Mara has no past.
[…]
By the look on her face, I figure she’s stoned, and by her odd clothing, I guess she’s a hipster, so I have to show her something daring. I point to the Morbier. Illustrating the structure with my hands, I tell her, “It’s got two layers: the end of the day’s curds on the bottom and the beginning of the next day’s curds on top, separated by a layer of ash.
Thus begins the series of moments in time that compose R. S. Benedict’s “Morbier,” from the July/August 2018 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s haunted me ever since I read it on the train to San Jose for that year’s WorldCon.
It starts with the introduction of Mara, the woman without a past, who until last year had no social security number, no birth certificate, no fingerprints or DNA on file. Trish introduces her, Trish, the smoker sous-chef with some extra pudge around the middle and an eye for the beauty of women like Mara.
In the double-space to a new scene, a new moment, we cross the ash, from today’s curds to yesterday’s, when they met at the farmer’s market, and where Trish pointed out the Morbier. We cross, back and forth, across the ash, from yesterday to today, over the course of the story – and twice across into tomorrow’s curds, once in the middle of the story and at the very end. Today is in the depths of winter, and yet
I’m at the farmer’s market again. It’s springtime, all puddles and pollen. The girl is gone and she’s not coming back.
But our next double-space across the ash, to today, is to describe the other great food metaphor of the story: the chocolate fountain.
A chocolate fountain is a biological weapon disguised as a dessert. Once deployed, the fountain burbles out an invitation to every guest who has just scratched a rash or picked a nose to stick their germy fingers into the brown downpour. For fear of injury lawsuits, the chocolate (which is always of low quality) is not hot enough to kill bacteria – instead, it is diluted with a generic vegetable oil to maintain its runny consistency. By the end of the night, it becomes a sweet, gushing petri dish.
I’ve never eaten of a chocolate fountain, and I never will. Not after these fruits of Benedict’s exhaustive research.
Mara and Trish work at an exclusive Connecticut country club, Trish in the kitchen (but she smokes with the waitstaff) and Mara on the waitstaff. They set up and tear down the chocolate fountain, feed their blue-blooded and well-heeled guests on Costco stuffed grape leaves, steal bottles from the cellar when they can get away with it. It’s all they, and their colleagues, Ivan, Jake, and Peggy, can do. Those well-heeled bastards and blue-blooded heiresses treat them as subhuman. Mara is notable for being the only waitress or waiter who hasn’t barricaded herself in the closet to cry, even after the short litany of personal abuses and degradations Trish off-handedly relates.
Mara saves that for home at the apartment, with Trish, where she checks the fridge five times a night to make sure her leftover spaghetti is still there, where she curls into a ball in the bed for Trish to wrap herself around and hope, where she trembles when two friends of theirs, James and Geoffrey, announce their engagement. “Oh God,” Mara trembles, “the government has you on a list now. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
No one’s sure what to make of Mara, the girl without a past. Her therapist assures her that her memories of time travel, of a terrible future somewhere beyond the ash, are confabulations, but teams of doctors can only wring their hands and wonder if she’s not from some Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt bunker instead. She has a scar on her temple where she says they put in an implant (now, thankfully, finally dead). Once, while high, Trish asks Mara why they would have sent her. Mara just shrugs, “experiments need guinea pigs.”
And, slowly, we piece together where Mara is going, if not where she comes from.
One of the worst of the guests is a tech-lord named Helmut Geier, and his son, Hal. The father cannot meet any eye, speaks in a low monotone mumble, and communicates entirely through his assistant. All he ever communicates is “fire that waiter.” Some, like Jake, have made a game of it, getting fired and showing up again the next day. Helmut does not see the waitstaff as distinct enough people to bother differentiating. All except Mara, who performs with preternatural knowledge of his tastes and preferences.
This time, the assistant’s message is: “he wants you to wait his table from now on.”
And so, when Helmut stays over a week at the club with his son in tow, for his son’s birthday, Mara works breakfast, lunch, and dinner, serving the billionaire’s peculiar needs. Usually before he voices them. Of the son, Hal…well…he’s eleven years old, speaks in grunts instead of his father’s mumbles, spends his every waking hour either on bloodthirsty video games or oversexed anime. Mara serves him as well, at his birthday party:
“Hal Geier has a taste for fried foods, but he doesn’t like to get grease on his device. So every item of food on his plate must have a toothpick in it to keep his fingers clean. He wants chicken tenders and those little French fries shaped like smiley faces. Put broccoli on his plate, too, but only to satisfy his father – the boy will not eat it. And he’ll want a big squeezy bottle of ketchup to go with it.”
“How did you figure all this out?” I ask.
“Research,” she says.
The chocolate fountain burbles on.
And something funny happens at Hal Geier’s birthday party.
It starts with the hypochondriac grandmother, the one who communicates entirely in racist slurs and fatphobic comments, complaining of stomach cramps, whisked away by her personal physician. Then an uncle, the heavy drinker and heavy eater, so no worries. Than a blonde boy who loves to steal food and let his mother emerge from her vodka long enough to laugh at the waitstaff who was too slow for him. Then a little girl named Gertrude – and that’s when it stops being funny, when the kitchen stops making side bets on the next guest to fall.
Now we cross the ash, to the weekend before Christmas, to the loading dock, where Trish is smoking with the waitstaff. Peggy the shift manager pops a question, a hack question for a hack amateur sociologist: “Would you kill baby Hitler?” Only Trish thinks to question the givens, asking if Hitler is predestined, if her attempt was predestined, whether she was doomed to fail. And then Mara answers, pointing to the long history of European anti-Semitism, to the brutality of WWI and the inadequacy of the peace, all the people who willingly participated in the Third Reich. If you killed Hitler, someone else could step into his shoes.
Peggy happily writes up “whether great men make history or history makes great men.” And Mara takes a last pull on her smoke, and gives her real answer, Benedict’s real answer, the heart of the story and the question she set out to ask:
[To prevent the Holocaust,] “You have to kill a lot more people.”
When Trish finally emerges from the kitchen, back across the ash in the present, the bodies have been moved out the back door, the party guests gone, the teardown crews “unaware they’re interfering with a crime scene.” The buffet is cooling in one corner, the stuffed animals deathly still in the centers of the tables, the party streamers hanging limp. The guests who aren’t dead, will be.
And Mara is standing next to the putrid petri dish of wealthy excess: the chocolate fountain, with the red juice of a strawberry and a speck of chocolate at the corner of her mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come,” are her last words. Along with “I’m sorry.”
We cross the ash one last time. Into the future, where Trish wakes up every morning in “the wrong life,” hounded by police and reporters, wondering if her girlfriend really was from the future, really had to kill all those people to prevent it, if she was just crazy, if Trish herself is crazy.
It’s a life cut in half by disaster, and the past lies buried beneath a layer of ash.
(If you’re racking your brains trying to remember where you heard of R. S. Benedict before, she was the Main Character of Twitter for about 36 hours, because of a dumbass opinion on fanfic. You may also notice that nowhere in this summary does fanfic come up. Her opinion of fanfic has no bearing whatsoever on this story. A person can have a shitty opinion and still be a good writer, published in F&SF. No matter what Twitter tells you.)
Many reviewers, then and now, compared “Morbier” to 12 Monkeys. The crazed time traveler, the sympathetic love interest here in the present, the unfathomable disaster to come, the brutal things to be done “in the present.”
It is not.
It is La Jetée.
Both 12 Monkeys and “Morbier” derive from La Jetée, but “Morbier” hones closer to the disjointed, nightmarish effect of the original. It was only on the third reread that I caught the calls-forward, the rhythm of the temporal displacements, the creeping hints that Mara is not crazy – the hints Trish doesn’t quite pick up on, even as she relates them.
This story creeps. It creeps up your spine and down your gorge, and then stays there.
“You’d have to kill a lot more people” is Benedict’s answer to the hoary old question, and Mara unflinchingly acts on that answer. She tries to save the waitstaff, the class innocents, from her bacteriological guillotine (since no staff member is dumb enough to eat from the fountain) but she can’t save them from the disjoint, from the horror of waking up in the wrong life ever after. She truly loves Trish, but has to keep her at arm’s distance. If you truly believed in killing baby Hitler, and killing a lot more people besides, to prevent a Holocaust, you would have to be Mara.
Ask yourself if you could do it. I still don’t have an answer myself.
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