by Tim Wirkus
I said, “So this—what’s his name again?”
“Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.”
“Right,” I said. “This Salgado-MacKenzie. Is he a Brazilian writer?”
“That’s a good question,” he said, brightening a little. “Open up the top drawer of that filing cabinet, would you?”
I had to scoot my chair nearly out the door, and when I opened the drawer I found a hypochondriac’s arsenal: blister packs of tablets for diarrhea, allergies, motion sickness; bottles of brightly colored syrups for coughs, sore throats, insomnia, the flu; bottles of pills for migraines, dizziness, fatigue.
“The antacid tablets,” said Sérgio. “The yellow lid.”
I found the bottle and handed it to him. With an expert flip of his thumb, he opened the snap-top lid and shook five of the chalky tablets into his palm. He tossed them back and proffered the open bottle in my direction.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Nodding, he shut the lid and tossed the bottle back into the drawer with a clatter.
“You can shut that now,” he said when he had finished chewing. A fine white powder dusted his lips. I shut the drawer.
“Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie,” Sérgio said and then paused, wincing. “I’m sorry.” He put a hand to his chest. “Disappointment gives me heartburn.”
He took a breath.
• • •
So (began Sérgio). Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. As you probably guessed, he’s my favorite writer. His stories—most of them anyway—feature Captain Irena Sertôrian, commander of a spaceship that gets separated from its fleet at the end of a long, drawn-out intragalactic war. Her ship doesn’t have the power to make it back home on its own, so she and her crew go from planet to planet in an obscure and dangerous system at the edge of the civilized galaxy—kind of a frontier situation. And that’s pretty much it. Each story is a different adventure on a different planet.
As far as science fiction premises go, it’s pretty conventional. People, at least the ones who’ve heard of him, dismiss Salgado-MacKenzie for that reason. They say his work is derivative and flat, but they’re missing the point. They’re not seeing what he does with that premise. I’m not sure how to explain to you . . .
• • •
Sérgio paused.
• • •
I was fifteen years old (he continued) when I first came across him in this magazine, Contos Fantásticos. I’d never heard of Salgado-MacKenzie before, but back then, when I read a magazine I read it cover to cover. So this story by Salgado-MacKenzie, it’s called ‘If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula,’ and it’s about a planet where all of the living people live on one side, the light side, but then once they die, they go to the dark side of the planet, where they populate whole cities. They’re not ghosts—they have substance—but they’re dead. In fact, they have an entire dead society that mirrors the living one on the light side of the planet. Businesses, dance clubs, churches. And how the story starts is, Captain Irena Sertôrian and her crew land on the dead side of the planet, and it baffles all of the residents, because Irena Sertôrian and her crew are all alive and no living creature has ever been to the dark side of the planet.
Well, everyone starts asking questions—both the planets’ residents and Sertôrian’s crew—and this leads to a big tribunal that culminates with a really eerie examination by a dead-person doctor who uses a kind of stethoscope, but with a long needle instead of a drum, to listen to the soul, basically, of each member of the crew. I loved the story, and of course I had to get my hands on everything else this Salgado-MacKenzie had written, but that’s where I ran into trouble. I riffled through the back issues of my magazines but came up empty. I subscribed to all the big ones, and some smaller ones too: FC, Argonauto, O Planeta, Contos Astronômicos, Contos Intergalácticos, Contos do Astronauta—the works. Anthologies too: stuff in translation by Asimov, Le Guin, Clarke, as well as Brazilian writers—Fausto Cunha, Jerônimo Monteiro, André Carneiro, Dinah Silveira de Queiroz, and some others. My father owned a newspaper—the Paulistano—so we were pretty comfortable and I had access to whatever reading material I wanted.
Even so, I couldn’t find anything else by Salgado-MacKenzie in my collection. So what I did was I interrogated the owner of every bookshop in a twenty-block radius. I was a persistent little teenager, but nobody had heard of the guy. I kept looking, though, unwilling to give up that easily.
• • •
Sérgio’s enthusiasm had an almost physical quality by this point—a tendril of intensity reaching across the room to hold me in its grasp.
• • •
Finally (continued Sérgio) in a three-year-old copy of a fifth-rate magazine called Contos ‘Science Fiction’ that I bought from a grimy used magazine stand at the train station, I found another one of his stories. In this one, Captain Irena Sertôrian lands on yet another undiscovered planet, in this case one that seems completely deserted. They poke around a little and are just about to leave, but then crew members start disappearing—just vanishing—and I’d tell you the rest but I wouldn’t want to spoil it. It’s great. I enjoyed this second story as much as I had the first, maybe even more.
Unfortunately, finding his stories didn’t get any easier from there. Over the course of five years, I only managed to track down another three. I loved them, though, as much as the first two I’d read, perhaps even more so because of the effort I’d expended in obtaining them.
Meanwhile, I’d also become interested in journalism and politics, and around the time I turned twenty-one, I got a job as a reporter for O Trabalhador, a minor leftist paper whose purpose in life was to criticize my father’s right-leaning Paulistano. I liked to pretend that nobody on the staff knew my true identity—I worked under a pen name—and that I had been hired based solely on the merits of the handful of mediocre pieces of mine that had appeared in small newspapers around the city. I’d later find out that the editor knew exactly who I was and had hoped I might be a useful source of inside information about the Paulistano. Regrettably, for both me and the editor, I had never paid much attention to my father’s mealtime shop talk, and once he heard I was working for the Trabalhador, he kept quiet about work whenever I was around.
Anyway, one day I was hanging around the offices of the Trabalhador, bending a colleague’s ear about the greatness of Salgado-MacKenzie, when my colleague—fed up—stopped me and said that if I loved Salgado-MacKenzie so much, I should find him and tell him how I feel about his work, just to get it out of my system.
Why this idea had never occurred to me, I’m not sure. I’d forgotten, I suppose, that we occupied the same plane of existence, Salgado-MacKenzie having developed such totemic significance for me. But in all likelihood we actually lived in the same country, possibly even the same city. Who knows if I had already passed him in the street or stood next to him on a bus or sat behind him in a movie? The prospect left me dumbstruck.
Over the next few weeks, I managed to speak with every editor who had ever worked with Salgado-MacKenzie’s fiction. Two of them had no idea who I was talking about; they had to look him up to verify that they had, in fact, published his work. Of the three editors who did remember his fiction, none had met him in person. His work had made an impression, though, and each of them offered up a different portrait—or, I suppose, theory—of the man, pieced together from whatever factual fragments they had managed to glean.
All three agreed that he had been born, or at least raised, in the United States, and that his mother was Brazilian, his father North American or possibly Scottish. The family relocated to Brazil when Salgado-MacKenzie was in his mid- to late teens, and so Portuguese was not his first language. Soon after moving, and here’s where the details get even fuzzier, both parents died—a car crash, or a political hit, or a double suicide. Whatever the cause, young Eduard was left alone and spent his teenage years being passed around by dis
tant relatives of his mother’s. Or maybe he spent that time barely surviving on the streets. No one could say for sure.
Beyond those few tidbits, the editors I talked to agreed on very little. One editor claimed that Salgado-MacKenzie had written the stories decades and decades ago, in English, and had in the meantime died or moved back to the States. A friend or relative had discovered the manuscripts and was currently translating them into Portuguese, submitting them to various magazines as they were finished. This would explain the choppy Anglo sentence structure of the prose, as well as the stories’ apparent unawareness of any scientific developments postdating the early fifties.
The second editor believed that Salgado-MacKenzie was actually a woman. This theory was based primarily, from what I could tell, on the fact that so many of his stories featured a female protagonist. This editor argued that the actual author felt a need to hide her identity and so adopted a male pseudonym. I asked why she would need to hide her identity, and the editor said she might be a government official, or maybe she was a serious artist dabbling in genre fiction. She might even have been the North American poet and noted lusophile Elizabeth Bishop, disguising herself with the stories’ clumsy prose. It was not so far-fetched, really. Many respectable writers made secret forays into the sordid world of genre fiction. I told the editor I was not so sure.
The third editor I talked to believed that Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie was just a man named Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie, currently alive and writing odd stories in a language that was not his own. He was in all likelihood a very dull person and if I ever found him I would only be disappointed. This editor also gave me Salgado-MacKenzie’s mailing address—a post office box—along with an assurance that I could try writing, but I’d never hear back from him.
I tried writing anyway, posting a brief but heartfelt letter in which I explained what his stories meant to me and asked if he would be open to speaking with me—perhaps I could profile him in the newspaper, or, if he shunned publicity, we could meet instead for a friendly cup of coffee.
I waited for weeks and then months, but as the editor had predicted, I received no response.
I was tempted at that time to take advantage of some government contacts I had established through my job. I knew they could get their hands on the personal information of the owner of that post office box, but in the end I decided to respect Salgado-MacKenzie’s silence. Although his work remained a lodestar for me, I would leave the man in peace.
We’ll jump forward about fifteen years, then: I was at a science-fiction convention here in the city. No, I should be more specific. I was three or four degrees removed from this convention. What I mean is, I had attended the convention during the day, and that evening I had gone to a party at a friend’s house, a fellow SF enthusiast. The evening had worn on, and from that party I had broken off with a few people to go to a different party nearby. I had broken off from that party, and the one after that, and that’s how, a little after midnight, I found myself in a cramped hotel room with a dozen or so fellow conventioneers that I had never met before in my life.
A few of us stood in the bathroom debating the merits of various first contact novels, but as the conversation grew heated and petty, I excused myself and made my way to the main room, stepping carefully over the lounging bodies of my fellow partygoers. The room reeked of cigarettes and sweat, but in a nice, intimate way. A relaxed, easy gathering, all in all: men and women sitting cross-legged on the two full beds, or sprawling out on the red-and-blue-patterned carpet, drinking and talking. In fact, everyone was sitting or reclining except for one slouchy middle-aged man who stood alone in the far corner of the room staring at an empty patch of carpet in front of him. He wore slacks, a threadbare blazer, and an unfashionably thick tie, the top button of his shirt still done up. He had a head like an upside-down egg and a sad, apologetic face.
I crossed the room toward the man, if for no other reason than to occupy the empty space of carpet in front of him; there was nowhere else to sit or stand.
“Sérgio Antunes,” I said, holding out my hand. He shook it without looking me in the eyes.
“Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie,” he said.
With the hum of a dozen conversations happening around me, I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. I leaned in closer.
“Excuse me?” I said.
The man’s already apologetic face assumed an even more remorseful expression as he opened his mouth to reply.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s a mouthful,” he said in a thick Anglo accent, his eyes still fixed on the carpet. “My name’s Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.”
I couldn’t believe it. I felt a rush of adrenaline, and the atmosphere in the room took on a vivid, dreamlike quality.
“Salgado-MacKenzie the writer? The Irena Sertôrian stories?”
“That’s right,” he said, looking up with surprise.
“This is wonderful,” I said. “Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie. Sir. I’m a great admirer of your work.”
He looked me in the eye, and for a moment—less than a moment—there was an expression of guarded pleasure, an expression that stretched his lips and cheeks into positions they seemed deeply unaccustomed to. He opened his mouth to reply, but then his eyes took in my face and something changed. His pale lips curled, his eyebrows clenched.
“You!” he exploded, and hit me in the chest, an awkward mix of a punch and a shove. I stepped back to keep my balance and knocked over the drink of the woman sitting on the floor behind me. She stood up, a ripple moved through the room, and then everyone’s eyes were on me and the man in the corner.
“How dare you?” said the man, his finger pointed at my chest. “How dare you belittle me like that?”
The crowd in the room went completely silent.
“You must have misunderstood me,” I said. “I’m truly a great admirer of your work. I can’t even begin to convey what it’s meant to—”
“No,” he said, fury in his eyes. “I haven’t forgotten how you treated me, and I refuse to allow it again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I think this is all a misunderstanding. You and I have never met before.”
He winced at this.
“You’ll pretend you don’t know me?” he said.
Hoping to clear this up as quickly as possible, I said, “Truly, I don’t recall—”
“Or have you forgotten?” he said, the fury now tinged with something much sadder. “Have you really forgotten?”
I lifted a placating hand. I said, “I can assure you, we’ve never met before tonight.”
“Unbelievable,” he said.
We were all a little tipsy by this point in the evening, but there was something frighteningly sober about this man, a clarity in his thin voice and his pale eyes. He had the attention of the entire room.
He said, “You lived for several years in a building on the corner of Imperiador and Machado. Apartment number 207. Am I wrong?”
He was not. That was my first apartment. I lived there when I was first starting out as a freelancer, up through my time with the Trabalhador. My hope that this was a complete misunderstanding shriveled inside me. I still didn’t recognize this man, but he knew where I’d lived.
“That was my apartment,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “We were neighbors. I lived in 209.”
He waited for me to process this, but still I didn’t recognize him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He said, “So you still claim we’ve never met?”
“All I’m saying,” I said, “is that your face doesn’t ring a bell.”
“It figures,” he said, throwing up his hands. He took a breath, composing himself, and turned to face the roomful of people, who watched us intently. When he began to speak again, it was to them, as if he couldn’t bear to address me directly.
“This man,” he said, his
voice soft now, his audience straining to hear. “This man and I were neighbors for three years. We lived right next to each other, and although we were not friends by any means, we were friendly. I don’t believe we were ever formally introduced, but we had a nodding acquaintanceship and exchanged pleasantries whenever we passed each other on the stairs or ran into each other at the mailboxes. During one of these exchanges, we discovered that both of us wrote professionally; he was a journalist and I earned my living translating repair manuals for industrial equipment.
“Once we found that common ground, we’d always talk books when we saw each other—not great, in-depth conversations, but updates on what each of us was reading. I was on a Flaubert kick in those days, and if I recall, Sérgio here was reading a lot of Hermann Hesse. There was the slightest edge of competition to our book updates, or if not competition then a desire to impress, at least on my part, which is why I might mention the latest Vargas Llosa novel I’d read, but not the latest Le Guin. Aside from books, we might complain about the building superintendent—a belligerent Southerner rumored to be the son of a Nazi in hiding—or commiserate over the building’s unreliable plumbing. Standard neighbor small talk.”
Salgado-MacKenzie paused and wiped at his pale lips. Personally, I could remember the bad plumbing, the superintendent with alleged Nazi ties, the building itself, but this guy’s face was still completely unfamiliar to me, and so was our supposed book talk.
“As I said,” Salgado-MacKenzie continued, “he and I were not friends—I recognize that—but when we greeted each other I thought I could detect a genuine warmth in his smile, a collegiality in his voice.
“We also shared a schedule in common—or rather, a lack of schedule. Unlike others on our floor, the two of us kept irregular hours. I translated from home, and so I worked when I felt like working and slept when I felt like sleeping. I often went for late-night walks and would return to see my neighbor here just getting in, or sometimes leaving.
“I still remember one chilly June midnight in particular. I’d just finished a translation and had no interest in sleeping. I decided, for starters, to check my mail. As I passed apartment 207, I saw light peeking through the crack at the bottom of the door and heard cupboards being opened and shut. Feeling that night owl’s sense of camaraderie, I saluted the closed door and continued on to the stairs.