The Radio Magician and Other Stories (24 page)

Dorian’s hand flew to his heart, and he clenched his shirt in a fist. “You know where Stephanie is?”

Two short hallways later, they were in the lobby; the same long window that seemed so familiar looked out on the moonlit mountains. Dorian’s pulse pounded and his face felt hot. The same cliff face covered with plants made the back wall, and, Dorian thought, the same concierge, his handlebar eyebrows pointing upwards, waited at the reception desk. But he wasn’t the same. Similar, but not the same. Shorter, perhaps? A little broader in the shoulders?

Stephanie stepped out from behind the concierge.

Wordlessly they embraced. Dorian held her tightly, his cheek pressing against the side of her head. She trembled in his arms. For a moment, all centered on her, on the feel of her breathing against him, of her fingers on his back. The smell of her skin. The texture of her blouse.

For a moment, all was perfect.

But she stiffened–—he could feel it in her muscles—and she pushed away.

Stephanie looked at him, her hands still holding his. Dorian studied her. Where Stephanie’s hair had been curled, it now hung straight. Where her eyes had been blue with tiny white spokes, they were now blue with tinges of green.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m Dorian. Who are you?” He released her hands, and they hung in place where he’d left them. She took a single step back.

“Oh, no,” said the concierge. “This is distressing.”

“Where’s my husband?” the woman said. “Where’s my Dorian?”

The concierge took a position between them. “The inn is not at fault here. It doesn’t happen this way. If you’ll come with me, sir.” He took Dorian by the elbow and walked away from the reception desk. “How many transitions did you go through?” he whispered harshly.

“I . . . maybe . . .”

“You went through at least two, didn’t you?”

Dorian stopped, pulled his arm away from the concierge. “The damn inn is so confusing that anybody can get lost. Give me a guide, and I’ll be happy to go back to where I belong.”

“It’s a
big
inn. How many?” The concierge wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t look friendly in the least.

“What does it matter? Five or six, I think.”

The concierge blanched. “You don’t understand, sir. There are nine transition zones.”

“So?”

“When you go through one, you come out at different Inns at Mount Either. Each inn has nine transition zones too. Nine different ones. When you go through two transitions, there are eighty-one different inns you might have come from. If you went through five. . .” He paused, closing his eyes for a second. They popped open. “You could have come from any one of 59,049 realities. If you went through six, we’d have over a half million possibilities.” He grabbed Dorian’s elbow again with urgency. “Where did you come from to get here?”

Dorian winced and found himself half walking and half trotting. “A jungle, I think. Ouch! What’s the hurry?”

They reached an elevator. The concierge punched the button. Then he punched it again. “Zone drift. When you go through a zone, the door you came from is the way back for two or three hours, but if you wait too long, the place you came from isn’t there anymore. It’ll be another version of the inn. It might even be a really, really close version of the one you came from, but it won’t be the same one. If you didn’t dawdle in any of the zones, though, you should be okay.”

Dorian glanced at his watch. When had he gone through the first transition?

The elevator door opened. “Jungle?” asked the concierge.

Dorian nodded. “Another version? Like a parallel world?”

The concierge grunted as the elevator started down. “Um, sort of. We prefer to call them non-convergent. There’s a lot of variation.”

“But the door to the jungle is out of order. I would have gone back through it on my own.”

“We locked all the doors when we realized a guest was making unguided transitions.”

Dorian followed the concierge, who made turns down hallways and chose stairwells with practiced confidence. They crossed the transparent bridge, but now the door was lit and they passed into the rainforest transition Dorian remembered.

“Okay, how did you get here?” The concierge reached behind a curtain of vines hanging next to the wall, and pulled a phone from a hatch behind.

“From a kind of a desert world, I think.”

The concierge’s forehead furrowed in frustration.

“I’m sure it was desert, like the Arabian Nights.”

He said something into the phone, then listened to the reply.

They hurried around a hallway’s long curve. Dorian hadn’t looked at the scenery the first time through, but now he noticed solid vegetable weaves that made the walls, and the sweaty smell of wet wood and dripping leaves.

“How come you are here? I mean, you’re just like the concierge from the inn that I came from.”

They trotted up a flight of stairs, crossed a dizzying walkway over a ravine and entered a small court circled with open booths. Guests sat on stools drinking from tall bamboo cups or coconuts with straws stuck in them. An elevator rendition of jungle music played softly in the background.

“I’m everywhere,” said the concierge. “So’s your wife. So are you. That’s the problem. You are lost, and so are about a zillion non-convergent versions of you wandering about the inn where they don’t belong. Of course, there are a lot of you who didn’t get lost either. The worlds aren’t parallel. At least your wife had the wit to come back through the same doors she exited.”

“She has a pretty good sense of direction.” Dorian shook his head. “I didn’t come this way. I don’t remember this.”

“Short cuts. Your clock is ticking. With any luck, another version of me is hustling another version of you, the right one, back to my lobby where that woman you met is waiting. How long has it been since you went through the first transition?”

“I’m sure it hasn’t been two hours yet.” When had he started looking?

“Good. We should make it without any trouble.”

Finally they entered a transition with a western theme, rough textured pine walls and the smell of cactus.

“This is the first zone I entered.”

The concierge sighed and smiled for the first time since Dorian talked to him in the lobby. “Fifteen minutes back for me. Piece of cake. From here, all I need is your room key.”

Looking at the key, the concierge plucked another phone from a hidden niche. He read a string of numbers into the mouthpiece.

Minutes later, they stood at the transition back to the inn Dorian had come from. The concierge put out his hand. “I’m glad that I could help you, sir. A bellboy on the other side will escort you to the lobby, where I’m sure your wife will be glad to see you.” He paused. “We’ve always said that a guest should lose himself in the experience.”

Dorian grimaced. “I didn’t think that was funny the first time I heard it.”

When he entered the lobby, he spotted Stephanie right away. Her back was to him, but her blonde hair, lightly curled at the end, barely touching her shoulders, caught a ray of sun through the window and practically glowed. He remembered that once he’d told her that he liked looking for her in crowded places. “I just tell myself that I’m looking for the prettiest woman in the building, and when I find you, I’m done.”

She turned, but her smile was tentative.

“Dorian? The real Dorian?”

He tried to speak. Nothing came out, and his eyes blurred.

She was in his arms. Dorian held her tightly, afraid to let go. She buried her face in his neck, and he could feel her tears on his skin. He thought about the first time he’d held her, a night when they’d parked on a cliff’s edge with the city’s lights spread out in the valley below, when he knew that they would be together forever. Her breathing had synchronized with his. Her shoulder fit under his arm as if the two of them had been sculpted at the same time to go together. Dorian shook with sobs, and she held him. Her crying matched his own.

A long time later, it seemed, when they’d dried their faces, made their apologies to the concierge, who just seemed happy that they were where they belonged again, and all thoughts of further repercussions for going through transitions were forgotten, they walked toward their room. Stephanie’s arm wrapped around Dorian’s waist, and he kept a hand on her shoulder, as if afraid that she might slip away again.

“Where were you at lunch?” Dorian asked. “I waited for an hour.”

Stephanie’s inhalation still sounded shaky. “I was in the wrong restaurant. When you didn’t show up, I went back to the room. But you didn’t come, so I started looking for you. That’s when I went through the transitions. Dorian, it was all so beautiful. I lost track of time.” She frowned. “They brought a man who looked like you, but he wasn’t you. I’ve never been so frightened before.”

“I know.”

Dorian pulled her even tighter. It didn’t matter why they’d been apart, as long as they were no longer lost. He loved the feel of her walking beside him. He loved that he could match strides with her so they wouldn’t jar each other. Twenty years of marriage, and he loved that she still surprised him with her laugh.

They reached the room. Dorian slid his plastic key into the lock, but it didn’t work.

“Let me,” Stephanie said. The door recognized her key and let them in. “I’m so tired, I could sleep for a week.” She leaned against the wall, looking at him.

“Me too. I haven’t slept since yesterday.”

She headed for the bed, and Dorian was glad because she couldn’t see the change in expression on his face. He hadn’t slept since yesterday, he’d said, but that wasn’t true. He’d slept in the moon room, where he’d dreamed of Stephanie. “You’re so far away,” she’d said in the dream.

How long had he slept?

Stephanie pulled back the sheets. Dorian watched. Was that
exactly
the way Stephanie unmade the bed? Didn’t she always wash her face first?

She walked past him into the bathroom. Her fingers touched his as she rounded the corner. “You look like you swallowed something gross.”

The sink turned on. Water splashed. Dorian backed up to the edge of the bed, but he didn’t sit down. Stephanie had left the door open. She always closed the bathroom door, even to brush her teeth, even to blow her nose. Her shadow moved on the carpet in the light of the open door.

How long had he slept?

Much, much later that night, long after the woman had fallen asleep, Dorian lay with his eyes wide open, listening. Straining. What did his wife sound like when she breathed? Could this possibly be her beside him, and what if it wasn’t? How long would it be before she noticed? A year? Ten years? Never?

Or could she wake up right now and know? Would she lever herself up on one elbow and look at him in the dark? “You’re not Dorian,” she’d say. Her breath wouldn’t smell like Stephanie’s. Her voice wouldn’t be Stephanie’s. Not quite. Not exact. Not real.

She stirred slightly. Every muscle in Dorian’s body tensed, but she didn’t wake up.

Not then.

THE ICE CREAM MAN

K
eegan chose a song from the truck’s jukebox after he crossed 6th Street going south on University Blvd.: “You are My Sunshine.” It was his Thursday route. The music boomed through the loudspeakers, echoing from the late 19th Century houses. Within a minute, doors opened, people wandered down their sidewalks and waited for him on the street. He muted the song as the truck slowed to a stop. Even through his dark sunglasses, the sun was too bright. Every reflective surface bounced the light in painful intensity. He squinted against the intrusions.

An old lady in a broad-rimmed hat that shadowed her face and a lacy blouse that covered her neck to her chin looked up at him. “Do you have strawberry today?”

He handed her a cone with a single scoop.

The tip of her tongue touched the treat. She closed her eyes and sighed. “Best strawberry ice cream in the world.”

He snapped his fingers. “Overripe strawberries are the secret. They’re sweeter. You’re lucky they’re in season.”

The lady put a pint of bourbon on the counter. “Will this do?”

Keegan held it to the sunlight, where it glowed like golden honey. “That’s a couple weeks worth, darling.”

She blushed. “I need a box of .22 longs if you have them. Something’s been in my back yard the last few nights.”

Keegan searched below the counter. “Short rounds, short rounds, short rounds.” He moved the small boxes aside. “Ah, here we go, .22 longs. That would make us even.”

Behind her frowned a middle-aged man with a tiny black mustache like a charcoaled thumbprint below his nose. “Where do you get the ammo, hairlip?”

Keegan resisted the urge to cover his mouth. He smiled instead. “It’s all in trade. I have something someone wants. Somebody else has something I want. What do you want?”

“Nobody trades bullets. They horde them.” He looked suspiciously at the truck. “And how do I know your ice cream is any good?”

Another man a couple folks back in the line said, “Are you going to order, Rich, or are you going to be a pain in the ass? Doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. You can’t get ice cream anywhere else.”

The man scowled. “Vanilla.”

Keegan turned his back to get another cone from behind him. He rubbed his nostril with his thumb, and as he scooped the ice cream he pressed the thumb firmly into the frozen ball before plopping it into place. “There you go, mister,” he said. “Since it’s your first time, it’s on the house.”

The next customer wanted a double scoop of chocolate, which Keegan let him have for a nearly full bottle of powdered cinnamon.

“Can’t get enough good spices,” said Keegan to the man who’d defended him. “How are you doing, Laird?”

Laird leaned on the counter, his tanned arm a sharp contrast to the polished aluminum, liver spots sprinkled across the top of his hand like the map of an island chain. “Pretty good, Keegan. You put a booger in his ice cream, didn’t you?”

Keegan grinned. “I didn’t charge him.”

“Maple-walnut for me, if you have it.”

The ice cream rolled smoothly into the scoop. Keegan liked the cold air caressing his wrists. It felt better than the waves of heat rising from the asphalt outside the truck, and it was only 11:00. Good for business. Hard to work in.

Laird licked a drip off the cone before it reached his hand. “Can’t really blame the guy for his bad temper. He moved in a month ago. No territory. No prospects. Some muta-bastard broke into his house and tore up most of his stores, so he’s feeling pinched.”

“Is he thinking of scavenging north of Colfax Avenue?” Keegan closed the freezer lid. No need to let the product melt, and the truck used less fuel if the refrigerator unit wasn’t working the whole time. “I wouldn’t recommend going alone.”

“You don’t seem to have trouble.”

Keegan swept a damp rag the length of the counter, keeping his eyes down. “I know the area.”

“Speaking of that, did you find the item I asked for?”

“It’s rare. Really rare.” The rag swung loosely in Keegan’s hand as he leaned against the cabinets, squinting through his sunglasses at the sunlight outside the truck’s dark interior. The last two people in line, a middle-aged couple he’d served several times before, wiped their foreheads in unison. Like most folks, they didn’t look at his face. He wanted to cover his mouth again.

Laird sighed. “All right. I can double the sugar for next month.” He leaned forward to whisper, “I found a cache you wouldn’t believe. Geezer who’d filled a double-car garage with goodies before kicking off.”

“Great.” Keegan pulled two boxes of 12-gauge shotgun shells from under the counter. He rattled them before putting them down. “Got a project?”

Laird pocketed the boxes. “Nope. The boys on the Colfax fence say they’re having breakthroughs every night. I want more punch for my dollar. Whatever tore into Rich’s house went through the bars on his window. Something new south of the fence, evidently. One of these days I’m afraid I’m going to stumble on a mutoid that’s all teeth, scales, tentacles and bad attitude, and I don’t want to face it with a popgun.”

“You could move to the country like everyone else.”

Laird turned to look down the street. Many of the houses were boarded up, their windows staring into the street like blind eyes. On other houses, bars covered the windows and doors. Barbed wire separated them from their neighbors. “What, and leave all this? There’s still a lot of scavenging to do before I start scratching dirt for a living. Besides, farms have mutoid problems too.” He licked the last of the ice cream out of the cone. “Could you sweeten this up?”

Keegan dropped another scoop on the cone.

Laird said, “The ammo question was dumb. You know the one I want answered?”

Keegan looked at him through his sunglasses.

“Where do you get the cream? The last true cow died twenty years ago.”

“I have good freezers.”

Laird laughed. “See you next Thursday.” He walked away, waving as he went.

The last couple both wanted raspberry, but Keegan didn’t have any. They settled for a scoop each of chocolate macadamia nut. He placed the set of four sundae glasses they’d brought on the floor. The woman looked suspiciously at her cone.

“Just ice cream in that one, ma’am,” he said.

When he drove away, he flicked the music back on, “Little Brown Jug.” A couple blocks later, a new crowd gathered. By 1:00 he was sold out.

Driving the ice cream truck had been Keegan’s first job out of high school. In the dispatch office, Old Josh Granger had handed him the route and an inventory sheet along with the keys to the truck. “Drive slow in the neighborhoods,” he said. “Nothing sadder than a little kid who can’t catch the ice cream truck.”

Keegan nodded.

“Not that there’s kids anymore.” Granger sat heavily on a stool, cupping his hands over his knees. “God, I remember when the five-year-olds would chase me down. Scads of them. Couldn’t even get their change up to the counter. Little hands holding money. Do you remember kids?” Granger looked out the window onto the lot where the trucks were parked. Canvas covered six of them. “You’re what, eighteen? No, you wouldn’t. You’re one of the last batch.”

Keegan ground the toe of his sneaker into the cement. “They’ll find out what’s causing it. I heard the news the other night. They’re making headway.”

Granger sighed. “Do you have a girl?”

Keegan blushed. “They don’t seem to take to me.” He scratched his nose, covering his mouth.

“Humph! Sorry, son. Maybe it’s for the better. Save you the heartache. No ultrasound horror show. No little bundled buried in the back yard for you . . .” He trailed off. A muscle in his arm twitched, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Nobody gives you guff about it, do they?”

“No, sir. They’re all real nice.” Keegan thought about the whispers in the school hallway. Once he’d heard an entire conversation. “Do you think he’s a mutation?” someone had said. “Nah,” said someone else. “Cleft palate. It’s just a birth defect.”

Granger said, “Don’t they have operations to fix that?”

“I had it. You should have seen it before.”

For the rest of the summer, Keegan drove the truck. Kids his own age and older waited for him. In the shadows, they hardly noticed his face. “I want a bomb pop,” one would say. “Ice cream sandwich,” said another. For a summer he drove the town, music filling his ears: “Home on the Range” and “London Bridge” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” calling, calling, and the folks came out, remembering in the music what it must have been like to be five. He imagined them as children, running after him, their eyes on fire, laughter in their throats. It was the best summer of his life. Then, in August, the company went under, and he had to turn in his keys.

When he left his last inventory in the dispatch office, Old Man Granger sat unmoving on his stool, staring off into an unfocused middle distance.

“Here’s my paperwork, sir. I filled everything out.”

Granger didn’t speak.

“I rinsed out the freezer wells too. The truck’s clean.” Keegan resisted an urge to pass his hand in front of the old man’s eyes. “Well, I got to go.”

When Keegan turned back to close the door, Granger finally spoke. “Don’t ever drive too fast.” He could have been talking to himself. “You don’t want to leave the kids behind.”

It was thirty years before Keegan would drive an ice cream truck again.

The University Blvd. and Colfax Avenue enclave ended south of Cherry Creek, about fifteen blocks from Colfax. Keegan drove through the empty neighborhoods, his music turned off, the ice cream gone, and the boxes of traded goods packed securely behind him. He rested his wrists loosely over the top of the wheel, avoiding road debris with long, sweeping curves. Here the remains of homes sat back from the sidewalk on top of short, weeded slopes. The frame houses that weren’t burned to the ground sagged forlornly, holes gaping in their roofs, an occasional glass shard still clinging to a window, catching the sun. The brick homes fared better, though their roofs swooped to black holes too. Nothing worth scavenging in them now, unless there were secrets buried in their basements. Too close to University. Inside, all the drawers would be pulled out, the sheet rock rotted, wallpaper hanging in ragged folds, their owners either dead or moved to the country to raise crops.

Keegan sighed, checked the fuel gauge, and turned north. A slinky, black form, ten feet long, flowed across the road on short, powerful legs, before vanishing behind some bushes. The sun was still high in the sky. Keegan whistled. Most of the mutoids were nocturnal. He hadn’t got a good look at it, but it moved like a predator. Either it had broken through the Colfax fence, or it came out of the Platte River wastes a couple miles west. Keegan slowed the truck.

It appeared again, beside a house, placed a foot high on the worn wood, then pulled itself up. When its front paws reached the gutter, its hind feet were still on the ground. Then, without a break in rhythm, it poured onto the roof, defying gravity in its sinuous path. Before it disappeared over the peak, it looked at Keegan, small eyes buried in a broad, black skull, like a bear’s. That high, poised in the sun, it no longer appeared black, but a deep, regal purple.

Back on University, two fence men pushed the barrier aside to let him through.

“Saw something big on the road back there,” said Keegan.

“Like a low-riding black panther?” asked the fellow hoisting a scoped rifle.

Keegan nodded.

The man shaded his eyes to look up into the truck. “I got a shot at him yesterday, walking bold as brass in front of those shops on 6th Street. Nothing to eat in the enclave except us, so we’ve organized a hunting party for tomorrow. Find him and then go north for a bit. Clean out the worst of them.”

“About time we went north,” said the man’s partner, wearing thick glasses and a cowboy hat. “The leave-them-alone and they’ll-leave-us-alone policy sucks.” He hefted his rifle, a military issue weapon with a curved magazine. “We need as much replacement ammo as you can get us when you come next week. If we’re going to clean the area out, we’ll be jacking quite a few rounds.”

“Tomorrow, you’re hunting?” Keegan wondered if they heard the quiver in his voice.

“Couple hours before sunrise. We’ve got forty rifles. Figure we can make a sweep as far north as 30th Avenue. Some hotheads on the committee wanted to burn everything in that direction, but we figure a lot of the best stuff is up there.”

Keegan tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. University Blvd. stretched in front of him. The tops of trees in City Park a couple blocks ahead waved in a breeze that didn’t touch them on the street. “No need to go
beyond
the fence, is there? The majority aren’t dangerous.”

Rifle-scope man looked at him curiously. “Us or them, buddy.”

Keegan nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The afternoon routine was the same as always. First he unloaded the truck in the converted bank building’s garage, putting the consumables in the steel-doored storage room, then placing the rest on the shelves except for the glasses he took into his living quarters to add to his display, two rooms of ice cream art under the lights. His favorites were ruby glass banana-split plates, casting red shadows beneath them. Then there were the tall sundae glasses, fluted sides and pouty lipped tops. Fine ice cream bowls of delicate china. Scoops by the dozens, some mechanical (one with a heating element for ease in carving hard-frozen treats), another of ivory, another with knuckle protectors, another with mother of pearl inlay in the handle. In the next room he had the pictures: ice cream trucks from all over the world. Psychedelic ones, and plain ones, and ones that looked like motorized tricycles, and ones shaped like cones or ice cream men or hot dogs or popsicles. Today, though, he didn’t pause to admire the collection. The men were coming!

But what could he do? He spent a couple hours in the ice cream room, beating eggs, adding sugar, stirring in cocoa powder and cream and vanilla. All the variations: chocolate almond, blueberry, mango sorbet, cinnamon, and a triple batch of plain vanilla. Pouring the mixture into the ice cream makers. Turning them on. His hands smelled of chocolate. The air smelled of sweet cream.