The first time I read “The Last Day of July” I paid less attention than I should. I registered the quality of the writing, the accuracy of the author’s eye (“A rubber duck next to the wagon, dead, eaten away by weather, the side of its face distorted as if by acid”), and the magisterial progress of the narrative. I felt the menace in its paragraphs, the dread in John’s self-image and outlook, and the disorienting weirdness of the change about to befall him. (When, near story’s end, John walks downstairs, Dozois describes this walk as “like wading through hardening glue, and with every step the glue gets deeper and stiffer. [John] holds very tightly to one proper thought, because he knows now what happens to people-seeds who are caught too tightly by the world . . .”) Initially, though, I failed to grasp the historical setting, the nature of John’s impending change, and even the story’s legitimacy as science fiction.
Pay attention. Note that John thinks once of “swing” music and that the groceryman whom he finds so annoying speaks of Edvard Beneš who resigned as president of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Also, John has firsthand experience of the London blitz, as well as scary premonitions of both Boston and New York City “fused into molten glass by some new atrocity of man.” Think about “The Last Day of July” as a psychological case study, yes, but remain open as well to its mind-blowing operation as a tale of both personal and societal transformation. Think Poe, Kafka, and even H. P. Lovecraft (“a lactescent, nacrid light,” “The labored, ugly beating of a monstrous heart”). But understand, too, that in this still early story, Gardner Dozois continued forging his own inimitable voice and identity, and that the heat from his forge fired the imaginations of many of his contemporaries, mine among them.
Michael Bishop
The Last Day of July
He can feel them in the air around him, swimming through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, always just out of sight. What they are he doesn’t know, but they are there. Sometimes he can almost see them out of the corner of his eye—a motion, a flickering, a presence: a glow behind him, as if someone had just turned up an oil lantern. And yet there is no light. When he turns to look, nothing is there, everything is still—but with that subliminal sense of stirred air, as if something has just passed, as if something has flowed aside into the wall an instant faster than he can turn his head. He tries to catch them, spinning violently, rounding on his heel. But always finds the room empty, the same peering windows, the same hunched shapes of furniture. And the tension will grow, redoubled, at his back: the air watchful, watching, an imminence never quite defined—until he whirls again. Nothing. Empty. The table, the piles of papers and books, the chairs, the tall china cabinet. And then he will feel eyes re-form behind him.
When John comes into the house with the second suitcase, daylight has already begun to die. All at once, everything is flatter, duller—not darker, but just less vivid, as though a grey film of oil has been pulled between the sun and the earth. The house, the surrounding forest, all suddenly seem two-dimensional: the house a stage set, the forest wall a backdrop. There are no sharp edges, no highlights, no reticulations. The large rain puddle in the elbow of the encircling dirt road is a solid gunmetal oval—no reflections, no ripples; it seems that you could pry it up in one piece and stack it against a wall. The air itself is heavy, somehow sodden without being wet, without the slightest trace of moisture. The branches of the trees hang close to the ground, as though pregnant with rain: they are dry to the touch, sterile, almost like stone. There are no birds.
The man from the agency honks, backs the car, and turns it around so that it points back toward the access road to the highway. John pauses on the threshold of the back porch, sets down the suitcase, and nods in thanks for the ride from the train station. Already he has forgotten the ride, except as a confusion of sensation: noise, movement, alternating explosions of light and shadow, unfocused objects flowing by the windshield, pirouetting, tumbling, expanding and contracting in obedience to an unknown rhythm. He does not know where he is, does not know where the house is in relation to anything else in the vicinity, does not know what county he is in, is not even sure of the state. He has been informed of these things, but he has forgotten. He never really listened.
The agency man puts his car in gear; the back wheels spin in mud, then bite gravel. The car accelerates, swerves by the house onto the access road that leads to the blacktop secondary road that merges at last into the state highway. It disappears, taillights bobbing. In the perspectiveless, colorless perception imposed by that dusk, it does not seem to dwindle normally into distance. Rather, it vanishes, abruptly, as if it has been absorbed tracelessly by some universal solvent, as if it has passed into another reality. John listens for the sound of a retreating engine. There is none. Balancing the suitcase against his foot, he watches the last light drain from behind a stand of silver birches: a visual dopplering; mushroom shadows sprout up and lengthen across to form a hedge of darkness in which the birches gleam faintly—bones. Then he goes inside.
The enclosed porch opens onto the kitchen. He can make out a sink and stove to his right, a dining table to the left, shelves and counters facing. The living room beyond is lost in shadow. The deep grey half-light makes him strain his eyes; objects seem to hang suspended in light as in a fluid, kept recognizable only by an intense, squinting focus—they threaten to slip out of resolution into formlessness, a primitive amorphism in which they are not bound by human preconceptions as to their shape and nature. Faced with this rebellion, he gropes for a wall switch, finds it, flips it up.
New shadows snap across the room, click into their accustomed places under chairs, along the edges of the tables, the counters, the shelves, in the angle of the sink and stove. Positive and negative space define order, etching each other’s borders; between them they shape the room, sculpting it out of light and shadow, overt and implied. Pinning it down. He begins to breathe more easily. John sets the suitcase down beside its mate and moves into the center of the room. A mirror over the shelves gives him his reflection: pale, high forehead, drawn. He ignores it, uneasily avoiding the reflection’s eyes. His friend’s things are still here: he can see soiled plates stacked in the sink basin, frying pans and pots on the drainboard, a waffle iron, a cigarette-rolling machine. Reassured, he moves forward into the living room, turning on lights as he goes.
The living room is a large, L-shaped chamber, taking up most of the ground floor. The shorter end of the L has been used as a writing room. It contains two mahogany tables, still paper stacked; a massive, dust-covered typewriter; bound files lined up on the window ledge, flanked by ceramic pots containing withered ivy; a tall china cabinet that faces in toward the long bar of the L. The two sections are divided by a high, open archway. The long section of the L contains a couch, a settee, an end table, an overstuffed chair. The stairway leading to the second floor is at the far end. Set in the facing wall—between two glassed-in doors leading to the veranda—is a stone fireplace, filled with charred wood scraps and ashes. Books glint on the mantelpiece over the fireplace: heavy, leatherbound, oiled volumes. He steps forward into the room, unconsciously wary, turning his head from side to side. He stops, sniffing the dead air. The air is musty and tomb-dry, as if it has not been breathed for a hundred years. He takes another step, and dust puffs from the living-room carpet under his feet. The dust swirls avidly up to meet him, dancing fiercely and joyously in the middle of the air. The backlighting throws his long, spindly shadow ahead, across the carpet, the andirons, the ashes, up the wall of the fireplace to the mantel, into the dust and silence of the empty house.
Later that evening, while unpacking his suitcases and arranging his belongings—mostly clothes—in the bedroom, John is submerged in a silence so deep and profound that it seems to manifest itself as a low hum, a steady buzz felt with the back of the teeth rather than heard. There are none of the settling of floorboards or knocking of waterpipes expected in a house this old, and the absolute quiet is disturbing. He finds himself wishing for a r
adio or a phonograph, anything to keep his ear from straining constantly in anticipation of sounds that never come. He would even welcome a barrage of that tinny “swing” music that always sounds as if it is being played underwater a million miles away, or one of those endless, dully foreboding commentaries on the danger of American involvement in Europe. At least they would be company, and their taste of the mundane and the absurd oddly comforting when balanced against the alien perfection of complete silence. The human voices would remind him that life is still going on in the ticking world, that he is not, as it feels, suspended in a limbo between creations: a tiny detail from an obsolete continuum that has been overlooked and not yet swept into the melt for the new.
As he is closing the lid on the last empty suitcase and putting it into the closet to store, he thinks he hears a noise downstairs: the slamming of a door, and rapid, heavy footsteps—passing underneath, headed into the living room. The noise is so clear and loud after the hush of the past hours—and such a sudden, unexpected answer to his strained listening—that he starts, and knocks over his bag. Leaving it, he goes out the door and down the corridor toward the stairwell, puzzlement changing to an unreasonable, unexplainable fear as he goes, metamorphosing more completely with every step. His heart thumps against his chest, like a fist from inside. Slowly, he goes down the stairs into the living room, not understanding who such a late visitor could be—the man from the agency perhaps?—and not understanding why he is afraid.
No one is there.
John stands for a moment at the foot of the stairs—one hand on the railing, head tilted and then walks through the living room and the writing room to the kitchen, stepping with the exaggerated caution of one who expects a viper to strike from concealment. There is no one in the house. Bewildered, he returns to the living room.
As he nears the fireplace, he hears the footsteps again—this time they are upstairs, just as loud, just as distinct. They pass overhead as he listens. There is an unpleasant rasping quality to them now, as if the feet are too heavy to lift and must be scraped along the floor. Clearly there is someone upstairs, but no one has passed him in his sortie into the kitchen, and there is only one stairwell leading to the second floor. He feels the short hairs bristle on the back of his neck and along his arms. He forces himself to go upstairs, pausing after every other tread to listen, telling himself that at worst it is only a tramp looking for something to steal. But there is no one upstairs either. Although he searches the entire second floor—closets, linen cabinets, the bathroom—and even, with the help of a chair and a flashlight, peers into the crawlspace between the ceiling and the roof, he can find no one, nothing, and no way for anyone to have avoided him.
That night he sleeps uneasily, feverishly, fighting his bed-clothes as if they are snakes. In the morning, he cannot remember his dreams.
The next day is hot and clear, and John decides to go outside. He wants to look over some of his old notes, to see if he can assemble something workable out of the shambles of his career, and it would be pleasant to read on the lawn. He stands in the doorway of the porch, blinking against the furnace glare of the sunlight, smelling heat and raw earth. Suddenly he is reluctant to leave the shelter of the house. At some point in the morning, John has stopped thinking of the house as desolate and menacing, and has begun to consider it comfortable and peaceful, its cool, restful half-light infinitely preferable to the hot welter out of doors. He is not aware of the change in his thinking. Almost he turns to go back into the kitchen, but he reminds himself irritably that he is here for his health, after all. He finds the idea of sunning himself distasteful, but he has been told pointedly that it is healthy to “take the sun,” so take it he will. He steps over the threshold. Warm air swallows him, a golden pear sliding over his skin. His nostrils are flared by the strong resin smell of grass. His eyes dilate. Blinded, he stumbles down the porch stairs to the flagstone path.
Blinking and squinting, John moves away from the house. His shoes click on flagstone, then swish through grass as he strays from the path. The grass whispers around his legs, caressing his ankles, rasping abrasively against the material of his trousers. His vision returns slowly, and as it does, he feels the earth roll majestically under his feet in a long sea swell, like a giant’s shoulder shrugging uneasily in sleep. The sky is a brilliant blue. He can sense the house behind him, the top half rising up and over him, a cresting wave about to topple. Now it is the house that is distasteful—again it seems brooding, mournful, unwholesomely confining. This time he is aware of his change of attitude, and dimly puzzled by it.
John plows across the lawn, leaving a flattened wake behind him, like a boat. There is a toy wagon on its side, rusted almost solid, a few flecks of red paint still showing; it is tied down firmly by grass, a robot Gulliver. John nudges it with his toe, and a wheel spins a tired protest in a shrill voice of rust. A rubber duck next to the wagon, dead, eaten away by weather, the side of its face distorted as if by acid. The shadow of the house lies across the lawn here, and it is cooler and less murmurous. John’s fingers work uneasily on the buttons of his shirt. He turns and walks at an angle to his previous path, the house roof seeming to describe a backwards arc against the sky as he watches, until the sun pops into view again above the roof peak, a hot copper penny squeezed from between an invisible thumb and finger. Its heat makes his bare arms tingle pleasantly, and he blinks again, almost drowsy.
There was a garden here once, by the rear of the house. He steps into a ring of faded white stones, careful not to wrench his ankle, as the ground inside the circle is a little lower. At the far end of the ring is a chinaberry tree, a white oak, a few silver birches. He touches one of the birches: it feels like coral, sharp, unfriendly, dead—stratified. Startled, he snatches his hand away. He had not expected that type of texture, it is not congruous with the texture of the bark that he can see with his eyes. It should not feel that way. A sun-dog winks at him from an upstairs window, under the eaves. Uneasy again, John walks on until he comes to the dirt access road that circles the house. He scuffles the toe of his shoe in the dust, as though testing some earthen tide. He is reluctant to cross the road. Somehow, it is a boundary.
He can feel the house behind him. Without turning his head, he can see it: the high peak of the roof, the windows like eyes, the door like a gaping mouth—growing up out of the earth and shrouded in its turn with rank growth. A troll, with dogwood in its hair and rhododendron in its beard. Very old, very strong, patient as mud.
Irritated by this nonsense, John strides back toward the house. He has come here to recover from irrational fancies; he does not need new ones. He spends an hour or so making a mental list of the household repairs he will have to accomplish, rummaging around to find the proper tools, and dragging an extension ladder up from the dank, low-ceilinged basement. Then he discovers that his energy has leaked away, absorbed by the morning as by a blotter. In spite of his effort to keep his mind on practical things, he is again awash with jittery, contradictory emotion that makes the thought of attempting repairs intolerable. He will read his notes then after all, he decides grimly. He will not be defeated by the day.
John wades to the center of the lawn with his notebook, and sits down determinedly, in the sun. Sitting, the grass comes up above his waist, and he has the illusion that he has just lowered himself into a tub of sun-warmed green water. For the first time, he notices how overgrown the grounds actually are. Weeds and wildflowers have sprung up and proliferated everywhere, and John is submerged in an ocean of growth. He finds this a sensation both terrifying and dizzyingly exultant, and, sitting in this breathing tabernacle, this beating green heart, John feels oddly ashamed.
Uncertainly, John takes off his shirt, and lets the sun bake his back. He moves uncomfortably, uncrossing and refolding his legs, lifting the binder from his lap and placing it in the grass before him. He is painfully aware of the unhealthy pallor of his skin, and he begins thinking, in a disjointed fashion, of sickness, of enclosure: of d
ecay embodied in the image of a wax flower yellowing with age—death so gradual, so subtle and imperceptible that it is not so much a transition between states as an intensifying of a long-existing condition, and even the soul involved may be unable to tell when life ended and death began, or if it yet has, or even if there is any difference between the two. He stretches an arm out along the grass, fish-belly white against new green, and has to reassure himself that he can still feel the blood throbbing in his neck, at the temples, in the wrists; that he still breathes, that he has not forgotten to live.
Birches sigh and toss overhead, and he looks up. The perfection of the weather is somehow alien, even more so than the grey, distorting twilight that had greeted him upon his arrival. Everything within the limits of his vision is endowed with an excessive clarity. There is a feeling of craft behind each incidence of light, the fall of every shadow, the position of the smallest rock: as if the world was some fantastic simulacrum—three-dimensional and discernible by all the senses—painted over another and more complex reality.
This thought disturbs him greatly, and he looks down again. He is suddenly afraid that if he continues to watch he may see the world waver and go out like an abruptly extinguished candleflame, and that beyond the guttering of the universal ember he will see—something else. What that something else, that other thing, may be he does not know. He is afraid of that moment of clear sight.
Silly, he thinks. Naive and juvenile, as have been all his moods and preoccupations since coming to this country house. He can imagine the scorn of his intellectual friends in London and Boston, the curiously similar—although differently motivated—contempt of his stolid, cannery-owning father, the needle-sharp disdain of his former fiancée, tough-minded, intensely practical Marilyn. But he cannot control the swing and scurry of his emotions. Like nervous fish, they dart where they will, unpredictably, and he cannot stop them.
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 42
