2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  A strong hand grips my arm and spins me. It is my father. He drags me away, off the street and into the otherwise empty temple. He shakes me once, peering in to my eyes. When I grin at him, he slaps my face.

  “You sentenced Carl Drossan to die.”

  “Of course. It is my duty as Chief Seer.”

  “You made me sentence him to die.”

  Father nods. “You also did your duty as a Seer.”

  “But he was once your friend.”

  We stare at each other. Realization lights my father’s eyes.

  “Thomas, you can’t believe anything Drossan told you. He was a liar.”

  “He was worse than that. He was a coward. And when I saw that man groveling in the streets to me, I knew I was a coward too. I’m just like Carl.”

  “You’re not a traitor like he was. Drossan sided with the aliens—”

  “There were no aliens!”

  He pulls back, head turned to the right, almost looking at me askance. “What did you say? I reiterate, anything Drossan told you—”

  “He didn’t tell me anything I haven’t seen for myself. In here.” I touch my head.

  “You know?” he says, the words barely audible.

  “Know. Remember. Call it what you will.”

  He seems almost breathless as he shakes me by the shoulders. “You have your memories?”

  I grin at him, flushed with fear and a savage triumph. “I recall everything. It seems the procedure failed with me, Father.”

  “How could it have failed? How long have you known?”

  “Long enough to realize I want no part in this lie.”

  “It’s not a lie, not if you believe. Thomas, I can correct your problem. I can—”

  “What? Inject visions into my head?”

  “The same kind of vision that will, through you and the office of the Seers, keep people in a state of hope.”

  “They don’t need a lie!”

  “They do,” he says, his grip softening. “I used to think like you did. I thought what was needed wasn’t some hopeful expectation of the future, but an uncompromising stare at the past. Now I know that all our history shows one thing: that those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

  He holds his hand out to me. I just stare at it.

  “I know I can’t escape you,” I say. “But I think if you try to do the procedure on me again, it will still fail. What happens to me if it does? Will you kill me?”

  “I’m a hard man,” he says, but his voice is soft.

  “I’m going to go, Father. Out into the desert with the others. It’s where I belong.”

  “What will you do? Try to overthrow the peace?”

  “No. Just live, day to day. Maybe that’s the only way to forget the past. Focus on the now.”

  “What about your mother?”

  The question freezes me. At last I say, “Could you… make her forget me.”

  My father smirks. “Hyopcrite.”

  “I’m my father’s son.”

  I step toward the temple door. My father does not move.

  “The hunting parties will continue, Thomas. If I lead one that encounters you… do you think I won’t fire?”

  “I know that you will.”

  “Then goodbye, Thomas.”

  I leave him and the temple behind. My pace quickens as I head away from Almindor and into the wastelands. The day is so bright my eyes hurt from seeing.

  Bill Ferris became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Athlete’s Foot” in Crowded (Feb. 2013), edited by Baden Chant and Ethan Fode.

  Visit his website at www.famousauthorbillferris.com.

  * * *

  Short Story: “Athlete’s Foot” ••••

  ATHLETE’S FOOT

  by Bill Ferris

  First published in Crowded (Feb. 2013), edited by Baden Chant and Ethan Fode

  • • • •

  LET ME TELL YOU how LaWilliam Morris really lost his legs.

  I saw the Outside the Lines piece about Morris on ESPN. You know, car crash, lost his legs below the knees, can’t ball anymore. Very sad.

  It’s bunk.

  I don’t believe in karma, but it’s funny that what goes around does, in fact, come around sometimes. If I did believe in karma, I’d wonder what I did to deserve having LaWilliam Morris sign with Minsk halfway through the Baltic Basketball League season.

  The fun began after Morris’ first practice. I was undressing at my locker when I heard, “All you faggots get out of my shower!”

  The other guys, half of whom didn’t speak English, either didn’t understand Morris or thought he was joking. Having played on a team with Morris before, I hustled to put my sneakers back on so I wouldn’t slip as I ran to break up the fight that was about to happen.

  Our center, a gangly, seven-foot Czech, looked like the world’s largest marionette when Morris flung him out of the shower area. I stepped between Morris and Detlef, our starting point guard whom Morris outweighed by almost 100 pounds. I’m not as big as Morris, but I’ve got enough meat on me that Morris couldn’t toss me around. “Hey, hey, easy big fella,” I said. “These guys just didn’t know you like your privacy.”

  Calmer, Morris thanked me in his own way. “Out of my face, rook,” he said. You can imagine my elation that he’d remembered his old pet name for me. Once I was properly out of his face, Morris glared at the rest of the team, requested that we all stop staring at his dick, and took his shower alone. With fifteen shower heads available to him, he used only one in the spirit of saving water, which was as close as LaWilliam Morris got to a redeeming quality.

  My basketball career wasn’t always this demeaning. Four years ago I’d spent two glorious months playing for the Milwaukee Bucks in the National Basketball Association. During that time I averaged seven-tenths of a point per game playing one-and-a-half minutes per night. You may remember me from that clip on SportsCenter when Kobe Bryant dunked on me, knocked me to the floor, then accidentally planted his foot in my junk. Yeah, that was me. All-star forward LaWilliam Morris, taking pity on me, took it upon himself to make me his personal goddamn slave.

  “Grab my bags, rook,” he’d say. “Go get me a gin and tonic, rook.” Or, “Hey rook, iron my shirt. I got a girlie on the line.”

  When you’re a rookie making the league minimum, you do these things. If you don’t, guys like LaWilliam Morris, who made literally thirty times my salary, could simply make it known to the coach or GM that he doesn’t want me around. So I sucked it up and took the abuse, hoping my good behavior would help me secure a roster spot for the next season, which it didn’t.

  In fact, the best offer I got from any American team was from the Washington Generals—the team that loses to the Harlem Globetrotters. I played in Barcelona for a year, Athens for two. This season my agent tried the big-fish-small-pond approach by signing me to a second-tier team in Minsk, Belarus, a country I hadn’t given a thought to since high-school geography. The weather: Cold. The food: Heartburny. The TV shows: Russian, in which I know how to ask where the bathroom is.

  When he showed up in Minsk, Morris looked a lot different from when I last saw him. He’d been out of the game for a year due to a mashup of injuries, drug policy suspensions, and judging by his gut, McDonald’s. The chiseled muscle that used to knock me to the floor every day at practice had morphed into a cushion of flab that verged on smothering me instead.

  Morris’ first game was in St. Petersburg. Not the one in Florida, I assure you. He started at forward, opposite me. The guy could still score—he got nineteen, decent for his first pro game in more than a year—and his girth provided an impenetrable force field against would-be defenders. He also made lots of free throws—his enhanced personal gravity seemed to draw fouls to him.

  I knew from experience you really had to be desperate to play in this league, though, and it was easy to see why he was playing in Europe instead of America. Two minutes after th
e opening tip Morris was already drenched in sweat and breathing hard. On a few series we basically had to play four-man defense while Morris moseyed back down the court. A couple times he didn’t come back to defend at all, seeing as how the other team scores pretty quickly when you only have four men playing defense.

  I, on the other hand, had probably my best game since joining Minsk. Twenty-one points, eleven rebounds. I even hit a three-pointer, which I attempt once a month, tops. It was the type of performance that could get me back to the Association, or at least the Western hemisphere.

  When I look back on that night, though, what I remember most is stepping off the team bus at our hotel and LaWilliam Morris holding out his hand to me. Instinctively I stuck out my hand to shake his, ready to receive his congratulations on surpassing him as a player. Instead, in my palm I felt the leather strap of his duffel bag.

  I stared at the duffel like an idiot. “This isn’t my bag.”

  Morris thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Better not be thinking it’s your bag, rook,” he said. Through his laugh I heard a little edge in his voice, like he was wise to my plan to make off with his collection of fat-guy shirts.

  I looked around for some sort of explanation. Glances flung themselves to the ground to escape my eye contact. I had the mark on me. I was to be Morris’ whipping boy again.

  I tried to protest. I’d been a professional basketball player for four goddamn years! I was too old to put up with this. But Morris was already strutting toward the hotel front door. My teammates evacuated the area quickly so as not to get infected with whatever sort of loser virus that caused Morris to single me out. I cursed under my breath, hoisted Morris’ and my own bags over my shoulders, and trudged toward the hotel.

  At the airport the next morning, Morris tried to foist his bag on me again, but I was ready for him. I was a veteran and the team’s leading scorer, and I simply would not put up with this. Not me, and not anybody else, either.

  Morris surprised me. He shrugged and said, “Okay.” Then he picked up his bag and walked to the terminal. The game had been nice, but a moment like this called for one of the little vodka bottles I’d smuggled in my carry-on luggage.

  When the flight landed in Minsk, Mr. Sidorov, the team owner himself, greeted us on the tarmac. He beckoned me over to him, not bothering to wait until we got into the terminal. My adrenaline pounded like I’d just hit a jump shot. This usually meant a player transaction. My recent hot streak must have caught somebody’s attention. Maybe my contract had been bought out by Madrid, or a minor-league American team. I tried not to get my hopes up for the NBA. I failed.

  “Mister Tyler,” the owner said, his words transforming into vapor in the cold. “You play a good basketball.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I tried to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “But. Is teams game. You are not so being a teams mates.”

  “I’m… sorry?”

  “Mister LaWilliam. He is the temperamental, no?”

  “No. I mean, yes.”

  “Yes. But. Mister LaWilliam sells the tickets. Peoples come from miles from Minsk to see great NBA star.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You haven’t traded me, have you?”

  “I needs you carry Mr. LaWilliam’s bags.”

  “Mr. Sidorov, with all due respect, that’s rookie stuff. I mean, nobody should have to do that. Especially me. I’ve been a pro for years. I’m your leading scorer.”

  “I knows. I thanks you. But he—Mr. LaWilliam—he trust you. You American. You good speak English.”

  “Plenty of guys speak English. We’ve even got two more Americans on the team.”

  “He say you especially.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “Please. As favor to me.”

  I sighed. “Sure thing, Mr. Sidorov.” As a basketball nomad, I’ve picked up a bunch of words in a bunch of languages, but I never learned how to say no to the man who signed my paychecks.

  Morris was waiting for me at the baggage area as I shuffled into the terminal. “Hey, rook,” he said through a shit-eating grin. I said nothing as I hefted his bag, which I suspected he’d filled with rocks just for the occasion.

  For the next two months we jetted around Europe, playing to packed houses eager to see “great NBA star.” And while fans gave Morris a standing ovation for scoring seventeen a game by virtue of being too large to defend, crowds saluted the best basketball of my life with large rounds of indifference despite the fact that I outscored, outrebounded and outhustled Morris every night.

  By the time we got to Bucharest, the only time I was actually happy was during the games. Even those grated whenever a crowd cheered one of Morris’ graceless dunks after knocking defenders down with his huge rump. Thankfully, Bucharest gave me something altogether new to complain about.

  Romania is an interesting country. Unlike Belarus, it’s a major player in popular culture. Of course, most of that has to do with Dracula. Bucharest has lots of old-world charm. Parts of it look like any modern city. Other sections look like you just stepped into the middle ages.

  Our game was in the middle-ages area, in the most run-down gym I’ve ever seen. It seated fewer than a thousand people, but only a third of that number showed up. Most of the folks in attendance looked like they’d caught whooping cough. I think the gym was part of a community rec center or something. It had a pool one level below us. Water seeped up through the hardwood floor and dripped from the ceiling. A grey, moldy substance I was careful not to touch clung to the walls. All that water plus the humidity from the pool caused the mold to thrive. It was like the walls were breathing.

  The locker room was worse. The mold had claimed half the locker room as its own territory, and probably had its sights on the rest of it. Me and Alexei, a backup point guard, opted to share a locker rather than risk the moldy half. The look of the place made me want to shower as soon as I got there, except the fungus was all over the shower room, too.

  Bucharest’s coach apologized for the facilities—he assured us his team usually played in a much nicer arena downtown, but someone had accidentally booked the circus the same night. This zombie cousin of the YMCA was the best they could do.

  The surroundings didn’t affect my game, though. I scored twenty-nine, my highest total since high school. Morris scored twenty-four—hardly a dominant performance considering Coach mandated he touch the ball every possession. Naturally, he still drew the largest crowd of autograph seekers after the game, all of whom he ignored.

  Coach walked into the locker room, chatting on his cell. He hung up and, speaking in Russian, asked us to gather around. We were already huddled together—I swear the mold claimed another ten square feet of the locker room during the game.

  My Russian was good enough that I understood that a double-whammy of snow and fog was headed for Bucharest, and if we wanted to make it to the next game, we’d need to hustle to the airport.

  All of us ran to the shower—teams in our league could barely afford to fly commercial, and a dozen six- and seven-footers riding in coach while still drenched in sweat is pretty much as horrible as it sounds.

  “You faggots stay the hell out of my shower!” Morris said.

  “Do you want to get on a plane and sit next to a dozen sweaty dudes?” I said.

  “What did I just say?”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “What did I just say?”

  “We all know what you said, but you can’t keep all of us out. We’re taking showers, and if you don’t like it, then you’ll have to kick us all out.”

  Morris snickered. I turned to look at my teammates. Half of them had already changed into street clothes. “Cowardly sons of bitches,” I muttered. I walked back to my locker and changed.

  We made the flight. It turned out the snowpocalypse didn’t come to Bucharest. We’d have had time for a Turkish bath if we’d wanted. We were on our way to Istanbul, and I vowed to take one when I got there.

&nbs
p; “You were right,” Morris said once we were in the air. “Y’all motherfuckers do stink.”

  The Istanbul team flattened us the next night. Scratch that—we were flat before we hit the court. Long road trips could do that to you, sap your energy. I figured maybe we’d all caught whatever malady it was that the fans in Bucharest had. Me, I had eleven points and four rebounds. I’d worked out a formula: a good game got me one day closer to playing in America again, while a game like the one in Istanbul meant another week traipsing around the old world. By my math I should’ve been back in the U.S. three weeks ago, which made me feel even worse about my job prospects in or out of basketball.

  Morris had the worst night of his professional career, so the evening wasn’t a total loss. He couldn’t get enough elevation for his patented bovine dunks, and he wasn’t even trying to run down the floor. After a while, the other team just stopped guarding him. Coach finally acknowledged something was wrong and pulled him out.

  When it happened again the next night I felt bad—if he was seriously injured I didn’t feel right taking so much delight in his failure. Jesus, what happened to the guy who dunked on Shaq in the playoffs? The guy with the shoe deal? Time catches up with everyone, I suppose—along with poor decision-making, bad diet, and treating people like dirt. No wait, in Minsk, treating people like dirt apparently got the team’s leading scorer to be your butler.

  Mr. Sidorov’s PR lackey released a statement the next day. LaWilliam Morris’ comeback temporarily derailed by turf toe. That’s code for, “We don’t know what the hell’s wrong with him.” At the press conference Morris sat next to Mr. Sidorov, wearing an ill-fitting suit and a scowl that fit him like a glove.

  After his injury, I got the impression Morris was taking his frustration out on me by putting dead squirrels in his bags. Walking to the hotel after a game one night, I opened up his bag to see what was causing the stench. I saw no dead animals or rotten food, but his sneakers—the Nike Air Morris model from two years ago, now scuffed and shabby, the air cushioning squished out of the soles by Morris’ extra weight—practically gave off visible stink lines. It smelled like a rat decomposing under a pile of wet leaves.