by Janis Ian
"My name," he whispered, "is Carson. Vaughn Carson. I lived all of twenty-five years and I died when I put my car into a tree and it killed the girl who was with me because all I could think about was showing off to her so maybe I could get laid that night and she said, Please slow down, you can’t control the car at this speed, so I went faster and I can’t ... leave here. I don’t want to. I can’t go on because if I do I’ll have to face ... what I did."
"You just faced it," said Deeny. "Telling me."
"No," he said. "You don’t know. All I did was tell you. I can’t—I’m a coward. That’s what we are, the ones who linger here. Cowards. We just can’t go on. We’re too ashamed."
"So you haunt cellphones?" She couldn’t keep the derision out of her voice. Did he expect her to believe this? Of course, she did believe it, because it made more sense than any other possibility that had occurred to her. So the dead live on. And some of them can’t bear to take the next step, so here they are.
"We never haunt things," he said. "Not houses, not any thing. It’s people. We have to find some way to make ourselves ... noticeable. To people. Somebody who knows how to look at other people and really see them. Somebody who’s willing to accept that a person might be where a person couldn’t be. Or a voice might be coming out of something that shouldn’t have a voice."
"Why me?" she said. "And besides, Lex heard you too."
"Lex heard what she expected you to hear. Not the same voice, but the idea of the same voice. The voice you were hungry for."
"I wasn’t ‘hungry’ for a man," she said.
"You were hungry to have people think of you differently at school. But what you chose, what you pretended, was a man. A lover on the phone. And I could do that. I remember it ... not how it felt because I don’t even have the memory of my senses, but I remember that I once felt it, whatever it was, and I liked it, and so I talked about what I did that I knew made girls ... shiver. And ask for more. And let me do more. I remembered that. It’s what you wanted. I couldn’t miss it—you were screaming it."
"No I wasn’t," she said. "I never said it to anybody."
"I told you, I can’t hear. I can only know. You were like a siren, moving through the streets. You were so lonely and angry and hurt. And I—"
You pitied me. She didn’t say it into the phone, because the battery was already dead, and anyway, he could hear her whether she spoke aloud or not.
"No," he said. "Not really. No, I was attracted to you. I thought, here’s what she needs, I could do that."
"Why bother?" she said.
"I’ve got anything else to do?" he asked.
"Granting wishes for sex-starved ugly teenage girls?"
"See, that’s the thing," he said. "You’re not ugly."
"I thought you couldn’t see."
"I can’t. But I know what you see, and you’re completely wrong, the very things that you hate about yourself are the things that seem most sweet to me. So young, fragile, so real, so kind."
Oh, right, Miss Bitch herself, let’s check this with Ms. Reymondo and see what she thinks.
"Stop listening to Treadmarks," said the voice. The man. Carson. Vaughn.
"You really are raiding my brain," she said.
"You know what? Your father is really just doing the best he can to deal with the fact that he lusts for you. You haunt his dreams."
"Oh, make me puke," she said. "That’s such a lie."
"He never actually thought it through, but by treating you so badly, he guarantees that you’ll hate him and so he’ll never be able to get near you and try the things he keeps dreaming of doing. He hates himself every time he sees you. It’s very complicated and it doesn’t make him a good father, but at least he’s not as bad a father as he could have been."
"What, were you a shrink?"
"Come on, I’ve been dead for seventeen years, I’ve had time to figure out what makes people tick. Never had a clue while I was alive, no one ever does."
"So how many other girls have you talked dirty to."
"You’re the first."
"Come on."
"The first who ever heard me."
"Lex was first."
"She heard me because you wanted her to."
Deeny began to cry again. "I didn’t really. I didn’t know what I wanted."
"Nobody ever does. So we try for what we think we want and hope it works out. Like me and Dawn. I thought I wanted to impress her so she’d sleep with me. All I did was scare her and then kill her. That wasn’t what I wanted. What I really wanted was ... to marry her and make babies with her and be a father and watch my kids grow up and if I’d married her, if I hadn’t killed us, then maybe our first child would have been a girl and maybe she would have looked like you and when she was so lost and angry and hungry and sad, then maybe I could have put my arms around her, not like your poor father wants to, but like a real father, my arms like a safe place for you to hide in, my words to you nothing but the truth, but the truth put in such a way that it could heal you. Show you yourself with different eyes, so you could see who you really are. The dreamer, the poet, the singer, the wit. The beauty—yes, don’t laugh at me, you don’t know how men see women. There are boys who only see whether you look like the right magazine covers, but men look for the whole woman, they really do, I did, and you are beautiful, exactly as you are, your body and mind and your kindness and loyalty and that sharp edge you have, and the light of life inside you, it’s so beautiful, if only you could see what I know you are."
"The only guy who sees it is a dead guy on the phone," she said.
He chuckled. "So far, maybe you’re right," he said. "Because you’re still in high school, and the only males you know are just boys. Except a few. This Wu kid, he’s not bad. He saw you."
"Only after I got a reputation as a whore."
"No, I know better than that. I really know. He saw you before. Before me. He just took a while to work up the courage."
"Because his friends would make fun of him if he—"
"The courage to face a woman in all her beauty and ask if she’d give a part of it to him, just for a few hours, and then a few hours more. You don’t know how hard that is. It’s why the assholes get all the best women—because they don’t understand either the women or themselves well enough to know how utterly undeserving they are. But look at the guys who did that to you today. Look what they confessed about themselves. They already knew that the only way they could get any part of your beauty and your pride was to take it by force, because a woman like you would never give it to trivial little animals like them. All they could do was tear at you, rip it up a little. But they could never have it, because a woman of true beauty would never even think of sharing it with them."
To her surprise, the words he said flowed into her like truth and even though they didn’t take away what had happened that afternoon on the bus, it took away some of the sting. It didn’t hurt so bad. She could breathe without gasping at the pain and shame of it.
"Now I know what I wanted," she said.
"What?"
"On the phone," Deeny said. "What I wanted on the phone."
"Not a lover?"
"No," she said.
And in her mind, she did not say the word aloud, but she thought it all the same, knowing he would hear.
What I needed was a father.
"Can I call you again?" she said. "Please?"
"Whenever you want, Deeny," he said.
"Until you decide you can go on," she said. "It’s OK with me if you go, whenever you want, that’s OK. But while you’re still here, I can call?"
"Just pick up the phone. You don’t even have to press the buttons. It doesn’t even have to have any juice. Just pick up the phone and I’ll be there."
And he was.
~~~~~
Six years later. Deeny was married. Not to Jake Wu, though they came close, until it became clear that his family really did expect that his career would swallow her up and she reali
zed she couldn’t live that way, and couldn’t bear their disappointment if she didn’t. But the guy she married was just like Jake. Not in any obvious superficial way, but just like him all the same, in the way he treated her, in the things he wanted from her. Only he didn’t want her to become a support for his life. The man she married wanted them to support each other. And now she had his baby, their firstborn child, a girl, and she could see that he loved the baby, that he was going to be a great father.
And that was why she came to the cemetery. She had finally found Vaughn Carson, even though he had never told her where his body was. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he simply didn’t notice how much she wondered. But she found him, anyway, in a cemetery two states away. How he got from where he lived and died to where she was as a teenager—maybe she really had been calling out like a siren. Or maybe it was one hunger calling to another.
However he had found her, now she’d found him back, and here she was, standing at his grave, a single red rose in one hand, a cellphone in the other.
"You’re so silly," he said when she opened the phone. "It’s just dust now. Dust in a box."
"I just wanted to tell you," she said. "That my husband is a wonderful father."
"I know," he said. "I told you he would be when I gave you my permission to marry him."
"No, you’re not hearing me. It isn’t that he’s a wonderful father, it’s that I know he’s a wonderful father. How do you think I know what a wonderful father even is?"
She didn’t have to say, Because I had you. She knew he heard what was in her heart.
"So what I’m saying," she said, "is that you’ve had that daughter. Not the way you wanted. Not with Dawn. But you found a fatherless girl and you led her out of despair and instead of marrying somebody like my own father because I thought that’s what I deserved, I married somebody ... good."
"Good," he said. His voice was only a whisper.
"And so," she said, "it’s done. You can go on."
"Go on," he said.
"You can face whatever it is you have to face, because you’ve done the thing you hungered most to do. You’ve done it, and you can go on."
"Go on," he whispered.
"And I will love you forever, Vaughn Carson, even when you aren’t on the phone anymore. Because you were on the phone when I needed you."
"Needed you," he echoed.
She laid the rose on the engraved plate that was set in concrete at the head of the grave. It softened the stainless steel of death a little. Even though the rose, too, was dying now. It was still, for this brief moment, vivid and red as blood.
She took the phone from her ear and kissed it. "Good-bye, Daddy," she said. "I’ll miss you. But I’m glad I had you for as long as I did."
"Long as I did," he echoed. And then one last sigh. "Good-bye." And she thought she heard something else as if he had laid it gently inside her heart instead of speaking it aloud. "My daughter."
(Back to TOC)
For I Have Lain Me Down on The Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again
Michael Swanwick
We are ships without a harbor
We are sailors on dry land
And the song goes on forever...
~ from Mary's Eyes by Janis Ian
Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich the,
For of saynte chairité
Come ant daunce with me
In Irlaunde.
(anon.)
The bullet scars were still visible on the pillars of the General Post Office in Dublin, almost two centuries after the 1916 uprising. That moved me more than I had expected. But what moved me even more was standing at the exact same spot, not two blocks away, where my great-great-grandfather saw Gerry Adams strolling down O’Connell Street on Easter morning of ’96, the eightieth anniversary of that event, returning from a political rally with a single bodyguard to one side of him and a local politico to the other. It gave me a direct and simple connection to the tangled history of that tragic land.
I never knew my great-great-grandfather, but my grandfather told me that story once and I’ve never forgotten it, though my grandfather died when I was still a boy. If I squeeze my eyes tight shut, I can see his face, liquid and wavy as if glimpsed through candle flames, as he lay dying under a great feather comforter in his New York City railroad flat, his smile weak and his hair forming a halo around him as white as a dandelion waiting for the wind to purse its lips and blow.
"It was doomed from the start," Mary told me later. "The German guns had been intercepted and the republicans were outnumbered fourteen to one. The British cannons fired on Dublin indiscriminately. The city was afire and there was no food to be had. The survivors were booed as they were marched off to prison and execution, for the common folk did not support them. By any conventional standard it was a fiasco. But once it happened, our independence was assured. We lose and we lose and we lose, but because we never accept it, every defeat and humiliation only leads us closer to victory."
Her eyes blazed.
I suppose I should tell you about Mary’s eyes, if you’re to understand this story. But if I’m to tell you about her eyes, first I have to tell you about the holy well.
There is a holy well in the Burren that, according to superstition, will cure a toothache. The Burren is a great upwelling of limestone in the west of County Clair, and it is unlike anyplace else on Earth. There is almost no soil. The ground is stony and the stone is weathered in a network of fissures and cracks, called grykes, within which grow a province of plants you will not find in such abundance elsewhere. Three are caves in great number to the south and the east, and like everywhere else in that beautiful land, a plenitude of cairns and other antiquities to be found.
The holy well is one such antiquity, though it is only a round hole, perhaps a foot across, filled with water and bright green algae. The altar over it is of recent construction, built by unknown hands from the long slender stones formed by the natural weathering of the limestone between the grykes, which makes the local stone walls so distinctive and the walking so treacherous. You could tear it down and scatter its component parts and never hear a word spoken about your deed. But if you returned a year later you’d find it rebuilt and your vandalism unmade as if it had never happened. People have been visiting the well for a long, long time. The Christian overlay — the holy medals and broken statues of saints that are sometimes left as offerings, along with the prescription bottles, nails, and coins — is a recent and perhaps a transient phenomenon.
But the important thing to know, and the reason people keep coming back to it, is that the holy well works. Some holy wells don’t. You can locate them on old maps, but when you go to have a look, there aren’t any offerings there. Something happened long ago — they were cursed by a saint or defiled by a sinner or simply ran out of mojo — and the magic stopped happening, and the believers went away and never returned. This well, however, is charged with holy power. It gives you shivers just to stand by it.
Mary’s eyes were like that. As green as the water in that well, and as full of dangerous magic.
I knew about the holy well because I’d won big and gotten a ticket off-planet, and so before I went, I took a year off in order to see all the places on Earth I would never return to, ending up with a final month to spend wandering about the land of my ancestors. It was my first time in Ireland and I loved everything about it, and I couldn’t help fantasizing that maybe I’d do so well in the Outsider worlds that someday I’d be rich enough to return and maybe retire there.
I was a fool and, worse, I didn’t know it.
We met in the Fiddler’s Elbow, a pub in that part of the West which the Bord Failte calls Yeats Country. I hadn’t come in for music but only to get out of the rain and have a hot whiskey. I was sitting by a small peat fire, savoring the warmth and the sweet smell of it, when somebody opened a
door at the back of the room and started collecting admission. There was a sudden rush of people into the pub and so I carried my glass to the bar and asked, “What’s going on?”
“It’s Maire na Raghallach,” the publican said, pronouncing the last name like Reilly. “At the end of a tour she likes to pop in someplace small and give an unadvertised concert. You want to hear, you’d best buy a ticket now. They’re not going to last.”
I didn’t know Maire na Raghallach from Eve. But I’d seen the posters around town and I figured what the hell. I paid and went in.
~~~~~
Maire na Raghallach sang without a backup band and only an amp-and-finger-rings air guitar for instrumentation. Her music was ... well, either you’ve heard her and know or you haven’t and if you haven’t, words won’t help. But I was mesmerized, ravished, rapt. So much so that midway through the concert, as she was singing "Deirdre’s Lament," my head swam and a buzzing sensation lifted me up out of my body into a waking dream or hallucination or maybe vision is the word I’m looking for. All the world went away. There were only the two of us facing each other across an vast plain of bones. The sky was black and the bones were white as chalk. The wind was icy cold. We stared at each other. Her eyes pierced me like a spear. They looked right through me, and I was lost, lost, lost. I must have been half in love with her already. All it took was her noticing my existence to send me right over the edge.
Her lips moved. She was saying something and somehow I knew it was vastly important. But the wind whipped her words away unheard. It was howling like a banshee with all the follies of the world laid out before it. It screamed like an electric guitar. When I tried to walk toward her, I discovered I was paralyzed. Though I strained every muscle until I thought I would splinter my bones trying to get closer, trying to hear, I could not move nor make out the least fraction of what she was telling me.
~~~~~
Then I was myself again, panting and sweating and filled with terror. Up on the low stage, Mary (as I later learned to call her) was talking between songs. She grinned cockily and with a nod toward me said, "This one’s for the American in the front row."
