Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

Ra Mahleiné wound her yarn into a ball as Lorraine held the other end. They conversed with animation. Ra Mahleiné turned in her seat and said to him, “You’re not reading? Lorraine will heat up dinner as soon as we’re finished winding. The food’s already made.”

He didn’t feel hungry. He stood and watched her.

She interpreted that as disapproval.

“We conducted an experiment,” she said. “We didn’t interrupt you, to see if I would have pain again.”

“And?”

“Can you imagine, nothing, absolutely nothing hurt. Those hours passed like a single moment. I can describe it now only in general: I sat here, in the sun, knitted, made dinner… The details are all gone from my memory.”

“The same happened to me,” said Lorraine. “It was without details… I sat, I did this or that. I can’t remember anything concrete.”

Ra Mahleiné turned pale. “The Red Claw,” she groaned. “It has me again.”

“I’m to leave, so that you feel better?” he said.

“Eat now, for your strength. But you must read, read as much as possible. I love you, very much—but you must read,” she said, seeing his confusion. “When you read, my disease doesn’t advance. Your reading gives me relief.”

“What happens when I finally finish the book? What will stop the Red Claw then?”

She took the pills that Lorraine brought her.

“I don’t want to think about it. But read, you must read, because it helps.”

He ate his food quickly and returned to the book. This was a delusion, no doubt, but what other way did he have to help his wife?

This time the run went normally, without adventure. The ink blots contracted or expanded, but they kept their distance from the road.

Daphne, stretched out on a love seat behind the armchairs, reached for Nest of Worlds , a book that had little colored stones set in its cover. She drank herbal tea. On a quiet day like this, she could sink completely into a book. Gary didn’t mind driving; he could be at the wheel for long stretches. In uncertain weather both stayed in their seats: one driving, the other a supporting presence. Today that wasn’t necessary.

Daphne took a swallow from her mug, its glass thick and cloudy. The bitterness made her mouth pucker. For a bookmark she was using a canceled check. She loved Jaspers, the main hero of the book: a likable man and, from the description, much better looking than Gary.

Jaspers stretched until his elbows cracked and the bunk squeaked. He put his hands under his head, but then drew them out, because they began to get pins and needles. The best was for his arms to lie extended beside his head, the hands hanging over the edge.

Always after the required evening shower in cold water, his feet took forever to warm up. They were covered with fermenting sweat.

“Jaspers, stop that thrashing! The damn straw is falling on my head,” growled Crooks, who lay on the bunk below his.

“His balls froze off, and now he’s looking for them in the straw,” chuckled Lee, who was curled up on his bunk and shivering.

Crooks and Lee were the two most important men in the hall. Crooks because he was strongest, and for that even the guards respected him; Lee because he was longest here—a whole two years—and filled the function of hall elder.

Both had finished work an hour before, but Jaspers had dragged himself in only fifteen minutes ago, completely exhausted from his murderous shift on the assembly line. Crooks had been made Monitor, whose job it was to supervise all the workstations in the hall and yell at the men. His muscles were sufficient; he didn’t carry a stick, as the guards did. He never overtaxed himself. Every evening he looked for a victim among the harassed workers, someone to pound before he turned in; it improved his opinion of himself, assured him that he was still in shape.

Jaspers’s hands, when they began warming up after the ice-cold shower, throbbed with pain. They had been burned from twisting lids all day onto still-hot jars that contained pasteurized vegetable products. When he worked, he wore the required rubber gloves, but they didn’t protect him from burns or lacerations. The small of his back ached from sitting rigid for hours on end. If he bent or slumped, he received a whack across his shoulders from a guard. And the guards could appear at any moment. Nor was there time to look around, because the jars kept coming in an endless line, and one lidless jar getting past him could mean a no-food and eight or even twelve whacks with the stick. A no-food was a day of liquids only. That was why Jaspers sat like a rod, straighter than he had to, for twelve hours, and why his back was in such agony now.

The hall was long and dim; to either side were rows of bunks. On his hot plate Chung boiled water for bitter tea. He hadn’t gone to work today because of a fever; the medic gave him pills to take. Jaspers envied Chung his fever.

“Blast it, Jaspers, stop that turning. I’m getting straw in my face,” came the rumble from below. This meant trouble, because Jaspers, warned once already by Crooks, had not moved a muscle.

“Straw or something wet?” Bennett put in. “After looking at those broads, maybe he’s jacking off.”

Jaspers despised Bennett, the ass kisser.

He occasionally saw women when he was assigned to load boxes of jars onto the collection cart, which came to take the vegetables to the hall where the women worked. Sometimes he helped push the large pasteurizers on wheels: enormous vats of hot water in which dozens of layers of pickles were immersed. Jaspers remembered the stench that filled the halls and the warehouse under the hard sky.

The women he encountered were not pretty. They were sexless. He remembered one with the face of a grandmother, wrinkled like a dried pear, her long black greasy hair tied back in a braid. She told him she was forty-five. The other women either looked like her, shriveled before their time, or were grotesquely fat.

Crooks apparently believed what Bennett had said, because after the time he needed to make the mental connection, he howled:

“You poke a hole in the mattress over my head, you scum, and I’ll break your dick off!”

He aimed a powerful kick in the middle of the upper bunk. The springs squealed, and Jaspers went flying up.

Crooks groaned with pain, yelled, “Shit!” He must have hurt his bare foot on the metal wires that held the mattress. He began coughing and gagging from the dirt and dust that descended on him from the kick.

“I’ve had it with that pervert over me,” he said with unexpected calm and got out of his bunk. He examined his injured foot. “The lousy bastard, I try to quiet him down, and this is what he does to me,” he went on, spitting on his finger and wiping the blood from his cut. With the skill of a connoisseur he was building the suspense, destroying his opponent psychologically before he went to the trouble of climbing up. That he would go to that trouble was beyond question now. “He spoils the air, that one. He ruins the mattress, poking holes in it with his dick,” he said to his victim with studied calm.

Jaspers was not puny, but fighting Crooks, who had the build of a gorilla, was like getting hit with a truck. Jaspers never backed down from a fight, did not allow Chung or Trub to strike him with impunity. That may have been the reason why he got into trouble more, why Crooks went after him more. Today Jaspers was not defenseless: he had managed to smuggle into the sleeping area a half-meter-long piece of gas pipe. He kept it under his pillow.