Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  'They were called eels, and I guess they looked like eels at first. But they ended up more like dragons.'

  'Didn't we establish that this was all marketing stuff?'

  'Yes. No. Maybe. Look – what if the thing could cross over? Using you. I mean, me. What if it became actually, really real?'

  'Mm-hmm.'

  'And nobody believes you. No – I take it back, the only people who believe you are kooks.'

  He shifted in his seat. 'Ah, now I'm with you. Well, if you're really serious about this, you should get tested. There are scientists studying precognition and stuff. Then you'd know, objectively. There would be proof. Right?'

  I shivered. 'I don't know anymore. I thought that was what Dataplex was all about. I thought they knew what they were doing. I thought I wouldn't be alone. But it's been all about using me.'

  Miles said, 'I wish you would let me pursue this. I'm sure I could nail Dataplex for something.'

  I shook my head. 'What's the point? It's too late. I've let the thing happen. There's no going back now. I think I've . . . brought something over. From the Grid.'

  My voice trailed off. I couldn't say it. I sounded too stupid. Besides, Miles was getting sick of me. I could tell. I couldn't blame him. Everything he said, I shot down. Then again, everything I said, he came up with a movie he'd seen it in.

  But I wasn't really prepared for what came next. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table.

  'Cookie. I'm your friend. I have to say this to you, and if you get mad, there's nothing I can do, but I'll still be your friend if you let me.'

  'Yeah? What?'

  He wrinkled his brow. He looked very sincere.

  'You have a . . . problem. With reality.'

  I laughed. 'You think I'm a shithead.'

  There! I said it! I actually said 'shit.' Incredible.

  'I don't think you're a shithead. I'm just saying—'

  'No, no, no, don't back off it, Miles.'

  'I'm not backing off it, Cookie. On the contrary. I've seen what's in your medicine cabinet. I know the stuff they've prescribed for you. Doctors don't just hand out Thorazine for fun.'

  'And I don't just take it for fun – in fact, I don't take it at all.'

  'Maybe you should.'

  'Maybe the doctors are wrong. Maybe the doctors are stupid. Maybe— You know what? Hey, I do have a problem with reality. How can you not? Take Clarissa Delgado. What is she doing every day? What is the meaning of her life? She eats, sleeps, watches TV and goes shopping. And cleans offices. For what? That's reality? Being Clarissa Delgado for what purpose?'

  'Who knows? It's not for us to say. Maybe she'll give birth to the next Edison. Or maybe she'll save somebody's life by giving blood, or smelling smoke and pulling a fire alarm. Or maybe she won't. But you can't judge people. You're not God.'

  'I'm not judging her – I'm asking why she gets out of bed in the morning.'

  'Habit, probably. Why do any of us?'

  'Aha. Exactly. Well, I'll tell you. Food was why I got up in the morning. It was the meaning of my life. It was my reason for doing things, my reward, my stopgap to fill up dead time. It was my cushion, my defense, my weapon. It was the thing that anchored me to reality, if we're talking about reality. You got sugar-substitutes, right? Sweet 'n' Low? Well, I took my coffee with reality-substitute. Now I can't take it anymore. I can't use food. I don't have my security blanket and everything is naked and ugly. People are going on with their pointless routines and I'm one of them. There is nothing else.'

  'There's being dead,' Miles replied amicably. 'Besides, not everybody's a drone. People do amazing things. They skydive. They invent things. They act in plays and climb mountains and play the stock market and save the whales. It's called free will. You should check it out.'

  'I did check it out. I took up karate, and that turned out to be bogus, too.'

  'You can't give up that easily.'

  'Yes, I can. Look, those people you're talking about, the skydivers? They have their act together. And you know what? People like that never seem to have much imagination when it comes to the bad things. They never seem to think very deeply. Or if they did, they'd be too depressed.'

  'Like you.'

  'I'm not depressed. I'm confused. I want to know what the rest of us are supposed to do in this so-called real world of yours. I'm not a mountain climber or an ice diver. I'm twenty-five years old and I see things on TV that I'm not supposed to see. I thought it was the future, or something very far away. Now I'm not so sure. And the people I thought I could go to for help are only interested in predicting the next Cyndi Lauper or the next MASH or the next. . . Orville Reddenbacher microwave popcorn, I guess.'

  Miles sighed. 'I don't know what to tell you, Cookie. All I can say is, we have one world. D&D is great, but it's a game, Blade Runner is a movie, The Hobbit is a book. We have one world, and this is it, and you've got to find a way to live in it.'

  'Thanks for the Tough Love, Miles,' I sneered.

  'Come on, come on, don't be like that. I'll tell you what. The whole point of escapism is to escape. So we'll keep playing by letter. Or over the phone. I'll go down to the Compleat Strategist and get you a new miniature. Unless you're really giving up Monty.'

  'Yeah, I'm really giving up Monty. Being a paladin sucks.'

  Miles looked sad. 'I thought you were a good paladin,' he murmured, turning away.

  And that was pretty much the end of me and Miles. We said some other stuff; I can't remember what. He said he'd write me but I knew he wouldn't. Then he left.

  But I'm OK. You know what, bottom line? I really am OK. I miss Gossamer, but I don't miss the rest of it. No more Machine Front, no more gore, no more orchid-taste in my mouth. I work out a lot. They have a gym here and hardly anybody ever uses it. The only thing the inmates want to do is Jane Fonda or Richard Simmons.

  I pump iron.

  I eat, too. But not too much. The food is awful. If you want to lose weight, commit a crime and go to prison.

  I guess it's a reprieve. As long as I'm here, I don't have to think about the other stuff.

  Maybe it can't last.

  OK, definitely, it can't last. Sooner or later I'll have to go back out there and deal with what happened when I let the Grid feed back through me.

  I'll have to find out where she is. The one who came through my eye.

  What she is.

  I mean, talk about damaged.

  Oh, what a can of worms I got myself there.

  Yeah, so for now I'm happy to lie low, bide my time.

  And I've got a lot of Love Boat reruns to get through.

  objectivity

  Over the Hackensack skyline, the silhouette of City Hall a regal puce rectangle sunk in a bed of orange-stained cloud, Miles saw and felt the wings. He was looking idly through the plate-glass floor-to-ceiling window of Garden State Checks while a raven-haired woman with a teenaged daughter went to the window and fished a driver's license out of her gigantic pocketbook, and a tiny Latina who must have been standing on a box behind the bulletproof glass slipped a form across the counter.

  In that moment, Miles glanced up. The downdraft had hit the back of his neck like the rush of a passing tractor-trailer, only there was no sound. The wings cast a shadow over Main Street. In the illumination of the sign CHECKS CASHED 24 HRS he could see the dark green veins in the webbing, and the tiny hairs - or were they pin feathers? He could see the shadows of circuits in the translucent body, too. Just for a moment.

  Saliva caught in his throat and instinctively he threw himself flat on the sidewalk. He looked up just in time to see the trident of the monster's tail vanishing over the courthouse.

  The thing broke up into sound. Not thunder; not words; but snatches of what might once have been music, somewhere, in some other air – like a record played backwards, upside-down, inside-out – reflecting an unknown-to-him intelligence. It petered off, leaving a sonic jet-trail in its wake that faded until Miles couldn't distinguish the stran
ge sound from the ordinary traffic noise.

  Trembling, Miles stood up, expletives dying on his lips as his mind worked feverishly to tell him a plausible story about what had just happened. He stood there like an abandoned marionette for what must have been several minutes, because now the woman came out of Garden State Checks stuffing her wallet into her purse, which she clutched protectively. The teenager trailed behind, scuffing the toes of her unlaced basketball sneakers against the sidewalk. She had Joan Jett spiky black hair and colored lengths of chain wrapped around her forearms, and a Deep Purple concert shirt. She saw Miles in his immaculate Dock Siders and Rush jeans jacket, motionless for no reason on the sidewalk. Miles gawked and the girl gawked back, almost challengingly. Then the girl tossed her head and turned away, running to catch up with her mother. The two started walking north.

  Miles closed his mouth and looked around. Everyone else was going about their business. He wanted to stop someone, say, 'Did you hear? Did you see?'

  But he knew better than to set himself up for that one.

  Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe he had a brain tumor. Maybe someone had doctored his hot dog at lunch.

  Miles shivered and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Out of the pillow of air between his jeans jacket and body he got a nasty whiff, some residual odor . . . sulfur?

  He looked at the sky again. With a last burst of twinkly high notes, the dragonsong blended into the noise of rush hour.

  'Well,' Miles whispered. 'Sink me.'

  Table of Contents

  something like lunch

  the department of

  extraplanetary hauntings

  without a babysitter

  trailbreaks

  referred pain

  orchids

  a good untarnished fact

  the cosmic information

  max fact

  the pimpernel gets nobly drunk

  grateful dead to the humpbacks

  like my hiney

  eat jerky

  cookie starfishes

  it bakes cakes

  all members commit feedback

  syntactical reversal

  max fact unpacked

  too high-tech for cosmo

  mr. potato head

  holy toledo

  company picnic

  the dead lamb's Mother

  planetary journey

  follow the yellow brick road

  between a pathological phenomenon and a breakfast cereal

  the american book of the dead

  drano

  seven pairs of kenneth cole

  thank you, ma'am

  easter

  into the wishing well

  my coffee with reality-substitute

  objectivity