Shuteye for the Timebroker (37 page)

“You must place me in the flame, Mother.”

“You’ll die.”

“Not at all. Nor will you be harmed. Trust me.”

If the green flame gave off heat, it was not the heat of a normal fire. Tansy approached warily. Closed her eyes for the final few yards.

A sensation as of silken threads infiltrating her blood vessels informed her that she was fully engulfed.

She tipped out Plum Sun into the flames, then backed away, out of the fiery column.

The eel lashed back and forth within the fires, but did not crisp or wail, but rather became engorged, priapic.

Big as a house, Plum Sun occulted or had completely absorbed the fires that had ennobled him. He seemed at ease in the air.

“Step closer, Mother.”

Tansy obeyed.

Plum Sun’s mouth a needled, ribbed cavern.

The hundred hands of invisible currents pulled her inside her son’s gullet.

Blackness, acid reek, hot fluids laving her.

Dissolution, assimilation into the flesh of her child.

Tansy looked out through Plum Sun’s eyes, felt his/her hermaphroditic body slip through gill-freshening darkling estuarial waters, sensed electrical impulses through novel organs of perception.

More of her kind fed below, drab cousins. She dropped swiftly through the waters to claim her share.

A woman’s corpse provided the banquet, its clothing shredded. Dozens of eels tailed off the rotting body like flowers from a garden plot. Half-eaten already, disintegrating, drifting like a seedling on the marine winds, the woman’s body reminded Tansy of someone close to her.

Plum Sun joined the feast.

The net took them unawares as they gorged, too busy incorporating the woman’s substance into themselves to heed the surface predators.

Up, up, into the cruel air.

Confinement in a narrow bucket.

Speech vibrating the interface between air and liquid. Plum Sun understands.

“Have a dekko then, child. C’mon, naught’ll happen to you.”

On tiptoes to peer into the bucket.

Tansy’s first impression: a single braided whip in constant coiling motion, a flux of silver and black. Then: separation into component parts: heads, eyes, bodies, flukes, gills.

A bucket of writhing eels, sinuous, muscled, constrained.

Their weavings seem to scribe watery ideograms in perpetual flicker, transiting from one half-perceived meaning to another.

And at random moments, as their serpentine bodies open a clear view to the bottom of the bucket, millisecond impressions of something piebald, gold and blue, beneath them. Like a queen or king guarded by courtiers. A sport or mutant brother to the mundane sea-snakes …?

Tansy finds the bizarre sight of so much life compacted into such a small compass soothing somehow. Feels herself composed of similar perpetually coiling energies, her DNA lashing like eels at the heart of each cell. Energies that offer new configurations of possibility every millisecond.

Comes down off her tiptoes. Gazes at the proprietor of the eel-pie stall. The man winks at her, a wink conveying centuries of complicity.

“You’ll be needing this meal now, then?”

Places her hand gently on her own stomach.

“No, not now, thank you. I’m already quite full.”

Recently I had the pleasure of contributing critical commentary to a lush new art book, Todd Schorr’s
Dreamland
(Last Gasp, 2004). Schorr’s paintings all possess great narrative and allegorical drive, and I found myself spinning stories in my head around each canvas, little vignettes that intersected with Schorr’s artwork at odd angles. These are those stories, their titles taken from Schorr’s canvases. I hope my pieces resonate, even without the inspirational artwork beside them, and that they motivate readers to search out Schorr’s otherworldly art.

My thanks also to Harlan Ellison and Michael Swanwick for their pioneering work in the field of literary miniaturization.

The Farthest Schorr

1.

THE HUNTER-GATHERER

The hominid named Gra had to chew the skins for several days to get them supple enough to form the sack. His big blunt teeth and wide parabola of jaw began to ache. But he persisted. No effort could be spared for the all-important hunt, the first of its kind. Fashioning the bone sewing needle occupied another half of a day, as did cleaning the animal intestines to form thread. During this period he subsisted on carrion, too preoccupied to track new game. He grew sick from the tainted meat. His mate, Reh, brought him some of the fleshy stalks that grew in the swamp, a plant that had cured his distress once before. But finally, after all the work and illness, he was ready.

Warily, he approached the site where the odd, unclean strangers in their outlandishly textured furs had once camped, before vanishing in a whirlpool of shimmering air. They had scattered debris over a wide area before leaving, and the bright colors and half-recognizable shapes of the abandoned objects hypnotized him. The slick surfaces of the figurines that resembled his fellow tribespeople in the oddest, most disturbing ways seemed to impart knowledge through Gra’s skin. One by one, he began to pick up the objects and place them in his sack, his muscle-corded arms, veins in bas-relief, almost too powerful for the delicate task assigned them.

By midday he was feeling faint, possibly from the lingering effects of the bad meat, but also possibly from the collective mojo of his prizes. And then, as he stooped for one last trophy, dizziness washed over him. The air swirled in chromatic pinwheels similar to the whirlpool that had taken the strangers away. Two of the figures—a black and red mouse and a pregnantly voluptuous woman with a beehive for a head—came to life atop a pedestal of untainted fresh kill; orchestrated noises unlike any he had ever heard filled his ears. Something never before felt was born inside him. Gra fell to his knees—to
pray
.

And how much will you be contributing today to the fund for new stained glass windows, Mr. Jones?

2.

SUGAR SHAKES

The pentagram was outlined in Kool-Aid powder. The candles were stacks of pierced Necco wafers with licorice-whip wicks. The sacrifice was a beheaded chocolate Easter bunny. Solid, not hollow.

Little Kenny Firazzy was ready to invoke his own peculiar demons.

Butt-naked, smeared with strawberry syrup, a necklace of candy skulls draped across his bony, ten-year-old chest, Kenny began to chant the evil invocation he had learned from collecting enough Bazooka bubble gum comics.

“Skittles and Kit-Kats and hyperglycemia! Gummis and Starbursts and sweets that are dreamier!”

The chant took a full five minutes to recite. But when he finished, Kenny knew he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Confined in the pentagram, three demons hovered: Cottonwisp, Bad Apple, and Beninjeri. Vainly did they writhe to be free, uttering seductive promises and lies. Their tails lashed, their fluids oozed, their worm-tongues flickered. But Kenny had been too smart for their wiles. They were trapped, and forced to accept his commands.

“Listen, you three,” Kenny ordered, “I wanna have all the worlds sweet stuff, all the time, anytime I want it! And for starters, I’ll take a nice big serving of chocolate milk.”

“Your wish,” hissed the three demons, “is our command.”

A bioengineered cow crashed through the roof, landed on Kenny, and squashed him flatter than a fruit roll-up. Chocolate milk dribbled from its teats. The pentagram dispersed upon impact, and the demons were freed.

They went straight back to their home in the innermost circle of sugar hell: Hershey, Pennsylvania.

3.

THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL TAUNG BABY

The aliens picked Lena Wilkinson up in 1951, right in the middle of a photo session with Irving Klaw—a flock of horrible little creatures with heads like partially deflated, mushroom-textured balloons, riding in glittery Formica saucers. They couldn’t fit her lingerie-clad form into any of their tiny, one-alien cruisers, of course, so they enveloped her in some kind of translucent protective protoplasm, zapped Klaw and his crew with their amnesia ray, and towed Lena off with gravity waves behind their mini-fleet as they soared out into space.

That envelope of protoplasm eventually became her only friend.

The trip across the light-years involved passage down an infinite helical tunnel tinted a bilious yellow-green and studded at intervals with slate-colored exit portals. The fleet eventually dove down one exit and emerged above a hospitable planet, and that is where they dumped Lena.

The protoplasm shivered off her and coalesced into a small bulbous luminescent starfish-shaped entity.

“Lena, I’m your new companion, Rollo. Follow me to your new home. We have a lot of learning and fucking to do.”

Still clad only in underwear and stockings and heels, and dazed from her swift abduction and transport, Lena could only dully obey.

For the past fifty years, Lena has indeed learned and fucked a lot. She has not aged. Although it is not visibly different, her head sometimes feels as if it has swelled ten times in size. And her fruitful loins have disgorged dozens of alien babies, the result of her congress with a host of unimaginable creatures. Naked mole rats, exoskeletal ghouls, giant blue rabbits—Lena dreams that someday one of her babies—all of whom were taken away by her original captors shortly after weaning—will return to rescue her and return her to a planet she only vaguely recalls.

Idly, she wonders what Klaw is paying for a photo session these days.

4.

A GOOBER AND A TUBER IN AN EXCHANGE OF FISTICUFFS

Midge was doing plenty all right for herself. A gal with nothing much to get by on except for her va-va-voom figure and an enigmatic blank gaze that certain joes found sexy, she had come out of the worst kind of poverty and landed in the lap of luxury. Not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier, she nonetheless knew when she had a good thing going.

And this affair with Skippy Goober was one helluva sweet deal.

Oh, sure, he had his drawbacks and failings and quirks, like anything in trousers. The only position he liked for screwing was doggie-style. Claimed he had a hard time getting up off his back once he was down, and his skinny little legs always collapsed when he tried boring old missionary style. And his body odor—whew! Even deodorant failed to hide that earthy scent. But worst of all was his temper. Once Skippy wrapped himself around a few drinks—mai tais were his favorite—he could be as brutal and mean as Senator McCarthy looking for Reds. Still, he had never yet hit Midge—she had told him she’d knife him while he slept if he ever laid a hand on her—and he did take her out to the nicest places.

Like tonight, at the Brown Derby, with all the swells and stars admiring Midge’s cleavage. Heaven on earth.

Until Argus Toober showed up.

Toober was Goober’s rival in the rackets. They hated each other like North Korea hated South Korea. And now that idiot maitre d’ was seating Toober right next to Midge and her man!

Goober growled and hefted his sword-cane. Midge sighed and surreptitiously checked her purse for her mad money. Looked like she’d be going home alone. No playing with Goober’s stalk and peanuts tonight.

5.

VARIATIONS IN KITSCH

The anonymous respirator-wearing worker tending the giant bubbling vat of lava-lamp fluid leaned over just a bit too far. Out of his shirt pocket fell a small, curious pebble he had picked up on the way to work that morning. That pebble was, in fact, the remnant of a thousand-ton meteorite from beyond the Horsehead Nebula, all that had survived the burning passage through Earth’s atmosphere, and it possessed uncanny properties.

The lamps filled with the contaminated fluid were shipped around the nation.

One went to Kaarlo Krisp, a Broadway set designer who lived in a Greenwich Village apartment surrounded by all the nostalgic icons of his youth, acquired through assiduous collecting.

Kaarlo tripped while carrying the lava lamp upstairs and dropped it, opening a hairline crack in its vessel. Nervously running his finger around the glass, Kaarlo simultaneously cut himself and absorbed some of the alien fluid into his cut.

During the next ten hours Kaarlo experienced a trip like no other human had ever undergone. He journeyed to a world where cavemen manned a NASA-style Mission Control, and another where tubby porkers bowled an infinite succession of perfect games. The ménage à trois with Sheena Queen of the Jungle and the Fujiyama Mama brought a tear to his eye. He was just getting used to the constantly shifting scenery and characters when a small crocodile wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a sombrero materialized and said, “Hey, kid, is your ticket punched?”