Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  I’m making this all sound so very lighthearted, aren’t I?

  I met Mum at JFK in the company of Maxine, a Jokertown Yellow Cab driver of my acquaintance who really drives her vehicle. That is to say, she runs it off her own calorie intake. This, if one can do it, is, apparently, a good deal, economically. It means that Maxine is happy to be paid in junk food, which also makes economic sense for her passengers, and makes hers the hack that jokers and poor drama students head for after the show, with a bag of White Palace and fries for change. This ability came to her suddenly, when she was a child, when she was involved in a frightening car accident, and, in that extraordinary way which makes it very clear that our brains know our bodies better than we do, managed to turn the birthday meal she’d just eaten with her loving parents into a sudden burst of automotive power that saved their lives. Long term, however, it meant she lost her family. Within the year, actually. Because that moment she used her, you know, power for the first time was also the moment she … changed. They couldn’t deal. They put her up for adoption. Nobody took her. You get a lot of stories out of those children’s homes that got packed with ace and joker kids back then. These days, they’re the stuff of Young Adult novels, but I bet the truth of it was even more grim. People understand, to some degree, the original release of the Wild Card virus in September 1946. They feel for the first generation of those infected, be they powerful ace or differently bodied joker. They feel the loss of those who “drew the black queen” and died on the spot. They feel for the deformed and stillborn children of those infected. They’re not quite as able to categorize their emotions for those of us unlucky enough to get infected in subsequent decades. The virus is still out there in the jet stream. It’s been found on every continent. (At some point in my childhood it must have been drifting through rural Dorset.) Maxine, at the moment she expressed it, changed into, and now looks like … well, a pile of rubber tires with a pair of googly eyes on top. Okay, yes, you know, like that advertising character. I’ve never said it out loud within earshot of her. That would be cruel. She makes reference to it every now and then, a nod out of the window when we pass a hoarding: “That’s my Dad.” She says tourists who’ve come to gawk at the jokers sometimes go, “No, really?!”

  My mother, however, rolled her luggage on wheels to the edge of the sidewalk in the airport pick-up area, and when Maxine got out of the cab to help her with it, went way beyond any awkwardness and into the land of outright social horror. She saw Maxine and screamed.

  I had to basically wrestle her into the cab, while looking desperately around to make sure there weren’t any jokers about who might be offended. Maxine was silent all through the journey back, while Mum was a stream of “Honestly, darling, you can’t blame me, we don’t have jokers in Dorset. I thought I was dreaming. I was prepared for your joker friends to be horrifyingly ugly monsters, not, I’m sure charming, if rather disconcerting, giant, blobby, vastly flexible, to fit in that seat up front, I mean you must be…” And this was all without the slightest forensic trace of guilt, as if we all yelled about this stuff all the time at the top of our voices in Jokertown.

  “Maxine doesn’t self-identify as a joker,” I told her, my voice already a hiss. “She thinks of herself as an ace: someone with useful powers.”

  “Ah, of course, because jokers are your actual monsters,” said Mum, “who can’t do anything useful.”

  I stared at her, once again horrified by the prospect of taking this woman into my ghetto. “Except … sometimes they can, and very few of them self-identify as monsters—”

  “So it’s all a bit of a mess, classification-wise? How very American, not to have proper names for what things are. And what is this ‘self-identify’ business you keep on about?”

  “It’s about how they want to see themselves!”

  “Darling,” she said, “I’d like to see myself as Keira Knightley, but it’s what the world sees that matters, isn’t it? Hey, with your own, you know—”

  “My powers.”

  “Yes, yes, well, you’ll be picking up a bit of Maxine’s power, won’t you, how did you put it? ‘Like hi-fi’?”

  “Wi-fi.”

  “Yes, that! I mean you’ll be sort of automatically catching on to what she’s doing—”

  “Unless I stop myself,” I emphasized. “I can do that now.”

  “Well, well done darling, but don’t stop yourself right now, because surely, if you’re doing it too, you’re contributing to keeping this car moving.” She saw the look of befuddlement on my face and sighed, speaking as if to a toddler. “So you’ll be contributing to the petrol money! I think we should negotiate a discount.” She turned to start doing just that, but before she could I decided I had to put the possibility of being thrown out of the cab before my own comforts and make the ultimate sacrifice.

  “Mum,” I asked quickly, “how are my aunts?”

  Which immediately distracted her onto her favorite subject, a conversation which was only dangerous to my nerves rather than to my health. My, you know, power, if you haven’t read the reports of what happened, is that I pick up other peoples’ powers (yes, like wi-fi) and start expressing them myself, utterly randomly. Well, until the last few weeks, when, as I said, I’ve managed to gain a level of control. But still, if I’m caught unaware, if, let’s say, an ace passes me in the street, and their power is that they can turn into a pile of goo, well, there I suddenly am, a pile of goo with a sign saying GOLF SALE stuck in it. As happened that one time when I was, erm, between acting engagements. It took all my willpower then to literally pull myself together as the ace, unaware that it was all about proximity for me, and not noticing goo when it was other people, dawdled nearby, getting himself a coffee, passing the time of day. I ran the risk of being lapped up by a small dog, until I managed to rear up at it. And of course, once reintegrated, I was atop my clothes rather than in them. As happens to me rather too often for my taste. My taste in those matters would actually tend toward the not at all.

  I’m distracting myself. Like I won’t have to finish this if I do that. Like it won’t have happened, then. Sorry. Anyway. I was able to just about ignore mother’s usual drone about what the aunts were doing back in Dorset, all of which was, as usual, formidably dull. But she segued out of that into her equally doleful round up of cousins and distant relatives the provenance of which remained a mystery, while New York, bloody incredible New York, which she’d never seen before, sailed past the windows like an in-flight movie. I had to lower my own window to get some early autumn air in my face to stay awake. Just as Mum started talking about the sleeping pills which had got her through that terrible flight. She was intending to use them to manage her awful jet lag. I was already feeling that, of Mum and I, only one of us was going to survive the next few days, and that it was going to be me, frankly, because I already wanted to murder her with a crowbar, just bash it across the back of her latest stupid hat, time after time after—

  Sorry. I really need to calm down. Just thinking about the start of all this makes me so … well, there I am now. I’m angry. Which is better than sad, I suppose. But it’s such an impotent anger. At how things worked out. At how things are. When I don’t think they have to be. They really don’t. No, let’s not go there. Not yet, anyway. Not until I have to.

  Sorry. As I think I already said. Many times, probably.

  Hello. My name is Abigail Baker.

  I am a serious actor.

  Until just before the landing of my mother, I’d been having the summer of my life (apart from being arrested and accidentally publicly naked quite a few times during it), working at the Bowery Repertory in Jokertown, the lovely Old Rep, on loan from the School, and making my debut as a stand in.… But actually, you may well have read about that, as I said.* It was all over the media, for all the wrong reasons. In the end Mr. Dutton, the theater owner, got a team of lawyers involved, and I didn’t even have to spend a single night behind bars, though I do now, technically, have a crimina
l record. And, erm, a suspended sentence. Well, several. Anyhow, now the Old Rep’s autumn season was approaching, and with it the end of my placement there, and, having shown me off to the audience in a range of parts that frankly hadn’t stretched my talent to its rawest extremes, Mr. Dutton had, rather too quickly to my mind, agreed to the Circus asking to benefit from my newfound notoriety when it came to my last role before the new school year began.

  They actually asked for me. I don’t know if my Mum ever got that, or if it just added to it for her.

  Anyway, that was another reason why I wasn’t entirely comfortable with her being in New York. I’d covered up all that unpleasantness, to her, with euphemism, made easier by the positive spin the joker-friendly elements of the media had given it. I’d sent her all the right press cuttings and crossed my fingers about whether or not the sort of newspapers my mother reads would take an interest. That was all I had to worry about. Mum doesn’t do online media. She once, prompted by her favorite columnist, called me up to warn me that Facebook could literally kill me where I stood. As it turned out, she hadn’t ever quite been aware of the me-being-arrested part. She does tend to mention these things if she hears about them. So that was fine. It joined the encyclopedia of details concerning my life of which my mother was unaware. On the day of which I speak, for instance, I had concealed any of my tattoos that might be visible with several layers of foundation.

  But there was one big thing I hadn’t told her about. One big thing who, when Maxine angrily thumped Mum’s luggage onto the sidewalk in front of my humble apartment building, was waiting inside. Because he’d insisted. Because he was strung out to the point of distraction and kept grabbing my hands and urging me that since we were together, he wanted my parents to know we were together, wanted them to see he was a good guy. I hadn’t said to him that that wasn’t exactly true. I’d have meant it as a good thing, but right now I didn’t know how he’d take it. I didn’t know how he’d take anything. I looked up at the building, wondering how this was going to go.

  “So,” said Mum, completely ignoring Maxine standing there staring at the packet of mints she’d offered her as a fare, “remind me, darling, when’s your first public appearance as an elephant?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” I said, trying to indicate to Maxine with mere expression that, next time, I’d bring her at least a hamper. “At the matinee. And that’s great, I thought you were going to say something about where I lived.”

  “Oh my dear, I wouldn’t dream of hurting you like that. That’s why I said something irrelevant to the moment, you see, to distract us both. But now you’ve spoiled that little act of grace on my part. You never were one for the social niceties.” She glanced back to Maxine. “You know, your friend should come to the circus with you, she’d get straight on the bill. She’d do so well. Bouncy bouncy!” And with an engaging grin, like this was the best idea ever, she actually made a motion like a trampoline.

  My mother had told me that she liked circuses. And, she’d said on the phone, also elephants. I didn’t wonder at the time that she’d never mentioned that before. She told me then that she and Dad had met at a circus. That they were there with their parents. I imagined at the time that, with the austerity of Britain in decades past, said Big Top probably consisted of three mice, a spoonful of jam, and a man in an interesting hat. And that my Mum, even at such a young age, would have spent the evening telling my putative Dad at horrifying length about what her mother’s sisters were up to. But now I wonder if that story was even true.

  Anyway. Sorry. My expression to Maxine gained several extra dimensions, to the point where I hoped it intimated that next time I saw her I would provide her with nothing short of a feast. Finally, she just shrugged, her arms bouncing off her sides, and got sulkily back into her cab. Mother looked to me with an expression that said her words had once again fallen, inexplicably, on stony ground, and rolled her noisy luggage toward the front door of my block. Where, to my increasing worry, a greater class of horror awaited us.

  * * *

  His name, and I’m pretty sure it’s his real one, is Croyd Crenson. He was infected by the Wild Card virus in 1946, and since the events I mentioned that you might have already read about, with the being arrested and the nudity and everything, he’d been, erm, my boyfriend. He doesn’t look his age. He just looks as if he has ten years or so on me. Okay, maybe twenty. All right, listen, if it was a thing on my part, it was not that much of a thing, compared to being made of rubber or having the ability to reduce oneself to goo. That’s something else I’ve realized about the people who live in Jokertown: Their notion of what’s socially acceptable for nats (sorry, I mean, noninfected people) extends quite a way beyond what’s okay for those living elsewhere. It’s all about what one is surrounded with, what one has as a background to compare oneself to. That, and the low rents, is what makes Jokertown such a vibrant, diverse, Bohemian environment. (That is to say, as Mum would translate it, there are a lot of gay and transsexual people here too. Actually, that’s probably not how she’d translate it.)

  But, sorry, I was talking about Croyd Crenson. As I probably will be for the rest of my life, now. Croyd has not always been on the right side of the law. And that was very much the situation that summer. The trouble we’d been in, as you may have read, had a lot to do with his then-current ability to multiply objects (and, luckily for me concerning one particular escape from the police, people) with a touch of his hand. He had been using that for nefarious purposes involving DVDs.

  I should have realized that something terrible was approaching (other than my mother) when, three weeks before her anticipated arrival, Croyd had appeared on my doorstep with flowers. They were beautiful, and he looked especially charming with his awkward, sad smile beside the blooms. Though his teeth were chattering even then. Croyd isn’t one for grand romantic gestures. He’s been alive long enough to know that it’s the small things that matter: the way he understands a person, and wants to know about that person, and gives that person, if they’re me, space to talk. And talk. He is, actually, rather the silent type, now I think of it, although maybe that was just because he was with me—

  Oh dear. Oh, I’m crying now. Sorry. Sorry. So stupid.

  Anyway. Where was I? Right. Right.

  That night, he took me out to this backstreet Italian joker place. Its decor was a combination of Sicily and the kind of twisted outsider tattoo-parlor chic that young jokers in New York had developed, that showed up in mainstream design in ways which made you wonder if said jokers were impressed or pissed off. Lady Gaga having the former effect, of course. Her concerts in Jokertown itself, with free admission for jokers, meant she could plaster her videos with orange and purple swirls if she liked. Croyd knew the owner, like he seemed to know everyone dodgy in New York City, so we got a table on our own, and had the food shown to us by the waiters as they sloped or skittered or flapped out to their customers.

  Croyd put his hands on the tablecloth and visibly controlled their twitching. He didn’t quite manage to make them stop. The speed of his breathing, in the last few days, had started to worry me. It was all the amphetamines he was taking. Looking back, I’d started to feel nervous around him, not to anticipate his visits with unbridled delight. I could feel him, whenever he put his arm in mine or his hand on my waist, treating me deliberately carefully, like one day he might treat me otherwise. It had started to be like he took a deep breath before I opened my door. But on the flip side of that, the release of that, when I gave him license, in intimate situations, to let all that energy loose … yes, well, I think you get the idea.

  I suppose he made me feel a lot better about myself. Being with him kind of made one a lady, without anyone ever having to use the word. I hate to say this is true, but I suppose he really was something from the past that I’d tried to escape, that had reached out to me and said I was okay. And at the same time he was something from my new world of jokers and aces, who had helped me to accept being one of that comm
unity, to stop standing quite so nervously apart from it. He listened to all my emo bollocks, because, unlike every other man I’d ever met, he seemed to soak up how people felt about one another, seemed to enjoy hearing about it, particularly when it was about me and him. Even when he started to get jittery and raging and paranoid, he still stopped and listened. He made himself do that for me. And he made his own rules, but was nonetheless honorable, outside the law rather than against it, you know, the bad boy thing. But that so minimizes what he was to me.

  After dark, we would go for walks in Central Park. People say it’s dangerous at night, but we never felt threatened there. We could always make more trees to hide behind or more stones to throw. Or I could reach out into the brilliant shining city above us and call over someone else’s useful power. We never had to do any of that.

  I often think New York feels like it does, natural and full of energy and about and for people, because it reminds us all of something from our evolution: We scurry about at the foot of what seem like enormous trees, and we’ve got this clearing in the middle to rush out into and play and fight and change. You see so many jokers there, day and especially night, like that forest clearing is even there for this latest direction of evolution. And we were jokers too. We were part of the night, and so not threatened by it. We sat on benches, and we talked, or I suppose I did while he looked at me.

  I see that look in my memory now. It’s still a good thing.

  And then we would go back to my apartment and shag like bunnies. And nobody ever says that at this point in stories, but they really should. They really should.