The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  The real stuff. Hadn’t that been my mission all these years? Was someone finally going to tell me? I trembled in anticipation. Also I was lonely.

  John plopped the black tape in the deck and I expected music.

  But it was words.

  People talking. Two men and a woman. Talking jargon.

  And a strange familiar hiss their voices seemed to swim in. Didn’t John believe in Dolby?

  “Doppler’s gone lulu.”

  “486? That can’t be right.”

  “Shear reports from Denver.”

  “Coffee’s cold.”

  “Want some more?”

  “Thanks, Jill, but if I have any more and I’m gonna have to open a window.”

  (Laughter)

  (John hit the fast forward button, smiled and winked at me.)

  “Descending to 10,000 feet. Check the flaps, will you?”

  “Systems fine. Denver in about six minutes.”

  “Remember when I asked you to dance, Jill?”

  “You’re a lousy dancer.”

  “I’m better horizontal — What was that?”

  (A pause. A noise.)

  “Damn, check backup.”

  “Denver, this is US AIR 224 we’re having a —”

  “Shit!”

  “Let me do it!”

  The woman: “Can I help?”

  “SHUTTUP.”

  “You got it! You got it!”

  “No.

  “Hold it. Hold it steady.”

  (An infinite pause. Then voices talking quickly, overlapping.)

  “Denver this is 224, say again.”

  “Hold it! Hold it!”

  “Jill? I’m sorry!”

  “Hold it, dammit.”

  “Up! Up! You can do it!”

  “Wait!”

  “No!”

  “God!”

  “No!”

  “Fuck!”

  “God!”

  “NOOO!”

  (A pause)

  A whisper. “Mom, I love you.”

  (Silence)

  I had closed my eyes. My mouth was full of the menagerie of fluids you call “spit.” I swallowed.

  I heard the click as John shut off the tape.

  I opened my eyes to see him smiling grimly.

  “That’s not even the best one. I got ‘em all. Every last black box recording ever made.” He folded his arms over his chest. “My uncle’s on the FAA investigative unit. I get him primo dope. He gives me these.”

  His arm swept over the wall of black tapes.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “Here’s the thing. You know what?” He held his palms together as if in prayer. “They’re all the same. Like some formula scenario some situation network hack kept rewriting over and over. Little variations to throw the folks at home off the scent. I got ’em all . . . every last one of them.” He laughed. “They’re all the same!”

  He did that thing with his hands. “God!”

  He did it again. “Fuck!”

  And again. “MOM!” he shouted to the ceiling.

  I got up and made for the door.

  “Wait,” he said, grabbing my arm. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I — I thought you could take it.”

  I looked at his face. Hope and joy.

  Patrick thought: You are a sickening breed. An exception to the embedded order of the universe. Why would anyone want to be you? Why would I? It is true you have baseball. It is true your gestures and hotdogs are sublime. You have developed the most advanced Entertainment Industry in the known U. Also you have Robert De Niro. You have created skyscrapers, drum solos and scotch tape. You have intoxicated me for four assignments and I will miss the sex, but I cannot tolerate this expedition another second.

  Also I am lonely.

  “Don’t you see, man?” John said. “Don’t you see? This Means Something!”

  I bolted down the stairs and I didn’t look back.

  He called down from the top. It was the last thing he ever said to me. “You don’t understand, man! It’s Beautiful!”

  I caught my breath three blocks away and leaned against a cage of goats. Their eyes were yellow like Mother’s. A blind black guitarist with creamy cataract eyes stopped his strumming and said in a raspy voice, “Deep breaths, brother,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

  When I finally got to my office building my secretary was embarrassed at having to explain that I had no reason to be there. “Your wife called,” she said with a smoldering glare. “I can’t believe I ever slept with you.”

  “Where do I go now?” I asked, remembering the hotel.

  “Try the elevator,” she said.

  I did. I got on. It was empty. Oh God, how beautiful an empty elevator is — You have no idea.

  I got off on the thirteenth floor.

  Had I been well I would have noticed, but as it was I took it as pure luck that every other office building in America but mine skips this floor. The 13th floor. I thought: There is a good reason why buildings across the world have no thirteenth floors. I am assured of this. But at that moment Patrick had no idea what it was.

  Also he was lonely.

  The entire floor, like so much of reality, was under construction. One desk stood out amidst the rolls of pink insulation and the unconnected wires. A grey desk occupied by a laptop and a blonde.

  I sat on the desk, picked up her streaming Tiparillo and took a long satisfying drag.

  “Where on earth have you been?” Matilda queried.

  “I am a middle-aged man, Matilda, experiencing paranoia. I am on drugs. I need to lie down.”

  She looked at me.

  “Also, I am going to La Guardia. Also I have purchased a hot dog. Also I am wanting sex.”

  Matilda is a competent debriefer. She knows about Reentry. She touched the tattoo on my inner elbow — the only visible sign of difference — and my mind was clear. I knew who I am.

  I am after all not human.

  “Dump,” she said.

  This is how it happens. You start off with an abundance. You use it up like an appetite. You end up like everybody else. Death. Erasure. 23 Skidoo.

  I knelt down, grasped both sides of her attractive laptop and stuck my tongue into the floppy slot. When I was done, she asked, “Better?”

  “Thirteenth row. Nothing on the wings. Aisle seat,” I chuckled as I tasted the residue. “Fuck. God. Mother.” If this was worth The Occupation, you could have fooled me.

  Matilda did something with my ears which made me very tired. “Log out,” she sighed. “Someone will replace you. Believe me, Patrick, it wasn’t a very good novel. It lacked a certain surface plausibility which all human genres require.”

  I have never trusted the obvious. This is why I was chosen. “Why don’t you spell it out for me?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Also, it sucked.” She took me by the elbow and walked me to a long row of chairs. “You are an alien. Metaslipped into human form to gather data. The substitution is complete but temporary. That may be good science but it’s lousy literature. Take a seat.”

  I watched her walk away. The undulating buttocks of a female is one of the leftover fringe benefits of Occupation. Gestures, you know? I sat in a molded grey plastic chair and smelled the tang of mustard beside me. The hot dog vendor winked at me and said: “I’m Wayne and I’ll be your waitperson this evening. Our special is mutilated beef.” He shook my hand. “A little joke there to take the edge off.”

  “That’s all?” I asked.

  “Yup,” he said.

  “I’m not really?”

  “Nope, you’re not,” he nodded.

  “Is this some Scrooge thing?” I asked. The human habit I had acquired of regarding all reality as a metaphor was hard to shake. I’m told it is the last thing we shed.

  The hot dog vendor said, “I prefer the quantum paradigm. Unlimited choices. Alternate yous. Even De Niro doesn’t repeat himself. You’re off duty. Not needed.”

  “Not needed,” I said
, wonderingly.

  It felt, after all my fears, a great relief. I was off duty. Also I would never disappoint my wife again. Still, I missed the part on page 422 where the alien starts eating Dove Bars.

  The vendor smirked and said, “Cattle. That’s all they are. Stupid cattle to be laser splayed and gutted. A species so tamed and egocentric they can co-exist for decades with an alien race in their midst and not know the difference.”

  He was talking about humans. I had given up on humans. I was off duty. “The difference?” I asked.

  “Between a copy and an original,” he said.

  We are warned that weeping is the last stage of Reentry. I began to weep. “I’m not listening to you. I remember my life. I have all the files. I had a wife. I enjoyed lima beans. We rented videos. I have a cold and I forgot my dosage. I am not erased. Please. Please?”

  “Take it easy, will ya? This is the thirteenth floor,” he said. “We’re off duty.”

  The door opened and a fat man held a list in both hands. He was so bored. I felt sorry for him.

  “Now don’t piss him off on your first day back, okay? This is why you should be careful with cold medicine and pink questionnaires and especially metaphors. Metaphors only take you so far.”

  “Also I am lonely,” I concluded with a sob.

  The Manager came out of the door and looked at the seated men. “Next,” he said.

  23 Skidoo.

  Charles said he wrote the first draft of this in one sitting, drawing from his experiences as a parent and the memories of his own childhood. It sure ended up being a fantastic story. Charles published the three novel Traitor to the Crown historical fantasy series set during the Revolutionary War. As for this cover, Tom Simonton sent a very large original painting, and the image used for issue #32 was a smaller section of it.

  HAIL, CONDUCTOR

  CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY

  Railroad tracks, silent all these months, slant off in both directions. Maddy wouldn’t know which way to choose.

  She stands at a window on the second floor. The low sun pushes the shadow of her house across the dead end of the street, over mud and chuckholes, until it touches the rails. Beyond the railroad tracks, broken lights on tapered stilts stand blind watch over a wasteland of rubble and derelict cars all the way to the soccer stadium.

  Maddy is five years old.

  “Five and a half,” she told the guard at the checkpoint, last time she went through.

  She’s not sure about the half, but it seems like forever since her last birthday party, so that’s what she said.

  Downstairs, inside the house, her father and members of his militia unit argue with each other to fill the time until darkness. Bad words, shouts, and laughter curl up like strands of smoke from their home-rolled cigarettes. Once, when the house was empty, Maddy swept up the flakes of loose tobacco from under the couches, along with the dropped cartridges and spent casings, and buried them outside in the dirt where the flowers used to be, and waited for them to grow.

  Tonight, she chokes on the smoke, winces at the words, and, because she isn’t tired, crawls out the window onto the sagging balcony.

  The wind frisks through her coat pockets, perfunctorily, without ill intent or the expectation of finding anything. Just like the checkpoint guards. She wears her coat to bed because there’s no heat in the house, though winter’s worst has passed. The maple tree in the back yard is gone, even the roots dug up for firewood. She looks through the branches of the apple tree and into the roofless garage. Her dad saved the apple tree for her. He says that summer will come and she can eat apples again. She can hide in the garage later, maybe, if she gets scared.

  A gunshot in the living room — a firecracker pop, only a 9mm, she thinks — and everybody laughs.

  Maddy scoots over to the edge of the balcony, as far away from the house as she can go. The wood creaks under her small thin feet, and a splinter snags her canvas sneaker. She pulls it out, careful not to lean on the railing because the railing isn’t safe. She squeezes her body behind the corner post, as much as she can, to hide from the snipers in the stadium.

  She’s a brave girl. Everyone says so. She carries things for her dad, small things, through the checkpoint, into the other neighborhood, and everyone says how brave she is. Her mom lives on the other side, and when Maddy went through the checkpoint last time she met Pastor Rod and a woman who said she was Maddy’s mommy but she wasn’t. Maddy hasn’t seen her mom for a long time, longer ago than her birthday. But Maddy hung on the woman’s arm, and squealed “Mommy” and hugged tight to her when it was time to leave, crying until Pastor Rod told her that she must be brave and go back through the checkpoint. Then Mommy became very stern and Maddy didn’t like her any more, so she stopped clinging. Pastor patted her on the head, took her dad’s package, and gave her a piece of hard candy from his big black pocket. “You’re very brave,” he says. “A splendid girl.”

  Pastor disappeared weeks ago. Like Maddy’s real mom. “But I’m still splennid,” she tells herself. She forgets that she’s trying to be quiet, and she hangs on the cornerpost just like she hung on the fake Mommy’s arm, rocking side to side and making the wood creak. “I’ve brave and I’m splennid, I’m splennid and brave.”

  She tugs furiously, creaking as loud as she can to drown out Wayney’s voice downstairs. Jim Wayne Davey is the militia’s enforcer. He shaves his head, and has his eyebrows pierced, and his ears pierced about a million times, with a red devil tattoo on his neck, right by that vein that jumps out when he screams at her. He wears a black coat that says S.W.A.T.; it has bullet holes in it. When Maddy dropped the paper wrapper from the candy Pastor Rod gave her, after he made her promise not to, Wayney screamed and raised his fists at her.

  She hugs the post. “Ringer round the rosy,” she says, but she can’t remember the rest.

  Clouds cover the sky. It’s neither dark yet, nor still light, but something in between. When it is summertime again, it will be light light light until late and all the kids will play outside, and she won’t be sent to bed when it’s practically afternoon and she’s not even tired. And she won’t have to climb out her window onto the stupid balcony. And she can eat apples, right down to the seeds, even if they are small and hard and wormy, and let the juice run down her chin, and make her hands all sticky. And and and. She can’t wait for summer.

  Tires screech around the corner up near Summit Street. Maddy hears rifle shots, probably from the lookouts on the corner roofs, and then a burst of automatic fire. She freezes, for a second, then darts up the sloped balcony for the window, to get inside and under her bed.

  Wheels screech to a stop in front of the house, amid shouts, scattered shots, a car door slamming, a window breaking.

  She is poised on the edge of the window frame when the house bucks and flames jet out the downstairs windows. She slides backward through a soup of debris as the porch roof caves in and the railing disappears. She falls, buffeted by wood and shingles, slamming hard into the ground.

  Wayney staggers out the back door screaming “Jeff! Jeff!” He goes to the corner of the house, and pumps round after round into the street, screaming “Jeff!” mixed in with bad words Maddy’s not allowed to say. Jeff is her dad’s name, and she knows right then that something bad has happened to him.

  The house bucks again, spewing smoke and glass and splinters.

  She walks away, stiff with pain and fear, head turtled down between her shoulders, arms straight at her side. It’s the way kids walk to find their parents, when only their parents can make them feel better. As flames flicker behind her in the twilight, she staggers shadowless over the brown yard, through the gate in the drooping, paint-flecked picket fence, and across the mud and chuckholes into the safe hiding of the weeds by the railroad.

  The tracks slant off in either direction. She doesn’t know which way to choose. Mom’s gone, and Mommy, and Pastor Rod, on the other side of the tracks. On this side, her dad’s gone.

  Her mo
m told her once that the trains carried everything important: food, medicine, coal for electricity. Maggie doesn’t think she believes that, because she’s seen food on trucks, and she still has a bottle of cherry flavored Tylenol. Although she’s always cold. Her mom told her that trains hooked together like people holding hands, and that they reached all the way around the world that way. Maddy doesn’t believe that either.

  The sun is down and darkness covers everything.

  Thinking of what her mom told her, Maddy climbs the gravel embankment onto the railroad tracks. She walks straight down the tracks, almost floating from tie to tie, looking for the people holding hands. What she believes is this: As long as she stays between the rails, she will be safe.

  Prostrate yourself on the sky, next to the trapdoor that opens on the earth, and peer, with an eye capable of infinite magnification, through the keyhole in these clouds.

  You see stealth bombers slice through the night air like manta-rays underwater. You reach out with your finger and nudge them aside. Somewhere, in the sea-bottom city below, a little girl is walking along the railroad tracks. You find her. A soft scab forms along the jagged cut on her scalp where fresh crimson flows into her slick-sticky hair. She doesn’t notice, staring at the ties between the rails in rapt concentration, her brows drawn down. Tears have shaped rivulets in the dirt across her cheeks. A breadcrumb trail of downy feathers leaks from a rip in her winter coat.

  Watch her walk between the rails, perfectly between them, like a lonely child in bed, holding her arms in tight to keep the monsters from nipping over the edges.

  You drum your fingers thoughtfully. You don’t know which way to choose. The sky rumbles.

  Gray domes the sky above, neither day nor night, and it rumbles like Hungry Monster’s belly.

  Maddy only faintly remembers Hungry Monster from the TV, back when TV still had good shows, but she knows the Hungry Monster song, sort of, and sings it now as she hops from tie to tie.