Alternate Gerrolds (27 page)

A buzz of excited noise began. People stood up, some of them stretching, some of them heading straight for the tables. Maggie turned and looked to George. “I want to do it,” she said quietly.

George’s hands had fallen to his lap. They were old and rough and battered-looking. He seemed to be studying them, but Maggie knew better. He had withdrawn into thoughts. She’d seen him do this before. Whenever he felt pressured, he disappeared inside himself. He simply wouldn’t respond.

“George,” she said insistently, refusing to be ignored this time. “I want to be happy. I want you to be happy. I’m going to sign up.” She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. “I want you to sign up with me.”

Slowly, he lifted his gaze. He turned heavily to look at her. His eyes were rheumy and shaded with years of unspoken sadness. When he spoke his voice was barely audible. “I can’t,” he said. “I—I’m afraid.”

She was astonished by his honesty. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she tried to reassure him. “These people won’t hurt us—”

“No,” he shook his head. “I’m not afraid of dying. I’ve been dying
all my life....” For a moment, Maggie thought he was through speaking, but then he managed to croak out the last of the thought. “I’m afraid...of living.”

Maggie let the words hang in the air between them while she studied his face. “Fine,” she said, finally. “I’ll do it without you then.” After a moment more of waiting, she got up and headed for the table at the back of the room.

George watched her go, his eyes filling up with years of shame and failure.

My next-door neighbors have six children. This is not enough reason to hate them, but it’s a good start.

The smallest one, Tali, is ambulatory, but still pre-verbal. She is not a problem. She can stay. We will leave her name off the eviction notice.

Next up is Nolan. He has been retarded at the age of three for four years now. Nolan is an interesting social experiment. What do you get if you allow a child to raise himself without any parental involvement at all?

He breaks things. He takes things. He denies accountability. He starts fires. He blames other children. He screams. He goes into other people’s yards, and he climbs up onto the roofs of houses—usually his own, but occasionally the roof of a neighbor as well. He throws things over the fence into my yard, oftentimes aiming for the pool. A half-eaten Taco Bell burrito must be retrieved within the first thirty minutes or you can plan on having the filter cleaned again.

Wait, there’s someone at the door—

(on paper the pauses don’t show)

—it was Nolan. I can’t even write this down without one of the little monsters knocking on the door. They have been sent to bedevil me.

Next up are Jason and Jabed, hovering somewhere in age between eleven and juvenile hall. Jason and Jabed are the coming attractions for Nolan’s adolescence. They specialize in noise and attitude. They have no manners. They have no courtesy. They have no conception of consideration for others.

My life was quiet and peaceful once. I work at home. I take my time to think things out. I sit in my office and think and write. I sit in my living room and read and listen to classical music; Bach, Vivaldi, occasionally a Shostakovitch string quartet—nothing too strenuous. I open all the doors and all the windows, and the cross breeze keeps the house pleasant and sweet-smelling. I would love to be able to do that again. Last year, I paid six thousand dollars to install a 4000 BTU air conditioner on the roof so I could close all the doors and windows and still keep working. The noise from the fan drowns out the softer strains of Debussy.

In the afternoon, they play touch football and baseball across three lawns. Mine is in the middle. Even the judicious planting of large amounts of purple Wandering Jew has not deterred them. They leap over it ... sometimes. They scream, they shout, they claim the ball in mid-air. “It’s mine—mine!” Their voices are atonal and dissonant, precisely mistuned to jar with whatever music is on the turntable.

In the evenings, they play basketball in the back yard. I used to go to bed at eleven. But they play basketball until one in the ayem, shouting and jabbering. The basketball hoop is opposite my bedroom window. It serves as the perfect acoustic focus aimed at my headboard. I am not making this up. A specialist in theatrical sound systems came out to my house, took some measurements and ran them through the computer.

Jabed and Jason like to climb roofs, too. Last January, they climbed up on the roof of the auto parts store behind the alley and plugged up its storm drains, just for the fun of it. When the big rains came in February, the water puddled on the roof. The weight of the water brought the whole ceiling crashing in, causing over a half-million dollars worth of damage to the store. The police refused to arrest the boys because of insufficient evidence. In August, they were accused of stealing 120 dollars from a neighbor’s wallet and spent the night in juvenile hall. The next day, they were swimming at the same neighbor’s house. How do they get away with it? What magic are they working?

Then there’s Vanessa. She’s another sweetheart. I think she’s eighteen.
She takes care of the kids while Mom’s at work. No, check that. She’s
supposed
to take care of the kids while Mom’s at work. What she does is have parties. One of her friends once took forty bucks from Mom’s purse—but Mom and Dad blamed every other child on the street for the theft, and when the truth came out, didn’t bother to apologize.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. The neighbor on the other side of Hell House has developed an ulcer. The neighbors across the street have put their house up for sale. Half the parents on the block have forbidden their children to play with the demonic brood. This is validation. It’s not me. It’s
them
.

Mom and Dad. Lyn and Bryce. He’s a former minister, she’s a former cheerleader who never aspired to anything more than the right shade of blonde. She hasn’t yet noticed that her tits are working their way south and her ass is spreading faster than the crab-grass on their lawn. I gave up on my lawn this year. There’s no point in it, while the crab-grass sod farm next door is so aggressive.

Their philosophy of childrearing is non-existent. They daydream their way through life, drifting from one day to the next, oblivious to the fact that they are loathed by all of their neighbors. No, check that. They are loathed by all of the neighbors who live close enough to know who they are.

Oh—I almost skipped Damien. He’s the one I like. He moved out and went to college four hundred miles away. We only see him on holidays. He has manners and courtesy and is obviously a changeling, not a real part of the family. He wants to major in art. Maybe he’s gay. I hope so. I’d like to see the look on their faces when he comes home with a boyfriend. Idle fantasies of revenge are rapidly becoming an obsession over here.

I like to believe I’m smarter than they are; but I still haven’t been able to plot the perfect crime—one that would allow me to chop their bones into fragments, burn their house down and salt the earth into toxic uninhabitability, without anyone ever suspecting that I was the agent responsible. In some matters, anonymity is preferable to acknowledgment. Revenge is one of them.

It bothers me, because I am supposed to be a specialist in revenge. Writers, as a class, are the research-and-development team for the whole human race in the domain of revenge. We ennoble it, we glorify it; we earn our livings inventing wonderful and exotic ways to justify the
delicious deed of puncturing the pompous who make our lives miserable. We create virtual daydreams for the masses in which the mighty are humiliated for their misdeeds of oppression against those who are still climbing the evolutionary ladder. It is our job to tend the flames of mythic vision, creating the cultural context in which the arrogant are accurately mirrored and drawn, so that all will know who they are. It is our job to prepare the ground so that the thieves of joy can be reduced to craven, whimpering, pitiful objects of scorn and abuse.

And ... the fact that I remain unable to find a way to drive these people screaming from their house frustrates me beyond words, because it implies that I am not yet a master of my trade. If anyone should be able to envision a suitable revenge here, it should be me. Through a delightfully Machiavellian bit of timing, innuendo and legal maneuvering, I once engineered the enforced exit off the Paramount lot of a particularly leechsome lawyer; studio security officers arrived with boxes, and physically escorted him off the premises—so abusing a few troublesome neighbors should be easy. Shouldn’t it?

The problem is Grandma. Theirs, not mine. Grandma is a spacecase. Not of this world. She exists in her own reality of hydrangeas and luncheons and Cadillacs. Life is pleasant, life is good, there are no problems. Let’s all be nice to each other and everything will work out fine. She sees and hears only what she chooses to. Grandma owns the house and Mom and Dad and all the little Mansons live in it rent-free. They couldn’t afford to live in this neighborhood otherwise. There is no way they’re ever going to move out. Ever try to pull a tick off a dog? Grandma is the problem—

(narrative interrupted again)

—that one used up the rest of my evening. While I admit that it gave me no small amount of satisfaction to see three police cars pulled up in front of
that
house, it did not bring me any joy. I appreciate the validation; I do not appreciate losing half a day of working time.

This time, Jason was chasing Damien with a knife, threatening him. Damien socked him with a frying pan in self-defense. Damien got arrested. He’ll end up with a charge of child-abuse on his record. These people have a way of getting
other
people in trouble and coming out unscathed themselves. It’s a talent.

That was six months ago.

The day after I wrote that, I ran into my friend, Sara McNealy. Sara is a witch.

I had stopped in at Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks to deliver my monthly box of books that I would rather not have in the house and to select a few volumes in return that would enhance my bookshelves. Given the fact that most publishers seem to have given up the publication of real books in favor of the production of commodity products, the task of reinvigorating the sleeping sense of wonder becomes harder and harder every year. Nothing destroys a person’s enjoyment of a subject as fast as becoming obsessive about it. Never mind.

Sara was standing at the counter, chatting with Lydia Marano, the store owner. There were two other customers in the back of the store, browsing through the non-readers’ section, looking for the latest
Star Trek
novel.

Sara doesn’t look like a witch. She does not have flaming red hair. She does not have green eyes. She does not dress in flowing capes with unicorn embroidery.

Sara is short, not quite dumpy but almost, and she has little tight black curls framing her pie-shaped face. She is given to flowing dresses and little round spectacles that look like windows into her dark gray eyes. She looks like a yenta-in-training, but without the guilt attached. She is obscenely calm and unruffled.

Sara never talks about the goddess; she is not given to feminist rhetoric and rarely reads fiction. She created her own job, managing the computers for a major theatrical booking-chain. She is the first stop for technical support for a very small and very exclusive group of science-fiction, fantasy and horror writers. She is equally conversant with nanotechnology, transhuman chickens, selfish genes, disturbed universes, dancing Wu-Li masters, motorcycle maintenance (with or without the zen), virology (both human and silicon strains), paleontology, biblical history and several mutant strains of buddhist discourse. She can quote from Sun Tzu’s
Art of War
as easily as from
The Watchmen
.

She does not cast spells herself. She works only as a consultant, serving as the midwife at the spellcasting sessions of others. She was telling Lydia, behind the counter, about her experiences breaking up a fannish coven, trying to grow hair on Patrick Stewart. “Finally, I just flat out
told them, ‘Witchcraft is potent stuff. Every spell you cast uses up part of your life force. If you assume that every spell you cast takes a year off your life expectancy, you don’t do it casually. You save it for things that matter.’”

I looked up from the copy of
Locus
I was browsing through. They hadn’t reviewed a book of mine in years—not since I’d requested that the reviewers read the books before writing about them. “Hey, Sara, didn’t you say there were ways to rebuild your life force?”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled sweetly as she said it. “Creativity. Haven’t you ever noticed that a disproportionate share of conductors, writers, musicians, directors, et al, live well into their nineties? The act of creation is very powerful. When you bring something into existence out of nothing, it becomes a focus for energy. If you create positive energy, you get invigorated. If you create negative energy, you diminish yourself. You can’t afford the luxury of nastiness.”