To Mark and Jodie
From the depths of phenobarbital slumber, Silvia Bohlen heard something that called. Sharp, it broke the layers into which she had sunk, damaging her perfect state of nonself.
"Mom," her son called again, from outdoors.
Sitting up, she took a swallow of water from the glass by the bed; she put her bare feet on the floor and rose with difficulty. Time by the clock: nine-thirty. She found her robe, walked to the window.
I must not take any more of that, she thought. Better to succumb to the schizophrenic process, join the rest of the world. She raised the window shade; the sunlight, with its familiar reddish, dusty tinge, filled her sight and made it impossible to see. She put up her hand, calling, "What is it, David?"
"Mom, the ditch rider's here!"
Then this must be Wednesday. She nodded, turned and walked unsteadily from the bedroom to the kitchen, where she managed to put on the good, solid, Earth-made coffeepot.
What must I do? she asked herself. All's ready for him. David will see, anyhow. She turned on the water at the sink and splashed her face. The water, unpleasant and tainted, made her cough. We should drain the tank, she thought. Scour it, adjust the chlorine flow and see how many of the filters are plugged; perhaps all. Couldn't the ditch rider do that? No, not the UN's business.
"Do you need me?" she asked, opening the back door. The air swirled at her, cold and choked with the fine sand; she averted her head and listened for David's answer. He was trained to say no.
"I guess not," the boy grumbled.
Later, as she sat in her robe at the kitchen table drinking coffee, her plate of toast and applesauce before her, she looked out on the sight of the ditch rider arriving in his little flat-bottom boat which put-putted up the canal in its official way, never hurrying and yet always arriving on schedule. This was 1994, the second week in August. They had waited eleven days, and now they would receive their share of water from the great ditch which passed by their line of houses a mile to the Martian north.
The ditch rider had moored his boat at the sluice gate and was hopping up onto dry land, encumbered with his ringed binder--in which he kept his records--and his tools for switching the gate. He wore a gray uniform spattered with mud, high boots almost brown from the dried silt. German? But he was not; when the man turned his head she saw that his face was flat and Slavic and that in the center of the visor of his cap was a red star. It was the Russians' turn, this time; she had lost track.
And she evidently was not the only one who had lost track of the sequence of rotation by the managing UN authorities. For now she saw that the family from the next house, the Steiners, had appeared on their front porch and were preparing to approach the ditch rider: all six of them, father and heavy-set mother and the four blonde, round, noisy Steiner girls.
It was the Steiners' water which the rider was now turning off.
"Bitte, mein Herr," Norbert Steiner began, but then he, too, saw the red star, and became silent.
To herself, Silvia smiled. Too bad, she thought.
Opening the back door, David hurried into the house. "Mom, you know what? The Steiners' tank sprang a leak last night, and around half their water drained out! So they don't have enough water stored up for their garden, and it'll die, Mr. Steiner says."
She nodded as she ate her last bit of toast. She lit a cigarette.
"Isn't that terrible, Mom?" David said.
Silvia said, "And the Steiners want him to leave their water on just a little longer."
"We can't let their garden die. Remember all the trouble we had with our beets? And Mr. Steiner gave us that chemical from Home that killed the beetles, and we were going to give them some of our beets but we never did; we forgot."
That was true. She recalled with a guilty start; we did promise them... and they've never said anything, even though they must remember. And David is always over there playing.
"Please go out and talk to the rider," David begged.
She said, "I guess we could give them some of our water later on in the month; we could run a hose over to their garden. But I don't believe them about the leak--they always want more than their share."
"I know," David said, hanging his head.
"They don't deserve more, David. No one does."
"They just don't know how to keep their property going right," David said. "Mr. Steiner, he doesn't know anything about tools."
