by Ellen Datlow
Since the coming of the stars, Black William has undergone a great renewal. Although in the immediate aftermath there was a hue and cry about fleeing the town, shutting it down, calmer voices prevailed, pointing to the fact that there had been no fatalities, unless one counted the suicides, and but a single disappearance (Colvin Jacobs, who was strolling through the park that fateful night), and it could be better understood, some maintained, in light of certain impending charges against him (embezzlement, fraud, solicitation). Stay calm, said the voices. A few scrapes and bruises, a smattering of nervous breakdowns—that’s no reason to fling up your hands. Let’s think this over. Colvin’s a canny sort, not one to let an opportunity pass. At this very moment he may be developing a skin cancer on Varadero Beach or Ipanema (though it is my belief that he may be sojourning in a more unlikely place). And while the town thought it over, the tourists began to arrive by the busload. Drawn by Pin’s photographs, which had been published around the world, and later by his best-selling book (co-authored by the editor of the Gazette), they came from Japan, from Europe, from Punxsutawney and Tunkhannock, from every quarter of the globe, a flood of tourists that resolved into a steady flow and demanded to be housed, fed, T-shirted, souvenired, and swindled. They needed theories upon which to hang their faith, so theory-making became a cottage industry and theories abounded, both supernatural and quasi-scientific, each having their own battery of proponents and debunkers. A proposal was floated in the city council that a second statue be erected to commemorate Black William’s visitation, but the ladies of the Heritage Committee fought tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of the original, and now can be seen twice a year lavishing upon him a vigorous scrubbing.
Businesses thrived, mine included—this due to the minor celebrity I achieved and the sale of Stanky and his album to Warner Brothers (David Geffen never called). The album did well and the single, “Misery Loves Company,” climbed to No. 44 on the Billboard charts. I have no direct contact with Stanky, but learned from Liz, who came to the house six months later to pick up her clothes (those abandoned when Stanky fled my house in a huff), that he was writing incidental music for the movies, a job that requires no genius. She carried tales, too, of their nasty breakup, of Stanky’s increasing vileness, his masturbatory displays of ego. He has not written a single song since he left Black William—the stars may have drained more from him than that which they bred, and perhaps the fact that he was almost taken has something to do with his creative slump. Whatever his story, I think he has found his true medium and is becoming a minor obscenity slithering among the larger obscenities that serve a different kind of star, anonymous beneath the black flood of the Hollywood sewer.
The following March, I went fishing with Andrea at Kempton’s Pond. She was reluctant to join me, assuming that I intended to make her a stand-in for Rudy, but I assured her this was not the case and told her she might enjoy an afternoon out of the office, some quiet time together. It was a clear day, and cold. Pockets of snow lay in the folds and crinkles of the Bittersmiths, but the crests were bare, and there was a deeper accumulation on the banks than when Rudy and I had fished the pond in November. We had to clear ourselves a spot on which to sit. The sun gilded the birch trunks, but the waters of the pond were as Stygian and mysterious as ever.
We cast out our lines and chatted about doings in her office, my latest projects—Lesion (black metal) and a postrock band I had convinced to call themselves Same Difference. I told her about some loser tapes that had come my way, notably a gay Christian rap outfit with a song entitled “Cruisin’ for Christ (While Searching for the Heavenly City).” Then we fell silent. Staring into the pond, at the dark rock walls and oily water, I did not populate the depths with fantasies, but thought instead of Rudy. They were memorial thoughts untainted by grief, memories of things said and done. I had such a profound sense of him, I imagined if I turned quickly enough, I would have a glimpse of a bulky figure in a parka, wool cap jammed low on his brow, red-cheeked and puffing steam; yet when I did turn, the figure in the parka and wool cap was more clearly defined, ivory pale and slender, her face a living cameo. I brushed a loose curl from her eyes. Touching her cheek warmed my fingertip. “This is kind of nice,” she said, and smiled. “It’s so quiet.”
“Told you you’d like it,” I said.
“I do.”
She jiggled her line.
“You’ll never catch anything that way.” I demonstrated proper technique. “Twitch the line side-to-side.”
Amused, she said, “I really doubt I’m going to catch anything. What were you and Rudy batting? One for a thousand?”
“Yeah, but you never know.”
“I don’t think I want to catch anything if it resembles that thing he had mounted.”
“You should let out more line, too.”
She glanced at me wryly, but did as I suggested.
A cloud darkened the bank and I pictured how the two of us would appear to God, if God were in His office, playing with His Game Boy: tiny animated fisherfolk hunched over their lines, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting for a tiny monster to breach, unmindful of any menace from above. Another cloud shadowed us. A ripple moved across the pond, passing so slowly it made me think that the waters of the Polozny, when upthrust into these holes, were squeezed into a sludgy distillate. Bare twigs clattered in a gust of wind.
“All these years,” Andrea said. “All the years and now five months. . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Every day, there’ll be two or three times when I see you, like just now, when I look up and see you, and it’s like a blow . . . a physical blow that leaves me all gaga. I want to drop everything and curl up with you.”
“Me, too,” I said.
She hesitated. “It just worries me.”
“We’ve had this conversation,” I said. “I don’t mind having it again, but we’re not going to resolve anything. We’ll never figure it out.”
“I know.” She jiggled her line, forgetting to twitch it. “I keep thinking I’ll find a new angle, but all I come up with is more stupidity. I was thinking the other day, it was like a fairy tale. How falling back in love protected us, like a charm.” She heel-kicked the bank. “It’s frustrating when everything you think seems absurd and true all at once.”
“It’s a mystery.”
“Right.”
“I go there myself sometimes,” I said. “I worry about whether we’ll fall out of love . . . if what we feel is unnatural. Then I worry if worrying about it’s unnatural. Because, you know, it’s such a weird thing to be worried about. Then I think, hey, it’s perfectly natural to worry over something you care about, whether it’s weird or not. Round and round. We might as well go with the flow. No doubt we’ll still be worrying about it when we’re too old to screw.”
“That’s pretty old.”
“Yep,” I said. “Ancient.”
“Maybe it’s good we worry.” Then after a pause, she said. “Maybe we didn’t worry enough the first time.”
A second ripple edged the surface, like a miniature slow tsunami. The light faded and dimmed. A degree of tension seemed to leave Andrea’s body.
“You want to go to Russia?” she asked. “I’ve got this conference in late May. I have to give a paper and be on some panels. It’s only four days, but I could take some vacation.”
I thought about it. “Kiwanda’s pretty much in control of things. Would we have to stay in Russia?”
“Don’t you want to go clubbing in Moscow? Meet new people? I’ll wear a slutty dress and act friendly with strangers. You can save me from the white slavers—I’m sure I’ll attract white slavers.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “But some of those slavers are tough.”
“You can take ’em!” She rubbed the side of her nose. “Why? Where do you want to go?”
“Bucharest.”
“Why there?”
“Lots of reasons. Potential for vampires. Cheap. But reason number one—nobody g
oes there.”
“Good point. We get enough of crowds around here.”
We fell silent again. The eastern slopes of the Bittersmiths were drowning in shadow, acquiring a simplified look, as of worn black teeth that still bore traces of enamel. But the light had richened, the tree trunks appeared to have been dipped in old gold. Andrea straightened and peered down into the hole.
“I had a nibble,” she said excitedly.
I watched the surface. The water remained undisturbed, lifeless and listless, but I felt a presence lurking beneath, a wise and deliberate fish, a grotesque, yet beautiful in the fact of its survival, and more than a murky promise—it would rise to us this day or some other. Perhaps it would speak a single word, perhaps merely die. Andrea leaned against me, eager to hook it, and asked what she should do.
“It’s probably just a current,” I said, but advised her to let out more line.
LUCIUS SHEPARD
“Stars Seen Through Stone” had its genesis in the ten years I spent in Detroit and Ann Arbor as a rock musician. It’s rather more autobiographical than most of my stories, in that Vernon, the main character, bears some resemblance to my younger self, and various other characters bear resemblance to people I knew and played with and so forth. Joe Stanky, who serves as the fulcrum of the story, was an actual . . . one hesitates to call him a human being. He was far more desperate and unseemly than his fictive self, far worse a pain in the ass than I have depicted. Several years after the band we played in together broke up, I saw a figure waddling toward me along the country road where I was then living. I was chopping wood beside the house and I paused, stared, then went back to work. But sure enough, the figure turned out to be “Stanky.” He approached me with his usual cajoling air and started talking about the “good ol’ days.” About wouldn’t it be great if we could start a new band, and so on. Looking at him, at this malignant, dwarfish lump, I suddenly became aware of the ax in my hand. He must have sensed my mood, because his talk veered off in a different direction, his attempt at manipulation took a new tack, and he told me, in pious tones, how he had found Jesus and changed his life, sneaking hopeful looks at me as he related the facts of his conversion. Eventually he left, presenting a dejected image, going with a limp.
I think of him rarely these days, but when I do I often say something on the order of “Fucking Stanky!” And then, finishing the thought as though it were an equation, sometimes I say to myself, “Rock and Roll!”
WHAT YOU SAW WAS WHAT YOU GOT: THE YEAR IN FILMS
HOWARD WALDROP
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is one of the most delightfully iconoclastic writers working today. His highly original books include the novels Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs and the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, and Going Home Again. He has won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”
His most recent book is Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005, from Old Earth Books.
Forthcoming are Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 and the novellas “The Search for Tom Purdue” and “The Moone World.”
So another year sank into the sunset with a record of noble attempts, mild successes, and spavined failures—of nerve, of conception, of narrative shortcomings.
Part of the problem of being a semi-independent, but still assignable, part-time online reviewer is that someone has us out reviewing what looks to be possibly interesting stuff, while more interesting stuff comes and goes at the same time.
Quick follow-up DVD release has solved some of the problems, but it still doesn’t happen when the movie’s making money somewhere but has already committed seppuku in Austin.
So I’m out reviewing, like, The Nines (like, a really earnest, well-acted film studies major, graduate-thesis movie) and something else comes in, gets raves, and Hey! Presto! It’s already headed for Netflix.
Next month or two . . .
Why am I whining when it always comes with the territory? Because, this year, I think I missed some better stuff than I saw. (I hope so, anyway.)
Let’s start at the top and work down, way down.
The best writing in the movies this past year is the same place it’s been (with the exception of the best episodes of The West Wing) on television these past twenty years: The Simpsons Movie and its adjunct, the straight-to-DVD Futurama: Bender’s Big Score (but it’s to be broadcast as a three- or four-parter on the cable reruns). People actually (as in the commercials) came out of The Simpsons Movie singing the “Spider-Pig” song. The scenes where Homer tips the pig-crap silo into polluted Lake Springfield and the water achieves toxic-waste critical mass are some of the finest in movie history. (And the fact that the EPA task force comes in a fleet of the planes nobody else wants, Ospreys, is an added bonus.) If you take your eyes off the screen any given second, you’re going to miss something, especially during the Simpsons’ attempt to escape and start new lives in Alaska (there’s a bar there named eskiMOE’S). And all this, like the years-gone-by A Private Function, because of a pig . . .
Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: Just as audiences had to wait eighty-two years (from the invention of motion pictures to l977) to see a spaceship go into hyperdrive in Star Wars, we have waited 112 years to see time travel as it would be.
Bender, a robot, is now, like everything else, owned by the aliens who called in all the Earth’s debts and own the place. The aliens have a one-way time travel device that goes into the past. They send Bender back to loot it. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll go into the past, grab the swag, come back to the limestone cavern under the basement here, turn myself off for fifteen hundred years, wake up, and come up from the basement.”
Bender jumps into the time field and comes up from the basement door with the Mona Lisa under his arm.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he says.
Of course, we end up with more and more complicated time paradoxes that have to be fixed before they destroy the past, the present, and the future.
And you get to see the Nude Beach Planet, which has umpteen suns. . . .
Enchanted tried to do for fantasy what Galaxy Quest did for SF in 1999, and it pretty much succeeded, though the film has problems in the last few minutes. But before then, oh, my! When the princess, abandoned in our world, sings her happy working song while she’s housecleaning, all the animals come to help her just like in fairy-tale land. You know, Manhattan wildlife. Rats—thousands of them, millions! Cockroaches. Squirrels. Pigeons.
Since there were no opening credits, I kept asking myself, “Who’s the broad with Susan Sarandon’s eyes in the dark hair playing the Witch/Queen?” The credits come on and it is, of course, Susan Sarandon. (Even the dragon later on has her eyes.) Disney’s back—and they almost got it right.
By far, the most influential movie of the year was The Host, a Korean monster movie. It’s like Them! told from the p.o.v. of the Lodge boys, the ones who end up in the storm drains after the giant ants have pulled their father’s arm off while they were down by the river flying a model airplane. You’re having fun and then giant ants are everywhere.
The Host is about a family who runs a squid shop on the river in Seoul—suddenly there’s a monster there, and the daughter’s taken away. They try to find her for the rest of the movie. They aren’t part of the military or members of an investigative team (the Them! and other 1950s templates). The scenes of the monster’s first appearance are truly frightening. People stand around watching something BIG in the distance coming toward them. Nothing should be that big. Nothing that big should be on a riverbank in Seoul—and then it’s on them.
As I’ve said elsewhere, a few Koreans have some things to teach Hollywood.
It has had its greatest influence on Cloverfield, which is a 2008 movie. Trust me.
Don’t get me started.
The Golden Compass (or, “Bears Discover Armor”) is set in a wo
rld that is not our own, like some Edwardian para-time ruled by the quasi-religious Magisterium. In this world, all the children have changeable daemons (familiars), but by the time they reach adulthood, their daemons have settled on a permanent form. (The daemon of Sam Elliott is, of course, a jackrabbit, which is perfect.) There’s some sinister goings-on in a sort of Oompa-Loompa domain run by the Magisterium near the North Pole (sort of a Ray Eames Santa Claus house) involving children’s daemons and evil designs. There are armored bears, some terrific fights, quests, and kids learning lessons. People who’ve read the books tell me it ends halfway through the first one.