SECRET LIVES

Jeff VanderMeer

For Ann, who is a big part of my secret life

Cheeky Frawg Books

Tallahassee, Florida

Copyright © 2011 by Jeff VanderMeer

Cheeky Frawg logo copyright 2011 by Jeremy Zerfoss.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke

Originally published in limited edition hardcover by Prime Books, 2008

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

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INTRODUCTION

Some projects have more of a secret life than anyone can know. This one started with a revelation in the wee hours of the morning in a bed-and-breakfast in Robin Hood’s Bay, England, during a gathering of the writer group Storyville. It then progressed through a story called “Secret Life” that became the title story of my first major story collection in 2004, and then reached its full fruition in this book, Secret Lives. (And, no, this is not an attempt to confuse bibliographers.)

How did this book coalesce? When my Golden Gryphon collection Secret Life came out, Ziesing Books asked if I could do something special to enhance the copies they were selling through their catalogue. Ziesing Books is run by Mark & Cindy Ziesing, two of my favorite people in the world. So I said, naively, how about I write a secret life for each of them? Then the orders started pouring in. Then the lives started getting longer and longer. I had meant to do each life long-hand, but after about nine of them I realized this was impossible. So I started typing them up and putting them on fancy paper, with nice envelopes that I then drew weird cats and things on. The Ziesings kept selling and I kept writing. Endlessly.

And, inevitably, at some point, the project got away from me. I never wrote the long story about Anne Sydenham, creator of the Edward Whittemore site, that I had planned. In that story, Anne takes a speedboat and conquers a small island off of Madagascar, which she then rules for a decade under Marxist principles. (Someday, I will complete it.) Other stories became so long and complicated that they mutated from being secret lives into something else entirely.

In the end, I had written so many secret lives that I simply ran out of ideas. At that point, I offered the last few people left in the lurch a free book or two and ran screaming out of the room.

So, in short, this is not the definitive secret lives book I had envisioned. On the other hand, there’s something appealing about the fact that the project has, in its own way, mutated and had its own secret life. Each story begins with the truth, as given to me by the subject of the story, which permeates the first couple paragraphs before descending into fiction. Some reactions from recipients made me wonder about coincidence; for example, the priest who, unbeknownst to me had just gone swimming with sharks in Australia, only to come back to find my story about him swimming with sharks in Australia…In other cases, after publication of the print version of this book, I had people who weren’t the subject of the story think they had been--and email me to thank me for so perfectly documenting their real and secret lives. Then, too, a few of these stories led to longer stories; a part of one entry will even be included in a new novel of mine.

In the end, all I can say is that I so enjoyed writing these little stories and I really enjoy reading them as well. They get a tremendous reaction when read aloud. I hope you enjoy them as well. And, er, no, I will not be writing you a secret life as a promotion for sales of this e-book . . .

Jeff VanderMeer

June 2011

Tallahassee, Florida

THE SECRET LIVES OF

JIM DALY

PETER DANSSAERT

PETER HEISS

TROY KNUTSON

LYNN MINNEMAN

ALLEN LEWIS

PETER LAVERY

STEFANIE BIERWERTH

REBECCA SAUNDERS

SYDNEY MILLER

JIM HENRY

FLENSING U.K. HLANITH

JAMES PATTERSON

KEVIN POINTER

ANDREW HATCHELL

DAVID KIRKPATRICK

GEORGE WARE

RICHARD MAYFIELD

HONORIO ALVES

BRANDON PERKINS

BILL MOODY

TROY

ALAN SAUL

LIBRARIAN BOB SCHEFFEL

JENNIFER SEAUX

JEFF GORDON

DAVE DRISCOLL

RICK AND PEGGY

GAYLE DEVEREAUX

JOHN AND MAUREEN DAVEY

BOWEN MARSHALL

RICH DEMARS

TERRY TIDWELL

RAJAN KHANNA

CONSTANTINE MARKOPOULOS

SHANE HAMMILL

MATT CHENEY

AFTERWORD: A REPORT

THE SECRET LIFE OF

JIM DALY

Jim Daly is a teacher and book collector who owns Arthur C. Clarke’s manuscript of Deep Range. Unbeknownst to friends and family, Mr. Daly is also the mayor of a miniature underground city of his own creation. He has built this city at an undisclosed location after much surreptitious removal of dirt over a period of several years, followed by an equally meticulous and masterful building and then resodding project. A trapdoor with artificial grass camouflaging it completes the illusion that no such subterranean building, no such city, exists . . . The city itself is an amalgamation of every city Mr. Daly has ever read about in literature, but with one important distinction. Mr. Daly has chosen to create every alley, every courtyard, every courthouse, not described on the published page. His frankencity lurches forward on the assumption of inference, of those selections of text where other elements are alluded to; it is the space between the words that Mr. Daly has mined for his creation. It is this which gives him pleasure, for he has not performed a stale re-enactment of that which already exists whole and glowing in every reader’s mind, but instead provided what each writer failed to provide, or could not provide . . . Built of spare parts—cast-offs and has-beens, the dullard sheen of dusty junk shop antiques re-imagined into utility and grace—the city has a unity instilled solely by the mind of its mayor-creator. In the light of day, the artificial suns of common bulbs, and in the dusk of dimmed track lighting, Mr. Daly admires his City on the Hill. All faiths come together here, he thinks. All faiths, whether fantastical or mundane, whether futuristic or anachronistic. Here, they form a single world, and it is good.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

PETER DANSSAERT

Peter Danssaert researches the illegal arms trade, diamond smuggling, organized crime, and Lebanese networks. These rather mundane activities sometimes require him to travel to West Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. He lives in Belgium, known as one of the world’s foremost beer countries, with a football team respected for playing stingy, physical defense. However, despite his travels and his current location in Belgium, Danssaert’s ties are much stronger with the tiny country of Dissembla, which is, according to him, located somewhere between the Antipodes and “the gleam in the eye of the Fisher King.” More specifically, Danssaert is the King-in-Exile of Dissembla. Lately, King Danssaert has taken to announcing his status as royalty given the slightest provocation—such as passing a stranger on the street. “I am the ruler of Dissembla,” he will say. “Severe is my discipline, unwavering my justice. Er, when I left my place, I forgot to bring along a few coins for a cup of coffee. Care to loan a King a euro?” Several are the parties he has thrown for himself, to which bemused friends and family attend with ever decreasing enthusiasm (and in ever decreasing numbers). At these parties, King Danssaert makes his entrance in the full traditional regalia of his office: The twin ostrich plums jutting from the steel helmet (that some mistakenly believe is but a common colander, out of context), the royal purple robes, made of finest rayon, inset with semi-precious stones, the fine denim slacks or sometimes tights, and the boots with the curious glued-on up-turned toe points. Lately, too, King Danssaert has told anyone who will listen about the ongoing war between Dissembla and Sembla, its neighbor—waged over a dispute involving two musicians, a cow herder, and a harmonica. At least, that is how it started; the issues are now too important to allow for quick resolution. King Danssaert is certain of this. And just as certain that as soon as the war is over, he will be allowed to return to Dissembla, there to take up his rightful place on the throne. “Spies abound,” he says to people who he knows not at all. “Spies are everywhere. I found one in my pocket the other day. I found one at the supermarket. I found one in the water faucet, dripping slowly into my apartment.” Peter Danssaert is fairly sure that his true enemies have long since stopped watching him, thinking him mad at all points of the compass, but has been in character for so long now that he is not sure he can stop. For, surely, some day the conflict between Dissembla and Sembla can be resolved?

THE SECRET LIFE OF

PETER HIESS

Peter Hiess lives in Austria and is a journalist, book author, translator, public reader, chief editor for an Internet magazine, married, and 45 years old. Despite his quite busy, productive life, he had for a long time felt an absence in his life. He didn’t quite know the shape or substance of this void, or what might fill it, but he recognized its presence in a sudden melancholy on rainy nights, a sadness upon hearing the ring of a public telephone, the apprehension of being set apart from the world when caught in that no-man’s-land at parties where you are not quite part of one group and not quite part of another.

Hiess did nothing about this feeling for awhile, but, then, while surfing the Internet, he came across a website for an organization called The Institute for Further Studies. The description of the institute included this sentence: “As a subsidiary function, the Institute has for many years filled a secret need in the area of self-actuation and valuation.”

Despite the bureaucratic syntax of the sentence, it struck a chord with Hiess. On a whim, he sent an email to The Institute for Further Studies, and included his snail mail address. In the email he wrote, “I would like to hire you to identify for me what I lack, and what I can do to satisfy that lack. I need something—you may call it a secret life, a calling, or whatever you like. But I need it, and I think you might be able to find it for me.”

For several weeks, The Institute for Further Studies remained resolute in ignoring his electronic missive. He even forgot, after awhile, that he had sent it. He continued with his busy, frenetic schedule. Then, one day, a weathered-looking off-white envelope came in the mail, with the Institute’s name and address as the sender. A spark of excitement ignited in his chest. They had responded after all! Breathless, he read the letter.

Dear Mr. Hiess:

Thank you for your most unusual request. It certainly falls outside the brief of our not-for-profit organization. At the same time, the intensity of your emotion about your situation, your reference to part of our mission statement, and, admittedly, a general slow-down in our other activities, meant that we paid it more attention than we would have otherwise. In fact, we decided to pursue research into a “secret life” for you, as you call it, since we had some unused grant money that might otherwise have gone a’wastin’, as they say.

To this end, we have thoroughly examined your everyday life using our foreign operatives (mostly ex-KGB). Through our proxies, we have examined your financial records, your applications for various forms of credit, the interior of your living quarters, and the contents of your trash.

In addition to what we routinely call “invasive intel,” we have also considered relevant information about Austria, such as the presence in Vienna of noted dog enthusiast Jonathan Carroll, “the tinkerbell cows that hide in the fogs of Tyrol” (as one tourist put it), the omnipresence of lager, and your country’s online frog museum. We have also factored in the information you provided in your application about your career, marital status, and age.

Our analysis of all of these elements (and many more) has resulted in only one conclusion: the perfect secret life for you will consist of serving as a private mascot for a wealthy utilities family in Thomasville, Georgia. We are sending you your mascot costume under separate cover.

We will also be sending you a plane ticket to Atlanta, Georgia, where you will be greeted by Jed Perkins, the youngest son of the patriarch of the family, Jedediah Perkins, and transported in the back of a pickup truck to the ancestral residence. Once there, you will wear your mascot costume at all times, except when dining in your private shed in the back of the mansion. Your job will be to keep the Perkins family in high spirits with your antics and gambols. You may not speak at any time, but physical comedy is appreciated.

It has cost us much in political and other capital to procure this opportunity for you. Therefore, this “secret life” is non-negotiable and severe penalties may result if you do not immediately report for duty. After a period of ninety days, one of our operatives, also wearing a personal mascot outfit, will contact you. If you are not experiencing the spiritual and emotional growth we believe this secret life will bring out in you, you will have the option to take up a secondary secret life that we are holding in reserve. (Although we do not believe you will find it as much to your liking.)

Thank you—and good luck!

Sincerely,

Dr. Ronald Simpkin

Institute for Further Studies

P.S. From experience, I should let you know that the mascot outfit tends to get hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You will derive satisfaction from the fine workmanship of the authentic capybara hide mixed with alpaca that forms the outer surface. For several decades, this outfit figured prominently in our Masonic rituals down at the lodge, so it has some history to it.

For several minutes, Hiess stood there, looking at the letter he had just read. Then he recoiled in horror, crumpled up the letter, and tossed it in a nearby trash bin. It was clear now, he thought, that he had no void inside of him. It must have been some recurring bit of indigestion. It must just have been something he’d eaten. It was all gone now. He didn’t need a secret life. He never would need a secret life again. Still, as he walked back inside his home, a part of him looked forward to receiving the costume, which he would put to good use, although not as Dr. Simpkin might have wished . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

TROY KNUTSON

Troy Knutson is a pharmacist who not only loves to impersonate cartoon voices but also experiences, by his own estimation at least, a high rate of success at this endeavor. Despite this, Troy has felt unfulfilled of late and, after trying several less radical approaches (including kung fu classes, followed by yoga), hired a private detective. “What do you want me to do?” the private eye asked. “I want you to follow me.” “Follow you?” “Yeah—follow me.” “And do what?” “Make a note of everything you find out.” “Interesting,” the detective said. “Wouldn’t it just be easier if I interrogated you about you?” “Maybe,” Troy said, “but I don’t want to do it that way.” “Okay, you’re the boss,” said the detective. “Can I bug your house? It’ll cost extra. It’d be easier if you just let me in and let me listen from a corner or something.” “No,” said Troy. “Just bug the house.” “Fair enough,” the detective said, and proceeded to do just as his client desired.

The detective examined Troy Knutson’s financial records, the interior of his home, and, during the course of one particularly eventful night, the contents of his trash. He followed Knutson everywhere and spent many hours looking through the resulting photographs with a magnifying glass. He also bugged his phone and recorded his conversations. When he was done, he came back to Knutson and said, “I’ve done what you asked. Now what?” “Well, what did you find out?” Knutson asked. “I found out you’ve got a regular routine. I found out your credit rating is pretty decent. And I found out you’ve got no secrets to hide.” “Very good,” Troy said. “Now, show me how you went about finding out what you found out.” “That’ll cost extra,” the detective said. “That’s good to know,” Troy said. “Show me.”

So the detective showed Troy how he had done what he had done—tailing techniques, how to get his credit report, all of the tricks of the trade. At the end of it all, the detective took a sip of his scotch (they had retired to a local bar for the last part of the debriefing), and said, “Satisfied now, Mr. Knutson? I have been very thorough and professional. If you were hoping to find out something about yourself that you didn’t know, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed. You have no secret life—secret from anyone else, or from yourself.” Troy smiled. “Oh, but now I do.” “Is that so?” the detective said. “You’ve kept something hidden?” “No,” Troy said, “but now I know that I want to be a detective.” The detective stared at Troy for a second, then sighed. “I should have known. I came into the business in a similar way. You start with self-disclosure and before you know it, you want in on everybody’s secrets . . . Mr. Knutson, you don’t really want a secret life. You just want a window into the secret lives of others. And that’s more of a burden than people think. It will change you in so many ways, and some of them aren’t good ways.” The detective took another swig of scotch, gave Troy a penetrating stare. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” he asked. And Troy said, in a perfect imitation of Roger Rabbit, “I was born ready, detective.”

THE SECRET LIFE OF

LYNN MINNEMAN

Lynn Minneman is a stamp collector and a retired survey statistician. For a long time, he had been content with his life and with his friends and his family. However, one day he received a set of Lewis & Clarke commemorative stamps from the post office that changed his contentment to restlessness. In examining the stamp set through the clear protective envelope, he noticed a small, triangular stamp trapped in a corner, the illustrated side facing away. The back of the stamp had yellow discoloration, indicating some age, the glue having melted.

Generally, Minneman didn’t like to open up his stamp sets right away. He liked to appreciate them from afar, and then, only later, examine them in detail. But the little triangular stamp intrigued him. He wanted to see what was on the front of it, for one thing. As a child, one of his greatest satisfactions with stamp collecting had been the exotic quality of it, the images hailing from far-off lands. Minneman has long forgotten this, but his mother had once given him a dozen stamps from “Nippon,” all with delicate traceries of cherry blossoms and storks and other images that conveyed an otherness he treasured. At the time, he had not realized “Nippon” meant “Japan,” and so the country itself had been a mystery, a place not found on the globe, waiting to be discovered.

A flicker of this memory sparked across his vision as he took a pair of tweezers and extracted the odd stamp from the envelope. He turned it over and set it down on the kitchen table, on top of the envelope. It was an etching, very carefully rendered, of a mountain range, with a river winding through the foreground. Whoever had created the stamp had managed to mix monochromatic colors—greens, blues, purples, and browns—into a clever tapestry of texture. Even though it was heavily pixilated, it conveyed authenticity, reality. For a moment, the river even seemed to move, and Minneman drew in his breath. Across the three corners of the stamp lay the words “Republic of Sonoria.”

Minneman raised an eyebrow. Sonoria? In all his days of stamp collecting, he didn’t think he’d ever heard of the Republic of Sonoria. It sounded faintly Eastern European, and it was true he still had trouble keeping track of all the former Soviet provinces that had become independent, but it still sounded false to him. He stared at the picture on the stamp one more time, shivered a little as if a breeze blew across the grassy plains surrounding the river. Something about the image not only startled him, it stirred some deeply buried recognition.

Carefully, as if the precision were important, he picked up the stamp using the tweezers and placed it back in the envelope, in the same position, with the front facing inward. Then he walked over to the map of the world framed in his living room, and he looked for Sonoria. First, he tried Eastern Europe, then Central Asia, then randomly, letting his gaze linger where it liked, and then systematically, starting from the left and traveling down and then up, down then up. No Sonoria. No Sonoria in Asia, Europe, South America. No island named Sonoria. No isthmus. No province. No state. No city. Nothing. Unless it was so small, it wouldn’t show up on a map?

He shook his head. Well, it was probably a fake stamp. A postal employee had stuck it in there as a joke. Why should he waste his time with it?

But that night, as he tried to get to sleep, he recalled the weathered quality of the stamp, the yellowish stain on the back, the high quality of the image on the front, and something about it worried at him, made him toss and turn. When he did finally get to sleep, he dreamed he stood in front of a huge rendering of the stamp that blotted out the sky. The image in the stamp was composed of huge dots, but the dots began to bleed together, and then swirled into a photograph that became a living, moving scene, and the edges of the stamp were just a portal. On the plains, strange animals were moving. In the river, birds dove for fish. The mountains in the distance were wreathed with cloud. A smell came to him, of mint and chocolate and fresh days far from the choking, clogging pollution of cities. Then the stars came up in a sky of purest black and blotted it all out, and he woke gasping for breath, afraid, so afraid, that he might forget this glimpse, this door into the Republic of Sonoria.

For a week, the dreams were enough. They came to him more and more frequently—sometimes even while he nodded off after lunch during the daytime—and the details of them grew more and more vivid. He woke from them refreshed, reinvigorated, and everything around him seemed brighter, more intense. Sometimes, in his dreams, he walked along the river bank. Sometimes, he ran through the plains. Sometimes, he walked toward the mountains, although he never reached them. He never saw a single person in these dreams, but animals and plants and birds and fish were all around him, performing their ancient routines.

Once a day, he took out the stamp and stared at it, fixing it in his imagination. But, each time he did so, the stamp lost a little of its intensity for him. And, after a time, so did the dreams. The dreams became as faded as the stamp. The stamp became as faded as the dreams.

Normally, for Minneman, this would have been enough. It was not that he lacked a spirit of adventure. It was more that he had done many things in his life, and he liked a certain sense of order.

But now, he fidgeted. He walked back and forth across the living room, upset that he could not fix the image from the stamp in his mind as clearly as he had before. The Republic of Sonoria. Where might that be? He didn’t know, but he knew that in his dreams, he had drawn his hand across the surface of the water of a mighty river and felt the thick wetness of it against his skin. He knew that his pants had been stained with the yellow-green of the grass of the plains. His face had felt the breath of that place upon it. He had smelled the essence of it. No dream had ever been so real, so true.

After seven days of this, Minneman could take it no longer. He called the post office, asked to speak to whatever employee might have sent him the Lewis & Clarke stamp set. Was told it was impossible—it could have been anyone. Asked if they had ever heard of the Republic of Sonoria—was it in their system as a destination? Was told it was not, with a sort of heightened concern in the voice of the woman he was speaking to. Hung up. Sat down at the computer and began a search for “Republic of Sonoria,” and when that didn’t work, “Republic of Slonoria,” “Sembla,” “Shonoria,” “Sonora,” hoping ludicrously that the name on the stamp might be misspelled. Hopeless again in the thought that the stamp was simply a fake, and all this effort a waste.

The more the dreams faded in intensity, the more the little weathered stamp failed to anchor his imagination, the more frantic he became, the more lost, even though surrounded by the familiar.

His friends and family became worried, but said nothing. “Minneman’s on a mission,” they muttered to each other, rolling their eyes. Minneman on a mission, as they all knew from past experience, could not be thwarted or redirected. Let it run its course. Let him run it all out as far as it would go, and then he would come back to reality.

But Minneman himself was unconvinced by this theory, for it was one he had run through his head many times. It was something he’d thought about while he still had control over his actions. A separate part of him observed the part of him searching so desperately for Sonoria with alarm. But, eventually, that part of him faded away, became as pixilated and disconnected from the rest as the little dots that made up the image on the stamp.

Minneman searched the public library. He searched the microfiche of old and obscure newspapers. For a month, he searched, as the dreams dried up, as the depth and breadth of his tactile knowledge of Sonoria faded to a single pixel point.

Then, in an old travel issue of Granta, of all things, buried in a footnote in an essay about European refugees, he found something. The single pixel point expanded into the scene on the stamp. He was able to breathe again, properly, for the first time in months. The tight muscles in his shoulders and back relaxed. Right there, right there. The sentence. The sentence that unlocked part of the mystery: “This nameless refugee said she came from the Republic of Sonoria, a small country between the borders of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic—a hidden mountain valley. She was in some distress, in that she had not wanted to leave, but had become lost, she said, and could not now find the way back. There is no Republic of Sonoria, and the woman may have been mad, but there was a resonance to her story that shed light, in an emotional sense, on the fate of displaced peoples everywhere.”

The mountains. The valley. The river. A chill, a shiver down the spine. The sense of the world opening up right before his eyes. He photocopied the page from Granta. He put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart. Now he had two separate visions of the same place. Now he knew he was not alone.

The very next week, Minneman told his friends and family that he had to take a trip. He packed up his bags, liquidated his savings into traveler’s checks and cash, and booked a flight to Prague. On the flight, first to New York, and then through Amsterdam to Prague, he hummed to himself, his mind firmly locked on what lay ahead of him. The carry-on bag between his feet held the stamp, still in the envelope, still in the position he had found it, as if it were a compass direction, as if to remove it would be to lose his place in the world. Lewis & Clarke would help guide him.

The sentence about Sonoria still lay in his shirt pocket, next to his heart. Every once in awhile, he would pull it out and stare at it, and almost cry.

When he landed in Prague, safely in a taxi heading toward the visitor center, where he would find out how to rent a car that would take him to the border of the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, from whence he would proceed on foot, with a backpack and a walking stick, into the mountains, searching for little signs, clues, for what he sought—when he landed in Prague, the tingle in his palms, the faint scent of mint-and-chocolate in the air, told him that he was close, that he was about to enter the Republic of Sonoria, that he was free . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

ALLEN LEWIS

Allen Lewis (Padre Allen) is an Episcopal priest and banker who loves to cook and collect first edition science fiction and fantasy hardcovers. Padre Allen leads a stable, fulfilling life that often creates solace for others. And yet, behind that gentle smile, those sometimes rambling but always authentic sermons, beats a heart intent on vengeance. Yes, revenge! A base emotion, and one Padre Allen only allows himself to succumb to once every few years, when he boards an airplane for the Australian coast, near the Great Barrier Reef. Once there, Padre Allen dons a steel mesh scuba suit loaded with pockets of chum and jumps off a fast boat into the churning water . . . and, weightless, floating, fast descending, carries out his private war against the Great White Shark. There is nothing personal about his assault. No relatives or friends have succumbed to the deadly charms of the Great White’s teeth. No chunk of thigh has been separated from the priest in years past, leaving that tell-tale semi-circular bite mark, made official by the faint trace of long-removed stitches. Nothing in the Bible commands him to wrestle sharks. Nor has he any political or social issues with the Great White. Instead, he wages this one-man war against the Great White solely on the basis of having been frightened out of his mind upon first seeing the movie Jaws. Nothing before or since has quite affected him in this way. He seeks to conquer that feeling, to understand it over and over again. And so, down in the briny depths, where swims the hawksbill turtle, where the lacy fronds of certain sea grasses sway hypnotically back-and-forth, where the moray eel peeks furtively from its hidey-holes, and where the Crown-of-Thorns starfish makes its laborious and tortured way across the coral reef, deathstar of Death Stars, so too Padre Allen becomes part of the landscape, framed in light, framed in shadow, armored suit a-gleaming. As the sharks approach, as he can sense the powerful swash of tails, the blocky gray of their bodies appearing through the murk, see that grinning mask of pure ferocity, there is always a moment when Padre Allen wishes he were one of them—so perfect, so certain, so unwavering, with no hint of the doubt he has always been assailed by. God’s creatures. Beautiful in their sensible yet senseless aggression. And then they meet in mortal combat until his air gives out and he rises to the surface, chumless, battered and bruised, his faith born anew.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

PETER LAVERY

Peter Lavery works for Pan Macmillan on the third floor of the Pan Macmillan building in London. A tallish man who has been known to appreciate a good red wine, Peter spends his days stamping out the incessant “rabbiting” of his authors, whilst simultaneously coordinating this and acquiring that. Dealing with writers is his joy and his burden. They are always e-mailing him about something—“rabbiting on” even when not writing books—and yet he loves them all.

Still, sometimes, as much as he enjoys his job and working with the nefarious Stefanie Bierwerth and the devious Rebecca Saunders, Peter needs a break. Whenever he feels the restlessness coming on, whenever the pressures of the job begin to rise like a tide against cliffs, he walks down the stairs to the basement. The basement is filled with rats, cockroaches, and Pan Macmillan employees. After a few minutes of nonchalant conversation to allay suspicions, he saunters over to the far wall. He is usually sweating a bit by now, for this is the moment of greatest peril. He looks around, this way and that. When everyone is busy typing away at a computer keyboard or looking at cover proofs, when no one is looking at him—

—in one quick, twirling motion, Peter presses the hidden button and hugs the wall as it swivels open, depositing him in the secret tunnel behind the wall . . . before sliding innocently back into place, no one the wiser.

Safe, Peter breathes in a mouthful of the salt air that wafts faintly toward him. To his left is a natural grotto holding several bottles of merlot, pinot noir, burgundy, and cabernet sauvignon. In front of him lies the tunnel, carved from the rock over many years by Peter himself, finally completed only a few years before. The floor of the tunnel has train track running out toward a smudge of light in the distance. A miniature train car idles on the track in front of him. Peter lets out a deep sigh of satisfaction. “Free for awhile,” he mutters. “No more rabbiting for awhile.”

Selecting a bottle of wine, Peter sits down on the plush cushion atop the seat, pulls a red lever—and off the car goes, down the tracks, accelerating to a pleasant thirty kilometers per hour.

The sea scent gets closer and closer. The train car rocks gently from side to side in a pleasing way. The breeze picks up, the murky circle of light ahead more distinct, until eventually it replaces the walls of the tunnel entirely . . . and Peter is released into the light.

The light comes from the pale blue sky above, seems to reflect off of the black sand beach and the mirrors of tidal pools, before sliding up across the arc of brambly cliffs that frame the scene. With a light bump, the train car comes to a stop at the end of the track. In front of Peter is a former Blackpool tram car, converted into a cottage get-away. It is bedecked in barnacles, the green paint fading and chipped.

This is Peter’s refuge, and inside all that seems eroded on the outside has been restored: a galley kitchen, all gleaming stainless steel and polished wood; a bunk bed; a living room with two comfortable chairs and a number of books and magazines; a refrigerator for the occasional beer; a phonograph and stereo system; and, most of all, blessed solitude.

Peter has never been exactly sure where this place is in relation to London; nor can he remember how the tram car came to be in this place. All he knows is that he has found it, and he is grateful.

He looks at his watch and reminds himself that he should return in a day or two. Time passes differently in this place; when he returns, it will be as if he never left.

Meanwhile, he will drink his wine and listen to his music and read his books and watch as, out in the water, strange phosphorescent creatures breach hard above the crystalline water, under twinned murky suns, all thoughts of author rabbiting driven from his mind.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

STEFANIE BIERWERTH

Stefanie Bierwerth works for the Tor UK imprint of Pan Macmillan in the Pan Macmillan building in London. She works with the secretive Peter Lavery and the nefarious Rebecca Saunders. Her life is very busy, but very rewarding: like Lavery and Saunders, she helps provide honest work for dysfunctional individuals, namely writers, who would otherwise have no way to earn money. In her free time, she reads mysteries and thrillers for entertainment, and sometimes she visits relatives who live in Florida. At least, she says she is visiting relatives in Florida. In fact, Stefanie Bierwerth is lying through her teeth. The truth? She leads a double life. While in England, she works as a book editor. While in Florida, she has a second career. It may certainly be true that she has relatives in Florida—in the Tampa/St. Pete area to be precise—but they have no knowledge of her whereabouts during most of the time she spends in Florida.

Typically, she will spend two or three days with her relatives—long enough to take photographs to show to her friends and colleagues back in London, a kind of proof of innocence, in a sense—and then rent a car and travel across the state to St. Augustine. It is in St. Augustine that Stef pursues her second career, in the limelight.

This career is not something she embarked on as a whim. It has taken five years in the gyms of London, five years of careful coaching in gymnastics classes, and five years of training in all manner of muscle-shattering physical disciplines.

And all for the pursuit of one dream: to wrestle large reptilians in St. Augustine at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. But “wrestle” is too crass a word for the art form that Stef has mastered. As a twenty-foot alligator enters a death roll with Stef perched atop its thrashing body, spectators forget even to gasp, for the balance Stef shows is akin to the logrollers of yore, to high wire acts over Niagara Falls. These giant saurians—they rage, they hiss, they snap and dart, they wriggle, they thwack their tails in bone-crunching displays of strength. (And the smell—well, the smell is simply dreadful; nose plugs recommended.)

The nimble muscularity and brutality of wearing down a huge alligator “must be seen to be believed,” as the posters read.

And yet, some delicacy, too: a dandelion rubbed under the chin of Old Peculiar, as the farm’s largest alligator—a twenty-six-foot-long monstrosity—is called, will put him to sleep as quickly and easily as Stef’s specialty: the Sleeper Reptile Death Grip, invented and perfected by her and only her.

As she strides down the hall on Pan Macmillan’s third floor, strong as an ox, she laughs to herself, just daring one of them, just one of them, to challenge her to a fight. For they know not who they tangle with.

They call her “Stef the Editor” in London. They call her “The Alligator Wrestler” in Florida.

Who is to say which is the more difficult profession? For no writer alive is so unwary as to be put to sleep by a dandelion rubbed under the chin . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

REBECCA SAUNDERS

Rebecca Saunders works for the Tor UK imprint of Pan Macmillan in the Pan Macmillan building in London. She works with the secretive Peter Lavery and the devious Stefanie Bierwerth. Rebecca hails from Australia, a frank and forthright country, entirely above suspicion of any kind. During her time off, Rebecca visits exotic locations such as Iceland and Egypt, the Czech Republic and Sweden. There, to those who meet her, she is the perfect tourist—polite and knowledgeable, self-effacing yet witty, fair but not an easy mark.

“Australians make such great tourists,” more than one hotel clerk has been known to say after one of her visits.

Little do they know that Rebecca is a spy, an expert in espionage, and comes from a long line of spies. What more perfect cover than working for a publishing house and being an Australian citizen?

All of Rebecca’s female relatives are spies—going all the way back to her great-great-great-grandmother—although Rebecca does not know this. She has never questioned the impulse that made her want to become a spy, never knew it lived in her blood from her birth. Little does she know that when her mother visits her in London, her mother has her own missions, just as crafty, dangerous, and adrenalin-pounding as Rebecca’s own. Does Rebecca’s mother know that Rebecca is a spy? That information is a closely guarded secret. She lacks the proper security clearance. Eyes only.

Running across rooftops in Prague, pursued by enemy agents, gleefully jumping from roof to roof, holding the papers that were the object of her mission. Snapping photos with a tiny camera hidden in her fake eyeglasses at a symposium of foreign diplomats in Cairo. Exchanging gunfire with Basque separatists in a remote rural area of Spain—whilst driving fast over a dangerous gravel road, in an Aston Martin with the top down. (She can load and unload a Glock in .24 seconds.) Every day holds some new adventure.

But do they see this, her co-workers, as Rebecca prowls the halls of the Pan Macmillan offices? Do they know she could disable any one of them in .23 seconds with a carefully aimed kick? Or that in .34 seconds any one who even looked at her funny could be knocked unconscious by their own shoes? Or that in .45 seconds the annoying author who sends all the e-mails could be, if he ever visited the offices again, flying through a window?

No, they don’t know any of this, because it’s a secret. If she told you, she’d have to hurt you (at the very least).

THE SECRET LIFE OF

SYDNEY MILLER

Sydney Miller is currently a water resources planner. In the past, while serving in the military, Sydney worked with chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf and helped destroy them while on the Johnston Atoll near Hawaii. However, few people know that Sydney is perhaps the foremost writer of water puppet plays in the West. This ancient art, developed in Southeast Asia, requires a strong knowledge of the water and of the dramatic arts. In Asia, vast pools are filled with milk to make them cloudy. The puppeteers lurk beneath the water, breathing through straws as they animate the puppets that seem to walk on water. Sydney has forgotten where he got the urge to create water puppet plays, but it was from looking at a Time Golden Book with a blurry photo of a scene from just such a play. Now, Sydney has built a secret swimming pool which he keeps filled with chlorinated milk at all times. For years, he has scribbled down his intricate, twelve-act plays in the margins of official army journals, keeping the details sharp in his memory. Now that he’s settled down as a water resources planner, he has found the time to stage many of the plays. Sydney has a unique style for these plays, since he has been reluctant to tell his family about his pastime—or to enlist other actors in the production of his plays. Or, even, to divulge the secret of his tarp-hidden swimming pool. But many is the rainy Sunday afternoon when he can be found submerged in his milk pool, breathing through a straw, as he manipulates the ten finger puppets on his hands and the ten toe puppets on his feet—creating a great crescendo of drama such as the world has never seen. Someday, he thinks, he will go legit. He will stage his plays at the public pool, to a great and watery applause. Someday . . . But until then, this is his secret life.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

JIM HENRY

Jim Henry has a fluency with languages that extends beyond his mastery of Esperanto and the languages inherent in being a network systems programmer. Not only has he learned the musical language first put forth by French crackpots in the 19th century—

a language that required the intricate use of several musical instruments just to “say” common every-day words—but he has also learned to understand the secret language of dust. Wherever he goes, their voices follow him—small, reedy, mellifluous voices. They call out to him with a poignancy that speaks of decay and loss. As motes swirl around him in the light of the midday sun, he understands that they are only ghosts, only shadows, of the people or animals they once encroached upon, their language a kind of insensate memory of the shapes of the past. Mumbled, whispered, rattled. There’s nothing the dust can’t tell him, if only he listens hard enough.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

FLENSING U.K. HLANITH

Flensing U.K. Hlanith stalks his graveyard patch in search of the ghost of Clark Ashton Smith. The only thing that can wrench him from his obsession is watching gonzo XXX movies until late at night. Otherwise, he watches over his graveyard, alert for the ghost of Clark Ashton Smith. “I saw him once,” he’ll explain to anyone who will listen. “I saw him here—I swear.” Although he’s not really certain, when it comes down to it, if he saw Smith in the graveyard or if the image of Smith’s likeness had so burned itself into his retinas from his repeated re-readings of the man’s books that he only thought he saw Smith’s ghost. Does it make sense that Smith’s ghost should haunt this particular graveyard. Of course not, but the nature of obsession withholds from the brain the information vital to the rejection of the obsession. “There’s no reason he couldn’t be here,” he mutters. “No reason at all.” Flensing has a question for Mr. Smith should he ever make another appearance. It’s a question that he feels must haunt the ghost, as it haunts him. The question is this: “Did you have to use quite so many compound adverbs and adjectives?” For it is this usage that Flensing believes has robbed Mr. Smith of his rightful due as the best writer of his century, better than H. or F. or even N. “Why, Clark Ashton Smith?” Flensing shouts into the darkness sometimes. “WHY?!” But this is not his secret life—this is his all-too-public life. In his secret life, Flensing collects coupons. His secret is that he has flown to Hawaii three times and vacationed in Las Vegas five times just using coupon rebates, not having to pay for a thing. The dead don’t need coupons. The dead don’t need vacations. But Flensing does.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

JAMES PATTERSON

James Patterson has just seen Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique with his own eyes. It’s a tattoo parlor on a dingy street in a small town he passes through on his way somewhere else. The neon sign splutters and sighs like a garish animal taking its last breath. The place lies between a diner and a one-hour motel. Characters pass through its doors that could never be mistaken for Atlantean kings or expert swordsmen. Zothique has come down in the world, and it pains Patterson. It pains him plenty, although there’s nothing he can do about it. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t have time to. He’s on his way to a graveyard where a man named Flensing U.K. Hlanith claims he’s seen the ghost of Clark Ashton Smith. Yeah? thinks Patterson as he puts the town behind him. Well, I’ve seen a ghost too—right there, in a small town. Zothique. Debased. Defiled. If that isn’t a ghost, he doesn’t know what is. Before long, Patterson reaches the graveyard. Flensing is hopping up and down around the edge of the gravesites like a crazy person. He stops when he hears Patterson’s car approach. “Hi, you must be Patterson,” Flensing says, embarrassed. Patterson gets the feeling Flensing will never tell him what he was doing. “Yes, I’m Patterson,” Patterson says. “And you must be the graveyard guy. Where did you see Smith’s ghost?” Patterson thinks it best if he keeps this conversation as short as possible. “Er, I can’t remember,” Flensing says. Patterson thinks Flensing’s probably lying. “I just traveled two hundred miles after a long plane trip to come see you, Flensing,” Patterson growls. “I think at the very least you’d better show me where you saw the ghost.” Flensing blanches and shrugs. “Okay. Follow me.” And so Patterson follows Flensing into the heart of the graveyard. Flensing stops next to a crumbling stone with unreadable letters on it. “He was right here. Staring at me. About to tell me about the adverbs.” “What?” says Patterson. “Never mind. This is where he was.” “Good enough,” Patterson says, and takes out his camera, snapping a quick shot of Flensing. “Thanks,” Patterson says. Flensing, still blinking from the flash, says, “What was that all about?” “Nothing,” Patterson says, and walks back to his car, leaving Flensing, confused, behind him. Patterson has a secret life, all right, but it has nothing to do with Clark Ashton Smith. He likes to take photos of people who have seen ghosts. As he explains to the tattoo guy at the Zothique later that day, “Some of the ghost essence stays with the person who saw the ghost. You can see it in the photograph, if you develop it just right. You can never take a photograph of a ghost. But you can see a wisp of ghost if you take a photo of a ghost watcher.” “And what do you do with the photos?” the tattoo guy asks. “Nothing,” says Patterson. “I just stick them on the wall with all the others and wait for a pattern to emerge. Someday soon, it will . . . ”

THE SECRET LIFE OF

KEVIN POINTER

Kevin Pointer, a network administrator/photographer dresses in black most of the time. He has demons in his house that open bottles of sake and make him drink it. “Drink the sake, human beast!” they scream at him, cackling and waving their little swords. “Drink it ALL!” So he does, after which the demons usually become much more reasonable and revise their request: “Read us Saki! NOW! Read it all!” And so he reads all of Saki’s collected short fiction to them, until they fall asleep, their little black bellies rising and falling from their repast on the couch. It is then and only then that he retires to his bedroom, there to indulge in the particulars of his secret life. Every piece of black clothing he possesses must be cleansed of lint using only a single tweezers. This is a nightly chore, even for clothing he does not remove from the closet. One. Two. Three. Pieces of lint. He squints. Is that another piece, at the seam? Yes. Yes, it is. Pluck, and it is gone, a sense of deep satisfaction welling up inside of him. He achieves a Zen-like level of concentration by removing the lint in this manner. It gives him the fortitude not to gibber with fright and wet himself when the demons demand the drinking of the sake, the reading of the Saki . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

ANDREW HATCHELL

Andrew Hatchell travels all week and thus cannot entertain more than one cat on his premises. He must balance his need for the company of cats with his need to sustain a day career as an enterprise data warehousing consultant. By night, however, Andy scours the cities he’s sent to for cats in distress. A cat up a tree? No problem. Andy brings his own tiny titanium collapsible ladder with him. A cat beset by dogs? Andy will jump into their midst and break them up, no matter what the cost in bites and possible rabies. A cat hungry? Andy carries cat food in his plastic-lined pockets for just such an eventuality. If there are no cats in definite distress, Andy’s will seek out those felines who seem disgruntled or in some way disinclined to purr. A family with a disgruntled cat will get a stern talking to. “Don’t you know how to play with your cat?” he will tell the startled family gathered at the front door of their suburban house as he hands their plump tabby to them. “Kitty tease your cat at least once a day.” He gives them the evil eye. “If I hear of this happening again I will be back.” . . . Sometimes Andy wears his bulky superhero costume with the kitty ears, and sometimes he doesn’t. Depends on the weather.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

DAVID KIRKPATRICK

David Kirkpatrick works as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, where his research involves the cellular mechanisms underlying mutation and recombination. In short, he is a mad scientist—in fact, on the weekends, he combines his DNA with that of certain species of turtles and uses his resulting hugely buoyant shell and webbed claws to perfect his fishing in local Minnesotan lakes. But this is not his secret life. Everyone knows about his DNA experiments—it’s clear enough every time he comes out of the laboratory disheveled, cackling insanely and holding broken beakers full of green smoke. No, David’s secret life is in the field of interpretative dance, wherein he attempts to “dance out,” as he calls it, the human genome, to a Def Leppard song. Thus far, he has not placed in competition, but in his green military unitard with flowing Japanese ribbons, he creates quite a scene. He practices in fields of clover during the summer, far from any human habitation. In the winter, he furtively goes through his moves in his neighbor’s backyard when they are not around. But it is in the spring that he hits his stride, for it is in the spring that the competitions sprout like newly-planted marigolds, and an adrenalin rush is only an hour away by car. Every time, he strides out boldly, with confidence, certain the judges will understand the genius of his interpretative dance mapping out the human genome. And yet, and yet, he has never won more than an honorable mention. After competitions, he stomps into his laboratory and changes into a turtle, slides beneath the surface of the lake, and salves his wounds with water.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

GEORGE WARE

George Ware works as the vice president of a Fortune 500 company proposal center that responds to requests for proposals. He is the proud father of two daughters and the slave of three cats. He has a large book collection. George Ware’s house reflects the value of his position, as do his other material possessions. Hard work and a passion for books have sustained him for many years. As has his secret life. Every couple of years, George Ware sneaks off for three or four weeks. “Business trip,” he tells his family. “Family obligations” he tells his employer and his secretary. “You’re strong. You’ll survive,” he tells the cats. The cats are not convinced, but, then, they never are . . . And then George Ware boards a plane bound for Prague. He carries only a small suitcase; all his necessary clothes and other items are waiting for him. There is a mysterious smile on George Ware’s face during the flight. It is as if he listens to distant music, or reviews a distant memory in his mind. Far away. Floating away over the clouds that pass by outside the window . . . And in Prague, he takes a taxi to a hostel in the traditionally Jewish part of town, there to retrieve his costume, his change of clothes, and the Czech Republic money he has secreted in a sock. A nod to the hostel owner and then he’s off, through the crooked, narrow streets, until he reaches an expanse of green dominated by a large multi-colored tent, worn and tattered, surrounded by trucks and cars. He has reached the winter quarters of the Svankmejer Circus. He breaks into a run as he sees old comrades, old friends, and as they meet hugs them fiercely. For the next month, he will travel with them through Eastern Europe as their knife-thrower, juggler extraordinaire, and, as the situation demands it, barker and clown. It’s true it all started as a business trip and a drunken tour of bars in Prague a decade before. A chance meeting. A ringmaster. The words, “I have a proposal,” which George Ware had heard so many times before, but not in this context. And now: a month of living on the move, with the slightest inflection of danger and intrigue, conversations until three in the morning about all manner of subjects, sojourns to half-forgotten towns in sleepy valleys or near the tops of mountains. Sometimes George Ware is not sure which of his two lives is the secret life. He is not sure he should examine the question too closely.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

RICHARD MAYFIELD

Richard Mayfield is a teacher and book collector who lives in Kentucky. He has a Maine Coon Cat named Ash who lives under the sink during the day. (Richard thinks that Ash tolerates no other cats, but everything depends on context and self-knowledge.) When Richard comes back from teaching—always taking time to admire his book collection when he comes in the door—Ash comes out from under the sink, shakes herself, meows, and gives Richard the look of “Where’s my food?” Except, one day in the near future, Ash will come out from under the sink, shake herself, meow, give Richard the look of “Where’s my food?”, and say, “You’ve got to get that leak fixed, Richard. I can’t stand one more day of having my head soaked.” To which Richard will reply with a deafening silence, relieved only by the sound of the bag of groceries he is holding sliding out of his hands and crashing onto the floor . . . Ash gives Richard yet another look. “Try to get a grip. Now, the sink can wait, but the rest of it can’t. Put your shoes back on—we’re going back outside.” “Okay,” Richard says. “Okay, Ash,” he says. He can’t think of anything else to say. He reviews his memory of the past week, the past month, the past year, because this all seems so normal that it must have happened before. But he can’t think when it might have happened before . . . Outside, he follows Ash into the backyard and then through the woods to a clearing. Was there a forest here before? Was there a clearing? Richard is more than a little muddled in his thinking. He can’t remember if this is the first time he’s seen all of this or if it’s always been there. “C’mon, Richard,” Ash says, looking over her shoulder at her owner. “You can move faster than that. We’re going to be late.” “Late for . . . for what?” Richard manages to ask. Ash gives him a cat grin, wrinkles her whiskers. “That’s for a cat to know,” Ash says. Once in the clearing, Richard stops in his tracks. The clearing is full of Maine Coon Cats. Under the dusky sky, with the half-moon already beginning to shine down. So many Maine Coon Cats that Richard cannot believe his eyes, all of them huge and proud and padding about on enormous paws. The calm strength of the cats invades his body, makes him relax, takes his nervousness away from him. “Can you tell me, Ash?” he says. “I think you know, Richard,” Ash says. “It just took a little while for you to remember. Not everyone remembers all at once. Give it time.” “I’m serious, Ash,” Richard purrs as he lopes alongside Ash. “Can you tell me what this is all about?” Richard’s coat is shiny, his whiskers twitching. “Now you know,” Ash whispers, as they join all the other Maine Coon cats, under the moon, across the clean-smelling, dark-green Kentucky grass . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

HONORIO ALVES

Honorio Alves sells Subaru parts and accessories. According to him, he was born in the Azores. This is a blatant and filthy lie, although Alves may have suppressed the memories of his true childhood and believes he tells the truth. Nonetheless, Alves was not born in the Azores. He was born in the Antipodes, the son of a centaur named Gabriel and a unicorn named Dawn. No one was more surprised to have a human child than Dawn, who had been hoping for a uni-taur. As the privileged offspring of mythical beasts, Honorio—so named for the honor of having been born to such august parents—spent his formative years under the shade of banana trees being fanned by the wings of tiny dragonfly-sized faeries, who would sometimes pull his hair out of spite. As for schooling, Honorio received his grammar lessons from a ten-foot-tall kangaroo named Samantha, his math lessons from a llama-man named Bosun, and his science from a discredited skunk-ape named Larry. This may account for the fact that he scores well on tests given to him while in close proximity to zoos. The only trauma inflicted on Honorio during his years in the Antipodes came at the hands of the King of the Antipodes, who most commonly took the form of a giant wild boar—bigger than an elephant. One day, while hunting humans, the King of the Antipodes tripped and his left front hoof struck Honorio a glancing blow on the top of the head. After the aardvark doctors stitched him up, Honorio could hardly see the stitches—and, indeed, the resulting scar could now only be seen now if he were to shave his head bald and then examine the top of his head, with the aid of a mirror, under the intense light of a full moon. Then, and only then, might he see the imprint of the curve of the King of the Antipodes hoof upon his pate. Because Honorio cursed the King for his clumsiness, he was banished from the Antipodes forever and eventually wound up selling Subaru parts and accessories. But the most outrageous part is that Honorio has forgotten all of this in his headlong rush into his secret life for Subaru. But no—I cannot believe he remembers none of this! And yet, when I bumped into him in his place of business and began to recite the tale, I could tell at once that he thought me a liar. I forgot entirely that I needed to buy an alternator and entered into an argument with the man. How can he have forgotten that I once taught him astrology under the shade of the banana trees? How can he have forgotten the Antipodes, that heaven on Earth, the place we both may one day return to, once the King is dead?

THE SECRET LIFE OF

BRANDON PERKINS

Brandon Perkins is a full time student at Montana State University, majoring in business finance. His three best friends in the world are his girlfriend Dawn, his brother Chris, and his dog. He has a third best friend, but because this friend is invisible, Brandon chooses not to discuss him with anyone. Brandon knows his invisible friend is real for two reasons: (1) he only met this friend after he was already grown up and (2) his invisible friend has a distinctive smell. The smell is neither offensive nor pleasant, like a combination of a musty wine and a sharp cheese. The smell most readily tells Brandon when his secret friend is around. For Brandon’s secret, invisible friend doesn’t talk much. More specifically, he talks once each day, at exactly noon. The wine-cheese smell will permeate the office or restaurant or car in which Brandon is currently situated, and the voice will emanate from empty air. The voice has a distant, echoing quality to it, as if coming from the bottom of a deep hole in the ground. Sometimes the voice says something profound, like “Only by coming to grips with one’s past may a man look to the future.” Sometimes the voice says something obscure, like “If candles had no wicks, then light would have no reason for existence.” And sometimes the voice says something conversational, like, “That was a splendid game of cricket, don’t you think?” Brandon has given up trying to interpret the rhyme or reason behind these pronouncements. Sometimes he thinks his invisible friend is reading off of fortune cookies. Other times he believes he has eavesdropped on part of a conversation his invisible friend is having with another invisible friend. Once, for three weeks, he tried to respond to these dribbles and leaks of words, but never received a reply, and thus gave up. In moments of quiet contemplation, Brandon almost believes that this invisible friend is actually a guardian angel who smells of wine and cheese. In moments of panic, the invisible friend is a stalking demon waiting for the right moment to strike and end his life. But most of the time, Brandon accepts the presence of this invisible friend the way he accepts the breeze on his face when he steps out of the student administration building at Montana State University. Certainly, his girlfriend has never experienced his invisible friend’s presence, and he is glad of that. With any luck, she will never have to know . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

BILL MOODY

Bill Moody is a contractor, guitar player, and a wine snob. In keeping with his wine snobbery, Mr. Moody also collects and identifies gestures, mannerisms, and facial expressions. Every day becomes a kind of catalogue for him. Walking down the street, Mr. Moody will watch a car drive by. The woman driver, talking on a cell phone, will toss her hair back and Mr. Moody will mutter, “Jennifer Gray, about forty minutes in, 1987, Dirty Dancing. Precursor: Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Since 1987, replicated often. No longer sui generis. Common in hair coloring commercials. Ultimate origin: beginning of time.” Over time, the entire world has become a derivation of something else. For originality, he is drawn to smells, to touch—the tactile experience of tree bark under his hand, petting a cat, running his fingers over the coils of the spiral notebook in which he records his daily observations. These observations, however, do not constitute his secret life. His secret life involves the CIA, the country of Uganda, and a weapon—a sword made in the 16th-century in Damascus and given to him by a dying stranger on a street corner. Mr. Moody never discusses his secret life with anyone. It’s his. And it’s secret.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

TROY

Like the ancient city of Troy, Troy the person has many layers, if only one has the time to excavate all of them. Troy is a Republican book collector, although this does not mean he only collects books or book-related materials from Republicans, as I can myself attest simply by compiling the details of Troy’s secret life in this document . . . As a cover for his secret life, Troy runs a vitamin and supplement company. Beneath this layer, Troy works as a rare book detective. He comes to cases by word of mouth alone, will not cooperate with concurrent police investigations (who know of his presence only as a wall knows the shadow transfixed upon it), and receives ungodly amounts of compensation from his grateful clients. Two or three cases a year keep Troy afloat, just enough to allow him the comforts to which he has become accustomed: vacations in Hawaii or Tahiti, the acquisition of new and exciting vitamin supplements for his vast collection (preserved under glass, much like a butterfly collection, each one labeled and pinned), and the procurement of Sterling and Gibson first editions . . . Troy’s worst case involved a Shakespeare folio, a thief who had once been a supermodel and who smelled like lavender and lace (the conversation a blur, casual, in a bar, at a time when she did not suspect his true calling), and a high-speed chase through the narrow, blind streets of Vienna, followed by the return of fifty half-singed pages rescued from the burning Mercedes. He could have saved more pages, but then he could not have saved Lavender & Lace, as he came to call his latest conversion. Back at home, waiting for her latest call about a case they’re both working on now, he picks up the telephone to the sound of yet another retailer inquiring about a vitamin supplement. Troy smiles. Life is good. Life is layered. For he is Troy, Rare Book Detective.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

ALAN SAUL

Alan Saul works for the Bio-Terrorism Unit of New York, West Nile Virus Unit. His teenage daughter is an aspiring actress. What she doesn’t know is that her father, in his secret life, has been an actor for many years. He is an actor without portfolio. His is, in fact, the most profound of all acting careers. Alan lives the lives of others. It is a meticulous and time-consuming “hobby,” for he must first observe a fire fighter, a banker, an electrician, a meter reader, a shoe salesman, for months, always taking notes. What they eat, how they walk, what they say, how they express themselves during extremes of emotion. It couldn’t be called stalking—he doesn’t follow them home because he doesn’t care what they do at home. He only cares about what they do on the job. He wishes only to replicate the artifice, the shell. Once he feels he has perfected his approach, he will carefully pick a time and place and perform the job function in a work setting, if at all possible. On rare occasions, he will wait until the person is on vacation and claim to be the temporary replacement, if it is the kind of job where he can safely do so. For ten years, Alan Saul has never been found out. But he is a little afraid of where it might all lead, for he is running out of professions. Each one becomes more and more obscure. Who knew, for example, that one could specialize in the feeding of orphaned hedgehogs? Or that you could be a scientist of disgusting smells? Or that animal husbandry could have so many sub-disciplines? Some days, now, he comes out of his acting role in mid-scene, convinced his secret life has become his life, convinced that he must find some secret life still more secret than the one he has chosen for himself.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

LIBRARIAN BOB SCHEFFEL

Bob Scheffel works as a librarian and DJ for an alternative music station. He discovered his secret life while shelving books in the generation fiction section. Returned B’s—Banks through Burke—held accordion-like between his hands, a ritual known in some quarters as “the librarian bench press”—he backed up against the stacks to let an old woman with a cell phone waddle by. The old woman was speaking in a hissing whisper about “the catsss and the lizardssss.” Something about the old woman unnerved Bob, and so as she drew close he didn’t say hello or cough or make any movement that might give away his presence. The old woman stopped in front of him, turned, looked right at him—or, rather, at the books in front of his chest—and pulled a James Lee Burke mystery from the “stack” before waddling back the way she had come, whispering “spiderssss and cormorantsss, eelsss and beetlesss” to the person on the other end of the conversation.

Bob stood there, transfixed by this moment of absurdity. She hadn’t seen him. She had mistaken him for a shelf.

Over the weeks that followed, Bob thought about the old woman and that moment. He thought about it while wearing a gray shirt and gray pants and standing still for twenty minutes against the gray metal sides of the shelves. He thought about it while wearing a black shirt and black pants and standing against a black billboard.

Finally, he succumbed to the idea implicit in his encounter with the old woman. As training for the fruition of the idea, he became an expert photographer. He became an expert at collage. He became good at sewing and using a sewing machine. Through close observation, he learned to distinguish between fifty-seven varieties of shadow, to know obsidian from black and black from ebony. The exact shade of a bus stop kiosk, and how it differed from the same color on the side of a police car. The red of a stop sign compared to the red of an ambulance compared to the red of a rose.

And the textures! He’d never truly understood the importance of touch, of how corduroy was like soft pine bark and jeans like rough tarmac, or how much marble could convey hard and smooth at the same time. How he could imitate colors, textures, anything that might make him invisible depending on the time, location, the state of the sky (overcast versus “pregnant” with rain, sunny versus shadowless).

He became attuned to the seasons in ways he’d never known before—more than just the swelter of leaves in the fall, or the sculpting of the heat around bodies in motion, or the way the cold lit up living things and reddened them.

More than anything, Bob came to understand the true spirit and identity of details, and to appreciate them.

As this informal education progressed, Bob’s friends and fellow employees noticed—or rather did not notice—his transformation.

“Bob’s more confident,” they said, mistaking negation for attitude.

“Bob’s more silent,” they said, mistaking solitude for thoughtfulness.

“Bob’s not around as much,” they said, mistaking integration with absence.

He surprised people with his sudden presence in a room. Some liked the change, others did not. Bob didn’t care. He was getting closer and closer to something—in clothes he’d made himself, labeled by season, weather condition, location, and made from cloth, from cut-up photographs, from the debris of the natural world.

Bob was getting close to a state that he thought might mean a strange kind of omniscience. Being there but not being there. Able to observe without impacting on that which was being observed. Why, he’d be able to read minds in a sense. He’d be able to understand the world, in a sense.

The breakthrough happened in a park. He stood to the side of a path, clear of the nearby trees, in the light of midday (partially cloudy), wearing a complex pattern of browns, greens, and grays that corresponded with perfect simplicity to the conditions, the textures, the life around him.

Just like the muttering old woman so many months before, the people walking past could not see him. He didn’t register with them. He had become incorporeal. He had given up his body. He felt weightless, invincible. His heart trembled in his chest. A profound and overwhelming joy overcame him as he looked, unremarked upon, at the faces of the people passing by. This was not voyeurism. This was not skulking about. This was about becoming so much a part of the world that he was the world. The world rose up through his feet, his legs, the warmth of it entering him through his fingertips. It made him so happy that he started to cry.

Through his tears, however, with the electric jolt of another kind of joy, his vision cleared and he noticed others like him standing silent in the park—invisible, omniscient, part of the world, lost in the sensation of no one seeing them in their magnificent camouflage.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

JENNIFER SEAUX

Jennifer Seaux is an orchid grower and a retired ad executive. For a long time, those in surveillance who read her private journal on a regular basis thought her secret life was hearing the voices of her orchids. According to these journal entries, the voices manifested as a burbling murmur, an aristocratic mumble, a slight drunken slur while she misted them. “I like the idea of the orchids having voices. I like the idea of hearing them,” she wrote. But, later, when the voices became distinct and clear, she realized they weren’t the voices of the plants at all: they were the voices of the employees she worked with, or the voices of actors who performed in radio and television advertisements. It made her wonder if she’d really retired after all. It made the tenor of her journal entries change, the frequency of her entries more intermittent. Soon, it became clear to those in surveillance that Seaux was writing a book. But what kind of book? A subversive book? A book that ought to be suppressed? Or something harmless? As day followed day, the cover of Seaux’s journal began to gather dust. Instead, she spent hours at the computer, typing madly. About the voices of flowers. About the voices of advertising executives. About people she imagined might be watching her. About something fresh and green struggling to reach the air through deep, fertile soil. Soon, those in surveillance lost their interest. Seaux was writing a novel. They had no interest in novels. In time, they dismantled the hidden camera and audio feeds. They stopped taking photographs of the outside of her home. They moved on to the next case. You could say that Seaux had written them out of her life . . . As for Seaux’s novel, you may wonder what happened to it. Without surveillance we cannot be sure of anything, but you may be reading part of it right now.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

JEFF GORDON

Jeff Gordon is a ceramic artist who enjoys gardening and telling people where to go when they ask if he realizes he shares a name with a famous NASCAR driver. “I am a gardener, not a motor vehicle enthusiast,” he tells them, “so this information elicits no emotional response from me whatsoever except for a weary scorn regarding your lack of originality.” Although, under the duress of tough questioning, perhaps after a drink or two, Gordon might admit that the gardening has gotten out of control. And perhaps the ceramics, too. “The thing is,” he might say, if given the chance to unload his secret burden, “people don’t realize the imperfect status of their gardens, their houses. They have no sense of the improvements that could be made.”

At first, Gordon helped jump-start these improvements in his own neighborhood. At three in the morning, dressed all in black and slathered in an insect repellent an incompetent friend told him was loathed by dogs, he began to sneak out of his home armed with a potted plant and/or some ceramic marvel—an owl, a small fountain, a replica of the Taj Mahal constructed meticulously from a mold fashioned over several months. Thus equipped, Gordon would plant his plants in the yards of lawn-retarded neighbors and add his ceramic gift to some part of the outside of their home.

However, the panic of sudden alarms, lights, and enthusiastic dogs in love with his repellent scent, and a pulse suddenly at a dangerous level, persuaded him to at least go farther afield. (“My neighbors would never appreciate it anyway,” he often mutters.)

So now he roams to more fertile fields, having bought a van to help convey the instruments of his secret life. Every Sunday morning, some sleep-droopy husband or wife pads out in ridiculous slippers to collect the newspaper, only to notice a new cascading trellis of bougainvillea—or, even more likely, a huge, man-sized ceramic owl, plunked down by the front door, to draw attention from the, to Gordon’s expert eye, ridiculous rattan rocking chairs that some “aesthetically challenged moron” had placed there previously.

Gordon, as may be obvious by now, is much more than a garden-variety ceramics and plant enthusiast. He may fairly be called “obsessed.”

THE SECRET LIFE OF

DAVE DRISCOLL

Dave Driscoll enjoys shooting guns. For many years he dreamed of meeting Philip K. Dick and Sam Peckinpah on the same night. Despite serving as a professor of humanities, he long understood the impossibility of this, both parties being dead. However, since the summer of 2005, he has spent no little time and effort on the most practical next best thing: building a time machine. He knew (and still knows) that in 1973 Dick and Peckinpah met in a Berkeley, California, bar for about half an hour. If he could only focus on that particular moment, he would be able to make his dream a reality.

Experimenting with several psychotropic and psychedelic drugs, varying the electrical currents passed through his extremities, carefully watching the documentary Le Jete more than one hundred times, and using stolen equipment from the labs of friends in harder sciences than the humanities, Driscoll finally managed to create precisely the right conditions in the right combination on October 29, 2006. Before strapping himself onto the time travel table, Driscoll—as he always did before a “PDKSP Attempt,” as he called them in his journal, to avoid discovery—strapped two holsters with handguns to his sides and held onto an old shotgun he’d picked up in a thrift shop. “You never can tell what you might meet,” he once wrote in his journal. “Old flames. Old enemies. Other people traveling into the past.”

Driscoll materialized in the bar at its farthest end—ahead of him, the bar itself, the stools, the bartender, the open door, a rectangle of light against the gloom, and framed by it: Philip K. Dick, sitting back on his stool, and Sam Peckinpah hunched over in deep monologue, both nursing whiskeys.

Peckinpah had his back to Driscoll, but Driscoll still recognized that distinctive back from the many old photographs he had examined late at night as part of his research.

Dick, meanwhile, was staring right at Driscoll, mouth wide, a look of horror on his face. Driscoll realized Dick had just seen him appear out of thin air.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Driscoll said, aiming his shotgun at the floor. “I’m not from the government. I’ve nothing to do with your wife or any ex-wives. I just—I’m just a big fan of you both.”

Dick was still making his amazed face, managing to say to Peckinpah, “He’s got a gun. He appeared out of nowhere. It’s just like I said. Just like I said.”

In slow motion—or so it seemed to Driscoll—Peckinpah turned, saw Driscoll, took in the weapons at his side, the shotgun pointed down, and drew his own gun, a Colt .45, and fired. Driscoll jumped to the side and the shot missed.

“No, no—don’t fire. I’m a friend!” Driscoll shouted as the bartender ran out the door, followed by as many customers as thought they could make it. Dick and Peckinpah stayed put.

“He’s a fucking demon or a devil or a wizard or something,” Dick ranted.

Peckinpah said nothing but fired again, right over Driscoll’s head, where he lay protected by an overturned table.

“Don’t shoot!” Driscoll cried out. “I’m from your future. I just wanted to meet you guys.”

“Shoot him, Sam,” Dick shouted. “He’s a government assassin—from the future!”

Peckinpah fired twice more, striking the wood of the table and sending up chips.

Driscoll returned fire for his own protection, but aimed high. The smell of gunpowder and smoke got in his nostrils. His heart was beating fast. This wasn’t what he’d wanted. Not at all.

Peckinpah, who had remained silent the whole time, fired a fifth time, an inch from Driscoll’s head.

Mercifully, the drugs began to fade and the electrical currents pulsating through Driscoll’s extremities turned off, and he slowly began to return to his own time. As he left, he saw one last time the horrified look on Philip K. Dick’s face. What a paranoid bastard, Driscoll thought.

When he came to on his time travel table, he realized he never wanted to see Peckinpah or Dick again.

THE SECRET LIVES OF

RICK AND PEGGY

Rick works as a commercial credit officer at a bank and has an obsession with H.P. Lovecraft. This might be why he refers to the bank’s managers as “The Old Ones” and believes that at night they creep into the vault and shed their human disguises, shuggothing and writhing about, bathing in the money that carries the secret Masonic Old Ones symbol on it. In his secret life, unknown even to his good friend Peggy, Rick is a 24-7 Lovecraft apologist. In a secret bungalow outside of the city, Rick keeps sophisticated tracking equipment so that he can monitor the media day and night. Whenever he comes across a negative reference to Lovecraft, he fires off a missive via snail or e-mail, using one of his many aliases. He considers this his holy duty. For example, when in the summer of 2004 the writer Jeff VanderMeer scoffed at the hideous effectiveness of the giant penguins in Lovecraft’s In the Mountains of Madness for a Locus Online article, Rick immediately sent a letter to the editor under the name “Gerald Rebarb” that stated in part, “Clearly VanderMeer has never set foot in the Mountains of Madness.” It is a little-known fact that ninety percent of all letters and emails to the editor concerning Lovecraft originate with Rick.

Meanwhile, his friend Peggy ostensibly works as a stylist, making drab products look beautiful for advertisements. In truth, her main job is protecting Rick from the Old Ones that work at the bank. As the great-great-great granddaughter of Dexter Ward, and privy to all of the secrets of the Mad Arab, Peggy has considerable experience in this area. Using as her latest cover the search for a new house, Peggy spends a lot of time saving Rick’s ass from various plots by the Old Ones. For it is Rick’s fate to be an unknowing nexus, or portal, into the Old Ones’ universe, which is the real reason he obsesses over Lovecraft. He cannot escape his fate yet has no inkling of it. He certainly doesn’t understand Peggy’s worries about his belly button. “Keep it clean of lint,” she repeatedly tells him. “Make sure your pants or shirt covers it at all times,” she says. “Who knows what might come out of it?!” Rick’s fairly sure nothing is coming out of it, but Peggy knows better. One day, an entire universe might devour our own.

Sometimes Peggy is even behind the bank building, battling the green tentacular strength of the Old Ones, while oblivious Rick works in the front, attending to clients. Naturally, this takes a lot of energy and physical prowess on Peggy’s part, so it’s only understandable that she might from time to time get irritated. When Rick asks how her house search is going, Peggy says between gritted teeth, “It’s going fine.”

It’d be going much better, she thinks, if the Old Ones didn’t gravitate toward you like bears to honey pots. It’d be going much better if you weren’t such a portal!

Still, she’s his friend for the long haul, and it could be worse. At least he’s not writing missives day and night in support of Lovecraft or something nuts like that, she thinks. Unlike the crackpots Rick’s always pointing out to her in the letters-to-the-editor columns of various respected periodicals.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

GAYLE DEVEREAUX

Gayle Devereaux lived most of her life in Washington state, but moved to Atlanta, Georgia, a few years ago. She likes to swim in Florida springs and has a son in college named Rob; sometimes, she thinks the two facts are related. Gayle renovated the old house she now lives in, and sometimes her family comes to visit her there. (As does Dan, her talented yet humble boyfriend.) Among her many talents are cooking and an appreciation of good beer. But these particular talents do not constitute her secret life. No, her secret life involves another talent entirely. She’s had this talent for many years, but only recently became reacquainted with it. As a child, she first discovered her secret proclivity, but it long ago became enmeshed in the wash and warp of early memories, as distant as her first encounter with a bumblebee, her first lick of ice cream, her first ferris wheel ride. (Alone, sitting cross-legged in the sun on warm grass, next to a large, long rock eaten through by lichen. The green smell of grass and distant flowers. The feel of the tickly ground. And then the sly scuttle onto the stone: a small brown lizard or gecko, head bobbing, throat pink and throbbing. A trickling giggle from Gayle at the sight, a subconscious thought—a wisp of a thought, lighter than cotton candy—and her secret talent manifested, the lizard become as skillful as any Catskills song-and-dance man.)

Recently, Gayle’s secret life manifested itself again. Sitting alone outside on her deck in the backyard, contented as she sipped a bottle of beer, a thin line of green—thin as a papercut—sped across the edge of her vision. Turning, she caught a glimpse of a tiny reptilian tail, a clever, narrow eye, claws light as sharpened pencil points gripping wood. And suddenly, Gayle remembered the first lizard, buried in her past, and what had happened on that long-ago afternoon.

As she remembered it, the lizard on the edge of her deck rose onto its hindlegs and began to sway, foot forward, foot back, foot to the left, foot to the right. And slowly, by the ones and the twos and then the dozens, a torrent of lizards scuttled up to her deck and began to dance and gyrate and even do a little soft shoe, while she watched with a sense of astonishment, but also fear, because she had no idea how she had conjured up this vision, or how to unconjure it. Bright eyes staring up at her. The almost-silent scrape and patter of lizard foot and lizard tail. The faint sounds of delight issuing from their throats. Was she drunk? Were they? And why just lizards? She had no answer to any of these questions. People rarely understand the whys of their secret lives. Sometimes your secret life is just thrust upon you, without explanation.

But later: in deep winter, in the bronzed dusk of a day when the snowflakes fell slowly and silently onto her deck while the lizards gathered around her despite the chill, Gayle felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, a surge of mingled joy and sadness in which every detail around her was magnified and more intense; it made her shudder and wrap her arms around her shoulders. And she no longer felt the need to know why.

THE SECRET LIVES OF

JOHN AND MAUREEN DAVEY

John and Maureen Davey lead productive, fast-paced lives as the founders and owners of the world infamous “Jayde Design: Building, Computing, & Publishing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design,” although recently their company split like rapidly mutating cells into “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, & Computing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design” and “Jayde Designs: Building, Management, & Surveying—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design.” To simplify matters, John sometimes makes up letterhead for himself that reads “John Davey: Builder by Trade, Surveyor by Profession, Writer by Hobby.”

“Sometimes,” Maureen has been known to say to John, “I think we have taken on too much. Sometimes I think there are small third-world countries that have less work to do than Jayde Design and Jayde Designs.”

Then John smiles his clandestine smile and the sudden light in his eyes and the light in her eyes display a perfect harmony of secrecy.

Neither he nor Maureen ever let on to their friends about the particulars of their secret life, however—a life they carve out for themselves in the minutes, the seconds, the moments, at which their over-active brains are not pulsing toward the solution to some multi-faceted consultancy, contracting, or design problem. (It is theorized by one of their friends, in fact, that the energy caused by the firing of neurons in John and Maureen’s heads has been harnessed by the aliens who live on a planet circling a dying star—a white dwarf—and that this energy alone has kept the star from imploding, and thus John and Maureen are not just responsible for a multi-faceted business, but also for keeping alive an entire alien race, although this is, of course, speculation, not a secret life at all, and at no point in the immediate future will John and Maureen change their moniker to “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, Computing, & Enabling the Survival of Alien Intelligent Life Across the Galaxy”.)

What is their secret life? When they can grab the time, they work together as Inventors of the Impractical—conceiving of inventions that would, perhaps, be universally admired in a parallel universe but which (they realize) may never be appreciated in this one. Together, they draw out the designs, they pencil in the descriptions on graph paper. They debate (over drinks) the pros and cons of each invention.

“Plastic,” he will say in a stray moment when Jayde Design(s) does not require their attention.

“Breathing tube,” she will say hours later, in another free second, with an almost lascivious smile.

“Furniture saver,” he will say, the next day, in the car, with a leer.

“Pets!” she will reply that evening, over dinner, giving him a long hug.

Shortly thereafter an invention is born that allows a pet owner to wrap his or her dog or cat in a plastic sheath complete with hole in the back and an air tube—providing for full freedom of movement, but negating any possible injury to furniture from fur, hairball, or claws.

“No more need to cover the furniture in plastic,” Maureen says, looking down at the finished design, breathless, happy.

“Cut off the problem at the source,” John says, hugging her.

“Totally impractical,” Maureen says. “Completely fool-hardy.”

“I love it!” John says.

The next day, they will let their idea out in to the world. Curl up the graph paper, stick it in a bottle of glimmery old green glass, stopper it, and send it on its way—by river by tossing into the open window of a car by sneaking it into someone’s briefcase by mailing it to Timbuktu by any of a thousand means.

John likes to think that whatever their delivery system, their idea will end up with someone or somewhere it can be of use.

Maureen just likes to think that someone somewhere will be amused.

Regardless, they are soon onto the next thing. A fashionable handle to clip onto the existing handle of an old suitcase! A suit with small globes of aquariums hanging from it! A pillow that doubles as a hibachi! Just so long as the idea works those few neurons not busy with their day job. Just so long as it is fun, secret, and, above all, theirs.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

BOWEN MARSHALL

Bowen Marshall is an aspiring librarian who believes his sister leads a more interesting life just because, at the age of seventeen, she moved to San Francisco to become an artist and circus performer. However, Bowen is mistaken in his assumption about his sibling. Being a circus performer requires a Herculean commitment of time to repetitive, boring practice, usually in close quarters in smelly, animal-feces-encrusted circus tents inhabited by lots of unsavory, tattered characters who might have looked Romantic and fun from a distance but are revolting up-close. Not to mention the “excitement” of being an artist. There is nothing particularly exciting about snobbish gallery owners, ignorant art buyers, and slowly starving to death from a lack of steady income.

Besides, Bowen’s secret life would make even an adrenaline junky Navy SEAL weak with envy. Every night, about an hour into sleep, Bowen begins to dream of a fantasy land. First, the smells come to him: rich sandalwood and the exact freshness of a breeze that runnels across a stretch of clear, clean pond water. Then, the sounds: the rustling of leaves in a sensual wind, the staccato stamp-stamp of some animal moving through the underbrush, a hint of a bird-call, an owl perhaps, flying through the dusk. A taste of lime, a hint of mint. And when he opens his eyes in dream, he is there, with the somehow comforting hulk of a mountain range in the distance, and the splay of moonlight across his hands. He is sitting by a pool of water, in rich, deep mud, and when he staggers to the water’s edge and looks into its depths, he sees not just the reflection of the moon but also his face, transformed.

Every night, it is a different face, of some creature from myth or nonsense rhymes. Each night, he delights in the power of the creature he has become, whether it be the powerful leg thrusts of the jackalope as it thunders across prairie beneath the mountains’ gaze or the thick muscular slide of a giant snake, belly ridges catching with itchy delight against an underbrush of dead, crinkly leaves. And with each incarnation, the concurrent amplification of his senses: eyesight that can pierce through the bark of trees to reveal the insects tunneling through its pulp; or hearing so acute that he can sense a droplet of water falling from the wing of a wasp in flight a hundred miles away; or taste that can bring him the brine of the far-off, long lost Old Sea, wrapped in the tang of seaweed and salt.

From each dream, he wakes refreshed but with no memory of his adventures, while in the land he has left for the day, some creature dreams the details of his daily life with a similar amnesiac’s satisfaction.

You could join a thousand circuses for a thousand years and never experience what Bowen experiences in his sleep, and which the cells, the blood, the flesh of his body still retain even if his conscious mind does not.

Someday, Bowen will wake up during his dream, and his life will be more riotous with color and light than he could possibly imagine . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF

RICH DEMARS

Rich Demars runs a gas-driven power plant that uses landfill methane. Once a nuclear operator on a submarine near Corpus Christie, he is a man with a full appreciation for the uses of energy, and the application of those uses. There are stories he could tell about his life on the submarine, but he chooses to keep them to himself. No one would believe him anyway. But his submarine secrets are not the only ones he keeps from his friends and family. The other set of secrets would not be believed either . . . “except when their utter and devastating truthfulness shall be revealed in the fullness of time” as he sometimes mutters during the slow times at the power plant. “Then they’ll understand. They’ll all understand.”

For, in his off hours, Demars works for a worldwide secret society dedicated to returning the Earth to the rule of an obscure sect of Mesopotamian magicians and priests. These priests and magicians have kept their bloodlines pure down through the trials of thousands of years, and kept their plans intact as well. It may be the most secret of all secret organizations in the history of the world.

Using the library in his home town—specifically, that marvelous invention the inter-library loan—Demars has been instrumental in helping the society realize its goals. For it was Demars who discovered the location of the legendary Euphrates Tablet, with all that connotates. It was Demars who figured out the best cell phone plan and got the entire sect to adopt it. And it was Demars who came up with the idea of a monthly newsletter, which he now edits. (The newsletter has no bylines and no masthead; it has no name and it has no mailing address; it also has no English letters, as it is written all in cuneiform—thus ensuring that infidels and other undesirables cannot read it, although also ensuring that each newsletter is hundreds of pages long, for not only is cuneiform somewhat cumbersome in execution, but many members of the sect are ancient and insist on the use of large letters for their aged eyes.)

As Demars looks out over the landfill, when he realizes what he has hidden under all of that waste, and what it will one day do . . . a glimmer of a gleam comes into his eyes. He has a well-defined sense of imagination. He can already see the transformation. For, when the sect’s work is complete, a vortex in time will open and the Mesopotamian past will seep into the American present, devouring it whole. The mighty Euphrates, twined to its twin, will barrel through and flood the land. What will happen to Demars then, he neither knows nor cares. Let the elders of that ancient river valley decide his fate, along with all the rest. It is entirely possible he will remain on as the editor of the newsletter, at the very least.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

TERRY TIDWELL

Terry Tidwell is a builder, a bookworm, and a beer drinker. Of late, however, he has become obsessed with 18th-century automata.

One night, out with friends, he bumped into a homeless man. A miasma of sweat, funk, and mustiness blew over Tidwell as he held the man in his arms, in one of those unplanned moments that permeate every life, one that to an observer might even look like a reunion of old friends.

The man’s face, hidden by salt-and-pepper whiskers, imploded in an unmistakable grimace as he flailed to get free and as Tidwell held on long enough to make sure the man would not gain his freedom by falling.

Released, the man stumbled to the curb as cars passed behind him, and glared at Tidwell.

“Watch yourself,” he growled.

As he took a step back, Tidwell noticed something peculiar about the man’s left eye. It was completely black, without a hint of white, and when the man blinked, Tidwell swore he could see ridges in his eyelid, as if the object lodged in the orbit was not an eye at all, but something entirely more mechanical.

“Sorry,” Tidwell said, taking another step back, his friends waiting for him up ahead.

He turned to go, a shiver of fear making him hurry, but the man came up behind him and caught him by the arm. His grip was as strong and implacable as that of a robot arm.

“Vaucanson had a duck you know,” the man hissed in Tidwell’s ear. “He had a duck, and it broke. But it wasn’t my fault. You’d think they’d know that by now. Vaucanson. Vaucanson has a lot to answer for.”

The man released Tidwell.

Tidwell whirled around, stared at the man, opened his mouth to speak, but found he had nothing to say. He simply wanted to get away from the man as quickly as possible.

One of his friends had walked back to help Tidwell and now said, “Do you want me to call the police?”

Tidwell stared at the man with the impossible eye and the man with the impossible eye stared back.

“No,” Tidwell said, “but let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Vaucanson’s duck. Find it,” the man said, “and you’ll find a whole lot more. My time is done. I’ve nothing left to find it with.” A look of unexpected sympathy on the man’s face. “Good luck,” he said softly—and then as Tidwell and his friend looked on with bewilderment, the man ran down the sidewalk with almost preternatural speed and into the night.

Much later, when he got home, he could still feel the man’s grip on his arm. That grip had left two uniform welts that took a fortnight to heal.

As might be expected, Tidwell could not forget his encounter with the homeless man. He played it over and over in his mind. For one thing, the more he thought about the man, the more the man seemed familiar to him, as if he had once known him, but no matter how long or hard he tried to penetrate the fog surrounding that particular mystery, it remained a mystery for quite some time.

So, instead, in his free time, Tidwell decided to find out about the duck and about Vawkansun, if either had ever truly existed. He would have liked to have forgotten about both the duck and Vawkansun, but since he dreamed every night of a magical duck and a shadowy man with a V monogrammed on his shirt, this was impossible.

“You going out with us tonight?” one of his friends would ask and Tidwell would reply, “I’m not feeling too good tonight. I think I’ll just stay in.” And then he would go down to the local library to research “Vawkansun.”

It didn’t take long to realize that such a duck and such a man, Vaucanson, had existed—in France in the 18th-century. In a moldy old book of facts, water-damaged and coffee-stained, he found the following entry:

One of the most famous automata was built by a French engineer named Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s. His ingenious mechanical duck moved like a duck, ate like a duck, and digested fish like a duck. The duck had a weight inside connected to over a thousand moving parts. Vaucanson, by trial and error, made these parts move together to make the duck move and give it the illusion of life. It even had a rubber tube for its digestive track. The duck and other automata made Vaucanson famous, and he traveled for many years exhibiting his duck and other machines around Europe. Although he collected honors for his work, he also collected scorn from those who believed he had employed infernal means to create his duck. After a time, he fell out of favor and took a position managing silk-mills in the countryside. Most of his creations were destroyed in a fire a year after Vaucanson died, but the miraculous duck was spotted in 1805 by the famed poet Goethe in the collection of an Austrian antiques enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian died and the collection auctioned off to pay his debts. The duck has not been seen since. Even in 1805, Goethe had reported that the duck looked mangy and had “digestive problems.” Strange sounds came from inside the automata, and it is likely it ceased to function shortly after 1806, when it was sold to an anonymous buyer. Vaucanson’s relatives have often claimed that the duck was Vaucanson’s most prized possession and that he believed it held the key to solving several scientific mysteries.

It would be wearisome to relate how Tidwell came to acquire the duck—the money he had to save, the journeys he had to make to various European countries, the bribes given to this curator to look up records from centuries past and that old grandmother who claimed to remember seeing it in her youth, or even to convey the sheer ferocity of desire it took for Tidwell to continue on his course. Suffice it to say that in due course, he did acquire the duck, even though he committed more than one crime to do so. All seemed forgivable if only the duck came into his possession.

One rainy spring day, Tidwell came back from his final journey, holding a box. He wearily opened the door to his home, threw the box on the couch, and went to fix himself a drink. It had taken over five years to find the duck, and several times he was certain he would fail in his quest, dead end leading to dead end. But, finally, a wizened old man in a beret, sitting in a cafe in the wine country outside of Marseilles, had given him the lead that had led to the clue that had resulted in a box containing Vaucanson’s duck.

Tidwell wondered idly if his family and friends would ever forgive him for his obsession. Probably not, but the damage was already done. He could not undo it. Nor, he thought as he drank down his whisky, did he think he would have wanted to. He was not the same person he had been before. He had picked up a dozen new skills in his journeys, discovered in dangerous situations that he responded firmly and well. The world had, no matter what came next, opened up for him in a different way than it had opened up for him in his previous life.

Thus far he had glimpsed the duck only briefly—winced at its crumbled condition, one wing inoperable, the beak chipped, one foot half sawed-through, the feathers that had once coated its metal surface weathered or gone, so that Vaucanson’s duck looked as though it were half-plucked. A smell had risen from it, too. The smell of rotting oil, of metal parts corroding.

Could it ever be restored? Tidwell didn’t know. But he lovingly took it from its box and set it out on the kitchen table. At some point, one of the duck’s many owners had tried to restore the duck to its former glory, with mixed results. Now one eye appeared to consist of faux emeralds, while the neck had a pattern engraved on it more common to paper doilies. The one intact leg had a similar design inflicted upon it. The duck should have been self-winding, but even the emergency wind-up mechanism, twisted and torn, couldn’t get the duck to work. Vaucanson’s creation had survived the centuries, but only as a corpse.

Something wistful welled up in Tidwell as he sat at the table with his whisky and the mechanical bird. Something sorrowful.

He remembered the words of the man who had started him on this path to either ruin or Enlightenment. He wondered now why he had taken them so to heart, why it had seemed at the time like a directive or a plea he could not ignore.

Well, it was too late now for regrets. He sighed and went to get a screwdriver and some other tools. Almost from the start, he had decided to perform an autopsy on the duck should he ever get his hands on it. Between the homeless man’s comments and the remarks of the people he had encountered on his quest—including the descendents of Vaucanson—it had increasingly struck him that there might be something inside the duck even more important than its worth as an automaton.

It took some effort to pry the matching halves apart and he was breathing heavily by the time he had finished. A flicker of deep excitement energized him, though, and it was with triumph rather than exhaustion that he finally peered into the mysteries of the duck’s innards.

At first, he saw nothing of interest. Just gears and levers and rusted chains, the remains of a rubber tube that had served as the duck’s intestinal tract. But when he looked closer, he found, nestled deep in the bird, a compartment in which sat a round, grooved black globe the size of a human eye, and a corresponding empty space beside it.

All the tension draining out of Tidwell, he sat back in his chair, arms behind his head, and began to laugh. This, this is what the homeless man had led him to. His journey had just begun. Caught. Afraid. Curious.

After awhile, he began to weep, and then to reach out with a trembling hand for the black globe buried in the guts of Vaucanson’s duck, and then to pull back, as if from a flame. Reach out, pull back, reach out.

For all I know, Tidwell is sitting there still.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

RAJAN KHANNA

Rajan Khanna currently works as a data manager for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, in the New York-New Jersey area. Rajan writes short stories and novels in his spare time. His wife, Libbette Mahady, is from Queensland, Australia.

Rajan is not religious, although, if pressed, he would say that his inclination runs more toward Eastern schools of thought, like Taoism or Zen Buddhism. Perhaps this inclination provides some evidence of a proclivity for seeing what is truly there.

The first time Rajan came across a secret path, in Livingston, New Jersey, he was only eight, and did not recognize the significance of the event. He had drifted past the swings, jungle gym, slide, and sandbox, off toward the wooded area where he and his friends often incorporated a large concrete tube into their imaginary explorations of strange lands.

On this particular day, Rajan was by himself, reluctant to return from a recess just ending, but reconciled to it. When he heard the teacher call to him and other stragglers, he started to walk back toward the school. Half-way there, he stumbled, moved a little to his right on his knees, arms out for balance, and then looked left because of unexpected light. He saw, in a moment that didn’t seem real, a slice of sun through the otherwise overcast sky, a hint of a breeze where none had existed, and, stretching out before him, a path of dried golden-brown leaves. The path wound its way up the lee of a slice of hill that had not been there before, and out of sight, always touched by the sliver of sunlight that seemed from some other place.

Rajan inhaled with an audible gasp, mouth open, heart beating faster, and grasped the thick grass of the hill with both hands, as if to anchor himself.

He blinked once.

The path was still there. It seemed both tranquil and dangerous. The leaves upon its surface spun and whirled, but never blew away. The light upon the leaves had an unreal, hypnotic quality.

He wrenched his gaze from the sight. He blinked again.

The path, the light, the leaves, had disappeared in that instant of blindness. There was a ringing in Rajan’s head. No, not in his head. The teacher calling to him once again, in a shrill voice.

Reluctantly, Rajan released the grass and ran up the hill through the cut grass smell, back into the safety of the school. The mangled stalks of grass in the fists of his hands felt much more real than what he had just seen.

Soon, the memory of that glimpse into . . . into what? he did not know . . . receded into the morass of other childhood memories. It became more and more unreal, until it became a daydream, a vision, utter fantasy.

But Rajan did not entirely forget, either. It was hard to forget an event like that, even if dismissed as mere epiphany. It became a kind of submerged memory. It came back to Rajan in moments of triumph, of ecstasy: the column of remembered sunlight like a manifestation of his personal happiness. And yet, a disturbing memory, so that in photographs of Rajan happy, experiencing happiness, there is a hint of a puzzled expression on his face, a hint of looking through the camera into some dilemma, some mystery.

And that might have been the extent of the secret life of Rajan Khanna: a curious expression in family photographs, a sense in those who met him that at times he wrestled with some unanswerable question. It might have ended there, and simply lent him that attractive otherworldliness his wife secretly adored in him. But, for whatever reason, Rajan Khanna proved to have a talent for finding paths and roads, streets and bridges, overpasses and tunnels, that either no longer existed or had never been there.

The second time it happened—or, at least, the next time it happened and he could not ignore it or explain it away—Rajan was sixteen and walking with his friends in Manhattan, down a street clogged with pedestrian traffic. In the middle of a block, a sudden compulsion came over him, accompanied by an odd yet pleasant scent, as of fresh lime, to stop, step out of the bustle of people, and look to his left, at the solid brick wall of a bank . . . only, it wasn’t solid brick. Now, in the middle of a building he had passed dozens of time, a mews, or narrow alley, cut right through the wall and traveled off into the distance, buttressed by the dark suspicion of alcoves at irregular intervals to either side. There was a wavery quality to the edges of the brick where it met the open air of the sudden corridor. A suggestion of mirage, as when heat rises beneath from a manhole cover.

Rajan frowned, tried to control the sudden acceleration of his breath, his heartbeat. That couldn’t be right. It just . . . couldn’t. The mews went right through the building, cut offices in half, created a sliver of blue sky in the middle of windows, and he could see people walking from one side of an office to another, disappearing as they passed through the area now occupied by the sky above the mews, and reappearing unharmed on the other side.

“Rajan—c’mon. What’re you looking at?” one of his friends asked.

“Just a second,” Rajan said, still staring.

Rajan realized then that sometimes he existed in two worlds at once. He stood there and stared down the alley into that expanse of impossible blue sky and knew that if he chose to, he could walk through the building, that there would be no brick to stop him.

But on that particular day, at the age of sixteen, Rajan chose not to follow the path, in part because he was with his friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t curious. He was. But on that day, too, Rajan began to realize that he didn’t yet understand this “gift,” and that while it might seem wondrous, it could also be dangerous.

For, he could hear, above the sounds of the people moving around him, a low growling whimper. It came from somewhere far, far down the alleyway. It didn’t sound human. It didn’t sound friendly. For some reason, until he heard that sound, and a wave of the lime smell washed over him again, Rajan had not realized that the paths he saw might be populated . . .

No, although he began to sense more and more of them—felt, at times, as if the world were riddled with them like wormholes—it wasn’t until college that Rajan first placed his feet upon a “ghost path” as he began to call them (because no one else could see them because there was something mournful about even the brightest of them because it was better to think of them as ghosts of paths than as portals).

In his second year at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsyvania, on a cold winter’s night at the end of a drunken party to celebrate a friend’s birthday, Rajan was sitting on a couch, wide awake, with other students sleeping or dazed all around him, when a path appeared to him in the white wall directly in front of him. It was a canopy road: oak trees with deep green leaves hanging over red clay. It was like a cocoon in greens, reds, and the solid brown-gray of the oak tree trunks. A wind came roiling up across the road, bringing a haze of red dust up into the room; Rajan could taste it. He could smell the red clay, thick and oddly comforting. He could hear the rhythmic retort of a woodpecker. He could feel the thick, wrinkled roughness of the oak bark . . . and then he realized he was on the path, that he had gotten up off the couch and was standing on the path, and when he looked back he could kind of see the apartment and the couch and his sleeping friends, but they were the mirage now, and the path was the reality, and somehow he wasn’t frightened, not frightened at all, and drunk but alert, he started to walk down the path.

For a long time, he walked alone on that path, content to let the mottled sunlight through the tree branches massage his shoulders with warmth and the cooling wind push gently against his clothes. Off to the sides lay deep, sprawling forests of oak and fir trees. Sometimes, he could hear the distant complaint of a blue jay, or the very personal bustling sound of a squirrel in the underbrush, searching for acorns. Sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the apartment he’d left behind—an exit, a slice of his world, reassuring him that, when he wanted to, he could return home.

After minutes or hours or seconds of walking—his watch had stopped as soon as he had set foot on the path—Rajan noticed a two-humped dark shape crouched to the side of the road about a hundred feet ahead. At first, he could not tell if it was human or animal, and then, when he had come within fifty feet, he realized it was both an animal and a human: an old woman holding a leash attached to the collar of some sort of boar or wild pig. They sat by the side of the road in silence.

For a moment a prickle of unease slowed Rajan. He stood there, looked back the way he had come, and wondered if he should try to return to the apartment. Again, the thought of populated paths filled him with a numbing dread.

But when he turned back, the woman and the boar had stood up and were staring at him. The woman was smiling; her eyes were white with just a hint of pupil. The boar was huge—bigger than the woman. It had the coarse black bristle-pad hair common in its breed, as well as sharp, yellowing upturned tusks. A faint musky smell wafted up from the boar. In its barrel-chested, broad-backed swagger, it reminded Rajan of the actor Oliver Reed.

Rajan smiled back, his natural politeness kicking in. He walked toward them. After all, it was just an old woman with her pet pig. On a road that had appeared out of an apartment wall.

“Hello,” Rajan said as he approached, addressing the woman. “You are the first person I have seen since I started walking this road.”

The woman smiled and burbled something.

Pulling on the leash with one foot so the woman had to hunch over, the boar said, “She doesn’t talk. She doesn’t talk. She’s just how I get onto this path.”

Gooseflesh broke in a wave over Rajan. He tried to control a sudden visible shaking. The voice of the boar was the same pitch and timbre of the thing that had whimpered in the alley when he was sixteen.

“I’m sorry,” Rajan murmured. “I meant no offense.” It had all started to become distinctly too real.

The boar grunted, ignored his apology, and asked, “Are you here because of them? Are you one of the others?”

“I don’t think so,” Rajan said. “I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”

The boar huffed and snorted. “You must be new. New scent. New human.”

“Where am I? What path is this?” Rajan asked. He did not want to answer the question implied by the boar’s statements.

“If you don’t know,” the boar said, staring up at Rajan with its black marble eyes, “then my telling you won’t help. It wouldn’t mean anything, would it? Until you’ve experienced it.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Rajan said. The boar was huge. Just the size of it scared him. Besides, he was still drunk.

The boar sat back on its haunches. The old woman sat down beside it, smiling inanely. Around them: the swirling wind, the red dust, the slightest echo of a catbird’s call.

“It’s fine, you know,” the boar said in a kindly, almost grandfatherly fashion, “not to know. We’re all travelers here. I hope your journey is a good one.”

Rajan stood there in silence for a moment. The woman stared up at him, and he could have sworn the white of her eyes had changed and now a miniature of the canopy road swirled there.

Then he realized he had been dismissed. The boar had dismissed him. Their conversation was over. Somehow, through his relief, he felt disappointment.

“Well, then,” Rajan said, “It was nice to meet you.”

When he was long past the boar, the boar shouted out, “Be careful! You never know who you might meet on these paths!” And laughed—a deep, rough roar of a laugh.

Rajan did not look back. He met no one else on the canopy road, and, after a time, catching yet another glimpse of the apartment, off to his left, he plunged toward it, and in no time at all, he was standing at the front door, in the snow, shivering because, of course, his jacket was inside the apartment, where he’d left it.

Now the paths came fast and furious. Somehow the encounter with the talking boar had emboldened him, as had his ability to get back so easily. He went from path to path, exploring, experimenting, figuring out how to get from here to there, and back again. What, after all, were one’s college years for, if not experimenting? So he traveled over paths covered with pine needles and broken through by roots like veins. Paths of fine sand that smelled of brine. Paths of mud, deep and treacherous. Paths of pebbles, curling down the sides of cliffs. Paths of sawdust and paths of cedar chips. Paths of asphalt and of concrete. Paths of wood. Paths that lay below ground. Paths that lay above ground in the form of bridges and causeways. Paths weaving upwards through the branches of trees. Paths over which a light rain of spores poured down. Paths in darkness and in light. Paths of granite and of shale. Paths of marble. Paths that were like nothing he’d ever seen on TV or in photographs, that could not be of the Earth he knew, so that he stood

. . . in a field of wheat, through which the ghost path ran over flattened stalks, while at the horizon huge twinned minotaurs battled in front of a blood-red sun, the stink of their sweat infiltrating the wheat, the musk of bull, tornadoes swirling up in the wake of their passage . . .

. . . on a gravel path near a brook that panted and burbled and trickled down into a pond full of carp, while a woman who looked like his mother played a violin . . .

. . . on a dirt trail outside of a vast city beside a river, looking up at two green towers rising from the water, between which the sky looked different and strange birds flew . . .

. . . in the middle of a desert, the path the faintest indentation of sand, ahead of him ruins overrun by weeds and decay, while beside him little metal-and-flesh scorpions clattered and clacked and leathery lizards pumped up their red throats . . .

. . . on a cobblestone street, watching an old man sweep a courtyard clean under the glare from a purpling sun, while down the way a woman put clothes on a clothes line and dogs yapped at her feet . . .

. . . at the center of a labyrinth of mine shafts, staring down at an abyss, hearing the plop of pebble he’d sent tumbling down, but only after several minutes . . .

. . . and in all ways he familiarized himself with this gift for finding what lay side by side and simultaneous with the reality of his every-day life, until it was no longer a matter of searching for a path, but of seeming to create it.

For awhile, then, it could be said that Rajan Khanna took his secret talent for granted. He used it frivolously—as a shortcut to arrive early to work, or to make sure he wasn’t late for a date with his wife. It did not occur to him that this was frivolous because he had become so used to finding secret paths through the world. For a time, that mysterious otherworldliness he carried about him like a cloak became merely the jetlag of the weary world traveler, except that the world he traveled was like no other in his experience. Sights he came upon—the very ground erupting into hilly golems; a turtle the size of a large island, dotted with trees; a huge metal sculpture in the shape of an Egyptian pharoah in the middle of an infinite desert—no longer moved him to awe or tears. Instead, it was almost as if these images wore on him, burdened him, lessened him. When he saw the face of a tiger carved into the side of a mountain, eroded and smoothed down by the years, it seemed to him that this was his face.

Once, he had known a salesman who had described a life of months on end living out of hotel rooms and walking through airports, until the delightful frisson and discovery of travel had become the daily plodding toward an end point that whispered only of room service, nights spent in his underwear, alone, on a bed with a view of a parking lot and luminous skyline, watching television. “It could’ve been Rio,” the salesman whispered to Rajan as he left. “It could’ve been Monte Carlo, and it would have been the same as some small town in Alabama with nothing to do.”

And so, after awhile, Rajan stopped using the paths that often. If they were so common, why bother? He could, most days, get where he was going without recourse to them. Why, although it was rare that he saw someone on the ghost paths, he had once been passed by a jogger of all things—someone jogging on a secret path. Using what had once seemed mysterious and sacred as an exercise route! Stuck in the backwash of sweat and a mumbled greeting from the man, who had his headphones on, Rajan had stopped walking and left that particular path at once.

When he finally told his wife Libbette about the ghost paths, she thought he was talking figuratively, kissed him on the cheek, listened intently, and then shared her own views on religion and spirituality. He did not mind this overmuch. It was better that than that she think him crazy.

Then, one winter evening, everything changed again. Imagine: Rajan, walking through lower Manhattan, on his way to meet his wife. (Although, later, thinking back, he couldn’t be sure he was in his Manhattan at the time, and not some shadowy other Manhattan, that he hadn’t accidentally walked onto a ghost path.)

It’s just after dusk and there’s still a glow in the sky to remember the day by. There’s the glow of streetlights to presage the full night. And the constant steady stream of headlights, the cars and cabs now rushing by, now stopped and holding, waiting, waited upon.

The cold has Rajan hidden under shirt, sweater, and overcoat, along with a hat and gloves. A sprinkling of snow lies across the ground, looking as if scattered there by the beating of great wings. Breath comes out painfully, seems to cramp the side, make sore the ribs. Yet it’s an exultation to Rajan, a kind of holiness—the chill, and the winter night, with him hurrying to meet his wife at a restaurant they love. He is completely self-absorbed. He is without self. And he has no need for secret paths—the real ones will do fine.

But then he is brought up short by a sound like the end of the world played out in the rip and screech of metal against metal. Then there’s the odd and lonely sound of metal in the air, turning over and over, and the awkward thud and crash of a car overturned, crumpled between two other cars, half on and half off the sidewalk at Rajan’s back, the impact, the momentum, a kind of drawing in of the world’s breath, so that he cannot move, can feel his heart beating and feel the blood pumping through him, and is sure that the next sound will be of metal wiping him from the sidewalk as surely as he had never existed . . . only for a few seconds of silence to be followed by beeping car horns and the unmistakable shift from accident to aftermath. There’s the smell of oil and the smell of burning, although, as he turns to face the scene, nothing seems to be on fire. The car is overturned, and its driver is groping to open the driver’s side door, and someone is helping him, and behind several other cars and SUVs have clearly collided with one another in the confusion, so that there’s an infernal traffic jam. Some people rush up to the driver, others to the cars, while others stand still, staring. A woman in a pink jacket and stretch pants is wailing to someone else over her cell phone.

That’s when Rajan notices the boy off to the side, thrown clear, probably a pedestrian, and the way he sits under a newly planted tree, as if broken in on himself, a blotch of blood spreading across his side, and at first all Rajan can focus on is the spray of blood across the scattered snow, and the way the red, under the lights, doesn’t deepen but diffuses as it widens, until it’s pink and crystallized in the cold, and then just a shade deeper than the white.

The boy is gasping—drawing in breaths in great gulps and swallowing severely, and looking off into a place that doesn’t exist.

Rajan walks up to the boy. He can see a hint of blood near the boy’s mouth, the way the teeth grind, lower against upper. There’s a tiny man crouched near the boy, dressed all in black, and Rajan actually shouts—a nonsense word, a nothingness—when he sees the man, because he was invisible until Rajan was so close that he could have touched him. The man’s face is dark. The boy’s face is impossibly pale, untouched even by the blossom around the cheek usually brought out by the cold. A sour smell comes from either the boy or the man, Rajan can’t tell which; he ‘s still trying to absorb what he’s seeing.

The man turns from his crouch, sees Rajan, and says, “He needs help. He needs it now. I’m a doctor. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help immediately.”

Rajan straightens up, looks down the street, first one way and then the other. The traffic jam is total now, due to the accident, and it’s going to take an ambulance some time to get to them.

“He’s going to die,” says the little man who claims to be a doctor.

Rajan doesn’t doubt it. The boy is becoming paler by the instant, if that is possible. The boy’s hands are clenched tight, one around the little man’s fist.

“What’s he doing here all alone?” Rajan says in a hushed whisper, as if it matters whether the boy hears him or not.

“I think he’s from one of the cars,” the man says. “I think he was thrown clear. And they’re all gone. They’re all gone. We need to get the boy to a doctor.”

It’s an impulse, but it’s all Rajan has to help with. He leans down, into the boy, can smell the sweet of his breath against his cheek, faint and sugary, and gently scoops his arms under the boy, bends his knees, and lifts up—and the boy is so light he comes away from the ground like a leaf, like something already departed into the darkness. This lightness, this ethereal lack of weight, surprises Rajan, and he almost falls over backwards.

But he rights himself, and with one last look at the doctor, he turns to his right, and walks through the wall of a convenience store, onto a ghost path.

Until he did it, he had no idea that it would work—never even thought about the possibility that he would make it onto the ghost path but leave the boy behind, that through some quirk of how his gift worked, that he might kill the boy by bringing him onto the path.

But it does work, and they are both on the path, and suddenly the boy is heavier than he was an instant ago, and blood is steadily collecting on Rajan’s shirt.

The path: It’s summer here, and the path is yellowing grass, cut short, running through a field of wildflowers, flanked on one side by the crease of a barely discernable stream, the sound of running water a salve to Rajan in that moment, and on the left a copse of oak trees. There’s the smell of the flowers and the constant sleepy sound of the bees collecting pollen, and a red-shouldered hawk wheeling through the sky overhead, searching for mice and rabbits. Rajan’s encumbered, stumbling, already sweating.

Quickly, he lowers the boy, who looks up at him with a unwavering but almost unseeing stare, sheds his coat, his hat, his gloves, his sweater, and then gathers the boy up again, holds him close, whispers in his ear, “I’ll have you to a hospital right away. In an instant. As if no time had passed at all.”

At least, he hopes, for as he half-walks, half-runs across that field of flowers, in the soft summer light, he realizes it might not work, he might not find the path. It’s been a long time since he had to find a path, a long time since he had to focus, a long time since he even took in all the details that make one path unique from another.

So he run-walks along, searching for that hint of a different light, a sliver of another seeming, at the corners of his vision, that would bring him to another place.

After five minutes, Rajan’s nearly frantic. After ten minutes, he’s in despair. He can’t see it. He can’t find it. And even though he knows time works differently on the ghost paths, he begins to think that if he’d just left the boy where he found him, he might be in a hospital by now.

The field gives way to forest, and the path is pine needles and the wind is fresh and clean, but it’s no comfort to Rajan, because he can hear the sough of the boy’s breathing, and can feel how the boy’s body relaxes and stiffens, as if preparing for some transformation. And his own strength is giving way to fatigue, his arms heavy, his legs churning, the sweat enveloping him.

It’s the boy who saves them—saves his own life and saves Rajan, because Rajan is in danger of becoming lost; the thoughts going through his head are unthinkable, but still there. That the boy might fade away, on the ghost path. That he might have brought the boy to his death through the simply human hubris of thinking he had a way, that he could be a hero, that he had control over something he still didn’t totally understand.

But it’s the boy who save them both, who raises his hand long enough to point, as if to say, “I see it,” as if he knew all along what Rajan was looking for, was willing them toward, and Rajan turns and he sees it—the tear in the world along the left side of the path, and through it the neon of emergency room lights, and without hesitation, without even breaking stride, he changed direction and lunged for it—for this change of attention, this way to another path—and with the sudden and inexplicable taste of lime in his mouth, and a slowly growing joy and relief, he was crying as they passed through and he brought the boy to safety.

Afterwards, everything was different for Rajan, although he didn’t know why. Suddenly, exploring seemed important again. It took up much of his time, and for many long years he walked the paths cataloguing their every detail. What made one seem cheerful and another somber. What made one seem still and another busy, although no one walked upon either. There was no detail so small that he could not take interest and joy in it, from the latticework of veins running across the back of a leaf to the absurd drunken scuttling of a stink bug up and down a stalk of sedgeweed. The feel of crumbling brick from the wall of a ruin that might once have been a watch tower. The smell of cedar and of larch. The sound of . . . well, every sound captivated him, and in each sound some part of him listened, flinching, for that same odd and lonely sound of metal flying through air.

And, over time it seemed only natural to show Libette the paths, to explain that he had not been talking in metaphor, about something that could be or should be, but something that was . . . and to his delight, she accepted both it and him, after her initial shock, as if nothing had changed. Because, in a way, nothing had.

Once, during his explorations, Rajan came upon the canopy path again. He was gray in the temples by then. He walked with a cane. He was not with his wife, for his wife did not always come with him.

The trees encircled and cocooned him, and for some reason it made him think of the boy whose life he had saved, and he was in a sweet, good mood for many miles.

After a time, he saw ahead a shape by the side of the road that became two shapes. As he came closer, he saw that one was a great boar, ancient beyond measure, his eyes, with each blink, reflecting a sliver of a different ghost path. The other was an old woman, her hair like gray bristle pad, sparse and coarse and close against her scalp, her eyes blue and watery.

“Hello,” he said to the boar.

The boar stared at him curiously with its strange eyes.

“There is no point speaking to him,” the old woman whispered to him in a throaty murmur. “He can’t speak. He hasn’t for many years.”

“Oh? Have you been waiting here long?” Rajan asked.

The old woman smiled. “We’ve been on a great journey.”

“I know,” Rajan said, and they both laughed, although the laugh was tinged with a bittersweet quality familiar to the aged, and then Rajan walked past them both, down the ghost path, down the corridor of trees, the clay firm yet soft beneath his feet.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

CONSTANTINE MARKOPOULOS

It comes lumbering out of the ocean onto the North Carolina shore: at dusk: like a boulder-sized behemoth, water spraying out from its massive, deep-green shoulders. Across its chest lies a trail of encrusted barnacles, closed tight. What form it has for legs is cowled by seaweed, in the strands of which the pale shapes of caught fish, caught shells, glisten. The eyes lie so deep within the unknowable kern and curl of its face that they flicker and flare only when the creature blinks, the movement catching on the hint of moon above. A myriad of smells rise from the thing as it approaches the beach, some of the sea and some not of the sea. Brine and riddled, rotted wood, passionflower and sage; a glimpse of mint. The thick musk of dead fish is a distant aftertaste. There is in the curled, coiling scents such a sadness of forgotten memory as to be unbearable.

At first, the creature struggles under the weight of displaced water; it must raise its shoulders, push out its chest, pull each leg from the sand with a muscle-damaging effort. But, closer to the shore, the kelp and other debris drains flat against its barrellous body. The water trickles away to nothing. Suddenly, a sinnuous quality displays itself; a litheness at odds with the thick directness of its form . . .

There’s always rain on those nights when the creature crunches a path up the beach toward the high tide mark. A mist that obscures the dark green fir trees beyond the sand. As it walks, it raises its head to feel the rain more fully, and a sigh seems to fall out of the general area of its face, enters the world as a fresh, clean sound.

From the directness of its path—the way in which it forces its ungainly body to adhere to a quick and certain destination, with no diversions—an observer might think the creature planned to enter the forest, to lose itself amongst the dark, damp, cool camouflage of the firs. Yet ever it is the same: the creature stops at the high tide mark. Beyond this point, the creature will not venture.

In its solid quiet, its fealty to the idea of motionless, the creature quickly becomes no more animate than the trees, the gathered shells and rocks that form a necklace for the high tide. And yet, in the intensity of that stillness, lies hidden some tension, some coiled event or contact. Every muscle in the creature’s body seems poised for action, and still no action comes.

Until, from amongst the trees, treading carefully, a man appears and walks up to the creature. He is as hidden in shadow as the creature. There is no difference now, under full nightfall, in the color of their skin.

The man stops in front of the creature. The creature makes a sound like a thousand branches heavy with rain. The man bows his head. The man puts his hand upon the creature’s shoulder. The creature bows its head. Now the man makes the sound of a thousand branches heavy with rain. Now the man bows his head and the creature puts its hand upon the man’s shoulder.

After a moment, they drift away from one another. One slowly walks into the ocean. The other walks in amongst the trees.

One of them is Constantine Markopoulos, a comic book artist and certified hypnotist with a degree in computer science and cognitive psychology. One of them is unknown. Which is which has not yet been determined, nor is it clear that making this distinction would lead to any greater revelation. What this secret life means, or what in entails, cannot be understood simply by waiting from a safe place with binoculars held at the ready.

Some secret lives remain inscrutable under even the closest observation.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

SHANE HAMILL

Here is everything that I know about the strange events that happened in and around the area of our bookstore, starting eighteen months ago. This is also everything I know about Shane Hamill. We never liked him. I want that on the record, first and foremost. We never liked him, and I’m fairly sure he never liked us. There may have been some good reasons for this situation, and some bad reasons, too, but I doubt any of it is important now.

Shane once made out with a girl in a graveyard. I don’t know if he met the girl there or if they came there together. I mention it because Shane told us about it so often, or referred to it. For my part, I found this fact kind of creepy, not cool. Others, more attuned to the Goth scene, I believe made Shane into a sort of hero over it, behind his back. Although, as I’ve stated, we didn’t like him. He was a good worker, and some even said he was a good supervisor, I’ll admit that—but no better than the rest of us. We’re all good workers.

Sometimes, even early on in his employment with our bookstore, Shane had a far-off stare, which was strictly against bookstore policy. I cannot stress that enough: Shane often said or did things that were against corporate policy. Not explicitly against policy—not the formal policies—but still things no one else said or did.

For example, once, during a slow day, we were both standing around the cash register, Shane staring out the window, when he said to me, “I’ll bet it’s not snowing in Sarajevo.” Now, the weirdest thing about what he said is that it wasn’t snowing here. So I don’t know why he would say that. It didn’t make sense. Besides, who’s to say it wasn’t snowing in Sarajevo at that moment? It might very well have been snowing in Sarajevo. Thee might have been a blizzard for all Shane knew. That bothered me for a long time, to tell the truth.

Another time, Shane actually paid for a book for a customer, and it wasn’t even because he liked her, if you know what I mean. He felt sorry for her! Which also doesn’t make sense. When someone can’t afford groceries, that’s a tragedy. When they can’t afford a book, that’s just a shame. Maybe she told him it wasn’t snowing in Sarajevo. I have no idea.

But all of this happened before the boat, and it was manageable, these little things he did that made him unlike the rest of us. (Although I think it’s all relevant. Even the kiss in the graveyard, which I may get back to later in this report; I was given no directions to follow in making this report, so I think it’s best if I just get it all down and let you guys in HQ worry about what should be in it and what shouldn’t be in it.)

The boat was just like . . . like a physical manifestation of his strangeness. He’d been borrowing books about boats secretly for awhile before he asked our manager if he could build one on a lot not far from our bookstore.

I still remember hearing our manager snort when Shane asked him. I was kneeling in the history section, facing copies of William Vollman’s latest, and they were in Politics, just one shelf over. He snorted and said something like, “What would you want to do that for?”

And Shane replied, “I’m going to build the boat and then I’m going to leave for the ocean.”

Our manager snorted again and said, “No, really. Is it some kind of hobby?”

Slowly, Shane said, “I guess you could call it that.”

And our manager was so amused—and bored, too, probably—that he told Shane that he could build a boat if he wanted to.

That was eighteen months ago. Now that the boat is built and Shane is gone, it doesn’t seem funny anymore, even to those of us who are still bored. At first, it didn’t seem like he was serious. A boat? Near the bookstore? How could one man build a boat, anyway? It turned out he could, but very slowly. He started out by buying lumber for scaffolding. Then he bought lumber for the hull. One weekend, his friends must have come out and helped him, because when I got there on Monday (I don’t work weekends; that’s what seniority and an assistant manager badge can get you) about two months after he’d started, the scaffolding was all in place, along with ten long curved beams for the hull. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some abstract sculpture, like the stuff in the more boring books in our Art section. It didn’t look like a boat back then. It looked like a mess. A few of us stood out back at lunch time and we laughed as we watched Shane work on it. He’d get no more done than bolting something in place to something else in an hour—I can’t pretend to know enough about boat-building to give you the technical terms. To us it was clear: Shane had gone mad. Something in his head had gotten loose and inside he was thinking “I’ll bet it’s not snowing in Sarajevo” over and over again. Or maybe he was thinking about the girl in the graveyard.

I should tell you that I looked through his knapsack once, while he was working on the boat. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t like Shane, but it fascinated me that he was doing something so insane. I wanted to know why. I wanted to have some clue. I found a little notebook inside and quickly took it to the photocopier, but could only run off a couple of pages before another employee came by, so I put the notebook back. But I’ve still got those two pages. I’ll transcribe them here for you, in case it’s useful:

Once, I made out with a girl in a graveyard. I didn’t realize it was a portent of the future. It was the kind of thing thousands of people have done before me, and if it had personal significance, if it symbolized a certain individual daring, a frisson of experience outside of the every day, well, then, I seem to have psycho-analyzed all the mystery out of it by now, haven’t I? The fact is, the world is generally indifferent to such acts. They do not reverberate or echo. No quiver or ripple comes unbidden to others because of it. But I still think of this event, if not often, then often enough; the softness of her lips, the intensity of her tongue, the feel of her against me, and, also, I can remember feeling the tombstones all around us, almost a dulling comfort against the burning. What am I to make of it? As much as “I’ll bet it isn’t snowing in Sarajevo”. Later, we sat there, gazing at the dead. Perhaps it was then that I decided I’d rather leave than stay.

There’s more, but it’s not particularly useful to relate it. Some things are too personal, and I do not feel I deserve the comments anyway.

So it wasn’t until month five or six that we really began to see the shape of the thing, and to realize the extent of Shane’s Folly, as some of us began to call it. It took the form of a Roman galley, or so Shane said. It had five slots on each side for oars and one main mast in the middle. Typical for him, when I asked him where he’d gotten the blueprints for it, he just smiled and flipped me a coin. I’m going to take a rubbing of it with a pencil and show it to you here, right in this report, so you can see just how disrespectful Shane was to those around him.

A coin with a tiny, rough image of a boat on it. My first thought was outrage—that he had wasted the time of my fellow employees on building something that wouldn’t even work. Later, I realized that this thought meant Shane had gotten to me in a way. I thought about the ramifications of this while in my apartment enjoying a glass of cheap brandy and some jazz music and looking over the heirlooms my father had left me (if any of you are ever in the market for antiques for around the house, you might consider checking with me first). For a time, I even thought about going to the manager and handing in my resignation. Shane had compromised my integrity as a corporate employee. He had tried to substitute his vision for the corporate vision in my mind. He had almost succeeded.

At the time he tossed me the coin, I didn’t let him know the extent of his almost-victory. I flipped the coin right back to him and said, “If you’re not going to be serious, why should I listen to you?” He replied, “Because if you don’t, you’ll be left out.” I didn’t realize at the time what he was talking about. Left out of what? His talk of graveyards and kisses? His grotesque utterances about Sarajevo? His frequent lunches with some of the other employees, to which I was never invited? It didn’t phase me.

You must understand—I was never angry at Shane. Never. I merely understood better than anyone that we had a job to perform in the bookstore and Shane was making it more difficult to do that job.

After nine months, the entire outline of the galley lay before anyone who cared to step around the back of our bookstore. For this reason, Shane had bought a huge tarp and thrown it across the entire frame. Somehow he managed to get the help of most of the other employees in pulling the tarp off when he wanted to work on the ship and then again in pulling it back on afterwards. It was probably easier to help than have to listen to Shane’s messages disguised as small talk. However, I must report that the manager of our bookstore cannot be forgiven for his actions. Time and time again, even during busy periods, he would allow Shane to take breaks to work on the galley. At night, when Shane worked by flashlight and the headlights of his beat-up old car, it was even worse. Shane would be gone for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, with our manager pretending not to notice. Shane would give any number of excuses to engage in his lazy and demoralizing behavior; our manager never saw them as excuses, though, even when I pointed it out to him. This, then, I cannot forgive, since we looked to our manager for guidance and for the strength to follow the corporate rules. Even more importantly, to keep track of the corporate rules, which were so many. (I can, in some sense, forgive Shane simply because I came to believe that it was in Shane’s nature to be lazy; however, my observations of the manager had previously yielded the notion that he cared about his duties.)

A year had passed when Shane announced at an employee function at the local tavern that the initial phase of work had ended on his precious galley. “Thank you for your help,” he said. “Thank you for your good wishes. Thank you for not firing me,” he said, and gave a nod to the manager, who grinned ear-to-ear, looking for all the world like one of those hideous chimps on the covers of books in our Nature section.

To which Shane Statements (as I’d taken to calling them behind his back), to their credit, his fellow employees gave only a tepid smattering of applause, even, might I say, to the trained ear, a mocking amount of applause. This did not depress him. It did not affect him at all. He acted as if they loved him, and loved his “sacred task” as he had taken to calling it whenever I was around. Nothing, I can see now, would have stopped him, short of death. For whatever reason, the boat was locked into his thoughts in a way that I would never understand. I am not by nature obsessive.

When I saw that Shane’s Folly would not soon end, I began to accept the world he had created for us—but accept it only so I could shatter it and return us to the state in which we had existed Before Shane (or B.S., as I called it when talking to my fellow employees). I began to think of the bookstore as a ship and all of us as its sailors, guiding it from safe port to safe port. In that light, it was clear that Shane had called for a mutiny, a term I was familiar with from my work shelving books in the History and Sports sections. Not only had Shane called for a mutiny, but our manager had joined the mutiny! I began to sort my employees by those who appeared to be listening to the teachings of the Shane and those on whom his siren song seemed to have no effect. It was a difficult process I had undertaken, and one that I eventually hoped would be documented in a company report. Unfortunately, one of those Leaning Shane crumpled up my notes on a particularly difficult evening in the bookstore, some 17 months into the period of Shane’s Folly, and tossed them in a waste basket. I have only my memories, as a result, although I am happy, at some future time, to reconstruct who I suspected of mutiny, even though it may no longer matter.

The only effect of my change in worldview, I see now, was to distance myself from the loyal employees who still remained, and for this I take full responsibility. My interrogations and probings were taken in the gracious spirit with which I offered them by most. However, some did not see my work for what it was. If I had to do it over again, I might have stayed more within the powers of my assistant managership, for twice the manager of the store reprimanded me for what he said was “intrusive and inappropriate behavior.”

I couldn’t take him seriously, of course. How could I? He had gone in with Shane and the rest of them. Now it was not just Shane saying things about Sarajevo, it was other employees, although, as is the way with statements handed down, they became changed by the time I heard them from the other employees. One employee, a girl I rather liked until that moment, said, as we stood at the cash register, “I wonder if it’s snowing where Sara is.” “Sara?” I said. “Who is Sara?” “No one,” she said, gazing with a strange, strange look on her face out the window. It wasn’t until later that I caught the odd similarity.

By this point, 17 months and 2 weeks into Shane’s Folly, the galley was finished. He had painted it, added caulking, furnished the galley, and even—of all the audacious things!—let some of the employees “ride” in the boat and practice pulling on the oars. They all, including the manager, seemed in awe of this oddity Shane had created; Shane himself seemed awed by it. Now all Shane was doing, it seemed, was waiting. As was I. I had by then decided all I could do was watch and wait and record, so that if a report was required by corporate HQ, I could provide one, as I am now doing. I am not violent by nature, nor persuasive; I am a simple assistant manager, devoted to the company, and to the idea of our bookstore. What else could I do? I could not stop Shane, although I was fairly sure Shane would stop himself.

So Shane waited. One day, 17 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days since he had started, I overcame my mental objections long enough to stand in front of the galley with Shane. It glistened in the morning sun and the sail whipped in the wind. The sail had a huge “S” in red on it. What it stood for was not immediately clear to me. It could have stood for Shane, or it could have been a mocking “Sarajevo,” intended to get to me. The whole thing looked like a hideous monster made of wood, and no doubt un-seaworthy to boot. We were, after all, in the middle of Iowa. What could any of possibly know about building boats like this one? Especially using an old coin to design it?

“What are you waiting for?” I asked Shane.

Shane stood there with his hands in his pockets, smiling up at his folly.

Then he stared at me, with what I can only call ill intent, and he said, “I’m waiting for the girl I kissed in the graveyard. Once she gets here, I’m gone. Because you know”—and as he said it I could hear the laughter in his voice, and the echo, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a long time—“Because you know, I’ll bet it isn’t snowing in Sarajevo now.”

I’m afraid I broke down. I’m afraid almost eighteen months of this nonsense had gotten to me. I turned red. I stood there, trying to control myself, but could not.

“You bastard!” I said. “You complete and utter bastard! What the hell are you talking about?! What can you possibly mean?! Why did you build this ridiculous ship? Why does the manager like you so much? You bastard! Bastard!”

After a while, I could not stop saying bastard, although after a time I could not look Shane in the eyes any more, and my “bastard” became a groan and then a mumble and then a whisper. By the time I had stopped, Shane had gone inside, no doubt to spread more mutiny and to tell the employees who reported to me about my little episode.

I admit, it was a clear violation of corporate policy for assistant managers—but it was in direct response to Shane’s own violation of hundreds and hundreds of corporate policies, repeatedly flaunted day after day, minute after minute, for months and months and months. What else could I do? My own mouth knew it had to mutiny against this mutiny.

But when I went back inside, no one would talk to me, not even the manager, not even to reprimand me. And that is when I knew beyond any doubt how far things had gone.

Exactly eighteen months after Shane started his little project, his folly, his insanity, he disappeared along with the Roman galley built using an image on a coin as his guide. It is believed that he took all of our bookstore employees with him, including the manager. When I got into work that dreary Monday morning, I had to open the bookstore myself. At first, I thought there must have been some emergency, someone from the bookstore in the hospital. But no: when I unlocked the back door to prepare for the daily delivery of books via truck, I saw the truth. The ship was gone. They must have gone with it. The first thought that went through my head was actually a series of images: of a girl, of a graveyard, of Shane, of Sarajevo, a place I’d never been. The second thought was a n actual thought, a treacherous one: A sudden pang in my heart, a sudden pain there—that I had been left behind, that they all had left me here, in Iowa, in our bookstore, while they left for . . . for what? As you know, it is still unclear, which is why you have asked for this report. To stop it from happening again? To explain what happened at our store? To track down Shane wherever he might be? This is unclear to me, too.

But I know my thought, my pain, was just the last poison Shane brought to us making its way to the surface—my body, my brain, betraying me to Shane’s mutiny, just for a second. Just for that second when part of me wanted to join them. I know that now, and I have consulted the corporate policy book many times for guidance on how to stop it from ever happening again to me. I know it is not behavior appropriate in an assistant manager, even if it a betrayal of thought not deed.

I suppose what bothers me the most, though, is the simple mystery behind what Shane said and the way in which Shane’s encounter in a graveyard will not leave me, and the way in which I still, now, six months after the disappearance, see that huge sail in my dreams, flapping in a sudden breeze. I wish I could stop thinking about it.

If you need any more information, please do not hesitate to ask. I am happy to provide it.

THE SECRET LIFE OF

MATT CHENEY

aka

The Secret Life of The “Secret Admirer” of Jeff VanderMeer: a “Scrivener Who Is IMPATIENT with the SUN”

This secret admirer, a scrivener familiar with the famous yet tragically underrated author Jeff VanderMeer, is IMPATIENT WITH THE SUN. The sun, it seems to the scrivener (who we will call “he” until otherwise informed . . .), is at best overrated, at worst a glorified light fixture. Why, he thinks, should anyone depend on so distant a source of illumination? One that disappears every night. The scrivener, being a scrivener, has more time to waste on pointless thinking than those who fulfill the demands of many another profession. This drives him to obsession — he does not want to rely on the sun unless he absolutely has to. He is sick of the darkness the sun leaves behind. He’s sick of the glare of sunrise and sunset, when it’s difficult to even discern a stoplight turning green. One day, he decides he has had enough. He’s not just IMPATIENT WITH THE SUN — he’s furious with the sun. So he buys three thousand candles for the yard and a hundred lamps for the inside of his house, and at dusk of one particularly annoying day, he lights the candles and turns on the lamps. In an hour, his lawn turns into a slick wash of wax. Not only do his lights short out, but the lights for the entire neighborhood go out. Undeterred, he plots his vengeance against the sun. He uses torches outside instead of candles. He uses batteries for huge outdoor flashlights, buys a generator. Something always goes wrong. Finally, he has no choice but to burn his house down at dusk. And this he does, cackling as the night is placed in temporary abeyance due to his grandiose obsession. When he is done, his house is a cinder, and the sun seems to appear the next morning just to mock him. The scrivener becomes a wanderer. He wanders here and there, hither and thither, preaching hatred of the sun. One day, he happens upon a bookstore where Jeff VanderMeer is doing a reading. Jeff is giving a secret life to anyone who buys his short story collection. The scrivener is dirty and thirsty and hungry, and by now he has so succumbed to his obsession that he babbles uncontrollably to Jeff about his impatience with the sun, while the huge line behind the scrivener, waiting to receive Jeff’s benediction, grows impatient. Finally, the scrivener finishes his tirade. He says to Jeff, “Can you give me a secret life? If I scrape together the money to buy your book? And I will tell you my name then, the name of your most secret admirer.” Jeff scratches his left ear, the pre-arranged signal for dealing with insane people. His bodyguards take the scrivener, kicking and screaming — “I’m still IMPATIENT WITH THE SUN!” — out into the cold light of day to his not-so-secret fate . . .

AFTERWORD: A REPORT ON THE SECRET LIVES OF VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE:

Everyone has a secret life. It may seem trite to re-state this, but sometimes it needs restating. Even the most banal individual has some sort of secret life, often a profoundly rich secret life. Can it be said that the more boring the public face of the person, the more fecund their clandestine existence? Not necessarily, but I’m sure it is true for some people. (Not that we’d ever know about it.) “The Important” often seem to lead lives so busy and so full that we cannot imagine they have the time to pursue secret lives. For make no mistake—one must pursue a secret life. Although some have secret lives thrust upon them, in most cases, the individual runs toward the secret life willingly, almost as a kind of release. At least, I find this is true in my case.

Famous people who have either pursued a secret life or had one thrust upon them include William the Conqueror, P.T. Barnum, Teddy Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, Kate Blanchett, P-Diddy, and George W. Bush. Of course, many countless thousands of others have led secret lives, but for some reason these seven have caught my magpie eye where others did not. The secret lives of Genghis Khan, Rasputin, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Jennifer Aniston, William Hurt, and Bill Clinton, for example, do not excite nearly as much interest upon a thorough review and investigation. When charting these secret lives on the bulletin boards in my office—when cutting out various photographs and articles and spreading them out across the floor, when noting the connections between them with candle wax and gobs of paint—the first seven formed a rather pleasing if mysterious pattern, while the latter seven seemed only chaotic and random, with no order to speak of.

Therefore, I did not choose the latter seven for my planned exhaustive book on secret lives of famous people—a companion volume to my book of fictional secret lives of “ordinary” people. (I use double quote marks around “ordinary” because in all of my travels and conversations with people around the globe, I confess to being unable to determine what “ordinary” or “normal” might mean; each person, in his or her way, has seemed extraordinary to me. I feel like Kinsey, faced with data that determined “norms” but not “normals.”)

Of the seven I chose, the most challenging to research and investigate was, of course, William the Conqueror, simply because the trail was so old, and for this reason I haven’t gotten past writing about his secret life (70 pages of the book-in-progress).

I received my first clues about William the Conqueror from examining pages from the Domesday Book at the British Library while on a book tour last year, and it has taken me until almost this very moment to track down the relevant details, to receive the confirmations and recognitions—including a look at a very old, inscribed, fragment of sword, said blade “shewed” to me by an ancient woman who claimed to be the Conqueror’s great-to-the-nth-degree granddaughter—that would allow me to publish my conclusions, with some degree of their accuracy.

I believe, based on my findings—and certain emanations I felt whilst walking over places William would have trod—that during the dusks and evenings of his days, the Conqueror led a secret life as an ophichthusanthrope. In layman’s terms, William led a secret life as a giant eel. I cannot tell if his transformation was voluntary and he changed only at night so as to keep his ability a secret, or if the transformation was involuntary. If involuntary, was his transformation tied to the lunar cycles? To the way in which river water changes from season to season? Did he only change during the spring and summer, for example? Did silt or clarity compel or entice him? It is maddeningly impossible to tell from the written record, or even from anecdotal evidence.

However, that he did change into an eel seems to me to be certain. There is, as mentioned, the evidence of the blade fragment—from the sword William broke at the Battle of Hastings. Inscribed on it in Sicilian (forecast of Norman conquest-to-come) is the phrase, “of earth and water, limbless yet fast, swimmer to the heart.” The serpent commonly attributed to the sword—an engraving of no small skill by the famed Antonio of Padua—looks to me, from the tail I saw on the sword fragment, much more like the sinuous coilings of an eel.

Then there is the small matter of the Domesday Book (1086), one of England’s landmark “documents” in bound form. The Domesday Book qualifies as one of the most extensive land surveys of its time, edging out the Chinese “Counting of the Little Sticks” (1042; “little sticks” referring to the way in which the Chinese surveyors used the cut up delicate branches of the yee-han tree to count people in each village, cutting notches in each branch). The conquering Normans used the Domesday Book to determine the extent of their wealth, and to divvy up said wealth amongst their knights and nobles.

At least, this is the official version of the reasoning behind the book. Look, however, at this entry in the book from Essex, which I examined at the British Library:

Peter de Valence holds in domain Hecham, which Haldane a freeman held in the time of King Edward, as a manor, and as 5 hides. There have always been 2 ploughs in the demesne, 4 ploughs of the men. At that time there were 8 villeins, now 10; then there were 2 bordars, now 3; at both times 4 s 1, woods for 300 swine, 18 acres of meadow. Then there were 2 fish ponds and a half, now there are 5. One pond finds a stream three ox wide. At that time there was I ox, now there are 15 cattle and I small horse and 18 swine and 2 hives of bees. At that time it was worth 60s., now 4f-. 1 Os. When he received this manor he found only I ox and I planted acre. Of those 5 hides spoken of above, one was held in the time of Kind Edward by 2 freemen, and was added to this manor in the time of King William. It was worth in the time of King Edward 10s., now 22s., and William holds this from Peter de Valence.

Although the Domesday Book wasn’t completed during William’s lifetime, sections of it were sent to him upon completion, and he is said to have examined these closely. The section quoted above has notations made by William’s personal scribe. These annotations are in a short-hand incomprehensible to modern scholars—perhaps it is even a cipher?—but one fact is of extreme interest: the notations all revolve around the mention of “Then there were 2 fish ponds and a half, now there are 5. One pond finds a stream three ox wide.” Next to the sentence about a “stream three ox wide” we find the letters “d-l-t” and, a little farther down, “open stream in winter”, the only recognizable words.

Based on examining this passage and several others detailing freshwater ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, and brooks, it is my belief that part of the reason William the Conqueror undertook to create the Domesday Book, besides the benefit to his Norman knights, was to document every possible body of freshwater in the land, thus ensuring that wherever in his realm he might travel he would have access to his natural element while transformed into a giant eel. Thus, the notations, which, to my way of thinking, probably dealt with follow-up questions regarding the course of such bodies of water, their depth, their length, etc.

There are the persistent rumors about William and his ilk before they became known as Sun Kings (or, Kings of the Sun, due to their Kingdom of the Sun in Sicily later in the same century). These rumors hinted of a secret society that the Norman knights and kings belonged to known as “Le Serpent.” However, the depiction of “Le Serpent” on the broken blade from the Battle of Hastings, and even in the stylized banners in parts of the Domesday Book do not look like snakes so much as pale eels. (See also French and English folktales about the “eel folk” and the “eel life,” most of which date from William’s time and after.)

Then there is the water component of Le Serpent’s rituals. According to an untitled document I happened upon in the British Library, found among the belongings of one of William’s spies before the battle of Hastings and brought to Edward the Confessor along with other intelligence, “Shall we immerse in waters like unto baptism. Ours is the moonlight, wherefore we writhe and receive the benefit of the waters, to rejuvenate and lengthen us; let us swim twice upon a moon and all our cares and wounds shall be gone.” (Translation mine.)

This strange passage hints at an unusual scene indeed: of William and his knights in the water, dissolving from human flesh into the thick length of eels and cavorting like teenage boys at summer camp. I have this very humanizing image in my head of William shedding his armor or courtly attire at dusk and jumping energetically into a pond filled with his fellow knight-eels while yelling out the Medieval equivalent of “cannon ball!” (which just might have been “cannon ball”). It almost becomes science fictional to me, the more I think about it, as if from a bad science fiction movie: What if not eels at all, but extraterrestrials on vacation, inhabiting the bodies of Norman knights? But this is, of course, ridiculous and unsupportable. As a kind of surreal Jodorowsky image, however, it retains a certain amount of power for me. (Of course, I am not so invested in the legitimacy of my theory that I don’t recognize that William may have merely thought he was a giant eel.)

I could continue to document the various circumstantial evidences uncovered by my research, but I must retain some of it for the forthcoming book. Not to mention that of late I’ve found the pull of investigating P.T. Barnum’s secret life further has been distracting me from William the Conqueror’s secret life. Barnum’s secret life does not seem possible given what we know about the limits of the flexibility of the human body, but I am heartened by my work on William. If William’s hidden identity as a giant eel can be corroborated by so many independent sources, then surely Barnum’s midnight walks out to the old barn, the strange lights that emanated from the place while he was inside it, and what eventually resulted from it will be much, much easier to substantiate. Or, perhaps, in this case, I should say “trans-substantiate.”

In any event, I plan to finish the book by 2040, depending, of course, on research grants, time for travel, and the vagaries of circumstance created by the details of my own secret life, which is often a health-hazard and includes periods of almost unimaginable danger to my person and to my sanity.

THE REAL LIFE OF

JEFF VANDERMEER

Jeff VanderMeer is a multiple-award winning fantasy author with books published in over twenty countries. VanderMeer has collaborated on short films with rock groups like The Church, has worked with Ben Templesmith, co-creator of 30 Days of Night, has had his fiction adapted for promotional purposes by Playstation Europe (by filmmaker Joel Veitch), and writes for the Amazon book blog and The Washington Post. His online nonfiction has been name-checked frequently by the likes of the LA Times, Boing Boing, and many more. With his wife Ann VanderMeer, the fiction editor for Weird Tales, he is the co-editor of Best American Fantasy, Fast Ships, Black Sails (pirates), Steampunk, New Weird, and many more. Together, they have taught writing workshops and given lectures all over the world. This literary “power couple” (Boing Boing) has been profiled on Wired.com, the NYT blog, and national NPR, among others. VanderMeer runs a popular blog at http://www.jeffvandermeer.com. It is a little-known fact that he will, at random intervals, roll down the window while driving and shout “SQUID!” at perplexed passersby. Other than this, he has no secret life to speak of, being too busy in his real life for this luxury.