Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (9 page)

And so he said: “You sound—I don’t know—bitter? Or even angry.”

Phillips nodded as though he’d gotten the reaction he’d sought. “If I am guilty of those emotions, I assure you I have my reasons.”

“What possible reason could you have?”

“If you are observant, you already know I have neither means nor health. Although I tell myself I suffer from a common ailment, the lie does not banish the thing that is consuming me.”

And just like that, it made sense to Jim. He felt twice the fool. He’d believed his own lie—the greatest falsehood of adolescence—that he would live forever.

As he struggled for the appropriate response, he was shocked to hear himself talking—the words coming from a place where thoughts are replaced by feelings. “And you think your art has destroyed you?”

Phillips considered the question—one he’d most likely never been asked. Then: “I think that’s as accurate as it is perceptive.”

Jim beamed. “I think you’re wrong. I think that’s what gave you life, what gave you the only true pleasure we—how’d you put it?—
‘sad sorcerers’
can have!”

Phillips again did his best imitation of a smile. “You are an unexpected palliative, young man. How could you possibly know already that creation is the true and only machinery of joy?”

Now it was Jim’s turn to pause. “I don’t think I did . . .”

Phillips leaned forward, touched the sleeve of Jim’s peacoat, then held up his hand. It was performed as though part of a ritual. “I think something important has happened this day. Irony is a powerful force, is it not? You came to this place in search of something you didn’t know you even needed. It is something I fear I’ve lost, and yet I am still able to give it to you. Does that make sense?”

Jim grinned his schoolboy grin. This time he understood perfectly. “I came here looking for one thing, but I found something else.”

“As did I.” Phillips nodded gravely. “The tragedy of life is not that men die, but rather that most allow their dreams to expire while they still live.”

Jim felt transformed by this exchange, as well as an odd connection to this strange, feeble man. Signaling the waiter to refill their cups, Jim felt himself smiling at the man he now considered a friend.

He was certain they still had much to discuss.

About “The Exchange”

Okay, so I took liberties with reality (at least the one with which we’re most familiar) and postulated an encounter that never happened. Which is one of the simplest functions of fiction, right? How else are we ever going to slip our tethers and check out the nightlife in any of the infinite parallel universes? The real concern for me is why I even tried to make this story work.

And I think it’s pretty simple, really.

During my formative years I received a couple of literary two-by-fours to the head, delivered by the doppelgängers of Jim Holloway and Phillips Howard. When I read
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, the characters of Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway were instantly familiar to me—because they were
me
. Bradbury became one of my favorite writers because I believed that, somehow, he
knew
me. In a dissimilar but equally powerful way, when I read my first collection of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s stories, he became one of my seminal writers because he knew how to
scare
me.

In totally different ways, both Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft showed me the power of language and the sheer, raw energy of imagination. To say they
inspired
me seems silly and inadequate—rather, they both demanded something of me. They forced me to face the silly ideas I entertained about someday doing something unique . . . and to do something about it.

I’d like to think both of them made an exchange with me as well, and while I didn’t do as well as either of my trading partners, I’m humbled and honored to be here right now.

Thanks, Ray. It would have never happened without you.

—Thomas F. Monteleone

CAT ON A BAD COUCH

Lee Martin

I
’ll admit I was drunk when I bought it, so I shouldn’t blame anyone else for my error in judgment, my lack of taste, my total disregard for the aesthetics of fabric and color and design necessary to what my wife, Vonnie, used to call the healing home. She got that from a book she read, one that encouraged her to use aromatherapy, light, feng shui, color, and natural materials to create a space where she and I would feel connected to earth, air, and each other. It was our last chance, though of course we didn’t know it then. All we knew was that we’d started to lose sight of what first brought us together—I couldn’t even have said what that something was—and still we were tongue-tied and dumb. If there were words that might have made a difference, we were having trouble finding them.

“A healing home is a happy home,” Vonnie said one day, and I agreed I’d give it a shot.

Then we got Henry, and everything went to hell in a hurry.

He showed up at our house in late October, just as the days were starting to cool and winter was in the air. A long, skinny tabby with a notch bitten out of his ear, a limp to his roll, a smirk on his face—yes, I swear a cat can smirk—and the most pitiful meow you’d ever want to hear. A croak that made Vonnie fall in love.

“Poor baby,” she said. “Where’s your house? Do you have a house?”

He was winding himself in and out around her legs, tail straight up in the air, as she stood on the front porch, petting him. I was inside watching through the storm door, and when I opened it to step outside, he saw his chance; he shot the gap, and presto, he was inside.

“Hey,” I said, but it was too late.

He’d already curled up on the window seat, smack-dab in the middle of the ramie-covered cushions Vonnie had purchased from IKEA earlier that morning. In an instant, he was asleep. Vonnie and I could see him through the front windows, and I could tell from the way she looked at him there’d be nothing I could say to convince her that a bit-eared, gimpy, smart-mouthed stray was nothing but bad news.

“Oh, my.” I heard her intake of breath. She touched me on the arm, and it was one of the few times in more than a year—yes, it had been that long—that we’d touched at all. “Lex,” she said to me. “Sweetie, he looks so peaceful there.”

I knew then that this scruffy-assed junkyard cat, soon to be named Prince Henry Boo-Boo Ca-Choo, had taken his last fall and landed in the gravy.

He’d been looking for us, Vonnie would say that night as he made himself comfy on our bed, stretched out longways between us, his claws pricking my back. He was home.

B
ut I was telling you about my couch. I bought it one night when I’d been drinking at the Rusty Bucket, drinking more than I should have because it was easier to do that than to go home to Vonnie. What was our problem? I don’t imagine there’s any way to say it was this or that; it was more a combination of things, one of them being time and what it can do to romance. We’d been together since we were eighteen, and somewhere along the line the thrill went away, and then we were left with the people we really were—I mean the people we were deep down inside—and maybe what we were finding out was that we didn’t really like those people. They just didn’t match up. That’s the best I’ve been able to do, at least in the time I’ve had to think about it. People fall out of love. I didn’t mean for that to be the case with Vonnie and me, nor I imagine did she, but that’s what happened, and maybe—just maybe—the start of the end was when I ducked into the discount furniture store that evening all because that couch, which I could see through the display window, caught my eye.

I walked in, and the salesgirl, a pretty girl with her eyes just a little too close together, asked if she could help me find something.

Lord, the questions people ask, not having any idea what they can mean to a person. This girl was a pleasant sort who smiled a lot and had dimples in her cheeks, and she was so eager to help me find exactly what I needed, I almost told her the truth. I almost said,
Please, help me find my way
.

Instead, I said I’d spotted that couch. “That one.” I pointed to a harvest-gold couch with a high back, and a plaid pattern formed from brown and green lines, and kick-pleat skirting around the bottom. “The one with the kick-pleat skirting,” I said, and the girl’s smile got even wider.

“You know your material, I can see that.” She gave me a wink of one of her too-close-together eyes. “I’ll have to be on my toes with you.”

The store was nearly empty that near to closing. Somewhere toward the back, a radio was playing, some old big-band tune from the forties, a time, if the movies I’d seen were any evidence, when men and women believed in love. I took a glance behind me out the plate-glass display window, and I saw that in the little bit of time that had passed since I’d stepped into the store, the dusk had faded to full dark. It could happen like that. In fact it did every night. In the wink of an eye.

“ ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,’ ” I said, and the girl gave me a puzzled look. “The song,” I said, and then I sang along. I was wild again and beguiled, etc.

And I was too loud for the mostly empty store—I was singing too loud and I was too full of booze—and for the first time, I saw a look of concern pass over the girl’s face, as if she feared I might grab her and throw her down and have at her on that couch, which I already knew I was going to buy if for no other reason than to make this all up to her.

She glanced toward the back, looking, I assume, for a coworker, hoping someone would come to the front of the store so she wouldn’t have to be alone with me.

That’s when I nearly lost it, knowing I’d caused a nice girl like her alarm, and I said, “I’ll take it. The couch. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

T
he next morning I woke up and went outside to retrieve the
Dispatch
from the front step. That was the first time I saw Mr. Mendes, the man who would become my neighbor across the street.

He was moving in. The HER Realty sign was leaning against the maple tree in the front yard. The previous owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Zambesi, had raked the last of the fallen leaves before bidding the neighborhood fare thee well. No one had been sorry to see them go. They were, in short, a disruption to the generally tranquil cul-de-sac. They were people with tempers, and more than once their arguments had escalated to the point where some of us had called the police. It wasn’t uncommon to hear shouting in the middle of the night, doors slamming, glass breaking, car tires squealing. “You’re no one I care about,” I heard Mrs. Zambesi scream one night. “Do you hear me? No one!”

Our expectations for Mr. Mendes, then, were high. It didn’t matter to us that he was a single man. In fact, that was a plus. A single man who led a pleasant and quiet life. At least that was our hope.

The house was a four-bedroom two-story with a brick façade halfway up the front and vinyl siding the rest of the way. The siding was light yellow and the window shutters were green.

A house that said howdy-do and welcome.

The front door was wide open that morning, and a couple of men in sleeveless T-shirts were unloading furniture from a white truck that said
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK
on the side
.
Truth in advertising. There they were: two men and their truck.

Mr. Mendes had parked his red Volvo wagon along the curb in front of my house—such a cheery color, red—and was easing a birdcage out of the back. He had a cockatiel inside—a gray-feathered cockatiel with a yellow head and a bright orange spot on each cheek. The bird was whistling and clicking to beat the band, singing and trilling like he was the happiest Gus on this old planet Earth. Mr. Mendes looked quite chipper himself, dressed in crisply pressed navy slacks and a shirt the color of a robin’s egg. The crowning touch? A cardigan sweater of white, violet, and sky-blue stripes—vertical stripes along the front and back, and short horizontal hatches on the sleeves. On this day, when the trees were bare and the sky was leaden and there was just enough bite in the air to remind us that soon we’d settle into winter, he and his bird were a glorious sight.

I couldn’t help but call out to him. “Hello,” I said. “Welcome to Saddlebrook Estates. I’m Lex. I like your sweater.”

He looked down at the front of his sweater, as if he’d forgotten what he was wearing. Then he gave me a pleasant grin. “My name is Mendes,” he said, “and this is Popcorn.”

What a delightful name for a cockatiel, and I said as much.

“Thank you,” Mr. Mendes said. “He’s the light of my life. I’ve had him fifteen years.”

“Does he talk?”

“Oh, yes, very much.”

Mr. Mendes leaned over and said something to the bird. Soon Popcorn’s chirpy bird voice rang out. “Touchdown,” he said. “Touchdown. Touchdown.”

“It’s football season,” I said with a laugh. “And you know how football-crazy Columbus is. Go, Bucks! You’ll be the hit of the neighborhood.”

And he was. All because of Popcorn, who charmed the neighbors when they dropped by to bring Mr. Mendes a loaf of bread, a pound cake, some homemade cookies. Mr. Mendes himself was civil but quiet. He withstood the neighbors’ visits, but I could tell it was painful for him. He was a man who liked to keep to himself. As the weeks went on, I took note of the way he kept his curtains drawn and how I mostly saw him when he was leaving for work—he did something with computers at Cardinal Health—or coming home.

As winter settled in, we saw each other less frequently, and to be fair, the same could be said about all the neighbors. We were starting to hunker in, holing up for the long haul that was winter in central Ohio, all of us having to face the facts of our own lives.

For a while I thought I might develop a lasting friendship with Mr. Mendes—out of all the neighbors, it seemed to be me, the first to welcome him, with whom he felt most at ease. Chick Hartwell on the corner was too har-de-har-har, a backslapping sort who acted like he’d never had a sad day in his life. How could someone like Mr. Mendes not feel even more down in the mouth about his solitary life in the presence of someone like Chick? Herb Shipley, two doors down from me, was too angry.
Fuck this
and
Fuck that
. Pissed off about the homeowners’ association, which told him he couldn’t store his garbage can outside his garage. Pissed off about the Buckeyes and their lack of want-it. Just pissed off at the world in general. Then there were the Biminrammers—Benny and Missy—next door to Mr. Mendes, who were clearly incompetent, though cheerily so, and on a dead-straight course toward disaster. They were always asking Mr. Mendes to do them a favor. Maybe they’d locked themselves out of their house and needed to use his phone. Maybe Benny had sliced his thumb open with a carving knife when Missy was at a Mary Kay party, and now he wanted to know if Mr. Mendes would be good enough to drive him to the emergency room.

I, on the other hand, asked nothing of my new neighbor, and for that reason alone he found me to be someone he could confide in.

His own story was a story of heartache. He’d left his native Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift. Castro, besieged by Cuba’s economic problems, agreed that anyone who wanted to leave the country could. Mr. Mendes was fourteen years old and in love with a beautiful girl named Eva. She and her family stayed behind, and he never saw her again. He still thought of her, he told me one evening when we were chatting by the curb. It was nearly dusk and too cold to be standing outside, but we’d both come out to our mailboxes at the same time and he crossed the street to say hello and one thing led to another.

“I wonder what happened to her,” he said. “I wonder if she ever thinks about me.”

“Forgive me for being too personal,” I said, “but surely you’ve had other loves.”

“A few.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But nothing to last. No one like her.”

At that moment Henry came slinking across the street. He’d been out gallivanting somewhere, and now he was eager for the warmth of home, his food dish, and Vonnie’s fussing over him as he stretched out beside her on the new couch.

Perhaps it was something about what Mr. Mendes and I had been discussing there on a winter’s evening with the dark settling in and the lights glowing in our neighbors’ windows that made him reach down to pet Henry, who promptly hissed at him and lashed out with a claw that scraped Mr. Mendes across the back of his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“You should keep that cat inside,” said Mr. Mendes, and that was the last time I spoke with him that winter.

I
t was a winter of odd occurrences that further frayed the flimsy threads barely holding Vonnie and me together.

Our phone rang often, and when one of us answered, there was no one on the other end of the line. Nothing you’d think about if it happened occasionally, but something else altogether if it happened three or four nights a week to the point that we finally had to give in and change our number.

Of course, Vonnie accused me of having an affair. Of course, I did the same.

“How could it be a boyfriend or a girlfriend calling?” I finally asked her, “if they’re hanging up when either one of us answers?”

“That makes sense.”

I could have pressed on, but I decided against it. The truth was neither would accuse the other of infidelity if the accuser hadn’t already wondered, him or herself, what that might be like. If Vonnie thought a phone call with no one on the other end was a sign that I’d been unfaithful, then that told me she’d been imagining another life for herself and was looking for a reason to walk out the door.