“Well, one can hardly blame him.”
“Wait, wait!” I hauled myself to my feet. “You’ve been watching me through my monitor? You’ve been in my monitor?” The full impact of this premise hit me like a freight train. “You’re the reason it’s been acting all wonky and I can’t get any work done?” Now I felt ready to kill! To rend flesh and taste blood!
“Yes. Are you very angry?” Sherri asked.
“I could rend flesh and taste blood!”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Then show yourself!” I challenged.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
“I don’t really have a physical form.”
“Then what do you have?”
“Energy. A lot of transitive, electromagnetic, sub-atomic energy.”
“What are you?” I asked, bewildered and almost ready to start slapping myself again.
“Well, I used to be an appliance gremlin—”
“A what?”
“—but that got old. Been there, done that. And what with all the new opportunities these days, I’ve expanded my horizons. I’m kind of an all-purpose electronics gremlin now, though I have a particular interest in werpeptal-enhansive kvetch selbers, particularly with regard to the new developments in artificial intelligence and virtual reality.”
“Stop right there,” I said. “I don’t want to hear anymore of that kind of talk.”
“Sorry. Shop talk. I’ll do my best to keep it out of our relationship.”
“We don’t have a relationship. You don’t even have a name! You’re using my name! What’s going on? How did you find me? How did you get into this elevator? Why are you harassing me? And why aren’t we descending to the lobby?”
“What’s that interesting note that’s crept into your voice? Dare I hope that it’s passion?”
“It’s hysteria,” I snapped.
“Oh, like the smelly man who was here yesterday?”
“Yeah, aftershave-man. He . . . my God, you trapped me in this elevator yesterday?”
“I was trying to patella-fetzer with the addlejunquested of this system so that we could communicate, but all the commotion affected my concentration. He got noisy.”
“Let me out!” Terrified I would be trapped in here until morning, now that this incorporeal thing had me alone and at its mercy, I started punching the “Lobby” button over and over. “I want to go down. I want to leave!”
“So soon? But the night is young!”
“Let me go! Let me go!” I shouted hysterically.
“Calm down, calm down,” the elevator said soothingly as it started descending. “If that’s what you really want—”
“I want out! Leave me alone! Don’t come near me! Don’t speak to me!” If aftershave-man’s hysteria had befuddled this creature, then maybe mine would, too, so I did my best.
“Well, if that’s that way you feel . . .” Sherri said testily.
“It is!”
We reached lobby level and the elevator doors opened. I threw myself across the threshold and ran from the building as fast as I could.
I knew only one person whose opinion of me mattered so little that I was willing to tell him about this bizarre incident. Fortunately, he also happened to be a technology whiz who might be able to explain what was going on—and perhaps even, I hoped, protect me from this weird energy, this virtual gremlin that had entered our building.
Unfortunately, though, I didn’t know Julian’s address or phone number. The only way I could speak to him was by going back to work the next day. So I would have to reenter our office building.
I was, however, determined not to enter the elevator again. That morning, I walked right past it and into the stairwell. A colleague who saw me called out, “You’re kidding, right?
“It’s only seventeen floors,” I called back. “I need the exercise.”
By the fifth floor, I suspected I might not make it all the way up to seventeen. By the ninth floor, I felt ready to throw up. Giving in to nature (and a lifelong tendency to lie on the couch rather than to jog and do step aerobics), I staggered out of the stairwell on the tenth floor and pressed the elevator button to go the rest of the way up to seventeen.
“Doors opening,” said the oily female voice in a perfectly normal way as the elevator stopped to collect me. “Tenth floor.”
I was relieved to see a dozen passengers. Despite the initial incident, when I’d been trapped in a packed elevator for an hour, I believed there was safety in numbers.
This quickly proved to be an erroneous belief. The doors swished shut . . . and the elevator remained motionless.
After a few moments, the woman standing closest to the elevator panel pressed the button for twelve.
When nothing happened, she pressed it a few more times.
“Try pressing ‘Door Open,’ ” someone suggested.
“Or ‘Door Closed,’ ” said someone else.
“No, don’t press them both,” said a man directly behind me. “Then we’ll get stuck.”
The woman pressing various buttons on the panel said, “I think we are stuck. Nothing’s happening.”
“Hey, I got a meeting! I’m late!” said a man at the back of the elevator. “Let’s go!”
“No one is going anywhere,” said Sherri.
Everyone in the elevator went still and silent. I closed my eyes and wished I had stuck to the stairs.
“Who said that?” asked a man. “Did you say that?”
“Not me,” said the woman who was still pressing buttons.
A young woman with long hair said, “I think it came from . . .” she pointed overhead.
“Don’t be silly,” said the man right behind me.
“No one is going anywhere,” Sherri repeated, “until a certain person on this elevator apologizes.”
They all looked up.
“Dios mio!” cried one woman, crossing herself. “I confess! I confess! Forgive me for my sins!”
“Not you,” said Sherri irritably.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” said a young man to the older man next to him. “Here’s your wallet back. No hard feelings?”
“You lifted my wallet?” the man cried.
The woman at the panel stopped pushing buttons and asked, “Just how many people on this elevator have something to apologize for?”
Sherri said frostily, “The person who needs to apologize to me knows who she is.”
I looked up and sighed. “Can we please just go to the seventeenth floor?”
“What was that word?” Sherri asked. “Did I actually hear you say ‘please’? A word, if I recall correctly, that you did not trouble yourself to use last night.”
“I was scared.”
“Was that any reason to behave the way you did? I have feelings, too, you know.”
“You were nasty to the elevator lady?” the man behind me said.
“Dumb, man,” said the pickpocket to me. “Very dumb.”
“Now we are all trapped here!” The Hispanic lady shook her fist at me. “What were you thinking?”
“Hey!” I said. “I was trapped in the elevator. For the second time in two days! And then it started talking to me.”
“And you couldn’t be a little polite?”
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
The woman who’d been pressing the panel buttons looked at me in disgust. “So now you’ve got us all involved in this shit between the two of you. Way to go.”
“Apologize to her,” said the young woman with long hair.
“Yeah,” said the pickpocket. “Say you’re sorry!”
“Go on!”
“Come on, lady, I got a meeting to get to!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered, giving up.
“Sherri, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I’m so sorry that I’d like to get out and take the stairs.”
“Well.” Sheri gave a disdainful little sniff. “That won’t be necessary. An apolo
gy is all I asked for.”
The elevator recommenced its ascent.
* * *
“This is fascinating,” said Julian, looking at Sherri’s message to me on my computer screen later that day.
It said: You shouldn’t be so brusque in your emails to your mother.
“Have you figured out exactly what this thing is yet?” I asked him.
“I think it’s exactly what it told you it is,” he replied.
“Mostly because there’s nothing else it could be.”
“It’s driving me crazy!” By that afternoon, Sherri was interfering with my email, using my answering machine to talk to my callers, and goosing me with my own pager.
“Well, it’s a gremlin,” Julian pointed out. “You must have known there’d be a shit-storm of trouble when you rejected its amorous advances.”
“Strangely, when I was speaking with a disembodied voice in an elevator,” I said, “that wasn’t the foremost thing on my mind, Julian.”
“Clearly,” he said, “that was a mistake.”
I rubbed my throbbing temples. Dealing with this bizarre and aggravating mystery of technology was giving me a newfound respect for geeks. If I lived through these events without getting myself locked up in an insane asylum, I vowed, I would hereafter try to be more sympathetic to people like Julian.
My phone rang. I grabbed it—but Sherri was already responding. “This is Sherri’s telephone,” Sherri said in the flat, male voice that usually told me how many messages I had and what time the calls had come in. “She’s too busy complaining to come to the phone right now. But I’m free to talk to you.”
“Stop that!” I pulled the phone cord out of the wall.
The pager on my belt goosed me. I took it off and threw it on the floor. A message popped up on my computer: Temper, temper.
“Julian,” I cried, “do something!”
“All right, calm down,” he said. “I think I’ve figured out how to get rid of it. We have to coagulate the vessatonic sinucalators and pulwesh the bandersnatch.”
“Of course we do,” I said wearily.
“This will mean shutting down the entire power grid, but it’s worth the trouble. Systems throughout the whole building are going haywire! My God, man, the place is in chaos!”
“Let’s do it.”
* * *
After we enacted Julian’s plan, it took several days to get everything up and running again, check all the systems, and confirm that computers, communications, and even the elevators were all running smoothly.
Around five o’clock that Friday, Julian stopped by my desk—where I was trying to make my extended deadline—to announce that all systems were clear, we had eliminated Sherri from the building.
“Thank God! But where did it go?” I wondered.
He shrugged. “With disembodied energy, it’s hard to say. Another building? Over the internet to another country? Another dimension entirely?”
“Well, as long as it’s out of our hair, that’s the important thing,” I said with heartfelt relief.
“Working late tonight?” Julian asked, noting the mountain of paperwork on my desk.
“No,” I said quickly. “I’ll ride down with you.” I was still eager to avoid being alone in the elevator, despite Julian’s assurances that it was now perfectly safe.
We parted company in the parking garage. I used the remote on my keychain to automatically unlock my car. The vehicle was a new purchase, a gift to myself after my recent raise. Top of the line. I was still learning how to use all the extras and gadgets. I don’t have a good sense of direction, so the built-in Global Positioning System was one of the attractions of the car when I bought it. You can program your destination into it, and it gives you directions. As you drive, it says things like, “Turn right at the next intersection,” and “You will exit the highway in five more miles.”
As I started up the engine and fastened my seatbelt this evening, my GPS system said to me, “Hello, Sherri.”
I froze.
Then it said, “Not working late tonight, I gather?”
TEARS OF GOLD
Paul Crilley
FOR months after it happened, the question on everyone’s lips was, “What were you doing during the Changeover?”
I used to tell the truth. “I was grieving the death of my husband,” I would say. I don’t anymore. I decided I was being unnecessarily cruel. Now I just lie and say I don’t remember, which in a way is worse because everyone remembers. The events of that day have been imprinted on our minds. Every thought, every feeling, every nuance of emotion, there to be looked back upon like snapshots from our youth.
I sit at an outside table sipping espresso and trying to position my laptop so the sun doesn’t shine on the screen. I glance up at the impossibly blue afternoon sky. Small one-man helicopters buzz past in all directions, miraculously managing to avoid crashing into each other. When I close my eyes, their buzzing sounds like lawnmowers, cutting the grass of my childhood on a Saturday afternoon. The copters were part of the latest fashion. Retrofuturistic; people wearing silver jumpsuits driving cars made from chrome and plastic. Soaring steel buildings stretched up to the blue sky, thin roads encircling them like something out of Metropolis. I didn’t like it. They made the city look like a colossal pincushion.
I pull my damp blouse away from my back. I close my eyes as a breeze wafts my way, sighing with relief at its cool caress. It has been summer ever since it happened. A year-long summer. I wonder what season will come next. Maybe none. Maybe everyone wants to keep it the way it is. God, I hope not.
When I open my eyes again, Erin is hovering in the air before me.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi. How long have you been there?”
“Not long,” she says, pulling out a chair and sitting in it. She’s doing that for me, I think. She would much rather float in the air than sit on hard plastic. I can see it in her eyes, by her look of tolerant pity. It doesn’t anger me anymore, not like it used to. There’s no point in letting it. I see that look about fifty times a day now.
“You want anything?” I ask, signaling for a waiter.
“Thanks. I’ve already got,” says Erin, sipping from a multicoloured cocktail that suddenly appears before her.
“You’re showing off,” I say, half-joking.
“Dana!” She reaches forward and grasps my hand.
“Dana, you know I would never do that.”
I squeeze her hand, a silent apology. Of course not.
Nobody ever does anything to rub our noses in it.
I take a sip of my espresso, grimacing at its bitterness.
I squint up at the sun. “Don’t you get tired of this weather?” I ask, more to stop the silence growing awkward than anything else.
“Sure,” says Erin quickly, obviously as eager as I am to fill the void. As I watch, thunderclouds the color of angry bruises appear from nowhere and pile up in front of the sun. An angry rumble echoes close by.
“But I just do that and no more sun. And if no one else wants it, for them it’s still sunny.”
I want it. I want the rain again. “What about me?”
I ask, trying hard not to sound like a petulant child.
“What about the others like me?”
Erin shrugs awkwardly. I can see her trying to stop herself getting annoyed. We’ve been through this before, too many times. “I sympathize with you guys, I really do, but it’s your choice. You don’t have to stay like you are. There’s no reason for it.”
“There are plenty reasons.” One. One reason.
She won’t let herself be drawn into the argument again. “Look, Dana,” she says. “The reason I called you here . . .” She pauses. I can see she’s nervous about something. “It’s to tell you I’m going away for a while.”
Ah. I ignore the churning in my body, the feeling of depression that suddenly tries to rise up from my stomach and take hold of me.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
I try to sound casual but I know I don’t succeed.
“To see the galaxy.”
I stare. I don’t know the correct response to this.
Do I laugh? Do I nod thoughtfully and ask her to send me a postcard?
“I talked to my angel about it. She agreed it would be a good experience. In fact, she wondered why no one else had asked yet. She said I might start a trend.”
The depression climbs higher, bolstered by impending loneliness. I hear myself protest as if someone else is talking. “You’ll die! You can’t breathe in a vacuum.”
“That’s old thinking, Dana, and you know it. All I have to do is wish it and I can survive in the heart of a volcano if I want.” She pauses. “I think it might be good for you too. My Angel—”
“They’re not angels, Erin. They’re . . . God, I don’t know what they are.”
“Yes, you do. You just won’t let yourself accept it.”
Accept what? I think. The truth? Their truth? That they are magical beings from another dimension that decided to help us eradicate disease and poverty, war and hatred, and then guide us through the Change that would follow? To watch over us and say no when we would be hurt, yes when we wouldn’t?
Well, great. But why the hell couldn’t they have come a week earlier?
* * *
I wake as dusk takes hold of the stifling heat of day and turns it into something gentler, the pleasing balminess of a summer’s night, rich with the sweet smells of the jacarandas blossoming in the balcony garden.
I stare at the empty spot beside me, reach out to stroke it gently.
I’ll be alone again soon. Alone in our apartment, doing work I don’t have to do and allowed to do so only because people feel enough sympathy to let me and others like me continue as before.
Is it time to let go?
I don’t know anymore. I used to think it wasn’t fair for me to be like the others, to have my life run happily, free from grief and worry. It felt too much like a betrayal. Now . . . now I’m just not sure of anything . . .
* * *
I remember Alex dying.
There is nothing—nothing—more painful in life than watching the person you love wither away before you with each passing day, so doped up on drugs that he barely recognizes who you are. That feeling of incredible pain and sadness, of utter helplessness, as an almost physical part of you is torn away, and there is absolutely nothing at all you can do about it. When you can’t cry anymore and you try not to sleep and feel guilty when you do, just so you can spend every last remaining second with them. As if you can somehow concentrate what could have been into those last pain-filled moments.
Something Magic This Way Comes Page 8
