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

They talk of nothing. It’s just as well. Charlie does not remember much about the trip to Brazil, does not remember anything of what he’s done in the three days since getting back. No problem, for she seems to want to talk only of tonight. They drive to the Castle, and he tells her its history. He feels an irony about it as he explains. She, after all, is the reason he knows the history. A few years from now she will be part of a theater company that revives the Castle as a public amphitheater. But now it is falling into ruin, a monument to the old WPA, a great castle with turrets and benches made of native stone. It is on the property of the state mental hospital, and so hardly anyone knows it’s there. They are alone as they leave the car and walk up the crumbling steps to the flagstone stage.

She is entranced. She stands in the middle of the stage, facing the benches. He watches as she raises her hand, speech waiting at the verge of her lips. He remembers something. Yes, that is the gesture she made when she bade her nurse farewell in Romeo and Juliet. No, not made. Will make, rather. The gesture must already be in her, waiting for this stage to draw it out.

She turns to him and smiles because the place is strange and odd and does not belong in Provo, but it does belong to her. She should have been born in the Renaissance, Charlie says softly. She hears him. He must have spoken aloud. “You belong in an age when music was clean and soft and there was no makeup. No one would rival you then.”

She only smiles at the conceit. “I missed you,” she says.

He touches her cheek. She does not shy away. Her cheek presses into his hand, and he knows that she understands why he brought her here and what he means to do.

Her breasts are perfect but small, her buttocks are boyish and slender, and the only hair on her body is that which tumbles onto her shoulders, that which he must brush out of her face to kiss her again. “I love you,” she whispers. “All my life I love you.”

And it is exactly as he would have had it in a dream, except that the flesh is tangible, the ecstasy is real, and the breeze turns colder as she shyly dresses again. They say nothing more as he takes her home. Her mother has fallen asleep on the living room couch, a jumble of the Daily Herald piled around her feet. Only then does he remember that for her there will be a tomorrow, and on that tomorrow Charlie will not call. For three months Charlie will not call, and she’ll hate him.

He tries to soften it. He tries by saying, “Some things can happen only once.” It is the sort of thing he might then have said. But she only puts her finger on his lips and says, “I’ll never forget.” Then she turns and walks toward her mother, to waken her. She turns and motions for Charlie to leave, then smiles again and waves. He waves back and goes out of the door and drives home. He lies awake in this bed that feels like childhood to him, and he wishes it could have gone on forever like this. If should have gone on like this, he thinks. She is no child. She was no child, he should have thought, for THIEF was already transporting him home.

“What’s wrong, Charlie?” Jock asked.

Charlie awoke. It had been hours since THIEF brought him back. It was the middle of the night, and Charlie realized that he had been crying in his sleep. “Nothing,” he said.

“You’re crying, Charlie. I’ve never seen you cry before.”

“Go plug into a million volts, Jock. I had a dream.”

“What dream?”

“I destroyed her.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It was a goddamned selfish thing to do.”

“You’d do it again. But it didn’t hurt her.”

“She was only fourteen.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“I’m tired. I was asleep. Leave me alone.”

“Charlie, remorse isn’t your style.”

Charlie pulled the blanket over his head, feeling petulant and wondering whether this childish act was another proof that he was retreating into senility after all.

“Charlie, let me tell you a bedtime story.”

“I’ll erase you.”

“Once upon a time, ten years ago, an old woman named Rachel Carpenter petitioned for a day in her past. And it was a day with someone, and it was a day with you. So the routine circuits called me, as they always do when your name comes up, and I found her a day. She only wanted to visit, you see, only wanted to relive a good day. I was surprised, Charlie. I didn’t know you ever had good days.”

This program had been with Jock too long. It knew too well how to get under his skin.

“And in fact there were no days as good as she thought,” Jock continued. “Only anticipation and disappointment. That’s all you ever gave anybody, Charlie. Anticipation and disappointment.”

“I can count on you.”

“This woman was in a home for the mentally incapable. And so I gave her a day. Only instead of a day of disappointment, or promises she knew would never be fulfilled, I gave her a day of answers. I gave her a night of answers, Charlie.”

“You couldn’t know that I’d have you do this. You couldn’t have known it ten years ago.”

“That’s all right, Charlie. Play along with me. You’re dreaming anyway, aren’t you?”

“And don’t wake me up.”

“So an old woman went back into a young girl’s body on twenty-eight October 1973, and the young girl never knew what had happened; so it didn’t change her life, don’t you see?”

“It’s a lie.”

“No, it isn’t. I can’t lie, Charlie. You programmed me not to lie. Do you think I would have let you go back and harm her?”

“She was the same. She was as I remembered her.”

“Her body was.”

“She hadn’t changed. She wasn’t an old woman, Jock. She was a girl. She was a girl, Jock.”

And Charlie thought of an old woman dying in an institution, surrounded by yellow walls and pale gray sheets and curtains. He imagined young Rachel inside that withered form, imprisoned in a body that would not move, trapped in a mind that could never again take her along her bright, mysterious trails.

“I flashed her picture on the television,” Jock said.

And yet, Charlie thought, how is it less bearable than that beautiful boy who wanted so badly to do the right thing that he did it all wrong, lost his chance, and now is caught in the sum of all his wrong turns? I got on the road they all wanted to take, and I reached the top, but it wasn’t where I should have gone. I’m still that boy. I did not have to lie when I went home to her.

“I know you pretty well, Charlie,” Jock said. “I knew that you’d be enough of a bastard to go back. And enough of a human being to do it right when you got there. She came back happy, Charlie. She came back satisfied.”

His night with a beloved child was a lie then; it wasn’t young Rachel any more than it was young Charlie. He looked for anger inside himself but couldn’t find it. For a dead woman had given him a gift, and taken the one he offered, and it still tasted sweet.

“Time for sleep, Charlie. Go to sleep again. I just wanted you to know that there’s no reason to feel any remorse for it. No reason to feel anything bad at all.”

Charlie pulled the covers tight around his neck, unaware that he had begun that habit years ago, when the strange shadowy shapes hid in his closet and only the blanket could keep him safe. Pulled the covers high and tight, and closed his eyes, and felt her hand stroke him, felt her breast and hip and thigh, and heard her voice as breath against his cheek.

“O chestnut tree,” Jock said, as he had been taught to say, “… great rooted blossomer,

“Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?