The Best of Joe Haldeman

by Joe W. Haldeman

“Compared to not ending, it’s bad.”

  “That shows how little you know. I and the ones like me can never die. If you want something to occupy your last moment, your last thought, you might pity me.”

  John stared straight into his eyes. “Fuck you.”

  The cane dropped. A fireball exploded in his head.

  ~ * ~

  12. marriage is a dangerous came

  “We’ll blackmail him.” Castle and Lena were together in the big antique bathtub, in a sea of pink foam, her back against his chest.

  “Sure,” she said. “ ‘If you don’t let us pass this manuscript off as the real thing, we’ll tell everybody you faked it.’ Something wrong with that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “Here, I’ll put mine on it.”

  She giggled. “Later. What do you mean, blackmail?”

  “Got it all figured out. I’ve got this friend Pansy, she used to be a call girl. Been out of the game seven, eight years; still looks like a million bucks.”

  “Sure. We fix John up with this hooker—”

  “Call girl isn’t a hooker. We’re talkin’ class.”

  “In the first place, John wouldn’t pay for sex. He did that in Vietnam and it still bothers him.”

  “Not talkin’ about pay. Talkin’ about fallin’ in love. While she meanwhile fucks his eyeballs out.”

  “You have such a turn of phrase, Sylvester. Then while his eyeballs are out, you come in with a camera.”

  “Yeah, but you’re about six steps ahead.”

  “Okay, step two; how do we get them together? Church social?”

  “She moves in next door.” There was another upstairs apartment, unoccupied. “You and me and Julio are conveniently somewhere else when she shows up with all these boxes and that big flight of stairs.”

  “Sure, John would help her. But that’s his nature; he’d help her if she were an ugly old crone with leprosy. Carry a few boxes, sit down for a cup of coffee, maybe. But not jump into the sack.”

  “Okay, you know John.” His voice dropped to a husky whisper and he cupped her breasts. “But I know men, and I know Pansy ... and Pansy could give a hard-on to a corpse.”

  “Sure, and then fuck his eyeballs out. They’d come out easier.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Go ahead.”

  “Well ... look. Do you know what a call girl does?”

  “I suppose you call her up and say you’ve got this eyeball problem.”

  “Enough with the eyeballs. What she does, she works for like an escort service. That part of it’s legal. Guy comes into town, business or maybe on vacation, he calls up the service and they ask what kind of companion he’d like. If he says, like, give me some broad with a tight ass, can suck the chrome off a bumper hitch—the guy says like ‘I’m sorry, sir, but this is not that kind of a service.’ But mostly the customers are pretty hip to it, they say, oh, a pretty young blonde who likes to go dancing.”

  “Meanwhile they’re thinking about bumper hitches and eyeballs.”

  “You got it. So it starts out just like a date, just the guy pays the escort service like twenty bucks for getting them together. Still no law broken.

  “Now about one out of three, four times, that’s it. The guy knows what’s going on but he don’t get up the nerve to ask, or he really doesn’t know the score, and it’s like a real dull date. I don’t think that happened much with Pansy.”

  “In the normal course of things, though, the subject of bumper hitches comes up.”

  “Uh huh, but not from Pansy. The guy has to pop the question. That way if he’s a cop it’s, what, entrapment.”

  “Do you know whether Pansy ever got busted?”

  “Naw. Mainly the cops just shake down the hookers, just want a blowjob anyhow. This town, half of ‘em want a blow-job from guys.

  “So they pop the question and Pansy blushes and says for you, I guess I could. Then, on the way to the motel or wherever she says, you know, I wouldn’t ask this if we weren’t really good friends, but I got to make a car payment by tomorrow, and I need like two hundred bucks before noon tomorrow?”

  “And she takes MasterCard and VISA.”

  “No, but she sure as hell knows where every bank machine in town is. She even writes up an I.O.U.” Castle laughed. “Told me a guy from Toledo’s holdin’ five grand of I.O.U.s from her.”

  “All right, but that’s not John. She could suck the chrome off his eyeballs and he still wouldn’t be interested in her if she didn’t know Hemingway from hummingbirds.”

  Castle licked behind her ear, a weird gesture that made her shiver. “That’s the trump card. Pansy reads like a son of a bitch. She’s got like a thousand books. So this morning I called her up and asked about Hemingway.”

  “And?”

  “She’s read them all.”

  She nodded slowly. “Not bad, Sylvester. So we promote this love affair and sooner or later you catch them in the act. Threaten to tell me unless John accedes to a life of crime.”

  “Think it could work? He wouldn’t say hell, go ahead and tell her?”

  “Not if I do my part ... starting tomorrow. I’m the best, sweetest, lovingest wife in this sexy town. Then in a couple of weeks Pansy comes into his life, and there he is, luckiest man alive. Best of both worlds. Until you accidentally catch them in flagrante delicioso.”

  “So to keep both of you, he goes along with me.”

  “It might just do it. It might just.” She slowly levered herself out of the water and smoothed the suds off her various assets.

  “Nice.”

  “Bring me that bumper hitch, Sylvester. Hold on to your eyeballs.”

  ~ * ~

  13. in another country

  John woke up with a hangover of considerable dimension. The diluted glass of absinthe was still in the drink holder by the window. It was just past dawn, and a verdant forest rushed by outside. The rails made a steady hum; the car had a slight rocking that would have been pleasant to a person who felt well

  A porter knocked twice and inquired after Mr. Baird. “Come in,” John said. A short white man, smiling, brought in coffee and Danish.

  “What happened to George?”

  “Pardon me, sir? George who?”

  John rubbed his eyes. “Oh, of course. We must be past Atlanta.”

  “No, sir.” The man’s smile froze as his brain went into

  nutty-passenger mode. “We’re at least two hours from Atlanta.”

  “George ... is a tall back guy with gold teeth who—”

  “Oh, you mean George Mason, sir. He does do this car, but he picks up the train in Atlanta, and works it to Miami and back. He hasn’t had the northern leg since last year.”

  John nodded slowly and didn’t ask what year it was. “I understand.” He smiled up and read the man’s name tag. “I’m sorry, Leonard. Not at my best in the morning.” The man withdrew with polite haste.

  Suppose that weird dream had not been a dream. The Hemingway creature had killed him—the memory of the stroke was awesomely strong and immediate—but all that death amounted to was slipping into another universe where George Mason was on a different shift. Or perhaps John had gone completely insane.

  The second explanation seemed much more reasonable.

  On the tray underneath the coffee, juice, and Danish was a copy of USA Today, a paper John normally avoided because, although it had its comic aspects, it didn’t have any funnies. He checked the date, and it was correct. The news stories were plausible—wars and rumors of war—so at least he hadn’t slipped into a dimension where Martians ruled an enslaved Earth or Barry Manilow was president. He turned to the weather map and stopped dead.

  Yesterday the country was in the middle of a heat wave that had lasted weeks. It apparently had ended overnight. The entry for Boston, yesterday, was “72/58/sh.” But it hadn’t rained and the temperature had been in the nineties.

&nbs
p; He went back to the front page and began checking news stories. He didn’t normally pay much attention to the news, though, and hadn’t seen a paper in several days. They’d canceled their Globe delivery for the six weeks in Key West and he hadn’t been interested enough to go seek out a newsstand.

  There was no mention of the garbage collectors’ strike in New York; he’d overheard a conversation about that yesterday. A long obituary for a rock star he was sure had died the year before.

  An ad for DeSoto automobiles. That company had gone out of business when he was a teenager.

  Bundles of universes, different from each other in small ways. Instead of dying, or maybe because of dying, he had slipped into another one. What would be waiting for him in Key West?

  Maybe John Baird.

  He set the tray down and hugged himself, trembling. Who or what was he in this universe? All of his memories, all of his personality, were from the one he had been born in. What happened to the John Baird that was born in this one? Was he an associate professor in American Literature at Boston University? Was he down in Key West wrestling with a paper to give at Nairobi—or working on a forgery? Or was he a Fitzgerald specialist snooping around the literary attics of St. Paul, Minnesota?

  The truth came suddenly. Both John Bairds were in this compartment, in this body. And the body was slightly different.

  He opened the door to the small washroom and looked in the mirror. His hair was a little shorter, less grey, beard better trimmed.

  He was less paunchy and ... something felt odd. There was feeling in his thigh. He lowered his pants and there was no scar where the sniper bullet had opened his leg and torn up the nerves there.

  That was the touchstone. As he raised his shirt, the parallel memory flooded in. Puckered round scar on the abdomen; in this universe the sniper had hit a foot higher—and instead of the convalescent center in Cam Ranh Bay, the months of physical therapy and then back into the war, it had been peritonitis raging; surgery in Saigon and Tokyo and Walter Reed, and no more army.

  But slowly they converged again. Amherst and U. Mass.— perversely using the G.I. Bill in spite of his access to millions—the doctorate on The Sun Also Rises and the instructorship at B.U., meeting Lena and virtuously waiting until after the semester to ask her out. Sex on the second date, and the third ... but there they verged again. This John Baird hadn’t gone back into combat to have his midsection sprayed with shrapnel from an American grenade that bounced off a tree; never had dozens of bits of metal cut out of his dick—and in the ensuing twenty-five years had made more use of it. Girlfriends and even one disastrous homosexual encounter with a stranger. As far as he knew, Lena was in the dark about this side of him; thought that he had remained faithful other than one incident seven years after they married. He knew of one affair she had had with a colleague, and suspected more.

  The two Johns’ personalities and histories merged, separate but one, like two vines from a common root, climbing a single support.

  Schizophrenic but not insane.

  John looked into the mirror and tried to address his new or his old self—John A, John B. There were no such people. There was suddenly a man who had existed in two separate universes and, in a way, it was no more profound than having lived in two separate houses.

  The difference being that nobody else knows there is more than one house.

  He moved over to the window and set his coffee in the holder, picked up the absinthe glass and sniffed it, considered pouring it down the drain, but then put it in the other holder, for possible future reference.

  Posit this: is it more likely that there are bundles of parallel universes prevailed over by a Hemingway look-alike with a magic cane, or that John Baird was exposed to a drug that he had never experienced before and it had had an unusually disorienting effect?

  He looked at the paper. He had not hallucinated two weeks of drought. The rock star had been dead for some time. He had not seen a DeSoto in twenty years, and that was a hard car to miss. Tail fins that had to be registered as lethal weapons.

  But maybe if you take a person who remembers every trivial thing, and zap his brain with oil of wormwood, that is exactly the effect: perfectly recalled things that never actually happened.

  The coffee tasted repulsive. John put on a fresh shirt and decided not to shave and headed for the bar car. He bought the last imported beer in the cooler and sat down across from the long-haired white-bearded man who had an earring that had escaped his notice before, or hadn’t existed in the other universe.

  The man was staring out at the forest greening by. “Morning,” John said.

  “How do.” The man looked at him with no sign of recognition.

  “Did we talk last night?”

  He leaned forward. “What?”

  “I mean did we sit in this car last night and talk about Hemingway and Vietnam and ghosts?”

  He laughed. “You’re on somethin’, man. I been on this train since two in the mornin’ and ain’t said boo to nobody but the bartender.”

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “Yeah, but that’s over; that’s shit.” He pointed at John’s bracelet. “What, you got ghosts from over there?”

  “I think maybe I have.”

  He was suddenly intense. “Take my advice, man; I been there. You got to go talk to somebody. Some shrink. Those ghosts ain’t gonna go ‘way by themself.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “It ain’t the ones you killed.” He wasn’t listening. “Fuckin” dinks, they come back but they don’t, you know, they just stand around.” He looked at John and tears came so hard they actually spurted from his eyes. “It’s your fuckin’ friends, man, they all died and they come back now—” He took a deep breath and wiped his face. “They used to come back every night. That like you?” John shook his head, helpless, trapped by the man’s grief. “Every fuckin’ night, my old lady, finally she said you go to a shrink or go to hell.” He fumbled with the button on his shirt pocket and took out a brown plastic prescription bottle and stared at the label. He shook out a capsule. “Take a swig?” John pushed the beer over to him. He washed the pill down without touching the bottle to his lips.

  He sagged back against the window. “I musta not took the pill last night, sometimes I do that. Sorry.” He smiled weakly. “One day at a time, you know? You get through the one day. Fuck the rest. Sorry.” He leaned forward again suddenly and put his hand on John’s wrist. “You come outa nowhere and I lay my fuckin’ trip on you. You don’ need it.”

  John covered the hand with his own. “Maybe I do need it. And maybe I didn’t come out of nowhere.” He stood up. “I will see somebody about the ghosts. Promise.”

  “You’ll feel better. It’s no fuckin’ cure-all, but you’ll feel better.”

  “Want the beer?”

  He shook his head. “Not supposed to.”

  “Okay.” John took the beer and they waved at each other and he started back.

  He stopped in the vestibule between cars and stood in the rattling roar of it, looking out the window at the flashing green blur. He put his forehead against the cool glass and hid the blur behind the dark red of his eyelids.

  Were there actually a zillion of those guys each going through a slightly different private hell? Something he rarely asked himself was “What would Ernest Hemingway have done in this situation?”

  He’d probably have the sense to leave it to Milton.

  ~ * ~

  14. the dangerous summer

  Castle and Lena met him at the station in Miami and they drove back to Key West in Castle’s old pickup. The drone of the air conditioner held conversation to a minimum, but it kept them cool, at least from the knees down.

  John didn’t say anything about his encounter with the infinite, or transfinite, not wishing to bring back that fellow with the cane just yet. He did note that the two aspects of his personality hadn’t quite become equal partners yet, and s
mall details of this world kept surprising him. There was a monorail being built down to Pigeon Key, where Disney was digging an underwater park. Gasoline stations still sold Regular. Castle’s car radio picked up TV as well as AM/FM, but sound only.

  Lena sat between the two men and rubbed up against John affectionately. That would have been remarkable for John-one and somewhat unusual for John-two. It was a different Lena here, of course; one who had had more of a sex life with John, but there was something more than that, too. She was probably sleeping with Castle, he thought, and the extra attention was a conscious or unconscious compensation, or defense.