Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  Felix leaned into the opening chords, pounding the Jackson, thinking about nothing but the music, putting a depth of rage and frustration into it he never knew he had. But he couldn’t sustain it; the drummer was pounding out 2 and 4, oblivious to what Felix was playing, and Sid had cranked up again and was whaling away on his Gibson with the flat of his hand.

  Felix jerked his strap loose and set the guitar back in its case.

  “What’s the matter?” Sid asked, the band grinding to a halt behind him.

  “I just haven’t got it today,” Felix said. He wanted to break that pissant little toy Gibson across Sid’s nose, and the strength of his hatred scared him. “I’m sorry,” he said, clenching his teeth. “Maybe some other time.”

  “Sure,” Sid said. “Listen, you’re really good, but you need to learn some solos, you know?”

  Felix burned rubber as he pulled away, skidding through a U-turn at the end of the street. He couldn’t slow down. The car fishtailed when he rocketed out onto Rundberg and he nearly went into a light pole. Pounding the wheel with his fists, hot tears running down his face, he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  Karen was gone when Felix got home. He found a note on the refrigerator: “Sherry picked me up. Will call in a couple of days. Have a lot to think about. K.”

  He set up the Princeton and tried to play what he was feeling and it came out bullshit, a jerkoff reflex blues progression that didn’t mean a thing. He leaned the guitar against the wall and went into his studio, shoving one tape after another into the decks, and every one of them sounded the same, another tired, simpleminded rehash of the obvious.

  “I didn’t ask for this!” he shouted at the empty house. “You hear me? This isn’t what I asked for!”

  But it was, and as soon as the words were out he knew he was lying to himself. Faster hands and a better ear weren’t enough to make him play like Beck. He had to change inside to play that way, and he wasn’t strong enough to handle it, to have every piece of music he’d ever loved turn sour, to need perfection so badly that it was easier to give it up than learn to live with the flaws.

  He sat on the couch for a long time and then, finally, he picked up the guitar again. He found a clean rag and polished the body and neck and wiped each individual string. Then, when he had wiped all his fingerprints away, he put it back into the case, still holding it with the rag. He closed the latches and set it next to the amp, by the front door.

  For the first time in two days he felt like he could breathe again. He turned out all the lights and opened the windows and sat down on the couch with his eyes closed. Gradually his hands became still and he could hear, very faintly, the fading music of the traffic and the crickets and the wind.

  Wild for You

  It was a Pontiac Firebird with a custom paint job, a metal-flake candy-apple red. The personalized plates said WILD4U.

  I was right behind her on that big clover-leaf that slopes down off Woodall Rogers onto I-35. The wind caught a hank of her long blonde hair and set it to fluttering outside her window. I saw her face in her own rear-view as she threw her head back. Laughing, or singing along with the radio, or maybe just feeling the pull as she put the pedal down and scooted into the southbound lane.

  She was a beauty, all right. Just a kid, but with a crazy smile that made my heart spin.

  I whipped my pickup into fourth but I couldn’t get past this big white Caddy coming up on me from behind. The two lanes for Austin were fixing to split off in half a mile. An eighteen-wheeler filled up one of them and the Caddy had the other. I eased off the gas and watched her disappear over the horizon, a bright red promise of something beyond my wildest dreams.

  It was mid-afternoon, sunny with a few clouds. The weather couldn’t decide if it was summer or winter, which is what passes for fall in Texas. I wasn’t but a kid myself, with my whole life in front of me. I put Rosanne Cash on the tape deck and my arm out the window and let those white lines fly by.

  I was at the Fourth Street Shell station in Waco, halfway home, when I saw that little red car again. I’d just handed my credit card to the lady when the squeal of brakes made me look up. There it was, shiny and red, rocking back and forth by the Super Unleaded.

  I kept one eye on it while I signed the receipt. The driver door opened and this guy got out. He was in jeans and a pearl button shirt and a black cap. I can’t say I liked the looks of him. She got out the passenger side and leaned across the top of the car, watching the traffic. I couldn’t hardly see her because of the pump. I hung around the ice cream freezer, hoping she’d come inside. Instead the guy came in to pay cash for five dollars’ worth.

  I followed him out. She turned to get back in the car and I felt a chill. Her hair was shorter than it had been, just barely past her collar. And her face looked older too.

  I couldn’t figure what the hell. Maybe she’d got her hair cut? She’d had time, as fast as she’d been driving, and as long as we’d been out. I felt like I’d already spent half my life on the road. Or maybe this was her older sister had borrowed the car somehow.

  Weird, is what it was. I got back in the truck and hit it on down the highway. About two miles on they came up behind me to pass, and that’s when I saw the license had changed. Now it said MR&MRS.

  Right as they pulled up next to me I looked over at her. She was staring out the window, right at me. She pointed a finger, like kids do when they’re making a pretend pistol. And smiled, that same crooked smile.

  For some reason that really got to me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

  Some things are just Mysteries, and you don’t expect to understand them.

  When I passed that car south of Belton, there were different people in it. The woman driving looked like the blonde girl, but was old enough to be her mother. There was a dark-haired girl in the passenger seat, maybe thirty years old, and two little kids in back. The dark-haired girl was turned around to yell at them. The speed limit had gone back up to 65, but they chugged along at 60. The plates were standard Texas issue and there was bumper sticker that said ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDBABY.

  Tell the truth, I was too tired to think much of it anymore. The sun had started to set and I had this pinched kind of pain between my shoulders. About thirty miles on I saw a roadside rest stop and pulled in.

  I might have slept a quarter of an hour. The sky had clouded over and the sunset lit everything up pretty spectacular. It was being thirsty woke me and I gimped over to the water fountain on stiff legs.

  Luck or something made me look back at the highway. That metal-flake red Firebird pulled off at about thirty miles an hour, just barely rolling. The old lady was by herself again. While I watched she hung a left turn under the interstate and disappeared.

  I had my drink of water, remembering that pointing finger and crooked smile. I got back in the pickup and followed. When I came out on the northbound access, I saw the car pulled over in the Johnson grass at the side of the road. I parked behind it and eased out of the truck.

  There was nobody inside. Up ahead an ambulance screamed onto the northbound entrance ramp, siren going and lights flashing. After a few seconds the lights went out and it crested a hill, headed back the way we’d come.

  Till Human Voices Wake Us

  They were at forty feet, in darkness. Inside the narrow circle of his dive light, Campbell could see coral polyps feeding, their ragged edges transformed into predatory flowers.

  If anything could have saved us, he thought, this week should have been it.

  Beth’s lantern wobbled as she flailed herself away from the white-petaled spines of a sea urchin. She wore nothing but a white T-shirt over her bikini, despite Campbell’s warnings, and he could see gooseflesh on her thighs. Which is as much of her body, he thought, as I’ve seen in ... how long? Five weeks? Six? He couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love.

  As he moved his light away he thought he saw a shape in the darkness. Shark, he thought, and felt his throat tighten. He
swung the lamp back again.

  That was when he saw her.

  She was frozen by the glare, like any wild animal. Her long straight hair floated up from her shoulders and blended into the darkness. The nipples of her bare breasts were elliptical and purple in the night water.

  Her legs merged into a green, scaly tail.

  Campbell listened to his breath rasp into the regulator. He could see the width of her cheekbones, the paleness of her eyes, the frightened tremor of the gills around her neck.

  Then reflex took over and he brought up his Nikonos and fired. The flare of the strobe shocked her to life. She shuddered, flicked her crescent tail toward him, and disappeared.

  A sudden, inexplicable longing overwhelmed him. He dropped the camera and swam after her, legs pumping, pulling with both arms. As he reached the edge of a hundred-foot drop-off, he swept the light in an arc that picked up a final glimpse of her, heading down and to the west. Then she was gone.

  He found Beth on the surface, shivering and enraged. “What the hell was the idea of leaving me alone like that? I was scared to death. You heard what that guy said about sharks—”

  “I saw something,” Campbell said.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic.” She rode low in the water, and Campbell watched her catch a wave in her open mouth. She spat it out and said, “Were you taking a look or just running away?”

  “Blow up your vest,” Campbell said, feeling numb, desolate, “before you drown yourself.” He turned his back to her and swam for the boat.

  Showered, sitting outside his cabin in the moonlight, Campbell began to doubt himself.

  Beth was already cocooned in a flannel nightgown near her edge of the bed. She would lie there, Campbell knew, sometimes not even bothering to close her eyes, until he was asleep.

  His recurring, obsessive daydreams were what had brought him here to the island. How could he be sure he hadn’t hallucinated that creature out on the reef?

  He’d told Beth that they’d been lucky to be picked for the vacation, that he’d applied for it months before. In fact, his fantasies had so utterly destroyed his concentration at work that the company had ordered him to come to the island or submit to a complete course of psych testing.

  He’d been more frightened than he was willing to admit. The fantasies had progressed from the mild violence of smashing his CRT screen to a bizarre, sinister image of himself floating outside his shattered office windows, not falling the forty stories to the street, just drifting there in the whitish smog.

  High above him, Campbell could see the company bar, glittering like a chrome-and-steel monster just hatched from its larval stage. He shook his head. Obviously he needed sleep. Just one good night’s rest and things would get back to normal.

  In the morning Campbell went out on the dive boat while Beth slept in. He was distracted, clumsy, bothered by shadows in his peripheral vision.

  The dive master wandered over while they were changing tanks and asked him, “You nervous about something!”

  “No,” Campbell said. “I’m fine.”

  “There’s no sharks on this part of the reef, you know.”

  “It’s not that,” Campbell said. “There’s no problem. Really.”

  He read the look in the dive master’s eyes: another case of shell shock. The company must turn them out by the dozens, Campbell thought. The stressed-out executives and the boardroom victims, all with the same glazed expressions.

  That afternoon they dove a small wreck at the east end of the island. Beth paired off with another woman, so Campbell stayed with his partner from the morning, a balding pilot from the Cincinnati office.

  The wreck was no more than a husk, an empty shell, and Campbell floated to one side as the others crawled over the rotting wood. His sense of purpose had disappeared, left him wanting only the weightlessness and lack of color of the deep water.

  After dinner he followed Beth out onto the patio. He’d lost track of how long he’d been watching the clouds over the dark water when she said, “I don’t like this place.”

  Campbell looked back at her. She was sleek and pristine in her white linen jacket, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, her still-damp hair twisted into a chignon and spiked with an orchid. She’d been sulking into her brandy since they’d finished dinner, and once again she’d astonished him with her ability to exist in a completely separate mental universe from his own.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s fake. Unreal. This whole island.” She swirled the brandy but didn’t drink any of it. “What business does an American company have owning an entire island? What happened to the people who used to live here?”

  “In the first place,” Campbell said, “it’s a multinational company, not just American. And the people are still living here, only now they’ve got jobs instead of starving to death.” As usual, Beth had him on the defensive. In fact he wasn’t all that thrilled with the Americanization of the island. He’d imagined natives with guitars and congas, not portable stereos that blasted electronic reggae and neo-funk. The hut where he and Beth slept was some kind of geodesic dome, air-conditioned and comfortable, but he missed the sound of the ocean.

  “I just don’t like it,” Beth said. “I don’t like top secret projects that have to be kept behind electric fences. I don’t like the company flying people out here for vacations the way they’d throw a bone to a dog.”

  Or a straw to a drowning man, Campbell thought. He was as curious as anybody about the installations at the west end of the island, but of course that wasn’t the point. He and Beth were walking through the steps of a dance that Campbell now saw would inevitably end in divorce. Their friends had all been divorced at least once, and an eighteen-year marriage probably seemed as anachronistic to them as a 1957 Chevy.

  “Why don’t you just admit it?” Campbell said. “The only thing you really don’t like about the island is the fact that you’re stuck here with me.”

  She stood up, and Campbell felt, with numbing jealousy, the stares of men all around them focus on her. “I’ll see you later,” she said, and heads turned to follow the clatter of her sandals.

  Campbell ordered another Salva Vida and watched her walk downhill. The stairs were lit with Japanese lanterns and surrounded by wild purple and orange flowers. By the time she reached the sandbar and the line of cabins, she was no more than a shadow, and Campbell had finished most of the beer.

  Now that she was gone, he felt drained and a little dizzy. He looked at his hands, still puckered from the long hours in the water, at the cuts and bruises of three days of physical activity. Soft hands, the hands of a company man, a desk man. Hands that would push a pencil or type on a CRT for another twenty years, then retire to the remote control of a big-screen TV.

  The thick, caramel-tasting beer was starting to catch up to him. He shook his head and got up to find the bathroom. His reflection shimmered and melted in the warped mirror over the bathroom sink. He realized he was stalling, staying away from the chill, sterile air of the cabin as long as he could.

  And then there were the dreams. They’d gotten worse since he’d come to the island, more vivid and disturbing every night. He couldn’t remember details, only slow, erotic sensations along his skin, a sense of floating in thin, crystalline water, of rolling in frictionless sheets. He’d awaken from them gasping for air like a drowning fish, his penis swollen and throbbing.

  He brought another beer back to his table, not really wanting it, just needing to hold it in his hands. His attention kept wandering to a table on a lower level, where a rather plain young woman sat talking with two men in glasses and dress shirts. He couldn’t understand what was so familiar about her until she tilted her head in a puzzled gesture and he recognized her. The broad cheekbones, the pale eyes.

  He could hear the sound of his own heart. Was it just some kind of prank, then? A woman in a costume? But what about the gill lines he’d seen on her neck? How in God’s name had she moved so quickly?

  She st
ood up, made apologetic gestures to her friends. Campbell’s table was near the stairs, and he saw she would have to pass him on her way out. Before he could stop to think about it, he stood up, blocking her exit, and said, “Excuse me?”

  “Yes?” She was not that physically attractive, he thought, but he was drawn to her anyway, in spite of the heaviness of her waist, her solid, shortish legs. Her face was older, more tired than the one he’d seen out on the reef. But similar, too close for coincidence. “I wanted to ... could I buy you a drink?” Maybe, he thought, I’m just losing my mind.

  She smiled, and her eyes crinkled warmly. “I’m sorry. It’s really very late, and I have to be at work in the morning.”

  “Please,” Campbell said. “Just for a minute or two.” He could see her suspicion, and behind that a faint glow of flattered ego. She wasn’t used to being approached by men, he realized. “I just want to talk with you.”

  “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

  “No, nothing like that.” He searched for something reassuring. “I’m with the company. The Houston office.”

  The magic words, Campbell thought. She sat down in Beth’s chair and said, “I don’t know if I should have any more. I’m about half looped as it is.”

  Campbell nodded, said, “You work here, then.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Secretary?”

  “Biologist,” she said, a little sharply. “I’m Dr. Kimberly.” When he didn’t react to the name, she softened it by adding, “Joan Kimberly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Campbell said. “I always thought biologists were supposed to be homely.” The flirtation came easily. She had the same beauty as the creature on the reef, a sort of fierce shyness and alien sensuality, but in the woman they were more deeply buried.

  My God, Campbell thought, I’m actually doing this, actually trying to seduce this woman. He glanced at the swelling of her breasts, knowing what they would look like without the blue oxford shirt she wore, and the knowledge became a warmth in his groin.