Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Across the street four or five young men were pushing a burning garbage dumpster down the sidewalk. They bent their backs to it. Flames surged and lapped over their heads. Sparks, like swarms of fireflies, twisted in and out of chugging gray-black smoke.

  Sensing movement behind him, Daniel turned. The pile of rags stood next to the car. He had barely registered the rags before, avoiding them with his drunk-dar. Now he realized they constituted a derelict. As the Hellfire dumpster passed on the opposite side of the street firelight flickered on the derelict's face. Except, below his ratty watch cap, he had no face. It was like a rudimentary manikin's head displaying the subtlest impressions and protrusions, suggesting features not yet formed. As Daniel watched, the impressions deepened, as if invisible thumbs were pressing into soft wax. Shadows quivered in the eye cups. A wet gleam occurred. Daniel's breath caught, and there was a tremendous crash across the street. He jerked around. The dumpster was now tipped over inside the display window of Talbot's. Real manikins turned into torches. The young men capered like savages, their identities lost to a mob impulse. When Daniel looked back, the derelict was gone—if he'd even been there in the first place.

  He steered the Toyota up Pine Street toward Capital Hill, hunched forward, both hands fisted at the top of the wheel. Behind him sirens ululated. He became confused in the residential back streets. Nancy had kicked him out of the house only a couple of weeks ago. In the dark the hulking brick building where he now resided looked like any other. Daniel hated the apartment, hated the smallness of it, the feel of other lives having passed through. He'd almost rather sleep in the Toyota. Finally, exhausted, he parked randomly, stubbing the front tire on the curb.

  His balloon head carried him through shadows, puddles of moonlight. He swayed against a noisy fence, fingers hooked in the chain link. A girl gazed at him from a third story window. She was wearing a light summer dress. There was no glass in the window. He blinked and she was gone, an apparition of his mind. The building, which otherwise appeared abandoned, seemed to lean toward him. Daniel's head drooped, balloon deflated. He felt his gorge rise for the umpteenth time since leaving O'Leary's. Without looking up again he lurched away from the fence. The next thing he knew, he was pushing open the door of his apartment.

  * * * *

  Daniel lay on his bed and stared at the dingy white plaster with its sags and cracks and stains. His ears were ringing. Sleep eluded him, his mind meandering down empty paths. His mouth had Saharan aspirations. He worked his throat, swallowed. Finally he got up and shuffled into the bathroom. Bare feet planted on the cold tile, he leaned over the sink and slurped at cold, metallic-tasting tap water. He heard a voice conducted down the air shaft and cranked the tap off. A girl reciting a nursery rhyme, that sing-songy cadence. But it was not a child's voice. Daniel turned to the window and raised the sash. Counter-weights knocked inside the frame. A gray concrete wall faced him, so close he could almost reach out and touch it. The voice stopped. Below was a forlorn slab. He craned around and looked up. At the same time a head stuck out of the window on the next floor. A round-faced teenaged girl, eighteen or nineteen, looked down at him, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. She was very pale and serious, her shoulder length black hair hanging straight down.

  Daniel said, “Hi,” in a phlegmy voice.

  “I thought I was all alone,” the girl replied, then withdrew from sight and closed her window.

  * * * *

  He slept into the afternoon and awoke with a headache. The sight of the unpacked, cluttered, and dusty apartment depressed him. Upon moving out of the Ballard house he'd taken two week's vacation. He wanted to settle into his new life alone, to establish himself in his new environment. But the interruption of the work routine left him prey to wounded maunderings and depression. The drinking had gotten on top of him. He knew he had pushed Nancy's last button. The button's name was Julie. But he had only wanted Julie so long as he couldn't have her. Instead he achieved what he had really craved all along: to be totally alone. He'd even given up the girl on the internet, the one Nancy never did find out about. Daniel's isolation imperative throbbed as though infused with cosmic energy, perfectly accomplishing his estrangement. He'd felt this way before, when he was fourteen, during his suicide summer. Nobody knew about that.

  * * * *

  He lay on the bed in his underwear, watching TV with the sound turned off, a Merlot bottle on the bedside table and an empty stem glass balanced on his stomach. The picture quality was bad. It was an old portable television. The antenna imperfectly snagged broadcast signals out of the air.

  There was weeping in the airshaft.

  For a while he pretended he didn't hear it. Then she started in on the nursery rhymes again. He couldn't quite make out the words and it bothered him. He put the glass on the table and stood up. It took him two tries, which is how he discovered he was drunk again.

  In the bathroom he knelt on the floor, arms folded on the window ledge. Mary's lamb had a white fleece. As white as snow. Go figure. The girl's voice was sweet, trembly. There was something about that Rhyme, something he couldn't quite remember, something important. Daniel struggled with it for a minute, then gave up. As he stood, his elbow knocked a bottle of shampoo off the window ledge. It hit the slab and the cap popped off.

  The girl's voice stopped for a moment. Then she said, “Is somebody there?”

  Daniel stared at the blunt concrete wall. It was almost as though he were snug and safe inside a chimney. Safe from the anxieties that plagued him, safe from the world. He didn't want to come out.

  “I didn't think so,” the girl said. “Just another nasty trick.”

  Daniel cleared his throat.

  “Hey—” the girl said.

  Daniel addressed the wall: “I'm here, I'm not a nasty trick.” He had the strangest feeling he was talking to himself.

  “Let me see you.”

  Daniel extended his upper body out the window and twisted around. As before, she gazed down at him, her hair hanging straight.

  “God,” she said.

  “No, just me. Dan.”

  “Eh. I'm Frankie.”

  He stared at her. Frankie was the name of the chat girl he had abandoned. This couldn't be...

  “What were you crying about?” he asked.

  “My cat ran away.”

  His Frankie had a cat, too. So had his ex. Daniel was allergic. Before they married, Nancy used to put the cat out when he came over. One night he woke up to the sound of rain. Nancy was asleep. The cat clung to a branch outside the bedroom window, miserable, fur matted and dripping. That was the night the damn thing disappeared. Who knew what happened to it. Hit by a car, run off. He had felt bad. Nancy told him it wasn't his fault, of course. Sixteen years later, though, she let him know how it had been his fault. And how she didn't even believe in his allergies. “It's all psychosomatic with you,” she had said. “You don't want anything around that demonstrates love, that might need you, or that you might need. Not me, not even a cat. You can't take it.” Well, she had a point. He really couldn't take it.

  “That's too bad,” he said to Frankie.

  “He's all I had left. Now they'll get me.”

  “Who will get you?”

  “The saucer people.”

  Daniel felt tired.

  “Will you come up here?” Frankie said.

  He didn't reply. His back hurt.

  “Please? I want to show you something. I'm scared.”

  “What is it?” he said.

  “You have to see it.”

  * * * *

  The hallway seemed to tilt. Daniel kept bumping into the wall. It was too dark. On the ceiling inverted bowls glowed dimly yellow. At the end of the hallway a hydrocephalic moon leered through the broken window. Trash littered the floor. It was as though he were in two buildings at once. Which one was real? Either of them? Daniel had to haul himself up the stairs using the rail. He closed his eyes for a while and kept climbing. When he opened them ag
ain the third floor appeared normal. He found the right door and knocked.

  * * * *

  Frankie was a small person, not much over five feet. She wore a faded summer dress in a flower print. Her legs and feet were bare. She was pretty, in a way. Mostly she made him conscious of his age, just as his unseen internet girl had. He was forty-nine.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Nineteen.”

  The same as his Frankie.

  “I think I know you,” he said.

  “I don't think so,” she said, taking his hand and leading him through a duplicate of his apartment, minus the clutter. He didn't want her to touch him but he allowed it. In the kitchen she said, “Feel that?”

  He did: a cold exhalation, a draft. She pulled him to the other side of the kitchen. The draft was coming out of the narrow space next to the refrigerator. He should have been able to see the back wall. Instead there was a velvet shadow, an impression of depth, a vague iridescence. The draft raised his hackles. There was a strange odor. It evoked slaughterhouses, the smell of wet concrete after they've hosed the blood away. He took his hand out of Frankie's.

  “The Sleeve,” she said. “It's like a connecting corridor between here and there. The saucer, I guess. Like that tunnel thing at the airport that you walk though to get on the plane? It's for people like us.”

  Daniel really wished he hadn't come up.

  “Where do you think you are right now?” she said, suddenly intense.

  “Uh, your kitchen?” Daniel said.

  “Wrong. They mess with our minds. First they shoot us with rays to make us crazy. Make us more alone. You want to know what my theory is? To be human, to belong on Earth, you have to be connected to other people, you have to be yourself and part of the human web. When we lose that sense of connection we're vulnerable. They isolate us then they replace us. It's like an invasion. They're replacing us.” (And he saw his own shadowed face in a cracked and spotted mirror, mouthing those words: They're replacing us.)

  Daniel rubbed his eyes. Except for the rays and invasion bullshit her words sounded familiar. Web of human connection. He'd read that somewhere.

  “Sleeping so close to an open Sleeve, my dreams started telling me things,” Frankie said. “That's how I know. But I had Mojo to protect me. He isn't human but he kept me on this side. You have to go voluntarily. That's part of it, I think. You have to not care. You allow the replacement to come through. Kind of like inviting a vampire into the house?”

  “Vampire,” Daniel said.

  “There isn't any getting out. I opened the door once. I was afraid to, but I opened it. I had the dumb idea I could leave the building. Mo slipped past me and I couldn't even chase after him. I call him but he doesn't come. He's not a dog. I guess they'll get me now. Except, I mean unless you and I connect?”

  Daniel moved to the other side of the kitchen, leaned against the counter, folded his arms.

  “It's relationships,” Frankie said, “real human connections that keep us in the world. That's all.”

  She moved close to him, invading his famous boundaries. Her body was practically touching his. And Daniel's body responded to her proximity. But it was just his body. Every other facet of his being wanted to get away. He knew the drill, Alien Lonely Hate Rays not withstanding.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “We should stay together. Maybe we can anchor each other? I don't want to be alone anymore.”

  “Frankie, I have to go.”

  “Let me come with you.”

  (His own face in the spotted mirror)

  She wrapped her arms around him. He gently moved her back. She did not hold on, did not resist or cling. She was used to this. She courted it. Rejection was her drug. He could see that in her eyes. He'd seen it before, in other eyes. He was just another in a long line of rejecters, when he left her there in the slaughterhouse draft. It's what he told himself.

  * * * *

  In the hall he noticed the faded pattern on the rug was the same as the one on Frankie's dress. And suddenly he remembered maryslamb was his Frankie's chat handle. He turned back to the closed door, brought his hand up, but didn't knock. After a moment he turned away.

  * * * *

  He found a station that endlessly ran programs from the 1960s, shows that he'd watched when he was a kid, some only because his mother watched them, and his dad whenever he happened to be home, which wasn't often. The Fugitive, Run For Your Life, Burke's Law, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and so on. His mother eventually ran off with some other man. Daniel remembered the terrible fight his parents had, how his dad struck his mother a hard open-handed blow across the face before she slammed out of the house for the last time. He had been twelve, and after that he mostly raised himself. But it was strange. With his eyes closed Daniel could see his mother's face. And he could see Robert Stack's face, Rod Serling's face—but not his own father's.

  He was drinking beer, watching Richard Kimble and his TV ghost images. His mind was unmoored, disconnected. Footsteps creaked across the ceiling. He turned the sound down on the TV. There was more than one person up there. He listened. After a while there was only one set of footsteps. Then it was quiet.

  He got up to use the bathroom. A window rattled open in the airshaft. He turned the light out and stood quietly. But after a minute he couldn't help himself. Loneliness moved through him like a subterranean tide. He opened his own window. He leaned out and looked up. The rain fell in silky whispers around her head. Her straight hair was wet and dripping.

  She had no face.

  Daniel jerked back. The top of his head caught the sharp edge of the window sash. Black stars pulsed around him. He reached up, fumbling, slammed the sash down, crawled back to bed.

  * * * *

  The dawn arrived in smoky darkness. The rain was constant, thunderous. No amount of heat could dispel the dampness inside the apartment. Black mildew spotted the walls and ceiling. Daniel felt the damp entering him, greening his bones. He had lost weight. In the kitchen, rummaging for food, he held his pants up.

  Something strange was happening outside the kitchen window. Just beyond the dark rain-lashed trees that crowded the building the sun was shining. Bright afternoon sun. It made little misty rainbows on the outer edge of the downpour, but penetrated no further. On the lanai attached to one of the apartments across the alley a woman stretched out on a lawn chair. She was wearing a yellow bikini top and dark glasses.

  Daniel rubbed his eyes, a cold, crumbly piece of Gino's cardboard pizza in his mouth. A violent gust thumped the window, and he jumped back.

  * * * *

  From the bathroom mirror a Dachau survivor stared out at him. He fingered his ribs. I'm losing myself, Daniel thought. How long had he been here? If Jimmy Bair could see him now. The alien Lonely Hate rays would never get Jimmy—he was too goddam jovial and big-hearted.

  He recalled the faceless thing in the airshaft. It couldn't be true. He had been drunk. Frankie was still up there. His Frankie. He shoved the window open and called her name. When there was no reply he got dressed, not bothering to knot his shoelaces, and lurched out into the hall. Immediately he felt exposed, hollowed out and filled back up with terrible anxiety. He mustn't leave the apartment. But he did. The elastic hallway tilted and stretched and swayed. He climbed the stairs. Frankie's door stood open. He entered and found the apartment empty. In the kitchen there was no slaughterhouse draught. The Sleeve had closed, if there had ever been a Sleeve.

  * * * *

  He lay flat on his back, sweating in the damp chill, breathing shallowly, staring at the ceiling, his mind vacant. He was dimly aware of something scratching at the door. He ignored it. Besides, the scratching seemed as much inside his head as outside it. A cool draft touched his bare feet. Daniel's heart clenched with fear, but in a way he was ready to go. More than ready. He got up. His knees felt weak. In the tiny living room, rain shadows drained over the piled boxes and furniture. The unnatural draft emanated from a voi
ded section of wall. Velvet darkness stretched back into vague iridescence. Something moved in there.

  Daniel forced himself to turn aside, his heart speeding with fear. He stumbled out of the living room, remembering what Frankie had said about the cat anchoring her in the world, that small connection. He yanked the apartment door open. The hallway was empty. He tried to step out and his guts clenched and knotted, as if he were trying to step into an airplane propeller.

  “Come on, Mojo,” he said.

  The hallway remained empty.

  Daniel's throat tightened. Not even a fucking cat—

  Then Mo came around the corner where the stairs dropped to the first floor. His fur was tawny and puffy. He hesitated, seeing Daniel.

  “Here, kitty?” Daniel said, without much hope.

  Mo looked at him, for a moment stood stock still with tail high, then padded over.

  * * * *

  Chuck Norris and his ghosts hawked the Total Gym at the foot of Daniel's bed. The rain was like sand blowing against the windows. A slaughterhouse draft breathed through the apartment, and Daniel mostly stayed under the covers. Mo curled against him on top of the bedspread, his little furnace body thrumming. Mo wore a collar, but the name on the collar was “Fritz,” not “Mojo.” This nagged at Daniel. His mind tried and failed to get around it.

  * * * *

  Mo didn't care for his new diet of frozen pizza. His stool was runny and especially odoriferous. Daniel couldn't house-train him, since he himself was afraid to leave the apartment, let alone the building. He tore pages out of an old Esquire magazine and arranged them on the bathroom floor between the sink and tub and tried to direct Mo's bowel to evacuate there and only there. No dice.

  * * * *

  Mo grew restless. He prowled the confines of the apartment, hunting avenues of escape. Daniel erected a barrier of boxes between the hallway and the living room, afraid Mo would disappear into the Sleeve. He almost wished the cat would disappear. Daniel's eyes and nose were runny. When he breathed his lungs made a raspy sound. He knew Mo was his protection against them. Nevertheless, there were times when even Mo's presence was too much. The shit and allergies didn't help.