The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

by John Joseph Adams

  You teach her how to peel her skin away. You show her where to place her fingers, how to hide the soft pink shell that she leaves behind. You advise her to check for salt on her return, to always check for salt.

  “You’ll burn up,” you warn.

  You take her for her first blood. You show her where to place her bite, right into the pulsing vein of a little boy’s neck. The boy is not much younger than she is.

  She drinks much too fast and she staggers back. You tell her that she doesn’t have to take all of it. She doesn’t require another’s life, only the blood. She nods, but you know that eternity is long and she will someday forget, when her loneliness is too much to bear.

  Watching her ecstasy, you feel that old unbearable hunger, the loneliness biting at you, and you give in to it, plunging your sharp tongue into the boy’s neck. You take in a gulp of blood and you reel back, gasping in pain, the blood bitter and burning in your mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” the girl says absently, still swimming in the blood.

  “Nothing,” you say. “I am nothing at all.”

  This is how you remind yourself you’re still alive.

  One night, when the girl is out gorging herself on blood, you hurl off your husk, letting it fall wherever it may.

  You go down to the beach, breathing in the salt, feeling it burn in your mouth and sizzle in the slits of your nose. You walk to where the sand is wet and write out your entire life along the shore with your fingers. You confess to everything, holding nothing back, watching the salty tide come in as you do.

  When you are finished, you walk to the water’s edge and wade in. You swim until there’s nothing left.

  Samuel R. Delany

  The Hermit of Houston

  from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “First off,” I remember the Hermit’s assistant told us, “you can’t tell the entire story.” She was perhaps ten years older than I was and had that pigment thing some black people get where blotches on their skin are missing the melanin. She had a large one on her left cheek. I was a child and that was weeks after I’d been brought to the door and turned loose to see if I’d enter or run away. Immediately I’d gone inside, though it wasn’t natural curiosity. “Like me trying to tell you everything you’re going to learn here,” she told the group of us, in our high-ceilinged classroom. “Or why you’re going to learn it, whether from me or on your own, or from each other. I couldn’t do it,” she repeated in the hallway when I went up to say I didn’t understand.

  (“You better go in there with the rest,” my older sister had said, looking at the shrubbery and the rocks beside the door, “or you’ll be killed—”)

  I remember leaving by those same doors—twenty feet tall they were, of patinaed bronze, practically black, around panes of scratched glass. On wet days raindrops blew jaggedly down and across. Sometimes clouds reflected in them, during the glorious weather that obtained for ten and a half months of the year. We children would gather in front of the building for our trips and wanderings, for wherever, in those years, we thought to go off to. We could explore anywhere on the Yucatán coast, in sight of the squat pyramid, down the shore, above the neat city between.

  The Hermit of Tolmec herself we saw far less frequently. She was rich, old, and a woman I’m pretty sure had been born that way on all fronts—though a decade later Cellibrex, once we met and learned to talk to each other, told me you really can’t tell about gender. People change it all the time—though he never had.

  Neither had I. But by then he and I both had known people who’d done so. I’d never knowingly been to bed with any, though he said he had several times. He preferred what he was used to, however—which apparently, at least he said so, was me.

  And by that time we were used to each other.

  In my very unclear memory of childhood (lucid about some things and nonexistent about others), the Hermit of Tolmec wore blue rags one week and red ones the next. She had old boots and a supply of different-colored laces, which she changed every morning to receive the visitors who came while she sat in a big wooden chair in her part of the building. The chair—an ecclesiastical throne—had knife scars on its frame that spoke of age and a history I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know if the Hermit did either. Once I whispered to the assistant, “What are they . . . ?” and she put her hand—which also had some white patches—on my shoulder.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to. But we’re slated to get a replacement by the end of the month: something simple. Then we can all forget such atrocities.”

  The Hermit’s laces beneath her torn skirts that day, at the foot of her chair’s carved wooden legs, above a small fur rug, glimmered black.

  Her assistant liked her; me, the Hermit frightened.

  For most of the time, those of us in the hermitage lived pretty much alone, in the shell of what her assistant explained had been a suburban supermarket, though she said that even earlier it had been an urban cathedral, when this had briefly been the site of the city of Tulum on the eastern Yucatán coast, before the Texans came. (I think they were Texans, but I don’t know for certain.) Then it was a village again. They had invaded before I was born but later drifted away. No, I hadn’t been born there either. Though I’m not sure where I’d come from, or if I ever knew. I remember the assistant also telling our group that there was once a movement to tell stories that focused on how you got food, how the technology worked, how you related to something called “mean production,” how some of it was really dangerous and some of it was actually helpful. But you couldn’t accept all of it without serious thought, which was the notion of an ancient religious leader named Marx, who at one time you could learn about in various threads on the greatest of the old religions, Facebook, but that an older—or was it newer—religion called Handbook had gone back to the idea that everyone could live naturally and not have any mean production at all, though she used to laugh and say it didn’t seem any more natural to her than any other kind.

  “Listen to me, Smart Girl (you know that still sounds strange to me, because you are a male), I am delighted you are not terrified to come see me,” said the Hermit in our own conversation, having been called in to discipline me. “I’ve killed so many children—babies they were, little female babies that we called boys, to make it easier—and for a while many people knew it. I hope that’s something you never wake up one morning and realize you’ve done, no matter how inadvertently. But at that time it seemed the only way to bring down the population. As followers of Facebook go, we were fairly deluded; almost as deluded as the followers of Handbook who tried to replace them.” She snorted. “And just ended up mingling with them . . . I suppose we are lucky that Facebook has such a short memory. Or, who knows, maybe some other little girl like you told a tale . . . ,” and I was startled, because I thought she might have known about my sister giving up her own place to get me in there. “Be glad you’re a boy.” But that’s just a name, and I am not sure what you would call me if you actually met me this week, though most probably it would be different from next week. These categories change much too quickly for anyone to keep up, though I feel as if I’ve been sexually stable since I came back to the area after my traumatic childhood wanderings.

  But then I had my coming-of-age forgetting process, as did all those in the hermitage and all those in any government education system, I was told; and while all of us worried about it beforehand, since it wasn’t a complete memory erasure but highly selective, certainly it made me and all of the rest of us feel better, even a bit superior, if not privileged. And there was the shared paradox of thousands and thousands of children, I just assumed, not remembering what it was we’d forgotten . . .

  Today, more than thirty years later, the Tolmec Hermit must be dead. I know my sister is. I wonder about the other children who were there with us. (Though I still know where Ara lives, who was in my group back then.) I like to think we were there, all those years ago, because we were smar
t. Or was it because someone thought we needed to be taught certain things and might learn them more easily there? Which is not quite the same . . .

  The story I put together for myself about my very confused adolescent travels is that I must have gone more than two thousand kilometers by bicycle, helicopter, horse, barge, and boat. After that I lived (I learned I ended up there almost by accident) between thirty and fifty kilometers from the old supermarket-once-cathedral in Tolmec, though it might as well have been on the other side of what people around here still argue could be a globe turning in space or an endless plane that stretches to infinity in all directions. I didn’t intend to tell you that much about my childhood, or how I got my food, or which of the vegetables I ate, or which I gave to my companions or which were stolen by my enemies (I don’t think I could bear it: too many people died in that process to make it the kind of story acceptable on Facebook or Handbook), and the Handbook priests used to come through with their guns to police the tales we told at the seasonal gatherings, where we got to make music and those who wanted to be Great Writers themselves told tales in keeping with the Algorithm Transparency Act, and that for a while was all the news with the people who were concerned with what was and what wasn’t Acceptable to the Tribe.

  I wonder if, on that trip that’s so unclear in my memory, I went all the way around—or only described a small circle.

  It’s interesting listening to stories in a closed arena while priests stand in the aisles with guns. Twice I saw them shoot a Writer. As soon as it happened, people began to check on their pocket phones for what was acceptable to say and what was not, while the blood ran to the platform edge and down the front of the stage.

  (Cellibrex says that during his childhood he never heard any official tales told but lived in among gangs of hundreds of children, mostly underground, and you could watch all the porn you wanted. But nobody did. Cellibrex said he too had gone traveling in his youth, though almost instantly he had been set upon, captured, dragged away through trees and rocks, imprisoned, and held as part of another gang from which he did not really get loose until his mid-thirties. He said it was very much like the first one, only the children in it looked more like he did. All memory of where he’d started was now gone. Though in his gang, sex among the boys was constant, there was what I assumed must have been age-mate guidance, but nothing like adult supervision; as he said, there were no adults.)

  Everyone knows straight men and women and gay men and women do lots of different things. But the only act you can talk about in a public telling, either in a local gymnasium or a great auditorium with murals hanging on the cinder-block walls, is a penetrative one that’s supposed to be common to all. Especially once they are married. You can describe that act for anyone in as much detail as you wish. Because it is Universal, as is Marriage itself. But the mentioning of anything else outside of Marriage could get you shot. I knew even before I went traveling that many things called safe sex that were part of what men did together, most of what went on between men and the men who were called women, you could not mention in public. (It’s what got the second Great Writer who I saw shot and wounded in his—she was a woman—performance.) But it meant that I grew up thinking “safe sex” and “oral sex” were the ultimate evils for all.

  It certainly cured me of wanting to be any sort of Writer, Great or otherwise.

  I’ve lived with so many Round Earthers; most of my life it never occurred to me to take Flat Earthers seriously. Someone once told me a story about a famous old detective who didn’t know that the earth was round because he didn’t need such information to do his detective work. He had a friend who was a doctor who lived on Baker Street—or was he a Baker who lived with a doctor?

  That part I didn’t remember.

  I do remember public demonstrations and big arguments—shooting ones, with stun guns—among critics over whether they had a heterosexual relationship or a homosexual one. You could find old DVDs of versions in which Watson was played by a woman, which was supposed to clinch the argument. Then someone cited an earlier written text which was supposed to clinch it the other way. Then a third voice upheld that we should take each version for exactly what it said and not get lost in decoding, which finally drew the biggest guffaws.

  That got the commune of a friend of mine smashed up.

  But I may sneak in a few accounts of such forbidden topics about Cellibrex—not his real name: my nickname for him, because years before, I read in some library it had been a kind of recording tape, and so many of the things he did say were things he repeated. But we were together for a long time. I learned quickly that he had grown up with many more children than I had. Neither he nor any of the boys he’d grown up with ever learned to read. He didn’t even know his family. “Clone” was the worst insult you could call someone, he told me. And if anyone in any group looked too much like anyone else in the clique, often that person was driven out to seek people who were physically different—for friendship, sex, or other social bondings. But we are broaching the kinds of differences that, were this an official tale, I would not be able to tell.

  Cellibrex says the world is flat—there is no argument, as far as he is concerned, and saying otherwise is silly. To me that sounds so absurd, I never thought to argue. In his childhood, he saw men and adults kill people who held contrary opinions. He says he grew up in a commune—which I always assumed meant an artificial environment, the way it’s used here—but I can’t be sure since I wasn’t there—with an apple in it, which was like a big pocket phone or a pad with a screen on it, which I never encountered. It’s not a popular opinion, but it’s not one that would get you killed at a public tale-telling either. (Those are the parts of the story I’m not allowed to tell.) Though he never was taught how to use it, Cellibrex knew we were ruled by the internet, which was not a book but a group of men, and very shortly he found himself rounded up and shipped to a sprawling penal combine, where he spent a dozen years of his life. (I assume dozen meant twelve, but I can’t be sure of that either: he says he learned to use the word for an approximate general number from us. What he and the boys he was captured with were incarcerated for, he does not know or refuses to say. He says he didn’t learn the word dozen meant a specific number until after he’d escaped from the military.)

  That’s when I began to wonder if flat to the Flat Earthers meant curved so slightly that it might as well be flat in all directions . . . and just gave up because they didn’t need to know anything else to do their work. Like the famous detective (who was probably gay, since his best friend was an Asian woman).

  From the time he was eleven until he was twenty-two or so, Cellibrex has told me, he does not know where he was either; but it was far away. He killed people while he was there, and he does not believe he can go back, which at first made me wonder if he had been a Hermit or a Hermit’s assistant. But later I realized he’d been in a gang called a family, or a family called a gang: it had lots of people in it, of all ages. His gang-family had no parents in it that he was aware of. There was a lot about age-mates, which were important. It was all male and the sex was pretty ritualized and possessive. He remembered standing on some rocks, either in the morning or the evening, seeing fields full of his gang moving below, in groups of what he was sure had to be hundreds.

  Then, somehow, he spent some years in a military unit, which he said entailed thousands of men—again, no men who were even called women had survived among the gangs of his childhood.

  But the sex and the work were so different that he thought for the first six months it would drive him crazy, learning to understand them. But somehow he found that once he stopped resisting, it was actually both interesting and easier. And he’d traveled around enough to make him believe in the world’s flatness.

  I remember a childhood of living in units with people who were responsible for me. He remembers sleeping in piles of brothers in which anything might happen.

  But I didn’t find out he believed all these things abo
ut the world and had seen so much to make him sure of them—unless he was just bat-shit crazy, which now and then I have considered, though he was pretty quiet most of the time—until after we had known each other almost a year.

  He was a very expressive man, but not a communicative one.

  He knew his real name—which I don’t think there’s any reason to tell—but not where he came from, though he had an ID number. But it began with QX4, which makes me think it was from a long, long way away.

  You want to know how we met?

  It was during my recurring two days off from my job that—like I say—good literary form stipulates I not specify as to time and place, though I’ll be vulgar and mention it entailed baskets and boxes and keeping track of the food and electronics they contained. But I don’t want to get myself in trouble, telling whether I worked indoors or out, or if it was mostly physical labor or information tracking that I did, whether I was paid in copper notes or material certificates, etc. Distinctions of that sort are not literary. Today what is valued in a tale is the universal, not the specific, what is common to all men and women, whatever their sex: how we are all alike.

  You get in the habit of not talking about things like that with others, and soon you don’t think about such things yourself.

  It’s that forbidden mean production again.

  At any rate, I was walking up through the recreation area between the major living hoods and the farming areas, through trees and by ponds, where the wild animals are kept with their tracking collars and the tame ones walled away on the Farms (another kind of institution entirely) that smelled so incredibly when you rode by them on a bicycle or glided over them in a glider. I’d taken my blue shirt off and tied the sleeves around my neck and was wondering about taking off my sandals and going barefoot when a very large, unshaven, brown-skinned fellow wandered from behind some trees.