Duplex (3 page)

I
WISH THIS WAS A DIFFERENT STORY. THE VESSELS sailed and sailed and eventually they fell off the edge. You can have all the information in the world and what good does it do you? The edge of the world is a real place; when you have no soul there are no limits. There was a game everyone used to play at birthday parties called musical chairs. A parent would put a record on the record player and cheerful music would start up, disguising the fact that someone was about to be cast into the outer dark where the fairies live.

Eddie returned to school as if nothing had happened and Miss Vicks acted as if he had never been gone, withholding the favors she usually granted sick students like clapping the erasers or feeding the goldfish. She knew it wasn’t Eddie though, that the thing sitting in Eddie’s seat wasn’t the same Eddie who’d been sitting there before. She couldn’t take out a measuring tape and measure him but she felt sure he was bigger—bigger and less apprehensive and nowhere near as sweet. Down came the sailing vessels, up went the turkeys. The first-grade teacher married a man with legs made of wood. It was a mast year; a tremor ran through all the mothers. The wind blew. The clouds spread out and draped themselves across the face of the weather. A snowflake fell and then another and then many snowflakes. There was a holiday recital during which Cindy XA did twenty solo fouettés, passing wraithlike through matter like a neutrino.

The wind was a woe but not personal. Spiky black balls blew off the sycamores lining the street. Two of the “special” children sickened and died. At some point in high school Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; Eddie was very tall now and slicked his hair back with a comb he carried in a shirt pocket located in the same place as the one the girl with golden hair had flown into years earlier. There was never any question that he and Mary would become sweethearts, but things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.

Even so, the look of Eddie—his obvious preoccupation with a secret he kept hidden from everyone, the way he glanced from under his lowered eyelids while counting something off on his fingers,
one, two, three
—excited Mary; she would sneak out of class to meet him in the last stall in the girls’ bathroom. Though he insisted he wasn’t any different from the way he’d always been, something about him felt completely different to her, almost like he was made of the same material as the horse they had to jump across in gym. Whenever she tried asking him where he’d gone that summer night so many years ago he looked at her like she was crazy. “Don’t be a jerk,” he’d say. “I never went anywhere.”

But she knew Eddie wasn’t telling her the truth. Ever since that night the world had been lit differently—everything had grown brighter, much too bright, really, facing west toward the world’s rim.

Of course he was her date for the prom.

The dress Mary wore was on loan from the robots—the master bedroom closet at number 37 contained many such treasures, though, sadly, the original Mrs. Andersen’s feet had been a lot smaller than hers. The dress, on the other hand, seemed like it had been made for her. “You have to come try it on after school,” Cindy told Mary, the idea being that they were supposed to behave like friends. As far as Mary knew, she was the first person invited inside number 37 since the robots moved to the neighborhood.

The house felt overpoweringly stuffy. The windows were never opened, the robots having no need of air, and the sofa cushions were lumpy and slick, the robots having no need of comfort either. At the time of Mary’s visit they were flying around and around the ceiling fixture, making a faint sound like hedge clippers—as soon as she was gone they planned to roost there and recharge. She could hear the sound they made but she didn’t know what was making it. She could also hear a muffled set of thumps, exactly like the sound a pair of feet might make coming down a flight of stairs, though she couldn’t see anyone. It seemed like the sound was coming from the other side of the wall in number 39, like the way Miss Vicks’s feet sounded to her coming down the stairs in number 49, only heavier. The people who lived in number 39 had moved out right after the robots moved in. A For Sale sign appeared on the front lawn, but it got taken down soon afterward.

Presently something came into the room and sat beside Mary on the sofa. Its physical presence was cold and large and animal-like yet not so heavy that it made a dent in the cushion; it had sour breath with a sweet edge as if it had just eaten those pellets the special children in room 12 fed their guinea pig. This must be Downie, Mary thought.

Before the robots moved into the house the Andersens had lived there. Mr. Andersen had been a famous scientist, Mrs. Andersen a housewife, Cindy and Carol their two lovely daughters. Eventually a third child joined the family. They called him Downie because of the extreme softness of his hair; for some reason his lanugo never fell out, leaving him covered with a beautiful coat of soft, grayish hair. Downie was a large, plump boy, sweet and tender like Mrs. Andersen had been, but he could do nothing for himself, which turned out to be a problem the Andersens didn’t know how to handle. At some point they must have moved him next door into number 39, though Mary couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to get into number 37 without her seeing.

“Mary,” Downie said. “You’re as pretty as Cindy said.”

“Cindy said I was pretty?”

In his lap she could see a bundle of pink fabric that she thought might be the prom dress.

Above her head the robots were going wild. Even though whatever was sitting beside her on the sofa had done nothing to hurt her they knew that if it wanted to it could crack her in two, suck out the meat and throw away the rest, like a person eating a lobster.

“Mary,” Downie said. “I can’t give this to you until we get a few things straight. No no no! Don’t look at me. You can look at me later. Look over there!”

A very old television, one of the ones with a small oval screen in a large wooden box, had come on across the room, but before it did Mary had caught a glimpse of a pair of large sad blue eyes, their blueness swimming around in a wide, open face. There wasn’t much to see in the way of programming, mostly a few ancient reruns. “Good work,” said a man wearing a white cowboy hat and a white shirt laced up the front like a shoe. This was Sky King and he was commending his niece for handing over to him the stolen ruby she had just found tied to a carrier pigeon’s leg. The actor who played the part would die in a car crash on his way to watch the launch of the space shuttle
Challenger,
later sparing him the sight of what became, for its day, a tragedy of epic proportion.

“Mary Mary Mary!”

Mary continued to stare at the TV but nodded her head to let Downie know she was listening.

“We’re pinning all our hopes on you,” Downie said.

“On me?”

“You’ve got a big job ahead,” Downie said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“A big job?”

The room had grown so still Mary could hear only the sound of something inside herself quietly pounding. The volume on the TV was turned all the way down and the robots were lying on the rug in the light cast by the TV screen, glinting like spilled pocket change.

“A lot of time is going to go by, or at least that’s what it’s going to seem like to you, and the timing is going to have to be just right. More than just right. It’s going to have to be perfect. Everything hinges on its being perfect, like the hinge on a door. If the hinge doesn’t work perfectly the door is useless. Plus you’re not going to get much in the way of advance warning, and by the time you get it you’re going to have forgotten we ever had this conversation. You’re going to have forgotten a lot of things, including what’s at stake. The most important thing to remember is that a duplex’s properties are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went. I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You live in one yourself. You’ve heard the way Miss Vicks drops things, the way she bangs the drawers and doors and windows. You’ve had the contact dreams.”

“I’m not sure,” Mary said, thinking. It was true that sometimes while she slept all she saw were great shimmering panels of numbers, as sharply bright and beyond reckon as stars in the sky. Other times she felt something lowering itself into her. It would start pumping and it would be like water entering water through a hose, turning her sleek like a seal and without thoughts but a pulse, and when she woke she’d be drenched in sweat.

On the TV screen the little Cessna Sky King called the Songbird took off, carrying him and his niece home to their ranch in Arizona. Mary felt a hand reach for hers and when she looked, there was Cindy sitting on her other side in her cheerleader uniform. Outside the house Miss Vicks’s dachshund was barking the high-pitched excited barks that could only mean one thing—the sorcerer was in the neighborhood.

“You have to go home,” Cindy said, looking anxiously out the bay window.

“I thought you wanted me to try the dress on first,” Mary said.

“There isn’t time for that now,” Cindy told her.

THE PROM DRESS WAS PINK AND HAD A PRINCESS neckline and a full skirt composed of overlapping layers of taffeta and tulle. There was what looked like a small cigarette burn near the hem, practically invisible.

“Smoking must have been fun,” Mary said to Eddie.

In keeping with prom night tradition, he had reserved a booth for them at the Captain’s Table. The restaurant was filled with other prom goers and chaperones; it had a nautical theme, its walls covered with paintings of seascapes by local artists, not a one of whom had ever been anywhere near the sea.

While Eddie was busy studying the menu, Mary was studying the hem of her dress, trying to avoid having to look at the painting hanging above their booth. In it a sailboat sat directly atop the water in the light of the moon. The water had a curve to it like the meniscus on a glass of milk but other wise looked rock solid. You could almost
feel
the painter trying to get the water right and failing—“missing the boat,” Mary said—though maybe all she was feeling was Eddie’s wish for her to stop talking about the painting in such a loud voice.

“I’m going to have the combination plate,” Eddie said. “Only without shad. What about you?”

“I hate shad too,” Mary said. She thought Eddie looked especially good tonight in his black tuxedo and red baseball cap. Not only had he ended up handsomer than everyone expected, he’d also been elected captain of the baseball team. “Order me the same,” she said, holding Mrs. Andersen’s purse aloft suggestively. “You know where to find me.”

The waiter pointed her down a long hallway, unlit aside from a red bulb flickering at the end of it. Mary proceeded cautiously, the only other source of light the glow from around the door to the kitchen.

Her plan was to wait for Eddie in the bathroom the way she did at school, with her skirt hiked up around her waist and her underpants down around her ankles. At school there was barely enough room in the last stall for him to press her against the wall, and when she tilted her head to kiss him she would see the same spider web that had been there since they’d been in seventh grade. Now that they were seniors, usually he was the one who brought the whiskey, but tonight Mary had Mrs. Andersen’s flask.

A trickle of music entered the restaurant bathroom through speakers in the ceiling. The room was nicer than the one at school but not much; there were two stalls with dark wood doors and old-style toilets, a pedestal sink just for show, a photograph of a dog wearing sunglasses and a fur stole to hide the dactilo port. “Hi there,” Mary said to herself in the mirror. She smiled before she remembered that she couldn’t stand the sight of herself smiling. The French twist was a nice touch though, and pink was a good color on her; it made her look young even though she knew she had been endowed with the disposition of an old person long before she actually became one.

Mary went into the stall and pulled down her panties and waited. They were pink like her dress and embroidered with black flowers. Soon enough someone else entered the bathroom. But Eddie would never wear shoes like the ones Mary saw through the opening at the bottom of her stall door, their pointed tips pausing there in front of her for a moment before turning into the stall next to hers. She heard a zipper being unzipped, the protracted sound of a man urinating, like coins falling into a box on a bus.

“That’s better,” said the sorcerer.

The proximity of Mary filled him with excitement; he had to work to slow his breathing. A drop, another drop—he was flicking his penis dry. It grew long and thin, the corona pointed and cleft like a hoof. “Don’t worry,” the sorcerer said. “Your boyfriend’s preoccupied.” He shifted his feet. “Hello in there. Are you listening to me?”

When she didn’t answer he tapped the wall between them once, hard, with the sharp tip of his index fingernail. “You’re right—every idiot thinks he can paint water. It takes genius and even then—well, I don’t have to tell you.”

Mary still didn’t answer. A large black ant was walking along the ledge that held the toilet tissue and she made herself focus on it, the way its abdomen was gleaming like patent leather. She had never felt so naked in her life.

“If you were an ant, you wouldn’t be stuck in there that way,” the sorcerer said, and as he did the ant came to a halt. “Don’t cry,” he said.

“I’m not crying!” Mary replied, though she hadn’t realized she was until he said so.

Meanwhile the sorcerer had what he’d come for; he had taken what he needed to get erect. Now all he had to do was keep the result viable until he could ejaculate it later into a jar. From one receptacle into another—that was the system. He had many such jars that he screwed into lids attached to a ceiling panel in his basement workshop, a system popular among do-it-yourselfers for storing nails of various sizes. But this jar was different; this jar was part of a plan that had come to him in a dream. The sorcerer knew how to sow fear inside human bodies or in their places of habitation, among the folds of their brains or the leaves of their trees; in this way he always got what he wanted. The difference this time was that Mary was his fate. In the dream he saw her face, very close up, including the pores and the small colorless hairs. She was old in the dream and that was the most important part of all, for without the things living and dying on it, what was the world to him except a useless lump of rock?