by Jerry
How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?
Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.
“There’s a problem,” I said to the director.
“It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”
He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.
“Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.
“That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”
“Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”
“No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”
I sputtered, trying to explain. “But, but . . .”
“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”
He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.
“I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing clothes, sitting in a park . . .”
“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”
He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”
He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.
“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”
With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”
The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.
“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”
I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.
I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.
There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers.
Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.
1986
CHIMERA DREAMS
Gregg Keizer
These cloaks disguise reality and blur the distinction between man and beast
On the other side of the door the werewolf howled. He wanted in. Enough to scrape at the wood and even throw himself against it. sending shudders through the frame. I sat in the deep chair on the far side of the room, my legs and dress tucked under me. I swallowed the last of the wine and threw the shimmering crystal against the door. For a second the sound of the spinning fragments drowned out his yells.
“God damn it, Kirt, you were told not to come here again,” I yelled as loudly as I could, hoping that the werewolf would hear me over his own howling.
I got up from my chair, reached for the thick wooden cane that leaned against it, and walked a bit unsteadily across the room. I’d drunk too much, and my feet kept catching in the wrinkles of the rug. The werewolf—no, Kirt actually—kept up his yowl. How can he stand to listen to himself? I thought as I began unlatching the door. Another shudder went through the wood frame. Then I flung the door open and lifted the cane.
“Shut up. shut up, do you hear me?” I screamed, swinging the cane as hard as I could across his shoulder. The silver handle, in the shape of a bison, slammed into the thick hair. I didn’t have the strength to really hurt him. But Kirt still shrieked in pain. Fake pain; he’d seen the cane’s silver head and screamed because the drug he’d taken forced him to. By legend, silver was agony to werewolves, and so Kirt, who thought himself a werewolf while he was on fantacin, screamed.
As he recoiled from the blows, he retreated across the corridor until his back was against the papered wall, his paws before his face. I put my hands on my knees and bent over, trying to draw sweeter air into my lungs. A snarl from the werewolf forced me to look up over the rim of my glasses, and I tightened my grip on the cane. But he didn’t lunge, only stood warily five feet away.
He was tall and rangy, at least six feet tall if one counted the tufts of fur at the top of his ears. His face was only vaguely wolflike; it had as many human characteristics as lupine. An overlarge nose jutted from the matted hair around the circles of his eyes, and his chin was decidedly cleft. Wolves’ chins were not like that; I had seen photos of the last wolves found in northern Canada. His ears w
ere pointed and a bit bent at the tips. Huge canines dropped over the lower lip, but they appeared more awkward than dangerous. And Kirt’s paws had opposing thumbs, something evolution hadn’t given the wolf.
It was all part of the chimera cloak Kirt wore. Just an illusion fabricated by the living crystals woven into the cloak’s fabric. Cloak was a poor word, for it was more a tight-fitting shirt that ended above the waist. Depending on the pattern and type of crystals, the holographic projection the cloak manufactured forced the viewer to believe different things. Kirt had chosen a chimera cloak made to show a werewolf, and so that image was what I saw. I knew that it was really Kirt who stood in front of me behind the fur and crooked limbs, but my eyes could see only the twisted vision.
And Kirt. Even he saw himself this way. Not only that, but fantacin, the drug he was on, convinced him that he was a werewolf. When he ran on two legs, fantacin made him feel he loped on four. When he let loose an all-too-human cry, he imagined a wolf’s bay. It was what made him fear my silverheaded cane. To those of us who changed to were-animals each night, fantacin was our release. We remembered our humanity only when we tried something impossible. The first chimera werewolf who thought his canines were real had been shocked when five teeth broke as he tried to crack the femur of an antelope in the zoo compound.
Kirt was coming off the fantacin. Fear always makes one come down faster. He did not metamorphose slowly into his human shape, as in some poorly done dissolve in an old movie. He stayed a werewolf, for his chimera cloak was still on. but his movements and gestures became subtly human. His paw groped at his chest as if he were searching for cigarettes.
Then he was Kirt, the cloak a piece of glittering black cloth he held in his hands. He brushed blond hair from his eyebrows and slumped to the floor, rubbing his shoulder and neck where I’d caned him. Sweat slid down his face, and he wiped it with the chimera cloak. The hallway smelled thick, a strange sweetness that hung in the air. He grinned idiotically at me.
“Have fun. Courtney?” he asked, pointing a finger at the cane I still held.
“You’re a bastard, Kirt. You really are.” I said, smiling back at him, and watched his grin disappear.
“I just wanted to get in to see her.”
“She’s not home, Kirt,” I said. “She told you never to come here again. Especially this way.” I shuddered at the thought of what he might have done if he’d gotten inside the apartment while fantacin burned in him.
“I wasn’t going to do anything.” he said, eyeing the cane. He still seemed wary of it. “I knew I’d come down off the drug before I got inside.”
“It’s not that accurate, Kirt. Don’t you think I know?” I asked. I swallowed the dark red capsules, too. but I played a different part. I glanced down at the bison head on the cane’s tip. “You don’t have any more control over fantacin than anyone else. Don’t lie to me, Kirt. I’m not stupid.”
“Where is she, Courtney?” He stood up slowly, using the wall as a brace.
“You don’t seem to understand. Hellea doesn’t want to see you again. Not when you’re real, not when you’re that,” I said, pointing at the chimera cloak he held. “If you come around again, Kirt, I’ll use the revolver.” His face drained of color. He was free of the drug, and his fear was now of metal bullets, not the self-made fright of silver that fantacin manufactured.
“Why do you play these games, Courtney?” he asked finally. “Hellea still loves me. You took her away from me, and I want her back. You’d see she still loves me if you just let me talk to her.” I drew a breath and forced my voice beyond a whisper.
“You want her back, Kirt? For what? So you can beat her again? Hellea’s told me everything, Kirt. You’re violent. Insane and violent. She’ll never go back to you.” I paused and drew another breath. “Don’t come here again. Stay away.”
“Everything?” he asked. “She told you all of it?” I nodded. He was quiet for several seconds. “We’re not so very different. I think. We both want Hellea. But I want her enough to kill you to get her.” I backed up a step toward the apartment door, the cane now held before my breasts. He stayed on the other side of the corridor and kept his gaze on the silver bison tip as he spoke. “It doesn’t matter where she goes. I’ll find her even if she hides behind you.”
“How?” was all I could manage.
He touched his nose, once on each side of his nostrils. “I’m a werewolf, Courtney. A real werewolf. Scent will lead me.”
I couldn’t help staring, and I heard my voice catch in the rear of my throat. “God, you are insane.” Then Kirt pointed with the hand that held the chimera cloak, and I followed its direction until I saw the thing on the floor. It was a small animal of some kind. All I could see was its twisted throat and the slight dark line on the floor. That was what I’d smelled. I realized. Its death smell.
“For Hellea,” he said, moving his hand to indicate the small, dead form. “Tell her I was here.” I held my hands at my mouth to keep the sourness inside me. I knew I was shaking my head, and the moan that I heard must have been mine. “And for you, Courtney. Take it as a warning.”
A shrill, faraway howl came through the thick walls from outside, and Kirt laughed softly as he looked at me. Then he was running down the hall, heading for the darkness at the head of the stairs. In the dim light just above the first step, I thought I saw him hesitate and slip his chimera cloak on once more. Then only his footsteps remained, their sounds broken finally by the howling from Outside.
I heard the key turn in the lock and hefted the cane in my hand, moving slightly in the chair as I braced my feet on the floor. If it wasn’t Hellea I would be ready.
“What’s-that?” Hellea asked as she closed the door behind her. I still held the silver-tipped cane, but now it felt only foolish. “Do you want me to move out already?” And she smiled, that Hellea smile that made my anxieties and the memories of Kirt’s face wither and fall from my mind.
“He was here again,” I said, my eyes on her lips. They were nothing like the thin streaks of Kirt’s mouth. “I had to use this to drive him away.”
“I’d hoped he wouldn’t come back,” she said. She stood in the center of the room and seemed awkward and stiff as she spoke. “I told him he shouldn’t come here again. I told him I didn’t love him.” She paused. “I wonder how he found us?”
Although we’d been lovers for almost two months now, Hellea had moved into my apartment only four days before. Last night Kirt pounded on the door, shouting for her. Their screaming argument in the hallway hadn’t been hard to hear through the door.
Then I told her what had happened between Kirt and me. When I mentioned the small, dead thing still in the hallway, of how its throat was torn open, she looked away from me.
“He said it was a gift for you and a warning for me.” Hellea was silent and stared at the closed door. “I’m calling the p.o.’s.”
Finally she moved toward my chair and knelt beside it. I put the cane down on the other side of the chair. Her hand was on my shoulder, warm and comfortable. She brushed her fingers along my eyebrows, circled the edges of my ears. I felt the blood warm my face.
“They won’t want to talk to us about it.” Her voice was soft.
“Perhaps. But he’s killed something. That may make a difference.” I pulled her hands from my face, stood, and walked to the phone. She followed me.
“Once they find out chimera is involved, they’ll make excuses. You know that; everyone does. They’ll apologize and say they’ll send someone out to investigate, but no one will show. They never do.”
“But Kirt’s insane. He killed . . .”
“Murder they’ll listen to, even if you tell them chimera is part of it,” she said, her hands on my shoulders again. “They have to come then. But for a lover’s quarrel? A dead animal caught in the park? Hardly.”
It was true. Crimes were almost impossible to solve when chimera cloaks were involved because they made perfect disguises. That was why the p.o.‘s c
oncentrated on murders or rapes. Minor violations of the law were ignored, for the most part. They weren’t worth the time.
‘Just let me call and tell them what he’s done. Once they hear what he said to me, they’ll at least listen.” I picked up the phone.
“What did he say?” Hellea asked. Her hand tightened almost imperceptibly on my shoulder.
“That he’d track us by our scent,” I said, punching numbers on the phone.
“What else?”
“That he was a real werewolf.”
Her hand twitched again. When Hellea said nothing, I turned to her. She was still, her eyes closed.
“He is insane,” she whispered, and I heard her breath hiss from between her teeth. Her hand closed over mine and pushed the phone receiver back into its cradle. “Don’t bother with the p.o.‘s. They won’t bother with us.” She paused. “Well deal with Kirt ourselves. I promise.”
“If that’s what you want,” I said. She nodded. I couldn’t understand her hesitancy in calling the p.o.‘s, but she was upset. I shrugged and let the matter drop.
“I want something else, Courtney.” She was not very subtle in leading me from the talk of Kirt and madness and the p.o.‘s, but again I said nothing, for she was suddenly pressed against me, her curious perfume enveloping me. her hands busy at my neck, then at my waist. Her touch was so delicate and sure that it drove the fear from me, and for those moments I was only in love.
In the coolness of our sheets we lay next to each other, shoulders touching. Hellea’s smell was everywhere, even on my fingers when I lifted them to my nostrils. Pungent, yet intoxicating.
“Like it?” she asked, and her voice was deeper, more in the back of her throat.
