John Adams: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Stan started crying. And laughing.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Well, shit, Susan. I guess you were telling the truth.

Stan turned to me.

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Human idiot—why didn’t you tell me you had this technology?

ME: Um, I didn’t realize it was so important?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: That’s why you’re an idiot. You can come up with this and yet not realize how important it is.

ME: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that but for the existence of our literature, you would have thought this whole universe was worth destroying?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Dude, now you’re talking crazy. The stories won’t save the world. But they are evidence of something. They are evidence that despite the tenuous grasp on reality you all seem to have here, the collapsing of objective truth that’s going on, and the instability it’s causing at this particular point in space and time—despite all of that, you still seem to have at least a few people interested in imagining better worlds, other worlds, the existence of alternative points of view. Based on these twenty stories, this narrative speculation, we have… something to go on. A scrap of hope, for you as a civilization. As a species.

ME: So… you’re not going to annihilate us?

STAN THE INTERDIMENSIONAL COP: Not yet. But you’d better keep this up. You’re on thin ice. [to Susan] You hungry? I could go for a slice of pizza.

And with that, Susan and Stan disappeared from this universe. For at least another year.

This is all true. All of this really happened. I mean, to the extent that “truth” and “reality” still exist.

After the whole thing with Susan and Stan was over, I finished my coffee. Then I went and got a sandwich. Self-fulfilling timelines make me hungry. As I ate my sandwich, I dove back into my work, with renewed vigor and an appreciation for the stakes involved. Time hardly moved—I must have entered some kind of vortex, as I read the remarkable stories that make up this collection. These stories we tell ourselves, the best of them, they tell us something about what parts of reality we understand well enough to question. About who we are now. And about what we are capable of when we let ourselves imagine the people we could be. These stories, taken together, might be sufficient evidence to persuade the cosmic overlords that despite our shortcomings, we merit an extension pending further consideration. That on some anthropological rubric, we pass a minimum test for proof of civilization. Or better yet, at their very best, they might be (in the words of Stan the Interdimensional Cop) a scrap of hope.

There were a lot of stories about Annalee Saperstein and why she came to Little Spindle, but Gracie’s favorite was the heat wave.

In 1986, New York endured a summer so miserable that anyone who could afford to leave the city did. The pavement went soft with the heat, a man was found dead in his bathtub with an electric fan half submerged in the water next to his hairy knees, and the power grid flickered on and off like a bug light rattling with moths. On the Upper West Side, above the bakeries and delicatessens, the Woolworth’s and the Red Apple market, people slept on top of their sheets, sucked on handkerchiefs full of crushed ice, and opened their windows wide, praying for a breeze. That was why, when the Hudson leaped its banks and went looking for trouble on a hot July night, the river found Ruth Blonksy’s window wedged open with a dented Candie’s shoebox.

Earlier that day Ruth had been in Riverside Park with her friends, eating lemon pucker ices and wearing a persimmon-colored shift that was really a vintage nightgown she’d dyed with two boxes of Rit and mixed success. Rain had been promised for days, but the sky hung heavy over the city, a distended gray belly of cloud that refused to split. Sweat beading over her skin, Ruth had leaned against the park railing to look down at the swaying surface of the river, opaque and nearly black beneath the overcast sky, and had the eerie sense that the water was looking back at her.

Then a drop of lemon ice trickled from the little pink spoon in her hand, startling as a cold tongue lapping at her pulse point, and Marva Allsburg shouted, “We’re going to Jaybee’s to look at records.”

Ruth licked the lemon ice from her wrist and thought no more of the river.

But later that night, when she woke—her sheets soaked through with sweat, a tangle of reeds at the foot of her bed—that sticky trail of sugar was what first came to mind. She’d fallen asleep in her clothes, and her persimmon shift clung wetly to her stomach. Beneath it, her body burned feverish with half-remembered dreams of the river god, a muscular shape that moved through the deep current of sleep, his gray skin speckled blue and green. Her lips felt just kissed, and her head was clouded as if she’d risen too fast from some great depth. It took a long moment for her ears to clear, for her to recognize the moss-and-metal smell of wet concrete, and then to make sense of the sound coming through her open window—rain falling in a steady patter onto the predawn streets below. The heat had broken at last.

Nine months later, Ruth gave birth to a baby with kelp-green eyes and ropes of seaweed hair. When Ruth’s father kicked her out of their walkup, calling her names in Polish and English and making angry noises about the Puerto Rican boy who had taken Ruth to her junior prom, Annalee Saperstein took her in, ignoring the neighborhood whispers and clucking. Annalee worked at the twenty-four-hour coin laundry on West Seventy-Ninth. No one was sure when she slept, because whenever you walked past, she always seemed to be sitting at the counter doing her crossword beneath the fluorescent lights, the machines humming and rattling, no matter the hour. Joey Pastan had mouthed off to her once when he ran out of quarters, and he swore the dryers had actually growled at him, so nobody was entirely surprised that Annalee believed Ruth Blonksy. And when, waiting in line at Gitlitz Delicatessen, Annalee smacked Ruth’s father in the chest with the half-pound of thinly sliced corned beef she’d just purchased and snapped that river spirits were not to be trusted, no one dared to argue.

Ruth’s daughter refused milk. She would only drink salt water and eat pound after pound of oysters, clams, and tiny crayfish, which had to be delivered in crates to Annalee’s cramped apartment. But the diet must have agreed with her, because the green-eyed baby grew into a beautiful girl who was spotted by a talent scout while crossing Amsterdam Avenue. She became a famous model, renowned for her full lips and liquid walk, and bought her mother a penthouse on Park Avenue that they decorated with paintings of desert flowers and dry creek beds. They gave Annalee Saperstein a tidy sum that allowed her to quit her job at the coin laundry and move out of the city to Little Spindle, where she opened her Dairy Queen franchise.

At least, that was one of the stories about how Annalee Saperstein came to Little Spindle, and Gracie liked it because she felt it made a kind of sense. Why else would Annalee get copies of French and Italian Vogue when all she ever wore were polyester housedresses and Birkenstock sandals with socks?

People said Annalee knew things. It was why Donna Bakewell came to see her the summer her terrier got hit by a car and she couldn’t seem to stop crying—not even to sleep, or to buy a can of green beans at the Price Chopper, or to answer the phone. People would call her up and just hear her sobbing and hiccupping on the other end. But somehow a chat with Annalee managed what no doctor or pill could and dried Donna’s tears right up. It was why, when Jason Mylo couldn’t shake the idea that his ex-wife had put a curse on his new Chevy truck, he paid a late-night visit to the DQ to see Annalee. And it was also why, when Gracie Michaux saw something that looked very much like a sea monster breach the waters of Little Spindle Lake, she went looking for Annalee Saperstein.