The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE HAPPY MAN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  VANILLA DUNK

  LIGHT AND THE SUFFERER

  FOREVER, SAID THE DUCK

  FIVE FUCKS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  THE HARDENED CRIMINALS

  SLEEPY PEOPLE

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1996 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  “The Happy Man,” “Vanilla Dunk,” and “Forever, Said the Duck” appeared, in slightly different form, in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  “Light and the Sufferer” appeared, in slightly different form, in Century.

  “The Hardened Criminals” appeared, in slightly different form, in Intersections. The Sycamore Hill Anthology.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Lethem, Jonathan.

  The wall of the sky, the wall of the eye: stories/ by Jonathan Lethem.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Contents: The happy man—Vanilla dunk—Light and the sufferer—Forever, said the duck—Five fucks—The hardened criminals—Sleepy people.

  ISBN 0-15-100180-4

  1. Fantastic fiction, American. 2. Horror tales, American. 1. Title.

  PS3562.E8544W35 1996

  813'-54—dc20 95-32093

  First edition

  eISBN 978-0-544-34621-5

  v1.0414

  Without Whom

  Michael Randel, Richard Parks, Gardner Dozois, the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference 1992 and 1994, and Charles Rosen and Christian K. Messenger, inspirers of Dunk.

  The book’s title is taken from a description of Fritz Lang’s films in Geoffrey O’Brien’s The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century.

  “The Happy Man” is for Stanley Ellin

  —otherwise, for Blake Lethem

  THE HAPPY MAN

  1

  I left her in the bedroom, and went and poured myself a drink. I felt it now; there wasn’t any doubt. But I didn’t want to tell her, not yet. I wanted to stretch it out for as long as I could. It had been so quick, this time.

  In the meantime I wanted to see the kid.

  I took my drink and went into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed. His night light was on; I could see I’d woken him. Maybe he’d heard me clinking bottles. Maybe he’d heard us making love.

  “Dad,” he said.

  “Peter.”

  “Something the matter?”

  Peter was twelve. A good kid, a very good kid. He was just eleven when I died. All computers and stereo, back then. Heavy metal and D and D. Sorcerers, dragons, the flaming pits of Hell, the whole bit. And music to match. After I died and came back he got real serious about things, forgot about the rock music and the imaginary Hells. Gave up his friends, too. I was pretty worried about that, and we had a lot of big talks. But he stayed serious. The one thing he stuck with was the computer, only now he used it to map out real Hell. My Hell.

  Instead of answering his question I took another drink. He knew what was the matter.

  “You going away?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Tell Mom yet?”

  “Nope.”

  He scooted up until he was sitting on his pillow. I could see him thinking: It was fast this time, Dad. Is it getting faster? But he didn’t say anything.

  “Me and your mother,” I said. “There’s a lot of stuff we didn’t get to, this time.”

  Peter nodded.

  “Well—” I began, then stopped. What did he understand? More than I guessed, probably. “Take good care of her,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I kissed his forehead. I knew how much he hated the smell of liquor, but he managed not to make a face. Good kid, etc.

  Then I went in to see his mother.

  It was while we were making love that I’d had the first inkling that the change was coming on, but I’d kept it to myself. There wasn’t any purpose to ruining the mood; besides, I wasn’t sure yet. It wasn’t until afterward that I knew for sure.

  But I had to tell her now. Another hour or so and I’d be gone.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, just like with Peter. Only in this room it was dark. And she wasn’t awake. I put my hand on her cheek, felt her breath against my palm. She murmured, and kissed my hand. I squeezed her shoulder until she figured out that I wanted her to wake up.

  “Maureen,” I said.

  “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  I wanted to undress again and get back under the covers. Curl myself around her and fall asleep. Not to say another word. Instead I said: “I’m going back.”

  “Going back?” Her voice was suddenly hoarse.

  I nodded in the dark, but she got the idea.

  “Damn you!”

  I didn’t see the slap coming. That didn’t matter, since it wasn’t for show. It rattled my teeth. By the time I recovered she was up against the headboard, curled into herself, sobbing weakly.

  It wasn’t usually this bad for her anymore. She’d numbed the part of herself that felt it the most. But it didn’t usually happen this fast, either.

  I moved up beside her on the bed, and cradled her head in my hands. Let her cry awhile against my chest. But she wasn’t done yet. When she turned her face up it was still raw and contorted with her pain, tendons standing out on her neck.

  “Don’t say it like that,” she gasped out between sobs. “I hate that so much—”

  “What?” I tried to say it softly.

  “Going back. Like that’s more real to you now, like that’s where you belong, and this is the mistake, the exception—”

  I couldn’t think of what to say to stop her.

  “Oh, God.” I held her while she cried some more. “Just don’t say it like that, Tom,” she said when she could. “I can’t stand it.”

  “I won’t say it like that anymore,” I said flatly.

  She calmed somewhat. We sat still there in the dark, my arms around her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but evenly now. “It’s just so fast. Are you sure—”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We hardly had any time,” she said, sniffling. “I mean, I was just getting the feeling back, you know? When we were making love. It was so good, just now. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just thought it was the beginning of a good period again. I thought you’d be back for a while . . .”

  I stroked her hair, not saying anything.

  “Did you know when we were fucking?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied. “Not until after.�
��

  “I don’t know if I can take it anymore, Tom. I can’t watch you walk around like a zombie all the time. It’s driving me crazy. Every day I look in your eyes, thinking maybe he’s back, maybe he’s about to come back, and you just stare at me. I try to hold your hand in the bed and then you need to scratch yourself or something and you just pull away without saying anything, like you didn’t even notice. I can’t live like this—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, a little hollowly. I wasn’t unsympathetic. But we’d been through it before. We always ended in the same place. We always would.

  And frankly, once I’d absorbed the impact of her rage, the conversation lost its flavor. My thoughts were beginning to drift ahead, to Hell.

  “Maybe you should live somewhere else,” she said. “Your body, I mean. When you’re not around. You could sleep down at the station or something.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “I just remembered—”

  “What?”

  “Your uncle Frank, remember? When does he come?”

  “Maybe I’ll be back before he shows up,” I said. It wasn’t likely. I usually spent a week or so in Hell, when I went. Frank was due in four days. “Anyway, he knows about me. There won’t be any problem.”

  She sighed. “I just hate having guests when you’re gone—”

  “Frank’s not a guest,” I said. “He’s family.”

  She changed the subject. “Did you forget the medication? Maybe if you took the medication—”

  “I always take it,” I said. “It doesn’t work. It doesn’t keep me here. You can’t take a pill to keep your soul from migrating to Hell.”

  “It’s supposed to help, Tom.”

  “Well it doesn’t matter, does it? I take it. Why do we have to talk about it?”

  Now I’d hurt her a little. We were quiet. I felt her composing herself there, in my arms. Making her peace with my going away. Numbing herself.

  The result was that we came a little closer together. I was able to share in her calm. We would be nice to each other from here on in. Things were back to normal.

  But at the time, we’d backed away from that perilous, agonized place where to be separated by this, or separated at all, even for a minute, was too much to bear; from that place where all that mattered was our love, and where compromise was fundamentally wrong.

  Normal was sometimes miles apart.

  “You know what I hate the most?” she said. “That I don’t even want to stay up with you. You’ll only be around for what? A couple of hours more? I should want to get in every last minute. But I don’t know what to say to you, really. There’s nothing new to say about it. I feel like going to sleep.”

  “It’s coming fast,” I said, just to set her straight. “I think it’s more like half an hour now.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “But no hard feelings. Go to sleep. I understand.”

  “I have to,” she said. “I have to get up in the morning. I feel sick from crying.” She slid under the covers and hugged me at the waist. “Tom?” she said, in a smaller voice.

  “Maureen.”

  “Is it getting faster?”

  “It’s just this one time,” I said. “It probably doesn’t mean anything. It’s just painful to go through—”

  “Okay,” she said. “I love you, Tom.”

  “I love you too,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  She went to sleep then, while I lay awake beside her, waiting to cross over.

  If Maureen hadn’t still been in school when I died, that would have been the end of it. If she hadn’t been in debt up to her ears, and still two years away from setting up an office. As it was I had to sit in cold pack for three months while her lawyer pushed the application through. Eventually the courts saw it her way: I was the breadwinner. So they thawed me out.

  Now she was supposed to be happy. I kept food on the table, and she had her graduate degree. Her son grew up knowing his dad. It wasn’t supposed to matter that my soul shuttled between my living body here on earth, and Hell. She wasn’t supposed to complain about that.

  Besides, it wasn’t my fault.

  2

  In Hell I’m a small boy.

  Younger than Peter. Eight or nine, I’d guess.

  I always start in the same place. The beginning is always the same. I’m at that table, in that damned garden, waiting for the witch.

  Let me be more specific. I begin as a detail in a tableau: four of us children are seated in a semicircle around a black cast-iron garden table. We sit in matching iron chairs. The lawn beneath us is freshly mowed; the gardener, if there is one, permits dandelions but not crabgrass. At the edge of the lawn is a scrubby border of rosebushes. Beyond that, a forest.

  Behind me, when I turn to look, there’s a pair of awkward birch saplings. Behind them, the witch’s house. Smoke tumbles out of the slate chimney. The witch is supposed to be making us breakfast.

  We’re supposed to wait. Quietly.

  Time is a little slow there, at Hell’s entrance. I’ve waited there with the other children, bickering, playing with the silverware, curling the lace doily under my setting into a tight coil, for what seems like years. Breakfast is never served. Never. The sun, which is hanging just beyond the tops of the trees, never sets. Time stands still there. Which is not to say we sit frozen like statues. Far from it. We’re a bunch of hungry children, and we make all kinds of trouble.

  But I’m leaving something out.

  We sit in a semicircle. That’s to make room for the witch’s horse. The witch’s horse takes up a quarter of the table. He’s seated in front of a place like any other guest.

  He’s waiting for breakfast, too.

  The witch’s horse is disgusting. The veins under his eyes quiver and he squirms in his seat. His forelegs are chained and staked to keep him at the table. He’s sitting on his tail, so he can’t swat away the flies which gather and drink at the comers of his mouth. The witch’s horse is wearing a rusted pair of cast-iron eyeglass frames on his nose. They’re for show, I guess, but they don’t fit right. They chafe a pair of raw pink gutters into the sides of his nose.

  If I stay at the table and wait for breakfast, subtle changes do occur. Most often the other children get restless, and begin to argue or play, and the table is jostled, and the silverware clatters, and the horse snorts in fear, his yellow eyes leaking. Sometimes a snake or a fox slithers across the lawn and frightens the horse, and he rattles his chains, and the children murmur and giggle. Once a bird flew overhead and splattered oily white birdshit onto the teapot. It was a welcome distraction, like anything else.

  Every once in a while the children decide to feel sorry for the horse, and mount a campaign to lure him forward and pluck the glasses from his nose, or daub at his gashes with a wadded-up doily. I tried to help them once, when I was new to Hell. I felt sorry for the horse, too. That was before I saw him and the witch ride together in the forest. When I saw them ride I knew the horse and the witch were in it together.

  Seeing them ride, howling and grunting through the trees, is one of the worst things I experience in all of Hell. After the first time I didn’t feel sorry for the horse at all.

  Whatever the cause, disturbances at the garden table are always resolved the same way. The activity reaches some pitch, the table seems about to overturn, when suddenly there’s a sound at the door of the witch’s house. We all freeze in our places, breath held. Even the horse knows to sit stock-still, and the only sound that remains is the buzzing of the flies.

  We all watch for movement at the door of the witch’s house. On the slim hope that maybe, just this once, it’s breakfast time. The door opens, just a crack, just enough, and the witch slips out. She’s smiling. She’s very beautiful, the witch. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, actually. She’s got a great smile. The witch walks out across the lawn, and stops halfway between her door and the table. By now we’re all slumped obediently in our se
ats again. My heart, to be honest, is in my throat.

  I’m in love.

  “Breakfast will be ready soon,” sings the witch. “So just sit quietly, don’t bother Horse, and before you know it I’ll have something delicious on the table—”

  And then she turns and slips back through her doorway and we start all over again.

  That’s how Hell begins. Maybe if I were a little more patient—waited, say, a thousand years instead of just a hundred—breakfast would appear. But then, knowing Hell, I’m not sure I’d want to see what the witch has been cooking up all this time.

  But I don’t wait at all anymore. I get up and walk away from the table right away.

  Time in Hell doesn’t start until you get up from the garden table.

  3

  The Hell in the computer starts out the same way mine does: in the garden.

  Peter laid it all out like Dungeons and Dragons, like a role-playing computer game. We entered a long description of the scene; the other children, the witch’s horse, the witch. It was Peter’s idea, when I came back with my first tentative reports of what I’d gone through, to map it out with the computer. I think he had the idea that it was like one of his dungeons, and that if we persisted we would eventually find a way out.

  So Peter’s “Dad” character wakes up at the garden table, same as I do. And when Peter types in a command, like GET UP FROM THE TABLE, WALK NORTH ACROSS THE LAWN, his “Dad” goes to explore a computer version of the Hell I inhabit.

  I don’t soft-pedal it. I report what I see, and he enters it into the computer. Factually, we’re recreating my Hell. The only thing I spare him are my emotional responses. I omit my fear at what I encounter, my rage at living these moments again and again, my unconscionable lust for the witch . . .

  4

  When I crossed over that night, after fighting with Maureen, I didn’t dawdle at the garden table. I was bored with that by now. I pushed my chair back and started in the direction Peter and I call north; the opposite direction from the witch’s house. I ran on my eight-year-old legs across the lawn, through a gap in the border of rosebushes, and into the edge of the forest.