William Alexander
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Valentines
Shira Lipkin
1.
The waiter's name is Valentine. He has long, slim fingers, and he writes down my order instead of pretending to commit it to memory. I like that, his pen on the paper bringing forth one simple thing about me. My lunch. Just a tiny fragment of information. I honor him by doing the same. “The waiter's name is Valentine,” I write in my battered notebook, “and he has long, slim fingers."
Information is sacred. I don't remember why, or who told me. But I know that information is sacred, so I write it down, scraps of knowledge and observations. I used to write in leather-bound journals with elegant, heavy pens, but my fetish for elegance has fallen by the wayside in my rush to commit everything to paper. Now I use cheap marbled composition books, purchased by the dozen. The pen is still important, though. It must write in smooth lines of black, not catch on the page. There is too much to capture.
I order chai and butternut squash soup. I write that down as well, just after Valentine does. I watch him walk to the kitchen, slender and graceful, and I wonder what Valentine does when he is not refilling coffee mugs. I wonder if he dances. I write that down: “Perhaps Valentine dances.” I watch him flirt with the barista, their movements around each other a careful ballet of hot espresso and soup and witty banter, and I curl up in my armchair and wrap my hands around the mug of tea when Valentine brings it to me with his usual smile and nod. I observe. I record.
I write on the bus, on my way home. I write about the bus driver, and about the woman sitting across from me, wearing a too-heavy jacket ("perhaps she is sick"). I write about the barista and the patterns of her movement around the large copper espresso machine, the way she admires her reflection. When I get home, I carefully tear the pages from my notebook, and I tear fact from fact, isolating each bit of information, and I file them in the rows of small boxes nailed to my walls. Miniature pigeon coops filled with paper instead of birds. Facts. Ways to build the world. I copy things over when necessary, when I must file “perhaps Valentine dances” under both “Valentine” and “Speculation.” I must separate speculation, after all. My shreds and fragments of information comprise my image of Valentine (for example). I cannot allow speculation to color that. I can allow his grace, but not the possibility of his dancing.
With enough data, maybe I can figure out the world.
2.
The waiter's name is Val. His hands are stained a burnished yellow from nicotine, and guitar-callused. He is bored and impatient, waiting for his shift to end. He does not write down my order—which is fair because it's just coffee and blackberry pie, and the pie is right at hand. He slices it and slaps it on the plate; it falls over just a bit, slides, and blackberry oozes out onto the plain white plate, the color almost shocking. I write that down, and the way the steam dances over the coffee mug. The mug is smooth and unadorned, the same bone white, and the coffee is rich and dark and bitter. The diner is a diner, no more and no less, retro-1950s tube with aproned waitresses and meat loaf and pie and Val, leaning forward by the register, staring at the door. Waiting for something else.
He talks to me, I think out of sheer boredom—I'm the only customer at the bar, the only person here alone. His dark hair is frosted blond at the ends, and his eyes are seaglass blue. He is in a band, but he worries that now that the guys have day jobs, they'll stop playing music. He doesn't think he's good enough to go solo. He shrugs a lot—he has developed his own fake-casual rolling shrug, a silent “whatever.” He asks why I care, and I tell him that these are the things that make him him. That we are collections of information. We are what we are because our dog died or our dad left or we won the lottery or whatever. And I like to figure out what people are by examining what they're made of.
When I close my eyes, I imagine Val made of paper, all the little strips of paper I'll file later under “Music” and “Loss” and “Resentment,” cross-reference him with others, see if I can figure out “loss."
See if I can figure out data loss.
When I open my eyes, Val has gone on to the next customer. I eat my pie and write.
3.
The waiter's name is V. It's a new restaurant, sci-fi-themed; all of the waiters have names like Klaatu or Ripley. I point out that V is a series, not a character, and he laughs. “No one remembers character names from V. But everyone remembers the show. Everyone remembers the lizards."
He writes down my order, and I write down that everyone remembers V. I will file it under “Television” and “Things everyone remembers.” “Things everyone remembers” is one of my bigger boxes; it is not nearly full. Not nearly as full as it needs to be.
Data loss. I do not remember the things everyone remembers. And I need to. In order to build a self, I need a foundation. So I write everything down, and I am always hoping that someone will let slip one of the things “everyone knows” or “everyone remembers.” V and the Challenger explosion and 9/11 and the Smurfs. Sometimes when I get home, after I file the day's newly gathered information, I take the slips out of that box and spread them out on the floor, subcategorize them. Everybody knows this about politics. Everyone remembers that song.
My food arrives, a faux-Klingon dish I've already forgotten the name of. I must look it up later and record it. The drink V brings is not what I ordered—it's a neon-blue thing in a Klein bottle with dry ice fuming out of it. V grins and drapes himself over the chair beside me. “You looked like you could use it."
"What is it?"
"Dunno. Try some."
"I have ... trouble. With things I don't know."
V looks around; seeing no manager, he takes a quick sip from my glass. “Perfectly safe."
I sip. It's sweet. V grins as I lower the glass. His hair is frosted silver, and I wonder if he's dyed it, or if he sprays it on every night. His hands seem to have a mind of their own; he gestures incessantly when he talks. Italian, he says, with a shrug very unlike Val's. I write that down: “Italians talk with their hands,” and also, “V is Italian."
He has to get up, eventually, as the restaurant gets busy. He brings me a spoon for dessert, with a wink like Valentine's.
1.
Valentine writes my order down with a flourish and gives me a wink like V's. I study him—none of his other mannerisms remind me of V. He does not talk with his hands. He is not flashy or flamboyant. His hands, unlike Val's, do not have guitar calluses; if Valentine plays anything it's a wind instrument, or maybe a violin.
This is speculation. I cannot allow speculation.
I study my own hands. They shake slightly, and I wonder if I ever played anything; if so, that data is lost. I should search my apartment. It has been too long since I've done anything there but file and sleep.
Valentine presents my chai with a smile. “Valentine,” I ask, halting him in his graceful spin kitchenward, “do I always order the same thing?"
"In the fall, yeah.” He sits down beside me in a way not entirely unlike V's draping or Val's slouch. “Other soups, the rest of the year. But always chai and soup."
"Then why do you write it down?"
"Because you like it.” I must look as puzzled as I feel, because he shrugs (unlike Val, like V) and continues. “You told me once that you don't see how anyone can hold that in their heads, not really. Things fade. I might forget what kind of tea, what kind of soup."
I stretch my hand, aching from holding the pen. “I think I forget."
2.
Val pours the coffee, thick plume of steam from the stream of dark liquid, the battered pot. “Do I always get the same thing?"
Val gives his rolling shrug. “Coffee, keep it comin'. Pie. Yeah, you do."
I write that down: “I always order the same thing."
I don't know how to file that. “My brain.” That box is overflowing. I need to find a way to subcategorize it. I can't figure it out.
I ask Val if he's Italian. He's n
ot. Mostly Norwegian, he says. I study him all shift for things that correlate with Valentine and with V. He notices, but ignores it.
I write. Everything. The clumping of the salt in its shaker. The reflection of sunlight on the silver edge of the clock. Val and the waitress, Thalia—she looks like the barista.
Everyone looks like everyone else these days. It feels like my world is compressing. I have to write more, write faster. I have to make sense of things.
3.
I don't remember entering the restaurant, but V is already sprawled across from me. He asks if I'm okay, and I tell him honestly that I don't know. I ask if he's in love with a waitress, and he laughs, says no, gestures at a waiter in Jedi robes. I tell him what I'm slowly, falteringly, worrying about: that all of them are the same person. He tells me all the ways he's different, but I find some things the same.
(A)
They all have a younger brother. They all had a dog, growing up. They are all waiters.
1.
I am so tired. Valentine brings me a chai without my asking, and he asks if I'm okay, and I tell him honestly that I don't know. He asks me when I last saw my doctor.
I say, “Doctor?"
He takes my hand and notices its tremor. He asks if he can walk me home.
4.
I am shy. I have never let anyone in.
Valentine enters, and his eyes widen at the sight of all of the little boxes lining the walls, perched on shelves, the bits of things everybody knows spread over the floor. “What is this?"
"Information,” I whisper. “I—have chunks missing. Parts of the world I can't figure out. And I think—I think that bits of other worlds are melting in to cover the gaps. I think that maybe all Valentines are the same Valentine. I think the universe or the multiverse or whatever has this stopgap for data loss, and I think the human brain does pattern patching on a subconscious level—finding the things that match you and filling holes with them. Do you think that's what happens?” And I pray for an “Everybody knows,” but he gives me something else.
He had been on duty when I had the seizure. He watched my body arc back; he called 911. Probably saved my life. The doctor told him I might lose some memory.
I lost more than that.
I lost swaths of long-term memory, the things everybody knew, the things I knew. I stopped being able to get all of my short-term memory into long-term. I started having trouble conceptualizing things.
I started writing. Data retrieval. Trying to make sense of the world.
I don't remember. I don't remember any of it. But Valentine so clearly does. And he is right there, holding my gaze and holding my hand, and the earth begins to tremble—
He tries to pull me to the doorway, but I refuse—I stand in the middle of the room and the whole building starts to shake, and I watch a year of carefully gathered and filed slips of information explode from the walls and shower around me like a snow globe, all of the fact and the speculation, all of the ways to learn people and make things make sense, all falling around me like ash, and I have a sort of hitching sob in my chest as I drop to my knees as the room settles, and he is there. V. Val. Valentine. His hair flashes silver, flashes blond, settles to dark, and his hands resolve from callused to slim, and he is folded back into himself; all Valentines are one Valentine. And I look up at him helplessly, all of my data scattered, and I ask: “Do you dance?"
* * * *
Epileptics live in a very interstitial state, slipping from world to world with little or no warning. Some seizures induce a sort of religious euphoria. Some are stark, terrifying disconnection. In some, one hears music no one else can hear, or one experiences the scent of lilacs as a physical object.
Temporal lobe epilepsy means, at its best, walking between worlds.
In 2003, I became interstitial, and I've been trying to make sense of it ever since—of the electrical cascades in my brain that can send me elsewhere, of the battery of medications that often make things worse, and of the pervasive sense of data loss and the odd things the brain does to patch those holes.
"Valentines” could be an extended seizure state. It could be many-worlds quantum physics. It could be magical realism. It is me, like my protagonist, trying my best to make sense of this in-between world.
Shira Lipkin
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(**?) ~~~~ (—) :
The Warp and the Woof
Alan DeNiro
Roger found the notebook in his attic, tucked in the side pocket of a kevlar jacket. The notebook contained his first novel, the one he wrote when he was twenty-two and never had the heart to revise or learn any more about. He had forgotten about it, but the smell of his old cologne on the pages awakened his memory. The world that he had written about was long dead, but he wanted someone else to sift through the notebook, to extract something marketable from it. Roger couldn't read his own handwriting anymore. He stared and stared at it—the squiggles—but did anyone know cursive anymore? No one had penmanship. For a few delusional seconds he wondered whether someone else had written it.
He went downstairs. Having no luck figuring out what to do with the notebook, and too afraid to place it with his current material, next to his laptop (which still needed to be hand-cranked for the night), he called his agent, voice only.
"I'm going to ship the notebook to you, I mean manually.” Above Roger was a framed picture of Roger with the president. Roger's hair was darker then—no, not the radiation, that had no effect on the color.
"What time is it?” his agent asked.
"It's noon,” Roger said. “What are you doing? Why are you still sleeping?"
The agent said nothing. The agent knew Roger didn't want to hear about Lord Manhattan, the sweeps and declarations. The agent would have moved out of Queens if she could, but she didn't have the right IDs. The agent had to conduct meetings at night, and daytime security was expensive.
"Well,” Roger said, after the pause, “okay, could you look at it, then? Maybe there's something there that could be extracted from it?"
"Sure, sure,” the agent said, turning over, squinting at the blinds.
It took five business days for the notebook to reach the agent. FedEx lost a few planes in a flurry of SAMs the week before. Flight schedules were blown up and reconstructed. The courier who handed the package to the agent came at 3 am.
"Hang on, let me find my wand,” the agent said, fumbling in her pockets. “Shit, do you have yours?"
The courier shook her head. “Sorry, mine got stolen."
"Just give me the package, then. I can scan it later."
The courier shook her head and eyed the corridor of the agent's building, the cameras like rifle scopes in the crown molding. “You know the rules. I could get in trouble from the Lord's Army, like that."
"Bitch, give me the package!” the agent spat. The courier took a step back and cradled the package to her chest.
"OK, OK,” the agent sighed. “I think I might have a spare wand in my kitchen. Hang on.” Storming back into her apartment and slamming the door behind her, she thought about her options. She hadn't been able to find her wand for week. Roger, as much as she found him a saddening figure, was her primary source of income. And he hadn't had a new book in a year. The side projects, yes—but the ghost writers and translators made their cuts larger and larger, the custom freight to Roger's market strongholds—White Vegas, Nebraskan Rhodesia, the Dobsonpods on the Yellow Sea, Pentecosta—were getting more restrictive. And they were strongholds, not strangleholds. Newer, semiliterate thriller authors were rising. Thugs, Roger called them, even some reeducated Asians and Arabs, but they gave people what they wanted. Words garnished with blood. Roger was about ideas, his ideas about the state. With each passing year after Operation Mexico Moon, the agent cared about those ideas less and less. The agent had to eat and pay for the apartment, not to mention the retainer fee for the building's security detail. She thought about what she had to do, walking to her bedroom, and
what she had to do made her sad.
She would not tell Roger.
She came back and opened the door, was rather amazed that the courier was still standing there. The agent raised her arm and Tasered the courier's face. Wasn't a clean shot; the stinger punctured her cheek, straight through. The courier fell back, and the agent kicked the package through her apartment door, rubbing the arm brace where her Taser was attached. She then unhooked the wire, which would dissolve in about an hour. Kneeling down to the courier she said, “I warned you. It's my risk. It's my package. Why should you give a fuck if I get blown up by it? I have no family left to sue you. And you can fuck your Lord, you fucking hear me?” She stood up and rolled the courier into the freight elevator, and pressed Down.
She decided she needed wine before opening the package. After half a bottle, Quebecois Concord vintage, she cut open the package with a butcher knife. Black duct tape all along the perimeter, thicker than the packaging itself. Then she extracted the notebook. Thick gray cover, gray wire spirals. The pages were soft, cheap paper, almost decomposing, unlined. Roger's cursive alternated between blue ink and pencil. The agent couldn't make heads or tails of it.
"Fuck,” she said to herself, taking the wine from the bottle. “Was he thirteen when he wrote this?” Then she slept, dreaming of elephants in rivers electrocuted by lightning. They were trying to cross to tell the agent something, but she kept saying, turn back, turn back! When she woke, she took the tube out of her ear and shook it.
"Ah,” she said, then stared at the notebook. Then Roger called.
"Well?” he said.
"I don't know what to tell you, Roger,” she said. “It's really ... dense.” She rubbed her arm where she had attached the Taser. “I'm going to have to bring in a consultant."
"Who?” On the other end, she heard his apprentice scrubbing a floor and running a hose. Roger had good grandchildren, who went to good schools. He boarded writers-in-residence each year from his pool of readerly constituents. This year it was only one writer. He would not trust his apprentice with his notebook; she did his chores. The other Minnesotans in his complex, which used to be the Minnesota Zoo, tolerated him because he was famous.
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