Memory and Dream

I hope my sister—excuse me, my stepsister—Susan is suitably grateful to me. If I hadn’t been there, her parents would have taken it all out on her, instead of me. But of course as far as Susan’s concerned, the sun rises and sets with Margaret and Peter. Especially Margaret. Everybody always defers to her. I mean, while it’s true that Peter started fucking me from the time I turned six, and I’m not saying the old pervert didn’t enjoy it, it was Margaret who put him up to it. Margaret who sat on the bed and watched it happen. Margaret who kept coming up with all these “interesting” variations. Margaret who took the Polaroid pictures that they’d sell to the other sick freaks who hadn’t been lucky enough to acquire their own live-in sex toy. Considering what put my natural father in jail, I guess life wouldn’t have been much better living with my real parents.

I wonder what it’s like to have parents that love you. Parents who’d do anything to protect you from the kind of shit that Margaret reveled in.

I’m never going to know, am I?

* *

This morning I was washing out a tin can before I put it in the recycling bin and I sliced open my finger. I can’t believe how much blood poured out of that little wound. I might have bled to death, standing there watching the blood spurt from my finger into the sink, but I finally got smart, washed it out, bandaged it, and then put up with the way its been throbbing all day.

Luckily it was the index finger of my left hand, so I can still write my daily entry. Trouble is, ha ha, I’ve got nothing to say. Cutting my finger was the highlight of my day.

* * *

Izzy called this morning and we had a nice long talk. She’s invited me out to the island for the weekend, so I’ve got that to look forward to. I still can’t get used to her being so far away after all the years we lived together, but then things started to get different long before she actually packed up all her stuff and went away.

Something changed in Izzy after John left her and the mugging. I’m not sure which was worse on her.

The mugging seemed a betrayal of the city she’d come to love, as though it were responsible for the battering she received. When she finally moved back to the island a few years later, I wasn’t surprised. I think I was the only one.

As for John’s abandoning her ... I wonder if he ever realized just how much he broke her heart? He was the reason that she didn’t want to use her newfound magic anymore. It was as much because of how badly things turned out between them as it was for John’s warnings of the danger it would put the numena in. That’s what I call the beings that came to life through Izzy’s art. I ran across the word “numen” in the dictionary once while looking up something else. It means a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or locality. Works for me.

Izzy and I had long talks about her numena, me saying she owed it to the numena to make their own choice as to whether or not they wanted to come across, she being scared of what might happen to them once they got here and knowing how terrible she’d feel if they got hurt. I’m not sure what convinced her to continue bringing them across. I doubt it was my arguments alone—when Izzy sets her mind on something she can be the most stubborn woman I know. It’s more likely that with Rushkin gone, she felt it would be safe.

Once she made the decision, though, she threw herself into her work—creating paintings that would have stood the test of time with the best of the world’s great art, had they only survived. She had Rushkin’s studio to herself—he’d gone on sabbatical or something—and that was where she worked her magic, peopling not only her canvases, but the streets around us with the denizens of her imagination.

The numena themselves were usually pretty circumspect about being noticed. Mind you, Newford’s always had a reputation for being a hotbed of oddities and marvels. Next to the West Coast, we’ve probably got the highest percentage of mystics, pagans, sages, and downright strange people on the continent, so a few more magical sightings weren’t necessarily going to make the headlines of anything except for a rag like The Newford Sun.

Izzy told no one about the magic besides me—not even Alan or Ply. She felt as though Hking about it would dissipate the power, that it would set up a wall between our world and that otherworld from which the magic came. I still maintain that there was no otherworld—or at least not in the sense that Izzy believed in it. The magic came from her. The world was inside her, the magic blossomed in the fertile ground of her inner landscape and was pulled forth by her painting. No less a wondrous, enchanted process, to be sure, but the difference seemed important, if not to anyone else, at least to me.

After a few months of mourning her abandonment at John’s hand, she also became very social. She was out all the time, a fixture at all the Waterhouse Street parties; she started drinking and taking drugs, and she had a constant stream of lovers. I don’t think there was ever a time in those years that she didn’t have a lover in attendance, with at least one or two pining for what they’d lost and a couple more waiting in the wings to take their turn on the carousel. Count me in among the former, forever unrequited like so many of the women in those Victorian novels that Kristiana loves to read.

But it wasn’t all fun and games, though it might seem so from the outside looking in. Izzy found time for her career as well. Her star rose until soon the occasional paintings she offered up for sale began to command high four-figure prices. Still, for all her success at the easel or in bed, I don’t think she was ever happy again.

My own fortunes seemed to rise in direct proportion to how her happiness diminished. My turning point came when Alan decided to publish The Angels of My First Death. I still have no idea why that first collection did as well as it did. My circle of friends had widened to include any number of other writers and I thought many of them to be far more talented than I was. Anne Bourke, certainly. Christy Riddell—especially with his newer stories. Frank Katchen. We had quite a community going in Lower Crowsea in those days. Not so high profile as the artists and musicians, or even the theatre people, but then writers aren’t usually as flamboyant, are they? We work in private, emerging for the parties or book launches and signings, before withdrawing back into our seclusions. Except for Frank, who seemed to enjoy the idea of being a writer so much more than actually doing the work. But then there are always exceptions, aren’t there, and whatever else might be said about Frank, he did exceptional work.

Alan’s Crowsea Review never had to go beyond the borders of Lower Crowsea itself to find its contributors, but it grew rapidly from a student effort into one of the more respected literary magazines in the country. It seemed only natural for him to use his East Street Press as an imprint of books as well. He tested the waters with a novella by Tama Jostyn called Wintering and Dust, Dreams and Little Love Letters, a collection of Kristiana’s poems, before he did my collection of short stories. The first two did reasonably well for books published by a regional press, selling out their modest print runs within six months of publication. Then came The Angels of My First Death and everything changed.

I made so much money off the paperback sales and subsequent foreign rights, movie options and the like that it was criminal. I could’ve lived high on the hog, but instead I kept the apartment on Waterhouse Street and channeled my money into setting up the Newford Children’s Foundation.

I don’t mention this to toot my horn. Truth is, if I had a choice between being remembered forever and the Foundation, the Foundation would always come first. I believe in what I write—I can’t not write—but once I saw the serious money I could make by writing, the act of writing became subservient to the Foundation, existing to keep the Foundation solvent as much as for my own need to tell stories.

They both promote the same message: children are people and they have rights; don’t abuse those rights.

They both strive to educate the public. But the Foundation will always be more important because it’s actually helping those in need. I’d’ve given anything for the option to become a ward of the Foundation when I was a kid myself.

* *

Tomorrow I’m off to Wren Island to stay with Izzy. I’m so excited. I’ve packed and repacked my bags three times already. I was hoping to finish off that new story before I went, but I can’t seem to concentrate on it. Maybe I should just write, “And then they all died. The End.” And leave it at that. It wouldn’t be any worse than what I’ve written so far. But who knows? Maybe being with Izzy again will make the whole thing come alive for me. Stranger things have happened in her company, that’s for sure.

* *

I’m having the best time I’ve had in ages. Izzy’s been after me for years to move onto the island with her and