Solaris Rising 3 - The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

by Ian Whates

  She looked away.

  “You’re impossible,” he added, turning off the movie. “What do you want?”

  “A glass of water,” she said, leaning back in her chair.

  He had warned her, “Never walk in front of a waiting vehicle, even if the driver sees you.” A hobbling man had slapped a car in Midnight Cowboy and shouted, “I’m walkin’ here!”

  “Pacino ad-libbed that line,” Bruno had told her as if he had been there, and then again reminded her to always walk against traffic – the rule for pedestrians. “Walk against traffic, bicycle with traffic.”

  She had wished she could fly.

  “Dustin Hoffman, dear,” she had said gently, “not Pacino. And I’m not sure he slapped it.”

  “Against traffic,” he had repeated. “He whacked the hood with his hand.”

  SHE HAD WALKED well behind a Hummer one day and was knocked down when it backed up in the exit lane from the gas station.

  “Why didn’t ya’ walk out in front!” the woman screamed as she got out and hurried over.

  “Yeah, why didn’t I?” June muttered as the woman helped her up. Bruno had also mumbled something about not walking around behind a stopped vehicle, even with its motor off. “It could back up, or roll forward.”

  “Are you okay?” the mousey brown-haired woman asked, looking around for witnesses.

  “What’s your name?” June asked.

  “It’s –” she started to say, tucking her red shirt into loose gray slacks. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  June said, “Not really.”

  “So you don’t need me,” she snapped and turned to her Hummer.

  The door slammed, and June saw the sign on it:

  Melony K. Jelle Caterers

  “Bye, Melony!” June called out.

  The woman gave her a medusa glare, then peeled out onto the avenue and turned right, just missing a cat.

  Angered, June took a deep breath and watched the Hummer accelerate – and stop. Cars braked and honked behind their fellow creature.

  Melony K. Jelle popped her hood, scrambled out, padded around to peer inside, and gasped as she fell forward against the vehicle.

  June blinked through a darkness in her eyes. “What is it?” she called out.

  “Look!” Melony shouted, standing back. “Just look!”

  June came out into the avenue and looked. The space under the hood was empty.

  Melony squatted and peered under the vehicle. June looked to one side, suddenly imagining the engine scurrying away.

  “Nothing there,” Melony said, straightening up.

  The line of vehicles behind the Hummer was getting longer, their honks more insistent. Melony was looking at her reproachfully.

  “Beats me,” June said, trying not to laugh.

  “Well, I didn’t leave it somewhere!” Melony shrieked, then stood up on the fender and leaned into the empty space. Her loose slacks, June noticed, hid fat.

  “It’s not here!” she echoed like Donald Duck from a deep well, then leaned out from under the hood and stepped down. A police cruiser pulled up on the sidewalk. Melony straightened her hair.

  June walked away, glancing back. Melony was looking after her.

  “NOT EVEN A scrape,” June said to Bruno.

  “She backed up on you?” he asked.

  “I told you.”

  “Better than knocking you out into the road to get run over.” She saw his face pale at what might have been.

  “There wasn’t much traffic,” she said.

  “Could have been. A bump might have thrown you out into traffic, with no chance against how they run up and down that way.” He shuddered and sat down clumsily at the dinner table.

  They took a deep breath together. She tried to smile, but he wasn’t looking.

  “So what did happen?” he asked, and began to tap on the table with his fingers.

  “The woman’s engine disappeared...”

  “What?”

  “I did it.”

  He looked at her with suspicion. “What?” he said more softly.

  “She looked at me,” June said, “as if she knew I did it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “There’s a way to find out.”

  He gave her his skeptical look. “What way?” he asked, softening his gaze.

  She said, “For my own peace of mind.”

  He asked, “Do you really think you did something?”

  June said, “She knew I did it, as if in revenge for getting knocked down.”

  His kindlier look faded into impatience and exasperation. She had known him, and his one close friend, Felix, all her life, but she felt for a moment that she didn’t know who any of them were, herself included. Maybe they were different people at different times, as if someone was always changing their biographies, so that they would never really know what their lives were all about.

  “I wonder where they go,” she said suddenly.

  The idea was sinking into him. “Oh, you mean the engines. Maybe into a metaphysical hell for ill-conceived inventions.”

  He was humoring her. She tried to smile.

  “Or maybe into a warehouse somewhere,” he said, warming to the absurdity. “I know a few good warehouses down by the river,” he added.

  “We should go look for it,” she said. “It might be nearby. I wonder how I do it – I mean if I do, of course.”

  He laughed as if in relief. “That’s easy. You flip something... clean out of its space. Some kind of... topological twitch.” He snapped his fingers expertly, something she had never been able to do. “You’re an unconscious thief, in business with... someone.” He grimaced. “That’s got to be it.”

  She stared at him.

  “Well – you wanted an explanation!”

  She said, “You’re mocking me.”

  “Okay – if you do it,” he said happily, “then it happens, whether we can explain it or not – or your motives. But there have to be reasons. You have a motive. But there have to be reasons. Every time. There’s always a reason. Gotta be reasons...” He seemed lost in himself, as if about to weep.

  “There have to be?” she asked.

  “Oh, not if it’s magic,” he said. “No explanation needed. You wish and it happens. Might as well call it magic.”

  “I’m only telling you what I saw, you dope.”

  “Part of the delusion,” he said. “You’re not here, but somewhere else, maybe asleep upstairs. Let’s go see.”

  She sighed. He had always known how to get her into bed.

  He said, “You can have anything you want in your mind, and think it real.”

  She glared at him.

  “The mind,” he said, “is a universe.”

  The engines were out there in some faraway desert, waiting for her under the stars. She closed her eyes and sat under a scimitar moon.

  “But you didn’t do anything,” Bruno said from the starry sky, “and you can’t. Not enough reasons for you to be able to do... such things. Not enough reasons. Can’t ever be enough reasons for such a thing...”

  “Then what happened?” she asked, opening her eyes to a bewildered middle-aged man about to panic, whose wife had lost her mind and was bewitching his. Maybe they should go upstairs, she told herself, and quiet the beast...

  “Something else,” he said, “with enough... reasons.”

  “Yes,” she said, “... something else.”

  He turned his head away, and it seemed to her as if he had never existed.

  SHE WENT OUT for her morning walk after Bruno went down to work at his basement drafting station, where he corrected the engineering designs of his younger boss, whose mother owned the company. Bruno didn’t mind; the boss needed reliable talent to leave him free to pursue his sexual interests, which left Bruno in control.

  At the corner of the avenue she stopped and watched the beasts running toward the city, drifting through each other’s dizzying leavings of fuel and tire odors. She clos
ed her eyes for a moment, then saw a familiar white-haired head low over a driving wheel, floating through a red light on a license that should have been pulled long ago, in thrall to the machine and her lost youth.

  A young man yakking on a phone wafted by, steering with his left hand. A head of red hair raised itself into view and looked out the passenger window.

  Black lightning flashed in June’s vision, and the car slowed. The driver put down his phone and pulled over. June watched him get out and stumble around to the hood, open it and stare inside, then back away and scratch his head.

  His passenger sat up straight and looked bored, then hunched down again when she saw June.

  “Engine’s gone!” he shouted.

  June walked over. He was sweating in his business suit as he pointed into the space she knew would be empty.

  She saw it with him and knew that this could not be an illusion. Maybe they had all agreed, cops included, through some unconscious link, to blot out reality, she told herself.

  “If it happens, it’s natural,” Bruno had said. “No magic. None. Not even a little bit.”

  “How could this happen!” the man shouted. He looked at June, his eyes pleading for her to tell him that it was not so. “Is it gone?” he asked. “Is it really... gone?”

  His redheaded woman rolled down her window and bleated, “What is it, darling?”

  “TWICE MORE,” SHE said to Bruno. “I’m not crazy.”

  “Stop,” Bruno muttered, “just stop.” He yawned in his recliner and added, “Felix is coming over with his old Jaguar,” as if daring her to object, “so I don’t have time for this.”

  She had also married his solitary friend. It was suddenly a strange life with Bruno. What would it have been like with Felix? He loved old cars more than lawyering. He was driving away from life.

  The vintage Jag roared and belched dragon smoke as it rushed up the driveway in the sunny afternoon. They watched through their kitchen window as it stopped before the red matador’s cape of the garage door. Her stomach tightened, and her vision skipped through a black beat.

  “Hey!” Bruno shouted, hurrying out the back door.

  Felix rose from the low seat, leaving the motor running as they embraced. The boys were going out for a noisy Saturday ride and a beer.

  They shouted at each other as if she didn’t exist. Old friends from their college days, they still held their shapes: one stocky, the other tall, although each had gained weight and grayed a little.

  Unmarried, Felix kept to himself; mercifully, he had not brought his growling dog, the beloved Burke, whose nickname, ‘Edmund,’ was a joke for middle-brows who read history.

  The men gestured, shouted and laughed, then noticed the Jag’s silence.

  Felix stared at the vehicle.

  “I left it running,” he said as he went to the hood and pulled it up. He looked inside and cried, “My engine’s gone!”

  June moved back from view as Bruno looked toward the kitchen window. Felix walked around his car and looked down the driveway, then came back and stuck his head under the hood. “It’s not here!” he echoed, then stood up and burst into tears.

  June turned away from the window as Bruno rushed in through the back door. “What do I tell him?” he shouted as June retreated to the broom closet, feeling sick.

  “So now you believe me,” she said.

  They turned and looked out the window. Felix was at the wheel, trying to start the engine, then stopped and sat still.

  “What do I tell him?” Bruno said, his voice breaking.

  “If I had married him,” June said softly, “the engine would still be there.”

  “What in hell are you saying?”

  “We both love him, don’t we,” she said.

  “You’ve got to stop this!” Bruno shouted.

  “It’s involuntary.”

  He glared at her, then grabbed her arm. “Calm down!”

  “How?” she asked as he let go and they watched Felix, his hands clenching on the wheel, listening for the engine to start.

  “Put it back,” Bruno hissed at her, and for the first time in her life she felt hatred from him.

  “Convinced?” June asked and closed her eyes.

  Felix got out of the car, lowered his head, and walked down the driveway.

  “He knows we know something he doesn’t,” June said.

  Bruno rubbed his forehead. “No, he can’t – it’s some kind... of coincidence, has to be.”

  Black lightning closed her eyes and she felt tired from what she had done.

  Bruno was a stranger staring at her when she opened them again.

  THE JAG SAT in the driveway all the following week. Bruno went to work at the company office rather than to his basement and came home too late to talk to her.

  On Sunday, Fox News reported a story about car engines being found in the Sahara south of Tunis.

  “Yours, no doubt,” Bruno said from his recliner, as the report went on to suggest that local bandits were reselling the engines.

  “Maybe I can put them back,” June said from her high-backed chair.

  Bruno said, “Lots of stuff gets dumped all over the world.” He sighed. “Whatever happened to my old Sony XBR monitor?”

  “How can I bring them back,” June said, “since I don’t know how I do it?”

  “If you’re doing anything,” Bruno said, then frowned. “You just want it to be you.”

  “I’m worried about Felix,” she said.

  “I called him,” Bruno said. “He’s in bad shape. He rebuilt that Jag piece by piece. He can’t help feeling that bringing it here had something to do with what happened but he won’t say so. Maybe hopes it’s a gag of some kind, which we’ll let him in on... soon. His birthday’s in a few days.”

  “And what did you say?” she asked.

  “What do I know?”

  “He knows,” she said, “somehow he knows.”

  Bruno shouted, “But you just can’t be the cause of all this!”

  “I don’t know how it happens, except that I feel angry at what we breathe, at the congestion and endless accidents.”

  “Stop rationalizing.”

  “We should go over and see Felix.”

  “And what – console him?”

  “Maybe we should buy him a new engine,” she said.

  “Too expensive – and you’d make that one disappear too.”

  “So you do think it’s me,” she said.

  Bruno brought his recliner up. “Why be so half-hearted about it? Go all the way and abolish internal combustion.”

  She asked, “What about that news story?”

  “Well, the engines do have serial numbers... but you still couldn’t be sure it was the ones you... sent away, without records. They might lock you up just to see if it stops.” He looked at her with tears in his eyes, as if sure that they had both lost their minds.

  June cried, “I’m afraid.”

  “Stop yourself, then.”

  “How?”

  “Just stop!” he shouted, and she saw him rushing toward fear and hatred of her. What else could she... remove? What was she? She should have been a writer, as she had dreamed of in college, who gets away with anything on the page. Infinite possibilities in the conditionals of wordy-worlds on pages, but beware the conditional subjunctive escaping into the world... could she wish the world away? If she absented herself, the effect would be the same. The world always comes to an end for the dead...

  Bruno stood up from his chair and glared at her. She felt dizzy, fearing what she could do to him if he became violent.

  “I read a scary story,” he said, “about people losing their brains all over the streets... and it was a woman plucking them out.”

  “I won’t,” she said, afraid to blink.

  Bruno said, “Women are more censorious... all that femme fatale stuff inside them says they gotta sift through the males somehow...”

  “What are you saying?” she cried.

&
nbsp; “You can’t help yourself,” he said. “You’ll do it to me in your sleep.”

  “No!” she cried. “What do you think I am?”

  He stared at her, accusing her, challenging her, or pleading for mercy. Who was he, anyway? Who was she, and what were they together?

  FRESH GARBAGE GRACED her lawn, front, side, on the street, inside the hedge and its branches. A week before she had filled a bag with fast food wrappers, cups half-filled with drink and ice, partly eaten food, opened envelopes with discarded dunning letters inside, year-old wedding invitations, illegible post-it notes, baby photos, a package of celery, and a beer bottle with some kind of liquid in it. None of it could be blamed on animals scattering garbage cans, or on breezes; human hands had thrown the stuff.

  June sat on her front porch and waited. A red convertible drifted by, with two young couples inside, and she was sure that it had to be a repeat offender.

  Objects went ballistic over the hedge.

  June closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and black lightning flashed in the pink of her eyelids.

  The car slowed and halted well before the corner stop sign. The driver went out and looked under the hood...

  “Make sure,” she said. “You told me.”

  He went back into the house.

  She got up from her lawn chair and walked out across the yard. The driver was on his cell phone as he looked repeatedly under the hood of the car.

  June called out from behind the hedge, “Pick up your crap from my yard!”

  The two couples stared at her as if she had materialized out of nowhere.

  “Get it all,” she added, “whether it’s yours or not.”

  The driver slammed the hood shut and stared at her, then went around to the side of the car, reached into the back seat for a plastic bag, and came over to the hedge.

  “Here’s some more,” he said, tossing the bag over the hedge.

  “You should improve your diet,” June said, watching the cartons, wrappers and soft drink cups spill out of the bag at her feet. The blond, blue-eyed god was smiling at her as he tossed another bag over.