This time, there was a glass of Merlot in front of her, dark like a chalice of ceremonial blood. This time when she reached to bring it to her lips, Swift saw her nails were painted black.
Swift sat opposite her, and his own voice sounded peculiar to him coming from outside his head. Talking with him was like talking to a mirror that answered back, but did not follow his lead. He said to her, “You two had quite a nice conversation going.” He smiled – Swift knew his own face well enough to recognize the smile held no humor – and nodded in the direction of someone who had just left. Talane didn’t follow the gesture, but she didn’t have to; Swift recalled who it was he had referred to. Their waiter. He recalled that the young waiter and Talane had chatted amicably beyond the time it took for the man to take their orders. The man had barely noticed Swift. “I can call him back if you want.”
“Please stop.” Talane avoided that vitriolic smile by focusing on her salad, probed through it with the tip of her steak knife as if in search of something.
“No, really, if you’d rather spend our short time together with him instead I’ll go and leave you to it.”
“I asked you to stop, okay? For the love of God.”
He felt her shifting foot come into contact with something under the table. She looked down, and Swift saw it was one of the circular fruit, fallen and soggy with rot. Her saw that her toenails were painted black, too. When she kicked the fruit away from her a little, the motion stirred up some gnats that had been feasting on it.
A burst of children’s laughter caused Talane to turn her head. She spotted three mutant children at an outer table of The Arbor, being shooed away by another waiter as he collected the dishes of his departed customers. The mutants had grabbed several uneaten rolls.
This was it – these children – the element that made this memory special to Swift. He knew that in a few more minutes, the children would make their way to this table, and beg for some coins to buy something in the food court. One of them would have a winning smile despite the fact that his hairless head was shaped like a human heart, weird protruding growths like valves and all. After some playful, teasing banter in which Talane would offer to buy them lunch rather than give them the coins (which she and Swift knew they’d use to play games in the mall’s arcade instead), Talane would relent and give them the money but still invite them to join her and Swift for lunch. This time he wouldn’t be jealous for sharing her company. She and Swift and the three boys would joke and mock each other and eat like a strange little family, and it would be fun and different and warm.
But it would be several more minutes before the boys worked their way over here, and in the meantime there was a cold sore on the floor of her mouth that she kept worrying with the tip of her tongue. He didn’t know if it was laziness or masochism that had kept her from banishing it easily with a drop of medicine.
He had been silent for a few minutes while they chewed, but as if he couldn’t swallow his unsavory thoughts, as if he just couldn’t stop himself, he finally continued, “Have you noticed that you’re giving me less and less of your precious time? We used to see each other almost every day. You remember those days?”
“That was before Laz suspected things.”
As if he hadn’t heard her, he continued, “Then it was a few times a week. And now here we are down to maybe once or twice a week, for one or two hours, and –”
“It’s that I’m not fucking you enough, huh?” she asked without looking up at him.
“It isn’t about fucking! Is that all you think I think of you?
“Sometimes I don’t know what you think of me.”
He leaned across the table toward her abruptly, as if he meant to do her violence. “What the fuck does that mean? You love to turn things around on me, don’t you? You know perfectly well what I think of you. That isn’t the question between us. The question is what you think. What you want. How important I am to you, and what you intend to do about it...if anything.”
She didn’t say anything, but one of the gnats floated up past her face, like one of her nanomites come to proudly show off the wings it had grown on its own.
Swift then perceived an odd sensation or impression, like another VT channel’s programming bleeding over into the one he was watching. It was a faint image of Laz laughing. Laz was sitting opposite Talane as Swift sat opposite her now – and it was at The Arbor restaurant, in fact. Swift realized what he was experiencing. Talane was thinking back to that earlier date at The Arbor, with Laz. Had they laughed together before or after the brief recollection of it that Swift had sampled? Whatever the case, he knew she was either comparing that time with now, or worse, even longing for it. A memory within this memory.
“Hello?” the past Swift said to her, and the present Swift cringed at his own words. “Did you hear me? Or maybe you’d prefer if I called our waiter back.” Talane raised her eyes to see him twisting around in his chair and lifting his arm as if to snap his fingers. “Garcon,” he called. “Hey, Garcon!”
“Please stop,” she hissed at him pleadingly. “Please, will you just st–”
...
He didn’t know how long it had been from the time the recording cut off, until now – opening his eyes and lifting his head from his crossed arms to find himself seated at his kitchen table with a congregation of empty Knickerson bottles and his extractor resting before him. His shirt was off, and he was cold, and his head ached as if he had jammed the tip of the extractor into his skull between his eyes...instead of pressing it to his bony arm, and ordering the nanomites – every last one of them – to march out of his system and into the cartridge that was inserted into the instrument. It was still in there. He saw its silvery-gray contents glittering. It was a snake’s poison, that he had sucked out of himself. A snake’s poison that he had been mad to put into himself.
Also resting on the table, like another medical instrument, was the beam-emitting cutting gun he kept in his freezer lest it overheat. At some point in the hours past, he had apparently considered whether this might be a better instrument of empathy. An ultimate kind of empathy. But now as he took it in, he was so reluctant to touch the gun that he didn’t even feel an imperative to return it to the cold.
It was a thud at his apartment’s door that had awakened him. Maybe there had been others preceding it. Another came now. With a groan of pain, Swift pushed himself up from the table, tottered toward the door, leaned against it as he activated the security view screen. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw out there.
“Jenny,” he mumbled.
Through the speaker came a drowned, gurgling voice. “I felt that you were ready for me to return.”
Swift hesitated a moment or two, as if he might take offense to this statement, as if he might protest. But then he opened his door, and stepped aside to let the Sufferer enter.
7
As he closed his apartment’s door, Swift thought he saw the being – who had come to a stop near the kitchen table, having dragged its steaming, wheeled cart behind it – incline its body to take in the articles spread upon the table’s surface. As if to divert its attention from the gun, Swift said, “I removed all the nanomites from my body.”
“Yes – I had sensed that.”
“So I won’t be as unique a brew to you anymore, Jenny. Sorry for that.”
The otherworlder did not turn toward him. The bubbling voice issuing from its cart said, “I would like you to put them into me.”
Swift stepped away from the door and swayed dizzily before he caught himself, though his stomach wasn’t done reeling. His first impulse was to tell the Sufferer to fuck off. This was Talane, her concentrated essence, not some drug for a pain junky to ingest. Did he want this being, with its own mission of self-loathing, privy to her every thought, fear, desire, dream? Everything she had ever felt for Swift, for her husband, for her mother, for herself? From the soft, cloudy consciousness of infancy to the moment when she had recorded this data at her work place? Maybe the
Sufferer was of the erroneous assumption that the recording went further than that – to the moment when a sufficient amount of blood cells had trickled out of her body, like an evacuation of nanomites, for her to achieve the oblivion she sought. That had to be the vein of gold his guest hungered for, right there. That final, missing scene.
“If you want to experience her death, it’s not there,” Swift informed it. “The data ends when --”
“I want all of it,” the Sufferer said.
Swift contemplated the back of the creature as it remained turned from him. With its barren white flesh and its lack of arms, and a true head for that matter, it seemed to him like an uncooked cut of meat, like a mass of blank, undifferentiated cells. It looked like an empty vessel.
He had a notion too wild to be called a hope. What if Talane could be perpetuated in something more organic than just a computer file or encoded molecules; what if, furthermore, she could live again, be reborn, by awakening all of the nanomites as the Sufferer requested? But live again as what? Swift had dreamed of merging with Talane in his mind; where before he had been selfish, he had wanted to become selfless. But this way, she would be merged with the Sufferer instead of him. And who was he fooling? In no species of vessel would she ever really live again. She would have no new, original thoughts; there was no true soul recorded there along with the data of memories, no matter how intense and immediate they might feel. But let the Sufferer have them, if intense and immediate was what it wanted. Let it have them if it thought it was a sturdy enough vessel.
“Let me transfer them from the extractor to the injector, then,” he told his guest, moving past it to scoop up the cutter gun and return it to the freezer. “I only ask you one thing,” he said, his back to the alien this time. “Where the recording finishes, I want you to tell me if she still loved me.” He considered asking if she had loved him more than Laz, at that point, but knew how pitiful that was. “I just want to know that she didn’t hate me more than she loved me.”
“I will tell you whatever I can, that you ask of me.”
Swift shut the fridge door, dropped his hand to the lower compartment to withdraw a fresh beer. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Please.”
“You’re a braver soul than I, my friend.” Swift turned around to face his guest like an embalmer, ready to fill the veins of the dead with his preserving potions.
8
He awoke with memories he did not want. Memories of his own he wished he could command out of his body like obedient insects.
Some of it, mercifully, was blurred and remote. The injecting of the nanomites. The multiplying Knickerson bottles on the table. Sitting there as if at a séance and asking the alien what it felt...what did it see? But only moans had escaped the translation apparatus, until finally came a few garbled lines of a song. “My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”
“Is that all you have to tell me, Talane?” Swift had laughed. Laughed with tears slick on his face. “All you can tell me from the great beyond? You can’t tell me if you wanted me? You can’t tell me if you loved me like I loved you?”
An entranced medium, the Sufferer had shuffled a little, turning its body to face him more directly. “Yes,” came that seemingly disembodied voice. “Yes...of course I loved you.”
Swift had lurched up from his chair at the words. “Talane...”
“Ohh,” the Sufferer had groaned then. “There is such...pain. So much pain.” This time, it had seemed the otherworlder was expressing its own sentiments. “This is more...more than I would have expected...”
Somewhere after more beers and more questions – most of which seemed to have gone unanswered – Swift had unstrapped the Sufferer from its harness. They had gone to his bed, and the creature had lain down on its front so Swift wouldn’t have to see what passed for its face. His actions, his desires, inexplicable even to himself, he had undressed and crawled onto the Sufferer’s back. There was a rubber-sheathed port tucked low in the cleft of its human-like buttocks that he inserted himself into. He clung there, lying flat, as if hanging onto a manta ray as it skimmed across a dream ocean. As if riding a magic carpet, dizzying heights above any recognizable terrain.
Its flesh beneath him was not so barren, pure and unfinished, after all. Up close, again he saw the scars it bore, felt them raised against his own flesh. Cigarette burns, long stitched incisions like zippers that he might tear open with his own hands so as to unravel whatever tormented thing it was that this creature called its soul. When he awoke, Swift wouldn’t recall whether it was his idea that they fuck, or the Sufferer’s, or Talane’s, or Swift imagining it was Talane’s. But they rode united through the night, in their conjoined agony and delirium.
He awoke in his bed, nude, his groin smeared with a clear jelly. If possible, his head hurt even more than it had when the Sufferer had appeared at his door. Managing himself into a sitting position, he noted that it was day – and that Jenny was no longer in his bedroom.
He found the otherworlder, though, when he staggered into the bathroom to blast himself with a scalding shower.
This time the Sufferer lay on its back, and lay there alone, not surfing across a phantasmagorical sea but unmoving and leaking a clear, thick fluid from a number of long gashes that had pulled open to yawn deeply. Seeing it there, with its cart toppled on its side beside the toilet, its grille no longer steaming, the blue fluid in its container no longer glowing, Swift could now remember having helped the being back into its harness. But he was certain, certain, whatever else he was forgetting, that he himself had not taken his cutting gun out of the freezer again. The gun was still gripped in the claw of the mechanical arm that had unfolded from the Sufferer’s translation machine.
“Fuck – no!” Swift shouted, falling to his knees beside the body. “God, Jenny, no! Why? Why, you bloody stupid fuck?” He took hold of one of its satyr-like, crooked legs and squeezed it in both hands, lowering his forehead to touch the cold appendage. With his eyes closed, it felt as though he were holding a stiff human arm.
Why, his mind wailed, had he allowed Jenny to shoot up the nanomites? Even if he hadn’t put the gun in its hand, he might as well have done so. Couldn’t he have foreseen that the past could only repeat itself?
“Talane,” he sobbed, his face a clenched fist that squeezed fresh tears from his eyes. They fell upon the stark canvas of the Sufferer’s body, and quivered there in tiny pools as if the flesh might absorb them. “Talane,” he cried – knowing that instead of bringing her alive again, he had only helped to kill her again instead.
Life Work
HANAKO
1
Hanako first met the old woman on the landing between floors three and four of the apartment building they shared, which stood on the border of a good-sized park in Subtown. Subtown was the subterranean level of Punktown, and while it did not extend fully to the borders of the megalopolis above it was still extensive enough. Denied the benefits of rain, the park’s flora had been chosen for its ability to draw moisture from the air, and was nourished by the artificial light of the high, solid ceiling that was the only sky this plant life had ever known.
The underground park had been claimed by gangs, drug dealers and drug-addicted prostitutes a generation before, and consequently the city had all but given up on its upkeep. The trunks of many of its trees were entirely slathered in graffiti, its miniature pond capped by an epidermis of scum, its vegetation riotously overgrown. The locals called it the Jungle. It was the back of Hanako’s apartment building that faced onto the Jungle, and she was grateful there was a tall fence between the structure she called home and the park those others had made their own.
The elderly woman was leaning her back against the landing’s wall, one hand on the handle of a small pull-cart with two wheels, filled with bags of groceries. She smiled at Hanako when they met each other’s eyes, and when Hanako reached the landing she stopped before the woman.
“Oh my,”
she said, “have you been dragging that up all these stairs?” But of course she had; the poorly maintained elevator was out of service again, or else Hanako herself wouldn’t be making this climb to her fifth floor apartment.
“I’m almost there, sweetie,” the old woman said. Despite the abundance of alien races living in this colony-city on the world of Oasis, the woman was a human of Earth lineage. Hanako couldn’t judge her age, but she knew the woman must have been strikingly beautiful in her youth, with her pronounced cheekbones and vividly blue eyes.
“Let me help you,” Hanako said.
“Oh no, my dear, please,” the woman chuckled, “you’re too small!”
At 4’9”, Hanako could understand why the woman should take her for a child, regardless of her businesswoman’s metallic gray, custom-tailored jacket and skirt, and expensive high heels. “No, please, I insist. I’m stronger than I look, I promise you.”
Ghosts of Punktown Page 18
