by Nick Mamatas
Do yourself a favor and forget about me. I’ve already forgotten about you. There is no need for further communication between us.
yrs.
L
Of all the words in that message, the one Raymond took most seriously was “yrs.,” and so Raymond wrote Liz back, asking if she would at least meet him at his apartment and help pack his things. Liz agreed that she could do that, yes, but only if an exterminator was called to spray down the place and all its contents beforehand, which Raymond’s landlord did.
The packing didn’t take long. Liz stormed through the four rooms, jamming everyone of Julia’s possessions and everything that she suspected might be Julia’s into one of the several large contractor’s refuse bags she had brought with her.
“Are you separating them out for the Goodwill, and some for eBay, and some for—”
“The incinerator,” Liz said. “All consigned to the flames, not the consignment shop. This is the best way to help you pack.” She leaned over the bureau whose top she was clearing into the bag and found us. “Oh no,” she said, snatching one of our appendages between her forefinger and thumb, “looks like one of the little buggers managed to hold his breath!” She waved us in front of Raymond’s face. He flattened against the wall, surely due to Liz’s thick and aggressive stance. “Well, the exterminator was here,” he said.
“Oh, I can smell that,” Liz said. “Like maple syrup and Elizabeth, New Jersey, all rolled into one.” She raised us up, over her head. “I’ll take care of this little spy for free.” For a mad moment, we thought she might open her mouth wide and drop us in. Instead she marched out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, dangled us over the sink and dropped us down the drain.
RAYMOND and Julia engaged in the act of physical love to completion only three times over the next year. Interruptions of various sorts kept intercourse to a minimum: the slow-burn realization from Raymond that he was engaging in sexual congress in the room in which his mother had slept for thirty years; Julia whispering the words “penis panic” into his ear as a joke, he pouts while she laughs; Julia suddenly becoming terrified of sperm and fetuses as they are reminiscent of parasitism in their own ways and so she flails and scratches and tries to sweep Raymond off the top of her as if sex were a judo match.
Julia became pregnant anyway and miscarried after two months. They mourned in separate rooms, Raymond and Julia, and together simply sniped and argued about anything they could that wasn’t Peter Neads Fishman, Plesiometa argyra, the Sans Nom movement, or Z-Day.
One day, not long after the miscarriage, Davan appeared at the doorstep with a coffee cake and a pair of bookends. “Presents,” he said.
“Come in,” said Julia. The sun was low and in her eyes, so she squinted at him. She was wearing a house coat and slippers, looking older than Davan remembered her. Raymond wandered into the dining room from upstairs, hands in his pockets, and was ready to turn and go back up the steps, but Julia said, “Cake,” so he stayed.
“You’re going to be pardoned,” Davan said.
Julia sipped her tea in response, leaving it to Raymond to say, “Oh?”
Davan waggled his hand. “We have someone in the White House. The pardon will be buried, a footnote of a footnote of an errata of a rider of an executive order countermanding a bill that died in subcommittee, but it’ll be there.”
“What’s the bill about?”
Davan rolled his eyes and tsked. “Federalizing library cards for children of illegal immigrants who are not themselves illegal because they were born on the right side of a dotted line or something like that.”
The three clinked their teacups together. “Bravo,” said Raymond. Then he said, “How did you find us?”
“I’ve been here for a while. Since Z-Day, really. It’s not bad for a town that doesn’t exist.”
“So, you just looked in the phone book that doesn’t exist?” asked Julia.
“You’re not in it, actually.”
“We have cell phones only,” said Raymond.
“I work for a publisher—nothing big, just catalogs. You’re on the mailing list for some baby clothes thing.”
“Yeah,” said Julia. “I throw those out when they arrive.”
The conversation wilted and soon enough Davan left. Raymond took the bookends, two pieces of Lucite shaped somewhat like the ziggurats of the Olmec-like tribe that once inhabited our place of origin, and started stacking the books in which he had chapters, or had reviewed for journals, between them on the mantle place.
The next morning, Julia went up to the room that was only half-painted like a nursery, took her journal out from the slim drawer of the writing desk, found her favorite fountain pen, and got back to work on her short story:
June wept sighed ran her fingers through what was once left of her mousy brown hair. The cancer year had been a difficult one, and Raymond almond-eyed Astasio had grown ever more distant. He was now a memory of a line from a once-favored poem—“One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry”—
On the margin she had scribbled: Astasio like poem or wombat? Fix later.
His embraces, which were few and tentative, were now a strange sensation, nearly chthonic spectral. The last time she felt at home, alive, in his arms was at the New Year’s Eve party, when Liz Alysse Leslie had walked in just after eleven 11:11? Fix later wearing the same cocktail dress and the same smile June always wore. The next morning, June was hung over from all the nerve-strangled champagne gulping, and three days later, after the feeling in her throat hadn’t gone away, she knew something was wrong. With her marriage, with her health soul life soul life.
“Fuck it,” she said, and she tore the page out of her book. She looked around for a wastebasket, but there was none. She cast her eyes around the room, even craning her neck as if that would allow her to see around the corner and out into the hallway where Raymond may have been lurking. Then she crumpled the paper up in her hands, ripped it into three smaller chunks, and ate them. Then she wrote on a fresh leaf of paper:
My name is Julia Ott Hernandez. I killed a man, started a massive protest movement, shut down the Internet, funded terrorists to the tune of tens of millions of bucks, received a Presidential pardon, learned to play the theremin, and lost a fetus, not in that order but all due to the war between two nonhuman species—one insect, the other arachnid. I remain trapped in a world I didn’t create but tried to change. I am a character in a story, clearly. Mad? Yes, in all senses of the word. If I must be a character in a story, I vow to make it my story!
Then she stopped writing, and sucked on the nib of her fountain pen, leaving a bluish smear on her lip. She sighed and shut the journal, then opened it again and tore out the page on which she had just written. Crumpling it into a ball, Julia brought the paper to her mouth but did not eat it. Instead, she stood up, pushed the chair away from her with a flex of her hips, and marched down the hallway and steps into the dining room on the first floor.
Raymond was eating some soup he had prepared from a can at the dining room table. He was leaning over the bowl, his nose nearly touching the bumpy surface of the saucy red stuff, and shoveling in great tablespoons of potato and celery, He looked up, barely, when Julia entered the room. He said, “Hello.” Julia threw the ball of paper at him; it bounced off his forehead and shot nearly straight up toward the ceiling, then landed atop his head and bounced off that as well, into his soup.
“Yahbye,” Julia said. “I’m hitting the road, viejo. This was all a mistake. There are no epiphanies here for me in this dead world. I gave it another shot with you, and you shoot blanks. I don’t care whether I live or die anymore, but I do care whether I live before dying.” She nodded curtly. “Enjoy your soup. I know you had big plans for it.”
She walked out of the dining room; Raymond got up and followed her, his hands wringing his mother’s cloth napkin. “Where are you going to go? What am I going to do now?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Julia as she opened the screen do
or and stepped outside. “Watch the news!”
We are.
Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels, including Move Under Ground and Under My Roof, which have been translated into German, Italian, and Greek and nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards and the Kurd Lasswitz Prize. Many of his sixty short stories were recently collected in You Might Sleep … As coeditor of Clarkesworld, the online magazine of the fantastic, he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and for science fiction’s Hugo Award, and with Ellen Datlow is he coeditor of the anthology Haunted Legends. Nick’s reportage and essays on radical politics, digital society, pop culture, and everyday life have appeared in the Village Voice, In These Times, Clamor, The New Humanist, The Smart Set, and many other venues, including various Disinformation and Smart Pop Books anthologies. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.
PM PRESS
SPECTACULAR FICTION
TVA Baby
Terry Bisson
978-1-60486-405-2
$14.95
Beginning with a harrowing, high-speed ride through the Upper South (a “TVA Baby” is a good ol’ boy with a Yankee father and a 12-gauge) and ending in a desperate search through New Orleans graveyards for Darwin’s doomsday machine (“Charlie’s Angels”), Terry Bisson’s newest collection of short stories covers all the territory between—from his droll faux-FAQ’s done for Britain’s Science magazine, to the most seductive of his Playboy fantasies (“Private Eye”), to an eerie dreamlike evocation of the 9/11 that might have been (“A Perfect Day”). On the way we meet up with Somali Pirates, a perfect-crime appliance (via Paypal) and a visitor from Atlantis who just wants a burger with fries, please.
Readers who like cigarettes, lost continents, cars, lingerie, or the Future will be delighted. For those who don’t, there’s always Reality TV.
“Bisson’s work is a fresh, imaginative attempt to confront some of the problems of our time. It is the Bissons of the field upon whom the future if science fiction depends.”
—Washington Post Book World
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SPECTACULAR FICTION
Fire on the Mountain
Terry Bisson
978-1-60486-087-0
$15.95
It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army.
Long unavailable in the U.S., published in France as Nova Africa, Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.
About the Author:
Terry Bisson, who was for many years a Kentuckian living in New York City, is now a New Yorker living in California. In addition to science fiction, he has written bios of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Nat Turner. He is also the host of a popular San Francisco reading series (SFinSF) and the Editor of PM’s new Outspoken Authors pocketbook series.
“Few works have moved me as deeply, as thoroughly, as Terry Bisson’s Fire On The Mountain … With this single poignant story, Bisson molds a world as sweet as banana cream pies, and as briny as hot tears.”
—Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner and author of Live From Death Row, from the Introduction.
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Left Left Behind
Terry Bisson
978-1-60486-086-3
$12
Hugo and Nebula award-winner Terry Bisson is best known for his short stories, which range from the southern sweetness of “Bears Discover Fire” to the alienated aliens of “They’re Made out of Meat.” He is also a 1960s’ New Left vet with a history of activism and an intact (if battered) radical ideology.
The Left Behind novels (about the so-called “Rapture” in which all the born-agains ascend straight to heaven) are among the bestselling Christian books in the U.S., describing in lurid detail the adventures of those “left behind” to battle the Anti-Christ. Put Bisson and the Born-Agains together, and what do you get? The Left Left Behind-a sardonic, merciless, tasteless, take-no-prisoners satire of the entire apocalyptic enterprise that spares no one-predatory preachers, goth lingerie, Pacifica radio, Indian casinos, gangsta rap, and even “art cars” at Burning Man.
Plus: “Special Relativity,” a one-act drama that answers the question: When Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, J. Edgar Hoover are raised from the dead at an anti-Bush rally, which one wears the dress? As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
Modem Times 2.0 Michael Moorcock
978-1-60486-308-6
$12
As the editor of London’s revolutionary New Worlds magazine in the swinging sixties, Michael Moorcock has been credited with virtually inventing modern Science Fiction: publishing such figures as Norman Spinrad, Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard.
Moorcock’s own literary accomplishments include his classic Mother London, a romp through urban history conducted by psychic outsiders; his comic Pyat quartet, in which a Jewish antisemite examines the roots of the Nazi Holocaust; Behold The Man, the tale of a time tourist who fills in for Christ on the cross; and of course the eternal hero Elric, swordswinger, hell-bringer and bestseller.
And now Moorcock’s most audacious creation, Jerry Cornelius—assassin, rock star, chronospy and maybe-Messiah–is back in Modem Times 2.0, a time twisting odyssey that connects 60s London with post-Obama America, with stops in Palm Springs and Guantanamo. Modem Times 2.0 is Moorcock at his most outrageously readable–a masterful mix of erudition and subversion.
Plus: a non-fiction romp in the spirit of Swift and Orwell, Fields of Folly; and an Outspoken Interview with literature’s authentic Lord of Misrule.
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Wild Girls
Ursula K. Le Guin
978-1-60486-403-8
$12
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.
Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.
Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake While We Read”, (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.
“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
Mammoths of the
Great Plains
Eleanor Arnason
978-1-60486-075-7
$12
When President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West, he told them to look especially for mammoths. Jefferson had seen bones and tusks of the great beasts in Virginia, and he suspected—he hoped!—that they might sti
ll roam the Great Plains. In Eleanor Arnason’s imaginative alternate history, they do: shaggy herds thunder over the grasslands, living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. And in an unforgettable saga that soars from the badlands of the Dakotas to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the AIM protests of the 1960s, Arnason tells of a modern woman’s struggle to use the weapons of DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage.
PLUS: “Writing SF During World War III,” and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.
About the Author:
Ever since her first story was published in the revolutionary New Worlds in 1972, Eleanor Arnason has been acknowledged as the heir to the feminist legacy of Russ and Le Guin. The first winner of the prestigious Tiptree Award, she has been short listed for both the Nebula and the Hugo.
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Lucky Strike
