Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  Suddenly curious as to why he was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, Raul turned from the window back to the timer. Still forty-five seconds to go. Frowning, he moved toward the stove.

  The aroma was stronger now. He watched clear liquid seethe in the pan and heard it sizzle at the periphery of metal and air. His mouth watered, tasting it, and his stomach arranged itself in preparation to receive it. He would drink it hot, too hot but for sips, and it would fall away within him, and the heat would soothe away last night’s indulgence and that would soon be forgotten forever. Ah!

  And so he stood, lost in thought, and at length, the egg was ready, spread across the golden toast, rich with golden butter from the cream of cows, and he carried that, with a cup of broth, to the table and sat down in front of it.

  He tasted the broth with the spoon and blew to cool it more, sipping from the spoon, savoring it. While he did this, he looked at the newspaper from the printer, automatically delivered before him. It contained three-dimensional color pictures so lifelike that, if they were larger, it would be impossible to believe that he could not walk into them and become lost, as though into an endless forest, such as those great, central forests of the north and northwest . . .

  SUCCESS ASSURED FOR

  PASSENGER PIGEONS

  Headlines large enough to read. He thought of passenger pigeons, like passenger trains, lost before the time of his great, great grandfather, really. From what Martha or Edy had read him once, he knew that in the not too far distant tomorrow, spring and fell, the sky would blacken with the passenger pigeons recovered from time by incomprehensible genetic manipulations and that future air would resound to the flurry of their wings as it was in the days of the Indians and the buffalo.

  He was thankful, once more, that man had managed in the end to save birds. The issue had been in doubt within his own lifetime, when they were almost lost entirely, completely, everywhere, forever, from the whole planet, and even its most remote recesses. But in the end they survived the insecticides and all the other poisons, and now it was as if mankind were turning evolution back, shocked by the hopeless vision of a rapacious, synthetic, and sterile tomorrow, and was retreating into its own past, into the past of the world as history, recreating even the passenger pigeons. Somehow this morning he was obsessed with the thought of the death and rebirth of birds.

  Egg and broth consumed, he remained at the table, the desire for a cigar just short of unendurable. It was always thus after breakfast, but long experience taught that it would subside and vanish for a while within a few minutes after the meal.

  Martha, smiling, came from her own room and scolded him playfully for not calling her. He scarcely listened as she talked, knowing the substance of her thoughts, or rather, her chatter, for it was likely her thoughts were elsewhere than with her tongue. She bustled at the stove, preparing her own breakfast.

  “It looks a pleasant day outside,” she said at length.

  Raul nodded, thinking that he should get up now and go out, for the beginning of warmth, the change toward the promise of midday heat from the night’s coolness, was a time he most enjoyed when the weather was fine. Still, there was a heaviness upon him, perhaps from the meal itself. “Ah, ah,” he said.

  “Feeling all right?” she asked with concern.

  “Eh? Yes, yes,” he said. “I’ll go out; I’ll sit awhile out on the lawn. The robins are here. I counted three, I think it was three yesterday.”

  Outside, he went slowly to the lawn chair and seated himself, ever conscious of the subtle aches and the stiffness of his joints. Overhead, the sky was blue and distant. Sunlight fell without intervention. Morning shadows lay like living things upon the carefully tended lawn.

  From the pillowed chair, he looked outward, across the slight roll of land falling away to the quiet brook, invisible. and unheard, which separated his property from the new-leafed maple trees. The half-circle of vision showed only the growth of green things; beyond which, isolated in their individual wildernesses if not by distance, lay other homes such as his own. Here he was in a unique and undistracted correspondence with nature, each sending, messages to the other: yet just beyond the trees . . .

  What was it Martha had said earlier that he should remember about a reporter coming and why would that be? Why would anyone be coming to see him today?

  Ah! Yes, of course! Today was his birthday. That’s what Martha had reminded him of, and come to think of it, it was strange that he had forgotten that . . .

  A tiny rite of passage, another landmark, and what do we really have for rites of passage nowadays but the slow fall of birthdays, and in the end, for those like me, the ceremony of the reporter? Perhaps in some distant future that might as well be the past, we will recover these as well, and the time when the child enters into manhood will be one of hope and terror: and that proving, at least, might be desirable.

  Well, one learned to live after a time from day to day, one to the other, thinking thoughts, awaiting that larger rite, perhaps, although it was unimportant in the face of the new breeze and the sound of leaves and the distant and indistinct sound of something living to some unknown purpose . . . on days like this, at least, that larger rite was always too distant in time for concern.

  He observed the movement of new leaves and he heard all the sounds there were for his ears to hear and he thought about many things, sometimes forgetting and thinking the same thing twice within the space of a few minutes, each time with enjoyment.

  Ah! How long the day would be, and how long to nightfall, when he would get the drink and the cigar. Damn! That was a long, long time away, an almost eternity away. Tomorrow breakfast, certainly, was forever. There were just these present moments, and time was some fragile, beating heart that you could almost feel inside the skin of your palms, beating, beating, beating, just as long as you never squeezed too tightly.

  Henry Adams, a writer, once wrote somewhere: “One needs only to be old enough to be as young as one will . . .” And Henry Adams was right; each day can become a new experience because of forgetfulness. He chuckled to himself.

  He noticed the first robins of spring were back. He saw two of them. Robin red breasts. The first two robin red breasts of spring. And hadn’t he heard somewhere that the geneticists were actually breeding back the passenger pigeons?

  This spring reverie was interrupted by a crackling sound and a roar and a whine and a thunder clap that turned his ancient, faded eyes skyward and sent his thoughts from the present space outward and from the present time both backward and forward, as he embraced that other world beyond all the careful forests of this world, where adventurers hurled themselves in metal bullets at the sky to walk the alien sands of Mars and plunge further outward. And for what reason? he asked.

  They should do something about that noise, he thought in flickering, fading annoyance. Ah, that’s the penalty for living here. Not like in the fastness of the Rocky Mountains; but air so high is now too thin for old lungs, the winters too long for arthritic joints, and the isolation . . . and the massive extent of nature restored, challenging but forever beyond intimate inspection now. Ah, this is better anyway, and here comes a young woman up the walk, and she must be wanting to see Martha about something.

  “Hello,” she said. “Mr. Lopez, I’m Betty Mably from the paper; you remember me. We arranged an appointment yesterday.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Raul. “I remember that. Of course I do.”

  They chatted for a while, and Martha came and served the young woman coffee and a little cake, and he had just a sip of hot tea and did not think of his cigar or brandy for a long time. After the reporter left, he went in for his noon-time nap. He wished the physicians could do something about the tiredness, but thinking of the millions of hours they’d spent on research to keep aged senses alert, he felt ungrateful and brushed at a tear, unbidden. He fell deep asleep listening in imagination to distant music from the radio in a maple glade, where a young girl waited for her dawn lov
er.

  After a quiet afternoon that unfolded ancient thoughts one upon the other almost endlessly in a mixture of satisfaction and sadness, Martha came for him for the evening meal, and as he sat with his food, she read to him from the earlier interview.

  “ ‘Seven score today,’ is what the headline says. ‘A hundred and forty years old today and looking at least sixty years younger, our city’s eldest citizen is apprehensive about the future. Mr. Raul Lopez, born in the old State of Colorado, in 1981 on the record, says we’re looking backward too much instead of forward. Discounting the new Mercury exploration team, he points out that—’ ”

  . . . Listening, Raul nodded to himself. What he heard sounded good to him. Of course, there was a lot he hadn’t said, too. But what the young lady who talked to him yesterday said, she had it right, she was no fool. They’ve turned back the clock to the good old days, to the good old days that nobody ever had before but that everybody somehow remembers like childhood, and now we’re living there, but they don’t know where to stop, and they’re turning the clock further and further backward, and they don’t really see where they’re going and they don’t really see what they’re doing. There’s a regression, a sort of evolution in reverse, an implosion of the population, and even time, itself, is running backward, and someday if they keep on going backward like they are, there won’t be any trains at all and finally we’ll even abandon our horses and dismantle our carriages and there’ll be fewer and fewer of us and we won’t be able to keep any factories going at all, and then we’ll breed back the other animal species that we’ve destroyed and forgotten, and the reptiles will get larger and larger, and maybe we’re going backward trying to seek something . . . like some kind of security that . . . what . . . what?

  Ah, that’s what the young lady is really saying, and that shows she’s pretty smart, for you can’t disagree with that and maybe not all of these new kids are quite so bad as you’re likely to think.

  Ah, it’s been a long, hard day, a tiring day, come to think of it, just really exhausting for some reason, and it’s hard to sort of keep to the same line of thought for so long.

  “ ‘When asked his secret for a long and happy life, he answered, “Brandy and cigars” ’,” Martha concluded.

  Thinking, now, there’s a smart one! one of them that’s going to make it, Raul said, ‘That reminds me, Martha, I think I’ll try one of those good cigars we’ve been getting, and a little brandy. Help me relax, help me go to sleep early tonight after such a day!”

  A moment later, the bottle of aged brandy was before him, together with the familiar snifter and the fat, black cigar and the clipper and the box of wooden matches. Slowly and carefully he poured out the brandy, his hand trembling with eagerness.

  In just a moment, he would have the drink he’d been waiting for all day. He continued to pour, watching the beautiful amber liquid fill toward the 50 cc mark that the doctor had etched for him. There. Then a drop, two drops more, a bit over wouldn’t hurt, a tiny half sip, a ghost taste more. Already the odor had surrounded him, as though he had walked into some exotic garden: The odor was heavy and sensuous and luxurious and promising, like a massage, like a hot bath, like every relaxing thing you could imagine. God, it was beautiful just to smell that brandy!

  There’s a lot of it! he thought. Tonight, I’ll avoid that damned hangover tomorrow. I’ll just sip half of this. I’ll leave at least half there in the glass. I won’t drink it all tonight.

  He tasted it. It was worth waiting for. There were more tastes in there than there was time to determine; they were gone too fast, so you try again, and they tumble over each other again and again and again . . .

  He smacked his lips with satisfaction, and the fumes of the brandy rose within him and he felt all the tenseness slowly leave his body, all the persistent aches fade away to nothingness. He trimmed the end of the cigar with the little clipper, and he lighted the cigar carefully, watching the match flame, and he smelled the aroma of burning tobacco, and he tasted the multi-layered richness of the cigar that took his thoughts to the fields where it was grown, to the hangers where it was cured, the markets where it was sold, and the shops where it was fashioned with surpassing skill and love into its final form. Behind that, touched at every step by human hands, as was the brandy, stood this great and incomprehensible technology, refining all the skills and arts involved in manufacturing processes to perfection, itself.

  Ah! he thought, sipping again of the brandy. Ah, what a great thing this is that these things which are strong and masterful are available to assault old taste buds, old nerve endings, networks no matter how augmented deadened to many of the subtle vibrations once loved. Brandy strikes upon them with the power of a Hercules. It makes old bodies ring like great, golden bells, shivering them with delight.

  He chuckled to himself at his secret knowledge and the deceit he was practicing upon them. Brandy and cigars are for men; milk and candy is for children.

  And for a moment, in the garden of these delights, he closed his eyes and forgot about his concern for the world and the reversal of evolution which he foresaw in the future and how important it was to warn them against this, and was content merely to exist alone in the present time, as if, in fact, there were no one in this great, oceanic universe surrounding him but himself.

  He opened his eyes. The brandy was almost gone; he had smoked one quarter of the cigar. Any more of either and he would have a hangover in the morning.

  What the hell! he thought. You only live once!

  He drank the last drops of the brandy and inhaled once more the cigar, feeling the two drugs weighting him down, fragmenting his thoughts. Another five minutes and he would fall asleep here at the table.

  Painfully he pulled himself erect and with great effort mounted the stairs. They do the best they can; nothing could stay the pace of time forever, and the knees were first to go. The days were far too long and exhausting now, and he wanted them to, become shorter and shorter, and the long stretches of the day in the middle, these could all be dropped out.

  In the end, the days should be telescoped inward until there’s nothing left but the cigars and brandy, with no time between them for hangovers. Just the brandy and cigars, forever and ever, where he could lose himself in those great, bursting sensations that seemed somehow to bring everything to full cycle, and join the end to the beginning in a way he could not quite grasp because he was too sleepy and wanted now merely to rest.