Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 34
“Father says I’m to take all my books with me,” Catina said.
“Oh, I suppose, that’s as it should be,” Anson said in his small voice. He didn’t want to cry. He hated crying.
Catina rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Anson, you’re positively feminine sometimes, you know it? Mother’s to give you no books either, except proper books, you know. You’ve no doubt heard about the Revisionists. They don’t even want women to know how to read, and father says they’re going to win the next election.”
“Father asked you to say all this?”
“He says I should get used to thinking of you as my charge. He says women like you are difficult to marry off, and I may be stuck with you for a long time. Work on yourself while I’m gone, would you? Marry some rich doctor or other. I don’t want you pulling at my suit tails.”
Catina broke away from the dance and went back to her group of friends.
Anson’s anger, as always, melted into tears, the very symbol of his masculine perfection, and the only one he could summon on cue. He fled across the lawn and into the house and cowered in the bathroom until his mother came to retrieve him.
“Anson, this is embarrassing,” his mother said from outside the bathroom door. “You’re making a terrible impression on Catina’s friends.”
“Catina’s going to study law at University and she’s stupid!” Anson said.
“Stupid and perfect,” his mother said. “If you would court those friends of hers you could be the perfect girl, too. This world will bend you, Anson, or it will break you. I learned that long ago. So will you.”
“I don’t want to be a girl!” Anson yelled.
“Open the door, Anson.”
Anson unlocked the door, and his mother walked in and shut the door behind himself. He sighed and gazed down at Anson.
“We can’t change what we are, Anson. We must learn to accept it.”
“I don’t want to accept it,” Anson said. “I want to fight it, but I don’t have anything to do that with. That’s what the world wanted, isn’t it?”
“Hush your voice. Your father will hear you.”
“Then let him hear! I want to be a scholar! I want to be a doctor! I want to break the world! I want –”
His mother slapped him. Startled, Anson fell silent. His mother’s face was red, and when he spoke, his voice was low and hushed and hurried.
“You can’t do any of those things,” his mother said. “They create life. We can only care for it. That’s our place. You cannot argue against the way you were born and the way the world made you.”
“I reject the world.”
“The world made you. You can’t reject it.”
“Cast me away from it then.”
“Into the void?”
“They keep us like this,” Anson said. “They keep us tiny and frail so we can’t fight them.”
“Stop that now, Anson. You sound hysterical.”
Anson quieted. He knew what happened to hysterical women.
And so.
He stopped writing the editorial articles, and he burned all the ones he had stowed in his desk.
When Anson U. was eighteen his mother died. He did not cry at his mother’s funeral, though everyone seemed to expect it. He found that he felt number. A month later, Anson became engaged to a University man who broke off the engagement two months later when she ran away with a Revisionist swinger from a neighboring state.
Those were dark times, for Anson. He could feel the hysteria rising in him, the slow bubbling of madness. He was a ship coming loose from its mooring. Where did hysterical women like him go, when they finally broke loose? What had happened to the woman with the orange beard?
Anson embroidered all the furniture in the house. His father provided him with suitability feminine poetry to read, poetry all about the necessity of creating a calming living environment for husband and children. Anson memorized one hundred and eighty-eight of these poems. He began to dream in them. He fantasized about tall, dark men with broad hips and palm-sized busts rescuing him from the house and taking him to foreign locales with exotic names like Lhystonia, Tragica, Karlissin, Shelot-An. He began to daydream while he embroidered. He dreamed sometimes that he was a man and wore loose-fitting suits with long feathered tails and men fluttered about him like uncaged birds.
His maidservant’s daughter, Luke, sometimes came over to assist in cleaning the house, and he and Anson would dance sometimes, and sometimes Anson would close his eyes and imagine himself as a man, dancing with Luke, but when Luke kissed him once, Anson told his father to keep Luke away from the house.
“I don’t like his looks,” Anson said by way of explanation, but did not look at his father when he said it.
Everything about the world was confusing and imperfect. I am imperfect, Anson thought, and scrubbed it from his mind. But in his dreams, he remembered. He remembered when he gazed up at the sky. He remembered that there were other worlds, other stars. And for the first time he wondered why he had never read a single book about a world where the people were any different than the one in his.
When Anson U. was twenty-one, his father fell ill and did not get better.
Catina was still at University for another year (she had not passed her first year and had to retake all of her classes), and Anson’s maidservant was squeamish about taking care of a dying man.
Anson was a woman, which meant it was his duty to take care of men and children, but it didn’t make it any easier for him to ascend the stairs each day and go to his father’s deathbed and clean the sheets and spoon feed him soup and mashed blue potatoes. But he did it because he wanted to be perfect. This one last time. He wanted it desperately.
As the days went by, Anson felt increasingly weak. One morning he woke and could not ascend the stairs. He needed his maidservant to help him. He craved rest in the afternoons, and spent most of his evenings sitting by the fire in a dream-like state, after which he could not sleep. He paced his bedroom in a state of agitation until well after the midnight of the evening. Why was he so anxious, now, when he was surely so close to perfection?
One morning, Anson awoke and did not get out of bed.
Ravi came in and tried to stir him, but Anson’s head ached, the room seemed to be spinning, falling in on him, and his neck and the left side of his body were stiff. For three days he lay in bed and let himself fall into a haze of half-dreams. And each time Ravi came in to check him, some new part of his body ached, or would not respond. Anson did not want to eat, or he wanted to eat too much.
Ravi rang for a doctor.
The doctor was tall but slender, and the long slope of her nose made her look hawkish, keen. Her black hair was swept back from the pale of her face, and clipped neatly to just below her ears. She bore the attractive crinkles of experience at the corners of her eyes, along either side of her mouth. She was terribly handsome. Terribly perfect.
“Miss U.?” the doctor said.
Anson clung to the edge of his comforter. “Anson, please.”
“Of course.” The doctor smiled, and Anson nearly wept. “My name is Doctor Emma B. Your maidservant tells me you’ve been ill. A colleague of mine has been by regarding your father’s illness. Perhaps you could tell me a bit about your symptoms.” Emma opened up her little black bag and removed a pencil and small black notepad.
Anson coughed politely into his hand. “I have these headaches. I cannot get out of bed in the morning. Certain parts of my body don’t respond to me, that is… my arms one day, my legs the next, and I have a… a peculiar pain here, in my neck, today, so that I can barely move it, you see.” And Anson demonstrated his inability to move his neck.
“Would you mind if I examined the affected area?” Emma said.
Anson’s stomach fluttered. “No, no, certainly. That’s quite all right.”
He clasped his hands together as Emma approached the bed. She sat on the edge and leaned in toward him. Her hands traced the muscles of his neck, pressed along the flesh from chin to collarbone. She had very soft hands.
“Do you feel any pain when I do that?” she asked.
Anson’s voice came out very small, the way it had when he was a child. “No, no, pain.”
Emma gazed down at him. Her eyes were a stormy gray, and their gazes met. Anson shifted his gaze to the pattern of the bedspread. Red fengora flowers. Six sharp points. Blue petals.
“Perhaps you could tell me when this ailment first began to afflict you,” Emma said. She went back to her chair and took up the notebook and pencil again.
A man was going to listen to what Anson had to say. For a long moment the idea that any man who hear him honestly and sincerely was so overwhelming that Anson was struck dumb. It took him some time to gather his thoughts.
Anson described his father’s illness, a wasting away of flesh that did not cease, that only got worse, that ate her from the inside and left her in pain, and raving.
“I just became so tired,” Anson said. “I couldn’t go up there any longer.”
Emma listened as Anson told her about everything, about the daydreams, and his nightmares, and all the little indignities of his day.
He had expected to get some pill, some cure, but instead Emma simply came to visit him each day, and each day Anson found something else that pained him. And Emma listened.
“Perhaps,” Emma said, one afternoon, “you should take some air in the garden on occasion.”
“Oh, I could never do that,” Anson said. “I’m much too weak.”
“Perhaps I could help you,” Emma said.
When Anson U. turned twenty-two, he found that he and Emma had spent an entire year together as patient and doctor. He had a small income from Catina that paid for his upkeep, and he would have a dowry, of course, in time. It was at the end of that year that Emma asked about the woman with the orange beard.
“Do you think your fear started then?” Emma said. “Did you fear you would be taken away for being imperfect?”
“That’s what’s done,” Anson said.
“It is,” Emma admitted. “The imperfect are –”
“I know,” Anson said. “I know.”
Emma took his hand.
Finally, one afternoon, Anson could stand the walks and talking no longer. He couldn’t spend every night convincing his body to produce symptoms for Emma to attend. He could no longer pretend that something in him was not stirred when Emma took his arm. One afternoon, the two of them strolled through the garden and Anson’s hands were trembling with all of the words he wanted to tell her and could not.
“Are you all right, Anson?” Emma asked.
“Oh, just, as I said I’m just so…” Anson felt his little voice trail away. “Oh, Emma!” he said finally, and the words poured out all at once, before he could stop them. His voice was too loud, trembling, and he couldn’t look at Emma for fear of seeing her face. “Runaway with me, Emma!” he said. “I have a very suitable dowry. We could go anywhere together. Thoth-tla, Tarangoria! We’ll eat exotic fruit and I’ll take care of your babies. We’ll build an entire new life together. We’ll escape from –”
“Anson –”
“–this oppressive place and create our–”
“Anson–”
“Just the two of–”
“Anson, I’m married. Both spouses. There’s no room for more.”
He burst into tears, which was a perfectly perfect response.
Emma recommended that Anson be moved to a country house, encouraging a change of scenery to speed his recovery.
He did not argue.
Emma returned once each week, at the country house, and listened politely. Emma told him that he could either recover or become a hysteric, and be removed from the world.
Anson chose the date of his recovery. The last day he spoke to Emma, he decided he was cured, and he told her so.
Emma published a report about Anson and the brilliant way she had cured him. Emma became very famous. As men did.
Anson, for his part, peeled away the memory of her. He no longer wondered what it would be like to be Emma’s wife.
Ravi helped Anson pack up all of his things to move back into the family house, and as he did, Anson went to the window, stared out at the rocky fence of the yard, the long fields of purple maize.
“They say that women and children are more susceptible to revolution because we have a weaker constitution,” Anson said. “That isn’t true, you know, Ravi. Old men become the last bastion of the old ways because they have the most to lose from its demise. They hold out not because they’re stronger, but because they’re weaker. They fear change because it takes away all the power they have ever known.”
Ravi brought the baggage down to the carriage.
“No one will save me, Ravi,” Anson said to the empty room. “I must do it myself.”
When he arrived home, Catina was already there, back from some business trip to a nearby system. She had hired two servants, a butler, and was having Anson’s room redecorated. She sat in their father’s chair, smoking and reading a newspaper, just as their father had always done. And, just like their father, she did not look up from the paper when Anson came in.
“Thought you were admitted to an asylum,” Catina said.
“You would have had to sign the papers,” Anson said.
“Yes, I suppose so,” Catina said. “I’m having some more acceptable material brought into your room. Your doctor says you need more stimulating literature. I think she’s rather mad, but who am I to argue with a gentleman of learning? My old schoolbooks will do.”
Catina’s schoolbooks were almost five years out of date, but Anson didn’t care. He read all of them. He underlined. He made notes. He started writing articles again, and he sent them to the newspapers this time. He found that no one would print them, though, until he listed his name as simply, “A.U.” The editors paid him with little bits of money, and he squirreled it away. Catina brought over friends and colleagues each night to introduce to Anson, but he just smiled sweetly at them.
I’m not hysterical, he thought as he realized that he was increasingly uninterested in their attentions. I’m not mad. I just don’t fit into the place you want me to fit.
I will bend you.
When Anson U. was twenty-five, the newspaper he wrote for asked him to make a public appearance. The Revisionists were neck and neck with the ruling party in the latest elections, and Anson was considered the newspaper’s chief anti-Revisionist theoretician. Anson did not tell Catina about it. He had to have Ravi escort him into the city. He had not told the editor that he was a woman.
When he and Ravi arrived, a massive group of men milled about beneath the arches of the conference room. Political banners draped the walls. Anson sat with Ravi in the back. They were the only women in the room, and the men kept looking at them.
When the editor took the podium and announced she was not certain that the witty political thinker A.U. had arrived yet, Anson stood up. His hands were shaking, but he clasped them tightly together and stared straight at the man on the podium.
The editor smiled good-naturedly at Anson. “Is this a joke?”
“No, it is not,” Anson said, and he thought of his father, and of Emma, and Catina. He walked out into the aisle as the men around him began to stir and mutter. He made his way to the podium.
“You have invited me to speak, sir,” Anson said. “And I intend to. If I do not, you have invited all of these fine gentlemen here for naught, and that would make you appear quite foolish.”
The editor barked out a laugh that sounded more like a choke and smiled broadly. “Ha! Yes, of course, it is my pleasure to, uh, surprise all of you. The writer who has kept us all entertained these last few years, revealed in the flesh. Now you know why I waited so long to bring him to the fore!” The editor nervously stepped back off the stage.
Anson U. took the podium. He stepped up in front of a sea of men’s faces. The men stirred, but they did not get up. They did not shout him down, but here and there, little murmurings, little whispers:
“That woman is hysterical.”
“Yes, I am,” Anson said. “Let us discuss why that is. Let us discuss why we have created a world that throws away those who will not bend, instead of bending for them. Let’s discuss why we made a world where hysteria and exile is preferable to living in a perfect world.”
They hissed. He raised his voice, knowing what was next. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the vacuum all around him. He could feel the hissing of the wires, the twisting of the world.
He was hysterical. He was obscene. He was playing with spaceships. He had never felt saner in his life.
Anson gripped the podium and leaned forward. The breath left his lungs. The saliva on his tongue bubbled. He looked up into the eye of some great monster above him, and he raised his hands to it.
“Bend,” he tried to say, but there was no air.
The great eye closed. The world around him shuddered. Anson gasped; air flowed around him again. He coughed and rested against the podium, exhausted.
Something in the room had changed. He rubbed his eyes. The men still sat there, agape, aghast. But something out there had shifted, some core part of him, or the world. The world had moved.
“I’ve seen the world for what it really is,” Anson said. “It isn’t perfect. It’s what we’ve made of it. And we can bend it any way we like.” He held out his hand to them. “Bend it with me.”
He did not wait for their answer.
THE FISHERMAN AND THE PIG
NEV SAT ON THE END of the charred pier, casting his line again and again into the murky water in the hopes of catching a corpse. A new war raged thirty miles upstream, and if Nev was patient, he could often hook one of the bodies that washed down the river. Beside him, Pig, a little pot-bellied pig, lay snoring softly in the folds of the cloak he had shed as the suns rose over the gray water. Mist still clung to the water’s edge, and he caught a glimpse of crested herons poking around in the shallows for breakfast.
