Stop it, she says. You can check out whenever you feel like it. Just don’t try to leave. Don’t you know that by now?
I’ve heard there’s an escape, you say. A way to get out alive.
That’s not it, Ms. B— says, nodding at the flashing exit/don’t exit sign.
Don’t you even want to hear?
Enlist? Is that it? Sign up to wage war on the wicked? Well, that’s a crock, too.
I’m sure it is.
Okay, then — what is it, your secret way to get out?
Adoption, you tell her. The padre says that if a soldier with six tours adopts you, you’re no longer a wrong-way orphan and you can leave.
Ms B— regards you as if you’ve proposed sticking nasturtiums down the barrel of an enemy soldier’s rifle. Oh, I’ve heard that, too, it’s a fat load of bunkum.
You don’t reply, but you also don’t go down the tunnel to try the door with the contradictory flashing messages. You return with your friend to the Sleep Bay without raising the subject again.
But it makes sense, doesn’t it? A decent orphanage adopts out its charges. If you believe, just believe, somewhere there’s a compassionate Brice or Elise, a person who’s survived six tours and wants nothing more than to rescue some poor wrong-way orphan from terminal warehousing. Such people do exist. They exist to lead you from Vinegar Peace to a place of unmerited Milk and Honey.
That night, huddled on your cot amid the hubbub in the Sleep Bay, you envision a woman very like Elise sitting with you on a porch in late autumn or early winter. You sit shivering under scarlet lap robes, while this person whispers a soothing tale and tirelessly rubs your age-freckled hands.
Michael Bishop published his first story, “Piñon Fall,” in Galaxy over forty years ago. Since that time, living in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, an elementary school counselor, he has published seven story collections and many novels, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning Unicorn Mountain, and the Locus Award-winning Brittle Innings, which Twentieth Century Fox optioned for a film in 1993 and bought outright in 1995. (To date, no film has been made.) The Bishops have a daughter, Stephanie Loftin (a fitness trainer), and two grandchildren, Annabel and Joel.
In 1996, LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, secured Bishop as its writer-in-residence. He teaches creative-writing courses and January interim-term courses (including “Art & Story: Graphic Literature in Contemporary World Culture”), and has assisted other department members in organizing three art-and-literature conferences called Slipstreaming in the Arts. In April 2007, Bishop’s anthology A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales About the Christ appeared from Thunder’s Mouth Press. Currently, he is compiling a collection of his Georgia-based stories, Other Arms Reach Out to Me; marketing a mainstream novel, An Owl at the Crucifixion; and slowly working on a novel about Jonathan Swift visiting many of the invented lands in his classic satire, Gulliver’s Travels. In the fall of 2009, PS Publishing in England released a reprint anthology that Bishop coedited with Steven Utley, Passing for Human, with an original digital-collage cover by Jamie Bishop.
I NEEDS MUST PART, THE POLICEMAN SAID
Richard Bowes
FROM THE AUTHOR: In his generous essay/review of my novelette, Richard Larson refers to the story as a “speculative memoir,” a blend of speculative fiction with memoir. It’s the story of a narrator with the same name as the author who gets sick, nearly dies, goes into a hospital, is operated on, and released. The story involves memory and hallucination. I wanted among other things to make the reader feel the ways that dream and memory overlap and the way Time carries the world we once knew away from us. Over the years, friends and lovers and family members, sick and sometimes dying lay in hospital beds and spoke of their dreams and hallucinations. I’d seen more than one while still alive go off to another kingdom and look back on this world as a semi-stranger. I was afraid of this, kept a pen and notebook with me at all times and wrote down what I saw while conscious or remembered when I woke up.
Before I got sick I’d been listening to a John Dowland song, “Now, Oh Now, I Needs Must Part.” The aptness of the lyrics and the way they tied into hallucinations of my own evoked the Philip K. Dick title, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, for which he also used a John Dowland lyric.
Shortly after I got out of the hospital the National Public Radio show RadioLab broadcast an episode titled “Memory and Forgetting,” about how memory is created and implanted, manipulated and lost. They also did a show on sleep and explored the fringes of that land in which we spend so much of our time.
As I write this essay, the place in which my story is mainly set, the legendary Greenwich Village institution Saint Vincent’s Hospital, harbor for the Village poor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beacon in the nightmare landscape of AIDS in the 1980s, is in the process of closing its doors. It’s being described as a casualty of the changing urban demographics, of modern medical practice. I think of it as having been carried away in the stream of time which moves ceaselessly as we sleep or are distracted or lie sick in bed and leaves only our flawed and distorted memories.
1.
In the predawn one morning last April, I woke up from a violent and disturbing dream. In it, I was somewhere that I realized was the Southwest with three other guys whom I knew in the dream but didn’t quite recognize when I thought about them later.
All of us were engaged in smuggling something — drugs as it turned out. We were tough. Or they were anyway, big guys with long hair and mustaches. There was, I knew, another bunch of guys much tougher than us with whom we didn’t get along and there were cops.
The end of the dream was that I heard police sirens and was scared but relieved because they weren’t as bad as the other guys. The last image in the dream, however, was the cops smashing two of the big guys’ faces right into the adobe wall of the building we stayed in. And I knew, in the way one does in dreams, that the other guy and I were in for something as bad or worse. Then I woke up before dawn in my apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
From the time I was a small boy I’ve been afraid of the long marches of the night, the time in the dark when the lights inside me went out. The fear that would hit me as my head was on the pillow was that I, the one falling asleep, would not be the one who woke up.
Imagining the fragility of my identity chilled me. I did fall asleep again though and dreamed once more.
This time, I saw the main cop with his short white hair and gray suit sitting in his car, smoking a cigarette, staring blue eyed and expressionless at me. I was much younger than I am now, maybe in my mid-twenties instead of my sixties.
In my dream, I realized that I had been looking at a computer and had viewed all this on some kind of a website.
When I awoke this time, the sun was up. Except for my having seen it as a website, the dream seemed like a fragment of the past, a time when I might, in fact, have found myself in places almost as bad as the dream.