The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay Read online

  Table of Contents

  Reality, Interrupted

  In Jurong

  Always a Risk

  Embracing the StrangePostscript 1: Dragging the Frame

  Postscript 2: Hidden In the Leaves

  Represented Spaces

  Notes

  About the Author

  The Alchemy of Happiness

  three stories and a hybrid-essay

  Jason Erik Lundberg

  The Alchemy of Happiness

  The Alchemy of Happiness: a triptych of stories rooted in Southeast Asian myth and legend, literary fantasy at its very best.

  In the beginning were the four: Water, Fire, Air, and Earth. Arriving simultaneously with the creation of the world, these archetypal elementals shaped humanity from the very start; two of the four continue to do so.

  BLUE - The first trickster, fluid and fickle, holder of all the answers, and, therefore, of all the power.

  DANE - The loyal lieutenant and enforcer, dispatching fiery judgment without question.

  In various guises and forms, through the interstices of our reality and multiple afterlives, these two ancient but flawed siblings seek to find the one metaphysical formula that will lead them out of the never-ending cycle of suffering. Like all of us, human and demigod alike, they yearn for the pure land of endless bliss.

  This volume also features "Embracing the Strange," a 14,000-word hybrid essay on the transformative power of speculative fiction, as well as "Represented Spaces," a wide-ranging interview with Jason Erik Lundberg by author and editor Wei Fen Lee.

  Published by infinity plus at Smashwords

  www.infinityplus.co.uk/books

  Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

  © Jason Erik Lundberg 2012

  cover © Keith Brooke

  ISBN: 9781301777112

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  The moral right of Jason Erik Lundberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  Reality, Interrupted

  I.

  Blue sipped at her hazelnut-flavored Italian soda and glanced at her Mickey Mouse watch for the third time. Short arm on the twelve, long arm on the three. Goran was late again. Lack of punctuality was one of Blue’s pet peeves, and she got increasingly irritated with each subsequent tick of Mickey’s tail. She had witnessed human beings systematically attempt to capture time throughout the ages, measuring in ever-finer increments of micro, nano, pico, femto, but as those measurements grew increasingly exact, it seemed to Blue that people found more and more ways to be late.

  The other patrons of the Brooklyn coffee shop chatted and devoured mocha lattés or other espresso drinks, oblivious to Blue’s growing frustration. Leather-clad students in the corner discussed Baudrillard. Three men with nearly identical shaved heads and biker tattoos lamented their slow home wireless networks. A man and a woman in spiky purple haircuts whispered intently, close enough to taste each other’s breath. Shopping bags littered the floor next to all the trendy footwear, bags from Beacon’s Closet, Century 21, Daffy’s, Keith’s Organic Produce, 7th Avenue Records, Straight From the Crate, and as Blue looked at these people, she didn’t see their diversity, but instead saw a roomful of corpses. She saw their deaths, some sooner than others.

  Goran Velicković was eighteen minutes late upon his grand arrival through the front door. He swept into the café with a flourish, his long black leather coat billowing out behind him like a cape. Everything about the man was bigger than life; he tended toward Armani and Gucci, and when he laughed, each person within a square block could hear it. He almost always wore an enormous smile, which he had to bleach periodically to remove the stains from habitual clove cigarette use.

  He dropped into the seat opposite Blue with a dramatic sigh. “I am tardy, I know,” he said, a waft of sweet-smelling cloves drifting across the table. “These fucking subway trains, yeah?”

  “Sure, Goran. But I still managed to be on time.”

  Goran flashed his famous smile, the smile seen weekly on national television, the smile made eternal by that toothpaste commercial, the one with Heidi Klum, the smile that led to admittance into any club in the city, the smile that charmed the pants off of whatever young-lady-of-the-moment he happened to be chasing, the smile that was currently attracting the furtive attention of the other café patrons around them. It was a smile that made most people, especially women, forgive him instantly. Fortunately, Blue was not most people.

  “It’s not going to work, Goran,” she said.

  “Vrlo dobro, draga,” he said. Very well, my dear. He leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “I apologize for being late. Please excuse this most grievous transgression.”

  Despite herself, the corners of Blue’s mouth turned up. The man was damn charming.

  “Apology accepted,” she said. “You want to order anything before we get to why I called you here?”

  “Yes indeed. I have been craving a chai since this morning.” Goran pushed himself up, slid out of his leather coat, gently placed the coat on the back of his chair, then glided over to the counter. Blue watched the muscles in his back move underneath his grey sweater while he fidgeted in line, and was reminded of how his muscles moved without any clothes at all. They had been lovers only briefly, a two-week fling amid the falling bombs and scattered gunfire in the last days of Slobodan Milosević’s reign.

  After a moment, Goran walked back over to the table with a slice of chocolate espresso cake and a cup of steaming chai, and sipped liberally at the tea. “This shit,” he said. “They do not know how to make chai in this country. Kod Konja in Belgrade, now there was a place could make you think you were drinking Heaven.” He sipped again and made a face. “Fuck.” A sigh. “I met Milena in that café, you know.”

  Goran normally didn’t talk about his dead wife. “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I never told you this?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it was long ago. We were both very young, still at university. I went to the café after class to meet some friends, but was early. She sat two tables in front of me, so beautiful in the sunlight.” Goran sighed and took another sip of chai. He smiled briefly, an involuntary reflex, and continued. “She wore a ponytail back then, so her hair was out of her face. But I remember one piece hanging down, here.” He motioned to an area around his right eye. “She was looking out the window, her eyes so sad. If I had brought my camera, she would have been a masterpiece.”

  Goran sat silent for several moments. “It was not meant to last,” he said. “A car crash with a drunk driver and I am made single again. But for six years, we were happy as anyone I have ever known. You remind me of her sometimes.”

  “I do?” Blue was fairly certain she couldn’t pass for Serbian. If anything, she appeared Chinese. It was a look that had served her well in recent years as the American fascination with Asia had risen sharply.

  “Something in the eyes,” Goran sa
id. “You express a similar sadness. Your eyes are brown and Milena’s were blue, but sadness knows all races equally. It might be this is what drew me to you in the first place.”

  Blue coughed briefly into her fist. “Goran, the reason I called you here ... I saw you on Young America last week.”

  Goran clapped once and sat up straighter. “Yes! My newest reality show!”

  “Reality-based show,” Blue interrupted. “That show is based on reality, and shows only a passing resemblance to it. Anyway, I saw you last week and did some digging. It’s the third show you’ve been on in two years.”

  Goran nodded and shrugged, an expression of false humility. “Yes. What can I say? The American public, they love my face. They cannot resist my charisma.”

  The door to the café opened and in walked a tall, svelte black man with a bald head and no eyebrows. He wore a light olive sweater, though the temperature outside was in the mid-forties, and he took a seat near the door.

  “Do you remember your life prior to meeting me?” Blue asked.

  “Of course, draga,” Goran said. “The world did not begin with you, you know.”

  “How was your love life back then? As busy as it is now?”

  “I was married, if you remember.”

  “Yes, but how long did it take to start that relationship?”

  Goran’s eyebrows furrowed and he looked sidelong at Blue. “Two years. You know this.”

  “That’s right, it took two years of wearing her down, right? Two years of wooing, of being considered only a friend. Two years before your first kiss.”

  “She had other suitors. Plus, we were both deep in our studies. Why do you bring this up?”

  “Isn’t it odd that it took so long to win Milena’s heart, when only a smile and wink is enough for pretty blonde things to spread their legs for you now? That is, if the stories you’ve told me are true.”

  “Yes,” Goran said, “all true. I can snap my fingers and a girl is sucking me off in the middle of Central Park. I had not thought on it, but I suppose I assumed it God’s compensation for taking Milena from me. No?”

  “No,” Blue said. “Think back, Goran. Try to remember when your luck started to change, when people began to respond differently to you.”

  Goran frowned and folded his arms together. “I do not like where this conversation has turned. What point are you trying to make?”

  “Just think for a moment.”

  Goran looked toward the exposed ductwork suspended from the ceiling. Next to his cup of chai sat his slice of cake, uneaten, the smell of chocolate making Blue’s stomach grumble. “I suppose it was when I was helping to fight Milosević. When I met you.”

  “Exactly. Something happened when we were together, when we were intimate. A part of me was transferred to you. Since then, you’ve been living on borrowed charisma, sponged natural magic. You’ve been getting in the beds of young women and on television because of me.”

  Goran shook his head. “I do not understand.”

  Blue motioned to his half-empty cup of chai. “Watch.”

  The liquid in the cup trembled, then began to swirl counter-clockwise all by itself. The swirl inverted and twisted up into a braided cone, which rose several inches above the lip of the cup. A droplet detached itself from the top of the cone and hovered in a perfect milky sphere in front of Goran’s eyes. He stood up quickly and backed away, knocking his chair over with a clatter. At his abrupt movement, the chai in the cup returned to its normal placid state, and the sphere dropped to the table’s surface with a quiet plish. Goran’s mouth hung open.

  “How?”

  “Goran, sit down. You’re attracting attention.”

  “Me? You are the one who—”

  “No one else saw,” she hissed. “Sit down.”

  He righted his chair, then sank down slowly as if expecting to be burned by it. Sweat stood out on his brow and upper lip, and he trembled slightly. The other patrons were still staring, some with smartphone cameras aimed in their direction, and Blue smiled to indicate that everything was all right.

  “How is this possible?” Goran breathed. “This should not be so.”

  “Like I said, natural magic. In you, it manifested as charisma and self-confidence. But others handle it differently.”

  “There are others?”

  Blue nodded. “Many others. Most of them you wouldn’t know about, since they don’t go around broadcasting their gifts on national television.”

  “So.” Goran cleared his throat, picked up his fork, then put it back down. “So what happens now?”

  “The magic you’re carrying? I need it back.”

  “But ... but if what you say is true, if I return this magic to you, I will no longer attract women. I will lose my place on my show, be kicked into the gutter.”

  “Not exactly. In order for me to get the magic back, you have to die.”

  Goran lurched to his feet again and shoved his arms into his leather coat. “I do not accept this. However I got this gift, it is mine now. Have I not earned it for all the suffering I have endured?”

  Blue leaned forward in her chair and touched Goran’s fingers with her own, looked him straight in the eyes. “It doesn’t belong to you. We can do this easy or hard, it’s your choice. If you give it back willingly, we can make it much less painful, blissful even. If we’re forced to track you down—and we will—I can’t guarantee anything other than unimaginable agony.”

  Goran took a step toward the door, breaking contact with her touch. “Goodbye, Blue. I do not think we shall speak again.”

  Blue sighed and nodded to the bald black man at the door. “No, Goran, we won’t.”

  Before Goran could take another step, small green flames sprouted from the toes of his expensive shoes. He yelped in surprise and attempted to stamp the flames out, but they grew and traveled up his legs to his torso, his arms, his face. The eyes of the black man seated by the door blazed as green as the fire engulfing the shrieking Serbian. Several customers leapt out of their seats—the purple-headed duo, one of the bikers, two of the students—and tackled Goran onto the floor in an attempt to smother the unearthly fire, but were consumed themselves. The remaining patrons screamed and fled the coffeehouse. Blue sighed again as Goran and the good Samaritans were immolated in front of her, then took the fork off the table and cut a piece out of the cake. The combined flavor of coffee and chocolate tasted like regret, power, and inevitability.

  ~

  II.

  A confusion of colors, swirling, twirling, bursting apart then fusing back together, a Jackson Pollock gone horribly wrong. A hundred thousand cans of paint splattered over the canvas of Goran’s existence. No eyes to speak of, but a part of him marveled at the kaleidoscopic display to which he was the sole audience. That eruption of yellows and oranges: the bombs and explosions in the skies above Belgrade. This slow languid dribble of purples and reds: the profile of his dead wife before he introduced himself in that café. The intense inertia of the greens and blues: the form of a man and woman hurrying away from a building fire that they caused to happen. All other colors faded away, and Goran could feel whatever part of him that still existed being drawn toward the green man, or perhaps dragged behind him.

  The violent screeching of uncountable nails on chalkboards, the rustiest of swing sets, the white noise of an infinite number of televisions and clothes washing machines. A cacophony of every sound ever created, all at once, assaulting Goran, penetrating the fabric of his being, a hellish mechanical malevolence. The crackle of flame, the piercing shrill of police sirens, the blat of car horns.

  And then, abruptly, the sounds softened and the colors resolved. Goran drifted roughly twenty feet above the striding form of the bald black man who had killed him. A translucent umbilicus originating from the man’s head reached up and connected somewhere in Goran’s midsection, though he could not perceive exactly where. His own body remained hidden to him, though he could once again sense his arms and legs. As
he concentrated, other vinelike threads became visible, sprouting upward from the bald man’s head like a forest of writhing translucent tubes, extending upwards into the space surrounding Goran. The air shimmered as from the heat above a bombed-out car. Shapes drifted in the haze of his peripheral vision, but dispersed when he attempted to focus on them.

  Below him, the bald man was speaking. “That seemed a bit excessive, my sister. Are you sure it was absolutely necessary?”

  The woman walking next to him turned her head. “You know it had to be done, Dane,” Blue said to the black man. “You’re not getting squeamish, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Dane said. Goran could smell the faint acrid tang of smoke emanating from the man, as if it lived in his skin. A dim green glow surrounded his body, flickering and wavering, giving the impression of a low fire. “Just a shame, that’s all.”

  “Well, it’s one more down,” Blue said. “I would have been happier had he given it back willingly, especially since it would have meant sex with him one more time, but you saw his reaction.”

  Goran wasn’t sure how he could hear them so clearly, but discovered that the same was true if he concentrated on anyone on the sidewalks below him. The street vendors, the pedestrians, the self-proclaimed asphalt preachers. People he originally would have thought talking to themselves were in actuality having conversations with ghostly interlocutors whom no one else could see. Ghosts were everywhere in fact, whispering in ears, tripping up feet, lifting up skirts in an imagined breeze, talking incessantly, the street and sky packed with spirits, choked with the dead.

  Had he known about this constant claustrophobic profusion of ghosts in the everyday world, taking up any available space, chattering endlessly to those who seemed not to listen, he might have gone mad. As it was, he was now one of them, floating helplessly behind his murderer, wishing he could pass into the afterlife and be with his beloved Milena again. He was abruptly and overwhelmingly furious at Blue for destroying him, and for passing her magic to him in the first place. He still would have had many years left, and there were places he wished to visit, no longer possible to see. His rage was a palpable thing, boiling out of him, a physical force, and the air darkened around him and sparked with electricity. He howled his anger and impotent rage, and the dogs below pissed themselves involuntarily and whimpered at their masters. The eruption from his unseen and unfelt lungs brought the world further into focus, more solid, more real. And in that moment, he was jolted from his helpless floating position and drawn past dozens, hundreds of other umbilici, pulled inextricably to another connected soul, a formless shape which quickly took the form of a small man, the two of them drawn together like opposite magnetic forces, together and through.