The Last Novelist (or a Dead Lizard in the Yard)

by Matthew Kressel

  On her pad, beside my transcribed words, she’s drawn a woman with wavy dark hair, large curious eyes, a glittering gem in her nose, the same gem Ubalo had crossed light-years to fetch.

  “That’s Yvalu?”

  “You recognize her?” she says.

  “This is fantastic, Fish.”

  “You think?”

  “Fish, I have another idea. Do you want to illustrate my book?”

  “Hill-a-straight?” Wiki-less, she seems confused.

  “I want you to draw pictures of some scenes. We could have the maker convert them to lithographs and we can print them alongside the text.”

  “But I’m not any good.”

  “No, you’re not good. You’re amazing. With your permission, I’d like to use this picture of Yvalu on the cover so it’s the first thing people see.”

  She stares at me, her violet eyes boring into mine. Then she breaks eye contact. “But,” she says, almost a whisper. “Who will see it?”

  I feel a pang of dread. Another fact she’s gleaned from my wiki is that my readership has steadily declined over the years, so that the last person to request one of my printed books was an Earth antiquities dealer on Bora, who carefully sealed my book in plastic and placed it in storage, where it would serve as an example to future generations of what paper books had been like. As far as I could tell, the dealer had no intention of ever reading it. That was twelve Solar years ago.

  Fish turns back to me. “Reuth, I’d love to hill-a-straight your book.”

  And at this we both laugh.

  * * *

  We get to work. Each day, Fish comes by just after sunrise and we use the mornings to set type. It’s a laborious, slow process, but I love every aspect of it. I show her the right way to hold the composing stick, why she should let the slug rattle a bit, and how to use leads to add spacing between each line of type. I show her how to swipe her thumb to keep the type in place as she adds each letter, and I explain why it’s imperative to have snug lines and why it’s wise to start and end each line with em quads.

  We press a few test signatures, adjusting here, correcting there, as our hands and faces become stained with ink. In the afternoons, after a break and a light lunch, Fish retreats to the corner to ponder my novel and draw new scenes, while I churn out more pages on my pad. Fish loves everything about the process and laughs easily, even when we make mistakes. And her joy is contagious. I haven’t been this happy in a long time, and for no reason at all I find myself smiling too.

  Fish draws: the cascading light of Jacob’s ladder spilling across the desert; a close-up of Ubalo’s eyes, fearless and sad, creased by time; a thoughtliner tearing through a hell-bardo, trailing the disturbed dreams of its passengers; a parade of glowing comets crossing the starry sky; Yvalu’s desperate hand, reaching for a falling leaf. More than once, I catch Fish writing words of her own, but before I can look she always tucks her pad away.

  Meanwhile, my words flow better than they have in decades. I write:

  And after days of thought and deliberation, Yvalu knew there was only one reason why Ubalo had called her across the gulfs, why he himself could not be here to welcome her. There was only one reason why he had erased all evidence of himself from the planet’s records. He had called her out here not to bring her toward him, but to move her away from something else.

  He had sent her here to protect her.

  I reread my words and a warm feeling fills my heart. There are moments as I’m writing when I think this might be my best work yet, my magnum opus. By now I should be suspicious of such thoughts, but the feeling is hard to shake. If only I can finish it in time.

  * * *

  The afternoon is hot as Fish and I work from opposite ends of the room, deep in creative flow when the voice startles us. “Dolandra! Oh, thank Mitra!”

  A woman stands outside the window, and even from across the room, the glare of her violet eyes shines brighter than the sun. She has the same shape of face, the same nose as Fish. “I been looking for you all day!”

  “Moms!” Fish says, dropping her pad. She leaps to her feet.

  I walk to the front door to let the woman in, but she gives me a look as if I’m a demon come to eat her soul and stays put. “DOLANDRA!” she shouts.

  Fish sprints around my legs, outside and onto the grass. Her shirt and hands are stained black as she stands beside her mother, head hung low, and I can’t help but feel guilty even though I know I’ve done nothing wrong.

  “Why you shut your neural?” her mom says, eyeing me. “What the bones and dreck, girl?”

  “I’s…” Fish says. “I’s drawing, Moms.”

  The woman stares lasers at me. “I got your number,” she says. “You stay the fuck away from my daughter, or I show you real Ardabaabian justice.” She grabs Fish by the shirt and yanks her away, down the path toward the sea. Before they turn around a bend of sugarcane, Fish looks back.

  I wave goodbye, because I have a feeling I’ll never see her again.

  * * *

  The bungalow is quiet without Fish’s exuberance. I try to write on the porch, but find myself scribbling random shapes on the page, which pale in comparison to her art. I try the beach, seeking the inspiration I found on my first days here, hoping Fish might return to plop beside me. But I meet only wind and floating gulls and the occasional ship drifting slowly across the sky. To jar my inspiration I buy a neur-graft of Gardni Johnner and experience her famous BASE jump on Enceledus, the one where she tore her suit on a rock and nearly died. But this just leaves me shaken and craving solid earth. At night I drink and stare at Fish’s drawings, following each delicate line, wishing she were here. And still my words do not flow. I’m as dry as a lizard carcass in the sun.

  The baby lizard still sits in the yard, just leather now. Even the ants have departed for tastier shores. The rain and wind have tossed it about, but the carcass lingers always near, as if it’s trying to tell me something.

  “I know,” I tell it. “I know.”

  * * *

  It’s been six days since Fish has left, and I’ve written a sum total of negative three thousand words (I have scrapped two chapters) when I activate my neural for the first time since I arrived. I request a skinsuit from the local We, and after it instructs me on the standard safety precautions—using my dead wife’s voice again, the bastard—I walk down to the beach.

  I’ve found the address of one Dolandra Thyme Heurex in the local wiki, and my neural guides me to her home. While the hot sun slowly rises over the placid waters, I wade into the turquoise sea. I’ve swum in a skinsuit before, but my heart still pounds as I fully submerge. Fins grow from my feet and hands, and black-and-yellow striping appears on my body to mimic a local species.

  And there are many. Their sheer number and palettes of bright colors make me gasp. It’s as if some ancient god let her creative spirit loose on the canvas of the sea. Crimson and gold fans of coral wave like bashful geishas of old. Barracudas peer curiously at me before swimming off. Schools of fish flash in the sun as they dart from my grasp. In the distance, a pair of bottle-nosed dolphins inspect a sponge on the sea floor.

  Fish’s house is set among a group of blue-gray domes in twenty meters of water. I swim up to the door and try the chime.

  “Who’s there?” I recognize the voice of Fish’s mom.

  “Havair Heurex? It’s Reuth Bryan Diaso. I’d like to speak with you about your daughter.”

  “I warned you!” she says.

  “Look,” I say. “I did nothing wrong and won’t apologize. Your daughter is a supremely talented artist. She was illustrating my book. I’m an author—”

  “A what?”

  “An author.”

  A wiki-length pause. “Go on.”

  “The truth is, Havair Heurex, your daughter and I have become friends. I respect your decision to keep her from me—you don’t know me at all—but I wanted you to know what a talented artist she is, and I hope that you’ll encourage her to pursue i
t in the future, that you won’t keep her from her art.”

  The channel is still open, but I hear only silence.

  “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Good-bye, Havair Heurex.”

  A beep. The connection closes. I’m just about to swim off when the side of the dome shivers and a panel slides open. A door, for me.

  I swim in, the panel closes, the water drains, and the pressure equalizes. My skinsuit, sensing air, melts away. The inner door opens into a spacious and tidy living room. The outside of the dome was opaque, but from within the walls are transparent. The sea and its colorful fish surround us. Fish’s mom stands in a wavering sunbeam, violet eyes flickering. “Why you write novels if no one reads them?”

  Pads and scraps of paper are spread across the living room, each covered with a different drawing. Fountain pens lie everywhere. “The same reason,” I say, “that Fish continues to draw. I can’t stop.”

  “Her name is Dolandra.”

  “She told me her name was Fish.”

  “We moved under the sea because of her. Every day she gets up before dawn to watch the fish in the sunrise.”

  “It’s her favorite thing.”

  “I know.” Havair Heurex flares her nose at me, an expression that reminds me of her daughter. She turns to her kitchenette. “Would you like some tea?”

  “I’d love some, thank you.”

  She pours me a cup and it’s better than anything I’ve had in a long time. “No one shuts off their neural round here,” she says. “When I found you with my daughter that day, I got nervous.”

  “I don’t blame you. You were only being a mother.”

  “I looked you up. Not your public wiki. I … I used some favors. I got the local We to glean some of your private data.”

  I hold back my anger. Yet one more reason to hate the local Wees. “Oh?”

  “You’re dying?”

  I nod. “Decades ago I drank Europan sea water. It’s loaded with—”

  “Microorganisms.” Eyes wide, she retreats from me a step.

  I hold up my hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. But those microorganisms are loaded with genetic material similar to—but different enough from—our own that over fifty Solar years they’ve altered my biochemistry to the point that one day soon I simply won’t wake up. If they’d discovered this forty years ago, they might have fixed me. But the genetic damage is too far gone now. I guess it’s my punishment for one stupid night of hallucinogenic bliss.”

  Havair Heurex sighs deeply. “So you’ve come to Ardabaab to die?”

  A school of rainbow parrotfish swims past the window. “It just seemed like the right place. Also, I came here to finish my last novel. Fish … she’s been a muse of sorts. She reminds me a bit of my daughter. Is she here?”

  “She’s with her uncle on the other side of the planet.”

  “Well,” I say, standing. “Thank you for your hospitality, Havair Heurex, but I should be going if I’m to finish my book before…”

  “Yes,” she says. “Good luck and all.”

  “Thank you,” I say, heading for the door. But I pause. “Does Fish know?”

  “That you’re dying?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t told her.”

  “Then if it’s all the same, please keep it that way.” I look around the room at her many drawings. “She seems to be doing just fine without me.”

  “So you’re the last one?” she says, and I know what she means.

  “Goodbye, Havair Heurex.”

  I swim away from her underwater home, and when I arrive back at the bungalow that afternoon, I surprise a green monkey while it’s inspecting the dead lizard. The monkey leaps away, leaving the carcass behind.

  * * *

  I press every page of my book, inserting lithographs of Fish’s drawings throughout the text. But my novel is incomplete. I have the final chapters yet to write. And as each day comes to a close and I look at my hastily scrawled words that make no sense I worry that I won’t finish this before I die.

  * * *

  “Moms says I can see you again, long as I keep my neural on.”

  Fish stands above my bed, the morning light slicing my bedroom in half.

  I sit up. “Fish! Hello!”

  “I’s at my uncle’s,” she says. “But I’s back now. Get up you loafing fool, ’cause we gots work to do!”

  I laugh, and it’s as if a switch has been flipped and an engine turned on. My words flow as easily as water again. I will finish this after all.

  Fish comes by every day now. In the mornings, she studies the art of bookbinding. In the afternoons, she creates new illustrations. She says we have too many, but I tell her there’s always room for more art.

  She draws: Yvalu’s transport ship landing in heavy rain; a flock of migrating sea birds on Muandiva silhouetted in the bright sun; a pine forest reflected in the glassy lake of Naa; Yvalu and Ubalo, da Vinci-like, reaching for each other’s hand, galaxies swirling behind them; Yvalu tasting the dirt of Muandiva. And sometimes, she inks words, which she will never let me read.

  I write:

  “Yes, I’s seen him,” the street vendor said to Yvalu as she showed the woman a holo of Ubalo’s likeness. “On Suntiks, he sat over there in the shade, throwing back lagers, listening to them steel drum bands.”

  “You sure?” Yvalu said, her hopes rising. “You certain?”

  “Absolute,” the woman said. “Certain as Shaddai makes the sun rise and the stars turn.” She made the namaste gesture and bowed. “This mentsh, he were here, same as you stand now.”

  I pause to laugh.

  “What is it?” Fish says, eyes flashing as she looks up from her pad.

  “I’ve figured it out!” I say. “I know how my book will end.”

  “Don’t tell me!” Fish says. “I want it to be a surprise.”

  “Okay,” I say, smiling. “Okay.”

  Later, when the sun dips low, Fish goes home, and I head out to the porch to relax in the cooling afternoon. The early stars emerge, their constellations familiar to me now. The sugarcane bends in the breeze. The crickets chirp in the grass. High above, a ship, bright as a star, moves across the sky and vanishes. I take a deep breath. I’m so tired. So damn tired. But all is good, all is good.

  I search the yard, but the lizard is gone.

  * * *

  “Reuth Bryan Diaso, citizen of Ganesha City, Mars. Born on Google Base Natarajan, Earth orbit, one gravity Earth-natural. Died on Ardabaab, Eish orbit. Age: ninety-one by Sol, two hundred ninety-three by Shoen.”

  So says Reuth’s wiki now. In the morning, I’s coming to see him, but he wasn’t in bed. Why don’t he answer my call? I thought. Where’s he at?

  I found him under a coconut tree, flat on the grass. He get real intox and pass out? The ants were on him something bad.

  Moms and I buried him in the sea. We thought he’d like that, being with all them colorful fish. His wife and kid died a long time ago, I learned. And that crazy fool left everything to me!

  Mornings are stellar quiet without the sounds of his pen on paper and the clink of setting type. There ain’t no more words to press. Moms don’t like it, but I sit out back in his bungalow, drinking tea, watching the gulls cross the sky, just like him.

  A baby lizard skitters ’cross the deck and pauses to gaze at me. I pick up my pen and write:

  “Don’t you worry, Ubalo!” Yvalu shouts to the stars. “I’s confused before, but not no more. I know where you at, and I’s coming to get you!” Yvalu walks freylik down to the sea, cause that’s where the most beautiful fish swim, specially in mornings, when the sun comes up and turns them bright rainbows. “I know you hiding under there, waiting for me, Ubalo, so you best be shiny. I got such a kiss waiting for you, it’ll make stars shine, it’ll make universes.”

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Matthew Kressel

  Art copyright © 2017 by Scott Bakal