The interstitial narrative was one of the toughest assignments in any Wild Cards book. In a mosaic novel, you want the whole to be more than the sum of its parts. If each story was a brick, the interstitial was the mortar that made them a wall. Whoever wrote the interstitial had to wait until the other stories were done, read the first drafts to see where the holes were, and then try to patch them over … while also telling a good story of his own. If the interstitial was just filler, the book would fall apart.
Later in the history of Wild Cards, other writers would step forward to do the interstitials. Bud Simons took a crack at it, and Steve Leigh let himself be drafted more than once. In the early volumes, however, the task usually fell to me as editor. “The Journal of Xavier Desmond” is my favorite of those interstitial stories, and represents some of the best work I did for Wild Cards. This is the first time it has been presented by itself, shorn of the stories it originally wove around and through.
Nothing goes on forever. After a good long run the Wild Cards series began to lose steam. The books had gotten darker (and they had been pretty dark to begin with), and sales were declining with each volume, slowly but steadily. Some of our best writers had gone on to other projects; popular characters had died or retired. The books were still out-selling most paperbacks by a healthy margin, but we were definitely on the downslope. When our contract came up for renewal, Bantam offered us the same terms for the next triad that we had received for the last two.
Foolishly, perhaps, we rejected that offer, and took the series to a smaller publisher for a substantial raise. It was a bad mistake. Though we got more money in the short run, our new publisher lacked both Bantam’s resources and Bantam’s commitment to the series. Without new titles in the pipeline, Bantam soon allowed the first twelve books to go out of print. Not only did our backlist sales dry up, but new readers no longer had an easy entry to the world by way of volume one. We tried to get around that by scrapping the old numbering and promoting volume thirteen as “book one of a new series,” but Card Sharks remained a confusing read for readers not familiar with all that had gone before. Sales dropped precipitously, and after the publication of the fifteenth volume in 1995, we found ourselves without a publisher.
And that was the end of that.
Or was it? With strange aeons even death may die, said H. P. Lovecraft. As of 2001, Wild Cards returned with a brand-new publisher, iBooks. After a seven-year hiatus, Deuces Down, the sixteenth volume in the series, was released in 2002 with all new stories. Our seventeenth volume is in the pipeline, and the old books are being re-released for a new generation of readers. Once more we’re hearing talk of games and comic books and movie options.
Will any of this come to pass? Will there be an eighteenth book, a nineteenth, a twentieth? Damned if I know.
I wouldn’t bet against us, though. There’s a certain turtle that I know who has already had more lives than any cat.
SHELL GAMES
When he’d moved into the dorm back in September, the first thing that Thomas Tudbury had done was tack up his signed photograph of President Kennedy, and the tattered 1944 Time cover with Jetboy as Man of the Year.
By November, the picture of Kennedy was riddled with holes from Rodney’s darts. Rod had decorated his side of the room with a Confederate flag and a dozen Playboy centerfolds. He hated Jews, niggers, jokers, and Kennedy, and didn’t like Tom much either. All through the fall semester, he had fun; covering Tom’s bed with shaving cream, short-sheeting him, hiding his eyeglasses, filling his desk drawer with dog turds.
On the day that Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Tom came back to his room fighting to hold the tears. Rod had left him a present. He’d used a red pen. The whole top of Kennedy’s head was dripping blood now, and over his eyes Rod had drawn little red X’s. His tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
Thomas Tudbury stared at that for a long, long time. He did not cry; he would not allow himself to cry. He began to pack his suitcases.
The freshman parking lot was halfway across campus. The trunk on his ’54 Mercury had a broken lock, so he tossed the bags into the seat. He let the car warm up for a long time in the November chill. He must have looked funny sitting there; a short, overweight guy with a crew cut and horn-rim glasses, pressing his head against the top of the steering wheel like he was going to be sick.
As he was driving out of the lot, he spied Rodney’s shiny Olds Cutlass.
Tom shifted to neutral and idled for a moment, considering. He looked around. There was no one in sight; everybody was inside watching the news. He licked his lips nervously, then looked back at the Oldsmobile. His knuckles whitened around the wheel. He stared hard, furrowed his brow, and squeezed.
The door panels gave first, bending inward slowly under the pressure. The headlights exploded with small pops, one after the other. Chrome trim clattered to the ground, and the rear windshield shattered suddenly, glass flying everywhere. Fenders buckled and collapsed, metal squealing in protest. Both rear tires blew at once, the side panels caved in, then the hood; the windshield disintegrated entirely. The crankcase gave, and then the walls of the gas tank; oil, gasoline, and transmission fluid pooled under the car. By then Tom Tudbury was more confident, and that made it easier. He imagined he had the Olds caught in a huge invisible fist, a strong fist, and he squeezed all the harder. The crunch of breaking glass and the scream of tortured metal filled the parking lot, but there was no one to hear. He methodically mashed the Oldsmobile into a ball of crushed metal.
When it was over, he shifted into gear and left college, Rodney, and childhood behind forever.
Somewhere a giant was crying.
Tachyon woke disoriented and sick, his hangover throbbing in time to the mammoth sobs. The shapes in the dark room were strange and unfamiliar. Had the assassins come in the night again, was the family under attack? He had to find his father. He lurched dizzily to his feet, head swimming, and put a hand against the wall to steady himself.
The wall was too close. These weren’t his chambers, this was all wrong, the smell … and then the memories came back. He would have preferred the assassins.
He had dreamed of Takis again, he realized. His head hurt, and his throat was raw and dry. Fumbling in the darkness, he found the chain-pull for the overhead light. The bulb swung wildly when he yanked, making the shadows dance. He closed his eyes to still the lurching in his gut. There was a foul taste at the back of his mouth. His hair was matted and filthy, his clothing rumpled. And worst of all, the bottle was empty. Tachyon looked around helplessly. A six-by-ten on the second floor of a lodging house named ROOMS, on a street called the Bowery. Confusingly, the surrounding neighborhood had once been called the Bowery too—Angelface had told him that. But that was before; the area had a different name now. He went to the window, pulling up the shade. The yellow light of a streetlamp filled the room. Across the street, the giant was reaching for the moon, and weeping because he could not grasp it.
Tiny, they called him. Tachyon supposed that was human wit. Tiny would have been fourteen feet tall if only he could stand up. His face was unlined and innocent, crowned with a tangle of soft dark hair. His legs were slender, and perfectly proportioned. And that was the joke: slender, perfectly proportioned legs could not begin to support the weight of a fourteen-foot-tall man. Tiny sat in a wooden wheelchair, a great mechanized thing that rolled through the streets of Jokertown on four bald tires from a wrecked semi. When he saw Tach in the window, he screamed incoherently, almost as though he recognized him. Tachyon turned away from the window, shaking. It was another Jokertown night. He needed a drink.
His room smelled of mildew and vomit, and it was very cold. ROOMS was not as well heated as the hotels he had frequented in the old days. Unbidden, he remembered the Mayflower down in Washington, where he and Blythe … but no, better not to think of that. What time was it anyway? Late enough. The sun was down, and Jokertown came to life at night.
He plucked his overcoat from th
e floor and slipped it on. Soiled as it was, it was still a marvelous coat, a lovely rich rose color, with fringed golden epaulets on the shoulders and loops of golden braid to fasten the long row of buttons. A musician’s coat, the man at the Goodwill had told him. He sat on the edge of his sagging mattress to pull on his boots.
The washroom was down at the end of the hall. Steam rose from his urine as it splashed against the rim of the toilet; his hands shook so badly that he couldn’t even aim right. He slapped cold, rust-colored water on his face, and dried his hands on a filthy towel.
Outside, Tach stood for a moment beneath the creaking ROOMS sign, staring at Tiny. He felt bitter and ashamed. And much too sober. There was nothing to be done about Tiny, but he could deal with his sobriety. He turned his back on the weeping giant, slid his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and walked off briskly down the Bowery.
In the alleys, jokers and winos passed brown paper bags from hand to hand, and stared with dull eyes at the passersby. Taverns, pawnbrokers, and mask shops were all doing a brisk trade. The Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum (they still called it that, but admission was a quarter now) was closing for the day. Tachyon had gone through it once, two years ago, on a day when he was feeling especially guilt-ridden; along with a half-dozen particularly freakish jokers, twenty jars of “monstrous joker babies” floating in formaldehyde, and a sensational little newsreel about the Day of the Wild Card, the museum had a waxworks display whose dioramas featured Jetboy, the Four Aces, a Jokertown Orgy … and him.
A tour bus rolled past, pink faces pressed to the windows. Beneath the neon light of a neighborhood pizza parlor, four youths in black leather jackets and rubber facemasks eyed Tachyon with open hostility. They made him uneasy. He averted his eyes and dipped into the mind of the nearest: mincing pansy looka that hair dye-job fershure thinks he’s inna marching band like to beat his fuckin’ drums but no wait shit there’s better we’ll find us a good one tonight yeah wanna get one that squishes when we hit it. Tach broke the contact with distaste and hurried on. It was old news, and a new sport: come down to the Bowery, buy some masks, beat up a joker. The police didn’t seem to care.
The Chaos Club and its famous All-Joker Revue had the usual big crowd. As Tachyon approached, a long gray limo pulled up to the curb. The doorman, wearing a black tuxedo over luxuriant white fur, opened the door with his tail and helped out a fat man in a dinner jacket. His date was a buxom teenager in a strapless evening gown and pearls, her blonde hair piled high in a bouffant hairdo.
A block farther on, a snake-lady called out a proposition from the top of a nearby stoop. Her scales were rainbow-colored, glistening. “Don’t be scared, Red,” she said, “it’s still soft inside.” He shook his head.
The Funhouse was housed in a long building with giant picture windows fronting the street, but the glass had been replaced with one-way mirrors. Randall stood out front, shivering in tails and domino. He looked perfectly normal—until you noticed that he never took his right hand out of his pocket. “Hey, Tacky,” he called out. “Whattaya make of Ruby?”
“Sorry, I don’t know her,” Tachyon said.
Randall scowled. “No, the guy who killed Oswald.”
“Oswald?” Tach said, confused. “Oswald who?”
“Lee Oswald, the guy who shot Kennedy. He got killed on TV this afternoon.”
“Kennedy’s dead?” Tachyon said. It was Kennedy who’d permitted his return to the United States, and Tach admired the Kennedys; they seemed almost Takisian. But assassination was part of leadership. “His brothers will avenge him,” he said. Then he recalled that they didn’t do things that way on Earth, and besides, this man Ruby had already avenged him, it seemed. How strange that he had dreamed of assassins.
“They got Ruby in jail,” Randall was saying. “If it was me, I’d give the fucker a medal.” He paused. “He shook my hand once,” he added. “When he was running against Nixon, he came through to give a speech at the Chaos Club. Afterward, when he was leaving, he was shaking hands with everybody.” The doorman took his right hand out of his pocket. It was hard and chitinous, insectile, and in the middle was a cluster of swollen blind eyes. “He didn’t even flinch,” Randall said. “Smiled and said he hoped I’d remember to vote.”
Tachyon had known Randall for a year, but he had never seen his hand before. He wanted to do what Kennedy had done, to grasp that twisted claw, embrace it, shake it. He tried to slide his hand out of the pocket of his coat, but the bile rose in the back of his throat, and somehow all he could do was look away, and say, “He was a good man.”
Randall hid his hand again. “Go on inside, Tacky,” he said, not unkindly. “Angelface had to go and see a man, but she told Des to keep your table open.”
Tachyon nodded and let Randall open the door for him. Inside, he gave his coat and shoes to the girl in the checkroom, a joker with a trim little body whose feathered owl mask concealed whatever the wild card had done to her face. Then he pushed through the interior doors, his stockinged feet sliding with smooth familiarity over the mirrored floor. When he looked down, another Tachyon was staring back up at him, framed by his feet; a grossly fat Tachyon with a head like a beach ball.
Suspended from the mirrored ceiling, a crystal chandelier glittered with a hundred pinpoint lights, its reflections sparkling off the floor tiles and walls and mirrored alcoves, the silvered goblets and mugs, and even the waiters’ trays. Some of the mirrors reflected true; the others were distorting mirrors, funhouse mirrors. When you looked over your shoulder in the Funhouse, you could never tell what you’d find looking back. It was the only establishment in Jokertown that attracted jokers and normals in equal numbers. In the Funhouse the normals could see themselves twisted and malformed, and giggle, and play at being jokers; and a joker, if he was very lucky, might glance in the right mirror and see himself as he once had been.
“Your booth is waiting, Doctor Tachyon,” said Desmond, the maître d’. Des was a large, florid man; his thick trunk, pink and wrinkled, curled around a wine list. He lifted it, and beckoned for Tachyon to follow with one of the fingers that dangled from its end. “Will you be having your usual brand of cognac tonight?”
“Yes,” Tach said, wishing he had some money for a tip.
That night he had his first drink for Blythe, as always, but his second was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The rest were for himself.
At the end of Hook Road, past the abandoned refinery and the import/export warehouses, past the railroad sidings with their forlorn red boxcars, beneath the highway underpass, past the empty lots full of weeds and garbage, past the huge soybean-oil tanks, Tom found his refuge. It was almost dark by the time he arrived, and the engine in the Merc was thumping ominously. But Joey would know what to do about that.
The junkyard stood hard on the oily polluted waters of New York Bay. Behind a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three curly strands of barbed wire, a pack of junkyard dogs kept pace with his car, barking a raucous welcome that would have terrified anyone who knew the dogs less well. The sunset gave a strange bronze cast to the mountains of shattered, twisted, rusted automobiles, the acres of scrap metal, the hills and valleys of junk and trash. Finally Tom came to the wide double gate. On one side a metal sign warned TRESPASSERS KEEP OUT; on the other side another sign told them to BEWARE OF THE DOGS. The gate was chained and locked.
Tom stopped and honked his horn.
Just beyond the fence he could see the four-room shack that Joey called home. A huge sign was mounted on top of the corrugated tin roof, with yellow spotlights stuck up there to illuminate the letters. It said DI ANGELIS SCRAP METAL & AUTO PARTS. The paint was faded and blistered by two decades of sun and rain; the wood itself had cracked, and one of the spots had burned out. Next to the house was parked an ancient yellow dump truck, a tow truck, and Joey’s pride and joy, a blood-red 1959 Cadillac coupe with tail fins like a shark and a monster of a hopped-up engine poking right up through its cutaway hood.
Tom honked again. This time he gave it their special signal, tooting out the Here-he-comes-to-save-the-daaaay! theme from the Mighty Mouse cartoons they’d watched as kids.
A square of yellow light spilled across the junkyard as Joey came out with a beer in either hand.
They were nothing alike, him and Joey. They came from different stock, lived in different worlds, but they’d been best friends since the day of the third-grade pet show. That was the day he’d found out that turtles couldn’t fly; the day he realized what he was, and what he could do.
Stevie Bruder and Josh Jones had caught him out in the schoolyard. They played catch with his turtles, tossing them back and forth while Tommy ran between them, red-faced and crying. When they got bored, they bounced them off the punchball square chalked on the wall. Stevie’s German shepherd ate one. When Tommy tried to grab the dog, Stevie laid into him and left him on the ground with broken glasses and a split lip.
They would have done worse, except for Junkyard Joey, a scrawny kid with shaggy black hair, two years older than his classmates, but he’d already been left back twice, couldn’t hardly read, and they always said he smelled bad on account of his father, Dom, owned the junkyard. Joey wasn’t as big as Stevie Bruder, but he didn’t care, that day or any day. He just grabbed Stevie by the back of his shirt and yanked him around and kicked him in the balls. Then he kicked the dog too, and he would have kicked Josh Jones, except Josh ran away. As he fled, a dead turtle floated off the ground and flew across the schoolyard to smack him in the back of his fat red neck.
Joey had seen it happen. “How’d you do that?” he said, astonished. Until that moment, even Tommy hadn’t realized that he was the reason his turtles could fly.
Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle Page 98
