Wilde Stories 2014

by Editred by Steve Berman

  “Why should we?” he asked. “Patterson said he’d sign the bill, if it’s passed. We can marry in Gracie Mansion, if we want to. Knowing Tommy’s contacts, he can swing that, by Bloomberg himself, no less. Have a cheap-o wedding; splurge on a fucking big reception.”

  “I’ll come to the wedding. Wherever it is, be it Boston or New York, I’m there.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “I’m serious, Danny,” I said. “Your happiness is important to me.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel snorted. “Whatever.”

  Craig was a well-known figure at school meets. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, he had the big feet and long arms that marked every school swimmer. He was fair, and had freckles as numerous on his back as stars in a patch of night sky.

  “Is that Craig Whisenton?” I heard a girl at a meet gasp. “He is amazing-looking!”

  Like Danny, Craig was good at every event. Some thought he was a basketball player, but, at the meets, they said he never played basketball. I suppose he liked being the black kid on the school swim team. Craig was best at the backstroke. He owned the school records for the backstroke.

  Danny said he hoped Craig would give him pointers about the backstroke. My son wanted that badly. He seemed to live for that possibility. When Daniel wanted something, it is hard to resist. Daniel does not take “no” easily.

  “Craig Whisenton,” I said to him once at a meet, “hi! I’m Barb Hausmann, Danny’s mom.”

  “Hi.”

  Craig’s big hands had a firm, manly shake, unlike my Danny’s, and Craig did seem confident, but he was a bit shy, like every high school boy. I could see why he was big man on campus. He had the big man’s way of talking about nothing. Leo Dolan waited nearby.

  “I met Craig at the meet,” I told Danny on the way home.

  “So?”

  I asked Danny how did he meet this senior VP. He took a soft look, the softest I had seen on his face in years. He seemed not to care that we were in a diner having eggs and hash. I didn’t see that often, but his face brightened. He had color—not blush—but life. His eyes twinkled as well.

  “We were at the deli in the lobby at work,” he said. “Side by side, you know? I was getting me a matzo soup and he got a pastrami on rye, and, when my soup came, he said ‘I got that recipe,’ not with the deli crew hearing him, mind you. I told him I’d like to try it. I went up to his office, and then we started sharing recipes. Then, one thing led to another and then, bat-ta-bing!—is this making you uncomfortable?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Good.” He smiled. “I’ll spare you the part about fucking on the first date.”

  I thanked him.

  Daniel had big, strong hands. They hurt.

  I remember Leo very well. His mom Patsey was an in-line skater, sprinting, practicing the form I heard she had honed at Colorado Springs, hoping for the Olympics. I heard she missed Lake Placid by, like, a millisecond. No matter. She seemed determined to get her Leo there, somewhere. On the village streets, Patsey raced him, urging him to stay aerodynamic, and to push.

  “Oh, Mom!”

  Leo went faster, his chestnut hair a reddish blur beneath his helmet, his arms managing turns. Later, in the pool, his arms reached for the wall as he did the butterfly. Long arms kept him first. In the medley relay, Leo and Craig worked together. They celebrated each time.

  At meets, I saw my son’s reaction as Craig and Leo celebrated. Though in the stands, I could see Daniel’s eyes turn green.

  Before he became fully Daniel, my son and I could discuss anything. There was a little girl that seemed to like him, but Danny was not interested.

  “You will be,” I said, knowing he was still not yet a teenager.

  “Nuh-huh. She’s got no ass—”

  “Daniel!” I laughed.

  “It’s true. Her rear is too flat. No shape to it at all.”

  “Are you telling me you are one of those tits-and-ass men?”

  “So to speak.” He laughed as well. He had a cute laugh back then. Even today, I try remembering it, and its absence makes me sad. “I like a well-shaped behind,” he said. “Like that one by the bike rack.”

  All I saw was a big, light-skinned black boy I later found out was Craig Whisenton. Right then, it struck me my boy really was. He was just eleven. “That’s a boy, Danny.”

  “He’d be good, if he’s a girl. That’s the kind of ass I like. One that won’t stop. Find me a chick with that! I’d be happy.”

  The phone rang. Danny answered, stepping away for privacy. I stepped away as well. I had the idea it was his senior VP on the cell phone. I looked at the artwork in the hall. This senior VP had conservative tastes. The artwork was of black people, but most were recognizable, unlike on the set of The Cosby Show. I could see real people in the art, and most of the art was original. Danny had no hand in selecting these. I knew it. The things were beyond his means.

  “Sorry about that,” Danny said when he was finished.

  “Was that Tommy?”

  “He just said he has to work late. Close some business. But we are doing dinner. Wanna come?”

  “I don’t want to be a third wheel.”

  “Tommy’s paying. He got a charge-card account you won’t believe.”

  Still, I declined. I had to give them their space. My son was a grown man. I never had the desire to chaperone a grown man’s love life. Besides, what do you say to your only son’s sugar daddy? I hadn’t the stomach.

  Jerry and I remember a peaceful night when we made love. It had sleeted, just enough to glaze the streets, and Danny went out before dinner to play hockey with some friends. When he came back, he was exhausted, too exhausted even to practice strokes. He was out before nine-thirty.

  “This is our chance,” Jerry said, offering to snuggle.

  “But, he will hear us.”

  “Not if we do it downstairs.”

  At Jerry’s insistence, we used the extra bedroom in the basement. Danny was knocked out on the second floor; he couldn’t hear, not even through the vents, if we closed them. Besides, we could lock the door.

  I wore my red things, and lit a candle. Jerry put Dave Matthews Band on. We took a hit that got us in the mood for wild things. Then, when we were done, we fell asleep. We both had called off work already.

  Pot, sex, and sleep do strange things. I saw myself barefoot in a field of daisies, back in school, playing Frisbee with a dog. I had not a care in the world, a real flower child, which I had been before, even if I was born a decade too late to have been one originally. In the dream, I saw my belly grow and grow, like when I was pregnant, until my belly

  POP!

  “What the hell was that?” Jerry demanded.

  POP!

  Thinking the worst, we sprang into our robes and ran upstairs. Daniel met us on the stairs to the second floor. He was rage.

  “It’s after seven!” he yelled, pushing Jerry and me downstairs. “I’m supposed to be at practice already! Jesus fucking fuck! I missed him! What in the fuck is wrong with you two shitheads!?!”

  No parent, no mother, should ever fear a child, even when he becomes physically violent. That morning, Jerry and I knew to fear Daniel. He tried to kill his sister within hours of her being conceived. That monster tried to break our necks.

  "Don’t do that,” Danny scolded, getting me to leave the personalized scratchpads by his bed alone. “Tommy is particular about his things.”

  “Your Tommy, does he doodle in bed?”

  Danny, smiling, rested his head and looked at the ceiling. “Tommy fucks in bed. He writes poetry before we fuck.”

  I knew I had asked too much. Looking at me, Daniel smiled. He knew he smelled blood.

  “Most of the time, though, he uses those scratchpads to keep track of his dreams. Tommy isn’t into analysis, mind you. He just likes to write down his dreams, especially after we fuck. He usually gets these outer space and space alien dreams, then. Real fucking weirdo crazy shit.”

 
; I couldn’t say Tommy sounded pretty screwed up. Daniel would not like that. I just said “oh.”

  Danny came home from school bubbling. “I made the medley relay,” he said. He was excited, as was I. I was happy for him. Then I found out that Leo Dolan had been injured in an accident. He didn’t die then, but he had been hurt so bad he was on life support. One of the swimming moms told me.

  “Patsey must be distraught,” I said. “She lived in that boy. How did that happen?”

  “He wasn’t paying attention while riding his bike, apparently,” she said. “He went right into traffic. Patsey is holding up good, but that black kid on the team, Craig Whisenton?, he’s really taking it bad.”

  Someone said Leo got a note, but no one said who gave it to him. I suppose that note kept his attention from the street. That sort of thing happens to kids.

  The medley relay didn’t win its next meet. Craig must have had his mind on other things. On the way home, Daniel was in his mood.

  Before meeting for lunch, I called this senior VP. I wanted to make sure.

  “Tommy, Henderson?”

  “This is Thomas Henderson,” the whitest voice said on the other end. “May I help you?”

  “This is Barb Hausmann—your friend Danny’s mom?—we haven’t met, but we’ve talked on the phone before. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes. Barb! Yes, yes, I remember. How are you doing?”

  “Fine, thanks. Just great—”

  “Danny is not here,” he said. “He went to the Park for a bit. I can give him a buzz, if you want. He has his cell phone—”

  “No, Mister Henderson—Tom, Thomas. You’re the one I wanted to talk to.” I looked at my cocktail. Hopefully, he could not smell my drink. “I was wondering, did he talk much about growing up?”

  “You mean, about the swim team?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I know,” he offered gently, quietly. “I know.”

  “I’m so very sorry.”

  I felt his hair before he was taken away, and Daniel glared at me. I knew, but that didn’t matter to me. I wanted to touch my Danny. By the time he was eighteen, he was fully Daniel. It was a horrible transformation to see.

  I still feel for that senior VP. Does he know he has in his house some monster?

  I have known all along.

  Caress

  Eli Easton

  Albertus made me a new heart, and he gave me an even more precious gift—knowledge. He taught me everything he knew. Hunger of the mind replaced hunger of the belly.

  1. London, 1857

  The child’s mother was asleep in the chair when I climbed in through the window. I was small and light and well versed in the science of being invisible. Two, three, four steps to the bed. I placed the mechanical lark on the table, moving aside bloodstained rags and a bottle of laudanum that had likely cost this family a month’s wages. When I looked up, the child’s eyes were open. They were huge in her pale face and blue as the Crimean sky. I placed a finger to my lips and winked.

  “Who are you?” she whispered, joining in the conspiracy at once.

  “An angel,” I whispered back, unable to resist the irony.

  “Is this from heaven, then?” Her bony fingers reached for the lark.

  I nodded solemnly.

  She picked up the automaton as if it were so fragile a breath could break it. But despite the delicate look of its enameled wings, it was strong.

  “I love it so,” she whispered fervently. She started to turn the key. I touched her hand and put up a finger. Wait. She stopped.

  I attempted a smile in lieu of a good-bye. But I could already see Death’s hand on her in the purple tinge of her lips and the gray around her eyes. My smile felt like the white flag of a traitor.

  I slipped out the window. As I climbed down the building—it was so close to its neighbor that even my short legs could meet both walls—I heard the key wind. Snick, snick. I dropped to the ground and scooted out to the street, the lark’s song playing sweetly behind me. I’d given it a real lark’s voice but the tune was his. I could almost see the throat and breast pulsing, see the tiny wires that made the eyes blink. Nictitating membrane, upper eyelid, iris contracting, repeat.

  Her name was Grace, and two days later I watched them carry her from the building in a box. I wondered if the lark was in her cold, still hands, or if her parents had decided to sell it. The lark would pay their rent for a year, so it was only logical. But I knew the heart was an irregular clockwork, untidy. There were enough larks of mine buried in the paupers’ cemetery to found a feathered choir. It had been a hard year for cholera and consumption.

  Grace’s mother, Molly, was a pretty barmaid at the Dunswood pub. I went there when the silence of my lonely rooms became too full of remembered screams. She was back at work a few days later, her eyes swollen and red.

  “Aye, the Angel of Seven Dials brought my poor Grace her treasure,” I overheard her tell some fellow customers. “I caught nary a glimpse of him, mind. But I’ll tell ’ee this: that man has a heart of gold.”

  I nearly spewed out my drink of ale. I wanted to laugh until I cried.

  They had no idea the sins I atoned for.

  My heart was not gold, in fact. But it wasn’t human either.

  I stood next to the mirror, taking deep breaths to calm myself, and watched my bare chest rise and fall. Pulse 120, 110, 95. At twenty-five, I still had a boy’s frame. Early privations had stunted me. Or perhaps my father was small; I never knew his name.

  I had the gauze and bandages ready along with the three new valves, perfectly calibrated. Inverted piston design, powered off the electrical impulses of the heart, warm from the sterile bath. Albertus had instructed me on the method to replace the valves. It was done once a year, just before my birthday. But since the war I’d not been able to stomach the sight of blood, not even my own.

  I used the tiny key to open the chest plate. Inside, the mechanical heart beat steady and sure. I could see the purple of my lung as it inflated in and out, the pink of my esophagus. Living arteries attached to gold couplings, but the heart itself was made with the thinnest plates of steel—a pump, a work of art, the clockwork engine of a monster.

  I used a small pick to turn off the blood to one valve and remove it. Bright red spurted from the coupling, making me feel faint. My gloved fingers grew slick as I set in the new valve and hooked up the pins. I forced myself to replace the other two, despite my shaking hands.

  I closed the chest plate and sterilized it. Done. The entire thing had taken less than five minutes, but darkness threatened the edges of my vision and my skin was clammy. I lay down on the bed. Since the war I’d had the urge, as my birthday neared, to ignore the procedure. How long would it take for the valves to wear out? Knowing Albertus’s craftsmanship, it might take years. They might slow down before stopping entirely, or miss beats, causing me to lose consciousness. They might fail one by one. I deserved such a death, but I hadn’t yet found it in me to ruin Albertus’s masterpiece. Not when there was any lingering chance that he might come.

  Albertus had made the mechanical heart for me when I was fourteen to replace the faulty one I was born with. If he’d known the horrors I would commit, the thousands of people I would murder, he might have thought twice.

  I am sorry.

  London, 1844

  I was twelve when my mother and I stood in the queue, in the cold rain, for two whole days and a night to see him. I counted the cracks in the sidewalk and the bricks on the wall. Two hundred forty-two to the bottom of the second-story windows. My clothes grew wet and my teeth chattered like castanets. Hunger was always with me, a snake in my belly that coiled and bit. But by the second day, it was enraged and tormented me.

  I was smaller than the next smallest boy in the line, three inches shorter, two stone lighter. Twelve was the minimum age, though there were boys who looked as old as sixteen. My body had always been little, but it ran hot as a furnace, and the broth and scraps of bread m
y mother could afford to feed me were never enough. I dreamed heady dreams of boards groaning with meats and heaping bowls of potatoes. All I understood or cared of my mother’s determination to get me in to see Albertus was that it might lead to food. A piece of cheese or an apple. Tangy apple, thirty grams. Beyond that, I cared not.

  Of course, everyone knew Albertus was the greatest machinist in London. But I thought nothing of my chances. I was no one, a lad frequently weak and ill, with pockets too mean to even afford lint. But the hope that they would feed me inside, and the fierce determination in my mother’s eyes, gave me the strength to endure.

  When I was finally seated at a table in Albertus’s workshop, and the wondrous tools and puzzles were placed in front of me, I forgot my hunger. I forgot about being wet. My brain was caught like a gear engaging, and I reached out my fingers to touch. I’d never imagined such marvels.

  I moved tiny copper fragments around under a magnifying glass with the aid of pin-thin tweezers—red ones to the left, black ones to the right. There was a game with turning pipes and dials and getting a flow of water from point A to point B, and a lovely sorting game involving parts that looked nearly identical but weren’t.

  I was so enamored with the sorting game that I jumbled the pieces up and replayed it three times. By the time I came to myself, Albertus, all gangly limbs and gray hair, was discussing the terms of my apprenticeship with my mother. He required nine years, a long term for an apprentice, but the post was a coveted one and there was a lot to learn. My mother gave him her hand, and my fate was sealed.

  “This is the greatest opportunity of your life, Tinker,” my mother said through her tears as she hugged me good-bye. “Be good. Be brave. I’m so proud of you, my brilliant boy. This will change your destiny.”

  I clung to her, sobbing out protests that were ignored. She forced me from her arms and hurried away. It was the first time my heart broke, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  2. Crimean Peninsula, 1854

  He had green eyes.

  Irises the color of Kolmården green marble with flecks of gray and gold and a black outer band.