Magic for Beginners: Stories (24 page)

Ed’s job: stirring the Susan beer with a long, flat plank—a
floorboard Susan pried up—and skimming the foam, which has a
stringy and unpleasantly cheeselike consistency, into buckets. He
carries the buckets downstairs and makes Susan beer soufflé and
Susan beer casserole. Susan beer surprise. Upside-down Susan cake.
It all tastes the same, and he grows to like the taste.

The beer doesn’t make him drunk. That isn’t what it’s for. I
can’t tell you what it’s for. But when he’s drinking it, he isn’t
sad. He has the beer, and the work in the kitchen, and the ripe,
green fuckery. Everything tastes like Susan.

The only thing he misses is poker nights.

Up in the spare bedroom, Ed falls asleep listening to the Susans
talk, and when he wakes up, his jeans are gone, and he’s naked. The
room is empty. All the ripe Susans have gone up to the attic.

When he steps out into the hall, the little Susan is out there,
drawing on the walls. She puts her marker down and hands him a
pitcher of Susan beer. She pinches his leg and says, “You’re
getting nice and ripe.”

Then she winks at Ed and runs down the hall.

He looks at what she’s been drawing: Andrew, scribbly crayon
portraits of Andrew, all up and down the walls. He follows the
pictures of Andrew down the hall, all the way to the master bedroom
where he and the original Susan used to sleep. Now he sleeps
anywhere, with any Susan. He hasn’t been in their room in a while,
although he’s noticed the Susans going in and out with boxes full
of things. The Susans are always shooing at him when he gets in
their way.

The bedroom is full of Andrew. There are Susan’s portraits of
Andrew on the walls, the ones from her art class. Ed had forgotten
how unpleasant and peculiar these paintings are. In one, the
largest one, Andrew, life-sized, has his hands around a small
animal, maybe a ferret. He seems to be strangling it. The ferret’s
mouth is cocked open, showing all its teeth. A picture like that,
Ed thinks, you ought to turn it towards the wall at night.

Susan’s put Andrew’s bed in here, and Andrew’s books, and
Andrew’s desk. Andrew’s clothes have been hung up in the closet.
There isn’t an alien machine in the room, or for that matter,
anything that ever belonged to Ed.

Ed puts a pair of Andrew’s pants on, and lies down on Andrew’s
bed, just for a minute, and he closes his eyes.

When he wakes up, Susan is sitting on the bed. He can smell her,
that ripe green scent. He can smell that smell on himself. Susan
says, “If you’re ready, I thought we could go up to the attic
together.”

“What’s going on here?” Ed says. “I thought you needed
everything. Shouldn’t all this stuff go up to the attic?”

“This is Andrew’s room, for when he comes back,” Susan says. “We
thought it would make him feel comfortable, having his own bed to
sleep in. He might need his stuff.”

“What if the aliens need his stuff?” Ed says. “What if they
can’t make you a new Andrew yet because they don’t know enough
about him?”

“That’s not how it works,” Susan says. “We’re getting close now.
Can’t you feel it?”

“I feel weird,” Ed says. “Something’s happening to me.”

“You’re ripe, Ed,” Susan says. “Isn’t that fantastic? We weren’t
sure you’d ever get ripe enough.”

She takes his hand and pulls him up. Sometimes he forgets how
strong she is.

“So what happens now?” Ed says. “Am I going to die? I don’t feel
sick. I feel good. What happens when we get ripe?”

The afternoon light makes Susan look older, or maybe she just is
older. He likes this part: seeing what Susan looked like as a kid,
what she’ll look like as an old lady. It’s as if they got to spend
their whole lives together. “I never know,” she says. “Let’s go
find out. Take off Andrew’s pants, and I’ll hang them back up in
the closet.”

They leave the bedroom and walk down the hall. The Andrew
drawings, the knobs and dials and stacked, shiny machinery watch
them go. There aren’t any other Susans around at the moment.
They’re all busy downstairs. He can hear them hammering away. For a
minute, it’s the way it used to be, only better. Just Ed and Susan
in their own house.

Ed holds on tight to Susan’s hand.

When Susan opens the attic door, the attic is full of stars.
Stars and stars and stars. Ed has never seen so many stars. Susan
has taken the roof off. Off in the distance, they can smell the
apple trees, way down in the orchard.

Susan sits down cross-legged on the floor and Ed sits down
beside her. She says, “I wish you’d tell me a story.”

Ed says, “What kind of story?”

Susan says, “A bedtime story? When Andrew was a kid, we used to
read this book. I remember this one story about people who go under
a hill. They spend one night down there, eating and drinking and
dancing, but when they come out, a hundred years have gone by. Do
you know how long it’s been since Andrew died? I’ve lost
track.”

“I don’t know stories like that,” Ed says. He picks at his flaky
green skin and wonders what he tastes like. “What do you think the
aliens look like? Do you think they look like giraffes? Like
marbles? Like Andrew? Do you think they have mouths?”

“Don’t be silly,” Susan says. “They look like us.”

“How do you know?” Ed says. “Have you been up here before?”

“No,” Susan says. “But Susan has.”

“We could play a card game,” Ed says. “Or I Spy.”

“You could tell me about the first time I met you,” Susan
says.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Ed says. “That’s all
gone.”

“Okay, fine.” Susan sits up straight, arches her back, runs her
green tongue across her green lips. She winks at Ed and says, “Tell
me how beautiful I am.”

“You’re beautiful,” Ed says. “I’ve always thought you were
beautiful. All of you. How about me? Am I beautiful?”

“Don’t be that way,” Susan says. She slouches back against him.
Her skin is warm and greasy. “The aliens are going to get here
soon. I don’t know what happens after that, but I hate this part. I
always hate this part. I don’t like waiting. Do you think this is
what it was like for Andrew, when he was in rehab?”

“When you get him back, ask him. Why ask me?”

Susan doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then she says, “We think
we’ll be able to make you, too. We’re starting to figure out how it
works. Eventually it will be you and me and him, just the way it
was before. Only we’ll fix him the way we’ve fixed me. He won’t be
so sad. Have you noticed how I’m not sad anymore? Don’t you want
that, not to be sad? And maybe after that we’ll try making some
more people. We’ll start all over again. We’ll do everything right
this time.”

Ed says, “So why are they helping you?”

“I don’t know,” Susan says. “Either they think we’re funny, or
else they think we’re pathetic, the way we get stuck. We can ask
them when they get here.”

She stands up, stretches, yawns, sits back down on Ed’s lap,
reaches down, stuffs his penis, half-erect, inside of her. Just
like that. Ed groans.

He says, “Susan.”

Susan says, “Tell me a story.” She squirms. “Any story. I don’t
care what.”

“I can’t tell you a story,” Ed says. “I don’t know any stories
when you’re doing this.”

“I’ll stop,” Susan says. She stops.

Ed says, “Don’t stop. Okay.” He puts his hands around her waist
and moves her, as if he’s stirring the Susan beer.

He says, “Once upon a time.” He’s speaking very fast. They’re
running out of time.

Once, while they were making love, Andrew came into the bedroom.
He didn’t even knock. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed at all. Ed
doesn’t want to be fucking Susan when the aliens show up. On the
other hand, Ed wants to be fucking Susan forever. He doesn’t want
to stop, not for Andrew, or the aliens, or even for the end of the
world.

Ed says, “There was a man and a woman and they fell in love.
They were both nice people. They made a good couple. Everyone liked
them. This story is about the woman.”

This story is about a woman who is in love with somebody who
invents a time machine. He’s planning to go so far into the future
that he’ll end up right back at the very beginning. He asks her to
come along, but she doesn’t want to go. What’s back at the
beginning of the world? Little blobs of life swimming around in a
big blob? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? She doesn’t want to
play Adam and Eve; she has other things to do. She works for a
research company. She calls people on the telephone and asks them
all sorts of questions. Back at the beginning, there aren’t going
to be phones. She doesn’t like the sound of it. So her husband
says, Fine, then here’s what we’ll do. I’ll build you another
machine, and if you ever decide that you miss me, or you’re tired
and you can’t go on, climb inside this machine—this box right
here—and push this button and go to sleep. And you’ll sleep all the
way forwards and backwards to me, where I’m waiting for you. I’ll
keep on waiting for you. I love you. And so they make love and they
make love a few more times and then he climbs into his time machine
and whoosh, he’s gone like that. So fast, it’s hard to believe that
he was ever there at all. Meanwhile she lives her life forward,
slow, the way he didn’t want to. She gets married again and makes
love some more and has kids and they have kids and when she’s an
old woman, she’s finally ready: she climbs into the dusty box down
in the secret room under the orchard and she pushes the button and
falls asleep. And she sleeps all the way back, just like Sleeping
Beauty, down in the orchard for years and years, which fly by like
seconds, she goes flying back, past the men sitting around the
green felt table, now you can see them and now they’re gone again,
and all the peacocks are screaming, and the Satanist drives up to
the house and unloads the truckload of furniture, he unpaints the
pentagrams, soon the old shy man will unbuild his house, carry his
secret away on his back, and the apples are back on the orchard
trees again, and then the trees are all blooming, and now the woman
is getting younger, just a little, the lines around her mouth are
smoothing out. She dreams that someone has come down into that
underground room and is looking down at her in her time machine. He
stands there for a long time. She can’t open her eyes, her eyelids
are so heavy, she doesn’t want to wake up just yet. She dreams
she’s on a train going down the tracks backwards and behind the
train, someone is picking up the beams and the nails and the
girders to put in a box and then they’ll put the box away. The
trees are whizzing past, getting smaller and smaller and then
they’re all gone too. Now she’s a kid again, now she’s a baby, now
she’s much smaller and then she’s even smaller than that. She gets
her gills back. She doesn’t want to wake up just yet, she wants to
get right back to the very beginning where it’s all new and clean
and everything is still and green and flat and sleepy and everybody
has crawled back into the sea and they’re waiting for her to get
back there too and then the party can start. She goes backwards and
backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards
and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and
backwards—

The cheerleader says to the Devil, “We’re out of time. We’re
holding things up. Don’t you hear them banging on the door?”

The Devil says, “You didn’t finish the story.”

The cheerleader says, “And you never let me touch your tail.
Besides, there isn’t any ending. I could make up something, but it
wouldn’t ever satisfy you. You said that yourself! You’re never
satisfied. And I have to get on with my life. My parents are going
to be home soon.”

She stands up and slips out of the closet and slams the door
shut again, so fast the Devil can hardly believe it. A key turns in
a lock.

The Devil tries the doorknob, and someone standing outside the
closet giggles.

“Shush,” says the cheerleader. “Be quiet.”

“What’s going on?” the Devil says. “Open the door and let me
out—this isn’t funny.”

“Okay, I’ll let you out,” the cheerleader says. “Eventually. Not
just yet. You have to give me something first.”

“You want me to give you something?” the Devil says. “Okay,
what?” He rattles the knob, testing.

“I want a happy beginning,” the cheerleader says. “I want my
friends to be happy too. I want to get along with my parents. I
want a happy childhood. I want things to get better. I want them to
keep getting better. I want you to be nice to me. I want to be
famous, I don’t know, maybe I could be a child actor, or win
state-level spelling bees, or even just cheer for winning teams. I
want world peace. Second chances. When I’m winning at poker, I
don’t want to have to put all that money back in the pot, I don’t
want to have to put my good cards back on top of the deck, one by
one by—

Starlight says, “Sorry about that. My voice is getting scratchy.
It’s late. You should call back tomorrow night.”

Ed says, “When can I call you?”

Stan and Andrew were friends. Good friends. It was like they
were the same species. Ed hadn’t seen Stan for a while, not for a
long while, but Stan stopped him, on the way down to the basement.
This was earlier. Stan grabbed his arm and said, “I miss him. I
keep thinking, if I’d gotten there sooner. If I’d said something.
He liked you a lot, you know, he was sorry about what happened to
your car—”

Stan stops talking and just stands there looking at Ed. He looks
like he’s about to cry.

“It’s not your fault,” Ed said, but then he wondered why he’d
said it. Whose fault was it?

Susan says, “You’ve got to stop calling me, Ed. Okay? It’s three
in the morning. I was asleep, Ed, I was having the best dream.
You’re always waking me up in the middle of things. Please just
stop, okay?”