Angry Candy Read online

  "Not by drones, fellah. But I can do it. I did it." He nodded at the black box.

  "The tv sitcom land where my dead Aunt Babe is trapped, it's in there, in that cube?"

  "Ah calls it a simularity matrix," he said, with an accent that could get him killed in SouthCentral L.A.

  "You can call it rosewater if you like, Modisett, but it sounds like the foothills of Bandini Mountain to me."

  His grin was the mutant offspring of a sneer and a smirk. I'd seen that kind of look only once, on the face of a failed academic at a collegiate cocktail party. Later that evening the guy used the smirk ploy once too often and a little tweety-bird of an English prof gave him high cause to go see a periodontal reconstructionist.

  "I can reconstruct her like a clone, right in the machine," he said.

  "How do you know? Tried it yet?"

  "It's your aunt, not mine," he said. "I told you I'd get back to you. Now I'm back to you, and I'm ready to run the showboat out to the middle of the river."

  So he turned on a lot of things on the big board he had, and he moved a lot of slide-switches up the gain slots, and he did this, and he did that, and a musical hum came from the Quad speakers, and he looked over his shoulder at me, across the tangle of wires and cables that disappeared into the black box, and he said, "Wake her up."

  I said, "What?"

  He said, "Wake her. She's been an electronic code for almost twenty-five years. She's been asleep. She's an amputated frog leg. Send the current through her."

  "How?"

  "Call her. She'll recognize your voice."

  "How? It's been a long time. I don't sound like the kid I was when she died."

  "Trust me," he said. "Call her."

  I felt like a goddam fool. "Where do I speak?"

  "Just speak, asshole. She'll hear you."

  So I stood there in the middle of that warehouse and I said, "Aunt Babe?" There was nothing.

  "A little louder. Gentle, but louder. Don't startle her."

  "You're outta your . . . " His look silenced me. I took a deep breath and said, a little louder, "Hey, Aunt Babe? You in there? It's me, Angelo."

  I heard something. At first it sounded like a mouse running toward me across a long blackboard, a blackboard maybe a hundred miles long. Then there was something like the wind you hear in thick woods in the autumn. Then the sound of somebody unwrapping Christmas presents. Then the sound of water, like surf, pouring into a cave at the base of a cliff, and then draining out again. Then the sound of a baby crying and the sound suddenly getting very deep as if it were a three-hundred-pound killer baby that wanted to be fed parts off a freshly-killed dinosaur. This kind of torrential idiocy went on for a while, and then, abruptly, out of nowhere, I heard my Aunt Babe clearing her throat, as if she were getting up in the morning. That phlegmy throat-clearing sound that sounds like quarts of yogurt being shoveled out of a sink.

  "Angelo . . . ?"

  I crossed myself about eleven times, ran off a few fast Hail Mary's and Our Father's, swallowed hard and said, "Yeah, Aunt Babe, it's me. How are you?"

  "Let me, for a moment here, let me get my bearings." It took more than a moment. She was silent for a few minutes, though she did once say, "I'll be right with you, mio caro."

  And finally, I heard her say, "I am really fit to be tied. Do you have any idea what they have put me through? Do you have even the faintest idea how many times they've made me watch The Partridge Family? Do you have any idea how much I hate that kind of music? Never Cole Porter, never Sammy Cahn, not even a little Gus Edwards; I'd settle for Sigmund Romberg after those squalling children. Caro nipote, quanto mi sei mancato! Angelo . . . hello hello. I want you to tell me everything that's happened, because as soon as I get a chance, I'm going to make a stink you're not going to believe!"

  It was Babe. My dearest Aunt Babe. I hadn't heard that wonderful mixture of pungent English and lilting Italian with its show-biz Yiddish resonances in almost thirty years. I hadn't spoken any Italian in nearly twenty years. But I heard myself saying to the empty air, "Come te la sei passata?" How've you been?

  "Ti voglio bene — bambino caro. I feel just fine. A bit fuzzy, I've been asleep a while but come sta la famiglia? Anche quelli che non posso soppartare."

  So I told her all about the family, even the ones she couldn't stand, like Uncle Nuncio with breath like a goat, and Carmine's wife, Giuletta, who'd always called Babe a floozy. And after a while she had me try to explain what had happened to her, and I did the best I could, to which she responded, "Non mi sento come un fantasma."

  So I told her she didn't feel like a ghost because she wasn't, strictly speaking, a ghost. More like a random hoot in the empty night. Well, that didn't go over too terrific, because in an instant she'd grasped the truth that if she wasn't going where it is that dead people go, she'd never meet up with my Uncle Morrie again; and that made her very sad. "Oft, dio!" and she started crying.

  So I tried to jolly her out of it by talking about all the history that had transpired since 1955, but it turned out she knew most of it anyhow. After all, hadn't she been stuck there, inside the biggest blabbermouth the world had ever known? Even though she'd been in something like an alpha state of almost-sleep, her essence had been saturated with news and special reports, docudramas and public service announcements, talk shows and panel discussions, network extra alerts and hour-by-hour live coverage of fast-breaking events.

  Eventually I got around to explaining how I'd gotten in touch with her, about Modisett and the big black box, about how the Phantom Sweetener had deconvolved her, and about Bill Tidy.

  She was not unfamiliar with the name.

  After all, hadn't she been stuck there, inside the all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing electromagnetic pimp for Tidy's endless supply of brain-damaged, insipid persiflage?

  I painted Babe a loving word-portrait of my employer and our unholy liaison. She said: "Stronzo! Figlio di una mignotta! Mascalzone!" She also called him bischero, by which I'm sure she meant the word in its meaning of goof, or simpleton, rather than literally: "man with erection."

  Modisett, who spoke no Italian, stared wildly at me, seeming to bask in the unalloyed joy of having tapped a line into some Elsewhere. Yet even he could tell from the tone of revulsion in Babe's disembodied voice that she had suffered long under the exquisite tortures of swimming in a sea of Tidy product.

  What Tidy had been doing to me seemed to infuriate her. She was still my loving Aunt Babe.

  So I spent all that night, and the next day, and the next night — while Modisett mostly slept and emptied Dr. Pepper down his neck — chatting at leisure with my dead Aunt Babe.

  You'll never know how angry someone can get from prolonged exposure to Gary Coleman.

  The Phantom Sweetener can't explain what followed. He says it defies the rigors of Boolean logic, whatever the hell that means. He says it transcends the parameters of Maxwell's Equations, which ought to put Maxwell in a bit of a snit. He says (and with more than a touch of the gibber in his voice) it deflowers, rapes, & pillages, breaks & enters Minkowski's Covariant Tensor. He says it is enough to start Philo T. Farnsworth spinning so hard in his grave that he would carom off Vladimir K. Zworykin in his. He says it would get Marvin Minsky up at M.I.T. speaking in tongues. He says — and this one really turned me around and opened my eyes — he says (wait for it), "Distorts Riemannian geometry." To which I said, "You have got to be shitting me! Not Riemannian gefuckingometry!?!"

  This is absolute babble to me, but it's got Modisett down on all fours, foaming at the mouth and sucking at the electrical outlets.

  Apparently, Babe has found pathways in the microwave comm-system. The Phantom Sweetener says it might have happened because of what he calls "print-through," that phenomenon that occurs on audio tape when one layer magnetizes the next layer, so you hear an echo of the word or sound that is next to be spoken. He says if the tape is wound "heads out" and is stored that way, then the signal will jump. The signal that is my d
ead Aunt Babe has jumped. And keeps jumping. She's loose in the comm-system and she ain't asking where's the beef: she knows! And Modisett says the reason they can't catch her and wipe her is that old tape always bleeds through. Which is why, when Bill Tidy's big multimillion-dollar sitcom aired last year, instead of the audience roaring with laughter, there was the voice of this woman shouting above the din, "That's stupid! Worse than stupid! That's bore-ing! Ka-ka! C'mon folks, let's have a good old-fashioned Bronx cheer for crapola like this! Let's show 'em what we really think of this flopola!"

  And then, instead of augmented laughter, instead of yoks, came a raspberry that could have floated the Titanic off the bottom.

  Well, they pulled the tape, and they tried to find her, but she was gone, skipping off across the simularity matrix like Bambi, only to turn up the next night on another Tidy-Spellberg abomination.

  Well, there was no way to stop it, and the networks got very leery of Tidy and Company, because they couldn't even use the millions of billions of dollars worth of shitty rerun shows they'd paid billions and millions for syndication rights to, and they sued the hell out of Bill Tidy, who went crazy as a soup sandwich not too long ago, and I'm told he's trying to sell ocean view lots in some place like Pekin, North Dakota, and living under the name Silas Marner or somesuch because half the civilized world is trying to find him to sue his ass off.

  And I might have a moment of compassion for the creep, but I haven't the time. I have three hit shows running at the moment, one each on ABC, NBC, and CBS.

  They are big hits because somehow, in a way that no one seems able to figure out, there are all these little subliminal buttons being pushed by my shows, and they just soar to the top of the Nielsen ratings.

  And I said to Aunt Babe, "Listen, don't you want to go to Heaven, or wherever it is? I mean, don't you want out of that limbo existence?"

  And with love, because she wanted to protect her bambino caro, because she wanted to make up for the fact that I didn't have her wonderful bosom to fall asleep on any more, she said, "Get out of here, Angelo, my darling? What. . . and leave show business?"

  The Author would like to thank Franco & Carol Betti, Jody Clark, Bart Di Grazia, Tom Kafka, Alan Kay, Ann Knight, Gil Lamont, Michele D. Malamud, and the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Public Library reference staff for invaluable assistance in getting the details of this story written accurately.

  EIDOLON: a phantom, an apparition, an image

  ANCIENT GEOGRAPHERS gave a mystic significance to that extremity of land, the borderland of the watery unknown at the southwestern tip of Europe. Marinus and Ptolemy knew it as Promontorium Sacrum, the sacred promontory. Beyond that beyondmost edge, lay nothing. Or rather, lay a place that was fearful and unknowable, a place in which it was always the twenty-fifth hour of the day, the thirtieth or thirty-first of February; a turbid ocean of lost islands where golden mushroom trees reached always toward the whispering face of the moon; where tricksy life had spawned beasts and beings more of satin and ash than of man and woman; dominion of dreams, to which the unwary might journey, but whence they could never return.

  My name is Vizinczey, and my background is too remarkable to be detailed here. Suffice to note that before Mr. Brown died in my arms, I had distinguished myself principally with occupations and behavior most cultures reward by the attentions of the headsman and the strappado. Suffice to note that before Mr. Brown died in my arms, the most laudable engagement in my vita was as the manager and sole roustabout of an abattoir and ossuary in Li Shih-min. Suffice to note that there were entire continents I was forbidden to visit, and that even my closest acquaintances, the family of Sawney Beane, chose to avoid social intercourse with me.

  I was a pariah. Whatever land in which I chose to abide, became a land of darkness. Until Mr. Brown died in my arms, I was a thing without passion, without kindness.

  While in Sydney — Australia being one of the three remaining continents where hunting dogs would not be turned out to track me down — I inquired if there might be a shop where authentic military miniatures, toy soldiers of the sort H. G. Wells treasured, could be purchased. A clerk in a bookstore recalled "a customer of mine in Special Orders mentioned something like that . . . a curious little man . . . a Mr. Brown."

  I got onto him, through the clerk, and was sent round to see him at his home. The moment he opened the door and our eyes met, he was frightened of me. For the brief time we spent in each other's company, he never ceased, for a moment, to fear me. Ironically, he was one of the few ambulatory creatures on this planet that I meant no harm. Toy soldiers were my hobby, and I held in high esteem those who crafted, painted, amassed or sold them. In truth, it might be said of the Vizinczey that was I in those times before Mr. Brown died in my arms, that my approbation for toy soldiers and their aficionados was the sole salutary aspect of my nature. So, you see, he had no reason to fear me. Quite the contrary. I mention this to establish, in spite of the police records and the warrants still in existence, seeking my apprehension, I had nothing whatever to do with the death of Mr. Brown.

  He did not invite me in, though he stepped aside with a tremor and permitted entrance. Cognizant of his terror at my presence, I was surprised that he locked the door behind me. Then, looking back over his shoulder at me with mounting fear, he led me into an enormous central drawing room of his home, a room expanded to inordinate size by the leveling of walls that had formed adjoining areas. In that room, on every horizontal surface, Mr. Brown had positioned rank after rank of the most astonishing military miniatures I had ever seen.

  Perfect in the most minute detail, painted so artfully that I could discern no brushstroke, in colors and tones and hues so accurate and lifelike that they seemed rather to have been created with pigmentations inherent, the battalions, cohorts, regiments, legions, phalanxes, brigades and squads of metal figurines blanketed in array without a single empty space, every inch of floor, tables, cabinets, shelves, window ledges, risers, showcases and countless numbers of stacked display boxes.

  Enthralled, I bent to study more closely the infinite range of fighting men. There were Norman knights and German Landsknecht, Japanese samurai and Prussian dragoons, foot grenadier of the French Imperial Guard and Spanish conquistadors. U. S. 7th Cavalry troopers from the Indian wars; Dutch musketeers and pikemen who marched with the army of Maurice of Nassau during the long war of independence fought by the Netherlands against the Spanish Habsburgs; Greek hoplites in bronze helmets and stiff cuirasses; cocked hat riflemen of Morgan's Virginia Rifles who repulsed Burgoyne's troops with their deadly accurate Pennsylvania long-barrels; Egyptian chariot-spearmen and French Foreign Legionnaires; Zulu warriors from Shaka's legions and English longbowmen from Agincourt; Anzacs and Persian Immortals and Assyrian slingers; Cossacks and Saracen warriors in chain-mail and padded silk; 82nd Airborne paratroopers and Israeli jet pilots and Wehrmacht Panzer commanders and Russian infantrymen and Black Hussars of the 5th Regiment.

  And as I drifted through a mist of wonder and pleasure, from array to array, one overriding observation dominated even my awe in the face of such artistic grandeur.

  Each and every figure — to the last turbaned Cissian, trousered Scythian, wooden-helmeted Colchian or Pisidian with an oxhide shield — every one of them bore the most exquisite expression of terror and hopelessness. Faces twisted in anguish at the precise moment of death, or more terribly, the moment of realization of personal death, each soldier looked up at me with eyes just fogging with tears, with mouth half-open to emit a scream, with fingers reaching toward me in splay-fingered hope of last-minute reprieve.

  These were not merely painted representations.

  The faces were individual. I could see every follicle of beard, every drop of sweat, every frozen tic of agony. They seemed able to complete the shriek of denial. They looked as if, should I blink, they would spring back to life and then fall dead as they were intended.

  Mr. Brown had left narrow aisles of carpet among the vast armadas, and I had w
andered deep into the shoe-top grassland of the drawing room with the little man behind me, still locked up with fear but attendant at my back. Now I rose from examining a raiding party of Viet Cong frozen in attitudes of agony as the breath of life stilled in them, and I turned to Mr. Brown with apparently such a look on my face that he blurted it out. I could not have stopped the confession had I so desired.

  They were not metal figurines. They were flesh turned to pewter. Mr. Brown had no artistic skill save the one ability to snatch soldiers off the battlefields of time, to freeze them in metal, to miniaturize them, and to sell them. Each commando and halberdier captured in the field and reduced, at the moment of his death . . . realizing in that moment that Heaven or whatever Valhalla in which he believed, was to be denied him. An eternity of death in miniature.

  "You are a greater ghoul than ever I could have aspired to become," I said.

  His fright overcame him at that moment. Why, I do not know. I meant him no harm. Perhaps it was the summation of his existence, the knowledge of the monstrous hobby that had brought him an unspeakable pleasure through his long life, finally caught up with him. I do not know.

  He spasmed suddenly as though struck at the base of his spine by a maul, and his eyes widened, and he collapsed toward me. To prevent the destruction of the exquisite figurines, I let him fall into my arms; and I carefully lowered him into the narrow aisle. Even so, his lifeless left leg decimated the ranks of thirteenth-century Mongol warriors who had served Genghis Khan from the China Sea in the east to the gates of Austria in the west.

  He lay face down and I saw a drop of blood at the base of his neck. I bent closer as he struggled to turn his head to the side to speak, and saw the tiniest crossbow quarrel protruding from his rapidly discoloring flesh, just below the hairline.

  He was trying to say something to me, and I kneeled close to his mouth, my ear close to the exhalations of dying breath. And he lamented his life, for though he might well have been judged a monster by those who exist in conformity and abide within the mundane strictures of accepted ethical behavior, he was not a bad man. An obsessed man, certainly; but not a bad man. And to prove it, he told me haltingly of the Promontorium Sacrum, and of how he had found his way there, how he had struggled back. He told me of the lives and the wisdom and the wonders to be found there.