Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

After the meal, we drank beer and watched the city below as five million Denverites turned on their lights. I knew I was getting too high too fast when I confused pulling the tabs off self-cooling beer cans with plucking petals from daisies.

She loves me.

Funny how melodrama crops up in real life. My life. Like when I met her.

It was about a year before, when I’d just gotten a job with Mountain Bell as a SMART—that’s their clever acronym for Service Maintenance and Repair Trainee. In a city the size of Den­ver there are more than half a million public pay phones, of which at least a third are out of order at any given time; vandals mostly, sometimes mechanical failure. Someone has to go out and spot-check the phones, then fix the ones that are broken. That was my job. Simple.

I’d gone into a bad area, Five Points, where service was es­timated to be eighty percent blanked out. I should have been smart enough to take a partner along, or maybe to wear blackface. But I was a lot younger then. I ended up on a bright Tuesday after­noon, sprawled in my own blood on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store after a Chicano gang had kicked the hell out of me.

After about an hour somebody called an ambulance. Jody. On the phone I’d just repaired before I got stomped. She’d wandered by with a field crew on some documentary assignment, snapping holograms of the poverty conditions.

She loves me not.

I remembered what we’d quarreled about in September. Back in early August a friend of Jody’s and mine had come back from Seattle. He was an audio engineer who’d worked free-lance with the Hayes Theatre. He’d seen Jody.

“Man, talk about wild!” my friend said. “She must’ve got cov­ered by everything with pants from Oregon to Vancouver.” He looked at my face. “Uh, you have something going with her?”

She loves me.

“What’s so hard to understand?” Jody had said. “Didn’t you ever meet a survivor before? Didn’t you ever think about survi­vors? What it’s like to see death so plainly all around?” Her voice was low and very intense. “And what about feeling you ought never to have babies, and not wanting even to come close to tak­ing the chance?” Her voice became dull and passionless. “Then there was Seattle, Paul, and there’s the paradox. The only real de­fense against death is not to feel. But I want to feel sometimes and that’s why—” She broke off and began to cry. “Paul, that’s why there were so many of them. But they couldn’t—I can’t make it. Not with anyone.”

Confused, I held her.

“I want you.”

And it didn’t matter which of us had said that first.

She loves me not.

“Why don’t you ever say what you think?”

“It’s easy,” I said, a little bitter. “Try being a lonely stoic all your life. It gets to be habit after a while.”

“You think I don’t know?” She rolled over, turned to the wall. “I’m trying to get through.” Her voice was muffled by the blankets.

“Yeah. Me too.”

She sat up suddenly, the sheets falling away from her. “Listen! I told you it would be like this. You can have me. But you have to accept what I am.”

“I will.”

Neither of us said anything more until morning.

She loves me.

Another night she woke up screaming. I stroked her hair and kissed her face lightly.

“Another one?”

She nodded.

“Bad?”

“Yes.”

“You want to talk about it?”

There was hesitation, then a slow nod.

“I was in front of a mirror in some incredibly baroque old bed­room,” she said. “I was vomiting blood and my hair was coming out and falling down on my shoulders. It wound around my throat and I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth and there was blood running from my gums. And my skin—it was completely covered with black and red pustules. They—” She paused and closed her eyes. “They were strangely beautiful.” She whimpered. “The worst—” She clung to me tightly. “Oh, God! The worst part was that I was pregnant.”

She roughly pushed herself away and wouldn’t let me try to com­fort her. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Finally, childlike, she took my hand. She held my fingers very tight all the rest of the night.

She loves me not.

But she did, I thought. She does. In her own way, just as you love her. It’s never going to be the way you imagined it as a kid. But you love her. Ask her. Ask her now.

“What’s going on?” Jody asked, craning her neck to look directly below our ledge. Far down we saw a pair of headlights, a car sliding around the hairpin turns in the foothills road. The whine of a racing turbine rasped our ears.

“I don’t know. Some clown in a hurry to park with his girl.”

The car approached the crest of a hill and for an instant the headlights shone directly at us, dazzling our eyes. Jody jerked back and screamed. “The sun! So bright! God, Pittsburgh—” Her strength seemed to drain; I lowered her gently to the ledge and sat down beside her. The rock was rough and cold as the day’s heat left. I couldn’t see Jody’s face, except as a blur in the dark­ness. There was light from the city and a little from the stars, but the moon hadn’t risen.

“Please kiss me.”

I kissed her and used the forbidden words. “I love you.”

I touched her breast; she shivered against me and whispered something I couldn’t quite understand. A while later my hand touched the waist of her jeans and she drew away.

“Paul, no.”

“Why not?” The beer and my emotional jag pulsed in the back of my skull. I ached.

“You know.”

I knew. For a while she didn’t say anything more, nor did I. We felt tension build its barrier. Then she relaxed and put her cheek against mine. Somehow we both laughed and the tension eased.

Ask her. And I knew I couldn’t delay longer. “Damn it,” I said, “I still love you. And I know what I’m getting into.” I paused to breathe. “After Christmas I’m taking off for Seattle. I want you to marry me there.”

I felt her muscles tense. Jody pulled away from me and got to her feet. She walked to the end of the ledge and looked out be­yond the city. She turned to face me and her hands were clenched.

“I don’t know,” she said. “At the end of summer I’d have said ‘no’ immediately. Now—”

I sat silent.

“We’d better go,” she said after a while, her voice calm and even. “It’s very late.”

We climbed down from the rocks then, with the November chill a well of silence between us.

SORT OF a plane crash in an uncharted region of the park.

We were flying fairly low over the mountains. We had come to the last ridge when there, before us, appeared this incredible valley…

Suddenly the plane sputtered. (We knew we were low on gas but we had thought to make it over the mountains.

“I think I can bring her in.” (John’s last words.)

I was the only survivor.

A plane crash in a field of alfalfa, across the road from it the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. An oasis on the edge of the park­ing area. One survivor. He alone, Al, who has spent considerable time in France, Algeria and Mexico, his paintings without social relevance (or so the critics say) and best in the darker colors, not a musician at all yet seems to be one of us. He, a stranger, wander­ing in a land he doesn’t remember and not one penny of our kind of money, creeping from behind our poster, across from it the once-a-year art experience for music lovers. Knowing him as I do now, he must have been wary then, view from our poster: ENTRANCE sign, vast parking lot, our red and white tent, our EXIT on the far side, maybe the sound of a song, a frightening situation under the circumstance, all the others dead and Al hav­ing been unconscious for who knows how long? (the scar from that time is still on his cheek) stumbling across the road then and into our ticket booth.