He had to reach Michelle, talk to her, explain, plead. She loved him. She would forgive him, she had to. She would call it off, she would tell him what to do.

  Frantic, Cantling rushed back to the living room, snatched up the phone. He couldn’t remember Michelle’s number. He searched around, found his address book, flipped through it wildly. There, there; he punched in the numbers.

  The phone rang four times. Then someone picked it up.

  “Michelle—,” he started.

  “Hi,” she said. “This is Michelle Cantling, but I’m not in right now. If you’ll leave your name and number when you hear the tone, I’ll get back to you, unless you’re selling something.”

  The beep sounded. “Michelle, are you there?” Cantling said. “I know you hide behind the machine sometimes, when you don’t want to talk. It’s me. Please pick up. Please.”

  Nothing.

  “Call me back, then,” he said. He wanted to get it all in; his words tumbled over reach other in their haste to get out. “I, you, you can’t do it, please, let me explain, I never meant, I never meant, please…” There was the beep again, and then a dial tone. Cantling stared at the phone, hung up slowly. She would call him back. She had to, she was his daughter, they loved each other, she had to give him the chance to explain.

  Of course, he had tried to explain before.

  * * *

  His doorbell was the old-fashioned kind, a brass key that projected out of the door. You had to turn it by hand, and when you did it produced a loud, impatient metallic rasp. Someone was turning it furiously, turning it and turning it and turning it. Cantling rushed to the door, utterly baffled. He had never made friends easily, and it was even harder now that he had become so set in his ways. He had no real friends in Perrot, a few acquaintances perhaps, no one who would come calling so unexpectedly, and twist the bell with such energetic determination.

  He undid his chain and flung the door open, wrenching the bell key out of Michelle’s fingers.

  She was dressed in a belted raincoat, a knitted ski cap, a matching scarf. The scarf and a few loose strands of hair were caught in the wind, moving restlessly. She was wearing high, fashionable boots and carrying a big leather shoulder bag. She looked good. It had been almost a year since Cantling had seen her, on his last Christmas visit to New York. It had been two years since she’d moved back east.

  “Michelle,” Cantling said. “I didn’t…this is quite a surprise. All the way from New York and you didn’t even tell me you were coming?”

  “No,” she snapped. There was something wrong with her voice, her eyes. “I didn’t want to give you any warning, you bastard. You didn’t give me any warning.”

  “You’re upset,” Cantling said. “Come in, let’s talk.”

  “I’ll come in all right.” She pushed past him, kicked the door shut behind her with so much force that the buzzer sounded again. Out of the wind, her face got even harder. “You want to know why I came? I am going to tell you what I think of you. Then I’m going to turn around and leave, I’m going to walk right out of this house and out of your fucking life, just like Mom did. She was the smart one, not me. I was dumb enough to think you loved me, crazy enough to think you cared.”

  “Michelle, don’t,” Cantling said. “You don’t understand. I do love you. You’re my little girl, you—”

  “Don’t you dare!” she screamed at him. She reached into her shoulder bag. “You call this love, you rotten bastard!” She pulled it out and flung it at him.

  Cantling was not as quick as he’d been. He tried to duck, but it caught him on the side of his neck, and it hurt. Michelle had thrown it hard, and it was a big, thick, heavy hardcover, not some flimsy paperback. The pages fluttered as it tumbled to the carpet; Cantling stared down at his own photograph on the back of the dust-wrapper. “You’re just like your mother,” he said, rubbing his neck where the book had hit. “She always threw things too. Only you aim better.” He smiled weakly.

  “I’m not interested in your jokes,” Michelle said. “I’ll never forgive you. Never. Never ever. All I want to know is how you could do this to me, that’s all. You tell me. You tell me now.”

  “I,” Cantling said. He held his hands out helplessly. “Look, I…you’re upset now, why don’t we have some coffee or something, and talk about it when you calm down a little. I don’t want a big fight.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you want,” Michelle screamed. “I want to talk about it right now!” She kicked the fallen book.

  Richard Cantling felt his own anger building. It wasn’t right for her to yell at him like that, he didn’t deserve this attack, he hadn’t done anything. He tried not to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing and escalating the situation. He knelt and picked up his book. Without thinking, he brushed it off, turned it over almost tenderly. The title glared up at him; stark, twisted red letters against a black background, the distorted face of a pretty young woman, mouth open in a scream. Show Me Where It Hurts.

  “I was afraid you’d take it the wrong way,” Cantling said.

  “The wrong way!” Michelle said. A look of incredulity passed across her face. “Did you think I’d like it?”

  “I, I wasn’t sure,” said Cantling. “I hoped…I mean, I was uncertain of your reaction, and so I thought it would be better not to mention what I was working on, until, well…”

  “Until the fucking thing was in the bookstore windows,” Michelle finished for him.

  Cantling flipped past the title page. “Look,” he said, holding it out, “I dedicated it to you.” He showed her: To Michelle, who knew the pain.

  Michelle swung at it, knocked it out of Cantling’s hands. “You bastard,” she said. “You think that makes it better? You think your stinking dedication excuses what you did? Nothing excuses it. I’ll never forgive you.”

  Cantling edged back a step, retreating in the face of her fury. “I didn’t do anything,” he said stubbornly. “I wrote a book. A novel. Is that a crime?”

  “You’re my father,” she shrieked. “You knew…you knew, you bastard, you knew I couldn’t bear to talk about it, to talk about what happened. Not to my lovers or my friends or even my therapist. I can’t, I just can’t, I can’t even think about it. You knew. I told you, I told only you, because you were my daddy and I trusted you and I had to get it out, and I told you, it was private, it was just between us, you knew, but what did you do? You wrote it all up in a goddamned book and published it for millions of people to read! Damn you, damn you. Were you planning to do that all along, you sonofabitch? Were you? That night in bed, were you memorizing every word?”

  “I,” said Cantling. “No, I didn’t memorize anything, I just, well, I just remembered it. You’re taking it all wrong, Michelle. The book’s not about what happened to you. Yes, it’s inspired by that, that as the starting point, but it’s fiction, I changed things, it’s just a novel.”

  “Oh yeah, Daddy, you changed things all right. Instead of Michelle Cantling it’s all about Nicole Mitchell, and she’s a fashion designer instead of an artist, and she’s also kind of stupid, isn’t she? Was that a change or is that what you think, that I was stupid to live there, stupid to let him in like that? It’s all fiction, yeah. It’s just a coincidence that it’s about this girl that gets held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, and that you’ve got a daughter who was held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, right, just a fucking coincidence!”

  “You don’t understand,” Cantling said helplessly.

  “No, you don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like. This is your biggest book in years, right? Number one best-seller, you’ve never been number one before, haven’t even been on the lists since Times Are Hard, or was it Black Roses? And why not, why not number one, this isn’t no boring story about a has-been newspaper, this is rape, hey, what could be hotter? Lots of sex and violence, torture and fucking and terror, and doncha know, it really happened, yeah.” Her mouth twisted and trembled. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was all the nightmares that have ever been. I still wake up screaming sometimes, but I was getting better, it was behind me. And now it’s there in every bookstore window, and all my friends know, everybody knows, strangers come up to me at parties and tell me how sorry they are.” She choked back a sob; she was halfway between anger and tears. “And I pick up your book, your fucking no-good book, and there it is again, in black and white, all written down. You’re such a fucking good writer, Daddy, you make it all so real. A book you can’t put down. Well, I put it down but it didn’t help, it’s all there, now it will always be there, won’t it? Every day somebody in the world will pick up your book and read it and I’ll get raped again. That’s what you did. You finished the job for him, Daddy. You violated me, took me without my consent, just like he did. You raped me. You’re my own father, and you raped me!”

  “You’re not being fair,” Cantling said. “I never meant to hurt you. The book…Nicole is strong and smart. It’s the man who’s the monster. He uses all those different names because fear has a thousand names, but only one face, you see. He’s not just a man, he’s the darkness made flesh, the mindless violence that waits out there for all of us, the gods that play with us like flies, he’s a symbol of all—”

  “He’s the man who raped me! He’s not a symbol!”

  She screamed it so loudly that Richard Cantling had to retreat in the face of her fury. “No,” he said. “He’s just a character. He’s…Michelle, I know it hurts, but what you went through, it’s something people should know about, should think about, it’s a part of life. Telling about life, making sense of it, that’s the job of literature, that’s my job. Someone had to tell your story. I tried to make it true, tried to do my—”

  His daughter’s face, red and set with tears, seemed almost feral for a moment, unrecognizable, inhuman. Then a curious calm passed across her features. “You got one thing right,” she said. “Nicole didn’t have a father. When I was a little kid I’d come to you crying and my daddy would say show me where it hurts, and it was a private thing, a special thing, but in the book Nicole doesn’t have a father, he says it, you gave it to him, he says show me where it hurts, he says it all the time. You’re so ironic. You’re so clever. The way he said it, it made him so real, more real than when he was real. And when you wrote it, you were right. That’s what the monster says. Show me where it hurts. That’s the monster’s line. Nicole doesn’t have a father, he’s dead, yes, that was right too. I don’t have a father. No I don’t.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that,” Richard Cantling said. It was terror inside him; it was shame. But it came out anger. “I won’t have that, no matter what you’ve been through. I’m your father.”

  “No,” Michelle said, grinning crazy now, backing away from him. “No, I don’t have a father, and you don’t have any children, no, unless it’s in your books. Those are your children, your only children. Your books, your damned fucking books, those are your children, those are your children, those are your children.” Then she turned and ran past him, down the foyer. She stopped at the door to his den. Cantling was afraid of what she might do. He ran after her.

  When he reached the den, Michelle had already found the knife and set to work.

  Richard Cantling sat by his silent phone and watched his grandfather clock tick off the hours toward darkness.

  He tried Michelle’s number at three o’clock, at four, at five. The machine, always the machine, speaking in a mockery of her voice. His messages grew more desperate. It was growing dim outside. His light was fading.

  Cantling heard no steps on his porch, no knock on his door, no rasping summons from his old brass bell. It was an afternoon as silent as the grave. But by the time evening had fallen, he knew it was out there. A big square package, wrapped in brown paper, addressed in a hand he had known well. Inside a portrait.

  He had not understood, not really, and so she was teaching him.

  The clock ticked. The darkness grew thicker. The sense of a waiting presence beyond his door seemed to fill the house. His fear had been growing for hours. He sat in the armchair with his legs pulled up under him, his mouth hanging open, thinking, remembering. Heard cruel laughter. Saw the dim red tips of cigarettes in the shadows, moving, circling. Imagined their small hot kisses on his skin. Tasted urine, blood, tears. Knew violence, knew violation, of every sort there was. His hands, his voice, his face, his face, his face. The character with a dozen names, but fear had only a single face. The youngest of his children. His baby. His monstrous baby.

  He had been blocked for so long, Cantling thought. If only he could make her understand. It was a kind of impotence, not writing. He had been a writer, but that was over. He had been a husband, but his wife was dead. He had been a father, but she got better, went back to New York. She left him alone, but that last night, wrapped in his arms, she told him the story, she showed him where it hurt, she gave him all that pain. What was he to do with it?”

  Afterwards he could not forget. He thought of it constantly. He began to reshape it in his head, began to grope for the words, the scenes, the symbols that would make sense of it. It was hideous, but it was life, raw strong life, the grist for Cantling’s mill, the very thing he needed. She had showed him where it hurt; he could show them all. He did resist, he did try. He began a short story, an essay, finished some reviews. But it returned. It was with him every night. It would not be denied.

  He wrote it.

  “Guilty,” Cantling said in the darkened room. And when he spoke the word, a kind of acceptance seemed to settle over him, banishing the terror. He was guilty. He had done it. He would accept the punishment, then. It was only right.

  Richard Cantling stood and went to his door.

  The package was there.

  He lugged it inside, still wrapped, carried it up the stairs. He would hang him beside the others, beside Dunnahoo and Cissy and Barry Leighton, all in a row, yes. He went for his hammer, measured carefully, drove the nail. Only then did he unwrap the portrait, and look at the face within.

  It captured her as no other artist had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the high angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash blond hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and he could see the strength there, the courage, the stubbornness. But best of all he liked her smile. It was a lovely smile, a smile that illuminated her whole face. The smile seemed to remind him of someone he had known once. He couldn’t remember who.

  Richard Cantling felt a strange, brief sense of relief, followed by an even greater sense of loss, a loss so terrible and final and total that he knew it was beyond the power of the words he worshipped.

  Then the feeling was gone.

  Cantling stepped back, folded his arms, studied the four portraits. Such excellent work; looking at the paintings, he could almost feel their presence in his house.

  Dunnahoo, his first-born, the boy he wished he’d been.

  Cissy, his true love.

  Barry Leighton, his wise and tired alter-ego.

  Nicole, the daughter he’d never had.

  His people. His characters. His children.

  A week later, another, much smaller, package arrived. Inside the carton were copies of four of his novels, a bill, and a polite note from the artist inquiring if there would be any more commissions.

  Richard Cantling said no, and paid the bill by check.

  Introduction to “Tourists”

  by Lisa Goldstein

  The one year that the American Book Awards included a science fiction category (immediately howled out of existence by the dreadfully sensitive literateurs who, quite properly, feel threatened by a fiction which they do not understand, yet which is taken seriously by many intelligent and educated people), Goldstein won the award with her first novel, a paperback original entitled The Red Magician. Who was this writer?

  I still don’t know. I’ve never met her at any convention, or read any biographical material about her. This is what I know: For years, when people ask me to list my favorite writers working today, my brief list has invariably included Lisa Goldstein. And not because of the American Book Award—to this day I still haven’t read that particular book. I came to know Goldstein only through her work, and came to know her work first through this haunting story.

  Yes, Goldstein has also written a brilliant novel entitled Tourists, and yes, it bears a superficial resemblance to this story. But, unlike most writers who adapt a short work to a longer form, she felt no allegiance to characters or outcomes or, really, anything but the most fundamental situation. Thus even if you have been fortunate enough to read the novel, the story must be read in its own right, for it is not the same tale; it immediately became part of me, a heartfelt allegory of the fundamental dilemma of human life.

  TOURISTS

  Lisa Goldstein

  He awoke feeling cold. He had kicked the blankets off and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie—where was she? It was still dark out.

  Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was…he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.

  He got up and opened the curtains. The ocean ten stories below was black as sleep, paling a little to the east—it had to be east—where the sun was coming up. He turned down the air conditioning—the soft hum stopped abruptly—and headed for the bathroom. “Debbie?” he said, tentatively. He was a little annoyed. “Debbie?”

  She was still missing after he had showered and shaved and dressed. “All right then,” he said aloud, mostly to hear the sound of his voice. “If you’re not coming, I’ll go to breakfast without you.” She was probably out somewhere talking to the natives, laughing when she got a word wrong, though she had told him before they left that she had never studied a foreign language. She was good at languages, then—some people were. He remembered her saying in her soft Southern accent, “For goodness sake, Charles, why do you think people will understand you if you just talk to them louder? These people just don’t speak English.” And then she had taken over, pointing and laughing and looking through a phrase book she had gotten somewhere. And they would get the best room, the choicest steak, the blanket the craftswoman had woven for her own family. Charles’ stock rose when he was with her, and he knew it. He hoped she would show up soon.