Gene Wolfe: Home Fires

Unable to speak, he nodded. His hand had found her shoulder in the dark; bowing before her, he kissed her.

“I took my own shirt off. I guess you found that out when you put your arms around me.”

It was difficult, but he said, “I did, Seashell.”

“Want to do the rest for me? If you don’t, just say so and I’ll go.”

* * *

Much later, while she was in the bathroom doing the things that women did at such a time, he thought back on all that he had heard and seen that evening.

The line of light beneath the bathroom door vanished with a click. He heard the door open and her soft barefoot step before she said, “Your turn.”

He rose. As he passed the table at which the three of them had eaten, he picked up the little notebook beside her plate. In the bathroom he read:

Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue.

Sv #66797-9053-0169101

Base telephone 8897 4434-83622

Chelle 7990 7374-17840

I am Jane Sims Jane Sims I am Jane Sims

“God is love.”

“Love is blind.”

If these be true, then God is blind: simple logic that would appear to have escaped the theologians. Res ipsa loquitur , love is not blind, neither God’s love nor man’s, though we all wish at times to escape God’s eye, and though it must at times appear that the lover cannot see what we see—unless, of course, we ourselves are that lover.

Like God, the lover sees but forgives. Chelle is hard and violent, but that is scarcely a fault; she could never have returned to me if she had not been both. She is self-centered; how could a woman so tall, so strong, and so lovely not be? She seems blind to my faults, but without that blindness I could not have had her love; I am a mass of faults, held together as it were by a little skin and the law, mortalium rerum misera beatitudo .

These arms—my arms—held her. That is the sole great and significant point, the pivotal thing and the unforgettable thing. We had made love: I clumsily and without spontaneity, she a tigress and a nymph. (Indeed, I ought to have been Zeus, since none but Zeus could have matched her.) Nothing that we did in bed, nothing that we could ever do there, could match that first embrace, when I held her in my arms beneath an overcast sky, with the cold wind whipping dust from between a thousand parked cars and the crowd jostling us without courtesy, mercy, or effect.

The Army thinks her mad and so do I, a woman so young and fine cleaving to a balding middle-aged lawyer? Yes, Chelle is mad, and I am mad to love so much something that I cannot, finally, possess—as mad as an astronomer who loves the stars. Bedlamites wandered naked once, begging, with traces of the straw they slept in still in their hair, or so we read, those few of us who still read anything at all. Did they love at times, the naked madman and the naked madwoman? Surely. Oh, surely. Chelle and I were naked, Caliban and Miranda, and how we loved! Let the Army think her mad and let her go with me. The Army itself is mad, as are all bureaucracies.

And yet Chelle loves it.

The resurrected Vanessa is sane, and as a sane woman must surely see that I see through her every stratagem, though she does not desist from them and in fact doubles and redoubles her efforts. How can I resist her? I have had brain scans, too; will I not find myself in similar straits at some far-off date, a resurrected defense lawyer restored to life’s shallow shadow to defend the indefensible? Then how I shall struggle to prolong the case! Struggle, knowing that I will live no longer than the cause I champion in that future court. “Ladies, gentlemen, visiting Os, and self-aware mechanisms of the jury, surely you realize that your verdict, whenever you may reach it, must…”

Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

Who is Jane Sims? Well, quite obviously, Chelle is. Multiple personality disorder is by no means unknown, though I would think it must be uncommon. Can it be cured? If so, how? I should ask Boris.

What if I wake beside Jane Sims? What will she be like, and what will I be like in her company? How long will she persist, and what will she want to do? Want me to do?

So many questions.

Where’s Charlie? We did the show in high school and had a most wonderful time pretending to be English and Victorian, inserting lovely little digs at the EU. Now I find the question with me still.

Where is Charlie? Chelle and Vanessa hardly speak of him. Hey, kids! One of our cast is missing.

He visited Chelle when we were in college, as to the best of my knowledge her mother never did—a tall blond man who had run to fat. He wore sunglasses indoors and out; when I asked him about it, he told me quite frankly that he did it so others couldn’t tell what he was looking at.

That frankness is the quality I remember best. Women delight (or so they say) in men who are brave and strong, yet vulnerable—in men who will feel the lash, in other words. Charles C. Blue, I feel quite certain, would never feel any woman’s lash.

Once, in an old stone restaurant not far from the campus, we talked about firings; and now, when I have to fire someone I can sense the ivy on the walls outside and feel that if I were to look down hard enough at the surface of my desk I would see the clams casino that Chelle’s father insisted upon ordering as an appetizer.

He had spoken casually of firing his secretary. I said that it must have been a trying interview, and he laughed. “I said you’ve been doing a lousy job for the past year so clean out your desk, and she started bawling. I told her to shut the hell up or I’d say she stole office supplies. Which she did, by the way. I told her I wanted her out in an hour, and she almost made it.”

Chelle said, “Charlie!”

“Look, honey. She could have done a good job if she’d wanted to. She’ll be two or three years on unemployment, and when she finally gets a job she’ll try to hang on to it.” Charlie laughed again. “I’d phoned NEO, so she had to fight her way through the applicants. Don’t you think she loved that?”

“She thought you’d never fire her.”

“Because I’d been balling her? It was grow-up time, honey.”

I would never fire Susan. Nor will she ever give me reason to. There never was a better secretary, nor a more loyal one; although she believes that Dianne will replace her (as Dianne herself believes) Susan will remain with me for as long as I practice my profession.

“I got a secretary and two assistants for as much as I’d been paying Marcia,” Chelle’s father told us. “They know what happened to her, so they won’t sit around doing their nails and wondering about a five-letter word for jaguar.”

The executive smiled the smile of a gambler who knows that he can only win. “I told you I’d give you fifteen minutes, Mr. Grison. You’ve used only six. I’ll try to be equally concise.”

Skip waited.

“You say that Vanessa Hennessey is a human being, and that reverting her will result in her death. For that death you threaten Reanimation with the law, both criminal and civil. We can prove by public records that Vanessa Hennessey died some years ago. Fingerprints and retinal patterns will prove that the woman to whom you refer is in fact an employee of ours, and not Vanessa Hennessey. Let me add that I have no intention of divulging our employee’s identity to you here. It will be divulged in court—if necessary. Comment?”

“None at this time.”

“Good.” The executive offered Skip a cigar, which he declined. “Mr. Grison, you’re in an odd position. I won’t say an unethical one, but it’s pretty odd. You’re Vanessa Hennessey’s sponsor as well as her attorney. Pro bono?”