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

by Various

  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 community, 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.

  Oh dear. There I go again. Sorry.

  He looked up from his hands, at that table in that restaurant that night. “The thing is, kid,” he said (and I would hate it with a passion if anyone else called me that), “in this next couple of weeks, you don’t know how extreme I’m going to get.”

  I watched his hands as I always did, as his fingertips went to absentmindedly stroke the stem of his wine glass, well, not that absentmindedly, or he’d have found himself with several wine glasses. And so would I have, except that I was managing to hold a place in my head back from his now very familiar, very intimate power. “You’ve told me,” I said. “You need the speed to keep you awake—”

  “—And I become a different person because of it. Irritable. Cranky. Sometimes … terrifying. That’s a word people have used. You haven’t seen that. I haven’t let you see that. Not yet.” I realized with a little jolt that he’d interrupted me. He never did that. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. You know that next time I go to sleep—”

  “You’ll wake with a new … you know…”

  “Power, yeah.” He hadn’t been to sleep since I’d met him. I’d wake up in the night, and he’d be sitting up in bed beside me, reading these terrible 1950s crime novels. He once told me he was trying to catch up with all the books from his youth. “That’s actually what my own power is. Sleeping. Every time I sleep, my DNA gets rewritten by the virus, and I wake up with a new power. But—” He held up a hand to stop me saying I knew all this. “What I haven’t told you is, two other things might happen.”

  “You might wake up as a joker?” I guessed.

  “Yeah. I might wake up with claws or no face or oozing sores, and you’d have to stop yourself getting those too. How you’d feel about that?”

  I actually felt annoyed. I think I got that he was testing me. Although I don’t know how conscious that ever was for him. But at the time I thought I knew everything that was on that table. “I’d still—” And then I quickly changed what I was going to say. Because neither of us had used that word. Yet. “I’d still feel the same way about you. How could you think I wouldn’t? If I’m okay with our joker friends—!”

  “Yeah, yeah, but—”

  “And if it was that terrible for you, you could just go back to sleep and draw another card, right?”

  He paused. He took a deep breath. “Okay, here’s the thing. You might have wondered why I’ve stayed awake so long—”

  “I thought you were just finding the duplication thing, you know, useful.”

  He laughed. And there was an edge to it. “I don’t want to lose you, Abi. I don’t want to lose you by turning into some horrible monster—”

  “But I’ve said you won’t! Don’t say that word!”

  “And I don’t want to lose you by dying.”

  I stared at him.

  “Every time I go to sleep, Abi, I risk drawing the black queen. It’s like playing Russian roulette. One day I won’t wake up. That’s why I stay awake as long as I can before I start hating the way the speed makes me. That’s why this time I’ve stayed awake … longer than ever.”

  “Because of me.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes searched my face.

  I hoped I was looking back at him like he needed me to look. I took his hands in mine, and held one of them to my face. If I felt I could have gotten away with it in public, I’d have held it to my breast. “Listen,” I said, “you could get hit by a bus. Or, this being New York, probably a cab. Thank you for telling me the risks. But this changes nothing.”

  He smiled. And yet there was something not quite satisfied about that smile. “You’re young,” he said. And then he looked up and realized we hadn’t been served and let go my hand and started yelling for the waiter. We walked in the park that night, but, looking back, it was more like a march.

  * * *

  We didn’t talk about it after th
at. We both knew where we stood. I found myself accepting the thought that I was a military girlfriend. That my love might vanish forever when he closed his eyes. Or I wonder if I did accept it. I wonder if I got there?

  He would arrive at my doorstep with bruises and wave away what happened. “Just some stupid guy, you should see him.”

  He would get angry at some memory of the past, pacing and raging, “and then he said, this was in 1962, then he said—!” And then he’d realize I was standing there listening to him in silence, and he would make himself stop, panting.

  The worst time was when he went to the window and said he thought he could hear police out there on the ledge. And then he looked at me as if he was using me to check on whether or not what he was saying was sane. And then he broke into a terrible false laugh, and clapped his hands at his own “joke” and headed off, saying he needed a drink, and I didn’t see him for two days and I thought he’d died.

  * * *

  I should have canceled Mum’s visit. If I could. She might have just shown up anyway. It was only because Croyd insisted so hard, insisted like it was a dying man’s last request, that I didn’t. He was trying so desperately to hang on to something. He so needed to be that decent, upright guy for me. I see that now.

  * * *

  Mother walked into the apartment and was confronted by the sight of Croyd, obviously at home there (though he actually wasn’t, we were still in our separate messy apartments), finishing up washing the dishes. Thanks to Maxine’s rage-fueled, literally, driving, we were, I realized, a few minutes early. “Mrs. Baker,” he said, drying his hands and then holding one out to her, keeping it steady through what I could see was sheer willpower. “Croyd Crenson. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Mother looked at him as if he were a burglar. At that time, Croyd didn’t look anything other than nat, though maybe there was something a little too intense about those eyes. Even without the drugs. He was wearing a vest and braces, like something glamorous from a 1940s movie, with his hair slicked back. Mum looked to me without taking his hand. “Who’s he?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  That sound of genuine anguish and despair in her voice may have been the most terrible thing I ever … No, actually, it wasn’t. But at that moment, it was. I looked to Croyd, afraid that he’d be furious. But he’d kept that pleasant, fixed smile on his face.

  “Croyd is my…” I had been going to say “boyfriend.” But that suddenly seemed such a small, childish word. And the last thing I wanted to feel then was childish. But what? “Lover”? “Partner”?

  Croyd didn’t step in to help me. It wasn’t that he was waiting to hear me describe him for the first time. It was, I think, that he realized that if he butted in, it would look like he’d provided the definition, that he had maybe coerced me into that way of seeing things. Holding on to his kindness, on that ledge above such a drop.

  “We’re … together,” I finished.

  Mother turned back to him and looked him up and down. “What are you?” she said, as if she were being shown round the zoo.

  “Parched,” said Croyd, “do you want a G&T as much as I do?”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” And that was still so jolly. “What are you?”

  “Normal.”

  “Well, hey, me too.”

  “Oh.” She visibly relaxed, as if she’d been told anything meaningful. “Well, that’s a relief.” And she actually took his hand.

  I was about to bellow with righteous anger, but eye contact from Croyd stopped me.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “I’m just surprised that my daughter never mentioned you.”

  “She was worried that you might not approve.”

  She smiled so broadly. “I think, actually, I will have that G&T. Now, darling, where are your facilities?”

  While she went to the bathroom, I followed Croyd into the alcove I laughingly called a kitchen. “You let her believe—!”

  “I will explain the misunderstanding and tell her my true nature. Once she’s got used to me. Okay?” And the tone in his voice, for the first time ever to me, sounded like he didn’t want to hear any arguments.

  * * *

  The Big Apple Circus stands on Eighth and Thirty-Fifth. It’s not that huge a building, but that’s kind of what makes the BAC authentic: It’s a classic, one-ring circus. As I’d discovered, from rehearsing with them for the last few weeks, the joy of actors at their comradeship and tradition, and especially about those situations where they find themselves in a rep company, is to be felt also in the troupe of a serious circus. Clowns aren’t scary when they’ve devoted their life to their craft, and can project helplessness and pathos past their makeup to make kids squeal with laughter that’s about a shared impotence. That fear of them that’s arisen in the last few years: That’s the product of a world that started accepting second-rate clowns. The Big Apple’s joker clowns are especially something to see, not concealing their differences, but using them as props. This isn’t a freak show. It’s about traditional joker skills, used as they’ve been used in circuses since the 1950s. On the morning of my debut, I got to the circus at seven, as usual, for my last rehearsal. Mum had departed for her hotel thankfully early the night before, popping a pill and succumbing to the jet lag I’d so desperately hoped for. Croyd had come to the end of his charming ability to listen to stories the protagonists of which he’d neither met nor heard of. But he’d remained resolutely charming, though I was proud he never nodded at her more ridiculous political assertions.

  “Meet me for lunch tomorrow,” she said to him on the way out to her taxi, “and then we can attend Abigail’s debut performance together. I feel we should get to know each other.” He’d agreed and feigned enthusiasm.

  But after the door closed, and we’d heard the taxi drive off, he ran at the wall and kicked it, so hard I feared for his toes. “People like that—!” he yelled. “How is she your mother?!”

  I told him about how distant I felt from the ancient and immobile forces that Mother represented. How she always tried to control what I did. I reassured him that we’d fooled her, that he’d done fine. And finally, his heart beating through his chest against my palm, he calmed.

  I tried to sleep as he tried not to. He was listening on headphones to jazz that I couldn’t help but hear seeping out, as if from some great distance. The man who never slept in the city that did likewise. The saxophone and the little lights way out there finally got into my head and I was unconscious. Which was just as well, because this hadn’t been the greatest preparation for my first performance. But we’d both known it would be like this.

  Next morning that taut look on his face was one notch more haunted. “Break a leg,” he said when I was dressed and ready to go. I kissed him. I held him hard. “You too,” I said.

  Radha O’Reilly was waiting for me at the performers’ entrance. She looks like a petite, incredibly fit fiftysomething (though I hear she’s a lot older), with the sort of golden biceps that, to my eyes, demand a bit of ink. But that’s not something I ever could say to her, because I’m a bit in awe of her. You’ll appreciate the reasons why: She’s been a famous ace for decades now, Elephant Girl, someone who walked out into the spotlight and declared who she was before there were the ace and joker communities and celebrities of today. She was the first person who turned into an elephant onstage and expected people to see it as entertainment rather than horror. Today I was to be the second.

  “Okay this morning?” she said.

  What she meant was, was I receiving her power, and was I able to control it? That was why she always met me outside, so we wouldn’t be in a confined space for that moment. I’d been feeling her power from halfway down the street, in that way that I’d used to find so horribly intimate that the first few times I’d come to rehearse I’d been all kind of blushy when I got there. It was true that what we were going to do that afternoon, then t
hat night, then eight times a week was, if anything went wrong, vastly dangerous. But I’d never felt able to ask her if she felt I was the newbie, still likely to mess up, or an actor only trying to be a circus pro, or someone that had been foisted on her, because of my newfound bums-on-seats value, or even if I was any good. She had an utter calm about her that made one both desperately not want to flap around in front of her, and yet more likely to do so at any moment. There goes that language again: Flapping around in front of her was exactly what I was there to do.

  I told her I was fine, she finished her none-blacker coffee, and we went inside.

  * * *

  “My mother’s going to be in the audience,” I said, as we stood in the empty ring, me aching all over after the rehearsal.

  Radha looked sidelong at me, taking this new factor onboard. Realizing, I think, that I was letting something out by saying it. “Does that add to the pressure?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Only, I was wondering why you seemed distracted—”

  What, distracted enough to dump me at the last moment and send the clown car out a second time? “No! No, there’s … you know, stuff going on in my life. But when I’m up there, I’m completely focused.”

  She rolled athletically onto her back, and lay there on the sawdust, looking up through the safety net that we knew would be totally inadequate for our own protection this afternoon, but was entirely to make the audience feel that they were watching something only reasonably death defying. “I do this for my mother, you know.”

  Feeling a little awkward, I sat stiffly down beside her. “In my case, it’s kind of in spite of.”

  “My mother was on the Queen Mary in 1946. The death ship. She was transformed by the virus. She grew thick gray skin. People are still shocked by the pictures of her, but to me that’s just Mum. I never heard her voice. I always wanted to. She’d never recorded herself when she was a nat. Dad stayed with her, while the rest of the world threw up their hands and backed away. They were taken in by this cult, back home in India. You’d see this awkward relationship between Dad and the priests. He loved Chandra, but they worshipped her. She took it, being seen as a kind of holy object, because, well, we needed a home, this was the only place we could live in peace. She had me seven months after the virus. She had a choice in that. Nobody was sure if she would survive the pregnancy. But they wanted me so much, they always told me that. My mother sacrificed so much, without being able to say a word.”