Stories: All-New Tales ngss-1

by Neil Gaiman

  He said he didn’t know what happened to me during those times. He would go to my apartment, check on things, water my plants. When he remembered. When he wasn’t so deep in the writing that nothing outside registered.

  I was always in his head during those times, he said, at the edges of his thoughts. As if that should reassure me.

  It happened faster. He would begin to write, and I would be in the story, and I would stay there until he was finished.

  The more I lived in his writing, the less I lived in the real world, and the less I remembered what it was like to live in the real world, as a real person, as me.

  When the writing was going well, I would be surrounded by the comfortable, warm feeling that someone else knew what was going on, was making all the decisions, was the safety net under the high wire. Everything was gauzy, soft focus, fuzzed at the periphery.

  I could have an adventure without worrying about the consequences. After all, I was always at the edges of his thoughts.

  Until the day I wasn’t. Everything froze, and I was in a cold, white room, full of statues of the people I had been talking to.

  I walked from person to person, attempting to start conversations, but nothing happened. Walked around the room again, looking for a way out, but there was nothing. Solid white walls, floor, ceiling. It was a large room, but I could feel the pressure of the walls against my skin.

  I walked to the center of the room, and sat, cross-legged, on the floor. Waiting.

  Have you ever had your mind go blank? That space between one thought and the next when your brain is just white noise, when there is not one thought in your head-do you remember that feeling?

  Imagine that absence extending forever. There’s no way of escaping it, because you don’t know-not don’t remember, don’t know-what you were thinking about before your brain blanked out, and so you don’t know what to do to get it started again. There’s just nothing. Silence. White.

  And there’s no time. No way of telling how long you sit in that vast, claustrophobic white room, becoming increasingly less.

  I never was able to figure out how long I waited there. But suddenly I was in a room I had never seen before, back in the real world, and he was there.

  There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and gray threading through his hair. Writer’s block, he explained to me. He had tried to write through it, work on other projects, but nothing helped. Finally, that morning, he had abandoned the novel as unworkable.

  I asked if he had tried to bring me back, while he was stuck.

  He hadn’t really thought of it.

  That was when I broke up with him.

  He had, I discovered, become quite successful while I was away. A critical darling, praised especially for the complexity, the reality, of his female characters.

  Speaking of Marah in an interview, he described her as his one lost love. The interviewer found it romantic.

  I found the interviewer tiresome. Being lost was not romantic at all.

  Parts of me stayed lost, or got covered over by all those other women I had been for him. Sure, they were me, but they were his view of me, exaggerated, slightly shifted, truth told slanted.

  I would turn up a song on the radio, then remember that it was Ali who liked gypsy punk. I abandoned my favorite bakery for two weeks when I convinced myself that I had Fiona’s gluten allergy.

  For three months, I thought my name was Marah.

  During all of this, there were intervals of normalcy. But I still felt the tugs as he borrowed little pieces of me for his fictions. I would lose my favorite perfume, or the memory of the first time I had my heart broken. Tiny bits of myself that would slough away, painlessly. Sometimes they would return when he wrote “The End.” More often, they did not.

  I reminded him that he had promised not to write about me anymore. He assured me he hadn’t meant to. It was just bits, here and there. He’d be more careful. And really, I ought to be flattered.

  But then a week of my life disappeared. I loved that short story, and Imogen was an amazing character, the kind of woman I wished I was. That wasn’t the point.

  The point was, he had stolen me from myself again. I was just gone, and I didn’t know where I went. And there were more things about myself that I had forgotten. Was green really my favorite color?

  I flicked on the computer, started typing madly. Everything I could remember about myself. But when I looked over the file, there were gaps that I knew I had once remembered, and duplications of events.

  Panting, I stripped off my clothing and stared at myself, hoping that my body was more real than my mind. But was that scar on my knee from falling off my bike when I was twelve, or from a too-sharp rock at the beach when I was seventeen. Was that really how I waved hello? Would I cry at a time like this?

  Anyone would, I supposed.

  I tried to rewrite myself. I scoured boxes of faded flower petals, crumpled ticket stubs, paged obsessively through old yearbooks. Called friend after friend to play do you remember.

  When I remembered enough to ask. To know who my friends were.

  It didn’t work. Whatever gift he had or curse that I was under that let him pull me into his stories, it was a magic too arcane for me to duplicate.

  And still, the gaps in my life increased. New changes happened. I woke one morning to find my hair was white. Not like an old woman’s, but the platinum white of a rock star or some elven queen.

  I didn’t dye it back.

  There was a collection published of his short fiction. He appeared on Best Of lists, and was shortlisted for important literary prizes.

  I forgot if I took milk in my coffee.

  He called, asked to see me. Told me he still loved me, was haunted by memories of my skin, my voice, my scent. I missed, I thought, those things, too. So I told him yes.

  It took him a moment to recognize me, he said, when I walked across the bar to meet him. Something was different. I told him I didn’t know what that might be.

  He ordered for both of us. I let him. I was sure he knew what I liked.

  There was a story, he explained. He thought maybe the best thing he would ever write. He could feel the electricity of it crackle across his skin, feel the words that he would write pound and echo in his brain.

  He had an outline that I could look at, see what I thought. He slid a slim folder across the table.

  I wondered aloud why, this time, he would ask permission. This one was longer. An epic. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to write it. And after what had happened the last time, when I had…Well. He wanted to ask.

  I appreciated the gesture.

  I drummed my fingers across the top of the folder, but did not open it.

  A waiter discreetly set a martini to the right of my plate. Funny. I had thought that it was Madeleine who drank martinis. But I sipped, and closed my eyes in pleasure at the sharpness of the alcohol.

  I said yes.

  To one more story, this masterpiece that I could see burning in his eyes. But I had a condition.

  Anything, he said. Whatever I needed.

  I wanted him to leave me in the story when he was finished.

  He told me he had wondered if I might ask for that. I was surprised he hadn’t known. He nodded agreement, and that was settled.

  We talked idly through dinner. Occasionally his eyes would unfocus, and I could see the lines of plot being woven together behind them.

  I wondered what he would name me this time, almost asked, then realized it didn’t matter. Then realized I wasn’t even sure what my own name was anymore. Grace, maybe? I thought that sounded right. Grace.

  He started scribbling on the cover of the folder while we were waiting for the check. I watched him write.

  “Rafe fell in love with her voice first, tumbled into it when she introduced herself as…”

  Jonathan Carroll. LET THE PAST BEGIN

  EAMON REILLY WAS HANDSOME AND SLOPPY. He seemed to know everyone, even waitresses
in restaurants. When he walked in the door, they beamed and began seriously flirting the minute he sat down at their table. I saw this happen several times at different places, places none of us had ever been to before. I asked if he knew these women but he always said no.

  Eamon wore his heart on his sleeve and it worked. People cared about him even when he was being impossible, which was pretty often. He drove an old, badly neglected Mercedes that was filthy inside and out. Whenever you rode in it, he had to move stuff off the passenger’s seat and throw it in the back. Sometimes you couldn’t believe what was there-a metal dowsing rod; a box of diapers (he was single); a jai alai xistela; or once a very intimately autographed, badly wrinkled photo of a famous movie actress. He wrote everything in block letters so precise that you might have guessed it came from a typewriter. He kept a detailed daily diary but no one ever saw what was in it, although he carried the book around with him everywhere. His love life was a constant disaster and we wondered why no woman ever stayed with him for very long.

  He had once been together with my girlfriend Ava for a couple of weeks. But she was no help when I finally got up the nerve to ask why she broke up with him. “We didn’t fit.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Some people just don’t fit together in certain configurations. There are people you can be good friends with, but if you turn it into lovers, the mix is wrong or toxic or…something. For me, Eamon is a good guy to hang around with but he wasn’t a good boyfriend.”

  “Why?”

  She narrowed her eyes, which is usually the sign a topic is closed and Ava doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. But this time was different. “Sit down.”

  “What?”

  “Sit down. I’m going to tell you a story. It’s kind of long.”

  I did as I was told. When Ava tells you to do something, you do it because, well, because she’s Ava. The woman likes dessert, foreign politics, the truth, working in perilous situations, and wonder, not necessarily in that order. She’s a journalist who goes on assignment to extremely dangerous places around the world like Spinkai Raghzai, Pakistan, or Sierra Leone. You see her on the TV news holding down her hair or helmet as a military helicopter takes off nearby, leaving her and a small camera crew in some forward armed outpost or barren village that was attacked by rebels the night before. She is fearless, self-confident, and impatient. She is also pregnant, which is why she’s home these days. We’re pretty sure the child is mine but there is a chance that it might be Eamon’s.

  I’ve known Ava Malcolm twelve years and loved her for about eleven of them. During those eleven years, she expressed virtually no interest in me save for an occasional late-night telephone call from unimaginable places like Ouagadougou or Aleppo. The reception on these calls was invariably bad and scratchy. More often than not until the birth of satellite telephones, somewhere in the middle of these chats the line would suddenly go dead, as if it had grown tired of our gabbing and wanted to go to sleep.

  Later she admitted that for a while she thought I was gay. But when she came back from some assignment at the end of the world and saw I was living with Jan Schick, it put an end to my gay days in Ava Malcolm’s mind.

  But poor Jan didn’t stand a chance. I always assumed I would only get to love Ava from a distance, be grateful for any time she gave me, and go on admiring this brave talented woman as she went about living her larger-than-life life.

  Then she got shot. The bitter irony is that it did not happen in some far-flung flyblown, 130-degree-in-the-shade hellhole where the bad guys rode in on animals instead of tanks. It happened at a convenience store four blocks from her New York apartment. A quick trip to the market for a bottle of red wine and a bag of Cheez Doodles coincided with a dunce named Leaky trying to rob his first store with a gun he later said went off accidentally, twice. One of those bullets nicked Ava’s shoulder. But since it came from a Glock G36 subcompact pistol, being “nicked” was an understatement. It probably would not have happened if she’d dropped to the floor like the rest of the people in the store as soon as Leaky started screaming. But Ava being Ava, she wanted to see what was going on, so she just stood there until the gun went off while pointed roughly in her direction.

  Ava saw many terrible things in her years as a reporter but had always escaped being hurt. However, as is often the case with people who have been seriously injured, it traumatized her. When she got out of the hospital, she “traveled, screwed men, and hid for a year.” Her words.

  “I came out of the hospital with my arm in a sling and my ass on fire. I was about 142 percent crazy, I’ll say that. I wanted to live life twice as hard afterward-see twice as many things, and have as many men as I could. I’d come this close to dying and the only sure thing I learned from the experience was I wanted more: more life, more sex, more new places…

  “So I used up all the frequent-flyer miles I’d accrued over the years in my job. When they were gone, I called in every favor I had due from people who could get me where I wanted to go. I spent a lot of time in southwestern Russia because that area was like the new Wild West, what with all the oil money and exploration going on down there.

  “It was in Baku that I met the Yit.”

  This was typical Ava storytelling. On her TV reports she gave you relevant information in perfect sound bites and was crystal clear about it. Yet in person she often got so carried away telling you a story or personal anecdote that she overlooked the fact you might not know Baku or, like most people on planet earth, what a “Yit” was.

  “Please explain the last two terms.”

  “Azerbaijan,” she said impatiently. “Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan.”

  “Okay, that’s Baku. What’s a Yit?”

  “A djelloum.”

  “What’s a jell-loom?”

  “A Yit is another word for a djelloum-kind of like a fortune-teller but more shamany. It’s a sort of combo fortune-teller and sage. But in Azerbaijan, women are djelloum, not men. Which is interesting because it’s a very macho, male-oriented society otherwise.”

  “Okay-Baku, and a Yit.”

  She leaned over and kissed me on one side of my mouth. “I like how you stop me and ask for clarification. Most people just let me rattle on.”

  “Proceed.”

  “Okay. So at the end of the trip I wanted to spend some time in Baku because one of my favorite novels, Ali and Nino, takes place there. The book makes the city sound like one of the most romantic places on earth. It isn’t, but that’s beside the point.

  “I was visiting a section called Sabunçu. My guide was Magsud, an Azeri fluent in English who we’d used before when I was there on assignment for the network. So I knew the guy pretty well. He knew the sort of things I liked and was interested in. This time, because I wasn’t working, I hired him just to show me around.

  “When we got to Sabunçu, Magsud said one of the most famous djelloum in Russia lived in that part of the city. Would I be interested in visiting her? Things like palmists, astrology, and tarot card readings are like crack for chicks. Seers, shamans, psychics-lead us to ’em. So I said sure, I’d love to meet a Yit.

  “Her name was Lamiya, which is Azeri for ‘educated.’ She lived in a small apartment in one of those soulless 1950s, gray-cement Communist public-housing projects where every building looks exactly the same and you can easily get lost. I think there were two rooms in the place but we only saw the living room, which was dark even in the middle of the day. Lamiya sat on a couch. Next to it was a baby bassinet. The whole time we were there she kept one hand inside the bassinet, as if she were touching the baby to keep it quiet.

  “After we sat down, she asked Magsud if I knew about lal bala, which means the silent child. He said no. She told him to explain it to me before she went any further. Of course I didn’t understand them because they were speaking Azeri. But I did see him grimace when she finished, like it was going to be tough explaining this in a way that I’d comprehend.

  “While Ma
gsud explained lal bala to me, Lamiya kept her hand constantly inside the bassinet. I didn’t know why until later.” Ava stopped speaking and just stared at me for a few moments. I think she was gathering her energy to go on to the difficult part.

  “Now I’m going to tell you the story exactly as it happened. You can believe it or not, but just know that I do with all my heart because of what Lamiya told me about myself. Details and facts no one on earth could know but me. No one, do you understand? Not my parents, or my sister, no one. But Lamiya knew. She rattled off the most intimate things about me like she was reading them from a list.

  “Let me first explain the silent child. According to legend, there are three of them in Russia at all times. When one dies another is immediately born to replace it. It’s kind of like the succession of the Dalai Lama in Tibet: a silent child chooses its mother before it’s born.”

  “What do you mean, before it’s born? Before the child is born?”

  “Yes. Lamiya said she knew she’d have a silent child the moment she first sensed she was pregnant. So when hers was born, she wasn’t surprised or upset to see it.”

  “Why would you be upset to see your own baby? Was there something wrong with it?”

  Ava looked apprehensive, as if hesitant to tell what must be said next. “The child is not alive. I mean, it’s half alive-half alive and half dead; it lives half in this world and half in the other world too.”

  “What ‘other world’?”

  “The afterlife. The baby’s half alive and half dead, as I said. It never ages. It lives a certain number of years; they never know how many it’ll be. That’s different for each child. The day it dies, it looks exactly the same as it did on the day it was born, although some of these children live for decades. It never moves, eats, or breathes. It never opens its eyes. But its heart beats, and most important, it’s an oracle.

  “After she’s told you secret things about yourself that absolutely convinces you beyond a doubt that she’s genuine, you’re allowed to ask the mother two questions. You can ask anything-about the past, about the future, anything you want. As long as she’s touching her silent child, she will answer them. But you are only allowed to ask two.”