The People's Republic of Everything

by Nick Mamatas

  Jeremy winced at the name of my late grandfather, but I had a dozen-time-a-day rote response. “Grandpa is watching over us from heaven, Abuelita. But you can look at this.”

  I took my grandmother by the arm and led her through the open-plan living room to the kitchen table. Jeremy spread out the photocopies of the magazine covers and the Silex stories like someone in a cop show presenting evidence to the camera.

  “Where are my glasses?” Silvia snapped.

  “Around your neck,” Jeremy said.

  I dug the glasses out of the folds of my grandmother’s housecoat. There was hardly a trace of dignity in our relationship anymore. “Here you are. Does any of this ring a bell?”

  Grandma took a seat and bent so far forward that her shoulders and neck were nearly parallel to the floor. “Hmm, hmm,” she said, which is what she said when trying to buy a precious moment or two with which to remember something, anything. America is a young nation, though its history is sufficiently bloody that the cosmic aether is stained with the dying moments of the native and settler, soldier and criminal. Her voice was strong, the words effortless; Grandma read in the casual sing-song of the substitute elementary school teacher she had once been. Into the trackless prairies I was called one summer through the secret network of learned entities known only as the Sisterhood of the Spiral to confront not just a single entity but what appeared to be the octoplasmic manifestation of a defeated people entire who—

  Silvia looked up at me, owlish behind her glasses. “I did that.” She smiled. “That rat bastard wanted a ‘Brotherhood’ of the Spiral, but I looked right at him and told him that if I was going to type up his stories, it would have to be a Sisterhood of the Spiral. Mr. Goulart knew nothing about women, that was his problem.”

  Jeremy said, “So you recall all this? You typed these stories.”

  “Of course I typed the stories. When we had a typewriter, that is. That machine went into hock more times than I could count,” Grandma said. She was lucid, in two times at once: there, in her own kitchen where she used to cook and play endless hands of solitaire and cut coupons and make phone calls for local politicians, and in the past, as a young woman living on the other end of the continent, typing up stories from handwritten notes on another kitchen table until her husband, wild-eyed and drunk, stumbled in, spilled his own pages to the floor, and slammed the portable typewriter case shut to drag it away down four flights of steps and across the street to the store with three hanging balls over the entrance.

  “Where is that pawn shop ticket? We need the typewriter back,” Grandma said. That was wrong. Something reset in her brain. “Santo is coming home from work soon. I have to start dinner.”

  “I’ll do dinner, Abuelita,” I said. “Why don’t you take a nap?”

  “I’m not tired.”

  Jeremy collected several photocopied pages and handed the stack over to Silvia. “Why don’t you keep reading, ma’am. You seemed to enjoy the story.” Silvia took the pages and I said “. . . in bed.”

  “I need my glass—”

  “Around your neck,” Jeremy said too quickly.

  After Abuelita was put away in her bedroom, I sat down at the kitchen table and picked up a page between thumb and forefinger, like it was a used tissue. “Spirit Smasher.”

  “It’s very old-fashioned, even compared to some of the other stories in the same issues, but it’s interesting, in a way. Tom Silex is like a Sherlock Holmes/cowboy/ghostbuster/Harry Potter–type all rolled up into one,” Jeremy said.

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “We can get more, I’m sure of it.”

  “How are you sure of it?” I said. “Maybe that guy spent his life’s savings coming out here to talk to Grandma.”

  “You can call her ‘Abuelita’ in front of me, Rosa,” Jeremy said. “White guys are capable of understanding a little Spanish.”

  “What’s five hundred bucks,” I asked myself. “If I found five hundred bucks on the street, I’d be thrilled. Hell, five bucks would still be an anecdote.”

  “What is the hold-up. Just call the guy, have him come over, and sign over the rights, then.”

  “You were the one telling me about Superman!”

  “It can certainly happen,” Jeremy said. “But I’m sure that for every one Superman there’s a million Tom Silex, Spirit-Smashers out there, with a dedicated fandom of seventeen old weirdoes.”

  “I wonder how much of these stories Grandma actually wrote,” I said. “Did she make a lot of changes while she typed them up for Goulart? Maybe she pitched ideas; they could have collaborated.”

  Jeremy snorted. One of his most annoying habits. “Highly doubtful.”

  “And why’s that, Jeremy?”

  “Did she ever mention it? Ever? I mean, even when she was . . . not suffering? When you were a kid?”

  “She barely even mentioned her first husband. Maybe she felt betrayed; that’s why she never said anything.” Maybe that’s why my own mother hated fantasy novels and ghost stories. All her Jesus talk aside, we went to church all of twice a year.

  “Anyway, I’ll call him. He can meet Abuelita. Maybe sympathy will lead him to cough up a few more bucks.”

  The pulp collector couldn’t come back till the next morning. He invited us to invite him to lunch as well. Five hundred bucks minus forty-five for four plates of huevos rancheros. Just like all the big movie deals for Superman, I’m sure. Abuelita had a quiet night, but a strange morning. The Silex stories, which she had picked through, occasionally recalling a turn of phrase she liked—“the shimmering phantasm looked at me, her eyes filled not with tears but the most minute of fireflies; they flew from her cheeks and streaked through the inky blackness that enveloped the old farmhouse”—or banging her little fist against the table. “That rat bastard!” she cried out more than once. “I’d slap him square in the mouth if he were here right now.” Elders with dementia often perseverate on something, but Abuelita’s usual concerns—“Where’s little Rosa, Daniela?”; cooking dinner for Santo, who will be home any minute; how we have to sell the house and move to Florida so “the police” won’t find her and put her in a home, were gone. It was almost a relief.

  Perhaps I should have left her home, but it was Sunday and the homecare nurse wouldn’t be available to watch her until after church services. We only had to explain where we were going—Melrose Kitchen, for food—and why—to meet a man who has some money for us—three times. Only once did she say, “But Santo is coming soon. I have to cook for him.”

  My poor grandfather, Santo. He had suffered through Abuelita’s decaying mental state for years, preparing meals and thanking his wife for cooking for him, repeating, “Daniela is in heaven; she died in an accident,” without even a blink to hold back tears. He never raised his voice to his wife, never. His only complaint, ever, was that the inflexible church wouldn’t sanction marriage to a divorcée back in the old days, and so they had had to go to the courthouse, like he was applying for a fishing license.

  What would Santo have done had he known that he wasn’t ever married after all, that on some level—a level of spirit that he always believed in—his wife’s soul was still tied to that a dead drunk named Flint?

  The pulp collector had decided to dress like a giant grape. He was in a big purple sweatsuit anyway, and he had already ordered and was halfway through his omelet when we arrived. Jeremy strode ahead to shake his hand and arrange the seats around the table as I led my stooped, shuffling abuelita across the length of the restaurant because the pulp collector decided that he needed to sit in the back. I’ll give him credit, though, for standing up when my grandmother approached, cleaning his hands with a napkin, and gently shaking her hand. He repeated his name—Edgar—three times for her before we managed to get her into her seat, and each time he spoke as if it were the first. It was the first time he introduced himself to us instead of just launching into his offer.

  Then he took a conversational wrong turn. “Mrs. Hernandez, I
have to know. What was Marcus Goulart like? When he was working, I mean. He named his own fictional creation after himself, so I imagine he was quite the character. An adventurer?” My grandmother didn’t answer; she shifted her gaze to a spot off to the side.

  “He really was one of the most underrated talents in the occult detective subgenre. He was a master of generating mood and atmosphere, and he kept Silex reasonable. Too many occult detectives end up becoming too powerful—there’s never a concern that he might be brought low by the forces he confronts. Silex, on the other hand, was always right on the edge of defeat.”

  “Really,” Jeremy said. “All the stories I read—and I haven’t had a chance to read them all—seem pretty similar. He gets a call from some ally, shows up at a haunted location, encounters a ghost, then shines a light on it.”

  Edgar turned hard. “And when I used to read The New Yorker, every fiction selection there was about a Connecticut businessman or New York college professor drinking cocktails and contemplating an affair. And by a different author each time. Not only were the stories formulaic, an entire generation of writers shared identical thematic preoccupations.”

  “The New Yorker’s not like that now—” Jeremy started. I would have kicked him under the table if my grandmother wasn’t in the way. As it was, she cut off him.

  “Goulart was a drunk,” she said, finally. “He was always nipping at his flask. By three p.m., he was swaying back and forth like he was on the deck of a rusty ol’ boat. He was a charmer, but you couldn’t depend on him. One time I wanted to do the laundry, so I sent him out to the corner store for some soap—All Soap, that was the brand. He was gone for more than an hour and came staggering up the steps, a big paper sack draped over each arm. He put the bags down and they thunked. You know what was in those bags, Mister?”

  “What?” Edgar said.

  “Chicken noodle. Clam chowder. Tomato. Pea. Cream of broccoli. The little rat bastard bought ‘all soups.’” She slapped a hand against the tabletop and laughed, a solid “Ha!”

  I almost swallowed my tongue. I’d never heard that anecdote before.

  “I’d hoped it was a working Shadow Lantern, but that is a great story!” Edgar laughed quite a bit.

  “What’s a Shadow Lantern?” Abuelita asked. “Where do I know that from?”

  “Let’s just talk business,” I said. “I’m still not sure I understand. Abuelita, this man says that you own these stories.”

  “Why would I own them?” She looked at me very seriously.

  “Because . . .”

  What sort of person was Edgar, the pulp collector? Would he care if I lied? Probably not. He just wanted the stories. If he could live inside a pulp magazine, swinging a Shadow Lantern at the ghosts of a thousand dead Apache, or if he could caress the gray cheek of a lost little girl who has been waiting for a playmate for a century, he would. But maybe he was literal-minded, legalistic. To him, Abuelita’s signature might not be any good if she weren’t competent. The Silver Alert was already a strike against her. . . .

  What kind of person was Jeremy? That I should have known by now, eh? He was definitely a first-year law school student. Everything was a potential tort, or criminal charge, or giant pain in the ass. He carried a black pen with him everywhere to make his signature on Starbucks receipts more legally meaningful. But I bet he wanted to keep sleeping with me. He wasn’t going to squawk.

  What kind of person am I? What would my ghost look like under the Shadow Lantern? Am I just marching my grandmother around toward the end of her life, and giving her another little psychopomp nudge to get it over with?

  “Because . . . you typed them, Abuelita. And you gave Mister Flint—Goulart—ideas, right?”

  “I did!” she said. “That rat bastard wanted a ‘Brotherhood’ of the Spiral, but I looked right at him and told him that if I was going to type up his stories, it would have to be a Sisterhood of the Spiral. Mr. Goulart knew nothing about women, that was his problem.” Word for word what she said the day before.

  “The Sisterhood of the Spiral is a major component of the Silex Cycle,” Edgar said.

  “Heh, say that five times fast,” Jeremy said, and Edgar smiled like he was going to, but I raised my hand. “Please, my grandmother is very tired. She can’t stay out long.”

  “I just wanted to say that the Sisterhood of the Spiral is among the most intriguing elements of the Silex stories. It’s a secret society of widows whose interpersonal connections blanket the world, all with some sort of supernatural insight. They’re old women, crones, with little in the way of physical abilities, but they know all and see all, and intervene as they can, thanks to their sons and nephews. Silex is the grandson of the Sister Supreme, and—”

  “Let’s just get the paperwork out, please,” I said. “And the check, if possible.”

  “Do you have PayPal?” Edgar asked. “I have the app on my phone.”

  “A check,” Jeremy said, like a lawyer.

  “Of course,” Edgar said. He had a folder in his bag, and pulled it out along with a pen, but Jeremy had his black-ink pen ready as well, and handed it to Abuelita.

  “I don’t want to go to a senior citizen home,” Abuelita said. “I have to be at the house when Santo comes back. He’s going to want dinner. We need to stop at the store and get some soup. Chicken noodle. Clam chowder . . .”

  I took the pen and contract both. It looked pretty straightforward. I guess Edgar wrote it up himself, rather than spending the money on an attorney. There was some nutty language: “. . . including, without limitation, copyrights, publication rights, distribution rights, reproduction rights, rights to create derivative works, the rights to publish and publicly display the works everywhere in the Universe by any and all means now known or hereinafter invented, and all future created rights,” and I read that aloud.

  “That’s pretty standard,” Jeremy said.

  “Everywhere in the universe?” I said. Abuelita shot me an upset look, the meaning of which I didn’t really understand.

  “Standard,” Jeremy and Edgar agreed.

  “All future created rights?”

  “Like if a new medium emerges,” Jeremy said. “Virtual reality, maybe.”

  “One day we may be able to inject stories. Encode narratives in our RNA,” Edgar said. “If there’s one thing pulp fiction taught me, it’s that the possibilities are limitless. We could, in the future, inject stories, even entire life memories, into our own bodies. We’d never forget anything; we could gift our own memories to our descendants . . .” He trailed off, sucking his teeth.

  “Is it worth more than five hundred dollars for you, then?” I said.

  Edgar shrugged. “Not . . . much more. The possibilities are limitless, but let’s face it, nobody remembers Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher. I have a lot of work to do just to get him back into the public mind by publishing the old stories again. Oh, I brought some cover art, if you wanted to see.”

  He pulled another folder from his bag, and opened it up. The cover art, spread over one very large paper page was . . . not quite so good as the pulp magazine stuff. It wasn’t even painted art, but bad Photoshop. There was a man, who looked pretty much like a photo of a younger Edgar, struggling to hoist up what looked like the result of forced breeding between a megaphone and an old beer keg. He stood in profile in a sort of null-space. Much of the rest of the cover was taken up by a photo of a spiral galaxy, with the faces of old women just plopped on top of the galactic arms. They were all white women.

  “That’s mine,” Abuelita said.

  “I’ll be sure you to send you a copy, as a courtesy, when the book is printed.”

  “A courtesy,” Jeremy said.

  “The contract doesn’t give me any obligations, but I’m pleased to send a copy of the book. Obviously, I may end up relicensing or reselling the property to a larger media company—movies, video games, VR, like you said. I can’t be tied to providing sample copies of Silex-branded properties to Mrs. Hernandez, here.�
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  “I did that,” Abuelita said, pointing to the Sisterhood of the Spiral. “The rat bastard, he wanted a Brotherhood of the Spiral. That doesn’t even sound good. I said, ‘It has to be Sisterhood.’” Her finger drifted over to the Shadow Lantern. “That was my idea too. But it’s supposed to be smaller, so you can hold it one hand, like the Greek philosopher who looked for an honest man.” She turned to me. “What was his name, Daniela? You were such a good student.”

  “I’m Rosa,” I said, quietly. “Daniela was my mother,” I explained to Edgar.

  “She’s getting confused,” Edgar said. “We’d better have her sign.” He glanced over at Jeremy, who nodded like it was his decision without even looking at me.

  “No. No, I don’t think so,” I said. I was surprised to hear it. “Abuelita, I want this. I want these Silex stories for me.”

  Edgar flipped the folder shut. “Why! You know nothing about him? You didn’t even know the character existed until a week ago. You think you’re going to sell it to Guillermo del Toro or something like that?” Edgar rolled his r’s ostentatiously, incorrectly even.

  “Abuelita, let’s go!” She hesitated, so I said, “Abuelo Santo is coming home and he’ll want dinner.” She got herself up out of the chair, a pneumatic piston. I left Jeremy to make apologetic white-boy noises at Edgar. He didn’t have much to say on the trip home, which was fine. Abuelita told us the story of “all soups” again, only this time starring poor mostly deaf Santo instead of the rat bastard, so I told her she already had plenty of soup cans in the cupboard.

  That night, I turned on my computer, clicked on the big blue W icon to bring up MS Word, and thought myself some thoughts. My grandmother was dying; I was born to be a psychopomp, just for her. If I had a Shadow Lantern, and walked around my life in ever broadening spirals with it, whom would I encounter, and what would I be able to do about them?