The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  —From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.

  I woke up from my thoughts.

  Farther off the sheep had suddenly began baaing wildly. I saw them start to come tumbling down the slope as if they were suddenly in a big hurry to get somewhere.

  “The train is coming,” Rupert said.

  Only then did I notice there were little decorative Donald Ducks on his picnic tie—he hadn’t completely forgotten his childhood after all. A gust had arisen and was intently tugging at his tie and making his white lapels flap like the wings of a large white butterfly.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “The train is coming,” Rupert repeated still smiling and pointed somewhere toward the sheep. I put my sandwich down and turned to look.

  The railway ran along the ridge of Sheep Hill; from the cool darkness of the spruce forest it dived down to the clearing and then disappeared in a long cold tunnel excavated through Sheep Rock. The tunnel’s mouth stood above us, breathing darkness, on top of the high embankment heaped out of big stones. The growing metallic clang and the rumble of hundreds of metal wheels against the iron rails muffled the protest of the affronted sheep. A fast red electric engine emerged. After it an endless line of dark goods wagons rattled toward the clearing.

  I instinctively glanced at my watch: the time was 1:27.

  The rhythmic noise chased the sheep. It filled the whole scene and buried the cries of the sheep like an avalanche. Rupert took the hand of his fiancée, kissed her, and then said something I didn’t hear. She laughed. A nervous butterfly fluttered over our party, and its brown dryness made me think of falling autumn leaves.

  The train now drew a moving line the length of the whole clearing. Wagon by wagon it pushed itself above us into the tunnel and eclipsed the sun burning above Sheep Rock, offering instead a hypnotically quick dark-bright dazzle. Dust from the embankment began to fall on us. I glanced upwards with a mild resentment and thought that I definitely ought to cover our sandwiches before they started tasting too sandy.

  Then something broke loose of the train’s dark shape and started to spin down toward us.

  I followed the track of the object in the blue skies, now gray with dust; it rotated and whirled and got bigger all the time. I stared at it spellbound. Suddenly I realized it was coming toward us and would probably fall right in the middle of our picnic.

  I opened my mouth to yell a warning to Rupert and Birgitta, but instead inhaled dust and could get no sound out of my throat because of a fierce fit of coughing. To crown it all the dust blinded my eyes and I could do nothing but cough and fling my arms about and hope my companions would realize they ought to move back.

  Among the clank and rumble I discerned a muffled crack, like the sound of a breaking egg.

  I forced my tearing eyes open and saw faintly how Rupert waved his arm, as if greeting an old acquaintance he hadn’t seen for years, and an object the shape of a marrowbone rebounded off his head into the brook. Rupert fell on his back in the grass. Birgitta’s shrill whimper penetrated my ears through the train’s monotonous chant.

  “Do we have eggs in the basket?” I yelled idiotically and started to cough again.

  The girl kept shaking her head and pointed with a trembling finger at Rupert who lay on the slope, limbs spread out, and seemingly asleep. When one looked closer at him, one could see his hair’s recently neat part was now missing completely.

  Birgitta started a furious legal campaign against the State Railways.

  State Railways admitted that the metal object which had broken Rupert’s skull had indeed originated from the train rushing past us, to be exact from the locking system of the twenty-eighth goods wagon of the train. The Railway attorney expressed his surprise that a part had come loose at all, since that was, in principle, impossible. The train had been duly and carefully checked before departure according to all possible railway traffic regulations. It sounded as if he were insinuating that we should be under suspicion for some malicious act cleverly sabotaging their precious train. The part coming loose troubled the SR very much. But for Rupert’s sake, the railway people seemed not to lose a single night’s sleep—when the insincere platitudes were peeled away, the basic attitude of the SR seemed to be Shit happens, so what? You should have kept far away from our railway!

  In the past I’d have wanted to go into a blind rage and tear the attorney’s self-important head off his weak shoulders, but the dinosaur seemed to have disappeared from inside me and instead of empowering rage I only managed to feel enormous fatigue and defeat.

  About indemnities no consensus could be reached: Birgitta demanded thirty million, and the Railways did not want to pay a penny over hospital expenses—just paying the hospital bill was already proof of the extraordinary benevolence of the SR and exceeded all legal obligations, said the Railway attorney and chided us for our greed. Birgitta swore to me, gasping for breath, that she would make the Railways pay dearly and would even destroy with different tactical lawsuits the whole Finnish railway system, if nothing less would make the SR take full responsibility for Rupert’s skull fracture and its possible consequences.

  I presumed that Birgitta would calm down in time and her storming holy rage would quieten, and after five months that was the case. She phoned me, embarrassed, and told me she had no more strength any longer to attack the windmills. I said that as far as I was concerned the mills could turn and the trains could move, what had happened could not be undone.

  When Rupert woke up he did not recognize Birgitta. He just stared at the walls of his hospital room, ill at ease, twiddled his thumbs, and finally asked Birgitta, who was trembling by the bed, if ma’am happened to have any Chicago chewing gum with her, please.

  “And that damned brand of chewing gum hasn’t even been produced for years!” Birgitta sighed when we sat in the hospital cafeteria and wondered at the turn things had taken.

  The doctors had said Rupert would never remember Birgitta, not really. The part of Rupert’s brain where all the memories of Birgitta had been located had suffered irreparably serious damage.

  “As far as I am concerned he is sort of dead,” the unhappy fiancée stated, and since I could invent no reasonable counter-argument, I stuffed my mouth full of the bun I’d bought in the cafeteria.

  Besides the Birgitta-memories, the destroyed bit of his brain had stored the whole of Rupert’s legal learning, and some other rather important information. Rupert did remember me, though. Just after the chewing gum, Rupert had started to ask for his mother. And he remembered the Lola brand of chocolate (although that was also out of production, as we later found out to Rupert’s regret) and Donald Duck and trains and the death of his father and all the nightmares of his childhood. Actually he remembered everything quite excellently—up to his ninth year.

  For understandable reasons the engagement lapsed. Rupert returned to the home of his childhood. He had spent six months in the hospital. During his stay, the summery land had shriveled up in the leafless squeeze of winter.

  It took time to get used to the creature who wandered in silence around my house from one room to another. He didn’t speak much, just sometimes asked me to bring some sweets from the shop or inquired after his things long since discarded. It was Rupert, and it was not. It was some kind of an anachronistic person: the being had the exterior of the grown-up lawyer-Rupert and the frightened eyes and mind of the child-Rupert already once left behind. It kept watching the courtyard out of the windows nervously cracking its finger joints and sneaking around like a ghost. It brooded over thoughts hidden from me. It was scared of its own image in the mirrors since that had become unfamiliar and strange to it.

  I’d have screamed if I’d had the energy for such behavior, but I was tired and apathetic and thought I’d never again have the strength for any dashing enterprises. The air I breathed was thin and stuffy.

  “Rupert,” I said finally. “It can’t go on like this for much longer. Something has to happen. Something.”

/>   I didn’t know myself what I was actually trying to say, and certainly I’d been speaking more to myself than to my son, but the anachronistic Rupert looked at me and nodded as if he had known exactly what I meant.

  Months passed outside the house. Inside it time had, at first, stopped, and then gone definitely haywire after the anachronistic Rupert returned home.

  I stayed at home with Rupert. I didn’t even see Miriam except a few times in passing: in the supermarket, out in the village, on the road, at the watchmaker’s. Sometimes I doubted whether we had ever known each other, so distant had we become. I didn’t ask her to visit, and she was intelligent enough not to come without invitation. I simply lacked the energy to talk to people, to explain all the time—to myself and to others—Rupert’s present appearance and situation and the type of his brain damage. I couldn’t stand people’s empathetic, watery looks; I did not want to see my son through strange pitying eyes that made me only feel miserable and sorry for someone who, a moment ago, had been a successful lawyer but now was something else completely.

  I have never been a regular guest to the Houndbury parties or otherwise particularly sociable, and now I froze even my scant relations with the local people to a polite level of Seasons’ Greetings. I did not want to look in people’s eyes and realize that nowadays I was “the poor mother of that disabled lawyer,” rather than Ms. Emma Nightingale. I did not want my son, “that disabled lawyer,” to become one of the established Houndbury oddities. I had to find out something that would help both Rupert and me to cope with the new situation. I had to find some meaningful solution to it, and I wanted to do that alone, in my own peace.

  In the first week of February, Miriam turned up for a surprise visit.

  She had dyed her beautiful golden hair profoundly red. She had put on some weight, but a slight roundness became her and made her look more sensuous than ever. My sensuality, however, was waning. My black hair had acquired quite a lot of gray during the last weeks, and some strange unconscious idea had made me keep my hair short after Rupert’s skull fracture. I’d even lost weight, and had started to notice the first real signs of old age in myself (and only now, bitterly, was I able to distinguish them from the earlier signs of maturity).

  We hugged, and then we kissed, too, although no longer as lovers but as friends, and I thought I felt the light taste of farewell on her lips. We had a cup of coffee, ate some salt crackers and made some small talk.

  Miriam was wondering about the burglary on the Tykebend road construction site; some amount of dynamite had gone missing, and teachers had been told to keep an eye on their pupils in case any of them turned out to have explosives in their desks or bags. I reminded her that it was by no means the first time something like that happened around Houndbury.

  We were appalled by today’s immoral little creepy-crawlies. The stolen explosives had either been sold on, or else there was a rather big cache somewhere close by—very soon a part of Houndbury would surely fly off in the four winds, we prophesied. (And I at least was secretly pleased with the idea.)

  I asked whether Miriam was still writing her short stories, and she said she was soon going to send some to the publisher. She inquired politely if perhaps I’d like to take a look at her writings and give my opinion. I declined the honor, I didn’t understand one whit about fiction since I read only factual material.

  Suddenly Rupert came out of his room to greet his former teacher. As usual, he wore a white shirt, a waistcoat, a Donald Duck tie and a pair of gray trousers (although he didn’t really feel comfortable in those, as would no nine-year-old boy). At first he sounded thoroughly sensible, even grown-up-like, and Miriam glanced at me with a glad surprised smile. So what’s supposed to be wrong with him? her eyes asked. Then Rupert blew the impression to pieces when he started to ask Miriam about how far behind he was in his math lessons: how many pages had the rest of the class gone ahead while he’d been in the hospital? And could the teacher possibly give him some extra tutoring, for he’d been having difficulties with fractions.

  Miriam snatched her handbag, spluttered some good-byes, and rushed out of the house with tears in her eyes, leaving the anachronistic Rupert staring after her in wonder.

  The night noises of the trains made Rupert fall out of his bed, and quite often he had to be patched up with Band Aids—a grown-up man falls out of bed harder than a little boy. He stayed very much inside. That was al right with me, I didn’t want him to be mocked and stoned by the neighborhood kids.

  Always on Wednesdays, Rupert went out to the mailbox and came back looking disappointed. When I finally paid proper notice, I realized he was expecting his Donald Duck comics.

  I didn’t know whether I was acting wisely, but— after a break of twenty years—I subscribed to the comic again for him. (Although the day the comic came had been changed to Thursday, which gave Rupert diarrhea.) I saw neither grounds nor reason any more to control what he was reading, doing, or watching. As far as Rupert’s imagination was concerned, he now had to cope with it himself. I could not manage to launch a major offensive against fantasy a second time. My war was over, my inner dinosaur was buried under the avalanche of all that had happened and, in the pressure, changed to oil muddying my insides.

  Sometimes Rupert leafed through books he found on the shelves: encyclopedias and biographies and a thick anthology of poetry that probably was a present from Miriam. A couple of times I saw in Rupert’s hands that first law book he had learnt by heart; he fingered it uncertainly and then always put it away without opening it.

  I don’t know how much my son understood of the books he studied, or about what had happened to him. Sometimes he seemed like the intelligent and clever lawyer he had been only a few months before; then he was, again, a big confused child who wore Armani suits and five-hundred mark ties and could ponder for hours the story of “Square Eggs” he had read in the Duck comic. Those two sides seemed to compete for territory inside him, and mostly he was somewhere in between.

  Now and then Rupert drew strange little pictures, which he tore up immediately and burned in the sauna oven. I got the impression that he was trying to draw Birgitta and other things he had lost with the accident, things that now only haunted him as vague dream images.

  The old Timex had again found its place on his wrist, although I had to go and buy a new, longer strap for it from Houndbury Watch—since he could not really believe that the Rolex glittering in the chest drawer actually belonged to him.

  Everything dissolved into a sleepy anticipation-filled dormancy which was held together only by the ticking of the clocks, the repetitive daily routines, and my belief that something would happen. Something that would give me the key to a solution, a way out from the deadlocked dream I couldn’t possibly imagine continuing endlessly. (As unfounded as such a subjective notion of course was, objectively considered.)

  March came, with harsh nightly cold. The ribs of the house cracked in the squeeze of coldness, and sometimes just before falling asleep I imagined that the walls were breaking to splinters around me and winter was rushing in and freezing me into a rigid naked statue in my bed. I dreamed of a terrible cold that rolled over me.

  Now and then, I woke up and did not know who or where I was—I had to sneak around the house and go look at the sleeping Rupert and look over objects I found for evidence to be able to locate myself back in my own life.

  On the last week of the month, during the night between Thursday and Friday at 01:12 in the morning, I woke up to muffled sounds of departure seeping to my ears through the floorboards.

  Rupert had slipped out at night before, but each time I had noticed it only afterwards from his wet shoes and the trails left in the snow. Through the clogged ducts of my mind gushed a sudden excitement that quickened even my numb flesh—I yanked a thick housecoat over myself and dashed down the cold stairs.

  I threw the front door open. Rupert stood in the courtyard with skis and poles in his hands and a rucksack on his back and stared at me
. He may have been a little scared, thinking he would be scolded, but at the same time I could sense unusual determination in him: the fact he was leaving and I could do absolutely nothing about it.

  That was all right by me.

  I let the icy black night air fill my lungs and soak into my bloodstream. The sky spreading above us seemed to open directly to the cold halls of space. The stars were skimping on their scant light, but in the middle of them the Moon hunched big and bright, yet grieving for its imagined imperfection: only after a couple more nights would it be perfectly round and beautiful and could really wallow in its own light. The cold made the black-and-white night scene crackle and pop as if it were the bowl of rice crispies in thick cream and sugar that Rupert ate in the mornings.

  I shivered in my housecoat and we stared at each other without words, Rupert and I. Then I broke the silence: “Don’t worry, you aren’t going to become mink food.” (I remembered my threat from over twenty years back, and so probably did Rupert, because he looked relieved.)

  “Besides, old Traphollow died of a heart attack last fall while he was hunting rabbits. We have a new constable, too, whom I wouldn’t try to bribe for his silence. But why don’t you wait a little before you start. I’ll come with you this time, if you don’t mind. Who knows: perhaps I’ll be a ferroequinologist, too.”

  Rupert seemed to frown thoughtfully under his broad-brimmed Stetson, but then he nodded. The hem of his gray Burberry were sweeping the ground. He had wrapped a medium length red muffler round his neck and covered his ears with black earmuffs. He didn’t at all look like a brain-damaged man who thought like a nine-year old. He looked like a gentleman who was going to take a breath of fresh air after an evening of theatre, then afterwards have a nightcap, read a few lines of Dostoyevsky, and withdraw to his bed.

  I dressed as quickly as I could, found my ski boots, locked the house, and fetched my old skis from the woodshed where they had spent the last twenty years. Then we started skiing in the blocked lightlessness of the forest, the son ahead with coat flapping and the mother behind, stumbling in her slippery skis and with the unfamiliar poles.