Eclipse Three

by edited by Jonathan Strahan

  "Five'll buy you, babydoll," he said, hamming for his table buddies. One of them giggled. Ugly sound in a man, Cookie thought. "Five'll buy you five times!"

  "And how long did it take you to come up with that, honey?"

  "The fuck?" He looked confused.

  "I said, your brain must be smaller than your dick, which I'd guess is even smaller than your wallet, only I doubt that's possible," and she plucked the bill from his fingers, snapped it under her g-string and walked away.

  In the dressing room she looked at herself in the mirror. Twenty-four was too old for this. Definitely. She had no idea what time it was.

  She stuck her head out of the door. "Danny!"

  "Yes, doll."

  "Time is it?" She'd have to get herself a watch someday. A nice expensive watch.

  "Ten after," Danny said.

  "After what?"

  "Ten."

  Three hours earlier on the West Coast. She stacked her night's take, counted it, thought for a minute, peeled off two hundred in fives and ones. She stuck her head out of the door again. "Danny!"

  "Here, doll."

  "I'm gone."

  "You sick?" He ambled up the corridor, stood breathing heavily by the door.

  "Sick of this."

  "Mister Pergoletti says—"

  "You tell Pergoletti to stick it. I'm gone. Seriously." She handed him the wad of bills. "You take care of these girls, now. And have a good life."

  "Got something else lined up?"

  "Guess we'll find out."

  There was one bottle of beer in Cody's fridge. She opened it, poured it carefully into a glass, stared at the beige foam. A glass: she never drank beer from a glass. She poured it down the sink. She had no idea what was real anymore but she was pretty sure alcohol would only make things worse.

  She made green tea instead and settled down in the window seat. The sun hung low over the bay. What did Susanna see from her apartment? Was her ankle better? Contraceptive pills, Jesus. And, oh, the smell of her skin.

  She was losing her mind.

  She didn't know who she hated more: Richard for making the proposal, or herself for accepting it. Or Susanna. Susanna had done it for money.

  Or maybe . . . But what about those contraceptive pills?

  And what if Susanna did feel . . . whatever it was? Did that make it real? It was all an experiment, all engineered. Fake.

  But it didn't feel fake. She wanted to cradle Susanna, kiss her ankle better, protect her from the world. The Richards of the world.

  She picked up the phone, remembered for the tenth time she had neither address nor phone number. She called information, who told her there was no listing under Susanna Herrera in the Atlanta Metro area. She found herself unsurprised, though surprised at how little it mattered.

  She got the number for the Golden Key instead.

  A man called Pergoletti answered. "Cookie? She's gone. They always go." The music thumped. Cody's insides vibrated in sympathy, remembering.

  "—don't have a number. Hey, you interested in a job?"

  Cody put the phone down carefully. Sipped her tea. Picked up the phone again, and called Richard.

  It was open mic night at Coffee to the People. Richard was in the back room on a sofa, as far from the music as possible. Two cups on the table. One still full.

  "You knew I'd call."

  "I did."

  "Did you program that, too?"

  "I didn't program anything. I primed you—and only about the sex." He patted the sofa. "Sit down before you fall down."

  She sat. Blinked. "Give me her phone number."

  "I can't. She gave me a fake. I called her at the club, but she hung up on me." He seemed put out.

  "What does she know?"

  "I talked fast. I don't know how much she heard. But I told her she wouldn't get the rest of the money until we'd done follow up."

  The singer in the other room sang of love and broken hearts. It was terrible, but it made Cody want to cry anyway.

  "How long does it last?"

  "Love? I don't know. I avoid it where possible."

  "What am I going to do?"

  Richard lifted his laptop bag. "I planned for this eventuality." He took out a small white cardboard box. He opened it, shook something onto his hand. A grey plastic inhaler.

  "What is it?"

  "A vasopressin analogue, formulated to block oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens. That is, the antidote."

  They both looked at it.

  "It works in voles," he said. "Female voles."

  Voles. "You said it tasted bad."

  "I've used it. Just in case. I prefer my sex without complications. And I've had a lot of sex and never once fallen in love." He arched his eyebrows. "So, hey, it must work."

  The elephant whistle hypothesis. Hey, Bob, what's that whistle? Well, Fred, it keeps elephants away. Don't be an asshole, Bob, there aren't any elephants around here. Well, Fred, that's because of my whistle.

  "Cody." He did his best to look sincere. "I'm so very sorry. I never thought it would work. Not like this. But I do think the antidote might work." His face went back to normal. He hefted the inhaler. "Though before I give it to you, I have a favor to ask."

  She stared at him. "On what planet do I owe you anything?"

  "For science, then. A follow-up scan, and then another after you take the antidote."

  "Maybe I won't take it. Give me the number."

  "Love is a form of insanity, you know."

  "The number."

  In the other room, the bad singing went on and on.

  "Oh, all right. For old time's sake." He extracted a folder from his bag, and a piece of paper from the folder. He slid it across the table towards her, put the inhaler on top of it.

  She nudged the inhaler aside, picked up the paper. Handwritten. Susanna's writing.

  "Love's just biochemical craziness," he said, "designed to make us take a leap in the dark, to trust complete strangers. It's not rational."

  Cody said nothing.

  "She screwed us."

  "She screwed you," Cody said. "Maybe she fell in love with me." But she took the inhaler.

  Cody sat in the window seat with the phone and the form Susanna had filled in. Every now and again she punched in a different combination of the numbers Susanna had written and got the Cannot be completed as dialed voice. Every now and again she touched the form with the tip of her middle finger; she could feel the indentation made by Susanna's strong strokes. Strong strokes, strong hands, strong mouth.

  She didn't think about the grey inhaler in its white box, which she had put in the fridge—to stay viable a long time, just in case.

  After a while she stopped dialing and simply waited.

  When her phone lit up at 11:46 she knew who it was—even before she saw the 404 area code on the screen.

  "Do you feel it?" Susanna said.

  "Yes," and Cody did. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it was there, as indelible as ink. She wanted to say, I don't know if this is real, I don't know if it's good. She wanted to ask, Had you ever had sex with anyone for money before me? and, Does it matter? She wanted to know, Have you ever loved anyone before? and, How can you know?

  She wanted to say, Will it hurt?

  Walking through the crowds at the airport, Cody searched for the familiar face, felt her heart thump every time she thought she saw her. Panic, or love? She didn't know. She didn't know anything except that her throat ached.

  Someone jostled her with his bag, and when she looked up, there was the back of that head, that smooth brown hair, so familiar, after just one night, and all her blood vessels seemed to expand at once, every cell leapt forward.

  She didn't move. This was it, the last moment. This was where she could just let the crowd carry her past, carry her away, out into the night. Walk away. Go home. Use the inhaler in the fridge.

  That was the sensible thing. But the Cody who had hung from the ninth-story balcony, the Cody who
had risked the Atlanta contract without a second thought, that Cody thought, Fuck it, and stepped forward. Will it hurt? You could never know.

  Sleight of Hand

  Peter S. Beagle

  She had no idea where she was going. When she needed to sleep she stopped at the first motel; when the Buick's gas gauge dropped into the red zone she filled the tank, and sometimes bought a sandwich or orange juice at the attached convenience store. Now and then during one of these stops she spoke with someone who was neither a desk clerk nor a gas-station attendant, but she forgot all such conversations within minutes, as she forgot everything but the words of the young policeman who had come to her door on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon, weeks and worlds ago. Nothing had moved in her since that point except the memory of his shakily sympathetic voice, telling her that her husband and daughter were dead: ashes in a smoking, twisted, unrecognizable ruin, because, six blocks from their home, a drowsy adolescent had mistaken his accelerator for his brake pedal.

  There had been a funeral—she was present, but not there—and more police, and some lawyer; and Alan's sister managing it all, as always, and for once she was truly grateful to the interfering bitch. But that was all far away too, both the gratitude and the old detestation, made nothing by the momentary droop of a boy's eyelids. The nothing got her snugly through the days after the funeral, dealing with each of the endless phone calls, sitting down to answer every condolence card and e-mail, informing Social Security and CREF of Alan's death, going with three of his graduate students to clean out his office, and attending the memorial on campus, which was very tasteful and genuinely moving, or so the nothing was told. She was glad to hear it.

  The nothing served her well until the day Alan's daughter by his first marriage came to collect a few of his possessions as keepsakes. She was a perfectly nice girl, who had always been properly courteous in an interloper's presence, and her sympathy was undoubtedly as real as good manners could make it; but when she had gone, bearing a single brown paper grocery bag of photographs and books, the nothing stepped aside for the meltdown.

  Her brother-in-law calmed her, spoke rationally, soothed her out of genuine kindness and concern. But that same night, speaking to no one, empty and methodical, she had watched herself pack a small suitcase and carry it out to Alan's big old Buick in the garage, then go back into the house to leave her cell phone and charger on Alan's desk, along with a four-word note for her sister-in-law that read Out for a drive. After that she had backed the Buick into the street and headed away without another look at the house where she used to live, once upon a time.

  The only reason she went north was that the first freeway on-ramp she came to pointed her in that direction. After that she did not drive straight through, because there was no through to aim for. With no destination but away, without any conscious plan except to keep moving, she left and returned to the flat ribbon of the interstate at random intervals, sometimes wandering side roads and backroads for hours, detouring to nowhere. Aimless, mindless, not even much aware of pain—that too having become part of the nothing—she slogged onward. She fell asleep quickly when she stopped, but never for long, and was usually on her way in darkness, often with the moon still high. Now and then she whistled thinly between her teeth.

  The weather was warm, though there was still snow in some of the higher passes she traversed. Although she had started near the coast, that was several states ago: now only the mountains were constant. The Buick fled lightly over them, gulping fuel with abandon but cornering like a deer, very nearly operating and guiding itself. This was necessary, since only a part of her was behind the wheel; the rest was away with Alan, watching their daughter building a sandcastle, prowling a bookshop with him, reaching for his hand on a strange street, knowing without turning her head that it would be there. At times she was so busy talking to him that she was slow to switch on the headlights, even long after sunset. But the car took care of her, as she knew it would. It was Alan's car, after all.

  From time to time the Buick would show a disposition to wander toward the right shoulder of the road, or drift left into the oncoming lane, and she would observe the tendency with vague, detached interest. Once she asked aloud, "Is this what you want? I'm leaving it to you—are you taking me to Alan?" But somehow, whether under her guidance or its own, the old car always righted itself, and they went on together.

  The latest road began to descend, and then to flatten out into farm and orchard country, passing the occasional township, most of them overgrown crossroads. She had driven for much of the previous night, and all of today, and knew with one distant part of herself that it would soon be necessary to stop. In early twilight, less than an hour later, she came to the next town. There was a river winding through it, gray and silver in the dusk, with bridges.

  Parking and registering at the first motel with a Vacancy sign, she walked three blocks to the closest restaurant, which, from the street, looked like a bar with a 1950s-style diner attached. Inside, however, it proved larger than she had expected, with slightly less than half of the booths and tables occupied. Directly to the left of the Please Wait To Be Served sign hung a poster showing a photograph of a lean, hawk-nosed man in late middle age, with white hair and thick eyebrows, wearing evening dress: tailcoat, black bowtie, top hat. He was smiling slightly and fanning a deck of playing cards between long, neat fingers. There was no name under the picture; the caption read only DINNER MAGIC. She looked at it until the young waitress came to show her to her booth.

  After ordering her meal—the first she had actually sat down to since leaving home—she asked the waitress about Dinner Magic. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears, and language itself came hard and hesitantly. The girl shrugged. "He's not fulltime—just comes in now and then, does a couple of nights and gone again. Started a couple of weeks ago. Haven't exchanged two words with him. Other than my boss, I don't know anybody who has."

  Turning away toward the kitchen, she added over her shoulder, "He's good, though. Stay for the show, if you can."

  In fact, the Dinner Magic performance began before most of the current customers had finished eating. There was no stage, no musical flourish or formal introduction: the man in evening dress simply walked out from the kitchen onto the floor, bowed briefly to the diners, then tossed a gauzy multicolored scarf into the air. He seized it again as it fluttered down, then held it up in front of himself, hiding him from silk hat to patent-leather shoes . . .

  . . . and vanished, leaving his audience too stunned to respond. The applause began a moment later, when he strolled in through the restaurant's front door.

  Facing the audience once more, the magician spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and clear, with a certain engaging roughness in the lower range. "Ladies, gentlemen, Dinner Magic means exactly what it sounds like. You are not required to pay attention to me for a moment, you are free to concentrate on your coffee and pie—which is excellent, by the way, especially the lemon meringue—or on your companion, which I recommend even more than the meringue. Think of me, if you will, as the old man next door who stays up all night practicing his silly magic tricks. Because that, under this low-rent monkey suit, is exactly what I am. Now then."

  He was tall, and older than the photograph had suggested—how old, she could not tell, but there were lines on his cheeks and under his angled eyes that must have been removed from the picture; the sort of thing she had seen Alan do on the computer. From her booth, she watched, chin on her fist, never taking her eyes from the man as he ran through a succession of tricks that bordered on the miraculous even as his associated patter never transcended a lounge act. Without elephants or tigers, without a spangled, long-legged assistant, he worked the room. Using his slim black wand like a fishing rod he reeled laughing diners out of their seats. Holding it lightly between his fingertips, like a conductor's baton or a single knitting needle, he caused the napkins at every table to lift off in a whispering storm of thin cotton, whirl wildly around t
he room, and then settle docilely back where they belonged. He identified several members of his audience by name, address, profession, marital status, and, as an afterthought, by driver's license state and number. She was never one of these; indeed, the magician seemed to be consciously avoiding eye contact with her altogether. Nevertheless, she was more intrigued—more awakened—than she had meant to let herself be, and she ordered a second cup of coffee and sat quite still where she was.

  Finishing at last with an offhanded gesture, a bit like an old-fashioned jump shot, which set all the silverware on all the tables chiming applause, the magician walked off without bowing, as abruptly as he had entered. The waitress brought her check, but she remained in her booth even after the busboy cleared away her dishes. Many of the other diners lingered as she did, chattering and marveling and calling for encores. But the man did not return.