by Melanie Tem
Creatures gathered around him, none of them masked anymore, all of their faces looking new and strong. “You have liberated us,” they sang to him, a song he’d never been able to hear before because of the music of the masks. “Now we will take you home.”
They made a sack for him and ferried him through the iridescent viscosity, took him back through the fear and wonder of his dreams and out into the chilly Saturday morning of the other world. The warehouse was empty. His bicycle was where he’d left it. His package had been delivered.
BEAUTIFUL STRANGERS
At first Mary was sure she’d known him before. There was something so familiar about him, at the same time that he seemed odd, different.
In the dim light of the bar and through the alcohol haze she’d finally managed to induce, she tried to stare at him, although it was hard to keep her gaze focused. She wondered, briefly, if maybe she’d left her protective lenses in, then remembered they were back in her room’s supply chest. He was paying no attention to her. Men often didn’t notice her until she made the first move.
He faded into the shadows and smoke, and she thought he might not be there anymore. Then he slowly slipped into focus again, as if he’d moved, or as if the light had changed. She didn’t think either of those things had actually occurred; it was just that she was drunk, or not drunk enough.
He was beautiful. Seductive. Terribly familiar. Surely she’d known him somewhere before.
Maybe it had been as long ago as her second week out with the company, her first drop. The vague impressions she seemed to have of him now could well have come from some of those early fantasies she’d had of the kind of men, or non-men, she might find out here. Back then she’d been naive, desperate to please, willing to become anything anybody wanted her to be. The stewards had nearly driven her planetside that first day in port. Perhaps in that first port there had been a man like this man: watching, waiting, familiar in this unfamiliar landscape.
Mary shivered and rubbed her eyes. She was tired and lonely, conditions so characteristic of her life that she was surprised she even noticed them anymore. Remembering how she’d been in those early days, which were not really so long ago, made her ashamed, made her call for another drink. The bartender pretended not to see her; he sometimes did that when he wanted to slow her down. For now, Mary let it go and stared again at the beautiful dark stranger at the door.
Maybe she’d known him in Brotskyville or Smithport, one of the innumerable little frontier towns with aluminum-alloy shacks and hydroponics and not much work. Mansfield, Stellarton, Unity, Quest. With fancy names or pedestrian, they were all nothing more than stops on the line for the big interstellar subs.
This one, planet and town, had—with foolish nostalgia or failed wit—been dubbed Wheat. Since she’d been here she’d seen nothing growing but nameless weeds, dun-colored and frayed like the last of her grandfather’s sickly Kansas grain, but thicker, sharper at the edges, ready to slice through garments and skin.
Suddenly the man looked at her and, she thought, smiled. Mary’s skin tingled, and she realized she couldn’t possibly have known him or anyone like him before. He was breathtaking.
She’d dreamed about him, though, and he’d given a form to her longings when she’d been drinking alone or when she was finishing with a particularly boring customer. He wasn’t of this world, or any other she’d physically lived in.
But now he’d walked through the rickety door of this nondescript establishment in this dull little backwater town as if he were a regular. She couldn’t tell whether he was looking at her or not.
She’d met enough men in this place that some things were second nature by now; she looked him over, tried to meet his gaze. His skin was dark but gave the impression of being transparent, like night air almost too thin to breathe. His eyes were empty. And yet she knew he was staring at her.
Then he wasn’t. He moved from the doorway, and Mary caught her breath at the primal beauty of his body in motion. In ways she couldn’t specify, his movements were unlike those of any man she’d ever watched before, yet somehow she knew what to expect. He took a stool at the far end of the bar.
This time the bartender came when she signaled, but he made no move to draw her another ale. Mary tapped her glass impatiently on the bar and demanded, “Who’s he?”
The bartender glanced in the direction she’d indicated. “What are you talking about?”
Very deliberately, knowing he was being difficult because he thought she’d had too much to drink, Mary persisted. “The guy at the end of the bar. The stranger. Who is he?”
The bartender did an exaggerated double-take. Then he took the glass away from Mary and patted her hand. “No more for you tonight. When you start hallucinating in my establishment, you’ve reached your limit.”
“What are you trying to do to me?” She heard the rising panic in her own voice and knew he was right, she’d had too much to drink. A woman in her situation couldn’t afford to be afraid of anything, and here she was, afraid of the beauty and strangeness of this beautiful stranger and equally afraid he wasn’t really there. She grabbed the bartender’s substantial wrist and demanded, with considerably more belligerence than she felt, “What are you talking about, hallucinating? Why are you playing with my mind? I’m not that crazy. He’s right there.”
That was true. Although she didn’t dare turn her head to look at him again, she could see his reflection, or a suggestion of it, in the glass over the huge primitive painting above the bar. Fragments of his face hid in the shadows surrounding the stalks of wheat. She saw his dark hair with the odd scalloped hairline, his eyes that seemed to be no color at all. He was real. He was right there.
But suddenly she was also seeing—in the glass, in the painting itself—suggestions and reflections of other beautiful strangers. Suddenly she wasn’t in this lonely bar on this barren, lonely planet, trying to figure out reality, wasn’t clutching the bartender’s wrists with both hands to force him to admit what she knew was real. For a long, wavering moment she was somewhere else, not quite in the world of the painting either, but in a space between which was populated by creatures, suggestions of creatures whose forms and voices and names weren’t like hers but with whom she was quite at home.
She knew these creatures. She remembered their names and their functions in the heavy Russian accent of her Great-Aunt Sonia, who had believed in them the way people who’d travelled the dark between planets believed in the stars when they were back on Earth looking at pinpoints of light in the night sky.
Domoviye, who lived behind the stove and would ruin the house if they weren’t kept content. One-eyed Lishiye, whose whispering often lured men off the path into the dark woods. Rusalky, slender and beautiful as summer grain, dancing in the wind to induce the grain to grow. Dark and handsome Poleviki, who altered their height according to the growing season, and who would silently strangle the drunkard careless enough to trample the crops and fall asleep in the fields.
Sonia had often appealed to the fairies when times were hard on the Kansas farm, and times were often hard. Barely realizing it, the child Mary had waited for the fairies to speak to her, too, and sometimes she thought they had. She’d liked to think of them living in miniature behind the stove, or so tall between the growing green and yellow stalks of wheat. Living, like her, in the world, but, like her, strange to it all. Living in the spaces of the world, the parts in between. Alien and beautiful.
For a long, whirling moment, Mary was now one of them. A creature not factual but profoundly real, whose existence made sense and had a clear purpose, with an unspoken mythical name of her own.
But then the long moment passed, and the painting— antique, a little sloppy, part of the bar’s self-conscious and tacky “atmosphere”—was again only a depiction of a simplistic Kansas wheat field. Mary had often sat and stared at the painting when business was slow. Now, like an irritating tune she couldn’t get out of her head, it snapped back into focus and she w
as clearly outside it, an observer, much as she’d been in the world it represented, much as she was on this sickly little planet that ironically shared its name.
Nearly in the center of the landscape, atop an old-fashioned diesel tractor, sat a shirtless young man; muscles were inexpertly shaded under improbably bronzed skin. The spidery legs of an irrigation machine rolled away toward the low horizon. The picture was dominated by a warm, rippling, gold color, and heads of grain that were finely detailed in the foreground blended into waves to suggest distance. Across the bottom quarter of the painting was its title in elaborate gilt scroll: “Wheat.”
This was the country where Mary had grown up. The wheat fields had still been vast and golden like this, although no people had worked them since the prolonged drought and series of economic depressions around the turn of the millennium. Her grandparents and Sonia had operated one of the semi-private co-ops whose machinery, along with the even more sophisticated and efficient machinery of the agro-industrial conglomerates, had by then dotted the prairies, foreground and background. Back then it had never occurred to Mary that eventually somebody would paint a foolishly nostalgic painting of it, which would then hang in some atmospheric bar somewhere in the populated universe and make people feel homesick when they had no reason to be.
All her life there, Mary had felt lost. Hating the vastness of the prairie, she’d yearned for the vastness of the stars. She recognized every detail in the crude painting, but none of it felt like home.
The bartender had leaned his elbows on the bar and brought his face very close to hers. At this proximity, he almost didn’t look human. Each of his features separated from the rest and took on a life of its own: the nose a bulbous snail, the eyebrow a serpent. Mary found herself a little afraid of him.
The antique home-video unit in the corner blared dissonant, surprisingly disturbing music Mary knew had been called punk rock. On the white wall, indistinct forms gyrated and mouthed the lyrics out-of-sync. More atmosphere.
The place had filled with noisy patrons, almost all of them from the company. There was little else to do in this place. The stranger at the other end of the bar was almost lost in the crowd, but Mary knew he was still there.
“Mary, listen to me,” the bartender said earnestly. She thought she must reek of ale, then told herself he must be used to that by now as she was used to the various odors that came with her job. “Mary. You’re in trouble. You’ve got to get yourself some help. The company doctors—”
She stopped herself from jerking away from him only because she was afraid she’d tumble backwards off the stool. “Just get the hell out of my way, will you? I’ve got a living to make here.”
The bartender guffawed. “This should be interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a hooker put the moves on a figment of her imagination before.” Shaking his head, he went to wait on another customer, passing right by the handsome stranger as if he weren’t there.
Mary sighed and checked herself in the mirror above the end of the bar. The combination of ship’s inventory officer and whore still jarred her. Blonde hair cut regulation length just above the collar, and thick blue makeup in an Earth style that she knew must already be out-of-date. As the days and nights accumulated here, she took less and less care with her appearance, and it didn’t seem to matter at all to her customers. Sensory drugs and stimulation machines were readily available all over the frontier, and there were probably equal numbers of men and women, but actual whores were rare and easy money was always passing through. Mary’s customers didn’t care what she looked like or how much she charged; they cared only that she didn’t try to get to know them, or expect them to be interested in knowing her.
Someone sat down between her and the stranger, then waved to a friend across the room and went away. Mary moved several stools closer to him. Like closed tents on the gleaming, cracked surface of the bar, his hands were thin, long-fingered, with delicate skin and gleaming nails. He reminded her of things.
The voice of the computer in Sonia’s kitchen: On Sunday mornings she used to wake up to the peaceful, orderly chatter of the computer as Sonia prepared all the meals for the coming week, all the homemade cookies and breads and lunches, and filed them in chronological order.
The tiny fuzzy spores—she’d settled for calling them spores because everyone else did, but privately thought of them as having a touch of sentience—which had invaded her shack during one of the early pit stops on a close-in planet. She still dreamed about them sifting into the pores of her skin and, waking, thought they probably were still there.
A mentally retarded laborer aboard ship, whose mouth twisted when he laughed at nothing and whose eyes were so slow to focus that they looked hollow. Her Intro to Astrophysics prof at school, who’d had six fingers on his left hand. Aunt Sonia in the year before her death, refusing all the hormones and mental stimulation therapies, joyous in her senility, clutching at Mary’s hair, eyes turned inward to some other reality that had made Mary restless with curiosity and envy. Shadows on the low, distant Kansas horizon, drifting in and out of the silhouettes of wheat.
She didn’t know why he should make her think of such things, but the images came immediately, hungrily. Suddenly she was sure he’d said something to her, something so soft and intimate that it might have been the wind shifting sand outside or a dry clump of weeds rustling across the metal wall. But the sound had been articulated; she was sure there had been words. He wasn’t looking at her yet; he still faced forward, looking at nothing as far as she could tell, face devoid of any expression she could read.
Mary huddled over her glass, which was full again with the acrid brown ale made of whatever vegetation grew in this place; the bartender, she thought with some regret, must have given up. She took a long swallow of the stuff, thinking how stupid she’d been to join the company in the first place. She’d wanted a survey ship, and she should have held out. She had the training: fluency in several Earth and simulated languages, advanced degrees in interstellar anthropology, honors in research. But she hadn’t been willing to wait. This transport company had seemed a good way to sample many different worlds in a short time.
So far, though, all she’d seen were Earth outposts and a crew of humans whose customs and languages were essentially the same as hers, although she felt no kinship with any of them. And, anyway, reports from the survey ships indicated they were discovering nothing but new species of tiny flora and fauna. Mary longed to find a being she could engage with, fundamental alienness she could struggle with face-to-face, someone she could come to understand and who would understand her.
Hearing the whispering again, she slid impatiently off her stool and stood beside the stranger. “Hello. Would you like a little company?”
His eyes were half-closed, yet she thought they looked dreamy, unfocused. His hair fell oddly across his forehead and grew very low down his temples and neck, heavy black on dusky skin. He didn’t acknowledge her presence in any discernible way, but Mary knew he was aware of her as nobody had ever been, and that he understood what she wanted from him.
She touched his shoulder and bent closer to him, wondering if maybe his auditory perceptions were different, thinking that he might not have heard her over the blare of the nostalgic music and the shouts of the war-games players in the corner. His odor was startling—not unpleasant, certainly, but unexpected, a fragrance she was sure she’d never smelled before. “Hey, stranger,” she said, because it most often met with the response she wanted. “Can I buy you a drink?” It was something they might have said in an old vid; in any other bar she’d have felt silly, but here the anachronistic cliché was part of the ambience, and with this stranger nothing was out of place because, clearly, she was inventing the rules.
He looked up at her then—or, she interpreted his head movement and the peculiar scanning of eyes which appeared pupil-less as looking at her. He slid his narrow mouth into a gesture that resembled a smile. Afraid to break the connection, she kept he
r hand on his shoulder longer than she would have otherwise. She didn’t know what to expect, was as nervous as if this were her first time.
Finally, when he still said nothing, Mary sat on the stool beside him and signaled the bartender for another round. This time he came, but when she said, “Bring one for my friend here, too,” he said, “Mary, I can’t do that,” and would fill only her glass. The stranger didn’t seem to mind.
She had downed almost half the bitter ale in her glass before she thought of anything to say. “I haven’t seen you around here before. I thought I knew everybody on Wheat by now.”
“I’ve seen you,” she thought he replied, although his voice had such a startling timbre that she almost didn’t understand his words. Rapidly, she reviewed everything she’d learned in school about accent and dialect and idiom, trying to place his origin.
Finally she asked him, “Where are you from?”
He gestured with his long hands, a round sweeping double motion obviously intended to convey information to her, to answer her query. She had no idea what it meant, but she didn’t ask again.
Sipping the ale, Mary remembered the first time she’d approached a man in this bar—her awkwardness and shame, the skill she’d discovered in herself, the ability to keep a man at a distance safe for both of them while doing the most intimate of things. Dumped on this seedy backwater planet by a chief steward she’d turned down once too often for reasons that were obscure to her now, she’d had to make her way somehow. Whoring turned out to be no more distasteful than anything else she could think of, although there were days when it didn’t seem worth the effort.
On those days she’d appealed to the fairies, who might as well live in the in-between spaces of Wheat as Kansas, and apparently they’d answered her, shown her the way, because here she was, trying to pick up this strange and beautiful man. He was so beautiful that she could hardly look at him, so strange that she hardly dared understand what was happening between them.