by Pratt, T. A.
Don’t look back. It wasn’t meant literally. It didn’t mean “Don’t turn your head,” it meant “Don’t remember.” Because how could your lover live, if you knew she had died? How could you go on loving her, with the weight of that knowledge, with all that interrupted grief clogging up your head? You had to forget it all, drink the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and afterward you’d never understand why your lover was afraid of subway stations and cemeteries, why she refused to go to your aunt’s funeral with you, why she wept on gray days and stared off into the middle distance as if she were looking at things you’d never be able to see. Because she wouldn’t forget about her death. Just you.
I thought about all the gray, hollow people I’d met in my life, shuffling through their days, as if they were swathed in shrouds no one else could see, and I wondered how many of them had been dead, once upon a time, and come back, and remembered.
I looked at the sinuous lizards, at their indifferent grace. They would lead me to H., if I let them. I would find my dead lover holding a needle full of Lethe-water, more potent than any drug we’d taken in the old days, and then what? Would we go back in time? Would I be a star again, with H. by my side? A strangely quiet H., still doing drugs but for a different reason, trying to forget something he knew I would never remember again?
Because the dead know things, even if they come back to life, and because it is still up to the living to act, to choose.
Was I willing to forget all the pain, everything I’d learned since H.’s death, in order to bring him back, to have him suffer, and remember, and be lost to me again someday?
“The bees can sting you,” E. said to Jay. “They can sting the loss away, and then I can follow you back. If you want.” She sounded totally indifferent.
“Don’t you want to come with me?” Jay asked.
“It’s up to you.”
“Of course I want you back,” he said, and walked into the black and yellow mist of bees.
I turned and walked away, taking big ground-eating steps. The lizards followed me, paced me, and I started running to get away from them, from their cool green temptation. I wept as I ran. I wondered if H. would understand why I was running away, if he would want it this way, too.
I found the train, and its doors hissed open at my approach. The lizards hung back among the stone trees, watching me.
I looked back at them, for a long moment, then wiped the tears from my eyes. I got on the train. Jay would find his own way back, into the sun, and E. with him. But he would never understand why she didn’t want to go outside, why she was so afraid of bees and dark places, and he would leave her eventually, I think, because the strange sad girl who came back would not be the woman he’d loved. That was Jay’s trial, his price to pay.
“Doors are closing,” the driver whispered over the speaker, in tones of warning. These doors wouldn’t open again, not for me. This was my one and only trip on this train, at least while I was alive.
“Let them close,” I said, and rode back through the emptiness in the belly of the night, toward another morning, having nothing but my memories, but holding tightly to those, holding them as though they were worth all the rest of my life.
STORY NOTES
Bradley Bowman was too good a character not to use again. But before I talk about how he ended up, here’s what I wrote about this story when it appeared in my collection Little Gods:
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I inevitably set stories int he places where I live. The flavor of my environment always seeps in. This story takes place in North Oakland and Berkeley, where I’ve lived for the past two years, and in the underworld, where I haven’t spent much time. The coffee shop where Bradley Bowman meets Jay is the Temescal Cafe, at the unfashionable ned of Telegraph Ave., where I occasionally drink Italian sodas and eat cheap bagels. I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to count waiting for trains in the downtown Berkeley BART station, and I’ve wondered more than once what I’d do if a decidedly non-standard train pulled up to the platform. It’s a story about grief and loss, and contains my answer to the question that’s always bugged me about the Orpheus story—why the hell did that idiot look back?
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In the eight years since I wrote that, the Temescal Cafe has closed, and that bit of Telegraph Ave has actually become a bit fashionable, with a few wonderful new restaurants and some other enticements opening up. Since then I’ve lived in other neighborhoods in Oakland, and eventually settled in south Berkeley (far closer to the place where Bradley caught his train to the underworld than to the place where he talked to his dead lover in a drain).
Other things changed, too: I started writing a series of urban fantasy novels about a sorcerer named Marla Mason. In the first novel, Blood Engines, Marla has to leave her east coast home to go to San Francisco Bay Area. Because I loved Bradley so much in this story, I decided to give him a role in that book. I thought it would be a minor appearance, little more than a cameo... but I kept seeing more possibilities for the character, and he went on to play prominent roles in three other Marla novels: Dead Reign, Spell Games, and Broken Mirrors. Ultimately, he became one of the most popular characters in the series, and certainly one of the most important. Over the course of those novels, B goes from being a confused lost soul bewildered by his own powers to... well, I won’t spoil it. But it’s a pretty big and awesome change.
If you’d like to find out more about the Marla Mason series, try www.marlamason.net, which has linkes to the other novels and stories about her.
Table of Contents
Cover
Down with the Lizards and the Bees
Story Notes