Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

There were fresh pages in the typewriter on his desk. Another waltz into the past. Those four perfect weeks. I wondered if he’d pulled off Hugo’s final magic trick, and part of him now belonged to a time when his life was right and good. An escape from a life that he considered inconsequential. These pages were his access point.

But this was no escape. This was the corpse of an old man who’d simply stopped living his life.

I called the police. They arrived and asked their questions, and then the body was removed. I realized that I couldn’t stay here in Colin’s rooms without him. That part of my life had been a gentle anesthetic but it was over now. Exhausted, I went back to my flat and fell asleep in my clothes. I dreamed but I couldn’t recall it when I woke. It was there on my pillow anyway, but I didn’t try to peer between its folds. It began to crumble in my hands when I put it in a jar with the others.

I never played whatever was on Hugo’s digital recorder. It wasn’t for me. It belonged to someone else’s great escape. I ended up putting it into the jar that contained the final dream. I put lids on them and walked down to the promenade. The sea was rushing in. There was no one else around. I flung them as far as I could and let the waves take them. Then I walked away. They were just dreams. They had no weight, but I felt lighter for giving them away.

I packed my bags that afternoon. There wasn’t much. Just that hold-all I’d used to escape almost a year ago. I left the turntable and Colin’s records behind. I didn’t really need them. No one did. It was just stuff.

I stopped to see Ingrid on the way out of town. I found her alone at a table in one of the common rooms of the hospital. She looked bereft in her dressing gown and slippers. Her ashtray was overflowing. She was staring out of the window. It had begun to snow - huge flakes, falling in slow motion in a lonely garden. I sat down beside her and we talked. I told her about Colin. I said I was leaving. I looked at the chipped paint on her bitten fingernails, at the bandages on her wrists. She’d tied her hair back; the nape of her neck looked bare and impossibly vulnerable. I saw flecks of grey in her eyes. All of these things, these little details; they discovered something in me then, coaxed light into places I’d left in shadow for what I assumed was my own good. She studied me. At first her eyes were vague with the medication but gradually her consideration hardened. Was I the man I seemed to be, or the man she hoped I could be? At some point I said Emily’s name, and I told her this story. All of it. It took an hour, maybe more. At some point I realized that her hand was in mine.

And then we kept on talking.

You maintain a menu of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most. That certainly makes your workday easy. All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal (wolf usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year), and the approximation of a peyote experience. Tourists always come out of the Experience feeling spiritually transformed. (You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?) It’s all 101 stuff, really, these Quests. But no other Indian working at Sedona Sweats can do it better. Your sales numbers are tops.

Your wife Theresa doesn’t approve of the gig. Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you, but she thinks the job itself is demeaning.

“Our last name’s not Trueblood,” she complains when you tell her about your nom de rêve.

“Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt,” you explain. “I need to sound more Indian.”

“You are Indian,” she says. “Turnblatt’s Indian-sounding enough because you’re already Indian.”

“We’re not the right kind of Indian,” you counter. “I mean, we’re Catholic, for Christ’s sake.”

What Theresa doesn’t understand is that Tourists don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies, and who can blame them? Movie Indians are terrific! So you watch the same movies the Tourists do, until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and Stands with Fists your best girl. You memorize Johnny Depp’s lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker. For a while you are really into Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man .

It’s Little Big Man that does you in.

For a week in June, you convince your boss to offer a Custer’s Last Stand special, thinking there might be a Tourist or two who want to live out a Crazy Horse Experience. You even memorize some quotes attributed to the venerable Sioux chief that you find on the internet. You plan to make it real authentic.

But you don’t get a single taker. Your numbers nosedive.

Management in Phoenix notices, and Boss drops it from the blackboard by Fourth of July weekend. He yells at you to stop screwing around, accuses you of trying to be an artiste or whatnot.

“Tourists don’t come to Sedona Sweats to live out a goddamn battle,” Boss says in the break room over lunch one day, “especially if the white guy loses. They come here to find themselves.” Boss waves his hand in the air in an approximation of something vaguely prayer-like. “It’s a spiritual experience we’re offering. Top quality. The fucking best.”

DarAnne, your Navajo co-worker with the pretty smile and the perfect teeth, snorts loudly. She takes a bite of her sandwich, mutton by the looks of it. Her jaw works, her sharp teeth flash white. She waits until she’s finished chewing to say, “Nothing spiritual about Squaw Fantasy.”

Squaw Fantasy is Boss’s latest idea, his way to get the numbers up and impress Management. DarAnne and a few others have complained about the use of the ugly slur, the inclusion of a sexual fantasy as an Experience at all. But Boss is unmoved, especially when the first week’s numbers roll in. Biggest seller yet.

Boss looks over at you. “What do you think?”

Boss is Pima, with a bushy mustache and a thick head of still-dark hair. You admire that about him. Virility. Boss makes being a man look easy. Makes everything look easy. Real authentic-like.

DarAnne tilts her head, long beaded earrings swinging, and waits. Her painted nails click impatiently against the Formica lunch table. You can smell the onion in her sandwich.

Your mouth is dry like the red rock desert you can see outside your window. If you say Squaw Fantasy is demeaning, Boss will mock you, call you a pussy, or worse. If you say you think it’s okay, DarAnne and her crew will put you on the guys-who-are-assholes list and you’ll deserve it.

You sip your bottled water, stalling. Decide that in the wake of the Crazy Horse debacle that Boss’s approval means more than DarAnne’s, and venture, “I mean, if the Tourists like it…”

Boss slaps the table, triumphant. DarAnne’s face twists in disgust. “What does Theresa think of that, eh, Jesse?” she spits at you. “You tell her Boss is thinking of adding Savage Braves to the menu next? He’s gonna have you in a loincloth and hair down to your ass, see how you like it.”

Your face heats up, embarrassed. You push away from the table, too quickly, and the flimsy top teeters. You can hear Boss’s shouts of protest as his vending machine lemonade tilts dangerously, and DarAnne’s mocking laugh, but it all comes to your ears through a shroud of thick cotton. You mumble something about getting back to work. The sound of arguing trails you down the hall.