A few days later, Stacia was outside Mary’s apartment building when Dave and Mary came outside, tears scattering across her face. “I just want to know where we went wrong,” Stacia said, and Mary wasn’t sure which “we” Stacia meant. “What happened to us? I thought nobody could ever come between us. What happened? What happened to us? What happened to us? What happened to us?” Mary and Dave had to get in a random taxi just to get away from her.
Mary could see what was going to happen next. Stacia was going to stalk them one too many times, she was going to act just a little too creepy around Dave, and she was going to know too many embarrassing things about Mary. And then Dave would bail, and Mary would topple back into the dating pool. Wings on fire.
Maybe a week passed, and Mary started to relax. And then, when she was walking along the waterfront with Dave, Stacia came running up behind them, arms waving and eyes streaming with tears, wearing a torn skirt and mismatched high-heel shoes.
“I’ve never felt anything like what he felt, when he got together with you,” Stacia said, panting. “I’ll never feel anything like that for myself, firsthand. It was so intense. I can’t even imagine feeling that much love for anyone.” To Dave, she said: “You can’t compete. You might as well go home. She’s already had the great love of her life! Every time I close my eyes, I keep replaying it in my mind. It’s so intense. I wasn’t prepared. He loved her so much, he went half-crazy with love. You’ll never measure up. You’ll always be her second love. A consolation prize. Sorry to be the one to tell you!”
Then she ran away, stumbling over her own shoes.
That night, Mary spent hours staring into the depths of her kitchen trash compactor, where the last shreds of the memory wisp still clung. After a while, the crushing mechanism started to look like faces, or little blades of black grass, because your mind has a nearly limitless ability to see familiar outlines in anything. Mary didn’t cry, but she did heave, more and more violently, halfway between crying and empty-vomiting, until she had to send her kitchen away and summon her bed into the same spot on the wall.
Mary hugged herself in bed all night, staring at the peeling wall opposite. In the morning, she had a nine-tequila hangover, but she also had a moment of clarity: It wasn’t enough to avoid the places she and Roger had gone together. She had to grow up and move on with her life.
She took an extra smart cookie and spent an hour at dawn, sending out résumés for jobs that would actually use her bio-artist skills. And she started surfing apartment listings on her kina, because maybe she could actually live someplace where a sink and bed could coexist. She read up on extreme sports, which had gotten a lot more extreme since smart-cookies gave people superhuman reflexes and concentration. She kept looking for jobs and apartments for hours, until she was almost late for work.
By the time Mary met Dave for dinner (a different hand-pulled noodle place than the one where she got dumped), she was full of news. “I already have a job interview in ten days,” she said, sploshing dumplings. “And I’m thinking of trying BASE jumping. I know, this isn’t really like me, but change is healthy. Right?”
“I haven’t known you for long enough to know what’s like you,” Dave said. “I keep being surprised.” He looked around, as if afraid that Stacia would turn up at the next table, with more advice about Mary’s erogenous zones or more declarations that Dave couldn’t compete with Mary’s great lost love. “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
“Um, yeah,” Mary said. “This has been a weird time in my life. I mean … ”
“You know,” Dave said in his matter-of-fact drawl, “I hate drama. I had a lot of drama when I was in my early twenties, and I just can’t stand it.”
Okay. So this was it. She was giving off too much crazy. She looked like a weirdness magnet, or at least someone with horrible judgment in choosing her friends. So, she was about to be dumped. She deserved to be dumped, truth be told. She had mismanaged her shit.
“This is really hard for me to say,” Dave said.
“I’m listening.” Mary braced herself, hands on elbows. Tried to keep a game face on. She was never going to eat hand-pulled noodles again.
“I know this is really out of line,” Dave said.
Mary felt her insides lose all stability, like she was falling off a skyscraper. But then she also felt a cushion of okayness, deep inside. Like she’d already been through the worst that could possibly happen, and she was still here. Even if Dave broke her heart again, he wouldn’t break her.
“Whatever you have to say,” she told Dave, amazed at her own calm, “just say it.”
“I think your friend is in trouble,” Dave said. “I know it’s none of my business, and you can tell me to butt out. But I think she’s having a psychotic break or something. Yesterday, at the waterfront, she seemed like someone who was coming apart. All that crazy stuff she said about the memories being so intense.”
Mary almost fell out of her chair at the realization that she wasn’t being dumped. Then she took on board what Dave was saying.
“God, you’re right,” she said. “She’s suffering from a neural overload. She can’t integrate those memories, because they’re so different and conflicting. You know, Roger kind of hated Stacia, especially early on. Plus she remembers the intensity of Roger falling for me, but not everything that came after, when we settled into just a normal relationship. Wow. I should have seen this sooner, but I was too busy thinking about how she hurt me.”
“Again, this is none of my business.” Dave raised his hands. “And I know this is her own fault. But … ”
“We ought to help her.” Mary grabbed her purse. “You’re right.”
“Thanks for not being mad at me for speaking out of school.” Dave seemed relieved. She had to pause to kiss him on the lips and embrace him with all her strength, right next to the man pulling noodles with his bare hands.
• • •
One time, when Mary and Stacia were still in college, Mary had cooked up a bad batch of prions. They were supposed to induce an hour of amyloid brain-melt, then dissolve harmlessly. But instead, they’d turned Mary and Stacia into basket cases, and when Mary found herself losing the use of language and forgetting how to walk, she’d lunged for the antidote she’d prepared just in case. Mary was fine an hour later, but Stacia had kept shaking and making preverbal chatter, like a giant baby. Mary had stayed with Stacia all night, holding onto her and saying, “It’s okay, I’m here,” until the prions had finally flushed out and Stacia had regained her mind.
This was worse. Stacia was huddled in one corner of her light-box apartment, wearing a bright flamenco-dancer dress that had been beautiful but was now stained and torn. “I can’t,” Stacia said over and over. “I can’t, I can’t.” Her self-actuating eyelashes were flicking tears in all directions.
“I know,” Mary said. “We’re going to help you. There are ways to make some memories seem less vivid. I’ve read about it. We can fix this.”
“I don’t ever want that,” Stacia said. “Roger’s love for you is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever felt. He was right about me, I was jealous. You were perfect together. I was just a stupid useless third wheel. You were amazing.”
“You only think Roger’s love for me was so great, because it’s like a lump your mind can’t digest. It really wasn’t that great, trust me.” Mary felt a weird relief, saying this aloud. “You can’t reconcile Roger’s version of events with yours, and it’s like you’ve given yourself a split personality or something. We’re going to help.”
They got Stacia cleaned up, and strapped her to her bed, which was an actual piece of furniture instead of a module. Mary and Dave debated about taking Stacia to the hospital, but Stacia begged them not to, and Mary had a feeling she could help Stacia better than the E.R. staff could in any case.
“So first you have to go cold turkey on the smart cookies, so your brain goes into withdrawal and your thoughts slow down to a crawl,” Mary said. “Then we slowly work you back up
to a normal dose over a four-or five-day period. It’s basically like rebooting your brain. I’m sorry. This is going to hurt a lot.”
“No,” Stacia said. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“You have to,” Mary said. “You have to let go of this. Come on. If anybody knows how to get rid of a guy, it’s you.”
Stacia actually laughed at that, which seemed like a good sign.
Stacia sweated through her clothes and sheets. She went clammy and glass-eyed as her most recent smart cookie wore off. Mary sat with her, calling in sick at work and sitting at Stacia’s bedside even after Dave had to go to his office. And once Stacia’s brain was barely functional and she was gazing into space, Mary started speaking in Stacia’s ear. Telling her the history, the saga of the Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick. Their friendship after college, and how they had stayed friends even after Mary got into a long-term relationship with some guy, whatsisname. Mary dredged up details from some storage locker in the back of her mind, rebuilding Stacia’s true memories to banish the false ones.
“That guy, whatsisname, he’s gone, but we’re still here,” Mary said. “We’re not going anywhere. I haven’t forgiven you, but I’m not going to bail on you either. Hey, remember that time you and I went ice skating and we each twisted an ankle? It was a couple years after I started dating whatsisname. We ate those revolting tofu corndogs until we barfed.” She kept talking until her voice got tired, repeating the same stories with minor variations after a while and obsessing over minor details like the exact color of a stuffed animal they’d had for a week and then lost.
The sun crested over Stacia’s slit of a window and then bobbed again, and darkness reasserted. Mary brushed Stacia’s forehead with the veiny part of the back of her hand, like someone waking a child from a bad dream.
© 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders.
Charlie Jane Anders is managing editor of io9.com and the organizer of the long-running reading series Writers With Drinks. Her novelette “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was a finalist for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards.
Dim Sun
Maria Dahvana Headley
They’re rolling the cart around the edge of the room and the crowd is salivating. Everyone but us has been waiting in line for hours. This is the place to go if you want to eat Dim Sun, and everybody knows it, particularly after the article my buddy Bert Gold wrote. This restaurant used to be a secret. I tried my damnedest to keep him from writing the address down, but he couldn’t be stopped. Some people are secret sharers. That’s what they live to do, and that’s Bert Gold. He tells one secret, and then goes off hunting another.
Bert Gold’s an old white man with a ponytail and a belly, and the only way he’s ever been able to get the ladies interested is to take them out to dinner at places they can’t get into on their own. Almost nobody but Bert can get in everywhere, and it’s not because Bert’s cool. It’s just that his job is a password. No one really wants him to come in. He’s a curve skewer in terms of the look of a place, but his recommendation means insane business. His bad review means bust. The result of Bert Gold’s prodigious appetite and connections is that, all over the universe, pinned to the back walls of restaurants hoping not to re-encounter his savage tongue, there are photographs of him in the company of young lovelies.
It might be enough to make a person jealous, if a person were inclined toward jealousy. I’m just hungry. But that’s the shit of my position: buddy to the legend. The legend makes the reservation, and sometimes, when the legend’s lady cancels, I get to horn in.
Today is no exception. Bert’s been working on a woman twenty years too young for him, and finally she got a date with someone righter. He’s a lech, but he doesn’t seem to care. He seems to think the universe owes him younger women. Universe owes all of us something, is my feeling. We all had bad childhoods. Whole world full of bad childhoods. Look at the last fifty years. Things went south all over. Some of us have gotten to an age where our pee floats without warning. It’s not pretty, the anti-gravity, and the having to pee. It never was. You’d think they’d find a way to deal, but I spend a lot of time with a plastic sack tied to a stick these days, just like everyone else our age. It’s like I’m Nabokov after butterflies, but not.
“Damn it,” said Bert when he called. “That little pony canceled on me again. Got a spot for you at Dim Sun, you’re interested. I’m thinking of de-starring them. They’re scared. They’ll feed us up right.”
“I’m there,” I said. “I’m there in five minutes.”
I had to make a quick portal. It took a bribe to my ex, the welder—short notice—but she had the right materials. She hacksawed a chunk of universe out, and I walked through it, and into the restaurant.
The music’s changed since the last time I was here, before it got popular. Now we have some kind of botanical singing, like electronic music used to be prior to things getting more exotic. This is the secret language of plants, and it turns out plants like to break it down.
“Is that a fern?” I ask Bert Gold, who is arriving just ahead of me, stepping out of the air, his black t-shirt rumpled, his ponytail done up in a coil for the occasion. Sometimes Bert wears his hair in the local style.
“Nah, that’s just some kind of marigold,” he says. “Listen. It’s got no bass. I miss synth. Fucking organics everywhere you go these days. Want to know a secret?”
“What secret?”
“I don’t know,” Bert says. “I’m fresh out. But I bet someone here’s got their thumb in a plum.”
In the old days, back on Earth, Bert was a sin-eater. Except, the reverse. A sin-spitter. He’d take someone’s sins, and then he’d walk them to another part of the world, where he’d spit them out in a hole in the dirt, cover them over, and grow magic plants. There was a period of time when the ground, post-radiation, was really fertile. It grew whole vines of sins, twisting ropes of bright green Infidelity, yellow-leafed Embezzlement, perennially flowering Neighbor’s Wife. People paid money to display the things Bert planted. He was a horticulturist to the stars, decking their gardens out in the sins of everyone else. Up here, his job is a demotion from what he did on Earth, but sin-chewing gave him tooth trouble, and he was happy to stop that line of work. Now that he’s a critic, though, he’s basically doing the same thing, under a different title. From what I hear, this tastes better.
“I’m hungry,” I say to Bert. He looks at me, and grins.
“You’re always hungry,” he says. That’s true. I’ve been hungry since I was born. The cart rolls past. I crane my neck to see what’s on display, but it’s all still under wraps. The windows are steamed up and people look desperate for a taste. The crowd here is pretty, skinny, and young, and they’re from all over the place. I take a moment to appreciate them. A couple have tentacles and a couple more are wearing classic big-eyes pointy-chins. Apparently that’s coming back. I never went in for that style. The real stuff is more interesting. Life out here was never going to be a kind of pretty that people from Earth could appreciate. The restaurants are all about dress up and cover whatever you really look like. Unless you’re us. We look like two old guys from the blue and green, born in the ’50s, and dressing like the ’70s still have hold of us. For a while, we rode motorcycles. Now we just walk, and it’s hard enough. We feel heroic, me and Bert, though Bert has been known to use wheels on occasion. He’s not as young as he used to be. Who is?
We’re seated at the best table, and I watch the waitstaff flitter frantically in the corners. Bert Gold calls ahead, but only by five minutes. He comes into your restaurant without any real warning. That’s his deal. If you’re not prepared, too bad for you. He waves his hand in the air, and the cart tilts. It’s got wheels made of magnets, because without them, it’d be the saddest place. All the Dim Sun would just be flying around, splatting onto customers.
“We’re going to have the Dim Sun Unlimited,” Bert Gold says. “How’s that today?”
“Amazing as always, a pleasure,
a privilege,” says the server, but he looks uneasy. I glance at the cart. The cover they’ve got on it is glowing. Whatever the specials are, they’re volatile. Bring it, I say. I want to eat Dim Sun, and I want to eat it desperately. It’s been months since I’ve tasted it. This place does it right. The waiter whips out a damp towel, and some fire retardant, and gets ready to present, but the front door opens with a whoosh, and we all look over, startled. Nobody uses the door here. It’s just for show. It opens onto nothing.
“Shit,” says Bert Gold, and there’s a whimper in his voice. “How’d she know? Somebody in the kitchen must be on her payroll.”
“Everyone’s on her payroll, Bert,” I tell him.
Bert’s ex-wife, Harriet, is burning her way in the door, with her white hair twisted into coils identical to his. Harriet Gold, unlike Bert, can go anywhere she wants to, without an invitation. Bert has to be a critic, feared by chefs. Harriet has an all-access pass. She always did. When he married her, everyone knew he’d gotten lucky. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that Bert had an eye a mile wide, and that no matter who he had, all he could do was hunt for a younger model.
Harriet kicked him in the balls and divorced him, and ever since, he’s been in mourning. She got Earth. Bert got booted up here to the colonies. That doesn’t mean Harriet doesn’t travel all the time. She has friends on every planet these days, and wherever she is, Bert’s uncomfortable. He’s risen up three inches from his chair even now with the memory of that kick. I feel like doing a sympathy wince, but I know if I show weakness Harriet will be at me too. She and I used to be close, back when they were a couple. Bert got me in the divorce, and Harriet got the rest of everything and everyone. Poor Bert, I’d say, except Bert is a freestanding catastrophe. I don’t feel bad for Bert. He brought this on himself.
“Bert,” Harriet says crisply as she arrives at our table. “Fancy meeting you here.” She flicks him in the ear with her screwdriver of a fingernail. Harriet’s wearing a swath of somebody’s sky wrapped around her like a toga, and she glitters in a migraine-inducing way. “Rodney,” she says. “I don’t know why you still hang out with this miscreant.”
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 15
