Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“That’s not the same thing as helping someone be happy.”

“What it comes down to is she was born a certain way—you know, a white, rich, cute way—and acts like she had anything to do with it. It’s a sickness.”

While the others were talking, Phyllida quietly asked me how I’d been. She was the only one there who knew even a little about the situation I’d had at my last job. The man I had met there, who in fact still worked there. His name had shown up on an online list of un-famous bad men, and nothing had happened to him, the same nothing that happened to so many other men. This was a nothing that could sometimes be filled with gaseous excitement and horror and alarm and puffy thought bubbles containing phrases like “Somebody should do something!” all of which never became solid and eventually leaked out, leaving nothing behind and resulting in nothing.

Phyllida looked into my eyes and picked up the cutlery on the table. “I would stick him with this fork.” Oh, she was so nice. Why weren’t we closer?

Wait, it was because of the time I went to Devon’s birthday party and saw Phyllida talking and laughing gaily with the man, even though I knew she knew. Maybe they had only interacted for a few seconds, maybe Phyllida needed a professional favor. Maybe, caught off guard, she’d been accidentally polite to him. It happened. But this incident sure did make me not want to tell anyone else about it, because if I saw them being friendly with him later I would have to slink off like a dog giving birth under a house and tend my grievous wounds alone. I knew that now. And sure, yes, of course: Even without telling someone the story there was a chance I’d see them being friendly with that man, which would still hurt, but not nearly as much. This way, at least I wouldn’t be certain that they had chosen rapists and politeness over me.

I knew I was asking too much, but I didn’t want to ask too little. What was the correct amount, allowing for how much people fail? We fail so hard. All of us do.

Smiling past Phyllida, I watched Nina draw on a napkin. I called out to her and she looked up. “What’s the latest on your ghost problem?” I asked. The details were harrowing, sad, disgusting—but she was always ready to talk about it. We were the only ones who believed her. We had all been at that Halloween party.

Derrick interrupted us. He lifted his phone like a pack of gum in a gum commercial. (Put it away, Derrick, nobody can read a word from here anyway.) Apparently Bonnie had gotten back to him. She said she was fine and that everybody should leave her alone.

“Is she okay?”

“That’s all she said? What a bitch!”

After that, we all went home, full of a guilty, binge-eaten feeling of having talked that much shit about our friend, at her actual birthday celebration no less.

Nearly a whole week passed, and still no Bonnie. I was eating granola standing up, wearing only an old and obscenely baggy thong, when I heard a key in the door and I sped over to an armchair with a crumpled coat of Bonnie’s on it and only had time to tuck the coat under my armpits but I was still excited to see Bonnie at the door and say, Dude, where have you been and I’m only wearing your coat like a tiny assless sandwich board because you caught me in my worst underwear until the door opened and it wasn’t Bonnie—it was two well-dressed sixtysomething people who had already been having a bad day and here I was to worsen it.

Luckily, because I was mostly naked, they first thought I was Bonnie’s secret girlfriend, so when they learned that I was, rather, Bonnie’s secret roommate of whom they had never heard, they were so relieved and distracted that I found a brief opening in which to lie my face off.

Sometimes people with money didn’t want to give it to people who needed it extremely badly, like how they didn’t want to offer sympathy or belief to those who had been victimized, as the act of needing was inherently thirsty, plus there was the way situations that caused you to become needy sometimes could render you disgusting and un-whole so the idea of joining forces with you was just, blaaaaarrrrb , and of course joining forces was what happened when money, sympathy, and belief changed hands.

So I hoiked up my posture a couple notches and pretended to be a novelist (zero evidence of visual art in this apartment so words it had to be), highly experimental (I didn’t want it to be easy to find my books, since they would in fact be impossible to find since they didn’t exist), with most of my work published in Chinese (which I wasn’t but they wouldn’t know the difference but also why had I even added this level of obfuscation?), in residence at a university nearby whose apartment roof had caved in over the, ah, living room. I had met Bonnie at—

“—at, at an event, a p-party after a salon. When I told her about how disruptive the noise from the workmen was, the dust and the disruption, she offered me a room in her place for the time being, and it has been such a godsend. I wouldn’t have been able to—do my work, if it wasn’t for Bonnie and her generosity.”

Not bad, not bad! Cultural capital, the implication that I didn’t need money, this apartment, or anything at all, a foreignness which was not real and therefore nonthreatening. (Oh, that was why I’d done that.)

The parents relaxed, smiled subtle WASP smiles, and let it go. Bonnie’s mother had a smooth white bob and was fat and tall and graceful, clad in a whispering computer-gray silk blouse. Thready webs of chain and gem blinked against her neck, fingers, ears. Her bling felt oceanic, as in naturalistic yet unutterably vast. All that was dark and grotesque about her soul was contained in the bulky handbag dangling from her right elbow. Bright orange-brown this handbag was, crisscrossed with straps and black chains and waxy twine.

Bonnie’s father wasn’t nearly so interesting looking.

“Do you know where she has been?” I asked.

They told me that she showed up at their house yesterday, completely frazzled, telling a wild tale about a week that was repeating over and over again. Her mother said, “Bonnie told us she’d traveled to New Zealand to check if it was last week there too. Though she chose it randomly, she ended up really enjoying the place. Except for the fact that it was also still last week there.”

“Which is to say this week,” her father said.

They had tried to calm her down, even as she insisted she had lived this week many times, listing off news of sex scandals and murderous police and mass shootings as if she were bringing precious communiqués from the future and not just delivering the same old easy guesses absolutely anybody could make, so they fed her dinner and offered her benzos and put her to bed, thinking she would have to stay with them for a while—thinking facilities, thinking inpatient/outpatient, thinking medication, and so on—and when they checked on her in the morning she had fled.

As they searched Bonnie’s bedroom and peeped very quickly and apologetically into mine, her mother said, “I am not unsympathetic, you know. How could she prove her story to us? It would be next to impossible. Should we tell her a secret so massive that merely through her repeating it back to us in the next iteration we would immediately believe that she was telling the truth, that she had indeed lived this week before?”

“And what if the week didn’t repeat?” said Bonnie’s father, scrolling through his phone. “We three would then be forced to march into the future together, bound by the hideous secrets Bonnie now knew. All for nothing.”

I said, “I mean, why do they have to be massive and hideous secrets?”

“Still more horrible,” continued Bonnie’s mother, “would be if she were correct, and were somehow able to prove this to us, and keep proving this to us—that she, our daughter, Bonnie, has been doomed to live the same week over and over again. Pulling us helplessly along with her. Cursed to remember, blessed to forget, or the opposite, or both.”