FSF, January-February 2010 (32 page)

"Hey, Lil babes,” he said. “Did you know they filmed you in black and white?"

"Are you sure he can't move?"

"Nothing that matters. Here, the first pint is full. Esperanza, are you ready?"

"Yes, doctor."

Another woman? That Carlos. This could get interesting. Liliac's mist drifted out of sight, followed by the brown cloud of Carlos. Graeber tried to turn his head.

"Save one for me, Carlos,” he mumbled. He drifted into a four-way fantasy.

Liliac's voice woke him. She was back in front of him. “Now the second pint. That is for you, Arturo."

Who?

"How can we repay you, Doctor Sångera?"

"That is simple. When you are back in Mexico, donate blood. Once a month, if they will let you. But not any more often than that. Remember that the artificial blood will need time to grow. If you can, convince the others, those who receive your blood, to donate too. But do not let Esperanza give blood until at least a year has passed."

"It will take that long to cure the cancer?"

"Probably not, but just to be sure."

Give blood? Once a month? Graeber gave an involuntary shudder. Poor sucker. No way you'd get me to give blood.

"Thank you,” Carlos said. “I will travel all of Mexico to give blood.
Adios.
"

"Yes, go with God,” Liliac answered.

The other woman said something in Mexican. She has a pretty voice, Graeber thought. I wonder who she is?

The dim shapes moved away, except for the black-and-white ghost that was Liliac. He heard a door close. A few moments later...or was it an hour?...he heard another door open on the opposite side of the room.

"Hey, Doctor S., how's it going? Golly, look at all that blood!"

Vanessa! Now we'll really get some action! Graeber tried to say something, but he couldn't seem to get his mouth to move. Couldn't think of anything to say. Oh, well. He knew what he meant.

"Yes, Van. Just two pints left. Are you ready for yours?"

"You betcha! Say, how about one for Ms. G? I think it'd cheer her up."

"No, we must be gone before dawn. Do not worry, she will get one eventually, I am sure. Her kind look after themselves."

One what? Graeber wondered. Can I have one? But he couldn't seem to say it. His vision was fading, narrowing, until all he could see was a pair of pitch-black eyes in a white face framed by hair the color of night. Something sparkled for an instant, two tiny glints of light. He remembered a smile. Whose? Oh, well. Who cares? He smiled at the pitch-black eyes as they grew and merged, and swallowed his final thoughts.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Six of John Langan's short stories have recently been collected in
Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters.
Searching for it on the internet has turned up the fact that another man named John Langan has written a series of college texts on writing over the past two decades. Those of you who remember the story “Tutorial” from our Aug. 2003 issue might think this coincidence of names falls in the category of “Cruel Irony.”
John Langan—
this
John Langan, the one who blogs at
jplangan.livejournal .com
—is pleased to report that his first novel,
House of Windows,
should be out by the time this issue comes off the presses.
And speaking of online matters, we at
F&SF
have teamed up with the folks at
www.suvudu.com
to run some of our stories online. Take a look—
F&SF
readers are almost certain to find something of interest on the site.

I thought it was a dog. From the other side of the lot, that was what it most resembled: down on all fours; hair plastered to its pale, skeletal trunk by the rain that had us hurrying down the sidewalk; head drawn into a snout. It was injured, that much was clear. Even with the rain rinsing its leg, a jagged tear wept fresh blood that caught the headlights of the cars turning onto Central—that had caught my eye, caused me to slow.

Kaitlyn walked on a few paces before noticing that I had stopped at the edge of the lot where one of the thrift stores we'd plundered for cheap books and cassette tapes had burned to the ground the previous spring. (The space had been cleared soon thereafter, with conflicting reports of a Pizza Hut or Wendy's imminent, but as of mid-November, it was still a gap in the row of tired buildings that lined this stretch of Central Ave.) Arms crossed over the oversized Army greatcoat that was some anonymous Soviet officer's contribution to her wardrobe, my girlfriend hurried back to me. “What is it?"

I pointed. “That dog looks like it's pretty hurt.” I stepped onto the lot. The ground squelched under my foot.

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know. I just want to see if he's all right."

"Shouldn't you call the cops? I mean, it could be dangerous. Look at the size of it."

She was right. This was not one of your toy dogs; this was not even a standard-sized mutt. This animal was as large as a wolfhound—larger. It was big as Latka, my Uncle Karl and Aunt Belinda's German Shepherd, had appeared to me when I was seven and terrified of her, and more terrified still of her ability to smell my fear, which my cousins assured me would enrage her. For a moment, my palms were slick, and I felt a surge of lightness at the top of my chest. Then I set to walking across the lot.

Behind me, Kaitlyn made her exasperated noise. I could see her flapping her arms to either side, the way she did when she was annoyed with me.

Puddles sprawled across the lot. I leapt a particularly wide one and landed in a hole that plunged my foot into freezing water past the ankle. “Shit!” My sneaker, sock, the bottom of my jeans were soaked. There was no time to run back to the apartment to change. It appeared I'd be walking around the QE2 with one sopping sneaker for the rest of the night. I could hear Kaitlyn saying she'd
told
me to wear my boots.

The dog had not fled at my approach, not even when I dunked my foot. Watching me from the corner of its eye, it shuffled forward a couple of steps. The true size of the thing was remarkable; had it raised itself on its hind legs, it would have been as tall as I. There was something about the way it walked, its hips high, its shoulders low, as if it were unused to this pose, that made the image of it standing oddly plausible. Big as the dog was, it didn't seem especially menacing. It was an assemblage of bones over which a deficit of skin had been stretched, so that I could distinguish each of the oddly shaped vertebrae that formed the arch of its spine. Its fur was pale, patchy; as far as I could see, its tail was gone. Its head was foreshortened, not the kind of elongated, vulpine look you expect with dogs bred big for hunting or fighting; although its ears were pointed, standing straight up, and ran a good part of the way down the side of its skull. I was less interested in its ears, however, than I was its teeth, and whether it was showing them to me. It continued to study me from one eye, but it appeared to be tolerating my presence well enough. Hands out and open in front of me, I stepped closer.

As I did, the thing's smell, diluted, no doubt, by the rain, rolled up into my nostrils. It was the thick, mineral odor of dirt, so dense I coughed and brought a hand to my mouth and nose. The taste of soil and clay coated my tongue. I coughed again, turned my head and spat. “I hope you appreciate this,” I said, wiping my mouth. I squinted at the wound on its leg.

A wide patch of the dog's thigh had been scraped clear of hair and skin, pink muscle laid bare. Broader than it was deep, it was the kind of injury that bleeds dramatically and seems to take forever to quiet. While I doubted it was life-threatening, I was sure it was painful. How the dog had come by this wound, I couldn't say. When we were kids, my younger brother had been famous for this sort of scrape, but those had been from wiping out on his bike in the school parking lot. Had this thing been dragged over a stretch of pavement, struck by a car, perhaps, and sent skidding across the road? Whatever the cause, I guessed the rain washing it was probably a good thing, cleaning away the worst debris. I bent for a closer inspection.

And was on my back, the dog's forepaws pressing my chest with irresistible force, its face inches from mine. There wasn't even time for me to be shocked by its speed. Its lips curled away from a rack of yellowed fangs, the canines easily as long as my index finger. Its breath was hot, rank, as if its tongue were rotten in its mouth. I wanted to gag, but didn't dare move. Rain spilled from the thing's cheeks, its jaw, in shining streams onto my neck, my chin. The dog was silent; no growl troubled its throat; but its eyes said that it was ready to tear my windpipe out. They were unlike any eyes I had looked into, irises so pale they might have been white surrounded by sclerae so dark they were practically black, full past the brim with—I wouldn't call it intelligence so much as a kind of undeniable
presence
.

As fast as it had put me down, the thing was gone, fled into the night and the rain. For a few seconds, I stayed where I was, unsure if the dog were planning to return. Once it was clear the thing was not coming back, I pushed myself up from the sodden ground. “Terrific,” I said. My wet sneaker was the least of my worries; it had been joined by jeans soaked through to my boxers; not to mention, my jacket had flipped up when I'd fallen, and the back of my shirt was drenched. “So much for the injured dog.” Although doing so made me uncomfortably aware of the space between my shoulders, I turned around and plodded across the lot. This time, I didn't worry about the puddles.

That Kaitlyn was nowhere to be found, had not waited to witness my adventure with man's best friend, and most likely had proceeded to the club without me, was the sorry punchline to what had become an unfunny joke. Briefly, I entertained the idea that she might have run down the street in search of help, but a rapid walk the rest of the way to QE2 showed most shops closed, and the couple that were open empty of a short woman bundled into a long, green coat, her red hair tucked under a black beret. At the club's door, under the huge QE2 sign, I contemplated abandoning the night's plans and returning to my apartment on State Street, a trek that would insure any remaining dry spots on my person received their due saturation. I was sufficiently annoyed with Kaitlyn for the prospect of leaving her to wonder what had become of me to offer a certain appeal composed of roughly equal parts righteous indignation and self-pity. However, there had been a chance we might meet Chris here, and the possibility of her encountering him with me nowhere to be found sent me to the door to pay the cover.

Inside, a cloud of smoke hung low over the crowd, the din of whose combined conversation was sufficient to dull the Smithereens throbbing from the sound system. The club was more full than I would have expected for the main act that Wednesday, a performance poet named Marius Elliott who was accompanied by a five-piece rock band, guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, the whole thing. Marius, who favored a short black leather jacket and tight black jeans onstage, was an instructor at Columbia-Greene Community College, where he taught Freshman Writing. He was a lousy poet, and a lousy performer, too, but he was the friend of a friend I worked with, and the band was pretty good, enough so that they should have ditched him and found a frontman with more talent. This was Marius's second show at the QE2; I couldn't understand why the owner had booked him after hearing him the first time. While the club did feature poets, they tended toward the edgier end of the literary spectrum, in keeping with the place's reputation as the Capital District's leading showcase for up-and-coming post-punk bands. (That same friend from work had seen the Chili Peppers play there before they were red hot.) Marius wrote poems about eating breakfast alone, or walking his dog in the woods behind his apartment. Maybe the owner's tastes were more catholic than I knew; maybe he owed someone a favor.

In his low, melancholy voice, the Smithereens’ lead told the room about the girl he dreamed of behind the wall of sleep. I couldn't see Kaitlyn. Given the dim light and number of people milling between the stage and bar, not to mention that Kaitlyn was hardly tall, there was no cause for my stomach to squeeze the way it did. Chris wasn't visible, either. Trying not to make too much of the coincidence, I pushed my way through to the bar, where I shouted for a Macallan I couldn't really afford, but that earned me a respectful nod from the bartender's shaven head.

The Scotch flaring on my tongue, I stepped away to begin a protracted circuit of the room in quest of my girlfriend. The crowd was a mix of what looked like Marius's community college students, their blue jeans and sweatshirts as good as uniforms, and the local poetry crowd, split between those affecting different shades of black and those whose brighter colors proclaimed their allegiance to some notion of sixties counter culture. Here and there, an older man or woman in a professorial jacket struggled not to let the strain of trying to appear comfortable show; Marius's colleagues, I guessed, or professors from SUNY. The air was redolent with the odors of wet denim, cotton, and hair, of burning tobacco and pot, of beer, of sweat. I exchanged enough nods with enough faces I half-recognized for me not to feel too alone, and traded a few sentences with a girl whose pretty face and hip-length blond hair I remembered but whose name eluded me. The Smithereens finished singing about blood and roses and were replaced by the Screaming Trees, their gravelly voiced lead uttering the praises of sweet oblivion.

At the end of forty-five minutes that took me to every spot in the club except the Ladies Room, and that left the Macallan a phantom in my glass, I was no closer to locating Kaitlyn. (Or Chris, for that matter, although I was ignoring this.) Once more at the bar, I set the empty glass on its surface and ordered another—a double, this round. A generous swallow of it was almost sufficient to quiet the panic uncoiling in my chest.

I was about to embark on another, rapid circuit of the crowd before the show began when I caught someone staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought the tall, pale figure was Chris, just arrived. I was so relieved to find him here that I couldn't help myself from smiling as I turned to greet him.