“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”
He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”
He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.
“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”
With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”
The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.
“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”
I DIDN’T GO back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.
I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.
There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers.
Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
Rat
James Patrick Kelly began contributing to magazines and anthologies in the late 1970s and quickly established a reputation as a writer of well-crafted stories that take a variety of approaches to an eclectic mix of themes. Much of his fiction is firmly grounded in social commentary. “Death Therapy” envisions a future justice system where simulated death is used to rehabilitate criminals. “Still Time” and “Crow” present opposing viewpoints on typical human behavior in the shadow of nuclear war. “Pogrom” presents the generation gap in terms of future civil war. “Big Guy” explores the breakdown of personal relationships and interactions coincident with the rise of rapid telecommunications and virtual reality. Kelly’s best short fiction has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories. His work as a novelist includes the diptych Planet of Whispers and Look into the Sun, concerned with life on the planet Aseneshesh, where political and religious strife replicates problems that cripple third world countries on Earth. His novel Wildlife explores the conflict between parent and offspring in the context of biogenetic engineering, with its tale of a young woman who rebels against the personality and destiny her father has engineered for her. He has also collaborated with John Kessel on Freedom Beach.
RAT HAD STASHED the dust in four plastic capsules and then swallowed them. From the stinging at the base of his ribs, he guessed they were now squeezing into his duodenum. Still plenty of time. The bullet train had been shooting through the vacuum of the TransAtlantic tunnel for almost two hours now; they would arrive at Port Authority/Koch soon. Customs had already been fixed, according to the maréchal. All Rat had to do was to get back to his nest, lock the smart door behind him, and put the word out on his protected nets. He had enough Algerian Yellow to dust at least half the cerebrums on the East Side. If he could turn this deal, he would be rich enough to bathe in Dom Perignon and dry himself with Gromaire tapestries. Another pang shot down his left flank. Instinctively his hind leg came off the seat and scratched at air.
There was only one problem; Rat had decided to cut the maréchal out. That meant he had to lose the old man’s spook before he got home.
The spook had attached herself to him at Marseilles. She braided her blonde hair in pigtails. She had freckles, wore braces on her teeth. Tiny breasts nudged a modest silk turtleneck. She looked to be between twelve and fourteen. Cute. She had probably looked that way for twenty years, would stay the same another twenty if she did not stop a slug first or get cut in half by some automated security laser that tracked only heat and could not read—or be troubled by—cuteness. Their passports said they were Mr. Sterling Jaynes and daughter Jessalynn, of Forest Hills, New York. She was typing in her notebook, chubby fingers curled over the keys. Homework? A letter to a boyfriend? More likely she was operating on some corporate database with scalpel code of her own devising.
“Ne fais pas semblant d’étudier, ma petite,” Rat said, “Que fais-tu?”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, pouting, “can’t we go back to plain old English? After all, we’re almost home.” She tilted her notebook so that he could see the display. It read: “Two rows back, second seat from aisle. Fed. If he knew you were carrying, he’d cut the dust out of you and wipe his ass with your pelt.” She tapped the Return key, and the message disappeared.