The Radio Magician and Other Stories
James Van Pelt
Mixing straightforward science fiction ideas, such as the search for habitable planets, the terra-forming of Venus, and a time-traveling substitute teacher, along with fantasy concepts, such as saving the Earth from nuclear destruction through supernatural sacrifice, a teen werewolf agoning over attending prom on the night of the full moon, or a young boy who denies his polio by listening to a radio magician, to tales of horror where a pair of fathers have both lost sons, or an inn so vast that a man may never find his wife, The Radio Magician and Other Stories showcases James Van Pelt’s wide-ranging talent as a tale spinner of the fantastic.
James Van Pelt
THE RADIO MAGICIAN
AND OTHER STORIES
To my parents, Betty Van Pelt, who encouraged me to read and was never impatient when that was all I did, and to Jack Van Pelt, who let me stay up late at night with him to watch old science fiction and horror movies. Thank you for Tom Swift, Tom Corbett, Godzilla, Dracula, and all of your love and encouragement.
INTRODUCTION
Carrie Vaughn
I thought I was going to start by talking about my favorite James Van Pelt story in this collection. But looking over the table of contents, I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pick just one. I have lots of favorites—a favorite science fiction story, a favorite fantasy, a favorite time travel, a favorite historical, a favorite story about students and teachers (a high school English teacher, Jim tackles the high school experience better than just about any fiction author ever), and a favorite one about families. This is why a James Van Pelt collection is such a lovely thing to have. I don’t have to pick a favorite, they’re all here.
This is Jim’s third collection since 2002, which tells you something about how prolific he is. Jim’s been writing a long time. But the last few years—the stretch of time covered in this current book—have seen Jim’s career entering a new phase, taking off, maturing, if I can be so bold as to throw out some of those clichés. He’s risen through the ranks of “hot new writer” to become, dare I say, established. (He’ll probably be shocked to hear this. I know how hard he’s worked to get where he is, and he’s still working that hard.) These days, he’s one of those writers who frequently shows up in the table of contents of top magazines like Asimov’s Science Fiction. His stories get reprinted in various Year’s Best anthologies. More than all that, though, he’s one of those writers who you’re happy to see in any table of contents. As in, “Oh, excellent, a new James Van Pelt story!” You can count on him to deliver a good story well told, with characters you care about and powerful insights. These are not easy things to accomplish.
Jim’s stories cover a lot of ground. On one hand, you never know what you’re going to get: the past, the future, time travel, distant space, a quiet story at home, present day in a school. On the other hand, you know exactly what you’re going to get, and it’s the reason you read a James Van Pelt story in the first place: humanity. In his stories, Jim is in conversation with his culture, with history, ideas, literature, people. Different kinds of people, groups of people, individuals. Students, family, fellow writers, fellow teachers, the world. Across time and space, what’s come before us and what lies ahead. He’s comfortable writing about the distant past and the end of the universe. His settings, as carefully researched and created as they are (“The Radio Magician” puts us right in the middle of the almost-forgotten polio epidemic), are tools for telling the bigger stories, the real stories. Whatever else they’re about, they’re primarily about people.
That should seem obvious. Every fiction how-to book and writing workshop discusses character development and motivation, how the story grows out of character, and so on. While most stories have characters, I’d argue that not all of them have people. Jim’s stories are about people. The point of “The Inn at Mount Either” isn’t the amazing hotel with interdimensional capabilities. It’s about confronting a nightmare: what if you lost the person you love most in the world—but only slightly? I suppose I could also go on about metaphor, since a lot of commentary about science fiction discusses metaphor and how the fantastic elements of the genre symbolize other themes that anchor the story to the real world. In that regard, I could talk about how the Inn is a metaphor for what happens when a couple grows apart, recognizing that the person you married isn’t quite the person you’re now with, the terrible fear that comes from realizing the comfortable life you thought you had no longer exists. But to say the Inn is “just a metaphor” belittles the story. Because the “what if” of the fantastic taps into our subconscious better than glib metaphor ever could. It’s what made the classic Twilight Zone episodes so powerful, and what makes the Inn so memorable. Dorian really has lost his wife, without losing her. Glib metaphor is safe and easily glossed over. But that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I get while reading the story? That’s real.
Okay, I changed my mind, I am going to pick a favorite. At least, a favorite at this moment in time, and a favorite when I got to read an earlier draft of it: “Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?” is a thought experiment. It’s also about two smart high school girls sitting in class, when something completely bizarre and unbelievable happens. The story itself is a lovely, squicky, nerve-wracking mini-thriller that gets under the skin in the best tradition of The Twilight Zone. But on a more personal level, Olivia is me. I was an intense, engaged, starry-eyed high school kid who thought she was going to change the world but wasn’t sure how she was going to do it. That character is so recognizable, and I’m sure Jim’s been seeing her every day his whole teaching career. But the amazing thing is how well he captured her on the page in Olivia. I felt like I was looking in a mirror. What happens to Olivia and Latasha—I take it personally. Talk about getting under my skin.
There’s a line from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech that gets quoted, perhaps overquoted, about how the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. (The speech, delivered in 1950, is available to read and hear on the Nobel Prize website, www.nobelprize.org.)
I looked up that quote, intending to talk about it blithely, like most people do, because Jim is one of those writers who “gets it.” His stories, even the ones about mutants and robots, are about people duking it out and struggling to survive and make sense of the world, and themselves. In reading the speech that the quote came from, I discovered what prompted Faulkner to make the speech in the first place and how amazingly out of context everyone’s been taking it all this time. He wasn’t just tossing off a pithy statement about the function of literature. He was warning us about the death of art.
“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”
So. Global war and the atom bomb are distracting us from the true worth of art. Maybe even destroying art. People are too afraid of annihilation to acknowledge such a small thing as the internal struggles of the human spirit. The thing is, putting that quote back in context? Jim still gets it. He writes about that very fear, and how to overcome it. (Literally, in “The Light of a Thousand Suns,” and in every one of his stories that starts with Armageddon and ends with hope. Jim’s written a whole novel about that, Summer of the Apocalypse.) He’s been able to make that fear concrete, to humanize it—to discover the human h
eart in it rather than being overwhelmed by the abstract. Here’s the end of Faulkner’s speech:
“It is his [the writer’s] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Yeah. Jim gets it. I think Faulkner would be pleased to know that these stories exist, answering his call to arms, or rather, pen.
THE RADIO MAGICIAN
In the evening Clarence sprawled on the ragged hook rug, facing the cathedral front of the burnished wood Edison, a pillow tucked beneath his chin, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and his useless legs encased in casts, sticking behind him. Eyes shut, he listened to KLZ, the Reynolds Radio Company, and then slowly rotated the dial through the other Denver stations. Sometimes late at night he’d pick up WDAF out of Kansas City or WAAF in Chicago. Everywhere he turned he found wavering voices, scratchy baseball games, foreign speech and strange music. News from overseas. Poland invaded. President Roosevelt. Big bands. The slightest twist of the wooden knob brought new sounds, all so far, far away from his tiny bedroom and the ragged hook rug. He wished he could crawl in among the glowing tubes with their tiny suns suspended in glass cages. They warmed his chilled hands. He’d listen as hard as he could so that he wouldn’t hear his own breathing, so he wouldn’t even think about his breathing. Did that breath hurt? What about the next one? Did the muscles in his chest tighten up just a little that time?
Mom had said, “You’re luckier than some, son. It’s only your legs.”
So far, thought Clarence. So far. No, he didn’t want to think about breathing.
So, he listened to The Shadow, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters, and he loved Charlie Chan stories from Five Star Theater, but mostly he listened for Professor Gilded’s Glorious Magical Extravaganza. On the table by the window, the clock ticked to the hour, just as the announcer said, “Now, for your listening pleasure, Denver’s very own radio magician.” Clarence shivered in delight, and waited impatiently through a Pepsodent commercial.
“We return today to disappearance and transference,” said Professor Gilded. “Last session, we talked of coins that moved from one hand to the next, from your hand to a pocket, from a pocket to a purse, or coins that vanished all together.”
Clarence scooted closer to the radio, holding his own coin tight, a gold quarter eagle that felt warm and smooth. Tonight he barely had a headache, so the show was more enjoyable.
“You see, I put a coin in my left hand. I show it to the audience. The coin is there, I assure you. Its edges press against my skin. Everyone has seen it go into my left hand. That is the secret. Everyone must see.”
Clarence pictured Professor Gilded on his tiny radio stage. Once The Denver Post had printed a picture of the professor’s broadcast. Beside him, his top hat rested on a spindly legged table. The audience of ten who were there by the luck of having their names drawn from letters they’d sent the show, leaned forward. Every week Clarence wrote Professor Gilded a letter, but his name had never been drawn.
Last week, Father had patted Clarence’s head. “How would we get you there, Clarence boy? You won’t be going on that journey while you are sick. But write your letters. It’s good your mind is so active.” Then Father drew a long breath through his pipe, and held it in his lungs before releasing a steady gray stream.
Professor Gilded continued, “The coin does not know the trick. That is the trick. The coin does not know. So when the magic happens, the coin has jumped from my left hand to wherever I want it to go.” He paused. A quiet drum rolled in the background as it did before the magic occurred. “Where do you think the coin has appeared this time? It is not in my left hand as you can see.” The audience oohed and then clapped. Clarence squirmed in contentment. He could see Professor Gilded’s empty hand. “Young lady with the fancy hat sitting in the back row. Yes, you. Would you check inside that beautiful red ribbon on the hat?”
A surprised squeal burst from the background. The audience buzzed with startled conversation.
The announcer said, “Ma’am could you describe what happened for our listeners?”
“The coin was inside my hat! Professor Gilded never moved from the stage!” She giggled suddenly. “I’m going to keep this forever.”
Clarence squeezed the quarter eagle, a birthday present. “A ten-year-old deserves real money,” Mother had said as she gave it to him. “It’s a lucky coin, minted the year your father and I were born.” She put her finger on the date, 1910. “You can’t spend it. It’s not legal money anymore.” She leaned close, like a conspirator. “We were supposed to turn all the gold over to the government in 1933, but I held this one for you.” The secret made the coin worth even more. Sometimes he thought of what the two and a half dollars could buy, and it made him feel rich.
Clarence pressed the small coin’s bumpy edges against his skin, clenched it in his fist, turned the hand over, willed the coin to vanish. He scrunched his forehead, focused, tried to believe the quarter eagle was no longer in his grasp. But it was no good, just like wishing he could move his legs was no good. Even getting around on crutches would be better than his plaster jail. New crutches rested against the closet door. Beneath them in a box waited leg braces with long metal bars, heavy leather straps and black buckles. Someday, his mother promised, he would walk in them. The casts, though, were too heavy, and he couldn’t swing his legs to keep himself moving forward. A week ago he’d tried, only to fall face first onto the hardwood floor.
Professor Gilded’s voice broke in. “We do not dabble in the supernatural here. Charlatans claim their magic is real. The coin’s disappearance is an illusion, a trick of perception only, but our perceptions make reality for us all. If you perceive you are cowardly, then illusion becomes the world. If you perceive you are ill, then illness becomes you.”
Clarence’s eyes popped open. He turned the sound up, his own attempts at the trick forgotten. Beneath his casts, his legs ached. He remembered running home down the long muddy lane beside the field, its corn already harvested, the broken stalks lying across each other. He’d run on the weeds beside the lane to keep his shoes dry. Then he stumbled. For a second, he thought he’d stepped in the mud, but he could see the shoe was clean. His right leg dragged again. He slowed to a heavy limp, massaging his thigh through his jeans. What was wrong with his leg? The house had never looked so far away. Too far to call for help. He leaned on the fence and felt his strength fading.
Just as he reached the gate an hour later, Mom came out on the porch to look for him. She ran to him as he fell, her face wet with fear. By morning, the left leg had gone weak too. How far would it stretch? As the doctor poked at him later that day, Clarence made a fist, then unmade it, over and over. Would the paralysis spread? Fist. No fist. Fist. No fist.
Professor Gilded said, “The world’s illusions cloud perceptions. Most fail to recognize reality before them. They believe they are poor, or ugly, or life’s horizons are short. If my assistant will allow me to demonstrate, observe the reality of my four-legged friend.”
The sound of clopping came from the speakers before the announcer said, “Professor Gilded’s beautiful assistant, Sonia, is leading a horse into the studio, a strawberry roan, courtesy of the Phipps Ranch. I have to tell you folks, livestock in a radio studio is not what you see every day.” Chairs scraped across a wooden floor. Someone said, “Give him a bit of room.”
The announcer whispered, “The studio is not large, my friends. Our audience has moved to the back wall. The horse, a gentle one, chosen especially for this demonstration, stands no more than five feet from them. Professor Gilded’s stage gives him a height advantage. He’s removing a large, blue blanket from the chest behind him.”
Clarence turned the sound up again. The big trick alway
s ended the show. First, the small demonstrations. Cards that reordered themselves. Balls that multiplied. Flowers that changed colors. Handkerchiefs that metamorphed into birds. All the while Professor Gilded lectured on magic, on the magic he was doing and the magic in the world, as he built to the finale, something so impressive that his audience clapped and clapped and clapped until the sound faded and the show ended. But he’d never worked with a horse! He couldn’t possibly make a horse vanish from a small studio in front of an attentive audience. Not even Houdini could accomplish such a feat. For a moment, Clarence didn’t think about his legs.
“A beautiful animal, the horse. Much more intelligent than humanity imagines. Please, people, run your hands along the horse’s side. Don’t be shy. Feel his beating heart. Ahh, a true horse fancier, are you? Yes, check his hooves. This is a hale and healthy representative of his breed. Assure yourselves of his reality, for, I promise you, in a moment you will doubt your memories and senses, and, perhaps, you will wonder what other illusions you harbor about the world.”
Outside Clarence’s window, a trolley car rattled by. Every fifteen minutes the trolley clattered, reminding him that his parents had moved from the farm so they were close to Broadway and Denver General Hospital. “We can’t risk him, Thomas,” Mom said. “The doctors warned about the disease migrating into his lungs. We might need Dr. Drinker’s respirator until Clarence becomes strong again.” Father had only nodded, and soon he completed negotiations with their neighbor to lease the land. Within weeks, both parents had found part-time work, which was remarkable. Jobs were hard to come by. Mom cleaned houses while Dad sorted mail. Clarence envisioned the virus like a horrible mold. Its name sounded like a mold, poliomyelitis. The doctors put his legs in casts. Itching during the day was intolerable, but Clarence could force a pencil, or a ruler, or a straightened coat hanger only so far under the plaster. Maybe the virus really reassembled a mold, growing out of sight in the cast’s moist darkness. If the casts came off now, would his legs look human anymore? And that wasn’t the worst. In his blood, he pictured the virus marching toward his lungs, filling them with cauliflower-like lumps of gray and green mold until he couldn’t inhale. Mom called the machine they would put him in “Dr. Drinker’s respirator,” an iron lung, and Porter’s hospital only had one. Iron lung. Iron lung. Nothing sounded more frightening. It made him think of iron crosses and invasions, a German army charging up his arteries’ roads, a blitzkrieg to the heart. But that wasn’t the worst. Close as they lived now, the iron lung would do no good if someone else filled the machine. Clarence was not the only sick child in Denver. An eleven-year-old from Broomfield lay in the machine now. The Post put his picture in the paper yesterday. The caption read, “Young Sean Garrison, completely paralyzed from the neck down, battles for his life against all odds.” But he didn’t look like he was battling in the picture. He looked like he’d lost, and all the weight of that loss, and all the grief, were written in his face.
The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 1
