Stories: All-New Tales ngss-1 Page 41

  His thin, grey face with its grey toothbrush moustache became earnest. “In spite of anything Rex says?”

  We promised.

  “Or anything he tells you? Or I tell you?” This was puzzling, but we agreed. Once he had our promises, he drew a long breath. Then: “You know, don’t you, what he was doing with Jenny?”

  “We don’t want to.” Lucinda spoke before I could answer. Of course I wanted him to tell me.

  “Okay.” Chick turned on his pillows. “Probably just as well.”

  Lu and I drove home in unspeaking silence.

  Chick died a few days later. In late August many friends were on holiday and couldn’t make it to the funeral. Rex blamed them, of course. If Chick’s frail old dad could make the trip, then surely…? I went to stay with him. He was dazed. He’d found Chick’s diaries before we could. “I never realised what he gave up. Why he was so unhappy.” I pointed out that journals are almost always misleading. We use them to record miseries, frustrations of the moment, anger we don’t want to put into the air. We didn’t need them when we were content. But he refused to be comforted. He had failed Chick. That’s all he had to say. He was drinking again.

  Rex was very particular about the funeral, insisting we wear what he called “full mourning,” which meant black hats and veils for women, suits and ties for men. There were only seven of us in the Grasmere cemetery where Chick wanted to be buried. Rex bore his grief through his familiar haughty disguise. Lucinda had organized the funeral meats, such as they were. Rex had insisted on everything being simple. Chick had wanted the same. After we had all gone to bed or home, Rex sat down in his study and phoned everyone who hadn’t been able to make it. If they didn’t pick up, he left messages on their machines. Not the usual whimsical tales. He told them what he and Chick had always said behind their backs about their lack of talent, their ugly child, their gigantic ego, their terrible cooking, their bad taste. When Rex hurt, everyone got hurt. Next day, high on his own vengeance, he told me in a series of vignettes what he’d done. Some of the people phoned me next. Many were in tears. Almost all tried to forgive him. Several wanted to know if he was right. My daughter Cass had given him Helena’s regards and been snubbed so badly by Rex she was still crying when she got through to me. She was readier to forgive him than I was.

  About a week later, while Lu visited her hypochondriacal mother, I went over to see how Rex was doing. He’d been drinking heavily. “I’m glad you came,” he said. “I wanted you to know about a favour I did you a few years back.” I cooked us dinner, after which he told me what he’d done for me. He was sure I’d be pleased, he said. I didn’t know who he was mocking. Gasping and yelping with pain from the arthritis brought on by the booze, he poked up the fire and poured us cognacs. Then he started with the slow, dramatic relish he reserved for his readings. I suppose you could call it a revenge tale, with all the elements he enjoyed in Balzac and the Jacobeans. Soon after Jenny and I split up, and blaming her for “luring” him into the threesome with which he had taunted Chick, Rex became, in his words, her confessor, suggesting ideas to her for sexual adventures, often helping her make specific contacts and introducing her to what he called his list of “forty famous perverts.” He had sometimes accompanied her to dinners and parties, encouraging her to risks she’d never have dared take on her own. “I drove her farther and farther down that road, Mike. You’d have loved it! Whenever she faltered I was there encouraging her to stay the course. I told her heroin wasn’t addictive!” (Luckily he’d only been able to persuade her to snort it.) “I convinced her she was a natural whore. I became her best friend, just as Vautrin took Emma under his wing!” That terrible, self-approving chuckle followed as he sat there in his big leather chair overlooking the darkening fell, staring in sardonic satisfaction at the sky, speaking in the tones of measured mockery usually reserved for his satirical verse. “I knew you wanted to do it but couldn’t. So I took your revenge for you, Mike!”

  “Jesus, Rex. She didn’t deserve…I would never…”

  “Oh, Mike, you know what she deserved. You’d never do it, but Vautrin could, eh? I learned the lessons of Balzac better than you ever did!” At that point, as the world grew darker and the fire reflected on his face, he was every inch Balzac’s monster, apparently completely mad. I felt physically sick, concerned for his sanity, deeply sorry for Jenny. I wondered if Lucinda had guessed what had gone on. Was that why she had refused to let Chick tell us anything? Rex relished every revelation. Giggling, he explained how he persuaded her to do something particularly demeaning. I was no sadist but of course he was. He could hate women. He went on for ages, offering chapter and verse, names, places, bringing all the horror and misery back. He explained little mysteries, offered anecdotes, consequences, a whole catalogue of betrayal. Chick could not have known the half of it. I wanted to walk out on him there and then but I was too fascinated. Besides, I had promised Chick I would stand by Rex. I couldn’t abandon him. This was Rex’s way of being my friend. I knew how much he relished revenge. He sincerely believed others merely pretended not to take the same pleasure in it.

  I had promised to stay the night. By the time I went to bed, I had nothing to say to him. I knew how kind he could often be, how kind he had been to Jenny. I could hardly imagine such complicated, elaborate cruelty. Around three A.M. I took a couple of sleeping pills and woke up at eight on a wonderful sunny morning. Under a clear grey-blue sky the granite glittered and the grass glowed. Rex was down in the big, stone-flagged kitchen making breakfast. I ate it as if it might be poisoned. Standing in his drive beside my car, I hugged him. “I love you, Rex,” I said. And I did, even at that moment, when I could barely look at him. He paused, appearing to consider this. Then he teared up, making that muted humming sound I became used to hearing when he searched for an appropriate word, the little smack of his lips and intake of breath when he’d found it.

  “I love you, too,” he said at last.

  I got home that afternoon. I’d had to pull over twice to collect myself. Lucinda was still out. I’d hoped so much she would be home before me. The message light was flickering on the phone. I had a sickening premonition something had happened to her. But it was Rex sounding dramatically cheerful, a sure sign he’d been drinking. “Hi, Mike! I know you’re off ratting with your friend the vicar and your Jack Russells. Clearly you’ve no time to spend for poor old Rex…” And so on until the machine cut him off. I was relieved I’d taken longer getting home. When Lu finally arrived with fish and chips from the local, she was too full of her own frustrations with her mother to notice my mood so I explained how I was tired from staying up all night with Rex.

  We saw a bit more of Rex after that. Because I would never know anything different, I decided to treat most of what he'd told me that night as an elaborate fiction. I was probably right. A couple of months later, as if he had been practicing on me with the Jenny story, he began writing again. At first I was relieved, but we eventually realised he was unable to finish anything. He had lost his gift for narrative, his sense of the future. We did all we could to encourage him, to keep him engaged. The ideas themselves were as brilliant as ever. He phoned to read me a couple of opening paragraphs over the answer machine and they were so good, so typical of Rex at his best, Lucinda wouldn’t let me erase them. When I was home he might read several pages, even a chapter. But two chapters were the most he could manage of anything. Chick had always been the one to help with construction. After I stopped editing he wouldn’t let me do it anymore. He claimed Chick’s diary had left him unable to complete a story. “Maybe because I know how it finishes. How they all finish.”

  Rex had spent his whole life telling stories. There wasn’t much I could say. He was still writing narrative verse and every fortnight or so he would phone again with the start of a new story, still leaving it on the machine if we weren’t in.

  Then his troubles began to increase. Phoning him I learned how he was threatened by the VAT authorities because of his
failure to send in his forms or how a builder had gone off on a second job in the middle of fixing the library roof, how rain was drenching his books. I’d go over and do what I could but eventually I’d have to return home. I felt horribly guilty, recalling my promise to Chick. Not that I failed to remind Rex of what Chick had mentioned, but I couldn’t be there the whole time. Often he seemed to resent our help. I suppose the boxed wine he bought by mail order didn’t help. He ate a lot, but badly for a diabetic, and for all the various domestic disasters, which his friends coped with pretty well among us, things appeared to improve with time. If anything his grasp on reality seemed to strengthen. He broke down less and began going to a few parties and conferences. He made his peace with the friends he’d insulted and was mostly forgiven. Optimistically, we spoke of him as becoming his old self again. He was introspective in a positive way.

  When another August came round he seemed pretty positive. He might start off feeling miserable but conversation soon cheered him up. We’d share a piece of gossip or make fun of a good friend. That was how we were. He joked about Chick, too. I saw that as another sign of healing. Lucinda could always tell who was on the phone because of the laughter. I spoke to him on the first Monday in September. He was drunk, but no more than usual. He’d sent me an e-mail, he said. This was unusual. He hated e-mail as a rule. So I went to my PC and there it was. Rex rarely offered that amount of self-revelation and this had the feel of a continuing conversation, maybe with himself. It knocked me back a bit. So much that I made plans to see him the following weekend. It was as short as it was shocking:

  “The story I never wrote was the story of my life, my unhappiness at failing to convince my father of my worth. I tried so hard, but I never had the courage or the method to tell that story. I wrote to impress. The verses always had to be witty, the prose clever. You remember me telling you, when we were young, how scared I was about dropping my guard. Truth wasn’t as important as success to me. I needed to impress the people my dad approved of. Nobody else’s opinion meant much. Either he saw me in the Saturday Evening Post or I simply didn’t exist as a writer.” I think he’d planned to say more, but that’s all there was.

  On the Thursday, Jimmy Cornish called and told me Rex was dead. The rest was in the obits. Gone but not forgiven.

  I had failed to keep my word to Chick. I hadn’t found the bullets. I should have spoken to his accountant. I should have helped him back to AA. I’ve never understood booze. People have to be rolling in the gutter singing “Nellie Dean” before I get the picture. I missed all the signs and fell down on a solemn promise. Not for the first time. I never gave a promise to a child I couldn’t keep, but I made a habit of breaking them to adults. Rex knew exactly what he was doing. I’m not the only survivor still running scenarios through their head. If I’d found the gun and stolen it…If I’d checked to see how much he was drinking…If I’d listened more closely…

  Rex wrote some great ghost stories. When it came to haunting his friends, he was a bloody expert. What he’d done to Jenny told me he knew exactly what he was up to. People say all ghost stories are optimistic because they show a belief in life after death. Equally, all artists are optimists because the act of creation is optimistic in itself. Rex’s poems and openings are still on our machine. Lu won’t erase them. On a bad night I’ll pour myself a glass of wine and press the button until I hear his voice. I’ll listen to his gentle mockery as he invents an outrageous tale about my getting my toe stuck in the bath’s hot tap or being arrested for vagrancy on my way back from a climb. He always gets cut off. If I’m feeling up to it, I’ll listen the way you listen to a sweet, familiar tune.

  I think that was the real reason why, after Chick’s death, Rex never completed anything. There was only one story he really had to tell and from deep habit he had repressed it, choosing suicide rather than write it. “The Story of Rex and Chick.” Even under such dreadful stress he couldn’t let it come out. He had destroyed Chick’s journals to ensure it never would be known. And then he had destroyed himself.

  Rather than dwell on that I’ll listen to his familiar fantasies once again. Then I’ll turn off the machine, curse the bastard for a liar and a coward and a calculating fucking sadist, pick up one of his books and head for bed, glad enough, I guess, that I still have a few stories of my own to tell and some rotten bloody friends to remember.

  Elizabeth Hand. THE MAIDEN FLIGHT OF MCCAULEY’S Bellerophon

  BEING ASSIGNED TO THE HEAD for eight hours was the worst security shift you could pull at the museum. Even now, thirty years later, Robbie had dreams in which he wandered from the Early Flight gallery to Balloons amp; Airships to Cosmic Soup, where he once again found himself alone in the dark, staring into the bland gaze of the famous scientist as he intoned his endless lecture about the nature of the universe.

  “Remember when we thought nothing could be worse than that?” Robbie stared wistfully into his empty glass, then signaled the waiter for another bourbon and Coke. Across the table, his old friend Emery sipped a beer.

  “I liked the Head,” said Emery. He cleared his throat and began to recite in the same portentous tone the famous scientist had employed. “Trillions and trillions of galaxies in which our own is but a mote of cosmic dust. It made you think.”

  “It made you think about killing yourself,” said Robbie. “Do you want to know how many times I heard that?”

  “A trillion?”

  “Five thousand.” The waiter handed Robbie a drink, his fourth. “Twenty-five times an hour, times eight hours a day, times five days a week, times five months.”

  “Five thousand, that’s not so much. Especially when you think of all those trillions of galleries. I mean galaxies. Only five months? I thought you worked there longer.”

  “Just that summer. It only seemed like forever.”

  Emery knocked back his beer. “A long time ago, in a gallery far, far away,” he intoned, not for the first time.

  Thirty years before, the Museum of American Aviation and Aerospace had just opened. Robbie was nineteen that summer, a recent dropout from the University of Maryland, living in a group house in Mount Rainier. Employment opportunities were scarce; making $3.40 an hour as a security aide at the Smithsonian’s newest museum seemed preferable to bagging groceries at Giant Food. Every morning he’d punch his time card in the guards’ locker room and change into his uniform. Then he’d duck outside to smoke a joint before trudging downstairs for the morning meeting and that day’s assignments.

  Most of the security guards were older than Robbie, with backgrounds in the military and an eye on future careers with the D.C. police department or FBI. Still, they tolerated him with mostly good-natured ribbing about his longish hair and bloodshot eyes. All except for Hedge, the security chief. He was an enormous man with a shaved head who sat, knitting, behind a bank of closed-circuit video monitors, observing tourists and guards with an expression of amused contempt.

  “What are you making?” Robbie once asked. Hedge raised his hands to display an intricately patterned baby blanket. “Hey, that’s cool. Where’d you learn to knit?”

  “Prison.” Hedge’s eyes narrowed. “You stoned again, Opie? That’s it. Gallery Seven. Relieve Jones.”

  Robbie’s skin went cold, then hot with relief when he realized Hedge wasn’t going to fire him. “Seven? Uh, yeah, sure, sure. For how long?”

  “Forever,” said Hedge.

  “Oh, man, you got the Head.” Jones clapped his hands gleefully when Robbie arrived. “Better watch your ass, kids’ll throw shit at you,” he said, and sauntered off.

  Two projectors at opposite ends of the dark room beamed twin shafts of silvery light onto a head-shaped Styrofoam form. Robbie could never figure out if they’d filmed the famous scientist just once, or if they’d gone to the trouble to shoot him from two different angles.

  However they’d done it, the sight of the disembodied Head was surprisingly elective: it looked like a hologram floating amid the hundreds
of back-projected twinkly stars that covered the walls and ceiling. The creep factor was intensified by the stilted, slightly puzzled manner in which the Head blinked as it droned on, as though the famous scientist had just realized his body was gone, and was hoping no one else would notice. Once, when he was really stoned, Robbie swore that the Head deviated from its script.

  “What’d it say?” asked Emery. At the time he was working in the General Aviation Gallery, operating a flight simulator that tourists clambered into for three-minute rides.

  “Something about peaches,” said Robbie. “I couldn’t understand, it sort of mumbled.”

  Every morning, Robbie stood outside the entrance to Cosmic Soup and watched as tourists streamed through the main entrance and into the Hall of Flight. Overhead, legendary aircraft hung from the ceiling. The 1903 Wright Flyer with its Orville mannequin; a Lilienthal glider; the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. From a huge pit in the center of the Hall rose a Minuteman III ICBM, rust-colored stains still visible where a protester had tossed a bucket of pig’s blood on it a few months earlier. Directly above the entrance to Robbie’s gallery dangled the Spirit of St. Louis. The aides who worked upstairs in the planetarium amused themselves by shooting paper clips onto its wings.

  Robbie winced at the memory. He gulped what was left of his bourbon and sighed. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Tempus fugit, baby. Thinking of which-” Emery dug into his pocket for a BlackBerry. “Check this out. From Leonard.”

  Robbie rubbed his eyes blearily, then read.

  From: l.scopes@MAAA.SI.edu

  Subject: Tragic Illness

  Date: April 6, 7:58:22 P.M. EDT

  To: emeryubergeek@gmail.com

  Dear Emery,

  I just learned that our Maggie Blevin is very ill. I wrote her at Christmas but never heard back. Fuad El-Hajj says she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer last fall. Prognosis is not good. She is still in the Fayetteville area, and I gather is in a hospice. I want to make a visit though not sure how that will go over. I have something I want to give her but need to talk to you about it.