Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

“More private.”

She put her chin on his shoulder. “You might as well have taken me to a tennis court or a football field.”

“Not down here. Up there, Jackie. Inside the tank.”

Her expression, softly starlit, did not change. She tilted her head to estimate the height of the tank and the difficulty of the climb. Joshua was pleased that she did not angrily veto his idea, disappointed that she did not seem more surprised. They had come a long way together, both tonight and over the course of the summer. He, she had admitted, was her fourth lover, whereas he had nervously forfeited his virginity to her amid a small range of sand dunes not far from Santa Rosa Beach. Jackie’s readiness to fornicate inside a metal globe one hundred feet above terra firma was probably far less miraculous than her willingness to fornicate at all. A Vietnamese by birth, a dutiful daughter, and “a good Catholic girl,” she ought to have been as chaste as a nun, but Florida had transformed her without really negating these attributes and now she considered herself an enlightened woman of the world. She insisted on embracing diversity.

“Very imaginative, Joshua.”

“Not for me. For me it was an obvious notion.”

They left his Kawasaki capsized in the grass, vaulted the low fence, and climbed the ladder to the catwalk about the tank’s middle. Joshua carried the flashlight in his belt and the quilt over his shoulder like a serape. As insurance against Jackie’s slipping, he brought up the rear, while she protested that because of the crap he was carrying he was the more likely to fall. Neither of them fell, but the climb made even Joshua dizzy, and they rested on the catwalk before proceeding up the hemisphere-hugging ladder to the hatch in the top of the tank. This time Joshua went first.

Perched on the hatch lip, he played the flashlight beam about the inside of the tank. Scale shone dully on the surfaces that had not yet been sandblasted, and the smell of chlorine, rust, and scoured metal made him hang fire. Maybe this wasn’t such a brilliant idea, after all.

“Go on,” Jackie urged him. “What are you waiting for?”

He descended into the tank. Nimbly, Jackie followed. Against one of the lower slopes, near the abyss of the tower’s riser pipe, they found an island of migrating sand from the blasting. Here, in a conspiracy of whispers and useless hand gestures, they spread the quilt. The butt of the flashlight struck the side of the tank as Joshua was working, and the resultant clangor was deafening.

“People drink the water from these tanks?”

“It’s sampled every month for impurities.”

Her face rendered gargoylish by shadows, Jackie glanced about at the slime and scale. “Ugh.”

It occurred to Joshua that if she could differentiate his face from the encompassing darkness, he must look even more alien than she—but, touching his chin, she leaned forward to kiss him. They melted like candles to their knees. They collapsed into each other on the floating surface of the quilt. Their flesh was warm paraffin, and in the blindness of their melting they were transparent to each other.

When Joshua was next aware of himself as a separate person, they lay side by side, naked and sweat-lathered. The Garden of Eden on stilts, that’s what the stinking water tank had become. The scale corroding the tank emitted not a stench but a perfume. Their bodies were relaxed, purged of lust, and no serpent had yet appeared.

“Nice.”

“Four stars,” Jackie said. “Highly recommended.”

“Let’s get married.”

She let these words echo a moment before saying, “Oh, no, Mr. Kampa. You are a bitter young man who’s not yet totally happy with himself. I don’t want to be the live-in private secretary who records your dreams.”

“I asked you to marry me. You didn’t even think about it.”

“I’ve thought about it many times. I just didn’t think you would ever ask me—Joshua, I’ve got other things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Have you ever heard of Mother Teresa of Calcutta? She’s a role model not many people have tried to follow. I think a lot about trying to do work comparable to hers.”

Joshua yipped like a chihuahua.

“I’m not kidding. It sounds ridiculous to you because you can’t imagine me undertaking a spiritual mission. A mission of mercy. That’s your problem.”

“I asked you to marry me.”

“I told you no, and I told you why. You don’t want to get married either. Think about these dreams you have, Joshua. The apemen in them—the apemen trying to become human—they’re the key. You want what they want, but you don’t know how to get there any better than they do. You’re perplexed and conflicted.”

“I love you, Jackie.”

“That’s your glands talking. Glands and gratitude. You don’t get married for those kinds of reasons. You shouldn’t, anyway.”

“Jackie, I’ve had these goddamn dreams since before I could speak. I’ve been ‘perplexed and conflicted’ since infancy.”

“That’s because you’ve got a mission, and you don’t know what it is yet.”

“You.”

“Fuck that nonsense.”

“How the hell do you know you’re not my mission?”

“Because I have a mission of my own. Otherwise, you know, I would not have been spared when so many others were taken.”

Jackie’s quasi-mysticism was unanswerable. It reminded him that at the center of his own life lay a mystery that he had come to regard as both commonplace and disreputable, like a touch of the clap. He had revealed this mystery to the Tru family because their foreignness—that is, their assumed distance from the prejudices and thought patterns of real people—had made them seem safe confessors. Besides, telling his dreams had helped to win Kha over and demonstrably heightened Jackie’s interest in him. At least at first. Now she was blithely dropping depth charges into the fragile fishbowl of his hopes.

“Anyone who’s alive has been ‘spared,’ Jackie. Trouble is, nobody knows for how long or for what.”

“Some do, and some should.”

“Listen to you, you’re gloating.”

“You’re at odds with yourself, Joshua, not with me. So stop it. You’re also at odds with your own family, and there’s no longer any reason to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“ Eden in His Dreams .”

Ah, yes. His mother’s—rather, Jeannette Monegal’s—proposed book about his uncanny chronic affliction. So far as Joshua knew, the book had never appeared, under either that title or another. He had walked out on her, and she had apparently dropped the project. Jeannette still had no idea to what sanctuary he had fled, however, for he had not tried to get in touch with her since his defection from the West Bronx. Nor was he ready to repair the breach with a telephone call. No, ma’am. No long-distance orgy of apology and forgiveness for him. Who would apologize, who forgive? Joshua closed his eyes and tried to center himself in the impenetrable dark.

“You don’t want to talk about that, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

After a while Jackie said, “What about your job, then? Are you willing to talk about that?”

“You don’t like my job? You don’t want a steeplejack for a husband? A tank painter’s wages don’t thrill you?”

“None of that has anything to do with what I’m talking about, Joshua. Your job is a detour, a stopgap.

You go into some little town and set about sprucing up its most conspicuous phallic landmark. It’s hard, honest work, but for you it’s also a kind of masturbation. Mindless and lonely.”

“Holy shit. I can’t believe this.”

“Can’t believe what?”