The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (44 page)

They get her bandaged up. The cuts aren't too deep. Meggie calls her agent, Pike, and Pike arranges for someone to take the girl to a private clinic. He tells them not to worry about any of it. It turns out that the girl is fifteen. Of course she is. Pike calls them again, after this girl gets out of the clinic, when she commits suicide. She has a history of attempts. Try, try, succeed.

The demon lover does not talk to Meggie again, because Pilar, who is naked—they are both naked, everyone is naked, of course—but Pilar is really quite lovely and fun to talk to and the camera work on this show is really quite exquisite and she likes the demon lover a lot. Keeps touching him. She says she has a bottle of Maker's Mark back in one of the cabins and he's already drunker than he's been in a while. Turns out they did meet once, in an AA meeting in Silver Lake.

They have a good time. Really, sex is a lot of fun. The demon lover suspects that there's some obvious psychological diagnosis for why he's having sex with Pilar, some need to reenact recent history and make sure it comes out better this time. The last girl with a camera didn't turn out so well for him. When exactly, he wonders, have things turned out well?

Afterward they lie on their backs on the dirty cement floor. Pilar says, “My girlfriend is never going to believe this.”

He wonders if she's going to ask for an autograph.

Pilar's been sharing the cabin with the missing girl, Juliet. There's Whore-igami all over the cabin. Men and women and men and men and women and women in every possible combination, doing things that ought to be erotic. But they aren't; they're menacing instead. Maybe it's the straight lines.

The demon lover and Pilar get dressed in case Juliet shows up.

“Well,” Pilar says, from her bunk bed, “goodnight.”

He gets Juliet's bunk bed. Lies there in the dark until he's sure Pilar's asleep. He is thinking about Fawn for some reason. He can't stop thinking about her. If he stops thinking about her, he will have to think about the conversation with Meggie. He will have to think about Meggie.

Pilar's iPhone is on the floor beside her bunk bed. He picks it up. No password. He types in Fawn's number. Sends her a text. Hardly knows what he is typing.

I HOPE, he writes.

He writes the most awful things. Doesn't know why he is doing this. Perhaps she will assume that it is a wrong number. He types in details, specific things, so she will know it's not.

Eventually she texts back.

WHO IS THIS? WILL?

The demon lover doesn't respond to that. Just keeps texting FILTHY BITCH YOU CUNT YOU WHORE YOU SLIME etc. etc. etc. Until she stops asking. Surely she knows who he is. She must know who he is.

Here's the thing about acting, about a scene, about a character; about the dialogue you are given, the things your character does. None of it matters. You can take the most awful words, all the words, all the names, the acts he types into the text block. You can say these things, and the way you say them can change the meaning. You can say, “You dirty bitch. You cunt,” and say them differently each time; can make it a joke, an endearment, a cry for help, a seduction. You can kill, be a vampire, a soulless thing. The audience will love you no matter what you do. If you want them to love you. Some of them will always love you.

He needs air. He drops the phone on the floor again where Pilar will find it in the morning. Decides to walk down to the lake. He will have to go past Meggie's trailer on the way, only he doesn't. Instead he stands there watching as a shadow slips out of the door of the trailer and down the stairs and away. Going where? Almost not there at all.

Ray?

He could follow. But he doesn't.

He wonders if Meggie is awake. The door to her trailer is off the latch and so the demon lover steps inside.

Makes his way to her bedroom, no lights, she is not awake. He will do no harm. Only wants to see her safe and sleeping. An old friend can go to see an old friend.

Meggie's a shape in the bed and he comes closer so he can see her face. There is someone in the bed with Meggie.

Ray looks at the demon lover and the demon lover looks back at Ray. Ray's right hand rests on Meggie's breast. Ray raises the other hand, beckons the demon lover closer.

The next morning is what you would predict. The crew of
Who's There?
packs up to leave; Pilar discovers the text messages on her phone.

Did I do that? the demon lover says. I was drunk. I may have done that. Oh God, oh hell, oh fuck. He plays his part.

This may get messy. Oh, he knows how messy it can get. Pilar can make some real money with those texts. Fawn, if she wants, can use them against him in the divorce.

He doesn't know how he gets in these situations.

Fawn has called Meggie. So there's that, as well. Meggie waits to talk to him until almost everyone else has packed up and gone; it's early afternoon now. Really, he should already have left. He has things he'll need to do. Decisions to make about flights, a new phone. He needs to call his publicist, his agent. Time for them to earn their keep. He likes to keep them busy.

Ray is off somewhere. The demon lover isn't too sorry about this.

It's not a fun conversation. They're up in the parking lot now, and one of the crew, he doesn't recognize her with her clothes on, says to Meggie, “Need a lift?”

“I've got the thing in Tallahassee tomorrow, the morning show,” Meggie says. “Got someone picking me up any minute now.”

“'Kay,” the woman says. “See you in San Jose.” She gives the demon lover a dubious look—is Pilar already talking?—and then gets in her car and drives away.

“San Jose?” the demon lover says.

“Yeah,” Meggie says. “The Winchester House.”

“Huh,” the demon lover says. He doesn't really care. He's tired of this whole thing, Meggie, the borrowed T-shirt and cargo shorts, Lake Apopka, no-show ghosts, and bad publicity.

He knows what's coming. Meggie rips into him. He lets her. There's no point trying to talk to women when they get like this. He stands there and takes it all in. When she's finally done, he doesn't bother trying to defend himself. What's the good of saying things? He's so much better at saying things when there's a script to keep him from deep water. There's no script here.

Of course, he and Meggie will patch things up eventually. Old friends forgive old friends. Nothing is unforgivable. He's wondering if this is untrue when a car comes into the meadow.

“Well,” Meggie says. “That's my ride.”

She waits for him to speak, and when he doesn't, she says, “Goodbye, Will.”

“I'll call you,” the demon lover says at last. “It'll be okay, Meggie.”

“Sure,” Meggie says. She's not really making much of an effort. “Call me.”

She gets into the back of the car. The demon lover bends over, waves at the window where she is sitting. She's looking straight ahead. The driver's window is down, and okay, here's Ray again. Of course! He looks out of the window at the demon lover. He raises an eyebrow, smiles, waves with that hand again, need a ride?

The demon lover steps away from the car. Feels a sense of overwhelming disgust and dread. A cloud of blackness and horror comes over him, something he hasn't felt in many, many years. He recognizes the feeling at once.

And that's that. The car drives away with Meggie inside it. The demon lover stands in the field for some period of time, he is never sure how long. Long enough that he is sure he will never catch up with the car with Meggie in it. And he doesn't.

There's a storm coming in.

The thing is this: Meggie never turns up for the morning show in Tallahassee. The other girl, Juliet Adeyemi, does reappear, but nobody ever sees Meggie again. She just vanishes. Her body is never found. The demon lover is a prime suspect in her disappearance. Of course he is. But there is no proof. No evidence.

No one is ever charged.

And Ray? When the demon lover explains everything to the police, to the media, on talk shows, he tells the same story over and over again.
I went to see my old friend Meggie. I met her lover, Ray. They left together. He drove the car.
But no one else supports this story. There is not a single person who will admit that Ray exists. There is not a frame of video with Ray in it. Ray was never there at all, no matter how many times the demon lover explains what happened. They say,
What did he look like? Can you describe him?
And the demon lover says,
He looked like me.

As he is waiting for the third or maybe the fourth time to be questioned by the police, the demon lover thinks about how one day they will make a movie about all of this. About Meggie. But of course he will be too old to play the demon lover.

JESS ROW

FROM
The New Yorker

S
HE HAD NEVER
perfected the trick of moistening the envelope flap with the tip of her tongue so it would stick and lie perfectly flat. In those days,
perfect
meant
as if untouched by hands.
Her flaps were always overwet and lumpy; when she pressed them down, she made them worse. Still, she loved folding the paper twice over, into three equal parts; she loved writing addresses, but especially her name and address in the upper-left corner.
J. Seiden. 29 Portnock Road.
The dignity, the businesslike efficiency of these slim objects, asking nothing, never disclosing more than they needed to. An envelope with only a check inside flapped like a flag, but an envelope containing a two-page letter had a solid integrity on every plane. A writer only in the sense that she loved having written. She slid the envelopes under the metal lid of the mailbox on her parents' porch and stared at them for a few moments. Proof of her existence in the world. Proof the world existed. You could count on it: someone was coming to take them away. Proof you would be sent, proof you would arrive.

She's sitting with Quentin at the Caf Café, set up under an enormous beech tree next to the South Royalton charging tower—a collection of salvaged plastic tables and chairs and a wheelbarrow cut up and welded into a wood-burning stove. The café serves mostly sassafras and stinging-nettle tea, but now and again there are red-market goods, unearthed from a collapsed house or a forgotten box in the pantry: half-rotted Lipton bags or dented cans of Bustelo two years past their expiration date. Dorrie, the owner, is a strict no-currency Vore, and you have to know her to get in on the bartering for the really good stuff. But it's worth biking the seven miles just to bask in the shade of Quentin's unrepentant optimism. Quentin is a Resurrectionist, a money hoarder. Before that, before the last supplies ran out, he traded unleaded on the red market. He's the last one left in South Royalton with a working laptop, a silver incongruity whenever he takes it from its case and plugs the white cord into the charging tower's concatenation of rusting cables. Five minutes of charge keeps the battery alive. People stare at him until he anxiously gathers the laptop up and slips away. Not that anyone would steal it. They just don't want to be reminded. This isn't fucking Starbucks, some crusty Vore always mutters.

She herself takes a bag of nails everywhere she goes, bound up with fraying rubber bands. Everybody needs nails, and the Rumsons left boxes and boxes of them, sorted by size and type, in the basement.
Her
basement. Though only in the most accidental sense: it was Nathan who'd found the house, as a caretaker gig on Craigslist.

Anyway, Quentin's saying, I was down at the Grange listening to these guys arguing about the difference between dystopia and apocalypse. Can you believe that? One of them was saying that we were living in a dystopian novel, and the other guy, big bearded dude, from the West Rats Collective, said, No,
dystopia
means an
imaginary
place where everything is exactly wrong, and what we're living in is a postapocalyptic, prelapsarian kind of thing, you know, a return to nature after the collapse of society as we knew it. Want some?

He unscrews a Burt's Bees tin and holds it out to her. Pine sap—milky, resiny, the consistency of caramel. People say it's almost as good as Nicorette. She shakes her head. He scoops some onto his thumbnail.

And I must have been three or four shots in—we were drinking Wayne Peters's sweet-potato vodka—because I said, Look, kiddos, the truth is
neither
, because we have no idea what might happen, the infrastructure is still basically in place, especially if people from certain collectives hadn't stripped out the copper over in White River—

No copper, no charging tower, she says.

—but my point is really that dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives are
narratives
, that is,
stories:
things that are inherently invented or collated ex post facto. Narratives are static. Real life is, is—

Kinetic?

The point is, we need to just let all that shit
go
, because, call it End Times or whatever you want, things are different now. None of the old endings played out, did they? So we have to imagine
new
endings. Hence the possibility for hope.

They must have gone easy on you.

They just started crying. That's the sad thing. Haven't seen so much crying since August of '15. Some people, you get a little liquor in them and it's all about the old times. They want to huddle up and sing Lady Gaga.

The dark is thickening now. Dorrie clanks her step stool from one low-hanging branch to another, lighting the candles inside each red glass globe. Tomas, the glassblower, held out for almost two years, firing the furnace with the last of his stored LPG, then with wood, making thick, indestructible goblets and candle lanterns, heavy and irregular as stones. He'd had exhibits at the Met and the Louvre, had made Christmas ornaments for the White House; now he's buried under a cairn up on Hull Mountain, dead of spring dysentery.