The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  None of it hurts. None of it seems to harm me in any way. Except that I’m falling apart, and a lot of my time is taken up with finding bits of me that have broken away somehow, and sticking them back on again in more or less the spot they came from.

  I don’t leave the house the way I used to. I’m glad I live in a time when nearly everything can be delivered.

  * * *

  And sometimes I get misty and confused. I’ll be in the middle of some task and realize three hours later, in another part of the house, that I’ve left it undone. I’ll find my spectacles in the fridge, or my socks on the bookshelf. I’m sure putting them there seemed like a logical idea at the time.

  Sometimes also, I’ll find my clothes in a puddle under me on the sofa and realize that they just kind of drained through me while I was working. I’ll be chopping vegetables and the knife will hit the chopping block and just lie there, and it will be some time before I can manage to pick it up again. My hand will pass through my coffee cup for a while before it solidifies once more, and I won’t get to drink it until it’s cold.

  At least the pens and notebooks are always solid. Always real. My laptop, too, and I guess that’s logical, because it’s not that different from a notebook in intention. Heck, some people call them notebooks.

  Oh, but now. But this time.

  I think I did more than get a little misty. I think I forgot something.

  I think I forgot something very important. I think I forgot it on purpose, and because I forgot it, something terrible is going to happen. To a lot of people. Not just me.

  So I’m falling apart. And I’m losing my mind.

  * * *

  I used to burn my notebooks.

  I didn’t want to be connected to the past they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the person they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the me that was.

  I wanted to reinvent myself. Each time I made a terrible mistake, I wanted to put everything aside, walk away, move on. I wanted to erase my errors. I wanted to change the past so the bad things had not happened. So I could not be punished for them. So I would not have to feel, all the time, so wrong.

  I erased my thoughts, my feelings. My failed loves. The classes where my grades were only average. The abusive family background. The jobs that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped, that had toxic office politics, or abusive bosses. I erased the pain, the pain, the pain.

  I wrote it all down in hope, and when it didn’t work out, I burned it in despair.

  I was trying to erase my mistakes, I suppose. It was a kind of perfectionism. If something has a flaw, throw it out and get something perfect next time. I was trying to move forward, in the hope that the next adventure would end better.

  But not learning from the failures.

  And so, little by little, I erased myself.

  I threw myself away.

  * * *

  I would have been free and clear if I just hadn’t read the newspaper that day. The day they printed the manifesto. I could have gone on about my life and my business in ignorance.

  I could have spared myself a lot of grief. And work. And worry.

  Grief and work and worry that would have been transferred to other people in my stead. That might still be served up to them if I can’t prevent it.

  And if it happens, I will know that it is my fault, because I failed.

  The manifesto was in the paper. All the papers, I imagine, not just my specific one. It purported to be written by the group that had been mailing incendiary bombs to universities. Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago. To their medical colleges.

  That niggled at me, and I didn’t think it was just because the University of Chicago was my alma mater. There was something.

  Something back there.

  Something I had worked very hard to forget.

  Not violence, no. But the promise of violence. The expectation of violence.

  Is that what people mean when they talk about menace? Something being menacing? That awareness that there is not just the potential for violence, in the abstract, a kind of background radiation that is always present—but that somebody, somewhere, is planning to cause someone harm.

  * * *

  Any long-term relationship is served by a little amnesia. A marriage—and I’m using the term loosely here, but we were together, if you can call it together, for almost eight years—is a country in flux. A series of negotiations and edges and considered silences. And some unconsidered ones, depending on how self-aware the diplomats in question are. Sometimes all the negotiations are carried out by reflex and instinct. Sometimes this results in war. A covert war, or an open one.

  But sometimes, there’s a plan.

  When a diplomat who’s acting on reflex, instinct, and conditioned response (diplomat A) meets a diplomat who is acting with self-awareness, caution, and a considered agenda of compromises (diplomat B), (diplomat B) is usually going to win the exchange.

  I was (diplomat A) in this example.

  I was seventeen years old.

  I went in without a theory.

  * * *

  A broken heart is like a cracked bathtub. Nobody’s going to make a full-price offer for a property with annoying repair problems like that hanging around. So either you fix it yourself, or you try to hide the cracks and cover up the damage. At least until the mark has signed enough paperwork that it’s inconvenient to back out.

  * * *

  Plastic-covered notebooks give off a terrible smell as they burn.

  * * *

  I wasted a lot of paper.

  I was not good at finishing the notebooks. I would reach a point where I was damned sick of who I was, how I had been feeling, how I had been acting. And then I needed to be done with the stained pages I had been writing, because I had written down everything. Everything about my internal landscape, anyway.

  I didn’t have friends.

  I just had secrets.

  And so I wrote them down.

  It was actually easier—well, cheaper, anyway, and more efficient—when I was younger. In the three-ring and spiral-bound notebooks, I just ripped out the offending pages and tore them up. Got rid of them. Shredded them and gave them a shove.

  But then I graduated to bound books. The cheap fabric-covered ones at first. Then better ones, professional-quality ones, with paper that ink pens did not feather on or bleed through. I liked the hard-covered ones in pretty colors, with ribbon markers and pockets in the back. Graph paper or dot grids. I did not like wide-ruled.

  But those were harder to destroy, eventually. When they needed destruction.

  Everything needs destruction in the end. And so I learned to burn.

  I thought about burning more than notebooks when I was young. I thought of self-immolation, but I never had the courage. I thought of arson, but I never had the cruelty. I remembered those things, vaguely. Like a story that had happened to someone else.

  Maybe that was why that manifesto struck me so hard, I tell myself, as my fingers slip through the handle of the coffee pot again. A major American city, it had said. An inferno of flames. The Judgment of a just and terrible God.

  Engulfed.

  Soon, soon. Soon.

  But no. There is more than that. Some part of me that I can’t access knows. Knows which city. Knows who had written those words. Knows enough to stop this terrible thing from happening.

  I just can’t remember.

  * * *

  How do you learn to erase yourself?

  It’s not something that comes naturally to children. Children seek attention because attention means survival. So to get them to erase themselves, you have to teach them that they don’t exist. And because it is an unnatural, self-destructive thing that you are teaching them—a maladaptive response—the only tactic that works is to make the consequences of noncompliance worse than the consequences of nonexistence.

  That takes force. Violence, physical or emotional. If you just try to ignore a k
id, they’ll act out and seek attention through misbehavior.

  Any port in a storm.

  I bet, given half a chance, I could have been a charming child.

  But I didn’t learn to be charming. I learned how not to be real.

  I learned to have no vulnerabilities and expect no consideration. I learned I had no intrinsic value and was only marginally worthwhile for what I could provide, if what I provided was beyond reproach.

  I learned I was not allowed to be angry. To defend myself. To have needs. I learned to be good at being alone, because if you were alone, nobody could betray you.

  I thought I had escaped all that when I went away to college. But like the horror movie phone call, the loathing was coming from inside my head.

  * * *

  I didn’t hold on to things, because holding on to things hurt. If you didn’t hold on, then when you lost something, you lost it easy.

  But if you don’t hold on, you lose things.

  My notebooks and pens are still solid. I can write all the time. Under any conditions. I can write things down.

  If I can just remember them.

  I can write them down.

  * * *

  I lost a lot of pens.

  I couldn’t bear to write in pencil. And it didn’t matter because I was burning the books.

  But I couldn’t seem to hang on to the pens.

  * * *

  It’s in the notebooks, isn’t it? The thing I need.

  There’s no way to get the notebooks back, of course. Even if I found similar ones, they’d be empty. All the important words—all of the words that have the memories attached that might keep people from being hurt—set on fire, burned up—were, in a particularly distasteful irony, burned up themselves long ago.

  Oh. But the pens.

  * * *

  I started collecting pens when I was very young. My mother gave me a fountain pen. Not an expensive one, but she wrote with fountain pens, and she thought I should, too, and I was excited to be like my mother in this way I thought was grown-up and cool. One led to two, led to five or six. Student pens.

  I loved them.

  And the ink! I loved the ink even more. Because you can put the same ink in a cheap pen as in an expensive one, and then you get to write with it.

  Finding the right ink, the right pen, is like coming home. Like finding the place in which you live and in which you want to live. The place you want to stay forever. The place where you belong.

  On a smaller scale, of course.

  But still, it can make you a little bit emotional.

  And if you are lucky, you might actually recognize it while it’s right in front of you, while you’re standing there, and not once you walk away, foolishly.

  The hardest thing is when you walk away from home knowing that it’s home, because home is changing, or challenging, or making you sad. Or because you screwed up and broke something, and you think you’re too embarrassed to stay, or you’re not welcome there anymore.

  So you go someplace else and think you can live there. But it isn’t home. And then you have to try to get home again.

  Sometimes it takes a long time to get home again. Some people never make it back.

  I thought I had to be perfect. I thought I couldn’t live with my errors. I thought it would be better to run away. Start clean. Discard the ruined page and keep reaching for a fresh one. Burn my notebooks.

  Erase my history. Erase my screwups.

  Erase my self.

  Erase, erase, erase.

  * * *

  I start on collectors’ websites and then on auction sites, looking for the pens. Most of them were not expensive at the time when I bought them—I never had a lot of money. Some of them had gotten more expensive since.

  A funny thing happens as I start looking. I search for one pen to see what it would cost to replace it. And in the related items, I find more that look familiar. That I suddenly remember having owned. And when I chase those links, there are more, still more familiar-looking ones.

  I am forty-five years old. I think I am forty-five years old.

  I get out my birth certificate and check.

  I am forty-five years old.

  How many pens have I lost?

  How many other things have I forgotten about, before now?

  * * *

  I think of a pen I’d liked, when I was twenty-five or so. I remember putting it in a jacket pocket. I don’t remember ever finding it there again. It had been a blue marbled plastic fountain pen, a kind of bulbous and silly-looking thing. A lot of personality, I guess you’d say. It wrote very well.

  I find one like it on an auction site. Lose that auction but win another in a few days. Sixty-three dollars plus shipping. I think the pens in a box set with ink were thirty dollars new back in 1995.

  Fortunately my books are doing all right, and my needs in general are few. My chief extravagance is a little indulgence in grocery store sushi, once in a while. I use a grocery delivery service. I can’t drive. What if my foot fell off while I was reaching for the brake?

  The pen arrives after three days. I get lucky with the mail that day and it doesn’t fall through my hands. I take the pen out of the box, weigh it in my palm. Light, plastic with gold trim. The blue is so intense, it looks violet.

  I uncap it and examine the nib, squinting my middle-aged eyes. Then I laugh at myself and use the zoom function on my phone camera to get a better look at it. The phone, for once, doesn’t slide through my hand.

  The mysterious internet stranger I’d bought it from hadn’t cleaned it very well. I get a bulb syringe and wash it at the sink, soaking and rinsing. You’re supposed to use distilled water, but the water here at my house is soft, from a surface reservoir. The same reservoir H. P. Lovecraft once wrote about, as the towns that now lie under it were drowning.

  Anyway, I’ve never had any problems with it. Even if it is saturated with alien space colors, they don’t seem to cause problems with the nibs, so that’s good news overall.

  Once it’s clean, I ink it up from a big square bottle in a color that matches the barrel, and sit down at the table with a notebook, ready to write.

  With the pen in my hand, I find suddenly I am full of memories. Strange; I can go through a whole day, usually, without remembering things.

  I remember the pen.

  And now I’m holding it in my hand, and I start to write, in a lovely red-sheened cobalt blue.

  * * *

  I grew up to be a writer. A novelist. That will not surprise you. You are, after all, reading my words right now.

  I write, and write, and the notebook stays solid and the pen stays solid and it writes as well as the one I used to have. But my right hand—I’m left-handed—has a tendency to slide through the table if I’m not paying attention. And twice I fall right through my chair, which is a new and revolting development.

  I don’t let it stop me, though. I write, and remember, and write some more. About somebody I can sort of recall. A long, long time ago.

  An incident that happened at the University of Chicago. After . . . after I stopped being a student there?

  It’s so damned hard to recall.

  * * *

  “There is no point in being so angry.” His words had the echo that used to come from long distance.

  But I wasn’t being angry to make a point.

  Which was not something the manipulative son of a bitch could ever have understood. I was angry because I was angry. Because he deserved my anger.

  I was angry because anger is a defense mechanism. It’s an emotion that serves to goad you to action, to remove the irritant on your turf or the thing that is causing you pain.

  “I’m angry because you’re hurting me,” I said. “I’m angry because you’re hurting a lot of people. Stop it, and I won’t need to be angry with you anymore.”

  Therapy gives you a pretty good set of tools to be (diplomat B), it turns out. I was still furious with my mother for forcing me to
go.

  But it was helping.

  It might take me a while to get over my anger. But that didn’t seem salient to the argument we were having, so I kept it to myself.

  “You can’t just set things on fire because you don’t like the way the world is going.”

  “Oh, I can,” he told me. “And you already helped me. You’re just too much of a coward to own that and be really useful, so you’ll let other people do your dirty work and keep your hands clean.”

  “You won’t do it,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “I probably won’t. Don’t call me again.”

  * * *

  I think about calling. An anonymous tip. Or sending an email.

  But I don’t have any evidence. And I don’t have a name.

  “I know who wrote the manifesto. But I can’t remember his name. And I helped him come up with the plan. The plan to burn down a city. Except I can’t remember what city, either. Or the details of the plan.”

  Yeah. No.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I am too much of a coward to take responsibility for something I believe in. For something I had once believed in, until I forgot?

  Maybe I forgot because I knew it would feel like my fault if I remembered.

  * * *

  My mother gave me an expensive fountain pen when I graduated high school. It was a burgundy one, small and slim. Wrote beautifully. I didn’t know enough to appreciate it at the time.