Pat Cadigan - Naming Names

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NAMING NAMES

By Pat Cadigan

We all know the old saw about how “sticks and stones can break my bones, but

names can never hurt me.” Untrue. Most untrue. As the scary, intricate, and

passionate story that follows will demonstrate. . . .

Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in Overland

Park, Kansas. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently

come to be regarded as one of the best new writers in SF. She was the coeditor,

along with husband Arnie Fenner, of Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines of

the late 70s; it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special

Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981. She has also served as

Chairperson of the Nebula Award Jury and as a World Fantasy Award Judge. Her

first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her

second novel, Synners, appeared in l99l to even better response, as well as winning

the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover” has

recently appeared on several critics’ lists as among the best science fiction stories of

the 1980s; her story “Angel” was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award,

and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather

unusual distinction): and her collection Patterns has been hailed as one of the

landmark collections of the decade. Her stories have appeared in our First, Second,

Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Annual Collections. Her most recent book is a

new novel, Fools, and a new story collection, Dirty Work, is coming up soon.

* * * *

It had been years since I’d had the dream. So many years that I thought I’d finally

outgrown it, if there is such a thing as outgrowing a recurring dream. It was the only

recurring dream I’d ever had, and when I stopped having it, I’d all but forgotten

about it. As time goes on, little pieces of life drop away and are left behind,

unmourned and unmissed. I always figured that coming across them again meant you

were retraveling old territory, either because you’d missed something important the

first time through, or you’d just gotten jammed up, stuck in a rut. I’d also always

figured that it would happen to me, even more than once, but the dream took me by

surprise anyway.

In the dream, I’m way out in an enormous area, a kind of ghost-field, and I’m

standing partially below the ground. I used to think I was in a hole or a well, or

maybe even just shrunk to the size of an apple, but it’s none of those things. I’m just

lower than the surface, sunk into the ground deeply enough that the long, wild weeds

tower over my head. It’s almost dark—the clear sky is the deep blue that comes in

the last minutes of sunset. There’s a golden glow in the west; stars are beginning to

appear. I keep looking up, at the sky, at the glow, at the weeds leaning in the

pre-night breeze, and in that suspended moment, my mother walks by.

It’s more of a very slow stroll, a drift. She isn’t here to find me. She isn’t

looking for anyone or anything, because, I realize, she knows where every-thing is,

or where it ought to be.

And then somebody calls her name. The voice is distant yet very clear, like

one of those stars overhead. But the name it calls is not my mother’s name.

Except that somehow it is. I know that it is. Not because my mother turns

toward the voice with a genuinely frightened expression that I have never seen on her

face in real life—I know this is her name because it fits her, describes her, is her. It’s

the articulation of her, mentally, physically, spiritu-ally, any way at all, anything that

is about her, in her, of her, what she has seen, what she’s known. What she has told,

what she will never tell.

My mother takes a step backward—I’m not sure whether it’s to run, or to

brace herself against some imminent attack, and I know that she isn’t sure, either. I

know everything about my mother now, I realize. But of course I do—it’s all

contained in that name, that Name, her Name.

And I think to myself, I’ve got to remember this. I’ve got to remember

everything I know about her now, everything I know about her and everything I

know about our life together and her life before me and after I went out on my

own. I’ve got to remember the way she thinks . . .

That’s as far as my thoughts go, however, because then she turns and sees

me through the bending weeds. Her black hair flares with the movement, her face is

tight, eyes wide, the cords in her neck stand out starkly. I under-stand two things:

first, it’s all my fault that this voice, wherever it comes from, whoever it belongs to,

called her Name, and second, the voice is about to call another Name, and this one

will be mine.

That was where I always woke up, and it was no different this time. For a long

time, I lay staring at the distorted oblong of light thrown across the ceiling by the

window. The bedroom of my current apartment had an eastern exposure and I

always opened the curtains just before I went to sleep, so the sun could wake me in

the morning. It wasn’t that I was so crazy for getting up with the sun; I just liked

lying there watching the morning come on before I had to join the rest of the world.

My insistence on easing into a day and easing out of it was probably why I didn’t

have much in the way of those cultural trophies most people have by the time they’re

staring thirty in the face, but then, I wasn’t working on an ulcer or a heart attack or a

drinking problem, either. When you don’t eat much, there isn’t much that eats you.

Most mothers would have said that was no kind of attitude to have. Maybe

mine would have, but probably not out loud, or at least not to my face. All

mother-daughter relationships have a certain amount of odd to them, but ours was

odder than most. This was probably because it had always been just us. The focus

becomes a lot tighter between a parent and child when there’s no one else in the

house—no distractions. I went from infant to very young roommate to accomplice,

and I stayed an accomplice for a long, long time, until we both sensed there was a

change coming, some fork in the road that meant she had to go her way and I had to

go mine. It was that bloodless.

As I lay there, I tried to remember everything I’d known about her in the

dream. I could still feel what it was like to know but, as always, it had all gone away

when I’d woken up. Every bit, including that Name I’d heard. The only thing I knew

without a doubt was that she was going to call me.

Where was she now, anyway? Seattle, still? The fogginess that dreams always

leave behind hadn’t cleared out of my head yet, I wasn’t ready to connect with

anything real. Except for that certainty that my mother was going to call, and very

soon.

Heat shimmies ran through the block of light on the ceiling. The details of the

day were starting to press on me but I already felt removed from everything, pulled

out of my routine to some place where no one else could go.

I picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Did I wake you?” asked my mother.

“No. This is the time I usually wake up.”

“Ah.” My mother is one of those people who remembers things audibly.

“Well, I’ve been up all night.”

“Something wrong?”

“Yes. Or—well, not exactly wrong. There’s a problem.”

“What is it?” I asked. I knew exactly what she was going to say but

sometimes you can’t skip any steps in a process.

“It’s . . . it’s hard to explain on the phone. Easier if you just come here and I

can lay the whole thing out for you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing now . . . what kind of job do you have?”

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Pat Cadigan - Naming Names

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