INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (12 page)

We both smile at that.

But hers disappears quickly. “But I don’t—” A tear escapes, finally, rolling down her cheek. She wipes it away angrily. “I don’t even remember his fucking name.”

She covers her face.

I leave my hand on her back while she sobs quietly. Overhead, stars shine bright in a clear night sky, the mist above us gone. I imagine I hear the Milky Way as it flows, and watch the Jade String inch across the sky while this girl weeps tears over a man she can’t remember. There’s a tightness in my chest, and I scowl at myself. I’m too old for such sentimentality.

After a time, she stops sobbing and then, after a few minutes, says with a thick voice: “Is this all there is, Omissioner?”

I pause. “Yes. This is all. Eternity is one gigantic corpse. We take our turns weeping and grieving, while great men do great things.”

She lets that ride for a few seconds and then laughs, with humour and bitterness. “Wow. Thanks for cheering me up.”

I rub her back and smile back at her. “There’s only one medicine I can recommend.” I pull a fresh bottle from my satchel. She looks up at me, eyes red, and I hold the bottle out to her, my eyebrows raised in a question mark.

“Ha,” she says, pushing her hair back from her red eyes. “I think for once you’ve got the occasion right. Pour me some damn wine.”

So we drink it all and tell each other stories as the bitter winds of the night blow down from Wu Mountain. We huddle close, letting wine and company and nostalgia warm us. She tells me splinters of what she can remember of her old life, and I tell her the parts of mine that hurt a little, but not too much, in the telling.

Too soon the mists come heavy again and the wine is gone and all we can do is walk back to the camp, and sing. It is a patriotic tune, I think, and I get more excited than an old man should and fall and hit my head. Xiaofan puts my arm over her shoulder and helps me back, while I mumble and slur and try to tell her the time I defeated the jade dragon with my wits.

She laughs. “If you told me your enemy was a jade bottle of wine I might believe you.”

***

The next day, after my hangover abates enough, I make my agreement with Xiaofan. I make a promise to her, and it is no lie.

In the weeks that follow I teach her and the others how to use the equipment in the shelter, how to record memories and how to access them. Xiaofan enters all her memories of her husband, while she still can. The cook’s boy sits on my knee while I show him how to use the programs on the screen that will, in turn, teach him to read and write. I explain to all the history of the artefacts and show the cook which wines he may use for cooking, making sure he writes it all down on his memory card.

After one month, my end of the deal is done, and I ask Xiaofan to fulfil hers.

She does. She helps me escape.

Just before dusk, during her watch, she hugs me fiercely. “Stay safe, old turtle,” she says. Then she lets me leave.

***

The boat starts when I press the ignition button, sputtering itself into existence. I had one, brief chance to test the engine two weeks earlier. It started straight away then, as well. I smile, despite myself.

Then the engine stops, and so does my smile. I press the button again, jabbing it until my finger hurts. Nothing happens. I check the power pack: it is dead. The solar collectors must no longer function. This boat, like this world, is an illusion.

I sit in the gunwale of the boat, feet sodden, my fight as dead as the battery. The wind picks up my old white hair, holding it vertical in the breeze, like the crest of a wild crane. My hands rest on my thighs, palms open, as though in supplication.

My wife and my two sons, they are this ache in my chest. My too-young wife with her crooked smile, touching my shoulder as I sit writing my poems, and my too-energetic sons, waiting to throw the ball with me. They are this numbness where my soul should be. I weep the bitter tears of defeat and pray this plague of forgetting blesses me again and again, removes them from my mind. That my mind fades as this day closes: in a purple dusk, beautiful in its remnants, then gone forever.

My wife and sons are lost. An old turtle like me can’t make a journey of five thousand
Li
, even if I could get this boat working. A hundred more rivers like this and a thousand more paths besides, they are too far, for this old man. My heart, I think, has always known it. My choices now are death, or to endure.

It’s a shame I’m too stubborn and selfish for death.

The clouds run close to the ground now, dark on a darkling earth. I sit here, unable to feel my feet, and watch the memory of the world pass away. I smile and think: at least, at the end, there will be wine.

***

T.R. Napper is an aid worker, stay-at-home father, and writer. He is a Writers of the Future winner and his non-fiction has been widely published. ‘Dark on a Darkling Earth’ was inspired by the life and poetry of the great Du Fu. The translation of one of his poems in this story is by David Young, and has been reproduced with Mr Young’s permission. T.R. Napper currently lives in Ha Noi, Vietnam. His website can be found at 
www.nappertime.com
, and he can be found here on twitter: @DarklingEarth.

JULIE C. DAY

Illustrated by Richard Wagner

Drive long enough and you can find anything. Copper-eyed goddesses. Gilded August afternoons. That arid stretch of Oregonian high desert in the southeastern corner of the state. Keep driving and you might catch something even more precious – a path through. Perhaps even a fairy tale ending. That’s what Amber promised me during that long ago summer.

Didn’t matter. Back then the girl could have said almost anything and I wouldn’t have listened.

Each Saturday morning I drove while Amber sat beside me, watching the miles slide by. Unwanted photographs and half-finished journals, scratched and dusty vinyl, Amber knew exactly what she wanted. Bessie Smith’s ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’ or, better yet, early Helen Hume and Anita O’Day before the heroin slide. “Oregon’s true spirit” was Amber’s term for all that transformed darkness. As though I had the slightest idea what she meant.

That particular Saturday morning, Amber was already waiting on the front step when I pulled up in my truck. She stood pressed against the handrail, as far from her mother as physically possible. Amber’s mom sat hunched in the sunshine, picking at the scabs that ran along her too-thin arms.

It was just Amber and Mrs Destros. Amber’s dad, Mr Destros, had disappeared months ago, just before Amber and I had started going out. “Didn’t even bother to show me the way” was all Amber’s mom would say on the subject. Somehow, I had the sense Amber knew exactly where her dad had landed.

“Hey, babe,” I called from the open passenger window. Amber bolted down the stairs and across the weed-strewn yard while Amber’s mom stopped picking at her scabs long enough to grab a nearby metal can opener.

“Let’s go,” Amber said as she opened the passenger door. “You’re fucking late,” she added.

“Sunstone?” Amber’s mom had started waving the can opener in our direction. “Sunstone? I’m only trying to help. No one else gives a shit if you ever find the way. Not like me. Not like Dad pretended to.”

“Brilliant parenting, Mom,” Amber said through the open passenger window. “Stellar, in fact. I said let’s go,” she repeated, turning in my direction.

“You look hot, you know? Combustible,” I clarified as I put the truck into drive. And she really did. Back then Amber smoldered with some strange amalgam of rage and pain: flushed skin, scorched honey-dust eyes – and those breasts.

Amber glared at me. “What the hell are you smiling at?”

“Nice try, but I’m not even close to angry,” I said, steering the Ford away from the curb and her mom’s strange obsession. Hopefully, the gas would last.

Amber’s house was littered with can openers: easy-grip double-wheels, standard butterflies, and those old-fashioned church keys that you punch down against the can. “The same old parent shit – just with spirits and crumbly bits,” Amber told me the one time I bothered to ask.

“What?”

“They like to snort it. Or she does, I guess. Dad did too, before he cut out.”

“Snort what? Tuna fish and cling peaches?” I ignored the dig about her missing dad.

“All sorts of stuff. Basically whatever might push them through.”

“Huh.” After that I left the topic well enough alone. Asking Amber too many questions was exactly the wrong sort of hassle. Like why she called me her “little catalyst”. Like why her mom kept talking about “Oregon’s Golden Realm”.

“So where the fuck were you?” Amber leaned forward and turned on the radio. “I’ve been waiting for almost half an hour out there with
her
and her kitchen utensils.”

“Still not angry.” I rolled down my window and turned onto Highway 206 and the empty miles between central Oregon’s fade-away towns. “You get as mad as you want. Doesn’t matter to me. ‘No feelings’ Larry, right? I’m your ‘no demands’, ‘no expectations’ guy.”

Amber laughed, flecks of smoke-tinged gold shining from her eyes. “God, I really love you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, refusing to parrot back her words. Girls and their feelings were dangerous – this girl anyway, busily tracing her secret path.

Home for both of us was on the wrong side of the Cascade Mountains. Our stretch of Oregon was full of barely-there towns, faded aluminum siding, and old men in lawn chairs, waiting for the reappearance of something even they suspected would never return.

According to Amber, towns like Wasco weren’t just small-town Oregon. They were entry points into the true Oregon, Oregon’s spirit realm.

Maybe, and maybe not, but back then I could drive my truck forever if it meant I’d get laid.

“Amber?” I tried, slipping one hand between her thighs.

“Shh, Larry, I’m concentrating.” Amber swatted me away. The wind came through the open windows, whipping her dark hair into a shroud that covered her eyes and mouth.

“Come on, babe,” I said. “Sing me one of your old-timey songs.”

That got her attention.

Some days, Amber was just a girl with faded bruises and stories she didn’t share. Other days she sang. Those hot-and-crumbly ghosts, she claimed, required her music before they’d reveal the path’s next turn.

God, Amber could sing. Billie Holiday and Etta James took me that way, but Amber was the real thing: an “old soul” carrier, all ashy with second-hand shame.

***

It took two songs and thirty minutes to flush out our prey.

“This is it,” Amber said, pointing to a trailer home set in a patch of hemlock and pine. There were no other people in sight, just a woman with stiff, salt-and-pepper hair and a rough slash of lipstick.

“Hey,” I said as I stepped down from the cab. The old lady nodded but remained silent. The two of us watched Amber pick through the tables of stuff: a box of Nancy Drew novels covered in tattered dust jackets, a crockpot with a brittle-looking cord, a broken wicker basket filled with buttons.

“Larry.” Amber held up a dented metal cylinder about ten inches tall. Inside, I could see red-and-white drinking straws.

“You sure?”

“Definitely.”

“Eighteen dollars.” The old lady frowned, daring either of us to argue.

“Give the lady her money, Larry,” Amber said with a grin.

“Okay,” I said, pretending to reach for my wallet.

Then we were both sprinting for the truck, Amber still wrestling with the cab door as I pulled away – fast.

That’s what I remember about that Saturday in August: red-and-white straws and the two of us laughing as we traveled west along Highway 206. Blue skies all the way.

Forget souls or emotional vibrations; truth is ghosts are closer to ambered flies trapped in their own past. How much do they even notice the needs of the living? That’s the question neither of us thought to ask. Amber assumed the ghosts were trying to help, and perhaps they were, but there are only so many ways to use those red-and-white drinking straws.

No more Saturday morning drives. No more flushed cheeks while my hands slid down Amber’s naked belly. Those first few weeks of August were all the same: me standing in the gloom of Amber’s basement, waiting impatiently as she worked on her homemade pixie sticks.

A single light bulb hung overhead. A can opener rested on the edge of the table, ignored, at least for now. Amber had never explained its presence. She didn’t need to. Even then I knew it was Amber’s metaphorical cyanide pill, her option of last resort.

“Get this right and it’ll be even better than my ‘old-timey’ songs,” Amber promised yet again. Her voice sounded grim. There were dark circles under her eyes and a tightness to her lips. The pink streaks in her dark hair, though, still made me think of melt-in-your-mouth spun sugar.

“Maybe the old lady’s straws weren’t the key after all.”

Amber grunted but otherwise ignored my comment.

I’d been sampling Amber’s pixie sticks every night for the last week. No snorting; that was one of Amber’s few rules. We swallowed it all down: the powdered nutmeg and straight-up sugar, the pulverized shrooms and crushed Necco Wafers, we even cooked up a homemade extract of weed, plastic-bottle vodka, and honey.

Kids’ stuff. The two of us searching for that path through to our fairy tale ending.

I shifted restlessly, watching from a spot just behind Amber’s chair as she taped shut the end of yet another straw, added the Ritalin I’d scored, and then poured in my favorite version of her sugar chasers: Sour Patch Kid remnants she’d saved from a grocery store candy-run the week before.

“The kick at the end” was my name for that sweet, acidic tingle. A taste like cotton-candy rage coating the back of my throat as we fucked.

I reached out and touched the nape of Amber’s neck, frowning as her shoulders stiffened. This basement stuff was getting old.

“Just five more minutes,” Amber muttered.

“Right.” I turned away from Amber and her latest soon-to-fail experiment, kicking a can opener left at the bottom of the basement stairs. It made a satisfying clatter as it skidded across the floor. My sneakers scuffled out my progress as I followed the can opener toward the dimness of the far wall.

“No going back there. You promised, Larry,” Amber said, still not looking at me.

“Okay,” I said. But I didn’t stop. Amber’s game was going nowhere. It was my turn at spirit guide.

I pulled the cord of a nearby light and leaned in for a closer look. All I could see were metal shelves set across the length of the cinder block wall. Each shelf was filled with rows of dusty cans the size and shape of canned tomatoes but copper-colored with thick, lead seams. Some of the cans had mineral bleeds of blue and turquoise. A few still had partial labels, more than half worn off.

I grabbed a can. Already its coppery weight felt so much better than any candy-coated pixie stick. On the ragged bit of label, I could make out the word ‘Hospital’ in bold, black letters. And higher up, typed in fainter print, was a name. ‘Maisel’.

“Amber, check this out.”

“You fucking promised.” For once Amber was looking straight at me.

“Explain why again,” I said, striding back with the ‘Maisel’ can in my hand.

“Dad left them here. When they closed the hospital, they didn’t even bury their ghosts. Just left behind all that ash. He was the only one who cared. Well – knew how to use them,” she amended.

The light bulb above Amber drew strange shadows across her face. Still, there was something funny about her expression. Sadness maybe? Anger? Euphoria, as well. The girl was ready to burst with it.

“Looks like he already opened some of them.” I grabbed Amber’s can opener and gave the ‘Maisel’ can a quick shake. Even before I cracked it open, I could feel the ashes inside, just waiting for the two of us to say hello. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I said, grinning.

Amber stared at me, but didn’t answer.

***

Despite Amber’s rules, turns out swallowing ashes works just fine, no snorting necessary. Ghosts really aren’t all that fussy.

That first time I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Amber though, her hand trembled as she held the red-and-white straw to her lips.

“Old souls take me away,” she mumbled, and then tilted her head back, swallowing the contents down in one long slide. She didn’t even bother with a sugar chaser. Almost immediately her face seemed to harden, her skin flushed a bloody red, her lips pinched and cracking. When she spoke her eyes looked far too dark. “Your turn, dearest.” The laugh that followed was a gritty rough sound, nothing like my Amber.

I sucked in my own strawful. It was like being rinsed clean, my own thoughts tossed aside as I slipped into someone else’s groove. Forget indulging in her sad-sack games. Maisel and I had another agenda.

Amber didn’t look angry anymore and she didn’t look scared. Her entire torso trembled, as though under the thrall of some kind of palsy. She stood in the middle of that damp basement, the musty scent of mold filling her nostrils as her eyes rolled and her cracked lips bled. Meanwhile, my own body was getting warmer, burning up. No shakes, though. No spirit visions either. Just heat, as though the energy from Amber’s shaking body was combusting me from the inside out. My hands reached for her, tearing at her T-shirt, her jeans, at that thin piece of cotton between her legs.

“Don’t worry, baby,” Maisel said, using Amber’s voice. “I still like to fuck.”