Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  The irony that he now sought refuge from her here, when he’d spent restless days in this house hoping to make her happy. Even if the museum wouldn’t work out, maybe he would just hole up in the cottage like a hermit. Tape up the windows.

  Dwayne came back in with the camping lantern and a heavy black battery-powered device that seemed to be the pump. “It fits in the valve like this, see?” Slowly, the mattress began to inflate. “You think you’re going to be warm enough?”

  “Sure. I’m actually really excited to sleep here,” Vikram said, trying to convince himself. “After all, a genius slept here. Sort of.”

  “In this room?”

  “In the big room, I think. But still.”

  “That was my grandma’s room.” The mattress made little popping noises as the air forced apart layers of plastic that had been stuck together. “Me and my brother Shawn slept over all the time when we were kids. She already had some strange collections—that I remember. Meat grinders. Thimbles. I used to like the souvenir glasses she had best, all painted with flowers or animals. I would make him take them out of their box and unwrap the newspaper, every time we were here. Our mom would drop us off and leave us, usually just for the weekend. One time, though, it was more like a month. My grandma was still working then—she was in her fifties, probably. She did bookkeeping for a construction company. I remember she took the first Monday and Tuesday off to stay with us, but when my mom didn’t show up after that, she just gave Shawn the key and told him to keep an eye on me. Told me to keep an eye on him and call 911 if his breathing got bad. I could tell she was feeling guilty, like it was a really irresponsible thing for her to do, her leaving us alone. Guess she didn’t know our mom had been leaving us in charge of each other since Shawn was in grade school.”

  “How much older was your brother?”

  “Two years. He was twenty-three when he died, and that was three years ago. That means I’m older than he ever got to be. Much as I try not to, I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It’s funny—with an old person, you can see why they get called home. But Shawn. Guess it still don’t make sense to me.”

  “Yeah,” Vikram said.

  “I should go see his grave. Tomorrow, I’ll do it.” Dwayne got to his feet, leaving the pump connected to the still-expanding mattress, and walked to the door, peering out into the hall, the other bedroom. His back to Vikram, he continued to talk. “We weren’t supposed to go in that big bedroom when my grandmother wasn’t home, but of course that’s what we liked to do. She had the stuff she said was valuable back there. All these dolls she’d ordered out of ads in the TV Guide that she kept in special clear plastic cases.”

  Vikram thought of the sentient heads in jars from Sleight’s early novel, The Pain Ray. “Weird.”

  “Yeah. They scared us, like Snow White at the end of the Disney movie, that dead lady lying there in her glass coffin, waiting for the prince to kiss her. Wait. You wouldn’t have seen that.”

  “We had our own Snow Whites. Half a dozen, probably—cartoon, live-action, versions from Indian cinema—just not the one you’re talking about. I don’t remember a glass coffin in any of them.”

  “That shit was pretty dark for kids. But me, I always wanted to look at the dolls, and at that painting Grandma had. Took up the whole wall, almost, from floor to ceiling. Shawn made up a game. One of the rules was you couldn’t step any closer to it than the edge of the carpet by the bed. So I couldn’t see whatever the little people on the edge were up to. Still, that iceberg and that ship gave me a chill.”

  “Iceberg?”

  “It was a big old thing.”

  “Iceberg,” Vikram repeated dumbly. He remembered sitting in the abandoned mental hospital in the children’s ward while the sticks ran from room to room below. His breaths, shallow in the pitch dark, his extreme sensitivity to the input of his four remaining senses. The feeling that he was in the presence of a ghost. He felt that now: every inch of skin alive and his heart a dead, frozen block.

  “The big waves and the storm clouds and the ice. I’ll tell you, it made me not even want to go in the paddleboats you could rent at Marine Park in the summer.” The Coleman lantern lit Dwayne’s face from below, shadowing his forehead and cheeks, illuminating his eye sockets, nose, and jaw like a skull in reverse. A parody of someone telling a scary story around a campfire.

  Of course Vikram had seen reproductions of the painting, color plates in library books. He’d read Sleight’s own childish description from his collected schoolboy letters, tho they cast out to the drowning man he can’t ever seem to find their ropes, papa, and the blue sea-ice shews the water to be killing cold, not to mention technical monographs written by experts. Still, he said, “Tell me. What did it look like?”

  “The sky was on fire. Sunset, big ocean, big sky. Blueish-white icebergs and the top of a drowning ship. That’s what it was. And the frame—big and heavy, gold-painted wood. Looked like something that belonged in—well, a museum.”

  “Hey!” Her own voice sounded shaky and jarringly loud; there were no cars around, for once, no one outside but her. “Hey, you!” She ran toward the two figures—Ayanna Donaldson and the stranger. Over her shoulder rode her stars. She felt them there, faint and weak but asserting themselves nevertheless through the smog and light pollution. Following her.

  At the sound of her voice, the man jerked his head. Behind him, Donaldson looked up too, her eyes dark like pits, but she didn’t appear scared. Hel pictured that first card she’d found on the ground at Kent Avenue and its Truth deck analogue, the Sword Queen. In Smith’s design, that queen was the one who appeared to sleep sitting up, while all the eyes carved on her throne stared impassively outward, watching out for her.

  If Jonas had come to Hel that night in Prospect Park when she yelled, if he’d run to her arms instead of seeking outside help—she’d never said this to Jonas, but of course he must have known it, must have learned this lesson more indelibly than it could have been taught any other way—if her son had stayed with her, she wouldn’t have been able to protect him.

  But this time it would be different.

  “Back up, or I’ll call the sticks! The cops!” Donaldson’s face, frozen like wood. “I’ve got my phone ready. I’m going to take a picture of you, and when they find you, she’s going to press charges.” The weight of the knife dragged down the pocket of Vikram’s yellow-and-black ski parka, the coat that kept her warm while she surveilled. She thought of Vikram at the storage warehouse, how she used to worry about him patrolling alone inside the cyclone fence. But he was fine. He’d shown her how he would protect himself. He’d demonstrated clubbing someone, in the safe domesticity of their apartment, with that standard-issue flashlight. Indeed, an improvised weapon could be much better than a blade. A blade could always be turned against you.

  She kept her hand on it, inside her pocket. Safer not to show that she had it, but if the man didn’t obey her, she would stab him right in the eye.

  The would-be thief dropped his hand from Donaldson’s arm. “Go,” Hel ordered. “Get the fuck out of here.” Swords, the suit associated with action and danger. Hel stood firm, like the youth in the five of that suit, a figure who treads upon the weapons of his enemies, smiling cruelly as they flee him. A card signifying conflict and tension. Loss.

  Without a backward glance, Donaldson’s attacker jogged away from them—heading toward the river, turning right when he reached the corner—and then they couldn’t see him anymore. Hel was surprised to feel regret. She’d wanted more. In the Ten of Swords, a man lies on the shore, ten swords growing out of his body, pinning him to the sand. “Do you want me to call 911?” she asked.

  “No.” Donaldson moved as if to crouch, to pick up the spilled contents of her purse, but then half fell. Catching herself, she sat ungracefully on the sidewalk. “God. Actually. I guess we should.”

  Hel punched in the numbers and then handed over the phone so Donaldson could give the address. Then she helped Don
aldson to a nearby stoop, the baby-soft feel of the sleeve of the leather jacket reminding Hel that this wasn’t a dream.

  Her job had been both destruction and reconstruction. She would take a bone plate using a craniotome and drill, shape it to fit the defect, the area that had been excised. She would harvest strips from the scalp and suture it all in place. Right away, while the patient was still anesthetized, she’d be able to tell how well he or she had tolerated the procedure. She had an instinct for that. Donaldson’s scared eyes were somehow harder to read. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m—yes,” Donaldson said. “I think so. Thank you. Thank you. That was really—are you all right?”

  “Did you know him? That man?”

  “No.” Donaldson looked off in the direction he’d run. Hel noted the positions of the lit bridges, the shapes of the Midtown buildings, familiar and unfamiliar. “You can see the Chrysler Building,” Donaldson said. The contents of the purse were still strewn across the sidewalk. She took a lipstick tube in her hands, uncapping and recapping it. “From the roof of our building. Our realtor told us that. He called this neighborhood ‘up-and-coming,’ but I know an MTA employee got murdered inside the Hunters Point station, the year we moved here. The killer—whoever it was—got away with it.”

  It was the job of the patient-care team to test for neurological defect, afterward. Hel would make herself scarce for this, when she could. She didn’t want to be thanked. She didn’t want to be asked about future prognosis. After she left the operating theater trance, her own hands would sometimes shake, as they were shaking now. That series of little snaps as Donaldson played with the lipstick cap. They bothered her. “You should really carry a weapon.” Hel said, “A gun or whatever, to protect yourself. They’re easier to get here, aren’t they?”

  “You seem to have these two beliefs that are in fundamental conflict. That everything is worse here than it was where you came from. And that everything’s easier for us—that we’re all soft and we don’t know about danger. Which is it?”

  “No matter what I answer, you’ll tell me I’m wrong.”

  “People are the same, that’s what I think. People are people. Good and bad, safe and dangerous. People are always the same.” In the distance, a siren approached. Donaldson heard it too. “I guess you should go,” she said. “We took out a restraining order against you. I’d hate for you to get into trouble. You know how cops are, with that UDP murder case in the news.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you’ve given me back my book. You owe me now.”

  Donaldson laughed, a little hysterically, but Hel wasn’t joking.

  “Where is the book?”

  Donaldson put the cap of the lipstick down on the step next to her. With both hands, she twisted the base of the tube. A waxy nub grew in the dark. “I handed it back to you, Helen. I never saw it after that night, the party.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  Donaldson shrugged. She tossed the open lipstick to the ground. “I’m never going to wear this again, am I?”

  “I guess not.”

  Now, the unmarked police car turned off the avenue, lights flashing on the dash. “Go,” Donaldson urged.

  “Yeah, I’m going.” Hel began to walk toward the Citgo, then turned to call over her shoulder. “Hey. Next time, don’t stay quiet, at least. You need to yell for help. Take it from me.”

  She was all the way to Jackson Avenue when the cops pulled up alongside.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: ORSON YOUNG, AGE 54, QUEENS

  In 1905, railroad men calculated out the perfect spot in the desert for refueling the trains of the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad, and those moneymen plotted out my hometown, drawing the streets clean, with rulers. For a hundred years, it kept that same spirit: a place for supplying practical demands. They never built no dams to light up the desert, and gambling wasn’t tolerated. Bone-dry town in a dusty state. That’s where I grew up.

  I guess they call it Sin City here.

  But the Las Vegas of my childhood was neighborhoods of four-block apartments built in the ’70s to house a population of two hundred thousand, the built-up ruler streets lined with dwarf palms. Everyone who wasn’t military worked for one of the two big visor games development companies in town. Missile defense and missile sims, those were our industries. Seemed dull to me at fifteen, sixteen. I dreamed of sky-tall neon buildings and cold, cold ocean. Couldn’t wait for my call-up, hoped to be stationed far away, see another slice of the world, somewhere else.

  Then I went somewhere else.

  I went rats. I guess they call that bats here. Or bugs.

  You know—crazy.

  Dementia praecox was my diagnosis. Schizophrenia. It started out I heard things. Not voices. Ill spits, battle taps. I always liked music, but this was entirely else. Unseen enemies, insulting me in rhyme, and I spit right back to them. Then I started seeing things too. I remember snags of time out on the back streets and in the desert, before my moms got me sectioned and locked up tight. For my own good.

  After some stretch, seemed like the volume got turned down so it was bearable, and I found I was on a new drug. Was staying at a Supervised Home out on Alameda Boulevard by the remains of the Old Mormon Fort. I’d lived there for years, they told me. I’d missed my chance for Alt Service. I’d missed everything. My counselor wasn’t hopeful for me, neither. He said, “The biggest obstacle with prescribing this treatment tends to be a poor rate of compliance.”

  But I was scared of the older guys I saw in the halls, who’d led rat lives for even longer. What curses echoed in their ears? I didn’t want to know. So I complied.

  First I learned to manage the chores on the chore list. When I stayed with that, they got me a job doing supervised janitor work in the public housing buildings. The routine of it helped, the patterns. And the little orange tablets. After a year, I moved out of the Home and applied for Guild training as a coolant tech. For years, I worked that job, inspecting ductwork all over Vegas. I was happy enough, and I knew I couldn’t risk a change. Even when my moms died and I got her pension, I did nothing.

  The day I turned fifty, I heard a voice—but it was my own, this time. I said to myself, they got them pills anywhere. You always wanted to leave. This is when. New York is where. So I bought a one-way airship ticket. I told myself, what have you got to lose now? Nothing.

  Turns out I was wrong about almost all of that.

  When I saw my personal number on the ordinator screen, when I reported to Calvary and they scanned me through the barriers, I was more terrified than anyone else in the entry. Why me, I thought, and not others who were healthy? On the other side, I told anyone who would listen that I needed help, that there was something wrong with me. The Debrief officers got me evaluated and the doctor put me on something right away, and I knew it wouldn’t work. I’d been on my medication at home for two and a half decades, but I didn’t know the chemical composition. The look of these new white pills almost made me cry—not my friendly orange moons. I took the first dose and waited.

  UDPs. Other people say we all bats. I look at the aimless and angry folks in my Reintegration Education group, and I know what they mean. But that’s not bats. That’s just standard UFO shit. Alien is how anybody sane would feel, in the face of a life that’s so unfair.

  As for me, seems like the drugs they got in this world work for me as good as the other. A miracle.

  I don’t really like spending time with UDPs. Instead, I go and sit with my man down the block. His name is Ralph. Guy about my same age, same diagnosis. He lives open-roof. They call that sleeping rough here. He ain’t from my world, Ralph. He fought in a war I don’t know nothing about. He’s my brother, all the same. A rat is a rat. Or a bat. Or a bug.

  I got things I think about at Reintegration Education, when Officer Dunn asks us to share. About the way I’m rushing to learn a whole language, because my native tongue of slang and nuance is suddenly rare. About what it feels like hea
ring gootches talk aliens right to my face when they don’t know I got the wrong ID in my pocket. Worst, about the shape of the mountains. I think about how the same mountains still float above Vegas, waiting for my visit, but I can’t go there knowing the city itself is gone. How I miss that empty, nothing place, my home. And that feeling after I left it all through the blue, that long backward glance.

  I can’t say these things out loud. I been taken apart before and I don’t want to be taken apart no further. But I sit with Ralph sometimes, and I whisper it to him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Can I use a telephone directory?” she asked the officer who’d accompanied her to the wall telephone.

  “Nope.” The officer scrutinized Hel with a level of interest that suggested she was new on the job. Either that, or she’d never seen a UDP before.

  If Hel hadn’t been following Donaldson last night, no one would have stopped that man from attacking her. Maybe the man would have taken Donaldson’s money, her rings. Or maybe he would have beaten her, raped her. Maybe Donaldson would have struggled and maybe he would have killed her.

  Donaldson had told the truth. She was a curator, after all. She understood the value of artifacts.

  The only phone numbers Hel knew by heart were Vikram’s and Carlos Oliveira’s, and Vikram never picked up calls from numbers he didn’t recognize. He hadn’t even figured out how to set up his voicemail, yet. What she wanted was a lawyer.

  “Can you possibly look something up for me on the internet?”

  “No. You want to make a call or not?”

  “Fine.” Hel punched in Oliveira’s office number.

  Unlikely that he would be in this late.

  Six rings and then Oliveira’s recorded voice. The tone.

  She wasn’t supposed to feel disappointed.

  “Uh, this is Helen Nash,” she told the machine. “I’ve been arrested. I know you don’t care, but maybe you could text Vikram Bhatnagar and let him know what happened? I can’t reach him because—well, never mind. Anyway, please tell him I’m being held at the . . .” Here, she turned to her babysitter, who stood five feet away with her arms crossed over her uniformed chest, listening in.