The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 16

by John Joseph Adams

They disperse to their stations as she calculates the next jump toward Cormorant Sigma and the Arora Nebula System. Kosavin has estimated that it will be a safe harbor for them all until—if—they choose to go elsewhere later.

  Will you sing? she asks Li Sin. She wants to give them the memory of her awakening in return; of how she first saw the universe. She will find a way to share it with them. I’d like to hear my song.

  She is not afraid anymore.

  Li Sin holds her pilot’s hand. They sing to her and now she will remember her song as she glides toward an unknown future.

  She finds a glimmer of memory tucked deep inside and allows herself to inspect it at last: that of her mother’s eyes and proud smile just for her.

  Carmen Maria Machado

  The Resident

  from Her Body and Other Parties

  Two months after receiving my acceptance letter to Devil’s Throat, I kissed my wife goodbye. I left the city and drove north, toward the P—— Mountains, where I had attended Girl Scout camp in my youth.

  The letter sat beside me on the passenger seat, pinned down by my pocketbook. Nearly as thick as fabric, the paper did not flutter like lighter, cheaper stock would have; occasionally it spasmed with the wind. The crest at the top was embossed with gold leaf, the silhouette of a hawk that has just plucked the writhing body of a fish from the water. “Dear Ms. M——,” it said.

  “Dear Ms. M——,” I murmured as I drove.

  The landscape changed. Soon I passed suburbs and malls, and then stretches of trees and low hills, and then I went through a tunnel steeped in tungsten light and began a slow, meandering ascent. These mountains were so close, only two hours and fifteen minutes from our home, but I saw them rarely nowadays.

  The trees dropped away from the roadside, and I passed a sign: WELCOME TO Y——! WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE HERE. The town was run-down and gray, like so many of the old coal and steel towns that dotted the state. I’d describe the houses that lined the main thoroughfare as ramshackle, but ramshackle suggests a charm that these lacked. A traffic light hung above the lone intersection, and except for a cat that darted behind a garbage can, there was no movement.

  I stopped at a gas station whose prices were a full eighty cents above the state average—I had consulted the price before my departure. I went inside the minimart to pay for my gas, and picked up a bottle of water.

  “’S two for one,” said the morose-looking adolescent behind the counter. There was a tiny television suspended from the ceiling, playing a program I did not recognize.

  “What?” I said.

  “You can get one more bottle, for free,” he said. A constellation of pustules clustered at his jaw in the elliptical shape of the Andromeda galaxy. They were tipped in yellowish green domes. How he resisted lancing them was anyone’s guess.

  “I don’t want one more bottle,” I said, pushing my money across the counter.

  He looked puzzled but picked up the bills. “You heading up the mountain?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, relieved that he had asked me. “To the residency at Devil’s Throat.”

  His finger faltered over the register’s buttons, his hand crimped as if he were experiencing pain. He rubbed his jaw and then looked up at me with an unreadable expression; one of his pimples had opened and left a comet’s trail of pus across his skin.

  I was about to ask him if he’d ever been to that part of the mountain when a trill of music sounded from the television above us. On the screen, a young woman in a nightgown stood barefoot in a stand of trees. She slowly lifted her arms out to the side, groping at the air, then flapping listlessly like a stunned bird that’s just struck a window. She opened her mouth, as if to call out for help, but then soundlessly closed and opened it again, like a patient with a secret on her deathbed.

  The camera cut to behind the trees, where a group of girls watched the unfortunate young woman take one stumbling step, then another. One of them, leaning into her neighbor’s ear, whispered, “Not everybody’s cut out for this, I guess.”

  Then a laugh track ripped open the audio, and the youth guffawed as he punched numbers into the cash register. “What is this?” I whispered, disturbed.

  “Rerun,” he grunted. The change he returned to me was damp with sweat. Outside, I touched my face and was startled to discover tears the temperature of blood.

  Soon my car tipped upward and I was climbing the mountain again.

  In my adolescence I had a standing obligation to attend Girl Scout camp for a long weekend every autumn with the rest of my troop. Since we left after school, and in late October, by the time we arrived in these mountains we were beset by an inky darkness. In the backseat of Mrs. Z——’s minivan, the girls fell into silence and sleep, having been so long on the road, and having exhausted conversation well before leaving civilization. After the incident, I always sat in the passenger seat. It was fine, as I preferred the company of adults to that of my peers.

  In the car, the only light was the luminous glow of the dashboard. Mrs. Z—— stared straight ahead, and her daughter—an enemy of mine, but a fine-looking girl of great height and chestnut-brown hair—would inevitably be asleep in the backseat, her skull rapping on the glass of her window every time the vehicle struck a bump, though it never woke her. Next to her, the other girls would be staring into the middle distance or also resting their eyes. Outside, the car’s headlights cut through the night, illuminating a constantly rotating filmstrip of pavement, fallen branches, and blowing leaves, and the occasional slurry of red and flesh where a stag had met its end since the last rainfall.

  Occasionally Mrs. Z—— would look over at me, take a breath through her nose, and then murmur something generic. (“How is school?” was a favorite.) I knew that she was keeping her voice low so as not to wake her daughter, or let her daughter know that she was talking to me, and so I did the same and said something generic in return. (“Good. I like English class.”) There was no way to explain to this particular woman that school was adequate for learning and terrible for everything else, and that her own sweet-mouthed daughter (whom she had birthed, held, fed, and loved for many years) was a distinct percentage of this misery. And then we’d fall silent again, and the forest stretched on and on.

  On either side of the road, the white trunks of the trees were illuminated to a degree, the kind of brief visibility provided by a camera’s flash at midnight. I saw a layer or two of trees, and beyond that an opaque blackness that was disturbing to me. Autumn was the worst time to go into the mountains, I thought to myself. To drive into the wilderness when it writhed and gasped for air seemed foolish.

  I turned off the air conditioner. If only those girls could see me now: an adult, married, magnificent in my accomplishments.

  The radio was tuned to a classical station, which was playing a grand, jaunty song that moved along irregularly, dipping and swelling as I drove through the curves. It was like the beginning of an old film, a vehicle weaving along roads to reach its destination behind white-lettered credits. As the credits ended, the car would pull up to an old farmhouse, where I would get out, untying a white scarf from my hair and calling the name of my old friend. She’d emerge with a wave, and the laughter and rapport we’d share carrying my suitcases into the house would in no way foreshadow the gruesome plot whose wheels were already turning.

  “That was Isaac Albéniz,” the announcer intoned, “and his Spanish Rhapsody.” After a while the peaks began to chew up the music, eventually reducing it all to static. I flipped the radio off and rolled the window down, resting my elbow on the rubber lip and feeling very satisfied.

  Then I noticed the car behind me: a low white behemoth that hovered too close. I felt a strange spiral behind my navel, the downward swirl that might precede fear or arousal. Then there was a change, which I perceived before I understood it. Red and blue light spilled into my car.

  The police officer sat behind me for a full two minutes before opening his door and crunching in my directi
on.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. His eyes were small but oddly kind. He had a reddish patch at the corner of his lip: a fever sore, ready to bloom.

  “Good afternoon,” I responded.

  “Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.

  “I certainly have no idea,” I said.

  “You were speeding,” he said. “You were going fifty-seven in a forty-five zone.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Where are you heading?” he asked.

  As we spoke, the reddish patch seemed to sense me and expand outward, like an amoeba preparing for reproduction. He had a wedding ring, and so, barring any recent tragedies, there was a spouse who had seen this mark as recently as this morning. I imagined her (you may think me presumptuous to assume that his spouse was a woman, given my own particular circumstances, but there was something in his demeanor that suggested to me that he had never touched a man without anger or force or anxiety, and even now he touched the ring unconsciously with his thumb, suggesting affection, maybe even an erotic memory) being a woman entirely unlike me; that is, she was a woman unafraid of contagion. I imagined her kissing his mouth, perhaps even procuring a tiny tube of cream from a basket of many kinds of creams and dabbing it on, saying something soothing to him (“No one will notice, I’m sure”) and squeezing his shoulder. Perhaps they had a single fever sore that they traded back and forth, like an infant exchanged between them.

  When I emerged from my musings, his car had already driven out of sight. I looked at the paper he’d given me: a warning. “Drive slowly, arrive safe. Officer M——,” it said in sad, blocky handwriting at the top.

  I soon reached a T junction, where, the sign indicated, I was to turn left to go to Devil’s Throat. The other direction would take me back to the past, that dilapidated campground where so many things had gone wrong, and right.

  This last stretch was the most beautiful part of the drive. The trees bent over the road like footmen, acquiescing to the early heat. The glossy leaves were dense and blocked out the sky. I could hear the scream of cicadas, but I found it comforting. I felt renewed as I drove this lane—to paradise! To a completed novel! I had spent my life imagining a time when, instead of relying on the generosity of others, I would be able to stand on my own as an artist—refer to my published novel (released to modest but positive reviews—I was not so arrogant as to assume it would light up the world), teach where I wanted to, give small but respectable lectures for small but respectable sums of money. All of this now seemed within reach.

  A creature darted beneath my car.

  I swerved and braked so hard I could feel the car grinding in protest and the thunk of metal on body. Had it been icy or raining I would have surely died, swung into the nearest tree. As it was, I came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the lane.

  I looked in my rearview mirror, terrified to see what lay in the road.

  There was nothing.

  I got out of the car and looked beneath the chassis. There, the black, lifeless eyes of a rabbit met mine. The lower half of her body was missing, as neatly as if she were a sheet of paper that had been ripped in two. I stood and walked around the car, looking for the other half. I even knelt down again and peered up into the labyrinth of the car’s undercarriage. Nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her blank eyes. “You deserved better than that. Better than me.”

  I sat down heavily in the driver’s seat, twin spots of dirt on my jeans for my trouble. Distress came over me like a wave of nausea. I hoped this was not some sort of omen.

  Ahead of me there was a blue sign with an arrow, pointing right. DEVIL’S THROAT, it said. No pleasantries here.

  As my car wound around the edge of the property, I understood that I would only be seeing a small fraction of it during my stay. It was hundreds of acres, much of it undeveloped. Devil’s Throat had once been a lakeside resort for New York millionaires, but the owners overextended their finances and the entire endeavor collapsed during the Great Depression. The current owner was an organization that funded fellowships providing time and space to writers and artists to do their work. The residency, I discerned from the map that had arrived in the mail soon after my acceptance letter, occupied the southernmost corner of the resort: a cluster of studios and a main building that had once been the sumptuous hotel. The studios themselves rimmed the periphery of a lake, where the wealthiest of the residents had stayed for entire summers, lazing around in the muggy heat.

  I followed the road until the trees finally parted. The former hotel swelled out of the ground like an infection, a disturbance in the woods. It had clearly once been a grand structure, radical in design, the kind of work done by ambitious young architects not yet crushed by years of anonymity and unfinished blueprints.

  Two cars—one ancient and dirty blue, the other red and glinting in the sunlight—were parked haphazardly next to the hotel. I pulled in beside the red car, and then, nervous, pulled out again and parked next to the blue car instead. I suddenly felt self-conscious about the number of possessions in my trunk and backseat. I would have to unload, and it would take half a dozen trips.

  I got out of the car and left everything behind.

  The hotel’s first story was ordinary but elegant, with dark gray stone and black mortar, slender windows that revealed choice cuts of interior: red velvet, wood-paneled walls, an abandoned coffee mug leaking steam on a side table. But the second story made the building more closely resemble a large piece of saltwater taffy stretched and pulled to wild dimensions. The windows and their walls turned at odd angles from their first-floor cousins, tipping to and fro. You might from one window be able to see more of the ground than the sky, from another more of the sky than the ground. One of the rooms bent so close to the surrounding trees that a branch was arched toward the window; surely a stiff breeze would instigate its advances. At the top the roof sloped up and up until it came to a whorl of a point, like the tip of a dollop of cream. Resting there was a large glass orb.

  The steps leading to the front door were wide, so wide that if one stood in the middle, the banisters would be inaccessible. I walked up the right side, sliding my hand along the banister until a splinter bit into my palm. I lifted my hand and examined the shard between my heart line and head line. I pinched the exposed wood and pulled; my hand contracted around the wound, which did not bleed. I mounted the last few steps to the porch.

  I hesitated before the opulent entrance, disliking how the wood curled in organic tendrils from where the doors met, like an octopus emerging arm and suckers first from a hiding place. My wife had always teased me for my feelings and sensations, the things that I immediately loved or hated for reasons that took months of thought to articulate. I dithered there on the stoop for a full ten minutes before the door was opened by a handsome man in penny loafers. He looked startled to see me.

  “Hello,” he said. He sounded like a drinker, and possibly a homosexual. I took an immediate liking to him. “Are you—coming in?” He stepped to the side and nearly vanished behind the door.

  “I—yes,” I said, stepping over the threshold. I told him my name.

  “Oh, yeah! I think—” He turned to the empty space behind him. “I think we thought you were going to come tomorrow? Perhaps there was a miscommunication.”

  The doorway to the adjacent room ejaculated a flurry of activity, and I realized that he had been speaking to a trio of women just beyond my line of vision: a slender, pale waif in a shapeless frock whose fractal pattern spiraled dozens of holes into her torso and created in me immediate anxiety; a tall woman with dreadlocks coiled on top of her head and a generous smile; and a third woman whom I recognized, though I was also positive I’d never seen her before.

  The woman in the anxiety-provoking dress introduced herself as Lydia, a “poet-composer.” Her feet were bare and filthy, as if she were trying to prove to everyone she was an incorrigible bohemian. The tall woman said that she was Anele, and a photographer. The woman
I did and did not recognize called herself by a name that I immediately forgot. I do not mean that I wasn’t paying attention; rather, she said her name and as my mind closed around it, it slipped away like mercury from probing fingers.

  The man who had opened the door said, “She’s a painter.” He called himself Benjamin and was, he said, a sculptor.

  “Why are you not at your studios?” I asked, regretting the imprudent question as soon as it left my mouth.

  “Midday boredom,” said Anele.

  “Mid-residency boredom,” clarified Lydia. “The more social among us”—she gestured to the people around her—“sometimes eat lunch here in the main hall, to stop ourselves from going crazy.”

  “We just finished,” said Benjamin. “I was heading back. But I bet if you stick your head in the kitchen you can catch Edna and she can fix you something to eat.”

  “I’ll take you there,” said Anele. She hooked her arm in mine and walked me away from the others.

  As we crossed the foyer, I felt a fresh burst of fear regarding the woman whose name I could not seem to retain. “The painter—” I said, hoping that Anele would provide the relevant information.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “She is—lovely.”

  “She is lovely,” Anele agreed. She pushed on a set of double doors. “Edna!”

  A wiry woman was hunched over the sink, where she appeared to have been gazing into its soapy depths. She straightened and looked at me. Her hair was flame red and was tied behind her head with a black velvet ribbon.

  “Oh!” she said, upon seeing me. “You’re here!”

  “I—I am,” I confirmed.

  “My name is Edna,” she said. “I’m the residency director.” She pulled off her yellow rubber gloves and proffered a hand, which I took. It was cool and damp, like a freshly wrung-out sponge. “You’re early,” she continued. “A full day.”

  “I must have read my letter incorrectly,” I whispered. I flushed scarlet, and I could hear my wife’s gentle laughter, my mortification on full display.

 

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