The combo played all the notes around “Stormy Weather” without stepping on the actual melody. I wandered through the huge house, past the murmuring stoners and half-dressed mating rituals in progress. My boredom felt like a jail sentence for trumped-up charges. Up on the third floor I heard classical music behind a closed door. Solo cello. I stood still and the hardwood stopped creaking beneath my boots. The door flew open. “What are you doing?” Moira asked. “Go away.”
I didn’t know yet that her name was Moira. She was the only other not-drunk person on the premises.
As soon as I said, “You’re really good,” it occurred to me that the music was still playing behind her.
“At what?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I don’t really like my friends even when they’re sober. I’m bored out of my skull.”
“It’s Starker performing Bach,” she said. To this day she still indulges me with that same not-smiling smile. “I’m studying, but you can come in if you promise to be quiet.”
She had a dress on that buttoned all the way up the front and ragg wool socks. The oak door groaned on its hinges.
“The dwarf feels a kind of trembling in the earth,” I say.
“That’s lowercase e, right?”
“As in Middle-earth.”
“Fine, from the ground. The big thing beneath your feet.”
“I am rolling for perception: four. Scheiße.”
“Your rolls suck.”
“You can use my dice.”
“You are not very perceptive.”
“It’s impossible to localize the vibration but it might be growing in intensity.”
“Is that an icosahedron in your sack or are you just happy to see me?”
“I cast mage armor. It lasts eight hours.”
The front door opens before I can have them roll again for initiative. Jason runs into the dining room and yells, “Neeeeerds!” at us and retreats giggling up the stairs.
Harry comes in and scavenges for leftover pizza. He is wrapped in a wet SpongeBob towel. Red juice covers his mouth. He grabs the Beholder miniature and floats it over the table making spooky sounds. The Beholder is his favorite monster. The Gelatinous Cube is his other favorite. And the will-o’-the-wisps out back. They are all his favorite.
The atmosphere changes when Moira comes in. “You, get in the tub,” she tells Harry. The sari she’s wearing clings to the wet bathing suit underneath. My wife is still extremely attractive—even more beautiful now than when we were in school. “Let Daddy play his nerdy game,” she says.
“Hey, Moira,” Jamin says.
“Hello, guys. How’s the game going?”
“Your husband is a terrible dungeon master.”
“The hummus was excellent, thank you.”
“I require a new set of dice.”
“Kobolds are dicks.”
“Language!” Moira says.
Jamin shouldn’t be allowed around children.
“Sorry—jerks. Kobolds are jerks.”
“Harold, upstairs now!”
Harry grabs a bouquet of Twizzlers and marches up to his watery fate. My wife goes to the kitchen. She fills the kettle and puts it on. The sliding door opens and closes.
“You’re a lucky man,” Dig Doug says.
“Kobolds are dicks,” Harry yells down the stairs.
We listened to the Cello Suites on repeat. Moira, still dancing in those days, had control of every motion and intake of breath. János Starker performed a series of small miracles. The winter sky brightened a little bit.
A pair of Doc Martens shook the floorboards down the corridor. I detangled myself from Moira and poked my head out the door. “Keep it down,” I said. “People are sleeping.”
“We need to get back,” Benjamin said. He had trouble standing. “I have a chemistry exam in—shit—two and half hours.”
Even asleep, Moira seemed composed and graceful. The semester was almost over, the mansion about be emptied. If I left I might never see her again. The night’s spell could be broken forever.
“Are you OK to drive?”
“Not even close.”
From Bryn Mawr to Villanova is a straight shot on Lancaster Ave. Two miles, tops.
“Get Farley to do it,” I said. I threw him my car keys. They hit him in the chest and fell to the floor. He swayed on his feet to pick them up. I closed the door.
The kettle whistles and Moira comes inside for a moment and then rejoins the will-o’-the-wisps.
That mansion burned down a few years ago. There are condos there now.
Lolth’s skeletal minions rise up scratching and crawling from the damp ground. Dozens of them come shambling from every direction until they encircle the party like the concentric rings in a decaying tree stump. The stench of moldering flesh fills the air. The creatures do not attack yet.
I could have driven them safely to campus. Even with the snow on the ground I would have been back to Moira’s room in twenty minutes with coffee and fresh pastries from Walter’s, and Farley would be sitting here right now in his Viking helmet.
My fist is clenched so tight that the d20 has indented my palm. If I have to be honest with myself, the answer is no. I would not do anything different. I would not risk losing all of this—Moira and the boys, the tepee and the will-o’-the-wisps—even if it meant having Farley back.
At this point, I can have Cropaz send in the cavalry to save everyone’s bacon or I can wipe out the entire party and be done for good with this stupid game and these so-called friends.
“Let’s stop here,” I say. “We’ll pick this up next Wednesday.”
Their death sentences have been commuted for another week.
“It is a work night,” Gregor says.
“At least you don’t have a thirty-six-mile commute.”
I am not a good person. I understand that. It’s a fact I can live with.
The guys collect their things and leave much too slowly. The dining room is a pigsty. I turn off some of the lights and pour the remaining half of my beer down the drain. On the deck, the summer air is muggy but tolerable. A citronella candle burns on the railing next to where Moira has hung her bikini bottoms to dry. I pull a chair next to hers and she reaches for my hand.
We still own those Cello Suites CDs. They skip now, but we keep them around.
The End of the End of the World
Stephen O’Connor
When Dawn was nine, she would lie on her bed and think of infinity while crickets filled the night with tiny cries. First her mind would go to the moon, then Mars, then to the edge of the Milky Way. From there, she would cross unimaginable emptiness, passing the Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy, and then galaxies so remote they were little more than theoretical possibilities. Soon the known universe was nothing but a trail of glowing dust shrinking behind her back, while the unknown expanded all around her, filling itself with ever more galaxies, clouds, black holes, and ever vaster emptinesses, so vast that the Milky Way, the planet Earth, New Jersey, her town, her split-level home, and even she herself, lying on her bed in a cotton nightie, diminished to entities of such profound insignificance they trembled on the edge of nonbeing—and in that instant she would lapse into a peacefulness so complete she could not distinguish it from joy.
The first time Dawn sees the bearlike young man with hair like a petrified dust cloud, he is standing outside the observatory with a glossy green-black glob resting on his hand. Feeling her gaze, he looks up and smiles. “A salamander,” he says, and swings his hand around gently so that she might see.
When Todd was nine, space was something like a jungle gym into which, aided by rocket ships and wormholes, he could climb from planet to planet, star to star, galaxy to galaxy, until he reached the edge of the curved universe, where, by a miracle that only he might accomplish, he could slip through whatever it was that marked the boundary between existence and all else and enter a realm where no law of nature made sense and even mathemati
cs had to be completely reimagined.
“Doesn’t that kill them?” Dawn asks the bearlike young man. He is still smiling, and she decides he is excessively stupid.
“What?” he says.
“There’s something on our skin,” she says. “It destroys their protective layer of mucus.”
“Oh.” The smile fades. “Really?”
“Of course,” she says, but all at once it occurs to her that she might be thinking about fish. Or moths.
As the young man looks down at his hand, the salamander oozes over the tips of his pressed-together fingers, hits the rust-red gravel path, and, slapping the ground with its starburst feet, wriggle-walks into the high grass, where it is soon only an intermittent hiss and a twitching of green blades.
The young man smiles again, but then he looks worried. “Uh,” he says. His smile comes back, but it’s the neurotic twin of his original smile. He thrusts the hand from which the salamander has just oozed in Dawn’s direction. “I’m,” he says, “Todd Sbagliaro.”
She sidles around the hand, in the direction of the observatory door. “Pleased to meet you.”
Dawn is forty-three and Todd is thirty-eight. It’s the stuffed-sausage rondure of his neck and cheeks that makes him look two decades younger than his true age. Also he has more than the usual allotment of human facial expressions. In between those connectable to things he is actually saying or doing, his eyebrows wriggle or tilt, and his mouth forms sneers, astonished Os, or dreamy smiles, all of which make it seem as if he is having spirited interactions in two or more dimensions simultaneously. Dawn, on the other hand, suffers from an expression deficit, and the majority of the expressions she does make are most commonly seen on gargoyles. She’s six feet tall, sapling skinny, and habitually walks around with her forearms raised and her hands dangling. She has frequently been compared to a praying mantis.
Seven months previously, Dawn and Todd each received an e-mail from the Wendall Institute for Interstellar Investigation offering them a three-month summer fellowship at the institute’s “state-of-the-art observatory and astrobiological think tank” in Wendall, Montana. This year’s fellows, “prominent scholars in the fields of radio and infrared telemetry, exoplanet habitability, hypothetical neurology, interstellar communication, and the sociology of advanced civilizations,” would be investigating “The Problem of the Quiet Universe.”
The e-mail did not expand upon the precise nature of the “problem,” nor was the linked page at wiii.org any more illuminating. But photographs on other pages of the website showed mule deer grazing in a field of radio telescopes, a silver observatory gleaming atop a crag of red volcanic rock, and a gaggle of stubble-cheeked men in enormous cowboy hats playing guitars in front of a wall of bison, bear, and pronghorn trophy heads.
In addition to free access to research facilities, fellows were provided with room and board, expeditions to “natural and historic attractions,” and a stipend of $50,000. Dawn was a professor of astronomy at Texas Tech, but had just been denied tenure. Todd’s thesis on the physics of orphan-planet formation was ten years overdue and he worked as a salesclerk at Amoeba Records in Berkeley, California. Neither he nor Dawn hesitated more than half a minute before accepting the invitation.
When Dawn arrived at the airport, a white van with W.I.I.I. inscribed in two-foot-high evergreen letters on both flanks was waiting for her. The driver looked fifteen, but was wearing a white blouse with a gold brooch at the collar, a slim-fitting gray skirt, sheer stockings, and four-inch heels. She worked in the hospitality industry, she told Dawn, and only drove for the institute to save money for college. She wanted to major in hospitality. “That’s the only kind of work there is around here,” she said.
The receptionist in W.I.I.I.’s administrative office was tall and athletic, with Windex-blue hair. She was wearing cargo pants and a T-shirt with a hole just above and to the right of her belly button—apparently a cigarette accident. She touched Dawn on the shoulders and upper arms as if they were old friends. She smiled as if they shared a salacious secret. Her name was Jen. “We are so honored to have you here, Dr. Finnkeisse,” Jen said as they walked across the grounds toward the Fellows’ Residence. “Dan can’t wait to meet you!” That smile came back and she stroked Dawn’s upper arm.
Dan was Dan Wendall, the founder and benefactor not just of W.I.I.I., but of the town of Wendall. He was an oil and uranium tycoon and had more money than half the countries in the world combined. “His interest in the Earth naturally led to his interest in the sky,” Jen explained. Two hundred and fourteen people lived in Wendall, and two hundred and two of them were Dan’s top executives, their families, his wife, six children, and himself.
Dawn’s room looked like a room in a motel that aspired to be a room in a bed-and-breakfast: doilies, glass-knobbed dresser, Shaker-style headboard, marble-top sink in an alcove composed entirely of mirrors. “Make yourself at home,” said Jen. “Dinner is at seven o’clock.” When she left, the room turned dim and lonely.
Atop Dawn’s dresser was a photocopied list of the current W.I.I.I. fellows, three of them among the outside experts her department had approached when she went up for tenure. All three probably knew that she had been turned down. They might even have written the very letters that sabotaged her case. She lay on the bed and covered her face with her hands.
After a while, the vault-like silence inside her room made it impossible to breathe. She went for a walk.
The dining hall looks like the restaurant at Mount Rushmore—or at least how that restaurant looked in North by Northwest. Dawn has never been to Mount Rushmore, and she doesn’t remember the movie well. But she does remember that the restaurant had two-story-high windows facing the stone presidents. This dining hall has two-story-high windows facing miles of ultragreen grass, a black sprinkling of Angus cattle, and a range of hills shaped like shark fins, each with two or three rust-red boulders on its flanks. There is room for a hundred people at the hall’s redwood tables, but only one seat in the whole room is occupied—by the bearlike young man with the smoke-like hair whom she encountered on her walk. His back is to her. He is facing the view. Dawn contemplates taking a seat at another table, but then realizes that if she sits opposite this strange young man there will be less chance of her winding up face-to-face with one of the outside experts. “Hi,” she says, sliding her plate between the silverware across from Todd.
There are things about sex that Todd just doesn’t understand. Do women actually like to cover their bodies with strapped-together pieces of black leather and have their wrists chained to the bedposts? Do they really find their own breasts so sexy that they can’t help fondling them every time they wake up? There is a way that perfectly ordinary men make the transition from standing beside a woman at a bus stop to lying naked with her under the covers of a bed—what is it? Of course he has seen countless movies and read countless books in which a series of deft insults traded with wry smiles leads directly to a full-body clinch under the pouring rain—but how is it possible to come up with so many deft insults in a row? Or even just one? And why is it that insults open the door to physical union and not frank declarations of love?
Todd can actually imagine proclaiming love to a woman, or looking into her eyes and asking if she would be interested in kissing him. Many, many times he has sat beside a woman in a classroom, or stood next to one at a record rack and wanted to cover her small, smooth hand with his big, hairy one—but why is it that every single time such a thought enters his mind, his ears go hot, the room begins to whirl, and a queasiness twists up from his stomach into his sinuses? Why is it impossible for him to speak even the word “hello” in the presence of a beautiful woman? Why do the very desires that propel the entire human race into one another’s arms cause him to writhe in a silent, sweating mass of shame?
“Where is everybody?” says Dawn.
“Excuse me?” says Todd. They have eaten in silence for the last six and a half minutes. The sun has gone from be
er gold to brick-dust orange. Fin-shaped shadows are rising along the slopes of the shark-fin hills.
“There’s nobody here,” says Dawn.
Todd looks over his shoulder, turns back, and shrugs. “Jen said some people would be delayed.” He impales the last elbow of mac ’n’ cheese on his fork and puts it into his mouth.
“Looks like everybody’s delayed,” says Dawn. “I don’t see how that’s possible. There must be sixty people on that list they left in our rooms, and they’re all supposed to be here today.”
“Fifty-seven.”
“What?” Dawn’s brow furrows vertically. She pushes her face forward and squints. Her hair is black and stringy, but she looks a bit like Joni Mitchell. Same cheekbones; that wide mouth and broad upper lip. As Todd begins to construct an image of the body underneath her fleece vest and T-shirt, he has to look away.
“Fifty-seven,” he says. “On the list.”
“Oh.”
When Todd looks back, one side of Dawn’s mouth is smiling and her opposite eyebrow has formed a skeptical check mark. She shakes her head and leans back in her chair. “Anyhow,” she says, “it seems totally bizarre to me that fifty-five out of fifty-seven people should fail to show up on the day a conference starts. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“Maybe it’s like ‘The End of the End of the World,’” he says.
Again her brow furrows, her face juts forward, she squints. But this time she doesn’t say anything.
“You know,” he says, “that Bradbury story—about the village that’s so remote it never gets the news the world has ended, and so people just go on with their normal lives.”
She lets out a loud, flat “Hah,” smiles, and shakes her head.
Todd’s face goes watermelon red and his ears start to burn. He wonders if she thinks he made a joke.
A half dozen teenagers in white aprons and muffin-shaped chef hats stand behind the brushed-steel serving table where three hundred pounds of uneaten pot roast, Cajun chicken, mac ’n’ cheese, and assorted other dishes steam under orange heat lamps. One of the teenagers—the girl who picked Dawn up at the airport—waves her spatula and says, “Hope everything was to your satisfaction.” The rest just stand there looking as if they are waiting for their grandmothers to finish taking an embarrassing photograph.
Affinity Page 9