Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “No,” Memory agreed. “It wasn’t.”

  On Friday afternoon, eager for solitude, I went up to Jeremy’s cabin by myself. I filled the hummingbird feeder and watched until dusk as a pair of females flew aerial dogfights around each other—a battle for exclusive sipping rights.

  When no birds appeared the next morning, however, I hurried to check out the feeder. Small red ants paraded up the wall of the shed, under the eave, along the feeder’s drop line, and down the sticky glass bottle to the four plastic blossoms dispensing sugar water. Although a few ants had drowned in the clear syrup inside the cylinder, most hadn’t—they swarmed like coolies all over the bottle. No wonder my hummingbirds hadn’t returned.

  I found a garden hose, leveled a cleansing spray on the feeder and the ants crawling over the shed, and tried to find a better spot for the feeder. Where? No place seemed absolutely safe from ant attack—so, finally, I dumped the bottle’s gluey contents on an ant hill next to the shed and lugged myself back inside.

  Later, lying on Jeremy’s king-sized bed and staring at nothing, a fresh lie came marching into my mind—like a train of ants, each insect carrying one syllable of the conceit that I could not evict from my consciousness:

  “Anteaters sometimes impersonate hummingbirds in order to gorge on the ants that have overrun their feeders.”

  Ha ha, I thought bitterly. Very amusing.

  At which moment I had a disturbing picture of Memory playfully straddling me, her glossy hair hanging down around my temples, her nipples moving over me like the pink felt nubs of Magic Markers. What was her eidolon doing? Tracing on my chest, I realized, the very words that she was whispering to me inside the hallucinatory veil of her perfumed tresses:

  “Often, Peter, some of these imposters—anteaters pretending to be hummingbirds – have trouble staying aloft.”

  Memory’s smart-ass corollary to Falsehood Number Ten. For, even after her naked phantom had vanished, there was no doubt in my mind that she was calling me—subtly, very subtly—an imposter.

  By dint of real effort, I sidestepped her for a whole week. I took lunch an hour earlier or later than she did, I stayed well out of her territories in the KG&K building, I stopped telephoning her in the evenings, and I let my answering machine reply to every call to my apartment, even when I was there to interrupt my own recorded spiel. To Memory’s credit, or maybe as a sample of her shrewdness, she called me only once that week, and her voice among my messages sounded neither desperate nor sad:

  “My father enjoyed talking with you last week, Peter. Let me hear from you in the next day or two, and he’ll stand us to dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. Love ya. ’Bye.”

  I ignored the call, which came on a Tuesday evening. In fact, I made it until Thursday afternoon without Memory’s spotting me on the fourteenth floor or chasing me down in the parking lot. As it was, she cornered me right after an unscheduled marketing meeting called by her boss, Vivian DuPriest, to which Logan Metasavage, my boss, had sent me as his proxy.

  Throughout this meeting, at which I learned that my animated NRG-Assist hummingbird ads would debut that evening on Ted Turner’s Channel 17, Memory behaved to everyone, including me, as if nothing were wrong. When she buttonholed me outside the meeting room afterwards, she displayed a possessiveness—fingering my tie, patting my pocket handkerchief—that nonplussed me.

  “You must be busy, Peter. Well, Vi’s kept me on the go, too, and it won’t hurt Daddy to wait a while to see you again.”

  “Ah.” (That old Jurusik wit in action.)

  “Which reminds me. It’s time for a hummingbird lie, Peter.”

  Criminy. The woman was insatiable.

  “Don’t get uptight. I know you’ve been busy. I have too, but I decided it was time for me to do one.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “This one’s my treat. You should like it. It makes reference to advertising. Ready?”

  I just gaped at her.

  Memory laughed and kissed me on the forehead. “‘Hummingbirds regard the imperceptible eyeflashes of subliminal TV ads as heavy reading.’”

  I heard the words, but they didn’t register at the level of my conscious understanding. Memory smiled and repeated them.

  “Number Eleven,” she said. “The last two are yours, but if you want me to take over or just to drop the whole game, fine. We’ll find a less phony way to make our relationship meaningful. You’re too bright a guy for this crap, Peter.”

  That night, I drove straight to my apartment, locked myself in, and heated a low-calorie gourmet dinner in the microwave. Peter, I told myself, switching on the TV, take a few minutes to review your situation.

  Just then, one of my NRG-Assist spots came on. Two animated hummingbirds flew a pas de deux around a cartoonish bottle of the stuff, chittering lies like “For instant energy replenishment” and “Fly with the fleetest when you NRG-Assist.”

  But I noticed something weird about the ad—an annoying blur at the bottom of the screen, twin streaks of spectral characters that came and went so fast it was impossible to tell if they were real. During the crummy sit-com afterward, I shoved my tray aside and went looking for my Polaroid. Finally, camera in hand, I returned to my chair for the next commercial break.

  A repeat of my NRG-Assist spot was squeezed between an upbeat Toyota ad and a dull brokerage-firm come-on. During this rerun, I took four hasty pictures of the screen. One of my shots, developed, clearly disclosed the illegal eyeflash message that I had suspected to be there.

  It said, in computer-printer letters that convinced me paranoia was a legitimate, survival-oriented response: “A hummingbird’s miniscule heart can beat up to thirteen weeks after the bird itself has died. How long do you think yours will beat?”

  That was Lie Number Twelve. Truly heavy reading.

  How had that ominous message appeared in my ad? Well, at least one version of the spot must have gone to our client’s offices from KG&K that way. I had a hunch that Memory was the marketing rep who had fed the doctored clip to our client—who, in turn, had passed it on to the TV people for broadcasting. Her doctoring was clumsy and obvious, but when it was discovered, as it eventually would be, I was the ad exec who’d catch the flak.

  That night, I packed. On Friday, I went to work as if nothing were wrong. I continued to avoid Memory, whom I once saw staring into copywriting-and-layout from the edge of her research-and-marketing warren. Later, pleading a queasy stomach (the truth, the honest-to-Jesus truth), I left three hours early.

  But I didn’t go home. I drove to the bank, withdrew every last cent in my savings account, and got on I-20 West out of Atlanta, to Birmingham and whatever unknown spots farther west the evil designs of Memory Yang might ultimately force me to flee.

  I cruised for hours. I didn’t stop cruising until the air had an unfamiliar, high-altitude sting.

  For the past ten or twelve days, I have been writing this on motel stationery in a variety of motels across the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest: Econolodge, Day’s Inn, Motel 6, Scottish Inn, you-name-it.

  I jump every time I see a Volkswagen, and yesterday morning my heart nearly burst when I entered a mom-and-pop grocery in Klamath Falls, where I’d been holed up for two days, and saw a hummingbird broach on the floral-print blouse of the proprietress.

  “Where did you get that?” I demanded.

  “Pretty lady handed it to me yesterday right after you’d bought something from us. Said, if I didn’t mind, to let you have it the next time you came in.”

  She shouted something after me as I fled, but with no time to waste I beat it back to the motel to gather up my belongings and hit the road again. I drove south, into California, and continued treading asphalt long after night had fallen.

  Two nights ago, in a ramshackle boardinghouse in Bakersfield, California, I dreamed that a wrinkled, gnomish old man sat astride my hams pulling my spinal cord, knob by Tinker Toy knob, through a hole he had punctured at the base of my neck. He reeled it
out (even flat on my belly, I could see the moist, cartilaginous column emerging from between my shoulder blades) like a man drawing a knotted rope out of a well.

  On each knob—on each knot—shone a tiny photo-booth portrait of a young woman I had pursued, screwed, and alienated. The gnome on my back felt the blood-smeared face on each picture with a crooked thumb, grunted his pitying recognition, and continued extracting my spine. At last, finished, he climbed down from the bed and stumped out onto the boardinghouse’s second-story landing using my flaccid backbone as a not very serviceable walking stick.

  Later, a series of noises wakened me. It was a dog’s furious barking.

  Face down on my room’s lumpy daybed, I could not move. It took an hour—at least—to scrunch myself into a wormlike parody of uprightness and to shuffle to the door. The moon was still up, and standing on the sidewalk across the street from the boardinghouse was a silvery, lion-maned dog. Even as it barked, it snapped and slavered at me.

  I slammed the door, grabbed my gear, and hustled down the rear steps to the eucalyptus-guarded yard sheltering my Audi.

  I have just returned to my roach-infested second-floor room in a motel on the outskirts of Socorro, New Mexico. I was out less than forty minutes, long enough to buy some Kentucky Fried Chicken and a new set of fingernail clippers. The first thing I saw when I came back in—a shock worse than those afforded by either Memory’s hummingbird pin or her father’s resurrected seeing-eye chow—was a small hardcover book lying open on my bed.

  A tiny creature rested in the crease between the book’s yellow pages, a creature that I could not identify until I went across the room and lifted it squeamishly by a tail feather. I don’t know whether this bird is male or female, for the blood spot on its gorget consists of real blood—as if whoever brought it to me first sliced its throat with a razor blade. Some of its blood stains the elegant poetry of the volume, a first edition of Harmonium.

  My phone line has been cut. When I peeked through the curtains a few minutes ago, two shadowy figures stood on the landing across the courtyard from my room. And the silhouette of a lion-maned dog wavered in the gloom beneath their lodgings, a canine statue no more substantial than moonlight.

  The dead telephone rings. I answer it with a nervous “Hello.”

  “Hello,” says the party calling me, a young woman. I already know who she is, of course. “This is your imagination speaking,” she goes on, but it is so obviously Memory that I must clench my teeth to keep from calling her on her lie. “And you have a good one, Peter, better than I would have ever guessed. Forgive me for doubting you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “That first lie you told me: ‘I am a hummingbird.’ Don’t you remember it, Peter?”

  I grip the dead phone, resolutely saying nothing.

  “It wasn’t a lie. That makes it the truth. Which, given the game we were playing, makes it a lie again. See?”

  “I’m finished,” I blurt. “I’m finished playing.”

  “Close your eyes, Peter.”

  I try to resist this command, but I can’t. Memory’s powers of coercion, even through the cut line, are preternatural.

  “You’re not finished until the last lie is spoken, Peter. But even though you started the game—and even though you’ve long since broken your promise to play it through to the end—I’ll let you off the hook. I’ll be Official Finisher, okay?”

  I start to open my eyes.

  “Don’t!” Memory shouts at me through the handset. Both she and her blind daddy can see what they shouldn’t be able to access. How do they do that? Imagination or memory?

  I keep my eyes closed.

  “Here,” Memory says. “Our thirteenth lie. ‘A dead hummingbird symbolizes unspeakable grief.’”

  Does she mean me? Is her lie, like Mr. Yang’s, a barbarous physical threat? No, I don’t think so.

  But my eyes open anyway, and when I look at the bed, I see that the first edition of Harmonium is really a Socorro phone book and that the butchered hummingbird in the crease between its pages has turned into the jade-green hand comb that I ordinarily carry in my pocket with my car keys.

  Doesn’t Memory understand—didn’t she ever know?—that hummingbirds don’t pair-bond? That’s the truth, perhaps the first truth I ever learned about myself.

  Suddenly, there is a low hum in my ear—a busy signal, abrupt and raucous―and I am all alone in a shabby little room somewhere not too far from either the White Sands nuclear testing grounds or the treacherous Jornada del Muerto.

  How did I get here? I can’t help wondering. And why do people always lie to one another?

  The Unexpected Visit of a Reanimated Englishwoman

  THE FOOTFALLS ON THE STAIRS HAD WEIGHT. I COULD hear not only their impress on the lacquered heartpine but also the successive creaking of each riser and the begrudging pops of the handrail balusters. I stopped taking notes and listened harder.

  I half expected—I always half expect—my father to climb as he often did in life to my second-story office and to bark, “Let’s go for a sandwich, Michael.” If he had come today (March 11, 1996: the 178th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus), he would barge in wearing a ratty parka, a woolen watchcap, and grimy, checkered trousers, his feet shod in army-surplus boots, for a deep cold held sway. The saucer magnolia in my front yard had lost its pink blossoms to a weekend frost; those still clinging to it fluttered like tiny flags of beige nylon.

  In the dark upstairs hall, the temperature had not risen above forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. To my right, a propane-burning space heater labored to keep my teeth from chattering; they clacked anyway, for whoever had materialized on the stairs continued to climb them, producing more groanings in the wood and a mounting jitteriness in me. Still, the intruder’s tread did not suggest the coming of a large person, certainly not a marauding golem. A child, I figured, or a woman. Jeri would not return from her counseling job in Hogansville for another four hours, though, and because I had heard no one twist the bell-key on our front door, materialized seems the aptest word for my guest’s advent on the bottom landing.

  The phantom on our steps shoved through the stuck door at their top, just outside my office. I don’t keep a pistol in my desk—but would a burglar or a potential assassin have bothered to knock? I coasted back in my chair and croaked more than called, “Come in!”

  She entered, without flamboyance. Tentatively, in fact; courteously. If she had expected either elegance or order, my office—two cramped squares, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on four of the six walls—disappointed her. She hesitated before a stack of books on the floor. The door gaped behind her; cold air swept past her shawled body like a williwaw from the final chapter of her teenage masterwork.

  “Shut the door,” I said. “We’ll freeze if you don’t.”

  At her own careful speed, she obeyed. Her gaze took in the prints on my walls and the weird windowed machine on my rolltop. The garish spines on the paperbacks in my bookcases also seized her notice.

  Only a few of these titles and authors could have meant anything to her: The Aeneid of Vergil, The Republic of Plato, the plays of Shakespeare, and a smattering of early titles by Charles Dickens. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has horrific affinities with Frankenstein, had only just passed his first birthday when she died. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross) did not publish her first book until seven years after my visitor’s death. Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and Virginia Woolf first saw daylight six, fifteen, twenty-three, and thirty-one years, respectively, after her 1851 demise—compatriots all, but all of course forever strangers to her.

  And what could she possibly make of writers named Aldiss, Ballard, Bradbury, Clarke, Delany, Disch, Le Guin, Silverberg, and so on? Trembling a little, she let her gaze linger on the Dan Simmons titles Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, but the clutter on my floor kept her from going to them and unshelving one or
both.

  I nodded at the paperbacks. “They make great insulation. Please sit in my chair.”

  “No, thank you. I fear my arrival inconveniences you.”

  Of course it did. My office has only one chair, and no other decent place to sit except the three-step stool that my father-in-law built to provide access to my topmost shelves. The inconvenience meant nothing, though. I knew my guest for the daughter of protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and William Godwin, author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). In 1714, a month shy of her seventeenth birthday, she had eloped with the married writer Percy Shelley. Later, she had written many books herself, including Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), as well as the five supernatural tales about which, owing to an unexpected writing assignment, I was now obsessively ruminating.

  Inconvenience? No, call her arrival an opportunity. She arranged herself and her skirts on my stool and clasped her gloved hands in her lap. Her presence heartened as well as spooked me. I wanted to tell her about automobiles, airplanes, movies, television. To chauffeur her to the Little White House in Warm Springs. To treat her to a Popsicle. To show her the plastic lemon in our refrigerator. (Would she think it witty or just grotesque?) To play her snippets of my Miles Davis, Abbey Lincoln, and Chris Botti CDs. (So much, good and bad, has happened since Mozart.)

  We began to talk. She recognized me as a fellow writer, but implied no knowledge of my work and offered no assessment of my gift. (I regarded her forbearance as a kindness, for I quailed before her opinion and had no idea how she could have reached one.) Like the heroes of her essay/tales “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman” and “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman,” she had won through to some sort of second-chance resuscitation. I wondered what had awakened her, revivified her, and sent her climbing the stairs to my office in a country far from either England or her beloved Italy.

  “I had an inclination this way whilst you set down your odd sequel to my Prometheus,” she said. “And came when you decided to write a commentary about my supernatural tales.”