Izzy & the Father of Terror
Eliot Fintushel: Izzy and the Father of Terror First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1997. Nominated for Best Novella.
—————————————— He who feels punctured Must once have been a bubble. –Lao Tze (trans. Witter Bynner) ONE 1. A Hole in My Mind I was thumbing through New Mexico with nothing, headed nowhere, when I fell in with a shaman named Shaman who pricked a hole in my mind. A little prick it was, but everything gushed in through it, and everything spilled out. Suddenly, I could not tell the difference between myself and others or between my body and the rest of the world.
“Don’t be afraid, Mel,” Shaman said. I was very afraid. We were sitting inside a long canvas tent, the communal kitchen of the Space People. All the other Space People were asleep. They had picked me up outside of Albuquerque and driven me out onto the desert to their little spread. Because Shaman liked me, they had picked me up. Even though there were Chicanos in those days who hated hippies, who conned their way into communes and shot them up, and I am as dark-skinned and small as a Mexican, they had picked me up. It was dark in the tent. Flaps open, stars filled the big triangles at either end; feeble candlelight unsealed the night between us, loud with cicadas and dead souls crying. There was a votive candle in a shot glass on the dirt floor. Rococo shadows angled and sprawled across chairs, long table, canvas, and ourselves. “You’ve broken me.” The words jumped where my bones should be. Something in me arched and bristled like a frightened cat. Were the words mine? Shaman took them for mine. “I’m you,” he said. Incomprehensible. “Relax.” I left that place. I left the Space People sleeping. I left Shaman with his kit of tropes that killed or cured or pricked your mind and left you to bleed to death or to drown in the world’s blood, bleeding into you through a tiny hole. The last thing I saw there was the candle flame reflected in Shaman’s eyes, two little flames dwindling as I stumbled out into the desert, out into stars and the cries of cicadas and dead souls, which might have been my tongue, my voice, my limbs, or my self, since Shaman had pricked a hole in my mind.
2. Talk with a Joshua Tree
I had a talk in the dark with a Joshua tree. I said, “Everything’s okay. I have a mother in New York. I have brothers and a sister. My father left us, but he’s still in my mind. In there, I can see the faces of all the people in my life, I know the names of everything, and no one on Earth would disbelieve me.” The Joshua tree was unconvinced. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face. I stood there, out of sight of any highway, lost to the Space People, stars in my skin. Someone had just spoken. It might have been the Joshua tree. It might have been the sand.
3. Izzy
Finally, tears gushed. I was sitting on a curb by the highway before dawn. I was dawn, not quite risen over a small, dark man on a desert highway. I was a pool of tears splash-fed by a biped above my gutter. I was a tremble, a sob, a cicada, a dead soul listening in. I don’t know what I was. I was a car coming, high beam illumining tear-slicked face, driver coming in earshot of moaning figure, alone in the desert, in the dark.
The car stopped a few yards past me, then purred back. The passenger door flung open, and a man leaned out, balding, single-browed, a skinny man with a nasal accent: “Get in, Jack. We ain’t got all day.”
I smelled jasmine, sweet and piercing. Inside, beneath a red tassel hanging from the rearview, a small soapstone elephant was lit by the map light above the dash. My tusks curled into the tangle of threads. I had many arms. In my hands were medicine bottles, knives, diamonds, skulls, crushed demons, and snakes. A naked woman scissored me.