Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

by Ellen Datlow

  “I’m going to go check out the roof,” Landsman says. “Don’t let anybody leave, and call me when the latke decides to show up.”

  Landsman rides the elevatoro to the eighth floor and then bangs his way up a flight of steel-edged concrete steps to the roof of the Zamenhof. He walks the perimeter, looking across Max Nordau Street to the roof of the Blackpool. He peers over the north, east, and south cornices to the surrounding low structures six or seven stories down. Night is an orange smear over Sitka, a compound of fog and the light of sodium-vapor streetlamps. It has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat. The lamps of the Jews stretch from the slope of Mount Edgecumbe in the west, over the seventy-two infilled islands of the Sound, across the Shvartsn-Yam, Halibut Point, South Sitka, and the Nachtasyl, across Harkavy and the Untershtat, before they are snuffed in the east by the Baranof range. On Oysshtelung Island, the beacon at the tip of the Safety Pin—sole remnant of the World’s Fair—blinks out its warning to airplanes or yids. Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grin-spoon’s Felting two blocks away.

  “It’s nice up there,” Landsman says when he gets back down to the lobby, with its ashtray charm, the yellowing sofas, the scarred chairs and tables at which you sometimes see a couple of hotel residents killing an hour with a game of pinochle. “I should go up more often.”

  “What about the basement?” Tenenboym says. “You going to look down there?”

  “The basement,” Landsman says, and his heart describes a sudden knight move in his chest. “I guess I’d better.”

  Landsman is a tough guy, in his way, given to the taking of wild chances. He has been called hard-boiled and foolhardy, a momzer, a crazy son of a bitch. He has faced down shtarkers and psychopaths, has been shot at, beaten, frozen, burned. He has pursued suspects between the flashing walls of urban firefights and deep into bear country. Heights, crowds, snakes, burning houses, dogs schooled to hate the smell of a policeman, he has shrugged them all off or functioned in spite of them. But when he finds himself in lightless or confined spaces, something in the animal core of Meyer Landsman convulses. No one but his ex-wife knows it, but Detective Meyer Landsman is afraid of the dark.

  “Want me to go with you?” Tenenboym says, sounding offhand, but you never know with a sensitive old fishwife like Tenenboym.

  Landsman affects to scorn the offer. “Just give me a damn flashlight,” he says.

  The basement exhales its breath of camphor, heating oil, and cold dust. Landsman jerks a string that lights a naked bulb, holds his breath, and goes under.

  At the bottom of the steps, he passes through the lost-articles room, lined with pegboard, furnished with shelves and cubbyholes that hold the thousand objects abandoned or forgotten in the hotel. Unmated shoes, fur hats, a trumpet, a windup zeppelin. A collection of wax gramophone cylinders featuring the entire recorded output of the Orchestra Orfeon of Istanbul. A logger’s ax, two bicycles, a partial bridge in a hotel glass. Wigs, canes, a glass eye, display hands left behind by a mannequin salesman. Prayer books, prayer shawls in their velvet zipper pouches, an outlandish idol with the body of a fat baby and the head of an elephant. There is a wooden soft-drink crate filled with keys, another with the entire range and breadth of hairstyling tools, from irons to eyelash crimpers. Framed photographs of families in better days. A cryptic twist of rubber that might be a sex toy, or a contraceptive device, or the patented secret of a foundation garment. Some yid even left behind a taxidermy marten, sleek and leering, its glass eye a hard bead of ink.

  Landsman probes the box of keys with a pencil. He looks inside each hat, gropes along the shelves behind the abandoned paperback books. He can hear his own heart and smell his own aldehyde breath, and after a few minutes in the silence, the sound of blood in his ears begins to remind him of somebody talking. He checks behind the hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.

  The laundry is next. When he pulls the string for the light, nothing happens. It’s ten degrees darker in here, and there’s nothing to see but blank walls, severed hookups, drain holes in the floor. The Zamenhof has not done its own wash in years. Landsman looks into the drain holes, and the darkness in them is oily and thick. Landsman feels a flutter, a worm, in his belly. He flexes his fingers and cracks the bones of his neck. At the far end of the laundry room, a door that is three planks nailed together by a diagonal fourth seals a low doorway. The wooden door has a loop of rope for a latch and a peg to hook it on.

  A crawl space. Landsman half dreads the phrase alone.

  He calculates the chance that a certain style of killer, not a professional, not a true amateur, not even a normal maniac, might be hiding in that crawl space. Possible; but it would be pretty tough for the freak to have hooked the loop over the peg from inside. That logic alone is almost enough to persuade him not to bother with the crawl space. In the end Landsman switches on the flash and notches it between his teeth. He hikes up his pants legs and gets down on his knees. Just to spite himself, because spiting himself, spiting others, spiting the world is the pastime and only patrimony of Landsman and his people. With one hand he un-holsters his big little S&W, and with the other he fingers the loop of rope. He yanks open the door of the crawl space.

  “Come out,” he says, lips dry, rasping like a scared old fart.

  The elation he experienced on the roof has cooled like blown filament. His nights are wasted, his life and career a series of mistakes, his city itself a bulb that is about to go black.

  He thrusts his upper body into the crawl space. The air is cold, with a bitter smell of mouse shit. The beam of the pocket flash dribbles over everything, shadowing as much as it reveals. Walls of cinder block, an earthen floor, the ceiling a loathsome tangle of wires and foam insulation. In the middle of the dirt floor, at the back, a disk of raw plywood lies set in a circular metal frame, flush with the floor. Landsman holds his breath and swims through his panic to the hole in the floor, determined to stay under for as long as he can. The dirt around the frame is undisturbed. An even layer of dust lies over wood and metal alike, no marks, no streaks. There is no reason to think anyone has been fooling with it. Landsman fits his fingernails between the plywood and the frame and pries off the crude hatch. The flashlight reveals a threaded tube of aluminum screwed into the earth, laddered with steel cleats. The frame turns out to be the edge of the tube itself. Just wide enough to admit a full-grown psychopath. Or a Jewish policeman with fewer phobias than Landsman. He clings to the sholem as to a handle, wrestling with a crazy need to fire it into the throat of the darkness. He drops the plywood disk back into its frame with a clatter. No way is he going down there.

  The darkness follows him all the way back up the stairs to the lobby, reaching for his collar, tugging at his sleeve.

  “Nothing,” he tells Tenenboym, pulling himself together. He gives the word a cheery ring. It might be a prediction of what his investigation into the murder of Emanuel Lasker is bound to reveal, a statement of what he believes Lasker lived for and died for, a realization of what will remain, after the Reversion, of Landsman’s hometown. “Nothing.”

  “You know what Kohn says,” says Tenenboym. “Kohn says we got a ghost in the house.” Kohn is the day manager. “Taking shit, moving shit around. Kohn figures it for the ghost of Professor Zamenhof.”

  “If they named a dump like this after me,” Landsman says, “I’d haunt it, too.”

  “You never know,” Tenenboym observes. “Especially nowadays.”

  Nowadays one never knows. Out at Povorotny, a cat mated with a rabbit and produced adorable freaks whose photos graced the front page of the Sitka Tog. Last February five hundred witnesses all up and down the District swore that in the shimmer of the aurora borealis, for two nights running, they observed the outlines of a human face, with beard and sidelocks. Violent arguments broke out over the identity of th
e bearded sage in the sky, whether or not the face was smiling (or merely suffering from a mild attack of gas), and the meaning of the weird manifestation. And just last week, amid the panic and feathers of a kosher slaughterhouse on Zhitlovsky Avenue, a chicken turned on the shochet as he raised his ritual knife and announced, in Aramaic, the imminent advent of Messiah. According to the Tog, the miraculous chicken offered a number of startling predictions, though it neglected to mention the soup in which, having once more fallen silent as God Himself, it afterward featured. Even the most casual study of the record, Landsman thinks, would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.

  MICHAEL CHABON

  I was inspired to write The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by the haunting example of another book: Say It in Yiddish, a pocket-sized, sobersided “phrasebook for travelers” to a land where every level of human interaction, from the everyday to the governmental, is conducted in Yiddish. It was the nonexistence of such a land that haunted me, and as time went on I found myself increasingly hungering for a visit. So I wrote this book.

  ABOUT THE RHYSLING AWARD

  Since 1978, when Suzette Haden Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, its members have recognized achievement in the field of speculative poetry by presenting the Rhysling Awards, named after the blind bard protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.”

  Every year, each SFPA member is allowed to nominate two poems from the previous year for the Rhysling Awards: one in the “long” category and one in the “short” category. Because it’s practically impossible for each member to have read every nominated poem in the various publications where they originally appeared, the nominees are all collected into one volume, called The Rhysling Anthology. Copies of this anthology are mailed to all the members, who read it and vote for their favorites. The top vote-getters in each of the two categories become the Rhysling winners. Past winners have included Michael Bishop, Bruce Boston, Tom Disch, Joe Haldeman, Alan P. Lightman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Palwick, Lucius Shepard, Jeff VanderMeer and Gene Wolfe.

  In 2006, the SFPA created a new award, the Dwarf Stars Award, to honor poems of ten lines or less.

  For more information on the SFPA, see its website at www.sfpoetry.com.

  Jane Yolen, often called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America,” admits to actually being the Hans Jewish Andersen of America. She is the author of more than three hundred books, ranging from picture books and baby board books to middle-grade fiction, poetry collections, nonfiction, novels, graphic novels, and story collections. Her books and stories have won many awards, including two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott, the Golden Kite, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Medals, the Jewish Book Award, and nomination for the National Book Award. She has also won the Kerlan Award and the Catholic Library’s Regina Medal. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates.

  RHYSLING DWARF STARS AWARD

  LAST UNICORN

  JANE YOLEN

  Others, like foxes, go to ground,

  But the last unicorn, whitened,

  Faded the color of old sheets hung

  On a trailer park line,

  Goes to the edge of the ocean.

  The tops of waves are as white as he.

  Brothers, he thinks, sisters,

  And plunges in, not so much a death

  As a transfiguration.

  Rich Ristow was born in Bitburg, Germany. He’s also lived in England, Bermuda, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He holds a master of fine arts in poetry from UNC-Wilmington. Currently, he lives in New Jersey with his wife. In 2008, Skullvines Press published his novelette “Into the Cruel Sea,” which is available only at www.skullvines.com.

  RHYSLING SHORT POEM AWARD

  THE GRAVEN IDOL’S GODHEART

  RICH RISTOW

  The Baghdad Battery, thought to be about two thousand years old, is the oldest known generator of electricity. Some historians believe it was used to give a small electric charge to statues.

  The godheart of your graven idol is a clay pot

  of grape juice, a copper sheet, and an iron rod

  that creates a weak volt, like an electric shot

  to the finger, if you touched your golden god.

  The stern high priest hid it, but he surely knew

  of grape juice, a copper sheet, and an iron rod.

  His authority your fear and faith would renew.

  As you fell to the floor and sobbed into the sand

  the stern high priest hid it, but he surely knew

  you’d give more gold and do as he’d demand,

  like let your baby boy die on the bloody altar.

  You fell to the floor and sobbed into the sand

  before you watched it all and would not falter.

  Fearing a greater smiting or even failed crops,

  you let your baby boy die on a bloody altar.

  You never knew the high priest used props:

  the godheart of your graven idol is a clay pot

  that gives other metal a static sizzle and a pop

  created by one weak volt, like an electric shot.

  Mike Allen lives in Roanoke, Virginia, with his wife, Anita, and a demonic cat and comical dog. By day he covers court cases for the city’s daily newspaper; in his spare time the hats he wears include editor of the poetry journal Mythic Delirium and the anthology series Clockwork Phoenix. He’s a semiregular performer in the local improv theater and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. The Philadelphia Inquirer called his work “poetry for goths of all ages.” His newest books are The Journey to Kailash, a poetry collection published by Norilana Books, and Follow the Wounded One, a dark fantasy novelette from the publishers of Not One of Us magazine.

  RHYSLING LONG POEM AWARD

  THE JOURNEY TO KAILASH

  MIKE ALLEN

  When Ganesh marries my mother,

  I am 18, my own man

  in the eyes of the law; but barely a zygote

  in his eyes. He calls me spermling

  the first time we speak in private;

  I tell him I know a doctor

  who can do something about that nose.

  Trunk curls up, perhaps to strike?

  —a smile beneath

  that touched the ancient folds around his eyes.

  Kid, he says, we’ll get along fine.

  In my neighborhood, unseen trains

  shake the ground every day at 5.

  Streets without sidewalks slide between houses

  tiny as boxcars, or old and rambling

  as the stories the fogeys at the gas station tell,

  like them eaten from inside and about to fall,

  unlike them divided into 4 apartments each.

  Ganesh and I play Xbox

  before my afternoon shifts (of course he’s great,

  with all those hands he’s at least two players

  at once) and I steal glances

  at his impossible profile, framed

  by the dusty window: lumpy wrinkled nose

  like a seasoned draft guard, curled

  in inverse question mark of concentration;

  on this day, clad in coveralls

  with the bib undone: How is it, I wonder,

  that you feel like you belong?

  As if he heard, he mumbles,

  Wherever someone loves me, I’m in like Flynn.

  No, no, Mom, I don’t want to know

  (but as always, she tells me—

  I know, he could use a few weeks at the Y,

  and yeah, he’s a lot older than your father

  but turn off the lights

  and you wouldn’t know it. Sure,

  sometimes the beginning is way better

  than the end, but who cares

  when he gets the party rolling . . .

  Oh, when he gets rolling . . . and that trunk!)

  No, no, Mom, I don’t
want to know . . .

  I still don’t have a clue how they met.

  Mom can’t remember, and my stepdad

  always changes the subject, spins me

  yet another harrowing first-person account

  of leading his father’s troops against demonkind.

  For me there was no warning: after a long

  afternoon behind the Burger King counter

  I come home, to find him on the couch,

  Mom asleep against his pillowy chest,

  a bowl of popcorn in his lap, quietly munching;

  his huge ears fanned out, cupped forward

  as he watches Temple of Doom on cable

  and giggles under his breath. In retrospect

  I was far less surprised than

  what the moment warranted.

  As we wait in matching tuxes

  for the justice of the peace to call us in