Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  She picked one up that may or may not have been sitting next to the napkin dispenser a moment before. She cranked it slightly and set it down ticking.

  “Transphysical ego-consciousness is the egg,” she said.

  I regarded my Camel. My mind felt uncharacteristically sharp, lucid, but I knew it was unraveling in delusion.

  Nichole said, “The timer started when the first inklings of self-awareness appeared. And at a certain moment—”

  The timer went ding!

  “—the tipping point of human evolutionary consciousness arrives. A handful of individuals are on the leading edge. I’m one. You’re another. It’s pretty random as far as I can tell.”

  There was a sound in the kitchen, like someone moving around. We both looked toward the service window behind the counter, but it was dark back there, and quiet again.

  “So,” I said, “who are the Harbingers supposed to be then? Not that I believe in them, or you, or any of this.”

  She smiled.

  “They’re definitely not alien invaders. In fact they might be us, some unconscious projection of our desire toward growth and freedom. Or maybe they are a transdimensional race with a vested interest in seeing us successfully evolve forward. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that we make it, you know.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “Are you okay, Joe?”

  I looked at her through a veil of blue smoke. Past my personal tipping point, likely.

  “If we fail to advance,” she said, “so does the conscious universe. Everything stagnates and begins a long devolution into separate numbered worlds of barbarism. The long decline.”

  In the kitchen a utensil clattered to the floor. Nichole said, “Uh oh.”

  I started to stand but she shook her head.

  “What?” I said. “I thought you said this place was safe.”

  “Safe-er.”

  I rubbed my eyes.

  “You’re on the brink,” she said, “but if you let your fears and neuroses and paranoia dominate, you could create a Dark World that will pull in weaker egos. That’s why this is so important.”

  I made a sketchy pass with my cigarette. “Draw them into the great sucking pit of my neuroses.”

  “It’s happened so many times already, Joe. We only need a handful to swing the balance toward positive evolution.”

  “How many have you got so far?”

  “One, counting me.”

  I laughed. She did, too. We were down the rabbit hole together, if she even existed.

  “Would it be so bad to believe me, Joe? To believe in me? At least consider the possibility. Thousands have disappeared into the Dark Worlds of a few. I need you to help me counterbalance things. You’re lucky. It’s a choice you get to make.”

  “Order up!” somebody yelled. That voice.

  I stood up facing the kitchen. Suddenly I was cold. Fluorescent lights began to flicker and a scarecrow shape stuttered into view.

  “Sorry, Joe,” Nichole said, and she pushed hard at the base of my skull, a sharp locus of pain. I faltered, reached back, and found myself sitting on a hard chair in the interrogation room. I blinked, my head still aching. The door opened and Gerry walked through with a lab tech in blue scrubs.

  “Was I asleep?” I said, my voice like a toad’s croak.

  “Just drifting, Joe.”

  The tech delicately removed the skull patches. I looked at Gerry. “I’m done?”

  “Three days. It’s as far as we can go under the current charter.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Nada.”

  *

  I slouched up Broadway in hazy sunlight, exhausted. Back in the numbered world. My eyes felt grainy and my head pounded. As I attempted to go around HOMELESS VET he grabbed my ankle.

  “I served my country!”

  “I’m broke,” I said.

  “Come on, Joey. The End is near, give me some change.”

  His voice had altered, and the bones of his face under the beard.

  Paul Newman eyes.

  I fled.

  My apartment was dark. I racked up the shades. Daylight penetrated feebly through the dusty pane. I picked up the phone, dialed Cheryl’s number. Because she was the only person who knew me and I was afraid. The only real person. It rang three times before I hung up. I couldn’t reach out to her, not through the fog of betrayal. I just couldn’t.

  The light grew dimmer. Perhaps a cloud had passed before the sun. I contemplated the cheap automatic, a big change hurtling toward me. It wasn’t about wanting it or not wanting it. Perhaps it spun forth from my own spider-gut psyche.

  I removed my shoes and socks and lay down on my bed. Time passed but I didn’t sleep. The room darkened into night. There was a rustling sound. I opened my eyes. Mom’s birch stood at the foot of the bed, 2001 obelisk style. I clicked on the lamp and sat up, then knelt on the mattress and reached out. Okay, a dream. My fingers touched the white skin. My thumbnail dug in, making an oozing green crescent. I pulled a ribbon of bark away, and my mind flooded with a child’s innocent expectations. I crushed them before they could hurt me.

  Sirens wailed on Broadway. I grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the bedside table and lit up. Go away, I said to the tree. It didn’t. I swung off the mattress and went around to the foot of the bed. The roots were like long bony fingers melded into the floor. The only important philosophical question is whether or not to lose your mind.

  THE EXHIBITIONIST sat on her bed with her head between her knees, hair straggling down. It looked like an orange prescription bottle on the mattress beside her, but it was so far away I couldn’t be certain. I was seeing her with normal vision now; she had emerged into objective reality, or objective reality had warped and enclosed us both.

  The .38 was in my hand before I was aware of reaching for it. The only important philosophical question is what took you so long. In my bedroom Mom’s tree wilted. The leaves drooped, some had gone brown and crisp around the edges.

  I left my apartment. The door across the hall stood open a crack. You always get a choice, even at the end of things. To give him belated credit, Charlie had chosen not to shoot into the closet. I pushed the door inward on the empty apartment. A peculiar cold light shone out of the kitchen, glaring on a drift of dust.

  I heard a sound and looked to my left. THE MANAGER stood at the end of the hall, frozen, with a fistful of keys. Probably it was the gun that froze him. I should have put it down before coming out.

  “You better leave,” I said, frightened for him.

  “I don’t think so, kid.”

  When did the keys turn into a belt? The buckle gleamed dully. “You aren’t there,” I said, and crossed into the empty apartment. The light drew me to the kitchen. My feet were bare. The dust was hot and had the texture of talcum powder. The dust and the peculiar light came from the open refrigerator, which was empty and deep, a Narnia passage to a brilliant desert landscape under a black sky.

  I sat on a kitchen chair to finish my cigarette. Heavy boot treads approached out in the hall. The leather belt whip-cracked. Okay, Charlie. I gripped the gun tighter. But who knew what would come through the door? A figment, a neurotic fear, a fat apartment manager in the wrong place at the wrong time. I smell smoke, my stepfather’s voice said outside the empty apartment or inside my head. And where there’s smoke there’s fire.

  The cigarette dropped from my lips. I raised the gun. But as he came through the door, a shifting thing, I turned away from him and lurched into the Narnia passage. It was narrow as a closet. At first the way was clear. But as I hunched forward my progress became impeded by hanging pelts thick with the stench of old blood. I shoved through them now, crying, and at last came into the open.

  *

  The Earth was a big blue and white bowling ball, just like all the astronauts used to say. I strolled barefoot in the hot regolith and dropped the gun, which was no longer heavy. She was waiting for me at the Arctic Circle, just a girl named Nichole.
Delusions are like mosaics assembled from the buckle-shattered pieces of your mind. A tree, a restaurant, a dreaming sky, the pretty girl you never knew.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Nichole smiled. “Good. We have a lot of work to do.”

  She was right about that.

  Rewind

  I was reaching for my pint glass of Red Hook when the first explosion ripped through the beer garden. My fingertips had just touched the glass. In an instant the world was reorganized. Only it didn’t have much to do with organization, come to think of it. The table I’d been sitting in front of was now sitting on top of me. Of course, it may not have been the same table. Debris lay scattered around. Some of it was human debris. The right side of my face felt scorched. It couldn’t have been the fire, because that hadn’t started yet. That came with explosion number two.

  I lay there, rattled. People were moaning and crying, some were screaming. I heard it all through wads of cotton cranked into my ears. And of course the bells. I could still feel the cold, moisture-filmed glass on my fingertips. I concentrated on that and on the moments preceding as my hand reached for the glass of red-tinted beer, but this time I cut off the explosion and let my hand grip the pint glass and raise it to my lips, tasted the fruity Red Hook slide over my tongue. For several moments I existed in two realities, it seemed. In the first I’d just been blown out of my chair, in the second my consciousness meandered forward uninterrupted by horror.

  I’d been thinking about that beer for quite a while as I wandered the Pike Place Market Fair. It was a warm May afternoon in Seattle, around eighty degrees. When I came upon a large grouping of tables under white umbrellas and enclosed by a low fence, I turned in and looked for a seat. The beer garden was crowded. There was a street musician in a straw hat playing pretty good acoustic guitar on a stage a dozen yards from the fenced-in area. I spotted a table with an empty seat. A young woman with short, dark hair and lavender sunglasses sat by herself. I asked if I could take the empty seat, and she nodded with one of those neutral smiles you give strangers whom you don’t wish to encourage. I took the chair and hitched it back to let her know that I wasn’t there to hit on her. Then I ordered my Red Hook, it arrived, I reached for it . . . and ka BOOM! My illusion of duel realities collapsed.

  The young woman was sitting on the ground holding her head, her sunglasses crooked on her nose. Her eyes looked frightened but rational. They were big, brown Audrey Hepburn eyes occupying a plain face, and she turned them to me and we held each other’s gaze. I shoved the table off, stood up, and went to her.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, my voice muffled in my ringing ears. She nodded. I extended my hand, she grasped it, and I pulled her to her feet. That’s when the second explosion went off. The concussion shuddered through my body, staggering me sideways. It did something worse to the young woman with the brown eyes. It sent a hunk of white metal spinning into her waist, almost ripping her in half. I saw it in slow motion as the world tilted drunkenly and I fell, a hot, violent odor blowing over me, and then I saw red flames devour the blue, blue sky.

  *

  A mild concussion, two cracked ribs, a wicked abrasion on my right cheek (this is what felt “scorched” immediately after the first explosion), a fractured middle toe. Sundry cuts, scrapes, contusions, etc. Two days in a Group Health hospital. I walked out of there with Frankenstein stitches and a limp, glad to be alive but with a depressed feeling clinging to me like a low-grade fever.

  My best friend picked me up in his sixty’s era Volkswagen Beetle. I liked to think of Sean as a practical poet. He was twenty-three years old, sported a soul patch on his chin, and round steel frame glasses. He had found the frames in a Wallingford antique store and had his prescription fitted to them. He liked to write poems in coffee houses on the Ave, scratching them out with the nib of a black ink fountain pen, filling small notebooks. All of which should have added up to capital A affectation. But somehow with Sean it didn’t. He was a good guy, a good listening ear. He was also one of those perpetual students who manipulate majors and minors with the finesse of a concert pianist. That was his practical side. I was already a year out of University and coping, after a fashion, with real life. In other words I was under-employed as a record store clerk and spent my evenings trying to tweak my resume into something irresistible.

  “You’ve got the look,” Sean said as we pulled away from the hospital with a lawn mower whine of the VW’s engine.

  “Which look is that?”

  “The look of someone who’s been blown up. The look of bells ringing in your ears. Well, buddy, they didn’t toll for thee, so come back to planet Earth and I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Bells I could live with.”

  “What can’t you live with?”

  “Forget it.”

  “I would,” Sean said, “but forgetting things isn’t so easy nowadays. You want to go to Dante’s? I’m buying.”

  I stared out the window, feeling a bit unreal. “Thanks, but I really just want to go home.”

  “If you’re turning down free beer then the center really will not hold,” Sean said. And then, with uncharacteristic bitterness: “Fuck Jihad.”

  *

  In my apartment I made coffee and sat out on the postage stamp-sized sun porch with my feet on the rail and Details Of A Sunset And Other Stories tented open, unread, on my lap. Three floors down some guy was washing his car and he had the radio up loud, tuned to an alternative rock station. My ribs hurt every time I breathed. My toe hurt whether I breathed or not. I began playing a game we’ve all played, the game of WHAT IF, the game of IF ONLY.

  The young woman’s name had been Janice Burnley. Her image haunted me. The girl with the Audrey Hepburn eyes, her goofy lavender glasses crooked on her face, her hand reaching out. I took it back a couple of minutes to her reserved smile and nod when I asked if I could share her table. I ran through it to the point at which I reached for my Red Hook Ale, but before my fingertips touched the cold glass I hesitated, and at that intersection in my reality re-wind I seemed caught in a double suspended moment. The car radio below me swelled, faded, swelled again, faded out altogether, and there was guitar music coming from the street musician standing outside the beer garden.

  I was there.

  My table companion was watching the guitar player, her fingers tapping along. I stared at the line of her jaw, the way her hair spiked over the delicate shell of her ear, which looked fiercely pink in a cunning bar of sunlight that had penetrated the umbrella cover. Then the first bomb went off.

  I shoved the table off me and bolted up, the blood and screaming all around, and I couldn’t shut it out. Again the girl sat on the ground with no apparent injuries, even looking a little comical with her glasses cockeyed. I knew what was coming and I didn’t wait for it to happen. I threw myself over Janice Burnley, knocking her flat just as the second explosion tore through.

  *

  “How are we doing today?” my morning nurse asked me.

  “Okay. A little dreamy.”

  “Still dreamy?”

  “Yeah.”

  The doctor came by and frowned at my chart for a while. He couldn’t figure out the “dreamy” aspect of my recovery. Everything else looked good.

  “I suppose it’s just plain disorienting to get blown up,” I said.

  “It is definitely that,” he said.

  Dreamy. Not a big deal. On the first day of my second convalescence I had lain in my hospital bed and stared at the television set. All the colors sort of ran together, like one of those light boxes from the summer of love that was supposed to simulate an acid trip. The guy in the next bed held the remote. I said, “Why don’t you change the channel?”

  “You don’t like Katie Couric?” He was in his fifties, with an equine face and a beach ball belly lifting the bed sheet.

  “I like her fine.”

  “So?”

  “So that isn’t Katie Couric.”

  He squinted at
the TV. “Yes, it is.”

  Gooey colors oozed over the screen. “Look at the picture,” I said.

  “I am looking at the picture.”

  “And you see Katie Couric?”

  “No.”

  “Ha.”

  “I see Matt Whatshisface. Katie’s not on right now.”

  “You don’t see a bunch of weird colors?”

  He shook his head, his lips pressed into a skeptical line. I let it drop. And I stopped looking at the set, because after a while the colors had a nauseating effect. It wasn’t just the picture, either. The sound issuing from the speaker was nothing more articulate than a fly buzz that rose and fell with inflective randomness. When the nurse wandered in I asked her what was on the TV. My roommate gave me a sour look, and the nurse glanced up and said, “A dog food commercial.”

  “A dog food commercial,” the man in the next bed said flatly.

  I told the doctor about the TV. Soon enough we discovered it wasn’t only the TV. Computer screens presented incomprehensible jigsaws patterns. My senses now scrambled everything that came filtered through electronic media. Even a voice modulated through the phone came to my eardrum like a mosquito whine.

  I guess they gave me every test they could think of but it got them nowhere. I departed the hospital with little more than a fond hope that it would all “clear up.”

  It didn’t.

  “How do you explain that?” Sean asked me, looking every bit as skeptical as my former roommate with the beach ball belly. We were sitting at a window table in Bean There, a java joint on Forty-Fifth, a couple of miles from the UW.

  “I think I got to rewind an event and play it different,” I said, kind of making it up as I went.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Only in this new version I’m one half step removed. You know how when you see a computer screen or a TV screen in the background of a news shot or whatever? You know how you see this black bar scroll up the image?”

  Sean nodded.

  “Well, that’s what I mean. I guess.”

  “Oh, now I understand perfectly.”