“Dolmades. Comes from the same Turkish word as ‘dolmush.’ They both mean ‘stuffed.’ ” She put the tray beside the glasses. “Sit down.”
I sat on the studio-couch-that-becomes-bed. Under the brocade I felt the deep, fluid resilience of a glycogel mattress. They’ve got the idea that it approximates the feeling of free fall. “Comfortable? Would you excuse me for a moment? I have some friends down the hall. I want to see them for a moment.” She winked. “They like spacers.”
“Are you going to take up a collection for me?” I asked. “Or do you want them to line up outside the door and wait their turn?”
She sucked a breath. “Actually I was going to suggest both.” Suddenly she shook her head. “Oh, what do you want!”
“What will you give me? I want something,” I said. “That’s why I came. I’m lonely. Maybe I want to find out how far it goes. I don’t know yet.”
“It goes as far as you will. Me? I study, I read, paint, talk with my friends”—she came over to the bed, sat down on the floor—“go to the theater, look at spacers who pass me on the street, till one looks back; I am lonely too.” She put her head on my knee. “I want something. But,” and after a minute neither of us had moved, “you are not the one who will give it to me.”
“You’re not going to pay me for it,” I countered. “You’re not, are you?”
On my knee her head shook. After a while she said, all breath and no voice, “Don’t you think you… should leave?”
“Okay,” I said, and stood up.
She sat back on the hem of her coat. She hadn’t taken it off yet.
I went to the door.
“Incidentally.” She folded her hands in her lap. “There is a place in New City you might find what you’re looking for, called the Flower Passage—”
I turned toward her, angry. “The frelk hangout? Look, I don’t need money! I said anything would do! I don’t want—”
She had begun to shake her head, laughing quietly. Now she lay her cheek on the wrinkled place where I had sat. “Do you persist in misunderstanding? It is a spacer hangout. When you leave, I am going to visit my friends and talk about… ah, yes, the beautiful one that got away. I thought you might find… perhaps someone you know.”
With anger, it ended.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, it’s a spacer hangout. Yeah. Well, thanks.”
And went out.
And found the Flower Passage, and Kelly and Lou and Bo and Muse. Kelly was buying beer so we all got drunk, and ate fried fish and fried clams and fried sausage, and Kelly was waving the money around, saying, “You should have seen him! The changes I put that frelk through, you should have seen him! Eighty lira is the going rate here, and he gave me a hundred and fifty!” and drank more beer. And went up.
Afterword: 1994.
This story was written in September of 1966—three years before Stonewall and half a dozen years before anyone was aware there might even be a disease like AIDS. Had you asked me what it was about when I wrote it, I’d have said it was my try at taking two characters—one, the narrator, whom most readers would relate to as male, and another who was objectively female—and, through science fictional distortion of the world around them, making this disturbingly “normal” couple stand in for the range of the perversions.
I’m not sure how the change in the social status of homosexuality, sadomasochism, and the like have changed the way we read the story today. Ask me what the story is about now, however, and I’ll probably say it’s somehow about the desire for desire.
But what direction is this account—of a woman who wants sex and a man who, finally, says no—casting its irony in? Is it a satirically serious version of Peg and Al Bundy? Is it a role reversal of a young female prostitute and the older male John? Is it some sort of analogue of the straight hustler and the older gay John, but with some of the parts switched along other axes?
I don’t know. But I suspect that only by asking such questions does the story become even vaguely interesting—to those readers who might want to reanimate it with whatever traces of life it once might have held at the longer and longer-ago time of its writing.
Ursus Triad, Later
KATHE KOJA AND BARRY N. MALZBERG
Kathe Koja is the author of The Cipher, Bad Brains, Skin, Strange Angels, and Kink. She was cowinner (with Melanie Tern) of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for The Cipher (Superior Achievement in a first novel) which also won the Locus poll in the same category. She is the author of many short stories, several of which have appeared in best of the year anthologies. She lives with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and her son, Aaron, in the suburbs of Detroit.
Barry N. Malzberg’s collected essays on science fiction, Breakfast in the Ruins was published in the Spring of 2007. The book conflates his l982 classic Engines of the Night and all of the essays published since. His collection In the Stone House was published in 2000; and several of his science fiction novels from the 1970s have been reissued within the past half-decade.
Malzberg’s body of work includes several novels and short stories concerned with religion, such as The Cross of Fire and “The Passion of Azazel”—only the third work that deals with the Judaic. Two of Malzberg’s short stories from the 1970s appear in Jack Dann’s anthology More Wandering Stars. Malzberg has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for forty-five years; his first story, “We’re Coming Through the Windows,” (Galaxy magazine, August 1967) was sold on January 11, 1967.
His most recent piece of fiction, “The Man Who Murdered Mozart,” is an ambitious novelette in collaboration with Robert Walton, published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2012.
NOW THE DOOR, THE knob on the door, the small sliver of light dense, concentrated, aiming from the room behind: where the bears nested. The splinters of the floor, the brutal surfaces upon which she had rolled, scrambled, been pawed and lumbered over, half-suffocated between fur and ragged blanket and fear of the splinters, pointed always but always somehow missing puncture: of her eyes, the worn but tender skin beneath; her suffering lips. Once her perspective had been larger, once—she thought, or believed she had thought—she had seen the house entire, light everywhere: the gleam of glass and porcelain, the glimpse of cages through transparent walls, but that must have been a long time ago or perhaps some trick of perspective, some dull accident of sensibility, for now she could see only that door, that knob, the light, the floor from the position to which she had sunk: the dainty ordnance of paws, the heavy intake of the bears’ breath somehow framing conditions without providing illumination. The cages had come open some time ago, were never closed now; the keeper—if there had been a keeper, a jailer, some master who had schooled them (and if so for what extravagant enjoyment, who under God’s sun could train animals to purposes like these?)—now fled, the house the bears’ alone, she the intruder, she the peeping, curious, external force crushed now to this sullen, sunken wood and the creaking sound of their inhalations as one by one, solemnly, they played with her: over and over, opening her up like a wound, their paws and fur the ancient sutures drawn by that wound, bleached and stanched and then somehow magnified by their withdrawal as one by one, each by each they left her on the floor: to gather her own breath and breathing wounds together before another one returned to rend her now anew.