by Rich Horton
At about the time his life here outstripped his power to control it—when the world as he had made it for himself seemed to be wholly subsumed in the world that everybody all together made and would have made even if he had never been part of it—he realized that he would still have to go through all the events from the first life that would not or could not be changed. His father’s death, at a relatively young age, burst aneurysm in the hospital to which in that time he’d gone for a CAT scan and where in this time, soon, he would go again, and the same thing would happen, for there was nothing John C. could do about it and nothing in this life would be likely to deflect it; he would have to wait for his mother’s call, the same call he had got in this year in a different place. And there would be all the other griefs, his sisters’, the nation’s, to pass through: a few of them avoided by luck or a clinamen accounted for by nothing, but that were mostly just the ones he knew were to come because they had come and he had experienced them once already. He began to feel monstrously old.
And now it’s the day before his birthday, seven o’clock in the evening, a sweet LA winter day. Five hours till midnight. What should he do, this night that is different from all other nights? Should he be Socrates, gather around him the wise and the young who love him (there are a few) to pass the last hours? Drive the Jag out to the desert, sit alone and watch dawn and judgment come? He can’t know if the whole of his birthday is allowed to him to make his decision, or if it has to be made on the stroke of midnight or be moot. He decides that he will spend the hours exactly as he would if he didn’t have destiny’s coin to flip. He’ll go to a party.
• • •
When was it that he began to find himself, even in the midst of the memorable and lovely things he earned in the second life, missing the small things of the first life? It didn’t surprise him really, anyone with a shred of consciousness would have known at the start that such would be possible; it wasn’t as if he escaped from a life in hell or prison or from poverty or hideous abuse, no, it was a good life, and the remembered moments are mostly sweet. He can even feel shame that he abandoned wife and children, friends and associates, career and home—but of course he has abandoned nothing, it all remains there for him to rejoin it if he chooses to. Whereupon the other life, this life he now inhabited, will—if he understands the rules—simply and entirely vanish away, never actually having existed.
If it were possible that he could be returned to the other, the first, life and once returned have no memory at all of this life; that if he did choose that life, which just because it was the original had ontological status different from the made life, then might he somehow contrive to be reconstituted in it at some commonplace moment, a moment that had arrived just at the point of his vanishment, or rather of his duplication or his revision, whatever the word might be; a moment anyway in which real life would tomorrow commence or recommence for him seamlessly, he himself oblivious that decades of otherness elsewhere had ever passed?
What if that could be, what if all along, from the beginning, it was meant to be ? With a soft moan, a child’s cry of longing or amazement, he sees himself beside the old Toyota wagon, ignorant of all of this world he looks out upon. A thundery summer evening, nineteen ninety-one, he inserting his exclaiming daughters into the back seat; the New England maples, smell of rain coming, and over him the swallows that nested in his barn flashing in the electric air.
No it is not going to be so. It is not like that.
He takes the Jaguar down the Old Topanga Canyon road to the Santa Monica beach, because he may never see it again in his lifespan: the water blue satin, lifting like a veil with graceful gestures, the sun going down in a clear winter sky. It’s longer this way, but he’ll go along broad Sunset, glimpses of old mansions behind high walls and shaggy overgrown trees; up Hollywood Boulevard into the Hills.
Perhaps he does suffer from anosognosia, as Carla Young seemed to believe. It would make everything simpler. Can you suffer from a condition of ignorance that you don’t know you have? Of course you can. If it’s true that a neurological condition prevents his understanding that he has simply invented another life, a life wherein he graduates from a Catholic high school and goes on to Indiana University and then New York and all that thereafter happened, the life that (so he believes) he was living when he was given the chance to return to an early key point in that life and deflect it consciously and deliberately to make a life he’d rather live, this life—well, if he invented all that then it doesn’t matter what choice he makes, because he will awaken tomorrow to find himself still here, in the only actual life he has ever had.
No. No. He did, he really did make that new life for himself starting at sixteen, in delight and a rage of creation, meeting and overcoming obstacles because he knew now what obstacles are and how to overcome them, which he learned only as he grew to maturity in that life, before he was given the choice to begin again. And he did win for himself what he wanted, taking every well-thought-out step in turn, from adolescence through early creative development and on.
He was offered a choice, the choice a hundred fools and heroes and maidens in tales are offered, but his choice was a choice he offered to himself. He understands at last now, though, that it wasn’t in fact a choice at all: choice, and even possibility in some weird but absolute sense, has been drained out of the arrangement he made and the world he entered, and the world also that he left. He supposed at the beginning, in a vague way, that there would be a lesson and that he would have to learn it, about choice, about life, about desire, and that learning it would make the ultimate and mandated choice-making easier, hard but also easy, or clearer at least, because he would have learned in the course of his second life to choose the right one in the end. But he has learned nothing and there is no choice. There is not one thing and another thing, one pile of hay and another pile. It’s a single indivisible soup of possibilities and memories. If he returns to the first way, he will return imbued with three decades’ worth of memories of another world; if he remains in this path or place he will swim always in the past he exited from, a world that has ceased to exist: which is dreadful to imagine.
He belongs in no place. It’s just as though he has been exiled from the land of his birth, the land that was his, because of what he did: his hubris. He is that folklore figure who at a moment in his life laughed at Jesus on the Cross and so was cursed to wander forever, in lands and times he could never inhabit but only pass through in embarrassment, empty-handed.
The house in the Hills he comes to is one of those built up here in the late 1940s, Modernist masterpieces made of vast windows divided by slim columns, stone patios, wide stairs, jutting beams, and nothing else. As calm and open as a Greek temple empty for a thousand years. He stops the Jaguar where the parking service waits. His door is opened for him and he climbs out, takes the proffered ticket, and feels a sharp pang as he turns away, as though he is abandoning a friend, nevermore to see him. He climbs the broad shallow steps.
Maybe this was a mistake. Too many people, too many he knows well or superficially. But no, he can make no mistake now, no more than a skier on a fast downhill run: it’s all go. He feels evanescent already, but calm enough. Takes a glass of champagne—something fizzing anyway—from the tray of a passing waiter. Is hailed, returns the wave. Is carried forward. Seconds continue to come and die.
Hours later. On the deck cantilevered over the rubble of rocks that seem to be frozen in their fall down the canyon he stands alone; a screening has been scheduled, and he has slipped away. He has decided that the limit set for decision won’t be midnight, first seconds of the day. Dawn, he thinks, will be the moment. He’s always felt, and on this deepening night feels intensely, “the always coming on/The always rising of the sun.” He was born about dawn.
Below him on the lower level is the azure pool, where now naked boys and girls, bodies as hairless and gleaming as dolphins’, are climbing out and taking towels; he knows they laugh, but he can’t hear t
hem. Something about their aliveness, and how they vanish two by two, leaving the water empty, the golden lights endlessly chasing, returns a thought to him that he once had but set aside.
He had made it clear to Carla Young that in the story as he has lived it there could be no Third Thing: but of course there could be a Third Thing. Even now, at the very end, the unexpected resolution appears to him, the anagnorisis. How can it be that he has not ever considered it?
Death. Death as meta-stability, causing a permanent system crash in both worlds.
Maybe it’s why he chose to come here, why he stands looking down from this height; maybe he knows, maybe he knew, that it is why. A step up onto that corner of this low concrete wall, a brief flight outward. Put out the light, and then put out the light. For the first time in years he remembers his dyke Hamlet on stage, thrusting a pistol, bare bodkin, into her mouth, desperate to do it, unable to. Barking out all those makes-cowards-of-us-all qualifications as though (Yeah right) she knew she was lying to herself, and to us. Not conscience but consciousness, and its inconceivable extinguishing.
No. Even if he was allowed to he wouldn’t, and it’s clear to him he is not.
He glances at his watch, or rather turns his wrist to see it, but doesn’t comprehend the hour it shows. It’s hard to tell, in the dull coming-on of the city lights and the smog that thickens above and resists them, whether the sun is near rising. He feels at last no anxiety, no urgency; he will make a decision or he will not; if it doesn’t arise within him, it will be borne in upon him, and it will be made; and it will make no difference at all. Either he has invented all this, or he is himself invented: and these are not two contradictory things but one thing.
Yes: he can see it now: the sky in the east is really lightening, and clouds are taking shape, lit by the sun just under the horizon.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
E. Lily Yu is the author of On Fragile Waves (Erewhon Books, December 2020). She received the Artist Trust / LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017 and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her stories appear in venues from McSweeney’s to Tor.com and in twelve best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.
Alec Nevala-Lee was a 2019 Hugo and Locus Award finalist for Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Dey Street Books / HarperCollins), which was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by The Economist. Syndromes, an audio original collection of thirteen of his short stories from Analog, was released earlier this year by Recorded Books. He is currently at work on a biography of the architectural designer Buckminster Fuller, which is scheduled to be published by HarperCollins in 2021.
Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto. She is the non-fiction editor of Anathema Magazine, and co-founder of Omenana, a magazine of african speculative fiction. She was also former chief spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. Her short stories have been featured in Slate, Uncanny, The Kalahari Review, and Brittle Paper as well as in several anthologies including the award-winning New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction from People of Colour. You can find the author on her website at: www.chineloonwualu.com or follow her on Twitter @chineloonwualu.
John Kessel has written the novels Pride and Prometheus, The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and Freedom Beach (with James Patrick Kelly), and the collections Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. His work has received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, James Tiptree Jr., and Shirley Jackson awards. For over thirty-five years Kessel has taught literature and writing at North Carolina State University, where he helped found the MFA program in creative writing. He lives with his wife, the novelist Therese Anne Fowler, in Raleigh.
Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer, whose fiction work has been nominated for several awards. Her next book Nothing But Blackened Teeth is coming out in 2021.
Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of chaotic paladin cats.
Debbie Urbanski is a writer living in Central New York. Her stories have been published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Nature, Terraform, Conjunctions, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and The Best American Experimental Writing. Several of her stories have also been long-listed for the Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award). In 2019, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
Rammel Chan’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and Riksha. His short plays Northern Michigan Trust and Chuppah Chaps have premiered as part TEN at the Gift Theatre and he is a recipient of the Bob Curry Fellowship from the Second City and a Kundiman Fiction Fellowship. Rammel also occupies himself, somehow, as an actor. He has most recently appeared in the 2020 indie film “I Used To Go Here.” Rammel lives in Chicago with his family and their two cats, Wayne Newton and Beyoncé.
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to the short novel Driftwood and Turning Darkness Into Light, a sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent. She is the author of several other series, over sixty short stories, and the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides; as half of M.A. Carrick, she has written The Mask of Mirrors, first in the Rook and Rose trilogy. For more information, visit swantower.com, Twitter @swan_tower, or her Patreon at www.patreon.com/swan_tower.
Gregory Feeley is the author of The Oxygen Barons, Arabian Wine, Kentauros, and numerous stories and novellas. His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and original anthologies, and has been finalists for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Feeley’s reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, the Times Literary Supplement, and numerous “little” magazines. “Cloud-Born” marks his third appearance in a Year’s Best anthology this year. He recently completed a long novel, Hamlet the Magician, and is now working on another.
A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has won a Nebula Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimovs, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt
Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of short stories, appearing in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny, among other places. She has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Locus, Sturgeon, and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Yoachim’s short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, and the chapbook for her award-nominated novelette “The Archronology of Love” are available from Fairwood Press. Find her online at carolineyoachim.com or on twitter as @CarolineYoachim.
A community organizer and teacher, Maurice Broaddus’s work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, Cemetery Dance, Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Mart
yrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk novella, Buffalo Soldier, the steampunk novel, Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novel, The Usual Suspects. As an editor, he’s worked on the Dark Faith anthology series, Fireside Magazine, Streets of Shadows, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.
Sofía Rhei writes books for young readers and in this category she has been awarded the ESFS Spirit of Dedication; the mention of the Banco del Libro de Venezuela; and has been included in the White Ravens catalog. For adults she has written Róndola (Celsius Award), Newropia, and, in English, Everything is Made of Letters, with Aqueduct Press. Also, her speculative poetry has been translated by Lawrence Schimel and they are 2019 Dwarf Stars award winners.
Born in Quebec and raised in Northern California, Ray Nayler has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for nearly two decades. He began publishing speculative fiction in 2015 in the pages of Asimov’s with the short story “Mutability,” which also appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. Since then, his critically acclaimed stories have seen print nearly a dozen times in the pages of Asimov’s, as well as in Clarkesworld, Analog, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Nightmare and numerous “Best of the Year” anthologies.
Minsoo Kang is the author of the short story collection Of Dreams and Enigmas, the history books Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination and Invincible and Righteous Outlaw: The Korean Hero Hong Gildong in Literature, History, and Culture, and the translator of the Penguin edition of the classic Korean novel The Story of Hong Gildong. His stories have also appeared in F & SF, Strange Horizons, Azalea, Entropy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and five anthologies. He is currently a professor of European history at the University of Missouri – St. Louis.