In Other Worlds Read online

  In Other Worlds

  Attanasio, AA

  In Other Worlds

  by A.A.Attanasio

  version 1.0

  Contents

  Eating the Strange18

  Alfred Omega .88

  The Decomposition Notebook146

  He who looks does not find,

  but he who does not look is found.

  -KAFKA

  Carl Schirmer's last day as a human was filled with portents of his strange life to come. As he completed his morning ablutions, he saw in the bathroom mirror his hair, what little of it there was, standing straight up.

  He smoothed it back and tucked it behind his ears with his damp hands, but it sprang back. Even the few strands left at the cope of his shining pate wavered upright. His hair was a rusty gossamer, and it stuck out from the sides of his large head like a clown's wig.

  With his usual complaisance, he shrugged and commenced to shave his broad face. Today, he sensed, was going to be an unusual day. His sleep had been fitful, and he had awoken to a breed of headache he had never encountered before. His .head was not actually aching-it was buzzing, as though overnight a swarm of gnats had molted to maturity in the folds of his brain.

  After completing his morning cleansing ritual and checking the coat of his tongue and the blood-brightness under his lids, he put his glasses on, took two acetaminophen, and dressed for work.

  Carl was not a stylish or a careful dresser, yet even he noticed that his clothes, which he had ironed two nights before for a dinner his date had canceled and which had looked fine hanging in his closet, hung particularly rumpled on him that day. When he tried to brush the wrinkles out, static sparked along his fingers. The morning was already old,- so he didn't bother to change. He hurried through breakfast despite the fact that his usually trustworthy toaster charred his toast, and he skipped his coffee when he saw that no amount of wire jiggling was going to get his electric percolator to work. Not until he had left his apartment and had jogged down the four floors to the street did he realize that his headbuzz had tingled through the cords of his neck and into his shoulders. He was not feeling right at all, and yet in another sense, a perceptive and ease-ful sense, he was feeling sharper than ever.

  Carl lived in a low-rent apartment building on West 'Twenty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and he was not used to smelling the river, though he was only a few blocks away from the Hudson. This morning the air for him was kelpy with the sweetand-sour smell of the Hudson. Immense cauliflower clouds bunched over the city, and the blue of-the sky seemed clear as an idea.

  He strolled down Twentythird Street with an atypically loose stride, his face uplifted to the path of heaven. Spring's promise-haunted presence drifted through the tumult of clouds, which was odd, since this was November. The rainbow-haired punks that loitered about the Chelsea Hotel looked childbright and friendly today, and Carl knew then that the ferment of a mood was indeed altering him. But he didn't care. Though his blood felt carbonated, it was wondrous to see the city looking benevolent, and he went with the illusion.

  At the corner of Seventh Avenue, a drunk approached him,, and he handed over a dollar, appreciating the serene desuetude of the woman's face. Nothing could depress him this morning. And the sight of the place where he worked sparked a smile in him. The Blue

  Apple at Twentysecond and Seventh was a bar and restaurant that he managed. Except for the neon sign in the vine-trellised window, the structure was antiquated and looked smoky with age. Until Carl had come along, the narrow building had been an Irish bar with the inspired name the Shamrock, run and owned by Caitlin Sweeney, an alcoholic widow supporting her thirst and a daughter with the faithful patronage of a few aged locals. A year ago, after losing his midtown brokerage job to the recession and his own lack of aggression, Carl had let a newspaper ad lead him here.. He had been looking for something to keep him alive and not too busy. And then he had met Sheelagh and wound up working harder than ever.

  Caitlin's daughter had been sixteen then, tall and lean-limbed, with green, youthless eyes and a lispy smile. Carl was twice her age, and he lost his heart to her that first day, which was no common event with him. He had experienced his share of crooked romance and casual affairs in college, and for the last ten years he had lived alone out of choice sprung from disappointment. No woman whom he had found attractive had ever found him likewise. He was gangly, nearsighted, and bald, not ugly but lumpy-featured and devoid of the conversational charm that sometimes redeemed men of his mien. - So instead of contenting himself with the love of a good but not quite striking woman, he had lived alone and close to his indulgences: an occasional spleef of marijuana, a semiannual cocaine binge, and a sizable pornography collection stretching back through the kinky Seventies to the body-painting orgies of the Sixties. Sheelagh made all the years of his aloneness seem worthwhile, for she was indeed striking-a tall, lyrical body with auburn tresses that fell to the roundness of her loose hips-and, most exciting of all, she needed him.

  When Carl had arrived, the Shamrock was brinking on bankruptcy. He would never have had anything to do with a business as tattered as the one riven-faced Caitlin had revealed to him were Sheelagh not there. She was a smart kid, finishing high school a year ahead of her class and sharp enough with figures and deferredpayment planning to keep the Shamrock floating long after her besotted mother would have lost it.

  Sheelagh was the one, in her. defiant-child's manner, who had shown him' that the business could be saved. The neighborhood was growing with the artistic overflow from Greenwich Village, and there was hope, if they could find the money and the imagination, to draw a new, more affluent clientele. After talking with the girl, Carl had flared with ideas, and he had backed them up with the few thousand dollars he had saved. The debts were paid off, old Caitlin reluctantly became the house chef, and Carl took over the bartending, the books, and the refurbishing. A year later, the Shamrock had almost broken even as the Blue Apple, a name Carl had compressed from the Big Apple and the certain melancholy of his hopeless love for Sheelagh. That love had recently increased in both ardor and hopelessness now that Sheelagh had finished high school and had come to work full-time in the Blue Apple while she saved for college..

  On Carl Schirmer's last day as a human, when he entered ,the restaurant with his collar of red hair sticking out from his head, his clothes knotted with static, and his eyes shining with the beauty of the day, Sheelagh was glad to see him. The new tables they had ordered had come in and were stacked around the bar, legs up like a bamboo forest. "Aren''t they fine?"

  Sheelagh asked.

  In the year since they had first met, she had filled out to the full dimensions of a woman, and Carl was not

  addressing the tables when he answered: "Beautiful. just beautiful."

  With his help, she moved aside the old Formicatop table from the choice position beside the window and placed the new wooden one there. Sunlight smeared its top like warm butter. She sighed with satisfaction, turned to Carl, and put her arms about him in a jubilant hug. "It's happening, Carl. The Blue Apple is beginning to shine." She pulled back, startled.

  "You smell wonderful. What are you wearing?"

  He sniffed his shoulder and caught the cool fragrance misting off him, a scent kindred to a mountain slope. "I don't know," he mumbled.

  "Long night on the town, huh?" She smiled slyly. She truly liked Carl. He was the most honest man she'd ever known, a bald, boy-faced pal, soft around the middle but with a quiet heart and an inward certainty. His experience as an account exec had earned him managerial skills that to Sheelagh seemed a dazzling ease with the world of things.. For the first year he ran the entire business on the phone, shuffling loans and debts until they. burst into the black. H
e was a solid guy, yet he pulled no sexual feeling from her whatever. And for that reason, he had become in a short time closer to her than a brother. She had confided all her adolescent choices to him, and he had counseled her wisely through two high school romances and the lyric expectation of going to college someday. He knew her dreams, even her antic fantasy of a handsome, Persianeyed lover. "From the looks of your clothes," she went on, "your date must have been quite an athlete." Her lubricious grin widened.

  Carl pridefully buffed the thought with a smile and went about his business. The redolence of open space spun like magnetism about him all day, a day like most others: After getting the espresso machine and the coffeemaker going at the bar, he brought the first hot cup to a hungover Caitlin in the kitchen.

  The old woman looked as wasted as ever, her white hair tattering about her shoulders and her seamed face crumpled-looking from last night's drinking. Grief and bad luck had aged her more harshly than time, and she wore a perpetual scowl. But that morning when she saw Carl back through the swinging door of the kitchen, his hair feathering from his head and his clothes clinging like plastic wrap, a bemused grin hoisted her features. "Don't you look a sight, darlin'. Now, I know you don't drink, and you smell too pretty to have been rolledso, mercy of God, it must be a woman! Do I know her?"

  He placed the black coffee on the wooden counter before her, and she quaffed it though the brew was ply boiling in the cup. "It's not a woman, Caity."

  "Ah, good, then there's still a chance for my Sheelagh" -she winked one liver-smoked eye-"when she's older and your hard work and bright ideas have made us all rich, of course."

  Carl took down the inventory clipboard from its nail on the pantry door. "Sheelagh's too young, and too smart to be interested in a bald coot like me."

  "Hat That's what you think. And she too probably. But you're both wrong." Caitlin sat back from her slump, refreshed by the steaming coffee. "Baldness is a sign of virility, you know. My Edward was bald, too. It's a distinguishing feature in a man. As for being too young, you're right. She's young with ideas of going off to college. But what's college for a woman? Just a place to meet a roan."

  "You know better than that, Caity," Carl told her as he prepared the reorder checklist. "Your daughter's smart enough to be anything she wants to be."

  "And does she know what she wants to be? No. So why run off to college when she could be making her fortune here with a clever businessman like yourself? She should be thinking of the Sham-of the Blue Apple, and the lifetime her father gave to this place. before the Lord called him and his weak liver answered.

  What's going to come of all this recent fortune and long hard work if she goes away? I'm not going to live forever."

  "Not the way you drink, Caity. Have the ketchup and mayo we ordered gotten here yet?"

  "They're in the cooler downstairs. I'm too old to stop drinking now, Carl. I haven't long to go. I can feel it. Old folk are that way.

  We know. But I'm not scared now that the Blue Apple has come around. Forty years Edward and I put into this tavern. And only the first ten were any good-but that was back when Chelsea was Irish. I would have sold out when it all changed after the war, but Edward had been brought up here, you know, and he had his dreams, like you have yours, only he wasn't near as handy at making them real.

  And then Sheelagh was born." She laughed, making a sound like radio noise. "I was forty-five when she was born. Is she Godsent or not, I ask you? Edward blamed the devil. No children for twenty-five years, and then a girl. I think that's what finally killed him, not the drink. If only he could have lived to meet you and see this: the house jammed every night-and eating my food, no less. Take off your glasses."

  Carl peered over the rim of his wire glasses as he arranged the dry goods on the counter for that day's dinner menu.

  "Why don't you get contact lenses?" Caitlin asked him. "Those glasses bend your face and make you look like a cartoon. And brush back your hair. If you're going to be bald, at least keep what you've got neat."

  Carl was well acquainted with Caitlin's ramblings and admonitions, and he grinned away her jibes and checked the potato-and-leek soup she had prepared yesterday far this day's lunch. The old woman was an excellent cook. During the Forties she had worked as a sous chef in the Algonquin, and her dishes were savory and accomplished. She made all of the restaurant's fare with the help of _a Chinese assistant who came in the afternoon for the dinner crowd. When Carl saw that the menu for the day was ready, he patted Caitlin on the shoulder and went out to set up the tables for lunch.

  Caitlin Sweeney watched him go with a throb of heartbruise that the airy, springstrong scent he trailed only sharpened. She loved that man with a tenderness learned from a lifetime of hurting.

  She recognized the beauty in his gentleness that a younger woman like her daughter could only see as meekness. Like a lightning rod, Carl was strong in what he could draw to himselfas he had drawn more fortune to them in one year than her Edward for all his brawny good looks had drawn in forty years. Carl had the prize of luck only God could give. She saw that.- And she saw, too, that Sheelagh, like herself in her hungry youth, yearned for the luckless arrogance of beauty. She sighed like the warmth of a dying fire leaking into the space-cold of night and put her attention on that day's cooking chores.

  Carl was pleased that Caitlin encouraged his passion for Sheelagh, believing that the old woman was only teasing his interest in her daughter to keep him happy and hopeful. Carl's loneliness was the only lack Caitlin could pretend to complete in return for all he had done for* them. Besides, Sheelagh was too self-willed for her mother's opinions to influence her even if the crone had really thought he was right for her. Carl spent little time pondering it that last day lie lived as a man, for he was kept busy with his own strangeness.

  Lightbulbs blinked out around him faster than he could replace them. And as he worked the bar for the afternoon business lunches, the reverie he had experienced that morning spaced out and became moony and distracted.

  "You look pretty harried, sucker," a friendly, gravelly voice said as the blender he was trying to run for a banana daiquiri sputtered and stalled. He looked up into the swart-bearded face of Zeke Zhdarnov, his oldest friend. Zee was a freelance science writer and parttime instructor of chemistry at NYU. He was a thickset man with a penchant for glenurquhart plaid suits and meerschaum pipes. Carl and Zee had been friends since their adolescence in a boys' home in Newark, New Jersey. They had nothing in common.

  At St. Timothy's Boys' Home, Zee had been a husky, athletic ruffian and Carl a chubby, spectacled math demon. A mutual love for comic books brought them together and defied their differences.

  St. Tim's was a state house, and the place was haunted with dispirited, vicious youths-from criminal homes. Zee offered protection from the roughs, and Carl did his best to carry Zee's classwork. At eighteen, Zee graduated to the Marines and Nam.

  Carl sought personal freedom by applying his math skills to finance at Rutgers University. A Manhattan brokerage drafted him straight out of the dorms. Meanwhile in Nam, Zee was learning all there was to know about the smallness of life. He paid for that education cheaply with the patella of his right knee, and he came back determined to invent a new life for himself. He studied science, wanting to understand something of the technology that had become his kennel. When that became too abstract, he went to work for a New Jersey drug company and married, wanting to find a feeling equal to the numbness that surrounded him. During his divorce, he had sought

  out Carl, and the pain and rectification of that time had brought them together again, closer than they had ever been. Carl had done poorly at the brokerage, stultified by the anomie that had poisoned him from childhood but only oozed out-of him after he had found enough security to stop his mad scramble from St. Tim's and catch the scent of himself. He had smelled sour, and not until he had met Sheelagh and developed the Blue Apple did he begin to feel good about himself. That was a year ago when Zee had reappeared.
Now Zee came by often with a crowd of students to fill the Blue Apple up, and Carl was always happy to see him. They shook hands, and a loud spark snapped between their palms.

  "Wow!" Zee yelled. "Are you charged! You look like you're being electrocuted-very slowly." He shifted his dark, slim eyes toward the table Sheelagh was clearing, her pendulous breasts swaying with her effort-. "She's overloading you?"

  "Today's an unusual day for me, buddy, but not that unusual.

  What'll you have?"

  "Give me a Harp."

  Carl took out a bottle of Harp lager from the ice cooler and poured it into a frosted mug. "The wiring's shot around the bar. I can't get this blender or even the damn lightbulbs to work right."

  Zee reached over, and the blender purred under his touch.

  "It's the same way with women and me. The touch must be light yet assertive. I think you've got a lot of backed-up orgone in there."

  He stabbed Carl's midriff with a swizzle stick. "How about a run with me tomorrow? We'll follow the Westway down to the twin towers. I'll go easy on ya."

  Carl agreed, and they chatted amiably about their usual subjects-slow running and fast women-while Carl tended to business. Later, as he was leaving, Zee leaned close and whispered: "No sense wearing that

  expensive cologne if you're going to dress like that." He reached out to shake, thought better of it, saluted, and left.

  The rest of the day was a bumbling of small accidents for Carl.

  The bar's electrical system gave-out entirely, and he had to mix drinks by hand and repeatedly go down to the basement cooler for ice. The tiny screws in his eyeglasses popped out; and he lost a lens down an open drain. Napkins clung tenaciously to his fingers, no matter how dry he kept them, and he spilled several drinks before he got used to the paper coasters coming away with his hand.

  Midway through the dinner shift, with the house jammed, the lights began dimming. When he left; the bar to check the fuse box, the light came up, only to fade again on his return. "This is weird," Carl at last acknowledged, running both hands through his startled hair.