The blue thing looked like an asparagus tip, only it wriggled.
“Find someplace safe and quiet,” Pete said. “Preferably indoors with a lock. Eat it with water.”
“I’m not putting this in my mouth.”
Pete shrugged. He was a scrawny kid, his tattooed face stubbly in the dim light, long red hair cascading over his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter to me. But the wild blue yonder is especially good for your situation. Complicated grief, right?” I nodded because his eyes—one brown and one bright yellow—told me that he probably knew it from experience. “Eat this. Spend a weekend sweating and naked on the floor. You’ll be a new man.”
“Naked and sweating?” I looked at the bag again, then back to Pete. “And how do you know Bob?” I couldn’t imagine a therabot needing a dealer.
Pete smiled. “We’re colleagues.”
“Colleagues?”
The smile widened even further. “I’m a back-alley grief counselor.”
Slipping my wild blue yonder into my pocket, I left Pete in his alley and turned myself toward home.
* * *
I ate the wild blue yonder and stripped down in my living room. I put on some retro music—Zeppelin, I think—and stretched out on the floor.
It worked fast.
Light and sound from within me, building in magnitude until the nausea clenched my stomach and I sat up. My living room had become a purple field beneath swollen stars. Something like crickets sang all around and I saw a girl sitting on a stump in the middle of the clearing. In the distance, deep blue trees swayed under a windless summer-night sky.
“You must be Charlie,” she said.
I was naked still, but for some reason I was unafraid and unashamed. “I am,” I told her, standing. “Who are you? And where am I at?”
“I’m Verity.” She tossed her long brown hair and batted the lids of her big brown eyes. “And you are in the wild blue yonder.”
She wore a silver gown that flowed like mercury over the curves of her body. When she stood up too, I saw she was taller than me by at least a foot. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said, “and the man you thought was your father.”
I blinked. “How do you know all of this?”
She shrugged. “I’m Verity.”
We stood there, looking at each other, as an enormous moon rose to the south. A minute passed. “So how does this work?” I asked.
“Simple. I run. You chase me.”
And then she ran.
* * *
As Pink Floyd said, I ran like hell. Or maybe I chased like hell. I didn’t give a shit about Pete anymore. Or Bob. Or all the lost millions in the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, Japan, and everywhere the sea had come crawling up onto land with bloody salted fingers and needle teeth.
Verity ran before me. With her she carried the hard burden of truth like a seed in the claws of a nuthatch. Her legs sped over this strange blue landscape as perfect as I’d ever seen on a woman. Michelangelo would have cried to sculpt her. I would have cried to catch her.
But it wasn’t that perfect ass I craved. It wasn’t those high, firm breasts that I could imagine bobbing with each leaping step. It wasn’t that trailing hair that I could wrap around my body.
She carried me: my past and my future.
How the hell had Pete known to give this to me; how had this wild blue yonder reached so far into time and my soul?
My thoughts fell aside as she ran. Reason gave way to desire. Logic yielded to need. The chase gave way to the run. The ground vanished. We sprinted across a stark, unyielding field of stars. They flared, dying as every hydrogen cycle eventually does, all of time compressed in a dozen falls of those perfect feet; then we ran through the salt sea, the world-girding amnion that had birthed all of evolution’s ambitions. The seas boiled and dried and vanished in wispy, weeping gases; we ran on roads of light, leaping from quantum packet to quantum packet.
Across time, across space, across the seventy-two acres of my neural net, until sufficient self-awareness finally returned to me for me to understand I would never catch up to the truth by chasing it. Grief is the Grendel-monster in the watery cave of the human heart. I pursued Grendel’s mother, and she would have her vengeance on me if I dispatched her son.
So I stopped, caught in a moment of wisdom, and let Verity the cup bearer of my grief come to me. The universe is circular, after all, endless in the manner of an egg, and if you wait long enough your own light will come back to you.
In ceasing my chase of Verity, she soon ran into my arms.
* * *
We collapsed in a tangle of limbs and clothing amid lush mounds of mint and violets. Scent, suddenly the world was scent; and the sweet smell of Verity’s sweat, which made me want to turn to her and place my lips upon the yoke of her neck and breathe her in.
Think, man, think. You’re not here for this.
“You caught me,” she whispered, and her tongue slipped into my ear.
I wriggled away. “We’re not doing that chase, either.”
“What do you want, Charlie?” Her breath was a furnace of passion warming me down to bones I’d forgotten I ever had.
“Truth,” I said. The answer surprised me.
“No one wants truth, Charlie. They want certainty. They want forgiveness. They want love. Truth is like a dead city, a million watery graves. It doesn’t compromise and it gives nothing back.”
“Relief.” This time I almost sobbed the word. “I want relief.”
“From truth?”
Truth. Who was my dad? What had my mom meant by this? Whose lie had determined the pattern of my life? Had Mom cheated on Dad? Had he come along after she was pregnant with me, and accepted another man’s get as his own child?
I slowly realized that it didn’t matter. The ghosts of the past ten years, what Bob had so patiently (as if a machine could be otherwise) talked me through, past, around, away from, out from beneath: those ghosts were of my own making.
Mom’s unquiet spirit might haunt the desolate ruins of Auburn, Washington, sleeping beneath the hard, frozen waters. Dad’s fetch might ride the rusted rails beneath the Puget Sea. So what?
“I live today,” I told Verity.
“Is that the truth?”
“We can only go forward.” I set my hand upon her breast, cupping the firm nipple through the flowing silver of her dress.
“I’m not real,” she whispered in my ear again.
Tell that to my gonads, I thought, but that didn’t matter now. “Is this what I was supposed to find?” She touched my hand, the curves of her flesh proud but not overflowing my grip, and I ached to draw her clothing away and set my lips to suckling.
“You came into this world damp and frightened. Your parents left this world damp and frightened.”
“Even my dad?” I meant my biological father, the progenitor that Dad had almost told me about before being erased under a billion gallons of seawater.
It was just a splash, really, good news from outer space. Even if the clouds hadn’t dissipated for three years after.
“Even your dad,” she said. “Him.”
So Dad-the-sperm-donor had been in the Northwest, too. Or Hawaii. Or coastal Alaska. Or Japan. Or on a ship at sea.
I hoped all three of their ghosts were happy somewhere, around some spiritual campfire trading stories about the boy I’d been. I wished them well, the love of each other, and even the love of me.
The past belonged to them, swept away along with the legacy of a sixth of the planet.
The future belonged to, well, maybe not me, but at the least, to itself.
* * *
Roger Waters wailed from my speakers. I swear it had been Robert Plant when I first tripped out. I lay flat, drained. My thigh was sticky where I’d come at some point. I looked down to find my torso covered with blue lip prints.
Lipstick?
I touched myself and flinched. No. Hickeys. What kind of drug trip left you with hickeys, for the love of god?
>
Aching, I dragged myself to my feet, turned down the stereo, and stepped into my kitchenette for some apple juice. Something was missing. Something was wrong.
I probed my thoughts, like a tongue questing for a missing tooth.
Grief.
My parents were still present in my absence. But the paralyzing pain, the near-total abrogation of self and initiative, seemed to be gone finally. After all these years. Was this what normal life was like? No wonder Bob had fired me.
As for Pete, the back-alley grief counselor, I owed him everything.
Heading for the tiny bedroom, I noticed something out of place in my living room as well. I stopped to look around. A woman’s silver dress was draped across the back of my couch, as if stripped in a moment of wild passion. I touched the hickeys again.
What was real?
What was true?
Something stirred in the next room. A wall of seawater finally come to claim me as well? Or the future, waiting with bruised lips and the longest legs I’d ever seen on a woman?
With a silent thanks to Bob and Pete, I stepped into the wild blue yonder, looking for truth. Or at least whatever might come next.
I was finally done with what had come before.
Angels ii: Scent of the Green Cathedral
* * *
The angels stories continue. I always did like writing in second person, which may be one of the most obnoxious things a writer can do to his readers.
* * *
You thought you knew the way. There was a path, broad and brightly lit at the first, seducing you through tangled thickets and along narrowing alleys between the boles until there was nothing left but the ache of your feet and a cathedral-green darkness all around you. The forest had become thick and treacherous, wolves in every shadow, brigands hidden in each tree.
Behind? You saw nothing. No evidence of your passage. No backward path. It was as if you had been born in this place, child of leaf and branch.
Before? Everything, leading nowhere. Just the forest’s endless sheltering shadow. It was as if you had come to die in this place, a rough beast who would slouch no further.
Then you saw the light, flickering among the branches, a star descending. Stories came to your mind, fairies of old, time stretched to taffy Under the Hill. You had never believed in them.
The light had wings, making a promise of the spark. It sailed toward you, path as smooth and sure as any river’s, to spin round your head until the very gleaming made you dizzy and you fell to the leafy loam.
“I am lost,” you croaked. “My way is gone.”
The wings spread wide then, golden pinions glowing with dawn’s rich light. Her face was beauty, a brilliant scarab frozen in the bubbling amber of God’s handiwork. Her body was a temple, desirable beyond lust. “There is always a way,” she said. “You only need ask.”
Your mouth opened, words on your tongue, breath caught in your throat, but the words would not come. Your lungs worked like bellows, creaking in your chest, but no air would move. The amber flowed from her to you, an examination by the lidless green eye of God.
Only those without sin could be saved. Only those with sin would desire salvation. To ask was error, silence a worse failing.
“I…” You finally choked the word from your lips, the sound a fishbone gone wrong, but she had already departed.
You were left with only memories of golden light and her ivory-skinned glory. Newfound beads of amber in your fist, you stumbled around a corner into sunlight and traffic. The scent of the green cathedral has never left you.
Steam, Punks, and Fairies
Spendthrift
* * *
Editor Jennifer Brozek asked me to write this story. I don’t think she quite had this end product in mind, but I had fun with it. Plus I’ve always loved flying boats. And the real-life Roubicek is a much nicer guy than I made him out to be here.
* * *
All of Merauke whispered with the rumors. The Japs are coming. Springfield McKenna didn’t place much faith in rumors. She’d traded in them far too long to lend credence to someone else’s social munitions.
The Hotel Hindia-Belanda had stood above the port town’s waterfront for two centuries, insofar as she knew. Springfield could believe that story, based on the eccentric interior fittings. The parlor seemed to have been constructed of lumber salvaged from a dozen wrecks. Parts of the walls were paneled in teak that would have fetched a fortune at auction in Honolulu or San Francisco. Other sections were raw, faded ash; gone to splinters and mottled with mysterious stains that could just as easily have been rotten durians burst in the heat or the lifeblood of a hapless crew overrun by Sea Dayaks.
The piebald interior suited the Hotel Hindia-Belanda, a piebald place in a piebald city at the edge of the Dutch East Indies. Which was, insofar as Springfield was concerned, precisely the ass end of nowhere.
She liked it that way.
Or had, until the war came creeping down the sea lanes and stepping across the islands, scaring the Dutch and the Aussies who ran most of the guns and money in these parts. Though she wouldn’t have cared to be a huisvrouw in Merauke, the fat old traders and their lean factors were happy enough to do business with an American woman who could match them drink for drink and joke for joke until the dawn came back around the curve of the world to light up another day.
Except for the damned Japanese and their damned Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
That, she thought, and a certain American bastard who traded away almost every bit of my wealth, all for a nickel.
The coin lay now on the tabletop. The familiar Indian head had been cut to a grinning skull, still wearing his braids and feathers. The old bastard looked positively happy. Which was strange, because the hobo nickel bore a patina that Springfield could barely put words to, speckled with time and hate. She could swear she heard it vibrating in her bureau drawer at night, mixing with her costume jewelry gold and her real silver.
First Ferris Roubicek had come into her life. Then he was gone again, leaving her with a broken heart, a failed business, a Japanese invasion, and a coin.
She wasn’t sure the coin wasn’t the worst of the whole business.
The scrape of chair legs prodded Springfield McKenna out of her reverie. “You still here?” asked a rough Aussie voice. Which was good, because her Dutch was crap; mostly useful for talking to bartenders and sailors.
Springfield peered up to discover that to her surprise she was mildly drunk. Otherwise Captain Waldo Innerarity, Royal Australian Air Force, wouldn’t have looked so good to her.
No way.
Not even for a moment.
He wasn’t all that bad a view to take in, she had to admit. Tall for a pilot, with the shoulders of a shore patrolman and pale blue eyes like the Andaman Sea. Ruddy from sun and drinking, brown hair with enough of a kink to argue about where all his ancestors might have come from. All of that just made him more interesting to think about.
But looking good? Waldo? She’d have sooner kissed her brother.
“You’re out of uniform,” Springfield said. Which was true but pointless. Waldo wore canvas trousers and a short-sleeved linen barong Tagalog. The embroidery looked a little queer on him.
“Uniforms might be pretty unpopular around here soon.” Waldo threw himself down in the chair with reckless disregard for the stresses involved and signaled the bartender for a drink. The Hotel Hindia-Belanda knew how all its regulars took their booze.
Springfield was pretty sure that the Indonesians and New Guineans in Merauke hated their white masters with an indiscriminate abandon, but at least around the hotel they smiled and kept their opinions behind the kitchen doors. She was careful never to order any food that could easily be spat in on the way to the table.
Sometimes one just had to trust the cook.
“Not all of ’em,” Springfield finally said, realizing she hadn’t been holding up her end of the conversation. “Jap yellow could be all the rage for the n
ext season’s fashion.”
Waldo nodded and reached for the coin on the table. She snatched it away before his big, oddly delicate fingers could close on it.
“What you got there, lass?” he asked. Inerarrity’s voice went oddly soft, as it did so often when he spoke to her. She knew what that meant, coming from a man like him.
“Nothing anyone here cares about.” That, at least, was true.
“Been taking payoffs?”
She had to laugh. “In American nickels? One at a time? You’re out of your mind, flyboy.”
He leaned forward as a sweating glass of gin garnished with a sliver of mango tapped on the table. Springfield avoided the waiter’s eye. Waldo bit his upper lip, then asked, “So if you ain’t being paid, why are you still here?”
She met his stare with a level gaze of her own. “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.” The verbal equivalent of a shrug.
“Not every somewhere is in fear of Jap bombings. Or patrols. The boys had a shootup two nights ago in the hills not forty miles east of here.”
“So I heard.” Rumors, rumors. The Japs are coming. “They’ve got a lot better things to do than knock over one-horse towns where the horse died.”
He smiled like moonlight on the Torres Strait. “You’ve got a lot better things to do than sit around waiting for one-horse towns to be knocked over.”
Springfield thought that one through for a moment. “Are you propositioning me, Leftenant Innerarity?”
His smile blossomed to a grin. “Hell no, Sheila. A man ain’t that daft. But I am trying to save your damned fool life. If you want a seat out of town, I’m flying over to Darwin in two days. Hitch a ride, see what comes next.”
The name slipped unbidden from her lips. “Ferris Roubicek.”