by Ellen Datlow
Stephen Graham Jones
A guy on hiatus from grad school gets a call from his aunt to house-sit for the week, and ends up having to watch his best friend die on the floor in the living room.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
A grad student uses the last pre-paid minute on his cell phone to answer a call from his lovely aunt Cyn, and he says yes so fast that she doesn’t even get all the way to the question mark.
We’re talking about me, here.
I took the bus over for the big key hand-off ritual. It was a Thursday. In spite of all my assurances over the phone, I hadn’t visited my aunt once over my three years in town, was just seeing her wide ranch-style house for the first time. As for the why of that—I don’t know. It was probably that I could never tell if she felt sorry for me or if she was regretting what I was doing with my life. Not the grad school or brief infatuation with math—those were supposed to be me getting back on track. Everybody said so. No, what she was disappointed with, I have to figure, it was the general slouchiness I probably expressed, to her generation. Cigarettes, hair I didn’t feel the need to compulsively brush, some scruff on my chin, a fine braiding of careful scars above my sleeves and pants legs. Four- and five-day jeans. Better living through chemicals.
Thing was?
In secret, I shared her estimation of me. Her judgment. Or, I could imagine the sightline she had to have on me, and it kind of made me crinkle my nose, too, look away.
Just because I could see myself like she did, though, that doesn’t mean I finger-brushed my hair on the bus ride over. I even smoked a cigarette between the stop and her front door, to be sure I smelled like the ashtray she’d expect.
She squealed my name over the welcome mat, then rose to—her words—“hug that neck.”
I narrowed my eyes over her shoulder like already taking stock of her living room, let her say what she had to about who in the family I was looking more and more like, and how she remembered this thing I did at that one reunion, and soon enough we were to the walkthrough part of this: three bedrooms two bathrooms, shoes off at the door, dishwasher needs a push on the door right here or it’ll run and run, just leave the mail in this paper bag, master bed and bath are off-limits, and emergency phone numbers are there by the phone in the dining room. Do I still know how to use a landline? Oh, and be sure not to leave the doggie door open, as raccoons will make themselves at home in the kitchen.
And of course there was no smoking inside—drapes like these are an absolute sponge for smoke, go yellow at the slightest hint of nicotine—and no parties, but “it’s not like you’re fifteen anymore, right?”
Right.
If I smiled here, she didn’t see it, anyway.
The next night, Aunt Cyn’s extra key folded into my wallet because I couldn’t locate my keyring, Lewis and Tabby and Alice showed up.
* * *
I’d known Lewis since the smoking circle at high school—his post-grad stipend was my life support—and Tabby was his sometimes ex, and Alice, she was Tabby’s miniskirted chaperone, I guess.
I was pretty sure I remembered her from my first year in the program, and she might have even been in Number Theory with me for a few weeks. As far as I knew, she was still advancing through her coursework, was probably cleared to teach pre-calc to undergrads now. Anything I taught undergrads these days, it was by example. By cautionary tale.
We slouched instinctively to the back porch, to the wire patio furniture that was all built on springs.
All four burners of Aunt Cyn’s stove were currently bubbling pots of Tabby’s made-up-on-the-spot hybrid of lasagna and spaghetti, which she assured us was probably going to solve world peace.
“You don’t solve peace, you achieve it,” Alice said. It was her first contribution.
“Have to agree with her,” I said, not immune to her careless way with that miniskirt.
“It might solve some world hunger, though,” Lewis chimed in, rocking so deep in his chair that I had to suspect my aunt felt a shudder of concern over her patio set.
Were the neighbors keeping tabs over the fence? I had to think so, yes. To them we’d be four floating embers by the sliding glass door. Four floating embers finally rising, crushing themselves out in a cascade of sparks that fall through the wire tabletop. Then the shadows coalescing around those embers, they slide the glass door open, they slouch inside, away from prying eyes.
As best I can remember, it was the last time both Alice and me were outside the house.
* * *
When Alice had stepped back to a bedroom for a phone call, Lewis and Tabby, our matchmakers here, told me her story.
Apparently it had been Alice in Number Theory lo those three years ago, but higher math had turned out to be more of a romantic notion for her. Number Theory was fun to show off at the coffee shop, and zero and infinity and exponentials were difficult enough to conceptualize that the effort left you spent in a way that felt like it mattered, but unless math was your chosen fulcrum with which to leverage the world up on its end, well: it tended to leave you with just a handful of slippery numerals, each more variable than the last.
This coming from two people deep in mathlandia. Lewis and Tabby hadn’t fallen into bed again yet this month, but their minds still had sex on the chalkboard, and probably left them, I don’t know: pregnant with knowledge? Or maybe math’s an STD, one they’d be passing back and forth for the next decade, until one of them inoculated themselves with a big Russian novel.
It’s what Alice had done. She was a humanities major now—had become a folklore major, of all things.
“So you saying I shouldn’t ask her if I can borrow any money?” I said.
Lewis and Tabby chuckled like they were supposed to—like studying math was the path to financial security?—and I registered that their pinky fingers were already touching on the couch between them. It was kind of sickening.
When Alice breezed back into the house she caught us up on the drama in her department—no, I finally figured out, a couple minutes into it: she was talking about the drama involved with a class she was teaching for a prof, out with some emergency but always calling to micromanage. The class was folktale morphology and dissemination of urban legends, and the prof, while she’d been there, had assured the students this could all be gleaned through tattoo culture, through the semiotic codes being passed from arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder, below the radar of the rest of the uninked and uninitiated.
“Tats?” I said, looking around to be sure I’d heard right, then turning sideways on the couch to show her the back of my calf. “What’s this mean, then?”
“Mountain lions were on blue light special?” Tabby said.
“More like well shots were a dollar per,” Lewis chimed in.
“That a house cat?” Alice said.
“It’s a panther,” I said, rotating my leg back around, barely catching the ash from my cigarette.
“I’m calling Aunt Cynthia…” Tabby sing-songed.
“Tell her I left the doggie door open last night, too,” I said back, opening my hand, letting the ash I’d saved drift down onto the carpet.
Alice smiled.
Lewis picked up on her and me, and on his way to the bathroom did his usual crude hand gesture, for my eyes only.
“Real subtle,” I called after him.
“What?” Alice said.
“So tell us a folktale,” Tabby said, redirecting her.
Alice sat back in what my aunt had assured me was her favorite chair. It swallowed Alice’s starved-down frame.
“A scary one,” I added.
“I’m just first-year,” Alice said. “Technically.”
“We’re zero year,” I said back. “Practically prenatal.”
She liked that too.
“You already know it, sort of,” she said. “Everybody does. From the movies?”
“Jason Voorhees was a folktale first?” I said.
“This is before that,” Alice said. “
Lewis Carroll.”
“Wonderland’s not a folktale,” Tabby said. “That’s just a story he made up.”
“But what if he didn’t?” Alice said.
I had to admit, it was a good lead-in. At least until Lewis ruined it from the arched doorway to the hall: “So … Alice is what you’re teaching to the kiddos, Alice?”
Tabby chuckled and blew smoke up and to the left, as if there were some air intake in that part of the living room that could scrub our breath clean.
“It’s not my born name,” Alice said.
At which point Lewis hauled up what he’d scavenged from the hall closet: an ancient dinosaur of a video camera.
He held it up to his face, aimed the bulging iridescent lens at us each in turn.
This is where a good nephew would have protected his dear aunt’s valuables, defended the homestead, all that.
There weren’t any of these good nephews in the immediate vicinity.
“So,” Lewis went on, tracking into the room like a real cameraman, “so if your name’s not really Alice, then Alice in Wonderland is a legitimate research focus?”
“Who were you in Number Theory?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Alice said, her eyes suddenly full and shining.
Because of Lewis, sure. But also because of herself.
She wasn’t long for humanities grad work either, I suspected.
I wanted to tell her I’d save a stool for her at the bar of broken dreams, but instead it came to me all at once, her real name. I said it out loud: “Marly.”
At which point Alice ran from the room, slammed the door to my aunt’s bedroom, that was supposed to be off-limits, and still would be if Lewis hadn’t known how to jimmy a lock.
Tabby glared at me and chewed her gum with her mouth open.
“This where one of us go after her?” Lewis said, setting the camera down on the coffee table, its red light blinking.
“One of us, yeah,” Tabby said, thoroughly disgusted with us, and rose, leaving Lewis and me with all the wine and smokes. It was like we were in Charleton Building’s math-basement again, my first semester here, all of grad school spread out before us, still. All of academia.
The world, right?
That’s what we were going to apply ourselves to, conquer forthwith.
Right after this cigarette.
Right after one more cigarette.
* * *
My turn at the stove sat us down at the table over what I was calling a taco sandwich lunch. It was the next day, whatever that was. Saturday?
Alice walked into the dining room like nothing had happened the night before. It made me wonder what I’d been expecting. For her to be demure and guilty and apologetic, like serving penance for the eggshells she’d left all around the house for us to tiptoe through?
Tabby had already explained to us that “Marly” was someone Alice had used to be, clear? Someone who dated the wrong guys, fixated on unhealthy things, and maybe cut herself in weak moments.
Serving lunch, I tried not to study any folktale major’s legs for lines or x’s or triangles—whatever her thing had been. Also, I made sure to keep my inner arms from being the center of any attentions. At least the left one, since I’m right-handed.
We’ve all got a history, I figure. And none of us are those same people we used to be. Some of us even have certain tattoos to help us forget. To cover up.
I was getting defensive about Alice, at least on the inside.
On the outside, Lewis was already going for her.
“So, Alice,” Lewis said in his professor-y voice, his fingers even steepled under his chin. “Not you, I mean. Her.”
Alice took a hesitant bite and flashed her eyes up to us.
“Good,” she lied about that bite, guiding a stray spaghetti noodle the rest of the way in.
“Thought I got all those out,” I said, eeking my mouth out to the side.
Alice swallowed what looked like a lump and said, her voice hovering at some register that felt more like a persona than a real person, “With undergrads you want to start with defamiliarizing what they know.”
“And they all know Alice in Wonderland,” Tabby filled in.
“It’s a famous exercise,” Alice said. “Not mine. But it works. What you do is ask them to tell the story from the other side.”
“Of the looking glass?” I said, because, come on: one of us was going to.
Alice nodded. “Not what it’s like for Dorothy, say, to get whisked off to Oz. But for some random munchkin to get pulled up into the storm, deposited into the middle of Kansas. Our colors would be just as Technicolor. Our customs just as alien. Our songs just as corny.”
“They are the same, aren’t they?” Tabby said, squinting like seeing deeper into this line of thought. “Dorothy and Alice.”
“Mirrors everywhere,” Lewis said, using his spooky voice now.
“Bloody Mary,” Alice said, keeping right up. “Say her name into the mirror three times, then she’s standing behind you.”
“Only if you turn the lights off,” Lewis said.
“No,” Tabby said. “You’re supposed to close your eyes at the end.”
“Same difference,” Lewis said.
“Are they related?” I asked. “Bloody Mary and Alice?”
“Then Snow White would be, too,” Tabby said. “Not everything with mirrors is going to be the same story—not that I’m the expert, of course.”
“I did find one story,” Alice said, kind of quieter. “It wouldn’t print, though. The PDF wouldn’t resize down for our machine.”
“Do spill,” Lewis said, reeling his fork toward himself, like urging more from Alice.
The taco sandwiches weren’t as bad as I’d feared.
Neither was Alice’s story.
* * *
What she’d unearthed from the library was pulp. A thirties story from a thirties magazine, which was when Wonderland was only a couple of generations old—so recent that “Alice” had been spelled “Alis,” likely to avoid litigation, or carve down to the truth under the cartoon characters, the story before the fiction, something like that.
“Sounds like this is going to be high quality, timeless, and bulletproof,” Tabby said, picking up on Alice’s hedging.
“And you can cite that kind of stuff?” Lewis asked.
“Popular outlets often distill what’s circulating out in the world,” Alice said back to him so fast it was a practiced line, practically. I was starting to like her. Whoever she was. Already I could feel my fingertips getting sensitive enough to read the braille-work of delicate scars she might be keeping secret.
“Let her talk,” I told Lewis, and, judging by the way his back straightened, Tabby must have clamped a hand onto his leg.
“It was somebody doing this exercise back before folktales was really a class,” Alice said. “He flipped the story around, like.”
“Like—to Bloody Mary?” Tabby said.
“Bloody Mary wasn’t a thing yet,” Alice said.
“Snow White, then,” I said.
“Which one?” Alice said. “There used to be two. But—in both of them, there’s an entity in the mirror, like? A different intelligence? When you say ‘mirror, mirror,’ you’re talking to someone. Someone other than yourself.”
“You’re making them real by addressing them,” Lewis said, impressed. “I like it. What do they call that? A performative utterance?”
We ignored him.
“Remember,” Alice said. “For a long time, mirrors, the old silverback ones, not polished tin or whatever, they weren’t everywhere. So associating lore with them would really come down to a class-thing, as the victims of that mirror lore would of course be those privileged enough to own and use these fancy mirrors.”
Listening to her, I could imagine her at the front of a classroom. The undergrad in me was falling in some sort of love, and the grad student I wasn’t anymore was wondering when her office hours might be.
&nbs
p; Tabby rose, poured wine all around. We all toasted her thanks. She was just sitting down when the dishwasher fired up again. It had been on continuous cycle ever since Aunt Cyn had left. I didn’t have the knack for where to push with my knee, evidently. It was kind of soothing, though. Like a surf, surging up onto the beach at regular intervals.
“This is also the early days for photography,” Alice went on. “Not everybody had cameras, either, but it was a technology that was out there. And, like with any new technology, ‘scary’ progress gets warned against by demonizing the tech. Same way cell phones are sapping our brains of brains, or sterilizing us.”
“Demonized how?” Tabby said.
“Set a camera up parallel to a mirror,” Alice said, holding her hands up. “Aim it right into itself, straight on. What’s it see, right? Itself. Then itself being itself. Then itself seeing itself seeing itself. In this story, that infinite reduction makes a tunnel something can crawl up through.”
“An Alice,” I said, then, holding my hand out like stopping traffic: “Not you, I mean. Her.”
“I wouldn’t say infinite reduction…” Lewis said apologetically—but more like what he was sorry for was her poor choice of words.
At which point started The Great Argument of How Many Reductions Would Fit in a Camera Lens, and whether that had to do with the laws of optics or the fineness of the optics, and did this correspond to that stupid bar trick of only being able to fold any piece of paper evenly nine times? Or was it eight?
Luckily Aunt Cyn had some copy paper in a kitchen drawer.
Seven folds was easy, eight took some doing, and for nine you had to either cheat or have the kind of muscles none of us had, even with the next bottle of wine and a second round of taco sandwiches.
This took us up until dark, about.
And then we had to settle the other argument. The one about the mirror.
* * *
Since it seemed like providence that we had the video camera, we elected to use it for this experiment instead of our phones.
Also, of course, neither Lewis nor Tabby wanted their phones to end up haunted, and mine already was, by a lack of pre-paid minutes. So we single-filed it down to the off-limits master bathroom.
While Lewis—of course Lewis—was getting the camera aimed and steady, I watched Alice’s reflection. What I didn’t say anything about was how she never really looked at herself in the mirror.
