Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  “You looking for something?” he says. “Be glad to help you find it.”

  “Yeah, actually. A book called Hunter’s Night. By Albert Allonsby.”

  Josh frowns, considering, unsnaps a transmit from his belt, frowns at the tiny keyboard, then one letter at a time with a careful forefinger types in the name of the book. A beep: he turns the unit so that she can see the thin stripe of screen, flashing “unknown.”

  “Sure you got that right?” Josh says. “Hey, lemme try the author. Can’t be a lot of dudes with a name like that.”

  He types again; again the screen flashes. Unknown.

  “Come on up to the counter, and we go ask the boss. She maybe look it up in Books in Print or something.”

  The boss, a grey-haired white woman in jeans and a T-shirt that says “What’s the good word?” does just that, talking the author and title into the main ROM comp behind the cluttered counter. While the unit searches, Tiffany studies the piles of dollar postcards and free bookmarks that lie every which way, so jumbled that she loses track of where the edges of one stack end and the next begins. Fortunately, before this contour meltdown can spread and disorganize her entire view, the boss speaks.

  “No such book in print, sorry, not for the last ten years anyway.”

  “Weird. The copy I lost was new. I mean, I’m pretty sure it was new.”

  “Where’d you buy it?”

  “Got it at a USO in Greece.”

  “Oh!” The boss grins, painted red mouth in a wrinkled face. “Well, you know, I bet it’s a Euro edition, then. It was probably never picked up by a publisher over here. Happens all the time, and Albert Allonsby sounds like a Euro name to me. Lessee, there’s a couple of import bookstores in town. I probably have a card for one of them lying around here. Or you can try a used bookstore. They get all sorts of odd things.”

  She rummages through the heaps on the counter and the stacks behind it, finally pounces in triumph and hands over a business card.

  “Give these people a call. If anyone’s got it, they do.”

  “Thanks, thanks a lot. Never dawned on me, that it just plain might not be a California I mean American book.”

  Neither the boss nor young Josh notices the slip. They merely nod and smile as Tiffany thanks them again and leaves, slipping the card into the breast pocket of the Forty-Niner jacket where she won’t lose it. She’ll never call the store, of course; using the vuphone terrifies her for one of those obscure reasons beyond her discussing, even with herself. But she just might go over and drop in one morning, on her way to the hospital, maybe, or on one of her rare afternoons off. Surely she’ll be able to work through a mere sixty-five pages of reading, and maybe, with those sixty-five under her belt, she’ll be able to tackle a completely new book.

  Outside, night. Caught off-guard she stops, staring, seeing dark sky, night shadows, stripes of white slashing through dark as trolley after trolley clangs its ways through rush hour. Up and down the streets mercury-vapor pole lamps radiate solid spheres of light. People rush, people crowd round, people push by. Tiffany feels her mouth opening for a scream, chokes it back, shuts her mouth, feels her bad hand stab with pain as the fingers clench, feels her good hand balling into a fist, shoving into its own pocket. She never should have stopped, should have gone straight home, can’t remember which way home lies, can’t see her streetcar stop, can see nothing, in fact, but striped light, spherical light, and the faces and shoulders of women dashing home from work, women lugging heavy shopping bags, women dragging kids behind them or carrying kids in backpacks, a perfumed sea of women, dotted with the occasional islands of men and boys. And a boy’s face at her elbow: Josh from the store.

  “You need help, doncha. Which bus you take?”

  She would like to scream at him to leave her alone, would like to lie and swear or state calmly that she’s fine, that she needs no help, but the lights shatter into a thousand swords and the faces swirl by on a perfumed tide.

  “The D-car. And thanks.”

  A strong hand on her good elbow steers her through the raging sea of faces, past the exploding lights and the crates of cabbages, the tables spread with bolts of cloth, the kids racing and playing tag out in the street. Josh leads her round the corner and down half a block to the dark and shuttered post office, where some twenty people stand, their backs to the street, reading the news-loop on the bright red digital strip above the door. Chinese ideograms flash on and crawl past, a steady parade.

  “Don’t look at them words,” Josh snaps. “You look at them red words moving and you be gone.”

  “You’re right. Your brother, he a zombie like me?”

  “Yeah, but we sure glad to have him back anyway. Here’s the streetcar stop, and look, here it comes.”

  “Thanks, Josh. Thanks a lot.”

  “No problem, miz. No problem at all.”

  The kindness of strangers. The phrase echoes in her mind as she climbs the steps, slides her FastPass through the slot, and makes her trembling way down the aisle. I’m dependent on the kindness of strangers. Where the hell is that line from? She can’t remember, knows she’ll never remember, finds a seat and slides in, turning to press her face against the window as the trolley groans and moves, clanging wildly at the women crossing back and forth. The conductor leans out and screams at sudden children, pressing alongside, raising cupped hands to open windows, begging for a coin or a piece of candy, Brazilian kids, barefoot and shivering, dressed in baggy shorts, thin shirts, those that have shirts at all. At last the streetcar sways across the intersection, stops, clangs, moves again, stops. On the Geary corner, another crowd streams through littered banks of fruit stands, sausage sellers, tables strewn with cheap merchandise. She sees one display clearly, notebooks and calculators, boxes of scribers, kids’ school supplies, before the car lurches into the middle of the wide boulevard. On a concrete island two men stand under a deathly glare of mercury vapor light.

  “Whattha hell? No, can’t be.”

  But it is the old man in the black suit, the rabbi, as she finds herself thinking of him, with his flood of grey hair escaping from his pudding-shaped black hat and his beard and his peyes, his skinny arms upraised as he argues with a young man, a very flash young man, his blond hair slicked back into moussed forks, wearing a bright red shirt of some shiny cloth, a pair of very tight black pants, and a wide belt, encrusted with buckles and studs. He struts back and forth with his arms folded over his chest and a sneer on his face as the old man waves one bony finger under his nose. The streetcar clangs, glides, clangs again and picks up speed, darting into the silence and safety of residential streets, leaving the old man and the flash dude far behind on their island of light and concrete.

  Tiffany slews round in her seat to sit facing forward and lets out her breath in one long sigh. It’s been a peculiar trip, getting home, a weird day, but then all her days fall into these disconnected chunks and oddities. It’s the wiring. Nine, almost ten, minutes without oxygen total. Two termination incidents. Two resurrection events. Wired weird wired. Weird. Outside the window Golden Gate Park slips past, trees dark mounds strange shapes flowers, a distant tower picked out by floodlight, streetcars clanging by in the opposite direction, fast, too fast. She looks away, concentrating on the brightly-lit car and the passengers nearby, but she has to keep track of where she is, out of the corner of her eye: Lincoln Avenue, by now, free of the park. The streetcar groans as it loops round to Seventh Avenue. Time to count. If she forgets to count the cross streets, she will lose her place in the complex book of the city. Two blocks, three. Sirens wailing, an ambulance darts past; the flash of lights and a roaring, a fire engine howls nearer and nearer. The streetcar lurches, quivering, to a stop. Her count is broken, and she feels the rage, rising on a sharp slivered tide of exhaustion, pounding in her ears and making her eyes fill with mist.

  Deep breaths, clenching fists. Cold window touching the side of the head. Breathe slowly, count your breaths. Count count count, and the stre
etcar moving again, a sigh of metal wheels on metal tracks, a sigh of breath, releasing the rage. Tiffany sits upright, seeing the lights and the gleaming tracks of the N-car line on Judah Street, where she can start her count again and find a new point on the grid, her place in the story, her stop, her cross street as she rises, gives the cord a smart pull, and slides her way through the crowded aisle to the back door. The last stage of the journey is the easiest: almost home, trotting in the cool night air down a blessedly dark street, houses, yellow windows, tiny patches of ivy and ice plant out front, or the defeated patches of concrete painted green, and the stairways rising up to doors. Door. A grey door, scabbing paint, beside a small window, covered with rusty iron bars, light gleaming through the window. Key, lock, two steps down. Home.

  Inside, soft light on a blue rug, stained but clean, a dark green sofa, sagging into hollows, a coffee table, chipped along one edge, but there are no pictures, no clock, no heaped magazines or shining comp monitors, no TV set in the wall, though distantly she hears electronic voices mutter. Her family followed doctor’s orders when they set up this room. Nothing moves but a grey cat, rising from the sofa to hump its back and stretch one front paw at a time, yawning, all pink mouth and fangs. The smell of chicken and cabbage, rice steam, ginger and garlic, drifts on warm air.

  “Hi Meebles. Daddy’s home, huh?”

  “Tiff?” Mark calls from the kitchen, a hint of worry.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Am I late?”

  “Nah, not very.” Relief shimmers in his voice. “You hungry?”

  “Sure am. Smells good.”

  She takes off the Forty-Niner jacket, drops it on the floor, means to pick it up, forgets it and walks down the narrow hall, past the door to their bedroom, which was once the other half of a two-car garage, and into the kitchen, a bright gold pool of light over green linoleum and dark-wood cabinets and walls. Mark stands by the stove. A pillar—that’s how she thinks of him—her pillar of strength, her tower, tall and heavyset, dark skin, dark hair, safe and steady. Her Mark. She lets him enfold her with one massive arm, pull her tight, catch her good hand in one of his huge hands, hers slender and pale against his brown skin. He understands about the wiring and the bad hand and the lacing of scars, Mark who slogged through twelve years in the Marines, Mark who made it through the entire Brazilian war and another year in Israel. The bad hand. She pulls away, grinning.

  “Got something to show you.”

  When she holds up the bad hand and clenches the fingers, he whoops and laughs and does a few quick steps of a war dance.

  “All right! Wish we had champagne.”

  “Wish I could drink it.”

  They laugh together. At times they both resent that her neuro drugs keep her from drinking, at those odd moments when she’d really like to join him in a beer during a game on TV or in a bar with friends, but now, seeing the scarred fingers move, neither of them mind the side effects. While he turns the food out of the work onto plates she squeezes herself into the chair between the tiny table and the blue-tiled wall. An ancient box TV sits on the opposite counter; a talking head mutters on-screen.

  “Want that off?”

  “No, it’s okay. Oh hell, sounds like the Yemen treaty’s breaking down.”

  “Yeah. You surprised?”

  She shakes her head no. She has grown up with war flaring and dying back in the Middle East, year after tedious year. News commentators speak images of brush fires and the waves of the sea; Tiffany thinks of it as a case of acne. You can scrub and scrub all you want, and maybe for a week your face looks fine, but one bite of chocolate and you’re a goner again. On the TV, tiny images of planes flit inside a box of sky. Mark reaches over and turns it off.

  “It was okay,” Tiffany says.

  He merely shrugs and sets full plates on the table.

  “How was your day?”

  “Okay.” He sits down carefully on the rocky chair. “Put in a lot more applications. Something’s bound to open up soon for a vet with my record. That’s what they all say, anyhow. Sure as hell hope so. Can’t see myself working a farm. Sure dunt want to re-up.”

  They eat in silence. Tiffany finds the food tasteless, but she’s used to that by now. The centers of her brain that control taste were hard hit, harder, perhaps, than those controlling any other sense, an odd glitch, difficult for the doctors to explain, since she can smell things clearly. Still, the warmth of the stir-fry comforts her, as does the spicy scent, the bright colors on the plate, neatly arranged—Mark is an excellent cook, or so those who can taste food tell her. She needs the comfort and the warmth because she feels sick and cold at the very thought of his re-enlisting, but aside, of course, from food, the rice and wheat that feed Europe and most of Asia, America’s mercenary armies are its biggest export, and their weapons its last true industry. In the cities, jobs for men are few and far between, even for twice-wounded vets with a long list of commendations and medals. She herself will never fly to war again; she has lost all the high economic value her fine-timed reflexes and steady hands once gave her. They cannot live forever on their combined benefits, hers of course much higher than his. Since he was only an enlisted man, his checks will stop soon. She has a lot of mustering-out benefits left, years’ and years’ worth.

  “Not like I need much of a job,” he remarks. “Maybe two thousand a month would do it.”

  “We could scrape by on less. Wish you’d just marry me, and then we’d get another allotment for a dependent.”

  “Damned if I’m gonna leech off of your rank.”

  “Well, if you’re gonna keep seeing it that way, you stubborn bastard.”

  They glare at each other across steaming plates in over-familiar anger. At length Mark sighs and begins shovelling food.

  “Sorry,” Tiffany says.

  “Ah well y’know.” A pause. “What’s happening tomorrow?”

  “The clinic’s gonna be open. I’ve got to go in for physical rehab. Oh yeah. Did my mom call about Sunday?”

  “She did, yeah. Amber and the kids are coming in on the morning train. So we’ll go over to your mom’s place in the afternoon, give the kids a chance to settle down after the trip. We’re invited for dinner.”

  “Well, I’d like to stay, talk to Amber.”

  “Maybe we can bring a bottle of wine. And something for the kids. Chocolate if we can find some.”

  “Good idea.”

  Mark smiles, relieved that he can shore up some small thing against the constant tide of her mother’s generosity. Tiffany chases a slice of carrot round her plate, spears it, eats it, remembering how carrots once tasted. The silence hangs over the table like the pool of light from the overhead lamp. Mark leans back and turns on the TV, letting the drone of bad news fill the space between them. A consortium of Korean investors is already negotiating with the president for thirty-three fighter squadrons and two divisions of infantry to guard their Yemenite refineries, one of the last lucrative installations in the Middle East. Pictures flash by, a holo scene of the haggling: serious American women in suits argue over the cost of lives with serious Korean men in suits.

  “Those dudes sure look nervous ’bout something, don’t they?” Mark turns the box off again. “If I had me all that oil, I wouldn’t be pinching the yen over the cost of GAMs.”

  “Makes you wonder, don’t it? What they’ve found out there, past Jupiter, I mean.”

  “Oh hey, those big moons, they could be drowning in methane, but the Euros, they still gotta get it back here, don’t they? And down to the surface. That stuff catches fire real easy.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be flying the shuttles down, no. I suppose they could freeze it somehow. Guess it is frozen, from what you hear on the news. Titan is cold, man. Long way away from the sun.”

  “Yeah, but gas expands when you warm it up. Bringing it down in tanks or something, all that friction warming them up, it could be real dangerous.”

  “Yeah, but if they work it all out, those Euro dudes won’t be
taking anyone’s orders anymore, will they? Could change a lot of things, man.”

  They both nod in the same rhythm, lean back in their chairs, smile, the brief gap bridged again. Mark gets up, takes the plates away, stacking them in the sink, where they will sit until the non-potable wash water gets turned on, round about 2100 hours. Although Tiffany lets him bring her the collection of pill bottles—too many and too slippery for her to manage—from the cupboard in the bathroom, she insists on getting up and fetching herself a glass of drinking water from the tank in the corner. She can set the glass on the little stand under the tap, turn the tap on with her good hand, turn it off again, then pick the glass back up without having to use the semi-bad hand at all. After Mark opens the vials, she shakes one or two of each kind of pill out, red and yellow and green on the tabletop, takes them one variety at a time, while Mark checks them off on the printed list from the clinic. Some she takes every day, others go in descending sequences, (seven one day, six the next, and so on), others still are occasional, every fourth day, twice a week, whatever Dr. Rosas and the pharmaceutical therapist have decided. She needs three glasses of water to get them all down.

  Mark is just putting the bottles and the list away again when the vuphone rings, a harsh claw of noise ripping the kitchen. Both of Tiffany’s hands clench tight as Mark rushes for it, hits the console, answering the call and turning off the screen all in one smooth smack of his hand.

  “You want to see, I’ll go in the living room.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  But she leaves anyway, limping into the green and blue refuge of the living room so he can see the person he’s trying to talk to like normal people do. As she listens to his end of the call—a series of okays, mostly, though he certainly sounds happy about something—she wonders why she hates watching a vuphone so much. It’s the wiring again, or so the doctor says, a glitch like the irrational rage and the memory lapses, a mere misfiring of neurons that make her detest the sight of a familiar face on a screen, surrounded by a harsh black line to set it off from the various message fields. She can watch the number-called-from blinking on the screen with no problem, just as she can copy off any words or graphics transmitted; it’s just the face, seeing the face and knowing that the face can see her, that fills her with a flood of ridiculous anger, a sheerly chemical rage. Yawning and stretching again, Meebles pads over to climb into her lap and sniff at her mouth, checking out just what she’s been eating for dinner. Gently she pushes him away.