The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (41 page)

Meggie says, “I've decided to give up acting. I'm going to be a poet. Nobody cares when poets get old.”

Fawn says, appraisingly, “I hope I look half as good as you when I'm your age.” Fawn, twenty-three. A makeup artist. This year she and the demon lover are married. Last year they met on set.

He says, “I'm thinking I could get some work done on my jawline.”

You'd think they were mother and daughter. Same Viking profile, same quizzical tilt to the head as they turn to look at him. Both taller than him. Both smarter, too, no doubt about it.

Maybe Meggie wonders sometimes about the women he sleeps with. Marries. Maybe he has a type. But so does she. There's a guy at the Halloween party. A boy, really.

Meggie always has a boy and the demon lover can always pick him out. Easy enough, even if Meggie's sly. She never introduces the lover of the moment, never brings them into conversations or even acknowledges their presence. They hang out on the edge of whatever is happening, and drink or smoke or watch Meggie at the center. Sometimes they drift closer, stand near enough to Meggie that it's plain what's going on. When she leaves, they follow after.

Meggie's type? The funny thing is, Meggie's lovers all look like the demon lover. More like the demon lover, he admits it, than he does. He and Meggie are both older now, but the world is full of beautiful black-haired boys and golden girls. Really, that's the problem.

The role of the demon lover comes with certain obligations. Your hairline will not recede. Your waistline will not expand. You are not to be photographed threatening paparazzi, or in sweatpants. No sex tapes.

Your fans will: Offer their necks at premieres. (Also at restaurants and at the bank. More than once when he is standing in front of a urinal.) Ask if you will bite their wives. Their daughters. They will cut themselves with a razor in front of you.

The appropriate reaction is—

There is no appropriate reaction.

The demon lover does not always live up to his obligations. There is a sex tape. There is a girl with a piercing. There is, in the middle of some athletic sex, a comical incident involving his foreskin. There is blood all over the sheets. There is a lot of blood. There is a 911 call. There is him, fainting. Falling and hitting his head on a bedside table. There is Perez Hilton, Gawker, talk radio, YouTube, Tumblr. There are GIFs.

You will always be most famous for playing the lead in a series of vampire movies. The character you play is, of course, ageless. But you get older. The first time you bite a girl's neck, Meggie's neck, you're a twenty-five-year-old actor playing a vampire who hasn't gotten a day older in three hundred years. Now you're a forty-nine-year-old actor playing the same ageless vampire. It's getting to be a little ridiculous, isn't it? But if the demon lover isn't the demon lover, then who is he? Who are you? Other projects disappoint. Your agent says take a comic role. The trouble is you're not very funny. You're not good at funny.

The other trouble is the sex tape. Sex tapes are inherently funny. Nudity is, regrettably, funny. Torn foreskins are painfully funny. You didn't know she was filming it.

Your agent says, That wasn't what I meant.

You could do what Meggie did, all those years ago. Disappear. Travel the world. Hunt down the meaning of life. Go find Meggie.

When the sex tape happens you say to Fawn, But what does this have to do with Meggie? This has nothing to do with Meggie. It was just some girl.

It's not like there haven't been other girls.

Fawn says, It has everything to do with Meggie.

I can see right through you, Fawn says, less in sorrow than in anger. She probably can.

God grant me Meggie, but not just yet. That's him by way of Saint Augustine by way of Fawn the makeup artist and Bible group junkie. She explains it to the demon lover, explains him to himself. And hasn't it been in the back of your mind all this time? It was Meggie right at the start. Why shouldn't it be Meggie again? And in the meantime, you could get married once in a while and never worry about whether or not it worked out. He and Meggie have managed, all this time, to stay friends. His marriages, his other relationships, perhaps these have only been a series of delaying actions. Small rebellions. And here's the thing about his marriages: he's never managed to stay friends with his ex-wives, his exes. He and Fawn won't be friends.

The demon lover and Meggie have known each other for such a long time. No one knows him like Meggie.

The remains of the nudist colony at Lake Apopka promises reasonable value for ghost hunters. A dozen ruined cabins, some roofless, windows black with mildew; a crumbled stucco hall, Spanish tiles receding; the cracked lip of a slop-filled pool. Between the cabins and the lake, the homely and welcome sight of half a dozen trailers; even better, he spots a craft tent.

Muck farms! Mutant alligators! Disappearing nudists! The demon lover, killing time in the LAX airport, read up on Lake Apopka. The past is a weird place, Florida is a weird place, no news there. A demon lover should fit right in, but the ground sucks and clots at his shoes in a way that suggests he isn't welcome. The rain is directly overhead now, shouting down in spit-warm gouts. He begins to run, stumbling, in the direction of the craft tent.

Meggie's career is on the upswing. Everyone agrees. She has a ghost-hunting show,
Who's There?

The demon lover calls Meggie after the
Titanic
episode airs, the one where
Who's There?
's ghost-hunting crew hitches a ride with the International Ice Patrol. There's the yearly ceremony, memorial wreaths. Meggie's crew sets up a Marconi transmitter and receiver just in case a ghost or two has a thing to say.

The demon lover asks her about the dead seagulls. Forget the Marconi nonsense. The seagulls were what made the episode. Hundreds of them, little corpses fixed, as if pinned, to the water.

Meggie says, You think we have the budget for fake seagulls? Please.

Admit that
Who's There?
is entertaining whether or not you believe in ghosts. It's all about the nasty detail, the house that gives you a bad feeling even when you turn on all the lights, the awful thing that happened to someone who wasn't you a very long time ago. The camera work is moody, extraordinary. The team of ghost hunters is personable, funny, reasonably attractive. Meggie sells you on the possibility: Maybe what's going on here is real. Maybe someone is out there. Maybe they have something to say.

The demon lover and Meggie don't talk for months and then suddenly something changes and they talk every day. He likes to wake up in the morning and call her. They talk about scripts, now that Meggie's getting scripts again. He can talk to Meggie about anything. It's been that way all along. They haven't talked since the sex tape. Better to have this conversation in person.

(1991) He and Meggie are lovers. Their movie is big at the box office. Everywhere they go they are famous and they go everywhere. Their faces are everywhere. They are kissing on a thousand screens. They are in a hotel room, kissing. They can't leave their hotel room without someone screaming or fainting or pointing something at them. They are asked the same questions again. Over and over. He begins to do the interviews in character. Anyway, it makes Meggie laugh.

There's a night, on some continent, in some city, some hotel room, some warm night, the demon lover and Meggie leave a window open and two women creep in. They come over the balcony. They just want to tell you that they love you. Both of you. They just want to be near you.

Everyone watches you. Even when they're pretending not to. Even when they aren't watching you, you think they are. And you know what? You're right. Eyes will find you. Becoming famous, this kind of fame: it's luck indistinguishable from catastrophe. You'd be dumb not to recognize it. What you've become.

When people disappear, there's always the chance that you'll see them again. The rain comes down so hard the demon lover can barely see. He thinks he is still moving in the direction of the craft tent and not the lake. There is a noise, he picks it out of the noise of the rain. A howling. And then the rain thins and he can see something, men and women, naked. Running toward him. He slips, catches himself, and the rain comes down hard again, erases everything except the sound of what is chasing him. He collides headlong with a thing: a skin horribly clammy, cold, somehow both stiff and yielding. Bounces off and realizes that this is the tent. Not where you'd choose to make a last stand, but by the time he has fumbled his way inside the flap he has grasped the situation. Not dead nudists, but living people, naked, cursing, laughing, dripping. They carry cameras, mikes, gear for ghost hunting. Videographers, A2s, all the other useful types and the not-so-useful. A crowd of men and women, and here is Meggie. Her hair is glued in strings to her face. Her breasts are wet with rain.

He says her name.

They all look at him.

How is it possible that he is the one who feels naked?

“The fuck is this guy doing here?” says someone with a little white towel positioned over his genitals. Really, it could be even littler.

“Will,” Meggie says. So gently he almost starts to cry. Well, it's been a long day.

She takes him to her trailer. He has a shower, borrows her toothbrush. She puts on a robe. Doesn't ask him any questions. Talks to him while he's in the bathroom. He leaves the door open.

It's the third day on location, and the first two have been a mixed bag. They got their establishing shots, went out on the lake and saw an alligator dive down when they got too close. There are baby skunks all over the scrubby, shabby woods, the trails. They come right up to you, up to the camera, and try like hell to spray. But until they hit adolescence, all they can do is quiver their tails and stamp their feet.

Except, she says, and mentions some poor A2. His skunk was an early bloomer.

Meggie interviewed the former proprietor of the nudist colony. He insisted on calling it a naturist community, spent the interview explaining the philosophy behind naturism, didn't want to talk about 1974. A harmless old crank. Whatever happened, he had nothing to do with it. You couldn't lecture people into thin air. Besides, he had an alibi.

What they didn't get on the first day or even on the second day was any kind of worthwhile read on their equipment. They have the two psychics—but one of them had an emergency, went back to deal with a daughter in rehab; they have all kinds of psychometric equipment, but there is absolutely nothing going on, down, or off. Which led to some discussion.

“We decided maybe we were the problem,” Meggie says. “Maybe the nudists didn't have anything to say to us while we had our clothes on. So we're shooting in the nude. Everyone nude. Cast, crew, everyone. It's been a really positive experience, Will. It's a good group of people.”

“Fun,” the demon lover says. Someone has dropped off a pair of pink cargo shorts and a T-shirt, because his clothes are in his suitcase back at the airport in Orlando. It's not exactly that he forgot. More like he couldn't be bothered.

“It's good to see you, Will,” Meggie says. “But why are you here, exactly? How did you know we were here?”

He takes the easy question first. “Pike.” Pike is Meggie's agent and an old friend of the demon lover. The kind of agent who likes to pull the legs off of small children. The kind of friend who finds life all the sweeter when you're in the middle of screwing up your own. “I made him promise not to tell you I was coming.”

He collapses on the floor in front of Meggie's chair. She runs her fingers through his hair. Pets him like you'd pet a dog.

“He told you, though. Didn't he?”

“He did,” Meggie said. “He called.”

The demon lover says, “Meggie, this isn't about the sex tape.”

Meggie says, “I know. Fawn called, too.”

He tries not to imagine that phone call. His head is sore. He's dehydrated, probably. That long flight.

“She wanted me to let her know if you showed. Said she was waiting to see before she threw in the towel.”

She waits for him to say something. Waits a little bit longer. Strokes his hair the whole time.

“I won't call her,” she says. “You ought to go back, Will. She's a good person.”

“I don't love her,” the demon lover says.

“Well,” Meggie says. She takes that hand away.

There's a knock on the door, some girl. “Sun's out again, Meggie.” She gives the demon lover a particularly melting smile. Was probably twelve when she first saw him onscreen. Baby ducks, these girls. Imprint on the first vampire they ever see. Then she's down the stairs again, bare bottom bouncing.

Meggie drops the robe, begins to apply sunblock to her arms and face. He notes the ways in which her body has changed. Thinks he might love her all the more for it, and hopes that this is true.

“Let me,” he says, and takes the bottle from her. Begins to rub lotion into her back.

She doesn't flinch away. Why would she? They are friends.

She says, “Here's the thing about Florida, Will. You get these storms, practically every day. But then they go away again.”

Her hands catch at his, slippery with the lotion. She says, “You must be tired. Take a nap. There's herbal tea in the cupboards, pot and Ambien in the bedroom. We're shooting all afternoon, straight through to evening. And then a barbecue—we're filming that, too. You're welcome to come out. It would be great publicity for us, of course. Our viewers would love it. But you'd have to do it naked like the rest of us. No clothes. No exceptions, Will. Not even for you.”

He rubs the rest of the sunblock into her shoulders. Would like nothing more than to rest his head on her shoulder.