The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

Pili threw parties often and Amelia declined any invitations just as often. She had internalized her mother’s directives: study, work hard, don’t drink, no boys. It was difficult to shake those manacles off. Whenever she did, Amelia felt guilty. But she didn’t want to think about her conversation with Anastasia at the gallery – the fucking humiliation of it – and the music at Pili’s apartment eviscerated coherent thoughts.

Amelia pushed into Pili’s place, trying to find her friend amongst the dancers and the people resting on the couch, chatting, drinking, smoking. Finally, she spotted Pili in a corner, laughing her generous laughter.

‘Amelia!’ Pili said. ‘You came after all. And you look like a secretary or some shit like that.’

Amelia glanced down at her clothes, knowing she was overdressed. ‘Yeah. No time to change.’

‘Look, we’ve got a ton of booze. Have a drink. Tito! Tito, she needs a drink!’

Amelia accepted the drink with a nod of the head. The booze was strong. It had a sour taste. With some luck, it had been fabricated in Pili’s dirty bathtub. If not, it was liable to have come from somewhere much worse. But it wouldn’t be hazardous. Pili didn’t allow additives in her home.

She watched the partygoers flirting, chatting, dancing. Amelia wondered why some people found it easy to be happy, like an automatic switch had been turned on in them the moment they were born, while she watched in silence, at a distance, unmoved by the merriment. Amelia’s cup was efficiently refilled through the night. Although she neither danced nor spoke much, she leaned back on a couch and listened to the beat of the music, the booze turning her limbs liquid.

A guy she knew vaguely, a rare animal trader, sat next to her for a while. He was carrying an owl in a cage. The owl was dead, and he told her he was taking it to a guy who was going to stuff it right after the party.

‘Am I boring you?’ the guy asked. Amelia did not even try to pretend politeness. She drank from her plastic cup and utterly ignored him, because last thing she needed was this guy trying to sell her a fucking dead owl and it was obvious where his monologue was going.

Owl Man got up. Another guy sat in the vacated space, his friend hovering next to the sofa. They complained that Soviets (fucking FUCKING REDS, were their exact words) were sending fake tequila to Hamburg. One of them had made money exporting the liquor to Germany, but that was over and the man who was standing up was now reduced to something-something. She didn’t catch the details, but she knew the story. Everyone had a story like that. They’d all done better at one point. They’d run better cons, done better drugs, drunk better booze, but now they were skimming.

The guy sitting next to her was trying to elbow her out of the way so his friend could sit down. Amelia knew if she had been cooler, more interesting, more something, he wouldn’t have tried that. But she was not. The appraisal of her limitations provided her with a defiant stubbornness. She planted her feet firmly on the ground, did not budge an inch, and both of the men walked away, irritated.

She dozed off, thought of Mars. Black-and-white, like in Lucía’s movie. Rayguns and space pirates, the ridiculous Mars they’d dreamt in a previous century. Far off in the distance, blurry, out of focus, she saw a figure that had not been in the movie.

There are only two plots, Lucía had told her one evening. A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes into town. Amelia couldn’t tell if this was one or the other.

What do you do in the meantime? she wondered. What do you do while you wait for your plot to begin?

The stranger’s shadow darkened the doorway, elongated. The doorway of the bar. The space bar. It was always a bar. Western. So then, this was A stranger comes into town. Fate knocks on your door.

She woke curled up on Pili’s couch. Many of the partygoers were still around, passed out on the floor and chairs. Amelia took out her phone, wincing as she looked at the time. It was past noon. She had two text messages and a voicemail. The voicemail and one of the messages were from her irritated sister, who wanted to remind Amelia she was supposed to babysit that night at seven. The other text message was from Elías. What are you up to?

Amelia hesitated before slowly typing an answer. Woke up with a huge hangover.

A couple of minutes later and her phone rang. Amelia slipped out of Pili’s apartment and answered the phone as she walked down the stairs.

‘How huge of a hangover?’ Elías asked.

‘Pretty massive. Why?’

‘I have a great trick for that.’

‘Oh?’

‘If you stopped by, I’d show you. It’s an effective recipe.’

‘I am a mess and I am on babysitting duty at seven o’clock.’

‘That’s ages away. Should I send a car?’

Amelia emerged from the building and blinked at the sudden onslaught of daylight. She really shouldn’t.

She accepted the offer.

*

Amelia reeked of cigarette smoke and booze, but part of the pleasure was swanning into Elías’s pristine apartment and tossing her stinky jacket onto his couch. She was a foreign element introduced into a laboratory. That was what his home reminded her of: the sterile inside of a lab.

She leaned on her elbows against his white table and watched him as he chopped a green pepper in the kitchen.

‘Was it a good party?’ he asked.

‘Does it matter?’ she replied with a shrug.

‘Why else go to a party, then?’

She did not reply, instead observing him intently. It was funny how you thought you remembered someone. You sketched their face boldly in your mind, but when you saw them again, you realized how far you were from their true likeness. Had he always been that height, for example? Had