Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  The sun started to bear down. There were only a couple of dry places on my father’s shirt, high on his chest. “Think you can serve?” I asked. The doctors took a lump out of his lung five years ago and he still complained about the pain in his shoulder muscles.

  “Good enough for you,” he said.

  He took a few practices. His backswing had a hitch in it and he couldn’t get any height or power. The few balls that got over had no pace. My father saw where the serves hit and got a look in his eyes that I’d only seen once before. It was after his second heart attack, when they brought him into the ICU. He had an oxygen tube up one nostril and a catheter coming out from under the sheet. My mother said, “Well, dear, you’re just going to have to take it a little easier.” My father looked like a dying shark, hanging from the scales, eyes bitter and black and empty.

  “Listen,” I said. “We don’t need to do this.” It hurt me to look at him. All I could think of was my mother, what she would say. “C’mon. Let’s go home, get something to drink.”

  “No. You’ve got this coming to you.” He served, and I saw him wince from the pain. The ball came in soft and I moved up on it automatically, driving it hard and deep to his backhand. He ran for it, missed, and went down on all fours.

  I started for him. He got up into a crouch and froze me with a look. “Get away,” he said. He picked up the ball and got ready to serve again. “Love fifteen,” he said.

  He lasted five games, and lost every one. I gave up trying to stop it. He was clearly exhausted, could hardly chase the ball. But he would not quit.

  He started the sixth game with a junk serve, the ball flipped head-high and cut with exaggerated spin. I couldn’t do anything with it. I hit it into the net, and the one after it into the fence. The third I couldn’t even reach.

  I moved up to the service line. “Forty love,” my father said. “Set point.”

  I stared at him. Was he crazy? If he took this point he would win his first game of the day. If I’d been ahead forty love, then it would have been set point, set point for me. Did he not even know the difference?

  He started to toss the ball. It dropped at his feet and rolled away. Then the racket came out of his hand and clattered on the court. His face was the color of wet cement. He put his hands on his hips and stood there, looking down, fighting for breath.

  “Dad?” I said. But I already knew what had happened. Here it is, I thought. You did it. You killed him. Just like you always wanted. I took two steps toward him.

  “Get away,” my father said. He picked up the racket. I could hear his scratchy breathing all the way across the court. “Get away, goddamn you.” He picked up a ball and hit it into the empty court before I could get to him. “Game,” he said. “Set, match, and tournament.”

  He staggered to the fence and started to put the brace on his racket.

  “Dad! Dad, goddammit!”

  He looked at me. “What?”

  “You’re having a heart attack. Will you get in the goddamn car? I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “Shit. Heart attack. What do you know about heart attacks?” He picked up the bucket and waited by the trunk until I unlocked it for him. He put the bucket and the rackets inside and slammed it closed. I watched him walk around the car and open his door and get in. He could barely move his feet, barely shut the door.

  I got in and said, “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “You’re taking me home. If you even start toward the hospital I’ll open this door and get out, no matter how fast you’re going. You hear me?”

  He was sitting up straight, calm, one arm stuck out the window, the other on the back of the seat. Except for the fact that there was no color in his face he looked completely normal.

  I knew what I’d seen. His heart had gone into fibrillation and he’d choked it down and ridden it out.

  I drove him home.

  When we got there he went straight to the bedroom. I heard the shower start up.

  “Is he all right?” my mother asked.

  “No. I think he had a heart attack.”

  My mother squeezed her mouth into a hard, straight line. “You couldn’t stop him.”

  “No. This isn’t...I didn’t want this to happen.”

  “If he dies—he dies. I guess.” It was the kind of thing she always said, to convince herself she didn’t care.

  I went to my room and packed my bag. When I came out my father was sitting in front of the TV, shouting at my mother. “I’m not going to the fucking hospital. Now go away and leave me alone.”

  My mother walked me out to the car. She was crying. I put my arms around her. I wished I could cry too. I wished it was that simple. “I’ll call you,” I said, and got in the car.

  It was a three-hour drive to Austin. After a while I couldn’t think about my father anymore and then I was thinking about my ex-wife. Counseling hadn’t been able to save the marriage. We found ways to blame each other for everything—bounced checks, bad sex, spoiled food in the refrigerator.

  When I was in grade school my smart mouth was my only defense. I was no good at sports and worthless in a fight, but I could hurt people with words. I never learned to stop. Even when the thing that had saved me in grade school began to kill my marriage.

  I thought of the strength it would take to fight off a heart attack. It was the same kind of strength it took to pull yourself off a shit-poor Texas farm and become a professor at a major university, with two cars and a big house and a cabinet full of French wines. A strength that didn’t know when to stop.

  The first thing I saw when I got home was the sketch of the tennis player. His face was intent, unforgiving. I tore it up and threw it away.

  When I got out of the shower the pain was still there, knotted up in my stomach. I taped a sheet of clean, white Bristol board to the drafting table. I looked at it for a long time, trying to see what was inside it, waiting for me. After a while I started to draw.

  It was a young woman in a sundress, someone I’d never seen before. She walked barefoot down a beach. She was thirsty. She licked her lips. She saw something in the distance and smiled. Maybe it was a bottle of my client’s fruit drink. Seagulls drifted overhead, riding the updraft in the hot afternoon.

  Relay

  Stevens rewound the tape, pretending to concentrate on the hum of the machine. “What is it I’m supposed to be hearing?” he asked. “Voices?”

  Across the desk from him, Blair was pale and sweaty. “It’s Weston, the other man I was ... traveling with.”

  “Into the future,” Stevens said, not bothering to make it a question, no longer believing that Blair would deny it.

  “I know what you’re thinking. With the tape that way and all. I don’t know what happened to it. But if you concentrate, you can still hear it. You can hear him saying my name.”

  Blair’s mother sat next to him, her face stiff as papier-mache. How old she looks all of a sudden, Stevens thought. Just since last week.

  “Here,” Blair said. “Let me play it again.”

  He leaned over the desk and pushed PLAY. As the weird humming and crackling began again, Stevens let his attention wander to the open window of his office. In the long twilight he could see miles of Kansas prairie rolling away from him, the glint of Fall River in the distance, beyond that the vivid pinks and purples of sunset. A warm breeze puffed at the white lace curtains and the smell of cut grass sent his mind back twenty years, to the day he’d first met Blair’s mother.

  She’d brought the boy in with chicken pox. Stevens had been drawn to her immediately: strong, thin, handsome, with an educated accent from the Eastern seaboard. He’d hoped at first she was widowed or divorced. She hadn’t been, of course, so they’d become friends instead, and Stevens had no real regrets.

  Though it broke his heart to see her now. She had so much grief locked up inside her, and no way for him to help her with it. Whatever was wrong with her boy would take a psychiatrist to figure out, maybe a tea
m of them.

  Stevens shut off the tape in mid-yowl.

  “Look,” Blair said. “You told me you’d heard of the Project.”

  “Heard of it, yes. I heard there was some kind of space station they were using for time research, or some such nonsense.”

  “A relay station. In geosynchronous orbit. With matter transporters and a Schwartzchild simulator that can produce nearly infinite acceleration. That’s why they had to put it up there in space.”

  Stevens spread his hands out on the desk. “You’ve obviously read up on it. I’m not going to debate this with you. I don’t even know what half those words mean. The simple fact is that they closed the project down five years ago. And you were never part of it.”

  Stevens pushed the EJECT button and handed Blair the cassette. “Until two days ago you were in California, in graduate school. Your mother has letters to prove it. Then you suddenly showed up on the train from Wichita, babbling a lot of nonsense about government projects and time machines. There’s nothing else I can say.”

  Blair nodded, looking resigned. “I knew there wasn’t any point in coming to you. But Mom insisted.”

  “Go on home. Get some sleep. If you still feel ... disoriented tomorrow, maybe I can prescribe something.”

  “Yeah, right,” Blair said, getting heavily to his feet.

  Stevens wondered if he would ever get used to the sight of the adults he remembered as children. “I’ll go wait in the car, Mom.”

  When the office door closed, Stevens said, “I’m sorry. I just don’t think there’s anything I can do.”

  Tears started in her eyes, then refused to fall. “I know. I just ... couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.” She stood and reached one hand across the desk to him.

  Stevens took the hand and held it, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  Blair lay in the darkness of his parents’ house and lived through it all again. He and Weston, suiting up in the relay station. Stepping into the transport chamber, the energy field making his hair crackle and his stomach chum. The feeling of falling, a small impact against the bottoms of his feet. Then his first sight of the future.

  They stood on an endless plain of concrete, rough textured, unpainted, broken only by a network of hairline cracks. The sky was clouded over and a relentless wind sent sand and grit pinging against their helmets.

  “Blair?” Weston said. “Do you feel something ... ?”

  Blair turned to look at him. Through the distorted glass of the face plate he saw Weston’s mouth tighten in pain. Blair was reaching for him when Weston began to scream.

  Weston’s suit seemed to shrivel and contract. In an instant he was gone.

  Then Blair felt it himself, his entire body flexing and distorting like a reflection in a piece of foil. Something popped in the cooling system of his suit and he was suddenly flooded with freezing air. His stomach heaved. He took one step forward, groping blindly, and then the whole world shot away from him, in all directions. He blacked out.

  He came to on the floor of the relay station, his skin covered with chill bumps inside the suit, his teeth rat, ding and his arms instinctively wrapped around his legs for warmth that wouldn’t come.

  He crawled to the control console and read the instruments. Power but no air, no heat. He was trapped in the malfunctioning suit.

  A red light blinked next to the cassette recorder. Blair reached out with a shaking hand and played the tape through his suit radio.

  “Blair ... I’ve waited here two hours and I can’t see waiting any longer. I don’t know what’s happened, but the transporter seems to be working. I’m going to try it.

  “Blair ... this is not the station we left from. Something’s gone wrong. In this world, the station has been shut down for years. If you end up here, use the transporter. I’ll try to find you somehow.”

  Blair had the tape in his hand as he staggered down the hall to the transporter. The room was empty. He could feel the blast of escaping air when he opened the hatch. Once inside, the room began to repressurize automatically. He got out of the freezing suit as soon as there was air to breathe.

  His clothes weren’t in the locker where he’d left them. Instead there was a suit of coveralls with someone else’s name on the chest. He got into them and checked the transport controls. Everything seemed to be functioning. The destination coordinates were set for NASA in Houston.

  He started to power up the machine with a hand that still shook—he wondered if he would ever be warm again—and then hesitated. If Weston was right, and this world wasn’t the same one they’d left, he could transport himself into the middle of a concrete wall.

  His mind suddenly flashed on Neodesha, the flat empty land where he’d grown up. It hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, and he remembered the latitude and longitude from his school days. He reset the coordinates, and as he pushed the TRANSMIT button he was thinking of home.

  His mind skipped over the rest: the lurch of the transporter, falling into the field outside of town, catching a ride on the Wichita train. He concentrated on the earthly, visible reality in front of him, the cool breeze coming in the window, the sound of crickets and wind.

  It’s all right, he thought. I’m back. I’m safe. It’s 1990 and this is Kansas, and I’m back again.

  He found his old red and gray flannel bathrobe in the closet and put it on, hugging it against himself for warmth. He didn’t want to go back to sleep, didn’t want to let the fragile illusion of reality slip away.

  He walked barefoot into the living room, stepping around the loose board that had creaked all his life. He sat on the blue floral sofa with his legs tucked under him, wanting a cup of coffee but unwilling to risk waking his father, who still got up at six every morning for his job at the lumber yard. He remembered the awkward silence when he’d tried to talk to his father about the project, the haunted look in his mother’s eyes.

  He picked up the newspaper from the coffee table and glanced at it by the moonlight coming in through the front window. The small town trivia of retirements and flower shows was comforting, had him on the verge of sleep.

  Then he noticed the date at the top of the page.

  April 23. 1997.

  He clutched his stomach to keep from screaming.

  Through the window he could see the spindly heads of the rye grass in the uncut lawn, the asphalt street, the lightning-split oak in the neighbor’s yard. He’d grown up with that sight, but now it was terrifyingly alien.

  When the voice spoke his name, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Blair...”

  He turned to see Weston in the doorway.

  “Had to warn you,” Weston said. He was dressed in jeans and a sport shirt, reaching out with one hand. “It’s not holding ... I wound up back on the station again ... couldn’t tell if it was the same one or not ... used the transporter again but something’s wrong...”

  Weston reached for the wall and his hand passed through the paneling. “I don’t know how much longer I’ve got. Listen, Blair, you have to...”

  Clear streaks of lightning shot through Weston’s image. His voice turned to static. In a second he was gone. Blair was left with the memory of his face, distorted in unbearable pain.

  Blair ran to the spot where Weston had stood. Nothing remained, no smell of ozone, no stains on the wooden floor, nothing to show it had been anything but a dream.

  The morning came up sunny, with a slight chill that had burned off by the time the coffee was done.

  She hadn’t wanted to wake her son yet, but he’d always been a light sleeper. He couldn’t possibly have slept through the noise she’d already made. She put sugar in a cup of coffee and took it to his room.

  She stopped outside his door. A wave of feeling, of loss, came over her for no reason. She had to swallow, hard, and brush her hair back to regain control. Then she knocked softly with one knuckle and eased the door open.

  It was as if she’d known he would be gone.

 
; She sat on the rumpled bed, touching the cool sheets, and let silent tears run down her face.

  Castles Made of Sand

  Jim worked for a rental company—jackhammers, barricades, portable signs. He met Karla when he hired some temporaries from the agency she managed. There was just something about her. A sense that if anybody ever sprung her loose she might be capable of almost anything.

  They got off to a slow start. She phoned just as he was leaving to pick her up for their first date. She was still at the office and would be there at least another hour. Could she come by and get him instead, late, maybe around nine?

  Jim said okay. They had a slightly out-of-kilter dinner during which Karla drank too much wine and Jim too much coffee. When they got back to Jim’s apartment, Jim asked her in, little more than a formality. She begged off because of an early meeting the next day. This is going nowhere, Jim thought. But when he leaned over to kiss her goodnight she met him with her mouth already open.

  She was a little overweight, with permed hair somewhere between blonde and brown, almost no color at all. Jim’s hair was black and thinning, and some mornings he felt like a toy whose stuffing was migrating out of the arms and legs and into the middle. He was in the final stages of his second divorce. Karla had been married once, briefly, right out of high school. That was now a while ago.

  It wasn’t like they were laughing all the time. Mostly they talked about things that happened at their jobs. None of that seemed important to Jim. What counted was that, from the first, he could see they needed something in each other.

  Karla was in no particular rush to have sex. Still, after a few weeks, it was clearly only a matter of time. Jim carefully raised the subject one night as they lay on his couch, watching old sitcoms on Nickelodeon. Karla thought they should make a big deal out of it, go away for the weekend. Maybe down to Galveston.