Shiva and Other Stories (13 page)
Read Shiva and Other Stories Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg,Catska Ench,Cory Ench
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #Short Stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #Time Travel
Perhaps in some other way, some other simulacrum of Stanford might have worked out a different situation, he thinks, but that is beyond him. Most things are beyond him. He trudges onward, this traveler of the late millennium, seized not by limitation but by purpose as he considers the many advancing millennia through which he may be able to consider this condition.
Last slide, please
Here is Stanford, confronting the bleak and illimitable landscape of imponderable millennia, not trudging, holding fast now, trying to establish some final understanding of his condition. “This was the price, wasn’t it?” he says to the djinn. “But what if I hadn’t asked for immortality? Would I still have been condemned to this wasteland?” Stanford chooses not to discuss the apocalypse which—like everything else—is many millennia behind him. He is thinking not now of the Biblical but the practical. “That was the plan all along, right?” he says.
The djinn—still in punk guise, he is kind of fond of it, he has decided, and finds it the most amenable of all the guises he had adopted through his own imponderable progression of time seized—says, “I don’t know. I don’t think of this as punishment. I don’t think of this as anything at all. I told you, djinns have no understanding of metaphor. One thing doesn’t stand for another thing; it simply
is
. That’s the best way to carry on our condition.”
“It’s monstrous,” Stanford says. Millions of years have thickened his lungs, stuck in his throat, made his speech guttural, although otherwise he is more or less the same guy, only burdened by the sheer dimensions of his knowledge. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known. Who wants to hang around like this? And it’s all turned out the same.”
“Well,” the djinn says, snapping gum and adopting a more convincing guise although it has not been necessary for a very long time to masquerade, to adopt a convincing persona, “that’s like the total unit of it, you know? The sameness of everything? But you had to find that out on your own.”
“It’s crazy,” Stanford says. Here is Stanford, still trying to be sane at the edge of the world, but admitting to craziness as a cunning way of deferring, he thinks, an inevitability. He is wrong. He has always been wrong, although less than ever is this a proper concern. “The wishes had nothing to do with it, did they? This was all set out from the beginning.”
“I don’t know” the djinn says. For sport, he turns into an Arabian potentate of frightening mien,
whisk!
one exercise of transmogrification, and he fixes Stanford with unblinking and terrifying eyes. “It is all in the cause of prophecy, of course. The prophetic is the absolute,” the djinn says mysteriously and then strides off (as the djinn has been so apt to do over these millennia), leaving Stanford once again alone, amidst the dusk and dirt of exhausted possibility, looking at the gray band of sky against the gray ribbon of river, trying to find some conjunction that cannot exist.
“Three wishes,” Stanford says, “
three
wishes.” He seems to want to say more and if there were an observer to consider the situation, there might from Stanford be some outpouring of final revelation. But there is no observer, all observation ceased long ago, and so it is not possible to judge what has been said. Second millennial man confronts the fullness of his destiny against that gray and diminished ribbon of sky and for the meaning of all this, for its implication and portent, one must as always turn elsewhere. The situation is not inconsiderable, but it is far beyond Stanford’s means to apprehend.
The unbottling
Stanford twists the stopper, yanks at it, feels it leap within his hand, and then the steam begins its arc through the spaces of his riverfront digs, his hand clutched with the arthritic imprint of something at last beyond his control. Swirls and steam convulse in the ceiling, and from their outline congeals a figure which Stanford feels he may recognize from old books, half-glimpsed in childhood. Perhaps not. It is very difficult to keep a steady eye on all of this. At length, something which might be human streams from the ceiling, settles before him, grants him a wink from a glazed eye under a turbaned cap. “That is a pleasure and a portent,” the figure says, “and in return I am prepared for the most minimal arrangements to offer you three wishes. Three wishes which will change your life. You must, however, embark upon them quickly; otherwise my power and obligation will disappear and nothing, nothing at all will happen.” The eye is watery but filled with conviction. “It will be for your best interest to choose quickly,” the figure says.
Stanford, who had only wanted a wine cooler and a light, easily absorbed drunk before dinner, stares in fixity and fascination. From the depths he feels an obscene necessity, a certain pornographic recognition and even as he tries to deny those emotions they seem to flood him as the steam has flooded his upscale but distinctly underfurnished condominium.
“I can’t name my wants so easily,” Stanford says. “Nothing like this has happened before.”
“Everyone,” the figure says, “can codify his wants. It goes with being human.” It stares at him solemnly and this time winks. “You may call me Djinn,” he says. “That is not my name, I
have
no name, but that is my condition and the condition is as close to naming as you may become. All power, possibility, all riches lie within your means if you choose correctly,” the djinn says. “If you do not, of course, the opportunity has vanished. It is almost time,” the djinn says. “It is almost time, it is nearly time, it
is
time as my power already crumbles.”
Stanford, dismayed, twists his thumb in the bottle; there is, of course, nothing else. Contemplating, formed to full attention, he considers the djinn while the djinn considers him and it is as if the full weight of his futile meanderings and convolutions has come upon him and with it the desire to change, to shift the focus of his being toward some kind of adjustment and possibility.
“I’m thinking about it,” Stanford says. “Let me think about it. I’m thinking about it as fast as I can.”
The lights, please
“The lights, please,” Stanford says, staring out at the impossible and ravaged deadlands, but of course there are no lights. There are no lights and no djinn to rekindle them. There is, however, a profusion of memory and for all I know, Stanford is recycling it at this very recollected moment while the rest of you are, I am empowered to say, dismissed. Please do not crowd the aisles and leave the visual aids you have been given on the front desk.
Ready When You Are
T
HE WORLD IN HIS WORKS—
* * *
Finzie, the big producer, biggest guy in the industry now, hovered over the lush blonde, his limbs poised for long, cool, detached entrance but—knowing better the insistent demands of collusion—gave into it with a sigh, sighed and gave into it, penetrated his partner, the most desirable and successful romantic star in the Western world, an absolute top star, feeling the shock of uncoiling, the gathering as if from his most distant places of a soft and baleful scream. What a deal this whole thing was, what a wonder!—and in his mind the film unreeled, slow dissolve to close-in shot, the heaving and thrashing of the bodies. Soft-core only, no detail shots, the genitalia discreetly covered. From the corner of one eye, in diminished perspective, Finzie caught a slash of Mediterranean, a slash of sun passing through clouds in this beaming and pleasant landscape. Oh boy, oh boy the big producer, a real hero thought, if only I could send a memo back to Flatbush Avenue, to that thirteen-year-old pounding himself in the familial bed, trying to put his strokes where they would make the least noise and do the most good. Made it, made it, made it! Finzie advised his thirteen-year-old self and pan shot into the blonde, Dorothea Harkins from Easton, Pennsylvania, transmogrified by the star system and clever agents to Eve Harlow and all his, his, his property now in this equipment room of the most exquisite furniture and design.
And later, later then: Eve Harlow was sent to her room to lie in diaphanous, dreaming splendor and Finzie took a stroll through the garden of Cannes, surrounded by cameras and reporters, sycophants and jury, the troops trembling with their divergent and physical needs as he strode to the judging panel where he would make the long-anticipated announcement: Finzie was going global. Astonishing Productions would link with Italian financiers, Japanese bankers, ancient French money, British quick-hit money, the substance of the secret governments worldwide for a long-term contract which would carry the Finzie vision in eighteen languages and thirty-seven separate versions to all of the corridors and pockets of the world. In Zaire, voices dubbed in Swahili would articulate the political subtext; in Sweden, actors with heavy American accents would put dour Scandinavian words to the Finzie vision of compassion transcendent. Premier filmmaker to the world, orphan king of the 21st century, he feels the spectacular glow of close-in lights heating his features to ruddy and tumescent glory.
* * *
So Finzie, superhero, once tormented film-struck kid in the Flatlands of Brooklyn but now creator, producer, and director of a dozen increasingly important films limning the alienation and splendor of post-industrial circumstance, modestly accepts the laurel of the Leaf of Gold from the chairman of the jury, bows to the convulsion of applause which storms through the auditorium, then holds the microphone to make a brief speech which will be translated simultaneously into twenty languages and broadcast throughout the world. Hot stuff for the kid from Brooklyn. Eve Harlow stares adoringly from the audience, doubtless recalling their afternoon of love and the role which he had promised her in the new trilogy, and Finzie nods at her wisely, distantly, seeking to keep their relationship private even at this moment of such public triumph.
“Those visions,” he says, “those visions which we hold to ourselves in the clutch of night, those dreams of childhood splendor, it is my earnest hope that I will bring these dreams, that child to splendor, to the world. I think the true filmmaker is not only a visionary but a seer, a reconstructionist who can make the crooked places straight and the rough places plain. For that and in that spirit I accept your award.” And so he does. The applause is tumultuous; it beats at him like the wings of a covey of birds, flushed from the auditorium, flushed from memory. Finzie can see the camera coming in on dolly, the close-up of his graceful yet subtly tormented face slowly dissolving then, cracking open in the heat and light to the face of the kid who might have been. Might not have been. It is difficult to tell, the past is as fluid, as shapeless as the present, it seems to shift under his attention just as sometimes during the conjoinment of love it all slips into the liquefied dark and he must begin again and again. Finzie, filmmaker to the world, splendid issue and prince of light, addresses the audience at Cannes clutching his Leaf of Gold, his sprig of astonishment, attending to the ghostly shrieks and stammer which lurk at the border of memory.
* * *
And still great hours later, still feeling the thrust and urgency of that applause, a vast and gaping need, an emptiness in the continuum which pleaded for him alone, the superhero and top director lies in his palatial bedroom clutching Eve Harlow or Dorothea Harkins (call her what you will, she remains adoring), watching a tape of his award-winning film on the videocassette recorder he takes with him everywhere. This film,
Thrills and Wonder in America
, traces the odyssey of a young man from Flatbush who comes to rule the world, first by film and then by American salute: he ventures into politics, becomes President and the leader of the new world government.
Thrills and Wonder
is a metaphor for his own desire, a subsumed autobiography: Finzie knows the real meaning of all this stuff. As in Reifenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will
, huge crowds chant, there are posed friezes of splendid, beseeching athletes and supporters who usher the actor to ever greater power while Finzie, superheroic filmmaker and highly experienced lover of women who in the old days would have passed him in contempt, looks at his accomplishment in awe. He appears to be playing the lead role too, and making a splendid job of this. What he has done is truly remarkable, he thinks: he has through the medium of his art made the world an adjunct to his obsession. All these actors screaming, those thousands of extras posturing and saluting and he in control of every gesture. It goes beyond gesture, beyond metaphor: he has made the world the paradigm of his desire, his need. Griffith, Reifenstahl, Huston, Capra: these predecessors tried that as well but he, Finzie, has taken the obsession to consummation. Here in the splendor of Cannes he has made his film not an accessory but an empire. Shattered, almost humbled by the power of his vision, the magnificent and heroic director of the year reaches for Eve Harlow.
“What do you think?” he says, “Is this as good as it gets or what? How could it be any better?”
The splendid Eve grinds a hip, brushes a breast to his side, touches his back. “Who is to know?” she says. “If you say it’s so, then it is so.” An actress, not introspective like most of them, Eve Harlow seems to have exhausted most of her capacity for invention by accepting her change of name. Twice married and twice divorced with many feature films beside her and one Academy Award for best supporting, she lives in an eternal, glistening present and tries not to think of metaphor. Or so she had once told Finzie in one of their serious conversations. “You can make it better if you want,” she says. “You can make it even better than that.”
Her hand pleads exactingly for a more convincing gesture. Finzie gives it to her. Unheeded now, the film clatters on in the clutch of the player, the scenes of the great dictator’s magnanimity and sexual skills not to be noticed by the pair tangled on the bed. It is splendor, splendor Finzie thinks, but now and again that perilous insertion fails and he must start all over again. Take five, take six. Climb the slippery and elusive Pyrenees. Groan the expiring sigh of the damned and the doomed into the solid panels of his lady’s neck.
And that groan then the true encapsulation of an admission which Finzie could not have otherwise made: somewhere back there in Flatbush the kid, not yet a superhero, not even a top student in his audiovisual course, tugs for a firmer grip upon himself, trying to overturn that sense of fragility and despair which utterly encapsulates; but the mature Finzie, this sliding and groaning Finzie as it were, cannot help the kid, cannot communicate in any way. Finzie has his own and fraught concerns, not only sexual climax but enlightenment seems to spill as he allows the calming and soothing gestures of that appendage, Eve Harlow, to carry him his anguished way home. In the spaces of his own theatre, on the internal screen, an ever-greater and wondrous film of another kind seems to be unreeling but Finzie is not able to see it now, so narrow is his funnel of attention, so elongate the tube of concentration. Oh Eve, oh Eve this famous filmmaker grunts, oh Eve, hold me, how he cries and softly, insistently, in search of a plum role, Eve Harlow gathers him in.
* * *
Later, sometime after the press has disbanded and the juries have returned to their individual countries of origin, after the starlets have replaced their upper garments and the last cajoling interviewer has packed away recorder and headed for the Concorde, Finzie walks out and along the waters by himself, the fine grains of beach glinting at him with small and confidential messages. Gone too is Eve Harlow, returning to loop dialogue on a romantic comedy, then an Arthur Miller revival in London for a few months for the prestige before she returns to Finzie’s palatial, guarded, hidden estate in Glendale where she has promised to live with him and embark upon pre-production. All alone now except for his memories, his conscience, and his agent is this Finzie who walks slowly along the beach, pondering many possibilities and the nature of his destiny. Superguy Finzie, his Leaf of Gold-winning autobiographical odyssey already booked into a thousand theatres worldwide, more thousands to follow: Finzie sending unanswered and unanswerable messages to the kid in Flatbush who perished in an apartment building fire in 1963 and whose ashes were interred with those of his parents in a small mausoleum in the borough of Queens. Vanity, Finzie thinks, all is vanity and watches three young women, glorious in their youth and necessity, gambol on the sands before him. None can be older than fourteen and each in her special way has destroyed him. He is the remnant, he thinks, of their design. “Have you need of anything?” the bodyguard, detailed by his agent and studio to keep him company in these final days asks. “Can I service you anything, sir?” Finzie in whose right hand half of our possibilities and all of our dreams will soon enough dwell looks at the man absently, his face for the moment stripped of pain and pleasure as well, a perfect and inscrutably vacant frame upon which anything at all could have been inscribed. “Only my history,” Finzie says. “It is a superhero who can survive a fatal fire, don’t you think? How remarkable but I seem to have left my history behind.”
“Ah sir,” the bodyguard says with exquisite and poised understanding, “Ah sir, it is this lack of history which has given you this power,” and reacting to the sheer and mortifying truth of this observation, Finzie—
* * *
Puts aside the necessary equipment of the auteur, the cape, the mask, the special wire, the equations of history and thrall which have given him such awful if inconsequent power, puts these toys away now as so long ago the fire had put away that necessitous part of himself. Finzie puts aside the clutter of the superhero because, having transcended fire and destiny, he no longer needs to be one, needs the costume no more and leaving a warning for Eve Harlow and the others that they will have to make do with crumpled mask, hidden cloak, the all-encompassing, serious and now latter-period Finzie whose distraught and distressing visions will define what if anything will be remembered of the shining city on the hill, Finzie the auteur without mask or cape breaks into groans much like those he had groaned against the neck of Eve Harlow and then sinks to the ground, weeping. Here comes the fire. The fire is coming. Dolly in on camera, superhero no more but only a pietà of Finzie unmasked in Eve’s rambunctious embrace. Freeze frame. Freeze it until—
—Until the end of everlasting fire.
* * *
And his works the world to come.