The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Weeks go by before you visit the Melancholarium.

  Father H— has told you that it’s a memory room that only two people at a time may enter: an orphaned couple, or the only surviving orphan and a person of his or her choice. No one may enter alone, or in a party of three or more. None of these rules makes much sense, but little about Vinegar Peace ever does, even if it sometimes seems to have a coherent underlying principle of organization that you can’t fathom owing to an innate personal failing.

  Meanwhile, you’ve grown used to the noisy Sleep Bay, learned when to visit the crowded jakes, perfected the art of getting servitors to do your bidding, and made enough friends to feel – well, if not connected, at least not entirely estranged from the protocols of what passes for normal life here. You no longer bolt up when bombs go off at Fort Pugnicose (where many of the recruits for the War on Worldwide Wickedness train), or when air-raid sirens wail in the galleries, or when some of the older orphans sidle up to your cot at night and plead, Take me home, take me home. Even the twilight influx of dispossessed oldsters, addle-wits with confusion writ large in their pupils, has ceased to faze you. After all, they’ll adjust . . . maybe.

  Then a dormitron sporting Henry Kissinger glasses and nose gives you a pass to visit the Melancholarium.

  The name itself sabotages the place. Just hearing it, who’d want to go there? You, indeed, would rather return to your life-help cottage in Sour Thicket. Vinegar Peace isn’t a concentration camp, but neither is it a Sun City spa. It’s a training facility for people with little time to make use of that training in the Real World, which in your opinion no longer exists.

  Choose somebody to go with you, the dormitron says.

  You pick Ms. B—, the strap-thin woman who asked you to tell her a breakfast story, and one morning in your second month of residency, the two of you ride a lift to the fifth level and walk together to a tall cylindrical kiosk where a familiar-looking young person, probably female, seats you next to each other at a console and fits you both with pullover goggles.

  You walk side by side into the Melancholarium. Now, though, Ms. B— is no longer Ms. B— but your late husband Mick, whose hand you hold as you approach the gurney on which Elise lies in a pair of jeans and a blue chambray shirt open at the collar. Her clothing is so blatantly neither a gown nor a full dress uniform that the simplicity of her look – her sweet girlishness – briefly stops your breath, as hers is stopped. You reach to touch her. Mick seizes your wrist, not to prevent you but instead to guide your fingers to Elise’s arm, which you both clutch for as long as you have now endured in this grand human depository. Or so it oddly seems.

  Elise’s red-tinged hair, which the military cut short, now hangs behind her off the gurney. It sparkles like a sequined veil. The expression on her face suggests neither terror nor pain, but serenity; and if you addressed her, saying, Elise, it’s time to get up, come out to the porch to see the sun shining on the spider webs in the grass, you believe with the same soft ferocity that you once believed in God that she will obey – that she’ll open her eyes, sit up, and embrace you briefly before striding out of the Melancholarium into the stolen remainder of her life.

  You kiss Elise’s brow. Leaning across her, you give her the hug that she’d give you if only the same green power seethed there. Her body has a knobby hardness that would estrange you from her if you didn’t love her so much. All your pity re-collects and flows from your bent frame into her unyielding one. She has the frail perdurability of Cold Room effigies – but none of their alienness – and so she has finally become yours, although neither you nor anybody else can own her now. When her smoke rises through the crematory flue, it won’t dissipate until your smoke also rises and clasps her last white particles to yours. Then both clouds will drift away together.

  You step back. Mick gives you room. You want to freeze this tableau and visit it like a window decorator, keeping its centerpiece – Elise – intact but endlessly rearranging the furniture and flowers. You kiss her brow again, hold her hands, and finger the runnels in her jeans.

  You undo the buttons next to her heart to confirm a report that three high-caliber rounds inflicted her nonsustainable injuries. You find and examine them with a clinical tenderness. You must know everything, even the worst, and you rejoice in the tameness of her fatal mutilation.

  Joyce, Mick says, the first time anyone has spoken your given name in so long that it jars like a stranger’s. Are you okay?

  You embrace, leaning into each other. Of course, it isn’t really Mick holding you upright in the vivid deceit of the Melancholarium, but so what, so what?

  You pull back from his image and murmur, Mick, her hands . . .

  What about them?

  They’re so cold, colder than I thought possible.

  Yes, Mick says, smiling, but if you rub them, they warm up.

  On your journey back to the Sleep Bay, you tell Ms. B—, Mick would never have said that. That was you.

  Ms. B— says, Well, I’ve never seen such a pretty kid.

  You should have seen Brice.

  Stop it. I was just being polite. You should’ve seen mine: absolute lovelies fed into the chipper by tin-men with no guts or gadgets.

  You don’t reply because you notice a short tunnel to a door with a red neon sign flashing over it: exit and then the same word inside a circle with a slash through it. You think about detouring down this tunnel and even try to pull Ms. B— along with you. She resists.

  Stop it, she says. You can check out whenever you feel like it. Just don’t try to leave. Don’t you know that by now?

  I’ve heard there’s an escape, you say. A way to get out alive.

  That’s not it, Ms. B— says, nodding at the flashing exit/don’t exit sign.

  Don’t you even want to hear?

  Enlist? Is that it? Sign up to wage war on the wicked? Well, that’s a crock, too.

  I’m sure it is.

  Okay, then – what is it, your secret way to get out?

  Adoption, you tell her. The padre says that if a soldier with six tours adopts you, you’re no longer a wrong-way orphan and you can leave.

  Ms B— regards you as if you’ve proposed sticking nasturtiums down the barrel of an enemy soldier’s rifle. Oh, I’ve heard that, too, it’s a fat load of bunkum.

  You don’t reply, but you also don’t go down the tunnel to try the door with the contradictory flashing messages. You return with your friend to the Sleep Bay without raising the subject again.

  But it makes sense, doesn’t it? A decent orphanage adopts out its charges. If you believe, just believe, somewhere there’s a compassionate Brice or Elise, a person who’s survived six tours and wants nothing more than to rescue some poor wrong-way orphan from terminal warehousing. Such people do exist. They exist to lead you from Vinegar Peace to a place of unmerited Milk and Honey.

  That night, huddled on your cot amid the hubbub in the Sleep Bay, you envision a woman very like Elise sitting with you on a porch in late autumn or early winter. You sit shivering under scarlet lap robes, while this person whispers a soothing tale and tirelessly rubs your age-freckled hands.

  Michael Bishop published his first story, “Piñon Fall,” in Galaxy over forty years ago. Since that time, living in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, an elementary school counselor, he has published seven story collections and many novels, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning Unicorn Mountain, and the Locus Award-winning Brittle Innings, which Twentieth Century Fox optioned for a film in 1993 and bought outright in 1995. (To date, no film has been made.) The Bishops have a daughter, Stephanie Loftin (a fitness trainer), and two grandchildren, Annabel and Joel.

  In 1996, LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, secured Bishop as its writer-in-residence. He teaches creative-writing courses and January interim-term courses (including “Art & Story: Graphic Literature in Contemporary World Culture”), and has assisted other department members in organizi
ng three art-and-literature conferences called Slipstreaming in the Arts. In April 2007, Bishop’s anthology A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales About the Christ appeared from Thunder’s Mouth Press. Currently, he is compiling a collection of his Georgia-based stories, Other Arms Reach Out to Me; marketing a mainstream novel, An Owl at the Crucifixion; and slowly working on a novel about Jonathan Swift visiting many of the invented lands in his classic satire, Gulliver’s Travels. In the fall of 2009, PS Publishing in England released a reprint anthology that Bishop coedited with Steven Utley, Passing for Human, with an original digital-collage cover by Jamie Bishop.

  I NEEDS MUST PART, THE POLICEMAN SAID

  Richard Bowes

  FROM THE AUTHOR: In his generous essay/review of my novelette, Richard Larson refers to the story as a “speculative memoir,” a blend of speculative fiction with memoir. It’s the story of a narrator with the same name as the author who gets sick, nearly dies, goes into a hospital, is operated on, and released. The story involves memory and hallucination. I wanted among other things to make the reader feel the ways that dream and memory overlap and the way Time carries the world we once knew away from us. Over the years, friends and lovers and family members, sick and sometimes dying lay in hospital beds and spoke of their dreams and hallucinations. I’d seen more than one while still alive go off to another kingdom and look back on this world as a semi-stranger. I was afraid of this, kept a pen and notebook with me at all times and wrote down what I saw while conscious or remembered when I woke up.

  Before I got sick I’d been listening to a John Dowland song, “Now, Oh Now, I Needs Must Part.” The aptness of the lyrics and the way they tied into hallucinations of my own evoked the Philip K. Dick title, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, for which he also used a John Dowland lyric.

  Shortly after I got out of the hospital the National Public Radio show RadioLab broadcast an episode titled “Memory and Forgetting,” about how memory is created and implanted, manipulated and lost. They also did a show on sleep and explored the fringes of that land in which we spend so much of our time.

  As I write this essay, the place in which my story is mainly set, the legendary Greenwich Village institution Saint Vincent’s Hospital, harbor for the Village poor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beacon in the nightmare landscape of AIDS in the 1980s, is in the process of closing its doors. It’s being described as a casualty of the changing urban demographics, of modern medical practice. I think of it as having been carried away in the stream of time which moves ceaselessly as we sleep or are distracted or lie sick in bed and leaves only our flawed and distorted memories.

  1.

  In the predawn one morning last April, I woke up from a violent and disturbing dream. In it, I was somewhere that I realized was the Southwest with three other guys whom I knew in the dream but didn’t quite recognize when I thought about them later.

  All of us were engaged in smuggling something – drugs as it turned out. We were tough. Or they were anyway, big guys with long hair and mustaches. There was, I knew, another bunch of guys much tougher than us with whom we didn’t get along and there were cops.

  The end of the dream was that I heard police sirens and was scared but relieved because they weren’t as bad as the other guys. The last image in the dream, however, was the cops smashing two of the big guys’ faces right into the adobe wall of the building we stayed in. And I knew, in the way one does in dreams, that the other guy and I were in for something as bad or worse. Then I woke up before dawn in my apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

  From the time I was a small boy I’ve been afraid of the long marches of the night, the time in the dark when the lights inside me went out. The fear that would hit me as my head was on the pillow was that I, the one falling asleep, would not be the one who woke up.

  Imagining the fragility of my identity chilled me. I did fall asleep again though and dreamed once more.

  This time, I saw the main cop with his short white hair and gray suit sitting in his car, smoking a cigarette, staring blue eyed and expressionless at me. I was much younger than I am now, maybe in my mid-twenties instead of my sixties.

  In my dream, I realized that I had been looking at a computer and had viewed all this on some kind of a website.

  When I awoke this time, the sun was up. Except for my having seen it as a website, the dream seemed like a fragment of the past, a time when I might, in fact, have found myself in places almost as bad as the dream.

  I felt sick, my stomach was upset, every bone and muscle ached, and each move I made took an effort.

  Nothing seemed to have led up to this illness. I’d been to the theater the night before with my friend Ellen. We’d seen a show with music about eighteenth century boy sopranos (played by women) and abducted orphans.

  A few hours before that, an affair I’d been having for some time with a guy named Andre was broken off very suddenly. The man with whom Andre lived had called me up and said that Andre had told him everything. They both wanted me to stay away from him from now on. It was a once-a-week thing that had become routine and boring, as I told the man, and I asked him to say good-bye to Andre for me.

  I’m a veteran of more than forty years in Manhattan and normally neither big, melodramatic Broadway shows nor sudden disruptions in love cause the kind of distress I felt that morning.

  Even as I wondered if I should call my doctor, I was aware of a kind of web stream that ran constantly in a corner of my brain. The fever dream took the form of a constant Google search complete with web pages and blogs I couldn’t remember looking for.

  Pictures and stories with elusive contexts appeared. At one point, I found myself looking at the profiles of the members of a tough cop unit somewhere in the Southwest. It had short bios, photos of them with mustaches and holsters and masklike sunglasses.

  As I wondered why and how I had looked this up, I saw a familiar face with a white crewcut and expressionless cop eyes.

  I remembered I wanted to call my doctor. As I dialed the number, I thought of the tune and lyrics of a song I’d been listening to recently. It was by John Dowland, a poet and composer who was kind of the Kurt Cobain of Elizabethan England. Something in the melancholy grace of the tune, the resignation of the song’s lyrics had caught me.

  Now, oh now I needs must part,

  Parting though I absent mourn.

  Absence can no joy impart:

  Joy once fled cannot return.

  Maybe this attachment had been a kind of harbinger, some part of my consciousness telling me I had started dying. I wondered how Dowland’s song “Flow My Tears,” had affected Philip K. Dick when he’d used it in a title.

  Somehow the call to the doctor never got made. I couldn’t remember what day it was. People who phoned me – friends, the godchildren who in sentimental moments I thought of as my kids, the woman who had been my work-wife before I retired from the university – seemed concerned.

  Many things ran on the screen inside my head. The Macabres when I found myself looking at their site seemed like many a New York late seventies punk group. The photos showed the musicians – emaciated, decked in bondage accessories, with their hair hacked off at odd angles. A bit of one of their songs played. Then police sirens wailed just like they had when my friends and I had gotten caught.

  I realized that the sirens were my phone ringing. A friend who had once been a nurse wanted the telephone number of my medical group and the number of someone who could take me there next morning.

  2.

  That night was especially awful: a long confusion of dreams. Chris, my speculative fiction godchild who lives in Ohio, seemed almost frantic. He kept calling me but I was too sick to talk to him for more than a minute or two.

  When I looked at my inner computer screen it showed me palm trees and bright sun and elephants. The Macabres now worked nearly naked in a prison chain gang. A woman with the face of a peacock seemed very familiar. I thought I s
potted the policeman with the blue eyes that gave away nothing. He looked right at me and was about to speak

  Then my doorbell sounded and it was my friend Bruce who was there to take me to the doctor’s. With his help I walked the few blocks to my medical group office on Washington Square. A very concerned doctor ordered me into Saint Vincent’s hospital. Shortly afterward Bruce escorted me to the emergency room admittance desk. Then he hugged me and was off to another job and I was in the power of the hospital.

  There was no waiting. I identified myself, was given a form to fill out, and was shown right into the middle of the beds and gurneys, patients, and orderlies. Numbers flashed on computer screens, and machines beeped.

  Nurses and doctors clustered around an enormously fat, comatose woman then dispersed. A social worker took the life history of an elderly black man who very patiently explained to her how he had lost everything he had ever had and lived now in a shelter. A moaning patient rolled by on a gurney hung with IV bags. Two cops wheeled in a shooting victim.

  Then an orderly threw back the curtains around a bed and told me to come inside. My clothes were taken away. I was dressed in two gowns, one worn forward, the other backward, and socks with skid-proof soles. I was bled and examined and hauled through cold corridors and x-rayed.

  Tubes got attached to me. A catheter was stuck up my urinary tract; at one point a very new intern tried to stick a tube down my throat and I choked and gagged. A horrible brown goop came up my guts and into my mouth and nose. My hospital gowns got soaked and there was commotion. People talked about me as if I was dead or not there.

  It reminded me of an accident scene. I heard police radios, saw flares illuminating a nighttime car crash. I saw a familiar picture on a computer screen. It was in black and white, a 1950s newspaper shot.

  A kid in his late teens had been thrown onto the branch of a tree by the force of a collision. He hung there bent at the waist over the branch of the tree, his loafers gone, his legs still in jeans, his upper body bare. The cool striped shirt he wore now hung down over his head. That was probably for the best: the face and eyes under those circumstances are not something you’d want to see.