The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction NovemberDecember 2011 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Book 121) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

On my way to Bob's house I was thinking of how he never forgot a birthday, and how he sometimes sent gifts for no particular reason other than knowing his friends would enjoy them. It was always something delightful: an out-of-print book you'd wanted to read, a favorite movie you hadn't been able to find, a fifty-year-old science fiction magazine in mint condition. He was a generous man who asked for nothing in return, but he had a way of getting what he wanted when it came to his obsessions. Bob collected rare books, sf magazines, posters, obscure recordings, rare films on 16mm, VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, and abandoned birds.

It's all fairly common stock for collectors, except for his birds and the last collection he started. When he first told me about it I was sure he'd finally gone round the bend...not that he hadn't always been highly eccentric. Maybe the word is "disturbed."

I hasten to add that Bob was never nasty or violent. There was nothing mean about him. He was quiet most of the time, gentle but intense. He could be very funny when he wanted to be, sometimes at the expense of friends who he felt had betrayed him.

Nothing was beneath him as far as humor goes. Little was above him, either. Fart jokes or jokes about Kant and Pascal were all the same to Bob Krovantz. He had a knack for comic timing, delivering the punch line in his deep voice to devastating effect. If he hadn't been too shy to perform in public, Bob could have done stand-up. He was a brilliant man who never understood how extraordinary he was. Bob was highly self-conscious. His lack of formal education coupled with his pack-rat instincts barely hinted at his personality disorder.

He let it slip once or twice that his father had been a cruel, tyrannical man, physically abusive and unfaithful to Bob's mother. The only thing the old man had done for his wife and son was paying off the mortgage shortly before dying of heart failure at the Santa Anita horse track.

Bob's mother hung on for several years. When he had guests, she didn't come out of her bedroom. Reclusiveness ran in the family. Bob never moved out of the house he'd been raised in, so I suppose that in a sense both parents were with him to the end.

His friends knew what a mess Bob's private life was, but the people with whom he worked never did. He passed from youth to middle age in an office job as a pleasant actuarial clerk for an insurance company, an enthusiastic collector in his free time. I visited him at his job once. Bob's workstation was just one cubicle among dozens. The boss's office door was a few steps away from his tidy desk. Occasionally, as the years passed and the insurance company expanded, he'd be moved to one of their other facilities, each time farther away from his home in El Monte. He didn't seem to mind, as long as he had a steady income.

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