Secret Lives

by Jeff VanderMeer

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  HONORIO ALVES

  Honorio Alves sells Subaru parts and accessories. According to him, he was born in the Azores. This is a blatant and filthy lie, although Alves may have suppressed the memories of his true childhood and believes he tells the truth. Nonetheless, Alves was not born in the Azores. He was born in the Antipodes, the son of a centaur named Gabriel and a unicorn named Dawn. No one was more surprised to have a human child than Dawn, who had been hoping for a uni-taur. As the privileged offspring of mythical beasts, Honorio—so named for the honor of having been born to such august parents—spent his formative years under the shade of banana trees being fanned by the wings of tiny dragonfly-sized faeries, who would sometimes pull his hair out of spite. As for schooling, Honorio received his grammar lessons from a ten-foot-tall kangaroo named Samantha, his math lessons from a llama-man named Bosun, and his science from a discredited skunk-ape named Larry. This may account for the fact that he scores well on tests given to him while in close proximity to zoos. The only trauma inflicted on Honorio during his years in the Antipodes came at the hands of the King of the Antipodes, who most commonly took the form of a giant wild boar—bigger than an elephant. One day, while hunting humans, the King of the Antipodes tripped and his left front hoof struck Honorio a glancing blow on the top of the head. After the aardvark doctors stitched him up, Honorio could hardly see the stitches—and, indeed, the resulting scar could now only be seen now if he were to shave his head bald and then examine the top of his head, with the aid of a mirror, under the intense light of a full moon. Then, and only then, might he see the imprint of the curve of the King of the Antipodes hoof upon his pate. Because Honorio cursed the King for his clumsiness, he was banished from the Antipodes forever and eventually wound up selling Subaru parts and accessories. But the most outrageous part is that Honorio has forgotten all of this in his headlong rush into his secret life for Subaru. But no—I cannot believe he remembers none of this! And yet, when I bumped into him in his place of business and began to recite the tale, I could tell at once that he thought me a liar. I forgot entirely that I needed to buy an alternator and entered into an argument with the man. How can he have forgotten that I once taught him astrology under the shade of the banana trees? How can he have forgotten the Antipodes, that heaven on Earth, the place we both may one day return to, once the King is dead?

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  BRANDON PERKINS

  Brandon Perkins is a full time student at Montana State University, majoring in business finance. His three best friends in the world are his girlfriend Dawn, his brother Chris, and his dog. He has a third best friend, but because this friend is invisible, Brandon chooses not to discuss him with anyone. Brandon knows his invisible friend is real for two reasons: (1) he only met this friend after he was already grown up and (2) his invisible friend has a distinctive smell. The smell is neither offensive nor pleasant, like a combination of a musty wine and a sharp cheese. The smell most readily tells Brandon when his secret friend is around. For Brandon’s secret, invisible friend doesn’t talk much. More specifically, he talks once each day, at exactly noon. The wine-cheese smell will permeate the office or restaurant or car in which Brandon is currently situated, and the voice will emanate from empty air. The voice has a distant, echoing quality to it, as if coming from the bottom of a deep hole in the ground. Sometimes the voice says something profound, like “Only by coming to grips with one’s past may a man look to the future.” Sometimes the voice says something obscure, like “If candles had no wicks, then light would have no reason for existence.” And sometimes the voice says something conversational, like, “That was a splendid game of cricket, don’t you think?” Brandon has given up trying to interpret the rhyme or reason behind these pronouncements. Sometimes he thinks his invisible friend is reading off of fortune cookies. Other times he believes he has eavesdropped on part of a conversation his invisible friend is having with another invisible friend. Once, for three weeks, he tried to respond to these dribbles and leaks of words, but never received a reply, and thus gave up. In moments of quiet contemplation, Brandon almost believes that this invisible friend is actually a guardian angel who smells of wine and cheese. In moments of panic, the invisible friend is a stalking demon waiting for the right moment to strike and end his life. But most of the time, Brandon accepts the presence of this invisible friend the way he accepts the breeze on his face when he steps out of the student administration building at Montana State University. Certainly, his girlfriend has never experienced his invisible friend’s presence, and he is glad of that. With any luck, she will never have to know . . .

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  BILL MOODY

  Bill Moody is a contractor, guitar player, and a wine snob. In keeping with his wine snobbery, Mr. Moody also collects and identifies gestures, mannerisms, and facial expressions. Every day becomes a kind of catalogue for him. Walking down the street, Mr. Moody will watch a car drive by. The woman driver, talking on a cell phone, will toss her hair back and Mr. Moody will mutter, “Jennifer Gray, about forty minutes in, 1987, Dirty Dancing. Precursor: Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Since 1987, replicated often. No longer sui generis. Common in hair coloring commercials. Ultimate origin: beginning of time.” Over time, the entire world has become a derivation of something else. For originality, he is drawn to smells, to touch—the tactile experience of tree bark under his hand, petting a cat, running his fingers over the coils of the spiral notebook in which he records his daily observations. These observations, however, do not constitute his secret life. His secret life involves the CIA, the country of Uganda, and a weapon—a sword made in the 16th-century in Damascus and given to him by a dying stranger on a street corner. Mr. Moody never discusses his secret life with anyone. It’s his. And it’s secret.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  TROY

  Like the ancient city of Troy, Troy the person has many layers, if only one has the time to excavate all of them. Troy is a Republican book collector, although this does not mean he only collects books or book-related materials from Republicans, as I can myself attest simply by compiling the details of Troy’s secret life in this document . . . As a cover for his secret life, Troy runs a vitamin and supplement company. Beneath this layer, Troy works as a rare book detective. He comes to cases by word of mouth alone, will not cooperate with concurrent police investigations (who know of his presence only as a wall knows the shadow transfixed upon it), and receives ungodly amounts of compensation from his grateful clients. Two or three cases a year keep Troy afloat, just enough to allow him the comforts to which he has become accustomed: vacations in Hawaii or Tahiti, the acquisition of new and exciting vitamin supplements for his vast collection (preserved under glass, much like a butterfly collection, each one labeled and pinned), and the procurement of Sterling and Gibson first editions . . . Troy’s worst case involved a Shakespeare folio, a thief who had once been a supermodel and who smelled like lavender and lace (the conversation a blur, casual, in a bar, at a time when she did not suspect his true calling), and a high-speed chase through the narrow, blind streets of Vienna, followed by the return of fifty half-singed pages rescued from the burning Mercedes. He could have saved more pages, but then he could not have saved Lavender & Lace, as he came to call his latest conversion. Back at home, waiting for her latest call about a case they’re both working on now, he picks up the telephone to the sound of yet another retailer inquiring about a vitamin supplement. Troy smiles. Life is good. Life is layered. For he is Troy, Rare Book Detective.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  ALAN SAUL

  Alan Saul works for the Bio-Terrorism Unit of New York, West Nile Virus Unit. His teenage daughter is an aspiring actress. What she doesn’t know is that her father, in his secret life, has been an actor for many years. He is an actor without portfolio. His is, in fact, the most profound of all acting careers. Alan lives the lives of others. It is a meticulous and time-consuming “hobby,” for
he must first observe a fire fighter, a banker, an electrician, a meter reader, a shoe salesman, for months, always taking notes. What they eat, how they walk, what they say, how they express themselves during extremes of emotion. It couldn’t be called stalking—he doesn’t follow them home because he doesn’t care what they do at home. He only cares about what they do on the job. He wishes only to replicate the artifice, the shell. Once he feels he has perfected his approach, he will carefully pick a time and place and perform the job function in a work setting, if at all possible. On rare occasions, he will wait until the person is on vacation and claim to be the temporary replacement, if it is the kind of job where he can safely do so. For ten years, Alan Saul has never been found out. But he is a little afraid of where it might all lead, for he is running out of professions. Each one becomes more and more obscure. Who knew, for example, that one could specialize in the feeding of orphaned hedgehogs? Or that you could be a scientist of disgusting smells? Or that animal husbandry could have so many sub-disciplines? Some days, now, he comes out of his acting role in mid-scene, convinced his secret life has become his life, convinced that he must find some secret life still more secret than the one he has chosen for himself.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  LIBRARIAN BOB SCHEFFEL

  Bob Scheffel works as a librarian and DJ for an alternative music station. He discovered his secret life while shelving books in the generation fiction section. Returned B’s—Banks through Burke—held accordion-like between his hands, a ritual known in some quarters as “the librarian bench press”—he backed up against the stacks to let an old woman with a cell phone waddle by. The old woman was speaking in a hissing whisper about “the catsss and the lizardssss.” Something about the old woman unnerved Bob, and so as she drew close he didn’t say hello or cough or make any movement that might give away his presence. The old woman stopped in front of him, turned, looked right at him—or, rather, at the books in front of his chest—and pulled a James Lee Burke mystery from the “stack” before waddling back the way she had come, whispering “spiderssss and cormorantsss, eelsss and beetlesss” to the person on the other end of the conversation.

  Bob stood there, transfixed by this moment of absurdity. She hadn’t seen him. She had mistaken him for a shelf.

  Over the weeks that followed, Bob thought about the old woman and that moment. He thought about it while wearing a gray shirt and gray pants and standing still for twenty minutes against the gray metal sides of the shelves. He thought about it while wearing a black shirt and black pants and standing against a black billboard.

  Finally, he succumbed to the idea implicit in his encounter with the old woman. As training for the fruition of the idea, he became an expert photographer. He became an expert at collage. He became good at sewing and using a sewing machine. Through close observation, he learned to distinguish between fifty-seven varieties of shadow, to know obsidian from black and black from ebony. The exact shade of a bus stop kiosk, and how it differed from the same color on the side of a police car. The red of a stop sign compared to the red of an ambulance compared to the red of a rose.

  And the textures! He’d never truly understood the importance of touch, of how corduroy was like soft pine bark and jeans like rough tarmac, or how much marble could convey hard and smooth at the same time. How he could imitate colors, textures, anything that might make him invisible depending on the time, location, the state of the sky (overcast versus “pregnant” with rain, sunny versus shadowless).

  He became attuned to the seasons in ways he’d never known before—more than just the swelter of leaves in the fall, or the sculpting of the heat around bodies in motion, or the way the cold lit up living things and reddened them.

  More than anything, Bob came to understand the true spirit and identity of details, and to appreciate them.

  As this informal education progressed, Bob’s friends and fellow employees noticed—or rather did not notice—his transformation.

  “Bob’s more confident,” they said, mistaking negation for attitude.

  “Bob’s more silent,” they said, mistaking solitude for thoughtfulness.

  “Bob’s not around as much,” they said, mistaking integration with absence.

  He surprised people with his sudden presence in a room. Some liked the change, others did not. Bob didn’t care. He was getting closer and closer to something—in clothes he’d made himself, labeled by season, weather condition, location, and made from cloth, from cut-up photographs, from the debris of the natural world.

  Bob was getting close to a state that he thought might mean a strange kind of omniscience. Being there but not being there. Able to observe without impacting on that which was being observed. Why, he’d be able to read minds in a sense. He’d be able to understand the world, in a sense.

  The breakthrough happened in a park. He stood to the side of a path, clear of the nearby trees, in the light of midday (partially cloudy), wearing a complex pattern of browns, greens, and grays that corresponded with perfect simplicity to the conditions, the textures, the life around him.

  Just like the muttering old woman so many months before, the people walking past could not see him. He didn’t register with them. He had become incorporeal. He had given up his body. He felt weightless, invincible. His heart trembled in his chest. A profound and overwhelming joy overcame him as he looked, unremarked upon, at the faces of the people passing by. This was not voyeurism. This was not skulking about. This was about becoming so much a part of the world that he was the world. The world rose up through his feet, his legs, the warmth of it entering him through his fingertips. It made him so happy that he started to cry.

  Through his tears, however, with the electric jolt of another kind of joy, his vision cleared and he noticed others like him standing silent in the park—invisible, omniscient, part of the world, lost in the sensation of no one seeing them in their magnificent camouflage.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  JENNIFER SEAUX

  Jennifer Seaux is an orchid grower and a retired ad executive. For a long time, those in surveillance who read her private journal on a regular basis thought her secret life was hearing the voices of her orchids. According to these journal entries, the voices manifested as a burbling murmur, an aristocratic mumble, a slight drunken slur while she misted them. “I like the idea of the orchids having voices. I like the idea of hearing them,” she wrote. But, later, when the voices became distinct and clear, she realized they weren’t the voices of the plants at all: they were the voices of the employees she worked with, or the voices of actors who performed in radio and television advertisements. It made her wonder if she’d really retired after all. It made the tenor of her journal entries change, the frequency of her entries more intermittent. Soon, it became clear to those in surveillance that Seaux was writing a book. But what kind of book? A subversive book? A book that ought to be suppressed? Or something harmless? As day followed day, the cover of Seaux’s journal began to gather dust. Instead, she spent hours at the computer, typing madly. About the voices of flowers. About the voices of advertising executives. About people she imagined might be watching her. About something fresh and green struggling to reach the air through deep, fertile soil. Soon, those in surveillance lost their interest. Seaux was writing a novel. They had no interest in novels. In time, they dismantled the hidden camera and audio feeds. They stopped taking photographs of the outside of her home. They moved on to the next case. You could say that Seaux had written them out of her life . . . As for Seaux’s novel, you may wonder what happened to it. Without surveillance we cannot be sure of anything, but you may be reading part of it right now.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  JEFF GORDON

  Jeff Gordon is a ceramic artist who enjoys gardening and telling people where to go when they ask if he realizes he shares a name with a famous NASCAR driver. “I am a gardener, not a motor vehicle enthusiast,” he tells them, “so this information elicits no emotional response from me what
soever except for a weary scorn regarding your lack of originality.” Although, under the duress of tough questioning, perhaps after a drink or two, Gordon might admit that the gardening has gotten out of control. And perhaps the ceramics, too. “The thing is,” he might say, if given the chance to unload his secret burden, “people don’t realize the imperfect status of their gardens, their houses. They have no sense of the improvements that could be made.”