Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  NOVELETTES

  Tuesday, March 1, 2011

  Clean

  John Kessel

  LEAN John Kessel Two-time Nebula-award-winning-author Kessel co-edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, and The Secret History of Science Fiction with James Patrick Kelly. John’s most recent short story collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, was...

  “I WAS NEARLY YOUR MOTHER”

  Ian Creasey

  “I WAS NEARLY YOUR MOTHER” Ian Creasey Ian Creasey tells us that with the following story he has reached a milestone in two respects. “Firstly, it’s my tenth sale to Asimov’s; it’s very pleasing to reach double figures. Secondly, it’s my first appearance with a story that’s longer than ten thousand...

  The Most Important Thing in the World

  Steve Bein

  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD Steve Bein Steve Bein’s fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future, Asimov’s, and Interzone, and his translation of a Japanese classic on Zen philosophy, Purifying Zen,. will be out in the summer. The author’s latest story was inspired by an interview he...

  Purple

  Robert Reed

  PURPLE Robert Reed Of his latest tale, Robert Reed says, “My daughter and I know a barn owl. It lives in the nature center at a local park, and the bird is lucky to be alive. He is blind and one wing is missing, but he handles the visiting children with heroic indifference. So that’s part of...

  Top of NOVELETTES

  SHORT STORIES

  Next Article

  NOVELETTES

  Clean

  John Kessel

  LEAN

  John Kessel

  Two-time Nebula-award-winning-author Kessel co-edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, and The Secret History of Science Fiction with James Patrick Kelly. John’s most recent short story collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, was published by Small Beer Press in 2008. About “Clean” the author says, “This story is a sequel to the first story I ever sold to Asimov’s, ‘Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,’ which appeared in the October 1983 issue. In some ways this tale represents my attempt to imagine what an episode of a TV series based on that original story’s premise would look like.”

  Her father taught electrical engineering at the university and had a passion for vacuum tubes. When she was eight, he taught her how to repair old radios. They would sit on high stools in his basement workroom and inspect the blackened interiors of battered old Philcos and Stromburg-Carlsons.

  “Lee De Forest held the patent on the regenerative circuit,” her father told her, “but that was an act of piracy. It was actually invented by Edwin Armstrong. Tell me what kind of tube this is.”

  “It’s a triode,” she would say.

  “Smart girl.” Her father took apart the wiring and made her, with a soldering gun, put it back together. Back then his hair was dark, and had not receded. She liked the way the skin at the corners of his eyes wrinkled when he squinted at some wiring diagram.

  “This is hard work,” he said after a while. “How about a poem?”

  Her father had memorized scores of odd poems and obsolete songs. She blew on the bead of solder at the end of the wire. The pungent, hot smell got up her nose. “Okay.”

  “Here’s one of my favorites,” her father said. “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

  “There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold.

  The arctic trails–”

  “Moil?” she said, laughing. “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t know what moil means? What are they teaching you in that school?

  “Arithmetic.”

  “Moil means ‘to toil, to work very hard.’ Like we’re doing right now.”

  “So why don’t they just say ‘toil’? It sounds the same.”

  “It’s poetry, dear. It doesn’t have to make sense. Hand me that spool of solder.”

  She couldn’t remember how many weekend afternoons they spent down there in his workshop. Many. Not enough. She would never forget them.

  On the mantel over the fireplace that they only used during Christmas sat a framed photograph. It showed Jinny’s mother and father and a little red-haired girl who was Jinny, standing on a beach, squinting into the sun. Her father had one arm around her mother, and his other hand resting on Jinny’s head.

  Jinny hated going home for the holidays. Christmas was difficult; they had never been a religious family, and the celebrations seemed to involve increasing amounts of gin and vermouth. Her mother had checked out of the marriage emotionally years ago and her father spent hours in his workshop, but with Jinny there they felt obliged to spend time in the same room, and each of them bounced comments meant for the other off Jinny. As much as Jinny enjoyed seeing her dad again, she did not enjoy being the backboard for their loveless marriage.

  She was in her third year of the PhD program in Sociolinguistics at Harvard. The night before she had gone out with some old friends to a club in Santa Monica, and she awoke with a head muzzy from a scotch hangover. She went down to the kitchen to find her father at the breakfast table in his bathrobe, staring at a cup of coffee.

  He looked up at her with a dazed expression on his face. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Always a joke with her father. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” she said.

  Her father’s face worked with strong emotion. Jinny got worried. Her mother came into the kitchen then. “Dan, what’s the matter?”

  Jinny’s father turned to her mother, looking even more puzzled. “Who are you? What is this place?”

  “This is our home. I’m your wife, Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth? You’re so old! What happened to you?”

  “I got old, Dan. We both got old. It took a while, but it happened.”

  Jinny hated the bitterness in her mother’s voice. “Mom, can’t you see something’s wrong?”

  Dan raised a hand to point at Jinny. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s your daughter, Jinny,” Elizabeth said.

  “My daughter? I don’t have a daughter.”

  They calmed him, made him lie down, and called the doctor. The doctor said they should bring him to the hospital for some tests. They took him to the emergency room. By the time they had arrived he seemed normal, recognized them both, and was complaining that he wanted his breakfast. The doctor had called ahead and they admitted Dan to a private room, gave him a sedative, and he went to sleep. Once they had gotten him settled, Jinny turned on Elizabeth.

  “What’s going on?” Jinny asked her mother. “This doctor expected you to call. This isn’t the first time, is it?”

  “Your father has Alzheimer’s. You talk to him on the phone. You haven’t noticed him forgetting things?”

  Jinny had. But she had chalked it up to normal aging. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You’re the one who is supposed to be so close to him. I just live with him. I’m going to the ladies’ room.” She turned away and walked down the hall.

  Jinny sat by the bedside watching her father sleep. His gnarled hands lay on the blanket. A burn scar ran across the back of his right. His eyelids fluttered and he took an occasional restless breath; he was dreaming. She wondered of what. She remembered how as a girl she had had a recurring nightmare about some witch living in the basement, so that whenever he asked her to go downstairs to fetch something from his workbench she turned on the stairway light and rushed down and up as fast as she could, not looking into the dark corners. She’d grab the shop manual or screwdriver he’d requested and dash up the stairs two at a time. She put her
hand out and brushed his thinning hair behind his ear. He needed a haircut.

  She tried to understand why her mother was so cold. After a while she heard her voice in the corridor, talking to someone. She moved toward the door and listened.

  “You can bring him in anytime after he’s released,” a woman’s voice said. Jinny peeked out of the gap in the door and saw a woman in a nurse’s smock, maybe in her thirties, attractive in a mousy way.

  “I’m not sure he’ll want to go through with it,” Elizabeth said

  “Have him talk with Phoebe Meredith,” the woman said. “Phoebe will draw him out.”

  Jinny pushed the door open. “Hello,” she said.

  The woman smiled nervously, “Hello. You must be Jinny.”

  “Who are you?”

  Elizabeth started to protest, but the woman placed a hand on her arm. “I’m Connie Gray. I work in the trauma center,”

  “This isn’t the trauma center.”

  The woman seemed determined not to take offense. “Just talking to your mother. We met before.”

  “Jinny, please be civil,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s okay,” Connie said. “This is hard on everyone.”

  “Is that Jinny?” Her father called sleepily from inside the room. His voice made Jinny’s heart leap. She went back into the room, closing the door on her mother and the nurse. Her father was trying to prop himself up; she helped him get the pillow situated. His belly protruded under the blanket; she had not realized how much weight he had gained in recent years. “Sit down,” he said, breathing heavily. “We’ve got a problem to face.”

  She sat in the chair beside the bed. “How do you feel?”

  “Like they hit me with a sledgehammer. I didn’t need the drug.”

  Jinny didn’t tell him how upset and irrational he had been. She studied his face. He looked tired, but still her father. His smile was grim.

  “Did your mother tell you about the plan?”

  “What plan?”

  He looked away. “There’s a treatment that might help me. They say, if it works, that it can arrest the Alzheimer’s and prevent dementia.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “There’s a cost.”

  “We can afford it. Mom and I will find a way.”

  He rubbed his stubbly cheeks with his thumb and fingers, then slid them down his throat. “Not that cost. In order to not end up forgetting everything, I would have to forget a lot.”

  “I don’t understand. Isn’t loss of memory the problem?”

  “It’s the problem and the solution. It’s just a matter of how much, and I don’t know how much. They can’t tell me, they say. But the more I give up, the better my chances.”

  Jinny wondered if she should call the doctor. He wasn’t making much sense.

  “I don’t want to be useless,” he said. “To be a burden on your mother, and you. I won’t have that.”

  “You wouldn’t be a burden.”

  “And I won’t be. I won’t be, Jinny. That’s the point.”

  Elizabeth drove them home from the hospital, Dan fidgeting in the passenger’s seat.

  “Calm down, Dan,” she said.

  “I should drive,”

  “You don’t have to drive all the time.”

  “I can still drive,” he said.

  Elizabeth looked at him out of the corner of her eye. If only he would say what he felt. Did he even realize how he was withholding it? “I know, Dan,” she said. “You can still drive.”

  Jinny was following them in the other car. When they got home Dan insisted he was fine and went down to his workroom. Jinny went down with him. Elizabeth sat in an armchair in the living room to read one of the briefs she had brought back from her office.

  Her eyes kept slipping over the words. She had a silly kid’s song in her mind. I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there. . . . Dan had sung that song to Jinny when she was a child. He’d had a head full of such songs. Long before Jinny had been born he had sung them to Elizabeth in bed, after sex. The sex had been good at the beginning, and Dan’s childlike remoteness, those moments when he seemed to drop out of the human universe into some near-autistic world of abstract thought, had not bothered Elizabeth then.

  He had never been warm or demonstrative. He was at his best with ideas and objects. She might have been put off if not for his vulnerability and her understanding that he did not choose the way he was. And there were those songs.

  At the university, he was never beloved by students. He had strict rules and he stuck to them. With his colleagues he was just as bad, and had never advanced within the department. Elizabeth ran interference between Dan and the social world he negotiated so poorly. The animal fair.

  She gave up on the pile of papers—a sheaf of uncontested divorces, pure boilerplate—and listened for sounds from the basement.

  Elizabeth wished that Jinny had not been home to witness Dan’s latest episode. She supposed she should have told Jinny about Dan’s deterioration, but she had dreaded Jinny’s reaction. Jinny assumed that Elizabeth was jealous of her closeness to Dan, but that was not true. Rather, Elizabeth resented the fact that Jinny saw only Dan’s good side whereas she had to deal with his depressions, his temper, his increasing distance. For Jinny he had infinite amounts of time and attention. For her he had nothing.

  After a half hour Jinny came back upstairs and paced around the room like a nervous cat. She had grown more angular since she had gone away, and Elizabeth wondered how her life was going. Like her father, she seldom confided in Elizabeth.

  Finally, Elizabeth spoke. “For pity’s sake, Jinny, please stop pacing.”

  Jinny abruptly sat down on the sofa and waited until Elizabeth looked her in the eye.

  “New Life Choices, mom? It sounds like some online dating service. How did you even hear about them?”

  “That nurse, Connie Gray.”

  “Dad told me what you’re planning.”

  “I’m not planning anything.”

  “How could you consider having him erase his memory? Do you want him to forget you were ever married? That he ever had a daughter?”

  “You saw him this morning. Did he know he had a daughter then?”

  “But that’s an illness. This is deliberate! You want to take away his life?”

  “His life is coming apart. You don’t have to live with it. You call on the phone every couple of months, come flying here like a princess once a year, and you think you know him? I know him. I’ve known him for thirty-five years. I sleep in the same bed with him. I cook his meals. I take care of him when he’s sick. I wash his clothes. I make sure his socks match.”

  “That was your choice, you—”

  Elizabeth felt tears coming to her eyes. “I watch him across the dinner table and I can see that he’s not exactly sure what I just said. I go to find him when he calls because he’s forgotten the way home. When he forgets the first time we met.”

  “Mother—”

  “It’s too hard, Jinny. I’d rather see him lose it all in one clean sweep than lose it bit by bit.”

  She seemed to have gotten Jinny’s attention. “I don’t want him to forget me,” Jinny said.

  “He’s going to, regardless. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. What did he tell you?”

  “He said—he said what you’re saying. That he’d rather forget everything all at once.”

  “And the erasure people say that if his memory is cleaned far back enough, he won’t suffer from dementia. He won’t feel afraid, or lost, or paranoid. Do you want to see him raving, strapped to a bed, or medicated just to keep him from hurting himself? And he’s going to need caretakers. I can’t do it alone.”

  “If he gets erased, you won’t have to do it at all! You’ll just move on. Like you’ve wanted to do for ten years.”

  Elizabeth looked at her daughter. She could recall looking into the mirror thirty years ago and seeing in her own reflection that same certitud
e. “You may think that I don’t care about him anymore, but you don’t have the right to say that.”

  “You made a promise. You’re supposed to catch him if he falls. You’re his wife.”

  “And who will catch me? Are you going to catch me, Jinny? Your father won’t. I’ll be alone. I’ve been alone for fifteen years.”

  Jinny launched herself from the sofa, her voice rising. “My god, you thought this up. You want to get rid of him. This is going to happen, and I won’t be able to stop you.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Jinny turned and stomped out of the room.

  Elizabeth listened to the sound of her steps climbing the stairs to her old room. From the basement she heard nothing. She wondered if Dan had heard any of this, and if he did, why wasn’t he there to explain, to take responsibility for his own actions?

  Why wasn’t he there to tell Elizabeth what he thought about erasing her from his memory?

  There was no such thing as a soul. There were only the brain and its structures: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the limbic system, the brain stem. And the sub structures: the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. The thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. That was all: the soul was a bunch of neurons firing. Or not firing.

  Reuben read souls for a living. He knew where love hid in the brain. Lust, fear, confusion, faith, embarrassment, guilt. He saw them on his screen. He mapped them, in preparation of wiping them out.

  But today Reuben was having trouble concentrating. Last night he had failed to ask Maria Sousa Gonsalves to marry him.

  He glanced at the monitor showing the interview room where Phoebe was talking to the prospective client, an older man with thinning red hair. The guy—the tag on the screen read “Daniel McClendon”—was, according to the file, sixty-one years old. The pressure and temperature sensors of the chair in which he sat revealed a calm man, not anxious the way most of their clients were. The physiognomic software reading his face also raised no red flags.

  Last night Reuben had meant to ask her at the restaurant, but in the presence of the other diners he lost his nerve. What if she said no? But when they went back to her apartment and made love, Reuben realized he could never be with another woman. The glint of her brown eyes in the faint light. The smell of her sweat beneath the perfume. As vivid in his memory as if it had happened a second ago.