The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  “Good luck,” Lisa called out to me, breaking the rules, “Congratulations!”

  They were all before me now. I had always said when it was time for my fifteen minutes, I knew exactly where I would look as I sang my song, or danced, or told my joke, or exposed my genitals. So I peered out over the sea of limbs and howling faces to the spot on a nearby corner where I used to stand, feet precariously balanced, fist pumping in the air. Someone was there, I could see a flash of blue, a shirt, maybe jeans? But whoever was standing there was just a blur. I tried to make out somebody’s face, but even the people in the front row, the ones crushed against the stage, they were all screaming mouth or semiconscious swoon. So I just stared at the microphone and spoke.

  “Thank you, thank you all for your support. My brother, I’m sure, feels your love, the way I do now. I never wanted my fifteen minutes of fame to start this way, with my only living relative trapped in a space capsule, unable to land. I just wish that each and every one of us will take a deep breath, right now, just one breath. And I pray to God above,” and this point I gestured upward at a giant holographic antidepressant tablet beamed onto a cloud, “that our love just gives him one more breath for each person here tonight!” The crowd cheered. I looked at the clock. Five minutes left. Time for meaningless sex and cocaine. I dove into the crowd and let the carpet of arms embrace me and drag me down.

  It was a crippled old peasant woman, swathed in colorful scarves, who brought me lines of the purest cocaine on a silver tray. “Peruvian,” one of my handlers whispered to me, “the woman, the coke, the silver, all of it. Part of our New Realism campaign.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, turning my head, but my handler (they slide through the crowds, anointing and prodding those whose turn it is) had already melded back into the wall of people. I took the tray into my hands and watched the peasant woman right herself as I snorted. She swayed and stripped, dancing out of her indigenous clothing and tearing off the latex wrinkles, to show off her perfect young body, the best that money, my money could buy. I forgot my brother’s name.

  Three minutes. A game show, a quick memoir, maybe recording another sentence for posterity, I didn’t want to go back to work yet. It is pure tedium in the factories, whether you’re sewing the sequins onto a gown or making snacks, or in charge of building guitars to be smashed. The police have it slightly better, they get to choose where they stand in the perpetual party economy, but they don’t get their fifteen minutes of fame until they beat down or shoot the right person, or the wrong one. The handlers, well, nobody knows where they come from, but they have to be making a mint. I’d tell Lisa, back when we were equals, that I thought that handlers arranged the whole thing, that they were the only ones who got a piece of all the action. They got a piece of everyone’s fifteen minutes, the food concessions, the factories, the travel and the ads that color the dome of night. They even get to tax us all to pay for the sweeping up every morning, while we work to make sure the party goes on.

  And then Lisa would tell me, “At least we’re white. The Third Worlders only get their fame when the handlers decide to stage a war party. I don’t want my fifteen minutes to come from being dug out of a mass grave.” She was always so straightforward. I found it harder to shove the broiled weenies into the dough when she’d get like that, but then I would think of my fifteen minutes and feel better.

  A man came up to me and punched me hard in the face to the light of a million flashbulbs. The image of me on the ground, bleeding from the nose, crying, was instantly beamed across the earth. The crowd shifted slightly as the man’s own fifteen minutes began. A world of microphones wanted to know why he did it, why did he punch a man in his hour of need? And then wanted to know how I felt.

  “No pain!” I said, still crazed from the noise, the drugs, and the smells of the party economy. “No pain!” I said, rising to my feet. “No pain!” I pumped my fist in the air, and thousands followed my lead, proving that there was no pain with razors and syringes and cigarettes extinguished into arms, thighs and necks. There was pain though. I had one minute left. One minute left, then my world would end again. “Who to lay, what to say, was there time for another song or another t-shirt with my name, or is this an end game?” I said aloud, mostly to myself.

  “Hey, you’re a poet, nice,” said a young woman with a tape recorder. She hit stop. And as she walked away, ignoring me like I was a ghost or a peasant, I knew my fame was over.

  Some time later. The same day, the next? I was on the assembly line again, making four cents for each cocktail I wrapped in dough. Lisa was next to me.

  “Your brother,” she said slowly, “still has thirty seconds left. Your fame overshadowed his for a few minutes, but I’ve always been a fan of astronauts. I’ve been following him on the news.”

  “He was very brave,” I said, sounding like the assembly line. It was a lockstep response. I didn’t want to think about my time at the top anymore. Just let me work, let some master tell me how to move, how to shave a precious half-second from my technique, so that I can make a few more pigs in blankets every day.

  “You should watch the TV,” Lisa said, nodding up towards it. The factory had televisions over every work station, all the factories did. You could tell who had been famous, and who had not. The obscure watched while they worked, people like me spent their day staring at their hands instead. I looked up though and my brother was on, weightless, still alive, but gaunt and bearded.

  “Hello America, hello world. This is Commander M of the spacecraft Nike. I’ve come to a decision. As you all know, I lost radio contact at 0900 hours, Swatch Time. The radiation that caused the system breakdown finally abated, and I’m able to communicate with you all. There are still too many malfunctions, I will not be able to return to earth, but I have made a decision.”

  I knew what the decision was. After all, he had a few seconds left.

  “I have asked for and received clearance to leave orbit. I will head towards deep space and spend the rest of my time, until the oxygen on the Nike runs out, watching television signals transmitted into deep space. My own liftoff, sitcoms, who knows,” he said, winking back a tear, “maybe I’ll even be able to watch an old World Series game, one I missed as a kid. Is there a better way to die, than surrounded by the memories you love? Nike, after all, was the ancient Greek goddess of victory, and the end of this mission will be a victory to us all.”

  I turned to Lisa, but couldn’t catch her eye. She was teletranced, in communion with my brother. She wanted to be up there too, watching old television commercials, listening to the hit songs and jingles we remembered as kids, without having to worry about anything else, not even the quickly fading oxygen supply. We all did. I turned away from the television and went back to work.

  Jennifer Rachel Baumer had four stories published in the magazine, and “The Forever Sleep” appeared in issue #26. She says 9/11 and the crash of an American Airlines flight in November 2001 caused her to write this “other way out.” Jennifer had two previous stories in the magazine, but this was my favorite, and it included a haunting illustration by Frank Wu.

  THE FOREVER SLEEP

  JENNIFER RACHEL BAUMER

  Not long after they’d given up on The Tonight Show and gone upstairs to bed, Jerry heard it coming. The drone of jet engines, too close, too low and something wrong. It was still some distance off but it was coming fast and he didn’t figure he had a lot of time. Jerry’s hearing was amazing — incredible — but a couple miles was nothing to a jet.

  Christy was already gone, deep into a Forever Sleep. That’s what she called it when she plunged over the abyss into sleep. Jerry hated the term but it was true — Christy asleep was Christy vacated. So Jerry alone was awake, the insomniac. The therapist kept suggesting biofeedback and self-hypnotism, said they were working for Jerry’s daughter, and Jerry kept saying next week as if next week would have more time.

  Speculation took maybe twenty seconds, maybe only ten, and then he was upright,
half-dressed out of deference to a New York winter, Christy up and over his shoulder and the speed of sound coming towards them, increasing but not yet blotting out the world, the sound of the plane to the point where normally one looks up and wishes it would pass, maybe thumbs the remote to up the volume on the television. But it was there, increasing, coming closer, how many minutes away? Miles? Blocks? He had no time. He ran, Christy jolting against his back, downstairs to the pink bedroom where Carly lived, only she wasn’t awake, their six-year-old insomniac, slipped off into her mother’s Forever Sleep and she’d locked her door the way she’d been told time after time after time never to do.

  The sound was on top of them, the plane a matter of blocks away. Seconds only. He figured he had three blocks, maybe less, and he could hear the wrongness in the engines, something, not the sound of a plane going overhead and what did you say and wow, that’s loud, but the kind of misstep that sends planes down into the ground like gravity really does work.

  He pounded on her door, shouted, solid wood under his fist and there was nothing on the other side, only silence, only sleep, and the plane filled the world — he’d lose them all. One last shouted “Carly!” before he ran.

  Jerry ran, Christy coming awake, starting to surface, and vaguely combative, ran for the basement stairs, down them so fast one of them should have been hurt, into the sub-basement, old house, civil war days, revolutionary war days. There were tunnels. There were escape routes. Christy surfaced and screamed “Carly!” in a voice that sounded like jet fuel ignited and then the sound was on top of them and then there was.

  Silence.

  They held each other in the moments after, eyes wide and staring over each other’s shoulders, staring into each other’s eyes. Light flickered over them. Power held, somehow. A series of explosions shook the earth. The basement walls shuddered and held. Smoke filled their lair. They had to go further into the tunnels and up and out from there. Or back to the house.

  “It’s on fire,” Christy said and was out of his arms before he could even grab for her.

  “Please —” but he was following. Of course he was following, it was the only reason he wasn’t leading. Wife and daughter, one he could get to and carry to safety, one he couldn’t; how do you choose? Stairs like ice under his feet — he could feel them this time — and getting warmer as they went higher. When they pushed the door open into the house he expected flames. Instead the door from the basements opened into the engine, huge and filling the world. The blades had stopped spinning, stopped sparking, stopped doing whatever it was jet engines did. He turned to Christy to say, “I’m going in there,” and she was already past him.

  Convoluted. Like a nautilus shell. They doubled back on themselves time after time. There was nothing around them but the industrial gray of engine housing. They could move almost upright, trailing through as if finding their way through a maze. Farther in with every turn around curved metal fan blades, curved metal walls, they’d walked through the back of a blow dryer, or one of those industrial fans on buildings, but there was depth and there was trail and always they moved farther in and it was taking too much time, following Christy and when she fell, sobbing, Jerry pulled her up and took her hand and led the way.

  Staging area next. Something. There was a place where engine ended and another world began. To their left and ahead they could see into the plane, frozen expressions on the passengers’ faces. This was a lost place. A Forever Sleep. To the right and just ahead, where there should have been more plane and a way to the cockpit, no admission, crew only, there was instead a corridor of the same industrial airline gray. They didn’t speak but followed. What would it be this time? Jerry thought. Terrorism, domestic or foreign. Human error. Another senseless tragedy. Why are planes routed over neighborhoods? Bad enough airports are ensconced in the heart of cities — and “Nothing’s supposed to go wrong,” Christy would say, those times he asked this aloud, and Jerry always said, “Well, of course it’s not supposed to,” and sometimes that ended the conversation and sometimes it didn’t.

  He moved faster. She was up ahead somewhere, his Carly — caught in the passages between life and death, safe for the moment in the Forever Sleep and they had to reach her before she woke.

  “Are they dead?” Christy asked. They moved through the gray and around them the passengers sat in their seats, tray tables upright and seatbelts securely fastened, as if waiting for the seatbelt sign to go out so they could move freely around the cabin. Sat securely tucked in, neat and arranged, hands natural, faces rigid. “Jerry?”

  “I think its their last minute,” he said. “The last way they remembered looking before —” he spread his hands. Before the wreck they couldn’t see, the crash that had shattered their homes and lives and somewhere up ahead Carly, please, God, in the Forever Sleep. “We have to get to her,” Jerry said. Along the gray metal nowhere, curved walls either side and they were running into the stillness and silence, but the smoke and the sounds were starting to come in, starting to filter along the cracks in the metal (the cracks in the dream.) Hurry, he whispered, to Christy, to himself.

  Running now, and their footfalls were hollow and he thought he could hear the very distant sound of sirens, likely the aircraft would have radioed for help and word would have gone out, it’s going down and the location, pinpointed seconds after the crash, but sirens already on the way and sirens always woke Carly, the insomniac six-year-old, even once she slept dreams couldn’t hold her, she woke if people talked too loudly or a car went by trailing music or if a dog nearby barked a handful of times or if a siren went off in the city. Unless she fell into the Forever Sleep.

  Long tunnel, gray, and webbed, he thought he could see through panels of it, understood, suddenly, the tunnels were concourses sent from terminal to plane, the carpeted accordion pleated covered walkways that stretched from Point A to Point B. They ran, their footfalls jolting the concourse, bouncing the fold-up walls, he could hear Christy’s breath sobbing in and out, Carly’s name under her breath but not loud enough to wake her, please let her be in a Forever Sleep, one of the times Carly toppled over and down into sleep as deep as her mother’s. Please let her be dreaming. Let her be waiting.

  “It’s changing,” Christy said. She slowed. Jerry wanted to keep running. “Jerry, listen.”

  He followed her example, slowing, his footsteps quieter until they stood together, listening. Dull gray corridor and there had been sound minutes ago, something past the panicked pounding of their feet, the bouncing of the moveable throughway. A sound like the engine, Jerry thought now. Like something mechanical, failing. Like the plane had sounded as it headed for their home.

  “Jerry?”

  He put his hand up against her. “Wait.” Soft sound. Vibrating. Like something gearing up. Idling. Like a plane on power but not ready to taxi. “Something’s changed it,” he said, and Christy looked like she was going to say something, instead turned and ran, further along the corridor, in the lead again, and Jerry followed.

  The plane formed around them, plane as it might look to someone who had only flown a couple times. Outline, only. Seats, aisles, overhead compartments, windows. The aisles were wrong, though, the seats something like school desks. The doors to the plane had changed. Everything askew.

  “What is it?” Christy asked.

  “She’s changing it,” Jerry said. The aisle stretched out in front of them, impossibly long. Passengers lined up in the seats, facing straight ahead, eyes open, chests moving but otherwise as stick figured as the passengers they’d passed at first.

  “Carly,” Christy breathed and Jerry whispered, “Shhh,” moved forward, gray becoming color, color becoming pink and Christy’s intake of breath behind him, when he turned she had covered her mouth with one hand. The other hand reached for his. Jerry took it tightly and turned the doorknob to his daughter’s room.

  The unlocked door opened easily.

  Pink, the way she wanted it. Princess pink, Disney pink, six-year-old
girl pink, and in the center of it Carly slept in a tangle of limbs, mouth slightly open and eyes squinched shut in the Forever Sleep.

  The room filled with the sound of the jet engine the way Jerry had never heard it — strong, steady. There was no tremor, no uncertainty, no underlying sound that signaled something was wrong. Just the jet, the way Carly had heard it, before Jerry did, far enough out that nothing had gone wrong yet, Carly the insomniac whose hearing put Jerry’s to shame, who heard the first foreign note enter the plane’s refrain. And then? And then forced herself to sleep, the therapist’s biofeedback or relaxation training or whatever technique she used working for her as it had yet to work for Jerry. Carly the insomniac with enough time to throw herself into one of Christy’s Forever Sleeps, enough time to enter into the land of dream. In Carly’s world the plane continued overhead, the engines strong and steady. In Carly’s world, her family was safe.

  “Carly,” Christy said and Jerry jolted. The sirens were closer still.

  “Don’t.” He said it so quietly she didn’t hear him and started to speak again. Jerry moved faster, hands up over her mouth, his movement shocking her, her daughter’s name cut off. “She’s holding it off,” he said and Christy stared at him, hands gesturing.

  “You can’t mean — we can’t let her sleep —” she fumbled over the last word, “forever.”

  There were tears on his cheeks, cold in the night air. The sound of sirens was closer. Christy would hear them soon. Carly would wake. He heard the sirens and smelled acrid smoke, oily, dark and chemical. It had already happened and not yet, a fact held in abeyance. The world breathed between possibilities. Christy looked from husband to daughter, mouth opening. Smoke billowed. Sirens crept closer. Carly whimpered and moved restlessly. Jerry panicked, one look at Christy, begging her not to speak, and then he scooped up Carly, flushed face close to his, held her the way he did when she’d fallen asleep during a car trip and he carried her in to her bed. Carly mumbled and let her head fall against his chest. Jerry wasted an eternal instant staring down at her before he motioned to Christy, come on, back toward the tunnels. Christy first, ducking slightly as she entered the metal corridor, as though the ceiling of the walkway had lowered slightly, hemming them in. Jerry frowned at it even as he followed her in, waited just for an instant to see what the plane was doing. Hum of jet engines, strong and steady and then, for an instant, for a heart stopping moment, the engine stuttered.