The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [21]
The impenetrable darkness has made me think of her, I suppose. She talked about growing up on the prairies that were virtually uninhabited, of being out late when there wasn't a light to be seen, of her fear of the dark then and forever after. When I said I wasn't afraid of the dark, she muttered, "You don't know dark, child. You don't know." I do now.
She came out of the kitchen muttering the day I took Warren home to meet my family. "That man ain't as smart as he thinks," she said. "He don't know enough to open a can. Simple, that's what he is." I went to the kitchen to find Aunt Jewel showing Warren how to use an old can opener. He had never seen one like it. Simple. He was thirty, with a Ph.D., tenure at the University of Oregon, working with Gregory Oldhams. He had turned down other, better-paid, positions for the chance to work with Greg; he could have gone to Harvard, Stanford, almost anywhere he wanted.
It has started to rain, a soothing monotonous patter on the roof of the car, and now a wind has come up, rustling in the firs, in the vine maples, the broom that grows down the face of the cliff where nothing else can find enough dirt to sink roots. I am very tired.
I brought Warren up here before we were married; he was envious. "You grew up in a wilderness!" he said. He had grown up in Brooklyn.
"Well, you're here now," I said. "So it doesn't really matter so much, does it?"
"It matters," he said, gazing down at the ocean, then turning to look at the trees, and finally at the A-frame house below us and across a shallow ravine. I had lived in that house for the first twelve years of my life. "It matters," he repeated. "You have things in your eyes I'll never get. I have people and traffic and buildings, and people, more people, always more people, always more cars, more exhaust, more noise..." He stopped and I was glad. There was anguish in his voice, bitterness - I didn't know what it was; I didn't want to know it.
Greg Oldhams is the foremost researcher in hematology, the study of blood. He already was famous when Warren started working with him, and since then his research, and Warren's, has become what the articles call legendary. At first, after I met Warren, I felt almost ashamed of my own field -medieval literature. What was the point in that, I wondered, compared to the importance of what they were doing? At first, Warren talked about his work with excitement, passion even, but then he stopped. I know to the day when it changed. On Mikey's fifth birthday, five years ago. Warren didn't come home in time for the party, and when he did get home, he was old.
A person can become old in a day, I learned then. Mikey turned five; Warren turned a hundred.
The wind is increasing; there may be a gale moving in. I had to roll up the window on my side when the rain started, and when I reached over to open the passenger side window, I realized I still had the seat belt fastened and then it seemed too hard to work the clasp and free myself. I began to laugh, and then I was crying and laughing. I don't care if rain comes in the passenger side, but the wind makes a harsh whistling sound through the narrow opening near my head, and I have to decide, open the window more and get wet, or close it. I can't bear the whistling noise. Finally I make the effort to undo the seat belt, reach over, and open the other window and close the driver-side one. Now I can hear the ocean, and the rain, and even the wind in the trees. So much exertion, I mock myself, but I have to lean back and rest.
This is where I told Warren yes, I would marry him, up here overlooking the sea. "No children,"