The Faithful Companion at Forty

The Faithful Companion at Forty

By Kern Joy Fowler

Does he hear me? About like always. “I figured it out,” he says. “It’s a combination of biofeedback and the mantra “home”. I’ve been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know, that was never the problem, but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped to say something, but I’m too pissed. He goes on. “Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I’m about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement.” He says this like he’s shivering. “I couldn’t get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward.”

He pauses again and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.

His voice is severe. “This is too important for you to miss just because you’re sulking about god knows what, pilgrim,” he says. “This is travel through space and time.”

“This is baloney,” I tell him. I’m uncharacteristically blunt, blunter ahan I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the womb period. If noboy’s listening, what does it matter?

“Displacement,” he repeats and his voice is all still and important. “Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?”

The Faifulth Companion at Forty. Photo by Elena

I don’t believe I’ve heard him correctly. “Say what?

“Return with me,” he says and then he’s gone for good and this time he hasn’t hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There’s a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don’t have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. “You call this grass?” it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. “Where’s the plains, man?” Where’s the railroad?”

So I’m happy for him. Really I am.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)