The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Moonlight silvered the whole world. Pellenera—piping, argent eidolon—loomed atop the bank of the feeder canal. Tug shivered. Did she herald the arrival of a new recruit? Where was the guy?

  But no newcomer emerged from among the winter-bare branches. Pellenera seemed intent merely on bleeding out her heart through the ocarina, as if seeking to convey an urgent message to someone.

  Tug’s mind drowned in the music. He seemed to be seeing the world through Pellenera’s eyes, gazing down at himself on the deck. Was she tapping his optic nerves, seeing herself on the shore? That music—

  Tug had a sudden vision of the Nubian woman, dancing naked save for—

  —a skirt fashioned of bananas?

  The music stopped. Pellenera vanished.

  What the hell had all that been about?

  An o-mail response from Drawn & Quarterly came in March, just as spring arrived.

  Tug rushed back to the Tom Pudding with an o-café printout of the message.

  Sukey Damariscotta was playing a videogame with Janey Vogelsang when Tug tracked her down: Spores of Myst. He hustled her away from Janey, to a quiet corner, then bade her read the printout.

  “Oh, Tug, this is wonderful! We’ve done it!”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Me neither!”

  Tug grabbed Sukey, hugged her close, kissed her passionately and wildly lips to lips.

  Hands on Tug’s chest, Sukey pushed back, broke his embrace.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sukey, I— You’ve gotta know by now—”

  “Know what?” Her face registered distaste, as if she had been handed a slimy slug. “Oh, no, Tug, you can’t imagine us hooking up, can you? I like you, sure, a lot. I respect your talent. But you’re way too old….”

  Time must’ve crept along somehow in its monotonous, purposeless, sempiternal fashion, although Tug couldn’t have testified to that reality. All he knew was that in some manner he had crossed blocks of Carrollboro to stand outside The Wyandot. His old residence of thirty years’ habitation was garlanded with scaffolding, its plastic-membraned windows so many blank, unseeing eyes, unbreachable passages to a vanished era, a lost youth.

  In the end, he returned to the Tom Pudding.

  What choice did he have in this fallen, inhospitable world?

  Sukey acted friendly toward him, even somewhat intimate. But Tug knew that they would never relate the same way again, and that their collaboration was over, whatever the fate of their one and only book.

  * * * *

  The voice of Ozzie Vasterling, when broadcast through the intercom system of the Tom Pudding—a system no one prior to this moment had even suspected was still active—resembled that of the Vizier of Cockaigne in the 1939 film version of that classic, as rendered by the imperious Charles Coburn.

  “Attention, attention! Everyone report to my lab—on the double!”

  Some folks were missing, ashore on their individual business. But Ozzie’s lab soon filled up with two dozen souls, Tug among them.

  Weeks ago, Tug might have been as excited as the others gathered here. But since Sukey’s rebuff, life had lost its savor. What miracle could restore that burnish? None….

  But yet—

  Pellenera stood before the brane-buster, looking as out-of-place as a black panther in a taxi. Imagine a continent full of such creatures! Ozzie sat behind the keys of his harmonium. The brane-buster hummed and sparkled.

  Ozzie could hardly speak. “Vibrations! It’s all the way the invisible strings vibrate! I only had to pay attention to her! Watch!”

  He nodded to the Nubian, and she began to play her ocarina, as Ozzie pumped the harmonium attachment.

  In the cabinet of the brane-buster, what could only be paradoxically described as a coruscating static vortex blossomed. Gasps from the watchers—even from sulky Tug.

  With a joyous primal yawp, Pellenera hurled herself into the cabinet, still playing, and was no more.

  The vortex lapsed into non-being as well.

  Someone asked, “Is that the end?”

  “Ha! Do you think I’m an idiot! I recorded every last note!”

  Pellenera’s looped song started up again, and the vortex resumed.

  Everyone waited.

  Time stretched like the silent heist scene in Hitchcock’s Rififi.

  Pellenera popped out of the cabinet, carrying something concealed in the crook of her arm, but naked as water herself.

  Even from the edge of the crowd, Tug noticed that her naked back was inexplicably criss-crossed with a latticework of long antique gnarly scars, and he winced.

  Revealed, her burden was one perfect golden Cavendish banana.

  She smiled, and took several steps forward, the spectators parting before her like grasses beneath a breeze, until she came face to face with Tug.

  And she handed the banana to him.

  FEMAVILLE 29

  La Palma is a tiny mote in the Canary Islands, a mote that had certainly never intruded into my awareness before one fateful day. On La Palma, five hundred billion tons of rock in the form of an unstable coastal plateau awaited a nudge, which they received when the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted. Into the sea a good portion of the plateau plunged, a frightful hammer of the gods.

  The peeling off of the face of the island was a smaller magnitude event than had been feared; but it was a larger magnitude event than anyone was prepared for.

  The resulting tsunami raced across the Atlantic.

  My city had gotten just twelve hours warning. The surreal chaos of the partial evacuation was like living through the most vivid nightmare or disaster film imaginable. Still, the efforts of the authorities and volunteers and good samaritans ensured that hundreds of thousands of people escaped with their lives.

  Leaving other hundreds of thousands to face the wave.

  Their only recourse was to find the tallest, strongest buildings and huddle.

  I was on the seventh floor of an insurance company when the wave arrived. Posters in the reception area informed me that I was in good hands. I had a view of the harbor, half a mile away.

  The tsunami looked like a liquid mountain mounted on a rocket sled.

  When the wave hit, the building shuddered and bellowed like a steer in an abbatoir euthanized with a nail-gun. Every window popped out of its frame, and spray lashed even my level.

  But the real fight for survival had not yet begun.

  The next several days were a sleepless blur of crawling from the wreckage and helping others do likewise.

  But not everyone was on the same side. Looters arose like some old biological paradigm of spontaneous generation from the muck.

  Their presence demanded mine on the front lines.

  I was a cop.

  I had arrested several bad guys without any need for excessive force. But then came a shootout at a jewelry store where the display cases were incongrously draped with drying kelp. I ended up taking the perps down okay. But the firefight left my weary brain and trembling gut hypersensitive to any threat.

  Some indeterminate time afterwards—marked by a succession of candy-bar meals, digging under the floodlights powered by chuffing generators, and endless slogging through slimed streets—I was working my way through the upper floors of an apartment complex, looking for survivors. I shut off my flashlight when I saw a glow around a corner. Someone stepped between me and the light source, casting the shadow of a man with a gun. I yelled, “Police! Drop it!”, then crouched and dashed toward the gunman. The figure stepped forward, still holding the weapon, and I fired.

  The boy was twelve, his weapon a water pistol.

  His mother trailed him by a few feet—not far enough to escape getting splattered with her son’s blood.

  Later I learned neither of them spoke a word of English.

  One minute I was cradling the boy, and the next I was lying on a cot in a field hospital. Three days had gotten lost somewhere. Three days in which the whole world had learn
ed of my mistake.

  They let me get up the next day, ostensibly healthy and sane enough, even though my pistol hand, my left, still exhibited a bad tremor. I tried to report to the police command, but found that I had earned a temporary medical discharge. Any legal fallout from my actions awaited an end to the crisis.

  I tried being a civilian volunteer for another day or two amidst the ruins, but my heart wasn’t in it. So I took the offer of evacuation to Femaville 29.

  * * * *

  The first week after the disaster actually manifested aspects of an odd, enforced vacation. Or rather, the atmosphere often felt more like an open-ended New Year’s Eve, the portal to some as-yet undefined millennium where all our good resolutions would come to pass. Once we victims emerged from the shock of losing everything we owned, including our shared identity as citizens of a large East Coast city, my fellow refugees and I began to exhibit a near-manic optimism in the face of the massive slate-cleaning.

  The uplift was not to last. But while it preveailed, it was as if some secret imperative in the depths of our souls—a wish to be unburdened of all our draggy pasts—had been fulfilled by cosmic fiat, without our having to lift a finger.

  We had been given a chance to start all over, remake our lives afresh, and we were, for the most part, eager to grasp the offered personal remodeling.

  Everyone in the swiftly erected encampment of a thousand men, women and children was healthy. The truly injured had all been airlifted to hospitals around the state and nation. Families had been reunited, even down to pets. The tents we were inhabiting were spacious, weather-tight and wired for electricity and entertainment. Meals were plentiful, albeit uninspired, served promptly in three shifts, thrice daily, in a large communal pavilion.

  True, the lavatories and showers were also communal, and the lack of privacy grated a bit right from the start. Trudging through the chilly dark in the middle of the night to take a leak held limited appeal, even when you pretended you were camping. And winter, with its more challenging conditions, loomed only a few months away. Moreover, enforced idleness chafed those of us who were used to steady work. Lack of proper schooling for the scores of kids in the camp worried many parents.

  But taken all in all, the atmosphere at the camp—christened with no more imaginative bureaucratic name than Femaville Number 29—was suffused with potential that first week.

  My own interview with the FEMA intake authorities in the first days of the relocation was typical.

  The late September sunlight warmed the interview tent so much that the canvas sides had been rolled up to admit fresh air scented with faint, not unpleasant maritime odors of decay. Even though Femaville 29 was located far inland—or what used to be far inland before the tsunami—the wrack left behind by the disaster lay not many miles away.

  For a moment, I pictured exotic fish swimming through the streets and subways of my old city, weaving their paths among cars, couches and corpses. The imagery unsettled me, and I tried to focus on the more hopeful present.

  The long tent hosted ranks of paired folding chairs, each chair facing its mate. The FEMA workers, armed with laptop computers, occupied one seat of each pair, while an interviewee sat in the other. The subdued mass interrogation and the clicking of keys raised a surprisingly dense net of sound that overlaid the noises from outside the tent: children roistering, adults gossiping, birds chattering. Outside the tent, multiple lines of refugees stretched away, awaiting their turns.

  The official seated across from me was a pretty young African-American woman whose name-badge proclaimed her HANNAH LAWES. Unfortunately, she reminded me of my ex-wife, Calley, hard in the same places Calley was hard. I tried to suppress an immediate dislike of her. As soon as I sat down, Hannah Lawes expressed rote sympathy for my plight, a commiseration worn featureless by its hundredth repetition. Then she got down to business.

  “Name?”

  “Parrish Hedges.”

  “Any relatives in the disaster zone?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What was your job back in the city?”

  I felt my face heat up. But I had no choice, except to answer truthfully.

  “I was a police officer, ma’am.”

  That answer gave Hannah Lawes pause. Finally, she asked in an accusatory fashion, “Shouldn’t you still be on duty then? Helping with security in the ruins?”

  My left hand started to quiver a bit, but I suppressed it so that I didn’t think she noticed.

  “Medical exemption, ma’am.”

  Hannah Lawes frowned slightly and said, “I hope you don’t mind if I take a moment to confirm that, Mr. Hedges.”

  Her slim, manicured fingers danced over her keyboard, dragging my data down the airwaves. I studied the plywood floor of the tent while she read my file.

  When I looked up, her face had gone disdainful.

  “This explains much, Mr. Hedges.”

  “Can we move on, please?”

  As if I ever could.

  Hannah Lawes resumed her programmed spiel. “All right, let’s talk about your options now….”

  For the next few minutes, she outlined the various programs and handouts and incentives that the government and private charities and NGO’s had lined up for the victims of the disaster. Somehow, none of the choices really matched my dreams and expectations engendered by the all-consuming catastrophe. All of them involved relocating to some other part of the country, leaving behind the shattered chaos of the East Coast. And that was something I just wasn’t ready for yet, inevitable as such a move was.

  And besides, choosing any one particular path would have meant foregoing all the others. Leaving this indeterminate interzone of infinite possibility would lock me into a new life that might be better than my old one, but would still be fixed, crystallized, frozen into place.

  “Do I have to decide right now?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  I stood up to go, and Hannah Lawes added, “But you realize, naturally, that this camp was never intended as a long-term residence. It’s only transitional, and will be closed down at some point not too far in the future.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “We’re all just passing through. I get it.”

  I left then and made way for the next person waiting in line.

  * * * *

  The tents of Femaville 29 were arranged along five main dirt avenues, each as wide as a city boulevard. Expressing the same ingenuity that had dubbed our whole encampment, the avenues were labeled A, B, C, D and E. Every three tents, a numbered cross-street occurred. The tents of one avenue backed up against the tents of the adjacent avenue, so that a cross-block was two tents wide. The land where Femaville 29 was pitched was flat and treeless and covered in newly mowed weeds and grasses. Beyond the borders of our village stretched a mix of forest, scrubby fields and swamp, eventually giving way to rolling hills. The nearest real town was about ten miles away, and there was no regular transportation there other than by foot.

  As I walked up Avenue D toward my tent (D-30), I encountered dozens of my fellow refugees who were finished with the intake process. Only two days had passed since the majority of us had been ferried here in commandeered school buses. People—the adults, anyhow—were still busy exchanging their stories—thrilling, horrific or mundane—about how they had escaped the tsunami or dealt with the aftermath.

  I didn’t have any interest in repeating my tale, so I didn’t join in any such conversations.

  As for the children, they seemed mostly to have flexibly put behind them all the trauma they must have witnessed. Reveling in their present freedom from boring routine, they raced up and down the avenues in squealing packs.

  Already, the seasonally withered grass of the avenues was becoming dusty ruts. Just days old, this temporary village, I could feel, was already beginning to lose its freshness and ambiance of novelty.

  Under the unseasonably warm sun, I began to sweat. A cold beer would have tasted good right now. But the rules of
Femaville 29 prohibited alcohol.

  I reached my tent and went inside.

  My randomly assigned roommate lay on his bunk. Given how the disaster had shattered and stirred the neighborhoods of the city, it was amazing that I actually knew the fellow from before. I had encountered no one else yet in the camp who was familiar to me. And out of all my old friends and acquaintances and co-workers, Ethan Duplessix would have been my last choice to be reunited with.

  Ethan was a fat, bristled slob with a long criminal record of petty theft, fraud and advanced mopery. His personal grooming habits were so atrocious that he had emerged from the disaster more or less in the same condition he entered it, unlike the rest of the survivors who had gone from well-groomed to uncommonly bedraggled and smelly.

  Ethan and I had crossed paths often, and I had locked him up more times than I could count. (When the tsunami sturck, he had been amazingly free of outstanding charges.) But the new circumstances of our lives, including Ethan’s knowledge of how I had “retired” from the force, placed us now on a different footing.

  “Hey, Hedges, how’d it go? They got you a new job yet? Maybe security guard at a kindergarten!”

  I didn’t bother replying, but just flopped down on my bunk. Ethan chuckled meanly at his own paltry wit for a while, but when I didn’t respond, he eventually fell silent, his attentions taken up by a tattered copy of Maxim.

  I closed my eyes and drowsed for a while, until I got hungry. Then I got up and went to the refectory.

  That day they were serving hamburgers and fries for the third day in a row. Mickey Dee’s seemed to have gotten a lock on the contract to supply the camp. I took mine to an empty table. Head bowed, halfway through my meal, I sensed someone standing beside me.

  The woman’s curly black hair descended to her shoulders in a tumbled mass. Her face resembled a cameo in its alabaster fineness.

  “Mind if I sit here?” she said.

  “Sure. I mean, go for it.”

  The simple but primordial movements of her legs swinging over the bench seat and her ass settling down awakened emotions in me that had been absent since Calley’s abrupt leave-taking.