==========================================
InterText Vol. 6, No. 2 / March-April 1996
==========================================
Contents
FirstText: Thank You, Thank You Very Much.........Jason Snell
Their Turn........................Past InterText Contributors
Short Fiction
Gone.....................................Ellen Terris Brenner
The Hard Edge of Things............................Mark Smith
Danielle........................................Edward Ashton
Other Flesh....................................Pat Johanneson
Business..........................................Sung J. Woo
Oak, Ax and Raven.............................G.L. Eikenberry
Wave..............................................Craig Boyko
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@intertext.com geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
Assistant Editor Send correspondence to
Susan Grossman editors@intertext.com
susan@intertext.com or intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 6, No. 2. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this
magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold
(either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire
text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1996, Jason Snell.
Individual stories Copyright 1996 their original authors. For
more information about InterText, send a message to
intertext@intertext.com with the word "info" in the subject
line. For writers' guidelines, place the word "guidelines" in
the subject line.
....................................................................
FirstText: Thank You, Thank You Very Much by Jason Snell
============================================================
Five years ago I was news editor of the UCSD Guardian, and
apparently I had too much time on my hands, because in addition
to taking a full load of upper-division courses, I was busy
writing fiction and getting it published on the Internet. The
end of 1990 was one of the busiest times of my life, because for
10 weeks the powers-that-be at the Guardian decreed that we'd
publish the paper three times a week, instead of the traditional
two. It didn't last very long -- we managed to pull it off,
tired though we were, but the advertising wasn't there to
support the paper costs of that extra edition.
But in the midst of that, I got word that Jim McCabe's Athene
was closing up shop, and I was crazy enough to take it upon
myself to start a new online magazine on this thing that was
sucking up more and more of my spare time: the Internet. Even
when prompted with the news that two other people, Geoff Duncan
and Phil Nolte, had also offered to take over Athene from Jim, I
didn't drop it. Instead, I contacted Geoff and Phil and we
proceeded to start working on what would become InterText.
I can honestly say I didn't know what I was getting myself into.
When I do something, I do it until it's done -- but I really
never considered that since publishing a magazine is an endeavor
with no logical ending, there would never be an end. So now five
years have passed since that day in late March where I mailed
out Vol. 1 No. 1 of InterText from my Macintosh SE (complete
with 2400 baud modem) in my on-campus apartment. The day I
graduated from UCSD and lost my free college Internet account
came and went, but that artificial "end" to InterText passed
without any change. By then, I had decided to go to graduate
school at UC Berkeley, and by the time my access from San Diego
would expire, I'd have a new account in Berkeley. InterText
lived on.
And before I graduated from Berkeley, I had already taken a
full-time job at MacUser magazine, a publication that obviously
provided Net access. InterText lived on. Now the Internet is a
common concept -- a word familiar to people born before there
was such a thing as an _airplane_. Bookstores are overflowing
with Internet books, but when I started InterText I had to learn
how to mail the magazine and transfer files through
word-of-mouth.
I'm glad to say that in addition to the Net getting bigger over
the years, the stories we've printed in InterText have improved
greatly. Though there are some stories from that first year of
InterText I still enjoy, they can't hold a candle to the ones we
printed just two years later. Because we're not in a position to
pay our writers (I hope that changes sometime in the next five
years -- preferably sooner, not later), there are many who have
stopped appearing in our pages because they've moved on to
greener pastures. But there are always new writers who appear
and manage to amaze us with their ability.
In the last five years I've had the pleasure to work with a lot
of remarkable people. First and foremost, I have to thank Geoff
Duncan. Geoff and I worked together on InterText more than three
years before we met in person. Without him, this magazine
wouldn't be half of what it is now. Any time I've gotten
complacent, stuck in a rut, or lost sight of what we should be
doing, Geoff's been there to nudge me in the right direction.
His good taste in stories has drastically improved the stories
we've printed. He's our Editor With An Art Degree, our
renaissance hacker, and he is so integral to so many steps in
our editorial process that I can't envision doing InterText
without him.
The two other people involved in InterText editorially also
deserve a lot of credit. Phil Nolte was there at the start to
offer advice, support, and material. And a while ago Geoff
Duncan brought in one of his colleagues, Susan Grossman, as an
assistant editor. Her skill as an editor has vastly elevated the
quality of every single story that has appeared in this magazine
since her arrival.
I'd also like to give my appreciation to Jeff Quan -- the former
graphics editor of that selfsame UCSD Guardian -- for
illustrating our very first cover and for illustrating countless
covers since then, up to this very issue. Jeff's the very best.
Without him we'd be running pictures of stick figures on our
cover. (You think I'm kidding? You haven't see me draw.)
And finally, I'd like to thank the thousands of InterText
readers, especially those who have written stories for us.
You've helped make InterText what it is today.
Who knows what the future holds? The Internet will be
unrecognizable five years from now. But no matter how much
full-motion video and interactive adventure games flood the Net,
there will still be a place for stories, for simple scratchings
on a cave wall or tales told in hushed voices around a campfire.
And so there will always be a place for something like this
magazine.
InterText lives on.
Jason Snell (jsnell@intertext.com)
------------------------------------
Jason Snell is the editor of InterText and is associate
editor/online at MacUser magazine ().
Their Turn by Past InterText Contributors
============================================
...................................................................
A few past InterText writers contribute their thoughts on the
occasion of our fifth anniversary.
...................................................................
Greg Knauss (knauss@netcom.com)
---------------------------------
It was in the offices of the Guardian, UC San Diego's one stab
at a semi-legitimate campus newspaper, that Jason Snell first
approached me about contributing to this fiction magazine he had
an idea for. He was an editor with far too much time on his
hands and I was a hanger-on who had found the one place on
campus inhabited by people with even fewer social skills than
myself.
InterText, he was going to call it, because it would only be
distributed over the Internet. This was actually a fairly
radical idea at the time, as the Internet in 1990 wasn't much
more than a way for college nerds to play elaborate pranks on
each other. The idea of writing stories -- original, unique
stories -- for such a medium was something only a lonely
Communication major could conceive. At the time, I was editing a
small pamphlet of short stories called The Erratically, and it
was from back issues that I gathered up some stories that packed
-- packed, I tell you! -- two or three pages in the first
InterText.
Truthfully, I didn't think InterText would go anywhere, or much
of anywhere. I was having a hell of a time keeping The
Erratically coming out on any sort of schedule and it was only
two eight-and-a-half by eleven pages, folded over. A full thirty
pages or so of fiction, every other month? **I** certainly
couldn't do it.
But Jason could, and the Internet could. And still are. Amazing.
InterText, near as I can tell, is the best, most consistent
source for fiction available online. Five years is a lifetime on
the Internet and a lot has happened. Now deep pockets are being
emptied in countless attempts to recreate what really only takes
a mailing list and a good idea. InterText may have more
competition now, but the quality, the originality, and the
simple fortitude of the magazine is as strong as it ever was. I,
as a reader, owe Jason, Geoff, and Susan a huge debt.
Oh, and just for the record, that goofy line in a teensy-tiny
font at the end of every issue? Jason stole that from The
Erratically.
................................................................
Greg Knauss wrote "The Talisman" and "Schrodinger's Monkey" in
Vol. 1, No. 1, "New Orleans Wins the War" and "The Explosion
that Killed Ben Lippencott" in Vol. 1, No. 2, "The Damnation of
Richard Gillman" in Vol. 1, No. 3, and "Novalight" in Vol. 4,
No. 3. His collection of observations, An Entirely Other Day, is
available on the Web at . After
five years, he's still loopy as a loon.
Levi Asher (brooklyn@netcom.com)
----------------------------------
If you walk into the computer section of a bookstore these days,
you'll probably find entire shelves devoted to books about the
Internet. Well, I remember when there was exactly _one_ book
about the Internet, and at the time one seemed like plenty.
The book was Ed Krol's The Whole Internet Catalog (published by
O'Reilly & Associates). I bought it in late 1993 after becoming
an early victim of what would soon become a common malady: total
senseless addiction to email and newsgroups. I figured I'd try
to learn more about the Internet to lessen my devotion to the
newsgroups I was spending all my time in (at the time,
rec.music.gdead, rec.music.dylan, alt.tv.twin-peaks and
alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die).
The book listed a few notable sites in an appendix, and I
noticed it had exactly one entry for literary fiction: a
magazine called InterText. An FTP address was listed, and I
proceeded to spend the next several weeks trying to retrieve an
issue of InterText>. Things were not so easy in late '93. The
major problem was that I had no FTP access at my job, but it
took me a while to realize that. I finally found a friend who
knew how these things worked, and he snuck an ASCII copy of
InterText into my directory. I then lurked in the vicinity of
the company printer for a few hours waiting for a moment when I
could print 30 pages of text without being noticed. I thought I
found a time, ran back to my cube to print, and two minutes
later received an angry phone call from an assistant
vice-president: "What is this crap you're printing?"
The moral of this part of the story is: the World Wide Web
really did need to be invented. But the reason I'm writing this
is to thank Jason Snell, Geoff Duncan and the other folks at
InterText for pioneering the medium of contemporary online
fiction. The important fact is not so much that they did it, but
that they did it with such a sense of quality. The work
published in InterText is good -- very good. There's a quirky
intelligence behind almost every piece, and a pleasant focus on
down-to-earth human experience and "regular folks" that's a nice
break from the dark, nasty, cyber-heavy stuff that is often
thought of as the only kind of writing "computer people" like.
Most of all, there's solid editorial attention behind InterText.
It takes nerve, sometimes, to do a good job at something, and I
bet there were moments, back in the early days of InterText,
when Jason and Geoff wondered why they was working so hard at a
project this uncertain, this time-intensive, this devoid of
profit motive. By forging ahead and producing a high-quality
online magazine, Jason and company set a standard that is still
being followed. Now there are countless venues offering fiction,
poetry and literary experimentation on the Internet and the Web,
and if all the purveyors of these venues were not directly
inspired by InterText (as I was), they were probably inspired by
somebody who was.
A final note: by the time InterText published my first story, I
had my own FTP access and endeavored to retrieve the PostScript
edition instead of plain vanilla ASCII. Only then did I discover
what InterText was supposed to look like, and only then did I
realize how much work obviously went into producing it. I wrote
to Jason that if I'd known how serious this thing was I wouldn't
have had the nerve to submit anything to it. Luckily for me, I
didn't know.
Jason, Susan and Geoff: Keep up the great work! Happy
anniversary, and let there be many more.
................................................................
Levi Asher wrote "Jeannie Might Know" in Vol. 4, No. 2 and "The
Thieves" in Vol. 4, No. 5. He is the creator of Literary Kicks
(), the Beat literature web
site, and Queensboro Ballads (),
a fantasy folk-rock album in text form. He lives in New York City.
Colin Morton (morton@gloria.cord.edu)
---------------------------------------
The other day one of my manuscripts came back in the mail from a
print anthology -- a well-known publication that doesn't need a
plug from me.
In a familiar tone, the editors thanked me for contributing to
their anthology, explained that they had received an
overabundance of good work, far more than they had room to
print, apologized for holding my story so long before returning
it, and encouraged me to send something new for their next
annual volume.
The only thing extraordinary about this latest rejection letter
was that I sent them the manuscript two years ago. More than a
year ago, after giving those tardy editors up for dead, I
decided to send the story to InterText, where it appeared a
month or two later.
No doubt many writers can tell similar stories. As publishing in
print becomes a more expensive and more perilous enterprise,
both writers and readers are rapidly discovering in cyberspace a
wide open frontier for exploration and innovation.
"Crown Jewels," a science fiction story, was a bit of a
departure for me. I usually write mainstream and literary
fiction and poetry. But in those fields, too, the Internet has
both expanded the shelves of my personal library and put my work
within reach of many more potential readers.
My mainstream novel Oceans Apart was published last May by
Quarry Press, a small literary publisher that doesn't have the
profile to get its books stocked by Barnes and Noble. Most of
the bookstores that did order Oceans Apart have already taken it
off the shelves to make room for the new season's titles.
But for as long as the Internet lasts, readers and browsers will
be able to sample the excerpts from my book that appeared last
summer in the e-zine Gruene Street. Or the poems included in
Tender is the Net, an anthology put together by CREWRT-L, the
creative writing mailing list I belong to. Or any of the other
works I've collected on my home page.
The Internet has changed the way I look at my computer and the
way I look at my world. For that reason it has probably changed
my writing too -- not that I've yet tried to create in
hypertext.
The stimulating friends I've made here have changed my life in
ways even more profound than the fact that one of them offered
me my current job. And I know those changes are permanent and
accelerating. Thanks to the Net, I travel more, meet more people
face-to-face, and see into the lives of a greater range of my
fellow humans than ever before.
InterText has been a part of those changes. Congratulations on
being one of the first settlements on this limitless frontier.
................................................................
Colin Morton wrote "Crown Jewels" in Vol. 5, No. 1. He is a
Canadian writer and poet currently teaching at Concordia College
in Moorhead, Minnesota. He co-produced the animated film Primiti
Too Taa. His home on the Web is at .
Carolyn Burke (clburke@passport.ca)
-------------------------------------
InterText published a short story of mine two years ago. That
experience changed my attitude about both writing and
publishing. After that story ran in InterText, I learned that
writing and allowing others to read what I wrote could be
incredibly fun and exciting. I took it up full time as a
consequence of that one story.
Just over a year ago, I started a Web site called "Carolyn's
Diary" () and have
been writing an electronic diary since then. This is not a
simple travelogue of my life, but rather the philosophical and
psychological reflections on life as seen and experienced by me.
"Carolyn's Diary" has been quite well received, leading to
positive reviews from Web site-rating services, mentions in
Internet books, and even mentions on television programs about
the Internet.
My experience with InterText was crucial in making this project
happen. Thanks, all of you!
................................................................
Carolyn Burke wrote "Timebugs" in Vol. 4, No. 1.
Gone by Ellen Terris Brenner
================================
The adults, with their need for steadfast solids
Have to resort to vast built structures
To pull off the trick, to contain the chaos.
And that's not bad, in its own narrow way.
The trip that brought me here, with Papa,
Was on such a ship, and it was a wonder:
A star-Leviathan with a sun in its belly,
Bearing a thousand soft souls in its cells
As it swam the dimensional seas.
They fear to let you too near to the chaos.
But I stood, girl-face pressed to the viewscreen,
As we made the jump to the higher regions
And I saw not chaos, but order.
The cosmos revealed its weft to young eyes,
Each thing twined through every other.
I swung out in that net in a widening arc.
I could have jumped, myself, into hyperspace then
And been gone.
Two years later, it's Papa who's gone,
Borne to some business by another starship
While I wait for him on this planet of grasses,
Rank coarse grass that, if it were Terra,
You'd expect near an ocean; but no ocean appears.
Two years is a long time marooned.
I remember the trick that was played that day,
The order-in-chaos I saw in that screen.
So simple a dance; shall I do it now?
There are none here to hold me, much else that calls me.
I look around at the sealess sea of grasses
And they appear to nod their assent.
Turning my face and my heart to the sky, I begin.
A dance of four steps, with prelude.
Step zero: the point, dimensionless virtue.
Step one: the point draws out to a line.
Step two: the line broadens into a plane.
Step three: the plane rises into the solid.
And then, the release of step four...
I look around at the sea of grasses.
I look up to the empty sky.
Somewhere up there, a Leviathan swims
Bellyful of stars, my papa in tow.
Papa, I am leaving now.
Step four... and I am gone.
Ellen Terris Brenner (e.brenner1@genie.geis.com)
--------------------------------------------------
Ellen Terris Brenner wrote "Home" in Vol. 4, No. 1. She is a
writer of science fiction and fantasy, a Unitarian Universalist
minister, a sometime activist in the gay/lesbian/bisexual
community, a resident of Seattle, and an alumna of the 1994
Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her latest work, "The Book of
Permissions," will appear this year in the speculative fiction
anthology New Altars, from Angelus Press
().
The Hard Edge of Things by Mark Smith
=========================================
...................................................................
Going home or leaving home -- sometimes there's no difference.
...................................................................
I thought how strange it was to find myself after all these
years back in downtown Temple, Texas, with no money on a
Saturday afternoon, facing the hard edge of things and no choice
about it. I'd hit the limit of what a body could do without a
car. The public library closed half an hour ago, and they didn't
allow sleeping anyway. I'd been to the park and watched
clean-cut guys in shorts pushing their kids in the swings. I
walked up one street and down another looking at the empty
stores, whitewashed, boarded up. I remembered them when people
still shopped there and air-conditioning was new and smelled
funny and my mama would buy me a Coke at Mackey's Drug Store. I
cupped my hand against the sun and looked through the plate
glass where there used to be a department store. A single
high-heeled shoe lay sideways on the carpet. I never felt so
low.
I made up my mind that minute to walk out to the highway and get
out of town, no matter how long it took or how hot it was. But I
got stopped after a block by a big freight train passing
through, slow as a dream. It had about a hundred cars, so I sat
on the high curb to watch it go by. A guy on the other side of
the street had the same idea, except he had a flask of peach
brandy. He belched and I could smell it and hear it even over
the rumble of the train. I read the contents on the sides of the
cars: methanol, corn syrup, liquid petroleum gas, gravel. I
looked away, up to the big grain silos, and thought how much it
looked like Kansas or North Dakota. A black woman came up on the
other side of the train, waiting to cross to my side. She wore
shorts and a halter top and she had a baby in a stroller. Seeing
her flash between the cars as they passed gave an effect like a
series of still photos. She looked as hot as me standing there
in the sun.
I thought about turning around and heading out South First
Street to see the spot where my grandmother's house used to be,
that big old house with stained-glass windows and a wide front
porch. But just then the last car went by, and I decided I'd
head out to the highway like I first planned. There wasn't any
point in going to South First anyway, since they'd torn the
house down to put in a Diamond Shamrock station and I knew that
would only make me feel worse.
So I walked on, down the dusty streets, wondering when they
stopped having cabooses on the ends of trains.
Mark Smith (mlsmith@tenet.edu)
--------------------------------
Mark Smith wrote "Back From the West" in Vol. 2, No. 5, "Reality
Check" in Vol. 2, No. 6, "Slime" in Vol. 3, No. 1, "Doing Lunch"
in Vol. 3, No. 1, "Snapper" in Vol. 3, No. 2, "Innocent
Bystander" in Vol. 3, No. 3, and "Sue and Frank" in Vol. 3, No.
5. He lives in Austin, Texas. His first book of short stories,
Riddle (Argo Press) won the 1992 Austin Book Award. His first
children's book, Slosh, will be published in 1997.
Danielle by Edward Ashton
=============================
...................................................................
The dividing line between love and obsession can be as thin as a
pane of glass.
...................................................................
She works in my building. I see her sometimes in the stairwell
and sometimes in the halls. She's taller than I am, over six
feet, with long black hair and pale blue eyes and a neck that
curves up from her collar like a swan's. Her name is Danielle,
and if I'm feeling brave I might say "Hello, Danielle," or "Good
morning, Danielle," or even something about her jacket or dress,
how she wears it very well. She often says thank you if I say
something nice, but she never says anything unless I speak
first. In fact, I don't believe she knows my name, though we've
been working in the same building for almost two years.
My wife's name is Laura. When I get home from work she says,
"How were things at work today? How's Danielle?" She knows about
Danielle because I talk in my sleep. I tell her things are the
same as always, that she doesn't know I'm alive. She says I
should let her know if things change, because she has a bag
packed and ready. I've looked for this bag and have never
actually found it, but because we have no children I consider it
a credible threat.
Danielle lives alone in a one-story cottage on Herkimer Street.
I know this because a year ago I found her address in the
telephone book, and since then I've occasionally driven past her
house on my way to somewhere else. The neighborhood is quiet and
clean. In the daytime children play kickball in the street, and
at night I've seen couples and old people walking up and down
the block. I have never seen Danielle out walking, either alone
or with others. Once, in a moment of weakness, I parked across
the street from her house and sat watching her through an open
window as she ate her dinner and worked a crossword puzzle in an
easy chair. She was wearing glasses, which she never does at
work, and she was dressed in an old rumpled sweatshirt and torn
denim jeans. You'd think this might tarnish my image of her, but
in fact I found her more attractive then than I had before. When
she set aside her puzzle, stood, stretched, and went off to bed,
I had a terrible urge to slink around to the back of her house,
to try to find her bedroom window, to watch her as she slept.
But I haven't sunk to quite that level yet.
Laura was waiting when I got home that night, demanding to know
where I'd been. I told her I'd been drinking at a bar, but there
was no alcohol on my breath, so she knew that was a lie. She
said that if I'd smelled of perfume she would have left me on
the spot, but since I didn't I'd probably only been hanging
around outside her window masturbating, which she supposed was
all right if that was as far as it went. I wanted to explain to
her that in fact there was nothing sexual in the incident at
all, but I could see that this wasn't something she could
discuss rationally. In the end I just nodded and left it at
that.
I have a friend at work named Brian. He has an office across the
hall from mine. He's just turned forty and has been married and
divorced three times in the past ten years. He advises me to
leave Laura -- or, more likely, to coerce her into leaving me --
and then to pursue and win over Danielle. I haven't done this
for two reasons: I don't believe that Danielle would have me,
and I truly would miss my wife, who is an excellent cook and a
good conversationalist. Brian has said more than once that if he
ever caught himself thinking of his wife in those terms he'd
either divorce her immediately or throw himself off the roof. I
think this attitude goes a long way toward explaining his utter
failure as a husband. Physical attraction is transitory. The
pleasures of the intellect are the only ones that last.
I have a recurring dream in which I'm hiding in the bushes
behind Danielle's cottage, peering in her window as she
undresses for bed. She peels off layer after layer, but no
matter how much clothing she removes, she still has more on
underneath, until finally I begin to beat my head against the
glass in frustration. She comes to the window then and opens it,
but just as she's about to speak I always wake. I've tried many
times to fall back asleep and into the dream, but somehow it
always comes out twisted -- I end up staring in the window at my
wife getting undressed. Or, worse yet, it's me in the bedroom
and Laura on the outside looking in.
Over lunch I tell Brian about the dream. He laughs and says that
if I want to get over my frustration I should come to his
apartment that evening, and that I should bring along a
twelve-pack of beer. When I get there we sit at his kitchen
table for a while, drinking and talking about work and women and
whether the Pirates still have a chance at the pennant. I don't
drink very often, and by the time we've gone through four or
five beers each I'm feeling light-headed and giddy. Brian asks
if I want to see something and I say yes, mostly because I feel
a need to get up and move around, so we go into his front room
and he puts in a black-and-white videotape of himself having sex
with a woman who looks like Danielle. She's on top of him,
straddling his hips, rocking forward and backward and grunting
each time. Brian on the tape turns and winks at the camera.
Brian sitting beside me bursts out laughing. I lean forward, put
my head between my knees, and squeeze my eyes shut. The room is
spinning and my pulse is racing and I'm afraid I'm having some
sort of attack. Brian tells me to sit up, that I'm missing the
best part. My stomach is heaving and Danielle is crying out to
God and Jesus and Brian is laughing and fluid is pouring out of
my mouth and splashing onto the carpet. I press my hands to my
ears and wait for the screaming to stop.
I see Danielle in the stairwell at work the next day, coming up
to the fourth floor as I'm going down. I don't say hello. She
looks up with a half-smile when she sees me, but as we come
closer she glances away, and she turns to avoid brushing against
me as we pass.
A month or so after that, Laura shakes me out of a sound sleep
at five in the morning and asks me if something is wrong.
"Is there trouble in paradise?" she says. "You haven't mentioned
your girlfriend in weeks."
I close my eyes and say I don't have a girlfriend. I only have a
wife. I feel Laura lean closer then, feel her breath warm in my
ear.
"That's right," she whispers. "You do have a wife." She kisses
my ear, kisses my cheek, kisses my mouth. She pulls her
nightgown off over her head and climbs on top of me, and we make
love for the first time in the better part of a year. And it's
fine, it's good, until Laura began to shake and cry out and I
think of Danielle and the video and I just can't do it. I can't
quite get there. I pretend, but I think Laura knows, because she
doesn't say anything to me when we're finished. She just pulls
on her nightgown and goes into the bathroom, and I fall asleep
listening to the water running and dream that I'm in Danielle's
bed and it's her in the shower and not my wife. When I wake the
next morning, there's a note taped to the headboard. "I'll be at
my sister's," it says. "Get this out of your system. Then give
me a call."
Two days later I'm drinking at the bar in a Mexican restaurant
after work when Danielle walks in. She looks once around the
place, and I half-expect her to leave when she sees me. But she
has no idea that there's anything between us, of course, and in
fact she comes over to the bar and sits down two stools away
from me. She orders a strawberry Margarita. I'm hardly aware
that I'm staring at her until she turns and sees me.
"Oh, hello," she says. "Don't I know you from work?"
"Not really," I say. "I have an office on the fourth floor."
"Right, but -- " She hesitates, looks confused for a moment.
"You used to say hello to me almost every day, didn't you? But
you don't anymore. Did I do something rotten to you?"
"Well," I say, "my wife just left me because of you. But I don't
suppose that's entirely your fault."
"Oh." She's confused again, not sure if I'm trying to be funny.
I smile and shake my head, and she takes that as her cue to
laugh. The bartender brings her drink. She pays him, leaves a
quarter on the bar as a tip.
"So really," she says. "Did I take your parking space or
something? If I did, I'm sorry, because you really used to
brighten up my day."
"No," I say. "You didn't do anything. I've just had a lot of
things on my mind lately. I'm sure I'll be back to my old self
soon."
"That's good," she says. The hostess calls my name. Danielle
nods and smiles. I wish her good night.
I drive up and down Herkimer street six times that night before
I work up the courage to park. I leave my car two blocks away
from Danielle's, for fear that she might look out the window and
recognize it. When I get to her cottage the street is deserted.
Danielle is in the front room, half asleep in front of the
television. I walk up the driveway and around the side of the
house, trying not to look like a burglar until I'm out of view
of the street. The first window around back is her bedroom.
Light from the hallway falls across her pillows and onto the
floor. She has a dozen stuffed animals at the foot of her bed. I
wait for five minutes, then ten. At least her neighbors haven't
called the police. I lean my forehead against the glass and
close my eyes. It's a warm, clear night, with just a hint of a
breeze, and crickets are singing in the backyard...
And then there is light. My eyes snap open and she's standing
there, her hand still on the light switch, only ten feet and a
pane of glass between us. A bathrobe hangs around her shoulders,
but it's open in the front and she's wearing nothing underneath.
Her breasts are sagging heavily and she needs to shave her legs.
She's looking straight into my eyes.
I jerk back from the window, turn and bolt around the side of
the house and across the front lawn. No casual pretenses now,
I'm running flat-out down the middle of the street, expecting
every moment to hear her screaming behind me. But I never do,
and when I get home there are no policemen waiting at my door,
and the next morning when I pass Danielle in the stairwell at
work she smiles and nods.
That night I have a new dream. I'm standing outside Danielle's
window again, but when the light comes on it's not her bedroom
I'm looking into, but my own. Laura slides the window up for me.
She offers me her hand.
Edward Ashton (ashton@recce.nrl.navy.mil)
-------------------------------------------
Edward Ashton wrote "The Rock" in Vol. 5, No. 3. He is a
research engineer by necessity and a fiction writer by choice.
His work has appeared in a number of online and print magazines,
including Blue Penny Quarterly, Painted Hills Review, Brownstone
Quarterly, and The Pearl. He currently lives and works in
Washington, D.C.
Other Flesh by Pat Johanneson
=================================
...................................................................
Today criminals can change identities with a fake passport or
driver's license. But tomorrow...
...................................................................
The old guy on the table didn't look capable of hurting anyone,
much less killing them. That was good. My rep depended on it.
The wires retracted into their housing in the wall, which melted
back into its Dali camo. Disintegration of the Persistence of
Vision, this time. Last time it'd been the Last Supper, making
the lapsed Catholic in me feel kind of creepy. Jesus' eyes in my
back, staring me down as I checked the hotline to find her voice
there. "Help me." It always started like that. I decided I
should probably edit the Last Supper out of the playback loop
when I got the chance.
I glanced at the guy's brain and the worms were busy doing their
thing, crawling on the contacts, converting the metal to gray
tissue. In about ten minutes there would be nothing on a medical
scan of this guy's head to show that he'd been plugged into a
dumper, nothing abnormal in his head at all -- just a few
patches of dead tissue. Normal for a senior citizen.
I zipped him up, glued the rug down -- standard
old-man-white-with-a-touch-of-yellow hair -- and wheeled him
into the wake-up room, full of doctor-esque toys. I even had a
salt shaker dressed up to look like a medical instrument.
Sarcasm is my middle name. John Sarcasm Smith, you'll understand
if I don't shake hands, but I've gotta wash the blood off first.
Which I did, at a stainless-steel basin.
He woke up in about an hour and I told him not to drive for at
least four days -- you just can't force-learn everything when
you get a brand new body. I told him to walk six blocks west and
catch a cab.
Four hours ago he'd been a devastatingly gorgeous redhead with
three corpses on her conscience and the bad fortune to have left
blood on the last victim, enough for a tight-scope genotype.
Watching him walk away, I wondered if he'd notice the absence of
breasts and how it made his back hurt less. At least he didn't
have the swaying hips of the last female-to-male I'd done.
I watched my work walk away, then I went into the house and
called Cardinal Points, telling them to send a cab to the
twelve-hundred block of Parkwest.
I used to work for lockheed, and if that means nothing to you,
then you haven't been keeping up with USASF declassification.
I was on the team working on the interhook, the biomechanical
interface between pilot and craft. I was one of the middle-level
techs on the bio side of things, with a high enough security
clearance to have more than a faint idea what I might be doing.
My specialty was biological memory storage. The sky over White
Sands was full of warbirds, mainly old-stock F/A-23 Bloodhawks
and EA-91 Eagle Eyes. The planes weren't the experimental part
of the project; the pilots were.
Yeah, you say, I read about it in Popular Whatever, so what? But
this was sixteen years ago, long before anyone outside of a
tight circle of Aerospace Force brass knew what was going on. I
didn't really know; I guessed at some of it but I told no one.
The death penalty was in effect; it was wartime, remember?
What war? The Big Fizzle. The one where we were gonna kick some
serious Second Soviet ass, except they crumbled. Hard to believe
we took 'em seriously again, ain't it? But there you go again,
forgetting historical context.
Anyway, the pilots were the experiment.
My phone rang.
My phone _never_ rings. No one has the number. I've got a device
over the output on it that prevents my name and number from ever
leaving my house.
So my phone rang and I thought, _Shit_.
I answered it, though. What else am I gonna do? If it's cops
they've got a lot of nerve, warning me, and if it's anyone else
I wanna know where they got the number.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Philip."
"Sorry, I don't know any -- "
"Cut it," he said. "Don't bother ducking. It's Genera."
Genera? Vaguely familiar -- "Hi." Nobody's called me Philip
since I quit answering to it. Fourteen years ago.
"I understand that you've got a business going. Profitable."
"From who?"
"Never mind that. I need your services."
"Go through the usual channels."
"Wait on a -- "
I unplugged the phone. Ten minutes later I plugged it back in
and it was, of course, ringing.
"_What_, goddamn it?"
"Philip, that was rude. I've never had to use the redial on this
phone, you know that?"
"I care."
"It works. Regardless, I need your services. A friend of mine
requires a body."
"This better be secure. The phone."
"Of course it is." Genera -- now I remembered. Cop, ex-cop.
Couldn't remember his real name, not right now. I'd done
bodywork for him once. But how'd he get my number? It didn't
matter. Not right now, anyway.
"All right," I said, "I'll bite."
"New body."
"Well, duh. Male, female? I need an age, height -- "
"I've got a blueprint for you. How much?"
"Remember last time?"
"Yeah."
"Add four hundred percent."
"All right." My price had actually only gone up three hundred,
but I figured he owed me for the phone call. The personal touch,
you know?
The sky was gray and i should have known something was going on
just from that. I'm omen-driven; things that look wrong
sometimes have special significance for me. Red sky at night,
sparrows take flight. I'm still kicking myself.
But I don't wanna give too much away.
I met Genera -- turns out William Carlyle is his real name -- in
a small restaurant that served Szechuan food. I had something
green with too much curry. Soy sauce on it didn't help.
"So where'd you get my phone number? And where'd you get my
name?" Genera looked pretty much like I remembered him. The hair
had gone gray, the stomach had expanded, but hey, same deal with
me. I allow myself to look middle-aged. It helps me blend into
my 'hood.
"Your name was easy. They've got a file at the PD."
"You're cop again? I have a gun, you know."
"Yeah, but you didn't bring it."
Damn, he was slick. I hadn't even seen him scan me. Unless he
had a cohort, which was unlikely.
"And no, I'm not cop. They just have, um, unimaginative
passcodes."
"Oh." I shoveled green-black rice into my mouth; tried to, but
I'm bad with chopsticks. "The blueprint."
"Yeah. Actually, you should already have it."
"Huh?"
"In your computer."
"Fuck that. You couldn't have hacked it, it's not connected."
Quite deliberately, I might add.
"No, but it _is_ powered on."
"Uh-huh," trying to see his point.
"That's all my hackboy needs."
"Bullshit."
"Check it and see."
At least he paid for lunch.
It was raining when I pulled in back at my house, and that was
just another omen. The weatherman, lying bastard, had called for
clear and sunny the rest of the week. There was a niggling
feeling in my hindbrain that told me that something was off
here, but I sat down at my computer anyway. The words floated in
front of my eyes:
> Warning -- New File in Tree:
> "genera/gotcha ashole." Disposition?
"Get a hackboy who can spell," I said out loud.
_Disposition?_ it repeated. I wished I'd bought voice chips that
didn't sound like Majel Barrett.
"Clear it and then run it," I said.
A pause. _File is clean._ Not viral, at least not in any way
that Majel could find. _Running. File is a standard image file
with text attachment._
Deep breath. "Go," I said.
The image was a 3V of a male, 172cm tall, age about thirty-nine.
Everything was pretty average in size and shape; the text said
that he was to have green eyes and thinning brown hair. You'd
pass him on the street and never know he'd been someone else
days ago.
The body was easy enough. I went into the back, through the
hidden door, and grabbed a beer and a blue-labeled test tube.
Then I went and sat on my veranda, the rain drumming on the
green corrugated plastic above me, and watched the slanting gray
as it obliterated any visibility out there, musing over the last
time I'd been given a really _hard_ one.
Green eyes, brown hair, that was easy. Thinning brown hair, I'd
have to work in a gene for male pattern baldness. Fine, easy.
The challenge was gone. But it was still big goddamn money, you
betcha. That was why I was still doing it, I think.
I decided I'd give him a mole, too. On the left foot, just above
the heel. Gotta sign it somehow.
The sky was clearing later on when I came back up out of my
fugue. I do that sometimes, get lost inside my head, thinking
about the engineering. My beer was warm and flat and still half
there, and the sun was setting. I finished the beer and went
down to the lab.
In four days he was born, a tabula rasa for me to imprint
Genera's friend into. The new genotype is precisely that, a
_brand new_ genotype, not in the police records or anyone
else's, for that matter. They're all grown from clones, but I
tinker with them enough to make them all unique.
And the cloning is only the least illegal part of the whole
deal.
I dialed my hotline and listened to Genera saying he was ready
when I was. At least he hadn't called me again.
We met at a Greek place up the street and around the corner from
the curry-intensive Szechuan place. I ate something I could
pronounce and Genera ate something I couldn't.
Halfway through I told him I was ready. He said his hackboy was
fourteen and so it was no wonder he couldn't spell. I told him
that was pathetic and he handed me the rest of my money, cash,
in the time-honored black briefcase. I named a place for the
pickup and told him I didn't want to see his ugly face again. He
grinned and told me that wasn't what his women said. I left.
I should have killed him, but there was no quiet way to do it.
Plus all I had was my taser.
Besides, I didn't _know_.
The body was lying on the table. The guy I was transferring told
me he'd never heard of this shit before, if it wasn't for Genera
it'd just be a matter of time before the rape-murder cops got
him on the genotyping. I hate hearing shit like that. I'd as
soon not know about what a client did. Guaranteed it's gonna be
bad.
So I told him to lie down and attached the electrodes to his
forehead, the sleep inducers.
When he was asleep I wheeled him to the real lab, opened up his
skull, shoved the metal transfer contacts in, and told the Dali
to dissolve and gimme the wires.
The actual transfer is computer-controlled; once I connect the
wires, I might as well have a beer. I never do. I feel like I
should at least supervise, even though if anything goes wrong I
still have to depend on the computer. My reflexes are nowhere
near fast enough, and neither is my mind.
So I hit the switch and watched the green lights flicker.
Nothing went red, or even yellow. That only happened once, a
red, and the computer caught it in time. No troubles.
I built this stuff after the interhook project, ten years ago.
I've used it nineteen times since then. I know it intimately.
The electronics are cobbled together from the flight system
interface, the place where the plane dumps itself into the
pilot. In the interhook, the pilot's senses are replaced. Taste,
for instance, becomes fuel mix; a sweet taste is ideal, bitter
is too lean, salty is too rich. Sight is suddenly the
cartographic outlay of the terrain, the targeting system. The
plane's skin becomes the pilot's flesh. Pain, depending on the
type and location and intensity, can indicate a hull breach or a
failing engine or a low fuel tank.
My use of this technology, as far as I'm concerned, is simply
the next logical step. Dumping the personality of one body into
another is actually a two-step process: first the original's
mind is transferred to a buffer, a truly vast buffer, made up of
a generally-inert cloned brain, and then the buffer is dumped to
the new body. Two dumps for the price of one.
This is the most illegal part of my work; most of the technology
I deal with is still technically classified. Don't ask me to
tell you how I got it. I have no intention of giving a friend
the death penalty.
When his green eyes twitched open he said, "Philip Cabrierre,
you are under arrest. You have the right -- "
"Genera, you shit," I said.
" -- to remain silent, anything you say -- "
"Dollhouse," I said.
" -- can and will be used against you in a court -- "
"Mambo," I said.
" -- of law, you have the right to an -- "
"Shitheel," I said.
" -- attorney or an attorney program, if you cannot afford
one -- "
"F-stop," I said.
" -- one will be..." He sort of trailed off there. First time
I'd ever had to use the shutdown phrase.
In the interhook there is provision for a hypnotic trigger
sequence. In the military it's generally used to induce a pilot
to carry out his mission. You don't want a bomber pilot, say, to
freeze up just because he's going to drop an H or three on a
city full of innocents. So you say some words to him and he's
yours, wide open, do anything you say. Drop them bombs, soldier.
Then repeat the phrase to close him up again.
"Whose fucking idea was this?" I said, evenly.
"Captain Carlyle," he said.
Captain, huh? Genera, you shit.
They'd been after me for seven years, he said. Genera -- Carlyle
-- had been a cop all along. They'd bought a bunch of people,
not the least of which was that damned redhead I told you about
earlier. They had me. This guy's voice wasn't smug, just
matter-of-fact. I told him to quit breathing. When he turned
that blue color I told him to start again.
Then I sat down and looked into his blank eyes. "You are now
under my power," I said. "Your mission" -- should you choose to
accept it, as if he had a choice, wide open like that -- "is to
find and kill Genera. William Carlyle. You will go to your
station house or wherever it is that you came from. You will act
normally until you have the opportunity to kill Captain William
Carlyle. You will take the first opportunity you see. Do you
understand that?"
"Yes." His voice was flat and dull.
"State your name, rank, serial number, and mission for me."
"Sigvaldursson, Davis Anthony. Corporal. Zero one four three
three one two eight dash seven B. I am to take the first
opportunity I see to kill Captain William Carlyle."
"Good. Now give me a hand here, will you?"
I watched the wires retract and Cygnes reflechis en elephants
come up. It was weird, lying there on the table while he did all
the work.
"Okay," I instructed him, "now seal the scalp and kill the
cutout switch." I heard the seal -- it never sounded quite so
wet before -- as my forehead closed back up. Then all sensation
was back and I had one hell of a headache.
I stood up anyway. "The blonde wig." I looked down at my new
bustline and was impressed. He'd done a good job. Too bad I
couldn't hire him on as permanent help. But he had other uses.
"Yeah, that one." I'd have to get a hair graft later. The wig
would do for now.
"Dollhouse," I murmured to him, "mambo, shitheel, f-stop," and
then I walked away. I glanced back over my shoulder at him and
he was rubbing his eyes, then eyeing my butt in the snug shorts
I'd picked. Yeah, look real hard, boy. Just another
drop-dead-gorgeous girl you'll never get to know.
That was two weeks ago. I've been watching the news, but I still
haven't seen anything about Genera. Maybe the hypnotic
suggestion doesn't work after the second code phrase.
Maybe I'll have to do it myself. I'll give Sigvaldursson another
week, and then I think I'll buy a gun. Genera won't even see it
coming.
I'm almost looking forward to it.
Pat Johanneson (johannes@austin.brandonu.ca)
----------------------------------------------
Pat Johanneson wrote "Chronicler" in Vol. 5, No. 4 and "Watching
You" in Vol. 5, No. 5. He has lived most of his life in
Manitoba, and has been the computer operator at Brandon
University for over two years now. His home on the Web is at
.
Business by Sung J. Woo
===========================
...................................................................
Whoever said there's no honor among thieves was right. Trust,
friendship, and loyalty, sure -- but mostly there's just
_policy._
...................................................................
There were five of us in the bathroom -- not including Chuckie
-- Eduardo, Two-Tone, Grease, Tony, and of course, me. I tiptoed
and stretched, but I still couldn't see over Two-Tone's huge
head. Two-Tone smelled of something awful, a cross between
garlic, rotten cheese, and the locker room at the Y.
"Why the fuck do all you guys have to be here?" Chuckie said,
his pants down, his face red, sitting on the toilet.
"Because we don't trust you, that's why, Chuckie," Eduardo said.
"Who knows, maybe you'll swallow it, you know?"
"Give me a fucking break," Chuckie said. "Is it my fault I got
constipated? It's all that garlic shit pizza we ate."
"Hey, I liked that stuff," Two-Tone said. "My mother used to
make it all the time."
"Shut up," Eduardo said, "you guys are giving me a headache." He
sat down on the edge of the bathtub.
"Oh shit," Chuckie said, "it's ripping. I can't do this,
Eduardo." I crouched down and looked at his bright red face
between Two-Tone's legs.
"You get your asshole ripped," Eduardo said, "we can sew it up.
Grease's real good at that, right?"
"I ain't touching nowhere nohow," Grease said. "I ain't going
near his hole."
And everyone laughed, even Eduardo, even Chuckie.
"Oh shit!" Chuckie screamed. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit it's
coming out, oh shit!" His face turned purple and he was shaking
all over.
"Holy shit," Grease said, running out of the bathroom. Then
Two-Tone, Tony, and finally me. I slammed the door behind me.
"What the fuck was that he ate that stinks so bad?" Two-Tone
asked us, laughing.
"And Eduardo's still with him," Tony said. "I guess he really
doesn't trust him."
Me and Grease and Two-Tone exchanged looks. Eduardo trusted
Chuckie; Eduardo trusted all of us. Tony had been with us for
the last couple of months and he still didn't understand. He was
a bit slow but pretty good at busting into safes.
"It's okay, Chuckie," Eduardo was saying in the bathroom. We all
leaned closer to the door to listen. "You're doing fine."
Then silence -- then a whole bunch of grunts -- then a final,
whopping yell of pain and relief. After a couple minutes of
waiting, Eduardo came out.
"Pee-yoo, man," Grease said, clamping his nose shut with his
fingers. "Now you smell like shit."
"Shit or not, he's done, and it's out," Eduardo said. Chuckie
followed him out, still adjusting his belt and tucking in his
black Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt, which had big dark spots under his
armpits.
The bathroom still stunk, but we all had to look. After all, it
was ours.
The log was green and brown and really thick, almost the girth
of a Coke can. And it looked really hard, not the usual
smoothness of regular shit. It had cracks and dimples and had a
shiny surface, like it was glazed. A few droplets of blood were
dissolving into the water, wavering like cigarette smoke in
still air.
"Where the fuck is it?" Grease asked.
A bamboo chopstick in hand, Eduardo slowly spun the log around.
And when we saw the other side, it was there, a bright red ruby
ring stuck smack in the middle.
We all left the bathroom and went into the kitchen. I was
starving for some strange reason, and we still had some roast
chicken left over from the night before.
"So who's gonna take it out?" I said, picking at the chicken.
"Ain't me," Grease said. "I say whoever shat the fucking thing
go get it."
Chuckie waved him off. "You want it, you get it yourself. I've
done my tour of duty today." Feeling his butt, he added, "Maybe
forever."
So we were arguing, horsing around, having some fun now because
the worst was over. We got away from customs and we made it back
here and Chuckie had shat and we didn't even see Tony leaving
the kitchen and going into the bathroom, no, none of us saw it.
"You hear that?" Eduardo said.
"No," I said, unable to break free from his surprised gray eyes.
It was the sound of someone taking a leak.
"Oh my fucking God," Grease and Two-Tone said at the same time,
and we all ran to the bathroom.
Tony was there flicking his dick and pulling down the flush at
the same time. There was only one chance, and Eduardo dropped to
the floor and shoved his hand into the toilet as the water
swirled and swirled into the tunnel.
We all held our breath. Tony held onto his penis, wondering what
all the problem was. Then he realized suddenly and left his dick
hanging out of his fly. "Oh shit, oh shit," he said jumping up
and down, looking like some kid needing to go to the bathroom.
"I'm so fucking stupid," he said.
All eyes were on Eduardo and his right hand shoved deep into the
toilet. "Got something," he said, and pulled his hand out of the
water. His hand had a part of the log, only about half of it.
It was breathless. Nobody said anything, we just opened our eyes
and hoped. Eduardo slowly opened his hand -- he had crushed some
of the shit, but it was still together.
But nothing. He was holding the end without the ruby.
I laughed. What else could I do? I laughed and laughed until
somebody shoved a hand full of shit into my face. Then everybody
else started laughing, so I laughed again, knowing little else
to do. What can you do but laugh at something like that?
It's that feeling at the pit of your stomach, that empty and
hollow churning -- butterflies, some people call it. You've done
something wrong, and this man -- this _police man_ with his red
and white lights and his flashlight -- is going to get you.
I'm talking about a speeding ticket here. Since almost everyone
has been stopped by a cop once or another, that's a good place
to start.
They make you feel like a kid, even if you're past retirement
and the cop is just out of high school. I've seen the breakdown,
the sweat forming on the brows while the cop adjusts his cap a
little bit, like he's annoyed at everything that you do.
So it's that feeling, but multiplied one thousand, ten thousand,
a million times. You don't understand the rush, the high. You
can only get it when you have a pound of hash stuffed under your
seat and the cop is checking out your license, staring at your
ugly mug. You can barely keep from laughing because you're free.
Until you break yourself away from the law and government and
all that stuff, you'll be trapped forever in a mindless maze.
Whenever we go on road trips, we stop at a 7-11 and hold one up.
Just one, because once you hold up two, you're giving them a
line. And lines have a way of pointing.
These guys say they don't have the combination to the safe, who
cares? That's what Tony's there for. We just make sure they
don't press any buttons or anything like that. We tape them up
good with duct tape, which every 7-11 has, and I stick one of
the workers in the toilet feet first, threatening to zap him
while Grease fucks around with his 12-gauge.
And the whole time we're doing this, I'm thinking _I'm free_.
I'm free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, whoever I want.
Just last week I had the stash under my car when the cop pulled
me over and the whole time I'm trying really hard not to laugh.
Because if I laugh (I have a crazy sounding laugh, "like someone
rubbing two balloons together and playing the harmonica at the
same time," Grease once told me), it's all over.
So that's what I'm thinking when the cop is looking over my
license, that if I slip, I'm finished. It's like thinking about
my stinky grandmother when I'm having sex, only a little
different. In both cases, it keeps me from laughing, which is
the important thing.
I think all five of us have done time at one point or another.
It happens -- it only takes one fuckup to get caught. Then
you're in prison and there isn't a whole lot you can do about
it. You just start counting the days.
I was in for armed robbery and kidnapping, for holding up one of
those fancy clothing stores downtown. They were having their
annual One Day Sale and a friend had told me they cleared more
than a hundred grand on that day. Of course, security would have
been beefed up -- so going up to the counter and yelling for
money would have been suicide. So I came up with a very smart
plan (I thought it was smart, anyway).
I went into the store dressed in my best cloths and took a pair
of pants into the dressing room. Inside one of the cubicles, I
took out both my guns, sat down on the bench, and waited.
Eventually they would come, because they always did. And sure
enough, after a half-hour wait, they arrived.
"After Daddy tries this on, you tell me what you think, okay?" a
voice said from the cubicle next to me, a pleasant news
anchorman's voice.
"Yes, Daddy," a little girl said from outside the cubicle.
"Just wait out there, Maggie, I'll be right out," he said,
unzipping his pants. It was time to make my move. I walked out.
The girl had beautiful red curls, the dripping kind, like
Slinkys. She looked at me and smiled but didn't say anything.
Little kids and I usually get along, I think mostly because I'm
not much taller than they are.
I walked behind her and put my hand over her mouth, her head
shoved tight against my chest. Her eyes were about to pop out of
their sockets when I showed her my gun. I thought she would bite
my hand, but instead she became completely calm, as if she were
glad to see the gun. It's amazing what television has done to
these kids.
I dragged the kid back into my dressing cubicle and closed the
door, at which point my neighbor finished putting his new pair
of pants on.
"Maggie?" he said uncertainly.
"Over here," I said. And I heard the tightening up of every
muscle in his body. "Don't even think about it," I said. "Unless
you want your little darling to look like Swiss cheese." I love
saying that kind of stuff.
"Oh Lord," he said.
I opened the door and let him in. It was a big dressing area,
enough to fit two adults and a kid comfortably. I had my gun on
Maggie's head, who didn't seem a bit nervous.
"I'm not going to kill your kid," I said.
"Thank God," he said.
"If you do what I want you to do."
"Oh Lord," he said. He was fat and bald and looked early
thirty-ish.
"You're a deeply religious man, aren't you?"
"No," he said. "No. Only in emergencies."
I tried hard not to laugh. "Here's what I want you to do," I
said, handing him my second pistol. You can always tell when
someone is holding a gun for the very first time. They have an
awed look about them, as if they were holding something sacred.
"I want you to go outside, go up to the counter, and have all
the cash taken out of all the drawers and anything else valuable
they have stashed in there." I paused. "Announce yourself as
'Squeaky Norman' from the 'Zippadee-Dooda Money Laundry
Service.'" At this point I took the gun off of Maggie.
"Zippadee-Dooda, I got it," he said, and pointed his gun at me,
quick as a tiger. "Let go of my daughter."
I put my gun back into my belt. "It's not loaded, Norman," I
said. Eyes closed, he pulled the trigger -- without hesitation
-- and it went _click._ "Great," I said. "Now I know for sure
you can do the job. If you can kill someone as sweet as me, you
can certainly rob a store, can't you?" I told him to meet me at
the corner of 6th and Brown, in front of the deli, when he was
through with his job.
I pushed him out the cubicle and waited with Maggie, who wasn't
saying a word. So I listened to the goings on outside. "I'm
Squeaky Norma, from the Zippadee-Dooda Money Cleaning Service,"
he was yelling. Close enough, so he got a couple of words wrong.
After all, he was under a lot of pressure. I giggled.
"Hey mister," Maggie said, pointing a gun at my butt. I went for
my own, but it was gone. She had somehow taken it out -- but
how? To this day, I still don't know what happened.
I was going to say something like "You don't know what you're
doing," but she didn't even wait for that. She held the gun with
both hands, shot it, shot off my left buttcheek, and the gun
went flying from the recoil.
I fell down and she ran right past me, not even giving me a
passing glance, and while I was wondering whether there was too
much violence on TV, the ambulance people and the police
officers landed next to me one by one like vultures. They played
musical chairs on the bench until a pair of men in white suits
carted me away.
So I was serving my five year sentence in Greenwood and that's
where I got to know Eduardo. Although we had both arrived around
the same time and were serving out similar sentences (his was
also for armed robbery, but with first degree manslaughter
instead of kidnap), we didn't actually get to know each other
until the last year of our stay. Greenwood was a big place,
holding as many as four thousand people. It was divided into two
sections, North and West, and each of those sections were
subdivided into four more sections, A, B, C, and D. I lived in
North C, and Eduardo lived in West D, so that's why we never saw
each other.
But because of some mix-up, both Eduardo and I ended up in the
same softball team that last year, me at second and Eduardo at
short. We got to know each other pretty well on and off the
field. He seemed like a straight arrow to me, someone who you'd
never expect to be involved with my kind of business. But once
you got to know him, you knew that there was no other kind of
life for Eduardo. Like me, he had to be free. Law and order were
things to be ignored, not followed.
Although everyone talked about their future plans, it was a
serious subject between someone like me and Eduardo since our
time was up in a couple of months. Believe it or not, you get
used to prison life. After a couple of months, you get into a
groove. People can get used to just about anything.
"I'm going straight," Eduardo said when I asked him what he was
going to do. "My brother works in construction, and he can
probably get me a job."
"Oh," I said. That was a polite way for him to say that he
didn't want me to be a part of his business.
"What are your plans?" he asked me.
"Not sure," I said. "Not straight, that's for sure."
He nodded and smiled. "We better take the field."
The game went smoothly until the sixth inning, when the catcher
from the West team ran over Eduardo in order to prevent a double
play. It wasn't a slide -- it was a football tackle that knocked
Eduardo flat on his back.
A fight broke in almost every single game we played, so this was
no big deal. Eduardo got up and kicked the catcher in the
stomach. From his stance, it was obvious Eduardo had done some
Thai boxing, fists held up next to his head, ready for anything.
Every time the catcher came close to him, Eduardo kicked him
somewhere and kept him away. After his fifth attempt, the
catcher whipped out a knife from his ankle and slashed Eduardo's
leg.
It didn't take long for Eduardo, even with one of his legs
injured, to take the knife away from the catcher. Eduardo had
him down and was about to stick the knife somewhere when I
kicked it out of his hand.
He came after me, but I kicked him in the injured leg, which
immediately knocked him down to the ground. Then the guards
came, and it was over.
Eduardo and I didn't talk for the rest of the time at Greenwood,
not until the last day anyway. I was afraid he was angry at me,
and with so little time left, avoiding him wasn't a very big
deal. Softball was over, red and brown leaves were blowing in
from somewhere outside, and freedom was a few days away.
I was in the rec room, watching a rerun of Barnaby Jones. I was
surprised to find myself feeling nostalgic -- this was the last
time I was going to be in this room, the last time I was going
to have to move the chair under the television, step up, and
pull on the on-off knob. I was lost deep in my thoughts when
Eduardo sat down next to me. It took me a few minutes before I
realized he was there. He didn't say anything to me, so I didn't
say anything back. Barnaby, a gun ready in his hand, was running
after a man in a rabbit suit.
"I've been thinking," Eduardo said.
I didn't say anything.
"I'm not going into construction," he said. And that's all he
really had to say. I still didn't say anything. Barnaby had
caught up to the man in the rabbit suit. "Put your hands up," he
said, and the rabbit-man, complete with painted whiskers and a
bright red nose, slowly raised his hands in the air.
"For a retard, he got us pretty good," Eduardo said. I looked at
Chuckie in confusion. "I just got off the phone with Merlo. Tony
sold the ruby to Montrose."
"Sold it?" Two-Tone asked, rocking his huge head side to side.
It was a habit of his whenever he didn't understand something.
Two-Tone and Grease were playing ping-pong. I had winners.
"It couldn't have been all an act, though," I said, looking at
Eduardo. I could tell what he was thinking. "Working for
somebody else."
"Bingo." Eduardo watched the little white ball go to and fro.
"He didn't sell it to just anybody, he sold it to Montrose."
"That ties him with our good friend Columbus," Chuckie said.
"Columbus," Eduardo said.
"Shit!" Two-Tone blew an easy shot.
"What are we gonna do about it?" Chuckie asked.
"Slice slice slice the motherfucker," Grease said, slamming the
tiny ball down the line.
"Shit," Two-Tone said, tossing me the paddle. "Your turn."
Grease was on a hot streak, and I was worse at this game than
Two-Tone.
Eduardo walked over to the balcony, lost in his thoughts.
Chuckie and Two-Tone were watching Mighty Mouse on TV. And
Grease was already trouncing me with his spin serves.
Eduardo walked back in from the balcony and picked up the
phone. Pushing a couple of buttons, he went back out to the
balcony. It was a brief call, but a few seconds later, the phone
rang, and he answered it.
"I do believe some rather unappealing events will soon take
flight," Grease said in a completely believable British accent.
I nodded, thinking the same thing.
"Get your stuff," Eduardo said to all of us. "We're taking a
little trip." We all looked at him, wondering where we were
going. "About a three-and-a-half hour drive up north. We'll take
the van."
"You found Tony," Chuckie said.
"At a motel in Upper Wayne," Eduardo said. "Come on, let's get
this over with."
In the beginning, it was me, Eduardo, and Chuckie. Chuckie was a
serious bookie, and for the first couple of months we lived with
him and his girlfriend in a little shack overlooking the ocean.
Eduardo knew Chuckie from his hometown. According to legend,
they've been bad ever since the second grade, when they stole
cigarettes from the teacher's lounge.
The first thing we did when we got out of Greenwood was
household robbery. We scouted the upper middle class
neighborhoods and got them one by one. After the fifth one or
so, each town would set up a neighborhood watch -- which was a
signal for us to move onto the next town. "Then after a couple
of months, we can go back for a couple more jobs or so," Eduardo
said. He compared it to crop rotation -- by not overdoing any of
the towns and going back to them after a short wait, we could
keep the jobs continuously flowing.
Eduardo was a natural-born leader, one of those types that
people helplessly turn to for whatever reason. He was like a
wise old man, a father, and a mother -- everything. He was also
a visionary, but not a talker. He was a doer. What he wanted he
got, but he never got it alone. He needed us like we need him.
Grease was the next to arrive, the blackest man I'd ever seen.
At night all you could see were his eyes, and maybe his teeth if
he were smiling, which wasn't often. He was from West Virginia,
and before we picked him up he owed some serious money. Eduardo
lent him thirty grand out of his own pocket, which still has
Chuckie and me wondering just what was going through his mind. I
mean he made the right call and all -- Grease turned out to be
an essential part of our business -- but at the time, the move
seemed completely unlike Eduardo.
Grease's real name was Clement something -- something really
hard to say. Chuckie told me how he got his nickname. Just after
turning sixteen, Grease got a job at a diner as a dishwasher.
Somebody pissed him off (something to do with his sister, who
was murdered when she was just ten), and this is what Grease
does: he goes to the thing that fries chicken parts, the hot
thing with boiling oil, and he pours it over the guy, head to
toe, covers this guy with grease. "Grease! Grease! Grease!" the
guy yelled, falling to the floor and tossing and jerking in
pain. Then to top it off, Grease takes a match and lights the
guy on fire.
Two-Tone was a much easier going guy. He wasn't much for taking
care of serious business, but then again, neither was I. Only
Eduardo and Grease have killed people. Two-Tone was his real
name, the name that was on his birth certificate (he has a copy
of it shrunk down to wallet size so he could show it to people).
"Dad had a two-tone Chevy Camaro, and that's where I shot out,"
he told me. "And by the time I was getting hair on my balls,
this started to happen," he said, pointing at a part of his head
where the hair wasn't as dark as the rest. It was completely
natural, a part of his hair turning silvery-white. So the name
Two-Tone made more sense than ever. He'd dyed it regularly since
he was identified by a witness as a "guy with skunky hair."
Two-Tone was a big guy, and fast, too. When he became a part of
our business, we got real serious, going after larger houses in
better neighborhoods. Chateaus and mansions, and when Tony came
along we got big.
Tony. We knew very little about him. Maybe he wasn't as stupid
as we had thought. He didn't seem like a bad guy. Chuckie had
known him a long while back, so we thought if Chuckie knew him
he was okay.
But now we were going to have to take care of him.
We didn't talk very much on the road. I-75 is a calm drive, rows
of evergreens standing tall and straight, so thick that you
can't see anything but brown and green. Every so often there's a
sign for adopting a part of the highway for clean-up, so we
talked about doing something like that, but we soon fell back to
silence.
I think Grease likes the act of killing, but even he doesn't
like the silence that comes before death. It's like we're having
a pre-funeral. None of us hate Tony, but what he did was
unforgivable. We all risked our lives for that ring.
We got to Upper Wayne by sunset. Our motel is right off the
highway, Upper Wayne Motel, not terribly creative. The only neon
light that works on the sign is the word "Upper," flickering on
and off randomly, as if it can't make up its mind.
We asked the motel guy about Tony, and he shook his head. Grease
showed him his gun. He gave us a key and told us to go to B8,
which was on the second floor, the fourth room on the right.
We used the key and open the door. Tony was in bed, watching TV
while munching on some chips and drinking Budweiser. He looked
at us and that's all he has to do, that look. Guilt, sadness,
self-pity -- and at the end of it all, fear. It all came through
so clearly that he didn't have to say a single word.
Eduardo and Grease both pointed their guns, and they each fired
two bullets, two to the head and two to the heart.
Sung J. Woo (sjwoo@castle.net)
--------------------------------
Sung J. Woo wrote "Bleeding Hearts" in Vol. 4, No. 1, and
"Nothing, Not a Thing" in Vol. 5, No. 2. He is an Associate
Editor with IEEE Transactions/Journals in Piscataway, New
Jersey. He was the editor of Whirlwind
().
Oak, Ax and Raven by G.L. Eikenberry
========================================
...................................................................
In olden days, life was simpler. All you had to worry about was
providing a home and food for your family, and stocking up
enough wood for the winter. Oh, and the occasional sentient
tree.
...................................................................
See him? Over there, a few yards off, approaching the stand of
youngish oaks. A young peasant by the look of him. Is he trying
to grow a beard or just lax about shaving? He seems dressed well
enough -- at least, well enough for a peasant -- the vest is
leather, after all. And look at the ax. You can often tell a
great deal about a man from the tools he carries, and that ax is
quality.
This is the third time he's come back to that particular oak
this morning. I'm willing to bet he truly means to put that fine
ax to it this time.
"Yes, Flek, I do say so to myself, this is the tree. It is a
_special_ tree she wants, and it is a special tree I've picked.
If I be any judge of tree-flesh at all, Flek, I do say so to
myself, I've picked a fine tree. Just the right portion of
wisdom, and of straightness, and of -- well, the right portion
of all those other things she spoke into my forgetful ears. I
have picked a tree 'twill suit our purposes wonderfully.
"The bestest part will suit itself to the crafting of the finest
of cradles for the son which my Arda will bear me on the other
side of this fast-approaching winter. The other parts will feed
the rich warmth of our hearth, proof against the cracks and
fissures that corrupt our frail habitation.
"Yes, Flek, I do say so to myself, you have chosen well. There
will be no fault for Arda to find with this tree."
This peasant is a talkative one! Although I begin to harbor
certain doubts concerning the initial assessment of quality.
Perhaps he filched the ax.
And lazy! Laziness fertilized with wanton verbiage to yield a
most unbecoming harvest. Look at him as he as he pulls a scrap
of rough, unmarketable cowhide from his bag and places it on the
ground to sit. The cowhide testifies to the premeditated nature
of his sloth. He leans himself against the very oak he intends
to fell. He looks over this way as if to say he has done
something deserving of either rest or the crusts of bread and
curds he is this very instant stuffing into his garlic-reeking
maw, already over-full with crooked, yellow teeth. He spent the
entire morning meandering about looking at a few trees, and yet
I'd not be surprised if he were next to settle himself in for a
nap.
There, see! He yawns and stretches. But, wait, I judge him
over-harshly. To give credit where credit is due, he stretches
to rise, apparently ready to heft that fine ax rather than
sleep.
But, wait, he walks off -- meaning, perhaps to leave the work
for another day -- or --
Why does he come _this_ way?
The bumpkin means to fell the _wrong_ tree!
I have not spent these many seasons spreading my vast and
complex network of roots throughout this district -- I have not
stood this ground for scores of years only to fall victim to an
obviously pilfered ax wielded by a prattling, hollow-headed,
landless oaf! Such indignities can scarce be -- ooommfff!
That will be enough of that, you ignorant, insolent, irreverent
young -- uuurrrnnk!
Very well. I shall just give -- him -- a jolt -- of -- his own
-- medicine -- communicated -- down -- along -- the handle -- of
that -- fine -- ax -- and see -- how he -- ... -- there!
And perhaps, for good measure, I'll summon up a raven to follow
him back to his own rootage. We might even manage to infiltrate
a small amount of good sense and, perhaps, even a mote of
respect into that igneous head of his.
"...yes, yes, of course, my dearest Arda, I fully comprehend. I
_did_, my dearest, get myself a goodly start on the job, but I
must assure you that the finishing of it will make no small
feat! I have chosen us the very finest of trees, but, being
such, it has its own mind about it. Its very own mind, I assure
you, and it very much prefers standing its own ground to being
felled for our son's cradle."
"Can it be, Flek of Amber Hill, that you are even more
feebleminded than my father warned? Can you truly expect me to
believe this cat vomit you spew about trees resisting your ax?
You've little enough time left before the harvest to bring down
a suitable tree and lay it open to season whilst you busy
yourself with our lord's work. You'd best not waste any more
precious time with your laziness and your foolish piffle about
unwilling trees."
"There are things in this world about which a woman knows
nothing -- "
"I know a great deal about that sort of mumbling under your
breath! It was a form of insolence my father often tried against
my mother, and it served him as poorly as it shall serve you."
"Woman, you vex me greatly!"
"Vexing shall be the very least of your worries if you don't get
you back to the wood and -- what is that racket of rapping and
thumping at our door?"
"Oh, dear me. How can it be, my dearest wife, that two so dear
to each other can be so constantly a-quarreling? I am certain
this boiling of our bloods can be of no benefit to the man-child
you have stewing in your belly. We must make our peace -- "
"If it's peace you want, do something to silence that infernal
commotion outside our door!"
"Of course, my dearest, I shall -- aaawk!"
"Get it out! -- get that beast out of my house -- scat, you
demon -- scat, you -- begone!"
"It's useless, dearest Arda. The beast has taken up a perch in
the rafters. Well beyond your reach or mine."
"So what, then do you propose to do about it, dearest numskull?
Leave it there day in and day out until it expires by
starvation? Or, worse still, leave it there to preside over the
birthing of our child? I tell you this, Flek of Amber Hill, and
I tell you true: There will be no raven in this house as long as
I am here. Or no me in this house as long as it is here."
"But Arda, most dearest -- you can't -- surely -- where?"
"You can fetch me and the child I carry back from the safety of
my mother's house after, and only after, you have rid our own
house of that hateful beast and its dark and evil stare."
The mighty and venerable oak sends up sprites of saplings from
the outermost reaches of roots recurving to probe the surface of
the earth, which gives itself to her care. The sprites lift free
and dance a slow hymn of celebration of their tree, gathering
acorns, which, in turn, give rise to ever greater numbers of
sprites. The growing congregation of life envelopes the monotony
of the drudge's dwelling. Within, the wife of two or possibly
three generations since the original insult weeps bitterly as an
enormous raven draws one, then another and another withered
sapling from the portal of her womb until, at last, mercifully,
her consciousness flees, screaming.
Then it is the peasant, himself, who cries out, awakened by the
screaming from the crest of the vision carried to him by my
raven.
The dim-witted peasant has moved himself out onto his door path
to sleep beneath the moon. It appears that he fears moon-madness
less than he fears sleeping beneath a roof shared by my
messenger.
"Go. Go, damn you. Go back to your oak, you demon-spawned
apparition. My need of tree flesh is great, but not so great
that I can't take it elsewhere. It's my Arda that needs
satisfying, and she's not so demanding as all that when it comes
to tree flesh. I had no way of telling I had chosen me an oak so
great in spirit. I can be blamed, yes, blamed for -- well, I
know not precisely what. But surely whatever blame may be due me
is not blame beyond forgiveness."
He throws open the door.
"Leave us now. Leave our roof trees. Go back to your oak and
communicate my capitulation. Go! Be gone!"
I am strong, but not hard. As he returns to my grove with the
next dawn, bearing, of his own volition, offerings of fresh
water and well-seasoned manure, my own reward awaits this rather
pathetic creature. Perhaps I did not, after all, misjudge him by
the quality of his ax.
I watch him now as he struggles to carry off the last of the
pieces he has hewn from the plentiful windfall I left him from a
failing lower branch.
G.L. Eikenberry (garyeik@synapse.net)
---------------------------------------
G.L. Eikenberry wrote wrote "Eddie's Blues" in Vol. 3, No. 5,
"Reality Error" in Vol. 4, No. 2, "The Loneliness of the
Late-Night Donut Shop" in Vol. 4, No. 4, and "River" in Vol. 5,
No. 1. These days he earns his living as a freelance
informations systems and communications consultant.
Wave by Craig Boyko
=======================
...................................................................
It isn't hard to imagine a world without freedom. But try to
imagine a world without privacy -- a commodity without which
there can be no freedom.
...................................................................
You can't see the street. I suppose you could, if you looked
directly down, possibly while you were walking, although it
would work better if you stood still. But you're not supposed to
stop and look at your feet, or the street. You're supposed to
keep moving, even if you've got no place to get to. The crowd
gets edgy if they're just standing around.
It's the people. You can't walk down the street without running
into one; or in ten minutes, a hundred.
I don't know where I'm going. I guess work, so I can save up
enough for another room with...
I would slap myself, hard, but I might elbow somebody in the
face and instigate a riot. It's impossible to get into a fight
with just one person.
And I keep forgetting.
I think that's dangerous, psychologically, when you keep
thinking that a part of your life that's now gone is actually
still there, and you just take it for granted. Then you feel
like hitting yourself, crying, mourning.
I never did mourn. And it's been two months. I've been counting
the days on my toes.
I worked one day, and the manager, Bill with the green hair, he
seemed pretty impressed with me. He even told me to come back
whenever I could. And that's a rarity. But the problem is I
don't think I'll ever see Bill or his little food hut again,
because I can't remember what it looked like from the outside or
what it was called.
I hear that's what usually happens. Which is why you consider
yourself lucky to get one paycheck at the end of the day.
I remember I used that paycheck for an 8-by-8, partitioned with
delaminating blue foam, and behind that rusting corrugated
steel. There wasn't a lock on the door, and you could hear what
was going on in the other rooms, but it was worth it. I'd never
been in an empty room before. I had been saving up for a month.
Molly chipped in, too, with the watches and wallets she had
lifted from the undulating mass of humanity out on the street.
I wonder where Molly --
Stop it.
My feet and legs are turning numb, becoming rancid blocks of
wood. I have to find a place to sit down, quick. I've heard
stories, where the wave just rolls over you.
"Darwinism," Molly used to say, smiling contentedly at my
confused expression.
I see flashing neon and tilt my head up to the emblazoned "Sit
'n' Dry" sign that looks like it's a mile up. Beside the sign is
a gilt-framed 3-D cutout of Uncle Luis, set off by seven
multi-hued spotlights on the roof of the building. Uncle Luis:
saint, supplier, and quasi-legal drug cartel. 'Course, when you
own 44 percent of the Drug Op Force, legal and illegal become
hazy concepts.
The Sit 'n' Dry is free, but there's a time limit. Supposedly
Uncle Luis supplies the charity to the weary myriad of humanity,
in hopes that his benevolence will pay off in other areas of
business. I guess it's economic acumen: I'd go to a LuisBurger
before a Burger-Burger, even though I can currently afford
neither. Nor, I'm sure, can any of the people who actually need
to use the Sit 'n' Dry.
"PR," Molly would say jauntily, straining over the ubiquitous
noise of people, as we stood in a corner of another nameless
bar, talking, since sitting always costs extra.
Stop it...
The place is packed, as always, but the bouncers at the eight
front doors try to limit the inflow to match the outflow. Still,
there's always about a hundred people standing around inside,
perfectly quiet, just waiting for someone to stand up for the
bathroom, or to leave altogether, or even for a bouncer to come
over and yank them out of their seat because they've been there
over two hours.
There's no sleeping here, but usually you can get away with a
good hour if you rest your head on your hand. Uncle Luis also
owns Nite-Lite, which is a lot like this place, but the chairs
recline and the time limit is twelve hours, and it costs 100
bucks to get in the door.
I see a bouncer talking to someone down the furthest right
aisle, number 59 that is, and I head for it instinctively. About
five others circle in on the possibility but stop dead about ten
feet away. You can get kicked out for not giving the sitters
their space. So you're not even supposed to walk down the
three-foot wide aisle unless you're pretty sure you're gonna get
a chair.
The woman in the chair stands up, and I keep walking. She steps
away from the chair, following the bouncer out to the front, and
I'm a good three feet closer than all the others. I get it by
two feet, sit down and sneer at the languid guy who was the
closest. He backs off quickly, holding his hands up in a gesture
of peace, and hurries away, probably heading for the far left
aisle. He knows you're not supposed to run for the chairs. You
can get kicked out for that.
I sit and just stare at the people walking around like vultures,
some of them wincing with each step. I've heard stories where
some people just collapse after days of waiting for a chair, and
the bouncers pick up their bodies, and nobody ever sees them
again.
Of course, nobody ever sees anyone again, unless you're tied
together, or holding hands.
Molly and I held hands for almost three weeks straight.
A lot of people rent the rooms for sex. Molly and I could hear
them, in the adjacent rooms, their involuntary bestial grunts.
We didn't. We sat on the bed and held each other for awhile,
savoring the space about us, the absolute emptiness of this
8-by-8 that became our world for three hours.
We talked. In soft tones, always vaguely aware of the invisible
others behind the walls, who probably couldn't have cared less
if we were discussing assassinating Uncle Luis himself.
Molly told me once about books, and she laughed mellifluously at
my puzzled stare.
She told me about the encyclopedia she had found in a tiny
bathroom cubicle, where it was being torn apart page by page and
used as toilet paper. She had taken it, tucked away in her red
windbreaker that was her father's, disregarding all posted and
implicit laws.
She told me how she carried that encyclopedia around for three
days straight, reading as much of what was left as possible. She
told me how difficult it was to read while walking, being jabbed
and shoved by other faceless and nameless bodies.
I was nonplussed, utterly awed that she could read. Her father
taught her, she said, before he had to sell the abandoned
pesticide shed that they lived in. Before they got split up, he
gave her that red windbreaker she wore everywhere. It had been
raining the day Molly was propelled irrevocably into the real
world.
Molly talked about roads. Like the street? I asked her. No, she
said. Roads. Roads for vehicles, for passengers, for buses, for
transportation. Roads that were paved twice a year, cleaned
every other month by huge machines with cleaning bristle-brushes
set underneath.
She said she read about them in the encyclopedia. The
encyclopedia claimed that, at one time, everyone had a car, and
everyone had a house and a garage to store their car, and kids
who grew up to be 18 before leaving home.
I told her that was impossible. There was no longer room for
houses or anything so silly as roads.
She agreed, sadly, nodding her head as her black hair brushed
against the green foam that we lay upon.
"But," she said, "suppose there were once. I think the book is
right. Suppose there were. Maybe there still are, somewhere."
"But who would use them? There would no be room, with all the
people. I mean, look at the street..."
"Maybe," she said. "But maybe, I think, the rich people could
afford them. How else would someone like Uncle Luis visit other
countries, all the Luis-Pizzas?"
"Helicopters," I explained, matter-of-factly. Once, I heard a
guy in a bar talk about helicopters. And he hadn't looked very
drunk.
Molly talked about babies. After a moment of silence, just
holding each other, listening to the sounds around us coming
from behind rusted iron and faulty fiberglass doors. She talked
about how the explosion was over, and the shrinking was going to
begin. Like the Big Bang theory of evolution. How humans would
be lucky if there was every a bang again, or even a whimper.
I didn't know what she was talking about. "Babies," she said,
staring up at the peeling plaster of the ceiling, where chunks
were missing and you could see the mahogany slant of the rusted
steel roof.
"There's not going to be any more," she whispered, her soft,
warm hand in mine.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean there won't be any more babies. There's sex, on this
kind of small scale," she said, gesturing at the blue foam walls
and beyond. "But even if there are babies, how do they grow up?
How do they even get born? Uncle Luis doesn't have a Quick-Stop
Baby Hut. Most likely, the mothers die, and the babies with
them."
I thought about this in silence.
"Is that why you don't?" I asked finally.
"Don't what?"
"Want to have sex?"
She laughed her melodic laugh and leaned over to kiss my cheek.
"No," she said, squeezing my hand.
"Good," I said, not sure if it was.
Silence settled down, comfortable and warm. Above us, erratic
drops of rain struck the roof, creating a soothing metallic
patter. Molly's hand, dry and soft, brushed my chin.
I guess I've fallen asleep, because a bouncer is pulling me up
out of my chair. I look back at it longingly, but I don't fight
to break the grip. When he sees I'm going quietly and that
someone else has already got the chair, he lets go of my
shoulder and walks on to find other misdemeanors.
I bump into someone, which is not uncommon, but I turn to look
anyway. A woman looks back at me, not moving amongst the chairs
like the others, circling in for the kill. Just staring back at
me, appraisingly, very calm and quiet, a shadow of a smile on
her lips.
"What?" I say, only vaguely aware that I'm speaking out loud to
a stranger.
"Sorry," she says, the playful smile more apparent. In her hand,
she is holding an old Coke can, and she takes a quick pull from
it. A single clear drop of water trails down her cheek. "I just
kind of noticed your situation."
"So?"
"You tired?"
"Isn't everybody?"
"I know a place, cheaper than the Nite-Lite, if you're looking."
"How cheap?"
"How cheap you looking for?"
"I'm broke."
"Perfect," she says, taking another sip from the water in her
can. I watch her lips closely, enrapt as they conform to the
shape of the aluminum. "Follow me."
I stay close, trying not to touch her or get in her way, but
also trying to stay less than a foot away, lest I get cut off by
the crowd and lose her. She doesn't turn around to look at me,
even when she turns into the alley.
I've seen alleys before, from the street, but never really
entered one. The consensus is that the dangerous people hang out
in them, wielding knives and guns and electric prodders. All of
which I've heard a lot about, but never actually seen.
Plus, alleys are supposed to be where they dump the bodies. The
street is full, and there's no room for those who just can't
stand any longer. And since everyone's scared of the alleys
anyway...
The alley isn't empty, but it's surprisingly close. A few people
seem to be entering warily from either street at any given
moment, a few others are hurrying out, and some even sit down
with their backs to the faded gray brick, oblivious to the
dangers that are ostensibly skulking about behind every corner
and every rusted fire escape. No bodies... There's one, lying
down in a small dark space beneath an overhang. But he might be
just sleeping. Yes, his arm twitches.
Still, it's amazing: there's no more than 30 people dispersed
about the entire alley. Which probably amounts to 20 square feet
of space per person. Amazing.
The woman stops halfway to the other street, turns right into a
small alcove in the brick, below a metal skeleton of steps and
rail that looks ready to crash down to the cracked black cement.
The orange lamplight and the red neon glow from the streets is
nonexistent here. It's a quiet blackness that seems so
impossible, so far away from any reality, that it must be a
vacuum in the very fabric of sight and sound.
The woman turns to me, a quick smile shooting out at me through
the dark. Just making sure I'm still with her, but her look
tells me that she wouldn't go searching for me if I wasn't.
She pulls something from her coat; her right hand has
mysteriously lost the Coke-can of water. From the looks of it,
she is now holding a key. I'm sure of it. I've heard of keys
before, I think probably from Molly, because I've never really
known anyone else who had ever read through a volume of
encyclopedia.
It's small, rectangular, white, and has a black strip on one end
she runs through a dead black box set upon the brick. The box
comes to life for a second, a green flash of digits and red LED
eyes peering out into the blackness, then it's dead and silent
again. Beyond the wall, a metallic slide and click, like bolts
moving out of position.
She pushes the door open and is inside so fast that I don't have
time to look for a doorknob or to figure out how the door opened
before I'm following her into deeper darkness.
Slick-chink.
I back up. The door is icy metal on my spine. The cold sends a
shiver of fear up my back, into the tensed muscles in my neck.
Here I am, locked indoors, off the street, in an oppressive cage
of inky black and piercing cold.
But then the lights come on.
My breath leaves my lungs, but I'm not sure at first why. And
then it comes to me, inexorable and supernal.
It's the _space._
This place is huge. There's got to be at least 350 square feet
of raw open space, possibly as much as 400. God, yes, the walls
are definitely 20 feet...
There's a few chairs, a cupboard sticking out along the far
wall, and what looks like a fridge, and some other small square
machine that's plugged into the wall...
Christ, _electricity._
And a bed, enormous, and what could possibly be a television,
though much smaller and older than those mounted in the
LuisBurgers above the tables while you eat -- that is, if you
can afford to pay the $300 for a table...
Of course, I've seen rooms this size, and I've seen rooms 200
times larger. But never, never in all my life, have I seen a
room this size with only two people in it. And one of them me.
I notice the woman suddenly, as if for the first time. She is
standing ten feet away from me, smiling calmly, showing perfect
yellow teeth, and she seems to be the only tangible symbol of
reality in this surrealistic picture of emptiness.
It scares me and enthralls me, equally and simultaneously.
"Like it?" comes a voice, and it seems an eternity before I
match it to this woman standing before me.
My lungs rasp out a choked breath, but speaking still seems an
impossible feat.
"I know what you're probably thinking. It's huge, I know. I've
never actually brought anybody here before, so I guess I'm used
to it, but I can imagine, after the street..."
I find my voice, small and tinny and miles away. "You... you
_own_ this?"
"Yeah. My dad passed the ownership down to me. Got the deed
locked up in that safe over there."
Sure enough, there is a safe over in the corner, sleek black and
shiny.
The woman laughs, and the muscles in my neck and shoulders that
were pulled tight as arrow strings loosen slightly. I force my
hands to open. I uncurl my toes. I blink once, a full second,
and breathe deeply.
"This place," I say, my voice no longer shaking and resonating
from somewhere near the bottom of a deep well, "must have cost
you a fortune." I'm not even sure if there is such a thing as
private ownership anymore. It makes my mind race back to Molly,
how she used to talk about houses, and how I thought it was
insanity....
The woman smiles wanly, walks a few steps and sits down in a
chair. She motions for me to sit. I can't feel my legs, so I
just shake my head politely.
"My dad owned a chain of water suppliers. Built it up from the
plumbing, and bought out most of that underground shit that
nobody wants anyway. I think before he died he was worth close
to 500 million. Everybody needs water, right? He sold out 98
percent of his holdings to buy this place, this one room. Gave
it to me a week before he died. Guess when you look at it that
way, this place cost about ten million per square yard."
"Free parking," is all I can say, sitting down before my legs
collapse. (I said that once, in the 8-by-8, must have been.
Molly laughed, sweet laughter like champagne over rocks.
Brushing a hair back, looking into my eyes, her own lit up deep
aquatic blue. Wondered what the hell that was supposed to mean.
Just an expression, I guess, I told her. Funny, she said, how
the craziest things from the past can mutate into the craziest
things in the present, with no discernible transition. Something
about idioms, she said, running her hand through my hair,
declaring how impossible it would be for anyone else to learn
this language if everybody didn't already speak it.... But I
wasn't listening, just watching her perfect pink lips forming
the intricate shapes of the many words I had never even
heard...)
And then I must have collapsed, somehow, because I'm no longer
in the fantastical dimension where beautiful women on the street
take you back to their impossible rooms, 400 square feet in
size...
But then where am I?
I'm comfortable, and warm, and I'm lying down. These facts alone
surprise me. I had no money for anything so exorbitant as a bed.
A hand is on my shoulder, light and warm, moving ever so
slightly back and forth. Not a waking gesture...
I turn and see the face of the woman on the street, lit up by
flashing blue neon light that filters in through a dirty plastic
pane above the bed. She smiles, shy yet intimate. Her hand is
still on my shoulder.
"Are you okay?" she asks, her voice a whisper.
"Yeah... I'm fine. Guess I really was tired."
"It's okay, if you want to rest. Stay as long as you like."
I don't say anything. Just watch her.
After probably five minutes, a private eternity, my hand moves
to her cheek. My thumb brushes her skin slowly.
Her smile from the street returns, confident and serene.
"Why me?"
The light from the sun is gone now, hidden from the night, lost
beyond the horizon. The only light that falls on her face is the
continuous blue flare from the street. When it sputters and
dies, sometimes minutes at a time, I can only make out the
outline of her jaw, her limp blond hair, the white t-shirt that
she wears.
"What do you mean, why you?"
"Why am I here?"
"I don't know," she says, very quiet. "It sometimes... gets very
lonely."
"I know." (Molly and I talked about this once. Or rather, Molly
talked about it, while I half-listened, fully in love with her.
She said something about the heavy irony of the situation, the
poetic justice. How the street was packed with strangers,
millions and millions, and every individual was still so
desperately lonely...)
We lie like that for hours, blissfully content in each other's
warmth, miles away from the wave of humanity just beyond that
single pane of plastic.
And still, I can't help but think about Molly.
By the first gray tint of morning light, she strokes the hair
from my eyes. Neither of us has slept but has reached some other
form of consciousness. The peace of sleep, the perception of
wakefulness.
Her hand runs down my back. Her lips meet mine. Above us, a
single drop of rain taps the plastic, immediately followed by
many more.
I sit up in gray darkness, suddenly cold and tired. Outside, the
rain pours down. Behind me, on the bed, she reaches for me. I
brush her grasp away.
"I can't," I say.
She does not sit up suddenly, does not grab me from behind, does
not beg me to explain. She stays silent for a moment. Then,
simply, "Why?"
"Molly."
She sits up beside me, does not reach for me. Sits quietly, her
hands in her lap, staring at the vast expanse of floor. And in
her silence, I sense her understanding.
"What happened to her?" she asks. I stand up, grab my coat from
a chair by the bed. I pause, then turn.
"The wave. I was holding her hand, and we got pushed apart by
the people, and she just got backed into a corner. The wave just
rolled over her."
I turn quickly, head for the door, fumble for the latch. She
calls out from behind me. I tear the door open. I hesitate. I
turn around.
"What?"
In her face, I see sympathy and deep sorrow. Sorrow not just for
me, but for herself, and maybe even for the damn wave. And in
her face, somewhere, I see Molly.
That's why I have to leave.
"I don't even know your name," she says.
"I don't know yours."
She smiles hollowly. "Then I guess it's okay." The door closes
behind me, _slick-chink._
The rain is solid gray bars, soaking the gray concrete, the gray
flow of people. The flood of people, nondescript and cold, could
be the result of the rain.
It clears up eventually, amidst the general sigh of relief from
the crowd.
No one speaks, and the river flows silently on, branching out
occasionally, feeding the neon-framed franchises that line the
street, only to be spit back out into the torpid tide.
Sometime, much later, a distant face smiles at me, framed by the
ripple of heads and shoulders. It's Molly's face, or the
nameless girl's, or maybe a figment dancing on my eyes. The hand
belonging to the face waves to me, then disappears altogether.
Behind and all around me, the wave goads me on.
Craig Boyko (chlorine@microcity.com)
--------------------------------------
Craig Boyko wrote "Decisions" in Vol. 6, No. 1. He is a senior in
high school and lives in Canada.
FYI
=====
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InterText's next issue will be released May 15, 1996.
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