And he remembered.
* * *
When he had stopped running, he found himself huddled into a cold, lightless corner. The ghost was there. He could feel her breath on his face, sense a near-visual glimmering of warmth from her body.
What do you want? she asked him. He was not surprised that he could hear her even though she had not spoken, because he was still wearing his Toshiba, and his thoughts were not rational enough for any further reasoning.
But what did he want? It was a question he could never have answered straight. But in his hallucinogen-saturated state, he found that the answer came out easy and lucid and straightforward, as if it arose from the true center of his being, where there are no lies and evasions, no confusion and no misunderstanding, but simply what is.
“I want to understand what’s going on,” he said, “and I want to know what to do about it.” The blackness waved around him, ran its fingers through his brain.
Her answer came—again—not in words, but in a sense of delighted amusement, of pleased recognition: So be it.
Standing there in the lightless cellar, amid dirt and broken furniture, his ears singing acid songs, head bowed slightly to avoid hitting it against the low overhead beams, he received his gift. It was an understanding so pure and complete, so detailed and comprehensive, undeniable and true, that no human mind could have contained a fraction of it without being destroyed completely.
Faced with this overload, his mind shut down, to avoid handling it.
* * *
He found himself being dragged roughly through the narthex by a policeman. This was bewildering. He had only faint shadow-memories of the events since his visit to the Lady in the basement, and they seemed … unconvincing. Nor did he retain his illumination; all that remained of it were three words, running like a mantra through his head.
“What was that?” Oberg paused before the sanctuary door. He cocked his head, trying to listen over the riot noises. “That sound…”
Children burst all around them, cascading up from the stairs, bubbling out into the narthex. As the startled cops drew their guns, they came whooping, crowding about them, shreeping and chirping with excitement.
“Shoot the little bastards!” Oberg commanded. The policemen all stared at him in horror and disbelief. “Shoot them!” he insisted, and still they disobeyed.
Peter was so preoccupied by the words running through his thoughts that he did not at first realize that his guard had released him. The children—and the parents and teachers that came running after—had separated him from the group; he realized now that he was leaning against the door to the outside.
Open the door. Open the door. Open the door. The words tumbled over and over one upon the other—openthedoor—urgent and overwhelming. Suppose, he thought, just suppose they meant something? Suppose you were supposed to take them literally.
He put his hand on the door. Outside, the riot was in progress. Hundreds of vent people were being forced against the door. Some were beating on it with their hands; it shivered and vibrated in sympathy.
Open the door.
Oberg had noticed him now. He was pointing at Peter and shouting some angry command that could not be heard over the children and the riot. One of the policemen turned toward him.
He opened the door, and stood to the side.
* * *
Vagrants and derelicts, vent men and shopping bag ladies—the insane and confused, the outcast and discarded—the filthy and vile, the crazy and crippled and those haunted by religious or political visions that made no sense to anyone but themselves … all flooded through the doors, a great wash of stinking humanity, excited and fearful, some shouting cries of joy or triumph, many badly injured, at least one attempting to sing.
They swarmed over police and captives and children, teachers and Oberg and parents and all, and swept them into the sanctuary.
Oberg was slammed against the doorsill, his head cracking sharply against the wood. He slumped. The Lady, falling from his arms, was snatched up by Sam, who carried her within. The flows of children and derelicts converged around the altar.
Jennifer’s eyes were bright and alert, and serenely calm.
—advising all inhabitants of nuclear targets—that includes all residents of the BosWash corridor, any port cities, heavily—
The thing still hovered over the altar.
“It’s pretty!” Sheila gasped, by Peter’s ear.
It was. It glimmered slightly, where it floated, and there were hints of bright colors and far places in its light. It whirled and spun, as if to some unheard music. It seemed full of promise and possibility.
Just as Jennifer was lowered onto the altar, though, fierce light bloomed outside the windows. The unseen skies turned brilliant with nuclear fire, and the stained glass grew intensely, unbearably bright. It was the beginning of the war they had all been expecting for so long.
A horrified silence fell, and then—shocked by that awful hush—several of the children began to cry.
Jennifer gasped and convulsed—at last her time was come. She stretched out a hand over her head and the thing above her pulsed. Three times it expanded and contracted, and then it exploded.
The explosion engulfed them all in an instant, swallowing up the church and expanding outward, ever more rapidly, still growing.
The last coherent thought Peter had before he was transformed entirely was that perhaps Oberg was right. Perhaps it was a judgment on them all.
Rapid circles, of reality and light, raced one another around the globe.
Mark 4:30–32
JOHN KESSEL
The Pure Product
Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his wife, Sue Hall, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; his stories have also appeared in Galileo, New Dimensions, The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Berkley Showcase, and elsewhere. In 1983, Kessel won a Nebula Award for his brilliant novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year. His most recent book is the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. He is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled Confidence. Kessel’s story “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine” was in our First Annual Collection, and his story “Friend,” written with James Patrick Kelly, was in our Second Annual Collection.
Here he takes us for a taut and hard-edged tour of modern-day America, in company with an unusual and spooky pair of tourists.
THE PURE PRODUCT
John Kessel
I arrived in Kansas City at one o’clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the car I’d taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by the Mormons, whose God tells them that in the future Jesus Christ will come again.
I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun beating down through the windshield. The car had no air conditioning and my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I found a hardware store, “Hector’s” on Wornall. I pulled into the lot. The Citation’s engine dieseled after I turned off the ignition; I pumped the accelerator once and it coughed and died. The heat was like syrup. The sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Avenue. August.
The man behind the counter in the hardware store I took to be Hector himself. He looked like Hector, slain in vengeance beneath the walls of paintbrushes—the kind of semi-friendly, publicly optimistic man who would tell you about his good wife and his ten-penny nails. I bought a
gallon of kerosene and a plastic paint funnel, put them into the trunk of the Citation, then walked down the block to the Mark Twain Bank. Mark Twain died at the age of seventy-five with a heart full of bitter accusations against the Calvinist god and no hope for the future of humanity. Inside the bank I went to one of the desks, at which sat a Nice Young Lady. I asked about starting a business checking account. She gave me a form to fill out, then sent me to the office of Mr. Graves.
Mr. Graves wielded a formidable handshake. “What can I do for you, Mr…?”
“Tillotsen. Gerald Tillotsen,” I said. Gerald Tillotsen, of Tacoma, Washington, died of diphtheria at the age of four weeks—on September 24, 1938. I have a copy of his birth certificate.
“I’m new to Kansas City. I’d like to open a business account here, and perhaps take out a loan. I trust this is a reputable bank? What’s your exposure in Brazil?” I looked around the office as if Graves were hiding a woman behind the hatstand, then flashed him my most ingratiating smile.
Mr. Graves did his best. He tried smiling back, then looked as if he had decided to ignore my little joke. “We’re very sound, Mr. Tillotsen.”
I continued smiling.
“What kind of business do you own?”
“I’m in insurance. Mutual Assurance of Hartford. Our regional office is in Oklahoma City, and I’m setting up an agency here, at 103rd and State Line.” Just off the interstate.
He examined the form I had given him. His absorption was too tempting.
“Maybe I can fix you up with a life policy? You look like dead meat.”
Graves’ head snapped up, his mouth half open. He closed it and watched me guardedly. The dullness of it all! How I tire. He was like some cow, like most of the rest of you in this silly age, unwilling to break the rules in order to take offense. “Did he really say that?” he was thinking. “If he did say that, was that his idea of a joke? What is he after? He looks normal enough.” I did look normal, exactly like an insurance agent. I was the right kind of person, and I could do anything. If at times I grate, if at times I fall a little short of or go a little beyond convention, there is not one of you who can call me to account.
Mr. Graves was coming around. All business.
“Ah—yes, Mr. Tillotsen. If you’ll wait a moment, I’m sure we can take care of this checking account. As for the loan…”
“Forget it.”
That should have stopped him. He should have asked after my credentials, he should have done a dozen things. He looked at me, and I stared calmly back at him. And I knew that, looking into my honest blue eyes, he could not think of a thing.
“I’ll just start the checking account now with this money order,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “That will be acceptable, won’t it?”
“It will be fine,” he said. He took the completed form and the order over to one of the secretaries while I sat at the desk. I lit a cigar and blew some smoke rings. The money order had been purchased the day before in a post office in Denver. It was for thirty dollars. I didn’t intend to use the account very long. Graves returned with my sample checks, shook hands earnestly, and wished me a good day. Have a good day, he said. I will, I said.
Outside, the heat was still stifling. I took off my sportcoat. I was sweating so much I had to check my hair in the sideview mirror of my car. I walked down the street to a liquor store and bought a bottle of chardonnay and a bottle of Chivas Regal. I got some paper cups from a nearby grocery. One final errand, then I could relax for a few hours.
In the shopping center I had told Graves would be the location for my nonexistent insurance office, there was a sporting goods store. It was about three o’clock when I parked in the lot and ambled into the shop. I looked at various golf clubs: irons, woods, even one set with fiberglass shafts. Finally I selected a set of eight Spaulding irons with matching woods, a large bag, and several boxes of Topflites. The salesman, who had been occupied with another customer at the rear of the store, hustled up his eyes full of commission money. I gave him little time to think. The total cost was $612.32. I paid with a check drawn on my new account, cordially thanked the man, and had him carry all the equipment out to the trunk of the car.
I drove to a park near the bank; Loose Park, they called it. I felt loose. Cut loose, drifting free, like one of the kites people were flying in the park that had broken its string and was ascending into the sun. Beneath the trees it was still hot, though the sunlight was reduced to a shuffling of light and shadow on the brown grass. Kids ran, jumped, swung on playground equipment. I uncorked my bottle of wine, filled one of the paper cups, and lay down beneath a tree, enjoying the children, watching young men and women walking along the paths of the park.
A girl approached along the path. She did not look any older than seventeen. She was short and slender, with clean blonde hair cut to her shoulders. Her shorts were very tight. I watched her unabashedly; she saw me watching her and left the path to come over to me. She stopped a few feet away, her hands on her hips. “What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Your legs,” I said. “Would you like some wine?”
“No thanks. My mother told me never to accept wine from strangers.” She looked right through me.
“I take whatever I can get from strangers,” I said. “Because I’m a stranger, too.”
I guess she liked that. She was different. She sat down and we chatted for a while. There was something wrong about her imitation of a seventeen-year-old; I began to wonder whether hookers worked the park. She crossed her legs and her shorts got tighter. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“San Francisco. But I’ve just moved here to stay. I have a part interest in the sporting goods store at the Eastridge Plaza.”
“You live near here?”
“On West 89th.” I had driven down 89th on my way to the bank.
“I live on 89th! We’re neighbors.”
An edge of fear sliced through me. A slip? It was exactly what one of my own might have said to test me. I took a drink of wine and changed the subject. “Would you like to visit San Francisco some day?”
She brushed her hair back behind one ear. She pursed her lips, showing off her fine cheekbones. “Have you got something going?” she asked, in queerly accented English.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.
I took another sip. “A bottle of wine,” I replied in good Midwestern 1980s.
She wasn’t having any of it. “No artwork, please. I don’t like artwork.”
I had to laugh: my life was devoted to artwork. I had not met anyone real in a long time. At the beginning I hadn’t wanted to and in the ensuing years I had given up expecting it. If there’s anything more boring than you people it’s us people. But that was an old attitude. When she came to me in K.C. I was lonely and she was something new.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not much, but you can come for the ride. Do you want to?”
She smiled and said yes.
As we walked to my car, she brushed her hip against my leg. I switched the bottle to my left hand and put my arm around her shoulders in a fatherly way. We got into the front seat, beneath the trees on a street at the edge of the park. It was quiet. I reached over, grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck and jerked her face toward me, covering her little mouth with mine. Surprise: she threw her arms around my neck, sliding across the seat and awkwardly onto my lap. We did not talk. I yanked at the shorts; she thrust her hand into my pants. St. Augustine asked the lord for chastity, but not right away.
At the end she slipped off me, calmly buttoned her blouse, brushed her hair back from her forehead. “How about a push?” she asked. She had a nailfile out and was filing her index fingernail to a point.
I shook my head, and looked at her. She resembled my grandmother. I had never run into my grandmother but she had a hellish reputation. “No thanks. What’s your name?”
“C
all me Ruth.” She scratched the inside of her left elbow with her nail. She leaned back in her seat, sighed deeply. Her eyes became a very bright, very hard blue.
While she was aloft I got out, opened the trunk, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into the gutter and used the funnel to fill the bottle with kerosene. I plugged it with part of the cork and a kerosene-soaked rag. Afternoon was sliding into evening as I started the car and cruised down one of the residential streets. The houses were like those of any city or town of that era of the midwest USA: white frame, forty or fifty years old, with large porches and small front yards. Dying elm trees hung over the street. Shadows stretched across the sidewalks. Ruth’s nose wrinkled; she turned her face lazily toward me, saw the kerosene bottle, and smiled.
Ahead on the left-hand sidewalk I saw a man walking leisurely. He was an average sort of man, middle-aged, probably just returning from work, enjoying the quiet pause dusk was bringing to the hot day. It might have been Hector; it might have been Graves. It might have been any one of you. I punched the cigarette lighter, readied the bottle in my right hand, steering with my leg as the car moved slowly forward. “Let me help,” Ruth said. She reached out and steadied the wheel with her slender fingertips. The lighter popped out. I touched it to the rag; it smoldered and caught. Greasy smoke stung my eyes. By now the man had noticed us. I hung my arm, holding the bottle, out the window. As we passed him, I tossed the bottle at the sidewalk like a newsboy tossing a rolled-up newspaper. The rag flamed brighter as it whipped through the air; the bottle landed at his feet and exploded, dousing him with burning kerosene. I floored the accelerator; the motor coughed, then roared, the tires and Ruth both squealing in delight. I could see the flaming man in the rear-view mirror as we sped away.
* * *
On the Great American Plains, the summer nights are not silent. The fields sing the summer songs of insects—not individual sounds, but a high-pitched drone of locusts, cicadas, small chirping things for which I have no names. You drive along the superhighway and that sound blends with the sound of wind rushing through your opened windows, hiding the thrum of the automobile, conveying the impression of incredible velocity. Wheels vibrate, tires beat against the pavement, the steering wheel shudders, alive in your hands, droning insects alive in your ears. Reflecting posts at the roadside leap from the darkness with metronomic regularity, glowing amber in the headlights, only to vanish abruptly into the ready night when you pass. You lose track of time, how long you have been on the road, where you are going. The fields scream in your ears like a thousand lost, mechanical souls, and you press your foot to the accelerator, hurrying away.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 35