Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Talk to the Frog
Friday, May 21st, 2010
“I think there’s been a mistake with my job placement,” I said, fingering the revolver nervously.
“Oh?” said the frog in the pearl gray suit. He didn’t seem very interested. Or surprised. He just sat behind his desk and leaned back in his emerald green Herman Miller chair, settling his cigar into the corner of his wide mouth. “Why don’t you tell me about it? Have a seat.”
The only seat was a wooden stool half-hidden under a potted ficus. I pulled it out so as not to be actually in the leaves of the ficus as I talked and sat on it. The frog frowned.
“Well, first of all,” I said, “I’m having some trouble working with talking animals.”
“What’s the matter? Skunks giving you lip? That’s just the way skunks are. You’ve got to have realistic expectations. They don’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s more that talking animals exist at all,” I said. “I’m just saying, it’s unnerving. A little beyond my … previous experience.”
The frog smiled widely. “Kind of a surprise, right? I love surprises. God, the stories I could tell you! But OK, beyond your previous experience. What else?”
“Well, there’s this gun,” I said. “I’ve never even shot a gun before. I don’t know–”
“What’s to know? They showed you how to work the safety, right?”
I nodded.
“So you point it, you pull the trigger. Somebody drops dead or they don’t. It’s simple.”
“But why do I have it in the first place? You don’t seriously expect me to shoot it? Who am I supposed to shoot?”
“Anyone. Everyone! It’s not my job, I’m not going to tell you how to do it.”
“Listen,” I said, standing up, “this is completely wrong. Yes, I needed a job, but nobody told me I wouldn’t be able to go back home after I got here. And I don’t want to shoot anybody. I’ve been telling these guys for days that I don’t belong here. They keep telling me I have to wait to talk to you, but you can’t do this, don’t you get that? This is America! You can’t keep a guy locked in a building and tell him to randomly shoot people!”
“No, you listen,” said the frog, leaning forward. “We can do anything we want. You walked in here of your own free will, and if we want to keep you here until you rot, we’ll do it. You’ll do what we say, act like we say, and if we tell you to go around shooting people, you’ll do it.”
“I’m not kidding,” I said. “You’re going to have to let me out of here.”
“And I’m not kidding that you’re not going anywhere,” said the frog. He reached for the intercom button on the phone, probably to call back those two rough-handed baboons who had shown me in.
I shot him.
Well, tried. I raised the gun and pulled the trigger; there was a bang, and then his tongue flicked out and seemed to knock the bullet aside–it was really too fast to see, but the bullet punched into the wall two feet to the side of where I aimed it. I noticed now that there were a few other holes in that wall.
The frog laughed. “That really wasn’t a surprise, but I still enjoyed it,” he said.
“What are you going to do with me now?” I said. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Kill you?” he laughed again, a deep, croaking sound. “I’m promoting you! Just wait ’til you see what I’ve got in mind. You’re a very lucky guy.”
I put the gun down on the stool. I wondered if the promotion came with a raise.
Suite
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. On the other side was a vast, cold expanse of stars. “God damn it!” the bellhop said. “They were supposed to fix that!”
“What?” said Claire. She was exhausted beyond belief, having flown to Los Angeles from Paris via Newfoundland, after a marathon 9-hour sales presentation, following three hours of sleep. Why is the … ?” she waved her hand vaguely at the door.
“Dimensional disjunction,” sighed the bellhop, slumping to the floor. “It’s this hallway. It’s been broken since the ’96 Curse War. They said they fixed it!”
The bellhop looked to be about 17, with kinky blonde hair and wide blue eyes that somehow gave him a rabbity look. He was skinny and short, with long, elegant fingers that looked out of place on a person so young. Claire herself was thirty-eight, compact and dark-skinned, curvy, expensively dressed, rumpled from the flight. She thought they probably looked ridiculous together.
“How long?” she said.
“About three years. But don’t worry–they say you don’t remember anything afterward. I never do. I’ve had four of these so far, but it was like blinking when I was done.”
Dimensional disjunctions canceled hunger, thirst, aging, and all biological needs except two. One was sleep.
After the first few awkward hours, they talked–and talked, and kept talking. They played charades. They made up stories, sang camp songs, made up elaborate skits and played them out together. They had lots and lots and lots of sex–increasingly creative, revealing, vulnerable, and acrobatic sex, over time. Whatever Claire’s reservations about Lawrence were, there were advantages, she soon saw, in his being 17. And eventually her reservations about him went away completely, because he wasn’t there for her to accept or reject: he was just there. He was just Lawrence.
They grew to love each other more than either one of them could possibly express. They talked about it for hours, days, weeks on end. They talked about how they would recognize their kinship even when the disjunction was over, how they would be together, what their life would be like.
Claire woke up one “morning” (“morning” was what they called the time when they woke up) with a sudden, cold fear that the three years were over. She put her hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. “Sweetheart?” she said, “Do you think–”
#
The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. Beautiful furniture, Claire remembered thinking, and then she walked inside and fell face-down on the bed, exhausted. She didn’t even remember to tip.