Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  'I don't know, I don't know, it seemed harmless . . . I guess Masunobu was pretty drunk but he's a master, what could I say? What could I do? He was telling me really interesting stories. I guess I was flattered. I never imagined . . . I mean, he's married, and I never came on to him or anything. I'm taller than him!'

  'Like that ever mattered a crock of beans,' Gloria observed. What do they teach you in college, anyway?'

  'Not much,' I said. 'Go on, please, Miss Cooper.'

  'At first I thought it was a joke. I thought he was just messing around. Then I started getting scared. He was on top of me and I couldn't get out from under him. He's so strong, Gloria, you'd never believe somebody so short could be so strong. He started taking my clothes off. He kept saying, 'This I like, this I like,' and 'You have face like doll.' I was like, 'No, no, please stop,' and I tried to get free but I couldn't. Then he stood up and took his pants down – no, Gloria, this is too embarrassing.'

  'Honey, this is criminal stuff, I'm telling you.'

  'It's cultural differences,' Miss Cooper said wildly, still crying. 'I'm sure it's not his fault.'

  'Cultural differences my behind,' I snorted. 'Have you told Shihan?'

  'I tried to. I kept crying when I was talking to him, though. He told me to stay home today and he'd look into it. But I don't think he understood.'

  'What's to understand?' said Gloria. 'The guy's a menace. Tanya, did he actually force himself on you?'

  Miss Cooper shook her head. 'I rolled off the bed and got to the door. He tried to come after me but he tripped over his pants. He was talking Japanese – I don't know what he was saying.'

  'Well!' said Gloria, making a wry face. 'Is it true they have really small dicks?'

  Miss Cooper started crying again. Gloria broke into a spate of apologies. I went over to Miss Cooper's speedball that she has mounted in her living room and started hitting it.

  'I don't believe this,' I said. 'Everywhere you look, there's no integrity.'

  'I agree,' Gloria said. 'If these are the people that Shihan is looking up to, then I think he ought to know what they're really like.'

  'It's probably perfectly acceptable in their country,' said Miss Cooper, but even she sounded doubtful.

  I said, 'I guess I'm just highly connable in all departments. I really believed that karate was about warriors.'

  'But it is,' said Miss Cooper passionately. 'Maybe our Shihan isn't always the best example. Maybe Masunobu Hideki was out of line last night – and I'm not saying he was, I really can't be sure—'

  'Ho!' cried Gloria. 'He was outta line already. I'm thinking about calling my cousin Paulie and asking him to go up to their hotel and have a conversation, you know what I mean?'

  'Oh, I wouldn't do that! Your cousin could get hurt.'

  'Pffff!' said Gloria. 'Gimme a break.'

  Gloria's cousin vs. the Okinawan masters. I thought about what I'd seen in the pool hall. It hadn't looked much like a kung fu movie, had it?

  Miss Cooper must have seen the thoughtful look on my face. 'Now, Cookie, you mustn't let this put you off. Karate is still pure. The spirit of Bushido is still pure.'

  'So, what's the plan, then?' Gloria broke in. 'We're only purple belts. And fellow women. We came by to see if you were OK, and you're not. Are you going to the tournament? Or to the police? If I were you, I'd go to the police.'

  'I can't do that! Shihan told me to stay here, and that's what I'm doing.'

  So in the end, after a lot more talking, we left her there. What else could we do? I knew one thing. She needed to keep believing in karate. To do otherwise would shatter everything she'd worked for. I had too much empathy for how that feels to tell her that probably these masters would get mopped up if they had to fight for real, and anyway, I knew she wouldn't believe me if I did.

  But I knew I was right. I just thought of Serge and I could see where all this karate stuff fit into the big picture. Yes, Miss Cooper could do fifty push-ups without putting her knees on the ground once. Then again, I could do five and so how hard could it be to get to fifty? Yes, Miss Cooper could do a kick to the height of somebody's face. So could the Rockettes. Yes, she knew all the moves to Seipai kata. But even Miles's dog had some choreography in his newspaper-catching routine – was Seipai really that special? Still, I knew that if you put everything together, Miss Cooper looked pretty good. Especially to me. I'd always been overweight and shy, I'd always believed in arcane knowledge and yearned to be part of an elite.

  On the other hand, Serge moved like a rusty pipe. But I remember one time when Serge sat exposed on the perimeter of the N-Ridge mines with lightning hitting the Grid over her head and rain coursing down her back. Sat there for three days. For hours at a time she barely moved, watching the golems through her scope. She lived on rainwater, and I suspected her breathing filters were damaged because she kept taking them out and fiddling with them. She waited her quarry out, she used incendiaries, she completed her mission; and then she went back to X and got really drunk. And went out and did it all again.

  Was that what made a warrior? Why had Serge done what she did in the end, right down to ordering her own destruction and letting herself be taken by the Grid? Her rhetoric declared that she was a patriot and a servant of the military. Yet nobody really believed that. Serge just couldn't back off – that was it. Didn't have the concept of it in her brain. Couldn't quit.

  And Serge wouldn't have let some little toad grope her up just because he was a higher rank and she was in awe of that, whatever it meant.

  Let's face it: Serge would have wiped the floor with Masunobu Hideki and then gone out to practice barrel-racing on her pony Captain Painter. But there I was, all these months and years, standing in line, practicing the moves, bowing religiously – thinking there was something these people could give me that was worth having. I broke the brick because Troy was baiting me and I was angry, not because I'd learned to move ki into my left toe.

  Gloria was agitated.

  'I just don't get it,' she finally said as we stopped at the lights on Alps Road. 'How could she be so stupid?'

  'It shouldn't be about how smart she is,' I said. 'He should have left her alone.'

  Gloria clicked her tongue. 'Hey, easy. It's not like I'm defending the little s%*t,' she said.

  Just because something happens, does that mean it's destined? Is there a big picture, or is everything just a mess? Why would the Grid really offer up logic bullets that could be used to destroy it? Are the logic bullets really bait, like Serge thinks – will the Grid use them to turn Machine Front against itself?

  Or will the Grid turn into Machine Front in the process of fighting it?

  And just because something happened, does that mean the Universe wanted it to happen? Does the past justify itself, just by being the past?

  Is Gloria right? Did Miss Cooper ask for it? Somehow? Toyota?

  No. No, I can't put any of it together. I can't understand the Grid. I can't understand people. I don't understand myself.

  Gloria parked her Lincoln Town Car on the far side of the Wayne Hills High School parking lot. The hot engine cracked and pinged as we got out. The cars all shimmered liquidly in the burgeoning heat. I was reminded of Gossamer's visuals during a pollen storm.

  'I changed my mind about one thing,' Gloria said. 'I'm looking forward to the sparring now.'

  We set off into the mirages. I was still thinking, hard. I said:

  'I wonder when I'm going to learn. I can't seem to tell the difference between a psychopathological phenomenon and a breakfast cereal.'

  'What?' Gloria said, turning her Ray Bans on me.

  'I don't know the difference between reality and TV.'

  'Oh,' she said. 'That. Don't let them get to you, Cookie. You're OK.'

  'I'm not OK. I can't tell the authentic from the BS. Why is this? Have I taken myself totally out of the equation? Am I always going to be behind the curve, out of fear, when I could be ahead of it, darn it? Am I going to let the fact th
at I'm a nutcase ruin my life?'

  'I think we should just concentrate on what we have to do right now,' Gloria said. 'Let's get through today. I'm serious about calling Paulie. I just might do it.'

  I wasn't really listening. I was still talking to myself. It wasn't that I expected Gloria to understand. I just needed to hear myself say it.

  'No. No. Nononononononono. I'm going to be a nutcase and I'm going to be it to the best of my ability, starting now. I'm going to be an authentic nutcase. Thank you very much.'

  I turned on my heel and marched away. Gloria called after me,

  'Hey! Cookie! What about pocketbook-and-broom? What am I going to tell Mrs. Cannalletto?'

  I waved my hands in the air to show I didn't care what she told Mrs. Cannalletto. I was going to try Quark/not-Quark again. Miles kept saying it was an interactive game. Well, maybe it was time for me to start interacting.

  Time for me to get tough.

  I reached my Rabbit and burned my hand on the chrome when I put the key in the lock. 'Shhhhhh— sugar!' I said. That was very nearly a swear. It really was.

  the american book of the dead

  It's about time. Where have you been, dead-beat?

  I typed: I don't want to play Quark. I want to know about the mines.

  Then you've come to the wrong place. Now, where were we? You were trapped in a large cavern, weren't you, and you still hadn't figured out what those ropes were for. Shall we resume?

  I put: No. We were in the Grid, with Serge. But I need to see Klaski now. What have the golems done to her?

  I pressed 'return' and waited. Maybe it wasn't going to work this time. Maybe I had taken it for granted. Maybe—

  They took her down into the logic mine, but nothing was like it was supposed to be.

  It took Klaski a while to get this one. She remembered the time her uncle Ed bought a barbecue from Sears and inside the box was a lawn mower. Ed kept looking at the picture of the Sun Chef on the box, at the Sun Chef receipt, at the Sun Chef instruction manual, and then back again at the Lawn Ranger 909. He just couldn't come to grips with the contradiction. The kids laughed, and Aunt Bea went into a tirade against Sears, but Uncle Ed had to go get a Michelob and stand there drinking it and scratching his balls just to get over the shock. Things like this weren't supposed to happen and they could really mess up a guy's head, not to mention what to do with the spare ribs?

  Klaski knew how Ed felt that day.

  She had followed the golems down the shaft and the doors boomed shut behind them; but they weren't in a lit tunnel and they weren't in total darkness, either. There was a feeling of open air: damp, windy darkness like after a rainstorm at dusk. The wind carried her sideways and she stumbled, sprawling on her side with a curse. For the first time since she had left X she had a truly hard, unyielding surface beneath her.

  Klaski rose to her knees, then stood. The darkness around her was falling back to reveal planes of concrete: floor, walls, but incomplete. After the whorls and Grid vertigo, this smoothness and predominance of right angles made her feel rooted and secure, as if someone had nailed her boots down. That was nice; but otherwise this wasn't a nice place. It was a concrete wasteland: the floor slabs were buckled and cracked, revealing rusted iron reinforcements. Puddles lay in uneven patches, and burn marks stained the walls.

  Whatever it was, it wasn't a mine.

  The girls seemed to have led her onto the top floor of some partly bombed-out building, its jagged edges hanging over a gulf. There was no more roof and the walls were either destroyed or under construction; it was hard to be sure which. Straight ahead of her there was no wall at all: Klaski could see a complex of other rectangles, an irregular city skyline but without any of the light or noise. She could see arching stairways that formed bridges between high buildings. Figures moved across them. Below, there must have been roads but there was no sound of traffic. There was, instead, a humming so faint as to be almost subuminal: an erratic music.

  'Where are we?'

  'Do you like coffee?'

  The girl walked closer to the edge of the precipice. There seemed to be people here, but something wasn't quite right about them. They were out of focus. The girl walked among them and Klaski realized that they must be golems. She hesitated, looked over her shoulder. More golems.

  Then she picked up the aroma and for a moment she thought she was back home.

  'Oh, I must be dead because that smell is heaven.'

  A strip of the enormous building had been rendered into a coffee shop by the presence of a green and white striped awning and a counter with stools in front of it. Klaski could smell the brew.

  Klaski sat down at a flimsy round table that wobbled under the pressure of her palms. A styrofoam cup was rolling slowly across the puddled floor, describing a semaphore on the tile. The jarring whir of the espresso machine shook her dental work and made her tap her fingers on the glass, which was gritty and wet. Golems were all around her, going about their business in a way that made sense evidently to them if not to her; but she couldn't get a bead on them, couldn't bring her attention to bear on anything but the inanimate, the fixed. The one exception to this rule was the sad release of smoke from a chimney stack on a tilted rooftop opposite, where a piece of guttering let loose a vapor of the softest, warmest pale gray. It sighed into the sky and quickly disappeared in random shapes and without violence. She watched it.

  And realized that she was already missing the Grid's hellfire. The absence ached like phantom pain from a lost limb.

  The girls sat down at a table. They look at Klaski as one. After a while she stood and went up to them aggressively, upset.

  'I don't get this. Is it some kind of trick? We haven't taken a ship. This isn't home. This isn't my world.'

  'It's under your world. This is your part of the the Grid.' The girls were taking turns playing with a crinkly brown-paper sack that used to hold, apparently, cement. They were making a paper airplane out of it. 'This is the Grid, having digested what you brought. All we did was join up the logic mines to the MaxPact that we pulled down. It's all the same thing. It's just a slice of paradigm.'

  'The Grid, the Grid, the Grid. All I wanted was to get out of it. But this isn't right. It doesn't feel right.'

  The other girls passed the words around. 'The Grid is yours. The American Book of the Dead. It's the garbage dump and the graveyard, and nirvana and Valhalla and hell and the sky. It's the static between stations, the wood between the worlds, it's twilight, the unconscious, the kitchen sink. It's your mother and your undertaker.

  'It's the only thing that will ever really know you, and it doesn't give a fuck about you,' they finished. The last girl to speak squinted at Klaski across the partially formed wing of her airplane. 'To the Grid, you're just Play-Doh.'

  Klaski's jaw went slack for a minute. The girl licked her fingers and made another careful fold in the paper. Klaski reached for a half-full mug of black coffee.

  'I wouldn't drink that if I were you,' said another. And a third finished: 'It's full of unproven theories.'

  Klaski put the cup down, feeling foolish.

  'So, what?' she snorted, trying to sound mocking. 'We're supposed to just give up and go home? Stop the mining?'

  A shadow fell over Klaski from behind. It was bigger than a child's. She was afraid to turn around.

  'You people are mining your own birthright, and you're doing it the wrong way' The speaker launched an airplane at Klaski, who ducked. It flew over her head and she heard it hit something behind her. The shadow moved to her right. She hunched her shoulders in anticipation of a blow; but she couldn't make herself turn. The girls said, 'By seeking to use a part or aspect of the logic of the world without understanding all of it, you create obscenity. The Grid is the infrastructure of

  things. You try to use machines and mechanistic principles to understand it, the deepest reality of yourselves.'

  And then a new voice spoke. A scratchy, phlegmy, ugly voice: one that used to figure in
Klaski's nightmares. It said, 'But the machine truth ain't any more real than the Great Pumpkin. Every attack we made here was bogus, dude.'

  KLaski turned around. And there was Serge, looking just the same. Just as ontologically pissed-off, too.

  'So you survived. I should have known,' Klaski said. 'I guess you did what Arla wanted. You know it all now, right? You know what's on the Other Side.'

  'I am what's on the other side.'

  'And them?' Joanne pointed.

  'The girls?' Serge's tone was amiable enough. This was unusual, and contributed to Klaski feeling herself losing what grip she'd ever had. 'Well, speaking of obscenity, I guess you could say they're obscenity run amok. They're the face of suffering, and of life, that rises out of the mess. They're the most terrible thing and the most wonderful thing. I never wanted them to be here, but now that they are, I got to save them.'

  Save them? The notion was so romantic, so incongruous, that it made Klaski's stomach pitch.

  Serge caught another airplane. The airplane's maker laughed, and the others echoed her. The genuine happiness in (t)he(i)r voice unsettled Klaski almost as much as Serge's declared intentions.

  'And how are you going to do that?'

  Serge said: 'Let me ask you one question. What do you think is going to happen to you now? I could kill you, or I could leave you to the Grid. Either way, it ain't no beauty pageant. I don't see no Fritos here. I don't see no working power supply and I sure don't see no batteries for your damn Walkman. Maybe you made it this far, but your clock's ticking.'

  Klaski shrugged. 'I'm a one-trick pony in a one-horse town.'

  'Is that supposed to be funny? You mocking the way I talk, Joanne?'

  Without any warning, Serge picked Klaski up bodily and threw her a man's length. Klaski bounced off a solid wall and landed on a chunk of reinforced concrete with its rusted steel wire protruding from crumbled edges like broken fingers. This knocked the wind out of her. She lay there making a point of feeling pain for a while.