Crackpot Palace (18 page)

Days passed and Paige hung on. Each day I'd spy on his meager existence and wonder what he must be thinking. When the time came and he wasn't dead, I killed him with a cigarette. I brought the glass to the very edge of the table, bent a plastic drinking straw that I shoved the longer end of up into the glass, and then caught it fairly tightly against the table edge. As for the part that stuck out, I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and then blew the smoke up into the glass. I gave him five lungfuls. The oxygen displacement was too much, of course.

Mrs. Trucy accepted our story and the magnified view of her lover's diminutive body. We told her how he bravely took the shrinking ray for the sake of science. She remarked that he looked younger than when he was full size and alive, and the Research General told her, “As you shrink, wrinkles have a tendency to evaporate.” We went to the funeral out in the desert near her home. It was a blazingly hot day. She'd had his remains placed into a thimble with some tape across the top, and this she buried in the red sand.

Later, as the sun set, the Research General and I ate dinner at a ramshackle restaurant along a dusty road right outside of Mateos. He had the pig knuckle with sauerkraut and I had the chicken croquettes with orange gravy that tasted brown.

“I'm so relieved that asshole's finally dead,” whispered the Research General.

“There's dead and there's dead,” I told him.

“Let's not make this complicated,” he said. “I know he's out there in some smaller version of reality, he could be filling all available space with smaller and smaller reproductions of himself, choking the ass of the universe with pages and pages of Mando Paige. I don't give a fuck as long as he's not here.”

“He is here,” I said, and then they brought the martinis and the conversation evaporated into reminiscence.

That night as I stood out beneath the desert sky having a smoke, I had a sense that the cumulative beams generated by the repercussions of my actions over time, harboring my inherent will, had reached some far-flung boundary and were about to turn back on me. In my uncomfortable bed at the Hacienda Motel, I tossed and turned, drifting in and out of sleep. It was then that I had a vision of the shrinking ray, its sparkling blue emission bouncing off a mirror set at an angle. The beam then travels a short distance to another mirror with which it collides and reflects. The second mirror is positioned so that it sends the ray back at its own original source. The beam strikes and mixes with itself only a few inches past the nozzle of the machine's barrel. And then I see it in my mind—when a shrinking ray is trained upon itself, its diminutive-making properties are canceled twice, and as it is a fact that when two negatives are multiplied they make a positive, this process makes things bigger. As soon as the concept was upon me, I was filled with excitement and couldn't wait to get back to the lab the next day to work out the math and realize an experiment.

It was fifteen years later, the Research General had long been fired, when Mando Paige stepped out of the spot where the shrinking ray's beam crossed itself. He was blue and yellow and red and his hair was curly. I stood within feet of him and he smiled at me. I, of course, couldn't let him go—not due to any law but my own urge to finish the job I'd started at the outset. As he stepped back toward the ray, I turned it off, and he was trapped, for the moment, in our moment. I called for my assistants to surround him, and I sent one to my office for the revolver I kept in my bottom drawer. He told me that one speck of his saliva contained four million Daltharees. “When I fart,” he said, “I set forth armadas.” I shot him and the four assistants and then automatically acid-washed the lab to destroy the Dalthareen plague and evidence of murder. No one suspected a thing.

I found a few cities sprouting beneath my fingernails last week. There were already rows of domes growing behind my ears. My blood no doubt is the manufacture of cities, flowing silver through my veins. Crowds behind my eyes, commerce in my joints. Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee.

A Note About “Daltharee”

This story originally appeared in
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy,
edited by Ellen Datlow, and got some good reviews as well as coverage in the
Los Angeles Times
. It would be almost impossible to be my age and, in writing a bottled-city story, not have been influenced by Kandor, the capital city of the planet Krypton, which was shrunken and bottled by Superman's nemesis, Brainiac. The most interesting thing to me about “Daltharee” is that it just barely misses adding up and making sense. This was intentional on my part; I was interested for a while in stories that are made to be consciously misshapen or broken in some way. No one ever complained about the fact that the shrinking of the city, Daltharee, and the smaller and smaller reproductions of it really don't account for its proliferation and/or its infecting of the scientist/protagonist, Mando Paige. The story seems like it ought to make sense, and in a way, that seems to have been enough for readers.

Ganesha

O
n a floating platform adrift in the placid Sea of Eternity, Ganesha sat on his golden throne beneath a canopy of eight cobras. The eyes in his elephant head gazed out past the moon; his big ears rippled in the breeze. Each of his four human hands was occupied, so his trunk curled up to scratch his cheek, the itch a manifestation of evil in the million-and-second reality. In one hand he held the pointed shard of his broken tusk, using it to write on parchment held by the second hand. In his third hand was a lotus flower, and his fourth hand was turned palm out to show a red tattoo of a cross with bent arms, meaning “be well.” He wore baggy silk pants the color of the sun, but no shirt to cover his chest and bulging gut. His necklace was a live snake, as was his belt. At his feet sat Kroncha, the rat, nibbling a stolen modak sweet.

In the west, something fell out of the sky, sparking against the night. Ganesha watched its descent and, when it collided with the sea, a great sizzle and a burst of light becoming dark again, he marked the spot by pointing his trunk. He stood and stretched. “A journey,” he said to Kroncha. The rat followed and they went to the edge of the floating platform, where a boat had appeared, an open craft lined with comfortable pillows. In a blink, they were aboard. Ganesha rested his weighty head back, one hand holding a parasol to block the moonlight, and crossed his legs. They remembered only after they had pushed off to bring the modak sweets, and so the sweets appeared. The wind picked up and gently powered the boat to sea.

After a brief eternity, they reached the spot where the object had fallen.

“There it is,” said Kroncha, who was sitting atop the parasol. As Ganesha rose, the rat scurried down his back.

The boat maneuvered next to the floating debris. Ganesha leaned over and picked something out of the water. “Look at this,” he said and held up a prayer. It wriggled in his hands for a moment before he popped it in his mouth and ate it.

“Where to this time?” said Kroncha, leaning his elbow against the bowl of sweets, shaking his head.

“My favorite, New Jersey,” said Ganesha, and his laughter, the sound of om, gave birth to realities.

They took the Turnpike south from the Holland Tunnel, Ganesha perfectly balanced on Kroncha's small back. The rat did seventy-five and complained bitterly of tailgating. At the traffic tie-up, they leaped in graceful arcs from the roof of one car to the next, landing in perfect silence and rhythm. Back on the road, Ganesha eventually gave instructions to take the number 6 exit south. Kroncha complied with relief.

In the next instant, it was the following afternoon, and Kroncha carried Ganesha across a vast, sunburned field toward a thicket of trees next to a lake. In among the trees, there were picnic tables, and sitting at one of them, the only person in the entire park, was a dark-haired teenage girl smoking a cigarette. She wore cutoff jeans and a red T-shirt, sneakers without socks. When she saw the elephant-headed god approaching, she laughed out loud, and said, “I thought you might show up this time. I burned five cones of incense.”

“A tasty morsel,” said Ganesha as he dismounted from the rat with a little hop. His stomach and chest jiggled. The girl stood and walked toward him. When she came within reach, he lifted his trunk and wrapped it around her shoulders. She closed her eyes and patted it softly twice. “Florence,” he whispered in an ancient voice.

“I changed my name,” she said, turning and heading back toward the table.

Ganesha laughed. “Changed your name?” he said and followed her. “To what, Mithraditliaminak?”

She took a seat on one side of the bench, and he shimmied as much of his rear end as he could onto the opposite side, lifting hers a couple of inches off the ground. The wooden planks beneath them quietly complained as the two leaned back against the edge of the table.

“Call me Chloe,” she said.

“Very well,” said Ganesha.

“Florence is a crappy name,” she said, “like an old woman with a girdle and a hairnet.”

“You have wisdom,” said Ganesha, and allowed the bowl of sweets to appear on the table between them.

“Chloe's much more . . . I don't know . . . I love these things,” she said, lifting one of the golden rice balls. “How many calories are they, though?”

“Each one's a universe,” he said, lifting a modak with the end of his trunk and bringing it to his mouth.

“I'll just have a half,” she said.

“She'll just have a half,” said Kroncha, who sat at their feet.

“If you bite it, you'll be compelled to finish it,” said Ganesha.

Her lips were parting and the sweet was just under her nose. Its aroma went to her eyes and she saw a beautiful garden alive with butterflies and turquoise birds, but even there she heard his warning.

“No,” she said and put the sweet back into the bowl.

“Aha!” he said, and picked up the abandoned modak. He stood up suddenly, her end of the bench falling three inches, and he waddled a few feet away from the picnic table. Standing in a small clearing amid the thicket, his elephant head trumpeted, his human legs danced, and his four arms spun. As his clarion note echoed out through the trees and across the field and lake in all directions, he gave a little kick, and threw the modak into the sky.

Her gaze followed its trajectory, first golden against the blue day and then, all of a sudden, a ball of fire streaking away through the night. The eyeblink replacement of sun with moon nearly made her lose her balance. Still, she managed to watch until the sweet became a star among the million other stars. When Ganesha, glowing slightly in the dark, turned to face her, she clapped for him. He bowed.

Once they were situated back on the bench, the girl lit a cigarette. Ganesha gently waved her smoke away with his ears, and curled his trunk over his left shoulder. Kroncha climbed on the bench between them, curled up, and went to sleep.

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and turned her head to look at him. “It's night now?” she asked.

He nodded, pointing to the moon and stars with three of his hands.

“What happened to the day?” she asked.

“You'll get it back later,” he said.

“Got my report card today,” she said and took a drag.

“A triumph, no doubt,” he said.

“When my father saw it, he checked my pulse. My mother was in tears. I can't help it, though, their frustration is comical to me. Like a report card. What does it really mean?”

“An excellent question,” said Ganesha.

“Should I care?”

“Do you feel as if you should?”

“No,” she said, and flicked the glowing butt away onto the dirt.

“You've outwitted that conundrum then,” he said.

She leaned over slightly and began petting the sleeping Kroncha.

“When I saw you in the time of the red leaves, you told me you were in love,” said Ganesha.

She smiled. “An elephant never forgets,” she said. “I hate that part.”

“The young gentleman with the tattoo of Porky Pig on his calf?”

She nodded and smiled, “You know Porky Pig?” she said.

Ganesha waved with all four hands. “That's all, folks.”

“Simon,” she said. “He was okay for a while. We used to bike out to the forest, and he helped me build a little shrine to you out of cinder blocks from the abandoned sand factory. I brought out your picture, and we'd go there at night, drink beer and light incense. He was really cute, but under the cute there was too much stupid. He was always either grabbing my tits or punching me in the shoulder. He laughed like a clown. After I dumped him, I rode out to the forest, to the shrine, one day and found that he'd wrecked it, tore your picture to scraps and kicked over the thing we'd built, which, now that I think about it, looked a lot like a barbecue pit. Then he told everyone I was weird.”

“Aren't you?” asked Ganesha.

“I guess I am,” she said. “Poe's my favorite writer, and I like to be alone a lot. I like the sound of the wind in the trees out by the abandoned factory. I like it when my parents are asleep at night and aren't worrying about me. I can feel their worry in my back. I have a lot of daydreams—being in a war, being married, making animated movies about a porcupine named Florence, running away, getting really good at poetry, having sex, getting really smart and telling people what to do, getting a car and driving all over.”

“Sounds like you'll need to get busy,” said Ganesha.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “My specialty is napping.”

“A noble pursuit,” he said.

“The other day,” she said, “when I took a walk in the afternoon, I went all the way out to the factory. I sat on that big rock next to it and watched the leaves blowing in the wind. In a certain configuration of sky and leaves, I saw this really detailed image of a mermaid. It was like she was there flying through the air.”

He closed his eyes and tried to picture it.

“A rabbit hopped out from behind a tree then, and I looked away for a second. When I looked back to the leaves, she was gone. No matter how I squinted or moved my head, I couldn't find her there anymore.”

“Nevermore,” whispered Kroncha from sleep.

“I thought it might have been a sign from you.”

“No,” said Ganesha, “that was yours.”

“I've wanted to write a poem about it,” she said. “I can feel it inside me, there's energy there to do it, but when I sit down and concentrate—no words. All that happens is I start thinking about other stuff. I'm afraid I'll look away from her one day, and she'll be gone, as well, from my memory.”

“Well,” he said, sitting forward, “am I the destroyer of obstacles or am I not?” As he spoke, the color drained from him and he became a gleaming white. Out of thin air appeared four more arms to make eight, and in his various hands he held a noose, a goad, a green parrot, a sprig of the kalpavriksha tree, a prayer vessel, a sword, and a pomegranate. His eighth hand, empty, he turned palm up as if offering something invisible to her.

“You are definitely the Lakshmi Ganapati,” she said, laughing.

The seven items suddenly disappeared from his hands, but he remained the color of the moon. “Show me the things you think about instead of the mermaid,” he said.

“How?”

“Just think about them,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

She did, but after quite a while, she said, “I can't even picture . . . Oh, wait. Here's something.” Her eyes squinted more tightly closed. She felt the image in her thoughts gather itself into a bubble and exit her head. It tickled the lobe of her left ear like a secret kiss as it bobbed away on the breeze. She opened her eyes to see it. There it floated, five feet from them, a clear bubble with a scene inside.

“Who's that?” asked Ganesha.

“My mother,” she said.

“She's preparing something.”

“Meat loaf.”

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Gross,” she said.

“Not exactly a modak,” he said. “Let's see more.”

She closed her eyes and thought, and eventually the bubbles came in clusters, exiting from both ears. Each held a tiny scene from her life. They bobbed in midair and sailed on the breeze, glowing pale blue. Some had risen to the tallest branches of the trees and some lit snaking paths through the thicket toward the lake or field.

“There goes Simon,” she said, as the last few bubbles exited her right ear.

“Call them back,” said Ganesha.

“How?”

“Whistle,” he said.

She did, and no sooner had she made a sound than all of the glowing bubbles halted in their leisurely flights and slowly reversed course. She whistled again, and they came faster and faster, flying from all directions, each emitting a musical note that made their return a song that filled the surrounding thicket. Their speed became dizzying, and then, at once, they all collided, exploding in a wave of blue that swamped the picnic table. The blue blindness quickly evaporated to reveal a man-shaped creature composed of the bubbles. Now, instead of scenes, each globe held an eye at its center. The thing danced wildly before Chloe and Ganesha, sticking out its long, undulating tongue of eyes.

She reared back against the table. “What is it?”

“A demon. We must destroy it,” said Ganesha, and leaped off the bench. The ground vibrated with his landing, and this startled the demon, which turned and fled, its form wavering, turning momentarily to pure static like the picture on the old television in her parents' den.

“Kroncha, to the hunt,” said Ganesha, his color changing again, blue and red swirling through moon-white and mixing.

The rat rubbed its eyes, stood up, and jumped down to the ground. As Ganesha squatted upon Kroncha's back, the rat asked, “A demon?”

Ganesha now brandished the point of his broken tusk as a weapon. “Correct,” he said. Kroncha inched forward, building speed.

Chloe was stunned by what she'd seen. She wanted to follow but was unable to move.

“I suspected as much from the moment she refused the modak,” said the rat.

Ganesha nodded and they were off.

It wasn't until god and vehicle were just a faint smudge of brightness weaving away through the trees that Chloe overcame the static in her head and woke from amazement. The thought that called her back was that the demon could easily return and she would have to battle it alone. She tasted adrenaline as she bolted from the bench. Across the clearing and into the trees she sprinted, afraid to call out for what might be watching.

At one point, early on, she thought she would catch them, but Kroncha moved deceptively fast and suddenly the path had disappeared. The ground was uneven and riddled with protruding roots. She hurried as best she could, still driven by fear. “Where's my day?” she whispered. The night was getting cold. She passed through a forest she'd not known existed, waiting for the demon to pounce at any moment and thankful for the moonlight.