IGMS Issue 33 Read online

  Issue 33 - April 2013

  http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

  Copyright © 2013 Hatrack River Enterprises

  Table of Contents - Issue 33 - April 2013

  * * *

  The Cartographer of Dreamland

  by Robert J. Howe

  The Other City

  by J.S. Bangs

  Small Creatures and Large

  by Michael Haynes

  Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma

  by Alex Shvartsman

  Thirteen Words

  by J. Deery Wray

  InterGalactic Interview With Elizabeth Hand

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  Letter From The Editor

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  The Cartographer of Dreamland

  by Robert J. Howe

  Artwork by Francesco Guardi

  * * *

  This is me at twelve years old, running for all I'm worth up Classon Avenue, bookbag under one arm, with Kevin Lester and three other bullies in close pursuit. They're mostly bigger than me, and the only reason they haven't caught me yet is because I had a half-block head start from the Nativity School gate.

  This isn't just about the atlas now; they want to punish me. I don't want to go home again minus my bookbag, with torn clothes and another bloody nose.

  I look back on this scene and I ask myself where the hell all the adults were? Like every other time I'd been chased by bullies, or beat up, or robbed of my lunch money and bus pass, it was on a public street in broad daylight. But in my memory the streetscape is deserted except for me and my pursuers.

  I hear their shoes slapping the pavement behind me and fear makes my knees a little wobbly. I can't outrun them all the way home. There's an empty, weed-strewn lot on the corner of Quincy Street, and with a gasp of desperation I plunge off the sidewalk and into last year's dead vegetation, rattling yellow and head-high. I can't run much further, but maybe I can hide.

  I stumble a little on the uneven ground, and thorny vines pull at the legs of my gray school uniform slacks. My mother will be furious if I tear them, but at the moment I'm more afraid of being caught by Kevin and his crew.

  When I figure I've reached the middle of the lot, I bend over to catch my breath, trying to gasp for air quietly so I don't give myself away. Probably a vain hope: the lot isn't that big.

  After a minute or two it dawns on me that I don't hear my pursuers. I don't hear anything in fact, except for birds singing nearby, and the slight movement of the vegetation in the breeze. There are no traffic sounds, no voices of the other kids getting out of school, no nothing.

  My heart begins to slow down. I realize that everything's much greener here in the middle of the lot. The March weather, iron gray and chill just a few minutes ago, is spring-like and warm now. Above my blind of vegetation, the sky is deep blue with a couple of puffy white clouds.

  I'm taking this all in when I notice a pair of dark eyes set deep in a furry brown face peering out at me from the foliage. I'm a good kid -- I never talk back to adults or use curse words -- but now, without meaning to, I say "Holy shit!" right out loud.

  The only "A" I ever got was in Miss Walsh's sixth grade geography class. I loved Miss Walsh with the intensity and purity of a first schoolboy crush.

  I loved her because she was pretty. I loved her because she was kind. She never raised her voice -- her worst punishment was a frown of disappointment. I loved her because in her class, I felt smart for the first time ever.

  Her class was the only bright spot in my young life. By that time I'd become expert at telling whether my father was drunk by the sound of his tread on the stairs. We -- me, my mother and my father -- lived in the second floor apartment of my grandmother's house. Our apartment was the same as hers, except we had an extra room, my bedroom, over the garage.

  My father was a truck driver ("straight jobs," meaning not tractor trailers), on shortruns between the docks and local warehouses. The job offered him ample time to play the horses, and endless opportunities for petty thievery. We had three restaurant-grade blenders that had "fallen off a truck," but ate macaroni and beans for supper two nights a week.

  Every Friday the same drama would play out: my father would come home from work via Ack's Tavern and give my mother a handful of bills -- some unknown and unknowable part of his salary -- and he and my mother would get into it.

  She would count the bills then say, "Where's the rest of it?"

  There would be a back and forth: "Don't worry about it," and "How am I supposed to pay the rent-electric-butcher?" and "Stop breaking my balls, willya?" until my father would slam out of the apartment to "go buy cigarettes." Though the candy store was right on the corner of Myrtle Avenue, my father never returned from these errands until long after I was asleep.

  He was always short of money. I came to dread hearing "let me hold that for you." Birthday money, the envelope for the collection basket at church, the ten dollars from Aunt Mary's Christmas card, all went into my father's pocket "until you need it," never to reappear.

  Likewise the watch I "lost" (a first communion present from my grandmother), the TV set ("it's getting fixed"), and my mother's earrings ("don't ask me -- where'd you leave them?") disappeared to fund my father's louche lifestyle.

  On that March afternoon, it was cold enough so that you could see your breath outside. Miss Walsh handed back the geography quiz -- a map of the British Isles on which we had to fill in the names -- and mine not only got an A+, but a gold star for knowing where the Shetland Islands were. I was sitting there in a happy trance when I realized Miss Walsh was calling my name.

  "Jerry, come up," she said, with a happy little hand gesture.

  That I didn't feel so good about. No attention was good attention -- to be praised by the teacher meant being bullied in the schoolyard later.

  Miss Walsh turned me around to face the class. "Because Jerry has a perfect A average in geography, he wins this month's prize," she said. Every month she gave away little prizes for things like best map (I won a pencil with a rubber globe on the eraser end for that one), or most improved spelling.

  Miss Walsh then handed me the book she was holding, The Children's Atlas of People and Places. Little people marched across exotic landscapes on the cover -- a beret-wearing Frenchman near the Eiffel Tower, Peruvian peasants in colorful shawls in the Andes, and Asian farmers behind bullocks in emerald green paddies. As I took the book from her, my heart sank. I really wanted it, but I could tell from the smirks on the faces of Kevin Lester and his friends that the book would end up destroyed (like my globe pencil), or in someone else's bookbag ten minutes after school let out.

  I went back to my seat amidst halfhearted clapping. For the rest of the afternoon I took every opportunity to peek at the book's contents, sure I wouldn't get to see any more of it once school let out. But the more I peeked ("Jerry, please close that book and pay attention . . ."), the more I wanted to read it and study all the maps and pictures.

  Between geography and religion class, I opened it at random and found myself looking at a map of Vietnam. The Mekong Delta was in the news a lot then, but looking at the map and reading the captions, it was the first time I realized that a delta was where a river spread out to the sea, and that the Mississippi and Mekong deltas were named after rivers. I was so absorbed that I didn't realize religion class had started until Sister Agnes swatted me with her horny hand.

  At two-forty I thought I had a bit of luck. Just before class was over Sister Agnes noticed that Kevin had drawn something inside the cover of his missal. Sister Agnes took him by the hair and went steaming toward the principal's office, calling over her shoulder to read quietly to ourselves.

  When the bell rang at two-fifty, I grabbed my coat from the back of the
room and took the stairs two at a time, hoping to get away before Kevin left the building. When I got to the stop, though, the bus was just pulling away. Knots formed in my stomach. Kevin's friends would wait for him inside the schoolyard, probably, but there was no way to know how long the principal, Sister Gertrude, would detain him.

  Just when the next bus came into sight, Kevin and his toadies came out of the building. I hoped they hadn't seen me. Rather than wait for the bus, I started walking away from them up Classon Avenue.

  I hadn't gotten very far when I heard Kevin call from behind me. "Hey Jerky!" (his clever play on my name). "Come back here!"

  I hesitated. It was probably smarter to just go back and take my medicine -- if I made Kevin mad he'd be even meaner. But then it wasn't fair -- I didn't even have a chance to read most of the atlas yet. I kept walking.

  "Are you ignoring me, Jerky?" Kevin yelled. The angry disbelief in his voice tightened the knots in my stomach. It took an effort of will not to stop and turn around.

  "Man!" Mark Franco, one of Kevin's buddies, said. "You gonna take that?"

  I was terrified at defying them -- it was the first time I'd ever done so. I also wished I could punch stupid Mark Franco in the face.

  "Hey!" Kevin yelled. Now I could tell they were walking after me. That's when I ran.

  When I say "Holy shit!" the face disappears in a flash of brown fur and rustle of leaves. I'm frozen by equal parts fear and wonder. What was that? Too small to be a bear (I think), and anyway there aren't any bears in Brooklyn. I don't know for sure if there are raccoons in the city, but it didn't have a bandit's mask, and it was the wrong color.

  Kevin and his crew all are forgotten. The plants around me don't look anything like the weeds I'm familiar with.

  There's a small clearing just ahead of me, and I pick up my bookbag and press along. The vacant lot has to be larger than I thought. I know -- I think -- I'm heading northeast into it, since I entered it at Quincy Street on the south and Classon Avenue on the west. The sun is out, and that's another weird thing: it's not where it should be in the sky -- it seems like morning.

  Everything here is green, like it's summer, and the air smells sweet. There's a carpet of dead leaves on the path -- red and yellow and orange. I go a little further and I'm amid a copse of trees -- not grown-up weeds, but actual trees taller than buildings. Some look familiar, like maples or evergreens, but some are trees that I'm sure I've never seen before, including one that has three-lobed leaves like oversized shamrocks. The leaves are deep green above and pale, almost yellow, underneath, and they flash like a school of fish in the light breeze.

  The weirdness is getting to me now, like a kind of white noise in my brain. I pluck one of the leaves and put it in my bookbag, flat between two pages in my composition book. On the way to the street I walk right into a thorny vine, which leaves a nice four or five-inch scratch on my face.

  I'm on Classon, just crossing Greene Avenue, when I realize that it's getting dark. My watch says it's almost a quarter to six -- I couldn't have been in the lot that long. My mother is going to kill me.

  "I've never seen one like this," Miss Walsh said, looking at my leaf on Monday. I'd spent the weekend at the Grand Army Plaza library, looking through botany books and field guides to identify the leaf and the tree it came from. There was nothing even close.

  "Where did you get this from?"

  "The lot down the street," I said. "It was from a really big tree."

  "Which lot?" She looked perplexed, "The one here on Classon Avenue?"

  I nodded. The slight tone of skepticism in her voice made me glad I didn't mention the animal I'd glimpsed.

  She looked at the leaf again. "Do you mind if I hold onto it for a day or so?"

  "No," I shook my head. I really didn't mind -- unlike my father, I knew Miss Walsh wouldn't say she'd give it back unless she meant it.

  "Okay," she carefully placed the leaf inside the front of her grade book and closed the cover. "I'll look it up this week."

  Excitement over the lot had almost eclipsed my fear of Kevin and his buddies, who'd had the whole weekend to work themselves up. All day they'd shot me dirty looks -- and spitballs -- when the teachers weren't looking. When we'd filed down for lunch, Kevin had caught me in the stairwell and hissed in my ear "After school, pussy!" while he dug his knuckles into my back.

  Now that only religion class stood between me and Kevin's little band of scumbags, I wasn't feeling so good. I thought about telling Sister Agnes that I was sick, but they might call my mother to get me, which she wouldn't like.

  Sister Agnes was late, which gave me more time to concentrate on the knots in my stomach. The thought flashed in my mind, "I could leave." I had never cut school before. I would get in trouble.

  I could leave. I didn't want to go to the back of the room to get my coat -- I'd have to walk past Kevin -- but I was wearing my sweater, and it was warmer out than the day before.

  Suddenly I was on my feet. I held by bookbag in one hand and walked out the door without looking back. If anyone noticed, they probably thought I was going to the boy's room.

  In the hallway I could hear Sister Agnes coming up the stairs, her footsteps heavy on the steel treads. I dashed around the corner, past the other sixth-grade classroom, and into the back stairwell, careful not to let the heavy door slam behind me.

  On the ground floor, I felt conspicuous walking by myself through the lunchroom, but Mrs. LaVeccia, the elderly teacher's aide, hardly noticed me as I went out the side door.

  Once I was on the street I realized I couldn't go home -- my mother would ask me a lot of pointed questions, and she'd check with the school. I headed to the empty lot.

  As soon as I was past the raspy perimeter of weeds, there was that sudden rise in temperature again, and the absence of street noise.

  As before, the air smelled green and sweet. I followed the path to the shamrock tree. There were more birds this time, brightly colored, like parrots, in the upper branches of the trees. Something about them looked different, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

  Again the sun was in the wrong place in the sky -- without the fear of Kevin after me, this struck me as deeply strange.

  Still, it was hard to feel bad -- even with punishment for cutting class hanging over my head. It was a green oasis. It was a mental relief just to have space around me.

  "What are you doing in there?" my father would roar through the bathroom door whenever I was in there "too long." I was always in there because walking on eggshells in that house gave me a bad nervous stomach. He would rattle the knob, making my nervous stomach even worse.

  There wasn't a knob on the door to my room. I'd locked it one day to read a biography of Sir Richard Burton on my bed. I fell asleep in East Africa on Burton's expedition to find the source of the Nile. I woke disoriented to the crashing sound of my father breaking in the door because I hadn't responded quickly enough to his pounding.

  "Why the hell do you have to lock the door?!" he yelled, his red face a few inches from mine.

  I didn't know. At twelve, I couldn't have put my need for privacy, for some space, into words. Virginia Woolf was 47 when she wrote A Room of One's Own. I loved Burton's Africa not just because it was exotic, but because it seemed so empty.

  In the lot, I sat down and took out my notebook and pencil. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I started making a list of all the things that were wrong. The sun's position. The different weather. The shamrock tree. The birds. What else? There was no litter: not one coke bottle or hubcap or cigarette butt. Like no one else came in here before. How big was the lot? It was only one block -- though a long one -- from Classon to Franklin Avenue, wasn't it?

  The path stopped at the shamrock tree. The lot couldn't go on much more beyond that. I left my bookbag and things at the base of the tree and headed directly away from the way I'd come.

  It didn't take me long to realize that the ground was sloping upward, and that this was mo
re than just a vacant lot. I passed more unfamiliar trees, and the undergrowth changed from grass to patches of ground-hugging plants like ivy, alternating with clumps of dark evergreen bushes hung with violet berries. There were spindly plants with whitish leaves, little blue flowers that nestled close to the ground, and in the leaf litter under the trees, several kinds of mushrooms that varied in color from bright yellow to almost blood-colored.

  As I walked further, there were more trees in dense copses, and outcroppings of rock poking through the ground cover. The birdsong was louder and more varied now, and it took me a while to realize that I was hearing another sound beneath it -- the rush of water.

  When I came to the top of a small ridge, I could see the water -- a glint of blue through the trees. This was too much. I could see the way I'd come, but now I was afraid of getting lost.

  I looked at my watch, but it had stopped. That was a pain in the ass. I'd needed to know what time to head home so I wouldn't get in trouble. Reluctantly, I headed back. Aside from being nervous about the time, I wanted to come back to the lot when I had a whole day to explore.

  It was dark when I stepped out of the lot. My mother was going to kill me. I looked at my watch from force of habit, and it said 7:15; in the lot it had been stopped at2:03. None of that made sense.

  I jogged all the way home, too anxious to wait for a bus. My mother threw open the apartment door when she heard me on the stairs.

  "Where the hell were you?!" she yelled as soon as she saw me.

  I had made up an excuse about going to the library after school, but under my mother's angry glare, my head filled with white noise and I couldn't say anything.

  "Get in here," she said, pulling me into the kitchen. My father was at the table, smoking an unfiltered Camel and looking put out: my disappearance had disrupted his evening routine.