I realized then that I was different.
We step back on the sidewalk, waiting for the truck to pass, waiting to get the license plate so we can call the police anonymously. The police might be able to stop Earl with a road block. They could stop him up U.S. 23 a few miles. If they believe us.
If Earl didn’t kill the girl first. If she wasn’t already dead.
My stomach lurches. We can’t help thinking of the horror that the girl must have faced, must be facing.
Giving the license plate to the police wouldn’t be enough.
We step into the street and wave our hands, flagging Earl down.
We once dated a woman, a beautiful woman with chestnut hair that fell to the middle of her back. We dated for several years, and finally became engaged. In one of the worlds, just one, she started to change, grew angry, then elated, then just empty. The rest of us watched in horror as she took a knife to us, just once, in one universe, while in a million others, she compassionately helped our retching self to the kitchen sink.
She didn’t understand why I broke off the engagement. But then she didn’t know the things I did.
Earl’s cab shudders as he slams on the brakes. His CB mic slips loose and knocks the windshield. He grabs his steering wheel, his shoulders massive with exertion.
We stand there, our shopping bag dropped by the side of road, slowly waving our hands back and forth.
In a handful of worlds, the tractor trailer slams through us, and we are rattled by my death. But we know he will be caught there. For vehicular manslaughter, perhaps, and then they will find the girl. In almost all the worlds, though, Earl’s semi comes to a halt a few inches from us, a few feet.
We look up over the chrome grill, past the hood ornament, a woman’s head, like on a sea-going vessel of old, and into Earl’s eyes.
He reaches up and lets loose with his horn. We clap our hands over our ears and, in some universes, we stumble to the sidewalk, allowing Earl to grind his truck into first and rumble away. But mostly, we stand there, not moving.
It didn’t matter who was president, or who won the World Series. In sum, it was the same world for each of us, and so we existed together, on top of each other, like a stack of us, all living together within a deck of cards.
Each decision that created a subtly different universe, created another of us, another of a nearly infinite number of mes, who added just a fraction more to our intellect and understanding.
We were not a god. One of us once thought he was, and soon he was no longer with us. He couldn’t have shared our secret. We weren’t scared of that. Who would have believed him? And now that he was alone — for there could only be a handful of us who might have such delusions — there could be no harm to the rest of us.
We were worlds away.
Finally the horn stops and we look up, our ears benumbed, to see Earl yelling at us. We can’t hear what he says, but we recognize on his lips “Mother Fucker” and “Son of a Bitch.” That’s fine. We need him angry. To incite him, we give him the bird.
He bends down, reaching under his seat. He slaps a metal wrench against his open palm. His door opens and he steps down. We wait where we are.
Earl is a large man, six-four, and weighing at least three hundred pounds. He has a belly, but his chest and neck are massive. Black sideburns adorn his face, or it is cleanly shaven, or he has a mustache. In all worlds, his dead eyes watch us as if we are a cow and he is the butcher.
I am slight, just five-nine, one hundred and sixty pounds, but as he swings the wrench we dodge inside it as if we know where it is going to be. We do, of course, for it has shattered our skull in a hundred worlds, enough for the rest of us to anticipate the move.
He swings and we dodge again, twice more, and each time a few of us are sacrificed. We are suddenly uncomfortable at the losses. We are the consciousness of millions of mes. But every one of us that dies is a real instance, gone forever. Every death diminishes us.
We can not wait for the police now. We must save as much of ourself as we can.
We dodge again, spinning past him, sacrificing selves to dance around him as if he is a dance partner we have worked with for a thousand years. We climb the steps to the cab, slide inside, slam the door, and lock it.
I am a composite of all versions of myself. I can think in a million ways at once. Problems become picking the best choice of all choices I could ever have picked. I can not see the future or the past, but I can see the present with a billion eyes and decide the safest course, the one that keeps the most of me together.
I am a massively parallel human.
In the worlds where the sleeper is empty, we sit quietly for the police to arrive, weaving a story that they might believe while Earl glares at us from the street. These selves fade away from those where the girl is trussed in the back, tied with wire that cuts her wrists, and gagged with duct tape.
She is dead in some, her face livid with bruises and burns. In others she is alive and conscious and watches us with blue, bloodshot eyes. The cab smells of people living there too long, of sex, of blood.
In the universes where Earl has abducted and raped this young woman, he does not stand idly on the sidewalk, but rather smashes his window open with the wrench.
The second blow catches my forehead, as I have no place to dodge, and I think as my mind shudders that I am one of the sacrificed ones, one of those who has failed so that the rest of us might survive. But then I realize that it is most of us who have been hit. Only a small percentage have managed to dodge the blow. The rest of us roll to our back and kick at Earl’s hand as it reaches in to unlock the cab door. His wrist rakes the broken safety glass, and he cries out, though still manages to pop the lock.
I crab backwards across the seat, flailing my legs at him. There are no options here. All of my selves are fighting for our lives or dying.
A single blow takes half of us. Another takes a third of those that are left. Soon my mind is a cloud. I am perhaps ten thousand, slow-witted. No longer omniscient.
A blow lands and I collapse against the door of the cab. I am just me. There is just one. Empty.
My body refuses to move as Earl loops a wire around my wrists and ankles. He does it perfunctorily — he wants to move, to get out of the middle of Sandusky Street — but it is enough to leave me helpless on the passenger side floor. I can see a half-eaten Big Mac and a can of Diet Coke. My face grinds against small stones and dirt.
I am alone. There is just me, and I am befuddled. My mind works like cold honey. I’ve failed. We all did, and now we will die like the poor girl in the back. Alone.
My vision shifts, and I see the cab from behind Earl’s head, from the sleeping cab. I realize that I am seeing it from a self who has been beaten and tossed into the back. This self is dying, but I can see through his eyes, as the blood seeps out of him. For a moment our worlds are in sync.
His eyes lower and I spot the knife, a hunting knife with a serrated edge, brown with blood. It has fallen under the passenger’s chair in his universe, under the chair I have my back against.
My hands are bound behind me, but I reach as far as I can under the seat. It’s not far enough in my awkward position. My self’s eyes lock on the knife, not far from where my fingers should be. But I have no guarantee that it’s even in my own universe at all. We are no longer at the center of the curve. My choices have brought me far away from the selves now drinking coffee and eating bagels across the street from the bookstore.
Earl looks down at me, curses. He kicks me, and pushes me farther against the passenger seat. Something nicks my finger.
I reach gently around it. It is the knife.
I take moments to maneuver it so that I hold it in my palm, outstretched like the spine of a stegosaurus. I cut myself, and I feel the hilt get slippery. I palm my hand against the gritty carpet and position the knife again.
I wait for Earl to begin a right turn, then I pull my knees in, roll onto my chest, and launch myself, back f
irst with knife extended, at Earl.
In the only universe that I exist in, the knife enters his thigh.
The truck caroms off something in the street, and I am jerked harder against Earl. He is screaming, yelling, pawing at his thigh.
His fist slams against me and I fall to the floor.
As he turns his anger on me, the truck slams hard into something, and Earl is flung against the steering wheel. He remains that way, unconscious, until the woman in the back struggles forward and leans heavily on the knife hilt in his leg, and slices until she finds a vein or artery.
I lie in Earl’s blood until the police arrive. I am alone again, the self who had spotted the knife, gone.
The young woman came to see me while I mended in a hospital bed. There was an air of notoriety about me, and nurses and doctors were extremely pleasant. It was not just the events which had unfolded on the streets of their small town, but that I was the noted author of such famous songs as “Love as a Star” and “Romance Ho” and “Muskrat Love.” The uncovering of Earl’s exploits, including a grim laboratory in his home town of Pittsburgh, added fuel to the fire.
She seemed to have mended a bit better than I, her face now a face, her body and spirit whole again. She was stronger than I, I felt when I saw her smile. My body was healing, the cuts around my wrist and ankle, the shattered bone in my arm. But the sundering of my consciousness had left me dull, broken.
I listened to songs on the radio, other people’s songs, and could not help wondering in how many worlds there had been no knife, there had been no escape. Perhaps I was the only one of us who reached the cab to survive. Perhaps I was the only one who had saved the woman.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for what you did.”
I reached for something to say, something witty, urbane, nonchalant from my mind, but there was nothing there but me.
“Uh . . . you’re welcome.”
She smiled. “You could have been killed,” she said.
I looked away. She didn’t realize that I had been.
“Well, sorry for bothering you,” she said quickly.
“Listen,” I said, drawing her back. “I’m sorry I didn’t...” I wanted to apologize for not saving more of her. For not ending the lives of more Earls. “I’m sorry I didn’t save you sooner.” It didn’t make any sense, and I felt myself flush.
She smiled and said, “It was enough.” She leaned in to kiss me.
I am disoriented as I feel her lips brush my right cheek, and also my left, and a third kiss lightly on my lips. I am looking at her in three views, a triptych slightly askew, and I manage a smile then, three smiles. And then a laugh, three laughs.
We have saved her at least once. That is enough. In one of the three universes we inhabit, a woman is singing a catchy tune on the radio. I start to write the lyrics down with my good hand, then stop. Enough of that, we three decide. There are other things to do now, other choices.
I first met Steve Rasnic Tem at World Horror in Denver, and then again in Corpus Christi for World Fantasy. It was at one of these that I found a little story called “The Man in the Ceiling” that he wrote with his wife Melanie. It caused quite a sensation, and if you’ve never read it, you must find it and read it. “Cats, Dogs, and Other Creatures” was one of the first stories to break a hard and fast rule at Talebones: no cat stories. But then again, is it really a cat story? Oklahoma artist Tom Simonton did a number of covers for us, including issue #21, where this story appeared. Simonton did a whole lot of interior art as well.
CATS, DOGS, AND OTHER CREATURES
STEVE RASNIC TEM
CATS
Outside, in the cold air, the babies were crying again.
Esther knew they weren’t really babies. They were cats: tabbies and calicoes, short-hairs and long-hairs, Persians and Russians and Siamese. All of them crying like babies, just to be mean, their high-pitched cries rising steadily until they were babies in distress, babies in grave danger, babies going insane within a deadly dream. Such hateful cats.
Even though she knew better, Esther always let herself be fooled, always thought of them as the babies, because she wanted to be fooled. Her own babies were long gone now, married with babies of their own. Which she never saw, because their parents never visited. Because they’d hated their own mother for years, just like those selfish cats hated her.
Outside, in the cold air, the babies began to quarrel. Babies were always quarreling because there was never enough food, never enough love to go around. Esther thought that was a terrible thing, but it was the way of the world, and there was nothing she could do about it. But of course the babies never understood the worries of a mother.
Let us in, let us in! all the babies cried, but Esther was afraid. For she knew just how hateful babies could be, with their crying, and their quarreling, and their terrible hungers, and still more crying.
Outside, in the cold air, the babies began to scream. The wind rose, and looking out her window Esther could see the babies flying through the air, blown by the wind and blown by their own anger, which Esther knew to be without limit.
Open the window, open the window! all the babies cried, but Esther would not. For she understood the deceitfulness of babies, who cared only about filling their own mouths. The babies had taken from her all she had to give, and was it her fault she had had so little to give? She’d never been married, never had a man who stayed long enough to help out. She’d been thin and cheated and poor. She’d done what she could, the little that she could.
Then the babies were dropping softly through the broken glass, their bodies torn, tiny faces bleeding, and Esther ran around with towels and torn pieces of bed sheet to stop the wounds and soothe their cries, and even though their claws tore at her arms she never complained, never opened her mouth without a lullabye inside, and still it wasn’t enough.
DOGS
That summer the dogs gathered about him almost obsessively, as if afraid to let him out of their sight. There were the three he owned: the spaniel and the corgi and the retriever Ellen had left behind when she took the kids that day and went away. He’d always thought she loved that dog more than the kids, but he supposed he’d been wrong about that one aspect of their marriage. Certainly she hadn’t loved him more, but that wasn’t the reason he’d cheated on her. At least he was honest about it — that was part of his nature. Just as cheating had been part of his nature. He still believed he couldn’t have helped himself.
He supposed the retriever, Sam, was his now, even though he’d never liked the dog. Sam was old and fat and lazy, but he’d always believed that you never kicked out a dog just because you didn’t like him. You let him hang around until he died of natural causes.
Sometimes when he was out in the yard with the three dogs, picking up the kids’ toys — after all these months he was still finding toys everywhere he looked, sometimes telling them to put them away even though he knew good and well the kids weren’t there — other dogs from the neighborhood would join them, following him around with his own dogs. At least he thought they were from the neighborhood — he’d actually never seen these particular dogs before. Sometimes they’d follow him into the house. He’d never stop them. He didn’t care.
Occasionally the sheer number of dogs caused a disturbance among them — a dachsund would get too close to a boxer, a corgi would inadvertently step on a retriever’s paw — but a little fight had never bothered him much. He liked a little fight in a dog.
Over the months the dogs accumulated until he stopped counting their numbers. He simply knew he had more dogs than furniture, more dogs than words he wanted to share with anyone. He wasn’t sure when he had stopped getting up: a doberman had ripped the calendar off the wall and eaten the pages — one centerfold pose at a time, Miss July, Miss August, the mighty Miss September. He’d laughed at that one, cheered the beast on, especially that evening when the dog shit some glossy nakedness out. The god-damned chihuahua had knocked the alarm clock off onto the
floor, where it was quickly covered by a heaving mass of canine bodies. Not that he ever wanted to look at the time again, but he’d never cared much for hairless dogs.
“Hey, boys,” he whispered from the bed, making a half-dozen of them move off his back. “Hey, now,” he said, as he rolled over and a shepherd stretched out over his chest, pressing down so hard he could hardly breathe. There were snarls and snaps in answer, and vicious fights he could not see. “So what have you gone and done?” as the air filled with the stench of dead dog.
AND OTHER CREATURES
The children played all afternoon on the wide lawn while their parents drank and played cards inside in the glass-walled room. One of the mothers worried that it might be too hot outside for the younger children, but the man who owned the house said it was fine because his children had always played in such heat with no ill effects. Her husband reassured her and poured another round of drinks. Then the couples traded stories about the resiliency of childhood and they all laughed and shook their heads, even the woman who had been worried.
Outside, the sun had become a great penny of fire. The older children advised the younger children to stare at the fire if they wanted to see the pretty pictures, and the younger children did as they were told even though it hurt.
At the edge of the wide lawn the other creatures gathered and watched.
Inside the glass-walled room the parents put on some music and began to dance. The young children on the lawn outside this room could no longer see through the glass, but they could hear the music and the jumble of noise that was their mommies and daddies laughing. The children moved toward the glass wall, lay down on the lawn and closed their eyes. The mother who had worried at first was glad her children weren’t in the room, because she wanted to forget them for a change, forget herself and have some fun.
The Best of Talebones Page 5
