Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  I could sense a new feeling on the streets. For no specific reason I felt like I had become the center of attention everywhere I went. People seemed to be talking behind me as I walked by, and there was a murmur following me that sounded openly hostile.

  The house where I’d seen Smith my last time across was deserted. I cut through the center of town to the woman’s house, but it was empty too. Even the furniture was gone.

  Back in the park I stood under a tree and watched the people moving by me. The streets were crowded now, and I could hardly walk without running into people. Whenever I touched any of them I felt the mild charge of contact, the way I had with the woman. Anyone I touched pulled away from me and turned to whisper to someone else.

  After a few minutes I got tired of waiting and went out on the streets again. I don’t know how long I’d been walking when I saw him, but he almost seemed to have been waiting for me. He was lounging against the wall of a building, apparently alone, and when I got within a block of him, he began to walk away. He didn’t make any sign that he’d seen me, but I was sure he had. He stayed a block in front of me, sometimes seeming to want to look back at me, but never quite going through with it. When I picked up the pace a little, so did he.

  We’d been walking away from the center of town, at first, in the general direction of the woman’s house. Then he’d turned right to return to the main avenue, and right again, taking us back the opposite way.

  By the time we passed the park I sensed that something was happening. Fewer people were on the sidewalks ahead of us, and a constant murmur came from behind. I stopped, and ahead of me Smith leaned against a wall and waited. I started toward him, then turned in the middle of a step.

  Thirty or forty of the citizens were following me. They all wore loose white clothing, all had fair hair and pale skin. An intensity about their faces frightened me. When I turned on them they stopped where they were, casually, and started talking among themselves. I couldn’t hear their voices, but their eyes were still fixed on me. When I took a step toward them they held their ground, and when I backed away they moved slowly after me.

  I turned and ran for Smith, but he was more agile than he looked and darted away down the block. I chased hard after him and heard the footsteps of the crowd following me.

  We were almost to the footbridge over the highway. Smith stumbled with exhaustion and collapsed against a concrete retaining wall, his back to me. I slowed to a walk and stopped just behind him.

  “Smith?” I said. “Turn around.” He ignored me. I started to reach for him when something ominous in the noise of the crowd made me look back.

  They were coming for me, like an army of zombies out of a horror film. Their flat, neutral eyes were locked on me, and they were shuffling forward with a deliberation that terrified me. I backed away from them instinctively, moving out onto the footbridge. They were only a few yards away when I heard another noise behind me and turned to see a second army of them coming out of the woods.

  I suddenly knew what Matheson had been talking about. All my desire for answers went away, and the only thing I wanted was to be out of there.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, ducked my chin, and squeezed my eyes shut.

  When I opened them I was fading away and the crowd was dimming into blackness.

  I came to in my bed, burning with fever. My skin was hot and tight, and my throat was cracking like a dry river bottom. I sat up, wanting to get up for water, but I never made it. Sleep fell on me like a warm avalanche.

  The detail man from Sandoz had a card table set up outside the Emergency Room, giving away coffee and donuts. He was pushing Hydergine, which was supposed to help you if you were senile. That wasn’t my problem. I asked him for some Mellaril samples, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. He got a narrow box out of his case and gave me a strip of ten-unit doses.

  The tablets were light green, 100 mg, intended for advanced psychotics. I wasn’t crazy, I knew that, but the symptoms were similar. Only the Seconal that was still in my system kept me calm enough to deal with the razor-cut drug rep in his three-piece suit. As soon as I was out of his sight, I tore open one of the blister pacs and swallowed the pill dry.

  By eight o’clock I was relaxed, and the visions of dirt and decay had started to recede. I managed a vaguely coherent presentation and even got through morning rounds without any real trouble.

  I called Matheson’s apartment twice during the morning, with no answer. I hadn’t really expected any. I fought to keep myself from thinking about the fact that I was completely out of Adonine.

  By lunchtime I couldn’t think about anything else. I took another hundred milligrams of Mellaril and washed it down with hot coffee.

  In the quiet hours of the afternoon I went through Matheson’s locker in the conference room. When I didn’t find anything I started pulling out his books and papers and dumping them on the floor, searching frantically for even a single dose of the drug.

  “What are you doing?”

  I whirled around to see a look of horror on the face of the charge nurse. I had a dreamlike vision of myself—red, swollen eyes, hollow cheeks, shaking hands and chattering teeth.

  I ignored her, scooping the papers back into the locker and slamming the door on them. I pushed past her into the hallway and tried to keep from breaking into a run as I headed for the cafeteria. Sweat was running off of me, but I felt like there was ice in my stomach and I needed to pour something hot onto it.

  That afternoon I saw a letter for Matheson in his box. It had a PharmChem return address on it, and so I slipped it in my pocket. The first chance I had I took it into the men’s room and tore it open.

  It was from the chemist who had done the first analysis. He’d been feeding the rest of the Adonine to rats, and he hadn’t been ready for the results he’d gotten.

  “I’m certain,” he wrote, “that this drug is forcing reticular formation cells to make a reverse transcriptase. The fraction of rat brain homogenate from the reticular activating system contained not only the viral DNA, but a large quantity of radically altered DNA.”

  RNA was supposed to make protein. But if what the chemist was saying was true, this RNA was turning around and building new, abnormal DNA, and god only knew what that new DNA was doing to the cells of my brain, or what effect it was having on my perceptions.

  “It is recommended in the strongest possible terms that you do not administer this substance to human subjects. As well as taking control of cellular metabolism, the drug is found to have an extremely high addiction liability.”

  So what else is new? I thought. I crumpled the letter and flushed it away.

  At six o’clock I was pushing my way through the happy hour crowd at the Pub, looking for Smith. I had to shout at the bartender to get him to hear me, and when I finished the description, he said he had no idea of who I was talking about. He gave me some coffee, but I couldn’t swallow more than a sip of it. When I set the cup down on the bar, a kid was standing next to me.

  “I’ve seen him,” the kid said.

  “Where?”

  “In here sometimes. He was in here last night, talking to a friend of mine. I think he said he’d be back here tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow?” It was like a cold fist in the gut.

  “That’s what he said.”

  I walked away from him and went back out into the snow.

  I kept it up as long as I could, working in a radius out from the hospital that took in every bar, restaurant and pizza joint in the circle. But before long the cold was just too much for me, leaving me shaking so badly I couldn’t even walk. I drove back home through the thick, drifting flakes of snow, thinking about a city where there was no winter.

  I took three more Mellarils and sat shivering under my blankets, waiting for them to work. The ticking of the snow against the windowpane took forever to fade, but sometime around dawn I finally dozed off.

  I dreamed of the city, but I wasn’t really there. It wa
s like watching it through a glass-bottomed boat, or through a plastic bubble that I could press myself against and almost put my hand through, but not quite. It was as much comfort to me as a photograph of a lost girlfriend.

  I called in sick the next morning and lay in bed, dazed from the drugs, shattered by a sense of emptiness and loss. Sometime in the afternoon I stumbled out of bed and dressed in the dim light reflected from the snow outside.

  Even over long underwear and another layer of clothes, my shirt and pants hung loosely on me. My joints creaked when I moved, and my face belonged in Dachau.

  I had to drive to the Pub; I couldn’t walk it in that awful cold. I finally staggered in, sat in a back booth, and ordered coffee. I washed down a Mellaril with the first cup and sat back to wait.

  I waited an endless time, a longer time than I was able to keep track of. When my cup was empty someone filled it, and I sipped at it again until it was dry.

  With my coat and gloves on, sitting still, I was all right, but the world seemed to come and go. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything.

  When Smith finally came in, I was nearly delirious, unable to tell if I was seeing him in a waking reality of in another drug-twisted dream. The place had somehow filled up around me, and Smith was about to disappear into the crowd.

  I lurched to my feet and went after him.

  “I need to talk to you,” I whispered at him hoarsely.

  He turned slowly, and those tiny, hot eyes went into me, burning me the way they had once before, somewhere else that I didn’t quite remember.

  “What?”

  “I need to talk to you. Outside.” I had to lean against the wall of a booth, but otherwise I was all right.

  “What about?” His face had no expression, was as slick and hard as blue-black clay.

  “Adonine,” I said.

  Smith turned to the two people he was with and muttered, “Excuse me. I’ll be just a second.”

  I led the way to the back door. I could barely feel my feet and I had to move slowly to keep my balance. We went through the metal fire door, and the cold air poured over me like the water of a frozen lake.

  “Now. What was it you wanted?” Smith’s voice was hollow and soft, as if it wasn’t really coming from his body.

  “Adonine,” I croaked. “I’m an addict. I need help.”

  He tilted his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Adonine!” I shouted. “The drug! Like you gave Matheson! Like you gave Davis!”

  “Matheson?” he said, with a gentle sort of curiosity. “Davis? Am I supposed to know these people?”

  “Don’t lie to me, you bastard!” I shouted, moving in on him. “You know what I’m talking about. Now give it to me!”

  His eyes widened with fear. I grabbed the lapels of his coat and felt a sudden tingling. It was a sensation I’d had before, in a dream somewhere. He brushed my hands away.

  “Get away from me,” he hissed. Sweat started out across his bald, tapering head, and he backed away.

  “No more crap, Smith!” I shouted. “Give me the drug!”

  I lunged for him again and missed, falling into the snow against the side of the building. Smith was glancing nervously from side to side, but he had nowhere to run. I was blocking his only way out. He backed up until he was spread-eagled against the back wall of the alley.

  I grabbed him again and started to shake him. “The drug, Smith! Give me the drug!”

  He screamed, and with a sudden movement he threw me aside. My head went into the pavement, stunning me for an instant. But I got up on my hands and knees and started for him again.

  And froze.

  “No,” I whispered. “No, no, it can’t be...”

  But it was.

  Smith’s eyes were closing and he was drawing into himself like a trapped animal. Then, very slowly, he folded his arms and tucked his head to his chest.

  His body seemed to sparkle for a moment in the gray light of evening, then he was gone.

  The War at Home

  Ten of us in the back of a Huey, assholes clenched like fists, C-rations turned to sno-cones in our bellies. Tracers float up at us, swollen, sizzling with orange light, like one dud firecracker after another. Ahead of us the gunships pound Landing Zone Dog with everything they have, flex guns, rockets, and 50-calibres, while the artillery screams overhead and the Air Force A-1Es strafe the clearing into kindling.

  We hover over the LZ in the sudden phosphorus dawn of a flare, screaming, “Land, motherfucker, land!” while the tracers close in, the shell of the copter ticking like a clock as the thumb-sized rounds go through her, ripping the steel like paper, splattering somebody’s brains across the aft bulkhead.

  Then falling into knee-high grass, the air humming with bullets and stinking of swamp ooze and gasoline and human shit and blood. Spinning wildly, my finger jamming down the trigger of the M-16, not caring anymore where the bullets go.

  And waking up in my own bed, Clare beside me, shaking me, hissing, “Wake up, wake up for Christ’s sake.”

  I sat up, the taste of it still in my lungs, hands twitching with berserker frenzy. “‘M okay,” I said. “Nightmare. I was back in Nam.”

  “What?”

  “Flashback,” I said. “The war.”

  “What are you talking about? You weren’t in the war.”

  I looked at my hands and remembered. It was true. I’d never been in the Army, never set foot in Vietnam.

  Three months earlier we’d shot an Eyewitness News series on Vietnamese refugees. His name was Nguyen Ky Duk, former ARVN colonel, now a fry cook at Jack in the Box. “You killed my country,” he said. “All of you. Americans, French, Japanese. Like you would kill a dog because you thought it might have, you know, rabies. Just kill it and throw it in a ditch. It was a living thing and now it is dead.”

  The afternoon of the massacre we got raw footage over the wire. About a dozen of us crowded the monitor and stared at the shattered windows of the Safeway, the mounds of cartridges, the bloodstains, the puddles of congealing food.

  “What was it he said?”

  “Something about ‘gooks.’ ‘You’re all fucking gooks, just like the others, and now I’ll kill you too,’ something like that.”

  “But he wasn’t in Nam. They talked to his wife.”

  “So why’d he do it?”

  “He was a gun nut. Black market stuff, like that M-16 he had. Camo clothes, the whole nine yards. A nut.”

  I walked down the hall, past the potted ferns and bamboo, and bought a Coke from the machine. I could still remember the dream, the feel of the M-16 in my hand. The rage. The fear.

  “Like it?” Clare asked. She turned slowly, the loose folds of her black cotton pyjamas fluttering, her face hidden by the conical straw hat.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know. It makes me feel weird.”

  “It’s fashion. Fashion’s supposed to make you feel weird.”

  I let myself through the sliding glass door, into the back yard. The grass had grown a foot or more without my noticing, and strange plants had come up between the flowers, suffocating them in sharp fronds and broad green leaves.

  “Did you go?”

  “No,” I said. “I was I-Y. Underweight, if you can believe it.” In fact I was losing weight again, my muscles turning stringy under sallow skin.

  “Me either. My dad got a shrink to write me a letter. I did the marches, Washington and all that. But you know something? I feel funny about not going. Kind of guilty, somehow. Even though we shouldn’t ever have been there, even though we were burning villages and fragging our own guys. I feel like ... I don’t know. Like I missed something. Something important.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. Through cracked glass I could see the sunset thicken the trees.

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure myself. “Maybe it’s not too late,” I said.

  I walk through the haunted streets of my town, s
weltering in the January heat. The jungle arches over me; children’s voices in the distance chatter in their odd pidgin Vietnamese. The TV station is a crumbling ruin and none of us feel comfortable there any longer. We work now in a thatched hut with a mimeo machine.

  The air is humid, fragrant with anticipation. Soon the planes will come and it will begin in earnest.

  Straws

  He had apparently spaced out for a second or two. When he came to, a large, annoyed woman was leaning in toward him. “Mister? Mister, are you even listening to me?”

  He looked at the receding rows of fluorescent lights on the struts of the cavernous ceiling, the gleaming linoleum floors, the pallets of sale-priced plastic coolers and Special K and motor oil, and then he looked at the rack of merchandise at his back and understood that he was in a Wal-Mart, behind the returns counter.

  He heard his own voice saying, as if by reflex, “Do you have your receipt?”

  At the first opportunity, he locked himself in a bathroom stall and dug out his wallet. His driver’s license showed the right name, birthdate, and photo, but it had been issued by the State of North Carolina, and it listed an address he’d never heard of.

  He scrubbed his face at the sink. It was him in the mirror, a tanned and healthy 56, hair mostly gray but still all there. He felt groggy, as if he’d woken prematurely. It was only the numbness, he thought, that kept the panic at bay.

  If he didn’t push, he found he knew the answers to some questions. He was due to clock out in an hour. When he left the parking lot he would go under the highway, turn left, and merge.

  He found his way to a battered white Toyota pickup in the employee section. The key in his pocket started the engine. He forced himself not to think too hard as he drove, taking the turns that seemed to have a certain inevitability. He wound up on a dirt road near someplace called Pittsboro, in front of a small brick house surrounded by high yellow grass, pines, and live oaks.