* * *
Jesus, reading back through this journal, I see that I don’t come across as exactly the most cheerful person you’d ever want to meet. I’m not really as bad as these entries make me seem. I don’t always focus on the negative, or at least I don’t think I do. But having said that, I also have to admit that I always remember the one negative line in an otherwise good review, and the bad reviews stay with me for far longer than the good ones do. Especially when the critic is wrong. Personal opinion is one thing; any creative endeavor is fair game to a critic’s opinions. What I hate is when they stand there on their pedantic heights and pass judgment not only on what writers do, but why they think we do it.
It’s like when the despicable Roger Tory finally decided to turn his jaundiced eye upon my work and reviewed the East Street Press edition of Encounters with Enodia for The New York Times.
“What the author of this collection has yet to recognize,” he wrote at one point, “is that the very form of her work invalidates any hope of objective plausibility which, in turn, renders it impossible for her stories to make any sort of meaningful contact with the real world. For that reason her work, like that of other fantasists writing in a similar vein, will always be dishonest as a medium for serious social comment.
These authors are desperate in their search for respectability and self-importance, and their attempts to be taken seriously would be laughable if they weren’t so harmful. When not telling outright lies, their stories perpetuate the very worst sorts of stereotypes under the guise of exploring the human condition through the translation of folklore and myth into a contemporary setting.”
From there he went on to tear apart the individual stories, painting a portrait of me as yet one more perpetrator of the world’s ills, rather than as a person who fights against them. He made me out to be a right-wing bigot, hiding behind a mask of feminism and misguided nostalgia, and then claimed that when I wrote of abusive relationships, I was pandering to the people who were guilty of those very same crimes.
“The only honest fantasy to be found in Encounters with Enodia,” he wrote in conclusion, is “when she gives heroic stature to the downtrodden of the world, when she raises the pathetic life stories of hookers and runaways and psychotic street people to the level of the great hero myths of ancient legend.
Someone should put her out on the same streets that her characters inhabit. She would soon discover that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder, one’s time is utterly taken up with the need to survive. There is certainly no time left over for hopes, for dreams, and especially not for encounters with Enodia or any other of the chimerical individuals with whom she peoples her stories.”
Needless to say I disagree. To paraphrase one of my heroes, Gene Wolfe, the difference between fiction based on reality and fantasy is simply a matter of range. The former is a handgun. It hits the target almost close enough to touch, and even the willfully ignorant can’t deny that it’s effective. Fantasy is a sixteen-inch naval rifle. It fires with a tremendous bang, and it appears to have done nothing and to be shooting at nothing.
Note the qualifier “appears.” The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—a harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes—the way Izzy would pull her numena from hers—and then set out upon the stories’ various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.
* *
I got a call from Alan today telling me that Nigel died last night. David brought him home from the hospital on Monday and I’d been planning to go visit him tomorrow. Now it’s too late. Christ, he never even got to turn twenty.
David told Alan that he tested positive as well, but he didn’t want anyone to know because he wanted to keep it from Nigel. “He kept saying to me over and over again,” David explained to Alan,
“right up until he died: ‘At least I know you’re okay.’ How could I tell him different?”
Here’s what AIDS has done to our community: When so many of your friends die, the sheer quantity of death ends up dehumanizing you. You start to lose the capacity to fully grieve each individual. You find yourself no longer as able to share how much you loved them, how much you miss them, not even to yourself. Your grief gets buried under the sheer multitude that we’ve lost.
* *
Plato said everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can’t see. I don’t know if that’s true or not. If it is true, then I don’t want to be in the world. All my life I’ve tried to manipulate the shadows so that things will go my way for a change, but it never works out. I’m so tired of these shadows. Just for once I want to be face-to-face with what’s real. I don’t want to carve a place for myself from the shadows. I want to carve a place for myself from what casts the shadows and let the chips fall as they may.
* *
Alan took me out to lunch today. When we left the apartment I got this sudden tightness in my chest and I almost couldn’t move through the door. I realized that I hadn’t been outside since I’d gone to see Dr. Jane earlier in the week. It took me most of the time I was out with Alan just to get myself to feel that being away from home was normal.
* *
Sometimes, when I’m talking to people, I forget what words mean and I can’t explain anything. I talk, but I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m standing there, my mouth’s moving, and all I hear in my head is “yadda, yadda, yadda.” The only time it’s never happened is when I’m at the Foundation, talking to the kids. I think they ground me, or something.
Those kids. Some of them are so sweet and brave it breaks my heart that we can’t do more for them. But we’re always in a running battle with their parents or the people from the child-services office.
Everybody knows what’s best for them. Everybody’s got advice. Everybody’s got a solution. I say let the kid decide, but nobody wants to hear that.
* *
I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone—I always have such a crowded head.
When I told Dr. Jane about it, she asked me how long I’d felt that way. I didn’t even have to think about it.
“I’ve always felt that way,” I told her.
* *
I wish I could foresee a better ending for the story of my life. The whole reason for telling stories, even like this when I’m telling one to myself, is to insist that there’s some kind of meaning, or at least shape, to the messy collage of incidents that make up our lives. Most of us have to believe that we’re floundering through the confusion for some particular reason or we simply can’t bear the thought of existence.
I’d like to live for the moment, for the right now. I’d like to always be in the present and not have to carry around the baggage of everything that’s gone before. I’d like to not feel disappointed because all the pieces of my life don’t add up to a story with a coherent plotline and a satisfactory ending.
If I were ever to kill myself, it wouldn’t be to end my life. It would be for a far simpler reason: amnesia.
tertium quid
WHAT THE CROW SAID
Though friendly to magic
I am not a man disguised as a crow
I am night eating the sun
—Michael Hannon, from Fables
I
Newford, September 1992
Roger Davis sat at his desk in the Crowsea police precinct
and studied his partner’s features as Thompson spoke on the phone. The Mully murder case had led them up one dead end into another, but they’d finally gotten a break. An earlier call from the woman’s husband had had them out looking for Alan Grant again. Mully’s daughter claimed to have seen Grant in the hotel at the right time for him to have done it, all his protestations to the contrary.
He looked good for it. He had the right motive and now they had someone to put in the right place at the right time, but something didn’t feel right to Davis. The man they’d interviewed earlier today had been scared, sure, but not guilty scared. More like, how’d-I-get-mixed-up-in-this/what-am-I-gonna-do-to-get-them-to-believe-me scared. Still, they had the girl’s testimony and Davis had been wrong before. He figured he’d just let the DA’s office sort it all out. Until this call came in, it had only been a matter of picking Grant up and booking him.
When Thompson finally got off the phone, he gave Davis a weary look. “That was the daughter,” he said.
“I figured as much.”
“She says it wasn’t Grant she saw in the hallway.”
Davis sighed. So much for getting a break in the case. “She’s changing her story?”
“Changing her mind, sounds like. Said she was sick of lying.”
“Would it help if we brought Grant in for a lineup?” Davis asked.
“She says she knows what he looks like well enough, thank you very fucking much, and it wasn’t him.”
Tired as he was, Davis had to smile as he imagined the Mully girl saying “thank you very fucking much” to his partner.
“Was that a direct quote?” he asked.
“Fuck you, too,” Thompson told him.
It was the father who’d had them come back to the hotel and made Susan Mully tell them who she’d seen in the hallway. Of course this was after they’d already cut Grant loose. But now the kid was having an attack of conscience and calling it off. He wondered if the father knew.
Davis rose to his feet. “I’ll cancel the APB on Grant.”
Thompson nodded. “Now all we’ve got left is the Indian the desk clerk saw.”
Taking the elevator up to the same floor as the Mullys were on at just about the same time as the coroner’s estimated time of death. Right. His description fit just about every fifth person on the skids in that part of the city and of course he’d have all kinds of motive, wouldn’t he?
The case, Davis realized, was dead in the water and he doubted that it’d ever get resolved. And the thing of it was, it wouldn’t exactly break his heart. He’d never much cared for Margaret Mully—or at least not for the woman he’d seen on the news or read about in the paper. So far as Davis was concerned, the Newford Children’s Foundation was doing a bang-up job and anybody trying to screw them the way she was doing deserved what she’d got. But that wasn’t an opinion he’d share with anyone—not even to his partner.
“Just let me deal with the APB, Mike,” he told Thompson, “and then we’ll talk about where we go from here.”
II
John crouched outside the window, balancing easily on the narrow ledge, and watched the drama as it unfolded before him. He could have applauded when Isabelle stood up to Rushkin, unwilling to admit even to himself that he hadn’t been sure how she’d respond to his offer. He waited patiently as Bitterweed led Isabelle away, watched his doppelganger return alone, listened as Rushkin sent Bitterweed and Scara away to hunt.
When Rushkin’s numena left the room, he was caught in a dilemma then. Follow them and protect Cosette and the others? How long would it take the creatures to track down their source paintings? Or should he leave them to fend for themselves while he attempted to deal with Rushkin?
“I’m sorry, Cosette,” he whispered as he edged away from the window and squeezed around the squat bulk of the gargoyle that shared his ledge. Dealing with Rushkin’s creatures was only a temporary solution. The only way to stop them for good was to cut off the evil at its source, and god help him if he failed, for then he would have still more deaths on his conscience.
Once the numena’s vehicle pulled away from the curb, Scara behind the wheel once more, John scrambled down a drainpipe until he could drop to the ground. He entered the building through a ground-floor window by the simple expediency of kicking out the sheet of plywood that had been nailed across it. He made no effort to be quiet. Rushkin wasn’t going anywhere.
He had no trouble finding his way up to the room where Rushkin’s pallet lay. The monster was sitting up, waiting for him, when John stepped into the room. John paused at the doorway and their gazes locked.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Rushkin said.
“Then you know why I’m here.”
Rushkin smiled. “You can’t hurt me. You had your chance—long ago on that winter’s night—but you tarried too long. We’re not in one of your maker’s dreams now and I won’t make the mistake of entering them again. Give it up, John Sweetgrass. Accept your fate.”
“No,” John told him, but he clenched his fists in frustration as he realized that, this time, Rushkin spoke the truth. Every part of him wanted to take that scrawny neck in his hands and wring the life from it, but he could no more make a move against Rushkin than he could against Isabelle.
“It’s over now,” Rushkin said. “You’ve killed many of my hunters, but no more. These are the final days of the enmity that lies between us. I will take my nourishment from you and all of your maker’s creations and put an end to you, once and for all.”
There at least, John knew he was safe. Long before the night of the terrible fire, he’d taken his painting from the farmhouse on Wren Island and brought it to the studio of another of Rushkin’s proteges—the one who hadn’t been with the monster long enough to fall under his sway. Barbara had painted over it and now kept the painting safely stored away in her studio, hidden in a cupboard along with all of her juvenile work. In return for her help, John had told her the secret of bringing numena across from the before, sharing what he knew of it from having observed Isabelle at work, but it wasn’t a knowledge that Barbara had cared to practice. She brought one across—because of curiosity as much as to test him, John had supposed—but then no more.
“I’ve got enough trouble being responsible for my own life,” she’d told John. “I don’t need the extra grief this’d bring.”
John only wished that Isabelle had felt the same. While it was true that he owed his existence to her gift, he’d rather have remained in the before than to see so many of the others she’d brought across die.
“You know,” Rushkin was saying, “I miss Benjamin the most. He was with me for a very long time indeed.”
John couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“You’re incapable of any emotion except for greed,” he told Rushkin.
“Now you wrong me,” the monster said. “I might have a failing or two when it comes to interacting socially, but you have only to look at the work I have produced to know that what you’re saying is a lie.”
John shook his head. “You might get someone like Isabelle to buy your lies, but don’t bother trying them on me.”
“The work speaks for itself.”
“You work is hollow at its heart,” John said. “It’s all flash and technique and glossy lies—no different from its maker. Something rots under the surface of both you and your paintings. The trouble is most people don’t peel away enough of the veneer to see it.”
Anger flashed in Rushkin’s eyes, but he quickly suppressed it. “So now you’re an art critic?” he asked.
“Merely a good judge of character,” John replied.
Rushkin shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Your opinion changes nothing. In the end, I will prevail and you will be nothing more than ashes and memory.”
“Isabelle will stop you.”
He would convince her, John vowed. Even if it cost him his life.
Rushkin laughed. “I doubt that. Isabelle is already hard at work on a new painting to feed
me.”
“Another lie. I heard her turn you down.”
“And yet, she’s painting even as we speak.” Rushkin waved a hand casually to the doorway behind John. “See for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
John hesitated, suddenly unsure. He had heard her refuse Rushkin’s offer, hadn’t he? Or did he have to distrust his own memories now, as much as he did Isabelle’s?
“I’ll take her away from here,” he told Rushkin.
“How do you know she wants to go?”
“I’ll convince her.”
“Then she’ll simply complete the work elsewhere, but I will still have it. Give it up, John Sweetgrass.
I have won. I will always win.”
John turned abruptly and strode into the hallway. He tried the doors as he went along, flinging them open, until he came to one that was locked. The key was still in the lock. With one quick motion, he unlocked the door and shouldered it open to find that Rushkin hadn’t lied. In the room Isabelle turned away from the canvas she was working on to face him. She looked angry until her gaze alit on his wrist and the bracelet he was wearing.
John ... ?” she asked uncertainly.
All he could do was stare at her. He was rendered immobile by confusion. By shock. But most of all by the enormity of her betrayal.
Isabelle dropped her palette and brush on the table beside her. Wiping her hands on her jeans, she stepped toward him.
“Is that you, John?” she said.
“How could you?” he asked, his voice thick with disappointment.
He started to retreat from the room, but she caught his arm to keep him from leaving. When he pulled free, she grabbed hold of him again.
“No,” she told him. “This time we’re going to finish a conversation without one or the other of us walking away.”
John couldn’t help himself. “I never abandoned you,” he said. “No. But you didn’t stay either, did you?”
“You didn’t want me.”
Isabelle shook her head. “We both know that isn’t true. I can’t tell you how many nights I lay awake, wishing you’d come back to me, wishing everything could just be like it was before that day in the park.”
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