Her hand trembled. The gun was heavy. Her voice trembled, too, and she despised herself for it. “Sometimes I think the only thing that’s kept me alive is knowing I had half a pack of cigarettes left. That and the desire to make you crawl.”
The old man sat looking at the gun in her hand. “I was the president?”
“No,” said Evans bitterly, “I made it all up.”
His eyes seemed to sink farther back in the network of lines surrounding them.
“I started a war?”
Evans felt her heart race. “Stop lying! You sent the strike force; you ordered the pre-emptive launch.”
“I’m old. How old am I?”
“You know damn well how—” She stopped. She could hardly catch her breath. She felt a sharp pain in her breast. “You’re sixty-one.”
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say?”
The old man stared hollowly, then slowly, so slowly that at first it was not apparent what he was doing, he lowered his head into his hands and began to cry. His sobs were almost inaudible over the hissing of the radiation detector. Dr. Evans watched him intently. She rested her elbows on the desk, steadying the gun with both hands. Havelmann’s head shook in front of her. Despite his age, his gray hair was thick.
After a moment Evans reached over and switched off the loudspeaker. The hissing stopped.
Eventually Havelmann stopped crying. He raised his head. He looked dazed. His expression became unreadable. He looked at the doctor and the gun.
“My name is Robert Havelmann,” he said. “Why are you pointing that gun at me?”
“Please don’t,” said Evans.
“Don’t what? Who are you?”
Evans watched his face blur. Through her tears he looked like a much younger man. The gun drooped. She tried to lift it, but it was as if she were made of smoke—there was no substance to her, and it was all she could do to keep from dissipating, let alone kill anyone as clean and innocent as Robert Havelmann. He took the gun from her hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.
DR. EVANS SAT in her office, hoping that it wasn’t going to be a bad day. The pain in her breast had not come that day, but she was out of cigarettes. She searched the desk on the odd chance that she might have missed a pack, even a single butt, in the corner of one of the drawers. No luck.
She gave up and turned to face the window. The blinds were open, revealing the snow-covered field. She watched the clouds roll before the wind. It was dark. Winter. Nothing was alive.
“It’s cold outside,” she whispered.
There was a knock at the door. Dear God, leave me alone, she thought. Please leave me alone.
“Come in,” she said.
The door opened and an old man in a rumpled suit entered. “Dr. Evans? I’m Robert Havelmann. What did you want to talk about?”
LISA GOLDSTEIN
Tourists
Lisa Goldstein’s fiction features motifs common to science fiction, including time travel, visits to exotic alien worlds, and future dystopia. In Goldstein’s hands, however, these elements are usually means to literary ends that are more properly categorized as magic realism, mythopoeic fiction, and contemporary fairy tales. She achieved instant recognition in 1982, when her first novel, The Red Magician, an allegorical treatment of the rise of Naziism and the holocaust, won the American Book Award. Her next two novels are her most conventional excursions into science fiction. The Dream Years forges a link between the surrealist art movement of the 1920s and the French countercultural movement in 1968, through the adventures of a time-traveling novelist who finds the two eras more similar than not. A Mask for the General is set in a future America under the rule of a dictatorial soldier and explores ideological and social differences that have shaped different factions in the revolutionary subculture. Tourists, expanded from the novella of the same name, gradually eases its characters into Amaz, an uncharted third world country that serves as the setting for some of Goldstein’s short fiction and runs on its own peculiar rules of logic. Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon presents the historical era just prior to the Enlightenment as one where fantasy and mythology are still accepted and thus regularly permeate daily life. Summer King, Winter Fool, set in a world where gods and mortals interact, is Goldstein’s most overt detour into high fantasy. Walking the Labyrinth, in which a young woman comes into her heritage as the descendant of stage magicians who practiced real magic, and Dark Cities Underground, which deploys the familiar theme of the breakdown between reality and the world of a literary fantasy, are both examples of Goldstein’s talent for conveying a sense of magic potential in the everyday through a slight, often imperceptible twist of ordinary events. Her short fiction has been collected in Daily Voices and Travellers in Magic.
HE AWOKE FEELING cold. He had kicked the blankets off, and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie—Where was she? It was still dark out.
Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was—he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.
He got up and opened the curtains. The ocean ten stories below was black as sleep, paling a little to the east—it had to be east—where the sun was coming up. He turned down the air conditioning—the soft hum stopped abruptly—and headed for the bathroom. “Debbie?” he said, tentatively. He was a little annoyed. “Debbie?”
She was still missing after he had showered and shaved and dressed. “All right then,” he said aloud, mostly to hear the sound of his voice. “If you’re not coming I’ll go to breakfast without you.” She was probably out somewhere talking to the natives, laughing when she got a word wrong, though she had told him before they left that she had never studied a foreign language. She was good at languages, then—some people were. He remembered her saying in her soft Southern accent, “For goodness’ sake, Charles, why do you think people will understand you if you just talk to them louder? These people just don’t speak English.” And then she had taken over, pointing and laughing and looking through a phrasebook she had gotten somewhere. And they would get the best room, the choicest steak, the blanket the craftswoman had woven for her own family. Charles’s stock rose when he was with her, and he knew it. He hoped she would show up soon.
Soft Muzak played in the corridor and followed him into the elevator as he went down to the coffee shop. He liked the coffee shop in the hotel, liked the fact that the waiters spoke English and knew what an omelet was. The past few days he had been keeping to the hotel more and more, lying out by the beach and finally just sitting by the hotel pool drinking margaritas. The people back at the office would judge the success of the vacation by what kind of tan he got. Debbie had fretted a little and then had told him she was taking the bus in to see the ruins. She had come back darker than he was, the blond hairs on her arm bleached almost white against her brown skin, full of stories about women on the bus carrying chickens and temples crumbling in the desert. She was wearing a silver bracelet inlaid with blue and green stones.