FSF Magazine, June 2007 Read online

  Guy Gavriel Kay has always played along the edges of memory, elegy, and romantic love. Here, in contemporary Provence, the land remembers what happened; the light remembers. The loss of obvious fantasy tropes doesn't dim the play of people who are in no way contemporary. History isn't hidden in the pages of almost mythic fantasy, and it certainly isn't absent—it's everywhere Ned walks.

  But if there is power in old stories—and there always is—there is power in new stories, as well. In Ned, who slowly works his way toward a dim understanding of what Phelan and Cadell face, crossing their paths time and again in his fumbling attempts to save Melanie before she's lost to our world, and in the process, providing closure.

  Guy Gavriel Kay's books always move me to tears. This novel is no exception, and I think readers who had some difficulty with The Last Light of the Sun will be happier with Ysabel.

  An Eye for an Eye by Charles Coleman Finlay

  Charlie Finlay notes that although this new story is in part about an engagement gone wrong, his own life has taken a happier turn: his recent engagement to Rae Carson recently ended happily in marriage.

  "An Eye for an Eye” began with the first sentence, which was written as an example during a workshop discussion of first lines. After Catherine Morrison dared him to write the rest of the story, Mr. Finlay obliged with a story that might be classified as science fiction noir.

  So we're sitting at a table in a Starbucks, and the beefy guy in the Hawaiian shirt says to me, “Yeah, after the colostomy, I had them put an eyeball in my anus—seemed like a good idea at the time."

  I think about saying, “Why, ‘cause you wanted hindsight?"

  But because I don't know him or his sense of humor, but mostly because I really need the job, whatever the job is, what I end up doing is taking a long sip of coffee, then saying, “So how'd that work out?"

  "Not so well, you know!” He's surprisingly intense about it, so I slouch forward and rub the stubble on my chin as though I care. Here I am, wearing serious bling, a hand-crafted jewel-covered globe on a chain around my neck, best thing I own, worth a small fortune. The last client I dealt with, some lawyer, made a big deal about it, had all kinds of questions. Now it's this guy, who's wearing an ugly shirt and telling me about the eyeball in his ass. And I have to take him seriously.

  "See,” he's saying, “I figured I could stick my ass in my windshield and drive down the highway mooning people."

  I decide I don't care so much whether this guy ends up being my client or not, because, hey, he's whack. So I say, “See anything worth seeing?"

  He laughs. “It didn't work out. The optical nerve they ran up my anus to my spine was more like telegraph wire than DSL. I couldn't see shit—I know! Don't say it. But no depth perception, not much color, just a lot of blurry movement. I tried to drive like this, holding the steering wheel between my legs.” He leans over out of his seat, and reaches down between his legs, miming the action. “Ran off the road on the first curve. Sprained my neck, was lucky I didn't roll the car. You ever have the mocha frappuccino?"

  He's drinking some deluxe frothy thing full of sugar and topped with whipped cream. It must take a college degree to prepare it because the girl behind the counter was telling us about her years as an English major for the three hours it took her to fix the drink. Me, I have my coffee plain. I used to joke that I liked my coffee like I liked my women—strong, hot, and black. But the truth is, I just like it cheap and easy. Which is how I like my women these days too. But it's better if I don't think much about that.

  What I answer is, “No."

  He takes the lid off to slurp it, and says, “It's like slushie heaven."

  "What happened to the eyeball?” I ask, ‘cause I gotta know.

  "I had it removed when they grew the new intestine and took off the colostomy. Like I said, not my best idea ever. So are you interested or not? In the job?"

  "What job?” I say. “We haven't talked about anything except your surgeries."

  He says, “Oh, I'm sorry. Guess I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. But what I mentioned in my e-mail. I was engaged to be married and it turned out badly, now I want to get my jewels back."

  "Jewels?” I ask. Perking up some.

  He shifts in his seat. The animated parrots on his Hawaiian shirt flutter nervously to new branches. “Yeah."

  Because I'm impatient and want to know what I'm going after, I say, “Like your grandmother's diamonds? What?"

  "No,” he says. “They're my family jewels."

  I must stare at him like I'm stupid or something, because he tilts his head back and holds up his chunky hands in open supplication, and finally I say, “What?"

  With a look of exasperation, he leans forward and whispers. “My testicles. She's got my testicles."

  "Dude,” I say, reaching down to check my own package and make sure it's intact. “Whoa."

  Tilting his chair back, with a glance at the girl who made our drinks, he says, “I gave them to her for an engagement present. She said she wanted them because she wanted kids and all that. You know, I was in love, I thought, hey, kids, cool. But after we broke it off she wouldn't give them back."

  And I know if he's telling the truth, I'm in. I'm thinking, if he's telling the truth I'm crazy if I'm not in.

  Of course, he's not telling the whole truth. No one ever does. But is he telling enough truth to make it worth my while to get involved? That's what I need to find out.

  * * * *

  You have to understand that I got into burglary the way some women get into prostitution. First I did it for fun, then I did it for some friends, now I do it for money.

  That's what I tell myself anyways. It's my way up.

  Maybe I should tell you about it, so you can understand why I do what I do. When I do it later.

  It started out a few years ago. I had a roommate who had a drug habit. He was a Have, like the guy I was meeting here in the Starbucks, and I was—am—a Have-not. I was born a borderline Have, my mom being a corporate lawyer and all, but when she divorced my dad for her trophy husband, Corwin, about the time I started middle school, Dad and I plummeted pretty quickly into Have-not territory. I've been trying to climb my way out ever since.

  So my roommate, like I said, turns out he was a gasm addict, a dryhead, hooked on moneyshots, those inhalers that make a guy have orgasms. I tried that stuff once, but let's face it, it doesn't compare to the real thing, not least because where I live you can get the real thing cheaper.

  Anyway, I found out roomie had a habit when he started pawning my stuff to make his dealer rich. I gave him one day to move out, which he did. When I came home from work, he had moved out all right—and taken all my stuff with him.

  I couldn't afford the rates the contract cops charge these days. Oh, sure, I could've taken him to small claims court for nothing, but then I didn't really want to wait until we were scheduled for our TV slot to get satisfaction. That can take months. Instead I found out where he moved, broke in, and stole my stuff back. Since he'd already sold some of it, I had to visit him several more times, over six months and a couple addresses, until the checkbook balanced out.

  The last time I robbed him, it was just for the thrill. The freak had gone straight, borrowed money from his folks, put up cameras and bought a guard fearit, one of those genetically engineered ferret hybrids smalltime dope dealers keep around. But sneaky low-tech beats stupid high-tech. I spraypainted the cameras and drugged the fearit with Nyquil-marinated chicken livers, broke in and took what I wanted. Then nature called at an opportune moment, so I left a king-size dump in the middle of his queen-size bed, wiped my ass on his pillowcases, and called it even.

  I left off that last part when I told my friend Diane about it. Which ended up being lucky, because she'd just found out her boyfriend Joe was cheating on her. Diane was, is, a Euro-Chinese kickboxing braniac, with big dark eyes and great taste in jewelry. It wasn't like her to get all emotional, but she'd been in love with Joe and had her
life planned out right down to the brood of children. That was going to be her whole life. So she took it pretty hard, especially when Joe kept a bunch of things that mattered to her, including her earpod with maybe her ten thousand favorite songs on it, her collection of Generation Mutant action figures, and the celery-colored Fiestaware.

  There we were, drinking away her sorrow, and she started telling me how Joe ruined her world, how he took something away from her she could never have replaced. She was cold-hearted that night, swearing she'd have him killed. I said she didn't need to go that far to get her stuff back. I could do it for her. Trying to impress her, be the nice guy rebound after that jerk. She took me up on it.

  I got her most of her stuff back, but it wasn't enough to make her happy and I didn't get to be the rebound. Truth is, she's always been cold-hearted since that time. Joe died in a motorcycle accident a couple months later, casting a weird pall over the whole thing. She called me up to take her to the funeral, said I was the only one who could understand her true feelings about him. She finished law school after that, found a job at a big criminal firm, and crossed the border into Have-land. And that was that.

  I crossed the border into Crooksville. My plan was to do a few big jobs, salt away the money, and start over. Finish college, go to law school maybe, something like that. Only the jobs were never big enough to give me that chance, even though I keep trying to move up into the big leagues.

  Diane did me a favor here and there, telling some of her more discreet colleagues about my special talents. If their clients didn't have enough money for legal fees to resolve property disputes, they referred their clients to me. Over the past couple years, I've built up a steady business. It's a better gig than smash-and-grabs. I get some inside tip, a key or passcode, plus the people who are robbed are usually not eager to involve the cops. I make way more than I could on my own.

  It was one of Diane's sleazier friends who contacted me about the beefy guy sitting across from me in Starbuck's. In an odd way, everything I have now I owe to Diane.

  I try not to think about the fact that I don't have what I really wanted.

  * * * *

  What I say next to the guy in the Hawaiian shirt is, “Wow. That took some balls for her to do."

  He frowns at me like he's already heard all those jokes, which probably he has, so I jump to the next question.

  "Why not just take her to court?"

  After another drink of frothy coffee, he leans forward and says, “Look, I depend on a trust fund and my mother administers it like a fucking food stamp program. She tolerates a lot but if she ever found out that I lost all of her future grandchildren, she'd go off like a missile."

  "I'll do it,” I tell him.

  Because I'm in the moment I hear him say “trust fund.” I name a price that's twice my usual fee and he says yes so fast I figure I'd lowballed him.

  But that's what happens when you move up into the next league. You make a few mistakes, and you learn.

  I won't sign any affidavits for accuracy, but here's the story he told me, the way he told it to me, only with the boring stuff edited out.

  Said his name was Casto Beckett, and waited for a response like that was supposed to mean something to me. Okay, so later I looked it up, and he's one of the Becketts who own all the rental properties and retail space and the old nostalgia malls they have out by the exurbs. At the time, I had no idea who he was and just waved him on impatiently. He wandered a lot, talking about boarding school, hospitals, his controlling mother. Said he spent a lot of time and money on “business projects"—by which I gather he meant travel, clubs, and drugs—before his mother clamped down on him.

  His ex-fiancée's name is Patrina Solove. They met at a club or a party, somewhere on the scene, he can't remember. But she was an insecure, evil, controlling bitch just like his mother, which is why he fell for her so hard according to his therapist. He'd been in a self-destructive phase then—he didn't do anything harder than the mocha frappuccino these days, honest—and he'd made a lot of bad decisions. One of them was buying Ms. Solove an engagement ring with a five carat diamond in it.

  Interjection here by me, saying I'd never seen a five carat diamond, and him impatiently saying it was big enough it could choke a dog, and maybe she'd choke on it. But he didn't care anymore. That wasn't the point.

  Being she was from a family similar to his, only construction and data infrastructure—this time I nodded like I knew the name—the two of them got lawyers involved and drew up prenups before they even told their parents or let word leak to the gossip-web. She was set on having children, so as a condition of the engagement she got possession of his testicles.

  "I've been in and out of hospitals,” he says, stroking the patchy beard on his chin, “so I figured what the hell, no big deal, and went and had it done."

  "And then the relationship went bad?” I prompt.

  "Like takeout you forget in the backseat on a hot day."

  More rambling here, but the short version is the woman's crazy, the kind who says one thing and does another, wants control of every facet of his life, always has to know where he's been, who he's been with, like she hasn't got his balls already and that isn't enough.

  "She's totally freaked,” he says. “She had my testicles dolled up like those easter eggs."

  "The plastic kind?” I ask, thinking about my grandma putting quarters and hard candy in those pastel eggshells and hiding them in her garden.

  "No, like the kind they have in museums. All gold and shit."

  "Fabergé eggs?"

  "Yeah, I don't know, something like that,” he says, and it's another one of the injustices of the world that I know this and he doesn't. “She keeps the pair of them on a shelf in her living room, or did when we were still talking to each other. Last time we talked, she told me I'd never get them from her, and she had her security guy, Sean, throw me out of the house. I went into rehab after that...."

  More rambling here, but the way it ends up is he gives me her addresses, everything he knows about her, and transfers a few token bucks into one of my bank accounts as a deposit. I have it set up so it looks like he bought something from me on eBuy, so we can explain it away if it ever gets traced.

  And that's how we become business partners.

  * * * *

  Truth is, I feel a little bit of sympathy for Beckett. Not that I lost my balls or anything, but I had exactly one piece of bodmod done and it was for Diane.

  I figured I'd never have a real chance with her, being short as I was, a couple inches shorter than her anyway, and her going for tall guys. So I cleaned out my dad's bank accounts, what he had left, all for his retirement, and spent it getting four inches added to my legs. Pretty tame stuff, compared to what people do these days. Hurt like hell. Hell, it still hurts sometimes, and I've never quite gotten used to my new height. Center of balance is all off and shit.

  It was the last time I ever spoke to my dad. Once he quit calling me up and cussing me out, that is. Served him right for getting fat and screwing things up with mom.

  Diane didn't even notice. When I saw her after the surgery, she paused for a second, looking up into my face instead of down, then kept on talking and didn't say a word about it.

  There's no way for me to get back my money or give back the pain. So I have to live without the one and with the other. But it's no big deal anymore.

  Beckett's job looks it will be a big one, so I break it down into parts. Problem with that is the more parts there are, the more parts there are to go wrong. First part, the hardest part, is finding out where she has his balls. I can't steal them if I can't find them.

  But the information he gave me is good. His ex lives in one of those old gated communities on the cliffs along the river, the kind where they took down the gates a long time ago and now just have these big decorative entryways. It's quaint, if twenty thousand square feet with a six-car garage can be called quaint.

  I put on a shirt with a nametag—"Eliz
abeth,” which cracks me up—and a ballcap, and carry around a meter-reader that I stole from a van that was unlocked after I busted out the window and reached in to flip the handle. That's the thing about Have neighborhoods—the Have-nots that make them run are pretty much invisible. Look like you're there doing a job that nobody who lives there would ever be caught dead doing and they never give you a second glance.

  The first floor of her house is all windows and no window coverings, in order to show off her possessions to the neighbors. The security systems in these houses, with their live-in guards, make hiding stuff superfluous anyway. Walking by, I see a pair of golden somethings sitting on a shelf in the living room like a pair of fancy Hummel figurines. “Humpty,” I mumble, “If that's you and Dumpty, don't fall before I get there, okay?"

  I know it's not all going to be this easy. When I see somebody walking around inside, I take the next step on impulse and go knock on the door. I'm looking down at the meter, clicking buttons, when the door opens.

  "Yeah?” the guy says.

  Whatever I was going to say, I forget it for a second when I see his face. He's obviously one of those old ultimate-fighting guys. His nose has been made flat so it can't be broken, flaps hang down over his ears, and he's got thick leathery pads on his jaws like protective headgear. Makes him look like a bulldog. For a second, I'm ready to ask him if he wants to sniff my ass to make sure I'm okay.

  Instead, what I say is, “Says here the meter's behind the garage. Didn't see it there. Maybe it's down in the basement?"

  I look up and meet his eyes challengingly, but bored. Like a guy who gets paid by the hour and has seen it all before, including JoJo the dog-faced houseboy. Then I look past him, like I'm trying to find the meter on the wall, like he's not even there, that's how bored I am, how much I want to get my job done and move on.