Strange Wine (20 page)

He stopped and stared at the set-up. She had it hung with white, sheer hangings, tulle perhaps, some kind of very fine netting. White walls, white ceiling, white carpet so thick and deep he lost his ankles in it. And an enormous circular bed, covered with white fur.

“Polar bear,” he said, laughing a little drunkenly.

“The color of loneliness,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing, forget it,” she said, and began to undress him.

She helped him lie down, and he stared at her as she took off her clothes. Her body was pale and filled with light; she was an ice maiden from a far magical land. He felt himself getting hard.

Then she came to him.

When he awoke, she was standing at the other side of the room, watching him. Her eyes were no longer a lovely blue. They were dark and filled with smoke. He felt…

He felt…awful. Uncomfortable, filled with vague terrors and a limitless desperation. He felt…lonely.

“You don’t hold nearly as much as I thought,” she said.

He sat up, tried to get out of the bed, the sea of white, and could not. He lay back and watched her.

Finally, after a time of silence, she said, “Get up and get dressed and get out of here.”

He did it, with difficulty, and as he dressed, sluggishly and with the loneliness in him growing, choking his mind and physically causing him to tremble, she told him things he did not want to know.

About the loneliness of people that makes them do things they hate the next day. About the sickness to which people are heir, the sickness of being without anyone who truly cares. About the predators who smell out such victims and use them and, when they go, leave them emptier than when they first picked up the scent. And about herself, the vessel that contained the loneliness like smoke, waiting only for empty containers such as Mitch to decant a little of the poison, waiting only to return some of the pain for pain given.

What she was, where she came from, what dark land had given her birth, he did not know and would not ask. But when he stumbled to the door, and she opened it for him, the smile on her lips frightened him more than anything in his life.

“Don’t feel neglected, baby,” she said. “There are others like you. You’ll run into them. Maybe you can start a club.”

He didn’t know what to say; he wanted to run, but he knew she had spread fog across his soul and he knew if he walked out the door he was never going to reclaim his feeling of self-satisfaction. He had to make one last attempt…

“Help me…please, I feel so–so–”

“I know how you feel, baby,” she said, moving him through the door. “Now you know how they feel.”

And she closed the door behind him. Very softly.

Very firmly.

Like “Killing Bernstein,” earlier in this series of tiny fables, there is nothing deep or profound to say about it beyond what the story says for itself. As Mark Rothko put it: “Silence is so accurate.”

“Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered. Proust in Venice, Matisse’s bird-cages overlooking the flower market of Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: that is civilization, and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of combining with the Past. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places, and we need only a few bombs and some prisons to blot it out altogether. “The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have not forgiven them. One by one, the Golden Apples of the West are shaken from the tree.”

Cyril Connolly,
The Unquiet Grave

July 22nd, 2076…

Exclusive to the Going Nowhere News Service…

Mike Strathearn reporting…

My second wife once told me I’d write if I were strapped into a straitjacket in the deepest, moldiest dungeon cell of the most remote lunatic asylum in the world. She said I’d probably write news releases on the insides of my cheeks with my wet tongue-tip. She’s probably right, wherever she is. I’m a compulsive. Stranded on the most remote peak of K2 (Mt. Godwin-Austen or Dapsang, 8,611 meters, second highest mountain in the world: in the Himalayas, the Karakorams), I would fold the dispatches in the shape of a glider and skim them off the peak in hopes a Sherpa herdsman or a
yeti
or
some
one would find them. Marooned on a desert island, I would use notes in bottles. No one has ever figured out how someone marooned on a desert island came up with bottles to cast into the sea, but if there weren’t a convenient case of empty liquor bottles already there, I’d slip the dispatches into the mouths of dolphins, hoping they had a nice sense of direction. I was born in 2014, little more than a decade after the turn of the century, which makes me sixty-two now, and my mother once ventured that the difficulty she’d had giving birth to me was probably due to my having written all over the walls of her womb. I had a pretty happy childhood and by the time I was…

I’m rambling.

That’s lousy reportage.

I’ve always despised personal journalism. I try to be dead-on factual. But there isn’t much to do here, and I have this damnable need to
communicate!

I’ll try to keep to the subject.

The child. That kid. The emissary from Hamelin.

I got the word he wanted to meet me from the night desk. They called me at home and said, “There’s a kid says he’s got the biggest story in the history of the world, says he’ll only give it to you.”

I stared at the face of the guy in the phone. It was a new guy from the Bombay office, wearing a lot of pancake makeup and glitter on his eyelids. I didn’t know him except by sight, and I confess I didn’t like him. I guess I didn’t much like any of the new breed of reporters. Back when I was a kid, back around ’27 and ’28, I was greatly impressed by all the wacky film comedies of the nineteen thirties, the ones that took place in the old-style newspaper offices. Wisecracking guys and gals getting the beat on all the other papers, phoning in their leads on phones that just talked, didn’t have holo or even sight. Boy, what times those must have been! “Hello, Sharkey? This’s Smoke Farnum, hold the presses! I’ve got a doozy! Gimme rewrite. Hello, rewrite, take a lead for the dead dog final…”

I’m rambling again.

That kid. Yeah, I got to stick to telling about that kid.

Well, I looked at this yo-yo from Bombay, and I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Glitterlids just stared at me like he wanted to buzz me off, and finally he said, “The cops’ve got a kid up on a power wand tower out in Westwood. They don’t know how he got up there, and they don’t much give a damn; but they can’t get him down.”

“Why not?”

“Says he wants to talk to Strathearn of the Newsservice.”

“I asked you why not?”

“Because every time they send up a cop with a flitterpak on, the unit bypasses fail-safe and the cop falls on his ass, that’s why not!”

“And what’s all this about him having a story?”

“Look, Strathearn,” he said, “what the hell am I supposed to be, your grapevine? I’ve got other things to do; stop annoying me; either take the call or don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can chew mud!” And he buzzed me off before I could ask him why the kid wanted to talk to me and nobody else.

I floated there for a while, just revolving and thinking nothing in particular, just resting. I was half drunk to begin with, and not particularly interested in going out to cover some dumb kid up on a wand. But the more I thought about it, the more curious I got about him, and I must admit my ego was massaged thinking the kid wanted to talk to me and nobody else. It reminded me of the nineteen twenties, when Haldeman or Manson or Pretty Boy Floyd, one of those mobsters, gave himself up to Walter Winchell.
Hold everything, Sharkey
, I thought.
Stop the presses! I got a five-star final for you. Banner headline! Eighty-point Railroad Gothic! Crazed killer kid on a wand with the biggest story in the world!

I had to laugh at myself, but before I knew what I was doing I was peeling the wrapper off a clean suit, blowing it up, putting it on and skitting for Westwood.

What the hell. Maybe it
was
the biggest story in the world. How often does
that
happen?

I can answer that now. I wish I couldn’t, but I can. It only happens once. Damn it.

They fitted me out with a flitterpak. I couldn’t believe it when the cops said they blamed the kid up there on the power wand tower for the failure of their units. I planned to do something with
that
bit of self-serving alibi when I put together my story.
If
there was a story.

I kicked the unit on, it hummed prettily, and I took off. Up I went, without any problem.
What noodles, those cops
, I thought.

I went up, 210 meters. Thank God I’m not afraid of heights. And there he was.

It wasn’t a crazed teen-ager. It was a little boy, about ten years old. He was walking around the maintenance platform. Limping. He was dressed in some soft furry kind of jacket and pants, wearing a pointed cap of the same fur, with a feather in it. He had a striped red and yellow scarf around his neck, and at the end of the scarf he had a flute of intricately carved wood attached by a leather thong. I recognized the flute as wood, and the thong as leather. Do you know how long it’s been since we had any wood or leather around? Do you know how long it’s been since anyone wore fur? Oh, there was a story here, all right.

The kid watched me as I floated up over the guard rails and dropped onto the platform. I kicked off the unit, but I didn’t take it off. He was only about 120 centimeters tall, but I wasn’t taking any chances on his suddenly going wild and doing something unexpected. It was, after all, more than two hundred meters to a messy finish.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything. Finally I said, “It’s pretty cold up here, son. Don’t you want to come down?”

He spoke very quietly, and it wasn’t
just
that what he said was so adult, so reasoned; his voice was that of a little man. No, I don’t mean a
little man
, I mean what they used to call a young chap when he was being plucky and brave and grown-up. “You’re a plucky little man.” That’s what I mean.

“No thank you, sir. I can come down whenever I choose. I’m sorry you had to come up here to see me, but I’m a child and I knew if I asked to see you on the ground, someone bigger would have stopped me. Or just laughed.”

My God
, I thought,
it’s The Little Prince
. This kid was 120 centimeters tall and fifty years old. What a cute little guy. Very serious. And he looked at me with the steadiest gaze I’d ever encountered. I had the fleeting thought that if a politician could get that steady look down correctly, he’d be a dead shot for the Presidency Commissarship of the whole damned planet.

“Well, uh, what’s your name?”

“My name is Willy, sir. And I’ve come a very long distance to speak to you.”

“Why me, Willy?”

“Because you like children, and you remember many things that happened long ago, and you know the poem.”

“The poem?”

“Yes, sir, the poem about the Pied Piper who took the children when the Mayor of Hamelin would not pay him what he had promised to pay him for ridding the town of rats.”

I hadn’t the vaguest idea what the kid was talking about. Yes, I’d memorized Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” off one of the obscure-search scanner fiches when I was just a child, but that had been many, many years before. And what had Browning’s poem to do with this child? And where had he come from? And how had he managed to scale a two-hundred-meter wand? And if he was able to jam the cops’ flitterpaks, as they had said, then why had he let
me
fly up? And what was this big story he was supposed to have for me? And where had he gotten fur and wood and leather?

And then I ran Browning through my mind.

“But when they saw ’twas a lost endeavor,

And Piper and dancers were gone forever,

They made a decree that lawyers never

Should think their records dated duly

If, after the day of the month and year,

These words did not as well appear:

‘And so long after what happen’d here

On the twenty-second of July,

Thirteen hundred and Seventy-six;’

And the better in memory to fix

The place of the children’s last retreat,

They call’d it the Pied Piper’s Street…”

“In one week it’ll be exactly seven hundred years to the day,” I said to the child. He did not look happy when I said it. He sighed and looked over the edge of the platform, out across the endless expanse of San Frangeles stretching from what long ago had been Vancouver, all the way down to what had been Baja California. And I thought I saw him crying; but when he turned back, his eyes were only moist.

“Yes, sir, that is correct. We feel more than enough time has been allotted for you. And that is why I was sent out. But I try to be fairer than my ancestor, and that is why I asked for you. You can understand; you will be able to tell them, warn them, so I won’t have to…”

He didn’t finish. He just left it hanging, and up there on the wand, as cold as it was, I felt a deeper chill wash through me, as if someone had walked over my grave.

I asked him what he meant to do.