by Joe Hill
The Clockwork waiter comes clitter-clattering from behind the bar on his cricket legs. A brass hatch opens in the floor, panels sliding away in a manner that suggests an iris widening in the dark. A quivering membrane fills the opening, an oily rainbow slick of light flashing across its surface.
“Who’s ready to step into a dream and float back to earth?” cries the Clockwork waiter, gesturing with spindly arms. “Who’s big enough and thirteen years old enough to go first?”
Girls scream me me me me me me! Chip observes Iris wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“How about the birthday girl? Abigail Danforth, step on up!”
The kid in the Girl-Next-Door face grabs her father’s hand and hauls him to the edge of the hole. The girl hops up and down with excitement while Dad gazes uneasily over the rim of the open hatch.
“Step right onto the Drop Bubble surface. There is no reason for anxiety. The bubble will not pop, or we pledge to refund your money to your next of kin,” the Clockwork waiter says.
Dad tests the quivering, transparent membrane with the toe of a polished loafer, and it yields slightly underfoot. He pulls his leg back, upper lip damp with sweat. The daughter, impatient to go, leaps into the center of the open hole. Immediately the glossy, glassy, semiliquid floor under her begins to sink.
“Come on, Dad, come on!”
And probably because she has a Girl-Next-Door face on and no one likes to look nervous in front of the Girl-Next-Door, Dad steps onto the soap-bubble floor beside her.
The ground sags beneath them. They sink slowly and steadily downward. Dad’s eyes widen as the open hatch rises to his chest. He almost looks like he wants to grab the rim and pull himself back up. The girl hops up and down, trying to speed things along. The glassy soap bubble continues to expand, and Dad sinks out of sight. A moment later the Drop Bubble separates from the hatch and a trembling sheet of iridescent soapy stuff fills the opening once again.
“Who’s next?” the Clockwork asks, and they leap and wave their hands, and the waiter begins arranging them into a line. The girl wearing Tell-Me-Anything casts a haunted, angry look over at Iris and Chip. Iris turns to face the night once more.
The sky is lit with stars, but Iris appears to be regarding her own reflection.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asks. “Please be honest. I don’t want flattery. How do I measure up?”
“You’re not bad.”
One corner of her mouth twitches upward. “Give me the math, robot.”
“The distance between your pupils and your mouth conforms closely to the golden ratio, which means you’re a honey. Because of the way you cut your hair, few would ever notice that your left ear is a centimeter higher than ideal.”
“Mm. That does make me sound smokin’ hot. The firm that employed my dad already let me know they’d hire me the day I turn eighteen. I guess pretty girls are the most popular victims. They can earn five times what men earn. They can make a killing.”
Chip can see more than a thousand gradients of color, but when it comes to emotion, he is color-blind, and knows it. Her statement suggests she’s seeking praise, but other indicators imply dismay, irony, confusion, and self-hate. Absent a clear cue, he remains silent.
“Ms. Paget?” comes a modulated, electronic voice, and Iris turns. The Clockwork waiter stands behind them. “You’re the only one left. Would you like to float back to the world below?”
“Can I take my friend?” Iris asks.
The Clockwork and Chip glance at each other and share a few megabytes of data in a quantum burst.
“Yes,” the Clockwork waiter says. “The Drop Bubble can support up to seven hundred pounds without deformation. Your chance of dying accidentally remains one in one hundred and twelve thousand.”
“Good,” Iris tells him. “Because in my family no one dies without getting paid for it.”
10.
They fall slowly into darkness.
The bubble, almost twelve feet in diameter, detaches and begins to spin lazily down through the gloom. Iris and Chip are standing when the Drop Bubble lets go of the hatch, but not for long. Iris’s knees knock, not from fright but because her legs are so wobbly on the slippery-stretchy material under her feet. She loses her balance and plops onto her butt.
It is difficult to imagine Chip off-balance. He crosses his ankles and carefully sits across from her.
Iris leans forward to look through the glassy bottom of their bubble. She sees other bubbles, spread out below, floating here and there. Blue will-o’-the-wisps drift among them, constellations of bobbing, hovering lights: swarms of drones the size of wasps, armed with sapphire LEDs.
“This was just what I wanted for my birthday—only I was going to come here with my family and friends,” Iris says. She cradles the aquaball in her lap, turning it absentmindedly in her hands. “I’m glad I didn’t now. Those little girls were gross. That little creep playing her smug power games, trying to blackmail me. All of them casting spells on one another with their overpriced Hideware. My friends and I are older, but I’m not sure we’re any better. Maybe sometimes it’s best to experience something alone. Or just with one friend.”
“Which is it? Are you alone? Or with a friend?”
The bubble carries them into cool, drifting mists. Birds of shadow dart through the clouds around them.
“To be a friend, you’d have to like me as much as I like you.”
“I don’t just like you, Iris. Until the meter runs down, I would do almost anything for you.”
“That’s not the same. That’s a program, not a feeling. Clockworks don’t feel.”
“Just as well,” he tells her. “We were talking about the genie in the bottle earlier, remember? Maybe the only way to survive being in the bottle is not to want anything different or better. If I could yearn for things I can’t have, I’d go crazy. I’d be one long scream that went on and on for a hundred years, while my face keeps making this smile and I keep saying Yes, sir, of course, ma’am. Those girls disgust you because they like cake and parties, but if they didn’t like it, if they couldn’t want it, they’d be no better than me. In seventeen minutes I’ll plug back into my charging plate and might not move again for a day, a week, a month. I once spent eleven weeks without collecting a single token. It didn’t bother me in the slightest. But can you imagine not moving or speaking for eleven weeks?”
“No. I can’t imagine it. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” She hugs her knee to her chest. “You’re right about one thing. Wanting what you can’t have makes people crazy.”
They emerge from the thin band of cloud and find themselves sinking past the birthday girl and her father. The girl has her hands around her father’s waist, and the two of them turn slowly in silent dance, her head on his chest. Both of them have their eyes closed.
There are only eleven minutes left on Chip’s meter when the bubble touches down in the landing zone: a cordoned-off area where the floor is all springy green hexagonal tiles. When the bubble hits those padded green hexagons, it bursts with a wet smooch. Iris flinches and laughs as she is spattered by a soapy rain.
They were the last to leave the Sun Parlor but the first to arrive on the ground floor. Iris can see the frizzy redhead in the Tell-Me-Anything mask, about four stories above them, hands pressed to the wall of her bubble, glaring down at them. Time to go. Without thinking, Iris takes Chip’s hand and runs. She doesn’t realize until they’re outside that she’s still laughing.
Fine grains of moisture hang suspended in the air. She looks up for stars, but of course now that she and Chip are below the clouds, the sky is its usual murky blank.
The Monowheel is locked up at a hitching post. Chip nods toward it.
“I don’t have time to carry your Monowheel home for you now,” he says. “I hate to do this, Iris—it’s scummy and mercantile—but in thirty seconds an automatic advertisement will play, inviting you to insert another coin. That’s not something I choose to do. It exists ou
tside my executive functions.”
“I’ll walk you back to your charging plate,” Iris tells him, as if he’d said nothing. “We can say good night there. Leave the Monowheel. I’ll get it later.”
She still holds her hand in his. They walk, in no hurry now.
At the far end of the plaza, he cries out in a sudden, loud, falsely cheerful voice, “If you’re having a good time, why should the fun stop here? It’s just one slim coin for another thirty minutes of devotion! What do you say, Iris, old pal?”
He falls silent.
They cross the street and travel almost another block before he speaks again.
“You didn’t find that distasteful?”
“No. It didn’t bother me. What will bother me is if you pretend to feel regrets we both know you can’t feel.”
“I don’t regret it. Regret is an inversion of desire, and it’s true, I don’t want things. But I can tell when a musician strikes the wrong note.”
They have reached his corner. His meter has less than four minutes on it.
“I’ll let you make it up to me,” she says.
“Please.”
“You were a good birthday gift, Chip. You carried me to the top of the Spoke. You gave me the sun and the stars. You saved me from blackmail, and you floated down to earth with me. For an hour you gave me back the life I had before my father got hurt.” She leans toward him and kisses his cold mouth. It feels like kissing her reflection in the mirror.
“Did that make it up to you?” he asks.
She smiles. “Not quite. One more thing. Come with me.”
He follows her past his charging plate and up onto the overpass. They climb the slight slope of the bridge until they’re over the rails. She straddles the wide stone balustrade, one leg hanging over the tracks, one leg over the sidewalk, the aquaball in her lap.
“Chip. Will you climb up here and drop this thing in front of the next train? I’m not sure I can time it correctly. They’re so fast.”
“The mermaid was a gift from your father.”
“It is. It was. And he meant well. But when I look at it, I feel like I’m looking at him: this helpless thing, trapped in a little space, that isn’t good to anyone anymore and won’t ever be free again. Every time I look at it, this ugly fish is going to remind me my dad won’t ever be free again, and I don’t want to think of him that way.”
Chip climbs onto the balustrade and sits with both feet hanging over the rails. “All right, Iris. If it will make you feel better.”
“It will make me less sad. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
A faint, whistling, bottle-rocket sound begins to rise in the night, the next cannon-train coming toward them.
“You remind me of him, you know,” Iris says.
“Your father?”
“Yes. He’s as devoted to me as you are. In some ways you were filling in for him tonight. I was supposed to have the stars with him. I had them with you instead.”
“Iris, the train is almost here. You should give me the aquaball.”
She turns the glass globe over and over in her hands, does not offer it to him.
“You know how else you’re like my father?” she says.
“How?”
“He used to die, every day, so I could have the things I wanted,” she says. “And now it’s your turn.” And she puts her hand on Chip’s back and shoves.
He drops.
The cannon-train punches through the darkness with a concussive boom.
By the time she carries the aquaball down the embankment, the train is long gone, rattling off into the south, leaving behind a smell like hot pennies.
Chip has been all but obliterated. She finds one of his ceramic hands on the blackened pebbles, a few feet from the rails, discovers shreds of his wool coat, still smoldering, among some slick, damp weeds. She spies a black diamond of battered plasteel—Chip’s heart—and is able to pry the battery out of it. It is, miraculously, intact and should slot right into her Monowheel.
Tokens gleam between the rails, across the rocks. It almost seems there are as many silver coins on the ground as there were stars above the Spoke. She collects them until her fingers are so cold she can’t feel them anymore.
On the walk back to the embankment, she kicks something that looks like a cracked serving plate. She picks it up and finds herself staring into Chip’s blank smiling face and empty eye sockets. After a rare moment of indecision, she sticks it chin down in the soft gravel, planting it like a shovel. She leaves the aquaball next to it. She has no use for the kind of ugly, helpless thing born to live its life trapped in a bottle or a ball for the amusement of others. She has no use for victims. She intends never to be one herself.
She scrambles up the slope, grabbing brush to pull herself along, thinking that if she hurries, she can get to a RebootYu and buy some used Hideware before she has to meet her friends in the Carnival District. She collected seven hundred tokens in all, which might even be enough for a used Ophelia. And if that jealous bitch Joyce Brilliant thinks Iris is going to let her borrow it, she’s got another think coming.
In another minute the mermaid is alone. It swims disconsolately out of the murk to gaze through the side of the aquaball at Chip’s easy smile and empty eyes.
In a small, warbling voice, the pitiful creature inside the glass sphere begins to trill. Her song—a low-pitched, unearthly dirge, like the forlorn cries of the whales that have long been extinct—has no words. Perhaps there never are for grief.
Thumbprint
THE FIRST THUMBPRINT CAME IN the mail.
Mal was eight months back from Abu Ghraib, where she had done things she regretted. She had returned to Hammett, New York, just in time to bury her father. He died ten hours before her plane touched down in the States, which was maybe all for the best. After the things she had done, she wasn’t sure she could’ve looked him in the eye. Although a part of her had wanted to talk to him about it and to see in his face how he judged her. Without him there was no one to hear her story, no one whose judgment mattered.
The old man had served, too, in Vietnam, as a medic. Her father had saved lives, jumped from a helicopter and dragged kids out of the paddy grass, under heavy fire. He called them kids, although he had been only twenty-five himself at the time. He’d been awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
They hadn’t been offering Mal any medals when they sent her on her way. At least she hadn’t been identifiable in any of the photographs of Abu Ghraib—just her boots in that one shot Graner took, with the men piled naked on top of each other, a pyramid of stacked ass and hanging sac. If Graner had just tilted the camera up a little, Mal would have been headed home a lot sooner, only it would have been in handcuffs.
She got back her old job at the Milky Way, keeping bar, and moved into her father’s house. It was all he had to leave her, that and the car. The old man’s ranch was set three hundred yards from Hatchet Hill Road, backed against the town woods. In the fall Mal ran in the forest, wearing a full ruck, three miles through the evergreens.
She kept the M4A1 in the downstairs bedroom, broke it down and put it together every morning, a job she could complete by the count of twelve. When she was done, she put the components back in their case with the bayonet, cradling them neatly in their foam cutouts—you didn’t attach the bayonet unless you were about to be overrun. Her M4 had come back to the U.S. with a civilian contractor, who brought it with him on his company’s private jet. He had been an interrogator for hire—there’d been a lot of them at Abu Ghraib in the final months before the arrests—and he said it was the least he could do, that she had earned it for services rendered, a statement that left her cold.
Come one night in November, Mal walked out of the Milky Way with John Petty, the other bartender, and they found Glen Kardon passed out in the front seat of his Saturn. The driver’s-side door was open, and Glen’s butt was in the air, his legs hanging from the car, feet twisted in the gravel
, as if he had just been clubbed to death from behind.
Not even thinking, she told Petty to keep an eye out, and then Mal straddled Glen’s hips and dug out his wallet. She helped herself to a hundred and twenty dollars cash, dropped the wallet back on the passenger-side seat. Petty hissed at her to hurry the fuck up, while Mal wiggled the wedding ring off Glen’s finger.
“His wedding ring?” Petty asked when they were in her car together. Mal gave him half the money for being her lookout but kept the ring for herself. “Jesus, you’re a demented bitch.”
Petty put his hand between her legs and ground his thumb hard into the crotch of her black jeans while she drove. She let him do that for a while, his other hand groping her breast. Then she elbowed him off her.
“That’s enough,” she said.
“No it isn’t.”
She reached into his jeans, ran her hand down his hard-on, then took his balls and began to apply pressure until he let out a little moan, not entirely of pleasure.
“It’s plenty,” she said. She pulled her hand from his pants. “You want more than that, you’ll have to wake up your wife. Give her a thrill.”
Mal let him out of the car in front of his home and peeled away, tires throwing gravel at him.
Back at her father’s house, she sat on the kitchen counter, looking at the wedding ring in the cup of her palm. A simple gold band, scuffed and scratched, all the shine dulled out of it. She wondered why she had taken it.
Mal knew Glen Kardon, Glen and his wife, Helen, both. The three of them were the same age, had all gone to school together. Glen had a magician at his tenth-birthday party, who had escaped from handcuffs and a straitjacket as his final trick. Years later Mal would become well acquainted with another escape artist who managed to slip out of a pair of handcuffs, a Ba’athist. Both of his thumbs had been broken, making it possible for him to squeeze out of the cuffs. It was easy if you could bend your thumb in any direction—all you had to do was ignore the pain.
And Helen had been Mal’s lab partner in sixth-grade biology. Helen took notes in her delicate cursive, using different-colored inks to brighten up their reports, while Mal sliced things open. Mal liked the scalpel, the way the skin popped apart at the slightest touch of the blade to show what was hidden behind it. She had an instinct for it, always somehow knew just where to put the cut.
