RodMer Short Story Package KK Closing the Mansion
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Here is Short Story Package KK -- a short story by Rod Anderson.

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This short story written in 1987 and slightly revised in 1995. I never got around to submitting it to a litmag for publication -- partly because I didn't want any misunderstanding while my mother was alive. It is not, of course, about mothers anyway. I just wanted a non-patriarchal image of the "in my father's house are many mansions" notion. I guess it is another of my many pieces about the universe. And do you have to hold your breath all the time you're dead?

Approximately 3,600 words

That's why it's strange that Andrea's here in the mansion boardroom tonight. She never comes to hear mother's endless announcements. The night when curfew was imposed, for example, Andrea didn't hear about the new rules until she rolled in joyously drunk ten hours late. Thinking it was morning. Of course, it was still night. It's been night ever since. Andrea was so mad she ran around the dormitories turning on all the showers and flooded the entire mansion for a month. Things are never boring when Andrea's around.

And tonight, oddest thing, here she is. I watch her striding along in her pink, sky-diving suit, incongruous beside the dark walls of ancient carved paneling. She sees me and waves. Next thing she's squeezing in at my right. Turns and laughs at my surprise, her cheeks flushed from the friction of pounding air. Andrea has a round reddish face and when she gets hot it glistens like a freshly misted tomato. I've never had the nerve to sky-dive. But Andrea loves it. Says it's the only thing that makes her alpha waves lie still. I'm just happy she's beside me. "Can I borrow your lipstick, Sonia," she pants. Red on red, I think to myself. But anyway, I'm digging away for it in my old leather purse, cursing Ms. Knieholtz to my left, who has her knobby elbow in my face, when Gabby gets up on the stage to make the introductions. I don't know why Gabby's assigned this duty. But she always is. Probably a punishment for some misdemeanour aeons ago.

"Sisters," beams Gabby, trying without success to get our attention. A few stare at her. But most of us are too occupied with the interchange of pressing gossip. Does mother really have secret bank accounts? Were Cheryl and Olga caught in an illicit liaison? - the sort of chatter that seems inevitable whenever two or three or more are gathered together in mother's name. I squeeze Andrea's arm with pleasure. I feel so at peace when she's beside me. Though I'm a little unnerved by the occasion.

In the front row the White Ones sit hunched in their long robes, whispering to one another and occasionally twisting about to scowl at us. For our part, we jostle back and forth on the hard oak benches behind them, elbowing each other, complaining as always about the inadequate facilities as crowds of us squish into our places. Fortunately, none of us takes up much room. And the compression, if anything, helps raise the temperature slightly above the absolute zero at which mother, with her fetish for energy conservation, has kept the place for as long as any of us can remember.

"Sisters," beams Gabby again. There is a grudging diminution of noise. "One very short preliminary announcement," she chirps. "Cookies and punch will be served after this meeting and I want you all to try them. I made them myself and, if I do say so, they're absolutely super ." The 'super' comes out like a miniature volcano erupting. Andrea makes a face at me. She can do a wonderful take-off of Gabby when she gets going. I tell her not to get going right this minute. Gabby glances at the stage wings and continues. "Sisters, we are fortunate in having with us again tonight . . ." Andrea squirms at 'night'. "In having with us again tonight, the one without whom I need hardly say, and for which we all feel eternally grateful, none of us would be here."

And with that mother herself enters from stage left, white-haired, and stooped, poking her way across the stage, dry blue-white knuckles clenched over her short stubby cane. The White Ones in the front row prostrate themselves on the floor, their ridiculous humps waving like sails in the air, old stubs of wing muscle long since atrophied. Mother keeps tapping her way doggedly toward the lectern. There's a theory that mother actually sprints across the stage in the form of a beautiful athlete with wet, glistening skin. That it's only the cavernous size of the boardroom that creates the illusion, by some sort of light-shift, of cane and hump. I doubt this theory is correct, but you never know Anyway, there's an awkward pause as mother scrabbles about for a small platform to stand on. She finds one, hobbles up onto it and turns. Fortunately only her squinting eyes are visible. The lectern hides what we know is there: that benign, motherly smile, which always makes me a little frightened and Andrea want to laugh.

"Thank you, Gabriella. Thank you, little one. Now daughters, I wanted to gather you all together here in the mansion this one last time to . . . " she pauses for effect, "say good-bye." Her voice breaks slightly on the last syllable.

There's a collective gasp about the boardroom. Is she stepping down? Can a mother step down? I remember once asking Andrea if she thought mother ever would. "Step down from what?" Andrea asked. "Everyone knows there's no real stage up there. Just a big mirror."

"Whoever told you that?" I cried, but inside my pulse was suddenly pounding. "Honestly, Andrea, you believe the weirdest things! Anyway, how would you know since you never come?"

But tonight Andrea's here beside me. Still panting. She can see for herself that there's no mirror. That there really is a mother. And that she's actually thinking of bogging off. We stare over towards the stage, uneasily.

A White One cries out, "Lady, Lady, please no!" But mother silences her.

"No, my daughters. This is good-bye." She lowers her dark eyes for a second. Then looks up again. "You've all been very faithful - well somewhat faithful." Some nervous titters. "You've all been faithful, in your fashion, to me all these years and I feel some regret in having to inform you that we've come to the end of the line."

"We who?" whispers Andrea to my right. I nudge her to keep quiet. "The old witch!" she mumbles under her breath.

"Yes, little ones, the end of the line. Our pensions have run out. The mansion's closing down."

General cries of "What?" resound around the dark-paneled boardroom. I feel Andrea stiffen.

"As you know," mother intones, waving some tattered notes on yellowed parchment, "it's now 200 billion years since the Big Bang - about 190 billion since the first of you started to arrive here. And what times we once had! My darling girls! What times! But let's face facts. All the stars in all the galaxies have long ago burned out. Which, by the way, I know a number of you felt pretty let down about."

Some backbenchers in one corner grumble their assent. There's a theory that the stars wouldn't have burned out so quickly if mother had set certain physical constants a little more carefully to start with.

"As long as something remained, however - the burnt-out cores of former stars orbiting invisibly about in the cold expanding darkness - it seemed sensible to hang on. But, as I'm sure you're aware, darlings, the inter-galactic black strings swallowed up everything and then began to evaporate themselves. Last month we were down to a handful of them. I'm sorry to inform you tonight that the last black string has just snapped itself out to infinity and disappeared."

I steal a glance at Andrea. There's a theory that black strings are really psycho-somatic. Just a reflection of the mansion's self-absorption. "You and your theories," Andrea said to me a few billion years ago when that one popped up. "I mean, why bother?" I bother because I'd like to understand. But I never have. Right now Andrea's picking lint off her sky-diving suit and frowning.

And mother looks colder than I've ever seen her before. Not like the old days when she used to teach Andrea and me and the others origami squatting around the old mansion fireplace. Perhaps it's just exhaustion. Her voice drones on. "Not a crease, not a pucker on the surface of space-time anywhere. Not a single photon, quark, or . . . " She peers again at her notes (mother has always been a bit shaky on names, "or lepton - not one of them is left. No energy. No matter. Not even my most successful trick: the oscillation of virtual particles in vacuum. Just a dead flat calm everywhere. Indeed, I'm afraid, girls, we must concede: there no longer is an 'everywhere'. Space-time itself has stopped. We simply haven't any dimensions left, daughters. I'm sorry. But that's what's happened. And now it's time for us to cease to exist as well. And I'd just like to say, well, it's been heartwarming to love you all."

There's a stunned silence in the boardroom. None of us has ever conceived that mother would close up shop. We know the outside world has not gone altogether as she had hoped. But close down the mansion? No more Brandy Alexanders in our rooms at midnight? No more group massage sessions in the long winter blackness? No more of Andrea's irreverent jokes in the dark intimacy of the sauna? Everyone's face has gone deathly white. A few of the younger backbenchers are vomiting.

One of the White Ones in the front row begins chanting the old yell, "for thine is the kingdom forever and ever." But no one else takes it up. Pretty soon she lapses into an embarrassed silence. There's a theory that the old yell is flawed anyway - if the mansion exists outside of time. Though none of us ever figured out what 'exists' would mean in that case. Mother looks down at her notes and seems ready to go at it some more.

But Ms. Knieholtz on my left unsquashes her elbow from my face and leaps up. "Now just a minute, old woman," she interrupts. The White Ones gasp in astonishment and twist around to stare at the blasphemer. Ms. Knieholtz was once an earth-life - a banker from Frankfurt, I think. But who can remember those distant times?

"Just a damn minute," Ms. Knieholtz continues. "You've got your nerve pulling out right now - just because things look bleak. You made a bargain with us. Not true? Put up with a few years on some miserable planet or other and you'd save us a space in the mansion forever. So we did. Not true? We put up with the lot. Just went on smiling and turning the other cheek. One thought sustained us. Not true? One thought. Eternity was worth it. And we had your promise."

Mother peers up in our general direction myopically. We know she can't see us. She hasn't really been able to see anything for years. "But you've had 180 billion years, Anna! How much do you want, liebchen?"

"We want it all, old woman! A deal is a deal! Isn't it? A covenant is a covenant! Not true? You can't default on your Own Word. Look, I know you meant well, old woman. But hell, if we'd known our spirits were going to be zapped to nothingness someday regardless, we wouldn't have put up with all your well-intentioned but ridiculous dress codes, food laws, prayer wheels, curfews! Well would we? What's the difference between dying on some planet to start with or having one's spirit zapped away 200 billion years later? Either way we have to go on being dead for an eternity of time." Several more of us begin to vomit. I'm scared shitless myself but I can't manage to throw up. Anna Knieholtz continues: "What's 200 billion years? Nothing. Gone in the twinkling of an eye! One twinkling is no twinkling. We've had a bum deal. We were virtuous and now," she pauses and dabs at her eyes, "now you've reneged on the payment! Haven't you! It's just . . . well, muti, it's just not fair." And she burst into tears.

Mother stares up at us for a long time and then slowly raises one hand as if to give a sort of gentle blessing. Or maybe she's just waving for silence. In any case, it's at this precise instant that the former Frankfurt banker disappears. Simply vanishes. Leaving an infinitesimal, though nonetheless gratifying, empty space to my left.

"It hurts me to lose you, Anna," mother says softly. "It will hurt us all to lose each other. But you have to agree, my own darlings, you've had a pretty good run for your virtue. Now it's over. I'm not asking you to do anything I'm not about to do myself."

Further to my left, Marie Lavisse, a former real estate developer from New Paris in Alpha Centauri, rises to her feet. "But look, old mum! I don't mean to complain. And I won't complain. This is not a complaint. More of a respectful question." Andrea lets out a loud fart and rolls her eyes upward towards the ceiling. "And that is simply: is it not possible, even at this late hour, for you to pull off another trick? There are those who say (though I don't say it myself) that you're the one, old mum, who's let everything burn out, cool down, evaporate. That you're the one who's frittered away our entire universe. Our real estate. Our birthright. That it's up to you, old mum, to resurrect some solution."

"I didn't fritter it away. I let it run its natural course."

"But it's not natural for everything just to end like this. What's natural - please don't you see, dear old mum? - is for things to go on and on and on." And the developer waves her arms in exasperation as mother blesses her. And then there are no arms but only the wave. And then the wave too collapses. And the space where the developer recently stood is vacant.

Three of the White Ones cry in outrage: "Have mercy, Lady. Have mercy, damn it." Mother raises her hands again and the three White Ones spin into a vortex of pale white foam, and are gone too. There's a theory that mother herself may have caused bits of the universe to spin away into vanishing white holes over the last few billion years. Perhaps she was disenchanted with them.

"We've been cheated," someone shouts, crouching behind a pillar where she can't be blessed.

Mother takes a step sideways and forward, fixes on us a look of righteous indignation. "I am not a cheat." And then returns behind the lectern so her slight mustache is once again concealed. "Perhaps I was ambitious. Perhaps I hoped for more than we got. Perhaps I got carried away and made the odd mistake. But I did it out of love for you, daughters. For you, my babies. You who have meant more to me than my most spectacular astronomical experiments. I did it for you. And I expect just a little gratitude in return.

We sit there in stunned silence. She must have known this from the beginning, we think. She must have foreseen it all. But not us. We weren't told. None of us has had a chance to prepare for the idea of final extinction. We all feel a sense of vertigo. The tug of trillions of empty years to come. Endless vacant stretches of time in which we have to endure nothingness. "I wouldn't mind being dead for a year or two or even ten," Andrea once told me in the swimming pool, her red face bobbing about in the water like a channel buoy. "But I couldn't do it forever. I just couldn't last. I'd go off the deep end. That's the only thing that keeps me in the mansion, makes me put up with mother." I wonder what Andrea's thinking right this moment, sitting here beside me.

"If I might suggest, Madam . . . " comes a voice from the back. It's the voice of a one-time science-fiction writer from Boston. "Might I suggest, Madam, a second go at 'Let there be light'? There's a shocked silence. Any discussion of the fiat lux and speculation as to how it once worked has always been forbidden on pain of ex-communication.

Mother stares at us. "There won't be a second time. Or a third time, or a billionth time. And how dull and pointlessly repetitive if there were! No, this was a one-shot affair. It might have lasted but it didn't and now it's over. Nothing was and nothing will be. and in between: briefly something was. Is that so hard to understand?" And with that the one-time science-fiction writer glows a bright, electric orange for the briefest instant, then fades into hyper-space.

A tall White One stands up, slowly shaking her head. "Sweet Lady, Beloved Progenetrix, Our Adored Mother," she says, bowing deeply so that her hump is thrust upward in mute appeal, "we understand. Truly, we understand. But with all filial love and the deference due your age," (there's a collective intake of breath throughout the boardroom) "we can't accept. A one-shot affair is a bizarre singularity. It's just not the simplest assumption. Occam's Razor, you know. Time going on for ever and ever, world without end - that's the simplest assumption. A departure from deep simplicity would be an imperfection. And you, Wonderful Mother, have always made such a point out of perfection - and simplicity too, if I may humbly say so."

But mother has grown sick of arguing. Or maybe she's just tired. "Time, little ones," she sighs. "All this time you keep speaking of - it's an hallucination. You've all made it up. I made it up myself." She reaches for a cough drop in the right-hand pocket of her cloak. "But of course it hardly matters now." She waves an arm lethargically and the entire front row of White Ones collapses inwards with a slight clap, like a child's thunder machine. A horrified gasp escapes from the squashed mass of us in the back benches.

I poke Andrea in the ribs and whisper: "You still there?"

"Yes," she whispers quietly. But she hands me back by lipstick just in case. I feel her fingers touch my palm and I squeeze them instinctively. Now that there's no hope, I'm able to feel a sense of tenderness.

Once after the shower incident, when Andrea was gated two months as punishment, she confided, "You know, Sonia, in my heart I'm really fond of the old witch; but I sure wouldn't want her job!"

"Fond? I thought you hated her," I said.

"That too," said Andrea quietly. "But the fondness has always been a hundred times stronger. And I noticed that her eyes were wet.

Andrea is hard to understand at the best of times. And these aren't the best. But I trust her completely. I know what she says is the truth. It feels in my stomach like the truth. If only my head could understand it.

The back benches are beginning to disappear. The whole right-hand end of the mansion boardroom has gone completely - with the blackest night I've ever seen trumpeting through the gaping hole, where once the ancient oil paintings of obscure saints hung Mother is taking off her heavy black cloak.

"What about my cookies and punch, mum?" cries Gabby pathetically before she too is blessed and disappears.

This is so absolutely stupid, so exactly like Gabby, that I reach out my hand to poke Andrea again. But this time my hand meets nothing. Only a tear glistening on my palm as I bring it slowly back into my lap.

I see a little girl stepping out from inside Mother's cloak - from inside Mother's body. A little girl with a small red face. She looks around the fading room with big round eyes. I'm sorry Andrea can't see her. Her eyes are sort of like Andrea's. No, perhaps like my own in the morning mirror. Or rather, now I see them more clearly, like every sister here I have ever known. And I do believe for a brief instant the little girl can see us. The last few of us as we begin to evaporate. We in turn stare at her. And as our brains begin to spin, ever so slowly to start with, we see that her eyes are growing. Her eyes are huge and black and - terrified. She's crying! For the first time in aeons something catches in my throat. Our faces go red with shame. But somehow I know the shame is forgiven. The tears keep coming. Hers and ours. And the shame resolves into the most beautiful and overpowering sense of happiness I have ever felt. And at that instant the large black eyes begin to fade and

		.............................Copyright  © Rod Anderson 1987, 1995

Rod Anderson
'SwallowHill', 1940 Hill 60 Rd., R.R.5
Cobourg, ON, K9A 4J8
Canada
rod@rodmer.com