The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  This guy just couldn’t be dead.

  He looked like he was going to sit up any second.

  I blinked then because it was almost as if he was glowing like one of those religious paintings I’ve seen in churches. It was as if I could see the stuff of his soul, or something like that. Christ, I almost fell backward.

  I knew that was all bullshit, but I saw it just the same.

  Crocker didn’t seem to see it; at least he didn’t say anything. So it must have just been me.

  And then I remembered something about my father that scared me. It just sort of came out of nowhere!

  I remembered the nurse taking my arm and trying to pull me out of the hospital room. Mom was crying and screaming, and she fell right on top of Dad on the bed. But I got one last look at Dad; and he looked like he was made up of light, sort of like a halo was around him and all over him.

  How could I have forgotten something like that?

  But I did. I must have just pushed it right out of my mind.

  “How d’you think he died?” I asked Crocker. Hearing my own voice made me feel normal again. And that was important right now.

  “Who knows? Probably some sort of accident.”

  “Nah, he looks too good.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’,” Crocker said. “They can make anybody look good as new … almost. He could have even had cancer.”

  Crocker looked up in the air.

  I called his name, but he ignored me. It was as if he was listening to something. He had his head cocked like the RCA dog.

  “Crocker, come on,” I said after a while. I was starting to get worried. “Hey, you … Crock-a-shit.”

  “Shut up!” Crocker snapped. “Can’t you hear him?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Just listen.”

  I listened, I really did, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. Crocker was probably off his nut, plain and simple. But I wasn’t much better, not after I had just seen the corpse glowing like the hands on a watch.

  Who knows, maybe the dead guy could talk. And maybe Crocker could hear him.

  But I just wanted to get out of there.

  I was already feeling like the walls and everything were going to close in on me.

  “He’s leaving,” Crocker said. “He’s saying good-bye to everybody. Cool!”

  “Okay, then let’s go,” I said, but I couldn’t help looking at the spot where Crocker seemed to be staring, and I got the strangest feeling. Then I saw it: a pool of light like a cloud that seemed to be connected to the body that was now glowing softly again.

  And the light was bleeding out of the corpse like it was the guy’s spirit or something.

  A few seconds later the light just blinked out, as if someone had thrown a switch; and the body looked different, too, as if something vital had just drained out of it. Now it was nothing more than a shell; it looked like it was made of plastic. It was dull, lifeless.

  We left then. Crocker and I just left at the same time, as if we both knew something.

  And I heard thunder and remembered my father talking in the language only he could understand; and I felt as if I was drowning in something as deep and as big as the ocean.

  * * *

  When we got out of the funeral home, and past all the men standing around and smoking cigarettes, Crocker said, “You heard him, didn’t you? I could tell.”

  “I didn’t hear nothin’,” I said, protecting my ass.

  “Bullshit,” Crocker said.

  “Bullshit on you,” I said.

  “Well, you were acting … different,” Crocker said.

  I admitted that maybe I saw something that was a little weird, but it was probably just in my head. That bent Crocker all out of shape; he seemed happier than a kid with a box of Ju Ju Bees, and I got worried that he’d shoot off his mouth to everyone he saw.

  I warned him about that.

  “Give me a break,” he said. “It’s enough that the guys in the club think of me as some sort of asshole as it is. You’re the only one I feel I can talk to—and I don’t even really know you.”

  “Okay,” I said, worried that maybe there was something wrong with me. Why else would Crocker feel that way? It also worried me that first I saw the dead guy glowing like my aunt’s Sylvania Halolight TV, and then I saw his soul (or whatever it was) pass right out of him, leaving nothing but a body that was more like a statue or something made of plaster of Paris. But I put those thoughts away and asked, “What did the guy say?”

  “His name is Matt … remember? He said he was scared out of his gourd until he found his grandmother.”

  “What?”

  “His grandmother’s dead. She’ll show him around.”

  “Around where?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Crocker said. “Heaven, probably.”

  “You gotta be kidding.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re making that stuff up.” But somehow I really wanted to believe it.

  “I thought you said you saw something,” Crocker said, hanging his head. “And I believed you.… I wanted to know what you saw—”

  “I said I thought I saw something.” I punched him hard on the arm to make him feel better. “And it wasn’t nothing but a glowing like a TV tube when you turn it off.”

  “I never saw that.”

  “Now tell me, what else did Matt say?” I asked.

  “He hates Bill Haley, but we got Jackie Wilson right.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Well, that’s what I thought I heard,” Crocker said.

  “Why’d you say, ‘Cool’?” I asked.

  “Whaddyamean?”

  “When you were looking up in the air, you said, ‘Cool.’ Don’t you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  And Crocker started laughing. It was like he couldn’t stop. He kept leaning forward and stumbling and then laughing even louder. I couldn’t help but smile, and I kept knuckling his arm until he told me.

  “He said he was going to visit the Big Bopper.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what he said. And Ritchie Valens.”

  “You’re so full of crap,” I said. But now I couldn’t stop laughing either.

  “Then maybe dying’s not so bad,” I said, and we fell down right there on the sidewalk on Ackley Avenue in front of a brown shingled house that belonged to Mrs. Campbell, my third-grade teacher. I don’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t stop laughing and crying.

  Neither could Crocker.

  And who knows, maybe I really did see something flickering in the air above Matt’s dead body while he was floating around in Heaven somewhere meeting his grandmother.

  And maybe he did get to see the Big Bopper.

  Just like the Big Bopper probably got to see Valens and Holly … and probably Mozart and Beethoven, too.

  And maybe the Big Bopper also got to meet my dad.

  Why not? Dad would be there, standing right on line; he always liked to play the piano, all that bebop and boogie-woogie stuff. So maybe he became a musician, just like all the others.

  Now, that would be something.…

  FOAM

  Brian W. Aldiss

  One of the true giants of the field, Brian W. Aldiss has been publishing science fiction for more than a quarter of a century, and has more than two dozen books to his credit. His classic novel The Long Afternoon of Earth won a Hugo Award in 1962. “The Saliva Tree” won a Nebula Award in 1965, and his novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include the acclaimed Helliconia trilogy—Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter—The Malacia Tapestry, An Island Called Moreau, Greybeard, Frankenstein Unbound, and Cryptozoic. His latest books include the collection Seasons in Flight and the novels Dracula Unbound and Forgotten Life. Upcoming is a new novel, Remembrance Day, a new collection,
A Tupolev Too Far, and a collection of poems, Home Life with Cats. He lives in Oxford, England.

  In this complex and subtle story, Aldiss sweeps us along with a man bound on a long and grueling journey of discovery to find … himself.

  There’s nothing for it when you reach the Point of No Return—except to come back.

  —E. James Carvell

  Many Central and Eastern European churches had been dismantled. The deconstruction of Chartres Cathedral was proceeding smartly, unhindered by Operation Total Tartary.

  On the previous day, a guide had taken me around Budapest Anthropological Museum. I had wanted to see the danse macabre preserved there, once part of the stonework of the cathedral at Nagykanizsa. Although the panel was in poor condition, it showed clearly the dead driving the living to the grave.

  The dead were represented by skeletons, frisky and grinning. The line of the living began with prelates in grand clothes, the Pope leading. Merchants came next, men and women, then a prostitute; a beggar brougtit up the rear, these allegorical figures representing the inescapable gradations of decay.

  As I was making notes, measuring, and sketching in my black notebook, the guide was shuffling about behind me, impatient to leave. I had special permission to be in the gallery. Jangling her keys more like a gaoler than an attendant, she went to gaze out of a narrow window at what could be seen of the prosperous modern city, returning to peer over my shoulder and sniff.

  ‘A disgusting object,’ she remarked, gesticulating with an open hand towards the frieze, which stood severed and out of context on a display bench in front of me.

  ‘“What it beauty, saith my sufferings then?”’ I quoted abstractedly. To me the danse macabre was a work of art, skilfully executed; nothing more than that. I admired the way in which the leading Death gestured gallantly towards an open grave, his head bizarrely decked with flags. The unknown artist, I felt sure, had been to Lübeck, where similar postures were depicted. The helpful guidebook, in Hungarian and German, told me that this sportive Death was saying, ‘In this doleful jeste of Life, I shew the state of Manne, and how he is called at uncertayne tymes by Me to forget all that he hath and lose All.’

  For a while, silence prevailed, except for the footsteps of the guide, walking to the end of the gallery and back, sighing in her progress, jingling her keys. We were alone in the gallery. I was sketching the Death playing on a stickado or wooden psalter and goading along a high-bosomed duchess, when the guide again shuffled close.

  ‘Much here is owed to Holbein engraving,’ said the guide, to show off her knowledge. She was a small bent woman whose nose was disfigured by a permanent cold. She regarded the work with a contempt perhaps habitual to her. ‘Theme of danse macabre is much popular in Middle Ages. In Nagykani-zsa, half population is wipe out by plague only one years after building the cathedral. Now we know much better, praise be.’

  I was fed up with her misery and her disapproval. I wanted only to study the frieze. It would buttress a line of thought I was pursuing.

  ‘In what way do we know better?’

  It is unwise ever to argue with a guide. She gave me a long discourse regarding the horrors of the Middle Ages, concluding by saying, ‘Then was much misery in Budapest. Now everyone many money. Now we finish with Christianity and Communism, world much better place. People more enlightenment, eh?’

  ‘You believe that?’ I asked her. ‘You really think people are more enlightened? On what grounds, may I ask? What about the war?’

  She shot me a demonic look, emphasised by a smile of outrageous malice. ‘We kill off all Russians. Then world better place. Forget all about bad thing.’

  * * *

  The grand steam baths under the Gellert Hotel were full of naked bodies, male and female. Many of the bathers had not merely the posture but the bulk of wallowing hippopotami. Fortunately the steam clothed us in a little decency.

  Tiring of the crowd, I climbed from the reeking water. It was time I got to work. Churches long sealed with all their histories in them were to be opened to me this day. By a better guide.

  Everyone was taking it easy. Headlines in the English-language paper that morning: STAVROPOL AIRPORT BATTLE: First Use Tactical Nukes: Crimea Blazes. The war had escalated. Everyone agreed you had to bring in the nukes eventually. Hungary was neutral. It supplied Swedish-made arms to all sides, impartially.

  The Soviet War marked the recovery of Hungary as a Central European power. It was a godsend. Little I cared. I was researching churches and, in my early forties, too old for conscription.

  Wrapped in a white towelling robe I was making my way back towards my room when I encountered a tall bearded man clad only in a towel. He was heading towards the baths I had just left. We looked at each other. I recognised those haggard lineaments, those eroded temples. They belonged to a distant acquaintance, one Montague Clements.

  He recognised me immediately. As we shook hands I felt some embarrassment; he had been sacked from his post in the English Literature and Language Department of the University of East Anglia the previous year. I had not heard of him since.

  ‘What are you doing in Budapest?’ I asked.

  ‘Private matter, old chum.’ I remembered the dated way he had of addressing people—though he had been sacked for more serious matters. ‘I’m here consulting a clever chap called Mircea Antonescu. Something rather strange has happened to me. Do you mind if I tell you? Perhaps you’d like to buy us a drink…’

  We went up to my room, from the windows of which was a fine view of the Danube with Pest on the other side. I slipped into my jogging gear and handed him a sweater to wear.

  ‘Fits me like a T. I suppose I couldn’t keep it, could I?’

  I did not like to say no. As I poured two generous Smirnoffs on the rocks from the mini-bar, he started on his problems. ‘“Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory…” So says the poet Shelley. But supposing there’s no memory in which the soft voices can vibrate…’

  He paused to raise his glass and take a deep slug of the vodka. ‘I’m forty-one, old chum. So I believe. Last month, I found myself in an unknown place. No idea how I got there. Turned out I was here—in Budapest. Budapest! Never been here before in my natural. No idea how I arrived here from London.’

  ‘You’re staying here?’ I remembered that Clements was a scrounger. Perhaps he was going to touch me for the air fare home. I gave him a hard look. Knowing something about his past, I was determined not to be caught easily.

  ‘I’m attending the Antonescu Clinic. Mircea Antonescu—very clever chap, as I say. At the cutting edge of psychotechnology. Romanian, of course. I’m not staying in the Gellert. Too expensive for someone like me. I rent a cheaper place in Pest. Bit of a flophouse actually.’ He laughed. ‘You see, this is it, the crunch, the bottom line, as they say—I’ve lost ten years of my memory. Just lost them. Wiped. The last ten years, gone.’

  He shone a look of absolute innocence on me. At which I uttered some condolences.

  ‘The last thing I remember, I was thirty. Ten, almost eleven years, have passed and I have no notion as to what I was doing in all that time.’

  All this he related in an old accustomed calm way. Perhaps he concealed his pain. ‘How terrible for you,’ I said.

  ‘FOAM. That’s what they call it. Free of All Memory. A kind of liberty in a way, I suppose. Nothing a chap can’t get used to.’

  It was fascinating. Other people’s sorrows on the whole weigh lightly on our shoulders: a merciful provision. ‘What does it feel like?’

  I always remember Clements’ answer. ‘An ocean, old chum. A wide wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continent. The continent has gone.’

  I had seen him now and again during those ten years, before his sacking. I suggested that perhaps I could help him fill in gaps in his memory. He appeared moderately grateful. He said there was no one else he knew in Budapest. When I asked him if he had been involved in an accident, he shook his head.


  ‘They don’t know. I don’t know. A car crash? No bones broken, old boy. Lucky to be alive, you might say. I have no memory of anything that happened to me in the last ten years.’

  Unthinkingly, I asked, ‘Isn’t your wife here with you?’

  Whereupon Clements struck his narrow forehead. ‘Oh God, don’t say I was married!’

  He drank the vodka, he kept the sweater. The next day, as suggested, I went round with him to the Antonescu Clinic he had mentioned. The idea was that an expert would question me in order to construct a few more of those small islands in the middle of Clements’ ocean of forgetfulness.

  The clinic was situated in a little nameless square off Fo Street, wedged in next to the Ministry of Light Industry. Behind its neo-classical façade was a desperate little huddle of rooms partitioned into offices and not at all smart. In one windowless room I was introduced to a Dr Maté Jozsef. Speaking in jerky English around a thin cigar, Maté informed me we could get to work immediately. It would be best procedure if I began to answer a series of questions in a room from which Clements was excluded.

  ‘You understand, Dr Burnell. Using proprietary method here. Dealing with brain injury cases. Exclusive … Special to us. Produces the good result. Satisfied customers…’ His thick furry voice precluded the use of finite verbs.

  Knowing little about medical practice, I consented to do as he demanded. Maté showed me up two flights of stairs to a windowless room where a uniformed nurse awaited us. I was unfamiliar with the equipment in the room, although I knew an operating table and anaesthetic apparatus when I saw them. It was at that point I began to grow nervous. Nostovision equipment was also in the room; I recognised the neat plastic skullcap.

  Coughing, Maté stubbed his cigar out before starting to fiddle with the equipment. The nurse attempted to help. I stood with my back to the partition wall, watching.

  ‘Wartime … Many difficulties … Many problems … For Hungarians is many trouble…’ He was muttering as he elbowed the nurse away from a malfunctioning VDU. ‘Because of great inflation rate … High taxes … Too many gypsy in town. All time … The Germans of course … The Poles … How we get all work done in the time? … Too much busy…’