Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  Whatever its name was, the cat reacted to the sight of Daniel, darting around to the front of the apartment building.

  There is no fucking cat, Daniel thought wildly.

  He started to follow Mo anyway but made it only as far as the tree. He fell against it, the rough bark digging into his cheek. The rain was drowning him. He thought of his good bed, the covers pulled up, the television soothing with the familiar ghosts of his past. Up there is where he belonged. He raised his head. On the second floor a dim figure stepped back from the window.

  Follow the cat.

  He lurched away from the tree, came around the front of the building. Mo/Fritz was gone. Beyond the dark veil of rain a vague, muted light persisted. Daniel stepped toward the light . . . and encountered a fence. Chain-link. Summoning reserves of strength he hoisted himself up and over, ripping his shirt on a sharp twist of metal. He fell to the other side, rolled and stood up, and first the rain and then even the sound of rain fell way. He held his hand up, palm outward against the brilliant August sun. Time dilation, he thought, remembering some science fiction movie. A sign attached to the fence announced the building’s future demolition. It wasn’t his building. Little wet paw prints tracked away on the white sidewalk. Daniel began to follow them, bare feet slapping the hot paving. And then the prints vanished before his eyes, and his clothes were dry, and he was just a raggedy man staggering along, voices mumbling in his head.

  *

  He lived on 1st Avenue. His home was a broken-down cardboard box that had once held a 46-inch plasma television set. He sat on the box and waited for people to drop coins in the old Starbucks cup. A certain number of passersby did so, and they were his tenuous web of human connection. Most people ignored him, though. And even those who paused, because he looked as though he had once been a normal person, a nice man, a down on his luck man, were eventually repelled when he told them about his cat and the saucer people.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said, when coins rattled into his little cup. “I have a cat to feed, you know.”

  There was no cat. Daniel knew he was crazy, and he wished someone would lead him back to his senses.

  *

  Twilight was upon the world, and he was afraid. He dragged his cardboard into the recessed doorway of an Army-Navy surplus store. Nights were bad. Wherever he huddled he was alone and could feel the slaughterhouse draft, the opening of the Sleeve, the dreadful invitation formulating in his mind.

  “Dan Porter, is that you?”

  Daniel looked up. A tall, wide man in a sport coat a size too small stood above him. He had a potato nose.

  “Jimmy Bair,” Daniel said.

  Bair crouched beside him. “My God. Flynn told me he saw you. I told him he was out of his fucking mind. Look at you.”

  “You were right,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “The alien satellites and their invisible Hate Rays, for one thing. Only they’re Lonely rays, too. Jesus Christ, Jimmy, they’re ruining the world. They’re replacing us.”

  Jimmy Bair nodded but he looked sad.

  “Sure, and don’t I know it,” he said.

  “You’re the one who warned me.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jimmy reached out and touched Daniel’s hand. Daniel pulled the hand away.

  “I—I don’t like to be touched,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s part of it. They mess with our minds. They want us to be isolated, so we’ll go and they can take over.”

  “If you say so, Danny.”

  Tears welled up in Daniel’s eyes. None of it was true. He wanted to get better. “Thank God you’re here, Jimmy. You don’t really believe it all, do you?”

  “I do.” Jimmy Bair smiled. Then he poked at Daniel with his fingers, not touching him, but almost touching him, and when Daniel cowered back, whimpering, Jimmy Bair’s smile got wider.

  Alone with an Inconvenient Companion

  May I join you?”

  Douglas Fulcher looked at the woman, trying to detect whether her face was real. The subdued light in the hotel bar didn’t make such a determination easy.

  “Sure,” he said, not wanting her to sit, not wanting to be with anyone, but unable to resist his compulsions, either. Not even at this late and final hour. They had been the only two people sitting by themselves.

  She pulled the chair out opposite him, sat down, extended her hand.

  “I’m Lori. I’m with the In-Gen convention? I’ve been watching you, trying to figure out if you’re part of our group.”

  He put his fork down (he’d been enjoying his last meal, a Cobb Salad) and shook her hand.

  “Doug,” he said. “With the Cow-Boy convention.”

  She laughed, her voice a bit rough, like somebody had given her esophagus a light scuffing with a Brillo pad. She looked about half his age, which would make her twenty-five or so. Her hair was a flaming yellow dye job. A good flaming yellow dye job, but phony nevertheless. A come-on. Like an ad, or one of those direct government advisories that shoot out of thin air, admonishing you to buckle up, vote, wear a condom, recycle, rat on your neighbor. But what really bothered him about this girl was her face, which was too beautiful.

  “Intrinsic Genetics,” she said.

  “I know. That was just my A.J.R.”

  “A Jay Are?”

  “Automatic Joke Response.”

  “I see, very cute.”

  He smiled, which felt like a rictus but probably appeared okay, and they looked at each other across a gulf that only Doug was aware of.

  “You’re not wearing a name tag,” he said.

  “Neither are you.”

  “But I’m not an injun,” he said.

  “Maybe I’m not, either. Maybe I just said that to start the conversation.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  He laughed, but not like he meant it, though he did, a little. Which surprised him.

  “I’m not with any convention,” he said. “I used to go to every one I could wrangle my company into paying for. But I’m just staying here now because I like this hotel. I remembered it.”

  “Are you on vacation?”

  “I’m traveling,” he said, after a moment.

  “Let’s have a margarita,” Lori said. “I’m buying.”

  He didn’t want a drink.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He didn’t want a drink, but having one he knew he would have another, and perhaps another. Which he did. Now he stood halfway across the gulf on a bridge of frozen green booze. But only halfway. It’s as far as he ever got, or ever would get. Lori was explaining to him about the fascinating work Intrinsic Genetics was doing on the cyborg project, attempting to invest analog brains with human response characteristics, growing cortical cells in labs and “infecting” the cyborg tissue with them.

  “Jesus Christ,” Doug said. “Can that actually be done?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you,” he said, joking around, but a part of him actually wondering. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that a percentage of the human population was in reality not human.

  “It would be par for the course if everybody was a cyborg,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” She sounded genuinely interested, not pissed off that he wasn’t onboard with the cyborg thing.

  “Just a theory I have.”

  “What’s the theory?” She smiled, flirtatious and interested.

  “You’ll think I’m crazy,” Doug said.

  “Crazy is okay. It’s better than regimented conformity, which is what you usually get. I never wear my stupid name tag, because when I’m out of town, even for a convention, I don’t really want to meet the kind of people I work with all year.”

  He stopped tearing his coaster into tiny bits and looked into Lori’s eyes, which he could see clearly from his suddenly advanced position more than halfway across the gulf.

  “Ev
erything wants to be a mechanism,” he said.

  “A mechanism?”

  “I mean in the world, it’s all about becoming part of the mechanism.”

  She looked at him with a neutral expression. He felt on the verge of saying something significant. Something true, something outside the mechanism. All he required was the tiniest encouragement. He got it: Lori smiled and said, “Go ahead, it sounds interesting.”

  He cleared his throat and leaned on the table. “They come at you,” he said, “with the deliberate intent to de-humanize you, turn you into a thing, a responsive object. A slave consumer. They want you to respond to their marketing, their salesmanship, their evil politics, their Draconian health tactics. All of that. Even your own parents want you to be a responsive mechanism. A good little mechanism. If you aren’t good enough, they’ll let you know, don’t worry. They’ll move you out of the private Sector school and into the God forsaken Public Sector. Not that the public Sector schools were always God forsaken. God only forsook them after the ruling power structure did. Anyway, it’s all designed to get them into your head and you out of your mind.”

  “My,” Lori said.

  He sat back, slightly embarrassed. “I told you you’d think I was crazy.”

  “I—”

  “Excuse me a minute. Bathroom.”

  He stood up, the vertical movement immediately informing him of the depth of his inebriation.

  “I want to ask you something,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Your face. It’s a SuperM job, isn’t it.”

  They were like masks, those SuperM makeup treatments. In fact they had to be applied by qualified medical-paras, and they did more than enhance your natural looks. Much more. All Douglass knew was that it was unlikely a damned geneticist would naturally come by the kind of looks Lori displayed. She looked up at him, seeming to weigh her response.

  “Yes,” she finally said.

  “Be right back,” he said.

  *

  In the Men’s Room he unzipped and began to relieve himself of the high-octane margaritas. He felt derailed, subverted from his original intent, which was to blow a hole in the middle of the emerging mechanism within him.

  The urinal made a strange clicking sound, like some exotic insect, then spoke to him.

  “Good evening, Mr. Fulcher,” it said. “As a complimentary service of the Desert Palm Hotel your waste is being analyzed.”

  Jesus Christ. Had it come to that? Douglas looked around, even though he knew he was the only one present.

  “Your privacy is our main concern here at the Desert Palm—” The urinal’s voice was female, upbeat. It sounded Midwestern-sensible. He pictured a healthy corn-fed blonde (no dye job), sweet-faced (no guess-what-I-really-look-like SuperM job), in practical clothes (no slit skirt and high heels). “—so I am speaking to you in a narrowly directed aural cone that only you can hear.”

  Douglas looked up. On the ceiling was a thing like a brass tulip the size of a man’s thumb.

  The voice continued: “The results of your urinalysis will be available on your room’s World-Window and a copy will be attached to your bill at the conclusion of your stay with us. The hotel of course assumes no responsibility for any legal ramifications should your waste contain one or more banned substances.” The urinal chittered like a doped squirrel. “There we go! Your complimentary urinalysis is complete, Mr. Fulcher. I recommend that you don’t drive at this time, as your blood alcohol rating is a whopping point zero three.”

  “Right,” Doug mumbled.

  “Do have a pleasant stay with us,” the urinal said.

  “Uh.”

  “And on a personal note, why don’t you try to get some sleep tonight, Douglas.”

  He had zipped up and was starting to step back, but paused.

  On a personal note?

  He leaned back into the “aural cone.”

  “What did you say?”

  A large man in a blue button down shirt with a name tag clipped to the breast pocket, an injun conventioneer that Douglas had noticed in the bar but had not heard enter the Men’s Room, stepped up to the next urinal and began to pee. The man glanced at him then looked straight ahead, intently, as if his true fortune was engraved on the tiled wall.

  *

  Back in the bar Douglas said, “The urinal told me I should get some sleep.”

  Lori smiled uncertainly. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I guess they’re even putting computers in the toilet now.”

  “It figures they would get around to it,” Lori said.

  “Told me I shouldn’t drive, either. When you get right down to it, that was a very solicitous urinal.”

  Lori nodded, smiling, being a sport.

  “I don’t think mine talks,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s just some of them.”

  The waitress showed up with two fresh margaritas, ordered by Lori while Douglas was gone. She put the drinks on the table. Douglas didn’t want his. Or he wanted it and didn’t want it at the same time.

  Lori immediately sipped her drink, raising the big saucer glass of slushy green booze with the fingertips of both hands and dipping her face down to meet it halfway. She set the glass on the table again, said, “My turn, back in a minute. I’ll let you know if the Lady’s Room has anything to say.”

  “Great,” Douglas said, noticing the salt crystals embedded in her thick SuperM lipstick application. He watched her walk away. She had a nice swing in her backyard, but that was less interesting than it should have been. He sensed the mechanism of his compulsion and rejected it. There had been too many women in too many hotel bars, all of them finally adding up to a big empty zero. As his marriage had started to bend under the weight of his necessary estrangement he’d began to travel, attending every convention he could wrangle his company, Boston Cell-Tech, into paying for. And if there weren’t any conventions, no valid reason to travel, he pretended there was a valid reason and went anyway, burning vacation and sick leave, sometimes traveling to distant cities, sometimes simply booking a room in a local hotel. To be away. He would call Sara, his wife, to inhabit the familiarity of their complicated estrangement. Alone but not alone, in anonymous hotel rooms. There but not there. After the compulsory sexual liaisons began the marriage collapsed, stranding him between zeros. That’s when the bad thing happened, when he tried to force Sara to be real. Not a good idea. They had taken him away, tweaked his brain chemistry, subjected him to compulsory therapy. In short, they had commenced construction of the mechanism; but it hadn’t worked, and when they released him and Sara rejected him, he went on following his compulsions.

  Now, three years later, he was finally done. He let the concept hover a moment or two, then he folded a couple of bills and tucked them under the edge of the coaster, got up and left the bar, quickly, bumping into a big tropical plant in his haste to be gone. The plant rattled its fronds at him.

  *

  A tiny, green jewel winked on the wall opposite the foot of the bed, where Douglas lay on top of the covers in his underwear. A blue steel Parabellum rested on the pillow next to him, like a random piece of the secret world mechanism that had mistakenly fallen into the visible spectrum and landed on his bed.

  Doug reached over, but not for the gun. He touched the remote, and the World-Window, five feet across, opened with Microsoft’s familiar blue sky and clouds, which resolved into the Hotel’s Logo. A busy, animated menu followed, presenting a staggering number of entertainment choices—none of which interested him. There were no incoming messages.

  Douglas slumped back. He had been hoping for the results of his complimentary urinalysis. And not merely a dry, voiceless presentation of cholesterol ADL and DPL, blood sugar levels, and all that. Perhaps after the breakdown there would have been a short paragraph advising him to consult with a qualified medical professional (as if any of them were qualified) regarding some of his more questionable numbers. For instance, was he perilously close to receiving another
Compulsory Consumer Restriction Tag from the US Department of Citizen Health Oversight? Douglas was in reasonably good shape for a fifty year old, but almost everybody started accumulating CCR’s around his age.

  On a personal note . . .

  Really, though, he had been hoping for the voice. He called it up in his mind, and also the accompanying picture he had formed, the Midwest girl, fresh beauty, plain and sensible, somehow outside the trans-urban mechanization that was rapidly overcoming the rest of the world, wanting nothing more than to examine his waste for signs of trouble.

  Lying back, he turned his head and gazed at the Parabellem on the other pillow.

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  Douglas pushed himself up on his elbow, startled.

  There was another knock. He slipped out of bed and padded quietly across the room in his boxers. He listened at the door, but he wasn’t a bat, he couldn’t broadcast sonar waves or whatever.

  He flirted with the door handle, caressing it with his fingers. If he opened the door would he find Lori from the bar, a hotel employee, room service, the interruption of zero time? He felt between everything. Between gigantic zeros, the alien environments of his empty house and the hotel. His own fault it was empty, of course. Now he was always alone with an inconvenient companion: Himself.

  Had there really been a knock? He began to doubt it. Finally he turned the handle down and pulled the heavy door inward and stuck his head out into the empty, anonymous hotel corridor.

  *

  Three-thirty a.m. Douglas crossed the lobby. He was wearing shoes but no socks, unpressed slacks and a white, sleeveless T-shirt, not tucked in. The plastic-tipped ends of his untied shoelaces clicked on the red stone floor. The night clerk looked up but said nothing when he passed. Doug noted the vacancy in the man’s eyes. Cyborg?

  He entered the Men’s Room, the one right outside the closed bar. Chrome and white porcelain gleamed. He approached the same urinal he’d used earlier. This time it made no special clicking-chittering sounds, and no sweet, solicitous voice spoke to him within the narrow privacy of an aural cone.