Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  He stood patient, waiting. She was his seventh supervisor in more than fifty years; this, the first time he had ever been called into the shiny monochrome office. He had long since forgotten that office summons used to elicit a tight sensation in the gut, and the faint dampening of the hands, and the humming worry, what about the kids and will it be all right; a worry that faded into reassurance when his supervisor revealed that he had in fact been called in for a raise. A reward: something he had not even dreamed of in decades.

  “Sort of funny,” the boss said, making a noise that did not sound funny, “you and I are some of the only people left. I’m sure you’ve been feeling the clock tick down. We all have.”

  He thought of the heart box, but obviously she didn’t mean that—she didn’t know it existed. He said nothing.

  She sighed. “All good things must come to an end, Ted—Terry. Friday will be the last day our doors are open, so my time has come too. You’ve been a good employee these last fifty-three—” fifty-three? she thought—“years, and now it’s bon voyage.”

  Or maybe she should say happy retirement? She didn’t know. He didn’t look old enough to retire, or to have worked fifty-odd years. But then she had a migraine aura coming on and couldn’t focus on his face.

  He walked out, staring into the offices he passed. Desks sat vacant; shelves gaped like maws. In reception, something electronic buzzed and buzzed into empty space.

  It wasn’t necessary to pack his things, since he no longer had the kind of personal possessions that populate an office space—family photos, certificates, artwork. He shredded some papers because it seemed like he should, and deleted all the files on his computer. He left his stapler, White-Out, and calculator, and took his pens.

  As he walked home, he became aware that something was missing. He put his hand over his chest and realized it was a sense of regret.

  7. After

  A new family moved in next door. Their cardboard boxes and bicycles blocked the entrance to his apartment, and one of the boxes had broken open, spilling stuffed teddy bears holding hearts between their paws and fuzzy pillows and a pair of unicorn slippers with shiny gold fabric horns and cunning black eyes.

  “Sorry, sorry!” the young mother exclaimed, rushing over to thrust everything haphazardly back into the box. Red color blossomed in her cheeks and sweat shone on her forehead. Her thick curly hair had wrenched itself free from her ponytail. She waved the unicorn slippers at him. “Nice style, huh?”

  “Mom, those are mine!” A girl shouldered through the door—about eleven years old, in a black T-shirt and running shorts, a ribbon tied jauntily around her head. No hair grew from her scalp. She was bald—entirely bald.

  She seized the slippers and dashed back inside.

  The mother cleared her throat, and he realized that his gaze had not moved from the place where the girl had been. The woman didn’t look upset, however; mostly tired. “She has leukemia. That’s why she’s bald.”

  “Oh,” he said. Now, he thought, would be the time to feel something, if he could.

  She studied him. Her eyes were black and held a hard obsidian glimmer, as if she knew what it was like to build a wall around her heart and guard its entrance fiercely. With decision, she stuck her hand out. “I’m Malorie—Mal. My girl’s name is Clara.”

  He shook her hand as much from reflex as anything else.

  “I’d invite you to dinner, but . . .” Her gesture encompassed the disaster in the hallway.

  “I’ll help you.”

  He didn’t know where the words came from, but he had a memory of a white slate house, boxes overflowing a van, dropping a bassinet from the top staircase landing and breaking the cheap wood in half. His pregnant wife, flushed with effort, falling against him, laughing.

  He carried in the teddy bears and boxes of books, a wad of carpets, several shaky lamps, a desk. The movers, being either hard-hearted or poorly paid, had left most of the furniture in a pile next to Mal’s old snub-nosed sedan. Together he and Mal wrestled two mattresses up the stairs, since they wouldn’t fit in the elevator. Next came a dining room table and an assortment of mismatched chairs, each painted a different shocking hue. Set up in the living room, it all made an impossible jumble, nothing like the silence and order of his place next door.

  Mal collapsed on a sagging blue futon and said, “Oh my god, I need a beer.”

  He looked over his shoulder. Clara watched him furtively across the mess of boxes. She pointed at a red and white cooler set on the kitchen floor, then vanished into her bedroom.

  He fetched Mal a beer and got himself one too. They both lay back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, a cracked and dirty white.

  “Thanks for helping,” she said. “As you can tell, I don’t have a man around to haul heavy things anymore.”

  “Where’s Clara’s father?” he wondered.

  “Divorced forever ago. Good riddance.” She sat up, wiped her forehead, sipped her beer. “With her medical bills, we couldn’t afford the rent on our old place.”

  He recognized, again, that this was another moment when he should feel something. Say something. I’m sorry, perhaps. But he didn’t.

  “Thanks again,” Mal said, standing up now. “But if you don’t mind, I’m going to start organizing this mess.”

  8. After

  Clara was following him down the alley, her shadow jumping out behind his, past dumpsters and parked cars. When he glanced back, she hid with a quick breathless sound.

  Mal had asked him to look after the girl in the afternoons before she got home from work (the second of her three jobs), since at the moment he had nothing but time on his hands. He had interviewed for six positions, but so far no one had offered him a job . They seemed to look right through him. This is good work, they said, handing back his file, their eyes already searching for the next person.

  He couldn’t just live on in the apartment, though as he hadn’t taken a vacation since the last one forty years ago, he had saved up a good amount of money. Still, eventually he would run out of funds for rent and groceries, and Clara alone seemed likely to pauperize him with ice cream cones. (He couldn’t seem to say no.) He needed help. He required an answer for why he was fading into almost-invisibility, for why he kept living on with no end and no purpose, and there was, as far as he knew, only one person who could explain.

  He turned the corner. The house squeezed in between two other buildings with a disgruntled air, its roofline askew, as if the proximity of its neighbors had caused it to buckle. An enormous hand-painted yellow sign occupied the entire right front window: PSYCHIC.

  Underneath, in more conventional font, it read: FOR SALE.

  He ran up the steps. Rapped on the door. Peered through the windows to the empty, dusty floorboards inside.

  “Who are you looking for?” Clara asked, behind him.

  “Larry.” Except Larry had not used his knowledge to prolong his own life. Forty years ago, he had been in his thirties; when he last saw him, a decade ago, Larry’s flesh had grown soft, his hair white. Now, approaching eighty, he was gone. Retired, nursing home, dead, it did not matter. He had no way to find him. No way to end this.

  “Don’t you have a phone number?” Clara piped up.

  He did, but it had been disconnected. This morning, after the last fruitless interview, he had thought that was one of Larry’s quirks. Now he saw otherwise.

  Clara edged up beside him, read the sign. “You know a psychic?”

  He glanced at her, baffled.

  “You always wear business suits,” she explained. “Business people don’t go to psychics.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know.” He had already left the porch, striding back the way they had come. If he couldn’t find Larry . . . but then Larry might not be able to fix the problem in any case. Larry might say this was the inevitable outcome of what he had done to himself.

  Clara trotted to keep up with him. Today she wore a bright yellow scarf wrapped around h
er bald head.

  “You don’t feel sorry for me, do you?” she asked as they approached the alley.

  He blinked. The question came far from his thoughts. “Why would I?”

  “Because I have leukemia. DEATH!” she sang it out in sudden, dramatic tones that echoed up and down the soot-stained walls. He glanced at her, and she grinned.

  “Do you feel sorry for yourself?” he asked. The world of feelings seemed an impossibly foreign country.

  “No. Well, sometimes.” She chewed at her bottom lip. “But there are people out there with no home and no families. People getting torn from their families. All I’ve got is, like, maybe dying.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  Afraid of the chill: the emptiness. Of saying a name and having it be only a word in the mouth.

  “I’m more scared I won’t get to live all the life I want to.” She glanced at him. “I’m a little scared, though. You are too.”

  “No,” he began, thinking of that formlessness; that absolute, ringing silence; that ultimate erasure.

  Clara touched his elbow. The warm brush of her fingers startled him. No one had put a hand on him in a very long time. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Actually, it really scares me a lot. I pretend it doesn’t because it makes me feel better.”

  He swallowed.

  “My mom says everyone who’s died is with us all the time.” She lifted one shoulder. “We can feel them if we pay attention, like a red thread wrapped around our hearts.”

  9. After

  He took the heart box from the closet, past the same jackets and shirts that had hung there long ago, and set it on the marble surface of the kitchen island. Every part of the apartment lay quiet and still, gray and unchanging as it had been when he first moved in. Next door, Mal had painted the living room mustard yellow and the kitchen fire engine red. (At midnight, when she finished the third job. The thumping had woken him up.)

  The box sat on the counter, its cherrywood turned dark over the years, its once-crisp edges softened. It occupied the marble with the authority of an icon: something raw and powerful from a more potent age. It beat and beat and beat.

  A rattle at the door: Clara breezed in. She’d stolen his backup key and now let herself into his apartment whenever she liked, trailing books and ice cream, the scent of fresh grass and school textbooks.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the heart box with the core of the apple she was eating.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just memories.”

  Yet he left it there.

  10. After

  His phone rang, rang into the night, and when he answered Mal sobbed something incoherent into the line. All he understood was one word. Hospital.

  He threw on his clothes, and he ran—down the streets, across the freeway overpass. The nighttime city smelled of gasoline and pavement and gathered hopes and marsh grass and the dreams of all the people he passed. The lights on the wide, wide road poured on and on into the darkness like fireflies, or souls.

  He ran, the breath flashing hard in his lungs. But no heart pounded in its cage. He had no heart to tighten as he skidded over the curb and through the gleaming glass doors, past the reception, down the white linoleum hallway to a blank wooden door where Mal stood talking to a man in a pale green coat. Then she saw him, and she was too strong for relief to overwhelm her face, but she reached out and closed her warm hand around his palm, twining her fingers through his, so hard the pressure dug into his bones.

  He had no heart, so how could he feel this: the crawling, grappling desperation, the words that wouldn’t come, the question too immense to be asked.

  “She got up when I came home at midnight,” Mal said. “Came into the kitchen and collapsed—”

  The doctor shook his head. “She needs to take her medications regularly. She keeps skipping. If she would just—”

  He interrupted, driven by a need so profound it struck him like a pressure between his shoulders. “Is she—”

  “She’s on fluids now,” the doctor said.

  “She’s in deep trouble,” Mal said, “with me. She can’t scare the hell out of me like this.”

  “I’m sure she’s given both of you quite a scare,” the doctor said. “Though if she kept a more regular schedule . . .”

  “I know,” Mal said, and terribly, her voice cracked. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  Her fingers tightened on his, and he held back, held her up. He wanted to say, I will help. To declare, I will be there for her.

  “Well,” the doctor said, “we’ll talk to Clara when she’s awake. Best to let her rest.”

  Mal nodded, and the doctor left, and he stood there feeling the blood race through his veins even though it had no destination—even though, when they entered the room, Clara was safe, tucked on her side in the hospital bed, the purple bow knocked off her forehead. They sat on the beige chairs by the window and watched her eyelids flutter through a dream, and Mal put her fingers over her mouth and whispered, “Ed, I thought that was it. I thought . . .”

  He looked at her, at the tears winking unshed in her eyes, at the fierce curve of her lips and the bold tumble of her hair. Mal put a wall around her deepest feelings because she felt everything. And somehow, she was big enough to hold it all.

  “Clara’s so strong,” she was whispering. “And she pretends none of this fazes her, but I know that’s not true. I tell her she’s been given this, and it might feel like a curse, but it’s her chance to feel it all. The grief and the fear and the pain—yes, all of it. It’s what it is to be alive.”

  He looked at Mal, at their still-joined hands. “She’s strong, and so are you.”

  “I know. But sometimes I get so tired of being a rock. I get tired of being strong, and so does she.”

  “I want . . .” he began, and stopped because the words tasted like stars in his mouth: strange and bright and foreign, something that should not belong to him. He had not wanted anything in a long time—except that he had wanted nothing.

  “What do you want?” she said. “Ed?”

  He looked into her black eyes. “How do you know my name?”

  “You told it to me the day we met,” she said, starting to laugh, “you lunatic. Imagine going all these months thinking of you as that guy next door!” She was laughing so hard now that she snorted, and pressed her face against his arm, and then she sighed and remained there, snuggled in. When he looked down at her next, she had fallen asleep.

  11. Now

  He has returned from the hospital with a tired Clara and a steely-eyed Mal (who drove the snub-nosed sedan). He has closed himself in his pristine apartment, where an ice cream stain darkens the carpet by the door. He approaches the counter where the organ that once dwelt in his chest beats and beats and beats, only now he realizes it’s not just the rhythm of something lost, it’s a summons, a plea, it’s the way home.

  He wants:

  Color

  The pounding in his chest when he runs

  Hope

  Gray hairs

  Fear

  Presence

  Strength (for Mal and Clara, when they can’t be strong themselves)

  Clara (to be there for her last chemo, for every night and day when she needs him)

  Mal (to hold her up, when she needs to be held; to let go, when she needs to be released)

  The past, the present, and the future

  To feel (everything)

  He puts his hands to the wood, and opens the box.

  LEV GROSSMAN

  PROBABLY THE HARDEST SINGLE REVISION I’VE EVER HAD TO MAKE WAS cutting this section from The Magician’s Land, the third book in the Magicians trilogy. I was almost done with it when one morning I woke up and realized that the opening was moving too slowly. So I had a stiff drink, wrote a new first chapter, added a subplot, and then ripped out about thirty thousand words, including this bit.

  I love it, but it didn’t fit in the story anymore. So I’m overjoyed to finally s
ee it in print.

  The passage is a fragment, but it doesn’t require much context. Plum is a senior at Brakebills, an exclusive college for magic in upstate New York. She is a tough, upbeat person, but born under an ill star—a curse that she knows will catch up with her once she graduates and leaves the safe haven of college. Plum is haunted by two people: a charmingly arrogant rival named Wharton, and a mysterious phantasmal being with whom she had a close brush earlier in the book.

  Plum studies with Professor Coldwater, who as a younger man was the protagonist of The Magicians. She’s working on a piece of advanced magic that she hopes will win her the senior prize. But like so many things in life—for example, novels—it won’t work out exactly the way she planned.

  Lev Grossman

  Everybody Said It Would Hurt

  Lev Grossman

  Plum didn’t see the ghost again after that night. For a week whenever she passed a mirror she was afraid to look for fear that she’d see that glowing blue face looking back at her instead of her own. But she never did. All she ever saw was Plum.

  She was relieved and, after a while, also just a tiny bit disappointed too. In a perverse and vaguely suicidal way, Plum missed the ghost. She wondered whose ghost she was, and how she died, and why she was still here. Probably she wasn’t here for the fun of it. Probably she wasn’t a nostalgic alumna haunting Brakebills out of school spirit. Probably she needed something; all else being equal, Plum would have liked her to get it and go wherever retired ghosts go. Just so long as that thing wasn’t, you know, to kill Plum.

  Frankly before this she hadn’t even thought ghosts were real. So taken all in all the whole thing had been quite an eye-opener.

  Plum was just a few months away from graduation, and she could already feel the impending forcible expansion of their horizons outward in all directions. Academic work was starting to feel like one of those childish things it was time to set aside, as the verse sayeth—but unfortunately where that was concerned there was something that she couldn’t set aside, which was her senior thesis project. She had an eye on the senior prize, which came with an attractive, outstandingly cushy yearlong fellowship at St. Margaret’s, the magical university in Edinburgh. Plum wanted that fellowship. It was Professor Coldwater’s class that gave her the chance.