by Nisi Shawl
“Maybe you should consider pulling up stakes, retooling for the new millennium. As a cult writer in the US, you’re nothing. You have considerably less effect on how the world fares than a Hollywood screenwriter, which is low indeed in the social hierarchy. But as a cult writer in Russia, you’d have some clout. They are afraid of writers in Russia, and with good reason. You could leverage your celebrity into a political career, take control of that long-suffering country, and change the world. Of course, you could also get killed.” He sighed. “It’s a sad thing, but nobody kills writers in the U.S. They just don’t matter enough.”
“I will consider that,” said Swanwick, and did. It would not be so difficult for him and his wife to create new lives in another land. She was a public-health scientist, although, when provoked, she sometimes described herself as a career bureaucrat. Russia had jobs in either category; like everyplace else, it needed scientists more, and paid bureaucrats better. And Michael had always enjoyed caviar and sour cream, however difficult they were to obtain on the Jersey Turnpike. It could work.
But, he thought, it was time to get back on the road. They gathered up their things, recycled the trash, slapped on their canvas hats and a heavy layer of sunblock, and hit the road.
They continued north in Swanwick’s chartreuse 1959 Thunderbird, past service areas named for the heroes of New Jersey: Allen Ginsberg, Paul Robeson, William Carlos Williams, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Hoffa, Yogi Berra, and Jon Bon Jovi. Soon enough, they found themselves at the most intellectually exciting stretch of highway in the United States. Between exits 16E and 13A, the New Jersey Turnpike at that time passed over the Passaic River. The General Casimir Pulaski Skyway, a masterpiece of Depression-era engineering, soared off to one side, crossing the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers in great lattice-work leaps. As the car approached New York City, the primeval Meadowlands swept off on the left, balancing the demands of nature and of solid-waste disposal, and the darkly crystalline rectangles of the Manhattan skyline arose to the right. Gleaming networks of railroad tracks recalled to them the glorious empire, created by commerce and forced labor, that had, until the new century and its disasters, sustained the American Dream. Where the towers had been there was still, in 2005, negative space.
◊
The car containing the two men sped across the George Washington Bridge and made its way, under Swanwick’s instruction, to Delany’s residence. Chip Delany, ever hospitable, invited Michael Swanwick to come upstairs and continue their conversation, but Swanwick, by now lost to American literature, made a hasty excuse in mumbled Russian, and disappeared into the gray fog of urban twilight.
Billy Tumult
Nick Harkaway
Billy Tumult, psychic surgeon, with six shooters on his hips, walks into the saloon. There are dancing girls dancing with dancing boys and dancing boys dancing together, and women behind the bar in hats made of feathers. There’s a fat man at the piano and a poker game in each corner. Up on the balcony there’s some comedic business involving infidelity, but no gunplay, not yet. Billy swaggers over and gets a beer. And make it a cold one, miss, okay? The barkeep leans across the shiny surface and prints a perfect lipstick mark on his cheek. Rein it in a little, cattle hand, she murmurs, you’re cute but this here’s a civilized sort of establishment.
Yeah, sure, Billy mutters, you can tell by the nice clean bullet holes in the furniture, I bet you dust ‘em nightly, and the barkeep actually laughs and says she likes his style. She sounds too much like Chicago, almost a moll, and Billy adjusts the filter a few notches to the left. Doesn’t do to mix your conceptual frame during a house call.
I’m lookin’ for a man, Billy Tumult says, probably comes over like a gunslinger. New in town, a solitary sort of fella, not much for talking. He’d be my height or more and looking to keep things quiet. Barkeep says she doesn’t know nothing about that, maybe talk to the fat man, fat man hears everything, and Billy Tumult knows she’s lying and she knows he knows and she blushes: talk to the fat man, and he says okay.
Billy turns his back on the bar and lets his hands fall down by his sides. Six shooters be damned, they’re for show and to take care of any ambient hostility, the real weapon is invisible to these good townsfolk, the Neuronoetic Interference Scalpel 3.1.a holstered in the small of his back. He can clear and fire it in under seventy subjective milliseconds, literally faster than thought unless the thought is a really bad one. Patient in this case presents with anhedonia, and that’s pretty damn bad.
He looks around at the room, and has to hand it to the guy: these are well-imagined people, and there’s a decent ethnic mix. He’s pretty sure that cardsharp is supposed to be a Yupik, for example, which may not be authentic—you surely didn’t get a lot of Eskimo hustlers in the Old West—but it speaks well of the patient’s interior life. Most of Billy’s patients are assholes, by definition. Billy has no problem with assholes in the abstract. It is everyone’s God-given right to be an asshole, in fact it’s basically the default setting and you evolve your way up from there, but that does not mean Billy particularly enjoys spending time in worlds created by assholes, which is his working life. So this guy has problems but is less of an asshole than most and that is acceptable.
Billy walks over to the fat man. Fat man can’t see him, surely, not from this angle, but he shifts to a minor key, staccato. Mood music? Billy wonders if he should just flat out erase the guy. Better not. Don’t want to be talking to a patient’s lawyer about how you came to delete his memory of nine thousand nine hundred hours of music tuition. Never a good scene, there are lawyers and all that but the worst is the crying. Billy hates emotional display, he’s a fucking surgeon for crying out loud, not a therapist. You want to break things and scream about your momma you can go see one of those wishy-washy liberals on the East Coast. You want your problem hunted down and shot, you call Billy: mind medicine, open-carry style. Your psychological issue will bleed out and die and you carry right on with your life. It appeals to traditional men with sexual dysfunction, executive types who’ve suddenly discovered their humanity and want it gone, that kind of thing. Occasionally he does memories for divorce cases and once the State of Alabama had him kill a man’s whole history from the present back down the line, leave nothing but the child he’d been before he became a crook. They raised that fella back to manhood inside the system, and he’s a productive citizen now, although Billy went back and met him out of sheer curiosity and he’s kinduva a jerk, basically a boring-ass wage slave of the dehumanizing statist system. Not Billy’s problem, but he doesn’t take government work any more. One time they asked him to do espionage. Fucking torture bullshit. Billy said no, turned those fuckers in to the real law, the sheriff’s office, made a helluva stink, man from the New York Times came to interview him. Weirdest month of his life, so-clean liberal actresses draping themselves over his arm and whispering sweet nothings in his ear, sweet nothings and some really outré shit Billy was quick to take fullest advantage of because those chances do not come along twice. Weird, but really satisfying, sexually speaking. Got to hand it to the Democrats, they know from orgasms.
Hey, fat man, Billy says, you playing that for me? Fat man shakes his head. No, he says, I play what’s on the hymn sheet is all, and sure enough there it is written out. Turn the page, Billy says, give me a preview. Fat man does and growls, it’s a fight scene. Brawling or guns? Well, that’s kinda hard to tell, you better ask me what you want to know in the next few bars.
Where’s the new guy, Billy says. Lotsa new guys in town, fat man replies. No, Billy says, there ain’t, there’s only one. My height and taller, black hat, solitary fella don’t like to make friends. Oh, that new guy, fat man says. That new guy got hisself a room above the hardware store, has Missus Roth bring him food and all. He armed? Billy Tumult asks, and the fat man says that a patron that tough don’t go about without some manner of weapon but the fat man don’t know what kind.
Fat man turns the page on his hymn sheet and one o
f the poker tables flies up in the air. Fistfight, bottles flying and you goddam cheating bastard and blahsedyblahs. Dissolve to later.
Billy Tumult, walking down the street. Tips his hat to the ladies, bids the fellas good afternoon. Going to the Marshall’s office. Want to be in good with the local force. No stink-of-armpit law-keeper, this one, but a high buttoned pinstripe and waistcoat number, almost a dandy. What are the chances, Billy Tumult growls. Man might could be Billy’s brother, might could use him for shaving around that dandy moustache. Patient’s been thinking about coming to see Billy Tumult for long enough that he’s got hisself a tulpa in here, a little imaginary robot doing what the patient thinks Billy’d do. Ain’t that just the sweetest thing?
Marshall William says hello, and Billy says hello right back and they shake hands. It’s like icebergs colliding. The Marshall’s got two shooters on his hips, of course, just like in the brochure. What’s behind his back, Billy wonders, maybe a third gun, maybe a humungous nature of a knife. That would figure. But when they get into the Marshall’s office and the fella takes off his coat, mother of Christ, it’s a dynamite vest, a bandolier. The guy so much as farts wrong and they’re all in the next county over and fuck if he doesn’t actually smoke. Laws of sanity have been suspended for Billy’s oversold publicity-and-marketing hardassery. Thank God if the thing goes up the worst that happens to Billy is a damn reset and the whole surgery to redo from start, pain in the ass, but if this was the real world or if Billy was really part of this whole deal then he’d be pasta sauce.
Pasta sauce is inauthentic. Billy tweaks the filter again. He prefers the gangster aspect, can’t keep this horses-and-mud shit straight in his brain. Well, if the patient can have Eskimos, Billy can have pasta sauce, call it fair play.
I’m Billy Tumult of the Pinkertons, he tells Marshall William, come lookin’ for a dangerous man. We got plenty, says the Marshall, which one you want? Or take ‘em all, I surely won’t miss ‘em. I want the new guy, Billy says, the one in the black hat living over the store. The one Missus Roth has an arrangement with. Now hold on, begins the Marshall, no not that kind of arrangement, the feedin’ kind is all I mean, I got no beef with the Widow Roth.
Widow my ass, parenthesizes Billy Tumult, if I know how this goes, but never mind that for now.
He’s an odd one, sure, says the Marshall. Odd and I don’t like him and he don’t much like me. But I figure the one he’s looking out for is you, now I think on it. He offered me a whole shit-ton of gold, I saw it right there in that room, to tell him if a fella came askin’ about him. You say yes? Billy wants to know. No, Marshall replies. ‘Course not, he says, and rolls his shoulder.
Cutaway: a thin man naked in a room full of gold, lean like a leather-gnarled spider stretched too tight on his own bones. He tilts his head and listens to the sound of the town, and he knows someone’s coming. Slips down the gold rockface into his pants and shoes—demons evidently need no socks—and buckles on his gun. Not much of a thing, this gun. Small and dirty and badly kept. Buckles it on, long black coat around his shoulders. Tan galàn on his head: bare-chested Grendel in a hat, and that’s as good a name as any. Arms and legs too long, Grendel spidercrabs out of the golden room and into shadow, gone a-huntin’. Too fast, he’s under the balcony across the street, flickers in the dark alley by the blacksmith, by the sawbones, by the water tower. Too fast, too quiet. All of a sudden: it’s not clear at all who’s gonna win this one.
Billy Tumult doesn’t exactly see all this, not being present in the mis-en-scène, but he gets the gist because that’s the benefit of narrative surgery. You pay a price in hella stupid costumes and irritating dialogue, but you get it back in inevitability. Sooner or later they will stand in the street and one of them will outshoot the other, and Billy can do it over and over and over and over until he nails it; the other fella has to get it perfect every time. That’s the thing about your average cognitive hiccup or post-Freudian crise: they just don’t learn. That said, on this occasion there’s a sense of real jeopardy, contagious fear, and it takes some stones to go out on Main Street and walk down the middle, spurs clankin’.
Billy Tumult has those stones. He surely does.
Half-naked Grendel comes on like blinking, like he doesn’t really understand physical spaces. Which he don’t, but all the same he’s fast and he’s focused, he sees Billy the way they mostly can’t, sees him as an external object rather than part of the diorama. Not your common or garden mommy issue, this fucker, but a real nasty customer, maybe even a kink in the standing wave. Blink! Walking outside the smithy. Blink! Hat shop, dressmaker. Blink! By the trees outside the mayor’s place. Blink! Right there, dead on his mark where he should be for the showdown, except it’s too soon. Can’t draw down on him, not yet, the patient’s mind will fracture him away. It’s not the right time. Got to earn your conclusions. This is the chit chat segment, bad guy banter.
Heard you might be in town, Billy says, figured I’d come and see if you were that stupid.
White teeth under thin lips. Patient presents with anhedonia: can’t feel joy, can’t even feel pleasure, just nothing. Only pain and less pain, sadness and more sadness. Whole top half of his spectrum is missing. Grendel is stealing all the best stuff like a leech, keeping it in that room back there above the store.
Figured you’d stay out in the wilderness, Billy suggests, figured you had maybe a cave out there, livin’ on human arms and all, figured you’d feel safe being a wild beast. No place for you in here, you have to know that. It’s time to give it up. I’ll go easy on you. Like hell he will. Ugliest fucker Billy’s ever seen, standing there without moving his eyes, turning his head like a goddam owl. The weird face twists and tilts, and off somewhere behind there’s a laugh, an old woman cackle. Billy looks for her, can’t find her. Always check your corners.
Patient says he’s being watched, all the time, can’t shake the feeling, paranoia with all the trimmings.
There is no patient, Grendel whispers—Billy can hear it like he’s right there behind him, and then he is, actually is right there, cold breath on Billy’s neck—there’s just us.
Oh, shit, Billy Tumult thinks, like a lightbulb just before it pops.
◊
This is the cave where Grendel lives. Right now it’s in a room over the hardware store, but it could be anywhere because it’s basically a state of mind. It’s a cave because Grendel lives in it. If you went in—well, if you went in you’d probably die, but if you went in without dying—you’d see it as a great dripping space full of twisting faces drawn in black on shadow, lit by the glimmer of a solitary camp fire and the reflected sheen of bullion. By the fire you’d see Grendel, crouched in his long coat, roasting fish for his mother for her dinner. On a stout stick you’d see a head that looks a lot like Billy Tumult’s. It would be unclear if it’s a trophy or a dessert.
What Grendel sees, if Grendel sees or even thinks at all, we do not know.
◊
Billy Tumult, on his stick, takes a moment to contemplate the forgotten virtue of humility.
Goddammit.
He was operating on his own self. How did he ever get that stupid? And why can’t he remember? Well, he can think of reasons, reasons for both. Can’t be much of a psychic surgeon if you’ve got your own crippling issues, can’t exactly trust the competition much, can’t be seen to go to a therapist. How’d that play on cable? Not well.
And as to forgetting, well, that could be a mistake or a choice he’s made, maybe the stakes are high and he doesn’t want to cramp his decision making. Maybe he wanted to be sure he’d do what it took, deliver a cure even if some of the loss was painful. Maybe Grendel’s got roots in something Billy’d ideally like to hang onto, good memories from the old days, whatever. But clear enough: this fucker needs to be got, because he is one terrifying sumbitch.
Which is going to be hard to arrange from the top of a goddam stick in a goddam cave.
◊
Top of the morning to you, Mis
sus Roth, Marshall William says, tips his hat. And to you, twinkles the merry widow on her horse, thirty five years of age at most, sure in the saddle and a fine figure of a woman. William wishes she’d stop and pass the time a little but she never does. I hear there was some excitement earlier, she tells him, I hear it was quite unsettling. Oh, well, yes, there was some excitement, William says, but it’s all done now. A man come to town lookin’ for a fugitive, your Mister Grendel as it happens, but it was all a misunderstanding if you can believe it, and the fella’s gone on his way and no harm done. Is that right, says Evangeline Roth, is that right, indeed? And Marshall William assures her that it is, misses the flicker in her eyes, the hardness that says he’s just fallen in her estimation, fallen a good long way and may now never resurface. That’s fine, she says then, for Mister Grendel is a gentleman I’m sure. And she goes on her way to market. That’s a fine figure of a woman, William murmurs, and bold for a respectable widow to wear a vermillion chapeau to go out riding, bold and quite suitable on her to be sure.
Evangeline Roth married a young preacher in Spokane, Missouri, when she was only twenty, loved him more than life, saw him die on the way out west of a snake bite. The thing had lunged for her and he put out his hand to take the strike, the wound festered and that was that. They had no children: they were waiting for the right time. She learned to shoot from a carnival girl, learned to sit a horse the same way, has no intention of being a second class anything, not here or in any other town. Owns the hardware store in her own name and takes in lodgers when it suits her, knows fine well there’s a darkness in her house now, a bad place that needs dealing with the way you’d bag a hornet’s nest and put it in the river. Looks back over her sharp shoulder at Marshall William and growls. Useless.
But speaking of the river—she taps her heels to the flanks of the horse—well, now, wasn’t there a place once? A wide strand where all manner of things wash up, jetsam and littoral peculiars. Yes, indeed, some distance out of town, a half day’s riding and a little more. Widow Roth, with a few necessaries in her saddlebags, makes her way along the old mule trail and past the abandoned mines, across the yucca plain to the very spot, where the wide blue water winds about the sand, and removes her clothes to work magic. She has no idea if nudity is requisite, but likewise no intention of making a mess of things for the sake of crinolines and stays.