Nevernever

by Will Shetterly

  (Sparks said gently, “Neither of us needs a kid. And we both think we’re disease free, but one of us might be wrong. It’s for both of us.”

  (Then I remembered, and I grinned as I reached into my jacket pocket.

  (“Gee,” Sparks said, “We’ll have to thank Gorty.” I looked at the rubber, and Sparks said, “What?”

  (I tossed it to her. It was no longer a useful trade item: the wrapper was cracked and stiff from age. Sparks shook her head. “Poor Gorty. If he’d learn to be nicer to people—” She tossed the rubber at the trashcan beside my desk.

  (My big opportunity seemed to be over. I decided that was a relief, since the mood was completely broken. Then Sparks reached into her jacket and came out with a foil-wrapped disk of her own. I was astonished at how quickly the mood came back.)

  •

  (Afterward—hey, I’ll leave some details for you virgins to discover and you nonvirgins to wonder about—I remembered to hold onto the base of the rubber when I withdrew so it didn’t fall off, and I threw it away because you’re not supposed to use them twice. Getting the textbook details of sex is easy. But textbooks don’t tell you what to do after you’ve had sex and you’re filled with doubts about whether any of it went like it was supposed to.

  (Sparks, curled up against me, draped an arm over my chest and said, “Mmm.”

  (I said, “Mmm,” too, because she seemed to expect that. It had all been messier and more awkward than I’d expected, with arms and legs getting in the way, and almost everything I had tried had required fine tuning by Sparks. It hadn’t occurred to me that movie love scenes are as carefully choreographed as dances. Now that we were done, I wanted to move away from Sparks and lie perfectly still until I felt dry or fell asleep.

  (She hugged me tighter. “Some guys are too insecure to just lie there and hold you afterward.”

  (I gave a little shrug. It was nice lying there with someone I liked beside me. My left arm tingled as it fell asleep under her, but I didn’t want to move it. The sun was bright outside our window. The pigeons had gotten bored and flown away.

  (Careful not to disturb Sparks, I reached for my notebook, propped it on my knee, and wrote, THANK YOU.

  (“No, no, my dear Alphonse,” she said. “Thank you.”

  (I tapped what I’d written. She tapped it, too, and then we engaged in a flurry of jabs at those two words, until our fingers linked, and then we were holding hands. Which was nice, but I couldn’t write, so I let go and wrote, I REALLY LIKE YOU.

  (Her face became still, which I had not expected. “Is that followed by a ‘but’? I’m used to it, you know.”

  (I wrote, STATEMENT OF FACT.

  (“Good.” She moved her hand through the hair on my chest. “I really like you, too. As you might’ve guessed.”

  (WHAT’LL THIS DO TO OUR FRIENDSHIP?

  (“You want to pretend this didn’t happen?”

  (I shook my head.

  (“Then that’s a remarkably stupid question.”

  (I wrote, A BOY QUESTION?

  (She laughed. “Exactly. Males and females are alike in every important way, except guys are idiots.”

  (I kissed her, then wrote, APPRECIATIVE IDIOTS.

  (She said, “Well, the best of them are.” Then she reached across the futon for her jacket. I figured she was cold, until she said, “Guess what a girl who’s prepared carries at least two of?”)

  Chapter 6—Fast Forward #1

  If you want, you can skip this whole chapter and pretend it consists of a single sentence: Time passed.

  There’s nothing in here about Crystaviel’s hunt for Elfland’s missing heir. (I ask you, how many writers provide this kind of service for their readers? I sure hope you didn’t steal this book.) For the first month after Orient’s attempt to find Florida, I watched for Crystaviel in every dark place, and I thought every unexpected sound was announcing her return. In the second month, I began to relax: maybe she had given up. In the third month, I may have been more vigilant than ever before; I decided Crystaviel would never give up, and she was only staying away to get us all to relax our guard.

  I asked Strider when we’d know Florida was safe.

  He said, “Never.”

  I wrote, THANKS HEAPS.

  He said, “When Florida is an adult in the Elflands, she’ll be as safe as anyone can make her.” I asked him when we’d know that Crystaviel had given up. He said that question had the same answer as the first one.

  By the fourth month, we had all relaxed our guard. We knew that Crystaviel would always be searching, and we knew that an elf’s sense of urgency is much more leisurely than any human’s, but we relaxed anyway. We had to. It’s called getting on with life.

  Mickey and Goldy got back together and stayed back together. They fought some more, of course. Given their personalities, I guess that was inevitable.

  Mickey’s obsession with being independent must have been tied to losing both her arms in a farm accident. When she was nineteen, she came to Bordertown against her parents’ wishes, using money she’d earned herself, with no more help than a kid who agreed to be her hands for six months in exchange for a one-way ticket to B-town and two meals a day. By the end of the six months, the kid had gone back to the World, but Mickey had started Elsewhere, B-town’s finest bookstore, in my not-so-humble opinion.

  Goldy’s obsession with independence had something to do with being picked on for being fat and weak when he was a boy. So he’d started working out, and when he wasn’t exercising, he read: he’d decided to be strong in every way he could. When he was seventeen, his mother expected him to join the army and be prepared to kill people he didn’t know for reasons he didn’t understand. He discovered he was strong enough to live with her disapproval, and he came to Bordertown.

  I wasn’t going to ask either of them for details about what went wrong and what went right between them. I was just glad they decided they could be independent together.

  Sai and Florida and I took sign language at the University Without Floors. Sai dropped out after learning a few basics, but Florida and I kept it up. In the evenings, when we came home, we’d teach Mickey what we’d learned—she didn’t need hands to read us, after all. To my amazement, Goldy started taking lessons too. He said it was to talk with deaf customers at Danceland.

  After a couple of months, I moved out of Elsewhere. That wasn’t an easy decision, but I decided I wanted a place of my own. Since I kept working part-time at the bookstore, I still saw a lot of Mickey, Goldy, and Florida.

  The place of my own was an office in an abandoned factory. The steel doors had been locked when Faerie returned, and never reopened. A few looters had found their way in the same way I did: climbing through a skylight that you reached by climbing to the top of an oak tree, then tossing a rope or jumping about fifteen feet. You got out by reversing the process. If you missed the tree, it’d be ugly.

  I lived in an enormous room where supervisors and accountants and secretaries must’ve watched huge machines work forty feet beneath them. I spent a day shoving all the desks, chairs, shelves, and modular walls to the back wall. Since I never figured out an easy way to get a futon in there, I made a bed of blankets in the center of that room where I could lie, surrounded by windows. Though the panes were thick with dust on the inside and dirt and pigeon droppings on the outside, I could look out at Bordertown, the Mad River, or the woods of the Nevernever whenever I wanted.

  I also joined a band. Sergeant Furry and His Howling Commandos—hey, I didn’t name it—released one tune on the B-town club circuit. “Music of the Night” was mostly drums, a little strings, and me making the sounds I make best. We were a novelty act, I wasn’t very musical, and we were all egomaniacs who couldn’t see that a band whose main strengths were visual had muchos problemas in a place where film and video aren’t dependable. But it was fun practicing our tunes and planning what to tell the press when we were megastars.

  The Howling Commandos and the sign classes ke
pt me away from Sparks. She wanted to take sign with me, and I said I didn’t want her to do anything just for my sake, and she asked why it was okay for my other friends to do stuff for my sake, and I walked out on her.

  Sometime later, she suggested we could find a flat to share, and I said I wasn’t ready to make a commitment to anyone, and she said, “Who’s asking you to commit? We’re spending all of our free time under one roof; why shouldn’t it be our roof?” I got a book and didn’t talk to her for a couple of hours. She didn’t bring it up again.

  We finally realized that if we wanted to stay friends, we’d better stop being lovers. That was my decision. I felt very mature.

  The Commandos opened for several hot bands at Danceland and Homegirl’s; we knew we were going to be B-town’s biggest, baddest band. After breaking up with Sparks, I slept with a couple of groupies, and while I didn’t like either of them very much, they were real, honest-to-God groupies, even if they were rather sad kids who measured their worth by the fame of the people they slept with.

  Right after “Music of the Night” came out, you couldn’t walk into a Soho club without hearing the seedy, or walk down a street without passing some kid gripping an impression ball (the magical equivalent of wearing headphones—the ball feeds the music through your skin). I think we were the hottest band in B-town for three and a half days. Then Wild Hunt released a new song, and we were old news.

  Our main singer said if we were serious, we would make a tour into the World, where some lame band’s lame cover of “Music of the Night” was white hot, and bootlegs of our seedy were making lots of other people rich. I told her if I left the Borderlands, I’d be human again and we’d lose our novelty shtick, or I’d be your standard run-on-four-legs-and-eat-his-own-feces lapdog. She thought it was worth the risk—I could wear a fur suit if I turned human, and a singing dog would have loads of novelty value in the World. She said I could be Wolf the Wonder Dog.

  I just don’t have a show biz soul. I walked.

  By then, Sparks was living with Milo Chevrolet. I visited her once and asked if we could get back together. She said she couldn’t do that to Milo, and they were real good for each other, and I’d been right all along, we should stay friends. I cried, and she held me and cried, and eventually we gave each other very chaste kisses and went our separate ways.

  But we did stay friends.

  After that, I had a short involvement with Vangogo, a deaf painter from the sign class. I think that didn’t work because we didn’t trust each other. Sometimes I was afraid my only attraction was that I’d been famous for a week, and sometimes that it was that I was a freak and it didn’t really matter whose mind was behind the Wolf’s eyes. Vangogo was convinced that a hearing person could never truly understand a deaf one. I was going through a cynical phase then. I answered, Who can truly understand anyone? Isn’t it OK to have fun? Looking back now, I see that affair was doomed. It still hurt when it ended.

  There was also a night when I ran into Taz at Homegirl’s. We hung out together, we danced, but nothing happened. The night that she helped fool Crystaviel had probably been my one chance with her. If we’d slept together, I doubt we would’ve lasted a weekend.

  Besides the relationship with Sparks, the best part of my life during that winter was my relationship with Surplus Art, one of Bordertown’s homemade art mags. The publisher-editor was a girl named Jiff who had a small, hand-powered press in her basement. The staff was always changing; I played poetry editor for a couple months.

  Through Surplus Art, Orient and I began to hang out. He wrote essays and short stories about life in B-town. I mostly wrote poems, but I was working on a novel about an elf detective that Orient thought was hilarious. I never told him it wasn’t supposed to be funny.

  Our friendship grew from our knowledge of what it’s like to have people think we’re strange. He’d discovered his finding talent in the World. It’d scared people there. Teen Wolf had an advantage that Li’l Finder never did: People see me and know I’m different, then they get to know me, and I’m just a guy who goes through a lot of shampoo.

  But in the World, people saw Orient and thought he was like them. Then they learned he had something they didn’t, and they felt he’d betrayed them. You never learn until too late that everyone’s passing for normal.

  Orient, Florida, and I made a day trip into the Nevernever once, to lie by a lake and swim. Florida told us the waves were calling our names, and Orient laughed. And as he did, I saw him looking at her bare left shoulder.

  Ms. Wu’s spell was working, but even if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have worried about him. He said, “You’re lucky, having a sister.” For the briefest second, I wanted to scrawl in the sand, DIDN’T I TELL YOU I STARTED LIFE HUMAN? ISN’T IT OBVIOUS TO ANYONE WHO LOOKS THAT SHE’S ELF?

  Then I saw his smile. I looked at Florida running toward us with a turtle in both hands, and I nodded. Yes. I was lucky.

  I gave up on love after my second failure. I didn’t give up on being in love: I had crushes on Sai, who was only interested in Strider; and Tick-Tick, who was only interested in machinery; and Jiff, who wasn’t going to sleep with anyone she was working with “’cause you can’t let good sex confuse you about good art.” Heck, I had crushes on every talented female musician in town. At least I had plenty of subjects for my poems.

  Sorry if I sound like I’m whining. I’m not. It was a good time. I had friends and a family in B-town. That meant I shared a lot of pain, like when Wiseguy’s second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and when Florida fell and needed fifteen stitches at the Free Clinic.

  I also shared a lot of joy. When Florida was Puck in the Ho Street Players’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Goldy, Mickey, Strider, Sai, and I sat grinning through the thing like opium eaters.

  I kept busy. I clerked at the bookstore, and I filled in at Danceland sometimes as a bouncer or a bottlewasher. I helped do almost everything on Surplus Art, from laying out pages to running the press to selling copies on the street. Sometimes I’d go into the Padded Cell Studios when a band needed prime howling on a song. After I started doing music reviews in Surplus Art, half the clubs in town let me in free.

  But I also had a way to escape when life got too busy. I made several trips into the Nevernever for Ms. Wu., hunting herbs, artifacts, and oddities.

  Those trips always began the same way. After checking with Ms. Wu for last-minute changes in her shopping list, I’d say good-bye to the Elsewhere gang. Mickey usually told me to take a book she’d read recently. If Goldy was there, he’d give me a loaf of bread or a jar of vegetables from his garden that was “going to go bad if somebody didn’t eat it,” then tell me to watch out for wild elves. Once he added, “Especially the female ones,” and winked, but Mickey kneed him in the butt and he never did that again.

  Florida always followed me out into the street and signed, You have big fun. I’d back away and sign, No, you have big fun. She’d sign, No, you have big fun. And we’d repeat that at each other as I walked backward down the street, each time adding stress to a new word and putting more stress on the ones we’d already emphasized until our arms were flying furiously as we tried to see who could have the last and grandest farewell before I turned the corner onto Ho Street.

  •

  I should tell you about the Nevernever. Problem is, time and space are strange near the Border. The lands change as you go through them, and so do the seasons. You might walk from summer to fall or from desert lands to ice fields by going around a hill or through a clump of brush. Once I was gone for weeks from the city and came back to find that only a few days had passed there. Once I was away for six days and found a month had passed in B-town.

  I made maps during my first explorations, but they never did me any good on later trips. It’s as if the landmarks move or change, as if space and time are as whimsical as magic is here. Maybe the gods of Faerie have incredibly stupid senses of humor.

  The Nevernever was scary at first, I admit, and
it continued to be scary at times. Most good things are worth a little fear.

  Before Leda turned me into Wolfboy, I hadn’t thought much about nature. (Okay, there’s a long list of things I didn’t think about back then.) Now I began to wonder about my place in the world. No answers, mind you, or I’d write them here. But I found I loved running through the woods and swimming in the lakes. I felt I was part of the natural world, and the natural world was part of me.

  Which is enough simpleminded philosophy for this chapter, and maybe for the whole book. The Heir of Faerie Affair resumes on the very next page, shortly after my return from one of those trips.

  Chapter 7—Danceland Blood

  It was springtime in Bordertown, I had just made a very profitable run into the Nevernever, and Wild Hunt was finally going to give their hungry fans a live gig after canceling three previous engagements. I sauntered down Ho Street, ready to howl.

  “Wolfboy!”

  I started grinning before I looked. At the curb near Danceland, Orient was sitting in his usual place in his sidecar. He was smoking an herbal cig that smelled of coltsfoot and comfrey. The tips of his dark hair had been dyed red since I last saw him: he was out to steal hearts tonight.

  I didn’t see Tick-Tick. Since she’d parked across from Snappin’ Wizard’s Surplus and Salvage—“More bang for the buck, more spell for the silver, more toys for the trade”—it didn’t take an Elflands magician to guess where she’d gone.

  Orient was talking with a quiet kid I hadn’t seen before. Given the extremes of dress in any Danceland crowd, this small girl should’ve been invisible, but she wasn’t. She wore gray denim jeans and jacket, and a black cap with a gray pheasant feather in its band. The clothes were too new, and she didn’t know how to wear them like they didn’t matter. I smelled runaway. I wondered whose floor Orient was offering her.