by Rich Horton
“Dinner,” another said.
“Talk about the constellations,” said a third.
“Zip it,” said the chief goon. “I want to hear about the wedding plans. I always find your wedding plans so interesting.”
“You hate it when I talk about my wedding plans,” Laura said.
“You’re right,” the chief goon said. “That was a trap.”
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Laura said, and then goons were hushing other goons, and one of them switched off the radio, and for a moment all she could hear was the noise of the car’s engine, which came as though from deep in the earth.
“The story is called ‘A Window or a Small Box,’ and it’s about some stones at the bottom of a stream—”
“Boring,” said one of the goons.
“Some stones,” she said, “that dreamed they were turtles.”
The same goon said, “Oooh,” and Laura could hear the slopping sound of him as he settled back into his seat.
“They dreamed that they were turtles, and the turtles swam in the waters of the stream, up above the rocks that dreamed them . . . ”
Jim wandered until he came to the bus station. He sat for a while, watching the drivers raise their rope ladders and motor away. Then he walked over to a food stall and watched sausages turn under the heat lamps. He was hungry but his money was gone. He said to the boy in the stall, “Hey, can I have one of those sausages and not pay you for it?”
The boy said, “Sure,” and gave him one on a hard roll. Jim ate the sausage quickly, even though it was probably alpaca, and so far he’d managed to avoid eating alpaca.
He felt a little better after that. He stole a pen from a ticket booth window, then found a stack of leaflets advertising masks and baskets. The backs of the leaflets were blank. He made posters, drawing Laura’s face with his left hand. The picture looked like something a five-year-old would make, all squiggly lines and smudges. But with some practice he got her eyes right, and the length of her hair.
Lost, he wrote at the top of each sheet, and then at the bottom, Please tell Jim if you see her.
A janitor saw what he was doing and gave him a little pot of glue. Jim put the posters up all over the bus station, then went outside and stuck them under windshield wipers. He pasted them to telephone poles, to construction site barriers, to windows, to doors. When he was hungry, he found an open-air market, ordered a bowl of noodle soup, and asked if he could have it for free. The chef just shrugged and said, “Sure, Jim, it’s all yours.”
He made more signs. He wrote, Jim wants to marry this girl but he can’t find her! He plastered one neighborhood with them, took a bus to another neighborhood, plastered that one too. Sometimes people recognized him and cheered him on. A kid gave him a pair of nice blue sneakers with stars on them. They were too big, but he wore them anyway, letting them flop around as he walked.
By evening he was exhausted. He found a door in the base of an overpass, opened it, and went into the empty room on the other side. He curled up on the cement floor, said Laura’s name aloud to himself, and slept.
“ . . . the boy whose job it was to count the turtles sat on the shore all day, eating sandwiches and keeping a tally on his abacus. Sometimes the turtles floated by on logs, and he wasn’t sure if he’d counted them or not, so he started painting white spots on their shells.”
“Why did he have to count the turtles?”
“Because there are people who want to know how many turtles there are. The real problem, though, was that no one had counted dream turtles before. Should they be counted like regular turtles? And what if the stones woke up? What would happen to the turtles then? The boy knew he needed some good advice, so he went to the girl who could predict the future.”
“Where did this story come from?”
“It’s a collaboration between me and a writer named Gray. Have you heard of Gray?”
They chuckled, and their chuckling sounded a little dangerous, so she kept talking.
“Now, the girl who could predict the future was making a lot of money, but she was sad and she didn’t know why. When the boy who counted turtles came to see her . . . ”
Jim was awakened by a gentle knocking and the orange light of morning in his eyes. A woman stood in the doorway. She was short with short pale hair, and very pretty. “Mr. Jim?” she said. “Mr. Jim, I wonder if I could speak with you now?”
He knew her voice from the telephone. It was the biographer—no, the biographist.
“Um,” he said, sitting up.
She took a notebook and pen from her vest. “Are you sleeping in here, Mr. Jim? I never thought of that before. Anyone could just walk right into one of these rooms and take up residence!”
“It wasn’t locked.”
The woman leaned against the doorway as she laughed, her knees buckling slightly. “Of course it wasn’t!” she said. “Is this the real you, Mr. Jim? It is, it is. How can you keep it up?”
Jim realized that the biographist didn’t have a baby. She wasn’t from this city, and maybe not from this country. The thought dizzied him: other, stranger nations in this already too-strange place. “Listen,” he said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me. I’m not supposed to be famous. Back home, I’m pretty much just like everyone else.”
She wrote that down. “It must be a very funny place.”
Jim rubbed his cheeks. “You’re right,” he said. “It is a funny place.”
She knelt beside him and looked him in the eyes. Her seriousness made him feel serious as she asked, “And tell me, are you interested in the work and life of the author Gray?”
She tapped the biography with her pen. A dozen times yesterday Jim had nearly left the book behind: hard enough hanging all those posters with one hand. But he’d kept it, and last night he’d used it as a pillow again.
He flipped through the biography as the biographist watched. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I am very interested in the life and work of the author Gray.”
She was writing this down.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Jim said.
“I have never made a deal before. How do we make it?”
“I say what I’m going to do for you, and also what I expect you to do for me, and then we negotiate.”
She swayed back and forth a little, thinking. Then, “I am ready,” she said.
“I’m going to take you on as my biographist.”
“Really?”
“Yes, but listen. First you have to help me find Gray. That’s the deal. What do you think?”
“We negotiate now?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I accept!” she said, and hugged him. He put his arms around her and patted her back, twisting a little to keep them both from tumbling over.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Is this part of the negotiations?”
“No, I’m just wondering what your name is.”
“In that case,” she said, and tapped his nose with her pen, “I am not telling.”
She stood and walked out the door. He followed her. There was a bright yellow car parked beneath the overpass.
“Is this your car?” he asked.
“No, silly. It is Gray’s car. He sent me to find you.”
“ . . . and just when the dream turtle soup was starting to get cold, the boy added more logs to the fire, and stirred the ladle in the cauldron. Turned out that a lot of people wanted to know what dream turtle soup tastes like, and a line had formed.”
“What does dream turtle soup taste like?”
“It tastes like regular turtle soup, except fizzier, and it evaporates on your tongue. The boy ladled the soup into wooden bowls, and everyone had a little, and they all thought it was very good. But the girl who could predict the future arrived late, and there wasn’t any left for her, and she told them about the bad things that were to come: the storm, and the battle, and the waking of the stones—”
“I hate this story,” said the ch
ief goon. “It’s making me sad.”
“It’s not a happy story,” Laura said, “and it doesn’t turn out well.” She took a breath to keep her voice steady, but when she tried to speak again her voice wasn’t there at all. How long had she been in this car? How many hours, how many days? The silence, without her voice to break it, was terrible.
“Is that it, then?” the chief goon said.
“It,” she said, trying to make it a question but failing.
Grumbles, now, from the dozens of goons in the audience. She had never heard annoyance sound so menacing.
“I want Jim,” she said without thinking.
The grumbles got louder. She could feel the goons crowding close.
“Is that part of the story?” the chief goon said.
Even now, she thought, that monster in the front seat was enjoying this, enjoying his job. The goons loved getting angry, loved knowing that she would eventually disappoint them. Loved having the excuse they needed to snuff her out.
She choked back tears and said, “And the thing about this soup? Everyone who ate it was soon dreaming they were turtles, swimming in the stream and floating on logs in the sunlight . . . ”
The goons settled in again, but as she told her story, she could tell they were no longer listening. She’d failed, somehow. The driver shifted gears, shifted direction. The car swayed, moving fast now, and Laura braced herself against the seat to keep upright, to keep herself from falling into one of those vile forms in the dark.
The biographist drove Jim into the hills, along winding roads choked nearly to the narrowness of a footpath by flowering bushes and vines. A gentle rain fell, but they kept the windows cracked. There were bottles of Purple Pow-Pow in a cooler in the back seat, and Jim helped himself. He had to hold the bottle between his legs while he twisted off the cap.
“Isn’t it good?” the biographist asked him.
“Tastes like medicine, but it reminds me of home,” Jim said.
An hour passed before they turned off the road and through an open wrought-iron gate. The biographist stopped the car there and let the engine idle. She gave Jim another serious look and said, “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Gray can be very mean to people. I heard he gave terrible, terrible presents to his own biographist. But you and me, Mr. Jim, we could keep on driving. Do you know how much coastline we have here? It just goes and goes.”
Jim twirled the purple liquid at the bottom of his bottle. He could say yes, he thought, and his own old world would never know the difference. The two of them would drive, and he would talk, and she would write things down and laugh, and who knows?
But he was already shaking his head. “I have to talk to him. I have to find out if he knows where Laura is, and if anything here adds up to anything else.”
She nodded, very solemn, and put the car back into gear. Neither of them spoke as they rode through more bushes and then out over a green meadow. The sun was clear of the clouds now, and the air was hot and damp. Beyond the fields, the broad valley was dotted here and there with houses and swimming pools.
But Jim didn’t have time to take in the view, because the biographist was driving the car straight into something that looked a lot like a carnival.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Mr. Jim,” she said sadly, “this is your wedding.”
Before he and Laura crossed over, Jim had tried hard to love planning their wedding. He read wedding magazines, and pitched his ideas, even the ones he knew Laura’s aunt wouldn’t go for. “Everybody has doves,” he said at dinner one night. “What would really liven things up is a falconry demonstration. And let’s have a medieval feast. People can eat with their hands and drink tankards of ale.”
He knew how far he could push things before Laura got upset, and he pushed things just that far, then stopped. The wedding he was talking about wasn’t a wedding at all, but a spectacle meant to make people scratch their heads. A ceremony that didn’t mean what it meant, because what it meant scared the hell out of him.
But nothing he’d come up with compared to what was underway here on this field in the hills.
Three great pavilions were festooned—festooned was the word—with streamers, blinking bulbs of glass, and giant glittery suns and moons. Beneath the tents and spilling out over the lawn were hundreds of revelers, people in suits and dresses but also in masks and wigs and corduroy clown costumes. People on stilts, or riding alpacas, or driving miniature cars with plastic eyes on the hoods and big furry wheels. Babies, painted bright colors and decorated with ribbon, rode laughing on shoulders or careened over the grass.
There were ice sculptures: birds, mountains, helicopters, treasure chests, symbols that might have been religious or might have been signs for money or mathematical functions, all melting into clear pools. Music came from one of the pavilions. It sounded like a brass band, heavy on percussion, piped through a Theremin. The noise made the car rattle.
The biographist must have brought him in through a back way, because more people were arriving by the minute, in cars and on motorcycles, sliding down ladders out of buses. She touched his hand. “We had only so much to go on. But the wedding, it sounds very important. So we wanted to build it proper.”
Jim got out of the car. People saw him and cheered. They held up sheets of paper: the fliers he’d plastered all over town. Jim wants to marry this girl! Laura’s poorly drawn face, hundreds of times over.
He ran through the crowd, and the biographist followed him. She had her notebook out again. “Mr. Jim, Mr. Jim,” she said. “What are you feeling right now?”
Jim was thinking too much to think about what he was feeling. He was thinking about these tents. One was full of food (enormous aspics jiggling between piles of olive loaf and stacks of Pow-Pow), one was for dancing (laser lights bounced off euphoniums and shining steel drums), so maybe the third tent was for the ceremony. And maybe he’d find Laura there.
Streamers and flash bulbs popped as he strode over the lawn, his too-big sneakers flopping. People touched his arms, back, and neck, then whirled away screaming, as though they’d won a prize. A corduroy clown on stilts leaned back and bellowed, “No telling what’ll happen, folks!”
Jim found the tent for the ceremony, the smallest of the three, heaped with pillows for people to sit on. In the center, a kind of altar: overlapping rugs, candles flickering on five-foot-tall holders, and suspended from the ceiling a great green sea turtle made of wire and fabric.
As soon as Jim entered the tent, the music stopped and the crowds hushed. A few people followed him inside and sat on pillows, set babies in their laps. Others peered in from just outside. Others, he saw, watched live feeds projected onto screens out in the field. The biographist kept close, and kept taking notes.
Standing at the altar was a man in loose-fitting brown clothes. Jim recognized the long hair, long nose, and wide eyes from the pictures in the biography. Gray opened his arms and said, “Jim, my boy. There you are. Such a long time I’ve been waiting for you.”
In the darkness one of the goons said, “Ready?” and the dozens of others responded together, “Ready,” and Laura heard a sound like a thousand bubbles popping. Her captors were going liquid.
The car stopped, doors opened. She closed her eyes against the light. The chief goon took her arm, and she grabbed her hat as he pulled her outside. His hand felt cool on her arm. “This isn’t how I wanted things to go,” he said. “I wanted a happy ending.”
Damp grass brushed against her ankles as he led her forward. She put her hat on and pulled the brim low, squinting to see. She’d expected some nameless spot in the desert, buzzards overhead, a shovel to dig with, but here was a lush green place, full of people and noise and music. It looked as though a party was underway.
“What is this?”
“Dunno,” the chief goon said. “It’s Gray’s thing. He said to bring you, but I figured if it worked out between you and me . .
. ” He threw his head back and set his jaw, making a show of not showing how hurt he was.
“Gray?” she said. “Gray the writer?”
The goon didn’t answer, but led her across the field toward something so bright she couldn’t look at it directly. An enormous mushroom, growing dome-like over the grass. No, it was a tent, and there were three of them. Three, just like she’d told the chief goon a few days ago at the Set-It-Down Saloon.
The goon must have seen the hopefulness on her face, because he said sharply, “Come on,” and dragged her more roughly along. A dozen pinstripe suits slithered through the grass at their feet.
Gray. The wedding guests loved him. Loved him as he strutted over the rugs, telling Jim and Laura’s story. They already knew how it went, but they loved hearing Gray tell it: the bus rides and train rides, evenings camped out in strange bars and diners, those jellyfish men close behind. The biographist, in a trance, listened and wrote everything down while the others swooned and held their breath.
Jim thought maybe he loved Gray, too. There was something familiar about him, like an uncle he’d forgotten he had. Or like all the mad scientists in all the movies that had mad scientists in them. Gray hugged Jim, and Jim hugged him back. Gray said, “Are you ready?”
“For what?” Jim said.
Gray turned to the crowd, arms wide. “For what, he wants to know!”
The people laughed and bounced their babies, and the babies laughed or cried or stared at other babies.
“Ready for your own marriage,” said Gray, “so long in the making!” To Jim he added quietly, “And for the premiere of my greatest work to date. Congratulations, my boy. We’re so pleased that you could be part of it.”
He told the rest of the story. Told how Jim lost his hand—gasp!—told how the goons captured Laura—groan!—told how the goons had her still. “My footmen,” Gray called them. Did they report to this man, then? Had they hunted Laura and him on Gray’s behalf?
“I knew you’d come one day,” Gray said. “But you got here on your own, didn’t you? You found the clues I left.”
Gray looked at him and waited. Everyone looked at him and waited. It was his turn to say something. He said, “It was in your play. Everything That Swims.”
