Are You There and Other Stories (13 page)

Sunday night I drank the last Red Hook in my refrigerator, plugged a cigarette in my mouth, grabbed a lighter, and headed out for a smoke. I didn’t even know what time it was.

I was on the second floor at the end of the hall, next to a door that led to the open back stairs above the trash dumpsters. The apartment across the hall was empty and in the early stages of renovation. THE MANAGER was doing the work himself. Slowly. I suspected him of dragging out the job so he would have an excuse to hang around my floor.

The door to the empty apartment opened, but it wasn’t THE MANAGER. The weird girl I’d met the night of my play’s opening stepped out. She had changed to Levi’s and a white blouse, and she had a plastic trash bag in her right hand. I stared at her as I would a horned Cyclops.

“Hi, Joe.”

I took the unlit cigarette out of my mouth.

“It’s Nichole, right?”

“Right. I’m always surprising you, aren’t I.”

“Uh huh.”

“Well this should really surprise you. We’re neighbors!”

Behind her I could see the vacant apartment. THE MANAGER had been doing some drywall work. Powdery white dust lay in a drift across the hardwood floor. Nichole pulled the door shut. The rational world shifted under my feet. I mean it shifted
more
.

She followed me outside with her little trash bag. Was it a prop? From the landing the moon was big and white among carbon paper clouds. Pretty in a Hallmark way. The landing and stairs were liberally spattered with pigeon shit, however. I lit up, inhaled, blew smoke out the side of my mouth.

“It’s nice here,” Nichole said.

“Delightful. Don’t you miss the moon?”

“It’s right up there.” She smiled. “Come over some time, neighbor. We’ll have an ice cream cone and chat.”

“That apartment’s empty.”

“Only if you think it is,” she said, and winked.

I watched her go down the stairs, drop her trash in the dumpster and proceed into the night. MOON GIRL. Nichole. I finished my cigarette.

*

I worked part time in a warehouse belonging to the Boeing Company. The Homeland boys picked me up in the parking lot. Two men in dark suits with those American flag lapel pins stepped toward me, one on each side.

“Joseph Skadan?”

“Yeah.”

“Federal Agents.” They flashed their credentials. “We have to ask you to come with us.”

“You’re asking?”

The one who had spoken smiled without parting his lips.

“No choice, I’m afraid.”

*

First it was like a job interview. I sat across from a woman of middle years. She wore a pearl gray suit and glasses with red frames and what looked like a lacquered chopstick stabbed through the hair bun at the back of her head. In between questions and answers I entertained a fantasy about grabbing that chopstick and busting out of the Federal Building, Matt Damon-Bourne style.

Her questions turned strange and personal, and I knew I was being given a psych evaluation. I began to guard my responses. Which was pointless. Those tests anticipate and integrate prevarication. She asked about dreams. I made one up about a three-legged dog but kept the recurring one about my mother’s birch to myself.

Finally CHOPSTICK LADY (keep objectifying everyone and pretty soon it will be safe to start shooting) put her pad down and folded her hands over it.

“Mr. Skadan, I’d like you to sign an authorization paper. You aren’t obligated to sign it, of course. You are not under arrest or accused of a crime. But it is in your best interests to sign—and, I might add, the best interests of the United States, and perhaps the world community.”

“If I’m not under arrest, why did I have to come here?”

“You’re being detained.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A matter of degree and duration.”

She removed a document from her briefcase and pushed it across the table.

“This authorizes us to subject you to a technique called borderlanding.”

“I need a cigarette.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s borderlanding?”

“A variation on sleep deprivation methods used to extract information from enemy combatants. Of course, for borderlanding purposes it’s been modified. The object is to produce a state of borderland consciousness without the use of drugs.”

While she spoke I scanned the document.

“But I don’t have any information,” I said.

“Borderlanding isn’t to extract information, Mr. Skadan; its purpose is to draw out the Harbinger we suspect may be hiding in your unconscious mind.”

“Come on.”

“I am perfectly serious.”

“What if I don’t sign?”

“After a couple of days of close observation you will be free to go. But under provisions of the Modified Patriot Act the proper government agency will keep you under surveillance for an indefinite period of time. And of course your employer will be notified.”

I signed.

*

They kept me in a room with a table and a couple of hard chairs. My head was rigged with a Medusa’s tangle of wires. The wires ran into a junction box that fed data to a lab monitor somewhere. The light was bright and never went off. If I started to drift, loud music blasted into the room, or somebody came and pestered me.

“How are we doing, Joe?” a baldish guy with a corporate look asked me. His security badge identified him as Gerry Holdstock. Gerry.

“I’d like a cigarette is all.”

“It’s a non-smoking building, sorry. I want you to know we appreciate your cooperation. Borderlanding is the most promising method we’ve yet devised for isolating these anomalies. I do understand it’s uncomfortable for you.”

“I don’t believe in Harbingers,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I’d been awake for two days.

Gerry smiled.

“Which is part of the problem with outing them,” he said.

“How many have you outed so far?”

“That’s classified. Joe, let me ask you a question.” He leaned over me, one hand flat on the table and the other on the back of my chair. His breath smelled like wintergreen. “Do you have any idea how many people have disappeared without a trace since the Harbinger Event?”

“How many?”

“I can’t tell you. But it’s more than you think.”

“Well,
I
haven’t disappeared.”

“Not yet. But you’ve been identified as a potential MP. We’ve discerned a pattern in these disappearances. The first to go are marginal types on society’s fringes, the mentally ill, disaffected artists, failed writers. One will vanish from the face of the Earth, followed by mass vanishings of normal people. We have a computer model. And consider this. If you
do
disappear, you might be missed by friends and relatives (his tone indicated that he doubted it), but your absence would be absorbable without ripples of any consequence. Now imagine if someone important disappeared. Imagine if the
President of the United States
disappeared.”

“A disaster,” I said. “By the way who identified me as a potential?”

“I’m afraid that’s privileged information.”

“Whatever.”

Gerry patted my shoulder

“Hang in there.”

*

I didn’t know about Harbingers, but if they wanted a zombie they wouldn’t have long to wait. My head dropped. Audioslave blasted on the speakers. It didn’t matter; I felt myself slipping away. Then the music stopped. Sensing someone present, I managed to raise my head. The door remained shut, but Nichole was standing in front of it.

“Hello, Joe. Want to go for a walk with me?”

“Too tired.”

“You’re not tired at all.”

She was right. There was a moment when I felt like I was
supposed
to be tired, exhausted to the point of collapse. It was almost a guilty feeling, like I was getting away with something. Nichole crossed the room and stood beside me, offering her hand.

“Ready?”

The corridor was deserted. We entered an elevator. There were only two buttons, both unmarked. Up and Down? Nichole pushed the bottom one.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace safer to talk,” she said.

After a moment the doors slid open. Beyond was a parking lot and a burger joint, an Arctic Circle, with the big red, white, and blue sign and the chicken or whatever it was, the corporate mascot. I recognized it because I’d seen a run-down version of it once on a road trip to Spokane. My mother had pointed it out. It was just like the one she used to work in. “Better than McDonald’s and the best soft ice cream!”

“What is this,” I said.

“A safer place. Come on.”

Nichole pulled me across the parking lot, my shoes scuffing the asphalt. It was night. A few cars of 60s and 70s vintage gleamed under bright moonlight. Too bright, really. The moon was at least twice its normal size, bone white, so close I could discern topographical detail. India ink shadows poured over crater rims. There was a pinhead of color in the Sea of Tranquility. I looked back but the elevator, not to mention the Federal Building, was gone. We entered the shiny quiet of the empty restaurant and sat in a booth.

“Who
are
you?” I said.

“A girl named Nichole.”

“How do you pull off all these tricks?”

I reflexively patted my breast pocket, knowing there were no cigarettes there. But I felt a pack, pulled it out, and looked at it. Camel Filters, half empty, with a book of matches tucked into the cellophane sleeve.

“You did that one,” Nichole said.

“What one?”

“The cigarettes are one of
your
tricks. I don’t smoke.”

I twisored one out and lit up.

“This place is one of your ‘tricks,’ too. You’ve never had a safe place, Joe, so you borrowed one of your mother’s. I’ve been borrowing it, too, to help me understand you better. We haven’t much time, so I’m going to give you the
Reader’s Digest
version of what’s going on.”

I held hot smoke in my lungs then released it slowly.

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. They got it wrong. Earth
is
the center of the universe. At least the self-aware consciousness that has evolved there informs the emerging pan-universal consciousness. Now think of an egg timer.”

She picked one up that may or may not have been sitting next to the napkin dispenser a moment before. She cranked it slightly and set it down ticking.

“Transphysical ego-consciousness is the egg,” she said.

I regarded my Camel. My mind felt uncharacteristically sharp, lucid, but I knew it was unraveling in delusion.

Nichole said, “The timer started when the first inklings of self-awareness appeared. And at a certain moment—”

The timer went
ding!

“—the tipping point of human evolutionary consciousness arrives. A handful of individuals are on the leading edge. I’m one. You’re another. It’s pretty random as far as I can tell.”

There was a sound in the kitchen, like someone moving around. We both looked toward the service window behind the counter, but it was dark back there, and quiet again.

“So,” I said, “who are the Harbingers supposed to be then? Not that I believe in them, or you, or any of this.”

She smiled.

“They’re definitely not alien invaders. In fact they might be
us
, some unconscious projection of our desire toward growth and freedom. Or maybe they
are
a transdimensional race with a vested interest in seeing us successfully evolve forward. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that we make it, you know.”

“Isn’t it.”

“Are you okay, Joe?”

I looked at her through a veil of blue smoke. Past my personal tipping point, likely.

“If we fail to advance,” she said, “so does the conscious universe. Everything stagnates and begins a long
de
volution into separate numbered worlds of barbarism. The long decline.”

In the kitchen a utensil clattered to the floor. Nichole said, “Uh oh.”

I started to stand but she shook her head.

“What?” I said. “I thought you said this place was safe.”

“Safe-
er
.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“You’re on the brink,” she said, “but if you let your fears and neuroses and paranoia dominate, you could create a Dark World that will pull in weaker egos. That’s why this is so important.”

I made a sketchy pass with my cigarette. “Draw them into the great sucking pit of my neuroses.”

“It’s happened so many times already, Joe. We only need a handful to swing the balance toward positive evolution.”

“How many have you got so far?”

“One, counting me.”

I laughed. She did, too. We were down the rabbit hole together, if she even existed.

“Would it be so bad to believe me, Joe? To believe
in
me? At least consider the possibility. Thousands have disappeared into the Dark Worlds of a few. I need you to help me counterbalance things. You’re lucky. It’s a choice you get to make.”

“Order up!” somebody yelled. That voice.

I stood up facing the kitchen. Suddenly I was cold. Fluorescent lights began to flicker and a scarecrow shape stuttered into view.

“Sorry, Joe,” Nichole said, and she
pushed
hard at the base of my skull, a sharp locus of pain. I faltered, reached back, and found myself sitting on a hard chair in the interrogation room. I blinked, my head still aching. The door opened and Gerry walked through with a lab tech in blue scrubs.

“Was I asleep?” I said, my voice like a toad’s croak.

“Just drifting, Joe.”

The tech delicately removed the skull patches. I looked at Gerry. “I’m done?”

“Three days. It’s as far as we can go under the current charter.”

“What’d you find?”

“Nada.”

*

I slouched up Broadway in hazy sunlight, exhausted. Back in the numbered world. My eyes felt grainy and my head pounded. As I attempted to go around HOMELESS VET he grabbed my ankle.

“I served my country!”

“I’m broke,” I said.

“Come on, Joey. The End is near, give me some change.”

His voice had altered, and the bones of his face under the beard.

Paul Newman eyes.

I fled.

My apartment was dark. I racked up the shades. Daylight penetrated feebly through the dusty pane. I picked up the phone, dialed Cheryl’s number. Because she was the only person who
knew
me and I was afraid. The only real person. It rang three times before I hung up. I couldn’t reach out to her, not through the fog of betrayal. I just couldn’t.