Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I sat in my room in the half darkness and replayed everything that had happened since I’d come to Paris. Had I been followed? What about the men in the raincoats at the Marché Vernaison? No one connected with the wire recorder—not Philippe, Vlad, Madame B, nor Madame Rochelle—knew where I was staying. Was somebody reading my email?

  And what was I to believe about Miller? Madame Rochelle had seemed completely convincing, but she had a political agenda and the only evidence to support her was a handwritten label on a spool of recording wire, currently in my safe deposit box in North Carolina. If the recording had been made by anyone other than Miller, or at some earlier time, her story was no more than that. As for “David Smith,” assuming he was military, he also had a motive to lie. American officers involved in the drug trade, and the Army implicated in a black market coup d’état, was far worse than his friendly fire scenario.

  But it was the betrayal that came back to me again and again. Somebody that I’d been with in the last four days was deceiving me.

  I had to do something. I called my airline and took a financial beating to change my flight to a Friday departure—from London.

  I arrived at Waterloo Station just after noon on the train from Paris, and used a pay phone to call the number Sandy gave me. I got an elderly woman at a florist’s shop who’d never heard of Sandy or anyone answering her description. “Sorry, love,” she said. “You’ll find someone else, I’m sure.”

  I wasn’t surprised as much as curious to see how far the deception went. I took the tube two stops north to Charing Cross Road and wheeled my suitcase down the crowded sidewalks of Oxford Street and into Marks and Spencer. I found the cosmetics counter and was about to ask a sales clerk for Sandy when I saw her.

  She caught my glance and something like panic flashed across her face. I went up to her, saw the name “Margaret” on her nametag, and said, “Which is it, Sandy or Margaret?”

  “Keep your voice down, please. Please. It’s Margaret.”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  “Please, could you pretend to be buying something? Everyone here knows me. I don’t want them asking questions.”

  I picked up a lipstick, took the cap off, drew a blood red line on a scrap of paper. “What kind of questions?”

  She looked down and whispered, “I’ve got a fella. They all know him. If word gets back to him that some glamorous older bloke was coming round to see me, I’ll be in it for sure.”

  I thought the “glamorous” was a nice touch. “We have to talk.”

  “Not here. I’ve got lunch in a quarter hour. I’ll meet you just inside the main doors of the HMV across the street.”

  “You’re not going to stand me up, are you? “

  “I’ll be there. Fifteen minutes, I promise. Just go now, okay?”

  I lurked inside the main doors of the giant record store, checking my watch when I wasn’t looking out at Oxford Street. I knew she could easily slip into the crowds and disappear if she had a mind to, and it was with vast relief that I finally saw her hurrying up the sidewalk.

  I stepped out to meet her and she said, “Let’s walk. I don’t want anyone to see us here.”

  We headed west toward Tottenham Court Road. “So your boyfriend is the violent type, is he?”

  She walked on in silence for a long time and then said, “Yes.”

  “Is he the one that gave you the scar?”

  “No, that part was true.”

  “Were you ever working on a book about Glenn Miller? Interviewing people for it?”

  She gave me a sidelong glance as if evaluating my sanity. “No.”

  That left the tough one. “Did you talk to anyone about me? In Paris, or here? I mean anybody, a girlfriend, a stranger, a cop?”

  “No. It’s my secret.” She stopped and looked at me defiantly. “Everything I told you is true except my name and the phone number you made me give you.”

  “You didn’t tell me about your ‘fella.’”

  “You didn’t ask. You just assumed.” She started walking again. “I needed what you gave me. Maybe it’ll eventually give me the guts to change my life. But if I tell anyone, it won’t be mine anymore. I don’t want to share it.”

  The sound of her heels against the concrete was like the ticking of an enormous clock. “It’s really arbitrary, isn’t it?” I suddenly said. “Who we choose to believe? It’s subject to coercion, or habit, or wishful thinking.”

  “You’re saying you don’t believe me? Not that I blame you.”

  “No. I’m saying I do. Believe you.”

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  After a minute I said, “I lied to you, too. When I said I didn’t cheat? I did cheat. I had an affair, toward the end of my marriage. I hated the deception, even though I couldn’t resist the sex part, for a while anyway. But I broke it off and swore I wouldn’t do it again, and I would either make my marriage work or get out. I ended up getting out.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I mean, in the circumstances, I’d be pretty much of a hypocrite to complain, wouldn’t I?” She reached out and ruffled my hair. “Is that why you came all this way? To confess?”

  “Something weird happened last night in Paris. It’s nothing I want to talk about, but I had to know you weren’t involved in it. I had to see you, face to face, to know for sure.”

  “And now what?”

  I hadn’t even thought about it until that moment, but once I did it seemed inevitable. “I want you to do something for me. Can you call in sick tomorrow?”

  “I just got back from holiday.”

  “Tell them you picked something up in Paris.”

  She laughed, then turned serious again. “Listen. What happened in Paris...”

  “It’s not like that. I need to go to an abandoned airfield about 50 miles north of here. It’s called Twinwood Farm.”

  I called my father and told him about my change of schedule, then I spent the rest of the day arranging a hired car, finding the cheapest hotel I could, and reading at the British Library. Margaret met me at my hotel the next morning wearing jeans and a sweater, and I felt a pang of desire for her that I couldn’t seem to shake.

  We took the M1 north out of London, then the M6 on to Bedford. My head was too full for me to feel like saying much. Margaret talked easily about her boyfriend, her job, how envious her friends had been of her trip to Paris, and I was happy enough for the distraction.

  I stopped at the post office in the town of Oakley and asked a man in his sixties if he’d ever heard of Twinwood Farm. “You’re joking, son,” he said. “Everyone knows of it now, what with the Glenn Miller festival just there in August.”

  We followed his directions and drove due east, through the tiny village of Oakley Hill and onto a well-kept tarmac road. We passed a sparse forest, then restored hangars and outbuildings as we pulled up to the control tower itself, a two story brick cube painted in broad vertical tan and olive camouflage stripes. I parked in front and we got out into a cold wind. Margaret went up to the building and looked in the windows. “It’s some sort of museum,” she called back. She read from a plaque: “‘...opened on 2nd June 2002... contains a tribute to Major Alton Glenn Miller, who took his final flight from here 15th December 1944.’”

  After a while she came back to where I stood by the car, hugging herself against the cold. “Don’t you want to look?”

  “I thought there might be something left of him here,” I said. “But I’m too late. The myth has taken over.”

  “People need myths.”

  “We need the truth. But all we get is the amusement park version of it. And nobody cares.”

  “You care,” Margaret said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I dropped Margaret at a tube stop near the car hire agency. We had real phone numbers for each other this time, but I doubted we would ever use them. I slept poorly that night, and not at all on the long,
long afternoon flight back to the States.

  I went straight to the hospital from the airport and found Ann and my father watching the news. My father switched off the set as soon as he saw me; Ann looked like she was going to protest and then thought better of it. I hugged them both and handed out their presents and we made some small talk about the flight, how my father was feeling, the tepid meal he’d just eaten.

  “So,” my father finally said. “How was the wild goose chase?”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. “I’ve got somebody who says it was Miller on the tape. What you heard is the sound of him being murdered—murdered by somebody working for the US Army.” Apparently, somewhere over the Atlantic, I’d made up my mind about who I was going to believe.

  “You can’t trust the French. They’re all Communists.” He smiled as if he were joking.

  “I want to ask you something, Pop. I want you to tell me about Dachau.”

  “It was horrible. You’ve seen the pictures. You don’t need to hear it from me.”

  “I do need to hear it from you. I want you to tell me what you did there.”

  He saw then that I knew, and that I wasn’t going to let him escape. “I don’t feel like talking about it,” he said meekly.

  “Francis?” Ann said.

  I waved her off. “I learned some things in Paris, and then I read some more things in the library in London.”

  My father said, “I don’t have to—”

  “We have to stop pretending everything’s simple, Pop. Black and white, Greatest Generation and Axis of Evil. We have to take responsibility for what we do, and tell the truth about it. We can start right now.”

  I kept staring until he looked away. “Ann,” he said, “could you leave us alone for a minute?”

  She started to get up and I said, “I’d like her to stay for this.”

  I could feel her glare on the back of my head. “Francis, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Sit down,” I told her, still looking at my father. “Pop, tell me what you did.”

  He was motionless for so long I was afraid I’d given him another stroke. Then the tears started to run down his cheeks. “I’ve never talked to anybody about this,” he said. “Not ever.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “We love you. Nothing you can say is going to change that.”

  “It might. It very well might.”

  I waited.

  He sighed and said, “It wasn’t a death camp, not like Auschwitz. Those were all in Poland. Dachau was a work camp. Not that there was a lot of difference, except they kept the prisoners alive longer. More or less alive. You’ve seen the pictures, you two have known about it all your lives. We didn’t. We were kids, most of us, and we’d grown up in a sane, reasonable world. Until we went in that camp we didn’t know why we were fighting that war in the first place. We thought it was about cleaning up somebody else’s mess. We knew the Germans were brutal, inhuman, but nothing prepared us for what we saw.

  “We went crazy, all of us. You couldn’t look at those starved, brutalized remnants of humanity and feel anything but rage and hatred. Blinding, murderous rage.”

  “You shot the guards,” I said.

  “Lined them up and shot them.”

  “With no trial,” I said.

  “No trial, no questions, nothing. But that wasn’t the worst.”

  “Tell me the worst, Pop.”

  “We had to search all the buildings. I was paired up with a Jewish guy from Brooklyn, a big tough kid named Schlomo. We found one of the guards hiding out in a latrine. Schlomo told me to keep him there, and he went out, and he came back...he came back with one of the prisoners. And we stripped the guard naked and...” He faltered.

  “Go on,” I said, and squeezed his hand.

  “And we gave the prisoner a bayonet. I lost my nerve then, but Schlomo stayed and watched.”

  My father took a long breath and closed his eyes. “He told me later what happened. The prisoner...first he castrated the guard. Then he gouged out his eyes, one at a time. And then he started stabbing him, faster and faster, over and over. It wasn’t until then that the guard finally started to scream, and then they were both screaming, and then it was all three of them, and I could hear them from outside.”

  My father opened his eyes. “I don’t care about the guard. There was no torture, no punishment horrible enough for what he did. But I can never forgive myself for letting that poor bastard prisoner become a murderer too. It’s like I took the last decent thing away from him.”

  I held my father and let him cry for a while. “Did you ever tell Mom about this?”

  “No,” he said. “She would have...”

  “Say it.”

  “Some day, years later, when I was least expecting it, she would have used it against me.”

  “Never,” Ann said, a whisper with claws. “She would never have done that.”

  I slowly let go of my father, stroked his forehead a couple of times, and turned back to face Ann. “Yes, Ann. She would have.” Her eyes burned into me, hating me. “For five years I’ve stood by and let you turn her into a plaster saint. Whenever Mom got scared—like after those huge, screaming fights she and Pop would have—remember?—she would turn cold and vicious and spiteful. You used to know that. Now it’s like you’re turning into her, and I hate it.”

  “Get out,” Ann whispered. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  “Not this time. You ran me off from Mom’s deathbed and I’m not going to let you do it again.”

  “You don’t know how to take care of people, Francis. You’re too spoiled and too selfish. Mother and I made you that way, God help us, by giving you everything you ever wanted.”

  “I don’t have everything I ever wanted,” I said slowly. “I never did. Mom and Pop didn’t have the perfect marriage. We’re not the perfect kids. Neither of us.”

  I watched her anger overwhelm her, to the point that she could no longer speak. She jumped out of her chair and ran from the room.

  “She’s so angry,” my father said. “I’ve never understood that.”

  “Mom’s death hit her hard.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” We sat in silence for a while, and then he said, “What are you going to do with that recording?”

  “I guess I’m going to play it for people. Starting with the Washington Post. If they don’t want to write about it, I’ll go to the New York Times and work my way down. I’ll put it on the Internet and hand it out to strangers on the street. If I get sued, so much the better. The story has to get out. It’s important.”

  “Okay,” my father said.

  It was after midnight in Paris and my body was aching for sleep. “You want the TV back on?” I asked him.

  “That would be great.”

  I fell asleep in the chair almost immediately, and when I woke up the room was dark and silent. I went to the window and watched the stars for a while. My father made a noise and turned over. “Frank?” he said sleepily.

  I sat down next to him and touched his shoulder. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Stuff of Dreams

  Technical assistance by John Swann of the University of Texas College of Pharmacy.

  “If it gets to be too much,” Matheson told me, “you can always bail out. Like this.”

  He clenched his fists and folded his arms in an X across his chest. With his white intern’s smock and his unkempt wiry hair, he looked like he was getting ready to step out on the karate mat.

  “You just cross your arms and duck your head and you’ll come out of it. Sort of like a fetal position, only you’re standing up. I don’t know why it works, but it does.”

  “What do you mean,” I asked, “‘too much’?”

  Matheson shrugged. “You’ve got to understand. This isn’t just lights and colors we’re talking about here. You’re going across into a whole other world, even if it is inside your head. It gets more real every time you take the stuff. It�
�s going to have its own people, own rules, everything. You may find yourself in a situation you want out of, that’s all. Hell, didn’t you ever wish you could just turn off an acid trip?”

  I nodded, looking at the small plastic pouch he’d given me. It was like a Tubex system, with five small doses of the drug and a steel plunger unit. Adonine, he’d called it.

  “And you don’t know anything about it?”

  Matheson shook his head impatiently. We were in the middle of the hallway, right by the nurses’ station, and I could understand why he was uncomfortable. “I sent a sample to PharmChem last week,” he said. “It was a stat order, so I should get the analysis in a couple more days. That should answer all your questions.”

  I was just making excuses and I knew it. It was time for my rounds, and I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of a drug deal either. So I handed Matheson a twenty and put the package in my coat pocket.

  Matheson winked as he tucked the bill away. “You won’t be sorry,” he promised. “It’s a real trip.”

  That night I went across for the first time.

  I closed the blinds on the gently falling snow outside and sat on the edge of my bed. Everything I needed was laid out on the night table beside me, but I still hadn’t made up my mind whether I was going to go through with it or not.

  It was one thing for Matheson and another for me. Matheson wasn’t afraid of drugs, had even used heroin off and on for several years. I’d used the usual chemicals in undergraduate school, and when I’d gotten into med school I’d sometimes taken speed in the morning and Valium at night. But never to the point of dependence, and I’d never liked using needles on myself.

  But Matheson said this was special, and since Sarah had moved out it didn’t make much difference anyway. I’d been losing interest in everything, and some kind of desperate measures were in order.

  Even this.

  The plunger assembly screwed together easily, and the plastic sheath popped off the needle with a little pressure from my thumbnail. I tied off with a piece of surgical tubing and made a fist with my left hand. When I patted the inside-of my elbow, the vein rose up fat and blue.