Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “In my right pocket,” Bernie said. “Keys for my apartment. Scout knows where it is.” He coughed, misting the air with blood. “You’ll need a place.”

  “Dad—”

  “I’m sorry, son. I love you.”

  A savage coughing fit took him, and when it was over, so was the thief.

  The world contracted into a throbbing locus of pain under Norman’s heart.

  “The apartment,” Scout said. “—it isn’t much. Deli on the ground floor. A noisy Deli. Two flights up to a hot plate and a smelly carpet. Of course, I have a sensitive nose.”

  Norman sat down in the street.

  “At least you don’t have to worry about anybody finding you there,” Scout said. “But you’ll need some kind of disguise when you go out. You could use my scarf, if you want.”

  Norman closed his eyes, the flood all through him now. The terrible thing. The love.

  Scout bit his ear.

  “Ow!”

  The dog backed away. “You better get off your dead ass. This is a tough world. And as of today you’re the only lawman in it. Norman, there are innocent people here. You can do something.”

  Norman fingered his lobe, which was not bleeding. “You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”

  “You’re half right, sweetheart.”

  Norman found the key in his father’s pocket. He lifted the body in his arms and carried it to the edge of the world and held it a moment longer before letting it roll away into the star twinkle. He waited, but it did not roll back. After a while, compelled, The Avenger of Love turned toward the City of Endless Night.

  For Harlan

  Dead Worlds

  A week after my retrieval, I went for a drive in the country. I turned the music up loud, Aaron Copland. The two-lane blacktop wound into late summer woods. Sun and shadow slipped over my Mitsubishi. I felt okay, but how long could it last? The point, I guess, was to find out.

  I was driving too fast, but that’s not why I hit the dog. Even at a reduced speed, I wouldn’t have been able to stop in time. I had shifted into a slightly banked corner overhung with maple—and the dog was just there. A big shepherd, standing in the middle of the road with his tongue hanging out, as if he’d been running. Brakes, clutch, panicked wrenching of the wheel, a tight skid. The heavy thud of impact felt through the car’s frame.

  I turned off the digital music stream and sat a few moments in silence except for the nearly subaudible ripple of the engine. In the rearview mirror, the dog lay in the road.

  I swallowed, took a couple of deep breaths, then let the clutch out, slowly rolled onto the shoulder, and killed the engine.

  The door swung smoothly up and away. A warm breeze scooped into the car, carrying birdsong and the muted purl of running water—a creek or stream.

  I walked back to the dog. He wasn’t dead. At the sound of my footsteps approaching, he twisted his head around and snapped at me. I halted a few yards away. The dog whined. Bloody foam flecked his lips. His hind legs twitched brokenly.

  “Easy,” I said.

  The dog whimpered, working his jaws. He didn’t snap again, not even when I hunkered close and laid my hand between his ears. The short hairs bristled against my palm.

  His chest heaved. He made a grunting, coughing sound. Blood spattered the road. I looked on, dispassionate. Already, I was losing my sense of emotional connection. I had deliberately neglected to take my pill that morning.

  Then the woman showed up.

  I heard her trampling through the underbrush. She called out, “Buddy! Buddy!”

  “Here,” I said.

  She came out of the woods, holding a red nylon leash, a woman maybe thirty-five years old, with short blond hair, wearing a sleeveless blouse, khaki shorts, and ankle boots. She hesitated. Shock crossed her face. Then she ran to us.

  “Buddy, oh Buddy.”

  She knelt by the dog, tears spilling from her blue eyes. My chest tightened. I wanted to cherish the emotion. But was it genuine, or a residual effect of the drug?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “He was in the road.”

  “I took him off leash,” she said. “It’s my fault.”

  She kept stroking the dog’s side, saying his name. Buddy laid his head in her lap as if he was going to sleep. He coughed again, choking up blood. She stroked him and cried.

  “Is there a vet?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  Buddy shuddered violently and ceased breathing; that was the end. “We’d better move him out of the road,” I said.

  She looked at me and there was something fierce in her eyes. “I’m taking him home,” she said.

  She struggled to pick the big shepherd up in her arms. The dog was almost as long as she was tall.

  “Let me help you. We can put him in the car.”

  “I can manage.”

  She staggered with Buddy, feet scuffing, the dog’s hind legs limp, like weird dance partners. She found her balance, back swayed, and carried the dead dog into the woods.

  I went to the car, grabbed the keys. My hand reached for the glove box, but I drew it back. I was gradually becoming an Eye again, a thing of the Tank. But no matter what, I was through with pills. I wanted to know if there was anything real left in me.

  I locked the car and followed the woman into the woods.

  She hadn’t gotten far. I found her sitting on the ground crying, hugging the dog. She looked up.

  “Help me,” she said. “Please.”

  I carried the dog to her house, about a hundred yards. The body seemed to get heavier in direct relation to the number of steps I took.

  It was a modern house, octagonal, lots of glass, standing on a green expanse of recently cut lawn. We approached it from the back. She opened a gate in the wooden fence, and I stepped through with the dog. That was about as far as I could go. I was feeling it in my arms, my back. The woman touched my shoulder.

  “Please,” she said. “Just a little farther.”

  I nodded, clenched my teeth, and hefted the dead weight. She led me to a tool shed. Finally, I laid the dog down. She covered it with a green tarp and then pulled the door shut.

  “I’ll call somebody to come out. I didn’t want Buddy to lie out by the road or in the woods where the other animals might get at him.”

  “I understand,” I said, but I was drifting, beginning to detach from human sensibilities.

  “You better come inside and wash,” she said.

  I looked at my hands. “Yeah.”

  I washed in her bathroom. There was blood on my shirt and she insisted I allow her to launder it. When I came out of the bathroom in my T-shirt, she had already thrown my outer shirt, along with her own soiled clothes, into the washer, and called the animal control people, too. Now wearing a blue shift, she offered me ice tea, and we sat together in the big, sunny kitchen, drinking from tall glasses. I noted the flavor of lemon, the feel of the icy liquid sluicing over my tongue. Sensation without complication.

  “Did you have the dog a long time?”

  “About eight years,” she said. “He was my husband’s, actually.”

  “Where is your husband?”

  “He passed away two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was looking at me in a strange way, and it suddenly struck me that she knew what I was. Somehow, people can tell. I started to stand up.

  “Don’t go yet,” she said. “Wait until they come for Buddy. Please?”

  “You’ll be all right by yourself.”

  “Will I?” she said. “I haven’t been all right by myself for a long, long time. You haven’t even told me your name.”

  “It’s Robert.”

  She reached across the table for my hand and we shook. “I’m Kim Pham,” she said. I was aware of the soft coolness of her flesh, the way her eyes swiveled in their wet orbits, the lemon exhalation of her breath.

  “You’re an Eye,” she said.

  I took my hand back.


  “And you’re not on your medication, are you?”

  “It isn’t medication, strictly speaking.”

  “What is it, then?”

  A lie, I thought, but said, “It restores function. Viagra for the emotionally limp, is the joke.”

  She didn’t smile.

  “I know all the jokes,” she said. “My husband was a data analyst on the Tau Boo Project. The jokes aren’t funny.”

  The name Pham didn’t ring any bells, but a lot of people flogged data at the Project.

  “Why don’t you take your Viagra or whatever you want to call it?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m allergic.”

  “Or you don’t trust the emotional and cognitive reality is the same one you possessed before the Tank.”

  I stared at her. She picked up her ice tea and sipped.

  “I’ve read about you,” she said.

  “Really.”

  “Not you in particular. I’ve read about Eyes, the psychological phenomenon.”

  “Don’t forget the sexual mystique.”

  She looked away. I noted the way the musculature of her neck worked, the slight flushing near her hairline. I was concentrating, but knew I was close to slipping away.

  “Being an Eye is not what the public generally thinks,” I said.

  “How is it different?”

  “It’s more terrible.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The Tank is really a perfect isolation chamber. Negative gravity, total sensory deprivation. Your body is covered with transdermal patches. The cranium is cored to allow for the direct insertion of the conductor. You probably knew that much. Here’s what they don’t say: The process kills you. To become an Eye, you must literally surrender your life.”

  I kept talking because it helped root me in my present consciousness. But it wouldn’t last.

  “They keep you functioning in the Tank, but it’s more than your consciousness that rides the tachyon stream. It’s your being, it’s who you are. And somehow, between Earth and the robot receiver fifty light years away, it sloughs off, all of it except your raw perceptions. You become a thing of the senses, not just an Eye but a hand, a tongue, an ear. You inhabit a machine that was launched before you were born, transmit data back along a tachyon stream, mingled with your own thought impulses for analysts like your husband to dissect endlessly. Then they retrieve you, and all they’re really retrieving is a thing of raw perception. They tell you the drugs restore chemical balances in your brain, vitalize cognitive ability. But really it’s a lie. You’re dead, and that’s all there is to it.”

  The animal control truck showed up, and I seized the opportunity to leave. The world was breaking up into all its parts now. People separate from the earth upon which they walked. A tree, a doorknob, a blue eye swiveling. Separate parts constituting a chaotic and meaningless whole.

  At the fence, I paused and looked back, saw Kim Pham watching me. She was like the glass of ice tea, the dead weight of the dog, the cold pool on the fourth planet that quivered like mercury as I probed it with a sensor.

  Back in the car, I sat. I had found the automobile, but I wasn’t sure I could operate it. All I could see or understand were the thousand individual parts, the alloys and plastics, the wires and servos and treated leather, and the aggregate smell.

  A rapping sounded next to my left ear. Thick glass, blue eyes, bone structure beneath stretched skin. I comprehended everything, but understood nothing. The eyes went away. Then: “You better take this.” Syllables, modulated air. A bitter taste.

  Retrieval.

  I blinked at the world, temporarily restored to coherence.

  “Are you all right? Kim was sitting beside me in the Mitsubishi.

  “Yes, I’m all right.”

  “You looked catatonic.”

  “What time is it?”

  “What time do you think it is?”

  “I asked first.”

  “Almost seven o’clock.”

  “Shit.”

  “I was driving to town. I couldn’t believe you were still sitting here.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “God, I’m tired.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I have a charming little apartment at the Project.”

  “Do you feel well enough to drive there?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “They might not let me out again.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Not really.”

  “It’s hard to tell with you.”

  “Did they take care of Buddy okay?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at her, and saw an attractive woman of thirty-five or so with light blue eyes.

  “You better follow me back to my house. Besides, you forgot your shirt.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  I parked my car in the detached garage and stowed the keys under the visor. The Project had given me the car, but it was strictly for publicity purposes and day trips. We Eyes were supposed to have the right stuff.

  There was a guest room with a twin bed and a window that admitted a refreshing breeze. I removed my shoes and lay on the bed and listened to hear if she picked up the phone, listened for the sound of her voice calling the Project. She would know people there, have numbers. Former associates of her husband. I closed my eyes, assuming the next face I saw would be that of a Project security type.

  It wasn’t.

  When I opened my eyes the room was suffused with soft lamplight. Kim stood in the doorway.

  “I have your pills,” she said, showing me the little silver case.

  “It’s okay. I won’t need another one until tomorrow.”

  She studied me.

  “Really,” I said. “Just one a day.”

  “What would have happened if I hadn’t found you?”

  “I would have sat there until somebody else saw me, and if no one else happened by, I would have gone on sitting there until doomsday. Mine, at any rate.”

  “Did you mean it when you said the Project people wouldn’t let you leave again?”

  I thought about my answer. “It’s not an overt threat. They’d like to get another session out of me. I think they’re a little desperate for results.”

  “Results equal funding, my husband used to say.”

  “Right.”

  “My husband was depressed about the lack of life.”

  I sat up on the bed, rubbing my arms, which felt goosebumpy in spite of the warmth.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “A tumor in his brain. It was awful. Toward the end he was in constant pain. They medicated him heavily. He didn’t even know me anymore.” She looked away. “I’m afraid I got a little desperate myself after he died. But I’m stronger now.”

  “Why do you live out here all by yourself?”

  “It’s my home. If I want a change there’s a cottage up in Oregon, Cannon Beach. But I’m used to being left on my own.”

  “Used to it?”

  “It seems to be a theme in my life.”

  It was also a statement that begged questions, and I asked them over coffee in the front room. Her parents were killed in a car accident when Kim was fourteen. Her aunt raised her, but it was an awkward relationship.

  “I felt more like an imposition than a niece.”

  And then, of course, there was Mr. Pham and the brain tumor. When she finished, something inside me whimpered to get out but I wouldn’t let it.

  “Sometimes, I think I’d prefer to be an Eye,” Kim said.

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” She was turned to the side, facing me on the couch we shared, one leg drawn up and tucked under, her face alive, eyes questing.

  “I already told you: Because you’d have to die.”

  “I thought that was you being metaphorical.”

  I shook my head, patted the case of pills now replaced in the cargo pocket of my pants.
<
br />   “I’m in these pills,” I said. “The ‘me’ you’re now talking to. But it isn’t the me I left behind when I climbed into the Tank.” I sipped my coffee. “There’s no official line on that, by the way. It’s just my personal theory.”

  “It’s kind of neurotic.”

  “Kind of.”

  “I don’t even think you really believe it.”

  I shrugged. “That’s your prerogative.”

  For a while we didn’t talk.

  “It does get lonely out here sometimes,” Kim said.

  “Yes.”

  Her bedroom was nicer than the guest room. With the lights out, she dialed to transparency three of the walls and the ceiling, and it was like lying out in the open with a billion stars overhead and the trees waving at us. I touched her naked belly and kissed her. Time unwound deliciously, but eventually wound back up tight as a watch spring and resumed ticking.

  We lay on our backs, staring up, limbs entwined. The stars wheeled imperceptibly. I couldn’t see Tau Boo, and that was fine with me.

  “Why did you do it, then?” she asked.

  “Because it felt good. Plus, you seemed to be enjoying yourself as well.”

  “Not that. Why did you want to be an Eye.”

  “Oh. I wanted to see things that no one else could see, ever. I wanted to travel farther than it was possible for a man physically to travel. Pure ego. Which is slightly ironic.”

  “Worth it?”

  I thought of things, the weird aquamarine sky of the fourth planet, the texture of nitrogen-heavy atmosphere. Those quicksilver pools. But I also recalled the ripping away of my personality, and how all those wonders in my mind’s eye were like something I’d read about or seen pictures of—unless I went off the pill and allowed myself to become pregnant with chaos. Then it was all real and all indistinguishable, without meaning.

  “No,” I said, “it wasn’t worth it.”

  “When I think about it,” Kim said, “it feels like escape.”

  “There’s that too, yes.”

  In the morning, I kissed her bare shoulder while she slept. I traced my fingers lightly down her arm, pausing at the white scars on her wrist. She woke up and pulled her arm away. I kissed her neck, and we made love again.

  Later, I felt disinclined to return to the Project compound and equally disinclined to check in, which I was required to do.