My friend Vince and I were in the science fiction section of Barnes and Noble. I was trying to talk him into reading Michael Swanwyk’s Stations of the Tide while he was pushing the latest John Ringo military at me. We weren’t exactly fighting about it, but our discussion was animated. Twice, the same salesperson had tip-toed up to us and whispered, “Please talk a little lower.” On the positive side, three browsers, who couldn’t help overhearing us, had picked up copies of the books and bought them.
* * *
Vince and I had been friends since kindergarten. Ever since he sat on a bully’s head in the sandbox when the kid wouldn’t give me back my shovel. The bully ran off to tell the teacher. Vince told me not to be a crybaby, put his arm around my shoulder, and we’ve been best buddies ever since. Physically, we were a study in opposites. Vince is tall, nearly six foot two, blond and blessed with a body that seemed to pick up muscles if he just bent over to pick up a pencil. I’m just five foot, five inches, although I sometimes stretch it and say that I’m five foot , six.
I have dark brown hair, glasses and have roughly the physique of a celery stick.
Our families had more in common that our friendship. Mine were non-practicing Jews and his were non-practicing Christians. Every few months, the families would do a joint barbecue. Vince’s dad, who was in the meat business, always provided the steaks. My folks brought hot dogs, and three kinds of salad: tossed green, macaroni, and my mom’s fantastic potato salad. The moms would stand in the kitchen, drinking wine, and whispering something that reduced them to helpless laughter, while our dads smoked cigars and criticized Vince and me.
Vince’s family had a long military history while my family had been in education since before they fled Europe with the threat of a gas chamber to spur them on. It’s amazing how much teachers and military people have in common. I think they both harbor a secret desire to beat the crap out of people they identify as troublemakers.
With my final year of college ahead, Dad was practically shoving me toward graduate school to get a masters in English and start teaching, and Vince’s father was constantly trying to strong arm him into the service where he could get a masters in technical engineering. Neither of us was keen on these plans. We’d been writing stories together and apart since we could hold a pencil, and that’s just what we wanted to continue to do…write.
Every Saturday we met at Barnes and Noble to browse, buy books, drink coffee, split a bagel and talk about our future and the virtues of patricide.
* * *
“Ringo is great for a quick adrenalin fix,” I said, “but Swanwyk builds worlds and fills them with people…human and alien, all of them dealing with universal problems.”
“Hold on. Ringo deals with universal problems; he knows the real world. He’s
been in the marines, for Christ’s sake. He studied Marine biology, he’s lived in twenty-three foreign countries! He’s the man who said, ‘He who laughs last is generally the one that thought fastest on his feet.’” Vince laughed.
I shook my head. “You’re beyond tough, Collins. How come you’re sounding so military?”
Vince shrugged. I knew he was conflicted. Hell, I was conflicted myself. It’s amazing, despite our semi-serious talks about murder, how much pleasing your father still influenced your thinking…and maybe your decisions.
We seemed to have reached a stalemate. Stations of the Tide and Strands of Sorrow hovered between us, a story of a man hunting a technological bush wizard vying for attention with a military stand against a zombie plague.
And then we heard the music.
For just a moment, I thought it was coming from the Barnes sound system and wondered at their choice. It sounded like a string instrument playing something that wasn’t quite folk and not (fortunately) new wave. There was something Celtic about it, something blue grass, and something fortune teller/Ouija board about it.
The Swanwyk and Ringo books drooped in our hands as a hooded figure moved into our aisle. The guy was our age, give or take, and was a striking figure, a punk Robin Hoody with thick, dark hair spilling out of the forest green hood and a mouth and chin, outlined by an Errol Flynn van dyke. He was holding a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune in tat-covered hands and the music was coming from his throat.
“Yar,” he said, smiling at Vince and me. “Dune.” He waved the book at us.
I’d read Dune a couple of months earlier, when I’d finished reading Lord of the Rings for the third time and needed another epic saga. It blew my mind; I associated with Paul Atreides and the shocking number of life-altering decisions he had to make throughout the book.
“Love that book,” I said. “My favorite line: “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
Robin Hoody’s eyes lit up as I tossed the quote. I’m not speaking metaphorically either. I mean it looked like someone had flicked a little switch at the back of his head and turned a bulb on.
He smiled and rolled up one sleeve of his hoody. His arm was covered with tattoos.”
Vince had a couple of tattoos and was always considering getting more; I saw him scanning Hoody’s arm for possible inspiration.
“You are the genuine Illustrated Man,” I said smiling.
“Ray Bradbury,” he beamed in response. “Total dude, but dig this.”
He pointed at a line of script that covered the inside of his left arm from elbow to wrist. It was another line from Dune. Vince and I bent forward to read it: The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.
Vince frowned at the quote and studied it. “I think it should be in reverse,” he said. His mouth twisted to one side the way it always did when Vince was going to say something cynical. “First the mind resists order, and then it commands the body to do the wrong thing. Yeah…the history of the world.”
“Have you read Dune already?” I asked Hoody.
He let his sleeve fall; the quote disappeared under the greensward of his sleeve.
“Three times. Loaned it to a bud. Good-bye book! Gotta have a copy. Know what I mean?”
I nodded and so did Vince who added, “I have most of Ringo in hardcover, but when the paperbacks come out, I have to get them too…just for backup. He waved Strands of Sorrow one last time. “Ringo is my man.”
Hoody grinned at Vince and said, “I have been to the speed of God, sir…and I discommend it.”
“A Hymn Before Battle,” Vince said proudly, “one of Ringo’s best.” He beamed at our new friend.
Robin Hoody nodded and then flashed back to Bradbury. “Love my man Bradbury,” he said. “First sci fi I ever read…Martian Chronicles. Very deep.” He dipped his chin and did a heavy, mystical sort of voice, “Who are the Martians?” From somewhere deep in his throat the music started again. He moved his head a bit to the rhythm. It sounded a little like the theme from Star Trek or maybe The Twilight Zone.
Watching our hoody man I thought that he might be answering his own question.
Vince clicked his tongue. “Too many metaphors in Bradbury. Too dragged out for me. My first sci-fi was Alan Dean Foster. Pipe and Flinx. Love that series. I almost memorized Orphan Star.” Vince struck a dramatic pose and gave me a friendly sock in the arm, “ Watch where you’re going Qwot!”
Hoody crouched, rifling through books, but wasn’t too absorbed to throw Vince another Dean quote over his shoulder, “Freedom is just chaos with better lighting. But, man, I don’t agree. I think freedom is freedom! Everything elseis chaos. The lighting don’t matter.”
Hoody had pulled out a large gray book and was frowning at it thoughtfully. I looked down and almost gasped. He was holding my second favorite book in the world, The Once and Future King by T.H. White. I’d started reading the book in a dentist’s office when I was twelve and was knocked out by it. I remember running home after an hour in the chair of pain, and reading the book laying on my bed. Only the tedious interruptions of dinner and homework kept me from finishing the first part of the book. Happily, there were five parts in all which kept me reading for some time.
Hoody looked up at me as if he’d read my mind. “You read this, bro?”
“Read it?! I’ve read it at least five times since I was twelve. It’s so great! It’s the story of King Arthur, but told in a modern way. It’s funny, and sad and filled with all kinds of great ideas. My favorite quote of all time comes from that book, “Might does not make right! Right makes right!” So many people try to get Arthur to do the wrong thing, but he Merlin teaches him to think for himself. It isn’t always easy to do the right thing, especially if other people try to tell you that it isn’t right.
It sounded like Hoody was humming something from Camelot. He stood up with the book, “Awesome. I am getting this book.” He held out his hand, “Ran,” he said. I’d forgotten that we’d never exchanged names.
I shook it. “I’m Teddy and this is Vince.”
Vince shook Ran’s hand.
“Real name’s Ransome, can you dig it?” he chuckled, and somehow managed to continue humming something at the same time. “It’s from some English ancestor.” He shrugged and rolled up the sleeve on his other arm. “Got a tat to go with the roots.”
“Man you’ve got a lot of art,” Vince said. Ran pointed at an exciting tattoo on his forearm. It showed a helmeted knight with sword upraised; he was clearly in battle. There was a large red cross on his breastplate and another on his shield and behind him was an arch surmounted by a circled pyramid and eye, just like the Mason’s symbol on a dollar bill.
“I used to belong to this group,” Ran said, “the Knights Templars.”
“Is that the Masons?” Vince asked. Vince had been fascinated with the Masons ever since he Nicholas Cage in “National Treasure.”
Ran raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Rock group, baby,” he said. “Joined them after I left the military. Cool sound, but dropped acid every two minutes. I got fried trying to forget some shit that happened over in Iraq.” He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb and rolled his eyes. “Hospital. Rehab! Don’t do it anymore. Now I get high on books. Yeah! Bradbury, always a good trip. Foster, Heinlein, Herbert. Dune!” He rolled his eyes again. Dune! Who needs acid when you can trip on that bad boy.”
Vince pointed to the eye that was just under the Knights Templar’s raised sword. “Know what that means on the dollar bill?”
Ran and I looked at each other and Ran puckered his lips.
“Doesn’t it stand for the thirteen original colonies?” I said.
Vince winked, “Yeah, but more. A French guy put it there to mean that God approves of what America does.”
“I don’t think He’d approve of everything, man,” Ran said. He fingered a chain around his neck that I now saw was connected to dog tags.
“No,” Vince agreed. His face had a flushed look it got when he was agitating over something.
Ran hummed again; the music sounded like an anthem.
“What’s that you’re humming?” I asked.
Ran shrugged, “Don’t know. They just come to me. I was thinking Unity. The eye and all…know what I mean? And it just came to me.”
I thought about Unity. I also thought about my father and my future.
“Want some coffee?” I needed some; my mind was churning.
Vince said, “Yeah, let me grab some more books and I’m ready.”
“Come and join us, Ran,” I said.
Ran smiled and pointed at another tattoo on his still almost bare arm. It was on the inside of his forearm. Never having succumbed to the urge for body decoration, I wondered how anyone could get such a detailed tat on the tender, un-muscled part of their arm. It was a copy of an illustration from The Lord of the Rings showing the doors of Durin. Over the door in elvish runes were words that every living person probably knew thanks to Tolkien and Peter Jackson, “Speak friend and enter.”
I looked at Ran and smiled, “Friend,” I said.
“Friend, Teddy. Friend Vince,” Ran said grinning. He held his arms out wide. “Unity!”
He grabbed a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, I snatched up another Swanwick book, The Dragons of Babel, and we headed for the café.
Vince said, “I think they still teach elvish at Harvard. I’d like to take Elvish.”
I took drink orders while Ran and Vince took possession of a café table. Ran wanted a black coffee with three shots, I always drank decaf with lots of milk, and Vince, who hated coffee, had his usual black tea over ice.
As I headed to place the order, I heard Ran humming again. I looked back and he and Vince were bent over the Ringo book. Vince was showing him something in the inside cover, happy as a clam to be showing off his favorite writer. Ran looked intent on the book, but I heard the music plainly. It was not like the anthem-music. It was much lighter and gave me an inexplicably happy feeling.
When I got back to the table, Vince and Ran were having a spirited conversation about military fiction. The Ringo book was open and placed spine up on the table. Ran had one of his sleeves turned up again and was showing Vince words on his upper arm. The words were bella detesta matribus, “Wars: the horror of mothers,” Ran translated. Next to the words was a picture of a bloody sword with the words “No Fear” breaking through the blade.
Vince looked at Ran and then at the words and picture beside it. He smirked. “Everyone’s scared. Who the fuck wants to die.”
Ran hummed something and then said, “Marine. Two years. Respect it totally. Wouldn’t do it again for anything.”
Vince looked uneasy. He had often said that if he did join the military after college it would be either the marines or the Navy.
“I’d like to write a science fiction book about war and make it real. I mean real.”
I put down the drinks, and Ran winked and said, “Thanks, friend.” He turned back to Vince and pointed at the Ringo book, “High action…good sense of humor. Clever lines like, “Peace through superior firepower,” and “nuke em till they glow and then shoot 'em in the dark.” Ran laughed, but Vince frowned. He turned the book right-side up and shut it.
“When I came back,” Ran said, “I was messed up, like I said. Did the acid to forget, but now I forget all kinds of things. Yeah, all kinds of things, but not the things I want.”
Ran paused and hummed again. Vince and I shared a quick look. This time the music reminded me of “Danny Boy.” It had the sad, plaintive quality of the old Irish ballad.
“Man wages war over bits of land, ancestral beliefs and the hatred that lays bare his own self-hatred. Children weep and bleed and the land weeps and bleeds, and the prize is nothing but wet ashes.”
“What’s that from?” Vince asked.
Ran’s face was blank, “From me.”
“Shit, that was good,” Vince said.
“Do you write?” I asked.
Ran shook his head. “Can’t do it. Tried, but concentration isn’t good. The acid.” He shook his head. “Maybe someday.” He shrugged.
“I want to write,” I said, “but my family wants me to be an educator.”
Ran looked nonplussed. “Being a teacher is a good thing…if the teacher is good that is.” He paused. “Writers make good teachers too…if their good writers!” He chuckled.
“But it’s so hard to make a living writing,” I added; it was shocking to hear my father speaking out of my mouth.
“Hey, bro,” Ran said, “it’s hard to live period. If you don’t take a chance, you won’t find romance.” He chuckled, blew on his coffee and took a big sip. “Ooh, that’s good stuff.” Ran began to hum as he sipped more of the coffee. It was a deep, rich throated sound that made me think of eating warm soup on a rainy day.
Vince said, “Teddy and I have always wanted to write. Heck, we started writing screenplays when we were in second grade. Remember that Ted? Remember the one we wrote about the two kids who found an amulet that made people kinder. The two kids found a way to sneak it into an orbiting space station and the amulet, circling the globe made everyone stop hating each other; soldiers dropped their weapons and went home.”
I watched Vince’s face; he was guarded about showing too much, but when he told Ran about that old screenplay, he looked happy, and then sad, and then I wasn’t sure what he looked. It was as if he were waiting for his brain to tell him what to feel. “My family was all military,” Vince suddenly went on. “My dad, my older brother, grandpa; all of them. Like it’s the thing to do to be a man.”
Ran pushed up his left sleeve again, higher this time so we could see his upper arm and part of his shoulder.
We saw a colorful tattoo covering that area. It showed two hands holding a green planet earth. Butterflies circled the hands, and the sun shone down on the scene.
Ran looked down, his goatee pressing against his clavicle. “This is my favorite tat; it’s the whole thing, man,” he said. “Know whose hands those are?”
“God’s,” I said immediately.
Vince shook his head. “Naw,” he said. He narrowed his eyes, “They’re supposed to be everybody’s hands…yours…” he looked at Ran, “…and Teddy’s, and mine.”
Ran lowered his sleeve and smiled at Vince, “You got it brother.” He held up his hand for a high five. Vince smacked it hard.
Ran drank some more coffee and then, as if he’d gotten a sudden electric shock, announced, “John Scalzi!”
Vince brightened and so did I. We both liked John Scalzi’s writing, especially Old Man’s War.
“Scalzi came to a Knight’s Templar concert. He was a friend of the group’s leader and was invited on stage to jam with us. Scalzi plays a way cool instrument; it looks like a mandolin, but it’s tuned to sound like a ukulele. Oh man, the dude was rippin’. Afterwards he came backstage to jaw with us and got offered some acid. He puts out his hand like this…” Ran put out his hand palm up, “…and said, ‘There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.’
When he left he said to me, ‘Don’t go cosmic on yourself, singing man.’”
“That’s what I want to write about,” I said. “Not…about the universe but about how people cope with…what was it you said?…the inherent unfairness of things?”
Ran sipped more of his coffee and said, “You two dudes should be a writing team. Yeah. A good team.” He pointed at Vince, “You save the planet, man, and you,” he pointed at me, “you save the people.”
“That’s a fuggin’ big order,” Vince said.
Ran closed his eyes and kept them closed. Vince and I looked at each other. Ran continued to keep his eyes shut. I began to wonder if this was some side effect of the drugs that Ran had taken. But then he started to hum again.
“I wrote this a long time ago,” Ran said, his eyes still closed.
I had to remind myself that what I was hearing was just the sound that air made moving over a man’s vocal chords, because listening to that tune I had the feeling that Ran had swallowed an orchestra and I was listening to multiple instruments. I had an urge to close my eyes too, because pictures were flitting through my head as I listened.
“I call it Shimmering Waters,” Ran said, the music continuing to flow.
The name did not surprise me. One of the images that flitted through my mind was of a small waterfall in a green forest. There were bursts of light as the sun hit the water.
I looked at Vince and saw that he had closed his eyes. His face was placid in a way that it seldom was. Vince is a man who cooks and cooks inside like a pot that’s just about ready to come to a boil. You can’t always tell it’s happening unless he suddenly boils over.
All around us, people were talking at café tables. Three old guys were sitting looking at travel books about Italy. At another table a woman and two young children, a boy and girl, were looking at a Golden Book. The older of the two children was slowly sounding out the words and reading to his little sister. The mother was texting on a cell phone.
Baristas were calling out people’s names, as orders were ready. There was an order to life in the café. Different people came and went, but the café itself was a tidy little world with simple rules that people seemed to instinctively understand. When we stepped out of the bookstore that would all change. The world was a spinning ball boiling all the time, just like Vince.
I brought my attention back to the table and saw that Vince and Ran had both opened their eyes and were looking at me.
Ran raised his sleeve slightly and looked at his watch. It was almost invisible surrounded by all his pictures and words. “Ooh, gotta go. Too bad. Like talking to you guys.”
“Maybe we’ll see you here again,” Vince said; he sounded like he really hoped it would happen. I had a feeling that perhaps it wouldn’t.
Ran smiled and said, “Cool.”
We shook hands and he got up without taking his empty coffee container. We watched him exit the café humming again. I don’t know what it was, but it felt like Ran. It felt temporary.
I picked up Ran’s cup and my own.
“Wanna head out?” I asked Vince.
“Where you wanna go? Wanna get lunch?”
I nodded. “Let’s get pizza and talk.”
“What about?”
“Everything,” I said. “Maybe about getting a few tattoos.”
THE END
Try Bradbury's DANDELION WINE. It's a magical evocation of the summer he was 12 years old in Waugegan Illinois. In the book, his name is Douglas Spaulding and he lives in Greentown, Illinois. He used that town again in his excellent SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. I taught Dandelion Wine at one point,and put up a big piece of oak tag. As we read the book, the kids created a pictorial map of the town. They loved doing it. Another author you might try is a British novelist named John Wyndham (sci-fi mostly) Two of his most famous books are THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS and THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS. Enjoy!!
Ray Bradbury is about the best litmus test I have for whether or not I'm going to vibe with another human being. If you can pick up what ol' Uncle Ray has to throw down, then we can hang, no problem. If you can't or don't want to, well, we can still hang but please understand that we're just different people.
Loved that story, Sandy. It's great finding more of your own out there in the wild. I think that for a lot of us, that's a rare occurrence.