The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  Then they headed for the wine and the food Mme Fabre had laid out on long tables, and I headed for the fountain.

  I’d planned to go back to my room, take a shower, fall into bed, read a mystery, and go to sleep. But the young actors, turned back into rowdy adolescents, were screeching and whooping in the barn. Needing quiet more than clean hair, I slipped out my private door and felt my way down the dusky path, past the leaning tree, past the moss-covered rocks, to Ondine’s spring.

  The full moon rode high in the sky, silvering the tall ferns growing above and beside the fountain’s opening, glinting off the surface of the water like a mirror, picking up the white flowers strewn in the grass like scattered pearls. Everything looked magical and lush, ferns and flowers growing everywhere much more thickly than could possibly have happened in a few short weeks of relative neglect.

  It must be my eyes, I thought, or my exhaustion, or a little-known side-effect of making an entire grove of Rackhamesque trees for an amateur production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All it lacked was Titania to be the bank where the wild thyme grows, although it was much too late in the year for cowslips and nodding violets. If they even grew in this part of France.

  And then, just as if I’d called her, I saw Titania.

  She wasn’t what I’d imagined—clothed in green gauze, or pale silk, or even heavy Elizabethan brocade, with a wreath of flowers in her hair. No. This spirit was naked and uncrowned, and stood at the edge of the fountain with her long pale hair veiling her face as she looked down into the water.

  I must have made a sound—a gasp, a sigh, a choke of awe or shock or disbelief—for she turned and looked at me from eyes as wide-set and liquid as an animal’s.

  “Ondine,” I said.

  She laughed—that light, mocking, enchanting laugh—and tossed back her hair with both hands, showing me her nakedness. It was a wanton gesture, but not a sexual one—she meant to display, not to seduce. In any case it was not a seductive body she showed me, inhumanly thin and smooth and long of flank and waist, with small, high breasts and a smooth blank like a classical statue’s at the bottom of her gently sloping belly.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. I don’t. I’m just dreaming. Or over-tired. This isn’t real.”

  “Do you really want to take that attitude, Desdemona? Because if you do, you won’t like your present, and then I’ll have to be offended and do you a mischief. Which would be a pity, because you’ve been a great help to me.”

  I grasped at the one thing out of her speech that made sense. “I don’t want to offend you.”

  “Good. Then you’ll take your present?”

  I don’t really like surprises and I don’t like presents I haven’t asked for. But Ondine had made it perfectly clear on several occasions what weight she gave my preferences. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  “Wait there, then, and I’ll get it.” She slipped into the water and disappeared under the surface.

  Some part of me knew she wouldn’t surface within a normal breath-holding span, that she was a comfortable under water as in the air—more comfortable, water being her native element. Another part of me, the part that believed in fairies only as metaphors for the multifarious facets of the human subconscious, prompted me to jump into the fountain after a drowning woman and pull her out. The tension between the two parts made the time of her absence seem interminable. But the moon hadn’t moved when she returned.

  I hardly recognized her. Her beauty, always exotic, had grown inhumanly strange, the relative proportions of her forehead and chin, eyes, mouth, and nose, exaggerated and attenuated to the edge of caricature. Furthermore, she was distinctly green—skin, lips, eyes, and hair like duckweed floating on the surface of the water, luminescent in the moonlight. A star glittered in her brow—no decoration, but part of her skin, her skull, her very self.

  “I had a bet with myself,” she said, “whether you’d choose to run away or jump in the water after me or wait and see what happened.”

  “And did you win?” I asked stupidly.

  “I’d have won no matter which you chose. You, on the other hand, might have lost a great deal.”

  “What—” I began, then prudently shut my mouth.

  “Would you like your present now?”

  It occurred to me that Ondine’s gift might turn out to be something I’d be better off without. The gifts of fairies were traditionally uncomfortable, possibly troublesome. On the other hand, my life was hardly comfortable or trouble-free as it was.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I believe I would.”

  She brought her hands out of the water, cradling something bright and clear—a crescent moon. It wasn’t the moon, of course—the moon was overhead, and just off the full—but it felt like the moon. I couldn’t think what I was supposed to do with it.

  “Kneel,” she said, and I got down on my knees. She lifted the moon towards me, phospherescent in the green cup of her palms.

  “Eat,” she said.

  I ate.

  Later, after moon-set, I walked past the fountain and down through the wood to M. Fabre’s vineyard. When I reached the farmhouse, it was near dawn. The windows were lit. Mme Fabre answered the door, bustled me into the kitchen, sat me down at the battered wooden table, and set a brioche and a bowl of café au lait in front of me.

  M. Fabre came in just as I was drinking the ambrosial last of the café. “The spirit has returned to the spring,” he remarked in much the same voice he’d use to comment on the weather.

  “She has,” I said, equally matter-of-factly.

  “Bien. It is better like that.”

  That’s the end of it, really. Oh, there was a certain amount of drama attendant on Mme Ondine Collingsworth’s sudden and mysterious disappearance, complete with weeping adolescents and a stoic husband and policemen tramping through the fountain and the woods, searching for signs of foul play. I got to know—and like—Peter Collingsworth a lot better than I ever would have believed possible. When the fuss had died down at last and the students had left, we sat with our wine on the veranda and talked about what was going to become of L’Ecole de la Source.

  “She doesn’t care,” he told me on the night before I left. “She has what she wants. She’d been waiting to get back to her spring for ages—far longer than I knew her, certainly. It wasn’t in her nature to feel about me as I felt about her. But we were happy together. We were happy for a long time.”

  He sighed, and we sat in silence until he went on: “I’ll stay, of course. The spring needs someone to look after it, make sure it’s not plowed under or built over or some such foolishness. That’ll be easier if the school’s a going concern. And she did care about the dancing.”

  “Keep the school going by all means,” I said. “I suspect she cares about art as much as she cares about anything human, and she clearly likes having artists around.”

  “You’ll come next summer? Teach art—figure drawing, that kind of thing. You can have the big room over the granary, if you like—use it as a studio.”

  “I’d rather have the bread oven.”

  And so it was settled.

  My horrible abstract is hanging in my studio in Devon, just outside the toilet.

  I’m still working out what the gift was that Ondine gave me that night. Not a sudden perfection of line: I don’t draw any better than I did before—not yet, anyway. I certainly draw more, and much more mindfully, than I did. Drawing has become an obsession with me, and walking on the moors with my sketching-block and my little tin of watercolors. I’ve done dozens of trees and hundreds of rocks, many of them with faces peering out of or around them—little, cold, inhuman faces. Are they really there? I don’t know. I only know I paint what I see—the truth, as Ondine bade me.

  The other thing I’ve done is reproduce the watercolor of La Source. In the foreground, where duckweed and shadow had cast a woman-shape, I painted Ondine as I’d last seen her, star-browed, the crescen
t moon cradled in her palms echoing the curve of her mocking smile.

  I showed it to my friend Sia, who turned and hugged me.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “For this,” she said. “For painting something real.”

  THE REGION OF UNLIKENESS

  RIVKA GALCHEN

  Some people would consider Jacob a physicist, some would consider him a philosopher or simply a “time expert,” though I tend to think of him in less reverent terms. But not terms of hatred. Ilan used to call Jacob “my cousin from Outer Swabia.” That obscure little joke, which I heard Ilan make a number of times, probably without realizing how many times he’d made it before, always seemed to me to imply a distant blood relation between the two of them. I guess I had the sense (back then) that Jacob and Ilan were shirttail cousins of some kind. But later I came to believe, at least intermittently, that actually Ilan’s little phrase was both a misdirection and a sort of clue, one that hinted at an enormous secret that they’d never let me in on. Not a dully personal secret, like an affair or a small crime or, say, a missing testicle—but a scientific secret, that rare kind of secret that, in our current age, still manages to bend our knee.

  I met Ilan and Jacob by chance. Sitting at the table next to mine in a small Moroccan coffee shop on the Upper West Side, they were discussing “Wuthering Heights,” too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me. Jacob looked about forty-five; he was overweight, he was munching obsessively on these unappetizing green leaf-shaped cookies, and he kept saying “obviously.” Ilan was good-looking, and he said that the tragedy of Heathcliff was that he was essentially, on account of his lack of property rights, a woman. Jacob then extolled Catherine’s proclaiming, “I am Heathcliff.” Something about passion was said. And about digging up graves. And a bearded young man next to them moved to a more distant table. Jacob and Ilan talked on, unoffended, praising Brontë, and at some point Ilan added, “But since Jane Austen’s usually the token woman on university syllabi, it’s understandable if your average undergraduate has a hard time shaking the idea that women are half-wits, moved only by the terror that a man might not be as rich as he seems.”

  Not necessarily warmly, I chimed in with something. Ilan laughed. Jacob refined Ilan’s statement to “straight women.” Then to straight women “in the Western tradition.” Then the three of us spoke for a long time. That hadn’t been my intention. But there was something about Ilan—manic, fragile, fidgety, womanizing (I imagined) Ilan—that was all at once like fancy coffee and bright-colored smutty flyers. He had a great deal to say, with a steady gaze into my eyes, about my reading the New York Post, which he interpreted as a sign of a highly satiric yet demotically moral intelligence. Jacob nodded. I let the flattery go straight to my heart, despite the fact that I didn’t read the Post—it had simply been left on my table by a previous customer. Ilan called Post writers naïve Nabokovs. Yes, I said. The headline, I remember, read “AXIS OF WEASEL.” Somehow this led to Jacob’s saying something vague about Proust, and violence, and perception.

  “Jacob’s a boor, isn’t he?” Ilan said. Or maybe he said “bore” and I heard “boor” because Ilan’s way of talking seemed so antiquated to me. I had so few operating sources of pride at that time. I was tutoring and making my lonely way through graduate school in civil engineering, where my main sense of joy came from trying to silently outdo the boys—they still played video games—in my courses. I started going to that coffee shop every day.

  Everyone I knew seemed to find my new companions arrogant and pathetic, but whenever they called me I ran to join them. Ilan and Jacob were both at least twenty years older than me, and they called themselves philosophers, although only Jacob seemed to have an actual academic position, and maybe a tenuous one, I couldn’t quite tell. I was happy not to care about those things. Jacob had a wife and daughter, too, though I never met them. It was always just the three of us. We would get together and Ilan would go on about Heidegger and “thrownness,” or about Will Ferrell, and Jacob would come up with some way to disagree, and I would mostly just listen, and eat baklava and drink lots of coffee. Then we’d go for a long walk, and Ilan might have some argument in defense of, say, Fascist architecture, and Jacob would say something about the striated and the smooth, and then a pretty girl would walk by and they would talk about her outfit for a long time. Jacob and Ilan always had something to say, which gave me the mistaken impression that I did, too.

  Evenings, we’d go to the movies, or eat at an overpriced restaurant, or lie around Ilan’s spacious and oddly neglected apartment. He had no bed frame, nothing hung on the walls, and in his bathroom there was just a single white towel and a T.W.A. mini-toothbrush. But he had a two-hundred-dollar pair of leather gloves. One day, when I went shopping with the two of them, I found myself buying a simple striped sweater so expensive that I couldn’t get to sleep that night.

  None of this behavior—the laziness, the happiness, the subservience, even the pretentiousness—was “like me.” I was accustomed to using a day planner and eating my lunch alone, in fifteen minutes; I bought my socks at street fairs. But when I was with them I felt like, well, a girl. Or “the girl.” I would see us from the outside and recognize that I was, in an old-fashioned and maybe even demeaning way, the sidekick, the mascot, the decoration; it was thrilling. And it didn’t hurt that Ilan was so generous with his praise. I fixed his leaking shower and he declared me a genius. Same when I roasted a chicken with lemons. When I wore orange socks with jeans, he kissed my feet. Jacob told Ilan to behave with more dignity; he was just jealous of Ilan’s easy pleasures.

  It’s not as if Jacob wasn’t lovable in his own abstruse and awkward way. I admired how much he read—probably more than Ilan, certainly more than me (he made this as clear as he could)—but Jacob struck me as pedantic, and I thought he would do well to button his shirts a couple buttons higher. Once, we were all at the movies—I had bought a soda for four dollars—and Jacob and I were waiting wordlessly for Ilan to return from the men’s room. It felt like a very long wait. Several times I had to switch the hand I was holding the soda in because the waxy cup was so cold. “He’s taking such a long time,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders, just to throw a ripple into the strange quiet between us.

  “You know what they say about time,” Jacob said idly. “It’s what happens even when nothing else does.”

  “O.K.,” I said. The only thing that came to my mind was the old joke that time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. I couldn’t bear to say it, so I remained silent. It was as if, without Ilan, we couldn’t even pretend to have a conversation.

  There were, I should admit, things about Ilan (in particular) that didn’t make me feel so good about myself. For example, once I thought he was pointing a gun at me, but it turned out to be a remarkably good fake. Occasionally when he poured me a drink he would claim he was trying to poison me. One night I even became very sick, and wondered. Another evening—maybe the only time Jacob wasn’t with us; he said his daughter had appendicitis—Ilan and I lay on his mattress watching TV. For years, watching TV had made me sick with a sense of dissoluteness, but now suddenly it seemed great. That night, Ilan took hold of one of my hands and started idly to kiss my fingers, and I felt—well, I felt I’d give up the rest of my life just for that. Then Ilan got up and turned off the television. Then he fell asleep, and the hand-kissing never came up again.

  Ilan frequently called me his “dusty librarian.” And once he called me his “Inner Swabian,” and this struck him as very funny, and even Jacob didn’t seem to understand why. Ilan made a lot of jokes that I didn’t understand—he was a big fan of Poe, so I chalked his occasionally morbid humor up to that. But he had that handsome face, and his pants fit him just so, and he liked to lecture Jacob about how smart I was after I’d, say, nervously folded up my napkin in a way he found charming.

  I got absolutely no work done while I was friends wit
h them. And hardly any reading, either. What I mean to say is that those were the happiest days of my entire life.

  Then we fell apart. I just stopped hearing from them. Ilan didn’t return my calls. I waited and waited, but I was remarkably poised about the whole thing. I assumed that Ilan had simply found a replacement mascot. And I imagined that Jacob—in love with Ilan, in his way—hardly registered the swapping out of one girl for another. Suddenly it seemed a mystery to me that I had ever wanted to be with them. Ilan was just a charming parrot. And Jacob the parrot’s parrot. And if Jacob was married and had a child wasn’t it time for him to grow up and spend his days like a responsible adult? That, anyway, was the disorganized crowd of my thoughts. Several months passed, and I almost convinced myself that I was glad to be alone again. I took on more tutoring work.

  Then one day I ran randomly (O.K., not so randomly—I was haunting our old spots like the most unredeemed of ghosts) into Jacob.

  For the duration of two iced teas, Jacob sat with me, repeatedly noting that, sadly, he really had no time at all, he really would have to be going. We chatted about this and that and about the tasteless yet uncanny ad campaign for a B movie called “Silent Hill” (the poster image was of a child normal in all respects except for the absence of a mouth), and Jacob went on and on about how much some prominent philosopher adored him, and about how deeply unmutual the feeling was, and about the burden of unsolicited love, until finally, my heart a hummingbird, I asked, “And how is Ilan?”

  Jacob’s face went the proverbial white. I don’t think I’d ever actually seen that happen to anyone. “I’m not supposed to tell you,” he said.

  Not saying anything seemed my best hope for remaining composed; I sipped at my tea.

  “I don’t want your feelings to be hurt,” Jacob went on. “I’m sure Ilan wouldn’t have wanted them hurt, either.”

  After a long pause, I said, “Jacob, I really am just a dusty librarian, not some disastrous heroine.” It was a bad imitation of something Ilan might have said with grace. “Just tell me.”