by Nagle, Pati
He reached for the dagger, as if he would sheathe it in his body. Suddenly afraid for him, for us, I took a step backward, and I dropped the blade behind me.
Ravening, desperate for the knife, for the power, my uncle fell upon me. His hands grasped at my skirts, my waist. His fingers fumbled at my white sash, and he buried his face against my thighs. I struggled, and he ripped at the gossamer cloth. I felt his lips, felt his clinging mouth on my flesh.
He was young and strong and holy, and he pinned me to the earth. No man had ever touched me like that before; no man had even seen me clothed as a woman. Terror rose in me, leaping up like a living animal, like a beast I’d never seen, even in my dreams. In my nightmares. My uncle rose to meet that beast, thrusting himself against me, into me.
I screamed.
The willow tree could not have known what frightened me, could not have known what evil force interrupted our magical working. Before I could tug my clothes back to a semblance of modesty, before I could speak a calming spell, before I could understand, explain, the tree had taken Merlin. Its trunk opened wide, and its branches fed the writhing, bellowing man into its great cavity. Before I could reach out to save my uncle, he was gone.
∞
And now, I sit beside the fire in the cottage that Merlin and I shared for more than a decade. I sit in a chair, and I watch my son sleep on his pallet by the fire.
Seven years ago, Merlin and I worked our magic. Seven years ago, he ripped me from our protected world of magic, thrust me into the terrifying world of men. He failed to meet his own strictest requirement of purity, his own demand for perfection. Seven years ago, the willow took my uncle, the father of my child.
At first, I tried to get the willow tree to open. I begged. I cried. I threatened. I harnessed all the magic that Merlin had taught me. The willow’s protection was too strong, though. It was bound to save me, to save our holy working, from whatever threat it sensed. It was bound to take my uncle.
Sometimes at night, I cannot sleep, for all the questions running through my mind. Could our spell have worked? Is Merlin even now growing older every day, inside the willow tree? Or will he continue his strange backward living, until he becomes a boy, a babe, then nothing? Did he cease to exist the moment the trunk snapped shut around him, the moment I cried out in terror and in pain?
Maybe all that is left of Merlin is his son. My son.
And despite all that happened, I catch myself loving the child that grew out of that midnight terror, loving him more than any Lady of the Lake should ever love a boy-child. I love the way he watches me as I work the spells his father taught me. I love the line of his jaw, which he sets stubbornly when I forbid him to try some new magic. I love the way he lives each day in the normal way of man, growing older from sunrise to sunset, as his father never did.
And so I try to keep him from hearing the stories about me. In Camelot, they say I am a heartless wench, a slattern who seduced the mighty Merlin. They say that I plotted to lock Merlin away, used his magic against him, betrayed a weak and foolish old man with my wicked passions and my ready thighs.
I think about the stories, and I watch my sleeping son. I think about the different meanings of love—between a mother and her child, between a teacher and a student, between a man and a woman. I think about betrayal, and I think about the truth.
Art & Science
Sue Lange
“Art & Science” is my favorite story because I want to live in this world I’ve created. It’s dark and weird and makes no sense. I love all my absurd stories, but this is the one I want to make a movie out of. I’d like to see what a cinematographer and set designer would do with it. Beyond that, I want this one to have happened to me. To me it is beautiful—like entering Alice’s Wonderland. We smart apes have created a dualistic culture and some people say that’s where our problems lie. But I think the construct is ripe for entertainment and I like playing with it. Laughing at it. Having a joke at its expense. Will this story change the world? Of course not. The world goes around with or without us. But it’s fun watching it spin. This story is the spin of the world in my mind.
∞ ∞ ∞
This story takes place back at UT, University Tech, just before I left the physics sector in the student ghetto. The tech heads there had cordoned off a section of the courtyard, declaring it theirs so the divas over by the stage area wouldn’t misunderstand. Make sense?
I suppose not. Let me clarify: the theater arts group and the quantum mechanics shared room and board. Sounds weird, but they worked it out with the cordon and never the twain met. You could tell the physics majors by the long hair and the fact that they were as old as the hills. Seems like they took forever to graduate. They sat around at little round café tables set up in the courtyard and drank coffee while discussing things they didn’t understand: chaos theory, string theory, time travel. That sort of thing.
The thespians had no time for theories. They were all practice because they were young and beautiful and going places. Hollywood most likely. I’ve seen several of their faces since that time in ads for toothpaste and rectal ointment so I guess they knew what they were doing.
Being a physics major with a vocal arts minor, I fit right into the place. Had a room on the fifth floor of a walkup on the techie half of the courtyard. There were always gangs of four and five down there hanging about in the corners and cheap seats.
The neighborhood resembled a dungeon in that practically no light filtered down to the courtyard. The walls were straight and high, and a permanent layer of dudgy grunge lay on the cracked doorways, broken-out windows, crumbling architecture, and decaying fecal matter in the corners. Just below that layer, there was another one of grease. It was like the whole area had been cluster-bombed with a cockroach treatment years before and nobody had bothered to clean it off before the dust settled in. Gray was the predominant color. Thank God the theater people were into red and chartreuse, otherwise anybody who happened into the alley would dim to a dusty mindset forever. As annoyingly perky as they were, those soon-to-be-famous actors were sort of needed. But you get the picture: the place was dirty, smelly, overcrowded, cheap. It certainly wasn’t the type of territory to get territorial over.
Across this courtyard that hadn’t seen daylight or scrub brush since the day the wealthy moved out and the students moved in, the theater majors had constructed a stage. It took up one whole wall of the quadrangle and the footlights provided the only illumination around. Perfect for a group of people that are intent on being watched. With no curtain to close themselves off from the rest of our prying eyes, they practiced their struts and frets out in the open. I’d done scales myself there on occasion but always self-consciously as some of the younger, good-looking guys from the time-sequencing lab always seemed to be around just at that time. I hated for them to think I was off in any way.
Not sure why I was so worried about that. Physics majors are inherent stoners. The biggest ones on campus, in fact, followed closely by the philosophy majors. You have to get high to see God. And seeing God is how physicists learn all that theory. You certainly can’t learn it by using the tools mortal man has been given: a human brain. Nope, gotta go see the Big Guy. So physicists are for the most part pot heads and acid takers. All post twentieth-century relative theories are developed while under the influence. Why would I be concerned about being taken for a fuzzy-thinker in that milieu? Low self-esteem? You wouldn’t think so. I’d just finished my master’s thesis, and I’d done it, I must say, with aplomb.
My project entailed attaining enlightenment through the use of good vibration as opposed to chemical libation. The good vibration in this case being a powerful rendition of ‘My Funny Valentine.’ Certain musical notes and combinations of notes and series of notes, specifically the “Are you smart” line in the aforementioned song, are guaranteed to put the listener on a higher plane. I’d worked my voice into a timbre rich in near-inaudible overtones that tingled not only the ear, but also the inner wo
rkings of every human heart and bowels. You just can’t stay straight or stand still or not be changed in some way when I sing ‘My Funny Valentine.’ I’d worked for years on this and had just received the approval of my instructors that morning. They hadn’t exactly given me a glowing pass, but having left them in a puddle of tears, incapable of speech, and helpless on the floor, I’d figured I’d done the job.
The thing about that line, that question—are you smart?—isn’t just the tingling vibration of notes juxtaposed in such a way as to reverberate the belly emotionally. The thing is the question itself is so loaded with meaning. Are you smart? We’re all smart aren’t we? We can prove to the world we are—we have the pieces of paper to prove it—but we never fool ourselves. We always question ourselves. Are we smart? Sure, but are we smart enough? Smarter than the rest of the pack? Are we better? More sexually attractive? Will we get laid? All of that implosive meaning is in that line, and when you package it up in such a strong interval between the “you” and the “smart,” you’ve got more than a loaded question. You’ve got psychological dynamite. No wonder the thesis board was helpless on the floor.
On my last day of scholarship, my last day in the ghetto, my graduation day, just as I was about to hit the road, Jack (and I mean Jack Kerouac because I didn’t have a job and felt the only alternative was to go off and discover America), an event of stellar proportion occurred in the physics sector. A fight started between the two groups hunkered down there.
Keep in mind that an altercation between these two peoples—the physics majors and the dramatic arts people—is not likely to rival a WWE event in action. Not like if some business major had sparked one of the hockey team’s girls. Now that would be a fight. This was more like if someone on the tennis team looked cock-eyed at one of the elementary ed majors: insults would be lobbed and tongues stuck out, but no blood. Still, kind of painful to watch.
I’m not sure how it started, but as I was dragging my steamer trunk down the stairs, my progress became blocked by a group on the stoop. Seems a crowd had formed there to watch the big do and kibitz as watchers of fights are wont. I propped the door open with my cargo and pushed through the crowd to determine the cause of the stoppage.
Somewhere in the middle, a guy with long, long hair but only on the sides of his head, not on top, stood gripping a smoldering smoking pipe. He was locked eye-to-eye with a young blond gripping a smudged and tattered paper in his hand. A big circle had formed around these two who were backlit by the footlights so you could hardly see their faces. But you could see the spit fly between them as they sputtered their nasty arguments. It was an artistically pleasing fight, I must say.
“A light year is a measure of space, not time . . . ” the old guy was saying.
The young guy said, “It’s a metaphor, sir, dialogue taken from the street. It has validity, regardless if in error.”
Old guy: “You have a chance here, a duty, in fact, to enlighten the people.”
Young guy: “I am enlightening the people to the hipness of the world.”
The crowd was getting in on the act. The physics majors shouted encouraging things like “theoretical,” “at the atomic level,” and “if a train is traveling at the speed of light in one direction . . . ”
The theatre people egged the blond on by all stating the same thing at slightly different cadences: “Julius Caesar, you seize her and we’ll squeeze her.” Each one just a little bit off from unison so the effect resembled a crowd scene in a DeMille flick.
The action increased in intensity and any minute you just knew somebody was going to say something about right-brained faggots or somebody else was going to mention left-brained stiffs with their heads up their asses. It was definitely heading to worse before it got better.
Outsiders began entering the courtyard from the only entrance, plugging up any chance for my egress. Graduates like me still wearing the square cap, parents of said graduates, and even a professor or two were filing into the tiny squeezed courtyard. Everyone wanted to witness the square-off.
Tensions between the two disparate groups had been building for eight years, ever since the drama department had been assigned to share the digs of the physical theorists. Years had slipped by and no one had spoken aloud about the uneasy tension growing. We all felt it and knew it, but tried to ignore the heavy feeling brewing in the belly of the beast. Nevertheless, sooner or later somebody had to say something to somebody. They’d all been watching each other, waiting for a slip, waiting for a moment to prove that one was better than the other. Today was the day. A faux pas had occurred. One group was to be deflated. The other declared triumphant.
But I wasn’t having it. I had light years of travel ahead of me and wasn’t going to wait another attosecond to get to it. But the swarm of rubbernecking humanity, none of whose members could give a hoot for one small wannabe beatnik and her desire to leave the stifling premises, blocked the exit. So I did the only thing I could do, I broke out into my master’s thesis.
Sounds surreal, but it worked. I knew it would, I’d worked out that mind-bending phraseology that could effect peace amongst the most savage of combatants. (It probably wouldn’t work in the WWE, however.)
Keep in mind we’re talking about Physicists and Actors. Are they smart? Better than any cheap belly shot, that line. Think about it. What if you were a self-respecting physics major? You’ve done the homework (i.e. dropped the acid, smoked the pot), you actually understand the theory of relativity. You are smart. But here come the pretty boys. They have trouble memorizing the Gettysburg Address, they stumble over Bible verses, yet they claim Shakespeare. And they always get the girl. How about having that thrown up in your face? And if you were said pretty boy how would you feel knowing that the subtlest of subtext eludes you because when it comes to the world you haven’t a clue? You haven’t worked out the proper motivation, you don’t know the back story. You are not smart, you are merely pretty.
Oh how those words must sting: that question that deep down you know the answer to but will never cop to before an audience. And as great an actor as you are, you’ll never pull it off. And sure you’ll get the girl, and the cocaine habit, the divorce, the thoughts of suicide, and when you’re forty, the paunch, the ulcer, the runaround from your agent.
The two quarrelers looked at each other, sort of stuck in a loop, each one’s brains short-circuiting to a certain conclusion. Are you smart? They were both stung, both stupid, both wrong, and both defeated.
The crowd loosened up and the obstruction slowly dissipated. The physics gang headed back to a ten-year project they’d been working on to reduce everyone’s heating bills by sharing the steam to each flat in short bursts and collecting the dissipating energy via insulated copper plate and disseminating it later during the coldest parts of the nights. The thespians returned to the play they had been rehearsing, the blond’s, a musical about an ugly lover. He was having trouble coming up with a title and theme song. It was scheduled to open on February 14th and still he wasn’t getting it.
I picked up my trunk, pushed through the loosening crowd in the ghetto, hailed a cab, and hit the road, Jack Kerouac.
Genuine Old Master
Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust comments, “While this is about culture shock, as most of MZB’s works are, it looks at the lighter side of it. It’s not just about what can go wrong when beings from two vastly different cultures misunderstand each other; it’s about what can go wrong, be hilariously funny, and end up with neither side being harmed.”
∞ ∞ ∞
“You may call me Roald Ruill,” said the man from the future.
“And I’m usually called Amarga,” added the (supposedly) female creature beside him.
Dan Casey nodded. He was too dazed and dumbfounded to do anything much, except nod. After all, when a pair of unbelievably tall, spidery, green-skinned, and, let’s face it, gruesome characters wake you up out of a sound sleep, walk b
ack and forth casually through your wall without bruising so much as a single rose on your landlady’s wallpaper, all the time calling you “O, famous master of the Past,” and “O, great Casey,”—all this is, to say the least, disturbing.
It’s disturbing even if you’ve been hitting the bottle hard and heavy; and Dan Casey, who was an unsuccessful illustrator for some unsuccessful magazine, hadn’t drunk anything stronger than restaurant coffee. Not because he’d signed the pledge, but because he was—to put it mildly—broke. Broke, on his uppers, flat. The art editors yawned in his face and indicated where he could find the door on the way out. In fact, Casey had gone to bed that night with his eyes sore from staring at the want ads. He liked painting—but he also liked eating, and it was beginning to look as if he couldn’t do both.
Granted, he hadn’t gone to bed in any happy mood. A nightmare would have been fair enough. But waking up to delirium tremens—when he was cold sober—that was adding insult to injury!
So he only stared glumly at the green-skinned characters and mumbled, “So now you have names, yet. Pleased to meet you. Have a chair. Stay awhile. My name’s Casey.”
“Oh, we know,” fluted the one called Amarga. Yes, on second glance she was undeniably female, and she might even have been called pretty—if you like your females eight feet tall, with green skin. Her hair was infinitesimally longer than that of Roald Ruill—if you could call it hair; it looked like feathers. A metallic band was wrapped around her skimpy breasts, and there was a most unusually decorated triangle painted on the front of the brief skin-tight bikini thing that covered her hips. Casey blinked, looked away from it and looked back again, wondering if it was really meant to represent what it looked like, or whether he was merely possessed of a spectacularly filthy mind.
