by Jerry
There is a slight hiss coming out of the tape recorder. Then even that is gone.
Ben palms the microcassette that doubles as sound track from my first visit at the Purcells’. “You think of everything, don’t you?”
“Hey, when you grow up with people calling you ‘Liar’ you learn to compensate.” I can’t help the smile that I try to choke down. “But it is sneaky, isn’t it?”
“And you’re proud of yourself, too.”
“Damn right. Well?”
“I think I’ll hold on to this.”
You do that. My bank opens early; the original is in the vault. “Do you think we have a case here?”
“It has all the earmarks.” He frowns. “We’re just missing the physical evidence.” He reaches out for my hair-entangled fingers again.
“Oh all right.” I bat his hand away and force my own back to my desk. “This is going to be tough, this case. This is no slob I’m dealing with and I’m going to have to tiptoe until I can get enough evidence for a conviction. But I believe that evidence exists! And I want your blessing; will you back me?”
“With the present workload around this place we can take that time,” he says. “I want you to draw up a schedule. Put down all your theories and how you plan to go about testing them. Do everything.”
He looks worried.
“Ben, something’s bothering you. Only the cops on TV get to do everything.”
“Yeah.” He lays a set of documents before me. “That’s ’cause the cops on TV get funded by the networks, and we get funded by quota.”
Something twists inside me as I read the figures. The branch axed and replaced by a peep show is ironic enough almost to be funny, if you’re into sick jokes. “Christ. How widespread is this?”
“Growing. I sat twiddling my thumbs while you were out yesterday. I thought the phones had gone dead. The number of reports coming in here has plunged.”
“I can see that. We’re supposed to be happy about this you know. Remember those nights we were all getting soused, toasting to the day when we’d all lose our jobs in this business?” I hand him the papers back. “Why aren’t we happy?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Maybe we’re as bad as they are. Hey, put that brandy away—”
“I was taking it out for you.” I shove the bottle back into its drawer. I swear the strongest glass made on this Earth is the type they make to hold booze. “To me it feels wrong. If the abuse is going to drop off it’s got to drop off slowly, fade away. Sort of linear, you know, like zero population growth.” I shrug. “Any self-proclaimed saviors on the market these days?”
“No.”
“New legislation?”
“No. You know that.”
“Just checking.”
“The point is this.” The shadows under his eyes face mine. “We need paperwork. And red tape. And reports. And they have to look as though we’re really doing our jobs. You’ve got what looks like a real stinker and for our solvency it looks like a gem.”
“You’re disgusting me.”
“That makes two of us. But it’s the best of all possible worlds for this operation and, in the end, we hope, for Amy. I’m not asking you to milk it to inefficiency.”
“I know.” I pat his hand. My palm doesn’t know quite what it’s doing but that’s all right, it’s the thought that counts. I try to smile. “Does that mean I don’t get my word processor this year?”
“Not even a talking watch.” He pats my hand back. “Well, if we’re going to go out we may as well go out obsolete.”
“Now you can have the child you’ve always wanted.”
Amykins sits in front of the television. Out of the speaker, a man’s soothing voice-over tries to sell her kind. On the screen, high-density pixels configurate into family scenes; now a Lazuli doll pumps her little legs in a smooth arc as she rides a swing in someone’s playground. Now a Lazuli doll vocalizes a “Please,” and a “Thank you,” at a family picnic. Now a Lazuli doll is hugged, and freely hugs back.
Amykins’ syntheskin palm rests lightly on the screen, and the vibrations coming from it are warm and tingling. Once a man’s hands held her softly; she opened her eyes and for the first time the configuration of a face peered into hers as she was turned on into life, and a soft voice said, “Good morning, little one.”
All over the world, every Lazuli doll has that primeval memory logged deep inside. Every Lazuli doll, no matter what age when turned on, has that one welcome in common. Good morning. Good morning, little one.
Then, before she could form kinship attachments in the factory, Amykins was turned off and not reactivated until she arrived here. And when she awoke, she was in the arms of a little girl who cried hard tears of confusion, and didn’t cry again.
Then Ernest’s hands were on her babygirl’s synthetic nipples, rubbing her hard enough to bruise, pinching her skin into black and blue marks. He thrust his fingers, into her tiny synthetic pee hole and her automatic programming made her begin to wet his hand. Furious, he slapped her across the face and her chip registered: this is pain. Then a voice smoothly said, “Wow, you’re just like her.”
Now the voice-over on the television tells her, “What you have just seen is not just a commercial. These are real home movies, taken by real families . . . just like yours.”
Amykins invokes a self-check function and waits while her programming and memories are verified. They are distant from her; she is half-aware as a built-in system tests and retests her parts. Her experiences flash by unencumbered by real time, much faster than her reflexes can react to them, and after each test is run she receives the same message. There is no error. There is no error.
“Good morning, little one.” No error.
“. . . taken by real families . . . just like yours . . .” No error.
Amykins says, “Off,” and the screen darkens to a pinpoint of light. She runs her fingers briefly over its plastic wood casing, where Ernest’s fist has pounded dents over the past two years.
A television cannot really remember.
Ernest is out buying groceries. Amy is in school. Amykins watches TV. Now she turns it on again and watches cartoons, where a young boy crosses his wrists against each other and turns into a Good Robot, so he can go out and destroy the Bad Robot.
Someone is fitting a key into the lock. Light footsteps, slow turn of the key. Amy. She walks in, dropping the key on its chain back into her blouse. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Where is he?”
“Market.”
“Good.” Amy turns toward the television and says, “Off.” Then she turns to Amykins. “No one else in kindergarten has a Lazuli doll because their parents can’t afford one. So I’m bringing you in for Show And Tell tomorrow. Daddy won’t let me take you in the morning, so we’re going to sleep in the school.”
Unbidden, a tear forces its way out of Amykins’ left eye.
“Shhh. It’ll be all right, we just have to look like the people in the commercials, that’s all.” She lifts Amykins to her feet. “Just follow me. Quickly.”
Hand in hand, they walk out the door and down the stairs to the lobby. They walk out the door, past the hedges. Amy squares her shoulders with vigilance, tries to look between the brambles. Amykins numbly curls her lips into an innocent smile and plays internal video games with the changing scenery as she and Amy walk, walk, walk. She looks up.
“Don’t look at the sun,” Amy warns her. “You’ll go blind.”
“No I won’t.”
“Oh.” Amy looks down at her. “Sorry. I forgot.”
Then she says, “Let’s remember to tell that to the class.”
“Okay.” A command lodges in Amykins’ head.
Amy fits her hand over the large brass doorknob that feels like a cold golden egg in her palm, and eases the door open. Grade-school classes are still in session; she places her fingers over her lips and they walk quietly down the hall, to the stairwell. They take the stairwell do
wn to the basement, where there is a little-used Girls’ Room. They go inside. Amy tells her, “We’ll have to hide from the custodian. But that’s later.”
My beeper goes crazy on my belt as I hop up the stairs to my office. Ben intercepts me as I round the partition.
“That was quick,” he says.
“I cut my lunch short anyway,” I say, throwing my sandwich in the trash. “What happened?”
“Purcell’s daughter and the Lazuli are missing.”
“The what?”
“The doll!”
“He reported that?’
“Well it’s no ordinary doll. Why didn’t you tell me it was a Lazuli?”
“Like I should know dolls! When did he call?”
“We got the report from the precinct shortly after noon; you don’t think he’d be dumb enough to call ms! Amy was supposed to be home from kindergarten. He just came back from grocery shopping with some ‘buddies’ he’d rounded up, and both of them were gone. Said the doll was never taken out of the house, too expensive to be broken, an investment sort of thing.”
“An investment by a man who’s unemployed?”
“Well it must have been an investment. Those dolls have memories, they record things! A Lazuli costs as much as my car!”
“Well I plumb don’t know dolls . . . and anyway, Amykins just stared at me, I didn’t even know if she was the real thing or not.”
Ben is riffling through multicarbon forms. “We’ll claim neglect for now . . . if we can establish that Ernest bought the doll himself rather than take proper care of Amy. If we can find her or—” He screws up his face at me. “Amykins?”
“Yeah, and the doll looks just like her, too. At about the age of three.”
“Oh my God.” He sinks into a chair. His face has turned pasty. “Get me Amy’s file.”
I get him Amy’s file. He flips the forms until he comes across her psychological profile.
“Look at this.” His finger traces the page. “Amy talks about being five years old, four years old . . . but not three, or two, or one. See? She says, ‘I don’t know,’ or, ‘I don’t remember.’ Even birthday parties; she remembers her last two birthday parties but none earlier. She remembers her mother from age four up to four-and-a-half but not earlier than four. And her mother kept reporting to us anyway. Even though Amy consistently showed no bruises, no damage we could see.”
“But Amykins would have seen what happened.”
“Seen?” At my puzzled look he says, “You really don’t know dolls, do you? Ernest was raving about how the doll could break and that’s why he didn’t want her taken outside. These are clothclones, Peggy! They have syntheskin! They don’t break, they heal themselves, just like the real thing!”
I blink at him, and in a tiny voice I say, “Morphine. They’re like morphine.” All of a sudden I begin to tremble, all over. We can’t just find and keep Amykins for observation, we’ll have to find and keep Amy, too. “Ben . . . our funding . . .”
But Ben is already on the phone, asking Records for a detailed breakdown of abuse reports and their frequencies. Then he places another call, to find out when Lazulis were introduced into the market. Then he calls our lawyer to subpoena records on sales and distribution from the manufacturer.
Carefully, Amy pries open the metal plate that hides electrical cables under benches built into the wall. She has to blink several times and catch her breath, and wait until her eyes have adapted to the dark. After a few minutes she sees the cross-hatched shadows thrown by streetlamps through chicken-wire windows and onto the floor.
Amykins’ eyes have switched instantly over to night vision.
Carefully, they listen for footfalls. There are none.
Amy, who can’t see the clock yet, whispers, “What time is it?”
Amykins says, “The little hand is just after the ten and the big hand is just after the four.”
“Good. It’s late, then.”
Amy crawls out first. Then she motions for Amykins to follow her. Amy stretches until all the kinks from folding herself against the cables are out of her back, and then she replaces the plate against the bench. She pulls out a couple of half-crumpled chocolate chip cookies from her blouse and munches on them. They sit together on the floor. Amy yawns.
Daddy is looking for us. He’ll send out people to find us and then we’ll die.
She hugs Amykins close to her. Where’s Mama?
A man’s head shadows the floor, blocking out the chicken-wire.
“Quickly!” They roll prone on the floor and Amykins begins to cry. Amy has her pressed against the bench and is shaking hard against her. “He didn’t see us. Shhh, quiet, he didn’t see us. We’re okay, it’s going to be all right.”
Suddenly Amykins’ tears stop. She has run out of water.
“The fountain’s on the other side of the room, I’ll fill you from the fountain, we just have to wait until he’s gone. Until he’s gone. It’s going to be okay, it will. It will!” Something wells up inside Amy, something washing over the numbness. She wants to throw up.
“She’s in there. I think she saw me.”
“Great,” I say, disgusted. “She probably thinks you’re her father.”
“Wish I was.” Ben grabs my hand and squeezes it, and a wave of revulsion sweeps through me. But this is Ben, I must remember that. I squeeze back.
He says, “Do you hear a motor?”
“Yeah,” I whisper, “people are still driving at this time of night. Parking by the school is permitted after-hours.” Even so, we squat in the bushes by the school. “License plate?”
“That’s our man.”
My hand worries its way into my pocket, and I open up the larger blade on my Swiss Army knife. Its red handle warms against my palm.
Ben knows what I’m doing. “This is Amy’s father, not yours,” he mouths at me. “Put it away.”
All feeling has left me. I’m living on my adrenaline. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can,” he says. “Please.”
Ever so slowly, I fold the blade back in but keep my hand on the knife.
We flatten ourselves against the wall as Ernest makes the same rounds we had, inspecting one window after another. As he tries to jimmy his way through the entrance, we slide further around, camouflaged by the noise of his wrenching.
Ben whispers fiercely in my ear: “Now!”
Together we run to the opposite side of the school, carrying our shoes across the cement courtyard. Pebbles bite into my feet with a vengeance but we reach an adjoining basement on the other side of the boiler rooms in record time. Ben whips out a master key and unlocks the metal screen that hems in one of the larger windows. I boost him as his fingers clasp the window sill and he hoists himself onto the lip and pushes the screen up.
He breaks the glass with the butt of a pistol and quickly cuts through the chicken-wire with a pair of shears. Unlocking the window from the inside, he maneuvers his arm through the broken glass and lifts. I force my fingers through the new and tiny opening at the bottom and together we push until there is room for us to climb in.
We must take a stairwell up to the ground floor and round a U-shaped corridor until we reach a second stairwell that we take back down. As we approach the second stairwell we can hear Ernest take a battery-powered saw to one of the screens.
I run well ahead of Ben and slide down one of the bannisters. “Amy!” I cry out. “It’s me, it’s Peggy!”
“Peggg . . .” A weak voice, high and metallic, answers me.
“Amykins?”
“Peggg . . .” Weaker, now.
I dive to the floor as the sound of buzzing increases, and slide toward Amy and Amykins. Amy stares wide-eyed and doesn’t move; I grab her wrist and pick up a faint pulse. When I slide my hand along her neck I find a tightly-wrapped electrical cable.
I turn now to Amykins, whose head has been half-cleaved from her body by the edge of a large metal plate dropped on her.
“Did Amy do this?”<
br />
“Yes . . .”
“Amykins, you’re going to have to trust me now. And you’re going to have to trust Ben.” Sitting up slightly, I motion him forward and swallow hard at the sight of grief spreading over his face. “They’re alive, Ben, both of them. We’ve got to get out of here now!”
We free them. Above me I see the power-saw glint in the streetlamps, and the outline of Ernest’s face. Momentarily it stares into mine with a look of pure hatred. For one wild second I am convinced I can pass my hands through the glass, through the wire, through the screen and take him by the neck and twist and twist and twist and twist. If I only tried hard enough. If I only, ever, tried hard enough.
Ben carries Amy. I carry Amykins, cradling her head against her body as it tries to heal. Up the stairs. Down the hall. To the principal’s office.
We break our way in and barricade ourselves inside as Ben dials the precinct. Amy and Amykins are laid out on the tops of desks and I comb the supply cabinets for first aid. I cover Amy with a makeshift blanket made from a canvas backdrop that says, “Merry Christmas,” and a secretary’s sweater left in a closet.
Then we wait.
There are no smelling salts to be found anywhere. I open desk drawers and find a bottle of Scotch. I shake a few drops onto my finger and rub it lightly against Amy’s tongue. I dribble a few drops to the back of her throat.
She comes out of shock coughing. I enfold her in my arms and in the canvas. “It’s me, Peggy. You’ll be safe with us.”
“Mama!” She clings to me tightly.
“Not Mama . . .” Amykins’ voice says, distant. “Peggg . . .”
“It’s okay,” I say to the doll. “She’s in shock. She’ll be better in a few minutes.”
“He’s in,” Ben says softly. “Quiet, everybody.”
Ernest’s footfalls echo down the corridor and reverberate off the walls. It is difficult to tell his exact position—which is real, and which is a reflection. We sit perfectly still in the darkness, until I hear Ben cock the hammer on his pistol. As the footsteps near us and their echoes lessen, Ben aims his gun at the locked door and fires a single shot.
