Asimov's SF, December 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The porch seemed to have been imperfectly attached. The back wall was out of true, and with the roof's unusually wide and uneven eaves, gazing up at the house from below was a dizzying experience.

  Lex was so excited he raced for the porch. Daniel laughed. But then Lex stopped abruptly at the steps. “What's wrong?” Daniel called.

  “I don't think anybody lives here anymore!” Daniel caught up and Lex continued, “There's all these brown and gray houseplants on the porch. Lots of them—it's like a dead jungle up there. And the shades are down all the way around, except that one—it looks boarded up from the inside.”

  Daniel walked a little closer while his son stayed where he was. “It's okay, Lex. Come here, I want to show you something.” His son joined him slowly. “I don't think the houseplants have been dead that long. See, there are touches of green—maybe their care just got away from him.”

  “Why wouldn't he just move them inside?”

  Daniel considered. “Maybe there wasn't room for them inside.”

  “Dad, it's a huge house. Are we going to find a dead body in there?”

  “Let's hope not. Walk with me around the side.” After a few feet Daniel pointed. “See, I don't think that window is boarded up. It might be the back of a bookcase. The shade's fallen down behind it, trapped against the bottom of the glass. And the other shades, see how they're all pushed against the glass from the inside like that? I think that's because there are things inside stacked up against them, pressing the shades to the panes. Antonio probably doesn't want people looking inside, but I'm thinking he couldn't get to the shades to raise them even if he wanted to. Come on, let's go knock on the door.”

  Lex lagged well behind him going up the steps, keeping away from the dead plants and raising his arms to avoid any possibility of accidental contact. Daniel felt a little sorry for him and handed him a pair of plastic gloves. “Put these on, but just let me check out these plants.”

  “Dad, don't touch them.”

  “I don't plan to. Just looking, promise.” Daniel stepped closer to the miniature forest of crumbling stalks and withered leaves, leaning over to get a better sense of the interior plants. “I don't see any spots or blemishes or anything else suspicious. I really think he just stopped watering them, and I'm guessing some are root bound.” He looked over at his son, still pressed close to the far porch railing. “You know, plant diseases that make humans ill are pretty rare anyway. I can't remember the last report I saw . . .”

  “Rare doesn't mean perfectly safe.”

  “Okay, can't argue with you there.” Daniel went over to his son and put a hand on his shoulder. “Did you bring a breathing mask?” Lex nodded. “Then put it around your neck in case you feel you need to use it once we're inside.”

  “Won't that be rude?”

  “I wouldn't worry about that very much. Antonio himself isn't beyond getting a little rude at times.”

  Daniel knocked, swift and loud. The door had a spongy sort of quality and he could feel it shift in the jamb with each knock. After a few minutes the door shifted inward a crack, a reddish eye appearing above the chain. “Antonio? Is it okay that we came by? We went to the Mall, and I gather you don't have a shop there anymore.”

  The reddened eye blinked, then a thin version of Antonio's voice came out from behind the door. “Daniel? My house isn't really, well, company ready at the moment.”

  Daniel tried to smile reassuringly. “You know, I don't think that matters to us.” He could feel Lex's restlessness. “We just wanted a quick visit, and it wasn't very easy finding you.”

  The eye disappeared. Daniel glanced at his son, who still looked unhappy with him. There were a few moments of soft rustling inside and no more words from Antonio. But at least he hadn't shut the door yet. Then the chain clicked and the door eased open. “I apologize for my place—I never have guests, you see.” Antonio was wearing an old pair of pants under an oversized and tattered bathrobe that made him look hunched and shrunken. His face was red, his beard crusty. Daniel had never seen him this bad. “But since you went to so much trouble, I can't very well turn you away.”

  “Antonio, are you okay? What happened to your business?”

  Antonio struggled to get his glasses on. When he finally did, he looked startled, and a bit embarrassed, to see Lex there. “My arthritis got a lot worse—that's all it took. I couldn't manage the trip out to the Mall anymore, much less taking care of things in the booth. Just like that, it was over. I had to let everything go pretty cheaply. I'd been putting off the joint replacements for years—I didn't see how they could take care of me here—I'd be stuck in the care facility. Then I got old enough they wouldn't do it for free anymore—I missed the deadline.”

  “But there are still programs to get that kind of surgery for the elderly.”

  “They'd want to see my living space, Daniel.” He looked nervously at Lex. “Obviously I couldn't let that happen. My situation here, well, it bends a few rules.” Antonio turned abruptly, moving stiffly across the cluttered floor. “Let me get you fellows some chairs.” The debris—a trampled mix of papers, pamphlets, mail, and bits of packaging—shifted and rustled with each step. Daniel turned to check on Lex. His son was nervously twiddling with his breathing mask, but he hadn't yet slipped it on. Brave boy.

  “Dad, have you looked at this place?”

  “Well . . .” Daniel turned around, genuinely focusing on their surroundings for the first time. The house was dim, the few bulbs in a couple of chandeliers doing very little to cut through the gloom other than to lovingly illuminate the thick cloud of dust forever descending. They were standing in the entrance hall, an area about ten feet square whose floor appeared to be a colorful collage of paper items, the discarded mail deliveries from a previous decade. But along the edges the beautiful marble floor underneath could be detected. Directly ahead of them, across this trampled paper entrance, was a staircase to the second floor. Approximately two-thirds the width of each stair was being used for book storage, stacks two feet high or more. Much of the narrow passage on the right had apparently been used for sorting old magazines. At some point there had been a small avalanche that completely obscured entire sections. Dirty shoe prints all the way to the top showed that Antonio had kept using these stairs.

  The wide doorway on the right appeared to open onto a large dining room, if Daniel had guessed correctly that the wooden platform supporting numerous boxes of books and sheltering a similar quantity of full boxes beneath was in fact an old dining room table. It was too dark to see much of the room beyond, except for a patch of burnt yellow that might be a bit of window shade glowing from the sunlight outside. The angular silhouettes vaguely visible in this dimness practically reached the ceiling, however, suggesting to Daniel that the area was probably impassable.

  The spacious room off to the left from the entrance might have been a fancy parlor at one time, given the fine woodwork and the ceiling decorated with flowers, cherubs, birds. Now it was completely populated with boxes a good seven feet high. Some of the supporting boxes had partially collapsed, twisting and damaging the old hardcovers inside, and an attempt had been made to stabilize the stacks with a network of ropes and elastic cords attached to hooks in the woodwork, ceiling, and floor, suggesting cargo tied down on the deck of an ocean-going vessel.

  The various tied-together stacks made an assortment of sheer-walled islands in that location that continued at least partway into a room beyond, with narrow goat trails meandering between them that a man Antonio's size might navigate sideways. Some individual boxes had exploded under pressure, herniated time capsules vomiting paperbacks and catalogs and small objects over the other boxes, into the paths, and cascading into the entranceway where Daniel and Lex stood.

  In several corners there were great, brownish, crumbling piles of newspapers. Daniel supposed the ones on top might be readable, but he was pretty sure the papers lower down were crumbling to dust, adding their load of fiber to the thickened air.
>
  At several points in these rooms boxes had been pulled out with no consideration for the effects on the delicate balance, apparently to examine or display individual items. Such favored items were much in evidence, arranged everywhere you looked, but at least they'd been kept off the floor. Scattered among these there were also file boxes made of transparent plastic, no doubt meant to hold the more precious, smaller paper publications.

  Even with his vast experience sifting through bewildering streams of miscellaneous information, Daniel at first actually hadn't noticed all the bookcases, perhaps because this was how he expected books to be kept. Along the walls in every room, floor to ceiling bookcases stood, but so dim-lit and dusty and blocked by other things that they resembled decaying library-themed wallpaper rather than anything three-dimensional. Small, homemade bookshelves fabricated from planks and wire hung in the odd places above doorways and on the backs of the doors themselves. In one corner an actual net had been hung from the ceiling, its full catch of books threatening to escape.

  “Dad, I think I'm going to have to leave,” Lex stated shakily.

  “I understand, son.” Daniel turned around. Lex was wearing the breathing mask. He looked like a frightened surgeon. “At least I don't see any garbage. I'm smelling old books, old paper, probably mildewing newsprint, but nothing spoiled or rotten.”

  “Dad.”

  “I know, I know. It's still pretty bad. You know your way back to the public transport, right? There's that rail stop a block away, and I think the moving walk branches just a little further than that.”

  Lex was nodding a little too vigorously. “Dad, you should come with me. This isn't healthy.” But Lex already had one hand on the doorknob, so Daniel knew he couldn't wait, whatever his reckless Dad decided.

  Antonio shuffled into the room out of breath, carrying three battered metal folding chairs. “Sorry it took me so long. Been a long time since I needed more than one chair in here. Lex? Are you leaving already?”

  “He has a little problem with dust, Antonio.”

  “Oh. Oh, of course. It's bad stuff—I shouldn't be breathing so much of this old book air myself. I guess you just get used to it, but I tell you, it's a killer.” He looked alarmed at what he'd just said. “I mean, if you were exposed to it for an extended period of time, then it might kill you.”

  Daniel hadn't experienced this talkiness or awkwardness in Antonio before. He was feeling a little embarrassed for him. “Oh, yes, we understand. Lex would like to stay, but he really shouldn't.”

  “Dad, you should come too.”

  Daniel paused. “I won't be very long. I'll put a mask on.”

  “Oh, absolutely!” Antonio said with agitation. “You really should. I would, but I've been breathing it in so long, well, it probably won't get any worse than it already is. Maybe I've built up an immunity.”

  Lex waited, his hand still on the doorknob. Antonio raced over and grabbed one of the clear plastic boxes of small printed items. “You know what I've got in here, Lex? Ephemera. That's what we call it. It's quite an interesting specialty, really. They're paper printed items that were originally meant to be discarded after a relatively short period of time. They were never meant to be saved, certainly not collected. The people who used them considered them worthless. Garbage. I suppose it's really a dead-end specialty, I mean, that's all done electronically these days, isn't it? Tickets, advertising, menus?”

  Lex looked hesitant, nodded. “I guess so.”

  “Exactly. But you know what? These sorts of items are really of great historical interest. If you want to know how people in a particular culture actually lived, I mean on a day-to-day basis, you don't go to their history books, or to the things they wrote or said that they hoped might be passed down through the ages, the official record. No, you look at their temporary communications—their notes, their letters, their crime reports, advertisements, writings on sports and cultural events, even their menus. That's how you find out how they really lived. Their ephemera.” He stopped, looking expectant.

  “I see. Well, thanks, Mr. Ascher. That's really interesting.” Lex turned toward the door.

  “No, wait—I'm going to give this to you, or I'll put it in a bag, give it to your dad to show you later. I've got school-related ephemera in this box, you see: report cards, school announcements, a class newsletter students put together, a teacher's lesson plan, an old history test, even a school lunch menu. You'll be able to see how school was for students in another age.”

  Lex turned around shyly. “Well, thank you, Mr. Ascher. That's very nice. I'll look forward to it, okay? See you, okay?” He left.

  Daniel didn't feel he should stay long, and put his plastic gloves on. But several hours passed, and still he couldn't make himself leave. He'd never seen Antonio so manic—going from one box of books and magazines to the next, pulling items out, prattling on about their rarity or other special qualities, laying them back down in some random location, then going on to the next. Nothing was ever returned to its original spot.

  Here inside his home all traces of Antonio's arrogance had disappeared. He mumbled and fumbled with his things, nervous and always apologizing. “This place, this place,” he muttered, “it's like the inside of my head.”

  Now and then he would open a book, provide a few words of introduction, then shove it into Daniel's hands within an explosion of flying dust and fluttering pages. After coughing through a couple of such incidents Daniel snapped on his breathing mask.

  “I have one book in this house somewhere that I've been searching for for years. A first edition Where the Wild Things Are, very good condition at least, maybe a plus—I'd have to examine it again to know for sure. Do you know it?”

  “Of course—I read it as a child, and it was one of Lex's favorites.”

  “A classic. Beautifully illustrated. And a first edition is one of the most valuable children's books you could find—tens of thousands of dollars in VG or better.”

  “Something like that, I would have thought you'd put it in a special place, Antonio.”

  “I did! I had it well-wrapped in brown paper, and I put it on top of a box right over there—where I could always see it. I always try to put the really important stuff on top of everything else, so I'll always know where they are. Having all these things out in the open, it's as if they're physical extensions of my memory, but they don't go away on you at awkward moments.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I had a little, well, I call them ‘book-a-lanches.'” He winked. “It started up on the second floor. Something shifted, or fell—I don't know—there was some kind of chain reaction, and then this wall of books and boxes and miscellaneous paper came rushing out of the top of the staircase there, as if the entire second floor had ruptured, books slapping and pounding down everywhere, and the loose papers and magazines making this whooshing sound like a heavy load of sand pouring over the railings, covering this floor here, then pushing over into the next rooms, upsetting my careful arrangements.

  “My Sendak first edition was buried, moved, I don't know. That was at least six years ago and I haven't found it since. It's a shame—if I could sell that book I could solve most of my problems. I've got lots of books in here worth quite a bit of money. I just have to find them, then find someone who'll buy them. You know what they say, sometimes you don't know what you have, and sometimes you know what you have but you can't find it.”

  “What if it happens again?”

  “Oh, I don't think it will. There was a leak in the roof that softened some boxes. I've been up there a couple of times since, stuffing plastic into the ceiling, and I've moved boxes away from that damp place on the floor. There are other things needing fixing that I can't get to—too many boxes in the way. I have two rooms upstairs, Daniel, that no longer exist for me—I can't get into them. But at least with this one leak I can still reach it to do something.”

  “Maybe you should get it properly fixed.”

  “I'd like
to, but I don't think anyone else could get up there without knocking over my book stacks. You have to put one foot on that bare spot, then lean against the railing for leverage while you stretch a few steps up, pulling on the rail to get yourself up and over.”

  “Antonio.” Daniel searched for the right words. “You know you shouldn't have to do that.”

  “Oh. I know. But the thing about repairmen, there are so many permits required now, inspections, they ask so many questions, and they always have to check your records.”

  “I've wondered how you could keep a house like this, down here, so near the frames and everything else. The taxes alone.”

  “Daniel, I'm afraid I don't pay them.”

  Daniel opened one of the books lying by his knees. It was a study of steam power, with a number of speculations concerning possible future applications. The illustrations were wonderful. “I didn't see how you could,” he said, without looking up.

  “No, certainly not now,” Antonio said. “At first, I was only looking to give myself some time on the heating bill. I didn't need or want it toasty in here, but it was important to keep the pipes from freezing—a flood would have been disastrous—and I needed to have it warm enough in the house so that I wasn't tempted to use space heaters, which would have been equally disastrous.”

  “I'd be terrified of a fire in here, space heaters or not. I'm sure you've violated fire codes.”

  “I know, Daniel, I know—I've let it all just—well, it's completely out of hand. But my original intention was that I'd let myself have a break on the heating bill for just a few months. I'd volunteer, do charity work, to make up for it. There was a fellow at the Mall in those days—Stephen—who was a real computer whiz. He told me he'd get me that break. When I saw him a few days later, he said that they'd tightened things up a bit security-wise and the only way he could figure how to do it was to ‘take my house off the books.'