by Andrew Post
“The night you showed up and I heard someone behind me on crutches and I turned around and saw you, I really hoped it was you. I resisted asking you your name because I knew, right before going onstage, that if you weren’t you, that would’ve killed me. Figuratively speaking.”
Without touching the tablet, I leaned over it and read on, reached again the part where Thadius was being pulled from a wheeled cage of some kind and put on the pile of gasoline-soaked logs. I looked up, with tears in my eyes.
“When does this happen? I mean . . . there’s me, I mention crutches, and I mention you. All of this seems right and . . .” I hit the part where Mom is first mentioned.
Thadius turned away, eyes closed.
“What the fuck is this?” I put a finger on the screen and swiped down without picking up the tablet. I didn’t want to touch it even that much.
“Your mom?”
“Yeah. What the hell is this, Thadius?”
“Quiet,” he said, his glance cutting to the door as if there were a platoon of Smocks standing on the front lawn just waiting for the right word. “I think . . . there might be a chance, in that versh, in that line of events, they find her.”
“What do you mean find her? In here, she’s a Smock.”
“Sometimes if they’re after a scratcher, they’ll find someone they care about, rebuild them as one of their own; basically, cause a Smock to wear the scratcher’s loved one like a mask. Makes it pretty tough to shoot someone wearing someone you knew.”
“I won’t let them have her.” I had Mom’s recipe on my Hello Kitty tablet. I’d sooner die than let them tarnish her like that.
“I hate to say it, kiddo, but it seems like for that Cass, it already happened. But I might be wrong. I really wish Mosaic Face were still around to help us with this shit.”
“I feel sick.”
“Best as I understand it, this book, this Cass’s The Siren House, was written in a versh where there’s the Smocks and there’s you and me, but it seems like maybe the Smocks hadn’t stolen much more off the planet that this thing comes from, because they’re ahead of us by a few months. Maybe even a few years. This other you doesn’t mention how long after the fact she’s decided to start writing the story down.”
“So this could happen?” I waved at the tablet, afraid of so much as looking at it. “This is possible?”
“It happened to that Cass.”
I scrolled down a few more pages. Squishy was mentioned here and there, but all that came in clearly from beginning to end was the first chapter. Everything after was scrambled or blank, the file irrevocably corrupted. Still, in that first chapter, “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning,” my eyes kept finding that three-letter word. Mom. Mom. Mom, as a Smock apparently. My stomach turned. I directed my focus away from the tablet. When that wasn’t sufficient, I hugged a pillow.
Thadius sat forward, perched on the edge of his armchair. “I don’t know anything about your mother, Cass. I promise you. It’s just when we—you and I—met, and I showed you the pit and I slipped about saying something about your mom, I . . . I still didn’t understand what the story on that thing meant. I thought that was our possible future, but now . . . since we know about it, I think, I hope, it means we’re changing it. Maybe we’re already on a new path.”
In my sour mosh pit of feelings, confusion was shouldered aside by anger and then promptly kicked in the junk by resentment.
“You wanted me to join your fight because you needed help avoiding getting killed by the Smocks,” I snapped. “You asked Mosaic Face to put out a feeler, and he did. You guys found me, found exactly the girl you were looking for, and knew all along what I mean to you.”
Thadius nodded solemnly. “Yeah.”
“You were using me. To find a way to save yourself.”
Again, he nodded. Two dips of his chin, his pointy beard wagging. “Yeah. I was. But listen, this is a great thing we got here, having this.” He pointed at the tablet. “It’s like we can look ahead now and see what might happen. I think of us as friends, girlie, I do, and—”
“This is a great thing? You die. My mom is in charge of it, and somebody apparently I’m in cahoots with—this here—this line, this about ‘Did they buy it?’ and I go, ‘I think they did.’ It’s like I’m sad, but I’m also . . . conning someone.”
Thadius kept his gaze fixed on the tablet for a moment, then sat back with a sigh and dragged his focus to me. “With stapling something across all vershes—which, this one failed because it doesn’t come in all the way—the whole story isn’t there, just bits and pieces. If we want to help others, we have to do this.”
“Why didn’t you just start writing your own?”
“I would, but it seems like you’re a pretty big part of this. Plus, I have no idea how to cross vershes like they do.”
“But Mosaic Face does?” The TV was no longer displaying the moment of our friend’s death, but I felt like it was still there, staring at me from the corner of the room. “Did?”
“Sort of, but it’s kind of a moot point now. They got him and, with him, everything he had. All of his research and—”
“Stapling. That’s what you guys called it.”
“Yeah, I came up with that. Like when you staple a stack of pages and lift the page and you can see the staple, no matter which page you’re on, and—”
“I get it. Real clever.” I sat back, still dizzy. “Well, at least I won’t have to struggle trying to come up with a title for the damn thing.”
Thadius chortled. “Yeah, well, there’s that.” He waited a moment. “Are you going to write it?”
I scoffed. “Doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice.”
“Just one request. I always wanted to be thought of as dapper. I try to be. Not sure if I’m successful, but the reader doesn’t need to know that. I am what you say I am, in there.”
I stared at the opening chapter title again: “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning.”
“Isn’t that a song?”
“Smashing Pumpkins,” he said. “Off Rarities & B-Sides.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard it. My parents had some Smashing Pumpkins, but not a lot. I don’t remember seeing Rarities & B-Sides in their collection anyway.”
Thadius shrugged. “She said her parents did.”
“But doesn’t that pretty much prove that if I haven’t heard the song that this can’t be me, and that this, what happens here, to you, can’t really happen? This Cassetera is different; she’s had a different life, and . . .” I stammered when I picked out a detail I’d overlooked before, toward the end of the chapter. After rereading it aloud, I said, “See. This too. This Cassetera says she doesn’t even need crutches, that they’re just part of a guise. This can’t be me, Thadius. This . . .”
Thadius’s face was dark. “That’s what Mosaic Face was sending me through the pony express, kiddo. Something we can use to fix you, your legs. It arrived on a pony last night.”
Track 20
DIFFERENT STORY
“I don’t believe it.”
“I’ve read every page of that that comes in clear a hundred times. We make it work somehow.”
“But . . . how? I mean, why?”
“Don’t you want to be able to walk?”
“Yeah, of course, but . . . Why would we do it?”
“You make it sound like you want to be on crutches the rest of your life.”
“I don’t. Of course, I don’t. But why would Mosaic Face go through all this to make some equipment from the ground up to make me walk? What does that have to do with the fight?”
“I told you. I read every legible page in that thing. It works. We fix you and go to them, in their versh. We hop vershes and attack the Smocks right where they live.”
“Do we . . . win?”
Crestfallen, he shook his head. “All you gotta do is read that first page to see we don’t. Something happens, and you change sides, or I offer myself up, or . . . I mean
, if that’s what needs to happen so we stop them, fine, but . . . God, I wish you hadn’t been so cryptic with that first chapter.”
“Sorry,” I said and genuinely felt like it was my fault. I looked at the tablet’s screen and studied the wordage, how this other Cassetera described things. It sounded enough like my writing style. But it had something about it—an edge, a slight defeated edge to it. This Cassetera had lived through some stuff, seen some shit. At the idea of trying to consider what exactly, my head spun a little again. I set it aside even though the book burned to be read more.
“To fix my legs, we’re going to have to jazz me, aren’t we?”
Thadius nodded. “The gear Mosaic Face sent is basically what will make my cauldron into a series seven, with all the bells and whistles. A software patch, some new lenses, and a kit to rewire the reassembling chamber. We’ll basically have to make it overclock, but I think with enough trial and error it should be fine. Total upgrade.”
“I’m not sure if I like the sound of that.”
“We’ll run a lot of tests beforehand. We won’t just wing it. I wouldn’t do that.”
“So to jazz me, you’ll have to first . . . harvest me.”
Thadius cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“And you know what to do to fix everything? I don’t want to come out worse off than I already am. Because as I’ve heard it, you’ve tried something like this before. With Beth.” It was a little malicious, but felt necessary. He’d kept all this from me for quite some time.
“She told you about that?”
“Some of it.”
“It was different with her.”
“How?”
“If it’s all right with you, I’d rather not talk about that right now.”
I blinked at him, keeping my face stony.
“Fine. Things weren’t going well when I first opened the Siren. I started making drugs, to sell. Needed help getting fixins. I brought Beth on. She was just a waitress at the time. I’d discovered her on the boardwalk a few months before. She said she knew a guy who knew a guy who could get us the pills we needed to jazz up our own brand of dope. Few months into it, she asked if I could use the harvester gun to take a tattoo off her lower back, her ex-boyfriend’s name. I refused, and she said if I didn’t, she’d tell the Smocks what we were doing, that I was a scratcher. I begged her not to make me do it, but she had a story already lined up that she was going to tell the Smocks, even recited it for me. So we tried it. I was careful. You’ve worked the harvester; you know it isn’t exactly the most precise piece of technology. I went a bit too deep. Just . . . nicked her spine. Just barely, but it was enough. I smuggled a doc in past the Smocks to look at her. Sure enough, she’d never walk again.”
“You two seem to get along pretty well still, given what happened.”
“We have an understanding. I think she learned her lesson. I know I certainly learned mine. I gave up the dope making, and she learned not to blackmail me. Sometimes I wonder if she thinks I did it on purpose.”
I didn’t need to ask. I knew he’d never do something like that deliberately.
For a while, we were quiet. Outside, the birds were singing, the sun was out. Inside the living room, though, it felt like we’d just ripped open a big old bag of grade-A gloom and upended its contents over both of us. I wanted to bury my head in a pillow and scream myself mute.
“Is that everything?” I asked instead.
“In regards to . . . ?”
“Everything.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Liar. Still, I let it sit. If the opportunity arose, I’d throw at him the fact he had a picture of Clifford in his desk drawer. I could play that game too. Know things. Dangle them.
“I know what not to do, Cass,” Thadius said with measured softness. “Been waiting for you to arrive for a while. I had plenty of time to study. If you go in my office there, you’ll see there’s nothing but medical books on the one shelf. I’ve got Gray’s Anatomy. I’ve got Atlas of Neuroanatomy. I’ve got—”
Here it was. My opportunity. “A picture of Clifford with some guy.”
Thadius reeled as if slapped. “What?”
“I saw it in your desk.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“I was looking for something for my leg.”
“In my desk?”
I shrugged. “In your office at the Siren House, you keep spare buttons and dead double-A batteries in a freaking cookie jar. How am I supposed to know your organizational methods?”
“So do we really have to get into that right now too?” He threw his hands up. “I figured you’d want to do this with baby steps. I mean, you just learned that there’s another you out there—a whole bunch of other yous. And you want to go from the minor league of mind fucks to the bigs?”
“It’s not like multiple-universe theory is all that new of a concept,” I spat. “Just knowing there’s a bunch of other mes out there somewhere through the ether isn’t that crazy. It’s reading something one of them wrote that’s the real shocker. I mean, if there’s another me, there’s another you and . . . oh, shit.”
It was right there. The wide-set brown eyes. The square shape of the face. Throw on some years, lose some hair on top, add a few pounds, and replace all the dark denim with polka dots . . .
“I guess because he’s younger than you, I didn’t really put it together. But”—I couldn’t get my fingers to touch the idea, no matter how hard I tried—“I can see it now.”
“Introducing Clifford T. Cohen. The T stands for Thadius,” he said, and sighed. “The versh he comes from is a bit behind ours, one of the ones the Smocks packed on their stolen turf. He’s probably about your age.”
“And he was a Smock?”
Thadius nodded. “He was, yeah. Just like me, he didn’t know what to do with his life. Ended up joining the Regolatore since it was either that or start flippin’ burgers.”
“You’ve talked to him?”
“Once. He came in and, I mean, you may not’ve been able to tell, but he looks just like me when I was his age.”
“I saw the picture in your office,” I said, throwing a thumb. “It’s . . . crazy.”
“Imagine how I felt. Especially when he said he was a Smock and he’d quit them when he’d seen me the one day. They don’t tell them that. That they might end up having to kill themselves, their versh twin, eventually if it comes to it. He said he couldn’t do that. He hung up his hood, but . . .”
“He doesn’t really want back in with them, does he? You just said that because you didn’t want me to talk to him, didn’t you? Why?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” He laughed, shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. I guess I didn’t want you to like him. I mean, he still has the sockets in his hands. He can still harvest, rebuild, and all that. And he wants to stop them just as much as I do, and I thought maybe if you met him you wouldn’t want to chum around with me anymore at the Siren. I thought you’d think I was some old man who wasted his life and kept you around just because”—he looked at the tablet still displaying the chapter where the other me had given his death so much detail—“you and I could do something to figure this all out.”
I had nothing to say to that. Sure, I felt deceived, used, but what could I say? Who, if given the option, wouldn’t want to find out some way to avoid an untimely death if they’d been handed such a document that gave its unfolding beat for beat?
In our second bout of silence, the pain in my knee returned. It was as if the infection had been kind enough to hush itself while Thadius and I were talking.
Thadius took a deep, deep breath and sighed. Stood up, stretched, and let his arms drop to his sides. “Meanwhile, we got a show to run. You got those Namaste & Jeff script revisions done?”
I handed him my tablet. “On there.”
“I still think you should stay here tonight,” he said, standing and holding the tablet, running down through the episode’s script. He rarel
y let the Thickskulls see the script changes more than a few hours before the show went on. He wanted them to improvise, to struggle with it and make it more real with them having to be on their toes.
He scrolled, scrolled, nodding and smiling as he read. I watched his hands.
I’d seen his hands many times, with that missing thumb on his left hand. I’d gotten used to seeing him hold things between his first and middle fingers, how adept he was without it—as if it’d been absent a long time and he no longer missed it. The story he’d said before about it getting harvested off by a Smock when he’d brought one back hadn’t sat well with me. Not after I came to his house that night with Beth, and especially now, after he’d revealed so much.
“How’d that really happen?” I bobbed my head toward his hand.
He looked at it as if he’d never seen the shiny pink nub before. He frowned. “I told you.”
“You told me something. I don’t think it was the truth, though.”
He lowered the tablet. “What are you accusing me of now?”
“I don’t think you’ve ever built anything animate. The way you reacted when you first saw Squishy, the way you acted mad when I told you what I’d done with the Smock fixins. I could tell you were actually curious.”
His brow knitted, his neck reddened. He set the tablet on the coffee table with a bit of unnecessary force. “You want to see?”
“No. I don’t care. I just don’t want to be lied to anymore.”
“No, I think you want to see. You do. Let me show you.” He moved toward me, swept me up in his arms.
“Let me go!”
But he didn’t. I struggled and twisted like a fish while he walked me to the back door. He pushed it open with a knee and set me on the porch swing. The yard was small. I’d seen it plenty of times before. I looked at Thadius, confused as to what I should be looking for.
He dropped onto the grass, tromped to the side of the garage, and began peeling off the old burlap cover, rolling it up in his arms as he walked it from one end to the other. He revealed the raised flower bed, walled with old railroad ties. Within were no growing plants but a series of short, square stones. They weren’t marked, but the way they were spaced apart, I could tell they were graves. Five tiny graves.
