Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“Snow! Snow!” the kids sang out, crowding to the window. The room was entirely bare, and one eight-foot section of paneling had been pried off, exposing beams and caulking and black asbestos siding. We burned the cornices first, then the shelves, cabinets and banisters. The mantelpiece kept us warm for an entire day, being about six feet long and two feet square and very goddam hard to saw in half. The moldings around the floors and ceilings were used quickly, making excellent kindling, and we had just begun the sad task of prying up the parquet squares in the dining room. Paper of any kind was so rare that we used old grease and garbage to seal cracks as we slowly pulled off pieces of the house, like Hansel and Gretel plucking hard cookies from the witch’s roof.

Betty, my putative mate of seventeen years, zipped her padded jacket shut and walked carefully down the partially dismantled steps to the basement. She carried twenty plastic jars outside to catch the snow for later water storage. The poor girl cried the winter we burned the draperies, but we had used all our extra clothing for fuel years ago. I used to have twenty suits and eighty shirts, not counting underwear, old clothes, and handkerchiefs. I worked in a bank and had to dress up every day. Now I was down to two sets of dirty long-johns, six pairs of athletic socks, five layers of sweatshirts, two pairs of woolen pants, a massive corduroy coat, and a thirty-eight-dollar Stetson that I dearly loved. I felt like crying myself the year we cut up my two-hundred-dollar cashmere shooting jacket and stacked the squared pieces beside the fireplace. Much later, on a twenty-below evening, I was to cut the brim from the Stetson and use it to start a fire. Life was, as Bill, our seventeen-year-old son, put it, a matter of groveling about for things to bum in the fireplace. For example, think hard—should that vinyl jacket stay thumbtacked over that crack in the wall, or should it be burned as fuel? It would bum rapidly, we decided, and it would smell bad and put sticky black filaments in the air, so leave it where it is. But the drawers in the end tables could be taken apart. Betty loves those heavy tables, so try to fix it so the drawer facings can remain. The two of them will probably have to be burned before spring anyway. Outside, the tortured earth-crust received the balm of white crystals—so soft a fall, and yet so harsh a shower of fluffy meteorites. In the blackened, cracked fireplace, an old cedar log burned quietly, almost with dignity, and I wiped my soot-clogged nose on a tennis ball because I was tired of wiping my nose on my sleeves.

It snowed for three days and three nights, a strange, silent, windless fall of white. When the coppery-red sun rose on the fourth dawn, our tiny parcel of the world was iced like frozen glittery cake frosting. The sky was swept clean, a deeply saturated blue, and the air was so clear that my sense of visual perspective had to accommodate the new binocular cues. Plumes of smoke rose straight up from dozens of chimneys, like faintly wavering pencil lines drawn on bold blue paper. The snow had drifted very little and was about three feet deep everywhere. And the landscape was perfectly untouched, I could not see a single footprint, tire track, animal pawprint, nor any signs of fallen branches (who had even seen a branch in recent years?) or birds or little children, or brave paperboys, or postmen, or milkmen—where had all these nostalgic images come from? Then, next door, Macy heaved his slop jar from an upper window, the shallow tin pan hitting the hard snow-crust face down. A tributary of yellow fluid ran slowly out on to the snow and steam vapors sifted upward. Reality had returned. Sixteen-year-old Alex opened our back door and dropped our full slop jars straight down. Three years ago the door had opened onto a large redwood deck, with handsome railings and bracings and stairs. The deck was dismantled for firewood in 1983.

If life had any meaning left for us that winter, it centered on the primary survival function of keeping warm, keeping tolerably clean and fed, and, above all, fighting back new and persistent incest fantasies, sociometric shiftings in the family group, and trying not to get panicky in boredom or hopelessness. We all sensed that each others’ sex drives were active and strong. I jacked off every day, trying to stay detumescent, and it was a matter of where to go to do it—I had taken to pounding off in the attic, shooting the stuff down into the asbestos-litter insulation (damn shame asbestos won’t bum). Our scents grew pungent and spoor-like, fifteen-year-old Sandra bloomed like a sweet waxy flower, and the boys must have wrestled mightily with their fierce hydraulic pressures. I thought it would be so kind, so beautiful, so eminently right to have intrafamilial sex, but, dammit all, none of us seemed to be able to throw over our incest taboos. I thought how natural it would be for the boys to plow their dam or their female litter-mate, and what better way to introduce a young girl to sex than through the gentle skill of a considerate paternal figure? But tremendous conflicts arose in my mind—thou mayest not incestuate, a voice kept telling me, a stodgy voice straight from the throne of the superego.

The day rang clear and hard and bitterly cold. I spat from the doorway, and the spittle cracked into crystals before it hit the snow. I cranked the wireless and got a weather station report of 18° below zero. We roasted ersatz rabbit legs on the fireplace spit and ate them with hard pumpernickel and warm red wine (I had traded a BMW for three hundred bottles of wine back in 1981 and had never regretted it). We huddled around the fire, hunkered down, like primitive tribesmen worshiping an idol. We smelled of grease cracklings and hot gnawed bones. Sandra smelled lovely, a kind of musk-oil perfume, and the boys also had cologne smells partially masking the basic odors of dirty socks and sweatshirts with sodden-yellow armpits.

What a day to have to go to the goddam store! I had half forgotten, half repressed the idea, and Betty pointed to the boldly circled date on the calendar, giving me a sweet look that seemed to connote sadness, encouragement, and secret promises of intimacies to be shared when I returned. She kissed me skilfully, and an urgency in her brief writhing both pleased and puzzled me. The wine was sweet and nourishing on her lips. I did not notice Alex and Sandra exchanging expectant glances. Bill had gone to break out our outdoor clothing.

I left Betty and Alex and Sandra together, and Bill and I made ready for the bothersome monthly chore of getting food rations at the commissary. I went quickly to the basement, almost as if this were something I would have to do quickly or not at all. Bill and I put on plastic body-suits over the several layers of clothes we always wore, then hefted the heavy hooded parkas from their nails and helped each other put them on. Then we put on snowshoes, opened the garage door, quickly shoveled the steaming dog turds outside, and watched the dogs charge into the three-foot-high snow, barking excitedly, leaping and thrashing, pawing and rearing. We got them back inside and tried the snowcrust ourselves. Immediately our shoes cracked the crust to a depth of about two inches, the wetness froze in my nostrils, and my eyes felt like iced marbles in warm plastic sacs. The silence was incredible, a cotton-muffled aura of urgently compacted oxygen molecules. We knew it was useless to talk—we had made a few bad-weather trips before—so we just paced the snow as best we could, thankful for our ski masks and rubber gloves and for the strength of our relative youth. The fence-gate was damn hard to open enough for us to squeeze through, and we tried to sift flowingly over the snow, but a moderate trudging was what we got, moving unsteadily up the driveway toward the street, two padded figures on a sea of glistening white, metal fences beside us, behind us, in front of us, the fences providing stark, gridlike reference points. We turned left down the steep street and met Macy. He was carrying his chihuahua in a sling around his neck, and the tiny animal looked utterly hairless and vulnerable, trembling, an all but in utero look. Of all the great good luck, a municipal snow plow came grinding up the road, diesel engine screaming, its chute spewing huge fans of snow into the air. “Good Gawdamighty,” Macy said, “will you looky thar—sent straight from heaven above.”