Woman on the Edge of Time

“I put it downstairs in cans. Believe me, some people around here just throw it out the window. But why foul your own nest? I could see carrying it downtown and putting it by City Hall, to teach them to improve the garbage pickup. In white neighborhoods, you better believe it, they don’t drown in their garbage. In the summer, how it stinks! There in the white apartments, they have a super who picks up the garbage in the hall. Or else they have a dumbwaiter–that’s a little elevator–and the garbage goes down to the basement, where the super unloads it.”

“The super is the name of the task? The person who does the job of returning the garbage to the earth?”

“He puts it in cans in the street and the city comes and takes it away.”

“And what does the city do with it?”

“They burn it.”

“It’s all true!” Luciente shouted with amazement. More gently he added, “Sometimes I suspect our history is infected with propaganda. Many of my generation and even more of Jackrabbit’s suspect the Age of Greed and Waste to be … crudely overdrawn. But to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food chain! Wait till I tell Bee and Jackrabbit! Nobody’s going to believe this. It all goes to show you can be too smart to see the middle step and fall on your face leaping!”

“All right, smart ass. What do you do with garbage and shit? Send it to the moon?”

“We sent it to the earth. We compost everything compostible. We reuse everything else.”

She frowned. Oh, he had to be putting her on. “Are you talking about … outhouses?”

“Out houses? Houses isolated from others?” Luciente made a despairing face. “We aren’t supposed to bombard you with technology, but this is more than I redded.” He raised his wrist‑watch to his ear to see if it was ticking, his lips moving.

“I mean how it used to be at my Tнo Manuel’s in Texas, for instance. They were too dirt poor to have inside plumbing. They had an outhouse. Flies crawling all over. You sit on a board with a hole in it and it goes down in the ground.”

“That’s the idea in very primitive–I mean rudimentary form. Of course now–I mean in our time–it’s composted centrally for groups of houses, and once it is safe, used in farming.”

“You’re trying to tell me you come from the future? Listen, in fifty years they’ll take their food in pellets and nobody will shit at all!”

“That was tried out late in your century–petrochemical foods. Whopping disaster. Think how people in your time suffered from switching to an overrefined diet–cancer of the colon–”

Connie giggled. “You get so serious when you talk about food and shit, you remind me of Shirley–my brother Luis’s second wife. She’s an Adelle Davis nut.”

Luciente shook his head sadly, his expressive dark eyes liquid with sorrow. “I was redded for this, but I can’t find the door to what you’re meaning half the time.” He combed his fingers back through his thick hair. “I worked sixmonth with nine other strong senders. Fasure we’re a mixed dish. A breeder of turkeys, an embryo tester, a shelf diver, a flight dealer, a ritual maker, a minder, a telemetrist, a shield grower and a student of blue whales. Youngest eighteen and oldest sixty‑two. From James Bay to Poughkeepsie, our entire region. We’re called the Manhattan Project–that’s a joke based on a group–”

“I know what the Manhattan Project did,” Connie said with cold dignity. “What are you fixing to blow up? Just everything?”

“It’s a rib, you see, because that was a turning point when technology became itself a threat … . Cause we’re a mobilizing of inknowing resources–mental? We’re the first time travelers fasure–not that I’m actually traveling anyplace!”

“Like the bird that flies in narrowing circles until it goes up its own asshole.”

“We have that rib too.” Luciente beamed. “We must not chill each other. If you’re patient in spite of my bumping along, we’ll succeed in interseeing and comprehending each other. Alia–that’s the student of blue whales–told me that after months with them, Alia can only inknow the grossest emotions or messages. Those long epic operas that are their primary pastime are still garble to per. After a whole generation of com municating with the Yif, we are merely transmitting digital code. We think of the Yif as superrational, a world of mathematicians–and maybe that’s how they vision us … . Anyhow, if you and I suck patience, can we fail to clear our contact? We have only been at this a few weeks, and look how strong and clear we are talking. If we both work at it, we should hear better and better!”

“Work at it!” Connie chuckled, remembering Professor Everett Silvester in bed, working at sex. Her body was a problem he was solving. He put everything in pass‑fail terms. “You’re crazy, you know that? If I’m not.”

“Crazy? No, actually I’ve never been able to. Jackrabbit went mad at thirteen and again at fifteen–”

“Who’s this Jackrabbit?”