F&SF July/August 2011

by Fantasy; Science Fiction

  I rolled my eyes. "I need it for a spell."

  Hanna cocked her head.

  I thought she'd take my bitterness as sarcasm, but she turned her body back toward mine. "A spell? That does what?"

  I looked away. She finally reached out and took the cash, and I gratefully pulled back into myself. "I was kidding. Forget it."

  "What does it do? This spell?"

  "I don't need it for a spell, okay? I was being sarcastic."

  "You're a rotten liar."

  "Come on. Do you really believe that I secretly know how to cast spells?"

  "You seem to."

  I didn't reply.

  Hanna took out a wallet from her back pocket and flipped it open. For a moment, I hated her for her self-absorption and breezy acceptance of something so strange. Shouldn't she feel something? Betrayal? Shock?

  She put the money away. I saw Hanna's hard-copy picture of our mother in her wallet, her serene expression, her narrow, wide-set eyes, her face as cool and evocative as the face of the moon. Leading a life somewhere just as out of reach, for twenty-three years now and counting. For a moment, I hated her, too. Had she stayed around, Hanna might have turned into something other than this.

  Hanna said, "You'll have to show me some magic sometime."

  I looked at her closely. I couldn't read her expression. "Can you find an animal for me or not?"

  Hanna slid her wallet back into her pocket and offered me that deceptively sunny grin. "Sure can."

  "Find me something slow, that won't run away. Like a tortoise or a slug. Or better yet—" I took out my wallet again and handed her a credit card. "Buy it for me with this, if you can. And call my cell as soon as you do, so I know it's on its way."

  She took the card. Her eyes glittered. "Do I get a present for helping you? Since Daddy refuses to 'sponsor a whore' and give me money anymore?"

  I couldn't say no. "Sure. Buy yourself whatever you want."

  She slid up to me and gave me a one-armed hug, while slipping my credit card into the front of her waistband with her other hand. "Love you bunches, Rammy. Call me and we'll hang out sometime for real, okay?"

  Her hair smelled like cigarettes, and this close, I could see the redness in her eyes. I hugged her back, as if I could squeeze out everything within her that I had long ago ceased to recognize. "Sure."

  I left the party and got back into the Jag. I drove a winding course through L.A. for hundreds of years. cikhe innkeeperb b again, making more calls.

  "Alan, it's Ramshead. I'm calling to see how things are going."

  "Alan, it's Ramshead. I couldn't get you on your main cell. I'm seeing if you've found any of those things we talked about."

  "Hi, Alan, it's Ramshead. I've tried a bunch of your other numbers. Where in God's name are you?"

  I finally gave up and called the direct line to his secretary again. "Patty Cheng."

  "Hi, Patty, this is Ramshead."

  "Ramshead! Hello. Is everything all right?"

  "Yeah. I need to speak with Alan again. He should be expecting my calls, but I can't raise him. Didn't he come back to the office?"

  "He did. I think he's here right now."

  I was driving east on San Vicente Boulevard, already doing sixty, but at this I upped my speed to sixty-five. "Do you know if he's supposed to be in for the next half-hour or so?"

  "He is, as far as he's told me."

  "Great."

  "Did you want me to get him?"

  "No. That's all I needed to know."

  We said our good-byes, and I hung up as I swerved onto Wilshire Boulevard. Alan was deliberately not answering my calls.

  I upped it to seventy.

  I PARKED in the garage, showed my badge to security, and ran into the depths of the building. In minutes, I stood outside the antechamber of Alan's office, sweating and breathless. I wiped my forehead with my wrists, figured that was good enough to make me look presentable, and went inside.

  Patty looked up from her desk as I came in. "Oh! Ramshead. I wasn't expecting you. Shall I—"

  "Yes."

  "I'll tell him you're here."

  I did not sit down. Patty smiled at me and busied herself at her computer. It should have taken Alan less than fifteen seconds to come out from his inner office, but thirty seconds passed.

  "Would you like to sit down?" Patty asked.

  "No."

  "I think he's in the middle of something."

  I moved to the inner door, but Patty stood up, her smile a warning. "I'm sure he'll be right out."

  I fumed and paced. Patty made calls and spoke in a sweet, pleasant voice. She typed at her computer. She put documents into envelopes. I pointedly checked my Daytona, over and over, and in this way, twenty horrible minutes passed.

  I stopped pacing. "Patty," I finally said, "I'm really sorry about this."

  She waved a hand. "That's all right. I know that things happen, and—Ramshead!"

  I ran into his office anyway.

  And right there, on the wide coffee table (Thomas Messel, American Chestnut), that lying son of a bitch was having lunch.

  With him .

  My heart seized. The door swung shut behind me. Alan looked up and away, too fast for me to even make eye contact, as across the table from him, my father said dryly, "Good afternoon, Ramshead. I can't imagine that you'd possibly be interested in our business meeting, but please, if you care that much about the Q2 reports, pull up a chair."

  My throat was ash. "I need to talk to Alan."

  "I don't think you do. We'll see you later, Ramshead."

  Alan nodded without looking at me. "We'll talk some other time, all right?"

  "Goddamnit it, no!" I shouted. "I asked you, and you agreed —so what the hell is this ?"

  "A meeting," said my father flatly. "Or is taking him out of one today not enough?"

  I tried again to make eye contact with Alan, but he still wouldn't look at me—only down at the details of his Caesar salad.

  My father pulled the napkin from his lap, wiped his mouth, and stood. "Ramshead, I really don't want to repeat myself."

  "This is important!"

  "Like it was this morning? Oh yes—Alan told me all about that. Of all the childish reasons to interrupt his day. Great crucified Christ."

  I reeled. "What—what reasons? What did you tell him?" I demanded of Alan, but he wouldn't answer.

  "Everything," snapped my father. "Which is to say, nothing much. A bunch of bushes? You|up or television— pulled him out over your love for a bunch of fucking bushes ?"

  Between us, thousands of truths and unheld conversations loomed.

  "But see...," I started. "It's not just... I mean there's—"

  "You've got a real problem with moving on and letting go, you know that?" My father adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, to make each one symmetrical and perfect. "I want you to listen to me, Ramshead, for once in your contrary, obstinate life. Your existence is designed to be unimportant. Ergo, by definition, nothing you could ever do or want will ever be as important as even one, tiny little word spoken within these walls. Unless my house is on fire, you are not to take Alan out of a meeting. Do you understand me?"

  I couldn't speak.

  "So I suggest that you grow up and accept the timely passing of the goddamn topiary. It can't mean anything real to you anyway."

  I took a step toward my brother.

  My father lunged forward, whites of his eyes visible all around, daring me to take it further.

  I turned on my heel and stormed out.

  I had trouble breathing. My muscles wouldn't work right. I couldn't see where I was going and moved only on blind instinct, to someplace where there would be no people to see my humiliation. A back stairwell somewhere. I sank to concrete steps and put my head in my arms.

  In my pocket, my cell phone rang. I drew it out and stared at the unfamiliar digits, then ground a palm into my eyes to clear them. Maybe it was Hanna's new number. "Ramshead."

  "I didn't tell
him everything ," whispered Alan. "Obviously."

  I stiffened.

  "He'd never believe it. You know that. And anyway—what do you think I am?"

  "I think you're a lying son of a bitch who I never should've—"

  "I saw something. Okay? Earlier, you asked me if I actually saw something. Well—I did. Every single night for an entire year, after Mom left, I dreamed that I saw everyone I ever gave a damn about—you, Hanna, Mom, Dad—walking into that thing, and never coming out.

  "Don't mess with it, Ramshead. I'm begging you. I don't want to know what you're doing, but for Christ's sake, leave it alone. You have no idea what this is connected to."

  "Neither do you," I choked, but Alan had hung up.

  I wasted valuable time collecting myself, then left the stairwell and made it back to the garage. Again I drove through L.A. traffic, growing rougher with the first edge of rush hour. I navigated it the way I turn side in The Maze: on instinct alone, with my mind in some disconnected place.

  To protect myself.

  This is fine, I told myself. I am fine. Everything is fine. I'm on my own all the time, so how is this any different? It's not. It's going to be fine.

  I took out my phone again and called down the list.

  "Hi, Sammy, this is Ramshead. Haven't talked to you in a while. Listen, I need a favor... call me back when you get this.

  "Hi, Diana, this is Ramshead. Oh, shit. You're in France this month, aren't you? Never mind.

  "Hey Vic. It's Ramshead. I think you told me once that you have an uncle who teaches at UCLA. He's in the Linguistics Department, right? This'll sound weird, but can you give me his number? Call me back."

  I went through my entire phone, leaving messages and getting actual answers from no one.

  So now what?

  I went to the house. Not my father's house, but rather the "little cottage" that he had given me on my eighteenth birthday, in which I, and not the house sitter, am supposed to live in stylish debauchery. It embodies the designated lifestyle I am slated to experience. It is a place I don't like. But my clothes are there.

  Inside the door from the garage, a pile of unopened mail had tipped over and now fanned across the floor, along with a pile of jackets and miscellaneous shoes. From the main living room, a space-age, minimalist monstrosity in white and silver, I heard Javier and his brothers laughing beneath wondered what acb the womanb b the throbbing beats of Rock Band. I glanced at them gaming as I passed, then went upstairs into my spartan office and turned on my computer.

  I began to Google things like "untranslated language" and "unknown language."

  Within one minute, I found pictures of something called the Voynich Manuscript (fifteenth century, rediscovered by the modern world in 1912 by Wilfrid M. Voynich). Studious scholars had plastered sample pictures of the still-undecipherable text all over the web, replete with its bizarre illustrations of nude women emerging from pipes, goats eating stars, and plant roots entwined with eyeballs. Satisfied that this would fulfill the screw's requirement for a "language unknown," and encouraged by the easy success, I printed several pages of it.

  Then I Googled "rare language."

  Mistake.

  Never mind the details. Never mind the tedious tweaking of Boolean search terms, broken links, dead ends, poor-quality JPEGs, problems installing the latest version of Acrobat, email addresses that bounce and phone numbers that no longer work, or warnings from Wikipedia that this page does not cite sources. Instead, consider the cruelly double-pronged crux of the problem: (a) rare languages, by their nature, are elusive and undocumented; and (b) how rare must this thing be, anyway?

  Frustrated moments strung themselves together into an entire wasted hour. I took a break to go downstairs and eat something, one hand on my pocketed phone in case Hanna called with news about the rare animal, which she didn't. In the living room, Javier and his friends played and banged around, then began a heated, multilingual discussion of Angelina Jolie. I heard beer bottles clink and topple musically, and someone curse. " Chinga, tengo que mantener limpio este sitio—por las dudas que vuelva, ¿no sabes? "

  I went back upstairs, into my bedroom this time. Time to try something drastic. I opened the drawer in my nightstand, and from beneath my photograph of my mother I pulled a small box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a deceptively simple string. When I was first hired, Perihana'ii had given me the box at HQ as part of an orientation packet. "That," she had said, "is your Trail Crew 98 Emergency Kit, to be kept somewhere safe on the other side of your portal. Hopefully, you will never need to open it."

  "Why?" I had asked.

  "The packet contains some artifacts imbued with very powerful taps and screws, so the seal-break causes long-term damage to local reality."

  "How much damage, exactly?" I'd asked, but Perihana'ii had just twisted her tail in dismissal.

  Well. Let's just hope the neighbors don't get transmogrified.

  I went outside, down the steps of my redwood deck and to the center of my backyard, stopping beneath a lone silver maple. The branches were alive with piping chickadees, as if they knew. I looked at the package in my hands, shrugged, and pulled apart the knot.

  The seal broke. My backyard shuddered, the way a Plexiglas door shudders if struck too hard, and the chickadees took wing in alarm. Everything was normal within my next breath, but I could feel that the coalesced curtain here had just been stressed. The cycles were trying to separate into their essential, chaotic parts.

  I didn't know if they'd succeed, so I figured I'd better hurry.

  I opened the box. Great, roiling clouds of invisible zap poured over my fingers and rolled away over the grass. Inside the steaming box, a Stone awaited me, next to a Blade and a String. Good God. What had Perihana'ii been thinking? With one incorrectly tied knot in that String, I could send away the entire sentient population of the Western hemisphere.

  Better just use the Stone. Worst that one could do was cause global madness.

  Gingerly, I picked up the Stone with my free hand. I could feel it breathing. I daren't put down the box, in case I knocked it over and caused the Blade to touch something living, so with my hands full, I sat down beneath the an unusual number of shouldor television— silver maple and crossed my legs.

  I closed my right hand over the Stone, then did something that I am forbidden to talk about.

  Soon, a different sort of Internet lay before me.

  My breath came quick. This thing was ugly. A lurching, throbbing mass of color and neuroses, needs and fears and perverted hungers. Memories branded with vulnerability and shame. Faces. Places. The landscapes of recurring dreams. Riddles, jokes, melodies; flavors, dirty fantasies; facts and factoids, urban legends and lies.

  Boolean search terms don't work here.

  Instead, I thought about the concept behind the pronoun "I," divorced from language, and skipped this concept over the muck like a rock across the surface of a pond. Words bubbled up with each point of contact, and I searched for any I did not recognize. Je, ÿ, watashi, mim, ik, magamat, io, jeg, mimi, jag, minä. Each time I found an unfamiliar word, I held it and thought of the concept of language, to dredge up any linked English words for the mystery tongue. French, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Swahili, Swedish, Finnish. But I needed a language rare. I couldn't be sure, but I didn't think these were rare enough.

  Ergo: lather, rinse, repeat. More times than I care to count.

  The sunlight in the backyard shifted further and grew long. They say that the Earth has somewhere around 6,000 languages.

  I believe it.

  My right hand was beginning to grow uncomfortable when I came across the word "nika." Language: Chinook Wawa.

  Oh?

  The word was fuzzy and irregular, like the concept of I was sloppy. I tried another: Pick up . "Mamook saghalie" floated up, but the boundaries here were also blurred and watery. Something was wrong. Languages are sharper than this.

  But I w
as running out of time. So Chinook Wawa it was.

  I (or was it Me, He, She, Mine, Him, Hers?): "Nika." Pick up (or was it Raise Above, Uplift, Make High?): "Mamook saghalie." I went through all the words I'd need to say for my screw: "I pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the net, and bind the strings." Then I tried to think of them together, all at once, to see what a grammatically correct translation would be, but I couldn't get anything to focus. Was this correct? Was this guy a novice speaker?

  The translation flickered in and out. I memorized it anyway, the cheap and dangerous way, copying the little entanglements in this anonymous donor's head into my own. Associations rode over on the words: the warmth of family, a burst of excitement, a flavor I had never tasted. Dust inside a corral somewhere. Sunlight.

  I felt the terrified donor shouting and holding his head, as he stood on a sidewalk outside a convenience store: "Get out, get out, get out!"

  Done.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw that the Stone had left a sunburned patch within my palm, and the silver maple's leaves had turned snow white.

  I WANDERED BACK into the house, clutching my restocked white box. My own thoughts felt tidy and small. I don't like telepathy. It reminds me of my loneliness and limited understanding.

  I went back into my office. I Googled Chinook Wawa, as a check, and uncovered the worrisome source of the "blurring" problem.

  It wasn't that the donor had been a poor speaker. It was that Chinook Wawa was an old pidgin language used by Northwest Native tribes and Europeans, for the purposes of diplomacy and trade with each other. By its very nature, the tongue was inexact and makeshift.

  How effing splendid.

  I looked at the clock on my monitor. 7:54. I checked my cell phone, but Hanna still hadn't called with news. Why hadn't I asked her for her new number?

  I dialed her old one out of futile anger. To my shock, a phone rang. Her voicemail kicked in. "Hey, kiddies, it's Hanna. Leave me a message, 'kay?"

  "You shouldor television— didn't change your number again?" I sputtered. "This whole time, I've been waiting for you to call me with any news, and you've still got your old—"