by Tim Pratt
She got the cape on around her shoulders, and he helped her tie on the mask. She gasped. “This—this—-”
“Indeed.” Mr. Grinde patted her shoulder. She looked like a young mother trying on her son’s Halloween superhero costume, but he imagined the subjective experience of wearing it was rather different. At first he thought the outfit made her look taller, but then he realized she’d merely levitated a couple of inches off the ground; that was all right. “May it bring you all the happiness you desire.” Mr. Grinde guided the young lady toward the front door and out into the world.
* * *
Some time later the bell rang again, and he looked up, and it was the same woman, this time emerging from darkness, fog swirling around after her.
“Ms. Stuart,” he said.
“Mr.—How can I not know this? What’s your name?” She wore a heavy dark coat, and her hair was damp.
“Grinde. Martin.”
“Mr. Grinde.” She placed an old paper sack, folded so often it had essentially turned into cloth, on the counter. “I’ve come to make another exchange.”
He opened the bag and peered inside. Mask, cape. “This was not to your satisfaction either, then?”
She took a deep breath. “It’s not your fault. At first, it really worked, but then, it didn’t, and…”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “This is how I learn.”
“Well,” she began.
#
First, just the feeling of wearing the cloak, it was indescribable, but she tried: total safety, physical invulnerability, the ability to fly—that last always a dream, a literally recurring dream, now made reality—and helping people, oh, yes. The thrill that first night when she walked the filthy rooftops of her city and saw a man being mugged in an alleyway where she herself had once been mugged and fortunately nothing worse. She jumped from the roof, falling light as a feather to settle in the alley, and simply plucked the mugger off his feet and threw him into a mound of garbage bags. The victim was so grateful, she saw him fall in love with her right there, his face like a window opening onto the light. She said, “Run along,” and he looked at her, reached out, didn’t quite touch her, and ran. Then she picked up the mugger and flew high, higher, higher, holding him by his ankles, dangling him upside-down in the sky, looking at the jewels of the city lights spread out below, and said, “Look. The world is bigger than you and what you want and need. Do you see that now? It’s a world full of people, real people just like you. Do you understand?”
He shouted something, terrified but affirmative, and she took him gently back to the ground, too polite to mention the smell of urine from where he’d wet himself, and deposited him in the middle of a plaza near the theater district filled with tourists and young lovers watching street performers play steel drums. They all looked at her with awe, and she waved, and flew off into the sky.
Every night was like that. She still went to work, during the day, waiting tables for the lunch crowd, but at night she was something special—the bloggers and eventually newspapers and TV stations called her the Redbird, though she’d never felt the need to name herself, or to wear any costume besides the essential, going out in t-shirts and jeans and sneakers under her cape and mask. She stopped muggers, and burglars, and rapists, and car thieves, and men who hit their girlfriends, and women who hit their children, and even admonished those who littered or left dog crap on the sidewalk or spray-painted public property, though it was only the truly dangerous ones she lifted up into the sky for a lesson in forced perspective: look. You are not the only real person on Earth. Everyone else is real too, not things for you to use.
Whether the flight made any difference in their lives, she didn’t know, but she never picked up the same criminal twice, so she let herself believe she was making more than a momentary difference, even as she knew, deep down, she was only treating symptoms, not causes. If crime was the common cold, she was a bit of tissue, a cup of hot tea, a soothing lozenge, rather than advanced anti-virals.
Then one night the mugger she carried up struggled, and pulled a knife, and tried to stab her—a stupid thing to do in the sky, and the blade glanced off her unbreakable skin anyway—it startled her, and she lost her grip, and he fell. She managed to recover her wits, swoop down, and catch him before he crashed to the ground, but she set him down on a corner without a word, flew away, and perched atop a church bell tower. After a moment she vomited over the roof’s edge, spattering the bushes below, and it was an hour before she stopped shivering.
There had been videos of her for weeks, posted on the internet, showing her various exploits in cell-phone-camera footage and occasionally higher resolutions, and she’d taken to doing her flights over more populated areas, because she liked the gasps, the shouted greetings, the spontaneous applause. But several people had filmed her dropping the man and catching him again, and the internet was full of voices saying she’d done it on purpose to terrify the man, the Redbird was toying with her victims, and while some of the commenters supported her new, more violent approach, others were disappointed, calling her a common torturer. It was all she could do not to log onto message boards under a name like RealRedbird and say, “No, it was just an accident.” But that would be worse. If the Redbird could make a mistake once, she could do it again.
After that, she didn’t take criminals into the sky anymore. She did make other mistakes: Breaking up a fight, stopping a woman from kicking a man, only to realize she’d been defending herself against the man, who’d tried to steal her purse. Flying too high near an airport and being pursued by police helicopters and later military jets. Stopping a drug deal that turned out to be a police sting operation, and getting tasered. The electricity had no effect on her, and neither did the pepper spray, but it was clear the police wanted her captured—that she was a dangerous criminal in their eyes.
Still, even with the setbacks, even with dark grays slithering into her comfortable black-and-white world, she might have kept on doing it, kept on helping people, kept on flying, except for two things.
First: One day in her “real life”—what she thought of truthfully as her false life, her secret identity—while waiting tables she saw a couple, a middle-aged-man and his younger companion, having a fight. When he got up to leave in a huff the pretty woman came after him and grabbed his arm, and he shoved her, knocking her into a table.
Forgetting where she was, forgetting she was only Eunie Stuart and not the Redbird just then, she grabbed the man from behind and attempted to throw him toward the door. Without her cape and mask she had no special strength, and he outweighed her by a factor of two, so he didn’t budge. She was fired for attacking a customer, and he said he might press charges. She realized then that this was her real life, and the cape was her false life, that and strength you only had because of something you’d bought wasn’t real strength at all.
And second: A ten-year-old boy put on a red cape and red mask and jumped off the roof of his suburban home and hit his head on the brick border around a flower bed on the ground and suffered severe head trauma. The whole thing was captured on video: he’d set up the family camera to record his first flight. The news showed part of it, alongside footage of the Redbird in the sky. Over and over.
* * *
“So here I am.” She shoved the bag at him. “Take it back.”
“I’m so sorry. There may be something here, a way to help the boy…”
“He died.” Her voice bitter as the scent of cyanide. “Do you have anything here that can raise the dead?”
He had to think about it. “Nothing you’d want to use, no. Nothing that works very well.”
She shrugged. “It was over a year ago. I’m… I won’t say I’m over it… but I’ve got some distance, now. It hurts like an old injury. I think I’m ready to try again. God knows happiness seems farther away than it ever has before. I’ve been reading. About happiness, and things that make people happy.” She shook her head. “From neuroscience to practical ad
vice. Sing in the morning. Enumerate your blessings every night. Write thank-you notes to everyone and everything. Have good genes—they think fifty percent of personal happiness is genetic. Take anti-depressants. Clean out your closets. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Be born in a first-world country. Be happily married. Have more sex. Eat chocolate. Believe in God. I tried all the little things. There were some good moments, but I always slump back to my baseline, and honestly, after my time as the Redbird, that baseline is even lower than before.”
He coughed. “I confess, your request intrigued me, and I’ve been looking through my books as well—I have many books—and I wish I’d done it earlier. We could have saved some time. Money can buy happiness, but only to a certain modest extent. Beyond a certain threshold of comfort and security, more money doesn’t make people any happier. Having children doesn’t make people happier, either, oddly enough, quite the opposite. I was going to suggest you consider motherhood or adoption, that seemed obvious since everyone says children are a joy, but they simply aren’t. Children do seem to cause transcendent highs that are more memorable than the more consistent negative feelings, but the little darlings are a terrible drag on what you’d call the baseline level. Being surrounded by friends and family is supposed to be immensely helpful—but I have nothing here that can give you those.”
She nodded. “I know. I know all that. And everyone agrees constant happiness isn’t possible anyway, there’s no such thing as constant joy, I understand that. Happiness at its best would be a sort of, I don’t know, dynamic equilibrium, with ups and downs, sure, but the baseline should be pretty damned good, that’s all I want. I can live with highs and lows, there’s no avoiding them, but—”
“Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“That you can’t avoid the highs and lows, and exist in a state of constant happiness. You can, of course.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “Become a lotus eater. From The Odyssey, you know, Odysseus finds an island full of people who only eat flowers… no? Let’s see, I used to know a bit of it by heart, my own translation, so forgive any awkwardness: ‘My crewmen went among the lotus-eaters, who did them no harm, but bid them eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that all who tasted it gave up all thoughts of home, and would not even return to tell the others on the ship, but instead sat eating of the lotus, and were content.’ Perfect happiness. Odysseus saw it as a drug, you know, horribly addictive, but in my studies the lotus isn’t like that, nothing like heroin or cocaine. You can choose to eat it, or not, but if you do…” He spread out his hands. “Happiness. I didn’t think of it before because it didn’t seem right for you, too passive, but…”
“It’s hard to imagine how I’d accidentally kill anyone by eating flowers,” she said. “Let’s give it a try.”
“I keep it here.” He had a small porcelain pot on the counter, and inside it, a small plant of a delicate green with a single pure white flower on top, with half a dozen petals. “I keep it nearby. Not to eat—I wouldn’t be much good to my customers, I don’t think, if I ate the lotus—but the scent is lovely, too.”
“So I just…eat the petals?”
“One at a time,” Mr. Grinde admonished. “Too many and you’ll simply sleep, I think.”
“Sleep is good for hiding from misery, but I think it would be an obstacle to real happiness.”
“Quite,” he said, and bid her good day.
* * *
It didn’t take her long to return. He’d barely filled two pages of his inventory ledger before the bell over the door rang again. This time, the bleating of goats wafted in after her, and he saw a slice of green hillsides sparsely dotted with scraggly trees. She had a little cardboard cake box, which, he was sure, held the lotus flower in its pot. Ms. Stuart handed him the plant without a word.
“Always a pleasure to see you,” he said, and it was. His loneliness had been such a fundamental part of his existence that he’d never noticed it until her repeat arrivals had dispelled it. He’d secretly hoped she’d return, for the conversation alone. There were a few things in the shop that could talk—magic mirrors, at least one sword, a brass-and-clockwork head—but they were variously flatterers, psychotics, and outrageous liars, and he’d stopped talking to them years before he’d stopped talking to himself. “Though I regret what your arrival signifies. Before we move on the issue of an exchange, if I may ask… How do you keep finding your way back here? I’ve seldom had exchanges before, and I think you’re the only person to ever pass through that door more than twice. That is no reflection on you—the failure is mine for not understanding your needs properly—but I’m curious. I know how you found my shop the first time, you were given the address by a man who, hmm, had store credit he could pass on, you might say—a man who once brought me something I chose to add to my inventory. But you’ve made it back twice since, without directions. How?”
She shrugged. “It’s strange. It’s like I just remember the way back, but it’s a different way back I remember, each time. This time I remembered that I had to take a plane, then another plane, then a much smaller plane, then a dirty bus stuffed with people and their chickens, and then a long walk, and right around the curve in the road I anticipated, just where I expected—here you were.”
“Extraordinary. So tell me. How have we failed this time?”
* * *
She went home with the lotus flower in its little pot, and put it on a small table where it could catch the shaft of sunlight that slanted down between her building and the building next door to pierce her window. The flower seemed to glow, faintly, with an inner radiance. After looking at the flower for a while, and weighing her inner state—troubled, churning, turmoiled—she plucked one of the petals, opened her mouth, and placed it on her tongue. The flower dissolved, gently, with a flavor like vanilla-scented moonlight…and she was happy. All her anxieties drifted away. She sat on her couch and contemplated the flower until the light faded, and then she contemplated the dark. The sensation was not a high, not in the sense of being a stimulant, anyway; it was a pure euphoric. She sat on the couch all night, and when the sun rose, the lotus flower was no longer missing a blossom, having replenished itself in the night. She wasn’t hungry, or thirsty. The flower sustained her utterly.
So she plucked another petal, and ate it, and sat on the couch, and simply experienced bliss.
* * *
“Not much else to tell,” she said. “I did that maybe forty times. And then, one morning I didn’t eat the flower petal. Didn’t feel any particular craving for it afterward, either, not even psychologically—you’re right, it’s not addictive, doesn’t seem much like a drug, except in all the ways it does.”
“Mmm. Why did you give up being a lotus eater?”
“The happiness…it was all very well, you know, but every day was the same. I woke up smiling; sat there smiling; fell asleep smiling. There were no highs or lows, and when everything is a source of wonder, when your own plain white walls are as amazing as sunrises or shooting stars or ocean waves, it’s like nothing is amazing. And there was a moment every morning, just before I ate the next petal, when the happiness would ebb, just slightly, just a fraction, the effects wearing off, and in that moment, I couldn’t silence this little voice in the back of my head whispering that it was all pointless, that it was a cheat, that to be happy you have to do something, not just be. Otherwise you might as well be, I don’t know, a barnacle on a ship, or lichen on a rock. Is lichen happy? I don’t know. Maybe it’s content. But that’s not happiness. The lotus…it felt like a delusion.”
“Studies show that realists are unhappy,” Mr. Grinde said. “The happiest people wander around in a state of delusion and denial.”
“I just don’t have the right turn of mind to be that delusional,” she said. “I’ll have to try to find happiness in spite of my realism. So what else have you got?”
While he’d hoped she wouldn’t need anot
her exchange—though it was lovely to see her, failure rankled—he’d nevertheless prepared for the possibility that she might return.
“Some poets and philosophers say the path to happiness is to live a life of tranquility and reflection in harmony with nature. How does that sound to you?”
“I think I’ve had enough quiet contemplation.”
“No, no. You’ve had…emptiness. Which many strive for, and I’m sure it has its virtues, but it’s not for you. No, this would be a chance to get to know your own mind, to understand yourself in the context of the natural world, to engage with a land of beauty and wonder, not to merely sit gazing at nothing.”
“Okay. I see the distinction. But I’m a city girl, Mr. Grinde. I never spent much time in nature. I think I’d starve to death, or get liver flukes from drinking out of a polluted stream, or eat the poison berries, or run afoul of a bear.”
He held up a finger. “Ah. But what if I told you I could send you to a perfect sort of nature, an idealized nature, a place where every stream is clear and clean, where the trees hang heavy with fruit, where the rains are gentle. Would that sound appealing?”
“Some time to myself. I could use that. What do you have to offer?”
“It’s here somewhere…” They walked deeper into the shop, to an area lined with aquariums and terrariums full of plants and animals, including tiny winged serpents, wise frogs, and venomous caterpillars. One tank, covered entirely in sheets of aluminum foil, held a basilisk, and he remembered the beast needed feeding. He had a collection of stone animals he could slip into the cage, and the gaze of the basilisk would turn the stone creatures into flesh and blood—the reverse of its more well-known power—allowing the cockatrice to feed without the need for Mr. Grinde to keep live rats or other delicacies on hand.
He didn’t want an animal, though; he wanted a plant, a miniature tree growing in a pot all on its own, branches heavy with small plum-sized golden fruits. He plucked one and took the fruit to the counter, put on a pair of thick rubber gloves, and cut open the fruit with a silver knife, carefully removing a single seed, which he placed in a clear plastic bag and handed to Ms. Stuart. “There you are. A seed of Arcadia. Plant it anywhere, water it, and…you’ll see.”