Stories: All-New Tales

AND I WON’T GO away. You will come to me instead.

EACH YEAR: JANUARY 26. One year, one insomniac night, Edward is flicking restlessly though TV channels and is surprised to see a sudden close-up of—is it Edgar? The demon brother Edgar? TV news footage from earlier in the day, rerun now in the early hours of the morning, suddenly this magnification of a man’s head, thick-jawed face, an aging face obscured by dark glasses, skin gleaming with oily sweat, an arm lifted to shield the disgraced congressman from a pack of pursuing reporters, photographers and TV camera crews, there’s Congressman Edgar Waldman being briskly walked into a building by plainclothes police officers. Indicted on multiple charges of bribe-taking, violations of federal campaign laws, perjury before a federal grand jury. Already the rich man’s daughter has filed for divorce, there’s a quick smile, a suggestion of bared teeth. In the brothers’ childhood house in which Edward lives in a few downstairs rooms Edward stares at the TV screen from which his lost brother has faded, uncertain if the thumping sensation in his head is a profound shock, a pang of hurt that must beat within the brother, or his own excitement, eagerness. He will come to me now. He will not deny me, now.

Epilogue

IT WAS SO. THE demon brother would return home, to his twin who awaited him.

For he knew himself now Not one but two. In the larger world he’d gambled his life and lost his life and would retreat now, to the other. In retreat a man sets aside pride, disgraced, divorced, bankrupt and a glisten of madness in the washed-out blue eyes. His heavy jaws were silvery-dark with stubble, a tremor in his right hand that had been lifted in a federal court to swear that Edgar Waldman would tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth Yes I swear and in that heartbeat it was all over for him, a taste like bile rising at the back of his mouth.

Still the wonder. Disbelief. The corroded ruin of a face like clay that has been worn down by rivulets of water, wind. And that glisten of madness in the eyes: Me?

In retreat now returning to his childhood home he had shunned for years. The left-behind, broke-backed younger brother who’d been living alone since their mother’s death, now many years ago. As a young man he’d never considered time as anything other than a current to bear him aloft, propel him into his future, now he understood that time is a rising tide, implacable inexorable unstoppable rising tide, now at the ankles, now the knees, rising to the thighs, to the groin and the torso and to the chin, ever rising, a dark water of utter mystery propelling us forward not into the future but into infinity, which is oblivion.

Returning to the suburban town of his birth and to the house he’s shunned for decades, seeing now with a pang of loss how the residential neighborhood had changed, many of the large houses converted to apartment buildings and commercial sites, and most of the plane trees lining the street severely trimmed or removed altogether. And there was the old Waldman home that had once been their mother’s pride, once so splendidly white, now a weatherworn gray with sagging shutters and a rotting roof and a lush junglelike front lawn awash in litter as if no one had lived there for a long time. Edgar had been unable to contact Edward by phone, there was no directory listing for a phone under the name Edward Waldman, now his heart pounded in his chest, he felt a wave of dread He has died, it is too late. Hesitantly knocking at the front door and listening for a response from within and knocking again, more loudly, hurting his knuckles, and at last there came from within a faint bleating sound, a voice asking who it was and he called out It’s me.

Slowly as if with effort the door opened. And there, in his wheelchair, as Edgar had imagined him, but not so ravaged as Edgar has imagined him, was his brother Edward whom he hadn’t seen in more than two decades: a shrunken individual of no obvious age with a narrow, pale, pinched yet unlined face, a boy’s face, and his hair threaded with gray like Edgar’s, and one bony shoulder higher than the other. Pale blue eyes filling with moisture he swiped at with the edges of both hands and in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in some time he said Eddie. Come in.

…WHEN IT HAPPENED COULD never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made up as a bed pulled up to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to be the accumulated debris of decades but which may have been materials for artworks or the very artworks themselves of the eccentric artist known as E.W., the elderly Waldman brothers in layers of bulky clothing must have fallen asleep in front of a fire in the otherwise unheated house, the fire must have burnt out in the night and the brothers died in their sleep in a protracted January cold spell: the brother to be identified as Edgar Waldman, eighty-seven, embracing his brother Edward Waldman, also eighty-seven, from behind, protectively fitting his body to his brother’s crippled body, forehead tenderly pressed to the back of the other’s head, the two figures coiled together like a gnarled organic material that has petrified to stone.

WILDFIRE IN MANHATTAN

Joanne Harris

IT’S NOT MY NAME—WELL, NOT QUITE—but you can call me Lucky. I live right here in Manhattan, in the penthouse suite of a hotel just off Central Park. I’m a model citizen in every way, punctual, polite and orderly. I wear sharp suits. I wax my chest hair. You’d never think I was a god.

It’s a truth often overlooked that old gods—like old dogs—have to die sometime. It just takes longer, that’s all; and in the meantime citadels may fall, empires collapse, worlds end and folk like us end up on the pile, redundant and largely forgotten.

In many ways, I’ve been fortunate. My element is fire, which never quite goes out of style. There are Aspects of me that still wield power—there’s too much of the primitive left in you Folk for it to be otherwise, and although I don’t get as many sacrifices as I used to, I can still get obeisance if I want it (who doesn’t?)—after dark, when the campfires are lit. And the dry lightning strikes across the plains—yes, they’re mine—and the forest fires; and the funeral pyres and the random sparks and the human torches—all mine.

But here, in New York, I’m Lukas Wilde, lead singer in the rock band Wild—re. Well, I say band. Our only album, Burn It Up, went platinum when the drummer was tragically killed on stage by a freakish blast of lightning.

Well, maybe not so freakish. Our only U.S. tour was stalked by lightning from beginning to end; of fifty venues, thirty-one suffered a direct hit; in just nine weeks we lost three more drummers, six roadies and a truckload of gear. Even I was beginning to feel I’d taken it just a little too far.