by Nina George
That’s what Henri told me the last time we talked. He’d arrived in London so stressed and so desperate that I felt like screaming, “What’s the bloody use of all this? Let’s be together. I love you so much. I love you, everything about you. Let’s be together for this life and every other. I can never get enough of you.”
He told me about dozens and dozens of people, and yet he never mentioned his son, Sam.
I spin the globe. It rotates only briefly, and yet those revolutions catapult me back two years into the past.
“I’m writing and traveling, drinking and trying to keep the nights at bay. Dawn is my foe. In Iceland I meet Etienne, a Canadian ocean cartographer who’s settled in Iceland and sees the world as most people will never see it—as the blue planet, whose principal feature is water, not land. Reality is flux,” Henri says, running his finger along the coastlines on the magnificent globe. “The areas we’ve explored are far smaller than those we know nothing about. In other words, we can see the world, but we don’t know it. We are dwarfed by reality.”
I quote this last sentence to Sam. He nods, and I see the question form on his face: What about me? Did he talk about me?
“Your teas are ready!” calls Emma.
Sam carries the tray as I push the BMW into the courtyard. We take the lift up to the publishing offices. It used to be the goods lift, and it’s decorated with painted tulip leaves, flowers, and bulbs. It stops at the fourth floor, where Ralph, Andrea, and Poppy work. From here a spiral staircase leads up to my flat.
Next to their messy desks stand a sofa (Ralph), several chairs (Poppy), and a farm bench scattered with embroidered cushions (Andrea). Ralph likes to surround himself with oriental furniture. Alongside his light table is a layout table where he occasionally does watercolors for our covers or makes copperplate prints with a hand-operated press. Poppy decorates her workplace with gothic objects and insignia, while Andrea stores manuscripts in scrupulously labeled Plexiglas containers surrounded by piles of books.
In the center of the room is the “atrium,” as we’ve named the large production table where the four of us work together on a book during the important prepublication stages, such as deciding on the cover, writing the blurb, and making the final adjustments before going to print. This is where Blue, our proofreader, sits when she comes in to check the galleys—the printouts of the typeset manuscript she must scan for any spelling and grammar mistakes. She plows through the pages while listening to Metallica or Berlioz at full volume on a gigantic pair of headphones.
Sam prowls around the office until he comes to the “trophy cabinet.” There, on shelves running along the big room’s long side wall, their covers facing outward, are all the books Realitycrash has published over the past twenty years. First editions, translations, special editions, reprints, and paperbacks.
Sam’s face lights up with delight and wonder. I catch myself blushing with pride. “We only publish speculative fiction. We aren’t big, but we are highly specialized. Two of our most successful titles are Schrödinger’s Cat and The House with a Thousand Doors. I founded Realitycrash at the age of twenty-four. I was a huge Michael Moorcock fan.”
Sam whispers, “The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius.”
“A Nomad of the Time Streams!” I shoot back.
Obviously enjoying our little joust, Sam counters with another Moorcock title, “The Eternal Champion.”
“I loved the Eternal Champions because—”
“They keep the multiverse in balance and make sure the parallel worlds don’t merge.”
We stare at each other, happy and surprised, and for a moment I’m thirteen again, a bookworm with a proclivity for subjects that remain largely obscure to others of my age. They read romantic novels, I read steampunk; they read Smash Hits and Just Seventeen, I read books by Ursula K. Le Guin about superluminal speeds and time theories. She gave me my maxim for life: “Truth is a matter of the imagination.” I had no one to share my exotic hobby with and would have given my right arm for a fellow reader like Sam.
We pick up our cups of tea from the tray and clink them gently, but alerted by the approaching click of lacquered high-heeled pumps, Sam spins around to be greeted by an incredible sight.
“Winnie darling, you haven’t given me any feedback on the cover design.”
Poppy blows her gleaming black, meticulously styled Bettie Page fringe out of her eyes. My press officer and marketing director is a practicing rockabilly girl with a bit of the pinup about her. Today she’s wearing a black dress with white polka dots and a red hem over seamed stockings and patent-leather Mary Jane shoes.
“Poppy, let me introduce Sam. Sam, this is Poppy. Sam’s into speculative fiction.”
“Oh, that’s lucky. It’s the only genre I like,” says my secret weapon, stretching out a delicate white hand in fingerless black lace gloves.
I don’t tell Sam that Poppy can do anything. She can spoil authors and take care of PR, have the press eating out of the palm of her hand, and compose amazing tweets even after seven Hendrick’s gin and tonics. I’ve known her for as long as I’ve run Realitycrash, which is to say twenty years, and we both love alternative realities, as do Ralph, the graphic designer, and Andrea, my chief editor.
Poppy is famous in the industry for the tattoo on her back. It depicts an open book in which she collects her favorite quotes by asking an artist to inscribe them in ink under her skin. Some authors would rather be immortalized on Poppy’s skin than win the Man Booker Prize.
She hands me a printout. We’re publishing a special tenth-anniversary edition of Thousand Doors.
“What’s it about?” Sam asks.
“It’s a multiworld scenario,” Andrea replies, having also left her corner with the Plexiglas-boxed manuscripts. “One day an anxious young criminal barrister discovers a door in his office that he’s never seen before. He steps through it and finds himself back in his office, only the parameters of his life have shifted ever so slightly. He has—”
“A fling with his boss’s wife,” Ralph completes the sentence after noticing the gathering by the trophy cabinet. “One hell of a moody diva, but what can you do?”
“He escapes, but doesn’t notice that he’s left through the hidden door of the second office,” Andrea explains, taking up the story again.
“And as he searches for the ‘best’ possible life, he becomes hopelessly confused by the thousand doors and the many thousands of different ways of living one’s life,” Poppy concludes.
What I haven’t revealed to Sam is that this was the unedited manuscript I read to my dead father over ten years ago as I kept my vigil beside his corpse. I know it practically by heart, and every time I see it I think of the silence in that room and of how empty life seemed without him. I think it took me four years to learn to laugh again without bursting into tears.
“What do you think of the cover?” I ask Sam.
He puts down his cup of tea, takes the design from my hands extremely earnestly, and studies it. The cover is very conventional—a blue door floating over a sea that turns out on closer inspection to be composed of dozens of similar doors. Covers are like faces: none ever pleases everybody, and they don’t always convey the full complexity of what’s behind them.
I wish there were a door I could walk through into a new life in which Henri and I had never met. Or else were a couple. With a little girl. And he wasn’t in a coma.
Sam says, “The cover’s for girls, whereas the story’s for boys. It sounds interesting, but the picture’s lame.”
Andrea groans, “Ouch!” Ralph says, “I told you so!,” and Poppy lays her arm around Sam’s shoulders and makes a suggestion. “Hey, Samuel, how about coming to all our cover presentations from now on? I think that having a genuine reader’s perspective would buck up our ideas. What do you say?”
He glances at her bashfully befor
e looking her squarely in the face and whispering almost inaudibly, “Okay!” He seems ready to explode with joy.
I did say that Poppy can do anything, even turn unhappy boys into young men—and very happy men at that.
“I think it’s a great idea, Sam,” Ralph agrees, “and if you know someone else who reads speculative fiction and—”
“My friend Scott!”
Oh, I do like you, little guy, I think. Your first thought is to share your good fortune rather than keep it all for yourself. My heart goes out to him.
The boy’s eyes alight on the large clock hanging on the wall of the corner kitchenette next to the stylized Doctor Who TARDIS. “I’ve got to go,” he says cheerlessly. “The SIG’s meeting at Forbidden Planet and then later at Kister Jones’s house.”
“SIG?” I ask. We’re all familiar with Forbidden Planet, London’s largest and best bookshop for science fiction, speculative fiction, and niche literature like our own.
“Special interest group,” Poppy says quickly, then adds, to Sam: “So you’re a Mensa member? Wow. How old are you—fifteen?”
“I’m thirteen. Well, almost fourteen, actually,” he replies, drawing himself up to his full height. Another sprinkle of magic from Poppy.
“You’re going to Kister’s?” says Ralph. “Well, say hi to him and tell him he still owes me a drink and a manuscript.”
“When did we start publishing Kister Jones?” I wonder aloud. Our budget doesn’t really stretch that far.
“He lost a bet, but I’ll say no more. Gentleman’s agreement.”
“Can you at least tell me what the book’s about, or is that also under embargo until publication?”
“Oh, the working title’s Slackline. It’s about people being put into induced comas so that they can travel through time in the dreams of the dead.”
There’s no need to look at Sam to know that Ralph’s words have punctured the sense of childish frivolity that has slowly returned to his demeanor over the past few hours. That’s how it is with pain: it responds to particular words the way a circus animal reacts to commands. Coma is the word that saps our courage and rekindles our dread.
“I’ll drop you at Forbidden Planet,” I whisper as Poppy admonishes Ralph with a punch on the arm and Andrea says, “Okay, I’ll come up with an alternative cover brief for Thousand Doors.”
* * *
—
Sam lets me take him to the tube station and no farther. Cracks have appeared in our fragile relationship. We’re standing close to the stairs, and a gust of air comes surging up from the Underground. It’s heavy with the typical smells of diesel and too many people, coupled with the heat generated by the trains. He looks me briefly in the eye as we say goodbye.
“We have a SIG group, organized by Mensa, that meets weekly” he whispers. “We always meet at Forbidden Planet and then go on to Kister Jones’s. My mother picks me up from there. She thinks I’ve been hanging out with Scott all day. She doesn’t want me to see my father, even though I’d never met him before all this happened. Thanks for the tea, and, well…bye.”
And with those cryptic comments, he leaves me standing there and runs down the steps.
“Hey!” I call after him. “Bring Scott with you next time!”
He turns round on the stairs and lifts his hand in a Vulcan salute.
I’d have loved to have had a child with Henri. I’d have loved to have had everything with Henri.
* * *
—
It’s dark by the time I feel too weary to drink any more Talisker. Its slight tang of amputation anesthetic has numbed my senses. I keep asking myself the same questions, but they are swirling around my head more slowly now.
Do I want this? Can I do this? Can I take care of Henri as Dr. Saul expects? Can I ask Wilder to put up with this? Can I ask myself to leave Henri alone? Will I be able to fetch him back? And what if I turn on him one day, if I feel like taking revenge or letting him die? And why, for hell’s sake, did Sam never see his father?
Dr. Saul advised me to consult other people to see if I wasn’t taking on too much, “biting off more than I could chew.” Sure, but the only person who knew me well enough, intimately, is dead. I still ask him, though. Silently I inquire, What should I do? Will I be able to do it? Should I do it?
My father was a lighthouse inspector. He didn’t just check the ones dotted along the Cornish coast but also those on the other side of the Channel, from Cherbourg to Saint Mathieu, just north of the roadstead of Brest. The sea around there was chock-full of lighthouses. He was able to hear if there was too little air in the bottles that heated the revolving lights. He could also hear if a storm was brewing by the whistling of the wind through the tower and open windows. And he would always steel himself before climbing a tower, especially during the winter months, when it felt as if he were ascending a fragile finger that rose mischievously from the foaming waves, while the waters crashed again and again around him, billowing up against the sides of the beacon like a giant collar of spray and rage.
My father told me to forget about the height of the staircase when I entered a lighthouse and to concentrate instead on the first step, taking it step by step from there.
“That’s how you confront a challenge that seems overwhelming at first. That’s how you manage.” Shrink the world, be precise; pay no heed to the long night before you but only to the next moment. That’s what he told me. “You must follow the path to the very end to get an overview of the whole journey, Edwina.”
I throw my arms around the pillow and press my face into it. It seems like an age before I finally doze off, and then Henri’s there, kissing my tummy. I can feel his lips and his breath. I feel him kissing the sides of my rib cage and up my neck, his mouth brushing mine and his lips on my eyelids, kissing me the way only he could and nobody else.
When I open my eyes to look at Henri and tell him I’ve had a dream, a terrible dream in which I chased him away and he fell into a coma after a mysterious accident, he isn’t there. Only my eyelids are cool, as if they’ve been kissed, really kissed, because the wind blowing in through the open window has dried the fine film of moisture on my delicate skin.
I’m forty-four. Henri rejected me long ago. I owe him nothing, let alone to sacrifice my life for his! No, I feel neither guilt nor any willingness to make sacrifices. I sense that any decision I make will be wrong.
I can decide against Wilder. Or Henri. Or myself.
Sam
Every evening my mother showers before she goes to bed. She applies a body lotion she orders from Paris that smells like pastry, and then sits in the kitchen in her knickers and bra until her skin has absorbed the cream. In the meantime she reads one of those pastel-colored novels that are on special offer at the supermarket.
She checks the last page of every new book first to make sure it has a happy ending; if not, she won’t even start the “stupid thing.” She sips a small glass of sparkling wine as she reads. No one’s allowed to speak to Marie-France during this ritual. Not Steve nor me, and even my younger brother, Malcolm, who used to be able to interrupt her when he was small, mustn’t disturb her.
I now know why she does this—it’s the only time she feels safe. The only time she knows that everything will turn out fine. My mother’s most urgent need is for everything to turn out fine after spending too long in parts of the world where life will never, ever be safe again. She’s seen every gate to hell.
I go into the back garden and sit there in the dark. I gaze at the house, the cube we live in. A small terrace house in Putney, with a bathroom whose light you turn off by tugging on a cord. My mother bought the brick-faced sandstone house because of this so-called garden, which consists of a patch of lawn and an evergreen hedge. Through the lit windows I can see Maman in the kitchen and Steve sitting in front of the television. There’s a football match on.
A small, safe cubic life.
I play a game called “If my father were here.” Here’s how it goes: I shut my eyes and imagine what it might be like and every idea comes true when I reopen my eyes. There would be a huge bookcase, crammed with novels. We’d have a dog called Winterfell or Lobsang. I’d wear a pointy black hat like Sir Terry Pratchett, and on Towel Day my father would quote Douglas Adams and spend all day in a striped dressing gown. My father would demonstrate how to cross a minefield on your own using a chopstick and a graffiti spray can. Eddie would come by on her motorbike. And Maddie would be there too.
I keep my eyes closed while I imagine Eddie climbing off her BMW and going into the house. My father would kiss her.
But what about Maddie? She’d come toward me with her hands covering her eyes, as in blindman’s buff, and yet she’d know exactly where I was. Suddenly she would be facing me, very close, and then she’d lower her hands and look at me.
When I open my eyes, the only books in the house other than my mother’s supermarket potboilers are still the ones in my room. Steve’s watching football, and Malcolm’s playing on his console.
“Super-Sander” is how Scott once described Steve. Steve’s a floor layer and works at a DIY superstore. He’s not such a bad guy, even if he does insist on calling me “Fanman,” as if he can’t remember my name. Scott’s usual name for my stepfather is “Fanman Steve.”