Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

Now I am here, I am not sure what to say. It won’t wait long. Suddenly I am embarrassed, and, sensing this (it is uncannily acute), the heart starts to regain its buoyancy. Slyly, as if only at the whim of a current, it starts to rise through the fluid. I worry suddenly that it may break the surface, a gaping vein present itself an inch below my lips. I back away, mumble, “Just wanted to see you were all right.”

Fantasies of revenge float through my mind all day. When I come home, I will slip it, jar and all, into the freezer. But does brine freeze? I could, while dusting, jostle it off its perch. The hearth is hard, the jar will shatter. It will flop about a minute or so, and then lie still. I am depressed when I arrive home. The key in the lock, the silence behind the door arrests me: what if something has happened? I fear the random violence of burglars.

One morning, I find the heart on the surface, lying on its side, a froth of bubbles around it. It looks an unhealthy gray. I lift it from its fluid, and, unmindful of the wet, I cradle it against my chest. I croon soft words in its direction. It lifts an artery, and quivers.

A week passes, and all is well. It was singing this morning when I left for work, sporting with the bits of toast I fed it. The doctor has taken it off salt. I am cheerful, the morning air expansive in my chest. As I come home that night I am whistling.

It is as if nothing has happened. The heart turns its back ostentatiously as I enter. The television fills the room with cheers. As I try to speak, it waves an aorta impatiently for silence: a line drive into right field; one man comes home, then another; the last holds up at third. The crowd is wild; the heart is assiduously intent. I drop my briefcase on my bed and take a shower.

As the steam climbs up the glass, water gurgles about my feet, the sounds of the next room fade. The thudding in my ears is all my own; the jar on the mantelpiece is empty, a crust of salt at its bottom. Tomorrow, I tell myself, I will throw it away. And suddenly I am sobbing as if my heart will break.

There is something I can’t recall. It has a name, like farther, or whom , but these are wrong. It was in the dream that woke me this morning, we call it morning when I awaken here, but I couldn’t remember the dream: only the shape of the word dissolving, a pair of lips parting, puckering shh . I told this to mission control, I don’t know why. Maybe because the way they say “Good morning” annoys me: it’s afternoon in Houston, and it’s nothing you could call anything here. So I said there was something I couldn’t remember, ate breakfast, and turned on the reader.

My coffee was cool by the time the reply came, breaking into their recitation of today’s schedule: which system did I think it was in? Without pausing they returned to their list and read on. I lowered the gain, said “No, it’s nothing real, it was in a dream. It sounds like hips, or maybe warm .” I mixed more coffee and started a new story, one of Stern’s mysteries: murder and incest, funerals, gunfire, somebody floating face-down.

Mission control muttered softly, static on the air. “Say again, Prometheus? ” They hate to ask for confirmation, now the line of sight has stretched to twenty minutes. The distance makes communication between us strained, as I have come to suspect the lengthening pause between question and response. It makes their politeness sound too deliberate to be genuine. This is only an illusion, the effect of distance.

“It was in a dream,” I told them, and looked from the reader out the port. Jupiter was off abeam, a featureless star so bright its light seems heavy. I can feel it in my eyes. Soon the image will spread, form a disc. I try to imagine what it will look like: a marble, a banded shooter, a catseye: I have seen pictures, but it will not be the same. There will be a salmon-colored eyespot, which I’m looking forward to seeing. It was our mission’s objective. At least it is something to wait for.

Return transmission was eight minutes late. “We’ve asked Dr. Hayford to discuss this with you. If you’d like.” If I’d like: back at Houston, Hayford could have driven halfway home by now, leaving a string of words slung through the ether from mission control: I could no more shut him up than I could stop this ship. Since Stern and Peterson walked out on me, there’s been a lot of empty deference on the airwaves, mostly incoming.

Dr. Hayford claims to know me better than my mother does, and this may be so, but I think he feels inadequate to this situation. “We’ve reviewed your transmission,” he says. “I gather it’s not your nightmare. So I’m glad. You mentioned a sound in this dream. That’s a good sign. Would you like to talk about it? I’ll wait.”

I told him if I remembered it I wouldn’t have bothered them in the first place, I didn’t care about it anymore, let’s quit wasting time.

I let him think it was only a sound, but it was more: it was a word.

HERE IS A list of mission control’s euphemisms:

the burn

the event

the incident

the accident

the unfortunate [all of the above]

the spontaneous ignition

the midcourse miscorrection

the transorbital overenhancement. This one was my favorite, but the one they prefer is “the accident.” I have started to ask them, “Which one?”

And they say I’ve lost my sense of humor.

I STILL NEED to explain. We slept afloat, adrift like tethered fish, hugging ourselves to keep our arms from feeling awkward. My mouth opens in my sleep, sometimes saliva wells around my tongue, forms a sphere inside my mouth, and then I inhale it and wake, choking. I hack on the gob of spit, cough it out, and when I can breathe again I look around and see only dark, drifting shapes, I cannot remember who or where I am. I see Stern and Peterson afloat on their tethers; I hear them breathe, first one, then the other, a soft sound like water flowing into a drum. The ship cycles air, water; servos whine on and off around the hull, all these sounds are very close, and though I would wake immediately if they stopped, waking now gagging in the dark these sounds are stifling, and I think first I have awakened with a fever in my bedroom in my parents’ home, I have heard the horn of a freighter on the lake; but then a window drifts in front of me, a light shines far beyond the pane, and I see stars, so thick they seem a solid mass, and the cabin walls could dissolve in an instant.

SICKENING PLUNGE THROUGH roaring; darkness; twitch at my belly the tether snapped; falling aft: down: we tumble together on the after bulkhead, Stern feet first and shouting, but the roar of the main engine drowns his voice, the darkness defeats us as we struggle. Peterson is motionless. The cockpit and controls now up against acceleration a dozen meters never meant to be climbed, I feel the distance stretching each second the ship leaps farther and faster ahead, leaving behind the fuel we need to get home. Banging my head against stanchions, losing my grip and slipping in the dark, alone, there is only one sound, and no progress upward: the ship is climbing away with us, and its gathering speed strips each moment out past measuring.

Suddenly there is light and I am blinded, blinking at the workbench I hug. Stern hangs from the opposite wall. We look up. A speaker squalls “…status…cutoff…manual”: gibberish. I freeze, but Stern climbs again, barking more noise into air already too burdened to carry sense.