Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 25

The telephone jangles as he walks out the door. He doesn't answer, just walks downstairs, not trusting the elevator. He stops in the lobby to glance up at the skylight, and then hunkers beside the old unworking fountain to feed the fish.

There's only a single fish, a gargantuan one-eyed koi whose back breaks the surface of the water every time he moves. Terry thinks the koi's probably eaten any other fish that might have shared the fountain with him.

Terry feeds him anyway.

SCENE 4.

Time: 1962 Place: Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City The General was wise among fish. Though he dined on pellets of moldy Wonder Bread and not on hazelnuts (like the legendary salmon of learning), he had a great deal of time for contemplation. The young human with the hair as bright as the General's own golden scales had left when the sun was high and the slant of light through water left-to-right and slipping to the side. He would return when the electric lights glowed overhead, and if all had gone well, he would fete the General with crumbs of rice crackers and broken bits of pretzels, and perhaps even pause to converse a little before heading up the stairs to his own dinner.

Someday, the General would like to find a way to make life easier for the young man, although he was gaijin, foreign, although he was the enemy.

That didn't mean what it would have, once, before the General became the enemy as well.

The General grew hungry. The General drifted softly, floating, in antic.i.p.ation.

SCENE 5.

Time: Eternity Place: A fern bar in the Afterlife.

Marlowe, Keats, and Ginsberg nurse their beers around the free lunch at the corner of the bar. The bartender is still polishing gla.s.ses.

Ginsberg: You just make the Devil too d.a.m.ned attractive, Kit. That's the problem with Mephistopheles.

Marlowe: And I argue, 'tis precisely what he needs to be. Attractive, or who would fall in love with him? Your demon Moloch just isn't pretty enough to work as a seducer. Who would fall for him?

Keats coughs.

Ginsberg: But they do. They do fall for him. Consumerism. Demons. Moloch. Read your Milton.

Marlowe: Milton! That pompous a.s.s. Call Moloch the Beast, but devils and dragons are supposed to be lovely to look upon. Seduction is part of what makes them terrible, terrible and fair. "And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pa.s.s through the fire to Moloch."

Ginsberg: You're so full of s.h.i.t, Christopher. That's the thing, man, it's all plastic paint and, and... waxed t.u.r.ds covered in S&H Green Stamps. It's not real. It's got a shiny surface, brazen idol, you bet, and then you poke it and it kind of caves in around the hole you made and it's like a little a.s.shole, you know, oozing s.h.i.t- Keats: Could the two of you be more pretentious?

Ginsberg: We could be Tom. He'd be ranting about how the j.a.panese say the dragon is three-toed, and he grows extra toes when he leaves j.a.pan, but the Chinese say the dragon is five-toed, and his toes and his morals atrophy when he leaves China. And Kit here would quote the Bible at him like the cawing divinity student he is, and we'd be off- Keats (coughing): Tom's not so bad.

Marlowe leans back on his barstool out of the line of fire between Keats and Ginsberg. He catches the bartender's eye; the bartender smirks at him, but doesn't comment.

Ginsberg: Eliot, Eliot, they teach him in colleges. Who cares about that? It's... staid, it's not the future, it's the past.

Bartender: Allen, can I get you another one?

Ginsberg: No, Terry. I don't need a beer. I need to get laid, that's what I need. How come this place isn't like it was in the old days? I remember when it was broadsides pasted to the walls and a stage in the corner built of cinderblocks and it didn't have a liquor license, but you could hide your pot in the storeroom if you liked. Where the f.u.c.k did the f.u.c.king ferns come from, man?

Bartender: (quietly) Same place the name did, man. Moloch. Where else?

The pay telephone rings shrilly, and continues to ring. No one answers.

Bartender: f.u.c.k. I have got to get to 1962.

SCENE 6.

Time: the Millennium Place: a pretentious Greenwich Village bar Terry arrives at Moloch's at 3:30 on the dot and lets himself in with his key. He ties on his ap.r.o.n and gets to work, daydreaming. It doesn't take much presence of mind to set up the speed rack, set out the free lunch, prepare the garnish trays; he's tended this same bar since 1955, when the place was still called Sunflower, although they served coffee and soup when he first got the job, and not beer.

There was a girl who used to work here too, who used to paint murals on the wall, until the new owner got her an ill.u.s.trating job with a fashion magazine. She stopped coming by after that; Terry doesn't see her anymore.

Terry has a cache of the old shirts. He took all the leftovers home after the name change. He has only fifty left, but he figures if he washes them inside-out in cold water they'll see him through to retirement.

A little before four, Terry waters the ferns and philodendrons and brushes the felt on the pool table. He checks the coin return on the black rotary-dial pay telephone-the only thing in the bar other than the scarred wood floor that's been there longer than Terry has-and makes sure the photographs and clippings and caricatures of Ginsberg, of Kerouac, of Burroughs and Kesey and Ca.s.sady and Corso and Snyder and Brautigan and McClure and di Prima and Whalen and Ferlinghetti and Waldman and Orlovsky and people whose names even Terry doesn't recognize, they're that obscure, hang straight.

None of them would recognize what had become of Sunflower, anyway.

Terry polishes the bra.s.s railing on the stair ascending to street level against one wall, and at 4:00 promptly, he unlocks the door. Moloch's is a tourist trap.

It doesn't get afternoon trade.

Terry smoothes his green T-shirt down over his skinny chest and his middle-aged pot belly, makes sure it's tucked into his ap.r.o.n strings and the top of his pants and that his ponytail's tidy, and heads back to polish the bar. The customers will be along eventually, and Jackie and Maura come on at six when things start to pick up.

There's plenty to keep him busy until then.

The first customers wander in around five, which is the beginning of happy hour, as advertised on the placard in the window of the door at the top of the stairs. The c.o.c.ktail waitresses follow an hour later-Jackie five minutes late and Maura ten minutes early, predictably-and by nine it's a steady stream of customers playing Bob Dylan and Thelonious Monk on the CD jukebox in the corner, and Terry's even started to hope the owner won't show up tonight.

He hopes too soon.

Mr. Ryusaki always pauses at the top of the stairs and scans Moloch's with a slow oscillation of his head that reminds Terry of Conan Doyle's description of Moriarty. He always wears a belted, black velvet jacket with a brocade collar that looks like something Hugh Hefner would order in red, and he always spiders his weird gnarled hands down the bra.s.s banister as he descends, the old wooden stairs silent under his slight weight, in a manner that gives Terry a bright green, creeping wiggins as bad as watching a c.o.c.kroach crawl up his leg.

Terry wishes it was busier, so that Mr. Ryusaki would leave him alone, but it isn't, so he keeps polishing a gla.s.s he's already polished once. He leans against the back bar, waiting for Mr. Ryusaki to come on over and say whatever pain-in-the-a.s.s thing he plans on saying tonight. Mr. Ryusaki owns the brownstone Terry lives in as well as the bar where he works. Terry feels as if he should probably be polite, for the koi's sake, if not his own. If it weren't for Terry, after all, who would feed the fish?

Tatsu Ryusaki is tall, for a j.a.panese man of his generation, and he wears his fingernails filed into long ovals, like a woman's. It makes his hands look inhuman, like the talons of a predatory bird. He leans across the bar on his elbows, fingers twisted together, the knotted joints making them look as if they were meant to interlock. Terry wonders how he got the pearl ring onto his finger, past those knuckles.

"Mister Ryusaki," Terry says. He pours the boss a gla.s.s of the house red, sets it on a napkin, and slides it across the bar with his fingertips without being asked.

Mr. Ryusaki picks it up and frowns over the top. "I need you to stay tonight, Terry. Johnny got hit by a taxicab; you and Maura are going to have to close and clean up."

"Johnny all right?"

"Torn ligaments," Mr. Ryusaki says. "He'll heal. He called from the ER. I can get somebody to cover his shift tomorrow, but I need you and Maura to cover tonight."

"Yeah," Terry says, wiping the dry, polished bar in thoughtful circles as the pay phone begins to ring. "You said."

Mr. Ryusaki leans back, his wine gla.s.s in his left hand, and frowns. He's a narrow man, with a ferret face that pinches around the eyes when he's irritated with Terry, which he usually is. "Get a haircut, Terry," he says, turning toward his office as the phone jangles again. It's an old phone, with a real hammer and a metal bell. The sound it makes is not a hesitant sound. Customers are craning their necks curiously now, as the d.a.m.ned thing rings again. Terry ignores it, breathing his sigh of relief a moment too soon.

Mr. Ryusaki doesn't pause, but he snaps back over his shoulder as he's leaving, "And answer the G.o.dd.a.m.ned phone."

Terry pauses with one hand on the bar gate, his towel tossed over his shoulder. "If I'd killed that son of a b.i.t.c.h when I met him," he mutters, "I'd be out of jail by now."

There's n.o.body on the line, of course. There never is, when he answers, "Moloch's."

But he can almost hear the ghosts sighing on the other side.

SCENE 7.

Time: the Millennium Place: Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City By the time Terry makes it home, the sky is grey. There's no such thing as dawn on Manhattan, or sunset either, but they haven't quite figured out how to roof the whole island in-yet-and the light still seeps through the cracks. It's a rare night when he still feels the urge for company after his shift in a bar crowded with pretentious twits who come because Kerouac kept his stash behind a brick in the back wall when it used to be a coffeehouse and impromptu soup kitchen.

It's a rare night when Terry feels the urge to do anything but scrub, after twelve to fifteen hours in a miniature Disneyland dedicated to capitalizing on a plasticized memory of revolution. Caricatures, for Christ's sake.

The whole f.u.c.king place is a caricature.

Terry stops by the broken fountain, in the grey light falling through the skylight, and digs in his pocket for a baggie full of crumbs. He remembers another era, when the baggie wouldn't have had a zip closure, and it wouldn't have been crumbs of bread that it held-and he wouldn't have been shaking it onto the stagnant surface of a make-believe lily pond.

Still, he casts the bread on the water and watches the nested Vs of the big koi's hungry approach. The d.a.m.ned thing is almost a carp; its round mouth breaking the surface looks big enough to swallow a mouse.

"I wish I'd had the sense to kill that son of a b.i.t.c.h thirty-eight years ago," Terry says conversationally, rubbing the last few bits of pretzel from the bag. "f.u.c.king fern bar's an abomination before the Lord, and naming it for a character in 'Howl,' that's just adding insult to injury. Man, I wish you could have seen the place back in the old days, fish. I wish it was still like that now."

The koi churns back and forth, back and forth. Terry figures a cat or some sort of big predatory bird must have been what got him; there are three parallel scars across the side of the fish's head with the ruined eye, the proud flesh high and bare between the scales.

"That was some s.h.i.t," Terry continues, before he turns away to climb the stairs.

"Hippies and beatniks and queers, oh my, hippies and beatniks and queers."

SCENE 8.

Time: 1962 Place: Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City The golden carp, gobbling crumbs from the surface of his prison, heard someone make- -a wish.

SCENE 9.

Time: Eternity Place: a fern bar in the Afterlife.

Marlowe and Ginsberg are still arguing, although now they're standing beside the pool table. Keats leans over the bar, his chin on the back of his hand, coughing into his spotted handkerchief occasionally. Shakespeare sits beside him; the blond bartender is pouring.

The door at the top of the stairs opens.

Enter Brautigan. He stops to take in the scene, and seems drawn particularly to Ginsberg and Marlowe, who are insulting one another genially and shooting pool.

The two poets hesitate. Their eyes lock. They stare at one another for a moment, and then move toward each other violently. It's hard to tell who kisses whom; their mouths meet roughly and they seem to struggle as much as embrace, pushing, dragging one another down atop the pool table.

Brautigan witnesses the entire thing. His eyes bug out of his face, his head whirls around on his neck, and his impressive mantle of hair stands straight out around his head as if electrified.

Stuffing both hands against his mouth, Brautigan runs up the stairs.

The pay telephone rings shrilly, and continues to ring. No one answers. The bartender glances over at the writhings atop the pool table and sighs tiredly.

Enter Moloch, painted in tongues: a slender man, ferret-faced, in a black velvet smoking jacket with red and gold three-toed dragons embroidered at the collar. He pauses at the top of the stairs, one knotty hand splayed upon the brazen banister. A forked tongue flickers between his lips. Brautigan leads him by the arm, pauses, and points at Marlowe and Ginsberg f.u.c.king on the pool table.

Moloch watches for a moment, then lifts his chin and stares at the bartender. The bartender looks up, looks over at the poets on the pool table, and shrugs. He never stops polishing the gla.s.s in his hands.

Trailing Brautigan, Moloch descends the stairs and crosses to the bar. He lifts the gate and ducks through it; the bartender and Keats don't seem to notice his presence-they are, in fact, frozen as if they are stuck in time. As Shakespeare begins to figure this out, waving a hand in front of Keats'face, Moloch ducks under the bar and comes up with a shotgun, which he raises in both hands.

Shakespeare: It won't work, you know. Kit's already let go. Your bullets can't hurt him.

Moloch: I've got no interest in Master Marlowe, Master Shakespeare. He's long lost any power to harm me. (Hepresses the shotgun on Brautigan.) Do you remember how to use one of these, Richard?

Brautigan touches his b.l.o.o.d.y scalp and then reaches out with red-stained fingers to take the shotgun.

Brautigan: I think I can figure it out.

Moloch: Ginsberg. Do it, Richard.

Brautigan looks from Moloch to the gun to Ginsberg and Marlowe, and slowly reaches out and hefts the thing, taking it out of Moloch's hands.

Moloch: Are you too much of a sissy to get this right either?

Brautigan raises the gun to his eye as Moloch steps back, vaults the bar casually, and walks toward the stair. As the demon ascends, the poet studies his quarry like a hunter watching a tiger from a blind.

The door closes behind Moloch. The others present in the bar seem to snap back to themselves, and Shakespeare and the bartender shout and lunge, reaching for the gun in Brautigan s hand. The bartender yanks Keats to the floor as Marlowe's head comes up; he and Ginsberg break apart, Marlowe pushing Ginsberg under the pool table right-handed and reaching with his left for his rapier.

Too late.

The shotgun roars, and the reek of sulfur fills the bar as Shakespeare wrests it from Brautigan's hands.

Marlowe, his face fixed in an att.i.tude of surprise, pitches over slowly, backward, and falls to the scarred floorboards. Brautigan's head droops between sagging shoulders as Shakespeare tosses the shotgun away. Shakespeare crosses the few steps between them and embraces him. Shakespeare's hands come away from Brautigan's hair, dripping red.

Shakespeare (patting Brautigan's shoulders): What, lamb, still bleeding? There, there. There, there. If you let go of the poetry, your wounds will heal. The dead can't change the world, poor d.i.c.kon.

Brautigan: Turtles. I just wanted to say... something about turtles. I don't know. Maybe pancakes. Goldfish, you know, those big f.u.c.king goldfish, the ones like underwater Panzers. Something important. Something about why you didn't love me, Will. Why you loved him more....

Shakespeare (still soothing): I know. I know.

Marlowe's corpse stands up and examines himself, dusting his doublet off daintily, with fingertip flicks. He watches Shakespeare and Brautigan for a moment, and then shrugs, smiles at the audience, and turns his back, heading toward the bar, where the bartender is already drawing him a beer.

Bartender: You're taking that well.

Marlowe: It's not the first time I've been killed in a bar. Good thing it wasn't Allen, though.

They're joined by an obviously rattled Ginsberg, who hands the bartender the shotgun, which he has retrieved. The bartender takes it, breaks it, and reloads it thoughtfully while Ginsberg reaches over the bar to draw himself a pint.

Brautigan: Allen, I couldn't- Ginsberg: Kerouac was an anti-Semitic, h.o.m.ophobic little a.s.shole, d.i.c.k, and I still put up with him. Don't think anything of it. Terry, where are you going with that gun?

Bartender (on his way to the stairs up): To change the name of my f.u.c.king bar, Allen. It just sank in. I'm not dead.

Ginsberg: That'll never work, man. C'mere and kiss me.

Bartender: What?

Ginsberg: Kiss me. That's the only way to get to 1962 from here.

The bartender looks at Ginsberg, and looks at the gun, and looks at Ginsberg again.

Bartender: Don't worry about it, man. (Beat) I've got a magazine.