by Paula Guran
The only carving not on a shelf was the largest, a big-bellied jade frog wearing a gold crown. About three feet high, “King Frog,” as Jack called him, squatted on the floor in front of a shelf of stone subjects. Jack once asked Carolien, “Why don’t you kiss him and turn him back into a handsome prince?”
Carolien shrugged. “Maybe he wouldn’t like that. Or maybe I would become a frog.”
Now they sat facing each other in the middle of a polished black floor. Jack said, “Thank you for seeing me.”
She made a Dutch noise. “Am I a dentist now? Why wouldn’t I see you?”
“Sorry. It’s been a rough couple of days.” He reached out and touched her cheek. Whenever he touched her, he was amazed that skin could feel so soft and strong at the same time. Thank God for Dutch cheese, he thought.
Gently, Carolien removed his hand. “Tell me what is happening,” she said.
Jack took a breath. “I had a visit from COLE today.”
“Ah. Were you naughty?”
“Not me. At least, not exactly.” He paused, then said, “I’m in trouble, Carolien.”
“Tell me.”
Jack laid it all out for her, holding back only his errand before the Momentary Storm. She listened without moving, then suddenly leaned forward and kissed him. Surprised, Jack almost backed away before he held her face and kissed her back. Jesus, he thought, maybe this is what I need. To hell with dreams and Revenants. A wild thought surfaced that when they got naked they would discover his cock had gone all shiny, and he’d have to make up some line, “Once you’ve tried silver, there’s no . . . ” But he couldn’t think of a rhyme and he gave his attention to kissing the top of Carolien’s breasts, moving down—
And then suddenly it wasn’t him. He could not have described how he knew, but it was like seeing yourself/not yourself in a dream. The goddamn Rev had his lips on Carolien’s right nipple, his hand between her legs. With all his concentration, like some novice Traveler trying to psychically lift a fucking pencil, Jack managed to push the body, the Dupe’s body, his body, away from Carolien.
And then he was back again, gasping for breath.
“So,” Carolien said. “That bad, yes?”
“Jesus,” Jack said to her, “that was a test?”
“Yes, of course. How else do we know?”
Jack shook his head. Usually he appreciated Carolien’s Dutch frankness. “We are a small country,” she’d say, “we have no room for embarrassment.” But sometimes . . .
Carolien said, “Your scar is back. Good.”
“It wasn’t there?”
“For a moment, no.”
“So it really was him. How did he do that?”
She sighed. “He operates in dreams, Jack. Dreams are like ooze. They can slide, and cover things. But you know this.” Jack didn’t answer. “Oh, Jack,” Carolien said, “it’s not me you need. It’s her.”
“Fuck,” Jack said. But of course she was right. When you’re hunted by a dream, where else do you go but a goddamn Dream Hunter?
Jack Shade’s relationship/affair/fling/experiment/beneficial friendship with Elaynora Horne lasted a little over nine months. El’s father may have been an ex-Sun god, but her mother was the Queen of Eyes, and Jack had met El through working that case. They didn’t talk about Mom much. The Queen had never publicly acknowledged her, El being the product of a youthful indiscretion, which is to say the young queen-to-be trying to run away from her life. El was much closer to her father. She worked in his dream agency, after all, but it was more than that. You could say she idolized him, if that term wasn’t so heavy with meaning in this particular instance.
The first time they made love, on a snowy December night, El had told Jack it had to be at her place, an elegant two-story apartment on the Upper East Side. That was okay with Jack, he wasn’t wild about bringing girlfriends to his hotel room. In El’s bedroom, he was a bit surprised to see black wooden shutters attached to all the windows, and more so when she systematically closed them all. Privacy issues, Jack thought, and then forgot about it as he began to kiss her lips, then her face, her neck, her breasts, and then her thighs as their clothes came off.
They made it to the high bed that looked half as big as a basketball court—no compass alignments, Jack noticed—and El was arching her back, and gasping, when suddenly she pulled away and held up her hand. “Wait,” she whispered, “I need you to wear something.”
Jack almost laughed and said, “It doesn’t look like you need any help at all,” but he’d been around long enough to know you didn’t question or make light of these things. There’d been a woman in Denver who’d tied streamers on his wrists and ankles and scrotum, another in Paris who put makeup on him and called him “Jacquie,” and a Japanese diplomat in Brooklyn who’d had him wear a Barack Obama mask. And once in Boston a woman had spent hours inscribing Jack’s chest and thighs with words in some long-lost alphabet. “Messages home,” she’d called them.
So he just nodded, waiting for whatever strange thing she would give him, and almost made a noise in surprise when all she did was hand him a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses. But he just put them on and went back to kissing her, though it was a bit strange because he could hardly see. We may think we close our eyes during sex but we actually depend on them much more than we realize.
Jack had once made love to a blind woman, who’d seduced him by telling him that she could see when having sex. What she didn’t say was that he would become blind. At first he’d gotten angry and started to push her away, but she clung to him, saying, “Please, Jack, let me have this. Your sight will come back, I promise.” So Jack had discovered what it was like to make love entirely by feel. After, he lay in bed while his partner got up, and for a moment he panicked when sight did not come flooding back. But soon flashes came and went, and then glimpses. He saw her standing in front of a full-length mirror, staring and touching, urgently connecting finger knowledge to shapes she would try to memorize. Jack didn’t get up until his sight had fully returned. Then he walked over to where she still stood before the mirror, her blank eyes weeping. “I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to hold her, but she pushed him away.
“Go,” she said. “Please.”
“We could do it again. If not now—”
“No! It only works once. Then—then I have to find someone else.” Jack had gathered up his clothes and gotten dressed in the hallway before he let himself out.
Now, as he made love wearing glasses so dark he could barely see his partner’s outline, he remembered that other time, and closed his eyes to better feel his way around El’s body. He began to get hints of why the glasses—and the shutters—as El began to vibrate toward orgasm. Faint flashes filled the air, then died out. Jack could feel them even with his eyes closed, and when he opened them it looked like parts of the room were flaring up, then disappearing.
El began to shudder, and grunt, and the flashes came faster. And then she cried out, and Jack, who’d been using his fascination with the lights to hold himself back, let go so he would come with her. In the midst of that perfect moment, a blast of fiery light flooded the room.
Jack made some kind of noise but held on, unwilling to cut short the experience. When the moment came to separate he fell back on the bed, only to cry out and sit up when he realized how hot—how sunburned—his back was. Gingerly he touched his chest, winced, for it was worse. Made sense, since he’d been facing her. He pointed to the glasses. “Is it safe?” When she said yes, he took them off to look down at the worst sunburn he’d had since he was five and ran away from his parents so he could build the world’s biggest sand castle.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” El said, but he could see her fighting a grin. “I guess I should have warned you.”
“You think?” Jack said, and then they were both laughing.
“It’ll wear off,” she said, and kissed him. “The sunburn, I mean.”
So sex with Elaynora was, well, complicated, though they worked ou
t ways to manage it. Unfortunately, other problems began to surface. Jack got a sense that she considered the work of a Traveler undignified, if not downright low-class. At first she sounded fascinated, wanted to know everything. Then she began to make comments about the tricks Travelers liked to play on each other, such as sending someone through the wrong Gate, so he ended up in Pigworld rather than among the Messengers of Light, or some of Jack’s clients. She began to talk of the valuable work the Dream Hunters did, the scientific breakthroughs they inspired (“It’s not just the benzene molecule, Jack”), the important clientele, the need to police the dream borders and catch illegal aliens before they could take root. “Dream Hunters matter,” she would say. “What we do is important.”
It all came to a head about eight months into their time together, the day Elaynora took Jack to meet her father. She looked flustered, excited, which made Jack nervous. Was he supposed to ask Papa Click and Whistle for his daughter’s hand? El didn’t seem the type, far too modern. But what did Jack know? He asked her if they were going to meet Alexander Horne at home or at work. She laughed, a little too loudly. “At work, Jack. Believe me, you don’t want to see where my father lives.”
The Horne Research Group occupied a suite on the eighteenth floor of an innocuous office building on Forty-fifth Street, between Lexington and Park. Jack noticed that the floor-to-ceiling windows in the reception area looked out on the Chrysler building, and if you glanced up you could see the gargoyles looming above you. A Korean woman in her twenties sat behind a long empty desk. At least, she seemed like a woman. Standing before her while El said they were there to see “Mr. Horne,” Jack caught the faintest aroma of Other about her. Maybe she was a dream.
Alexander Horne came out to welcome them and lead them into his office—the corner, of course. He presented himself as a large man, a couple of inches taller than Jack. Probably that would have been the case no matter how tall Jack was. Probably he appeared two inches taller to everyone. He had a barrel chest and large, strong hands with prominent veins and muscles. His face was wide, with a high forehead, a prominent nose, and a long, thin mouth. His thick silver hair was swept back. He wore a conservative grey suit with a maroon tie.
“Jack!” the ex-deity said. “It’s great to meet you. Elaynora can’t stop talking about you.”
She laughed. “Hardly. Make one vaguely complimentary comment . . . ”
They sat down at a circular table made of bone or ivory. A moment later, the receptionist—“Wondrous Jessica,” Horne called her—came in with coffee on a polished silver tray.
For the next half hour Alexander Horne questioned Jack about his work as a Traveler. He pretended it was chatting, but Jack could recognize an interrogation, and found himself becoming more and more annoyed. And yet, it still amazed him when Horne said, “So El tells me you might be ready for something new.”
“What?” Jack said. He looked at El, who glared at her father, then told Jack, “I didn’t say that. Really. That’s not what I said.”
“Oh?” said Jack. “Then what exactly did you say?”
“Just that—that the life of a Traveler is uncertain. And as long as you have that Guest, your life isn’t really your own. Anyone at all could hire you. But maybe if you did some other kind of work the Guest wouldn’t apply anymore.”
Jack stared at her. “You told him about that?”
Horne chuckled. “Don’t be angry at her, Jack. Believe me, I’ve tried and it doesn’t work.” He sipped his coffee. “I understand. The last thing a guy wants is for his girlfriend to interfere in his career. But do me a favor, Jack. Just think about it, okay? What we do here is challenging and exciting. And it helps people. I know Travelers do that as well, but we get under the surface of things. We don’t just fight reality, we shape it.”
He paused, put on a serious face. “And something else, Jack. What my daughter said about your—spiritual obligation. The Guest, as you call it. And this comes from me, not Elaynora. We can do more than set this thing aside. If you decide to work with us, we can nullify it.”
“What? What the Hell are you talking about?”
“The dream world is a threshold, Jack. It’s the only place where true change can occur.” He sighed, held up a hand. “Look, let’s table this discussion for now. You’re angry, I understand that. I’ve ambushed you here, I apologize. Why don’t you take a few days to think about it. No pressure. Just know that this is not an empty promise.”
Jack stood. El started to get up as well but Jack turned and walked out before she could say anything.
For the next few days Jack went over Papa Click’s offer again and again. He avoided sleep and protected himself with dream net when he had to close his eyes for fear Alexander—or Elaynora—Horne would try to influence his decision. Freedom, he told himself. No more slavery to anyone who showed up with his goddamn card. He thought of creeps like William Barlow, who almost got Jack killed. Or his fear that someday some gangster from Le Societé de Matin would show up with Jack’s card and hire him to do something truly vile.
Jack had actually tried to break the Guest on his own once. It was early, his third case since making the disastrous promise. A prim middle-aged woman named Amelia Otis placed Jack’s card on the table and said, “I suspect my husband—Mr. Chandler Otis—of demonic copulation. I want you to find out if it’s true.”
“Do you know what sort of demon?” Jack asked.
“Incubus.”
Jack had to stop himself from smiling. “I think you mean succubus.”
“No,” Mrs. Otis said, and cast her eyes down. “Incubus,” she repeated more softly.
Jesus, Jack had thought, it’s not the demon part that bothers her, it’s the gay!
After the client left, Jack wondered, was this his life now? Hostage to every sleaze who showed up with his business card? He decided he would unswear his oath. He would say three times, “I, John Shade, absolve and abjure all vows and obligations surrounding my card.” As he said it, he would cut the card Otis had given him.
The first time he tried it his hand slipped and he sliced his thumb. The second time, his voice became a whisper and he felt like he’d been stabbed in the stomach. The third time, his throat seized up and his whole body seemed to break into little pieces. He managed to throw away the scissors and fall on the floor.
When he got up again he discovered the card was unharmed, as bright and fresh as if it had just come from the printer.
A couple of times Jack simply tried to ignore a client, and became so sick he ended up in the ER. Only taking some small action to begin the case broke his symptoms. So the one thing he knew was that he couldn’t break the Guest on his own. Then why didn’t he leap at Horne’s offer?
He told himself that he didn’t like coercion. Or that he liked being a Traveler. But there was something else, he could feel it. Finally, he went up on the hotel roof just before moonrise, and did a simple enactment to ask the moon to show him the thing he was missing. He expected the light to fall on something, but it was the moon itself that gave him the answer. Just for an instant, as it came into view above the low buildings across the East River, the face in the moon was Eugenia Shade. The image collapsed back into the usual vague form, but for that second it was Jack’s daughter, as clear as the picture on the corner of his desk.
He understood now. The Guest came from the worst moment of his life, it was part of his terrible mistake—but it was also his last link to his daughter. He couldn’t just throw it away.
Jack showed up at the Horne Research Agency at nine the next morning. Walking past Jessica’s protests, he went straight to Horne’s office. “I’m not interested,” he said, and left before Horne could say anything.
Things were never the same with El after that. She tried to apologize but Jack told her it wasn’t necessary, he knew she meant well, but it wasn’t going to happen and he didn’t want to talk about it, it was okay. Jack knew that was a shit thing to do to her, but he didn’t care. For a
while they pretended they could just go back to how things had been, but they got together less and less often, and for shorter times.
One night, as they were about to make love, and El went about closing the shutters, Jack had the sense she was simply going through the motions. Just as he felt her approach orgasm, he took off the dark glasses. Brightness indeed filled the room, but just for a moment, and barely enough to scatter a few dots across his field of vision. When they separated, El smiled with supposed satisfaction until she saw the discarded glasses. “Hell,” she said, and lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Jack got dressed and left, and that was the last he’d seen of her.
And now—now he was supposed to go ask for her help. He glanced at Carolien.
“Oh no, schatje,” she said. “This is one you’re going to have to do without me.”
Jack made a face. “Maybe she won’t be home.”
Carolien looked over at King Frog. The eyes glowed red for a second, then returned to dull stone. “Sorry,” she said. “She’s home. Better hurry.” Then her voice got serious. “This is real, Jack. The Revenant is not going to stop. And he came with your card. You need all the help you can get.”
Jack nodded. He could hear that voice again, the angry parody of himself. I want to beat him. I want to win.
Elaynora met Jack at the door to her apartment. She was wearing a white linen pantsuit with wide legs and an asymmetrical jacket, the left side longer than the right. Her hair was shorter, layered and blow-dried to look like she’d just stepped out from a swim under a waterfall. Jack glanced at the windows, saw the shutters were open, and hoped she hadn’t noticed him checking.
