The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection
Page 63
* * *
I woke up in a hotel room in downtown Seattle. Or was it uptown Seattle? I didn’t know how they numbered their streets here, but I knew I was in the city proper, whatever they called it, and my father wasn’t far away.
My backpack was lying on the floor next to the bed. A mother will always remember you need clean underwear. Even a mother like mine, who was apparently a travel agent as well as a traveler, I thought, amused, and got up to wash and dress.
The hotel was one of those nondescript places that charge by the week, where people stay when they have no real place to go, all worn carpeting and thrift-shop furniture and stained porcelain in the bathroom. Up to twenty-four hours before, I wouldn’t have thought anything about it one way or the other. There was a part of me that still didn’t care; old lifestyles die hard. But mostly, I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, find my father, and do whatever I had to do about him, and then figure out how I was going to spend the rest of my life.
The cool Seattle air was full of mist and I felt as if I were melting my way through it as I walked along the sidewalk. Having set me down somewhere near my father, my mother had left it to me to locate him exactly, as a way of flexing those long-unused muscles, a warm-up for the main event.
It didn’t take long. My father was very sure of himself these days. His power radiated uncamouflaged, like a dare: here I am, come and get me, if you can.
And just to make sure there was no mistaking the address, my mother was in the front window of the gallery, looking out on the street with a wary expression so subtle that it couldn’t have read to anyone who didn’t know her.
Actually, her entire face wouldn’t have read to anyone who didn’t know her. The rendering was photographically real, but the subject had been painted as standing behind some transparent barrier so thick that it obscured and distorted. One hand was clutching the edge of the barrier hard enough that the knuckles were white but It wouldn’t be clear—ha, ha—even after long study, whether she was trying to push the barrier aside, or hold it in place. Unless you knew her.
ArTricks was the name on the door, in silvery script. I pushed inside and my father’s presence rushed over me with the carefully climate-controlled air. The entire gallery had been given over to his work, not just for a few weeks or for a month, but indefinitely, though probably no one realized it. My father would camp here for as long as he needed or wanted, and that used-and-abandoned feeling wouldn’t kick in for a long time after he left. I understood quite a lot about my father. It was all there in those paintings he’d done of my mother.
They were arranged on the gallery walls in a way that reminded me of the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic church. There was an intended sequence, or rather, two intended sequences. In the order dictated by his numbering, my mother’s face started out extremely obscured and progressed toward being more clearly identifiable. This was for the general population of art appreciators, who would see only paintings and believe one followed another just the way he said they did.
The other sequence was secret, the real order in which the paintings had been done. The real first portrait was the clearest one in the sequence, the one everyone else was supposed to think was the most recent: Untitled, #12. The obscuring barrier was only slightly less than window-clear—my father’s acknowledgment that he had known my mother as she had wanted him to know her. It resembled her in some ways, but she could have stood right next to it and no one would have identified her as the subject.
The next one was on the other side of the airy gallery room, posing as the first one he’d painted. The face was so completely obscured in this one that it wasn’t possible to tell where the features were, whether it was a man or a woman, or even a human being.
He had followed that up with the portrait placed in the middle of the sequence, labeled Untitled #6. Had it been closer to #12, it might have been possible to see that he’d actually had much more understanding of the face taking shape on the board than he’d had when he’d done #12. Or maybe not; my father’s skill engaged expectations while it diffused perceptions.
The third painting was #11, his affirmation of the face my mother showed the world. Looking closely, I could see that he had painted her image in excruciatingly exact detail before muddying it.
And so on. I found my way from portrait to portrait, moving back and forth among the dozen paintings, minus the one in the window, which was actually the most recent one. Yes, I thought, my father must have been very sure of himself, to display it so openly, telling my mother how close he was. In the next portrait, her face would be completely clear and so would her Name, not just to my father but to anyone with the ability to know.
“Do you know Boileau?”
I had been so lost in the study of my mother’s face that the man had come up right behind me. He was very young, too thin, and probably too rich for his own good. “Pardon?” I said.
“Do you know Boileau? The artist. I’ve been watching you from my desk. I’ve never seen anyone come in here and view the paintings in the real order before.”
That my father hadn’t kept this completely a secret showed an arrogance that I found perversely pleasing. “Well, I know his other work,” I said.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Really? That’s amazing, considering there isn’t any other work. This is all there is—thirty years of discovering the same woman. When he finishes the last one, he says he’ll put down his brush for good.”
“He says that, does he?” I looked around; my mother’s face seemed to jump out of each picture and then recede again. “I wonder what he’ll do to keep busy.”
“Boileau is an extraordinary man as well as a gifted artist. I imagine he could do anything he wanted to.”
I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes when the grip of obsession loosens, people fall apart. Does he live around here?”
The guy clammed up. It was exactly like that—he put his lips together deliberately and looked away from me with a haughty tilt to his head, making it clear he wasn’t going to dignify my question by even recognizing it.
I took a step back, looked him up and down, and spoke his Name.
The effect was immediate; I owned him. He’d been pissing me off but mostly I did it to see what would happen. I hadn’t been prepared for the utterness of it, either because I was too used to not giving a rat’s ass one way or the other about most things, or because the idea of someone with absolutely no power at all really is unfathomable, until you’ve seen it. I half-expected him to turn into a blob of jelly or something, so unreserved was his surrender. And then I realized he damned well could turn into a blob of jelly if I wanted him to. Whatever I wanted was now the law as far as he was concerned, and this was irreversible.
He remained perfectly still while I walked around him, looking him over. He was just a gallery manager, a culture vulture whose life was focused on finding The Next Big Thing in the artistic community, an insulated world that breathed rarefied air, followed its own traditions, anointed its own high priests, and admitted no outsiders. When this gallery closed, he would find another, and another after that. His function was to sit with art, and talk about it, and contain various facts and terms and acquaintances without knowing anything.
Or it would have been, except I owned him now. I could have told him to be a truck driver or a ditch-digger and he would have walked out of the gallery and gone off to drive trucks or dig ditches without a backward glance.
“I just want you to take care of yourself,” I said after a while. “Go on as you were before, do whatever you were going to do, be whatever you were going to be. But tell me where he lives.”
“He’s got a house on Vashon Island. You’ll need to take the ferry.”
“What’s the address?”
“I don’t know. But I can draw you a map of how to get there.”
“Then do that. And then go back to whatever you were doing before I came in here. Think you can manage that?”
He drew me a map. He had no artistic talent at all, but it was a good enough map for my purposes. And it was all for my purposes. He was so much mine, he would have spent hours on the details. I watched him filling in landmarks, his aristocratic face tight with concentration. This was how my mother would look if my father managed to divine her Name.
I wasn’t sure for a moment whether I was ashamed of what I’d done, or just unhappy that I had to care now.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, turning to look at me. Concern flowed off him in waves; I could almost see the air shimmy with it.
“Nothing,” I said. “Is the map done?”
He held it up. “Can you find your way from this?”
It looked like he’d put in most of the major roads and a good many of the minor ones as well. “I can show the more heavily-settled areas—”
“That looks good.” I took the map from him, folded it up, and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “I want you to go back to your life. Can you do that?”
He shrugged. “I can keep working here, if that’s what you mean.”
“What about anything else?”
He frowned. “What else is there? Look, do you want me to take you there? I’ll just close up and we can go now, if you want.”
His Name might as well have been written all over his face—anyone with even a minor bump of knowledge could have Named him in the dark. “I don’t want you to go with me. I want you to stay here and go back to the way you were.”
“Oh? And what are you going to do?” he said bitterly. “Not know whatever you know?”
“What?” I said.
“You come in here and mess me up, and now you want it to be as if it never happened. Because it’s inconvenient for you, I guess.” He made a face at my puzzlement. “Oh, come on, didn’t you realize I’d know what happened? Well, not exactly what, or even how—I didn’t understand what you said—but I know what it did to me. I know what you are now, too. I always thought there were people like you in the world, but my shrink kept telling me it was just another facet of my neurosis, thinking that there were people walking around who could … do things. Boileau’s one of them, too, isn’t he? All my life I’ve been trying to get next to people like you. Even if it didn’t rub off on me, I thought maybe I could reap some of the benefits, anyway.”
Well, that explained how I’d been able to divine his Name so easily. I could also see why my father hadn’t gotten to him first, even though he could have quite easily: Naming someone like this was obviously more trouble than it was worth. I’d have to keep that in mind.
“It’s not my fault you’ve been standing around waiting to surrender to somebody,” I said after a bit. “So you shouldn’t complain now that someone’s taken you up on it. But I’m giving you a chance to breathe on your own. It won’t be easy, but you can get the hang of it with practice.”
He sneered. “It must be wonderful, to have life be so simple for you. No, it’s not your fault I was that way, but it doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for your own actions.”
“I’m not going to hang around here listening to a gallery manager lecture me on personal responsibility,” I said. “Forget what happened. Learn to cope.”
He hesitated. “All right. But someone should have told you that even when you buy something you don’t want, you still have to pay for it.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but I just wanted to get away from him and head my father off before he turned my mother into a lapdog. I made him give me directions to the ferry and left him sitting at his desk, doodling faces on the blank pages of his appointment book.
* * *
The ferry was like a great big floating house—there was a lived-in feeling to it. The feeling was all there was, at first. But as the boat plowed steadily through the water, I began to get flashes of the residents themselves. They were well-camouflaged, moving unnoticed among the passengers with ease but also with practiced caution. Some of them had been passengers themselves once, I realized.
Just as an experiment, I bought several packages of chocolate cupcakes from the snack bar on the upper deck and then found an unoccupied bench facing the stern. I unwrapped a package, set it down next to me, and got up to stand at the railing and stare at the slowly-receding mainland.
Only a minute later, I heard the open cellophane crackle, but I knew better than to turn around. “It’s not what I would have suggested, but it’s the thought that counts.”
The voice came from below, not behind. I looked down; two women were standing on the lower deck almost directly underneath where I was, chatting confidentially over flimsy cups of bad coffee. The cellophane crackled some more, to let me know I had it right.
“Well, I’ve always said an offer is an offer.” The woman on the left sipped her coffee. “What do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” said the woman on the right. “I guess I’ll have to hear the terms and conditions attached to it.” The wind came up suddenly; they shuddered together and went back inside.
“Think of it as a gift.” I spoke softly into the wind, letting it carry my voice back. “Or payment, in exchange for the use of your … residence.”
“I knew who it was right away,” said another voice. Now a man and a woman were standing on the deck below me, holding their collars closed against the wind. “You know how that is, when you get a call from someone you know of, but you haven’t actually met in person? I’d been dealing with the company itself for so long that I felt like I really had met everyone in it, so I had to remind myself that we weren’t actually acquainted.”
The woman’s murmur of agreement carried up to me quite clearly. “I really don’t find knowing someone personally to be any kind of definite advantage,” she said. “Sometimes, it even works the other way. I’ve had people try using that to pressure me into doing what they want me to. They try using the personal to influence the business we’re doing. So I’ve taken to keeping everything on a strictly business level, I don’t ask about their kids or their spouses or talk about my own life.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t want anything. The cupcakes are yours, free and clear.”
The cellophane rustled aggressively. I turned around just in time to see it be swept away by a sudden crosswind. It danced high in the gray air for a few moments before it blew out of sight.
I found a long bench indoors on the lower deck and set another opened package of cupcakes next to me. This time, I slumped down and closed my eyes. It took a little longer, but the presence was more tangible; the bench creaked and shifted a little. Amid the general noise and the rumble of the engines, the conversation that had been taking place behind me went from an unintelligible murmur to audible.
“I can spot that kind a mile away,” an older woman was saying.” I’ve been around long enough that nothing gets by me any more.”
I smiled to myself, still keeping my eyes closed.
“But they’re like anyone else, you know, they’re just people. Some of them are okay and some of them you have to watch out for. But, like anyone else, they all want something and don’t let anybody ever tell you differently. Everybody in this world, no matter how good they are, is out for themselves on some level. You’ve got to remember that, and never fool yourself into thinking that anybody is ever doing anything one hundred percent for your benefit. Nobody’s going to do anything for anybody unless there’s something in it for them as well.”
Ferry-boat philosophy, I thought, amused. Well, they weren’t very good cupcakes, after all, so I probably shouldn’t have expected much. There was a rustle of cellophane. I opened my eyes to find the empty package had been pushed close to me for disposal.
I tried another bench indoors on the upper deck, away from the windows. This time I slipped my watch in between the cupcakes before pretending to take a nap.
Over at the snackbar, the attendant was having a loud conversation with what must have been a
ferry regular. “So I says to myself, ‘Now, that’s more like it. Something real, that isn’t just junk.’ You know?”
I could sense the regular nodding in agreement. “I mean, it’s not like I really want so much,” the attendant went on. “I mean, if I wanted so much, would I be hanging around in a place like this, working my ass off? Hell, no. But you want to know someone’s making an effort, that it means something to them, right?”
The regular said something about a token.
“Yeah, well, I believe in stuff like that, a token of affection and esteem, all that stuff. So you know, now I know it matters. Enough, anyway.”
I left the last three packages of cupcakes in various unobtrusive spots and wandered aimlessly around the ferry. Twice I overheard people thanking each other and once, someone saying, That doesn’t even begin to cover it and what took you so long anyway?
The clouds were lower and heavier by the time the ferry docked; it was going to get dark early. Standing among the crowd waiting to be let off, I saw a tall woman who looked like a garage mechanic showily checking her watch. She glanced up, caught my eye and turned her wrist slightly so I could see before lowering her arm. The crowd moved forward then and she seemed to move along with everyone else, but she never appeared on the dock.
You’re a knower, my mother had said. The other part of that was knowing whether what I knew was at all useful, and I didn’t know that yet. But I was pretty sure it would come to me eventually.
* * *
The line of cars stretched a quarter-mile along the road running past my father’s house. He was giving a party. I had the guy I’d bummed the ride from let me off near the last car and I walked back. A mailbox marked the path that led down the steep embankment to where the house sat on the shore of the inlet.
where it was tonight. I could hear the party sounds before I reached the mailbox; it wasn’t rowdy, there were just lots of people.
A little ways down, the path had been made into an outdoor staircase, each packed dirt step bordered with a branch. I hesitated on the first one; below, the party had spread out of the house, all around the yard and down to the shore in spite of the coolness of the already-fading afternoon. Nicely-dressed people, like something out of a high-class magazine ad. My guy hadn’t mentioned this; I guess my father hadn’t considered him worth telling.