“Is your name Sonnier?” I asked.
He looked at me curiously.
“Maybe. You want to buy me a drink?” he said.
“Yeah, I can do that,” I said.
He ordered a shot of Beam with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side.
“Are you Verise Sonnier from New Iberia?” I asked.
He grinned stiffly when he took the schooner of beer away from his mouth. “Why you want to know?” he said.
“I think I’m your son. I’m Billy Bob.”
His turquoise eyes wandered over my face, then they lost interest.
“I had a son. But you ain’t him. Buy me another shot?” he said.
“Why not?” I replied.
Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that’s just a poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer’s day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta’s rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people.
1993
HARLAN ELLISON
MEFISTO IN ONYX
Harlan Ellison (1934-) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and had various jobs, mostly blue collar, in all parts of the country before settling in New York to become a full-time writer. Within the next two years, he produced and sold more than one hundred stories and articles before being drafted into the Army. Soon after his discharge, he moved to Chicago to work as an editor at Rogue magazine and Regency Books. His prolific writing career continued when he moved to California to write for motion pictures (including the 1966 blockbuster The Oscar) and, mostly, for television. Ellison supplied scripts for many series, including Burke’s Law, The Flying Nun, Route 66, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Outer Limits, and, most famously, Star Trek — his “The City on the Edge of Forever” is regarded as the best episode in the history of that series, named Best Original Teleplay by the Writers Guild of America; his “Demon with a Glass Hand,” for The Outer Limits, and two other teleplays also won the award. He is among the most honored writers in America, especially among writers of speculative fiction, winning ten Hugos (World Science Fiction Society), including Grand Master; four Nebulas (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America); five Bram Stoker Awards (Horror Writers Association), including lifetime achievement; and two Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Mystery Writers of America) for his memorable short stories “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” and “Soft Monkey”; among many other genre and nongenre honors.
It is uncommon to find fantasy and supernatural elements mixed with crime fiction, but Ellisons work successfully bridges and encompasses those genres frequently, as with this novella. “Mefisto in Onyx” originally appeared in the October 1993 issue of Omni magazine; several minor emendations were made for its first publication in book form three months later by the California publisher Mark V. Ziesing. The text for this volume is taken from that publication.
Once. I only went to bed with her once. Friends for eleven years—before and since—but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year’s Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn’t have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we’d be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants…
But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap sexual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other peoples’ minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.
It was always foul.
Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you’d think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out—take my word for it—you’d want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.
Trust me on this: I go into somebody’s landscape when there’s nothing else I can do, no other possible solution…or I forget and do it in a moment of human weakness. Such as, say, the IRS holds my feet to the fire; or I’m about to get myself mugged and robbed and maybe murdered; or I need to find out if some specific she that I’m dating has been using somebody else’s dirty needle or has been sleeping around without she’s taking some extra-heavy-duty AIDS precautions; or a co-worker’s got it in his head to set me up so I make a mistake and look bad to the boss and I find myself in the unemployment line again; or…
I’m a wreck for weeks after.
Go jaunting through a landscape trying to pick up a little insider arbitrage bric-a-brac, and come away no better heeled, but all muddy with the guy’s infidelities, and I can’t look a decent woman in the eye for days. Get told by a motel desk clerk that they’re all full up and he’s sorry as hell but I’ll just have to drive on for about another thirty miles to find the next vacancy, jaunt into his landscape and find him lit up with neon signs that got a lot of the word nigger in them, and I wind up hitting the sonofabitch so hard his grandmother has a bloody nose, and usually have to hide out for three or four weeks after. Just about to miss a bus, jaunt into the head of the driver to find his name so I can yell for him to hold it a minute Tom or George or Willie, and I get smacked in the mind with all the garlic he’s been eating for the past month because his doctor told him it was good for his system, and I start to dry-heave, and I wrench out of the landscape, and not only have I missed the bus, but I’m so sick to my stomach I have to sit down on the filthy curb to get my gorge submerged. Jaunt into a potential employer, to see if he’s trying to lowball me, and I learn he’s part of a massive cover-up of industrial malfeasance that’s caused hundreds of people to die when this or that cheaply-made grommet or tappet or gimbal mounting underperforms and fails, sending the poor souls falling thousands of feet to shrieking destruction. Then just try to accept the job, even if you haven’t paid your rent in a month. No way.
Absolutely: I listen in on the landscape only when my feet are being fried; when the shadow stalking me turns down alley after alley tracking me relentlessly; when the drywall guy I’ve hired to repair the damage done by my leaky shower presents me with a dopey smile and a bill three hundred and sixty bucks higher than the estimate. Or in a moment of human weakness.
But I’m a wreck for weeks after. For weeks.
Because you can’t, you simply can’t, you absolutely cannot know what people are truly and really like till you jaunt their landscape. If Aquinas had had my ability, he’d have very quickly gone off to be a hermit, only occasionally visiting the mind of a sheep or a hedgehog. In a moment of human weakness.