Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  5

  The Monk, by candlelight, laboriously produced an illuminated manuscript, caught in the press of the endless compulsion to reproduce the work in front of him before it vanished entirely.

  At length, the lateness of the hour took him to his tiny cell and restless sleep, where he lay for a long time haunted by the nightmare that tomorrow no work would remain to be done, it would all, somehow, in the night, get itself copied and then vanish away.

  6

  In the strange language of the time, Horothrag said, “It would be well to record this transaction beyond the impermanence of memory.” He made a mark upon the stone and then another, being somewhat distressed to note that no sooner had one mark been made than the preceding one faded, so that in the end he gave up entirely this useless endeavor.

  7

  In a time before Horothrag, there were animals and large reptiles of diverse forms, but in time they one by one went away, and soon there was the earth and the endless ocean, but nothing stirred nor moved within its depths and time continued and weathering produced strange effects with no thing to remark upon them.

  8

  On the distant planet, the forest moved in the warm sunlight to the motion of the gentle breeze, making sounds, zil, zil, zil, and none came to cut its trees.

  The End

  THE NIGHT OF THE NICKEL BEER

  Twelve thirty, Friday night. His wife slept.

  In the darkness he got from the bed and dressed with no particular destination in mind.

  He walked into the night air beyond the house. The time? He had forgotten his watch on the nightstand by the bed.

  Forty. The turning point. Forty. Earlier, the cake with one candle: for the time of numbering the years with separate candles had passed, and now the one served to stand for the thirty-nine others as well. Forty. A brittle breaking. A mortal wound never recovered from. Entrance into a cavern. Would she miss the warmth of his body? Not likely, for she slept as though drugged, exhausted by her own day, as he had been by his until restlessness left him turning with pointless thoughts of time as the day passed into tomorrow. That was all last night, now.

  The air was filled with ocean mist. The clean moisture entered his lungs, bringing youth again. Youth!

  A world was blurred into a dim reality of shifting lights. A silent car came, its headlights flaring out and then being lost. Turn: no sign of the passage of the car, only the white, moving mist and the distant sounds without identity.

  He walked, putting his hand in his pocket, feeling the change there between the thumb and forefinger: a twenty-five cent piece, pennies, perhaps a dime. His fingers could not distinguish the small coins, and there was an impulse to bring them out and hold them close before his face for identification.

  He looked down at the swirling mist made alive by his movement. He walked on, turning from street to street. The coins in his pocket. The coins only. He had forgotten the billfold, lying with the watch on the nightstand.

  Lights came from the darkness, smeared away in the ocean mist, and were absorbed. Lights falling into white darkness like his breath. Far sounds, bright as though near.

  Now and then, passing him, the cars; he, now and then, passing the lights of some late establishment. The coins in his pocket. A cafe or perhaps a tavern ahead, after the timeless walk. Today, he remembered, California goes off daylight savings time.

  He came abreast and paused and peered inside through the moist glass into the warm, bright interior, his face haloed with orange neon. A beer bar, he decided, drawn by its warmth. Inside were kids, a dozen or more of them, most gathered at a long central table, sitting quiet in the lateness of the hour. There a guitar. A girl with long blonde hair and eyes large and clear; seated beside her, a youth in a beret. Slow sipping of beer and talk. The taste of beer came to his mouth, bitter with hops, bringing thirst.

  The young man in the beret looked toward the window. He smiled recognition and gestured, inviting the man in.

  He turned to continue his solitary walk, feeling the coins in his pocket, but after a few steps, he hesitated, came back. After an indecisive moment, he entered the tavern, the mist swirling around him like a cloak. The young man in the beret smiled again, more distantly, as though identification, once certain, now hung on the rim of memory unabsorbed.

  He nodded noncommittally. The tavern was small, and he squeezed himself behind a comer table. He was only feet removed in space from the central table, but in time, now, cut off forever from its youthful occupants.

  The tavern smelled of beer and of a particular moistness of young bodies. There was the sleepy, late-night softness of conversations, reluctant to end. The young man in the beret turned to look at him, as did his blonde companion.

  He looked away, and waited for someone to come and take his order. Behind the bar, the bartender, resting on an elbow before the waitress with her tray. The mirror presented the waitress full face, and he saw himself, too, at the table, peering back from the reversed world captured in the hard, bright surface.

  The clock above the bar mirror told the time: 1:05. Had it been yet turned back? Had this night-time hour, beginning at a previous 2:00 a.m., been regained by the world? He did not know how long he had walked. Was there less than one hour or two? No matter, he thought, thinking of the coins in his pocket. A few minutes, then back into the night, home at last to rejoin his wife, his body pleasantly tired from the unaccustomed late-night exercise.

  The young waitress came, smiling. She put a smooth hand lightly on his table.

  “A glass of beer,” he said.

  The conversation at the central table was of unfamiliar worlds, illuminated with the crystalline brightness of youthful fantasy. He studied the people-One wore patched corduroy pants, such as he had not seen for years, and sat far back in his chair, eyes partly closed. Another lifted the guitar and strummed idly, the strings capturing his restless fingers but not his tongue. Another poured from a pitcher to the brim of his glass, spilling none, forming a head hardly thicker than the mist outside, so slowly was the last careful tilt.

  The waitress returned. “That will be a nickel, sir,” she said.

  A nickel. It had been many years since he had bought a glass of beer for a nickel. The quarter in his pocket suddenly extended time.

  He brought out the change to inspect it in the light. A quarter, an old one, the pennies, and a dime.

  He gave her the dime. “Keep the change,” he said.

  She smiled. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  He settled back with the beer, cool and dark. The glass made circles on the table top, and the condensed moisture on the surface was cold to his touch. The taste was bright and flowery, more characteristic of European than American beer. He drank a long swallow and the liquid moved in his throat as though across an internal desert. He could not remember a time, since early childhood, when from his father’s glass, beer had held that excitement for him.

  “Won’t you join us?” the young man in the beret asked.

  He put down the glass.

  “Please do,” said his blonde companion. Her voice was soft, bringing memories of some former time. As she turned, he noted the jeans she wore were faded. A masculine white shirt, open at the neck, did not fully conceal the contours of her upper body, and part of her high, smooth collar bone was visible as a rise in the flesh. The broad belt above feminine hips embraced a waist scarcely thicker than he could encircle with his hands. She could not be over twenty years old, he thought, noting there was no glass before her place.

  He was made welcome at the empty seat beside the girl. “Please go on with your conversation,” he said. “Don’t let me interfere, I’ll just sit here listening.”

  “We were saying,” the young man in the beret said, “when we saw you out there at the window that we’d seen you somewhere before.”

  “Where would that be?” asked the girl.

  He smiled. “Perhaps you’ve confused me with someone else?”

  Wi
th them at the long table, he felt a sense of belonging, as though in some way he were a contemporary of theirs, inexplicably grown older. They were talking about a movie he could not remember having seen but seemed vaguely to remember: there were some old stars in it. He felt his body slowly relax, and he drank again from the beer before him, and then once more, the glass was empty, the foam a little white circle near the top, and breaking invisibly on his upper lip. Suddenly he wished to remain here, in the soft quiet of this warmth and brightness, while the clock progressed to the uncertain hour.

  The young man in the beret filled his glass from the pitcher on the table, emptying it. “Somewhere.”

  “Thank you,” he said, observing the empty pitcher and signaling for the waitress. “Let me get another one.” The waitress nodded at his gesture and turned to the bartender.

  “Thank you for buying,” said the girl, although she had no glass in front of her. He was embarrassed, because he could not ask her if he could buy her something. The pitcher would consume his change.

  “I didn’t come away with much money,” he said apologetically. “I just came out for a walk.”

  “I wish I could remember where I’ve seen you,” said the young man in the beret.

  “I’ve lived in town for twelve years. Maybe you’ve seen me in a restaurant, somewhere like that, somewhere around.”

  “I’m not even sure it was here exactly,” said the girl. She wrinkled her brow and brought her lower lip between her front teeth, thinking.

  The waitress came with the pitcher, and he reached into his pocket. The hand came out with two quarters and the pennies. Both quarters were old, with milled edges worn to parent metal rather than the copper inner construction of recent mintage.

  “Twenty cents,” she said.

  He passed the quarter to her. “Keep the change.” He returned the remaining coins to his pocket.

  “Pass it around,” he said.

  The young man in the beret complied, and most of the contents of the pitcher emptied into glasses, bright, cold, foamy.

  “Funny,” said the girl, her thoughts apparently still on the identity problem. He was conscious of a perfume he did not recognize and needed the time to place. It was too faint and subtle to activate pathways to other thoughts.

  In the moment, then, it seemed to him that, in former days, the confused sense of identity might have arisen had one of his own group returned, one evening, with both age and amnesia. So again the feeling came that he was their contemporary, but returned from a long journey, perhaps to other worlds, while they had remained ageless and outside of time, suspended.

  Meanwhile, coexistent with his thoughts, their conversation flowed as did the time itself, and the lateness grew. He listened momentarily to some middle point:

  “I saw him come down the street on a motorcycle,” said the man in corduroy. The guitar man strummed. “That was last Friday.”

  “Well, I didn’t think he went in much for that, but he did sell the ’cycle day before yesterday.”

  An unfathomable subject, so he partly closed his eyes, hoping eventually to catch the background of the conversation, but feeling no compelling need to do so.

  “That reminds me,” the man with the guitar said, hitting the strings heavily for emphasis. “Same thing happened to a friend of mine about a year ago, although I think in his case it was an accident on the thing more than anything else.” He paused from the strings and poured from the pitcher.

  “Well, I never expected it.”

  He was content to sit among them, accepted as a member of the group, seeking to recreate some memory that he could not, for time had aged all his youthful companions and many were lost in memory and more were lost in the world. The ones around him, tonight, might, in their way, see themselves in him.

  Outside his thoughts, the conversations went: of persons and places veiled with familiarity from an outsider. He drank again, and the pitcher he had bought was empty. The hands of the clock had moved to 1:35.

  “Earlier we were talking about the beach,” the man in the corduroy said. “We can sit in the cars there. Who wants to come?”

  He looked at the faces around him, all eager and full of youth. His body was absorbing the warmth of the room, and for the first time he was conscious of the chill of the outside. He pictured the beach and the dark waves beneath the overcast, and the mists swirling around automobiles like smoke from some ice fire, and the picture he drew in his mind was beautiful with a strange heartbreak.

  And suddenly a sense of panic came to him. He desperately wanted them not to leave him here in the tavern; but rather to stay until the inevitability of the clock forced them from him: to keep the soft murmuring conversation around him as a cloak against the night.

  “Here,” he said. “Let me get another pitcher of beer. “We’ve plenty of time!”

  “They’ll be closing soon,” the man with the guitar said, strumming idly, looking at the remaining beer in his glass.

  He signaled the waitress for a refill and she came with it. He readied into his pocket and brought out two quarters and the pennies. He gave one of the quarters to the waitress.

  “Keep the change.”

  “If we’re going to the beach, we’d better go. It’s getting late.”

  “Might as well finish this new pitcher,” he said. “Here. Here. Let me pour your glasses full. Maybe we’ll even have time for another one.”

  And then he felt foolish, and sank back into his chair, waiting. The girl bent over him to the pitcher and refilled his own glass. “Anyone else?”

  The man with the guitar, glancing at the clock, said, “Maybe a last one.”

  The pitcher was passed over.

  He sat back, grateful.

  The blonde turned to him and moved her hair with a hand. “You’ll come with us to the beach? I’ve got my car, we can take it, and let them go on.”

  “Thanks for the invitation,” he said. “But really, I don’t think I can. But it’s been very nice sitting here with you.”

  “They’re about to close,” she said. “We’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

  He could feel the alcohol moving in his thoughts, mellowing them. “I don’t drink too much,” he said. “I’ll be leaving myself in a minute. Just finish this.” Still, there was sharp disappointment, and his eyes went to the clock above the bar mirror: 1:40. Perhaps the regained hour of time was nearly passed, and closing time was inevitably upon the tavern.

  The others were standing, their chairs making small sounds. The guitar player put away his instrument.

  “Oh, come along,” the girl said. “I’m not with anybody.”

  He shook his head, but he found himself standing when she stood, last to leave the table. There was nothing really to keep him any longer. She called to the departing troup: “See you at Malibu!”

  At the door, the mist greeted him, and when they moved outside, he and the girl were suddenly lost together in the swilling whiteness, and he was pleased to be thus isolated with her.

  “See me to the car, at least,” she said.

  He took her arm to guide her through the enveloping mist, hearing the sounds of car doors close and laughter and soft talk and motors respond.

  “I’m right over here,” she said. “Somewhere back here.” She stumbled, and he held her for an instant at the waist, consciousness of her body exploding in him, leaving him short of breath and, in a way, frightened.

  The car appeared from the mist, a model long out of date.

  “It’ll be bad driving tonight,” she said. “Perhaps I won’t go to the beach after all. Want to sit and talk a moment?”

  The voice, throaty, and the perfume, came to him out of the mist, her features blurred away. She had opened the door, and he saw it swinging an invitation. “Slip through, under the wheel,” she said.

  A moment later, surprised at himself, he was surrounded by the darkness of the car and the clean leather smell of the upholstery. Outside was endless isolation. She
was beside him, small and comfortable.

  Again the fragrance, and he was conscious of her youthful warmth, and again, of the moist smell, perhaps coming from her hair where the mists of the ocean were imprisoned. She started the motor and let it idle, the car heater slowly bringing up the inside temperature with a warm and distant purr.

  “You’re a very beautiful girl,” he said, feeling no particular strangeness sitting here with her, and instead, feeling again as he had felt in the parking lot when he momentarily supported her with an arm at the slender waist, above the softness of the hips. She, too, seemed conscious of the emotion, for she leaned back with a catch in her breath, and he studied her face in the dim light from the dashboard and marveled at the whiteness of her skin and its smooth and pliable youth, noting for the first time the absence of lipstick and any apparent makeup.

  “I like this,” she said, closing her eyes. “Here in the dark silence. In the warmth here. With the mist out there. Cutting us off from the world, just the two of us. We have a secret world in here. I’m glad you came tonight. I had hoped you would, when I saw your face out there, in the window. It was as if I was waiting for you.”

  He wondered what memory of lost and present love he represented for her, what particular formulation of experience unlocked what swelling need for the quiet intimacy here. And with him, there was a sudden, all encompassing sense of nostalgia. He sat back, waiting, knowing what his next move should be and yet unable to take it. And she sat waiting, too, and for a long time there was silence, but for the sound of the heater and the sound of their breathing.

  At last she said, “Whatever you’re looking for, and you’re looking for something, I can’t ever give it to you, can I?”