Read The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Online

Authors: Randy F. Nelson

Tags: #General Fiction

The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (3 page)

BOOK: The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
13.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

When Stillman reached, the animal hunched his shoulders and glared, crumpling the cup against his stomach.

“I don’t think he’s going to give it up.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, just wait a minute, both of you. Let me turn down the lights and get the recorder going. Here, give me that.” She plucked the cup from the thick fingers and put it into a plastic bag. To Stillman she said, “Just stay where you are and don’t lurch around. He’s a little uncomfortable. A grin like that could be a threat, but more likely it’s just nervousness.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

“Okay, let me just ask him a few preliminary questions.” Sylvia the caretaker placed a ball on the table and touched one of the keys on the console. The screen showed a question mark in the pictogram box and the word
What?
To the right of the box.

The crooked finger went automatically to a red key while the eyes remained unnervingly on Stillman.
Ball
said the screen.

Sylvia took the ball away and gave Morgan another grape, which he took between cheek and gum while he watched for the next object, an empty paper cup. Without waiting for the question, the chimp hit another key.
Cup.

“Good!” She reached across the table and scratched one ear and patted the head.

Juice. Grape. Cup
flashed the screen.

Without looking at Stillman the woman said, “This is one of the reasons that chimps in general are such great subjects. They’re greedy. They’ll steal food right out of your pocket.”

“Let’s just ask him what I wrote out for you. I’m getting a little claustrophobic.”

“You’ll have to be patient. You can’t just skip ahead to a complicated concept. In fact, one of the big questions is whether they understand syntax at all. You get garbled answers if you push them too hard.”

“How come he keeps looking at me like that?”

“Just be still. He’s nervous. I’ve got to take him through some verbs first.”

After a few more exchanges, the caretaker finally looked down at Stillman’s notes and typed.
Question. Who. Hurt. Greta. Question.

Ball. Greta.

“What’s wrong? Why didn’t he answer?”

“Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Or asking the right question the wrong way. It often takes several tries.
Question. Greta. Hurt. Question.

Yes.

Who?

Big. Ball.

Question. What. Hurt. Greta. Question.

Big. Light.

Question. Who. Question. Who. Hurt. Greta. Question.

Greta.

Who?

Greta. Juice. Grape.

Question. Greta. Big. Hurt. Question?

Yes.

Question. Who. Question.

Grape.

Who?

More. Banana. Light.

“I don’t know,” said Stillman. “I don’t think this is working. He doesn’t know what planet he’s on.”

“I’m sorry,” said the caretaker. “Maybe if you gave him just a few more minutes.”

“Yeah, well … maybe he’d be more comfortable if it was just the two of you. Thanks anyhow.” Stillman eased past them and into the heavy atmosphere of the compound, then used a pass card to open the door into the corridor. He patted his coat pockets for a cigarette and noticed a quiet figure standing next to the two-way observation mirror. It was Deckard.

After a moment he turned to the detective and said, “That was ingenious, Mr. Stillman. I would never have thought simply to ask.”

“It was worth a try.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Yeah, should have gone to the tape first.”

I sat Stillman down at the computer and called up the media player. Then clicked play. The images on-screen began with a stuttering burst
of light, like film skipping in an old-fashioned projector. In all, the sequence lasted sixty-three seconds. Stillman watched the events cycle four or five times, gradually leaning left as if he could pick up action that had occurred off camera. I watched him studying the moment of Greta’s death and wondered how many humans he’d seen die from this same perspective, images from ceiling cameras in pawn shops and convenience stores.

At 0224.14 on the blinking timeline, a hunched shape backed into the frame, then immediately charged forward out of range, reappearing again at 0224.33. I told him it was Greta. He could see the rest. Her hackles were raised and lips drawn back in a rictus of fear. She shook her head like a wet dog. Then another whiteout obscured a stamping display, and a second figure emerged from the emptiness at the left of the screen. I told him it was Morgan, also clearly agitated. He looked like a furious old man shaking his head no, no, no, no. Then at 0225.16 Greta turned toward the camera, a mask of insane terror frozen on her face; and she threw herself at the edge of the cliff. That was all. She was gone in less than a second.

“Let’s see it again,” said Stillman.

I showed him how to work the media player. He clicked with the mouse and once more watched Greta backing into the last moments of her life. “And there’s no sound at all?”

“Nope. And no artificial lighting inside the compound. When it’s dark outside, it’s dark in the compound.”

“Then what are those flashes of light?”

“Beats me. Maybe heat lightning.”

“And what about that?”

“Right there? Looks like an edge of the steel framing that holds up the roof, you know, one of the sections of the dome.”

“No way to enlarge any of this?”

“You could, but the resolution would be worse. What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

He started the sequence again. And again it was night. There was the lightninglike burst of whiteness and then a sweeping shot of the rock ledge. In the upper third of the frame, through the clear dome of their world, wheeled the slow stars of the Milky Way. And in the foreground were the rocks that we call the escarpment. Creeping into the lower left were the uppermost branches of massasa and mahogany. At 0224.14 Stillman’s muppet backed into the scene as before and mustered enough desperation to charge on all fours. Then stayed out of view for nineteen seconds. Then the second lightning flash revealed Morgan, shaking his head and flailing a branch that he had broken at some lower elevation and dragged with him to the peak. And then there was something else that caught Stillman’s attention as the terrified chimp slapped, open handed, at her own eyes. Just before she turned and launched herself into the void.

“Right there,” he said. “What’s that?”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Looks like a shoe.”

“Might be a shadow.”

“It might be a shoe.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just …”

“I think it’s time to get that magnification now.”

“Maybe it’s time to talk. Let’s step out in the hall for a second.” Which is when I told him the truth. He would have figured it out in another hour. Besides, the truth wasn’t relevant. It hardly ever is.

“You know why I picked you?”

“I just assumed it was a combination of the swimsuit and talent competitions.”

“I picked you because I thought you might understand if it ever got this far.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning that we can do things, right now, that we couldn’t do even a year ago. Meaning that these people, Stillman, are on the verge
of curing half a dozen diseases, perfecting noninvasive surgery, regenerating nerves, you name it.”

“And you thought what, that you could put my name on the list if they ever whipped up a cure for deafness?”

“No.”

“Then what?”


ALS
is a funny disease. You can never predict which neurons in the brain and spinal cord it’ll attack. Sometimes it paralyzes the arms and legs. Sometimes it affects speech or breathing first. They say Lou Gehrig himself eventually choked to death. There’s no cure, no therapy, and nothing on the immediate horizon except for the slight possibility that the man you met this morning really is a genius. And that I can get Janie into the first human trials. Right now she’s having trouble swallowing, and I figure in a few months it won’t make any difference whether the human trials are approved or not. That’s what I was hoping you could understand.”

For a long time Stillman said nothing. He wiped at his face with both hands as if trying to wash away the fatigue, then sat on one of the low benches that lined the hall.

So I pressed him some more. “The procedure works. We already know that. The problem was that Greta showed some anomalies, not enough to wreck the experiment, but enough to throw off the data. So we had to start reverification. Fast. All we’re asking you to do is sign a piece of paper, so we can start over with a clean slate.”

“How did you do it?” he said.

“Strobe light. You know, from the break-in at the photo lab. We figured if worse came to worst, we could blame it on some protesters.”

“‘We’ meaning you and Dr. Deckard.”

“It was his idea actually. After the procedure she’d had, it would overload her brain. She’d do anything to get away from it.”

“So you made a deal. Deckard gets something he wants. You get something you want. The only person hurt is a monkey. Let me ask you something, chief. Do you trust the guy that much?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Maybe I should have told him that it was all an insurance scam. It would have been easier. That’s what he believed at first, and maybe he would have gone for the money. You can never tell. Even if you’re spinning the absolute truth, you can never tell what kind of lies people will believe. Especially old cops. Now he would have to decide. And I’m not sure I could have chosen correctly myself. At five o’clock it was still raining the way it had been earlier, and I drove him back to his office after telling him I would e-mail a copy of his report tomorrow morning. And that Peggy could print it on their letterhead and fax it back to me in the afternoon, after he’d signed it. If that’s what he felt he could do.

On the way downtown he asked me when I thought they could start human trials.

I said a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, if we stayed on the fast track.

He looked at me like he thought I’d believe anything.

The rest of the drive was silent. I let him out in the scabby parking lot of his office, and he went inside after a slight wave of the hand. I watched him flick on the overhead lights and head down the hall toward one of the cubicles.

Then I pulled back into the deserted street and followed the yellow line.

Back at the Center I headed toward my own office to begin work on the incident report. I needed to finish it and also a press release about a new cholesterol drug being developed jointly by us and a major pharmaceutical company. It would take a couple of hours, but both items needed to go out the next day. First, though, I called home and got Janie on the speakerphone. Told her that I’d be late and that I’d get Mrs. Carrillo to come over and stay the night. She wasn’t happy, but she understood the job, and its benefits, better than I did. So I hung up and went by the cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich, the way I used
to do when I was a reporter. Banging away on a story that would be old news by morning.

Then I took the elevator up, balancing coffee in one hand and briefcase and sandwich in the other. Sipping gingerly. Hoping Stillman would come around after he dismounted from his high horse. Taking the glassed-in hallway, the syringe, that connected the two wings of the medical section. Halfway across, almost precisely where I had stopped Stillman earlier in the day, I met a lab assistant pushing a gurney like the ones in hospitals. I had to step aside and to control the momentary horror of stepping into an abyss.

Strapped to the gurney was my friend Morgan, partially sedated and on his way to the Emerald City where Deckard and the others waited for him. He seemed neither frightened nor enraged by his restraints but merely puzzled. His face looked like a sleepy child’s. And he wore a disposable diaper, already urine soaked and limp around his waist. His eyes seemed drawn to the car headlights in the parking lot far below, but as we passed he looked in my direction and seemed to find something that he recognized. He made a slight movement with one of his hands, perhaps an attempt to communicate in sign language, who could know? Maybe it was only a reflex.

The next morning I asked Sylvia the caregiver to bring me one of those little charts they use to teach sign language to the chimps, and on it I looked in vain for the word he had left in the air. For days I wondered if he had been reaching for some unprinted thing, or only a circus word. Like
grape
or
juice
or
cup
.

THEY HAVE REPLACEABLE VALVES AND FILTERS

The Cave

FOR SUSAN

In my mind I see the six of them hunched in the shade like a chain gang, exhausted, their fingers cut and caked with mud, faces already gone blank with despair. I imagine Burke down on his haunches, wrists hung over his knees, with a cigarette maybe, studying that ragged hole like it was his own grave. Their daddy, name of Lucas Bender, standing off by himself. And one of the twins praying, or maybe just hoping out loud, I don’t know. You can imagine that second day at the cave any way you want. It don’t change a thing.

I expect one of them finally said, “We could try and get that wild girl lives over to Flint Ridge. She might could crawl under the outcrop, reach him some food and a blanket so he don’t freeze. I mean, if we could find her.”

Which they did.

Plucked me out of a chinaberry tree. Carried me over the tourist road in a Model T Ford, my first ever ride in an automobile, to a no-name holler where the world had caved in on Lee Bender, and there I was. A whole new place. The same mountain blue sky as my sky, yes. And the same cotton white clouds, same layer on layer of greenness all tumbling over the crest of the mountain and down to towns where girls my age didn’t wear overalls or bob their hair or ride off with strangers. But hill folk are different; and here I was not even surprised at a man
who looked like Moses stepping me down from the running board of that Model T, saying, “Lucas Bender. This’d be Burke, Asa, Ronnie, and Donnie that brung you, and Hugh. I knew your granddaddy. And we obliged to you.” Like he had all the time in the world.

BOOK: The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
13.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Do You Know the Monkey Man? by Dori Hillestad Butler
Lucky's Choice by Jamie Begley
The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi
Who's Sorry Now (2008) by Lightfoot, Freda
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Book Collective
Stories We Could Tell by Tony Parsons
Dead to the Max by Jasmine Haynes
Jess the Lonely Puppy by Holly Webb