I looked at Robin. “You know, I thought about how one of the things I’d really regret, if I died, was never seeing New York. My parents acted like it was some sort of den of sin and iniquity when I was growing up, but they were wrong about a lot.”
“So wait, are you going to hit the road and drive the rest of the way east?”
I laughed. “I kind of think I should go home and pack up my stuff, give notice on my lease, stuff like that. But I expect I’ll be coming back this way in a few months.”
“Well, let me give you our address,” Robin said. “You can stay with us when you get to Minneapolis.”
“This is kind of silly,” I said, “but do you mind going back to the Center of the Nation Monument for a minute?”
Someone else was there, so I didn’t have to snap a selfie to get a picture of myself with Robin and Michael; they took it for me.
The road west was wide open, and I listened to music my parents would have hated the whole way back to Spokane.
The Hunger After You’re Fed
JAMES S. A. COREY
James S. A. Corey is the pseudonym of two young writers working together, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Their first novel as Corey, the widescreen space opera Leviathan Wakes, the first in the Expanse series, was released in 2011 to wide acclaim and has been followed by other Expanse novels, Caliban’s War, Abaddon’s Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, and Babylon’s Ashes. There’s also now a TV series based on the series, The Expanse, on the Syfy channel.
Daniel Abraham lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is director of technical support at a local internet service provider. Starting off his career in short fiction, he made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere, some of which appeared in his first collection, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Turning to novels, he made several sales in rapid succession, including the books of The Long Price Quartet, which consists of A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring. At the moment, he has published five volumes in his new series, The Dagger and the Coin, which consists of The Dragon’s Path, The King’s Blood, The Tyrant’s Law, The Widow’s House, and The Spider’s War. He also wrote Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, and, as M. L. N. Hanover, the five-volume paranormal romance series Black Sun’s Daughter.
Ty Franck was born in Portland, Oregon, and has had nearly every job known to man, including a variety of fast-food jobs, rock quarry grunt, newspaper reporter, radio advertising salesman, composite materials fabricator, director of operations for a computer manufacturing firm, and part owner of an accounting software consulting firm. He is currently the personal assistant to fellow writer George R. R. Martin, where he makes coffee, runs to the post office, and argues about what constitutes good writing. He mostly loses.
The story that follows takes place in a small near-future Mexican village where an acolyte is obsessively trying to discover the true identity of—and ideally to meet—a famous radical writer who publishes only under an impenetrable pseudonym.
“Does Héctor Prima live around here?”
My host’s expression went cool. He was a middle-aged man with a wide face and shoulders, and pale stubble on his cheeks and chin that held the promise of a lush beard. In the four hours I’d spent in his home since the evacuated rail from Nove Mesto had deposited me in Malasaña, he’d been nothing but jovial and expansive. His warmth and his pleasure in having a guest lulled me into feeling safe.
I had overplayed my hand.
“Who?” he asked.
“I think he’s a writer my sister likes,” I said, motioning vaguely. “She said he was in this part of the country somewhere. But I may have that wrong.”
“She is mistaken. Héctor Prima is a pen name. There are rumors that he lives here, but they’re not true. No one knows who really writes his essays. He could be anyone.”
“That’s interesting. Is he good?” As if I had not read everything Prima had put on the web. As if I had not read thousands of analyses of his work and speculations on who he might be. As if I were not in a sense a hunter. A stalker. I was driven by an enthusiasm I couldn’t explain, except that when I read his words, I recognized the world he described and my own unhappiness in it. Reading Prima felt like being seen.
“He has a following. Strange people. We see them now and again,” my host said with a shrug. “We have a great number of writers and artists, you know. We’re a very vibrant place, now that the money’s come.”
“It’s why I’m here,” I said with a smile, and the warmth was back in his eyes.
“We have rumba bands. Many, many rumba bands. There was a fight three years ago, when two different bands scheduled concerts on the same day. The police had to come in. You heard about that, maybe?”
“I think I did,” I lied.
“We are very passionate about our music here,” my host said, nodding to himself and watching me to see how I reacted. Whether there was a glimmer of interest in my eyes. It was no different in Nove Mesto. I knew what he wanted.
“Do you play in a band?” I asked.
If he had been pleasant and jovial before, now he became incandescent. “A bit. Only a little. I sing, you know. Here, we’ve just put together a new album. Let me play it for you, yes?”
“I’d like that,” I said.
It was the price of my hunt. I wanted something, and I would accept a great many things I didn’t want in order to get it.
How to describe Malasaña at night?
I came from a city that had known want, but only as one guest at a larger table. The richest sections of my home were indistinguishable from the high income districts of Milán and Paris. Even the slums had paving on the roads and water in the taps. Malasaña was approaching the same place in the spectrum of human want from the other direction.
The streets were too narrow for cars. The traffic that passed between the thick-stuccoed buildings consisted of people on foot or riding bicycles, stray dogs watching from the alleyways. The streetlights were built from repurposed emergency solar lamps, bright yellow plastic shaped like downward-facing daisies. Cables hung over the rooftops, piping the power from the day’s wind and sunlight stored in hundreds of batteries to the homes and clubs, public kitchens and mud-floored dance halls. Drones hummed overhead carrying glowing advertisements built from recycled medical tablets and luminescent paint. In the doorways and at the corners, children and women held platters, stepping out whenever someone came close.
I have the best flan you’ve ever tasted. Bean chowder; just try it and you’ll never want anything else. Baclava. Curried egg. Always cheap ingredients. Rarely fish. Never meat. Music filled the air like birdsong. Some live, the musicians sweating over print-fab guitars and hammering on drums made from pottery and plastic. Some recorded, but remixed, manipulated, remade with the personality of whoever had speakers loud enough to drown out their neighbors. One club had a child of no more than six standing at the door with a false, practiced grin, grabbing at people’s hands and tugging them to come in. The scars of poverty were everywhere, but few of the wounds.