Alternate Timeline Fanfic by Eric Del Carlo
In an alternate history with stunted technology and strange sexual mores, Coby enlists the help of his schoolmate Jaecar to write a story inspired by a retired science fiction author.
Jaecar told quality lies. He said he'd screwed a girl named Edie Thaw. There was quiet brilliance in that name. Edie was commonplace enough, but Thaw stood on the edge of believability. Somebody had to be named Thaw; plausible consonants bracketing the reliable vowel. Coby had never encountered it as a proper name, but Edie Thaw could be a real person. If you didn't know Jaecar. If you weren't sure he was as virginal as every other fourteen-year-old at President George S. Patton Middle School.
Even the details surrounding the girl were exquisitely credible. He and Edie had only screwed two and a half times. The number wasn't absurdly overstated. And that half - what a dramatic hook! It intrigued, forcing the question, the answer to which Jaecar was ready to provide: sex interrupted by the early arrival home of Edie's mother, sending Jaecar out the bedroom window and down a vine-entwined trellis.
The tenable invention of Edie Thaw was why Coby wanted Jaecar to help him write his story. Coby had the central idea. But he needed those honest-sounding peculiarities, the glib little adornments which made a story seem grown-up and fleshed out and professional.
Coby wanted a story worthy of the pro science fiction writer who had inspired it: Vic James himself.
It wasn't cool to like science fiction. It never would be. Cool kids bonded over sports and pop music and whatever else. But it was a deep fanatical love of science fiction that had brought Coby and Jaecar together. They were physically unalike, Jaecar a big uncoordinated Germanic blond, Coby spindly but wiry. Neither excelled academically. Neither, despite the fabled sexual ministrations of Edie Thaw, was romantically or even socially skilled.
They read the luridly covered "sci-fic" paperbacks that people made such fun of. At fourteen years of age they were supposed to have already outgrown this stuff. Coby did his best to ignore the disgusted or pitying looks he got from adults when he was reading on the bus. Some stared like he was playing with a doll.
There was, maybe, some distant justification for this prejudice. Science fiction, from its early twentieth century outset, had promised a future of technological marvels: flying cars, zap guns, space colonies, and so on. It was well into the twenty-first now, and none of that had materialized, not even the little stuff like personal walkie-talkies and video phone calls.
Some said it was because America hadn't had to face a rival since the defeat of Russia. Nothing to spur the nation, no urgency to develop scientific miracles. Every president in Coby's lifetime had vowed to land a person on the moon, but nothing ever came of it.
Coby traded novels and issues of sci-fic magazines with Jaecar. But it was more than that. They discussed the stories, in depth and at length. Coby wrote letters to the publications, and got replies sometimes, and had even been printed twice in letters columns. He sent off to the science fiction societies in New York for newsletters. He was a fan. Hardcore. Hooked on the elaborate futures and imaginative alien worlds.
And when one reached this intensity of devotion, it was evidently not uncommon for a fan to think: I can do that.
Part of it was having a favorite author whose work you devoured, read over and over, until his or her style fused with your consciousness. Until you could almost predict the shape and course of a sentence from its initial word. Until you began to believe you could write. Just. Like. Him/Her.
Jaecar had come over after school, and Coby was nervous. Jaecar at the house wasn't anything unusual. Even what they were doing was what they'd done on uncounted previous afternoons. Jaecar sat in an awkward pile of knees and beefy forearms on a patch of Navajo rug in Coby's bedroom. He was thumbing a yellowed paperback of The War of the Worlds, the edition with a still from Roger Corman's 1958 movie version for a cover. Even though the film was pre-Liberations, a half-naked Deborah Kerr posed provocatively with Martian tripods marching to war in the background.
Coby was nervous because of what he meant to ask his friend today. He had been delaying and delaying, and now it was almost time for Jaecar to go home for dinner.
Jaecar snapped the book shut and turned it to glare at the tiny letters on the spine that categorized it as SCIENCE FICTION, as if betrayed.
"Told you it wasn't like the movie," Coby said from his bed where he sat cross-legged.
"I mean, it's sci-fic and all," Jaecar said. "Aliens invading. But it's so... fuddy-duddy."
"It was written a long time ago."
"I can't relate to this guy, the character. I want him to be scared and desperate in the ways, y'know, I would be."
"Old book," Coby repeated, but he smiled. These were the kind of insights and analyses he hoped to get for the project he had in mind.
He took in a long breath.
"Jaecar, I want to propose something."
His friend offered a smirk. "We gonna get married?"
Coby didn't let himself get distracted. Just like he'd rehearsed, now. "I got this story I want to write. And I hope you'll help me with it."
Jaecar's round shoulders lifted and dropped, a lumbering sort of shrug. "You're the writer. I'll read whatever you write. But..." Again the shrug.
It was true that Coby had written before. Tried to write. Done a few "stories." But he knew they were bad, even the ones he'd finished, amateur retreads of clichéd sci-fic concepts. Yet Jaecar had dutifully read them.
He touched his five fingertips to his other five, and looked for a moment at the spidery bridge of digits. He said, "I've got an idea."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Excitement was a tension in his mind. It was a good feeling. Good, and scary too. "You know Vic James."
Not a question but Jaecar answered anyway. "'Course."
Coby reached for the book he'd tucked under a fold of blanket an hour ago, and held it up like a courtroom exhibit. "He wrote four novels that all take place in an alternate timeline where Stalin was never born and World War II happened a whole different way."
Jaecar was looking at the brownshirts on the cover of the paperback. His nose wrinkled just perceptibly. "He made Germans the bad guys."
A smidgen of racial pride had always kept Jaecar Weisenbach from wholly embracing the series, Coby thought, even though the first of the novels, Glory to the Damned, had won the coveted sci-fic Gernie Award in 1964.
"He did," Coby allowed. "He also made that parallel history so specific and real that when you stop reading, it takes a few minutes for our reality to pop back into place. James pretty much invented alternate timeline science fiction."
"Yeah?" His friend was still waiting, probably about to say he had to leave for dinner or else his mom would phone here.
For a few seconds Coby couldn't get another breath. This was what creativity must feel like, he thought. The true thrill of ideas.
Finally he said in a gaspy rush not at all like what he'd rehearsed, "I want to make a story about Vic James himself. I want to put James into his own alternate timeline, the one where we didn't fight the Russians. I want him to live in that reality. Then I want to send the story to him."
Jaecar stared back, with eyes that got bigger and somehow bluer. Coby waited in agony. Here, then, was the downside, or at least the dangerous side, of being creative, he thought. This was the first test of his idea on an outside party.
Big teeth split the clunky Germanic face. Jaecar howled laughter, which didn't tell Coby anything; and then he said, "That's fucking brilliant!" which told Coby everything, and which was what he'd so wanted to hear.
It was as important to know Vic James as to know the alternate history the author had famously created. Fortunately, a month ago, Coby had mailed an SASE to New York and gotten a little treatise on the life and times of Vic James, courtesy of the sci-fic society that handled such things for fans.
They were mimeographed sheets, slightly blurry purple ink. An official stamp marked the top right corner, but it had occurred to Coby that anybody could make a rubber stamp, and that this august league might be one guy in an apartment. Still, the information fascinated him.
With Jaecar on board for the project, Coby shared the biographical details with him. He had the material memorized, so he mostly watched the bigger boy absorb the text, hoping to get a glimpse of Jaecar's thought processes, the spark of ingenuity that let him tell such convincing lies.
Jaecar turned over the last page, then slowly tapped the little sheaf into perfect alignment on the rug. He didn't have intellectual features, but they still communicated the movement of deep mental currents.
"You got a picture of him?"
Coby bounded over to one of his bookcases. His room was cluttered - mostly with sci-fic materials - but not untidy. He poked the book he wanted off a shelf, the Blackthorne hardcover edition of James' prewar work.
"On the back flyleaf thing," Coby said, and added, "Careful, it's old," as he passed it into Jaecar's thick-fingered hands.
Jaecar studied the photograph. It was vintage Vic James, with a pipe and a moustache, dashing as a barnstormer.
Coby had barely slept last night, couldn't remember anything that had happened at school today, and now thrummed with anticipation. The enthusiasm he felt for this project was almost unsettling, like nothing he'd quite experienced before, even when he had gotten himself all jazzed up to write those earlier stories about space empires and bug-eyed aliens.
He tasted blood. Tasted it because he'd bit his lip waiting for Jaecar to say something. "So?" he finally said, too loudly. "You've seen his picture."
Jaecar blinked at him. "Oh, sorry. I'm just trying, y'know, to get in his head."
That sounded promising to Coby. But still he felt like a bundle of nerves, eager to act, to move. He sat on the bedroom floor alongside Jaecar, a notebook open beside him.
Jaecar turned the book over in his hands. "I thought I'd read all of James' stuff. How come you never loaned me this one?"
"Because it's old. Not as old as H. G. Wells or anything. But it's like a lot of sci-fic from the '40s before World War II. Not very sophisticated. But come on, that's seventy years ago. I only like it because I would read Vic James' grocery list. And it's kinda neat to see how his ideas and style got started." Coby continued to squirm.
Jaecar was reading the descriptive text. "The Galactic Placement Bureau. What's that?"
Coby suppressed a sigh and explained the concept which a young Vic James had turned into a series of popular stories for the pulp magazines of the day. A shady but ultra-powerful agency was responsible for assigning the population of an overflowing Earth to appropriate situations and fates on other planets. The shorts usually ended with an evildoer getting his, or a persecuted good person being rewarded with a position of power or wealth.
"I should read this," Jaecar said, musingly.
Coby finally slapped the carpet with his palm. "Well?" he said heatedly.
"Well what?"
"Well -" Coby gestured with frustration at the blank page of notebook. "What ideas have you got?"
"You're kidding, right? You think I can just snap my fingers and come up with a whole fake history for this man? Tell me that's not what you've been expecting this whole time."
Coby bit the same spot on his lip, and winced. He felt stupid suddenly.
"Sorry," he said, voice gone hoarse. He closed the notebook like he was hiding a shameful secret.
Jaecar dropped a meaty hand on his shoulder and kneaded his bony socket a little. "Hey, it's okay. Look, it'll take time. And effort. I've never tried to write anything. You know that. But this is a really wizard idea you've come up with. Let's do it right."
Coby felt a genuine warmth for his friend. This, then, was to be a mature undertaking, not something they did in an afternoon, like building a model four-prop cross-continental passenger plane. Coby tried to reset his mental and emotional speedometer. It wasn't easy. He burned with his ardor for this project. But if they did it right, like Jaecar said, it would be that much more satisfying.
Information retrieval was another area way behind the imaginations of writers. Jaecar wanted more material on Vic James, but it wasn't like there were biographies written about sci-fic authors.
It kept putting Coby in mind of Alfred Bester's classic novel Androidia, where every citizen of the futuristic human/robot civilization could access every archived and cross-indexed iota of knowledge, no matter how obscure. Total informationality. But nothing remotely like that had come about in the real world. America kept ahead of all the other countries technologically, but nobody else was really doing much so it wasn't a hard race to win.
Instead, Coby was in the periodicals room at the main library, and Jaecar was diligently rereading James' four novels, sucking up the fact that in an alternate reality the Germans started a world war. Coby allowed himself an evil little smile. Jaecar's racial discomfort seemed a fair price for Coby doing this scut work.
Still, he acknowledged that the more they knew about Vic James' personal history, the better.
The air in the library was heady with the scent of paper and hushed overpowering knowledge. He wished the whole place was devoted exclusively to science fiction, though, like stacked-to-the-rafters Fantasmo's Books on 20th Street. He even felt that way about school, wished his studies were committed entirely to sci-fic, which he admitted was numb-dumb. Still, there wasn't anything in this world, any field of study or ideology, that excited him as deeply and unfailingly as science fiction did.
He took a stack of sci-fic magazines to a long oak table. He wasn't going to find any new stories by James in these publications. The author had stopped writing in 1994, something that, though it was before his own birth, broke Coby's heart.
He looked through articles and reviews and letters to the editor, scanning column after column for James' name. It was tough to stay focused, but he was motivated. He paused to rub his smarting eyes and sneak a few baby carrot sticks from his jacket pocket.
Looking up, he saw a man eyeing him from the next table. The eye contact was brief but intense, like a match struck in the dark. The man wore a suit. Other than the periodicals librarian, they were alone in the much-alcoved room.
Coby went back to work. A few minutes later Vic James' name vaulted off a page, and he found himself reading a brief article written by another professional writer. It mentioned a longstanding friendship and a deep admiration for the other's work, citing, of course, Glory to the Damned as cause for including James in the pantheon of sci-fic giants.
The little tribute from some years ago also referenced an interview James had given in another magazine of the time. The writer called the piece "laudably candid," and Coby's heart raced until he saw where this fabled interview had seen print. In Genteel. A men's magazine.
Coby sat back with a sigh. Again he was vexed by the unprogressiveness of the society he lived in. Since the cultural Liberations of the early 1960s anybody who wanted to see tits could turn on the television after nine p.m. But he still couldn't buy or even legally look at a nudie magazine.
He made eye contact again with the man in the suit. He wondered, not for the first time, if it was his skinny build or his haircut or maybe just some subliminal whir he gave off that created these moments. The man's expression was hopeful and apprehensive.
Coby wrote down the magazine's title, volume and year, and tossed the paper to him. The man looked at it, nodded, then they both got up and went into a niche which was a concealing forest of lacquered wood arches. There the man cupped Coby's crotch for no more than sixty seconds, until his upper lip glistened with sweat and his color deepened considerably.
This was something secret, to be sure, something Coby never had and never would tell anyone else about. But it was a thing he could do, a talent. A power, even. He liked that he could make adults behave this way. They so obviously wanted him. It was the sex thing. So forbidden. So risky.
After, the man furtively delivered Coby the magazine and fled. Coby found the interview and decided to copy the whole thing out in the shorthand he'd invented when he was ten. The interview was great stuff - a gold mine, in fact - far more comprehensive than the mimeographed sheets he had sent away for, totally worth his effort.
Finally he closed his notebook, flexing an aching wrist. One of the reasons he knew nobody at Prez Patton who bragged about having sex had actually had sex was that none of his schoolmates ever mentioned how weird and boring it was. If they had just said they liked the power it gave them, he would have believed it.
Coby hurried away to Jaecar, to deliver this trove of insightful information.
Vic James had reached deep into history's wastebasket and unwadded the life of Ernst Röhm. This was a German military-political thug who in reality had been assassinated by bolshies in his own country in the 1930s. Instead - alternately - in James' world he had risen to absolute national power and, filling the historical vacuum left by Stalin's resounding absence, had started a global war.
Of course, there were many other fanciful factors accompanying this bent fact. Germany, in the altered timeline, was abetted by fascist elements in Italy and Spain. World War II started in 1940, not 1946, and it lasted twice as long. England and France fought on the American side, just like in real life. Russia stayed neutral, calling itself the Red Fortress and sealing its borders, only to collapse from leaderless internal corruption within a few years.
The 1982 interview in Genteel came out the same year Vic James had completed the final book in his most famous series. It was no sci-fic goon asking him questions; rather, a sophisticated journalist who wrote for a worldly magazine. He got James to talk about his military service. James had fought in California against the two-year-long Red Wave, trying to drive bolshies back into the sea, picking up a leg wound and watching Hollywood burn along the way.
Then there was James' personal life. This being a men's magazine, the readers would want to hear about his romantic exploits. He dutifully expounded on his affair with one of Orson Welles' ex-wives. It got a little graphic, and Coby tried to connect James' fond libidinous reminiscences with his own erotic experiences with adult males. There seemed no corollary. On the purely physical level Coby had only ever felt a vague tingling sensation. He wasn't into sex for the sex, after all. Maybe he would be one day, but right now it just gave him his only real sense of supremacy. Sometimes, like at the library, he got men to do stuff for him, even to give him money. Coby had $87 in random bills in an old action figure box buried deep in his closet. But that money was just another way of keeping score, showing he was the winner in those encounters.
James spoke of time spent amidst the postwar Miami movie scene, name-dropping starlets as well as producers who were courting him with a movie deal for his books - which never happened. He talked of kayaking and mountain climbing and how good one's middle age could be with the right attitude.
Vic James also admitted to a drinking problem as a young adult, something that had nearly derailed his nascent writing career. In the interview he said, "I had flown to New York. I met the editor who'd bought my first two Galactic Placement Bureau stories - this at a cocktail party, full of publishing and writerly types and young lovelies. So, I get smashed, and I do all the stupid things you do when you're too young and too drunk. This editor, a big Irishman, takes me out to the fire stairs of the building and tells me I need to shape up or I'll be through in this business. It was - I don't quite know - just the right admixture of humiliation and straightforwardness. I went into A.A. after that."
James even copped to the fact that Vic James wasn't really his name. He'd taken his first and middle names to write under, so as to avoid any confusion or association with his father, who had evidently been big in the unions and prewar California politics.
With this material an alternate Vic James could be constructed, Coby firmly believed, one invested with convincing distinctive biographical detail. Points of such cutting insight that Vic James himself would appreciate the creativity and effort.
How satisfying would it be to be acknowledged by his all-time favorite author?
Jaecar just had to come through for him, help him with the fine brushstrokes that turned the good painting into a masterpiece.
Something unexpected was emerging from all this, Coby found when he calmed down enough to reflect a little. He felt a kind of affinity for Vic James. Not just as a sci-fic writer with a tremendous imagination and flair for prose, but as a person: flawed, uncertain at the outset of his career. He seemed strictly heterosexual, but he'd hinted in the Genteel interview that his latter facility with women was preceded by a youthful awkwardness wherein girls were mysteries and he had no clue how to solve them. It might have even been that early intimate contact was as strange and carnally joyless as it presently was for Coby when he played his power games over men.
It would be funny, but pretty neat too, if he and James turned out to have important things in common simply as people. It was one thing to be able to write anything remotely like Vic James. It would be something else to be like him.
"What I don't understand," Jaecar said, "is why the books don't talk at all about Stalin."
He had said something to this effect last year, his first time reading the alternate timeline series. Coby proudly took it now, as he had then, as an indicator that of the two he was closest to being the real writer.
"Stalin isn't mentioned because Stalin doesn't exist in this reality."
Jaecar had that clouded look he got when faced with math fractions. "Christ, I know that. But it should say something -"
"Like what?" Coby glanced up from the typewriter. It was Jaecar's. They were at his place, so Coby could transcribe his shorthand. "Devote a chapter to Stalin not being born? Joseph Stalin was the twentieth century's greatest monster. Pull him out of history, and his absence is all the reader needs to know about." Jaecar lived in an apartment with his mother, in rooms smelling faintly of cabbage. She was a strange intense woman who worked for the phone company. "It would make no sense, within the story that Vic James is telling, to stop everything and point out that in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 there was this kid who was never conceived or who died in childbirth or - who knows? - just decided he wasn't going to become the worst, most ambitious dictator in the world. If James did that, it would be like an actor in a movie speaking straight into the camera to the audience."
Jaecar sat in a canvas folding chair, the only other place to sit in the cramped bedroom. His bed was piled with books, board games, dirty laundry and old LPs. One of those was playing on the turntable now, a Liberations-era British band. Clapton on guitar, vocals by that androgynous David Jones, who had two different color eyes. Jaecar had just finished a record by the pop trio the Monkees, though Coby wasn't really listening.
"So Stalin never having existed, that's really the only difference between our world and this one?" Jaecar held up the second book in the series, bookmark stuck in three quarters of the way through.
"Yep," Coby said. "If you actually took somebody that major out of history, there would be upheaval. Sociologically. Technologically. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse in different ways." He returned to hunting and pecking, his notebook next to the typewriter opened to a page full of shorthand scrawl.
"Wow," said Jaecar. "It sure changes things a lot."
"Well, it would, wouldn't it?"
"Sure, I get it. I'm not a numb-dumb. But I think the most interesting stuff is the... subtleties. Some movie star still being alive who died young. Or a politician having won an election that they lost. Weird names for candy bars. Slang that you don't recognize but still sounds like it might be real, in a fun house mirror way. It's that stuff I really like."
Coby smiled down at the little type hammers as they delivered letter-shaped ink to the paper. This was exactly why he wanted Jaecar in on the project.
Coby said, "What I need is for you to apply that interest to James himself. Try to imagine how things would have gone for him in the world he created, where there's no Joseph Stalin." Despite how good an idea he had come up with on his own, he knew it was those fine points Jaecar had mentioned which would make or break this story.
"I guess..." Jaecar said softly, gazing at the paperback's sensationalist cover of retro fascist Germans. "It's just my grandfather served in the ATO. Three years of a Weisenbach in bloody Alaskan snow..." His blue eyes shone. "My mom talks about him a lot. To read something where Germans are as bad as the Russians were - well, shit."
For the first time Coby really got what troubled Jaecar. But he could only think of one comforting thing to say:
"Hey, it's just a story."
The first words through the line, when he'd closed his bedroom door on the trailing phone cord, were: "It's about opposites, man!"
Coby's dad, in a perplexed tone, had called up the stairs of the house. A telephone call at almost ten o'clock at night. Strange. And now Jaecar on the line, sounding stranger. Sounding...
"Are you drunk?" Coby asked.
Braying laughter, loud enough that Coby had to hold the earpiece a few inches away. "It's not one way, it's the other!"
Coby didn't get a lot of phone calls. Calls were for sociable people, for cool kids. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, opposite stuff, man. Reverses, reversals. You take the thing and -" He made some kind of saliva-filled sound, probably accompanied by a gesture. "Twist it around."
"You're talking about our story?"
Jaecar drew a heavy breath. "We gotta take Vic James and just fuck him up."
"Huh?"
"His real life was good, right? Or exciting at least. Adventurous. Becomes a pro writer when he's young. Goes to the war and comes back a hero. Wins the big Gernsback Award - the Gernie. Dates actresses. Hell, in sci-fic circles he's like a movie star. So we got to reverse him."
Coby thought he finally had a handle on what Jaecar was saying, but his friend's manner still seemed alarmingly out of control.
"Where'd you get the alcohol?"
"Schnapps!"
"Where did you get the schnapps, Jaecar?"
"My mom poured it for me. There's always an anniversary, always a birthday, always a family something. Y'know?"
Jaecar's home life had always struck Coby as vaguely creepy. Only his mother there, and she an odd person, maybe more than odd; giving alcohol to her boy...
Then again, Coby thought, Jaecar would probably find it gross and bizarre to know how many men had groped his best friend in department store dressing booths, at bus stops, in dark doorways.
"Maybe you ought to go to bed, Jaecar."
"I feel awake."
"But if you close your eyes..."
"I lied about Edie Thaw." Suddenly his voice thickened. "I made her up."
Coby didn't know how to deal with this. "That doesn't matter. You'll feel better if you just go to sleep."
There was a long breathing pause. Then Jaecar said, "I already told you we gotta reverse Vic James, right? Make his life awful?"
"You did. It's an interesting approach, Jaecar."
"See? I can have good ideas too!"
Now, incredibly, he sounded angry. Didn't drunk people have any control over their emotions? But before Coby could say anything more, the line was dead. He stood a moment, holding the phone, afraid it would ring again, afraid for his friend.
When he took the heavy black extension back out to the wood pedestal in the hall where it normally sat, his father came up the stairs. Below, mother's sewing machine was starting and stopping. Nice domestic scene. Safe and ordinary.
"Everything okay?" asked his dad.
"Sure."
"It's just, a phone call this late -"
"Jaecar just wanted to know if we had a geography test tomorrow." It sounded like a lie even to Coby. He was good with concepts, not with the believable nitty-gritties.
"Okay, Coby. Goodnight."
He went back into his room to go to bed. There was so much he couldn't tell his parents. Even this writing project was something he would never mention.
Science fiction, like life, was such a lonely thing.
Jaecar Weisenbach didn't show up at school the next day. Was Coby's friend just avoiding him, maybe embarrassed about drunkenly admitting to the Edie Thaw thing? When Coby got back to his house after classes, he phoned. No answer at Jaecar's apartment. No answer all afternoon.
The alcohol worried him. Schnapps. Vic James had had a drinking problem when he was young, bad enough that he'd gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. Was Jaecar on that same path? Coby already felt he had commonalities with James. Did Jaecar as well? How strange if both their lives were converging in separate ways on the life of a retired science fiction author.
That evening Coby bit the bullet and telephoned again, when Jaecar's mother would be home. Mrs. Weisenbach picked up.
"This is?"
"Coby Jolson, Mrs. Weisenbach. Can I please talk to Jaecar?"
"Why are you having this with my son?"
Coby knew from experience that it wasn't just language difficulties. Jaecar's mother could speak in frustrating ellipses.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Weisenbach?"
"You read. He reads. I'm not liking this."
It dawned on him. She must have seen the alternate timeline novels he'd loaned Jaecar, the gruesome covers of the paperbacks. Vicious Germans, and her with a father three years in the Alaska Theater of Operations.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Weisenbach. Those are just books. Silly books." He bit his lip, a new place, fresh blood. It must be what renunciation tasted like. "Can I speak to Jaecar, please?"
"Family is very difficult. Family can fall apart. Think it's there and -" Another saliva-filled sound on the phone line, so like the noise Jaecar had made last night. "Gone. Blood in the snow and blood in your heart. You are bad for my son."
This last was said so direct, without Teutonic verbal static. It struck Coby with hurtful force. He stopped himself before he fired back at the woman with some nasty retort about schnapps and the legal drinking age being seventeen. Actually he hoped Jaecar had just drunk himself sick last night. If he'd spent all day puking, maybe he wouldn't touch the stuff again. More importantly it would mean he wasn't making himself scarce on purpose, to dodge Coby.
"I'm not bad for him," he said, but he whispered it and was already hanging up midway through his own words.
Five minutes later it started to rain.
He lied to his parents. And as the prevarications left his lips, one improvisation after the other, intertwining, making a narrative, he realized they were convincing. He was off to meet friends for a movie, he told his parents. Why not? He could have friends.
20th Street was a long walk, even in the daytime, even when it wasn't raining.
At last he looked up at the familiar, cheering sign through beaded eyelashes. Fantasmo's Books, still open for another half hour on a rainy Tuesday, catering to the needs of sci-fic goons who inhabited the odd hours and socially contemptible shadowlands.
His jacket dripped on the old green linoleum of the aisles. Books rose all around, a wondrous crush of printed matter, his kind of reading. Science fiction stimulated him. More than that, it electrified. It seemed to him to be the deepest expression of creativity and intellectual inventiveness. These writers, their names soaring toward the ceiling, had originated fantastical futures and astounding worlds, bending reality into grotesque and beautiful shapes. And every one of those futures and alien environments was more interesting than the present day dull-ass Earth Coby found himself living on.
But... what if he could contribute to this special breed of literature? If he and Jaecar both could add to it, create their own worlds and realities. It would be like escaping, only better. Making, instead of running away.
"What're you doing here?"
Coby felt dizzy. Wet clothes, the warmth of indoors, being walled in by all this wonderful fiction. So many books he hadn't yet read. Endless enjoyments awaited him.
He wiped his eyes.
"I mean, I know what you're doing here," Jaecar said. "But how come? Why're you out looking for me?" The chunky face was tense.
"We need to get started on the Vic James thing."
"I don't know if I wanna do that anymore."
These words too struck with force. Coby fought to keep a level tone. "Sure you do." Then his voice did waver some. "I need your help. I need you."
Jaecar's clothes were wet too, his damp blond hair piled darkly atop his head. Coby wondered how he'd gotten his mom to let him go out. Maybe he'd just snuck out. He stood in the aisle holding a paperback. Coby couldn't read the upside-down title, but the cover art looked familiar, or maybe he just recognized the usual sci-fic style.
"You're better at it than me," Jaecar said quietly. "Better at writing."
Coby had never acknowledged aloud the unsaid, and perhaps healthy, rivalry between them. He said, "I've just tried, that's all. Try with me. I'm serious about needing you."
Jaecar looked down at the novel in his hand, then up at the rising tiers of books. Some of these authors were famous; others had left faint passing impressions. But all had done something.
Jaecar swallowed audibly. He said, "I'm sorry for being such an ass-mouth on the phone the other night."
"Forget it." Coby nodded at the paperback in his hand. "Let's buy that and get out of here. My folks think I'm at the movies. We can sit someplace dry and talk about Vic James. That interview was incredible, don't you think? I got some ideas. I want to hear yours..."
Coby had typed the mailing manuscript because even though he could only hunt and peck, he still typed faster on Jaecar's machine than he did. Then Jaecar neatly addressed the manila envelope using a fine black marker, and slid the seven paper-clipped pages inside, along with the cover letter introducing themselves.
Jaecar looked as dazed and pleased as Coby himself felt. He had never experienced anything remotely like this sense of accomplishment with the trite sci-fic stories he'd written before.
"You think he'll read it? You think it'll even get to him?"
Coby said, "The sci-fic newsletter gives a contact address."
"But he's - what? Ninety?"
"Not quite."
"But alive?"
"But alive." Coby smiled. They might be getting this manuscript to Vic James just under the wire.
"I think the happy ending was the right way to go," Jaecar said. He grinned.
Coby remembered his friend's grin when he had first suggested the project idea, over a month ago now. "Yep," Coby agreed. "I felt we'd put the poor guy through enough hell."
They licked the envelope closed and took it to the post office.
They had gone with Jaecar's "opposites" approach with the story's protagonist, who was Vic James himself. Or sort of himself. In real life James had never married; they gave James a wife in the story. James hadn't had children; they loaded him up with a bunch. James had sobered up early; they kept him an active alcoholic into his forties. Nobody could say it couldn't happen this way in the other timeline. Stalin's absence from history would have had wildly unforeseeable consequences. Enormous things would change. So would the small stuff, tiny lives altered almost out of recognition.
Yet after the purposeful mess they had made of Vic James' existence, it had been nice and satisfying to have the alternate James finally get a story published late in his life, satisfying in some small way that beleaguered version's long held and unfulfilled desire to be a professional writer. What a strange trip through the looking glass all this had been, Coby thought.
They had mailed the story off three weeks ago.
Today they had gotten a reply.
Jaecar had pulled the canvas folding chair over to the desk as they both read the letter. They sat almost with their knees touching.
Finally, someone said softly, "Wow."
The other let out a long-held breath.
Everything went still again in the little bedroom.
Jaecar, hulkier, rather loomed above Coby where they sat close together. Coby had to make a kind of slow-motion lunge upward to press his lips against his friend's mouth. The contact was brief and firm.
As Coby settled back into the desk chair, Jaecar breathed out a little chuckle. "What'd you do that for?" He didn't sound upset.
"So I wouldn't have to wonder what it might be like anymore."
"Happy now?"
"Well, happier..." Coby laughed in a nervous giddy rush.
Jaecar swatted his arm, but even that contact was pleasant. In that moment, with the amazing encouraging letter between them on the desk, Coby could see the future. Their future. And the futures they could create. Together. Those fictional futures in books and stories. Writing together.
"So," Jaecar said. "What should we write next?"
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
Even the details surrounding the girl were exquisitely credible. He and Edie had only screwed two and a half times. The number wasn't absurdly overstated. And that half - what a dramatic hook! It intrigued, forcing the question, the answer to which Jaecar was ready to provide: sex interrupted by the early arrival home of Edie's mother, sending Jaecar out the bedroom window and down a vine-entwined trellis.
The tenable invention of Edie Thaw was why Coby wanted Jaecar to help him write his story. Coby had the central idea. But he needed those honest-sounding peculiarities, the glib little adornments which made a story seem grown-up and fleshed out and professional.
Coby wanted a story worthy of the pro science fiction writer who had inspired it: Vic James himself.
It wasn't cool to like science fiction. It never would be. Cool kids bonded over sports and pop music and whatever else. But it was a deep fanatical love of science fiction that had brought Coby and Jaecar together. They were physically unalike, Jaecar a big uncoordinated Germanic blond, Coby spindly but wiry. Neither excelled academically. Neither, despite the fabled sexual ministrations of Edie Thaw, was romantically or even socially skilled.
They read the luridly covered "sci-fic" paperbacks that people made such fun of. At fourteen years of age they were supposed to have already outgrown this stuff. Coby did his best to ignore the disgusted or pitying looks he got from adults when he was reading on the bus. Some stared like he was playing with a doll.
There was, maybe, some distant justification for this prejudice. Science fiction, from its early twentieth century outset, had promised a future of technological marvels: flying cars, zap guns, space colonies, and so on. It was well into the twenty-first now, and none of that had materialized, not even the little stuff like personal walkie-talkies and video phone calls.
Some said it was because America hadn't had to face a rival since the defeat of Russia. Nothing to spur the nation, no urgency to develop scientific miracles. Every president in Coby's lifetime had vowed to land a person on the moon, but nothing ever came of it.
Coby traded novels and issues of sci-fic magazines with Jaecar. But it was more than that. They discussed the stories, in depth and at length. Coby wrote letters to the publications, and got replies sometimes, and had even been printed twice in letters columns. He sent off to the science fiction societies in New York for newsletters. He was a fan. Hardcore. Hooked on the elaborate futures and imaginative alien worlds.
And when one reached this intensity of devotion, it was evidently not uncommon for a fan to think: I can do that.
Part of it was having a favorite author whose work you devoured, read over and over, until his or her style fused with your consciousness. Until you could almost predict the shape and course of a sentence from its initial word. Until you began to believe you could write. Just. Like. Him/Her.
Jaecar had come over after school, and Coby was nervous. Jaecar at the house wasn't anything unusual. Even what they were doing was what they'd done on uncounted previous afternoons. Jaecar sat in an awkward pile of knees and beefy forearms on a patch of Navajo rug in Coby's bedroom. He was thumbing a yellowed paperback of The War of the Worlds, the edition with a still from Roger Corman's 1958 movie version for a cover. Even though the film was pre-Liberations, a half-naked Deborah Kerr posed provocatively with Martian tripods marching to war in the background.
Coby was nervous because of what he meant to ask his friend today. He had been delaying and delaying, and now it was almost time for Jaecar to go home for dinner.
Jaecar snapped the book shut and turned it to glare at the tiny letters on the spine that categorized it as SCIENCE FICTION, as if betrayed.
"Told you it wasn't like the movie," Coby said from his bed where he sat cross-legged.
"I mean, it's sci-fic and all," Jaecar said. "Aliens invading. But it's so... fuddy-duddy."
"It was written a long time ago."
"I can't relate to this guy, the character. I want him to be scared and desperate in the ways, y'know, I would be."
"Old book," Coby repeated, but he smiled. These were the kind of insights and analyses he hoped to get for the project he had in mind.
He took in a long breath.
"Jaecar, I want to propose something."
His friend offered a smirk. "We gonna get married?"
Coby didn't let himself get distracted. Just like he'd rehearsed, now. "I got this story I want to write. And I hope you'll help me with it."
Jaecar's round shoulders lifted and dropped, a lumbering sort of shrug. "You're the writer. I'll read whatever you write. But..." Again the shrug.
It was true that Coby had written before. Tried to write. Done a few "stories." But he knew they were bad, even the ones he'd finished, amateur retreads of clichéd sci-fic concepts. Yet Jaecar had dutifully read them.
He touched his five fingertips to his other five, and looked for a moment at the spidery bridge of digits. He said, "I've got an idea."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Excitement was a tension in his mind. It was a good feeling. Good, and scary too. "You know Vic James."
Not a question but Jaecar answered anyway. "'Course."
Coby reached for the book he'd tucked under a fold of blanket an hour ago, and held it up like a courtroom exhibit. "He wrote four novels that all take place in an alternate timeline where Stalin was never born and World War II happened a whole different way."
Jaecar was looking at the brownshirts on the cover of the paperback. His nose wrinkled just perceptibly. "He made Germans the bad guys."
A smidgen of racial pride had always kept Jaecar Weisenbach from wholly embracing the series, Coby thought, even though the first of the novels, Glory to the Damned, had won the coveted sci-fic Gernie Award in 1964.
"He did," Coby allowed. "He also made that parallel history so specific and real that when you stop reading, it takes a few minutes for our reality to pop back into place. James pretty much invented alternate timeline science fiction."
"Yeah?" His friend was still waiting, probably about to say he had to leave for dinner or else his mom would phone here.
For a few seconds Coby couldn't get another breath. This was what creativity must feel like, he thought. The true thrill of ideas.
Finally he said in a gaspy rush not at all like what he'd rehearsed, "I want to make a story about Vic James himself. I want to put James into his own alternate timeline, the one where we didn't fight the Russians. I want him to live in that reality. Then I want to send the story to him."
Jaecar stared back, with eyes that got bigger and somehow bluer. Coby waited in agony. Here, then, was the downside, or at least the dangerous side, of being creative, he thought. This was the first test of his idea on an outside party.
Big teeth split the clunky Germanic face. Jaecar howled laughter, which didn't tell Coby anything; and then he said, "That's fucking brilliant!" which told Coby everything, and which was what he'd so wanted to hear.
It was as important to know Vic James as to know the alternate history the author had famously created. Fortunately, a month ago, Coby had mailed an SASE to New York and gotten a little treatise on the life and times of Vic James, courtesy of the sci-fic society that handled such things for fans.
They were mimeographed sheets, slightly blurry purple ink. An official stamp marked the top right corner, but it had occurred to Coby that anybody could make a rubber stamp, and that this august league might be one guy in an apartment. Still, the information fascinated him.
With Jaecar on board for the project, Coby shared the biographical details with him. He had the material memorized, so he mostly watched the bigger boy absorb the text, hoping to get a glimpse of Jaecar's thought processes, the spark of ingenuity that let him tell such convincing lies.
Jaecar turned over the last page, then slowly tapped the little sheaf into perfect alignment on the rug. He didn't have intellectual features, but they still communicated the movement of deep mental currents.
"You got a picture of him?"
Coby bounded over to one of his bookcases. His room was cluttered - mostly with sci-fic materials - but not untidy. He poked the book he wanted off a shelf, the Blackthorne hardcover edition of James' prewar work.
"On the back flyleaf thing," Coby said, and added, "Careful, it's old," as he passed it into Jaecar's thick-fingered hands.
Jaecar studied the photograph. It was vintage Vic James, with a pipe and a moustache, dashing as a barnstormer.
Coby had barely slept last night, couldn't remember anything that had happened at school today, and now thrummed with anticipation. The enthusiasm he felt for this project was almost unsettling, like nothing he'd quite experienced before, even when he had gotten himself all jazzed up to write those earlier stories about space empires and bug-eyed aliens.
He tasted blood. Tasted it because he'd bit his lip waiting for Jaecar to say something. "So?" he finally said, too loudly. "You've seen his picture."
Jaecar blinked at him. "Oh, sorry. I'm just trying, y'know, to get in his head."
That sounded promising to Coby. But still he felt like a bundle of nerves, eager to act, to move. He sat on the bedroom floor alongside Jaecar, a notebook open beside him.
Jaecar turned the book over in his hands. "I thought I'd read all of James' stuff. How come you never loaned me this one?"
"Because it's old. Not as old as H. G. Wells or anything. But it's like a lot of sci-fic from the '40s before World War II. Not very sophisticated. But come on, that's seventy years ago. I only like it because I would read Vic James' grocery list. And it's kinda neat to see how his ideas and style got started." Coby continued to squirm.
Jaecar was reading the descriptive text. "The Galactic Placement Bureau. What's that?"
Coby suppressed a sigh and explained the concept which a young Vic James had turned into a series of popular stories for the pulp magazines of the day. A shady but ultra-powerful agency was responsible for assigning the population of an overflowing Earth to appropriate situations and fates on other planets. The shorts usually ended with an evildoer getting his, or a persecuted good person being rewarded with a position of power or wealth.
"I should read this," Jaecar said, musingly.
Coby finally slapped the carpet with his palm. "Well?" he said heatedly.
"Well what?"
"Well -" Coby gestured with frustration at the blank page of notebook. "What ideas have you got?"
"You're kidding, right? You think I can just snap my fingers and come up with a whole fake history for this man? Tell me that's not what you've been expecting this whole time."
Coby bit the same spot on his lip, and winced. He felt stupid suddenly.
"Sorry," he said, voice gone hoarse. He closed the notebook like he was hiding a shameful secret.
Jaecar dropped a meaty hand on his shoulder and kneaded his bony socket a little. "Hey, it's okay. Look, it'll take time. And effort. I've never tried to write anything. You know that. But this is a really wizard idea you've come up with. Let's do it right."
Coby felt a genuine warmth for his friend. This, then, was to be a mature undertaking, not something they did in an afternoon, like building a model four-prop cross-continental passenger plane. Coby tried to reset his mental and emotional speedometer. It wasn't easy. He burned with his ardor for this project. But if they did it right, like Jaecar said, it would be that much more satisfying.
Information retrieval was another area way behind the imaginations of writers. Jaecar wanted more material on Vic James, but it wasn't like there were biographies written about sci-fic authors.
It kept putting Coby in mind of Alfred Bester's classic novel Androidia, where every citizen of the futuristic human/robot civilization could access every archived and cross-indexed iota of knowledge, no matter how obscure. Total informationality. But nothing remotely like that had come about in the real world. America kept ahead of all the other countries technologically, but nobody else was really doing much so it wasn't a hard race to win.
Instead, Coby was in the periodicals room at the main library, and Jaecar was diligently rereading James' four novels, sucking up the fact that in an alternate reality the Germans started a world war. Coby allowed himself an evil little smile. Jaecar's racial discomfort seemed a fair price for Coby doing this scut work.
Still, he acknowledged that the more they knew about Vic James' personal history, the better.
The air in the library was heady with the scent of paper and hushed overpowering knowledge. He wished the whole place was devoted exclusively to science fiction, though, like stacked-to-the-rafters Fantasmo's Books on 20th Street. He even felt that way about school, wished his studies were committed entirely to sci-fic, which he admitted was numb-dumb. Still, there wasn't anything in this world, any field of study or ideology, that excited him as deeply and unfailingly as science fiction did.
He took a stack of sci-fic magazines to a long oak table. He wasn't going to find any new stories by James in these publications. The author had stopped writing in 1994, something that, though it was before his own birth, broke Coby's heart.
He looked through articles and reviews and letters to the editor, scanning column after column for James' name. It was tough to stay focused, but he was motivated. He paused to rub his smarting eyes and sneak a few baby carrot sticks from his jacket pocket.
Looking up, he saw a man eyeing him from the next table. The eye contact was brief but intense, like a match struck in the dark. The man wore a suit. Other than the periodicals librarian, they were alone in the much-alcoved room.
Coby went back to work. A few minutes later Vic James' name vaulted off a page, and he found himself reading a brief article written by another professional writer. It mentioned a longstanding friendship and a deep admiration for the other's work, citing, of course, Glory to the Damned as cause for including James in the pantheon of sci-fic giants.
The little tribute from some years ago also referenced an interview James had given in another magazine of the time. The writer called the piece "laudably candid," and Coby's heart raced until he saw where this fabled interview had seen print. In Genteel. A men's magazine.
Coby sat back with a sigh. Again he was vexed by the unprogressiveness of the society he lived in. Since the cultural Liberations of the early 1960s anybody who wanted to see tits could turn on the television after nine p.m. But he still couldn't buy or even legally look at a nudie magazine.
He made eye contact again with the man in the suit. He wondered, not for the first time, if it was his skinny build or his haircut or maybe just some subliminal whir he gave off that created these moments. The man's expression was hopeful and apprehensive.
Coby wrote down the magazine's title, volume and year, and tossed the paper to him. The man looked at it, nodded, then they both got up and went into a niche which was a concealing forest of lacquered wood arches. There the man cupped Coby's crotch for no more than sixty seconds, until his upper lip glistened with sweat and his color deepened considerably.
This was something secret, to be sure, something Coby never had and never would tell anyone else about. But it was a thing he could do, a talent. A power, even. He liked that he could make adults behave this way. They so obviously wanted him. It was the sex thing. So forbidden. So risky.
After, the man furtively delivered Coby the magazine and fled. Coby found the interview and decided to copy the whole thing out in the shorthand he'd invented when he was ten. The interview was great stuff - a gold mine, in fact - far more comprehensive than the mimeographed sheets he had sent away for, totally worth his effort.
Finally he closed his notebook, flexing an aching wrist. One of the reasons he knew nobody at Prez Patton who bragged about having sex had actually had sex was that none of his schoolmates ever mentioned how weird and boring it was. If they had just said they liked the power it gave them, he would have believed it.
Coby hurried away to Jaecar, to deliver this trove of insightful information.
Vic James had reached deep into history's wastebasket and unwadded the life of Ernst Röhm. This was a German military-political thug who in reality had been assassinated by bolshies in his own country in the 1930s. Instead - alternately - in James' world he had risen to absolute national power and, filling the historical vacuum left by Stalin's resounding absence, had started a global war.
Of course, there were many other fanciful factors accompanying this bent fact. Germany, in the altered timeline, was abetted by fascist elements in Italy and Spain. World War II started in 1940, not 1946, and it lasted twice as long. England and France fought on the American side, just like in real life. Russia stayed neutral, calling itself the Red Fortress and sealing its borders, only to collapse from leaderless internal corruption within a few years.
The 1982 interview in Genteel came out the same year Vic James had completed the final book in his most famous series. It was no sci-fic goon asking him questions; rather, a sophisticated journalist who wrote for a worldly magazine. He got James to talk about his military service. James had fought in California against the two-year-long Red Wave, trying to drive bolshies back into the sea, picking up a leg wound and watching Hollywood burn along the way.
Then there was James' personal life. This being a men's magazine, the readers would want to hear about his romantic exploits. He dutifully expounded on his affair with one of Orson Welles' ex-wives. It got a little graphic, and Coby tried to connect James' fond libidinous reminiscences with his own erotic experiences with adult males. There seemed no corollary. On the purely physical level Coby had only ever felt a vague tingling sensation. He wasn't into sex for the sex, after all. Maybe he would be one day, but right now it just gave him his only real sense of supremacy. Sometimes, like at the library, he got men to do stuff for him, even to give him money. Coby had $87 in random bills in an old action figure box buried deep in his closet. But that money was just another way of keeping score, showing he was the winner in those encounters.
James spoke of time spent amidst the postwar Miami movie scene, name-dropping starlets as well as producers who were courting him with a movie deal for his books - which never happened. He talked of kayaking and mountain climbing and how good one's middle age could be with the right attitude.
Vic James also admitted to a drinking problem as a young adult, something that had nearly derailed his nascent writing career. In the interview he said, "I had flown to New York. I met the editor who'd bought my first two Galactic Placement Bureau stories - this at a cocktail party, full of publishing and writerly types and young lovelies. So, I get smashed, and I do all the stupid things you do when you're too young and too drunk. This editor, a big Irishman, takes me out to the fire stairs of the building and tells me I need to shape up or I'll be through in this business. It was - I don't quite know - just the right admixture of humiliation and straightforwardness. I went into A.A. after that."
James even copped to the fact that Vic James wasn't really his name. He'd taken his first and middle names to write under, so as to avoid any confusion or association with his father, who had evidently been big in the unions and prewar California politics.
With this material an alternate Vic James could be constructed, Coby firmly believed, one invested with convincing distinctive biographical detail. Points of such cutting insight that Vic James himself would appreciate the creativity and effort.
How satisfying would it be to be acknowledged by his all-time favorite author?
Jaecar just had to come through for him, help him with the fine brushstrokes that turned the good painting into a masterpiece.
Something unexpected was emerging from all this, Coby found when he calmed down enough to reflect a little. He felt a kind of affinity for Vic James. Not just as a sci-fic writer with a tremendous imagination and flair for prose, but as a person: flawed, uncertain at the outset of his career. He seemed strictly heterosexual, but he'd hinted in the Genteel interview that his latter facility with women was preceded by a youthful awkwardness wherein girls were mysteries and he had no clue how to solve them. It might have even been that early intimate contact was as strange and carnally joyless as it presently was for Coby when he played his power games over men.
It would be funny, but pretty neat too, if he and James turned out to have important things in common simply as people. It was one thing to be able to write anything remotely like Vic James. It would be something else to be like him.
"What I don't understand," Jaecar said, "is why the books don't talk at all about Stalin."
He had said something to this effect last year, his first time reading the alternate timeline series. Coby proudly took it now, as he had then, as an indicator that of the two he was closest to being the real writer.
"Stalin isn't mentioned because Stalin doesn't exist in this reality."
Jaecar had that clouded look he got when faced with math fractions. "Christ, I know that. But it should say something -"
"Like what?" Coby glanced up from the typewriter. It was Jaecar's. They were at his place, so Coby could transcribe his shorthand. "Devote a chapter to Stalin not being born? Joseph Stalin was the twentieth century's greatest monster. Pull him out of history, and his absence is all the reader needs to know about." Jaecar lived in an apartment with his mother, in rooms smelling faintly of cabbage. She was a strange intense woman who worked for the phone company. "It would make no sense, within the story that Vic James is telling, to stop everything and point out that in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 there was this kid who was never conceived or who died in childbirth or - who knows? - just decided he wasn't going to become the worst, most ambitious dictator in the world. If James did that, it would be like an actor in a movie speaking straight into the camera to the audience."
Jaecar sat in a canvas folding chair, the only other place to sit in the cramped bedroom. His bed was piled with books, board games, dirty laundry and old LPs. One of those was playing on the turntable now, a Liberations-era British band. Clapton on guitar, vocals by that androgynous David Jones, who had two different color eyes. Jaecar had just finished a record by the pop trio the Monkees, though Coby wasn't really listening.
"So Stalin never having existed, that's really the only difference between our world and this one?" Jaecar held up the second book in the series, bookmark stuck in three quarters of the way through.
"Yep," Coby said. "If you actually took somebody that major out of history, there would be upheaval. Sociologically. Technologically. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse in different ways." He returned to hunting and pecking, his notebook next to the typewriter opened to a page full of shorthand scrawl.
"Wow," said Jaecar. "It sure changes things a lot."
"Well, it would, wouldn't it?"
"Sure, I get it. I'm not a numb-dumb. But I think the most interesting stuff is the... subtleties. Some movie star still being alive who died young. Or a politician having won an election that they lost. Weird names for candy bars. Slang that you don't recognize but still sounds like it might be real, in a fun house mirror way. It's that stuff I really like."
Coby smiled down at the little type hammers as they delivered letter-shaped ink to the paper. This was exactly why he wanted Jaecar in on the project.
Coby said, "What I need is for you to apply that interest to James himself. Try to imagine how things would have gone for him in the world he created, where there's no Joseph Stalin." Despite how good an idea he had come up with on his own, he knew it was those fine points Jaecar had mentioned which would make or break this story.
"I guess..." Jaecar said softly, gazing at the paperback's sensationalist cover of retro fascist Germans. "It's just my grandfather served in the ATO. Three years of a Weisenbach in bloody Alaskan snow..." His blue eyes shone. "My mom talks about him a lot. To read something where Germans are as bad as the Russians were - well, shit."
For the first time Coby really got what troubled Jaecar. But he could only think of one comforting thing to say:
"Hey, it's just a story."
The first words through the line, when he'd closed his bedroom door on the trailing phone cord, were: "It's about opposites, man!"
Coby's dad, in a perplexed tone, had called up the stairs of the house. A telephone call at almost ten o'clock at night. Strange. And now Jaecar on the line, sounding stranger. Sounding...
"Are you drunk?" Coby asked.
Braying laughter, loud enough that Coby had to hold the earpiece a few inches away. "It's not one way, it's the other!"
Coby didn't get a lot of phone calls. Calls were for sociable people, for cool kids. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, opposite stuff, man. Reverses, reversals. You take the thing and -" He made some kind of saliva-filled sound, probably accompanied by a gesture. "Twist it around."
"You're talking about our story?"
Jaecar drew a heavy breath. "We gotta take Vic James and just fuck him up."
"Huh?"
"His real life was good, right? Or exciting at least. Adventurous. Becomes a pro writer when he's young. Goes to the war and comes back a hero. Wins the big Gernsback Award - the Gernie. Dates actresses. Hell, in sci-fic circles he's like a movie star. So we got to reverse him."
Coby thought he finally had a handle on what Jaecar was saying, but his friend's manner still seemed alarmingly out of control.
"Where'd you get the alcohol?"
"Schnapps!"
"Where did you get the schnapps, Jaecar?"
"My mom poured it for me. There's always an anniversary, always a birthday, always a family something. Y'know?"
Jaecar's home life had always struck Coby as vaguely creepy. Only his mother there, and she an odd person, maybe more than odd; giving alcohol to her boy...
Then again, Coby thought, Jaecar would probably find it gross and bizarre to know how many men had groped his best friend in department store dressing booths, at bus stops, in dark doorways.
"Maybe you ought to go to bed, Jaecar."
"I feel awake."
"But if you close your eyes..."
"I lied about Edie Thaw." Suddenly his voice thickened. "I made her up."
Coby didn't know how to deal with this. "That doesn't matter. You'll feel better if you just go to sleep."
There was a long breathing pause. Then Jaecar said, "I already told you we gotta reverse Vic James, right? Make his life awful?"
"You did. It's an interesting approach, Jaecar."
"See? I can have good ideas too!"
Now, incredibly, he sounded angry. Didn't drunk people have any control over their emotions? But before Coby could say anything more, the line was dead. He stood a moment, holding the phone, afraid it would ring again, afraid for his friend.
When he took the heavy black extension back out to the wood pedestal in the hall where it normally sat, his father came up the stairs. Below, mother's sewing machine was starting and stopping. Nice domestic scene. Safe and ordinary.
"Everything okay?" asked his dad.
"Sure."
"It's just, a phone call this late -"
"Jaecar just wanted to know if we had a geography test tomorrow." It sounded like a lie even to Coby. He was good with concepts, not with the believable nitty-gritties.
"Okay, Coby. Goodnight."
He went back into his room to go to bed. There was so much he couldn't tell his parents. Even this writing project was something he would never mention.
Science fiction, like life, was such a lonely thing.
Jaecar Weisenbach didn't show up at school the next day. Was Coby's friend just avoiding him, maybe embarrassed about drunkenly admitting to the Edie Thaw thing? When Coby got back to his house after classes, he phoned. No answer at Jaecar's apartment. No answer all afternoon.
The alcohol worried him. Schnapps. Vic James had had a drinking problem when he was young, bad enough that he'd gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. Was Jaecar on that same path? Coby already felt he had commonalities with James. Did Jaecar as well? How strange if both their lives were converging in separate ways on the life of a retired science fiction author.
That evening Coby bit the bullet and telephoned again, when Jaecar's mother would be home. Mrs. Weisenbach picked up.
"This is?"
"Coby Jolson, Mrs. Weisenbach. Can I please talk to Jaecar?"
"Why are you having this with my son?"
Coby knew from experience that it wasn't just language difficulties. Jaecar's mother could speak in frustrating ellipses.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Weisenbach?"
"You read. He reads. I'm not liking this."
It dawned on him. She must have seen the alternate timeline novels he'd loaned Jaecar, the gruesome covers of the paperbacks. Vicious Germans, and her with a father three years in the Alaska Theater of Operations.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Weisenbach. Those are just books. Silly books." He bit his lip, a new place, fresh blood. It must be what renunciation tasted like. "Can I speak to Jaecar, please?"
"Family is very difficult. Family can fall apart. Think it's there and -" Another saliva-filled sound on the phone line, so like the noise Jaecar had made last night. "Gone. Blood in the snow and blood in your heart. You are bad for my son."
This last was said so direct, without Teutonic verbal static. It struck Coby with hurtful force. He stopped himself before he fired back at the woman with some nasty retort about schnapps and the legal drinking age being seventeen. Actually he hoped Jaecar had just drunk himself sick last night. If he'd spent all day puking, maybe he wouldn't touch the stuff again. More importantly it would mean he wasn't making himself scarce on purpose, to dodge Coby.
"I'm not bad for him," he said, but he whispered it and was already hanging up midway through his own words.
Five minutes later it started to rain.
He lied to his parents. And as the prevarications left his lips, one improvisation after the other, intertwining, making a narrative, he realized they were convincing. He was off to meet friends for a movie, he told his parents. Why not? He could have friends.
20th Street was a long walk, even in the daytime, even when it wasn't raining.
At last he looked up at the familiar, cheering sign through beaded eyelashes. Fantasmo's Books, still open for another half hour on a rainy Tuesday, catering to the needs of sci-fic goons who inhabited the odd hours and socially contemptible shadowlands.
His jacket dripped on the old green linoleum of the aisles. Books rose all around, a wondrous crush of printed matter, his kind of reading. Science fiction stimulated him. More than that, it electrified. It seemed to him to be the deepest expression of creativity and intellectual inventiveness. These writers, their names soaring toward the ceiling, had originated fantastical futures and astounding worlds, bending reality into grotesque and beautiful shapes. And every one of those futures and alien environments was more interesting than the present day dull-ass Earth Coby found himself living on.
But... what if he could contribute to this special breed of literature? If he and Jaecar both could add to it, create their own worlds and realities. It would be like escaping, only better. Making, instead of running away.
"What're you doing here?"
Coby felt dizzy. Wet clothes, the warmth of indoors, being walled in by all this wonderful fiction. So many books he hadn't yet read. Endless enjoyments awaited him.
He wiped his eyes.
"I mean, I know what you're doing here," Jaecar said. "But how come? Why're you out looking for me?" The chunky face was tense.
"We need to get started on the Vic James thing."
"I don't know if I wanna do that anymore."
These words too struck with force. Coby fought to keep a level tone. "Sure you do." Then his voice did waver some. "I need your help. I need you."
Jaecar's clothes were wet too, his damp blond hair piled darkly atop his head. Coby wondered how he'd gotten his mom to let him go out. Maybe he'd just snuck out. He stood in the aisle holding a paperback. Coby couldn't read the upside-down title, but the cover art looked familiar, or maybe he just recognized the usual sci-fic style.
"You're better at it than me," Jaecar said quietly. "Better at writing."
Coby had never acknowledged aloud the unsaid, and perhaps healthy, rivalry between them. He said, "I've just tried, that's all. Try with me. I'm serious about needing you."
Jaecar looked down at the novel in his hand, then up at the rising tiers of books. Some of these authors were famous; others had left faint passing impressions. But all had done something.
Jaecar swallowed audibly. He said, "I'm sorry for being such an ass-mouth on the phone the other night."
"Forget it." Coby nodded at the paperback in his hand. "Let's buy that and get out of here. My folks think I'm at the movies. We can sit someplace dry and talk about Vic James. That interview was incredible, don't you think? I got some ideas. I want to hear yours..."
Coby had typed the mailing manuscript because even though he could only hunt and peck, he still typed faster on Jaecar's machine than he did. Then Jaecar neatly addressed the manila envelope using a fine black marker, and slid the seven paper-clipped pages inside, along with the cover letter introducing themselves.
Jaecar looked as dazed and pleased as Coby himself felt. He had never experienced anything remotely like this sense of accomplishment with the trite sci-fic stories he'd written before.
"You think he'll read it? You think it'll even get to him?"
Coby said, "The sci-fic newsletter gives a contact address."
"But he's - what? Ninety?"
"Not quite."
"But alive?"
"But alive." Coby smiled. They might be getting this manuscript to Vic James just under the wire.
"I think the happy ending was the right way to go," Jaecar said. He grinned.
Coby remembered his friend's grin when he had first suggested the project idea, over a month ago now. "Yep," Coby agreed. "I felt we'd put the poor guy through enough hell."
They licked the envelope closed and took it to the post office.
They had gone with Jaecar's "opposites" approach with the story's protagonist, who was Vic James himself. Or sort of himself. In real life James had never married; they gave James a wife in the story. James hadn't had children; they loaded him up with a bunch. James had sobered up early; they kept him an active alcoholic into his forties. Nobody could say it couldn't happen this way in the other timeline. Stalin's absence from history would have had wildly unforeseeable consequences. Enormous things would change. So would the small stuff, tiny lives altered almost out of recognition.
Yet after the purposeful mess they had made of Vic James' existence, it had been nice and satisfying to have the alternate James finally get a story published late in his life, satisfying in some small way that beleaguered version's long held and unfulfilled desire to be a professional writer. What a strange trip through the looking glass all this had been, Coby thought.
They had mailed the story off three weeks ago.
Today they had gotten a reply.
Dear Messrs. Jolson and Weisenbach,
I don't normally read fanfic, but this was some pretty wild stuff. Don't take this the wrong way, but it is plain you are amateurs. However, you can take this the right way: you only need time to work on technique and structure and all the bibbity-bobbities of the writing profession. Anybody who can make something this crazy work at all is already halfway there.
I don't know if anyone but myself or people intimately familiar with my work (there aren't as many as there used to be) would get the subtleties you put into this. I am personally impressed, for instance, how you unearthed my birth name. Strange to see that on a page after all these years. But there is probably no target audience for this story, no editor who would want to buy it, even if it had a professional polish.
Still, don't get discouraged. If you two fellows are serious about writing, then pursue it. The way you say you divide the labor sounds very equitable to me. I have known other writing teams from the old days, and it doesn't always work out. But I believe you two could be greater than the sum of your parts.
At any rate, I thank you for your interest and wish you well.
Sincerely,
Vic James
P.S.: I don't think my having children would have been quite as dreadful as you depicted it.
Jaecar had pulled the canvas folding chair over to the desk as they both read the letter. They sat almost with their knees touching.
Finally, someone said softly, "Wow."
The other let out a long-held breath.
Everything went still again in the little bedroom.
Jaecar, hulkier, rather loomed above Coby where they sat close together. Coby had to make a kind of slow-motion lunge upward to press his lips against his friend's mouth. The contact was brief and firm.
As Coby settled back into the desk chair, Jaecar breathed out a little chuckle. "What'd you do that for?" He didn't sound upset.
"So I wouldn't have to wonder what it might be like anymore."
"Happy now?"
"Well, happier..." Coby laughed in a nervous giddy rush.
Jaecar swatted his arm, but even that contact was pleasant. In that moment, with the amazing encouraging letter between them on the desk, Coby could see the future. Their future. And the futures they could create. Together. Those fictional futures in books and stories. Writing together.
"So," Jaecar said. "What should we write next?"
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