Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Suite
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. On the other side was a vast, cold expanse of stars. “God damn it!” the bellhop said. “They were supposed to fix that!”
“What?” said Claire. She was exhausted beyond belief, having flown to Los Angeles from Paris via Newfoundland, after a marathon 9-hour sales presentation, following three hours of sleep. Why is the … ?” she waved her hand vaguely at the door.
“Dimensional disjunction,” sighed the bellhop, slumping to the floor. “It’s this hallway. It’s been broken since the ’96 Curse War. They said they fixed it!”
The bellhop looked to be about 17, with kinky blonde hair and wide blue eyes that somehow gave him a rabbity look. He was skinny and short, with long, elegant fingers that looked out of place on a person so young. Claire herself was thirty-eight, compact and dark-skinned, curvy, expensively dressed, rumpled from the flight. She thought they probably looked ridiculous together.
“How long?” she said.
“About three years. But don’t worry–they say you don’t remember anything afterward. I never do. I’ve had four of these so far, but it was like blinking when I was done.”
Dimensional disjunctions canceled hunger, thirst, aging, and all biological needs except two. One was sleep.
After the first few awkward hours, they talked–and talked, and kept talking. They played charades. They made up stories, sang camp songs, made up elaborate skits and played them out together. They had lots and lots and lots of sex–increasingly creative, revealing, vulnerable, and acrobatic sex, over time. Whatever Claire’s reservations about Lawrence were, there were advantages, she soon saw, in his being 17. And eventually her reservations about him went away completely, because he wasn’t there for her to accept or reject: he was just there. He was just Lawrence.
They grew to love each other more than either one of them could possibly express. They talked about it for hours, days, weeks on end. They talked about how they would recognize their kinship even when the disjunction was over, how they would be together, what their life would be like.
Claire woke up one “morning” (“morning” was what they called the time when they woke up) with a sudden, cold fear that the three years were over. She put her hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. “Sweetheart?” she said, “Do you think–”
#
The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. Beautiful furniture, Claire remembered thinking, and then she walked inside and fell face-down on the bed, exhausted. She didn’t even remember to tip.
In the Troll Market
Monday, May 17th, 2010
The job was just annoying. In spite of all the things Miranda remembered about the year she’d spent here as a kid, somehow she’d forgotten the cold.
Now Riggs, the lead singer, wanted a certain sound from a David Bowie song. Couldn’t remember which one. So Miranda raided every used record store the guys from the studio could name, collected LPs, singles, Japanese-only picture disks… Somehow, this was part of the recording engineer’s job. She played them over the mixing room speakers, while Riggs drank and did crossword puzzles, badly, in pen.
Space Oddity.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Riggs, “Thought it had spacemen or astronauts.”
He could have saved her days of effort if he’d just said that. All she said was, “It’s a Moog.”
Could she find one? asked the producer.
It took a week of asking, begging, and, at one point, recording and mixing a boys’ school choir for free to get information, but she found one. Turned out the owner both knew Miranda’s father and loved Rigg’s records.
Took another week to move, set up, tune, tweak, and generally fix it.
“No, not that sound,” said Riggs, “that little needly-needly-zuzz bit right there.”
“Stylophone,” said Miranda. “Little gadget you play by touching a pen on a wire to a metal plate keyboard to complete the circuit.” Hadn’t been made since the 60’s. In a city on an island in the arctic, it was sure to be even harder to find than the Moog.
She went to the markets, literally underground, in the now-roofed-over valleys between the mountains upon which the city was built. The troll markets, where you could find anything.
But there was too much, so she went to Arduhl, who’d been her father’s assistant twenty years before, and, she remembered, his engineer. He sent her to a man who never left his basement flat, but knew every detail of what came and went through the markets with a trainspotter’s mania for detail.
“There’s a couple of them,” said the basement guy. “I know where. But in return, you have to tell me something I don’t know. About the markets.”
She set up her Nagra under a seller’s booth, recorded 24 hours of market sounds, brought a stack of reel-to-reel tapes to the basement.
His eyes were moist as he shoved a crumpled paper into her hand and shooed her out.
The stylus wire was loose, but she fixed that. And if it gave Riggs a little shock with every note, well, she couldn’t fix everything.
For the curious, a Stylophone demo video .