Woman on the Edge of Time

Dumbfounded, she stared at him. He seemed terrified, as if she held a bomb, and indeed his hand was fumbling behind him at the locks on the door. Bemused, she stubbed the cigarette out, and after the smoke had cleared, cautiously he approached the table fanning wildly. “We study with any person who can teach us. We start out learning in our own village, of course. But after naming, we go wherever we must to learn, although only up to the number a teacher can handle. I waited two years for Rose to take me. Where you go depends on what you want to study. For instance, if I were drawn to ocean farming I’d have gone to Gardiners Island or Woods Hole. Although I live near the sea, I’m a land-plant person.” Luciente clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Blathering about myself! I distract. There must be someplace to begin, if I could blunder on it. Well, at least you’re no longer scared of me.”

“So you want some cola? Or some coffee maybe? I have no wine. I have no beer. Unless soda scares you too?”

“Nothing, thank you. I ate before I came.” Then he grinned sheepishly, touching her hand. “Besides, I confess I am afraid to eat here. It’s not true, is it, the horror stories in our histories? That your food was full of poisonous chemicals, nitrites, hormone residues, DDT, hydrocarbons, sodium benzoate—that you ate food saturated with preservatives?”

“Some people—like me when I have any money—are good cooks! I could cook you a meal that would make you beg for seconds.”

“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Connie. I’m sure many of the tales we hear are gross exaggerations. Such as the idea that you—you plural—put your shit into the drinking water.”

“I never heard such nonsense!” Connie flounced up and turned on the faucet of the sink. “That’s drinking water.” Then she hauled him up by the arm and marched him into the hall. He hung back skittishly until she said, “There’s no one.” Then he scuttled behind her nervously as she opened the door and showed him the toilet. She wished it were cleaner. She felt a little embarrassed. The other people who used it never cleaned it, and she cursed as she cleaned for all of them once a week. She flushed the toilet, pulling the chain for demonstration. “See? It goes down and is flushed away.” Following him back to her apartment and routinely locking the door with the bolt, the Yale lock, the police lock with its metal rod that fit into the floor, she sucked her lip with satisfaction. For the first time she had scored a point. Then she realized her reaction made sense only if she was such a naïve idiot as to believe his fairy tale.

“So that’s a water closet!” Luciente rubbed his scalp, setting his long thick black hair flying. “I can’t believe it! So it’s all true.”

“What’s true? The water comes out of the faucet in the sink. Then you use the toilet and the waste goes away.”

“The garbage? Where does the food waste go?”

“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 Tío 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.”