Mac hadn’t known her when she was here—they met in October, during that seemingly endless round of funerals, and he remembered telling her he felt guilty for feeling that spark of attraction, for beginning something new when everything else was ending.
She had put her hand on his, the skin on her palms dry and rough from all the assistance she’d been giving friends: dishes, packing, childcare. Her eyes had had shadows so deep he could barely see their shape. It wasn’t until their second date that he realized her eyes had a slightly almond cast, and they were an impossible shade of blue.
There are no shadows under her eyes here, in Anna’s. Leta is smiling, looking incredibly young. Mac never knew her this young, this carefree. Her skin has no lines, and that single white strand that appeared above her right temple—the one she’d plucked on their first date and looked at in horror—isn’t visible at all.
She wears a white summer dress that accents her sun-darkened skin, and as she talks, she takes a white sweater from the suitcase she used to call a purse. He recognizes the shudder, the gestures, as she puts the sweater over her shoulders.
She is clearly complaining about the cold, about air conditioning he cannot feel. The air here is the same as the air in his bedroom, a little too warm. So much is missing, things his memory is supplying—the garlic and wine scent of Anna’s, the mixture of perfumes that always seemed to linger in front of the door. He isn’t hungry, and he should be. He always got hungry after a few moments in here, the rich fragrances of spiced pork in red sauce and beef sautéed in garlic and wine—Anna’s specialties—making him wish that the restaurant hurried its service instead of priding itself on its European pace.
But Anna’s had been a favorite of Leta’s long before Mac ate there. She had been the one who showed it to him, at the grand re-opening that December, filled with survivors and firefighters and local heroes, all trying to celebrate a Christmas that had more melancholy than joy.
Six months away for this Leta. Six months and an entire lifetime away.
A waiter walks past with a full tray—polenta with a mushroom sauce, several side dishes of pasta, and breadsticks so warm their steam floats past Mac. He cannot smell them, although he wants to. He reaches for one and his fingers find bread so hard and crusty it feels stale. He cannot pull the breadstick off, of course. This is a construct, a group memory—the solidity added to make the scene feel real.
He’s not confined to the chair—he knows that much about ’cordings. He can walk from table to table, listen to each conversation, maybe even go into the kitchen, depending on how deluxe this edition is.
He is not tempted to move around. He wants to stay here, where he can see the young woman who would someday become his wife flirting with a man whom she decides, one week later, to never see again after he gives her the only black eye she will ever have.
One of the many stories, she used to say, that never made it into the analysis.
Leta tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, laughs, sips some white wine. Mac watches her, enthralled. There is a carefreeness to her he has never seen before, a lightness that had vanished by the time he met her.
He isn’t sure he would be interested in this Leta. She has beauty and style, but the substance, the caring that so touched him the day of his uncle’s funeral, isn’t present at all.
Maybe the substance is in the conversation. The famous conversation. After a moment’s hesitation, he decides to listen after all.
June Sixteenth at Anna’s has often been compared with jazz—the lively, free-flowing jazz of the 1950s and 60s, recorded on vinyl with all the scratches and nicks, recorded live so that each cough and smattering of early applause adds to the sense of a past so close that it’s almost tangible.
Yet June Sixteenth at Anna’s has more than that. It has community, a feeling that all the observer has to do is pull his chair to the closest table, and he will belong.
Perhaps it is the setting—very few holocordings take place in restaurants because of the ambient noise—or perhaps it is the palpable sense of enjoyment, the feeling that everyone in the room participates fully in their lives, leaving no moment unobserved ….
— “The Longevity of June Sixteenth at Anna’s,”
by Michael Meller, first given as a speech
at the June Sixteenth Retrospective held
at the Museum of Conversational Arts
June 16, 2076
The cheap CD is playing “Sentimental Journey,” Doris Day’s melancholy voice at odds with the laughter in this well-lit place. Mac walks past table after table, bumping one. The water glasses do not shake, the table doesn’t even move, and although he reflexively apologizes, no one hears him.
He feels like a ghost in a room full of strangers.
The conversations float around him, intense, serious, sincere. He’s not sure what makes these discussions famous. Is it the unintentional irony of incorrect predictions, like the group of businessmen discussing October’s annual stock market decline? Or the poignancy of plans that would never come about, lives with less than three months left, all the obvious changes ahead?
He does not know. The conversations don’t seem special to him. They seem like regular discussions, the kind people still have in restaurants all over the city. Perhaps that’s the appeal, the link that sends the conversation collector from the present to the past.
His link still sits at her table, flipping her hair off her shoulder with a casual gesture. As he gets closer, he can almost smell her perfume. Right about now she should acknowledge him, that small turn in his direction, the slight raise of her eyebrows, the secret smile that they’d shared from the first instant they’d met.
But she doesn’t turn. She doesn’t see him. Instead, she’s discussing the importance of heroes with a man who has no idea what heroism truly is.
Her fingers tap nervously against the table, a sign—a week before she throws Frank Dannen out of her life—that she doesn’t like him at all. It always took time for Leta’s brain to acknowledge her emotions. Too bad she hadn’t realized before he hit her that Frank wasn’t the man for her.
Mac stops next to the table, glances once at Frank. This is the first time Mac has seen the man outside of photographs. Curly black hair, a strong jaw, the thick neck of a former football player which, of course, he was. Frank died long before the first June Sixteenth at Anna’s appeared, in a bar fight fifteen years after this meal.
Mac remembers because Leta showed him the story in the Daily News, and said with no pity in her voice, I always knew he would come to a bad end.
But here, in this timeless place, Frank is alive and handsome in a way that glosses over the details: the way his lower lip sets in a hard line, the bruised knuckles on his right hand, which he keeps carefully hidden from Leta, the two bottles of beer that have disappeared in the short forty-five minutes they’ve been at the table. Frank is barely listening to Leta; instead he checks out the other women in the room, short glances that are imperceptible to anyone who isn’t paying attention.
Mac is, but he has wasted enough time on this man. Instead Mac stares at the woman who would become his wife. She stops speaking mid-thought, and leans back in her chair. Mac smiles, recognizing this ploy.
He can predict her next words: Do you want me to continue talking to myself or would you prefer the radio for background noise?
But she says nothing, merely watches Frank with a quizzical expression on her face, one that looks—to someone who doesn’t know her—like affection, but is really a test to see when Frank will notice that she’s done.
He doesn’t, at least not while Mac is watching. Leta sighs, picks at the green salad before her, then glances out the window. Mac glances too, but sees nothing. Whoever recorded this scene, whoever touched it up, hadn’t bothered with the outdoors, only with the restaurant and the small dramas occurring inside it.
Dramas whose endings were already known.
Because he can’t help himself, Mac touches h
er shoulder. The flesh is warm and soft to the touch, but it is not Leta’s flesh. It feels like someone else’s. Leta’s skin had a satiny quality that remained with her during her whole life. First, the expense of new satin, and later, the comforting patina of old satin, showing how much it was loved.
She does not look at him, and he pulls his hand away. Leta always looked at him when he touched her, always acknowledged their connection, their bond—sometimes with annoyance, when she was too busy to focus on it, yet always with love.
This isn’t his Leta. This is a mannequin in a wax works, animated to go through its small part for someone else’s amusement.
Mac can’t take any more. He stands up, says, “Voice command: stop.”
And the restaurant fades to blackness a piece at a time—the tables and patrons first, then the ambient noise, and finally the voices, fading, fading, until their words are nothing but a memory of whispers in the dark.
June Sixteenth at Anna’s should not be a famous conversation piece. The fact that it is says more about our generation’s search for meaning than it does about June 16, 2001.
We believe that our grandparents lived fuller lives because they endured so much more. Yet all that June Sixteenth at Anna’s shows us is that each life is filled with countless moments, memorable and unmemorable—and the only meaning that these moments have are the meanings with which we imbue them at various points in our lives.
— From June Sixteenth at Anna’s Revisited,
Mia Oppel, Harvard University Press, 2071.
Mac ended up standing beside the bed, only a foot from the player. The ’cording whirred as it wound down, the sound aggressive, as if resenting being shut off mid-program, before all the conversations had been played.
The scent of Leta lingered, and Mac realized that it had been the only real thing in his entire trip. The scent and the temperature of his bedroom had accompanied him into Anna’s, bringing even more of the present into his glimpse of the past.
He took the ’cording out of the player, and carried it to the living room, placing the silver disk in its expensive case. Then he returned to the bedroom, put the player away, and lay down on the bed for the first time since Leta had left it, almost a week ago.
If he closed his eyes, he could imagine her warmth, the way he used to roll into it mornings after she had gotten up. It was like being cradled in her arms, and often he would fall back to sleep until she would wake him in exasperation, reminding him that he had a job just like everyone else on the planet and it was time he went off to do it.
But the bed wasn’t really warm, and if he fell asleep, she wasn’t going to wake him, not now, not ever. The ’cording had left him feeling hollow, almost as if he’d done something dirty, forbidden, seeking out his wife where he knew she couldn’t have been.
He had no idea why she watched all of the June Sixteenths. Read the commentary, yes, he understood that. And he understood the interviews, the way she accepted a fan’s fawning over something she never got paid for, never even got acknowledged for. Some of the June Sixteenth participants sued for their percentage of the profits—and lost, since ’cordings were as much about packaging as the historical moment—but Leta had never joined them.
Instead, she went back to that single day in her life over and over again, watching her younger self from the outside, seeing—what? Looking for—what?
It certainly wasn’t Frank. Mac knew her well enough for that. Had she been looking for a kind of perspective on herself, on her life? Or trying to figure out, perhaps, what her world would have been like if she had made different choices, tried other things?
He didn’t know. And now, he would never know. He had teased her, listened to her talk about the ancillary materials, even bought her the latest copies of June Sixteenth, but he had never once heard her speak about the experience of walking around as an outsider in her own past.
A mystery of Leta—like all the other mysteries of Leta, including but not limited to why she had loved him—would remain forever unsolved.
He couldn’t find the answers in June Sixteenth, just as he couldn’t find Leta there. All that remained of Leta were bits and pieces—a scent, slowly fading; a voice, half remembered; the brush of her skin against his own.
Leta’s life had an ending now, her existence as finite as June Sixteenth at Anna’s, her essence as impossible to reproduce.
Mac hugged her favorite pillow to himself. Leta would never reappear again—not whole, breathing, surprising him with her depth.
The realization had finally come home to him, and settled in his heart: She was gone, and all he had left of her were her ghosts.
The Green Leopard Plague
Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of The Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, and Aristoi. His novel Metropolitan garnered wide critical acclaim in 1996 and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His other books include a sequel to Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel, Destiny’s Way. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World.” His stories have appeared in our Third through Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Seventeenth, and Twentieth Annual Collections.
Here he spins an epic tale of love, loss, conspiracy, murder, and redemption that shuttles us back and forth through time to unravel a mystery that crucially shaped the fate of humanity itself …
Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed at the horizon from her perch in the overhanging banyan tree.
The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.
The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.
She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her bare skin, and then pushed off and dove headfirst into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool impact and a rush of bubbles.
Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.
After her hunt, the mermaid—her name was Michelle—cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that was the roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.
The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.
Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long nylon line. She tucked her wings away—they were harder to retract th
an to deploy, and the gills on the undersides were delicate—and then slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-dappled forest canopy.
She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.
During her excursion, she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea, where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw, enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other for later.
By the time Michelle finished breakfast, the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to passing tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.
It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet, she moved along a rope walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, straddled a limb, took her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.
There were several journalists requesting interviews—the legend of the lonely mermaid was spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 38