IN THE HOLE
                         Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley

                                   ****



                                   ****

  Lisa has been writing professionally since selling a short story back in
 1971. She believes that ‘In the Hole’ is the 99th short story she’s sold to
date. Her most recent novels, The Mysteries and The Silver Bough, are
  available from Bantam Spectra in the US. Lisa was born and raised in
Texas, has also lived in New York and London, but for the past seventeen
years she has been settled in a remote and rural part of Scotland with her
              family. She is currently working on a new novel.

                                   ****

Steven is the internationally unknown author of the story collections Ghost
Seas (published in Australia, 1997), The Beasts of Love (USA, 2005), and
  Where or When (UK, 2006). For some reason he lives in Tennessee.

                                   ****

Sitting up high in the back of the bus, resting his forehead against the cold
window, Heath gazed out at the misty landscape and tried to make sense of
what he saw. Although he had grown up in this country, it had become alien
to him.

      There had been rainstorms the night before, and now the late
afternoon sunlight filtered through drooping, perspiring greenery and
glistened on the boggy ground and the swollen streams. That seemed
normal, and yet here and there he also glimpsed a landscape in
agony—stands of blighted, shattered trees and the blackened ruins of farm
buildings; the swollen carcasses of dead animals; piles of what might have
been bodies, or just discarded clothing; burnt-out cars abandoned at
roadsides, even something that looked like the wreckage of an airplane
scattered over a hillside—all evidence that he traveled through a war zone.
But the war was over, or so somebody, or almost everybody, insisted, and,
anyway, the war, Heath’s war, had been a localized conflict on the other
side of the world. How could it have reached this far into his peaceful
homeland?
       He thought then about the conversation he had had with the stranger
beside him, who got off at the last stop save one. I’m looking for work, the
stranger told him, have been for months now, but there’s nothing a man can
make his living from—life’s tough these days, on account of the war. At first
Heath thought he meant that the cost of sustaining a war abroad had
crippled the domestic economy, but as he put together other, overheard
snatches of talk with the details of the ruined landscape before him, he
found himself forced to another conclusion. During his long years of
captivity, he decided, when he had known nothing of the world outside, the
war must have mutated and spread like a disease until no part of the globe
was free of it. Like a monstrous incurable inescapable plague, it had
become a reality for everybody, but nobody wanted, nobody dared to talk
about it. Thus he found himself wondering, Who are we fighting now? Who
is the enemy? Who are we?

    Still, somebody had told him: “Your war’s over, soldier, you’re going
home,” and, yes, here he was, going home.

        He originally dreamed of going home on the train, of arriving for the
first time at the railroad station that had loomed so large in his boyhood
fantasies of escape. He had spent what seemed in memory an inordinate
amount of time hanging around the platform, gazing yearningly down the
tracks, envying the grown-ups who had the money and the freedom to buy
tickets to go somewhere else, and promising himself that some day he,
too, would climb aboard and be gone.

      The train no longer went through his town, however, nor anywhere
near it. Not for many years had there been an operative line so far out, not
for many, many years—and when Heath, shocked, had tried to argue with
the woman in the travel agency, she clattered the keys of her computer
keyboard and came up with a date that stopped his mouth: the last trains
had come through during the year he started high school, they had been
long gone even by the time he left to enlist—how could he have forgotten?
He had left town on a bus, because there were no longer any trains.

      And now he returned by bus. He disliked it. The bus smelled of other
people, of unwashed clothes impregnated with sweat and cigarette smoke,
of sickening food, tuna fish sandwiches and bananas and apples and
potato chips, and coffee turned sour on breath. Bags rustled, people
chomped their food noisily and talked, the air conditioner struggled weakly
to cope with their exhalations and body heat. Some previous occupant of
Heath’s hard, lumpy seat had slashed it, and someone else had mended
the rents with strips of rough cloth-backed tape. The bus was a bad fit,
almost as bad a fit as the uniform they had given him to wear. Any clothes
at all felt wrong, for in the hole his only coverings had been darkness and
filth, but the uniform was an abomination, poking, pinching, itching in a
dozen places. His captors, the enemy, had worn uniforms, and though he
tried, though he knew his uniform was not the same, he sensed no
essential difference. He felt as though sewn into the skin of one of the
enemy.

      But who were the enemy? Not the people he fought when his war
began, not the people who captured him. They were all dead. “Your war’s
over, soldier, you’re going home,” his rescuers said, when they pulled him
out of the hole, when they finally made him understand. That could only
mean that before one war ended another had begun. He assumed it was
somewhere else, far away, and no concern of his, because he was going
home.

    Home. He tried to remember where that was, exactly, and what it
meant.

       Precisely how long he had been away he did not know. He had asked,
and received a reply, but numbers, dates, precise information floated
around his head like a cloud of gnats, as impossible to grasp as the
incomprehensible names of the countries the enemy controlled. He felt as
if he had been away forever, “forever and a day,” words from an old song
Cara had liked to sing. How did it go?

      I’ll love you though you stay away, forever and a day.

       She had told him on the day he left, though she was furious with him
for leaving, that she would wait.

      He knew she meant it, but he knew also that nobody could wait
forever. Not really. He had written to her anyway from the hospital, because
the people who rescued him—our side, he kept reminding himself—told
him, practically ordered him, to get in touch with his family, and though they
were not blood-kin and had never married, Cara was the closest thing to
family he had left, the only family he really wanted. My war’s over, he had
written to her, I’m coming home.

     He sent the letter to her father’s house, praying the old man still lived
and would pass it on to her, wherever she might be, and his prayers were
answered. Cara, amazingly, still lived there, in the town where they had both
grown up. She had not forgotten. I love you, she wrote, again, as in her very
first letter to him. Come back to me as soon as you can.

     As soon as I can, he thought, and slept slumped in his seat high in the
back of the bus, on his way home.

                                     ****

      The bus braked with a noisy exhalation, startling Heath awake. He
looked out at the dull concrete and glass box of a small-town bus station,
old and dirty. He stared, frowning, at the faded board bearing the name of
the town, trying to trace the distant chord the name struck within him. His
gaze moved to peeling advertisements for goods he could not imagine that
anybody sold, services surely nobody provided. He sat, unmoved and
unmoving until the bus driver sang out the name of the stop. Then he stood
as though jerked erect by a hook wedged between his ribs and caught in
his heart, and pain shot up his left leg, the legacy of a kneecap smashed
long ago by a bored, smiling guard. He limped slowly down the aisle and
made his way carefully down the steps. He stood for a long time beside the
bus, regarding the station’s sagging eaves, as the full import sank in. This
was Cara’s town. This had been his town. This was home. He was home.

      “There’s a pay-phone inside if you want a taxi,” the bus driver called
down to him, and Heath nodded agreeably, but though he knew he must be
a sorry sight with his curved spine and awkward gait, he wanted to walk. If
he meant to feel truly at home in this place again, he must start to reclaim it,
and the only way he could think to do that was the same way he had done it
as a kid, on the ground, mapping it out for himself.

       Things had changed; he saw that right away. Although he knew to
expect it, the sight of the abandoned, sagging railroad station made his
eyes sting. He picked his way over the rusted rails and found himself
skirting the commercial center, once bright and bustling, now almost as
decrepit in appearance as the station building. The few cars parked along
the street had seen better days, and at least half of the storefront
properties stood empty, their dusty windows displaying for sale or lease
signs if they displayed anything at all. The little Mom & Pop grocery store
was posted with warnings about security measures; the drugstore he
remembered, the bakery, the card and gift shop, had been displaced by a
locked-up tattoo parlor, a charity thrift shop, and a gutted shell of
fire-blackened cinder blocks. Grass grew through cracks in the pocked and
crumbling pavement underfoot. He glimpsed human figures, close by or far
away, he could not be quite sure. Some seemed vaguely familiar, but none
looked directly at him or spoke as he hobbled past. This did not surprise or
offend him. His imprisonment, those eternities spent alone in a concrete
box, had aged him. He had lost flesh and teeth, and what remained of his
hair had turned white. His skin was ashen from so long without sunlight or
decent food. He wondered if even Cara would know him.

      Nevertheless, walking on as quickly as his injured leg allowed, he took
hope from the fact that life went on in this town, wounded as it obviously
had been. Heath saw no bomb craters, no corpses in the street, no
uniformed men clutching guns, looking for an excuse to shoot. His
past—not the recent past, not the slow, painful tedium of physiotherapy, not
his confinement in the hole, and not the time before the hole when he had
been a young soldier, alternately terrified and bored out of his skull, but that
time when he and the world had both been young, when he first loved
Cara—fell over him like a comforting blanket.

       Cara, he believed, held the key to his life, his survival. Memories of
her had kept him alive, kept him from losing his mind in the hole. Squatting
on rough concrete in total darkness, he would touch his face, stroke his own
body, until his fingers became hers, and he could feel the hard floor
beneath him soften into the bed in Cara’s light-filled bedroom. Then he
would look up into her beautiful face, and, finally, as he saw the pure and
utter love shining from her eyes, he had been able, truly, to love her back.

      After a time, either long or short, he could not say exactly, of moving
through curiously empty streets, he found himself standing before Cara’s
house in the part of town once called ‘new’: a section of handsome brick
boxes built in neatly tended rows when a new factory had opened. The
factory soon closed, however, early victim of the wartime economy, some
of the houses had never been sold, and the neighborhood, once desirable,
had quickly gone downhill; the house next door was an abandoned wreck.
But Cara’s father, a proud and careful homeowner even in times of tight
money, insisted on mowing the grass once a week, planting flowers and
shrubs, keeping the gutters cleared and the trim of the house painted a
cheerful yellow. Now, when Heath saw the peeling paint, the sagging
gutters and flowerbeds full of weeds, he knew the old man must be dead.

      He stood before the house where Cara had lived—where he knew
she still lived—his heart racing, his mouth very dry. They had been virgins in
those days and, without a car or a place of their own, lacked privacy in
which to consummate their love. They walked everywhere together, holding
hands, leaning close as they talked—and talked, and talked. They shared
everything in words, all the secrets of their hearts, even a few tentative
sexual fantasies. They hugged and kissed often, but beyond that,
nothing—except once.
      Once, and once only, they found themselves alone together in Cara’s
house, her father having driven her mother to the city to see a specialist at a
hospital there; they were to have dinner before returning, so were certain to
be out until very late.

      Without a word about intention, in silent accord, Heath and Cara
walked home from school that day and let themselves in, went straight to
her sunny bedroom, undressed, lay down on her big, soft bed and then—

      Somehow, despite their best hopes and efforts, despite their love, it
all went wrong.

     He was clumsy, she was frightened, they were both embarrassed and
shy with each other, and, finally, virgins still, they clung together, whispering
hopeful promises, It’ll be okay, next time, another time ... not realizing they
had missed their one and only chance.

      Heath shuddered, ashamed of his ignorant, innocent younger self,
wishing he had been bolder. He would never have forced himself on her, of
course, but with a little more experience, he might have aroused her,
relaxed her enough to make intercourse possible. Only later had he learned
from other soldiers in his unit, and from magazines and videos, of the
things women supposedly liked, tricks to make them “hot and horny.”

      He stood before Cara’s house, aware of the heat in his cheeks and a
crawling in his belly, and he almost turned away. What right did he have to
presume? He belonged to the past, whereas she had gone on and grown
up. She must have found another, bolder lover by now. Unlike him, she
would not still be a virgin.

     Then he reminded himself: Come back to me, she had written. He
had not imagined that, she really wrote those words, and whatever else
might be true, she remembered, she still wanted him.

       He walked slowly around the house, into the backyard where he had
met her so many times, to the tree where, in the orange light of a long-ago
afternoon, he had carefully carved heath loves cara into the wood while she
sat in the grass at his feet and told him, “Forever. Put forever.”

      The tree still stood there, apparently thriving, and in the overgrown
grass beneath it sat a young woman, and she was still Cara. The years had
not changed her as they had changed him. She still wore her long fair hair in
a braid draped over her shoulder. He wondered how he must look to her,
and he touched his face, recalling the ashen, shrunken features of the old
man who stared back at him from a mirror in a hospital bathroom.

      But something flared in her eyes at the sight of him, and with a swift,
sweet smile she jumped up and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Heath!
Finally! I’ve been waiting for days, wondering when you’d get here!”

       Her weight knocked him back—she must have outweighed him by
twenty pounds—and he might have fallen except that she held him so
tightly.

     “I—I’ve missed you,” he murmured, a little breathless, but that was
wrong, he immediately thought, I shouldn’t have said that. How could he
miss her when he was always aware of her presence, keeping him alive?

      She let go of him and stepped back with an odd little laugh, and he
guessed she sensed the falseness in his words. He felt ashamed, fearful
that he had hurt her, especially as she would not meet his gaze. “I’m
sorry—”

       “Oh, stop! Since when do we need platitudes between us?” Finally
her eyes rested on his face. She looked him slowly up and down, and bit
her lip. “You look—oh, dear—you haven’t been well, poor darling.”

     He nodded, not knowing what to say. In the hole, there had been no
need for words. She had come to him when he needed her, and there was
never any strangeness or misunderstanding.

     She took hold of his hand. “Come inside. Are you hungry? I made
cookies and lemonade. It looks to me like you need feeding up.”

     His answering smile felt stiff on his face, but he walked up to the
house with her, hand in hand as in the past. He sat at the kitchen table and
waited as she got a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator and a
covered plate of oatmeal cookies from the pantry. He remembered that she
had made lemonade and oatmeal cookies on the day he went away; they
had sat here at the same table, she too sad to eat or drink, he too excited.

     Although he felt no hungrier now than then, he bit into a cookie,
watching while she did the same. His first impression of her had been
wrong; she had changed. She had been a girl when he left, and now she
was a woman, with a ripe, full figure, and very fine lines around her eyes.

      He said, “Your father,” and then stopped, not knowing how to go on.
      “Oh, he’s not too bad today,” she said brightly. “I’ll take you in to see
him in a little while.”

      “You mean he’s—what’s wrong with him?”

      She frowned as if he should have known and said shortly, “Daddy had
a stroke. Not a major one, thank God, but now he can’t get around so much
by himself. I do the best I can, but I don’t—I can’t—” Tears started to
gather on her eyelashes.

      “No, no, of course not. Cara, I’m sure you’re doing your best.”

     She blinked away the tears, but the frown remained. “You thought he
was dead.”

      “When I saw the flower-beds all overgrown, and the paintwork
peeling—”

       She cut him off with an anguished look. “I haven’t got time to do all
that, too! I cook and clean and look after him—that’s a full-time job! I
wanted to hire a nurse, but the expense—and besides—”

        “Hey, hey, hey!” He caught and held her hands in both of his. “I’m not
criticizing you, Cara! I think you’re the most wonderful...” He faltered again,
lost for words. Had this been one of his dreams, by this time she would
have been on his lap, stopping his mouth with her kisses, unbuttoning his
shirt with her small, deft fingers, but he was not in the hole now, he was
sitting in Cara’s kitchen, and she was gazing at him, hurt and hungry for his
praise.

      “Wonderful woman,” he finished rather weakly, dropping her hands to
pick up another cookie, which he quickly stuffed into his mouth. “Mmm!”

     She smiled rather sadly and a small sigh escaped her. “I guess ... I
guess you missed my cookies?”

     He nodded, eager to please, swallowed, and an idea struck him.
“Look, I could do the chores—yard work, repairs, sort of thing your dad
used to do...”

     She nodded cautiously. “That would be wonderful, Heath. If you can
spare the time, I mean. While you’re here.” She looked down at the table,
pushed a crumb around with one fingertip and went on hesitantly, “I don’t
know what you want to do, or how long you can stay—”

     At last he managed to say the right thing: “Forever. Forever, Cara.”
She looked into his eyes, and her face broke into the most beautiful smile
he had ever seen on a human face.

      “I do love you, Heath. I always have.”

      “I know. I’ve always loved you, too. I always will. Forever.”

      They said no more. The better part of a minute passed. Then, still
without speaking, without even touching, they both rose from the table and
went to her bedroom.

       The room was as he remembered it, only not so bright. The filmy
curtains were closed, and the late sunlight filtered through them, thin and
strange. The same prints of paintings by Monet and Cezanne hung on the
yellow walls, however, and the same china figurines shared space with what
seemed to be the same books and recordings on the shelves. He
recognized the flowered bedspread and fluffy white rug. He saw nothing
indicative of new interests acquired during the years of their separation, and
he wondered if she had really been here all that time, like the sleeping
princess in the fairytale, awaiting the reviving kiss of her prince. Or had she
returned only recently to look after her father? Had she left her real life
somewhere else, merely fitted herself back into the bedroom of her
childhood, too busy, or too depressed, to bother to redecorate, putting off
the major step of moving in all her stuff because to do so would be to admit
that this was her real life now?

      He did not ask; he dared not risk this moment of intimacy.

       Cara pulled back the bedspread, and they undressed clumsily,
scarcely looking at each other. Horribly aware of his wasted, scarred flesh,
pallid, shrivelled, and aged from years of semi-starvation spent crouching in
the dark, he was grateful for the maidenly reserve that kept her eyes
downcast as she fumbled with her clothes. When she turned away to pile
them neatly onto a chair, he crawled beneath the sheet. Moments later, she
slipped in beside him, and as they moved closer together he smelled the
clean fresh citrus tang of her shampoo, a powdery, perfumed waft of
deodorant, and the more subtle, personal scent of herself beneath. He put
his arms around her. She shivered at his touch and then lay still, waiting.

      He waited, too.
       He thought of how she had come to him countless times in the hole,
of how he would squat and stare and see nothing in that utter blackness
until, after a time, he caught glimmers of light, and a faint hint of motion.
Then he would hear her voice humming a sad, wordless tune, and the
sadness of it would bring hot tears to his eyes. She would murmur his
name, tell him that she loved him, tell him what she had done that day, all
the simple, ordinary things: how she had gone on her bicycle to the store
and then worked in the garden with her father, the music she heard on the
radio while preparing supper, what book she read at bedtime.

      Gradually, as he listened to her familiar phrases, the darkness would
lessen until finally he saw her, just her outline and a hint of her face. When
he opened his arms, she would melt into them, kiss him passionately and
explore his body with her hands and mouth while he gasped and shuddered
with pleasure. To his wondering amazement, the girl who came to him in the
hole was not the shy virgin he remembered, but a lover every bit as
practiced, skilled, and uninhibited as the stars of the pornographic videos
he had watched with the other guys before his capture. She could do
anything, and would do everything he had ever dared to imagine. She knew
just what would please him, what would excite and sustain him, and
thousands of times she had brought him release.

    And when she left, he would touch his face in the darkness, just to
make sure he was still there.

      Now, as he lay in Cara’s soft bed, in the dim light, aware of her real,
solid body pressed so close against his, he longed for her to make the first
move, as she had always done in his fantasies. He was too fearful of
spoiling the moment with his clumsiness and ignorance to touch her first.
He was still a virgin, just as when they had said goodbye, but then he had
been young, strong, responsive to the desires of the girl he loved. Now, he
was old and weak as well as inexperienced, and he did not know the
woman beside him.

       He heard her sigh, felt her shift a little beside him, and he stopped
breathing in the intensity of his hope that it was about to begin at last, for
real, that the love that had kept him alive in the hole would bring him back to
life. He would be reborn at her hands; it was the only way.

      Nothing happened. He did not feel her hands on him, he felt nothing,
only, as he began to breathe again, he thought he heard her whisper, faintly,
“Kiss me.”

      He turned his head and saw her waiting for his kiss. He pressed his
lips to hers for the first time since the day he had left her at the bus station.
He kissed a stranger’s mouth. He tried to ignore that chill warning and kept
his lips on hers, as he felt her hands begin to move on his back. Now,
surely, she would give herself to him.

       Her hands remained lightly pressing on his back, however, holding
him in a chaste embrace, never straying below his waist, showing no
inclination to go exploring. He continued kissing her until his lips grew
numb, and then he drew back. For the first time since they had left the
kitchen they looked into each other’s eyes, and he saw there bewilderment
and sadness, her feelings reflecting his own.

      The love he had come looking for existed only in a dream. He closed
his eyes.

      Cara would not let him give up, however. Just as, once, his memory
of her had kept him alive, now the real woman refused to let the dream die.
She demanded, “Heath, talk to me!”

      Talk was the furthest thing from his desire.

      “Please, tell me what you want!”

      He could not; it was impossible; what he wanted was for her to know
without being told, and if he so much as said so, everything would be
spoiled.

      Finally, she began to cry. “You don’t love me any more.”

      “Oh, Cara, of course I do!” He hugged her close. “Please don’t cry. I
love you. I wish I could show you how much.”

      She stilled in his arms. “You—you mean it?”

      “Yes. Loving you was all that got me through the war.”

       “Really?” She hesitated, then lifted her head to look him in the eye. “I
don’t mind, I’d understand, if you’d found another girlfriend, or even—even
if you went to, you know—” she faltered, barely whispered the word:
“prostitutes.”

      He shook his head. “Never, Cara. There’s never been anybody but
you. Never.”
     Understanding lit her face. “There’s never been anybody but you for
me, either. So we’re both virgins—that’s why—oh, Heath, it’s like before!
We just need time, that’s all! Time to learn how to please each other. And
we have plenty of time.”

      When he agreed, she hugged him, then abruptly pulled herself free of
his embrace, rolled away from him, out of bed, and began dressing.

     “I have to check on Dad and get his dinner,” she explained. “We’ll
have to wait until bedtime—think you can manage to wait? Luckily, we go to
bed early in this house.” She flashed him a smile he could not recall seeing
from her before, sexy and mischievous, and he felt a stirring of arousal.
Maybe it would be all right.

     He got up and dressed himself, determined to help. He followed Cara
downstairs to the kitchen, assisted her chiefly by being present as she
prepared a tray, and followed her back upstairs.

       Cara’s father sat in an upholstered hair and gazed through the curtain
of his bedroom window. He looked frail and tired and impossibly older than
he could actually be. A faint sour smell hung in the room. He only glanced at
Cara as she set the tray on a table beside his chair. Then he noticed Heath
standing behind her in the doorway, and started violently.

      “Daddy, it’s Heath,” Cara said. “You remember Heath.”

     “Heath,” said the old man, slurring the word almost beyond
recognition. One side of his mouth barely moved; one side of his face
seemed unsynchronized with the other. “Heath’s dead.”

      “No, Daddy. Heath was taken prisoner of war. Now he’s back.”

      “That’s not Heath.”

        “Yes, it is, Daddy. They did terrible things to him in the prison camp,
but it is Heath, I promise you.”

      “No, no...”

      “I’m upsetting him,” Heath said, backing out of the room.

      “Give him time,” said Cara.

      We all need time, Heath thought. He went downstairs and stepped
outside. Twilight was already settling; he listened for insect song, bird calls,
then for sounds of neighbors, distant traffic, anything, but all was weirdly
silent. He imagined the evening holding its breath as it waited to see what
he intended to do.

       Then, as he came around the corner facing the street, something
small and dark like a dog or a very dirty child yelped and darted away
quickly, too fast for him to get a good look at it, disappearing into a gap
among the wild shrubbery. Heath stared after it, breathing hard, waiting for
his heart’s beating to return to normal. When he had recovered, he walked
back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, always stopping well
short of the shrubbery. He glimpsed, as though from a distance, as though
through air turned hazy with impossible distance, a few indistinct human
figures stirring in the neighborhood. They took no notice of him; wraithlike,
silent, those who evidently had jobs were returning from them, others
evidently were leaving home for a night out. Heath recalled the closed
factory, the empty shops. He could not imagine what sort of jobs there
might be, or where, exactly, in this small town, one went for a night out.

      When he re-entered the house, he found Cara putting dinner on the
table. They sat opposite each other and ate without talking until Heath finally
asked, “What happened here?”

      “What do you mean?”

     “Everything. The town. What happened to everything, where did
everybody go?”

      Cara stared at him blankly. At last she said, “I’m still here.”

      Now he stared. “You mean you never left? But why did you stay?”

     “What else was there for me to do? I told you I’d wait. I never thought
the war could go on for so long.”

      “No,” he muttered, feeling cold, “neither did I. Nobody did.”

     “We were going to love each other forever,” Cara said, her voice
growing sharp, “and be together always. But then the war came, and you
wanted to go be a soldier.”

      “I didn’t want to. I had to. It was my duty.”

      She shook her head. “It was your excuse. You wanted to get away
from this town so much, you couldn’t think of anything but getting out, and
you left me behind.”

      “I said I’d come back for you, and now I have.”

        She set her fork on her plate. “Yes. You have. I’m sorry if I sounded a
little bitter just then. It hasn’t been easy for me, but I know what you’ve been
through must have been so much worse. But it’s going to be all right now
that we’re together.”

       Even so, though he felt another stirring of passion that night as he
watched her undress, it quickly faded and died. He told himself the problem
was too much light. Cara’s bedroom was never truly dark, owing to a
hall-light she left turned on for her father’s sake, and to the streetlights that
sent their sickly yellowish glow through the filmy curtains and cast unnerving
shadows on the wall. He suspected, however, Cara’s dull passivity was the
real cause of his impotence. She seemed both slow and skittish, reluctant
to touch him, and when at last he tried to direct her, the result was even
worse. He could not enjoy what he could only think of as masturbation by
proxy.

      Still, with fingertips and lips, he managed to bring her to orgasm. She
shuddered and cried out softly and then lay very still in his embrace. He
listened as her breathing slowed; he fancied he heard the slowing beat of
her heart as well.

      Finally, she said, “Heath, that was beautiful.”

    He could think of nothing to say except, “I’m glad you liked it.” After a
moment he added, “It was beautiful.”

      “But what about you?” She touched him hopefully. He felt nothing, not
the least tremor of arousal.

      “Never mind me.”

      “Heath, I want to make you happy.”

     “I know, and you do,” he told her, “you do make me happy,” and hated
himself for lying.

      They said no more, only held each other, drifting into sleep. He awoke
in the unmoving depth of the night and looked for the little painted Swiss
clock that Cara always kept on her bedside table. Its glowing dial faced
away from him; he picked up the clock and turned it and held it to his ear. It
was silent, inert. He returned it to the bedside table and lay staring at the
pattern of shadow on the bedroom wall, listening to nothing, thinking about
the sleeping woman at his side, with her head cradled in the hollow of his
shoulder.

     Then he found himself thinking about the other Cara, the one he had
known in the hole. How had her imagined touch aroused him so incredibly,
when the real woman, using her mouth and hands as he taught her, could
not? What was wrong with him? He lay awake almost until dawn, worrying
and wondering.

       On the second day, he walked around the house, noting jobs that
needed doing. Then, without telling Cara or even thinking to tell her, he set
off for a long walk around the town and did not return until late afternoon. He
found her in the kitchen, preparing her father’s dinner tray.

      “Where have you been?” she demanded.

      “I went searching for old landmarks,” he told her. “I didn’t find many.
In fact, at one point I started wondering if I’d ever actually lived in this place
before.”

      “That’s ridiculous. Of course you did.”

       “Cara, more than half the houses I passed looked like nobody lives in
them. Many were uninhabitable. There’s a house at the end of this street
with only half its roof. Its ceiling’s caved in, too. I could see, through the
dirty windows, the shadow of rafters cast on an inside wall. Other houses I
saw had charred walls, broken, sagging roof beams, empty windows,
missing doors. And everything overgrown, vines, fallen limbs of trees.” He
hesitated, groped for words. “Disappearing into wilderness. Here and there
I passed a lot covered in rubble, as if the house that’d been there just burst
apart under the impact of an immense fist. Further on, the same fist must’ve
ploughed through the cemetery. I think some graves are broken open
there—I couldn’t bring myself to look too closely. And feral, starving cats,
prowling everywhere, skittering away when I looked at them. Cara, what
happened here?”

       He saw emotions flowing across her face like a speeded-up history of
grief: flat denial gave way to fury at his lies, then she reluctantly conceded
that some of it might be so, yet haggling over the details, then sinking into
abject misery, before, finally, achieving a sad acceptance of the truth.
     “Terrible things,” she said softly. “While the war was going on over
there—your war—awful things happened here, too. But that’s all past now.”

      “What happened?”

      “There’s no point talking about it.” Her voice grew stronger. “It’s wrong
to brood on what we can’t change—it’s harmful. It only makes things worse.
You should just remember the good things. That’s what I do. And look what
happened! You came back. And now we can have the rest of our lives
together.”

      “But, Cara—”

      “Heath!”

      And so he let it pass.

       That night, their second together, she kissed him determinedly,
almost savagely, and ground herself against him, forcing him to respond. It
was what he had thought he wanted from her, this passionate attack, and
finally it did arouse him. He managed to sustain an erection long enough to
enter her and move himself to a mechanical climax.

       She clung to him afterward, refused to let him move off her while,
within her, he went soft and shrank and crept away, it occurred to him, as
though in disgrace. He supported himself on his elbows and lowered his
head to blow a cool stream of air into the hollow between her sweat-slicked
breasts. She murmured with pleasure. It was, he thought, the single honest
moment of the evening. When she spoke, Heath cringed at the sheer inane
repetition of avowals of love even as he found himself helpless to respond
otherwise. He could think of nothing meaningful to say, and as Cara, with
excruciating forced brightness, began to speak of their wonderful, shared
future, he reflected bleakly that though now neither of them was, technically,
a virgin, nothing fundamental had changed. He suspected that, for all her
hopeful, loving words, Cara found him no more satisfactory a lover than he
found her.

       Lying next to her, half-listening as she spoke of destinies entwined,
lives inextricably bound together by love, he felt shamed by his
estrangement from this girl whom he had loved in solitude for so long.

      When she paused, waiting for his answer to some question he had
not heard, he said, painfully, the words bruising his throat and bringing tears
to his eyes, “Cara, this doesn’t—none of this seems real. I feel like—I feel
like a ghost in my own life.”

      After a long moment’s consideration, she asked, “How does a ghost
feel?”

       After another long moment, he answered, “Ghosts move among the
living and believe that they, too, are still living. But they’re not.”

     “Heath, you’re not dead. You’re alive.” She squeezed his hand, and
though he was aware of the pressure, he knew he did not feel her touch the
way he should, the way he would have in the past.

       “People don’t have to be dead to be ghosts.” He tried to explain a
truth he only dimly sensed. “Maybe they only have to be out of step with
their surroundings. It’s very confusing...”

      “Oh, Heath.” She sighed. “You think too much. Can’t you just accept
things as they are?”

    “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. What things? How are they? This
war—”

      “The war’s over.”

      “Is it?”

     “Of course! Would you be here, would we be here like this if it
wasn’t?”

     “Maybe—why not? I don’t think it’s really over. And maybe it’s not just
me. Maybe we’re all ghosts.”

     “We’re not any of us ghosts. We’re two people who love each other.
Why is that so hard for you to accept? We have a future to build for
ourselves. It may be hard work, but it’s worth it to both of us, isn’t it?”

      Puttering around this house, he wanted to say, and taking care of the
yard can never be a full-time occupation for me, but he did not say it, as he
did not say many other things.

      It fell to Cara to say things.

      By late the next afternoon it occurred to him that she had spent much
of their third day together not exactly complaining but certainly bringing to
his notice things she did not like: his failure to notice what needed to be
done, his silence, his lack of appreciation, his air of bewilderment. When,
however, he stood up for himself she became indignant: it was because
she loved him that she told him when he did something wrong; if she cared
less, she would not bother; when two people loved each other,
communication was the most important thing—he must agree!

      After that, he could not tell her how her ceaseless talk sawed across
his nerves. Adding to his discomfort was her father’s fearful fury: at
dinnertime, the old man clumsily knocked away the tray, scattering bread
and beans on the carpet. Then, as Cara knelt to clean up the mess he
screeched at her, somehow conveying the accusation that the two of them
were paying a trick on him. Heath retreated, unable to blame the old man for
his mistrust, only too aware of himself playing a part, pretending to be
somebody who no longer existed. He went outside and stood under the
tree carved with heath loves cara forever.

       That night, because she felt it important that they talk about their
lovemaking, he described several scenes he recalled from X-rated films,
presenting them as his own fantasies. He got her to act out one scenario,
and she proved gratifyingly eager to do as instructed. At least, he knew he
ought to have found it gratifying, but, as before, every word he spoke and
every act she performed at his command served only to deal his libido
another bruising blow. He felt like some dirty-minded puppeteer and knew
that if she ever again did exactly anything he suggested, ostensibly of her
own accord, he would be too aware of his own impatient, flat, whispering
voice to enjoy it.

      I ask for too much, he thought. In the hole, with his life stripped down
to mere survival, physical wants were basic: the feel of sunlight on his skin,
clean water, enough food to fill his belly, the chance to stand upright and
walk around. Now he took all those things for granted, and this beautiful,
loving woman could not satisfy him. Nor could he shake the feeling that,
whatever she might say, he disappointed her as much as she disappointed
him.

       After Cara fell asleep, he rolled away from her and out of bed and
padded quietly down the hall to the bathroom. He meant only to relieve
himself without disturbing anyone, and he could see well enough by the hall
light. He let the door fall quietly shut behind him, and darkness enclosed
him—not total, but the nearest thing to complete darkness he had known
since the hole.
       For a moment it threw him back to an earlier time; the last few days
became no more than a particularly vivid, extended dream. Then, as his
eyes adjusted he saw a thin line of light marking out the bottom of the door,
and he breathed again in this world. Although naked, his skin was clean, still
smelling of the soap and deodorant he had used earlier in the day, and he
was in Cara’s house, and darkness not forced on him held no terrors, only a
promise. He sank to the softly carpeted floor, and waited as he had waited
before, and she did not disappoint him. When he opened his arms, she
came into them as ready and eager, hungry and passionate, as she had
ever been before, her lips and tongue going everywhere her fingers
explored, and with a groan of pleasure, a cry of relief he could not stifle, he
fell back...

      The light was everywhere, dazzling, almost as shattering as Cara’s
shriek.

     Was it disgust that made her scream, or jealousy? What had she
seen, exactly, when she opened the bathroom door?

     She would not say. For once, though he implored her, she refused to
speak. It was a natural urge, he told her, you were asleep, I was alone, it
wasn’t like I cheated on you, I’ve never loved, never even really lusted after,
anyone but you. Please, can’t we talk about this?

       Pale, rigid, she stood with her face averted, as though she could no
longer bear the sight of him, and told him to take a shower and get dressed.
When he emerged from the bathroom, she had his bag packed. Dawn was
just breaking when she all but pushed him out the front door.

     He stumbled along the strange, familiar street. In all the town, it
seemed, he alone stirred. Too early to be going to work, he supposed.
Then he stopped, disoriented, wondering if he had come the wrong way.
Near the end of the street, at the edge of a driveway, a bird stood with its
ashy back turned toward him, like some sort of vulture but impossibly large,
bigger than anything he had ever seen outside a zoo. It pecked and worried
at something that looked like a big, lumpy bag of garbage.

      Heath gave a little cry of astonishment and turned away from the
horror. Not real, he thought, not real. Nothing here is very real except...

     In turning, he found himself facing in the direction he had just come.
He could still see Cara’s house though it appeared to rest on the rim of a
jumbled horizon. He closed his eyes and dropped his suitcase and his
hands balled into fists as the wrongness of everything assaulted him. It’s
not fair. He took a step, and another. After all I’ve been through, she can’t
just throw me out like this, reject me because I had one brief moment of
pleasure away from her. He kept his head down, ignoring everything around
him, concentrating on walking, on getting back to Cara. She wanted to talk;
very well, he would make her listen. And then, he hoped, they could start
again, and love each other, more honestly this time.

         It was early morning by now, and though Cara’s street was still weirdly
quiet, he sensed human activity going on somewhere, though he could not
tell if it was near by or far away. A door opened and closed, an automobile
engine wheezed asthmatically. He risked a glance over his shoulder, saw
people behind him, moving purposefully, going about their unimaginable
business, ignoring or perhaps simply oblivious to the creature feasting at
the end of the street.

      Just as when he had first arrived, Heath headed for the backyard
rather than formally present himself at the front door. As soon as he came
around the side of the house he heard Cara’s voice, and knew she was
there under their tree, talking to someone. He heard her speak his name,
but not angrily; she sounded calm and normal. She seemed to be running
through her plans for the day. He could not imagine to whom she spoke.
She had introduced him to no one nor mentioned any friends.

     He stopped short, staring, trying to make out who that was beside her.
Not another woman, but a man—a young man.

     “Maybe a picnic down by the river ... maybe we could even go for a
swim, what do you say to that, Heath?”

      He froze, certain she must have seen him, but her entire attention
focused on the young man who leaned against the tree and smiled down at
her, a terribly familiar young man, though Heath had not seen that face in
the mirror for a long time.

       “Then we’ll come back, and I’ll make you something nice for dinner,
one of your favorites.” She laughed and tossed her head girlishly, as if the
silent, ghostly young man beside her had said something. “Just
because—because I love you, Heath, you know that! Forever.”

      He crept away, though he had an idea she would not have bothered to
look in his direction no matter how much noise he made. He knew there
was nothing he could say to her that would make her take him back. There
was no point in trying. She was happier, her life much simpler, with the
young man she had first fallen in love with. She did not need him.
       Avoiding the end of the street where he had seen the strange bird,
Heath made his roundabout way to the bus station on foot through the
decaying neighborhoods of the town that would never be his home, this
time not stopping or staring, this time unsurprised by the wasteland. Of
course, there were junked cars and ruined houses on every street, as well
as piles of uncollected refuse; and all this would attract scavengers and
carrion-eaters. The morning advanced, and he was no longer alone: others,
people he glimpsed from the corner of the eye, far away across the street,
walked to work or somewhere else, continuing lives he could not imagine.
Cars went by, some of them black and shiny with tinted windows rolled up
tight, others old, rattling, aggressively noisy.

        At the barred grille of the ticket counter he passed through the largest
bill in his wallet in exchange for a printed strip of paper that would allow him
to board the next bus. He had no idea where it would take him, or what he
would do when he got there, but that seemed not to matter.

       There were only half a dozen other people on board, each sitting
separately, all half-turned away from him and from one another as they
munched doughnuts or sipped coffee from paper cups. Heath settled into a
window seat near the back. He glanced across a debris-littered lot at the
railroad station platform, at the crowd patiently waiting there, and wondered
why he had not taken the train instead of the bus. He had always loved the
train as a boy. When the bus began to move again he stared blankly out at
the world, wondering if it would always seem as strange to him. He shifted
uneasily in his uncomfortable clothes, on the uncomfortable seat, and then
his fingers strayed to his face. Yes. He was still there.