Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  Back in my own rooms, I opened the package to extract RealFur (lilac). Libby had claimed the pink without wanting to see this, but I thought I had gotten the better part of the deal. The subtle coloring enchanted me as it shaded to a deeper hue at the touch of my hands. I fell asleep with it layered around me like a cloak of feathers.

  Every night that week I heard the rain, the delicious warmth of the RealFur around me in bed. Early every morning it released me to steal out and curl briefly around the rod of the feeding station, and then return to me, bright with heat and a little restive. I grew accustomed to that familiar warmth, the weight of the thick fur along my side.

  Over the next few weeks, we took our coats with us everywhere. No matter where we were in the house, they would be nearby or even at hand, coiled around our shoulders like companioning arms, or spread beneath us to shield us from the cold floor while we watched TV during the long hours while Larry was away at work. He laughed about it at first, but he took to hanging the coat up downstairs before coming to bed. He started turning the heat higher in the house as well; he and Libby followed each other from room to room, adjusting the thermostats.

  I slept with mine each night. I kept my window open and listened to the rain, nestled in its warm embrace.

  He offered to get her a kitten, but she said no.

  "Are you offering to clean its litter box for me as well?" she asked, and he hemmed and hawed as she chuckled.

  "Get me tickets to the Ballet instead." She wore the RealFur to it, and I wore mine. In the lobby, friends swarmed around us, caressing the coats. We had dressed to match them; Libby wore a shell pink dress and shaggy ivory boots, while I dressed in a more sedate eggplant-colored pantsuit.

  My friend Margery fingered the cuff, pinching the soft flesh between her fingers. The coat stirred and I pulled away.

  "Doesn't it like being touched?" she asked.

  I ran my hand along the front lapel and felt the swathe stir in the wake of my touch. "There are too many people here, it's making it nervous," I said. I made my way to a quieter part of the room and watched the two of them from a distance.

  Larry kept one hand slid through the crook of Libby's elbow, his fingers intertwined with hers. He looked around, smiling and nodding to as many people as possible, while Libby focused all of her attention on each person as they spoke to her, leaving out the rest of the world. The fur framed her face. Mine settled in heavy warmth along my shoulders and pulsed slowly along my thighs, subtly nudging them apart.

  Outside, the air was cold and crisp before we slid into the taxi back to Redmond. My coat cocooned me, smoothing itself out to catch any gaps.

  "Well," said Larry, leaning forward to adjust the car's heating upward. "You two were certainly the belles of the ball with your furs."

  "I love mine," Libby said dutifully. "Thank you again."

  I kept quiet, pretending to be asleep. We were crossing the bridge across Lake Washington, and the Seattle lights glittered and guttered on the dark water.

  Though I love her, I'd be the first to admit that my sister Libby is a flake. She reads her horoscope and watches for signs of it in her day; she believes in aromatherapy and Rainbow Paths. And I think it's one of the reasons Larry was attracted to her in the first place, that delicate nuance of belief he could mock in public and take comfort from in private. He insisted that she not work, but made sure to mention it around friends. He laughed at her for talking to her plants, but at the same time sang the praises of her vegetables to guests.

  She named her RealFur Petunia. It gave Larry plenty of fodder.

  "It's just a coat," he said. "You don't name your underwear, for Christ's sake."

  She stroked the RealFur.

  "It's Petunia," she said. "The Findhorns think you should name everything, even your appliances. We could name the refrigerator."

  Larry marched through the kitchen, naming the appliances: "Freezy! Heaty! Washy! Blendy!" He turned, pointing at her where she stood with the fur wrapped around her. "Coatie!"

  "Petunia," she said.

  "It's ridiculous."

  "It keeps me company."

  He lapsed into silence, looking at her. I was unsure whether to turn away and let them fight or not. They had argued about his hours all through the previous evening. She wanted time; he had none to give her.

  "Would you give it up," he said very quietly, "if I stayed home more?"

  She stroked the collar. "Find out."

  But his hours didn't change—if anything, they grew longer. He was on the fast track, and pausing would have ended in his sliding off.

  "Explain it to her, Pol," he begged me one night. "Tell her about the payoff."

  "Are you planning on spending every day of your golden years in Barbados?" I asked. "When do you know you have enough?"

  He paced the kitchen. I was chopping vegetables to make potato soup. In the corner, my coat was draped over a chair. I noticed Larry avoided its proximity.

  "I want to have enough to know I won't want for anything when I'm old," he said.

  "Want as in hunger for, or want as in 'Hey, that would be nice to have in blue too?'"

  He frowned at me. "I need this," he said. "I can't have kids."

  "What does that have to do with the price of eggs?"

  "What?"

  "It's an old saying. What does you not having kids have to do with anything?"

  He gestured, vague and uncertain.

  "Tell her," he said.

  "And what do you want from her?"

  "To give that thing up."

  I turned and looked at my coat. "Thing?"

  "I know you like yours, Pol. I'm not trying to interfere with you and it. But you don't like men or women, as far as I can tell, so you might as well have something. Maybe she could give it to you."

  "Go away." My knife sliced across the onions, cutting them into perfect translucent arcs.

  "Just talk to her."

  "I said go away!"

  The onion smell hung heavy on my hands, so I washed and dried them before picking up the coat. I slung it around my shoulders and passed my cheek along it.

  Libby sat in a rocking chair near the living room window, wrapped in pale pink fur. The sky was gray with rain, and whitecaps scudded on the lake.

  I went to stand by her, and tendrils of our coats reached out to each other, tangled like intimate snakes. I wound my fingers through her long hair.

  "He wants you to get rid of it."

  "I know."

  "He'll just keep on pushing."

  "I know that too, Pol." She leaned her head against my hip. The room was dimly lit from the hallway light. Our coats undulated against each other.

  Later, I realized that he must have planned it in advance—why else would he have had the can of gasoline already there? He poured it over the coat and for the first time I heard it make a sound, an ultrasonic keen that brought Libby towel-wrapped from her bath.

  My own coat pulled me along to the scene of the crime.

  He interposed his body between her and the coat, and flicked his lighter. He threw it with a twist of his wrist and the RealFur screamed again as it erupted in flames, writhing on the tiled floor, leaving greasy black marks in an accusing calligraphy.

  I couldn't tell if mine was pulling me forward or back; it convulsed on my shoulders.

  "I had a hard day at the office," he said. He had an arm wrapped firmly around Libby, holding her in place as she keened, as she hunched forward in vain. The coat spasmed, thick black smoke snaking from it. The smell was terrible. "A man needs to blow off a little steam."

  She struck at him, but he held her wrist with an indulgent strength. My coat moved me forward, towards him, and he half-turned, still holding onto Libby by the wrist.

  It slid from my shoulders and slithered up his legs with a terrible, sinuous speed. He was enveloped in pale lilac fur, a bag of it, stumbling around the kitchen trying to free himself.

  After five minutes, the bag slumped to its
knees; at the eight minute mark it fell over entirely. At ten, it slid from him and crept towards me. I gathered it in my arms. Petunia smoldered on the floor.

  The police have not outright accused Libby or I of engineering the RealFur's act. By the time they got there, we had hidden it in the garden shed. They found it, of course, and took it into custody. They will not say what will happen to it, but the possibility of destroying it has been mentioned. They let me go visit it at one point and take it its feeding station; it lapped about me in velvety, inarticulate warmth as my tears fell on its blanched fur.

  Libby would not come in with me, but waited outside in the car.

  "How is it?" she asked, starting the car.

  "Fine. Very pale."

  She nodded.

  We drove away into the silvery gray rain, its tendrils creeping along the windshield. I blew my nose and looked forward, unable to make out more than a glimmer of lights through my tears.

  Afternotes

  This early piece originally appeared in Serpentarius, and again deals with the relationship between person and object, as well as a marriage coming apart at the seams. It was written in 2004, before attending Clarion West, but I've resisted the urge to make it more complicated.

  I'm tactilely-oriented, and I think having a RealFur would be akin to seventh heaven. Can't you feel if you think about it, a heavy, soft warmth draping around your shoulders?

  NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING

  Curled on the leather couch, Jamie tried to pick a stubborn bit of popcorn kernel from between her teeth, worrying at it with a fingernail. On the TV, a talk show host quizzed a guest resembling a small willow tree. Yet another alien, visiting Earth. She'd taken him/her/it around the city last week.

  "We need to talk," Emilio said.

  The popcorn was wedged to the point of pain between a side molar and gum. She stared at him. His tone sent a panicky thrill down her spine.

  "I've decided to join the PsyKorps," he said. "I haven't had luck getting any other job, and they say I'm qualified. They say one human out of a thousand has the physiology to accept a shunt, and I have it."

  "I make enough money for us," she said in protest. PsyKorps? It was unthinkable. He'd become someone capable of riffling through a person's thoughts, picking through their innermost being. "You don't need to sell your soul to the government. My guide job gives us food and a roof over our heads."

  More than that, if truth be told. Aliens paid well.

  "PsyKorps does good work," he said. "Keeps the airplanes able to fly, for one. Catches criminals. Monitors events of state and provides absolute security where needed."

  "God knows what else," she said. She would have said, "You can't," would have asked, "Does this mean you're leaving me?" but the look in his eyes forestalled her. She tried again to unwedge the popcorn, bowing her head so her bangs fell forward, obscuring the tears welling in her eyes.

  He had made up his mind, she could tell, and was prepared to resist any argument. Why bother?

  After lovemaking that night, he stroked her hair tenderly, still struggling to control his breath. Once the gesture would have suffused her with love, left her sodden as a sponge with helpless emotion.

  But now the touch roused a terrible impatience in her. He had caused the pain that led her here, curled in her bed around the embryo of his decision. It felt as though she had fallen in battle. Her enemy knelt beside her, inexplicably tender and remorseful.

  All's fair in love and war, she thought, one of those cynical-edged observations, brittle as old paper, that had swirled through her mind since Emilio's revelation of his decision.

  She pushed away, went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her burning cheekbones, driving away the heat of tears.

  When she came back, Emilio was sprawled on the bed, comfortable as a sleeping cat. Light laddered across his body from the streetlight outside the blind. A car screeched past on the street. The area they lived in was respectable, but just barely, and bordered a more dangerous neighborhood. It was what they could afford, if they wanted this much space. If their income doubled, they could move someplace nice, Greenwood maybe or Queen Anne.

  In three months Emilio would be a fully active Psi. In three months they'd know whether or not they could stand it, a Psi and a normal living together. Others before them had tried. All had failed. Living with someone who could read your mind when you couldn't reciprocate—it would be like being a rat in a cage, an experimental animal. What lay on the other side of that line? She couldn't imagine it.

  Their marriage was a patchwork of threadbare compromise, but she'd thought it was a partnership. Was there some point at which he'd agreed?

  He snored and stretched out in his sleep when she nudged him.

  She wanted to shake him awake and say, "Can't we go back to the way things were, where I told you about my day and the extraterrestrials I dealt with? Sure, I always saw the envy in your eyes, but there was no need for it. I'd share it with you, share every scrap of it. If I could, I'd remote you, let you be the one walking among godlike creatures with just my voice whispering in your ear. I'd ghost for you, become a shadow of my former self. I would have done that willingly. Instead, you cut out my heart without asking, you tore it away and never consulted me, just made it collateral damage, an accident of your own quest."

  It was the last realization that pissed her off. She'd been reduced to a peripheral, an odd accessory to his life while on her part, he'd been the piston to her pump. Now she felt as though she couldn't function anymore, as though an integral part had been teleported away, its means of abduction unfathomable.

  She hugged the pain to her as though it might fill that void. It was the only thing she could think of, now that he'd gone away, leaving his body behind to let her know what she'd miss.

  "I want to go over what the process will be like," Emilio said during dinner. "So you know what to expect."

  Jamie'd been too exhausted to cook. It felt as though the day had passed in one weary, numb blur. She'd ordered pizza. It sat on the kitchen table between them, a circle of congealing grease studded with pepperoni wheels.

  Why bother, she thought, but she nodded.

  "The shunt won't immediately work," he said. "I'll have to train myself to focus and hear thoughts. They said I could practice with you, would you be up for that?"

  He beamed at her, pleased to have figured out a way to involve her in the process that would subtract him from her existence. But she couldn't think of how to put that without feeling as though she were raining on his parade.

  "Okay," she said, and put a smile on her lips to match his. She wasn't sure if it fooled him or not.

  Aside from that, they didn't talk about it.

  It wasn't that it wasn't on her mind constantly. When she woke it was her first thought, and it chased her, circling like the shadow of a shark, into the murky depths of her dreams. She felt submerged, awash, only her arms above the surface to try to signal. Not waving, drowning.

  Sometimes she wanted to talk about it, but she was afraid of what he'd say. She was afraid it'd only make him move faster. She had always disliked the inertia of action that sometimes surrounded him. It reminded her unpleasantly of the laissez faire attitude her father had taken to so many things when she was growing up.

  But now she prized that quality, thinking that where her words couldn't prevent him, perhaps that force could.

  But it didn't.

  A handbook arrived from the PsyKorps Institute, mental exercises Emilio was supposed to work on before the shunt was installed, to prepare him for its use. She flipped through it. Envision water, it said. Imagine a pool that is deep and clear. Sunlight plays on the water's surface. Watch the patterns that the light creates.

  She closed her eyes and tried to see the pool. But there was only darkness behind her eyes, flecks and freckles of light that seeped below her lashes, the imaginary light that one sees in a darkened room, the hallucinations of luminescence that trail one when half aslee
p, like ancient acid dreams.

  Emilio kept a notebook, as the handbook suggested, detailing his moods and the influences that might affect them: sleep and food and sex, and a précis of the day's activities. He wouldn't watch TV with her, saying that he didn't want those patterns imprinted on his mind. He shied away from music as well, and kept his laptop closed.

  He went for long walks in the park near them. He invited her to accompany him, but she declined after the first one. She could tell he wanted to walk in silence, but to her the silence ate away at their relationship, with the sureness of waves eroding a shoreline, erasing its contour grain by relentless grain.

  While he was gone, she lost herself in videos, long painful love stories that made her go into the shower and cry, hot water washing away her tears. These bouts left her feeling ragged as a torn towel, fragile and frayed. She would not show this side to him, she kept it shelled inside like an unhatched chick. He would see and despise it soon enough.

  She thought to herself that marriage depended on the ability to lie about little things, about daily farts and other human matters. Perhaps it was the lies that kept us human, kept us from being forced to judge publicly, to confront the things that would tear us apart.

  The day of the shunt's installation, Emilio rose and sipped some water. They had forbidden him any food the night before. She'd contemplated fixing his favorite meal: steak au poivre, and broccoli with a cheese sauce, and cherry pudding for dessert. Too obvious.

  She drove him to the hospital.

  "You don't need to stay," he said. "If you want to just take the car, go shopping, come back in three hours. They say that's how long it'll be until I'm done."