Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Weekends I live in a trailer in Piedmont. I live alone. The place is spotlessly clean because cleaning is something I do religiously. Besides, I tell myself, I might want to bring a woman home with me one night. Some nights I even do, and some nights I even enjoy it, but I always get restless and irritable when they start trying to get me to change my work schedule or take them along to the motels I live in or, once only, get the trailer-park manager to let them into my trailer when I’m gone. To keep things cozy for me. I’m not interested in “cozy.” This is probably because of my mother’s death; her cancer and my responsibilities as housekeeper for my father probably explain why I am a neat housekeeper. Therapist, therap thyself. The days passed in rain and highways and depressing people depressed out of their minds; the nights passed in television and sandwiches and motel bedsheets at state expense; and then it was time to go to the Millard County Rest Home again, where Elaine was waiting. It was then that I thought of her and realized that the rain had been going on for more than a week, and the poor girl must be almost out of her mind. I bought a cassette of Copland conducting Copland. She insisted on cassettes, because they stopped. Eight-tracks went on and on until she couldn’t think.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

“Locked in a cage by a cruel duke in Transylvania. It was only four feet high, suspended over a pond filled with crocodiles. I got out by picking the lock with my teeth. Luckily, the crocodiles weren’t hungry. Where have you been?”

“I mean it. Don’t you keep a schedule?”

“I’m right on my schedule, Elaine. This is Wednesday. I was here last Wednesday. This year Christmas falls on a Wednesday, and I’ll be here on Christmas.”

“It feels like a year.”

“Only ten months. Till Christmas. Elaine, you aren’t being any fun.”

She wasn’t in the mood for fun. There were tears in her eyes. “I can’t stand much more,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m afraid.”

And she was afraid. Her voice trembled.

“At night, and in the daytime, whenever I sleep. I’m just the right size.”

“For what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you were just the right size.”

“I did? Oh, I don’t know what I meant. I’m going crazy. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To keep me sane. It’s the rain. I can’t do anything, I can’t see anything, and all I can hear most of the time is the hissing of the rain.”

“Like outer space,” I said, remembering what she had said the last time.

She apparently didn’t remember our discussion. She looked startled. “How did you know?” she asked.

“You told me.”

“There isn’t any sound in outer space,” she said.

“Oh,” I answered.

“There’s no air out there.”

“I knew that.”

“Then why did you say, ‘Oh, of course? The engines. You can hear them all over the ship. It’s a drone, all the time. That’s just like the rain. Only after a while you can’t hear it anymore. It becomes like silence. Anansa told me.”

Another imaginary friend. Her file said that she had kept her imaginary friends long after most children give them up. That was why I had first been assigned to see her, to get rid of the friends. Grunty, the ice pig; Howard, the boy who beat up everybody; Sue Ann, who would bring her dolls and play with them for her, making them do what Elaine said for them to do; Fuchsia, who lived among the flowers and was only inches high. There were others. After a few sessions with her I saw that she knew that they weren’t real. But they passed time for her. They stepped outside her body and did things she could never do. I felt they did her no harm at all, and destroying that imaginary world for her would only make her lonelier and more unhappy. She was sane, that was certain. And yet I kept seeing her, not entirely because I liked her so much. Partly because I wondered whether she had been pretending when she told me she knew her friends weren’t real. Anansa was a new one.

“Who’s Anansa?”

“Oh, you don’t want to know.” She didn’t want to talk about her; that was obvious.

“I want to know.”

She turned away. “I can’t make you go away, but I wish you would. When you get nosy.”

“It’s my job.”

“Job!” She sounded contemptuous. “I see all of you, running around on your healthy legs, doing all your jobs.”

What could I say to her? “It’s how we stay alive,” I said. “I do my best.”

Then she got a strange look on her face; I’ve got a secret, she seemed to say, and 1 want you to pry it out of me. “Maybe I can get a job, too.”

“Maybe,” I said. I tried to think of something she could do.

“There’s always music,” she said.

I misunderstood. “There aren’t many instruments you can play. That’s the way it is.” Dose of reality and all that.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Okay. Never again.”

“I meant that there’s always the music. On my job.”

“And what job is this?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said, rolling her eyes mysteriously and turning toward the window. I imagined her as a normal fifteen-year-old girl. Ordinarily I would have interpreted this as flirting. But there was something else under all this. A feeling of desperation. She was right. I really would like to know. I made a rather logical guess. I put together the two secrets she was trying to get me to figure out today.

“What kind of job is Anansa going to give you?”

She looked at me, startled. “So it’s true then.”

“What’s true?”

“It’s so frightening. I keep telling myself it’s a dream. But it isn’t, is it?”

“What, Anansa?”

“You think she’s just one of my friends, don’t you. But they’re not in my dreams, not like this. Anansa—”

“What about Anansa?”

“She sings to me. In my sleep.”

My trained psychologist’s mind immediately conjured up mother figures. “Of course,” I said.

“She’s in space, and she sings to me. You wouldn’t believe the songs.”

It reminded me. I pulled out the cassette I had bought for her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome. Want to hear it?”

She nodded. I put it on the cassette player. Appalachian Spring. She moved her head to the music. I imagined her as a dancer. She felt the music very well.

But after a few minutes she stopped moving and started to cry.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

“You’ve heard it before?”

“Turn it off. Turn it off!”

I turned it off. “Sorry,” I said. “Thought you’d like it.”

“Guilt, nothing but guilt,” she said. “You always feel guilty, don’t you?”

“Pretty nearly always,” I admitted cheerfully. A lot of my parents threw psychological jargon in my face. Or soap-opera language.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just—it’s just not the music. Not the music. Now that I’ve heard it, everything is so dark compared to it. Like the rain, all gray and heavy and dim, as if the composer is trying to see the hills but the rain is always in the way. For a few minutes I thought he was getting it right.”

“Anansa’s music?”

She nodded. “I know you don’t believe me. But I hear her when I’m asleep. She tells me that’s the only time she can communicate with me. It’s not talking. It’s all her songs. She’s out there, in her starship, singing. And at night I hear her.”

“Why you?”

“You mean, Why only me?” She laughed. “Because of what I am. You told me yourself. Because I can’t run around, I live in my imagination. She says that the threads between minds are very thin and hard to hold. But mine she can hold, because I live completely in my mind. She holds on to me. When I go to sleep, I can’t escape her now anymore at all.”