John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

But when Steinfeld came in, sitting in the empty chair at the head of the table, the French guy shut up, just like that.

Everyone shut up. They were like children fighting till the teacher came back into the room.

And it was a schoolroom, the teacher’s conference room of the old école, with its cracked plaster walls and the oily warmth from its furnace. The school was receiving its electricity ration today and they had electric light, for now; old, humming, tubular fluorescent lights. The room—half its original size—was without windows; the windows had been covered by a false wall, to deceive the spy birds. Two guards stood at the two doors at either end of the room. Each with an old Uzi slung over his shoulder. The actives at the table were armed only with whatever they could carry without showing it. It was considered cloddish to display your guns, except in an actual firefight. But the bigger guns were nearby, under the coatrack, in a case, and loaded.

There were fourteen people around the long, gray-painted metal table, sitting in rickety plastic chairs, daydreaming about coffee. Four women, ten men.

So this is the Paris resistance. Kind of pitiful, really. Does that make it more heroic?

Song lyric in there somewhere…

Smoke sat on Steinfeld’s right, Yukio on his left. Hard-Eyes sat beside Rickenharp, Jenkins on the far side, both of them silent and bored. Yukio and Willow sat across the table from Rickenharp.

Carmen was there, sitting beside the doctor at the corner. She had insisted. Rickenharp stole glances at her. Her complexion was gray, but there was no droop in her posture. She’d changed her look, Rickenharp thought. And then he realized that what she was wearing wasn’t a “look.” She was wearing fatigues and a flak jacket because she meant to fight, and she wanted everyone to know it. She hadn’t said anything to Rickenharp since she’d regained consciousness. He’d tried to apologize, of course. (Thinking: How do you apologize to someone for putting bullet holes in their chest?) She’d acted as if she hadn’t heard. There was no angry chill about it. It was as if she’d made up her mind that he didn’t exist.

I’m an embarrassment to her, Rickenharp thought.

Somewhere in Italy—somewhere inside him—he’d made up his mind to get the hell back to the States or Freezone at the first opportunity. He’d played at being one of the guerrillas, almost believed it, especially when he’d pictured telling the band about it. But he’d had no real intention of going through with it. Not after that ride in the boat.

And then the gun. The feeling it was an instrument he wanted to learn to play. And then—

He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image came. Carmen falling back, those little neat round holes punched into her…

But now it was different. Now he wanted to be NR. It was as if he’d been slapped awake. Sitting there with his eyes shut, he thought: Until I shot her, I was asleep, sleepwalking through ego games.

The rest of the world had been unreal, except in the way it reacted to him; the way women reacted, or an audience. But now it was as if he’d been slapped—

“And who’s this? Is he asleep?” Steinfeld’s voice, and suddenly Rickenharp knew Steinfeld was talking about him.

Rickenharp opened his eyes and looked down the table. Everyone was looking back at him, except Carmen.

“I’m not asleep,” Rickenharp said.

“This building is no longer a school, in the traditional sense. So don’t sleep in it,” Steinfeld said. His voice was mordant. Some of them laughed, and Rickenharp realized it was a joke.

Steinfeld, though, was not laughing. He was waiting.

“I’m Richard Rickenharp,” he said. It felt clumsy in his mouth.

“I’m sponsoring him,” Hard-Eyes said.

Carmen looked at Hard-Eyes, annoyed, and Rickenharp had to smile.

“Me too,” Jenkins said. “I’m, uh, sponsoring him too.”

Steinfeld tugged at his own beard, hard, as if wondering if it was a fake. “But isn’t this the young man who—?” He looked at Carmen.

Oh, God, Rickenharp thought.

But Rickenharp cleared his throat (Thinking, For God’s sake, don’t let your voice quaver! ) and said, “I’m the guy who shot her. I take responsibility. I shouldn’t have insisted on having a gun when I didn’t know how to use it…”

“I’m not at all sure it’s your responsibility,” Steinfeld said, surprising only Rickenharp.

Carmen was looking at her hands folded on the table. She nodded. “It was my fault. I should never have given it to him. I knew he didn’t know how to use it. And it wasn’t an emergency.”

Steinfeld nodded. “Still—if he’s to be an active…” He shrugged.

“We’ve put in ten days target practice in the catacombs,” Hard-Eyes said. “Rickenharp’s working hard. He won’t make the same mistake.”

The catacombs. Rickenharp seemed almost to hear the echoes of the gunshots ringing off the curved stone walls. Smelling the wet mineral smell of the place, the underscent of sewage, then the smell of gunpowder. Seeing the cold gray stone reach of the subterranean target-practice room, with its woebegone, ravaged wooden silhouettes. Feeling the gun cold in his stiff hands, then feeling it grow warm with its compressed internal explosions. Hearing the hail-clatter of spent shells hitting the floor. Visualizing a guitar but holding the machine gun and fighting the urge to—

“He’s learned fast. He can take the weapons apart and put them back together. He’s accurate. He’s careful. We work on hand-to-hand; Jenkins teaches him field communications. He works hard.”

—the urge to laugh.

“Mr. Rickenharp is a… performer, right?” Steinfeld said. “And we are not performing here.”

“I know that.” Rickenharp began. “I—”

“Are you trying to make up for shooting Carmen by working hard to be one of us?”

Rickenharp sensed that Steinfeld considered that kind of motivation insufficient. But he also sensed Steinfeld would know it if he lied. “Partly. But—” He reached for words and couldn’t find them, but plunged into trying to explain anyway. “It’s more. Everything’s different when you—well… it’s like you’re… like that Poe story where the guy is tied to a table and there are rats all around him. But in my version, it’s like the guy was asleep, and there was someone there trying to untie him and save him from the rats, and a rat bites the guy who’s tied up, so… uh, when he wakes from the pain, he strikes out and accidentally hurts the guy trying to untie him and then he realizes what he’s done so he wants to kill the rats but it’s also because it made him realize, you know, something he never realized before: the rats are all around him —”

“Oh, for God’s sake, stop babbling!” Carmen said, very definitely looking at him now—looking two round neat bullet holes into him.

But Steinfeld was shaking, silently shaking, and after a confused moment Rickenharp realized he was laughing.

“Well—” Steinfeld tried to speak but the laughter made it impossible. He had to wheeze for a moment. Then he tugged on his beard and, with an effort, stopped laughing, and shook his head, his face red. “Well, that’s a wonderfully, uh, baroque explanation, my friend; and the frightening thing is I know just what you mean!”

Some of the others were laughing now, the English-speaking ones. The French speakers looked confused.

Carmen permitted a smile to lift a corner of her mouth, for just a moment.

Rickenharp saw her as she’d been at the club, bare-breasted and spike-crowned. He wanted her, and he knew that, now, he’d never make the move. Having made a small faux pas. Having shot her.