Kzine Issue 9

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  “I’ll find you two after the ceremony,” Carl told his mother who only nodded in reply. She hadn’t said a word to him since they left the house.

  “Carl Anders!” someone said, making him turn his head. Mr. Nash, the father of one of his classmates, was walking their way.

  “How’ve you been, boy?”

  “Good, thank you.”

  “You’re holding up okay?”

  Carl licked his lips and nodded mutely.

  Mr. Nash put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s a lot to go through your senior year, I know. But you’re a good kid, you’ll manage it.” He turned to Carl’s mother. “I’m sure you’re mighty pleased.”

  She smiled, a smile that Carl imagined even Mr. Nash could see was forced. “I’m pleased that he is graduating, thank you.”

  “What are you doing after graduation, Carl?” Mr. Nash asked.

  “Umm… You know. College.”

  The other man quirked a smile. “Well, which one?”

  Carl opened his mouth, tried to figure out what to say and watched as Mr. Nash’s face grew more puzzled.

  “Oh, for…” His mother sighed. “He’s going to Seneca, Alan.”

  “Good. Good for him.” A bell rang. “Well, that’s your cue, Carl. Good luck at Seneca!”

  Mr. Nash hugged Carl’s mom briskly and then walked off. Carl looked at his mother and sister, tried to think of something to say that might help, but couldn’t.

  “I’ll see you after the ceremony,” he said.

  His mother only nodded.

  Minutes later, the principal was speaking and then they were calling off names. Carl was one of the first to be called up. He went to the stage, shook several hands, was given a diploma, posed for a photo, and then it was over. High school was all over.

  He went back to his seat and looked at the diploma. He’d been dreaming of this moment and what it represented for so long. And yet…

  A rush of anger washed through him. None of this was right. He should be elated but instead he was confused and saying and doing all the wrong things and he had no idea – none at all - what he was supposed to do this afternoon or tomorrow or any day in the future.

  He looked at the diploma again. He didn’t remember a bit from any of the classes he had, apparently, taken his last year of school. Not a whit of physics or calculus or senior year literature. Well, the last might not be a great loss. But still. Would it all come back to him when he sat down for a class at Seneca? Or would he have to relearn these things?

  The names kept rolling on, classmates that he knew, and a few he didn’t, walking the same path he had across the stage. They’d taken very different paths through the past year, though.

  And then they were done and it was time to flip the tassel and throw their caps in the air. Anger kept building in him and he threw his with that fury, high up into the air.

  The cap sailed up, end over end. He wanted it to disappear, wanted to have the chance to… to do what? To do this right? To not have bartered away eleven months of his life for the promise of a lack of boredom during that time?

  Carl’s cap began its descent with the others. His classmates reached out and grabbed theirs but Carl let his own cap fall at his feet.

  He looked up and around. The other graduates were hugging, giving high-fives, celebrating what he had always thought would be one of the happiest days of his life. They had memories of this last year that he’d never have and there was nothing to be done.

  “There’d be no taking it back,” the woman had said. Last night. Last year.

  Carl bent down, picked up his cap, and put it on. The tassel flapped in the corner of his vision, hanging on the wrong side – the pre-graduation side. He closed his eyes and though he knew it was useless prayed that this was all a dream and he would wake up and laugh it all off.

  He opened his eyes, still in the auditorium, still in a cap and gown. Carl felt the strings of the tassel in his fingers and slowly, knowing there truly was no way back now, moved it back to the side worn by all the others - by all the graduates.

  HEADS

  by Jez Patterson

  When he turned, the wave was cresting. Its surf was thousands of heads: screams unzipping their lips to their ears, hair so tightly wrenched back their eyes were like boiled, peeled eggs…

  “What did you see?” Miguel asked.

  “Get your hands off me. I need a bloody drink.”

  “Sure,” Miguel said. “Calm yourself. I can do that. A drink. Sure.” He poured a shot of brandy, looked over at Ken and doubled it. “Here. Good health.” Ken grunted, bit at rather than tipped the glass and then sucked in a freezing breath through his teeth. “So? Were you there? On the beach?”

  “Yeah, I was there.”

  Miguel said nothing for a while, but his hands wouldn’t keep still and the smile wouldn’t stay in the mental pocket where it belonged. Miguel fussed over Ken and as Ken recovered from the trip, he let him. It was good Miguel remember who was needed here, who was just a bystander.

  Time was, pirates sailed real seas in search of buried treasure. These days, they plundered the oceans of the mind.

  “He’s a troubled man,” Ken told him, as if Miguel gave a damn.

  “A troubled genius. Hobbs is a genius. Remember that.”

  “More neurones produce more neuroses. I don’t know if this is worth the risk.”

  “You want a bigger cut?”

  “Hell, of course I want a bigger cut. But I’m not sure even that’s going to do me much good if I get caught in there.”

  “You just need to go in, find where he keeps his ideas, collect as many as you can carry, and get out again. Then we can sell them to the highest bidder. Or even produce the things they describe ourselves.”

  “What? Since when did you start having plans like that?”

  Miguel shrugged, but there was nothing casual in the set of his chin, the sparkle in his eyes. “I don’t want to be a pirate forever. I prefer to be a captain. Don’t you feel it, Ken? The tides are changing.”

  “One too many metaphors for me, captain,” Ken said, reaching across the table and ignoring Miguel’s disapproving look as he grabbed the brandy. There was no way he was going back in tonight. Not after the afternoon he’d just spent in Hobbs’s head. “Besides, where are you going to get the capital to kick-start an operation like that?”

  “I’ve got my sources.”

  “No doubt,” Ken said. “But you know shit-all about selling— just stealing.”

  Miguel looked hurt, stomped his way out, slammed a door, and Ken heard the springs twang as Miguel slumped onto a bed in one of his aunt’s spare rooms. The guesthouse was empty apart from them. Every bloody room smelled of boiled up clothing and bleach, with an underlying tang of furniture polish. Ken looked at the caramel liquid in the bottle and swirled it round until he found himself slipping back unexpectedly into Hobbs’s mind.

  No, he realised with a start, not slipping: pulled.

  “It’s never happened before,” he told Miguel. “Not like that.”

  “C’mon, you’re exaggerating. And even if you’re not, it makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

  “Look, Miguelito— when you dive in, then you can talk about if it’s easier or not. You go poking around inside another man’s head and you run the risk of doing either of you some permanent damage, if you don’t walk carefully. When that man’s already rocking without a chair, you’ve really got to mind where you tread. And I told you: it tried to pull me.”

  “Okay, okay. So I’ll be next to you the whole time. You don’t like what’s happening and I’ll wake you up.”

  “You don’t wake a man up from a trance— you bring him out.”

  “Look, I know that, dammit. I’ve done enough of these with you, haven’t I?”

  Ken grunted, but on that score at least his partner was right. If he didn’t trust Miguel on the business-end of things, he did when it came to pulling a snatch-and-grab. And if Hobbs wasn’t currently r
esiding in a mental hospital in town where his usual entourage couldn’t keep an eye on him and protect him from pirates like Ken… They’d never have this narrow window of opportunity again.

  “So, are we going to do this thing tonight, or what?”

  “Okay. But you don’t leave the room whilst I’m in there.”

  “Ken, you’re going to be bringing out inventions and ideas that will make us rich men. Very rich men. Believe you me, after tonight you won’t be able to get rid of me.”

  “I’m not bothered about ‘after tonight’, just tonight.”

  “Trust me.”

  It was time to go back in.

  Though it wasn’t his regular method, Ken picked up the bottle and began to rock it back and forth, letting the slow slosh of brandy carry him down… down…

  It was like he was sucked into the bottle. So sudden, so violent, he didn’t have time to throw out mental arms and scrape nails down the walls to slow his descent.

  He fell into water and knew he was back in that strange churning sea— the one whose waves were iced with screaming faces and whose reflections took solid form and swirled around you before kicking their twisted limbs, and swimming away.

  For those reasons, he didn’t look, but turned and began swimming for the lighthouse. This time, when he arrived at the beach, he fought the urge to sit on the grey sand and catch his breath. The screaming continued behind him and when he still refused to look, it jumped above him and he saw gulls— huge white and grey things, wheeling overhead and screeching at each other.

  As long as they stayed up there, he was fine.

  It was night in Hobbs’s imagined sea, but the moonbeams turned the sand to silver, and the rock beneath the lighthouse glittered. The lighthouse itself was striped in horizontal black and white bands. Everything here was black, white, or made to sparkle by the moon’s electric blue. Ken began to climb the gritty steps cut from the rock.

  That lighthouse, that lone beacon, was heavy in symbolism, of course. A last intermittently firing light, a signal for all to keep away, the last point still standing but surrounded by a hostile, destructive sea.

  You didn’t need to be a psychologist to decipher any of that.

  There was no wind, but as soon as Ken noticed this, suddenly it sprang up, as if responding to his observation. Which was impossible. Hobbs’s mind couldn’t read his thoughts or draw images from him to flesh out his own mindscape. Impossible.

  Oh yeah? Like the fact it pulled you in rather than you having to find your own route? Maybe he sneaked into your mind the same time you thought you were oh-so-silently creeping into his.

  Ken shivered, the wind doubling in response and increasing the chill of his wet clothes. They shouldn’t necessarily be wet, of course. His swim in the sea meant nothing because logic didn’t hold sway here. But his teeth chattered, and his joints hummed and telling yourself everything was an illusion didn’t change the fact it was fucking cold.

  He reached the top of the steps and saw there was no immediate way provided into the lighthouse. He walked around the base and now wished Hobbs was reading his mind because he would like a nice rounded archway and an elevator up to the treasure room, thank-you-very-much.

  None appeared. Instead, about halfway up the side of the lighthouse, he spotted a door, the route up a series of half-ring metal hoops. He stretched for the first— the metal cold enough to cling to and sting his fingers - and started up, his shoes sodden and threatening to slip on every other rung.

  He didn’t bother complaining about the fact he was dressed in a suit - an expensively cut pinstripe - as things in Hobbs’s head weren’t for an intruder to work out. At the last rung, he reached up and pushed at the door. It swung into a room lit by lanterns whose flames began jitterbugging as the wind hurried in ahead of him.

  Ken crawled over the doorway on hands and knees like a marathon swimmer exiting the pool. The wind died and the air in the room suddenly hung still enough to whine.

  There, hunched before the small open door of a furnace, to which he was feeding papers sheet by sheet, was an old, bearded man Ken immediately found himself associating with Hemmingway’s Santiago, the writer’s Old Man of the Sea. Miguel would have been pleased, at least.

  The old man turned his way and Ken recognised Hobbs not because he knew the man personally, but because he’d seen enough pictures to realise that it was a version of the mad genius.

  “Don’t burn any more,” Ken said. “Please.”

  “They’re all I’ve got left to burn,” the old man said and Ken saw the pages bore numbers, diagrams, so much more. He wasn’t a pirate just because he knew how to raid. What you stole from someone else’s ocean had to be carried back out in your own mind. That took training. Years of it. He needed those pages: to read through them and commit them to his own mental treasure chest.

  “Don’t waste them. Let me see them first. Then you can burn them.”

  The old man shook his head slowly and Ken looked at the table beside Hobbs. The inkpots, each with a long, dirty feather curling from them. The stack of unused sheets that waited to be filled. As Ken got to his feet, he saw that there were other pages still spread out on the table showing things written, drawn and annotated. Wild imaginings and bold ideas that reminded him of extracts he’d seen from De Vinci’s old notebooks.

  “You haven’t stopped inventing. You’re locked away here and you’re…” Ken’s eyes went to the small furnace Hobbs was feeding. With one hand the mad old man was creating new wonders, and with the other he was destroying them. Perhaps with only a very limited part of his brain still functioning, Hobbs had to keep clearing its space in order to work his magic. “Let me see them, Mister Hobbs. I can remember them for you. Then we’ll burn them together. What do you think of that idea?”

  Hobbs looked at the pages he was holding.

  Though the door was still open behind Ken, Hobbs’s mind was no longer working the sea, the wind, the gulls. This was his inner sanctum. It was surprising he hadn’t protected it better and had allowed the door to be there in the first place.

  Hobbs held out the pages and Ken made himself move slowly rather than snatch them away.

  “Yes. That’s the idea.”

  The first image told him everything he needed to know. The second expanded it. Machines. Philosophies. Mad, horrific creations and notions that would bring nothing but suffering - and to serve no other discernible end.

  Now he saw them, Ken could not drag his own eyes away. The door slammed, and the fire in the small furnace flared high and scorching and told him more in its flames and shadows. The fire filled first his eyes, then his mind.

  “Ken? Ken? Sorry, I just popped out for a moment. Just a moment. I… oh, Madre mia. Ken?” Ken’s lips parted and he released a slow breath that smelled curiously of smouldering newspaper. Miguel whooped first in relief then in joy as he realised what Ken’s awakening meant. He had made it out with a bounty that would make him, Miguel, a very rich man indeed. “Did you see it? Do you remember it all?”

  Ken’s eyes opened. They were different.

  “You have no idea,” Ken’s blistering mouth whispered, his head twisting round so that new eyes stared straight into Miguel’s. The words had come less as an admonishment, more as a pronouncement.

  SEVENTEEN YEAR SWITCH

  by Paul Hamilton

  Aurora whips off her shirt with the casual exhibitionism of an athlete, revealing a slender, sweat-shiny torso dynamic with brightly colored tattoos. Her breasts are as small as I remember them. The nipples are still pierced the way they were during those horny first months, before the long engagement and the surgeries and the lactation consultants. “Stunning,” I say around a stupid grin. I’m keenly aware of my colorless hair and paunchy midsection. I’m trying as hard as I can not to think about the scar along my jawline.

  “Your turn,” she says.

  “This will be less traumatic to both of us if I just stay clothed and watch you do more of that,” I r
eply.

  “Come on,” she teases, “the whole fun of this for me is seeing what I have to look forward to.”

  I arch an eyebrow and shoot back, “By ‘both of us’ I meant me and your boyfriend, not me and you.”

  She rolls her eyes and gives my arm a playful punch, which jiggles stuff that doesn’t jiggle that way anymore on my Rori. “He’s my fiancé, jerk,” she says with a grin. I raise my hands in surrender, and the moment fades while I continue to feast on the sight of her.

  My heart slams in my chest, both from excitement at feeling twenty-three again and with a weird sense of guilt. The handlers at the clinic said the guilt was perfectly normal, which provided them a convenient opening to introduce us to the Mutual Permission Agreement. I imagine my wife over in the other wing of the building, staring at a skinny kid I’m sure she barely remembers and thinking, “Am I going to be able to cram seventeen years worth of bring-me-to-orgasm training into ninety minutes with this twerp?”

  “What’s funny?” Aurora asks.

  “Nothing, just thinking about my wife and your fiancé over there.”

  She looks concerned. “Are you getting jealous?”

  I take her hands. They haven’t changed that much over the years. Aurora still keeps them carefully manicured, a luxury Rori dispensed with after the twins were born. “Honey, no. That dip-spitting idiot can have her for all I care.”

  Her jaw cocks to the side and she tucks in her lower lip, a restrained smile I’m familiar with. Did she always make that face? It’s hard to remember. “Hey, that’s my dip-spitting idiot you’re talking about,” she says in a tone I recognize as indulgent but uncomfortable. “Anyway, we’re supposed to be focusing on our limited time. So are you going to strip or do I have erectile dysfunction and exasperating bashfulness to look forward to?”

  Shaking my head, I stand, unbuckle my belt, and step out of my loafers. I let the weight of my wallet drag my pants down. The bulging tent pole in my underpants dispels both concerns. Aurora leans back and opens her legs a little, a silent and confident invitation Rori would never have been comfortable enough to express at this or any other age. There is more than the tattoos separating the two versions. I crawl over her and slide her shorts off. She watches passively, expectant but not excited or nervous. I wonder what subtle differences are in her past, which conversations my other version will have that diverge from the ones Rori and I had. The first time Rori and I slept together, she shook with timidity to the point I wondered if she might have some sort of sex-based palsy.