Those That Wake 02: What We Become

by Jesse Karp

  “That’s quite a little speech, Laura. Do you know what we’re doing here? I mean, do you understand what is happening right now?”

  “You’re patronizing me like you’re my grandfather?”

  “My cellpatch and the lenses they’re synced to are interpreting the wavelength we got off the digital core back near Pope Springs, and they’re picking it out of the air around us, differentiating it from a thousand other signals that are nearly indistinguishable. Essentially, I’m seeing an interplay of energy that’s invisible to the human eye.” Though his words were carefully paced and spoken in the low, heavy tone of the helplessly self-important, those eyes he was talking about were alive with the fervor of the fanatic. “It’s gotten us across four states and to within—what?—probably about six hours of our target now. Our target being somebody who’s been manipulating data and God knows how much of your precious human interaction for years without anyone knowing about it. We’re doing that because we’ve developed tools that enable us to overcome our weaknesses and make ourselves strong. Tell me, please, how by any remotely intelligent stretch of the imagination, that’s a bad thing?”

  She turned away from him and back to the road. He had mastered this magical technology that let him glimpse the ethereal, but he couldn’t even drive a car, wasn’t interested in the least. For some reason, Laura found herself fighting back tears.

  “Turn off here,” Aaron said, indicating a small road that broke off the highway, through grassy fields.

  She was going to ask him how he knew the small road would get them to town, but realized he was consulting the GPS on his cellens. Laura’s head was still mired in the idea that you needed to be holding something in your hand and looking at it to see it. Hopelessly obsolete at eighteen years old. Was that the new way of things?

  The road acquired a gentle curve over the course of three miles or so and finally opened up into a main street, and the calm façade of a quiet and friendly town met them. They passed rows of one- and two-story houses, neatly painted, with clean lawns and cozy porches.

  “Where to?” she asked. “Do you want—”

  “Just keep driving,” he responded sharply. His face was lit with the furious concentration she was sure only the freakishly smart ever truly acquired. “I’m having trouble reading this. There’s so much data flowing through here, it’s like a hailstorm.”

  Laura looked again at the tranquil town around her. The chaos he was recounting was hard to imagine, like a still graveyard, haunted by a swirl of invisible spirits.

  “I can barely tell one thing from another,” he said, almost breathless. “It’s all flowing up that way, out of town.”

  “So do you want me to—”

  “Just keep driving!” he snapped back at her, and retreated into his data.

  The signs outside the few businesses announced the town’s name as Woodhaven in tidy, dignified lettering, and she cruised along Haven Drive, perusing the town: a restaurant with darkened windows, a pharmacy with a wood façade that looked like something out of the nineteenth century, a tiny library—how quaintly welcoming—that abutted the tasteful town hall, a Woodhaven flag fluttering humbly between them. Off the town green was a grocer and general store, the only business here that showed any traffic whatsoever. Cars were parked sporadically along the curb, and Laura saw three or four people walking slowly along, not paying her any undue attention. Laura’s car was the only one moving on the road. There was a bookstore with posters of “the latest” bestsellers about six months out of date, and another restaurant that bragged it was an ICE CREAM PARLOR AND SODA FOUNTAIN! and then a swell of more residences and the town gave way again to highway.

  “Stop!” Aaron said with a sudden vehemence that made Laura jump.

  “What? What’s wrong? I thought you said the data was all flowing out of town this way.”

  “Go back into town and park.”

  Laura didn’t even slow down.

  “I am not your chauffeur, Aaron. We’re doing this together. If you want me to do something, you ask me to—”

  “Please go back into town and park,” he said with more vitriol than he had barked the order a moment before.

  Laura kept driving. She could feel him tensing, practically vibrating, as though every inch they drove was irrevocable and sending them into the heart of darkness.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said softly.

  “How will it help you to know, Laura? Will you even understand what I’m saying?”

  “Make me understand. Or get out and walk.”

  “Turn the car around, and I’ll tell you.”

  She kept driving. With children, you had to put your foot down somewhere.

  “There’s a massive flow of information concentrated all around here,” he spoke quickly, like his life depended on it. “Along the wavelength from the digital core I found. It’s impossible to see any other data through it, and there’s a lot of data flowing through the air in this country. But the concentration here is all flowing up this way, out of town, like there’s going to be a house along the way, and it’s all going to lead there.”

  “So what’s the problem? Why aren’t we going there?”

  “Aren’t you listening to me?” He nearly screamed it. “The flow is making all the other data invisible. Anything could be flowing into or out of that town, and I have no way to see it. The massive stream going out of town is working like a cloak for everything that’s in the town. Do you understand?”

  By way of answer, she slowed the car and turned it around and cruised back toward Woodhaven. It seemed to relax him minutely.

  “If we’re going to look at the town, then turn off your dataflow thingy,” she said.

  “No possible way.”

  “You just said it’s not doing you any good now. Turn it off and actually look at the town. Maybe you’ll learn something from that.”

  “Fine. I did.”

  “Really do it. Or I’m turning the car back around.” She tapped the brake.

  He glared at her, but before he spoke, she saw a tension leave his body, his brow unknit.

  “Fine,” he said.

  She pulled the car up to the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy, and they got out. She stretched and shook the kinks from her legs. Aaron turned in place, taking it in as if for the first time. A stout woman with a bag of groceries smiled at them as she passed by.

  “Seems perfectly lovely,” Laura commented, watching the woman go on her way.

  “Are you kidding me?” Aaron said. “This is the most bizarre place I’ve ever been in.”

  Laura’s eyes flickered back and forth, looking for what she had missed.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “There wasn’t a single dish antenna outside the houses coming into town, no apparatus for satellite HD or wireless service. There’s a bookstore but nowhere to buy or service a cell. A bookstore? Come on.”

  Laura looked around again and confirmed what Aaron was saying. Without another word, she walked around Aaron and into the pharmacy. Like the town itself, the rows of products in here were neatly lined along tidy shelves and, though the space was small, there was a warm feeling to it washing off the old wooden walls and the faded Christmas posters hanging on them.

  Aaron came in a moment later, hesitating like he was entering a torture chamber, and caught up with her as she approached the counter in back.

  “Good afternoon,” said an old man with tufts of white hair like clouds and a sprightly, almost mischievous face. “No school today?”

  “No classes.” Laura smiled back. “We were wondering if you could help us.”

  “Of course,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Where is there a school around here, exactly?” Aaron, perennially missing his social cues, interrupted what had been shaping up to be a pleasant conversation.

  “Comstock, two towns over,” the man answered politely.

  “Two towns over.” Aaron w
as consulting his cellenses. Laura had picked up the facial ticks by now. “That’s forty miles from here. Your kids travel forty miles to and from school every morning?”

  “That’s where the school is.” The man smiled back, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

  “Is there a place to stay in town?” Laura asked quickly, before Aaron could come back with something else.

  “Nope.” The man shook his head. “Nothing like that around here. There’s a motel up Route 4 a little ways. But don’t leave without stopping into the ice cream parlor. You never had such a good root beer float. You kids will love it.”

  Laura nodded, the smile never leaving her face.

  “Thanks very much,” she said.

  “Pleasure,” the man said, nodding once more and turning back to his work as they departed.

  “Us kids do love root beer floats,” Laura said once they were outside. She found it impossible to imagine Aaron eating ice cream, though she had to admit she could go for some herself.

  “So does that convince you?” Aaron said as they walked across the street toward the town green.

  “What, that the nearest school is far away? Who knows how those things work? This is a small town. There probably aren’t enough kids here to—”

  “There’s no hotels. That motel he said was ‘a little ways’ is twenty-five miles from here. This is exactly the sort of town that should do business with people weekending from the city.”

  Laura had to allow that this was true. She and her parents used to take long weekends to a town much like this every Thanksgiving and every summer.

  “But there’s no place to stay in it?” Aaron was pressing on. “Every town like this we’ve passed through for the last three states has a place to stay in it or near it, and this one doesn’t.”

  They were in the town square now, along a little path between the grass, flanked by welcoming trees and comfortable benches. Everything about this town seemed to offer welcome. On the surface.

  “Well,” she said with a sigh, “I’m not sure whether you’ve convinced me or pulled me into your weird delusional paranoia, but if you’re looking for a librarian, I know where to start.”

  “Where?” he asked, his body lurching with excitement. But Laura had already walked past him, along the path leading out of the green. His eyes followed her course and saw it would end at a small building across the street.

  The library.

  The Memory

  REMAK AND ROSE CRACKLED THROUGH the metallic light of Mal’s brain, and suddenly the light collapsed into a foggy darkness. The fog swirled and moved—no, it wasn’t fog precisely, and it didn’t exactly swirl. It would be more accurate to say it skittered and shifted, like a swarm of black insects. As the darkness coursed around them, an image beyond became partially visible: a small room, its ceiling so low that Rose felt an urge to crouch, though she had no actual body here. There were no doors, but through a window, there was a brief glance of a city, its black sky pouring down sheets of rain, buildings whose pinpricks of light made weeping faces.

  The darkness shifted again, offered hurried impressions: Mal sweating, struggling at bonds that held him to a chair; a man in a suit, his face bizarrely incomplete, almost a sketch of a face—eyes, nose, mouth—that had no real character. Was this true, or just an effect of the murky fog? The suit, similarly, seemed only the shape and size of a suit, but with no real specificity, not even a distinct color.

  We don’t want to be here, Remak said. This is Mal’s nightmare.

  More skittering fog opening brief apertures: the man in the suit’s fingers, long—too long—and hideously flexible, probing Mal’s face.

  Rose felt a sense of pressure: Remak guiding her elsewhere.

  Riveted, she watched: sharp fingertips forced themselves into Mal’s nostrils, his eyes. Mal gave an animal snarl, and the snarl receded, as if moving away down a tunnel, as Rose was pulled back, away from the nightmare, deeper down into Mal . . .

  Mal, six years old, sat on the floor, looking up at another boy. He was slightly older, maybe eight, but he had the same black hair, the same dark eyes looking out of a moody face.

  Is that his brother? Rose asked. Is that Tommy?

  Yes, I think so. These are Mal’s real memories now. But look around. They’re dim, fading.

  Remak was right. As Mal’s mind slowly ebbed away, the memories were thinning, viewed as if through a dark fog.

  Tommy was hammering a nail into the wall—almost dropping the hammer twice—hanging a newly framed image: a roughly drawn picture of himself in a boxing ring, knocking his opponent off his feet, rocketing him through the air. Tommy turned away from the picture, looked down at Mal.

  “Good?” he asked.

  Mal nodded. Good. If Tommy could knock opponents out of the ring, then Mal could, too, someday. If their father could be proud of Tommy, then he could be proud of Mal, too. Maybe, with Tommy’s help, Mal could draw a picture, too. And, if Tommy said it was good enough, they could hang it beneath his. If Tommy thought it was good enough.

  Rose felt the emotions sweep through her as if they were her own. Was this what it was like for Remak, living through other people’s minds?

  “What are you doing?” a shrill voice cut through Mal’s pride. Their mother appeared in the doorway, her eyes ruthless, her expression filled with sharp edges.

  Tommy looked at the picture he had just put up, knew what was about to happen. So did Mal.

  Their mother came over, tore the framed picture from the wall, glared down at it, and threw it hard at the floor. Glass splintered outward.

  She looked at the two of them. This was a place they often found themselves: balanced precariously on their mother’s next actions.

  “What happened?” Their father—Mal writ large, with shaggy gray hair, exhausted eyes—spoke in a tired voice, having just come home to the sound of anger. He saw the frame he had given them the money for, the picture shredded by sharp glass. His eyes came up again.

  Mal listened to his mother tearing into his father, like a boxer herself, a vicious, dirty opponent, but one who used words instead of fists. His mother’s face was hot with rage fueled by the contents of a bottle discarded on the kitchen counter. His father stood, took the punches, sagged under them like a fighter on the ropes, but gave nothing back.

  His father turned away from her briefly, glanced from beneath his lowered brow at Mal. Exhausted, heartbroken, his eyes struggled to give something to Mal. Just take it, was all they could come up with. You’re strong enough to take it. You’re strong enough to take anything.

  “Don’t look at him,” Mal’s mother raged. “He’s nothing.”

  Again, the words receded as Rose was pulled away, pulled onto the next . . .

  Mal’s mother, stumbling back into the house, using one hand to steady herself on the wall and the other to bring a tall bottle half full of sloshing golden liquid to her slurring lips. Mal, eleven years old, looked somberly over the cover of his book at his mother’s return. And naturally, she saw the eyes, as she was meant to.

  She began screaming at him about respect and how he goddamn well better not be looking at her, lying in wait every night for her return so he could judge her. Then, her voice got quiet, and that was when Mal knew that trouble, real trouble, was coming. He rose from the chair, intending to retreat to his room.

  “Don’t you dare walk out on me.” Her voice was hardly louder than the hiss of a snake. The bottle of liquor shot from her hand and blasted apart on the wall inches from Mal’s face. Had she meant to hit him with it or merely scare him? He never knew. But a shard of glass caught him across the bridge of the nose, deep enough so that the mark would never leave.

  Rose knew that scar, had touched it tenderly with the tip of a curious finger while Mal slept. She had never dreamed that this is where it had come from. She had gotten Remak to take her in here because she could help bring Mal back. But seeing this struck her with the hateful realization that she
barely knew Mal at all.

  This can’t be helping Mal, she said.

  No, Remak said. But this is the path that Mal has opened, and sometimes we have to follow the route we’re offered . . .

  “This is home now, Mal,” his father said, sitting in an unfamiliar chair in an unfamiliar room.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not going back to your ma. That’s gonna get you killed.” He touched his boy’s nose gently. Max had bandaged it himself, from the kit he kept in the bathroom. “You and me both.”

  “But what about Tommy?” Mal asked, knowing he could survive this if Tommy were here, too.

  “I’m sorry, Mal. Tommy is . . . I don’t know how I can explain this to you. Tommy is your mother’s. I can’t do a thing about that. It’s always been that way. You were mine, and she gave you hell just like she gave me. And Tommy was hers. I can’t make you understand any better than that.”

  Mal didn’t understand at all. He had never seen his father give up on anything—anything. Why should the first thing he ever gave up on be his own son?

  Rose was overcome with a sense of loss for Tommy, a boy she had never met, never even known of before a few days ago.

  This is too hard, Rose said, her words tangled with emotion. I feel everything the way Mal did.

  You’re touching his mind, Rose, and we’re following a path of pain, Remak told her. We have to move through it. If that’s what Mal has given us, that’s what he needs us to do . . .

  Six people stood in a small clearing in a pale, fading forest. Rose didn’t recognize any of them. Mal was much as she knew him now, no more than a year or two younger. The conversation between the six people was fraught with suspicion and contention, but Mal was looking to another boy with a sense of deference Rose would never have attributed to him.