Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “The old lady wants us,” said Starkey. “She’s a saint, and she’s dying.”

  “Do you want to give her tarnished goods, then? The notion’s crackers. John would—”

  “Are you really invoking John again?”

  “John would undoubtedly puke is all I was going to say.”

  “Seems to me,” said Harrison’s image from the vidcom unit at table’s end, “John’s past worrying about it.”

  “Gracias,” murmured Carlos under his breath.

  Of the three surviving members of the group, only Harrison remained svelte, almost hungry-looking. His close-cropped white hair accentuated his leanness.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” said Starkey. “To three quarters o’ the folks alive today we’re about as timely as the bloomin’ caveman.”

  McCartney turned on his heel. “I dunno about that.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Harrison from the vidcom unit. “Timely is as timely does.”

  “I always speak for meself, I do, and I say we’re old enough to make fools of ourselves. We’ve earned the fookin’ privilege, ’ticularly if we befool ourselves in a good cause. This one qualifies.”

  “Three Lads Who Rooked the World,” said Harrison from the screen.

  Even McCartney laughed, and Carlos hurried to interject, “This reunion will be much more legitimate—honest, I mean—than that silly Agatha Christie thing you did a year or so ago. You all had cameos, but not a single scene together.”

  “Why don’t you take a short hike?” Starkey said. “I liked that silly Agatha Christie thing, and you’re queering me pitch.”

  Flustered, Carlos let himself into the carpeted antechamber, where three attorneys, a pair of high-powered personal agents, and an executive of Video Verdadero’s American affiliate stood gossiping together. They shot looks of anxious inquiry at Carlos, who shrugged, walked across the room, and sat down in a lounger equipped with headphones and a video hood. Twenty minutes later he felt a hand on his ankle.

  “It’s set, mate,” said Starkey. “Don’t hold yer breath till it comes off, but I do believe it’s set.”

  Eleanor had a front-row seat in the cafetorium and entertainment hall. Dr. Petitt occupied the chair to her left, and the remaining patients and staff—a number that had swelled by thirty or more, owing to the influx of the various local officials claiming affiliation with the center—filled nearly every inch of space behind the two women. Where no people sat or stood, up sprouted remote-controlled video equipment or a battery of triangulating theatrical lasers. Nestled about the hall were dozens of miniature speakers to provide the occasional orchestral accompaniment that the group could not generate itself. Montage projectors recreated the myth of Swinging London and the legend of the Fab Four on a scrim of translucent indigo hanging down behind the band. These images slowed for love songs, ricocheted back into action for the hard stuff.

  How small the guys seem, Eleanor thought. And how old.

  In their white tuxedoes the four of them resembled well-dressed refugees from a Busby Berkeley musical. At present, suitably enough, McCartney’s husky voice was doing a respectable job on the lyric of “Yesterday.” Somewhat apart from the others and more ethereal in his imaginary old age than his living comrades, Lennon fingered his guitar strings.

  Something bumped Eleanor’s right elbow, and Carlos Villar eased himself into the only vacant chair remaining in the hall. “Pardon me, Mrs. Galvez,” he whispered. “I had some last-minute business to attend to.”

  “The Lennon’s remarkable,” Eleanor whispered back. “Just the way I’d envision him looking after all these years.”

  “Stereoholography. We had to get his sons’ permission, of course. It took some doing.” He squinted at the scrim. “Has he sung lead yet?”

  “On ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ yes. Utterly convincing.”

  In fact, the eidolon’s appearance stunned her. Never in her life had she undergone such a racking but joyful experience. Many others felt the same. This feeling—this thankful and expectant gaiety—had more to do with the aura of long-deferred rapprochement emanating from the performers than with the songs they had chosen. The songs heightened the general breathless gaiety, of course, but they had not created it, and they did not sustain it. Something else was at work. Eleanor found at the heart of this unlikely get-together a gospel akin to the one she had taken into the field with her splints, bandages, and pills.

  A short while ago, these aging men, and one utterly convincing apparition, had sung “All You Need Is Love.” And, setting aside the demonstrable impracticality of this precept, a roomful of men and women who had suffered insidious mental and physical abuse had listened to “All You Need Is Love”—on its face, bouncy idealistic cant—as if the song’s repetitive lyric embodied a real solution to the world’s ills. Absurd. Crazy. Tomorrow, of course, they would know better again, but tonight they had willingly suspended their adult disbelief in the foolish notion of universal amity.

  Absurd. Crazy.

  McCartney finished his solo on “Yesterday,” and a pair of overlapping lasers lifted the wizened face of Ringo Starr into front-and-center relief. He did some flashy business with his sticks, and the cymbals on his drum kit rang with a noise like hail hitting tin.

  “We’ve got a request for a song we just can’t do anymore,” he said. “It’s called ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’ We’ve got beyond such childishness, I’m afraid. We could change it to ‘When I’m Eighty-Four,’ but it would be hard to credit such an arbitrary substitution, it being based so baldly on the fleetin’ feet of time.”

  “Time’s got bald feet?” said the stereohologram image of Lennon, looking up from the fingerboard of his guitar. Laughter. Until now, the Lennon analogue had merely played and sung. It was startling to hear it engage in dialogue with the living group members.

  “Yes. Well,” said Starr. “I won’t play footsie with you on that one, John me lad.” He struck the cymbals an emphatic blow. “Besides, I didn’t speak up to announce another song, but to say we’ve got a special guest on the premises, and it’s me duty—me pleasure, I should say—to intromit ’im.”

  “Introduce,” said Harrison, looking pained.

  “I looked up the word, George. It’s intromit, ‘to cause or permit to enter—’”

  “Ha!” barked the Lennon analogue.

  “Or ‘to introduce or admit.’ It’s got a coupla meanings bagged up in one package. I’m only saying what I mean.”

  “Who is it, then?” asked Harrison.

  Oh, no, thought Eleanor. They’re not going to take public notice of me, are they? Everyone knows I’m here. What a waste of time. Then she recalled that Starr had said “him” instead of “her,” and her heart began to beat very fast.

  “Patience, podner,” said Starr. “Patience, patients.” He played a roll. “Here from Maracaibo, Venezuela, direct from El Teatro Clásico Nacional, is Adolfo Domingo Galvez. Get out here, Alfie. Ain’t this what it’s all about—rejoining for a time what fate and various lawsuits have put asunder.”

  Half-aghast, half-exhilarated, Eleanor watched her estranged husband emerge from one wing of the tiny stage and stroll past the four applauding musicians to the footlights. He looked sleek, gray, and uncertain; a mustache of sweat beaded his upper lip.

  This is just like Queen for a Day, Eleanor thought. Or any one of a dozen others of those corny video concoctions of her distant girlhood, programs that delighted in wringing pathos, warmth, and high ratings from artfully engineered, otherwise inconceivable reunions.

  Queen for a Day.

  Adolfo held the harmonica that Carlos had brought into her room back in October. “Vengas, querida,” he said when the applause had died. “You must perform with these gentlemen.”

  “No,” said Eleanor. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can,” Carlos Villar assured her, and before she could protest again, he had gripped the handles of her wheelchair and pushed it onto the mechanical lif
t at one end of the stage. This platform carried her upward, and Adolfo, after kissing her forehead, pulled her clear of the lift and positioned her chair so that she was facing the expectant crowd. Then he placed the harmonica in her hand and touched his lips to her brow again.

  “This one’s ‘Love Me Do,’” McCartney said. “John’s got the vocal, but Mrs. Galvez has the mouth-organ riff. One, two …”

  The group began to play. The houselights dimmed again. The Lennon analogue began to sing. The hospital staff and the recovering torture victims clapped their hands in time. Eleanor, trembling, raised the harmonica.

  “Take it!” McCartney cried, but she shook her head. She couldn’t. The band backed up, deforming the song to compensate for her reluctance. The stereoholographic image of Lennon drifted across the stage and superimposed itself on her person by sitting down with her in the wheelchair. The eidolon of the dead musician buttressed her, strengthening her resolve by inhabiting her body. Eleanor felt reinvigorated, galvanized. And with the aid of the Lennon analogue she played the crucial harmonica riff.

  During and after her playing, the hall shook with cries of “Bravo, Mrs. Galvez!” and “Thattagirl!” Her head reeled. The Lennon analogue separated from her, and Adolfo reappeared to help her back to her place between Dr. Petitt and Carlos Villar.

  The neurologist, however, gave up her seat to Adolfo, and before Eleanor could reorient herself to her swift transposition back into the audience, the group onstage was singing something new. Something old, rather. What the devil! Old or new, the rhythms of the piece summoned memories—Susan Carmack, Revolver, the bittersweet torment of her high school years. Only the words were different:

  “Eleanor Riggins

  Plucks at our hearts

  With a courage so icy it’s hot.

  We’ve not forgot.

  “Brought us together,

  Singing our songs

  For the last swingin’ times of our lives.

  Magic survives.

  “Such a gritty lady,

  Her work is never done.

  Such a pretty lady,

  She lifts us to the sun.”

  There was more, including a communal singing of Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” but Eleanor could not take it all in. She held Adolfo’s hand. At concert’s end, she smiled and nodded at the patients, staff members, and outside well-wishers who filed by her chair. She even spoke to the individual Beatles—once, that is, the hall had emptied of everyone but Adolfo, Dr. Petitt, Carlos Villar, and the musicians themselves. What they said to her she scarcely heeded. What she said to them had little importance beyond its bemused communication of her gratitude.

  In one otherwise inconsequential eddy of time, at a place far from the centers of world power, something good had happened. Tomorrow the bombs might fall, or aliens invade, or the planet spin off its orbit into a collision course with the sun. No matter. Something good had happened.

  Queen for a Day, thought Eleanor as her husband propelled her down the dark corridor to her room. Queen for a Day.

  Rewarded by Video Verdadero with an extended leave of absence, Carlos Villar flew from Bogota to the capital city of Guacamayo. From there he took a bus to the medical compound where Mrs. Galvez had worked for so many years. It seemed to him, walking the grounds of Casa Piadosa, that he had come to a place combining the lingering horror of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau with the sanctity of a religious shrine. Driven by a spontaneous impulse, he fell to his knees and kissed the ambiguous earth. Then he stood, wiped the dirt from his hands, and returned to Ciudad Guacamayo for dinner with the president of a Central American firm in competition with Video Verdadero. After dinner, back in his hotel, he learned that early that morning Eleanor Riggins-Galvez had died.

  “We’re All in This Alone” with Paul Di Filippo

  BAM! THE MORNING NEWSPAPER HIT THE SCREEN. Harry Lingenfelter sloshed coffee onto the mess littering his tabletop: two weeks’ worth of prior editions of The Atlanta Harbinger, all creased open to the same damned page; stacks of unpaid bills and scary envelopes from his wife’s lawyers; dishes crusted with the remnants of sour microwave bachelor meals. Lingenfelter gulped a calming breath and raked the stubble on his jaw with well-bitten fingernails.

  Blast old Ernie! Couldn’t he—for once—plop the paper gently on the grass? Every morning, Ernie Salter nailed the screen door. And every morning since the acrimonious departure of his wife Nan, Lingenfelter jumped. Nan’s decamping to her sister’s house in Montana, almost a continent away, had not surprised him, but it rankled yet. His gut never stopped roiling. In fact, nowadays even the trill of a house finch could unnerve him.

  But what most rankled, even shamed, Lingenfelter was his intolerably foolish preoccupation with a feature in the Harbinger called “The Squawk Box.” How much longer could he indulge his crazy, self-generated obsession with a few column inches in a two-bit newspaper? “The Squawk Box” ruled his waking life. Sometimes it invaded his dreams. Work on his latest Ethan Dedicos mystery novel had almost stalled, even as his deadline neared, and one look at the kitchen—hell, at any room in the house—disclosed the humiliating magnitude of his bedevilment.

  “The Squawk Box” ran daily in the Harbinger. It resembled similar columns in newspapers across the nation. A friend in Illinois had forwarded Lingenfelter copies of a feature called “The Fret Net,” and at airport newsstands he had run across others titled “The Gripe Vine” and “The Complaint Department.” An outlet for pithy bons mots and rants, these columns consisted of anonymous submissions from the paper’s own readers. The Harbinger’s readers generally squawked via telephone or e-mail. An unnamed staff member, self-dubbed the “Squawk Jock,” winnowed these quips and printed the wittiest. Although the Squawk Jock never interjected private opinion, Lingenfelter had concluded from the evidence of the columns that he had right-of-center leanings and no taste for controversy. You rarely encountered a squawk about abortion, gun control, ethnicity, the death penalty, or religion.

  The clumsy phrasings, the naiveté, and the smugness of the resulting mix usually irked Lingenfelter, but he could not stop reading it. Like the trend of “reality television,” the window that “The Squawk Box” opened onto the citizenry’s collective soul afforded a glimpse of a purgatory where sinners freely uttered their uncensored thoughts, however self-serving or damning.

  Lingenfelter had begun reading the column in earnest only after Nan’s departure. To that point, he had only scanned its entries or, on Sunday mornings, jumped to the highlighted “Squawk of the Week.” But just two days of involuntary solitude had forced him into new patterns of time wasting, and five days of reading the feature from top to bottom had addicted him.

  Most squawks clearly originated with their submitters. Unhappily, some readers plagiarized their submissions, rephrasing ancient jokes, ripping off cartoon captions or the punch lines of magazine anecdotes. Often, the Squawk Jock printed the cloned lines along with the authentic ones, without distinction. (Undoubtedly, the pressure to fill space explained the Jock’s lack of discrimination.) Still, by and large, the kudos and complaints making up each column exhibited the vivid eccentricities of those who had composed them.

  • Ever notice how the faces of drivers in an Atlanta traffic jam look just like the mugs of “clients” at the cheapest mortuary in town?

  • Our new President has problems above the neck rather than below the waist.

  • A fool and his money are soon dot-com investors.

  • I’m so broke that if it cost a quarter to go around the world, I couldn’t get from the Fox Theater to the High Museum.

  • The latest census shows a lot fewer married couples. Folks have finally figured out that they can fight without a license.

  This last squawk had made Lingenfelter wince.

  But his fascination with these outpourings of the community mind had soon morphed into something unexpected and embarrassing, namely, a desire to join the voluble herd. He wanted to compose a squa
wk so succinct and biting that the Squawk Jock not only featured it in one of the paper’s daily columns but also showcased it on Sunday morning as “Squawk of the Week.”

  Having set this goal, Lingenfelter felt sure of success. After all, he had some small cachet as a writer. Three modestly selling mysteries starring his gutsy private dick Ethan Dedicos (with a fourth in progress—slowly in progress, true, but certain to appear to good reviews eventually) all testified to his skill and success. Or so he and his agent almost daily reassured each other.

  From this position of superiority, Lingenfelter had written and e-mailed off a half dozen brilliant squawks, then sat back to await the appearance—the next day—of three or four of them. After all, who could more intelligently tap the Zeitgeist? Who could more eloquently encapsulate the furor and the folly of these portentous days at the beginning of a new millennium?

  But neither the next day’s Harbinger nor any of that week’s succeeding issues had featured his work!

  Doggedly, Lingenfelter repeated the process—with identical results. Subsequent barrages of squawks—all of which he polished to a high gloss using time that he should have spent advancing Ethan Dedicos in his investigations—likewise met with rejection. Clearly, the Squawk Jock found no merit in his work. Given the crap that did make the column, the Squawk Jock may have even hated Lingenfelter’s fastidiously crafted quips.

  As of today, with neither money nor publicity as likely trophies, he had wasted three weeks in this pursuit. What foolishness! No, what quixotic idiocy! But he could not stop. He had to make that jerk—that bitch—that Grub Street hack, male or female—acknowledge the beauty and power of his vision, and feature one of his killer witticisms in “The Squawk Box”!

  Opening today’s paper, Lingenfelter could already feel his pulse throbbing. What bloated japes and mindless yawps had crowded out the twelve gems that he had zapped to the Harbinger’s virtual mailbox yesterday? Hope flickered in him, but dimly. Either to forestall disappointment or to fuel himself for another round of squawking, he scrutinized the front page, then studied the traffic reports, obituaries, and crime accounts in the Metro section.