Each time I come back, Budapest is different. By the time I am forty–five, she has returned to her old self––a courtesan whose best days may be behind her, still beautiful despite her wrinkles and age spots, basking in the sun beside the Danube.
“Vienna is richer than you are,” I tell her.
“You don’t care about Vienna,” she answers, smiling. “You come back, over and over again. You don’t care if I’m dirty or poor. The air here is the only air you can breathe without effort. Everywhere else, you have to wear an invisible mask, a filtration system. You can’t adjust to the atmosphere. Here, the sunlight is the right color. Here, food tastes the way it should.”
“I’ll leave you and never come back,” I say.
She answers only, “I’d like to see you try.”
In Hungarian, when you are in a country or city, you are either –ban or –ben. Americaban. Bostonban. But you are on Hungary, Magyarországon: the suffix is –on or –en. That’s because to the Magyars, Hungary was the world, and they rode their short, sturdy horses across it, from one horizon to the other. It’s the same for Budapest. When I am there, I am Budapesten. I am standing on Budapest, and from here I can see everything.
By the time I am thirty–three, I’ve become a hyphenated American. This is a new century. Multiculturalism is an important topic at my university, and suddenly we are all hybrid, interstitial. I am Hungarian–American, but what does that actually mean? If I’m not fully American, but I’m not fully Hungarian either, where do I fit? Not on either side of the hyphen. Then perhaps I am the hyphen?
I imagine inhabiting a two–dimensional planet, an immigrant Flatland where I have no substance or shadow. I exist only on a straight line between .
As I write this, which is neither a story nor an essay, perhaps a hyphenated story–essay, I am in Budapest, and the birds that perch on the roof are clicking like castanets. I am leaving in the morning. Great Britain has just voted to leave the European Union, and I’m suddenly afraid that time will go backward, and soot will descent on the buildings, and there will be Yugos in the streets again.
I thought the future was going to be like Star Trek , with all of us living together as one human family. We got our communicators, right? Later I will call my daughter and talk to her, just waking up in the morning, six hours behind me. I will see her face, with the confident grin of a typical American teenager, on the small screen of my cell phone. “See you tonight,” I’ll say, and then I’ll fly across the ocean to have dinner with her in Boston. Surely it’s not that far from here to the Enterprise .
But today the future feels as though it’s turning into something by William Gibson. Neuromancer , maybe. Except that novel’s most famous metaphor is already out of date. Most of my students can’t imagine a sky like a television tuned to a dead channel. They’ve never seen a dead channel. They watch television on their cell phones. Someday, I suspect, cell phones will be implanted in them directly, and they will simply have to close their eyes. They will have become cyborgs. That’s another way of being assimilated, but also alienated. In that future, we will all be aliens, right here on Earth.
When I am seven, I see America for the first time through an airplane window. It looks like stars, far below me in the darkness. I am told those stars are the lights of New York City.
It’s difficult becoming American. I must learn to eat new foods. Will I be able to survive in this strange place on Wonder Bread, which you can scrunch up into a ball and bounce on the kitchen table? Campbell’s soup from concentrate? Captain Crunch? The atmosphere here is different, heavier than on my home planet. The sun is not as bright. This planet must be farther from its sun.
I watch The Brady Bunch . Perhaps if I become like Marsha Brady, the inhabitants of this strange place will accept me as one of them.
When I am twenty–one, I watch Alien on my boyfriend’s VHS player. I sympathize with the alien. She’s a mother, after all. She’s only trying to protect her children. Find a better life for them, one with more opportunities. What mother would do less?
Imagine what it’s going to be like for those little aliens, growing up in a world inhabited by human beings. They’ll probably need to disguise themselves as human, learn how to eat human food, how to speak English. They might try to look like Marsha Brady. In fact, the entire Brady Bunch may be a family of aliens trying to pass as human. That would explain a lot.
Nevertheless, they’ll probably be teased in school. It’s not easy being a creature from outer space. Trust me, I know.
If I am at home anywhere, it is here, in Budapest speaking a language I only fitfully understand, in a city I will probably never inhabit.
The Hungarian language is not related to any other language in Europe. Finnish, maybe, but even that is a tenuous connection. I once saw a chart on which the languages of Europe were represented as a tree. Hungarian was off by itself, a branch growing from the trunk, unconnected to any other branches. I wondered if it was lonely.
It sounds like something made up for a television show, like Klingon. Except I think Klingon is probably easier to learn.
It sounds like something spoken by an alien species. Perhaps it was taught to the Hungarians by the same aliens who built Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu, and the Egyptian pyramids. Or perhaps Hungarians are aliens. That would account for the prevalence of high cheekbones.
On a SwissAir flight over the Atlantic, I watch John Carter of Mars on the small screen on the back of the seat in front of me. It’s in English, but somehow I’ve managed to turn on the Chinese subtitles, and I don’t know how to turn them off. I decide the movie is actually better with Chinese subtitles. It adds a sense of dislocation that seems entirely appropriate.
During World War II, a group of Hungarian scientists emigrated to the United States. They were Jews fleeting the Nazi occupation of Hungary and when they arrived, they joined the Allied war effort. Among other things, they helped to develop the atomic bomb. Because of their religion and strange accents, they were not immediately accepted into American society. One of them, the physicist Leó Szilárd, jokingly referred to them as “the Martians.” The name stuck, and the group is still known by that name. If you don’t believe me, go on, look it up on your communicator.
When asked about the possibility of alien life, Szilárd responded, “They are already here among us: they just call themselves Hungarians.” See, what did I tell you?
When the plane took off, I remember thinking, hinta–palinta.
When I am a fifteen, I realize with satisfaction that “alienation” can be written “alien–nation.” I come from an alien nation.
Like a typical teenager, I hate everyone, including myself. I am alien–nated. Does that “nated” come from the same root as native, nativity, natal? Does it mean I am alien born?
Well then, I am an alien born.
The OED says that “alien” comes from the Latin alienus , which means, among other things, “of or belonging to others, unnatural, unusual, unconnected, separate, of another country, foreign, unrelated, of a different variety or species, unfamiliar, strange, unfriendly, unsympathetic, unfavourable, inappropriate, incompatible, distasteful, repugnant.” Repugnant? That’s a bit much.
In its fourth definition of the word, the OED mentions its use in science fiction: “of, belonging to, or relating to an (intelligent) being or beings from another planet; designating such a being; extraterrestrial.” I’ll take intelligent over repugnant, thank you. Even in parentheses.
In the Budapest airport bookstore, I find a copy of The Little Prince in Hungarian.
Back in Boston, everything seems wrong. I’ve flown from one ancient city bisected by a river to another, but that river is the wrong color, and the sky looks like a television tuned to a dead channel in the 1980s. I can’t taste the food: it’s as though I’m chewing on cardboard. My stomach hurts. I have a perpetual headache. Somehow, I seem to have wandered into an alternate reality, the one in which time travelers failed to stop Wo
rld War II.
Every morning, to practice my Hungarian, I read a chapter of The Little Prince , or more accurately, A Kis Herceg . It’s exciting to recognize words I know. Bolygó: planet. Repülőgép: airplane. Róka: fox. Rósza: rose. Óriáskígyó: boa constrictor. I learned that one at the Budapest zoo. The little prince comes from egy kisbolygó, a small planet, as I come from a small country. He’s also searching for home, answers, the cure for a broken heart. We’ve both felt the sting of a fickle rose, although mine is an entire city.
Maybe I can find a friendly fox. Or, you know, aviator.
It occurs to me that I will be leaving Budapest for the rest of my life. As though we are in one of those movies with Richard Gere or Diane Lane where two people meet for a month each summer until they are old and one of them dies. I will die before Budapest, which is reassuring.
What will happen to her? In a future I won’t see, will she grow into a city of steel and glass? Will spaceships from Mars and beyond dock at her towers? Will aliens from other worlds eat gulyásleves and somlói galuska in her restaurants? Will they sit in her bars drinking palinka, speaking alien languages, like a scene out of Star Wars ? Will they go shopping on Váci utca?
Or will she drown when global warming raises the Danube? Will her buildings, crumbling by then, be flooded by jade–green water? Will her inhabitants develop gills and live beneath its murky surface?
Or will she be bombed again in World War III, as she was the last two times? Will her buildings and bridges burn? Please, I think, let me not see that happen.
When I am fifty–three, when I am seventy–five, when I am ninety–one I will return, assuming I’m still around. Who knows, by then I might be half machine, or half green gill–woman in a gold bikini. I will go back and stand in the park around the Nemzeti Múzeum and think, this is me spinning through space, but it does not matter, because for now, for a little while, I am Magyarországon, Budapesten. At least I am standing on my own ground.
I can smell the linden flowers…
Someone asks me why I write stories about space aliens, alternate histories, dystopian futures. Stories that could be classified as science fiction. I answer, because I’m a realist.
( Editors’ Note: “To Budapest, with Love” is read by Amal El–Mohtar and Theodora Goss is interviewed by Julia Rios on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 14B.)
© 2017 by Theodora Goss
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Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology co–edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two–sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Her first novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter , will be published by Saga Press in 2017.
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Some Cupids Kill With Arrows
Tansy Rayner Roberts | 2523 words
Meg should have known. This was what came of trying to be nice.
“It’s a new job, a new crowd,” her mother had declared, far too cheerfully. “Be sociable this time around. Make friends. Say yes to possibilities.”
Against her better judgement, Meg had worn the daffodil yellow shirt; Meg had said “yes” to drinks after work with her bubbly deskmate Dee; Meg had allowed the dangerous overtures of friendship to wash over her like a fog of latte foam and borrowed lip gloss.
This was how Meg found herself here, at a speed–dating night in a pub called Dog and Biscuit, opposite a man who introduced himself as Hercules.
Hercules. Without a trace of irony.
Worse than that, this beefcake with a side of cheese would not stop banging on about his ex–wife. Whose name, apparently, Meg shared. Whose fate he kept alluding to as “tragic.”
She knew what was going on here, and she was having none of it.
“So, you must be Hermes,” she accused the next man along the table, another Hollywood–gorgeous slab of everything with white teeth and sculpted muscle, though this one was spiky blond, and ran on sleeker lines than the mighty Hercules.
“Cupid,” said the blond, his forehead creasing slightly. “Why did you think I was Hermes?”
“Wings on your shoes. Cupid would have been my next guess—or Eros. I wasn’t sure if we were including Romans in the mix with the Ancient Greeks.”
“You figured us out fast,” he said, impressed.
“I have a Masters in Comparative Mythology. My mother said it would do nothing to prepare me for real life situations—ha, thanks for that. I think I just won a decades–old argument.”
“You intrigue me,” said Cupid, leaning in. “What did you say your name was?”
Meg wore a name tag, and was about to say something cutting about his failure to notice that, but it occurred to her that the reason he couldn’t read her name tag was because he was gazing into her eyes as if he might find the secrets of the universe there—or possibly a really amazing fuck against a wall.
Either way, he wasn’t looking at her name tag.
The bell rang, and Cupid released his intense scrutiny. As she moved on down the line, Meg felt like she was leaving half her clothes behind.
Theseus had a good run of chat up lines, and filled out a designer suit in interesting ways, but admitted within the first two minutes that his main goal in life was to have a threesome with a pair of sisters.
Jason talked about boats. Meg considered raising the question of his ex, to scope out the nature of his tragic backstory, but decided she did not want to know if this modern, gel–haired, soccer playing version of the ancient hero had once commanded his wife and children to be stoned to death.
Finally it was over and she crawled to the bar—an oasis in a desert full of terrible men who didn’t deserve her. “I blame you,” she told Cupid, who had been sitting there for a while in his battered blue jeans and tight white T–shirt.
“Most people do,” he said, not taking offense. “Can I buy you a —”
“Gin martini, dirty, followed by an immediate sequel,” she demanded. Letting men finish their sentences was overrated. That was the life lesson she was taking away from speed dating night.
“The preoccupation humanity has with romantic love is not my fault,” Cupid insisted, after he had ordered the drinks. “You’re the ones who chase after it like it’s the boss level of a computer game.”
“Easy for you to say, you’re married.” Meg had written her final thesis on Psyche and her magical fairytale of an invisible prince, of the mountains of seeds and the power of love.
“We broke up,” Cupid said morosely. He took the arrival of their drinks as a good excuse to throw back the rest of the beer he already had. “Centuries back.”
Meg gave him a sharp look. “Oh by all means, let’s talk about your wife. I can’t tell you how much my belief in Happy Ever After has been bolstered by tonight’s parade of sad saps with their tales of marital woe.”
“She said I wasn’t present enough in the relationship.”
“Was that a joke? Because of the invisibility thing when you first got together?”
“Might have been,” he sighed wistfully. “Psyche had a knack for puns. And crossword puzzles. She was perfect.”
“Give me strength.” Meg looked around for Dee, only to see her bubbly blonde deskmate leaving on the arm of Hercules. “Ugh.”
“Another drink?”
“It’s the least that you owe me.”
Another half martini later, Cupid said in a plaintive voice, “Didn’t you like any of them?”
“I knew it!”
Meg said savagely. “This whole night was for my benefit, wasn’t it? You’re on the clock, cupiding me. Not that ‘cupid’ should ever be a verb. Why on earth would you—” A horrible thought struck her. “Am I one of you? I’m not Aphrodite, am I?”
“No,” said Cupid with a special kind of horror in his voice. “You are not my mother. I think I would have noticed.”
“Are we related?”
“There’s no Greek god in you, I promise.” There was a long pause as if they were both listening to the obvious follow–up line to that: Would you like one?
“Thank fuck for that.” Meg chewed on an olive. “So why am I special enough to warrant my own magical mystery speed dating session? And, more importantly, why pick those men?”
“Well,” said Cupid. “You do have a Masters in Comparative Mythology. And you like muscles, according to your online profile and every Tumblr site you’ve ever visited.”
Ten out of ten for creepy stalker technique. “And these are the only men you know,” she guessed.
“And these,” Cupid conceded. “Are the only men I know. What was wrong with Ares?”
“Oh, do let’s speculate about why your father the God of War might be an inappropriate romantic match for a highly sarcastic pacifist.” Meg blew out an exasperated breath. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to telling my mother about this evening. Impractical field of study my arse.”
Cupid looked as disappointed and pathetic as was possible for a man that handsome.
Meg elbowed him in a friendly manner. “Why are you so terrible at this?”
“I think I forgot how to cupid. It’s been a few centuries since I made the effort.”
“What have you been doing with yourself to get so rusty?”
“Your lot invented the novel. It distracted me.”
“Which novel in particular?”
“All of them. I’m still trying to catch up. I’ve got as far as 1965.”
“Oh, hang in there, you’re nearly at Valley of the Dolls .”
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