Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  Because who could have imagined another year, let alone ten? Not me, certainly, when I watched my friends walk off stage one by one and waited to be summoned into the darkness myself. Even as I wrapped my loneliness around me like a security blanket, eschewed sex and love like it could keep me alive, I still felt certain my time would come—the hate-plague in the air would claim me eventually. And yet here we were, here I was, ten years from the day My Shattered Darlings was published, heading for Carnegie Hall, of all places, for an anniversary commemoration. Tom at Ten. Imagine.

  Across the platform was a poster, where two beautiful business-suited men held hands and smoldered at the camera. LOVE & RAGE, it said, and then: Tom at Ten. These ads were everywhere, the same two men smoldering in Speedos or Louis XIV frill.

  We do not die, someone had etched into the glass window of the subway when it arrived. The first line of the very poem I’d just licensed away. Tom’s manifesto; the source of a thousand tags and protest chants. The thing that assassinated fundamentalist politicians, kidnapped moderate liberals, burst into violence in the streets so often that dungeons shook, chains fell off. My head spun. True: it was a day for memory, but this was too much. Maybe it was the scotch and maybe it was the event I was heading for, but when I stepped off the train at 57th Street, muttering the poem under my breath—

  We do not die

  We don’t go cold

  We swell with rage/ with each fresh hurt

  Each new death

  Swells the flame

  The heat of us/ will burn them down.

  —sprinting through the eerily-empty rush-hour station, realizing I left my written remarks at my office, and that I’d arrive too late to deliver them anyway, I felt for the first time since adolescence like I was really truly losing control.

  Which is when a deep voice said—

  “Derrick … ”

  —a nightmare voice, drawing out the first syllable like a taunt, echoing down the station, and I stopped and turned, to where what I had assumed was a homeless man when I rushed past stood, and stepped forward, all black hair and jug-handle ears, and I knew that now, at the worst possible moment, what I had waited ten years for had happened.

  “Derrick … ”

  What came towards me was no towering monster, no gilded angel. No impossible synthesis of dead beauties. Only a man, small and haggard, face deeply lined, stinking of cigarettes and wet ash.

  “Tom?” I whispered. He stepped closer.

  “Derrick.”

  I had so many questions, but I made myself wait. I wanted him to speak. My heart was a panicked bird inside me, remembering Pablo, wondering if time had stopped outside the station, if any cops or commuters could come through and save me from whatever horrible death Tom had slated for me. His eyes were jagged brown flecked with fire.

  “It’s silly to be mad at me,” I said, finally, unable to stand the silence of his stare. “Everything I’ve done, I did to spread your words.”

  “What would I be mad at you for, Derrick?”

  Profiting off your work. Not believing in you. Surviving. “The poem. Licensing it to the pharmaceutical corporation.”

  Tom shrugged. “There’s so much to be outraged about. That seems like a pretty mild sin in the grander scheme of things.”

  “Then why … why haven’t you ever come to me before? All these years … ”

  Tom raised one hand, thumb-and-finger cocked pistol-style, and reached out to touch them to my chest.

  So he is going to kill me. So this is where I die. Survive a holocaust only to die in a grotty subway station.

  Startling, how unconcerned I was. How little I cared. Some part of my mind scrambled backwards, though physically I stood my ground even as I felt the cold of his fingers through my thin sweater. I clutched for things to hold me to the earth. Songs, food. People. The peculiar slant of October light, at twilight, in Manhattan. But I found nothing to grab on to.

  “Tell me the name of one person in the last twenty years who you truly loved.”

  I opened my mouth, ready with the long list of friends and colleagues who filled my Rolodex, ready to tell Tom how much they meant to me, how I loved them, but it wasn’t true, and there was no sense lying to a ghost. He clearly knew it already.

  I shook my head.

  “You survived by emptying out your heart,” Tom said. His voice had an undercurrent, like wind echoing through pipes. “By caring about nothing, not even your own desires. You were a monk long before AIDS—sex might make you come to care for someone, and you couldn’t take that risk.”

  Love is the disease. The motto of my youth, after Rich Putnam burned it out of me with a hot iron. AIDS, when it came along, years later, only proved my point, that love and sex offered far more pain than pleasure.

  “You asked why I’ve never come to you. That’s why. Jakob had hope, and Pablo had rage. They needed me. They fed me.” Harsh, raw pauses grew between his words. “You. Had. Nothing.”

  “Then … why now?”

  “So you can see. What you’ve become.”

  He took his fingers away. I had questions, but I didn’t want to hear him speak. I didn’t want to learn anything else about myself. So I turned and left, half-expecting him to sink an axe into my neck, but he let me leave.

  “Derrick!” someone called, as I entered the lobby of Carnegie Hall, and there were hand-shakings and back-claps, and I turned around in slow dazed sort of awe, to see so many of us, all the aging editors and authors who survived the plague, all gussied up in the expensive suits that were consolation for being so old. And perhaps even more marvelous were the new ones, the young pups and bear cubs and ragged blond twinks with full heads of hair and careless charming stubble and cheeks and hands worth dying for. Squint your eyes and look at us sideways and we could have been a coffee kvetch, one last massive hurrah on my back patio, age and class and race barriers melting away in the heat of our magnificent gayness. Gender barriers preserved, but where was the harm in that?

  They respected me. They fawned on me, many of them, kingmaker that I was. But I didn’t care about any of them. And I had spent so long trying my damnedest not to be moved by beauty that I could no longer see it, no longer take joy in the smile or ass or mind of a gorgeous man.

  Intermission. I was too late for my speech, and glad of it. I took my seat and spread my coat across the two beside me, ridiculously and sentimentally clearing a space for Pablo and Jakob, but soon a dowager socialite and her sodden daughter came to claim those spots.

  An Oscar-winning actress read a Tom Minniq poem. I didn’t remember this one; more brash and spoken-word than most of the poems we published. From the very start, Jakob had claimed these Ghost Tom pieces as proof that divine intervention was at play, but for far too long I had dismissed them as mere bandwagonism, someone else trying to secure publication for their work or the work of their lover—or son—or brother—or father—or sister—or mother—under a famous name. Now, of course, I could see that Jakob was correct. The poem was exquisite, but I could only analyze it with a cold officious eye.

  Two men mounted the stage. One old, one young. Movie stars; out; emblems of the new Hollywood openness. They read a dialogue, a pivotal scene from a play. I knew it was genius, could marvel at it intellectually but not apprehend it emotionally. Eyes moistened all around me. Mine stayed dry.

  Tom is dying, I thought, remembering his twitchy hands and the rough lines of his face. Whatever he is, his time is past. Whatever monster or angel he was, he’s a man now.

  We don’t need him anymore.

  We had won. Hadn’t we? The fire of our rage had burned down so much hate. Sometimes literally; Jesse Helms kidnapped and tied down and doused in gasoline and set on fire; Falwell acid-disfigured. Drug cocktails. Gay governors and Supreme Court Justices; Harvey Milk’s birthday a national holiday; commitment from Congress to provide free AIDS medications to all.

  The dialogue ended. The actors cleared the stage.

  We h
ad won. But I didn’t feel any safer, or happier. Or less alone.

  The mayor had meant to come, but been delayed by budget drama. In his stead, he sent his Deputy Mayor for LGBT Relations, a dreamy slim-waisted salt-and-pepper-haired creature who almost every gay man in the city was in love with, who mounted the stage with the effortless majesty of a symphony conductor and proceeded to play us like an orchestra.

  “Twenty years ago, New York City was dying. We were in the grip of a plague, and no one cared. We were ruled by fear. New Yorkers were content to walk past homeless men and women every single day, like it was something natural, something other than an unspeakable injustice. We were ruled by hate—not love.”

  Jakob had emailed me that morning, still living it up on whatever godforsaken Maine island he and his man have built a house on. Jakob, dying, but happy, he and his man, both of them refusing the brand new miracle drug cocktails after years of watching friends suffer more from the medication than the disease.

  “It’s impossible to imagine the Housing Rights Act passing in a New York City without Tom Minniq. No other American city, through legislative or executive action, has ever made the same commitment we have, to provide housing to every single person in need of a home, regardless of their circumstances. To Tom Minniq we owe not only the lives of the men and women who are currently housed—and not only the pleasure that his prose and poetry have brought to so many of our lives—but the very soul of this city.

  “Now, Tom Minniq wasn’t responsible for all of that. You were. We were. His voice merely galvanized us, gave us love and beauty that served as nourishment for the fight. We’re not here to celebrate him. We’re here to celebrate us. Our strength, our survival.”

  Sudden shouts from the highest gallery. The flutter and snap of a canvas unfurled; I turned around too slowly to read its full message—the two men from the Tom at Ten subway ads, their faces X’d out in charcoal, a slogan that read in part WOMEN DIE TOO and DEATH TO GAY MISOGYNY—before security yanked it back up and escorted ten black-garbed women protesters out.

  The mayor’s man frowned, nodded. “It’s true that our community, our city, our country, all have a long way to go. But your job is to hold us accountable, and I hope you won’t stop.”

  The audience roiled and murmured. Many, men and women, echoed the banner’s sentiments.

  “Please,” he said. “We’re family, and sometimes we hate our family. But we’re here to celebrate one of our own. And to celebrate ourselves. What we’ve achieved together.”

  The murmurs died down.

  “I want us to give ourselves a round of applause. For having the bravery to be who we are, for living lives worthy of living. For being a family.”

  Scattered applause, building. I clapped, but I wasn’t part of this family. I loved no one, and no one loved me.

  “Give me your hands if we be friends,” the Deputy Mayor said, Puck’s closing plea for applause in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we rose, some of us with the swift verve of youth and some of us moving slow, painstaking inch by inch at the behest of failing bodies, into the ocean of applause, our hands pressing together and then separating like a repeatedly-postponed prayer, an ancient ritual, practically pagan, a spell that bound us all together in that moment and then bound that moment to all the ones that came before, stretching back to Shakespeare and far beyond, but far forward too, into unthinkable futures, rocket ships and machine mind melds, this instant, this act eternal and unchanging, a flimsy and all-too-brief immortality but one that was ours whenever we needed it. The sound of us. A shallow, mocking, momentary kind of unity. The noise we made reminded us we had each other, and so we needed neither angels nor monsters.

  INDRAPRAMIT DAS

  Breaking Water

  1. BREAKING WATER

  At first Krishna thought the corpse was Ma Durga herself. A face beneath sun speckled ripples—to his eyes a drowned idol, paint flaking away and clay flesh dissolving. It was nothing so sacred as a discarded goddess. The surface broke to reveal skin that was not painted on, long soggy hair that had caught the detritus of the river like a fisherman’s net. Krishna had seen his mother’s dead body, and his father’s, but this one still startled him.

  In the shallows already, Krishna dragged the body to the damp mud of the bank, shaking off the shivers. He covered her pickled gaze with his lungi, draping it over the face. He returned to the winter chilled waters of the Hooghly naked and finished his bath. The sun emerged over the rooftops of Kolkata, a peeled orange behind the smoky veil of monoxides, its twin crawling over the river as it rose into the sky. Morning reflections warmed the tarnished turrets of Howrah Bridge in the distance, glistening off the sluggish stream of early traffic crossing it.

  Other bathers came and went, only glancing at the body. When Krishna returned to the bank, a Tantric priest was crouched over the dead woman. The priest looked up at Krishna. He was smeared white as a ghost with ash paste.

  “Is this your wife?” the priest asked.

  “No,” said Krishna. “I don’t have one.”

  “Then maybe you should be her husband.”

  “What’re you on about?” Krishna snapped.

  “She needs someone, even in death.”

  “Maybe she already has a husband.”

  “If she does, he probably argued with her, then beat her dead, maybe raped her while doing that, and tossed her in the river. Shakti and Shiva, female and male, should be at play in the universe. One should not weaken the other. This woman has been abandoned by man,” said the priest, gently touching the dark bruises on her face, throat and chest. Krishna thought about this. The priest waited.

  “Fine. I’ll take her to the ghat and see her cremated,” said Krishna.

  The priest nodded placidly. “You will make a good husband one day,” he said.

  “Your faith in strangers is foolish,” muttered Krishna. Not to mention his sense of investigative protocol, Krishna didn’t say. The priest smiled, accepting this rebuke and walking away. Krishna didn’t know much about how washed up likely murder victims were handled, but he was sure just cremating them without a thought wasn’t how it usually went, good intentions be damned.

  Still.

  Krishna looked at the corpse. Someone would eventually call the police, and they would take her to a refrigerated morgue where her frightened soul would freeze. Her killer would remain free, the case unsolved, because since when did anyone really care about random women tossed into rivers. He thought of his mother, cooking silently by lantern light, her face swollen.

  He remembered asking a policeman on the street to take his father to jail for hitting his mother. He was laughed at. He remembered playing cricket on the street with the other slum boys, doing nothing to stop the beatings, waiting years until his father’s penchant for cigarettes and moonshine ended them instead. Not that it mattered, since his mother followed him faithfully not soon after.

  “Why don’t you take her to the ghat, you self-righteous bastard? You’re as much a man as me,” Krishna said aloud, looking at the priest, who was sitting quietly by the water. He was too far to hear Krishna, not that Krishna cared. He shook his fist at the priest, for good measure.

  Then, he peeled his lungi off the body, leaving her naked again. Sullen, he threw the lungi in his bucket and tied another around his waist. He always brought an extra, in case he lost one in the water. He kissed his fingertips and touched them to the body’s clammy forehead, nervously keeping them away from her parted blue lips. For five minutes he sat next to her, as if in prayer, wondering how he might take her to the cremation ghats. Did the priest expect him to call a hearse, pretend to be a husband, and have her taken there? He shook his head, and thought some more.

  The priest had disappeared. Still, Krishna thought and he thought. Then Krishna shook his head, got up, picked up his bucket, and walked away. The sun had risen higher, and the crowds were beginning to gather like flies by the golden water. They looked at the woman lying there on the bank
. But blinded by her nakedness, by the ugly bruises that painted it, they all looked away and went about their day. They did this until the moment she got up and started walking across the shore, clumsy but sure, water-wrinkled soles sinking into the trail of footsteps Krishna had left in the mud.

  Even then, they didn’t look for long.

  At first, one man cried out in surprise from afar.

  An unsurprising reaction, since he’d just seen what he had presumed to be a dead body crawl a few paces, stand up and totter across the mud like a drunk madwoman. But refusing to let people think that he too was mad, he pretended his cry was a prelude to his singing while he bathed, and ignored the sight of the naked woman. Some others left the ghat in haste. The rest of the men took the first observer’s cue, looking away from her as they bathed, just as they would look away from a beggar with stumps for limbs hobbling across the ghat. She was up now, so she couldn’t be dead. Simple as that. Whatever her problem, she was alone. Naked women didn’t belong here, where men bathed, parading their lack of shame.

  In the morning air flies clothed her. Hesitant crows perched on her shoulders and head, making her a feathered black headdress, bristling with flutter. She didn’t give any regard to her beaked guests, nor their violence as they haltingly pecked at her flesh, somewhat confused by her movements, but not enough to keep from trying a taste of her ripe deadness.

  The spectators stole quick glances while studiously ignoring her, horrified. This was a very mad woman. Undoubtedly sex-crazed too, judging from her lack of modesty. Probably drunk. Crazy for sure. And a junkie, and homeless, and a prostitute. So filthy that the birds were pecking at her. So high she couldn’t feel the pain. Someone, someone would call the police.

  Carrying her hungry crows unwitting, she staggered on down Babu Ghat, wandering by the slimy stone steps that led to the rest of the city, as if unsure of how to climb them. She eventually found the garbage dump down the ghat, and started eating from it.