Full House by George R. R. Martin

Author:George R. R. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

The Elephant in the Room

by Paul Cornell

“MY DEAR,” SAID MY mother, “when your father told me you’d joined the circus and would be turning into an elephant, I had to come over immediately.”

And I suppose that was true.

Mum, you see, on hearing about my biggest, though perhaps not my most prestigious, theatrical gig thus far, had decided, to my horror, to come to New York. Dad had stayed home, thank goodness. He was probably looking forward to enjoying his shed. But Mum, on being told that the New York School for the Performing Arts had placed me with the prestigious Big Apple Circus, had darted across the Atlantic like a salmon. Sorry, I should be more specific. I’m still, I suppose, not quite used to living amongst … I mean living as part of … a community who have special, you know, powers. So I should emphasize that that was a simile. My mother cannot turn into a salmon. (That is, I suppose, one of the little-talked-of features of living in a neighborhood like New York’s Jokertown, where someone of one’s acquaintance might actually go green with envy or fall to pieces: One has to indicate where the line of metaphor is drawn.)

I’m making this all sound so very lighthearted, aren’t I?

I met Mum at JFK in the company of Maxine, a Jokertown Yellow Cab driver of my acquaintance who really drives her vehicle. That is to say, she runs it off her own calorie intake. This, if one can do it, is, apparently, a good deal, economically. It means that Maxine is happy to be paid in junk food, which also makes economic sense for her passengers, and makes hers the hack that jokers and poor drama students head for after the show, with a bag of White Palace and fries for change. This ability came to her suddenly, when she was a child, when she was involved in a frightening car accident, and, in that extraordinary way which makes it very clear that our brains know our bodies better than we do, managed to turn the birthday meal she’d just eaten with her loving parents into a sudden burst of automotive power that saved their lives. Long term, however, it meant she lost her family. Within the year, actually. Because that moment she used her, you know, power for the first time was also the moment she … changed. They couldn’t deal. They put her up for adoption. Nobody took her. You get a lot of stories out of those children’s homes that got packed with ace and joker kids back then. These days, they’re the stuff of Young Adult novels, but I bet the truth of it was even more grim. People understand, to some degree, the original release of the wild card virus in September 1946. They feel for the first generation of those infected, be they powerful ace or differently bodied joker. They feel the loss of those who “drew the Black Queen” and died on the spot.

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