Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  He parked next to a purple Nissan Sentra in the driveway, and tried the front door of the house. Inside, a woman sat watching TV in the living room. She was in her mid-thirties, plump, blonde, and plain. Her black polo shirt had a monogrammed logo for something called Harris-Teeter and a nametag that said JESS. She was young enough to be his daughter, but he didn’t think she was. She smiled when she saw him and it lit up her face in an attractive way.

  “I brought some of that rotisserie chicken home,” she said. “Is that okay? We had some of those little red potatoes like you like.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “You hungry? I could put it on the table right now.” She seemed a little nervous, a little eager to please.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Ten minutes into dinner, after she’d talked about a host of people he’d never heard of, she slowed to a halt. “You’re having that memory problem again, aren’t you?” She had an accent that mixed a hint of Canada with a Southern twang.

  He wondered what she thought the problem was. “I guess maybe so,” he shrugged. In fact his memories were quite vivid. They just didn’t match anything in front of him.

  “Aw.” She came around the table and wrapped him in a hug. She smelled of cooking, but not unpleasantly. His body seemed to know her, to take comfort in the embrace. “It was that email from Murray, wasn’t it?” she said. “I was afraid it was going to bring one of these on.”

  “Email?” he said.

  “Aw, no. I hate this. I wish I hadn’t said anything, ‘cause now you’re going to have to read it, and it’ll hurt you all over again.” She ran the back of her right hand over his cheek. “Could you at least eat a little more dinner before you go look?”

  He shook his head and she let him go.

  The computer turned out to be in the front bedroom, which also seemed to be his studio. He was shocked to see his guitar there, the gold-top Les Paul he knew so well, perched on a guitar stand. Next to it he saw a Fender Precision bass, a keyboard, and a Tascam multi-track cassette recorder that had probably been state of the art in 1986.

  He perched on the edge of a battered love seat and picked up the Les Paul. It fit into his arms like a lover, like a piece of a lost world.

  He looked up to see Jess in the doorway.

  “I wish there was something I could do,” she said. “I hate to see you this way. If you want to play guitar, go on ahead. It seems to help sometimes. I’ll put your dinner in the fridge.”

  He returned the guitar to its stand and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It seemed the polite thing to do.

  The computer was already on. He powered up the monitor and it blinked and showed his email program. Halfway down the screen was a message labeled “Your cat is on the roof” from someone named Murray Black. It read:

  You will probably think me a coward for doing this in email. So I’m a coward already. The bad news is that Sugar Hill passed on PALOMITA. Yeah, I know. Turns out they’re closing down their North Carolina office and consolidating all the operations in Nashville. The guy you talked to after the Local 506 show is no longer with the company, and is in fact leaving the business entirely. (Can’t say I blame him.) This will be all over the Internet tomorrow. Jeff, I don’t know what else to do. I would love to be your manager but the sad truth at this moment is, there is nothing here for me to manage. I don’t believe it’s the record, it’s just the business. I know that doesn’t help a lot right now.

  It was the things he did remember that made him feel like he was in free fall. He knew Palomita. It had come out on Warner’s, and had won a Grammy for Album of the Year.

  He put his name into Google and came up with a home page. The site had his photo and a list of his homemade CDs for sale. They were the albums he knew. He clicked on the Bio link and read the three skimpy paragraphs there.

  Nothing he read matched his own memories, which were vivid and detailed and indisputably authentic. Like his first night in LA in June of 1970, barely 20 years old and driving up into the foothills to pick out the letters of his name in the infinite recession of lights. Opening for Linda Ronstadt at the Troubadour in the summer of ‘71, retreating from the onslaught of celebrities and kingmakers to the bar, where he met an amiable kid from Texas named Don Henley. Then sitting on the balcony of his Laurel Canyon apartment that December afternoon in ‘75, watching the breeze stir the eucalyptus as Henley offered him the lead guitar slot that Bernie had just vacated.

  There had been the craziness at the end of the 70s that had culminated in his hanging off the wrought iron grill of a hotel balcony by one hand, ten floors above the Champs-Elysées, scaring himself into changing his life. His first day back in the studio, two years sober, laying down the first tracks for the first solo record. The day he saw Kathleen for the first time, walking out of the surf at Laguna, August 22, 1990, orange hair, orange one-piece suit, the sunset exploding orange behind her, knowing that she was the one. Playing the final mix of Palomita for her in the front room of their house in San Miguel fifteen years later, the voices of the street kids and the smell of jacaranda floating in the windows.

  He grabbed the phone and dialed his home number. On the third ring a man’s voice answered in Spanish. Yes, this was the right number, yes, San Miguel de Allende. No, and he was truly sorry, but he’d never heard of a Jeff McCoy and knew no one named Kathleen.

  The website had samples from Palomita. He was surprised by how similar they sounded, even with him playing all the instruments himself, to the studio versions he knew.

  He pushed the chair back from the computer and looked around the room. It had a musty odor, the smell of mold growing in the back of a closet. The wooden floors were stained and dented, the rug worn through in the center. He let himself, carefully and tentatively, try to imagine what it must be like to live here.

  There was a framed, autographed photo of Don Gibson on the wall, and just as he knew the way from Wal-Mart to this room, he knew why the photo was there. Gibson, after failing at three different record labels, had washed up in a trailer park north of Knoxville where, in a single afternoon, he’d written “Oh Lonesome Me” and “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” back to back, the songs that revived his career and went on to sell tens of millions of copies.

  To cling to that dream of a Don Gibson moment, as each year the odds grew longer, seemed a nightmare beyond endurance.

  Somebody had told him once that if you could see your hands in a dream, you could take control of it. He looked as his hands and whispered, “I’m ready to wake up now. I’ll count to three. One. Two...”

  Jess was asleep when he finally came to bed. He’d played guitar for a while after all, and nodded out on the loveseat. But when he woke up he was still there, in a tiny house near a town called Pittsboro.

  He was on register 3 in the morning. A young guy kept staring at him as he rang up three pairs of socks and two pairs of running shorts. “You know who you look like?” the guy said. “You look like this singer named Jeff McCoy.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”

  “You’re kidding! I can’t believe it. You’re working at Wal-Mart? I saw you at the Cradle last year. You were incredible. I thought you were, like, big time.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  Sometime after lunch he felt the numbness begin to wear off. He hadn’t realized how much it had been protecting him until it was gone. But now every minute, every second, was agony. Scanning candy bars and girdles and plastic leftover containers, feeding checks into the printer, cracking a roll of quarters over the drawer. Staring at the clock, willing the time to pass. What in God’s name was he doing here?

  How much longer could this go on?

  Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe

  1. On a Wednesday in November of 1957, nine-year-old Danny Armbruster disappeared from a subdivision outside Mesa, Arizona. His parents had expected him back since nightfall. Danny, meanwhile, had picked up a bullhead in the fro
nt tire of his bike and was having to walk it home.

  The sun had just gone down when Danny saw the light in the sky. For a second he thought he’d gotten turned around and it was the moon. Only it was the wrong shape for the moon, longer than it was tall. And the color was an intense blue-white, like the glow of the welding torches at his father’s plant.

  The light continued to grow and began to wobble slightly. Danny caught a glimpse of a deeper, reddish color on the underside. Suddenly he knew he was looking at a flying saucer.

  He could make out the shape of it now, like two dinner plates front to front. A cone of light sprang out of the bottom and swept toward him over the desert. His common sense told him to head for home, but he was afraid to run under the ship. He thought of a kangaroo rat he’d seen once, paralyzed by the lights of the car, going under the wheels despite his father swerving to miss it. It was like it had lost control of its own desires.

  This can’t be happening, he thought. Can it?

  The machine settled onto the desert. Bits of dirt and rock were sucked up into the weird glow and pinged away into the darkness. Danny felt grains of blowing sand nick his face and arms. For some reason he made no effort to turn away or cover his eyes. He just stood in silence until three small men in silver suits came to lead him onto the ship.

  2. A man from Project Blue Book came to talk to Danny’s parents. Since the two Sputnik launches by the Soviets that fall, there had been a massive “flap,” or wave of sightings. He listened to Danny’s mother describe the eerie lights in the sky and took pictures of a charred mesquite bush near the road where Danny’s bicycle had been found. The pictures were sent on to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson AFB. Danny’s mother never heard from the Air Force again.

  The police found no fingerprints but Danny’s on the bike, and the FBI declined to investigate when no ransom demands were made.

  A year after the boy’s disappearance, a middle-aged man in battered clothes came up to Danny’s father in the parking lot of the plant where he worked. “Don’t worry about your boy,” the man said. “The space people have him. He’s all right. Really. He’s getting to see things ... things you could never imagine.”

  “Who are you?” Danny’s father said. “What do you want?”

  “I want you not to worry,” the man said, backing away.

  “Hey!” Danny’s father shouted. “Come back!” He chased the man for a block or more, only to lose him in a crowd. Danny’s father called the police, who were unable to locate the man.

  Danny’s father decided, after several sleepless nights, not to tell his wife about it. In the past year they had been harassed by dozens of letters and phone calls from “contactees” and they only seemed to prolong his wife’s suffering. Eventually he forgot the entire incident.

  3. The aliens were about four feet tall, wore silvery uniforms, and had pale gray skin. Their foreheads were large, their noses little more than the sharp intersection of the planes of their cheeks. Their eyes were outsized, dark, and widely separated, and their lips were so thin that their mouths seemed to disappear when they were closed. At first Danny couldn’t tell any of the aliens apart.

  They took him into a room that was as shining and white as a new refrigerator and strapped him to a table that was not quite long enough for him. He didn’t think to resist at first, but as the things they did to him got more and more unpleasant, he began to be afraid.

  They filled his mouth with a gummy pink substance from something like a toothpaste tube. Danny choked on it. The alien ignored all his struggles and held Danny’s mouth closed for several seconds. Then he pulled the wad out and dropped it into a slot on the wall.

  The touch of the alien’s hand was cold, damp, and scaly, and when it reached for Danny again he tried to pull his head away. Another alien came forward and guided a metal skull cap onto Danny’s head while the first one held him motionless. Danny felt a prickling in his scalp, then a wave of intense pleasure, like the last bell on the last day of school. It was followed just as suddenly by a feeling of weightlessness and nausea. Danny threw up and the aliens backed away, letting him turn his head so the stuff would run out of his mouth.

  In a few seconds they had reduced him to the level of an animal, shivering, terrified, unable to speak or move. They put adhesive patches on the skin inside his elbows and behind his knees, rolling up his jacket sleeves and pants legs to do it, then tore the patches off and fed them into the wall. They took blood from his left ankle, then pulled his pants down and poked at his genitals with a metal rod.

  When they finished, two of them carried him out of the laboratory and through a series of white-walled rooms. The numbness in Danny’s brain had worn off. “What are doing?” he shouted. “Where are you taking me?” Their only answer was to put him in a tiny room and leave him alone there.

  4. Danny cried himself to sleep, lying on what seemed to be a padded shelf that grew out of the wall. It was the only thing in the room that was not hard, white, and shiny. In the morning they brought him into another part of the ship. One of the aliens handed him a cup with something in it that looked like a vanilla milkshake and smelled like Cream-of-Wheat. His stomach seemed to accept it, and it did clear the bad taste out of his mouth.

  The room didn’t have any chairs in it, so Danny stayed on his feet. He couldn’t see any kind of controls or instruments, only a pedestal in the middle of the floor that held a fan-shaped sculpture. It looked like white plaster. The wide end of the fan merged with the ceiling.

  “How long are you going to keep me here?” Danny asked. He was taller than any of the aliens, and now that he’d rested he wasn’t quite as afraid. “My parents are going to be looking for me, you know. You can’t just hide me here forever.”

  “You will not be going back,” one of the aliens said. It wasn’t speaking English, but the meaning of what it said seemed to come into Danny’s head anyway. It was a little like a movie he’d seen once, where the people were speaking French, but the real words were written on the screen and he almost felt like he understood what they were saying.

  “Look,” said another one of the aliens.

  The wall in front of Danny darkened. In seconds it was black enough to show pinpoints of light. With a sudden spasm in his leg muscles, Danny realized he was looking out into empty space. In the distance the stars were smeared with an orange haze. It looked like a water-color painting, thickening to make dust-colored mountains and waves, then thinning away again to nothing. Several of the stars behind it shone with a fierce blue-white glow. In another part of the sky Danny saw an oval of light, its arms spiraling out into nothingness. The space between the stars was blacker than anything Danny had ever seen, and bright colors of the stars took his breath away. The longer he looked, the more of them he could see.

  He watched for a very long time, trying to get used to the idea of what they meant. Finally he turned back to the aliens and nodded to them. As they led him back to his cell he was crying again.

  In time he got used to the physical hardships - the ceramic-looking bucket instead of a toilet, the lack of baths or fresh clothing, the monotonous diet. By and large he had the run of the ship, though he never saw anything that looked like a control room.

  The worst of it was the boredom. The aliens walked around him like he was a piece of furniture, and never talked to him unless they had to. There was nothing to read, nothing to watch except the nearly motionless expanse of stars.

  One day he lost control, in the middle of the big room with the screen and the fan sculpture. “Damn you!” he said, screaming and crying all at once. “Goddamn you to hell!” It was the worst thing he knew to say. “Don’t you care? What kind of people are you? Don’t you have any feelings? Don’t you care what happens to me?”

  One of the aliens stopped. “We are not people,” it said reasonably. “And no, we do not care.”

  Much later, long after he’d lost count of meals and naps, after he’d lost all sense of time w
hatsoever, something new appeared on the screen.

  A planet.

  Danny slept a half dozen times before the planet grew large enough to fill the screen. As the ship closed in, Danny kept expecting the green-gray blur of the surface to resolve into recognizable detail. Instead the alien ship simply dipped into the living soup of the planet’s atmosphere.

  In seconds he was unable to see anything but whirling yellow feathers and smaller green, furry seeds. They flew toward him at a fantastic rate of speed, hung motionless against the surface of the screen for a few seconds, then were whipped away by the turbulence. Slowly Danny made out a shadow in the background. He understood that the image he watched was like TV, that the things he saw there couldn’t actually break through to reach him. All the same he found himself squirming in fear.

  It looked a little like the giant insects he’d seen in dinosaur books, only much, much bigger. It was only when the thing stopped and hovered directly in front of the camera that Danny could see all the hideous differences. A huge, oval mouth, surrounded by loose flaps of skin, took up most of what seemed to be the head. The rest of its body was lopsided and covered with white dust or mold. It sucked puffballs and green seeds continuously into its mouth. Halfway down its belly something like an open sore dripped thick liquid into the air.

  “What is it?” Danny asked one of the aliens.

  “It is what it is.”

  “That’s a stupid answer.”

  “What you are to your planet, it is here.”

  “You mean, that thing can think?”

  “It has a language. It fights wars. It has a God.”

  The next time he slept, Danny had a nightmare about the monster’s God. Ever since his parents had admitted that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy were not real, he’d wondered if God wasn’t more of the same thing. He’d never had the nerve to ask his parents, and now it was too late.