by Aeon Authors
From the neck down, he was a stooped old guy, skin like a tobacco leaf, in a not-terribly-flattering boxer-shorts and tank-top ensemble. Fuzzy slippers caught my attention for a fraction of a second before I noticed his face. I thought he was wearing a mask or headdress before I saw the eyes blink. Eyes the size of billiard balls, liquid black falcon’s eyes. The plumage on the head was perfect, lustrous gold and brown, with a hooked beak vivid yellow against it. The beak opened slightly.
“That better? Here, keep the change, already.” The door closed.
I guess I must have handed him the pie, because my mylar blanket was empty. I looked at the wad of bills. He’d given me fourteen dollars.
My apartment seemed like a much safer and saner place to be. I tried to remember what I knew about the onset of mental illness. Most of it revolved around chainsaws and screaming coeds, which I didn’t really think applied in my case yet.
Maybe it really had been a mask, a really lifelike mask like those ones you saw for sale in Fangoria. The old guy was probably a retired special effects dude from when latex was state of the art. I’d caught just the slightest glimpse of the inside of the house; it had been full of all kinds of crap. In my mind, I had this guy’s whole career plotted out, from glory days doing monster movies to an eventual decline and replacement by digital effects that had landed him in that dump of a house.
Everything was better now. I grabbed a beer out of the fridge and applied it as brain coolant. The phone rang, submerged somewhere under a reef of chip bags and aluminum cans. I fished it out on the fourth ring.
“Yeah, hello? This is Murf. Yeah. Hey, Ol— uh, hey Mrs. Januzaj. Whoa, calm down! I did. I did! Oh, you are shitting me! I’ll be right there, hang on.”
Mr. Fangoria had claimed I’d shorted him a free soda. My memory was clear enough to know that I’d done no such thing. The Old Lady could look at the receipt and figure it out pretty quickly, but she maintained a policy not quite along the lines of “the customer is always right,” so much as, “the employees are always wrong.” I kept a couple of two-liters of everything around the apartment against exactly this kind of thing. Freakity J. McFreak there would get his free soda delivered, him and his seventy-eight cent tip.
The moths and junebugs were still going at it when I pulled up. I used the soda bottle as a club to knock on the door, and hoped he was thirsty. “Mister Aten, your soda’s here.”
I didn’t get the spotlight-in-the-face treatment this time. The door just snapped open and there he was again, bird mask and all. The mask was a lot more realistic-looking than I had rationalized it over the last hour. It cocked sideways as a real bird might as he regarded me in the doorway. The hanging light fixture bobbed over his head, following his movement. As before, the beak parted just slightly, and didn’t synch to the words he spoke.
“You, Mister Too Old To Be A Pizza-boy. You see something?”
“Look, here’s your two-liter. I’m not on shift anymore.”
“I never drink those carbonated things. Such gas they give me.” He leaned closer, and I watched how the thin white eyelid blinked up from the bottom. “You do see something, yes.”
“Look, sir, it’s a great mask. You beat the system and got your free drink. Yay for you! I’ll just leave you to your obviously rich fantasy life.” I’d probably crossed the line on that one. My short line of credit with the Old Lady would be exhausted pretty quick if he called to complain. I felt like a shitheel as soon as I said it anyway. He was an old guy, and he’d invented a reason for someone to come to his house. He was lonely. You see it sometimes, old folks ordering pies they don’t want just to bring somebody to their doors.
He didn’t seem to notice. “Innmutef, that’s what we used to call people like you. Priests. Able to sense the divine without the divine having to bite them in the keister. Or, what was the word?” He snapped his fingers, cast his falcon head around looking for answers on the doorway. “Sem, that was it. Come in already, kid. You’re letting out the cold.”
“I’ve gotta get back—”
“To work? You said you weren’t working, I heard.”
Damn. I carried his soda bottle inside. Fine, I’d put it in his fridge for him. The inside of the house was mercifully free of old-person funk. It smelled like the incense aisle at Pier One instead. I couldn’t see any seams or wires on the back of the mask when he turned around. My carefully-constructed backstory for Eric Aten didn’t seem to be panning out. The front room of the house didn’t have any movie memorabilia. Instead, it was crammed full of the kind of faux-Egyptian dust collectors you see marked way up in mall stores. I saw a saucer of milk on the floor by the entry.
“You have cats?” I asked, trying to take the initiative and short-circuit a long conversation.
“Cobras,” he said, shuffling his slippers on the worn-slick rug. “Watch your feet. Don’t step on them, they nip.” He made a pinching gesture.
“I’ll do that.” The place was decorated in your basic Early Pack Rat. Every horizontal surface was occupied by figurines of every scale, usually in some kind of striding pose, some with an assortment of animal heads. I guessed that explained the mask. “So, you’re a big Egypt fan.”
“Since they fired me, not so much. I’ve been out of work since Rome was a big deal.” He sat, gradually, onto a battered recliner.
I took a seat on a folding chair that seemed to be temporarily vacant of either knickknacks or cobras. We stared at each other for several uncomfortable heartbeats.
“You still don’t believe it’s me,” he said finally.
“Look, mister, I’m really not sure about a whole lot of things right now.”
The bird head—I couldn’t think of it as a mask any more—turned to examine me with one eye, then the other, then both. “You kids today. You can go to the movies and see things stranger than three of me put together. Why would you have such trouble with this?”
“Because you’re real!” Damn. I’d said it. I clamped a hand over my mouth before the world could notice.
“Good for you! I was right to trust you. You probably have questions now, yes?”
It was not one of my finer moments. I made a lot of noises, still with my hand over my mouth, that came out something like geeba geeba geeba.
“No, my real name isn’t Eric Aten. That’s a little joke between me and the Social Security. People used to call me Ra.”
Geeba geeba.
“Yes, that Ra. I used to drive the sun around. It was good work while it lasted, but such troubles with the Longshoremen we had….”
I got my talker working again. “Why are you living here?”
“I immigrated in 1895. My great-great-granddaughter Nepthys was traveling overseas, cabled me I should leave the old country. And why not? What was I doing in Egypt? Selling dates, that’s what. Such a lovely girl; that’s her on top of the television.”
I looked, honestly expecting someone there. He was pointing to one of the little statues. I couldn’t tell which one out of the crowd he meant.
He kept puttering on. “The others, do they write? It’s not like they have jobs…”
“No, I mean why here? In this house, in this town?”
He had no expression, but I could sense some impatience. “What’s wrong with this town? It’s warm most of the year. I went to Florida once, and oh, the humidity! I thought about going to Arizona, but at my age, I don’t even like moving to the mailbox. I live better than the pharaohs did in their palaces, here. You probably do, too.”
I had a pleasant feeling of freedom as my mouth surged ahead on cruise control. “You ever try Vegas? They’ve got some kind of Egyptian resort there, you’d probably fit right in.”
“On my pension? I should be so lucky. I’ve seen pictures. The only interesting thing they’ve got there are girls running around with their gazoombies hanging out. For that, I’ve got cable.”
“Don’t people see you?”
His beak opened wider in irritation. “Don’t be den
se. I already explained that. Only priests can see me. Everyone else just sees a regular old man. Here, I got a driver’s license.”
He fished awkwardly in the seat cushion, produced a cheap, severely-overstressed trifold wallet and extracted a Texas Department of Public Safety ID for Eric Aten, age 98. The same falcon head stared out at me from the photo. It had expired two years ago.
“Terrible picture. Makes me look like an owl. What’s your name, kid?”
“Brian Murphy, sir.” Sir? Lord? Majesty? I didn’t remember ever hearing anything about forms of address for retired gods.
“’Murphy?’ Irish-Catholic?”
“Not for a while.”
“You’ll do. You ever thought about becoming a priest?”
“My folks were never that religious.”
“You’ve got the eyes for it, Murphy. The rest follows.”
I stood up, fighting a headrush that had nothing to do with changing position. “What exactly does a priest do?”
“For me? The job’s easy. I don’t get around to much of the divine heavy lifting anymore. I could use a hand around the place now and again, though. Maybe a pie from the Januzaj place once in a while, they’ve got that chunky garlic right on top, it’s like nectar. But no anchovies.” He stood, wobbly. It took him a while. “I can see that look. That ‘What do I get out of it?’ look. I’m not all gone to seed just yet. I still got some of the old kibosh left in here. For you, a trial offer. What do you want?”
“What do I want from what?”
Ra waved his hands in the air, revival-minister style. “The powers of the universe I’m offering, and ‘from what?’ he says.”
“Are we talking three wishes territory here?”
“Three? Don’t push your luck.”
I needed something implausible, but not something that might be irreversible. In the back of my mind I was also still hedging for the possibility that he was just an old guy in a funny hat. “I want a shot at asking Rina Januzaj out sometime.”
“That’s it? You’re a man of simple needs. I wish I’d had more like you four thousand years ago. For this, I shouldn’t have bothered standing up. That’s for you, by the way.”
My cell phone rang.
“Hello? Hey, Rina. That’s okay, I’m just hanging out, you know. She did? That’s not like your mother to leave the shop early. ‘Signs and portents?’ Is that some Old Country stuff, or… Huh. Yeah, I can come in. Closing by yourself sucks. Be right there. Bye.”
“You’re welcome,” Ra said, taking tiny old-man steps back to his Barcalounger.
Rina was twenty-one, the youngest of the Januzaj children. She showed up during the summer to help out. I had her figured for a psycho since she grew up with four older brothers and a mother who looked and acted like something created by Ray Harryhausen. In the rare instances when she and I had been in the kitchen together, she seemed to hold her own with her brothers.
I pitched the idea of maybe catching a movie together while we were both elbow-deep in cleaning out the grease traps, and set in that romantic environment I guess it sounded pretty good to her. It turned out that she liked schlocky monster movies too, and after the Retro-Horror Crypt Festival showing of Prisoner of the Zombie Mermaids, we stopped off for a beer. I bought the beers, because I’m just a top-shelf kind of guy, and because I couldn’t afford to buy her dinner also. Rina had these intense brown eyes that you couldn’t tell weren’t black if you were too far away. Amazingly, I avoided hitting the Murphy Limit. (The Murphy Limit occurs after you ask a woman to talk about herself, and you realize that she isn’t going to stop talking, and you wonder if you can successfully fake an epileptic seizure to get away.) She actually had cool things to say, and I kind of wondered if I might have made a mistake dropping out of college six years ago.
“Do you go to church a lot?” I asked, surprising us both.
Caught in mid-drink, she had to take a second to avoid snorking her Shiner. “Wow. Direct. We go to the Orthodox church over at God Corners.”
I knew the place. North Dallas is rife with churches, and there’s an Eastern Orthodox church on one corner of an intersection with Baptist and Methodist churches and a synagogue occupying the rest.
“Just curious,” I said. In retrospect, it wasn’t one of my better nonchalant covers. “I’m having some God trouble. Have you ever thought about changing religions?”
She looked at me with what I hoped was an interested stare. Rina had apparently learned that X-ray squint from her Old Lady. “I think religion is something you have to find. You know, whatever you can get that works for you.”
We talked about music, and other nothings, after I hastily changed the subject again. She didn’t want to risk my driving her directly home and incur the displeasure of Mama Januzaj discovering that her princess daughter had been seen out on the moors with a commoner, and I concurred. I dropped her off at Sunshine Pizza, and received the one kiss that used to be traditional. She gave me another dose of those X-rays before getting in her car. I drove home with an uncomfortable erection that persisted until I thought about going to confession.
“Bless me Father, it has been… uh…” I did some emergency math. “…nine hundred and forty-seven weeks since my last confession.” My family hadn’t had deep enough pockets to send me to St. Mark’s Academy. I supposed I would have kept up a little longer if I’d been in Catholic school.
The on-duty confessor was one of the newer breed. He didn’t give me any shit about not knowing all the proper secret handshakes of the ritual. “Father,” I went on, “I’m not going to tie you up with this. Confessing would take all day. I just need one little thing.”
The priest was pretty understanding. If I‘d been in his place I would have thrown my ass out on the spot. There wasn’t anyone else in line for the booth, or even in the church from what I could see, so maybe he felt indulgent. There was the slightest pause, then, “What do you need, my son?”
My hands were shaking a little. “How can I tell if God’s really working for me? What does He do every day?”
“God’s plan works all around us,” the young guy replied immediately. “He has given us everything in Creation, including His Son. There are signs all around you.”
I left All Saints’ after a couple more minutes of boilerplate lecture. I got the feeling that particular speech had been getting a workout lately, and I noticed by the end of it I was approaching the Murphy Limit. The sun was finally breaking through the clouds outside; it was going to be a hot day.
Ra and I reached a compromise. After I told him what he could do with his vow of chastity, I agreed to shave my head. Rina thought it was “cute,” which I took at face value even though I suspect that most women use “cute” to describe aspects of men that would otherwise be called “humiliating.”
I still deliver. I’m allowed to see Rina despite my outlandish baldness and open display of an ankh pendant. Old Lady Januzaj has chronic symptoms of shell-shock that might have resulted from losing a high-voltage shouting match. Rina looks great in the sunshine. I can sense those X-rays behind her aviator shades. The young priest at All Saints’ was right about the signs being there if you looked for them. Signs and portents, baby.
What Do We Pay the Moon?
Greg Beatty
Is it coincidence
that Earth and moon,
Pluto and Charon are
the twin pairs of Sol's family?
Jupiter's got a brood;
Saturn's got the rings.
Venus has the clouds;
Mercury stays close to mom.
But Earth and moon relate
like hell and his ferryman.
Charon brings souls
as the moon brings tides.
The dead gather on Pluto
as the living huddle here.
No, not coincidence, but
a pantheonic order of great balance.
The only question orbiting?
We know what we pay Charon.
The Dam
Daniel Marcus
“Not far from where I used to live in Western Massachusetts, there was a reservoir much like the one in this story, a project from the 30s to bring water to thirsty Boston, sacrificing the thriving, vibrant towns of the Swift River Valley. Every time I drove past those still blue waters, I thought of the houses, stores, and roads beneath, of the lives that had traversed that sumberged geography, and sometimes imagined myself down there in one of the houses, looking out a parlor window at the dappled surface above.”
IN ONE BEAKER, prepare a solution of seventy-six percent sulfuric acid, twenty-three percent nitric acid and one percent water. In another beaker, prepare a solution of fifty-seven percent nitric acid and forty-three percent sulfuric acid. Percentages are given by weight, not volume.
I was standing on the causeway that runs across the top of the dam, looking out over the reservoir. It had been raining for days and the water was the color of milky tea.
“It’s good,” a voice behind me said.
I whirled around, nearly jumping out of my skin.
“Jesus, Oscar, you scared the daylights out of me.”
“It’s good when it’s like this,” he said, his eyes grey and empty as the sky. A small rivulet of drool escaped from the corner of his mouth.
“What’s good?” I asked.
“The Dragon cannot live in water that is too pure,” he said.
He was looking through me, out across the water. Beneath his hat, dripping wet from the rain, I knew that there was a depressed concavity in his skull, as if someone had taken a tennis ball and pushed it deep into soft putty. The hair there grew thick and curly.
Beneath the muddy brown water, the towns slept.
Ten grams of the first solution are poured into an empty beaker and placed in an ice bath.
My house is at the end of the causeway, just off the road. It was originally the caretaker’s house and it sends roots down into the guts of the dam, basement, sub-basement, sub-sub-basement, the water heavier in the air the deeper you descend until it beads on the walls in thick, fat drops. I have never been to the bottom.