by John Skipp
But given the choice, not enough to stay.
This is a lot to let go of. But you have already let go entirely. I give you three months at the outside. Maybe a couple extra dream-lives, at most.
You won’t be coming back, that much is for certain. There’s not nearly enough of you left. I briefly replay my wild fantasy of banging you back to life, and it’s just too fucking pathetic. The fact that it would probably also kill you is almost beside the point.
This is my last chance to get mad at you, but I just can’t whip it up. So I wipe my tears back-handed, till my vision clears enough to watch your eyes minutely flicker behind those tissue-thin lids. Something’s going on in there.
I’d love to believe that the rictus on the skull of your scarecrow frame is a smile.
It could be. It totally could.
“You know what makes me saddest?” I say. “It’s that you’ll never know what you missed. Who you could have been. What you could have done, in this weird new world. What we could have done. What you could have done with me.
“I mean, I know you never got what you wanted in this life. And when you got it, you were never satisfied. The dream was always better than the reality. I get that. I do.
“That’s why we were so good, for so long. You kept the dream alive. And I kept us alive, by attending to reality. Making sure you lived to dream another day.
“I know it’s hard for you to understand. But I like reality better. It means more to me. It really does. The simple, stupid shit is what I love. The day to day. The week to week. The year to year. All the little things that happen.
“That’s what I like. That’s why I was with you. Not for your dreams, but because I just loved being around you, and with you.
“That was all that I wanted.
“But I can’t have that.”
There are no more tears left in me. But I have another smoke, which I light off the corpse of the last, let it drop to my feet. Will pick them up on my way out.
I am on my way out.
“I’m gonna go live,” I say. “I don’t need a job any more. Nobody who doesn’t want one needs a job any more. The machines unemployed us from every stupid job we ever hated. All that wasted time is just sitting there, waiting for us to fill.
“So I’m gonna go home, and feed the dogs and cats snacks—Phoebe’s gone, by the way, but I got three more—and then I’m gonna go to bed and listen to McCoy fucking Tyner, pretending it’s you, till I fall asleep. Then I’m gonna wake up, watch the whales jump outside our window, kiss the pillow beside me, and tell you what a chickenshit asshole you are for missing this.
“Then I’m gonna water the garden, and not feel guilty, because the machines desalinated enough ocean that Los Angeles will never be starving again.
“Then I’m gonna make huevos rancheros for Ravi, who is 100% accurate in thinking that I’m going to fuck him senseless very shortly after breakfast.
“Then I’m gonna spend a couple hours fucking Ravi some more. Laughing. Being human. Goofing around like animals do. At some point, we will pause for more food. I may play him the song I wrote for you twenty years back. If I do, he will understand why it means so much to me. Then I will fuck him some more. And I’ll cry. And he’ll hold me. It will all be very nice.
“Then the sun will set. It will be gorgeous. It’s so gorgeous now, baby, you wouldn’t believe it. All the nanobots have eaten most of the pollution straight out of the air, but it totally didn’t undercut the color scheme. Somewhere between God and cyber-nature, it’s all working out real well.”
You smile a little. It could be gas. It could be me and the universe getting through. Will never know. Not for me to know. Doesn’t matter at all.
You’re in your own place now. I may not even be in it at all. Maybe you wiped me clean. Maybe I’m still central. Or just off to the side. A whisper of a memory of life not erased, but from here on tactically evaded.
I start to sing you the song, but I just don’t feel it. It’s a ritual whose time has passed. So many rituals gone by the wayside now. No longer required.
There’s an enormous difference between no longer needed and no longer wanted. The machines no longer need us. But they like us. And that is great. It’s like all the pieces of God clicking into place at last.
You go your way, and I go mine.
I am cool with this at last.
“So long, Johnny,” I say. Picking up the butt, and then kissing your screen one last time. The screen relights, shows me who you are dreaming yourself to be now. It looks great.
I walk back down the length of the opium den into which you all have vanished. The Hopium Den. One stacked corpse-in-waiting after another, dreaming and dreaming again.
All you ever wanted was to matter. And now you do. At least to yourselves. And the imaginary audience you dreamed at. The ones who’d finally understand.
I walk out to my car. It is happy to see me.
Happy in real life.
“I love you,” I say.
LESS THAN HUMAN
MARGE SIMON
She was born blind, our child.
We Normals can’t imagine
how it would be to remain so.
She’d never find work in our Domes,
nor develop complex social skills.
With clay she molded our likenesses,
for her fingers were supple in those days.
She claimed she saw with her hands.
Perhaps she saw too much,
and surely heard too much.
She was given to spells of impertinence
that could prove dangerous to our family.
Too many questions for one so young,
as if she could find fault―she, but a child!
with how our society operates.
The pills didn’t work.
Prescriptions only made her very ill.
We finally put her in the basement,
without substances to sculpt
without a source of sound,
back into her own dark.
Before we put her down below,
I took a hammer to her fingers.
It was a painful thing for me to do,
but she was flawed from birth
and therefore need not be treated
by our Laws, as Human.
DOG AT THE LOOK
B.E. SCULLY
The sex women were gone by seven A.M. The first floor rooms were rented by the hour, but Song Ying had learned that most prostitutes weren’t morning people. The Hotel Reo wasn’t the kind of place to give out those little “Do Not Disturb” signs, and even in the few rooms where the sign hadn’t been lost, destroyed, or stolen, most guests weren’t inclined to use it. In a place like the Hotel Reo, it was understood that people didn’t want to be disturbed.
Which is why Song always started her shift on the second floor, where the “normal” people stayed. Or at least as normal as you could expect in this part of town. Take the man in #211, the room Song was now pushing her cart toward. For the past seven days, she’d knocked three times on his door and called out “Housekeeping!” When no one answered, she let herself in, quietly and discreetly, like she’d been taught when she started this job seven years ago. And every morning, she’d find the man sitting on the edge of his stained, wafer-thin mattress, staring at a huge crack in the wall opposite him.
He never spoke to her, and of course Song Ying never spoke to him. It wasn’t unusual for guests to stay in the room while she cleaned. Some of the lonely ones tried to talk to her, and some of the angry ones tried to harass her. Once she’d cleaned a room for a man who walked around stark naked the whole time without even glancing her way. But usually they just ignored her, which was fine with Song. She was invisible to them, but what they didn’t know was that they were invisible to her, too.
But the man in #211 wasn’t invisible. Apart from the fact that he never seemed to change his clothes, there wasn’t anything particularly weird or alarming ab
out him. He was just an ordinary man, maybe around sixty years old—not much older than Song Ying. He had smooth grey hair over a smooth grey head, like a helmet. In fact, everything about him was grey, even his eyes. But there was something else—something intense, even desperate. Once, when Song was a little girl still living in China, she had seen a tiger sitting in a great steel cage, waiting to be taken somewhere. Even though her mother had told her not to, she had gone straight up to the cage. The tiger had seemed so powerful, but tired, too. Broken, defeated. But not too defeated to claw her to pieces the second it got the chance.
Grey Man reminded Song Ying of that tiger.
She should have reported the crack in the wall to the manager, a small, quiet man named Clyde who sat in his office all day watching television. She knew for a fact the crack hadn’t been there before Grey Man checked in. Even worse, Grey Man had deliberately defaced hotel property. On the wall beside the crack, he’d written the words, “Look at the dog, dog at the look” in thick black letters. Song had no idea what that meant, but she also knew he’d written it, because the words hadn’t been there before, either. Clyde was too cheap to fix the crack, but he’d go crazy once he got a look at that graffiti.
For some reason, though, Song Ying hadn’t yet reported the destruction. Maybe she was curious about Grey Man, about his strange words and the strange crack. Maybe she was just too tired to want to deal with it. Because unlike the tiger, she didn’t have any claws in wait.
She knocked three times and called “Housekeeping!” But when Song entered room #211, Grey Man wasn’t there.
She was so surprised she went to check the room number just to make sure she had the correct one. The black words and the crack were still there. Grey Man had never had any luggage that she’d seen, but his room was still on her cleaning schedule, so he hadn’t checked out.
Where had he gone?
Song Ying frowned at her own foolishness. Why shouldn’t the man go out and enjoy the city? September was a fine month in San Francisco, so why sit in a flea-bag motel room staring at the wall all day?
And yet Song was surprised. It was impossible to imagine Grey Man taking the boat to Alcatraz Island, or eating sourdough bread by the wharf. In fact, it was impossible to imagine him anywhere but the edge of the bed, staring at the wall.
She gave a snort and plugged in the vacuum cleaner. She still had a floor and a half to clean. She didn’t have time for strange grey men and nonsense.
She was polishing the chipped, dinghy mirror over the chipped, dinghy dresser when she realized she was standing right next to it—right next to the crack. Song did not consider herself a superstitious woman. Her maternal grandmother had believed in luck and signs and premonitions, and look where it had gotten her. All of her childhood Song had heard the stories of what everyone in the family called the Black Wave. When the Black Wave came, everyone knew to leave her grandmother alone no matter how long she stayed hidden in her bedroom with the door locked and the blinds drawn tight against the outside. In one story, her grandmother hid for seven straight days before emerging, sallow-skinned and hollow-eyed, to ask “Who wants breakfast?” even though it was ten o’clock at night.
Her grandparents had lived by a lake, and her grandmother’s favorite thing was to swim far out into the deep, murky middle and just float there, sometimes for hours at a time. Whenever anyone asked why she spent so much time in the water, wrinkling up her skin and neglecting her household duties, she’d say, “It feels like being reborn.”
Song Ying had never known either of her grandparents. When her grandmother was only thirty-two years old, her husband, Song’s grandfather, had died instantly when a blood vessel burst in his brain.
After that, her grandmother spent almost all of her time at the lake, floating in the water or roaming the grassy shores like a shade.
“I no longer belong to this world,” she would say to anyone who tried to talk to her or help her.
One day she walked down to the lake, waded out into the water, and kept going to the deep, murky middle. A fisherman said he saw her dive beneath the waves, but he didn’t see her come back up. Her body was never recovered.
Song Ying’s mother, only twelve years old, was sent to live with an uncle and aunt far away from the lake.
“Crazy in the head,” Song’s mother would tell her on the rare occasions she talked about her mother. “You must always be careful to keep the crazy out. When it’s written in the genes, it can come back.”
Maybe that’s why Song’s mother had little tolerance for anything she saw as “nonsense,” and also why she’d drilled the same attitude so deeply into her own daughter.
When Song Ying left China and came to the United States, she didn’t have time to worry about genes one way or the other. Work was as good a cure as any for whatever may or may not have been written there. There had been times when the Black Wave had come for her—when she’d lost her first child and been told that she couldn’t have another. When first her father and then her mother died, and she eventually lost touch with everyone she had known in her old life.
Then seven years ago, while driving down one of the city’s famously steep, winding roads, her husband had lost control of their car on a rain-slicked curve. The crash had killed him and put Song in a coma for two days. When she awoke, she had three long scars across the top and back of her head from being somersaulted from the car and smacked against the road. After that, she had to sell the small grocery she and her husband had run for almost thirty years. But Song did not walk into a lake and never return. She’d had to take the cleaning job just to survive, but life went on, as it always did.
And yet sometimes, late at night when she couldn’t sleep and the mist came in thick and heavy off the sea, Song could almost feel the Black Wave rising, rising to sweep across the city and drag her out to the underwater world.
But the next day, the city was always still there, and she still had to go to work in it.
Her coworker Maria, who was twenty-one and so knew nothing about life, once told her, “You work too hard! You need to get out more, have fun. Have big adventures and dream big dreams!”
As if Song had never had fun or gone on big adventures or dreamed big dreams. But she had to admit, she hadn’t done any of those things in a long time. Maybe that’s why she was so interested in the Grey Man. In the crack.
In order to disturb Grey Man as little as possible, she’d always avoided it before, vacuuming that section of carpet quickly and moving on, aware of his eyes on the wall the whole time. But now she was alone.
She reached out and touched it. Nothing. She ran her finger up and down the chalky texture of the exposed drywall. Nothing. She snorted and shrugged and almost went back to her cleaning. But then the black words on the wall caught her eye.
“Look at the dog, dog at the look,” she said, pressing her right pointer finger straight into the widest, deepest center of the crack.
The crack opened up, and Song Ying saw.
She saw an off-kilter sky filled with hazy purple light, as if filtered through a crooked, dirty screen. She saw streets running at impossible angles lined with blasted, twisted trees. She saw smoky, silent winds blow the debris of humankind down streets filled with toppled, towering ruins. She saw babies with the ancient, wizened face of the never born. She saw the waves move backward, toward the sea, and the sea rise vertically and then break, a black wave rushing over the ruined city. Then in the swirling water, moving with the waves, she saw the face of the Grey Man. He had squirming fish for eyes and a cave-mouth teeming with unseen creatures of the deep.
“What is it?” Song Ying cried out.
The cave opened and the sea creatures poured forth, translucent and twitching with primal life. “Not was is,” the Grey Man said. “What may be.”
As Grey Man spoke the last word, a giant grey eel, pulsing and slick, slithered from his mouth and shot through the waves, straight toward Song Ying.
She opened her own mo
uth to scream and then she fainted.
“Hey, are you okay? Song Ying—wake up!”
She opened her eyes to see Maria’s concerned face floating above her. She was gently shaking Song’s shoulders, but Song could neither move nor speak. A thousand hammers were thundering against her head, and every time she tried to sit up, they pounded even harder.
Maria ran to the bathroom and came back with a wet rag, pressing it against Song’s forehead. It helped, and Song Ying sat up.
“Where’s the Grey Man?” she finally managed to ask.
“What, you mean the guy who stays here?” Maria clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Clyde is going to freak out when he sees what he did to the wall.”
The crack. Song Ying looked at the crack, and the world turned a hazy, sickly purple.
“Hey, you scared me there for a minute,” Maria was saying. “I know how you are, Song, but you should really take the rest of the day off. I mean it—maybe even go to the hospital. You don’t look so good at all.”
“The crack …” Song Ying said, and tried to stand before losing consciousness entirely.
She awoke in a stark white bed with a blue-green sheet pulled around it for privacy. A hospital—they must have called an ambulance at the Hotel Reo. Song Ying frowned, looking around for a nurse. She wondered how much all of this was going to cost.
Song sat up, slowly at first, but her head felt fine. A vision of a city with toppled, towering ruins skittered into her mind, but she smashed it before it had the chance to go any farther.
A fresh-faced young man burst through the sheet. “Welcome back!” he said, as bright and cheerful as if Song had just returned from a luxury cruise. “We thought you were going to stay conked out all night there for a while.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost six o’clock at night,” the young man said. “You’ve been here quite a while. We ran some tests on you while you were under—” He tapped the side of his head and winked at Song as if they shared a secret. “—to make sure everything’s in working order. The doctor will be in to talk to you in just a sec.”
