Vanishing acts, p.9
Vanishing Acts, page 9
I couldn’t move. She said it again.
The doctor was waiting, the baby slick in his hands. Lissy was white as a sheet, her forehead shiny with the sweat, and she couldn’t see it from where she was. “It would be special to me, Jo,” she said.
One of the nurses was beside me saying how it’s done all the time—by husbands and lovers, sisters and mothers and friends—but that if I was going to do it I needed to do it now, please.
I tried to remember who had cut the cord when Meg was born, and I couldn’t. I could remember a doctor, that was all.
I don’t remember taking the surgical steel snips, but I did. I remember not wanting to cut it—flesh and blood, the first of its kind in a long, long time—and when I finally did, it was tough, the cutting made a noise, and then it was over, the mother had the baby in her arms, and everyone was smiling.
A woman could have carried a Gorilla gorilla beringei to term without a care in the world a hundred, a thousand, a million years ago. The placenta would have known what to do; the blood would never have mixed. The gestation was the same nine months. The only thing stopping anyone that winter day in ‘97 when Cleo, the last of her kind on the face of this earth, died of renal failure in the National Zoo in DC, was the thought of carrying it.
It had taken three decades, a well-endowed resurrection group, a slick body broker, and a skinny twenty-one-year-old girl who didn’t mind the thought of it.
She wants money for the operation, my daughter says to me that day in the doorway, shoulders heavy, face puffy, slurring it, the throat a throat I don’t know, the voice deeper. I tell her again I don’t have it, that perhaps her friends—the ones she’s helped out so often when she had the money and they didn’t—could help her. I say it nicely, with no sarcasm, trying not to look at where she hurts, but she knows exactly what I’m saying.
She goes for my eyes, as if she’s had practice, and I don’t fight back. She gets my cheek and the corner of my eye, screams something about never loving me and me never loving her—which isn’t true.
She knows I know how she’ll spend the money, and it makes her mad.
I don’t remember the ten-year-old ever wanting to get even with anyone, but this one always does. She hurts. She wants to hurt back. If she knew, if she only knew what I’d carry for her.
I’ll find her, I know—tonight, tomorrow morning, the next day or two—sitting at a walljack somewhere in the apartment, her body plugged in, the little unit with its Medusa wires sitting in her lap, her heavy shoulders hunched as if she were praying, and I’ll unplug her—to show I care.
But she’ll have gotten even with me, and that’s what counts, and no matter how much I plead with her, promise her anything she wants, she won’t try a program, she won’t go with me to County—both of us, together—for help.
Her body doesn’t hurt at all when she’s on the wall. When you’re a walljacker you don’t care what kind of tissue’s hanging off you, you don’t care what you look like—what anyone looks like. The universe is inside. The juice is from the wall, the little unit translates, and the right places in your skull—the medulla all the way to the cerebellum, all the right centers—get played like the keys of the most beautiful synthesizer in the world. You see blue skies that make you cry. You see young men and women who make you come in your pants without your even needing to touch them. You see loving mothers. You see fathers that never leave you.
I’ll know what to do. I’ll flip the circuit breakers and sit in the darkness with a hand light until she comes out of it, cold-turkeying, screaming mad, and I’ll say nothing. I’ll tell myself once again that it’s the drugs, it’s the jacking, it’s not her. She’s dead and gone and hasn’t been the little girl on that train with her hair tucked behind her ears for a long time, that this one’s a lie but one I’ve got to keep playing.
So I walk into the bedroom, and she’s there, in the chair, like always. She’s got clothes off for a change and doesn’t smell, and I find myself thinking how neat she looks—chic even. I don’t feel a thing.
As I take a step toward the kitchen and the breaker box, I see what she’s done.
I see the wires doubling back to the walljack, and I remember hearing about this from someone. It’s getting common, a fad.
There are two ways to do it. You can rig it so that anyone who touches you gets ripped with a treble wall dose in a bypass. Or so that anyone who kills the electricity, even touches the wires, kills you.
Both are tamperproof. The M.E. has twenty bodies to prove it, and the guys stuck with the job downtown don’t see a breakthrough for months.
She’s opted for the second. Because it hurts the most.
She’s starving to death in the chair, cells drying out, unless someone I.V.’s her—carefully. Even then the average expectancy is two months, I remember.
I get out. I go to a cheap hotel downtown. I dream about blackouts in big cities and bodies that move but aren’t alive and about daughters. The next morning I get a glucose drip into her arm, and I don’t need any help with the needle.
That’s what’s behind the door, Lissy.
We gave them their press conference. The doctors gave her a mild shot of pergisthan to perk her up, since she wouldn’t be nursing, and she did it, held the baby in her arms like a pro, smiled though she was pale as a sheet, and the conference lasted two whole hours. Most of the press went away happy, and two of Mendoza’s girls roughed up the three that tried to hide out on the floor that night. “Mendoza says hello,” they said, grinning.
The floor returned to normal, I went in.
The mother was asleep. The baby was in the incubator. Three nurses were watching over them.
The body broker came with his team two days later and looked happy. Six of his ten babies had made it.
Her name is Mary McLoughlin. I chose it. Her hair is dark, and she wears it short. She lives in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego, and I get down there as often as I can, and we go out.
She doesn’t remember a thing, so I was the one who had to suggest it. We go to the zoo, the San Diego Zoo, one of the biggest once. We go to the primates. We stand in front of the new exhibit, and she tells me how the real thing is so much better than the holograms, which she thinks she’s seen before but isn’t sure.
The baby is a year old now. They’ve named her Cleo, and they keep her behind glass—two or three vets in gauze masks with her at all times—safe from the air and diseases. But we get to stand there, watching her like the rest, up close, while she looks at us and clowns.
No one recognizes the dark-haired girl I’m with. The other one, the one who’d have good reason to be here, disappeared long ago, the media says. Sometimes the spotlight is just too great, they said,
“I can almost smell her, Jo,” she says, remembering a dream, a vague thing, a kitten slept with. “She’s not full-grown, you know.”
I tell her, yes, I know.
“She’s sure funny looking, isn’t she.”
I nod.
“Hey, I think she knows me!” She says it with a laugh, doesn’t know what she’s said. “Look at how she’s looking at me!”
The creature is looking at her—it’s looking at all of us and with eyes that aren’t dumb. Looking at us, not through us.
“Can we come back tomorrow, Jo?” she asks when the crowd gets too heavy to see through.
Of course, I say. We’ll come a lot, I say.
I’ve filed for guardianship under Statute Twenty-seven, the old W&I provisions, and if it goes through, Lissy will be moving back to LA with me. I’m hetero, so it won’t get kicked for exploitation, and I’m in the right field, I think. I can’t move myself, but we’ll go, down to the zoo every weekend. It’ll be good to get away. Mendoza has asked me out, and who knows, I may say yes.
But I still have to have that lunch with Antalou, and I have no idea what I’m going to tell her.
Bruce McAllister’s short stories have appeared over the decades in many science fiction, fantasy and horror magazines, literary quarterlies, college textbooks, and “year’s best” volumes. His short fiction has won or been shortlisted for awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Nebula, Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Locus, and others. His Hugo-nominated story “Kin” was chosen by LeVar Burton to launch the podcast LeVar Burton Reads, and his short story, “The Boy in Zaquitos,” appeared in Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King. He has published the novels Humanity Prime, Dream Baby, and The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic and two story collections, The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories and Stealing God and Other Stories. By day he is a writing coach and screenplay consultant who lives in southern California with his wife, choreographer and medical Qi Gong instructor Amelie Hunter.
“The Girl Who Loved Animals” is one of several stories written by McAllister in the mid-eighties about an all too plausible near-future in which most animals are extinct and as a last ditch effort at preservation some have been put into “arks.” McAllister’s best work is imbued with passion and compassion. It’s a loss to the field that he has written so little fiction in the past decade.
SUNFLOWERS
IAN MCDOWELL
Kelly spotted Jesse while the bus was still pulling into the tiny station. Her cousin wasn’t the only white girl waiting there, but she sure was the skinniest, not to mention the only henna-haired one in a black trenchcoat. Kelly winced at the garment. Besides looking damned uncomfortable on the hottest day of a September that felt like late July (maybe goths are born without sweat glands, she thought, not for the first time), it could target a teenager for vicious abuse in more cosmopolitan places than Sherwood, North Carolina. At least she was a girl, and not quite as likely to get her ass kicked by rednecks. Putting her Powerbook back in its stained case, Kelly brushed pork rinds off her black jeans and white Heroic Trio T-shirt, pulled her bag down from the overhead rack and waited for the door to open.
There was an awkward moment before they hugged; Kelly suspected that the gesture came no more naturally to Jesse than it did to her, but they were still Southern and family, and certain protocols had to be kept. “God, you’re tall,” said Jesse, shaking dyed bangs out of her eyes. “I don’t remember you being tall. Maybe because everybody was when I was little. And I wish my hair was naturally that color.”
“It was purple when I was your age,” said Kelly. Seeing her cousin in the flesh confirmed what the photos on Jesse’s webpage had suggested; the troll-like little girl with the braces and Pippi Longstocking hair that she vaguely remembered from her late grandmother’s Christmas dinners had turned into a babe. Oh, there was more than a hint of acne, and her makeup was applied with about as much finesse as one would expect from a high school kooky-spook, but those were cheekbones to die for, and wonderful green eyes. Was that a shiner fading under her left one?
Yes, it was. Kelly remembered what the results of a punch to the face looked like, having given and received a few in those days when she lived with four other punk wannabes in Carrborro’s Crack Alley after dropping out of Carolina. That was before she got an American Skin boyfriend who taught her that the throat, the eyes and the instep made better targets.
“Somebody hit you.” She didn’t say it as a question.
Jesse’s response was just as blunt, and Kelly immediately decided her e-mail impressions had been correct and that she really, really liked this girl. “It wasn’t Dad. He’s a drunk sometimes, but a nice one.”
Kelly felt the old familiar anger. Every dangerous encounter in the old days had begun when she was taking up for somebody else, usually somebody who’d been stupid and shot off his mouth, but sometimes someone who’d been guilty of nothing but looking like an easy victim. Getting tired of being all her squatmates’ street-mom was one thing that had driven her back into mainstream society. That and Aaron getting himself shot in a meth deal. “Who did it, then?”
Jesse twitched and twirled hair protectively over the bruised eye. “Just this guy at school.”
“All he do was hit you?” Kelly immediately wanted to bite her tongue; it wasn’t her business, not yet, and the platform of the Greyhound station was no place to talk about it.
“Damn straight that’s all he did,” said Jesse, sticking her chin out and looking for a moment like the pugfaced little girl that Kelly remembered. “This is a small town, and guys around here only rape their dates. He didn’t want to date me. Hell, he hit me because he thought I wanted to date his sister. That and because of me kicking him after he called me a carpet muncher.” She looked down at the scuffed toe of her Redwing. “Even with these, kicking a guy in the balls doesn’t work as well as it does in the movies. Especially if he’s a jock.”
“Not if he’s already angry and full of adrenaline, it doesn’t,” said Kelly, ruefully remembering her own lessons in the subject. “Later maybe I can show you some things that will.” Oh, great, she thought, I’ve, been here less than five minutes and I’m offering to be the kid’s streetfighting sifu. Six years of respectability and yet it all comes back like that.
For the first time, Kelly noticed the paperback that Jesse was holding. It was a tattered copy of Night Wings, closed over the stem of a bright yellow flower. Somebody had blackened the teeth on the silly back cover photo.
Jesse’s gaze followed Kelly’s. “I didn’t do that,” she said, looking abashed. “I got it out of the stack of used books at the Lock and Key shop. Didn’t think to look for it when it was new.”
“I expect not,” said Kelly dryly. “You’re the one whose website has that hilarious rant about vampire novels and the trendigoths who buy them.”
Jesse flushed. “Yeah, but I didn’t know my cousin had written one, not till Mouse told me about this book she’d read by a lady with the same last name as me. Good thing it isn’t something regular like Smith, else I wouldn’t have thought to look you up on the net and find out if you were you. I’d never have recognized you from that photo, even if I’d been older than five when I saw you last.”
“The name’s the reason I allowed them to doll me up like that,” said Kelly with a laugh. “The publisher really wanted me to call myself something like Raven Bloodfire, or just about anything other than Kelly Gooch, and only let me keep the name if I agreed to a ‘sexy’ photo shoot, saying they were going to make me the next Poppy Z. Brite. I took enough shit about being a Gooch when I was in grade school and wasn’t about to change it on account of some dildoes in New York. You got a car waiting?”
Kelly had started to walk towards the station doors, but Jesse pointed her in the other direction, towards a path that ran through the grass behind the building and into the alley beside it. “Dad’s got the car with him at work. This way’s a short cut. You want me to carry your bag?”
“That’s all right, I’ve got it,” said Kelly as she followed. “Anyway, don’t sweat what you said about vampire novels. I only thought I never wanted to read another one until I actually wrote one of the damned things; then I knew I didn’t.”
The building next door was a KFC. A scrawny raccoon scrambled out of a trashcan and down a storm drain, trailing chicken bones in its wake. As they passed the drain, Kelly saw its mask peering up at them from the gloom and wondered if it preferred Traditional or Extra Crispy. She always preferred Church’s herself, and had been the only white person she knew who ate there when she lived in Carrborro.
Then they were on Sherwood’s main street, three blocks of shops and dogwood trees, with the courthouse circle at one end and the exit to the highway at the other. They passed a shoeshine parlor, the first she’d seen in years, and a pawnshop and a Rexall drugs. “Oh, shit,” said Jesse, stiffening.
The big, blond-stubbled broad-shouldered kid came ambling towards them with a tomcat’s arrogance, flanked by two equally Aryan-looking cornfed mutants. He had bright blue eyes and brighter white teeth and even without the letter sweatshirt, which must have been nearly as uncomfortable in this weather as Jesse’s overcoat, he would have looked straight from jock central casting. “Hey, Jesse, that your new girlfriend?”
“Fuck off, Jake,” said Jesse, placing herself between the guys and Kelly, a gesture Kelly found touching but impractical.
The kid’s laugh was predictably ugly “Hey, it’s not like I give a shit whose muff you’re diving, as long as you stay away from my sister.”
Kelly strode around Jesse and right into the kid’s face. He blinked before she did, and she got the feeling he was really looking at her for the first time. “This the guy who hit you?” she said quietly. Five years ago, she could have put him on the pavement fast. Maybe not’ now, though.
Apparently, she wouldn’t need to, because he gave an audible swallow, always a sign of submission. “Don’t listen to what she says, lady,” he mumbled, that last word indicating that he’d suddenly realized that Kelly was a decade older and above him in the social pecking order. She knew his type all too well, the kind of “good” kid whose sadism and aggression were only turned towards “acceptable” targets. “I only socked her because she kicked me.”
Kelly leaned in close, and was gratified to see him flinch back. Yeah, she still had The Glare, and far more dangerous guys than this one had withered under it. “You lay a hand on my cousin again and I’ll hurt you worse than you can imagine.”
His lip quivered, and she flattered herself that he would have actually said “yes Ma’am” if his buddies hadn’t been present. Instead, he turned around and stalked off with studied cool, his friends following. At the next curb, they paused and exchanged a few snickers, with him shooting a rather theatrical and not entirely convincing leer in her direction. She made out the words “nice tits for a skinny girl,” but then he looked quickly away, and he’d said it low enough that she could pretend she hadn’t heard.
“Wow,” said Jesse. “I think he was scared of you. I think I would have been, too, if you’d looked at me like that.”
Kelly chuckled. “Yeah, it’s amazing the guys who’ll back down from one hundred and twenty-six pound me.” She should have weighed at least ten pounds more than that, but had gotten positively gawky since things went bad with Rob. There’s a weight loss plan for you; your boyfriend dumps you for his research assistant, you lose your cushy day job and your apartment and have no place to go. Well, maybe the kindness of relatives she hadn’t spoken to in over a decade, plus some good southern cooking, would put more of the old curves back on her five-eleven frame and make her hips feel less like edged weapons. To hell with the idea that starving fueled creativity.
