A. A. Attanasio - In Other Worlds.pdf

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In Other WorldsIn Other Worlds
by A.A.Attanasio
version 1.0
Contents
Eating the Strange 18
Alfred Omega . 88
The Decomposition Notebook 146
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 Twenty-third 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
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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 Twenty-second 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..
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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. He 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
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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 God-sent 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
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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 free-lance 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.
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