Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  “Sleep now,” we crooned, with reception in our wings, with the ability to take down and send on for decryption and location and ambush, the shooting down of those who would have shot at us.

  Sleep in the cold dark seas, in your burnt out wings, in the silences before shifts and sugar-plum calls.

  When our pilots crashed we threw their splinters out. Cecily buried hers in the garden, with flowers. The twins wrote letters to families, enclosed theirs with tissue paper and proper thanks.

  Polly tossed hers into the ocean. “They got to fly once,” she said, her own wings heavy and useless. “But they’re no good to me now.”

  I was never sure if she were talking about the pilots or the planes.

  *

  When the war was over, the pilots who remained came to say their piece. For some it was goodbye, but some came with the hope of more.

  Many came for Polly. They said her feathers were the best luck of all.

  I always thought it was Andrew she favoured, but her attraction was based around distraction, around the ability to disrupt and disturb and thieve.

  He still had his plane; still had access to it at least and Polly had learned access and theory and flight.

  “They owe us for what we’ve done for them,” she said, and there were dreams of Spitfires in her eyes.

  Some of the pilots had come back so terribly burned. It was hard to see how they owed us for anything.

  At least my scars could be hidden, and surely the stench would fade with time and anaemia, the pulling out of feathers and the no-longer need for oil. They’d be there, but I could cover them.

  “Make sure you do it on your back,” said Cecily. “Or face to face. I don’t regret what we’ve done, but no man’s going to want to see the evidence of it. At least not in the marriage bed.”

  I’d blushed at her words, felt myself grow warm and crimson, but in truth, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t thought myself.

  If any of them wanted to marry for love, it might have been different. Mostly, though, they married to forget. To slim down the borders of their experience, to make their worlds narrow again, and safe. To forget what their bodies had done in the service of King and country, in survival and anger and the lightning-long swathe of hate.

  They married to be small. To be restrictive. All except Andrew, who loved expansively, poor boy, and never suspected that he wasn’t nearly expansive enough.

  *

  “He loves you,” I said.

  “And I love his plane,” Polly replied, heartless to the core, as if the feather spine of her had leaked through into vertebrae, rigidified her resolve. “Don’t worry so,” she said. “There are so few of them left now. They’ll have their pick. There are so many more women than men. He’ll forget me soon enough.”

  I wasn’t sure that he would.

  “Not my problem,” said Polly. “This is my chance to fly, to get out. I’m taking it.” She sat on her suitcase to close it, bouncing to get the latches shut and looked at me, considering. “You can come too, if you like.”

  We were friends. I should have considered it—should have wanted to consider it. But going with Polly would mean I’d have to keep my wings, and I’d had enough of signals and surveillance for one lifetime. Enough of spies and secrets and an imagined soundtrack of screams as the planes went down, one after the other and falling. Burning. Besides, the planes only had a single seat each. There wasn’t room for the both of us. Perhaps she meant for us to meet in other places, or perhaps she had access to more than one. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to be crammed into a small cockpit, strapped in with my wings strapped down behind me, chafing against the seat. They were already too much trouble.

  “I’m going to pull them out,” I said. I didn’t know how. Pliers, maybe, or I’d take Martha up on that long-ago offer of pruning shears, see if the lever of long handles could snap the things off at the base. Perhaps there was a doctor in the Royal Navy who could cut them out. Perhaps I’d have to pull the feathers out myself, one at a time for as long as they grew. For the rest of my life, maybe, in a larger, grotesque version of plucking my eyebrows, of shaving my legs.

  The war was over. We’d get nylons again, eventually. I’d have a reason to shave then; to dress up and dance, go beyond dormitories defined by signals and sisterhood. Might as well be smooth all over.

  “I remember you cried when she pulled the first feather out.”

  “I’ll get used to it,” I said. “I’m never eating red meat and spinach again. That’ll make them easier to shift.”

  “There’s still your skin, sugar-plum” said Polly. “You’ll not be able to forget so easily.” The little bumps along our backs where the feathers grew, the mounds in flesh covered over with silver stretch marks, with the purple stains like those that Cecily had on her belly, the remains of child-bearing.

  “I bet those be-medalled German women are all over scars, too,” I said. The marks of production; iron and blood and skin stretched out of shape. All least I’d need a mirror to see the sagging.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve done my bit. My body is my own again.” And if it took little bloodied pits all along my back to make it true then I’d take the blood and be done with it, hope that all the iron remaining in me came out in other ways. I’d take the cramps without complaining now; take them over itching any day.

  “My body has always been mine,” said Polly. When she moved, her wings brushed against each other, a slow silvery sound like scissors, the metal edges sharpened too much for silence.

  “What will you do?” I said. “You could join a carnival, show yourself off that way. Or the stage. I suppose you’d be a pretty good pin-up girl, too. They’re in all the magazines now. It’s a living.”

  “It’s not what I’ll do, it’s what I want,” said Polly.

  Lebensraum.

  “The sky is such an open place,” she said.

  SAM J. MILLER

  Angel, Monster, Man

  1. ANGEL JAKOB

  Tom wasn’t fiction. He was not a lie. He was a higher truth, something we invented to encapsulate a reality too horrific to communicate to anyone outside our plague-devastated circle. Maybe myth, but definitely not fiction. Myth helps us make sense of facts too messy to comprehend, and that’s what Tom Minniq was supposed to be. A fable to ponder, and then forget.

  We birthed Tom at one of Derrick’s Sunday coffee kvetches, salons of bitchery and wit that had once seen dozens of men gather every week, punctual like they never were for the club or the party or dinner before the opera; photographers handsome as the models, models as wise and cruel as the writers, writers as numerous and delicious as the omelets churned out in unflinching succession by the small army of fey fledgling chefs in Derrick’s kitchen. Fourteen-year-old runaways and sixty-something Times critics, homeless dancers and trust fund filmmakers fresh-returned from failing to win the Academy Award for Documentary, but really it was an honor just to be nominated, and next year, certainly, next year.

  But this was 1987. None of us could count on next year. Most of us no longer belonged to this one. Wind tugged at our bare forearms. Early yellow leaves lapped like waves at our feet. Hate made it hard to breathe, filling the air like the stink of burning plastic. Adulterous toad-priests and clean-cut closet-case politicians croaked endless joy at God’s vengeance upon the sodomites, and cawed opposition to any effort to fund care or find a cure. Since New Year’s, the population of Derrick’s patio had plummeted with every successive week.

  This week, there were only three of us: Derrick himself, the forty-something literary agent who had seemed old before the plague and now seemed ancient; Pablo, the photographer whose art had been eclipsed by rage, who now turned all his creative energy into direct actions and angry letters and random fights picked with assholes overheard on street corners; and me, Jakob, a minimally-published writer of only modest talent and looks, already leaving behind the age bracket where youth earned you credit in both categories.

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nbsp; An empty chair, left askew, brought a tidal rush of water to my eyes. Donuts had replaced the omelets. Only the coffee was the same, strong and hot and bitter. We swallowed it greedily, desperately. Blood for vampires.

  We were friends, we three. In a way it felt like cruel, just fate—that all the bright inessential boys had been burned away, leaving only us, who loved each other with the fierce hate-tinged love of brothers.

  Pablo was telling us about the third memorial service he’d attended that week, for a photographer friend. “Afterwards, his brother just handed me his entire photo archive. I told him Joe was just beginning to make a name for himself, and he should shop them around to dealers, find an agent for them, carry on Joe’s artistic legacy. Man looked at me like I was crazy. Said he looked at a couple pictures and that was enough for him. I think he saw one fisting shot and was finished. And now I’ve got all this incredible art, languishing in a drawer. I can’t even make a name for myself as a photographer, so how am I supposed to do it for someone else?”

  Derrick sighed, his face pained at the unfairness of it all. “At least his brother had the decency to recognize his limitations, hand the art over to someone who might know what to do with it. You’d be amazed how many writers die without a will, and their families snatch up things or throw them away or worse. I’ve spoken to lovers who had to smuggle manuscripts out in shoeboxes, or who watched fathers set drawers full of documents on fire.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “When Whit died last February, his mother gave me a laundry bag full of his writing to ‘see what I could do with it.’ I said yes, because what else can you say to a grieving mother? When I got it home, I found the work of two other writers in that sack along with his own—guys who had died, and who had left their work to him to ‘see what he could do with it.’”

  Again the waters rose, with the thought: and me? When I die, in six months or one, or ten years if the gods are good, will someone end up with a laundry sack containing my work—and Whit’s—and the two who died before him?

  “Fuck Hemingway,” Pablo said sourly. “We’re the real lost generation.”

  “Except we don’t have a Hemingway,” I said.

  “Who the hell wants a Hemingway?”

  “A Hemingway has its advantages,” I said. “As is evidenced by the fact that we know his name twenty years after he died, and all our friends are forgotten as soon as they hit the earth.”

  Pablo hadn’t heard, wasn’t listening. His mind was on our enemies, as it so often was. “Did you guys hear that the federal government sent inspectors to New York, and they expressed concern over the high number of homeless people with AIDS, and the city said not to worry, they were dying so fast there would be no visible increase, certainly nothing to impact tourism?”

  “Yeah,” I said. We had all heard it—a rumor, possibly hopefully a fiction, but all the worse for that, for the effortless way it encapsulated our world.

  “I’m against the death penalty,” Pablo said. “But those motherfuckers should be shot.”

  We sipped coffee, said nothing, our eyes following a swirl of dead leaves and dark thoughts.

  I firmly believe the idea entered all three of our brains at the same exact time, like Tom Minniq wasn’t so much a figment of our imagination as a wandering soul who got lost on the way to reincarnation and instead of entering a woman’s womb ended up in the brains of three grief-broken gay boys.

  “No one cares about a pile of dead gay artists,” Pablo said, and something in his tone made us all three scooch our chairs closer to the table—something hopeful and inspired, something dangerous and secret. “People can’t identify with statistics.”

  “They need one face,” Derrick whispered, the fraught tone leaping from Pablo to him like the wind passing a shudder from one tree to the next.

  “One name,” I said.

  “A composite,” Derrick said. “A synthesis of every brilliant artist who died before they could make their mark.”

  “A collective pseudonym,” I said. “For every writer in our lost generation. If we don’t have a Hemingway, we’ll invent one.”

  “Tom,” Derrick said. “A good, simple, macho name.”

  “Tom Minniq,” Pablo said, and spelled it for us. “Minniq was an Eskimo boy who the Natural History Museum brought to New York City along with his father and ten kinsmen, all of whom but Minniq died from pneumonia almost immediately. Separated from his tribe. Stranded among savages who thought he was the subhuman one. I read, you two.”

  Derrick inclined his head.

  “Also, he needs to be a little ethnic,” Pablo said. “Minniq sounds … other. People who aren’t white die too, you know.”

  They came easy: the mechanics of fraud, the logistics of forgery. We spent all day on the patio bouncing ideas around, and went inside when it got dark to fill up pieces of paper. Identifying all the problems likely to pop up. Finding ways around them.

  Being a criminal is not so different from being an artist. Both depend on the same degree of audacity. Derrick would handle the business end: submissions and edits, pitches and contracts. I would handle the work itself, the unread stories and unfinished novels gleaned or inherited or rescued or stolen.

  Finding a face and body for our Frankenstein proved more difficult. Fifty years earlier, we could have gotten away with a single blurry picture, or said he was a recluse who feared photographs would steal his soul. Our Tom had to be one of us: an urban butterfly, a creature of Saturday night dancing and Fire Island beach parties, and photo-shyness was incompatible with our pride and vanity.

  Pablo had the solution. From his bag, he pulled a thick folder of the late Joe Beem’s photos and spread them on Derrick’s coffee table, sweeping aside the Chinese take-out containers that had blossomed like mushrooms at some point in the preceding hours.

  “There,” he said, pointing to a black-haired dancing boy with his back to the camera, “and there,” another boy, shirtless on the beach, black hair cut the same way, “and this one,” and if you looked at them right you could see it, the rough outline of the same man in dozens of different ones. “We find photographs of men who meet this general type—average height, black hair, muscular build, stubble—and that’s him. I can work them in the darkroom to blur out the parts that don’t fit, or add distinguishing marks. Jug-handle ears, maybe, or a birthmark over his jugular.”

  “It’s perfect,” Derrick said. “No author photos, no glossy head shots. Candids, glimpses. A life lived out of the public eye.”

  Because to succeed as myth, Tom had to be dead. Otherwise the charade became too complicated to maintain. And who would know, in this city where the dying stacked up faster than firewood, that this one particular name in the long litany had never been an actual person? Who could prove that Tom Minniq was any more fictional than the rest of the gay men and women who fled horrific far-off small-town lives and reinvented themselves upon arrival in our city, sometimes changing their names and cutting all family ties and spinning the most ridiculous lies to cover them?

  We laughed about it, on our way out. Giggled like schoolboys plotting a prank. The streets of my city felt alive and inviting in a way they hadn’t for months.

  I was waiting at West Fourth for the train to Hell’s Kitchen, strolling the platform with the never-resting eyes of the gay man on the lookout for something fetching. I found nothing—no handsome busker or breakdance boy, no aging sanitation worker with a pleasant smile and an ample bulge—and this popped my good mood like a bubble, made me think all the beautiful boys and men are dead.

  An express train pulled into the station as I stepped onto my local one. I watched its doors open. My train’s doors slid shut. A boy stepped off the express, so gorgeous I pressed my hand to the door in helpless Pavlovian need. Clothes and hair soaking wet. How funny, I thought, No one else is wet. Now I’m eerily certain he was fresh-birthed from the womb of the earth or had hacked his way out of Cronos’ stomach, or whatever creation myth we had tapped into when we
called Tom Minniq into being. Because this man looked right at me, all black hair and jug-handle ears and sturdy build, and smiled as my train carried me away.

  We had agreed to give each other complete autonomy in our own areas. We could consult over the telephone, or in person, but never put anything into writing; no matter how clever or cryptic we thought we were being.

  We planted Tom like a rumor, dropped him into everyday conversation alongside names of notorious friends—the party? Oh it was grand, especially the part where the Governor’s wife caught Tom Minniq getting a blowjob from Edward Albee in the bathroom, and in her shock and embarrassment said “I’m sorry, dear,” and shut the door to let them finish. Derrick used his connected exes to plant Pablo-concocted photographs in the society pages, where our Tom smiled at an opera premiere or museum gala, third from the right, his name in print and therefore incontrovertible. I sent orphaned short pieces to scrappy fledgling literary journals. Piece by piece, we stitched Tom Minniq together.

  Tom made me a better person from the day he was born. I went to parties; I went to readings. I had been in hiding, mourning endlessly and aimlessly, focused more on men that had died than ones who still lived. Planting Tom-seeds sent me out into the world, brought me back to a generation I thought I had lost, when in fact I had turned away from it in grief. I think I intuited almost immediately what Tom really was.

  For months, maybe years by then, my mantra had been We could have changed the world. Queer lit had blossomed like a glorious cancer, poised to kill off all that was patriarchal and oppressive about English-language literature, the transformative force that James Baldwin and Walt Whitman dreamed of. And then came AIDS, like the English language’s revenge, a toxic bastard child of imperialism and every other exploitative impulse that let English grow to global lingua franca status. I gave up hope. But once Tom touched down among us, a Biblical messenger bearing scarcely-credible word of the new world about to be birthed, my mantra became We will change the world.