What You Wish For
By Philip J. Lees
While the barman was getting their order Biles put the unicorn detector down on top of the bar and turned it on. As usual, it took a few seconds to warm up, but by the time the barman placed Biles’ drink in front of him he could see four unicorns clearly, with several more materializing as faint shadows in the darker corners of the bar. One of the unicorns trotted over and sniffed at Biles’ Dimple on the rocks, but the barman didn’t seem to notice.
“There you are,” Biles said. “Like I told you. Nobody sees them except me.”
“I see them,” Rosh said. She had an unlit menthol cigarette in her mouth and she mimed drawing on it, plucking it from her lips between her thumb and first two fingers and twirling it in the air as she sipped her Campari. The barman scowled, but there was nothing he could say so long as she didn’t light it. Faux smoking hadn’t been criminalized yet. Rosh leered at the barman and sucked on the pristine paper tube again, relishing his discomfort.
“I thought you would. Hoped.” The disconcerting thing about Rosh—one of the many disconcerting things about Rosh—was the way she was able to focus so totally on the trivial, while ignoring the things that were really important. Things, anyway, that he, or other people, considered important. When he was with Rosh, Biles always felt at a disadvantage, as if he were suddenly thrust into the middle of some game where he had no idea of the rules. Or the classic actor’s dream, of being on stage in the middle of a scene and not knowing your lines, or even what part you were supposed to be playing.
“So what do you want me to do?” Rosh asked. “Exterminate them?”
“What? No, of course not.” An awful thought crossed Biles’ mind. “Can you?”
Rosh shrugged.
“I don’t want anything like that,” Biles said. “I’m still observing.”
Another unicorn was sniffing at Biles’ waist. He could feel its breath fluttering his Hawaiian shirt. Both unicorns seemed to be ignoring Rosh altogether.
Everything about Rosh was short: her stature, her black hair, her attention span, her temper. Her face sloped back and up from a pointed chin. Jaw line and cheekbone formed a wedge that pressed her black eyes up under a strong brow and tapering forehead. The lines converged in her high-set ears and made them seem pointed if you looked at her sideways. If she’d been a dog, she’d be a Doberman. She had that kind of intensity, even when she was swirling her drink around her glass as she did now, looking at it and not at him.
“So why am I here?” Rosh asked.
“I just need more,” Biles said. “Before I take it to Prentice. I never wanted this.”
That last statement sounded pathetic, he realized as soon as he said it, but it was true. This wasn’t his research. It wasn’t even his profession, or vocation, or even avocation. But Rosh didn’t know that, and mustn’t know.
“Do you believe in fairies?” Rosh asked.
Hell! What was that about? “I’d like to,” Biles managed.
“That’s a start. If you mean it.”
“No. I mean, we’re here surrounded by unicorns, right? In a bar. We’re in a bar full of unicorns. Fairies can’t be so bad.”
He was babbling. Every time he said or did something to try to move their relationship forward, it seemed to have the opposite effect. It was she who ended up ahead, just in a different direction.
Rosh snorted. And the two unicorns on either side of Biles snorted too, in unison, half a second later. He grabbed for his whisky: uisge-beatha. Water of life. Life preserver. He chugged half of it down. The ice had already melted.
“If you’d only ?” She shook her head. “Never mind.”
“Be crazy?”
A fleeting smile, but she continued to study her drink. “It helps.”
The unicorn detector was still set on minimum. He’d never tried a higher setting. Deliberately, he reached over and turned it up a notch.
Rosh raised her eyes and looked at him with an expression he couldn’t remember seeing before. He tried to read it as approval. The unicorns seemed to have grown slightly, or was he imagining it?
“Paraphiz,” Rosh said, “is ten percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent hallucination. I thought you’d realized that.”
She smiled a triangular smile. Biles tried to grin. The bar was suddenly much fuller.
For the hundredth time, Biles reconsidered his acceptance of the temporary assignment to Prentice’s lab and found it bad. Paraphysiology was nonsense, and the only reason he’d said yes was the thought of seeing more of Rosh than an occasional fleeting figure passing along the corridor, responding to his “Good morning” with a hurried wave. He’d stalked her at the coffee machine, but each time he’d found the opportunity to speak to her she seemed preoccupied with something else, not quite there.
If it hadn’t been for his fascination with Rosh he would have stuck with his own, wholly theoretical research into quantum alternatives. Building devices that actually did something was way outside his field of interest. But now here he was, with the detector. And here was Rosh. And here were the unicorns.
Not only unicorns, he realized. On this higher setting other things had started to be visible, too. A previously empty table was now occupied by five bearded midgets, who appeared to be playing poker. Two wore green bowler hats and another had a lapel pin in the shape of a harp. He wasn’t surprised to see they were all sipping from frothy glasses of Guinness.
Biles’ heart and stomach seemed to have descended to the level of his kidneys. He felt something tweaking the pen holder in the breast pocket of his shirt.
“Would you like another, sir?” The barman had disappeared and had been replaced by a glistening lump of a creature with tentacles, one of which had slithered across the bar and hooked onto Biles’ pocket.
His Scotch glass was empty. He nodded, unable to speak. The bar-creature had a name tag pinned on its upper body: it said “Dave.”
“Thanks,” Biles managed as the tentacle released his shirt and took the glass away.
Rosh sniggered.
“Aren’t you going to turn it all the way up?” she asked. Her eyebrows lifted into twin peaks.
“Do you think I should?”
“Why not? This your specialty, right? Peeking into alternate realities.”
“Not like this.” Biles scowled.
“Careful,” Rosh said. “If the wind changes your face will stay like that.”
She grunted into her Campari, whether in disgust or amusement Biles couldn’t tell. Her cigarette had disappeared somewhere. It wasn’t on the bar, or on the floor. Had she put it in her pocket? Focus! Biles told himself.
To hell with it! He reached out and turned the detector up to maximum. The dial felt stiff and he was only able to get it all the way by wrenching it. There was a flicker as the lighting changed from the orange bar glow, to a bright white for a fraction of a heartbeat, so bright it hurt, then to something like mauve, both blue and red together, different yet the same, or alternating rapidly between the two extremes of the visible spectrum, and possibly beyond.
Or maybe it was his own vision that had changed. Biles was dazzled and his eyes were watering. His garish Hawaiian shirt now looked drab. The flesh of his hands and arms was yellow and the veins pulsed blue. His whisky was green. And Rosh. She was Rosh and not Rosh. The strong features were the same yet somehow harder, a wood carving. Her tanned face was now golden, and behind her back quivered two huge, drooping wings.
“Do you like them?” the new Rosh said.
Her wings spread out on either side, doubling in size and stiffening with an audible pop. Through their almost transparent fabric ran a network of veins that pulsed with what looked like liquid metal. Rosh smiled. Her teeth gleamed sharply.
Too much, Biles thought. That’s totally more than enough. His eyes still on Rosh, he reached for the detector and fumbled for the dial, then the off switch. He found neither, and when he looked down he saw he was holding an ornate wooden casket, with illegible markings inlaid into the lid.
“Things don’t work the same here,” Rosh said. She looked expectant, as if waiting to see how he would perform in this new test.
He tried to open the casket, but the lid wouldn’t budge. What had she said? Ninety-nine percent hallucination? She was half joking, sure, but could that be it? Was his unicorn detector somehow creating this entire illusion within his mind?
Even if he couldn’t operate the device any more, he could surely destroy it. Then everything would go back to normal. He saw Rosh’s eyes narrow. Had she realized what he was about to do? No time to waste.
He raised the casket and smashed it down against the edge of the bar, hard; then again, and again. Rosh lurched off her stool towards him, but too late. Fragments stuck painfully in his hand but the box was crushed. He felt it dissolve, saw the remains turn to brown smoke and drift away leaving small flecks of blood where the splinters had been.
Biles waited. Waited for Rosh to return to normal. For the barman to rematerialize. For the unicorns to fade away. Rosh was watching him, unchanging, as all that faded was his hope.
“Well lover,” Rosh said, “I guess you get your wish.”
She pressed his face between her hard hands and leaned to kiss him. He could feel the tips of her curved nails against his temples.
Then she lifted his hand and touched her tongue to his bloody palm. She lapped once, twice, looked up at him, eyes aslant.
“Welcome to fairyland,” she said.
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2009