by Mark Teppo
A young man strode in his direction, every step rattling the pebble beach. Emile. My son. My little brother. No, it was clearly son, for such was the emotional logic of parenting. Even if it wasn’t your son at first, but just a stranger, the years made him your son. Blood of your blood. More precious than your own limbs, than the light of your eyes.
"You must be Dieter. Dieter the Bold." Emile shook Pier’s hand, and Pier almost froze, then returned the pressure. Emile’s hand had become huge, a man’s hand, hairy, crisscrossed with scars.
"That is right," said Pier, and he could barely swallow the lump in his throat. Such a strange blend of sadness and elation: as if your mouth was grinning while tears streamed down your cheeks.
"Our friends in Greater Amsterdam were full of praise."
That doesn’t surprise me, Pier thought. Vanderloo’s men had so thoroughly infiltrated the Amsterdam branch of Pax Viridi that every third member must have been in the pay of the Company.
"It is great to be here! So exciting. After all, this is the place where we really can get things done. Where we must tear the harpoon from the vile hand of the Company."
"True words! My wife is already heating a pot of mulled wine, my friend. Do you have children, Dieter?"
"Yes," he said, "actually I do."
Soon, he thought, soon I will see my grandson.
18—in death he carries his true name
A Spitsberg tombstone of reddish granite, 1940.
Description: A Janus head that shows a young man on the left and a gray-beard on the right. The deeply incised text reads as follows:
1893–1940
shan-pier memling,
who called himself jean-piere
and dieter van huskens
in death he carries his true name
Dieter van Huskens, 47 years old:
Pier met Vanderloo right on the edge of the ice. It was Arctic night with stars so bright than you could hear them tinkle. The judge wore a chameleon cloak and remained hidden if not exactly invisible. Only his voice was real—the body was no more than a flicker, a movement in the corner of Pier’s eye even if he looked straight at the judge.
"Tonight they board the flagship of your whaling fleet," Pier said. "They got themselves a Nipponese submarine. Six o’clock precisely."
"Good. I will put the mines on the seaward side. Order all men from the ships." He chuckled, a sound that was somehow bone-dry, like Pier’s heel crunching down on a heap of dry bay leaves. "When the survivors creep from the water they’ll stumble right into our bullets."
"I am yours to command. But remember your promise: Emile and his family go free."
"On my word as a judge."
"I don’t think Vanderloo feels even the slightest suspicion," Pier said. "It was a shame, you losing your supply ship but since then he really trusts me."
"Well," Emile said, "the Admiralty was finally forced to let our comrades go. It happened in Nipponese waters. Pure piracy the shogun called it en stopped the export of sake. Costs the Company millions."
Utshi pushed the curtain of the tent aside. "The albatross reports that the soldiers are dropping mines in the sea. Hundreds of them. Not even an anchovy could cross those waters without getting blown up."
Half past five. About fifty sailors slipped down from a hovering airship on cables of cobweb. The Aztec airship was sprayed with soot: Chimu had eagerly accepted Pier’s proposal. He clearly still believed that enemies of his enemies were perhaps not exactly friends, but that it made sense to support them against a common enemy.
Always useful to have such acquaintances, Pier thought. Funny how everybody swapped roles if you waited long enough. Take Chimu now. From customer to noble rescuer, then a crook and now a kind of friend again.
The men of Pax Viridi were all trained sailors: the anchors of ship after ship were silently lifted, and then a dozen ships unfolded their sails like the wings of night moths.
A short command: the men touched their cables, shot up into the sky.
Barely a minute later a ship set off the first mine.
Pier pulled the cup of his night-eye from his eyeball, and it was night again.
"All sixteen ships went down, Emile. Their whole whaling fleet. I guess . . ."He started to cough, a barking cough that seemed to tear his lungs, hurt his ribs. "What, what . . ."
"Daddy!" Emile cried and turned his lamp on.
Pier pulled his hands away from his face. The palms were spattered with blood.
"They made me young," he whispered, "but apparently they weren’t entirely successful."
The world contracted into a whirlpool of darkness, and then even the darkness was gone.
19—untitled
Unexposed lumino, 2006.
"Pier? Can you hear me, Pier?"
He opened his eyes, and his gaze swept across the bright blue sky. There were puffy clouds in her depths, darting swallows.
"I . . . I know I can’t have gone to heaven. My muscles just hurt too much. I can feel every bone."
A young woman bent over him, her smile a row of even white teeth. "Happy birthday! How does it feel to be one hundred and thirteen?"
"You must be a granddaughter. You are Frieda’s spitting image."
"Spitting image? I should hope so! I am Frieda herself."
Emile and Pascal stood on her side: men still in the prime of their lives. Behind them their sons and daughters crowded: grandchildren with cardboard crowns or butterfly bows in their hair. This was a family event, Pier understood, a grand feast.
"We buried your corpse deep in the permafrost," Frieda said. "We waited until the healers were skilled enough to raise the dead."
"It took a little longer than we had hoped," Emile said. "More than half a century."
"So stupid!" Utshi cried as she waved her camera. "I should have taken a lumino when he opened his eyes. Now it’s too late."
Selma Eats
— Fiona Moore
Maria told me not to eat the books. Maria was the one who found me after I came out of the bowl of purple rocks, found me living behind the bookcase, making myself flat. She wouldn’t believe I was eating the books until I showed her, and a couple of the seedees, and some folded-up papers about something called a women’s crisis centre. "Why do you eat those, and not these?" Maria asked, showing me pieces of plastic, pieces of paper and metal with a picture of a lady in a spiky hat, but I couldn’t explain, something to do with the ideas in them.
Maria lived in a room over the bookshop, and she took care of me. "Can’t let you out on your own," she would say, which was okay, because I didn’t want to go out on my own. The bookshop was warm; the walls were dark blue and high so the shop was narrow, and the people who came in were careful not to walk into the little tables between the shelves. There were bowls of pretty rocks, all one color in each bowl. At night I would sleep in one of the bowls of rocks, making myself dispersed; the pink ones were best, but I liked the turquoise ones too, and I tested all of them at least once. In the daytime there were people to listen to and things to eat, though I stopped eating the books on the shelves when Maria asked me to. The ones she brought me were better anyway; they were old, with numbers on them which meant they’d been sold more than once, and that made them taste better. She said it was nice to have someone to look after again. She would think of her little girl when she said that, but I never told her that I knew.
It was Maria who named me Selma. This was because I’d decided to look like the girl on the front of a seedee that I ate. Maria said it was called Selmasongs, and the girl was called Bjork. I wanted to be called Bjork too, I liked the sound of it, like a raindrop. But Maria said I couldn’t be named Bjork and look like Bjork. If something looks like a rock, don’t you call it a rock? I asked, but Maria said people weren’t like rocks, though when I asked her how they were different she just said it was complicated. I asked Maria what I was, and she didn’t know, so we decided I was just Selma and we’d have to figure out what I could and coul
dn’t do as time went on.
Maria was almost always in the shop, or over the shop. But for different reasons, reasons which made a connection between the little girl and the pieces of paper with the lady in the spiky hat. Maria had a lot of those pieces of paper, but she said it wasn’t enough for her little girl. I asked Maria what the connection was, and she told me not to mind and to go eat a newspaper. I told her I didn’t like them, because the ideas weren’t complicated enough. That made her laugh. She said she would get me some good Russian novels. She said that the people in them were like real ones. I asked if they tasted like real people, and she said she supposed they did. I asked why, if they tasted like real people, they weren’t real people, and she said maybe she shouldn’t let me eat Russian novels, since I seemed to have absorbed some ideas where were a little too complicated already.
After that I started paying attention to the people in the store. I would wonder what they would taste like. I thought the lady with the yellow hair, who owned the bookshop, might taste like Chinua Achebe, and the man who brought the packages might taste like Stieg Larsson or Joseph Conrad. But Maria said I mustn’t; she said when I ate a book, there was no book left. I said I would never eat her, and she just shook her head and said it was no different to anyone else. But she couldn’t explain how.
The man who came to the store made me think of one who had been on a deeveedee that I ate, called The Lady Killers, even though none of the killers were ladies (Maria said to stop asking questions). Not that he looked like that man, but something made me think he’d taste like that.
I was behind some of the books, making myself flat, the first time he came into the shop. Maria was alone, doing something with numbers in. He came in, and he spoke to her in the language she talked with me when there was no one else around. At first I thought that meant he was like me, but I didn’t think he was. He didn’t disperse or become flat. But there was something in his ideas, something that made her scared. Made her think of her little girl, in a dark red sort of way.
I don’t want to talk about it, Maria said later. She was making herself a cup of hot water with leaves in it.
He made you scared, I said, and she put her arms around me, which she would sometimes do. I didn’t like it, but I knew it made her happy, so I never said.
He’s a bad man, she said. I’ll protect you from him, she said, and that was a complicated idea, because she didn’t mean that; she meant she wanted someone else to protect her from him.
He came back the next week, and the week after that. Maria got quieter and forgot to bring me some books, and then got upset when she found me eating Our Bodies Our Selves. She brought me a copy of a book called Das Kapital, which someone had written all over the margins of. After I ate it I realized the someone was her, and so eating them must be almost like what it would be like to eat Maria.
Next week, he said. That gave her the dark-red thoughts. She was going to have to leave the bookshop, which she didn’t like and I didn’t like. Afterwards Maria went to the back room and took deep breaths. She smelled dark red and spicy, which made me hungry.
He would come by in the evenings. Just walk past the bookstore. Like his being there was a magic spell that could do her harm. What could I do to stop him coming, I thought. I’d never left the bookshop. When I was corporate and visible I looked like a little woman with dark hair and big glasses. I didn’t have magic powers. I didn’t even have complicated, delicious ideas like the ones Maria had, in the margins of Das Kapital. I didn’t want her to go.
And then, discorporating among the rocks, I had an idea. One of my own.
I waited until he was supposed to come, and that was when I ate all the pieces of paper advertising the Book Launch. Maria was angry and told me she’d have to go out and get some more. She was so distracted she thought it was earlier than it was, and even better, forgot to lock the door.
And then, when he came in through the door, I ate him.
He didn’t know what I was doing at first, then he fought back. Books never fought back, so the eating was messier than it should have been. But the fighting made the ideas he had much spicier. And at the end of it, he wasn’t there to bother Maria, all of his ideas were inside me instead, making me big and sparkling.
And things changed inside me.
I could leave the bookshop. That was a scary thought at first, but now I was big enough and sparkly enough, I didn’t need to sleep dispersed in the rocks (I could just disperse through the minerals in the earth, why hadn’t I seen that before), I didn’t need to eat books. And I didn’t need to look like Bjork, though I still might from time to time.
But then I realized other things had changed too.
Maria was right. Eating a person wasn’t like eating a book. There’s lots of books; if I eat Das Kapital, one copy is in me, but all the other kapitals, they’re out there. Even if there’s notes in, it makes the book spicier, but the ideas don’t go away when I eat them. The ideas are a bit smaller, but they’re still out in the world.
There was only one copy of the bad man.
Now his ideas were gone, pulled into me and out of the world. Out of the bookshop, out of places and things and people I had never seen. Out of Maria. There was a big, big gap in the world. One tiny person, who tasted like the man from The Lady Killers, and he’d left such a big gap.
Maria would still be frightened, and Maria’s little girl would still be alone, and lots of other people would still be doing things, wrong things and scared things and nice things too, because of the man, but no one would know why, and that would make them frightened, and sad. Would make them do other things, maybe bad things. Maybe worse things than the man.
I didn’t have a choice. I had to leave the bookshop.
I didn’t understand why eating the one man had made the difference. And it was a good thing in some ways; it made me big and sparkly. It meant Maria was safe, even if she didn’t know it. But Maria was right about eating people: it had been a wrong thing as well as a good one, and in a way I couldn’t explain.
I needed to go away. I had to make up for doing wrong, but first I had to figure out how.
I thought about saying goodbye to Maria, but if I did, I would have to tell her what I had done, and I really didn’t think she’d like it, even though it was for her.
But I’ll come back someday and see her, when I’m bigger and sparklier. And, if I ever can, when I’ve found a way to fix what I did.
Oh, How the Ghost of You Clings
— Richard Bowes
When my Shadow finds me I’m sitting on a bench in the university gym men’s locker room. It’s almost deserted in Winter Recess. I hear a single shower running, the slam of a locker door several aisles away. This building is due to be torn down and not replaced. Eight years back when I retired from a reference desk at the university library I wasn’t replaced. People are a bit passé.
I’ve still got enough self-awareness to know it isn’t the world that’s falling apart. It’s me, and I’m imposing that on the world.
"Identifying with a decrepit rec center! Truly old age is a sad place," says a voice I recognize. It’s my own voice, and it echoes in my head as always when this happens.
I look up, and there’s my doppelganger leaning against a pillar, a tanned, fit, and very amused seventy-year-old. When last we met, a couple of years ago, he was a mess of an old man, and I was in OK shape for my age. Things now are reversed. Aside from the tan and physique, of course, he looks just like me.
To my memory the times we’ve been together over the decades have been bad times.
"Get the fuck away from me," I whisper.
A young guy, nicely defined, with a towel riding low on his hips walks by, casts us barely a glance.
My Shadow’s eyes follow him. "No need to mumble, boy," he tells me. "Nobody but him around, and he wouldn’t think twice about a senile old gent talking to himself."
He gives me the once over and shakes his head. "Look at you now. I remem
ber dark nights on the piers when you blazed like a burning house soaked in gasoline—a human Brooklyn closing!
"They thought they were cruising me," I tell him. "But really what they saw was you AND me. Alone I was just another guy.
"Oh, in your memory you were such a nice little boy," he says. It’s that shit they taught you in recovery where you overcame this monster inside you, the one who led you into booze, drugs, and sexual degradation. It’s when you put aside the idea we were a partnership."
I turn away, and his image fades, but the voice is still with me.
"I remember being a half-formed thing," he says, "sitting in darkness watching this kid who lived in the world of light. And every once in a while at age three or eight or eleven I dared to step in there and maybe stand near him for a few minutes, maybe attract a moment of your notice. You were my world."
This is part of the argument my doppelganger and I have each time we meet: which of us invented the other. I finish getting dressed while he talks, stand, sling my bag over my shoulder, and start to walk away. He’s right beside me.
"The first time I ever came all the way into that world was one night when we were twelve, maybe thirteen. It was in Boston, and our grandaunt Margie was dying down the hall from you. Remember? It was the first time you really acknowledged me."
I suppress the instinct to tell him she was my grandaunt and not his. But I realize that what he says about a first-time encounter seems right. Before then I’d have what I considered nightmares. These would be tense but vague: something alien was trying to crawl into my dreams, and I’d wake up crying.
I haven’t thought about that night in many years. Aunt Margie was crying out in pain, asking God to save her, calling out to my father, to her father and mother dead and buried in Fall River many decades before.
I turn to face my Shadow, and he says, "Yes, you remember. You’d been told to take care of your little brother and sisters, to keep them distracted and out of the way while adults went about their scary business. You had the kids watching TV. The Adventures of Robin Hood was on."