Then I see the man strangling in midair.
Nobody else can see him. They stride purposefully by, some even walking through the patch of congealed air that, darkly sparkling, contains his struggling figure.
He is twisting in slow agony on a frame of chrome bars, like a fly dying on a spider's web. The outlines of his distorted body are prismatic at the edges, like a badly tuned video. He is drowning in dirty rainbows. His body is a cubist nightmare, torso shattered into overlapping planes, limbs scattered through nine dimensions. The head swings around, eyes multiplying and being swallowed up by flesh, and then there is a flash of desperate hope as he realizes I can see him. He reaches toward me, outflung arm spreading through a fan of possibilities. Caught in jellied air, dark and sparkling, his body shattered into strangely fractured planes.
Mouth opens in a silent scream, and through some form of sympathetic magic the faintest distant echoes of his pain sound a whispering screech of fingernails across the back of my skull.
I know a man who is drowning when I see one. People are scurrying about, some right through the man. They glance at me oddly, standing there, frozen on the sidewalk. I reach up and take his hand.
* * * *
It hurts. It hurts like a sonofabitch. I feel like I've been hit with a two-by-four. One side of my body goes completely numb. I am slammed sideways, thought whiting out under sheets of hard white pain, and it is a blessing because for the first time since you died, oh most beloved, I stop thinking about you.
When I come to, I draw myself together, stand up. I haven't moved, but the street is empty and dark. Must be late at night. Which is crazy, because people wouldn't just leave me lying there. It's not that kind of neighborhood. So why did they? It doesn't bear thinking about.
I stand up, and there, beside me, is the man's corpse.
He's dressed in a kind of white jumpsuit, with little high-tech crap scattered all over it. A badge on his chest with a fan of arrows branching out, diverging from a single point. I look at him. Dead, poor bastard, and nothing I can do about it.
I need another drink.
* * * *
Home again, home again, trudge trudge trudge. As I approach the house, something is wrong, though. There are curtains in the windows, and orange light spills out. If I were a normal man, I'd be apprehensive, afraid, fearful of housebreakers and psychopaths. There's nothing I'd be less likely to do than go inside.
I go inside.
Someone is rattling pans in the kitchen. Humming. “Is that you, love?"
I stand there, inside the living room, trembling with something more abject than fear. It's the kind of curdling terror you might feel just before God walks into the room. No, I say to myself, don't even think it.
You walk into the room.
"That didn't take long,” you say, amused. “Was the store closed?” Then, seeing me clear, alarm touches your face, and you say “Johnny?"
I'm trembling. You reach out a hand and touch me, and it's like a world of ice breaking up inside, and I start to cry. “Love, what's wrong?"
Which is when I walk into the room.
Again.
The two of me stare at each other. At first, to be honest, I don't make the connection. I just think: There's something odd about this man. Strangest damn guy I ever did see, and I can't figure out why. All those movies and television shows where somebody is suddenly confronted by his exact double and goes slack-jawed with shock? Lies, the batch of them. He doesn't look a bit like the way I picture myself.
"Johnny?” you say in a strangled little voice. But you're not looking at me but at the other guy and he's staring at me in a bemused kind of way, as if there's something strange and baffling about me, and then all of a sudden the dime drops.
He's me.
He's me and he's not getting it anymore than I was. “Katherine?” he says. “Who is this?"
* * * *
A very long evening later, I find myself lying on the couch under a blanket with pillows beneath my head. Upstairs, you and the other me are arguing. His voice is low and angry. Yours is calm and reasonable, but he doesn't like what it says. It was my wallet that convinced you: the driver's license identical to his in every way, the credit and library and insurance cards, all the incidental pieces of identification one picks up along the way, and every single one of them exactly the same as his.
Save for the fact that his belong to a man whose wife is still alive.
I don't know exactly what you're saying up there, but I can guess at the emotional heart of it. You love me. This is, in a sense, my house. I have nowhere else to go. You are not about to turn me out.
Meanwhile, I—the me upstairs, I mean—am angry and unhappy about my being here at all. He knows me better than you do, and he doesn't like me one tenth as much. Knowing that there's no way you could tell us apart, he is filled with paranoid fantasies. He's afraid I'm going to try to take his place.
Which, if I could, I most certainly would. But that would probably require my killing him and I'm not sure I could actually kill a man. Even if that man was myself. And how could I possibly hope to square it with you? I'm in uncharted territory here. I have no idea what might or might not happen.
For now, though, it's enough to simply hear your voice. I ignore the rest and close my eyes and smile.
A car rumbles down the road outside and then abruptly stops. As do the voices above. All other noises cease as sharply as if somebody has thrown a switch.
Puzzled, I get up from the couch.
Out of nowhere, strong hands seize my arms. There's a man standing to the right of me and another to the left. They both wear white jumpsuits, which I understand now to be a kind of uniform. They wear the same badge—a fan of arrows radiant from a common locus—as the man I saw strangling in the air.
"We're sorry, sir,” says one. “We saw you trying to help our comrade, and we appreciate that. But you're in the wrong place and we have to put you back."
"You're time travelers or something, aren't you?” I ask.
"Or something,” the second one says. He's holding onto my right arm. With his free hand he opens a kind of pod floating in the air beside him. An equipment bag, I think. It's filled with devices which seem to be only half there. A gleaming tube wraps itself around my chest, another around my forehead. “But don't worry. We'll have everything set right in just a jiff."
Then I twig to what's going on.
"No,” I say. “She's here, don't you understand that? I'll keep my mouth shut, I won't say anything to anyone ever, I swear. Only let me stay. I'll move to another city, I won't bother anybody. The two upstairs will think they had some kind of shared hallucination. Only please, for God's sake, let me exist in a world where Katherine's not dead."
There is a terrible look of compassion in the man's eyes. “Sir. If it were possible, we would let you stay."
"Done,” says the other. The world goes away.
* * * *
So I return to my empty house. I pour myself a glass of wine and stare at it for a long, long time. Then I get up and pour it into the sink.
A year passes.
It's night and I'm standing in our tiny urban backyard, Katherine, looking up at the stars and a narrow sliver of moon. Talking to you. I know you can't hear me. But I've been thinking about that strange night ever since it happened, and it seems to me that in an infinite universe, all possibilities are manifest in an eternal present. Somewhere you're happy, and that makes me glad. In countless other places, you're a widow and heartbroken. Surely one of you at least is standing out in the backyard, like I am now, staring up at the moon and imagining that I'm saying these words. Which is why I'm here. So it will be true.
I don't really have much to say, I'm afraid. I just want you to know I still love you and that I'm doing fine. I wasn't, for a while there. But just knowing you're alive somehow, however impossibly far away, is enough to keep me going.
You're never really dead, I know that now.
And if it makes you feel any better, neither am I.
Copyright © 2011 Michael Swanwick
[Back to Table of Contents]
Poetry: MONSTERS OF THE STRATOSPHERE by Darrell Schweitzer
* * * *
* * * *
It's been a long time
since any stalwart hero
wearing jodhpurs, flying cap, and goggles,
landed a biplane on the Heaviside Layer,
as if in a cloudy field,
to battle tentacled, voracious fiends
from beyond the sky;
and the Moon these days
in all its pits and hollows,
no longer harbors giant bugs.
Mars, cold, dry, almost airless, awaits,
quite free of thoats, Tharks, and rampaging Warhoons.
But the monsters are still there,
just lurking a little further out
into the eternal Dark,
their eyes agleam among the myriad stars,
like wolves beyond a campfire, waiting;
and the courage required to face them
is just the same.
—Darrell Schweitzer
Copyright © 2011 Darrell Schweitzer
[Back to Table of Contents]
Short Story: NORTH SHORE FRIDAY by Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas is the author of Move Under Ground, Under My Roof,and Sensation, and his short fiction from Tor.com, Nature, and elsewhere has been collected into his book You Might Sleep. . . . With Ellen Datlow, Nick co-edited Haunted Legends and he now edits Japanese SF/fantasy in translation for VIZ Media's Haikasoru imprint.His first story for us reveals many secrets about a dark night in 1965.
Back when Paraskevi's grandmother was in charge of getting guys off the boats and safely married off before they could be found and deported, she gave her granddaughter the same advice every week. One, don't hide anyone at the Greek church, that's the first place they look. Go to the Methodists, they are the kindest of the xeni. Two, if Immigration finds you, throw a huge screaming fit—rip at your clothes, scratch your own breast till it bleeds, kick and scream and cry and say over and over that you're going to kill yourself—and they probably won't arrest you. Three, if you feel the government trying to read your mind, think in Greek.
Between the backwater dialect, the generation-old slang she learned from her parents, and Red cant, Paraskevi would greet her charges and they would hear something analogous to this: “Can thou y'all comrades dig this crazy-struggle for liberty? Forsooth, thine art copacetic, no?” But yiayia knew that even if the INS had a Greek on their side, they'd get nothing from Paraskevi. Not even in 1965, when we began large-scale full-time brainscanning across Long Island.
* * * *
Getting Greeks off the boats had the feel of a game. Only a few of the big ships bothered with Port Jefferson anymore. Most of the illegals were someone's brother or everyone's cousin, a far-flung friend, the sons of godmothers, or buddies from the Civil War gone to sea and then looking to go to ground. Immigration went armed and wore their suits like they were mobile homes, but they weren't too bad as authority figures go, not back then anyway. Yiayia ran the show because men were too hot-headed, too ready to throw fists or start screaming at nothing, too proud to beg forgiveness or just skulk away when someone got nabbed and dragged back to the city to be sent on the first plane back to Greece. Plus, the men in the family, like me, didn't have an eye for the nice girls who'd come into the Lobster House with their parents or even by themselves. Girls who knew to pick a man who wore pants with the knees worn out from working, not a man whose pants had patches over the ass from sitting around all day doing nothing. Human smuggling was women's work, and generally not too hard. Yiayia didn't spend more than forty-eight hours in prison at a time and Paraskevi was never caught even once. Well, once . . .
* * * *
"Hey, Friday,” Jimmy the mavro said. “Your grandma is on the pay-phone.” Paraskevi went to the phone.
"Hello, Poppi?"
I hope yiayia's just sick. Maybe I can go home and watch some TV for a change. This place is always dead in November. Three dollars in tips all night, it's so stupid that we even open on—
"No, yiayia, it's your other granddaughter,” she said. “The one who actually works. The one you called?"
"Oh, I know who I called,” yiayia said. “Listen, you have to go to church tonight and light one candle. Do you understand?"
"Malesta, yes. I will."
Smelly gasoline, mustaches. “Eh? Eh?” at the end of sentence. “You like, no? Eh?” Say ti kanes ti kanes, will they bring . . .
"Where's Georgi? Is he there?"
"No, he's not here. He's at work. Why would he be here?"
These codewords are so dumb.
"Work? At night, outside?"
"Well, he's not here anyway."
"Maybe he stopped in for some dinner?"
"He didn't, yiayia. It's not even dinner time yet."
"Then you have plenty of time for church, before the dinner rush.” The sun hadn't even gone down yet.
* * * *
I wasn't working outside anymore. That was in the summertime. I was an engineer back in the 1960s, and a computer programmer of sorts. This was back in the days of room-sized humming monstrosities, the CDC 3600 and that was the cutting edge—we had older machines too. You know why it was called the Sage System? It knew everything, sure. And it was truly a system. That was my summer job—yiayia thought I was just cutting down trees along Nesconsent Highway to make room for radio towers and telephone poles, but it was all part of the system. Even the two screens on the console were round, not like radar displays, but like crystal balls. There was blood in the wiring, magic everywhere. A multidisciplinary endeavor between Stony Brook's computer science and religious studies department.
Everyone on the North Shore was a test subject. Long Island was our lab. I got very good at what I had to do, and not just swinging an axe. That was only the job my parents, my grandmother and aunt, could understand. I had to explain over and over again
Ah Friday, where are you now, under all that all skin and sixty years of flab? In your snaggle-toothed smile, I still see what I loved . . .
were adding machines, like the cash register, except it could do all the math itself. I was a genius back then. What fassarea it all was, really. Most people don't think much of anything. Like apes. We thought the first experiments were a failure because we didn't get any positives in animal testing. FOOD FOOD FOOD I'm a bit hungry right now myself, actually . . .
I can't do a thing with computers now.
Back then, though, I was a genius. I could look at a punch card and divine the data recorded on it. Spread them out on my desk and read them like coffee grains at the bottom of a very large cup. And I was in love with my cousin. My second cousin, mind you. Maybe it's just a Greek thing, or maybe it was just how we were raised. You know, everyone hanging out together all the time, the distrust of the xeni. It's hard not to fall in love with whoever is nearby.
* * * *
I know that the government is reading my mind now. I hope that my thoughts make them blush.
Paraskevi let Jimmy the mavro wait with her under the pier, as hobos and rats liked to congregate there, plus he too had a crush on her, and one didn't need a cool billion dollars worth of mind-reading equipment to know that. He played it tight to the vest though, and never even thought about Paraskevi that way. It was beyond our observations, all in the autonomic nervous system, in sweat and twitches and clenching fingers. Poor guy—it was hard to be a black man on Long Island in the 1960s. He was nervous that night, because Paraskevi was.
It's like my father said when he emigrated. “The CIA is responsible! They are behind the junta! They sent the tanks through the streets . . .” and he'd just trail off. “So then why did you move to America, papa?” I asked. “I wanted to go to a country with a government the Amerikanoi wouldn't overthrow . . ."
"You're going to have to go
, and go before he sees you,” she explained. “You know?"
"Yeah, yeah, I know."
"I mean, they might think that you're a cop."
rapist, and then they might kill you and decide to rape me. God, I'm so sick to even think . . .
"Forget it,” Jimmy said, “Don't explain. I can't stay here all night anyway, you know?"
"I know."
No. Sensitivity was attuned to lab tests; bored psychology students thinking of apples
There was a birdcall in the distance and Jimmy took off, not thinking a thing at all. Paraskevi laughed at the idea of a birdcall at night. The gulls were god-knows-where. “Embros,” she said, not knowing that her own grandmother wasn't saying “Hello” when she picked up the phone, not knowing that this illegal didn't have a phone—hell, Andoni had never even seen one except for once, in the Navy— but he heard Greek and a woman's smoky voice so he emerged out of the dark. Paraskevi waved at the time, hunched over, worried about her chest and a man long at sea. Andoni had a cap and he took it off and said, “Hi.” Paraskevi didn't smile, not for them. She heard the clinking of glass bottles in his bag. He didn't smell of sweat and ouzo like so many of these guys did, though.
* * * *
Think in Greek, Think in Greek, Ellinika, me logia Ellinika. Stupid random words mylo skylo, oraya kalispera gamo to panayia
Good! That's my smile. How she'd smile at me . . .
* * * *
Of course, there were gypsies in the woods, some of the time. Not too many in November, when the ice was slick over carpets of red-brown leaves, when the ramshackle homes and shacks in which they squatted for a season were too hard to heat with small bonfires and thick blankets. We got along with them, or I did. I'd pay for their meals at the Lobster House, they'd give me tips at the quarter horse track out East, since a lot of them got some work out there fixing horses with their Old World stuff. I had no idea what they did, but it probably involved ramming something up the horse's asses. That's where the conversation so often turned, when I'd meet them out back with coffees and sandwiches anyway.
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 9
