Complete Short Fiction, page 132
She wondered if she had as much courage. She did not want to give that fictional past up. The archeologist had never known how much she had loved those people, whose dry remains she had lived with since her marriage.
If he was right, the magnificent ruined Gardens of Nor the two of them had visited before deciding to get married were not the pleasure ground of ancient kings, but an elaborate fake, as were the remains of the dancing girls on the frescoed wall of the Small Withdrawing Room, where Queen Araspa had written her verses.
Her relationship with the archeologist had been cemented on that trip, by his passion for these vanished folk and her awakening sense of kinship with them. What did that say about the two of them?
Did it matter that when she enumerated her lovers to him that night, she had missed one? It was a man she now remembered only hazily, though she distinctly remembered skipping over him. That missing lover was a small trinket stolen from the eager archeologist with his whisks and trowels, and now she too had lost him.
If Queen Araspa had not written “In the winter, the morning is the best time, when the sun rises and the ice glows in the cracks beneath the basin,” while the girls with their elaborate hairdos had turned gracefully on the walls around her lonely table, then who had?
She smiled to herself. He’d probably figured that she would dispose of these papers without even reading them. He couldn’t have known that she would both read and understand them.
She tapped the edges of the pages until they were perfectly parallel. A colleague had offered to publish a collection of her husband’s papers as a kind of memorial. No matter how vicious the arguments it caused, this paper would be among them.
It would destroy his reputation. He would seem like another madman, someone infected by the theories of the Obliviators, or another similar group. The very people who would take the trouble to read that posthumous book would be the ones least likely to accept what it had to say about their careers.
But, perhaps, much later, after she was gone too, someone would pull the book from a shelf, see the courage she herself saw, and take a sober look at the fact that they were all, truly, people without a past. What they had was an illusion, and what they had lost was gone forever.
She rested her hand on the stack of paper and thought that until that moment she had never truly managed to touch her husband, the archeologist.
2016
The Return of Black Murray
Although the part of the Midwest where Alex grew up is more suburban than the Mt. Zion Township of this story, he does think that the region could stand to have more stories of weirdness and speculation set in it. Having said that, he has to admit that he’s lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for decades now, and doesn’t intend to leave. An earlier Asimov’s story of his, “Feral Moon” (March 2013), is now available online in several different audio versions.
Most midlife career changes are set off by a crisis, whether health, financial, or marital.
When it happened to me, I was as healthy as any former football player carrying a few extra pounds could be, and I was pulling a fair amount of money out of the security company I started after leaving the force.
It was Ehrman Security that put me in an over-air-conditioned meeting room that day, listening to people yammer about the industrial park. Honestly, the main product would be tax abatements. Hiring my company gave the whole thing more of an air of reality, but I really didn’t need to attend all the meetings.
So I ducked out into the lobby and called the office.
“What’s up, boss?” Terena always called me that. I mean, I was the boss, but everyone else called me Cliff. I would have felt stupid asking them to call me anything else, but I did like “boss.”
“I need something I can use as an excuse to get out of here, Terena. Anything.”
“That bad, huh?”
“You have no idea.”
She laughed. “Let’s see . . . that guy over at Megrum Fertilizer and Chemical says he’s found three new places in the plant that don’t show up on our cameras. Two are corners and third, I think, is under a desk.”
“Let’s give him three more cameras, keep him happy. And add a contract clause that says that ninjas void the warranty.”
I did like the way she laughed. Particularly at my jokes. “Anything else?”
“Paul says the red on the embroidery on the new guard uniforms is not our red.”
“What is it, then?”
“Some other red.”
I didn’t sigh. I didn’t. Though Paul, my ops guy, really was getting too obsessed with our logo, which he had mostly designed himself. “Put the swatches on my desk, I’ll look when I get in. But even that’s not getting me out of here. Is that really it?”
“Well . . . just got a call from some guy over at Prestige Liquors. Says he saw someone climbing into Candyland.”
“Wow. I can see everything just went to hell while I was in here.”
“Well, it was just funny. . . .”
“Funny how?”
“Our citizen said the trespasser . . . like, he walked on the fence. On top of it, I mean, like a tightrope walker. That’s pretty badass.”
The tightening at the back of my head told me I’d just gotten something better than just a Get Out of Jail Free card.
“Anything else about how he looked, anything about him?”
“Not much. Did say he was an older guy, not your usual kid going in to get high. Nice head of gray hair.”
A useful reminder of our age difference, and I half suspected it was deliberate. “Thanks, Terena. I owe you. This is heinous indeed, and I will certainly need to take care of it.”
“I like that, ‘heinous.’ I need to work that in somewhere.”
“You’re too young to be using that word.” In case she needed a reminder, too.
“Go get ’em, boss.”
She didn’t.
I parked behind Prestige Liquors. The only car there was a brown Impala, with the sticker of an upstate college in the back window.
Our concerned citizen was gone, leaving his tallboy cans in the high weeds along the fence, under the sign that let him know the area was protected by Ehrman Security.
It was an older sign, just our name and number, so I couldn’t check the red on the logo.
What distinguished us in the downstate market was our services for abandoned places the owners really wanted everyone to forget: factories, waste dumps . . . and amusement parks that had never really been profitable.
Candyland was some forty acres of land too rocky for farming in a loop of the Little Nominee River. That was just some garbled Indian word, nothing to do with politics. You should see what we do with the French ones.
From where I stood, I could just see the high point of the Red Dragon, the biggest of the three roller coasters, where it stuck above the scrub trees that had taken the area over once the park closed.
I didn’t have the balance to walk on top of the fence, but a security guy can always break in somewhere. I pulled a roll of mesh-backed recycled carpet out of my trunk and threw it over the barbed wire at a spot where the fence kinked. The rest was easy.
On the other side, I made my way up a rough path through the trees to what had been the main plaza. The station for the narrow-gauge railway had finally fallen in on itself, probably in the big snows the previous winter. Its clock face lay tilted against the pile of rotting lumber, hands and numbers gone.
The foundations of the Candybox Theater were over to the right, but I knew this guy wasn’t at all sentimental, so I kept on straight, past the Gemini space capsule—and was rewarded by the sight of a tall man in a ratty coat near the concrete support posts of the Gymboree. Nice head of gray hair, check, but I was surprised our good citizen hadn’t mentioned the coat.
Or smelled the coat. As I got closer, I sure could.
The guy didn’t look at me, but hunched over, as if in pain. “I gotta get out of here, man. I mean, they told me this was a shortcut. . . .”
He was so good at seeming a wreck that, for a second, I found myself unsure it was really him. “Who told you?”
“I was trying to get to the shopping center.”
“C’mon, I’ll show you the way out.”
I could see him working up a story as he shuffled along next to me, limping just a bit. He couldn’t hide that. He’d had the limp since that last night in Ali Baba’s Cave.
We came to a big stretch of battered concrete: the remains of the Candybox Theater.
“Shit,” Myron said. “Are you serious? Did I fool you at all?”
“Be careful of your tells. Tightrope walking over a barbed wire fence? A rare skill.” Particularly for a man missing toes from one foot, I didn’t say.
Myron unbuttoned the jacket and flung it into the bushes. “God, that thing stinks. Do people come in here to dump clothes they told someone they were donating to Africa? I grabbed it when I heard you coming, came up with a character.”
Standing up straight, now just in a white shirt and chinos, he was still the handsome star of the Mt. Zion Township theater department during my high school years.
“It’s pretty pointless to look at this old place.” He walked out to where the front of the stage had once been and looked out over the audience of silver maple saplings and sumac bushes. “Nothing left. Remember Pete and his magic show? That idiot. He almost burned the place to the ground.”
I remembered more than that.
Summers during high school, Myron had been the Candybox Theater, every summer. He did everything from taking tickets to sweeping up afterward, all the while writing short plays, directing them, and playing the main roles, which often included tightrope walking, juggling, and sometimes a song.
Myron had been the lead, and our friend Pete had been the tech guy: lights, stage sets, special effects, even some costumes, if they had to light up or come apart in some way. He was fantastic, and since has had a decent FX career in Hollywood, but he liked to keep to the background.
So it was kind of odd when he decided he wanted to be on stage, and talked Myron into giving him a magic show slot as Mysterio the Magnificent, complete with turban and smoking jacket.
Pete’s tricks turned out to be pretty great, and impossible to figure out. He made a collection of items from the audience disappear and reappear in someone’s car in the parking lot, and pulled live frogs out of women’s purses.
But he lacked the patter. He didn’t have the story. He just had a bunch of disconnected tricks, and his audience began to shrink over the summer, despite scoring a cute assistant in a copper wire bikini and an Egyptian headdress like Nefertiti’s. At the time, I thought getting her to join him was his biggest magic trick.
Trying to make up for the lack of showmanship, Pete boosted the special effects with explosions, laser beams hitting crystals, recordings of gabbling chants, and open vortexes of flame. I’ve seen descendants of those effects in movies and TV shows he worked on later. The vortexes, for example, had become aliens in a season of Zeta Station, the ones with voices like flushing toilets, which was carrying the vortex theme too far, in my opinion.
Nefertiti began to talk more, to get the show to make some sense. But as she did that, Pete’s own stage fright grew. He had never really been comfortable on stage, but as time went on, it got worse and worse.
One day someone else was running Ali Baba’s Cave, my usual ride, and I was helping out at the theater. Pete’s lovely assistant wasn’t there for some reason, and he had to go on without her. And, I mean, he had to be shoved on stage by Myron, because the audience was starting to get antsy, and a few people were yelling for a refund.
Myron went up front to work the ticket booth, and I strolled into the back of the theater. It wasn’t like that girl not to be there. She was a loyal assistant as well as, I gathered, Pete’s girlfriend.
I could hear the pounding as soon as I got back down by the dressing rooms. The girls’ dressing room was jammed shut. A hinge had pulled out of the wood and the door had sagged down against the jamb. It took some muscle to get it back open. Actually, a lot of muscle.
Nefertiti . . . Polly, it was Polly, who I’m now married to, though I didn’t know her name then, jumped out, her face red from wrestling with the door. You could hear the audience yelling and hooting. “Did he start without me?”
“He had to,” I said. “He delayed as long as he—”
“Damn it!” She ran down the hall, one hand on that giant Egyptian headdress, the other keeping her skirt on.
In an attempt to really get things rolling, Pete had shot out one of his flame vortexes without taking the usual safety precautions, and it had started burning the floor of the stage. The theater was filling with smoke, and he just stood there, frozen.
That’s the problem with any magic show: you don’t know what’s part of the show and what isn’t. So the audience sat in place, waiting to see what would happen next, maybe coughing a little. It could have been a real disaster.
Polly ran on stage with a fire extinguisher she had grabbed on the way, almost losing her skirt in the process, which helped in distracting the crowd. She blasted the vortex with it, aiming, like a professional, at the base.
But she had some patter to go with it: “This mystic mist was uncovered in the tomb of Damthes the Third, where it had lain since the mournful days of the Twelve and Halfth Dynasty. . . .” She managed to put the fire out without any sign whatsoever that anything had gone wrong. Then she knotted her skirt back on.
Myron finally ushered everyone out and gave them their money back, plus a gift certificate for a free corndog, though most of them had no idea why. Pete pitched a fit, blaming Polly for not being there when he needed her most, and Myron for deliberately trapping her in the dressing room.
Maybe Pete had some sense of something with Myron and Polly, but this lost him his girlfriend, if not yet his friend.
Myron seemed eager to get to something, so I let him lead me away from the Candybox to Ali Baba’s Cave Ride.
We came out where the turnaround pool had been. The boats had come out of the dark opening into a wider pool and bumped against the unloading dock. Laughing couples stumbled off there, the pilot checked to make sure no crap had been left in the bottom of the boat, then he slid it forward into the pickup line, eventually to get a fresh crew of thrill seekers.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll get us something and we can talk.”
I climbed down the rocks, closer to the Little Nominee. Though the cave itself had dried up, there was still a seep of water out of the limestone lower down, and it formed a pool before trickling down to the creek. Some of my crew had told me what they did with beer they confiscated from teenagers.
I came back with two of the beers they had stashed there to stay cold, twisted them open, and handed him one.
“Whoa.” He looked at the label. “Whatever happened to Iron City?”
“Kids these days have better taste than we did. I mean, they haul bottles out here. Who does that?”
We clinked bottles and drank. Cold beer on a hot summer afternoon. With an old friend, yet. Life still had its unexpected joys.
“Oh, Cliff. I got troubles, I don’t mind telling you.”
“I figured.”
He eyed me. “Just because you married Polly Deschutes and settled down doesn’t give you any right to judge me.”
I sat down on a rock. “Come on, Myron. Be serious.”
“I only wish the story was a bit more original. Okay. I run this theater intensive every spring. It’s a pressure cooker. The kids learn an insane amount, and it transforms their lives. Mostly they transform back afterward, but for those few months we’re our own little world. And almost every year I fall for somebody in the class. It’s always downhill after that, sometimes pretty steep, but it’s starting from the top that’s the thrill. Just like the Red Dragon.”
“Jeez, Myron.”
“Yeah, you can see it coming, right? Things have changed. This last time didn’t work out so well. So now I got a faculty committee supervising my suspension. They want me to show . . . what? Remorse, I think.”
“Probably contrition,” I said. “Academics aren’t big on remorse.”
“I guess you get those fine distinctions from interviewing office-supply thieves. Well, I don’t really feel either one.”
“You’re an actor, for heaven’s sake. Can’t you fake it?”
“Maybe I’ve just gotten tired of doing that. Maybe I’m ready for something else.”
“What are you ready for, Myron?”
That got him grinning again. “I took advantage of my spare time to do some research on what happened to all of us, that last summer. Nothing technical, no documents, just talking to people. So I talked to Melinda Cibber a while ago. Melinda Kent now. Lives in Houston. Ah, you do remember her.”
He’d caught my flush before I even felt it. Melinda had been my girlfriend until that last night. I hadn’t talked to her since. “How’s she doing?” She was the hottest girl I had ever dated.
“Great, three kids, sounds like a nice life. But a few weeks before I talked to her she got a call from our old friend Pete. He wanted to know what she remembered. About our last trip through the old Tunnel o’ Love. About what happened. Great minds, as they say.”
“And what did she say?”
“ ‘Say hi to Cliff’ That’s what she said. Otherwise she told me she didn’t remember a goddamn thing.”
That sounded like Melinda.
“And then, in answer to another inquiry, I got this.” Myron handed me a postcard of a water treatment plant in Indianapolis, Indiana. It hadn’t been sent from anywhere near Wisconsin, and looked like it had gotten wet in transit. In a fine blue cursive it said, “He wants to go back in the water. I won’t go back in the water.” No signature.
