Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "Which gives me a big advantage in facing the next forty years, doesn't it?"

  "Don't be a fool. Your situation here is no better tomorrow than it was yesterday." One of the rules is never to get involved, but I was into it now, and I cared about whether he listened to me or not. I could say it was because of my bank balance. I gestured toward the cabins, where Koerner and his family slept. "Worse, after tonight. You're throwing away your only chance to change your fate. Do you want to mortgage your talent to people like Charles Koerner? Sell yourself for the approval of people who will never understand you?"

  Welles seemed amused. "You seem a little exercised about this—Detlev, is it? Detlev, why should this mean so much to you?" He was speculating as much as asking me. "This is just your job, right? You don't really know me. But you seem to care a lot more than any job would warrant.

  "What that suggests to me is that you must really like my movies—I'm flattered, of course—or you are particularly engaged with the problem of the director in the world of business. Yet you must work in the world of business every day.

  "So let me make a counter-proposition: You don't take me back to the future; you stay here with me. I question whether any artist can succeed outside of his own time. I was born in 1915. How am I even going to understand 2048, let alone make art that it wants to see?

  "On the other hand, you seem quite familiar with today. You say you know all the pitfalls I'm going to face. And I'll bet you know your twentieth century history pretty well. Think of the advantage that gives you here! A few savvy investments and you'll be rich! You want to make movies—we'll do it together! You can be my partner! With your knowledge of the future we can finance our own studio!"

  "I'm a talent scout, not a financier."

  "A talent scout—we'll use that, too. You must know who the great actors and actresses of the next thirty years are going to be—we'll approach them before anyone else does. Sign them to exclusive contracts. In ten years we'll dominate the business!"

  He paced the deck to the table, put a brandy glass in front of me, and filled it. "You know, if you hadn't told me, I would never have thought you were anything other than a servant. You're something of an actor yourself, aren't you? A manipulator of appearances. Iago pouring words into my ear? Good, we can definitely use that, too. But don't tell me, Detlev, there aren't aspects of the future you wouldn't like to escape from. Here's your chance. We can both kiss the Charles Koerners of the world goodbye, or better yet, succeed in their world and rub their faces in it!"

  This was a new one. I had been resisted before, I had been told to get lost, I had faced panic and disbelief. But never had a target tried to seduce me.

  The thing was, what Welles was saying made a lot of sense. Maybe if I could bring him back I would come out okay, but that didn't look like it was going to happen. Everything I had told him about himself—his lack of family connections, his troubles with the industry, his bleak prospects—applied to me in 2048. And since I had burned this moment universe by coming here, there was no way anyone from the future was going to come to retrieve me, even if they wanted to. I could make movies with Orson Welles—and eventually, I could make them without him.

  I stared at the Ambersons film canister on the table in front of me and got hold of myself. I knew his biography. Welles hadn't just been abandoned by others. When necessary, he had seduced and abandoned even his most trusted friends. It was always love on his terms.

  "Thank you for the offer," I said. "But I must go back. Are you coming with me?"

  Welles sat down in the chair beside me. He smiled. "I guess you'll have to tell your studio head, or whoever sent you, that I was more difficult than he imagined."

  "You'll live to regret this."

  "We shall see."

  "I already know. I showed you."

  Welles's face darkened. When he spoke his voice was distant. "Yes, that was pleasant. But now, it seems our business is finished."

  This was not going to play well when I got back to DAA. I had one chance to salvage my reputation. "Then, if you don't mind, I'll take this." I reached across the table to get the print of Ambersons.

  Welles surged forward from his chair, startlingly quick, and snatched the canister before I could. He stood, holding it in his arms, swaying on the unsteady deck. "No."

  "Come now, Orson. Why object to our having your film? In the hundred years after that botched preview in Pomona, no one has ever seen your masterpiece. It's the Holy Grail of lost films. What possible purpose could be served by keeping it from the world?"

  "Because it's mine."

  "But it's no less yours if you give it to us. Didn't you make it to be admired, to touch people's hearts? Think about—"

  "I'll tell you what to think," Welles said. "Think about this."

  He seized the canister by its wire handles, twirled on his feet as he swung it round him like a hammer thrower, and hurled it out into the air over the side of the boat. He stumbled as he let it go, catching himself on the rail. The canister arced up into the moonlight, tumbling, and fell to the ocean with only the slightest splash, disappearing instantly.

  · · · · ·

  I was working at my video editor when Moira came into the apartment. She didn't bother to knock; she never did. I drained the last of my gin, paused the image of Anne Baxter that stood on my screen, and swiveled my chair around toward her.

  "Jesus, Det, are you ever going to unpack?" Moira surveyed the stacks of boxes that still cluttered my living room.

  I headed to the kitchen to refill my glass. "That depends—are you going to throw me out again?"

  "You know I didn't want to," she said. "It was Vijay. He's always looking over my shoulder." She followed me into the kitchen. "Is that twentieth century gin? Let me have some." She examined a withered lime that had been sitting on the windowsill above the sink since before my trip to 1942, then put it back down. "Besides, you're all paid up for now."

  For now. But Rosethrush had not put me back on salary. She was furious when I returned without Welles, though she seemed to enjoy humiliating me so much that I wondered if that alone was worth what it had cost her. She rode me for my failure at the same time she dismissed it as no more than might be expected. Her comments combined condescension and contempt: not only was I a loser, but I served as a stand in for the loser Welles.

  According to Rosethrush, Welles's turning me down showed a fatal lack of nerve. "He's a coward," she told me. "If he came with you, he'd have to be the genius he pretended to be, with no excuses. His genius was all sleight of hand."

  I didn't mention Welles's offer to me. Not arguing with her was the price I paid for avoiding another blackballing.

  On the editor, I was working on a restoration ofThe Magnificent Ambersons. By throwing the only existing print overboard, Welles had made my job a lot harder—but not impossible. The negatives of the discarded footage in the RKO archives hadn't been destroyed until December, 1942, so I'd had time to steal them before I came back. Of course Rosethrush didn't want Ambersons; she wanted Welles. Hollywood was always about the bottom line, and despite my sales job to Welles, few beyond a bunch of critics and obsessives cared about a hundred-year-old black-and-white movie. But I was banking on the possibility that a restoration would still generate enough publicity to restart my career.

  Or maybe I had other reasons. I had not edited a film since the end of my directorial ambitions, twelve years before, and working on this made me realize how much I had missed the simple pleasure of shaping a piece of art with my hands. The restored Ambersons was brilliant, harrowing, and sad. It told the story of the long, slow decline of a great mercantile family, destroyed by progress and bad luck and willful blindness—and by the automobile. It was the first great film to address the depredations of technological progress on personal relations in society; but it was also a human tragedy and a thwarted love story. And it centered on the life of George Minafer, a spoiled rich boy who destroyed himself while bringing misery t
o everyone around him.

  Moira gave up and took the lime off the windowsill. "Where's a knife? You got any tonic?"

  I liked Moira; the very fact that she cared nothing about movies made her refreshingly attractive. But I had work to do. I went back to the editor while she poked around the kitchen. I hit play. On the screen Anne Baxter, as Lucy Morgan, was telling her father, played by Joseph Cotten, the legend of a mythical young Indian chief, Vendonah. Vendonah meant "Rides-Down-Everything."

  "Vendonah was unspeakable," Lucy said as they walked through the garden. "He was so proud he wore iron shoes and walked over people's faces. So at last the tribe decided that it wasn't a good enough excuse for him that he was young and inexperienced. He'd have to go. So they took him down to the river, put him in a canoe, and pushed him out from the shore. The current carried him on down to the ocean. And he never got back."

  I had watched this scene before, but for the first time the words sent a shiver down my spine. I hit pause. I remembered the self-loathing in Welles's eyes when I had shown him the images of himself in decline, and now I saw that he had made a movie about himself—in fact, he'd made two of them. Both Kane and George Minafer were versions of Welles. Spoiled, abusive, accusing, beautiful boys, aching for their comeuppance. Which they had gotten, all three of them, almost as if they had sought it out, directing the world and the people around them to achieve that aesthetic result. No wonder Welles abused others, pushing until they said "no"—because at some level he felt he deserved to be said "no" to. Maybe he turned down my "yes" because he needed that "no." The poor bastard.

  I stared at the screen. It wasn't all sleight of hand—or if it was sleight of hand, it was brilliant sleight of hand. Welles had pulled a masterpiece out of the air the way he had pulled the key out of Barbara Koerner's ear. Yet to keep his integrity, he had thrown the last print of that masterpiece into the ocean.

  Within a week I would have it back, complete, ready to give to the world, both a fulfillment of Welles's immense talent and the final betrayal of his will, sixty-three years after his death. And I would be a player again.

  If I ever let anyone else see the film. If I didn't? What, then, would I do to fill my days?

  Behind me, I heard Moira come back out of the kitchen, and the tinkle of ice in her glass. She was going to say something, something irrelevant, and I would have to tell her to get lost. But nothing came. Finally I turned on her, just as she spoke. "What's this?" she asked.

  She was playing idly with an open box of junk. In her hands she held a trophy, a jagged lucite spike on a black base.

  "That?" I said. "That's—that's the best original screenplay award from the 2037 Trieste Film Festival."

  She turned it over and put it back into the box. She looked up at me and smiled.

  "Anyway, Det, the reason I'm here is to ask if you want to go swimming. It's been record low UV all this week."

  "Swimming."

  "You know. Water? The beach? Naked women? Come with me, sweetheart, and I promise you won't get burned."

  "The burn doesn't worry me," I said. "But these waters are infested with sharks."

  "Really? Where'd you hear that?"

  I turned off the editor and got out of my chair. "Never mind," I said. "Give me a minute and I'll find my suit."

  Every Angel Is Terrifying, by John Kessel

  World Fantasy Award Nomination for Best Short Story 1999

  Bobby Lee grabbed the grandmother’s body under the armpits and dragged her up the other side of the ditch. “Whyn’t you help him, Hiram,” Railroad said.

  Hiram took off his coat, skidded down into the ditch after Bobby Lee, and got hold of the old lady’s legs. Together he and Bobby Lee lugged her across the field toward the woods. Her broken blue hat was still pinned to her head, which lolled against Bobby Lee’s shoulder. The woman’s face watched Railroad all the way into the shadow of the trees.

  Railroad carried the cat over to the Studebaker. It occurred to him that he didn’t know the cat’s name, and now that the whole family was dead he never would. It was a calico, gray striped with a broad white face and an orange nose. “What’s your name, puss-puss?” he whispered, scratching it behind the ears. The cat purred. One by one Railroad went round and rolled up the windows of the car. A fracture zigzagged across the windshield, and the front passenger’s vent window was shattered. He stuffed Hiram’s coat into the hole. Then he put the cat inside the car and shut the door. The cat put its front paws up on the dashboard and, watching him, gave a silent meow.

  Railroad pushed up his glasses and stared off toward the tree line. The place was hot and still, silence broken only by birdsong from somewhere up the embankment. He squinted up into the cloudless sky. Only a couple of hours of sun left. He rubbed the spot on his shoulder where the grandmother had touched him. Somehow he had wrenched it when he jerked away from her.

  The last thing the grandmother had said picked at him: “You’re one of my own children.” The old lady looked familiar, but nothing like his mother. But maybe his father had sown some wild oats in the old days— Railroad knew he had—could the old lady have been his mother, for real?

  It would explain why the woman who had raised him, the sweetest of women, was saddled with a son as bad as he was.

  The idea caught in his head. He wished he’d had the sense to ask the grandmother a few questions. The old woman might have been sent to tell him the truth.

  When Hiram and Bobby Lee came back, they found Railroad leaning under the hood of the car.

  “What we do now?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “Police could be here any minute,” Hiram said. Blood was smeared on the leg of his khaki pants. “Somebody might of heard the shots.”

  Railroad pulled himself out from under the hood. “Onliest thing we got to worry about now, Hiram, is how we get this radiator to stop leaking. You find a tire iron and straighten out this here fan. Bobby Lee, you get the belt off the other car.”

  It took longer than the half hour Hiram had estimated to get the people’s car back on the road. By the time they did it was twilight, and the red-dirt road simmered in the shadows of the pinewoods. They pushed the stolen Hudson they’d been driving off into the trees and got into the Studebaker.

  Railroad gripped the wheel of the car and they bounced down the dirt road toward the main highway. Beside him, hat pushed back on his head, Hiram went through the dead man’s wallet, while in the back seat Bobby Lee had the cat on his lap and was scratching it under the chin. “Kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty,” he murmured.

  “Sixty-eight dollars,” Hiram said. “With the twenty-two from the purse, that makes ninety.” He turned around and handed a wad of bills to Bobby Lee. “Get rid of that damn cat,” he said. “Want me to hold yours for you?” he asked Railroad.

  Railroad reached over, took the bills, and stuffed them into the pocket of the yellow shirt with bright blue parrots he wore. It had belonged to the husband who’d been driving the car. Bailey Boy, the grandmother had called him. Railroad’s shoulder twinged.

  The car shuddered; the wheels had been knocked out of kilter when it rolled. If he tried pushing past fifty, it would shake itself right off the road. Railroad felt the warm weight of his pistol inside his belt, against his belly. Bobby Lee hummed tunelessly in the back seat. Hiram was quiet, fidgeting, looking out at the dark trees. He tugged his battered coat out of the vent window, tried to shake some of the wrinkles out of it. “You oughtn’t to use a man’s coat without saying to him,” he grumbled.

  Bobby Lee spoke up. “He didn’t want the cat to get away.”

  Hiram sneezed. “Will you throw that damn animal out the damn window?”

  “She never hurt you none,” Bobby Lee said.

  Railroad said nothing. He had always imagined that the world was slightly unreal, that he was meant to be a citizen of some other place. His mind was a box. Outside the box was a realm of distraction, amusement, annoyance. Inside the box his real life went on, the struggle between
what he knew and what he didn’t know. He had a way of acting—polite, detached—because that way he wouldn’t be bothered. When he was bothered, he got mad. When he got mad, bad things happened.

  He had always been prey to remorse, but now he felt it more fully than he had since he was a boy. He hadn’t paid enough attention. He’d pegged the old lady as a hypocrite and had gone back into his box, thinking her just another fool from that puppet world. But the moment of her touching him—she wanted to comfort him. And he’d shot her.

  What was it the woman had said? “You could be honest if you’d only try. . . . Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time.”

  He knew she was only saying that to save her life. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a message.

  Outside the box, Hiram asked, “What was all that yammer yammer with the grandmother about Jesus? We doing all the killing while you yammer.”

  “He did shoot the old lady,” Bobby Lee said.

  “And made us carry her to the woods, when if he’d of waited she could of walked there like the others. We’re the ones get blood on our clothes.”

  Railroad said quietly, “You don’t like the way things are going, son?”

  Hiram twitched against the seat like he was itchy between the shoulder blades. “I ain’t sayin’ that. I just want out of this state.”

  “We going to Atlanta. In Atlanta we can get lost.”

  “Gonna get me a girl!” Bobby Lee said.

  “They got more cops in Atlanta than the rest of the state put together,” Hiram said. “In Florida . . .”

  Without taking his eyes off the road, Railroad snapped his right hand across the bridge of Hiram’s nose. Hiram jerked, more startled than hurt, and his hat tumbled off into the back seat.

  Bobby Lee laughed, and handed Hiram his hat.