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

The man looked at him coldly, but his eyes danced with anger. No, not anger. Fear. Howard realized the man was afraid of him.

“This is a decent place,” the man said softly. “You can take your creatures and your booze and your pink stinking elephants and that’s a hundred bucks for the window, a hundred bucks right now, and you can get out of here in an hour, an hour, you hear? Or I’m calling the police, you hear?”

“I hear.” He heard. The man left when Howard counted out five twenties. The man seemed careful to avoid touching Howard’s hands, as if Howard had become, somehow, repulsive. Well, he had. To himself, if to no one else. He closed the door as soon as the man was gone. He packed the few belongings he had brought to the apartment in two suitcases and went downstairs and called a cab and rode to work. The cabby looked at him sourly, and wouldn’t talk. It was fine with Howard, if only the driver hadn’t kept looking at him through the mirror—nervously, as if he was afraid of what Howard might do or try. I won’t try anything, Howard said to himself, I’m a decent man. Howard tipped the cabby well and then gave him twenty to take his bags to his house in Queens, where Alice could damn well keep them for a while. Howard was through with the tenement—that one or any other.

Obviously it had been a nightmare, last night and this morning. The monster was only visible to him, Howard decided. Only the chair and the glass had fallen from the fourth floor, or the manager would have noticed.

Except that the baby had landed on the truck, and might have been real, and might be discovered in New Jersey or Pennsylvania later today.

Couldn’t be real. He had killed it last night and it was whole again this morning. A nightmare. I didn’t really kill anybody, he insisted. (Except the dog. Except Father, said a new, ugly voice in the back of his mind.)

Work. Draw lines on paper, answer phone calls, dictate letters, keep your mind off your nightmares, off your family, off the mess your life is turning into. “Hell of a good party last night.” Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? “How are you today, Howard?” Feel fine, Dolores, fine—thanks to you. “Got the roughs on the IBM thing?” Nearly, nearly. Give me another twenty minutes. “Howard, you don’t look well.” Had a rough night. The party, you know.

He kept drawing on the blotter on his desk instead of going to the drawing table and producing real work. He doodled out faces. Alice’s face, looking stern and terrible. The face of Stu’s ugly wife. Dolores’s face, looking sweet and yielding and stupid. And Rhiannon’s face.

But with his daughter Rhiannon, he couldn’t stop with the face.

His hand started to tremble when he saw what he had drawn. He ripped the sheet off the blotter, crumpled it, and reached under the desk to drop it in the wastebasket. The basket lurched, and flippers snaked out to seize his hand in an iron grip. Howard screamed, tried to pull his hand away. The child came with it, the leg flippers grabbing Howard’s right leg. The suction pad stung, bringing back the memory of all the pain last night. He scraped the child off against a filing cabinet, then ran for the door, which was already opening as several of his co-workers tumbled into his office demanding, “What is it! What’s wrong! Why did you scream like that!”

Howard led them gingerly over to where the child should be. Nothing. Just an overturned wastebasket, Howard’s chair capsized on the floor. But Howard’s window was open, and he could not remember opening it. “Howard, what is it? Are you tired, Howard? What’s wrong?”

I don’t feel well. I don’t feel well at all.

Dolores put her arm around him, led him out of the room. “Howard, I’m worried about you.”

I’m worried, too.

“Can I take you home? I have my car in the garage downstairs. Can I take you home?”

Where’s home? Don’t have a home, Dolores.

“My home, then. I have an apartment, you need to lie down and rest. Let me take you home.”

Dolores’s apartment was decorated in early Holly Hobby, and when she put records on the stereo it was old Carpenters and recent Captain and Tennille. Dolores led him to the bed, gently undressed him, and then, because he reached out to her, undressed herself and made love to him before she went back to work. She was naively eager. She whispered in his ear that he was only the second man she had ever loved, the first in five years. Her inept lovemaking was so sincere it made him want to cry.

When she was gone he did cry, because she thought she meant something to him and she did not.

Why am I crying? he asked himself. Why should I care? It’s not my fault she let me get a handle on her… .

Sitting on the dresser in a curiously adult posture was the child, carelessly playing with itself as it watched Howard intently. “No,” Howard said, pulling himself up to the head of the bed. “You don’t exist,” he said. “No one’s ever seen you but me.” The child gave no sign of understanding. It just rolled over and began to slither down the front of the dresser.

Howard reached for his clothes, took them out of the bedroom. He put them on in the living room as he watched the door. Sure enough, the child crept along the carpet to the living room; but Howard was dressed by then, and he left.

He walked the streets for three hours. He was coldly rational at first. Logical. The creature does not exist. There is no reason to believe in it.

But bit by bit his rationality was worn away by constant flickers of the creature at the edges of his vision. On a bench, peering over the back at him; in a shop window; staring from the cab of a milk truck. Howard walked faster and faster, not caring where he went, trying to keep some intelligent process going on in his mind, and failing utterly as he saw the child, saw it clearly, dangling from a traffic signal.

What made it even worse was that occasionally a passerby, violating the unwritten law that New Yorkers are forbidden to look at each other, would gaze at him, shudder, and look away. A short European-looking woman crossed herself. A group of teenagers looking for trouble weren’t looking for him—they grew silent, let him pass in silence, and in silence watched him out of sight.

They may not be able to see the child, Howard realized, but they see something.

And as he grew less and less coherent in the ramblings of his mind, memories began flashing on and off, his life passing before his eyes like a drowning man is supposed to see, only, he realized, if a drowning man saw this he would gulp at the water, breathe it deeply just to end the visions. They were memories he had been unable to find for years; memories he would never have wanted to find.

His poor, confused mother, who was so eager to be a good parent that she read everything, tried everything. Her precocious son Howard read it, too, and understood it better. Nothing she tried ever worked. And he accused her several times of being too demanding, of not demanding enough; of not giving him enough love, of drowning him in phony affection; of trying to take over with his friends, of not liking his friends enough. Until he had badgered and tortured the woman until she was timid every time she spoke to him, careful and longwinded and she phrased everything in such a way that it wouldn’t offend, and while now and then he made her feel wonderful by giving her a hug and saying, “Have I got a wonderful Mom,” there were far more times when he put a patient look on his face and said, “That again, Mom? I thought we went over that years ago.” A failure as a parent, that’s what you are, he reminded her again and again, though not in so many words, and she nodded and believed and died inside with every contact they had. He got everything he wanted from her.