A puzzled expression crossed her face and then, amused, she said, “Of course! You wouldn’t remember. You were with the Child.”
“Don’t start that crap with me!”
“You don’t believe me? That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you when you called at my parents’. I thought you wanted to get back together.”
“Why would I want that? What reason would I have? According to you, I have no memory of us fucking.”
I must have spoken loudly—a man at the bar turned to stare at us.
“You have to understand,” Nubia said. “I was confused when I got back to Merida. It took me a long time to grasp what was going on.”
“You’re talking about the Child now? Your imaginary friend confused you?”
“Let’s just drop it.”
“No, please. I want to hear.”
She concentrated on setting down her glass so that it fit precisely to the circle of moisture it had made on the table. “The Child passed from you to me while we were making love...”
“It’s been a decade since we made love.”
“Very well. While we were fucking!”
The man at the bar stared again, as did the bartender.
“What exactly is the Child?” I asked. “I’m not saying I’ll believe you, but for the record what is it? You skate around the topic in the book. You give a lot of embellishment but not much substance.”
“I don’t know what it is. Over the years I’ve picked up a few things. It’s old... and empty. And it wants adoration. It demands celebrants, people having sex to celebrate its presence. But I don’t understand why. I have the idea it’s frivolous, that sex is just something it likes.” She paused. “It’s intelligent, but I think its memory is failing. It may be senile.”
“How do you know that? I assume it knocks you out of the driver’s seat when it takes over.”
“I get bursts of memory that aren’t mine. I see people... short, with Mediterranean features and complexions. Ancient cities and buildings, only the colors are bright and there’s no sign of age or decay. But it doesn’t appear to retain any recent memories. The Moravians, for example. It doesn’t have many memories of them. Just tatters.” She fingered the rim of her glass. “At any rate, I’ve seen enough to know that Eros was no god, not as we imagine gods.”
“I’ve read your speculations.”
“They’re not speculations.”
“Aren’t you ashamed? Peddling this garbage... hustling fools. Does money mean that much to you?”
“Do you think I enjoy this?” She slapped the table, rattling the glasses. “I don’t have a choice! I told you it wants celebrants. This is how it goes about getting them. It likes me. I suit it. Literally. It wears me like a goddamn suit whenever it wants.” Anger emptied from her face and she lowered her head, fussing with a cocktail napkin. “It tried everyone else first. Macyory, Claudia... It killed Taylor. That happens sometimes. There’s some kind of incompatibility and they die.” She tore a strip off the napkin. “It’s always close to me. If I make a move it doesn’t like, it takes control.”
Her rapid shifts in mood, from amused to ruminative to angry to depressed... I thought them evidence of mental difficulty or very bad acting. She had always been the cause of my troubles, the source of my delirium, and whatever her condition I wanted no more to do with her. I had a sudden desire for my wife’s company. I pulled out my wallet and dropped a twenty on the table.
“Maybe one day it’ll find somebody it likes better,” she said. “That’s all I can hope for. I hope it’s soon, because if it isn’t... there’ll be nothing left of me. It’s corroding me, erasing me.”
I slid out of the booth.
She asked, “What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“Don’t!” She caught at my sleeve. “Stay a little longer. It’s so rare I get the chance to talk to anyone.”
“Either you’re insane or you’re a criminal,” I said. “Maybe you’re both. I don’t propose to waste time figuring it out.”
I started for the door and she seized my wrist. Her face was no longer distraught, but calm. Something seemed to stir inside my skull. Confused by that sensation, I shook her off and made for the street. Outside, amid the clamor of traffic and the voices of passers-by, I hesitated, held in place by our old connection—but its hold had weakened. I strode toward the parking structure where I had left the car.
“Jon!”
Nubia’s voice was raspy, strained, as if it had taken a supreme effort to produce that single syllable. She stood in front of the bar and, though she was about thirty feet distant, I felt her as if she were beside me, a cold, aloof presence spearing me with dagger eyes. She came forward, one stiff-legged, halting step, then another. I glanced overhead, half-expecting to see opaque shapes flurrying. She took a third step, braced with a hand against the building, and I fled, not running, but walking fast, desperate to get away from her, whatever she was, Eros incarnate or a lesser form of affliction. At the corner I turned back. Nubia had fallen and several pedestrians had closed in about her. A man in a gray T-shirt stooped and took her elbow, preparing to help her stand.
In the parking structure I sat in the car, my hand on the ignition, trying to find some clue, some lie or misstep that would prove the matter one way or the other. It was possible that Nubia was the ultimate victim of St. Gotthard and in need of rescue, but every element of her story was unbelievable, and that it was our story, our invention, made it more so... though even that could be explained away by the supranatural influence of the Child. I switched on the engine, listened to it idle, staring at the designation of the parking slot on the grimy cement wall: B-8. Bingo, I thought. Now what? Shrill laughter echoed behind me—a couple walking to their car. Minutes ticked by. My cell played a dervish snatch of Elvis Costello, a speeded-up version of “Watching The Detectives.” It was my wife, asking if I wanted to pick up a movie and some take-out from the Indian place. I said I would and was cheered, knowing I would soon be drowned in the extraordinary illusion of ordinary comforts.
“How was the lecture?” she asked.
“What you’d expect. We had a drink afterward. It was...” I searched for words to describe the encounter. “Pretty terrible. Sad. She’s gone now.”
After a silence she said, “Where are you?”
“Parking structure.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I just... I still can’t work it out. I thought talking to her would help, but it didn’t. It...” I made a frustrated noise.
“How long have you been there? In the parking structure?”
“Not long, I don’t think.” I looked at my watch, but could make no sense of the dial. “I don’t know.”
“Jon?”
I felt exhausted and dazed and frail, as I had when the soldiers rescued us from St. Gotthard. Staring at the watch, dazzling gold and crystal, an incomprehensible thing, brought tears to my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Jon,” my wife said firmly. “Come home.”
Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim” concerns a wealthy man who spends a good portion of his life searching for the most beautiful place on earth. It strikes me as a fragmentary work, since it merely states this as fact, gives a slender bit of character development, and then describes the place he found and how he developed it. I was intrigued by its incompleteness and I wondered what such a place would be like today after years of human occupation. What would be left and how would the place be used? I wondered, too, if a wealthy man who spent so much time and money on such a trivial aim could have a good character. Poe paints him as a dilettante, a lover of beauty, but to my mind such a man would be indulgent at the least, and it was more likely that his indulgence, when magnified by wealth and eroded by small-mindedness, would veer into the perverse.
<
* * * *
Suzy McKee Charnas is a born and raised New Yorker. After two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, she taught in private school
in New York and then worked with a high school drug-abuse treatment program. In 1969 she married and moved to New Mexico, where she began writing fiction full-time.
Her first novel, Walk to the End of the World, was a Campbell award finalist. The cycle of four books that sprang from Walkended in 1999 with The Conqueror’s Child, which won the James P. Tiptree Award. Her SF and fantasy books and stories have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, and the Mythopoeic award for young-adult fantasy. Her play Vampire Dreams has been staged several times, and a collection of her stories and essays, Stagestruck Vampires, was published in 2004.
She lectures and teaches about SF, fantasy, and vampires whenever she gets the chance to, most recently in a writing workshop at the University of New Mexico. Her website is at www.suzymckeecharnas.com
* * * *
Lowland Sea
By Suzy McKee Charnas
Miriam had been to Cannes twice before. The rush and glamour of the film festival had not long held her attention (she did not care for movies and knew the real nature of the people who made them too well for that magic to work), but from the windows of their festival hotel she could look out over the sea and daydream about sailing home, one boat against the inbound tide from northern Africa.
This was a foolish dream; no one went to Africa now—no one could be paid enough to go, not while the Red Sweat raged there (the film festival itself had been postponed this year till the end of summer on account of the epidemic). She’d read that vessels wallowing in from the south laden with refugees were regularly shot apart well offshore by European military boats, and the beaches were not only still closed but were closely patrolled for lucky swimmers, who were also disposed of on the spot.
Just foolish, really, not even a dream that her imagination could support beyond its opening scene. Supposing that she could survive long enough to actually make it home (and she knew she was a champion survivor), nothing would be left of her village, just as nothing, or very close to nothing, was left to her of her childhood self. It was eight years since she had been taken.
Bad years; until Victor had bought her. Her clan tattoos had caught his attention. Later, he had had them reproduced, in make-up, for his film, Hearts of Light (it was about African child-soldiers rallied by a brave, warm-hearted American adventurer—played by Victor himself—against Islamic terrorists).
She understood that he had been seduced by the righteous outlawry of buying a slave in the modern world—to free her, of course; it made him feel bold and virtuous. In fact, Victor was accustomed to buying people. Just since Miriam had known him, he had paid two Russian women to carry babies for him because his fourth wife was barren. He already had children but, edging toward sixty, he wanted new evidence of his potency.
Miriam was not surprised. Her own father had no doubt used the money he had been paid for her to buy yet another young wife to warm his cooling bed; that was a man’s way. He was probably dead now or living in a refugee camp somewhere, along with all the sisters and brothers and aunties from his compound: wars, the Red Sweat, and fighting over the scraps would leave little behind.
She held no grudge: she had come to realize that her father had done her a favor by selling her. She had seen a young cousin driven away for witchcraft by his own father, after a newborn baby brother had sickened and died. A desperate family could thus be quickly rid of a mouth they could not feed.
Better still, Miriam had not yet undergone the ordeal of female circumcision when she was taken away. At first she had feared that it was for this reason that the men who bought her kept selling her on to others. But she had learned that this was just luck, in all its perverse strangeness, pressing her life into some sort of shape. Not a very good shape after her departure from home, but then good luck came again in the person of Victor, whose bed she had warmed till he grew tired of her. Then he hired her to care for his new babies, Kevin and Leif.
Twins were unlucky back home: there, one or both would immediately have been put out in the bush to die. But this, like so many other things, was different for all but the poorest of whites.
They were pretty babies; Kevin was a little fussy but full of lively energy and alertness that Miriam rejoiced to see. Victor’s actress wife, Cameron, had no use for the boys (they were not hers, after all, not as these people reckoned such things). She had gladly left to Miriam the job of tending to them.
Not long afterward Victor had bought Krista, an Eastern European girl, who doted extravagantly on the two little boys and quickly took over their care. Victor hated to turn people out of his household (he thought of himself as a magnanimous man), so his chief assistant, Bulgarian Bob, found a way to keep Miriam on. He gave her a neat little digital camera with which to keep a snapshot record of Victor’s home life: she was to be a sort of documentarian of the domestic. It was Bulgarian Bob (as opposed to French Bob, Victor’s head driver) who had noticed her interest in taking pictures during an early shoot of the twins.
B. Bob was like that: he noticed things, and he attended to them.
Miriam felt blessed. She knew herself to be plain next to the diet-sculpted, spa-pampered, surgery-perfected women in Victor’s household, so she could hardly count on beauty to secure protection; nor had she any outstanding talent of the kind that these people valued. But with a camera like this Canon G9, you needed no special gift to take attractive family snapshots. It was certainly better than, say, becoming someone’s lowly third wife, or being bonded for life to a wrinkled shrine-priest back home.
Krista said that B. Bob had been a gangster in Prague. This was certainly possible. Some men had a magic that could change them from any one thing into anything else: the magic was money. Victor’s money had changed Miriam’s status from that of an illegal slave to, of all wonderful things, that of a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. (although whether her new papers could stand serious scrutiny she hoped never to have to find out). Thus she was cut off from her roots, floating in Victor’s world.
Better not to think of that, though; better not to think painful thoughts.
Krista understood this (she understood a great deal without a lot of palaver). Yet Krista obstinately maintained a little shrine made of old photos, letters, and trinkets that she set up in a private corner wherever Victor’s household went. Despite a grim period in Dutch and Belgian brothels, she retained a sweet naïveté. Miriam hoped that no bad luck would rub off on Krista from attending to the twins. Krista was anEast European, which seemed to render a female person more than normally vulnerable to ill fortune.
Miriam had helped Krista to fit in with the others who surrounded Victor—the coaches, personal shoppers, arrangers, designers, bodyguards, publicists, therapists, drivers, cooks, secretaries, and hangers-on of all kinds. He was like a paramount chief with a great crowd of praise singers paid to flatter him, outshouting similar mobs attending everyone significant in the film world. This world was little different from the worlds of Africa and Arabia that Miriam had known, although at first it had seemed frighteningly strange—so shiny, so fast-moving and raucous! But when you came right down to it here were the same swaggering, self-indulgent older men fighting off their younger competitors, and the same pretty girls they all sniffed after; and the lesser court folk, of course, including almost-invisible functionaries like Krista and Miriam.
One day, Miriam planned to leave. Her carefully tended savings were nothing compared to the fortunes these shiny people hoarded, wasted, and squabbled over; but she had almost enough for a quiet, comfortable life in some quiet, comfortable place. She knew how to live modestly and thought she might even sell some of her photographs once she left Victor’s orbit.
It wasn’t as if she yearned to run to one of the handsome African men she saw selling knock-off designer handbags and watches on the sidewalks of great European cities. Sometimes, at the sound of a familiar language from home, she imagined joining them—but those were poor men, always on the run from the local law. She could not give such a man power over h
er and her savings.
Not that having money made the world perfect: Miriam was a realist, like any survivor. She found it funny that, even for Victor’s followers with their light minds and heavy pockets, contentment was not to be bought. Success itself eluded them, since they continually redefined it as that which they had not yet achieved.
Victor, for instance: the one thing he longed for but could not attain was praise for his film—his first effort as an actor-director.
“They hate me!” he cried, crushing another bad review and flinging it across the front room of their hotel suite, “because I have the balls to tackle grim reality! All they want is sex, explosions, and the new Brad Pitt! Anything but truth; they can’t stand truth!”
Of course they couldn’t stand it. No one could. Truth was the desperate lives of most ordinary people, lives often too hard to be borne; mere images on a screen could not make that an attractive spectacle. Miriam had known boys back home who thought they were “Rambo.” Some had become killers, some had been become the killed: doped-up boys, slung about with guns and bullet-belts like carved fetish figures draped in strings of shells. Their short lives were not in the movies or like the movies.
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