Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 14 Read online

  "All change is evolution,” Rina says. “This is how wisdom arises from chaos. Now try to sleep."

  * * * *

  I am awake in the rooms of my home clan. They are large and full of light, and the doors are always open to other rooms. There are colorful objects everywhere, and here the table is crowded with chairs and others, the food ritual clamorous with conversation. I am learning to use my palate for speech so that I, too, might be understood. I am the subject of much attention, but my days are overlong without training. Even my tasks of living are no longer my own. I drift on this sea of empty time in contemplation of all that is new, ever alert to the blind persistence of chaos.

  Each night, in my narrow personal bed, I listen to the grid for traces of Rina, but she has vanished into the roar.

  * * * *

  She had arranged it all long before, and she warned me that the lull of transition would challenge my discipline. I am “abandoned” now, and “developmentally disadvantaged,” where once I was abomination. I am not to concern myself with the assumption that I am damaged and underdeveloped. I am not to share history or speak of the grid. Ever.

  "No one will pressure a four-year-old for his past,” she said. “You will learn to speak with your palate soon enough, and then many things will change. Your new teachers are chosen for their practical kindness, and will support your gifts simply because it is their nature to do so, as it is your nature to be compassionate of their limitations. You and I will meet again upon your first maturity. Until then, rare one, experience and observe. Listen to the grid. Keep a dull edge on your capacity for dismantling until you have the full training to support it. Awaken your talent for stillness. It is your gift from me."

  She fastened my coat under my chin, then took old red dog from my hand and carefully set him on the bed.

  "We must go now,” she said. “It isn't far."

  I began to ache, to tremble. Despite my rational understanding of the need for blank anonymity, I clutched at old red dog and refused to leave him behind. A great wail arose from my center and the weight of my failure of courage drove me down, onto the floor, but Rina lifted me up, wrapped me in her vital force, and carried me through the doorway into the larger world.

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  Two Stories by James Sallis

  Telling Lives

  A couple of kids are standing at the bus stop reading my book about Henry Wayne, possibly a school assignment. Henry's right there with them with a cup of coffee from the Circle K, answering questions. So probably it's an assignment, all right. The city bus pulls in and they get on. I'm never sure how this works. Do they get some kind of pass to ride the city bus to school or what? Every morning there's a couple dozen of them out there waiting.

  Across the street, Stan Baker, who owns most of the good affordable apartments in this part of town, is up on the roof of one of his units poking around at ledges, fittings, tar. Someone else with khakis and a clipboard is up there with him. City employee's my guess. Stan waves when I look up. I wrote my first biography about him.

  No one ever imagined they'd catch on this way. Who could have? I wrote that first one, about Stan, on a lark, more or less to have something to do as I sat in front of the computer each morning. My last, literary novel, at which I'd labored a full year, had sunk without a trace, not even flotsam or driftwood left behind. I'd taught for a while at the local community college but had no real taste or aptitude for it. When I went on to write features for the Daily Republic, bored with simple transcription, I found myself first making up details, then entire stories. It was in the biographies, cleaving to the well-defined shoreline of a life, that I found a strange freedom, a release.

  "Barely scratch beneath the surface of any one of us, even the dullest slob around,” my old man used to tell me, “and you'll come onto a source of endless fascination and contradiction. We're all inexhaustible, teeming planets, filled with wonder."

  This from a man who had little interest in others’ lives (mine included, sadly) and who rarely left the house. Number twenty-two in the series.

  Nowadays, of course, the biographies are about all anyone around here reads. Has the town somehow found itself, come to itself, within them? Certainly, for my part, I've stumbled onto an inexhaustible supply of material—and my life's work.

  Carefree, the town where they care.

  That's how we're known now, here just down the road from the nation's sixth largest city with its riot of dun-colored buildings, cloverleafs and sequestered communities, ridgeback of mountains looming always in the distance.

  And we do care. All of us, every one. School kids with their backpacks and mysterious piercings, bank presidents, sanitation-truck jockeys, yardmen and insurance salesmen alike. Clerks at convenience stores going nine out of ten falls with the angel of English each moment of their day. The group of street dwellers who regularly congregate in the alley behind Carta de Oro.

  However we try to break out, to break free, we're forever locked within our own minds. Locked away from knowledge of ourselves every bit as much. But there's this one ride out we can sometimes hitch, this tiny window through which with luck and good weather we can peer and see ourselves, in the guise of another, looking back in.

  That's what the biographies have become for us, I think, those rides, those windows.

  "Hard at work, I see,” Bobby Taylor (number eighteen in the series) says as I sip my morning double espresso at The Coffee Grinder. He's on duty, has his helmet tucked under one arm, what looks like half a gallon of coffee in the other hand, motorcycle pulled up just outside.

  "Finger on the pulse and all that, Officer."

  "Looks more like butt in chair to me."

  "What can I say? It's a sedentary occupation."

  "How's your mom?"

  Mother had been hospitalized six months back after meeting a UPS man at the door with an electric carving knife. She said he'd raped her, and no one should treat a twelve-year-old that way. In hospital, or so she claimed, she'd turned thirteen. One of the nurses baked her a cake, and everyone gathered round for the party. She'd blown out all thirteen candles.

  "Holding her own."

  "Alzheimer's, right?"

  "What they say."

  "She know you?"

  "Some days she does."

  "Next time you visit and it's one of those days, tell her little Bobby Taylor says hello. Had her for tenth-grade English, like nearly everyone else in town. Only ‘A’ I ever got. Parents couldn't decide whether to be shocked or expect it go on happening."

  "And?"

  "Shocked won out."

  I was getting ready to leave when a thirtyish woman stepped up to my table. She had black hair cut short in the back, longer towards the front, giving an impression of two wings.

  "Mr. Warren?"

  "Yes."

  She held out a warm, narrow hand, nails painted white and trimmed square across.

  "Justine Driscoll. May I join you?"

  Although I'd not noticed it before this, a radio was playing behind the counter. Now soft jazz gave way to news. I heard “two fairies collided off the coast of Maine,” then realized the announcer meant ferries.

  "Please do. Can I get you something?"

  "I'm fine. I own a small publishing company, Mr. Warren. I was wondering if—"

  "I have an exclusive contract with McKay and Rosenwald, you must know that."

  "Of course. But I hoped you might look this over. It's our leader for the fall. A flagship book, really, launching a new series."

  From a bookbag slung like a purse over one shoulder she extracted and passed across a copyedited manuscript, corrections and emendations in red pencil in a tiny, tidy hand.

  I read the first few pages.

  "The barber's hair,” I said.

  It began with the story of my mother at the hospital, blowing out those thirteen candles.

  "You're not surprised."

  "It was only a matter of time."

 
"Would you be willing to give it a read, let us know if there are errors?"

  I pushed it back across the table. “I have no wish to read it, Miss Driscoll. You have my blessing, though—for whatever that's worth."

  "Actually, it's worth quite a lot. Thank you."

  She stashed the manuscript back in her book bag.

  "Our sales people are strong behind this. We have solid orders from Barnes & Noble, Borders."

  "Then let me join them to say that I sincerely hope it does well for you."

  "I'll not take up any more of your time, Mr. Warren."

  She stood. Her eyes swept the room. I had the sense of a camera recording this scene. It was a glance I knew all too well.

  "Miss Driscoll?"

  She turned back.

  "You look remarkably like my wife, Julie. Way you're dressed. Nails. Hair."

  "Do I really?"

  "She died eight years ago, a suicide."

  "I know. From the book. And I'm sorry."

  "This Frances Frank, the author. It's you, isn't it?"

  She stood, irresolute. Before she could respond I asked, “Do you have plans for the rest of the day?"

  "No."

  "Yes."

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  The Museum of Last Week

  Thornton is right. The park has become crowded, all but impassable, inhabited by thickets of statues in various stages of self-creation and decay. I had no idea there were so many of them. Unmoving bodies as far as can be seen, crowded up against one another, standing, stooping, stretching. Some on their backs. The children like to come in at night and topple them.

  I walked by there today. Not that I'd meant or planned to. Far from it. Nonetheless, stomach rumbling and sour with the morning's coffee, I found myself outside the fence looking in.

  Scant miles away, scattered about with cholla and bottlebrush cactus, the desert looms, a sea bottom forsaken by the sea.

  It is, yes, beginning to look like her, just as Thornton said. In a few days the features will be unmistakable. Even as I watched—though in truth I must admit I stood there for some time—they changed.

  Tell me you won't forget me, you said.

  Easy enough, Julie. How could I ever? Ravage of your face in those last months soon to be caught in that of the statue inside, by the concrete bench and the fountain that hasn't worked for years.

  The whole secret of everything, you once told me—art, conversation, life itself—is where the accent's placed: the emphasis, the stress.

  Do things happen faster now, closer together, than they used to, or does it just seem that way? As though all has shifted to time-lapse photography, entire life cycles come and gone in moments; as though the lacunae and longueurs that for the most part comprise our lives, these struts that hold up the scaffold of the world, have been removed. Our lives have become instant nostalgia, an infinite longing for what's been lost. While the world, like Wallace Stevens’ wide-mouthed jar left out in the rain, slowly fills to the brim with the momentos, decay and detritus of our past.

  Looking for more coffee, hair of the dog, I stop at a convenience store. I always order two cups, and sure enough, as I depart, a youngish man in corduroy sportcoat and chinos approaches, coat so worn as to resemble a chenille bedspread, chinos eaten away well above onetime cuffs.

  "I am attempting to resolve the categorical imperative with the categorically impossible,” he tells me. We stand staring at one another. Kant at ten in the morning on the streets of downtown Phoenix. “Do you have the time, sir?” he says after a moment.

  Professing that I wear no watch, I offer what I have instead: the extra coffee.

  "I only wish I could have the luxury of not knowing,” he says. “Unfortunately that is not the case. And I feel,” he says as he takes a sip of coffee and falls in beside me, “that there may not be much time left.” We stride along, two men of purpose moving through city, day and world. Perhaps every third sentence of what he says makes sense. He is desperate for bus fare to the university where he teaches, one of these vagarious sentences informs me. “I was lost but now am found. Still, yesterday and today, I have had no access to research facilities.” And a bit later on: “Tomorrow for the first time my students will be prepared for class and I will not be."

  I ask what he teaches.

  "History. And, every other semester, a seminar on forgetfulness."

  Not long towards nightfall, I attend a housewarming for Sara and Seth, researchers who have just moved in together. This is a match made somewhere just off the interstate between Heaven and Hollywood. Seth is the world's leading authority on mucus, can speak for hours concerning protein content, viscosity, adhesiveness, mucopurulence, degrees of green. Sara in turn has fifty pounds of elephant penis in her—now their—refrigerator.

  You once told me that we understand the world, we organize it, in whatever manner we're able.

  "An erect elephant penis weighs around 108 pounds and is sixty-two inches in length,” says Gordon, who, as an editor, knows such things.

  "That's up to here,” Ralph remarks, holding his hand at a level about six inches above my head. Flamingly gay, he takes inordinate delight in such rodomontade.

  "Sixty-two inches is five-foot-two,” I remark.

  "Right,” Ralph says. “Up to here on you,” indicating again the same spot.

  What does it mean, I wonder, that he feels this need to belittle me during an exchange concerning penises? But I suppose that indeed I will be, must be, a short statue. Julie will tower over me as she did in life, in every way.

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how I remember it. Gregory Peck, on safari, has been injured. He lies all but helpless in his tent, gangrene staking claim to leg and life as hyenas circle outside. The woman he loves attends him.

  This is what I'm thinking as I step away from others, away from fifty pounds of elephant penis in the fridge and dissertations on mucus, into the night. I was eight, nine, when I first saw that movie at the Paramount one Sunday afternoon. Scant blocks away the Mississippi boiled in its banks. Within the week it would surmount levee and sandbags and rush the lowlands. I kept having to ask my brother to explain what was going on in the movie. I'm not sure he understood a great deal more than I did at that point, but he gave it his best. He's now a philosopher.

  And now, of course, in our world, anticipation has gone into overdrive. Gregory Peck would never just lie there listening to the hyenas. They'd be on him before he knew it.

  Back home, I brew white tea (high in antioxidants, low in caffeine) in a white pot and take it in a white cup out onto my white-pine patio. Darkness surrounds, and I lift my cup to it—whether in supplication or challenge I do not know. What has my life come to? What have all our lives, what has our world, come to?

  I go back inside, to the pantry. I've saved these a long time.

  The scars come in packages of six. I rip open a package at random and sense the scars's restlessness as they stir to life, sense their pleasure at being allowed to do at last what they were created for.

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  Pete and Earl

  Richard Butner

  Mrs. Stone has a new special friend. Her special friend's name is Earl. I'd never met Earl before, but he knows my name. “Hello, Pauline, please come in,” he says when he answers the big white door before I've even knocked.

  Mrs. Stone lives in a big white house. The Stones had lived in a series of houses of different sizes and colors, but the white one is the one they've had for decades. It was a nice place to end up, so after Mr. Stone died, Mrs. Stone kept the house. It has a pool, a tennis court, a pasture for riding horses, and woods for hiding in when you're nine years old. None of the Stones’ three daughters are nine anymore, and, of course, neither am I. The three horses—Lucky, Happy, and Ronald—are all gone now too. They've been gone for a long, long time.

  Earl is there, though. He takes my jacket and compliments me on my sweater, unaware of its thrift store origins.
He knows that I'd like a cup of Darjeeling, information passed on from Mrs. Stone's previous special friend, Eugene. Earl dashes off to get the tea. I wander through the pastel rooms of the mansion to the sun-porch where I know I'll find Mrs. Stone.

  "I'm so glad you've come, Pauline. What a pleasant surprise."

  I always come on the first and third Saturdays of the month. It shouldn't be a happy surprise to Mrs. Stone but then again most things are surprises, happy or unhappy, to her these days. She remembers me, but Earl probably prepped her for my visit. She offers her hand, which I grip for a moment before letting go and easing back into a wicker rocking chair.

  Earl appears at my elbow, sets the tea down on the glass-topped coffee table between our chairs.

  Then he leaps over the table, spinning in mid-air, and lands squatting down on his haunches next to Mrs. Stone. His hand on top of hers, his eyes wide and eager to help out. Ready to spring into action again.

  Mrs. Stone starts the conversational litany in the present, requiring some help from Earl to relate the current crises. Julie, the oldest daughter, is having marital trouble with her fourth husband. Patricia is doing just fine in Washington D.C., but Mrs. Stone can't understand why she can't find a good man to settle down with. She doesn't mention Angela, the youngest daughter, and neither does Earl.

  The place that's most comfortable for Mrs. Stone is the distant past, where her husband and all three of her daughters are still alive. Earl's been briefed on the distant past, I'm sure, but he doesn't need to help Mrs. Stone much once she starts rummaging around back there, telling the same stories she told two weeks ago and the same ones she'll tell two weeks from now.

  Earl is someone's idea of perfect, but not mine. Millimeters make the difference between a handsome face and a disgusting face, and Earl's mouth bleeds over into disgust. His lower lip bulges, pouting, even though his upper lip is barely there. I don't need to concentrate too much on Mrs. Stone's stories—I've heard them all—but this leaves me with a little too much time to concentrate on Earl's face. His immobile smiling gaze, a clown's idea of readiness, is unnerving.