Kate Wilhelm - Julian

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Julian

by Kate Wilhelm

First published in Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova, 1977

THE YEAR Julian was twelve he received a telescope for Christmas. A telescope

in a great city is a particularly useless gift, he had learned. There had

been three nights since the first of the year, and this was May, when he had

been able to see the sky well enough to use it, and what little he had seen

he might have observed just as easily with his own eyes. The moon was good,

but he quickly became bored with looking at dark and light patches that could

have been craters, or clouds, or smudges on his lens. What the telescope was

good for was to observe the city.

The city climbed a hill in the section where Julian lived. His apartment

building was high enough for him to be able to look out over the roofs of

many buildings all the way to the river and up the hillside across it. He

could see small boats, fishing boats, tugs laboring with barges, people on

the bank walking, kissing, throwing stuff into the water.

In March a demolition crew had started to raze a tall gray office building a

block from Julian's window. All spring Julian had been plagued with a series

of minor complaints that had kept him out of school -- sore throats,

stomachaches, headaches. He had watched the destruction of the building from

start to finish. Now it was no more than a pile of trash. On this day Julian

had got up with a stomachache, and as soon as his parents had gone to work,

and his younger sister had left for school, he had got out his telescope to

watch the workmen with their bulldozers and cranes clean up the mess they had

made.

He swept the scene slowly, pausing to watch two men chug-a-lug from a

thermos, moved on to where a grader was pushing the trash into a heap of

different proportions. He raised the telescope to see what had been revealed

by the removal of the last wall, and there were tops of buildings, more

windows to investigate, the river, and on a hill across the river, revealed

to him for the first time, was a motel. It was a grand location, with a view

of the river below it and the city sprawling upward. He found the motel

swimming pool with no difficulty; there were two children playing in it, and

a woman nearby in a canvas chair. A man was cutting grass. A dog ran after

him opening its mouth, probably barking. The man stopped to pick up a stone

and throw it at the dog. There were seven cars in the parking area. Julian

began to examine the building itself.

There were three black women with cleaning carts, and a man with a tool box

who went into one of the rooms. He watched a maid run her vacuum cleaner in

four passes and then leave a room. There were two doors with Do Not Disturb

signs. He began to go down the row of second-floor rooms. The third one had

one side of the drapes opened in an irregular way, as if the fabric had

caught on a chair or something and had remained like that, unnoticed by the

occupant. Working carefully Julian focused on the opening, then brought the

room into sharp view. He could see little of it, the foot of the bed, a

space, part of a dresser, the alcove where the bath was. As he studied it, a

naked woman appeared. She came from the side of the bed, stopped at the

dresser.

She was doing something in front of the mirror, her hands out of sight, only

her back profile visible, from her head down to her calves. He couldn't see

the floor. She was skinny, but his heart was pumping hard anyway, because a

skinny naked lady was better than no naked lady at all. He wanted her to turn

around and face him. Again and again he wiped his hands on his jeans,

although his mouth was dry; his eyes were burning from not blinking. He had

seen his sister, of course, but she was only eight and that was different. He

had seen pictures of naked ladies, and that was different too. This was the

real thing, this counted. He was afraid to touch the telescope now, for fear

he would move it, lose her, and have trouble finding her again. Her hair was

long and brown, lank, it looked oily; there was a hollow place on the side of

her hip. She was almost as flat as he was. She moved back a step and he

caught his breath as her breast in profile came into his range. It was like a

small bag, not the high, nipple-pointed breast of the ladies in the

magazines. She was old, he decided, and again, it was better to see an old

naked lady than no naked lady at all. Now she turned and walked away from

him, and he wiped his hands as he stared at the way her ass moved when she

walked.

He leaned back weakly and became aware of his heart pounding and the

clamminess of his hands, and the dryness of his mouth. Also he had an

erection, and he couldn't do anything about it, because what if there was

someone out there in one of those rooms with a telescope watching his every

movement?

He looked at the room, still empty, and wondered how long she would be in

there, wondered if she was on the john or in the shower, wondered if she

would reappear with a towel around her, or a robe on. The pounding in his

chest and the pounding in his groin became one painful rhythmic beat. Maybe

she had an accident, fell in the shower, was drowning. His head began to

ache, and his eyes were tearing. When he felt he could stand it no longer,

she stepped into view once more, dripping, her hair streaming water. She had

hair on her lower belly, glistening wet, and little rivulets of water running

down her smooth rounded stomach; her breasts were pink and...

Suddenly he ejaculated and involuntarily knocked the telescope askew. When he

could train it on the motel window again, she was gone. Exhausted, he threw

himself on his bed, face down in the pillow, and he fell asleep.

He woke up in a paroxysm of terror, fighting the sheet, battling his pillow,

gasping for air. He had been dreaming, had a nightmare, but there was no

memory of it. He went to the bathroom and washed his face, then got on clean

clothes -- his others were sweat-soaked and smelled foul -- and lay down

again, this time with a comic book. He didn't read it, or even track the

pictures. He dozed, woke with a jerk of fear, and got up, afraid of another

nightmare. He noticed his telescope at the window and put it away without a

glance outside. It was only twelve, but he felt that the day already had been

endlessly long, as if he had a fever that was distorting his perceptions of

time.

His mother called during her lunch hour.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Reading comics."

"How do you feel?"

"Okay."

"Julian, is your stomach still hurting?" There was a new note of anxiety in

her voice.

He made an effort to sound natural, but even to him his voice sounded

strange, toneless. "I feel okay now, Mom."

After a silence while she considered, she said, "I'm calling Esther Manning

to drop by. Let her in when she rings. And just lie around and take it easy."

"I don't need anyone to look at me, Mom. I'm okay now."

"Yes, I expect you are, but it won't hurt. Bye, honey. See you later."

Mrs. Manning was a tall heavy woman, not fat, but broad and big-boned. She

could tell fortunes with playing cards, and knew many strange and esoteric

things, like when and where to go out and find wild mushrooms, and if it was

going to snow, and when to go out to hear migrating geese. One time when

Julian had stayed home from school, she had dropped in, and when his mother

had mentioned his complaint, she had turned to Julian and winked quite openly.

She arrived an hour after his mother's call.

"Ah, Julian, another headache? A sore throat? A singularly bad case of

boredom?" She smiled widely and went ahead of him into the apartment. At the

entrance he had been in shadows, but now in the light from a broad tall

window, she paused to examine his face, find her manner changed. "Back into

bed, my boy, and I'll read you a story."

He protested that he did not want to go to bed, that he did not want her or

anyone to read to him now, because he was too old, that he wanted to finish

his model plane, but in the end he lay down and listened to her begin "The

Hound of the Baskervilles."

She read with expression that often was comical, sometimes chilling. Julian

began to feel better, less dopey and strange, more relaxed. After half an

hour she stopped to make tea, and he tagged along to the kitchen with her,

talking about the moors. "It's just like that in real life," she was saying,

washing her hands at the sink. She turned to find a towel, and he stared at

her wet hands, and for a moment felt the room spin sickeningly. She took a

step toward him, reaching for him with her wet hands, and he fainted.

....

For the next week Julian was hustled from doctor to doctor, to laboratories

where they took blood samples and x-rays of his head and made other tests. At

the end of the time his doctor said they had found nothing.

"We want to talk to you," his father said that night, and Julian felt crushed

by a sudden depression.

His father waited for him to sit down, his mother was already in her chair.

"Julian, you have missed twelve days of school this spring. You say you're

sick but no one can find any germs, or anything else they can point to. What

have you to say about that?"

Julian shifted uncomfortably and stared at the beige carpeting. It was dirty

under his feet, not bad, but grayer than the rest of the room.

"Julian! Look at me! If you are sick we want you to get well. If you aren't

sick, we want to know why you pretend you are. Are you just too bored with

school to sit through it every day? If that's it, for heaven's sake, say so.

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Kate Wilhelm - Julian

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