by Unknown
But now, as he sat in the Chrysler, Marcia was coming out of the Baltimore apartment building in a white spring dress, toward him. The dream was going to be real now, all the time, and just as good for being so. Jack leaped out of the car, took her suitcase from her young hand, tossed it into the back. Grasped her smooth, sleeveless shoulders, kissed her sweet lips, at last thinking of the future, not the past. Opened the door, eyes feasting on her graceful figure as she got in, became his forever. Got back behind the wheel, and drove off into the sunset.
They stopped for dinner on the other side of Frederick, at an old stone inn. And knowing the romance would be strong enough, they became lawyer and secretary again, talked lightly of practical things.
"Did you…tell her?" Marcia asked, her eyes clear in the candlelight. "Tell…Meg?"
"No," Jack replied. "She'd never have understood. And that might have made her…too strong." He smiled. "But I did leave it so that she'll have more than enough."
Marcia nodded. "And we'll be okay? I packed just the suitcase, like you said, and sold the rest, but it only came to a couple thousand dollars."
He took her hands across the table, forced a laugh—then found he didn't feel guilty at all. "Remember, I explained that? Some time ago, when I started my…dream, I began hiding away some money. 'Fuck you' money, some people call it."
Her young eyes—God, so wonderfully blue—questioned.
"So that you can say that to what you don't like, have to get out of. Or--he had a sudden, happier thought—"in this case, my love, so that I can…fuck you!"
She giggled, getting his drift.
And in Pittsburgh, in an expensive hotel room, they did it, all over the king-size bed; free for the first time, just the two of them, without any other commitments. Again, Marcia seemed to hide herself in his older mastery, praised his strong chest and legs, while Jack reveled in her smooth white flesh, her wonderful tightness below. They seemed the perfect combination of maturity and youth.
It was the next morning, as they drove leisurely through Ohio, that the first, mild problem occurred.
They had fallen silent—no problem, Jack thought; just dreaming together—and he reached over and turned on the Chrysler's radio. Out came a sixties song, something by the Mamas and the Papas. He smiled, sighed, and started to drum his fingers on the dash in time with the music. They'd never listened to the radio together before.
Marcia smiled over at him, blonde hair ruffling beautifully in the top-down wind, breasts swelling the T-shirt she wore. But said, "Do we…have to have that old stuff?"
He frowned, told her the name of the group, said the song had been a big hit. "And besides, Mama Cass was from Baltimore—Forest Park High School."
"Well, okay," she replied. And she good-naturedly began to beat time too, trying to sing along.
But he wondered why she agreed so easily.
By nightfall they were in Indianapolis, in another big room, big playpen, though the place was a tank town, continuing to carry their sexual odyssey cross country. And the next day, after a big breakfast to replenish their strength, they were back on the road again, the morning sun at their backs.
That was when, as he looked over at Marcia, Jack felt another, little twinge. It might have been the light, but. . there seemed to be tiny wrinkles beside her blue eyes, the kind an…older woman might have.
"Are we pushing it too hard?" he asked her, reaching over to put his hand on her thigh, which still seemed firm enough. "After all, we have the rest of our lives."
"No." She smiled back. "Just a bit tense, maybe—getting used to all this. But it's wonderful, lover!"
So to help her relax, he flipped on the radio again. Pressed the scanner, wound up with a fifties rock station. "You should like this. Doesn't your 'generation' have a nostalgia thing for the early rock?"
"Well…yeah," she replied. And her fingers drummed on the dash.
Near Kansas City, after a long pull, they stopped for the night at Jack's cousin's. The man was his age, and they'd been close, having grown up in Baltimore together; he was one of the few people he'd told about Marcia and his decision to break from Meg and escape with her. And after a much-appreciated steak dinner, prepared by the cousin's wife, who'd reluctantly come around to the situation, the two men sat on the dark front porch, drank beer, and talked about it.
"Sometimes I think of doing what you did," the cousin said. "Yet there's something that tells me not to. Sure, I haven't been a hundred percent faithful—most men aren't. But when I strayed, with a younger woman, it was more like a dream, an escape."
"Well," Jack replied expansively, "if the inner voice gets strong enough, you just have to follow it, have to make that dream real. It's not your fault that men and women age differently. And there's nothing wrong with a woman being older—it's just not for me. I've felt bad, yes—but it was nothing like I was going through at home. Or what I would have, for the rest of my life, if I hadn't acted. And now, I have no regrets at all—I feel great. There's even something–American–about it, you know? Going for youth, newness; going west?"
His cousin leaned back in his porch chair. "Just tell me one thing."
"Yes?"
"Why didn't you pick a…really younger woman?"
And Jack suddenly had a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if the bottom had dropped out of his whole day.
He said a hasty good night to his cousin and went upstairs to the guest room, where Marcia lay dozing in bed. In the light of the night table lamp, which was still on, he looked at her…closely. And saw, not only the crow's feet he'd thought he noticed the day before, but a few wrinkles on her brow, a puffiness in her cheeks, a general coarseness, even on her exposed shoulders and arms, to her smooth, white flesh.
God, he thought, the light, or your imagination, can do strange things.
The next morning they got up very early, planning to share the driving all the way to Denver, said good-bye to their hosts, and pulled the Chrysler out into the dawn.
"Why are you…looking at me funny?" Marcia said after a while.
Jack had hoped she hadn't noticed his scrutiny. "Oh nothing. Probably just drinking in your beauty, lover."
And, as they sped past endless fields of Kansas wheat greening in the sun, he had to admit that she did look good, young enough, dressed as she was, surely for him, in a revealing pink halter top and silk jogging shorts. In fact, when they made rest stops, other men looked at her, making him proud.
So he flipped on the radio again. And the scanner turned up a St. Louis station, broadcasting nonstop jazz.
"This is before both our times," he said, smiling over at her. "But I've always sort of liked it. How about you?"
"Oh, I love it!" Marcia replied. "Sitting in some dark, smoky club in the forties, watching the band…"
"Well," he said happily, "no 'generation gap' here. Maybe you can teach me!"
But when they made Denver, in the small hours of the morning, Jack's sinking feeling had returned, and his doubts were deep. Maybe it was the hypnotic effect of the long drive, but the night, the whole trip, suddenly seemed unreal. And the way Marcia, on the way to the plush motel suite he'd hopefully reserved, got stiffly out of the car, not speaking, and walked heavily after him across the parking lot.
It's as if, he thought, she was nearly as old as my wife, Meg, as myself, yesterday, when we listened to the fifties rock. And today…older? He thought further. Could she still have some regrets about our escape? Could I? Could they be making me feel old, not younger, and she…? But that's ridiculous.
Yet, as he put her to bed—they both were too tired for sex, especially she—two voices echoed in Jack's mind.
The first, Marcia's, when she'd talked about jazz and the smoky club…as if she'd been there. Though the music had only been a sign.
And the second, belonging to a big trucker at one of the rest stops, overheard: "Gee, what a sexy outfit. And she wears it well…for an old broad."
In the mor
ning, when Marcia got out of bed, Jack watched her. It must be the strain of the trip—if not on her, on me, he thought again, as if grasping at a last, rational hope. My eyes, my mind must be tired, must be playing tricks on me. She can't have…aged right before them.
But it was true. He was able, trying hard, to conjure up a picture of his lover as she'd been on that first wonderful afternoon in her apartment, when they'd made it, and his dream had begun to become real. Now, as then, she was naked, moving about the room. Yet now.
She was less tall, less statuesque; inches had been taken from her height, and where her curves had once been those of heartbreakingly beautiful shoulder, breast, hip, and thigh, now they were those of a body compressed, lessened, by age. And sagging: her breasts were flat, flaccid, her hips puckered and pendulous, her once firm, marble-like face and neck a mass of pouches; all of this, all of her, grown out of, yet concealing and grotesquely caricaturing, the perfect twenty-two-year-old she'd been.
Where it had once been a dream, it was now a nightmare, Jack knew. He had never before believed in punishment, in poetically just retribution for the following of impulses, especially natural ones, but at this moment, he knew. His stomach churned, he instantly feared all creation; the bottom dropped out not only of his day, but of his whole life, of existence itself. And the worst of it—he too got out of bed, stole a look at himself in the mirror, saw no change at all—was what he, he indeed, out of some unknown, malevolent force operating inside him, had done to her.
He had tried to make, keep himself young by escaping with Marcia…but instead, far from even the possible punishment, for his middle-aged obsession, of himself continuing to age, he had made Marcia's years turn practically to hours, her minutes to seconds; made her lifetime trickle away in sickly perfect time with the miles they had traveled.
Yet knowing that it was a nightmare, but real, was not enough. The worst of it, Jack realized as he dressed next to this heavy, sixtyish woman—who did not really know, as was apparent from her still-happy small talk—was that they had to go on.
Nor is there anything wrong with her being her age, he thought now, trying to hold back insanity, as he helped her out into the light of day, back across the parking lot to the Chrysler, and they drove west, the direction not lost on him; west was also death. She's not unbeautiful—as Meg, God, Meg wasn't, and wouldn't have been, unbeautiful. It's just that she's missed all the years in between—as I have, the later ones, with Meg—but for her, far worse.
So, to try to keep Marcia happy—I've ruined her, but I'm not completely selfish, he thought ruefully—he reached over, flipped on the radio once more. And out came the sounds of an Astaire-Rogers musical from the thirties.
Her puffy fingers drummed on the dashboard. "Ooo, lover! I used to dance to that…when I was young."
The day before, he would have braked to a stop and screamed. Now, Jack turned the radio off.
Their next nightfall—at a cheap motel in the wilds of Utah, all pretense of luxuriant sex gone, sunken into the earth they'd traversed, and the folds of Marcia's flesh—was uneventful, but for the surreal landscape around them, which matched Jack's now-horrible odyssey.
And but for the proprietor's surprise that he should be sharing a room with his…mother. Something else, Jack thought with supreme logic, that I tried to escape.
They got a late start the next morning. He dimly remembered her having gone instantly, heavily to sleep, while he tossed and turned on the bed in a half-conscious stupor, his heart and head pounding; at one point, he thought he'd even fled from the room, and gone out onto the desolate earth to scream at the moon. But it was she who was worn out now as he bundled her bent, white-haired, toothless form, shapeless in a sack dress, into the car.
It was the last day of their trip, but where Jack might have imagined himself and Marcia being in an impossibly-free, lighthearted mood as they entered California, their secret goal, that…young place in which they'd hardly dared think they would enjoy the rest of their lives together, now neither of them spoke…as if she, in her senility, could have anyway. He kept his eyes away from her, stared at the ribbon of road, driving being the only reflex that remained to him; didn't even dare reach for the radio, in terror of what new, or old, surprise it might hold for him, and in her. The only, constant sound was the swish of the Chrysler's tires; he didn't even stop for meals, as if either of them could have eaten.
But when, after dark, they entered the last city, L.A., Jack forced himself to look at Marcia one more time. Maybe it had been only a nightmare after all, born out of his second thoughts, his disorientation at finally achieving his dream—or better yet, he thought, some sort of parable made manifest, some lesson about youth and age. Maybe.
But when, in the passing lights of the sprawling city, he got clear looks at her, he knew the worst, the unspeakable end. Something he might have guessed, from the inexorable progress of the last few days. The…process…
"Oh…God! Oh-oh-oh…God!!" he heard himself scream to the empty sky. But inside, he was beyond terror already dead.
A was the form, once his golden young woman, on the seat beside him. Whose sack dress was now a sack…of bleached, white bones. And whose once-beautiful, spring-like face had become…a skull.
Jack drove on, straight ahead. Through the night streets, aimlessly, of that city of youthful promise, now become a city of death. Straight ahead, through neighborhoods, rich and poor, passing surreally in the dark, to the end of the American land, to a place where the bulky forms of ships waited.
Straight ahead, into the even deeper darkness of the sea.
BUT YOU'LL NEVER FOLLOW ME
Karl Edward Wagner
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1945, Karl Edward Wagner has been an influential name in the HDF field for twenty years. He has written or edited some thirty-five books, including the prestigious annual anthology, The Year's Best Horror Stories. Highly regarded by both his readers and his fellow writers, he is the winner of four British Fantasy Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. He also wrote the script for Conan II, but the film is as yet unproduced.
Karl moved to North Carolina in the sixties to attend medical school (he's a psychiatrist), but decided to cultivate his literary talents rather than a couch-side manner. His fiction combines sensitivity and muscle, which makes his style unique and damned enviable. The following piece examines a deeply personal dilemma many of us must someday face. Karl's letter which accompanied the story confessed that "writing this one was like throwing myself on a grenade."
I know exactly what he means.
Publisher's Note: Sadly, Karl Wagner is no longer with us. He passed some years ago, leaving far too many words for us to share. He is missed.
It wasn't the smell of death that he hated so much. He'd grown used to that in Nam. It was the smell of dying that tore at him. Slow dying.
He remembered his best buddy stuck to the paddy mud, legless and eviscerated, too deep in shock to cry out, just gulping air like a beached fish, eyes round with wonder and staring into his. Marsden had closed those eyes with his right hand and with his left he put a .45 slug through his Mend's skull.
After that, he'd made a promise to himself never to kill again, but that was as true a promise as he'd ever made to anyone, and never-intended lies rotted together with the never-realized truths of his best intentions.
Marsden found a moment's solitude in the slow-moving elevator as it slid upward to the fourth floor. He cracked a zippered gash into his bulky canvas flight bag, large enough to reach the pint bottle of vodka on top. He gulped down a mouthful, replaced the stopper, and then replaced the flask, tugged down the zipper—all in the space of four floors. Speed was only a matter of practice. He exhaled a breath of vodka as the elevator door opened.
Perhaps the middle-aged couple who waited there noticed his breath as he shouldered past them with his bag, but Marsden doubted it. The air of Brookcrest Health Care Center was already choked with the stench of bath salts and old lad
y's perfume, with antiseptics and detergents and bouquets of dying flowers; and underlying it all was the veiled sweetness of urine, feces, and vomit, physically retained in bedpans and diapers.
Marsden belched. A nurse in the fourth floor lounge scowled at him, but a blue-haired lady in a jerry cart smiled and waved and called after him: "Billy boy! Billy Billy boy!" Michael Marsden shut his eyes and turned into the hallway that led to his parents' rooms. Somewhere along the hall a woman's voice begged in feeble monotone: "Oh Lord, help me. Oh Lord, help me. Oh Lord, help me." Marsden walked on down the hall.
He was a middle-aged man with a heavyset frame that carried well a spreading beer gut. He had mild brown eyes, a lined and long-jawed face, and there were streaks of gray in his short beard and in his limp brown hair where it straggled from beneath the Giants baseball cap. His denim jacket and jeans were about as worn as his scuffed cowboy boots.
"You'd look a lot nicer if you'd shave that beard and get a haircut," Momma liked to nag him. "And you ought to dress more neatly. You're a good-looking boy, Michael."
She still kept the photo of him in his uniform, smiling bravely, fresh out of boot camp, on her shelf at the nursing home. Marsden guessed that that was the way Momma preferred to hold him in memory—such of her memory as Alzheimer's disease had left her.
