The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  His initial cry of amazement and horror, and the noise of his falling, brought his mother from the kitchen where she had been pondering dinner and sipping a glass of inexpensive sherry. According to her later account she tried to wake him, listened to his heart—which seemed to be beating in normal fashion, unlike her own—and then, being a doctor’s wife and knowing the basics of first aid, did not attempt to move him but called the operator (dropping the new Princess phone that sat on a table in the hall at first and fumbling the earpiece in desperate hurry) and asked for an ambulance. Then she called her husband at the college infirmary where he worked, and knelt on the floor beside her son and held his hand, which she thought surely couldn’t count as moving the patient. He had a pulse, fast but not wild or irregular. They two were alone in the house.

  John C. was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived, and when his father arrived very soon after. He remained unconscious—a state that was described as a coma but which didn’t meet all the criteria for such a diagnosis—for three days; he was given intravenous fluids and his temperature, heart rate and blood pressure were monitored. Whatever injury he had suffered internally didn’t appear outwardly; a scratch on his cheek from something, a bump on the back of his head that soon resolved. His parents sat with him, singly or together; his four sisters came from school to sit in turn by his bed, and the eldest and most pious of them got them all to say the rosary there for his recovery.

  It was his mother who was beside him when he opened his eyes, took a huge breath, and lifted his hands from the bedclothes as though they stung, or perhaps in preparation to arise. He didn’t do that, though, only looked around cautiously and then at his stricken mother, sitting forward in her chair waiting in awful suspense for what he’d say, if he could say anything at all.

  Are you all right? she said, conscious of the fatuity.

  I am, he said. I am all right. Then he closed his eyes again.

  Within the hour he was alert again and speaking almost normally, with what appeared to be a great and deliberate caution but making perfect sense; he observed his mother’s face with an intensity of attention that was unsettling—as though he were trying to remember who she was, she said later, but actually it seemed to her that he knew very well who she was and it was himself he didn’t quite recognize.

  What could only be understood as lingering side effects of his apparent coma remained for weeks. Though he recognized his house and his room, they seemed at the same time strange to him; he’d touch in wonderment or curiosity the surfaces of his books, the tools in the kitchen, the clothes in his closet (being the only boy in the family he had a room of his own). Sometimes he’d laugh aloud coming upon some ordinary item, as though astonished to find it existed, or as though an old acquaintance unseen for years had suddenly appeared before him. He didn’t talk much, though he had been the most voluble person in a talkative and lively household; he sat among them in silence but obviously enjoying their company and their attention, the extravagant jokes they made about an event that it was now all right to laugh about. At times he could be overcome by a sort of vertigo or paralysis, apparently overwhelmed by the sensation of the world entering his consciousness, and have to lie down alone for a time. Once, standing over a pile of his many drawings for imaginary productions of classic plays—he aimed, or had aimed, to be a stage designer—he actually fainted, slumped will-less to the floor; but he recovered quickly.

  Yet it couldn’t be denied that almost all the time he was well. A kind of wonderful elation, even, seemed sometimes to possess him; he gazed at the world with open eyes and swallowed it all down. He was happy. It was evident; very happy, divinely happy.

  As the small oddities that accompanied his return diminished, a larger change in him appeared. He was, or was rapidly becoming, a different person than he had been. Not only was his way of speaking odd, his way of thinking was also. Dreamy, inventive, intensely inward, sometimes goofily cheerful; bookish, a show-off where literature and arcane knowledge were the matter; careless of his person (as the sort of books he chose to read might put it), vague and clumsy outside the realms where he felt secure but alone: That was how he had been. Now he was not describable in those terms. If he’d gone off on a journey to another world during his days unconscious, he’d returned, estranged, but with gifts and weapons he hadn’t had before.

  The school year—John was a junior at St. Joseph’s High School—was now almost over. He’d been excused from classes for as long as he needed, though there was some discussion of his having to repeat a class or take a summer-school makeup. In the school he seemed more lost than at home; he recognized only a few of his classmates, had no memory of where his classes were held or what the general rules of school life were. He’d lost much of his Latin. Organic chemistry was a blank. Boys he didn’t know would joke to him about his having water on the brain, or allude to the personality and role he had apparently possessed in their eyes, but which he couldn’t quite remember. With surprising directness and aplomb, though, he managed to negotiate with the Brothers various projects and papers he could do outside of class that would assure him at least passing grades for his junior year. When he described the deal to his father at supper, his father regarded him with a mild bewilderment that resembled John’s own in the previous weeks. Who are you?

  But Dad, he said. There’s something else I want to talk about.

  His father waited, eyebrows raised.

  I don’t want to go back to that school next year.

  I think you’re doing fine, his father said. I think you can handle it. You’ve got the whole summer to rest up, get back to yourself.

  That’s not it. It’s a terrible school, Dad. You know it is. And it must be horribly expensive.

  Dad began to laugh, astonished. What are you talking about? It’s your school. You don’t want to graduate? You want to rest for life?

  I don’t. Of course I want to graduate. I just want to go somewhere else.

  Oho. Like for instance.

  I’d go to Central.

  A silence had fallen around the table during this exchange. John’s sisters, from the one older than he to the three younger ones, ought to have been at once alarmed and scandalized—not go to Catholic school?—but he was well aware that at least the two older sisters, one graduated from and the other now attending St. Joe’s, knew why he’d want to. His father was silenced too: never had he been spoken to in this fashion by a child, as though from equal to equal, on a matter of importance. Likely his father thought now: so the fall, or the coma, did do some damage.

  Could you even do that? John’s mother put in, somewhat timidly. Would the credits and all that match? Could you really go for only one year?

  His older sister Martha snorted at that. I did, she said. (That had been when they’d moved to Indiana from Kentucky, Martha with only two years left of high school. She’d graduated the year John entered.)

  He told his mother he didn’t know, that he’d have to go and ask, or write a letter; anyway he’d find out.

  How would you get there? his sister Kathy asked. It’s way far away. Downtown.

  Well, John said, with a big warm smile for all of them, that’s another thing.

  • • •

  John C. had always been unconscious of having a future, beyond a dreamy sense of distant fame and gratification; when he had been a young child he’d imagined that one day he would be pictured on the cover of Time magazine as Man of the Year, without being able to imagine for what. When a classmate had described his own goal of getting into pharmacy school by doing well in science and chemistry courses, earning a degree, moving to Los Angeles where the weather was always perfect and there starting a family, John could only marvel; he supposed the making of such firm plans was unusual, even rare. His own this-world planning (as opposed to otherworld imagining) had been rudimentary, reaching only as far as learning to drive and getting a license, which so far he had not accomplished.

  That minimal ambition
was now extended to actually possessing a car, and soon. It would be necessary to the idea he’d proposed, about not returning to St. Joseph’s in the fall. He didn’t think that his father’s objections were a real obstacle—he hadn’t actually made any, beyond his expressions of affronted surprise. Of course Catholic families stood under an obligation to send their children to Catholic schools, but it wasn’t a sin not to, and John didn’t think his school—it resembled a big new-ish public school building, made of yellow brick, and run and staffed by an order of brothers, something like male nuns, who were third-rate intellects mostly and full of bizarre notions about the world—this school could hardly retain anyone’s allegiance. John had only to cross the barrier between his standing in the family and his father’s, address Dad with grown-up reasonableness on the subject (as he had begun to already), and solve all the lesser practical problems, and then even if his father was in a mood to put his foot down, John was prepared to be intransigent too—for the first time. Evasion, restive acceptance, resentment and inertia: no more.

  He laughed that rich laugh, alone but heard down the hall and in the kitchen: a laugh of amusement or amazement or both.

  So the practical problems. These included the research about transferring schools, and the driver’s license, and the car.

  All these would depend on solving a forestanding problem: money.

  He’d been told, upon reaching the age when he could legally drive, that in order even to get a beginner’s license he would have to raise the money to pay for the additional premium that the insurance company demanded to cover a teenage male driver, whose risks were higher than any other’s. His sisters would not be charged this extra premium. It was a big number—more than sixty dollars, payable at every quarter—and the John C. that he had formerly been was incapable of imagining how to raise a sum like that. He had used to scan the South Bend Tribune for part-time jobs, and for a time worked downtown at the Colefax Theater as an afternoon usher, but at fifty cents an hour, most of it used up taking the bus back and forth from town to where his mother could pick him up, the proceeds couldn’t accumulate fast enough. He also bravely committed himself to try to sell water softeners door to door—no experience required, the ad said, just get-up-and-go. He was to show possible customers how hard their water was with simple chemical tests and display glossy pamphlets about the machine. Not only had he shrunk from the impertinence of doing such things—start with your neighbors, the sales manager told him and the other trainees—but intuited, without actually understanding, how unlikely it was that anyone would buy a large item of household machinery from him or anyone like him: slight, shy, slovenly and profoundly uninterested. He didn’t in the end make a single pitch.

  But he now knew a way to solve those two problems (car, insurance premium) at a stroke. It would take a little time, but it was summer now and he had plenty of that.

  There was at that time a television program, rather groundbreaking (it took very little to break the ground of network television programming then) and widely popular. John C.’s family watched it every week: the saturnine man in black with his eternal cigarette coming out of the darkness to propose some possibility, or impossibility; raise a profound-seeming question about life or time. And a story would follow that illustrated it.

  Where does he get these ideas, Mom wondered.

  They’re not mostly his, John said. Writers send them in. I read that. Stories and scripts. Some of them are from stories in magazines.

  Well I don’t know how anyone can think up these weird things.

  I bet, John said, crossing his legs and taking his knee in his hands, I could think of one. He cast his eyes upward then as though pondering a notion. His family were laughing now, at his brag, at the histrionic pose of meditation, which he continued by rubbing his chin and contorting his features into a parody of intense thought. I bet I could.

  • • •

  The Christmas before, his older sister had been given a pretty little portable typewriter, for her school papers and so on. John had borrowed it frequently—using it perhaps more than she did—and now that school was out he could sequester it in his own room for the work he had in hand. At the top of the first sheet of “erasable” style typewriter paper he rolled into the machine he typed this, in capitals:

  THE BUREAU OF SECOND CHANCES

  —and below this his name, including his middle name (Michael). Then he began.

  He tried at first to write his story as a screenplay—he could see vividly the scenes he planned, the stark black-and-white images, could hear the curt and pointed dialogue—but the mechanics of the typewriter were clumsy and trying; he got impatient attempting to put characters’ names in the center of the page and their dialogue in a shapely square below, and he made so many typos that the typewriter roller became coated in pink eraser dust. He cleaned it out and started again with a plain story, though in a very filmic style.

  Joe Noakes is a lucky man, it began. (This would, on television, be among the host’s minatory opening remarks.) He has a beautiful wife, and he’d come into a lot of money. His whole life’s ahead of him. So why should Joe be sitting in a dark bar in a dark part of town with nobody but the bartender to tell his story to?

  The story continued with Joe and the bartender—John C. tried to figure out how to communicate in words that looming angle at which movie scenes filled with foreboding are shot. Sure, Joe tells the bartender, I had a lucky break—or so I thought . . . Joe’s story, with Joe’s telling heard “over,” returns to its beginning: Joe walks a city street, buys a paper, pops a mint in his mouth, strolls on, turns right into an avenue and stops at a bus stop. A woman—a good-looking woman (John C. strove for the usual adjectives) in obvious distress stands at the stop. Spotting Joe, she runs to him, takes his arm as though she knows him. She’s in big trouble, needs a friend, pleads for his help. She puts a suitcase into his hands, whispers the address of a meeting place, and hastens away—but not before planting a kiss on his cheek and looking long into his eyes.

  Sure I went to meet her, Joe tells the barkeep. For a couple of reasons. First of all, she was a stunner, the most gorgeous animal that’s ever licked my face. And something else: that case she was carrying turned out to be full of US currency, high denominations. Where she got it, I guess I really didn’t want to know. And anyway we never spent much time talking.

  Joe tells his tale and the scenes of his life with the woman continue. She presses him to quit his job, move to another city. She’s demanding, then unfaithful; she tortures him with her beauty, mocks him as a weakling. It’s clear she’s been using people since she was a kid, and Joe’s just the latest of her catches. When the money starts to run out she needles him to get more. When he tries to break free she lets him know she can turn him over to the cops—after all, he received stolen money, her accomplice, her sucker.

  I can’t break with her, he tells the bartender. I can’t live with her.

  Tough, the bartender says.

  If there was only a way out . . . If only I could start again, knowing what I know now.

  Yeah? What would you do?

  Just one thing. If I could relive that day, when I got to that corner I’d turn the other way: left, not right. That’s all I’d ask.

  The bartender studies him thoughtfully (John C. had in his conception already cast the man—a heavy-set seen-it-all actor who appeared in many shows) and then from the corner of the bar mirror he plucks a card that’s stuck there and hands it to Joe. In closeup (as on TV it would be) he reads it: Bureau of Second Chances, and an address.

  Take it, says the bartender. You’re just the kind of guy they might help.

  The story follows Joe to the address on the card, a standard office building, and to a high floor and a door with the name lettered on the glass. The office within is plain and grim: a desk, a gooseneck lamp, a filing cabinet, a telephone. The dour man in the swivel chair seems to have expected him, and when Joe proffers the card, shows him a chair.
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  The next bit of dialogue took John the longest—Joe negotiates for his second chance, the power to return to where he started, and at that fateful corner turn left, not right, into the good, simple life he should have had. What reason can Joe give that he and not another should get this chance? What evidence that the Bureau has the power to produce it? In the end John got it pretty right (after many pages, both written and typed, had been crumpled and discarded).

  Then the ending, which he’d known all along.

  Then the writing of a letter of introduction, and mailing it and the story to the Los Angeles office of the production company, whose address took some library work to find.

  The strange thing was that from the first time the television show made from his story aired—he was gone from home by then—and then every time down through the years when he happened to see it again, when the weekly program he wrote it for had become a perfect example of a certain era of popular entertainment and the childhood of television, when people would gather to watch ancient reruns of the degraded kinescopes, when the one made from John C.’s initial story turned up on rerun channels (to ironic cheers among his friends and colleagues), he would every time be seized with an inexpressible dread or loathing, a heart-sickness that he couldn’t admit and couldn’t relieve: felt it most intensely in watching Joe, in the final moments of the show, walk down the street (a street in Santa Monica, as by then he knew), stop at the kiosk for the paper, pop a mint in his mouth, come to the corner, and at the light turn left not right.

  And walk—inevitably, forever, each time—right into the bank robbery, the heist from which the dame he’d made his wife, in the life he’s just escaped from, has got away with the take. She passes him with a curious look, he stands dumbfounded; the rest of the gang barrel out of the bank chased by the bank guard, who shoots bang bang at their fleeing backs, and hits—

  Joe.

  The last shot of the show—excepting the hosts’s grim setting of the moral—is Joe dying on the pavement. His POV, looking up at the faces of bystanders looking down (a trick shot John C. couldn’t himself have thought of in the writing of it). And among them one who mouths Poor dope. He never had a chance.