First Person Peculiar (23 page)

I grew up on Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially the Martian tales. I love Carol, to whom I have been married for 52 years as I write these words, and it is my fondest wish that I die first, because I don’t think life would be at all interesting or enjoyable without her. I combined the two—ERB’s Mars and Carol—in this story, which was a Hugo nominee (And lost to another of my stories, though to this day I prefer this one.).

A Princess of Earth

When Lisa died I felt like my soul had been ripped out of my body, and what was left wasn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell. To this day I don’t even know what she died of; the doctors tried to tell me why she had collapsed and what had killed her, but I just tuned them out. She was dead and I would never talk to her or touch her again, never share a million unimportant things with her, and that was the only fact that mattered. I didn’t even go to the funeral; I couldn’t bear to look at her in her coffin.

I quit my job—we’d been counting the days to my retirement so we could finally spend all our time together—and I considered selling the house and moving to a smaller place, but in the end I couldn’t do it. There was too much of her there, things I’d lose forever if I moved away.

I left her clothes in the closet, just the way they’d always been. Her hairbrush and her perfume and her lipstick remained on the vanity where she’d kept them neatly lined up. There was a painting of a New England landscape that I’d never liked much, but since she had loved it I left it hanging where it was. I had my favorite photos of her blown up and framed, and put them on every table and counter and shelf in the house.

I had no desire to be with other people, so I spent most of my days catching up on my reading. Well, let me amend that. I started a lot of books; I finished almost none of them. It was the same thing with movies: I’d rent a few, begin playing them, and usually turn them off within fifteen or twenty minutes. Friends would invite me out, I’d refuse, and after awhile they stopped calling. I barely noticed.

Winter came, a seemingly endless series of bleak days and frigid nights. It was the first time since I’d married Lisa that I didn’t bring a Christmas tree home to decorate. There just didn’t seem much sense to it. We’d never had any children, she wasn’t there to share it, and I wasn’t going to have any visitors.

As it turned out, I was wrong about the visitor: I spotted him maybe an hour before midnight, wandering naked across my back yard during the worst blizzard of the season.

At first I thought I was hallucinating. Five inches of snow had fallen, and the wind chill was something like ten below zero. I stared in disbelief for a full minute, and when he didn’t disappear, I put on my coat, climbed into my boots, grabbed a blanket, and rushed outside. When I reached him he seemed half- frozen. I threw the blanket around him and led him back into the house.

I rubbed his arms and legs vigorously with a towel, then sat him down in the kitchen and poured him some hot coffee. It took him a few minutes to stop shivering, but finally he reached out for the cup. He warmed his hands on it, then lifted it and took a sip.

“Thank you,” he whispered hoarsely.

Once I was that sure he wasn’t going to die, I stood back and took a look at him. He was actually pretty good-looking now that his color was returning. He might have been thirty, maybe a couple of years older. Lean body, dark hair, gray eyes. A couple of scars, but I couldn’t tell what they were from, or how fresh they were. They could have been from one of the wars in Iraq, or old sports injuries, or perhaps just the wind whipping frozen bushes against him a few minutes ago.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, I’ll be all right soon.”

“What the hell were you doing out there without any clothes on?”

“Trying to get home,” he said with an ironic smile.

“I haven’t seen you around,” I said. “Do you live near here?”

“No.”

“Is there someone who can pick you up and take you there?”

He seemed about to answer me, then changed his mind and just shook his head.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“John.” He took another swallow from the cup and made a face.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “The coffee’s pretty awful. Lisa made it better.”

“Lisa?”

“My wife,” I said. “She died last year.”

We were both silent for a couple of minutes, and I noticed still more color returning to his face.

“Where did you leave you clothes?” I asked.

“They’re very far away.”

“Just how far did you walk in this blizzard?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I said in exasperation. “Who do I call—the cops, the hospital, or the nearest asylum?”

“Don’t call anyone,” said John. “I’ll be all right soon, and then I’ll leave.”

“Dressed like that? In this weather?”

He seemed surprised. “I’d forgotten. I guess I’ll have to wait here until it’s over. I’m sorry to impose, but …”

“What the hell,” I said. “I’ve been alone a long time and I’m sure Lisa would say I could use a little company, even from a naked stranger. At any rate she wouldn’t want me to throw you out in the cold on Christmas Eve.” I stared at him. “I just hope you’re not dangerous.”

“Not to my friends.”

“I figure pulling you out of the snow and giving you shelter qualifies as an act of friendship,” I said. “Just what the hell you were doing out there and what happened to your clothes?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It’s a long night, and I’ve got nothing to do.”

“All right,” said John with a shrug. “I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I can’t tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood.”

“Stop,” I said.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’ve heard that before—a long, long time ago. I don’t know where, but I’ve heard it.”

He shook his head. “No, you haven’t. But perhaps you’ve
read
it before.”

I searched through my memory, mentally scanning the bookshelves of my youth—and there I found it, right between
The Wizard of Oz
and
King Solomon’s Mines
. “God, it’s been close to half a century! I loved that book when I was growing up.”

“Thank you,” said John.

“What am I thanking you for?”

“I wrote it.”

“Sure you did,” I said. “I read the damned thing fifty years ago, and it was an old book then. Look at yourself in a mirror.”

“Nevertheless.”

Wonderful,
I thought.
Just what I needed on Christmas Eve.
Other people get carolers; I get you.
Aloud I said: “It wasn’t written by a John. It was written by an Edgar.”

“He
published
it.
I
wrote it.”

“Sure,” I said. “And your last name is Carter, right?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I should have called the loony bin to begin with.”

“They couldn’t get here until morning,” said John. “Trust me: you’re perfectly safe.”

“The assurances of a guy who walks around naked in a snowstorm and thinks he’s John Carter of Mars aren’t exactly coin of the realm,” I said. The second I said it I kind of tensed and told myself I should be humoring him, that I was a 64-year-old man with high blood pressure and worse cholesterol and he looked like a cruiserweight boxer. Then I realized that I didn’t really care whether he killed me or not, that I’d just been going through the motions of living since Lisa had died, and I decided not to humor him after all. If he picked up a kitchen knife and ran me through, Warlord of Mars style, at least it would put an end to the aching loneliness that had been my constant companion for almost a year.

“So why do you think you’re John Carter?” I asked him.

“Because I am.”

“Why not Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon—or the Scarlet Pimpernel for that matter?”

“Why aren’t you Doc Savage or the Shadow?” he replied. “Or James Bond for that matter?”

“I never claimed to be a fictional character,” I said.

“Neither did I. I am John Carter, formerly of Virginia, and I am trying to return to my princess.”

“Stark naked in a blizzard?”

“My clothes do not survive the transition, and I am not responsible for the weather,” he said.

“That’s a reasonably rational explanation for a crazy man.”

He stared at me. “The woman I love more than life itself is millions of miles from here. Is it so crazy to want to return to her?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s not crazy to want to be with her. But it’s crazy to think she’s on Mars.”

“Where do
you
think she is?” he asked.

“How the hell should
I
know?” I shot back. “But I know nothing’s on Mars except a bunch of rocks. It’s below zero in the summer, there’s no oxygen, and if anything ever lived there, it died out fifty or sixty million years ago. What have you got to say to that?”

“I have spent close to a century on Barsoom. Perhaps it is some other world than the one you know as Mars. Perhaps when I traverse the void, I also traverse the eons. I’m not interested in explanations, only in results. As long as I can once again hold my incomparable princess in my arms, I’ll leave the answers to the scientists and the philosophers.”

“And the psychiatrists,” I added.

He looked grimly amused. “So if you had your way, I would be locked away in an institution until they convinced me that the woman I love doesn’t exist and that my entire life has been a meaningless fantasy. You strike me as a very unhappy man; would that make you happier?”

“I’m just a realistic man,” I said. “When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to believe
A Princess of Mars
was true that I used to stand in my back yard every night and reach my hands out to Mars, just the way you did. I kept waiting to get whisked away from the mundane life I’d been living and transported to Barsoom.” I paused. “It never happened. All I got from all that reaching was sore shoulders and a lot of teasing from friends who didn’t read books.”

“Perhaps you had no reason to go to Barsoom,” he said. “You were a child, with your entire life ahead of you. I think that Barsoom can be very choosy about who it allows to visit.”

“So now you’re saying that a planet is sentient?”

“I have no idea if it is,” replied John. “Do you know for an absolute fact that it isn’t?”

I stared at him irritably. “You’re better at this than I am,” I said. “You sound so fucking reasonable. Of course, you’ve had a lot more practice.”

“More practice at what?”

“Fooling people by sounding normal.”

“More practice than you?”

“See?” I said. “That’s what I mean. You’ve got an answer for everything, and if you don’t, then you respond with a question that’ll make
me
sound like a fool if I answer it. But
I
wasn’t wandering around naked in a blizzard in the middle of the night, and I don’t think I live on Mars.”

“Do you feel better now?” he said.

“Not much,” I admitted. “You want some more coffee?”

“Actually, what I’d like to do is walk around a little and get some life back in my limbs.”

“Outside?”

He shook his head. “No, not outside.”

“Fine,” I said, getting up. “It’s not as big or stately as a Martian palace, but I’ll give you the chef’s tour.”

He got to his feet, adjusted the blanket around himself, and fell into step behind me. I led him into the living room, then stopped.

“Are you still cold?”

“A little.”

“I think I’ll light a fire,” I said. “I haven’t used the damned fireplace all winter. I might as well get my money’s worth.”

“It’s not necessary,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

“It’s no bother,” I said, opening the screen and tossing a couple of logs onto the grate. “Look around while I’m doing it.”

“You’re not afraid I might rob you?”

“Have you got any pockets to put your loot in?” I asked.

He smiled at that. “I guess it’s my good luck that I’m not a thief.”

I spent the next couple of minutes positioning the kindling and starting the fire. I don’t know which rooms he’d seen, but he was just returning when I straightened up.

“You must have loved her very much,” he said. “You’ve turned the house into a shrine to her.”

“Whether you’re John Carter or merely think you’re John Carter, you should be able to understand what I felt.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“She died last February,” I said, then added bitterly: “On Valentine’s Day.”

“She was a lovely woman.”

“Most people just get older,” I said. “She got more beautiful every day. To me, anyway.”

“I know.”

“How could you know? You never met her, never saw her.”

“I know because my princess grows more beautiful with every passing moment. When you are truly in love, your princess always grows more beautiful.”

“And if she’s Barsoomian, she stays young for a thousand years, give or take,” I said, remembering the book.

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? Don’t you know?”

“Does it really make a difference, as long as she remains young and beautiful in my eyes?”

“That’s pretty philosophical for a guy who thinks he makes his living lopping off heads with a longsword,” I said.

“I want nothing more than to live in peace,” he replied, sitting in the armchair that was closest to the fire. “I resent every second that I am away from my Dejah Thoris.”

“I envy you,” I said.

“I thought I was supposed to be insane,” he said wryly.

“You are. It makes no difference. Whether your Dejah Thoris is real or whether she’s a figment of a deranged mind, you believe she exists and that you’re going to join her. My Lisa is dead; I’ll never see her again.”

He made no reply, but simply stared at me.

“You may be crazy as a loon,” I continued, seating myself on the sofa, “but you’re convinced you’re going to see your Princess of Mars. I’d give up every last vestige of sanity if I could believe, even for a minute, that I would see my Princess of Earth one more time.”

“I admire your courage,” said John.

“Courage?” I repeated, surprised.