The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  I looked at Cameron, and she looked at me, and shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what that was all about, either,” she said. “But maybe you’re more important to the future than I thought.”

  “What am I supposed to do with all this?” I put my head in my hands. “My wife betrayed me. People from the future are honored to meet me, for some reason. And I don’t know why. Can’t you use your magic cell phone to ask them what the fuck I’m supposed to do? Who are those people, anyway?”

  “I try to call them on it often,” she said. “No one ever answers. This time, they did. I guess they knew this time it was important. The guy who pulled Portia in, he was my old client, the one who gave me the safe, who recruited me to the cause. But I don’t know the girl. Maybe someday I will. The future’s a big place.”

  So it was. “I ask again, for the millionth time: Is it over? And what do we do now?”

  “Brunch was a good idea,” she said. “It’s a start. But first, I’ve got to do something.” She sat down at the desk, drew a piece of paper toward her, and began to write. I looked over her shoulder, terrified it would be another secret note for me, but she wrote:

  Next client. Stephen. Tuesday.

  “Now? You’re writing this note now?”

  “Mmm hmm. Time waits for no one.” She didn’t look up. “I write what was written. I produce the note I was given.”

  “Do you ever, I don’t know, write something different?”

  She looked at me then, and sternly, and she was almost even lovelier when she was stern. “Stephen. Some people just have to kill the golden goose. But some people, like me, are content to keep collecting golden eggs. I follow the rules. These rules, anyway.” She went back to writing, and I remembered the blacked-out portion at the bottom of the note, and looked to see what she wrote, thinking she’d stop me if it really was too personal. But what it said was:

  His ex-wife is behind it all. But he won’t believe at first. Let him figure it out for himself. Don’t let him read this part.

  At first, I was pissed off. Cameron had known, all this time, she’d known…but if she’d told me my ex-wife was a time traveler out to get me, without me seeing the things I’d seen first, I’d never have believed her. “Can you maybe not keep any more secrets from me,” I said. “Just in the future?”

  “Why? Are we going to be spending a lot of time together in the future?” She kind of smiled when she said it.

  “Whatever we’re in, we’re in it together now. They wanted to make me useless, but I’m going to do my best to prove them wrong. Besides, you didn’t have anything better to do on Christmas Eve than tend to my troubles, so I figure you can probably use the company. And anyway, your office could use redecorating. Consider me hired.”

  She laughed, but didn’t say no, and pushed some numbers on the safe’s keypad.

  The door popped open, and she stared into it for a long time. “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “The safe.” She folded the letter she’d written into thirds, slipped it inside, then gently shut the door. “There’s no new letter inside the safe. No letter from myself from a week in the future. There’s always a letter.”

  “Which means…what?”

  “It means either a) I’m dead or b) there’s some other good reason I’m not around to leave a note in a week’s time. Though I honestly can’t think what else it could be.”

  “Hey,” I said, lightly. “You’ve got lottery and stock market money, right? And we could both certainly use a vacation. What do you say we go to the airport right now and take two weeks in a little shack on a tropical island somewhere far away?”

  “That would be a good reason to miss writing a note,” she said slowly. She looked up at me. Those chestnut eyes. I could get used to seeing myself reflected in them. “What would we be doing on this island for two weeks, Stephen?”

  “What else?” I said. “We’d be thinking about the future.”

  The Indelible Dark

  by William Browning Spencer

  He watched the car come down the mountain. The autumn trees were full of muted color, and black clouds rolled in the sky, restive monsters bloated with rain. The road unraveled in a series of switchbacks, and the car, black, shiny as a beetle, appeared and disappeared amid the trees. Gravid raindrops began to fall, exploding on the road in front of him, and the boy closed his eyes and stood motionless. He could raise the temperature of his body by the power of his will, or, more admirably, he could acknowledge the discomfort and endure it. He preferred the latter.

  The clothes he wore were designed to shed the rain before it reached his skin, and his hair was shorn so short that there was nothing to muss. He opened his eyes and waited: a proper schoolboy, not of the elite, but of merited parents, no scars, no admonishments scribbled on his face, his hands.

  Now that the rain had asserted itself, there was nothing much to see. He hoped the car would not race by him, oblivious.

  The car came out of the rain. He saw that it was bigger than the cars he had seen at Ashes Ville, and he suspected it might be powered by the blackoil that had burned the old world up.

  The car slowed and rolled to a stop in front of him and the passenger door swung open. A black shaft—a weapon?—emerged, bloomed suddenly with a popping noise, and the boy stepped back, alert. An umbrella. The man beneath it was tall and seemed to vacate the car in stages.

  “Stepped out for a bit of wet, did you?” the man said. His face was pale, unlined but ancient-seeming, smooth in the way that a river rock is smooth. Faded ink encircled his neck. He grinned, displaying a row of tiny silver teeth. “Where you bound?”

  “George Washington City,” the boy said.

  “Well, fancy that! Same as ourselves. Come on. In you go.” The man ushered the boy into the passenger seat, closed the door, then opened the rear door and, folding again, knees and elbows like some intricate device, shut his umbrella with a fierce shake and settled in the backseat.

  The boy could sense no danger in the man behind him, no psychic crouch or killer’s caution, which meant: a) that the man was no immediate threat or b) that the man was a grave threat, an assassin who could hide the subtle body language of intention. There was another person in the backseat, behind the driver, and this other was seeking him with a bright, hungry intelligence that the boy perceived as heat on the back of his neck.

  He did not turn and stare. He suspected that the scrutiny was meant to be felt, and he did not wish to dignify it with a response. The boy turned his head slightly and regarded the driver. The man was a menial, an Albert or a Jorge, and possibly dangerous but predictable. He wore a grey uniform, and a hat, too small for his head, intentionally comic, demeaning, as was the present fashion in menials.

  They drove on in silence, through a blur of colored trees, the world under glass and melting. Sometimes the beauty of the natural world felt like an assault, and his defense was a memory of burning cities, streets littered with rotting bodies, hulking scavenger machines that spoke to each other in bursts of static and feedback howls. The memory was not his own.

  The one who studied him spoke, instantly revealing her gender. “You are a Cory,” she said. He turned now and saw a girl with silver-blue eyes and short-cropped red hair, intricate ink scrolls crossing her forehead like a veil.

  “My father was Andrew Cory,” the boy said. “My name is Mark.”

  “I’ve never met a Mark. I hope you aren’t vicious or sly. Can I trust you?” She offered a quick smile, tilted her head, studied him. She looked a mere girl, her slight body enfolded in shimmer cloth, moth-themed, green wings that seemed to flicker in the dark-blue shadows of the fabric. Her face was pale and perfect and her mouth, lipstick-shaped to mirror moth wings, revealed the giddy fashion sense of a child.

  He shrugged. “Why would you need to trust me?”

  “I don’t,” she said, frowning. “But I was hoping you’d say a simple ‘Yes’.”

  “Why?”

  She turned away and gla
red out the car’s window at the roadside flora. Here the bright orange of maples pushed to the front, easily upstaging the purples and dark greens of the false birches and dog pines. The man behind Mark spoke: “What she’s hopin’ is that you aren’t a bomb.”

  “Of course I’m not!” Mark said, turning to look again at the tall man whose eyes glittered with madness or amusement.

  “You don’t have to be offended, boy. There’s more than a few of your kin who walked into the thick of crowds, yanked their little peckers and blew themselves and everyone around them all to fuck.”

  “You are speaking of an old protocol,” Mark said.

  “It puts my mind at ease, hearing you say that. You surely have an honest face.”

  The girl spoke: “Solomon, be quiet. He’s not a bomb. I’d know if he was.” She leaned toward Mark and touched his shoulder. “My name is Mary Constant,” she said. “My people fight against Lethe’s Children.”

  “We all did,” Mark said. “The LC won.”

  “That is what they would have us believe. But imagine a world without them.”

  “I thought pirates had no politics,” Mark said.

  “Pirates? We are no pirates.”

  “The scrollwork on your face is pirate. This is your longman here, with a rope tatt round his neck and the augmented smile. You could be costumed revelers, I guess, but you aren’t.”

  “Why not?” asked Mary Constant. She had taken her hand from his shoulder and it lay in her lap with the other. She gazed down at her hands as though chastened.

  “I know the smell of pirates,” Mark said. “I bet you stole this vehicle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if its former owners are dead.”

  Mary Constant looked up and frowned. “They are dead, but it was none of our doing. And, if we are what you say we are, why shouldn’t we kill you and be done with it?”

  Mark said nothing.

  The girl said, “We are not any pirates. We are revolutionaries.”

  * * *

  Okay. This isn’t one of those metafiction things. I hate it when an author intrudes, when he tries to ingratiate himself with his readers by pretending to be some sort of regular guy who is just trying to tell a story and hopes you are enjoying it. Here’s what I mean: for years I lived in South Austin (the authentic, slacker heart of the city), and every day, mired in traffic, I would be forced to contemplate a giant billboard advertising life insurance. On the billboard, a smiling man in a suit held a telephone receiver to his ear while above him these words demanded attention: WHY BUY LIFE INSURANCE FROM A STRANGER WHEN YOU CAN BUY IT FROM ME, JOHNNY GARCIA? Johnny looked a little shifty to me, something larcenous in his smile and the black mustache that presided over those paper-white teeth. And, try as I might, I couldn’t remember meeting the guy.

  I, dear reader, am not presuming we are friends. And here’s the best news: you’ll never have to read this. Back in 1973 an innovative teacher named Peter Elbow wrote a thin, brilliant little book entitled Writing Without Teachers. Mr. Elbow discussed the process of writing and suggested that a writer might consider writing a rough draft that contains reflections on the piece being written, random thoughts, a poem, anything that would create momentum. All of this peripheral writing would enliven the writer’s brain and when this chatter was later deleted it would, nonetheless, have imbued the final draft with its intellectual and emotional energy.

  I’ve been having some problems with this nascent novel, so these are my mental stretching exercises.

  My name is Joel Sherman, and I am typing this in my bedroom/office here in the Paris Apartments in Austin, Texas.

  I came to Austin in 2002 when an ex-girlfriend impulsively invited me down here after her marriage fell apart. Elaine and I got along brilliantly for about eight months, and then we didn’t get along at all, and I left the house but not the city.

  I moved into a large, ramshackle house in Oak Hill, sharing it with the landlord and an ever-shifting mélange of university students and guys in bands. That’s where I resided until recently.

  I logged many years in that house, knocking out my series novels, vaguely aware of the melodrama that surrounded me. These transient young people, filled with hope, horniness, desperation, ambition, sundry drugs and alcohol, were volatile and unpredictable but easy enough to ignore. I assumed my ship would be coming over the horizon any day, and I’d be able to leave (maybe a movie sale, maybe an inexplicable surge in the popularity of private eyes whose eyes are very red) so I felt above the fray.

  I considered myself and my landlord, Maxwell, rock-solid. We weren’t close—I would never, for instance, have thought of calling him Max—but we would occasionally share a couple of beers and discuss the collapse of civilization. Maxwell was twelve years older than I, and somewhat morose. He wasn’t one for sharing personal details, his sorrows being couched in elliptical language. He explained the failure of two marriages as “hegemony issues.”

  It had taken me a few years to establish this relationship with Maxwell. He rarely spoke to the other tenants unless they were late with the rent. So I should, perhaps, have been the one to investigate when my housemates approached me in a ragged delegation and asked what the racket was all about. One student maintained that the incessant construction noise robbed him of thought. All my sympathy went to any robber who got away with that kid’s thoughts. I told them that our landlord was no doubt embarked on some major home improvements, and it was his house so he was within his rights. I recommended patience—and earplugs.

  Two days later the noise ceased. We all moved warily, aware that it could resume at any moment. I think we spoke in whispers, although that may be a storyteller’s embellishment. I remember at breakfast we all shared our observations: of the lumber and machinery delivered to the backyard, of the way it seemed to magically evaporate, and of our own creative relationship to the enigma of its use. What was Maxwell fashioning? Surely he intended to show us. It was not uncommon for days to pass without anyone laying an eye on Maxwell. His living area (which included a kitchen, living room, bedroom and bath) abutted the garage where he parked his aging Mercedes, so he could come and go at will without being seen. An unobtrusive landlord is usually a boon, but we were eager to see the results of his industry.

  My bedroom was directly above Maxwell’s, and in the general course of events, I never heard him. His home project altered that for a spell. I would have been justified in approaching him and asking that he curtail his zealous banging and sawing when 10:00 p.m. came round. That wouldn’t have been asking much, but I understood creative passion and how the muse shouldn’t be constrained by clocks. I worked at night myself. So I did not disturb him, and I was pleased when relative silence was regained without my intervention.

  It was a little after ten in the morning, and I was sleeping soundly when I was jolted out of sleep by a single loud resounding whump! as though some fairy-tale giant had slammed a castle’s giant-sized door. I had no recollection of a dream, but I felt an inexplicable dread. I lay there for a while and tried to will myself back to sleep. I failed and got up, pulled on a pair of trousers, and walked out into the hall where several young men and a waifish young woman I’d never seen before were milling around. I started down the stairs, and they followed. Being the oldest tenant (oldest both in tenancy and in years-on-the-planet) I led the way.

  I knocked on Maxwell’s door, but no one answered. The door wasn’t locked, so I pushed it open, raising my voice to carry his name into the room. The door opened onto his bedroom—I knew this, of course, having been invited over to his living space many times—and the bed was empty and made. I had never seen it unmade. There was a minimalist, military feel to this room, everything in its place. I walked across the room and passed through the open door and into the living room.

  I could feel my young roommates crowding up behind me: ragged breathing, a nervous squeak from the girl.

  We stopped and stared.

  I don’t know what they were experiencing, but, while
horror was surely the dominating emotion, they may have felt admiration for the craft involved, the care, the attention to detail. I know I did.

  I had never seen such a well-wrought gallows. There is something about a solid-built thing. In the rigor that has fashioned it, there is love. I could smell the sawdust in the air although the room had been swept and everything was neatly put away. If a single detail could sum it up, I suppose that would have to be the banister that rose parallel to the nine steps leading up to the platform. Some would argue that on this very short walk to oblivion a banister was superfluous, but this wasn’t about utility. The banister was there for its simple line: its dignity.

  The room was awash in morning sunlight, which spilled from the skylight and the glass doors that led to the patio. Maxwell himself, revolving very slowly, his body half-hidden under the platform where the rope had halted his brief and sudden descent, wore a dark blue suit, a white, hangover-bright dress shirt, and a red-striped tie. He had thoughtfully powdered his face so that his countenance wouldn’t look garishly engorged, and he wore sunglasses with a strap at the back so that they wouldn’t go flying off and reveal eyes that bulged and made one think of trashy horror flicks.

  He’d thought of everything. There was a piece of typing paper affixed to the lapel of his suit. It didn’t look like anyone else could be relied upon for clear-headed action, so I carefully ascended the steps to the platform— without using the banister so that the inevitable police investigation could not accuse me of contaminating the scene (I’ve seen my share of television). I leaned forward and peered at a single line of 12 point Times Roman. He had signed his name, Maxwell Armour under the line of type.