As I wait for my train, I watch swallows flying to and fro, carrying food to their chicks. The birds have built nests on the underside of the freeway. They don’t seem to care that semis and SUVs are thundering over them at 70 miles per hour.
When I return in the evening, I’ll hear frogs chirping in the stream that runs in a gully just behind the benches. Beside the stream is a tiny marsh where rushes grow.
I like this forgotten bit of wild land, hidden away beneath the city streets.
“My name is Jennifer. I am on my way to a toy company in Redwood City to have a meeting about fairies.
I met the company’s founder at an art opening and he said he liked the way I think. I was a double major in art and anthropology, and we had had a long conversation (fueled by cheap white wine) about the dark side of children’s stories. As I recall, I talked a lot about Tinker Bell, who tried to murder Wendy more than once. (My still-unfinished PhD dissertation is a cross-cultural analysis of the role of wicked women in children’s literature, and I count Tinker Bell as right up there among the wicked.)
Anyway, he hired me to be part of his company’s product development department. He told me he liked to toss people into the mix to see what happened.
After he hired me, I found out that he had a habit of hiring people for no clearly defined job, then firing them when they didn’t do their job. He hired me, then left for a month’s vacation. He is still gone. I wasn’t sure what my job was when I reported to work three weeks ago. I still don’t know. But this is the first steady paycheck I’ve had in a couple of years and I’m determined to make sure that something positive happens.
Today, I’m going to a meeting about fairies.
Tiffany is the project manager. We met by the coffee maker on my first day. While we waited for the coffee to brew, I found out what she was working on and chatted with her about it. She invited me to come to a few team meetings to “provide input.”
The company is creating a line of Twinkle Fairy Dolls. Among three- to six-year-old girls, fairies of the gossamer-wing variety are a very hot topic. That’s what the marketing guy said, anyway. He was at the first meeting I attended, but he hasn’t been back since.
Each Twinkle Fairy doll will come with a unique Internet code that lets the owner enter the online fairyland that Tiffany’s team is developing. In that world, the doll’s owner will have her own fairy home that she can furnish with fairy furniture. She will have a fairy avatar that she can dress with fairy clothes.
It’s a rather consumer-oriented fairyland. Players purchase their furniture and clothes with fairy dollars—or would that be fairy gold? And if it’s fairy gold, will it wither into dead leaves in the light of day?
These are questions I do not ask at the meeting.
Today the question that Tiffany wants to address is: What sort of world do the fairies live in? Is it a forest world where they frolic in leafy groves and shelter from the misty rain under mushroom caps? Or is it a fairy village with cobblestone streets and thatched huts, maybe surrounding a fairy castle? Or is it some mixture of the two?
“Why don’t we just ask marketing what they want?” says Rocky, the web developer. The temperature is supposed to top 100 today, but Rocky is wearing black jeans, black boots, and a black t-shirt from a robot wars competition. He strolled into the meeting late without apology, his eyebrows (right one pierced in three places) lowered in a scowl. He wants to look surly, but his face is sweet and soft and boyish and he can’t quite pull it off.
I suspect Rocky is not happy to be on the fairy project. Tiffany mentioned that another team is working on a line of remote control monster trucks. I think Rocky would rather be developing an online Monster Truck World.
Tiffany shakes her head. Her hair is very short and very blonde and very messy. She’s in her late twenties and tends to wear designer jeans, baby-doll tops, and mary janes. “We want to be authentic,” she says.
Jane, the project’s art director, stares at her. “Authentic? We’re talking about fairies here. In case you didn’t know, there aren’t any fairies.” Jane can be a little cranky.
I step in to help Tiffany. She’s kind of a ditz, but I like her and she seems to be in charge of some important projects. A useful person to befriend. “I think Tiffany means that we want our fairies to match the child’s concept of fairies. We want them to feel authentic.”
“Sherlock Holmes believed in fairies,” says Tiffany. “Isn’t that what you told me the other day?”
Did I say “kind of a ditz”? Make that “entirely a ditz.” “Not quite,” I correct her, trying to be gentle. “Arthur Conan Doyle, the author who wrote Sherlock Holmes, believed in fairies. Back in 1917, two little girls took pictures of fairies in their garden, and Doyle was certain that the photos were real.”
“What were they?” asks Jane. “Swamp gas?”
“Much simpler than that,” I say. “About sixty years later, one of the girls—in her eighties by that time—admitted that she had cut the drawings of fairies out of a book, posed the cutouts in the garden with her friend, and taken the photos.”
“Arthur Conan Doyle was fooled by paper cutouts?” Jane is intrigued.
“People believe what they want to believe,” I say.
“I’m thinking of something like Neverland in Peter Pan,” Tiffany says. She has moved on. A ditz, but a ditz with a goal. “Somewhere with lots of hidden, secret places.” In Tiffany’s world, secrets are wonderful and fun. “And it’s filled with beautiful, sweet fairies with gossamer wings. Like Tinker Bell.”
Rocky snorts. “Sweet?” he says. “Tinker Bell was never sweet.”
Surprised, I stare at him. He’s right. In the book Peter Pan, Tinker Bell was a jealous little pixie who swore like a sailor and did her best to get Wendy killed more than once. I didn’t think Rocky would know that.
“After the meeting, I go to the balcony for a smoke. The balcony—a narrow walkway just outside the windows of the cafeteria—is the smokers’ corner. In California, smoking has been banished from restaurants, offices, and bars. You can smoke in your own home, but just barely. Filthy habit, people say. Bad for your health. And second-hand smoke is dangerous for others, too.
I smoke three, maybe four, cigarettes a day. Not so much. I figure you have to die sometime. I take a drag, feeling the buzz.
At the edge of the balcony there’s a brick wall topped by a waist-high rail, an inadequate barrier between me and the sheer drop to the street. I lean on the rail and look down. Five floors down.
I hear the door open behind me. “Those things will kill you,” Rocky says. He is tapping a cigarette from a pack. He leans against the railing beside me, looking down. “Just far enough to be fatal,” he says.
He’s not quite right. You can survive a fall from five stories if you hit a parked car. The car gives just enough to cushion your fall. I know. I’ve done research.
“I was impressed at how well you know Peter Pan,” I tell him. “Most people only know the Disney version.”
He almost smiles. “The Disney version has no balls,” he says.
I laugh.
Rocky’s scowl returns. “What’s so funny?”
“Hey, it’s a long tradition,” I say. “Starting with the play where Mary Martin played Peter. Peter Pan doesn’t have any balls.”
He doesn’t smile. I’m sorry about that. For a moment there, I kind of liked him.
“Late that night, I sit on my bed, rereading Peter Pan. When I was ten, the year after my mother died, a friend of my father gave me a copy. The woman who gave it to me, one of a series of unsuitable women Dad dated, was under the mistaken impression that it was a children’s book. I read it with horrified fascination.
Disney made Peter Pan into a jolly movie with just enough adventures to be cheerfully scary. The book is not like that. Neverland is not all sunshine and frolic. Beneath every adventure lurks a deep and frightening darkness. Peter Pan was fascinating and terrifying. He was indifferent to human life.
“There’s a pirate asleep in the pampas just below us,” he says. “If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.” Death is an adventure, Peter Pan says, and nothing is better than that.
One of my cats makes a sound and I look up from the book to see what’s bothering him. The mirror that I found near the train station is leaning against the far wall. My cat, Flash, stares in the direction of the mirror, his ears forward, his tail twitching.
Everyone knows that there are things that only cats can see. In my house, Flash is the cat that watches those invisible things. He frequently gives his full attention to a patch of empty air for hours at a time.
Godzilla, the other cat, usually can’t be bothered with such nonsense. But tonight Godzilla has taken up a post beside Flash, staring at the same emptiness.
“What’s up, guys?” I ask them. But they just keep staring in the direction of the mirror that I found on my way to the train station. They are vigilant, concerned. They don’t trust this mirror.
I pick the mirror up and set it on top of the bureau. Flash jumps on top of the bureau where he continues to watch the mirror with great suspicion.
The phone rings.
It’s Johnny, the owner of the board-and-care home where my father has lived for the past six months. Whenever I stop by to visit, Johnny tells me how Dad has been doing and fills me in on details that I don’t particularly want to know. I have learned about the need for stool softeners and socks with no-skid soles. I have discussed the merits of different varieties of walkers (one called, without irony, the “Merry Walker”).
My father was once an archeologist. My father was once a member of Mensa. My father was once a very smart, very sarcastic, somewhat hostile man. Of all those attributes, only the sarcasm and hostility remain.
A few weeks ago, when I was visiting Dad, Johnny told me that my father had threatened to kick one of the other residents in the balls.
“He gets very angry,” Johnny told me. “It’s the Alzheimer’s.”
I nodded. It wasn’t really the Alzheimer’s. Dad had never suffered fools gladly. He considered most people to be fools. And he was always threatening to kick some fool in the balls.
I think Dad became an archeologist because dead people didn’t talk back. Living people were far too troublesome.
Johnny prefers to blame my father’s idiosyncrasies on Alzheimer’s. Johnny is a sweet guy who chooses to believe that people are inherently nice. But tonight, Johnny is facing a challenge. “Your father won’t stop talking,” he says.
I can hear my father’s voice in the background, but I can’t make out the words.
“He’s been at it for two hours. I’ve told him that it’s time for bed, but he won’t stop.” Johnny sounds very tired.
“Let me talk to him,” I tell Johnny.
I hear my father as Johnny approaches him. He is delivering a lecture on burial customs. “A barrow is a home for the dead,” he is saying. “In its chamber or chambers the tenant is surrounded with possessions from his life.”
“Your daughter needs to talk to you,” Johnny says.
Dad doesn’t even pause. “A shaman would be buried with his scrying mirror; a warrior with his weapons,” he continues. “A fence or trench separates the barrow from the surrounding world.”
“It’s important,” Johnny says. “She really needs to talk to you.”
“Yes?” my father growls into the phone. His tone is that of a busy man, needlessly interrupted. “I’m teaching just now.”
“This is Jennifer, your daughter. I called to tell you that it’s late. Class is over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is your daughter. You’re running late. It’s time for class to be over.”
“I was just wrapping up.”
“You’d better let the students go.” Wrapping up could take hours. “They have to study for finals.”
“They’d better study.” His voice is that of a demanding instructor. Then a pause. “I have to get ready myself,” he says, as if suddenly remembering something.
“Get ready? For what?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Several times over the last few months, my father has mentioned that he is going on a trip. Sometimes he’s going to an important excavation. Sometimes he’s leaving because the conference he was attending is over. Sometimes he’s not sure where he’s going. I’ve learned not to ask.
“You can pack in the morning,” I say. “You’ll have time then.”
“All right,” he says. “In the morning.”
In the morning, he will remember none of this.
“While I’m waiting for the train at the 22nd Street Station, I walk along the tiny stream that’s just a few steps away from the concrete platform. It’s a muddy trickle, enclosed in a culvert for part of its length, then widening to shallow puddles that support clumps of wild iris surrounded by pigweed.
Frogs live in that stream—I hear them croaking in the evening. But they’re hiding now. No matter how hard I look, I never catch a glimpse of them.
The steep slope above me is covered with tall grasses and wild fennel, with a few blackberry bushes working their way up to becoming a thicket. Toward the end of the platform, some city workers have been clearing the brush. I glance down at the bare ground.
It’s an old habit, developed over many summers spent at archeological digs. Out in the field, I’d be looking for shards of broken pots or chips of worked stone, indications of ancient settlements. Here in the city, I’m just looking, not expecting to see anything more than the glitter of broken beer bottles.
But the morning light reflects from the edge of a pebble. I stop, pick up the stone, and examine it more closely. It’s very tiny worked flint—about a centimeter long. I can see miniscule circles, each just a couple of millimeters across, where someone has flaked away the stone to make a sharp edge.
I hear a rumble in the distance. The train is coming. I put the tiny tool in my pocket, no time to examine it further. I hurry back to the platform.
As the train pulls away, heading south, I look out the window at the brush-covered slope. The city is filled with wild things. I once saw a family of raccoons crossing a major thoroughfare on their way to check out the dumpster behind a fast food joint. A possum with a wicked grin (way too many teeth) and a naked, ratlike tail regularly strolled through my father’s backyard. Coyotes live in Golden Gate Park.
If there are frogs and raccoons and opossums and coyotes, why not other creatures? Small, wild, living in the gaps, in the gullies, in the ravines, in the half-hidden places underneath.
“At today’s meeting, Tiffany wants to establish the specifics of our particular fairies. Tiffany believes in fairies that fly on shimmering wings (made of child-safe Mylar, I think). Her fairies are similar to Tinker Bell, but not so similar that they’ll trigger a cease-and-desist order.
Jane wants the fairies to hearken back to the classics. Think Midsummer Night’s Dream and Yeats. Her fairies wear elegant green dresses. They have a queen, of course. At fabulous parties, they dance all night. Like me, Jane lives alone. Unlike me, Jane seems to mind.
Rocky’s fairies sleep late. They are dark-eyed and sultry, dressing in black and looking for trouble. I think some of them are transgender, which makes sense if you really know Peter Pan. When Wendy returns from Neverland, she tells her mother that new fairies live in nests on the tops of trees. “The mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls,” she says. “And the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.”
That’s from the book, not the movie. I don’t think Disney believes in transgender fairies.
The way I figure it, you can choose what kind of fairies you want to believe in. I finger the stone tool in my pocket. In the foggy chill of San Francisco’s summer, my fairies wear clothing made of tanned mouse leather. They are grimy, hardscrabble fairies that chip tools from stone and drink from the stream. They hunt in the marsh with stone blades and feed
on frogs’ legs. They’d mug Victorian flower fairies and take their stuff.
“What do you think? Forest or village?” Tiffany is polling the meeting, getting each member of the team to vote. Rocky says city; Jane says forest. It’s my turn.
Wild or civilized. “Can’t we have it both ways?” I ask.
Why not? Dirty little fairies, crouching in the litter by the stream, chipping stone into knives, strapping blades onto spear handles made of pencils and pens that commuters had dropped. My kind of fairy.
“I spend the rest of the afternoon working on visual concepts for the fairy forest. For the fairy huts, I figure I should use all natural materials.
The traditional Celtic huts have stone walls, and I just can’t see the fairies going to all that effort. After some online research, I settle on huts that looked like ones built in eastern Nigeria. The walls are made of bundles of straw, tied side by side. The roof is made of reeds.
The shape of the huts reminds me of acorns—smooth sides, textured cap. I figure Tiffany will like that. And I think the fairies could manage to build huts with straw.
In my sketch, the huts are tucked among wild blackberry brambles. Poison oak twines among the blackberry branches. I don’t think these fairies want company.
“After work, I go to the board-and-care home to visit my dad. I stop by the grocery store on my way and buy a basket of fresh raspberries. These days, I always bring something to eat. Finger food is best. Grapes, raspberries, blueberries. Something he can pick up and eat, no utensils required.
We sit in the living room, my father in a recliner and I in a straight-back chair. We eat raspberries.
I’ve learned not to ask many questions. Questions are difficult. More often than not, he has no answers. Or his answers relate to the distant past. Or halfway through an answer, Dad forgets what he was saying.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 54