Are You There and Other Stories (9 page)

I stood on the sidewalk, head craned way back, staring up the copper face of the Outbound Center. The sky was clear and twilight was upon the world. The first stars had begun to appear. I thought of lying on the roof of the house with my father, watching the shuttles go up, their propellant streaking goblin green across the sky. “There are other worlds now,” he had said to me, referring to the advent of Kessel’s Outbound Drive. “And if you’re good enough you can go to them,” he added.

If you’re good enough
.

Almost pathologically self-critical. In dad’s view, I guess, he hadn’t been good enough to make NanOptions a success. He poured his heart into it, and when it failed he accounted his life a failure, too, and put an end to it. That was certainly a greater failure as far as my mother was concerned. After a year or so she started dating. Indiscriminately.

So I finished growing up mostly on my own, and eventually I figured out the neuro-stim thing for dad. It’s always easier to make someone else’s dream work. Insurance money helps, too.

*

Anca, who didn’t have a mouth like Lynn’s, sat as near the fire as she could, huddled inside my overcoat. She was always cold. The fire was in a floating bar on Elliot Bay called Aquablue. The flames cycled through a chemically dictated rainbow pallet. Management dialed the walls and floor to vitreous invisibility. Anca and I and the fire and the tan leather sofa thing all seemed to float upon the surface of the bay. Maybe it was that choppy green water and the steely cloud scud that made her feel so cold.

“I’ve been thinking about your lost one,” Anca said.

“Hmmm.”

“I think you like her out there where she can’t touch you.”

“There’s some truth to that.”

Anca held my hand. Her fingers were ice cold.

I remembered sitting on this same sofa (it was a sunnier day, though) with Lynn. This was where she told me the results of her Outbound exam. Lynn’s hands were always warm and they had been that evening, especially warm in the memory of a thousand intimacies. I’m sorry, she had said, but you’re stuck in your fear and I can’t wait.

Anca was on her third glass of wine. After a while I told her the results of
my
Outbound exam. Her grip tightened on my hand. And when I looked into her face and told her about my one irrevocable decision I could transmit nothing. Nothing.

*

Because Outbound was the only truly irrevocable decision. Once Outbound there was no returning. In a peculiar way, Outbound ships are like Ouroboros, self-consuming. They measuredly convert their specialized mass to energy, feeding it into a tachyon funnel,
becoming
the funnel. By the time you arrive in the Promised Land you barely
have
a ship anymore.

*

There is a longish period while you transit out of the solar system. A period in which there occurs more than enough time to recall and reform the recent past, to come up with stuff like lips that quirk to hold in the happy bug, and to notice that even in the absence of artificial neuro-stimulation, feelings of attachment persist. There is also time to remember the things you tried not to remember otherwise. Things besides the shape of a mouth and the sweetness of a long confessional summer. The way a person abandoned you, for instance, after you surrendered all your secret pain. Even after that. The transit between Earth and the interstellar gulf, then, is the vacuum between Chimeras.

Then the Outbound Drive kicks in. The stars gather into a whirling funnel. A knot tightens under your heart, and the ship begins to devour itself.

Overlay

B
ad memories haunted me. I kept my good ones in a box under the bed. It was a small box.

Sweating in the coffin-sized apartment
Northeast News Stream Services
provided, I sat in my underwear and fingered listlessly through the meager selection of loops. I was wasted but couldn’t sleep. A Passenger had borrowed my body the previous night. Rubbing the back of my neck, I could feel the hard, little button Thixton’s people had implanted under the skin at the base of my skull, the portal.

As with everyone else, my deepest memory impressions occurred before my twelfth birthday, and it was only from that rich memory soil that Dreamloops could be readily fashioned. So I had none of my wife, Cynthia. There was a way of altering near-memory engrams to make them more adaptable to loop technology, and I was working on that. But for now I picked out one of my childhood favorites. Long ago when I was little “Scottie” Kriegel I’d gone Halloweening for the first time. Lying back, I dropped the loop into the player and closed my eyes.

Run the spooky shadows, wind-sway of birch branches under arc sodium light. My right fist tight around the handle of my plastic pumpkin bucket. Big brother James holding my left paw. Sweat and rubber stink inside the mask. We approach the door, which has six panels and is swaged with cotton cobwebs. James tells me to ring the bell, which I do.

And that’s where it goes wrong.

Because there’s another door overlaying the one in my memory loop. It’s a slate gray slab with the number 217 stenciled at eye level, and it opens because I’ve just swiped a key card. It swings in, slightly out of sync with the Halloween door. And then I’m having some kind of schizophrenic mind-split experience. I’m seven years old trick-or-treating my little heart out, and I’m thirty-eight years old stalking into a strange co-op. A woman turns from the window. Her body is barely concealed by a gossamer shadow that clings to her skin and halts at mid-thigh. There’s a home-rolled cigarette between her fingers, and smoky light ladders up the half-open blinds to the accompaniment of helicopter chop. Her lips are black, her tightly razored hair gleams like tarnished copper, and Mrs. Henneke from across the street is wearing a pointy witch hat but smiles like my grandmother and says I’m the cutest thing. The woman with black lipstick says,
Did you kill that boy?
and I show her my hands. A miniature Snickers bar drops into my virgin bucket—

The loop ran to the end of its maximum two-minute duration. The player clicked off. I listened to my breath.

*

Franz Thixton threw his head back and slurped an oyster into his florid, jowly face. He replaced the empty shell on the plate, lips glistening with juice, and wiped his fingers fussily on a linen napkin. Even though we were sitting outside, the smell of the oysters flirted with my nausea switch. Or maybe it wasn’t the oysters.

“You don’t look good, Scott,” he said. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

I brushed the backs of my fingers against two day’s growth of beard stubble. “I’ll start hitting the gym,” I said. “You want to buddy up?”

He laughed asthmatically. I didn’t like the proprietary way he looked at me, but I guess it made sense.

“In all seriousness,” he said.

“Look,” I said. “What I wanted to talk to you about was boundaries. Our agreed upon boundaries.”

Thixton sopped up oyster juice with a hunk of French bread then pushed the bread into his mouth with his blunt fingers, as if he were loading something. He chewed methodically and looked at me like I was a good suit of clothes that needed pressing. It was the same look he’d given me on the day I met him, at a press function after the dedication of the Thixton Terminal, Back Bay station. He had picked me out of the crowd of journalists. Naively I’d thought I was going to get a private interview. That’s how fogged I was in the first months following Cyn’s murder.

“What about them?” he said now, referring to boundaries.

“Nothing illegal,” I said. “That was the agreement.”

“So I recall. And no scars. Did you find a scar?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no problem.”

“Just nothing illegal,” I said. “I mean it.”

He skinned his upper lip back and pried with an ivory toothpick at something green between his teeth.

“Do you have a particular illegality in mind,” he said, “or are you simply seeking in your own clumsy way to terminate our relationship?”

“No, no. I don’t want—”

“Perhaps you’ve found yourself the recipient of an unforeseen inheritance.”

“No.”

“Lottery ticket? A spectacular day at the track?”

I shook my head.

“Too bad,” he said. “Luck is a wonderful companion.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Thixton picked up his glass of Chablis and drained it off in one greedy draft.

“Then let me set your mind at ease,” he said. “As your passenger I haven’t incurred any traffic tickets, nor distributed any bribes, nor robbed any banks. I certainly don’t
need
to rob a bank, anyway.”

He put his empty glass down and stood, the servos of his dead leg’s exo-frames whirring loud enough to draw stares from other tables.

“Go home and shave, for God’s sake,” he said. “Don’t you ever look at yourself?”

“Not as often as you, I’m sure.”

He grunted and walked away, whirring and clicking, the exo-frames pinching at his baggy slacks. People stared not only because of
who
he was but
what
he was.

I looked at my crab salad then pushed it away.

Did you kill that boy?

My hands were clean.

*

I returned to my apartment on the ragged edge of the Boston Sprawl, Medford Township. Sleep continued to elude me. Being ridden by a Passenger denies you your REMs, flattens you out, and paradoxically keeps you vibrating above sleep’s sweet threshold for two or three days afterward—then you drop into sleep so lightless and abrupt it might as well be a coma. It can also in some cases have the unfortunate consequence of permanently shorting out your sleep centers, which is why passenger arrangements are illegal. That and the inevitable possibility of body jacking for various unwholesome purposes. I was willing to risk the consequences for a chance at seeing my wife again, if only in vivid memory-loop recall. Certain very expensive drugs had already begun to modify my near-memory engrams. Perhaps that’s why the overlay had occurred. Thixton paid well for the occasional use of my body.

I picked through some notes and hammered out five hundred words of scintillating prose concerning the “kinder/gentler” Homeland checkpoint makeover, filed the story with NENSS, and crashed with a beer and the TV.

And there she was! The girl with the tarnished copper hair, part of a guerrilla theater group perpetrating some disruptive art on the Boston Common, something to do with black body suits, red paint, and wrist-to-wrist paper chains. It was a quikclip on MSNBC, a disposable eyeflash that cut out right after the cops waded in with their movealongs.

I called a friend, a third banana news director on the network, and asked if he could ID the girl. He could and did, after an hour or so.

*

Her name was Rhonda Reppo, and her co-op’s security was laughable. I paged her room from the lobby.

“Ms. Reppo?”

“Yes. Franz—?”

“My name’s Scott Kriegel.”

A pause. “And?”

“And I’d like to talk to you.”

“Do I know you, Mr. Kriegel?”

“It’s about Franz Thixton.”

Another pause, this one longer. Then: “What about him?”

“It would be easier if I came up.”

“Easier for whom?”

“Look, I’m not interested in any arrangement you might have with Thixton. It isn’t about you.”

“I don’t know what you think you mean by ‘arrangement’ but I guess you can come up. Bear in mind I don’t have all day.”

Number 217 on a gray slab door. It opened, and Rhonda Reppo’s face morphed through a variety of reactions then settled on stoic neutrality. She wasn’t made up as she’d been in the overlay. Her pale lips and unlined eyes verged on wholesome vulnerability. Right. She turned and walked into the room. No clinging gossamer today; jeans and a green silk blouse. I followed her in and closed the door behind me.

Her place wasn’t much bigger than mine, though her taste was a quantum leap beyond. And of course the indulgence of such taste isn’t usually cheap.

“Drink?” she said.

“I’ll have what you’re having.”

“
I’m
having a joint, and I don’t share.”

“Beer, then.”

“Be serious.”

“Scotch?”

She sat on the white sofa and opened a red lacquered box that held her drug paraphernalia. I stood there like any inanimate object you care to name. She grinned up at me. “It’s your bottle and you know where it is,” she said.

“I don’t—”

But I did. I’m not a scotch drinker, and yet standing in the middle of her apartment the word had appeared in my mind naturally and I even experienced a desire for it. Now I breathed out, allowed the tension to relax from my body, and I found myself walking into the tiny kitchen and opening the cabinet over the stovetop. Horse finding his way home. Somatic memory reflex. I reached for the bottle of Lafroaig and poured a couple of amber-gold ounces into a glass.

She was already smoking when I re-entered the room, the air pungent with a melancholy haze of dope. I sat opposite her in a spindly appearing chair, more skeletal artwork than functional furniture.

“You found it,” she said.

I nodded, sipped, put the glass down. “It still tastes like mercurochrome.”

“Franz loves it.”

“I’m sure he does.”

She dragged primly on her joint and sat back, looking at me in a peculiar way that made me want to squirm. Instead of squirming, I told her why I was there. I explained the memory overlay and what I’d heard her say. She went on looking at me after I’d finished. The moment became uncomfortably elastic.

“Look,” I said. “I want to know what you meant by asking Thixton whether he’d killed someone.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I don’t believe you. And I wish you wouldn’t stare at me like that.”

She laughed. “But it’s
fasc
inating.”

She made me so nervous I found myself reaching for the scotch again, despite the medicinal—to my taste—flavor. It burned down my throat and almost immediately fumed up into my sleep-deprived brain.

“This is quite a study in opposites,” Rhonda said. “When it’s Franz he—”

“He what?”

She began preparing another joint. “He likes to be in charge.”

“In what way?”

She snorted.

“Tell me.”

“In a rough way, what do you think?”

“I think the price must be right.”

She lit the new joint with a Zippo and drew hard on it, holding the smoke in her lungs before finally breathing out. She slumped back on the cushions and regarded me with moist, drooping eyes.

“The price is right,” she said. “For both of us.”

I drank some more mercurochrome.

“I know all about you,” she said. “Franz laughs. He says you’re pathetic, selling yourself for the price of a few memory loops.”

I grunted.

“I can get under your skin so easy,” she said. “Franz’s skin is like Rhino hide.”

“What about the murder?” I said.

“You’re persistent.”

“I’m a reporter. It comes with the job.”

“You looking for a story, then?”

I shook my head. “I just want to know.”

She pulled her legs up on the sofa, feline sinuosity, and I recalled the gossamer thing and the black lipstick.

“What if he did kill someone while he was riding you, what would you do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it would make a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It just would.”

She reached out and dropped the tiny, glowing scrap of the joint in the ashtray on the table, stretched, and stood up.

“You have a car?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go for a drive,” she said.

*

She pointed and I turned. We rolled past grimy brick buildings. I knew the area. My skin felt prickly with sweat and nerves. A Boston police cruiser idled at the curb, flashers alternating, a man in the caged backseat staring out the window like he was watching TV while the cop filled in paperwork on a clipboard. A little farther on Rhonda said stop. We were in front of an empty storefront and a green fire hydrant. Across the street there was a nightclub with a red door.

“Franz drove me down here a few weeks ago,” Rhonda said. “There was a boy standing on the sidewalk right over there. Only he wasn’t just standing; he was advertising. Young, fifteen. Sixteen—
maybe
. Franz asked me if I thought the kid was good looking.”

Something ugly uncoiled in my stomach.

“Yeah?” I said.

“I told him I wouldn’t touch the kid with a ten foot pole even if I was wearing a full bio-hazard suit. So Franz said something like, I don’t blame you. He’s fucking scum and I’m going to kill him.”

“And that’s who you were asking about in my memory loop overlay?”

“Yes.”

“Did Franz kill him?”

“I’m hungry,” Rhonda said. “Let’s get out of this neighborhood.”

*

We hit a brewpub near Fenway Park, ordered pints of Revolution Ale and club sandwiches.

“What do you think our patron is having for lunch?” I said.

She almost choked on her sandwich. “Our
patron
. You’re too funny. Do me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

“Kiss me.”

“Why?”

“I want to compare. You know, is it what’s inside that counts?”

“Let’s skip it.”

“Chicken.”

I bit into my sandwich.

“How did your wife die?”

I chewed, swallowed, and said, “Let’s skip that, too.”

“Was she a reporter like you?”

I sighed, put down my sandwich. “Yes, she was a reporter. She was murdered. Not too far from the street corner you took me to.”

“Was she a good reporter?”

“She was good enough, which in our line pegs you to second rate venues, second rate pay scales, and second rate lives. She had ambition, though. She was chasing some mystery story on her own time when she got killed.”