by Paula Guran
Outside I spoke to him in private while Eira was upstairs searching our room for the hairbrush that I had been careful to leave behind.
“If you are here to reclaim her,” I told him, “I am your debtor. Thank you for waiting until morning.”
He grinned like the trap he was. “Have a nice night?”
“Very.
“Swell. You folks think we don’t want you to have any fun. That’s not the way it is at all.” He strove to stifle his native malignancy as he said this, with the result that it showed so clearly I found it difficult not to cringe. “I do you a favor, maybe you’ll do me one sometime. Right?”
“Perhaps,” I hedged.
He laughed. I have heard many actors try to reproduce the hollowness and cruelty of that laugh, but not one has come close. “Isn’t that what keeps you coming back here? Wanting favors? You know we don’t give anything away.”
“I hope to learn, and to make myself a better man.”
“Touching. You and Doctor Frankenstein.”
I forced myself to smile. “I owed you thanks, as I said, and I do thank you. Now I’ll impose upon your good nature if I may. Two weeks. You spoke of favors, of the possibility of accommodation. I would be greatly in your debt. I am already, as I acknowledge.”
Grinning, he shook his head.
“One week then. Today is Thursday. Let us have – let me have her until next Thursday.”
“Afraid not, pal.”
“Three days then. I recognize that she belongs to you, but you’ll have her for eternity, and she can’t be an important prisoner.”
“Inmate. Inmate sounds better.” The demon laid his hand upon my shoulder, and I was horribly conscious of its weight and bone-crushing strength. “You think I let you jump her last night because I’m such a nice guy? You really believe that?”
“I was hoping that was the case, yes.”
“Bright. Real bright. Just because I got here a little after she did, you think I was trailing her like that flea-bitten dog, and I followed her here.” He sniffed, and it was precisely the sniff of a hound on the scent. The hand that held my shoulder drew me to him until I stood with the almost insuperable weight of his entire arm on my shoulders. “Listen here. I don’t have to track anybody. Wherever they are, I am. See?”
“I understand.”
“If I’d been after her, I’d have had her away from you as soon as I saw her. Only she’s not why I came here, she’s not why I’m leaving, and if I was to grab her all it would do is get me in the soup with the big boys downstairs. I don’t want you either.”
“I’m gratified to hear it.”
“Swell. If I was to give you a promise, my solemn word of dishonor, you wouldn’t think that was worth shit-paper, would you?”
“To the contrary.” Although I was lying in his teeth, I persevered. “I know an angel’s word is sacred, to him at least.”
“Okay then. I don’t want her. You wanted a couple of weeks, and I said no deal because I’m letting you have her forever, and vice versa. You don’t know what forever means, whatever you think. But I do.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said; and I meant it from the bottom of my soul. “Thank you very, very much.”
The demon grinned and took his arm from my shoulders. “I wouldn’t mess around with you or her or a single thing the two of you are going to do together, see? Word of dishonor. The boys downstairs would skin me, because you’re her assignment. So be happy.” He slapped me on the back so hard that he nearly knocked me down.
Still grinning, he walked around the corner of someone’s camper van. I followed as quickly as I could, but he had disappeared.
Little remains to tell. I drove Eira to St Louis, as I had promised, and she left me with a quick kiss in the parking area of the Gateway Arch; we had stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch on the way, and I had scribbled my address and telephone number on a paper napkin there and watched her tuck it into a pocket of the denim shirt she wore. Since then I have had a week in which to consider my adventure, as I said on the first page of this account.
In the beginning (especially Friday night), I hoped for a telephone call or a midnight summons from my doorbell. Neither came.
On Monday I went to the library, where I perused the back issues of newspapers; and this evening, thanks to a nephew at an advertising agency, I researched the matter further, viewing twenty-five and thirty-year-old tapes of news broadcasts. The woman’s name was not Eira, a name that means “snow”, and the name of the husband she had slain with his own shotgun was not Tom, Dick, Harry, or even Mortimer; but I was sure I had found her. (Fairly sure, at least.) She took her own life in jail, awaiting trail.
She had been in Hell. That, I feel, is the single solid fact, the one thing on which I can rely. But did she escape? Or was she vomited forth?
All this has been brought to a head by the card I received today in the mail. It was posted on Monday from St Louis, and has taken a disgraceful four days to make a journey that the most cautious driver can complete in a few hours. On its front, a tall, beautiful, and astonishingly busty woman is crowding a fearful little man. The caption reads, I want to impress one thing on you.
Inside the card: My body.
Beneath that is the scrawled name Eira, and a telephone number. Should I call her? Dare I?
Bear in mind (as I must constantly remind myself to) that nothing the demon said can be trusted. Neither can anything that she herself said. She would have had me take her for a living woman if she could.
Has the demon devised an excruciating torment for us both?
Or for me alone?
The telephone number is at my elbow as I write. Her card is on my desk. If I dial the number, will I be blundering into the snare, or will I have torn the snare to pieces?
Should I call her?
A final possibility remains, although I find it almost impossible to write of it.
What if I am mad?
What if Foulweather the salesman merely played up to what he assumed was an elaborate joke? What if my last conversation with him (that is to say, with the demon) was a delusion? What if Eira is in fact the living woman that almost every man in the world would take her for, save I?
She cannot have much money and may well be staying for a few days with some chance acquaintance.
Am I insane? Deluded?
Tomorrow she may be gone. One dash three one four . . .
Should I call?
Perhaps I may be a man of courage after all, a man who has never truly understood his own character.
Will I call her? Do I dare?
Frumpy Little Beat Girl
Peter Atkins
One theory of angels is that they are archetypes representing the positive/negative polarity of the universe: light and dark, good and evil, yin and yang. But, really, is the universe . . . or the multiverse . . . always so neatly divided? Has your own – most likely infinitesimally insignificant – life always reflected such distinct divisions? Does our world, or at least our consensus reality, always retain a tidy equilibrium? Anomalies happen. Someone has to set things back in balance. Peter Atkins’s delightfully quirky story offers an original take on the angelic.
“They don’t make hats like that anymore,” says Mr Slater.
Jesus. Five minutes in and first thing out of his mouth. Bethany looks up from her book and through the windshield to see what the hell he’s talking about.
There’s a pedestrian, a Hispanic guy, crossing in front of the Lexus. He’s in no particular hurry about it, and he doesn’t need to be. The light they’re stuck at, the one at San Fernando and Brand, can take three minutes even in a good mood and, at eight thirty in the morning, you can usually count on it being pissy.
“Sure they do,” Bethany says, meaning the hat.
“No,” Mr Slater says, his head moving to watch the man reach the sidewalk and turn to wait, like them, for the northbound green. Bethany hears the pleasure, the admiration, in his voice. “They make t
hings that look like it, maybe,” he says. “But that’s period.”
He has a point. It’s not only the gray fedora. The pedestrian – elderly but vigorous, his body lean and compact, face like leather but like, you know, good leather – is dressed in a subtly pinstriped black suit that could be new or that could have been really well looked after for decades. There’s a tight quarter-inch of white handkerchief showing above the suit’s breast pocket, and the man wears opinionated shoes.
“Cool,” Bethany says. “Buena Vista Social Club.”
“You think he’s Cuban?” Mr Slater asks, as if she was being literal. “I mean, like, not Mexican?”
Bethany, no idea, shrugs and smiles. The light changes and Mr Slater – you know, you really can start calling me David, he’s said more than once but she’s been babysitting for him and his wife since she was fourteen and just can’t get her head around it – moves through the intersection and takes one last look back at the guy. “Check him out,” he says, happy and impressed. “It’s 1958. And it’s never not going to be.”
Gay Michael’s on with a customer when Bethany comes into the bookstore but he takes the time to cover the phone’s mouthpiece and stare pointedly out the plate-glass window as Mr Slater’s Lexus pulls away into the Glendale traffic. He gives her an eyebrow. “Bethany Lake,” he says, delighted. “You appalling little slut.”
“My neighbor,” she starts to tell him, ready to add that she’d needed a ride because her piece-of-shit Dodge is in the shop again but he’s already back on the phone giving directions.
“Yes, ma’am,” he’s saying, “Michael & Michael. On Brand. Between Wilson and California.” Listens for a moment. “Of course. Consider it held. And it really is in lovely condition. The website pictures don’t do it justice.” Bethany watches him run his hand over the tooled leather binding of the book on the counter in front of him as if he can send the seductive feel of it down the line. It’s an 1827 Paradise Lost, the famous one with the John Martin mezzotints. Bethany catches his eye, points to the curtained annex at the rear of the store, mimes a coffee cup at her mouth.
She’d figured she’d have to brew a fresh pot but Fat Michael’s already on it; three mugs waiting, OCD’d into a handle-matching line atop a napkin that’s folded in geometric precision. On a shelf above the coffee-maker, his iPod is nestled in its cradle-and-mini-speakers set-up and its random shuffle – which Bethany pretends is a radio station with the call-sign K-FMO, for Fat Michael’s Oddities – is playing “Jack the Ripper” by Screaming Lord Sutch. “Is your name Mary Blood?” his Lordship is currently screaming, albeit at low volume; Fat Michael would like to pipe K-FMO through to the store, but Gay Michael’s foot is firmly down on that one. “What are we, fucking Wal-Mart?” is about as far as the conversation ever gets.
“He’s really got a bite on that Milton?” Bethany says, knowing the guys have been asking high four figures. The coffee-maker pings.
“Some sitcom star’s trophy wife,” Fat Michael says, filling Bethany’s mug first and handing it to her, no milk no sugar, just right. “She’s shopping for his birthday. You know, like he can read.”
“None of your customers read, Michael,” she says. “They collect.”
“Hmph,” he says, because he doesn’t like to be reminded, and then, as the next selection comes up on K-FMO, “Oh, listen. It’s your song.”
It so is not her song. It’s a bad novelty record called “Kinky Boots” about how everybody’s wearing, you know, kinky boots. The only boots Bethany owns are a pair of Doc Martens but it wasn’t footwear that had made the boys declare it her song. Couple of months earlier, Gay Michael, bored on a customer-less afternoon, had treated her to an appraising look as she was leaning on the counter reading.
“Look at you,” he’d said. “With your jean jacket and your ironic T-shirts.” The one she’d been wearing that day had read “Talk Nerdy to Me”. “With your Aimee Bender paperbacks and your rah-rah skirts and leggings. You know what you are, Bethany? You’re a frumpy little beat girl.”
Fat Michael had clapped his hands in delight. Sometimes Bethany wondered which of the partners was actually the gay one. “‘Sweet girls, Street girls, Frumpy little beat girls’,” he’d recited, just in case Bethany had missed the reference to the stupid song’s lyrics. She couldn’t be mad at either of them – it was all so obviously coming from a place of affection – but, you know, Jesus Christ. Frumpy little beat girl.
She takes a sip of her coffee. “Not my song,” she reminds Fat Michael, even though she knows it’s like trying to lose a high school nickname.
Gay Michael pulls the annex curtain aside. “I have to drive it over at lunchtime,” he says, meaning the Milton.
“She won’t come here?” says Fat Michael.
“What, and leave the ’two-one-oh?” Gay Michael says. “She’d melt like Margaret Hamilton.” He raises a pre-emptive hand before Fat Michael can object further. “I am not risking losing this sale, Michael,” he says. “It’s two months’ rent.”
“It’s just that I have that, you know, that thing,” says Fat Michael.
“I’ll mind the store,” Bethany says. She knows that “that thing” means a lunch date with a woman from whatever dating service he’s currently using. She also knows it won’t work out, they never do, but Fat Michael is a trier and Bethany sort of loves him for it.
She’s never been left alone in charge of the store because the Michaels always stagger their lunch hours, so her offer to tend it for a couple of hours without adult supervision prompts – big surprise – a discussion. But they do their best not to make a drama out of it – which Bethany appreciates ’cause God knows it’s an effort for both of them – and it boils down to her receiving several overcautious instructions, all of which pretty much translate as don’t do anything stupid. After she promises that she’ll do her best not to, they take her up on it and Gay Michael’s gone by 11.45 to beat traffic and Fat Michael’s out of there by noon.
Which is how Bethany comes to be alone when the man in the Chinese laundry initiates the Apocalypse.
Bethany’s lost in her Kelly Link collection when the old-school bell tinkles on the entrance door. She looks up to see the door swinging shut behind a new customer as he walks in, holding a hardcover book in one gloved hand.
Huh, Bethany thinks. Gloves.
They’re tight-fitting gray leather and, given that it’s spring in California, would look even odder than they do were it not that the man’s pretty overdressed anyway. His suit is a three-piece and its vest sports a chain that dangles in a generous curve from a button and leads, Bethany presumes, to a pocket watch that is currently, well, pocketed.
He’s not in costume exactly, Bethany realizes – the suit is of modern cut and fit – but he’s hardly inconspicuous. She flashes on the elderly Hispanic guy she and Mr Slater had seen at the light earlier and wonders if she somehow missed the memo about this being Sharp-Dressed-Man Day in Glendale. ZZ Top start riffing in her head but the accompanying mind-video is a spontaneous mash-up with Robert Palmer and his fuck-me mascarenes and Bethany makes a note to self that she needs to start spending a little less time watching I Love the 80s.
“I wonder if you can help me?” the customer says, coming to the counter. Cute accent. Like the guy from House when he’s not being the guy from House.
“Almost certainly not,” she says. “But I’ll be real nice about it.”
“Ah,” he says, not put out at all. Far from it. “I take it, then, that you are neither Michael nor, indeed, Michael?” Now he’s doing the other Hugh – Grant, not Laurie – and Bethany thinks he’s laying it on a bit thick but decides to gives him the benefit of the doubt.
“Just Bethany,” she says.
“Exactly who I was looking for,” he says, laying the book he’s carrying onto the counter. “I wanted to ask you about this.”
There’s no such thing as a book you never see again, Fat Michael had told her, a little booksellers’ secret, sho
rtly after she started working here. Sooner or later, no matter how rare it is, another copy comes across the counter. He’d been trying to make her feel better because she’d fallen in love with a UK first of Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age and had been heartbroken when it left the store with somebody who could afford it. He’d been right, too; in her time with the Michaels, Bethany had seen many a mourned book wander back to their inventory, including the Grahame; one of the store’s freelance scouts had scored another copy at an estate sale just a few weeks ago.
And now here comes this customer with another book, another blast from Bethany’s past, from long before she worked here, but just as she remembers it; rich green cloth boards with a stylized Nouveau orchid on the front panel, its petals cupping the blood-red letters of the title.
“You do recognize it, don’t you?” the man says.
“Sure,” Bethany says, because she does. “The Memory Pool. Nineteen seventeen. First and only edition.”
When she looks up from the book she sees that the customer is staring at her with an expression that she finds confusing, one of well intentioned but distant sympathy, the kind of expression you might give to a recently bereaved stranger. He touches the book’s front panel lightly and briefly. “Mm,” he says. “And quite rare, wouldn’t you say?”
“Extremely rare,” Bethany says, and immediately wants to slap her stupid mouth. Curse me for a novice, she thinks, a mantra of Gay Michael’s whenever he’s made a rare misstep in a negotiation. She’s only been at the store a year, really is a novice still, but tipping a customer off that they’ve got something of real value is like entry-level dumb.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not actually looking to sell it,” he says, as if reading her dismay. “Just wanted to see if you knew it.”
“Huh,” says Bethany because, you know, huh.
The customer looks at her again, cocking his head as if intrigued. He extends his gloved hand across the counter. “James Arcadia,” he says, as Bethany shakes it. “I think, Just Bethany, we’d best have lunch.”
