Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  But it was. Why else would they be here? He saw Lehman standing behind her, now, looking fidgety and guilty. There were others there also. Eyaseyab, for one. A little party to celebrate his release. In the solitude of his cell he had lost track of the days somehow. He must have.

  Sandburg took him by the hand. Numbly he let her lead him out into the hall.

  “These are your slaves,” she said. “I’m giving Eyaseyab to you.”

  “Thank you.” What else did you say, when they gave you a slave?

  “And a charioteer, and a cook, and some others.”

  Davis nodded. “Thank you very much,” he said stonily.

  She leaned close to him. “Are you ever going to forgive us?” she asked in a soft, earnest tone. “You know we really had no choice. I wish you had never come looking for us. But once you did, we had to do what we did. If you could only believe how sorry I am, Edward—”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course you are.”

  He stepped past her, and into the hall, and on beyond, around a row of huge columns and into the open air. It was a hot, dry day, like all the other days. The sun was immense. It took up half the sky. I am an Egyptian now, he thought. I will never see my own era again. Fine. Fine. Whatever will be, will be. He took a deep breath. The air was like fire. It had a burning smell. Somewhere down at the far end of the colonnade, priests in splendid brocaded robes were carrying out some sort of rite, an incomprehensible passing back and forth of alabaster vessels, golden crowns, images of vultures and cobras. One priest wore the hawk-mask, one the crocodile-mask, one the ibis-mask. They no longer looked strange to him. They could have stepped right out of the reliefs on the wall of his cell.

  Eyaseyab came up beside him and took his arm. She nestled close.

  “You will not miss your old home,” she said. “I will see to that.”

  So she knew the story too.

  “You’re very kind,” he said.

  “Believe me,” Eyaseyab said. “You will be happy here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Perhaps I will.”

  The masked priests were casting handfuls of some aromatic oil on a little fire in front of a small shrine. Flames rose from it, green and turquoise and crimson ones. Then one of them turned toward him and held out a tapering white vessel of the oil as if inviting him to throw some on too.

  How different from Indiana all this is, Davis thought. And then he smiled. Indiana was 3500 years away. No: farther even than that. There was no Indiana. There never had been. Indiana was something out of a dream that had ended. This was a different dream now.

  “It is the Nekhabet fire,” Eyaseyab said. “He wants you to make an offering. Go on. Do it, Edward-Davis. Do it!”

  He looked back toward Sandburg and Lehman. They were nodding and pointing. They wanted him to do it too.

  He had no idea what the Nekhabet fire was. But he shrugged and walked toward the shrine, and the priest handed him the vessel of oil. Hesitating only a moment, Davis upended it over the fire, and watched a sudden burst of colors come blazing up at him, for a moment as bright as the colors of the jump-field vortex itself. Then they died away and the fire was as it had been.

  “What was that all about?” he asked Sandburg.

  “The new citizen asks the protection of Isis,” she said. “And it is granted. Isis watches over you, now and forever. Come, now. We’ll take you to your new home.”

  IT COMES AND GOES

  The rainy season of 1990-91 went on and on; and I, having finished my allotted rainy-season novel far ahead of schedule, trudged onward into the new year still writing short fiction. First came the novella, Thebes of the Hundred Gates, and then, late in January, 1991, this odd little story, occupying the hazy borderline between science-fiction and fantasy, that went to Playboy.

  And involved me, for the only time in my long career, in an artistic crisis stemming from a magazine’s advertising policy. My protagonist in “It Comes and Goes” is an alcoholic. Playboy, unlike science-fiction magazines, depends substantially on advertising for its income, and no little fraction of that comes from ads for liquor. In some embarrassment, the powers that be at Playboy let me know that it would be awkward for the magazine to run a story about an alcoholic in an issue that was going to have an advertisement for whiskey on its back cover. But Playboy does not run ads for cocaine or marijuana. Would I, I was asked, mind making my character a drug addict instead?

  For ten agonizing seconds I debated whether my artistic integrity would be compromised by that. But for story purposes all that mattered, really, was that my character be recovering from some substance-abuse problem that had caused him to suffer from hallucinations; and a drug habit would do that at least as efficiently as alcohol, perhaps better. So I made a few small modifications in my text and the story ran in the January, 1992 Playboy, which, as a Christmas issue, was loaded with liquor ads.

  On the other hand, I’ve chosen to reprint my original version of the story here, not as some ultimate gesture of defiance, but simply because it happens that the version of the text that I happened to store in my computer is the one in which Tom was a boozer instead of a druggie. On such casual, even random events are founded the textual issues which literary scholars debate with great passion for centuries.

  ——————

  The house comes and goes, comes and goes, and no one seems to know or to care. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You keep your head down; you take notice only of the things that are relevant to your own personal welfare; you screen everything else out as irrelevant or meaningless or potentially threatening.

  It’s a very ordinary house, thirty or forty years old, a cheap one-story white-stucco job on a corner lot, maybe six rooms: green shutters on the windows, a scruffy lawn, a narrow, badly paved path running from the street to the front steps. There’s a screen door in front of the regular one. To the right and left of the doorway is some unkempt shrubbery with odds and ends of rusting junk scattered among it—a garbage can, an old barbecue outfit, stuff like that.

  All the houses around here look much the same way: there isn’t a lot of architectural variety in this neighborhood. Just rows of ordinary little houses adding up to a really ordinary kind of place, neither a slum nor anything desirable, aging houses inhabited by stranded people who can’t move upward and who are settled enough so that they’ve stopped slipping down. Even the street-names are stereotyped small-town standards, instantly forgettable: Maple, Oak, Spruce, Pine. It’s hard to tell one street from another, and usually there’s no reason why you should. You’re able to recognize your own, and the others, except for Walnut Street where the shops are, are just filler. I know how to get to the white house with the screen door from my place—turn right, down to the corner and right again, diagonal left across the street—but even now I couldn’t tell you whether it’s on Spruce corner of Oak or Pine corner of Maple. I just know how to get there.

  The house will stay here for five or six days at a time and then one morning I’ll come out and the lot will be vacant, and so it remains for ten days or two weeks. And then there it is again. You’d think people would notice that, you’d think they’d talk; but they’re all keeping their heads down, I guess. I keep my head down too but I can’t help noticing things. In that sense I don’t belong in this part of town. In most other senses I guess I do, because, after all, this is where I am.

  The first time I saw the house was on a drizzly Monday morning on the cusp of winter and spring. I remember that it was a Monday because people were going to work and I wasn’t, and that was still a new concept for me. I remember that it was on the cusp of winter and spring because there were still some curling trails of dirty snow on the north-facing side of the street, left over from an early-March storm, but the forsythias and crocuses were blooming in the gardens on the south-facing side. I was walking down to the grocery on Walnut Street to pick up the morning paper. Daily walking, rain or shine, is very important to me; it’s part of my recovery regimen; and I was go
ing for the paper because I was still into studying the help-wanted ads at that time. As I made my way down Spruce Street (or maybe it was Pine Street) some movement in a doorway across the way caught my eye and I glanced up and over.

  A flash of flesh, it was.

  A woman, turning in the open doorway.

  A naked woman, so it seemed. I had just a quick side glimpse, fuzzed and blurred by the screen door and the gray light of the cloudy morning, but I was sure I saw gleaming golden flesh: a bare shoulder, a sinuous hip, a long stretch of haunch and thigh and butt and calf, maybe a bit of bright pubic fleece also. And then she was gone, leaving incandescent tracks on my mind.

  I stopped right on a dime and stood staring toward the darkness of the doorway, waiting to see if she’d reappear. Hoping that she would. Praying that she would, actually. It wasn’t because I was in such desperate need of a free show but because I wanted her to have been real. Not simply an hallucination. I was sober that morning and had been for a month and a half, ever since the seventh of February, and I didn’t want to think that I was still having hallucinations.

  The doorway stayed dark. She didn’t reappear.

  Of course not. She couldn’t reappear because she had never been there in the first place. What I had seen was an illusion. How could she possibly have been real? Real women around here don’t flash their bare butts in front doorways at nine in the morning on cold drizzly days, and they don’t have hips and thighs and legs like that.

  But I let myself off the hook. After all, I was sober. Why borrow trouble? It had been a trick of the light, I told myself. Or maybe, maybe a curious fluke of my weary, overwrought mind. An odd mental prank. But in any case nothing to take seriously, nothing symptomatic of significant cerebral decline and collapse.

  I went on down to the Walnut Street Grocery and bought that morning’s Post-Star and looked through the classified ads for the one that said, If you are an intelligent, capable, hard-working human being who has gone through a bad time but is now in recovery and looking to make a comeback in the great game of life, we have just the job for you. It wasn’t there. Somehow it never was.

  On my way home I thought I’d give the white house on the corner lot a second glance, just in case something else of interest was showing. The house wasn’t there either.

  My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

  My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

  My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

  I tell you that three times because what I tell you three times is true. If anything at all is true about me, that much is. It is also true that I am forty years old, that I have had successful careers in advertising, public relations, mail-order promotion, and several other word-oriented professions. Each of those successful careers came to an unsuccessful end. I have written three novels and a bunch of short stories, too. And between the ages of sixteen and thirty-nine I consumed a quantity of brandy, scotch, bourbon, sherry, rum, and beer—and so on down to Cherry Kijafa, Triple Sec, and gin fizzes—that normal people would find very hard to believe. I suppose I would have gone on to rubbing alcohol and antifreeze if nothing else had been available. On my fortieth birthday I finally took the necessary step, which was to admit that alcohol was a monster too strong for me to grapple with and my life had become unmanageable as a result. And that I was willing to turn to a Power that is stronger than I am, stronger even than the booze monster, and humbly ask that Power to restore me to sanity and help me defend myself against my enemy.

  I live now in a small furnished room in a small town so dull you can’t remember the names of the streets. I belong to the Program and I go to meetings three or four times a week and I tell people whose surnames I don’t know about my faults, which I freely admit, and my virtues, which I do have, and about my one great weakness. And then they tell me about theirs.

  My name is Tom and I am an alcoholic.

  I’ve been doing pretty well since the seventh of February.

  Hallucinations were one thing I didn’t need in this time of recovery. I had already had my share.

  I didn’t realize at that point that the house had vanished. People don’t customarily think in terms of houses vanishing, not if their heads are screwed on right, and as I have just pointed out I had a vested interest in believing that as of the seventh of February my head was screwed on right and it was going to stay that way.

  No, what I thought was simply that I must have gone to the grocery by way of one street and come home by way of another. Since I was sober and had been for a month and a half, there was no other rational explanation.

  I went home and made some phone calls to potential employers, with the usual result. I watched some television. If you’ve never stayed home on a weekday morning you can’t imagine what television is like at that time of day, most of it. After a while I found myself tuning to the home shopping channel for the sheer excitement of it.

  I thought about the flash of flesh in the screen doorway.

  I thought about the color of the label on a bottle of Johnny Walker, too. You don’t ever stop thinking about things like that, the look of labels and bottlecaps and the shape of bottles and the taste of what’s inside and the effect that it has. You may stop using the product but you don’t banish it from your mind, quite the contrary, and when you aren’t thinking about the flavor or the effect you’re thinking about weird peripheral things like the look of the label. Believe me, you are.

  It rained for three or four days, miserable non-stop rain, and I didn’t do much of anything. Then finally I went outdoors again, a right and a right and look across to the left, and there was the white house, very bright in the spring sunshine. Very casually I glanced over at it. No flashes of flesh this time.

  I saw something much stranger, though. A rolled-up copy of the morning paper was lying on the lawn of a house with brown shingles next door. A dog was sniffing around it, a goofy-faced nondescript white mutt with long legs and a black head. Abruptly the dog scooped the paper up in its jaws, as dogs will do, and turned and trotted around to the front of the white house.

  The screen door opened a little way. I didn’t see anybody opening it. It remained ajar. The wooden door behind it seemed to be open also.

  The dog stood there, looking around, shaking its head from side to side. It seemed bewildered. As I watched, it dropped the paper and began to pant, its tongue hanging out as if this were the middle of July and not the end of March. Then it picked the paper up again, bending for it in an oddly rigid, robotic way. It raised its head and turned and stared right at me, almost as though it was asking me to help it. Its eyes were glassy and its ears were standing up and twitching. Its back was arched like a cat’s. Its tail rose straight up behind it. I heard low rusty-sounding growls.

  Then, abruptly, it visibly relaxed. It lowered its ears and a look of something like relief came into its eyes and its posture became a good old droopy dog-posture again. It wriggled its shoulders almost playfully. Wagged its tail. And went galloping through the open screen door, bounding and prancing in that dumb doggy way that they have, holding the newspaper high. The door closed behind it.

  I stayed around for a little while. The door stayed closed. The dog didn’t come out.

  I wondered which I would rather believe: that I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in, or that I had imagined I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in?

  Then there was the cat event. This was a day or two later.

  The cat was a lop-eared ginger tom. I had seen it around before. I like cats. I liked this one especially. He was a survivor, a street-smart guy. I hoped to learn a thing or two from him.

  He was on the lawn of the white house. The screen door was ajar again. The cat was staring toward it and he looked absolutely outraged.

  His fur was standing out half a mile and his tail was lashing like a whip and his ears were flattened back against his head. He was hissing and growling at the same time, and the growl was that eerie banshee moan that reminds
you what jungle creatures cats still are. He was quivering as if he had electrodes in him. I saw muscles violently rippling along his flanks and great convulsive shivers running the length of his spine.

  “Hey, easy does it, fellow!” I told him. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, guy?”

  What the matter was was that his legs seemed to want to move toward the house and his brain didn’t. He was struggling every step of the way. The house was calling him, I thought suddenly, astonishing myself with the idea. As it had called the dog. You call a dog long enough and eventually his dog instincts take command and he comes, whether he feels like it or not. But you can’t make a cat do a fucking thing against its will, not without a struggle. There was a struggle going on now. I stood there and watched it and I felt real uneasiness.

  The cat lost.

  He fought with truly desperate fury, but he kept moving closer to the door all the same. He managed to hold back for a moment just as he reached the first step, and I thought he was going to succeed in breaking loose from whatever was pulling him. But then his muscles stopped quivering and his fur went back where it belonged and his whole body perceptibly slackened; and he crept across the threshold in a pathetically beaten-looking way.

  At my meeting that night I wanted to ask the others whether they knew anything about the white house with the screen door. They had all grown up in this place; I had lived here only a couple of months. Maybe the white house had a reputation for weirdness. But I wasn’t sure which street it was on and a round-faced man named Eddie had had a close escape from the bottle after an ugly fight with his wife and needed to talk about that, and when that was over we all sat around the table and discussed the high school basketball playoffs. High school basketball is a very big thing in this part of the state. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Do you mind if I change the subject, fellows? Because I saw a house a few blocks from here gobble up a dog and then a cat like it was a roach motel.” They’d just think I had gone back on the sauce and they’d rally round like crazy to help me get steady again.