The spotters are paid to warn dealers if the heat is on the prowl or tip them off that a customer is at hand. I glanced back and saw John watching me.
One evening I took Chris to see a play that was running at a theater around the corner from my place. As we walked down narrow, old Minetta Lane, kids on motorized wheelchairs rolled past the Sixth Avenue end of the lane.
For a moment I saw Jamine. Then I wasn’t sure and then they were gone.
One day on the street we found a guy selling candid black and white photos that his father had taken fifty, forty, thirty years ago on the streets of Greenwich Village. One shot taken from an upstairs window on West Tenth Street and dated 1968 showed the Ninth Circle Bar with young guys in tight jeans and leather jackets standing on the front stairs. I felt a rush of déjà vu.
That night on a website I saw that scene again, the street, the stairs, the figures. But this time there was a close-up. The kid in the center of the group was me. The other guys were my partners in crime from the dream.
I clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was a figure in a motorized wheelchair rolling up Minetta Lane toward the camera. My face was a twisted mask. My hands were claws. I was ancient and partially paralyzed: the ultimate nightmare.
“You see how long we’ve been keeping an eye on you. And how long we’ll keep it up,” McGittrick said and I awoke in the dawn light.
That evening when Chris and I kissed good-bye at Penn Station and he went off on the airport train, I felt the most incredible loneliness and loss. He’d been sharing his energy and youth with me and now I was on my own again.
Back downtown, I sat on a bench in Washington Square in the May twilight. Dogs yapped in the runs. As the light went away a jazz quintet played “These Foolish Things.”
McGittrick stood studying me. “Why,” I asked, “was it necessary to screw my head around as you’ve been doing?”
“Think of it as boot camp. Break you down, rebuild you. Would the you who went to sleep the night before you got sick have sat in a public park having this conversation?”
“How did you get into this racket?”
He smiled, “Immaculata recruited me. Said I was a restless soul that wouldn’t be happy unless I got to see a little more of life and death than others did.”
“And now?”
“I’m ready to move on. You’ll understand when you’re in my place.”
My guts, where they had been cut open and stapled back together, still hurt a little. I’d pretty much tapered off the medication but I needed to go home and take half an oxycontin tablet.
I arose and he asked, “Would you rather talk to Sister Immaculata?”
“That’s okay. You’re less scary than a nun.”
“You’ve got a while to decide,” he said. “But not, you know, for ever.”
I nodded and continued on my way. But we both knew how I’d decided.
Dowland wrote:
I had seen death and didn’t want to die. Maybe I was a restless soul or maybe I was too big a coward to face death all at once and forever.
From a little reading I’d done, some research on the Internet, I knew that injury or illness actually can change a personality. What I’d always feared had happened. The one who had gone to sleep that night a few weeks before had awakened as someone else.
And I now was different enough from the one I had been that I didn’t much care about that person who now was lost and gone.
Richard Bowes has lived in Manhattan for most of his adult life. He has published five novels, two collections of stories, and over forty short stories. Bowes has won two World Fantasy Awards, as well as Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers awards. This is his sixth Nebula Award nomination. Recent and forthcoming stories will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in the Digital Domains, Wilde Stories, The Beastly Bride, Haunted Legends, Year’s Best Gay Stories, and Naked City anthologies.
Most of these, like this year’s Nebula nominated novelette, “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said,” are part of his novel in stories: Dust Deviclass="underline" My Life In Speculative Fiction.
DIVINING LIGHT
Ted Kosmatka
FROM THE AUTHOR: The idea for “Divining Light” was in my head for a couple of years before I finally figured out how to write it. There were a lot of false starts that ended up in the wastebasket, and I eventually realized that before I could write the story in a way that held together as a narrative, there were several problems I’d first need to overcome — not the least of which being that the science behind the story was so impenetrable.
In “Divining Light,” the whole premise hinges on the reader understanding a twist extrapolated from a loophole in the logic of quantum mechanics. For the story to succeed, the reader had to understand not just the basics of QM, but also my particular spin on it — which in turn would require me to dump about a metric ton of physics into the story.
I knew it would never work.
You can’t say, hey, read this chapter on physics, and then the real story will start on page sixteen. So the big problem became, how do I get the reader to slog through pages and pages of raw physics without realizing it? I’d need to perform an act of prestidigitation, and I really had no idea how to pull it off. It was almost like a math problem. When I looked at it that way, I decided to move my variables around like algebra, throwing in different characters, different conflicts, trying to find a narrative that best tolerated the necessary info-dumps while at the same time serving the themes that grew naturally from the premise. Still, nothing I tried really clicked. At the time, I had a day job in a research lab, so I’d work eight to ten hours in this analytical environment, and then I’d come home and hammer away at a story that was beginning to look more like some dense, technical treatise than any kind of fiction worth reading. It was pretty discouraging.
I ended up shaking the Etch A Sketch one last time and started over. I asked myself what story I wanted to tell from the perspective of the characters, rather than the science. When I focused on that and only that, the writing finally opened up, and I managed to tell the story.
It is impossible that God should ever deceive me, since in all fraud and deceit is to be found a certain imperfection.
I CROUCHED IN THE rain with a gun.
A wave climbed the pebbly beach, washing over my foot, filling my pants with grit and sand. Around me, the rocks loomed black and big as houses.
I shivered as I came back to myself and for the first time realized my suit jacket was missing. Also my left shoe, brown leather, size twelve. I looked for the shoe, scanning the rocky shoreline, but saw only stone and frothy, sliding water.
I took another pull from the bottle and tried to loosen my tie. Since I had a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other — and since I was unwilling to surrender either — loosening my tie was difficult. I used the gun hand, working the knot with a finger looped through the trigger guard, cold steel brushing my throat. I felt the muzzle under my chin — fingers numb and awkward, curling past the trigger.