The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  “It’s not real,” she says.

  “Of course it’s real, Susan. It wouldn’t be on the news if it wasn’t real—”

  “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “Then how do you mean it?”

  When she doesn’t answer, he says: “I was hoping you’d understand.” He’s angry. If she really cared for him, she’d understand, wouldn’t she?

  “Maybe we need you,” she says quietly.

  “Come with me—both of you,” he says—brightening.

  “We can’t, Rick. It’s not our story.” She turns away. Jacob has the flu again and she’s got to take his temperature every hour on the hour. Doctor’s orders.

  Finally, he says: “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry.” She’s looking away, as always, but making it easy for him. “I’ll explain to Jacob what’s happened. He’ll understand. You’ll still be his hero.”

  Rick takes the old Ford pickup that’s been languishing in Susan’s garage for years and speeds toward Galveston. You’d think he’d be on a freeway at least, but he’s not—it’s a highway like Route 66 and the billboards have the old brand names and slogans again—SEE THE USA IN YOUR CHEVROLET and NO CLOSER CALL . . . THAN BURMA SHAVE—and the few cars that pass him in the night are just as old as his. The broken line down the center of the road mesmerizes him and his life flashes before his eyes. We see what he sees: McCulloughville, his parents, Buddy Blaylock and his car, Susan, Jacob, Chi Chi Escalante. We see all of the versions of Rick Rowe we’ve seen over the past few months. Something’s happening to Rick as he drives. We’re not sure what, but it’s important.

  Finally he sees himself as a locust—alien, wide-eyed, exoskeleton shimmering blue and green . . . and somehow it’s all right.

  He stops the car, pulls a U, and drives back. When he arrives at the house, the doctor is there. Rick looks at the boy, the doctor, Susan, and knows suddenly that it hasn’t been the “flu” all these months.

  “How long has he had this?” he asks her.

  “Since we arrived.”

  He doesn’t know what she means. Arrived?

  “What is it—what does he have?” Ricks asks.

  “A muscle weakness. A problem with the muscle sheaths. . . . I don’t know the scientific name. I’m not sure there even is one, Rick. Dr. Patterson has never seen anything like it.”

  “Shouldn’t he be at a hospital—with specialists?”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “You mean money?”

  She ignores him, looking at Jacob and the doctor instead, and all Rick can think to say is, “Will it get worse?”

  She smiles a little, looking at him for a moment, and he realizes he loves that smile. It’s a little off, a little higher on one side, and her teeth are awfully small, but he loves it. “Maybe . . . maybe not.” She says it with resignation and he remembers that she always says that: Maybe, maybe not. No assurances. No billboard-large promises.

  “He idolizes you,” she says quietly.

  “He doesn’t really know me.”

  “He knows what he needs to know,” she says.

  There’s an awkward silence between them as the doctor finishes his checkup on the sleeping boy. Rick notices the doctor’s hands. They’ve got the same red streaky rash on them that Jacob’s arms had in the theater, that Susan’s elbow had. He stares. The rash remains. It’s real, he sees. Very real. He starts to say something about it, but the doctor looks up at him and there’s something odd about his eyes—the doctor won’t look at him either—so Rick says instead:

  “There’ll be other aliens, other monsters, right?”

  “Of course,” she answers. “There always are. . . .”

  She’s seen Rick’s look and knows it’s time. It’s time to tell him. She holds out her hands, and there it is, the rash—but as he looks the red turns blue and green, shining like a rain-forest butterfly wing, and it’s her skin, he realizes, not a rash. And when he looks up at her face, her eyes aren’t what he remembered at all. They’re an incredible blue—like space between the stars—and they don’t have pupils, and her teeth look a little more pointed than he remembered them. It’s real, he knows.

  Sometimes what you want, she’s saying, though her mouth isn’t moving, isn’t very far away.

  He touches her hands and they’re thinner than he remembers, and maybe there’s an extra finger.

  It’s the atmosphere of your planet, she says, that’s making him sick. But he wants to be here. I’m all he’s got. We’re all we’ve got.

  We need you, Rick, she’s saying. We knew you were the one when we saw you on television that day. So brave. We knew you wouldn’t be afraid—that you of all people would be willing to help. . . .

  He’s staring at her, unable to speak. Even if he could, what would he say?

  I was the one, she adds, who got the Mayor to call you. He’s not one of us. There are only five. Jacob’s dad was the sixth. We had to get you here. I’m sorry.

  He’s holding her hands now and, though her skin should bother him, it doesn’t. She’s still the woman he knows, even if she’s something else. He nods. She steps toward him, puts her arms around him, her pupilless eyes only a few inches from his, and hugs him, really hugs him. It feels good. He knows what they must be feeling—Susan, Jacob, the doctor, and the others—alone here, not knowing what’s going to happen to them, bodies not really all that different from his. After all, we come from the same galactic seed, don’t we? a voice says—the one that always talks like this.

  “I’m glad you didn’t go,” she says in his ear, this time with words, and he’s hugging her back now—a real, honest-to-goodness hug between two beings who’ve become good friends and who may yet, God and anatomy willing, become lovers.

  As they hug, we see a tattoo on her forearm—a very patriotic eagle clutching arrows—something that wasn’t there a few days ago, something she’s put there for him, and this tells us that whatever else she might be feeling, whatever else she might be, she loves him—and isn’t that what really matters in a universe or a movie like this one?

  We fade to blue sky.

  Or stars.

  Or a newborn baby.

  Or whatever else feels right.

  Hero, The Movie

  Story Notes

  This story bears a striking resemblance to an absurdly long feature-film “treatment” which Hollywood producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Armageddon, others) requested in 1991 but didn’t buy because, she confessed, of its “romance element.” Ms. Hurd had read the novel version of “Dream Baby,” had liked it for its kickass female lead and ESP elements, but had in development at that same time another “psychic warrior” project; but she kindly invited me to pitch ideas, which I did one afternoon after two solid months of preparation (including artwork and a lot of biographical research on her). I pitched six ideas and Ms. Hurd and her staff were friendly as can be. Two of the ideas were too big-budget for her; two would have been of interest to her a few years earlier, she said; and two she indeed liked and wanted to see treatments for. “Hero” was the one I delivered, but because life at the time had its distractions (all worthy of at least a short story or two, though I doubt they’ll ever be written), I never delivered a rewrite to her that replaced the “romance” with “road adventures,” which is what she said she wanted. As a consequence, “Hero” was free to appear fourteen years later—with the “romance element” heightened (so there!) and other changes made—in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. One reviewer has questioned the wisdom of human beings hooking up with aliens—“even out of love”—but most readers, bless their romantic bones, seem not to have a problem with it, for which I am grateful.

  Afterword:

  The Arc of Circumstance

  My first contact with Bruce McAllister was in 1965 when I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency writing critique-reports to unpublished writers, and Bruce was sending stories there. “Close but not quite right for the mark
et, Mr. McAllister. Good imagery, powerful insight, but ragged plotting, and, say, what about those transitions?” Bruce, nineteen years old and the author of a story which had appeared, when he was seventeen, in Judy Merril’s “best science fiction” annual, persisted, although not with the agenting services of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. (The story, “The Faces Outside,” was written when the lad was sixteen. This may not be the record for precocity in modern science fiction—Larry Brody and a couple of others are, I think, competitive—but it is remarkably close.)

  Next, and in a flurry, he sold stories to Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, more stories to Fred Pohl at if and Galaxy, and a story, “The Big Boy,” to me in early 1968 during my own brief tenure at that tortured monument to science fiction, Fantastic Stories. He was twenty-two then. Still a promising kid. His science fiction was traditional in the way, say, that J. G. Ballard’s New Worlds fiction at the time was not, but it had other than clanking robots and ballistics as its major concern. Furthermore, this was a guy who, I felt sure, had clearly read Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” in New Worlds and knew exactly what it was about.

  We fell into correspondence. People did get into a different kind of correspondence in those days, still bereft of personal computers and e-mail. Poised effusions, projections of writerly persona managed for the typewriter, and the concept of a kind of evanescent permanence. All of seven years older than this redheaded California kid, I cast myself as the Old Hack, proceeded to refashion Rilke’s Letters To a Young Poet as an effusion for the category markets. In fact, called myself in our correspondence “the Old Hack.” The Redheaded Kid fell kindly and fully into the exchange, seeking a mentor’s advice. “Get out now,” the Old Hack advised him. Neither of us quite followed that advice.

  Chronology ground ahead. I was discharged, and a good thing too, from the editorship of Fantastic Stories. Bruce completed his BA and MFA degrees in creative writing (his master’s thesis, a revolution at the time, was a science fiction novel, Humanity Prime, which became one of Terry Carr’s final group of “Ace SF Specials”) and embarked upon an academic career, even as I wallowed in 60,000-word, three-week wonders and the joys of writing and publishing first drafts to sustain a mortgage, gardener, nursery school bus service, and all of the other insane accoutrements of insane suburban life. Our correspondence flourished as I furnished Bruce a diary of the writing life conducted in pursuit of middle-class anonymity.

  “Well,” he wrote in a letter I misplaced but never forgot, “I’d like to try to be nothing other than a writer, but I now see it is impossible. I simply cannot write fast enough to sustain myself financially.” Moved by the savagery of my example, Bruce clutched his MFA, then regarded by academe as a terminal degree for teaching, and entered fully upon an academic career, becoming eventually director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Redlands. (He invited me twice, in 1978 and 1985, to be a one-week Writer in Residence. Lovely landscape. The desert into which I drove at dawn on November 12, 1978, made me gasp. Ah, the wonders, as Buddy Glass would write, of the little traveling whore’s cubicle of the Writer in Residence.)

  Prior to the Writer in Residence business Bruce and I had to meet; and so we did in the Acme Supermarket parking lot in 1972, he distracted and near-unraveling from the effects of a 3000-mile cross-country drive; his wife at the time, like most writers’ wives, holding on gamely to the shreds of patience. We got along just as well in direct engagement. (Why else would he have twice elected me Writer in Residence?) We remain friends at this moment of transcription, forty years of family secrets and whispers behind. I think I am responsible (in fact, I know I am) for the inclusion of his great novelette “Dream Baby” in Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann’s signal anthology In the Field of Fire. In 1987 this story would have sold anywhere, but the Danns’ anthology of stories on the truth of the Vietnam experience was the first and right place to send it, and so it was there. Was transmogrified into the equally great novel of the same title a couple of years later.

  All these words about the Redheaded Kid, and until the last sentences above I have managed to essentially elide mention of his work. Old writers are thieves together; they tend to be this way: I have read Richard Ford’s essay on Tobias Woolf and Raymond Carver, which tells what great old friends they were (and don’t you wish you too were?) and has nothing else to say; I have read Norman Mailer’s well-known essay from Advertisements for Myself on the “Talent in the Room,” which says much of personality and little of work (he did call Salinger “the greatest mind who never graduated from prep school”), and I have always found this kind of thing annoying. “I know you’re Chevy Chase and I am not,” I want to bellow at the memoirist. “Why not tell me something useful and objective?”

  Well, we can try. Clouds of love and association obscure objectivity; it is hard to separate what I know of Bruce and the places we have shared from what I know of his work. The work is extraordinary. “Dream Baby” is certainly the best work of short fiction published anywhere in 1987 (there might be a masterpiece in Epoch or The North American Review which got by me, but this it not likely). His work starting in the period of the mid-eighties found an entirely new level; there really are no stories in the lexicon like that Vietnam story or “The Ark” or “The Girl Who Loved Animals.” They burn the page. Dream Baby is as good a novel as its origination is a novelette but it is an essential transmogrification; the novelette is absolutely individual, shattering in its encompassing fear and force.

  A friend of mine, Allan Kleinberger—also an editor at the Scott Meredith Agency but of a different generation (this was in 1987)—read “Dream Baby,” the novelette, in manuscript and said, “This is a brilliant science fiction story, top of the genre. But it is a tribute to this story to say that the opening section, which is objective realism, is so powerful, so overwhelming, that when the science fiction kicks in somewhere around the seventh page it is something of a declension, even though it is superb. I can’t think of any greater praise.” Echoes here of Kingsley Amis’s quote: “If it’s good it isn’t sf!”—but “Dream Baby” is nothing if not sf, though point taken.

  With Harry Harrison, I find it a pleasure to be an appurtenance to this collection. This is —with Alfred Bester and James Tiptree and what a Trinity!—the best short story writer to ever work within the defined genre of science fiction. And at sixty he is writing as well as ever. The next decade will be a series of shocks, aftershocks, thunderbolts: an exacerbated astonishment.

  Barry Malzberg

  Teaneck, New Jersey

  November 2006

  About The Author

  Bruce McAllister is best known for his science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction. His short stories have appeared in literary quarterlies, national magazines, theme anthologies, 'year's best' anthologies and college readers; won awards from Glimmer Train magazine and the National Endowment for the Arts; and been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. He is the author of two novels, Humanity Prime and Dream Baby, with a third, The Village Sang to the Sea, to appear in 2012. He lives in southern California with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter, and is a full-time writer, writing coach and book and screenplay consultant.

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