by Edward Lee
“Show me your beauty,” Smith said.
Off, then, came the garters, the stockings and frilly lace bra, all the same vibrant, bright fuchsia. She wore no panties. What stood before Smith now was her raw, physical reality. But—Not enough, he thought, squinting past his desk. He needed to see her beauty, and at first she did indeed strike him as beautiful…
Smith tipped up the desklamp. “Come closer. Please. Closer to the desk.”
She sauntered forward like a chic model on a runway, and assumed quick poses, turning before the light. Flesh flashed in cold glare. Glance by glance, the beauty collapsed.
The silken white-blond hair and bangs clashed with the waxed, black pubic patch. The rhinoplastied nose seemed too perfect on the elegant face. Smith’s eyes calculated up the supple physique, and snagged. Minute cannula marks pocked along her trim hips and waist, from liposuction, and when she raised her arms, the erect orbs of her breasts easily displayed the hairline implant scars.
She blinked at him, her smile freezing. Even the crystal-blue eyes were a lie, designer contacts.
“Thank you,” Smith said. “You may go now.”
Her nude, pretty shoulders shrugged. “It’s your dime.” Then she quickly put her clothes back on and left.
The ghost was laughing.
««—»»
On the night he was to die, Smith awakened as if rising from a lime pit. The darkness swarmed. His eyes felt plucked open by fish hooks.
You should have more faith, the hiss whispered.
“Yes,” he muttered. He walked to his desk, wizened as a dried corpse in the moonlight. Faith? he wondered. Smith didn’t believe in God. Perhaps he should have. Nevertheless, he doubted that the ghost meant religious faith.
Faith in me. Faith in what is real.
He’d failed again, he’d misconstrued everything. He’d never know reality now, only the reality of death, of being embalmed and buried, of reverting to slime in a box. But what was he—a writer—really dying of? Cancer, or the failure to recognize what was real? Prevarications were killing him, not disease.
Deserts, he thought. Wastelands. All the lies of history.
Only two realities mattered now. His dying flesh, and the ghost.
He saw it more clearly now than ever, which made sense. It faced the window, naked in its oblivion, a razorline shape of inverted oddments of darkness and light. “You’re real, aren’t you?” Smith stated more than asked.
Only you can make me real, the hiss replied.
Smith felt adrift on the scent of her—or its—perfume. But how could he make it real? Did it mean that it was only half-real now? Did it mean there was something about Smith that could unloose the ghost’s full reality?
“Assimilation?” Smith lit a cigarette, his last. “No,” he felt. “Transposition.” Perhaps he’d been correct all-along, back when he’d been talking to the blonde call-girl. Correct, but on the wrong tangent. It was his trade that had summoned the ghost—he was a writer, a creator, or, more accurately, a re-creator. Writers re-created their own conceptions of images of reality and blended them with abstraction, transposing the images, and making both the conception and the abstraction, in a sense—
Real, he thought.
He’d only been partly right. Beauty reflected only a semantic; it was something created, not transposed. Smith stared at the shifting figure, and its ebon glint. It seemed to gaze back at him, over the shadow-boned shoulder…
“Too late, though, hmm?” Of course. His life was over. His face felt sucked in. The old heart began to skip within the sunken cage of his chest. But at least he would die pondering this; at least he would die trying.
Ghosts. Not Dickensian specters flailing chains and moaning amid graveyards. Not transparent apparitions and sheet-shapes. Ghosts would be entities of human backwash, of unfulfillment, of failure. Ghosts would be slivers of the real world. And what was the world, then? A realm, not a sphere of rock, a domain of…transposition—a mutable domain, one that squirmed with each new generation, and each new age.
The ghost turned. Its black-chasm eyes widened.
“Now I’ve got you going, eh?” Smith felt proud. “The old dying stick in the mud isn’t as dumb as you thought.”
Make me real, came the hushed reverberation.
“I don’t know how,” Smith testily replied.
But you do.
Was it weeping? It seemed to be, perhaps as Smith, secretly, had wept over his entire life. Behind him on the wall hung a de Kooning print, A Study of Woman Number One, which he regarded as the greatest painting of the 20th Century. The painting reminded him of a girl from his dim past, but he’d never told her his real feelings. Hence, it felt too fitting to be overlooked by an image of this most monumental failure. Smith breathed shallowly now in that total loss. At least pain reminded him he was still momentarily alive.
Next, he turned on the radio. Vivaldi seemed nice to die to, or a light nocturne by Field. Besides, Smith wanted beautiful music as he confronted the ghost. He knew something now: the ghost—this shadow-person—was his confessor.
He rose, joints clicking, as he crossed the nighted room, atrophied, shrivel-penised, and as pale as death already. He could feel the cancer percolating, and it was a surprisingly neutral sensation. Transposition, he considered. Each new generation, each new age. Yes, the world was a realm of emotion, of which this queer thing in his room had surely been born. Out of the dark, the radio squawked another day’s unholy news. A bomb had exploded on an airliner, scattering hundreds of bodies across the outskirts of Los Angeles. A Florida man who had raped a 15-year-old girl and severed her arms at the elbows was paroled, after eight years, for good behavior. A coterie of scientists convened in Washington, citing the benefits of using brain tissue from aborted fetuses for genetic research. Terrorists had thrown seven satchel charges into an Israeli maternity ward…
Look. The ghost indicated the window. Smith peered out. At first, what he saw seemed beautiful: a warm endless night chipped by stars, the high, resplendent moon, and man’s crisp, perfectly symmetrical monuments. The scape of buildings looked like an intricate carved mesa of flawless black, still with tiny lights.
“It’s beautiful,” Smith muttered.
But then its reality rose before the vision. Flashing red and blue lights of terror. Sirens. Gunshots. Distant screams. A cool breeze carried in the chaotic stench.
Smith blinked.
Revere me. Make me real.
The ghost shifted. Now he understood.
It’s time now, isn’t it? Time for a new realm? Your realm is done, isn’t it?
It didn’t mean his life—of course not. It meant the age.
The night lolled. The ghost shifted like black sand pouring, until it was perfect, beautiful flesh. Dark long straight hair and dark eyes. Dark yet lambent nakedness. Poreless indefectible skin, smooth as newly spun silk. And it wasn’t a woman at all, but a girl, a prepubescent little girl. Nor was it a ghost…
A goddess, Smith realized.
The goddess’ voice eddied like water running through the bowels of a sewer, or garbage blown in gutters.
The new dark age needs a scribe.
Smith felt on fire inside. He watched his hand reach out, but it wasn’t the veined, liver-spotted hand he had known. It was a new hand, forged in truth, in acknowledgment. Smith wept, oblivious to the new hot blood, the fresh skin, strong muscles, and steady heart. He embraced the goddess.
He began to slide down, as if on a greased pole, sloughing off her perfect skin, and revealing her true age. Her horror sang to him, and embraced him back, the flensed figure gleaming in hate, disease, insanity. In despair and in pus.
In cruelty and heartbreak.
In truth.
Smith knelt in worship, and kissed the little feet, which were now caked by the blood, offal, and excrement of eons.
— | — | —
Afterword
Interchange, mutability, transposition, transfigurations. With
this story, I transposed a certain aspect of myself into the meld of my fears. All writers, in one sense or other, try to predict the future, often their own. The protagonist is me, in some abstract realm. My fear...and perhaps any writer’s fear. If fiction can be a real thing, this is as real as I can get. I like this story very much, and I dedicate it to my father who died on Christmas night, 1986.
The Seeker
(For Mary)
Bock’s eyes flicked up. “Something buzzing the hopper, Sarge.”
Balls, SFC John Ruben thought. He unlocked the alert safe behind the driver’s compartment and removed the CEIC binder which contained today’s prefixes and code dailies.
Then: “Victor Echo Two Six, this is X-ray One. Acknowledge.”
Bock stalled over the radio and AN/FRA shift-converter. “Who the fuck’s X-ray One, Sarge? Division?”
Ruben checked the codebook. “It’s Air Force Recovery Alert Operations. Gonna get shit on by fly boys again. Answer it.”
“X-ray One, this is Victor Echo Two Six. Go ahead.”
“Proceed to incoming grid. Target perimeter positive.”
Bock held the mike away from himself like a chunk of rancid meat.
Ruben could not believe what he’d just heard. The pause hovered in static, then Ruben grabbed the mike. “X-ray One, this is Victor Echo Two Six Tango Charlie. Repeat your last transmission.”
“Proceed to incoming grid,” the radio answered back. “Target perimeter positive.”
His memory struggled with the reality of fright. The sequence seemed miles away. “Status white. Progress code?”
“Red.”
“Recall code?”
“None.”
“Directive order?”
“Directive order is standby at target perimeter. This is NOT a drill. This is NOT an exercise. Assume SECMAT alert state orange.”
“Orders logged,” Ruben droned. Holy mother of shit, he thought.
“Victor Echo Two Six, this is X-ray One. Out.”
Ruben hung up the AN’s mike. Bock was sweating. Jones, the track’s driver, craned back from the t-bar. “What gives, Sarge!”
“Calm down,” Ruben eased. But he could not calm the thought: This has never happened before.
“We’re at war,” Bock muttered.
The alert had sounded at 0412; they’d been in the field nearly a day now. Victor Echo Two Six was a modified M2 armored personnel carrier, fully CBN equipped, and its crew was what the U.S. Army Chemical Corps termed a hazmat field detection team. Their primary general search perimeter was familiar open scrubby land; they’d tracked this terrain dozens of times on past alerts. Ruben, the TC, hadn’t been worried until now—until he’d heard the magic words: Target perimeter positive.
“What are you guys, a bunch of dickheads?” he countered. “This is a CONUS alert. If we were at war, the whole state would be a clusterfuck by now, and the op stat would’ve been jerked up a lot higher than a CONUS. We’d be at Defcon Two at least. Think with your brains instead of your asses. If this was war, why would they recall every unit in the division except us?”
“This is shit, Sarge!” Jones was not appeased. “Something’s really fucked up!”
“Calm down. We’re not at war.”
Bock was shaking, muttering, “It fucking figures. I’m two weeks short, and this shit happens.”
“You guys are shitting your pickles for nothing. We had four of these last year, remember? One of the early warning sites probably picked up something in our telemetry line. It’s probably another meteor, or a piece of space junk. Relax, will you?”
“Here it comes,” Bock announced.
The XN/PCD 21 began to click. The hopper freqs shifted through their 5-digit discriminators. Then the mobile printer spat out their destination grid.
Bock slid out the map book, teeth chattering. Jones’ face was turning to paste. They were just boys, and they were shit-scared, but Ruben had to wonder if he was too.
He put his hands on their shoulders. “We gotta get our shit together, girls. We’re hardcore Army decon ass-kickers, and we don’t piss in our BDU’s every time an alert directive goes up. We ain’t afraid of nothin’. We eat napalm for breakfast and piss diesel fuel, and when we die and go to hell, we’re gonna shove the devil’s head up his ass and take the fuck over. Right now we gotta job to do, and I gotta know if you guys are with me.”
Bock wiped sweat off his brow with his sleeve. “Hardcore, Sarge. I’m no pussy. My shit’s tight, and I’m with you.”
“Jonesy?”
Jones gave the thumbs up. “Hell on fucking wheels, man! Nobody lives forever, so let’s roll!”
“Hardcore,” Ruben approved. “Squared-fucking-away goddamn die-for-decon outstanding.”
“Let’s kick ass!” Bock yelled.
“Decon!” Jones chanted.
Ruben handed Jones the grid. “Get this twin-tracked Detroit coffin rolling, Jonesy. Hammer down.”
Jones revved the throttle, whooping. The track’s turbocharged Cummins V8 roared. Bock strapped in behind the commo gear. Ruben had enlivened them, but for how long? What was happening out there? What’s waiting for us? he wondered.
“Proceed to target perimeter positive,” he said.
««—»»
How powerful is the power of truth?
It was more a motto than a question. It was all that motivated him.
The writer didn’t believe in God, for instance. Now, if he saw God, then he’d believe in Him. He believed in nothing he couldn’t see, but that’s why he was here, wasn’t it? To see? Behind him, the bus disappeared into darkness. I see that, he thought.
Ahead, the sign blazed in blue neon: CROSSROADS.
“I see that, too. A drink, to help me think.”
But then he heard a word, or thought he did. It was not his voice, nor a thought of his own. He heard it in his head:
SUSTENANCE.
So he was hearing voices now? Perhaps he’d been drinking too much. Or, Not enough, he considered, half-smiling. All great writers drink. He could not dispel the notion, however, that he was entering something more than just a small-town tavern.
Dust eddied from the wood floor’s seams when he trod in and set down his bag. Yes, here was a real “slice of life” bar: a dump. Its frowziness, its cheap tables, dartboards, pinball machines—its overall Vacuus spiritum—delighted him. This was reality, and reality was what he sought.
Seek, he thought, and ye shall find.
“Welcome to Crossroads, stranger,” greeted the rube barkeep. The writer mused over the allegorical possibilities of the bar’s name. The keep had a basketball beer belly and teeth that would compel an oral hygienist to consider other career options. “What can I get ya?” he asked.
“Alcohol. Impress me with your mixological prowess, sir.”
Only three others graced these eloquent confines. A sad-faced guy in a white shirt sat beside a short, bosomed redhead. They seemed to be arguing. Closer up sat an absolutely obese woman with long blond hair, drinking dark beer and eating an extra-large pizza. Her weight caused the stool’s legs to visibly bend.
You’re here to seek, the writer reminded himself. So seek.
“May I join you?”
The blonde swallowed, nodding. “You ain’t from around here.”
“No,” the writer said, and sat. Then the keep slapped a shooter down. It was yellow. “House special, stranger.”
It looked like urine. “What is it?”
“We call it the Piss Shooter.”
The writer’s brow rose. “It’s not, uh… piss, is it?”
The keep laughed. “‘Course not! It’s vodka and Galliano.”
The writer sniffed. Smells all right. “Okay, here’s to—what? Ah, yes. Here’s to formalism.” He drank it down.
“Well?”
“Not bad. Very good, actually.” He reached for his wallet.
“Uh-uh, stranger. That there’s a tin roof.”
“What?”
The keep rolled his eyes. “It’s on the house.”
“What’cha want in a dull’s-shit town like this?” inquired the fat blonde, chewing. Her breasts were literally large as human heads. “Ain’t nothin’ around for fifty miles in any direction.”
Isolatus proximus. “I’m a writer,” the writer said. “I travel all over the country. I need to see different things, different people. I need to see life in its different temporal stratas.”
“Stratas,” the fat blonde said, nodding.
“I come to remote towns like this because they’re variegated. They exist separately from the rest of the country’s societal mainstream. Towns like this are more real. I’m a writer, but in a more esoteric sense… I’m…” He thought about this. He thought hard. He lit a cigarette and finished. “I’m a seeker.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me!” the guy in the white shirt shouted to the short red-haired girl. “You’ve slept with FIVE OTHER GUYS this week? Jeeeeesus CHRIST!”
She sipped her Tequila Moonrise reflectively, then corrected, “Sorry. Not five. Six. I forgot about Craig.” She grinned. “His nickname’s Mr. Meat Missile.”
“Jeeeeesus CHRIST!” White shirt exploded.
“He must be in love with her,” the writer remarked.
“He don’t get her pussy off,” the fat blonde said.
The keep was polishing a glass. “What’s that you were sayin’? You’re a seeker?”
“Well, that’s an abstraction, of course. What I mean is I’m on a quest. I’m searching for some elusive uncommon denominator to perpetuate my aesthetic ideologies. For a work of fiction to exist within any infrastructure of resolute meaning, its peripheries must reflect certain elements of truth. I don’t mean objective truths. I’m talking about ephemeral things: unconscious impulses, psychological propensities, etc.—the underside of what we think of as the human experience.”
“I’ve never heard such shit in my life!” White Shirt was still yelling at the redhead. “Those other guys don’t love you! I love you!”