Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  “Rude critter.” But she smiles, stroking his soft back, rubbing his chin.

  Meebles has just settled down in her lap when Mark trots in, moving as gracefully as a dancer in spite of his bulk. He has arranged his expression into a careful indifference.

  “Okay, what is it, poker face?”

  The grin breaks out, a flash of white.

  “Got a callback on a job. The one I liked the best. The warehouse dispatcher one.” He holds up an enormous hand flat for silence. “It’s just a callback, not a promise. Another interview, the woman said, but hey, it sure sounds good.”

  “All right! Wish we had some champagne.”

  “Wish you could drink it.”

  And they laugh, so wild, so happy, both of them, that Meebles leaps up and stalks indignantly away.

  Two

  When Tiffany arrives, the rehab clinic is just getting started for the day. At the check-in desk the computer is updating files, the comp-op is finishing her coffee, the physical therapist is leaning against the wall and talking about imported shoes with her respiratory counterpart. Tiffany takes her clinic card out of her shirt pocket and holds it out with the good hand.

  “I knew you’d be here the minute we opened that door,” the comp-op heaves a fake sigh. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “Tiff, I’ll be right with you.” The physical therapist’s name is Gina. “They’re bringing some new guys down from the hospital any minute now, and I want to get them started on the diagnostics.”

  New guys. More people who have died and come back to life. Tiffany feels her sympathy as an electric shudder, racing down her spine.

  “Sure, of course. I’ll just go in and start stretching out.”

  “Good, good. Be right there.”

  Although the workout room sports an entire wall of mirrors, Tiffany has grown quite skilled at avoiding looking into them. She knows by heart each of the scars that lace her once-beautiful face. Plastic surgery has reduced their number and smoothed out the pink ridges pushed up by shrapnel shoving into flesh, but military surgery will only do so much cosmetic work, even for an officer, and she can’t afford a private clinic for the rest. The scars on her bad leg she has to confront, because she must use the mirrors to check her posture and position throughout the session. Most of the feeling has returned to her shoulders, but her bad leg still seems to belong to someone else. If she forgets to keep watch over it, it drifts, and she ends up standing at an awkward and unbalanced angle. At least she does have both hands back again. Stretching and pointing with an arm that ends in sentient fingers turns out to be a much easier proposition than flapping a dead hand at a wall, so much so that she’s humming along with the taped music by the time Gina comes in.

  “Ohmigawd, look at those fingers! When?”

  “Yesterday on the way home. I had my juice up in neuro, and they just started clenching up.”

  “That’s so wonderful, it’s super!” Dancing automatically to the music, Gina comes over. “All that hard work! See, told you it’d payoff.”

  Rather than hurt Gina’s feelings, Tiffany allows herself to be hugged.

  “Let’s get you a squeezer for that hand. Oh, this is just so tremendous!”

  The squeezer turns out to be a tennis ball with a chip tucked inside. Every time that Tiffany clenches her fingers around it, the chip records the amount of pressure she can generate and keeps a running total of the number of times she grips it.

  “We’ll download it into your file once a day and reset it. Once you get to a certain level, we’ll upgrade and give you one that’s harder to squish.” Gina always uses words like squish. “Let me have your card so I can check this one out to you. I want you to keep it in your pocket all the time. Whenever you’ve got a moment, squish squish squish! The more you can do, the better. But if your hand aches, stop for a while and like rub it. The hand I mean, not the squeezer.”

  Getting to take the ball home with her, having therapy that she can do by herself, makes Tiffany happier than she’s been in a long while. Her good mood, however, lasts only a few minutes. She’s just getting into her rhythm on the push’n’pedal bike when Gina reappears in the doorway, stands there watching, merely watching, except she’s chewing on the side of her hand as she always does when she’s anxious. Tiffany lets the bike slow and stop.

  “Uh, yeah?”

  “We need a favor from you. I mean, like, only if you feel you can. Y’know? One of the new guys, his morale is down. I mean, way down. Like, running on empty. Can I show you off?”

  It takes Tiffany a long moment’s struggle with herself before she agrees, nodding a yes rather than speaking it, swinging her bad leg carefully off the bike.

  “I mean, if you really really don’t mind. I don’t want to bring you down, but God, Tiff, you’re our big success, you know. And it does the other guys so much good when they see you.”

  She cannot begrudge Gina her pride in her work, cannot begrudge the possible good, either, that her own recovery, so successful beyond the first diagnosis, might do for this human being who, like her, has seen death only to be wrenched back to some semblance, some altered and limited version, of life. She follows Gina down the pale blue hall to the diagnostic room, painted pink, the corners carefully rounded, the shiny machinery hidden away behind blue screens except for the inevitable cables and connections. The new patient sits in an ordinary powered wheelchair rather than an electro-chair—a good sign in itself, as is the tilt of his head, and his defiant scowl. His hands, too, clasp the ends of the chair arms in white-knuckled rage.

  “Bob . . . Major Wong, I mean. This is Captain Owens.”

  He swivels slightly to glance at her, forces a smile, nods at her answering smile. His face—the dark bangs of hair, the dark eyes, thin mouth, strong jaw—look perfectly normal, untouched, but the back of his head puffs out hairless, bright pink and engraved with the scars of old sutures, as if, perhaps his skull had got itself crushed, and the hunks and splinters pounded into the vulnerable brain lying just below.

  “Hello, sir,” Tiffany says. “If you can’t answer don’t worry about it. I couldn’t talk when I got here.”

  His head jerks up a little, and he stares full into her face, searches her face, really, as if he were reading a text written on her mouth.

  “It’s true,” Gina says. “She couldn’t even say yes and no like you can. Honest cross my heart.”

  His mouth twitches in a smile.

  “Can you stand, sir?”

  The noise he makes sounds more like the moo of a cow, cut short, than a no, but Tiffany can understand it. Even if Gina hadn’t prompted her, she still would have understood—another good sign.

  “Neither could I.”

  Tears fill his eyes, spill helplessly as he jerks one arm, can’t make it reach his face, mutters a noise that might be “God almighty,” wrenches the arm up somehow almost to his chin. Gina darts forward to help, to wipe the tears away on one of her omnipresent kleenexes. Although Tiffany turns and walks out fast, she know she’s done the right thing. When you cry, it means you care, and when you care, you want to live. Her hand finds the squeezer in her pocket and clenches. Hand. Back of the head. God almighty. Fat lot of good he can do. Uh God. She does not want to remember the back of his head, the reconstituted bone, the pink puff, scraped clean of the ever-so-thin layer of cells that carry whatever coloring a person’s skin might have. She makes herself think of other things, repeats words that fill the blank screen of her memory with other pictures. Don’t think of a white horse. Her sister would say those words and giggle, sitting on the edge of the top bunk and swinging stockinged feet. White horses. Green fields, fenced. Here now, you are here now, in the workout room. See the metal arms and levers of the equipment, hear the music rocking out from hidden speakers. Don’t look at the mirrors.

  After long hours on the push’n’pedal bike, the flat boards and the pull-up bar, after more juice in the rehab lounge and a fastidiously nutritional lunch as well, Tiffany puts
her new squeezer in the pocket of the Forty-Niner jacket and slides the semi-bad hand in after it. She has plenty of room to grab the ball and clench her fingers, but she stops at the mirror by the check-in desk and watches herself for a moment.

  “That look funny?” Tiffany says to the receptionist. “Seeing my fingers move in there like that?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t do it in a crowded place or anything, no.”

  “Okay. That’s why I asked.”

  The receptionist smiles, hands her card back, hesitates.

  “Gina tells me you went down to see Major Wong,” she says at last.

  “Yeah. Sure did.”

  “Real nice of you. He’s a hero, they tell me. Saved all kinds of lives. Guess we’ll find out how sooner or later. A real hero, Doctor says.”

  Tiffany smiles, nods, turns and leaves as fast as she can manage. A real hero. Not like me. The plant going up, tower of white light. Shoulda stopped them. How? In a half-armed plane? She shakes her head until she trembles and can forget.

  Outside the world lies wrapped in fog, the sunlight blessedly gone, all bright colors blurred, all sounds muted. In the fog the firestorm in Tiffany’s brain dies fast, leaving her confident enough to decide to stop at a bookstore and look for Hunter’s Night. As she walks downhill she fishes in her pocket, finds the card for the import store and checks the address: too far away. She’ll save that one for next week. On the other hand, she does remember a large used bookstore just off her usual streetcar line, just a couple of blocks on the far side of Golden Gate Park. She can even remember the cross street and the stores that lie on either side of it. Not that she trusts the memory, of course. The wiring may well have betrayed her again, and she braces herself for the shock, the disappointment.

  Which come. The bookstore indeed exists, a narrow aisle of a building, and indeed, on one side a delicatessen still displays rows of hanging ducks and trays of pork buns in its window, but on the other side stands a dry cleaner, a dusty faded store smelling of chemicals and old cloth, that must have been there for years and years. The drugstore she’s remembering is gone, obviously never existed except as a ghost or hallucination in the wiring. Somehow her torn brain built colored images of that drugstore, added the smell of perfumes and hair sprays, shrimp chips and cheap candy, fleshed out the scene with a crabby clerk and her pimply daughter. Betrayed by the mind’s eye. Again. Eye. That will not see. That sees what does not exist. Pluck it out. For a long time Tiffany stands on the sidewalk and stares at the dry cleaner, until the elderly Chinese man behind the counter notices her and looks up, peering through the philodendron leaves that ring round the window.

  Tiffany flees into the used bookstore, a gap-toothed cavern in the earth, glowing with phosphorescence, filled with boulders and stalactites. The smell of dusty paper and humid plastic reassures her, soothes the neurons firing in disordered clumps, stanches the flow of adrenaline pouring into her system, until she can focus her eyes in the dim electric light and realize that what she is really seeing is the merchandise. Near the window stands a counter, with a clerk perched on a stool behind the computer. Down the length of the shop run shelves, piled high, sagging, blocked by stacks and cartons of books and paper-books. The clerk looks up, smiles, returns to reading her news cartridge. Tiffany turns sideways, inches herself down the length of the store between piles of cartons, past the shelves of Bibles, the stacks of tracts, and finds the science fiction section exactly where she remembered it. For a moment her eyes well tears of relief. She wipes them dry, finds her piece of paper, and begins trying to match titles.

  No Hunter’s Night, but she feels only resigned. She is beginning to consider that her memories of this book might be as illusory as those of the drugstore. Why her mind would bother to create imaginary novels and places she cannot explain, any more than Dr. Rosas can offer any reasons that make sense. For the first time in her year’s fight back, she begins to wonder if her doctors really do know all the answers. That comforting catch phrase, the prayer or litany that’s kept her going, her lifeline, even, “it’s in the wiring” suddenly rings empty and dead.

  “Why is it in the wiring? That’s what counts.”

  She’s spoken aloud, and the clerk has heard her, or at least, heard sound drifting from the aisle. A young woman caped in uncombed black hair, she slips off her stool and hurries down.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Well, uh, maybe. I’m looking for a book by a dude named Albert Allonsby. Hunter’s Night.”

  “Ess Eff?”

  Tiffany thinks for a moment before she can decipher the abbreviation.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “I really like that stuff. You do, too, huh? I never woulda thought . . . well, I mean.”

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, sorry, I don’t wanna be rude, but you’re a vet, right? I mean, you musta done stuff that was real exciting on your own. A lot flashier than just reading books.”

  “I guess. I was a pilot, and I loved flying. That was flash. But you know something? Sitting around, waiting to fly? That was boring, superboring. We all read a lot, while we were waiting. To pretend we were somewhere else.”

  “You dint watch TV?”

  “The hostiles woulda picked it up, homed missiles on it.”

  “Oh.” Her lips part, and she stares, just for a moment, before she catches herself. “But Allonsby. Wait. I know him. I’ve even read some of his stuff, but I never knew he wrote novels. I mean, like, I’ve read short stories of his, just not a whole book.”

  “Well, I picked it up when I was overseas.”

  “Oh. I getcha, a Euro edition or something. Say, if you find it, and if you’re over this way, let me know, okay? I sure did like his stories.”

  Her relief at finding out that at least Allonsby himself exists is so strong that Tiffany would do the clerk a lot bigger favor than that if the chance presented itself. As she walks down to the streetcar stop, she pieces together the small fragments that repair another bit of her shattered mind. A real Albert Allonsby writes science fiction stories; he most likely lives in the European States; his novel, Hunter’s Night, most likely exists as well, simply in a hard-to-find edition that was never imported into America. By concentrating on this syllogism, by repeating it over and over, she can make herself forget the missing drugstore.

  At the streetcar stop a crowd stands and mills, women with shopping bags, women with kids in backpacks, women clutching the hands of larger children or hissing orders in their direction. Tiffany walks a few paces away, where she can stay by the curb and build herself a small booth of privacy. When she shoves her hands into her jacket pockets she finds the squeezer and smiles. Hand. Her hand, and working again. She has a prize to take home, a tangible proof of her progress.

  “Tiff! Hey, how are you?”

  The voice strikes her as utterly unfamiliar: male, but soft; soft, but scratchy. She looks up to find a young man, ever so barely familiar, smiling at her. Tall, With blond hair greased back, wearing black leather pants, a red silk shirt—very flash, this young man, and, she supposes, handsome in a way, but she dislikes his eyes. They are so pale that she can’t tell if they’re blue or grey, and they stare, glitter, never blink, never waver, until her own eyes seem to itch in sympathy. When she does blink a couple of times, then, at last, so does he.

  “It’s me,” he says. “Don’t you remember? Nick, ol’ Nick Harrison. Hey, heard you were, uh, wounded in the war. Sure sorry ’bout that. Uh, say, do you remember me?”

  “No, sure dunt. I’m real sorry.” By now Tiffany has grown used to this bleak routine, of running across acquaintances only to find that the wiring has wiped itself clean of their memory. “Nick, honest, it’s nothing personal. Okay? I’m afraid I got shot up pretty bad, and there’s just a hell of a lot of people I don’t remember.”

  “Well, sure, I mean, you hear about stuff like that on TV. I understand, yeah.”

  He tilts his head a little to one side and wa
tches her unblinking while she tries to follow down the memory trail leading back to the part of her history that includes him. Behind her, a streetcar clangs, hissing with brakes as it glides to a stop.

  “I better go,” Tiffany says, turning.

  “No, wait! Hey, can’t I buy you a cup of coffee? How long you been home?”

  Although she hesitates, taking his offer—no doubt intended kindly—would mean telling the story once again, remembering the story all over again. Black smoke rising. Missiles screaming down. She keeps turning, keeps walking toward the streetcar, but she is seeing the wing of her plane fall away, then a flare of white light and a sound shattering her life and mind.

  “Whoops! Young lady, watch out!”

  “Oh God! I’m sorry.”

  She has walked straight into someone climbing down from the streetcar. For a moment she can only stammer and blush as the old man picks up his round black hat, brushes it off, and settles it on his mass of grey hair. Sidelocks and a long beard, a black suit—the rabbi, smiling at her, clasping his hands in front of him, bowing at her.

  “Jeez, I am so sorry, mister.”

  “No problem. At least you had the good sense to run away from the Devil, huh? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  The streetcar clangs a warning of imminent departure.

  “Let it go. We’ve got to talk.” The rabbi takes her arm and swings her around. “We’ll go have a nice cup of coffee in one of these cafés.”

  All at once she remembers where she last saw Nick, out on the streetcar island, arguing with this same old man. His arms crossed over his chest, Nick stands glowering at them, his pale pale eyes unblinking, his mouth twisted into the ugliest scowl she’s ever seen on a human face. If indeed he is human. What did the old man say? Run away from the Devil? Just as if he knew her thoughts, Nick smiles, and draped in that smile he looks nothing but human, and a good-looking guy at that.