Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran (11 page)

It so is
not
her song. It’s a bad novelty record called “Kinky Boots” about how everybody’s wearing, you know, kinky boots. The only boots Bethany owns are a pair of Doc Martens but it wasn’t footwear that had made the boys declare it her song. Couple of months earlier, Gay Michael, bored on a customer-less afternoon, had treated her to an appraising look as she was leaning on the counter reading.

“Look at you,” he’d said. “With your jean jacket and your ironic T-shirts.” The one she’d been wearing that day had read “Talk Nerdy to Me”. “With your Aimee Bender paperbacks and your rah-rah skirts and leggings. You know what you are, Bethany? You’re a frumpy little beat girl.”

Fat Michael had clapped his hands in delight. Sometimes Bethany wondered which of the partners was actually the gay one. “‘Sweet girls, Street girls, Frumpy little beat girls’,” he’d recited, just in case Bethany had missed the reference to the stupid song’s lyrics. She couldn’t be mad at either of them – it was all so obviously coming from a place of affection – but, you know, Jesus Christ. Frumpy little beat girl.

She takes a sip of her coffee. “Not my song,” she reminds Fat Michael, even though she knows it’s like trying to lose a high school nickname.

Gay Michael pulls the annex curtain aside. “I have to drive it over at lunchtime,” he says, meaning the Milton.

“She won’t come here?” says Fat Michael.

“What, and leave the ’two-one-oh?” Gay Michael says. “She’d melt like Margaret Hamilton.” He raises a pre-emptive hand before Fat Michael can object further. “I am not risking losing this sale, Michael,” he says. “It’s two months’ rent.”

“It’s just that I have that, you know, that thing,” says Fat Michael.

“I’ll mind the store,” Bethany says. She knows that “that thing” means a lunch date with a woman from whatever dating service he’s currently using. She also knows it won’t work out, they never do, but Fat Michael is a trier and Bethany sort of loves him for it.

She’s never been left alone in charge of the store because the Michaels always stagger their lunch hours, so her offer to tend it for a couple of hours without adult supervision prompts – big surprise – a discussion. But they do their best not to make a drama out of it – which Bethany appreciates ’cause God knows it’s an effort for both of them – and it boils down to her receiving several overcautious instructions, all of which pretty much translate as
don’t do anything stupid
. After she promises that she’ll do her best not to, they take her up on it and Gay Michael’s gone by 11.45 to beat traffic and Fat Michael’s out of there by noon.

Which is how Bethany comes to be alone when the man in the Chinese laundry initiates the Apocalypse.

Bethany’s lost in her Kelly Link collection when the old-school bell tinkles on the entrance door. She looks up to see the door swinging shut behind a new customer as he walks in, holding a hardcover book in one gloved hand.

Huh, Bethany thinks. Gloves.

They’re tight-fitting gray leather and, given that it’s spring in California, would look even odder than they do were it not that the man’s pretty overdressed anyway. His suit is a three-piece and its vest sports a chain that dangles in a generous curve from a button and leads, Bethany presumes, to a pocket watch that is currently, well, pocketed.

He’s not in
costume
exactly, Bethany realizes – the suit is of modern cut and fit – but he’s hardly inconspicuous. She flashes on the elderly Hispanic guy she and Mr Slater had seen at the light earlier and wonders if she somehow missed the memo about this being Sharp-Dressed-Man Day in Glendale. ZZ Top start riffing in her head but the accompanying mind-video is a spontaneous mash-up with Robert Palmer and his fuck-me mascarenes and Bethany makes a note to self that she needs to start spending a little less time watching
I Love the 80s
.

“I wonder if you can help me?” the customer says, coming to the counter. Cute accent. Like the guy from
House
when he’s not being the guy from
House
.

“Almost certainly not,” she says. “But I’ll be real nice about it.”

“Ah,” he says, not put out at all. Far from it. “I take it, then, that you are neither Michael nor, indeed, Michael?” Now he’s doing the other Hugh – Grant, not Laurie – and Bethany thinks he’s laying it on a bit thick but decides to gives him the benefit of the doubt.

“Just Bethany,” she says.

“Exactly who I was looking for,” he says, laying the book he’s carrying onto the counter. “I wanted to ask you about this.”

There’s no such thing as a book you never see again
, Fat Michael had told her, a little booksellers’ secret, shortly after she started working here.
Sooner or later, no matter how rare it is, another copy comes across the counter
. He’d been trying to make her feel better because she’d fallen in love with a UK first of Kenneth Grahame’s
The Golden Age
and had been heartbroken when it left the store with somebody who could afford it. He’d been right, too; in her time with the Michaels, Bethany had seen many a mourned book wander back to their inventory, including the Grahame; one of the store’s freelance scouts had scored another copy at an estate sale just a few weeks ago.

And now here comes this customer with another book, another blast from Bethany’s past, from long before she worked here, but just as she remembers it; rich green cloth boards with a stylized Nouveau orchid on the front panel, its petals cupping the blood-red letters of the title.

“You do recognize it, don’t you?” the man says.

“Sure,” Bethany says, because she does. “
The Memory Pool
. Nineteen seventeen. First and only edition.”

When she looks up from the book she sees that the customer is staring at her with an expression that she finds confusing, one of well intentioned but distant sympathy, the kind of expression you might give to a recently bereaved stranger. He touches the book’s front panel lightly and briefly. “Mm,” he says. “And quite rare, wouldn’t you say?”

“Extremely rare,” Bethany says, and immediately wants to slap her stupid mouth. Curse me for a novice, she thinks, a mantra of Gay Michael’s whenever he’s made a rare misstep in a negotiation. She’s only been at the store a year, really
is
a novice still, but tipping a customer off that they’ve got something of real value is like entry-level dumb.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not actually looking to sell it,” he says, as if reading her dismay. “Just wanted to see if you knew it.”

“Huh,” says Bethany because, you know,
huh
.

The customer looks at her again, cocking his head as if intrigued. He extends his gloved hand across the counter. “James Arcadia,” he says, as Bethany shakes it. “I think, Just Bethany, we’d best have lunch.”

“Why?” she asks, and she’s smiling. Not too much, though; he’s cute and all but, c’mon, he has to be forty at least. Still, she’s flattered. Feels like she should conference-text the Michaels.
Not so frumpy
.

Arcadia returns the smile and she’s glad that his eyes are kind because it softens the blow of his reply. “We need to discuss exactly how we’re going to save the world,” he says.

Well, Bethany thinks, that was dramatic, and, as if on cue, a woman screams from somewhere beyond the store. By the time a man’s voice, equally horrified, hollers “My God, look at that!” Bethany and Arcadia have already turned to look through the window.

On the street outside, a man is melting.

He’d presumably been walking, but he’s not walking anymore. He’s rooted to the sidewalk, his legs already a fused and formless mass, his flesh and his clothes running in multicolored ripples of dissolution down what used to be his body as if he was some life-size religious candle burning in fast-forward.

Other people on Brand Boulevard are screaming now, some running away, some gathering to see, one idiot on his cellphone like he could actually fetch help, another using hers to snap a little souvenir of the atrocity. A group forms around the vanishing man, circling him but not going near, as if instinctively establishing a perimeter from which to bear witness but to keep themselves safe.

From what’s left of the man’s face – now liquidly elongated into a vile burlesque that puts Bethany briefly and horribly in mind of Munch’s screamer – he appears to be, have been, a middle-aged white guy. He has a life, Bethany thinks, he has a story, has people who love him. But he’s featureless in little more than a second. One of his arms has already disappeared into the oozing chaos of the meltdown but the other is waving grotesquely free, fingers twitching either in agony or, as Bethany wonders with a devastating stab of pity, as if he just wants someone to hold his hand in farewell as he slides helplessly from life.

When there’s finally nothing about it to suggest it had ever been human, the roiling mass begins to shrink in on itself, disappearing into a vanishing center as if hungry for its own destruction, growing smaller and smaller until, at last, it shivers itself into nothingness. There’s not even a stain on the sidewalk. It’s taken maybe seven seconds.

“Oh my God,” says Bethany.

Arcadia is keeping his eyes on the window. “Watch what happens next,” he says. And when Bethany does, she decides that it’s even more appalling than what came before.

Everybody walks away.

There’s a blink or two from one or more of them, and one older woman in a blue pantsuit looks to her left as if she thought her peripheral vision may have just registered something, but there’s no screaming, no outrage, no appeals to heaven or cries of
What-just-happened?
Everybody on the street quietly moves on about their day, neither their manner nor their expressions suggesting that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

“What’s
wrong
with them?” says Bethany. “They’re all acting like it never happened.”

“Don’t be cross with them,” Arcadia tells her. “It sort of
didn’t
happen.”

“But it did.”

“I don’t want to get too abstract about it,” he says, “but it’s a sort of tree falling in the forest question, isn’t it? Can something actually be said to have happened if it’s something nobody in the world remembers?”

“
I
remember,” Bethany says.

Arcadia holds her gaze for a second or two, his face expressionless. “Aha,” he says quietly.

Bethany’s still trying to think about that when he pulls his watch from his vest pocket and checks it. “Hmm,” he says. “Only eleven minutes in and already a serious anomaly. That’s a bit worrying.”

“What?” says Bethany, horrified as much at his calmness as at the idea that this nightmare is on some kind of a schedule.

“Clock’s a-ticking,” he says. “Lunch will have to wait. Come on.”

Bethany’s surprised to see that she’s following him as he moves to the door and opens it. Perhaps it’s the tinkling of the bell, perhaps just a desire to remember what she was doing the last time the world made sense, but something makes her look back at the counter.

“Wait,” she says. “What about your book?”

Arcadia throws it an unconcerned glance. “Do you know what a McGuffin is, Bethany?” he says.

“Yes,” she says, because she does. She watches her fair share of Turner Classic Movies and she briefly dated a guy who once had an actual name but whom she’s long decided will be known to her memoirs only as the Boy Who Loved Hitchcock.

“Well, the book’s a McGuffin,” Arcadia says. “It’s not
irrelevant
– I mean, it never existed and yet you remember it, which is good for a gasp or two and certainly pertains to the matter at hand – but it’s real function is this: to propel us headlong into a thrilling and probably life-threatening adventure. You good to go?”

He waves her through the door with a hurrying motion and they’re on the street and walking south before Bethany can get her question out.

“What do you mean, ‘it never existed’?” she says.

“Well, not in this particular strand of the multiverse. It’s a crossover, like the unfortunate gentleman outside your shop. Do you have a car, by the way?”

“No,” she says. “I mean, not here.”

“Oh,” he says, stopping in front of a green Mercedes. “Let’s take this one then.” He opens the passenger door for her, apparently without needing a key. Bethany doesn’t ask. Nor does she look too closely at how he starts it up before making an illegal U-turn and heading down Brand towards Atwater Village.

“What are we
doing
?” she asks, because she figures it’s about time.

“Well, we’re fixing a hole—”

“Where the rain gets in?” she says, flashing absurdly on the Beatles vinyl she’d rescued from her dad’s stuff.

“Would that it were merely rain,” he says. He nods toward the sidewalk they’re speeding past, and Bethany looks to see a small boy turning to green smoke while pedestrians stare open-mouthed and his screaming mother tries to grab him, her desperate fingers clawing only at his absence. By the time Bethany has swung in her seat to look out the rear window, the smoke has vanished and the crowd, including the mother, has forgotten it was ever there.

Bethany’s eyes are wet with pity as she turns back to Arcadia. “Tell me what’s happening!” she almost shouts.

Arcadia swings the car into the right lane as they pass under the railroad bridge. “I’ll try to make this as quick as I can,” he says, and takes a preparatory breath. “The spaces between the worlds have been breached. Realities are bleeding through to each other. People who took one step in their own dimension took their next in another. What you’ve witnessed is the multi-verse trying to correct itself by erasing the anomalies. Problem is it’s happening in each reality and the incidents will increase exponentially until there’s nothing left in any of them.” He turns to look at her. “With me so far?”

Bethany unfortunately
is
with him so far, though she wishes she’d heeded those schoolyard theories that comic books weren’t really for girls. “Collapse of the space-time continuum,” she says in a surprisingly steady voice.