Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Paul shuddered convulsively from head to foot.

  That’s it, he thought irrationally, that’s all.

  You’re finished, he thought.

  Suddenly he was unbelievably, unbearably, overwhelmingly tired. He staggered to his bed and fell down upon it. That great soundless bell was tolling again, beating through blood and bone and meat. His vision blurred until he was unable to clearly see the dawn-ghost of the ceiling. The bed seemed to be spinning in slow, slow circles. A cockroach scurried over his hand. He was too beaten-out physically to do anything other than twitch, but another enormous wave of disgust and loathing and rage and self-hate rolled through him and flooded every cell of his being. His eyes filled with weak tears. He grimaced at the ceiling like an animal in pain. His head lolled.

  Sleep was like a long hard fall into very deep water.

  As with every sentient creature, there was a part of Paul that never slept and that knew everything. Racial subconscious, organic computer, overmind, genetic memory, superconsciousness, immortal soul, call it what you will—it not only knew everything that had happened to Paul and to all the race of man, it also knew everything that might have happened: the web of possibilities in its entirety. Since there is really no such thing as time, it also knew everything that will and might happen to Paul and to everyone else, and what will and might happen to everyone who ever will (or might) be born in what we fatuously call “the future.” It is hopeless, of course, to try to talk about these matters in any kind of detail—our corporeal, conscious minds can not even begin to grasp the concepts involved, and the language is too inadequate to allow us to discuss them even if they could be understood. Suffice it to say that in Paul the superconsciousness-organic computer et cetera had always been much more accessible to him than is usually the case. And now that he had been partially freed from the bonds of ego by deprivation, exhaustion, starvation, fever, madness and hate, Paul’s dreaming mind was finally able to reach the superconsciousness and operate it to his own ends.

  He ran the “memory” of the superconsciousness back until it had reached one of the key junctions and turning points of his life, and then had it sort through the billions of possible consequences arising out of that junction until it found the one possibility that would best facilitate the peculiar sentence of oblivion that Paul had mercilessly handed down upon himself in the High Court of his own soul. The one that Paul finally decided upon was probably the least likely and most bizarre of all the myriad possibilities stemming from that particular junction of his life—a number which is finite, but which is also enormous far beyond our range of conscious comprehension. It was a corner that had never been turned.

  He went back. He turned that corner.

  The boy woke to night and silences. He lay quietly on his back and stared at the shadowy ceiling, half-relieved, half-disappointed. It had been only another storm, after all. Just like Ma said, he thought. It must have passed and spent itself while he was sleeping. And tomorrow I’m going to Ohio.

  But even as he was thinking this, the wind puffed up out of nowhere and slammed against the windows, rattling the glass in their frames. The boy could hear the wind scoop up the big metal garbage cans out front and send them rolling and clattering and clanging far down the street like giant dice. Suddenly there was a torrent of water slamming and rattling the window along with the wind, as if a high-pressure hose had been turned against the glass. The house groaned and shook.

  The boy lay trembling with fear and delight. The storm hadn’t passed, after all! Maybe he had awakened during a lull, or maybe he hadn’t slept as long as he had thought and the storm was just beginning. The boy sat up eagerly in the bed.

  As he did, the room filled with blinding blue-white light, so dazzling that it almost seemed to sear the retinas. A split-second later there was a buffeting, ear-splitting explosion. Then another blast of light, then another monstrous thunderclap, and so on in such fast and furious alternation that the boy couldn’t catch his breath for the shock of it. It was as if a heavy howitzer were firing salvos right outside his bedroom window. Another moment or two of this, the lightning certainly striking right outside the house, and then there came a silence that could only upon reflection be recognized as identical with the highest previous level of noise.

  Joy! the boy thought. He was leaning dazedly back against the headboard, eyes wide. He hoped that he hadn’t made in his pants.

  More thunder, not quite so overwhelmingly right-on-top-of-him any more. While it was still booming and rumbling, the bedroom door opened and his mother came in. She didn’t turn on his light, but she stood in the doorway where she herself was illuminated by the bulb in the hall. “Are you all right, baby?” she asked. Her voice sounded funny somehow.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “Don’t let it scare you, Paulie,” she said. “It’s only a hurricane; it’ll be over soon.”

  There was something funny about her voice. It had a strained, wild note to it. Tension under restraint.

  “I’m not scared, Ma, I’m okay.”

  “Try to get some sleep, then,” she said. And her face changed alarmingly, expressions melting and shifting across it faster than the boy could catch them. When she spoke again, her voice had gone gravelly and dropped in register, as though she was straining to keep it under control. “But if—” She started again. “But if you can’t sleep, then come downstairs and be with me for a while.” She stopped abruptly, whirled around and left. He could hear her footsteps clicking away down the hallway, fast and agitated.

  The same funny thing had been in her face as well as her voice. Dimly, almost instinctually, the boy recognized what it was: it was fear.

  She was the one who was afraid, in spite of her reassurances to him. His mother was afraid.

  Why?

  It was completely out of accord with her mood earlier that evening. Then she had been somewhat distracted, the way she always was lately—but that was somehow all tied up with him not having a father any more. She had been tense and snappish—but that was because she’d been packing all day. She hadn’t been afraid then. She’d been a little bit nervous about the approaching storm, but not afraid—mostly irritated by the thought of all the bother and nuisance it was going to cause her, maybe they wouldn’t be able to leave tomorrow if the weather was still bad. Why was she afraid now?

  The boy got out of bed and padded across to the door. He opened it and slipped out into the upstairs hallway. A few feet down the hallway he stopped, head up, “sniffing the air.”

  Something was very wrong.

  He didn’t know what it was, he couldn’t identify it or put a name to it, but somehow everything was wrong.

  Everything was the same, but it was somehow also completely different. He could smell it, the way he’d been able to smell the storm when it was behind the horizon. It was in the air itself, his mother, the house around him the most subtle and nearly imperceptible of differences. But the air, the house, his mother, they were not the same ones he’d had before.

  It was as if he’d gone to sleep in one world and awakened in another. A world exactly the same except for being completely different.

  The thought was too big for his mind, too complex for him to begin to appraise it. The whole concept slipped sideways in his head and then right on out of it, leaving him not even quite sure what it was he’d been struggling to comprehend a moment before. But it also left behind a legacy of oily panic. For the first time he began to become really afraid.

  He crept stealthily to the head of the stairs and listened at the stairwell. He could hear his mother’s voice talking downstairs, and Mrs. Spinnato’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. With utmost caution, he went down four treads and crouched next to the railing. They had the radio or the television on down there, but between the wind and the thunder outside and the crackling frying-egg static on the set itself, it was almost impossible to hear what it was saying, either. The boy strained his ears. “. .
. fall . . .” it said and the rest was swallowed by the wind. The boy went down another tread. “. . . falling . . .” it repeated.

  The rest was garble and static-hiss, wind, more eggs frying, a thunderclap, and then it said “. . . roche . . .”

  After another moment, his mother and Mrs. Spinnato came by the foot of the stairs, heading toward the kitchen. He froze, but neither woman looked up as she passed. Their voices came to him in snatches through the sound of the wind.

  “. . . lieve it?” his mother was saying.

  “. . . don’t know what . . . now . . . but if . .” said Mrs. Spinnato.

  “. . . we do? . . . how . . .”

  “. . . what can we . . . if it’s . . . that . . .”

  “. . . pray, that’s . . .”

  Unenlightened, the boy returned to his bedroom. The note of fear was in Mrs. Spinnato’s voice, too, and she was a powerful, strong-willed woman, ordinarily afraid of nothing.

  The boy went to his window and stood looking out at the storm. It was raining hard. The trees were lashing violently back and forth as if they had gone mad with pain. Dislodged slate roofing and shingles were flying and swirling around in the air like confetti. The sky was a mad luminescent indigo, except when lightning turned it a searing white. Some power lines were already down, writhing and spitting blue sparks in the street, and trees were beginning to have their branches torn off. There was a sudden high-pitched tearing sound over his head, and something scraped heavily across the roof before it tumbled down into the yard. That was their television antenna being blown away. A moment later the light in the hall flickered and went out. All their lights were gone. He stood in the dark, looking out the window—excited, exalted, and terrified.

  That was when the real storm front hit.

  The boy sensed the blow coming, an irresistible onrush of fire-shot darkness, and instinctively dropped flat to the floor. The window exploded inward in a fountain of shattered glass. There was a series of flat explosions, and wood chips sprayed and geysered from the wall opposite the window, exactly as if someone was raking the room with a heavy-caliber machine gun. The boy would never know it, but the damage was being done by chestnuts from the horse-chestnut trees outside, stripped from their branches by a 150 m.p.h. gust and whipped into the room with all the shattering force of heavy-caliber bullets.

  The wind struck again. This time the window-frame was splintered and pulverized, and the house itself screeched, rocked, and seemed to strain up toward the sky for a moment before it settled back down. A jagged crack shot the length of one wall. The boy hugged the floor while bits of plaster and lathing came down on his back.

  He wasn’t even particularly afraid. What was happening was too huge and immediate and overwhelming to leave any room in his mind for fear. During a lull in the wind he could hear his mother and Mrs. Spinnato screaming downstairs. He himself was making a little dry panting noise that he wasn’t even aware of, ahnnn, ahnnn, ahnnn, like a winded animal.

  The lull seemed as if it was going to last for a while. The boy tried to get to his feet and was knocked flat again by wind and water. He had forgotten that this was a “lull” only by comparison with the unbelievable gust that had struck a minute before. He pulled himself up again, hanging on to the shattered window frame and not lifting his head much higher than the window ledge. In a heartbeat he was drenched to the bone. If the rain had been hard before, it was now like a horizontal waterfall driving against the house. But by keeping his head close to the frame and squinting he found that he could see a little. He got his vision right just in time to see another tremendous gust destroy Mr. Leidy’s house, a gust that was fortunately blowing in a different direction. Fortunately for the boy anyway. Leidy’s place was built on a rise, denying it even the minimum shelter that the small hills to the southeast afforded the boy’s house. One moment the Leidy house was there, a solid three-story structure, and the next moment—in an eyeblink—it was gone, demolished, smashed to flinders, turned into a monstrous welter of flying debris that looked for all the world like a Gargantuan dust devil.

  Somewhere on the other side of the house he could very faintly hear his mother calling desperately for him. Probably she was trying to make it up the stairs to his bedroom.

  She didn’t make it, because at that moment, unbelievably, the earthquake struck.

  At first the boy thought it was the wind again, but then the entire house began to rattle and buck and plunge, and there was a rumbling freight-train sound that was even louder than the storm. Terrified and helpless, the boy could do nothing but cling like a burr to the windowsill while the room around him bounced and jigged and staggered. Hairline cracks shot out across the walls and ceiling and floor, widened, spread. A section of the far wall suddenly slid away, leaving a ragged five-foot gap. The house whammed the ground once with finality, bounced again; and settled. The ground stopped moving. Nothing happened for perhaps a minute, and then the entire front half of the house collapsed. Plaster powder and brick dust were puffed from all the windows on the boy’s side of the house, like steam from a bellows. For a heartbeat the boy was coated with dust and powder from head to foot, and then the rain came rushing back in the window and washed him clean again.

  Another lull, the most complete one yet, as though the universe had taken a deep, deep breath.

  In that abrupt hush the boy could hear someone close at hand screaming and sobbing. He realized with surprise that it was himself. Almost casually, the portion of his mind not occupied with terror noticed a sudden rush of sea-water sweeping in—across the ground. Mrs. Spinnato’s house had been determinedly smoldering in spite of the rain but it went out in a hissing welter of steam when the wave inundated it. That first wave had been a fake, only waist-deep and made mostly of spume, but there were a whole series of other waves marching in behind it—storm waves, tsunami, maybe actual tidal waves, who knows? and some of them were pale horrors twelve, twenty, thirty feet high.

  I’m stuck in it, said a voice in the boy’s head that was the boy’s voice and yet somehow not the boy’s voice. I can’t stop it. I can’t get out.

  I didn’t know it would be like this, the voice said.

  The universe let out that deep, deep breath.

  The wind came back.

  This time it gusted to 220 m.p.h. and it flattened everything.

  It uprooted one of the huge, chestnut trees in the boy’s yard and hurled it like a giant’s javelin right at the window where the boy was crouching.

  The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder what it would have been like to live in Ohio.

  The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder why he was thinking of feathers and soot.

  The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder who the man was who was crying inside his head.

  The Last Day of July

  Introduction to The Last Day of July

  Up front, let me admit that I don’t know what “The Last Day of July” means. I have a good idea what happens in the story because it unfolds, episode by disquieting episode, in linear sequence. Yes, subtle references to John the protagonist’s past or to the historical provenance of the tale bubble up briefly. But these strike me as time-tested rather than avant-garde devices, and Dozois never purposely muddles the description or the tenor of an event to throw the reader off stride. Mystery inheres in “The Last Day of July” not because the author dazzles or obfuscates, but because the meaning of John’s metamorphosis—from a wounded human being into a living seed for a brand-new continuum—defies rational explanation. It slips through the gears of one’s cogitating mind like an undiscovered isotope of quicksilver.

  This metaphor may seem to imply a criticism. I don’t intend it to. Among other things, “The Last Day of July” has to do with boundaries, and with fruitfully trespassing them—with coming out of the forests of
impotence and destruction onto the shore of a dolphin-engendering sea. It frames a whole pageant of life-affirming allegories, from the breaking up of writer’s block, to the triumph of peace over world war, to the cyclical coming of spring, to the mystery of resurrection. It opens itself out to all these readings, but limits itself to none of them.

  I like “The Last Day of July,” in fact, precisely because you cannot read it as you would a mere anecdote or news article. Even more surprising, you cannot even read it as you would a parable by Jorge Luis Borges, for Borges generally explains himself—even if his explanations stun us with their erudition and complexity. Here, on the other hand, Dozois’ storytelling leaves us gasping after meaning, catching a gulp or two of restorative oxygen, and breathing an entire otherworldly atmosphere, checking to see if our lungs have withered and the surface of our skin changed miraculously into an organ of aeration. I like “The Last Day of July,” in short, because you have to pay close attention. You must think about the implications of its events.