Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “Why don’t you stay here,” Kim said.

  It sounded good. I swallowed my daily dose of personality with my first cup of coffee. In fact, I made a habit of it every morning I woke up lying next to Kim. Some nights, we fell asleep having neglected to dial the walls back to opacity, and I awakened with the vulnerable illusion that we were outdoors. Once, I felt like I was being watched, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a doe observing us from the lawn.

  I began to discover my health and some measure of happiness that I hadn’t previously known. Before, always, I’d been a loner. Kim’s story was essentially my story, with variations. It was partly what had driven me to the Tau Boo Project. But for those two weeks, living with Kim Pham, I wasn’t alone, not in the usual sense. This was something new in my world. It was good. But it could also give me that feeling I had when I woke up in the open with something wild watching me.

  One morning, the last morning, I woke up in our indoor-outdoor bedroom and found Kim weeping. Her back was to me, her face buried in her pillow. Her shoulders made little hitching movements with her sobs. I touched her hair.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her voice muffled by the pillow, she said, “I can’t stand anymore leaving.”

  “Hey—”

  She turned into me, her eyes red from crying. “I mean it,” she said. “I couldn’t stand anymore.”

  I held her tightly while the sun came up.

  At the breakfast table I opened the little silver pill case. There were only three pills left. I took one with my first cup of dark French roast. Kim stared at the open case before I snapped it shut.

  “You’re almost out,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Robert, it’s not like what you said. Those pills aren’t you. They allow you to feel, that’s all. You can’t always be afraid.”

  I contemplated my coffee.

  “Listen,” she said. “I used to be envious of Eyes. No more pain, no more loneliness, no more fear. Life with none of the messiness of living. But I was wrong. That isn’t life at all. This is. What we have.”

  “So I’ll get more pills.” I smiled.

  Only it wasn’t like a trip to the local pharmacy. There was only one place to obtain the magic personality drug: The Project. I decided I should go that day, that there was no point in waiting for my meager supply to run out.

  Kim held onto me like somebody clinging to a pole in a hurricane.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  “They won’t let you past the gate.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll wait outside then.”

  We took her car. She parked across the street. We embraced awkwardly in the front seat. I was aware of the guard watching us.

  “You’ve hardly told me anything personal about yourself,” she said. “And here I’ve told you all my secret pain.”

  “Maybe I don’t have any secret pain.”

  “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”

  “I’ll spill my guts when I come out. Promise.”

  She didn’t want to let go, but I was ready to leave. I showed the guard my credentials and he passed me through. I turned and waved to Kim.

  “She’s a pretty one,” the guard said.

  I sat in a room. They relieved me of my pill case. I was “debriefed” by a young man who behaved like an automaton, asking questions, checking off my answers on his memorypad. Where had I spent the last two weeks? Why had I failed to communicate with the Project? Did I feel depressed, anxious? Some questions I answered, some I ignored.

  “I just want more pills,” I said. “I’ll check in next time, cross my heart.”

  A man escorted me to the medical wing, where I underwent a thorough and pointless physical examination. When it was over, Orley Campbell, assistant director of the Tau Boo Project, sat down to chat while we awaited the results of various tests.

  “So our stray lamb has returned to the fold,” he said. Orley was a tall man with a soft face and the beginnings of a potbelly. I didn’t like him.

  “Baaa,” I said.

  “Same old Bobbie.”

  “Yep, same old me. When do I get out of here?”

  “This isn’t a jail. You’re free to leave any time you wish.”

  “What about my pills?”

  “You’ll get them, don’t worry about that. You owe us one more session, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you having misgivings? I’ve looked over your evaluation. You appear somewhat depressed.”

  “I’m not in the least bit depressed.”

  “Aren’t you? I wish I could say the same.”

  “What time is it? How long have I been here, Orley?”

  “Oh, not long. Bobbie, why not jump right back on the horse? If you’d like to relax for a couple of weeks more, that’s absolutely not a problem. You just have to remember to check in. I mean, that’s part of the drill, right? You knew that when you signed on.”

  I thought about Kim waiting outside the gate. Would she still be there? Did I even want her to be? I could feel my consciousness spreading thin. Orley kept smiling at me. “I guess I’m ready,” I said.

  A month is a long time to exist in the Tank. Of course, as an Eye, you are unaware of passing hours. You inhabit a sensory world at the far end of a tachyon tether. I’ve looked at romanticized illustrations of this. The peaceful dreamer at one end, the industrious robot on the other. In between, the data flows along an ethereal cord of light. Blah. They keep you alive intravenously, maintain hydration, perform body waste removal. A device sucks out the data. It’s fairly brutal.

  I recouped in the medical wing for several days. I had my pills and a guarantee of more, all I would require. I had put in the maximum Tank time and could not return without suffering serious and permanent brain damage.

  My marathon Tank session had yielded zip in terms of the Project’s primary goal. The fourth planet was dead.

  Now I would have money and freedom and a future, if I wanted one. I spent my hours reading, thinking about warm climates. Kim Pham rapped on my memory, but I wouldn’t open the door.

  A week after my retrieval, I insisted on being released from the medical wing, and nobody put up an argument. I’d served my purpose. Orley caught up to me as I was leaving the building. I was hobbling on my weak legs, carrying my belongings in a shoulder bag. Orley picked up my hand and shook it.

  “Good luck to you,” he said. “What’s first on the agenda, a little ‘Eye candy’?”

  I wasn’t strong enough to belt him. He looked morose and tired, which is approximately the way I felt myself. When I didn’t reply he went on:

  “Cruising a little close to home last time, weren’t you? That Pham woman was persistent. She came around every day for two weeks straight. Nice-looking, but older than the others. I guess you would get tired of the young ones after a while.”

  The smirk is what did it. I found some ambition and threw a descent punch that bloodied his nose.

  A cab picked me up at the gate. On impulse, I switched intended destinations. Instead of the airport, I provided sketchy directions, and we managed to find Kim’s house without too much difficulty.

  The house had an abandoned look, or at least I thought so. A mood can color things, though, and my mood was gloomy. The desperation of the Tau Boo Project had rubbed off on me. There was no life on the fourth planet, no life on any of the planets that had thus far been explored by our human Eyes. When the receiver craft were launched decades previously, it was with a sense of great purpose and hope. But so far, the known universe had not proved too lively, which only made our own Earth feel isolated, lonely—doomed even.

  The windows of Kim’s house were all black. I knocked, waited, knocked again. I knew where she hid the spare key, on a hook under the back porch.

  The house was silent. Every surface was filmed with dust. I drifted through the hollow rooms like a ghost.

  Gone.

  I pictured all the ways, all
the ugly ways she might have departed this world. Of course, there was no evidence that she had done anything of the sort. An empty house did not necessarily add up to a terminated life. Probably I was giving myself too much credit. But the gloom was upon me. I could see the white scars on her wrists.

  I sat on the carpeted floor of the master bedroom, still weak from the Tank. Hunger gnawed at me, but I didn’t care. I let time unravel around the tightening in my chest, and, as darkness fell, I dialed the walls and ceiling clear, and lay on my back, and let exhausted sleep take me.

  Lack of nourishment inhibits the efficacy of the pill. In the morning, I opened my eyes to dark pre-dawn and a point of reference that was rapidly growing muddy. The pills were in my bag, but my interest in digging them out was not very great. Why not let it all go? Become the fiber in the rug, the glass, the pulse of blood in my own veins. Why not?

  I lay still and began to lose myself. I watched the dark blue sky pale toward dawn. At some point, the blue attained a familiar shade. Kim cradling her dead dog, the fierceness of her eyes. I can manage.

  A sharp bubble of emotion formed in my throat, and I couldn’t swallow it down. So I rolled over. Because maybe I could manage it, too. Maybe. I reached for my bag, my mind growing rapidly diffuse. The interesting articulation of my finger joints distracted me: Bone sleeved within soft flesh, blood circulating, finger pads palpating the tight fibers of the rug. Time passed.I shook myself, groped forward, touched the bag, forgot why it was so important, flickeringly remembered, got my hand on the case, fingered a pill loose onto the rug, belly-crawled, absently scanning details, little yellow pill nestled in fibers, extend probe (tongue), and swallow.

  One personality pill with lint chaser.

  I came around slowly, coalescing back into the mundane world, an empty stomach retarding the absorption process. Eventually, I stood up. First order of business: food. I found some stale crackers in a kitchen cabinet. Ambrosia. Standing at the sink, gazing out the window, I saw the garage. I stopped chewing, the crackers like crumbled cardboard in my mouth. I’d thought of ropes and drugs and razors. But what about exhaust?

  I walked toward the garage, my breathing strangely out of sync. I stopped to gather my courage or whatever it was I’d need to proceed.

  Then I opened the door.

  There was one car in the double space. My Mitsubishi, still parked as I’d left it. I climbed into the unlocked car and checked for the keys under the visor. They fell into my lap, note attached. From Kim.

  It wasn’t a suicide note.

  Life on the Preservation

  Wind buffeted the scutter. Kylie resisted the temptation to fight the controls. Hand light on the joystick, she veered toward the green smolder of Seattle, riding down a cloud canyon aflicker with electric bursts. The Preservation Field extended half a mile over Elliot Bay but did not capture Blake or Vashon Island or any of the blasted lands.

  She dropped to the deck. Acid rain and wind lashed the scutter. The Preservation Field loomed like an immense wall of green, jellied glass.

  She punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her. Kylie polarized the thumbnail port, at the same time deploying braking vanes and dipping steeply to skim the surface of the bay.

  The skyline and waterfront were just as they’d appeared in the old photographs and movies. By the angle of the sun she estimated her arrival time at late morning. Not bad. She reduced airspeed and gently pitched forward. The scutter drove under the water. It got dark. She cleared the thumbnail port. Bubbles trailed back over the thick plexi, strings of silver pearls.

  Relying on preset coordinates, she allowed the autopilot to navigate. In minutes the scutter was tucked in close to a disused pier. Kyle opened the ballast, and the scutter surfaced in a shadow, bobbing. She saw a ladder and nudged forward.

  She was sweating inside her costume. Jeans, black sneakers, olive drab shirt, rain parka. Early twenty-first century urban America: Seattle chic.

  She powered down, tracked her seat back, popped the hatch. The air was sharp and clean, with a saltwater tang. Autumn chill in the Pacific Northwest. Water slopped against the pilings.

  She climbed up the pitchy, guano-spattered rungs of the ladder.

  And stood in awe of the intact city, the untroubled sky. She could sense the thousands of living human beings, their vitality like an electric vibe in her blood. Kylie was nineteen and had never witnessed such a day. It had been this way before the world ended. She reminded herself that she was here to destroy it.

  From her pocket she withdrew a remote control, pointed it at the scutter. The hatch slid shut and her vehicle sank from view. She replaced the remote control. Her hand strayed down to another zippered pocket and she felt the outline of the explosive sphere. Behind it her heart was beating wildly. I’m here, she thought.

  She walked along the waterfront, all her senses exploited. The sheer numbers of people overwhelmed her. The world had ended on a Saturday, November 9, 2004. There were more living human beings in her immediate range of sight than Kylie had seen in her entire life.

  She extracted the locator device from her coat pocket and flipped up the lid. It resembled a cellular phone of the period. A strong signal registered immediately. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, she turned slowly toward the high reflective towers of the city, letting people go around her, so many people, walking, skateboarding, jogging, couples and families and single people, flowing in both directions, and seagulls gliding overhead, and horses harnessed to carriages waiting at the curb (so much life), and the odors and rich living scents, and hundreds of cars and pervasive human noise and riot, all of it continuous and—

  “Are you all right?”

  She started. A tall young man in a black jacket loomed over her. The jacket was made out of leather. She could smell it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You looked sort of dazed.”

  Kylie turned away and walked into the street, toward the signal, her mission. Horns blared, she jerked back, dropped her locator. It skittered against the curb near one of the carriage horses. Kylie lunged for it, startling the horse, which clopped back, a hoof coming down on the locator. No! She couldn’t get close. The great head of the animal tossed, nostrils snorting, the driver shouting at her, Kylie frantic to reach her device.

  “Hey, watch it.”

  It was the man in the leather jacket. He pulled her back, then darted in himself and retrieved the device. He looked at it a moment, brow knitting. She snatched it out of his hand. The display was cracked and blank. She shook it, punched the keypad. Nothing.

  “I’m really sorry,” the man said.

  She ignored him.

  “It’s like my fault,” he said.

  She looked up. “You have no idea, no idea how bad this is.”

  He winced.

  “I don’t even have any tools,” she said, not to him.

  “Let me—”

  She walked away, but not into the street, the locator a useless thing in her hand. She wasn’t a tech. Flying the scutter and planting explosives was as technical as she got. So it was plan B, only since plan B didn’t exist it was plan Zero. Without the locator she couldn’t possibly find the Eternity Core. A horse! Jesus.

  “Shit.”

  She sat on a stone bench near a decorative waterfall that unrolled and shone like a sheet of plastic. Her mind raced but she couldn’t formulate a workable plan B.

  A shadow moved over her legs. She looked up, squinting in the sun.

  “Hi.”

  “What do you want?” she said to the tall man in the leather jacket.

  “I thought an ice cream might cheer you up.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ice cream,” he said. “You know, ‘You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream’?”

  She stared at him. His skin was pale, his eyebrows looked sketched on with charcoal and there was a small, white scar on his nose. He was holding two waffle cones, one in each hand, the cones packed with pink ice cream. She ha
d noticed people walking around with these things, had seen the sign.

  “I guess you don’t like strawberry,” he said.

  “I’ve never had it.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Okay, I’m lying. Now why don’t you go away. I need to think.”

  He extended his left hand. “It’s worth trying, at least once. Even on a cold day.”

  Kylie knew about ice cream. People in the old movies ate it. It made them happy.

  She took the cone.

  “Listen, can I sit down for a second?” the man said.

  She ignored him, turning the cone in her hand like the mysterious artifact it was. The man sat down anyway.

  “My name’s Toby,” he said.

  “It’s really pink,” Kylie said.

  “Yeah.” And after a minute. “You’re supposed to lick it.”

  She looked at him.

  “Like this,” he said, licking his own cone.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m not an ignoramus.” Kylie licked her ice cream. Jesus! Her whole body lit up. “That’s—”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “You really haven’t had ice cream before?”

  She shook her head, licking away at the cone, devouring half of it in seconds.

  “That’s incredibly far-fetched,” Toby said. “What’s your name? You want a napkin?” He pointed at her chin.

  “I’m Kylie,” she said, taking the napkin and wiping her chin and lips. All of a sudden she didn’t want any more ice cream. She had never eaten anything so rich. In her world there wasn’t anything so rich. Her stomach felt queasy.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  She stood up, so did he.

  “Hey, you know the thing is, what you said about not having tools? What I mean is, I have tools. I mean I fix things. It’s not a big deal, but I’m good and I like doing it. I can fix all kinds of things, you know? Palm Pilots, cellphones, laptop. Whatever.”

  Kylie waved the locator. “You don’t even know what this is.”

  “I don’t have to know what it is to make it go again.”