Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  At last, he made a deal with the landlord’s teenage son: the boy agreed to deliver a cartonful of groceries to Paul’s apartment every other week, for a price. For a few dollars more, the boy eventually agreed to pick up Paul’s rent check when it was due and deliver it to his father, and to carry the garbage downstairs a couple of times a month if Paul would bag it and leave it outside his door. In effect, this deal meant that Paul no longer had to go outside at all, for any reason. It was much better that way. Perhaps his savings would not hold out long at this rate, but he could no longer worry about that. It was worth it to have to cope only with a wedge of the world—the crack of a half-opened door.

  Behind that door, Paul continued to erode.

  Supper was beans and franks and brownbread. The boy didn’t mind the beans and the brownbread, but his mother had insisted on boiling the frankfurters, and he hated them that way—he hated watching them plump up and float to the surface of the boiling water, and he especially hated the way they would split open and ooze out their pinkish innards when they were done. His mother had been making beans and franks a lot the past few months, because they were cheap and very quick and easy to make. Once she had made more intricate meals, but she was so distracted and tearful and busy lately.

  Now she was always having to leave him with Mrs. Spinnato while she went into town unexpectedly, or talking on the phone for hours with her voice pitched low so that he couldn’t overhear, or talking in that same low voice to Mr. Halpern the lawyer as she served him coffee in the parlor, or to her cousin Alice or Mrs. Spinnato or Mrs. DeMay in the kitchen, the bss bss bss of their whispering filling the air with moth wings and secrets.

  And so supper was usually late; and he got beans and franks, or what his mother called “American chop suey,” which was a frying pan full of hamburger and garlic powder with a can of Franco-American spaghetti dumped into it. Or TV dinner. Or hamburgers, or tunafish salad. Or spaghetti noodles with just butter and garlic on them instead of spaghetti sauce with ground meat. Any of which he liked better than boiled frankfurters, but his mother was still being mad at him for running off, and she wasn’t in a mood to listen to complaints or to let him get away without finishing his supper. So he ate, affecting an air somewhere between sullen and philosophical.

  His mother ate only half of her own meal, and then sat staring blankly at the stove and pushing the rest of her food aimlessly back and forth on her plate. Too restless to sit down at the table, she had pulled a stool up to the kitchen divider to eat, and she kept getting up to pace across the kitchen for condiments she subsequently forgot to use. She had been packing and cleaning all day; her eyes were shadowed and bloodshot, and there was a grimy streak across her forehead. She had forgotten to take off her apron. Some hair had pulled loose from the bun she’d tied it in; it scraggled out behind her head like an untidy halo, and one thick lock of it had fallen down over her brow. She kept brushing it out of her eyes with absentminded irritation, as if it was a fly. She didn’t speak during supper, but she smoked one cigarette after another, only taking a few nervous puffs of each before she stubbed it out and lit another. The ashtray in front of her had overflowed, spilling an ash slide out across the porcelain countertop.

  The boy finished his supper, and, getting no response at all when he asked if he could be excused, essayed a cautious sortie toward the door. His mother made no objection; she was staring at her coffee cup as though she’d never seen one before. Encouraged, the boy pushed the screen door open and went out on the porch.

  The lurid welter of color in the south had expanded to fill half the sky. The boy stopped on the bottom step of the porch, sniffing at the world like a cautious, curious dog. There was no wind at all now, but the crackly electric feel of the air was even more pronounced, as was a funny electric smell that the boy could not put a name to. The sun had been invisible all day; now it showed a glazed red disk just as it was going down behind the western horizon. It looked wan and powerless against that smothering black sky, as if it was no longer able to provide either heat or light—a weary bloodshot eye about to close at the edge of the world. But the landscape was bathed in a strange empyreal radiance that had nothing to do with the sun, a directionless undersea light that seemed to come from the sky itself, and which illuminated everything as garishly and pitilessly as neon. In that light the big chestnut trees seemed dry and brittle. Their branches were still now, held high like arms—thrown up in horror. There was a halcyon quiet everywhere. The world was holding its breath.

  “Don’t think you’re going to run off again,” his mother warned. She had come up behind him silently on the porch.

  “I don’t, Ma,” said the boy, who had been thinking of doing just that. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “You bet you aren’t,” his mother said grimly. She glanced irritably at the threatening sky, then glanced away. The eerie light turned her face chalk-white, made her lips a pale, bloodless gash—it almost seemed as if you could see the shadow of her bones inside her flesh, as though the new radiance enabled you to see by penetrating rays rather than by ordinary light. “The only place you’re going now, young man, is up to bed.”

  “Aw, Ma!” the boy protested tragically.

  “I mean it now, Paulie.”

  “Aw, Ma. It ain’t even dark yet.”

  She softened a little, and came forward to rumple his hair. “I know you’re excited by the storm, baby,” she said, “but it’s only a storm, and you’ve seen storms before, haven’t you—this’s just a bigger kind of storm, that’s all.” She smoothed down the hair she’d ruffled, and her voice came brisker. “Mrs. Spinnato will be coming over in a little while to help me pack the rest of the china, and I don’t want you underfoot. And I know what you’re like on a long car trip, and I don’t intend to have you all tired and crotchety for it tomorrow. So you go to sleep early tonight. Get on up to bed now, young man. Scoot now! Scoot!”

  Reluctantly, the boy let her herd him back inside. He said goodnight and went into the parlor, headed for the stairs. He felt spooky and oddly out-of-place in the parlor now, and he transversed it as quickly as he could. The furniture had been moved back against the walls, and the room was full of boxes and cartons, some only partially packed, some sealed up securely with masking tape. Dishes and glasses and oddments were stacked everywhere, and the curtains had been taken down and folded. The parlor looked strange stripped of all its familiar trappings, knickknacks, paintings, lace doilies, things that had been there for as long as the boy could remember. Without them, the parlor was suddenly a different place, alien and subtly perverse. Seeing the room like that made the boy sad in a way he had never been before. It was as if his life was being dismantled and packed away in musty cardboard boxes. Tomorrow they were going to Ohio to live, because his mother had family there, and after that he wouldn’t have a father anymore. The boy didn’t understand that part of it, because he knew his father was living in a house on Front Street, but his mother had told him that he didn’t have a father anymore, and somehow it must be true because he certainly wasn’t coming to Ohio with them.

  The boy went upstairs and changed into his pajamas, but before going to bed he got up on a stool and peeked out of the high bedroom window. The clouds in the southern sky had thickened and darkened, and they were streaming toward him like two great out-thrust arms. Although the trees outside were still not stirring, the clouds were visibly moving closer, as though there were a wind blowing high in the sky that had not yet reached the earth.

  One gritty, rain-filled morning Paul was roused from somnolent daze by a loud hammering at the apartment door. He swam up from the living-room couch bewildered by the sound. Automatically, he crossed to the door, and then stood shivering and bemused behind it, his fingertips touching the wood. More pounding. He snatched his hand away from the vibrating door-panel, hesitated, and then looked through the spyhole. He could see nothing outside but a hulking, shapeless figure standing too close to the lens.

  “Y
ou in there?” came a muffled voice from the corridor.

  Cautiously, Paul opened the door a crack and peeked out.

  It was the landlord. Behind him were two men in work clothes, hung about with tools and loops of wire cable.

  Paul could not think of anything to say to them.

  “We come in,” the landlord said rapidly, without a question mark. “Gutter’s clogged up ona roof ana roof’s filling up with rain. Water’s coming down inta the apartment down t’otha end d’hall. See?” He pushed forward, shouldering the door wide. Paul backpedaling to get out of his way. “Cain’t reach it up ‘are but maybe wecun git through to t’sonuvabitch frumin y’apartment, right? Okayifwecumen,” he said in one breath, and without waiting for an answer he was inside, followed by the two plumbers. They pushed by Paul and went into the kitchen.

  In a daze, Paul retreated to the living room.

  They were stomping around inside the bathroom now. “There’s an airspace behind this bathroom wall here,” one of the plumbers was shouting. “See, it used t’be a window and somebody plastered it over. We knock a hole through the plaster, we can get out inta the airspace and get a pump extension up to that outside drain on this side, right?”

  The other plumber came back with a sledgehammer and they began knocking the bathroom wall down. They dragged in cables and a spotlight, an electric drill, and a long hose-and-pump contraption that came up the stairs and snaked all the way through the apartment to the bathroom. Soon the air was full of dust and powdered plaster, the smell of wet ceramic-covered pipes and damp old wood. The spotlight dazzled like a sun in a box. Machines whined and pounded and snarled; people shouted messages back and forth. The pump thumped and thudded, and made a wheezing, rattling sound like an asthmatic gargling.

  Paul hid from this chaos in the living room. Occasionally he would peek out through the living room archway, trembling, aghast, gathering a ragged bathrobe tighter around him at the neck. The workers ignored him, except for a curious sidelong glance every so often as they strode in or out of the apartment. Paul tried to keep out of their sight. He felt dirty and weak and unwholesome, like some wet pallid thing that had lived out its life under a rock, traumatically exposed to wind and sunlight and predators when the rock is rolled away.

  At last, the workmen were finished, they gathered up their tools, rolled up their hoses and cables, and left. The landlord turned at the door and said, “Oh, I’ll send somebody around in a couple days t’fix up the hole in the wall, okay, buddy?”

  He went out.

  Hesitantly, Paul emerged from the living room. The kitchen floor was crisscrossed with wet dirty footprints, and there were little puddles of dirty water here and there. There was a large, ragged hole in the bathroom wall, with grey daylight showing through it. Plaster and bits of lathing had fallen down into the bathtub and the toilet, and formed an uneven heap on the bathroom floor. There was a strong musty smell, like wet wallpaper.

  Paul shivered and quickly retreated to the living room again. The broken wall filled him with shame and horror and helpless outrage, as if he had been raped, as if some integral part of him had been shattered and violated. He shivered again. It was no longer safe here. The rock ceiling had been torn away from his cave; his nest had been shaken down from the tree by the storm. He sat down on the couch and found that he couldn’t stop shaking. Where did he have to go now? Where could he go in all the world to be safe?

  The apartment was getting colder. He could hear the rain outside, dripping and mumbling past the hole in the wall.

  Eventually the shakes stopped, and he could feel himself going numb. He would have given anything for a working radio, just to get some noise in the apartment other than his own spidery breathing, but he had gone through the last of his spare batteries weeks ago, and it had never occurred to him to have the landlord’s son bring him some in the next grocery order. Instead he sat in the semi-darkness as the evening grew old and listened to the distant sound of other radios and televisions in other apartments that came to him through the paper-thin walls: faint, scratchy, and tuned to the confusion of a dozen different stations so that nothing was ever quite clear enough to comprehend. They sounded like whispering Gödelized messages reaching him from starsystems millions of light-years away. Toward dawn the other radios were turned off one by one, leaving him at the bottom of a well of thick and dusty silence. He sat perfectly still. Occasionally the glow of car headlights from the street would sweep across the ceiling in oscillating waves. It was so quiet he could hear the scurry of a cockroach behind the burlap that covered the walls.

  His mind was blank as slate. In spite of his enforced idleness, he was not doing any deep thinking or meditating or soul-searching, nor had he done any throughout the entire process. If any cogitation was taking place, it was happening on a deep, damaging level too remote and ancient to ever come under conscious review.

  When he thought about it at all, he supposed that he must be having a breakdown. But that seemed much too harsh a word. “Breakdown,” “cracking-up,” “flying to pieces,” “losing your grip”—they were all such dramatic, violent words. None of them seemed appropriate to describe what was happening to him: a slackening, a loosening, a slow sliding away, an almost imperceptibly gradual relinquishment of the world. A very quiet thing. A fall into soot and silence.

  Dawn was a dirty grey imminence behind drawn curtains.

  Outside it was by now a cold and gritty early spring, but Paul never noticed. He never looked out any of the windows during all his months of seclusion, not even once, and he kept the curtains drawn at all times.

  A needle-thin sliver of daylight came in through the crack in the curtains. Slow as a glacier, it lengthened out across the floor to touch the couch where Paul sat.

  A toilet flushed on the floor above. After a moment or two, a water tap was turned on somewhere, and the water pipes knocked and rattled all the way down the length of the building. Footsteps going down the stairs outside Paul’s door. Voices calling back and forth in the stairwell. A child crying somewhere. The sound of a shower coming from the apartment down the hall. And then, on the floor below, the first radio of the day began to bellow.

  One by one, then, over the next two hours, all the radios and televisions came on again, and there was the Gödelized babble of the previous night, although because people played their sets more loudly during the day, it now sounded like a thousand demon-possessed madmen shouting in tongues from deep inside metal rain barrels.

  Still Paul did not move.

  He sat motionless as marble on his couch while the living room curtains bled from grey-white to shadowblack again, and day once more dissolved into night. Twice during the day he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and each time he had returned to the couch immediately afterward. He had eaten nothing, nor taken any drink. Except for the occasional motion of his eyes as he sat in the darkened room, he might have been a statue, or he might have been dead.

  The night slowly decayed toward morning. Once there was a shot and a series of piercing screams somewhere outside in the street. Paul did not stir or turn his head. The sound of screaming police sirens came and went outside the building. Paul did not move.

  The radios and televisions faded one by one. The last radio whispered on in Spanish far into the night, and then it, too, died.

  Silence.

  When dawn shone grey at the window once again, Paul got creakily to his feet. His eyes were strange. He had gone very far away from humanity in the last forty-eight hours. He no longer remembered his name. He was no longer sure where he was, what kind of a place he was in. It didn’t seem to matter—the apartment had become the world, the womb, the sum total of creation. The Continuum. It might as well have been Plato’s cave, where Paul sat watching shadows on the burlap walls. A biological pressure touched off the firing of a synapse somewhere inside Paul’s brain, and a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern took over. In response to that pattern, he shambled slowly toward the bathroom. His
way led through the kitchen, which was still in deep darkness, as it was on the shadowed side of the building. Paul hesitated in the kitchen doorway, and a flicker of returning awareness and intelligence passed through him. He groped around for the light-switch, found it, and clicked it on. He squinted against the light.

  Almost every surface in the kitchen was covered with cockroaches, thousands and thousands of them.

  The sudden burst of light startled them and sent them into violent boiling motion. They came swarming up out of dirty cups and plates, up out of the sink, up out of overflowing garbage bags; they scuttled out across the kitchen table, across the floor, across the cabinet sideboard, across the stove. In an instant, the burlap walls were black and crawling with them as they scurried for their hidey-holes in the woodwork and the window moldings and the baseboards and the cabinets. Thousands of scuttling brownish-red insects, so many of them that their motion set up a slight chitinous whisper in the room.

  Disgust struck Paul like a fist.

  Shuddering, he sagged back weakly against the doorframe. Bile rose up in his throat, and he swallowed it. He reached out reflexively and shut off the light. The chitinous rustling continued in the darkness.

  Still shivering, Paul went back into the living room. Here the dawn had imposed a kind of grey twilight, and there were only five or six cockroaches to be seen, scurrying across the floor with amazing rapidity. Paul shuddered again. His skin itched as though bugs were crawling over him, and he brushed his hands repeatedly down along his arms. He was reacting way out of proportion to this—he was reacting symbolically, archetypically. He had been sickened and disgusted by this on some deep, elemental level, and now there was something reverberating through him again and again like the tolling of a great soundless bell. He could sense that thoughts were rippling just under the conscious surface of his mind, like swift-darting fish, like a computer equation running—to what end he did not know. Without conscious motivation, he reached out and suddenly tapped the spacebar of his typewriter. More cockroaches boiled out of the typewriter mechanism, scuttling out from under the machine, crawling up from between the keys on the keyboard, crawling up from beneath the roller.