Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  Malik thought for a moment. “I want to know where it comes from.”

  The man laughed. “I figured you were one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “In my experience, there are two kinds. The first kind is happy to listen, so that’s what they do. They listen. The second kind, though, they aren’t so easily satisfied. You’re the second kind. Bring me the album and I’ll put you on the path. How’s that sound?”

  “I…can’t.”

  “You can’t? Sure you can.”

  “I can’t.”

  The man sighed. “You will. You’ll see. Give me another call when you’ve come to your senses.”

  And with that, the man hung up. Malik called him back immediately, but all he got was a busy signal. He swore and nearly dropped his cell in the toilet. He stumbled out of the washroom and back to his desk. He knew he should bring the record to the stranger, if only to be rid of it, but the idea made him feel ashamed, as if Josh would have disapproved.

  He would bring the album to the stranger after, he decided. He had to listen to the entire thing first. He had to hear it out. He owed Josh that much.

  Some nights, Malik could make three, maybe four attempts before sunrise, drifting off then waking in a daze, then spinning the record again. Other nights he could only bring himself to try once, and then the nausea would chase him outdoors. The struggle wasn’t unlike a drop of rain hitting the surface of a body of water. If you watch it happen in slow motion, the drop doesn’t meld instantly. There’s a moment after it hits when the water’s surface buckles under the force of its impact, a moment when it’s still a discrete object with its own boundaries. That in itself is curious, but an even more curious thing happens next. The drop breaks in two. One half joins the water beneath while the other half bounces back up, as if it’s trying to escape having to become a part of that vastness. When that half of the original drop falls, the same thing happens again. An even smaller drop bounces up and falls back down. And so it goes, on and on, and maybe if the energy of the system never runs down, this goes on forever as the drop becomes a smaller and smaller fragment of what it once was; but always trying to free itself from gravity, not out of any desire to be whole again—if separateness can even be considered the same as wholeness—but only as a mechanical reflex.

  Sometimes, at the point of splitting from himself, Malik dreamed of Josh—always of Josh. The roar of static panned to the edges of his hearing as he met Josh for the first time at a liquor store checkout. Technically, they’d seen one another before and even exchanged pleasantries, but Malik liked to think of this particular conversation as their first meeting.

  “ID, please,” Josh would say after barely a glance at Malik.

  “Ouch. Really?” Malik would catch Josh’s gaze, and Josh would look bored and unimpressed.

  “No plastic, no fun times. That’s how it works, buddy.”

  “Oh, I have ID. I was just hoping you’d remember me by now. I’m here every week.”

  “I guess you don’t make much of an impression.”

  “Guess not. Unless you’re just asking to see my ID again because you don’t want to seem like you remember me.”

  “You got me. You’re all I think about every day I get to work. Will that cute guy with the mini-fro be in today? Please, God, let him stand in my queue.”

  “So you think I’m cute?”

  At last, Josh would let slip a hint of a smile. “That’ll be forty-seven twenty-five, if you have ID.”

  “All right, all right. Here you go.”

  “Uh huh. Looks like you’re older than you look…Malik.”

  “I’ll pay with debit.”

  “You want it bagged?”

  “Please.” Then, “Thanks. See you around.”

  “What, you’re not going to ask what I’m doing after work?”

  “Naw, I figure you get asked that all the time. But if I keep coming back, one day, you’ll ask me out.”

  “And if I don’t remember you next time?”

  “You’d be lying.”

  “You think no one’s ever tried this?”

  “Not like me.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll see then.”

  “Challenge accepted. Same time next week?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Malik would lean in to read Josh’s name tag, as if he had never taken note of it before. “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Josh. A pleasure to meet you, Josh. A pleasure to meet you, Josh. A pleasure to meet you, Josh. A pleasure to meet you, Josh. A pleasure to meet you—”

  Perhaps because of the warp in the vinyl, on some plays the needle would skip and the music would catch in a brief loop. Malik would emerge from the static wash in those moments to see a familiar figure. The figure sat on a chair far back in the shadows of the room, and the voice that moaned its tortured melody seemed to come from it, not the speakers. Then the needle would catch the groove once more, and the loop would break, and upon waking the next morning, Malik would have no memory of the dark figure or the music.

  On one such morning, Malik woke to the sound of curtains screaming as they opened on plastic rollers, letting sunlight spill into a room that Malik didn’t recognize. Malik groaned and the woman who’d opened the window frowned at him. She wore a nurse’s gown. He tried to speak but could only manage an incomprehensible whisper. Even the slightest movement sent shooting pains up from his abdomen, and he noticed an IV plugged into his arm.

  The nurse welcomed him back. L’il Lee was there as well, in a chair next to the bed. She clutched one of his hands in both of hers. He had nearly died of malnutrition. He hadn’t shown up to work in weeks, hadn’t left the apartment. They thought he’d tried to starve himself out of grief. All of their friends had been by to see him. He’d been in a coma for two weeks.

  “What about the record?” he asked as soon as he could speak again.

  L’il Lee shook her head in disbelief. “I’m sure it’s right where you left it.”

  Malik arrived at the record store at the appointed time, and the man from the party ushered him down into the basement, alone. In the basement, amongst the towering stacks of dusty crates, waited a frail and somewhat sickly man in a three-piece suit. He had the look of a Wall Street shark who’d seen better days.

  “Did you bring it?” he asked Malik.

  “Why the hell do you think I’m carrying this ridiculous tote bag around?”

  Malik handed the bag to the man, though as soon as he’d done so, he felt the urge to snatch it back. He might have tried if not for a sudden wave of dizziness. He nearly collapsed, but the man in the suit caught him by the elbow. Frail as the man seemed, Malik was in far worse shape.

  Something like recognition passed between the pair in that brief moment of contact. For an instant, Malik swore that he saw himself through the man’s eyes. Then the man let go of his elbow.

  “I know the feeling,” said the man, as if he could hear Malik’s thoughts, as if he’d also been Malik in that moment. “It was scary at first. Freedom is always scary at first. But there’s really nothing to be afraid of, because that’s what you are. You’re nothing. You aren’t. You shouldn’t fear yourself if there’s no self to fear.”

  Malik bristled, though he knew the man didn’t mean it as an insult. If anything, the man was all too sincere. “If I’m nothing, then who are you talking to?”

  “I’m talking to myself. Except I’m nothing, too, so I guess I’m not talking to anyone. I guess I’m not talking at all. There’s no me making words, understand? There’s just words. Words, words, words. The only thing holding me together is a pronoun. A pronoun’s a prison, you see.”

  “Just tell me how to find him.”

  The man looked Malik up and down. “For a while, when I first heard The Love Song, I thought I was like you. I thought that I had to find whoever had made this … thing. I can tell you what I found, and maybe you can follow those leads, and let’s say you track down the source of all this.
What will you do then?”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Malik said without hesitation. He glanced nervously around the basement, as if just in case someone was eavesdropping from the shadows. He dropped his voice to a whisper and repeated the same words. “I’m going to kill him.”

  The man nodded soberly. “There was this one time,” he said, “when I was doing my taxes of all things. I had to call for help because I’d lost my pin number. I found myself lost in this maze of recorded messages. Dial one for service in English, dial two for questions about filing your taxes, dial five for information about accounts, until I finally reached a recorded message telling me the exact same thing as the online FAQ, which I’d already consulted, and it didn’t tell me how to get a new pin number, I’ll tell you that. I think that’s when I realized there were no real people working the phones. There was no route through all the bullshit to an actual human being.”

  “Speak Goddamn English.”

  The man smiled. There was patience in that smile—a shark’s patience—and he spoke as if to a child, or as if explaining to an uncomprehending animal that it was about to be slaughtered for someone’s next meal. “You’re dialing one. Got it. How’s this? When I listen to the song, it’s like looking into myself to discover that there’s just a bunch of automated messages. Just like when you listen, you look inside yourself and all you see is clear, clear water. You think you’re going to kill a man, but the thing you’re hoping to kill, it’s not a man. You’re like a raindrop thinking it can stop gravity.”

  Malik recoiled at the man’s words. He felt a strong urge to bolt. Maybe he should forget about the record, forget about it all. But then the man beckoned him closer.

  “Come,” he said. “I could tell you what you want to know, but why waste the time? It’ll feel like when I held your elbow, but more.” His lips trembled just shy of Malik’s lips. Malik’s lips also trembled. Breath tangled up between them, belonging to neither of them. “Kiss me and you can see the things I’ve seen; you can know everything I know.”

  When Malik emerged from the basement a few minutes later, the clerk asked if he’d found what he’d been looking for. The man was grinning when he asked, so smug Malik wanted to punch him in the face. Instead, he pretended to ignore the man on his way out.

  Malik did eventually find what he’d been looking

  for. He found it in a theater in an abandoned town, somewhere in what was probably California. Time had passed; enough time that his body felt healthy again, strong even. Except that, strong as it felt, the body wasn’t sure anymore if it was or wasn’t Malik.

  It stood in the aisle and noted that the seats for the audience were all empty, while another male body busied itself setting up equipment on the stage. The female body walked past the male body in the aisle to speak to the male body on the stage. The male body on the stage nodded, looked at the other male body, then nodded some more. It approached the other male body and spoke.

  “Hi,” it said. “I’m Mikey. I’m the sound technician. We’re all set up for you. I won’t be able to, you know, stay for the performance, for obvious reasons, but Claire here will take good care of you. She’ll be up in the recording booth. She’s deaf, so you know, she’s immune, so to speak. Anyway, you’re in fine hands. He’s in fine hands, right, Claire?”

  The male body that called itself Mikey didn’t wait for a reply. It clapped its hands together and left the theater in a hurry, and the male body once called Malik took the stage. It sat at the piano and touched the keys gingerly. The man called Malik had never played an instrument in his life, but Malik was almost free of himself as he watched his body from the recording booth while it straightened its back and placed its hands on the keys with conviction this time. The body remembered what to do by doing it, because it was just like all the other bodies that had come before it to sit on this bench a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times. They were the bench and the piano, and they were all the bodies playing their selves, and they played, and as the music took shape, the last vestige of whatever still remembered separateness also remembered a word—just one word—and maybe it was a name.

  Josh. Yes, the body remembered Josh. The body was Josh, just as Josh was the song, and they were the air that vibrated with their own notes set in time to their own rhythms, and they were the mics that recorded those vibrations, and they were the vinyl into which the song would soon be pressed. They were everything and they were nothing. They were the river that flowed into the ocean, and they were the ocean, and they were heated and pulled apart by the sun’s light, and they were the sun’s light carrying themselves upward into the heavens so that one day—side by side for a second—they would fall.

  THERE USED TO BE OLIVE TREES

  RICH LARSON

  Valentin crept through the darkness toward the high stone wall of the Town, heart thumping hard against his ribs. His nanoshadow, wrapped around his chest under his shirt, sensed his anxiety and gave a comforting pulse, gritty and warm against his skin. It helped a little. Valentin had never gone over the wall before. He had never left the Town before.

  But anything was better than what awaited him in the morning: the prueba. His fourth prueba, to be precise. Valentin ran a finger over caked scar tissue until it contacted the gleaming black implant poking from the crest of his shaved head. It was the implant that let him control his nanoshadow—for anyone else, it would have been an inert black puddle. It was the implant that let him communicate with some of the simpler machines inside the Town.

  The implant didn’t make him a true prophet, though. Not until he passed the prueba, until the Town’s machine god spoke to him. No prophet had ever failed the test more than twice. Valentin was on three and counting.

  So he was leaving. Valentin breathed deep, staring up the weathered stone face of the wall that had kept him safe for all his sixteen years. He knew the world outside was a dangerous one. There were wilders and mudslides and scuttling scorpions. Valentin hated scorpions and he had a healthy fear of wilders from growing up with scarestories.

  But so long as he had his nanoshadow, he could do things no barbarian could even dream of. He reached out with his implant and summoned the gleaming black motes, coaxing the shadow down his arms, gloving his hands. He steadied his nerves, looked around once more for anyone who might stop him, then took a flying leap at the wall.

  Valentin was normally clumsy, but with the nanoshadow strengthening his arms like corded black muscle and coating his hands with clinging tendrils, he went up the sheer wall easily as a gecko. He felt a grin splitting his face as he topped it. Poised there on the edge with his nanoshadow balancing him, Valentin could see the empty campo stretching far and away. Rolling hills of dead gray soil, dotted ruins, crumbling road. It looked like freedom.

  With only the slightest guilt thinking of Javier, who would wake up in the morning to find his apprentice gone, Valentin slid down the other side of the wall and started to walk. It wasn’t long before he heard a familiar rumble of gods on the move. Valentin kept low but still felt a swirl of static inside his skull, the customary sting of his implant, as the pod of biomechanical gods thundered through the dark sky overhead.

  He could sense them, but their thoughts were walled off from him, inscrutable as those of the god who controlled the Town, and a moment later their ghostly yellow lights disappeared into the distance.

  Leaving him in the dark again.

  “Wake up, little Townie.”

  Still half in a dream, Valentin thought it was Javier’s voice, waking him for the prueba. Then he remembered scaling the wall, walking and walking, finding a crevice to sleep in cocooned by his nanoshadow.

  His nanoshadow that he could no longer feel against his skin. Valentin wrenched his eyes open, jolted by adrenaline, and found himself face to face with what could only be a monster with beetle-black eyes and an impossibly wide mouth.

  Valentin jerked backward, probing desperately for his shadow, and the bag clutched in the monster�
�s pale hand writhed.

  “None of that,” the monster said sourly, shaking the rucksack where Valentin’s nanoshadow was trapped. “None of your Townie tricks. All right?”

  It wasn’t a monster. It was a boy, maybe his age, maybe a bit younger. His mouth was the normal size, but a raw-looking scar gashed upward from one corner of it, splitting his cheek. He had shaggy black hair and coarse skin and wore a black coat that was different fabrics all patched together, nothing like the identical gray garments made by the Town’s autofab.

  The boy turned his head, and Valentin realized the other half of his face was beautiful, fine-cut with long black lashes. He had never thought wilders might be beautiful. It didn’t do much to help the cold panic numbing his limbs.

  “A live shadow,” the wilder said, shaking his head. His accent was thick and nasal and dropped the endings off familiar words. “Thought they were only in tales. Are you a prophet, then?”

  Valentin tried to clear his head. The wilder had found him while he was sleeping and peeled his shadow off him. Normally he’d still be able to control it, make it leap out of the bag, but he’d used it all through the night to keep warm and now, still without sunshine, it didn’t have enough strength to escape.

  “I’m a prophet,” Valentin said. “Yeah. I am. So if you don’t give me my nanoshadow now, I’ll have the gods blast you to ashes and a little heap of bone.”

  Alarm flashed over the wilder’s split face for a split second, then he tipped back his head and gave a warbling laugh. “Once you do something for me, Prophet,” he said, thumbing an eyelash off his cheek, “you can ask the gods to punish me however you like.” He hefted the rucksack onto his shoulders and strapped it tight.

  Valentin’s heart pounded. Maybe he could run for it, but the cold, hard look of the wilder’s eyes and the long knife in his belt made him think otherwise. And no way was he returning to the Town as not only the first prophet to fail three pruebas in a row, but the first to lose his nanoshadow to a wilder.