textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv9n3.etx

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InterText Vol. 9, No. 3 / May-June 1999
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  Contents

    Kaptain Komfort's Misdemeanor................Patrick Whittaker

    Amanuensis.....................................Armand Gloriosa

    Prospero's Rock....................................Brian Quinn

    Barely Human....................................James Michaels

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    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@intertext.com                    geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
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    Tom Armstrong, John Coon, Pat D'Amico, Katie Davey, 
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    Jason Snell, Jake Swearingen
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  InterText Vol. 9, No. 3. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this magazine
  is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by itself
  or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the issue remains
  unchanged. Copyright 1999 Jason Snell. All stories Copyright 1999 by
  their respective authors. For more information about InterText, send
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  Kaptain Komfort's Misdemeanor   by Patrick Whittaker
======================================================
....................................................................
  What happens when the land of dreams becomes infested by 
  nightmares?
....................................................................

  What hope is there for us now? With our cities in ruins and our 
  armies in retreat, this must surely be the end. Hypermorphia has 
  become an occupied territory, a kingdom without a king.

  We will, of course, surrender to our enemies. There is no 
  alternative. But first they will crush what remains of our 
  spirit and trample our national identity in the dust. For these 
  are ruthless people, aggressors from another world who do not 
  understand ours.

  My fellow countrymen blame Kaptain Komfort, and with some 
  justification. But what they cannot bring themselves to do is to 
  examine their own part in this perdition. For one individual 
  alone cannot bring about the ruin of a great nation.

  The truth is this: We are all culpable. We became complacent and 
  arrogant, and we failed in our duty to the children of Mundania.

  No, Kaptain Komfort -- villain that he is -- should not have to 
  carry the burden of our collective guilt. Nonetheless, if ever I 
  see him again, I will kill him.



  The air in this cave is damp and chilly. I spend my days in 
  misery, tormented by hunger and the thought that I will probably 
  not live long enough to wreak revenge upon Kaptain Komfort. My 
  only escape from this despair are the brief snatches of sleep 
  which grow ever rarer. At night, I forage for berries, careful 
  to avert my eyes from the sky, which has now taken on a greenish 
  hue. If I had the strength, I would attempt to reach the border. 
  If I had the courage, I would seek the remnants of our army and 
  prepare to die in battle.

  All I can do now is hope for a peaceful, if ignominious, end.



  A dingy cave, full of bat droppings and the smell of dank decay. 
  Maybe Kaptain Komfort is holed up in such a place -- perhaps 
  even one of the caves that litter these desolate hills. I know 
  there are others hiding hereabouts. I have seen them at night, 
  foraging for food, fighting amongst each other for sour berries 
  and stagnant water. Sometimes, the temptation to show myself, to 
  seek their friendship and company, has been almost overwhelming. 
  But that would be folly, for the Mundanes have put a price on my 
  head and I am hated by my own people, many of whom hold me in 
  some part responsible for our collective ruin.

  Yesterday, I stumbled across a dying man. He had no hair, no 
  eyebrows. The slight breeze peeled flakes of skin from his body. 
  I gave him water and he told me I was the last Senior Minister 
  to remain at liberty. Many of my colleagues had surrendered to 
  the enemy, only to be summarily executed. The rest had taken 
  their own lives or been murdered by lynch mobs.

  The dying man had no news of Kaptain Komfort. It is likely that 
  the villain has fled this land and will be seen no more.

  I asked after Princess Aurora; the man sighed and died in my 
  arms. I envied him.



  Princess Aurora. She, as much as Kaptain Komfort, was the agent 
  of our catastrophe. If she had kept her vow of chastity, if she 
  had not soiled herself and her family's name by taking Kaptain 
  Komfort to her bed, then perhaps none of the subsequent events 
  would have happened.

  And if the King had listened to me when I begged him to keep the 
  Princess and the Kaptain apart...

  So many ifs. So many mistakes and missed chances.

  Yes, I do partly blame myself for not persuading the King that 
  the old ways were best. Indeed, I was sometimes instrumental in 
  laying the foundations for his more liberal policies. But how 
  was I to know it would come to this?

  I think I was among the first to sense that something was amiss. 
  It was just a feeling, nothing I could have expressed in words 
  or placed a finger on. The citizens went about their business as 
  ever they did and Kaptain Komfort himself bore no outward sign 
  of the guilt that must have been gnawing at his soul.

  Again I ask myself, how could he? How could he still befriend 
  and console the lonely and lost children of Mundania when all 
  the time he was carrying such a dreadful secret? How many of 
  those poor innocents did he corrupt?



  I still recall the chill that crept into my heart that morning 
  when Rufus, Minister for Chocolate, announced that the nation's 
  honey had soured. It was at a special cabinet meeting to which I 
  was summoned at a moment's notice. "We've had to close off the 
  vats," he proclaimed with tears streaming down his face. "I -- 
  I -- I -- "

  Poor Rufus could not bring himself to say any more. He ran from 
  the Cabinet Room as fast as his corpulent frame could carry him. 
  The rest of us were too stunned to block his flight. He was then 
  only hours away from hanging himself.

  It was Herman, President of the Board of Toys, who finally broke 
  the silence. He slapped his hands on the Round Table and said, 
  "Well, I for one am not prepared to put up with this."

  We looked at him in amazement. His oft-used phrase seemed 
  singularly inappropriate. It was not a case of putting up or not 
  putting up with anything. The honey was soured and that was 
  that. Now we could do little more than minimize the harm that 
  would no doubt ensue.

  "The honey must be destroyed," I said, realizing no one else was 
  about to come forward with a plan of action. "And the vats. And 
  the warehouses that hold them."

  The Prime Minister cleared his throat. He seemed to have aged 
  considerably. "The Grand Vizier is, of course, right. We must 
  destroy this contamination before it spreads. A simple matter, 
  of course, but then we must go much, much further. There is the 
  question of the children."

  Now the true import of Rufus' announcement came home to me. The 
  children who had taken the soured honey would also be tainted.

  "Do we have any means," asked the Heritage Secretary, "of 
  knowing which children took the honey?"

  The Prime Minister shook his head. "We cannot risk missing a 
  single one of them; the consequences would be too awful to 
  contemplate."

  "Well, I for one am not prepared to put up with this," Herman 
  reiterated.

  "We have no choice. I don't have to remind you what happened not 
  so many years ago when some fool put salt instead of sugar in a 
  batch of ice cream."

  I flinched inwardly, aware of the gaze of my colleagues upon me. 
  My grandfather had been Prime Minister at the time and had 
  reacted to the crisis by expelling all non-native children. No 
  one had thought any more about it until a generation later when 
  the mundane world was engulfed in global war.

  "Do we have the right," asked the Prime Minister gravely, "to 
  once again equip the Mundanes with so many potential tyrants?"

  "Well, I for one -- "

  "Shut up, Herman."

  The debate went on for some hours, but the outcome was 
  inevitable. By a unanimous decision, it was decreed that all 
  mundane children currently visiting Hypermorphia should, without 
  exception, be hanged.



  There were more suicides in the days that followed -- not just 
  within the cabinet, but throughout the populace as a whole. 
  Riots swept our cities. In the Northern Province, a full-scale 
  insurrection had to be crushed by the army. The ringleaders were 
  burned in public.

  Oh, dark days indeed. But worse was to come.



  We had barely hung the last of the children when cracks in the 
  Sugar Mountain were discovered, forcing us to evacuate several 
  villages for fear of avalanches. A day later, the cinnamon mines 
  had to be closed when the spice elves complained of severe 
  headaches and stomach cramps. A detachment of alchemists was 
  sent to investigate; they reported that the mines were filled 
  with noxious gases.

  It was grim, but even then I was certain that we would somehow 
  pull through.

  My optimism evaporated, however, when word reached me that the 
  animals in the Garden of Fabulous Creatures had begun to die. I 
  went at once to the Garden, which was now closed to the public, 
  and spoke to Ozymandias in his office.

  Needless to say, Ozzy was distraught. "It started with the 
  kraken," he said, pacing in front of a cabinet filled with 
  stuffed birds. "The stupid creature leapt out of his enclosure 
  right on top of three members of the public, one of whom was 
  killed instantly."

  "Did it eat any of them?"

  "No. When we tried to entice it back to the water with freshly 
  slaughtered seals, it just ignored them. It took a whole platoon 
  of the King's Engineers to drag the serpent back to the water. 
  And then -- and then -- "

  Ozzy suddenly let out a great wracking sob. He was clearly close 
  to breaking point.

  I waited some moments until he had regained something like his 
  composure, then prompted him. "What happened?"

  "It leapt out of the water again. No matter how many times we 
  returned it to the water, it just kept doing it. It was as if it 
  wanted to die. Finally -- Finally, we had no choice but to 
  destroy the damn beast. In all my years as Keeper of the Garden, 
  I had never seen such a thing."

  "It must have been very distressing."

  "Heartbreaking. It was my great grandfather, you know, who 
  captured the beast barely a day after it hatched. All its life 
  was spent in this zoo. We have no idea why it was so hell-bent 
  on its own destruction. Every veterinarian in this city -- or so 
  it seems -- has examined the corpse. They all say the kraken was 
  in fine health."

  "I'm terribly sorry."

  "Sorry? I was sorry at first, but now I'm beyond sorry. The 
  centaurs were next to die. They all passed away one night. So 
  far as we can tell, they just went to sleep and then expired. 
  There's no rational reason for it. We've lost our snark, our 
  jubjub bird and even the sphinxes. What animals we have left are 
  in very poor shape. I don't expect a single one to survive the 
  week. Except, of course, the unicorn. He seems totally 
  unaffected by whatever is happening here." Ozzy put his face in 
  his hands and asked in a coarse whisper, "What _is_ happening 
  here?"

  I had no more answer to that than he did. "Perhaps Wizard Serrc 
  knows."




  As I left Ozymandias' office, i was almost forced back in by the 
  stench of putrid flesh. Placing a scented kerchief to my face, I 
  hurried past enclosures of dead animals. At the gate, a 
  detachment of the King's Men were digging lime pits.

  When I reached my coach, the horses were agitated. I leapt into 
  the cab and my driver did not wait for my command. Halfway back 
  to the Palace, I remembered the Wizard Serrc and gave orders to 
  proceed to his grotto at once.



  Thankfully, the wizard was at home, having just returned from a 
  pilgrimage to some shrine or another. He was preparing a potion 
  in a large cauldron when I burst in without ceremony.

  "Well, well," he said, emptying a jar of eyes into the boiling 
  mixture, "the Grand Vizier. No need to knock."

  "My apologies. I would have knocked if you had a door knocker. 
  Or a door, come to that."

  "Judging from the sweat on your brow and the rapidity of your 
  breathing, I would guess that you are here with regards to a 
  matter of great urgency."

  "You have not heard, then?"

  Wizard Serrc ladled some of his mixture with a wooden spoon and 
  blew upon it until it was cool enough for him to taste. He 
  smacked his lips. "Quite delicious. Would you like to try some? 
  It's a wonderful laxative."

  "The Kingdom is in great peril."

  "You don't say? What is it this time? Another rise in 
  unemployment?"

  As briefly as I could, I related the events of recent days and 
  watched with some satisfaction as the flippancy drained steadily 
  from Serrc's manner. He had never had much respect for 
  authority, but then wizard' never do.

  "I see," he said, when I had finished my tale. "That would 
  explain the mirror."

  "The mirror?"

  "Hm, yes." Serrc pulled aside a small, square curtain on the 
  cave wall to reveal an ornate looking glass. "Just watch and 
  you'll see what I mean."

  He cleared his throat, then, in a very wizardly voice, intoned 
  "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the greatest wiz of all?"

  The mirror clouded, then replied, "Not you, dog-breath. I've 
  seen elves do better magic than you."

  Serrc looked at me with a see-what-I-mean expression on his 
  face. "It's been like that ever since I got back. I just took it 
  to be teenage rebellion -- magic mirrors have certain human 
  qualities, you know -- but after what you've just told me, I 
  realize that that probably isn't the case."

  "So what's going on?"

  "Great evil, obviously. Someone, somewhere has performed a deed 
  so foul, so disgusting that dark forces have been able to 
  manifest themselves in the Kingdom."

  "Can anything be done?"

  "That would depend on the nature of the misdemeanor. However, 
  judging from what's happened so far, I would guess we're in deep 
  doo-doo. I doubt anything can save us now."



  Wizard Serrc was right. With no children allowed to come to us 
  in their dreams, the Kingdom had no purpose. Reports of civil 
  unrest reached us daily. Rioting became commonplace. The workers 
  refused to work. The peasants gave up toiling in their fields. 
  Drunkenness, crime, disrespect toward authority -- all these 
  became endemic.

  Cabinet meetings were held daily. When we weren't despondent, we 
  were angry. Angry at each other, angry at ourselves, angry at 
  the whole sorry state in which we found ourselves.

  There was talk of bringing the children back, even though there 
  was no end to the crisis in sight. It was felt, by a few, that 
  having the children around would restore normality. Fortunately, 
  common sense prevailed and it was accepted that such a course 
  could only compound our problems.

  We grew wearier by the day. The King aged visibly. There were 
  suicides. And through it all, only two people seemed untouched 
  by the growing tragedy.

  Ah, Kaptain Komfort, if you only hknew ow many times I saw you 
  leaving Princess Aurora's apartments with that stupid, 
  self-satisfied grin on your face. On each occasion, my hatred 
  for you grew stronger. While the Kingdom went to ruin, you 
  indulged your carnal desires with our beloved princess. You 
  cared not one jot for the lonely children of Mundania whom you 
  could no longer befriend.

  Many was the time I had to stay my hand upon the halberd of my 
  sword. I dreamt of murdering you on so many nights in so many 
  ways.

  And now, there can scarce be a soul in the Kingdom who does not 
  do the same.



  Ozymandias took his life the day the bong died. Aside from the 
  unicorn, it was the last of his fabulous beasts. He covered 
  himself in lamp oil and went out of this world in a blaze of 
  despair.

  The unicorn was moved to the Royal Stables, where the King's own 
  vet kept a watch on it night and day. It was he who gave us our 
  first clue as to the cause of our catastrophe.

  During yet another interminable cabinet meeting, he was called 
  for by Herman who said he had some information that might or 
  might not throw some light on the situation.

  The fellow stood before us, cap in hand, trembling at being 
  suddenly thrust before the most powerful men in the land. He 
  asked for -- and was granted -- a tot of whisky to steady his 
  nerves.

  "Speak," said Herman, in that grand manner he adopts when 
  addressing social inferiors. "What you say in this room is 
  privileged information. You need fear no retribution for telling 
  us what you saw -- or think you saw."

  The vet wrung his cap as if to dry it. "I'm not sure I saw 
  anything."

  "You seemed sure enough when you spoke to my Private Secretary 
  this morning. Now, in your own time, just tell us what you told 
  him."

  "Well, it was about midnight, I think. I was asleep in the 
  stables on a bed of hay as His Majesty commanded, when I 
  suddenly awoke, certain I was not alone in the building. Of 
  course, there were the horses and the unicorn, but I felt the 
  presence of another person and I knew whoever it was had no 
  right being there. So, fearing someone was up to no good, I lay 
  still with my eyes open.

  "There was -- as you might recall -- a full moon last night, so 
  it wasn't as dark in that stable as you might think. I looked to 
  where the unicorn had been bedded, and there the beast stood, 
  bathed in moonlight. And -- and -- "

  "Yes. Go on."

  "There was a man on the unicorn. Not exactly sitting on it -- 
  more like lying on its hindquarters. Surmising that the creature 
  was in some sort of danger -- of being purloined, if nothing 
  else -- I got to my feet and made slowly toward the door."

  "Away from the unicorn?"

  "I was going to fetch the guard. Only I never made it to the 
  door on account of there being a bucket I didn't see and which I 
  walked right into. Needless to say it made an awful clutter. I 
  thought for sure that the man on the unicorn would attack me, 
  but when I looked round, he was gone."

  "Did you recognize this phantom rider?"

  "I might have dreamt the whole thing. Maybe it was a trick of 
  the light."

  "Did you recognize him?"

  "He looked like Kaptain Komfort."



  I was puzzled as to why Herman should bring the matter to our 
  attention. If Kaptain Komfort had been in the stables without 
  permission, then what of it? Far worse misdemeanors were 
  occurring throughout the Kingdom.

  Once the vet had been dismissed, I turned to Herman. "I'm afraid 
  I can see no significance in that fellow's story. As he said 
  himself, it was probably just a dream."

  Herman gave me that old look of his, the one that said "I know 
  something you don't." It was just one more move in the constant 
  power game he was always playing. "I believe every word the vet 
  says. It tallies with a report I received from a source I 
  decline to name the night before the honey turned sour. It seems 
  my man was in the zoo around midnight. What he was doing there 
  need not concern us now. According to his account, he was in the 
  vicinity of the unicorn's enclosure when his attention was 
  caught by what he describes as a wild braying.

  "Again there was a full moon, just as there was last night. He 
  crept stealthily toward the source of the sound, and there, in 
  the unicorn's enclosure, neatly framed by the silhouette of two 
  oaks, he saw a bizarre sight. There was a man lying on the 
  unicorn, his trousers round his ankles, his buttocks heaving up 
  and down. I need not relay all the details that were imparted to 
  me.

  "Suffice to say, my informant was able to get close enough to 
  the unicorn to positively identify the rider. It was Kaptain 
  Komfort."

  There was uproar in the Cabinet Room. Shrill voices demanded to 
  know why the President of the Board of Toys had not brought this 
  matter to our attention before now. There were calls for proof 
  of the allegation. The Minister for Lullabies demanded that 
  Kaptain Komfort be arrested at once.

  Finally, the Prime Minister restored order by banging his shoe 
  -- first on the table, then on the heads of those nearest to 
  him. "Gentlemen," he said, "we must be sure of our facts before 
  we proceed against Kaptain Komfort. Perhaps Herman would care to 
  explain why he did not enlighten us previously?"

  "Because, Prime Minister, until the vet came to me, I dismissed 
  the tale as a flight of fancy. In retrospect, I can see that was 
  a mistake for which I now apologize."

  "Oh bollocks," exclaimed the Minister for Lullabies. "You, 
  Mister President, have again been playing games with us. The 
  reason you kept this to yourself was because you thought you 
  could gain some advantage by it."

  Herman was on his feet. "How dare you! In all my years in 
  government -- "

  "Sit down!" yelled the Prime Minister. "I will not have my 
  cabinet behaving like willful schoolchildren! If you two have 
  your differences, you can settle them somewhere else. In the 
  meantime, I want the Chief Constable to apprehend Kaptain 
  Komfort in person."

  This was too good a chance to miss. I flicked my hanky to gain 
  the PM's attention. "I rather fancy I know where Komfort is to 
  be found. May I suggest I take a detachment of my men and bring 
  him here forthwith? It will take no more than a few minutes."

  The Prime Minister beamed at me. "It is good to know, Grand 
  Vizier, that there is still one amongst us able to show 
  initiative. Yes. Fetch me Kaptain Komfort if you can. I would be 
  most grateful."



  Alas, Kaptain Komfort had fled. He was neither with the Princess 
  nor in his own apartments. Orders were issued throughout the 
  land for his immediate arrest, but the cowardly rogue was 
  nowhere to be found. By his own unwillingness to surrender to 
  the authorities, he admitted his guilt.

  At a stroke, Kaptain Komfort had made himself the most despised 
  person in the Kingdom. He became the bogeyman. Mothers kept 
  their children in order by promising them a visit from that vile 
  villain should they misbehave.



  There was a feeling abroad that we were at last nearing the end 
  of our misfortunes, that the deep well of our misery was running 
  dry. The lawlessness which had threatened to break up our 
  society began to abate as communities united in their 
  determination to find Kaptain Komfort and bring him to book.

  There were no suicides in high places over the next few days. 
  Cabinet meetings reverted to their usual format of quiet debate 
  and sly power mongering, punctuated of course by Herman's 
  frequent declaration that he was not prepared to put up with one 
  thing or another.

  By contrast, all was not well with Princess Aurora, who was 
  convinced of her paramour's innocence. She became a recluse, 
  never venturing from her apartments.

  I visited her often, always on pretense of official business. 
  She no longer ate and refused to wash. Her face bore a wild 
  expression, like a trapped animal. At my insistence, a team of 
  physicians stood by her every hour of every day, but they were 
  powerless to bring her around. Poor, besotted wench. It 
  distressed me to see her decline.



  Reports of alleged sightings of the fugitive became a daily, if 
  not hourly, event. He was seen in every corner of the Kingdom, 
  often in several places at once. Armies of peasants spent their 
  days scouring mountains and plains. My spies followed every slim 
  lead, every wild rumour, only to come up against one dead end 
  after another.

  It seemed Kaptain Komfort was everywhere and yet nowhere at all.



  When Wizard Serrc arrived at my apartments declaring he bore 
  news of great import, I was momentarily gladdened, for I was 
  certain he had found Kaptain Komfort. With his wizardly powers, 
  he could roam the Kingdom at will without even leaving his 
  grotto. If anyone could track down our quarry, it was surely he.

  It took him but one sentence to demolish my hope. "We are being 
  invaded," he said.

  I slumped into an armchair. Under other circumstances I would 
  have been inclined to disbelief, but I was by now conditioned to 
  accept bad news at face value. "Who by?" was the only question 
  my addled and weary mind could formulate.

  The wizard paced from one side of my desk to the other and back 
  again. "The Mundanes have entered our territory to the north. 
  Already they have laid to waste the City of Light."

  "When did this happen?"

  "This very morning. They have war machines beyond our 
  comprehension. It took them less than an hour to reduce the city 
  to rubble. No doubt messengers will arrive here bearing this 
  awful news before the day is out."

  "How big a force...?"

  "The Mundane Army is perhaps thirty thousand strong. We have 
  superior numbers, but they have tanks and aircraft and all their 
  other paraphernalia of war. We cannot hope to defeat them."

  "The Dragon Squadrons..."

  "Are no more. The Mundane flying machines shot them down almost 
  the moment they became airborne. Grand Vizier, we can mount no 
  defense against such machines. We must offer our surrender 
  immediately."

  "Never!"

  "Surely that is a matter for the cabinet."

  "Cabinet be damned. Besides, I know they will take the same view 
  as I. Giving up the Kingdom to the Mundanes is unthinkable."

  "If we don't give it to them, they will take it anyway. Our only 
  hope is to reach an armistice."

  I rose to my feet. "I would rather see the entire Kingdom in 
  ruins than surrender to these barbarians. We have a duty to the 
  children -- "

  "The Mundane children? The very children whose parents are 
  burning our villages with napalm? We no longer have any duty 
  except to ourselves."

  "I will speak to the King and recommend we muster every force at 
  our disposal."

  "To what end? We cannot hope to resist."

  "Thank you, Wizard Serrc. That will be all."



  As I predicted, the cabinet shared my views on the matter. It 
  was agreed that we should fight to the end. No mercy, no 
  surrender. As Herman so predictably put it, we were not prepared 
  to put up with it.

  After all we had done for the Mundanes...



  That evening, the King summoned me to the Palace Dungeons. We 
  had, by great luck, brought down a mundane aircraft and taken 
  captive its pilot.

  I was all for hanging the prisoner in a public place, but the 
  King insisted that we should not descend to the level of the 
  enemy. He did, however, accede to my request to interview the 
  Mundane.

  Four armed men stood guard outside the prisoner's cell when I 
  was shown in, a needless precaution in light of the Mundane 
  being manacled. Despite his predicament, the pilot seemed wholly 
  unbowed. He looked at me with an unwavering gaze that was part 
  insolence, part arrogance. I judged he could not have long 
  attained his majority and wondered that the Mundanes could send 
  their children to war.

  His uniform consisted of a leather jacket and khaki trousers, 
  scarcely a uniform at all. More the garb of a barbarian. On the 
  back of the jacket was emblazoned USAF.

  I introduced myself, then leant against the damp wall, not 
  caring that I was soiling my robe. "Why?" I asked.

  The airman shrugged his shoulders. "You were asking for it."

  "How did you manage to find our borders? Adult Mundanes should 
  not know of this place. They should forget it even exists."

  "Yeah. That's what you were counting on, wasn't it? You take our 
  children here in their sleep and brainwash them. Then you wipe 
  their memories. You fucking commie!"

  "We help the lonely and the lost. We give them an escape from 
  the harsh realities of their waking lives."

  "Says you."

  "Were you ever here when you were young?"

  The airman laughed. "What would I want to do in a crummy place 
  like this? When I was a boy, I went to Disneyland. We don't need 
  your dreams."

  "How did you find us?"

  "I'm only supposed to give my name, rank and number. However, I 
  can't see that it can do any harm to tell you. It was our 
  President who remembered you. He's a very old man. His mind's 
  going. You know how old men get. They revert to their 
  childhood."

  "I see." It had happened before. Senile Mundanes often managed 
  to find their way back to the Kingdom of Dreams. We always 
  welcomed them on the grounds that in their twilight they needed 
  us as much as they did in their dawn.

  "Why did you kill the children? The President saw it all, you 
  know. And he saw that pervert ride the unicorn."

  "Kaptain Komfort? If ever I see him again, I will kill him."



  I left the cell feeling more despondent than ever. So the 
  Mundanes were taking revenge for their lost children? I couldn't 
  blame them for that. How could they know that we did it for 
  their sake? If we had taken any other course, we could have been 
  inflicting their future with another Hitler, another Stalin, 
  another Pol Pot...

  I could not sleep that night. The curfew had brought with it an 
  eerie silence that was alien to the city.

  I sat in my library, trying to read various volumes, but always 
  thinking of our brave soldiers marching off to take on an 
  invincible foe. Wizard Serrc had been right. Our only choice was 
  surrender. But then what would be left for us? Our entire 
  existence revolved around the Mundane children. Without them for 
  us to give our dreams to, would any of us care to carry on? 
  Would life be worth living under foreign occupation?

  The answer to that last question was clearly no. Shortly before 
  dawn, I determined to flee the Palace. Perhaps I could cross 
  over the border to the Mundane world.

  Dressed as a peasant and carrying little more than some food and 
  a handful of gold coins, I sneaked out of my apartment and up to 
  the ramparts where I knew I would encounter no more than an 
  occasional guard. My plan was to take a horse from the stables 
  and shelter in Bil-au-Nor until the following night when I would 
  make my way to the border.

  I was halfway across the roof when a brilliant light washed away 
  the night and its shadows. Dazzled, I instinctively fell to my 
  knees, wondering what had happened to all the colors in the 
  world. There was only whiteness.

  A wave of heat hit the back of my head. This was followed by a 
  wind that drew the breath from my lungs. Then came the roaring 
  and rumbling; a terrible sound that filled my head and seemed to 
  drill into my bones. Dirt rained from the sky.

  After a time -- and I know not whether it was seconds or minutes 
  -- the air became wondrously still. I was aware that my hair and 
  eyebrows were singed; my back felt as if it had been burnt by a 
  ferocious sun.

  Shakily, I rose to my feet and turned. On the far horizon, where 
  the city of Bil-au-Nor had once stood, there rose a pillar of 
  fire and smoke.

  All at once, the silence was broken by a great clamour. Windows 
  were thrown open; heads poked out. People ran into the courtyard 
  crying in disbelief. We stood gazing in awe at this nebulous 
  mushroom which more than anything signaled the end of all hope.



  With Bil-au-Nor reduced to ruins, I had little chance of 
  reaching the Mundane world. I realised my only sensible option 
  was to seek refuge in the Velvet Mountains. On such a journey, a 
  horse would be a hindrance, so I set off on foot. Along the way, 
  I encountered many refugees from Bil-au-Nor.

  The tales they told of the aftermath of the Bomb will haunt me 
  to the end of my life.



  The air in this cave is damp and chilly. I am hungry. My hair is 
  falling out; my gums bleed; my teeth are coming loose.

  If ever I see Kaptain Komfort again, I will kill him.



  Patrick Whittaker (trashman97@hotmail.com)
--------------------------------------------
  Patrick Whittaker is an independent filmmaker with two short 
  films to his name ("The Red Car" and "Nevermore"). To keep the 
  wolf from his door, he works as a freelance software analyst in 
  the airline industry. He is currently working on a novel called 
  Trash and is planning on having a midlife crisis as soon as he 
  can find the time.



  Amanuensis   by Armand Gloriosa
=================================
....................................................................
  Often, one life can't begin until another one ends.
....................................................................


  1.
----

  Tina still didn't want to roll her windows down, even though the 
  view from the winding road was spectacular: little waterfalls 
  cascading hundreds of feet down jagged mountain sides. She 
  didn't want to consider herself "there" until she saw the famous 
  stone lion at the side of Kennon Road, and when she did, she 
  shut off the air conditioner, opened the old-fashioned 
  quarter-windows of her 1973 Dodge Colt, and the cool air 
  immediately swirled into the car, tousling her dark, wavy hair. 
  So, she was almost there: Baguio City, elevation 4,900 feet.

  Professor Louie Coronel had hinted in his last letter that, in 
  these his final days, he would finally allow her to see his 
  unpublished manuscripts. Tina thought it quite a privilege: 
  Professor Coronel had not shown his fiction, poetry and plays to 
  anyone in, how many, fifteen years? No one, that is, except 
  Bando, his fair-haired boy -- fair-haired only in the figurative 
  sense, of course, this being the Philippines. She knew from 
  Professor Coronel's lyrical letters that Bando had brown eyes 
  ("that twinkle in faintest candle's light") and brown hair 
  ("that only sighs silkily through my fingers as I touch it"); 
  and his description in a relatively recent letter of Bando's 
  "deeply-muscled, brown buttocks" could still make her ears burn 
  red. That last phrase was memorable for its indelicacy; it was 
  with some surprise and dismay that she read these very words not 
  much later in Salman Rushdie. Still and all, Tina had no reason 
  to doubt the accuracy of the description. What was more, she was 
  quite willing to take Professor Coronel's word for it.

  Tina had never quite mastered her discomfiture at Professor 
  Coronel's relationship with Bando despite the years. This, of 
  course, had nothing to do with her Catholicism; like everyone 
  else in her circle, she was lapsed, anyway. The old scandal 
  still echoed gleefully in the memory of the oldtimers in the 
  English Department, but the new teachers, those who came in 
  after Tina, expressed little interest in discussing it. 
  Professor Coronel's reputation as a lion of literature and drama 
  went into decline rapidly after he left, thanks in no small part 
  to the veterans who were left behind, who did a thorough hatchet 
  job on the pedestal on which he had stood. There is nothing 
  professional about professional jealousy. Tina mused on whether, 
  in the end, Professor Coronel's reputation would someday be 
  revived. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, his poems would be read 
  again, his plays, adaptations and translations performed again 
  for their own sake, without interest in his work being initially 
  prodded by the prurient, extra-literary aspects of his life. 
  Tina thought highly enough of the man that she honestly believed 
  that the scandal would, in the future, be a mere footnote, a 
  non-issue.

  For her own part, Tina still could not gloss over the 
  corporeality of that relationship, for she had had a ringside 
  seat to the whole thing all these years, although she stayed in 
  Quezon City all this time, and Professor Coronel and Bando in 
  self-exile in Baguio. Eventually she had quite a bundle of 
  letters from Professor Coronel, to each of which she dutifully 
  replied. She did look forward to his letters, for his wry 
  comments on the teaching life helped her regain perspective 
  after a factional spat with another teacher in the Department, 
  or another night spent checking occasionally cringingly 
  incompetent student essays. She knew the letters for her were 
  special, in that the remarks and observations he made therein 
  were only for her, and were not replicated for general 
  consumption in the clippings of his weekly column that he sent 
  her faithfully. Tina had effectively become a stand-in for the 
  daughter that Professor Coronel would never have, receiving bits 
  of his motherly wisdom which came to her dipped at turns in 
  metaphorical brandied sugar, and in wormwood and gall -- and 
  sometimes, more often than she would like, in likewise strictly 
  metaphorical body fluids.

  In one of his letters, after she complained of the younger 
  instructors intriguing against her, he had given her this piece 
  of advice: "Noli Permittere Illegitimi Carborundum." She wrote 
  back asking what it meant, but he ignored the question. She 
  tried looking the phrase up in the back of her Merriam-Webster, 
  but it wasn't listed under "Foreign words and phrases." Finally, 
  she had to go to a European Languages instructor who could 
  translate.

  "I'm just a garden variety English Lit graduate," Tina said 
  humbly. "I can't read Latin."

  The instructor was likewise puzzled. "It's certainly like no 
  Roman author _I've_ ever read: it's cod-Latin for 'Don't let the 
  bastards grind you down.' "



  She arrived in Baguio, with her radio picking up the local FM 
  stations. They seemed to play an awful lot of country music 
  here, which she hardly ever heard on Manila stations. She 
  guessed it was the influence of the Americans in Camp John Hay, 
  but the Americans were now long gone. Several times she passed 
  the occasional Igorot walking on the street in ethnic costume, 
  but regretfully there was a jeepney tailgating her, and she 
  couldn't slow down to goggle at them. She inhaled the smell of 
  the Benguet pine trees, savoring them: the trees never grew in 
  the hot lowlands. The fragrance, unexpectedly, made her remember 
  something about Baguio that she thought she had long put out of 
  her mind.

  Professor Coronel's house was in a shabby neighborhood, small 
  and off the beaten track, chosen, she surmised, for its low 
  rents. His house, like the others flanking it, was made of wood, 
  with doors and windows that needed no mesh screens. Each house 
  boasted a small lawn overgrown with crabgrass. A hand-woven 
  doormat, now shabby, bade her welcome to "Baguio -- City of 
  Pines." Professor Coronel opened the door to her knock, and each 
  of them volubly and expansively expressed unfeigned surprise at 
  the other's appearance. They had long neglected to send each 
  other the occasional snapshot, she out of inertia despite her 
  diligence in letter-writing itself; he, out of vanity.

  If it were possible at all for an aging queen to have 
  _gravitas_, then he had it. He still had all his hair, but it 
  had been white for years; and in his old age he was only making 
  himself older, with the chain smoking and nightly vodka that 
  gave his voice an even deeper, raspy resonance. She noticed that 
  he had slowed down considerably, speaking more slowly and 
  circumspectly, and when he gestured with his hands it was with 
  less of his former vivacity, and with more dignity. He still 
  held his head steady in the old way, while the rest of his body 
  swayed underneath it, although now there was less of that, too. 
  "My God," he said, "I barely recognize you! Come in!" and they 
  kissed each other, _mmmmwah_, on the cheek. He was unshaven, and 
  his grizzled stubble grittily grazed her face.

  Professor Coronel, for his part, now saw before him a mature 
  young woman that he had first met so long ago as a fresh-faced, 
  naive English Lit graduate, intimidated by the thought of 
  facing typically _pilosopo_ -- smart-ass -- U.P. students. They 
  had known each other for six months before the scandal broke, 
  and during that time theirs had become the fastest of 
  cross-generational friendships. "Call me Mommy," he had said 
  back then. "Everybody on the faculty does. Yes, dear, I'm not 
  too vain to admit I'm old enough to have earned it."

  She came in. The house had a low ceiling, but there were no 
  electric fans, because Baguio was blessedly free of jungle-like 
  lowland humidity. There were no computers in the house, either, 
  not even an Apple II or an XT, but there was a big old 
  office-model Underwood at least 30 years old that might have 
  dated back from Professor Coronel's U.P. days. Second-hand 
  books, hardcover and paperback, lined the flimsy shelves which 
  creaked under their weight. The air inside the house was close, 
  for the cold climate, the envy of the rest of the country, now 
  disagreed with the old man, who kept most of the windows shut. 
  The house might have been an underpaid U.P. professor's 
  cubbyhole of the 1960s, rather than a writer's home and office 
  at the close of the 1990s.

  The room in which she was to stay was a claustrophobically small 
  one, and by fiction belonged to Bando. Professor and protege 
  kept up the pretence of separate beds in deference to the 
  feelings of the old housekeeper who, under the Professor's 
  wonted arrangement, did not live in the house. This room had a 
  window that had no view at all, looking straight out into the 
  neighbor's shuttered window.

  Later, she sat on the tattered leatherette sofa in the living 
  room, while he settled down on the mismatched club chair to one 
  side of her. The old housekeeper served them weak coffee in 
  chipped china cups.

  "So," he said to her as he lounged back in the club chair, his 
  bermuda shorts displaying his wrinkled knobby knees to Tina, 
  "are you still keeping _your_ knees together? _Not_ a good idea. 
  Nowadays Mr. Right is _definitely_ going to want to rehearse the 
  catalog of marital prerogatives before he lets a plain gold band 
  around his finger cut off his circulation _forever_."

  Tina flushed in embarrassment, and that unwelcome memory came up 
  again, but there seemed to be no one else who would have heard. 
  The housekeeper in the kitchen probably didn't understand 
  English, for Professor Coronel had addressed her in Ilocano, 
  which, old man that he was, he had nevertheless managed to learn 
  in the time he had been in Baguio. And Bando, whom she felt she 
  almost knew intimately without ever having set eyes on him 
  except in fuzzy photographs, was not in sight. But there was 
  evidence of his habitation: a set of weights and an exercise 
  bench to the other side of the sofa, in the direct line of sight 
  of the club chair. Beside them, leaning against the corner of 
  the walls, was a spiffy, weird-looking electric guitar. A small 
  black amplifier with the word "Marshall" in white cursive script 
  on it peeked from behind the guitar.

  "Dear child," Professor Coronel was saying, "I really don't want 
  to go on about this, but time _is_ running out for you. If you 
  don't mind my saying so, you're well past the calendar" -- 
  meaning she was over thirty-one -- "and it's dangerous to have a 
  child after thirty-five. Tell you what: When I'm gone, you can 
  have Bando. I _bequeath_ him to you. He's quite a handful, but 
  worth it."

  And this time Tina flushed even more redly, face and ears. "I 
  wish you'd stop talking so morbidly, Mommy," she said. "You're 
  still all right -- all things considered," meaning the 
  cigarettes and the vodka.

  "My dear," he said, "it may be any time now. I feel it. My first 
  heart attack might just be my last."

  Then their talk wound down to a going-over of the things they 
  had recently written to each other. After a while, Professor 
  Coronel spoke inconsequentially about Kafka, and about how it 
  was the gloomy novelist's wish to have his papers destroyed upon 
  his death, and if not for Max Brod's disobedience, the world 
  would not even have heard of Joseph K. and Karl Rossman and 
  Gregor Samsa and the rest of the anomie-ridden lot.

  Then, he remembered something that made him perk up. "Just after 
  my last letter to you, I found out something. Bando's nearly 
  finished with something _really_ big, something that quite 
  surprised me when I found out after he left his drawer unlocked. 
  He's actually written an opera -- mind you, not some middlebrow 
  musical or pretentious rock opera -- a full-blown _opera_, 
  libretto and music, the boy is a veritable Wagner writ small. 
  And he never _told_ me. He's still polishing it. Self-taught 
  genius, he is. Taught himself to read music, like that Zappa 
  fellow, whatsisname, the one who posed on the toilet bowl. Bando 
  based it on one of Nick Joaquin's short stories. Of course the 
  devil of the thing is that we haven't actually talked to Nick 
  about it. But he'll give us permission, he'll give us 
  permission. Nick's an old friend."

  "I was wondering about the guitar," she said, indicating the 
  Gibson Flying V.

  "Dearie, if I could play an instrument," the Professor said 
  airily, "it would have to be the violin. You certainly cannot 
  touch the souls of hearers with such a _grotesque_ implement as 
  that." And he sank into recollection. Finally, he said, "God 
  knows where he got the money to buy that thing."



  In his days as a U.P. professor, Professor Coronel had run a 
  boarding house for several male students, in a separate building 
  at the back of his own little house, which U.P. provided its 
  senior professors. The arrangement was that his house had to be 
  given up upon retirement, to make way for another U.P. prof with 
  lower seniority, and the waiting list was decades long. Two 
  maids took care of the needs of both Professor Coronel's house 
  and the boarding house, cooking, cleaning, washing.

  Then Professor Coronel took in a small, dark, handsome boy of 
  eleven or thereabouts as a houseboy. The boy was from one of the 
  poor families living in nearby Barrio Cruz na Ligas. When the 
  summer vacation came around, Professor Coronel dismissed the 
  stay-in maids and ejected the boarders by not renewing their 
  contracts. Now a new housekeeper from another neighborhood came 
  in in the morning to cook and clean, and left, like any office 
  worker, at the end of the day. It was not long until the boy's 
  father found out about it and went wild. The father went to 
  Professor Coronel's house with a machete with a blade three feet 
  long, and hacked away at the doors and windows, screaming abuse 
  until the University Police Force arrived to take him away.

  Professor Coronel chose to brazen it out, but the Chairwoman of 
  the English Department was an old enemy, and she bayed for his 
  blood. The Philippine Collegian ran the story of the spat and 
  its causes but uncharacteristically treaded carefully; after 
  all, the dignity and name of the University were at stake. On 
  the other hand, the national papers, which picked up on it, 
  gleefully named names. Professor Coronel had to leave U.P., and 
  a young rising star in the faculty happily moved into his house.

  He went to Baguio, bringing the boy with him. Luckily for him, 
  the father, after the scandal, didn't want his son back, and 
  didn't press charges over his abducting the boy. But when he 
  arrived in Baguio, St. Louis University and the University of 
  Baguio turned him down; his notoriety had preceded him, thanks 
  to the newspapers. So Professor Coronel turned to writing under 
  a pseudonym, and over time built a local reputation as a 
  respected critic and reviewer of plays, musical performances, 
  and the art of the thriving colony of bohemians performing 
  and/or painting in the clement weather of Baguio. In addition, 
  he did commissioned work -- writing the occasional coffee-table 
  book on the history of some small parish or other, or glorifying 
  some self-regarding family's patriarch. He wrote much, all of it 
  hammered out on the Underwood, with insight at a furious pace. 
  It's wasn't much of a living, but it paid for the roof over his 
  -- and Bando's -- head.



  Bando came in, bringing a bag of groceries, wafting the scent of 
  after-shave into the house with him. The last photograph of him 
  that she had seen was of him at age nineteen. Now Bando looked 
  younger than his twenty-six years, while Tina was sure she 
  looked every year of her own thirty-five. More than the fact 
  that he was tall, broad-shouldered and muscular, with a strong 
  jaw and high cheekbones, there was something else entirely that 
  intimidated Tina. It was his eyes, which burned with anger even 
  when the rest of his face was calm and impassive; _that_ was 
  something that never came across in the snapshots, or in 
  Professor Coronel's letters.

  They were introduced, and Bando was coldly civil. He spoke 
  softly to Professor Coronel, as if he were used mostly to 
  speaking confidences not meant to be overheard: a report of his 
  expedition to the grocery, what in the shopping list was and was 
  not available. He disappeared into the kitchen, and Tina didn't 
  see him again until he came out an hour and a half later to 
  announce lunch.



  That afternoon, while going over the books on the shelves with 
  keen interest, Tina noticed a small hole in the jamb of the main 
  door. As Bando came in from the kitchen, she asked him what the 
  hole was.

  "Nothing, really. Some months ago a gun accidentally went off 
  while he was cleaning it."

  "Was anybody hurt?"

  "No. But the neighbors heard the shot, and the police came to 
  investigate. Bit of a problem there, because the gun was 
  unlicensed." Bando's Taglish -- Tagalog and English -- was as 
  idiomatic as any _burgis_ graduate of the country's best 
  schools, although she knew Bando's formal schooling to have been 
  limited to the woefully substandard public schools.

  "So what happened?" Tina asked, afraid that she was getting on 
  Bando's nerves. Bando, however, showed no sign of irritation, 
  just the apparent composure that hid untold reserves of anger. 
  "Was a criminal case filed for illegal possession, or anything?"

  "No. The policemen said something about the gun being an 
  unlicensed firearm, and what a fine one it was too: a teeny 
  weeny Walther PMS or P-P-something. In return for not reporting 
  the incident, the policemen," and at the word Bando mimed a 
  policeman's characteristic beer belly, "got to keep the gun. End 
  of story."

  Tina grew uneasy at this. Professor Coronel, wildly indiscreet 
  at the best of times, had said nothing about this in his 
  letters. But the gun was gone, and that was good enough to set 
  her mind at ease. Turbulent relationships were always good 
  breeding grounds for plenty of melodrama.



  2.
----
  
  That night, before going to bed, Tina stepped out of the house 
  to enjoy the air. She thought she had long put behind her that 
  episode, that one time she had come to Baguio when she was 
  seventeen. It had been with her boyfriend, a Bio major about her 
  age whom she had met in a GE course. They had secretly driven 
  from Quezon City to Baguio one Friday afternoon, when their 
  classes had ended for the week, and had taken a room in the 
  Hyatt. But when the big moment came, she discovered that he had 
  no intention of using protection -- in honor, he said, of the 
  occasion, it being her first time. Tina freaked. All along she 
  had had misgivings about the whole trip -- her boyfriend 
  ("Jerry, Jerry, damn it, that was his name, I didn't want to 
  remember it, his name was Jerry") had always hemmed and hawed 
  when she talked about marriage in general, even if she made it 
  clear she meant it to be several years down the road. She was 
  going to be compromised, for worse than nothing -- disgraced, 
  unwed, and a mother before her debut had even come around. 
  Luckily for her, she still had her clothes on ("blue jeans and 
  denim jacket buttoned up"), and when her boyfriend, already 
  stripped bare, wrestled with her on the bed, she was able to 
  fend him off. She locked herself in the bathroom and stayed 
  there all night, crying. In the morning, she yelled through the 
  door that she was going home, alone, by bus. He could drive home 
  by himself. She tried so hard to forget it ("Forget Friday, July 
  18, 1980") but then, like it or not, being assaulted by a naked 
  man is always memorable. So over the years she tried to look at 
  it positively, and thought of fending off an attacker as -- an 
  achievement.

  The following year she tried a little self-cure psychotherapy, 
  and organized an all-girls trip to Baguio for a weekend. Someone 
  had once told her that, if she ever got into a car accident, the 
  first thing she had to do right afterwards was to drive a car 
  again; otherwise, the trauma of the accident would mean that she 
  would never drive again. So for this outing, Tina deliberately 
  suggested the Hyatt, and the trip passed remarkably well. The 
  group did all the things that tourists were supposed to do in 
  the Honeymoon Capital of the Philippines: horse rides, boat 
  rowing in Burnham Park, trips to the Crystal Cave, pictures 
  taken with an Igorot in ethnic costume (G-string despite the 
  cold, feathers in headdress, iron-tipped spear). The girls had a 
  field day at the market stalls, giggling over and buying up the 
  kitschy, risque handicrafts for which Baguio was famous: like a 
  wooden ashtray, decorated with a phallus obtruding from the rim 
  over the ashtray at a forty-five degree angle, so that the whole 
  object looked for all the world like a sundial with the queerest 
  of gnomons; and a seven-inch high figure of a smiling man in a 
  barrel -- lifting the barrel revealed the man's huge, 
  spring-loaded, fabulously out of scale weapon. For herself Tina 
  drew the line at an ordinary wooden key chain with "Baguio" 
  etched on it. There was no need to go overboard with the 
  therapy.

  Despite that, since that incident she had distrusted all the 
  boys and men who had made passes at her. The thought of 
  voluntarily submitting to an attack was simply beyond 
  comprehension. Eventually they stopped coming around with their 
  protestations of honorable intentions.

  Now she was standing on the little lawn in front of Professor 
  Coronel's house, wrapped in a jacket (she hadn't worn one in 
  years) and taking in the cold air to which she was unaccustomed. 
  She kicked at a few pine cones on the ground, and made a mental 
  note to collect as many of them as she could to take home to her 
  mother, who enjoyed making Christmas wreaths out of them. She 
  turned around to look at the house. The lights in Professor 
  Coronel's -- and Bando's -- bedroom were on, and the shades were 
  up. They seemed to be burning sheafs of paper in a metal 
  wastebasket. The smoke was pumped out of the room by the 
  overhead ventilation fan that was used to clear out cigarette 
  smoke. There seemed to be the air of solemn ritual about it, 
  rather than the mere disposal of garbage. Sheet after 
  typewritten sheet they fed into the flame, as Tina watched, 
  worrying about fire catching in the room, puzzled as to what was 
  going on. When they finished, she went to bed, and later did not 
  mention it to either of them.



  Days passed, and Professor Coronel had not so much as given her 
  a peek at his work, or even mentioned it. Out of _delicadeza_ -- 
  since Professor Coronel's reason for wanting to show it to her 
  was the fear of his coming death -- she did not bring it up, 
  either.

  Just as Tina began to worry about almost using up all her 
  vacation time, the Professor passed into glory in the wee hours 
  of the morning. Bando was with him when it happened. Just as the 
  Professor himself had feared, it was his heart that did him in. 
  Tina, normally squeamish about death, had loved the old man 
  enough to bid him goodbye with a kiss to the corpse's clammy 
  forehead. Later the funeral parlor took him away, and she felt 
  an irrational fear that he might still be alive, just in a coma, 
  and would wake up on the mortuary slab. She felt numb and 
  hollow, as if it were her mother or father who had died. What it 
  would be like to lose to death a husband, or a lover, she had no 
  idea; she thought it would be something like this, too. Bando, 
  she noticed with something like disgust, seemed to be taking it 
  all very well.

  Bando left all the arrangements to the funeral parlor, telling 
  the staff that a little mass should be said over the old man, if 
  only because Bando was comfortable with the ritual. He told Tina 
  that it made his skin crawl to think of a nondenominational 
  ceremony with a professional funeral orator going on and on 
  about a man he had never even met; he thought it far better to 
  hear the familiar platitudes about bringing nothing into this 
  world, and bringing nothing out of it. In the event, only Bando, 
  Tina, and Professor Coronel's editor from the local newspaper -- 
  sent by the paper only as a matter of courtesy -- were at the 
  funeral, held in one of the marmoreally grim chapels of the 
  funeral parlor.



  "So what are you going to do now?" Tina asked Bando. It was the 
  evening after the funeral. They were sitting acrossea from ch 
  other at the kitchen table, with the bare light bulb burning 
  yellowly overhead, although there was still enough daylight by 
  which to see.

  Right now the fire in Bando's eyes was gone. In its place was 
  something else, something that ever so faintly suggested the 
  mischievous twinkle that Professor Coronel once wrote about so 
  rhapsodically. With an equanimity that annoyed Tina, who was 
  being hammered by waves of grief, he ticked off his options. He 
  could move to smaller quarters, a boarding house, maybe. He 
  could probably take over the professor's column in the local 
  daily; heaven knew he had already been writing much of his stuff 
  for him for the past year and a half. "I'd like to erase Louie 
  -- Professor Coronel -- from my life, but I can't. If anything, 
  the most I can do is step straight into his shoes, in everything 
  that the man used to do, theatrical reviews, column, 
  coffee-table books, and all."

  "But you can't just do that, step up and admit to being his 
  ghost-writer and expect to be taken in," Tina pointed out.

  "I'll trot out my credentials: 'Sir, I was the man's protege; 
  and, incidentally, his catamite.' Otherwise, I'm unemployable. I 
  can make you obscene propositions in four different languages. I 
  can discourse exhaustively on all three books of Dante's Comedy 
  -- infernal, purgative and celestial. I can set The 120 Days of 
  Sodom to music. Or perhaps you'd care to discuss the 
  technological anachronisms in Paradise Lost? But I don't have a 
  high school diploma. Who'd hire me as a clerk?"

  He held a letter from the landlord, a formal one demanding that 
  the lessee pay six months' arrears in rent.

  "What are you going to do about his things?" Tina asked.

  "I'm just leaving everything behind, and good riddance."

  Tina was too scared to bring up the topic of the manuscripts. 
  She didn't want to think that what she had seen them burning was 
  the work of the past fifteen years. Images flashed through her 
  mind: images of the Sibylline Books, the Lost Sonnets, the 
  vanished Sapphic poems. But she was running out of time. She 
  would have to go back to U.P. soon to prepare for the new school 
  year.



  The following day, Tina told Bando that she would be leaving. 
  She waited for him to volunteer information on the manuscripts, 
  but he received the news passively.

  Bando was gone all that day. Tina left a thank-you card for 
  Bando, and, secretly, some grocery money with the housekeeper. 
  Sometime around three in the afternoon, with her clothes packed 
  into her bag and flung into the back seat, and still hating her 
  own pusillanimity over the manuscripts, Tina tried to start her 
  car. To her horror, a flat click was all she heard from the 
  starter. She would have to have the car sent to a repair shop, 
  and heaven knew how long that would take. But at the back of her 
  mind, she was relieved at this little bit of bad luck. Somebody 
  -- Terpsichore, or Melpomene, perhaps -- was trying to tell her 
  to do her duty.

  Bando came home at around one the following morning, surprised 
  to find Tina's car still parked in front of the house. He had 
  his young friends with him, two women, and three men with long 
  hair, all carrying luggage. One of the women clung to his arm 
  possessively, as an apologetic Tina came out of her room, still 
  in her day clothes, to explain that she would have left already 
  but for her car. Bando was in high spirits, and not put out at 
  all by this little hitch in his arrangements -- for he had 
  changed his mind about leaving, and had asked his entire 
  _barkada_, his gang, to move in with him to share the rent while 
  he figured out what to do about a job. From the guitar cases 
  that some of the men were carrying, she guessed at how they made 
  their living.

  Bando spoke loudly, his words coming out rapid-fire. And not 
  just Bando, but the whole group seemed to be bustling about with 
  frenzied activity. Shabu, Tina guessed: methamphetamine 
  hydrochloride.

  "No problem." Bando was saying. "Dindo here is a good hand at 
  engines," and here he waved a hand to indicate one of the 
  long-haired musicians. "He'll look at it in the morning."

  "I think I'll just go to a hotel for the night. I'm crowding you 
  out." Tina was beginning to feel frightened.

  "No, no, don't go. You're quite welcome to stay on." Bando's 
  voice boomed out over the sound of activity. Tina worried about 
  the noise they were making, the slamming of the doors of the 
  taxi in which they had arrived, the thud of luggage and guitars 
  on the floor, people laughing and hollering at each other in the 
  dead of night.

  "I'll just go to the Hyatt," she said.

  Bando's girlfriend started laughing. So did Bando. Tina thought 
  that they had gone temporarily insane. But then Bando started to 
  explain.

  "Tina," he said, using her name for the first time since they 
  had met, "don't you remember? The Hyatt collapsed in the 
  earthquake ten years ago. It was in all the newspapers. Look, 
  it's really all right. You can stay." And he introduced her to 
  his friends. He was speaking too fast for her to catch all the 
  names. The only ones she retained were Dindo's, and that of his 
  girlfriend, an emaciated, sunken eyed waif named Iza.

  Bando left the two of them to talk. Tina, curious about the 
  girl, managed to have something of a conversation with girl, who 
  couldn't keep still. A fidgety Iza explained that she was an 
  architecture graduate, but never took the board exam. She 
  painted still-lifes instead, and her work was hung in the local 
  cafes. She had managed to sell several of her works, but it was 
  no way to make a decent living. Tina figured that Professor 
  Coronel had known about her all along, and, perhaps grudgingly, 
  had given Bando some liberty in the matter. Now she had made her 
  home in the house of which Bando was now master.

  After a decent interval, Tina retired to her room, but the 
  barkada carried on in the rest of the house. She could hear 
  their voices clearly. Occasionally from the neighbors' houses 
  there would be hisses of annoyance, which would be ignored.

  "Admit it," Iza was saying in English, "you think she's pretty."

  Bando laughed, and made a reply in Ilocano. The tone was 
  mocking. She caught the words, in English, "fag hag."



  Morning came, and after a quick chilly shower that left her blue 
  all over, Tina had a slice of buttered toast and tea by herself. 
  Dindo was awake, and returned her timid "good morning" with a 
  gruff wiggle of the eyebrows. Dindo and one of the men had spent 
  the night in the living room; that other one was still asleep on 
  a blanket next to the sofa, still fully dressed in last night's 
  clothes, down to his thick-soled sneakers. Which meant, Tina 
  realized, that the four others were sharing the master's 
  bedroom. Two couples, sleeping together in the same room.

  The old housekeeper arrived, and was appalled when she learned 
  that the house now had seven people in it, counting Tina. Tina 
  tried to explain to her, in Tagalog, that she, Tina, wasn't 
  going to stay. This somehow failed to mollify the housekeeper.

  The noise of the complaining housekeeper brought Bando out of 
  his room. As he closed the door behind him, Tina got a glimpse 
  of the bare flesh of somebody, male or female Tina couldn't 
  tell, padding about naked inside the room.

  Bando greeted Tina and the housekeeper. He didn't seem to notice 
  that the housekeeper was in a dudgeon over something. He spoke 
  to Dindo, and came back to Tina. He told her, "Dindo's fixed 
  your car. All it needed was a cleaning of battery terminals."

  "How much do I owe him?"

  "Nothing. He's not a mechanic. He's a musician. Don't insult him 
  by tipping him." Bando had gotten over the shabu, it seemed, but 
  he was still cheerful in a way that she had not seen when 
  Professor Coronel was still alive.

  Tina went over to thank Dindo personally. She got the same 
  sullen wiggle of the eyebrows in response. She resolved to leave 
  some more money for the groceries with the housekeeper. That is, 
  unless the housekeeper resigned in a huff that very morning.

  And still she could not bring herself to ask Bando about the 
  manuscripts.



  It was getting close to noontime when Tina started her car. She 
  had already said her goodbyes to everyone in that strange 
  household of indecorous bohemians, and Bando continued to say 
  nothing about any manuscripts. They've been destroyed, Tina 
  thought. Everything has been lost.

  Just as she was about to put the car into gear, Bando came out 
  of the house. He had a thick folder of loose papers in his 
  hands. Tina's windows were open, and Bando reverently placed the 
  folder onto the front passenger seat. Putting his head through 
  her passenger-side window, he said, "That's pretty much 
  everything he wrote. Plays, poems, essays."

  Tina took this in. Then she said, "But I saw you two burning 
  manuscripts."

  He rested his arms on the window sill. "You were meant to see 
  that. These are copies I made -- preliminary drafts, 
  photocopies, some stuff he didn't even remember writing. 
  Frankly, you're not missing much. By and large he just reprised 
  all his old stuff over and over again, even though he did it 
  better the first time around. I suppose he went on and on with 
  you about 'the beatniks who left their poetry pinned to toilet 
  stalls as they traveled the highways of 1960s America' -- he 
  didn't? Then he probably lectured you on Kafka. Ah, yes. If you 
  ask me, he was more like D.H. Lawrence, endlessly rewriting that 
  dirty book of his, not knowing when to quit."

  "But he told me about one new play. He said it was 
  autobiographical."

  Bando snorted. "I was afraid he would. Yes, it was 
  autobiographical. It was all about himself. And me. All the 
  filthy details of the things that he made me do. Even used my 
  real name, made such a big thing about the irony of my being 
  named Servando. He liked to flatter himself and me over it. He 
  said he was Verlaine to my Rimbaud, and he kept saying that he 
  was only portraying honestly my cruelty to him. He wrote it 
  after that little matter of his firing his gun at me when I 
  tried to leave. I'm sorry he missed. He was drunk at the time, 
  and so was I. The man had no shame whatsoever. Oh, pardon me, 
  I'm speaking ill of the dead."

  Tina waited.

  Bando said, "You don't expect me to let you have _that_ one, do 
  you? That, I've since burned, too, all the notes and drafts down 
  to the final version, along with my whole musical oeuvre. In 
  front of his eyes. It was the last thing he ever saw in this 
  life. He's diddled me enough in life, I'm not going to let him 
  do it to me after he's dead." Bando hesitated, and then gave 
  voice to something to which he seemed to have given much 
  thought: "At best, biographical entries dealing with him will 
  gloss over that little contretemps that forced him to leave U.P. 
  At worst, people will read about it but they won't remember my 
  name. I'll be a blind item in literary history, like the boor 
  who interrupted Coleridge at his writing."

  Tina had one question: "Was the play any good?"

  Bando said, "Something the old man didn't realize until 
  recently: he did his best work only when he was horny. Like the 
  early Jean Genet, he used to say."

  "Was it any good?" Tina repeated.

  Bando appeared to be turning something over in his mind. 
  Shortly, he said, "Yes. It was the best thing he ever wrote in 
  his life."

  The front door of the house opened, and Iza stood in the 
  doorway. Bando turned away and began to walk towards Iza. Tina 
  was keeping the engine on idle, and Bando, as if to close a door 
  on the whole thing, turned around and called out in the distance 
  between them, "I'd like to say I'm sorry, but I'm not. Goodbye."

  Tina saw the haggard Iza chuck Bando under the chin 
  affectionately. In reply, Bando jammed his hand between Iza's 
  legs. There was a shriek of laughter, and the couple disappeared 
  into the house.



  Armand Gloriosa (dogberry1@yahoo.com)
---------------------------------------
  Armand Gloriosa is a Philippines-based lawyer who has stopped 
  trying to make a living, and has instead tried to get a life. 
  Some of his other stories can be found on his Web site.

  <http://members.wbs.net/homepages/a/r/m/armandgloriosa.html>



  Prospero's Rock   by Brian Quinn
==================================
....................................................................
  Classical drama is played out on the stage. It also happens in 
  real life.
....................................................................

  1.
----
  
  For a birthday surprise last month, my wife took me to see 
  Shakespeare's "The Tempest." I take it as a sign of enormous 
  mental health that I enjoyed the performance so much, and only 
  thought of Holly once or twice during the show. Of course, I've 
  thought of her a dozen times a day since then.

  I have always loved the idea of live theater. It seems so 
  daring, so intense, so seemingly real yet so full of unreality. 
  It is somehow subversive, somehow liberating. Who is the self on 
  stage? Live theater is (to me, anyway) the submersion of one's 
  identity on stage, a make-believe, while at the same time it is 
  a very carefully crafted walk on a high wire. Is there a net 
  below? Only the actors can decide. We in the audience can only 
  watch the artists above us.

  Considering my history with Holly, my love of live theater is, 
  in itself, a sign of mental health. A weaker mind would avoid 
  anything to do with actors or acting, but I don't. Holly was 
  deep into acting, and all that entails -- indeed, she still is. 
  If you watch soap operas, you know Holly. She's been the 
  designated bad-word woman on a long-running series since the 
  late 1970s. I'm told she's convincing. I've never watched. 
  Mental health, as I say.

  I have been on stage myself, however, exactly twice in my life. 
  Both times I did violence to my fellow actors. And both times I 
  felt like an idiot, but the second time had far longer lasting 
  consequences. Falling in love with a woman already in love will 
  do that.

  In first grade I was the woodsman in the West Lee Street School 
  production of "Little Red Riding Hood," and I rescued Red with 
  such energy that the wolf ran howling into the audience and 
  burrowed his head into his mother's shoulder all through the 
  final curtain and bows. Mrs. Aldritch (the mother), Miss Sherman 
  (my teacher), and Mr. Hinden (the principal) all had something 
  to say about my technique. I gave up my part as the troll in 
  "Billy Goats Gruff," the next play scheduled, and vowed not to 
  tread before the footlights ever again.

  "Ever again" lasted 13 years, which isn't a bad record for such 
  vows. But when I was a freshman at college a track team friend 
  of mine asked me to be an extra in his mime show. "I have a spot 
  you're perfect for," said Robin, who, aside from being the Big 
  10 1,500 meters record-holder, was also famous on campus for 
  having studied in Paris with Marcel Marceau. I was a hurdler -- 
  shorter, thicker, faster than Robin, but with none of his 
  reserves of energy. I said, "No." He asked again. I said, "No." 
  Robin asked again, and again, and finally I said, "All right," 
  thinking that the show's five performances would just be like 
  five jumps to get over and forget. What the hell, I figured, it 
  wasn't a speaking part.

  I don't really care much for pantomime, I should tell you. I'm 
  too noisy. But Robin promised there was going to be background 
  music, and that I wouldn't feel amazingly naked on stage when 
  the time came. That should have been a warning to me. The 
  program Robin had devised was based upon Moussagorsky's 
  "Pictures at an Exhibition" (not my taste, but it was noise) and 
  it consisted of seven or eight scenes. I was only in one. When I 
  showed up at the first rehearsal, I knew exactly why Robin had 
  wanted me in particular.

  "Tim Donahue has the face of an altar boy." I've heard that line 
  my entire life. I suppose there are worse things to have someone 
  say about me, but because of this fact people usually relate to 
  me in one of two ways: either I am treated as a complete 
  innocent, or I am suspected of being a Dorian Gray-type 
  hypocrite and sinner. Robin had not come down on either side of 
  the question, one of the reasons I liked him. But as the 
  director of his own show, I think he saw so much potential for 
  irony or humor or just plain ambiguity in my fair skin, blue 
  eyes, reddish-blond hair, and regular features that he just 
  couldn't resist assigning me the role of a Roman soldier who 
  helped nail Christ (to be played by Robin) to the cross.

  I confess that I was somewhat shocked to be asked to nail Christ 
  to the cross. Part of me wanted the role, of course -- after 
  all, I was a freshman in college and wanted to rebel as much as 
  the next 18-year-old Catholic boy away from home for the first 
  time; and part of me was horrified by the very idea.

  But when I said something to Robin, he just smiled and 
  introduced me to the woman playing Mary, whose role it was to 
  stand off to the side and weep. This was Holly Austin, a petite 
  blond woman whose ironic smile and forthright eyes pierced me 
  like an arrow. "Listen, if I can be the mother of that big 
  baby," she said, pointing to Robin, whose height of six foot two 
  or so dwarfed her five foot nothing slenderness, "then you can 
  certainly string him up. I mean, Christ, he's asking for it!"

  I smiled wanly. "You'll look good in the soldier suit, too," she 
  added.

  I was hooked. If I was going to get to rehearse a scene with 
  Holly Austin every night for three weeks, well, then, the chance 
  of going to hell would be worth it, I thought.

  But the first four days of rehearsing, I found, were enormously 
  hard work. This was no longer first grade -- at Northwestern 
  University liv,e theater was taken very seriously indeed.

  Robin spent nearly every minute blocking out each scene, telling 
  us exactly where to stand and when to move. The first thing I 
  learned was that a stage, although it looks large from the 
  audience's point of view, and maybe is large when it's empty, is 
  a very small place when a scene is being acted. The trick is to 
  get the appearance of spontaneity, of real life in real time, 
  without the messy freedom of reality. People have to stay in 
  their places, or else they smash into each other and cause chain 
  reactions of comic chaos all across the proscenium.

  I had trouble with that. I either moved too slow to the right 
  place, or too fast to the wrong place -- when I wasn't moving 
  too slow to the wrong place, or moving out of the right place at 
  the wrong time. Robin called me a moron more times than I would 
  usually allow, but I accepted his censure as the price of being 
  near Holly. I kept promising to get it right just as soon as I 
  could.

  Holly, of course, got it right the first time, and stayed right 
  every time through. It was as if she had a bat's sonic measuring 
  skills and a ballerina's timing.

  "Watch her," Robin said to me. "She's got it down pat. It's not 
  just fun, Tim," he said to me with a look that meant, I thought, 
  that if it hadn't been for my altar boy's face he would have 
  found another centurion.

  "I'll get better, Robin," I answered. "Maybe Holly can give me 
  some advice."

  "You don't need advice from Holly," he answered. "You just need 
  to hit your marks." That was Friday, the fourth day of 
  rehearsals. Holly and I had not, as a matter of fact, exchanged 
  a single word since the first night. But I could see that to 
  her, like to Robin, this was serious work, not a lark in 
  costume. She spoke to no one. She listened to Robin, nodded 
  gravely, and then just did her part perfectly.

  I truly marveled at it, and wondered how they did their magic. 
  It was the strangest thing, but while I stayed a thick-set, 
  angelic-looking Irishman, the straw-blond Holly and the tall 
  thin Robin instantly turned themselves into ancient suffering 
  Jews carrying the woes of humanity on their shoulders. When they 
  were on stage they even looked alike, as if they could be mother 
  and child, and Robin looked half Holly's age.

  As we left the theater that night I heard Holly say to a friend 
  that she would not be going out that weekend. The junior she was 
  seeing was going to Ann Arbor with the football team.

  I walked over to the dining hall and got some dinner. I remember 
  the choices were fish cakes or chicken, and I took the fish 
  cakes. I might have been nailing Jesus to the cross, thought I, 
  but there I was six years after Vatican II still abstaining from 
  meat on Fridays. While I ate, I thought about Holly. There was 
  no reason in the world why she would talk to me, I thought, 
  except that there was no reason why she wouldn't. I was going to 
  call her, I decided, except that I knew I wasn't. Well, I wanted 
  to call her -- probably, at any rate, except I wasn't sure. I 
  went round and round in my mind and actually ate the red Jell-O, 
  which shows you how preoccupied I was.

  Back in my room I grabbed the phone and dialed Holly's number 
  (which I had already written on the pad on my desk) too quickly 
  to change my mind. She answered on the first ring, saying 
  "Hello?" in a way that made it seem she was open for whatever 
  adventure the world might offer her. That her "hello" was so 
  welcoming made me enormously confident.

  "Hi," I said, "You know me, except that you don't really. I 
  mean, we've spoken, except not very much. Damn, listen, I'm Tim 
  Donahue, the guy who's supposed to nail Jesus to the cross..."

  "Except that you don't, most of the time."

  "Yeah, true," I said, "I suppose I'll get it right someday, 
  except maybe not quite by the time the show starts."

  "You want my advice, Tim?" she asked.

  "You heard me," I said, "Which is all right, except Robin said I 
  wasn't supposed to ask for your advice..."

  "Except that my advice is the same as Robin's advice, which is: 
  hit your marks."

  "Well, yeah, I guess, except that's not easy for me."

  "It's always easy," she said, "except when it's hard."

  "Are you making fun of me? I take exception to that," I replied.

  "Except that you love it," she said.

  "Well, at least you're talking to me," I said. "I expected 
  almost anything except that."

  "Why shouldn't I talk to you, except for the obvious?"

  "If I were smart, except that I'm stupid, I'd know what the 
  obvious was, except that I do, so maybe I am smart," I said.

  "I followed that, except for the parts about you being stupid," 
  she said. "The obvious reason I wouldn't talk to you is that 
  we're in a mime show, which is totally silent, except for the 
  parts when it's mute or dumb."

  "It's not dumb at all," I protested, "except for the parts I'm 
  in."

  "Well, then, it's not dumb at all, from what I can see, because 
  you're not really _in_ it at all, except for your body lurching 
  all over the stage."

  "Wow, you really know how to make a guy feel good, except for 
  when you make him feel lousy."

  "Well, I would worry about your feelings, except that you're not 
  my guy..."

  "Oh, yes," I said, "That's right, I could be your guy, except 
  I'm not on the football team."

  "That's interesting, except neither is Dean. He's just the 
  manager."

  "Oh," I said, smiling.

  "What does 'Oh' mean?" she asked.

  "It means, 'Oh,'" I said.

  "Except when it doesn't," she said.

  "Except when it doesn't," I agreed. "Listen, do you drink 
  coffee?"

  "All the time," Holly said, "except when I'm not, like right 
  now."

  Well, we spoke more drivel like that for a while, until I 
  finally asked Holly if she would meet me in the campus coffee 
  shop and let me buy her a cup of coffee and we could maybe talk.

  We seemed to like each other, and Holly told me that Dean was 
  nothing serious, just an old friend from home (which was a 
  suburb of Milwaukee), and that if I wanted to make a play for 
  her, I was welcome to try.

  "You have such a beautiful face," she said (I winced), "That it 
  would improve my reputation just to be seen with you."

  "Is your reputation that bad?" I asked.

  "Oh, Tim, I'm an actress! Don't you know what that means? Why, 
  in the old Queen's day, we wouldn't be invited to reputable 
  people's houses. If you were a married man," she said.

  "Except that I'm not," I interrupted.

  "Don't start," she warned. "If you were a married man, why, just 
  having this cup of coffee with me would be grounds for divorce."

  "Except I'm having Coke," I said.

  "You see? One date with me and I've driven you to drugs! But no 
  one would believe it of you, not with that altar boy's face."

  "I actually was an altar boy," I said.

  "My mother is going to hate you," Holly said. "She hates all the 
  boys I date, but especially Catholics and Irish guys. This is 
  going to be fun."

  "Irish and Catholics? What are you?"

  "We're DAR. My mother can trace her lineage all the way back to 
  the first settlers in New England. She's still trying to make 
  her way onto the Mayflower," Holly said in all seriousness, 
  though with a touch of amused and tolerant disdain, "but she 
  hasn't made it yet. I don't suppose you can claim ancestors like 
  that."

  "Nope," I said. "My folks came over at the turn of the century. 
  My great-grandmother still has a brogue."

  "Oh, Christ," said Holly, "introducing you to Mummy is going to 
  be such fun!"

  That was October, 30 years ago now. Holly and I became a couple, 
  one of many pairs on campus. We rehearsed together until I 
  actually was able to passably pretend to be a soldier of ancient 
  Rome, stationed in far Judea, following orders to execute 
  another troublemaker. I thought about that role, and the man I 
  was playing. There must have been such a soldier, nearly 2,000 
  years ago, whose name is lost through time and inattention, 
  whose deed had far more life than he had, and whose thoughts can 
  only be guessed at. "What was he like?" I asked Holly one night 
  at dinner (we had taken to having dinner together, arriving at 
  5:30 and taking a table in the middle of the dining room, where 
  we would sit, the center of a circle of friends who came and ate 
  and went -- while we acted as the host and hostess of a dining 
  hall salon).

  "What was who like?" she asked.

  "The centurion I play, the poor shouted-at, ordered-about, 
  probably uneducated, underpaid, maybe unfeeling soldier who 
  really did drive the nails through Christ's arms."

  She made a face and a clicking noise at me. "Don't go getting 
  all method on me, Tim."

  I laughed. "Unlikely. But don't you ever wonder? Don't you think 
  about what Mary really thought as she watched her son dying?"

  "You're so Catholic," she said. "I never think that stuff, 
  because it just doesn't matter. What matters, dear Tim, is what 
  the playwright and the director think the character thinks. 
  There's no relationship between reality and art."

  "And no relationship between art and acting," said Robin, who 
  was eating with us.

  Holly made a face at Robin, too, but one with more tolerance 
  than she'd shown me. "Especially not when Tim is the actor," she 
  said.

  "Which reminds me, Tim," Robin said to me, "when you're using 
  that mallet, go easy. I have bruises from where you hit me last 
  night."

  "Sorry," I said, "I've always been dangerous to my fellow 
  actors." I told them the story of "Little Red Riding Hood," and 
  the table convulsed in laughter. It made me feel so alive, to be 
  the center of this group of talented, happy people, and to be 
  envied because I sat with Holly and walked her back to her dorm 
  each night after dinner.

  Holly, ah, Holly. I have a picture of her somewhere, but I don't 
  need to find it. I remember it clearly. She was wearing a dark 
  turtleneck and a single string of beads -- possibly pearls, 
  possibly plastic. Her head is tilted upward, not much, but 
  enough to indicate that her family came over (probably) on the 
  Mayflower. She's looking off to one side, "stage right," I'd 
  guess, with a serene, somewhat arrogant smile on her lips. She 
  was not, I have to admit, beautiful. Certainly my wife, whose 
  classic bone structure and dark laughing eyes still take my 
  breath away, is far lovelier. But Holly had a certain presence, 
  a fire in her yellowish eyes, a bearing that made her noticeable 
  everywhere.

  "Pictures at an Exhibition" went off well, as such things go. 
  Robin got rave reviews in the college newspaper, and the drama 
  department chairman noticed Holly. I hit Robin too hard on his 
  left arm on the first night, drawing a wince (though no sound -- 
  Marceau would have been proud of his mute pupil), but I pulled 
  my blows sufficiently through the other performances. 
  Nonetheless, I was so wooden that even my altar boy looks never 
  got me another role, not even as an extra.

  I felt like an idiot again, this time because of my costume, 
  which I had only found out about the night before in dress 
  rehearsal. I was given a cardboard breastplate and backpiece, 
  both painted silver, a helmet with a plume, and a short skirt. 
  "Your sprinter's legs will look good in that," Robin told me. 
  He, himself, for this scene, would be wearing a loincloth and 
  nothing else. On the day of our opening, Holly gave me a pair of 
  light brown dancer's pants, the kind that go under cheerleader's 
  skirts. "What's this?" I asked.

  "Well, you can't wear boxer shorts on stage, Tim. Everyone will 
  notice. I suppose the ancients wore nothing under their skirts, 
  but I don't think my altar boy could go that far for accuracy, 
  so wear these."

  Actually, I wore briefs, not boxers, but Holly didn't know that. 
  I was thinking that my white underwear would be noticeable, so I 
  took Holly's advice.



  2.
----

  We did the five performances, Friday, Saturday, a Sunday 
  matinee, and then the following Friday and Saturday again. 
  Perhaps a thousand people saw my legs and maybe got a brief 
  flash of my dancer's panties. Mother Mary wept on cue. Robin 
  clung to the stout nails we had driven into the heavy wooden 
  cross, and I and another athlete lifted the cross to the 
  vertical position where Robin as Christ hung for thirty seconds 
  while Moussagorsky played a dirge for him. Then the lights came 
  down, Robin leapt off his martyr's perch and scurried to change 
  into another costume, and I was done. Holly had parts in two 
  other scenes.

  I liked being in Robin's show. My parents even drove up and saw 
  it, but Holly, somehow, disappeared before I could introduce 
  her. I was proud of my girlfriend, and wanted them to like her, 
  but all they could say was that she was pretty.

  Holly and I were a settled couple by then, well known to all in 
  the freshman class. Dean had faded away, and there was no other 
  girl in my life. I had decided already -- though I kept this to 
  myself -- that I would marry Holly and we would live happily 
  ever after.

  When I look back now on the end of that October, I am amazed at 
  how little I really knew about life and love and sex -- all of 
  which seemed inseparable and simple to me then. But, in fact, 
  they were three distinct things, and though I was undoubtedly 
  living, and I thought I was both loving and the object of love, 
  sex was still a shadowy unreality. As I said, Holly didn't know 
  that I wore briefs instead of boxers because we had not made 
  love. Not that we had all that many opportunities. Evanston, in 
  1967, was still a relatively conservative place, where men were 
  allowed only in the lounges of the women's dorms, and women were 
  allowed to visit the men's dorms only for an hour on Sundays, 
  and the door to the room must stay open at all times for those 
  60 minutes.

  Holly and I were both virgins, but she obviously knew much more 
  than I did. We found places to be left alone to kiss and grope, 
  but no place comfortable or private enough to do much more than 
  that. I, however, felt we were making enormous progress. I timed 
  our kisses, and felt that the longer we were locked mouth to 
  mouth the closer we were getting to the happily ever after.

  There were strange and radical things happening, protests 
  against the Vietnam War and intensely fierce struggles for 
  personal freedom by the college kids of the day. In France 
  (which seems far from Evanston, I know -- but I was a French 
  major, so I paid attention), the students were preparing to 
  rebel again, and before my freshman year was out I would see on 
  TV the barricades going up around the Sorbonne. But Holly, who 
  went to Paris that Christmas, never noticed. She was in a world 
  of her own, and she drew me completely into it.

  We developed a routine with each other. Holly, never an early 
  riser, skipped breakfast, while I worked in the cafeteria during 
  those hours. Then we both had classes, but we would catch up at 
  lunch, sitting together in the dining room, chattering with 
  friends and each other. Afternoons we would sit near each other 
  in the library, studying, catching up on our work. Usually 
  around three, Holly would yawn and stretch, and come over to me 
  and kiss me on the forehead and tell me she was heading back to 
  her dorm. That meant, in our code, that she was taking a nap. I 
  let her go, and then I would either go to my room to nap as 
  well, or continue studying. If it was a fair day outside (and 
  that season, I seem to recall, had many fair days) I would join 
  the touch football games on the lawn. If it was rainy, I'd stay 
  snug in the library.

  At 5:30 she and I would meet once more by the dining hall, and 
  then hold court at our table until the workers chased us out at 
  7:30. Holly, I noticed, was a fastidious eater, taking small 
  bites and chewing them carefully, swallowing with hardly a 
  movement of her throat. I tried my poor best to imitate her, to 
  change my shanty Irish manners to fit her Mayflower form. After 
  dinner we would again study together, and then, around 10, we 
  would walk to her dorm slowly, hand-in-hand, stopping frequently 
  beneath trees or in the shadow of buildings to kiss and caress 
  each other through the layers of clothing an Evanston night 
  required.

  For me that next month, November 1967, was one of the best I had 
  ever lived. I've had better months, years, decades since -- but 
  then I was very young, and I had been sheltered and lonely, 
  thinking that by reading Sartre and Zola in French I was somehow 
  worldly. Holly, I realized, truly was sophisticated. If I knew 
  French, well, she knew French kissing, which (for a while, at 
  least) seemed much more useful. Holly seemed to me to have come 
  from an entirely different world than I had, even if we had 
  grown up less than 50 miles apart.

  My family lived in Beloit, a small town on the border of 
  Illinois, halfway across the state. Beloit was the kind of place 
  where the one Chinese restaurant served white bread with every 
  meal, and the local paper (The Beloit Daily News, which I 
  delivered every day from the time I was 12 until I left for 
  Northwestern) reported as front page news the building of a new 
  dentist's office. The small house I grew up in on Grant Street 
  was noisy and crowded and untidy. My father worked across the 
  state line in Rockford as a journeyman printer, and moonlighted 
  on the weekends in a bar. I never saw Dad drunk, but I never saw 
  him in a suit, either, except when someone in the family got 
  married or died.

  Holly's father was a vice-chairman (or something) of the Wausau 
  Insurance Company, a CPA and an attorney. "Wallace Stevens was 
  vice president of Hartford Insurance," I said one day, having 
  learned this bit of literary trivia in a freshman lit course 
  that week.

  "Yes," Holly replied, "Daddy has met him at industry conventions 
  and so on. He's a nice man, Daddy says, but his poems are 
  foolish muddle."

  "Is that what you think?" I asked. I had always had trouble with 
  Stevens's imagery myself.

  "That's what Daddy thinks. We have an autographed copy of one of 
  his books at home, but I've never read it." What Daddy thought 
  was much more important to Holly. She was his youngest, his 
  special pet. He gave her an allowance of $200 a week -- which 
  was possibly equal to what my father was making in those days.

  Holly's mother was a different story. She worried about Holly 
  constantly. It was a source of irritation, if not shame, that 
  Holly loved acting so much. To Mrs. Austin (to this day I do not 
  know that woman's first name -- Bob Austin called his wife 
  "Mother") appearance and conduct were everything.

  I got to meet the Austins at the end of Christmas vacation 
  freshman year. Holly, as I said, had so much money from her 
  allowance that she decided to go to Paris for Christmas, to 
  visit her older sister, who was married to an American diplomat 
  stationed there. (Claudia, the oldest of the Austin children, 
  had her mother's full approval, as did Bob, Jr., their only son, 
  who was a senior at Yale that year.)

  But she wrote me to come visit her when she returned. I made an 
  adventure of the trip. Since I had no car of my own, and neither 
  my father nor my mother could spare their cars, I took a train 
  from Rockford down into Chicago, where I spent the morning at 
  the Art Institute and looking at the Picasso sculpture in front 
  of the courthouse. It was December 29th and very cold. Finally, 
  I went back to the Chicago and Northwestern station on Evanston 
  Street, and took one of their double-decker green-and-yellow 
  trains north along Lake Michigan through the wealthy towns of 
  Glencoe and Winnetka and Lake Forest and on into Wisconsin to 
  Whitefish Bay.

  Holly met me at the train station. She had on a Loden coat and a 
  brand new Parisian beret. She had brought me leather-bound 
  French editions of Hugo and Dumas, the only two French authors 
  she had ever heard of, I believe.

  Holly drove us down to Milwaukee's art museum, and we wandered 
  hand-in-hand looking at 18th and 19th century Americana. Then we 
  drove back to her house. Her parents were out for the evening, 
  so we made our own dinner -- fondue, believe it or not -- and we 
  necked in her den until 10, when her dog, a very ugly little 
  dachshund, began whining at the front door.

  "They're home," Holly said, pushing my hand off her breast and 
  straightening her hair. We both stood up and went to the living 
  room, where I discovered that her parents were small, very 
  well-groomed people (no surprise there), and that they called 
  Holly "Buttons." That was a revelation.

  "Buttons?" I said softly, and Holly kicked me in the ankle.

  "Daddy, Mummy, this is Tim Donahue, the boy I've told you so 
  much about."

  I gravely shook hands, aware that the hand I extended had just 
  been under this man's daughter's blouse, and tried to say "How 
  do you do," as clearly and sincerely as I could. My mouth was 
  dry.

  Bob Austin said, "Welcome, I hope your drive was not too bad in 
  this cold weather."

  "Um," I said, "I took the train."

  "From Beloit? Well, that's a surprise. I didn't know anything 
  ran from those parts to here."

  "No," I replied, "I had some business to do in Chicago this 
  morning, so I left from there." I felt very sophisticated saying 
  I had had business in Chicago.

  "I see," he answered. "Well, welcome, welcome. Buttons always 
  has the run of our garage, so I'm sure you'll be able to get 
  around just fine while you're here."

  There had been a new Buick along with the Oldsmobile station 
  wagon we had used in the three car garage, and now they were 
  home, so I expected that what he said was true.

  Mrs. Austin just looked me over from head to toe while I had 
  that car chat with Bob Sr.

  Holly said, "Doesn't he just look like an altar boy, Mummy? You 
  should have seen him nailing Christ to the cross!"

  Mrs. Austin's eyes, already an icy blue, became absolutely 
  glacial. "Are you an actor, also?" she asked in a tone as 
  distant as 1620.

  "No," I denied. "They just picked me for my looks."

  An eyebrow raised a millimeter. Evidently one didn't boast in 
  the Austin household, nor did one make jokes.

  "I am glad to meet you," she lied. "Holly, put Tim in the blue 
  lake room. I'm sure if he was in Chicago on business this 
  morning he must be tired by now. I know we are," she said.

  "Yes, Mummy," Holly replied meekly. But when Mrs. Austin turned 
  to go up the stairs, Holly stuck her tongue out at her mother's 
  back. Bob Austin saw this, and winked at his daughter. "Good 
  night, Buttons. Good night, Tim," he said, following his wife.

  The blue lake room turned out to be a guest room on the third 
  floor, under the eaves of the big Victorian house. The ceiling 
  was high, but slanted. Out a wide double window I could see the 
  dark mass of Lake Michigan disappearing toward the east. The 
  furnishings were polished oak, and included a chest of drawers, 
  a desk and chair, and a wide double bed.

  "Are you staying here with me?" I asked with a grin.

  "Calm down, young altar boy. I'm sure Mummy is just at the 
  bottom of the stairs waiting, oh, so innocently for me."

  "I think you were right," I said. "She does hate me."

  "Not yet," said Holly. "But I'm sure she will." She kissed the 
  air between us and was gone. I sighed and unpacked my small 
  suitcase. Although I had gotten it new before heading off to 
  Evanston in September, the thing looked shabby and cheap to me. 
  That was, of course, in comparison. As I looked around the room 
  all I saw was wealth and what I took for good taste. The colors 
  were muted blues and light grays, with blond wood and a 
  multi-colored quilt. On the walls hung framed photographs of 
  ducks, eagles, wood grouse, and a sunset over a wide lake. I 
  looked closely at that one, it could have been a sunrise, I 
  supposed. It was peaceful and beautiful, either way.

  Looking for a closet, I opened a door and discovered an entire 
  bathroom at my disposal. This was wealth, I thought; in my house 
  there were two bathrooms for the eight of us. The tub was an 
  old-fashioned monster on legs with lion's paws. Although it was 
  already 10:15, I filled the tub, took a paperback book from my 
  jacket pocket (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), and settled 
  into the hot water.

  While I was offstage (and in the bath, how's that for irony?), 
  the high water mark of my relationship took place. Holly tiptoed 
  up the stairs and turned down the quilt for me. She left a 
  single poinsettia on my pillow. Finding that there when I came 
  out of the bathroom half an hour later practically brought tears 
  to my eyes. I vowed that Mrs. Austin would not hate me, but 
  would, rather, embrace me far tighter than her diplomat 
  son-in-law. I don't think I had ever wanted anything more before 
  that moment, not even a bicycle when I was eight.

  Looking back now, however, I think Holly was hoping for just the 
  opposite. She desperately wanted her mother to loathe me, 
  mistrust me, and hold me in contempt. I was part of Holly's 
  rebellion, her break with Mummy. But it had to be on Holly's 
  terms, which meant that Mummy must be the one to fire the first 
  salvo. As I lay beneath the quilt in that attic bedroom that 
  night, I never realized it, but I was the tethered goat, the 
  sacrifice to flush out the lioness for a clean shot.

  I did my best over the next two days. I spoke softly and 
  respectfully to Mrs. Austin. I listened to Bob Austin's Pete 
  Fountain records and heard about his experiences in the 
  quartermaster corps during the war, when he had been based at 
  Fort Sheridan just down the road in Illinois for all four years. 
  (I despised him a bit for his smugness over that cushy post -- 
  my father had flown P-38s over the Pacific and had been shot 
  down once. His war, I felt, gave him a right to boast -- but Dad 
  never spoke of his experiences. The only comment he ever made 
  was that he joined the air corps in the hopes the war would end 
  before he finished his training.)

  We watched the Packers win the famous Ice Bowl game against the 
  Dallas Cowboys on television, and the Austins took us out to a 
  steakhouse to celebrate. The next day we took the bus to 
  Evanston.

  In January 1968, the drama department announced open auditions 
  for the winter play, Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Holly told me 
  she was going to try out for a part, and I kissed her and wished 
  her great good luck.

  "This doesn't take good luck," she said. "An audition takes 
  preparation. Let's read the play together, all right?"

  So for a week every night we read aloud in a corner of the 
  coffeehouse. Our friends came by and chatted. People played "The 
  Crystal Ship" and "How Can I Be Sure?" on the jukebox. A quartet 
  of stuffy seniors played bridge every night from 8 until 10. 
  Gossip flew past us. We read Shakespeare. I took the male parts 
  one by one, while Holly read every line of the only female parts 
  Miranda and Ariel ("sometimes played by a boy, but most often by 
  a woman, and a really great role," she told me). But it was 
  Miranda she wanted.

  Four hours a night we read, and often at dinner or lunch Holly 
  would dig into her bag and drag out the battered paperback to go 
  over a line or two. I remember thinking that we were using time 
  that could have been used for kissing and fondling, but I 
  dismissed the thought as unworthy of undying love. I would walk 
  her back to her dorm, but we no longer held hands. Holly was 
  practicing gestures. Now and then I would see her with Robin and 
  they would be blocking out a scene or two. I was not jealous -- 
  I was glad someone else (and someone who was an actor, at that) 
  was involved with her passion. But I was left out.

  The night of the audition came, and Holly asked me not to 
  accompany her. "I'm afraid I'll be worried about you, if you're 
  there," she said. "I love you. I'll call you later."

  Robin came by before she called. "It was a cakewalk," he said, 
  "A triumph. She blew them away. Poor Trisha, who used to get all 
  the good roles.... She's history now. Holly was a revelation."

  "She got the part of Miranda?" I asked.

  "She had them eating out of her hand," Robin said.

  Holly called just after, and I listened to her tell me all about 
  it, pretending I hadn't heard it before. She gushed, she 
  preened, she was overflowing.

  Rehearsals began soon after. Holly worked every night at her 
  part -- a part I thought she already knew inside out, upside 
  down, and backwards. But she dove into it. When I reminded her 
  she had other work to do, she frowned. "Tim, this is my work. 
  This is what I want to do. This isn't just fun."

  I could see that. She was visibly dragging from the effort. But 
  I could see she was also loving every minute of it. "I hope 
  you'll have time for me, at least," I joked.

  "I'll always have time for you," she said.

  But she lied. She didn't have time for me. One day I said that 
  to her and she blew up. We were standing on the darkened stage 
  after the end of another long rehearsal. Everyone else had left 
  already. Holly was swaying on her feet, ready to pass out. It 
  seemed like torture to me, and she was suffering. But she came 
  to life and snapped at me. "What is wrong with you, Tim? Don't 
  you get it? I want to be somebody. This is my talent. This is 
  what I can do, and do well. This is the me I love. You can't 
  take that away from me."

  "I wouldn't want to, Holly," I said. "I just want to be part of 
  your life."

  "I've seen you on this very stage, Tim. This isn't part of your 
  life."

  "But you are," I said.

  She shook her head fiercely. "This is my life," she repeated. "I 
  am an actress. This is what I do. I don't do fantasies of being 
  the French teacher's little wife back home. I'm bigger than 
  that."

  She stared at me with such anger, such passion, such vehemence 
  that I almost believed she was bigger than that, bigger than I 
  was. I recoiled.

  "Tim..." she paused, and I waited for her to say what I knew she 
  was going to say, what I would have said to her, to say she was 
  sorry and that she was overwrought and tired and she didn't mean 
  it.

  "Tim," she repeated, "I don't think we should see each other any 
  more. It's no good. You're not for me. You deserve something 
  else." She turned and exited, stage left.

  I was mute, stranded without a line. After standing stock still 
  for a while, I left also, leaping down from the stage and 
  walking through the empty seats. I can't believe it, I thought. 
  I went back to my room and lay awake all night.

  I actually made Dean's List that term. Each night, I ate quickly 
  and returned to my carrel in the language library. I read all of 
  Proust and Gide and Balzac. I tried Robbe-Grillet and Malraux. I 
  read Moliere and Racine, but I avoided Shakespeare. I didn't go 
  see "The Tempest," though I read in the college paper that Holly 
  was superb.

  When spring came and the year ended, I took the bus back to 
  Beloit and found a job driving a truck for a bakery. Holly, I 
  learned later, went to New York where she and her brother shared 
  an apartment. He started a job as an investment banker. She made 
  the rounds of auditions for off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway 
  shows.

  Sophomore year she was gone, off in the road company of "The 
  Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds." Robin 
  occasionally heard from her, and now and then he'd tell me 
  something. I got better, though less trusting. Time went on, and 
  so on and so on.

  I used to think that Holly broke my heart. But it has kept right 
  on beating, hasn't it? I don't really have any scars -- just a 
  tender spot or two, like a bruise, maybe. But the whole episode 
  lasted perhaps 20 weeks from start to finish. A Broadway play 
  with so short a run would be a flop, even if not a disaster. To 
  be realistic, "Romeo and Juliet" it wasn't. I can't even be 
  certain that I learned any lesson at all from loving Holly, 
  except to stop, which I did more than 30 years ago. Have the 
  years since been kind to her? I don't know. I don't care. She is 
  really not my concern anymore.

  And so now I've seen "The Tempest," a play I had never before 
  seen staged. It was like an old friend. I recognized the lines 
  as they came. I noticed that Ariel was played by a woman, a 
  slender girl of 18 or so, with hope in her eyes and a lightness 
  to her step. Miranda seemed starchy to me, too tall and dark.

  My wife clapped and clapped when it was over, as did my sons. 
  And so did I. I'm sorry I've avoided that play for so many 
  years. My quarrel wasn't with Shakespeare; he did nothing to me. 
  And did Holly? I remember a conversation with Robin, just after 
  Holly had pushed me away. "I miss her," I said.

  "Go find another girl," Robin said. "You need to be more 
  cynical; right now you're an incurable romantic."

  Well, Robin was wrong. I was very curable, after all. I'm happy 
  and in love with a beautiful, happy woman. I do teach French, 
  and my students like me. My sons are happy and smart. Maybe it 
  really is a matter of mental health. My oldest son turns 18 
  soon. He's gotten his driver's license. He's trying to choose a 
  college. He's tall and handsome -- he doesn't have the face of 
  an altar boy. He's more Byronic, though he also seems clueless. 
  Should I tell him the real facts of life? That there's a Holly 
  Austin out there for everyone? Will he believe me if I say a 
  broken heart is only a flesh wound?

  MIRANDA: I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of....



  Brian Quinn (bquinn@molloy.edu)
---------------------------------
  Brian Quinn is the chief writer and an instructor of writing at 
  Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York. He has been a 
  public relations writer, a speechwriter, an advertising 
  copywriter and television commercial script writer. He has 
  ghostwritten two books, is a member of the National Association 
  of Science Writers, and is a consultant to the National Hockey 
  League and the American Lung Association. Besides writing short 
  stories, he is currently at work on a novel of the Civil War.
  
 

  Barely Human   by James Michaels
==================================
....................................................................
  In a world gone mad, our humanity can be our greatest asset
  -- and greatest weapon.
....................................................................

  1.
----

  The Japanese officer's head exploded in a spray of fine 
  particles that looked gray-green through Sayla's scope.

  As the headless corpse toppled to the pavement, the rest of the 
  patrol -- PacRim conscripts who tended to lose unit cohesion 
  rapidly -- scattered wildly into the darkness and rubble on 
  either side of the street. They disappeared into the ruins 
  before Sayla had a chance to draw a bead on another. One of the 
  drawbacks of a magcoil-rifle was that it fired slowly. The 
  battery-powered sniper rifles used magnetic rails rather than a 
  chemical charge to propel a round. It was silent, flashless, and 
  it threw slugs through a magnetized tube with a muzzle velocity 
  over 1,700 meters per second. At that speed, the simple, 
  cold-cracked iron balls exploded like small bombs on impact. A 
  perfect sniper weapon, virtually useless for anything else.

  Which was unfortunate, Sayla thought, because one of the Japs' 
  big dogs had been with the patrol below. Bagging the dog would 
  have been good, she told herself. Usually, if a dog was with a 
  Japanese patrol, the officer led it. Oddly, another led this 
  dog. A Rimmer? Had to be. Patrols never had more than one 
  officer.

  With a perfunctory wave at the surface-to-air missile unit 
  perched on top of the building across the street, Sayla slung 
  the coil-rifle over one shoulder and peered expectantly at the 
  western horizon. A chopper was almost certainly already on its 
  way from one of the helicopter carriers offshore. The SAM crew 
  would wait until the chopper showed and then knock it down. 
  Hopefully. Meanwhile, Patriot ground forces would move in and 
  mop up the rest of the patrol.

  Standard Japanese tactics were to send a patrol to draw fire and 
  when the Patriots struck, send in a chopper to put rockets and 
  mini-gun rounds into everything within a square block. It had 
  worked, once. The Northern California Patriots had been losing 
  the war. The Japs had been slowly pushing the Patriot lines back 
  from the beaches. Then Patriot tactics changed, they stopped 
  fighting the way the Japanese wanted, stopped engaging patrols 
  head-on and heads up and figured out a better way.

  It was simple math: There were millions of Rimmer conscripts but 
  there were only so many Japanese officers.

  _Attrition_ was what officers called it. Snipers called it 
  capping Japs. When the call went out for more snipers, Sayla 
  left changing bedpans in field hospitals and volunteered.

  Smiling, she made a mental note to carve a sixteenth notch in 
  the rigid polystyrene of her rifle's stock, then she crabbed 
  away from the edge of the building, crossed the rooftop, and 
  dropped through a blast hole into the apartment below. Inside, 
  she crouched still for a moment, listening for any sound in the 
  dark. There wasn't much left of the apartment. There never was. 
  It had been a moneygrubber's apartment. Between the rioting and 
  the fighting, these were the kinds of places hardest hit.

  Looking around the empty apartment, she supposed its 'grubber 
  occupants had fled to Oregon. Or maybe not.

  She remembered a carload of 'grubbers her Brigade of Allah had 
  come on. She remembered their car, big and shiny, glittering in 
  the light of torches and fires and stopped by sheer numbers as 
  it smashed into the massed bodies of the Brigade. She remembered 
  the man, shotgunned in the gut, then ripped to shreds by 
  screaming Brothers and Sisters. She remembered the two women. 
  And the girl. The girl had been about Sayla's age with blue eyes 
  and shiny blond hair tied up in a thick braid.

  The women and the girl weren't allowed to die as quickly, as 
  easily, as had the man.

  Men from the Nation of Islam and the Aztlan Coalition organized 
  the Brigades and the Corps De Hidalgo. These men, who came into 
  the streets after most of Oakland had already burned, called on 
  the mobs to turn on their true enemies. Given specific targets 
  and tasks, the rioting mobs became an army and had moved out of 
  the Projects, out of the poor neighborhoods, the black and brown 
  neighborhoods, into the moneygrubber neighborhoods. Sayla, her 
  mother missing, probably dead, was swept up into a Brigade, made 
  a Sister in the Nation of Islam, put to work in a field 
  hospital.

  Overwhelming the police and the National Guard, they fought the 
  others then -- the Christian militias, the White Aryan 
  Resistance and the Korean and Chinese neighborhood protective 
  forces. By the time real U.S. soldiers arrived, what TV was 
  calling riots had become a war.

  The Brigade leaders, the mullahs, said that many of the soldiers 
  -- white, African, Latino, Asian -- refused to fire on other 
  Americans, turned their rifles, their tanks, their helicopters 
  instead on their commanders, or one another, then deserted and 
  joined one side or the other.

  The army wasn't there long. A week after the American soldiers 
  were gone, the Japanese invaded California.

  The mullahs said the war had spread to other parts of the 
  country: New England, Florida, Texas, New York, even Idaho, 
  Montana, and Alaska. They said the Japanese were only part of a 
  U.N. peacekeeping force along with Eurotrash and Imperial 
  Russians. Sayla had never seen anything on the other end of her 
  scope that wasn't either Japanese or a Rimmer, though. Talk was 
  that blue hat Eurotrash were in Florida and New York while the 
  Russians had landed in Texas and Alaska. In California, the Japs 
  were keeping the peace, but their arrival had pulled NoCal's 
  battling factions together. They said the Japs were even worse 
  than the White Aryans and the Californian Asians. The mullahs 
  said NoCal had to solve its own problems and the Japs had no 
  business here.

  Sayla started at the unmistakable rip of a chopper's minigun. It 
  must already have been somewhere nearby to have arrived so 
  quickly, she thought.

  She sprinted through the apartment and out the shattered doorway 
  into a broad, empty hallway. Seeing no movement in the gloomy 
  hallway, she dashed for the stairs she knew lay at the far end. 
  The Jap chopper would blast everything in a five hundred meter 
  circle. It would try to find the SAM emplacement before it found 
  them.

  And they would try to kill the sniper.

  At the hiss of rocket fire she dove for the relative safety of 
  the stairwell's reinforced concrete. A flash erupted behind her. 
  The air seemed to crumple inward. A pounding concussion filled 
  the hallway, lifting and pushing her.

  She tried to maintain her footing, almost succeeded when the 
  second rocket hit. Her feet slipped from beneath her. She felt 
  herself falling. With a detached calm she noted that her 
  coil-rifle was probably wrecked. Then a blank grayness, like the 
  sky over the ocean before an autumn storm, closed over her.



  Sayla moved and it felt as if someone were trying to saw her 
  head in half just above her nose. She moved again, sending an 
  even greater pain racing up her left arm.

  Clenching her teeth, she levered herself into a sitting position 
  with her right arm. Nothing was visible. It was as if her head 
  was inside a black sack. Feeling around her with her good arm, 
  she realized she wasn't in the stairwell. How much time had 
  passed? She cocked her head and listened. Nothing. No gunfire, 
  no choppers. She examined her aching head with her right hand, 
  found dried blood, and matted hair. She might have a concussion, 
  she thought.

  Gingerly, she felt along the length of her injured arm. It was 
  difficult to tell for sure, but she thought the break was just 
  below her elbow. Grinding her teeth against the agony, she 
  gently lifted her left arm with the right and stuffed her 
  swollen hand into a space between two buttons on her fatigue 
  blouse. Snipers wore black fatigues and Sayla was glad she 
  didn't have to wear the aba and chador worn by other women of 
  the Nation of Islam. A chador had no buttons. She sat back, 
  gulping air, and made a quick inventory: She couldn't find her 
  coil-rifle and the holster at her belt was missing its flat, 
  ten-millimeter pistol. Her hand dropped to one boot, found the 
  small dagger still seated in its scabbard. Sayla knew nothing 
  about fighting with a knife, but its presence was comforting 
  nonetheless.

  Leaning back again, she decided she'd find her rifle, then make 
  her way down to the street. It wouldn't be easy going, but she 
  couldn't just stay there. No one would risk trying to find one 
  lost sniper who was probably dead anyhow.

  "You cannot get out," a man's voice said mildly from somewhere 
  within the gloom.

  Sayla's ragged breathing ceased. Her pain seemed to spiral down 
  to a tiny point in her gut. She squinted sharply into the 
  darkness, and her hand shot back to the dagger in her boot. 
  Quickly, she drew the small blade from its spring-held seat.

  "It is all right. You need not be... afraid," the voice said 
  again.

  "W-who's that?" Sayla managed. "You a Scabber?" Scabbers, 
  scavengers who hadn't been able -- or willing -- to leave the 
  war zone, were mostly harmless. Sometimes, they even helped 
  Patriots.

  "No."

  She swallowed. "You a Patriot?" she asked, doubtfully.

  "No, not that either," the voice answered quietly.

  "Jesus Christ," she whispered. "Y-you a fuckin' Rimmer?"

  "No," the voice answered just as quietly, but more forcefully.

  The breath squeezed from her lungs.

  "A Jap." The words escaped with her breath and seemed to push 
  her deeper into the darkness she hoped would swallow her.

  "Do not be afraid," he said. "My leg is broken. And I lost my 
  weapons when the rockets struck this place."

  I'll kill him.

  The thought filled Sayla's head like the flash of a detonating 
  rocket. But how? Her left arm was useless. Her only weapon, the 
  knife, seemed ridiculously tiny. And what if he was lying? Japs 
  lied all the time. Everybody knew that.

  "The only door to this place is buried beneath much rubble. The 
  hallway roof has collapsed, I think."

  She shouldn't believe him, she knew. But why would he be there 
  if he could escape? Even on a broken leg she knew _she'd_ find 
  some way to keep moving. Wouldn't a Jap? And why was she still 
  alive? Why hadn't he -- ?

  "I wish to surrender," the Japanese said from inside his part of 
  the darkness, almost in answer to Sayla's unspoken questions. 
  "To you."

  She stared silently into the empty blackness, unsure of her 
  hearing.

  "Do you understand? I wish to surrender."

  Surrender? Japs don't surrender, she told herself. Wasn't it a 
  part of their religion, or something? A CIO had spoken to her 
  unit about it one time, had said something about how a Japanese 
  who surrendered would never get into Jap heaven. The mullahs 
  said things like that, too. Dying in battle was a ticket to 
  heaven, they said.

  "Japs don't surrender," Sayla croaked.

  He laughed. A soft, low, sad sound.

  "Is this what they tell you? That we do not surrender?" he 
  finally said.

  "Everybody knows."

  "Yes," he said and then laughed again. "I suppose they do," he 
  went on. "Everyone knows things about you Americans, too."

  "I ain't ever seen a Jap prisoner," she said defiantly. "Plenty 
  o' Rimmers. No Japs, though."

  "Why do you think that is?"

  What a stupid question, Sayla thought and was about to say so. 
  "'Cause Japs don't surrender," she repeated.

  He laughed, again. The sound made her blink as if against a cool 
  gust of wind off the ocean.

  By his voice she could tell he was shaking his head. "Others, 
  perhaps. It is the religion of many. They believe to die for the 
  Emperor will guarantee their entry to..." he paused. "...you 
  would know it as heaven. I do not. Believe."

  "I used to believe in humanity, in the faith, hope, and glory of 
  being human," he said. "But I have lost my _faith_. I don't know 
  what glory is. We are taught that war is glory. My father says 
  this teaching is new and old at the same time."

  Sayla said nothing. How could something be new and old? Why was 
  the Jap telling her all this?

  "All then that remains is hope, yes? Hope of something 
  beyond...." He did not speak for a long moment. "Can I hope for 
  a place beyond all this horror and sadness?" he finally said, 
  his voice lower and rougher. "I don't know."

  Sounds came to Sayla, cutting the darkness, spreading it apart. 
  In the darkness the Jap was sobbing.

  Japs didn't surrender. Everybody knew. And Japs sure as hell 
  didn't cry.

  She didn't cry. Even when loss and fear washed over her like a 
  dual tide, and she longed to have back things she couldn't quite 
  remember and to forget things she could, the tears stayed away.

  She sat, listening to the Japanese soldier softly weeping, the 
  two of them separated by the empty wall of darkness.



  The popping of small arms fire startled Sayla; she'd fallen 
  asleep. Eyes wide, she peered desperately into the dark. It was 
  difficult to tell for sure, but it sounded as if the firefight 
  outside was moving closer.

  "They are moving this way," a voice came out of the dark room 
  before her, echoing her thoughts.

  The Japanese soldier. Hadn't she dreamed of him, dreamed his 
  face? She squinted into the dark, backtracing the path of his 
  voice.

  "Your friends," the Japanese said. "They will be happy to find 
  you, I think. Happy to find me, too. I think."

  "Yeah, man," Sayla said, the words rasping in her dry throat. 
  "Be plenty happy to find me. But you're gonna be one dead -- "

  The words had come to her almost automatically. So many times 
  she had sat with other Patriots, talking trash about what they 
  would do if they got their hands on a Japanese soldier. But 
  three hundred meters was as close as Sayla ever came to a 
  Japanese. At sniping range, death was a colorless, soundless 
  image. Her fingers loosened on her knife.

  "Yes, I suppose they will," he replied quietly. "Surely it is 
  not often you Americans find an Imperial Japanese officer. 
  Alive. Not many come here anymore. Only those who have not 
  pleased their superiors."

  What he said made sense. Then another thought occurred to her: 
  She'd killed a Jap officer. This one, the one she'd somehow 
  missed, must have been leading --

  The _dog_.

  "Dog?" She spoke unconsciously, her fingers tightening around 
  the knife again.

  "Yes." He said immediately. "She is with me."

  A sharp coldness, like a bullet of ice, seemed to punch a hole 
  right through her chest. The big dogs were new to the war. 
  Everybody knew the animals alerted Jap patrols to the presence 
  of a Patriot ambush. Capping Japs required greater distance, 
  more caution now. But the two hundred pound dogs could kill, 
  too.

  If he wanted to kill her, the dog was as good as any rifle or 
  pistol. Maybe better. In the dark, the dog wouldn't miss.

  "I'm finding a way outta here," she announced, struggling to her 
  feet, keeping her back to the wall. "You go ahead 'n sic your 
  dog on me if you want." She stood in a half-crouch, pointing the 
  tiny knife into the dark, preparing for the Jap's command, the 
  animal's attack.

  "Yes. I understand. You should not... trust me," the Japanese 
  soldier said after a moment. "The doorway is to your right. This 
  room has no windows. A utility room, I think." He was quiet 
  again, then went on. "I could not kill you. I have lost my 
  weapons, and my dog," he drew a deep, wavering breath. "She is 
  dying."

  Sayla paused and considered this. She liked dogs, would often 
  take scraps of food to the feral dogs that lived beyond 
  Company's perimeter. It made her sick when other Patriots would 
  use the pathetic strays for target practice. Was the Jap lying?

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "Hit. A bullet, I think. In her lower abdomen."

  She'd seen gut shot soldiers in hospital. It was bad. Always.

  Grunting against the pain, she stuffed her useless arm deeper 
  into the space between the buttons on her shirt. She moved to 
  her right, inching along the wall and feeling for the door with 
  her good arm.

  Her fingers found the doorframe and she reached across the cool 
  expanse of steel door to find a heavy round knob. The Jap had 
  said the door was blocked. Japs lied. But the door was where 
  he'd said it would be.

  Sayla twisted the doorknob and pushed. Nothing. She put her 
  right shoulder into it and it gave a half-inch, but no more. The 
  Jap hadn't lied. Something was blocking the door from the other 
  side.

  "I am ashamed I cannot help you," the Japanese said quietly.

  Anger rose in her at his words, pushing the pain aside. "Well, 
  maybe you shoulda thought that before you decided to invade my 
  country," she said. "Things was just fine before -- " A quiet, 
  high-pitched sound cut her words short. It took a moment for 
  Sayla to identify the sound. The dog.

  Words, Japanese words in a soothing tone followed the dog's 
  whining out of the darkness.

  "I got some medic training," Sayla said. "Maybe I can take a 
  look at it. The dog, I mean."

  "Could you?" said the voice in the darkness.

  She started toward the sound of his voice then stopped. This is 
  crazy, she thought. She had no idea what was really there in the 
  dark. Maybe the Jap had a knife, just wanted her to get close. 
  Why would she help a Jap dog?

  "If you can't move," she asked, testing, "how'd you know where 
  the door is?"

  "It is the way I came here with you. Before the second rocket 
  barrage collapsed the ceiling."

  She grunted again. "You brought me here? How? I mean, if your 
  leg's all busted up?" And why?

  "I had to do something. The helicopter was coming back. This 
  room is in the center of the building. It is the most safe 
  place."

  Gunfire erupted again somewhere outside and Sayla stopped 
  moving. Why was it taking them so long to clean up the Jap 
  patrol? Why did he help her?

  "I had to do something," the Japanese officer repeated. "I could 
  not let you die."

  "What?"

  "I could not," he whispered from the darkness.

  Why not? That's what she would have done, had she found him 
  unconscious in the rubble.

  "Huh," she grunted.

  "You were so helpless," he said. "And so beautiful."

  Helpless. Beautiful?

  "Can you tell me your name?"

  "What?" She snapped, squinting into the dark. Why would a Jap 
  soldier want to know her name?

  Beautiful, the man's word repeated itself in her mind. She 
  forced her eyes to narrow with the suspicion she knew she had to 
  maintain. "Look, I might, _might_ look at your dog, but there's 
  _no_ way you're gonna know my name," she said. "No way."

  "Yes, of course," he said quietly. "I understand."

  She grunted and inched forward. The pain in her arm had 
  subsided. She thought it might not be a break, only a fracture. 
  "Say something so I know where to go," she said.

  "Would you like to know my name?" The Japanese called softly 
  from the darkness.

  She stopped, peering incredulously into the darkness.

  "I don't care what your name is," she barked. You'll be dead 
  soon.

  "Yes. I suppose it does not matter," he said, as if in 
  realization of the truth she'd almost spoken.

  She waited for him to say more. After a moment, when he didn't, 
  she shuffled cautiously across the floor again. She had no idea 
  why she was doing this for this Jap officer. And a Jap dog. Gut 
  shot, the dog would be dead soon. Even if it lived a while, when 
  the Patriots finally found her they'd cap the dog.

  "They will kill her. I know."

  The words drifted on the darkness and for a moment Sayla again 
  thought she'd spoken her thoughts.

  "I know if your people find us first, they will. But she is in 
  such pain," he said again. "She does not show it, of course," he 
  went on, "dogs are that way. I know. I raise dogs where I live 
  with my family. Lived. Before."

  His voice emptied into the darkness. Sayla waited a moment, 
  shrugged her annoyance with this talkative Japanese, and with 
  herself for listening.

  "They will kill her," the Japanese said again. "And they will 
  kill me."

  Yeah, well, everybody dies, Sayla thought. Another dead Jap 
  meant nothing to her.

  Sounds from outside diverted her attention. She cocked her head, 
  listening intently.

  Relief washed over her. The clean up squad was closing in. But a 
  sound, a high-pitched whine laid over a low rumble, was 
  unfamiliar. She frantically searched her memory trying to make 
  sense of it.

  "ACTTs," the Japanese said.

  "What?" The term didn't register.

  "Air-cushion troop transports," he said. "Hovercraft."

  "Hover...?" The word was unfamiliar. "We got nothing like that." 
  Small arms' fire popped outside.

  "No," the Japanese said, after a moment. "They are part of a 
  push. It is why a second officer... why I was with the patrol. 
  We were a, you would call it a 'point' patrol."

  His words made no sense to her. A Jap patrol was just a Jap 
  patrol, she told herself, always the same. He had to be lying.

  "Point? For what?" she demanded.

  "An amphibious column. The ACTTs. Thousands of U.N. Coalition 
  forces, Rimmers mostly, will have come ashore by now. By air, by 
  ACTT, by amphibious craft.

  "The people have grown impatient with fighting you Americans," 
  he went on. "Families grow weary of the funerals. So many dead. 
  We were told it would be easy, that you were so busy fighting 
  one another the... _pacification_ would be a matter of months." 
  He was silent again, and she didn't speak. "But it has been 
  three _years_ and we are barely off the beaches and there have 
  been so many dead. So many."

  His voice had changed, sounding choked and strained. Sayla 
  thought he might be crying again.

  "And so we push again, but with no hope for success, nor for an 
  end. Imperial command knows this. Command only wants a good 
  appearance for the U.N. before we abandon this war."

  She stood a pace or two from where the darkness separated her 
  from a reality she hadn't even considered. What was this 
  Japanese officer telling her?

  From within the dark, a deep sobbing answered her voiceless 
  question, growing stronger until it eroded and crumbled the 
  black wall between them. Memories of nights on the floor of the 
  field hospital sparked behind her eyes. She saw again the maimed 
  and dying, heard the moans and the screams, recalled other 
  sobbing young soldiers.

  She blinked in the darkness, wanted to move, to follow the sound 
  of his tears. But she couldn't. She could only stand in the 
  darkness listening to the sounds of war outside coming nearer, 
  nearer, passing by leaving her alone, leaving them alone.



  2.
----
  
  The dog whined, a high, watery sound followed by a deep, 
  shuddering breath. Sayla knew the Japanese officer held the 
  animal's broad, flat head in his lap, but even this close she 
  couldn't see him.

  She turned her blind attention back to the dog. Jap dogs were -- 
  what was the word? -- _genealtered_, she recalled from a 
  half-remembered field briefing. Never having been this close to 
  one, she hadn't realized how truly huge they were. Touching the 
  animal's flank she marveled at the thick solidity. The dogs were 
  also much faster than normal dogs, moving with an odd fluidity. 
  Watching them through her night scope, they'd always reminded 
  her more of cats than dogs.

  "Synaptic augmentation," she remembered the briefing officer 
  telling her unit. "A part of every mammal's nervous system is 
  something called a synapse," the woman had told them in the 
  monotone of one who'd spoken the same words many times before.

  "Like an electrical relay, a synapse routes commands from the 
  brain to the body. The brain gives the command; the synapse 
  relays the message to the body. This means," she went on, "the 
  time between thought and action has been shortened. Mind you, it 
  was a small amount of time to begin with, but now, with these 
  dogs, it's even less. So they're not like little Fi-Fi and Spot 
  were back home." she'd said, casting dull eyes over the dozen or 
  so young grunts. "They're more like machines. Remember that," 
  she'd finished, her voice finally rising with emphasis.

  This machine's life, Sayla thought, was escaping through a 
  fist-sized hole in its gut.

  The Jap officer held the animal still, whispering in Japanese 
  while she knelt beside it, probed around its wound with her 
  fingers. She could do nothing.

  "I -- I'm sorry," she found herself saying, surprised at her own 
  words. She truly was sorry about the dog, sorry for the man.

  "My family has a farm," he said in answer. "We live by a river 
  in what you call _occupied_ western China. We raise fish and 
  corn. And I raise herd dogs. For cattle and sheep. That's why 
  they gave her to me. I know about dogs."

  What he was saying meant nothing to Sayla. All she knew of the 
  Japanese was that they were here, in California. She knew 
  nothing of China, nothing of farms and cattle and sheep.

  "She is not like my dogs," he said. "But a dog is still a dog, I 
  think. No matter what. Inside it cannot be changed from what it 
  really is."

  "They ain't much like our dogs, either," Sayla agreed.

  "No," he answered.

  "I don't even know why you have to have them here," Sayla said. 
  He didn't answer her, was silent a long time.

  "Because we are losing this war -- another war -- to you 
  Americans, and dogs do not come home in plastic sacks," he 
  finally said, his voice a low whisper she had to strain to hear. 
  "Because no one mourns a dog's death."

  He fell silent again, and Sayla was too stunned by his words to 
  speak. Patriot brass always said the Japs were losing, but no 
  one really believed. There were just too many of them, too many 
  Rimmers. Sayla wasn't even sure she knew what winning -- or 
  losing -- the war meant. Like the ruins and the firebases, the 
  dead and the wounded, the war just was.

  "I can't do anything for her, for your dog," Sayla said.

  "I know," the man said, his voice a bare whisper in the dark. 
  "But it is good, I think, that we are here with her, now. Don't 
  you?"

  She said nothing, only nodded in the dark. The dog's short, 
  thick fur was soft on her hand. Beneath her fingers, the dog was 
  warm and breathing and dying. No, not at all like a machine, she 
  decided, not at all like the target viewed in the flat green 
  cast of her night scope.

  When the dog drew a final choking breath and its hulking chest 
  fell still, Sayla expected the Jap to cry again. She could hear 
  the man's hand rubbing through the animal's heavy coat, but 
  nothing more. She opened her mouth, then closed it.

  Then, as if from far away, she heard the choking sobs she'd been 
  expecting. Only they were coming from the wrong place and a 
  stinging warmth was in her eyes, in her throat. A hand closed 
  over hers across the dog's fur and she didn't pull away.

  It was a long time before her tears stopped.



  Sayla closed her eyes and listened to distant thunder. The sound 
  reminded her of the winter storms when she was a kid. She 
  remembered lying awake at night listening to the thunder that 
  dulled the sharp sounds of the seemingly endless slums of 
  Oakland. Images gathered in her mind, images of a little girl 
  rising early after such storms, eating her breakfast cereal on a 
  tenement's front stoop, staring in wonder at the misty, empty 
  streets washed clean of their usual dirtiness.

  She opened her eyes. There was no thunder. And the street was 
  littered with the rubble of war. Mocking real thunder, rumbling 
  Japanese naval artillery rounds rhythmically sought their 
  targets somewhere far to the North.

  Above, silvery light had begun to push the stars from the night 
  sky. The Japanese officer's heavy warmth pressed into Sayla's 
  right side. Somehow, his closeness didn't bother her.

  He was feverish, exhausted, weak. Some rapid infection had 
  entered his body where bone had torn through the flesh of his 
  leg. He was completely weaponless and had even discarded his 
  tactical armor. She could take her small knife and cut his 
  throat.

  But she wouldn't kill him, was instead trying to save him.

  Unable to stand unaided, he had to drape one arm over her 
  shoulders and use a broom handle cane beneath the other. With 
  her good hand, Sayla grasped his wrist and pushed up against his 
  arm. He was only slightly taller and weighed less than her.

  "Shhh," she whispered when the movement caused him to cry out. 
  "You gotta be quiet. They're gonna find us for sure, otherwise. 
  We gotta get to Brigade, can't let a unit find us." The fighting 
  had moved out of their area, but she was sure someone -- 
  Japanese or Patriot didn't matter -- would still be near.

  She'd heard the small command unit was staged somewhere in the 
  hills above Oakland. It wouldn't, she felt sure, be too 
  difficult to find. She couldn't go back to her firebase. They 
  would kill him. But at Brigade, they were smart. That was where 
  Cultural Information Officers and such came from, after all. 
  They'd want this Jap alive.

  "Yes. Quiet. I understand." His words came slowly, almost 
  matching the fall of distant artillery rounds.

  He's dying. The thought echoed in her head like a ricochet. 
  Before they had, together, pried the door open, and escaped the 
  dark utility room, Sayla had splinted and wrapped his leg. But 
  she could do nothing more. He'd lost his medpack, and she had no 
  meds. But if she could get him to Brigade, they'd take care of 
  him. Once the Japs left, after the war, they'd let him go home, 
  wouldn't they?

  Sayla could say nothing for a moment. While she'd worked on his 
  leg, he'd spoken of his home, of the fast river, fields of wild 
  flowers stretching endlessly toward high, snowy mountains. No 
  war, he'd told her, no soldiers, no ruined cities. It was 
  difficult to imagine such a place.

  "Let's move," she said, forcing herself back on-task. "We're 
  perfect together, huh," she said, concentrating on her footing. 
  "My busted left arm, your busted right leg? Perfect.

  "Now you gotta try and keep that busted leg straight so..." She 
  trailed off when she felt his hand touching her chin, pulling 
  her face up.

  "Thank you," he said, so near she felt the heat of his breath 
  across her cheeks, her lips.

  "Yeah," she said, pulling back, confused. She moved again to 
  help him. They worked together to lever him upright. She threw 
  her weight forward, then back, pulling as he struggled to his 
  feet.

  "My book," he whispered hoarsely.

  "What?"

  "My book. It has fallen from my pocket. Will you please help me 
  find it?"

  "Book? What kinda book?"

  "It is..." he said, his voice dropping to a whisper then rising 
  again as he spoke:

    "One moment in Annihilation's waste,
     One moment of the Well of Life to taste -- 
     The Stars are setting, and the caravan
     Starts for the dawn of Nothing...
     For in and out, above, about, below,
     'Tis naught but a magic shadow-show,
     Play'd in a box whose candle is the Sun,
     'Round which we phantom figures come and go."

  He was silent then and she stood swaying slightly in the rhythms 
  of his voice. His words seemed physical things, swirling about 
  her, in the dim light.

  "Poetry," he said. "Very old. The book was a gift from my 
  mother. I was to study poetry at university."

  Sayla shrugged and helped him to lean against a protruding mass 
  of concrete. She dropped back onto her haunches, peered into the 
  night darkened rubble and moved her hand to and fro until her 
  fingers found the small square. "I got it," she said. "Here." 
  She held it out to him as she stood.

  "Would you keep it for me?"

  "You just keep it," she said, thrusting the small book away. "I 
  can't even read."

  "Yes, but," his voice trailed off again. "You remember," he 
  said, "when we spoke of faith, hope, and glory?"

  "Yeah, sure, you were talking about religion -- "

  "No. I was speaking of humanity."

  A feathery lightness brushed one cheek and thinking it a cobweb, 
  she reached to brush it away. Then she realized it was him, his 
  fingers gently stroking her face.

  "Please," he said quietly, desperately grasping her hand. "Keep 
  my book. For me."

  She could only stare at him, unmoving among the ruins and 
  destruction that rose up around them, swallowed them in the 
  endlessness of this war.

  And as if from far away across the flower covered meadow, 
  drifting on cool morning breezes she thought she heard a voice, 
  his voice whisper: Faith, hope, and glory, he whispered over and 
  over. Faith. Hope. Glory.



  "Freeze, motherfuckers, freeze!" The voice screamed out of a 
  collapsed building blocking the street before them.

  It was almost a relief. They'd traveled fewer than a dozen 
  blocks and Sayla was wondering how they'd go much farther. She 
  was okay, but the Jap officer was rough. It was all the two of 
  them could do to slowly edge around every obstruction in their 
  path. This mountain of crumbling brick and concrete looked 
  impassable.

  "Hands up, up!" the voice screamed.

  She closed her eyes briefly, tightly, then opened them, and 
  slowly raised her good arm.

  "H -- He's not armed," she whispered back. He isn't like the 
  others, she wanted to say. He's different, she wanted to shout.

  "I'm a Patriot," she finally called out. "He's my prisoner,"

  "Hands up, Patriot," the voice screamed back. "And stand away 
  from your prisoner. Stand. Away!"

  Then a deeper, more measured voice took over for the first. "Do 
  it, Sister. You got no way of knowing what you got there. No 
  way, little Sister. Put your hands up. And stand away."

  "Now, Patriot," the other voice screamed.

  Sayla stared into the rubble, her mind racing, wondering if the 
  owner of the second voice might understand as surely the 
  screaming man could not. Beside her, the Jap officer tottered on 
  his makeshift crutch. He stepped a pace or two away from her 
  raising one arm high and the other as high as possible.

  "I can only raise my right arm," she called back. "His leg's 
  busted. Neither of us is armed," she added.

  "That's fine, little Sister," the second voice called back. "But 
  you still got to step away from your prisoner. That's an 
  _order_, Patriot."

  She swallowed against the lump in her throat. They could see he 
  was crippled. Why didn't they just come and get him?

  "He's a officer," she shouted. "He _knows_ things, he can tell 
  us all about..." Her mind groped in a darkness more suffocating 
  than that in the laundry room and she felt engulfed by a foreign 
  fear.

  "Permission to stay with the prisoner back to Brigade!" she 
  called out. But where to, then? Where would he go then? Her 
  visions of a shining river and snowy mountains receded into 
  enveloping blackness.

  "Permission denied, Patriot," the first voice called back 
  instantly. "Stand. Away."

  "You must do as he commands," he whispered from beside her.

  She turned and the fear twisted within, contorting her face with 
  indecision. "I'm afraid. Of what they're going to do."

  "Yes. I am afraid, too."

  Her jaw worked silently, and her eyes traveled over his 
  features, his eyes. "No," she whispered. "No," she said as the 
  tears came, the still unfamiliar wetness startling her. "I 
  won't. I can't." She whispered and stepped not away, but nearer 
  to him across the few paces separating them.

  When his head exploded it was as if she were atop a building 
  again, at night, and viewing things through the gray-green of 
  her scope. A yawning space seemed suddenly to appear between 
  them and his head disappeared in a colorless spray.

  Sniper's silence filled her ears and a movement down the street 
  caught her eye. With startling clarity she saw an arm rise and 
  give a single short wave from the top of a building.

  The dead Jap crumpled to the ground and she knew she had to 
  move, had to bug out before the chopper came. She feared it 
  might be too late, though. The silence had been replaced by a 
  distant, horrifying scream like that of rockets raining 
  endlessly from the sky.



  It rested in the palm of her good hand, a cracked cerocrystaline 
  blob festooned with thousands of fibers. They might wonder what 
  had happened to the implant, wonder what had become of her, but 
  Sayla no longer cared.

  On a high point looking west across the empty ocean she stood, 
  thinking over what they had told her. The Company shrink had 
  said she couldn't believe anything the Jap officer had said 
  about himself, his family. Or about her.

  The Jap had just wanted to make her believe he was her friend. 
  With one friend he might _infiltrate_, was the word the shrink 
  had used.

  Another Jap like this, her sniper commander added, had come in 
  with a girl in a unit down at Monterey. They'd taken the two of 
  them to a comm bunker. The girl was carrying the Jap's med pack. 
  Only it wasn't a med pack. It was -- and here he paused, 
  glancing sideways at the shrink. It was a battlefield tactical 
  nuke, he went on finally, not explaining further.

  Everything about the Jap officer was unreal, they told her. Like 
  the dogs, they told her, he'd been altered, his synapses 
  enhanced, his adrenal gland enlarged. The rifle butt-shaped 
  bruise on his lower leg was unmistakable, the shrink said. The 
  Jap had broken his own leg. The Patriot psychologist had shaken 
  his head in fascination. Barely human, her commander had 
  muttered. Barely human.

  "And this device," the shrink had said of the glittering object 
  in his hand, "is similar to devices found inside the dogs' 
  skulls." In a dog, he had explained, it was an active governor. 
  The device would prompt the dog on a huge array of commands and 
  eradicate the animal's resistance, even blunting its survival 
  instinct.

  "In a man," the shrink said, speaking more to himself than 
  Sayla, "it's grown in the thalamus and operates on other levels, 
  as well. It analyzes supraliminal data from its host's senses. 
  It's an empathic amplifier. It magnifies the natural human 
  ability to read others' emotions from little cues in voice, 
  movement, expression, even smell.

  "The host," the shrink went on, staring in fascination at the 
  thing, "can then act on sensual cues received from his target, 
  magnified a hundred-fold." He'd turned to her then, blinking as 
  if remembering she was present. "With this in his head, that Jap 
  could almost read your mind."

  But it wasn't her mind he had read.

  And he'd never tried to hurt her; they hadn't found explosives 
  hidden on him.

  In one quick motion she cast the device away and watched it fall 
  to the sea, its fibers mimicking the motions of life. She stood 
  staring after it for a long time. Then she reached into her 
  breast pocket and retrieved the book, looked down on the small 
  black space in her hand.

  "Faith, hope, and glory," Sayla whispered, remembering a soft 
  touch in the dark. Then she thumbed the brass hasp open and 
  looked west over the water recalling his words. 'One moment of 
  the Well of Life to taste -- and the caravan/Starts for the dawn 
  of Nothing...'

  She lifted the book's cover.

  And looked into an instant of burning brightness that rivaled 
  the sun's. What Sayla had been, what had been Sayla, was gone.



  James Michaels (tmtrschell@aol.com)
-------------------------------------
  James Michaels is a resident of the Denver area. He currently 
  directs marketing and advertising for his family's successful 
  mortgage company. He is a former professional private 
  investigator and professional gambler. He is a member and past 
  president of the 27 year-old Northern Colorado Writers Workshop, 
  which is home to speculative fiction authors Connie Willis, Ed 
  Bryant, John Stith, Wil McCarthy, P.D. Cacek, and others.



  FYI
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Just pull down your pants and slide on the ice.
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