Hello? Hello?
Where are you?
A, can you let me know when you get in I need to give you a call? Thanks P
Hello?
Was he even real?
The sun-playing on the windows. So the glass looked like hammered metal. Reflecting the forms of the street beyond – I kept myself busy until the evening—
As the sun set I went off again – it was so swift, I fell into it, I didn’t try at all – I was aloft – far above – paddling through the ether, moving somehow forwards – deep and beyond – the myriad and multi-coloured city all below me, the chimneys puffing out their smoke, the shadows and the people moving from one dark place and into one more pool of light. I was overwrought, perhaps sleep deprived – I turned my head to the side. There was something hot and fierce around me, behind me – I felt a burning sensation at the back of my head, so hot, my hair was drenched in sweat, my palms were sodden. At the College – the gold was brighter this time, shining within the clouds of black smoke—
At the window I turned, twisted, went inside—
I sat beside him.
He was hunched over his screen, pale light flickering on his face – he was typing quickly, a Scotch in one hand, a piece of paper beside him—
I couldn’t quite read the words. There was something official at the top – the sign of a court – an insignia – crossed-keys, or swords, something about justice—
The big court with the sign above the gates. They’d forced him onto the scales, weighed him.
I wondered what he’d done. Something bad, desperately bad, perhaps – this formerly anonymous man, blameless for so many years, who had been dragged before the courts and summarily condemned.
It had made him snivel. Perhaps he regretted it entirely. Legs so long, he could hardly cross them under the desk. He was tall, strong, but his hands were soft. The room was thick with papers. He had a gown hanging on the door. The poor long-legged malcontent – he was a scholar. Perhaps it was philosophy that had made him suffer. And that scrap of paper.
I could see it now – it said – decree nisi, nothing more. Just another marriage, ended.
So he wasn’t a murderer, after all—
He typed, he drank, he buried his face in his hands—
I realized – it was a shock – suddenly, I was confined, I was in his chair – I was this poor and possibly foolish man—
I had a sheaf of papers to one side, and on the other, well, if I’d had a gun, what would I have done? But anyway I didn’t have a gun. I had a cheque book. I was meant to pay the rent. I had a phone call to make. The head of department wanted to discuss downsizing. It made my hands tremble, or was that the whisky? I was meant to dial his number and say, ‘Yes, good evening. How are you?’
I said, ‘Hello, Paul James here’ – now I knew my name, his name, but something else was fading from my mind, even as I spoke. I was trying to clutch at it, as the voice on the line said, ‘Veins,’ it said. ‘Paul, our veins are being severed.’
‘That’s bad,’ I said.
He was saying something about how no one’s job was certain, about how I mustn’t fly away, not too high, and I said, ‘No no, I’ll be there. You’re right.’
I stayed until he went to bed. Just outside the bedroom window. I watched him move into the bathroom – I didn’t follow him in there. Let the man spit his toothpaste in private. Let him wipe the grime from his face.
I saw him come into the room, fragile in his boxers. Thin arms, light hair to the elbows. A refined hairless chest. He gathered himself into bed, slung his legs under the cover. He meant to read, he seized a book from the table beside him, then he was too cold, and drunk, and tired – he couldn’t focus on the lines. He stared at the page for a few minutes. But he didn’t progress. Then he slapped the book down, turned out the light.
He lay there in the darkness, half-awake, too tired to light up the room again.
Winnowing wind. The papers whirled and I found I was receding, through the window – I had never been so winnowed – I was drifting backwards – I didn’t want to return, I was dragged – wafting against it, I couldn’t prevent—
I was slammed back—
My screen, sallow, edged around with blackness, my room, full of black smoke – I closed my eyes—
Paul James woke before dawn with a spun-out head. As if he’d been whirled in a gyre. All night he’d been perplexed by his dreams. He’d been looking down on himself, from above, he’d been flying – he’d been—
He’d flown above the Thames, to Wolvercote. He’d sat by the weir watching the water curdling below. Rats skittering along the banks. The air was thin and cold. In his dream he didn’t mind it. The leaves were turning red and yellow. Cows looming from the bushes. And the horses clacking against the fences.
He felt how the night was turning swiftly, it was in the process of becoming another dawn, then another day – the long lovely banks of the river – he was floating above them – clouds swirling, the water gurgling like a drain.
He’d woken time after time, he’d wondered if he was going mad. He was looking at himself as if he had been split in two. That sounded as if he was falling apart, inside first, then the rest. He couldn’t fall apart. They’d make things worse for him…
He had to keep to the specifics. Certainties. Facts, if he could find them.
He checked his clock. He had a tutorial to give in a few hours’ time. Though he had hardly slept, though his dreams had been strange and far too clear, so clear he felt he was still half-inside them, he didn’t feel tired. When he opened the curtains he saw the pock-marked moon fading above the houses.
The colour of the sky – changing—
We crossed the room and turned on the light.
(2013)
PRAXIS
Karen Joy Fowler
"Praxis" is Karen Joy Fowler’s first published story. A year later she won the John W. Campbell Award for her first collection, Artificial Things. Sarah Canary (1991) established her style: science fiction written with such sincerity and rigour that it doesn’t feel like science fiction at all. In Wit’s End (2008) euphoric, Bacchic online communities pit games against reality. In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) an ape and a human girl are raised together, and the human narrator’s subsequent life is depicted in terms that make no easy, human sense. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and five grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California.
The price of a single ticket to the suicides would probably have funded my work for a month or more, but I do not let myself think about this. After all, I didn’t pay for the ticket. Tonight I am the guest of the Baron Claude Himmlich and determined to enjoy myself.
I saw Romeo and Juliet five years ago, but only for one evening in the middle of the run. It wasn’t much. Juliet had a cold and went to bed early. Her nurse kept wrapping her in hot rags and muttering under her breath. Romeo and Benvolio got drunk and made up several limericks. I thought some of them were quite good, but I’d been drinking a little myself.
Technically it was impressive. The responses of the simulants were wonderfully lifelike and the amphitheater had just been remodeled to allow the audience to walk among the sets, viewing the action from any angle. But the story itself was hardly dramatic. It wouldn’t be, of course, in the middle of the run.