“7,” I guessed promptly. The last time he had told me his score it had been 7.
“92,” he said.
I laughed, because he seemed to be laughing. He had always had a puckish sense of humor. But I thought we really should get back to the World Economic Growth Plan, so I said laughingly, “That really is a very bad joke, Doctor!”
“92,” he said, “and you don’t believe me, Mary Ann, but that’s because of the cantaloupe.”
I said, “What cantaloupe, Doctor?” and that was when he jumped across his desk and began to try to bite through my jugular vein.
I used a judo hold and shouted to Bill the janitor, and when he came I called a robo-ambulance to take Dr. Speakie to Bethesda Asylum.
That was six months ago. I visit Dr. Speakie every Saturday. It is very sad. He is in the McLean Area, which is the Violent Ward, and every time he sees me he screams and foams. But I do not take it personally. One should never take mental ill health personally. When the Therapy is perfected he will be completely rehabilitated. Meanwhile, I just hold on here. Bill keeps the floors clean, and I run the World Government. It really isn’t as difficult as you might think.
Small Change
“Small change,” my aunt said as I put the obol on her tongue. “I’ll need more than that where I’m going.”
It is true that the change was very small. She looked exactly as she had looked a few hours before, except that she was not breathing.
“Goodbye, Aunt,” I said.
“I’m not going yet!” she snapped. I always tried her patience. “There are rooms in this house I’ve never even opened the door of!”
I did not know what she was talking about. Our house has two rooms.
“This obol tastes funny,” she said after a long silence. “Where did you get it?”
I did not want to tell her that it was a good-luck piece, a copper sequin, not money though it was round like a coin, which I had carried for a year or more in my pocket, ever since I picked it up by the gate of the bricklayer’s yard. I had rubbed it clean, of course, but my aunt had a keen tongue, and it was trodden mud, dog turds, brick dust, and the inside of my pocket that she was tasting, along with the dry-blood taste of copper. I pretended that I had not understood her question.
“A wonder you had it at all,” my aunt said. “If you have a penny in your pocket after a month without me, I’ll be surprised. Poor thing!” She would have sighed if she had been breathing. I had not known that she would continue to worry about me after she died. I began to cry.
“That’s good,” my aunt said with satisfaction. “Just don’t keep it up too long. I’m not going far, now. I just want very much to find out what room that door leads to.”
She looked younger when she got up, younger than she was when I was born. She went across the room lightly and opened a door I had not known was there.
I heard her say in a pleased, surprised voice, “Lila!” Lila was the name of her sister, my mother.
“For goodness’ sake, Lila,” my aunt said, “you haven’t been waiting in here for eleven years?”
I could not hear what my mother said.
“I’m very sorry about leaving the girl,” my aunt said. “I did what I could, I tried my best. She’s a good girl. But what will become of her now!”
My aunt never cried, and now she had no tears; but her anxiety over me made me cry again in alarm and self-pity.
My mother came out of that new room in the form of a lacewing fly and saw me crying. Tears taste salt to the living but sweet to the dead, and they have a taste for sweets, at first. I did not know all that, then. I was just glad to have my mother with me even as a tiny fly. It was a gladness the size of a fly.
That was all there was left of my mother in the house, and she had got what she wanted; so my aunt went on.
The room she was in was large and rather shadowy, lighted only by a skylight, like a storeroom. Along one wall stood distaffs full of spun flax, in a row, and in the place where the light fell from the skylight stood a loom. My aunt had been a notable spinster and weaver all her life, and was sorely tempted now by those rolls of fine, even thread, as well spun as any she had ever spun herself; the loom was warped, and there lay the shuttle ready. But linen weaving is a careful art. If she began a shroud now she would be at it for a long time, and much as she wanted a proper shroud, she never had been one to start a job and then drop it unfinished. So it was that she kept worrying about what would become of me. But she had already made up her mind to leave the housework undone (since housework is never done anyhow), and now she admitted that she must let other people see to her winding sheet. She hoped she could trust me to choose a clean sheet, at least, and a well-patched one. But she could not resist picking up the end thread of one of the distaffs and feeding out a length between her thumb and finger to test it for evenness and strength; and she kept the thread running between thumb and finger as she walked on.
It was well that she did so, as the new room opened onto a corridor along which were many doorways, each one leading to other halls and rooms, a maze in which she would certainly have lost her way but for the thread of flax.
The rooms were clean, a little dusty, and unfurnished. In one of them my aunt found a toy lying on the floor, a wooden horse. It was crudely carved, the forelegs all of a piece and the hind legs the same, a kind of a two-legged horse with round, flat eyes, which she thought she remembered, though she was not sure.
In another long, narrow room many unused kitchen tools and pans lay on a counter, and three horn buttons in a row.
At the end of a long corridor into which she was drawn by a gleam or a reflection at the far end, there stood an engine of some kind, which was certainly nothing my aunt had ever seen before.
In one small room with no skylight an intense, pungent smell hung in the air, filling up the room like a living creature caught in it. My aunt left that room hurriedly, upset.
Though her curiosity had been roused by finding all these rooms she had not known in her house, her explorations, and the silence, brought on her a sense of oppression and unease. She stood for a moment outside the door of the room where the strong smell was, making up her mind. That never took her long. She began to follow the thread back, winding it about the fingers of her left hand as she took it up. This process needed more attention than the paying out, and lifting her eyes from a tangle in the thread she was puzzled to find herself in a room which she did not recall passing through, but could hardly have crossed without noticing, for it was very large. The walls were of a beautiful fine-grained stone of a pale grey hue, in which certain figures like astrologers’ charts of the constellations, fine lines connecting stars or clusters of stars, were inlaid in gold wire. The ceiling was light and high, the floor of worn, dark marble. It was like a church, my aunt thought, but not a religious church (that is what she thought). The patterns on the walls were like the illustrations in books of learning, and the room itself was like the hall of the great library in the city; there were no books, but the place was majestic and reposeful, having about it a collected stillness very pleasant to the spirit of my aunt. She was tired of walking, and decided to rest there.