Mash Up

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  I’ll make a long story short. Ahab didn’t get the whale. The whale got him.

  The Pequod spent the next week roaming the waters off Nova Scotia, watching for whale pods making their seasonal migration from the Arctic waters further north. We saw quite a few sperms and right whales, but the captain wasn’t interested in any cetacean that wasn’t an albino.

  In the meantime, Ahab stomped around the poop deck, raving like a loon while everyone else hoisted up sails and battened down hatches and all that other sailor stuff. There was a coffin on the main deck. I don’t know why it was there, but Queequeg and I used it as a card table while we played poker and waited for this whole stupid trip to end.

  Which it finally did, and not well. Seven days after the Pequod left New Bedford, the guy up in the crow’s nest caught sight of something big and white breaching the surface about a half-mile away. We chased it down, and sure enough, it was Moby Dick. When we were close enough, the captain ordered all the harpooners into the boats. As luck would have it, he picked me to be the bowsman for his boat.

  Moby Dick was as big as Ahab said he’d be, and twice as mean. First, he took out two other whalers, crashing straight into them and sending everyone straight into the water. Then he came after my boat. I threw my harpoon, missed, and decided that was all for the day, but Ahab wasn’t giving up. When the whale got close enough, he began hacking at it with his harpoon. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…” Crazy as hell, but man, he sure knew how to rant.

  The whale had other plans. Moby Dick capsized my boat, and when that happened Ahab got tangled in a harpoon line. Again. How anyone can let the same thing happen to him twice is beyond me, but the whale was still taking the captain for his own personal Nantucket sleigh ride when it charged the Pequod. Moby must have decided that he’d had enough of that damn ship, because he slammed into it hard enough to open a hole in its side.

  So the Pequod went down, taking everyone with it. Funny thing about Queequeg; he never learned to swim. Nor did anyone else aboard, I guess. All that was left behind was that stupid coffin, which I clung to for the next couple of days until another ship happened to pass close enough for its crew to spot me.

  When I got back to New Bedford, I went to see my client and gave her the good news: she was now a rich widow. She paid my fee, and then she expressed her gratitude in a different way. The preacher was right; I could barely walk after I left her place.

  After that, I visited a friend of mine, a customs inspector whose office was just down the hall. Herman is a writer, the starving variety. Who knows? Maybe he might find something useful to do with my story. There might even be a novel in there.

  Naw. No one would ever believe it. I mean… a whale named Moby?

  DARYL GREGORY

  BEGONE

  Sometimes I get asked where I get my ideas. I usually give some vague answer. But because this is the Mash Up Anthology, I thought I’d finally admit the truth: I steal them.

  For this story, it was required that we steal from a great work of literature, and I burgled from one of the best, Dickens’ David Copperfield. The first line is, “Whether I am to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

  It’s my favorite opening line of a novel. It hints at the scope of the story. It establishes the character’s voice. And it raises a question that has a metafictional bent to it—something you wouldn’t expect from a fine upstanding realist like Dickens. How can you be replaced as the hero of your own life, your own story?

  That idea reminded me of a TV show I’d grown up watching. One of the stars of the show was replaced mid-series by another actor. Even as a kid, I felt sorry for the guy. Not the actor, but the original character. Did he miss his wife? His daughter? And what did he think of the man who replaced him?

  Which put me in mind of a close friend who recently went through a hellish divorce. You know the kind. Property fights, child custody battles, the sudden appearance of the ex’s new “lover”—who immediately begins to pop up in family photos posted online.

  When it came time to write the story you’re about to read, I tapped into the hurt and confusion my friend had experienced. Then I added the line from Dickens, a few details from old TV shows, and bits and pieces from a dozen other sources, including my own life. Your honor, I grabbed everything in sight. I only hope you enjoy the story that came from it. Here’s “Begone.”

  BEGONE

  BY DARYL GREGORY

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. The issue is not yet decided. The axe can fall any day. There are powers in the world, I have learned, who can replace you with the snap of their fingers. One more bastard is always waiting in the wings.

  In my case, he was a blow-dried, empty-headed puppet of a man. He answered to my name, and wore my suits, and carried the keys to my house in his pocket. He slept with my wife. When my daughter went to bed, it was the Fake who read her to sleep. In the mornings, when he kissed them goodbye on the front porch, my wife called him Dear and my child called him Daddy.

  I knew what I had to do to win my place.

  The morning I had chosen for the deed, I was parked down the block, hunched over the wheel of a battered Plymouth that did not belong in my upper-middle-class neighborhood. Neither he nor my wife noticed me. The Counterfeit jogged with a runner’s bounce to the new Chevy Corvair I had purchased only months ago. He moved like the athlete I once was. Every Thursday, he met his pals at the country club I paid for. On Saturdays, he golfed with my former clients. None of them noticed that he was an imitation, an inexact copy of the man they knew and respected. Oh, there was a superficial resemblance. We were both trim, good-looking men with brown hair. But he was taller than I, his hair more full, his teeth a shade of white that begged for kicking.

  I reached for the ignition and my lower back seized, a spike of pain that jerked my body and held me, jaw clenched. You’d think I’d have been used to it by then, but no. Experience had taught me that there was nothing that could hurry the seizure away. I waited, hissing through my teeth. When I thought I could move my arm without triggering another jolt, I dipped a blind hand into the pocket of my suit jacket, uncapped the bottle with my thumb, and tilted a few pills into my palm. I threw them into the back of my throat without chewing.

  The Imposter had driven away. But I wasn’t worried. After a week of surveillance, I knew where he was going, where I could find him at the time I had decided upon. I had hours to kill. I lit a cigarette, my fourth of the morning, and put the car into gear.

  * * *

  Years ago, before my banishment, before I had even met my wife, I was in an accident. The muscles along the right side of my back snapped like banjo strings. I spent three weeks in the hospital, and two months in bed after that. I climbed out of that bed on a Jacob’s ladder of Hycodan and Dilaudid.

  When we met, at a party held by the advertising firm I had recently joined, I hid my infirmity from her. How could I not? She was beautiful. No, more than that—a mathematical proof that solved my desire. That blonde hair, those hazel eyes, those legs! I brought her a glass of Scotch and said with mock confidence, You have to try this. I feared she would have nothing to do with me if she knew how fragile I was. I’d been to bed with women who knew about the accident. Who took care. Is that all right, they’d ask? Does that hurt? My every grunt, even in pleasure, became an alarm.

  Of course, I did not understand what she was hiding from me. Her age, for example. I suspected that she might be older than she appeared. Something in the frank appraisal of her gaze almost sent me running. Would I measure up? Would I provide what she needed?

  She swirled the Scotch glass, and sniffed. One twitch of that nose and I was in love.

  Oh, a shallow kind of love, a fairy glamour, though I didn’t recognize it then. I only unde
rstood true love when my daughter was born.

  * * *

  I spotted her immediately by her white-blonde hair. She moved among her fellow first-graders as if lit by a followspot.

  I was parked too far away to make out her face. Any closer would have been a mistake. Each morning since my banishment, I had driven here, and each morning, a few minutes after ten, her class entered the yard for their first recess of the day. The children ran for the swings, the grassy yard, the four-square block painted on the cement. This morning, my daughter made for the eagle’s nest, a dome of monkey bars. She’s a climber, my girl. A brave one. She reached the top and lifted her hands, balancing on her knees. Her face turned in my direction.

  Did she see me? Had she ever noticed my car, the familiar hand hanging outside the window, the smoke signal of my cigarette? Some days I thought so.

  * * *

  The night I was cast from my home, the night of my banishment, we had a terrible fight. I was not at the top of my game. My back was killing me. The usual before-dinner cocktail had turned into dinner itself, then dessert. The pain pills could find no purchase.

  “Don’t let her see you like this,” my wife said, referring to our daughter. “Go up to bed.” But I would not go up; the staircase was insurmountable. Sitting was impossible. I paced the first floor of the house, smoking, holding my spine at the particular angle that kept the pain to a manageable level.

  Early bedtime for everyone else, then. My daughter, in her pajamas, ran to me for goodnight kisses. She slammed into my hip, and pain lanced up my spine. My drink went flying. “Jesus Christ!” I yelled.

  My daughter looked up at me with a shocked expression. She didn’t know that she could hurt me. Then she turned and ran up to her bedroom.

  My wife attacked. “You’re ruining it,” she said.

  “Ruining what?”

  “Everything.”

  You see, she had pictured for herself a perfect life. Picture perfect. A two-story house in the suburbs, a handsome husband with a job in the big city, an adorable daughter. Or perhaps, I began to realize that night, it was only the daughter she needed, and I was the prop required to make that happen.

  I did not go gentle. I yelled. I asserted my ownership of the house, its furniture, and lawns. Also the lawn furniture. I accused her of withholding support when I really needed it.

  “I try to help you,” she said, “But you refuse every—”

  “Normal help!” I shouted.

  I continued my—let’s call a spade a spade—my rant. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t delivered it before. Even drunk, I hit all my marks, and nailed the key lines. My wife, however, had departed from the script. She was no longer looking at me. She sat on the couch (my couch) and stared at the floor. I went on for another minute, then finally interrupted myself.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re not the man I imagined you to be,” she said. “And you’re not what we need right now.”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes, as I had often noted during our courtship, were changeable. Sometimes blue, sometimes dark green. At that moment, they were hazel. Her nose twitched in what could have been disgust.

  A wild, cold wind sprang up out of nowhere. I could feel a vast emptiness open behind me, and the wind rushed past me, then into me, ripping me to tatters.

  She said a single word that was lost in the roar.

  * * *

  I left my daughter’s elementary school with plenty of time to make my appointment in the city. Before my banishment, I paid no attention to the commute from the suburbs to the city, and I cannot remember those trips now. They were interludes between the important scenes in my life. But after my reappearance, after I began trailing the Counterpart, each trip was a gauntlet. The stolen car, an ancient Plymouth, transmitted every bump and pothole to my spine.

  Oh, but the city still thrilled me. For an hour, I leaned in a doorway on Madison Avenue, smoking, and regarded the building where I once worked, a gleaming tower planted like a flag at the dawn of the sixties to lay claim to a decade of prosperity, stability, and brand management. Yes, I was a Madison Avenue Ad Man. A cliché. Or more charitably, an archetype in a city of metonyms, one with the Wall Street bankers and Broadway actresses. Is that what my wife first saw in me? Was I merely the type of man she was looking for?

  At 12:05, the Successor exited the building with a flock of other toothy men. My former colleagues. My former friends. They walked uptown, heading to the same restaurant as always, Maxi’s on 6th.

  I went into the lobby, seeing no one I recognized, and rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. Just as the elevator opened, a wave of anxiety swept over me. For the first time in weeks, I was worried that someone would recognize me.

  The door opened, and Betty, the receptionist, was not at her desk. I had planned this, knowing that she took her lunch in the break room, but still I was relieved. I walked quickly to my office and shut the door behind me. My heart beat fast. I’d soaked my shirt with sweat.

  But I was safe now. I had plenty of time. The Pretender and my former officemates would return in an hour and a half with ties loosened, suit jackets rumpled, bodies thrumming with companionable warmth. Not drunk—we knew how to hold our liquor—but well lit.

  I had not been in my office since my banishment, and I realized that I missed it more than I did my house. The view of the city, the cherry panel walls, the polished desk as wide as a car… the wet bar. I poured myself a double shot of Jameson and used it to wash down a couple of pills. Just enough to keep the pain from clouding my head. I needed to stay sharp.

  The Mock Me had not taken my CLIO award from the shelf, nor had he removed the three paintings I had acquired in the past few years, modern pieces that demonstrated that I was a creative person engaged with the zeitgeist. Perhaps he was afraid to arouse suspicion that he was not the man who had acquired them. Or perhaps he had no taste of his own.

  Certainly his latest project indicated that he had not stolen my creativity along with my life. An easel in the corner held story boards for a commercial for a new TV dinner called “Mom’s in a Minute.” I flipped through the boards, growing more appalled with each panel. Not an inspired thought in the presentation. But it was with my colleagues, and my boss, that I grew angry. Did none of them notice the lack of originality? Did none of them think, he’s better than this? It was one thing to be taken in by the Doppelgänger when in close proximity to my wife—her influence was powerful. But alone with him, how could they not suspect? Would this stand-in know how to use the word “metonymy” in a sentence? I think not.

  A while later, the Bogus Me stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He saw that the Grossholtz abstract had been removed from its place near the window, and now sat on the floor. I stepped from my hiding place behind the door. I swung the CLIO with a firm, two-handed grip and connected with the back of his head. A solid, base-clearing line drive. He collapsed onto the thick Berber carpeting.

  I suspected that he was already dead, but half measures would not do. I set the CLIO well outside the spreading pool of blood and knelt on his back. Then I removed from my pocket the length of hanging wire—good name, that—and passed it under his neck.

  * * *

  The morning after the fight with my wife, I woke before dawn with the taste of ashes in my mouth. I say woke, but it is more accurate to say that I appeared. A moment before I was not conscious, and then suddenly I was wide awake, my eyes open.

  I stood on a lawn, staring up at a row of arborvitaes as symmetrical as the miniatures in a model railroad. These evergreens, I realized, were the same ones I had stared at from my breakfast table for years. They were mine, now seen from the other side. I was just outside the border to my property, in my neighbor’s backyard.

  Through the trees, past the patio furniture collecting dew, past the Weber propane grill with electric start and two auxiliary burners, rose the two-story house I had bought and paid for. (Partially. Twenty percent down-p
ayment, plus five years on a thirty-year mortgage.) The kitchen was dark through the sliding glass door, as were the bedroom windows above.

  I had no memories of the previous night. I’d had blackouts before. I admit it. But this was something different. An erasure, not just of memory, but of myself.

  There is a disappearing trick common in film and television. The camera stops rolling, a character steps out of the frame, and filming resumes. Perhaps the disappearance is accompanied by a sound effect—say, the glissando of a harp. Sha-riing! A quick edit and the character reappears.

  My absence from the scene, however, had lasted at least through the night.

  I stepped between the trees. When I reached the edge of my yard, my feet stopped. A hairsbreadth from the toe of my shoe was an impenetrable border. I did not have to touch it to know that it was there.

  I could not cross. I leaned forward, or rather tried to lean. My body shook with the effort. Finally, I stepped back, and into a depression in the mulch. The misstep sent a spasm through my back.

  I circled the house, seeking a gap in the barrier, and could find none. The house was off limits to me. Or rather, not to me alone. My wife had told me that she had sealed the house against strangers. Our daughter would be safe here, she said.

  And now I was a stranger.

  I did not understand the full extent of what she had done—I had not yet seen my replacement—but I recognized that a crime had been committed upon my person. I stood in my neighbor’s backyard and screamed. I called my wife terrible names.

  On the second floor a light winked on—my daughter’s bedroom. A shadow moved behind her gauzy curtains. I recognized her tiny shape.

  Then a porch light flicked on behind me. A moment later another light sprang up, and another, like a bank of Klieg lights. I was struck by a feeling of intense embarrassment, as if I were naked before an audience. I did not belong here. I did not know my lines. At any moment, the authorities would yank me from the stage.

  Before another light went on, I lurched away.