2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  Visit his website at www.robindunn.com.

  * * *

  Short Story: “L.A. Actors” ••••

  Short Story: “Inside the Crown” ••••

  L.A. ACTORS

  by Robin Wyatt Dunn

  First published in Arc 1.4 (May 2013), edited by Simon Ings

  • • • •

  The Queen of Spades

  IMOVED to Hollywood. Best thing I ever did. Hollywoodland, as it used to be called, a land owned now by the Queen of Spades, or so she says and so she thinks and so we have come to believe, marching our student marches in the hallways of our academy.

  We train by night and day. And we march, laughing, crying, old and young, the bodies of the world come to nest for a year or two in our den mother’s radiant theater roost.

  “Latchka, Latchka, you’re up, you’re up next!” cries my classmate.

  I have decided to recite some Pinter, Old Times, he’s a sick one, Pinter, and I love him, I sing out Deeley’s syllables like a lover mid-affair and I get it, I’ve got it, I know it.

  When you a read a good play or when you see one, you drift back into that weird world that’s been dreamt for you, you slip back, like on the Dead Sea, buoyed by the water beneath.

  To be an actor is to be a servant. You serve the director, and the producer. You serve the stage manager and the assistant stage manager, and the whole crew. You serve the audience, and your fellow actors. Perhaps you serve an agent, and/ or a manager, if you are fortunate. You serve and are told you must be happy to do so, because you are not on the street, and they are right. Right enough.

  And so we plug in, we plug our nervus in. Nervus, the string of a marionette. It hurts, but it’s a good pain—the pain of the near promise of success.

  And so we serve the Queen of Spades, our manipulator, our goddess with her electric strings, and she’s a kind woman, and a cruel one.

  And I leap. I’ve eaten a huge free meal, and the nervus can make me do things that otherwise I could not do. I run across the stage and flip, and then am swept into the air as other strings leap down to support me, to unwind the nervus.

  To my left I can feel Alex leaping, joining me in flight, and our larynxes vibrate in superhuman communion, Pinter in operetta.

  “Dark!” (I’m a tenor)

  And Alex answers, in beautiful contralto, “Fat or thin?”

  “Fuller than me, I think!”

  Fuller than me. I feel the urge to vomit but I do not, and Eliza Penche, our Queen of Spades, eases back a bit, knowing we need to make it at least to the second entrance this morning.

  • • •

  At break I splash water on my face and try to avoid Alex. She is beautiful and young (only 19) and I am 33 and though I know she likes me she’s always be in love more with Hollywood than she is with men. She’s a Valley Girl and these four miles to the south, here in the heart of the Basin, is a huge journey for her psychologically. Too young, too young. I wish we had a pool at the academy; it’s so hot.

  We have had four burnouts already this year. We are reduced to fourteen. I am too intelligent to be an actor, you might say, but that is only a lie I tell myself. The truth is that I am too stubborn. I must relearn, every day, how to serve.

  I am yours, Queen. I move for you, I dance for you. I am an artist and I am your art. Move me, shape me, make me mean. Make me mean, Queen! Make for me a meaning that I am.

  Back to the nervus.

  I hiccup in the next scene, a modern art interpretation of the Pinterian pause (he loved pauses, Harold Pinter), and so I hiccup and hiccup again, faster than the human body is supposed to, a kind of punk rock rhythm,

  Hicc hicc hicchichhicchicchicc upuopup hiccuphiccup

  And I do it and it is good and I feel like I’m dying but I know it’s good, it looks good. Alex looks horrified but her body sways on the nervus like a willow in a breeze, a strong scene. It’s going to be well-reviewed.

  • • •

  Opening night is a technical nightmare. One of us is killed by a sudden power surge. We’re not allowed to cry then; the show must go on. The understudy grieves behind her eyes, and takes Alyssa’s place as Deeley’s old love. It blows the mind of the city. And lo god, I get a break.

  The King of Hearts

  Fama, in the Latin, is a rich word, meaning both fame and reputation. Reputation is so important, it’s never enough to hire competent reputation managers, both online and off, no, it’s personal behavior. Your acts happen on stage and they are judged and this is life. I have almost no privacy; it is what I signed up for. When I want privacy, I pay well for it.

  I am doing Deeley again. I have rewired the theater I bought. Now, I am impresario. I am both puppet and puppeteer. In my dressing room I put on my face.

  White, along the lines of the bones of the face, as Richard Corson taught in the long ago, to bring out the skull. Darker paint on the flesh, to make it sag. Chiaroscuro: I’m no Carravaggio but theatrical lighting and well-paid designers make up for that, I just have to fool your eye while I’m in hyper-motion.

  “Latchka?”

  “Yes?” It’s Munuel, my agent.

  “Break a leg.”

  “Thank you. Are you watching tonight, Munuel?”

  “Your wife is here, in the audience. She wanted me to tell you.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Yes.” His hands come together at his waste and flutter at one another like nervous spiders.

  “All right. Thank you Munuel.”

  I have decided to be almost nude. The nervus plug in my spine is emphasized, not hidden, by my make-up and nudity. Huge red lines painted on my back point at the small fleshy orifice attached when I was 29.

  I remember what our Queen of Spades would tell us when we were in training:

  “The duty of you as actors is to captivate! I can only manipulate your bodies; your souls must soar as well. No amount of technology or artistic vision will make up for lackluster performances in your eyes, in your voices. You must be present, you must be hyperpresent. You must astonish.”

  And so I astonish her, my little muse, my mistress, and manage to escape my wife. She is only twenty-two. Some women see only a philanderer, a man drunk on power. Neither observation is wrong, but then I know I see so much more, in myself and in others. Besides, it is what I am supposed to do: be the man who seems to have everything.

  I hold her hand in my villa, which is small, but well protected. The night is huge, and dry, and we can hear the ocean.

  “You were beautiful,” she says. “The stars, the yellow stars twirling around behind your head as you spoke of the little old women in black, it was like a dream.”

  “I’m glad you liked it.”

  “Where did you come up with it all?”

  “We’ve been working together for five years now. Even the financiers are happy, which is rare.”

  “You love me?”

  “You’re more beautiful than any play. Even if it’s one of mine.”

  Her laugh fills me with pain. It makes me feel my age, my weakness. I need more of the lithium now to soothe my aches on the weekends, sometimes it’s too much.

  I lie next to her most of the night, holding her, reassuring her with my body.

  The Ace of Clubs

  Five years later, revolution is come and it is good for business. My troupe and I have taken to street performing. The villa is unsafe and so I sleep now in Hollywood, having made a press release stating that I have given my fortune to the revolutionary committee (not much of it but enough).

  At Vermont and Santa Monica, close to my old academy, I squat by the subway station holding my manipulator’s box, which signals to my two actors of the morning, in full white body paint and pink/blue hair, twisting through the crowd and soaring above it with jumps they could not perform unaided. A couple of local news agents have come to record but I shoo them away: it’s more memorable if it is not posted on any net.

  One of the actors is my second
wife, Marissa.

  As a city-state, Los Angeles suffers few privations as long we control the Southland farms, though as a celebrity of course I still have access to some luxuries.

  I plug in the nervus more rarely now, having gotten used to directing. Across the street I see a small group of canine lovers doing their favorite performance art piece: “Being walked by dogs.” There is nothing stranger than letting a dog control your body. Often such performers end up hit by cars but traffic is, fortunate for them, light today. I copied their style in one of my plays, using a much ratcheted-down algorithm that reduced “being walked by the dog” to a mere physical aping, quite good with the right software. To do more, to actually yield to the conscious whims of the dog, strikes me as disgusting.

  Marissa pivots on her heel and shouts: “Hosanna” and I contort the second syllable and the flat “a” becomes long, becomes a kind of sexual need, and she wiggles, wiggles like a rat, twitching her nose, and I can feel the need of the crowd, their desire, their hate. Johan kneels beneath her, a supplicant, and improvises a kind of death rattle, shaking his shoulders and hissing, his eyes wide and laughing. Some onlookers laugh, some walk away. For a second John looks back at me and I know he wants to hold the reins, that the wait for seniority is just as hard on him as it was on me.

  A month after the revolution, I learn an interesting thing. They took every dime I had. And I find I do not mind. They have left me my equipment. My wife does not even notice at first, she likes our sleazy building; my notoriety keeps us both safe. The hours of busking, busking, busking are a strange kind of beauty, even without the lithium I find I have the stamina to fuck Marissa for over an hour every work night.

  “What has happened?” she asks, sweat covered beside me.

  “We’re changing.”

  “Who will we become?”

  “Parents.”

  “You really want to have a baby with me?”

  “Yes, woman. I do.”

  “Will we raise it as an actor?”

  “If you want. I hear at my old academy they are teaching the new Japanese style, the AI mediated one. It’s difficult to learn, I’m probably too old for it.”

  “I want to busk again tomorrow, just you and me.”

  “Yes.”

  • • •

  The light in Los Angeles is a strange fire, it is like the music you sometimes hear played on the street (usually recorded, and much rarer than in New York): it detonates like a bomb over the sidewalks, burning. It burns away yesterday’s lies to make room for new ones.

  I hold Marissa’s legs close, my right hand on the leg manipulator joystick. She sashays like a flapper who has learned to breakdance, doing what I call a zero-g Charleston, which involves spinning so fast she seems to leave the ground. The number of pivots is intense and I can feel her quivering. Then I make her scream, scream out, scream out, and I indicate that the phrase should be improvised.

  We get a good crowd coming up from the subway, most staying at least a couple minutes, tossing in their coins. Over their rapt faces Marissa howls:

  “I am yours!”

  INSIDE THE CROWN

  by Robin Wyatt Dunn

  First published in The Night Land (May 2013), edited by Andy Robertson

  • • • •

  Translator’s Note:

  This document was retrieved from a psychoneumic broadcast received after the latest attacks on Redoubt One, Levels Fourteen through Nine. I have done my best to render the thoughts of the abhuman narrator in prose sensible to us—this of course is never an easy prospect. Without getting into a discussion of politics since this is not the place for it, allow me to say that I believe the narrator was once human, and that his record here is honest to the degree he is capable of being so.

  I have rendered a term, which in the original recording can be transcribed as “kogonn,” as “Furnace.” From context it seems clear that this term names his point of origin, a dimension near to our own.

  Be assured that even now countermeasures are being enacted to seal this dimensional gap, and known collaborators with this narrator are being interrogated even as you read this.

  The Redoubt will not fall.

  One additional note: I have left in repeated references to “Chowder,” the word in the original is “chowhat”—interestingly, this is dialect which is known to be used on Levels Two and Three, where certain forms of cannibalism are legally permitted. Though my superiors may name me a blasphemer for including it here, I have left the term in context, where the narrator replaces our liturgical words “True Broth” (referring of course to our holy daily soup with its guaranteed meat quotient) with the term “Chowder.” If the narrator was in fact born in the Redoubt—and I do believe this—it seems likely he was raised a cannibal.

  INSIDE THE CROWN, is the weapon. I think it knows my name now. I’m not certain, but it glows brighter when I pass it; when it sees that I have been loyal to it.

  I spent a great many years on these levels as an adolescent. Even as you hear these words, so is our victory over you assured. Many of you have forgotten the devil’s deal you made with the Crown, when you allowed it to stimulate and order Broca’s area, where language is born. Doing so made the Crown your greatest weakness, as it forced your words to become stagnant, and surrendered your cognition to an unfeeling machine. For these and a billion other reasons, you will be destroyed.

  I must find my ancestor. I know that he died here, and was buried, here beneath the dictionary chambers. It is a large dictionary, with many floors. There are many Human Words in it too, like statues, men and women who have devoted their souls to the lexicographers; their grimaces and groans are really quite interesting—if you’ve never been, it is worth a visit.

  The darkness outside is a part of my own tragedy, I think, for I let the darkness within too.

  “Sieur?”

  “Yes, child.”

  “The robots need your blood.”

  “Here.” I cut my finger and put a drop onto his pan. The boy, the lexicographers’ servant, smiled his odd smile and took my fluid to the robots, behind the welcome desk.

  In truth I have only just arrived, but these new gates are strange even to me, a veteran traveler. I look and feel mostly the same, but it does affect one’s memories…

  • • •

  I went below the basement, and climbed down the stairs, the lights in the walls politely inquiring after my desired level of illumination as I descended.

  “Near darkness,” I whispered.

  “Yes…” The lights dimmed.

  My name is Remnant; I come from the Furnace. Unlike many of my brethren, I do not eat flesh, preferring the air of climes like those here. My body has many hidden lungs. Sometimes I remember being a man from before—same as the shape I have taken now, on this side of the Gate—but other times I prefer to forget.

  The lights brighten over one of the crèches. My ancestor. He has been well preserved.

  • • •

  “Ancestor,” I say. “Father.”

  His eyes flicker open, their rainbow irises swirling. “Son,” he grates. “You remembered.”

  “You’re looking well, Father,” I say.

  “I am dead.” He laughed then, a sound I will not describe. The Dictionary around us laughed with him somehow, and though I am a traveler I felt the quaking fear come back, the fear that is my blood, that is my drink, that is my sustenance—it almost overtook me.

  “You’re mostly dead, yes, Father. But alive too. Are you ready?”

  “I want to stay here.” He smiled behind the glass. Some of his flesh had begun to pulsate.

  I realized then that it was the time for Retribution, some annoying ceremony native to these levels I never understood, as then the shuddering walls threw their spindles into my joints, forcing me to bow, and Father closed his eyes, smiling, nodding his dead head in time to the rhythmic announcements coursing through our ear drums.

  Chowder is a food

  Ch
owder is power

  Chowder is a power

  Chowder is a food

  “Father?” I remained kneeling but I felt the need to hear his voice; I could not remember the proper obeisances for this ritual, whatever it was; I had been inhuman for a long time.

  “Father?”

  “Wait till it’s done,” he grated. “It finishes eventually.”

  Chowder is blood.

  Chowder is directional.

  Wink your eye when you align to the arcsecond moment of the food—

  Then it was silent. And I could hear Father laughing.

  • • •

  I must tell you one thing about my New People. We Who Will Brighten the Land. We Who Will Make Voice in the Silence.

  We are new, and broad. It is our breadth, you see, that is important, because we can scan more arrays that your cities can, than your oceans can, than your lives can. We are assembling workable simulacra of these scans into Gates, one of which I passed through.

  In the scan is a moment—a weapon, a knife. Sharp, like blood. A music fells my voice and I am their star—I am their star forever—

  No. I must not give in to my poetry now. Our people will come later. Now, I need Father.

  “Up Father!”

  I lift the corpse from his vestibule and he vomits beetles onto the stone beneath our feet, beetles that scream and cry as I crush them beneath my boots.

  His eyes swirl their rainbows and I kiss his cheek.

  “Up we go.”

  • • •

  “Boy!”

  “Sieur, corpses are not permitted on this level.”

  “This is my Father, boy! Get us a chair! And some tea!”

  “I must get the Adjutant.”

  “Yes, fine, but tea first. My father is tired. He has been dead a long time.”

  “Did you revive him, sieur?”

  “Tea!”