The Best of Joe Haldeman

by Joe W. Haldeman

  He swirled it around and breathed deeply. It did smell much like Pernod, but with an acrid tang that was probably oil of wormwood. An experimental sip: the wormwood didn’t dominate the licorice flavor, but it was there.

  “Thanks, Nelson,” he whispered, and drank the whole thing in one cold fiery gulp. He set down the glass and the train began to move. For a weird moment that seemed hallucinatory, but it always did, the train starting off so smoothly and silently.

  For about ten minutes he felt nothing unusual, as the train did its slow tour of Boston’s least attractive backyards. The conductor who checked his ticket seemed like a normal human being, which could have been a hallucination.

  John knew that some drugs, like amyl nitrite, hit with a swift slap, while others creep into your mind like careful infiltrators. This was the way of absinthe; all he felt was a slight alcohol buzz, and he was about to take another shot, when it subtly began.

  There were things just at the periphery of his vision, odd things with substance, but somehow without shape, that of course moved away when he turned his head to look at them. At the same time a whispering began in his ears, just audible over the train noise, but not intelligible, as if in a language he had heard before but not understood. For some reason the effects were pleasant, though of course they could be frightening if a person were not expecting weirdness. He enjoyed the illusions for a few minutes, while the scenery outside mellowed into woodsy suburbs, and the visions and voices stopped rather suddenly.

  He poured another ounce and this time diluted it with water. He remembered the sad woman in “Hills Like White Elephants” lamenting that everything new tasted like licorice, and allowed himself to wonder what Hemingway had been drinking when he wrote that curious story.

  Chuckling at his own—what? Effrontery?—John took out the 1921 Corona and slipped a sheet of paper into it and balanced it on his knees. He had earlier thought of the first two lines of the WWI pastiche; he typed them down and kept going:

  The dirt on the sides of the trenches was never completely dry in the morning. Ol’ Nick could find an old newspaper he would put it between his chest and the dirt when he went out to lean on the side of the trench and wait for the light. First light was the best time. You might have luck and see a muzzle flash. But patience was better than luck. Wait to see a helmet or a head without a helmet. Nick looked at the enemy line through a rectangular box of wood that went through the trench at about ground level. The other end of the box was covered by a square of gauze the color of dirt. A person looking directly at it might see the muzzle flash when Nick fired through the box. But with luck, the flash would be the last thing he saw.

  Nick had fired through the gauze six times, perhaps killing three enemy, and the gauze now had a ragged hole in the center.

  Okay, John thought, he’d be able to see slightly better through the hole in the center but staring that way would reduce the effective field of view, so he would deliberately try to look to one side or the other. How to type that down in a simple way? Someone cleared his throat,

  John looked up from the typewriter. Sitting across from him was Ernest Hemingway, the weathered, wise Hemingway of the famous Karsh photograph.

  “I’m afraid you must not do that,” Hemingway said.

  John looked at the half-full glass of absinthe and looked back. Hemingway was still there. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “It isn’t the absinthe.” Hemingway’s image rippled and he became the handsome teenager who had gone to war, the war John was writing about. “I am quite real. In a way, I am more real than you are.” As it spoke it aged: the mustachioed leading-man-handsome Hemingway of the twenties; the slightly corpulent, still magnetic media hero of the thirties and forties; the beard turning white, the features hard and sad and then twisting with impotence and madness, and then a sudden loud report and the cranial vault exploding, the mahogany veneer of the wall splashed with blood and brains and imbedded chips of skull. There was a strong smell of cordite and blood. The almost-headless corpse shrugged, spreading its hands. “I can look like anyone I want.” The mess disappeared and it became the young Hemingway again.

  John slumped and stared.

  “This thing you just started must never be finished. This Hemingway pastiche. It will ruin something very important.”

  “What could it ruin? I’m not even planning to—”

  “Your plans are immaterial. If you continue with this project, it will profoundly affect the future.”

  “You’re from the future?”

  “I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that you must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.”

  It gestured and a wand the size of a walking stick, half-black and half-white, appeared in its hand. It tapped John’s knee with the white end. There was a slight tingle.

  “Now you won’t be able to tell anybody about me, or write anything about me down. If you try to talk about me, the memory will disappear—and reappear moments later, along with the knowledge that I will kill you if you don’t cooperate.” It turned into the bloody corpse again. “Understood?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you behave, you will never have to see me again.” It started to fade.

  “Wait. What do you really look like?”

  “This—” For a few seconds John stared at an ebony presence deeper than black, at once points and edges and surfaces and volume and hints of further dimensions. “You can’t really see or know,” a voice whispered inside his head. He reached into the blackness and jerked his hand back, rimed with frost and numb. The thing disappeared.

  He stuck his hand under his armpit and feeling returned. That last apparition was the unsettling one. He had Hemingway’s appearance at every age memorized, and had seen the corpse in his mind’s eye often enough. A drug could conceivably have brought them all together and made up this fantastic demand—which might actually be nothing more than a reasonable side of his nature trying to make him stop wasting time on this silly project.

  But that thing. His hand was back to normal. Maybe a drug could do that, too; make your hand feel freezing. LSD did more profound things than that. But not while arguing about a manuscript.

  He considered the remaining absinthe. Maybe take another big blast of it and see whether ol’ Ernie comes back again. Or no—there was a simpler way to check.

  The bar was four rocking and rolling cars away, and bouncing his way from wall to window helped sober John up. When he got there, he had another twinge for the memories of the past. Stained Formica tables. No service; you had to go to a bar at the other end. Acrid with cigarette fumes. He remembered linen tablecloths and endless bottles of Coke with the names of cities from everywhere stamped on the bottom and, when his father came along with them, the rich sultry smoke of his Havanas. The fat Churchills from Punch that emphysema stopped just before Castro could. “A Coke, please.” He wondered which depressed him more, the red can or the plastic cup with miniature ice cubes.

  The test. It was not in his nature to talk to strangers on public conveyances. But this was necessary. There was a man sitting alone who looked about John’s age, a Social Security-bound hippy with wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses, white hair down to his shoulders, bushy grey beard. He nodded when John sat down across from him, but didn’t say anything. He sipped beer and looked blankly out at the gathering darkness.

  “Excuse me,” John said, “but I have a strange thing to ask you.”

  The man looked at him. “I don’t mind strange things. But please don’t try to sell me anything illegal.”

  “1 wouldn’t. It may have something to do with a drug, but it would be one I took.”

  “You do look odd. You tripping?”

  “Doesn’t feel like it. But I may have been ... slipped something.” He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “I just talked to Ernest Hemingway
.”

  “The writer?”

  “In my roomette, yeah.”

  “Wow. He must be pretty old.”

  “He’s dead! More than thirty years.”

  “Oh wow. Now that is something weird. What he say?”

  “You know what a pastiche is?”

  “French pastry?”

  “No, it’s when you copy ... when you create an imitation of another person’s writing. Hemingway’s, in this case.”

  “Is that legal? I mean, with him dead and all.”

  “Sure it is, as long as you don’t try to foist it off as Hemingway’s real stuff.”

  “So what happened? He wanted to help you with it?”

  “Actually, no ... he said I’d better stop.”

  “Then you better stop. You don’t fuck around with ghosts.” He pointed at the old brass bracelet on John’s wrist. “You in the ‘Nam.”

  “Sixty-eight,” John said. “Hue.”

  “Then you oughta know about ghosts. You don’t fuck with ghosts.”

  “Yeah.” What he’d thought was aloofness in the man’s eyes, the set of his mouth, was aloneness, something slightly different. “You okay?”

  “Oh yeah. Wasn’t for a while, then I got my shit together.” He looked out the window again, and said something weirdly like Hemingway: “I learned to take it a day at a time. The day you’re in’s the only day that’s real. The past is shit and the future, hell, some day your future’s gonna be that you got no future. So fuck it, you know? One day at a time.”

  John nodded. “What outfit were you in?”

  “Like I say, man, the past is shit. No offense?”

  “No, that’s okay.” He poured the rest of his Coke over the ice and stood up to go.

  “You better talk to somebody about those ghosts. Some kinda shrink, you know? It’s not that they’re not real. But just you got to deal with ‘em.”

  “Thanks. I will.” John got a little more ice from the barman and negotiated his way down the lurching corridor back to his compartment, trying not to spill his drink while also juggling fantasy, reality, past, present, memory—

  He opened the door and Hemingway was there, drinking his absinthe. He looked up with weary malice. “Am I going to have to kill you?”

  What John did next would have surprised Castlemaine, who thought he was a nebbish. He closed the compartment door and sat down across from the apparition. “Maybe you can kill me and maybe you can’t.”

  “Don’t worry. I can.”

  “You said I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone about you. But I just walked down to the bar car and did.”

  “I know. That’s why I came back.”

  “So if one of your powers doesn’t work, maybe another doesn’t. At any rate, if you kill me, you’ll never find out what went wrong.”

  “That’s very cute, but it doesn’t work.” It finished off the absinthe and then ran a finger around the rim of the glass, which refilled out of nowhere.

  “You’re making assumptions about causality that are necessarily naïve, because you can’t perceive even half of the dimensions that you inhabit.”

  “Nevertheless, you haven’t killed me yet.”

  “And assumptions about my ‘psychology’ that are absurd. I am no more a human being than you are a paramecium.”

  “I’ll accept that. But I would make a deal with a paramecium if I thought I could gain an advantage from it.”

  “What could you possibly have to deal with, though?”

  “I know something about myself that you evidently don’t, that enables me to overcome your don’t-talk restriction. Knowing that might be worth a great deal to you.”

  “Maybe something.”

  “What I would like in exchange is, of course, my life, and an explanation of why I must not do the Hemingway pastiche. Then I wouldn’t do it.”

  “You wouldn’t do it if I killed you, either.”

  John sipped his Coke and waited.

  “All right. It goes something like this. There is not just one universe, but actually uncountable zillions of them. They’re all roughly the same size and complexity as this one, and they’re all going off in a zillion different directions, and it is one hell of a job to keep things straight.”

  “You do this by yourself? You’re God?”

  “There’s not just one of me. In fact, it would be meaningless to assign a number to us, but I guess you could say that altogether, we are God ... and the Devil, and the Cosmic Puppet Master, and the Grand Unification Theory, the Great Pumpkin and everything else. When we consider ourselves as a group, let me see, I guess a human translation of our name would be the Spatio-Temporal Adjustment Board.”

  “STAB?”

  “I guess that is unfortunate. Anyhow, what STAB does is more the work of a scalpel than a knife.” The Hemingway scratched its nose, leaving the absinthe suspended in midair. “Events are supposed to happen in certain ways, in certain sequences. You look at things happening and say cause and effect, or coincidence, or golly, that couldn’t have happened in a million years—but you don’t even have a clue. Don’t even try to think about it. It’s like an ant trying to figure out General Relativity.”

  “It wouldn’t have a clue. Wouldn’t know where to start.”

  The apparition gave him a sharp look and continued. “These universes come in bundles. Hundreds of them, thousands, that are pretty much the same. And they affect each other. Resonate with each other. When something goes wrong in one, it resonates and screws up all of them.”

  “You mean to say that if I write a Hemingway pastiche, hundreds of universes are going to go straight to hell?”

  The apparition spread its hands and looked to the ceiling. “Nothing is simple. The only thing that’s simple is that nothing is simple. I’m a sort of literature specialist. American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Usually. Most of my timespace is taken up with guys like Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, Heinlein, Bierce. Crane, Spillane, Twain.”

  “Not William Dean Howells?”

  “Not him or James or Carver or Coover or Cheever or any of those guys. If everybody gave me as little trouble as William Dean Howells, I could spend most of my timespace on a planet where the fishing was good.”

  “Masculine writers?” John said. “But not all hairy-chested macho types.”

  “I’ll give you an A- on that one. They’re writers who have an accumulating effect on the masculine side of the American national character. There’s no one word for it, though it is a specific thing: individualistic, competence-worshiping, short-term optimism and long-term existentialism. ‘There may be nothing after I die but I sure as hell will do the job right while I’m here, even though I’m surrounded by idiots.’ You see the pattern?”

  “Okay. And I see how Hemingway fits in. But how could writing a pastiche interfere with it?”

  “That’s a limitation I have. I don’t know specifically. I do know that the accelerating revival of interest in Hemingway from the seventies through the nineties is vitally important. In the Soviet Union as well as the United States. For some reason, I can feel your pastiche interfering with it.” He stretched out the absinthe glass into a yard-long amber crystal, and it changed into the black-and-white cane. The glass reappeared in the drink holder by the window. “Your turn.”

  “You won’t kill me after you hear what I have to say?”

  “No. Go ahead.”

  “Well ... I have an absolutely eidetic memory. Everything I’ve ever seen—or smelled or tasted or heard or touched, or even dreamed—I can instantly recall.

  “Every other memory freak I’ve read about was limited—numbers, dates, calendar tricks, historical details—and most of them were idiots savants. I have at least normal intelligence. But from the age of about three, I have never forgotten anything.”

  The Hemingway smiled congenially. “Thank you. That’s exactly it.” It fingered the black end of the cane,
clicking something. “If you had the choice, would you rather die of a heart attack, stroke, or cancer?”

  “That’s it?” The Hemingway nodded. “Well, you’re human enough to cheat. To lie.”

  “It’s not something you could understand. Stroke?”

  “It might not work.”

  “We’re going to find out right now.” He lowered the cane.

  “Wait! What’s death? Is there ... anything I should do, anything you know?”

  The rod stopped, poised an inch over John’s knee. “I guess you just end. Is that so bad?”