Connie Willis - Fire Watch

Daisy said quietly, “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t hurt us.” There had been no fear as she stood digging her toes into the sand and looking up at him, only wonder. “He—”

“You’re crazy!” her brother shouted. “You know that? You’re crazy. You talk about him like he’s your boyfriend or something! It’s the sun, the wonderful sun that’s going to kill us all!” He yanked the book away from her. He was crying.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy was about to say; but their grandmother came in just then, hatless, with her hair blowing around her thin, sunburned face.

“They got the material in,” she said jubilantly. “I bought enough for all the windows.” She spilled out two sacks of red gingham. It billowed out across the table like the northern lights, red over red. “I thought it would never get here.”

Daisy reached out to touch it.

She waited for him, sitting at the white-damask table of the dining car. He hesitated at the door, standing framed by the snow of ash behind him, and then came gaily in, singing.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your theory do,” he sang. He carried in his arms a bolt of red cloth. It billowed out from the bolt as he handed it to her grandmother-she standing on the chair, transfixed by joy, the pieces of paper, the yellow tape measure fallen from her forever.

Daisy came and stood in front of him.

“Daisy, Daisy,” he said gaily “Tell me—”

She put her hand on his chest. “No theory,” she said. “I know.”

“Everything, Daisy?” He smiled the easy, lopsided smile, and she thought sadly that even knowing, she would not be able to see him as he was, but only as the boy who had worked at the grocery store, the boy who had known everything.

“No, but I think I know.” She held her hand firmly against his chest, over the flaming hoop of his breast. “I don’t think we are people anymore. I don’t know what we are—atoms stripped of our electrons maybe, colliding endlessly against each other in the center of the sun while it burns itself to ash in the endless snowstorm at its heart.”

He gave her no clue. His smile was still confident, easy “What about me, Daisy?” he asked.

“I think you are my golden bear, my flaming hoop, I think you are Ra, with no end to your name at all, Ra who knows everything.”

“And who are you?”

“I am Daisy, who loved the sun.”

He did not smile, did not change his mocking expression. But his tanned hand closed over hers, still pushing against his chest.

“What will I be now, an X-ray zigzagging all the way to the surface till I turn into light? Where will you take me after you have taken me? To Saturn, where the sun shines on the cold rings till they melt into happiness? Is that where you shine now, on Saturn? Will you take me there? Or will we stand forever like this, me with my bucket and shovel, squinting up at you?”

Slowly he gave her hand back to her. “Where do you want to go, Daisy?”

Her grandmother still stood on the chair, holding the cloth as if it were a benediction. Daisy reached out and touched the cloth, as she had in the moment when the sun went nova. She smiled up at her grandmother. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s come.”

She bent suddenly to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside as if she thought because she knew she might be granted some sort of vision, might see for some small moment the little girl that was herself, with her little girl’s chest and toddler’s stomach; …might see herself as she really was: Daisy, in the sun. But all she could see was the endless snow.

Her brother was reading on the blue couch in her mother’s living room. She stood over him, watching him read. “I’m afraid now,” Daisy said, but it wasn’t her brothers face that looked back at her.

All right, then, Daisy thought. None of them are any help. It doesn’t matter. I have come face to face with what I fear and what I love and they are the same thing.

“All right, then,” Daisy said, and turned back to Ron. “I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down.” She stopped and squinted up at him. “I love the sun,” she said.

When he put his arm around her shoulder, she did not move away. His hand closed on her breast and he bent down to kiss her.

I used to write confessions stories with titles like “I Called for Help on My CB… and Got a Rapist Instead.” I have made various pronouncements about this tawdry part of my past, calling the confessions a “quaint apprenticeship” and declaring that “I did them for the money,” but the sordid truth is that I loved writing confessions, and whenever I can get away with it, I still do.

What throwed me off about this guy was the way he looked. I mean, I ain’t no Burt Reynolds, but this guy was just plain ugly And little. He was wearing some of them fancy high-heeled boots, and he still didn’t hardly come up to my armpit. He had on a fancy East Coast suit and one of them little bitty black mustaches that look like they been painted on.

“Hello,” he says, like I should know who he is.

“Yeah?”

He kind of laughs to himself, and then he says, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

I shake my head, wondering if now they are hiring midgets at Welfare, which would be a switch. Most of those guys are twice as big as me ever since the Mafia took over the department. If he is one of the Welfare guys I am sure as hell not going to let him in. Last time they grabbed a six-pack of Coors and docked our check fifty bucks. They was looking at Marjean’s love magazines, too. Hell, what good is all that money if they won’t let you have no fun with it? Anyway, he can just stand outside till I figure out who he is.

“Don’t you remember?” he says, still kind of laughing. “Twelve ninety-five postpaid. Delivery guaranteed in three weeks?”

I was right. They’re on to Marjean’s love books. Only how’d they find out about this deal? “I don’t know nothing,” I says.

He smiles real wide. “I’m your clone ,” he says.

Well, what do you know? “Marjean,” I calls out, pretty cockylike, “Marjean Ramona, you come on out here. I got something for you to see.”

She comes sauntering out in her Indian nightgown which don’t have no sides, just strings to hold it together, and which is open in the front just about down to kingdom come. She’s got her hair up in braids, too. That means she’s in one of her Indian moods, prancing around not letting me touch her 'cause she’s got royal Kiowa blood.

I figure she’ll be pretty mad when I tell her who this guy is, since she was the one who kept saying the ad was a fake, but she don’t act mad at all. She just sort of smiles at the guy and pulls her nightgown together in the front. That don’t do no good. She ends up showing more than ever. She flips them black braids at him and says, real breathy, “Hi. What’s your name?”

“Marjean,” I says before he can answer. “His name’s the same as mine. He’s my clone .”

She’s not even listening to me. “Come on in,” she says, and the guy sort of scrapes past her into the house.

She starts right after him, but I got a hold of her arm. “That’s the clone I sent for that you said was a fake.”

“I know,” she says in that dreamylike voice. “I wonder what his name is.”

“I told you, Marjean. Same as mine. He’s just like me.”

“Maybe,” she says. She licks her lips with her tongue.

“You gotta be nice to him, Marjean,” I says, wishing she would show some enthusiasm. “Get him one of them beers we got hid outback. And take off that nightgown. We got company.”

She looks up at me with them big black eyes of hers and says, “Why, that’s just what I had in mind.”