The child smiled at him and he smiled back. Superficially, Edie Keller appeared normal; she did not seem to be a funny child. How he wished, God damn it, that he had an x-ray machine. Because—
He said aloud, “Tell me more about your brother.”
“Well,” Edie Keller said in her frail, soft voice, “I talk to my brother all the time and sometimes he answers for a while but more often he’s asleep. He sleeps almost all the time.”
“Is he asleep now?”
For a moment the child was silent. “No,” she answered.
Rising to his feet and coming over to her, Doctor Stockstill said, “I want you to show me exactly where he is.”
The child pointed to her left side, low down; near, he thought, the appendix. The pain was there. That had brought the child in; Bonny and George had become worried. They knew about the brother, but they assumed him to be imaginary, a pretend playmate which kept their little daughter company. He himself had assumed so at first; the chart did not mention a brother, and yet Edie talked about him. Bill was exactly the same age as she. Born, Edie had informed the doctor, at the same time as she, of course.
“Why of course?” he had asked, as he began examining her—he had sent the parents into the other room because the child seemed reticent in front of them.
Edie had answered in her calm, solemn way. “Because he’s my twin brother. How else could he be inside me?” And, like the Spanish ventriloquist’s chicken, she spoke with authority, with confidence; she, too, knew her business.
In the seven years since the war Doctor Stockstill had examined many hundreds of funny people, many strange and exotic variants on the human life form which flourished now under a much more tolerant—although smokily veiled—sky. He could not be shocked. And yet, this—a child whose brother lived inside her body, down in the inguinal region. For seven years Bill Keller had dwelt inside there, and Doctor Stockstill, listening to the girl, believed her; he knew it was possible. It was not the first case of this kind. If he had his x-ray machine he would be able to see the tiny, wizened shape, probably no larger than a baby rabbit. In fact, with his hands he could feel the outline… he touched her side, carefully noting the firm cyst-like sack within. The head in a normal position, the body entirely within the abdominal cavity, limbs and all. Someday the girl would die and they would open her body, perform an autopsy; they would find a little wrinkled male figure, perhaps with a snowy beard and blind eyes… her brother, still no larger that a baby rabbit.
Meanwhile, Bill slept mostly, but now and then he and his sister talked. What did Bill have to say? What possibly could he know?
To the question, Edie had an answer. “Well, he doesn’t know very much. He doesn’t see anything but he thinks. And I tell him what’s going on so he doesn’t miss out.”
“What are his interests?” Stockstill asked.
Edie considered and said, “Well, he, uh, likes to hear about food.”
“Food!” Stockstill said, fascinated.
“Yes. He doesn’t eat, you know. He likes me to tell him over and over again what I had for dinner, because he does get it after a while… I think he does, anyhow. Wouldn’t he have to, to live?”
“Yes,” Stockstill agreed.
“He especially likes it if I have apples or oranges. And—he likes to hear stories. He always wants to hear about places, far-away especially like New York. I want to take him there someday, so he can see what it’s like. I mean, so I can see and then tell him.”
“You take good care of him, don’t you?” Stockstill said, deeply touched. To the girl, it was normal; she had lived like this always—she did not know of any other existence.
“I’m afraid,” she said suddenly, “that he might die someday.”
“I don’t think he will,” Stockstill said. “What’s more likely to happen is that he’ll get larger. And that might pose a problem; it might be hard for your body to accommodate him.”
“Would he be born, then?” Edie regarded him with large, dark eyes.
“No,” Stockstill said. “He’s not located that way. He’d have to be removed—surgically. But he wouldn’t live. The only way he can live is as he is now, inside you.” Parasitically, he thought, not saying the word. “We’ll worry about that when the time comes, if it ever does.”
Edie said, “I’m glad I have a brother; he keeps me from being lonely. Even when he’s asleep I can feel him there, I know he’s there. It’s like having a baby inside me; I can’t wheel him around in a baby carriage or anything like that, or dress him, but talking to him is a lot of fun. For instance, I get to tell him about Mildred.”
“Mildred!” He was puzzled.
“You know.” The child smiled at his ignorance. “The woman that keeps coming back to Philip. And spoils his life. We listen every night. The satellite.”
“Of course.” It was Walt Dangerfield’s reading of the Maugham book, the disc jockey as he passed in his daily orbit above their heads. Eerie, Doctor Stockstill thought, this parasite dwelling within her body, in unchanging moisture and darkness, fed by her blood, hearing from her in some unfathomable fashion a second-hand account of a famous novel… it makes Bill Keller part of our culture. He leads his grotesque social existence, too… God knows what he makes of the story. Does he have fantasies about it, about our life? Does he dream about us?
Bending, Doctor Stockstill kissed the girl on her forehead. “Okay,” he said. “You can go, now. I’ll talk to your mother and father for a minute; there’re some very old genuine pre-war magazines out in the waiting room that you can read.”
When he opened the door, George and Bonny Keller rose to their feet, faces taut with anxiety.
“Come in,” Stockstill said to them. And shut the door after them. He had already decided not to tell them the truth about their daughter… and, he thought, about their son. Better they did not know.
When Stuart McConchie returned to the East Bay from his trip to the peninsula he found that someone—no doubt a group of veterans living under the pier—had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head, a heap worthless to him or to anyone else. He stood by it, pondering. Well, it had been a costly trip. And he had arrived too late anyhow; the farmer, at a penny apiece, had already disposed of the electronic parts of his Soviet missile.
Mr. Hardy would supply another horse, no doubt, but he had been fond of Edward. And it was wrong to kill a horse for food because they were so vitally needed for other purposes; they were the mainstay of transportation, now that most of the wood had been consumed by the wood-burning cars and by people in cellars using it in the winter to keep warm. And horses were needed in the job of reconstruction—they were the main source of power, in the absence of electricity. The stupidity of killing Edward Prince of Wales maddened him; it was, he thought, like barbarism, the thing they all feared. It was anarchy, and right in the middle of the city; right in downtown Oakland, in broad day. It was what he would expect the Red Chinese to do.
Now, on foot, he walked slowly toward San Pablo Avenue. The sun had begun to descend into the lavish, extensive sunset which they had become accustomed to seeing in the years since the Emergency. He scarcely noticed it. Maybe I ought to go into some other business, he said to himself. Small animal traps—it’s a living, but there’s no advancement possible in it. I mean, where can you rise to in a business like that?
The loss of his horse had depressed him; he gazed down at the broken, grass-infested sidewalk as he picked his way along, past the rubble which had once been factories. From a burrow in a vacant lot something with eager eyes noted his passing; something, he surmised gloomily, that ought to be hanging by its hind legs minus its skin.