by Tim Pratt
All at once, the handful of people in the café stood up, rattling their chairs, stuffing books into bags, closing laptops with snaps. Marzi frowned, wondering at the synchronicity, coming around the counter to glance into the other rooms. Everyone was leaving, looking suddenly worried or furtive or curiously Buddha-blank-faced. They all left without a word, even though a couple of them were regulars with whom Marzi ordinarily exchanged greetings. “Hey, guys, where’s the fire?” she said as they left, but no one spoke, or even glanced back; they didn’t hurry, just left as if they’d remembered someplace else they urgently needed to be.
Marzi thought of animals spooking before an earthquake. People said the animals always knew first, felt the vibrations before they even happened, that the animals knew, without even knowing what it was they knew. So why didn’t she feel anything?
“Shit,” Marzi said aloud, mostly just to hear herself speak. It didn’t help, and in fact seemed inappropriate, like cursing in the ruins of a possibly haunted church. Marzi considered putting on some music, really blasting something up-tempo, but couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. What if there were something she needed to hear? Something like Pouty Peter’s black buzz, or whatever made the customers leave?
The Fiesta-plate clock ticked loudly. Marzi shivered, hugging herself. Had the temperature in the room suddenly dropped, or was that her imagination? She thought of shutting the front doors to block the breeze, if there was a breeze, but it would also make it harder to run away, if . . .
If what? She was being ridiculous. She was—
Something flickered in the front window, the big one that looked over Ash Street. It was a flash of light, an incomplete reflection. Marzi frowned, coming around the counter, squinting. It looked like someone was trying to project film on the window, which wouldn’t work, of course, not really, since the window was transparent. But the darkness beyond the window and the dirt on the glass allowed hints of dancing light and shadow to briefly resolve. Marzi turned and looked behind her, and of course there was nothing, no dancing beam of light, no projector. It was just something outside, the reflection of a reflection of headlights, maybe, or—
We should talk, a voice said, emanating from nothing, from the walls, from the blackness of the spaces between Garamond Ray’s painted stars. Chew the fat. The voice was gravelly, and underlaid by a faint hiss, as if it were a severely degraded soundtrack.
Marzi spun around, looking behind her, toward the Desert Room beyond the kitchen, but no one was there. She looked back toward the window, where the flickering on the glass was more obvious now, more substantial, as if something were gathering substance from the air.
“Who am I talking to?” she said, amazed at how calmly the question emerged. She thought, What would Rangergirl do? It didn’t seem at all like a foolish question. She would be brave, Marzi thought. She wondered if she could manage that.
I don’t have a name. I come from a time before names, a place without them. You’re the one who names things. The voice was more substantial now, too, and seemed to emanate from that thickening patch of air, a space above the couch where the light seemed to stick together and swell. You could never decide what to name me. You call me lots of things.
“The Outlaw,” Marzi said. “You’re telling me you’re a character from my comic book?”
“A character from your comic book is me, more like,” it said, and now the voice was no vague emanation; it came from right in front of her, a rough, human voice. The curling whiteness—the glare of light reflected off a window, but with edges—was taking on a roughly human shape, two tendrils spinning down into legs, a widening torso, arms, something like a misshapen head.
Marzi retreated behind the counter. “You can’t get out,” she said, her jaw tight. “You’re behind me.”
“I’m not out. Not that I can’t get out—you can’t fence me in—but I’m not out yet. This is nothin’ but pretty lights on a screen. I’ve been hammerin’ on that old door, darlin’, and I’ve managed to open it a crack, to reach out a little, and touch the world. But this?” It stepped forward, having feet to step with, now, looking like a white man-shaped balloon, featureless, but the head was all wrong, lumpy, strange. “This is nothin’. I just thought we should have a powwow, is all, sit down and talk man-to-man. Or what have you. I’m not a man, and neither are you, but I don’t care overmuch about the particulars.”
“Why are you talking like that? Like some B-movie cowboy?” Marzi wasn’t afraid, exactly—it was almost too surreal to be terrifying. Or else, on some level, she’d been prepared for this, expecting it.
“It’s not up to me, how I talk. I don’t talk at all, given my druthers, but you make me want to ramble on. I’m callin’ you out, but you’re the one who chooses the time and place and weapons.”
“I don’t understand you.”
Improbably, the thing spat, turning its lumpy head and spewing a neat stream of whiteness that disappeared before it hit the floor. “No. I reckon not. Listen, I’ll make you a deal. You’ve got until sunup to get out of town, free and clear, and no one will follow you. There’s no shame in walking away from a fight you can’t win.”
What would Rangergirl do? Well. That was easy, now. “I’m not walking away from anything. Besides, last time I checked, you were still locked up. What are you going to do to me? I guess you’re the one who’s been pushing Beej, and Jane, huh, making them do things?”
“Nobody makes anybody do anything. I just help them do what they want to do anyway. They’re just getting in good with the winning side. But yeah, they’re my gang, even if they don’t know that, exactly.”
“Well, Beej is locked up, just like you, and Jane is gone. Not to mention crazy. And I’m here, and I’m going to keep you in. Tomorrow I’m coming back with boards, and I’m nailing your door shut, and that’s going to be the end of it.”
The thing laughed, cruel and mocking. It reached up, lifted the top of its head away, and rubbed its arm across its forehead.
Marzi burst out laughing, and the thing’s own laughter suddenly stopped. “What’s funny, missy?”
“Is that thing supposed to be a hat? That big lumpy thing on your head, that’s supposed to be a cowboy hat?”
“There’s no call to insult my hat,” it said in a wounded tone, and suddenly Marzi wasn’t in the middle of a dramatic movie anymore, she was in a comedy, something like Blazing Saddles, maybe, and the thing before her didn’t seem dangerous at all, just foolish, a nothing dressed up in a cowboy’s clothes, nothing to be afraid of at all.
“Oh, go to hell,” Marzi said. “Screw you and the nag you rode in on.”
The thing diminished, slumping on one side like a punctured beach ball, and began to dissolve, the light that made up its body dispersing, giving way to everyday shadows. “You have until sunup, missy. If you’re still here tomorrow it won’t go easy on you. I’ll see to that. I’ve killed your kind before. You’re not the first one to guard my door.” It sank to its knees, which came apart underneath it, and its ludicrous lump-hat lost what feeble definition it had.
“We’ll see about that,” Marzi said, feeling boisterous, watching the light-puppet come apart. “You’ve never had to fight me before. There’s a new sheriff in town.” She leaned on the counter, and added, as an afterthought, “Bitch.”
The thing came apart completely, and then there was nothing.
Maybe that wasn’t exactly how Rangergirl would’ve handled it, but Marzi thought she’d done pretty well, all things considered.
She turned away and saw someone coming up the steps, slowly, and it took her a moment to realize it was Lindsay, because Lindsay didn’t shuffle, she didn’t plod; even when she was exhausted from being up for a night and a day working or partying, she didn’t walk like this. She came into the café, and there were tears on her face. “Oh, Marzi,” she said. “Alice left. She left town. She’s gone.”
Conversation Fluid
* * *
Denis had spent
the past day trying to find a replacement coffeehouse, to fill the hole in his routine left when he’d been banned from Genius Loci. He’d tried Javha House, but there were actual pigeons roosting in the rafters there, which was too disgusting to contemplate, and he’d tried the Marigold Café, but the noise of a nearby jack-hammer had made concentration impossible. Now Whooping Coffee, the café of last resort, was also proving untenable. There was a primitive dance studio in the back of the building, full of mostly unattractive people contorting and leaping about ridiculously, presumably at least in part for the enjoyment of the café patrons, who seemed, by and large, fascinated by the goings-on. Denis could not, of course, work in such an environment, and being reminded of the primitive movement in any art form was enough to annoy him. He hated primitives; practitioners of such art were determined to recapture a nonexistent state of innocence, and in the pursuit of that spurious goal, they threw away everything a thousand generations of artists had learned about perspective, straight lines, linearity, self-referentiality, irony, postmodernism, all the artistic virtues that Denis held dear. Had he lived in the dimness of prehistory, he would not have been content with scratching pictures of elk and bison onto cave walls through some misplaced trust in sympathetic magic. Indeed, he would have been moved to do something not yet recognizable as art under those circumstances, like the formulation of mathematics and geometry, perhaps. He would not be at home among primitive, mud-streaked . . .
Denis put down his coffee cup with a gently shaking hand. He looked around the café, which was, naturally, decorated with primitive art, from ugly wooden masks to reproductions of cave paintings to “modern primitives,” the refuge of the artless would-be artist. There were pictures of women, those huge-breasted, wide-hipped, ant-headed über-mothers, and while none of them looked a bit like Jane, the association was there nevertheless. Jane had become something different, fundamentally—he’d known that, but now the nature of that change was more obvious to him. She was no longer capable of artifice. She had become a basic—a direct—creature. A modern primitive, violent, straightforward, mud-smeared.
Denis found it terrifying. Jane was now his very antithesis, and he had no idea where she was. Perhaps she was trying to break into Genius Loci now; perhaps she had gone to make love to a landslide; perhaps she was waiting in his apartment, having puzzled out the truth about what had happened to her, about what Denis had done, or failed to do. The old Jane, the Jane he’d dated, would have reacted in a certain way to improper actions on his part: She would have left, not talked to him for a while, stewed in her own juices, and become increasingly frustrated, all actions that didn’t interfere with Denis’s life in the slightest. But this new Jane . . . who knew what she might do? She wasn’t the woman he’d known. She was a monster, and there was no telling what action she might take next.
Denis found such unpredictability profoundly unsettling.
He rose from his chair and gathered his things, leaving the noise of thrumming drumbeats and bare feet slapping against the studio floor, walking out the door toward his car. What if he went home, and Jane was there? What then?
He had to get rid of her. It was as simple as that. Her very existence would weigh on his mind, make him paranoid, diminish his enjoyment of life. But how could he hurt her, when she was made of mud, when he’d killed her once already? Exorcisms and the like seemed absurd to Denis, but perhaps he should look into them. After all, ghost-animated mud-dolls seemed absurd, too. Getting rid of Jane, really rid of her, was the only way he could think to restore normalcy. And he would do whatever proved necessary to achieve that end. Without his routines, he would lose his mind, and in madness, his dreams of the machine that grinds would cease to be terrible, and would instead become a portent of some final solution.
“So what I want to do is get drunk,” Lindsay said, once she stopped crying—just sat up, wiped her eyes with her sleeves, and looked at Marzi earnestly, her eyes mascara-streaked. “Will you kindly be my enabler, barkeep?”
“Lindsay, sweets, are you sure you want to get wasted? How about we . . .” What? “Eat ice cream or something,” she said finally. “I guess we’re not culturally programmed with a lot of options, are we? We could talk about it, though.”
“Sweet lady liquor will loosen my tongue, Marzipan.” She sat back on the couch under the window, disappearing a little into its voluminous cushions, looking very small. “I just don’t want to think about it right now. I had this idea, this mental picture, of what the summer would be like, and Alice was a big part of that, bigger than I realized. I keep thinking about the way she’s gone, the hole that leaves in my understanding of things, it’s like hamster wheels spinning away in my brain . . . so I want to get drunk, and not think about it. Sometimes, if you repress enough, if you distract yourself enough, you can get so far ahead of the curve of grief that you never have to deal with it at all.”
“That’s a healthy attitude,” Marzi said.
“Fuck healthy,” Lindsay said softly. “Just be my friend, okay?”
Marzi nodded. “All right. But I’m going to make sure you drink lots of water, too.”
Lindsay took a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and handed it over. “Then beer me, dearie, and keep ’em coming until the money runs out. I have to go to the powder room.” Lindsay rose from the couch with none of her usual pixielike grace and walked through the Ocean Room to the tiny bathroom.
Marzi got up and drew a beer, wondering what had happened between Lindsay and Alice. There hadn’t been a lot of narrative sequence in Lindsay’s initial outpouring, just that Alice was leaving town on seriously short notice. It wasn’t as if they’d been involved for long—as far as Marzi knew, they’d only started flirting about three weeks ago—but with Lindsay, in this case, it was clearly more about missed chances and sudden disruptions than anything else. And maybe Lindsay had been prepared to give more of her heart than she usually did. Most people only got to enjoy the surface glitter of Lindsay’s personality, but Alice had touched something deeper in her, Alice with her quiet kindness, her true attention. Sure, it was hard for Lindsay. Sure, getting drunk wouldn’t ultimately help much. Sure, she would do it anyway.
“Hi, Marzi,” Jonathan said, appearing in the doorway, dressed all in black as usual. He looked as mournful, in his way, as Lindsay. “The pictures you took didn’t turn out. They’re overexposed.” He sat down in the ragged armchair beside the couch and put his feet up on the battered coffee table, right where the cowboy made of light had stood earlier. Marzi sat on one end of the couch, close enough for their knees to touch, almost.
Shit. All that effort for nothing. Well, not for nothing—she’d needed to go back into the Desert Room anyway, but . . . “Did I do something wrong? I knew that camera was too much for me.”
“No, it wasn’t you. The guy at the photo lab said it looked like the film had been exposed to the sun, but that doesn’t make sense. Even if it had been exposed, that would have ruined the whole roll. I’d taken a few pictures before I gave you the camera, and they all turned out fine.” He reached into his pocket and took out an envelope, fanning several photographs onto the table—pictures of beaches, peli-cans, seals, surfers, sunsets. “And there’s the picture I took of you, the last one on the roll.” Jonathan pulled that picture from beneath the others. Marzi thought she looked like a startled rabbit in the picture, but at least she didn’t have visible pimples or closed eyes. “It’s just the pictures you took for me in the Desert Room that didn’t come out. You can see it on the negative, they’re just wiped.”
“So it is my fault. I have the black thumb of photography.” That had to be it, right?
“No, I don’t think so. It’s some kind of equipment malfunction. You didn’t leave the lens cap on or anything—the film was ruined. I’m beginning to think the universe doesn’t want me to see this room.”
An equipment malfunction. Film that had never been shown to the sun, nevertheless exposed. Did it qualify as objective proof of the
supernatural? The light-cowboy was flamboyant, sure, and pretty dramatic, but it was also wholly uncorroborated, and could have been nothing but an apparition from the depths of her diseased mind. That exposed film, though . . . that wasn’t just inside her head. That must mean something, right? What if the Outlaw, the thing behind the door—what if it was real? Then the Outlaw was the cause of her mental breakdown, not a symptom of it, and taking refuge in the notion of her own madness was just ducking her responsibility. Not at all what Rangergirl would do.
Jonathan sighed. “You know, meeting you aside, the past few days have royally sucked. Mud, fistfights, and frustration.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not sleeping well, either. I get insomnia a lot anyway, but it’s been especially bad lately. I don’t think I’m used to the Pigeonhole yet. The acoustics in there are really strange. I hear distant voices all night long, coming up from the street, I guess. But I’ve been so excited about the work, and the murals, that I didn’t mind. But now this happens, and I still can’t see all the murals.” He shook his head.
“It’s just one room, right?” Marzi said. “You’ve got the other murals; they’re good examples of Garamond Ray’s work. Isn’t that enough?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. They have to be enough. I just hate that I’m so close to this other major work, and I can’t even see it. It gets to me.” He looked up at her. “I don’t suppose . . . Hendrix isn’t here, nobody’s here, nobody’d know if I went into the Desert Room and looked around, right? Could I?”
Marzi exhaled heavily. “Jonathan, please don’t put me in this position.” There was no way she’d let him go into that room, harmless as it had seemed while she was there. It was so close to bad things, it was thin ice, and who knew what might happen? She was the guardian, for whatever reason, like it or not, and she couldn’t let Jonathan in. She hadn’t even covered up the door again when she left, so it would be right there in plain sight. . . . “I stepped through a rotten board when I went in there this afternoon. I covered it up with an old piece of wood so Hendrix wouldn’t notice and flip out, but it’s just too dangerous. If you got hurt, and we had to call an ambulance . . . Hendrix already had to get out of bed to come here the other night because of Jane and Beej and Denis. I don’t want to wake him up again.”