The Best of Joe Haldeman (47 page)

“That’s one screwy aspect of it. Hadley herself never said, not on paper. Every biographer seems to come up with a different reason: she went to get a newspaper, she saw some people she recognized and stepped out to talk with them, wanted some exercise before the long trip ... even Hemingway had two different versions—she went out to get a bottle of Evian water or to buy something to read. That one pissed him off, because she did have an overnight bag full of the best American writing since Mark Twain.”

“How would you have felt?”

“Felt?”

“I mean, you say you’ve written stories, too. What if somebody, your wife, made a mistake and you lost everything?”

He looked thoughtful. “It’s not the same. In the first place, it’s just hobby with me. And I don’t have that much that hasn’t been published—when Hemingway lost it, he lost it for good. I could just go to a university library and make new copies of everything.”

“So you haven’t written much lately?”

“Not stories. Academic stuff.”

“I’d love to read some of your stories.”

“And I’d love to have you read them. But I don’t have any here. I’ll mail you some from Boston.”

She nodded, staring at him with a curious intensity. “Oh hell,” she said, and turned her back to him. “Would you help me with this?”

“What?”

“The zipper.” She was wearing a clingy white summer dress. “Undo the zipper a little bit.”

He slowly unzipped it a few inches. She did it the rest of the way, stood up and hooked her thumbs under the shoulder straps and shrugged. The dress slithered to the floor. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

“You’re blushing.” Actually, he was doing a good imitation of a beached fish. She straddled him, sitting back lightly on his knees, legs wide, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

“Uh,” he said.

“I just get impatient. You don’t mind?”

“Uh ... no?”

~ * ~

17.
on being shot again

John woke up happy but didn’t open his eyes for nearly a minute, holding on to the erotic dream of the century. Then he opened one eye and saw it hadn’t been a dream: the tousled bed in the strange room, unguents and sex toys on the nightstand, the smell of her hair on the other pillow. A noise from the kitchen; coffee and bacon smells.

He put on pants and went into the living room to pick up the shirt where it had dropped. “Good morning, Pansy.”

“Morning, stranger.” She was wearing a floppy terry cloth bathrobe with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She turned the bacon carefully with a fork. “Scrambled eggs okay?”

“Marvelous.” He sat down at the small table and poured himself a cup of coffee. “I don’t know what to say.”

She smiled at him. “Don’t say anything. It was nice.”

“More than nice.” He watched her precise motions behind the counter. She broke the eggs one-handed, two at a time, added a splash of water to the bowl, plucked some chives from a windowbox and chopped them with a small Chinese cleaver, rocking it in a staccato chatter; scraped them into the bowl, and followed them with a couple of grinds of pepper. She set the bacon out on a paper towel, with another towel to cover. Then she stirred the eggs briskly with the fork and set them aside. She picked up the big cast-iron frying pan and poured off a judicious amount of grease. Then she poured the egg mixture into the pan and studied it with alertness.

“Know what I think?” John said.

“Something profound?”

“Huh uh. I think I’m in a rubber room someplace, hallucinating the whole thing. And I hope they never cure me.”

“I think you’re a butterfly who’s dreaming he’s a man. I’m glad I’m in your dream.” She slowly stirred and scraped the eggs with a spatula.

“You like older men?”

“One of them.” She looked up, serious. “I like men who are considerate ... and playful.” She returned to the scraping. “Last couple of boyfriends I had were all dick and no heart. Kept to myself the last few months.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“You could rent yourself out as a service.” She laughed. “You must have been impossible when you were younger.”

“Different.” Literally.

She ran hot water into a serving bowl, then returned to her egg stewardship. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes?”

“The lost manuscript stuff we were talking about last night, all the different explanations.” She divided the egg into four masses and turned each one. “Did you ever read any science fiction?”

“No. Vonnegut”

“The toast.” She hurriedly put four pieces of bread in the toaster. “They write about alternate universes. Pretty much like our own, but different in one way or another. Important or trivial.”

“What, uh, what silliness.”

She laughed and poured the hot water out of the serving bowl, and dried it with a towel. “I guess maybe. But what if ... what if all of those versions were equally true? In different universes. And for some reason they all came together here.” She started to put the eggs into the bowl when there was a knock on the door.

It opened and Ernest Hemingway walked in. Dapper, just twenty, wearing the Italian army cape he’d brought back from the war. He pointed the black-and-white cane at Pansy. “Bingo.”

She looked at John and then back at the Hemingway. She dropped the serving bowl; it clattered on the floor without breaking. Her knees buckled and she fainted dead away, executing a half turn as she fell so that the back of her head struck the wooden floor with a loud thump and the bathrobe drifted open from the waist down.

The Hemingway stared down at her frontal aspect. “Sometimes I wish I were human,” it said. “Your pleasures are intense. Simple, but intense.” It moved toward her with the cane.

John stood up. “If you kill her—”

“Oh?” It cocked an eyebrow at him. “What will you do?”

John took one step toward it and it waved the cane. A waist-high brick wall surmounted by needle-sharp spikes appeared between them. It gestured again and an impossible moat appeared, deep enough to reach down well into Julio’s living room. It filled with water and a large crocodile surfaced and rested its chin on the parquet floor, staring at John. It yawned teeth.

The Hemingway held up its cane. “The white end. It doesn’t kill, remember?” The wall and moat disappeared and the cane touched Pansy lightly below the navel. She twitched minutely but continued to sleep. “She’ll have a headache,” it said. “And she’ll be somewhat confused by the uncommunicatable memory of having seen me. But that will all fade, compared to the sudden tragedy of having her new lover die here, just sitting waiting for his breakfast”

“Do you enjoy this?”

“I love my work. It’s all I have.” It walked toward him, footfalls splashing as it crossed where the moat had been. “You have not personally helped, though. Not at all.”

It sat down across from him and poured coffee into a mug that said
on the sixth day god created man—she must have had pms.

“When you kill me this time, do you think it will take’?”

“I don’t know. It’s never failed before.” The toaster made a noise. “Toast?”

“Sure.” Two pieces appeared on his plate; two on the Hemingway’s. “Usually when you kill people they stay dead?”

“I don’t kill that many people.” It spread margarine on its toast, gestured, and marmalade appeared. “But when I do, yeah. They die all up and down the Omniverse, every time-space. All except you.” He pointed toast at John’s toast “Go ahead. It’s not poison.”

“Not my idea of a last meal.”

The Hemingway shrugged. “What would you like?”

“Forget it” He buttered the toast and piled marmalade on it determined out of some odd impulse to act as if nothing unusual were happening. Breakfast with Hemingway, big deal.

He studied the apparition and noticed that it was somewhat translucent, almost like a traditional TV ghost. He could barely see a line that was the back of the chair, bisecting its chest below shoulder-blade level. Was this something new? There hadn’t been too much light in the train; maybe he had just failed to notice it before.

“A penny for your thoughts.”

He didn’t say anything about seeing through it “Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re not supposed to kill me? That’s why I came back?”

The Hemingway chuckled and admired its nails. “That’s a nearly content-free assertion.”

“Oh really.” He bit into the toast The marmalade was strong, pleasantly bitter.

“It presupposes a higher authority, unknown to me, that’s watching over my behavior, and correcting me when I do wrong. Doesn’t exist, sorry.”

‘That’s the oldest one in the theologian’s book.” He set down the toast and kneaded his stomach; shouldn’t eat something so strong first thing in the morning. “You can only
assert
the nonexistence of something; you can’t prove it”

“What you mean is
you
can’t” He held up the cane and looked at it “The simplest explanation is that there’s something wrong with the cane. There’s no way I can test it; if I kill the wrong person, there’s hell to pay up and down the Omniverse. But what I can do is kill you without the cane. See whether you come back again, some timespace.”

Sharp, stabbing pains in his stomach now. “Bastard” Heart pounding slow and hard: shirt rustled in time to its

“Cyanide in the marmalade. Gives it a certain
frisson
, don’t you think?”

He couldn’t breathe. His heart pounded once, and stopped. Vicious pain in his left arm, then paralysis. From an inch away, he could just see the weave of the white table-doth. It turned red and then black.

~ * ~

18.
the sun also rises

From blackness to brilliance: the morning sun pouring through the window at a flat angle. He screwed up his face and blinked.

Suddenly smothered in terry cloth, between soft breasts. “John, John.”

He put his elbow down to support himself, uncomfortable on the parquet floor, and looked up at Pansy. Her face was wet with tears. He cleared his throat “What happened?”

“You, you started putting on your foot and ... you just fell over. I thought ... “

John looked down over his body, hard ropy muscle and deep tan under white body hair, the puckered bullet wound a little higher on the abdomen. Left leg ended in a stump just above the ankle.

Trying not to faint. His third past flooding back. Walking down a dirt road near Kontum, the sudden loud bang of the mine and he pitched forward, unbelievable pain, rolled over and saw his bloody boot yards away; grey, jagged shinbone sticking through the bloody smoking rag of his pant leg, bright crimson splashing on the dry dust, loud in the shocked silence; another bloodstain spreading between his legs, the deep mortal pain there—and he started to buck and scream and two men held him while the medic took off his belt and made a tourniquet and popped morphine through the cloth and unbuttoned his fly and slowly worked his pants down: penis torn by shrapnel, scrotum ripped open in a bright red flap of skin, bloody grey-blue egg of a testicle separating, rolling out. He fainted, then and now.

And woke up with her lips against his, her breath sweet in his lungs, his nostrils pinched painfully tight. He made a strangled noise and clutched her breast.

She cradled his head, panting, smiling through tears, and kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Will you stop fainting now?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry.” Her lips were trembling. He put a finger on them. “Just a longer night than I’m accustomed to. An overdose of happiness.”

The happiest night of his life, maybe of three lives. Like coming back from the dead.

“Should I call a doctor?”

“No. I faint every now and then.” Usually at the gym, from pushing too hard. He slipped his hand inside the terry cloth and covered her breast. “It’s been ... do you know how long it’s been since I ... did it? I mean ... three times in one night?”

“About six hours.” She smiled “And you can say ‘fuck.’ I’m no schoolgirl.”

“I’ll say.” The night had been an escalating progression of intimacies, gymnastics, accessories. “Had to wonder where a sweet girl like you learned all that.”

She looked away, lips pursed, thoughtful. With a light fingertip she stroked the length of his penis and smiled when it started to uncurl. “At work.”

“What?”

“I was a prostitute. That’s where I learned the tricks. Practice makes perfect.”

“Prostitute. Wow.”

“Are you shocked? Outraged?”

“Just surprised.” That was true. He respected the sorority and was grateful to it for having made Vietnam almost tolerable, an hour or so at a time. “But now you’ve got to do something really mean. I could never love a prostitute with a heart of gold.”

“I’ll give it some thought.” She shifted. “Think you can stand up?”

“Sure.” She stood and gave him her hand. He touched it but didn’t pull; rose in a smooth practiced motion, then took one hop and sat down at the small table. He started strapping on his foot.

“I’ve read about those new ones,” she said, “the permanent kind.”