free spirits who live only on what the spirit offers. If you have not made the full journey yet, you must understand that you now have the means to do so. I have eaten nothing but air for ten years. Take a look at my pictures ... ’
The Second Interval
Henry Allardyce looked in the mirror. He couldn't really blame Sylvie for not phoning back; he wouldn't have phoned himself back, if he'd been a woman. God, look at yourself, Allardyce. Your hair needs cutting. You haven't bothered shaving. Your shirt collar is frayed. Your doctor says your blood-pressure is always on the up and up. Where's it all going to end?
Phttt, he thought. I'll go like that. Run out of air one day like a dead balloon. Phttt. Shrivelled skin on the pavement where the boots go hurrying by. One great phttt, and a mild, baffled obit in the local paper. Heading for flame and ashes, and maybe a little earthenware vase with a name inscribed and two dates: from this terminus to that one. A life. The exit from the womb and the entry to the grave. And as for the rest, the civic amenity site or, as we used to say when syllables were rationed during the war, the tip. Not my Picassos though; not my minotaurs. No one will be chucking those away. And, pray, what do you do about it all, sir? Pour yourself another glass of wine and listen to Thelonius Monk, why don't you?
Monk was a particular favourite of Henry's, who liked a great deal of modern jazz before it decided to abandon the tune entirely, though he had been told it had recently been returning home to it. Monk's version of Nice Work if you Can Get It was plinking and plonking through the gallery at the moment, gathering up contingencies as it went and transmuting each one into own weird causality. Henry poured himself a glass of red. French vin de table. Nothing fancy. Mustn't spend too much this month. Then the bell rang to indicate that someone had entered. Henry took a stern swig of his glass, adopted an expression of entirely insincere affability, and walked through to the main room. It was Bernard Trasker, MBE and Mrs Bernard Trasker, MBE by gender proxy and adoption. Henry could never think of them as anything other than this, since Bernard seldom let an opportunity pass of telling everyone about the existence of his gong. It was all over his letterhead, his compliment slips. Even, Henry suspected, his notes to the milkman. Probably had it embroidered on his socks. Should he ever omit to mention the honour, his wife would make good the lacuna. Her role as dutiful companion to a distinguished lifelong civil servant surely deserved some sort of recognition from the world. Bernard occasionally bought paintings for his fine old house up on the hill. Whatever he bought, his wife would disapprove of. She was looking with considerable disapproval now at the Nolan portrait of Rimbaud, which Bernard had been examining for the sixth or seventh time. Evidently pondering.
'Hello Henry.'
'Hello Bernard. Still thinking about the Nolan then?'
'It's a powerful piece of work. ’
'But where on earth would it go, Bernie?' his wife asked. 'We can hardly have it in the front room. The man looks positively demented.'
'He has shuffled off the coils of civilisation,' Henry said. 'Well he might have kept one or two on, if only for decency's sake.'
'He has got down to the essential core of things,' Henry said, now in his curatorial role. He could prattle on merrily like this for hours. 'He is a poor, bare, forked creature. As are we all, up on the heath, if old King Lear is to be believed.' Mrs Bernard
Trasker MBE gave Henry a look of severely disapproving incomprehension.
'It would have to hang in my study. Then it wouldn't need to bother you, would it dear?'
Awful lot of money for something that's only ever going to hang on the wall of your study.
Henry was in a dilemma. He badly wanted to get back to his wine, but couldn't really go and get it without offering his potential clients one as well. He
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain