by Bill Fawcett
Their drinks arrived. Frostfree sipped and smiled.
“You can taste things.”
“Of course. It’s difficult to cook when one cannot.” She sipped again. “Please give me fifty dollars, sir.”
“What?”
“Fifty dollars. I would think that would suffice. A fifty-dollar bill might be best, but two twenties and a ten should be acceptable.”
“You need the money.”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“To get me a warmhearted girlfriend.”
“Yes, sir. I will not hire her, sir.”
Roy Tabak shrugged. “You can’t get much for fifty anyway.”
“It depends upon the thing bought, sir. Passing it to me beneath the table might be prudent.”
He did, and she rose. “I must attend to a call of nature.” Her lips brushed his forehead, cold and firm.
He was still trying to imagine what a refrigerator might do in the lady’s room when she returned to their table. He raised an eyebrow. “Everything come out all right?”
“I believe so, sir. I emptied my drip pan, and my negotiations should be effectual.” She glanced to her left.
Their waitress and another were pushing through the throng of lookers and drinkers.
“It might be wisest if you said nothing, sir.”
Roy Tabak nodded.
The waitresses arrived, panting and pointing to Frostfree. “He said he couldn’t call you,” gasped the one who had served them.
The other added, “Your phone’s off. He said he’s dying!”
“He called here. He said you’d be here.”
Frostfree raised a hand. “Calm yourselves! The man is a hypochondriac, a faker. It probably isn’t serious at all.”
“But—”
“He just wants attention.” Frostfree sighed, her sigh visible but inaudible. “I suppose I have to go.”
“Yeah,” Roy put in. “Maybe you’d better.”
“You’re a darling.” Leaning over the table (in which something popped under the stress of her weight) she kissed him.
At the bar, Frostfree spoke urgently to Kay. Roy Tabak, watching and very much wishing he could overhear them, saw Kay nod reluctantly. A moment later, Kay and Frostfree turned to stare at him before resuming their conversation.
Before Frostfree had left, Kay rose, slipped through the crowd to Roy Tabak’s table, and sat. “Your friend told me about the awful thing that’s happened to you,” she said.
Roy nodded sadly without having the least idea what she was talking about.
“I don’t usually do this,” she said.
He stood as if to leave. “You don’t have to. Really you don’t.”
She stood, too. “Do you dance?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but I’m not very good.”
“Just follow my lead, Roy.” Her smile was brightly encouraging. “Only do it, you know, in a man sort of way.”
“Like a mirror reflection.”
“That’s it. That’s it exactly.”
The truth was that he enjoyed dancing, and danced agilely with a good sense of rhythm. The crowded floor limited them both until the people gave way to watch. Kay’s smile widened and her hips rolled more wildly. He had thrown her high into the air and caught her before they sat down, and she had slid between his legs and spun like a top.
Hours later, in the kitchen of his apartment, she came across a lone uneaten egg. “This egg in the tomato—did you cook this, Roy?”
“For my supper, after I got home from work.” When she stared at him, he added. “Eggs Columbus is really pretty easy and a good way to bake eggs. I ate the other three.”
“An egg baked in a tomato, on toast . . .”
“Or a green pepper,” Roy Tabak told her. “I like those better. And you add butter, and salt and pepper.” He shrugged. “Other spices if you want them, or bread crumbs. It’s easy and quick.”
The brunet sat. “You cook. Eggs Columbus, you said. Just for you.”
Roy nodded.
“Can I have a cigarette?”
He found an unopened pack and gave it to her.
As she opened it, she murmured, “You know, you’re really quite a person.”
There was a butane lighter in the pocket of his robe. He used it to light her cigarette.
“You’re going to drive me home.”
He nodded.
“My roommate will be asleep, but she’ll wake up and want to know where I’ve been and everything we did.” Kay inhaled, blew smoke through her nostrils, and looked pleased. “I don’t know how much I’m going to tell her, but I certainly won’t tell everything.”
“Up to you,” Roy Tabak said.
“Yes.” Kay smiled. “You’re going to drive me, so you shouldn’t have another beer. I’d like one just the same. Maybe you’d like a Pepsi or something.”
Frostfree, who had apparently returned to his kitchen some time ago, had replaced the beer and the cabbage. Roy got Kay a cold beer and poured it into a spotless tulip glass before pouring a glass of milk for himself.
“That’s an interesting refrigerator you’ve got there,” Kay remarked. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“That right there,” Roy Tabak told her in a tone that brooked no disagreement, “is the best damned refrigerator in the whole world.”
Much later, when he had finished his crepes, Roy Tabak said, “Kay, that’s her name. The brunet you sent over to talk to me.”
Frostfree, who had been washing dishes, turned to face him. “Yes, sir.”
“She’s a warmhearted person.”
“Yes, sir. She is, sir.”
“Warmhearted and loving. Affectionate. I’m not. I’m a coldhearted, lying son-of- a-bitch, and I know it. Also, I don’t make half as much as I’m worth, and I smoke. She already smokes a little, so we’ll smoke together.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I lied to her, and you lied to her to get her to come over and talk to me. We’re both liars.”
“No, sir. I explained that you are friendless man, not far from suicide and insanity, and that you had been terribly hurt by the actions of a woman you once loved. What I said was true, sir. Every word of it.”
“Okay.”
“I expressed myself persuasively and urgently, and explained that I was only an acquaintance of yours and that I was leaving. I asked her to stay with you for at least an hour, and she consented.”
Roy Tabak seemed not to have heard. “I lied to get her into the sack, and I lied afterward so she wouldn’t find out about you. That’s what I did, and now she’s mixed up with me. Is she under some sort of curse, like I was?”
“I cannot tell you, sir. I have no information upon the topic. It was not part of any download I received.”
Roy Tabak blew a thoughtful smoke ring and watched it float away. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think so, too.”
A Lunar Labyrinth
NEIL GAIMAN
On Gene Wolfe: I met Gene and Rosemary Wolfe when I was twenty-two, in September of 1983, in Birmingham, England, at the British Fantasy Convention. I went to the Fantasycon to interview Gene, and over the next day I discovered my people, several of whom would go on, although I did not know it then, to become my closest friends, one of whom would also commission and edit my first book. It was an important time. I had loved Gene Wolfe’s fiction. Now I learned that I really liked the man as well. He was funny, and he was real, and his wife, Rosemary, was by his side and beaming.
Gene and I became friends (it was the trip to the theater in 1987 that did it) and we have stayed friends. I have learned more than I can say as a writer from his wise, twisty stories, but value the things I have learned from the man who has been my friend for all of my adult life much more. I loved seeing Gene and Rosemary. He came to a fireworks party at my house, and was nearly hit by a stray rocket.
There is a story by Gene called “A Solar Labyrinth.” I read it aloud to the audience from a Wurlitzer Orga
n platform when Gene was given the first Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award. It is a short story of brilliance and beauty and, hidden deep in the shadows, danger and darkness.
I wrote this for Gene, and it has rosemary in it, and wolves. If Gene had written it, it would have been subtler.
We were walking up a gentle hill on a summer’s evening. It was gone eight-thirty, but it still felt like midafternoon. The sky was blue. The sun was low on the horizon, and it splashed the clouds with gold and salmon and purple- gray.
“So how did it end?” I asked my guide.
“It never ends,” he said.
“But you said it’s gone,” I said. “It isn’t there any longer. What happened to it?”
I had found the lunar labyrinth mentioned online, a small footnote on a website that told you what was interesting and noteworthy wherever you were in the world. Unusual local attractions: the tackier and more handmade the better. I do not know why I am drawn to them: stoneless henges made of cars or of yellow school buses, polystyrene models of enormous blocks of cheese, unconvincing dinosaurs made of crusted powdery concrete and all the rest.
I need them, and they give me an excuse to stop driving, wherever I am, and to talk to people. I have been invited into people’s houses and into their lives because I wholeheartedly appreciated the zoos they made from engine parts, the houses they had built from tin cans and stone blocks then covered with aluminum foil, the historical pageants made from shop-window dummies, the paint on their faces always flaking off. And those people, the ones who made the roadside attractions, they would accept me for what I am.
“We burned it down,” said my guide. He was elderly, and he walked with a stick. I had met him sitting on a bench in front of the town’s hardware store, and he had agreed to show me the site that the lunar labyrinth had once been built upon. Our progress across the meadow was not fast. “The end of the lunar labyrinth. It was easy. The rosemary hedges caught fire and they crackled and flared. The smoke was thick and drifted down the hill and made us all think of roast lamb.”
“Why was it called a lunar labyrinth?” I asked. “Was it just the alliteration?”
He thought about this. “I wouldn’t rightly know,” he said. “Not one way or the other. We called it a labyrinth, but I guess it’s just a maze . . .”
“Just amazed,” I repeated.
“There were traditions,” he said. “We would only start to walk it the day after the full moon. Begin at the entrance. Make your way to the center, then turn around and trace your way back. Like I say, we’d only start walking the day the moon began to wane. It would still be bright enough to walk. We’d walk it any night the moon was bright enough to see by. Come out here. Walk. Mostly in couples. We’d walk until the dark of the moon.”
“Nobody walked it in the dark?”
“Oh, some of them did. But they weren’t like us. They were kids, and they brought flashlights, when the moon went dark. They walked it, the bad kids, the bad seeds, the ones who wanted to scare each other. For those kids it was Hallowe’en every month. They loved to be scared. Some of them said they saw a torturer.”
“What kind of a torturer?” The word had surprised me. You did not hear it often, not in conversation.
“Just someone who tortured people, I guess. I never saw him.”
A breeze came down toward us from the hilltop. I sniffed the air but smelled no burning herbs, no ash, nothing that seemed unusual on a summer evening. Somewhere there were gardenias.
“It was only kids when the moon was dark. When the crescent moon appeared, then the children got younger, and parents would come up to the hill and walk with them. Parents and children. They’d walk the maze together to its center and the adults would point up to the new moon, how it looks like a smile in the sky, a huge yellow smile and little Romulus and Remus, or whatever the kids were called, they’d smile and laugh, and wave their hands as if they were trying to pull the moon out of the sky and put it on their little faces. “Then, as the moon waxed, the couples would come. Young couples would come up here, courting, and elderly couples, comfortable in each other’s company, the ones whose courting days were long forgotten.” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Not forgotten,” he said. “You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.”
“Did they have flashlights?”
“Some nights they did. Some nights they didn’t. The popular nights were always the nights where no clouds covered the moon, and you could just walk the labyrinth. And sooner or later, everybody did. As the moonlight increased, day by day—night by night, I should say. That world was so beautiful.
“They parked their cars down there, back where you parked yours, at the edge of the property, and they’d come up the hill on foot. Always on foot, except for the ones in wheelchairs, or the ones whose parents carried them. Then, at the top of the hill, some of them’d stop to canoodle. They’d walk the labyrinth, too. There were benches, places to stop as you walked it. And they’d stop and canoodle some more. You’d think it was just the young ones, canoodling, but the older folk did it, too. Flesh to flesh. You would hear them sometimes, on the other side of the hedge, making noises like animals, and that always was your cue to slow down, or maybe explore another branch of the path for a little while. Doesn’t come by too often, but when it does I think I appreciate it more now than I did then. Lips touching skin. Under the moonlight.”
“How many years exactly was the lunar labyrinth here before it was burned down? Did it come before or after the house was built?”
My guide made a dismissive noise. “After, before . . . these things all go back. They talk about the labyrinth of Minos, but that was nothing by comparison to this. Just some tunnels with a horn- headed fellow wandering lonely and scared and hungry. He wasn’t really a bull-head. You know that?”
“How do you know?”
“Teeth. Bulls and cows are ruminants. They don’t eat flesh. The minotaur did.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“People don’t.” The hill was getting steeper now.
I thought, there are no torturers, not any longer. And I was not a real torturer. But all I said was, “How high were the bushes that made up the maze? Were they real hedges?”
“They were real. They were high as they needed to be.”
“I don’t know how high rosemary grows in these parts.” I didn’t. I was far from home.
“We have gentle winters. Rosemary flourishes here.”
“So why exactly did the people burn it all down?”
He paused. “You’ll get a better idea of how things lie when we get to the top of the hill.”
“How do they lie?”
“At the top of the hill.”
The hill was getting steeper and steeper. My left knee had been injured the previous winter, in a fall on the ice, which meant I could no longer run fast, and these days I found hills and steps extremely taxing. With each step my knee would twinge, reminding me, angrily, of its existence.
Many people, on learning that the local oddity they wished to visit had burned down some years before, would simply have gotten back into their cars and driven on toward their final destination. I am not so easily deterred. The finest things I have seen are dead places: a shuttered amusement park I entered by bribing a night watchman with the price of a drink; an abandoned barn in which, the farmer said, half a dozen bigfoots had been living the previous summer. He said they howled at night, and that they stank, but that they had moved on almost a year ago. There was a rank animal smell that lingered in that place, but it might have been coyotes.
“When the moon waned, they walked the lunar labyrinth with love,” said my guide. “As it waxed, they walked with desire, not with love. Do I have to explain the difference to you? The sheep and the goats?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The sick came, too, sometimes. The damaged and the disabled came, and some
of them needed to be wheeled through the labyrinth, or carried. But even they had to choose the path they traveled, not the people carrying them or wheeling them. Nobody chose their paths but them. When I was a boy people called them cripples. I’m glad we don’t call them cripples any longer. The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics— they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.”
We were approaching the top of the hill. It was dusk. The sky was the color of wine, now, and the clouds in the west glowed with the light of the setting sun, although from where we were standing it had already dropped below the horizon.
“You’ll see, when we get up there. It’s perfectly flat, the top of the hill.”
I wanted to contribute something, so I said, “Where I come from, five hundred years ago the local lord was visiting the king. And the king showed off his enormous table, his candles, his beautiful painted ceiling, and as each one was displayed, instead of praising it, the lord simply said, ‘I have a finer, and bigger, and better one.’ The king wanted to call his bluff, so he told him that the following month he would come and eat at this table, bigger and finer than the king’s, lit by candles in candleholders bigger and finer than the king’s, under a ceiling painting bigger and better than the king’s.”
My guide said, “Did he lay out a tablecloth on the flatness of the hill, and have twenty brave men holding candles, and did they dine beneath God’s own stars? They tell a story like that in these parts, too.”
“That’s the story,” I admitted, slightly miffed that my contribution had been so casually dismissed. “And the king acknowledged that the lord was right.”
“Didn’t the boss have him imprisoned, and tortured?” asked my guide. “That’s what happened in the version of the story they tell hereabouts. They say that the man never even made it as far as the Cordon Bleu dessert his chef had whipped up. They found him on the following day with his hands cut off, his severed tongue placed neatly in his breast pocket and a final bullet hole in his forehead.”