Asimov's SF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She became aware of dampness. In the mirror her hair and clothing appeared dry, but her cheeks were wet, her eyes red. Obviously, she'd been crying. But she never cried, even when she wanted to, even when what she needed to do more than anything was start crying and not stop. She couldn't cry. It was a personal failing. And right now, she hadn't been aware of even feeling sad. She was whistling soundlessly in what she recognized as a nervous habit but saw no reason to break.

  A man's pale face precipitated out of the depths of the mirror, somewhere back of her head, his features distorted under plastic shielding. She started to look behind her. That'll do no good. Had the thought been hers or his?

  “You worry too much, Nezzie.” Ken had been talking with his mouth full. She'd told him a thousand times how much she hated that. It wasn't just the mastication itself, but the thoughts that went with it, and with sex, going to the bathroom—primitive wordless mental processes of desire, hunger, relief, anger. Being on the receiving end was beyond uncomfortable. Ken had been filling himself, and spitting some of it out at her. “Stay out of other people's business.” His biscuit had dripped gravy onto her best tablecloth. If she said he was criticizing her, he'd just deny it and twist it into another example of how she took things too seriously. But she knew the truth—more than a few times she had heard the aggression in his mind when he said things like that. He waited for her to answer. She just looked away and whistled very softly. That drove him crazy.

  Ken faded from view, and she was alone at her dining room table, staring at his empty chair. He'd died—-she wanted to say twenty years ago, but she'd been saying “twenty years” for the longest time and it must be much longer now. He'd had a heart attack. She hadn't known it was coming. He'd had many secrets, though a lot fewer than he'd imagined.

  “...yellow roses ... bells ... why can't I say what I feel ... alone so long ... goodbye...”

  Someone somewhere was lost and desperate. Inez had the familiar and pointless impulse to cover her ears. She could feel lost and desperate just fine all on her own, thank you very much. Now the actual ringing of bells came to her, which might be her own memory—she couldn't place it, but she'd heard a lot of bells in her life. Donna, in fact, had been in a children's bell choir for a while; Inez floated in that happy memory until it was interrupted by music she didn't recognize, surely from a place and time she'd never visited, strange instruments and strange voices and alien language and tune. Music was always nice. During the periodic long stretches when she'd had no thoughts but her own, Inez had most missed the alien music.

  “...hope her mind ... didn't take a turn...” Inez recognized the particular warmth: that sweet girl from the agency who did shopping for her. The girl was about to knock on her door. Wasn't she a few days early? Or had Inez lost track of time? It was her biggest worry, that she would lose time, the idea of it, the working of it, and she'd be wandering through space with no clear memory of anything, until death made her land.

  Whistling, Inez made the mistake of opening the door before the visitor had a chance to knock. “Oh!” said the girl.

  Dotty old woman.... Which of them had thought that? Inez resorted to talking with no thought at all. “I came out to look for the paper and see the flowers and that silly barking dog across the street. And what do you know? There you are?”

  “Hello, Inez. How are you today? Are you doing okay?”

  Inez made herself laugh. “Oh, fine, fine. I ... don't think I expected you today, did I?”

  The young woman gazed at her, no doubt evaluating. “It's your grocery list, hon. There are some things on it I don't quite understand. I just thought I'd better check.”

  “Let me see it.” Inez held out her hand. Was she being a little snappish?

  The list was in her handwriting, so she knew there hadn't been a mix-up between clients. She studied it.

  Cheese

  Furniture polish

  Stamps

  Bottle orange juice

  Glittering dust

  Crackers

  Faulty navigation

  Raisins

  Distant

  Wheat bread

  Tea

  Signal

  Cream

  Lost

  “I'm so embarrassed.”

  “Oh, honey, it's okay.”

  “Why, my penmanship is atrocious!”

  “Is it?” She touched the list, and when Inez didn't let it go, gently pushed one corner of it down and twisted her head and shoulders around so she could read. “I didn't think the handwriting was so bad.”

  “Well, look here, does that look like ‘Signal’ to you?”

  “Yes. Yes. It does.”

  “Well, that's supposed to be ‘Cereal.’ My ‘C's and ‘R's, especially, are terrible. Parkinson's, you know. And that last word on the list, can you read that?”

  The girl started to say something, stopped herself. “No, I guess I can't.”

  “Well, that's supposed to be ‘soap.’ Hand soap? It looks like ‘lost,’ doesn't it?”

  “Yes, yes, it does,” she said again, and smiled.

  “You probably thought it was my mind that was lost!”

  The answering giggle was uncomfortable, the protest unconvincing. “Of course not!”

  Inez corrected the list for her, adding glass cleaner, a mop, detergent, none of which she actually needed. The girl promised to bring the items in a couple of days, then asked to use Inez's phone. Thinking she might be calling in a report on her, Inez went just around the corner and listened, but it turned out to be just a call to the next client apologizing for being late.

  When the girl left, she walked right past a sad-looking man standing in the middle of the front sidewalk. The sun was suddenly too bright and Inez raised a shaky hand for shade. But by the time she adjusted her eyes he was gone and she closed the door, only slightly more aware than usual of the many things outside her comprehension in this world and, maybe, others.

  Sometimes at the end of the afternoon, on days she expected no guests, Inez would venture past whistling into outright singing. Usually she didn't remember entire songs, just choruses, beginnings, occasional other lines. She did the best she could, making up her own lyrics to fill in the gaps. She would have been embarrassed if anyone were to hear, but, alone, it was a pleasure to make these songs into songs about her life.

  “My life is an endless river!” she sang now, even though there was an outside chance that a sad-looking, glowing man might be standing in her driveway. “Which does not know it flows!”

  “Why so many ter-ri-ble secrets!” she sang. “That tear the heart within!/Why so many beau-ti-ful secrets/That would fill the heart with joy?”

  Silly as she knew this to be, it softened the loneliness. The central fact of her talent for receiving other people's thought was that, like being the unattached person in a crowded party, it only made you lonelier.

  “There are stars beyond number!” she sang. “My journey has no end!”

  Her face felt damp again. With the back of a shaky hand she wiped her tears away. Then she stared at the hand: it was wrapped in a shiny, plastic-looking material, some kind of glove. The fingers moved, but felt much too big. There was something vaguely sad about such large fingers, such a clumsy hand not made for grasping other hands or for touching another person's skin.

  Fear gripped her, along with a certain intense interest. Was this a Parkinson's symptom she hadn't been told about? Now her hand looked and felt perfectly normal again. Was she now going to start having physical hallucinations in addition to auditory ones?

  “Oh, for God's sake, Nezzie, don't be a little fool.”

  Ken had been gazing at her sleepily. Sometimes he nodded off in the middle of a conversation, or dropped his fork during a meal, suddenly unable to grip, unable to remain fixed in the here and now. During those last few years his thoughts had become less and less present, like a radio station whose transmitter had begun to fail, and the management couldn't afford to have
it fixed or replaced, so they were just going to let the station fade away and die. But he always seemed to have a firm grip on that awful nickname. “Nezzie, Nezzie, Nezzie.”

  “I've been trying to tell you for years,” she'd said. “A wife and a husband aren't supposed to keep secrets from one another.”

  His eyes had blinked on the word “secrets,” but other than that his face had remained a mask. She'd tried to think that maybe he wanted to come clean with her but he'd waited too long and could no longer move his frozen muscles enough to reveal the honest truth. “You say crap like that to the wrong people and they'll lock you up in a padded cell,” he'd said. “I don't know why it hasn't happened already.”

  The hinted threat had made her mad. “You know something, Kenneth? I really don't care. I've been living with this all my life. I should be able to talk to my husband about it—that's what husbands are for.”

  “Hey...”

  “Shut up, Kenneth. The least you can do is shut up and listen!”

  He'd looked away then, somewhere beyond their dining room, perhaps beyond his own life entirely, perhaps to his own idea of heaven. She couldn't know, but she thought she was on the right track, had finally after all these years reached her husband's sadness. His face was a shade paler, and something glistened there in his eyes.

  He'd turned back to her, his hands on the table on either side of his plate. “So you're telling me you can read minds.”

  “No. Not like in the movies or TV. It's more like sometimes, I feel them. And a few words or pictures come through. And sometimes I pick things up, like a radio, but a radio whose frequency selector is broken, and it's just scanning rapidly, and the channels clarify for just a second or two, and then they're gone.” She hadn't told him she thought of him as a broken radio, too.

  “Okay. Tell me what I'm thinking right now. And don't say I'm thinking that I don't believe you. That's cheating. Tell me something else.”

  “But I can't. You don't understand me. I told you already that's not the way it works.”

  He'd opened his hands abruptly, giving up on her. “Then it's not very useful, now is it?”

  His hair washed into lighter shades of gray. Fat began to disappear from under his skin, his cheeks sank and his teeth became more prominent. His skin dried and broke into intricate wrinkles. Then from inside Kenneth's vaporous image another image grew, the chest broader, the shoulders higher, the head bigger, the figure finally born as the rest of Kenneth shredded away.

  She recognized the uniform first, then the piercing green eyes, close-cropped blond hair, handsome nose, fine cheekbones, the sad eyelids dropping into place. She'd seen his picture a dozen times.

  Finally. I see you. The voice inside her head was weak, but she could tell that once it had been strong.

  “I ... this is an honor.” Light-headed, Inez meant to touch the counter for support but missed. He looked vaguely puzzled. His eyes flickered back and forth. “I'd recognize you anywhere. From the news, all your photos. Casey Liebler.” She was so pleased to have remembered the name.

  Then they ... know ... I've lost ... my way?

  “They actually think you're dead.” She was sorry she'd said that.

  I heard ... you singing.

  “Not very well, I'm afraid. I've never had a voice for singing, and especially now, but I do love to sing.”

  I heard ... you singing.

  “Well, well.” She smiled. “I am very glad you did.”

  The Lost Astronaut went away then, passed out of her awareness, dissipated—whatever the right term would be for the reverse of whatever the process was that brought other people's thoughts into her mind in the first place. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Inez waited for him to come back. She tried to make her mind especially receptive. She thought inviting thoughts. She put his name into her own thoughts: “Casey! Casey? Lost Astronaut?” No strategies like this had ever worked before either to bring thoughts to her or to keep them out, but she couldn't help trying. She so wanted to be in contact with him, this other person floating out of time and space away from the rest of the world.

  This was very odd, she couldn't argue with that. But no odder than, say, the time when, amid the hectic hodgepodge of everyday thoughts decidedly her own about the kids’ after-school schedules and Ken's socks that needed darning and her sister's impending visit, she'd discovered in her mind unuttered cries of anguish in a language she'd never heard but years later would encounter among traditional Alaskan Tlingits. No odder than, during Daniel's eighth-grade band concert, hearing a conversation about quantum physics so loud she'd turned to shush the people behind her and found no one sitting there. No odder, really, than countless things everybody took for granted every day—being born, giving birth, dying, falling in love, falling out of love, getting old.

  When Donna called, Inez didn't wonder what the sound was or mistake her voice for the voice of the Lost Astronaut or anything like that. It was perfectly clear who was who, and she understood as much about how Casey Liebler was communicating with her as about how her daughter was. More and more, understanding didn't seem to be called for.

  She said hello. Donna said, all in a loud rush as had become her habit after having been such a placid little girl and even-tempered teenager, “Hi, Ma, how you doing, I got your message, I haven't heard from Daniel, but then I don't, he doesn't call me, James says he's on spring break on a camping trip somewhere, how are you?”

  Breathless, though her daughter was not and could have gone on for paragraphs, Inez managed, “I'm all right. I was just thinking about Daniel,” though in truth it seemed a long time since she'd been thinking about Daniel. That scared her, made her feel disloyal. What if she'd been right, and Daniel—whom she'd known and loved since before his birth—had killed himself while she'd been distracted by the Lost Astronaut?

  And the Lost Astronaut had been receiving from her. Wondering over the years whether other people picked up random snatches of her thoughts the way she picked up theirs—whether maybe everybody's mind was spattered with other people's thoughts and it just wasn't talked about—she'd sometimes tried to be careful what she let herself think and other times deliberately put silly or nasty or fanciful ideas in there just to see what would happen. Nothing, as far as she knew.

  But Casey had told her straight out: “I heard you singing.” That was the part Inez couldn't get over—that and the terrible, lovely picture in her mind of him floating all alone in a place she longed to be able to imagine. “I heard you singing,” he'd told her. And that was another thing: Never before in her life, as far as she knew, had anybody deliberately sent her their thoughts.

  To her daughter she said, “Has James heard from him?” which sent Donna off on a long, loud, rapid monologue about how much money James was making now and how his wife didn't appreciate him and how Daniel was breaking his father's heart by not going into the family business. Though she'd heard it all more than a few times before, Inez knew not to tune it out because the answer to her question might be in there somewhere. But empty space and tiny little pieces of other people's thoughts instead of deluges looked more and more appealing. Eventually she gathered that no, no one in the family had heard from Daniel since he'd gone back to school in January.

  “Isn't that just typical,” Donna sneered. “He's got his ‘own life,’ you know.”

  “Oh, I hope so” was unquestionably Inez's own thought, and, in the interest of avoiding a diatribe from her daughter, she kept it to herself.

  Donna was full of stories about the assisted living place where she lived. Some of them Inez would have found entertaining if they hadn't been so mean-spirited. Not for the first time it saddened her and made her feel guilty that her daughter's main pleasure in life seemed to be criticizing while pretending not to be so you couldn't even object. Having a child in senior housing no longer seemed strange. “Some folks'll get used to any damn thing,” Ken would often say, just as snide as Donna talking about Daniel. Inez though
t what he said was true, but admirable.

  Over Donna's strident chatter she layered a silent, wordless plea for Danny to contact her. Though she knew better from years of experience, she closed her eyes and willed it to go to him.

  “Does he still play the drums?” she heard herself asking.

  It took Donna several beats to register that her mother had said something. She skidded to a halt mid-sentence. “What? Who?”

  “Daniel. Remember how he played drums when he was a little boy? And cymbals? James used to complain about the noise?”

  Donna's voice was syrupy with exaggerated patience. “No, Ma, I never heard about him playing drums.”

  “Oh,” Inez sighed, “maybe I'm wrong,” and maybe she was. It wouldn't be the first time she'd had a vivid impression that turned out to be totally false.

  Donna said she had to go, and provided a long detailed list of all the things she had to do today, iron and get her hair done and make a lemon meringue pie for the ladies’ potluck and clean her venetian blinds. Though none of these activities would ever have interested Inez enough to be conversational topics, the fact that she couldn't now do any of them depressed her.

  Now she was exhausted. As she was making her way step by careful step back to the couch, she got dizzy and fell, just like that, hard on her hands and knees, grazing the coffee table with the side of her head.

  She fell about once a month these days and hadn't broken anything yet, though it always shook her up a little. The few times it had happened when somebody was here, there'd been a flurry of activity to get her up, really quite foolish since what she wanted was to stay a few minutes where she'd landed, get her bearings, catch her breath, and she never did see what the rush was. The falls while she was alone, which was most of them, she could handle to suit herself, and that was what she did now, pulling the pillow off the couch, easing herself onto her stomach and then onto her side with one knee cocked in an undignified but more or less comfortable position, settling down on the rug in the sun and waiting to find out what would happen next, like that lovely summer morning speeding along the Haines Highway singing Broadway tunes at the top of her voice and then saying to herself, almost singing to herself, “I'm flipping the car. Isn't that interesting. I wonder how I'll get out of this one?”