Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “This gizmo,” I said. “What will it really do to him?”

  “In a perfect world, he’ll be a drooling vegetable.”

  “The world isn’t perfect.”

  “Usually not,” she said.

  “And what do you need me for? Why haven’t you just done it when he’s over there with my body?”

  The ember of dope glowed bright, subsided. After a long while she said, “Maybe there’s a chance he won’t be the only vegetable to come out of the deal.”

  “And I’m a nice guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

  *

  My night came around. I wanted to call it off but didn’t. I was nervous, and when I lay down it was with little expectation of sleep. The next thing I knew I was in a strange bedroom, tumbling backward, a bright ceiling light stabbing into my eyes, somebody gasping for air. I fell through a long gap in cognitive reality before I hit the floor, cracking the back of my head a solid blow. But it was the button-locus of pain at the base of my skull that really hurt. I writhed on my back, eyes squeezed shut. A cool hand touched my cheek. Rhonda Reppo’s voice, soothing: No, it’s all right, it’s all right . . .

  *

  Bad memories haunted me, and not all of them were my own. Now when I slept a nasty residue of Franz Thixton fumed up, and ghosts of his perverted deeds and desires spooked through the night marshes of my dreams. More than once I’d seen Cynthia on those marshes, and it was no longer memory enhancers I craved but a memory suppressant.

  A month after we’d scrambled Thixton like “breakfast eggs,” in a lost hour past midnight, I turned to my terminal, its flat blue light the only illumination in my apartment. I buzzed Rhonda Reppo and presently a box opened in the corner of the screen.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s find out.”

  “Find out what?” Rhonda said, after a moment.

  “Whether what’s inside is what counts.”

  Light streaked when she pulled the joint away from her mouth. She said, “I guess I’m ready for a ride, if you are.”

  Scatter

  I was enjoying the memory of a single malt scotch I had once drunk in a Las Vegas casino back around ought ’49, when I sensed someone enter my office. I let the scotch go (Glenfiddich, $22 a shot) and came forward.

  She stood clutching her handbag in front of her. She was wearing a green skirt in an iridescent fish scale design with a matching jacket. The skirt clung to her hips like a second skin. Holy mackerel! And she wore one of those hats that look like neuro netting with feathers.

  “Please take a seat,” I said.

  The only seat in the office placed her in front of a retinal scanner. Before she had her pack of smokeless c’s out of her handbag I knew everything about her, from her name (Kari Tolerico), to her yearly Kotex consumption, the brand of coffee she preferred, and her multiple online ID’s, and not to mention that unfortunate polyp she’d had lasered out of her most intimate recesses.

  She lit up, crossed her legs, and waited. Fairly impressive. Most of my prospective clients, when confronted with an empty office and a disembodied voice, tended to fidget. Kari Tolerico was not the fidgeting type.

  I chose to appear behind my desk as Robert Mitchum, circa 1947, the Out Of The Past era. Fully colorized for contemporary sensibilities, of course.

  “How can I help you, Ms. Tolerico?”

  “There’s going to be a murder.”

  “Is there?”

  “It’s a plot to kill my lover’s husband.”

  “What makes you think such a thing?”

  She shrugged, her jacket gleaming like an oil slick.

  “Intuition,” she said.

  “And—?”

  “Poison.”

  “Intuition and poison. It sounds like somebody or other’s autobiography.”

  “Does it? I’m not a reader.”

  “You’re not missing much,” I said. “Just the distilled and refined thoughts, art, philosophy, and history of the human race.”

  “I see.”

  “Seeing’s good, too,” I said.

  “Are you a reader then, Mr. Frye?”

  “I was before circumstances forced me to surrender corporal existence. Now I can only read books that I’d already read, that are in my memory vault. Anything new is scanned, and I can access the text, but it’s not like holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.”

  “What a romantic you are.”

  “Yeah, I’m Byronesque. Let’s get back to the poison, Ms. Tolerico.”

  “Actually it’s more of a viral infection.”

  “Huh?”

  Suddenly the taste of Glenfiddich came forward, burning at the back of the throat I didn’t have. With an effort of concentration, I managed to quell the sensation. But another immediately took its place. The sensation of urine-wet sheets gone cold on my little boy body.

  “You don’t look well, Mr. Frye.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Not at all. That hound dog face you’re wearing is getting all grainy and flickery, too.”

  Damn it. I shuffled her data, hunting for the clue I must have missed, the thread, the inconsistency. My Mitchum biolo stood, leaned over the desk, and stretched out his arm to point at the woman’s betraying eye. Any reasonable person would have flinched. Ms. Tolerico merely grinned and batted her pretty lashes.

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Frye.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  The wet sheets went away, and I found myself experiencing a memorable orgasm. This orgasm had occurred on the same day that I’d enjoyed my twenty-two dollar Glenfiddich. That had been a hell of a lucky day. Accompanying the orgasm was the scent and taste of the woman’s perfume. La Bon Nuit was the name of the perfume. Molly was the name of the woman. Later she became my wife, and later still she shoved me off a five-story balcony—more or less accidentally—and I suddenly found myself on a new career path.

  I cried out, shook the orgasm off, but by then my office was empty.

  I accessed the broadcaster on 2nd and Vine, planted myself as Richard Widmark, Kiss Of Death period, in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my building. Some people walked though me, momentarily scattering the microscopic swarm that allowed me to flirt with physical existence. A few who weren’t paying attention sidestepped at the last moment, and I endured the usual taunts from the anti-biolo contingent. I could sympathize. Before I went incorporeal all the glinty crap on practically every sidewalk used to irritate me, too. And I wasn’t sad to see the city ban biolos from public restaurants, either. But it’s amazing how a five-story plunge followed by a sudden stop can change your perspective on things.

  A kid with a fashionably flayed earlobe passed by on his wheel and waggled his hand around in my head. It was several seconds before the nano flakes could gather light in an orderly fashion and transmit it back to my “eyes.” I waited, all the while fending off a chaotic assault of memory sensation.

  Just as I regained my vision, Kari Tolerico emerged from the building. I stepped in front of her. She walked through me without a word. I scattered, reconstituted, and turned to follow. I felt like tying her to a chair and hurling her down a staircase.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  She ignored me, and for a moment I thought she might be one of the estimated twelve percent of the population who had declined an Aural Wave implant. I had the figures down cold, because my Redmond-based company had coordinated the local advertising blitz. Catch The Wave! was our brilliant hook.

  “Ms.—”

  “Stop bothering me.”

  “Lady, I haven’t started bothering you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Jesus, you scanned me.”

  “Okay. Why are you? As in: Why are you fucking with my upload? And how did you do it?”

  She ignored me again. And we were approachin
g the outside range of the broadcaster. There were plenty of others, and I knew the location of every one in the city, but I was rapidly becoming incapable of holding a coherent thought. I stopped at the flickering limit of the broadcaster, and she walked on.

  “Why!” I shouted.

  The sensation of numbingly cold surf foamed around my ankles, undermining the sand beneath my feet.

  Kari Tolerico threw me a saucy look over her shoulder and said:

  “Favor for a friend.”

  Then I let go.

  *

  It smothered me, a blizzard of sensation and memory, facts and fancies, a short-circuited synopsiscopic not-so-merry-go-round.

  I fled to a strong memory of sanctuary: the bedroom in my childhood house. Slamming the door, I simultaneously constructed barricades fashioned from the steady sensation of security and acceptance that had prevailed during the period of childhood that I originally occupied this room. The chaos yammered outside the door. It made scratchy rat sounds in the walls, battered softly and insistently at the window.

  But it couldn’t get in.

  Which was great, except neither could I get out. It beat going insane, though. I paced around my little room. The bed was made up with a baseball themed bedspread and pillowcase. My bookshelf was well stocked with prepubescent adventures (I was still a couple of years early for the pubescent adventures that I would download and hide under the mattress.

  Downloading porno. That gave me an idea.

  I fired up the terminal on my school desk and punched in the access code for my agency files. Fortunately, dream logic prevailed, and the data began to flow; I had a narrow conduit to the real world. The world outside my scrambled engrams.

  I scrolled the Kari Tolerico file. It was slow work. Beyond the barricaded walls of my child’s bedroom I could have immersed my being in the file, let it soak through, a filter catching potential clues.

  But here it took hours (relative time) to hunt through Tolerico’s info, even after dismissing the dross of her grocery bills, library and digi rental, etc. Her insurance and medical records yielded routine mosaics.

  Something heavy thumped against the window.

  Giving my better judgment a pass, I got up and tilted the blinds open. Fishsticks, my ex-wife’s ex-border collie, was mooshed against the glass, blood gouting from his mouth, body heaving. Just the way he looked that day the van hit him in the parking lot of the Seabreeze. Molly had screamed when she saw him. Some start to a vacation. She’d blamed me, of course. Well, I let him off the leash. We had gone to our Seaside condo to try to fix things and instead wound up with a dead pet and a fresh load of recriminations. And later on we wound up with an almost-dead me. I’m the first to admit that one weekend at the seashore is unlikely to retrieve a romance buried under eleven years of estrangement. Standing out in the salty breeze on the balcony, trying to put my arms around Molly who was having none of it, I’d said something stupid like, “You’d rather be up here with Fishsticks.” We were both drunk. She shoved me hard, and I tipped over the rail. I guess she loved that damn dog.

  I closed the blinds.

  Good old Fishsticks. Molly liked goofy names. With that thought, something clicked. I addressed the terminal again, hunted down Ms. Tolerico’s net monikers. I thought one of them had a familiar ring. Surga Can. A term of endearment, back when Molly and I had shared such things.

  I composed a brief message and routed it to every one of Kari Tolerico’s mail accounts, work and private. When she opened her primary account from her cell, I nailed her location. Hours if not days may have passed in my bedroom, but out in the real world only minutes had elapsed since I evaporated on 2nd Avenue.

  She didn’t reply to my message.

  If I wanted answers I’d have to brave the storm, only bravery didn’t have much to do with it. All things being equal, it was more a matter of abject surrender to a suicidally stupid impulse. But it was either that or spend the rest of eternity in my nine-year-old self’s bedroom.

  I opened the door—

  *

  —and came forward.

  Hell’s own sensorium awaited me. I slogged through kisses and constipation, the one swat on the ass my father ever gave me—and a few erotically intended ones from a certain female companion in later years as well. The taste of heavily salted yams. Farts and the smell of pickle juice. Headaches, drunken euphoria, sushi, vomit erupting up my throat, tears, falling from the Seabreeze balcony, turning over in midair, drunk, leaving my stomach on the fifth floor.

  Before I struck with a paralyzing, tissue-tearing, bone-breaking smack, I side-slipped into a projector two blocks north of the last one I’d used, and as Kirk Douglas (Bad And The Beautiful, 1952) I fell into stride with the Tolerico woman. Most of the old time tough guys were out of copyright, fortunately.

  “Guess who,” I said.

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “Now don’t be that way. Surga Can.”

  She stopped walking. So did I. A fat woman on a wheel glided through me. I scattered and reconstituted. Ms. Tolerico and I faced each other across from a micropark. A squirrel, representing the park’s contingent of fauna, twitched halfway up a spindly birch and watched us.

  “Tell me,” I said. “What I already know.”

  She took a moment to light a smokeless c, while I grimaced under the continuous assault of chaos. I could only take a little more. If I didn’t flee back to my safe room, my core personality would shred and join the Madhatter’s fucking tea party.

  “She wants you dead,” Ms. Tolerico said.

  “I am dead.”

  “Then she wants you gone. She can’t stand it, you haunting around like a ghost or something. It drives her crazy.”

  “Molly.”

  “You want my advice?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Let it go. Don’t fight. Then it’ll be over. Rest in peace. Get it?”

  “What did you use?”

  “Let it all go, Frye. Be happy.”

  She snapped her c at the squirrel and walked away.

  I almost didn’t make it back to my room.

  *

  Hunkered over my little kid’s terminal, I pecked out a message to my ex-wife. In some ways, I had kept in better touch with her since my death. But this particular message was tough. For a long time I got no further than: Dear Molly. Well, there were distractions aplenty. It sounded like a Lovecraftian army of rats in the walls. I got up and pressed my ear to the wall for a few moments. Not rats; voices. Squealy little voices that scrabbled frantically for a way in.

  Dear Molly: You pushed me off the balcony and all, but isn’t this a bit much? It won’t obliterate me, you know. I’ll persist and it’ll be hell. Worse than Hell. Please help. Call Surga Can off.

  I sent it and started waiting. Reduced to a nine by ten foot room, the texture and content of my memory vault was still impressive, if limited. I flipped through a couple of the flashprint books, boy’s adventure stuff. And I was like one of those pictures of the guy looking at a picture of a guy looking at a picture, looking . . . Except I was myself a memory, looking at a memory, which was full of memories, etc.

  I put the book away.

  On my knees I found my baseball glove and ball under the bed. Cool! I threw the ball into the glove a few times. I guess it would have been cooler if I’d had my nine-year-old’s sensibilities.

  I checked the flatscreen. No message.

  I risked another look out the window. It was kind of like looking out the window of Dorothy’s house while it careened around that tornado. Things drifted across my vision. School buses, hedges, tennis shoes, toys, faces (auntie Em!), and on and on. If I got closer to the glass I picked up smells, closer still and it was flavor ghosts, closer yet and a vibrating stew of emotion made me draw back abruptly.

  I turned away, breathing funny. The image of an envelope was tumbling around the flatscreen. I had mail.

  Sitting on the kid’s chair, my knees halfway to my armpits
, I opened the letter. It was succinct:

  Huh?— Molly.

  Damn it.

  *

  In corporeal life I’d been slightly rich and more than slightly bored. The rich part had allowed me to have an incorporeal existence after the plunge. But one thing I wasn’t going to do with Daniel Frye’s life, Part Deux, was run a business. At least, not a large business with managers and scores of employees and headaches and all that. Almost immediately after my death, I cashed out, disbursed a healthy mini-fortune Molly’s way, then built me a detective agency with one employee: Myself. And I was good at it.

  So I tried to be good at it now.

  I opened the Tolerico file and began rearranging clunky blocks of raw data. I lingered over her retinal scan, over the image of it. After a while I noticed two anomalies. The first was a tiny scar just above the iris, and I had no doubt it had been surgically created. Because the second anomaly was something like a pinhead glint of metal or some highly reflective grain floating inside the retina. If I’d had any skin it would have been crawling.

  Speaking of skin . . .

  I felt a hot breath on the back of my neck. I jerked around, but the room was empty. Somebody at some time or other had breathed like that on the back of my neck, and the memory impression had just come up. Which was a bad sign, because it meant the barricades had been breached.

  “Shit.”

  I looked around the room, a little frantically. First there was nothing. Then Fishsticks was there, sprawled and heaving and vomiting blood.

  I looked away, and had an orgasm, immediately followed by a flutter of stomach flu. My hands dotted up with measles, but only for a few seconds.

  I concentrated on my barricades and stared into the flatscreen. The room grew crowded. I didn’t look up. Indistinct reflections moved on the flatscreen glass. Visiting memory ghosts, crowding behind me. The air changed to the recycled hiss of a sub-orbital, familiar from scores of flights. I tried to isolate the reflective grain in Ms. Tolerico’s eye. A hot shower’s needle spray soaked me. My hair (I had hair!) dripped on the touchpad while my fingers worked. It was tough, because my fingers kept changing size now. At one point a baby’s chubby starfish digits slapped at the pad, and the data load dumped out and I bawled.