Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

“I do not fully understand,” I said, striving for a mature and measured tone but succeeding only in sounding petulant, “exactly what is expected of me.” I had not been to see my father—it had been made clear that I was not to see him—since the day he entered the hospital. That same day my littlest sister had fled the house in terror, while this gentlest of men overturned furniture and shouted defiance at unseen demons. The day it was decided he could no longer be cared for at home. “Is today special for any reason? What ought I to do when I see him?”

  I did not ask “Why?” but that was what I meant, and the question my mother answered.

  “I have my reasons,” she said curtly. “Just as I have good and sufficient reason for not informing you as to their exact nature just yet.” We had arrived at the hospital grounds, and the gatekeeper had let us in.

  My mother led me down the walk under the buttonwood trees to the west wing. A soft southern breeze alleviated the heat. The hospital buildings were situated within a tract of farmland which had been preserved within the city limits so that the afflicted could refresh themselves with simple chores. Closing my eyes, I can still smell fresh-mown hay, and hear the whir of a spinning wheel. Sunflowers grew by the windows, exactly like that sunflower which had appeared like a miracle one spring between the cobbles of our back alley and lasted into the autumn without being trampled or torn down, drawing goldfinches and sentimental young women. You could not wish for a more pleasant place in which to find your father imprisoned as a lunatic.

  The cell-keeper's wife came to the door and smiled a greeting.

  My mother thrust a banana into my hand. “Here. You may give him this.” Which was the first intimation I had that she was not to accompany me.

  She turned and crunched off, down the gravel path.

  The cell-keeper's wife led me through the ward to a room reserved for visitors. I cannot recall its furniture. The walls were whitewashed. A horsefly buzzed about in the high corners, irritably seeking a passage into the outer world.

  “Wait here,” the woman said. “I'll summon an attendant to bring him.”

  She left.

  For a long still time I stood, waiting. Eventually I sat down and stared blindly about. Seeing nothing and thinking less. Hating the horsefly.

  The banana was warm and brownish-yellow in my hand.

  * * * *

  Aeons passed. Sometimes there were noises in the hall. Footsteps would approach, and then recede. They were never those of the man I fearfully awaited.

  Finally, however, the door opened. There was my father, being led by the arm by a burly young attendant. He shuffled into the room. The attendant placed him in a chair and left, locking the door behind him.

  My father, who had always been a rather plump man, with a merchant's prosperous stomach, was now gaunt and lean. His flesh hung loosely about him; where his face had been round, loose jowls now hung.

  “Hello, Father,” I said.

  He did not respond. Nor would he meet my eyes. Instead, his gaze moved with a slow restlessness back and forth across the floor, as if he had misplaced something and were trying to find it.

  Miserably, I tried to make conversation.

  “Mary finished making her new dress yesterday. It's all of green velvet. The exact same color as that of the cushions and sofa and drapes in Mr. Barclay's parlor. When Mother saw the cloth she had chosen, she said, ‘Well, I know one place you won't be wearing that.'”

  I laughed. My father did not.

  “Oh, and you recall Stephen Girard, of course. He had a cargo of salt at his wharf last summer which Simpson refused to buy—trying to cheapen it to his own price, you see. Well, he said to his porter, ‘Tom, why can't you buy that cargo?’ and Tom replied, ‘Why, sir, how can I? I have no money.’ But ‘Never mind,’ said Girard, ‘I'll advance you the cost. Take it and sell it by the load, and pay me as you can.’ That was last summer, as I said, and now the porter is well on his way to being Simpson's chief rival in the salt trade.”

  When this anecdote failed to rouse my father—who had avidly followed the least pulsation in the fortunes of our merchant neighbors, and loved best to hear of sudden success combined with honest labor—I knew that nothing I could hope to say would serve to involve him.

  “Father, do you know who I am?” I had not meant to ask—the question just burst out of me.

  This roused some spirit in the man at last. “Of course I know. Why wouldn't I know?” He was almost belligerent, but there was no true anger behind his words. They were all bluff and empty bluster and he still would not meet my eyes. “It's as clear as ... as clear as two plus two is four. That's ... that's logic, isn't it? Two plus two is four. That's logic.”

  On his face was the terrible look of a man who had failed his family and knew it. He might not know the exact nature of his sin, but the awareness of his guilt clearly ate away at him. My presence, the presence of someone he ought to know, only made matters worse.

  “I'm your son,” I said. “Your son, William.”

  Still he would not meet my eye.

  How many hours I languished in the Purgatory of his presence I do not know. I continued to talk for as long as I could, though he obviously could make no sense of my words, because the only alternative to speech was silence—and such silence as was unbearable to think upon. A silence that would swallow me whole.

  All the time I spoke, I clutched the banana. There was no place I could set it down. Sometimes I shifted it from one hand to the other. Once or twice I let it lie uncomfortably in my lap. I was constantly aware of it. As my throat went dry and I ran out of things to say, my mind focused itself more and more on that damnable fruit.

  My mother always brought some small treat with her when she visited her husband. She would not be pleased if I returned with it. This I knew. But neither did I relish the thought of emphasizing the cruel reversal in our roles, his abject helplessness and my relative ascendancy, by feeding him a trifle exactly as he had so often fed me in my infancy.

  In an anguish, I considered my choices. All terrible. All unacceptable.

  Finally, more to rid myself of the obligation than because I thought it the right thing to do, I offered the loathsome thing to my father.

  He took it.

  Eyes averted, he unhurriedly peeled the banana. Without enthusiasm, he bit into it. With animal sadness he ate it.

  That is the one memory that, try as I might, I cannot nor ever will be able to forgive myself for: That I saw this once-splendid man, now so sad and diminished, eating a banana like a Barbary ape.

  * * * *

  But there's a worse thing I must tell you: For when at last I fell silent, time itself congealed about me, extending itself so breathlessly that it seemed to have ceased altogether. Years passed while the sunlight remained motionless on the whitewashed wall. The horsefly's buzzing ceased, yet I knew that if I raised my head I would see it still hanging in the air above me. I stared at my poor ruined father in helpless horror, convinced that I would never leave that room, that instant, that sorrow. Finally, I squeezed my eyes tight shut and imagined the attendant coming at last to lead my father away and restore me again to my mother.

  In my imagination, I burst into tears. It was some time before I could speak again. When I could, I said, “Dear God, Mother! How could you do this to me?”

  “I required,” she said, “your best estimation of his condition.”

  “You visit him every day.” One of my hands twisted and rose up imploringly, like that of a man slowly drowning. “You must know how he is.”

  She did not grip my hand. She offered no comfort. She did not apologize. “I have stood by your father through sickness and health,” she said, “and will continue to do so for as long as he gains the least comfort from my visits. But I have for some time suspected he no longer recognizes me. So I brought you. Now you must tell me whether I should continue to come here.”

  There was steel in my mother, and never more so than at that moment. She was not s
orry for what she had done to me. Nor was she wrong to have done it.

  Even then I knew that.

  “Stay away,” I said, “and let your conscience be at ease. Father is gone from us forever.”

  But I could not stop crying. I could not stop crying. I could not stop crying. Back down the streets of Philadelphia I walked, for all to see and marvel at, bawling like an infant, hating this horrible life and hating myself even more for my own selfish resentment of my parents, who were each going through so much worse than I. Yet even as I did so, I was acutely aware that still I sat in that timeless room and that all I was experiencing was but a projection of my imagination. Nor has that sense ever gone entirely away. Even now, if I still my thoughts to nothing, this world begins to fade and I sense myself to still be sitting in my father's absence.

  * * * *

  From this terrible moment I fled, and found myself back upon the dory, returning from my father's burial. Our hearts were all light and gay. We chattered as the doryman, head down, plied his oars.

  My baby sister Barbara was trailing a hand in the water, a blaze of light where her face should have been, hoping to touch a fish.

  “Will,” said Mary in a wondering voice. “Look.” And I followed her pointing finger upward. I turned toward the east, to the darkening horizon above Treaty Island and the New Jersey shore, where late afternoon thunderheads were gathering.

  Scudding before the storm and moving straight our way was a structure of such incredible complexity that the eye could make no sense of it. It filled the sky. Larger than human mind could accept, it bore down upon us like an aerial city out of the Arabian Nights, an uncountable number of hulls and platforms dependent from a hundred or more balloons.

  Once, years before, I had seen a balloon ascent. Gently the craft had severed its link with the earth, gracefully ascending into the sky, a floating island, a speck of terrestriality taken up into the kingdom of the air. Like a schooner it sailed, dwindling, and away. It disappeared before it came anywhere near the horizon.

  If that one balloon was a schooner, than this was an Armada. Where that earlier ship had been an islet, a mote of wind-borne land carried into the howling wilderness of the air, what confronted me now was a mighty continent of artifice.

  It was a monstrous sight, made doubly so by the scurrying specks which swarmed the shrouds and decks of the craft and which, once recognized as men, magnified the true size of the thing beyond believing.

  The wind shifted, and the thunder of its engines filled the universe.

  That was my first glimpse of the mighty airship Empire.

  * * * *

  The world turned under my restless mind, dispelling sunshine and opening onto rain. Two days casually disappeared into the fold. I was lurching up Chestnut street, water splashing underfoot, arms aching, almost running. Mary trotted alongside me, holding an umbrella over the twenty-quart pot I carried, and still the rain contrived to run down the back of my neck.

  “Not so fast!” Mary fretted. “Don't lurch about like that. You'll trip and spill.”

  “We can't afford to dawdle. Why in heaven's name did Mother have to leave the pot so long over the fire?”

  “It's obvious you'll never be a cook. The juices required time to addle; otherwise the stew would be cold and nasty upon arrival.”

  “Oh, there'll be no lack of heat where we're going, I assure you. Tacey will make it hot enough and then some.”

  “Get on with you. She won't.”

  “She will. Tacey is a despot in the kitchen, Napoleon reborn, reduced in stature but expanded in self-conceit. She is a Tiberius Claudius Nero in parvum when she has a spoon in her hand. Never since Xanthippe was such a peppery tongue married to such a gingery spirit. A lifetime of kitchen fires have in the kettle of her being combined—”

  Mary laughed, and begged me to stop. “You make my sides ache!” she cried. And so of course I continued.

  “—to make of her a human pepper pot, a snapper soup seasoned with vinegar, a simmering mélange of Hindoo spices whose effect is to make not one's tongue but one's ears burn. She—”

  “Stop, stop, stop!”

  Parties were being held all over town in honor of the officers and crew of the Empire, and the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic. There were nearly a thousand crewmen all told, which was far too many to be feted within a single building. Mary and I were bound for a lesser gathering at the Library Company, presided over by a minor Biddle and catered by Julius Nash and his crew of colored waiters.

  We were within sight of our destination when I looked up and saw my future.

  Looming above the Walnut Street Prison yard, tethered by a hundred lines, was the Empire, barely visible through the grey sheets of rain. It dwarfed the buildings beneath. Gusts of wind tugged and shoved at the colorless balloons, so that they moved slightly, darkness within darkness, like an uneasy dream shifting within a sleeper's mind.

  I gaped, and stepped in a puddle so deep the water went over my boot. Stumbling, I crashed to one knee. Mary shrieked.

  Then I was up and hobbling-running again, as fast I could. My trousers were soaked with ice-cold water, and my knee blazed with pain, but at least the pot was untouched.

  It was no easy life, being the eldest son in a family dependent upon a failing boarding-house. Constant labor was my lot. Not that I minded labor—work was the common lot of everyone along the docks, and cheerily enough submitted to. It was the closing of prospects that clenched my soul like an iron fist.

  In those days I wanted to fly to the Sun and build a palace on the Moon. I wanted to tunnel to the dark heart of the Earth and discover rubies and emeralds as large as my father's hotel. I wanted to stride across the land in seven-league boots, devise a submersible boat and with it discover a mermaid nation under the sea, climb mountains in Africa and find leopards at their snowy peaks, descend Icelandic volcanos to fight fire-monsters and giant lizards, be marked down in the history books as the first man to stand naked at the North Pole. Rumors that the Empire would be signing replacements for those airmen who had died during the flight from London ate at my soul like a canker.

  Father Tourneaux had had great hopes that I might one day be called to the priesthood, preferably as a Jesuit, and when I was younger my mother had encouraged this ambition in me with tales of martyrdom by Iroquois torture and the unimaginable splendors of the Vatican state. But, like so much else, that dream had died a slow death with the dwindling and wasting away of my father.

  In prosperous times, a port city offered work enough and opportunity in plenty for any ambitious young man. But Philadelphia had not yet recovered from the blockades of the recent war. The posting my brother-in-law had as good as promised me had vanished along with two ships of his nascent fleet, sacrificed to the avarice of British power. The tantalizing possibility that there might be money found to send me to the University of Paris to study mathematics had turned to pebbles and mist as well. My prospects were nonexistent.

  Mary grabbed my arm and dragged me around. “Will—you're dreaming again! You've walked right past the doorway.”

  * * * *

  Tacey Nash saw us come in. Eyes round with outrage, she directed at me a glare that would have stunned a starling, had one been unlucky enough to fly through its beam. “Where have you been?”

  I set the pot down on a table, and proceeded to unwrap layers of newspapers and old blanket scraps from its circumference. “Mother insisted that—”

  “Don't talk back.” She lifted the lid and with it wafted the steam from the stewed oysters toward her nostrils. They flared as the scent of ginger reached them. “Ah.” Briefly her face softened. “Your mother still knows how to cook.”

  One of the waiters placed the pot over a warming stove. Mary briskly tied on an apron—with Patricia married and out of the house, she'd assumed the role of the practical sister and, lacking Patty's organizational genius, tried to compensate with energy—and with a long spoon gave the pot a good stir. Another w
aiter brought up tureens, and she began filling them.

  “Well?” Tacey said to me. “Are you so helpless that you cannot find any work to do?”

  So the stew had come in time, after all! Relieved, I glanced over my shoulder and favored my sister with a grin. She smiled back at me, and for one warm instant, all was well.

  “Where shall I start?” I asked.

  * * * *

  Why was I so unhappy in those days? There was a girl and I had loved her in my way, and thought she loved me too. One of us tired of the other, and so we quarreled and separated, to the eternal misery of both. Or so I assume—I retain not a jot of this hypothetical affair, but considering my age, it seems inevitable. Yet it was not a romantic malaise I suffered from, but a disease more all-encompassing.

  I was miserable with something far worse than love.

  I had a hunger within me for something I could neither define nor delimit. And yet at the same time I suffered the queasy fullness of a man who has been at the table one hour too many. I felt as if I had swallowed several live cats which were now proceeding to fight a slow, sick, unending war within me. If I could, I would have vomited up everything—cats, girl, wharves, boarding-house, city, world, my entire history to date—and only felt the better for being rid of them. Every step I took seemed subtly off-balance. Every word I said sounded exactly wrong. Everything about me—my soul, mind, thought, and physical being—was in my estimation thoroughly detestable.

  I had no idea then what was wrong with me.

  Now I know that I was simply young.

  I suppose I should describe that makeshift kitchen, set up within the Loganian Annex of the Library. The warming pans steaming. The elegant black men with their spotless white gloves bustling out with tureens of stew and returning with bowls newly emptied of punch. How, for the body of the meal, the waiters stood behind the airmen (who, though dressed in their finest, were still a raffish lot), refilling their plates and goblets, to the intense embarrassment of everyone save the officers, who were of course accustomed to such service, and how Julius himself stood by the dignitaries’ table, presiding over all, with here a quiet signal to top up an alderman's glass, and there a solemn pleasantry as he spooned cramberries onto the plate of the ranking officer.