How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (10 page)

She goes over to the counter, heaps food onto a plate, and sets it down in front of my chair. She looks up, like she’s remembering something, almost as if she could sense me here.

“Hi, Mom,” someone behind me says, and she turns to look out the window. It’s my hologram me, coming up the fire escape, the way I just did.

“Get inside,” she says. “It’s cold.”

“Love you,” hologram me says.

“Scoop the rice.”

I watch my ghost-self eat as she continues to move around the kitchen, the whole time, never really looking at hologram me, just as she never really looked at me, either. She just wants someone to take care of, something to worry about. That’s all. That’s enough. I’m watching her idea of me, who is, in turn, watching her. She’s just going about her business.

After a while, my ears and nose are cold enough that it occurs to me that I should check my watch. Twenty-eight minutes, right on time.

She clears all the plates, washes them, and starts cooking again. I recognize this part. The loop is about to end. Before it can reset, I tap on the window, lightly so as not to scare her, but she nearly falls down in fright anyway.

She snaps out of her time loop, groggy. Not quite happy to see me. It’s been so long that it almost hurts her more that I’m here. This brief visit is just a reminder of how long it will be until the next one.

She opens the window, doesn’t invite me in.

“You never call. You should call more often.”

“I know, I know.”

“I don’t like it in here. Why did you stick me in here? Can you please take me out? I don’t like it in here.”

“I didn’t stick you in there, Ma.”

“I know, I know. You’re a good boy.”

“No I’m not.”

“Okay, you’re not.”

“I’m sorry, Ma.”

“It’s okay.”

“You don’t want to know what I’m sorry for?”

“You never call.”

“That’s not it.”

“Then what are you sorry for?”

“Forget it, Ma. I don’t know. Forget it.”

“You’re a good boy.”

“I better get going, Ma.”

“I know, I know. You have a life. It’s okay.”

“I’ll call more often. I will.”

“No you won’t,” she says. “Wait here.” She turns and walks out of the kitchen.

I learned grammar from my mom, who knew it well, considering she was not a native speaker, hadn’t even learned English until she immigrated here. She, like my father, had come from that little island in reality, where they spoke their language, a home language, a private, family language, as well as the mainland language taught in schools by the nationalists, and so this language that I speak, the only one I know how to speak, was actually her third language, and a distant third at that.

And yet she speaks it well, well enough, considering all that, even if she is always translating in her head, even if she never became fluent like my father, never quite able to think fluently in English, and who could blame her? The tenses are so complicated, had never quite made sense to her, as they didn’t work the same way in her language, one based largely on the infinitive.

When my mother taught me grammar, me at the kitchen table with a worksheet and blanks to fill in and verbs to conjugate, she was doing the dishes, cooking dinner, mopping the floor, I was six years old, I was seven, eight years old, I was young, I was hers, still her mama’s boy, I hadn’t yet entered the father–son axis, the continuum of expectation and competition and striving, I hadn’t yet left the comfortable and snug envelope of the mother-space, I hadn’t gone outside these parameters, out into the larger, free-form world of science fiction. My first understanding of grammar came from her, which is to say, my first understanding of chronogrammatical principles, of the present, the past, the future. I fall/I fell/I will fall. I am a good boy. I will always be her boy. I don’t know what I would do without you. I don’t know what I will do without you. I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar.

Worry was my mother’s mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.

After a few minutes, my mother comes back into the kitchen holding a box. She brings it over and sets it on the windowsill between us.

“I found this yesterday, in your closet.” It’s roughly the size and dimensions of a shoe box, wrapped in brown parcel paper. There don’t appear to be any seams or folds in the paper.

“Yesterday? Why were you out of the loop? Why were you going through my stuff?”

“You don’t live here anymore. You have so many clothes you never wear.”

“Ma, those are from, like, fifteen years ago.”

“So? They’re not good enough for you? You don’t remember, you asked me to buy those clothes. I bought them for you. See, I’m wearing your sweatshirt now. See? Fits. You have so many comic books. They are probably worth a lot now. Can you sell them? You should sell them. I will find them for you and you can sell them. Such a waste.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What’s that?”

“Have you been living outside the loop?”

“You think it’s enough? You got me a pretty nice one, okay, but you thought that would do it, that would take care of me, for the rest of, for good?”

“Mom. God, Ma. You just say that to me, like that, this late? Now? Why didn’t you, God, why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“Early when? Tonight? Last year? When you were first showing me the brochure?”

“Jesus, Ma. I’m, I’m sorry.”

“You can’t stay. I know. I know. Can you stay? I know you can’t. Can you? Just a little while?”

“Ma.”

“I know, I know.”

“You know I want to, Ma. I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“Okay, okay, bye. No sorry. You are a good son. No sorry, okay? I have to cook now. It’s okay.”

She shuts the window, turns, and goes back into her sixty-minute life.

On the way home, I see a lonely sexbot standing next to an empty glass vending case. She’s an older model, on the plump side of zaftig, a face so sweet it’s wrong to look anywhere but at her eyes, but I do anyway. Dark-haired with a hairstyle that seems slightly out of date, but then again, of all people, I’m not really one to talk.

I try to walk past, but she flags me down. Something about the look in her eyes gets me, even though I know they aren’t really eyes.

She asks if I could loan her a little bit.

I say what for.

She says nobody buys her anymore, so she wants to buy herself.

I fish a bill out of my pocket. It’s a five.

“This probably won’t get you much time with yourself.”

“Actually,” she says, “that’s a lot,” and she looks so happy about the five-dollar bill that it makes me feel sad. Even the sexbots here are lonely. There really aren’t even any bad guys anymore. I’m not sure there ever were. Everyone’s always questioning themselves. Am I doing this right, is this how I’m supposed to look? Am I good enough to be a good guy, am I bad enough to be a bad guy?

Up the street a song cloud floats by, sagging a bit, but still intact. I walk faster and catch up with it just in time to hear the ending, a symphony orchestra, the sound full and resplendent, and it is one of those times, you know those times every so often when you hear the right piece of music at the right time, and it just makes you think,
This music didn’t come from here, it was given, it fell from some other universe,
and it reminds you of that other universe, some place you’ve never seen but in your mind you know is there, because you have felt it, this special universe, stranger and better than the ordinary one, and you hang on to the sound of the violins for as long as you can, savoring the feeling of that special universe and wondering if you’ll ever get to go there and also wondering if maybe we don’t realize it, but we’re in that one already, and we have been all along.

By the time I get back to my room, it’s almost five in the morning. Ed, a bit confused, still gets up to greet me.

I take my toothbrush and a facecloth down to the sink at the end of the hall. Who is that, in the mirror? That’s me, in the past, a moment ago, when the light bounced off me. I brush and spit, wipe my face hard to get the grime of the city off me. A lot of news and vapors and sexbot perfume are floating around in the atmosphere here. After a night out in the lost half city, you end up with the dust of dead robots in your hair, or someone’s dreams, or their nightmares.

As I’m falling asleep, I can see, out the window, the fracture line of the disintegrated city, where this minor universe was left undone, not quite finished. Maybe it’s just something I imagine in the last moment before sleep, but I swear what I see, behind a peeled-back corner of the sky, is another layer underneath us, a second, hidden layer, one that is present at every point, and always has been.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

convenience, particular sadness of

Services available in the city include

• Ex-Girlfriend Hologram
  
• Pay-per-minute Alternate History Viewing Booth
  

Products available in the city include

• False Memories of Home (chewing gum)
  
• Aerosol Essence of Nostalgia for Summers Past
  
• Nearly six thousand varieties of sexbots
  
• Drinking buddy bots
  
• Friendbots, of varying humanness
  

When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself.

Not, you know, my self self. My future self. I shoot my future self.

What was I supposed to do? What else could I have done?

After my night out walking in the cold city, my body, unaccustomed to the exertion, had crashed, and when I woke up to the late-morning sun in my face, I knew something was wrong. I’d way overslept and woken up a quarter past eleven, thrown everything into my bag, grabbed Ed with one arm and the parcel my mom had given me in the other arm, and hustled down to Hangar 157, which is where I am now.

The clock says eleven forty-five as I run into this vast, climate-controlled space. Two minutes to go. I put Ed down and we run together, down endless aisles of identical-looking TM-31 machines, turning right and then left and right up until we get to the designated space, cage number 31-31-A, with, by my watch, eleven seconds to spare.

And there’s that jerk of a repair bot, watching the gigantic overhead floating clock display, counting down the seconds, hoping I’ll be late, and as I’m running up to my machine, I see a guy, future me, stepping out of that machine, with his own Ed the dog, future Ed, and his own service tool backpack, and even carrying his own brown-paper-wrapped parcel, and I guess I panic, because everything they ever tell you about what to do when you see yourself in a science fictional universe just goes out the window, and I take my corporate-issue prototype paradox neutralization concept weapon, and I point it at his chest and he reaches out with his right hand and he tries to pull the barrel of the gun down and what happens is that instead of the chest, I end up shooting him, once, in the stomach, just as he is saying something to me, it all happens very quickly but what I am pretty sure he says is

“It’s all in the book. The book is the key.”

and I don’t know yet what the hell that means or even what book he’s talking about but in any event it’s too late because I’ve already squeezed the trigger, activating the facility-wide alarm system, and there are klaxons and flashing lights and some kind of whooping noise and an official-sounding voice comes on the PA system, saying something official-sounding, and the two-mile-square hangar gets turned into one deafening echo chamber, and the future Ed flips out and runs away, because shit, I just killed my own future, and I think for an instant about chasing after Ed but I see corporate cops running up the aisles at me from all four directions, so I have no choice but to jump into the time machine that future me was coming out of, my time machine, which I suppose is his, too, but I notice a little too late that the hatch is only part of the way open and so I bang my knee against the silver-iridium alloy edge of the TM-31’s hatch, I bang it about as hard as I can imagine banging it without it actually shattering into tiny knee-shards, and I do an awkward and terrible half-somersault tumble into my machine, headfirst, while screaming in pain at TAMMY to go go go go go go go.