Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“That,” Izzy assured her, “is the one thing I don’t think you ever have to be afraid of “

“Money changes people,” Kathy said in response, “and big money changes people in a big way. I don’t want to have this deal of Alan’s go through and then find myself looking in a mirror five years from now and not recognizing the person who’s looking back at me.”

“That’s going to happen anyway,” Izzy said. “Think about what we were like five years ago.”

Kathy gave her a look of mock horror. “Oh god. Don’t remind me.”

“So maybe change isn’t always so bad. We just have to make sure that we pay attention to it as it’s happening to us.”

“Too true,” Kathy said. “But this conversation is getting far too earnest for the occasion. Any more of it and I’m going to become seriously depressed.” She looked down at her empty beer mug, then at Izzy, who wasn’t holding a mug at all. “Can I buy you a drink?” she asked.

“I thought there was supposed to be a free bar.”

“There is, there is.” Putting her arm around Izzy’s shoulders, she steered them toward the bar, where Alan was drawing ale from the three kegs he’d provided for the launch. “But I’m in the mood for some Jameson’s, and that, ma belle Izzy, Alan isn’t providing.”

“And here you are, about to make him all sorts of money.”

“I know,” Kathy said. “It’s a bloody crime, isn’t it? Let’s go give that capitalist pig a piece of our minds.”

XII

January 1978

“They’re paying you how much?” Izzy asked.

She’d gotten home from the studio early for a change, so she happened to be at the apartment when Kathy came bursting in with the news of the paperback sale Alan had negotiated for The Angels of My First Death.

“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Kathy repeated.

“Oh, my god. You’re rich!”

Kathy laughed. “Well, not exactly. The East Street Press gets fifty percent of that.”

“I can’t believe Alan’s taking such advantage of you.”

“He’s not. That’s the standard cut for a hardcover house when it sells off the paperback rights.”

“Oh. Well, a hundred thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at.”

Kathy nodded. “Mind you, I don’t get it all at once. Half on signing, half on publication. Alan figures I’ll see a check for fifty thousand in about a month and a half “

“It seems like all the money in the world, doesn’t it?”

“More than we’ve ever seen in one place before, that’s for bloody sure. Mind you, if Albina keeps doing as well by you, who knows? You could be selling paintings for that kind of money in a year or so.”

Izzy laughed. “Oh, right.”

“You got nine thousand for that last one.”

“Fifty-four hundred after the gallery’s commission.”

“And you’re complaining about Alan’s cut,” Kathy said.

“I never thought of it like that,” Izzy said. She considered it for a moment, then added, “Maybe Tom’s right—you know, the way he’s always going on about how middlemen are feeding off the artists that they represent. They don’t do the work, but they get almost as much money for it.”

“Where would we be without Albina and Alan?” Kathy wanted to know. “It’s all very well to complain about middlemen, but if it wasn’t for them, you and I wouldn’t have an audience—or at least not the kind of audience they got us. I don’t want to be a waitress all my life.”

“No, no,” Izzy said. “How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t define yourself by what you have to do to make a living, but by what you want to do. You’re a writer. I’m an artist.”

“I still find it hard to believe that I can actually make a living at writing,” Kathy said.

Izzy knew just what she meant. The only reason Izzy herself had been able to survive as long as she had without a second job was because she’d had the bulk of her art supplies and her studio space provided for by Rushkin, and since she and Kathy still lived here on Waterhouse Street, where the rent on their little apartment remained so cheap, her living costs were minimal. Before this, the money Kathy had made from her writing barely paid for her paper and type-writer ribbons.

“So now that you’ve got this money,” she asked, “are you really going to use it to start the Foundation?”

“Absolutely.”

“It doesn’t seem like it’d be enough.”

Kathy sighed. “I don’t think any amount of money would be enough, but I’ve got to start somewhere and fifty thousand dollars makes for a pretty good jumping off point.”

It was Kathy’s turn to make dinner that night. When she went into the kitchen, Izzy tried to imagine whether she could be as philanthropic if she were to come into that kind of money. There were so many other things one could do with it. Use it as a down payment on a house. Go traveling all around the world.

“I saw one of your new numena today,” Kathy said, poking her head around the kitchen door. “It was mooching around down by the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station. I wonder if some of them have taken to living in Old City.”

Old City was the part of Newford that had been dropped underground during the Great Quake, around the turn of the century. Rather than try to recover the buildings, the survivors had simply built over the ruins. Although Izzy had never been down there herself, she knew people like Jilly who had.

Apparently many of the buildings had survived and were still standing, making for a strange underground city that extended down as deep in places as it did aboveground.

There’d been plans at one time for making a tourist attraction of the underground city, as had been done in Seattle, but the idea was put aside when the city council realized that the necessary restructuring and maintenance simply wouldn’t be cost-efficient. Recently, after many of the growing numbers of homeless people began to squat in the abandoned ruins, city work crews had been sealing up all the entrances to Old City, but there were still anywhere from a half-dozen to twenty others that the street people knew. The best-known entrance was a maintenance door situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station, where Kathy had seen the numena.

“Which one was it?” Izzy asked.

There were so many now. She still had her old coterie of numena friends who dropped by the studio on a regular basis, but the newer ones went their own way and she’d never even met some of them.

Kathy had met even less of them. Most of the numena didn’t like to spend time with people who knew their origin. It made them feel less real, Rosalind had explained to Izzy on one of her visits from the island, where she lived with Cosette and those numena who felt more comfortable out of the city.

“I’m not sure,” Kathy said. “But I think they’re making a home for themselves in Old City. July’s told me that the people squatting down there have been seeing all sorts of strange things.”

As she went back into the kitchen to return to her dinner preparations, Izzy trailed along behind her.

She pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table and slouched in it.

“What kinds of strange things?” she wanted to know.

Kathy shrugged. “Hybrids like in your paintings—part human and part something else. So they must be your numena.”

“Well, what did the one you see look like?”

Kathy stopped chopping carrots long enough to close her eyes and call up an image of the numena she’d seen.

“Very feline,” she said, turning to look at Izzy. “Small, but with broad lion-like features and a huge tawny mane of hair. And she had a tail with a tuft at the end of it. I guess she’s from a painting that you haven’t shown me yet, because I didn’t recognize her. I remember thinking at the time that it was kind of odd how you’d mixed elements of a male lion with a young girl.”