Borderlands Read online

  There was a bug-eyed old black woman facing me across the aisle. She was staring intently at my face. I looked at the floor, at my hands, anything to avoid this gaze that would not go away.

  My left eye was watering. Waves of needle itches pulsed down the cheek beneath it. I shut my eye, twitched that whole side of my face, but refused to raise my hand, refused to touch my face. The old woman would not stop staring at me. The roar of the train seemed to be engulfing me, pounding me into pulp from all sides. I felt the water drip down my face. The itching was unbearable and sharpening into an excruciating pain. I thought my left cheek was swelling out of shape, when suddenly I felt a tremendous relief of pressure, a cool gust against my face, and the itching vanished.

  The old woman screamed. I looked up at her. She was standing, looking from me to the floor and crying out in hysterics.

  I stood and reached for my face. Where my left cheek had been, there was a deep, jagged hollow. Down on the floor, at my feet, was a slab of wet, quivering meat.

  Everyone was standing now, looking at us. I screamed. I ran to the train doors, but we were between stations. I pounded on them anyway, cracking the glass, and then ran across the car to the other doors and repeated these futile gestures-

  My fellow passengers watched me like horrified vultures, clearing away only during my runs from one end of the car to the other.

  And then, as I pounded on the glass I heard another wave of screams. I looked over and saw that the slab of meat—my cheek—was inching across the floor toward me.

  I tried to scream, but what emerged was a deafening roar. I saw an impossible reflection in the cracked glass, and then kicked the door away, diving through the opening.

  I hit wood and metal, and then bounced off the edge of the tracks and fell twenty feet onto the concrete below.

  I was still conscious when I hit bottom. I could feel pain in every limb and for a moment was sure I would now just die wherever I lay.

  But the pain lingered and intensified. It electrified me. When I went to test my limbs I found they were strong and unbroken. I stood and realized that my impact had not killed or even damaged me. These were growing pains. As I looked about me I felt taller, stronger, and more purposeful by the moment.

  Above me was a starless indigo sky, and set within it, a full moon surrounded by a soft glow. Within that moon was an intense and purposeful face, its frozen expression locked on to me, judging me or maybe just watching my every movement for its own sinister pleasure. I looked at the level plain around me. There were no el tracks above me, none of the recognizable landmarks that lined the Howard el line. It was a landscape sparse in detail and rich in horizons, spreading out for three hundred sixty degrees. There were silhouetted monoliths in the distance, things that might once have been buildings but which were now singular, isolated ruins. All around were congested gardens of bulbous, twisted plant growths, glowing with reflected moonlight. A low-pitched moan drifted down from that swollen moon face, while whispered choruses hissed from the garden patches.

  There was a familiarity about this place. There were soothing breezes that settled my tortured skin, and odors in those breezes that told me that no matter where I ventured across this plain, food would always be near.

  So I wandered, occasionally looking up at that moon whose face was so similar to my own, waiting for it to speak. I stopped once, sniffing at a garden beneath me, recognizing food by the salivation it spurred. I pulled up a thick strand of the stuff and dug my teeth into it. The meat was sweet, hot, and juicy, but along its axis ran bone. I held it out at arm's length as I chewed. It was a long, shapely, hairless leg. I gasped and dropped it, spitting out the morsel in my mouth. I started to run.

  Scraggly tailed little animals darted past as I ran. I stopped and watched them crisscross my path–all my possible paths. They were bipedal rats with human eyes and short, expressive snouts. In their arms, over their shoulders, they carried tiny objects, some of which looked like miniature furniture, some of which looked like the twisted, jagged carcasses of dead birds.

  The sky exploded with laughter. I looked up and saw the moon, its face thorned and encrusted, with a wide, needle-toothed mouth and long, slashing tongue, shaking the earth with its voice, staring at me with red eye slits.

  I cringed and felt myself shrink into the landscape. The scurrying rat things were nearly as tall as I now, and the gardens of bulbous, flesh-and-bone plants were like dark, imposing forests.

  I found a stone-ringed fountain, the center of which was filled with a glowing, effervescent red fluid. I sat down along the ring and buried my face in my hands as the laughter died away. I was safe and warm within the understanding shelter of my own sweaty palms.

  "Own up, buddy, you got somethin' for me, doncha?"

  I looked up. I was seated on a bench. A silhouette loomed above me, backlit by a street lamp.

  "Excuse me?" I croaked, my voice a deep, hoarse whisper.

  "Come on, man, get yer ass up!" I saw a flash of light across his midsection.

  A knife. Another goddamned knife. An instant of panic was billowed by an escalating appreciation of what had happened to me in Margaret's kitchen. So I stood up. Gladly.

  "What do you want?"

  I could see the light in his face now. Pale skin, light brown stubble on his face, an asymmetrical shock of black hair shooting out of one side of his head. The eyes were deep red and surrounded in black, painted shadow. But best of all, he was a little on the plump side.

  "Well, let's see…how about my slippers and a good book…a nice dinner, world-fucking-peace now that I'm on the subject, and, oh yeah"—brandishing the knife before my face—"I almost forgot: all your money. "

  "Uh, well, okay." I chuckled. My laughter sounded like the moon's. I wondered if he recognized that. "Bill me," I said casually, as I reached for my wallet, "how does my face look?"

  "Huh? What do you…"

  Either he was just now looking at me for the first time or my face was changing before his eyes, because his dominant sneer melted away and he let out a girlish, whining gasp, leaping away, holding the knife between us.

  "Stay back, man, or I'll open you up!"

  I laughed at that threat, and lunged. The knife pierced my palm but I flung it aside and tackled the guy–mangy, faggoty punk that he was–and sat over him as he cried out. We gave each other a long, touching, soulful look and then I did it.

  I didn't leave much behind except the mess. The fellow was poisoned, polluted, and I was left with that impure taint in my mouth that one is always left with after a chemically treated meal. I was stuck somewhere in the wastelands of uptown and sure that it was unwise for me to show myself in the glare of another train station.

  So I walked. And as I walked, I got to wondering: was what I had done so strange? In the world we live in? We eat dog and horse meat all the time and pretend we just don't believe it. And given what I'd just been able to judge for myself, it seems fairly credible to assume that everyone, at one time or another, has inadvertently eaten human flesh. But I had killed a mugger and eaten him on the spot. Uncooked. Just how was I to justify this? I've always had an instinct for taking correct, superior courses of action, even and especially when the value of my actions went unappreciated or misunderstood. Surely there could be a reason why this too was right and correct and perhaps even admirable.

  But when I stumbled into my apartment just before dawn and stood before the mirror, looking at this thing I had become, I knew I'd just been kidding myself.

  And that's all. I spent all day Sunday drifting in and out of sleep. At one point I even called Lisa. A big mistake, as it turned out. At first I had to convince her that it was actually me by claiming that I had a cold and sore throat. As the conversation "progressed" I found that I was having to defend myself constantly–for my record as a husband, as a father, as a son or son-in-law. It was getting harder and harder to speak all the time. Words that seemed to overdrive through my head got all garbled up as I t
ried to voice them, and quite a few unusual sounds seemed to punctuate and overpower them. And as I grew more defensive and she got more accusatory–and as I started to wonder whether that little bitch Margaret had gotten to my wife–I got louder and angrier and my speech became incomprehensible and, ultimately, physically impossible. I found myself roaring into the phone, coating it with lumpy green foam. The environment around me began pulsating in and out of shape and I felt myself caught on a breaking wave. Only the dial tone brought me around again.

  I've been thinking a great deal about work. About work, and about food. I wonder what Margaret did or plans to do about that ugly misunderstanding Saturday night. Of course I was the victim of circumstances. No one gives off scents like that, makes gestures and strikes poses and focuses in on someone like that unless she's ready to be taken on a long, fiery ride, and of course that's what was happening and she knew it and I was only playing a part, wasn't I? She backed out, looked at me as though I was some kind of a…she stabbed me, goddamn it! She tried to kill me. How could she bring me up on charges? How could she get me fired? She tried to kill me and, shit, oh shit, of course, I can see it all now! That was her plan all along, from the moment she called Lisa. I wouldn't be surprised if my boss put her up to it. Why not? That baby-faced little bitch, I…God, am I hungry. I've got to get something to eat.

  It's 6 A.M. Monday morning. I've been awake since midnight, mulling all this over and I can see the way things are, the way they will have to be. I am surging with strength of a kind I never dreamed possible. I get up to look in the mirror, when the place contracts enough for me to find the mirror, and I see something great and beautiful. My red, razor-sharp crests, this face–so big, so wise, so expressive…Look up there! The moon cannot set, because it can't take its envious eyes off me even as the red sun sizzles away at its swollen flesh. All around there are sweet-scented flying reptiles, all of whom wear my visage. I could be like them, one of them. All it would take is a surge in the right direction, at the right moment…

  Little rat things leave offerings at my feet. They leave me little wooden ornaments, birds, their slaughtered offspring….

  Thank you, little rat things, but my appetites are too great for your children to satisfy. I could surge into a small form and fill up on them and walk among you but, you see, there are things to be done. There is a place I have to go…

  I have to eat. I need food. And then I have to go to work. There are hordes of scheming, insignificant, back-stabbing little insects who need to be guided, need to be made an example of, need to be herded. I must go down there, to poor Alan, to John, Ellen, bless their poor, expendable little souls, to Margaret, and bring them all to me, and all the rest as well, you see, because…because

  God, you sizzling moon up in the sky, because I'M HUNGRY.

  Let them slice off their groping fingers on the razored ridges that surge up through me like a spreading, newborn sea floor. Let them try to keep me off a train. Let them try to keep me out of the building. Let them try to send me home, let them try to stop me from eating whatever I please.

  Let them look up to the sun that throbs as deep a red as my red, armoured flesh, to the moon who cannot stop laughing, that moon who wears my sweet, sweet swollen face.

  DELIA AND THE DINNER PARTY

  John Shirley

  John Shirley is one of those guys who never fail to make an impression—be it good or bad. And he's made plenty of both kinds through his outspoken columns, his penchant for punkish music and ideologies, and his totally strange brand of fiction. He broke into publishing back in 1979 with a novel called Transmanisoon. I guess you have to call what he was writing back then SF—but for speculative, rather than science, fiction. A succession of novels has followed and an impressive collection of short stories entitled Heatseeker.

  Shirley looks like a kind of dissolute William Hurt, has lived in places as diverse as Manhattan, Portland, Paris, and now Oakland. He used to be the lead singer in a rock band, but now spends all his time writing imaginative fiction that defies categorization. The following story gives a view of the world through the eyes of a child–which we all know can be piercingly accurate, even if all the rules are broken.

  Delia watched from the upstairs window as the guests arrived. Two cars of them, one couple per car, about ten minutes apart. There would be four guests here tonight, for her parents' dinner party.

  "There will be six adults," said the Telling Boy.

  She nodded. She went to the top of the stairs to watch the last couple come in.

  "Hey, you guys made it!" Delia's daddy said, greeting the man with a handshake.

  "How's it going, Jack?" the man said.

  "Kinda weird until, oh, maybe two months ago now. I had to get a new agent—picked up on somebody good through Robert Longo—started selling paintings again. Three today to a collector in Chicago."

  "That's great," the man said. Delia thought his name was Henry something. He was a balding man in horn-rimmed glasses and a turtleneck sweater; he was much taller than her short, thick-tummied daddy. He was a man who wrote restaurant reviews, she knew. She'd seen him before. And his plump, nervously friendly wife, Lucy, in her neat dove-gray and blue pantsuit. She was older than the others.

  "She plays mother to Henry," the Telling Boy said. The Telling Boy wasn't consulting his book yet. He was talking off the cuff. He had the little book, which looked like one of those gold-spined Golden Wonder books for kids, tucked under his arm. He stood there, stiff and formal in his jammies, six feet tall and wearing those jammies with the booties; wherever did he find them so big?

  The Telling Boy didn't look like a boy. He looked like an old man, in fact, tall and bent a little and age spotted and hooded eyed and sunken cheeked and gray haired. But the old man was called the Telling Boy anyway. You got used to it.

  "I wish I had a cigarette," the Telling Boy said wistfully, as he did rather often.

  She had tried giving him cigarettes, but he couldn't really touch things in the world, and he could only look at them longingly.

  "Who's that spying on us up there?" Lucy said impishly, waggling a finger in cutesy accusation up at Delia.

  Mama looked up at Delia and smiled wearily. Mama had dark hollows under her eyes and thinning hennaed hair and a special padded bra because one of her bosoms had been taken away by the cancer.

  "Come on down and say hi, Delia," she said, with a resignation that was heard as a certain flatness in her voice.

  Another flatness came into Daddy's eyes when he saw her up there. They didn't like her to watch them in secret. Her daddy had gotten mad, very mad, when he found Delia hiding under the kitchen table watching him, and realized she'd been watching him silently for a full hour as he puttered around the kitchen, taking bites from things in the fridge and putting them back, reading the comics pages, picking his nose, calling a woman Delia didn't know on the phone, talking to her in a funny, hushed tone of voice.

  Delia came down and said hi. Everyone sat around in the living room, listening to The Gypsy Kings on the record player, drinking aperitifs, admiring Daddy's paintings on the wall and Delia's dress. The other guests, the Crenshaws, smiled at Delia at first as if they meant it, but the smiles got more strained, after a while, as they always did, because she didn't respond. Mrs. Crenshaw was a tall and thin and very elegant black lady, skin more like creamy cocoa than black; she wore a tight red gown that showed a lot of cleavage, kind of dressy compared to the others. She used to be a model, Delia had heard Daddy say, and had appeared in lots of ads in Ebony. Her husband, Buddy Crenshaw, was a white man, shorter than his wife and stocky, with a neat little gray beard and a bald spot on the back of his head. He was talking about trying Rogaine for the bald spot, Rogaine was the baldness cure that he had helped promote, and what a rip-off it was because it hadn't worked for him and it was really expensive, and how he was going to do another promotional campaign for it. No one thought this was funny. And they talked about the parking around here, on the
se steep streets in San Francisco, and how hard it was on a Saturday night because they were near North Beach, but how nice a neighborhood, at least, to drive around in looking for parking, because you could "look at all the lovely Victorians."

  The black lady, whom they called Andy even though that's really a man's name, tried to talk to Delia a little, and laughed when Delia told her how old she was.

  "You're certainly a big girl for five years old," the Andy lady said, smiling indulgently, thinking Delia was joking. "Did you do a Rip Van Winkle sort of thing?"

  "She's almost eleven," Daddy said, with a faint disgust in his voice. "She likes to pretend she's five. She believes it, too."

  Mama gave Daddy a quick look of reproach. He was supposed to make light of all that, and he'd made it worse. Delia glanced through the door into the dining room and saw the Telling Boy there in his blue and white jammies, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the dining room table. How dirty the jammies looked in this light. They had something like mold on them in the crotch.

  No one else looked at the Telling Boy. Even though he was staring at them. He looked at Delia and held up the book, tapped it. She nodded. Her mother frowned at her, puzzled and vaguely angry.

  Dinner. Andy and Buddy were talking about having seen Nureyev's new ballet. Nureyev was choreographing, they said, instead of dancing now, and both Andy and Buddy chuckled over Nureyev's choreography. "He's really not a Renaissance man, should have stuck to dancing, but his ineptitude is taken as brashness and progressivity," Buddy said glibly, and everyone snorted and said, "God, Buddy, you're right, ballet critics are blind where Nureyev is concerned, they've all shared vodka with him."

  Talk like that. Delia was glad when her mother said she didn't have to stay for dessert. "A little girl who doesn't like dessert?" Lucy chirped. "My goodness, where did you get this one? Mars?"