Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  Copyright © 2015 by Nino Cipri

  Art copyright © 2015 by Richie Pope

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  “A coyote got my cat,” Nico says.

  It took me four beers and three shots to open him up. All night he’s been talking about the breakup, what’s-her-name Yelena I think, and all night I’ve known there’s something else on him, but I didn’t know know—

  “Fuck, man.” I catch at his elbow. He’s wearing leather, supple, slick—he’s always mock-hurt when I can’t tell his good jackets from his great ones. “Mandrill?” A better friend wouldn’t have to ask, but I’m drunk, and not so good a friend. “Your cat back home?”

  “Poor Mandrill,” Nico says, completely forlorn. “Ah, shit, Dominga. I shouldn’t have left him.”

  He only goes to the Lighthouse on empty Sundays, when we can hide in the booths ringed around the halogen beacon. I expect sad nights here. But, man, his cat …

  Nico puts his head on my shoulder and makes a broken noise into the side of my neck. I rub his elbow and marvel in a selfish way at how much I care, how full of hurt I am, even after this awful week of dead bikers and domestics and empty space where fucking Jacob used to be. It’s the drink, of course, and tomorrow if we see each other (we won’t) it’ll all be awkward, stilted, an unspoken agreement to forget this moment.

  But right now I care.

  In a moment he’ll pull himself up, make a joke, buy a round. I know he will, since Nico and I only speak in bars and only when things feel like dogshit. We’ve got nothing in common—I ride ambulances around Queens, call my mom in Laredo every week, shouting Spanish into an old flip phone with a busted speaker. He makes smartphone games in a FiDi studio, imports leather jackets, and serially thinks his way out of perfectly good relationships. But all that difference warms me up sometimes, because (forgive me here, I am drunk) what’s the world worth if you can’t put two strangers together and get them to care? A friendship shouldn’t need anything else.

  He doesn’t pull himself up and he doesn’t make a joke.

  The lighthouse beam sweeps over us, over the netting around our booth, over Nico’s cramped shoulders and gawky height curled up against me. The light draws grid shadows on his leathered back, as if we’re in an ambulance together, monitors tracing the thready rhythm of Nico’s life. We sit together in the blue fog as the light passes on across empty tables carved with half-finished names.

  “I’m really sorry.” He finally pulls away, stiff, frowning. “I’m such a drag tonight. How are things after Jacob?”

  I cluck in concern, just like my mom. I have to borrow the sound from her because I want to scream every time I think about fucking Jacob and fucking I’m not ready for your life. “We’re talking about you.”

  He grins a fake grin but he’s so good at it I’m still a little charmed. “We’ve been talking about me forever.”

  “You broke up with your girlfriend and lost your cat. You’re having a bad week. As a medical professional I insist I buy you another round.” Paramedics drink, and lie sometimes. He dumped Yelena out of the blue, ‘to give her a chance at someone better.’ The opposite of what Jacob had done to me. “And we’re going to talk.”

  “No.” He looks away. I follow his eyes, tracing the lighthouse beam across the room, where the circle of tables ruptures, broken by some necessity of cleaning or fire code: as if a snake had come up out of the light, slithered through the table mandala, and written something with its passage. “No, I’m done.”

  And the way he says that hits me, hits me low, because I recognize it. I have a stupid compassion that does me no good. I am desperate to help the people in my ambulance, the survivors. I can hold them together but I can’t answer the plea I always see in their eyes: Please, God, please, mother of mercy, just let this never have happened. Make it undone. Let me have a world where things like this never come to pass.

  “Nico,” I say, “do you feel like you want to hurt yourself?”

  He looks at me and the Lighthouse’s sound system glitches for an instant, harsh and negative, as if we’re listening to the inverse music that fills the space between the song and the meaningless static beneath.

  My heart trips, thumps, like the ambulance alarm’s just gone off.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he says, eyes round and honest. “I don’t want to get on Twitter and read about all the atrocities I’m complicit in. I don’t want to trick wonderful women into spending a few months figuring out what a shithead I really am. I don’t want to raise little cats to be coyote food. I don’t even want to worry about whether I’m dragging my friends down. I just want to undo all the harm I’ve ever done.”

  Make it undone.

  In my job I see these awful things—this image always come to me: a cyclist’s skull burst like watermelon beneath the wheels of a truck he didn’t see. I used to feel like I made a difference in my job. But that was a long time ago.

  So I hold to this: As long as I can care about other people, I’m not in burnout. Emotional detachment is a cardinal symptom, you see.

  “Did you ever see It’s a Wonderful Life?” I’m trying to lighten the mood. I’ve only read the Wikipedia page.

  “Yeah.” Oops. “But I thought it kind of missed the point. What if—” He makes an excited gesture, pointing to an idea. But his eyes are still fixed on the mirror surface of the table, and when he sees himself his jaw works. “What if his angel said, Oh, you’ve done more harm than good; but we all do, that’s life, those are the rules, there’s just more hurt to go around. Why couldn’t he, I forget his name, it doesn’t matter, why couldn’t he say, well, just redact me. Remove the fact of my birth. I’m a good guy, I don’t want to do anyone any harm, so I’m going to opt out. Do you think that’s possible? Not a suicide, that’s selfish, it hurts people. But a really selfless way out?”

  I don’t know what to say to that. It’s stupid, but he’s smart, and he says it so hard.

  He grins up at me, full-lipped, beautiful. The lighthouse beacon comes around again and lights up his silhouette and puts his face in shadow except his small white teeth. “I mean, come on. If I weren’t here—wouldn’t you be having a good night?”

  “You’re wishing you’d never known me, you realize. You’re shitting all over me.”

  “Dominga Roldan! My knight.” There he goes, closing up again, putting on the armor of charm. He likes that Roldan is so much like Roland. It’s the first thing he ever told me. “Please. You’re the suffering hero at this table. Let’s talk about you.”

  I surrender. I start talking about fucking Jacob.

  But I resolve right then that I’ll save Nico, convince him that it’s worth it to go on, worth it to have ever been.

  * * *

  I believe in good people. Even though Nico has what we call “resting asshole face” and a job that requires him to trick people into giving him thousands of dollars (he designs the systems that keep people playing smartphone games, especially the parts that keep them spending) I still think he’s a good man. He cares, way down.

  I believe you can feel that. The world’s a cold place and it’ll break your heart. You’ve got to trust in the possibility of good.

  I dream of gardening far south and west, home in Laredo. Inexplicably, fucking Jacob is there. He smiles at me, big bear face a little stubbled. I want to yell at him: don’t grow a beard! You have a great chin! But we’re busy gardening, rooting around in galvanized tubs full of okra and zucchini and purple hull peas. Hot peppers, since
the sweet breeds won’t take. The autumn light down here isn’t so thin as in New York. I am bare-handed, turning up the soil around the roots, grit up under my fingers and in the web of my hands. I am making life.

  But down in the zucchini roots I find a knot of maggots, balled up squirming like they’ve wormed a portal up from maggot hell and come pouring out blind and silent. And I think: I am only growing homes for maggots. Everything is this way. In the end we are only making more homes, better homes, for maggots.

  Jacob smiles at me and says, like he did: “I’m just not ready for your life. It’s too hard. Too many people get hurt.”

  I wake up groaning, hangover clotted in my sinuses. Staring up at the vent above my mattress I realize there’s no heat. It’s broken again.

  The cold is sharp, though. Sterile. It makes me go. I get to the hospital on time and Mary’s waiting for me, smiling, my favorite partner armed with coffee and danishes and an egg sandwich from the enigmatic food truck only she can find. For my hangover, of course. Mary, bless her, knows my schedule.

  Later that day we save a man’s life.

  He swam out into the river to die. We’re first on the scene and I am stupid, so stupid: I jump in to save him. The water’s late-autumn cold, the kind of chill I am afraid will get into my marrow and crystallize there, so that later in life, curled up in the summer sun with a lover, I’ll feel a pang and know that a bead of ice came out of my bone and stuck in my heart. I used to get that kind of chest pain growing up, see. I thought they were ice crystals that formed when we went to see ex-Dad in Colorado, where the world felt high and thin, everything offered up on an altar to the truth behind the indifferent cloth of stars.

  I’m thinking all this as I haul the drowning man back in. I feel so cold and so aware. My mind goes everywhere. Goes to Jacob, of course.

  Offered up on an altar. We used to play a sex game like that, Jacob and I. You know, a sexy sacrifice—isn’t that the alchemy of sex games? You take something appalling and you make it part of your appetites. Jesus, I used to think it was cute, and now describing it I’m furiously embarrassed. Jacob was into all kinds of nerd shit. For him I think the fantasy was always kind of Greco-Roman, Andromeda on the rocks, but I always wondered if he dared imagine me as some kind of Aztec princess, which would be too complicatedly racist for him to suggest. He’s dating a white girl now. It doesn’t bother me but Mom just won’t let it go. She’s sharp about it, too: she has a theory that Jacob feels he’s now Certified Decent, having passed his qualifying exam, and now he’ll go on to be a regular shithead.

  And Mary’s pulling me up onto the pier, and I’m pulling the suicide.

  He nearly dies in the ambulance. We swaddle him in heat packs and blankets and Mary, too, swaddles him, smiling and flirting, it’s okay, what a day for a swim, does he know that in extreme situations rescuers are advised to provide skin-to-skin contact?

  See, Mary’s saying, see, it’s not so bad here, not so cold. You’ll meet good people. You’ll go on.

  Huddled in my own blankets I meet the swimmer’s warm brown eyes and just then the ambulance slams across a pothole. He fibrillates. Alarms shriek. I see him start to go, receding, calm, warm, surrounded by people trying to save him, and I think that if he went now, before his family found out, before he had to go back to whatever drove him into the river, it’d be best.

  Oh, God, the hurt can’t be undone. It’d be best.

  His eyes open. They peel back like membranes. I see a thin screen, thinner than Colorado sky, and in the vast space behind it something white and soft and eyeless wheels on an eternal wind.

  His heart quits. He goes into asystole.

  “Come on,” Mary hisses, working on him. “Come on. You can’t do this to me. Dominga, let’s get some epi going—come on, don’t go.”

  I think that’s the hook that pulls him in. He cares. He doesn’t want to hurt her. Like Nico, he can’t stand to do harm. By that hook or by the CPR and the epinephrine we bring him back. Afterward I sit outside in the cold, the bitter dry cold, and I can feel it: the heat going out of me, the world leaking up through the sky and out into the void where something ancient waits, a hypothermic phantasm, a cold fever dream, the most real thing I’ve ever seen.

  I flail around for something human to hold and remember, then, how worried I am about Nico.

  * * *

  Don’t judge me too harshly. This is my next move: I invite Nico to game night with Jacob and his new girlfriend Elise. Nico is a game designer, right? It fits. I promised Jacob we’d still be friends. Everything fits.

  It’s not about any kind of payback.

  Jacob loves this idea. He suggests a café/bar nerd money trap called Glass Needle. I turn up with Nico (Cool jacket, I say, and he grins back at me from under his mirrored aviators, saying, You really can’t tell!) and we all shake hands and say Hi, hi, wow, it’s so great, under a backlit ceiling of frosted glass etched with the shapes of growing things.

  “Isn’t that cool?” Jacob beams at me. “They do that with hydrofluorosilicic acid.” He’s growing too: working on a beard and a gut, completing the deadly Santa array. Elise looks like she probably does yoga. She arranges the game with assured competence. I wonder how many times Jacob practiced saying hydrofluorosilicic, and what their sex is like.

  Nico tongues a square of gum. “That’s really impressive,” he says.

  The games engage him. I guess the games engage me too: Jacob will listen to anything Nico says, since Jacob cares about everything and Nico pretends he doesn’t. “I love board games,” Jacob explains.

  “I love rules,” Nico replies, and this is true: Nico thinks everything is a game to be played, history, evolution, even dating, even friendship. Everything has a winning strategy. He’ll describe this cynicism to anyone, since he thinks it’s sexy. If you know him you can see how deeply it bothers him.

  It’s Sunday again. I worked eighteen hours yesterday. I’m exhausted, I can’t stop thinking about the swimmer flatline. Jacob looks at me with the selfless worry permitted to the ex who did the dumping.

  If I weren’t here, I think, wouldn’t you be having a good night?

  The game baffles me. Elise assembles a zoo of cardboard tokens, decks of tiny cards, dice, character sheets, Jacob chattering all the while: “These are for the other worlds you’ll visit. These are spells you can learn, though of course they’ll drive you mad. This card means you’re the town sheriff—that one means you eat free at the diner—”

  Elise pats him on the hand. “I think they can learn as they go.”

  We’re supposed to patrol a town where the world has gotten thin and wounded. If we don’t heal those wounds, something will come through, a dreadful thing with a name like the Treader In Dust or whatever. Nico’s really good at the game. He flirts with me outrageously, which earns a beautifully troubled Jacob-face, a face of perturbed enlightenment: really, this shouldn’t be bothering me! So I flirt back at Nico. Why not? He’s the one getting a kick out of meeting my ex and out-charming him, out-dressing him, talking over him while he sits there and takes it. And wouldn’t Mary flirt, to comfort him? To remind poor forlorn Nico that the world’s not so cold?

  Only Nico doesn’t seem so forlorn, and when I look at Jacob, there’s Elise touching shoulders with him, which makes every memory of Jacob hurt. As if she’s claimed him not just now but retroactively too.

  Even Elise, who’s played it a hundred times, can’t manage this damn game. The rules seem uncertain, as if different parts of the rule book contradict each other. Jacob and Nico argue over exactly how the monsters decide to hunt us, precisely when the Magic Shop closes up, where the yawning portals lead. Oh, Nico—this must be so satisfyingly you: You are beating Jacob’s game, you’re better than his rules. Even Elise won’t argue with Nico, preferring, she says, to focus on the emergent narrative.

  It all leaves me outside.

  I drink to spiteful excess and move my little character around in sullen ineffective ways. Ja
cob’s eyes are full of stupid understanding. I look at him and try to beam my thoughts: I hate this. This makes me sick. I wish I’d never met you. I wish I could burn up all the good times we had, just to spare myself this awful night.

  That’s what I thought when he left. That it hadn’t been worth it.

  “Can we switch sides,” Nico asks, “and obtain dreadful secrets from the Great Old One?”

  “You could try.” Elise loves this. She grins at Nico and I savor Jacob’s reaction. “But your only hope is that It will devour your soul first, so you don’t have to experience the terrible majesty of Its coming.”

  And Nico grins at me. “What an awful world. You’re fucked the moment you’re born.” Making a joke out of his drunken despair, out of dead Mandrill and his own hurt. Of course he doesn’t take it seriously. Of course he was just drunk.

  I am everyone’s sucker.

  “I think you can do that with an expansion set,” Jacob adds helpfully. “Switch sides, I mean.”

  “Let’s play with it next time,” Nico says. Elise bounces happily. There probably will be a next time, won’t there? The three of them will be friends.

  “I feel sick,” I say, “it’s just—something I saw on shift. It’s getting to me.”

  Then I go. They can’t argue with that. They all work in offices.

  Nico texts me: Holy shit we lost. Alien god woke up to consume the world. We went mad with rapture and horror when it spoke hidden secrets of the universal design although I did shoot it with a tommy gun. Game is fucking broken. It was amazing thank you.

  I text back: cool

  What I want to say is: you asshole, I hope you’re happy, I hope you’re glad you’re right, I hope you’re glad you won. I believe in good people, you know, but I used to think Jacob was a good person, and look where that got me; I just wanted to cheer you up and look where that got me. I pull people from the river, I drag them dying out of their houses, I see their spinal fluid running into the gutters and look where all that gets me—