The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “I don’t get it,” Jim said.

  “They’re happy because he caught a turtle,” Laura said.

  * * *

  He went to get something to eat. The girl behind the lobby snack bar must have been from some other city: no baby, though she did have a chicken on the counter. She was teaching it to sort paperclips into little piles.

  He didn’t see any popcorn, but he asked anyway, and the girl set a packet the size of an old cassette tape on the counter. Jim opened it and looked inside. Not popcorn, exactly, but some kind of soft, white candy.

  “Twenty cents,” the girl said.

  He fished two dimes out of his pocket, and she dropped them into the register without looking. This was something he and Laura had going for them: the currency here was similar enough that no one noticed the different set of faces on their coins and bills, and the exchange rate seemed to be in their favor. The few twenties they had with them when they crossed over were going a long way.

  “I think that’s for you,” the girl said.

  The lobby telephone was ringing in its booth.

  “Why do you think it’s for me?”

  “It was for you last time it rang, and the time before that.” The girl stroked her chicken with both hands, smoothing its feathers. “Please just answer it,” she said.

  Jim stuffed the not-popcorn in his pocket and went into the booth, closing the door behind him before he answered.

  “I can’t believe I got you on the line,” someone said. It was a woman’s voice, eastern European accent but not quite, and anyway did they even have an eastern Europe here?

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is which of us? You’re Mr. Jim, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m Jim, but who are you?”

  “I know who I am, thank you. Oh, but you are doing that amazing thing you do. That funny way of speaking.”

  Jim could hear a scratching sound on the line. “Are you writing this down?” he asked.

  “I’m writing it up,” the woman said. "I’m a biographist, and I’m working on your biography. It’s coming along nicely.”

  “I don’t need a biographer,” Jim said.

  “Biographist,” the woman said, laughing. “Listen, I want to meet you. For an interview? We could live together, maybe, just for a year or two. My publisher would be so pleased.”

  “No,” Jim said. “Stop writing. Please, I don’t want to be interviewed. Why would anyone want to publish my biography?”

  “Haven’t you been reading the papers? You are just wowing them, Mr. Jim. Wowing them with your … I don’t know what to call it, exactly. But I want to figure it out, and turn it into something you can taste. Something you can slick back your hair with, you know?”

  Jim hung up and stumbled out of the booth, suddenly nauseous. He went back to the snack bar and asked the girl if she had a copy of today’s newspaper.

  “The one with you on the cover?” she said. “Right here.”

  The photo showed him in profile, talking to someone at a bus station, holding out a map, asking for directions. He scanned the article—some of the words were different, but it was close enough to American English—and yes, he was apparently famous, and dozens of people he’d spoken to since they crossed over had been interviewed, and specialists of various kinds were giving opinions, opinions that didn’t make much sense to him.

  There was no mention of Laura, only references to a traveling companion. He was the one they were interested in.

  He returned the newspaper, noticed that she had Purple Pow-Pow behind the counter and bought a bottle, then tucked that in his shirt pocket and went back into the theater. The boy with curly hair was center stage now. He stirred a cauldron of turtle soup and sang a kind of dirge.

  Laura leaned forward in her seat. “This is getting really good.”

  “Yeah,” he said, wondering: If he was famous here, why wasn’t Laura famous? Probably because he was the one who talked too much, who got them into trouble, who bumbled through everything they were up against. And people here found that interesting.

  “You get something to eat?” Laura asked.

  He shook a few of the whatever-they-weres from the envelope into Laura’s hand, then almost tried to pour some into his own right hand before he remembered. He tipped them straight into his mouth instead.

  “Ugh, these are weird,” Laura said. “Don’t they have popcorn?”

  “I kind of like them,” Jim said.

  She kept her eyes on the stage. The boy was still singing, stirring and singing, crying as he sang.

  “Did you hear that?” Laura whispered.

  Jim hadn’t been paying attention to the words, but now he listened. “I want to go home,” the boy sang. “I want to go home.” And then, more quietly, “All I need is a window, a window or a small box.”

  * * *

  After the show, Jim convinced the girl behind the snack bar to show them the way backstage. They found the young actor in his dressing room. He didn’t want to talk about the play, didn’t want to talk about the song he’d sung, or who’d written it. “I’m going to do bigger things,” he said. He nodded at Jim and added, “He knows. He understands.”

  “Sure,” Jim said, “you’re obviously going places.”

  The boy smiled.

  “Please,” Laura said. “May I see the script?”

  The boy rolled his eyes at Jim, knowingly, as though in some private understanding. Then he opened a trunk and brought out a stack of bound pages. “I think this is the one. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the last one I did. Or the one before that.”

  “All the Swimming Things,” Laura said, reading the title. “But who wrote it?”

  “This conversation is so boring,” the boy said. “Can’t we talk about something else? Let’s talk about feelings.”

  He was still looking at Jim, and Laura noticed this time. She gave Jim a hard look.

  Jim hunkered down and said, “So, thing is, we know this play’s just pig and pepper to someone with your talents.” Pig and pepper was a popular game here. At least, lots of people talked about it, though neither Jim nor Laura had seen it played. “But we really need to know who wrote this play. A lot of … a lot of feelings are riding on this. Ours, and some other people’s. Our families, our friends. People with some pretty big feelings.”

  The boy nodded slowly. This was making an impression.

  “So, what do you say?” Jim asked. “Can you help us out?”

  The boy looked at his feet. “He’s mean,” he said. “Like, alpaca-spit mean.”

  “Who is?” Laura said.

  “The man who wrote the play. He hurts people, and I don’t like talking about him.”

  Laura knelt beside the boy and put one hand on his shoulder. “We won’t tell him that we saw you,” she said. “This can be our secret.”

  The boy looked at himself in his mirror, then looked at Laura. “He comes every few days, to drop off more pages. He gives us presents, presents that we hate. He makes us open them in front of him. He says we aren’t good enough for his plays, that we should be happy just to know him. His name is Gray.”

  “Gray,” Laura said. “Gray what?”

  “Just Gray,” the boy said.

  The door opened and a tall man with a handlebar mustache ducked through, a marionette draped over his arms. Seeing it, the boy’s face went pale. The man set the marionette in a chair.

  “My contract,” the boy said to Jim, as though he’d know what this meant.

  Jim rose from his seat. “You’re all right?”

  “I’m great,” the boy said, though his voice was flat. The man with the handlebar mustache lifted him into his arms, and the boy went limp.

  “Where are you taking him?” Laura said.

  The man didn’t look at her, didn’t answer.

  “Our secret, like you said,” the boy told her.

  She nodded, but the boy’s eyes had closed, and the man carried him from the room, leaving them alo
ne with the marionette. Jim was about to say something, but she shook her head to stop him, because she’d already seen it, seen the puppet’s curly hair and brown eyes, its delicate fingers. It looked just like the boy.

  “I want to go home,” she said quietly. “I really just want to go home.”

  * * *

  They’d been fighting about something, the day they crossed over, but now neither of them could remember what the fight was about. They couldn’t remember how they’d crossed over, but they had their passports with them and their passports had been stamped. Were there customs officials? Inspections of some kind? Neither of them could say. The first thing they knew of this place was a roadside diner, and a menu they couldn’t make sense of. Then a hot meal of something syrupy that came in three bowls, each a different color, each with a little plastic ship floating on top, then a panicked conversation in the parking lot, and apologies for the things they’d said that they couldn’t remember.

  “I do want to marry you,” he’d told her, meaning it for the first time, maybe.

  “I want to marry you too,” she said. “Let’s just get home in time, all right?”

  The wedding was about two months off: plenty of time to find their way back. There were roadside hotels, and more diners, and drive-in movie theaters with big playgrounds under the screens. It was summer, and fireflies flashed in broad fields, and once they even managed to rent a car, but there was something in the contract they didn’t understand, and an agent of the rental company came and took the car from them, shaking the wad of paper they’d signed and shouting about how hard his job was because of people like them.

  They asked everyone they met which way to the border, but no one knew what they were talking about. They showed their passports, pointed at the stamps they’d been given, but got only shrugs and vacant looks in return. They asked, “Where are we?” until they learned not to bother asking.

  On a bus, following a hint that a retired colonel in a seaside town might know about the country they’d come from, they decided to work on their wedding vows. “I don’t want the usual nonsense about sickness and health,” she said, tapping her pen against the notebook.

  “You mean you’ll leave me if I get sick?”

  “Come on. What kind of marriage do we want, here? I thought you were looking for something a little off the beaten path.”

  “I don’t know. Beaten paths are sounding good to me these days.”

  He saw the whiteness of her knuckles as she squeezed her pen. She needed this, needed something to hang on to, and he did too, maybe. So he said, “Okay, how about this? I promise, at least once a year, to learn a new craft and to craft something for you.”

  “Really?”

  “Write it down.”

  She wrote it down and said, “Then I promise to bring you fresh flowers sometimes, especially on days for which there is no expectation of flowers.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I promise to do that thing you like when I—”

  “You can’t say that in front of my aunt Meg.”

  “Just put the first part, then. I promise to do that thing you like.”

  She wrote it down and said, “I promise to never make you feel bad about yourself on purpose, or to criticize you for making reasonable mistakes.”

  “And I, too,” he said solemnly, “shall keep in mind that you are a fallible human being.”

  “But I won’t have sex with other people,” she said.

  “Okay, ditto that one for me,” he said.

  And they were going to keep at it, but then the brass band at the back of the bus started rehearsing again, so they just held hands and watched the alpaca ranches roll by, until they came to the town by the sea, and to the colonel’s enormous empty house, up there on the cliffs, and that was where the goons caught up with them, and they’d been running ever since.

  * * *

  They left the theater and found the nearest newsstand. Newsstand wasn’t really the word for the thing. These roadside stalls, common to most every town they’d visited, were stocked with tools, small appliances, old photographs, and bits of junk neither of them could identify. But there were also books, maps, glossy magazines, and copies of the latest newspapers. They scoured the papers for mention of the play, for anything having to do with its author.

  New merchandise was unloaded at a neighboring stand, and the other patrons swarmed away. A man in shiny green shorts came up to Laura and said, “Take these for a minute?” He dumped two babies into her arms and was gone before she could say anything.

  “Unbelievable,” Laura said, though it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Because Laura and Jim didn’t have babies of their own, people here thought it was fine to lend them theirs.

  “Take one,” she said to Jim.

  He held up his handless right arm to protest, but she pushed the baby at him, and he bent to take it in his left.

  Laura searched the magazines while Jim stood there.

  “So, when did you first meet him?” he asked her.

  “Meet who?”

  “That asshole goon. There was something about the way you two looked at each other in the bar. Like it wasn’t the first time you’d talked.”

  She kept turning pages as she spoke. “He came up to me in the first week, I think. You were—I don’t know, in some store, looking for that soda you like.”

  “Purple Pow-Pow.”

  “He said he just wanted to talk. To explain some things.”

  “And did he?”

  “No better than anyone else. He said they’d be keeping track of us. They’re like border guards, I guess. And now he just kind of checks in with me sometimes.”

  “That’s really great,” Jim said, bouncing the baby against his side. “So as long as you guys are pals, do you think you could get us deported home or something? And while you’re at it, maybe you could ask him for my hand back? Because I really liked having a right hand.”

  The proprietor of the place, who’d been dozing in a big rattan chair with three babies sprawled sleeping on top of him, opened his eyes a little.

  “It’s not like that,” Laura said. “He doesn’t want to help. It’s more like he’s waiting for me to slip up. Like he’s looking for an excuse to—I don’t know what. To do something really bad to us.”

  Jim tapped the stump of his arm against what looked like a toaster oven. “He already has done something really bad to us, Laura. But apparently you’ve got too big of a crush on this guy to worry about it.”

  He looked horrible to her, then, with his stump, with the baby on his hip starting to cry, and she felt horrible for thinking it. “I guess I’m pretty useless to you,” she said.

  “I guess you are,” he said. He knocked over the thing that looked like a toaster oven, and trading cards of pig-and-pepper athletes spilled everywhere.

  She said, “I’ve been counting, you know.”

  “Counting what?”

  “It’s tomorrow, or maybe the day after. The day we were supposed to get married.” She shoved the other baby at him—now he had one on his left side and the other wobbling under his right arm. Both babies were red-faced and bawling as Laura ducked out of the stall and walked off.

  Jim let her go, and he didn’t watch her leave. He thought: I’m going to change out of this flowered shirt first chance I get.

  He went over to the man in the rattan chair and said, “You know this guy, Gray? Gray. Turtle soup, singing. Come on, help me out here.”

  “Gray, sure, sure,” the man said, standing up, shaking himself free of the babies. He took a utility knife out of his pocket and cut the twine from a bundle of thick books, then set them aside until he found the one he was looking for. The cover said simply Gray in big, blocky type.

  Jim put the two babies in the rattan chair, and the other three immediately started crying, as though they’d caught it from the new arrivals. The proprietor looked flustered, but he handed the book to Jim.

  It was heavy, the size
of a big city phone book. Jim set it on the ground and flipped through pages of very small print, then found some pictures: a long-haired older man standing among alpacas, papier mâché alpacas on a stage, the same man kneeling by a stream, pointing with a stick at some turtles on a log.

  “His biography,” the proprietor said.

  Jim flipped to the back of the book. “A Window or a Small Box” was the title of the last chapter.

  “Twenty cents,” the proprietor said. “But for you, my friend, who are so famous and so dashing, you can have that volume for free.”

  “Laura!” Jim shouted after her.

  The man went back to the rattan chair and leaned over the babies, whose cries had turned to a chorus of shrieking. He cooed at them, but they only got louder.

  “Laura!” Jim said again.

  She’d already disappeared around the corner. Jim closed the book, tucked it under his arm, and ran in the direction she’d gone. He thought he spotted her straw hat, bouncing above the downtown lunch hour crowd, but it was just the basket on a melon salesman’s head.

  He shouted her name again, spinning in place. All around him, people went in and out of doors, and there were doors in everything, doors in the street, doors on second stories with ladders leading up to them, doors built into doors, doors in those doors.

  “Laura!”

  But she was gone, and he was lost, sweating as he wove through the crowd, the biography getting heavy under his arm.

  * * *

  “West or east?” he’d asked her one day. They were on a train that sped along the edge of a deep, river-hewn chasm. “I just want to know if we’re going west or east.”

  “Sweetie,” she’d told him, squeezing his hand, “I don’t think they have west and east here.”

  * * *