Anybody there got a light?
Someone tapped the back of my chair and handed me a book of matches. I pa.s.sed it to the registrar. He opened it, tore out a match, struck its blue tip a rasp, the sudden burst of fire on the flint-strip. He cupped his mittens over the cigarette, drawing hard. The flame lent a warm glow to his face, two flickering glints in the curvature of his lenses. Shaking the match out, he tossed it into the ashtray. It fell, a thread of curling smoke in its wake.
Of course, you must realize, we"re about to close this receiving station. Not an inch of room left, as you can see. Or are you here to make an identification?
They must have come for me before morning. A woman had been found lying in the gutter. I told the father to call the police. Have they brought her in yet?
I"m sure you know how difficult it would be for us to locate this woman now. I"ve been sitting here since last night trying to put these affairs in order. It"s impossible. Even if she is here and that"s highly unlikely, given the time of morning you claim to have answered the call you"d have to get one of the custodians to take you around the outermost circle and, you can see for yourself, we"ve all got our hands full. I hope you"ll put that in your report. By then it"ll be too late to do any good. Not that I"m complaining! Far from it. Are you sure the old man remembered to phone the police? Maybe he was a bit deaf, or senile, and what you told him didn"t sink in. He might be waiting for you to go back there now. To claim the body. But I seriously doubt she"s here. You can look for her on your own, if you like. The odds are against it. This one here is the last sleeper I"ve accepted, and she came in late last night. The custodians are only getting to her now. We have to strip them, if only to look for a birthmark or some other physical identification when there are no effects. No stone left unturned. You understand. I don"t make the rules.
One of the guards was kneeling, flashlight in hand, between the blond girl"s thighs. The other one leaned forward with her soiled feet, a dead weight, crossed behind his head.
Yes, the v.a.g.i.n.a and the r.e.c.t.u.m, too. We"ve had a lot of drunks brought in. Some of them c.r.a.p all over the floor. But you, of all people, realize how necessary it is to make a complete examination. You"d be surprised what we find sometimes. It pays to be thorough, because later, when everything is being sorted out, certain questions will be asked. Questions that we won"t be able to laugh away so easily. Jesus, the paperwork! And I don"t dare go to sleep, myself. Who knows what would happen? At least none of us will wind up in one of these circles. G.o.d, what a smell! I wish you would tell them about the smell. Every once in a while it comes back to me full force. Well, it"ll be over soon enough. I"ve been authorized to terminate all receiving procedures. I have to wait now for my replacement. He should"ve been here already. Must have gotten held up at the main office. Paperwork. I was just tidying up a few things. You know, don"t like to leave a messy house. From now on the roundhouse will be admitting only relatives and other such witnesses for the purposes of identification. You wouldn"t believe how many of these clowns have been carried in here without so much as a driver"s license or even a voter"s card. People who, for the most part, were found in the streets.
I almost forgot. There"s another one. Not far from here, I think. A man stuck, head first, in a garbage bin.
That"s a new one.
By the docks. I tied a certificate to one of his toes.
The docks? Oh, you mean the other side of town. Out of our jurisdiction, anyway. With any luck, he"ll turn up at the movies. You know, the Omega? You"ll have to go there to track the woman down. That"s where she"d be taken, if the old man remembered to make the call. We"re moving the whole operation there. They"ve already started to receive.
A b.u.t.ton at the bottom of the phone dial pulsed with light.
Yeah......What?......Uh-huh...yeah, sure......Okay...right...
They had begun to dress the girl. Her blouse was on. She was still naked from the waist down. One of the guards tapped the registrar"s chair with the handle of a brush whose bristles were caked in luminous green paint.
What number?
The registrar put his mittened hand over the mouthpiece, cradled the receiver between chin and shoulder, reopened his ledger and answered, after a pause...
Eight. One. One. Twenty-five.
You can scour the mustiest tomes of this library for the early legends, wives" tales and remedies against the dread disease. The old man has let his beard grow out uncombed for days. He emerges on one of the upper tiers, leaning over the bra.s.s rail with shelves of antique books rising out of a shadow from three sides of the deep recess behind him, and makes a sign for you to come up. The only other light glows dimly on a caged rostrum near the check-out desk at the end of the main hall. You have walked across the darkness, the clop of your heels echoing off the distant ceiling, rebounding from hidden corners, through all the levels and tiers, until you reach the foot of an iron stair, one of many that spiral into the upper depths of the library. He beckons you with a vague gesture, silently, as though all words have been put away for a time between the pages of a book he has yet to locate, which is why, in spite of everything (the epidemic, the rumors of his disappearance and death), he, the antiquarian, has taken up residence here in one of the abandoned lofts, making his bed upon towering piles of yellowed newsprint no one asks for anymore. Not even a watchman to keep him company through the long hours of the night, to pa.s.s the time with him in idle conversation if only he could rouse himself to speak a word or two. He walks with a blind man"s cane, tapping the planks beneath his feet and the sections of cast-iron grillwork, each with its unique design, below the railing which keeps him from the abyss. He knows how to walk in the dark, if the occasion should arise; but, thus far, each recess of books in the tier he now inhabits conceals a small bulb that floods a yellow light from above. The switches are hidden in the corners of the outermost shelves. Each night, as he makes his rounds, the light follows him. He never scruples to double back, having flicked one switch on, to click the switch of the preceding recess off. What he loses in time and legwork is more than compensated by the saving of electricity, for it is entirely possible that no one will come to replace the bulbs which have burnt out. The watchman has gone to tend the victims of this terrible disease. No one is spared. Architectural Design is already lost in darkness. It"s only a matter of time, perhaps just hours, minutes, before another recess goes. He might, of course, venture out into the foggy streets for a new bulb. There are none in the janitor"s closet. He had often gone to look under the bas.e.m.e.nt stairwell, but there were only crates packed with straw, leaning mops, pails full of dirty rags tucked behind the joists. For a younger man it would be less of a problem to replace the bulb. Plenty of ladders about aluminum rungs painted brown, a ridged mat nailed to each of the narrow steps to guard against an unexpected slippage. But he was old. Staring into his own grave, as he liked to tell his wife before the sickness came. There was no guarantee that any of the shops would be open, including his own, which he hadn"t been to for almost a month. When the landlady died he gathered up some provisions, left his wife without a word of fond farewell, and set out for the library. He knew that she would have sent word after him to the old house lost in a mist behind the tree where an animal rocked its nights away in the branches. To the roundhouse, she or her brother would have come to look for him amid sleepers whose pale faces turned toward a blackness beyond the measure of time and s.p.a.ce. He has read the histories, all the ancient registers of lore and quackery. And now he stands, beckoning you, making a sign which brooks no glib interpretation. He might, for all the world, be swatting a fly as he waits for you. And when you have reached the top of the clankering spiral you come up through the hole in an iron grate, without light, your eyes straining toward that lunar ma.s.s of gray-white beard he will conduct you on a long, meandering tour through the darkness (you will not be able to find your way back so easily), at the end of which, two steps down, where he parts the wine-colored drapes of an opera loge, you are seated at a school desk overlooking the black gulf of the library theatre. A legal pad lies on the desk. You will be able to take notes. Nothing more will escape you. There"s a pen dangling underneath from a copper chain. A candle at your feet, near a book of matches. It"s just thick enough to be fitted into the inkwell. You will stop here in silence with the old man sitting behind you, his armchair turned to the wall as you strike a match, waiting for the curtain to rise. At the top of the pad, above the first of the aqua lines, someone has written: Hist. of Medicine.
The pantomime begins under the thatched roof of a hut. Through the opening, snowflakes drift and churn in gusts of wind against the night. You would be expected to note here that the hut is empty, though in the middle of the floor a small fire has recently burned. There remains a heap of glowing embers. A rude flap made of canvas, like a topsail, suddenly unrolls to cover the opening. On it these words, painted in blood, seen by the light of the coals: Eld Wanderer. A pickaxe and shovel lean, one crossed on the other, by the wall to the right of the flap. The interior of the hut, whose upper reaches are lost in a conical shadow, bristles with tufts of straw. Curtain.
Behind you the old man goes into his cigarette cough, a gravelly hack which he tries in vain to stifle as he keeps himself amused by making Chinese shadows on the wall, hands clasped to shape the profile of a boxer dog, or a cat. He pa.s.ses through the whole repertoire of illusive silhouettes. Then, with an unintelligible whisper, he turns toward you, begging the loan of five or six sheets of paper, which can easily be spared since the pad is full. He a.s.sures you by a series of emphatic gestures that, should you have need of it, a second pad has been placed inside the desk for your convenience. You raise the lid a crack, just enough to slip your hand through. You can feel it, a pad. Also, a pair of manicure scissors. Both of which you hand to him.
The next scene of the pantomime is staged to represent the night. Without stars. A silver web gleaming under the moon. The sky, completely black, against which the patterns work their geometric transformations. Symmetries intermesh so delicately that a breath might blow them out of shape or cause an unmendable tear. Euclidean and non-Euclidean allures. The threads swerve in a hypothetical sphere beneath the dome of a long-vanished planetarium. Some of the seats are rocking, giving off abrupt squeaks in the dark. An unseen cat meows. Who can tell how far the web continues, beyond the touch of moonlight, into an emptied cosmos? Curtain.
Yellow curlicues seesaw gently to the floor behind you. All this time, while your eyes were turned to the void, the old man has been snipping away, cutting himself a miniature fool"s cap with two diminutive windows giving on the inside of the cone. When he turns his head in a certain way the flickering candlelight shines through. A pale square with indistinct borders winks open and shut at the base of the pyramidal shadow. The old man balances an oblong cut-out on the bridge of his nose in such a way that it reappears in silhouette behind the curtained "window" on the wall of the loge.
The third tableau depicts a winding gallery cluttered with recently vacated beds. An old chateau where giant birds of prey walk, tipping the great chandeliers with their downy skulls vultures, cormorants on holiday from the sea, eagles bald or bristling with a thick head of fur to be smoothed down, almost mechanically, with dampened wing-feathers whenever they catch a glimpse of themselves in the tall mirrors between the gallery windows. Windows opening on a garden overgrown with weeds. The granite fountain, covered by verdigris moss, whose dried-up basins languish under a black sediment, flanked by two armless statues: a faun, with cheeks puffed out, blowing imaginary panpipes; an ancient bronze of the Huntress, her nose eaten away by the pox of time and weather. Both against a cloudless afternoon sky. The mammoth birds are looking for someone. They veil their eyelids against the shafts of window-light. Curtain.
You find a deck of playing cards inside the desk. The old man becomes excited. He drops the pad and scissors on the floor and holds out his hands. He fans the deck into a perfect circle and thrusts it, face down, under your chin. Pick a card. Any card. You draw the eight of spades. He closes the fan, shuffles the deck, shapes it into a tidy stack, and places it carefully between his feet. The old man"s mind is wandering. His lips move. A garbled noise escapes his clenched gums in a spray of spittle. Now he turns his face to the wall. A voice comes over the loudspeaker.
In the fourth and last tableau, the curtain rises on three wax figures. Narcolept, oh Narcolept! It seems as though daylight will never come! They have all but reached the end. One, dragged along the pavement by the other two, his feet cradled in their hands. From offstage, electric fans waft clouds of dry-ice vapor under the lamps. They cannot see the street. The buildings. Across the footlights. Lost.
Before the mask. I must at least go through the motions for as long as the ant.i.toxin can keep me awake. An increase from 0.5ml. of a 2,000 million per ml. vaccine, given as the first dose. My eyelids are getting heavy. A little while, and yet a while longer, to follow the tick of the clock (corner-of-the-eye hallucinations: livid specks that seem to jump out of the walls before a glance decomposes them), and I will have begun to dream. A window impossible to distance. Somewhere beyond the grimy panes there was, there is, another room, high above Promontory Wall, where he used to spend his time.
1.0ml. Behind the tree, the window. Fog too thick, at first, to cast even a faint reflection in the clouded gla.s.s. There, above the porch roof. Slate tiles toward a rusty gutter with the creak of something that rocks in the lower branches, no guttering water, not a sign of rain, though the air was leaden and damp. He waited, stretched out in his bed with the light off, for her footfall on the stair. He must have been down there, the old man, the antiquarian, leaning back, his cane chair squeaking from across the green of the tabletop the night the landlady died. The canaries had gone to sleep. Then, by degrees, the mist swallows up the image with its shifting forms and hidden noises. It comes back to me.
No one dies of the plague. One simply never wakes. When they first began to nod off in the streets, I took them for dead. The fog had not yet settled like a pall over the city.
1.5ml. I could almost see him then, the Ancient Wanderer, walking out among the sleepers. He had thrown a veil over the dark pools of his eyes and went from one to another with lamp in hand, or as an undulating shadow on a wall of water. The narcolept. Their faces turned up to him. In the empty streets. From the stairs I heard him breathing white smoke under the lampposts, down to the docks where keelboats and schooners were no longer even silhouettes. He walked alone to the end of the jetty. Somewhere behind the last crab shanty there was a noise of splashing water as he threw himself into the bay. Once, he came at night to the theatre. No one had cause to recognize him. There, from the edge of the darkness beyond the footlights, he showed his sad face to the actors. He was sitting alone, marking time by sketching a maze of webs around their bodies the night the old man saw him.
The metabolic process remains more or less normal, or normalizes according to the needs of sleep. As long as intravenous nourishment is provided, there is no reason at all why the patient cannot live out his allotted span of life in dreams. Glucose. Tubes to drain off the liquid excretions. Growth of hair and fingernails continues long after the last evacuation of feces. Always, whenever too many of them have been gathered in one place, the overpowering stench of sugared urine.
2.0ml. No effect. To keep myself from dozing off, I reset the alarm every five minutes and tried to picture the moon, which no one has seen for weeks. Before the mask, it was a lot easier to get around my office without knocking drug samples and specimen tubes off the cabinet tops. A full moon every night, large and yellow, under clouds swept by wind across the heavens. Something I"d read in a book. In cutting the eyeholes, I hadn"t followed the pattern closely enough. Whenever I ventured out, or if I was called away, I had to be careful of where I walked. A distinct fall-off of light toward the edges. The moon had all but disappeared behind the trees. The silvering that limned the rooftops pa.s.sed, and I was alone in the streets. They must have come for me before morning. A half moon every night, blood-red, hovers near the horizon. Without stars or light, he waited for her footfall on the stair. He was in his room, stretched out on the mattress. The mattress leaned against the wall, by the window. He had stretched out on the bare springs to keep from turning over. A waning moon each night the map hung under a sheet of gla.s.s. Second window. What I can see of the mist from here. The old man is leaving, going down the wooden porch steps. He will not return. He has taken almost everything. By degrees, piece by piece, until nothing remains but the smile in a pool of lunar clouds.
Something more that runs counter to every precept of medicine. Just before the plague of sleep, another nameless disease had taken form. Those who were exposed to the contagion began to dematerialize. They were only half there, as though the acc.u.mulating mists had wanted to eat them alive. Since the brain was almost the last organ to deteriorate, the victim was forced to suffer in full consciousness not so much the fading away, but the agonizing process of starvation. At first, the skin became a ma.s.s of effervescing dust behind which the internal organs gradually came to appear. Once the victim had reached this stage, a normal examination became impossible. The desire to eat remained; but, as the disease took its course, any solid or liquid nourishment placed in the mouth fell through the floor of the buccal cavity to the ground before it could be swallowed. The internal and external musculature remain in working order almost to the end. Temperature seems to play a crucial role in determining the degree of dematerialization of any given part of the body. The pathology, here, is elemental. The tip of the nose, the ears, the toes, and often the b.u.t.tocks, being anywhere from a quarter to a full two degrees cooler than the normal bodily temperature, tend to retain their density over a longer period of time than those organs and tissue which are normally concealed by the epidermal layer. One way to r.e.t.a.r.d the illness, then, would be to keep the patient constantly exposed to the cold which, however, would almost certainly result in pneumonia or some other complication. The process of dematerialization is such that, once the cutaneous envelope becomes affected, the glands, the musculature, the lymphatic and circulatory systems, being from one to four degrees warmer, will already be too far gone by the time the skin has begun to effervesce, removing all possibility of an early diagnosis. The incubation period is unknown. One cannot be absolutely certain that the dematerialization is in any way connected to the endless sleep.
2.5ml. Another opening. Then the old man must have known something. Before the mask. Before the mist. To imitate the buzz of the flies. It deflates. Without light, the putrid blot spreads over it, driving them mad. From room to empty room. Old, tumbledown crates. Shreds of crumpled waxpaper. And if I dare to close my eyes. Another street. In a strange part of the city. I was with her, upstairs with the one who died. Before the fog. The flies. What pa.s.sed for a bed, a night table by the curtained window, the faint ellipse of lamplight thrown up on the wall, bending out along the ceiling"s end. If this was the room. One without a clock. The ticks. It was much easier then, without the eyeholes or the goggles to fog my vision of a moonless night. Without stars. I could see her leaning in the doorway at the top of a long flight of stairs, where the light had begun to seep through. An opening, yes. I went on tiptoe. Late in the afternoon. In the morning. On a moonless night when the noise of the traffic was not so loud. If I closed my eyes, she would be there in the half-light of her room because my office was too far off, though I would have preferred to have her there, like all the others. Someone must have told him about it the night the landlady died. He must have been told. They would have come for me. Before morning. Upstairs, where so little remained of what we knew. All the rooms were empty, except one. The room with a second window on the mist. A bit more of the warbling. One of my patients sang like a nightingale. Other silhouettes. The flies. And all because the rats, as rats are wont to do, were making a bit of noise on their own, sniffing amid the wood shavings for a crumb of cheese the cat had carried away. In my eyes, the steps. One at a time. Like all the others. A soft tread on rubber mats nailed to the wood. On tiptoe in the night. The flies. The fleas. All that remained to be collected was lost to him. He had relinquished any rights he might have had to the landlady. Old jukebox colors tinged with a fading redness in the air. By way of recompense. Be careful, one of the steps has a loose mat. Squeak by squeak. The odor I could smell, always, on my hands. I have to go now. The police will handle everything, I have to go. Just after five. Scratches. Contusions. Where the lamplight glimmered through. We tried it on the bed. She lay in the shadows. The steps, once more. Not that I"m old. I return, step-shadows dwindling over the tips of my shoes. As I neared the top, she was standing with the light behind her, the one who died, and like the poor landlady after her, not even the unkept promises of the old man could bring her back. I told you to phone the police. Are you deaf? Or he has lost his own shadow beyond the last reaches of the mist. He searches the library alone each night for the words to come to him again. To come while I still have time to remember the ticks, not just a tick at a time. Between which, the notable absence of a clock at the bedside. Standing between the bed and the curtained window. Now, if she wanted to sleep. It would have to be the floor. Soon she would be too far gone. Nothing, at the brink of death, but this coa.r.s.e-grained shroud of dust sinking through the floorboards, down through the stippled ceiling to the last staircase, and into the bowels of the earth. If they told him about it, he must also know the horror of that night. Her skin took color with the cold, but the bed wouldn"t hold her. She sank under my weight through the mattress. Echoes of the wind pa.s.sing through old piano wire. I found her under the springs, stretched out beneath the hanging wads of dust, in a shadow.
Incipient ticks of metal, enamel to enameled wood, replace the ticking of all the rundown clocks. Still some places left in the gaps between them to find refuge from these hazy lights. Prowl the streets and your shadow comes just short of reaching through the mist; it sweeps across the pavement, stretching out till it is one with the dark at the far end of a wide ellipse that reduplicates itself endlessly on other streets whenever someone, or something, moves off under the burning lamps. And if the light carried only a bit farther, the three of them would be going to meet the doubles of their hulking silhouettes. Now they are far from home, lost beyond any reckoning back. It is useless to hope that anyone would come to answer the door, if they knocked. An upstairs window might open then slam quickly shut again, but often not before some object had come flying down: a flowerpot, shattered into a thousand fragments on the walk, scattering its contents from a mound of loam and upturned roots; or a wrench; or a rubber teething bone, after which they would hear the plaintive yelp of a dog. But no one came down to answer. The first of the three walks on ahead, trying to keep track of the house numbers. All that can be said is that they believe they"re headed roughly in the right direction. The numbers are odd and diminishing. Not far behind him, the second figure drags his heels, staggering under the weight of the third the yellow plume cuts an S with each uncertain step who rides him pickaback, arms pendent, like an ape in sleep. Now and again, the two who are walking have to step over a man or woman who seems still to be breathing. Even if there were trash bins to dump them in, it would hardly be worth the effort. They might have come across three or four bodies in the last half hour, though no one awake seemed to be about. The prankster was getting heavy. Every so often, when he felt he could bear no more, the second figure would unburden himself on a stoop, if there was a stoop, and stretch out on the bottom step as though he, too, were given up to the sickness. He would not be able to close his eyes. Something of the marble"s coldness penetrated his clothing as he watched the fog scud over the lamppost. Once or twice he thought he discerned hitherto secret irregularities, as though the mist were not all of a piece but a mixture of smoky densities that came together like ghosts in the air around the lamp nearest to his lying place. It is probably long past morning. The streets are lost, so quiet now that when the first one"s footsteps cease to echo back, his only waking companion thinks he hears the wind breathing like a man, and turns to see if someone else is there behind him. This, to fill in the lacunae. Thin margins of silence where the first of the three stops walking to check the front of a house, and the third, slumped over the back of the second, pauses before emitting a pebbly rattle. There can be no rest for a while longer. They carry him, stretched between them, by the ankles and under the dangling arms. His coattails drag the concrete, catching the tin ring of a beer can, which adds its sc.r.a.ping noise to all the other m.u.f.fled echoes that neither "one" nor "two" is of a mind to squelch. "Three," with closed eyes, head thrown back, the fuzzy tip of the panache stuck to his upper lip, breathes easier, blissfully unaware of the quickening pace of his bearers. A pulsing blot lies just ahead, tinging the mist with an orange glow that gradually sharpens into a neon arrow, pointing down a subterranean stair to a restaurant or an inn or a bar that has, in spite of everything, remained open. A descent into the dark below street level. The sc.r.a.p of metal sounds a ticking ring on the narrow steps, all the way to the bottom puddle. It foretells their coming to those who listen from within.
Areas of deep shadow. The cool marine obscurity masks a no man"s land between the pool tables. Eddies of cigarette smoke drift toward low, canopied lights with the dust. Green baize and clicking b.a.l.l.s. They come in by an old spittoon that keeps the inner door ajar, past nearly empty coatracks to a smell of stale tobacco juice and grease-stained leather, arm-tired and out of patience to carry the prankster to the gallery lost in darkness behind a bra.s.s rail at the other end of the hall. There, beyond the farthest lamps, a smoke cloud seems to hover above a few dim forms, barely distinguishable, as one"s eyes become accustomed to the murk, from the high-backed chairs they sit in. One of the players is making a run of the table. After a pause to take in the new arrivals, he bends to shoot again. The cue ball caroms off three cushions, grazes the five ball with a brittle click, and sends it rolling into a corner pocket. The other player, wooden chair tipped back against the rail, cue cradled between his knees, stares blankly as the two figures make their way among the tables, in and out of the greenish pools of light, their ponderous burden jackknifed so low between them that his knuckles sc.r.a.pe the musty floorboards. One shot before the table empties. The prankster is carried to the rail amid growls of displeasure, blocking all view of the table as his bearers stretch him. One hears the chalked nub tapping the cue ball, a rolling, a m.u.f.fled bounce, more rolling...then a click. The two dark figures are silhouettes forming an H; the third, their umbilicus. They grope about with their knees, answering the jibes of irate devotees with noncommittal shrugs, in the not-unreasonable hope of finding an empty chair to dump the prankster in for the duration of their visit. The ostrich plume droops and stirs with his breathing as they sit him down, crossing his arms so he won"t lean too far back. The game is at a standstill. Everyone has missed the last shot even the second player, who had turned in his chair at the crucial moment to watch the helpless newcomers fend off blows from the few diehards still awake in the gallery. Now no one but the standing player will ever know how the shot fell. True, there were no more b.a.l.l.s on the green bed cloth, but no one had heard anything like the sharp rattle at the end of a brief descent in any of the six pockets. The standing player, on a point of honor, refuses to claim victory. He, too, if they are to believe him, glanced away when he heard the fracas in the gallery. When he looked back, less than a second later, the table was cleared only the cue ball, rolling to a stop, remained on the felt.
The prankster remained impa.s.sive throughout the whole of this discussion. His two friends had quietly slipped off to the manager"s cage to scrounge a couple of cups of coffee. The manager pours out his heart, glad to have someone other than the seedy pool enthusiasts to share in his sorrows. Now that interest in the game has waned, he"s playing to the gallery as well which, with the exception of the prankster, comprises a somewhat limited but attentive audience. In a glowing stage voice, racked with emotion, he runs through the unabridged catalogue of domestic aggravations. The wife was giving him an ulcer. Since the outbreak of the sickness, she had been afraid of the bed. One morning, having taken the advice of a friend, she brought home two white mice in a cage. The ticks, always the ticks. It was driving him crazy. They liked to stick their tails through the bars and whip the metal feeder all night long, or chase each other in the wheel. Two days of that and he was fit to be tied. So he told her, "This is it, I can"t take no more!" Put a cot here in the back, tucked between the wall and a pile of crates, and now, after twenty-nine years, his worries are over. He"s even cut the telephone cord so she can"t get through to him. The mails aren"t running. She"ll never find him in this fog. They say it comes as a sudden black-out. Being tired isn"t enough. No way to make the diagnosis. You could go to sleep tonight in your bed and never wake again, without realizing that the rest of your life is a dream. He could be dreaming this pool hall, down to the detail of that smoke-blackened door.
You can"t quite make them out. The manager finishes his monologue. Two figures, faces blurred or turned away, lost under their night-hat brims, drain their cups to the dregs and set off once more for the gallery, across a s.p.a.ce of darkness and green rectangular islands.
The game resumes. The losing player racks up the b.a.l.l.s, carefully lifts off the triangular frame, sets it down on a neighboring table, chalks his cue, bends, lets his mouth hang open, makes two pa.s.ses at the white sphere (multiple shadows, faint ellipses cast on felt, the shape of a star), then gives it a hard shot into the phalanx of colored b.a.l.l.s, which scatter, spinning out in all directions, banking off the cushions before slamming into one another on a field of altering trajectories. The cue ball alone, through some dreadful miscalculation or inept.i.tude, rolls to a corner pocket and plummets out of sight.
That"s scratch.
But who hears him now? The manager bounds out of his cage like a man possessed. Gesticulating wildly, he overtakes the two figures less than halfway to the gallery and shoves them under the light of the nearest table. They turn out their pockets in the smoke to prove they have nothing but an old b.u.t.ton left with which to pay for the coffee. The manager dabs his brow with a wad of Kleenex. It"s not enough. Not nearly enough. Catching sight of the yellow plume (it rises and falls in the gallery darkness), he indicates the figure breathing beneath it to the two men, and that this figure might be brought to him to have its pockets searched.
Silence descends. Not a whine, not a murmur as they raise the prankster up, arms crooked around his back, hands clasped under his knees to make the throne of an imaginary palanquin, and bear him over the bra.s.s rail into the place of light. They prop him up between them, head slumped and open-mouthed, teetering from side to side, oblivious to one and all. The manager unb.u.t.tons the prankster"s overcoat, emptying his pockets of: some panty shreds garnished with lace, a pair of manicure scissors, seventeen plastic cups, a match, two Swedish meatb.a.l.l.s, a variety of hors d"uvres (slightly damaged), nine plastic forks, a pocket flashlight, three c.o.c.ktail napkins (one with the dried imprint of a ring), a penknife (containing bottle opener, nail file/emery board, skeleton key, and four blades of various size), a hickory duck-call, half a railroad tie with a dangerously splintered edge, a tube of airplane glue, a small screwdriver, some gravel, a handful of gra.s.s, two dog biscuits (half eaten), a stuffed canary, the cracked hand of a porcelain figurine (three fingers missing), one hypodermic syringe (empty, the needle broken off), seven pieces of colored chalk.
To make an end, the manager plucks the yellow plume from the prankster"s hair, raises his pudgy hand above the table, opens his fingers, and lets it drop, a lent.i.tudinous meander against the dark, rocking on a cushion of air.
The shadow I had lost in the streets could not have been as far off as the registrar had led me to believe the Omega was. Time pa.s.sed. The lines crumbled into heaps of confetti that blew away when I slipped the map from its frame and held it to the open window.
Under the blank marquee. The ticket booth stood concealed in an octagonal pillar of imitation marble whose blue glaze was dulled by a layer of soot, its window facing the entrance. No one there. Through the pane, behind its metal air vent, I could dimly see the calendar print of a wintry forest hanging on the wall, a wooden stool, an empty cash drawer to the right of the ticket slots. The telephone receiver was off the hook. It must have been dangling below. Silent, out of sight. The last one to inhabit the booth had not bothered to draw the curtain over the window or to empty the ashtray, which held a half-smoked cigarette with lipstick traces. By one of the entrance doors a poster in a cracked-gla.s.s frame depicted, in garish colors, a statuesque blonde clad in a negligee, the outline of her body a vague silhouette behind a muslin window. Farther into the room, a man was standing. His face, dull yet oddly menacing, lit from the side by a weak night-lamp near an unmade bed. I"d expected a line of ambulances (at least a paddy wagon or two) to be parked by the curb.
There was nothing. The mist, which hid less from me than the shadow I had lost, shrouded the opposite walk so completely that, for all one could tell, only abandoned excavations were to be found there, or vast asphalt lots jammed with cars that were no longer allowed on the streets, some perhaps holding those who had gone to sleep behind the wheel and been left to rot. I hadn"t seen a car all morning, not even close within the precincts of the roundhouse. What kept me out there? Obviously another dreadful miscalculation. With no landmarks to follow, I had hoped for luck enough to stumble on the Omega theatre. This couldn"t have been the one. The letters, lost in fog. Markings of where the sleepers were kept. I tried the door by the poster. It wouldn"t budge. Then the one next to it. My hands on the iron crossbar, pushing through to the darkness.
The foyer led up a carpeted ramp between two ranks of posts strung together by velveteen ropes. My reflection leapt from one wall panel to the next. A mottled blur, caged on both sides by netlike veins, seemed to flit through dim pools of yellow light across mirrors that reproduced its shrinking image to infinity down their endless corridors. The stale odor of popcorn and threadbare upholstery almost reached me. I made my way past humming soda machines luminous b.u.t.tons, glittering cup-wells in shadow to the vacated counter which stood in a nook by the ingress, its shelves emptied of all but a few gum-drop boxes, some scattered candy bars and a bag of half-crushed salted peanuts. I went slowly, softly, after having trod so many unfamiliar pavements. Tufted swirls of orange and black flowers m.u.f.fled my footsteps in a purple ground. Another more muted hum began to filter from the wormy umbra beyond the counter and the soft-drink machines. I slipped through the archway, turned right down a narrow pa.s.sage, groping the inside wall for vague glimmers, and came at last to a water cooler in an alcove of mosaic tile. The light shifted over it in irregular pulses, from silver to black. A section of part.i.tion had been taken down behind the last row of seats, giving an odd view of the screen through a maze of silhouetted tubes and flickering bottles that left evansecent afterimages as my eyes moved over them. The hum I had caught faintly in the lobby was the dry sound of all those open mouths, those slumping heads with phosphenescing numbers, dashes of glowing paint, scattered over the middle section of seats in a dense clutter of hanging glucose bottles. Puddles of sick-sweet urine trickled out of the occupied rows into the aisle, where the floor took a sudden tilt, and widened the stains in the carpeting. The screen fluttered its half-light onto the sleeping audience, throwing off black-and-white images of what may or may not have been scenes from the movie advertised. Facing the sleepers, alone at its desk, in the limbo between the first row of vacant seats and the black matting under the screen, an egg-shaped head, completely bald, lit from beneath by a lamp that cast a liquid glimmer in its eyes, seemed to beckon me. Above the head, an old car with spoked tires and a running board sped off down a winding country road, crossed by shadows that writhed in a cloud of dust.
The head was reading, arms folded on the pages of a dog-eared magazine, bending to decipher the last few lines in the haze of print. This was the caretaker. There were no other guards in the theatre. For all one knew, the projection booth had been left untended between reels. The sound was off. The caretaker closed his magazine, rolled it up, tossed it into an otherwise empty wastebasket, and rubbed his bleary eyes with ink-smudged fingers, speaking in a loud voice whose echoes rang off the distant walls to the corners of the balcony, at which he stared from time to time, as though preoccupied with the contrast of that wide, black recess to the light-box which sucked the dust in a beam through its little window.
Please. No need to stand on ceremony. We"ve still got plenty of seats left, but I wouldn"t want to predict how long that"ll last. I was told to expect you.
He let out a booming yawn which died all around us, shaking his head rapidly like a dog trying to dry itself, as he began to rummage through his litter of papers, whistling under his breath. His eyes fell on the luminous hands of the desk clock.
s.h.i.t. Half an hour, is it? Then the alarm goes off and the two of us will have to start replacing the bottles.
The two of us?
Oh! Don"t get the wrong idea. I was talking about the man up there. He likes to sit it out in the balcony between reels. Can"t take the heat in the booth. Can"t say as I blame him, either. It"s h.e.l.l up there. Hope he remembers to set another one going before he has to come down. We could have used a blank white projection, you know, but it"s too hard on the eyes. And since we were told to keep the electrical expenses to a minimum, we had to settle for this old movie. Never seen the thing all the way through, myself. It was either that or shut off the c.o.ke machines. Can I get you something? It"s free. We do get some concessions.
He opened one of the drawers and pulled out a dime fixed to the loop end of a copper wire.
You could probably use a cold drink after all that walking. I know I can. How about it? Orange? Grape?
Can we get on with it?
Yes. Well, I"m working overtime. It had been my understanding that the registrar was to arrive here three hours ago. But I could always be mistaken. He"s the one who handles all the paperwork and tends to the fine details. What could have detained him? No matter. Since you"re here, you"ll want to look things over. Isn"t very much to see besides this, really. Except the projection booth. We could go up there now, while there"s still time. The screen makes it easier to see if anyone sneaks in and tries to have his way you get my meaning? with one of the women. The roundhouse was full of bodies, but there will be more than enough left over to seat this place to capacity. It"s merely a question of time. There aren"t enough of us left to police them properly, hence the delays. The interminable delays. The screen is only a fair deterrent without guards. Please make note of that. Tell them that, under present conditions, I cannot accept responsibility for any foul-ups that may have occurred in the past, or will occur in the future. Do you know what we"re up against here? The problem of false or "pantomime" sleepers is an ever-present one, and has plagued our operations from the very beginning. Men and women alike! But mostly men. They usually have the presence of mind to strike an att.i.tude of complete oblivion during the search-and-examination procedure. We"ve even had to resort to tickling all the new arrivals, and managed to catch a few of them out that way. But there are always some with more than the usual amount of self-control who get through. They"re not above taking small doses of a soporific to help them along! Later, they wake up here in one of the seats with a tube in their arm and a number painted on their head. Then, when I"m looking the other way, or if I go to the can what am I supposed to do, anyway, isn"t there enough muck on the floor here without my adding to it? the pantomime sleeper crawls from row to row, on the prowl. I tell you, it"s disgusting! I caught one raping a woman in one of the back rows, right over there. He"d stuck his IV into the armrest, taken off his jacket and folded it in such a way that, from a distance, it looked like just another slumped-over head. What finally gave him away is that he got so worked up his foot tipped over the woman"s rack: bottle, tube, and all. h.e.l.l of a mess. Others are more discreet. If ever we find an empty seat between two occupied ones, we know something"s up. Often the crime is committed and the culprit is long gone when we come on the victim. That"s off the record! Don"t say anything. It"s one h.e.l.l of a lot easier to get away with it here than it was at the roundhouse. The rows of seats and all these G.o.dd.a.m.n tubes make excellent camouflage. But I ask you, where are we going to find another roundhouse? They say at least two other theatres have been commandeered for future use. The owners were glad to receive a fee for them. No one goes out anymore for fear of dropping in the streets. Just wait a while longer. We"ll have this place filled, standing-room only! Soon, when the s.p.a.ce runs out, we"ll have to start burning them alive in the streets! That"s the rumor, keep it under your...hat. Identification has always been something of a problem. About a third of the sleepers have remained anonymous. I"m not talking about the derelicts and the "old horns" we pick up in the gutters. Pantomime, pantomime. But that doesn"t explain all the cases of s.e.xual molestation. We"ve been finding plenty of women, just in the last few days, without a st.i.tch on. It"s being blamed on the one they call the Narcolept. But one man? No, I can"t believe it! There must be pantomime sleepers that haven"t yet been taken into account. One man couldn"t possibly be in so many places in so short an interval of time! Certainly there are lacunae. Unaccountable gaps that must forever remain a mystery to us.
But what if someone dies?
No one has died.
Maybe the father wasn"t putting on an act after all.
What?
They would have come too far already, the three like specters now at the alley"s end against a mound of rubble. Without bringing them anywhere nearer the roundhouse, these pits cut deep wells in the gloom, threatening to open chasms under their feet. Oceanic dins the fog can never reach. The dream of the one they drag behind them over the broken stones. His coattails fan out to put a mangy thickness of herringbone between the back of his head and the earth, two flaps like broad, rectangular wings on which he takes the pose of a drowned man seen from below. He comes up one last time, floats on the surface, his face to the murky depths, scudding across the sun with the rest of the shipwrecked debris. They"ve crooked their arms around his ankles to let him drift "against the current" as they walk, with no more sensation than what he feels or listens to in sleep.
Words never heard, where half-made changes in a dense wind break the mist into wreaths on a pyre of sifted ash. Old saw-toothed blades, frames for pictures and absent mirrors. Claw-footed table legs, emerging from the ruins, suggest the monstrous insect buried beneath.
He"s lighter than he would have been with his load of artifacts and the lost panache. Here and there, through the sh.e.l.l of a gutted cas.e.m.e.nt, the two upright figures peer out on a void. Gray on gray, without relief. Fine powdery snippets gather in plumes, dissolving curlicues around their heads as they drag their burden along, having made this useless detour to search the rubble for a wheelbar-row that might have been left behind. All to make it less hard. A simple thing. To remain lost now that they had stopped looking for numbers. The garbage bins are full to overflowing, the air heavy with an odor of waste and black incinerator fumes, coughed up into the day-night to warm the bones of those who live in fear of a knock on the door or a stranger"s tread echoing up the stairwell. Clues to their fading destination.
Through nyctalopic caverns behind his lidded eyes, all that went into the making of his landscape shreds of other shadowy streets, a promise of refuge withheld from the two who bear him away to the ancient mausoleum. They will have come this far, he muses, only because no one has died. The figure known to him, and to the others, appears at its window in silhouette, looking out through a h.o.a.ry vapor to where the tree rocks, c.u.mbered with some laughing animal. This dream they imagine for him, the one they turn to pull over the last few shards, before hazy lampposts reappear with a strip of pavement, leaving the mound of risen earth to darkness.
The father watches them from his window, behind a film of shrinking condensation. His eyes are weak. For him they are only two men lugging a sack or a long bundle he can"t quite make it out into the light-pool below. Both of them happen to look up at the same moment, to catch sight of him drawing back into the room with one hand raised above his head as if to swat a fly, and take this for an omen. One steers their inanimate cargo toward the foot of the stoop. The other goes up to try the door.
With just a dim lamp to light his way to the sofa (the old man has forgotten to wind the mantelpiece clock), the window dwindles to a clouded patch fluttering in the wormy black of the wall. Without having to mumble, even to himself, he knows where the couch is and doesn"t need to turn around after he switches off the lamp. His palms are dry, his fingers soft and lifeless. He lies down. Gradually. The ceiling appears. Dimly to his eyes. Through a horde of specks.
Now he will be alone.
My Mother.
Jamaica Kincaid.
Jamaica Kincaid (1949) is a critically acclaimed Caribbean writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker as well as the anthology The New Gothic (1990). She has won the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina etranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Lila Wallace-Reader"s Digest Award, among others. "My Mother" (1978) appeared in her first collection, At the Bottom of the River. Her evocative fiction often features strong maternal characters as well as colonial and post-colonial themes. "My Mother" is a phantasmagorical take on the weird through the lens of transformation.
Immediately on wishing my mother dead and seeing the pain it caused her, I was sorry and cried so many tears that all the earth around me was drenched. Standing before my mother, I begged her forgiveness, and I begged so earnestly that she took pity on me, kissing my face and placing my head on her bosom to rest. Placing her arms around me, she drew my head closer and closer to her bosom, until finally I suffocated. I lay on her bosom, breathless, for a time uncountable, until one day, for a reason she has kept to herself, she shook me out and stood me under a tree and I started to breathe again. I cast a sharp glance at her and said to myself, "So." Instantly I grew my own bosoms, small mounds at first, leaving a small, soft place between them, where, if ever necessary, I could rest my own head. Between my mother and me now were the tears I had cried, and I gathered up some stones and banked them in so that they formed a small pond. The water in the pond was thick and black and poisonous, so that only unnamable invertebrates could live in it. My mother and I now watched each other carefully, always making sure to shower the other with words and deeds of love and affection.
I was sitting on my mother"s bed trying to get a good look at myself. It was a large bed and it stood in the middle of a large, completely dark room. The room was completely dark because all the windows had been boarded up and all the crevices stuffed with black cloth. My mother lit some candles and the room burst into a pink-like, yellow-like glow. Looming over us, much larger than ourselves, were our shadows. We sat mesmerized because our shadows had made a place between themselves, as if they were making room for someone else. Nothing filled up the s.p.a.ce between them, and the shadow of my mother sighed. The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang, and then they stopped. All along, our shadows had grown thick and thin, long and short, had fallen at every angle, as if they were controlled by the light of day. Suddenly my mother got up and blew out the candles and our shadows vanished. I continued to sit on the bed, trying to get a good look at myself.
My mother removed her clothes and covered thoroughly her skin with a thick gold-colored oil, which had recently been rendered in a hot pan from the livers of reptiles with pouched throats. She grew plates of metal-colored scales on her back, and light, when it collided with this surface, would shatter and collapse into tiny points. Her teeth now arranged themselves into rows that reached all the way back to her long white throat. She uncoiled her hair from her head and then removed her hair altogether. Taking her head into her large palms, she flattened it so that her eyes, which were by now ablaze, sat on top of her head and spun like two revolving b.a.l.l.s. Then, making two lines on the soles of each foot, she divided her feet into crossroads. Silently, she had instructed me to follow her example, and now I too traveled along on my white underbelly, my tongue darting and flickering in the hot air. "Look," said my mother.
My mother and I were standing on the seabed side by side, my arms laced loosely around her waist, my head resting securely on her shoulder, as if I needed the support. To make sure she believed in my frailness, I sighed occasionally long soft sighs, the kind of sigh she had long ago taught me could evoke sympathy. In fact, how I really felt was invincible. I was no longer a child but I was not yet a woman. My skin had just blackened and cracked and fallen away and my new impregnable carapace had taken full hold. My nose had flattened; my hair curled in and stood out straight from my head simultaneously; my many rows of teeth in their retractable trays were in place. My mother and I wordlessly made an arrangement I sent out my beautiful sighs, she received them; I leaned ever more heavily on her for support, she offered her shoulder, which shortly grew to the size of a thick plank. A long time pa.s.sed, at the end of which I had hoped to see my mother permanently cemented to the seabed. My mother reached out to pa.s.s a hand over my head, a pacifying gesture, but I laughed and, with great agility, stepped aside. I let out a horrible roar, then a self-pitying whine. I had grown big, but my mother was bigger, and that would always be so. We walked to the Garden of Fruits and there ate to our hearts" satisfaction. We departed through the southwesterly gate, leaving as always, in our trail, small colonies of worms.
With my mother, I crossed, unwillingly, the valley. We saw a lamb grazing and when it heard our footsteps it paused and looked up at us. The lamb looked cross and miserable. I said to my mother, "The lamb is cross and miserable. So would I be, too, if I had to live in a climate not suited to my nature." My mother and I now entered the cave. It was the dark and cold cave. I felt something growing under my feet and I bent down to eat it. I stayed that way for years, bent over eating whatever I found growing under my feet. Eventually, I grew a special lens that would allow me to see in the darkest of darkness; eventually, I grew a special coat that kept me warm in the coldest of coldness. One day I saw my mother sitting on a rock. She said, "What a strange expression you have on your face. So cross, so miserable, as if you were living in a climate not suited to your nature." Laughing, she vanished. I dug a deep, deep hole. I built a beautiful house, a floorless house, over the deep, deep hole. I put in lattice windows, most favored of windows by my mother, so perfect for looking out at people pa.s.sing by without her being observed. I painted the house itself yellow, the windows green, colors I knew would please her. Standing just outside the door, I asked her to inspect the house. I said, "Take a look. Tell me if it"s to your satisfaction." Laughing out of the corner of a mouth I could not see, she stepped inside. I stood just outside the door, listening carefully, hoping to hear her land with a thud at the bottom of the deep, deep hole. Instead, she walked up and down in every direction, even pounding her heel on the air. Coming outside to greet me, she said, "It is an excellent house. I would be honored to live in it," and then vanished. I filled up the hole and burnt the house to the ground.
My mother has grown to an enormous height. I have grown to an enormous height also, but my mother"s height is three times mine. Sometimes I cannot see from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s on up, so lost is she in the atmosphere. One day, seeing her sitting on the seash.o.r.e, her hand reaching out in the deep to caress the belly of a striped fish as he swam through a place where two seas met, I glowed red with anger. For a while then I lived alone on the island where there were eight full moons and I adorned the face of each moon with expressions I had seen on my mother"s face. All the expressions favored me. I soon grew tired of living in this way and returned to my mother"s side. I remained, though glowing red with anger, and my mother and I built houses on opposite banks of the dead pond. The dead pond lay between us; in it, only small invertebrates with poisonous lances lived. My mother behaved toward them as if she had suddenly found herself in the same room with relatives we had long since risen above. I cherished their presence and gave them names. Still I missed my mother"s close company and cried constantly for her, but at the end of each day when I saw her return to her house, incredible and great deeds in her wake, each of them singing loudly her praises, I glowed and glowed again, red with anger. Eventually, I wore myself out and sank into a deep, deep sleep, the only dreamless sleep I have ever had.
One day my mother packed my things in a grip and, taking me by the hand, walked me to the jetty, placed me on board a boat, in care of the captain. My mother, while caressing my chin and cheeks, said some words of comfort to me because we had never been apart before. She kissed me on the forehead and turned and walked away. I cried so much my chest heaved up and down, my whole body shook at the sight of her back turned toward me, as if I had never seen her back turned toward me before. I started to make plans to get off the boat, but when I saw that the boat was encased in a large green bottle, as if it were about to decorate a mantelpiece, I fell asleep, until I reached my destination, the new island. When the boat stopped, I got off and I saw a woman with feet exactly like mine, especially around the arch of the instep. Even though the face was completely different from what I was used to, I recognized this woman as my mother. We greeted each other at first with great caution and politeness, but as we walked along, our steps became one, and as we talked, our voices became one voice, and we were in complete union in every other way. What peace came over me then, for I could not see where she left off and I began, or where I left off and she began.
My mother and I walk through the rooms of her house. Every crack in the floor holds a significant event: here, an apparently healthy young man suddenly dropped dead; here a young woman defied her father and, while riding her bicycle to the forbidden lovers" meeting place, fell down a precipice, remaining a cripple for the rest of a very long life. My mother and I find this a beautiful house. The rooms are large and empty, opening on to each other, waiting for people and things to fill them up. Our white muslin skirts billow up around our ankles, our hair hangs straight down our backs as our arms hang straight at our sides. I fit perfectly in the crook of my mother"s arm, on the curve of her back, in the hollow of her stomach. We eat from the same bowl, drink from the same cup; when we sleep, our heads rest on the same pillow. As we walk through the rooms, we merge and separate, merge and separate; soon we shall enter the final stage of our evolution.
The fishermen are coming in from sea; their catch is bountiful, my mother has seen to that. As the waves plop, plop against each other, the fishermen are happy that the sea is calm. My mother points out the fishermen to me, their contentment is a source of my contentment. I am sitting in my mother"s enormous lap. Sometimes I sit on a mat she has made for me from her hair. The lime trees are weighed down with limes I have already perfumed myself with their blossoms. A hummingbird has nested on my stomach, a sign of my fertileness. My mother and I live in a bower made from flowers whose petals are imperishable. There is the silvery blue of the sea, crisscrossed with sharp darts of light, there is the warm rain falling on the clumps of castor bush, there is the small lamb bounding across the pasture, there is the soft ground welcoming the soles of my pink feet. It is in this way my mother and I have lived for a long time now.
Sandkings.
George R. R. Martin.
George R. R. Martin (1948) is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction best-known for his Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, which contains its share of weird supernatural elements. According to myth, he began his career selling monster stories to other neighborhood children for pennies. Subsequent work has won many awards, including the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Despite readers" strong a.s.sociation of Martin with fantasy fiction, Martin"s devotion to the horror field has been lifelong. Cla.s.sics in this mode from Martin include the truly terrifying "Nightflyers" (1980), the disquieting "The Pear-Shaped Man" (1987), and the stunningly weird science fiction story reprinted herein, "Sandkings" (1979), winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among the dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Kress finally just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat each other if he were detained longer than expected. They"d done it before. It amused him.
Unfortunately, he was detained much longer than expected this time. When he finally returned, all the fish were dead. So was the carrion hawk. The shambler had climbed up to the belfry and eaten it. Simon Kress was vexed.
The next day he flew his skimmer to Asgard, a journey of some two hundred kilometers. Asgard was Baldur"s largest city and boasted the oldest and largest starport as well. Kress liked to impress his friends with animals that were unusual, entertaining, and expensive; Asgard was the place to buy them.
This time, though, he had poor luck. Xenopets had closed its doors, t"Etherane the Petseller tried to foist another carrion hawk off on him, and Strange Waters offered nothing more exotic than piranha, glow-sharks, and spider squids. Kress had had all those; he wanted something new.
Near dusk, he found himself walking down the Rainbow Boulevard, looking for places he had not patronized before. So close to the starport, the street was lined by importers" marts. The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, where rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes that made the interiors of the stores a mystery. Between them were the junk shops narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of offworld bric-a-brac. Kress tried both kinds of shop, with equal dissatisfaction.
Then he came across a store that was different.
It was quite close to the port. Kress had never been there before. The shop occupied a small, single-story building of moderate size, set between a euphoria bar and a temple-brothel of the Secret Sisterhood. Down this far, the Rainbow Boulevard grew tacky. The shop itself was unusual. Arresting.
The windows were full of mist; now a pale red, now the gray of true fog, now sparkling and golden. The mist swirled and eddied and glowed faintly from within. Kress glimpsed objects in the window machines, pieces of art, other things he could not recognize but he could not get a good look at any of them. The mists flowed sensuously around them, displaying a bit of first one thing and then another, then cloaking all. It was intriguing.
As he watched, the mist began to form letters. One word at a time. Kress stood and read: WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS.
ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFEFORMS. AND. MISC.