Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (38 page)

When MacGregor returned to the bedroom, he found Silvie dressed and packing her overnight bag with the few things she kept at his house.

“No, Silvie. I love you. You’re the most important person in my life.”

“I love you, too, Gerald. It’s your choice.” She finally looked at him.

“See, Silvie, the rocket landed safely on a new planet,” he said, and pointed to his chest. “It’s Mars. Look, four of the astronauts are getting out. Everything’s going to be okay this time.”

“They all have guns,” Silvie said anxiously.

“For protection, or in case of wild animals. Silvie, look at the planet. The sky is red! Can you smell it? The dust smells of flowers and vanilla. Everyone is safe.” To his joy, he found he really could smell the dust. He felt the hot breeze on his skin.

“They’re not safe, Gerald. They’re probably bringing germs that will infect everyone on the new planet. Or else they’ll try to take away the Martian riches, and a war will break out. I’ve seen these stories too many times. I can’t take any more.”

“But look. The astronauts have met a Martian family, a couple and two children. They’re all conversing. Everything is friendly. You can tell by their hand gestures.” MacGregor noted the hands of the Martians, their fingers long and elegant compared with the stubby mitts of the Earthlings. The sky behind them glowed the rich orange-red of campfire coals. MacGregor imagined the Martians and Earthlings sitting around a fire, and soon enough they were indeed sitting around a fire, conversing telepathically, cooking Martian fish and giant mushrooms they grew in their basements.

“What about that fifth astronaut lurking in the background?” Silvie said.

“He stayed at the rocket.”

“He’s right there now, drinking whiskey from a bottle. I can hear him cursing.”

“No,” MacGregor said, but he knew she was right. The man seemed unlike the others. He was suspicious and angry. And now he was drunk and armed.

“Somebody’s going to die,” Silvie said. She looked away from him and stuffed her slippers and bathrobe into her bag. “Eventually somebody’s going to die. Don’t deny it.”

“Eventually we all die, honey.”

“Well, I can’t face it.”

“Just look at the light reflecting off the Martian canals as evening falls. It reminds me of your eyes, Silvie.” He closed his eyes to imagine the story more vividly, and he heard the door shut. He wanted to run after her, but he needed to see the story through. As Silvie said, most of the stories ended with trouble, just as marriages ended in death or divorce. He thought he might work at keeping a story alive longer, putting off disaster, just as he might convince Silvie to give him one more chance. It occurred to him that he should run after her and beg for another chance. And yet, readers and watchers and listeners needed a story to end sometime.

M
acGregor and Silvie’s separation was as amicable as MacGregor could have hoped. He arranged an emergency meeting of the board of directors, and they agreed with him that Silvie should become acting president, while MacGregor would retain his majority stake in the company but return to being an engineer. He felt relieved to move his things from his father’s office back to his old desk in the fabrication shop. At the beginning of August, Silvie drove to his house in a new electric car she’d bought, in order to pick up some winter clothes she’d stored in his attic. She stepped out into the gravel driveway, wearing a trim-fitting pants suit in charcoal gray. She wore high-heeled shoes that barely covered her pretty toes. Her heels sank through the gravel and into the earth.

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out for us,” Silvie said. “I guess we’re another one of your tragic stories.”

MacGregor put the last box of clothes into the trunk of her car and invited her to stay and have some coffee. When she declined, he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. When he put them back on, Silvie was shaking her head at him and smiling as she might at a child. When she backed into the street, MacGregor walked out to the end of his driveway to watch the silver electric car, as sleek as a rocket ship, head down the road, and that’s when he saw the billboard for the county fair, August 4–9. He was surprised to realize that the fair was opening that day. His skin began to tingle, and his heart began to flutter crazily. Was it possible that the Illuminated Woman would be there? He’d seen her in his stories and dreams, but he hadn’t considered seeking her out. He could hope that Madame Needles had failed in the last year to find her daughter a husband. Of course she had failed, for the girl knew her own mind! MacGregor wanted to see her, to lose himself in her brilliant visions, to listen to her voice sing, to look into the eyes behind her dark-rimmed glasses. He had been ashamed to think of her this way when he was engaged to Silvie, but now there was nothing to keep him from visiting her and trying to know her better. And maybe now that he had his own stories, she might want to see him, too.

About “The Tattoo”

My idea in writing “The Tattoo” was to get up close and personal with an illustrated man. For a long time I’d suspected that such ink was not just skin deep, and now I’ve confirmed it. Writing this piece gave me a chance to study the ways stories move across a person’s body. Ray Bradbury is one of America’s most important philosophers, and he’s inspired me since I was a kid. What a great honor it is to be part of this anthology. I thank Heidi Bell for helping me with this story.

—Bonnie Jo Campbell

BACKWARD IN SEVILLE

Audrey Niffenegger

H
elene stood at the front railing on the upper deck in the dark, watching as the ship maneuvered at a funny angle too close to a low stone bridge. A few people stood near her, all watching quietly as the crew worked on the deck below them. The band was playing Ellington at the other end of the ship; couples would be dancing neatly, persistently. In the cabins below, most of the passengers were asleep.

Helene’s father, Lewis, had been sleeping when she left their cabin, his face collapsed without the dentures, his mouth open, snoring. In sleep he frightened her.
Let him wake up tomorrow,
she prayed every night, though she was not religious.
Don’t take him from me yet.

The
Persephone
wasn’t very large for a cruise ship. There were 300 passengers and 150 crew members. Helene had never been on a cruise before and had braced herself for bingo, seasickness, and enforced camaraderie, though her father kept assuring her it wasn’t that kind of cruise. “It’s low-key, mostly excursions to churches and lectures on Matisse. You’ve never been to Rome or Barcelona; you’ll love it. The Mediterranean is very calm in June. Don’t worry so much, Sweet Pea.” She had nodded and smiled. Of course she would love it; he wanted her to love it.

The ship moved backward and then sideways, away from the port and the bridge. They were in a canal; they had been docked in Seville for two days. In Seville, Helene had gone on an excursion to a convent, a very sad convent run by an order called the Poor Clares. All the nuns were from Africa and had been cloistered until recently, but then the Poor Clares had become too poor and now they sold baked goods and let tourists come inside for a few euros each. Helene felt bad for them. She thought of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s, which had been her first excursion. “You’d think they could redistribute the wealth a little,” she said to her father when she got back to the ship. “I don’t imagine nuns are too high on the food chain,” he replied. Storks were nesting in the chimneys of the convent. They made Helene want to cry.

The canal was narrow and the
Persephone
had to back her way out of it. Seville was serene and yellow under the artificial lights strung along the canal. The ship moved slowly. Seville receded. Helene tried to remember where they were headed . . . Lisbon. Then home. They would fly to London and then back to Chicago.

Lewis had been tired before they began the trip. At the airport he’d said, “Just a minute, Helene,” and stood gasping, leaning on his cane in the middle of the security line as she realized that he should have had a wheelchair, her heart sinking as she remembered that he always refused to use a wheelchair. She screwed up her courage and asked him anyway and was surprised when he nodded, still breathing heavily, eyes closed. A wheelchair arrived and Lewis sank into it and folded his arms across his chest, his cane sticking out like a shepherd’s crook. Helene didn’t travel much, but Lewis always had; it was all familiar to him, but she felt nervous as the attendant pushed Lewis along and eventually deposited them at the gate. She watched her father sit, chin sunk into chest, and she finally admitted to herself that he was terribly old.
When did this happen? He was always fine, and now . . .

Her mother had died in February. It was her mother’s place Helene occupied here on the ship. She slept in the narrow bed her mother should have slept in, ate the bland food her mother would have eaten. Lewis accepted Nora’s absence with grace; he might say, “Your mother would have liked that,” or “Your mother always did this,” but he never made Helene feel that he would have preferred his wife’s company to hers. When Helene was small she had stolen her mother’s lipstick and gone down to breakfast with scarlet lips. Her parents had smiled at each other and pretended not to notice as she left lip prints on her juice glass. It was like that. Helene was forty-five years old, by far the youngest passenger on the ship.

The other passengers at the rail were all in pairs. They were white-haired and bent but exceedingly compatible, each husband inclining toward his wife when she spoke quietly into his ear, all of them dressed for dinner with care, all leaning on the rail for support with a glass of wine or a cocktail clutched in one hand. Helene thought of Evan.
Is that what we would have looked like in forty years?
She had met Evan when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty-six. He’d always seemed on the verge of marrying her; she’d been patient. When he broke up with her fourteen years later and married a girl half her age, she understood that she’d been gullible and that he was a jerk, but oh well, and so she had lapsed into a quiet permanent rage.

It would be nice to have a drink, but lethargy kept her at the railing. The canal unspooled backward around the ship. It gave Helene the feeling that time was reversing, that things might be undone.
Daddy wouldn’t be old, Mom wouldn’t have died, Evan would come back and we’d have kids, it would all be different, I would change everything. I would change.
Trees and houses came from behind her; little boats began to appear in the water as the canal widened. Soon they would turn the ship and sail forward. Everything flowed away into the distance and the darkness.

One of the women at the rail dropped her cane, and her husband bent painfully and retrieved it for her.
How he cares for her,
Helene thought.
No one takes care of me; it’s always me taking care of somebody.
When she was a child she had been very timid, scared of strangers, thunder, the poodle next door, escalators, anything new or loud, anything that moved, pretty much. Her mother had kept her close, kissed her on the tip of her ear, whispered encouragement. Her father had brought her funny presents—a tiny silk umbrella from Paris, a tin of green tea from Kyoto. “It’s okay, Sweet Pea, I’ve got your back. Now go get ’em.”

I wasted my life.

She imagined the Poor Clares, tucked into their neat beds in their cloister, secure in the night, in belief. How good it must be to believe. Lewis and Nora were indifferent to religion. When Helene was nine she had asked about God. Lewis had taken her to synagogue and Nora had taken her to church, once each, and they had asked very carefully if she wanted to go back and she’d said no thank you, sensing their lack of enthusiasm. Now Helene wondered what her father believed, now when he was so close to death, when death had already claimed her mother.
He was never afraid.
He’d watched the couples dancing tonight with a smile. “Want to?” he asked his daughter. “Your heart,” Helene replied. “Not me, you—you should dance. Go on.” She shook her head and continued to sit by him.

Helene looked over the railing. The water was down there somewhere, she could hear it churning. The first day they were on the ship there had been a muster of all the passengers. They had been instructed in how to use their life jackets and where to gather if the alarm sounded. They had been told never to even think of diving off the ship; it was a long way down, you could break your neck, you could drown. Sharks could eat you. You might never be found.

I wish I could give the rest of it to him,
Helene thought.
Daddy would know what to do with another half a life. To me it’s just a burden.
Helene closed her eyes and tried to pray. She opened her eyes and felt foolish.

The canal was wide enough now, and the ship began to turn. The world revolved around Helene and she saw the way ahead; they were about to pass under an enormous bridge. She tilted her head back to see the silhouette of the underside of the bridge, menacing and close in the dark. She felt dizzy. She looked down and saw her hands on the railing, hands suddenly unfamiliar, knobby-knuckled and spotted.

Oh!
she thought.
Is it really that easy?
She put her hands to her soft, wrinkled face, looked down at her now-loose clothing. Her heart pounded; her vision blurred. Aches and pains beset her. The sounds of the world were suddenly muted. The ship sailed on as before.

Helene began to creep along the railing, back to the cabin, joyously certain of what she would find there.

About “Backward in Seville”

In June 2011 I accompanied a friend on a Mediterranean cruise. The ship was small (for a cruise ship), and most of the other passengers were older British people, many of them regulars who came every year and knew one another. My friend had been on many such cruises. She had taken them with her husband, and after he died she had been accompanied by various friends. We sat with different people at meals, and when our dining companions discovered I was a writer they always asked, “Are you going to write about this cruise?” “No, no,” I said. “I’m just here to hang out with my friend.”

Before I got onto the ship I had already decided to write in response to Ray Bradbury’s “The Playground,” which has always seemed to me equally horrifying and touching, a perfect evocation of the terrors of parenting and childhood. So as I wandered the ship’s decks watching the other passengers, I was thinking about impossible gifts, and it was a very small mental flip to imagine a grown child trading places with her elderly parent, instead of a parent taking the place of his child.

So I did end up writing about the cruise after all, and if any of my fellow passengers read this, I hope you will pardon my impudence. It was too perfect to resist.

—Audrey Niffenegger