Grandmother Mist
by William R. Eakin

She was a soft-spoken Mozart minuet in old bones; afternoons with her now had the inward silence of a tea ceremony. She poured tea purposefully: the sound of gentle steam and almost a distant brook. I watched the white egrets through the window of lace curtains never fully drawn back. The room was a meticulous world, tiny bone china sculptures and dainty teacups and butter cookies she once had made and now still offered, though they came from a can, offered and never ate herself because she ate only what she had to: brown toast with a thin layer of butter in the morning, maybe a soup or a finger sandwich at night. Her cardinals were closer than the egrets in the fields, congregating at the old birdbath, the cement as white as her bone china. Each year they came, and I'd seen the males eat from her hand. Now they swooped at seeds on the St. Augustine grass of her well-trimmed lawn, which was kept by one of the men from Satin, who still charged only twenty dollars, though he'd cut back on his workload and charged everyone else double that. The green grass was no different than when she'd played finger-elves with me out there, when we'd done armchair pirates in her lavender sitting room. Seeing the rich green of the lawn and thinking of that old man from Satin made me full of a wild half-terror, half-melancholy I could not explain, the kind finitude provokes. 
I watched her: those gnarled hands as brittle as the teacup handles and her eyes bloodshot with recent surgery and her skin sallow and harsh and irretrievably dry despite cutting edge lotions. She did not know the reason for my feelings, but from the silence of her tea-pouring, she sensed it and with a talent perhaps inborn, perhaps developed from years of being a wife and a mother and a deft-footed grandmother, she tacked back and forth around me until I was ready to tell her. 
I could not tell her. I said simply, "Please drink them." I knew that the nanotech neuro-attenuators swam invisibly and independently to the top of my tea as a barely visible sheen, undetectable. I'd asked her to let me put them in her cup as well; she'd refused me with a gnarled hand and a quick shake of her face. She was all I had. She'd never taken medicine well, and never followed doctor's advice. 
Instead of responding, she came and stood and watched her cardinals. "Do you remember, Roger, playing trucks through that crape myrtle?" 
It was the same crape myrtle, some forty years old. I remembered playing doctor there, too, with one of my cousins. She, no doubt, was gone now. Gone like Barbara. 
"Tea will do you some good," Grandmother said, putting her hands over mine; I realized I'd clenched my own together so that they were pale-knuckled. I hadn't told her about Barbara, and she had not asked. I looked up into the white clouds, and I thought of the clouds as they must have looked over the savannah. "Or maybe a stroll." 
"Yes," I replied hastily, almost with the panicked tone I'd used with Barbara, "a stroll. Let's go." 
I'd raised my voice, there in the room with the silence and the lace and the photographs and the lavender smell; my tones imperceptibly raised anywhere else sounded sharp and hurried and out of place here. Grandmother looked at me: I hadn't raised my voice like that since the early days at Globe-Tech and the problems Barbara and I'd had. Back then Barbara would go off to the savannah for half-year stretches of studying the almost completely extinct zebra; I would forget her there or at home, because so much seemed to be at stake; the strain of the ladder up was too much. She hadn't taken well the voluntary sterilization required of mid-management. 
"Let's walk," I told Grandmother and the old woman swept over to the door ahead of me: arthritic bone moved against bone in counterpoint that gave her amazing agility and grace, despite the twisted limbs and the limp from her girlhood polio. Please drink, I thought urgently. Sometimes she seemed to have the ability to read my mind; now she did not, or if she did, she was being stubborn. Damned stubborn women: like Barbara. Like Barbara. I knew I had to tell the old woman. I knew I had to confess what had happened, confess to her how men sometimes went mad. And I knew I needed to save her, because I hadn't stopped those clouds churning above the savannah, sweeping across the distant continent as wild gazelles and jaguars resting in the shade looked up, startled with a moment's terror and then confusion. I needed to save at least her, because I had gone mad. 
Barbara had called me on her remote. Why had she called me? She'd been unable to get through, of course, unable to penetrate through my lines into the heart of Globe-Tech because I was too busy, though I knew where she was, and I knew what she was seeing as it swept over the horizon like a mist, a lavender mist. I would have thought there would be no feelings, as many years as there were between us, as many other lovers; I could never have imagined how wrenched my heart would be when I heard her voice on the recorder. Damn her. I had told her what would happen. I had offered the out. And she went anyway. She went intentionally, to be with her damned animals and the long grasses and the wide open world that was once her stomping ground, that once existed and now did not. 
We were outside. Across the dip of the Little Nueces at the far end of the fields on Grandmother's acreage was a clump of mesquite and white oak and the intimations of the houses and cars of the little town of Satin. I again thought of the old man who mowed and trimmed. I didn't even know his name, but he was part of the family, as much a part of Grandmother's life as I was. More: every week for forty years. 
"Do you remember fishing with your Grandad down at the creek?" 
I looked up: above the few drifting cumulus were long mare's tails. Those were the dangerous ones, the ones sweeping along on the upper level currents, the breath of the planet. Bad breath. 
Instead of responding to her, though I heard or felt her question, I stammered, "I don't ask for much. You've got to trust me. I know--I know it took years to convince you to get your eyes worked on. When you did--you see better now, right?" She did not answer. It always seemed we held two conversations: mine frantic, always about pressing issues, irritated, hers calm like her yard, like the snails against the short garden wall. 
"And I know you won't take your blood pressure medicines like you're supposed to. I've seen the bottles half-full when it was time for a refill. But damn—" I stopped. I never used language like that with her. My head swooned slightly. I did use language like that with Barbara, and I was tempted now to say something like the same thing. I'd said: "Damn it, the savannah will not be there! Don't you understand? It'll be gone in a single electronic sweep, you with it, unless you take these damned attenuators." 
Barbara had not asked me for possible survival rates. There would be none, and she knew it, intuitively. Forty days and forty nights would leave nothing, no human life. Like a winged creature the clouds would move across the entire African continent and with a single touch, a single broadcast, countless nanotech receivers buried deep in the neurosystems of countless animals would activate. I gasped involuntarily, standing on Grandmother's St. Augustine, the roly-poly pill bugs busy in the rich soil at my feet, as I involuntarily imagined what Barbara had felt: she must have reached out with her hands into the air around her. Had she been watching the lions? Or the gazelles? Had the herd moved slightly? Had they bolted and run and had she a moment or two glimpse of them before they were gone? Had she felt more for them than for herself? Or thought of me before the lavender mist fell? 
I shuddered. The idea of the claustrophobia was too much for me. I couldn't stand the idea of the premature burial of all my senses. Please, God, I'd cried out, wandering the towers of Globe-Tech. Please, God, let this be the right thing to do! To have done! Because by then it was far too late to stop. The organic nanotech receivers had been replicating themselves in the upper atmosphere for months, then falling like rain from seeded clouds; the broadcasts from the Pleiades-like net of satellites had been preprogrammed. Preprogrammed and like the infallible steps of formal logic, unstoppable. 
"Hold my hand, Grandmother," I said. I nodded toward Satin. "You were a little girl over there, weren't you?" 
"Mama moved us there in the twenties. She had her hands full over there with the eight of us. Me in pig-tails. Your Great-GrandPa share-cropped out, right here, dug with his nails and fought and spit until we bought the place. That, Roger, was victory. I have hoped for you, and for your Dad, that same sense of victory." 
This place was home to me. It was the stationary omphalos out of which all the maelstrom of my life had emerged. Dad had grown up here and had called it home until the day he died, even though he was in India at the time, at the embassy, crushed by the mad onslaught of the food riots. Had being in the diplomatic corps ever given him a sense of victory? Spying on the nuclear technologies of other countries? I doubted it. He was too skeptical, too finally hateful; it was fitting that he should have died the way he did. He had always hated that world across the sea, and it finally killed him. Killed him and propelled me into the track that led finally to the secretive, sealed towers of Globe-Tech with its Illuminati directors and plotters. Propelled me finally to be a Designer, and a probable survivor of what would have happened with or without me. It was the Design, with or without me: some of us were to control the images and live; some were to live and be controlled. Some, the ones too many for us to reasonably control, had to die. That was survival: absolute control was requisite if things were ever to get better, if there was to be survival. That meant genocide could be justifiable. Didn't it? I thought of Barbara and the plains covered with running gazelles. 
"You've got to drink the tea," I blurted all of a sudden. 
She still did not ask why. I had vowed not to tell anyone else; I could have been shot, lasered by in-house security agents complete with paper-thin exoskeletal armor, for even whispering of it to the wrong people. The Globe-Tech satellites listened to everything I said; I had been allocated ten people, I'd listed only two: Barbara and Grandmother. Approved. Anyone else and I would be hunted and shot. Two people, and one of them had—damn it! Had done herself in. Barbara! I nearly gasped, and Grandmother caught from my subtle facial changes the tone and manner of my thoughts and she knew I was thinking about Barbara. 
She said, "Tell me what's going on with her." 
"Barbara—" I thought of her freckled face; even at forty she'd looked like a kid in her khakis, with her short-cropped brown hair, and that twinkle in her eye. She, like Grandmother, had moved with grace, but hers was the rhythmic motion of her animals. "Barbara flew last week to the savannah." 
Grandmother knew of the long stretches, Barbara's zoological studies designed mostly to get away from me and back to something she had real feeling for. Never hearing a word of them, Grandmother knew of my indiscretions and the destruction of our marriage. She knew the destructiveness of men and boys. 
"Something's happened to her there," she said. 
I looked down to the ground. Once I'd chased horned lizards flattened against the soil here. Once I'd looked for fairies below the toadstool rings in the fields where egrets now rustled. Once I'd played kickball and used the mimosa tree and the crape myrtle as bases, with her. I looked into Grandmother's eyes with panic: "It's not going to happen here. Not today. But soon—" 
"She's—been killed?" 
"Globe-Tech—" 
"Don't tell me anymore," she said, raising a gnarled hand. "Let's just enjoy being together this afternoon." 
"No." 
"The sky is clear; the breeze is pleasant." She spoke carefully, as she always did; calmly, musically. "The world is living. Let's just feel and enjoy while we can." She'd said something like that when Grandad died, and when Mother ran off to Mexico or someplace, and when she received the news of Dad's death and I was left—in my teens—with no one but her. No one but her. 
"Grandmother, you've got to listen. I've asked you to take the attenuators. Right now it doesn't make any difference. Not perceptibly. But see, in a few days it will. All this area is targeted for selective strike. Lavender mist." 
"Lavender mist. It's a scent—my bathpowder." It was also the name of a Jackson Pollock painting, so what? I thought of my sculpture in front of the building at Globe-Tech, like a Praxiteles—graceful, with the beauty of human form. One day it appeared there, and because so many received my transmission, it had seemingly always been there. People bumped into it, sat next to it, remembered courting their girlfriends at its feet. It had a history for them. My creation, pure fabrication, a confusion of cyberspace for reality made possible by years of dissemination through the atmosphere of those receptors now fused to the nervous system of every living creature. When I took the attenuators, I would be immune to all the controlling images and smells and sounds broadcast out of Globe-Tech. I would be immune to the lavender mist. 
"Imagine, Grandmother, breathing that bath powder, smelling nothing else, seeing nothing else, touching and feeling nothing else." Imagine, I wanted to scream at her, imagine sitting on the savannah with your animals as the mist descends and suddenly your neurotransmitters start to misfire and all you see, touch, smell, taste—is lavender. Lavender bath, drowning in it, suffocating, buried alive in all your senses clogged by great clots of lavender. And nothing else. Imagine all your senses clogged with a single, vast, unshakeable sensation; lavender mist in every nerve ending, eradicating everything, eradicating the ability to interact or react or do or see or think anything else. Only death can result. Over large chunks of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, forty days and forty nights of lavender mist! Animals—I'd never thought, really, about Barbara's animals and how they would have to suffer—animals and men and women and babies go mad clawing for any other sensory data. They claw their way in every direction, looking for escape from the claustrophobic overload of all their senses. 
A momentary madness, a single drowning: it was the most humane way we could think of, as humane as the Flood. We were doing it; we were curbing the population explosion and making social engineering possible on a global scale—in small, isolated, select communities. Now we were coming closer to home. Little bands of North America would soon be stripes of lavender. And the few spared urban centers were to be completely within our control, within the control of the few Globe-Techers who had attenuators, who would not drown in their own mists, who would walk like supermen among the few helpless and powerless that they had spared. 
"See, Grandmother, even if Satin and this county were to be passed over—and they're not—we're gonna engineer what everyone here sees. We can—we can engineer what they sense, broadcast it in their nervous systems, do you understand? We've already added a few things in the city—stormtroopers where they did not exist before; barrier walls where we need them—" Control the senses, control behavior. And life. I thought of the man who mowed her lawn, charging her the same amount all these damned years. 
"You know I don't believe in taking medicines unless I absolutely have to." 
"This is an 'absolutely have to.'" We had strolled out past the crape myrtle to the edge of the yard. The cardinals nearby did not mind us; they were too busy frolicking. A squirrel jumped from a nearby pecan into the top of the mimosa; its pink blossoms shook and fell like tissues of fragrance to the St. Augustine. 
"Do you remember," she said, "when your grandfather put that swing in the old pecan? Your legs were so short you couldn't get on it without his help—you were so funny scrambling onto that thing." I remembered that he used to walk around the yard with an oily rag and spare parts to small engines, just fiddling around, singing, "I was waltzing with my darling to the Tennessee waltz." 
I looked at Grandmother and found her looking directly at me. Her eyes were bloodshot, old, and tired but they still had that magic twinkle that had been there when I was a boy, when she told me stories or sang songs or ran around in the yard playing tag. Her presence had been magic, then; she could make me see and respond and somehow learn and grow and even act properly with her magic, with—with her grandmotherly mist. She said, as she'd said many times before, "You were so beautiful that first time I saw you. Such a beautiful little thing, a child—I didn't know until then what a miraculous place the universe was, and how special life could be." 
She's guilting me, I thought. But I knew she wasn't. She was just being Grandmother. And I sensed in her eyes that strange joy—that mist—she exuded when she talked of love and life and children, a joy I'd never had except, perhaps, in rare moments with Barbara. That joy was Grandmother's essence; it seemed funny how she could continue at all, when she looked into my eyes and saw what I had done. 
"I remember," she said, "how you looked into my eyes. You can look right into a baby's eyes, because they don't turn away to hide, and you can see right into the pure soul." I averted my eyes. 
"I cried," she said, "the day you were born. Cried for sheer happiness. I never knew how intense joy could be, how the universe was really made for moments of bliss—I never thought it possible until you came along. Your Dad, he was special. When he was born, I never thought anything could be better. When he was a toddler, I'd catch myself just watching him, with tears, thinking how precious, how precious he was—how precious human life could be. And then when you came along, I thought my heart would burst with joy." 
I looked down at the St. Augustine and saw the fairies and the pixies and the Little Tin Soldier she'd once conjured into existence. She moved back toward the house. Grandmothers had done all along what I was doing high tech. 
I looked up and saw a haze above the little town of Satin. Not, thankfully, the mist. Not yet. I followed her when I realized she was almost inside. I said, "You're going to drink the tea, aren't you?" 
We went to the table. I took the vial of attenuators I'd brought and dumped it into her cup. She looked up at me. I could not read her look. She said, "I remember the day your Daddy died. You: I never saw anyone so crestfallen; I never saw such deep sorrow in a child. I let you cry most of the day, and I sat by you on your bed. I remember once you looked up, so lost and hurt; somehow, so beautiful, too. It was awesome to me how beauty could live in such sorrow." 
"Drink, Grandmother." I did not want to refeel the feelings. But I knew what she was saying, and I knew she was saying that she saw those feelings in me now, for Dad, and for Barbara and for whole continents. "Drink," I motioned half-heartedly and she simply sat down instead. 
"Have you?" she asked. 
"No, I—" 
"What are you waiting for?" 
I couldn't speak for fear of choking; I couldn't even say that I didn't know. 
She closed her eyes and sat back, then opened them again at me and said, "I'll never forget how beautiful you were the first day I saw you. How beautiful and perfect, that little clean, untouched baby." She moved her gnarled hands as if she reached out to stroke the cheek of a child. With the same motion she picked up the delicate cup and turned it over in a flower pot. 
I stood still, watching her, and again heard the full silence of the room surround us. I looked around. I smelled and saw lavender, the lavender of her sitting room. It was not the color and smell and remembered-sensation of mass destruction, the mass destruction I had engineered. It was the attempt at comfort I'd only half-consciously sent with it. I sat down in the lavender mist of her sitting room and quietly emptied my own cup into the same pot. 
The End