Damon Knight - Orbit 18

Outside again, the afternoon sunlight was blinding. We tied the sacks around our necks and walked, heads low, eyes closed to slits, shutting out as much of the whiteness as we could. Bill held both hands over his eyes and I guided him about halfway home, then I closed my eyes and he guided me. The sun was white-hot, murderous in its light, yet giving us little respite from the bitter cold air that penetrated us like embalming fluid. Abreast of our street, we floundered up out of the street-wide trench, and made it the last hundred or so difficult yards to our house, opening the garage door, hugging the warm dogs, and cheering loudly. Above our heads, the huge bed squeaked through the floor, and we heard soft laughter, then loud greeting cheers from Betty and Alex and Sandra.

Betty looked marvelous, her face flushed, lips ripe. Sandra also looked good, somehow excited, blooming, humid, achingly sexual, I thought. And then, by damn, Alex looked like a bull with his cows, and I suddenly realized, just as clear as day, that these three loved ones had been at each other sexually. At first I resented being away, freezing my ass off, while they were plowing each other, but then I thought, this is the ultimate familial bond, and I was happy for them. I didn’t know what to do or say at the time, so I just coasted mentally and acted relaxed and happy and tired. After we divided the food rations, we all drank wine, sat in a tight circle, and Sandra leaned across and kissed me earnestly. Then she kissed Bill and Alex and Betty, and we all hugged each other. Alex brought a prized old cedar log, topped it with pine slabs, and set a fine, roaring blast going in the fireplace. As if some collective sense of exquisite imminence motivated us, we made breathless tropistic movements toward group sex, the growing darkness helping Bill and me past our inhibitions. I all but sobbed with joy as Bill mounted Betty, ventral over dorsal, Sandra guiding his glistening mallet to its target beautifully. Later, our beautiful children sang, and stroked Betty and me as we performed a long, ritualistic pas cl deux. Through the early-evening hours, we all put our mouths and hands and genitals wherever the urge moved us, and it was a beautiful scene. I had never been happier, and I began to think that incest should be the true theme for the Madonna and Child paradigms, the parent rewarding the child with the gift of patient, gentle sexual initiation. How quickly our taboos left us!

Late that evening we ate, slowly, ritualistically, luxuriating in the warm emotionality of our incestuous circle. We took a taper to our bedroom and took successive spoon positions on the bed. I put a sheepdog next to Bill, Betty clung to Bill’s back, then Alex slipped in next to Betty. Sandra moved to embrace Alex from behind, and I put the other warm dog next to Sandra. Sandra looked disappointed, but the dog seemed to whimper in satisfaction. Bill and I pulled the stitched impala skins up to cover us all, and we settled into readiness for sleep.

I knew that bittersweet times were ahead for us all. Bill and Alex were far better calisthenic screwers than I was, and sooner or later a pecking order would develop. I just hoped that our love for each other would smooth things out, but then, who is to say that love is anything other than a set of full seminal vesicles, or some vague estrogenic rumbling of the pelvic floor? But we had good signals so far. Christ, the warmth of the body is a holy thing. The room will probably go to 50° tonight, maybe zero in the garage, and twenty below outside. Maybe a dozen citizens will freeze to death tonight. At least I won’t have to go to the store again until February 21, 1986—thank God for that—hey, Sandra is reaching for me, such a sweet child—I know we’ll make it through the winter.

Not everybody who hears voices is insane.

Grasping the iron railing with both hands, the bridge vibrating beneath her feet, she paused to watch the river. For at least an hour now she had walked with her eyes and mind unfocused. But at last the sheer power of the river fixed her attention. If she could only think only of the force of the water only of the water only . . .

Here at the city’s highest point the river cut a deep chasm through the rock and rushed over a fifty-foot cliff with such velocity that it formed a great frothing arc. The late-afternoon sun slanted through the spray where its colors broke apart into a clearly defined bow. And beneath that?

She took off her glasses to wipe away the spray. A little farther on there was a footbridge that crossed directly over the rim of the falls and led to a small park. The benches looked inviting. She became aware of pain in her arthritic knee. It must have been hurting for some time to get this bad. She put her glasses back on and looked again, finally squinting. Yes, something, a kind of shapeless fluctuation of colors beneath the rainbow—maybe an afterimage formed from staring too long at the sun glaring off the water, or a prismatic effect blurred by the mist.

Strange, but no more important really than silver-backed clouds blown across a deep-blue sky. She looked at her hands and thought it strange that they were old.

“Mrs. Lockwood, please, can’t you understand?” Reese had handed her his handkerchief, all the while speaking tenderly, like a father to a child. And he not more than forty, while she—did he know that she was nearing her seventy-fifth birthday?

Halfway across the footbridge she remembered the colors and looked again. The rainbow was invisible from this angle, and the colors were hidden by the spray.

The bench was hard and her knee went on throbbing. There was something that she should do (there was always something) but she didn’t try to remember what it was. It hurt to think, and there was the water, only the water.

From here she could see the rock basin at the bottom of the falls where the river swirled through a half-circle and then went on. A narrow footpath bordered the basin and ended at a concrete wall where the stairs led back up the cliff. Two children were down there, leaning precariously over the railing. Their distance and the spray from the falls made it difficult for her to see them, but she thought that one might be a girl and the other a boy.

She must have stood in just that spot many times as a child. She and Paul, watching the water. (The children leaped away from the railing and raced along the path toward the stairs.) Of course there hadn’t been stairs then. And the wall? No, it couldn’t have been there either, because the only way of getting to the path had been around the side of the factory. She wondered how much else along the river had changed since that day, almost sixty-five years ago, when she and Paul had decided to walk to the ocean. They had known that the Lenape River ended there. It was only a matter of following it. She could still picture the ocean. Not the one that was sixty miles east of Lenape Falls. Not the one that they would never visit until they were much older and it didn’t really matter anymore. But the one that they had carried with them, past smokestacks, oil tanks, and dead things floating in the water, until it was night.

The throbbing in her knee was getting worse. She had better take some aspirin as soon as she got home. Home. She looked at her watch and, with that habitual motion, remembered.

“How long do I have?”

“Well, as it happens, we already have someone in mind.”

“I believe the standard procedure is two months’ notice.”

Such a slick young man, his hair and clothes styled ingeniously between establishment and mod. Yet now he seemed genuinely embarrassed. “That’s only for contract teachers.”

4:05. She should have caught the 3:15 bus home. Emma would be wondering why she was late. There might be a 4:20. She got up stiffly and crossed the bridge, feeling somehow not quite ready to leave the park. It was as if there was something that she had meant to finish first. Maybe a thought. Or a question.