Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 24
Page 9
* * * *
She was still driving a red ‘59 Kharmann Ghia convertible with a crumpled right fender and a busted headlight. The lone headlamp shone on me like a spotlight, like she was checking me out, taking aim at my heart. She got out of the tiny car in long, leggy slow motion. The years in mortality had been kind to Wanda. She was always striking, but now there was an air of inevitability about her that was irresistible.
"Not now,” she said when I attempted to crush her in my arms. “We have to get inside. Did you bring tools?"
There was a chain across the door five miles long. It was wrapped around the building, across every door, window, and air shaft. “I don't need any tools. I have skills.” It took me no time at all to find the weakest link. I took Wanda's lovely, delicate hand in mine and guided it toward the chain. “Touch it,” I whispered in her ear. “Here."
At her touch, the link broke like a bubble, and she laughed. “You haven't lost your touch, Stran."
"Your touch,” I told her. “Yours."
But we weren't so giddy once we stepped inside. The place was a mess, plunged into a deep and abiding gloom, cluttered with so much pointless crap you couldn't walk ten feet in any direction without tripping over something, damp, cold, moldy, and bitter, the huge building groaning in the wind as if it too was deciding each moment whether to go on standing or to collapse and crush everyone inside. We expected all that. What was different was that it was empty, when it used to teem with people. Now, except for us two and the rats who'd stayed, having always felt quite at home in the place, there wasn't another soul.
"It's just us,” she whispered. “You weren't lying. You have any ideas?"
"I want you,” I said.
"You always want me. That's not enough. There has to be more than that."
"I want you, but you don't want me."
"That's not true. Besides, where's the fun in that? We would need at least three to make it interesting. Do you think Jane...?"
"Not a chance. She's turned her back on broken dreams."
"Let's have a drink and think about this."
* * * *
We went into the lounge. It didn't seem the same without the Amer-Asian junkie on the piano playing sweet jazz and the blind bartender who could get you anything you wanted, no questions asked, smoking clove cigarettes behind the bar. We made our own drinks. It was a little bit scary to be in this enormous place all by ourselves. We sat in the big booth and held each other, trying to come up with some broken dream big enough to bust out of these chains and change the world.
But nothing came to us, and we made love on the office sofa, in the back of a cab, in a choir loft (though it wasn't the same without the wedding rehearsal going on below, the sound of someone's steady tread coming up the stairs). It was just the two of us. We went to the honeymoon suite and fell asleep. Nothing broken about that.
We tried. We really did. But no matter what we did, we couldn't break the dream. Some nights we danced all night long, others we knitted and watched television. Nothing worked. Wanda planted a garden. I made a forest. We dreamed our own dreams. We shared them, swapped them, pulled them every which way, but we couldn't break them. We only managed to stretch them out, expand them. We felt comfortable in them, comfortable with each other. We wore our dreams like old pajamas.
Then one night, snuggled in bed as we were falling asleep, Wanda whispered in my ear, “I'm going to have a baby,” and I was the happiest man the Broken Dream Factory had ever seen.
* * * *
I delivered our son on the big bed in the honeymoon suite—Wanda's choice (and I gladly did everything my great pregnant queen commanded). And what a son came forth. I know there are those who don't love their children. That's not Wanda and me. No child was ever loved more. We named him Orph, after the two of us, Wanda and I both being orphans. We used to say that made us lucky, because we had no parents to screw us up, but then we were being bitterly ironic, wallowing in self-pity; now it was the truth in a way. We had no bad habits to fall back on, no less-than-perfect role models. We truly did our best with Orph. We taught him everything we knew, tending the garden, wandering the forest, hanging out in the lounge where he taught himself sweet jazz he'd play for us evenings, writing his own songs. He learned to read almost before he could walk and spent hours in the Broken Dreams Library reading everything, even the dead languages. He spent weeks in the balcony of the Rialto watching everything, even the never released. We all liked books and movies, but he threw himself into them like I had once dedicated myself to my work at the Broken Dream Factory, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I began to worry.
He slipped outside when he was still small enough to squeeze through the chains and came back with a tomcat. He found an old Smith & Co. typewriter in the bourbon-soaked hotel room and started writing stories for the cat he called the Cat Gazette. The cat, his mother, and I were his avid readers. The stories were mostly thrilling tales and unlikely adventures starring, oddly enough, the rats, who, I suspect, also read the Gazette when we'd all retired for the night. Their scritches and scratches were a common feature of the Broken Dream Factory's night sounds, and they seemed particularly intense whenever a new issue of the Gazette was published.
The tales had a profound effect upon the cat, whom Orph had named Felix Culpa. Previously, an accomplished devourer of rats, Felix promptly turned vegetarian and embraced a doctrine of non-violence. One night he slipped away to turn himself into a spay/neuter clinic and never returned.
The rats soon after held a secret counsel of their own and, for reasons not entirely clear to me, promptly departed in a horde. The Broken Dream Factory was now oddly silent at night, except for the building groaning, though even that took on a different key, as if instead of contemplating collapse, it hoped to wrench itself loose from its foundations and flee.
Orph wept, and could not be comforted. He cursed the Smith & Co. typewriter and threw it off the roof of the Broken Dream Factory. It landed on the scarecrow in his mother's garden, displacing the head. The crows were no more afraid of it than they'd been of the old head, a volley ball with a smiley face painted in blood, by Orph, of course, after watching nothing but Castaway for three straight days.
Orph stayed on the roof for weeks, months, sleeping up there, picking at the food his mother and I brought him, until one morning early I found him in the supply closet into the pills. He'd had an inspiration. I noticed his voice had definitely started to change. He sowed the garden with Dexedrine, and while the crows pecked it up like kernels of popcorn, he fed an enormous roll of paper into the typewriter and wired a feeder full of pills and a bottle of water to the sturdy metal frame. The crows settled on the typewriter crammed so tightly there must've been one on each key, three or four on the big spacebar, all jostling each other continuously. A circling swarm periodically smacked the return. In a week they'd written On the Road and flown away, to return, nevermore.
"That was interesting,” Orph said.
* * * *
Then he started bringing girls home. He found new ways in and out of the place Wanda and I had never known about. There were always new girls, but about the time Orph started spending more nights out than in, some of the girls started staying behind, taking up residence in the dozens of empty beds in the Broken Dream Factory. When Orph did show up for the occasional night, he'd sleep with one of them, but rarely the same one twice. They befriended Wanda and me in the mistaken notion that this might help their chances to become the one chosen for his occasional homecomings, but they couldn't have been more wrong. He seemed to choose the one whose heart was near mended, who might get some sense and go home, just about to get over him. Until he showed up again to open the wound, so she wouldn't leave. He might even write a story about her, sing her a song. Many of them were lured here by his songs. I suspected him sometimes of using the same song more than once, just changing the names, so long as it would scan. They were nice girls, every last one of them. I urged them to leave, to get a li
fe. Wanda said I was getting soft, but she told them the same thing. “My son will only break your heart,” we told them.
And each one seemed to say, “My heart? Do you think? I should be so lucky!"
Months now passed between his occasional visits. Girls started showing up on their own, slipping in through secret passages he'd told them about, in hopes of finding him here. Some were now grown women, so crazy in love they might as well be girls. When he came and went, we spent infinitely more time consoling the bereft afterwards than we spent with our son when he was here.
Still, he was always very sweet to us. We would see him early in the mornings before he went away. He told us things about the various places he traveled, kept us up-to-date on his accomplishments. He was writing prolifically, he said. Like the crows on the typewriter? I asked him. He liked that and laughed, “Like I swallowed them and taught them some sense."
Then he left. It was always that way. He'd spend the night somewhere’ in the Broken Dream Factory, and see us in the morning when he was already packed to go.
* * * *
So when he came home this time and sought me out immediately because he had something important to tell me, I knew it must be serious. He came right to the point. “I'm not coming back,” he said. “I'm leaving in the morning. Tonight will be my last night here. It's time I left the Broken Dream Factory for good. As much as I love you and Mom, I can't keep coming back here. I hope you understand."
What could I say? I wept, and he comforted me, weeping himself. I asked him if he was going to tell his mother, and he said that's what he was going to do next—then he was going to spend his last night here with the two of us. If only that were true.
This is an old place, no one knows how old. Some say the cellar is fashioned out of an old cavern, and if you go down deep enough there are paintings on the walls of woolly mammoth and mastodons. You hear a lot of crazy stuff around here. But it's old anyway, with secret passageways, and strange acoustics. It only took one of the girls to overhear his plans, for all of them to know soon after.
He was singing to his mother in the lounge, like he used to do when he was younger, putting off telling her he was leaving for good, working up his nerve, and maybe because he knew it pleased her so to listen to him sing and remember.
They burst into the room, all of them, all the heartbroken girls who spent their lives dreaming he would stay here with them. They begged him to stay. He said it was impossible.
"Look at Stran and Wanda!” they said. “They're proof you can live forever in the Broken Dream Factory."
"No,” he said. “I created Stran and Wanda, a dream to comfort you in my absence. But now I'm going away, back to the real world, and so must all of you."
But that's not the way it was to be. They seized him, like the crows fastening onto the keys of the typewriter, five on this arm, six on that, a dozen around each leg, and a swarm around his head. “No!” they shouted, for they meant to stop him, and did, tearing him to pieces, but still his head kept singing, kept insisting it invented us all, until Wanda scooped it up and heaved it over the wall in a high arc, plummeting to earth we know not where. The girls are out looking every night. You know how the young are, ever hopeful.
We don't let on that we hear from him from time to time. He publishes stories and poems in obscure publications that are clearly his work, though he uses a variety of pseudonyms. He produced an experimental musical in West Virginia last summer that closed after a week, though it likely would've run for years on Broadway. And most weekends he plays piano and sings in a bar near a train station where the dog barks all night long. He probably does a dozen other things we don't even know about. But someone must be paying attention. He's having an effect: We've started getting orders again at the Broken Dream Factory. It looks like we might be opening back up any day now.
Once in a blue moon, Orph calls on the phone, usually when he's on the road somewhere, and the connection's nearly always bad. He says any day now he's going to catch a break.
Maybe so, I say. Maybe so. I try to encourage him anyway I can. His mother and I couldn't be more proud of him if he was the king of the world.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Dear Aunt Gwenda: The 140 Character Question-Within-a-Question Plague Edition
If you would like your question answered, please send it to the usual address and we will forward it on to our Dear Aunt.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
Turns out 5 billion people on this planet don't speak my language(s). I gots to communicate. Où est ma babel poissons, s'il vous plaît?
Aunt Gwenda: Between parlez-vous French and English you've got well over a billion people covered. I really think that's where the communication line in the sand should be drawn. If you want to communicate with more, is it because you plan on some sort of world domination? That's what I thought. Oh, you are transparent. But I suggest using the more universal language of music for that—what nation cannot understand the shaking of the tambourine or the sweet notes of the cowbell?
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
My twitter addiction has rendered me totally unable to complete sentences comprising more than 140 characters. What should
AG: Those who claim that brevity is the soul of wit are just being lazy, I'm afraid. Perhaps you could transfer your addiction to the fledgling social networking site, Soliloquy.com, where members communicate in static increments of at least 1400 words. Have you heard a great soliloquy lately?
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
My health care plan does not exist. Do you have any advice?
From
Forty-five million Americans
AG: There is, of course, the civilized solution of moving to any other industrialized, fat-cat or thin-cat nation. If that's not an option, I suggest regular sit-ins outside your desired physician's personal residence, spamming your senator or representative with inquiries, and a letter writing campaign to the member of Nigerian royalty who only needs your help to transfer a million dollars to the U.S. In the meantime, try not to need any health care.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
I'm joining the Peace Corps and moving to Kazakhstan next month. I'm worried, though: How can I keep up with latest news about Brad and Angelina when I'm living in the steppe?
AG: I hate to be the one to break the news, but it's entirely possible that Brad and Angelina will personally show up in the steppe. You should begin practicing the introductory lines you'll use to strike up a lifelong friendship. The true question is: How will Brad and Angelina continue to get news of you? They will be bereft without it.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
How do I ask you a question?
AG: With the utmost respect.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
I have eaten a wild mushroom of whose identity I realize belatedly I am unsure. It might be agaricus campestris, the delectable Meadow Mushroom. It might also be amanita ocreata, the Destroying Angel. What do you recommend?
AG: Can any mushroom truly be described as wild? I suggest you consult Jeff VanderMeer, whenever he next compiles his semi-annual ever-quarterly mushroom-related advice column.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
What should I read in the bathtub?
AG: It must be a book that you won't mind if it gets wet. Or a book with invisible writings revealed by moisture. Have you seen the imaginary Sarah Palin paper doll book? That'd be a good one.
Dear Aunt Gwenda,
Stealing library books is easy, but stealing librarians is hard! Any suggestions?
AG: Au contraire, stealing librarians is like stealing a baby from a candy factory. You need only obtain semi-secret information about their favorite books and authors. Like crack addicts to a gorge or canyon, they will follow a trail of the right books (a Catching Fire ARC works fine if you lack the appropriate degree of inside knowledge) to wherever you desire. This is known as book-baiting. Be careful of the spells that require stolen librarians, however. Unless you've always wanted to be trapped in a Borge
s story, that is. Have you? Then you need merely open your eyes.
Dear Aunt G,
Thanks for all your good advice. The boils are gone, at last, but now what do I do with all the monkeys?
AG: Aunt G, hmmm? How familiar we are. Did the monkeys not vamoose the boils for you? You must take care of them for life now. Such was your agreement, as I believe the X you marked on the paperwork indicates. You wanted only to be rid of boils at any cost. You expressed no concern about how to get rid of monkeys. Is it not too late? Oh, it is. Far too late. I hear they like typewriters and Indiana Jones movies.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Magician's Keeper by Anya Groner
Ophelia did not hear when the real world came knocking at her door. She did not see them break the window, tiptoe down the hallway, kick aside the rug, or pull up the trapdoor that led to the basement beneath the basement. And she was still sleeping when they found her and the magician, twisted like roots, naked as babies on a green quilt in a dank room with no doors and no windows, a room where Ophelia had lived for over eight years.
While the weary lovers rubbed sleep from their eyes, men with masks and billy clubs upended tables and broke dishes. To express their anger they threw vases at walls. Ooze from an electric-blue lava lamp dripped down and a sticky globule landed on Ophelia's bony shoulder. The violence seemed at first to Ophelia to be a new weather system, something the magician had conjured in his sleep, a tornado tantrum of sorts. But Ophelia accepted this strange storm without protest, without even a glimmer of recognition.
It happened so quickly. Minutes after their violent entrance, men in starched coats put their latex hands on her arms and guided her up the stairs, shielding her face with a newspaper from the flashing bulbs of the eager photo-journalists and the glorious glare of the sun which she squinted from for the first time in eight years. Ophelia could not register what was being undone. And she was gone before the blows that would have shaken awake her sleeping memory. The cops whispering their daughters’ names before swinging their metal batons and cracking open the magician's skull, then digging their bony knees into his chest, pinning his hands behind his back, and laughing as his mouth filled with blood that rose warm from his punctured esophagus. All Ophelia saw from the window of the black car were the clipped green rugs stretched out in front of toothy houses. The hungry sky gaping. The cops drove her to a new place, a place she'd never been before, a place they called home.