21st Century Science Fiction

by D B Hartwell

  Then you look up and realize that you’re on the sidewalk outside an all-ages club, and you’re holding a ten dollar bill, ready to hand it to the bouncer. The music thunders every time the door swings open. You turn to Joelly and—

  You’re in someone else’s car. On the Interstate. The driver is a boy you met hours ago, his name is Rush but you haven’t asked if that’s his first name or his last. In the club you leaned into each other and talked loud over the music about parents and food and the difference between the taste of a fresh cigarette in your mouth and the smell of stale smoke. But then you realize that there’s a cigarette in your mouth, you took it from Rush’s pack yourself, and you don’t like cigarettes. Do you like it now? You don’t know. Should you take it out, or keep smoking? You scour your memories, but can discover no reason why you decided to light the cigarette, no reason why you got into the car with this boy. You start to tell yourself a story: he must be a trustworthy person, or you wouldn’t have gotten into the car. You took that one cigarette because the boy’s feelings would have been hurt.

  You’re not feeling like yourself tonight. And you like it. You take another drag off the cigarette. You think back over the past few hours, and marvel at everything you’ve done, all without that constant weight of self-reflection: worry, anticipation, instant regret. Without the inner voice constantly critiquing you.

  Now the boy is wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and he’s reaching up to a shelf to get a box of cereal, and his back is beautiful. There is hazy light outside the small kitchen window. He pours Froot Loops into a bowl for you, and he laughs, though quietly because his mother is asleep in the next room. He looks at your face and frowns. He asks you what’s the matter. You look down, and you’re fully dressed. You think back, and realize that you’ve been in this boy’s apartment for hours. You made out in his bedroom, and the boy took off his clothes, and you kissed his chest and ran your hands along his legs. You let him put his hand under your shirt and cup your breasts, but you didn’t go any further. Why didn’t you have sex? Did he not interest you? No—you were wet. You were excited. Did you feel guilty? Did you feel ashamed?

  What were you thinking?

  When you get home there will be hell to pay. Your parents will be furious, and worse, they will pray for you. The entire church will pray for you. Everyone will know. And no one will ever look at you the same again.

  Now there’s a cinnamon taste in your mouth, and you’re sitting in the boy’s car again, outside a convenience store. It’s afternoon. Your cell phone is ringing. You turn off the cell phone and put it back in your purse. You swallow, and your throat is dry. That boy—Rush—is buying you another bottle of water. What was it you swallowed? Oh, yes. You think back, and remember putting all those little pills in your mouth. Why did you take so many? Why did you take another one at all? Oh, yes.

  • • • •

  Voices drift up from the kitchen. It’s before 6 AM, and I just want to pee and get back to sleep, but then I realize they’re talking about me.

  “She doesn’t even walk the same. The way she holds herself, the way she talks . . .”

  “It’s all those books Dr. Subramaniam gave her. She’s up past one every night. Therese never read like that, not science.”

  “No, it’s not just the words, it’s how she sounds. That low voice . . .” She sobs. “Oh hon, I didn’t know it would be this way. It’s like she’s right, it’s like it isn’t her at all.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Alice’s crying grows louder, subsides. The clink of dishes in the sink. I step back, and Mitch speaks again.

  “Maybe we should try the camp,” he says.

  “No, no, no! Not yet. Dr. Mehldau says she’s making progress. We’ve got to—”

  “Of course she’s going to say that.”

  “You said you’d try this, you said you’d give this a chance.” The anger cuts through the weeping, and Mitch mumbles something apologetic. I creep back to my bedroom, but I still have to pee, so I make a lot of noise going back out. Alice comes to the bottom of the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”

  I keep my face sleepy and walk into the bathroom. I shut the door and sit down on the toilet in the dark.

  What fucking camp?

  • • • •

  “Let’s try again,” Dr. Mehldau said. “Something pleasant and vivid.”

  I’m having trouble concentrating. The brochure is like a bomb in my pocket. It wasn’t hard to find, once I decided to look for it. I want to ask Dr. Mehldau about the camp, but I know that once I bring it into the open, I’ll trigger a showdown between the doctor and the Klasses, with me in the middle.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” she says. “Think about Therese’s tenth birthday. In her diary, she wrote that was the best birthday she’d ever had. Do you remember Sea World?”

  “Vaguely.” I could see dolphins jumping—two at a time, three at a time. It had been sunny and hot. With every session it was getting easier for me to pop into Therese’s memories. Her life was on DVD, and I had the remote.

  “Do you remember getting wet at the Namu and Shamu show?”

  I laughed. “I think so.” I could see the metal benches, the glass wall just in front of me, the huge shapes in the blue-green water. “They had the whales flip their big tail fins. We got drenched.”

  “Can you picture who was there with you? Where are your parents?”

  There was a girl, my age, I can’t remember her name. The sheets of water were coming down on us and we were screaming and laughing. Afterward my parents toweled us off. They must have been sitting up high, out of the splash zone. Alice looked much younger: happier, and a little heavier. She was wider at the hips. This was before she started dieting and exercising, when she was Mom-sized.

  My eyes pop open. “Oh God.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine—it was just . . . like you said. Vivid.” That image of a younger Alice still burns. For the first time I realize how sad she is now.

  “I’d like a joint session next time,” I say.

  “Really? All right. I’ll talk to Alice and Mitch. Is there anything in particular you want to talk about?”

  “Yeah. We need to talk about Therese.”

  • • • •

  Dr. S says everybody wants to know if the original neural map, the old Queen, can come back. Once the map to the map is lost, can you find it again? And if you do, then what happens to the new neural map, the new Queen?

  “Now, a good Buddhist would tell you that this question is unimportant. After all, the cycle of existence is not just between lives. Samsara is every moment. The self continuously dies and recreates itself.”

  “Are you a good Buddhist?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “Only on Sunday mornings.”

  “You go to church?”

  “I golf.”

  • • • •

  There’s a knock and I open my eyes. Alice steps into my room, a stack of folded laundry in her arms. “Oh!”

  I’ve rearranged the room, pushing the bed into the corner to give me a few square feet of free space on the floor.

  Her face goes through a few changes. “I don’t suppose you’re praying.”

  “No.”

  She sighs, but it’s a mock-sigh. “I didn’t think so.” She moves around me and sets the laundry on the bed. She picks up the book there, Entering the Stream. “Dr. Subramaniam gave you this?”

  She’s looking at the passage I’ve highlighted. But loving kindness— maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we already are.

  “Well.” She sets the book down, careful to leave it open to the same page. “That sounds a bit like Dr. Mehldau.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, it does. Did she tell you I wanted you and Mitch to be at the next session?”

  “We’
ll be there.” She works around the room, picking up T-shirts and underwear. I stand up to get out of the way. Somehow she manages to straighten up as she moves—righting books that had fallen over, setting Boo W. Bear back to his place on the bed, sweeping an empty chip bag into the garbage can—so that as she collects my dirty laundry she’s cleaning the entire room, like the Cat in the Hat’s cleaner-upper machine.

  “Alice, in the last session I remembered being at Sea World, but there was a girl next to me. Next to Therese.”

  “Sea World? Oh, that was the Hammel girl, Marcy. They took you to Ohio with them on their vacation that year.”

  “Who did?”

  “The Hammels. You were gone all week. All you wanted for your birthday was spending money for the trip.”

  “You weren’t there?”

  She picks up the jeans I left at the foot of the bed. “We always meant to go to Sea World, but your father and I never got out there.”

  • • • •

  “This is our last session,” I say.

  Alice, Mitch, Dr. Mehldau: I have their complete attention.

  The doctor, of course, is the first to recover. “It sounds like you’ve got something you want to tell us.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Alice seems frozen, holding herself in check. Mitch rubs the back of his neck, suddenly intent on the carpet.

  “I’m not going along with this anymore.” I make a vague gesture. “Everything: the memory exercises, all this imagining of what Therese felt. I finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter to you if I’m Therese or not. You just want me to think I’m her. I’m not going along with the manipulation anymore.”

  Mitch shakes his head. “Honey, you took a drug.” He glances at me, looks back at his feet. “If you took LSD and saw God, that doesn’t mean you really saw God. Nobody’s trying to manipulate you, we’re trying to undo the manipulation.”

  “That’s bullshit, Mitch. You all keep acting like I’m schizophrenic, that I don’t know what’s real or not. Well, part of the problem is that the longer I talk to Dr. Mehldau here, the more fucked up I am.”

  Alice gasps.

  Dr. Mehldau puts out a hand to soothe her, but her eyes are on me. “Terry, what your father’s trying to say is that even though you feel like a new person, there’s a you that existed before the drug. That exists now.”

  “Yeah? You know all those O.D.-ers in your book who say they’ve ‘reclaimed’ themselves? Maybe they only feel like their old selves.”

  “It’s possible,” she says. “But I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. They’ve come to accept the parts of themselves they’ve lost, the family members they’ve left behind. They’re people like you.” She regards me with that standard-issue look of concern that doctors pick up with their diplomas. “Do you really want to feel like an orphan the rest of your life?”

  “What?” From out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes. I cough to clear my throat, and the tears keep coming, until I smear them off on my arm. I feel like I’ve been sucker punched. “Hey, look Alice, just like you,” I say.

  “It’s normal,” Dr. Mehldau says. “When you woke up in the hospital, you felt completely alone. You felt like a brand new person, no family, no friends. And you’re still just starting down this road. In a lot of ways you’re not even two years old.”

  “Damn you’re good,” I say. “I didn’t even see that one coming.”

  “Please, don’t leave. Let’s—”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet.” I’m at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket, and pull out the brochure. “You know about this?”

  Alice speaks for the first time. “Oh honey, no . . .”

  Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. “Are you considering this?”

  “It’s their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can’t come through for them, or I bail out, boom. You know what goes on there?”

  She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in “intense group sessions with trained counselors” where they can “recover their true identities.” She shakes her head. “Their approach is different than mine . . .”

  “I don’t know, doc. Their approach sounds an awful lot like ‘reclaiming.’ I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese’s head.”

  I turn to Alice and Mitch. “You’ve got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau’s program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?”

  Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and she’s staring at me like a stranger.

  • • • •

  It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it’s still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porch step, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.

  “Does he do that a lot?” I ask.

  “He likes to drive when he’s upset.”

  “Oh.” Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.” She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. “He just doesn’t know what to do with you.”

  “He wants to put me in the camp, then.”

  “Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before.” She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. “I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?”

  She’s such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.

  “I’m not Therese. I never will be Therese.”

  “Oh, I know,” she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. “It’s just that you look so much like her.”

  I laugh. “I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job.”

  “It wouldn’t work, I’d still recognize you.” She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.

  “Wow, you made that before we left? Why?”

  Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. “I thought we might need it, one way or another.”

  She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. “I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back.”

  “It’s not that I—”

  “We’re not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you’ll still be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to decide who loves you.”

  ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON Born in Washington, D.C., Alaya Dawn Johnson lives in New York City, where she studied East Asian languages and cultures at Columbia University, and where she has worked as a journalist and in the book publishing industry. She has traveled extensively in Japan. Her short fiction began appearing in 2005. Her latest book, a YA novel, is The Summer Prince (2013).

  “Third Day Lights” starts as fantasy and becomes SF in the manner of “planetary romance,” the Leigh Brackett and Michael Moorcock tradition. In a very far future, humanity is destroying universes to drain as power sources for a huge posthuman project.

  THIRD DAY LIGHTS

  The mist was thick as clotted cream, shot through with light from the luminous maggots in the sand. And through that mist, which I knew would entrap almost any creature unlucky enough to wander through it, came my first supplicant in over thirty cycles. He rode atop one of the butterfly men’s great black deer, which greeted me with a sweep of its massive antlers. His skin was as pale as the sand was black; his eyes were the
clear, hard color of chipped jade. A fine, pale fuzz covered his scalp, like the babies of humans. He had full, hard lips and high cheekbones. His nose had been broken several times, and was quite large regardless. His ears protruded slightly from his head.

  He was too beautiful. I did not believe it. Oh, I had, in my travels, seen men far more attractive than he. Men who had eagerly accepted me in whatever form I chose, and had momentarily pleased me. But I had never seen this kind of beauty, that of the hard edges and chipped flakes of jade. That aura of bitterly mastered power, and unspeakable grief subdued but somehow not overcome. He gave the impression that he was a man to respect, a man who would understand my own loneliness despite my family, a man who might, perhaps, after so many cycles . . .

  But I have not lived for so long away from my Trunk by believing in such things.

  Eyes never leaving mine, he touched the neck of the deer and it knelt for him to dismount. His bare feet should have frozen solid seconds after they touched the sand, and the maggots begun devouring the icy flesh, but instead he stood before my staircase, perfectly at ease. From within the hostile mist, lacy hands and mouths struggled towards him but never quite touched.

  That is how I knew he wasn’t human.

  I anticipated with relish the moment when he would speak and allow me to drop him on the other side of the desert. But he stared at me and I glowered back and then I understood: he knew what I was. He knew who I was. At the time, I thought this meant that he was incalculably old. Now, I am not so sure.

  “Why do you stand before my gate? Tell me your purpose.”

  He stayed silent, of course. His impassive expression never wavered, and yet—perhaps from his slightly quivering shoulders or faintly irregular breathing—I had the impression that he was laughing at me.