The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  I didn’t leave immediately. I stayed with Katie until dawn, until she was asleep, with her dreams.

  As I drove up the mountain to leave the desert, an old man with elongated features was riding a bicycle up with me. He wore red shorts. His skin was a weird tint of orange, his body bony and muscular. He looked like he was a hundred years old. I tried to get away from him. He maintained his speed alongside me.

  “Hey there!” he said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I can keep up with you,” he said.

  I picked up the speed, tires screeching around every sharp corner. He was still beside me.

  “You see?” he said.

  “It is pretty amazing,” I said.

  “It’s like I have superhuman strength,” he said.

  “Maybe that’s because you’re not a human,” I said.

  “You make a good point,” he said.

  “Look, what do you want?” I asked.

  “Nothing really.”

  I shrugged. Let him do what he wanted to do. I ignored him. At some point, I’m not sure when, he wasn’t alongside me anymore.

  XVIII.

  Sheila and the mothman were lounging around naked in the living room, drinking coffee and eating bagels and watching the news on TV.

  “Hello, Neil,” Sheila said, without a hint of embarrassment or shame.

  “Good morning,” the mothman said.

  I sat across from them. “Do you have a name?”

  “Call me Bud,” he said. He laughed: a strong, confident chuckle.

  “This is going to be hard to explain,” Sheila said to me.

  “No, it won’t,” said Bud the mothman. “I believe he already understands.”

  “I remember seeing an image of Bud when I was a young girl,” Sheila said. “I was at church, people were singing a hymn. I closed my eyes. I saw him. He was making love to me.”

  “An unusual image to have in the throes of praise to Jesus,” Bud said.

  “The rip in reality is closing,” I said, sounding like Katie.

  “Yes,” the mothman said, “it has.”

  “Don’t you need to go back where you belong?”

  “No.”

  “You intend to stay here?”

  “Yes,” he said, “with Sheila.”

  She went into his arms. His wings moved in around her.

  “You don’t want her,” Bud the mothman said, “and I do.”

  “You have Katie,” Sheila said. “I was mad at you about that. I’m not anymore. Things have a way of working out.”

  I said, “He can’t possibly exist in this reality.”

  “Of course I can,” Bud said.

  “How?”

  “How does any creature exist in this reality?” he said.

  “You make a good point.” I stood up.

  The mothman added, “There have been others like me, not like me, over the centuries, who have. It’s called love.”

  I gathered up a few necessities into a suitcase and left.

  I drove back to the desert, to Katie.

  —October, 1998

  San Diego

  HARDBOILED ZOMBIE DETECTIVE

  I. “WHO KILLED ME?”

  …and then I woke up. I couldn’t breathe. It was, in retrospect, the most godawful feeling I ever had and God had nothing to do with it. I didn’t know where the hell I was. Mud, thick and wet like greasy shit, filled my mouth and it didn’t taste like anything really; it was slimy and going down my throat—I couldn’t scream, I could not fucking scream and that was the one thing I wanted to do most of all.

  I was under the earth.

  I reached out and broke free—my fist felt air and the storm. It was raining hard. The rain was making the dirt above me into mud.

  I pulled myself up, I climbed out.

  The grave I was in was shallow, dug in haste.

  I had no idea how I got there.

  I wasn’t even sure who I was—my name, my profession, the year, what city I was in.

  I was in a dark and desolate place. Thunder rolled across the sky like a giant bowling alley, and the rain came down harder. I spit out the mud from my mouth, blew it out of my nose, opened my mouth to the dark and stormy sky and drank the rain.

  I was so goddamn thirsty.

  I wore a gray and rumpled suit, torn here and there; my shirt was untucked and my thin black tie loosened. I didn’t have any shoes on. I thought: they bury the dead barefoot.

  But I wasn’t dead.

  Whoever put me in the grave fucked up.

  And I was going to fuck them up.

  I’m a Scorpio, I like revenge.

  Funny: that’s all I knew about myself: my zodiac sign and that I was, or had been, the unforgiving sort.

  I touched my chest and felt the bullet holes. I’d been shot twice, and I kind of remembered that. Yes, I’d been shot in the chest, in the heart, but I didn’t know who did it, or why.

  I stuck my finger into the bullet holes. No blood.

  Any other time, that’d be funny.

  I began to walk.

  The ones question in my mind, the only thing that was driving me to move through this storm and the night, was: who killed me?

  Who the fuck killed me, and how the heck did I come back to life?

  * * * *

  I found the road and the road looked familiar. I knew I had to walk west, that would get me somewhere. I walked with my bare feet and stared at the ground. The rainstorm subsided and became a manageable drizzle. It was cold but I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel much. I noticed light. I looked up. Two high beams. A car was approaching. The light hurt my eyes as the car got closer. I moved, slowly (my back somewhat at a hunch, my feet dragging) to the other side of the road and put my thumb out.

  I could only imagine how I looked. How I smelled. Nobody in his or her right mind would give a horrid, ungainly fellow like me a lift.

  But it was worth a try.

  So I put my thumb out.

  The car was a nice big Buick with tail fins. It stopped. The window rolled down. The man driving was in his fifties, wore a Hawaiian shirt and polyester pants. He took one glance at me and said: “Holy shit.”

  “I know,” I said, “listen—”

  He shook his head with apparent disgust, was about to gun it. Something took me over—something vile and ancient, something revolting and, in a grand and unspeakable way, pure. I took hold of the door handle and pulled. The door was locked; I had incredible strength and knew I had this powerful thing inside me—or the burning call for what I did next; it gave me the superhuman capacity to break the lock and literally yank the door off and toss the door aside, into the air, like it was cardboard.

  So this is what happened: I grabbed the man by the collar of his Hawaiian shirt—complimented him on the fabric—then snapped his neck like a straw, bashed his skull in half a dozen times onto the hood of his Buick until his head was split open and his brains were exposed; then I clamped my mouth down onto his brains and had myself a feast.

  Oh, it was sick and vile and somewhere in the back of my own brain (if I even had one now) I was telling myself to stop—but I could not stop. I relished the taste of the blood and skull meat…and the more I ate, the better I felt.

  It was the only thing that mattered in the universe, in that very crucial moment: that I eat a human brain and shudder in the ecstasy and tasty delight of it all.

  There was something wrong with me, sure, but I didn’t give a fuck.

  II. “THE GIDEON PRIVATE INVESTIGATION AGENCY”

  I drove the Buick downtown. Signs told me that I was in Miami, Florida, Dade County. Oh yes, that rang a bell all right. There was a wallet in my jacket pocket; at a stop sign, I looked in it. $33 in wrinkled, wet tens and ones and a Florida Driver’s License. Arthur Laurence Gideon. DOB: 11-15-33. I also had a private investigator’s license, with a business address. I knew where that
place was, where my office was. My office. I knew who I was now; I just didn’t know who the fuck killed me.

  I knew that it was October in 1966. I was thirty-three years old and would be thirty-four next month. I’d been married ten years ago, when I lived in San Diego; my young wife had died of cancer.

  I lived alone, I was alone, and I was a gumshoe in Miami.…

  That’s all I could recall.…

  I parked the Buick in front of the building where I had my office. It was starting to rain hard again.

  I had keys in my pants pocket. The light was on in my office, which was located at the back end of the third floor.

  I went inside.

  A woman’s voice—a yelp, a small scream, one gasp—

  “Arty?!?”

  “Who goes there?” I said.

  “Who do you think?”

  She was a curvy, voluptuous brunette with short-cropped hair and large, pointed breasts in a very, very tight white blouse and a very, very tight black skirt cut two inches above the knee, in black stockings and black, three-inch pumps. She wore black-rimmed glasses and bright red lipstick. It took me a few seconds, but I remembered who she was.

  “Miss Melfile,” I said with a sigh.

  Her name was Lissa Melfile and she was my secretary, had been for the past eighteen months.

  “Arty,” she said. “I mean, Mr. Gideon. Oh gosh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I—I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

  “I—”

  “Tell me.”

  “You look awful.”

  I said, “I feel awful.”

  “I wasn’t…,” she started to say, and began to cry.

  I glanced at the wall clock. “It’s three in the morning. What are you doing here at this hour?”

  “Waiting for you, of course,” she said. “I’ve been worried.”

  “How long have I been gone?”

  She looked at me with watery eyes like she figured I was nuts.

  “How long?” I said.

  “Three days,” she replied softly.

  “I don’t remember the last three days,” I said, “or even the last three weeks, or three months. My memory…has some…gaps.”

  I hoped I looked as confused as I felt.

  “Maybe you’re missing some of your, uh, memory,” and she was looking at my head when she told me this, and cried more.

  I said: “What is it? Why are you—?”

  “Go look in the mirror, Mr. Gideon.”

  I went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Let’s just say that I was not prepared for what I saw in the mirror above the basin.…

  I almost screamed but did not. A man does not scream like a little girl when he’s in his office and his secretary is near.

  Not only was I pasty pale with dark circles under my yellow eyes, not only did I have two bullet holes in my chest and blood and mud and who-knows-what-else all over my suit and skin, but I was missing half the left side of my head and my brain matter was exposed.

  Not only that, my left eye was dangling out of the socket. I popped it back in.

  “Aw, shit,” I whispered.

  Plus, I was barefoot!

  * * * *

  I told my secretary to please stop crying please, and she nodded. I told her to sit down and she sat in the chair in front of my big expensive oak desk. I remembered paying a lot of money for this desk—I always wanted such a desk and the day I could afford it, I went and got it. Well, at least I remembered something. Little things were coming back, like torn parts of blurry photographs. I felt like drinking booze, for some goddamn reason, and I knew I had the stuff—right in the big desk. I opened a drawer and found a half-full bottle of Maker’s Mark and a few little paper cups.

  “Join me?” I said.

  “Always,” Lissa Melfile said.

  She sat and crossed her long legs; I looked at her legs and knew I should be feeling something—a distant stir that had to be desire, sex.

  And I felt nothing.

  Miss Melfile sipped at her cup and coughed like she wasn’t used to the burn of alcohol. “That always hits the spot,” she said, and I remembered suddenly that she seldom drank.

  I drank and again I felt nothing—not the singe, not the warmth, not the buzz in the head that makes people want to drink more and more.

  “What happened to you, Mr. Gideon?” she asked.

  “Do you call me by my first name, or ‘Mr. Gideon’?”

  She blushed. “Depends. Both.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Oh,” she said and looked away.

  “Are we sleeping together?”

  “I could be insulted by a remark like that. I should be.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I understand—it’s a memory thing.”

  “Well?”

  “We were, for a short while.…”

  “But?”

  “But it wasn’t feeling like the right thing to do,” she said. “I mean, I work for you. We have that employer-employee relationship. You said—”

  “How goddamn typical for a private eye to be slipping the sausage to his secretary.”

  “Yes! That’s what you said! And—”

  I sat back in my chair and said: “I hate being a cliché.”

  “Yes, that’s what you—you remember now?”

  “No. But I figure that’s what I’d say. It’s what I’m thinking…right now.”

  “It was both of us,” she said. “I didn’t…well, Arty, if I can call you that, Mr. Gideon…I often wonder about your heart.”

  I looked at the holes in my chest.

  She said: “Most of the time it’s like you don’t have any feelings in you. Like you don’t have any emotions. I know you gotta be tough in this business, but when you’re with a lady in the bedroom, a man has to drop the hardboiled act…unless it’s not an act.”

  I nodded.

  “You know what I mean?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’m beginning to hark back to a night or two that we fucked.”

  “Sometimes you can be a real bastard, Mr. Gideon!”

  “I know.”

  “But that’s okay,” she said. “Most people are bastards.”

  “I still don’t recollect a whole lot.”

  “So you don’t know how—you got like you are?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it’ll come back.”

  “Do you know what I was doing? What case I was on?”

  “I should hope so,” she said with a smile, “or else I’d be a very bad secretary. You were on a missing persons case—some runaway girl, came from a rich family. But don’t they all?”

  “I was about to say that.”

  “Of course you were.”

  We smiled at each other. I wondered how gory my smile looked; hers was very pretty.

  Pretty. Yes. She was. I was feeling something down there, that thing I called my prick.

  “Was I making any progress?” I asked.

  “You never really tell me the details of your cases. I write your reports when you give them to me, handle your correspondence and invoices.…”

  I nodded.

  “Arty?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look like you’re dead.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I do.”

  “I mean, the wounds on you.…”

  “Ain’t pretty, is it,” I said.

  “You should be dead.”

  “I think I am.”

  “I was afraid something like that happened, like your check got cashed.”

  But she was looking at my face with too much interest for me to believe she had any fear.

  I said: “What’s the girl’s name? The one I’m looking for?”

  “Jenna Rush. Her father is Samuel Rush.”

  “He’s rich? A bigwig?”

  “Senator Rus
h,” she said. “The Rushes go back to the plantation days. Old money.”

  “A Senator?”

  “Our very own Republican.”

  “Hmmm,” I hmmmed. “Do I usually take cases for government officials?”

  “Mr. Gideon,” she said, “you take any case, as long as the money is green and it isn’t counterfeit.”

  III. “WEIRD SEX WITH A SECRET NECROPHILE”

  Obviously what I had to do was backtrack; I’d need to call on the Senator, find out just what, exactly, he sent me on. Miss Melfile said I didn’t have any other cases pending, so somewhere along in my sleuthing to find the missing girl I died and came back to life and had a desire to eat human brains.

  It was a good thing I gobbled down the brains of that guy in the Buick and I was satiated on the matter, for now; or else I may have cracked open my secretary’s skull and feasted on her mind. Instead, I kept looking at her pointy breasts and legs and feeling some other kind of want.

  “What I really need to do is call Senator Rush,” I said out loud, and reached for the phone.

  “At this uncivilized hour?” Miss Melfile said.

  I put the phone down. “Of course. It can wait till later.”

  She yawned.

  “Maybe I should get some rest,” I said, “go to bed.”

  “That would be a good idea.”

  “I have an apartment? A home? Or do I sleep here on the couch?”

  “You have a bungalow by the beach. It’s very nice.”

  “Do you have a car? I need a ride…home.”

  “Yes. What happened to your vehicle?”

  “I don’t know. I came here in a stolen Buick.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Borrowed,” I said.

  “Oh Arty,” she said.

  “What,” I said, “do I do this often?”

  She sighed and said: “Let’s go, I’ll drive you home.”

  * * * *

  She had a VW Bug. I felt cramped inside but couldn’t complain, she was concerned for me and that was an alien feeling. I kept looking at Miss Melfile’s pleasing-to-the-eye (even if I had one that kept popping out) legs. She drove a few miles toward the beach, to a stretch of beach bungalows that looked pricey and cozy. Parked in front of one and said: “This is your bachelor pad, Mr. Gideon.”