Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (503 page)

You stumble along the path to the
colonia
. Your head feels as tender as the skin of a plum. Your sinuses are clogged with blood and your nose creaks when you inhale. People watch in awe as you approach your shack. In that moment you’re as much a miracle to them as Gabriel Perea. They probably think they’re seeing a ghost. And they’re right, aren’t they? You aren’t here any longer.

Margarita’s not inside. Her camera’s gone. There’s no one to comfort you, no one to hear how you were written off. The heat inside is like the core of the sun. Back outside you walk to the water barrel, no longer concerned with what contaminants float in the water. You splash it on your face, over your head. Benzene? Who cares? You’re dead anyway. You touch your nose and it’s swollen up the size of a saguaro. Embarrassing how easily you’ve been persuaded to leave. It didn’t take anything at all, did it? One whack and a simple “Go away, Señor, you’re a fool.” What, did you think you could change the world? Make a difference? Not a second rate wedding photographer like you. Not someone with an apartment and a bed and an office and a car. Compromised by the good life. Nobody who leads your life is going to make the difference over here. It takes a breed of insanity you can’t even approach.

Baum was dead wrong about everything. He simplified the problems to fit, but they aren’t simple. Answers aren’t simple. You, you’re simple.

Two little girls kneel not far from the barrel, cooking their meal in tin pans on top of an iron plate mounted over an open flame. There’s a rusted electrical box beside them, with outlet holes like eyes and a wide slit for a switch. It’s a robot face silently screaming. The girls watch you even when they’re not looking.

Long after it gets dark you’re still alone inside. Margarita must be off on some adventure, doing what she does best, what you can’t do. You’ve had hours to build upon your inadequacy. Run your story and they’ll tear Perea apart. He was doomed the moment he believed in the possibility of her. Just like the Church and the little Catholic boy you were once. When you see that, you don’t want to see Margarita. You don’t want to have to explain why you aren’t going any further. All you can do is hurt her. Only a threat.

You pack up your few things, leaving the dozen film canisters you didn’t use. Let the real photojournalist have them. “
Nada que ver
,” you tell the empty room.

Back across the border before midnight, before your life turns back into a pumpkin—better she
should
think you’re lying under three feet of dirt.

* * * *

A month rolls by in a sort of fog. Booze, pain killers and the hell-bent desire to forget your own name. Your nose is healing. It’s a little crooked, has a bluish bump in the middle. Baum keeps his distance and doesn’t ask you anything about your story, though at first you’re too busy to notice. Then one day you find out from the sports editor that Joe got a package while you were gone, and although nobody knows what was in it, when he opened it, he turned white as a ghost and just packed up his office and went home. Called in sick the next three days.

When you do try and talk to him about what happened, he interrupts with an angry “Don’t think you’re the first person who’s been smashed on the rocks of old Juarez.” Then he walks away. They got to him somehow. If they wanted to, they could get to both of you. Like the wind, this can blow across the river. That message was for you.

Then one day while you’re placing ad graphics, Joe Baum comes over and sits beside you. He won’t look you in the eye. Very softly he says, “Got a call from Chicken Man. Margarita Espinada’s dead.”

You stare at the page on the monitor so hard you’re seeing the pixels. Finally, you ask him, “What happened?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know who did it. She’s been gone for weeks and weeks, but he said that wasn’t unusual. She lived mostly in her car.”

“Auto loco.”

“Yeah.” He starts to get up, but as if his weight is too much for him, he drops back onto the chair. “Um, he says she left a package for you. Addressed to him, so maybe whatever happened, she had some warning.” With every word he puts more distance between himself and her death. “There’s gonna be a funeral tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

Baum makes a face, lips pressed tight. Defiantly he meets your gaze. “She was dumped in the Lote Bravo awhile ago.”

* * * *

Pollamano nods sadly as he lets you in. “¿
Quiubo
, Deputy?” he asks, but not with any interest. His eyes are bloodshot, drunk or crying, maybe both. Some others are there inside. A few nod—some you remember. Most of them pretend you aren’t there. Her body lies in la Catedral, three blocks from Chicken Man’s current abode. You shouldn’t see it. Their newest member took pictures. Ernesto. He was there, following the cops with his police band radio the way he always does, always trying to get to the scene before they do. He’d taken half a dozen shots before he saw the black boots and realized whose body he was photographing. They’d torn off most of her clothes but left the boots. You remember the one who warned you off. The boots were left on so everyone would know who she was.

Everyone drinks, toasting her memory. One of them begins weeping and someone else throws an arm around him and mutters. One of the others spits. None of them seems to suspect that you and she spent time together. In any case, you’re an interloper on their private grief. Not one of them.

Margarita must have known you weren’t dead—otherwise, why send a package for you?

Late in the afternoon, everyone has shown up, almost two dozen photographers, and some unseen sign passes among you all, and everyone rises up and goes out together. You move in a line through the crowds, between white buses in a traffic snarl and across the square to the neon cathedral. Orange lights bathe you all. Ernesto with his nothing mustache runs up to the door and snaps a picture. Even in this solemn moment, his instinct is for the image. A few glare at him, but no one chastises him. You gather in the front pews, kneel, pray, go up one by one and light your candles for her soul. Your hand is shaking so hard you can hardly ignite the wick.

* * * *

After everyone else has left he gives you the package. It’s nearly the size of a suitcase. He says, “She left it for you, and I don’t violate her wishes. She was here a couple times when I wasn’t around. Using the darkroom.”

You pull out a folder of photos. On top is the picture of you she took the first day you arrived in
Colonia Universidad
. You look like you could take on anything. Just looking at it is humiliating.

Underneath is her collection of shots inside the factory. The top photo is Gabriel Perea standing all twisted and pointing. Foam on his mouth, eyes bugging out. The image is spoiled because of some fogging on the left side of it as if there was a light leak. Whatever caused it lit up Perea, too.

You almost miss the thing that’s different: He’s not wearing his goggles.

You go on to the next shot, but it’s a picture of the crowd behind him, all staring, wide-eyed. She’s not using a flash, but there’s some kind of light source. In the third, fourth and fifth shots you see it. It shines straight at Perea. There are lens flares in each image. The light is peculiar, diffuse, as if a collection of small bulbs are firing off, making a sort of ring. The middle is hard to make out until the sixth picture. She must have slid on her knees between all the onlookers to get it. Perea’s feet are close by and out of focus. The light is the center of the image, the light which is different in each shot.

“Jaime,” you say, “do you have a loupe?”

“Of course.” He gives it to you. You hold it over the image, over the light. Back in the lab at the
Herald
, you’ll blow the image up poster size to see the detail without the lens—the outline, and at the top of it a bunch of smudges, a hint of eye sockets and mouth, a trace of nose and cheek. Can an AI break loose from its handlers? you wonder. Does it have a will? Or is this the next step in their plan?

You give the loupe back.

He says, “That Perea is gone. Disappeared. People are looking all over for him. They say he was called up to heaven.”

One way or another, that’s probably true. If the Virgin can float on the air now, then they don’t need an interpreter. Belief itself will do the work hereafter, hope used as a halter.

“That crazy girl, she went right back into that factory even after he was gone.”

You wipe at your eyes, and a half-laugh escapes you.
That crazy girl
.

You close the folder. You can’t let anyone have these. That’s the ultimate, wrenching realization. Margarita died because of this and no one can see it. The story can’t be told, because it’s a lie. She knew it, too, but she went ahead.

This is your Sacred Heart. Your rusting nail. Gabriel Perea was called up to heaven or killed—for you it doesn’t matter which. By revealing nothing you let him go on living.

Under the top folder there are others full of negatives, hundreds of inverted images of the world—black teeth and faces, black suns and black clouds. The world made new. Made hers. There is a way you can keep her alive.

Jaime pats you on the shoulder as you leave with your burden. “You go home, deputy,” he tells you. “Even the devil won’t live here.”

—for Sycamore Hill 1999

* * * *

Afterword

Second person is a strange viewpoint. I did not start out intending to use it for this story. But nothing else felt right. I had read a novella called “Aura” by Carlos Fuentes some years ago, and was struck by the wonderful, jagged dreamlike quality he evoked by using that POV. The more I learned about Juarez and the plight of the women who work in the factories along the border, the more that kind of disorienting perspective seemed necessary.

Writing is to a great extent working very hard to make something look as if it was easy to create. This story, once written, had to walk a gauntlet where fourteen other, astonishingly fine writers pummeled and lashed it. Then the blood was rinsed off and it was patched up. Because of their combined critical skills, every break was stronger after it healed… which is why it’s dedicated to all of them.

* * * *

Copyright © 2002 by Dell Magazines

(1953– )

My absolute favorite Lisa Goldstein story wouldn’t quite fit in this anthology: “Breadcrumbs and Stones,” from the fairy tale anthology
Snow White, Blood Red
(1993), a mother uses the story of Hansel and Gretel as a Holocaust allegory in an attempt to come to grips with her survivor guilt and explain the unexplainable to her children. Much of her writing defies genre—science fiction, fantasy, literay fiction, and Jewish mysticism all mix freely. It reads beautifully, and the neither-fish-nor-fowl nature of her prose hasn’t kept her from recognition within the field: She’s been nominated for a Hugo, four Nebulas, and four World Fantasy Awards.

Elizabeth Joy Goldstein grew up in Los Angeles, the child of two Holocaust survivors. As an English major at UCLA, she began writing seriously; she’d been a genre reader since childhood, but bowed to pressure and tried to write in a more mainstream style. Her first novel,
The Red Magician
(1982) grew out of a short story, and won Goldstein an American Book Award. Even as she tried to write its successors in a mainstream way, fantastic elements kept creeping in; eventually she accepted that genre fiction was what she wanted to write.

She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Douglas Ackerman.

“Split Light” is a sort of alternate history, and a sort of historical fantasy, and a sort of lyrical essay on Jewish mysticism. It’s also a beautiful, haunting attempt to explain an otherwise baffling moment of history.

First published in
Travellers in Magic
, December 1994

SHABBETAI ZEVI (1626–1676), the central figure of the largest and most momentous messianic movement in Jewish history subsequent to the destruction of the Temple…

—Encyclopedia Judaica

* * * *

He sits in a prison in Constantinople. The room is dark, his mind a perfect blank, the slate on which his visions are written. He waits.

He sees the moon. The moon spins like a coin through the blue night sky. The moon splinters and falls to earth. Its light is the shattered soul of Adam, dispersed since the fall. All over the earth the shards are falling; he sees each one, and knows where it comes to rest.

He alone can bind the shards together. He will leave this prison, become king. He will wear the circled walls of Jerusalem as a crown. All the world will be his.

His name is Shabbetai Zevi. “Shabbetai” for the Sabbath, the seventh day, the day of rest. The seventh letter in the Hebrew alphabet is zayin. In England they call the Holy Land “Zion.” He is the Holy Land, the center of the world. If he is in Constantinople, then Constantinople is the center of the world.

He has never been to England, but he has seen it in his visions. He has ranged through the world in his visions, has seen the past and fragments of the future. But he does not know what will happen to him in this prison.

When he thinks of his prison the shards of light grow faint and disappear. The darkness returns. He feels the weight of the stone building above him; it is as heavy as the crown he felt a moment ago. He gives in to despair.

* * * *

A year ago, he thinks, he was the most important man in the world. Although he is a Jew in a Moslem prison he gives the past year its Christian date: it was 1665. It was a date of portent; some Christians believe that 1666 will be the year of the second coming of Christ. Even among the Christians he has his supporters.

But it was to the Jews, to his own people, that he preached. As a child he had seen the evidence of God in the world, the fiery jewels hidden in gutters and trash heaps; he could not understand why no one else had noticed them, why his brother had beaten him and called him a liar. As a young man he had felt his soul kindle into light as he prayed. He had understood that he was born to heal the world, to collect the broken shards of light, to turn mourning into joy.

When he was in his twenties he began the mystical study of Kabbalah. He read, with growing excitement, about the light of God, how it had been scattered and hidden throughout the world at Adam’s fall, held captive by the evil that resulted from that fall. The Jews, according to the Kabbalist Isaac Luria, had been cast across the world like sand, like sparks, and in their dispersal they symbolized the broken fate of God.

One morning while he was at prayer he saw the black letters in his prayer book dance like flame and translate themselves into the unpronounceable Name of God. He understood everything at that moment, saw the correct pronunciation of the Name, knew that he could restore all the broken parts of the world by simply saying the Name aloud.

He spoke. His followers say he rose into midair. He does not remember; he rarely remembers what he says or does in his religious trances. He knows that he was shunned in his town of Smyrna, that the people there began to think him a lunatic or a fool.

Despite their intolerance he grew to understand more and more. He saw that he was meant to bring about an end to history, and that with the coming of the end all things were to be allowed. He ate pork. He worked on the Sabbath, the day of rest, the day that he was named for or that was named for him.

Finally the townspeople could stand it no longer and banished him. He blessed them all before he went, “in the name of God who allows the forbidden.”

As he left the town of his birth, though, the melancholy that had plagued him all his life came upon him again. He wandered through Greece and Thrace, and ended finally in Constantinople. In Constantinople he saw a vision of the black prison, the dungeon in which he would be immured, and in his fear the knowledge that had sustained him for so long vanished. God was lost in the world, broken into so many shards no one could discover him.

In his frantic search for God he celebrated the festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot all in one week. He was exiled again and resumed his wandering, traveling from Constantinople to Rhodes to Cairo.

In Cairo he dreamed he was a bridegroom, about to take as his bride the holy city of Jerusalem. The next day the woman Sarah came, unattended, to Cairo.

* * * *

The door to his prison opens and a guard comes in, the one named Kasim. “Stand up!” Kasim says.

Shabbetai stands. “Come with me,” Kasim says.

Shabbetai follows. The guard takes him through the dungeon and out into Constantinople. It is day; the sun striking the domes and minarets of the city nearly blinds him.

Kasim leads him through the crowded streets, saying nothing. They pass covered bazaars and slave markets, coffee houses and sherbet shops. A caravan of camels forces them to stop.

When they continue on Shabbetai turns to study his guard. Suddenly he sees to the heart of the other man, understands everything. He knows that Kasim is under orders to transfer him to the fortress at Gallipoli, that the sultan himself has given him this order before leaving to fight the Venetians on Crete. “How goes the war, brother?” Shabbetai asks.

Kasim jerks as if he has been shot. He hurries on toward the wharf, saying nothing.

At the harbor Kasim hands Shabbetai to another man and goes quickly back to the city. Shabbetai is stowed in the dark hold of a ship, amid sour-smelling hides and strong spices and ripe oranges. Above him he hears someone shout, and he feels the ship creak and separate from the wharf and head out into the Sea of Marmara.

Darkness again, he thinks. He is a piece of God, hidden from the world. It is only by going down into the darkness of the fallen world that he can find the other fragments, missing since the Creation. Everything has been ordained, even this trip from Constantinople to Gallipoli.

Visions of the world around him encroach upon the darkness. He sees Pierre de Fermat, a mathematician, lying dead in France; a book is open on the table in which he has written, “I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.” He sees Rembrandt adding a stroke of bright gold to a painting he calls “The Jewish Bride.” He sees a great fire destroy London; a killing wind blows the red and orange flames down to the Thames.

He is blinded again, this times by the vast inrushing light of the world. He closes his eyes, a spark of light among many millions of others, and rocks to the motion of the ship.

* * * *

Sarah’s arrival in Cairo two years ago caused a great deal of consternation. No one could remember seeing a woman traveling by herself. She stood alone on the dock, a slight figure with long red hair tumbling from her kerchief, gazing around her as if at Adam’s Eden.

Finally someone ran for the chief rabbi. He gave the order to have her brought to his house, and summoned all the elders as well.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Why are you traveling alone in such a dangerous part of the world?”

“I’m an orphan,” Sarah said. “But I was raised in a great castle by a Polish nobleman. I had one servant just to pare my nails, and another to brush my hair a hundred times before I went to bed.”

None of the elders answered her, but each one wore an identical expression of doubt. Why would a Polish nobleman raise a Jewish orphan? And what on earth was she doing in Cairo?

Only Shabbetai saw her true nature; only he knew that what the elders suspected was true. He had been the nobleman’s mistress, passed among his circle of friends when he grew tired of her. The prophet Hosea married a prostitute, he thought. “I will be your husband,” he said. “If you will have me.”

He knew as he spoke that she would marry him, and his heart rejoiced.

They held the wedding at night and out of doors. The sky was dark blue silk, buttoned by a moon of old ivory. Stars without number shone.

After the ceremony the elders came to congratulate him. For Sarah’s sake he pretended not to see the doubt in their eyes. “I cannot tell you how happy I am tonight,”

he said.

When they left he brought her to his house and led her to the bedroom, not bothering to light the candles. He lay on the bed and drew her to him. Her hair was tangled; perhaps she never brushed it.

They lay together for a long time. “Shall I undress?” she asked finally. Her breath was warm on his face.

“The angels sang at my birth,” he said. “I have never told anyone this. Only you.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, then moved to lift her dress. He held her tightly. “We must be like the angels,” he said. “Like the moon. We must be pure.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I cannot fall into sin. If I am stained like Adam I will not be able to do the work for which I was sent here.”

“The—work?”

“I was born to heal the world,” he said.

The moon appeared before him in the darkened room. Its sliver-white light cast everything in shadow.

The moon began to spin. No, he thought. He watched as it shattered and plummeted to earth, saw the scattered fragments hide themselves in darkness.

He cried aloud. He felt the great sadness of the world, and the doubt he had struggled with all his life returned.

“It’s broken,” he said. “It can never be repaired. I’ll never be able to join all the pieces together.”

Sarah kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Let us join together, then,” she said. “Let two people stand for the entire world.”

“No—”

“I heard you tell your followers that everything is permitted. Why are we not permitted to come together as husband and wife?”

“I can’t,” he said simply. “I have never been able to.”

He expected scorn, or pity. But her expression did not change. She held him in her arms, and eventually he drifted off to sleep.

* * * *

With Sarah at his side he was able to begin the mission for which he was born. Together they traveled toward Jerusalem, stopping so that he could preach along the way.

He spoke in rough huts consecrated only by the presence of ten men joined by prayer. He spoke in ancient synagogues, with lamps of twisted silver casting a wavering light on the golden letters etched into the walls. Sometimes he stood at a plain wooden table, watched by unlettered rustics who knew nothing of the mysteries of Kabbalah; sometimes he preached from an altar of faded white and gold.

His message was the same wherever they went. He was the Messiah, appointed by God. He proclaimed an end to fast days; he promised women that he would set them free from the curse of Eve. He would take the crown from the Turkish sultan without war, he said, and he would make the sultan his servant.

The lost ten tribes of Israel had been found, he told the people who gathered to hear him. They were marching slowly as sleepwalkers toward the Sahara desert, uncertain of the way or of their purpose, waiting for him to unite them.

When he reached Jerusalem he circled the walls seven times on horseback, like a king. Once inside the city he won over many of the rabbis and elders. Letters were sent out to the scattered Jewish communities all over the world, to England, Holland and Italy, proclaiming that the long time of waiting was over; the Messiah had come.

A great storm shook the world. Families sold their belongings and traveled toward Jerusalem. Others set out with nothing, trusting in God to provide for them. Letters begging for more news were sent back to Jerusalem, dated from “the first year of the renewal of the prophecy and the kingdom.” Shabbetai signed the answering letters “the firstborn son of God,” and even “I am the Lord your God Shabbetai Zevi,” and such was the fervor of the people that very few of them were shocked.

* * * *

The boat docks at Gallipoli and Shabbetai is taken to the fortress there. Once inside he sees that he has been given a large and well-lit suite of rooms, and he understands that his followers have succeeded in bribing the officials.

The guards leave him and lock the door. However comfortable his rooms are, he is still in a prison cell. He paces for several minutes, studying the silver lamps and deep carpets and polished tables and chairs. Mosaics on the wall, fragments of red, green and black, repeat over and over in a complex pattern.

He sits on the plump mattress and puts his head in his hands. His head throbs. With each pulse, it seems, the lamps in the room dim, grow darker, until, finally, they go out.

He is a letter of light. He is the seventh letter, the zayin. Every person alive is a letter, and together they make up the book of the world, all things past, present and to come.

He thinks he can read the book, can know the future of the world. But as he looks on the book’s pages turn; the letters form and reshape. Futures branch off before him.

He watches as children are born, as some die, as others grow to adulthood. Some stay in their villages, farm their land, sit by their hearths with their families surrounding them. Others disperse across the world and begin new lives.

The sight disturbs him; he does not know why. A page turns and he sees ranks of soldiers riding to wars, and men and women lying dead in the streets of plague. Kingdoms fall to sword and gun and cannon.

Great wars consume the world. The letters twist and sharpen, become pointed wire. He sees millions of people herded beyond the wire, watches as they go toward their deaths.