Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  Ernest looked away. His vision accordioned then caught up and splintered again. More like playing cards fired between a dealer’s hands, only slow it down and put a woman image on each card. Delilah in rapid flickering vision. A flipbook person.

  The last time Ernest had seen anything other than himself as a whole picture he’d been reaching for his bulb of coffee, leaning forward in the pilot’s couch, careful not to sever numerous transdermal linking points. The Rift was a thousand klicks distant, a black fold in space. A Class One star vector advisory recommended avoidance. Ernest had gone far in his profession by ignoring such advisories. He conspired with his ship, Amelia, and they eased closer. A thrill traveled through Ernest’s body. Amelia, intimately bonded with his psyche and a perfect feminine reflection of his anima, always thrilled him. Especially when they were doing something forbidden, like violating rules of approach. The ship was Ernest at such moments, reading his desire, accommodating it, feeding his impulse back with fake but inspired feminine energy; Ernest was fully erect. Then the Rift sucked them in, and he slammed back, bulb rubber-balling off his face, his links to Amelia jerked loose. The thing about anomalous Rifts is you can’t trust them for safe distances.

  Anyway they crashed. Sort of.

  The weirdest crash landing ever. There was no sense of sudden deceleration. Ernest seemed at once to be inside and outside Amelia. Bulkheads, screens, gauges, panels all split and tilted like a mad cubist painting. Ernest slapped the engine cut-off while he could still see it. Then everything exploded but not with a bursting concussion. More like an engineer’s drawing, an exploded view depicting the starship Amelia and all her contents. Only dice those contents up and sling them in a chaotic sprawl over a vast area. If vast meant anything. Or area. To Ernest only his own body appeared unmolested by the Rift effect. Something to do with his self-absorbed ego perception. Delilah, too, could see herself as a whole person. Everything else, for both of them, was chaos. And it was all Ernest’s fault, of course. Wasn’t everything?

  *

  Well it’s not my fault,” Delilah’s nose said.

  Ernest had been searching for the pilot’s couch. A fruitless hunt of four days, so far, according to his implanted chronometer. He was starving, though not starving enough to eat the aliens, the Tofudians, as Delilah had dubbed them.

  “I was thinking it was both our faults,” he said.

  Delilah’s left nostril twitched. “You would think that.”

  He hadn’t found the couch but he kept encountering pieces of his wife, and all of them could talk.

  “I’m just trying to be fair,” Ernest said.

  “That’s typical. Why is it ‘fair’ for me to take half the blame for an accident you are solely responsible for?”

  “I guess it all depends on how you interpret things.”

  “Yes,” Delilah’s nose replied. “I interpret things honestly and you interpret them according to your pathological need to be right all the time.”

  “It’s not my fault if I happen to be right more often than not.”

  Delilah’s nose snorted. “You crashed us.”

  “You have no curiosity.”

  “You’re too damn curious. You and your girlfriend. By the way, would it kill you to let me interface with Amelia?”

  “I drive the ship.”

  “Yes I know.”

  “And it was my damn curiosity that won me the Vega Award,” he pointed out.

  “Funny. I thought the Vega was presented to both of us.”

  “It’s a team award,” Ernest said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Nothing. It’s our Vega, okay? And our Vega is why we got offered the Tau Boo vector, and Tau Boo yielded the hive minders, and if we can demonstrate their etheric mindchain we will get any vector we want. So please for God’s sake stop eating them.”

  “Mind is a big word for Tofudians. They’re too rudimentary to think. But I do wish they tasted better.”

  “Dee! I need at least ten to demonstrate their hive mind.”

  “I’d stop if I could find the comestibles. But I can’t, and I don’t intend to starve. You can if you want to.”

  “How many have you eaten?”

  “Twenty or so.”

  “Jesus!”

  “They’re not very filling. But you know, Ernest? They’re making me feel funny.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Like I’m spread out, but I’m not talking about the Rift effect. I’m picking up on all the other Tofudians. I kind of know where they are and what they’re seeing.”

  “Really? That’s interesting. Maybe you could use them to find the couch. Or hadn’t you thought of that? But I still want you to stop eating them.”

  Delilah’s nose sniffed. “It’s nice to know what you want, isn’t it?”

  *

  Ernest walked away. It was hard to conduct a serious conversation with a disconnected nose. Of course he knew the nose wasn’t really disconnected, that Delilah was a whole person. It was some kind of dimensional distortion, an intersection of different space-time templates, tectonic realities crossing each other, grinding out a new view of Amelia and her contents.

  So he walked away, but walking wasn’t easy, either. Imagine ten thousand mirrors shattered and pulverized, the glinty splinters and powder (Rift captured starlight?) cast over a landscape of clear syrup, the integument that bound the exploded view of Amelia. Every step Ernest took he sank into the integument. Strewn around were the various hunks and pieces of the ship and Delilah, some of them floating in the air (recycling hiss indicating it was Ameila’s oxygen they were still breathing), some of them imbedded in the glinty syrup.

  *

  Okay, Ernest loved Amelia.

  He craved the pilot’s couch and not just because it might save them. Patched in, Ernest sampled Amelia’s deepest recesses, where her data flowed sweetly and together they drove through space, a perfect fit. The more Ernest interfaced with the ship the more Amelia accommodated his psyche and became a reflection of his mind, his conscious and unconscious. She understood him because she was him, a reflection of him, with a feminine sensibility built in. It was the only way to drive a starship, by making it an extension and compliment to the complexity of a human mind. The intimacy factor was a side benefit, one not appreciated by Ernest’s wife.

  And the pilot’s couch really might save them. Ernest reasoned that if he and Delilah were existing in concurrent cross-dimensional space then Amelia probably was, too. If Delilah’s mouth could chew up a Tofudian in one “place” and process it through her bowels in some other “place,” then perhaps a command issued through Amelia’s couch would successfully activate her engine nacelles and boost them out of the Rift. Where, one hoped, Amelia and her contents would resume their contiguous existence. To be on the safe side of that equation he would make sure Dee was securely anchored to an interior hunk of the ship before he powered up. That is if she wasn’t too busy eating his next Vega Award.

  *

  But after four days he’d all but given up. Jigsaw puzzle pieces of Amelia were everywhere, but—then he saw it! Way off in the glinty junk-strewn distance (if distance meant anything). He quickened his slogging pace, until Delilah stopped him and he sank to his knees.

  Not her eyes or the back of her head or even her elbow or small intestine. Ernest was down on his knees addressing an old but rarely seen friend: Delilah’s vulva. The more time Ernest had spent wrapped in intimate communication with Amelia the more ignored Delilah had felt. When he took his conversation and attention away she responded by taking from him something he needed. Since Delilah started withholding sex Ernest found he had even less to say to her. And it wasn’t fair! Starship teams were supposed to be shipmates in a literal sense; that was the whole point, the way of enduring these long voyages. It was Delilah who was cheating! All he had wanted was a little breathing space. He told her that.

  *

  “What’s your hurry,” Dee’s vulva said.

  �
��I think I see the couch.”

  “Don’t worry about the couch. Why don’t you rest?”

  “Rest!”

  “Ernest, I feel something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s your breath, I think.”

  Ernest swallowed. Delilah’s vulva had always exerted a cobra-like fascination. Hypnotize the prey then . . . strike! Only this cobra hadn’t struck in a long while.

  He looked up, hunger sharpening his senses. That was the pilot’s couch over there. And some kind of movement. Ernest began to struggle back to his feet.

  “Remember when you used to tease me?” Delilah said.

  “Tease you?”

  “Your cheek on my thigh and your warm breath . . .”

  “Oh, yes.” He let himself sink back.

  “Sometimes you didn’t shave, and your cheek was all whiskery. Those two sensations, the breath and your rough cheek. It really drove me crazy.”

  His face subsided into starglint, inches from Delilah’s vulva, which presented itself complete with copper furred mons veneris. The newly moistened eye of the cobra glistened. Ernest grinned and reached out.

  “I see you still like a good tease,” he said and he moved a little closer.

  “I do indeed,” she replied, and her tone had shifted to hard and gleeful.

  He stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  “Now I know why you spent so much time with Amelia.”

  Ernest put it together and tried to stand up, forgetting his weakness. A string of Tofudians tracked by on little ant legs. They were everywhere. He needed a piece of the ship, preferably an interior piece, to anchor himself. But there were none within slogging distance.

  “Here’s your damn breathing space,” Delilah said.

  There occurred a great sucking whoosh. Ernest tumbled like a grain in the wake of a speedboat. Then he had his space. But Delilah and Amelia took the oxygen with them.

  Cat in the Rain

  Daniel Porter got drunk in an Irish bar called O’Leary’s. He downed two shots of Jameson’s then spent the balance of the night drinking pints of Guinness while he watched the TV mounted on the back bar between a dusty Shillelagh and a Bodhran. A neon beer advertisement bathed everything in nauseating green light. So much for atmosphere and the olde sod. Anytime it seemed possible somebody other than the bartender might speak to him, Daniel put out his famous repelling vibe. It was Wednesday night and O’Leary’s wasn’t crowded, anyway. O’Leary’s was never crowded, that’s why Daniel liked it.

  The basketball game was interrupted periodically for special reports on the potential riot situation in Pioneer Square; O’Leary’s was uptown, but riots tended to wander. Daniel watched the reports with detached interest. He was a police detective, and as far off duty as he could get. Rioting had become pandemic. One city or another igniting almost every week. Protests, anti-protests, Fat Tuesday, Super Bowl victory celebration, May Day, Arbor Day—whateverthehell. The Pioneer Square thing had to do with new city curfew laws scheduled to go into effect at midnight. It was as if the world had gone mad with violence. Or madder, anyway. The center will not hold, all that Yeats crap. The uncertainty factor. The impotence factor. The world seemed to have reached its ultimate crisis point at the same time Daniel Porter reached his ultimate crisis point. In his work Daniel never trusted a coincidence.

  Daniel’s partner, Jimmy Bair, had a cousin who supposedly worked for the NSA. This cousin told Jimmy that, unknown to the public, alien satellites had appeared in high Earth orbit, and they were, as Bair put it, “Cloaked—you know just like Star Trek. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not there. For all we know they’re shooting us with invisible Hate rays.”

  Good old Jimmy. He was Scotch-Irish, big and aggressively chummy, with a nose like a red potato. A stand-up guy no matter what. The one guy Daniel would want watching his back.

  “It’s a fucking sign,” Bair insisted. “You know, all that crap in the Middle East, AIDS, bird flu, wars, plagues, fucking terrorists, fucking pestilence. Plus things in the sky. Signs and portraits, right? It all adds up to the big picture. Like the Bible.”

  Daniel cultivated detachment as a barrier against idiot theories, not to mention his genuine sense of impending doom. Daniel was hell on barriers. He wasn’t too bad on Doom, either. For corroboration one could consult his ex-wife. Daniel had always been an asshole, to hear Nancy tell it. But lately he had become the Emperor of Assholes. Daniel couldn’t help it. He reacted against the cesspool the world had become, the cesspool his life in particular had become. And he couldn’t listen to any more bullshit—especially his own.

  The game was over (and how), the night progressed to the AM side of the clock. Daniel threw back the dregs of his last Guinness, paid, and left.

  It was a hot August night. He felt sick and dizzy. Hands in his pockets, he stumbled up the street like a badly manipulated marionette. A red Toyota Echo hunkered at the corner. Daniel recognized the creased quarter panel. He stepped around a pile of cardboard and rags, staggered against his car, fumbled the key into the lock, pulled the door open, and bundled himself into the backseat. He’d rest a few minutes, regroup.

  Daniel’s head expanded and contracted like a balloon nippled in the mouth of an asthmatic. Time passed. Several voices rose up, all male. Something loud and metallic clanged. Daniel, folded and sprawled half conscious across the back seat, opened his eyes. Yellow firelight played on the roof. A rusty sound made him wince, stiff wheels grinding on pavement. Daniel sat up cautiously, his head in deflated mode.

  Across the street four or five young men were pushing a burning garbage dumpster down the sidewalk. They bent their backs to it. Flames surged and lapped over their heads. Sparks, like swarms of fireflies, twisted in and out of chugging gray-black smoke.

  Sensing movement behind him, Daniel turned. The pile of rags stood next to the car. He had barely registered the rags before, avoiding them with his drunk-dar. Now he realized they constituted a derelict. As the Hellfire dumpster passed on the opposite side of the street firelight flickered on the derelict’s face. Except, below his ratty watch cap, he had no face. It was like a rudimentary manikin’s head displaying the subtlest impressions and protrusions, suggesting features not yet formed. As Daniel watched, the impressions deepened, as if invisible thumbs were pressing into soft wax. Shadows quivered in the eye cups. A wet gleam occurred. Daniel’s breath caught, and there was a tremendous crash across the street. He jerked around. The dumpster was now tipped over inside the display window of Talbot’s. Real manikins turned into torches. The young men capered like savages, their identities lost to a mob impulse. When Daniel looked back, the derelict was gone—if he’d even been there in the first place.

  *

  He steered the Toyota up Pine Street toward Capital Hill, hunched forward, both hands fisted at the top of the wheel. Behind him sirens ululated. He became confused in the residential back streets. Nancy had kicked him out of the house only a couple of weeks ago. In the dark the hulking brick building where he now resided looked like any other. Daniel hated the apartment, hated the smallness of it, the feel of other lives having passed through. He’d almost rather sleep in the Toyota. Finally, exhausted, he parked randomly, stubbing the front tire on the curb.

  His balloon head carried him through shadows, puddles of moonlight. He swayed against a noisy fence, fingers hooked in the chain link. A girl gazed at him from a third story window. She was wearing a light summer dress. There was no glass in the window. He blinked and she was gone, an apparition of his mind. The building, which otherwise appeared abandoned, seemed to lean toward him. Daniel’s head drooped, balloon deflated. He felt his gorge rise for the umpteenth time since leaving O’Leary’s. Without looking up again he lurched away from the fence. The next thing he knew, he was pushing open the door of his apartment.

  *

  Daniel lay on his bed and stared at the dingy white plaster with its sags and cracks and stains. His ears were ringing. Sleep eluded
him, his mind meandering down empty paths. His mouth had Saharan aspirations. He worked his throat, swallowed. Finally he got up and shuffled into the bathroom. Bare feet planted on the cold tile, he leaned over the sink and slurped at cold, metallic-tasting tap water. He heard a voice conducted down the airshaft and cranked the tap off. A girl reciting a nursery rhyme, that sing-songy cadence. But it was not a child’s voice. Daniel turned to the window and raised the sash. Counter-weights knocked inside the frame. A gray concrete wall faced him, so close he could almost reach out and touch it. The voice stopped. Below was a forlorn slab. He craned around and looked up. At the same time a head stuck out of the window on the next floor. A young, round-faced girl looked down at him, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. She was very pale and serious, her shoulder length black hair hanging straight down.

  Daniel said, “Hi,” in a phlegmy voice.

  “I thought I was all alone,” the girl replied then withdrew from sight and closed her window.

  *

  He slept into the afternoon and awoke with a headache. The sight of the unpacked, cluttered, and dusty apartment depressed him. Upon moving out of the Ballard house he’d taken two week’s vacation. He wanted to settle into his new life alone, to establish himself in his new environment. But the interruption of the work routine left him prey to wounded maunderings and depression. The drinking had gotten on top of him. He knew he had pushed Nancy’s last button. The button’s name was Julie. But he had only wanted Julie so long as he couldn’t have her. Instead he achieved what he had really craved all along: to be totally alone. He’d even given up the girl on the internet, the one Nancy never did find out about. Daniel’s isolation imperative throbbed as though infused with cosmic energy, perfectly accomplishing his estrangement. He’d felt this way before, when he was fourteen, during his suicide summer. Nobody knew about that.