By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  Dammit, I want those memories back! I know I swapped six months for a lifetime, but at that rate it’ll be five months and twenty-five days before I’m even breaking even. I think I’d even settle for a record of some kind—if only I’d had the sense to start a diary!

  She grimaced in disgust at the lack of foresight of the dead Virginia Harding, and activated the data-disc with an angry gesture. And then she dropped her jaw and said, “Jesus Christ in a floater bucket!”

  The first frame read, “PERSONAL DIARY OF VIRGINIA HARDING.”

  If you have never experienced major surgery, you are probably unfamiliar with the effects of three days of morphine followed by a day of Demerol. Rather similar results might be obtained by taking a massive dose of LSD-25 while hopelessly drunk. Part of the consciousness is fragmented…and part expanded. Time-sense and durational perception go all to hell, as do coordination, motor skills, and concentration—and yet often the patient, turning inward, makes a quantum leap toward a new plateau of self-understanding and insight. Everything seems suddenly clear: structures of lies crumble, hypocrisies are stripped naked, and years’ worth of comfortable rationalizations collapse like cardboard kettles, splashing boiling water everywhere. Perhaps the mind reacts to major shock by reassessing, with ruthless honesty, everything that has brought it there. Even Saint Paul must have been close to something when he found himself on the ground beside his horse, and Higgins had the advantage of being colossally stoned.

  While someone ran an absurd stop-start, variable-speed movie in front of his eyes, comprised of doctors and nurses and IV bottles and bedpans and blessed pricks on the arm, his mind’s eye looked upon himself and pronounced him a fool. His stupidity seemed so massive, so transparent in retrospect that he was filled with neither dismay nor despair, but only wonder.

  My God, it’s so obvious! How could I have had my eyes so tightly shut? Choking up like that when they started to Goof, for Christ’s sake—do I need a neon sign? I used to have a sense of humor—if there was anything Ginny and I had in common it was a gift for repartee—and after ten years of “selfless dedication” to Ginny and leukemia and keeping the money coming that’s exactly what I haven’t got anymore and I damned well know it. I’ve shriveled up like a raisin, an ingrown man.

  I’ve been a zombie for ten mortal years, telling myself that neurotic monomania was a Great And Tragic Love, trying to cry loud enough to get what I wanted. The only friend I made in those whole ten years was Bill, and I didn’t hesitate to use him when I found out our PPs matched. I knew bloody well that I’d grown smaller instead of bigger since she loved me, and he was the perfect excuse for my ego. Play games with his head to avoid overhauling my own. I was going to lose, I knew I was going to lose, and then I was going to accidentally “let slip” the truth to her, and spend the next ten years bathing in someone else’s pity than my own. What an incredible, impossible, histrionic fool I’ve been, like a neurotic child saying, “Well, if you won’t give me the candy I’ll just smash my hand with a hammer.”

  If only I hadn’t needed her so much when I met her. Oh. I must find some way to set this right, as quickly as possible!

  His eyes clicked into focus, and Virginia Harding was sitting by his bedside in a soft brown robe, smiling warmly. He felt his eyes widen.

  “Dilated to see you,” he blurted and giggled.

  Her smile disappeared. “Eh?”

  “Pardon me. Demerol was first synthesized to wean Hitler off morphine; consequently, I’m Germanic-depressive these days.” See? The ability is still there. Dormant, atrophied, but still there.

  The smile returned. “I see you’re feeling better.”

  “How would you know?”

  It vanished again. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you’re probably quite busy, but I expected a visit before this.” Light, jovial—keep it up, boy.

  “Tom Higgins, I have been here twice a day ever since you got out of OR.”

  “What?”

  “You have conversed with me, lucidly and at length, told me funny stories and discussed contemporary politics with great insight, as far as I can tell. You don’t remember.”

  “Not a bit of it.” He shook his head groggily. What did I say? What did I tell her? “That’s incredible. That’s just incredible. You’ve been here…”

  “Six times. This is the seventh.”

  “My God. I wonder where I was. This is appalling.”

  “Tom, you may not understand me, but I know precisely how you feel.”

  “Eh?” That made you jump. “Oh yes, your missing six months.” Suppose sometime in my lost three days we had agreed to love each other forever—would that still be binding now? “God, what an odd sensation.”

  “Yes, it is,” she agreed, and something in her voice made him glance sharply at her. She flushed and got up from her bedside chair, began to pace around the room. “It might not be so bad if the memories just stayed completely gone…”

  “What do you mean?”

  She appeared not to hear the urgency in his voice. “Well, it’s nothing I can pin down. I…I just started wondering. Wondering why I kept visiting you so regularly. I mean, I like you—but I’ve been so damned busy I haven’t had time to scratch, I’ve been missing sleep and missing meals, and every time visiting hours opened up I stole ten minutes to come and see you. At first I chalked it off to a not unreasonable feeling that I was in your debt—not just because you defrosted me without spoiling anything, but because you got shot trying to protect me too. There was a rock outcropping right next to you that would have made peachy cover.”

  “I…I…” he sputtered.

  “That felt right,” she went on doggedly, “but not entirely. I felt…I feel something else for you, something I don’t understand. Sometimes when I look at you, there’s…there’s a feeling something like déjà vu, a vague feeling that there’s something between us that I don’t know. I know it’s crazy—you’d surely have told me by now—but did I ever know you? Before?”

  There it is, tied up in a pink ribbon on a silver salver. You’re a damned fool if you don’t reach out and take it. In a few days she’ll be out of this mausoleum and back with her friends and acquaintances. Some meddling bastard will tell her sooner or later—do it now, while there’s still a chance. You can pull it off: you’ve seen your error—now that you’ve got her down off the damn pedestal you can give her a mature love, you can grow tall enough to be a good man for her, you can do it right this time.

  All you’ve got to do is grow ten years’ worth overnight.

  “Ms. Harding, to the best of my knowledge I never saw you before this week.” And that’s the damn truth.

  She stopped pacing, and her shoulders squared. “I told you it was crazy. I guess I didn’t want to admit that all those memories were completely gone. I’ll just have to get used to it I suppose.”

  “I imagine so.” We both will. “Ms. Harding?”

  “Yes?”

  “Whatever the reasons, I do appreciate your coming to see me, and I’m sorry I don’t recall the other visits, but right at the moment my wound is giving me merry hell. Could you come back again, another time? And ask them to send in someone with another shot?”

  He failed to notice the eagerness with which she agreed. When she had gone and the door had closed behind her, he lowered his face into his hands and wept.

  Her desk possessed a destruct unit for the incineration of confidential reports, and she found that it accepted unerasable discs. She was just closing the lid when the door chimed and McLaughlin came in, looking a bit haggard. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.

  “Not at all, come in,” she said automatically. She pushed the burn button, felt the brief burst of heat, and took her hand away. “Come on in, Bill, I’m glad you came.”

  “They gave me your message, but I…” He appeared to be searching for words.

  “No, really, I changed my plans. Are you on call tonight, Bill? Or other
wise occupied?”

  He looked startled. “No.”

  “I intended to spend the night reading these damned reports, but all of a sudden I feel an overwhelming urge to get stinking drunk with someone—no.” She caught herself and looked closely at him, seemed to see him as though for the first time. “No, by God, to get stinking drunk with you. Are you willing?”

  He hesitated for a long time.

  “I’ll go out and get a bottle,” he said at last.

  “There’s one in the closet. Bourbon okay?”

  Higgins was about cried out when his own door chimed. Even so, he nearly decided to feign sleep, but at the last moment he sighed, wiped his face with his sleeves, and called out, “Come in.”

  The door opened to admit a young nurse with high cheeks, soft lips, vivid red hair, and improbably grey eyes.

  “Hello, nurse,” he said. He did not know her either. “I’m afraid I need something for pain.”

  “I know,” she said softly, and moved closer.

  SATAN’S CHILDREN

  A beginning is the end of something, always.

  Zaccur Bishop saw the murder clearly, watched it happen—although he was not to realize it for over an hour.

  He might not have noticed it at all, had it happened anywhere but at the Scorpio. The victim himself did not realize that he had been murdered for nearly ten minutes, and when he did he made no outcry. It would have been pointless: there was no way to demonstrate that he was dead, let alone that he had been killed, nor anything whatever to be done about it. If the police had been informed—and somehow convinced—of all the facts, they would have done their level best to forget them. The killer was perhaps as far from the compulsive-confessor type as it is possible to be: indeed, that was precisely his motive. It is difficult to imagine another crime at once so public and so clandestine. In any other club in the world it would have been perfect. But since it happened at the Scorpio, it brought the world down like a house of cards.

  The Scorpio was one of those clubs that God sends every once in a while to sustain the faithful. Benched from the folkie-circuit for reasons he refused to discuss, a musician named Ed Finnegan somehow convinced the owners of a Chinese restaurant near Dalhousie University to let him have their basement and an unreasonable sum of money. (Finnegan used to claim that when he vacationed in Ireland, the Blarney Stone tried to kiss him.) He found that the basement comprised two large windowless rooms. The one just inside the front door he made into a rather conventional bar—save that it was not conventionally overdecorated. The second room, a much larger one which had once held the oil furnace (the building predated solar heat), he painted jet black and ceilinged with acoustic tile. He went then to the University, and to other universities in Halifax, prowling halls and coffeehouses, bars, and dormitories, listening to every musician he heard. To a selected few he introduced himself, and explained that he was opening a club called Scorpio. It would include, he said, a large music room with a proper stage and spotlight. Within this music room, normal human speech would be forbidden to all save the performers. Anyone wishing food or drink could raise their hand and, when the waitress responded, point to their order on the menu silk-screened into the tablecloth. The door to this room, Finnegan added, would be unlocked only between songs. The PA system was his own: six Shure mikes with boomstands, two Teac mixers, a pair of 600-watt Toyota amps, two speaker columns, four wall speakers, and a dependable stage monitor. Wednesday and Thursday were Open Mike Nights, with a thirty-minute-per-act limit, and all other nights were paying gigs. Finnegan apologized for the meagerness of the pay: little more than the traditional all-you-can-drink and hat privileges. The house piano, he added, was in tune.

  Within a month the Scorpio was legend, and the Chinese restaurant upstairs had to close at sunset—for lack of parking. There have always been more good serious musicians than there were places for them to play; not a vein for the tapping but an artery. Any serious musician will sell his or her soul for an intelligent, sensitive, listening audience. No other kind would put up with Finnegan’s house rules, and any other kind was ejected—at least as far as the bar, which featured a free juke box, Irish coffee, and Löwenbräu draft.

  It was only because the house rules were so rigidly enforced that Zack happened to notice even that most inconspicuous of murders.

  It happened in the spring of his twenty-fourth year. He was about to do the last song in his midevening solo set; Jill sat at a stageside table nursing a plain orange juice and helping him with her wide brown eyes. The set had gone well so far, his guitar playing less sloppy than usual, his voice doing what he wanted it to, his audience responding well. But they were getting restive: time to bottle it up and bring Jill back onstage. While his subconscious searched its files for the right song, he kept the patter flowing.

  “No, really, it’s true, genties and ladlemen of the audio radiance, I nearly had a contract with Chess Records once. Fella named King came to see me from Chess, but I could see he just wanted old Zack Bishop for his pawn. He was a screaming queen, and he spent a whole knight tryin’ to rook me, but finally I says, ‘Come back when you can show me a check, mate.’” The crowd groaned dutifully, and Jill held her nose. Lifting her chin to do so exposed the delicate beauty of her throat, the soft grace of the place where it joined her shoulders, and his closing song was chosen.

  “No, but frivolously, folks,” he said soberly, “it’s nearly time to bring Jill on back up here and have her sing a few—but I’ve got one last spasm in me first. I guess you could say that this song was the proximate cause of Jill and me getting together in the first place. See, I met this lady and all of a sudden it seemed like there was a whole lot of things we wanted to say to each other, and the only ones I could get out of my mouth had to do with, like, meaningful relationships, and emotional commitments, and how our personalities complemented each other and like that.” He began to pick a simple C-Em-Am-G cycle in medium slow tempo, the ancient Gibson ringing richly, and Jill smiled. “But I knew that the main thing I wanted to say had nothing to do with that stuff. I knew I wasn’t being totally honest. And so I had to write this song.” And he sang:

  Come to my bedside and let there be sharing

  Uncounterfeitable sign of your caring

  Take off the clothes of your body and mind

  Bring me your nakedness…help me in mine…

  Help me believe that I’m worthy of trust

  Bring me a love that includes honest lust

  Warmth is for fire; fire is for burning…

  Love is for bringing an ending…to yearning

  For I love you in a hundred ways

  And not for this alone

  But your lovin’ is the sweetest lovin’

  I have ever known

  He was singing directly to Jill, he always sang this song directly to Jill, and although in any other bar or coffeehouse in the world an open fistfight would not have distracted his attention from her, his eye was caught now by a tall, massively bearded man in black leather who was insensitive enough to pick this moment to change seats. The man picked a stageside table at which one other man was already seated, and in the split second glance that Zack gave him, the bearded man met his eyes with a bold, almost challenging manner.

  Back to Jill.

  Come to my bedside and let there be giving

  Licking and laughing and loving and living

  Sing me a song that has never been sung

  Dance at the end of my fingers and tongue

  Take me inside you and bring up your knees.

  Wrap me up tight in your thighs and then squeeze

  Or if you feel like it you get on top

  Love me however you please, but please…don’t stop

  For I love you in a hundred ways

  And not for this alone

  But your lovin’ is the sweetest lovin’

  I have ever known

  The obnoxious man was now trying to talk to the man he had joined, a rather elderl
y gentleman with shaggy white hair and ferocious mustaches. It was apparent that they were acquainted. Zack could see the old man try to shush his new tablemate, and he could see that the bearded man was unwilling to be shushed. Others in the audience were also having their attention distracted, and resenting it. Mentally gritting his teeth, Zack forced his eyes away and threw himself into the bridge of the song.

  I know just what you’re thinking of

  There’s more to love than making love

  There’s much more to the flower than the bloom

  But every time we meet in bed

  I find myself inside your head

  Even as I’m entering your womb

  The Shadow appeared as if by magic, and the Shadow was large and wide and dark black and he plainly had sand. None too gently he kicked the bearded man’s chair and, when the latter turned, held a finger to his lips. They glared at each other for a few seconds, and then the bearded man turned around again. He gave up trying to talk to the white-haired man, but Zack had the funny idea that his look of disappointment was counterfeit—he seemed underneath it to be somehow satisfied at being silenced. Taking the old man’s left hand in his own, he produced a felt-tip pen and began writing on the other’s palm. Quite angry now, Zack yanked his attention back to his song, wishing fiercely that he and Jill were alone.

  So come to my bedside and let there be loving

  Twisting and moaning and thrusting and shoving

  I will be gentle—you know that I can

  For you I will be quite a singular man…

  Here’s my identity, stamped on my genes

  Take this my offering, know what it means

  Let us become what we started to be

  On that long ago night when you first came with me

  Oh lady, I love you in a hundred ways

  And not for this alone

  But your lovin’ is the sweetest lovin’

  I have ever known

  The applause was louder than usual, sympathy for a delicate song shamefully treated. Zack smiled half-ruefully at Jill, took a deep draught from the Löwenbräu on the empty chair beside him, and turned to deliver a stinging rebuke to the bearded man. But he was gone, must have left the instant the song ended—Shadow was just closing the door behind him. The old man with the absurd mustaches sat alone, staring at the writing on his palm with a look of total puzzlement. Neither of them knew that he was dead. The old man too rose and left the room as the applause trailed away.