by J L Aarne
“Come back!” the man screams. “I have to tell you!”
Aarom shakes his head and walks a little faster.
“I’m like you!” the man says. “Come back! I bear the mark!”
Aarom stops and turns to see the man in rags holding his right hand above his head. He holds it aloft, clamped in his left hand like an object unconnected to him. On the back of his palm is a crescent shaped scar. Aarom recognizes it immediately. It was made by the cauterizing blade of a sickle knife. He has one exactly like it on his own hand.
The homeless man runs up to him and it takes everything Aarom has not to run away from him. He shoves his hand in Aarom’s face, the scar close to his eyes. “See?” he says. “Do you see?”
Aarom gently pushes his hand back. “Yes, I see,” he says.
“I’m like you!” the man shouts in his face.
Aarom recoils from him as if slapped. “You are not like me,” he says calmly.
“I too am a prophet of the Lord!” the man bellows, becoming agitated.
Aarom doesn’t know if the man is a prophet or just a madman who took a knife and a pen torch to his own hand to prove a point. He decides he does not care and walks quickly away from him. He’s exhausted and stressed and he hasn’t eaten since before he went out the previous night. He has little experience with insane people of this man’s type and no interest in making friends.
“I am Matthew! I am one of your brethren!” the madman calls after him. “I have seen the end of days! We have broken bread together, you and I!”
Aarom turns down an alleyway to escape his ranting screams. He can still hear him, though his voice gets smaller as he puts distance between them.
“We shall meet again beyond the veil, my friend! Keep vigilant! Their eyes are upon us all!”
When Aarom steps out of the alley onto the sidewalk again, Matthew’s voice is so distant that there are no words to the sound anymore. He’s glad and wonders what in the world ever compelled him to stop and listen in the first place.
When he gets home, Aarom pours himself a bowl of Cracklin’ Wheat cereal and sits in the open window off his living room while he eats it. There’s a black tomcat on the fire escape that meows hopefully for a handout and then scampers away when food is not offered. Aarom doesn’t really like Cracklin’ Wheat, but it’s one of the few brands of cereal that doesn’t have a cartoon mascot on the box to annoy him.
He eats his breakfast, showers and changes into comfortable pants to sleep in and has just stepped beneath the canopy of desert stars above his bed when there is a knock at the door.
Rat-a-tat-tat… tat-tat.
It’s Sabra, he recognizes his knock. Aarom gets up and goes to open the door and Sabra smiles. He has a wicked smile, a smile that promises mischief and sometimes even delivers.
“Care for some company?”
Aarom stands back from the door, wordlessly inviting him in.
Sabra slips by him and looks around the room and the open space of his apartment as though expecting an ambush to be waiting for him on the other side of the door.
“Have you talked to Sonja?” he asks.
Aarom just looks at him. There is nothing he can think of, in Heaven or on Earth, which would persuade him to voluntarily engage in conversation with Sonja Fletcher-Marks and Sabra knows it.
“Right,” Sabra says. He walks toward the sofa and removes his coat. “Well, Sonja has a new acolyte and she would like you to undertake his apprenticeship.”
“No,” Aarom says.
“Aarom,” Sabra says with a sigh. He sits on the sofa and reclines back. “You can’t even consider it?”
“I considered it. It didn’t take long. No.”
“I understand you’re an introvert, but lately it’s bordering on misanthropy. I really think you should think about it before you absolutely refuse.”
Sonja has reaped herself a baby prophet and now she doesn’t want to take responsibility for him is how Aarom interprets this. It might not be true. Perhaps Sonja genuinely believes that the man would benefit from Aarom’s knowledge, but he doubts it. What he does not doubt is that she asked Sabra to tell him about it and that Sabra, who is not stupid and would have known why she was asking, but who also cares about Aarom, did not think it was a terrible idea. It sometimes occurs to him to worry about Aarom, which Aarom finds rather baffling.
“I don’t want an apprentice,” Aarom says patiently. “I don’t want some scared, dumb kid following me around, making a lot of noise, offending people, drawing attention, getting in my way and asking stupid questions. I’ve thought about it. I absolutely refuse.”
“Well, all right then,” Sabra says. “But you know, you more or less just summed up every prophet who ever was, including yourself. I thought your questions were stupid too the first time you asked them.”
Aarom frowns at him. “You know what I mean and it’s not the same. You’re not like me.”
“Of course not. I’m charming and witty and great company to have, especially on rainy days. I am a people person. You most decidedly are not, dear.”
Aarom can’t help it, he smiles. Sabra is incredibly charming, if also somewhat shady. “I was going to bed.”
“Excellent,” Sabra says, standing. “I’ll join you.”
“I’m tired, Sabra. I want to sleep,” Aarom says.
“Certainly. I shall not attempt to seduce you until you are well and truly rested,” Sabra says, following him to the bedroom. “I’m not a monster.”
Aarom snorts laughter and gets into bed. Sabra sheds his clothes and climbs in after him and Aarom can feel his breath between his shoulders as he relaxes and closes his eyes.
“Do you know a prophet named Matthew?” he asks.
Sabra is quiet for a few seconds and Aarom wonders if he’s trying to think up a clever lie. Eventually, he says, “I did. That was years ago. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I think I met him,” Aarom says. “He’s homeless now, living under a bridge in a tent. I think he’s insane.”
“He is,” Sabra says. “Stay away from him.”
Sabra kisses his shoulder and wraps an arm around his waist and they say no more about it. As he drifts off to sleep, pulled down into it like sinking into quicksand, Aarom thinks of Jonathan and feels bad for the way they left things. He needs to fix it and soon. So thinking, he sleeps.
6.
For many days, Aarom is so busy that he does not have time to visit Jonathan again. He hardly has enough time to sleep. It happens sometimes, the way suicides happened in waves in the old days, and for a while there are almost too many supplicants in his district for him to handle on his own. He reaps three or four, sometimes five a night. His head is full of their stories and images and it leaves him so totally exhausted that he falls into bed like a man in a faint, only to be met with the most vivid and horrific dreams and wake unrested. It does not keep him from thinking about Jonathan or from wishing things were different. He’s been doing that forever, always in the back of his mind, an irritation and a constant idea like a pea beneath a royal mattress.
There are more young people than ever before hanging flags in their windows or on their doors. People who were infants when the machine was turned on or vague ideas in their parents’ brains or nothing at all, people who would not have existed without the Destiny Machine. They have no story and most of them wink out like lights when he touches them and that has always been disturbing to Aarom. It is more disturbing than those who die instantly when the bombs drop, who are eaten by wild dogs or pigs, who are set upon by raiders, who slowly perish from starvation and exposure. The very young do not even die. They are snuffed out like candle flames—except when they aren’t.
Aarom has never had that happen to one of his supplicants before. It’s rare. In the world that never was, not many people survived and even less found each other and produced offspring. In the world that never was, freak storms leveled whole cities, the sea level rose and swallowed islands and shra
nk continents, the lowering oxygen and rising carbon dioxide levels made buildings and highways crumble, some species of insects died and entire species of plants died with them, war destroyed countries and families and neutron bombs decimated the human population. One day he will answer a summons, show the supplicant their life, tell them their story and find there is no death waiting for them or that somehow they still would have been born, and then he’ll have an acolyte.
The way things are going, that day might not be too far off.
It’s near morning when Aarom comes upon a flag tied to the above ground railing of a below street level apartment. He almost misses it because it’s not very big and it’s crumpled in on itself, just hanging there, the picture mostly hidden by the folds of material. The sun is rising so he has to hurry. This will be his last of the night.
He finds the apartment door unlocked and cracked open at the bottom of the stairs and enters with caution. With law enforcement after them, there’s always a chance it’s a trap, especially when it looks like one. Still, he goes inside and it’s not a trap. There’s a handsome man of about twenty-five or so stretched out on the sofa watching an old movie on the crystal screen television on the wall. He looks up and smiles when Aarom enters the room.
“Hey,” the man says. He sits up and gestures to the chairs across from him and turns off the TV. “Have a seat. I’ve been expecting you. I mean, of course I have, right?”
Aarom considers it and looks around, but it’s safe. They’re alone. He goes to the chair directly across from the man’s seat on the couch and sits. There is a low, square coffee table between them and spread out on the tabletop are the supplies commonly used by shiners to mainline: two lancet syringes, a tourniquet and two vials of sunshine. Beside this, there are several rows of stacked credit chips and a small pile of rolled tobacco cigarettes. Aarom has read about them, but cigarettes have been illegal in the country since well before the machine.
“I’m Travis,” the man says. He takes a cigarette from the pile, taps it on the tabletop and lights it with an odd looking lighter. He exhales pale smoke that appears nearly blue in the dim light and Aarom thinks of dragons. “You want one?”
“I don’t think so,” Aarom says.
Travis holds his cigarette over the table for Aarom. “Try it. It won’t kill you.”
Aarom takes the cigarette from him, holding it pinched between finger and thumb, and tries to copy the way Travis smoked it. It burns his throat, makes his chest hitch and he coughs. It tastes thick and acrid and he doesn’t like it. There’s an aftertaste in his mouth that reminds him of garlic. Travis smiles and takes the cigarette back.
“I don’t know why it lets me smoke the damn things,” he says. “Guess I don’t smoke enough of them to risk killing me. Old girl don’t like it much though, you can bet on that. She’s a prude.” He flicks ash from the end of the cigarette carelessly on the carpet. “What do you think?”
“About what?” Aarom asks.
Travis shrugs. “Just conversation, my friend. The last conversation I’m going to have—in this world or that other one. Indulge me.”
Aarom is at a loss what to say. He has never met a supplicant like Travis, one who seems to know without his intervention about the alternate world. Travis seems almost eager, like a passenger about to disembark from a train he has been riding for too long.
“I don’t like it,” he finally says. “Tobacco. Where did you find tobacco anyway?”
“Bought it on the street in the sprawl,” Travis says. “Can find damn near anything down there if you’re willing to pay enough.”
This is true. Aarom has bought things from traders and merchants in the sprawl that can’t be had anywhere else. It’s where Travis would have bought the sunshine, too. The pale golden shade of yellow of the liquid in the vials means it’s expensive shine. Good shine, not something brewed by a second-rate chemistry student in an alley.
Travis sees him looking at it and smiles. “I’ll share it with you,” he says. “If you want. Got two needles and two hits laying out for just that reason. You bring the flag with you?”
Aarom takes the flag that was tied above from his pocket and drops it on the table near the credit chips and cigarettes. “You don’t seem… I don’t know. You’re different,” he says.
“Ain’t crying and blubbering all over the damn place?” Travis asks. “They do that?”
“Some of them,” Aarom says. “They’re afraid. Some don’t cry. Some are just… quiet. Sad.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you then,” Travis says. “I’m not sad and I’ve never known when to shut my mouth. That’s what I’m told. I’m tired, Aaron. That’s all.”
“Aarom,” Aarom corrects him automatically. His eyes go wide even as he’s saying his name though because he has not introduced himself yet. “Do I know you?”
“Doubtful,” Travis says. He tamps out his cigarette on a chipped saucer. “Moved here from Kentucky about a year ago for work. Nice enough job. Interesting. Kept my mind occupied. That’s important. Keeps me from thinking too damn much about all the shit jangling around up there, all the intruding voices. Like yours. Right now you’re freaking the fuck out, but you’re trying not to. Doing a pretty good job, too. If I wasn’t me, I’d never guess it.”
“How?” Aarom asks. There is no other question to ask.
“No idea,” Travis says. “It just is. I’m just tired. No need to be disturbed by that. It’s past my time. Past all of our times. You know, I was a kid, just seven years old, when that mad hatter, Vaughn made that thing and turned it on. Thought I was going to die from all the shrieking noise against my skull. The universe sounds like that when it’s screaming. A million-billion voices, all the voices that ever were and ever will be and ever were not.”
“Borrowed time,” Aarom says. He’s sensed it, too, though not like that. He senses it like a low static charge along his skin sometimes. Like ice water down his spine. A wrongness in everything.
“Stolen time,” Travis says, correcting him. “Stolen world. Stolen lives. I’m getting off this train before it crashes.”
“Crashes?”
“You don’t think a thing like this can go on much longer, do you? It’ll start small. Little rips in the fabric of reality. People will slip through the cracks. Other things too, I imagine. I’m almost disappointed I won’t be there to see it.”
“Not sorry enough to stay.”
Travis smiles. “No,” he says. “Don’t belong here. You know what I mean or you wouldn’t be here either, prophet. Why’d you do it?”
“Try to die?” Aarom asks.
“Yeah, that and, you know, you decided to stay when you could have tapped out,” Travis says. “Chip was gone, you could have finished it after that, but you didn’t. What changed your mind?”
“I don’t know,” Aarom says. He thinks about it though. Reluctantly, he says, “I had a purpose. It seemed important.”
“Does it still seem important?”
“Sometimes. But now… There’s something—someone I can’t leave.”
Travis nods, understanding. Then he sits forward to pick up one of the vials of sunshine and one of the syringes. He thumbs the button on the end of the syringe and the needle jabs through the top of the vial into the liquid and quickly back out, leaving it empty. Sunshine loses its effect when it hits the air so the needle has to be quick.
“The other one’s for you,” he tells Aarom, tying off his left arm with the tourniquet. He puts the syringe to the inside of his elbow where the vein swells up and hits the button. The needle goes in, the yellow fluid is gone, soaring through his blood before he can draw his next breath. “God. There’s nothing in the world like it.”
“Not much,” Aarom agrees.
Travis’s eyes slip closed and the syringe falls from his hand onto the carpet. “Who were you before?” he asks.
“Does it matter?” Aarom says.
Travis considers it, flying on his high. “I guess no
t.”
“I was in college. I studied surgical technology,” Aarom says. “You know, like organ clone farming, transfusions, implants. Everything from chip implants in newborns and cerebral port implants to ocular transplants and injections. I was only in my second year though, barely started, not a scientist or a doctor. Still reading about it, taking tests, writing papers, memorizing diagrams—that sort of thing.” Aarom can’t tell if Travis is listening or if he has nodded off. “I started to feel it and it all seemed so pointless.”
“That’s hard,” Travis says. “I’ve known this was gonna happen for a long time. Kept putting it off.”
“Why?”
“I was a kid and the doctors kept telling me and my folks I needed therapy and drugs. They didn’t work—the drugs. Had a good job. Had family still around. Had a girlfriend and thought I might marry her. There’s always a reason if you want one.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Travis opens his eyes, takes a deep breath and sits up. “All right,” he says. “I think I’m ready. Let’s get this done.”
Aarom hesitates and remains sitting for a minute. He realizes to his surprise that he doesn’t want to do this. It’s been a long time since he’s felt strongly about it one way or the other, but usually he feels like he’s helping them move on if he pauses to think about it. He stares at Travis across the table and Travis’s lips curve in a faint sympathetic smile.
“This time ain’t any different,” he says. “Probably shouldn’t have talked so long. I didn’t mean to make it hard for you.”
“It’s okay,” Aarom says. He stands and walks around the table. His hands are shaking as he sits on the sofa beside Travis. “You’re right. It’s the same.”
Travis isn’t nervous. He’s so calm that it embarrasses Aarom because he’s not.
“Are you ready?” Aarom asks.
“I am,” Travis says.
Aarom lets out a deep breath, bracing himself, and takes Travis’s hand. Travis lets him have it, spreads his fingers so their hands fit together when they close, and closes his eyes. Aarom doesn’t and the flickering glimpses of Travis’s story as it unfolds are overlaid in his vision on the man’s face.
