McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  The heat bakes relentlessly up from the pavement. She has half expected to get used to it, the way you get used to a hot shower, but that isn’t happening. She listens for the approaching howl of the promised ambulance and hears nothing. Then she hears Scott, croaking her name. At the same time he twitches weakly at the side of the sweat-soaked shell top she’s wearing (her bra now stands out against the silk as stark as a swollen tattoo). She looks down at him and sees something she does not like: Scott is smiling. The blood has coated his lips a rich candy red, top to bottom, side to side, and consequently the smile looks like the grin of a clown. No one loves a clown at midnight, she thinks, and wonders where that came from. It will only be much later that night—that long and mostly sleepless night, listening to the August dogs howl at the hot moon—that she’ll realize it was Lon Chaney. She knows because the line was the epigram of Scott’s third novel, the only one she has hated, Empty Devils. The one that’s sort of a riff on Romero’s Living Dead movies.

  “Lisey.”

  “Scott, don’t try to talk—”

  But he is relentless, twitching at her blue silk top, his eyes— dear God, they are so deep in their sockets now, but still so brilliant and fevery. He has something to say. And as always when he has something to say, he will find an audience if he can. This time he has her.

  Reluctantly, she leans down.

  For a moment he says nothing, but she can hear him getting ready to. He pulls air in a little at a time, in half gasps. The smell of blood is even stronger up close. A mineral smell. Or maybe it’s detergent. Or—

  It’s death, Lisey, that’s all. Just the smell of death.

  As if he needs to ratify this, Scott says: “It’s very close, honey. I can’t see it, but I . . .” Another long, screaming intake of breath. “I hear it taking its meal. And grunting.” Smiling as he says it.

  “Scott, I don’t know what you’re tal—”

  The hand which has been tugging at her top now pinches her side, and cruelly—when she takes the top off much later, in the motel room, she’ll see the bruise: a true lover’s knot.

  “You . . .” Screamy breath. “Know . . .” Screamy breath, deeper. And still grinning, as if they share some horrible secret. Do they? “So . . . don’t . . . insult my . . . intelligence. Or . . . your own.”

  Yes. She knows. It. The long boy, he calls it. Or just the thing. Or sometimes the thing with the endless piebald side. Once she meant to look up piebald in the dictionary—she is not bright about words, not like Scott is—she really did, but then she got sidetracked. And actually, it’s more than just a few times he’s spoken of that thing. Especially just lately. He says you can see it if you look through dirty water glasses. If you look through them just the right way, and in the hours after midnight.

  He lets go of her, or maybe just loses the strength to hold on. Lisey pulls back a little—not far. His eyes regard her from their deep and blackened sockets. They are as brilliant as ever—as aware, as full of pain—but she sees they are also full of terror and (this is what frightens her the most) some wretched amusement. As if what’s happened to him is in some way funny.

  Still speaking low—perhaps so only she can hear, maybe because it’s the best he can manage, probably both—Scott says, “Listen. Listen, Lisey. I’ll make how it sounds when it looks around.”

  “Scott, no—you have to stop.”

  He pays no attention. He draws in another of those screaming lung-shot breaths, then purses his wet red lips in a tight O, as if to whistle. Instead of whistling he makes a low, indescribably nasty chuffing noise that drives a spray of blood up his clenched throat, through his lips, and into the sweltering air. A girl sees this gusher of fine ruby droplets and cries out in revulsion. This time the crowd doesn’t need the voice of authority to tell them to move back; they do so on their own, leaving the three of them—Lisey, Scott, and the cop—a perimeter of at least four feet all the way around.

  The sound—dear God, it is a kind of grunting—is mercifully short. Scott coughs, his chest heaving, the wound spilling more blood in rhythmic pulses, then beckons her back down with one finger. She comes, leaning on her burning hands. His socketed eyes compel her; his mortal grin compels her.

  He turns his head to the side, spits a wad of blood onto the hot tar. Then he turns back to her. “I . . . could . . . call it that way,” he whispers. “It would come. You’d . . . be . . . rid of me. My everlasting . . . quack.”

  She understands he means it, and for a moment (surely it is the power of his eyes) she believes it’s true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder this time, and somewhere the long boy—that lord of sleepless nights—will turn its unspeakable hungry head. A moment later, in this world, Scott Landon will simply shiver on the pavement and die. The death certificate will say something sane, but she will know. His dark thing finally saw him and came for him and ate him alive.

  So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others nor between themselves. Too awful. Each long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret. She will ponder it that night in the terrible moonlight while the dogs bark. Now she leans close to him on the baking pavement, sure he is dying, nonetheless determined to hold on to him if she can. If it means fighting the long boy for him—with nothing but her fingernails, come it to that—she will.

  “Well . . . Lisey? What . . . do . . . you . . . say?”

  Leaning even closer. Leaning into the shivering heat of him, the sweat- and blood-stink of him. Leaning in until she can smell the last palest ghost of the Foamy he shaved with that morning and the Prell he shampooed with. Leaning in until her lips touch his ear. She whispers: “Be quiet, Scott. Just be quiet.” She pauses, then adds, louder—loud enough to make him jerk his head on the pavement: “Leave that fucking thing alone and it will go away.”

  When she looks at him again, his eyes are different—saner, somehow, but also weaker. “Have . . . you seen . . .? Do . . . you know . . .?”

  “I know you,” she says. “Don’t you ever make that noise again.”

  He licks at his lips. She sees the blood on his tongue and it turns her stomach, but she doesn’t pull away from him.

  “I’m so hot,” he says. “If only I had a piece of ice to suck . . .”

  “Soon,” Lisey says, not knowing if she’s promising rashly and not caring. “I’m getting it for you.” At last she can hear the ambulance howling its way toward them. That’s something. Yet she is still in her heart convinced it will be too late. That sound he made, that chuffing sound, has almost shot her nerve.

  And then, a kind of miracle. The girl with the bows on her shoulders and the new scrapes on her palms fights her way through to the front of the crowd. She is gasping like someone who has just run a race and sweat coats her cheeks and neck . . . but she’s holding two big waxed paper cups in her hands. “I spilled half the shit-ting Cokes getting back here,” she says, throwing a brief, baleful backward glance at the crowd, “but I got the ice okay. Ice is ni—” Then her eyes roll up almost to the whites and she reels backward, all loosey-goosey in her sneakers. The campus cop—bless him, oh bless him with many blessings, huh-yooge batch of orifice and all— grabs her, steadies her, and takes one of the cups. He hands it down to Lisey, then urges the other Lisa, coed Lisa, to drink from the remaining cup. Lisey Landon pays no attention. Later, replaying all this, she’ll be a little in awe of her own single-mindedness. Now she only thinks, Just keep her from falling on top of me again if she faints, and turns back to Scott.

  He’s shivering worse than ever, and his eyes are dulling out. And still he tries. “Lisey . . . so hot . . . ice . . .”

  “I have it, Scott. Now will you for once just shut your everlasting mouth?”

  And for a wonder, he does. A Scott Landon first. Maybe, she thinks, he’s just out of wind.

  Lisey drives her hand deep into the cup, sending Coke all the way to the top and splooshing over the
edge. The cold is shocking and utterly wonderful. She clutches a good handful of ice chips, thinking how ironic this is: whenever she and Scott stop at a turn-pike rest area and she uses a machine that dispenses cups of soda instead of cans or bottles, she always hammers on the NO ICE button, feeling righteous—others may allow the evil soft-drink companies to shortchange them by dispensing half a cup of ice and half a cup of soda, but not Lisa Landon! What was Good Ma Debusher’s saying? I didn’t fall off a hay truck yesterday!

  His eyes are half-closed now, but he opens his mouth and when she first rubs his lips with her handful of ice and then pops one of the melting shards onto his bloody tongue, his shivering suddenly stops. God, it’s magic. Emboldened, she rubs her freezing, leaking hand along his right cheek, his left cheek, and then across his forehead, where drops of Coke-colored water drip into his eyebrows.

  “Oh, Lisey, that’s heaven,” he says, and although still screamy, his voice sounds more rational to her . . . more with-it, more there. The ambulance has pulled up on the left side of the crowd and she can hear an impatient male voice shouting, “Paramedics! Let us through! Paramedics! C’mon, people, let us through!”

  “Lisey,” he whispers.

  “Scott, you need to be quiet.”

  But he means to have his say; as always, and until death closes his mouth sixteen years later, Scott Landon will have his say.

  “Take . . . a motel room . . . close to . . . hospital.”

  “You don’t need to tell me th—”

  He gives her hand an impatient squeeze, stopping her. “It may . . . have heard you . . . seen you.”

  “Scott, I don’t know what you’re—”

  The paramedics come shouldering through the crowd. She and Scott are down to only seconds now, and Scott knows it. He looks at her urgently.

  “First thing . . . you do . . . water glasses . . .”

  He can say no more. Luckily, he doesn’t need to.

  VI

  After checking in at the Greenview Motel and before walking to the hospital half a mile away to visit her husband, Lisey Landon goes into the bathroom. There are two glasses on the shelf over the sink, and they are the real kind, not plastic. She puts both of them in her purse, careful not to look at either one as she does so. On her walk to the hospital she takes them out one at a time, still not looking at them, and throws them into the gutter. The sound of them breaking comforts her even more than the sound of the little shovel’s scoop, connecting first with the pistol and then with Blondie’s face.

  [The following story is the winner of the first August Van Zorn Prize for the Weird Short Story, awarded to the short story, by an emerging writer, that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies the august tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn. “7C,” Mr. Roberts’s first published fiction, was selected from over six hundred submissions, many of them of considerable literary merit, and disturbing indeed. The editors are grateful to everyone who participated in the contest. ]

  7C

  by JASON ROBERTS

  I’M CLUMSY, I guess. Or self-oblivious. I suppose those are two ways of saying the same thing. Point is, damage just shows up on my body. Please, please don’t struggle like that. We are exactly where we’re going to be.

  Thank you.

  Damage just appears. My wife Eun-Ha had a routine. I shave in the shower, because the steam is good to soften up the stubble. They have special shower mirrors but they don’t really work, so I’m just mostly shaving by touch. Which is not a problem—I know my face—but with all that warm water you don’t feel the cuts so much, and anyway the blood gets washed right off. She gets the bathroom after me, and passing in the hallway she cups, would cup, my jaw to turn it for inspection. A slap slowed down to a caress. “You’ve sprung a leak,” she’d tell me, if I had.

  Since I was naked but for the towel she would, of course, notice other things going on with my skin. A deep beginning bruise, yellow like a spot of jaundice, just above the elbow. Fresh welts on my knuckles. Once a dark purple mass on the outside of my thigh, marbling and swirling like a weather system, big as a fist and spreading. Accident-class, assault-class bruise. You’d think I’d remember how I got it, but no.

  She’d trace the outline, raise an eyebrow. “Yolanda’s playing rough,” she’d say. That was the running joke, that I had a Yolanda and she had an Orlando.

  One morning she says, “How did I miss that one?” She guns out a finger to touch my temple.

  I had to step back into the bathroom and angle the mirror toward the window light to see it clearly. It was slight and faint, just a line of paleness against pale. Once I saw it I could lightly draw my fingers across and feel it, the smallest of interruptions on my skin. It was thin like a blade slip or a paper cut, but those are straight lines. They don’t rise from your left eyebrow to arc down your cheek, then swoop back up to terminate below the edge of the mouth, just a tremor’s length from where the lips meet and end.

  She stepped in close. In addition to her residency she does LifeWing air escorts of critical patients, and this has given her a tendency to snap out assessments. “That’s an old scar,” she said. “Very old. You were little when you got it, and it healed almost perfectly but it’s grown with you. A crescent like that means you probably ran into the edge of something round. I’m going to guess closet rod.”

  I didn’t remember.

  “Then it must be ancient. From before you can remember. Which is probably a good thing, considering it must have been a pretty traumatic smack. You’re lucky it wrapped around your eye instead of putting it out. Your parents never mentioned it?”

  I didn’t remember. “Maybe it’s not a happy story.”

  She was pulling my head down, closer to her, closer to the light. “Maybe they’re a little bit ashamed. Some moment of neglect. You should tweak them on it. It’s probably the oldest thing you have, and it probably always will be. Something you’ll take to the grave. So what, did you do some sunbathing? Is that what brought it out?”

  That was her tweak on me.

  Did you know I’m an astronomer? I’m sorry, we should have gotten to know each other better. Maybe if we weren’t next-door neighbors. If you were down the hall, or not on the seventh floor, we might have chatted up in the elevator. But there’s something comforting, I guess insulating, about staying strangers with the people right on the other side of your walls. You hear a sound, you don’t have to extrapolate based on personal knowledge what it’s all about. I’m just realizing this myself.

  I’m an astronomer. Which is why my wife joked about sunbathing, although it’s no longer true that we stay up all night peering through telescopes. Our instruments hardly ever have eyepieces, just capture fields, and we don’t look at the results until we run it through what’s called data reduction, which is software designed to throw away everything except what we want to see. Our scopes aren’t here, anyway—they’re in Utah, and the talk is of Ecuador next. Light pollution keeps chasing them farther out. But the Astronomy department is still in the same building that was built for it in 1927, when they were poking refractors through the roof and speculating about canals on Mars. The very few windows are little art deco slits, and having one in your office is a perk of seniority. I will never have one.

  My specialty is primordials, the mechanics of how our universe got underway. I always get one response to that: Oh, you mean you study the Big Bang. No, I don’t study the Big Bang. Nobody does. The Bang is a point stabbed on a chalkboard. It doesn’t really exist, or more accurately it is outside of existence. It doesn’t exist in the way the rest of existence does. I’m sorry, I’m not much of a popularizer. Let’s just say it’s like ballistics—you can trace the path of the bullet, but only to the point where it emerges from the gun. You can’t follow it back to the ammo box, or the mind of the bullet maker. I study distant and therefore early objects, because farther out in space is farther back in time—the
longer it takes light to travel to us, the older that light is when it arrives. And the earliest objects are encapsulated in the oldest light.

  Good, you’re starting to settle down. I’ll bet you can’t even walk anymore, much less run. Here, I’ll let you go. Try with all your might. Go ahead.

  Thought so.

  Something was up with the scar. Two days later it had stopped looking like a white thread, a flick of fishing line. It was starting to redden and bump out slightly, like a minor burn. By now even Harlan noticed, or rather everyone at work noticed but only Harlan was comfortable pointing it out. We were at lunch, and with his mouth full he reached across the table into the space between us and made a counterclockwise motion with his finger. I didn’t understand, so he muffled out, “It’s like you were looking into a coffee can.”

  I would say Harlan is like a brother to me, but I have a brother and it’s nothing like that. My brother sells industrial safety supplies and seems to make a hobby out of indignation. Harlan and I were postdocs together, and we just got along, even when we weren’t agreeing on something. Never spoke about it, but eventually it was understood that we were going to, I don’t know, live companionable, alongside lives. That kind of friend. We’ve published some papers together. Eun-Ha always said she liked him well enough, which I think was supposed to mean she respected our closeness without particularly wishing to share it. It’s a closeness of like minds, not personalities, though. He’s Mutt to my Jeff, nervous-quick and smart-mouthed, whereas I have always been shambling and sparsely worded.

  Here’s the thing about looking at old light. It’s like watching a young woman in one of those early silent movies. You see she’s beautiful, laughing, so animated and vivid the screen barely contains her, and you think: Dead. Gone to dust, before I was born. I have spent the last three and a half years mapping spectrum variations in high-redshift quasars, the farthest objects we can see. They’re also the brightest things we’ve ever seen, the energy of a thousand galaxies packed into a space as small as our solar system. We’re pretty sure that their brilliance comes from a black hole at the center, drawing the stars together and swallowing them. And since the light I’m seeing left about ten billion years ago, that means the last star was swallowed long before the Earth was formed. Not even gone to dust or gone to dark matter, just gone. A negation.