The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 15

3. She doesn't have a right to be happy. No one does.

4. Her mother or her sister or her father will see it and start to cry. They will put their arms around her and only make it worse. One day her own child might see it, and then what?

5. She cannot wear blue because he is wearing blue.

6. In prison, the prison carries you.

7. If she keeps it closed, then he might be alive, living in a world she's never seen. And she must look for him in newspapers and magazines.

8. Every time she opens it she must pay.

9. His mother chose it. Maybe it was the only one she had. Maybe she walked it to the bench as if she were carrying a wounded bird.

10. One day it will be the oldest photograph she owns, soiled and creased like a high school picture of her husband. And someone will say, "Oh Jess, who is this?" but that is not what she hears. What she will hear instead is, "Oh Jesus, who is this?"

Which is pretty good, pretty good, the instructor said. Except maybe give her a little more depth and, you know, variety in the story so it won't sound like an obsession or one of those love poems written by a thirteen-year-old. You know what I mean?

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1947, Volume 8, Number 4. $24. Cover ill.u.s.tration by unknown artist. Lead story "Allan and the Ice-G.o.ds: A Journey into the Dawn of History" by H. Rider Haggard. Overall Fair to G condition. Cover background dark green to black. Spine split one inch from bottom. Slight tears and creasing at cover overhang. All pages intact, paper creamy white to light yellow. No tape or marks. Purchased through eBay.

This is another high-contrast cover with a bright yellow splash containing the t.i.tle Famous FANTASTIC Mysteries in crimson. The ill.u.s.tration takes up two-thirds of the cover, and two-thirds of the ill.u.s.tration consists of an ice monolith inside of which is a frozen woman. She is reclining slightly, her eyes closed like Sleeping Beauty, and she is dressed in a long negligee or, more likely, a gown similar to those worn by Greek G.o.ddesses in the costume dramas of the 1940s and '50s. She has platinum blonde hair, full lips that might be parted for a kiss, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s that prefigure Jayne Mansfield. The monolith itself is multifaceted and tinged with a green glow, although the woman's image is undistorted.

And the hook is this: a man is kneeling at her side. He is dressed in a leopard skin and is perhaps one-tenth the size of the woman. His head is bowed in despair and his arms reach out to touch the surface of the ice in a gesture of love and hopeless longing. You can tell that the man is one-tenth the size of the woman because he is kneeling in the palm of a giant skeletal hand, also frozen in ice. It is unclear whether the man has been lifted to the height of the woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s or whether he climbed up the body of the giant skeleton.

This is the ill.u.s.tration that prompted me to make it a collection, the covers I mean. I realized I had seen this one before, or one very much like it, on another pulp magazine. It took me a long time to find the original, an August 1937 cover for Horror Stories (volume 5, number 4) done in pastels by John Newton Howett, where the woman is being frozen in a transparent vat of water. She is nude, her hands pressing against the lid of the vat as the water rises. The thermometer is below zero. A man is leaning over her looking down as he turns the dial of a machine. In the background are three other women who have already been frozen.

The same story, I think, is being told on the cover of Astonishing Stories, November 1941: the frozen woman is being guarded by a dragon. The same in Planet Stories, Summer 1948: a man and an alien are fighting in the background. The same in Marvel Science Stories, April 1939: other women are looking on as the woman is being frozen. One of them is a nurse.

I collected them, all of them that I could find over the next months. I called it the Frozen Beauty cover because the girl isn't just sleeping and the spell cannot be broken by a kiss. Before I graduated from high school I had collected over a hundred of the old pulps, rotting like corpses in dim rooms of my parents' house. At yard sales or estate clearances, I sometimes had to buy entire boxes of pulps in order to get the one I needed. That's how it grew, became more than a collection, I suppose. One day I heard my mother fretting to the man she married, and he, like the clueless king, said, "Oh well, at least it keeps her off the street."

Time means nothing in stories like these. One day, I don't know exactly when, he simply walked into the shop as I was arranging a window display. Perhaps it was in the eleventh year, perhaps the twelfth, and at first I thought he was looking for books. He worked the maze of shelves so slowly that he seemed to be lingering over every t.i.tle in the "Americana" section, then fingering the spines in "Law" as if reading them in Braille. He went through "Nature" and "Photography" just as slowly but finally returned to me after wandering through "Religion." He wore a dark wool overcoat glistening with rain droplets along the shoulders and sleeves. And in one hand he carried a gray fedora that had gone out of style in the forties. He was taller than I remembered and thin enough to make me think of my own father just before he had died.

At the pulp counter he stopped-they all do-and studied the covers, looking, I suppose, for some particular author or remembering the way the future was. "My G.o.d," he said, "I didn't know these still existed. When I was a boy, I read nearly ..."

"I'm sorry, those aren't for sale," I said.

"Ah. Well. Do you mind if I sit down in one of these? My old knees seem to creak a bit on days when the weather ..."

"There's coffee on the stove. m.u.f.fins next to the microwave. Please let me know if I can find something for you."

"Thank you. Yes, thank you, it's miserable out there, miserable even for this time of year, and you've made this such a lovely sanctuary, I do believe it's more inviting than the public library. Run by committees, you know. They're awful things, all of them. This must have been someone's home before you ..."

"It was. Is there something I can find for you?"

He laid his hat on the coffee table I keep among the chairs and then pressed his palms together in a thoughtful moment. So I waited, the two of us together again in the front bedroom of my parents' house, a cash register and display case where the bed had stood. "I hardly know how to answer that, Miss Meyer. I don't suppose you have any recollection at all of whom I might be."

"Your name," I said, "is Burrelle. Judge Saxby Burrelle. If I remember correctly."

"Yes, retired actually. Or, rather, semiretired, I suppose you should say." He spoke in single words and phrases, like a man who has spent the last of his energy in an uphill race. "You know, I have a great-granddaughter, Miss Meyer, whom I haven't seen. In five years. I doubt she would recognize me with the perspicacity that seems to be your defining trait. There. I believe I have completed an entire thought. Without interruption."

"Judge Burrelle, if you've come here about ..."

"Please. This will take a few moments, but I thought I should do this one in person since it involved one of my own cases. Seems the right thing, don't you agree, when one is contemplating how close he is to final judgment himself. Yes. Yes, I hadn't thought of that, consciously, until just now. One wants to do. Whatever one can."

He went on to explain that he had retired two years after hearing my case. His wife had died, and so had the partners in his old firm. And the idea of making new friends, at his age, seemed as repellent as learning how to eat new food. As he talked, I began to watch his hands the way I would have watched the hands of a child. They seemed to be more expressive than his words, cleaning his gla.s.ses with the pocket handkerchief, adjusting the fastidiously tied bow tie, checking, one by one, the b.u.t.tons of his vest to make sure he had not missed a hole. I could imagine him in the first years of his emptiness learning how to tie flies, sitting up late at night in his study, peering through a magnifying gla.s.s as he twisted feathers and fur and fishing line into fantastic shapes that disguised the hook. Then lifting each one with tiny tweezers, inspecting it in the light of a goosenecked lamp. That was the way I imagined him, and it was, in a sense, the message he had come to deliver.

"After a few years," he said, "I found I couldn't stand the void, being locked in my own house twenty-four hours a day. And of course with the constant backlog of cases, tort reform, legislative review-they're glad to see anything in a black robe. So. Here I am, Miss Meyer. Here. I am."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Yes. I suppose you don't. Let me ask you something first. Are you married, Miss Meyer? Is that still your name? Because this," he made a peculiar gesture with his hand, as if introducing himself to an unfamiliar audience, "is still the address of record for your case, and it's not a house at all. It's a bookstore that used to be a house, with some of the walls removed and shelves put in. And books. And china and silver in display cases over there. And exotic lamps. And very fine paintings for sale and very old magazines that are not. All of this inside the sh.e.l.l of a house sitting beside other houses on a street that is not a commercial street. And so I naturally wonder if I am in the right place. For the right reasons. Do you have children, Miss Meyer?"

"What do you want?"

"I'm part of a three-judge panel now, a sort of review board, examining old cases. Writing recommendations for the Judiciary Committee. Correcting a few old mistakes. I hope that doesn't shock you as profoundly as it shocks us. Three old fellows of the bar, occasionally stumbling over one of their own mistakes."

"What do you want?"

"The picture of course. That's the best I can do."

"The best that you can do?"

"Yes. We all agreed. It was a mistake. Far outside the sentencing guidelines, even ten or twelve years ago. The newspapers loved it of course. There were clippings. But poetic justice isn't justice, and it was in fact a mistake. That's the reason I've come myself. To tell you that your sentence, the terms of your probation, have been reviewed and set aside. Officially." He took a long envelope from the inner pocket of his coat and pa.s.sed it to me.

For a long time I said nothing. Did not open the envelope or even touch it where it lay.

I looked at it and wondered what he expected me to do.

Weird Tales, October 1933, Volume 22, Number 4. $625. Cover ill.u.s.tration by Margaret Brundage. Lead story "The Vampire Master" by Hugh Davidson, a novel, part one of four. Overall VG to Fine condition. Cover background lime green to forest green to dark green, mottled (in orig. illus.) but no fading. No splits or tears. All pages intact. No flaking or chipping. No tape. No marks. Purchased at auction.

This is the famous "bat girl" cover by Brundage.

I keep it in the cabinet beside the display case because it is so rare.

She is dressed in black and wearing a mask that covers the upper half of her face. Some collectors have suggested that it is a Halloween mask because the cover was published in October, but I believe it is more than a mask. It is a crown or a helmet, fitting over the skull like a second skin and spreading itself at the top into the image of a bat, its outstretched wings suggesting a hovering menace like the hooded cobra of a pharaoh's crown. And the subtle decadence of the dress she wears, high collared and tight around the throat, shining like black satin and straining against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, is as detailed as decadence could be in 1933. Sometimes the collectors come into my shop and ask for the one with the girl in the leather dress or the hooded halter, you know, the one with the arms like this.

And that is what they want, the arms in a most peculiar pose. Raised, elbows high, with forearms angled down, almost into an inverted V, so that the backs of her hands lightly touch her face. Which suggests, somehow, a world of sensuous flesh. They see it too in her mouth, the lips parted and curved like an unbent bow, innocent of any smile. And the eyes, of course, as black and vacant as the abyss. Has she been caught, we want to know, in a moment of drunken la.s.situde; or could we see, somewhere off the sheet, that she has been pinned like an exotic moth against the green velvet, dying by degrees, like one of Scott Fitzgerald's tubercular wives.

They all know that any cover by Margaret Brundage is valuable. The sylph-like girls on every one of them are uncomfortably real and fragile, giving the impression of having been drawn from living models. Indeed, it's surprising that she became the most collected artist of the pulp era given the fantastic excesses of her compet.i.tors. Her own covers have little depth or background, and her lines, having been first set down in pastels, did not translate well to print, especially considering the primitive technology of the time. In style they resemble the drawings found in fashion magazines. Often there would be only a single detail separating Brundage's world from that of Harper's Bazaar-a ballerina dancing with a severed skull, a harem girl with a whip. From 1929 until 1938 she was the only female artist in the world producing art for the pulp market, and yet during those years she had a virtual monopoly on the covers for Weird Tales. Today they are called fetish covers and are collected by people who have never read the stories of Lovecraft or Howard, Clark Ashton Smith or Seabury Quinn. They are now what they were then, splashes of color in monochromatic lives, frail treasures in red and green, and black and gold, and yellow and blue.

In the future. We will go looking for the rocket cars in red and green, skimming from dome to dome. Which one is our city? That is what we will want to know. And our elevator to Mars? Where are the autopilots and happy pa.s.sengers? And where have we berthed the s.p.a.ce yachts with their light sails billowing like Cutty Sark and their teenagers racing around the sun? The gyrocopter in the garage and the robot dog at night? Where did they go? We have been promised for decades our floating house with foam furniture and never-aging skin, or at least a cream to set the wrinkles right. Picnics on some Sea of Tranquility with our rocket engineer and our android child, plucking meteors like peaches. Reminiscing of Earth our home. They seem to have all gone missing. Every storied issue of "Life in the Year 2000" has been confiscated, lost, compacted with the trash of the last millennium. And we're on our own.

That's why I have my shop. I lay the covers out like this because they send the only signal that I know. I try to show them with "The Black G.o.d's Kiss" that she'd willingly embrace, set her mouth to cold obsidian and insinuate her hips beneath the folds of his darkened robe. But no. It's a still life after all. His eyes are hooded hawks, and in his squatting pose the graceless hands grasp only at his graceless feet. It's a statue and not a G.o.d. While her insistent curvature shouts, "Look at me, the pretty one. Look at me. Perfectly preserved. In gla.s.s."

In other words, I give them the perfect truth, that nothing ever happens on our covers. The sword is raised but forever stayed. Beauty really rendered into art within some frozen vat. Because the story is ever undercover, and in between the words of brittle pages. We do not thumb them, I have found, when we know they will flutter to the floor.

So I wait for some pioneer to break the mold, some intergalactic ranger perhaps, who will slip between dimensions and find my little shop. Sometimes they do, making furtive visits before their energy abates, lingering like a man looking for the lost jewels of ... some childish, imaginary place. And maybe once a year the boldest one will ask, "Are you the one? Who collected all of these? Because the sign outside ..."

"Doesn't list my name," I will say.

And then he will fumble, adding, "Oh yeah. What I mean is, someone gave me your card. And I was wondering ..."

Or perhaps he will explore. Buy a few t.i.tles from the mundane shelves, the ones that keep me in bread and milk, making himself familiar with the territory, before drifting into the happy aisles. Twisting his wedding band the way they do, looking up and down to make sure we are alone before suggesting, "Are you the one? Who collected all of these? Because the sign outside ..."

"Doesn't list my name."

"Doesn't list your name," this special one will say. But I can sense the need behind his wooden words. It's maybe once a year, or maybe once in every two, when one of them will take the extra step. "Though it's just ... such a great name for a bookstore. Why, when I was a kid, I could spend days in a place like this."

And "Pulp Life?" I will say. "You like my name? Well, thank you. You're very kind to notice."

"Yeah. Someone gave me your card, you know, told me about this place. And I was wondering. Do you have some more? Some items, I mean, that you might not have out here. To build a collection around."

It's the moment that I encourage him, step close enough to study the brown hair flecked with gray and brown eyes set beneath a wide, intelligent brow, like one of those descriptions in Edgar Allan Poe. And even if it's summer, he will wear his tie, carry his sports coat over the sleeve of his blue-checked shirt. And probably I will think he is English because his diction will be so precise and because he's one of the gentle ones determined not to show his wounds. With an aura of expensive aftershave. A slight fraying at the cuffs. "What do you have in mind?"

And he will say, "I'm not sure, in fact. I thought I just might look. If you had some more like these. It seems like I'm recapturing part of my sordid past." And he will laugh an awkward laugh.

"Yes. A few. Back here," and I will laugh as well, touching his arm like this to show a slight embarra.s.sment, "in the back bedroom." But of course there will be tables and shelves as well as lamps and chairs. All completely safe. And if, at the end of the afternoon, we have found what we both will need, then we sit in silent union for maybe an hour more. Turning pages that crumble as we read. Mouthing words that keep us home to stay.

ONE WHO GOT AWAY.

Escape.

FOR IAN.

1.

It's so steep at the crest that Rifken can simply lean forward, and the snow holds, as pliable and comforting as a blanket. He works a hollow among the boulders and waits, drinking in the thin air. There are no tree limbs between him and the white moon. And there is no more to the mountain, no higher ridge to supply perspective. There is just the momentary illusion that he is back at his grandfather's farm, looking down upon a floating disk at the bottom of a stone well. The only movement comes from Hargadon, the younger deputy, thirty yards below in the frozen present and still climbing with undiminished energy. It takes the kid several minutes to scramble past and then edge up to the ridge itself, where he takes out binoculars and tries to read their future.

"If you're going to do that," murmurs Rifken, "may as well stand up and wave a flag."

Wind rakes powder from their ledge and scatters it over the valley. Hargadon hunches lower, crabbing backward onto a shallow shelf made by his feet. "It's still dark," he says. "He couldn't have seen me."

"There's a moon. And there's snow."

"h.e.l.l, I don't know. I don't even know what day it is anymore. It's so d.a.m.n cold I can't feel a thing. I can't even think." Hargadon slips off a mitten to cup his bare hand over nose and mouth, puffing four, five breaths while the vapor rises between his fingers.

"He's down there, isn't he?" Rifken tries to see in his mind what's on the other side of the ridge.

"This can't be real, man. They quit making this kinda movie a long, long time ago. Your people just not get the message or something?"

"We got the message. Is he down there or not?"

"You're a throwback, Rifken, you know that? You're in the wrong century. You and him both. You're driving us all nuts. Two hundred state troopers, seventy-five local cops, twenty of us from Windfield. And two crazy Indians. You and him. Do you hate us that much, Rifken? Is this part of some master plan?"

"Tell me. What did you see?"

For a long time Hargadon says nothing. Finally maneuvers the rifle sheath around to his front and lies back in the snow, gazing at distant stars. Then, without looking down, he draws a cartridge clip from inside his parka, testing the spring with one finger. Then he slips his rifle from its sheath, rolls onto his side and inserts the clip, sliding the bolt back and forth to chamber a round. And raises both lens covers from the telescopic sight. Then answers, "I saw the son of a b.i.t.c.h. Standing in the middle of a lake."

Rifken waits, settling the image in his mind, trying to believe.

"I swear to G.o.d I could go to sleep right here. I could die happy this minute. Except, you know what?" Hargadon unhooks the binoculars and pa.s.ses them to the older deputy. "Except then, Rifken, I'd never know what you crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds did next."

Rifken props the binoculars on a crust of snow and studies the circular scene below him on the dark side of the ridge. After an age he says, "Let's go."

Finally.

They begin their delicate dance, separating on the downslope, picking their way among dead trees and ragged stumps that look like tombstones. Rifken wonders what kind of magic could kill an entire forest, leave it looking like the crumbling pillars of a lost civilization. And he worries about creaking snow and skeletal branches under the white powder, any silly sound that could crack the surface of things and set Robert James Henley to flight again. And instead of the brittle wind, he feels the cold emptiness inside of himself that, years ago, replaced the medicine pouch given to him by his grandfather. He makes a slow descent like a hunter, eyes intently upon a man who, just as the kid said, is standing in the middle of a shallow lake.

A man neither fishing nor swimming, but simply exhaling great triangular clouds of fear like a horse standing and stamping as wolves gather. Around a glistening secret lake so sharply cold and dense that the man seems to have been cut at the knees. Wisps of steam drifting above the snowmelt. So that when the figure finally begins to wade, it leaves a shimmering trail of silver like a ghost.

Forty yards upslope, among white riblike branches, Hargadon waits for something to happen, squinting through the telescopic sight of his match rifle, trying to hold steady in the cold, and wondering what is taking his partner so long. Thinking, man, this is crazy. This doesn't make a lick of sense.

While Rifken watches, working through the legends, trying to remember the old stories, his lips even forming some of the words or maybe a prayer, answered only by snowflakes drifting down through the darkness, that touch the hard reflective water, darken, and disappear.

Then the wading man reaches sh.o.r.e, his coppery hand giving no ripple as it cups the water, and only the faintest lip-lip as he raises it dripping and draws three fingers across his cheek. And then nothing. The end of the spell perhaps, with Rifken rising out of his squat and taking a step forward, further scattering the moment with his flat Appalachian accent. "Robert-James, is that you?"

The man doesn't even turn. "Ataghi."

"It's me and Hargadon."

"Ah. I figured it might be."

"You about ready now? It's plumb cold, and we got a ways to walk."

Now Hargadon comes carelessly down through cracked limbs and snowdrifts, cradling the rifle, fitting fingers back into his thick ski mittens. "You got that right." Then to the prisoner, "Jeezus Christ, Henley, what were you doing in the middle of a lake? It's a h.e.l.luva night for froggin', ain't it?"

Rifken gives him a distant look, nods toward the east where the slope is gentle. They work their way back to the trail in zigzags, skirting the ravines and thickets, following the last of the animal tracks where they can. Within minutes Henley's jeans have stiffened and turned gray-white below the thighs.

"He's gonna be frostbit 'fore we get back to the truck, and I ain't carrying his a.s.s down no mountain-you might wanna think about that, Chief. We not gonna cuff him or anything?"

Rifken takes off his gloves, thrusts them at Henley. To Hargadon he says, "Son-it's cold. It's night. And we got a ways to go. Why don't you just drop back a few steps and keep your finger on the trigger if that'd make it more official in your mind."

"I might just do that. How about you, Henley? You mind if I keep the crosshairs on you for a while?"

"I don't much care."

"Well, what about your buddy Willie T? Way I figure it, today or tomorrow's gotta be the day. Your very large neighbor on D Block might be nice and toasty warm about now. Does that have any appeal to you, Henley? It does to me."