LITMIR.BIZ

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the dictionary.” But Walace believes that it was this quest that made him what he is today—a writer.

      Walace Weiss is a famous writer of fantasy novels. He prefers the word romance to fantasy, but that makes people think of flowers and Fabio and girdles. It is Uncle Davis who made him a world-famous writer. Having Cal in the house comforts him, as if a bit of the old magic world were here, in this dirty kitchen.

      As he walks away, Cal is saying, “Hey boss, what the hell is a sygazy?”

      Walace used to know, but he doesn’t any more: a syzygy is the lining up of three things in space: moons, planets, suns.

      Even in the light before dawn, even in the shadow under the damaged cap, Walace can see Cal’s eyelashes are gone, and that his brows have a plastic shine, as if he is wearing one of those nose-and-glasses that make people look like Groucho Marx. He places the pipe back in his mouth, the way Groucho did with his cigars.

      Walace is glad he has not smoked too much from Cal’s pipe, because although it makes him brave and strong, it also makes him feel ruthless. Smoking the drug from a pipe feels wasteful. Heroes do not like to waste things. Walace has his own way of using the little crystals that Cal makes for both of them, and Cal’s pals who give him money for his magic potions.

      Walace closes his bedroom door. He needs the light of a lamp to prepare, but it is too bright so he throws a shirt over the lampshade. From a dresser drawer, he pulls a pack of syringes. Cal calls them his darts. “Are you throwing darts?” he calls up the staircase.

      Walace pulls the orange cap from the top. The orange cap shows that this needle is fresh, not used. He pours crystals onto a clean piece of paper, and rolls his good writing pen over all of it, crushing the crystals into powder. Then he slides the powder into the orange cap. When he pulls the plunger out of the long tube of the syringe it makes a popping sound. The sound excites Walace, because this is a romance, a romance of steel—the syringe is like a weapon. He uses the weapon to fight normal days, and the popping is the sound of taking the blade from its sheath. Uncle Davis would make that same sound by putting a finger in his mouth and pulling it out quickly. You know that sound.

      He fills the thing with powder and water. When he is sure all the powder is dissolved, he uses a strong rubber band on his biceps, blots the inside crook of his elbow, and places the needle where he can feel it resist a bit, then give as the dart enters the river of his own blood.

      I am telling you too much, perhaps. But you must see that for Walace Weiss, this moment is the whole story, a romance, a doorway into the magic worlds of his own novels. Soon, he will be like every character he has ever invented: hero, dragon, maiden trapped by dragon, a lawless wizard trickster like Cal, women with dark powers, fisher kings with wounds that never heal, and the creatures he is most famous for writing about, the immortal elves.

      So let me tell you a little more, and then I promise I will not speak these dark words again. He draws back a little on the plunger to make sure he is in the vein. There is a report of red, a red that looks like smoke in the clear fluid. Then, with a sure swift push, the red report, the clear fluid, all of it is no longer in the needle, but slammed deep into his body. In three quick moves, he tosses the needle aside, pulls off the rubber band, and presses the swab once again to his skin. Yes, Cal, Walace has thrown a dart.

      TWO

      New Life

      And then what happened? Youth, power, bravery, yes. But first, all of his long muscles, the ones in his arms and legs, they flex in his body. A real pick-me-up. But the ones that dilate, around the heart, the tiny ones in the pupils of his eye, his very sphincter, these all dilate, for what are these but ring-shaped bundles of long muscles, pulling tight. How funny, that muscles can flex to relax. “The heart dilates,” Walace says out loud as the buzzing comes to his ear and a cough comes from his lungs, taking on the extra cargo in his blood stream. But though it his heart he last thinks of for a while, it is his eyes that jiggle in his skull, as if somebody has pulled back the shades too quickly. He lies back on his bed and lets the rush rush. He wishes he had the brains or power to take his clothes off.

      Cal stands at the foot of the stairs. Who knows how long he has stood there. Who knows how long Walace Weiss has dilated. Hours. Days. Years.

      “Uh-oh,” says Cal, which makes Walace get off the bed, “Our professor has gone down the habit hole!”

      “Stop calling me professor,” says Walace, who does not need to teach at the college any more. He trundles down the stairs without falling. “And no, I haven’t.”

      But the truth is, Walace is glad that Cal’s ball cap had burned before he slammed, because he might not have said, “Your cap is on fire” now. Not because he is mean, not really. It is just that after Walace’s heart opens, he does not go down any rabbit hole. He is always here, here where he is, except that his power seems to have been placed at the top of a tower, captive, like one of the elf maidens from his novels. In fact, this is the plot of his second novel, The Pleasure of the Elves, which we all have read, even Cal, who praised it for having some colorful pigments of the imagination.

      From the tower of his body, eyes all pupil, Walace can see everything. He can see when Cal’s baseball cap is on fire, but now, for some reason, he would be unable to say, “Your cap is on fire.” His dilated mind wants him to say such things, but some other person or army inside him, a knight dressed in black, or a dark lady with spells, keeps his mouth from speaking. He can only see, not do.

      And he can see even more than what is there. He feels so creative, he could write ten books, if he could just find his good writing pen. That is his own quest as a hero—to find a way to break out of this tower, find a pen, and write a new story for the first time in twelve years.

      Perhaps, he thinks, being in the kitchen will feel like coming down from the tower. Cal is calling him. That helps. But the moment he gets to the kitchen, Cal walks past him and heads upstairs. “Where are you going?” Walace asks. But he knows. Cal is going to the drug attic. In a room over the garage, Cal has set up his magic engine, the great lab where household things turn into potions.

      “I have some clients coming today,” says Cal. “And I’ve got work to do.”

      “Have you been able to fix my computer yet?” asked Walace, who sometimes sees his broken computer as the only thing that stops the new novel from getting done.

      Cal shakes his head. “Rome wasn’t burned in a day.” Walace would not bother Cal with this, except it was Cal, on his first day living here, who removed nearly every program on that computer, for fear of spies in the apps and cams, until it was nearly nothing but a lit screen and an off switch. Even then, Cal asked that Walace keep the screen covered with a heavy blanket. He’d fix it up good. It was on his to-do list. Until then, Walace could write his novel on notepads, like they did in the Days of Shivery.

      It has been more than a month since Cal moved in. Cal’s girlfriend, Wendy, who reads all of Walace’s books, had thrown Cal out. Cal was sorry about that. He hoped Wendy might keep him in line, but she told Cal that she was not his mommy. Also, Cal did not like to be pinned down to just one girl.

      Also, he had started a pretty bad fire in Wendy’s tool shed. She had made it into a little office where she could write poems. When Cal’s lab blast destroyed all of her verse and also sucked all the air from the windowless shed and choked her old cat, poor Syd, to death, that was the end of their true love. When Walace, her hero, took Cal in, she was a little surprised. But just a little. “Frankly, it explains a lot,” she had said, oddly, to Walace when he came to pick up Cal in his dented Maserati.

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