The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  “I saw a whole carton of National Geographics I want to snag on the way out,” said the Devil.

  Off in the distance, I saw the shadow of something passing in front of the stars. It was too big to be a bird. “Here she comes,” I yelled and pointed. They both spun around to look. “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Stay behind us,” said Christ. “If she gets you, it’s going to hurt.”

  The next thing I knew, Mrs. Lumley had landed and we three were backed against the edge of the hill with a steep drop behind us. Her blue skin shone in the moonlight like armor, but there were tufts of hair growing from it. She had this amazing aqua body and an eight-foot wingspan, but with the exception of the gills and fangs, she still had the face of a sixty-five-year-old woman. She moved slowly toward us, burping out words that made no sense.

  When she came within a few feet of us, Christ said, “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” and the Devil stepped forward. Tentacles began to grow from her body toward him. One managed to wrap itself around his left horn when he opened his mouth to assault her with a minute of fire. The flames discharged like a blowtorch and stopped her cold. When she was completely engulfed in the blaze, the tentacles retracted, but she would not melt.

  As soon as the evil one finished, coughing out great clouds of gray smoke, Mrs. Lumley opened her eyes and the tentacles began again to grow from her sides. I looked over and saw that Christ was holding something in his right hand. It appeared to be a remote control, and he was furiously pushing its buttons.

  The Devil had jumped back beside me, his hand clutching my arm. He had real fear in his serpent eyes, yet he could not help but laugh at Christ messing around with the Machine of Eden.

  “What’s with the cosmic garage door opener?” he shouted.

  “It works,” said Christ, as he continued to nervously press buttons. Then I felt one of the tentacles wrap itself around my ankle. Mrs. Lumley opened her mouth and crowed like a rooster. Another of the blue snake appendages entwined itself around the Devil’s midsection. We both screamed as she pulled us toward her.

  “Three,” Christ yelled, and a beam of light shot out of the end of the Machine. I then heard the sound of celestial voices singing in unison. Mrs. Lumley took the blast full in the chest and began instantly to shrivel. Before my eyes, like the special effects in a crappy science fiction movie, she turned into a tree. Leaves sprouted, pink blossoms grew, and as the singing faded, pure white fruit appeared on the lower branches.

  “Not fun,” said the Devil.

  “I thought she was going to suck your face off,” said Christ.

  “What exactly was she,” I asked, “an alien?”

  Christ shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “just a fucked-up old woman.”

  “Is she still a saint?” I asked.

  “No, she’s a tree,” he said.

  “You and your saints,” said the Devil and plucked a piece of fruit. “Take one of these,” he said to me. “It’s called the Still Point of the Turning World. Only eat it when you need it.”

  I picked one of the white pears off the tree and put it in my pocket before we started down the junk hill. The Devil found the box of magazines and Christ came up with a lamp made out of seashells. We piled into the car and I started it up.

  I heard Christ say, “Holy shit, it’s 8:00!”

  The next thing I knew I was on my usual road back in Jersey. The car was empty but for me, and I was just leaving New Egypt.

  I hope my use of the Judeo-Christian mythology in this remix of a contemporary legend doesn’t upset anyone. It shouldn’t since, according to the dogma, everyone is supposed to have their own relationship with Christ. Ours is a casual friendship. We like to party, and if horn-head is along for the ride, so much the better. Sometimes the Buddha joins us, but he insists on riding shotgun and too often lips the rope. In honor of Christ’s teachings, we try not to be exclusive, for blessed are those who will suffer in his name.

  New Egypt, New Jersey, is a town I pass through every night on the way home from work. I’ve never stopped there except in my dreams. It boasts a perpetual flea market and a convenience store where you can buy The Weekly World Star—a perfect location for the second, or even third, coming.

  This story was originally published in the magazine Aberrations.

  Floating In Lindrethool

  1

  “Your profession, gentlemen, has a long and distinguished lineage,” was what the section boss had said when he stopped the bus, opened the door, and let them all out on the east side of Lindrethool. Eight men in black raincoats, white shirts and ties, and the company issued, indicative, derbies. They fanned out across the grim industrial cityscape, the soot falling like black snow around them. Each carried a valise in one hand and a large case with a handle in the other. Each walked away, mumbling his respective spiel, all of which included at some point the words, “for a limited time only.” In three weeks, the bus would be waiting at the west end to collect them.

  Slackwell sat now, tieless, hatless, pantsless, at a small scarred table in his hotel room, sipping straight bourbon from a smudged tumbler. “A distinguished lineage,” he said aloud to the window-pane that beyond his reflection gave a view of the night and the myriad lights of Lindrethool. Every light stood in his mind for a potential customer. All he needed was one to part with forty thousand dollars in easy monthly payments spread over ten years and he would have fulfilled his minimal quota for the year. On that first day, he had covered three apartment buildings, lugging his case from floor to floor. “Not even a smell,” as his colleague Merk might say.

  He couldn’t imagine the door-to-door salesmen of the previous century doing what he did, having nothing better to offer than brushes, or vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, bibles. At least he had a real wonder in his case, a value that could change the lives of his customers. That’s exactly what he told them while cajoling, reasoning, even threatening if necessary. While in training, he had practiced again and again like a martial artist the techniques of wedging a foot between the doorjamb and door, following through with the shoulder, and then achieving a look of homicide thinly veiled by a determination to please. The studies had shown that the novelty of face-to-face sales was what the consumer wanted. In the waning economy that had taken a nosedive ten years into the new century, people did not want to shop on-line or by phone for big-ticket items anymore. Or at least that was what they had told him during his training.

  He hadn’t had a sale in two months, and the section boss had told him that the company was thinking of letting him go. “You’re too tired-looking, Slackwell,” the boss had said. “Your complexion is as gray as your hair, and your spiel, though rabid enough, has all the allure of a drooping erection. Wrinkles are no comfort to our customers, it is power they want. You are selling status. And, please, your after shave is rancid.”

  Slackwell cringed into his bourbon, thinking about how he had pleaded, whined actually, to be allowed one more chance. The boss took pity on him, and not only allowed him another shot at it, but also issued him the latest model to hawk in Lindrethool. “If you can’t sell that,” the boss had said, “you can sell yourself to the devil.”

  Slackwell lit a cigarette. With the butt jutting from the corner of his mouth, he stood and unlatched the case that sat next to the bottle of bourbon. The black metal carrier bulged at the sides as if it housed an oversized bowling ball. The front panel opened on hinges, and he reached in and brought forth a large glass globe with a circular metal base. The base had dials and buttons on it, two jacks, a small speaker, and, attached in the back, a wound-up thin electrical cord. Thinktank, the name of the company, was written across the metal in red letters followed by the model number 256–B. The globe above was filled with clear liquid and suspended at its center was a human brain.

  The bourbon, having gotten the better of him, made him weave a little as he stepped back to view the illustrious product. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, and with the two fingers it
was wedged between pointed at the globe. “Now that’s a floater,” he said with a cloud of smoke. A floater was what the sales force of Think-tank called the organic center of their merchandise.

  “Organic computing, the wave of the future,” Slackwell slurred, practicing his spiel. “Consider this—a human mind, unfettered by physical concerns, using not the customary piddling ten percent used by your Joe Blow from Kokomo, not even fifty or seventy or eighty percent, but a full 95.7 percent of its total cogitative potential. The limitations of microchips have long since been reached. The computing power of a human brain is vast. This baby can run your household appliances from your apartment’s master control box, your lights, your phone. It can easily increase the power of your home computer 300 times, provide access to television from around the globe, all at a fraction of your present cost. Set it to pay your bills once and it will do so, on time, every month—it learns what you like, what you want, what you need. And the speed with which it runs will make your parallel processing seem like …”

  Slackwell couldn’t remember what bit of hyperbole came next. All he could think of was the boss’s “… a drooping erection.” He took a drag on his cigarette and sat down to stare at the gray, spongy fist of convolutions. There was something both awe inspiring and lurid about the fact that an individual’s consciousness was trapped inside that insanely winding maze of matter, an island lolling in a crystal bubble. Once, a few weeks earlier, Slackwell’s thoughts took a dangerous detour, and he briefly glimpsed the analogy to his own existence—trapped, trapped, and trapped again.

  This new model, though, this 256–B, had a feature that set it above all the others: a button on the base that when pushed would rouse the brain into consciousness. The customer could talk to it and the apparatus would break the spoken language down into an electrical impulse, send it to the floater by way of a remote transmitter in the base, and the brain would hear in thoughts. Then its response, sent out by the brain’s language centers as its own electrical impulse of thought, would be picked up by another device which would translate it into spoken language. The voice that came from the speakers wasn’t a stiff, robotic barking of words. The Thinktank technicians had patented a new development that allowed the device to emulate the tonality, resonance, inflection, and even accent of the original donor’s voice.

  The corporation had cut deals with certain indigent families, and there were a lot of them these days, to allow their loved ones’ brains to be extracted before actual clinical death set in. The legalization of certain types of euthanasia had opened the door to more liberal organ donation practices. Hence, the individual personality of the brain was kept intact. These deals involved cash in rewarding quantities and the promise that the dying family member would live on, remaining a useful member of society and a catalyst for change in the new economy that was ever on the verge of dawning. Slackwell wondered which, the cash or the promise, was the more comforting to the bereaved.

  The only member of the sales force who had had an opportunity to sell one of these new models with a personality as well as the usual unconscious computing power was Merk, and he had warned Slackwell and the others, “One thing to remember: you can demonstrate the floater’s sentience for the customer but, whatever you do, don’t engage it in conversation on your own. It’ll give you the yips.” They had asked Merk if he was speaking from experience or just relating what the researchers at Thinktank had told him. The veteran salesman gave no reply.

  2

  Although the concept of home was now no more than some vague memory, Slackwell never got used to waking in a strange hotel room. One second he would be dreaming of the old days back in the house on the bay, a spring breeze passing through the willows just outside the screened window. He would roll over in bed to put an arm around his wife, Ella, and then, like a light suddenly switched on, the nausea of his hangover would lodge featherlike at the base of his throat. His mouth would go instantly dry, and the pain would begin behind his eyes. That peaceful dream of the past would vanish and he would wake alone and disoriented.

  Of late, his hands had begun to shake in the mornings, and it was all he could do to steady the bottle in order to pour the first of three shots that would get him through the hellish shower, the donning of his Thinktank uniform and to his first cup of coffee. Sometimes aspirin would be called for; sometimes, when he had it, a joint. Whatever it took, he would be on the street sharply at 8:15, staggering along, case in hand.

  On this, the morning of his second day in Lindrethool, he met Merk at a diner around the corner from his hotel. They sat at a booth by the window, facing each other, but neither spoke until the first cup of coffee had been drained and the waitress had come with refills.

  “How many units did you fob off on the witless citizenry yesterday?” asked Slackwell.

  Merk shook his head. “This place is drier than my ex-wife.”

  “I had a guy who wanted to buy my hat,” said Slackwell.

  “There you go,” said Merk. “I walked in on the middle of a domestic dispute. The woman had a shiner and the old man was seething, but still he made me demonstrate the Tank for them. I had one hand on that revolver I keep in my jacket pocket and used the other to flip the switches and turn the knobs. I got the floater to sing them a song, ‘No Business like Show Business.’ You know, it’s a sentient model, and whoever the unlucky sap is who wound up under the glass can really belt out a tune. No sale, though. No sale.”

  “I’m packing a 256–B myself,” said Slackwell, trying to impress his senior colleague with the fact that the company had entrusted one of its top-of-the-line models to him. “But I still haven’t let the thing talk for itself yet. I had a near miss on a sale yesterday. A woman with a kid. She had me do the fucking kid’s homework on it and print it out—a report on mummies. The whole time the little monster kept smearing his greasy fingers all over the globe, trying to get at the meat inside. Finally, I told his old lady she should teach him some manners. That iced it.”

  “You gotta watch that anger. The customer’s always right,” said Merk.

  “The customer’s hardly ever right,” said Slackwell.

  They had a few more cups of coffee and Merk had a plate of runny eggs. There was a brief discussion of the new guy Johnny, who Merk said hung himself in the shower stall of his hotel room.

  “Did the company get there in time?” asked Slackwell.

  “You kidding me?” said Merk. “The implant tipped them off that he was going south before he even put the belt around his neck. I was called over there last night at around nine to witness the operation. They always call me for that shit. I get a bonus. They opened his head like a can of peaches and whipped his sponge out faster than you can say ‘a limited time only.’”

  “Won’t his brain be screwed up?”

  “They have ways to revive them,” said Merk. “Besides, when they cut him down, I’m not sure he was all dead, if you know what I mean.”

  “He seemed a little too sensitive for the work,” said Slack-well.

  “That poor bastard was born to be a floater,” said Merk. “Some of us drift in the liquid and some on the sidewalk.” He gave a rare smile, almost a wince, and shook his head. “Last I saw the kid alive, he had a stunned look on his face like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. You know, I’ve seen that look before.”

  “Where?”

  “Every morning in the bathroom mirror since the old lady left me.”

  “So make another face,” said Slackwell. “What would it take?”

  “Courage or insanity, and I haven’t got the juice to muster either. When the bell rings, I drool, but I’m good at it.”

  “Yeah,” said Slackwell, “my chin’s damp more often than not.”

  They each had a cigarette and then stood, lifted their cases and exited the diner. Out on the windy street corner, they tipped their respective hats to each other, gave the parting Thinktank sales force salutation, “Lose a brain, brother,” and set out on
their separate paths.

  By noon, Slackwell was no longer staggering. Instead, he was limping. On the last call before lunch, after covering two entire apartment buildings, a woman took a hammer she had apparently just happened to be holding and smashed the foot he had artfully wedged between door and doorjamb. “Scat,” she had yelled as if he had been some kind of bothersome vermin.

  As he moved slowly along the street, he could feel his foot swelling in the shoe. The pain was moderate—worse than the time an old woman had brought him a cup of steaming hot coffee after an hour and a half of hard sell and accidentally spilled it in his lap, but not quite as bad as the time a madman had taken his pen on the pretense of signing an agreement and jabbed him in the wrist with it. At times like this, he considered it a good thing that he did not carry a revolver like Merk.

  He spotted the next address on his list, and its newness, its cleanliness, and name—Thornwood Arms—made him decide to skip lunch. Everything about this place suggested affluence. These were the apartments of those who had wound up on the right side of the perpetually widening divide between the haves and have-nots.

  He entered the front of the building and made for the elevator, but before he could so much as press the button, a security guard had a hand on his shoulder.

  “Whom are you here to see?” asked the tall young man dressed in what appeared to be a ship captain’s uniform.

  Slackwell retrieved a business card from his coat pocket and handed it to the guard. “I am here to bring the future to your residents.”

  “Sorry, sir, but there is no solicitation allowed here.”

  “This is not solicitation. This is demonstration,” said Slackwell.

  “Either way,” said the young man, “you’ll have to leave.”

  “Luddite,” Slackwell yelled, as he exited through the revolving door.

  Once out on the street, he immediately ducked down an alleyway next to the building. There’s no way this fool is going to deny me contact with a public in need of innovation, he thought, especially a public with plenty of cash.