The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  “Ironic, isn’t it,” the agent says dryly without looking up from the contract he’s been reading.

  “You know why I come here every night?”

  “Because it’s just around the corner from your apartment,” the agent says.

  The last SF writer ignores him. “Because they still have menus that you can read and because flesh-and-blood waitresses still serve the food. Not like those new diners, with the voice-recognition ordering systems, computerized chefs, robotic servers...”

  “Yes,” says the agent, finally looking up from his papers, “but those places have something that this place does not.”

  “Such as?”

  “Patrons.”

  “I can sympathize,” the last SF writer says. “It is a different world now. It has evolved beyond me. Beyond this—” he shakes more flakes of paper off the ancient magazine. He glances toward the waitress standing behind the counter at the far end of the diner staring catatonically at the door. “She could be Linda Nielsen,” he says.

  “And you could be Jim Mayo,” the agent says.

  “And it would all end the same, regardless.”

  Staring at his papers, the agent says, “They don’t make life like they used to.”

  3

  The last SF writer sits in the all-night diner with ancient newspaper clippings spread out across his table. From an inner coat pocket, he pulls out a ball-point pen and adds to the notes he has scribbled on the napkin before him. It takes him quite some time, and before he is through, he has filled both sides of its surface with tiny print.

  The waitress stops by the table with more coffee and the last SF writer says to her, “Would you be a doll and bring me some more napkins? Thank you, dear.” She smiles at him vacuously and walks off.

  Then he says to his agent, “We were too smart for our own good. That was our downfall. Ahead of our time would be an understatement. We were ahead of any time. Listen to this—” he glances down at his napkin, “—’The Rocket Man’, published ninety years ago; ‘The Skylark of Space’, one hundred and thirteen years ago; ‘Requiem’, one hundred and one years ago. The list goes on and on.

  “Do you know when human beings last set foot on the moon?” He does not wait for an answer. “Over sixty-eight years ago! I was virtually a newborn then. No sir, we have outsmarted ourselves. We were the leaders. We were there before the rest of them in every single case: the moon, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. We had the vision to see what they could not see. We inspired the last great generation, I tell you. Ask any one of those twelve dead astronauts who actually stood on the moon—stood on the moon!—ask any one of them what inspired them to do something so incredibly outrageous and they will undoubtedly point to some aspect of science fiction.

  “And where are we today? We have solved the problem of literacy by eliminating it: ‘Books’ (if you can call them that) are sensory interactive, require no knowledge of letters, and no imagination on the part of the reader. Automobiles drive themselves—oftentimes without any passengers. Food preparation does not require human participation. Dogs can be walked by autonomous leashes. Hair can be colored by genetic pills. They have taken the ideas that we gave to them, and used them to solve every trivial problem they could think of.”

  This thought has been recurring to the last SF writer with increasing frequency. He wipes sweat from his forehead allowing several large drops to fall into his napkin, smearing the blue ink in several places.

  “We are no closer to the moon,” he says, scribbling madly as he speaks, “no closer to cold fusion, or curing cancer or a dozen other diseases. We have become preoccupied with a world-girdling network of electronic interaction and narcissism. The universe outside does not exist. It cannot affect us and we cannot affect it.”

  Finally, he breaks down and says what he is really thinking: “It is hard to watch a species on its way to extinction.” He thinks the ambiguity of this is profound, for while by “species” he means “science fiction writer,” he could just as easily be referring to the human race.

  It is at this point he realizes that he has been alone in the diner the entire time. His agent is not there, and he has been talking aloud to an invisible audience. Perhaps he has not even been talking. Perhaps it has all been in his head.

  4

  The last SF writer sits in the all-night diner and stares at the neon “Live Nudes” sign just outside the window. It is a mark of the deterioration in this part of town that the nude dancers are, in fact, live. In most places the dancers are computer-generated simulacrums, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing—until you try and touch them.

  His agent sits across from him, sipping at his coffee and reading a newspaper, but newspapers are rare, except in museums, and in fact, the agent himself seems rarified, fading in and out, at times appearing solid, and at other times like those ghostly holographic dancers.

  “When was the last time you actually sold a story of mine?” the last SF writer asks.

  “When was the last time you wrote a story for me to sell.?”

  “I am no longer able to write. I’ve lost that power. It has withered away out of disgust.”

  “There is no longer a market.”

  “We are a dying breed.”

  “You are a dying breed.”

  The last SF writer scratches at his chin and stares into his soup bowl. “This is how Hwoogh felt.”

  The agent flickers out for a moment and then reconstitutes himself. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “Survival of the fittest. Nothing personal, you understand.”

  The last SF writer nods sadly. “The day is done.”

  “How long?”

  “One hundred and two years.”

  5

  The last SF writer sits in the all-night diner. He is not well. The mild aches now make him restless. The cough, which started as a tickle in his throat, has grown into some kind of infection in his lungs. He avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

  “We never really made it beyond Apollo,” he says to his agent. “Do you realize that it has been sixty-nine years since human beings have set foot on the moon? Since Barry Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo was first published?” In his mind, both were the same.

  “I always thought that a most depressing book,” the agent says, sipping his coffee.

  “A most insightful book,” the last SF writer says, and then is overcome by a siege of coughing. When he recovers, wiping bits of green sputum from the table with a greasy napkin, he says, “I can sympathize with Harry Evans. The conditions were intolerable.”

  “The conditions are intolerable,” the agent says. Then he changes the subject. “Have you heard that scientists at M.I.T. think they’ve built a time machine that will actually work?”

  “I don’t listen to tabloids,” the last SF writer says.

  “It was the headline of all the major news organizations this morning.”

  “I no longer pay any attention to the news.”

  With a hint of emotion, the agent says, “With a time machine, you could go back in time an change things—you know, so that events turn out differently.”

  “And what would I change?” the last SF writer asks.

  “Well...maybe what gets written, how it is received and so forth.”

  “Too late, it’s already been done, seventy-six years ago in a story called ‘The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told.’“

  “Ah, but that was a story. I am talking about life, altering our reality, making a difference.”

  The last SF writer hawks spits something unpleasant into his napkin. He says, “It will never work.”

  “Why not?”

  “There has never been a successful science fiction story involving time travel, that didn’t end ironically, or dramatically. Call it a writer’s intuition, but I’d wager that even if their so-called time machine worked, altering the past would not achieve the desired goals. It would only make things far worse.”

  “How could
you possibly know that?” the agent asks.

  “I am not the first to know it, just the last. Harry Evans knew it. The reasoning is clear: the conditions were intolerable. A time machine? Ha! That will never work out.”

  6

  The last SF writer sits in the all-night diner, or perhaps he is asleep on his bed in the tiny, one-room studio he maintains around the corner from a diner which he has never actually visited. It is August 15, 2041 and as he nibbles at his toast and soup, or perhaps just rolls over in bed to face away from the calendar, he realizes that he is probably the only person on Earth who knows that one hundred years ago today, “Nightfall” first made its appearance on the magazine racks.

  “The greatest science fiction story ever written was more prescient than anyone could have possibly known,” he says to his agent—to the empty room. “We humans used to be fascinated by the stars. They roused the spirit of our ancestors and some of the mystery that surrounded them seemed to evaporate over the centuries.”

  “You are not making sense,” the agent says; or so the last SF writer thinks to himself. “This is why you stopped writing; this is why you haven’t written a story in thirty years.”

  “Some of that fascination,” the last SF writer continues, “inspired a couple of generations of writers, and during that brief interval, they shined like a golden sun.

  “Now, we are afraid of the stars. We do not understand them; cannot understand them. No—worse—we have forgotten them. We focused on trivialities, a quest for the ultimate in leisure when we should have been inspired to focus on industry and the quest for knowledge. That is what those men and women inspired in others. Somewhere along the way, though, something went terribly wrong.”

  He casts about the restaurant as though looking for an answer, catches the eye of the waitress and holds up his empty cup of coffee. She quickly refills the cup, and the last SF writer reaches toward the small nightstand next to his bed to take a sip of water from the glass there, but manages only to knock the glass to the floor with a crash. He does not have the strength to get out of bed and clean it up.

  “Perhaps it is a cycle,” the agent says.

  “Yes, a cycle. And maybe someday, it will start itself up all over again from scratch. That would be nice to believe, would it not? All of the old stories, retold exactly as they were told then, but to sound brand new. Like the library of Babel...” his voice trails off.

  The agent (who is now a discorporate whisper in the mind of the last SF writer) says, “The question remains: will they get it right?”

  The last SF writer does not know the answer to this. He can hope, but he does not know. He will not know. He says nothing for a long time, laying very still in the dark, empty room around the corner from the “Live Nudes” sign, his breath coming at irregular intervals. He thinks only of the great stories, and does not think of the future. He thinks of the stars, which others cannot see and which he cannot see, but which he knows are there, slowing winking out one by one.

  Waiting for Jakie

  Barbara Krasnoff

  I like the blue pills best. I have others, of course—the purple ones, and the green and yellow ones. The tiny white ones? Those are just for blood pressure, and all they really do, in my opinion, is give a living to the drug companies. Not that I have anything against drug companies, God forbid; after all, they not only allow me to face each day, but gave my son Benjamin a decent living for many years until the AIDS got him, poor boy.

  Anyway, the blue pills are the ones I take when I’m feeling nervous or depressed, which is most of the time, actually. I tell the doctors this, and they try to put me on other medications, more long term, they call it, but a week goes by and I’m feeling like taking a steak knife to my wrists, so I throw away the new ones and go back to the ones that at least keep me operating on, as Samuel used to say, all six cylinders.

  And sometimes, if I’ve taken just a little bit more than I’m supposed to—not much, only a few more milligrams, nothing, an extra pill or more, who would begrudge it?—then, if I squint my eyes a little and let the living room furniture blur a bit, then sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can see Jakie. Not very clear, I admit, and usually only a little, but it’s him. It’s him.

  And I miss him so much. Our time together was short, so short, but it was like a lifetime together. It should have been a lifetime together.

  Usually he’s sitting in the big stuffed chair where Samuel used to sit, with his long legs stretched out in front, and a book or a newspaper in his large hands. I love it when I can see Jakie. I could just sit and look at him forever. He’s tall, and thin, and his hair is still thick and brown. And his eyes—oy, his eyes. Those eyes are what I used to dream about after he left—large and dark and ironic. Like my father’s. Which is why I first trusted him, that day when he and the other Americans came walking into the camp.

  But enough of me.

  He doesn’t always read, Jakie. Sometimes he leans his chin on his hand and stares off to the side, his head nodding slightly, up and down. He’s listening to music, I think, maybe one of the Italian operas he was so fond of. Once, one of the girls found an old scratched recording of Rigoletto in a bombed-out house somewhere, and I traded her a full meal for it and gave it to Jakie, and he found an old wind-up victrola and brought it to his quarters. As soon as the music started, E Donna Mobile, all the other soldiers started snorting through their noses like horses, as though Jakie listening to opera was the funniest thing they’d seen.

  But I saw how the record helped him go away from the war, and I knew that this was the mark of a truly civilized man. I know—I grew up in a beautiful, rich home outside of Berlin, and we attended concerts, and went on holiday in Switzerland. When we went to the theatre, men and women in lovely clothing would nod respectfully at my parents and my uncle and smile at me, and I would feel so special. Jakie may have been born in America, but he too was special.

  I don’t think he sees me, Jakie, when he sits in Samuel’s chair. If I thought that, I’d die. Me with my bloated body and thin hair and God! I used to be so beautiful.

  Even right after the camp, when I looked like a scarecrow, my hair still short and dry and no meat on my bones, Jakie used to tease me and tell me that I looked like Veronica Lake. And I’d laugh at him and say no, I’m too skinny. And finally he came to the barracks one day, where we were waiting to find out what would happen and where we should go, and he told me to get two girl friends, we were “going out on the town.”

  And he got me a beautiful dress, and a nice pair of shoes—I never asked where he got them. And, would you believe it, lipstick—and three of us girls got together, and brushed our hair until it hurt, and scrubbed, and colored our lips and a little on our cheeks. We went to a local cafe where Jakie and two other boys whose names I don’t remember, we sat and the Americans gave the proprietor, a German pig who stared at us as though he wondered why we weren’t still in the camp where we belonged, they gave him money and told him they wanted wine and sausages, and we all drank, and ate, and tried to understand each other, and one of the Americans said something that made Jakie slap him on the head, and they all laughed, and when I asked Jakie in Yiddish what the boy said, he wouldn’t say.

  I was alone, and my family was dead, and we were diseased Jewish whores from the camps, but we ate, and drank, and pretended we were regular girls out on dates with three boys who would try to steal a kiss and then deliver us back to our parents. Oh, god. I was so happy that evening.

  And when I went back with Jakie, and kissed him, and wanted to give him of my own free will what I had been forced to give up for the last three years, he kissed me gently as if I was a bride, and told me that we had the rest of our lives and that I deserved more than a forest behind the barracks.

  I let him take me back. The two other girls told me I was an idiot. And they were right.

  Because in the morning, Jakie and the lovely boy soldiers were gone. And although he had promised to write, I never heard from h
im again. (Years later, Samuel said he could probably find my soldier—I had told him some of it, but not all—but I told him no. It was too late. I was married, and older, and didn’t want to know.)

  Eventually, I found a job as a secretary to one of the Red Cross officials. And one day Samuel walked in, quiet and clean and polite, in a beautiful suit that made him look like a banker or a movie star, although he wasn’t really tall enough. I thought then, what was a Jew doing in a suit like that, with so much meat on him? I thought, a collaborator, a bastard who sold Jewish lives in trade for his own. Later, I found out he had escaped and worked for the OSS, the American spies. And what did he do during the war? He never told me.

  But he looked so like the boys I used to see at the skiing lodges where we spent our school holidays that my breath caught in my throat. And it was the same for Samuel—he told me later that when he first saw me, for one moment he was walking into the office of his father’s shul where, he said, his friend’s pretty sister used to help with the paperwork. So we found each other in a mist of dreams of the dead.

  That is why I don’t like admitting that it is Jakie I see, and not Samuel. After all, Samuel was my dear husband for nearly fifty years, and it was his chair, and he was the one who took care of me and tried to help me. When we were living in Berlin, and when I found out I was pregnant and told Samuel that I would kill the baby and myself before I would let it be born in that damned country, didn’t he tell his bosses that he had to leave Europe, and bring me to America? And when one day I started crying and couldn’t stop, didn’t he take me to that doctor who gave me those pills and said they’d help me? And if they didn’t help me the way he’d planned, if I needed to take more of them over the years, was it his fault? He meant it for the best.

  And now Samuel is dead. My poor Benjamin, the only child we had, our hope for the future, is dead. And Jakie, if he is still alive, is probably married to some smart American woman with smart American children. And he is probably fat, and balding, and has forgotten all about me.