In the Mean Time

by Tremblay, Paul

  Advance Praise for

  In the Mean Time

  “Paul Tremblay’s In the Mean Time is a dark, heart-twisting collection of short fiction which defies categorization and requires your complete attention. The children, parents, and teachers who inhabit these stories exist in the ways we all exist—through those old historical longings which are rarely answered. Tremblay offers no solutions, but in the end, somehow, we walk away with a greater understanding of ourselves. Or, at the very least, the kind of selves we are but rarely see.”

  —Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent

  “Paul Tremblay creates images of terror and wonder. Lean, mean, and just a bit on the nasty side, he’s a hardnosed prose stylist with a heavyweight punch. Tremblay is a bona fide contender.”

  —Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation

  “In the Mean Time is a formidable collection, as disquieting as it is beautiful. They shock and they gleam, these stories, and the moods they provoke linger powerfully in the imagination: the dread of those who see the trouble coming and the strange relief of those upon whom it has already fallen.”

  —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

  “Rumor has it that the world will end in fire and ice, but then again, if Paul Tremblay is to be believed, it may conclude in preternaturally active plants, amusement parks, sudden brain aneurisms, and silence. In Mean Time, end of the world scenarios brush up against the traumas of more personal apocalypses. The resulting stories are as stressful and quietly traumatic as they are fluidly and lucidly written.”

  —Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

  “The power of these stories is that you think you’re reading them, that there’s that distance, but really you’re living them, experiencing them, and that’s how you remember them later. Not as something you read, but an event you lived.”

  —Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theoryand The Ones That Almost Got Away

  “In the Mean Time is a miscellany of voices—witty, wise, weird, assured. These stories push at boundaries, not just within genre; they play alongside the uneasy undercurrents of lives we’d usually call ordinary. Stories to read and read again.”

  —Helen Oyeyemi, author of White is for Witching

  “Paul Tremblay’s stories sneak up on you quietly and then . . . wow! You don’t know what hit you, but you like it. And you want more. Powerful, emotional and unforgettable; these are stories that work their way into your brain and into your heart. Highly recommended.”

  —Ann Vandermeer, Hugo Award-winning editor of Weird Tales

  “Paul Tremblay disappears into the dark places that most writers are afraid to venture, and he returns with something gleaming and beautiful, stories that are absolutely unforgettable. In Tremblay’s work, once the thrilling shock of seeing a two-headed girl wears off, he reminds you of what’s most important, the single beating heart inside of her. With this collection, Tremblay announces himself as a master of the fantastic, and I look forward to reading each new word he writes.”

  —Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

  Paul Tremblay

  ChiZine Publications

  FIRST EDITION

  In the Mean Time © 2010 by Paul Tremblay

  Jacket design © 2010 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design © 2010 by C. A. Lewis

  Interior illustrations © 2010 by Mara Sternberg

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Tremblay, Paul

  In the mean time / Paul Tremblay.

  Short stories.

  ISBN 978-1-926851-06-8

  I. Title.

  PS3620.R445I68 2010 813'.6 C2010-903996-3

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Helen Marshall

  Copyedited and proofread by Shirarose Wilensky

  always, for Lisa, Cole, Emma,

  sometimes, for me

  IN THE

  MEAN TIME

  Table of Contents

  The Teacher

  The Two-Headed Girl

  The Strange Case of Nicholas Thomas:

  An Excerpt from A History of the Longesian Library

  Feeding the Machine

  Figure 5

  Growing Things

  Harold the Spider Man

  Rhymes with Jew

  The Marlboro Man Meets the End

  The Blog at the End of the World

  The People Who Live Near Me

  There’s No Light Between Floors

  Headstones in Your Pocket

  It’s Against the Law to Feed the Ducks

  We Will Never Live in the Castle

  Acknowledgements

  Copyrights

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  “Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”

  —Georg C. Licthenberg

  “All good things arrive unto themthat wait—and don’t die in the meantime.”

  —Mark Twain

  The Teacher

  We loved him before we walked into the room. We loved him when we saw his name on our schedules. Mr. Sorent says, “All right, this is going to be a special class.” We love him because of the music and movie posters on his walls, the black stud earring in his left ear, his shoulder-length hair. We love him because of those black horn-rimmed glasses; the same glasses we see people wearing on TV and in movies. We love him because he looks like us.

  He stands at his podium. We love him because bumper stickers, many with political messages we want to understand, cover that podium. He says, “Because you guys are seniors and you’re going to be outta here and out there,” and he points out the window with his miniature baseball bat, and we love him for that, too. “We’re going to learn more than just AP American History.” We love him because he wears jeans. We love him because he makes fun of teachers we don’t like. We love him because he plays guitar and he knows our songs.

  There are only eight of us in his very special class. Four girls and four boys. We sit at a circular table. There are no desks. His is the only room in the school designed this way. He passes that smile around the circle. That smile we share, that smile we hoard for ourselves. He says, “We will be doing things outside of the book: special lessons. These lessons won’t be every day or even every week, but they will be important. They will have weight and meaning. Certainly more meaning than the AP test you’ll take next May.”

  We love him because he tells us the truth. Mr. Sorent leaves the podium and sits on a stool. “Just know the after school rules apply to our special lessons.” We love him because he lets us talk to him after school. He lets us be confidential. He lets us talk about beer and parties and drugs and parents and abortions. “This is so exciting. I really can’t wait. Maybe we’ll have a lesson tomorrow.” We love him because he is the promise that growing old doesn’t mean becoming irrelevant.

  At dinner Mom asks me about my soccer game even though she watched it. She’s dressed in a sweatsuit as bright yellow as our kitchen. She leans over her pla
te to hear my answer. She’s eager. She wants the coach to put her in the game. I tell her it was good because we won. Mom then answers her own question by announcing that those girls on the other team were playing dirty. Dad apologizes for missing the first game of the year, but it’s perfunctory. He’s wearing a yellow sweatsuit too. He doesn’t want to be left out. I tell him it’s okay and there’ll be other games. My brother Lance is six years old and stirs around the unwanted green beans. I stare at his dinosaur plate and Spider-Man fork and wonder why everything has to be something. It’s my turn to ask Lance how was his day. This is what we do at dinner. We ask about each other’s day as if it was an actual object, something that could be held and presented. Lance giggles, covers his face, and tells us normal stuff happened. Everyone smiles even though we have no idea what normal stuff is. Dad asks me more questions and I try some humor; I say, “How could I possibly describe my day in a manner that would truly communicate my individual experience and world view concerning what had happened in that randomly delineated time period?” My parents laugh, and make we’re-impressed faces. Dad says, “Did you learn that in school today, Kate?” He manages enough sarcasm for my approval. Mom shakes her head, then grabs my nose. Her fingers are cold. I look just like Mom. Right there, in the middle of my stir-fry, I make a solemn promise to never colour my brown hair auburn, or wear a yellow sweatsuit.

  After dinner, I go to my room to do homework and Facebook my friends. Dialogue boxes pop up on the lower right corner of my screen. We type messages on walls. We don’t capitalize. We use bad grammar and code words. We chat about who is seeing whom and how far each couple has gone. We chat about TV and we chat about Mr. Sorent. We chat about weekends past and future and we chat about nothing, and it’s a comfort. I don’t hear my friends’ voices but I know all their secret names.

  A TV on a rolling stand replaces his podium. Mr. Sorent is a live wire. His hands are pissed-off birds that keep landing on his face and then flying away. We sit and whisper jokes about Molly’s short skirt and Miles’s porn moustache, but we don’t take our eyes off Mr. Sorent.

  He says, “There will be more films and even some live demonstrations, but today’s clip is the arc of the course.” One of us turns out the lights without being asked, and the TV turns on.

  A black-and-white security video of a classroom. There are finger paintings and posters with big happy letters on the walls. Stacks of blocks and toys and chairs that look like toys are strewn on the floor. There is no sound with the video, and we don’t make any sounds. Five preschoolers run around the room, two more are standing on chairs and trying to knock each other off. The teacher is a young woman. She wears white, unflattering khakis and a collared shirt with the school’s logo above the breast. Her hair is tied up tight behind her head, a fistful of piano wire. She breaks up the fight on the chairs, and then another child runs into her leg and falls to the ground. She picks up the squirming child, grabbing one arm and leg. She spins, giving a brief airplane ride, but then she lets go. Mr. Sorent pauses the video, and we know the teacher did not simply let go.

  Mr. Sorent doesn’t say anything until we’re all looking at him. He says, “I don’t want to say too much about this.” He edges the video ahead by one frame. The airborne child is a boy with straight blond hair. We can’t see his face, and he’s horizontal, trapped in the black-and-white ether three feet above the carpeted floor. “Your individual reactions will be your guide, your teacher.” The video goes ahead another frame. The boy’s classmates haven’t had time to react. The teacher still has her arms extended out. If someone were to walk in now and see this, I imagine they’d want to believe she was readying to catch the child. Not the opposite, not what really happened. Mr. Sorent moves the video ahead another frame and a wall comes into view, stage right. Class ends, and none of us will go see Mr. Sorent after school.

  At dinner we eat spaghetti, and we’re quiet. Everyone’s day is a guarded secret. My parents missed my soccer game and when they ask about it, I tell them I scored a goal when I didn’t. I think they know I’m making it up; my parents are smart, but they don’t call me on it. They’re still dressed in their work clothes, not their usual sweatsuit dining wear. Mom sits up straight and I can almost hear her spine straining into its perfect posture. Dad crouches behind a glass of water. Lance won’t speak to us. He shrugs and grunts when we ask him questions. Dad sighs, which means he is pissed. Mom tells Lance it’s okay to have a cranky day. I imagine Lance flying through the air, toward a wall, and I get the same stomach dropping feeling I get sometimes when I think about the future.

  I don’t eat much and I go up to my room early to Facebook. My friends are all here on my computer. No one talks about the video. We know the rules. But no one knows what they’re supposed to write in their notebooks. Mr. Sorent handed us special-lesson composition notebooks that he wants us to decorate. We’re supposed to write down diary entries or essays or stories or doodles or anything we’re moved to do after reflecting upon the lesson. My notebook is open but empty, a pen lying in the spine. I’ve tried to write something, but there’s nothing, and I get that afraid-of-the-future feeling again.

  Days and weeks pass without another special lesson. We’ve had plenty of time to waste. Our first term grades are good and we lose ourselves in the responsibilities of senior year: college recommendations and applications and social requirements.

  On the first day of winter term the TV returns. Mr. Sorent doesn’t have to tell us what to do. We pull our chairs in tight and put away our books. Mr. Sorent says, “Lesson Two, gang.”

  There is a collage of clips and images—nothing in focus for more than a second or two—of car accidents. The kind of stuff some of us saw in driver’s ed. The images of crushed and limbless and decapitated bodies are intercut with scenes from funerals, and there are red-eyed family members, the ones who never saw any of it coming, wailing and crying and breaking apart. Then the video ends with a teenage boy, alone in his room. There’s no sound. His head is shaved to black stubble and he wears a sleeveless white T-shirt. The room is dark, and he scowls. There’s no warning and he puts a handgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. A dark mist forms behind his head and then he falls out of the picture. Mr. Sorent switches to the preschool video, still paused where he left it. He runs the video for a frame, then a second. The boy is still floating and horizontal, but getting closer to the wall. On the wall, bottoms of the finger paintings are curling up, heading toward the ceiling as if everything could fly. None of the boy’s classmates know what is happening yet. But we know.

  Mr. Sorent says, “Don’t forget to do your homework.”

  There was this time I was waiting for Mom to come home. I had a Little League game in an hour. I wore my white uniform and black cleats, ponytail sticking through the back of my hat. I was in front of my house skipping rope, even though I didn’t like skipping rope, but I liked the sounds my cleats made on the pavement. I was nine years old but if anyone asked I pretended I was ten. Three neighbourhood boys, three teammates dressed in their white baseball uniforms, came by, grabbed me, and forced me into one of their backyards. I didn’t resist much as they used the jump rope to tie my arms behind my back, but I screamed a little, just enough to let them know that I didn’t fully approve, especially since they never talked to me at baseball practice or games because I was a girl. They led me toward the edge of a stranger’s wooded property, to a woodpile buried in dried pine needles and spiderwebs. They’d hanged a bullfrog by its neck from a piece of twine. It was as big as a puppy, kicking its legs out and covering itself in web and debris. The jump rope went slack on my arms but the boys didn’t care. They told me to watch. They threw rocks. They had a BB gun and shot out one of the frog’s eyes. Then they took turns pulling and pinching the frog, dancing at the base of the woodpile in their bright white baseball uniforms. Everything was white. They had a book of matches.

  I left the jump rope in the grass like
a dead snake and walked home and sat down in front of the TV. Nothing was on. Mom was late coming home and we missed the first inning of my game. When it was my turn to be the pitcher, I closed my eyes before releasing every pitch, afraid of what might happen.

  Jake sits in a chair at the front of the room. Jake is elderly and has no hair. His face is a rotting fruit, and he moves like a marionette with tangled strings. He grins. Big yellow teeth break through his purple lips. He wears only a hospital gown, blue and white socks, and brown slippers. None of us wants to be here. Jake says, “Thanks to the loving support of family and friends, even if I don’t beat this disease, I’ll still have won, you know what I mean?” We don’t know what he means. We couldn’t possibly know. He says more heroic things, things that win us over, things that speak to the indomitable human spirit we always hear about, things that inspire us, that make us want to be better people, things that make us believe.

  Then Mr. Sorent says, “Okay, Jake.” Jake drops the curtain on his yellow teeth and he slouches into his chair, his marionette stings cut. He tells us everything he’s just said is bullshit. He tells us to fuck off. He hates our fucking guts because of our health and youth and beauty. He hates us because we expect and demand him to be brave in facing his own withering existence, because we expect him to make our own lives seem better, or tolerable. He tells us we’re selfish and that he’ll die angry and bitter if he wants, that he’s not here to die the right way for us, fuck you, you fucks he tells us, he doesn’t give two shits about us and he tells us that we’ll all die the same way he will. Alone. He limps out of the room, limbs shaking and moving in the wrong directions.

  Mr. Sorent says, “Look here,” and he points with his bat. We hate that stupid bat now. We want to steal it or break it or burn it. It’s meaningless to us. The bat points at the TV screen tucked away in a corner of the room, framed by all those posters that are no longer cool, but trying too hard to be cool. We want to destroy those too. We want to destroy everything. Mr. Sorent is still pointing with that ridiculous bat at the floating-boy video. It moves ahead another frame. Class dismissed.