As soon as we see that we have defeated the boys, Doi Liang and I untangle our limbs and push each other away as fast as we can.
Sensei Madame Tong and all the other girls catch up with us. They gaze in stun at the third year Academy boys in the sea, swimming back towards us. The girls look at each other and then bow to us. Doi Liang bows back to them as if they were honoring her. Her! Make me die of laughing!
Then that Doi Liang bows to Sensei Madame Tong, reaches into her skate, and gives her the scroll that I signed! Sensei Madame Tong reads the scroll and says, “Good.”
She bows to Sensei Madame Tong again and says, “I have waited three months for a day of quiet.”
If she thinks I am going to let her talk about me like that in front of everyone, she is even stupider than I thought! I skate up to her. “Do not think that they were bowing to you! Your stupid crippled arm almost lost us—Ai!” Doi Liang’s hand shoots out at my head, grabs a fistful of hair, and squeezes! Aiyah, she has creased it! Three months of sleeping with a rolled cloth under my neck to allow the hair to grow back straight, and she has ruined it!
I start to do the double-bladed mantis chop move on Doi Liang’s arm but Sensei Madame Tong shoots me an iron stare. She is taking that Doi Liang’s side! Piss me off to death!
Doi Liang releases my hair. It is still only at the level of my chin, so I cannot see how badly she injured it, but I toss it side to side and can feel from how it swings that that passage of hair is permanently creased and ruined.
“You stupid, ugly, low-grade—Ai!” Doi Liang’s fist is suddenly in my hair again, squeezing and crushing! “Do not do that, you crazy dog fart, you are going to—Ai!” Her other fist shoots into my hair! Her crippled arm is still strong enough to bend my hair. “Let go, you evil, insane—Ai!” Both her fists tighten and twist in my hair!
Out of the border of my vision, I see the two Academy boys climb out of the water onto the boardwalk. Oh, no, I cannot let them see me like this!
“Not in front of boys! Let me go, you stupid, stupid—Ai!” Doi Liang’s hands perform the ten-spoked churning maw move right in my hair!
The boys come and join everyone to watch.
I think I am going to faint.
When she finally releases my hair, my hands reach up, afraid to discover how terrible the injury is.
My hair is so creased and crooked and matted and frizzed that it feels like I am wearing a giant bird’s nest on my head.
I think I am going to vomit.
Then the boys laugh and applaud.
Why me, why me, why always, always me! I want to die!
I receive my Certificate of Successful Penitence from Pearl Colony. The victory against the boys finished us in first place. But I feel no victory.
For that Doi Liang and I are not done.
We are not equal.
We are not even.
We are tied.
So now, you ask us all to write this stupid essay to our parents about what we have learned during our sentence here at Pearl Colony.
Well, I will tell you what I learned here.
Nothing.
Not one stupid, stinking thing.
You tell me that I am a wicked girl, but you just hate me because I am more determined to be myself than you were ever strong enough to be.
You cannot shame me. You cannot deny me. For I am Her Grace, Radiant Goddess Princess Suki. I will take the entrance examination for Pearl Opera Academy and I will prevail.
Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will have skated out of here and forgotten you, and you will still be nuns, ugly, talentless nuns.
Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will battle this evil girl again and I will prevail.
Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will win the lead role in the Drift Season Pageant and in Beautymarch, and I will be crowned Super Princess of Wu-Liu.
Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will make my stupid parents so sorry that they ever sent me away and they will beg me to forgive them but I will not care because I will have already forgotten who they are, as everyone under Heaven will have forgotten them, as the nobodies that they are, while my name will live forever in glory.
Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will be a Legend.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST NOVELETTE
“IN JOY, KNOWING THE ABYSS BEHIND”
SARAH PINSKER
This is Sarah Pinsker’s first Nebula nomination. “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” won a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and appeared in Strange Horizons.
“Don’t leave.”
The first time he said it, it sounded like a command. The tone was so unlike George, Millie nearly dropped her hairbrush. They were in their bedroom, in their home of sixty-six years. Outside the French doors, fresh snow settled on top of old snow. The lights in George’s sprawling treehouse made it stand out against the otherwise unbroken white. George sat in the chair at the telephone desk. He was in the middle of changing his socks, one leg crossed over the other, when he dropped the new sock to the floor and coughed once. Millie glanced in the mirror on her vanity, caught him staring at her.
“Don’t leave,” he said again.
She turned around to face him.
The third time it arrived as a question, a note of confusion lurking in the space between his words. “Don’t leave, please?”
He seemed to struggle with the next sentence, his last. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you talking about, old man?” she asked, but he was already someplace else. He opened his mouth as if to say more, but no words came out.
She had always been calm in the family’s minor medical crises, but this time the words this is it blazed across her brain and crowded everything else out. She took deep breaths and tried to remember what she should do. She crossed to his chair, put her hand on his chest, felt the rise and fall. That was good. She didn’t think she could get him to the floor, much less perform chest compressions. She stooped to put the clean sock on his bare foot, then reached across him to pick up the phone and dial for an ambulance. Should those actions have been the other way around? Possibly. This is it.
“I’ll be right back,” she told him before leaving the room to unlock the front door. He was still in the same place when she returned, collapsed slightly to the right in the chair. His left eye looked panicked, his right eye oddly calm. She dragged the chair from her vanity over and sat down facing him. Behind him the snow continued to fall.
“I wonder if this will be the storm that proves too heavy for that poor old sycamore,” she said, taking her husband’s hand in hers and looking out at the treehouse. “I think this is going to be a big one.”
It had snowed the day they met. Chicago, Marshall Field’s, December 1944. He had held the door for her as they both exited onto State Street.
“Ladies first,” said the young man in the Army overcoat, gesturing with the fat notebook in his free hand. He was shorter than her by a few inches, and she was not terribly tall; if he hadn’t been wearing the uniform she would have mistaken him for a boy.
“Thank you,” she said, giving him a smile over her shoulder. She didn’t see the patch of ice beyond the vestibule. Her left foot slipped out from under her, then her right. He caught her before she landed, losing his own footing in the process. The pages of his notebook fluttered to the ground around them as he broke her fall with his body. They both scrambled to their feet, red-faced and breathless.
“Thank you again,” she said.
He brushed snow off his backside and bent to grab several loose pieces of paper from the pavement. She picked at one that had plastered itself to her leg.
He pointed at it. “It likes you. You should probably keep it.”
She peeled the page from her nylon and examined it. Even as the ink blurred and ran she could tell it had been a skillful sketch of the grand staircase and the Tiffany dome at the library. The soaked paper tore in two in her hands.
“It’s ruined!”
“It’s okay, I have more.” He held out the others. She saw the Field Museum, the Buckingham Fountain, the building they had just left, all bleeding away.
She put her hand to her mouth. “Your drawings are ruined, and you’ve torn your coat, too.”
He shrugged, touching the ragged edges at his elbow. “Don’t worry about it. These were just for fun. Practice. I’m an architect. George Gordon. You don’t have to memorize it. Everybody’ll know it someday.”
“Millicent Berg. Nice to meet you. And I’m sorry about your drawings, even if they were only for fun. Can I make it up to you?”
He scratched his head in a pantomime of contemplation. “I’d ask you to have lunch with me, but I’ve already eaten. You might let me draw another for you over coffee, I suppose.”
Millie glanced up at the clock jutting out from the building. She shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m already late to meet a friend.”
“Another time?” he persisted, rubbing his elbow in an obvious fashion. In another man she might have found it rude, but there was something about him that she liked. Too bad.
“Sorry. I’m only visiting Chicago until Tuesday. I go to college in Baltimore,” she said.
His grin chased everything ordinary from his face. “You may not get out of this so easily, then. I’m stationed in Maryland. Fort Meade.”
Out of such coincidences, lives were built.
The emergency workers tore two buttons off of George’s pajama top. Millie, who had dressed while she waited for them to arrive, slipped the buttons into the pocket of her cardigan. The EMTs checked George’s pulse and vital signs. They talked to each other but not to her. She hovered behind them as they worked.
“Will he be okay?” she asked. Nobody answered her, and after a moment she wondered if she had asked out loud. She glanced at herself in the mirror. The old woman who had stolen her reflection several years ago stared back at her. They nodded to each other in greeting.
When one of the paramedics finally spoke to Millie, it was to tell her they didn’t want her to ride in the ambulance with George.
“There isn’t room,” said the young one, the girl.
What she meant, thought Millie, was that they didn’t want to have to worry about her, too. She was spared the trouble of arguing when Raymond and his boyfriend Mark arrived.
“Don’t worry, Grandma,” Ray said. “We can ride behind them.”
Mark helped her into the passenger seat of their Toyota. They were good boys. They took her to the salon, took her and George to dinner and to plays and concerts. Of all of the children and grandchildren, she was glad that Ray was the one who lived nearby. He was the one she trusted most to actually listen to her if she said something.
Mark dropped Millie and Ray at the emergency bay. After filling out insurance paperwork, they sat in a waiting room until a tired-eyed woman in scrubs appeared. An ischemic stroke, the doctor said, on the left side of George’s brain. They had stabilized him. She could see him if she liked. Millie wondered about the phrasing. Did anyone ever say no, thank you very much, I’ve waited all day, but on second thought, I wouldn’t like to see him? After so many hours in one position she struggled to get to her feet. Raymond offered his arm, and she leaned on him all the way down the hallway to Intensive Care.
The right side of George’s face sagged, the eye tugging downward at the outside corner. His right hand lay limp on his hip. His left hand busied itself, roaming the white sheets in sweeping motions.
“He’s awake, but not really responding to anyone,” the doctor told her. What was the doctor’s name? DeSoto, like the mouse dentist in the book she had read to the grandchildren. She could remember that. “The stroke was on the left side, so we’re looking at right side hemiparesis, possibly hemiplegia. He probably will need therapy to regain speech, and that may be a long way off. For now, we’d like to see if he acknowledges you in any way.”
Millie approached with delicate steps. The man in the bed looked like George with all of the Georgeness scooped out.
“Hello, old man,” she whispered, just for him. A little louder she said, “Hi, George. It’s me, Millie.” That felt oddly formal, like an introduction. She didn’t want to touch the dead hand, and reached instead for the roving one, his left.
He brushed her away with a force she hadn’t expected and then resumed his interrupted motions. Millie fought back tears. He hadn’t meant it, couldn’t mean it, but the insult still bruised her.
“Believe it or not, that’s a positive sign, Mrs. Gordon. That’s the first time he’s responded to stimulus.”
Ray rested a hand on her shoulder. “He probably didn’t know it was you, Grandma. He wasn’t pushing you away.”
Millie looked at the doctor. “Doctor Gordon,” she said.
“No, I’m Dr. DeSoto.” The young woman glanced at Ray.
“And I’m Dr. Gordon,” Millie said. “Just so you know.”
She lowered herself into the chair by the bedside, then looked up at the doctor and her grandson. They both knew everything, and knew nothing.
“He’s drawing,” said Millie. “All that motion. He’s trying to draw. He’s left-handed.”
In their first months of courtship, she had once asked him to show her his designs.
“They’re just buildings,” he said. “Nothing special.”
She couldn’t believe that anything he did might be less than special. As far as she was concerned, everything about him was clever and funny and attentive and romantic. He had called her father to ask permission to see her, and replaced the ruined picture of the Tiffany dome with one of her college’s stately main hall. He brought her handmade bouquets of paper roses, since it was still winter. Her friends buzzed about the fact that she had found an older man, a qualified architect, twenty-four to her twenty. They all dated Hopkins boys, rich and bland.
“Bring me some of your blueprints,” she begged him one night in her dormitory’s well-policed lounge. “I know it can’t be the ones you work on for the Army, but maybe something from when you were in school? I want to see what you do.”
“Really, they’ll bore you,” he said, but he looked pleased. The next time he visited, he had a leather portfolio tucked under one arm. He spread the diagrams on the table in the visiting room.
“Is this a skyscraper?” Millie traced the outlines.
He grinned his charming grin, with a touch of sheepishness built in. “Yes—but that one isn’t being built or anything. Not yet, anyway.”
“I can tell it’s going to be beautiful. The doorways, the decorative touches. It’s lovelier than the Chrysler Building!”
He leaned over to kiss her, though a sharp cough from the dormitory matron interrupted his course. “The Chrysler Building was what inspired me to do this, you know,” he said, pushing his drawings slightly to the side to sit on the corner of the table, facing her. The enthusiasm in his eyes lit his whole face. “That and the Empire State Building. We lived in New York back then, and I would slip out of school to watch them going up. Nine, ten years old, and I knew right then that I was going to make things that people would want to see.”
He pointed to other drawings in the portfolio: towers, mansions, a stadium. Millie was amazed at his vision.
“When do you get to start making these?”
“As soon as the Army’s done with me.”
“I’ll bet they don’t have you designing anything as beautiful as this. Just barracks and bases.”
“There are some interesting projects. Hypothetical stuff, with the engineers.”
“Hypothetical?”
“Made up. Like out of the pulps. Barracks for soldiers who are ten feet tall, prisons built into the side of mountains, guard houses underwater. I know it’s all ridiculous stuff, kid stuff, but it’s fun to imagine. The engineers tell me what is and isn’t possible. I draw, and then they take my sketches away or tell me things to change. Mill, I thought my skyscrapers would be the future, but they’re showing
me all kinds of futures I hardly know how to think about.”
When he proposed to her a month later, she said yes. She loved the sweet touches, but also the dreamer architect. She wanted to be part of the future he envisioned.
A nurse brought a piece of butcher’s paper into George’s hospital room, and Dr. DeSoto put a fat marker in his hand. Millie sat in the chair by his bedside. Their son Charlie, Charles now, brought in a second chair to sit next to her. Jane was due on a flight that evening. The room was getting crowded, but Millie didn’t know whom she could ask to leave. She contemplated stepping out, excusing herself to go to the bathroom or the vending machine and not coming back. No, she would never get away with it. Charlie had become a hoverer, attending to needs she didn’t have, fetching her tea and a pillow for her chair and antibacterial sanitizers that turned her skin to paper.
The odor of the marker cut through the hospital smells. Why was it only the acrid scents that came on so forcefully? Charlie had brought two huge bouquets, but Millie couldn’t smell the flowers at all. Then again, it was winter, and these bouquets must have come from a supermarket or the hospital gift shop; they were probably scentless. She thought for a moment of the paper flowers that George used to make for her during the months that nothing bloomed.
George’s good eye opened. He didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular, but he began to draw again. Quick, sure strokes.
“The marker’s going to bleed through the paper!” Charlie half-rose from his chair.
“Let it,” said Millie. “White sheets are boring anyway.”
“Wait until the hospital bills you for them,” her son said under his breath. He had perfected that stage mutter at the age of five. She ignored it, as she always had.
Millie had seen enough of George’s blueprints over the years to know that this was an unusual one. He started from the center, instead of the perimeter. The sweeping motions he had made without the pen in his hand now transformed into curved walls. Thick walls, judging from the way he returned to them over and over. Shapes she had never seen him draw in any of his professional work.