“Oh, god, there’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”
“He knows that now.”
Zia’s gaze went back to me and I made a continuing motion with my hand. “And he wants,” she went on, then caught herself. “He wanted you to know that he’ll always love you. That he never held you to blame for what happened to him.”
The old woman put her arms around Zia.
“Oh, my boy,” she said. “My poor, poor boy.”
“He wants you to be happy,” Zia said. “We both do.”
The woman shook her head against Zia’s shoulder.
“I don’t even know the meaning of the word anymore,” she said.
“Will you at least try?”
The old woman sat up and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her housecoat.
“How does one even begin?” she said.
“Well, sometimes, if you pretend you’re happy, you can trick yourself into at least feeling better.”
“I don’t think I could do that.”
“Try by celebrating our lives,” Zia said. “Remember both your children with love and joy. There’ll always be sadness, but try to remember that it wasn’t always that way.”
“No,” the old woman said slowly. “You’re right. It wasn’t. I don’t know if you can even remember, but we were once a happy family. But then Ted left and I had to go back to work, and you children…you were robbed of the life you should have had.”
“It happens,” Zia said—a touch too matter-of-factly for the ghost of a dead girl, I thought, but the old woman didn’t appear to notice.
“It’s time for me to go, Mama,” Zia added. “Will you let me go?”
“Can’t you stay just a little longer?”
“No,” Zia said. “Let me walk you back to your bed.”
She got up and the two of them left the room, the old woman leaning on Zia.
“I’m going to wake up in the morning,” I heard the old woman say from the hall, “and this will all have just been a dream.”
“Not if you don’t want it to,” Zia told her. “You’ve got a strong will. Look how long you kept me from moving on. You can remember this—everything we’ve talked about—for what it really was. And if you try hard, you can be happy again…”
Donald and I waited in the bedroom until Zia returned.
“Is she asleep?” I asked.
Zia nodded. “I think all of this exhausted her.” She turned to Donald. “So how do you feel now?”
“I feel strange,” he said. “Like there’s something tugging at me…trying to pull me away.”
“That’s because it’s time for you to move on,” I told him.
“I guess.”
“You’re remembered now,” Zia said. “That’s what was holding you back before.”
He gave a slow nod. “Listening to her…it didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. I mean, I understand now, but…”
“Life’s not very tidy,” Zia said, “so I suppose there’s no reason for death to be any different.”
“I…”
He was harder to hear. I gave him a careful study and realized he’d grown much more insubstantial.
“It’s hard to hold on,” he said. “To stay here.”
“Then don’t,” Zia told him.
I nodded. “Just let go.”
“But I’m…scared.”
Zia and I looked at each other.
“We were here at the beginning of things,” she said, turning back to him, “before Raven pulled the world out of that old pot of his. We’ve been in the great beyond that lies on the other side of the long ago. It’s…”
She looked at me.
“It’s very peaceful there,” I finished for her.
“I don’t want to go to Hell,” he said. “What if I go to Hell?”
His voice was very faint now and I could hardly make him out in the gloom of the room.
“You won’t go to Hell,” I said.
I didn’t know if there was a Heaven or a Hell or what lay on the other side of living. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But there was no reason to tell him that. He wanted certainty.
“Hell’s for bad people,” I told him, “and you’re just a poor kid who got stung by a bee.”
I saw the fading remnants of his mouth moving, but I couldn’t make out the words. And then he was gone.
I looked at Zia.
“I don’t feel any better,” I said. “Did we help him?”
“I don’t know. We must have. We did what he wanted.”
“I suppose.”
“And he’s gone on now.”
She linked her arm in mine and walked me into the between.
“I had this idea for a store,” she said.
“I know. Where you don’t sell anything. Instead people just bring you stuff.”
She nodded. “It was a pretty dumb idea.”
“It wasn’t that bad. I’ve had worse.”
“I know you have.”
We stepped out of the between onto the fire escape outside the apartment. I looked across the city. Dawn was still a long way off, but everywhere I could see the lights of the city, the headlights of cars moving between the tall canyons of the buildings.
“I think we need to go somewhere and make a big happy noise,” Zia said. “We have to go mad and dance and sing and do cartwheels along the telephone wires like we’re famous trapeze artists.”
“Because…?”
“Because it’s better than feeling sad.”
So we did.
And later we returned to the Rookery and woke up all the cousins until every blackbird in every tree was part of our loud croaking and raspy chorus. I saw Lucius open the window of his library and look out. When he saw Zia and I, leading the cacophony from our high perch in one of the old oak trees in the backyard, he just shook his head and closed the window again.
But not before I saw him smile to himself.
I went back to the old woman’s apartment a few weeks later to see if the ghost boy was really gone. I meant to go sooner, but something distracting always seemed to come up before I could actually get going.
Zia might tell me about a hoard of Mardi Gras beads she’d found in a dumpster and then off we’d have to go to collect them all, bringing them back to the Rookery where we festooned the trees with them until Lucius finally asked us to take them down, his voice polite, but firm, the way it always got when he felt we’d gone the step too far.
Or Chlöe might call us into the house because she’d made us each a sugar pie, big fat pies with much more filling than crust, because we liked the filling the best. We didn’t even need the crust, except then it would just be pudding, which we also liked, but it wasn’t pie, now was it?
Once we had to go into the far away to help our friend Jilly, because we promised we would if she ever called us. So when she did, we went to her. That promise had never been like a chain dangling from our feet when we flew, but it still felt good to be done with it.
But finally I remembered the ghost boy and managed to not get distracted before I could make my way to his mother’s apartment. When I got there, they were both gone, the old woman and her dead son. Instead, there was a young man I didn’t recognize sitting in the kitchen when I stepped out of the between. He was in the middle of spooning ice cream into a bowl.
“Do you want some?” he asked.
He was one of those people who didn’t seem the least bit surprised to find me appearing out of thin air in the middle of his kitchen. Tomorrow morning, he probably wouldn’t even remember I’d been here.
“What flavour is it?” I asked.
“Chocolate swirl with bits of Oreo cookies mixed in.”
“I’d love some,” I told him and got myself a bowl from the cupboard.
He filled my bowl with a generous helping and we both spent a few moments enjoying the ice cream. I looked down the hall as I ate and saw all the cardboard boxes. My gaze went back to the young man’s face
.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Nels.”
He didn’t ask me my name, but I didn’t mind.
“This is a good invention,” I said, holding up a spoonful of ice cream. “Chocolate and ice cream and cookies all mixed up in the same package.”
“It’s not new. They’ve had it for ages.”
“But it’s still good.”
“Mmm.”
“So what happened to the old woman who lived here?” I asked.
“I didn’t know her,” he told me. “The realtor brought me by a couple of days ago and I liked the place, so I rented it. I’m pretty sure he said she’d passed away.”
So much for her being happy. But maybe there was something else on the other side of living. Maybe she and her ghost boy and her daughter were all together again and she was happy.
It was a better ending to the story than others I could imagine.
“So,” I asked Nels, “are you happy?”
He paused with a spoonful of ice cream halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“Do you have any ghosts?”
“Everybody’s got ghosts.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “I suppose one of the measures of how you live your life is how well you make your peace with them.”
My bowl was empty, but I didn’t fill it up again. I stood up from the table.
“Do you want some help unpacking?” I asked.
“Nah. I’m good. Are you off?’
“You know me,” I said, although of course he didn’t. “Places to go, people to meet. Things to do.”
He smiled. “Well, don’t be a stranger. Or at least not any stranger than you already are.”
I laughed.
“You’re a funny man, Nels,” I said.
And then I stepped away into the between. I stood there for a few moments, watching him.
He got up from the table, returned the ice cream to the freezer and washed out the bowls and utensils we’d used. When he was done, he walked into the hall and picked up a box which he took into the living room, out of my sight.
I could tell that he’d already forgotten me.
“Goodbye, Nels,” I said, though he couldn’t hear me. “Goodbye, Ghost Boy. Goodbye, old lady.” I knew they couldn’t hear me, either.
Then I stepped from the between, out onto the fire escape. I unfolded black wings and flew back to the Rookery, singing loudly all the way.
At least I thought of it as singing.
As I got near Stanton Street, a man waiting for his dog to relieve itself looked up to see me go by.
“Goddamned crows,” he said.
He took a plastic bag out of his pocket and deftly bagged his dog’s poop.
I sang louder, a laughing arpeggio of croaking notes.
Being happy was better than not, I decided. And it was certainly better than scooping up dog poop. If I was ever to write a story the way that Christy did, it would be very short. And I’d only have the one story because after it, I wouldn’t need any more.
It would go like this:
Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after. The end.
That’s a much better sort of story than the messy ones that make up our lives. At least that’s what I think.
But I wouldn’t want to live in that story, because that would be too boring. I’d rather be caught up in the clutter of living, flying high above the streets and houses, making a joyful noise.
The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories
Neil Gaiman
It was raining when I arrived in L.A., and I felt myself surrounded by a hundred old movies.
There was a limo driver in a black uniform waiting for me at the airport, holding a white sheet of cardboard with my name misspelled neatly upon it.
“I’m taking you straight to your hotel, sir,” said the driver. He seemed vaguely disappointed that I didn’t have any real luggage for him to carry, just a battered overnight bag stuffed with T-shirts, underwear, and socks.
“Is it far?”
He shook his head. “Maybe twenty-five, thirty minutes. You ever been to L.A. before?”
“No.”
“Well, what I always say, L.A. is a thirty-minute town. Wherever you want to go, it’s thirty minutes away. No more.”
He hauled my bag into the boot of the car, which he called the trunk, and opened the door for me to climb into the back.
“So where you from?” he asked, as we headed out of the airport into the slick wet neon-spattered streets.
“England.”
“England, eh?”
“Yes. Have you ever been there?”
“Nosir. I’ve seen movies. You an actor?”
“I’m a writer.”
He lost interest. Occasionally he would swear at other drivers, under his breath.
He swerved suddenly, changing lanes. We passed a four-car pileup in the lane we had been in.
“You get a little rain in this city, all of a sudden everybody forgets how to drive,” he told me. I burrowed further into the cushions in the back. “You get rain in England, I hear.” It was a statement, not a question.
“A little.”
“More than a little. Rains every day in England.” He laughed. “And thick fog. Real thick, thick fog.”
“Not really.”
“Whaddaya mean, no?” he asked, puzzled, defensive. “I’ve seen movies.”
We sat in silence then, driving through the Hollywood rain; but after a while he said: “Ask them for the room Belushi died in.”
“Pardon?”
“Belushi. John Belushi. It was your hotel he died in. Drugs. You heard about that?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“They made a movie about his death. Some fat guy, didn’t look nothing like him. But nobody tells the real truth about his death. Y’see, he wasn’t alone. There were two other guys with him. Studios didn’t want any shit. But you’re a limo driver, you hear things.”
“Really?”
“Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. They were there with him. All of them going doo-doo on the happy dust.”
The hotel building was a white mock-gothic chateau. I said good-bye to the chauffeur and checked in; I did not ask about the room in which Belushi had died.
I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.
Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of a wall in the courtyard.
I walked up the stairs into a dank little room. It seemed a poor kind of a place for a star to die.
The bed seemed slightly damp, and the rain drummed a maddening beat on the air-conditioning system.
I watched a little television—the rerun wasteland: Cheers segued imperceptibly into Taxi, which flickered into black and white and became I Love Lucy—then stumbled into sleep.
I dreamed of drummers intermittently drumming, only thirty minutes away.
The phone woke me. “Hey-hey-hey-hey. You made it okay then?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Jacob at the studio. Are we still on for breakfast, hey-hey?”
“Breakfast…?”
“No problem. I’ll pick you up at your hotel in thirty minutes. Reservations are already made. No problems. You got my messages?”
“I…”
“Faxed ’em through last night. See you.”
The rain had stopped. The sunshine was warm and bright: proper Hollywood light. I walked up to the main building, walking on a carpet of crushed eucalyptus leaves—the cough medicine smell from the night before.
They handed me an envelope with a fax in it—my schedule for the next few days, with messages of encouragement and faxed handwritten doodles in the margin, saying things like
“This is Gonna be a Blockbuster!” and “Is this Going to be a Great Movie or What!” The fax was signed by Jacob Klein, obviously the voice on the phone. I had never before had any dealings with a Jacob Klein.
A small red sports car drew up outside the hotel. The driver got out and waved at me. I walked over. He had a trim, pepper-and-salt beard, a smile that was almost bankable, and a gold chain around his neck. He showed me a copy of Sons of Man.
He was Jacob. We shook hands.
“Is David around? David Gambol?”
David Gambol was the man I’d spoken to earlier on the phone when arranging the trip. He wasn’t the producer. I wasn’t certain quite what he was. He described himself as “attached to the project.”
“David’s not with the studio anymore. I’m kind of running the project now, and I want you to know I’m really psyched. Hey-hey.”
“That’s good?”
We got in the car. “Where’s the meeting?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s not a meeting,” he said. “It’s a breakfast.” I looked puzzled. He took pity on me. “A kind of pre-meeting meeting,” he explained.
We drove from the hotel to a mall somewhere half an hour away while Jacob told me how much he enjoyed my book and how delighted he was that he’d become attached to the project. He said it was his idea to have me put up in the hotel—“Give you the kind of Hollywood experience you’d never get at the Four Seasons or Ma Maison, right?”—and asked me if I was staying in the chalet in which John Belushi had died. I told him I didn’t know, but that I rather doubted it.
“You know who he was with, when he died? They covered it up, the studios.”
“No. Who?”
“Meryl and Dustin.”
“This is Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman we’re talking about?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know this?”
“People talk. It’s Hollywood. You know?”
I nodded as if I did know, but I didn’t.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.
Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself.
The irritating question they ask us—us being writers—is: “Where do you get your ideas?”
The Urban Fantasy Anthology Page 7