Thomas World

by Richard Cox

  A few minutes later I drive out of the city, seemingly unwatched. There are only a few cars on the road and none that seem to be related to me. After looking constantly into the rearview mirror for about fifteen miles, I pull over to the shoulder and wait to see if any vehicles behind me also stop, but none do. None that I see, at least. At the next intersection I exit the interstate and spend a few minutes idling on the access road shoulder, and still I don’t notice anything that seems like surveillance. So I drive through the interchange, back onto the freeway, and this time I set the cruise control on eighty, fairly sure no one is following me.

  But I don’t understand. If it was so important for Runciter and Sherri and the rest to keep in contact with me, why on earth would they let me get away? It doesn’t make any sense. You would think they would have used double and triple coverage, incredible redundancy, when the penalty for losing me was so high. It’s so unlikely that I must again assume Runciter was lying. They must be able to keep track of me in some other way. It’s the only explanation.

  I don’t understand how you and I could have ever fallen in love in the first place.

  I know exactly how. Don’t I?

  I remember it. I remember it like it was yesterday.

  Gloria’s father and I had just finished playing “Sweet Home Alabama” together. He shook my hand and returned to the table. The band and I waited for the crowd to quiet enough that I could speak. Linda Knudson hugged her husband. Gloria watched them and then turned toward the stage, and even from here I could see her eyes were watery. This was the first time she’d ever seen her father play in front of a crowd, and I was so proud to have helped make it happen that I could have died happy at that moment. It didn’t matter that I had come here tonight with an ulterior motive. Seeing her so happy meant it was a good thing, whatever happened next.

  I leaned into the microphone and said, “I’d like to play one more song if I could.”

  The crowd cheered again. Eric Knudson clapped loudly.

  “As you guys might have guessed, I didn’t just happen to pick up a banjo and start playing tonight.”

  Everyone laughed at that.

  “I want to thank The Scanners again for allowing me to join them onstage, but even more so for practicing with me over the past few months. I can’t tell you how much it has meant to me.”

  More cheers from the crowd. At that point I could have announced a terrorist attack and they would have clapped. These were pretty drunk people.

  Then my eyes locked on Gloria’s. The room had turned shimmery. I blinked away tears.

  “I’m up here tonight because I’d like to sing to someone very special to me. So if you’ll forgive me, this song is dedicated specifically to her.”

  At the time I knew only the original version, and it wasn’t a guitar-friendly song. Afterwards, I learned it was a popular choice among university a cappella groups, including one at our own school. Believe it or not I was invited to join them at a free concert the following spring. The song has been reimagined many times, including acoustical versions like the one I played. I changed some of the lyrics.

  Looking from a window above

  It’s like a story of love

  Can you hear me

  Came back only yesterday

  Who went further away

  Want you near me

  All I need is the love you gave

  All I need for another day

  And all I ever knew

  Only you

  My voice cracked a bit after the last line, and I was afraid I might not make it to the next verse. Gloria covered her mouth with her hands. I have never forgotten that look in her eyes.

  Sometimes when I think of your name

  When it’s only a game and I need you

  Listen to the words that you say

  It’s getting harder to stay when I need you

  All I need is the love you gave

  All I need for another day

  And all I ever knew

  Only you

  By then most of the crowd had figured out who I was singing to. The bar was very quiet. My fingers worked the strings of the guitar as if I had been playing for years instead of months. Fred accompanied me with the piano, and Tippy added a bit of light percussion. You know the song, right? “Only You,” originally written and performed as an electronic rock song by Yaz.

  I imagined Gloria was bathed in light, warm yellow light that picked up the highlights in her hair and the tears in her eyes. Maybe I shouldn’t have been doing this, singing to her, because she was in love with someone else, and that person wasn’t even here to defend himself. The only way I could justify my choice is that I was in love with her, and I couldn’t exit her life without telling her one last time how much she meant to me. If she rejected me now, I would step away and out of her life forever.

  Her eyes were on mine, locked in like lasers. They glowed blue. I remember thinking they were like orbs. I remember that now, as unlikely as it seems. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t frowning. Her eyes were shiny and little rivers of tears ran out of them.

  Still I sang:

  This is gonna take a long time and I wonder what’s mine

  I need you

  Wonder if you’ll understand

  It’s just the touch of your hand, and I don’t want to lose you

  All I need is the love you gave

  All I need for another day

  And all I ever knew

  Only you

  Only you

  Only you

  I stopped playing. The bar was almost completely silent. I remember the rustle of feet and a few whispers and someone clearing their throat. I looked at Gloria and she looked back at me. Time stretched between us. The moment seemed to last forever.

  Finally I leaned into the microphone and said, “I love you, Gloria.”

  She stood up. Her wooden chair made a skidding sound on the concrete floor. There was a clear path to the stage from her table and she walked directly toward me. She was wearing a light blue blouse and a white skirt. She’d taken off her sandals and was barefoot.

  Gloria stepped onto the stage, took my face in her hands, and kissed me.

  Her lips tasted like beer and lip gloss and the sweetest honey any bees ever made. I was only vaguely aware of the thunderous applause that shook the bar. I touched the back of her neck and ran my fingers into her hair and bit her bottom lip a little. She laughed. She pulled away from me.

  “I love you, too, Thomas. Ever since that first night. Thank you so much for this.”

  It was the happiest moment of my life.

  And I cannot believe, even for a moment, that someone made it all up, that it’s only backstory intended to add a little depth to my character. I cannot and will not believe that.

  The thing is, unlike Runciter and Sherri and the rest, I do remember my previous life and I do know where I live…at least which street. Runciter acknowledged that things were different for me, that I was somehow the center of everything. Which could mean my memories are also different than theirs. More real, I mean. I sang to Gloria, after all. It was our seminal moment, our romantic movie moment. One of the local television stations did a story on us. When I proposed to her three months later it made the paper. The memory must be real. What is the point of anything if it’s not?

  The sun is falling down and more billboards are leering. Strings and horns signal my journey west, driven by the repetitive percussion of a drum. I sometimes hear the faint call of numbers, like 3…1…4…1 or 5…9…2…6, but by now I have grown tired of the soundtrack. The sky is somehow darker than it should be, like a cloud has passed in front of the sun, but when I look up I see no clouds. Just a fading star, cooling, like it might at some point simply wink out. In front of me, the end of the world seems too close. Points that become visible on the horizon rush by almost as soon as I see them, as if I’m driving hundreds of miles an hour, even though my speedometer only reads eighty.

  In minutes I have
made it through Texas. New Mexico is a blur. At one point I see a woman standing on the shoulder, apparently hitchhiking, and when I come closer I notice she’s carrying a violin. At the last minute she holds up this sign, a ratty piece of cardboard that says:

  IS THERE REALLY NO ONE EXCEPT FOR ME

  AND THE POWERS THAT BE

  I jam on the brakes. I look in the rearview mirror to see if anyone is behind me, and there isn’t, so I turn the car around, driving carefully over the wide, rocky median. By the time I reach her, there are still no cars coming. It occurs to me I haven’t seen a car since the first ten or fifteen minutes, and since then I have apparently driven at least several hundred miles.

  For that matter I haven’t passed through any towns, either. This is Interstate 40, and yes, it’s a remote highway out west, but I should have passed through Amarillo at least, and before that Oklahoma City, not to mention plenty of other small towns. Albuquerque should be around here somewhere, but I’ve seen no signs for it.

  I’m in the middle of nowhere under an alien sky, and the only human being I’ve seen since I began this journey is this woman, whose sign seems to—

  The soundtrack has changed. I hear a pedal steel guitar, and a plodding drum track, and even lyrics of some kind. I’ve pulled up next to the woman and rolled down my window, but she’s pretending like I’m not there. I get out of the car, not bothering to look for oncoming traffic at this point, and walk over to where she’s standing.

  “Hello,” I say.

  She doesn’t smile or otherwise use body language to acknowledge my presence, but she replies anyway.

  “Hello.”

  “Are you waiting for someone out here?”

  “I’m waiting for you.”

  Her accent seems French, or rather French Canadian, and her voice is completely lifeless, like she’s talking to me in her sleep.

  “How long have you been out here?”

  “Forever.”

  “What does the sign mean?”

  “It’s a song,” she says. “Lyrics from a song.”

  I look down at her violin. Much of the music I’ve heard over the past few days has been strings, violins especially.

  “What song?”

  “It’s called ‘Westworld.’”

  “‘Westworld’? Isn’t that a film?”

  “Yes. It is also a film.”

  “Where androids in an amusement park pretend to be characters from the Old West, right?”

  The woman says, “It is sometime in the near future, in a fictional high-tech amusement park called Delos. The park is divided into three zones: WesternWorld, MedievalWorld, and RomanWorld. The androids are indistinguishable from human beings, apart from minor flaws in their hands, and guests are encouraged to indulge in any fantasy, including killing the androids. The androids are programmed to respond positively to guest requests, specifically including requests for sex. Delos’ guests pay $1,000 a day for the experience.”

  “Did you memorize that?”

  “It’s taken from the Wikipedia entry on the film Westworld.”

  “Why do you know that?”

  “Because you told me to.”

  “Is the song related to the film?”

  “We wrote it after having watched it.”

  “But you don’t know how long you’ve been out here, holding up this sign? I mean, I’m the only person who has driven by in a while, right?”

  “You’re the only person who has ever driven by.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is your name?”

  “My name is Sophie.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Sophie.”

  “Like Sophia? Are you Sophia?”

  She doesn’t respond. I want to grab her, shake the answer out of her. I don’t know what to do and she won’t say anything. She doesn’t look like Sophia, but since I’ve never met Sophia in person I guess I can’t really say what she looks like.

  “Not Sophia,” she finally says. “Sophie. Sophie Trudeau. I play the violin. Perhaps you have heard some of my work.”

  “Where might I have heard it?”

  “In your ears,” she says.

  “That’s helpful. Thank you.”

  “It’s not playing in your head, is what I mean. You aren’t imagining the music you hear.”

  Sophie is trying to tell me something. Which means someone else is trying to tell me something. But who?

  “Why did you write a song about that film?”

  “It’s fascinating,” she says. “Don’t you think? Human beings so desperate to stimulate their senses that they would build artificial worlds where their every fantasy could be fulfilled?”

  “Yes,” I respond carefully. “It is fascinating.”

  “But what happens when the androids decide they don’t want to play along anymore, Thomas? What then?”

  I could ask her how she knows my name, but that would be pointless.

  “What if I don’t want to play along anymore?” I ask her. “What about me?”

  “But Thomas,” she says. “You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This—”

  She’s looking at me but she’s no longer seeing me.

  “…have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for you. You have to play. It’s all for you. This is all for—”

  Something is wrong with her face. It’s becoming blurry somehow, as if losing definition. As if her face were being down-converted from HDTV to regular TV. In fact it’s happening to her whole body. I begin to see weird artifacts on her skin, on her clothes, little blocks of color that don’t quite match the rest, and as she continues to repeat those words even her voice loses its clarity, begins to sound like a low-quality MP3 file, like music heard over the Internet, back before broadband, I mean, and I realize it’s going to keep getting worse, Sophie is basically in a hopeless situation, things are just going to keep on getting worse, and I can’t bear to watch what is happening to her, so I walk back to my car and climb in. But before I drive away I look back, I don’t want to but I do, and that’s when I notice it isn’t just Sophie who is losing definition but the area around her as well, it’s spreading, fast, and so I push the ignition button, the engine roars to life again, and I shove the accelerator to the floor. My tires roar and spin against the gravel until I’m up on the lanes of the interstate again, at which point the car shoots forward like a bullet. Behind me the ground at her feet loses detail, and so does the sky behind her, and I can’t help but feel that Sophie had nothing left to say and got stuck in a loop and now she’s drawing power away from the display, just like when one of the programs on your computer crashes, and nothing else will run properly until you kill the offending application, and it further makes me wonder if it wasn’t my computer’s fault that it crashed and burned the other day, if it wasn’t even the Ant Farm application itself. What if one of the ants ran some kind of computer program inside the game, and the demands of that application caused the ant farm simulation to get pulled into the loop, and eventually the whole game came crashing down, a loop so terrible it melted the chip in my computer and caused it to catch fire? Is that what happened?

  What if that happens in this simulation? What then?

  What if it happens in yours?

  FORTY-ONE

  I drive fast, faster than I have ever driven. At one point the speedometer actually turns past 150. I do not want to be caught in that loop. I do not want to be stripped of my definition, to become an entity so bl
urry that no one would be able to recognize me.

  But eventually I realize I’m making no more progress than I was before, and driving this fast even on an empty highway is kind of stupid, to be honest.

  At some point I pass a sign that welcomes me to Arizona, even though the sun’s position in the sky hasn’t changed all that much.

  About five minutes after crossing the border, I see a mountain on the horizon, my shadow looming against its jagged peaks, and I realize this is an important place. The mountain grows in size cartoonishly fast. In fact it makes me think of the “slew” feature in Microsoft Flight Simulator, where you can quickly zoom across hundreds or thousands of miles in order to check out the scenery along a certain route without being forced to endure it real time. Basically it’s for when you get lazy and bored with reality. As far as I can tell, that’s what I’ve been doing during this jaunt across the southwestern United States, because I don’t think more than two hours has passed since I left my home city.

  A road sign tells me Flagstaff is fifteen miles ahead, and a minute later I pull into town. Since this is the first city I’ve actually seen since I left, I have no choice but stop here and somehow get on the Internet, because if I don’t do it now, maybe there won’t be another town.

  I exit the highway and follow the road as it bends left, watching for a coffee shop or library or Internet cafe. Almost immediately I see a shopping center on my right, an odd-looking place where all the buildings have slanted green roofs. I pull into the parking lot and see a CVS Pharmacy, and beyond that a place called Jitters Coffee. I get out of my car and go inside.

  It’s colorful in here, almost surreal. A rainbow of small, round tables stand on a black floor crisscrossed with white lines. Most of the tables are occupied, but hardly anyone looks up as I walk inside. Against one wall I see a bank of computer monitors with barstools standing in front of them. Since I’m sure you have to pay to use them, I approach the counter, where pastries are laid out in an illuminated case. There is one other person in line, a blonde college student, so I stand behind her and wait. But after the college student buys a coffee and a miniature bundt cake, the girl behind the counter doesn’t acknowledge me.