Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “Think what?” Hector prompted. He was close to a sale now he could taste it on the tip of his tongue.

  “Think…” She gazed down at the table. Shook her psoriasis scalp. “If he came back and found me…” Then she looked up, and the look was so ferocious, Hector almost blinked. “That would make the bastard think—would make him realise.”

  “Well…” He shrugged. Genuinely non-committal. Nearly added, Have you considered how you might…? But he didn’t. Not yet, anyway. For Hurry was the Enemy of Completion. And, at the end of the day, a good customer always sold the product to themselves. “…You never know.”

  “You don’t, do you?”

  Then, at this most crucial of all moments, something went wrong. Even before he could do anything to stop it from happening, the customer had pushed herself up from her chair.

  “You fancy a drink? The medication I’m on, I’m not supposed to touch anything. But you’ve listened to me, mister, and it feels like you’re the first person to do so in years. So what the hell…”

  What the hell, indeed. Here he was, so close to closing the sale he could feel it tingling through him like it had felt back in the days he was still demonstrating the Elation button on the Psiclean. And now things were slipping out of his control.

  A cupboard door open. A gloss of amber fluids, expensive labels.

  “What’s your poison? Believe me, we’ve got the lot.”

  She was almost selling the stuff to him. Which was awful, terrible. “I. Er…”

  Another cupboard. Two tumblers clashed together so hard Hector was sure he saw chips of glass fly off. In this second cupboard, along with the glasses, dozens of little brown bottles were lined like soldiers. The label said Nembutal on every one.

  “Jesus.” She was almost playful now. Almost happy. Already, splashingly, she was pouring out whisky. “Might as well live a little. Otherwise, hey, what’s the point? And what exactly have you got in that case of yours, anyway, Mister, that you carry as if it’s nothing at all? Aren’t you ever going to show me? You’re not just going to leave me here, are you? Oh, please! Aren’t you going to make me a sale?”

  But Hector Douglas was already standing. Hector Douglas was already picking up his boater and lifting his featherlight case and holding them both tight to him and backing out through the kitchen door.

  “Jesus. You can’t do this! This is horrible. Please…? You’re just like—”

  He was off down the hall and letting himself out into the night air even before the woman’s shouts had faded. Not a sale, no. But nearly. So close that he could still smell the reek of whisky, cigarettes, hopelessness—and, yes, Nembutal, as well. But no cigar. The woman had already bought everything he could ever hope to sell. There was nothing he could offer, not Means or Despair or even the requisite Determination and Resolve, that she didn’t already own. And, as ever, there was no point in arguing. For the Customer Was Always Right. He could, perhaps, have popped the catches on his case. Opened it up for her, as he sometimes did when a customer was wavering, just to display to its lovely, empty depths in all their dark allure. But what would have been the point? For, in truth, you could never Sell To A Customer Who Has Already Been Sold.

  But still…

  Hector gave his case a further swing, yelped, and beamed up at the swarming stars. This particular suburb, his salesman’s instincts told him, was stale and fished out. But there was always other places, fresh opportunities. He checked his watch under the nearest streetlight. If he was brisk about it, he would still be able to snag a bus downtown. It would be late, perhaps, already closing on midnight by the time he got there, but for many a potential customer—the hopeless hookers, the hungry hobos, the studio rejects, the failed businessmen living out of their cars—this was the very best time of all.

  Hector skip-danced along the street, humming to himself.

  He was still certain that, sometime tonight, he would make a sale.

  Afterword

  Hector came to life as a result of a novel I was working on, which eventually became Wake Up and Dream. I knew by then that the novel was going to be set in Los Angeles, and also that it would involve an invention which allowed for the recording of emotion—the thing that in the finished work took over the entertainment industry and much else besides, which I called the feelies.

  I’d also long fancied the idea of writing about a ludicrously committed salesman. Someone so committed, in fact, that their commitment went beyond rationality and into homicide. So I sent Hector Douglas out into the Los Angeles suburbs, and he seemed to like what he found, and, for a while, I liked what I was writing and thought he might be a key character in my novel. Inside his shiny black case was…Well, perhaps an invention which had some resonance with the whole technology of the feelies which I was developing. I could call in the Psiclean…

  But Hector wandered. Hector dawdled. Hector did too little and thought too much. And what exactly was a Psiclean? And if he was going around killing people, why would he need to actually sell anything? There were answers, I’m sure, to all of those questions, Hector only seemed to care about two things, and they were selling and death. He didn’t need bosses or conspiracies or all the other things I wanted to put into my novel. He didn’t even need the feelies. He was a simple creature, and it’s a simple enough tale, and I finally liberated Hector to wander the Los Angeles suburbs, freed almost entirely, but for a couple of near-gratuitous references, from the shackles of the umbilical cord which had once tied him to my novel.

  Oh, and by the way—

  Yes, I have worked in sales. Not quite door to door, although I have certainly stood on plenty of doorsteps and rang bells and waited to see who or what would emerge along the hall. So do let me know if you’d like me to fix you up with an endowment policy that’s (almost) absolutely guaranteed to pay off your mortgage when it matures. Or if that doesn’t appeal, maybe I can interest you in something else…?

  Nevermore

  NOW THAT HE COULDN’T afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but to paint what he saw in his dreams. With no sketchpad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling up from the pillow and his mouth dry and his jaw aching from the booze he’d drunk the evening before—which was the cheapest means he’d yet found of getting to sleep—he was left with just that one chance, and few trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful before he had to face the void of the day.

  It hadn’t started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it had probably ended. Representational art had had its heydays, and for a while he’d been feted like the bright new talent he’d once been sure he was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under your fingernails would probably come back into style again—long after it had ceased to matter to him.

  So that was it. Load upon load of self pity falling down upon him this morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What had he been dreaming? Something—surely something. Otherwise being here and being Gustav wouldn’t come as this big a jolt. He should’ve got more used to it than this by now…Gustav scratched himself, and discovered that he also had an erection, which was another sign—hadn’t he read once, somewhere?—that you’d been dreaming dreams of the old-fashioned kind, unsimulated, unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological optimism. The hope that there might just be a hope.

  Arthritic, Cro-Magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs, knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the controls of his window in the pock-marked far wall, changing the perspectives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across something better. The sun and the moon were blazing down over Paris from their respective quadrants, pouring like mercury through the nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint t
his scene speeded through him. He’d finished at least twenty paintings of foreal Paris; all reality engines and cabled ruins in grey, black, and white. Probably done, oh, at least several hundred studies in ink-wash, pencil, charcoal. No one would ever buy them, and for once they were right. The things were passionless, ugly—he pitied the potentially lovely canvases he’d ruined to make them. He pulled back from the window and looked down at himself. His erection had faded from sight beneath his belly.

  Gustav shuffled through food wrappers and scrunched-up bits of cartridge paper. Leaning drifts of canvas frames turned their backs from him towards the walls, whispering on breaths of turpentine of things that might once have been. But that was okay because he didn’t have any paint right now. Maybe later, he’d get the daft feeling that, today, something might work out, and he’d sell himself for a few credits in some stupid trick or other—what had it been last time; painting roses red dressed as a playing card?—and the supply ducts would bear him a few precious tubes of oils. And a few hours after that he’d be—but what that noise?

  A thin white droning like a plastic insect. In fact, it had been there all along—had probably woken him at this ridiculous hour—but had seemed so much a part of everything else that he hadn’t noticed. Gustav looked around, tilting his head until his better ear located the source. He slid a sticky avalanche of canvas board and cotton paper off an old chair, and burrowed in the cushions until his hand closed on a telephone. He’d only kept the thing because it was so cheap that the phone company hadn’t bothered to disconnect the line when he’d stopped paying. That was, if the telephone company still existed. It was chipped from the time he’d thrown it across the room after his last conversation with his agent. But he touched the activate pad anyway, not expecting anything more than a blip in the system, white machine noise.

  “Gustav, you’re still there are you?”

  He stared at the mouthpiece. It was his dead ex-wife Elanore’s voice.

  “What do you want?”

  “Don’t be like that, Gus. Well, I won’t be anyway. Time’s passed, you know, things have changed.”

  “Sure, and you’re going to tell me next that you—”

  “—Yes, would like to meet up. We’re arranging this party. I ran into Marcel in Venice—he’s currently Doge there, you know—and we got talking about old times and all the old gang. And so we decided we were due for a reunion. You’ve been one of the hardest ones to find, Gus. And then I remembered that old tenement…”

  “Like you say, I’m still here.”

  “Still painting?”

  “Of course I’m still painting. It’s what I do.”

  “That’s great. Well—sorry to give you so little time, but the whole thing’s fixed for this evening. You won’t believe what everyone’s up to now. But then I suppose you’ve seen Francine across the sky.”

  “Look, I’m not sure that I—”

  “—And we’re going for Paris, 1890. Should be right up your street. I’ve splashed out on all-senses. And the food and the drink’ll be foreal. So you’ll come, won’t you? The past is the past and I’ve honestly forgotten about much of it since I passed on. Put it into context, anyway. I really don’t bear a grudge. So you will come? Remember how it was, Gus? Just smile for me the way you used to. And remember…”

  Of course he remembered. But he still didn’t know what the hell to expect that evening as he waited—too early, despite the fact that he’d done his best to be pointedly late—in the virtual glow of a pavement café off the Rue St-Jacques beneath a sky fuzzy with Van Gogh stars.

  Searching the daubed figures strolling along the cobbles, Gustav spotted Elanore coming long before she saw him. He raised a hand and she came over, sitting down on a wobbly chair at the uneven swirl of the table. Doing his best to maintain a grumpy pause, Gustav called the waiter for wine and raised his glass to her with trembling fingers. He swallowed it all down. Just as she’d promised, the stuff was foreal.

  Elanore smiled at him. And Elanore looked beautiful. Elanore was dressed for the era in a long dress of pure ultramarine. Her red hair was bunched up beneath a narrow-brimmed hat adorned with flowers.

  “It’s about now,” she said, “that you tell me I haven’t changed.”

  “And you tell me that I have.”

  She nodded. “But it’s true. Although you haven’t changed that much, Gus. You’ve aged, but you’re still one of the most…solid people I know.”

  Elanore offered him a Disque Bleu. He took it although he hadn’t smoked in years and she’d always complained that the things were bad for him when she was alive. Elanore’s skin felt cool and dry in the moment that their hands touched, and the taste of the smoke as it shimmered amid the brush strokes was just as it had always been. Music drifted out from the blaze of the bar where dark figures writhed as if in flames. Any moment now, he knew, she’d try to say something vaguely conciliatory, and he’d interrupt as he attempted to do the same.

  He gestured around at the daubs and smears of the other empty tables. He said, “I thought I was going to be late…” The underside of the canopy that stretched across the pavement blazed. How poor old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes. And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.

  “What—what I told you was true,” Elanore said, stumbling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. “I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we did talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time’s precious and, at the end of the day it’s been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn’t come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they’d keep. But I thought—well I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time.”

  “So all of this is just for me. Jesus, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but…”

  “Don’t be like that, Gustav. I’m not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out.”

  He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly what trick it was that allowed them to share it.

  “So you’re still painting?”

  “Yep.”

  “I haven’t seen much of your work about.”

  “I do it for private clients,” Gustav said. “Mostly.”

  He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his statement. Of course, if he really was painting and selling, he’d have some credit. And if he had credit, he wouldn’t be living in that dreadful tenement she’d tracked him down to. He’d have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was. I can help, you know, Gustav could hear Elanore saying because he’d heard her say it so many times before. I don’t need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance…But what she actually said was even worse.

  “Are you recording yourself, Gus?” Elanore asked. “Do you have a librarian?”

  Now, he thought, now is the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street—the foreal street. And forget.

  “Did you know,” he said instead, “that the word reality once actually meant foreal—not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality. But then along came virtual reality, and of course when the next generation of products was developed the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said, Why don’t we just call it reality?”

  “You don’t have to be hurtful, Gus. There’s no rule written down that says we can’t get on.”

  “I thought that that was exactly the problem. It’s in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it’s…” He’d have said more. But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.

  “What exactly are you doing these days, Gus?” she asked as he cleared his t
hroat and pretended it was the wine that he’d choked on. “What are you painting at the moment?”

  “I’m working on a series,” he was surprised to hear himself saying. “It’s a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which begin here in Paris and then…” He swallowed. “…bright, dark colours…” A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.

  “Sounds good, Gus,” Elanore said, leaning towards him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sunlight of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he’d brushed so many times with his the tips of his fingers. “I can tell from that look in your eyes that you’re into a really good phase…”

  After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of vin ordinaire. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disque Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost—she really was like Elanore. Gustav didn’t even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of abandon in all of this—new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what Van Gogh had meant about this café being a place where you could ruin oneself, or go mad or commit a crime.

  The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured grey-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank’s ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine. At least, Gustav thought, that was still foreal…

  “I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now,” Gustav said. “All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember.”

  “People still change, you know. Just because we’ve passed on doesn’t mean we can’t change.”

  By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have you changed, Elanore? he wondered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?