Age thirty.

  She sat in the living room of the apartment that she alone controlled. Her father’s pension would continue—the government was kind to victims of chance in the transportation system. She kept staring at the door and wondering why in the world she had longed to get away. After all, what was there to do outside?

  The walls closed in on her. The flat bed in her parents’ room looked just as it had when father lay there all day, at least from where his legs would be on down. But when she rolled up blankets to look like legs and stretched them under the sheets on the bed, putting legs where she had never seen legs before, it occurred to her that she had lost her mind.

  She packed her few belongings (everything else belonged to them and they were dead) and left the apartment and went to the nearest colony office because she couldn’t think of anything better to do with the rest of her disastrous life than to go off lo a colony and work until she died.

  “Name?” asked the man behind the counter.

  “Batta Heddis.”

  “This is a wonderful step you’ve decided to take, Miss Heddis—single, yes?—because these colonies are the empire’s newest way of fighting and winning the war. Only peacefully, you understand. Heddis, did you say? Come this way, please.”

  Heddis, did you say? Why had he looked so surprised? And so excited (or was it alarmed)?

  She followed him to a room a corridor away, a plush, convenient room with only the one door. A guard stood outside it, and she thought with terror that something was wrong, that Mother’s Little Boys were going to accuse her of something, and she was innocent but how can you ever prove innocence to people already convinced of their own infallibility?

  The wait was interminable—two hours—and she was reduced to a wreck by the time the door opened. Reduced to a wreck, that is, by her own perceptions. To an impartial observer coming in the door she was utterly calm—she had learned to exude calm no matter what the stress years before.

  But it was not an impartial observer who walked in the door. It was Abner Doon.

  “Hello, Batta,” he said.

  “My God,” she answered, “my dear sweet God, do I have to be punished like this?”

  His face went tense somehow, and he looked at her carefully. “What have they done to you, lady?”

  “Nothing. Let me out of here.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “We forgot it years ago! I forgot it! Now don’t remind me!”

  He stood by the door, and it was obvious that he was horrified and fascinated—horrified because as she spoke so passionately her voice remained flat and calm, her body remained erect, there was no hint that she was in any kind of turmoil; fascinated because the body was still Batta, still the woman he had loved and had been willing to share his dream with not that many years before, and yet she was a complete stranger to him now.

  “I’ve been on somec for several years,” he said. “This is my first waking. I had them all warned—a code was to be set off when your name came up for colonization.”

  “What made you think it would?”

  “Your parents had to die sometime. And when they did, I knew you’d have nowhere to go. People with nowhere to go, go to the colonies. It’s politer than suicide.”

  “Leave me alone, please. Can’t you have a little forgiveness for my mistake?”

  He looked eager. “Did you call it a mistake? Do you regret it?”

  “Yes!” she said, and now her voice raised in pitch, and she actually looked agitated.

  “Then, by heaven, let’s undo it!”

  She looked at him with contempt. “Undo it! It can’t be undone! I’m a monster now, Mr. Doon, not a girl anymore, a robot that performs services for revolting people without complaint, not a woman who can respond to anything the way you wanted me to. Nothing can be undone.”

  And then he reached into his pocket and held out a tape.

  “You can go under somec right now and let the drug wipe out all your memories. Then I’ll play this back into your mind, and you’ll wake up believing that you did not decide to go back to your parents. That you decided to stay with me in the first place. You will be unchanged. The last few years will be erased.”

  She sat, uncomprehending for a few moments. Then, hoarsely, huskily, she said. “Yes. Yes. Hurry.” And he led her to a tape-and-tap where they taped her brain and put her under somec and her mind washed away in the drug.

  “Batta,” a voice said softly, and Batta awoke, naked and sweating on a table in a strange place. But the face and the voice were not strange.

  “Ab,” she said.

  “It’s been five years,” he said. “Your parents both passed away. From natural causes. They weren’t unhappy. You made the right choice.”

  She was conscious of being naked, and the eternal virgin in her made her flush with embarrassment. But he touched her (and the memory of the night they first almost made love was still fresh—it had been only a few hours ago—and she was already aroused, already ready) and she was no longer embarrassed.

  They went to his apartment, and made love gloriously, and they were blissfully happy until she finally admitted what was gnawing at the back of her mind.

  “Ab. Ab, I have dreams about them.”

  “Who?”

  “Mother and father. You’ve told me it’s been years, and I know that. But it still feels like yesterday to me, and I feel terrible for having left them alone.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  But she did not get over it. She began to think of I hem more and more, guilt gnawing at her, tearing at her dreams, stabbing like a knife when she made love with Abner Doon, destroying her as she did all the things that she had wished, since she was a child, she could do.

  “Oh, Ab,” she wept one night—only six nights since waking—“Ab, I’d do anything, anything to undo this!”

  He stopped moving, just froze. “Do you mean that?”

  “No, no, Abner, you know I love you. I’ve loved you ever since we met, all my life, even before I knew you existed I loved you, don’t you know that? But I hate myself! I feel like a coward, like a traitor for having left them.”

  “They were perfectly happy. They never noticed you were gone.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Batta, please forget them.”

  “I can’t. Why couldn’t I have done the right thing?”

  “And what was that?” He looked afraid. Why is he afraid?

  “To stay with them. They only lived a few years. If I’d stayed with them, if I’d helped them through the last few years, then Ab, I could face myself. Even if they were miserable years, I’d feel like a decent person.”

  “Then feel like a decent person. Because you did stay with them.”

  And he explained it to her. Everything.

  She lay silently on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

  “Then this is a fraud, isn’t it? Secretly, truly, I’m a miserable bitch of an old maid who rotted away in her parents’ house until they had the courtesy to die, a woman without the guts to commit suicide—”

  “Absurd—”

  “Who was only saved from her fate by a man who contrived to play God.”

  “Batta, you have the best of both worlds. You did stay with your parents. You did the right thing. But you can go on with your life now without having the memories of what they did to you, without having to become what you became.”

  “And was I so horrible?”

  He though of lying to her, but decided against it. “Batta, when I saw you in that room in the colonization office, I nearly cried. You looked dead.”

  She reached over and stroked his cheek, his shoulder. “You saved me from the penalty of my own mistake.”

  “If you want to look at it that way.”

  “But there’s a contradiction here. Let’s be logical. Let’s call the woman who decided to stay with her parents Batta A. Batta A actually, stayed and went crazy, like you said, and she chose to go off to I lie colonies and keep her madness to herself.”

  “But it didn’t happen that way—”

  “No, listen,” Batta insisted, quietly, intensely, and he listened. “Batta B, however, decided not to go back to her parents. She stayed with Abner I loon and tried to be happy, but her conscience lore at her and drove her mad.”

  “But it didn’t happen that way—”

  No, Ab, you don’t. You don’t understand. Understand at all.” Her voice cracked. “This woman lying on the bed beside you—this is Batta B. This is the woman who turned away from her parents and didn’t fulfill her commitment—”

  “Dammit, Batta, listen to reason—”

  “I have no memory of helping them. They suddenly—end. I walked out on them—”

  “No you didn’t!”

  In my own mind I did, Ab, and that’s where I have to live! You tell me I helped them but I can’t remember it and so it isn’t true! That choice—that was the choice that the real Batta made, staying with them. And so the real Batta was shaped by that experience. The real Batta suffered through those years, even if they were awful.”

  “Batta, they were worse than awful! They destroyed you!”

  But it was me they destroyed! Me! The Batta who chooses to do what she believes she ought to!”

  “What is this, the old-time religion? You have a chance to be spared the consequences of your own suicidal sense of right and wrong! You have a chance to be happy, dammit! What difference does it make which Batta is which? I love you, and you love me, lady, and that’s the truth, too!”

  “But Ab, how can I be anything but what I am?”

  “Listen. You agreed. Instantly. You agreed to let me erase those years, to wake you up and have you live with me as if that agony had never happened. It was voluntary!”

  She didn’t answer. Only asked, “Did they tape me when they put me under somec? Did they record the way I really am?”

  “Yes,” he said, knowing what was coming. “Then put me under again and wake me up with that tape. Send me to a colony.”

  He stared at her. He got up from the bed and stared at her incredulously and laughed. “Do you realize what you’re saying? You’re saying, please take me out of heaven, God, and send me to hell.”

  “I know it,” she said, and she began trembling. “You’re insane. This is insane, Batta. Do you know what I’ve risked, what I’ve gone through to bring you here? I’ve broken every law concerning the use of somec that there is—”

  “You rule the world, don’t you?”

  Was she sneering?

  “I pull all the strings, but if I make a mistake I could fall anytime. I’ve deliberately made mistakes for you—”

  “And so I owe you something. But what about me? Don’t I owe me?”

  He was exasperated. He hit the wall with his hand. “Of course you do! You owe yourself a life with a man who loves you more than he loves his life’s work! You owe yourself a chance to be pampered, to be coddled, to be cared for—”

  “I owe me myself.” And she trembled more and more. “Ab. I haven’t. I haven’t been happy.” Silence.

  “Ab, please believe me, because this is the hardest thing I’ve had to say. Since the moment I woke up, something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. I had made the wrong choice. I hadn’t gone back to my parents. I have felt wrong. Everything has been colored by that. It’s wrong. I wouldn’t choose to live with you, and so everything about it is wrong!” She spoke softly, but her voice was intense.

  “I would not be here,” she said.

  “You are here.”

  “I can’t live a lie. I can’t live with the contradiction. I must live my own life, bitter or not. Every moment I stay here is pain. It couldn’t be worse. Nothing I suffered in my real life could be worse that the agony of living falsely. I must have the memory of having done what I knew was right. Without that memory, I can’t keep my sanity. I’ve been feeling it slip away. Ab—”

  And he held her closely, felt her tremble in his arms. “Whatever you want,” he whispered. “I didn’t know. I thought the somec could—make things over.”

  “It can’t stop me from being who I—”

  “Who you are, I know that, I know it now. But Batta, don’t you realize—if I use that other tape, you won’t remember this, you won’t remember these days we had together—”

  And she began to sob. And he thought of something else.

  “You’ll—the last thing you’ll remember is my having told you I could erase all the pain. And you saying yes, yes, do it, erase it—and then you’ll wake up with those memories and you’ll think that I lied.”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” he said. “That’s what you’ll believe. You’ll hate me for having promised you happiness and then giving it to you. You won’t remember this.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said, and they held each other and wept together and comforted each other and made love one last time and then he took her to the tape-and-tap where the past was washed away and a crueler life would be restored to her.

  “What, is she a criminal?” asked the attendant as Abner Doon substituted the tapes—for only criminals had their minds wiped and an old tape used to erase all memory of the crime.

  “Yes,” said Doon, to keep things simple. And so her body was enclosed in the coffin that would satisfy her few needs as her body slowed down to a crawl through the years until he awakened her.

  She would awaken on a colony. But one of my choosing, Abner vowed. A kind one, where she might have a chance of making something of her life. And who knows? Maybe hating me will make it all easier for her to bear.

  Easier for her. But what about me?

  I will not, he decided, spend any more of myself on her. I will close her from my mind. I will—I will forget?

  Nonsense.

  I will merely devote my life to fulfilling other, older, colder dreams.

  Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory

  Living in a fourth-floor walkup was part of his revenge, as if to say to Alice, “Throw me out of the house, will you? Then I’ll live in squalor in a Bronx tenement, where the toilet is shared by four apartments! My shirts will go unironed, my tie will be perpetually awry. See what you’ve done to me?”

  But when he told Alice about the apartment, she only laughed bitterly and said, “Not anymore, Howard. I won’t play those games with you. You win every damn time.”

  She pretended not to care about him anymore, but Howard knew better. He knew people, knew what they wanted, and Alice wanted him. It was his strongest card in their relationship—that she wanted him more than he wanted her. He thought of this often: at work in the offices of Humboldt and Breinhardt, Designers; at lunch in a cheap lunchroom (part of the punishment); on the subway home to his tenement (Alice had kept the Lincoln Continental). He thought and thought about how much she wanted him. But he kept remembering what she had said the day she threw him out: If you ever come near Rhiannon again I’ll kill you.

  He could not remember why she had said that. Could not remember and did not try to remember because that line of thinking made him uncomfortable and one thing Howard insisted on being was comfortable with himself. Other people could spend hours and days of their lives chasing after some accommodation with themselves, but Howard was accommodated. Well adjusted. At ease. I’m OK, I’m OK, I’m OK. Hell with you. “If you let them make you feel uncomfortable,” Howard would often say, “you give them a handle on you and they can run your life.” Howard could find other people’s handles, but they could never find Howard’s.

  It was not yet winter but cold as hell at three A.M. when Howard got home from Stu’s party. A must attend party, if you wished to get ahead at Humboldt and Breinhardt. Stu’s ugly wife tried to be tempting, but Howard had played innocent and made her feel so uncomfortable that she dropped the matter. Howard paid careful attention to office gossip and knew that several earlier departures from the company had got caught with, so to speak, their pants down. Not that Howard’s pants were an impenetrable barrier. He got Dolores from the front office into the bedroom and accused her of making life miserable for him. “In little ways,” he insisted. “I know you don’t mean to, but you’ve got to stop.”

  “What ways?” Dolores asked, incredulous yet (because she honestly tried to make other people happy) uncomfortable.

  “Surely you knew how attracted I am to you.”

  “No. That hasn’t—that hasn’t even crossed my mind.”

  Howard looked tongue-tied, embarrassed. He actually was neither. “Then—well, then, I was—I was wrong, I’m sorry, I thought you were doing it deliberately—”

  “Doing what?”

  “Snub—snubbing me—never mind, it sounds adolescent, just little things, hell, Dolores, I had a stupid schoolboy crush—”

  “Howard, I didn’t even know I was hurting you.”

  “God, how insensitive,” Howard said, sounding even more hurt.

  “Oh, Howard, do I mean that much to you?”

  Howard made a little whimpering noise that meant everything she wanted it to mean. She looked uncomfortable. She’d do anything to get back to feeling right with herself again. She was so uncomfortable that they spent a rather nice half hour making each other feel comfortable again. No one else in the office had been able to get to Dolores. But Howard could get to anybody.

  He walked up the stairs to his apartment feeling very, very satisfied. Don’t need you, Alice, he said to himself. Don’t need nobody, and nobody’s who I’ve got. He was still mumbling the little ditty to himself as he went into the communal bathroom and turned on the light.

  He heard a gurgling sound from the toilet stall, a hissing sound. Had someone been in there with the light off? Howard went into the toilet stall and saw nobody. Then looked closer and saw a baby, probably about two months old, lying in the toilet bowl. Its nose and eyes were barely above the water; it looked terrified, its legs and hips and stomach were down the drain. Someone had obviously hoped to kill it by drowning—it was inconceivable to Howard that anyone could be so moronic as to think it would fit down the drain.