Jensen

            We had the bottom floor of our own house, down off the main street of Jensen.  The upper two floors of the place were blasted open and the wind lived up there.  Some times I’d lay in bed at night awake and listen to it moving around above me, walking, singing, dropping things on the floor.  I slept on an old couch and my mother had a small bed.  We had a working toilet, and that was something not everyone had.  Our place wasn’t so bad as long as we kept the windows boarded and swept to keep it from filling with sand.

            My mother worked for the company at their headquarters guarded by armed sentries in black goggles.  She didn’t talk about her work much, but from the little she said, here and there, she sat strapped to a chair for ten hours a day with a machine attached to her head like a helmet.  “I think for them all day long,” she told me once.  “It’s exhausting.”  I asked what she thought about, and she said, “It doesn’t really matter.”  I’m sure it was her job that put the lines under her eyes, and thinned her hair, and made her wake at nights screaming until I went over and put my arm around her.   

            I went to school in a concrete bunker on the east end of town.  The company had blasted away a lot of the old run down wooden frame houses that had once been a neighborhood there to construct the place.  It was a square without windows, and I remember them building it when I was five, driving the steal girders deep into the sand.  When I started there in first grade, Miss Write, the blonde, ever-smiling, android educator, seemed to know everything and was very attentive to each one of us thirty kids, even though we were all different ages.  She could draw and play music and project the most beautiful holograms to illustrate whatever point she was making.  The company also supplied every student with a full school year’s worth of mnemo-tabs; pills that help you remember everything.  This was back in the days when people said that Jensen was going to make a comeback.  That optimism lasted about as long as Miss Write’s good looks. 

            Before three years were up, her fake skin was corroded by the blowing sand, and her glass eyes, that had once shone with something so close to human warmth we kids couldn’t tell the difference, had been scratched to blanks.  In addition, the dust had invaded her inner workings, and things began to go wrong, like the time she was telling us about the ecological disaster that had turned the land around Jensen from a grassy plain to a dustbowl while simultaneously projecting a hologram of a woman giving birth.         Her malfunctions compounded over time until in our last year of school, that year Mim and I were fifteen, every day we’d sit in the presence of a lurching, shaking horror, who babbled incoherent lectures, and displayed random three-d scenes while belching and farting sparks like a fireworks display.  Luckily, the company had long since stopped distributing the mnemo-tabs just as they had broken almost every other promise they’d ever made to the town.   The hours of school were like a waking nightmare in their rush of disconnected images and information. 

            It’s no wonder the kids got out of hand.  But when things became too unruly, Miss Write, no matter how far gone she was, never failed to quell the rebellion.  She neither struck us nor yelled, but merely projected the same glorious scene of a waterfall amidst a lush green rain forest, and no matter how many times we’d witnessed it and the endless splash and birdcalls of its audio, we were stunned by its beauty.  Mim and I had decided that when we left town we’d find that place and live at the base of the flowing cataract.        We became friends in our eighth year.  It was during the off-time from school; two months when we were not required to sit before Miss Write.  Mim had just moved to Jensen with her mother from Seluis, a hundred miles away to the west.  That town had fallen apart even faster than Jensen was, and when the silver mine there was tapped out, the few remaining families scattered. 

            Mim and her mother, Ida, took up residence in one of the rooms on the second floor of the old library in the center of town. I was the first kid she met on the street her first day there.  Her mother’d gone off to the company building and left her alone and she was exploring.  The wind was blowing crazy strong that day, and I was riding my bike past the front of the old library when a giant gust came along and stopped me dead in my tracks.  And there she was, looking at me with those green eyes, smiling. 

            Until that time, I’d been pretty much a loner, because the other boys were rougher than me and always angry, wanting to break things.  There was a lot to break in Jensen that no one cared about – windows in abandon houses and whole houses themselves.  Peeky Mor had a gang of four guys my age.  Once I saw them torture a starving coyote that had wandered in off the waste, and after that I couldn’t be part of them anymore.  After I quit them they became my enemies, and I was always trying to outrun them, hide from them, forget about them. 

            I saw Mim standing there that day in the off-time, and I called her over.  She told me she was new, and so I hid my bike and took her on a walking tour of Jensen, showing her all my special places.  We wound up on the north side, in the basement of an old abandoned house.  Peeky and his gang hadn’t discovered this one yet.  From the outside, the place looked decimated, but I’d found a way into the basement, and down there where light seeped in from a big hole in the floor above, we sat in the presence of Cal Luster.      When Mim saw him, she gave a start, because Cal was, then, no more than a skeleton, sitting in a lounger, wearing a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans with the bottoms rolled up. 

            “You visit him often?” asked Mim. 

            “About once a week,” I said. 

            “But he’s dead.”  She laughed at the idea of it. 

            “Well…,” I said.  “Cal was a famous astronaut.  He flew out to the stars in those rockets over at the space port.  I read about him in an old book I found out there.  They showed his house in a picture in the book, and I came to find it, and then I discovered him.  Yeah, he’d been on three missions to Mars before they closed down the space program after everything went bust.”

            I got a chair for her and she sat down. 

            “I come here and he tells me stories about space travel, so when I go out to the space port I can better make believe when I sit in the old rockets.”

            We sat there for a good long while in silence, and Mim asked, “Is he telling you one now?” 

            I nodded and told her about Cal, shipwrecked in the great Martian desert, alone with only his android, Miss Write, still beautiful, way back before she’d been rotted by Jensen.  23 days and nights before the rescue party found them.  When it was over, Cal put in for Miss Write to get human status because he secretly wanted to marry her.  As soon as the official request was accepted, she left him and struck out on her own.  She went to school to become a teacher, was hired by the company and sent to Jensen.  Then I told about the teacher and what had become of her in town.

            Mim laughed at the ending.

            Later that day, we ran into Peeky and his gang.  They surrounded us, and we couldn’t get away because we weren’t on bikes.  Peek got off his bike and came over and slapped my face, trying to start in.  Mim went up to him, and, without any warning, kicked him right between the legs.  When he went to his knees, holding his nuts, she grabbed him by the hair, pulled a small knife from her pocket and held it to his eye. 

            “Leave us alone,” she said. 

            Peeky nodded.  As he got up and hobbled back to his bike, Mim turned to the gang.  They all sat there staring.  Eventually they just rode away.   

            I promised Mim that before the week was out I’d find her an old bike at one of the run down houses that hadn’t been looted yet, and I’d take her to the space port.  She smiled and said, “OK, that would be great.”  Then we went past the school and looked in the door at Miss Write, yammering in the dark, while the projection of a giraffe loped in mid-air through the empty classroom. 

            I took Mim to the space port, and we crawled through the abandoned rockets that lay, rusting, adrift in the dunes.  On the crumbling dock of a vast hangar, we more posed with than smoked cigarettes she had stolen from her mother.  We told each other secrets.  Later on, when the wind picked up, we climbed the impossibly tall tower of the empty launch pad to peer back at Jensen and spy it, all at once, through the blowing veil of dust -- a rotted tooth in the sand. 

The Following is a paragraph from an e-mail I got from Rick Bowes:

A couple of years ago, Grey Galleries at NYU did a big and kind of important retrospective on the downtown art scene circa 1978-1985. The New York depicted was the world of Neuromancer – urban decay, 20 foot tall acrylic murals of distorted human figures looking out on half block swaths of broken glass and smashed bricks. The thing that struck me was that this New York of 25 years before was gone, replaced with condos. The other thing I noticed visiting it a few times in the course of its showing was how fascinated younger visitors - NYU and Parsons film and art students  – were not so much by the art as by the world in the background and how envious they were of those older, luckier artists who’d had the advantage of low rents, cheap and easily accessible hard drugs and an absolute conviction that there was no tomorrow.  I had been at the opening and had seen the artists – those that were still alive and allowed out on their own. And they – fat, medicated, fucked  up - seemed mostly struck by nostalgia for a lost world as they watched videos of a talentless and now deceased TV pretending to be Joan Crawford or a couple of brief shots of Basquiat in his amazing beauty.

My teaching semester is over at the end of this week, and the beautiful summer is at hand.  I found a couple of fragments of stories that have been cluttering up the old typer for quite a while and in lieu of just tossing them I thought I'd post them here in hopes of getting a different view on them and maybe getting a clue as to how to finish them.  There'll be at least one more this week and maybe more, maybe not. 

                            Polka-Dots and Moonbeams

           He came for her in the Belvedere convertible, top down, emerald green, with those fins in the back, jutting up like goal posts.  From her third floor apartment window, she saw him pull to the curb out front. 

            “Hey, Dex,” she called, “where’d you get the submarine?”

            He tilted back his Homburg and looked up.  “All hands on deck, baby,” he said, patting the white leather seat. 

            “Give me a minute,” she said, laughed, and then blew him a kiss.  She walked across the blue braided rug of the parlor and into the small bathroom with water stained ceiling and cracked plaster.  Standing before the mirror, she leaned in close to check her make-up – enough rouge and powder to repair the walls.  Her eye shadow was peacock blue, her mascara indigo, her liner, pure black.   She gave her girdle a quick adjustment through her dress, then smoothed the material and stepped back to take it all in.  Wrapped in strapless black, with a symmetrical design of small white polka-dots, like stars in a perfect universe, she turned profile and inhaled.  “Good Christ,” she said and exhaled.  Passing through the kitchenette, she lifted a silver flask from the scarred table top and shoved it into her handbag. 

            Her heels made a racket on the wooden steps, and she wobbled for balance just after the first landing.  Pushing through the front door, she stepped out into the evening light and the first cool breeze all summer.  Dex was waiting for her at the curb, holding the passenger door open.  As she approached, he tipped his hat and bent slightly at the waist. 

            “Looking fine, there, madam,” he said. 

            He straightened and she stopped to kiss his cheek. 

            The streets were empty, not a soul on the sidewalk, and save for the fact that here and there in a few of the windows of the tall, crumbling buildings they passed a dim yellow light could be seen, the entire city seemed empty as well.  Dex turned left on Kraft and headed out of town.

            “It’s been too long, Adeline,” he said. 

            “Hush now, sugar,” she told him.  “Let’s not think about that.  I want you to tell me where you’re taking me tonight.”

            “I’ll take you where I can get you,” he said. 

            She slapped his shoulder. 

            “I want a few cocktails,” she said. 

            “Of course, baby, of course.  I thought we’d head over to The Ice Garden, cut the rug, have a few, and then head out into the desert after midnight to watch the stars fall.”

            “You’re an ace,” she said and leaned forward to turn on the radio.  A smoldering sax rendition of “Every Time You Say Goodbye,” like a ball of wax string unwinding, looped once around their necks and then blew away on the rushing wind. 

            She lit them each a cigarette as the car sailed on through the rising night.  An armadillo scuttled through the beams of the headlights fifty yards ahead, and the aroma of sage vied with Adeline’s orchid scent.  Clamping his cigarette with his lips, Dex reached over and put his free hand on her knee.  She took it into her own, twining fingers with him.  Then it was dark, the asphalt turning to dirt, and the moon rose slow as a bubble in honey above the distant silhouette of hills; a cosmic cream pie of a face, eyeing Adeline’s décolletage.       

            She leaned back into the seat, smiling, and closed her eyes.  Only a moment passed before she opened them, but they were already there, passing down the long avenue lined with monkey-puzzle trees toward the circular drive of the glimmering Ice Garden.  Dex pulled up and parked at the entrance.   As he was getting out, a kid with red hair and freckles, dressed in a valet uniform, stepped forward. 

            “Mr. Dex,” he said, “we haven’t seen you for a while.”

            “Take a picture, Jim-Jim,” he said and flipped a silver dollar in the air.  The kid caught it and dropped it into his vest pocket before opening the door for Adeline.

            “How’s tricks, Jim?” she asked as he delivered her to the curb. 

             “They just got better,” he said and patted his pocket.

            Dex came around the back of the car, took his date by the arm, and together they headed past the huge potted palms and down a brief tunnel toward the crystal brilliance – a large rectangular patio open to the desert sky and bounded by a lush garden of the most magnificent crystal flora.  At the edge of the high arching portico, Dex and Adeline stood for a moment, scanning the hubbub of revelers and, at the other end of the expanse of tables and chairs and dance floor, the onstage antics of that night’s musical act, Daddy Long Legs of the Evening.  Above the sea of bobbing heads, chrome trombone in one hand, mic in the other, Daddy belted out a jazzed up version of “Weak Knees and Wet Privates.” 

            A fellow in white tux and red fez approached the couple.  He was a plump little man with a pencil mustache; a fifty year old baby playing dress-up.  Dex removed his Homburg and reached a hand out.  “Mondrian,” he said.” 

            The maitre de bowed slightly and said, raising his voice above the din of merriment, “What a pleasure to have you both back.”

            Adeline reached out and also shook hands with the fellow. 

            “You’re looking particularly lovely tonight,” he said. 

            “Table for two,” said Dex and flashed a crisp twenty under the nose of Mondrian.  “Something close to the dance floor.” 

            The plump man bowed again and in his ascent snatched the bill from Dex’s hand.  “Follow me, my friends,” he said, and then turned and made his way slowly in amidst the maze of tables and milling crowd.  As they moved through the packed house Adeline waved hello to those who called her name and when someone shouted to Dex, he winked, sighted them with his thumb and pulled an invisible trigger in their direction.  Mondrian found them a spot at the very front, just to the left of the stage.  He pulled out and held Adeline’s chair, and once she was seated, he bowed. 

            “Two Gin Wrinkles,” said Dex, and in an instant the maitre de vanished back into the crowd. 

            Adeline retrieved two cigarettes from her purse and lit them on the small candle at the center of the table.  Dex leaned over and she put one between his lips.  She drew on the other. 

            “How does it feel to be back in action?” he asked her. 

            She smiled broadly, blew a stream of smoke, and nodded.  “It always feels right, the first few hours on the loose.  I’m not thinking about anything else right this moment,” she said. 

            “Good,” he said and placed his hat on the empty chair next to him.    

            The music stopped then and was replaced by the chatter and laughter of the crowd, the clink of glasses and silverware.  Daddy jumped down from the band platform, hit the ground and rolled forward to spring upright next to Dex.  “Dexter,” he said. 

            “Still sweating out the hits,” said Dex and laughed as he shook hands with the band leader. 

            “Daddy, aren’t you gonna give me a kiss?” said Adeline. 

            “I’m just savoring the moment,” he said and swept down to kiss her on the lips.  The kiss lasted for a while before Dex reached his leg around the table and kicked Daddy in the ass.  They all laughed as Daddy moved around the table and took a seat. 

            Folding his willowy arms in front of him, the band leader leaned forward and shook his thin head.  “You two out for the stars tonight?” he asked. 

            “And then some,” said Adeline. 

            “So fill me in,” said Dex. 

            “Well, same old same old, but you have to know, Wince has been waiting for you.” 

            A waitress appeared with two Gin Wrinkles – liquid pink ice and the Garden’s own bathtub blend of gin.  The fluted glasses caught the light and revealed tiny bubbles rising from a plump red cherry.  Dex slipped the young woman a five.  She smiled at him before leaving the table.

            “Fuck Wince,” said Dex, lifting his drink to touch glasses with Adeline. 

            “He’s had somebody in here almost every night looking for you,” said Daddy. 

            “Wince is solid fruitcake,” said Adeline.  “And a pervert.” 

            “A scary fellow,” said Daddy, nodding. “He’s promised to kill you both.”

            “Again?” said Dex.  “If he shows his catcher’s mitt of a face in here tonight, I’ll fluff his cheeks.”

            Adeline took a drag of her cigarette and smiled.  “Sounds like boy fun.  I thought you were here to dance and drink.” 

            “I am, baby.  I am,” said Dex and finished the rest of his Wrinkle, grabbing the cherry stem between his teeth.  When he brought the glass away, the fruit hung down in front of his mouth.  Adeline leaned over, put one arm around his shoulder and her lips around the cherry.  She ate it slowly, chewing with only her tongue before it all became a long kiss. 

            When they finished, Daddy said, “Somebody’s gonna get the stem,” and they all laughed. 

            Dex ordered another round of Wrinkles.  They talked for a few minutes about another time and place where there were parrots and the constant sound of the ocean.

            “Breaks over,” said Daddy, quickly killing the rest of his drink.  “You two be careful.” 

            “Do ‘Name and Number,’” called Adeline as the bandleader bounded toward the stage.  With a running start, he leaped into the air, did a somersault and landed, kneeling next to his mic stand.  He stood slowly, like a vine twining up a trellis.

            Dex and Adeline clapped as did the rest of the house when it saw Daddy back on stage.  The willowy singer danced with himself for a moment before grabbing the mic.  The band members took their places and lifted their instruments. 

            “Mondrian, my good man.  Turn that gas wheel and lower the lights,” said Daddy, his voice echoing through the garden and out into the desert. 

            A moment later the flames of the candles in the center of each table went dimmer by half.  “Ooooh,” said Daddy and the crowd applauded. 

            “Lower,” called Daddy. 

            Mondrian complied.  Whistles and cat calls sounded from out of the dull amber glow of the Garden.  The baritone sax hit a note so low it was like a tumbleweed blowing in off the desert.  Then the strings came up, there was a flourish of piccolo and three sliding notes from Daddy’s chrome t-bone.  He brought the mouthpiece away, snapped his fingers to the background music and sang:

            “My dear, you tear my heart asunder

            When I look up your name and number

            Right there in that open book

            My flesh begins to cook

            It’s all sweetness mixed with dread

            And then you close your legs around my head

            As I look up your name and number…”

            As Daddy dipped into the second verse, Dex rose and held his hand out to Adeline.  He guided her through the darkness to the sea of swaying dancers.  They clutched each other tight, legs between legs, lips locked, slowly turning through the dark.  Within the deep pool of dancers, there were currents of movement.  They let themselves be drawn by the flow as the music played on. 

*I'm off tomorrow to Indianapolois to appear at Book Marks: An Evening of Words and Wine with the Carmel Clay Public Library Foundation.  It'll be at the Ritz Charles, located at 12156 North Meridian St. in Carmel.  The event runs from 5:30 to 9:00.  The other authors participating will be Elizabeth Berg, William Dietrich, and Mameve Medwed.  Roll on by if you're in the area.    

*Was In New York yesterday for an interview for Galleycat.  Ron Hogan interviewed Michael Chabon and myself about crossing genres and other topics.  We spoke for a little over two hours about Kipling, Singer, Mysteries, Genre, Comics, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, The Nebula Awards, etc.  Ron said he'll have it up in a few days.  

*So many great nominees for the new Shirley Jackson Awards  --   Liz Hand (twice), Lucius Shepard, Laird Barron (3 of them), Jeff VanderMeer,  Mary Rickert,  Andy Duncan, Nathan Ballingrud,  Glen Hirshberg,  John Klima, Ellen Datlow and more....   Check the entire list.  Good luck to all the nominees. This summer I'll be participating in a reading to benefit the Shirley Jackson Award.  See Ellen Datlow for details.  I think it's going to be in July in New York.
2007 Shirley Jackson Awards Finalists
NOVEL

* Baltimore, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Spectra)
* Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
* Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow (William Heinemann Ltd)
* The Terror, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
* Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace (Knopf)

NOVELLA

* 12 Collections, Zoran Zivkovic (PS Publishing)
* Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
* The Mermaids, Robert Edric (PS Publishing)
* "Procession of the Black Sloth," Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Night Shade Books)
* The Scalding Rooms, Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
* "Vacancy," Lucius Shepard (Subterranean #7, 2007)

NOVELETTE

* "The Forest," Laird Barron (Inferno, Tor)
* "The Janus Tree," Glen Hirshberg (Inferno, Tor)
* "The Swing," Don Tumasonis (At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press)
* "The Tenth Muse," William Browning Spencer (Subterranean #6, 2007)
* "Thumbprint," Joe Hill (Postscripts #10, March 2007)

SHORT STORY

* "Holiday," M. Rickert (Subterranean #7, 2007)
* "The Monsters of Heaven," Nathan Ballingrud (Inferno,Tor)
* "A Murder of Crows," Elizabeth Ziemska (Tin House 31, Spring 2007)
* "Something in the Mermaid Way," Carrie Laben (Clarkesworld, March 2007)
* "The Third Bear," Jeff VanderMeer (Clarkesworld, April 2007)
* "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," Andy Duncan (Eclipse One, Night Shade Books)

COLLECTION

* The Bone Key, Sarah Monette (Prime Books)
* The Entire Predicament, Lucy Corin (Tin House)
* The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
* Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard (Knopf)
* Old Devil Moon, Christopher Fowler (Serpent's Tail)

ANTHOLOGY

* At Ease with the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)
* Dark Delicacies 2, edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb (Running Press)
* Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
* Logorrhea, edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra)
* Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley)