by Andrew Post
“Yeah,” he said, returning his hand to his pocket, “that was really powerful stuff. I don’t usually react to songs like that. Especially old stuff. But that gal could sing. Holy shit. Who was that, anyway?”
“Mariah Carey. It was a cover, but I think she did it justice.”
He shook his head, grimaced. “Never heard of her. Might have to go online and see if I can find some more of that.” He thumped his chest. “Might be good to have some of that playing if we throw a Valentine’s Day party here or something. Get some guys some pity sex.” He smirked. “I, I mean. Not we.” There it was, he was raising his shields again. “You’re leaving. Keep forgetting that.” He turned when the display lit up, cleared away the previous song’s listing, and a new one came jerkily scudding across the LEDs.
“The End is the Beginning Is the End”—Smashing Pumpkins
“Oh, shit. No. Not that one. Stop.”
There was no way to stop the song once it’d started. I jammed my hands across all the keys, trying to get the Wurlitzer to play something—anything—else.
It refused. The song started with a few reverberating thumps of electronic drums, followed by plinky pianos, a long draw of synthesized cello, and the ethereal raconteur Billy Corgan putting shape to the dreamlike fog.
“Stop, stop, stop,” I begged, still mashing keys.
No volume control on the front, none discernible of the knobs on the back.
I dropped to my knees, trying to shoulder it aside to get at the plug, but it got me nothing but feeling like I was going to be crushed.
Behind it, the song was even louder, blasting into the side of my head, my ear inches from the interior speakers.
Two minutes in, I realized it was useless.
I slid out, stood. I dropped my arms, stepped back, and did the only thing I could do.
I listened.
The song continued, rolling along in its lumbering tempo.
If you have the song in your versh, you know it approaches its end by winding down, making broken-sounding mechanical clanks and clacks like the spring inside a marching toy soldier reaching his final shuffling steps. And last, an explosion, a rumble, and again, the long pull of an electronic bow that fades to silence.
“Guess now you can’t say you haven’t heard it,” Clifford said.
I sighed.
The jukebox clicked onto something else, something not at all fitting for my shaken state, still feeling the fresh residue of a kiss from inevitability: “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy).”
Clifford had watched me struggle to unplug the machine and had done nothing to help. I wanted to yell at him, but I could’ve done the same thing when he was receiving his own dose of cross-versh heartrending by Mariah. Fair is fair.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
“Funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.”
* * *
We sat in the front row of the theater, the screen showing nothing but wisps of dust bunnies being chased by static electricity and the occasional draft.
In the seat next to me was my bag, my jacket pushed through the strap and tied in place. I had on my boots, my new hoodie, and a pair of Clifford’s skinny jeans that were almost tight on even me. He’d brought the bottle out with him, and we passed it back and forth. I’d had a pretty big dinner while out, eating at a café in the same plaza as the Mega Deluxo, so thankfully the alcohol wasn’t getting to me. That or I wasn’t such a lightweight anymore.
“Can’t talk you into changing your mind?” He was slumped in the theater seat, the back of his neck about where the small of someone’s back would normally be, his legs splayed out ahead of him. He handed me the bottle.
I took a swig, passed it back. “Afraid not.”
Clifford took a deep breath. “You know, I never really thought myself to be the marrying type.”
I’d told him about Hamish. Only because he’d asked.
“Think you’ll go to New York?” I asked.
He laughed. “I think Thadius has probably already beaten me to the punch on that one.” His laughter softened to a pattering chuckle. “Asshole. Stole my boyfriend.”
We laughed.
“Kind of always wondered,” Clifford said, passing the bottle back to me. I waved at it, and he returned it to the floor. “Kind of answers a few questions. Still, it’s weird. Knowing that was a possibility, being married to a guy. Whenever I thought about getting hitched, it was always to a girl. Whenever I had some serious May to December with no strings, it was always men.” He chuckled. “Guess I should’ve reversed ’em.”
I smiled. “We had fun.”
He nodded. “That we did.”
“Any advice on how to take them on?” I asked. I didn’t want to talk too much about happy times when we had so much work ahead of us. It felt dangerous to talk about it. Like it’d jinx it or something. I barely wanted to think about any fun I’d ever had, or anyone I’d ever had fun with. I felt like I needed to keep those things safe, buried inside, until all this was over.
“If you manage to get into their temple—and that’s a big if, mind you—they won’t dare try to harvest you if you’re standing anywhere near their cistern. I guess if you get in a tight spot, since they don’t use guns, that’d be your best place to start making demands.”
“Why is that?”
“So you know how you and me, our harvester imbeds, are connected to my cistern upstairs? Well, all the Smocks’ are connected to this great big one they have in the core of the temple. If any of them were to try to harvest you and hit that by accident . . . watch out. Actually, scratch that. There would be no watching out, because it’d be such a big freaking mess so damn fast that there’d be no warning at all.”
“What would happen?”
“All right. Think of a harvester as a vacuum cleaner. The tank the vacuum cleaner dumps into is connected to the part that sucks things up. Turn it on and it’d just recycle the air over and over and over again in this loop.
“Go back—that’s no good. Okay, think of it like this. It’s like feedback when you’re at a concert. The sound that goes in comes out the speakers and goes right back in again, speeding up each time it goes through and makes that awful feedback sound. If a Smock happens to try to harvest the thing that’s going to accept what they harvested and it can’t because it’s the cistern that’s being harvested trying to accept itself over and over again, well, that’s bad news.”
“How bad?”
“Very bad.”
I nodded. “Good to know.”
“I’d love to send you along with a cistern of your own, but I can’t imagine you’ll want to carry that around on your back. You can use mine—harvest and reconstruct as you will. If you need anything from around here, e-mail, and I’ll zap in whatever you need so you can construct it there.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, shit—I almost forgot. Here.” He leaned to get at the back pocket of his pinstriped pants. He handed me an ID card with his face on it. There was no name, just a series of numbers, what’d been his identity as a Smock, and the Regolatore symbol: a gray R with a banner of olive branches surrounding it. I flipped it over. There was some crude work done with glue and an X-ACTO knife, a new bar code laid in over the old.
“Did that for you the other night. Go to any TeleHop and it’ll take you to anywhere you want to go. Still have to pay, though—haven’t worked out that kink yet.” He gave me some money. Next, he produced yet another gift, this one coming from the deep pocket of his black velvet jacket. It was small, about the size of a standard bathroom tile. Grafted onto a plain green plastic base with exposed capacitors and various tiny circuit boards was what looked like the channel dial off of an old TV.
“This is what Smocks use to jump vershes? It’s so . . . janky.”
“This is what I use to jump vershes. I made that. And it’s not janky; it’s practical.” It sounded like he’d cut himself off. I looked up from what I’d immediately begun to think of as the creator of rainb
ow poppers. He had that look again, except this time he actually said it. “See the tape on the dial there. Channels one and two only, vershes one and two. Okay? I put that on there to remind you not to do anything crazy. Things are squirrely enough as it is.” He snorted. “Like, for instance, apparently I’m supposed to be married.”
“Not supposed to,” I said. “Just a possibility, something you may’ve likely done if things had gone a different way.”
He was shaking his head. “Enough. I don’t . . . What I mean is, we’ll figure it out. All of us. You, me. Thadius.” He nodded, drunkenly confident. “Everything will be absolute sugar before long; I’m sure of it.”
Clifford and I looked at each other for a few seconds, saying nothing.
He spoke first. “Are you sure I can’t talk you into staying?” His face said he already knew the answer. “Opening night three weeks from now. We’re going to be showing the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Pizza. And beer, as long as you know the secret password and go downstairs to drink it.” He winked, just like Thadius would. Ting.
I leaned over the armrest between us, kissed him, and stroked his cheek. “Catch you on the flip side.”
Go ahead and groan, but it sounded good at the time.
I got up, picked up my bag, and left.
Track 33
FATHER OF MINE
Three blocks up, I came to the TeleHop booth. The sign above showed its mascot, a rabbit in profile, leaping between two destinations as if going from one place to another meant simply stepping through a glowing set of rings. Something about the simplicity of that scared me.
Stepping inside, I pulled the door closed behind me and the windows all automatically tinted to total opacity for privacy. I fed the bills in, ran the rejiggered identification card in front of the scanner. It took only five tries to get it to read. Next, the booth told me I had an excess of weight with me and would have to reduce what I was bringing or insert three more Aldrins.
I looked at my bag on the floor. It was practically bursting at the seams, packed with clothes, a blanket, my two tablets, and various other things, like a handful of toiletries and a three-pack of soap Clifford insisted I take. Living on the road often meant becoming a victim to highway robbery, he’d said—rest areas provided showers for free, but a packet of shampoo and soap was often as expensive as a night on the town in this versh.
“Please press the refund button if you wish to not travel with us today,” the booth impatiently told me. “Or reduce the amount of luggage you are currently carrying. Or insert the necessary funds for a secondary transaction.”
No one could see in through the fogged glass of the booth. I removed my glove and harvested my satchel, my jacket, and my second bag. I turned my palm around and watched the socket close, like a Venus flytrap easing shut after it’d lured its prey. The light on the touch screen turned from a flashing red to an encouraging shade of neon green.
“Destination?” it asked.
“Minneapolis.”
“Please stand still.” I did. “Hop in three, two . . .”
Next came that double-pop again, just like when Thadius had used the scythe rifle on me, and I was gone.
* * *
Gimme. That was the word I learned to use when harvesting something. It wasn’t like the sockets in my hands exactly had triggers to pull. It had to be activated by thought. It worked.
Reconstructing was the other action that needed a mental command. I found Here, have this worked for that.
While Clifford had been busy working on the theater, I had been secretly honing my reconstructing skills. Now rarely did anything lose its structure once I’d rebuilt it.
I’d moved on from bar glasses. When I was sure Clifford was preoccupied, sleeping off a bender, I’d go to the basement with a couple of bread slices, take a seat in a dark corner, and wait for the mice. Once they were nibbling away, looking pleased to have stumbled upon such an unguarded find, I’d hold out my hand and harvest them. It took concentration to narrow the invisible beam to just them and not a piece of the floor or the wall, or the bread they were eating. Gimme.
Here, have this. The first two I’d brought back, unfortunately, didn’t look quite right. The whole thing about them falling apart, as Thadius had said of his attempts, was quite accurate. They’d skitter about a little, then roll over onto their sides and begin to quake all over, their tails going from slender and furry and straight to looking more like a cursive uppercase Q. They’d fall apart in a rather upsetting way: they’d be mice one minute, then something very much not, like they were being boiled from the inside out.
I had lived with Clifford for almost two months. Half that time I spent in the basement, alternating between writing, helping out, signing for deliveries. I think the hours in the basement far outnumbered the time I did anything else there, along with formulating my plan. By the time we’d had sex and promptly had our weird little relationship implode, I’d gotten to the point I could jazz with my mind alone. I had to change my plan, since I then knew I’d have to do this on my own.
Sitting alone in the dark, waiting for mice to show up, gave me plenty of time to work out what I intended to do.
I jazzed. I could put together two mice, make them have four legs still but double the width of the torso.
After harvesting materials, I pictured what I wanted to create, held out my hand, and there’d it be, the imagination manifest.
Of course, not being a monster, I always put them back to the way they were. But sometimes, I think, I really tested their molecular bonds. Once, I harvested thirty mice over the course of a week. One night I constructed a mouse centipede of sorts.
Naturally, during this time I thought of Squishy a lot. I wondered if I could go and find a squid from a seafood restaurant in town, add a mouse, and just by thinking hard enough about all the countless episodes of Dr. Werewolf & Squishy I knew by heart, create another. I didn’t dare. Wherever he was now, perhaps the Savannah, he deserved his rest.
Through all my self-testing and getting better using my sockets in conjunction with my imagination, it was impossible to not think about Suzanne. How she and I were fused, two in one, and how much of her was in me. Sure, my nose was hers, but the rest of my face was mine. The sockets were definitely hers. But what if some errant strand of something found its way in as well? Would I get to the Smock temple and suddenly feel the desire to sign up? What if I were to play “Lightning Crashes” and find it had an odd feeling? What if I ran into someone while in Minneapolis who looked an awful lot like my dad? Would we fall in love—as gross as that sounds—because of whatever pushes things forward and makes connections and causes events no matter the versh? I wasn’t just Cassetera anymore, not entirely. I was walking because of Suzanne’s unaffected section of brain that had replaced my own faulty one. Could the part of her that was gently being coaxed by the Great Whatever to fall in love with Kenneth Robuck—and had done so in another versh, I knew, being living proof—still potentially do that here, while it resided in me?
It cemented my decision to actively avoid my father once I reached Minneapolis. No Back to the Future-esque encounters for me, thank you.
The trip was sadly unlike good long road trips that give you time to think. The TeleHop didn’t offer that at all. I felt like something had gone wrong, actually, because when I arrived in the Minneapolis TeleHop booth, it looked identical to the inside of the one I had just left in Duluth, opaque windows and all.
Their shading dissolved, and the glass around me became clear. It was the Twin Cities, no doubt about it: as I stepped out of the booth, the noise and urban reek of exhaust and industry hit me. It wasn’t all that different from the one my parents would bring me to when I was a kid, to go to the museums or the movies or just for a day away from our little town. I think my parents liked it especially since they’d both lived in the area for a long time, Dad having been born and raised there, and Mom having gone to college there.
It looked like not o
nly had the A never hit this versh but it would be impossible. Everything in this enormous city looked sturdy and immaculate and new.
I walked for a few blocks, hands in pockets and hood down, trying to blend in even though my eyes wanted to chase each skyscraper to where it stabbed the sky. I got to a major street cutting through the middle of the city and fell in with a swarm of people. No one pointed a finger and called me a versh-jumping interloper. No one paid me any mind. I didn’t see any Smocks, either, which was a relief.
I passed a bunch of TeleHop booths along the way. I guess since I didn’t specify which one I wanted, it took me the farthest from Duluth while still in Minneapolis. I assumed it was a way to wring out as much money as possible in the transaction.
I had no idea where the Smock temple was, so I let myself wander. Not making it out of this alive seemed like a very real possibility, so I gave myself some time to smell the roses. It was easy enough to do in this versh, which had never suffered an A.
Even with the Smock presence, people seemed happy. I suppose it was like back in my own versh, where people just got used to things. If you didn’t make waves, I guess you had no reason to worry about the Smocks or pay them any mind at all. Businessmen talked shop alongside holographic coworkers. Women in beautiful clothes went from store to store, arms heaped with bags. Kids milled about street corners, sharing cigarettes and swapping gross stories riddled with swear words. There was a lot of laughing in this versh, I noticed. An old couple, hand in hand, shuffled along.
I wondered what I looked like to others. Without crutches, I certainly didn’t pull in as many stares as I used to. I had on clean-enough clothes. My hair wasn’t too crazy, I hoped, pulled back as it was. I probably just looked like some twentysomething with the day off, looking for a store to poke around in to burn a few hours before meeting up with friends for drinks or something.
I decided, for the time being, I’d play that part. I began looking at the storefront as I walked along them, reading the hanging signs for the little boutiques, most of which were pretty vague. One place was called Slap Happy. I expected them to sell gloves or gear for prop comedians, but as I passed, I saw it was a place for people to get all their goodies for a kinky night. Spotting a woman inside going through a rack of leather straps for some kind of contraption, I kept right on walking, stifling a smile, cheeks burning.
