Circuit Of Heaven (30 page)

“But I’m nothing,” Justine said. “I’m not real.”

Angelina shook her head, tossing her hair from side to side. “No, you’ve got it like totally backwards. Without you,
we’re
nothing. Coffee’s ready!” She took two mugs out of the cabinet, set them on a tray, and filled them with coffee. She picked up the tray and held it out for Justine.

“Don’t we need a third cup?”

Angelina wrinkled up her nose. “I never liked the stuff.”

Justine took the tray and walked back to the living room, where the old woman seemed surprised to see her. “I’ve brought the coffee. Angelina made it.”

The old woman shook her head. “I can’t remember things. The girl helps me. She’s a lovely young thing, isn’t she?” She noticed Ishmael on the coffee table. “Just shove him out of the way.”

Justine slid the cat across the table. He raised his head and looked at her, then went back to sleep. She put the tray on the table next to him. The old woman smiled as she took a mug of coffee from the tray, then her face clouded over. “She doesn’t remember Wade, though.”

Justine sat down beside the old woman and picked up the other mug. It was rich and dark and smelled of cinnamon. “Wade?”

“My husband. A good man. A patient man. I remember him. But there’s so much I’ve forgotten. I can’t even remember his birthday. He liked birthdays. He liked for me to make a big fuss.”

The old woman stared into space at some image from her past, a look of fond melancholy on her face. Justine’s heart went out to her. “Do you like it here?” she asked.

The old woman, startled from her reverie, looked around as if she’d forgotten where she was, then broke into a smile. “Oh yes, Justine. You can’t imagine. See there? I remember your name.
Justine
. So pretty. I’m stronger with you. I always wanted to be a singer, you know. I had a pretty voice. Everyone said so. I don’t know why I never did anything about it.” She shook her head. “That’s all water under the bridge. You sing beautifully, Justine.”

“Thank you.”

The old woman leaned forward confidentially. Timothy stood up in her lap and stretched, and she pushed him back down. “I like the sex, too.”

Justine blushed. “I didn’t realize—”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes indeed. But we can talk about that some other time.” She tilted her head toward the front door. “I think you better go talk to her before you go,” she said. “She’s having one of her moods.” She made an exaggerated frown.

Justine looked through the door and saw a woman sitting on the porch steps, leaning her back on one of the columns, looking out at the street. Justine turned back to the old woman, who gestured toward the door.
Go on
, she mouthed.

Justine set down her coffee and went out onto the porch. Sasha ran out after her and jumped up on the railing. The woman spoke without turning around. “Hello, Justine.” Her voice was flat and tired.

Justine sat down on the steps next to her and saw she was pregnant, holding her swollen belly in her hands. She was the woman in her dream who’d given birth. Her face was drawn and blank. Her hair was limp and stringy. She turned toward Justine with a rolling motion, offering her belly. “Come to feel the little bastard kick?” she asked, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

Justine knew the woman was speaking literally. “Does it really matter so much that he’s a bastard?”

The woman gave a dry humorless laugh. “You sound like good old Newman.”

“Nemo?”

The woman turned back to the street. Ishmael was stalking a bird in the yard. “No. Newman Rogers.” The ironic edge was gone.

“Newman Rogers? Is he the father?”

“Should’ve been, probably. But no, it wasn’t Newman. I couldn’t…” She sighed and shifted her weight. “I’ve narrowed it down to three guys. One of them didn’t have a name as far as I know. Real asshole. Probably him. Serve me right.”

She stood up, using the porch column to steady herself. “I used to say, ‘God, if I only had it to do all over again.’ Now I’ve got my wish.” She mounted the steps one at a time. “Almost enough to make you believe in God, isn’t it?” She gave the same hopeless laugh. “Almost.”

“You’re not happy here.”

“I’m not happy anywhere. My life is shit, okay? But you want to know what’s worse? I deserve it. I worked hard for it.”

“You don’t deserve it.”

“Prove me wrong.” She pointed at the sun low in the sky. “It’s time to wake up and face the music, Justine. Don’t give up on yourself like I did. That’ll make me happy. Just that.”

Justine opened her eyes, and she was lying in her bed. The sunlight through the window turned everything a reddish gold. She half expected to see one of the cats basking in the glow.

WHEN
JUSTINE
WENT
DOWN
TO
THE
LOBBY
,
SHE
WAS
SURprised to see Lawrence sitting across from the elevator. Passersby openly stared at him. When he caught sight of her, he rose to his feet and greeted her with a little wave of his huge hand. “Thought we might ride out to the Thornes together,” he drawled.

Justine stared at him, still in a daze from her dream. “I don’t understand. Did Nemo send you?”

Lawrence shook his big head. “No. Mr. Menso. He thought you might want to talk to a Construct, help you sort some things out.”

“You know Mr. Menso?”

“Go way back.”

She wondered why Mr. Menso had never mentioned that he knew Lawrence in all their talk about Nemo. Menso seemed to be the one person she could trust, but he frightened her also, so intense and unpredictable. “Who is he? He’s not just some bookseller, is he?”

Lawrence didn’t answer right away. “He’s many things. He’s a good man. The genuine article. He figured you might need a helping hand about now, and asked us to drop by. We’ve also been helping him locate somebody for you to download into. He can’t go outside himself, of course. We help him out whenever he’s got business outside.”

Justine looked around the lobby, people hurrying in and out, going about their business. “I need to sit down,” she said. She lowered herself into a chair, leaned her head back against the wall, and stared up at the ceiling. It was flat black with tiny lights sprouting out of it. It was supposed to look like a starry sky, but you could see the shadows of the fiber optics if you looked too closely. She was vaguely aware of Lawrence taking the chair beside her. “What’s going on, Lawrence? Things are coming at me too fast, and I don’t even know who I am. I feel like Humpty Dumpty.”

“We remember that feeling. Folks’re used to having their heads to themselves. Takes them a while to warm up to the idea. But you get used to it. After a while, you even prefer it. Three heads are better than one, especially if you don’t have to actually have the three heads. Course we could do without this damn lizard suit. We keep looking for the zipper on the damn thing. Haven’t found it yet. You, on the other hand, got yourself a
real
nice outfit.”

Justine looked over at Lawrence and smiled. “I see why Nemo likes you so much. How did you become a Construct? I don’t remember anything about how it happened.”

“In our case, we all answered ads in the early twenties—good money for fifteen minutes of your time. Medical research, they told us. We went into a place like a dentist’s office, signed a bunch of forms we didn’t read, and sat in a chair in a round room. A voice suggested we relax, and then it was over. We felt nothing except a little richer. We were recorded, stored, apparently went our ways and lived our lives, unaware we’d show up again as Lawrence. Next thing we know, it’s March 21, 2064. Our birthday. Our other lives were all over by then. We don’t know how they turned out, but we got a whole new life out of the deal.”

“You never felt used? manipulated?”

Lawrence shrugged. “We all lived and died same as we would’ve. Nothing was taken from us. They only used recordings of people who’d already died. We’re genetically designed for a long, healthy life. Hell, being a seven-foot, bona fide dragon even has its moments. We’ve never been lonely. We had the son we always wanted, and we raised him up right. We’ve been through a lot together, and if we had to do it all over, we’d answer that ad again in a heartbeat.”

Justine tried to imagine Lawrence’s life, his stoic acceptance of it. “That’s why you were made, wasn’t it? To take care of children?”

“That’s right. We all must’ve scored high on the nurturing scale, though Nemo would say it was the kick-butt scale.”

She smiled at his humor, but her heart ached at the images of Nemo that filled her mind. “I don’t see how things are going to work out so great for me.”

“You only been here a few days, Justine. Give it a chance.”

“Do you know why I was made?”

He looked at her with his bright green eyes. They almost seemed to glow. His pupils were narrow, vertical slits. “According to Nemo, you were made for him. You should hear him on the subject. Enough to put you off sweets for a week. Course, that’s just his opinion. You can try to talk him out of it if you want to, but we don’t think you’ll get anywhere. Nobody’s forcing Nemo to do anything. Not that you could. Boy makes up his own mind, that’s for damn sure. We usually find it easier just to go along with him.”

You could hear his fondness for Nemo in his voice. It comforted her to talk to him, someone who’d understand how she felt about him. “I have to tell him the truth.”

“Course you do.”

“What do you think he’ll do when I tell him?”

“He’ll go into a low orbit. But you watch—he’ll do the right thing.”

She hung her head, speaking to the floor. “And what is that?”

“It won’t make any difference to him that you’re a Construct, Justine. We suspect he wishes he was one himself. Once he got our name right, he didn’t care what we were.”

Justine stared at her hands, running her thumb back and forth across the guitar-playing calluses on her left hand, remembering the old woman’s twisted hands, Angelina’s polished nails, the other one’s clenched fists. “I don’t say ‘we,’” she said. “Why is that?”

Lawrence held his hands out beside hers, studying them. “At first you’re a bunch of I’s, scared shitless, like a sack of wet cats. Then you get resigned to the fact there’s no way out of the sack. Still, you hold yourself back, you didn’t ask for this shit. These weird memories, strange ways of thinking about things, emotions you never felt before. Hell, even the food don’t taste right.” He turned his hands back and forth. “Even your own hands. But after while you start living this new life, giving up the old ones, little by little. Before you know it, you want this life, you got things you want to do with it—all of you, together. That’s when you start saying ‘we.’ You might not even notice when it first happens. It’ll seem like the most natural thing in the world.” He cupped her hands in his. Her whole hand was the size of his palm.

“But who is Justine, then?”

He stood up, pulling her to her feet. “A new life,” he said. “A whole new life.” He made it sound like something wonderful.

NEMO
WOKE
TO
HIS
ALARM
CLOCK
RINGING
. HE groped for the button and pushed it in, resting his hand on top of the clock. He opened his eyes a crack. He was on top of the covers, in his own bed, dressed except for his shoes. Didn’t know how or when he’d gotten there. Didn’t remember setting his alarm. He could feel the clunk of its
tick-tock
in the palm of his hand. He stared at the ceiling, replaying the night before. Especially the part where Justine told him to stay away and took off without saying a word. Especially that part.

He picked up the clock and set it on his chest. A little after five. At seven, he’d see Justine. Or not. Depending. Depending on what, he didn’t know.
I have to figure some things out
, she said. Then what? Another note on the mantel? She said she loved him, but Rosalind had signed her note
love
. She’d even said she was leaving
because
she loved him. At least his folks hadn’t tried to run that one by him.

But then, he’d never loved Rosalind either, no matter what they told each other at the time. Justine was different. He couldn’t lose her. He traced his fingertips around the face of the clock. He just couldn’t. He set the clock on the bedside table and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He felt better than he had the last time he’d stayed in too long. His head was stuffed with cotton, but at least he wasn’t dizzy. Fourteen hours totally unconscious must’ve been just what he needed.

He picked up his shoes, and rose to his feet. Water was dripping slowly into the pan on top of the refrigerator. It must’ve rained sometime, though it looked clear outside now. He really should empty out the pan—you could tell it was almost full by the sound of the drops—but now that he was standing, he didn’t feel that good. He shuffled downstairs, holding on to the rust-pocked chrome banister salvaged from a Chevy truck, wondering what the hell there was to eat. He didn’t have time to kill and dress and cook a rabbit.

Okra. It’d been Lawrence’s idea to plant it, but even he couldn’t stand the slimy sight of it anymore. I’m going to miss this place, Nemo thought. If I’m lucky.

JONATHAN
WAS
SITTING
AT
THE
KITCHEN
TABLE
READING
the Bible. He took off his reading glasses as Nemo came in and closed the Bible. “How’re you doing?”

Pleasant as always. Things were so simple for Jonathan. Some guy died going on 3000 years ago, rose into heaven a few days later, and that was all you needed to know until Judgment Day. Nemo slumped into a chair, dropping his shoes on the floor. “Not worth a shit. How did I get home?”

“Lawrence went up to D.C. and got you around two or three this morning. He had someplace to go, so he asked me to hang around and keep an eye on you. He left you some beans on the stove.”

“Bless him,” Nemo said, rising to his feet and leaning over the counter to pluck a saucepan of beans from the stove. He sat down at the table, shoveling beans into his mouth with a spoon. “Thanks for babysitting, but I’m fine. Just a little undernourished.” He had to stop and chew, catch a breath. “Where is Lawrence, anyway?”