by Cat Rambo
"I want you to take me out of this game," Glen said. "Leave me alone from now on."
Fred said, surprised, "You won't be joining us? It's a rare honor. Only two people have made it, Penny and Casey. Casey took to it a lot better though."
"Join you?" Glen said incredulously. "In your egocentric merry-go-round?"
"The alternative is to die, knowing that's it," Fred said. "You may relish the idea, but by the time I'm geriatric, I find myself looking forward to all that crazy kid energy again. It's even better when you really appreciate what you have." He stood. "Look, I'll show you something."
He went to the wall and took down the picture, an enormous Ansel Adams print. Behind it was a safe. The tumblers clicked as he worked the lock and took out ...
... how to describe the Peaches of Immortality? They were made of light, golden light, intersecting, clustered spheres that shone from within. They filled Fred's hands with their glow.
"How do they ... " Glen stammered.
Fred laughed. "How do they work? What do you think, I'm like some comic book villain, to reveal everything?"
"Well, but how would it work if I wanted to join you?" Glen said. His eyes drank in the sight of the object in Fred's hands. Something about its lines made him feel safe, and happy, and as though the world were filled with perfection. It was infinitely seductive.
He wrenched his gaze from it, stared out at the stone railing of the balcony where he had kissed Casey. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been a few months. He wondered what time felt like to them, after they'd lived it over and over. He thought that boredom must be a constant slow rasp, wearing against nerve and resolve. But perhaps he was underestimating the wonders of rearranging your own life.
He heard the peaches jingle as Fred turned them in his hands, a distant sound like fairy bells, like enchantment.
"The music's the only real moments you have left, isn't it?" he said.
Fred's voice was strained. "You have no idea what it's like, zombie."
"You hate me for being what you think you are," Glen said. "Someone helpless in the face of the Universe. Aren't you, in the end? Either you keep reliving your lives, or you die. Why won't you let Penny opt out?"
"She makes the game more interesting."
"And the game is all you have."
"It's all we ever need."
"Maybe," Glen said. "But it seems ... a little masturbatory."
The peaches jingled again as Fred set them down. They sounded like far away rain on crystal spires. Tears welled in Glen's eyes at the sound.
"You've surprised me once or twice this time," Fred said. "Are you really waking up or are we going to end, as we always do, with you giving in and going back to sleep? If you're serious this time, close your eyes. The peaches will set you up."
"Set me up?" It made no sense, but he closed his eyes.
Like being in a dark room, putting a hand out, encountering a surface. Biting on tinfoil and feeling it like sparks inside your skull. An internal organ that had never twinged before, but now twisted with gut-wrenching intensity. Electric eels along his spine, sharp pink then soothing gold, and ...
Click.
Everything aligned.
He could sense Fred's mind, and the minds of the others, sensing him in the time loop, in the peaches. Casey with a touch of anger, as though Fred had won. Fred, reckoning points on an intricate, abacus-like structure. Derek, despair and contempt at everything, including himself. Penny, absence and presence at the same time, a hole in such a particular shape that it could only be her.
And beyond that, the feel of the possibilities, the tiny shifts that resulted in a different configuration for one's life—not too far off course, but there were a surprising number of ways one could shift things, he was somehow told.
Fred, triumphant, flashing Casey a string of numbers and symbols, an intricate score, even as Glen reached out and grabbed the structure with his mind, wrapping tendrils of thought sinewy as muscle around it, and pulled and pushed at the same time.
A noise as high-pitched as pain shrilled from the peaches, and he felt it flay at the inside of his thoughts, more piercing than shame or grief or heartbreak. In the real world, he was falling forward, he could tell, but he flickered back and forth between the physical and mental landscape, stomach-jarring shudders of reality, falling forward on the golden object, tangling it with his head and arms, feeling the light sink into the side of his head, eclipsing the world, taking it apart. Far beyond himself, he could feel all the lives that had been contained in the loop, the lives lived over and over again, variations and repetitions, held by the peaches of immortality, escaping, slipping away like fish through a net, and his mind was the peaches and the peaches were his mind and they were taking each other apart and everything was being released and his last thought, confused and full of light, was oh the peaches are sweet.
Afternotes
This story came from one of those thought chains we all engage in—what might we have done if we'd been able to change some life decisions? It's one of those obsessive games we play over and over in our heads, and so many speculative fiction stories center around time travelers going back and manipulating the past with their knowledge. What would happen if you were able to do it, time and time again? Would it, in the end, become as meaningless as it seems to have for Fred and the others?
Another influence that shaped it is Fritz Leiber's novel, The Sinful Ones, which also appeared under the title, You're All Alone, and in which some people are more awake than others and able to exist outside of the daily life that everyone else grinds through. Leiber says: "What if the whole world were like a waxworks museum? In motion, of course, like clockworks, but utterly mindless, purposeless, mechanical. What if he, a wax figure like the others, had suddenly come alive and stepped out of his place, and the whole show was going on without him, because it was just a machines and didn't care or know whether he was there or not?"
The idea terrified me. It still does.
The story was submitted to Lightspeed Magazine, but editor John Joseph Adams felt it was more fantasy than SF, and the story ended up in Lightspeed's companion publication at the time, Fantasy Magazine, under the title, "The Immortality Game." As the former fiction editor of Fantasy, I was glad to have a story in there before the publication was merged into Lightspeed.
CLOSE YOUR EYES
The story might begin like this:
"Thank you for bringing me some water," Lewis said as Amber neared the kitchen table. "Thank you for working to pay the rent on our house, because otherwise we wouldn't have access to the water that comes free with it."
"Fuck you," Amber said. She was tired of this tune, tired of its tension clamping down on her neck muscles, gripping like lightning-laden wire along her inner arms.
This morning Lewis wore an unexpected, Dr. Seuss-bright tie, along with the usual plain white shirt and stiff new jeans. The cat strode across the fabric, peppermint-striped hat tilted, infinitely more carefree than her younger brother. Lewis folded his fingers, thumbs pressed together, pointed towards himself.
"No, I mean it," Lewis said. "Thank you."
She thumped the glass down near his elbow, settled to sprinkle salt substitute over her own microwaved sausage-in-an-egg-in-a-biscuit. Lewis had the same, plus a paper cup holding a dozen horse-sized pills, and two glasses of oily liquid.
After three bites of sausage, he methodically downed the pills, first using the vitamin-ade, then the water. He did it with a frown, looking into the distance as though examining himself in the bathroom mirror while shaving.
Was she supposed to ask why he was wearing a tie? What sort of scheme was he involved with now? How much of her money or energy or patience or love would it consume?
She was never sure how much of his hostility was humor, but the majority was genuine rancor at being unemployed, dependent on her.
"I'm staying late at the hospital after my treatment this afternoon," Lewis said. "Using the spar
e time you so generously provide me with to read to children. I'm sure you'll agree it's a valuable use of my time, a contribution to society that you're sponsoring."
She wavered between opting to swat back the hostility or ignore his tone. She didn't want to fight. "What are you reading to them?"
He gestured at the tie. "This sort of thing."
"What time should I take you?"
"More shining generosity on your part. Don't worry, I'm keeping track. I'll figure out how to pay you back. Eventually. A little before two."
"What kids are you reading to?"
"The fatalities," he said. "Who better? The ones that aren't going to make it."
Like him, Plague-touched. The rare genetically gifted ones that could survive its ravages, though not neurologically intact, knowing that they had a few years left.
That too is another way the story might begin, Lewis and Amber listening to the doctor explain how long Lewis might live, given the right care and treatment: one to five years. And how long he would live without it: less than a year.
Amber watching a cloudy sky outside the window, ashy as Lewis's face. He kept looking at her as though to judge her reaction. Dependency shaded by years of sibling rivalry and affection. Amber seeing Lewis as though through a window. Seeing too little time left with her brother.
And also too long, too long to dedicate herself to him, putting aside everything but her work, in order to support him, like some nun in a solitary abbey. One to five years of watching over him. One to five years of driving him to his hospital appointments, one to five years of seeing the hospital, becoming familiar with its corridors, knowing where every bathroom, every drinking fountain, every vending machine, every waiting lounge was.
"Enjoy reading to the kids," Amber said as she pulled up to the curb. "I think it's a nice gesture."
Lewis had been silent during the car ride, even when she tried to bait conversation with conservative talk radio.
"What time should I pick you up?" she said.
"7:00."
"That late?"
"Can you do it or not? I can take a taxi if I need to."
And be stiff and terrified all through the ride that one of his fits come, without her to coax him back away from unbending panic, with a driver who wouldn't know what to do with a hyperventilating, shaking passenger.
She could let him do it, but she'd sit there waiting, anxious, unable to work, until he came home.
"I can do it," she said.
He stepped out, thin and frail with recent body loss. Almost time for another trip to Sears, he'd dropped another pants size. The tie flashed in the sunlight.
He walked away.
The air was full of cottonwood that spring, riding the air like memories of ash. Last year Mount Rainier had rumbled, as though announcing Lewis's diagnosis, sent out a cloud that had coated the countryside for miles. Even now, traces of it lingered on roofs and rocks. Like everyone else, she had mason jars filled with the silky ash, so unsettlingly smooth to the touch.
Time and solitude in which to work. She ascended to her attic studio, settled like a weary bird into the papa-san chair, queued up Kay Gardner, Bach cello suites, then Beatles and Will Flirt For Fairy Fruit on the music player, pulled over her graphic tablet, and began to sketch.
When work was going well, it flowed, a narrow river into which she could submerge herself, almost forgetting to breathe, feeling colors, lines move through her, coming from her lungs and heart and brain, coiling together before racing through her stylus point onto the computer, words and pictures becoming the Land of Everkind, its citizens the people of Leaf and Flower, and the talking animals that helped and hampered them.
She had been working on them for two decades now. Characters as familiar to her as Lewis: Mrs. Mountebank and her be-ribboned head; the Whistling Gypsy; the Turtle-headed Woman; the Count of Cube; Pepperjill's Magic Monkey troupe; the Tango Gotango Gotengo.
Some parents thought the books too dark. The characters too raw, too savage. But that was what children liked. The monster under the bed. The touch of fear at their heels. Mrs. Mountebank's dark-windowed wagon; the magic monkeys' pointed teeth.
A new character was coming to her. She could feel it fluttering at her mind's edges. She sat still for a half hour, trying to will it closer. It stayed out of reach, as it had for months now.
She drew herself, Lewis on the pad, drew them looking at each other. Similar features. Lewis was skinnier, but not by much. Staring, caught.
Trapped.
She wiped the image away, let a story distract her. Caught herself moments after seven. She'd be ten minutes late. Not inexcusable, but he wouldn't excuse it. And she'd wasted valuable alone time on reading! She raced down the steps to the car with an angry clatter of keys.
She pulled into a waiting space in front of the hospital lobby. Lewis was staring at his watch. Her dashboard read 7:13.
He attacked, vicious as a wasp, as soon as he entered. "Glad you could spare time to pick me up."
"Lewis, sorry, I lost track," she said.
"Beggars can't be choosers," he said. Brittle, icy-edged in a way that sometimes signaled a fit's imminence, sometimes just a tantrum. "Perhaps you would be so kind as to stop at the drug store? I have some things to get. Wait in the car if you want."
He knew she'd opt for that.
After ten minutes she raised her head in time to see Lewis exiting the drugstore.
She readied her keys but saw him turn into the craft store that was next door.
What was he doing?
She waited.
The store was busy. A few dozen people came and went through the double glass doors before Lewis exited, carrying a plastic bag. Stems protruded from the opening, brown and knobby. Dried flowers?
He dumped his purchases in the back seat. She smelled eucalyptus. His look dared her to ask.
Whatever it was, he'd tell her in time.
The car chimed reproof as she started it, flashing an indicator for Lewis's missing seatbelt. As always, she thumbed it off, rather than argue with him.
"How was reading to the kids?" she asked.
"Fine," he said. "Good kids. Most of them."
"Not all of them?" she said, surprised.
"Think being close to dying makes somebody automatically good?" he said.
He pressed his fingers to the ledge where door met window, marched his hand along, middle finger become a head half raised.
When they were little, Amber eight to Lewis's three, they had pretended their hands were animals that explored the tops of the sofa and walked like tightrope dancers along the playpen's high wire.
The memory made her smile.
"People just become more of whatever they were to begin with," Lewis said. "Concentrated. Much more so." Malicious smile. "Like ever so much more grateful to you, darling Amber."
Plucking away her expression like a spider web.
Lewis read to the children every Tuesday and Thursday. He continued to be inexplicably late. He couldn't be reading to children for five hours.
Might he be dating someone?
Imagine if someone else took him on, drove him from place to place, paid for the medicine that kept him alive for the perhaps four years (but who knew what might happen, how that statistic might stretch with medical advances) he had left. It would be as sudden, as welcome as a fairy godmother granting a wish, removing the responsibility for Lewis from her life.
What would it be like if someone else—perhaps a nurse with excellent health insurance, susceptible to wounded bird sorts—took that on?
Extracting the hospital newsletter from the mail one morning, she looked through the list of classes and discussion groups: Social Networking for Seniors; Health Insurance Basics; Applying for Disability Benefits; Journaling for Beginners; Intensive Journaling; Extreme Journaling; Alcoholics Anonymous; Sexoholics Anonymous; Netheads Anonymous; Strength Training and You; Ornithology for Your Window Feeder; How to Live Without Salt; You and Your C
olon; Learning to Trust Doctors; Making a Living Will; Vegan Cooking.
Practical Shamanism.
She'd smelled sage and lavender wafting from his room. New habits: an odd gesture with his hands before and after eating, a phrase said under his breath. A scuttle of unintelligible words, like a tinny echo of a prayer in foreign movie. Sitting by himself staring at plants in the garden.
What could it be other than Practical Shamanism?
She stuffed the brochure in the recycling bin, as though it might tip him off that she'd been snooping. Give him something new to reproach her with.
She didn't want to ask him directly. She wasn't sure what to make of the concept of shamanism, or even where it fit into the world of the New Agey.
What else could she do but search on the Internet, making mental notes, bookmarking as she hopped from page to page?
A range of beliefs. Tarot and divinatory dreams. The healing properties of tourmaline and snowflake obsidian. The ability to enter other dimensions. Healers and renders of the soul, one website read. Animal or spirit guides.
She pushed her chair back and stretched. Wondered which of her characters would be her spirit guide. She loved them all. Maybe Mrs. Mountebank and the Whistling Gypsy a trifle more. Only a trifle. And they weren't animals.
What was Lewis' spirit guide? A snake, a wasp? Something more terrifying? She could not imagine it benign.
But Lewis seemed happier, less snappy. Perhaps she could relax. Never entirely, though. She'd been ambushed too often.
From The Annals of Everkind:
LILY THE TURTLE-HEADED WOMAN:
Something's coming, sure as shooting stars.
MR. WIGGLY:
Baa!
LTTHW:
No, I mean it. A chancy sort of thing, and lunatic as the moon's frown.
