Pandemonium

He stopped in front of a door. He seemed genuinely angry now.

“Young man. No one would do what you’re asking, no respectable doctor. You’re grasping at straws.”

I shoved the papers back into his hands. “Please, just look at them. Maybe we’re not talking about surgery; maybe there’s some chemical way to—I don’t know, interrupt the process.”

He shook his head, fishing in his pocket for a key card. “Even if I believed you, there is no way to do what you’re asking.”

“I’m not making this up. Just look at them. My name’s on there, and I wrote down a couple phone numbers where I can be reached.”

He looked at his door, then down the hallway, anywhere but at me or at the pages in his hand. “Please,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Ram said. “I cannot help you.” He stepped inside and closed the door without looking at me again.

“Liar,” I said.

Later, my new friend Tom steered me toward the bar.

“Trust me,” he said. “You need another fucking beer.”

“No, I’m okay . . .”

“Three more Coors Light,” he told the bartender. Then he turned to me. “Seriously, you look like somebody just ran over your cat.”

I laughed, shrugged. “So is your friend really a demon?”

Tom looked back toward the table. We were in a lounge on the second floor of the Hyatt. The place was crowded, half the people in costume. Valis, with his neatly trimmed beard and tweed jacket, looked like an Oxford don. He sat next to the handsome woman—Tom’s wife, Selena. They were surrounded by half a dozen people who had coalesced around Valis in the past hour. Tom had spotted me sitting alone by the bar and had sucked me into their gravitational field. Tom sighed. “Phil’s had a complicated life. Ever since the stroke—

well, even before the stroke, he heard voices. Imaginary friends, you know? Then in eighty-two, the first thing he said when he got his speech back was that we should refer to him from now on as Valis.” He shrugged. “I asked an exorcist to talk to him—”

“Mother Mariette?”

Tom’s eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, that’s right, you saw her! Anyway, she declared him a fake. Valis didn’t jump, he wasn’t in the public record, and it was simpler to say that Phil had finally . . . well, Phil had taken a lot of medications in his life, and this wasn’t his first hallucination. And frankly, Valis’s arrival wasn’t all bad. Look at him—you can’t even tell that half of him used to be paralyzed. Total recovery. Better than total! He eats better than he used to, he exercises, doesn’t take pills. He lives with Selena and me, but he takes care of us as much as we take care of him. I mean, shit, he’s enjoying himself! He can’t help it. He tries to do the silent Valis thing, but then somebody hits one of his hot topics, and he’s off, man.”

The bartender returned with three tall glasses filled with faintly discolored tap water. We carried the beers back to the table, navigating around bodies, through the smoke. Selena barely seemed to speak, Tom talked constantly, and Valis mostly listened, though when he did speak, as he was doing now, people shut up. A glass of ginger ale sat on the low table in front of him, untouched.

“But you cannot separate science fiction from fantasy,” Valis said,

“and a moment’s thought will show why. Take psionics; take mutants such as we find in More Than Human. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not cannot be objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.”

There was a slight pause, and then a Hispanic kid younger than me, dressed in a black T-shirt and immaculately pressed khakis, spoke up. “But does it matter what the readers think is possible? It seems to me that it’s how the characters in the novel behave that determines what kind of book it is. A character in a science fiction novel believes