Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Lou Aronica et. el.

  “I don’t know whether it had anything to do with your boat or not,” he told Gin. “But my knee got warm while I was standing up on the ridge.” He shifted his weight forward onto his left leg. “It feels like it used to.”

  Ginny looked scared when she relayed the story to Lasker. “Have you noticed,” she added, “that Will’s allergies have disappeared too?”

  * * * *

  They had hosed off the sails, which now hung just inside the barn door. They were white. The kind of white that hurts the eyes when the sun hits it. They did not look as if they’d ever been buried.

  Lasker stood inside, out of the wind, his hands in his pockets, thinking how good they looked. And it struck him for the first time that he had a serviceable boat. He’d assumed all along that someone was going to step forward and claim the craft. But on that quiet, bleak, cold Sunday, he understood that, for better or worse, it was his.

  He pictured himself at its wheel, sails billowing, slicing across the polished surface of the Red River. No: make that Lake Winnipeg.

  Lasker had never done any sailing, except once or twice with someone else at the tiller. But the prospect of taking that bright vessel into the wind overwhelmed him. He squeezed his eyes and pictured himself and Ginny sliding past the low hills of Winnipeg’s shoreline, the dying sun streaking the sky.

  Or Corey. If he’d had the boat when he knew Corey—

  He shook the thought away. Ridiculous. It would have made no difference.

  Call her. The thought exploded at the back of his mind.

  Lasker no longer kept livestock. He was alone in the barn. A gust of wind caught the door. It creaked, and the sails moved.

  Call her.

  His pulse rose in his ears. She lives in Seattle.

  Call. Talk to her.

  Lasker pushed it out of his mind.

  Settle it.

  The best cure for an old romance was to see her ten years later. Where had he read that?

  It was colder inside the barn than out. A combine and a tractor were stored at the far end, under tarpaulins. The place smelled of hay and gasoline.

  Do it.

  * * * *

  The taffrail was supported by a series of stanchions. These also seemed not to be bolted or joined to the deck, but were rather an integral part of the whole. Therefore, when a vandal stole one, he’d had to break it off. Nobody saw it happen, but Lasker responded by moving the boat into the barn, and padlocking the door. That same afternoon a television crew arrived from Grand Forks.

  They walked around with Minicams, interviewed Lasker and Ginny and the kids and half a dozen people who were still hanging about. (Most of the crowd had gone home after Lasker locked the boat away.)

  * * * *

  Needless to say, Lasker made no attempt to call Corey. He never seriously considered it. That’s a closed compartment, he told himself. Fini.

  Been over a long time.

  * * * *

  People kept coming. They got angry when confronted with a locked barn. Lasker tried to order them off the property. That tactic was met with a lot of grumbling about traveling a long way just to see his goddamn boat, now open up or they’ll open it up themselves.

  Lasker took the path of least resistance. And promised himself he’d start selling tickets. Hell, if he couldn’t turn it off, he might as well profit from it.

  * * * *

  That night:

  “And from Fort Moxie.” (Chuckles.) “You just never know what you might find lying around these days. A farmer out on Route 11 dug up a sailboat. The boat’s apparently in good condition, and nobody knows who put it there. Debbie Baker is on the scene—” (Smiles.)

  * * * *

  At sunrise Monday, Lasker noticed that the missing stanchion was back, and the damaged section was repaired. No: restored. There was no sign whatever that anything had been torn loose.

  Lasker glanced nervously around the empty barn, went back outside, and replaced the padlock.

  He phoned Frank Hall. “Need a favor, Frank,” he said.

  “At this hour?” Hall sounded half-asleep and not pleased.

  “When you get a chance. Is there a way we can find out how old the boat is?”

  “We looked for a plate.”

  “No. I mean, break off a piece and have someone analyze it.”

  “Tom, you can do that with stuff that’s old. But I don’t think there’s a process for dealing with material that’s been made recently. Maybe thirty, forty thousand years. But not 1988. You understand what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” said Lasker. “Let’s try it. Would you look into it? Find out how we can do it, and let’s see what we get.”

  * * * *

  “Tom.”

  The voice drifted in off the dark prairie, insinuated itself into the chatter from the television.

  He glanced over at Gin, who was reading the Herald, half-watching the TV.

  “Tom.”

  The wind blew against the side of the house. A sliver of moonlight fell against a storage shed. The other utility buildings bulked heavy and black. He realized that the outside lights were not on.

  Lasker eased himself out of his chair. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

  Her eyes found him over the top of the newspaper. She nodded.

  He walked into the kitchen, thumbed the switch.

  No lights.

  They were on out front; he could see them. But not in back. Near the barn.

  He caught a swirl of movement in the dark. Beside the storage shed.

  Odd.

  “Tom.”

  The voice was clearer this time.

  He opened the door and squinted into the night. “Who’s there?”

  Gravel crunched. “It’s me, Tom.”

  His limbs went cold. He knew the voice. “Who are you?”

  She stepped out of the gloom. Out of a time long past. “Corey?”

  She nodded. “Hello,” she said.

  He stared. “What are you doing here?” His voice was thick, and he had to make several attempts to get the question out.

  She was as he remembered her. The years had left her untouched.

  “I’ve always been here,” she said. She smiled and took a tentative step toward him. “You’re letting the cold into the house.”

  Lasker came out onto the porch. Closed the door. Moonlight fell across her shoulders, shadowed her eyes. “I don’t understand this,” he said. The porch railing was solid under one hand. The night air was cold, and a car droned by, throwing its lights briefly across the top of the barn.

  “I don’t either,” she said. “I think we’re getting a second chance.” She pushed her hands down into her pockets.

  Lasker came cautiously down the steps, not trusting his sense of balance. For the first time since his fortieth birthday, he felt acutely conscious of his age. He murmured her name and she watched him and his heart beat so loudly he could hear nothing else.

  They stood facing each other briefly, and then Lasker reached for her, touched one shoulder and gently drew her forward. She looked up at him, and a tear rolled through her smile.

  The old emotional storm froze his soul. The wind, the trees, the stars fell silent. He wanted to ask questions, but could only hold on. The world seemed rickety underfoot. In Lasker’s long existence it was a place constructed of splintered wood and solid earth, laid out in precise mathematical juxtapositions. No room for the supernatural.

  “It has to do with the boat, doesn’t it?”

  “It fixes things,” she said. “I don’t know how.”

  The sound of the television leaked out into the night air. Trembling, Lasker traced the line of her jaw with his fingertips. She lifted her face and their eyes locked and she gripped his shoulders. He placed his lips against hers, without pressure, so that he could feel her breath whisper in and out. “Corey, are you real?”

  “Do you need to ask?”

  They kissed. Warmth poured through him: adolescent passion, first l
ove reignited. Whatever.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know.” She pushed against him. “I’m sorry. I was young.”

  “You’re still young,” Lasker said. He was having trouble catching his breath.

  Her hand curled round the nape of his neck and drew him back for another long kiss.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  She backed off a step, looked up at him. My God, she was beautiful. “Just go in and pack,” she said. “I’ll wait in the pickup.”

  Lasker shook his head. “If you know anything about me at all, you know I can’t do that. Twenty years ago maybe.” The maybe tasted delicious on his tongue. “It’s not that simple anymore.”

  “It is that simple, Tom. If you really want me.”

  More than you could ever know. “Listen: we need some time to talk about this. Figure out what’s happening—”

  “There is no time, Tom. I’m sorry, but you have to make up your mind now.”

  Lasker shook his head. A burst of laughter issued from inside the house. Ginny.

  Ginny.

  “Tom: I love you. I always did.” Her eyes widened. “You never knew, did you?”

  “No,” he said. “I never did.”

  “I didn’t think you would give up so easily.”

  Lasker backed away. The stars burned fiercely. “What did you expect?” He looked away from her. “Anyway it doesn’t matter now. You’re far too late.”

  She nodded. “I understand. In a way, I’m part of you. But you can make it up to her later. You loved me long before you knew her. You love me still—”

  He stood silent.

  “Your decision,” she said quietly. “But be right. I can’t come back.”

  Lasker discovered he still had hold of her hand. He hung onto it and looked into her face. And let go. “You’re right, Corey,” he said. “You’ve always been here. I suspect you always will.” Like the lake, he thought: a lingering image, an impact. But long gone.

  He turned away from her and strode back up onto the porch.

  “I’m sorry, Tom.”

  He stopped with his hand on the door. “I’m not.”

  * * * *

  If Ginny recognized the change in the tone of her marriage, she never said anything to Lasker. But she must have noticed that he no longer hesitated to drive over to Fort Moxie when occasion arose.

  For him, the dreams stopped.

  And when, several weeks later, the dating report came in, it indicated that the materials from which the boat was constructed were new. No age could be assigned.

  But late the following Saturday night, at the Prairie Schooner Bar, Lasker told Frank Hall that he had expected no less. “It fixes things,” he said.

  <>

  * * * *

  Transfusion

  JOËLLE WINTREBERT

  Translated from the French by Kim Stanley Robinson

  M

  ORNING. She lifts her left foot. With deliberate care. And the utmost in determination. Today she will be in a bad mood. That’s how she is when she feels blurred. She doesn’t like things vague, floating, indefinite. A contained rage allows her to construct clean boundaries; and too bad if the angles are a bit sharp.

  She walks past Thomas, chin high, eyes blank, not responding to his cheery hello, not allowing herself to be trapped by the huckster smell of toast. She will breakfast alone, scrounging currants and heart cherries, their acidity a perfect match for an irritation unable to deal with the stickiness of jam and amorous gestures.

  She looks out at her garden, and finds it drowned in a fog so dense that all points of reference are gone. She hesitates, but the sound of Thomas’s voice thrusts her out. Walking randomly, afraid he’ll catch up with her, she moves between the tall silhouettes of the silver birches, the thickset purple masses of the hazel trees.

  Suddenly it seems the charcoal-sketch shapes form an unfamiliar pattern.

  And then she’s lost.

  Surely the garden isn’t this big? It’s disorienting, therefore exciting. How, after all this time, can such a familiar place have escaped her? Milky dampness falls on her face, like sails sewn with minuscule pearls; her arms grow taut, her steps groping; she stares, wide-eyed, and recognizes—not a single thing.

  Far away, at the end of a long tunnel of cotton wool, Thomas is calling her. She traps the grasping parasite sound under her eyelids, and suffocates it.

  * * * *

  When she reopens her eyes, it is watching her. It is suspended in the fog, ringed by a halo of light that crackles, diffracts, explodes. It has a serene, surreal face, which awakens a kind of religious awe in her… But its smile reveals the jaw of a beast, and in its eyes strange keyhole pupils contract to tiny slots, exposing orange-colored irises, as liquid and turbulent as waves on a beach.

  Stomach all knotted, she takes a step back. Then another.

  The mask of the predator breaks apart, then recomposes in a new face. Because of the contempt in the new eyes, and the brutal rictus of the new lips, she doesn’t immediately identify this face; but when she does, she groans with terror. Her face. This other self and its incomprehensible savagery frighten her more than the thing that preceded it.

  Centuries pass. Her fear pours her out in a long viscous flux, until she is nothing but a kind of glue. Finally the sap runs dry; but by then she’s been captured. Fertilized.

  A strange process distills the wine of fear into a brandy of perverse fascination; but then her other face explodes in a thousand splinters, ending the centuries’ stillness, and suddenly it’s as if she were transfused into a better body. As if she had been turned inside out, displaced, her atoms wrenched about to conquer her from within. To imprison her. A violent shiver of revolt runs through her, but fails to stop the creation of her new atomic structure. Why struggle against the force that fills everything?

  For her unencumbered heart, for living in the cracks, for feeling the secret sorrows hidden in every corner—for all that, it’s the end.

  From now on, she is without refuge.

  But full. Compact. Sleek.

  * * * *

  The fog lifts. She tastes earthy saliva at the back of her throat.

  Thomas appears, and she strikes him with a dangerous look; she can feel its impact. Thomas shudders, defends himself with a laugh that instantly fossilizes. He pales, turns his head aside. She knows she can break the orbit he moves in, for she is its centerpoint. Vertigo spins her as she discovers the power of cruelty. She straddles it, rides it, until it becomes a kind of ecstasy.

  “Who’s there, Barbel? You or the other one?”

  The question devastates her. She’s helpless before it; she can’t keep her hands from trembling. She thinks, Am I possessed?

  * * * *

  Thomas puts his lips to her forehead, as if sealing a final letter. He whispers the proof of his frailty: “You frighten me, Barbel Hachereau. That’s why I’m leaving. I lied—I haven’t been at a conference. Someone will be by to get my things.”

  He drifts off, a being without boundaries, nothing but a shape, loose, soft, shifting. She watches him disappear with an astonishment that contains no regret. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time; it’s only possible if one of them becomes blurred, vague. Transparent to the point of fading into the other.

  * * * *

  The vapor that called itself Thomas will finish dissipating as it reaches the gate at the end of the garden.

  * * * *

  From now on, Barbel is alone. An intense sensation, this liberty. She dilates, she opens wide, becomes a plump darkness, feverish, gasping, waiting. Standing in the blue milk of the sky, she hopes that some extraordinary seed will fill her. Languid but alert, open hands just barely trembling, eyes closed to better seize… what? She’s not sure, and yet it’s here, it’s waiting for her to sense it, she feels it in the rusty smell of the earth’s breath, in the heavy, slow acidity of vegetable rot, in the sugars and salts of her skin, to
uched by the relentless sun.

  She falls into herself, discovers the blood’s red alchemy, the effervescent flux of atoms; she dances the crazy ballet of the molecules… and then in the secret moisture, in the center of her being, its face reforms.