Interfictions 2 (28 page)

Morton's hands tightened on the wheel. He was ashamed. Selfish, that's what he was, taking advantage of her. Marie was right, and she wasn't even going to
say
so.

Alice undid his zipper, and the feeling of her fingers on him, so dearly wanted for so long, made him forget what he had been thinking.

They were nearly to the bridge. Morton would have to turn around. If he didn't have Alice back to the restaurant in time, if the driver saw him pull up with Alice, he'd get in trouble; Alice's daughter would find out, and Alice wouldn't be able to meet him anymore.

He kept driving. Of course he kept driving.

OK, pause
, Marie says. I figure dead people know everything, but it's clear she's as surprised as me. Maybe she thinks narrators know everything.

You're going to make them drive off the bridge
, she says, upset.
Or they'll get in an accident, or they'll drive into the ocean
.

I'm not the one driving
, I say.
Plus, you told me they'd had a thing
.

They did. That's obvious
.

So you knew they never, ah,
I say.

Marie's ghost seems to pulse.
You know how it feels, when you're having sex with your husband and you know he's thinking about someone else? He never said anything, but I could tell.

Still mad
? I hazard.

"Shut up, you two,” Morton said under his breath.

"What, hon?” Alice, with her Western-going magic and her hand in Morton's trousers, didn't seem to hear us at all.

No
, Marie says.
I love him
.

"Oh, sweetheart. Just wishing I could pull over.
Oh
,” Morton said. It was suicidal, what they were doing. He was going forty-five in the left lane, still on the bridge. He was trying to remember how to get to UCSF, the medical hospital where he'd taken Marie so many times. If the doctors could see Alice, the change in her behavior, they could investigate. Maybe fix her. He didn't know what else to do.

You're going to betray her like that
? Marie and I both want to know.

"What am I supposed to do?” Morton said. With regret, he gently grasped Alice's hand, trying to move it away from his penis. She moved faster.

"Just come, my love,” Alice said. The skin of her palm was so smooth.

You try stopping the girl you're in love with from touching you. He groaned, realizing what she was doing, and his hand tightened on hers.

His weakened left hand wasn't enough to hold the wheel. The car eased itself into the embankment. They were hit from the back, and the car twirled and twisted. The airbags deployed, breaking Morton's nose, but it was the windshield that stopped Alice.

I can't believe you let that happen, you jerk
, Marie says.
You know as well as I do that you're gone, just the same as them, once this story is over.

Marie is right. Also, this is embarrassing for them as well as tragic. I'd wanted to end the story in the restaurant. After the meal, and after Alice's driver had picked her up, Morton would have stood with some effort, found his cane hanging on the back of the chair, and walked toward his car, with every intention of going to the hospital. How about that?

Ain't going to work,
Marie says.
We may as well get comfortable.

We sit on the curb inasmuch as two spectral beings can, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Morton and Alice are both passed out; I can't feel anything from them. Which is probably good, because if they were dead already, they'd be with us. And we'd have some talking to do, for sure.

Somehow this is all my fault. It's terrible. But I did it for you.

The thing you don't know about dreams is the thing Marie teaches me as we follow the ambulance. When you fly in dreams, it's just like being dead. Being dead is just like flying. The trick is to keep going. Stay away from other people. They're just so
interesting
, it's hard to leave them be.

That was my problem, thinking their story is mine, but it's not. It's like quantum mechanics. If we hadn't been watching, I want to think that Morton and Alice would have had their boring normal lunch, and gone about their boring normal lives without really talking or touching, and finally died quiet, peaceful deaths. Comforting, but dull. Maybe we had to have the ghost of the wife, and the hand job, and the car accident, just to hold our interest.

On the other side of the bridge, Marie heads south with the ambulance and the freeway. I keep going west, towards the ocean and the sun.

And you. You stop here.

There is a trail along a creek bed near where I live. Exercise, and walking, in particular, is often useful for writing, so I took a hike one late Saturday afternoon and came up with this story. At one point, early on, my brain felt full, and I nearly turned back home to write it down before it all fell out; but I realized that I'd only found my characters and hadn't figured out what they would do. So I kept walking. By the time I'd completed the trail, I had all of the elements, so I went home and wrote the story. That's one version of its origins.

The other involves a long paper I wrote with Gary K. Wolfe, “21st Century Stories,” in the British scholarly journal
Foundation
103, for which we analyzed a number of stories associated with interstitiality, by authors such as M. Rickert, Jeffrey Ford, and Kelly Link. My fiction often ends up occupying interstitial territory—I get regular rejection letters from genre editors, saying that the speculative element isn't central enough, and have stories bounced from literary markets because genre work isn't serious enough—so it was neat to see how other writers used a combination of fantastic, postmodern, and what we in the genre call “mainstream” techniques. I kept this alchemical mix in mind while writing, and the story that resulted is a combination of my discovery of the characters and events, and a conscious dialogue with other writers. Though interstitial art is often defined as work that crosses borders or falls between cracks, it's also a way to describe works that bridge the intuitive and the intentional.

Amelia Beamer

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William Alexander

The news is getting everything wrong. Her name was Verona, and not Veronica. She was not a teenager, and would not have been flattered to be mistaken for one. She was not an edgy performance artist. She painted. She also sculpted.

The news is implying that her boyfriend is sketchy. They always imply that the boyfriend, or husband, is sketchy. I'm angry on his behalf. I am also angry because this basic, default assumption usually turns out to be right. Part of the logic behind it is that someone has to care about you very deeply if they are going to bother beating you to death with “multiple instruments."

The only fact which does not change between newspaper editions is the fact that she is dead. That part is accurate. I know because she isn't answering messages, and because she hasn't finished the painting that's supposed to be in a show next week. I know because I'm looking after her dog, and she would never leave her dog alone for this long if she could possibly help it.

The dog is small and bug-eyed. She loved it. I made fun of her for it. It never barks, it just whines when it needs to excrete.

The newspapers are retelling a familiar story, visible in the details they choose to print, the ones they ignore, and the ones they completely and utterly misrepresent. They are not doing this by choice. They have no choice. The pattern is hardwired.

They are telling a story about a girl who goes walking alone. She meets a wolf. The end. It is all very sad, but with clucking of tongues and with shaking of heads we must admit that, in some small way, she had it coming.

I am not at all sure that I want to know the other story, the one under the latex gloves of a medical examination, but I do know that it is not about a girl who went walking alone in dark woods and died there. She was smart, and she was careful, and she died at home. She did not have it coming.

"They're just trying to shrug it off,” says Arnold. He prints out another strip of “50% OFF” stickers and puts them on books. I stand by the register. There are no actual customers, so nothing more than standing is required of me. “That's what you get for being one of those bohemian artist types. It couldn't ever happen to one of
us
, the ordinary folk who qualify as persons."

"They're not shrugging it off,” I say. “They're fascinated. But whatever, I still think you should talk to your mom. Talk about
editorial slant
. Talk about
fact-checking
, for chrissake. They could at least get her name right.” Arnold's mother edits our largest local rag. I am not sure how much power she actually wields, given that the whole paper is owned by a company in Utah, but she
is
the editor.

Arnold shrugs and scratches his beard. His hair and beard are two different colors; one red, the other brown. “What I don't understand,” he says, “is how there could be multiple causes of death. How can there ever be multiple causes? Rasputin drowned. That's it. He drowned. He had various and diverse injuries, but when it comes right down to it, there is only ever one cause of death, and his was drowning."

"There's never just one cause of anything,” I say. Arnold, whose ears are purely decorative, gives a smug snort and goes on about Rasputin for awhile.

The bell on the door finally dings. A kid pushes his own stroller inside. A woman follows, taking kid-size steps to avoid stepping on the toddler.

"Can I help you find anything?” I ask. This is not a selfless question. Please let me help you find something. Please give me something to do. Ask me a question I can answer.

She smiles and shakes her head. I point in the direction of the kids' books, but the kid is already headed that way.

"What a great stroller,” I say, interrupting Arnold. “Looks like an escape pod with bicycle tires. Why didn't we get strollers like that? Mine had tiny plastic wheels."

"I have no idea what my stroller was like,” Arnold said. “But listen—thirteen inches. Seriously. Rasputin took it out for the palace guard when they demanded identification."

"You don't remember your stroller?"

"No. I don't. Kids creep me out. They creep me out under normal circumstances, and last night I got attacked by several little bastards on my ride home."

"Really?"

"Yeah,” he says. “Really. Kids threw bottles at me from the overpass bridges. Happened at Ninth Street, and then again at Fifteenth.” Arnold and I both commute to the bookstore by bicycle, but from opposite directions. He takes the bike path that used to be a railroad track: a long east-west ravine cutting through the city and underneath the north-south roads.

"Did you get hit?” I ask.

"No,” he says, “but the broken glass blew out one of my tubes. I had to replace it this morning."

"Shit,” I say.

"Yeah,” he says. “That whole trail is set up just like a mountain pass in a Western. You know, the one you're guaranteed to be ambushed in. I always get that feeling. It's like when you walk into a bar and you know exactly how the kung fu fight would go down, if it ever went down. You can see it happen. So I wasn't surprised when the bottles started dropping on my head."

"Shit,” I say again.

"Yeah,” he says.

I ask how kung fu fighting would likely go down in the bookstore, and Arnold launches into a fully choreographed description. He has clearly thought about this before.

I wonder if Verona fought back. She probably did. I try not to imagine this happening.

The stages of grief are not linear. They cycle rapidly and at random. My own version of Bargaining has more to do with time travel than making deals with some kind of deity; I think about the one thing in the past that, if changed, would fix the present and make the whole story work out the way it should. It would be helpful if I could repeat the day in question in an endless loop, broken only by my discovery of the right thing to do. This does not seem to be happening.

Instead I keep dreaming that I am a detective. Every night I figure it out. I go to her apartment, look around, and understand what happened, Sherlock style. He could always read a place, and all the little things that make a place, as though the dining rooms and street corners of London were built out of language to be read.

In the morning I can't remember, or else I
do
remember my imaginary understanding and it no longer makes sense.

The next day I check up on Verona's boyfriend, just to check up on him. He's glad I called, but neither one of us has much to say. He asks about the dog. I tell him about the dog, leaving out the most annoying and smelly details. He would be the one looking after the dog if he wasn't allergic. He tells me that his allergies are the primary reason why he and Verona never moved in together.

There is a pause. One of us is going to ask. It turns out to be him.

"Heard anything?"

"No,” I say. “You?"

"No. The police just remind me that forensic tests take longer than a commercial break."

"Yeah,” I say.

He sounds broken. He sounds like he is not actually there. This might just be a bad cell phone connection.

The dog skitters across the kitchen tiles, pauses to lick my toe, and moves on. Its name is Parsifal, but I still think of it as “the dog."

"Hey,” says Albert when I get to the store. “I found the
best
book cover in Alternative Health. It's a photograph close-up of someone sticking a long, purple gemstone in their ear. I kid you not. The ear takes up most of the cover, and it's like the rock is a magic Q-tip from the seventies. I put it on display. Go take a look."

I go take a look.
Crystal Healing
is propped up on an eye-level shelf beside Herbert RavenMonkey's
Athenian Vampires
. Next to that is
Confessions of a Pet Psychic
.