by Paula Guran
“Why?” she asks, and she’s smiling. Not too much, though; he’s cute and all but, c’mon, he has to be forty at least. Still, she’s flattered. Feels like she should conference-text the Michaels. Not so frumpy.
Arcadia returns the smile and she’s glad that his eyes are kind because it softens the blow of his reply. “We need to discuss exactly how we’re going to save the world,” he says.
Well, Bethany thinks, that was dramatic, and, as if on cue, a woman screams from somewhere beyond the store. By the time a man’s voice, equally horrified, hollers “My God, look at that!” Bethany and Arcadia have already turned to look through the window.
On the street outside, a man is melting.
He’d presumably been walking, but he’s not walking anymore. He’s rooted to the sidewalk, his legs already a fused and formless mass, his flesh and his clothes running in multicolored ripples of dissolution down what used to be his body as if he was some life-size religious candle burning in fast-forward.
Other people on Brand Boulevard are screaming now, some running away, some gathering to see, one idiot on his cellphone like he could actually fetch help, another using hers to snap a little souvenir of the atrocity. A group forms around the vanishing man, circling him but not going near, as if instinctively establishing a perimeter from which to bear witness but to keep themselves safe.
From what’s left of the man’s face – now liquidly elongated into a vile burlesque that puts Bethany briefly and horribly in mind of Munch’s screamer – he appears to be, have been, a middle-aged white guy. He has a life, Bethany thinks, he has a story, has people who love him. But he’s featureless in little more than a second. One of his arms has already disappeared into the oozing chaos of the meltdown but the other is waving grotesquely free, fingers twitching either in agony or, as Bethany wonders with a devastating stab of pity, as if he just wants someone to hold his hand in farewell as he slides helplessly from life.
When there’s finally nothing about it to suggest it had ever been human, the roiling mass begins to shrink in on itself, disappearing into a vanishing center as if hungry for its own destruction, growing smaller and smaller until, at last, it shivers itself into nothingness. There’s not even a stain on the sidewalk. It’s taken maybe seven seconds.
“Oh my God,” says Bethany.
Arcadia is keeping his eyes on the window. “Watch what happens next,” he says. And when Bethany does, she decides that it’s even more appalling than what came before.
Everybody walks away.
There’s a blink or two from one or more of them, and one older woman in a blue pantsuit looks to her left as if she thought her peripheral vision may have just registered something, but there’s no screaming, no outrage, no appeals to heaven or cries of What-just-happened? Everybody on the street quietly moves on about their day, neither their manner nor their expressions suggesting that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
“What’s wrong with them?” says Bethany. “They’re all acting like it never happened.”
“Don’t be cross with them,” Arcadia tells her. “It sort of didn’t happen.”
“But it did.”
“I don’t want to get too abstract about it,” he says, “but it’s a sort of tree falling in the forest question, isn’t it? Can something actually be said to have happened if it’s something nobody in the world remembers?”
“I remember,” Bethany says.
Arcadia holds her gaze for a second or two, his face expressionless. “Aha,” he says quietly.
Bethany’s still trying to think about that when he pulls his watch from his vest pocket and checks it. “Hmm,” he says. “Only eleven minutes in and already a serious anomaly. That’s a bit worrying.”
“What?” says Bethany, horrified as much at his calmness as at the idea that this nightmare is on some kind of a schedule.
“Clock’s a-ticking,” he says. “Lunch will have to wait. Come on.”
Bethany’s surprised to see that she’s following him as he moves to the door and opens it. Perhaps it’s the tinkling of the bell, perhaps just a desire to remember what she was doing the last time the world made sense, but something makes her look back at the counter.
“Wait,” she says. “What about your book?”
Arcadia throws it an unconcerned glance. “Do you know what a McGuffin is, Bethany?” he says.
“Yes,” she says, because she does. She watches her fair share of Turner Classic Movies and she briefly dated a guy who once had an actual name but whom she’s long decided will be known to her memoirs only as the Boy Who Loved Hitchcock.
“Well, the book’s a McGuffin,” Arcadia says. “It’s not irrelevant – I mean, it never existed and yet you remember it, which is good for a gasp or two and certainly pertains to the matter at hand – but it’s real function is this: to propel us headlong into a thrilling and probably life-threatening adventure. You good to go?”
He waves her through the door with a hurrying motion and they’re on the street and walking south before Bethany can get her question out.
“What do you mean, ‘it never existed’?” she says.
“Well, not in this particular strand of the multiverse. It’s a crossover, like the unfortunate gentleman outside your shop. Do you have a car, by the way?”
“No,” she says. “I mean, not here.”
“Oh,” he says, stopping in front of a green Mercedes. “Let’s take this one then.” He opens the passenger door for her, apparently without needing a key. Bethany doesn’t ask. Nor does she look too closely at how he starts it up before making an illegal U-turn and heading down Brand towards Atwater Village.
“What are we doing?” she asks, because she figures it’s about time.
“Well, we’re fixing a hole—”
“Where the rain gets in?” she says, flashing absurdly on the Beatles vinyl she’d rescued from her dad’s stuff.
“Would that it were merely rain,” he says. He nods toward the sidewalk they’re speeding past, and Bethany looks to see a small boy turning to green smoke while pedestrians stare open-mouthed and his screaming mother tries to grab him, her desperate fingers clawing only at his absence. By the time Bethany has swung in her seat to look out the rear window, the smoke has vanished and the crowd, including the mother, has forgotten it was ever there.
Bethany’s eyes are wet with pity as she turns back to Arcadia. “Tell me what’s happening!” she almost shouts.
Arcadia swings the car into the right lane as they pass under the railroad bridge. “I’ll try to make this as quick as I can,” he says, and takes a preparatory breath. “The spaces between the worlds have been breached. Realities are bleeding through to each other. People who took one step in their own dimension took their next in another. What you’ve witnessed is the multi-verse trying to correct itself by erasing the anomalies. Problem is it’s happening in each reality and the incidents will increase exponentially until there’s nothing left in any of them.” He turns to look at her. “With me so far?”
Bethany unfortunately is with him so far, though she wishes she’d heeded those schoolyard theories that comic books weren’t really for girls. “Collapse of the space-time continuum,” she says in a surprisingly steady voice.
“Precisely,” says Arcadia, pleased that this is going so well. “A return to a timeless shining singularity without form, thought, or feeling.”
“But how?” she says. “And why?”
Arcadia has started to slow the car down now, scanning the storefronts of Atwater Village’s main drag. “Because about seventeen minutes ago, something that’s lived all its life as a man remembered what it really is and spoke certain words of power.”
Bethany doesn’t like the sound of that at all and, as Arcadia pulls up outside one of the few remaining un-gentrified stores on a strip that is mostly hipper new businesses and milk-it-quick franchises, she stays silent, feeling the sadness and fear tightening in her stomach like cancer, thinking of peopl
e vanishing from the world like a billion lights blinking out one by one.
“Is this where we’re going?” she finally says, nodding at the store as they get out of the car.
“Yes,” Arcadia says. “Have you seen it before?”
Bethany nods, because she has. It could have been here since 1933, she’s always thought; peeling red paint on aged wood; plate-glass window whitewashed from the inside to keep its secrets; and a single hanging sign with the hand painted phrase, CHINESE LAUNDRY. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen it open for business. “I always figured it was a front for the Tongs,” she says as if she was kidding, but realizes as she says it that that actually is what she’s always thought.
“You’re such a romantic,” Arcadia says, and he sounds delighted with her. He opens the door to the laundry and leads her inside.
Its interior is as weathered and as free of decoration as the outside. A hardwood floor that hasn’t seen varnish for decades and utterly plain walls painted long ago in the kind of institutionally vile colors usually reserved for state hospitals in the poorest neighborhoods. Bethany is surprised, though, to smell the heavy detergent and feel the clammy humidity of what is clearly a working laundry. There’s even the slow hissing, from behind the screen space-divider, of a heavy-duty steam press. The place isn’t menacing, merely nondescript. The fifty-yearold man behind the bare wood counter would be nondescript too were it not for the subtle phosphorescent glow of his flesh.
Arcadia makes the introductions. “Bethany Lake,” he says – and Bethany registers the use of the surname she hadn’t told him – “meet the entity formerly known as Jerry Harrington.”
Bethany gasps a little as the man fixes his eyes on her because they are the almost solid black of a tweaker on an overdose about to kill him.
Not Chinese at all, a part of her brain wastes its time thinking, and wonders if it’s entirely PC of him not to have changed the name, however generic, of the business he bought.
“What do you want?” Harrington says. His tone is hardly gracious, but at least it still sounds human, for which Bethany is grateful.
“What do we want?” she says to Arcadia.
“Well, I want him to stop destroying reality,” Arcadia says. “Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Bethany says. “Of course.”
Arcadia turns back to Harrington. “There you go,” he says. “Two votes to one. Majority rules. What do you say?”
Harrington laughs, but there’s little humor in it.
“What is he?” Bethany asks Arcadia quietly. She’s turned her head away from Harrington because his face seems to be constantly coming in and out of focus in a way that she finds not just frightening but physically disturbing.
“A being from a time outside time,” Arcadia says. “There’s several of them around, hidden in the flesh since the Fall. Most of them don’t remember themselves, but occasionally there’s a problem.”
The Fall? Bethany hesitates to ask, because she doesn’t want to say something that sounds so ridiculous, but she supposes she has to. “Are you talking about angels?” she says. “Fallen angels?”
“Well, you needn’t be so Judeo-Christian specific about it,” he says, a little sniffily. “But, yes.”
“What do you want?” Harrington says again, exactly as he’d said it before. So exactly that it creeps Bethany out. Less like a person repeating themselves and more like someone just rewound the tape.
“We’re here to make you reconsider,” Arcadia says. “We can do it the hard way, if you want, but I’d prefer to talk you out of it.”
Again, the laugh. But there’s little human in it.
Arcadia moves closer to the counter, which Bethany finds almost indescribably brave. “Look, I get it,” he says. “You’re homesick. You want a return to the tabula rasa, the blank page, the white light, the glorious absence. You yearn for it like a sailor for the sea or a child for its mother. You’re disgusted by all this . . . this . . .” He waves his hands, searching for the words. “All this multiplicity, this variousness, this detail and color and noise and stuff.”
“You talk too much,” Harrington says, and Bethany, though shocked at her treachery, thinks he’s got a point.
“But isn’t there another way to look at it?” Arcadia says. “We’re all going back to the white light eventually, so what does it matter? Couldn’t we imagine looking at these people amongst whom your kind has fallen not with contempt but with delight? Isn’t it possible that an angel could embrace the flesh rather than loathe it? Could choose to be humanity’s protector rather than its scourge?”
“You can imagine whatever you like if it makes you feel better,” Harrington says, and his voice is confident and contemptuous. “But you won’t imagine it for very long. Because that’s not the path I’ve chosen.”
Arcadia smiles, like there’s been some misunderstanding. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you,” he says.
Bethany is wondering just who the hell he is talking about when the pores of her flesh erupt and the light starts to stream from her body. The rush of release almost drowns out the beating of her terrible wings and the sweet music of Harrington’s scream.
Arcadia picks up the small-pitted cinder-like object from the laundry counter with a pair of tweezers. It’s still smoking slightly and he blows on it to cool it before dropping it into a thin test tube which he slips back into an inside pocket of his suit.
“I’ll put it with the others,” he says to Bethany. She wonders where the if that’s all right with you tone has come from, like he’s her Beautiful Assistant rather than vice versa, but she nods anyway. She and he are the only people in the place and she’s sort of grateful that she has no memory of the last few minutes. She feels quite tired and is glad of Arcadia’s arm when he walks her to the car.
* * *
Bethany’s relieved that she’s back in the store before either of the Michaels. As ever, there are several out-of-shelf books lying around here and there and she decides to do a little housekeeping to assuage her guilt for playing hooky. She shelves most of them in the regular stacks, some in the high-end display cases, and one in the spaces between the worlds, though she doesn’t really notice that because she’s thinking about her crappy Dodge and how much the shop is going to charge her to fix it this time.
Gay Michael gets back first. Maybe Fat Michael’s date is going better than expected. Bethany hopes so.
“Anything happen?” Gay Michael says.
“Not so you’d notice,” Bethany tells him.
The Night of White Bhairab
Lucius Shepard
Commissioned in 1769 by King Rana Bahadur Shah (1775–1805), the “White Bhairab” is a portrayal of a fierce manifestation of Lord Shiva associated with annihilation. It was intended to ward off evil influences and protect a palace. About ten feet high, it sports a golden crown made of serpents, skulls and jewels. A huge open mouth shows terrifying white teeth and fangs. Angry red-pupiled eyes are set in a golden face detailed with red, black, blue and white paint. Usually mostly hidden behind a carved wooden screen, during the days of Indra Jatra and the coinciding festival of the Living Goddess, it is open to public view. Lucius Shepard sets his exotic and exciting story during the festival, but the evil that visits Katmandu is imported from the West: a demonically possessed spirit that takes more than human effort to fight.
Whenever Mr Chatterji went to Delhi on business, twice yearly, he would leave Eliot Blackford in charge of his Katmandu home and, prior to each trip, the transfer of keys and instructions would be made at the Hotel Anapurna. Eliot – an angular, sharp-featured man in his mid-thirties, with thinning blond hair and a perpetually ardent expression – knew Mr Chatterji for a subtle soul and he suspected that this subtlety had dictated the choice of meeting place. The Anapurna was the Nepalese equivalent of a Hilton, its bar equipped in vinyl and plastic, with a choirlike arrangement of bottles fronting the mirror. Lights were muted, napkins monogrammed. Mr Chatterji, plump and prosperous i
n a business suit, would consider it an elegant refutation of Kipling’s famous couplet (“East is East”, etc.) that he was at home here, whereas Eliot, wearing a scruffy robe and sandals, was not; he would argue that not only the twain met, they had actually exchanged places. It was Eliot’s own measure of subtlety that restrained him from pointing out what Mr Chatterji could not perceive: that the Anapurna was a skewed version of the American Dream. The carpeting was indoor-outdoor runner; the menu was rife with ludicrous misprints (Skotch Miss, Screwdiver), and the lounge act – two turbaned, tuxedoed Indians on electric guitar and traps – was managing to turn “Evergreen” into a doleful raga.
“There will be one important delivery.” Mr Chatterji hailed the waiter and nudged Eliot’s shot glass forward. “It should have been here days ago, but you know these custom people.” He gave an effeminate shudder to express his distaste for the bureaucracy, and cast an expectant eye on Eliot, who did not disappoint.
“What is it?” he asked, certain that it would be an addition to Mr Chatterji’s collection: he enjoyed discussing the collection with Americans; it proved that he had an overview of their culture.
“Something delicious!” said Mr Chatterji. He took the tequila bottle from the waiter and – with a fond look – passed it to Eliot. “Are you familiar with the Carversville Terror?”
“Yeah, sure.” Eliot knocked back another shot. “There was a book about it.”
“Indeed,” said Mr Chatterji. “A bestseller. The Cousineau mansion was once the most notorious haunted house of your New England. It was torn down several months ago, and I’ve succeeded in acquiring the fireplace, which—” he sipped his drink “—was the locus of power. I’m very fortunate to have obtained it.” He fitted his glass into the circle of moisture on the bar and waxed scholarly. “Aimée Cousineau, was a most unusual spirit, capable of a variety of . . .”
