Winter 2007 (7 page)

But I never saw
her.
I never saw her. I don’t know why I expected to, and yet on all of the hundreds
of voyages I took as a ship’s doctor, I always looked. The sailors say mermaids
live down there, with scaly hair and soft fingertips and cold, clammy kisses. I
cared for none of that. I yearned to see her face by some strange necromancy,
her blue eyes staring up at me through the ocean’s darker blue.

Worse yet, whether on deck
or in my cabin, whether during ferocious, stomach-churning storms or trying to
save a man with a jagged piece of the deck forced through his sternum, I wanted
a dead woman to tell the story of her life. I wanted to know if she had been a
sister, a niece, a granddaughter. I wanted to know if she played with kittens
or tormented them. Did she brew tea or drink coffee? Did she have an easy sense
of humor? Was her laugh thin or full? How did she walk? What did she like to
wear? So many questions came to me.

Because I had no idea of
her personality, I imagined her, probably wrongly, as my double: embarrassed by
her parents’ eccentricities, a little amazed to find herself touched by life
and led as though by the nose to this point of existence, this moment when I
searched a hundred flavors of water for her smile.

It wasn’t a moot point. I
experienced the sweet agony of living with a part of her every day. At first, I
had little control over it, and it either flopped loosely at my side,
uncooperative, or caused much trouble for me by behaving eccentrically. But,
over time, we reached an accord. It was more skillful than I at stitching a
wound or lancing a boil. The arm seemed to so enjoy the task that I wondered if
the woman had been a thwarted healer or something similar–an artist of
the domestic, who could sew or cook, or perform any arcane household task.

Sometimes, at night, it
would crawl outside the counterpane, to the limits of its span, and lie in the
cold air until the shivers woke me and forced me to reclaim it. Then I would
besiege it with the warmth of my own flesh until it succumbed and became part
of me again.

***

“Did you enjoy being a
ship’s doctor?” my guest would ask, if only to change the topic, and I would be
grateful.

“It was boring and
exhausting,” I would say. “Sailors can injure themselves in a thousand
different ways. There’s only so much medicine you can carry on a ship.”

“But did you enjoy it?”

“When it was busy, I would
get pleasure from doing good and necessary work.”

Keeping busy is important.
My parents taught me that the utility of work was its own reward, but it also
fills up your mind, gives you less time to think.

“Sounds like it wasn’t
half-bad,” he’d say, like someone who didn’t know what I was talking about.

Would I tell him the rest?
Would I tell him about the times on the docks or at sea that I saw the pale
white of drowning victims laid out in rows and immediately be back in the
cadaver room? That some part of me yearned for that white dead flesh? That when
I slept with women now it must be in the dark so that the soft yet muscular
whiteness of them would not interfere with the image in my head of a certain
smile, a certain woman. That I tried to fall in love with so many women, but
could not, would not, not with her arm by my side.

***

In time, I gained notoriety
for my skills. When docked, sailors from other ships would come to me for
bandaging or physicking, giving themselves over to my mismatched hands. My
masculinity had never seemed brutish to me, but laid against her delicate
fingers, I could not help but find myself unsubtle. Or, at least, could not
help but believe she would find them so. And, indeed, the arm never touched the
other hand if it could avoid it, as if to avoid the very thought of its
counterpart.

I settled into the life
easily enough–every couple of years on a new ship with a new crew, headed
somewhere ever more exotic. Soon,any thought of returning to the city of my
birth grew distant and faintly absurd. Soon, I gained more knowledge of the
capriciousness of sea than any but the most experienced seaman. I came to love
the roll of the decks and the wind’s severity. I loved nothing better than to
reach some new place and discover new peoples, new animals, new cures to old
ailments. I survived squalls, strict captains, incompetent crews, and boardings
by pirates. I wrote long letters about my adventures to my parents, and
sometimes their replies even caught up to me, giving me much pleasure. I also
wrote to Lucius once or twice, but I never heard back from him and didn’t
expect to; nor could I know for sure my letters had made it into his hands, the
vagaries of letters-by-ship being what they are.

In this way thirty years
passed and I passed with them, growing weather-beaten and bearded and no
different from any other sailor. Except, of course, for her arm.

At a distant river port, in
a land where the birds spoke like women and the men wore outlandishly bright
tunics and skirts, a letter from my mother caught up with me. In it, she told
me that my father had died after a long illness, an illness she had never
mentioned in any of her other letters. The letter was a year old.

I felt an intense
confusion. I could not understand how a man who in my memory I had said goodbye
to just a few years before could now be dead. It took awhile to understand I
had been at sea for three decades. That somewhere in the back of my mind I had
assumed my parents would live forever. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t even
cry.

Six months later, slowly
making my way back to my mother, another letter, this time from a friend of the
family. My mother had died and been laid next to my father in the basement of
the Preservation Guild.

It felt as if the second
trauma had made me fully experience the first. All I could think of was my father.
And then the two of them working together in their bungalow.

I remember I stood on the
end of a rickety quay in a backwater port reading the letter. Behind me the
dismal wooden shanty town and above explosions of green-and-blue parrots. The
sun was huge and red on the horizon, as if we were close to the edge of the
world.

Her hand discarded the
letter and reached over to caress my hand. I wept silently.

***

Five years later, I tired
of life at sea–it was no place for the aging–and I returned home.
The city was bigger and more crowded. The medical school carried on as it had
for centuries. The mages’ college had disappeared, the site razed and replaced
with modern, classroom-filled buildings.

I stored my many trunks of
possessions–full of rare tinctures and substances and oddities–at a
room in a cheap inn and walked down to my parents’ bungalow. It had been
abandoned and boarded-up. After two days, I found the current owner. He turned
out to be a man who resembled the Stinker of my youth in the fatuousness of his
smile, the foulness of his breath. This new Stinker didn’t want to sell, but in
the end I took the brass key, spotted with green age, from him and the bungalow
was mine.

Inside, beneath the dust
and storm damage, I found the echoes of my parents’
preservations–familiar fond splotches across the kitchen tiles–and
read their recipes in the residue.

From these remnants, what
they taught me of their craft, and the knowledge I brought back from my
travels, I now make my modest living. These are not quite the preservations of
my youth, for there is even less magic in the world now. No, I must use science
and magic in equal quantities in my tinctures and potions, and each comes with
a short tale or saying. I conjure these up from my own experience or things my
parents told me. With them, I try to conjure up what is so easily lost: the
innocence and passion of first love, the energy and optimism of the young, the
strange sense of mystery that fills midnight walks along the beach. But I
preserve more prosaic things as well–like the value of hard work done
well, or the warmth of good friends. The memories that sustain these
concoctions spring out of me and through my words and mixtures into my clients.
I find this winnowing, this release, a curse at times, but mostly it takes away
what I do not want or can no longer use.

Mine is a clandestine
business, spread by word-of-mouth. It depends as much on my clients’ belief in
me as my craft. Bankers and politicians, merchants and landlords hear tales of
this strange man living by himself in a preservationists’ bungalow, and how he
can bring them surcease from loneliness or despair or the injustice of the
world.

Sometimes I wonder if one
day Lucius will become one of my clients and we will talk about what happened.
He still lives in this city, as a member of the city council, having dropped
out of medical school, I’m told, not long after he performed the surgery on me.
I’ve even seen him speak, although I could never bring myself to walk up to
him. It would be too much like talking to a ghost.

Still, necessity might
drive me to him as it did in the past. I have to fill in with other work to
survive. I dispense medical advice to the fisherfolk, many driven out of work
by the big ships, or to the ragged urchins begging by the dock. I do not
charge, but sometimes they will leave a loaf of bread or fish or eggs on my
doorstep, or just stop to talk. My life is simple now.

Over time, I think I have
forgiven myself. My thoughts just as often turn to the future as the past. I
ask myself questions like
When I die, what will she do?
Will the arm
detach itself, worrying at the scar line with sharpened fingernails, leaving
only the memory of my flesh as the fingers pull it like an awkward crab away
from my death bed? Is there an emerald core that will be revealed by that
severance, a glow that leaves her in the world long after my passing? Will this
be loss or completion?

For her arm has never aged.
It is as perfect and smooth and strong as when it came to me. It could still
perform surgery if the rest of me had not betrayed it and become so old and
weak.

Sometimes I want to ask my
mirror, the other old man, what lies beyond, and if it is so very bad to be
dead. Would I finally know her then? Is it too much of a sentimental,
half-senile fantasy, to think that I might see her, talk to her? And: have I
done enough since that ecstatic, drunken night, running with my best friend up
to the cadaver room, to have deserved that mercy?

One thing I have learned in
my travels, one thing I know is true. The world is a mysterious place and no
one knows the full truth of it even if they spend their whole life searching.
For example, I am writing this account in the sand, each day’s work washed away
in time for the next, lost unless my counterpart has been reading it.

I am using my beloved’s
hand, her arm as attached to me as if we were one being. I know every freckle.
I know how the bone aches in the cold and damp. I can feel the muscles tensing
when I clench the purple stick and see the veins bunched at the wrist like a
blue delta. A pale red birthmark on the heel of her palm looks like the perfect
snail crossing the tide pool at my feet.

We never really knew each other,
not even each other’s names, but sometimes that is unimportant.

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Fiction:
Vacancy by Lucius Shepard

Chapter One

Cliff Coria has been
sitting in a lawn chair out front of the office of Ridgewood Motors for the
better part of five years, four nights a week, from mid-afternoon until
whenever he decides it’s not worth staying open any longer, and during that
time he’s spent, he estimates, between five and six hundred hours staring
toward the Celeste Motel across the street. That’s how long it’s taken him to
realize that something funny may be going on. He might never have noticed
anything if he hadn’t become fascinated by the sign in the office window of the
Celeste. It’s a No Vacancy sign, but the No is infrequently lit. Foot-high
letters written in a cool blue neon script: they glow with a faint aura in the
humid Florida dark:

VACANCY

That cool, blue, halated
word, then…that’s what Cliff sees as he sits in a solitude that smells of
asphalt and gasoline, staring through four lanes of traffic or no traffic at
all, plastic pennons stirring above his head, a paperback on his knee (lately
he’s been into Scott Turow), at the center of gleaming SUVS, muscle cars,
mini-vans, the high-end section where sit the aristocrats of the lot, a BMW, a
silver Jag, a couple of Hummers, and the lesser hierarchies of reconditioned
Toyotas, family sedans with suspect frames that sell for a thousand dollars and
are called Drive-Away Specials. He’s become so sensitized to the word, the
sign, it’s as if he’s developed a relationship with it. When he’s reading,
he’ll glance toward the sign now and again, because seeing it satisfies
something in him. At closing time, leaving the night watchman alone in the
office with his cheese sandwiches and his boxing magazines, he’ll snatch a last
look at it before he pulls out into traffic and heads for the Port Orange
Bridge and home. Sometimes when he’s falling asleep, the sign will switch on in
his mind’s eye and glow briefly, bluely, fading as he fades.

Cliff’s no fool. Used car
salesman may be the final stop on his employment track, but it’s lack of
ambition, not a lack of intellect, that’s responsible for his station in life.
He understands what’s happening with the sign. He’s letting it stand for
something other than an empty motel room, letting it second the way he feels
about himself. That’s all right, he thinks. Maybe the fixation will goad him
into making a change or two, though the safe bet is, he won’t change. Things
have come too easily for him. Ever since his glory days as a high school jock
(wide receiver, shooting guard), friends, women, and money haven’t been a
serious problem. Even now, more than thirty years later, his looks still get
him by. He’s got the sort of unremarkably handsome, rumpled face that you might
run across in a Pendleton catalog, and he dyes his hair ash brown, leaves a
touch of gray at the temples, and wears it the same as he did when he was in
Hollywood. That’s where he headed after his stint in the army (he was stationed
in Germany near the end of the Vietnam War). He figured to use the knowledge he
gained with a demolition unit to get work blowing up stuff in the movies, but
wound up acting instead, for the most part in B-pictures.