The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  “It’s about time!” shouted the young guy who answered the bell. His attitude answered my question about how Deborah had gotten Tim out in the first place. Inside help.

  “My God!” he said when he saw Tim. “What did you do to him?”

  “Never mind,” Deborah said. “Look, I brought new clothes.”

  We got Tim settled on his metal table.

  She put a hand on the young man’s arm. “I know you’ll make him look good.”

  We left.

  And Tim did look pretty good the next day at the funeral.

  Deborah and I walked arm in arm past the casket.

  “He looks a little squashed in the face,” I whispered.

  “It’s the G force,” she said. “Look at him go!”

  Patrick writes a lot of great stuff. Poetry, stories, novels, essays. His story collection Other Voices, Other Doors was the first trade paperback Fairwood Press put out. Before that, he’d published his first novel, Door Number Three, a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the year. Before that, Talebones published his first short story, “23 Skidoo,” which still makes me laugh and cry, thirteen years later. Artist Chris Whitlow attacked the reader with his purple people monster for issue #8, the first cover to feature full color.

  23 SKIDOO

  PATRICK O’ LEARY

  The Knowledge that I was erasing came upon me gradually. Like age. (For I am after all human.)

  My denial was so well programmed that it showed no glitches until that calm spring afternoon.

  It was a calm spring afternoon in Manhattan. The year was 1996. I had just left the FlatIron building — Manhattan’s first skyscraper — a gray and ornate wedge of stone — the nose of which rests on 23rd Street. I was muttering the phrase, “23 Skidoo,” which had just been explained to me when I saw a hot dog vendor buttering a thick dog with mustard and appetite kicked in (for I am after all human) and I approached the umbrella and got in line. He finished serving the lady in front of me, then looked over my shoulder at the boy on the skateboard and said, “Yeah?” and the boy said, “Yeah?” and the vendor said, “What’ll you have?”

  And before I knew it, the world had taken cuts, and I was fuming and I wondered, is this my life? Is this all I have to look forward too? I may as well be dead.

  “23 Skidoo” was the phrase, the SF Book Publisher explained after he had rejected my novel proposal, that Coppers used to scoot away the gawkers who stared slack jawed and incredulous at all fourteen stories of this new feat of modern architecture like a spaceship that had settled in Central Park. The prevailing wisdom (which I have learned on my expeditions is, contrary to appearances, untrustworthy) was that such a building was impossible and denied the laws of gravity. (There are three of them: two more than the prevailing wisdom acknowledges). I believe the spectators were waiting for it to fall.

  There are many ways to say Goodbye. Here are the most common: “See Ya!” “Bye Now!” “Later!” “Ciao!” “Ta!” I am particularly fond of “Bye Now.” Which, I’ll admit, has capitalist and temporal implications that, on my first hearing, led me down the route of metaphor. We are no good at metaphors. They are Dead Ends. They seem to be a genetic taste which you come naturally to, or should I say to which. I speak as people do (for I am after all human).

  “23 Skidoo” the cops would say, ushering the crowds away. Perhaps they too believed in the prevailing wisdom of the inevitable collapse.

  The hotdog man admonished me. “Patrick? What are you doing in New York? You should be logging out.” He was gentle. I liked him enormously. His apron was white and his attitude was Amish and, at that moment, I felt that maybe all this was one of those bizarre repercussions or episodes (or, as you call them, “side effects”) that resulted from my taking too much cold medicine. This, no doubt, triggered the perceptual discordances of the last twenty-four hours of my life.

  I’d been sneezing in the Publisher’s office and he had offered me the most lovely blue pills and it was only after I had swallowed them that I recalled that I did not recall when I had taken my last dosage of cold medicine. I shouldn’t have been in New York. I shouldn’t have been on the road. I knew this. But I had an appointment which I was trying to avoid in Detroit. I was determined to sell my novel. I had something important to say and, being human, I inflicted this knowledge on whoever would listen. Taxi drivers. Airplane passengers. My wife. My secretary.

  “You know, Patrick,” he said with a smirk. “You’re costing us a fortune in overtime. Do you think we would allow you to overstay your welcome? You are thinking like a human.”

  “I am a human,” I insisted. This seemed critical.

  “This happens to all of us. You’re Pre-Shed and you’re probably having an episode. Did you fall in love? Forget your pills? Oh, no — you didn’t go to a ball game, did you?”

  Did I? I wondered. It was a danger I had been warned about. Becoming a fan. Seduced by the arbitrary rules of recreation. But I am after all human and baseball is the National Past Time. “No,” I concluded. “No Baseball. I am writing a book. It is a Science Fiction. Also I have a cold. Also I have a question: Why won’t my wife talk to me?”

  “You’re Overdue,” he said simply.

  The phrase meant nothing to me. He was a stranger talking like an intimate. I was sick. This was New York. I was holding a hot dog.

  “Come see me, when I’m off duty. I’ve been there, pal. It’ll pass.”

  Strangers do not call me, “Pal.” It doesn’t happen. I am a sick man who needs to go home.

  How sick I was became evident as I ambled down the street and tried futilely to wave down a taxi. I can never remember when they are on-duty. When their lights are on? When their lights are off? And what is the first thing you remember when you wake up?

  An Indian taxi driver got the point, and when I mentioned the airport he said — in one of those cultural context interruptus moments I had specialized in noting — he said: “25 dollar.”

  Now your black says: “25 cent.” And your Indian says: “25 dollar.” And, as far as I can conclude everyone else says: “25 dollars and 25 cents.” I am told this has been my chief contribution. Singular and plural are not concepts to which We are accustomed. But it’s a big reality and I try to have an open mind. Perhaps that is the problem also.

  The driver informed me in what is called “Broken English” that we were headed toward “Robert De Niro” — Why an Actor and not a Location? I wondered. But I realized I was going to Hollywood by plane and Robert De Niro was really a character actor capable of adopting any variety of personas convincingly.

  “I am not well,” I informed the driver. I read his I.D. card posted on the screen.

  “I am not well . . . Thotakara Shumani Karanga.” I frowned. “Not from Kerala state?”

  He looked at me in the rear view mirror. His features were reversed, which is to say, the opposite of the unflattering picture on his I.D. card. “Yes. Kerala State. Yes? Yes?”

  “I hear the pomegranates are delicious in the spring.”

  “The Buddha’s Sweetness emanates all corporeality,” he commented.

  “Tampons are useful to bleeding women, no doubt you’ve noticed?”

  “No doubt!” he smiled.

  “Wayne!” I rejoiced.

  “Dennis!” he said. “What you are doing in the city of two names?”

  “Call me Patrick,” I corrected. The relief of having met my long lost volunteer brother could not moderate the ego of a new author. “I am trying to publish a Science Fiction,” I related.

  “Your memoirs?” he asked, shocked.

  “The cover is not blown yet,” I assured him. “I am resorting to caprice.”

  He eyed me. Were my features reversed as well?

  “Also I am annihilating germs. Also I am suffering side effects. Also the publisher was uncertain of my sanity and gave me blue pills,” I reported in the appropriate order.

  “Brother Dennis, you are skating on thin grace,” he squinted.
/>
  “Ice,” I corrected. “The phrase is Ice. Call me Patrick. I am after all human.”

  “You are Pre-Shed and about to go Off-Duty. You have been briefed. You know the dangers of lingering. Do you want Erasure? Is that what you are willing?”

  After a moment, I sighed and said: “It is a good story. An alien who adopts the body of human hosts in order to pass unseen among the host reality begins to lose his identity and becomes human. I thought it had great potential. Also I am lonely.”

  “My dear Dennis. I am driving you to La Guardia. You will take a plane to LAX. You will complete your status form. You will return to Detroit and take a taxi to your office. These are not options. Renegade Syndrome is well documented. Resistance is futile. Go to the office. Do not stop to see your wife. Am I making clear what I am saying to you?”

  “Very Clear,” I said. Reading the label of an eye medicine in my memory. There are associations which still elude us.

  I woke up driving in a Los Angeles rental car in order to get my license renewed. I was overcome by an uncomfortable state of paranoia. I was becoming two people. The coach rubbing your back after you’ve had the wind knocked out of you and the man who worries every cop will arrest him, every driver should not be operating heavy machinery, and threaded through all this: the insistent urge to sleep. We all have to rest some time.

  At the Secretary Of States I was overcome by an urge to giggle. I was handed a pink questionnaire, and I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t focus on the questions. I managed to press on regardless until I came to the one that read: “If you are taking cold medicine you should A) Call your Doctor. B) Get off the road. C) Not operate any heavy machinery. D) Read the label, Patrick. Go to your office. Log out. You are sick. Your wife is sleeping with another man and she is enjoying it.”

  I went home. Home is Detroit. I do not remember the plane ride. I have been in many airports, so this should not be alarming.

  At home my wife said. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Your husband,” I said with a smile. What a kidder. I stood on the front porch and I lifted my two carryon bags and waited for admittance. Also I wanted sex.

  “And my husband is . . . ?”

  “Me. Honey. Stop.” I smiled.

  “My husband was in New York, you bastard, and he died in a plane crash on the way to L.A., and this is pretty damn insensitive of you if you ask me.”

  “Fine.” I ventured. I am after all a reasonable man. “You are upset. I don’t talk to you enough. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and I believe we can reconcile. Also I want sex.”

  “After what you did to me?” she said and slammed the door in my face.

  Which brought up three questions. They seemed important at the time. Humans have a unique capacity to create new questions. It is their specialty, and in my clearer moments, it is what I most envy about them.

  Three questions: I stood on my wife’s porch — ownership has never been a problematic concept for a race which freely exercises the right to “Husk.”

  Three questions:

  Why is yellow?

  How far are the gods?

  When did pain?

  Like so many questions, asking them doesn’t help. Apparently, this does not irritate humans.

  I remember the plane ride to Detroit now.

  The nose tipped skyward and the jet sprang off its wheels.

  “You grunted?” said the young man in the seat beside him. Rough beard. Short, greasy bangs. He smiled. “Scared?” He turned the word into two syllables.

  “I hate takeoffs,” Dennis said. My name was Dennis then. I had resorted to a previous ID. I was getting tired of “Patrick” and all his ideas.

  “Sweaty palms? Butterflies?” the man asked.

  Dennis overturned the human questions in his mind, stunned by their beauty. And their lack of verbs. “Aren’t you afraid of flying?” he asked the young man.

  “Naaa. I got a system.” The young man bent closer and whispered, “My uncle’s a pilot. I call him before every flight. I tell him the make and he tells me the safest seat. This is a 767. Nothing in the rear. Stay off the wings. They tear out on impact and take the windows with ’em. First thirteen rows is your safest bet. Aisle seat.” He patted the arm rests.

  “Aisle seat,” said Dennis.

  “Right. Imagine trying to climb over a couple of hysterical passengers with sprained wrists in a cabin filled with smoke.”

  “But I got the aisle seat,” Dennis said.

  The man smiled painfully. “Late booking.”

  Someone behind them pressed the “call” button. The one with the icon of a woman on it. The first time I ever saw one I had made the rookie’s error of metaphor and had looped into references to “Call Girls” which gave me nothing but the urge to masturbate.

  There was A Loud Ding.

  The stranger smiled. “So you’re sitting pretty and I’m fucked.”

  “Doesn’t seem to bother you.”

  “I figure I can take you.”

  Dennis recognized a challenge when he heard one. Humans did it all the time.

  The young man smiled. “Just kidding. See, airplanes are like living. Except we know we’re going to crash — we don’t know when. We don’t think about it. If we thought about it we’d go crazy.”

  Dennis thought about it. Perhaps this is what had happened to Patrick.

  “No, it was the novel,” I insisted from an adjourning hemisphere. “You try writing a Science Fiction novel without resorting to autobiography. What a headache.”

  Dennis interrupted. “Also you are sick, Patrick. Also you are overdue. Also you have been Paused. Obey the precedence and give me a break.”

  The young man was talking. “They say it happens mostly on takeoffs and landings.”

  “Landings never bothered me,” Dennis admitted then shuddered. “Not after the first one.”

  The pilot came on and in a thick Spanish accent said that they were ahead of schedule due to prevailing winds.

  “Damn!” said the man.

  “What?”

  “That’s another thing.”

  “What?”

  “My uncle says never fly with a pilot whose first language isn’t English. Universal language of Air Traffic. And the best flight schools.”

  He saw the arm of a passenger ahead of them press the “call” button.

  There was A Loud Ding.

  “So. I’m a student. What are you?”

  After a brief scuffle with Patrick, he said, “Government work.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “You teach Government?”

  “No. English. But right now I’ve got a consulting project for the CIA.”

  “Really? Cool. But isn’t that, like, secret or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why you telling me?”

  The Pause was over and Patrick answered, “I have questionable judgement.”

  The young man laughed. “So if I told anyone, I’d be blowing your cover?”

  Patrick smiled. “And I’d have to kill you.”

  The stranger laughed again.

  The plane bucked and the air made pockets and Dennis grunted.

  “Doppler is an inexact science,” the young man assured me.

  At that moment, someone else pressed their “call” button.

  There was A Loud Ding.

  When the jet landed, a crowd of tourists up front applauded. This startled Dennis, who was unused to hurtling 600 miles an hour through the stratosphere in a submarine tube of metal. Not to mention the frigid silverware. Patrick unpaused again and his aislemate leaned over and, smirking, said, “Germans. They always do that.”

  At this remove I cannot reconstruct how the young man had talked me into coming to his apartment. He seemed harmless. And Patrick was in no hurry to visit his wife. Or go to work.

  The stranger called himself “John.” He insisted I come back to his place. It wa
sn’t far. A small chilly room above a mixed imported nuts shop, facing Eastern Market. He led a spartan existence. Bare wooden floors. The color scheme was brown and grey and black. Lots of candles and ashtrays. There was a black unmade futon under the window that looked out over the ugliest mural of a chicken I had ever seen.

  The layout of the room suggested a focus: everything seemed assembled deliberately around the stereo system in the corner. There were towering stacks and stacks of tapes meticulously labeled in a scrawny hand. Everything was black. The components, the shelves, the speakers. There was one picture on the wall. A portrait of Jim Morrison.

  John made me some tea that seemed to clear my mind, and insisted I sit on his futon as he paced about the room and gestured. He was round and pudgy and homely and he had a way of moving his hands as he talked as if he were pulling thoughts out of the air. You have no idea how complex gestures are. They exercise an almost hypnotic effect upon us. I felt swept up in his energy and passion. I felt that if I only hung on a little longer, I would break through. Truly become human. Enter the realm of the knowing. Be given admission to the inner circle.

  John seemed to naturally reside there.

  “This is so cool. This is amazing. See, the thing is, you must have been meant to find me because you’re the only one who didn’t change seats. Relax, man, I’m not a Jesus Freak or anything. I gave up all that Jesus shit in ’78. Phonies and Acid Burn Outs. That’s all they were. No integrity. No balls. They couldn’t follow God to the logical extreme. You know? You see?” He indicated the poster with his head. “Jim Morrison knew.”

  “I never liked The Doors,” I admitted.

  He nodded. “OK. Point Taken. A lot of it is phoney caucasian alcoholic bullshit blues. But on the edges, man, there’s poetry. ‘Horse Latitudes.’ ‘The Soft Parade.’ He was a brave dude. Fearless. He knew about the Other Side.”

  “The Other Side?” I asked reluctantly.

  He nodded. He walked over to the tape deck, ran a finger reverently down the spine of a dozen tapes, and selected one with glee. He turned and held it up to me. “The real stuff. Not the bullshit personas we wear every day. The evidence. Who we are. What we feel. Where we’re going. I’ve got it all.”