The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Like now. We were standing there awhile and I was looking around at nothing and everything, the cars cruising past, some of them stopping now and again for the hookers posing by the curb, and then I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. Stuff coming out of the Angel, shiny like sparks but flowing like liquid. Silver fireworks. I turned and looked all the way at him and it was gone. And he turned and gave a little grin like he was embarrassed I’d seen. Nobody else saw it, though; not the short guy who paused next to the Angel before crossing the street against the light, not the skinny hype looking to sell the boom-box he was carrying on his shoulder, not the homeboy strutting past us with both his girlfriends on his arms, nobody but me.

  The Angel said, Hungry?

  Sure, I said. I’m hungry.

  Angel looked past me. Okay, he said. I looked, too, and here they came, three leather boys, visor caps, belts, boots, keyrings. On the cruise together. Scary stuff, even though you know it’s not looking for you.

  I said, them? Them?

  Angel didn’t answer. One went by, then the second, and the Angel stopped the third by taking hold of his arm.

  Hi.

  The guy nodded. His head was shaved. I could see a little grey-black stubble under his cap. No eyebrows, disinterested eyes. The eyes were because of the Angel.

  I could use a little money, the Angel said. My friend and I are hungry.

  The guy put his hand in his pocket and wiggled out some bills, offering them to the Angel. The Angel selected a twenty and closed the guy’s hand around the rest.

  This will be enough, thank you.

  The guy put his money away and waited.

  I hope you have a good night, said the Angel.

  The guy nodded and walked on, going across the street to where his two friends were waiting on the next corner. Nobody found anything weird about it.

  Angel was grinning at me. Sometimes he was the Angel, when he was doing something, sometimes he was Angel, when he was just with me. Now he was Angel again. We went up the street to the luncheonette and got a seat by the front window so we could still watch the street while we ate.

  Cheeseburger and fries, I said without bothering to look at the plastic-covered menus lying on top of the napkin holder. The Angel nodded.

  Thought so, he said. I’ll have the same, then.

  The waitress came over with a little tiny pad to take our order. I cleared my throat. It seemed like I hadn’t used my voice in a hundred years. “Two cheeseburgers and two fries,” I said, “and two cups of—” I looked up at her and froze. She had no face. Like, nothing, blank from hairline to chin, soft little dents where the eyes and nose and mouth would have been. Under the table, the Angel kicked me, but gentle.

  “And two cups of coffee,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything—how could she?—as she wrote down the order and then walked away again. All shaken up, I looked at the Angel, but he was calm like always.

  She’s a new arrival, Angel told me and leaned back in his chair. Not enough time to grow a face.

  But how can she breathe? I said.

  Through her pores. She doesn’t need much air yet.

  Yah, but what about—like, I mean, don’t other people notice that she’s got nothing there?

  No. It’s not such an extraordinary condition. The only reason you notice is because you’re with me. Certain things have rubbed off on you. But no one else notices. When they look at her, they see whatever face they expect someone like her to have. And eventually, she’ll have it.

  But you have a face, I said. You’ve always had a face.

  I’m different, said the Angel.

  You sure are, I thought, looking at him. Angel had a beautiful face. That wasn’t why I took him home that night, just because he had a beautiful face—I left all that behind a long time ago—but it was there, his beauty. The way you think of a man being beautiful, good clean lines, deep-set eyes, ageless. About the only way you could describe him—look away and you’d forget everything except that he was beautiful. But he did have a face. He did.

  Angel shifted in the chair—these were like somebody’s old kitchen chairs, you couldn’t get too comfortable in them—and shook his head, because he knew I was thinking troubled thoughts. Sometimes you could think something and it wouldn’t be troubled and later you’d think the same thing and it would be troubled. The Angel didn’t like me to be troubled about him.

  Do you have a cigarette? he asked.

  I think so.

  I patted my jacket and came up with most of a pack that I handed over to him. The Angel lit up and amused us both by having the smoke come out his ears and trickle out of his eyes like ghostly tears. I felt my own eyes watering for his; I wiped them and there was that stuff again, but from me now. I was crying silver fireworks. I flicked them on the table and watched them puff out and vanish.

  Does this mean I’m getting to be you, now? I asked.

  Angel shook his head. Smoke wafted out of his hair. Just things rubbing off on you. Because we’ve been together and you’re—susceptible. But they’re different for you.

  Then the waitress brought our food and we went on to another sequence, as the Angel would say. She still had no face but I guess she could see well enough because she put all the plates down just where you’d think they were supposed to go and left the tiny little check in the middle of the table.

  Is she—I mean, did you know her, from where you—

  Angel gave his head a brief little shake. No. She’s from somewhere else. Not one of my—people. He pushed the cheeseburger and fries in front of him over to my side of the table. That was the way it was done; I did all the eating and somehow it worked out.

  I picked up my cheeseburger and I was bringing it up to my mouth when my eyes got all funny and I saw it coming up like a whole series of cheeseburgers, whoom-whoom-whoom, trick photography, only for real. I closed my eyes and jammed the cheeseburger into my mouth, holding it there, waiting for all the other cheeseburgers to catch up with it.

  You’ll be okay, said the Angel. Steady, now.

  I said with my mouth full, That was—that was weird. Will I ever get used to this?

  I doubt it. But I’ll do what I can to help you.

  Yah, well, the Angel would know. Stuff rubbing off on me, he could feel it better than I could. He was the one it was rubbing off from.

  I had put away my cheeseburger and half of Angel’s and was working on the french fries for both of us when I noticed he was looking out the window with this hard, tight expression on his face.

  Something? I asked him.

  Keep eating, he said.

  I kept eating, but I kept watching, too. The Angel was staring at a big blue car parked at the curb right outside the diner. It was silvery blue, one of those lots-of-money models and there was a woman kind of leaning across from the driver’s side to look out the passenger window. She was beautiful in that lots-of-money way, tawny hair swept back from her face, and even from here I could see she had turquoise eyes. Really beautiful woman. I almost felt like crying. I mean, jeez, how did people get that way and me too harmless to live.

  But the Angel wasn’t one bit glad to see her. I knew he didn’t want me to say anything, but I couldn’t help it.

  Who is she?

  Keep eating, Angel said. We need the protein, what little there is.

  I ate and watched the woman and the Angel watch each other and it was getting very—I don’t know, very something between them, even through the glass. Then a cop car pulled up next to her and I knew they were telling her to move it along. She moved it along.

  Angel sagged against the back of his chair and lit another cigarette, smoking it in the regular, unremarkable way.

  * * *

  What are we going to do tonight? I asked the Angel as we left the restaurant.

  Keep out of harm’s way, Angel said, which was a new answer. Most nights we spent just kind of going around soaking everything up. The Angel soaked it up, mostly. I got some
of it along with him, but not the same way he did. It was different for him. Sometimes he would use me like a kind of filter. Other times he took it direct. There’d been the big car accident one night, right at my usual corner, a big old Buick running a red light smack into somebody’s nice Lincoln. The Angel had had to take it direct because I couldn’t handle that kind of stuff. I didn’t know how the Angel could take it, but he could. It carried him for days afterwards, too. I only had to eat for myself.

  It’s the intensity, little friend, he’d told me, as though that were supposed to explain it.

  It’s the intensity, not whether it’s good or bad. The universe doesn’t know good or bad, only less or more. Most of you have a bad time reconciling this. You have a bad time with it, little friend, but you get through better than other people. Maybe because of the way you are. You got squeezed out of a lot, you haven’t had much of a chance at life. You’re as much an exile as I am, only in your own land.

  That may have been true, but at least I belonged here, so that part was easier for me. But I didn’t say that to the Angel. I think he liked to think he could do as well or better than me at living—I mean, I couldn’t just look at some leather boy and get him to cough up a twenty dollar bill. Cough up a fist in the face or worse, was more like it.

  Tonight, though, he wasn’t doing so good, and it was that woman in the car. She’d thrown him out of step, kind of.

  Don’t think about her, the Angel said, just out of nowhere. Don’t think about her any more.

  Okay, I said, feeling creepy because it was creepy when the Angel got a glimpse of my head. And then, of course, I couldn’t think about anything else hardly.

  Do you want to go home? I asked him.

  No. I can’t stay in now. We’ll do the best we can tonight, but I’ll have to be very careful about the tricks. They take so much out of me, and if we’re keeping out of harm’s way, I might not be able to make up for a lot of it.

  It’s okay, I said. I ate. I don’t need anything else tonight, you don’t have to do any more.

  Angel got that look on his face, the one where I knew he wanted to give me things, like feelings, I couldn’t have any more. Generous, the Angel was. But I didn’t need those feelings, not like other people seem to. For awhile, it was like the Angel didn’t understand that, but he let me be.

  Little friend, he said, and almost touched me. The Angel didn’t touch a lot. I could touch him and that would be okay, but if he touched somebody, he couldn’t help doing something to them, like the trade that had given us the money. That had been deliberate. If the trade had touched the Angel first, it would have been different, nothing would have happened unless the Angel touched him back. All touch meant something to the Angel that I didn’t understand. There was touching without touching, too. Like things rubbing off on me. And sometimes, when I did touch the Angel, I’d get the feeling that it was maybe more his idea than mine, but I didn’t mind that. How many people were going their whole lives never being able to touch an Angel?

  We walked together and all around us the street was really coming to life. It was getting colder, too. I tried to make my jacket cover more. The Angel wasn’t feeling it. Most of the time hot and cold didn’t mean much to him. We saw the three rough trade guys again. The one Angel had gotten the money from was getting into a car. The other two watched it drive away and then walked on. I looked over at the Angel.

  Because we took his twenty, I said.

  Even if we hadn’t, Angel said.

  So we went along, the Angel and me, and I could feel how different it was tonight than it was all the other nights we’d walked or stood together. The Angel was kind of pulled back into himself and seemed to be keeping a check on me, pushing us closer together. I was getting more of those fireworks out of the corners of my eyes, but when I’d turn my head to look, they’d vanish. It reminded me of the night I’d found the Angel standing on my corner all by himself in pain. The Angel told me later that was real talent, knowing he was in pain. I never thought of myself as any too talented, but the way everyone else had been just ignoring him, I guess I must have had something to see him after all.

  The Angel stopped us several feet down from an all-night bookstore. Don’t look, he said. Watch the traffic or stare at your feet, but don’t look or it won’t happen.

  There wasn’t anything to see right then, but I didn’t look anyway. That was the way it was sometimes, the Angel telling me it made a difference whether I was watching something or not, something about the other people being conscious of me being conscious of them. I didn’t understand, but I knew Angel was usually right. So I was watching traffic when the guy came out of the bookstore and got his head punched.

  I could almost see it out of the corner of my eye. A lot of movement, arms and legs flying and grunty noises. Other people stopped to look but I kept my eyes on the traffic, some of which was slowing up so they could check out the fight. Next to me, the Angel was stiff all over. Taking it in, what he called the expenditure of emotional kinetic energy. No right, no wrong, little friend, he’d told me. Just energy, like the rest of the universe.

  So he took it in and I felt him taking it in, and while I was feeling it, a kind of silver fog started creeping around my eyeballs and I was in two places at once. I was watching the traffic and I was in the Angel watching the fight and feeling him charge up like a big battery.

  It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. These two guys slugging it out—well, one guy doing all the slugging and the other skittering around trying to get out from under the fists and having his head punched but good, and the Angel drinking it like he was sipping at an empty cup and somehow getting it to have something in it after all. Deep inside him, whatever made the Angel go was getting a little stronger.

  I kind of swung back and forth between him and me, or swayed might be more like it was. I wondered about it, because the Angel wasn’t touching me. I really was getting to be him, I thought; Angel picked that up and put the thought away to answer later. It was like I was traveling by the fog, being one of us and then the other, for a long time, it seemed, and then after awhile I was more me than him again, and some of the fog cleared away.

  And there was that car, pointed the other way this time, and the woman was climbing out of it with this big weird smile on her face, as though she’d won something. She waved at the Angel to come to her.

  Bang went the connection between us dead and the Angel shot past me, running away from the car. I went after him. I caught a glimpse of her jumping back into the car and yanking at the gear shift.

  Angel wasn’t much of a runner. Something funny about his knees. We’d gone maybe a hundred feet when he started wobbling and I could hear him pant. He cut across a Park & Lock that was dark and mostly empty. It was back-to-back with some kind of private parking lot and the fences for each one tried to mark off the same narrow strip of lumpy pavement. They were easy to climb but Angel was too panicked. He just went through them before he even thought about it; I knew that because if he’d been thinking, he’d have wanted to save what he’d just charged up with for when he really needed it bad enough.

  I had to haul myself over the fences in the usual way, and when he heard me rattling on the saggy chainlink, he stopped and looked back.

  Go, I told him. Don’t wait on me!

  He shook his head sadly. Little friend, I’m a fool. I could stand to learn from you a little more.

  Don’t stand, run! I got over the fences and caught up with him. Let’s go! I yanked his sleeve as I slogged past and he followed at a clumsy trot.

  Have to hide somewhere, he said, camouflage ourselves with people.

  I shook my head, thinking we could just run maybe four more blocks and we’d be at the freeway overpass. Below it were the butt-ends of old roads closed off when the freeway had been built. You could hide there the rest of your life and no one would find you. But Angel made me turn right and go down a block to this rundown crack-in-the-wall called Stan’s Ji
gger. I’d never been in there—I’d never made it a practice to go into bars—but the Angel was pushing too hard to argue.

  Inside it was smelly and dark and not too happy. The Angel and I went down to the end of the bar and stood under a blood-red light while he searched his pockets for money.

  Enough for one drink apiece, he said.

  I don’t want anything.

  You can have soda or something.

  The Angel ordered from the bartender, who was suspicious. This was a place for regulars and nobody else, and certainly nobody else like me or the Angel. The Angel knew that even stronger than I did but he just stood and pretended to sip his drink without looking at me. He was all pulled into himself and I was hovering around the edges. I knew he was still pretty panicked and trying to figure out what he could do next. As close as I was, if he had to get real far away, he was going to have a problem and so was I. He’d have to tow me along with him and that wasn’t the most practical thing to do.

  Maybe he was sorry now he’d let me take him home. But he’d been so weak then, and now with all the filtering and stuff I’d done for him he couldn’t just cut me off without a lot of pain.

  I was trying to figure out what I could do for him now when the bartender came back and gave us a look that meant order or get out, and he’d have liked it better if we got out. So would everyone else there. The few other people standing at the bar weren’t looking at us, but they knew right where we were, like a sore spot. It wasn’t hard to figure out what they thought about us, either, maybe because of me or because of the Angel’s beautiful face.

  We got to leave, I said to the Angel but he had it in his head this was good camouflage. There wasn’t enough money for two more drinks so he smiled at the bartender and slid his hand across the bar and put it on top of the bartender’s. It was tricky doing it this way; bartenders and waitresses took more persuading because it wasn’t normal for them just to give you something.

  The bartender looked at the Angel with his eyes half closed. He seemed to be thinking it over. But the Angel had just blown a lot going through the fence instead of climbing over it and the fear was scuttling his concentration and I just knew that it wouldn’t work. And maybe my knowing that didn’t help, either.