Are You There and Other Stories (32 page)

“Trust me, Brian.”

Maybe it was the lingering wine buzz. But I decided I
did
trust him, or needed to, because he was the only one I ever
had
trusted. I closed my eyes. The breeze carried his smoke into my face. My dad had been redolent of that stink. Not a good sense-memory. But when I was little I loved the
look
of the cigarette cartons and packages, the way my dad would say,
Pack a Camels non-filter
, and the clerk would turn to the rack behind him and pick out the right one, like a game show.

“Now relax your mind,” Andy said.

“Consider it relaxed, Swami.”

“Try to be serious.”

“I’ll try.”

“Remember the empty mind trick they taught us, in case we ever got ourselves captured by unfriendlies?”

“Sure.”

“Do that. Empty your mind.”

It was easy, and I didn’t learn it from the Army. I learned it at my father’s knee, you might say. Survival technique number one: Empty your mind. Don’t be there. Don’t hear the screaming, even your own.

Andy said, “I’m going to say a word. When I do, let your mind fill with whatever the word evokes.”

I nodded, waited, smelling the Camel smoke, my head not empty in the way Andy wanted it to be. I was too preoccupied by a memory of smoke.

“Arrowhead,” Andy said.

I felt . . . something.

Andy said, “Shit.” And then, “What you are about to see is real. Okay, open your eyes.”

We were now standing outside a 7-Eleven store. The desert ran right up to the walls. A tumbleweed bumped against the double glass doors. The interior was brightly lit. In the back I could make out a pair of Slurpee machines slow-swirling icy drinks in primary colors. After a while I closed my mouth and turned to Andy.

“Where the hell did
this
come from?”

“Instant Unconsciously Directed Association. You like that? I made it up. Only I don’t know why this should be your Eyeooda for Arrowhead. I was hoping you’d bring up the real place. Anyway, let’s go inside while it lasts.”

He started forward but I grabbed his arm.

“Wait a minute. Are we still operating under the disengagement of preconceived notions policy, or whatever?”

He thought about it for a moment then said, “I guess not, now that we’re sharing a consensus reality. Brian, this 7-Eleven is actually the Arrowhead Instillation.”

The coal of an extinguished memory glowed dimly. I
knew
Arrowhead, or thought I did. A top-secret base located more or less in that part of the Arizona desert in which we now found ourselves. Or was/did it? The memory was so enfeebled that if I didn’t hold it just
so
it would blow away like dandelion fluff. Still, this wasn’t a military base; it was a convenience store.

“Bullshit?” I said.

“
Do
you remember Arrowhead?” Andy asked.

“Sort of. What is this, what’s going on?”

“Listen to me, Brian. We finally got one. We finally got an honest to God extraterrestrial—and it’s
in there
.”

“In the 7-Eleven.”

“No. In the Arrowhead facility that looks like a 7-Eleven in our present consensus reality. The alien is hiding itself and the instillation in some kind of stealth transdimensional mirror trick, or something. I’ve
been
here before. So have you. Our dreams can still remember. I’ve come out to the desert—I don’t know, dozens of times? I’ve talked to it, the alien. It shuffles reality. I keep waking up, then going back to sleep. Here’s the thing. It can cloak its prison, reinterpret its appearance, but it can’t escape.”

I regarded him skeptically, did some mental shuffling of my own, discarded various justifiable but unproductive responses, and said: “What’s it want?”

“It wants you to let it go.”

“Why me?”

“Ask it yourself. But watch out. That little fucker is messing with our heads.”

*

The store was empty. It was so quiet you could hear the dogs popping with grease as they rotated inside their little hot box. Okay, it wasn’t
that
quiet, but it was quiet. I picked up a green disposable lighter and flicked it a couple of times, kind of checking out the consensus reality. It lit.

Andy went around the counter and ducked his head into the back room.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for Squidward.”

“Squidward?”

“Yeah.”

Another dim memory glowed in the dark. For some reason I thought of the Seattle aquarium, where my father had taken us when I was little. It hadn’t been a fun experience. I remembered being vaguely repelled by some of the exotically alien examples of undersea creatures. Prescient echo from the future?

Andy snapped his fingers. “Right. Squidward likes it cool.”

I followed him into the cold storage run behind the beer, pop, and dairy coolers. A man sat on a couple of stacked cases of Rolling Rock, his legs crossed at the knees, hands folded over them. He looked Indian, that nut brown complexion. He was wearing a lavender suit.

“Squidward,” Andy said.

I tucked my hands snuggly under my armpits for warmth. “Has he asked to be taken to our leader yet?”

“I don’t remember.”

Squidward spoke up: “You are the torturer.”

We both looked at him.

“Sorry, not my gig,” I said.

Squidward nodded. “Your gig, yes.”

Something unsavory slithered in my stomach then lay still again.

“Andy,” I said, nodding toward the door.

He followed me out into the glaring light of the store.

“Talk to me,” I said.

He nodded, distracted. “I’m remembering most of it, but who knows what I’ll retain next time around. R&D developed some kind of souped-up spectrophotometer thing as a hedge against future stealth technology we suspected the Chinese were developing. During a middle phase test in Nevada we saw a vehicle doing some impossible maneuvers, somehow hiding between waves in the visible light spectrum. Naturally we shot it down.”

“Naturally.”

Andy clutched his pack of Camels, plugged one in his mouth, patted his pockets for matches. I handed him the Zippo.

“Thanks.”

He lit up.

“Anyway, it turns out we’re as much his captive as he is ours. Uh oh.”

Andy’s cigarette dropped from his lips, depositing feathery ash down the front of his sheepskin jacket. He blinked slowly, his eyes going out of focus, or perhaps refocusing inward.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“What?”

“Not again. I have to get
away
from this.”

He turned and stumped out of the store with the sloppy gait of a somnambulist.

“Hey—”

Outside the night absorbed him. I stiff-armed the door. Cold desert wind blew in my face. Andy was gone. So was the Cherokee. But he hadn’t driven away in it. I looked around where it had been parked. There were no tire impressions, nothing, just my warped shadow cast over the tawny grit.

I turned back to the 7-Eleven, its solid, glaring reality. I don’t know what hackles are exactly, but mine rose to attention. Out here in the desert, alone with a persistent illusion, I felt reduced. Childish fears came awake.

Exerting my will to power or whatever, I entered the store. The Slurpee machine hummed and swirled, hotdogs rotated. The fluorescent light seemed to stutter
inside
my head.

I looked at the coolers, the orderly ranks of bottles and cartons. Damn it.

I approached the door to the cold storage, put my hand on the lever. Fear ran through me like electric current. I felt the world begin to waver, and stepped back. The door, silver with a thick rubber seal, appeared to melt before my eyes. I felt myself slipping away, and so brought the force of my will down like a steel spike. The door resumed its expected appearance. I immediately cranked the handle and dragged it open.

Squidward sat on his beer case stool in exactly the same position he’d been in ten minutes ago.

“Make it stop,” I said.

“I don’t make things,” he replied. “I allow the multiplicity to occur.”

“Okay. So stop allowing the multiplicity.”

“Not possible, I’m afraid. My survival imperative is searching for a Probability in which you haven’t killed me.”

“But I
haven’t
killed you.”

“You have.”

I stepped toward him. That steel spike? Now it was penetrating my forehead, driving in.

“What do you want from us?”

“From you I want to live,” Squidward said. “We are bound until the death is allowed or not allowed, conclusively. I have perceived the occurrence of my expiration at your direction, unintended though it will be. Having access to all points of probability time in my sequence, I foresee this eventuality and seek for a probability equation that spares me. From your perspective also this is a desirable outcome. Without me to monitor and shuffle your world’s probabilities the vision vouchsafed your military leader may well occur.”

My eyesight shifted into pre-migraine mode. Pinwheel lights encroached upon my peripheral vision. I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes, fighting it, fighting it, fighting . . .

*

Probabilities shuffled . . .

*

I woke up next to my wife. In the ticking darkness of our bedroom I breathed a name: “Andy.”

Connie shifted position, cuddling into me. Her familiar body. I put my arm around her and stared into the dark, hunting elusive memories. Without them I wasn’t who I thought I was. After a while Connie asked:

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I think I was having a dream about Andy McCaslin. It woke me up.”

“Who?”

“Guy I knew from the Rangers, long time ago. I told you about him. We were friends.”

Connie suppressed a yawn. “He died, didn’t he? You never said how.”

“Covert op in Central America. He found himself in the custody of some rebels.”

“Oh.”

“They kept him alive for weeks while they interrogated him.”

“God. Are you—”

“That was decades ago, Con. Dreams are strange, sometimes.”

I slipped out of the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“Have some tea and think for a while. My night’s shot anyway.”

“Want company?”

“Maybe I’ll sit by myself. Go back to sleep. You’ve got an early one.”

“Sure? I could make some eggs or something.”

“No, I’m good.”

But I wasn’t. In my basement office, consoling tea near at hand, I contemplated my dead friend and concluded he wasn’t supposed to be that way. My old dreams of pain surged up out of the place at the bottom of my mind, the place that enclosed Andy and what I knew had happened to him, the place of batteries and alligator clips, hemp ropes, sharpened bamboo slivers, the vault of horrors far worse than any I’d endured as a child and from which I fled to the serenity of an office cubicle and regular hours.

But that wasn’t
supposed
to have happened, not to Andy. I rubbed my temple, eyes closed in the dim basement office, and suddenly a word spoke itself on my lips:

Squidward.

*

My name is Brian Kinney, and today I am not an alcoholic. My
father
was an alcoholic who could not restrain his demons. During my childhood those demons frequently emerged to torment me and my mother. Dad’s goodness, which was true and present, was not enough to balance the equation between pain and love. I had been skewing toward my own demon-haunted landscape when Andy McCaslin took my gun from my hand and balanced out the equation for me.

My new world order.

*

I’m driving through the moonless Arizona desert at two o’clock in the morning, looking for a turn-off that doesn’t exist. After an hour or so a peculiar, hovering pink light appears in the distance, far off the road. I slow, angle onto the berm, ease the Outback down to the desert floor, and go bucketing overland toward the light.

*

A giant pink soap bubble hovered above the 7-Eleven. Reflective lights inside the bubble appeared to track away into infinity. It was hard not to stare at it. I got out of my car and entered the store. The Indian gentleman in the lavender suit emerged from the cold storage run, a small suitcase in his left hand.

“What goes on?” I said.

“You remember,” he said, more command than comment.

And at that instant I did remember. Not just the bits and pieces that had drawn me out here but
everything
.

“My survival imperative sought for a Probability equation by which my death could be avoided. You are now inhabiting that equation. With your permission I will, too.”

“What do you need my permission for?”

“You would be the author of my death so you must also be the willing author of my continued existence. A law of probability and balance.”

I thought about Connie back home in bed, the unfathomable cruelty of my former Probability, the feeling of restored sanity. Like waking up in the life I
should
have had in the first place. But I also thought of Andy, and I knew it had to go back.

“No,” I said to Squidward.

“You must.”

“Not if my friend has to die. By the way, isn’t it a little warm for you?”

Squidward smiled. “I’m already in my ship.”

“Only if I allow it.”

“You will, I hope.”

“It’s the feathery thing,” I said.

“Behold.”

In my mind’s eye images of unimaginable carnage appeared then winked out. I staggered.

“I am a Monitor, coded to your world’s psychic evolution from birth,” Squidward said. “I subtly shuffle the broad Probabilities in order to prevent what you have just seen. Without me there is a high probability of worldwide military and environmental catastrophe. Such eventualities may be avoided and your species may survive to evolve into an advanced civilization.”

“That sounds swell, but I don’t believe you. You’ve been doing plenty of shuffling in captivity. With that power why do you need anything from
me?
”

“That’s merely my survival imperative, drawing on etheric energy from my ship’s transphysical manifestation. My survival, and perhaps your world’s, depend on you permitting this Probability to dominate.”

I didn’t allow myself to think about it.