Winter 2007

by Subterranean Press

  Lucius’ father owned the ship. It had been Lucius’ last favor to me, freely and eagerly given. “As far from the city as possible,” he said to me. “As far and for as long as possible.”

  My father looked crushed. My mother only smiled bravely and said, “Three days is not enough, but it will have to do. And you will write. And you will come back.”

  Yes, I would come back, but those three days–during which I would tell them everything, sometimes defiant, sometimes defeated and weeping–were my last three days with them.

  ***

  Even in the shallow water near the bungalow, you learn to find shapes in shadow, if you look long enough. Staring into deep water as it speeds past and sprays white against the prow of a large ship, the wind lacerating your face, you see even more.

  But I never saw her. I never saw her. I don’t know why I expected to, and yet on all of the hundreds of voyages I took as a ship’s doctor, I always looked. The sailors say mermaids live down there, with scaly hair and soft fingertips and cold, clammy kisses. I cared for none of that. I yearned to see her face by some strange necromancy, her blue eyes staring up at me through the ocean’s darker blue.

  Worse yet, whether on deck or in my cabin, whether during ferocious, stomach-churning storms or trying to save a man with a jagged piece of the deck forced through his sternum, I wanted a dead woman to tell the story of her life. I wanted to know if she had been a sister, a niece, a granddaughter. I wanted to know if she played with kittens or tormented them. Did she brew tea or drink coffee? Did she have an easy sense of humor? Was her laugh thin or full? How did she walk? What did she like to wear? So many questions came to me.

  Because I had no idea of her personality, I imagined her, probably wrongly, as my double: embarrassed by her parents’ eccentricities, a little amazed to find herself touched by life and led as though by the nose to this point of existence, this moment when I searched a hundred flavors of water for her smile.

  It wasn’t a moot point. I experienced the sweet agony of living with a part of her every day. At first, I had little control over it, and it either flopped loosely at my side, uncooperative, or caused much trouble for me by behaving eccentrically. But, over time, we reached an accord. It was more skillful than I at stitching a wound or lancing a boil. The arm seemed to so enjoy the task that I wondered if the woman had been a thwarted healer or something similar–an artist of the domestic, who could sew or cook, or perform any arcane household task.

  Sometimes, at night, it would crawl outside the counterpane, to the limits of its span, and lie in the cold air until the shivers woke me and forced me to reclaim it. Then I would besiege it with the warmth of my own flesh until it succumbed and became part of me again.

  ***

  “Did you enjoy being a ship’s doctor?” my guest would ask, if only to change the topic, and I would be grateful.

  “It was boring and exhausting,” I would say. “Sailors can injure themselves in a thousand different ways. There’s only so much medicine you can carry on a ship.”

  “But did you enjoy it?”

  “When it was busy, I would get pleasure from doing good and necessary work.”

  Keeping busy is important. My parents taught me that the utility of work was its own reward, but it also fills up your mind, gives you less time to think.

  “Sounds like it wasn’t half-bad,” he’d say, like someone who didn’t know what I was talking about.

  Would I tell him the rest? Would I tell him about the times on the docks or at sea that I saw the pale white of drowning victims laid out in rows and immediately be back in the cadaver room? That some part of me yearned for that white dead flesh? That when I slept with women now it must be in the dark so that the soft yet muscular whiteness of them would not interfere with the image in my head of a certain smile, a certain woman. That I tried to fall in love with so many women, but could not, would not, not with her arm by my side.

  ***

  In time, I gained notoriety for my skills. When docked, sailors from other ships would come to me for bandaging or physicking, giving themselves over to my mismatched hands. My masculinity had never seemed brutish to me, but laid against her delicate fingers, I could not help but find myself unsubtle. Or, at least, could not help but believe she would find them so. And, indeed, the arm never touched the other hand if it could avoid it, as if to avoid the very thought of its counterpart.

  I settled into the life easily enough–every couple of years on a new ship with a new crew, headed somewhere ever more exotic. Soon,any thought of returning to the city of my birth grew distant and faintly absurd. Soon, I gained more knowledge of the capriciousness of sea than any but the most experienced seaman. I came to love the roll of the decks and the wind’s severity. I loved nothing better than to reach some new place and discover new peoples, new animals, new cures to old ailments. I survived squalls, strict captains, incompetent crews, and boardings by pirates. I wrote long letters about my adventures to my parents, and sometimes their replies even caught up to me, giving me much pleasure. I also wrote to Lucius once or twice, but I never heard back from him and didn’t expect to; nor could I know for sure my letters had made it into his hands, the vagaries of letters-by-ship being what they are.

  In this way thirty years passed and I passed with them, growing weather-beaten and bearded and no different from any other sailor. Except, of course, for her arm.

  At a distant river port, in a land where the birds spoke like women and the men wore outlandishly bright tunics and skirts, a letter from my mother caught up with me. In it, she told me that my father had died after a long illness, an illness she had never mentioned in any of her other letters. The letter was a year old.

  I felt an intense confusion. I could not understand how a man who in my memory I had said goodbye to just a few years before could now be dead. It took awhile to understand I had been at sea for three decades. That somewhere in the back of my mind I had assumed my parents would live forever. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t even cry.

  Six months later, slowly making my way back to my mother, another letter, this time from a friend of the family. My mother had died and been laid next to my father in the basement of the Preservation Guild.

  It felt as if the second trauma had made me fully experience the first. All I could think of was my father. And then the two of them working together in their bungalow.

  I remember I stood on the end of a rickety quay in a backwater port reading the letter. Behind me the dismal wooden shanty town and above explosions of green-and-blue parrots. The sun was huge and red on the horizon, as if we were close to the edge of the world.

  Her hand discarded the letter and reached over to caress my hand. I wept silently.

  ***

  Five years later, I tired of life at sea–it was no place for the aging–and I returned home. The city was bigger and more crowded. The medical school carried on as it had for centuries. The mages’ college had disappeared, the site razed and replaced with modern, classroom-filled buildings.

  I stored my many trunks of possessions–full of rare tinctures and substances and oddities–at a room in a cheap inn and walked down to my parents’ bungalow. It had been abandoned and boarded-up. After two days, I found the current owner. He turned out to be a man who resembled the Stinker of my youth in the fatuousness of his smile, the foulness of his breath. This new Stinker didn’t want to sell, but in the end I took the brass key, spotted with green age, from him and the bungalow was mine.

  Inside, beneath the dust and storm damage, I found the echoes of my parents’ preservations–familiar fond splotches across the kitchen tiles–and read their recipes in the residue.

  From these remnants, what they taught me of their craft, and the knowledge I brought back from my travels, I now make my modest living. These are not quite the preservations of my youth, for there is even less magic in the world now. No, I must use science and magic in equal quantities in my tinctures and potions, and each comes
with a short tale or saying. I conjure these up from my own experience or things my parents told me. With them, I try to conjure up what is so easily lost: the innocence and passion of first love, the energy and optimism of the young, the strange sense of mystery that fills midnight walks along the beach. But I preserve more prosaic things as well–like the value of hard work done well, or the warmth of good friends. The memories that sustain these concoctions spring out of me and through my words and mixtures into my clients. I find this winnowing, this release, a curse at times, but mostly it takes away what I do not want or can no longer use.

  Mine is a clandestine business, spread by word-of-mouth. It depends as much on my clients’ belief in me as my craft. Bankers and politicians, merchants and landlords hear tales of this strange man living by himself in a preservationists’ bungalow, and how he can bring them surcease from loneliness or despair or the injustice of the world.

  Sometimes I wonder if one day Lucius will become one of my clients and we will talk about what happened. He still lives in this city, as a member of the city council, having dropped out of medical school, I’m told, not long after he performed the surgery on me. I’ve even seen him speak, although I could never bring myself to walk up to him. It would be too much like talking to a ghost.

  Still, necessity might drive me to him as it did in the past. I have to fill in with other work to survive. I dispense medical advice to the fisherfolk, many driven out of work by the big ships, or to the ragged urchins begging by the dock. I do not charge, but sometimes they will leave a loaf of bread or fish or eggs on my doorstep, or just stop to talk. My life is simple now.

  Over time, I think I have forgiven myself. My thoughts just as often turn to the future as the past. I ask myself questions like When I die, what will she do? Will the arm detach itself, worrying at the scar line with sharpened fingernails, leaving only the memory of my flesh as the fingers pull it like an awkward crab away from my death bed? Is there an emerald core that will be revealed by that severance, a glow that leaves her in the world long after my passing? Will this be loss or completion?

  For her arm has never aged. It is as perfect and smooth and strong as when it came to me. It could still perform surgery if the rest of me had not betrayed it and become so old and weak.

  Sometimes I want to ask my mirror, the other old man, what lies beyond, and if it is so very bad to be dead. Would I finally know her then? Is it too much of a sentimental, half-senile fantasy, to think that I might see her, talk to her? And: have I done enough since that ecstatic, drunken night, running with my best friend up to the cadaver room, to have deserved that mercy?

  One thing I have learned in my travels, one thing I know is true. The world is a mysterious place and no one knows the full truth of it even if they spend their whole life searching. For example, I am writing this account in the sand, each day’s work washed away in time for the next, lost unless my counterpart has been reading it.

  I am using my beloved’s hand, her arm as attached to me as if we were one being. I know every freckle. I know how the bone aches in the cold and damp. I can feel the muscles tensing when I clench the purple stick and see the veins bunched at the wrist like a blue delta. A pale red birthmark on the heel of her palm looks like the perfect snail crossing the tide pool at my feet.

  We never really knew each other, not even each other’s names, but sometimes that is unimportant.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction:Vacancy by Lucius Shepard

  Chapter One

  Cliff Coria has been sitting in a lawn chair out front of the office of Ridgewood Motors for the better part of five years, four nights a week, from mid-afternoon until whenever he decides it’s not worth staying open any longer, and during that time he’s spent, he estimates, between five and six hundred hours staring toward the Celeste Motel across the street. That’s how long it’s taken him to realize that something funny may be going on. He might never have noticed anything if he hadn’t become fascinated by the sign in the office window of the Celeste. It’s a No Vacancy sign, but the No is infrequently lit. Foot-high letters written in a cool blue neon script: they glow with a faint aura in the humid Florida dark:

  VACANCY

  That cool, blue, halated word, then…that’s what Cliff sees as he sits in a solitude that smells of asphalt and gasoline, staring through four lanes of traffic or no traffic at all, plastic pennons stirring above his head, a paperback on his knee (lately he’s been into Scott Turow), at the center of gleaming SUVS, muscle cars, mini-vans, the high-end section where sit the aristocrats of the lot, a BMW, a silver Jag, a couple of Hummers, and the lesser hierarchies of reconditioned Toyotas, family sedans with suspect frames that sell for a thousand dollars and are called Drive-Away Specials. He’s become so sensitized to the word, the sign, it’s as if he’s developed a relationship with it. When he’s reading, he’ll glance toward the sign now and again, because seeing it satisfies something in him. At closing time, leaving the night watchman alone in the office with his cheese sandwiches and his boxing magazines, he’ll snatch a last look at it before he pulls out into traffic and heads for the Port Orange Bridge and home. Sometimes when he’s falling asleep, the sign will switch on in his mind’s eye and glow briefly, bluely, fading as he fades.

  Cliff’s no fool. Used car salesman may be the final stop on his employment track, but it’s lack of ambition, not a lack of intellect, that’s responsible for his station in life. He understands what’s happening with the sign. He’s letting it stand for something other than an empty motel room, letting it second the way he feels about himself. That’s all right, he thinks. Maybe the fixation will goad him into making a change or two, though the safe bet is, he won’t change. Things have come too easily for him. Ever since his glory days as a high school jock (wide receiver, shooting guard), friends, women, and money haven’t been a serious problem. Even now, more than thirty years later, his looks still get him by. He’s got the sort of unremarkably handsome, rumpled face that you might run across in a Pendleton catalog, and he dyes his hair ash brown, leaves a touch of gray at the temples, and wears it the same as he did when he was in Hollywood. That’s where he headed after his stint in the army (he was stationed in Germany near the end of the Vietnam War). He figured to use the knowledge he gained with a demolition unit to get work blowing up stuff in the movies, but wound up acting instead, for the most part in B-pictures.

  People will come onto the lot and say, “Hey! You’re that guy, right?” Usually they’re referring to a series of commercials he shot in the Nineties, but occasionally they’re talking about his movies, his name fifth- or sixth-billed, in which he played good guys who were burned alive, exploded, eaten by monstrous creatures, or otherwise horribly dispatched during the first hour. He often sells a car to the people who recognize him and tosses in an autographed headshot to sweeten the deal. And then he’ll go home to his beach cottage, a rugged old thing of boards and a screened-in porch, built in the forties, that he bought with residual money; he’ll sleep with one of the women whom he sees on a non-exclusive basis, or else he’ll stroll over to the Surfside Grill, an upscale watering hole close by his house, where he’ll drink and watch sports. It’s the most satisfying of dissatisfying lives. He knows he doesn’t have it in him to make a mark, but maybe it’s like in the movies, he thinks. In the movies, everything happens for a reason, and maybe there’s a reason he’s here, some minor plot function he’s destined to perform. Nothing essential, mind you. Just a part with some arc to the character, a little meat on its bones.

  ###

  The Celeste Motel is a relic of Daytona Beach as it was back in the Sixties: fifteen pale blue stucco bungalows, vaguely Spanish in style, hunkered down amidst a scrap of Florida jungle—live oaks, shrimp plants, palmettos, Indian palms, and hibiscus. Everything’s run to seed, the grounds so overgrown that the lights above the bungalow doors (blue like the Vacancy sign) are filtered through sprays of leaves, giving them a mysterious air. Spanish
moss fallen from the oaks collects on the tile roofs; the branches of unpruned shrubs tangle with the mesh of screen doors; weeds choke the flagstone path. The office has the same basic design and color as the bungalows, but it’s two stories with an upstairs apartment, set closer to the street. Supported by a tall metal pole that stands in front of the office is an illuminated square plastic sign bearing the name of the motel and the sketch of a woman’s face, a minimalist, stylized rendering like those faces on matchbook covers accompanied by a challenge to Draw This Face and discover whether you have sufficient talent to enroll in the Famous Artist’s School. Halfway down the pole, another, smaller sign to which stick-on letters can be affixed. Tonight it reads:

  WELCOME SPRING B EAKERS

  SNGL/DBL 29.95

  FREE HBO

  The Celeste is almost never full, but whenever Number eleven is rented, the No on the No Vacancy sign lights up and stays lit for about an hour; then it flickers and goes dark. Once Cliff realized this was a reoccurring phenomenon, it struck him as odd, but no big deal. Then about a month ago, around six o’clock in the evening, just as he was getting comfortable with Turow’s Presumed Guilty, Number eleven was rented by a college-age girl driving a Corvette, the twin of a car that Cliff sold the day before, which is the reason he noticed. She parked at the rear (the lot is out of sight from the street, behind a hedge of bamboo), entered eleven, and the No switched on. A couple of hours later, after the No had switched back off, a family of three driving a new Ford Escape—portly dad, portly mom, skinny kid—checked in and, though most of the cabins were vacant, they, too, entered eleven. The girl must be part of the family, Cliff thought, and they had planned to meet at the motel. But at a quarter past ten, a guy with a beard and biker colors, riding a chopped Harley Sportster, also checked into eleven and the No switched on again.