The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (12 page)

Finally Benedict went to a bench and called him back, head lowered so the tiger wouldn’t see he was almost crying.

“Ben,” he said, “forgive me.”

The big head nudged him and as Benedict turned, the faint light from the one good eye illumined his face. Ben seemed to comprehend his expression, because he touched Benedict’s knee with one paw, looking at him soulfully with his brave blind eye. Then he flexed his body and drew it under him in a semblance of his own powerful grace and set off at a run, heading for the artificial lake. The tiger looked back once and made an extra little bound, as if to show Benedict that he was his old self now, that there was nothing to forgive, and launched himself in a leap across the lake. He started splendidly but it was too late—the mechanism had been unused for too long now, and just as he was airborne it failed him and the proud, flying body stiffened in midair and dropped, rigid, into the lake.

When he could see well enough to make his way to the lake Ben went forward, grinding tears from his eyes. Dust—a few hairs—floated on the surface, but that was all. Thoughtfully, Benedict took the microphone from his pocket and dropped it in the lake. He stood, watching the lake until the first light of morning came raggedly through the trees. He was in no hurry because he knew without being told that he was finished at the office. He would probably have to sell the new wardrobe, the silver brushes, to meet his debts, but he was not particularly concerned. It seemed appropriate, now, that he should be left with nothing.

—
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 1964

Wherein We Enter the Museum

Spike D’Arthenay

Outstanding, we’re the first ones in.

Until today, only authorized personnel made it through the electrified gates to the Museum—builders, painters, plumbers and electricians, tech support and curators. Next month the hundred galleries open for the great American public to look on the works of the mighty and admire.

If the public wants to come.

Today there’s nobody here but us. They want us going in all
tabula rasa
, with nobody around to get between us and The Donor’s intentions. Like we’re his special, expensive, living crash test dummies or the canaries that they drop into mines to test the air. If we come back dead, will he put off the Grand Opening another year?

Stupid gig, but for people like us, success hangs on stupid things. The Donor is intolerably rich and seriously
connected
. He says who gets remembered here, and who ends on the Remainders heap. Do this right and we get our own pedestals. Or our portrait in the ’Oughties hall. Worst-case scenario: a footnote on The Wall of Fame.

In a business built on making something out of nothing, you travel on hope. You hope you can do it, hope it’s good, hope to God somebody will take it and you’ll get paid, reviewed. Remembered. It’s about making it. It’s always about making it, but.

Through every gallery in this place? Out alive?

Too soon to tell.

We don’t have long. In today, out by Thursday, and the marble monster crouching on the hilltop is enormous. You could land a Learjet on that roof, and on the facade … Holy crap. The facade.

Bronze block letters stomp across the marble, shouting:

THE MUSEUM OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS

Gasping, Charlee gropes for my hand, but I’m too wild and distracted to grope back.

Stan yips like a virgin
interruptus
, and somebody—Melanie?—goes, “Wow.”

One of us—me?—says, “It’s so big.” Thinking:
we are so small.

Stan glares, thinking whatever Stan thinks.

“All for one.” Charlee’s voice flutters up. “Right?”

“As if!” In those wide boots, Mel looks like a castaway raised by pirates. Tough girl, she races Stan up the steps and hammers on the bell. I’m not the only one thinking,
me, me!

Electronically controlled from
somewhere
, the bronze doors swing wide.

Mr. Me-First muscles past. “Onward and upward with the fucking arts.”

Our ears pop as the doors snap shut behind us like the doors to a new Rolls-Royce. Charlee says into the hush, “We’re here,” but we are neither here nor there.

With one exception, all the doors leading out of the Rotunda are locked but one. That one, we are avoiding. For reasons. We’re stranded until the docent brings the keys, four wannabes eddying around a mammoth bronze.

The craggy hulk dominates the Rotunda like the centerpiece at an A-list banquet, too bad we’re not invited. It’s just like the Iwo Jima Memorial but bigger, and those aren’t Marines struggling to raise the flag. This sculptor put Thoreau and Emerson and Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott up there, struggling with the flagpole; the rockets’ red glare turns out to be a light show in the dome and, Right. The flag lights up as we approach.

Stan says, “
THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
, how over are they?” and frankly, he has a point.

All the statues in niches ringing the Rotunda are of people like that, as in, long dead and too gone to be competition: Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather and Richard Wright, along with Frank Norris; so, what did he write? Plus Margaret Mitchell that we all know about but face it, she’s dead, and a bunch of others I’ve never heard of, as well as Michael Wigglesworth who, in the posterity sweepstakes, is not what you would call a threat, so, in my career? No problem.

Every museum has to make its manners to the past, but face it. Who cares which hairy old scribblers mattered back in the pen-and-ink days before we had Twitter so everybody knew?

Mel backs off to take a screen shot of the bronze to post at TwitPic, gropes for her phone and smacks her head:
DOH
! They took our electronics at the checkpoint. The Committee sent us in here with nothing but a floor plan: no equipment, no flashlights, no walkie-talkies or signal flares, not even a ball of string or bag of Goldfish or a Post-it pad to mark our trail in this or any other part of the forest. Which, until they bring the keys, is immaterial.

We do what we have to. We open the door that we’ve all been avoiding. It leads to the ultimate dead end.

A placard on an easel just inside states our condition. Stan and Mel, Charlee and I are in that very special place the world reserves for writers. It’s called:

THE WAITING ROOM

Waiting is all we are.

Stan crashes on this sprawling hydra of a visitors’ bench, with seven carved settees fanning out from a central post. Carved busts like figureheads mark the end of every seat.

Portraits, but of—who?

Pacing, Mel studies them. “
OK
, this looks like Joyce Carol Oates but isn’t, and this one looks like what’s-her-name that wrote
The Devil Wears Prada-
type memoir about working for J. D. Salinger? And—owait, where
is
Salinger, is he in the main gallery, and does he have a whole hall to himself? He deserves a shrine, and … Ack, here’s Bret Easton Ellis. So, is this the
salon des refusés?
or what?”

“More like the vestibule of the uncreated.” Why am I so tired?

“Don’t, Spike.”

“No. We belong.” Stan goes all crown prince on us, yelling, “
INSIDE
.”

Charlee does her wafting, drifting thing, for she is a poet. “Like we’re God’s focus group.”

“This isn’t a temple, Char.”

“In a way, it is. And we’re …”

“Nobody. Until we become somebody.” Would I step on my grad school lover’s head to be remembered here?

Stan snarls, “Shut up! They could be listening.”

“Well, if you’re listening, bring the damn keys!”

Posturing for the hidden camera, my Charlotte murmurs, “So much history.”

I think,
We are so few.

The Donor

I had a dream, I have money. I dreamed until I saw it clear, and it was perfect. Then I announced.

They came at me with a committee and everything went to hell.

Six of my billions went into my tribute to our nation’s unsung heroes, the place is almost finished, but they came at me with a committee, and nothing is like I thought.

One man’s vision counts for nothing in this world.

Our nation’s capitol would be the perfect site. We have the Air and Space Museum, we have the National Art Galleries, I found a spot for
The Museum of Great American Writers
right in the middle of the National Mall. I sketched
my dream building and paid a guy to paint it in oils. Then I went to see The Man.

The President’s man had the temerity to turn me down. “Not right for Independence Avenue,” he said, but money talks. The President took an interest. It was flattering. It threw me off my guard, and the next thing I knew, every city and big small town in the country threw its name in the hat, like sub-teens entering a beauty pageant. So before I settled on Boise, I had to visit them all.

Now, I made my money in munitions. I make my own decisions and I make them fast. You know what you’ve got and when a problem comes up, you don’t ask. You tell. The President’s man sent me out looking for another city. He appointed a site manager, nothing but the best. He hired an architect. She hired more. The Committee met.

Some fool said, “Let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page,” and it’s been downhill ever since. Do you know what it’s like, bombing along in your Learjet with The Committee wrangling until the windows frost over and your brain fries? Do you know what it’s like, knowing there are two more planes full of jabbering opinionaters hard on your tail?

I hate them, I hate all the bloviating and I hate this
consensus
thing, like their
Committee
is in charge of making up my mind.
Get the hell out of my mind.

Look what they did to my dream! All I ever wanted was to honor my idols, Dink Stover and Mark Twain and the guy who wrote
Silas Marner
that we all read in high school that made such a big impression on me. Oh, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the greatest American writer of them all,
By the shores of Gitche Gumee …
but The Committee …

I give them the classics and they smother me with the new. The pretentious fuckers turned up their noses at everybody but Twain. They tried to tell me this guy George Eliot that wrote
Silas Marner
wasn’t American! They had the nerve to claim he wasn’t even a guy. I had a dream. It was ten years in the building, and now this. They have boiled down my personal tribute to our country’s greatest writers into some kind of Hungarian Goulash. Who is this Gary Shteyngart anyway?

E.g. in the matter of the Rotunda, they railroaded me. What’s so great about a bunch of nineteenth-century ditherers instead of the truly great writer I wanted honored here:
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
.
The Last of the Mohicans
, do you not agree with me that he is great? Oh, I got my Cooper portrait and a Mohican chief’s headdress the dealer told me he’d worn but the
COOPER CORNER
is stuck in some alcove at the far end of the Middle American wing, and the statue in the lobby? Not my dream.

When I grew up we read the classics, I mean, “Hiawatha” and William Cullen Bryant, who is this Robert Lowell anyway, did this Amy Lowell, his fat, cigar-smoking mama, rope him into poetry to keep the business in the family? And the Henry James Room? In high school we read “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” which I personally wanted in the diorama in the Middle American Wing. Instead The Committee got the entire James family, which does not include Jesse, in wax, and if you ask me, it’s an effete piece of crap. Every time I laid out an idea, The Committee came back at me with The Canon, The ostensible Necessary Names, and I never heard of most of them, and the ones I have heard of? I don’t approve.

I had a dream, and you fools came at me with all these newfangled-come-latelies that mean nothing to me, but in the course of many arguments and even longer wrangles, The Committee prevailed. A Committee is like a dinosaur. It isn’t very fast and it isn’t very smart, but when it steps on you, it mashes you flat. The Committee always gets what it wants. Well, not this time. Who, I ask you, is picking up the tab?