Complete Short Fiction, page 53
I broke open the vertical sash windows and replaced them with expanses of sliding glass. I tore out the rugs and covered the wood floors with white lacquer. I removed every door and widened the doorways so that everything was connected in an open plan. It took most of my savings to do it, but it was worth it.
It was amazing, how people used to live. There was a pantry in the kitchen, for example, as well as a marble square for making fudge and a flour bin. They all went, of course. It became a wide area with no countertops and no cabinets to intrude on the kitchen’s purity of function. But that pantry. . . . It had preserves in it, and stewed tomatoes, and crystallized ginger. That was normal. It also had jars with newts stuffed into them like frankfurters. There were containers of things that looked like dried eyeballs. The claws of owls. Animal tongues. Foul-smelling greases and oils. Black candles made out of some soft, sticky wax. I hadn’t liked eating dinner at Aunt Theresa’s when I was a kid. Now I knew that I had been right, despite my mother’s lectures about being a polite guest. I threw all that stuff out as well. Perrier and protein supplement was enough for me. I needed the purity of a monk.
During the second week of my purge, I noticed a couple standing on the other side of the street, pointing it out to each other, as if it were something easily overlooked. The woman waved her arms and knocked off her wide, flowered hat. The man wore Bermuda shorts, dark socks, oxfords, and an Atlantic City T-shirt with a picture of a slot machine on it. He took a lot of pictures of the house with one of the three cameras he wore around his neck. I wondered if they were from one of the newspapers, maybe the Sunday magazine section, recording my transformation of the house for an article. They didn’t look right, somehow. I ignored them. Let the hoi polloi gawk if they wanted to. I had more important things on my mind.
The outside walls became flat, perfect planes of white stucco, as featureless as movie screens. The railings on the stairs were white tubes. Inside, I exposed plumbing, electrical conduits, heating ducts, the interior of the coat closet, the workings of the toilet. The function of the house was thoroughly revealed. It was the essence of light, brought down from the skies and made geometric. It was purest culmination. Maybe that could be the subject of my article. To hell with bus stops. I was meant for better things.
Aunt Theresa turned out to have been a terrible housekeeper. No surprise there, I suppose. How do you keep a place like that clean? But there was no excuse for some of the things I found, like the trussed-up dead rooster, throat slit, in a hatbox in the closet. Or the . . . stains, on the wallpaper and the ceilings. It all went, the stains along with the elaborately patterned wallpaper under them. The dead toad under the bed went into the dumpster, along with the bed and the bedroom curtains, with their strange symbols and numbers.
Finally, one sunny day, I was almost finished. I stood in the middle of the living room, which was now two stories high, with a sisal mat on the floor. I have never felt so alive as I did at that moment. I had one more thing to do. I had salvaged a finial from the old roof, the Second Empire mansard which had sat on the house like a poorly fitted toupee. I’d saved the grotesque little foliated copper decoration to keep as a reference, so that the knowing passerby could mentally reconstruct the mess of the old house from this one symbol. Flirting with postmodernism, but I had earned it. I had just decided to support it above the house on a five-foot rod of transparent lucite, illuminated inside by an argon laser, so that it looked sort of like a rocket taking off. That had the additional merit of putting the finial in the same physical space it had occupied when Aunt Theresa had left it, a gesture of supreme cleverness. I was proud of myself.
“God, look at this, Marvin. It looks like an airport.” I looked around. It was the woman I had seen in front of the house the week before, wearing green stretch pants with a handkerchief on her head. She wasn’t looking at me, but, instead, up at the ceiling. The man in the Bermuda shorts stood next to her, smiling weakly, the only thing I ever saw him do. “Have you ever seen anything like it, Marvin?” she said. “Like a bathroom at a hospital. God, what Theresa would have said. I’m glad she didn’t live to see this.” She chuckled wickedly. “Of course, if she’d lived, we couldn’t be here now, could we, Marvin?”
“No, dear,” Marvin said. “Theresa was never very friendly.”
“Friendly! That’s the understatement of the year. I couldn’t get within a mile of this place when it was hers. She had wards and guardians on it like you wouldn’t believe, turn your guts inside out if you just thought about violating the boundaries.”
“What the hell are you doing in my living room?” I said.
She looked at me, finally, sharp little eyes through sequined harlequin glasses. She wore heavy mascara and long, clogged-up eyelashes. She had a neck like a chicken’s, sticking out of her yellow shirt. “Checking over my house,” she said.
“Your house?” My voice had the proper tone of cold, slightly lazy architectural contempt.
She nodded. Her cast-iron permanent didn’t move a millimeter. “You got it, buster. I’m Alva Biber. This is my husband Marvin.” Marvin smiled and nodded like one of those dogs with the bobbing heads you sometimes see in the rear windows of cars, not ones owned by anyone I know. “He installs aboveground swimming pools,” she added, as if that made everything clear. “Theresa kept this place locked up as tight as the Temple of Solomon. But you’ve taken care of that. I’ve waited years for this.”
I picked up the telephone, shaped like a silver prism with buttons on it. It wasn’t connected. “Get out of my house,” I said, my voice getting a little higher. Something about Alva bothered me. She just stood there, in the middle of my living room, wearing green polyester pants stretched over a fanny the size of the Astrodome, and argued with me, as if I had no idea that this house was mine. She would have made a great modern architect.
“I already told you, it’s my house now. And I don’t want to tell you again. I tried to take it from Theresa a dozen times, but she was a powerful witch, and the damn style of the place kept me off. She was real smart, the way she did that. The house itself fought me. Every turret, every decorated heating vent. But she had an idiot like you for a relative. The place would have kept fighting me forever, but you’ve stripped it of its power.”
“You better listen to her, Mister,” Marvin said in a reasonable tone. “Once Alva gets her mind set on something, there’s no arguing with her.”
“Stay out of this, Marvin, will you? It’s between me and this numbskull. Eh? I’m being good, you know. I’m letting you get out of here. I don’t have to do that. I don’t at all. So get a move on, buster.”
The time for words was past. I decided to act. I moved towards her, slowly, holding the finial out in front of me. Marvin just blinked like a turtle as I moved closer, but didn’t act to defend his wife. Probably just as glad to get rid of her, I figured.
Alva made a gesture with her hands that left a glowing pattern in the air and chanted something in Latin, or maybe Spanish. The finial grew white hot in my hand. I yelped and let go of it. It turned around and bashed me right between the eyes. I knew I should have thrown the damn thing away. The past can turn on you.
When I woke up I was frozen in a squatting position, holding a large ring in my hand. I wore a jockey’s uniform. . . . God, it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.
Marvin had already installed an aboveground pool in the back yard, next to a big barbecue. He was back there, cooking hamburgers, wearing a Come ’N’ Get It apron. Burgers, a man’s job. The house, my house, had been covered by vinyl siding in a kind of off-green color, like something a household disinfectant is supposed to be able to get rid of. There was a golden eagle above the door. The address was written in curlicue letters, with the legend “The Bibers.” I knew that every square foot of the floor was covered with acrylic cut pile carpeting, from which the furniture protruded like the flotsam from the sinking of a tramp steamer of Liberian registry. There was a huge color TV in the living room, and a Barcalounger made out of Naugahyde. There was even a lava lamp. They must have paid a fortune for it. An antique. The walls had been covered with a textured wallpaper that had pictures of Elvis Presley on it. It was over. All over. This was the fate of modernism. I had destroyed those defenses that Aunt Theresa had worked on so carefully, her gingerbread and her tiles, her hippopotamus umbrella stand with the peacock feathers in it, her wrought-iron fireplace screen. So her old enemy Alva had won. I could hear her in the kitchen, listening to Mantovani and cooking a casserole made out of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup, little frankfurters, and chow mein noodles. She muttered under her breath in medieval Latin, occasionally generating little fireballs from her fingertips and flinging them hissing into the soapy dishwater. Above the sink in the orange kitchen was a clock in the shape of a cat, its tail the pendulum, and the big eyes went back and forth as it went tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
So this is where I stay, a little black jockey with a ring in my hand. It’s not too bad, really. I see the sun rise and set, and have fantasies of immense hyperdimensional temples to Albert Einstein. It’s just that, every night, the pink plastic flamingo on the front lawn stalks over and eats my liver.
The Last Castle of Christmas
William Morrow has just published Alexander Jablokov’s latest novel, Nimbus, in hardcover, and a paperback edition of his last book, A Deeper Sea, is available from AvoNova. Mr. Jablokov tells us that “The Last Castle of Christmas” was inspired by the “combination of a foil-covered castle we placed under our Christmas tree every year, and the giant gingerbread house we had until the mice ate it over a summer.”
“What’s that madman doing out there?” A Dalka asked, rousing herself from her half doze.
Tessa tugged the reins, slowing the wagon, and looked off through the last traces of morning ice mist. For a moment, nothing: the black-on-white of pipe plants, tulap trunks, insulated bundles of sprouting plants waiting for spring, the canyon wall rising beyond them. Then: a single erect, flapping shape, sliding frantically across the ice of a pond.
“Ice skating, it looks like,” Tessa said.
Dalka snorted. “His way of celebrating Christmas?”
“Maybe it is.” Now that Tessa thought about it, it was disquieting. Old Man Lewis usually did not appear in the lower parts of the canyon so openly, even in winter. She’d known him all her life, so she knew when something disturbed him.
It was early morning and they were the first wagon down the road. A damp current had slid down from the high Shield during the night, and the twin ice rails were hidden by an unbroken blanket of flat ice crystals standing on end like scales evolving into feathers. The low-slung mule Legume crunched phlegmatically through them with its wide feet, tugging its burden easily along behind it. The insulating hide covering its back and vertebral spines, painstakingly applied by Tessa’s brother Benjamin, gleamed in the early morning sunlight.
“Tessa!” Lewis’s voice drifted across the wagon. “Tessa Wolholme.” He windmilled his arms and fell flat on his back on the ice. Ice skates gleamed as he kicked his legs in the air.
“He wants you to celebrate with him.” Dalka was contemptuous.
A gentle rein tug and the mule, splayed legs ungainly, bounced the wagon’s runners out of the ice-filled ruts onto the sloping embankments. Huffing, somehow realizing that it had been granted an unexpected rest, Legume wiggled its bulging belly into the frost, stuck its head under a front leg, and was promptly asleep.
“Then I will,” Tessa said. “Want to come along?”
She jumped out of the wagon. The older woman lowered her bulk after, grunting and complaining. Dalka and Tessa had spent the night in a high cleft, extracting physiologically active fractions from rare fungi. The fractionating procedure could have been carried out more easily in someone’s kitchen, but Dalka held to a romantic tradition, and made it a part of Tessa’s training.
Lewis lay sprawled on an irregularly shaped pond. It opened up for swimming in the summer, but densely packed leaves now closed in its surface, preserving carefully calibrated concentrations of salts and sugars. The pond was actually the bell of a subterranean flower, water storage for the dry period at the end of winter.
But pure water had seeped through the insulating leaves, and the pond was surfaced with ice. It always did, no matter how carefully the farmers grew the leaves and arranged their interlocking edges, leading Tessa to conclude that the leakage was deliberate on the part of the original plant breeders. Maybe it provided an extra seal. And maybe it was just for fun.
By the time Tessa got to Lewis, he was laughing.
“Ah, Miss Theresa Wolholme! You are too late to save me from falling. Years too late!” Lewis grinned at her, his eyes wide and blue. His white hair flopped around his head. With Tessa’s help, he climbed to his feet, slipping on his skates. “That ice is cold good on the skin, ah? Keeps it tight aware against the bone.” Lewis wore little under his black cloak, and Tessa could feel his sagging, stringy flesh. “Once you’ve seen a planet burned to death, cold makes more sense. Die with a chip of ice under your tongue, die relaxed and comfortable.”
“You should get inside, Lewis,” Dalka said, pleased by the unusual opportunity to play the part of conventional reason. “You look cold. The sky’s clearing. The temperature will drop.”
Lewis goggled at her. His hair was as white as hers, but in contrast to her carefully managed spray, his flew around like snow blown off the peak of Kardom.
“You should get out,” he said. “Koola does not stay inside. Inside is somewhere else. Earth, maybe.” His cloak flopped loosely, but he indeed didn’t seem cold. Legend had it that he curled up inside of snow drifts and ice caves for days-long naps. Even knowing him as she did, Tessa could not say that the rumors weren’t true.
“I’ve been out,” Dalka said irritably. “We were just coming back—” She stopped herself. Boasting to Lewis about anything to do with the defiles and cliffs surrounding Calrick’s Bend was as pointless as showing a bird how high you can jump. She turned her attention to the winter-hooded herbs at the pond’s edge, searching for something rare and unusual to make her visit worthwhile.
“Are you all right, Lewis?” Tessa looked into his eyes, but they were the same guileless blue as always.
“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m always all right. But the others—how is your father now?”
Tessa felt a moment of sadness at the question. Had it really been so long since Lewis and her father Perin had spoken? After all the years and the bonds between them?
“He’s been well . . . but not the same. Not since my mother died.”
“Ah, Sora. She was once his anchor. Now, you.”
“You should come see him.” In her younger days, Tessa would have been wary of offering such advice. Lewis was her father’s wild friend, not subject to ordinary laws. When she was ten, Lewis told her and her brothers to climb the rocks naked, to feel the strength of their planet, Koola, right through their skin. She and Dom, her older brother, had stripped down and done it, to be hauled off by their furious mother and sent to their rooms. Lewis’s only response was to suggest trying it a bit farther from the house.
“Perin doesn’t need me,” Lewis said. “He has his own way.”
“You should see him.” Tessa had waited for Lewis to appear at the house in the days after her mother’s death. He never did, as if his old comrade’s marriage and family were something insignificant, a mere bad habit. Lewis was not interested in anything that gave life comfort. But Tessa now lived with the look in her father’s eyes, and if Old Man Lewis could be tamed enough to do something, she would try it.
He didn’t answer her. He looked at something behind her, hard enough that she finally turned to look herself. A tiny girl had appeared in the frost-bitten field. Her head was bundled in a thick scarf, but the ends were flopping loose, not tucked into the collar of her coat.
“Hello, Malena,” Dalka said, straightening up from her herbs. “What are you doing out?”
“I’m running an errand,” the girl said in a high, firm voice. “Mama wants some reeds for the fire. For the cake, the castle. We’re cooking it tonight.”
“A small one, this year?”
“Very small.” Malena Merewin was serene about the possibility. “But big enough for the Kings to stay for Christmas night. They’re not proud, my father says. They’ll stop if they need to.”
“That’s good, Malena.”
Malena moved around the pond pulling up bundled reeds. She may have been going a little beyond the strict definition of permitted gleaning, but no one was about to protest. It was before Christmas, the trespasser a little girl, and the Merewins were poor. Tessa knew that she would be visiting their house tomorrow, on Christmas morning, towed there by Alta Dalhousie and the other charitable women of Cooperset Canyon.
Lewis continued to watch the little girl. She didn’t acknowledge his presence openly, but stood close by him, and touched his cloak. Lewis knew Malena’s father, Gorr Merewin, the same way as he knew Tessa’s father Perin: they had all fought in the wars together, were all veterans of that desperate fight in the Simurad tunnels on a planet far from Koola. And each bore his own individual scars from that fight.
But why was the girl’s scarf so loose? Her mother was starting to lose her grip. When children weren’t taken care of, things were almost over.
“Come here,” Tessa said. The little girl obediently marched up to her and stared up into her face. Her eyes had a stern wisdom that no five-year-old should have had, but her favorite doll still stuck its limp-necked head out of a pocket of her jacket. Her thick dark hair had come unbraided. It was cold, and Tessa did not have time to redo the braids, though she was tempted to take Malena home and do a decent job of it. She compromised by taking a couple of clips out of her own hair to provide some control. She tucked the head scarf into Malena’s coat and buttoned it back up.
