Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 95

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  “It’s about now,” she said, “that you tell me I haven’t changed.”

  “And you tell me that I have.”

  She nodded. “But it’s true. Although you haven’t changed that much, Gus. You’ve aged, but you’re still one of the most . . . solid people I know.”

  Elanore offered him a Disc Bleu. He took it although he hadn’t smoked in years and she’d always complained that the things were bad for him when she was alive. Elanore’s skin felt cool and dry in the moment that their hands touched, and the taste of the smoke as it shimmered amid the brush strokes was just as it had always been. Music drifted out from the blaze of the bar where dark figures writhed as if in flames. Any moment now, he knew, she’d try to say something vaguely conciliatory, and he’d interrupt as he attempted to do the same.

  He gestured around at the daubs and smears of the other empty tables. He said, “I thought I was going to be late . . . ” The underside of the canopy that stretched across the pavement blazed. How poor old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes. And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.

  “What—what I told you was true,” Elanore said, stumbling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. “I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we did talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time’s precious and, at the end of the day it’s been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn’t come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they’d keep. But I thought—well I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time.”

  “So all of this is just for me. Jesus, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but . . . ”

  “Don’t be like that, Gustav. I’m not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out.”

  He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly what trick it was that allowed them to share it.

  “So you’re still painting?”

  “Yep.”

  “I haven’t seen much of your work about.”

  “I do it for private clients,” Gustav said. “Mostly.”

  He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his statement. Of course, if he really was painting and selling, he’d have some credit. And if he had credit, he wouldn’t be living in that dreadful tenement she’d tracked him down to. He’d have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was. I can help, you know, Gustav could hear Elanore saying because he’d heard her say it so many times before. I don’t need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance . . . But what she actually said was even worse.

  “Are you recording yourself, Gus?” Elanore asked. “Do you have a librarian?”

  Now, he thought, now is the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street—the foreal street. And forget.

  “Did you know,” he said instead, “that the word reality once actually meant foreal—not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality. But then along came virtual reality, and of course when the next generation of products was developed the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said, Why don’t we just call it reality?”

  “You don’t have to be hurtful, Gus. There’s no rule written down that says we can’t get on.”

  “I thought that that was exactly the problem. It’s in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it’s . . . ” He’d have said more. But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.

  “What exactly are you doing these days, Gus?” she asked as he cleared his throat and pretended it was the wine that he’d choked on. “What are you painting at the moment?”

  “I’m working on a series,” he was surprised to hear himself saying. “It’s a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which begin here in Paris and then . . . ” He swallowed. “ . . . bright, dark colors . . . ” A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.

  “Sounds good, Gus,” Elanore said, leaning towards him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sunlight of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he’d brushed so many times with his the tips of his fingers. “I can tell from that look in your eyes that you’re into a really good phase . . . ”

  After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of vin ordinaire. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disc Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost—she really was like Elanore. Gustav didn’t even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of abandon in all of this—new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what Van Gogh had meant about this café being a place where you could ruin oneself, or go mad or commit a crime.

  The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured grey-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank’s ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine. At least, Gustav thought, that was still foreal . . .

  “I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now,” Gustav said. “All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember.”

  “People still change, you know. Just because we’ve passed on doesn’t mean we can’t change.”

  By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have you changed, Elanore? he wondered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?

  “You’re obviously doing well.”

  “I am . . . ” She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. “I mean, I didn’t expect—”

  “—And you look—”

  “—And you, Gus, what I said about you being—”

  “—That project of mine—”

  “—I know, I—”

  They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled and the moment seemed to hold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost . . .

  “Well . . . ” Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she had on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew delicately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth—although this was exactly the kind of affectation he detested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. “I suppose that’s it, then, isn’t it, Gus? We’ve met—we’ve spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times.”

  “Nothing will ever be like old times.”

  “No . . . ” Her eyes glinted, and he thought for a moment that she was going to become angry—goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. “Nothing ever will be like old times. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be . . . ”

  Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decide that he would just regard that as another affront, another slap in the face.

  Elanore turned and walked away from Gustav, fading into the chiaroscuro swirls of lamplight and grey.

  Elanore, as if Gustav needed reminding, had been alive when he’d first met her. In fact, he’d never known anyone who was more so. Of course, the age difference between them was always huge—she’d already been past a hundred by then and he was barely forty—but they’d agreed on that first day that they met and on many days after that there was a corner in time around which the old eventually turned to rejoin the young.

  In another age, and although she a
lways laughingly denied it, Gustav always suspected that Elanore would have had her sagging breasts implanted with silicone, the wrinkles stretched back from her face, her heart replaced by a throbbing steel simulacrum. But she was lucky enough to exist at a time when effective anti-aging treatments were finally available. As a post-centenarian, wise and rich and moderately, pleasantly, famous, Elanore was probably more fresh and beautiful than she’d been at any other era in her life. Gustav had met her at a party beside a Russian lake—guests wandering amid dunes of snow. Foreal had been a fashionable option then; although for Gustav the grounds of this pillared ice-crystalled palace that Catherine the Great’s Scottish favorite Charles Cameron had built seemed far too gorgeous to be entirely true. But it was true—foreal, actual, concrete, genuine, unvirtual—and such knowledge was what had driven him then. That, and the huge impossibility of ever really managing to convey any of it as a painter. That, and the absolute certainty that he would try.

  Elanore had wandered up to him from the forest dusk dressed in seal furs. The shock of her beauty had been like all the rubbish he’d heard other artists talk about and thus so detested. And he’d been a stammering wreck, but somehow that hadn’t mattered. There had been—and here again the words became stupid, meaningless—a dazed physicality between them from that first moment that was so intense it was spiritual.

  Elanore told Gustav that she’d seen and admired the series of triptychs he’d just finished working on. They were painted directly onto slabs of wood, and depicted totemistic figures in dense blocks of color. The critics had generally dammed them with faint praise—had talked of Cubism and Mondrian—were somehow unable to recognize Gustav’s obvious and grateful debt to Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. But Elanore had seen and understood those bright muddy colors. And, yes, she’d dabbled a little in painting herself—just enough to know that truly creative acts were probably beyond her . . .

  Elanore wore her red hair short in those days. And there were freckles, then as always, scattered across the bridge of her nose. She showed the tips of her teeth when she smiled, and he was conscious of her lips and her tongue. He could smell, faint within the clouds of breath that entwined them, her womanly scent.

  A small black cat threaded its way between them as they talked, then, barely breaking the crust of the snow, leapt up onto a bough of the nearest pine and crouched there, watching them with emerald eyes.

  “That’s Metzengerstein,” Elanore said, her own even greener eyes flickering across Gustav face, but never ceasing to regard him. “He’s my librarian.”

  When they made love later on in the agate pavilion’s frozen glow and as the smoke of their breath and their sweat clouded the winter twilight, all the disparate elements of Gustav’s world finally seemed to join. He carved Elanore’s breasts with his fingers and tongue and painted her with her juices and plunged into her sweet depths and came, finally, finally, and quite deliciously, as her fingers slid around and he in turn was parted and entered by her.

  Swimming back up from that, soaked with Elanore, exhausted, but his cock amazingly still half-stiff and rising, Gustav became conscious of the black cat that all this time had been threading its way between them. Its tail now curled against his thigh, corrugating his scrotum. Its claws gently kneaded his belly.

  Elanore had laughed and picked Metzengerstein up, purring herself as she laid the creature between her breasts.

  Gustav understood. Then or later, there was never any need for her to say more. After all, even Elanore couldn’t live forever—and she needed a librarian with her to record her thoughts and actions if she was ever to pass on. For all its myriad complexities, the human brain had evolved to last a single lifetime; after that, the memories and impressions eventually began to overflow, the data became corrupted. Yes, Gustav understood. He even came to like the way Metzengerstein followed Elanore around like a witch’s familiar, and, yes, its soft sharp cajolings as they made love.

  Did they call them ghosts then? Gustav couldn’t remember. It was a word, anyway—like spic, or nigger—that you never used in front of them. When he and Elanore were married, when Gustav loved and painted and loved and painted her, when she gave him her life and her spirit and his own career somehow began to take off as he finally mastered the trick of getting some of the passion he felt down onto the lovely, awkward canvas, he always knew that part of the intensity between them came from the age gap, the difference, the inescapable fact that Elanore would soon have to die.

  It finally happened, he remembered, when he was leaving Gauguin’s tropic dreams and nightmares behind and toying with a more straightforwardly Impressionist phase. Elanore was modelling for him nude as Manet’s Olympia. As a concession to practicalities and to the urgency that then always possessed him when he was painting, the black maid-servant bearing the flowers in his lavish new studio on the Boulevard des Capucines was a projection, but the divan and all the hangings, the flowers, and the cat, of course—although by its programmed natured Metzengerstein was incapable of looking quite as scared and scrawny as Manet’s original—were all foreal.

  “You know,” Elanore said, not breaking pose, one hand toying with the hem of the shawl on which she was lying, the other laid negligently, possessively, without modesty, across her pubic triangle, “we really should re-invite Marcel over after all he’s done for us lately.”

  “Marcel?” In honesty, Gustav was paying little attention to anything at that moment other than which shade to swirl into the boudoir darkness. He dabbed again onto his testing scrap. “Marcel’s in San Francisco. We haven’t seen him in months.”

  “Of course . . . Silly me.”

  He finally glanced up again what could have been moments or minutes later, suddenly aware that a cold silence that had set in. Elanore, being Elanore, never forgot anything. Elanore was light and life. Now, all her Olympia-like poise was gone.

  This wasn’t like the decay and loss of function that affected the elderly in the days before recombinant drugs. Just like her heart and her limbs, Elanore’s physical brain still functioned perfectly. But the effect was the same. Confusions and mistakes happened frequently after that, as if consciousness drained rapidly once the initial rent was made. For Elanore, with her exquisite dignity, her continued beauty, her companies and her investments and the contacts that she needed to maintain, the process of senility was particularly terrible. No one, least of all Gustav, argued against her decision to pass on.

  Back where reality ended, it was past midnight and the moon was blazing down over the Left Bank’s broken rooftops through the greyish brown nanosmog. And exactly where, Gustav wondered, glaring up at it through the still humming gantries of the reality engine that had enclosed him and Elanore, is Francine across the sky? How much do you have to pay to get the right decoders in your optic nerves and see the stars entwined in some vast projection of her? How much of your life do you have to give away?

  The mazy streets behind St-Michael were rotten and weed-grown in the bilious fog, the dulled moonlight. No one but Gustav seems to live in the half-supported ruins of the Left Bank nowadays. It was just a place for posing in and being seen—although in that respect, Gustav reflected, things really hadn’t changed. To get back to his tenement, he had to cross the Boulevard St-Germain through a stream of buzzing robot cars that, no matter how he dodged them, still managed to avoid him. In the busier streets beyond, the big reality engines were still glowing. In fact, it was said that you could now go from one side of Paris to the other without having to step out into foreal. Gustav, as ever, did his best to do the opposite although he knew that, even without any credit, he would still be freely admitted to the many realities on offer in these generous, carefree days. He scowled at the shining planes of the powerfields that stretched between the gantries like bubbles. Faintly from inside, coming at him from beyond the humming of the transformers that tamed and organized the droplets of nanosmog into shapes you could feel, odors you could smell, chairs you could sit on, he could hear wor
ds and laughter, music, the clink of glasses. He could even just make out the shapes of the living as they postured and chatted. It was obvious from the way that they were grouped that the living were outnumbered by the dead these days. Outside, in the dim streets, he passed figures like tumbling decahedrons who bore their own fields with them as moved between realities. They were probably unaware of him as they drifted by, or perhaps saw him as some extra enhancement of whatever dream it was they were living. Flick, flick. Scheherazade’s Baghdad. John Carter’s Mars. It really didn’t matter that you were still in Paris, although Elanore, of course, had showed sensitivity in the place she had selected for their meeting.

  Beyond the last of the reality engines, Gustav’s own cheap unvirtual tenement loomed into view. He picked his way across the tarmac towards the faint neon of the foreal Spar store beside it. Inside, there were the usual grey slabs of packaging with tiny windows promising every possible delight. He wandered up the aisles and activated the homely presence of the woman who served the dozen or so anachronistic places that were still scattered around Paris. She smiled at him—a living ghost, really; but then people seemed to prefer the illusion of the personal touch. Behind her, he noticed, was an antiquated cigarette machine. He ordered a packet of Disc Bleu, and palmed what were probably the last of his credits—which amounted to half a stick of charcoal or two squeezes-worth of Red Lake. It was a surprise to him, in fact, that he even had enough for these cigarettes.

  Outside, ignoring the health warning that flashed briefly before his eyes, he lighted a Disc Bleu, put it to his lips and deeply inhaled. A few moments later, he was in a nauseous sweat, doubled up and gasping.

  Another bleak morning, timeless and grey. This ceiling, these walls. And Elanore . . . Elanore was dead. Gone.

  Gustav belched on the wine he was sure that he’d drunk, and smelled the sickness and the smoke of that foreal Disc Bleu still clinging to him. But there was no trace of Elanore. Not a copper strand of hair on his shoulder or curled around his cock, not her scent riming his hands.