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

by Various

  It’s not my parents’ fault. They’re decent people. But being around them makes me remember. There’s a reason I only go home on the holidays.

  Dana says I should think about my trauma as a psychic wound that never healed. We need to find a way to close the wound—a way to give me closure.

  Ten years ago, treatment would have been limited to talk therapy and drugs. If things were bad enough, they might have tried early erasure techniques to wipe the initial trauma. But erasure is crude, especially long after the event.

  If I were a bad candidate for memory grafting, those would still be the options, but physiological and psychological testing shows the grafts are likely to take.

  “You’re lucky,” Dana said when we got the results.

  Dana says the term graft is technically misleading. There is no physical, manufactured memory to be implanted. Instead, new episodic memories are created by finely tuned stimulation of the brain.

  Once we’ve found the right scenario, I’ll go back to the neurologists. They’ll record what happens when I experience the scenario under hypnosis and then replicate it, filtering out the trance activity. Simultaneously, they’ll stimulate parts of my amygdala, hippocampus and temporal lobe in order to make the memory seem autobiographical and emotionally significant. My brain will create the graft itself—encoding engrams for events that never happened.

  Dana says this process sometimes occurred spontaneously during early hypnotherapy attempts, usually to the patient’s detriment. Those memories were often traumatizing. My new memory will be therapeutic.

  “I mean it. You’re really lucky,” Dana said. She shifted in her chair. Sunlight filtered through the blinds, dividing her body into stripes. “Part of how people process trauma is based on how events unfold. That may seem trivial, but the question is: how do we turn that to our advantage? Erasing trauma can cause memory problems and personality shifts. And we can’t modify the trauma itself because we can’t alter existing memories—at least not yet.

  “So we have to make new ones.”

  “So what new memory do you give me?” I asked.

  “That depends. People need different things—resolution, confrontation, revenge, absolution, the answer to a question. We’ll keep inducing hypnosis until we find a scenario that works.”

  She leaned forward, catching my eye.

  “This is just the start—bandaging the wound, as it were. You’ll still need therapy afterward.”

  I waved off her provisos. “Won’t I remember sitting here, talking about it? Won’t I know it’s fake?”

  Dana shrugged. “We’ve known for a long time that false memories feel true. Intellectually, you’ll know it’s fake. Emotionally and therapeutically, it’ll be true for you.”

  I was eight. He took me for five days.

  He kept me blindfolded with plugs in my ears. You’d think I’d remember something about him—some smell, some sense of his size and shape. But I don’t.

  For five days, I saw nothing but dark.

  On the sixth day, he left me on the porch of a farm in the middle of nowhere, still blindfolded. He rang the doorbell so the people inside would know to come out. The old couple saw a black truck pulling away, but that was all anyone ever found.

  My parents were prepared for the worst. The police were trawling for my body. No one thought he’d let me go.

  They told me I was lucky for that, too.

  Lucky, lucky me.

  “The subconscious is snarled and dark,” Dana tells me. “Indulge your worst fears, your most venal prejudices. Don’t filter anything.”

  He’s a fag. Spindly, disproportionate, long as a birch and narrow as a clothes hanger. Rouge and eye shadow enhance a foxlike face, sharp and predatory. He leers.

  I ask, “Do you know who I am?”

  A pointed tongue darts out, whetting his canines. Spindly fingers stretch toward me. I’m running, running, but his fingers are everywhere, poking into my mouth and my eyes and my nose and my rectum.

  Next, a thug. Skin like tar, slit with a mouth full of gleaming teeth. Meaty lips pull back into an animal growl. One enormous, muscled arm thrusts forward, fist wrapped around a semiautomatic.

  Metal gleams. He forces me to my knees.

  Barrel in my mouth. Steel shoving against my tonsils. I gag. It shoots. Everything goes black.

  Pathetic pedophile next. Downy-cheeked, timid. He sits at a heavy old desk scattered with ancient bibles and illuminated manuscripts.

  I ask, “Do you know who I am?”

  His piercing blue eyes are hollow. He wrings sallow hands.

  “I’ve waited so long,” he pleads. “I’ve spent years trying to atone…. Please forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  He clutches my sleeve. His grip is rigid with desperation.

  “I swear to God it was my only lapse.”

  I smack his hand away. I only hate him more for cringing.

  Dana’s expression never changes.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I tell her.

  She shakes her head. “Psychological leaps are often counterintuitive. The process is completely unpredictable, which makes it predictably difficult. Most patients go through dozens of scenarios.”

  For once, I’m normal.

  I imagine a famous actor, a bully from grade school, a woman, even though the only thing I know is he was male. The homeless man we found sleeping on our porch one morning when I was seven, scared and stinking, and shouting about aliens in the storm drains.

  It wasn’t my father, but Dana says the mind makes strange leaps. I follow her advice and imagine Dad. He’s as bulky as he was in my childhood, before prostate cancer and chemotherapy made his skin baggy and ill-fitting. He wears a cap with the logo from his hardware store. His overstuffed tool belt clanks when he walks.

  His jeans are unzipped.

  He cups his hand around his groin, trying to hide it.

  I start to ask the question—“Do you know who I am?”—but he turns away before I can open my mouth. He cowers. I’m bright red and shaking.

  It’s too embarrassing to imagine.

  I walk home from the station.

  Streetlights stare into the dark. Dirty remnants of last week’s snow lie in heaps, punctuated with trash cans and fire hydrants. I pull out my cell phone and dial. It rings a long time. Dad’s out of breath when he picks up.

  “Aaron?” he asks. “Long time no hear. Things are still a wreck at the store. The moron broke three crates of ceramics. I don’t think I can get away for that trip. We’ll have to postpone. Veteran’s Day, maybe? How about you? Young people heal up fast. You’ll be better any day now.”

  Suddenly, I don’t know why I called. I haven’t been okay since I was eight years old. If he doesn’t know that, no phone call or vacation is ever going to bridge the gap.

  I don’t blame Dad for failing to protect me, but he taught me early. No one can.

  I go up into my lightless apartment.

  Even Dana’s patience is thinning. Her fingers dig into my skin as she adheres the sensors to my scalp.

  She has no advice. She sets up the trance in silence.

  I close my eyes and go back to the place where I knew him. Back to the dark.

  Shadows.

  Then the smell of leather and cigarettes. I shift. A streetlight gutters on, casting faint, irregular yellow light on the windshield.

  The car’s interior is turquoise, spacious compared to modern cars. Beside me, the steering wheel is locked with a club. A torn toolbox sticker glistens on the dashboard. My father’s Mustang.

  I’m in the passenger seat. The driver’s seat is empty as it should be. I’m supposed to be in the back, trying to sleep with Dad’s jacket pulled over my knees.

  He only left for fifteen minutes while he went into the bank. He asked if I wanted to go in since it was after dark. I said no. I’d spent all day at Aunt Denise’s, swimming in her pool with Justin and Holly. I was tired.

  There’s an adu
lt in the backseat where I should be. I turn to see him, but the streetlight goes dark.

  I ask, “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re Aaron.”

  The voice is utterly generic, accent flat and unmarked.

  Shadows ebb and swarm. “What do you want from me?” he asks.

  That’s the real question. Some people want resolution, Dana says. Or confrontation, revenge, absolution.

  Or the answer to a question.

  My mouth is dry. I think my voice will crack. “Why?”

  Another silence. Shorter this time. “I knew I shouldn’t. But right then, all that mattered was what I wanted.”

  He pauses. Shadows shudder in the stillness.

  “And you, well—”

  My breath feels stuck as I wait for him to finish.

  “—you didn’t matter at all.”

  That’s it: the answer to a question I never even knew I was asking. Why choose me? Why hurt me? Why let me go?

  Why me?

  No reason. No reason at all.

  I feel strangely calm as his voice fades. The smell of cigarettes recedes. I can no longer feel the cracked leather seat.

  At last, I’m waking.

  Copyright © 2010 Rachel Swirsky

  Art copyright © 2010 Sam Weber

  Tor.com Stories by Rachel Swirsky

  “Eros, Philia, Agape”

  “A Memory of Wind”

  “The Monster’s Million Faces”

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  I didn’t hear the first knock. It blended into the patter of rain against my window.

  The full moon was shining brightly that night, penetrating storm clouds and my oiled cloth blinds to cast white pallor into my studio. I wouldn’t ordinarily have been working so late, but my commission was overdue so the moonlight was a boon. Supplementing with candles and my oil lamp, I had just enough light to work by.

  The painting showed a winter landscape of my patron’s fortress. Massive stone cylinders rose out of relentless white. A frozen river wended diagonally from the eastern tower to the edge of the panel.

  I’d gone out to sketch the fortress three months ago. At first, my patron had been afraid the building would decay if I sketched on the spot. I explained to him that the magic doesn’t work like that, but he still kept an anxious eye on the stones as my stylus crossed my tablet.

  Magic frightens people almost as much as it intrigues them.

  I mixed pale blue oils and dabbed color on to the painted riverbank. As my brush touched the panel, the water in the pitcher beside me began to tremble. A measure of liquid disappeared, as though swallowed past invisible lips. The painted river attained a new dimension, becoming tangibly cold.

  A second knock sounded, followed by a third. Finally jarred from my concentration, I traded my brush and palette for the oil lamp and hastened to answer.

  One of Lisane’s apprentices stood outside, water beading across his slender brows. His gloved hands shivered around the handle of his lantern. I recognized the boy from the last holiday I’d spent at Lisane's manor—Giatro. His infatuation with Lisane had been obvious. He’d followed her, lurking like a shadow cast against the wall, always ceding her the light as though she were the main figure in a composition and he a hastily brushed afterthought.

  I’d been the same way when I was her apprentice.

  Rain pelted the cobbles behind him. Giatro’s gaze flickered like a wavering candle flame across my face. “Mistress Renn, I have a message.”

  “Come inside. I’ll boil some water. You must be freezing.”

  I stepped aside to admit him. Giatro remained in the doorway. “Mistress Lisane has taken ill. She says she won’t last the night.”

  Giatro’s voice was newly tenor, but grief gave it gravity beyond his years. Lisane dying? Rain tipped from the gutters above my house, pouring onto the cobbles like water from a pitcher.

  “Has she summoned a physic?”

  “One came last night.”

  “And there’s nothing…?” I trailed off.

  Giatro inclined his head. A droplet ran down the bridge of his nose and splashed across his hands. As it went, it reflected the hazel of his eyes, the silver buttons on his coat, the slick black of the cobbles.

  “She wants you to come,” he said.

  “Is the hall big enough for all her old apprentices?”

  “She only asked for you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d once thought I was special to Lisane. The intervening years had shown otherwise—or so I’d thought.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Please,” Giatro said. “Will you come?”

  Giatro’s lantern swung, casting weird patterns of light and shadow across our bodies. White petals driven down by the rain lay crushed in the grooves between cobbles, releasing scents of perfume and soil.

  I pulled my cloak from its hook and followed him into the rain.

  I was taught to paint by Lisane da Patagnia, whose skill at rendering inner lives transformed portraiture. She painted aristocrats and merchants—and sometimes others who could afford her fee—in luminous colors against stark backgrounds. Even when she painted merchant’s wives in sumptuous golden gowns or dukes wearing ermine stoles, her paintings always drew the viewer’s eye toward the plain oval of the face.

  Her early work conceded to prevailing aesthetics. She softened sharp features and strengthened weak chins. The familiar iconography of portraiture crowded the panels: bowls of fruit to indicate fertility, velvets for wealth, laurel leaves for authority.

  As her work gained acclaim, she eschewed such contrivances. Her compositions became increasingly spare. She painted her subjects emerging, solitary, from darkness or fields of color. She detailed their expressions with an unflinching gaze—pinched lips and watery eyes, crooked noses and sagging jowls. Yet each flawed face contained its own ineffable intrigue. It was impossible to look away.

  Hints of magic sparkled across the panels, softening the fur on a collar or sluicing red in a raised wine glass. Her paintings flirted with magic, using its spare presence to captivate, just as Lisane herself might tantalize lovers with a hint of bare shoulder, inviting them to imagine more.

  Lisane was born the bastard child of a maid who worked in the house of Ruschio di Gael, an artist renowned for shimmering sfumato. He was famously debauched—a drunkard—but he was also a man with modern ideas. When he saw Lisane sketching faces with charcoal in the kitchen, he decided to let her sit with his students.

  She soon became his best pupil—the only genius who emerged from his school, just as he had been the only genius to emerge from the school of Umo Doani Nazatore, whose revolutionary invention of linear perspective had sparked the modern artistic renewal.

  Lisane da Patagnia, Ruschio di Gael, Umo Doani Nazatore—a line of geniuses stretching back through time like links in a chain, each creating a kind of beauty the world had never seen. Every one of us who came to study with Lisane hoped to be the next genius to emerge from that line.

  I was no exception.

  It was summer when I first came to Lisane’s house. The sun shone brightly, casting rose and gold across squared stone rooftops, glimmering through circular leaded windows, emboldening the trumpet-shaped blooms that peaked out of alleys and window boxes. Women sat at upper-story windows, watching events in the streets, their heads and shoulders forming intriguing triangles.
Shadows fell everywhere, rounding curves, crisscrossing cobbles, shading secretive recesses.

  That wasn’t how I saw it as I walked to Lisane’s house that morning, holding the hand of the journeywoman who’d met my boat. It was Lisane who would teach me how to dissect the world into shapes and shadows. That day, I was still ignorant, overawed by the chaos and clamor of beautiful, crowded Patagnia.

  The journeywoman, whose name was Orla, led me through an ironwork gate and small formal garden and into Lisane’s mansion. Russet tile spanned beneath painted plaster ceilings. A narrow hallway wended east to the kitchen at the back of the house; a staircase led to the mistress’s rooms. Orla guided me through an archway into the teaching studio.

  The room was large enough to hold a court banquet. An enormous window filled one wall, its wooden shutters thrown wide to admit sunlight and fresh air. Journeymen and apprentices crowded the room, their conversations echoing off of the wide walls. A circle of easels stood in the room’s center; the nearest one displayed an unfinished still life of a dragonfly with carnelian wings.

  “Is that Renn?” inquired an alto voice.

  I looked up to behold my new mistress. Lisane stood taller than most men, piled auburn hair adding to her height. Her features were so sharp they looked as though they’d been cut out with a knife. She wore a saffron-hued inset over a white chemise, triangles of lace at her throat and cuffs.

  A man, who I later learned was her fiancé, stood beside her, clearly annoyed by the interruption of my presence.

  Orla nudged me forward. I stumbled, too dazzled by Lisane to mind my feet. “I'm Renn.”

  “I brought her straight from the ship,” said Orla.

  “Unharmed by her travels, I see. Well, what did you think of the water?” Lisane bent to address me as if I were a child even though I’d already reached my full, diminutive height by age thirteen. She examined my face the way I’d later learn she looked at things she wanted to paint—assessing, absorbing.