Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Winter was a hard season. The ancient and erratic heating system wheezed and clanged, overheating everyone to dullness when it was on and letting them all freeze when it wasn’t.

“By what methods do they heat this place?” Lee asked, echoing eternal questions about eternal subjects. She was huddled with her coffee cup, trying to warm her hands.

“It’s a system that Lucy’s Abdicated First Husband the VIIIth thought up,” Helene said.

“The heating is taken care of by all the characters in the dreams we tell our doctors.”

“They don’t hate us, though,” Mary chirped gaily, “at least not me. They despise me intensely, but they don’t hate me—because the Bible says not to!”

Deborah got up and went in search of warmth. Since the eruption of the volcano, the need to keep alert for backfire material had lessened, though the anguish had not. The volcano’s fear-rage would still come and throw her against a wall with the force of its eruption, or send her running down the hall until she was stopped by a closed door or a wall. She was in a pack every day, sometimes twice, and once tightened in, she would let the fight explode and overcome her as violently as it would. Yet … yet they were all kinder, all the nurses and attendants, joking even, and giving little gifts of themselves.

“Don’t you know why?” Furii said.

“No. I am exploding and they take time with me. Lots of times I feel the thing coming and I ask to get packed and they do it, although it takes time and energy, and afterward, we sometimes even talk.”

“You see,” Furii said gently, “when this volcano of yours broke, something else broke, too: your stoniness of expression. One sees you now reacting and living by looking at your face.”

Deborah went ice cold with the special fear that was many years old and from which she had protected herself at such great cost.

“ Nacoi … nacoi … ”

“What is it?” Furii asked.

“It was always … unmatching … what the face showed: …Why are you angry?’ when I was not, and …Why are you scornful?’ when I was not. It was part of the reason for a Censor and the set rules and Yri laws.”

“You are free of them now,” Furii said. “Your face does not make enemies for you; it only shows a person reacting to what she feels. Anger and fear show also because you suffer them. But do not be frightened—no need anymore to lie about anger and fear, and, best of all, enjoyment shows too, and fun, and hope also, and these expressions are not unmatching, as you call it, but are appropriate and will become more and more subject to your own conscious wish and choice.”

But Deborah was still frightened. Her facial expressions were a mystery to her, one that had never been solved. In memories whose meaning was still dark to her, she counted years and years of enemies made in ways which she could never explain. Part of it had been the look—must have been the look—some expression not hers which she had been wearing, a voice and a doer not herself and capable of turning allies into persecutors. Now that the volcano had melted her stone face it might all start over again: the nacoi- life of laws to which she had no key and realities to which she could lay no claim.

The afternoon was cold and lowering, and coming back from the doctor’s office she laughed at herself and at the attendant with her, shivering in the cold (real cold), while she alone, although close to the attendant’s side, was also in cold (intraregional fear) and cold (Yr-cold).

“Like to freeze you to death!” the attendant said. It was nice being spoken to in that way, so Deborah repaid the sense of equality with truth.

“You’ve only got one kind of cold, the kind coats can fix.”

The attendant sniffed. “Don’t you believe it,” she said, and Deborah remembered back, through a thousand falls and punishments, to McPherson saying, “What makes you think you have a corner on suffering?”

“I’m sorry,” Deborah said. “I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

But the attendant was bitter and angry, and began to tell Deborah about how hard it was to raise children and work for long hours and low pay. Deborah seemed to hear into the attendant’s mind, where the woman was saying also that the work was ugly: cleaning up messes from adult bodies and sitting in the midst of childish noises made by adult lungs and ingenuity. The woman was angry at Deborah, who was at that moment a symbol of “the job,” but Deborah felt that she was giving a confidence also. The dislike was impersonal and honest and therefore not hard to bear. At the door, whose lock and key were also symbols, the whole relationship ended; the attendant erased it as if it had never been, and her face was impassive as she walked away from her charge.

Deborah walked idly around the ward for a while. When the change of shift came on, she asked to be let into the bathtub room to be by herself for a little while. Inside, the heat was turned off, but by force of habit she went to the old radiator and sat down on its covered top. A window above it looked out over the lawn part of the hospital grounds, where there were trees and a thick hedge that concealed the wall—Deborah had named it the Preserve. The sun, ready to set, glittered beyond the hedge like a cold star, and the trees seemed bare and gray in the diffusing light. It was quiet. Yr was quiet and the Collect, for once, was silent also. All the voices in all the worlds seemed stilled.

Slowly and steadily, Deborah began to see the colors in the world. She saw the form and the colors of the trees and the walkway and the hedge and over the hedge to the winter sky. If the sun went down and the tones began to vibrate in the twilight, giving still more dimension to the Preserve. And in a slow, oncoming way, widening from a beginning, it appeared to Deborah that she would not die. It came upon her with a steady, mounting clarity that she was going to be more than undead, that she was going to be alive. It had a sense of wonder and awe, great joy and trepidation. “When will it begin?” she said to the gradual night. It came to her that it was already beginning.

The night had fully arrived when she opened the door of the bathtub room and went out on the ward again. The Third Dimension, the meaning, persevered in the bare lines of walls and doors and the planes of people’s faces and bodies. There was a great temptation to watch—to keep seeing and hearing, sensing and reveling in the meaning and the light—the senses and planes of reality, but Deborah was the veteran of many deceits and she was cautious. She would subject this new thing to Furii’s time-hunter and let it shoot its arrows.

She ate supper and found herself capable of suffering that she had to do it messily, with fingers and a wooden spoon. The food tasted. It was substantial under her teeth and afterward she remembered having eaten it.

“Whatever this thing is …” she muttered, “… I wonder when they will pull it out from under.” She spent the evening listening to the attendants talking to one another like lonely outpost sentinels in a strange and barren land. They wouldn’t know what this thing was, but it was beginning to frighten Deborah because she didn’t know what it was going to turn into. Maybe it was another part of the Game, that always recurring last laugh of the world.

When she gulped down her sedative and walked to bed she said to Yr, Suffer, gods.

Suffer, Bird-one, we are waiting….

I have a question: Two natives are in a comic strip, but they don’t know it, and think themselves alive. They are building a campfire on an island, which is really the back of a hippo who is standing in a river. They begin to cook their dinner. When the heat reaches through the hippo’s hide, he gets up and walks away, carrying the natives with astonished faces. Then the reader of this comic strip laughs and turns the page on which are natives, astonishment, jungle, river, hippo, and fire. The question is: What can their faces show now? What can they do now?