Note:
This is one of those “what if” stories which grew out of reports of abductees who swore they had been cured of illnesses. I was also exploring the terror of coming face-to-face with the impossible, whether the contact be beneficial or malevolent. This was also part of what I dealt with in the novel Cradle of Splendor: i.e. the nature of good and evil, and how close they sometimes are.

No, it is not meant to be sacrilegious, but if you’ve never considered the panic inherent in a brush with the divine, perhaps you should.

The people on the north side of the lake had given him good information, but on the south side, closest to where the sightings had occurred, the families were so reticent as to be rude. By the time he’d reached the fifth house, where a woman was scrubbing her porch, his feet were tired and his temper worn. As he started up the drive, a liver hound rounded the side of the house. Harry stopped dead and stared suspiciously at it. “Shit,” he said under his breath, holding his camera and tape recorder a little closer to his chest in case he had-to run.

But it was the dog that fled, backing away with a hesitant growl at first and then taking to its heels with a yelp as if Harry had really flung the rock he’d considered throwing.

Harry took a long breath and let it out before he continued his trudge up the hill. At the bottom of the porch steps he stopped and pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose with an irritated gesture. It was a hot day and the skin of his face was oily, his armpits damp.

“I’m Harold Sterns with Mutual UFO Network,” he said, trying to conjure some warmth into his voice, “and I’ve been told that some of your neighbors have seen strange lights.”

The woman didn’t look up from her cleaning. She was on her hands and knees, a position which looked oddly natural for her; and her face was stamped with the seal of the mountains, an old-before-its-time sort of look.

Doggedly, Harry continued. “Your neighbors on the other side of the lake say that nearly every night for the past six months they’ve seen a flash just after dark that lights up half the sky. They’ve also sighted what they call ‘little dancing balls’ over here near where you live. You ever see anything like that?”

The metal bucket made a teeth-gritting sound across the concrete as she pulled it closer. With dull concentration, she plunged the bristle brush in the bucket to rinse away its coating of pink scum and began scrubbing the floor again. The air was prickly with the stench of ammonia.

“He comes ever night,” she said without looking up from her work, “and stands just where you’re standing.”

Harry felt an icicle of fear dislodge from the top of his spine and slide its way downwards. The woman’s brush made a shus-sha-shus-sha rhythm against the raw cement. “He?” Harry asked.

“Stands just where you’s standing now. Then when we walk out, he comes up on the porch. Never comes in the house. At least he never comes in the house.” She paused in her scrubbing and sat up on her knees. Wisps of gray hair had come undone from her bun and they hung around her face like spider webbing.

Harry licked his lips. Surreptitiously he flicked on the tape recorder and noticed his hand was shaking with excitement. “Who comes to your house?”

She gave him a flat, country look and went back to her scrubbing. “Him. The man.”

“What does he look like?” Harry asked. He mounted the porch slowly, so as not to alarm her.

“Tall as you. Plaid shirt. Jeans.”

Harry’s face worked itself into a puzzled frown. “Is he human?”

The brush paused. The pause was so brief, so sudden, that it seemed that time itself had stopped. Then she picked up her scrubbing rhythm again. “Don’t know.”

“What does he say?”

“Nothing.”

“He just stands on the porch?”

“Uh huh.”

“And he never says anything to you?”

“Wish he would,” she hissed angrily. “Wish the bastard would say something.”

“Uh huh. And then you come out on the porch to meet him.”

“Don’t have no choice.”

The brush made a hollow thunk as it was tossed into the bucket. Taking up the handle, she walked into the house.

After a brief hesitation Harry followed her. The parlor was faded, the hooked rug worn. The floors smelled of oil, but there was another smell under that: the lye soap scent of clean poverty.

The linoleum in the kitchen had once been green. He could see glimpses of color in the corners. The traffic areas, though, had been bleached to an off-white. “What do you mean you don’t have any choice?”

She poured the foamy pink water down the drain and filled up the bucket with clear from a tarnished tap. “He don’t give us no choice is what I mean. Sometimes he comes at dinner and we get up from the table and walk outside.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the thrumming of the water.

“Like you’re drawn or something?”

“Just like we don’t have no damned choice about it. Just like we don’t have no say in it at all.”

“Tell me something, Mrs. . . .”

“Foote.”

“Mrs. Foote. Do you remember anything after you get to the porch?” His voice was staccato with anxious energy. Harry had utterly forgotten how tired his feet were, how his back ached from his walk. “Do you find that after he’s gone you’ve lost time? Like maybe you’ve been watching one program on TV and after he’s gone another totally different show is on? Maybe it might seem like he was only there a few minutes, but you find out later a couple of hours have gone by.”

She turned off the tap and looked at him. Her eyes were a dirty brown and her eyelashes were gray as her hair. He guessed her age in an indiscriminate area between a hard forty and a gently-worn sixty. “I remember,” she told him.

“Remember what?”

“I remember what happens when we gets to the porch.”

She pushed past him and walked outside where she splashed the clear water over the cement. Through the screen door he watched as she took up a broom that had been matted by time and use into a permanent comma. She began to sweep the suds away. In the middle of the porch was a stubborn, dark sienna stain.

“He cuts my heart out,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“He cuts out my damned heart.”

The ancient broom moved methodically over the porch. Her arms were thick and strong; and when she swept the water she swept it out in a high arc across the yard. The motion of the broom was angry, as if she were imagining murdering someone.

The dog had come back and was whining under the stairs. Harry pushed at the screen door. It opened with a pained squeal. Careful of where she had swept, he stepped outside with her.

He considered turning off his tape recorder.

“What are you talking about?”

“You ever been raped?” she asked suddenly.

Harry cast around for an appropriate answer, but found none. He shrugged and shook his head.

“That’s what it’s like. Being raped.” There was an uncatalogable expression on her face.

Suddenly he understood the look. He hadn’t recognized it at first because he wasn’t expecting it. Mrs. Foote was watching him like a lost young kid might look for help from a policeman. Quickly he dropped his eyes. “I’d like to go over your statement again,” he said.

Mrs. Foote dismissed him with a disappointed, cynical sniff. “You think you’re so smart. How many times I gotta tell you?”

“You want me to believe that a man comes to the door, you come out, and he literally cuts out your heart while you’re standing there, and you let him?” Harry couldn’t help the tone that had crept into his voice. “Come on, Mrs. Foote. Really. If he cuts out your heart why aren’t you dead?”

“Don’t know,” she said wistfully and without the abrasiveness he’d been prepared for. “Jimmy Lee killed hisself. Don’t know why I don’t take the shotgun to myself, except for the boy.” She jerked her head to the right. Harry looked over to see a gangly teenager emerging from the barn. “Don’t seem fair to the boy.”

“Jimmy Lee?”

“Husband,” she said. There were no more suds on the porch but she set to sweeping again, anyway.

“Mrs. Foote . . .” he sighed. Turning towards her, he saw she had halted in her sweeping to open her blouse. Embarrassment nearly made him leap down the step to the ground. Talk about rape, he thought to himself. She must be kidding.

The neat, pink line stopped him in mid-flight. It ran from just below her collar and disappeared someplace past the still-fastened fourth button. “He takes his finger,” she said, “just so.”

She stepped up to him and ran her own finger down the front of his shirt, etching a trail of cold through Harry’s sternum.

“And I open right up, dress, bones, and all. Then he takes out my heart and holds it in his hand like he’s giving me some sort of gift. He looks at me while he’s doing it, looks right into my eyes. And l can see my heart move up and down like a mouse twitching in his palm.”

She was standing very close to him, closer than he would want anyone he didn’t know well to stand.

“I hate him,” she said. “He cured my angina, but I hate him. It’s like he comes back ’cause he wants me to know what he done for me. I don’t give a shit. Wish I was back the way I was, even with the breathing hard to walk across the room, even with the waking up in the night with the pain in my chest. He hurts me,” she told him. “He hurts me so bad. Seem like if it was a miracle, it wouldn’t hurt so much, don’t you think? Seem like if it was a real miracle he wouldn’t have to come back all the time.”

She stepped away. He looked down. The sienna stain was right between his feet.

A few yards away from the porch steps the boy stopped and made a hooting sound like a night bird. Harry flinched and glanced the boy’s way. The boy’s blond hair was plastered over his forehead with sweat. His eyes were the same dull, muddy brown as his mother’s. His expression was frightened.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Foote told her son. “He ain’t here to hurt nothing. Just asking questions is all.”

The boy made a “whuh-whuh” noise that sounded like it might have been a question, but the woman ignored him. The dog crept out from the shade of the steps to stand with the boy.

“Donnie was deaf,” Mrs. Foote said as she turned to Harry, “’til the man cured him. He hears now, he understands what I’m saying, but he still won’t talk.” She held out her hand to her son. “You want to come up and show him what that man done to your ears? You want to come up on the porch now, Donnie?”

The boy backed away three paces and then swiveled and sprinted back to the barn, the dog at his heels.

Mrs. Foote’s blouse still gaped open. Harry’s gaze was drawn to that line. It ran between the crepy mounds of her breasts, too straight, too neat, to be an incision.

She took the broom, placed it against the side of the house and then walked down to the yard, Harry tagging after. In the back was a clothesline with its burden of mended cotton. On the fronts of all the dresses were faded blotches of brownish red. There were dark auburn stains on the shoulders of the wash-stiff shirts.

“He holds onto my heart and looks into my eyes and I keep thinking that one night he’ll squeeze. Donnie screams when he cuts into his ears. I don’t when he cuts me, ’cause I don’t want to upset the boy any more than need be. No need to make it any worse than it is.”

“Who do you think the man is? I mean do you see him well enough? Do you remember him clearly?”

Her voice changed to a harsh, spitting whisper. “I’m afraid . . . sometimes I think . . . what if it’s Jesus? I mean, he don’t look much like those pictures they got in Sunday School, but what if it’s Jesus all the same? Who else can heal like that?”

“The other people . . .” Harry said before his voice died. He had to clear his throat to ask the rest. “Your neighbors. Have they had experiences like this?”

She tossed a stiff, torn towel into her clothing basket and straightened to look at him. “Janie Mitchell killed herself three months ago. With her it was just the dyspepsia. The man took out her stomach just the same. Dutton Friendly put a gun in his mouth just last week. He used to have the arthritis in his back. I don’t know. Some people can take it more than others, but you get tired of it, hear? You get real tired.”

Mrs. Foote looked tired, tired in a way Harry knew he could never understand. Mrs. Foote was worn old by her very survival; the woodstove cooking; the farming; the burden of the nightly miracles.

“And your husband?”

“It was his eyes,” Mrs. Foote told him in a strained voice, her face knotted up into an expression of pitying repulsion. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said in a whimper, “Jimmy Lee just couldn’t stand what that man did to his eyes.”

Harry swallowed hard and pushed his glasses back in place. To Mrs. Foote’s back the sun was crouching down fast behind a stand of trees.

After a moment she got her face back in control. She tried to smile, but shouldn’t have. “Stay on a bit. I’m about to set out dinner.”

The air was cooling down, but it was suddenly hard for Harry to breathe. “Maybe I’d better go.”

“Sit a spell,” she said. “Please. I’ll fix you some tea and hominy cake and greens.”