Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  He moved to the next urinal, and the next, and then he was out of analyzable waste. One per customer, he supposed. He’d only wanted to hear the voice again, the way he used to call his ex before she was his ex, to feel the constraining safety of her voice.

  He gazed forlornly up at the aural cone gizmo. He reached for it but couldn’t quite touch the little metal tulip, which was disguised to look like a fire sprinkler.

  *

  In the lobby he approached the desk clerk, a young cyborgish man with wispy, prematurely vanishing hair.

  “Yes, sir, may I help you?”

  Douglas nodded. “About that complimentary urine thing—”

  The desk clerk’s eyebrows went up a little, but just a little.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand?” he said.

  “The urinalysis. It’s mostly the voice I’m interested in. I wonder if you have the same voice speaking in other devices around here.”

  “Voice?”

  “Yes, you know. The voice that tells you about the urine test.”

  The clerk looked like he really wanted to help but didn’t know how.

  “Never mind,” Douglas said.

  “If there’s any—”

  “No, never mind.”

  *

  He was crossing the courtyard back to his wing of the hotel for the last time when a different but still familiar voice spoke out of the dark:

  “Hello.”

  He stopped. In the deep moon shadow under a lemon tree the tip of a cigarette glowed then dimmed. Someone only faintly visible was sitting at one of the courtyard’s glass-topped tables, smoking.

  “Lori?” he said.

  “You don’t have to talk to me,” she said. “I saw you walk by a few minutes ago, and then just now. I didn’t mean to say anything. You obviously were done with me earlier.”

  He approached the table.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t feel good.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “No. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Under the lemon tree, up close, she was still faceless. After a moment of hesitation she said:

  “I guess so.”

  He pulled the wicker chair out and seated himself. Lori drew on her cigarette, and in the brief breathing glow of its coal her face partially emerged. She looked different; had she removed the SuperM makeup? Could she remove it? Or had she merely been crying?

  “Cigarette?” she said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I should quit. I’m CCR’d on real nicotine.”

  “That smells real.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  She laughed a raspy, raw-throated laugh, her voice degraded, not at all the sweet modulations of the urinal voice. At least she was real. A real human being, not a synthesized personality or digital recording of an actress, whatever it was, some voice calculated to tempt his romantic view of mythical innocence and so relax him and allow the easy and free emptying of his bladder.

  “I get them black market,” Lori continued, meaning the cigarettes. “Nobody checking my status, looking for cancer markers. I hate that crap.”

  “Me too,” Douglas said.

  “The way we’re always being watched and taken care of and told what to do. Sometimes I’m sick of it, though I know it’s good for us. I mean they’re just trying to keep us safe and healthy, right?”

  “Maybe,” Douglas said. “I need to ask you something.”

  “All right.”

  He scooted his chair up, leaned toward her. He didn’t mind the cigarette smoke. He liked it. It made her human, a fallible human being subject to whims and compulsions that weren’t necessarily good for her.

  “Were you telling me the truth about the cyborgs?”

  “What about them?”

  “That there aren’t any yet, because they can’t do the brain cell thing.”

  “Just in a few labs, and they’re pretty clunky at this stage, more like retarded refrigerators.”

  “You couldn’t mistake one for a hotel clerk, for instance?”

  “You were right,” Lori said.

  “What about?”

  “Earlier you said I’d think you were crazy. I do.”

  She laughed. After a moment he joined her, faking it at first (the laugh mechanism) then feeling it genuinely, the absurdity of what he had said, of her reaction, but still, in a way, believing what he had said. Doctors weren’t always right. Especially when they make you endure their asinine probing questions and injections, carting you off on a platinum CCR rolling tag with mandatory restraints. They could make you appear mad, despite the truth you understood. Douglass had never disputed the validity of appearances. But appearances could and did hide truths. What if Lori herself were a cyborg? What if they were tracking him, or, more realistically, she could be one of many planted in various cities with access to a vast database of potential troublemakers. I’ve been watching you, she had said. Then Doug let it collapse, the paranoid lunacy of the idea.

  “You know what?” he said. “I really like you. And I don’t think I’ve liked anybody in a long, long time.”

  “I’m honored.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. He needed her not to be.

  “I’m glad you were out here,” he said, “waiting for me.”

  “I was just having a smoke before bed.”

  “It was you at my door a little while ago, too, wasn’t it?”

  She brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, making the tip glow.

  “At your door?” she said. “You never even told me your room number. We didn’t get that far.”

  “Anyway,” he said.

  “What is your room number?” she asked.

  He told her.

  “Is it nice?”

  “It’s exactly like all the other rooms.” He meant all the rooms he’d ever been in throughout the totality of his existence.

  Lori leaned way over to the side and snubbed her cigarette out in the dirt at the base of the lemon tree.

  “Can we go up and see it, Doug?”

  “Yes.”

  *

  In the elevator he noticed her face. It was still beautiful. SuperM beautiful. He was disappointed. Under the shadow he’d been mistaken. She smiled at him, and he didn’t know who she was. She pressed against him, and he kissed her, because he knew that was next. It was a stale smoke and booze kiss. Her tongue moved in his mouth, a thick sluggish thing, like something that lived in moist earth. The elevator stopped, not at his floor, and they broke apart. A sleepy-looking man, his tie pulled loose, stepped into the car.

  The doors slid shut. Douglas looked at Lori’s reflection in the polished metal surface. Her face was distorted, SuperM useless, stretched and warped out of pleasing proportion. He preferred it that way because it was truer to the way things really were.

  *

  She went in the bathroom, and he lay on the bed, waiting. After a while she came out. She was wearing a black bra and panties, her body blandly appealing in lamp light.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, not meaning it yet, but thinking he might later. He needed to mean it.

  “You’re dressed,” she said.

  “So far.”

  She straddled him and began rubbing her hands over his chest and down his body. The contact stirred him. He lightly slid his fingertips up her bare arms. She squirmed her shoulders, making her breasts jiggle.

  “That tickles.”

  He stopped.

  “You know,” he said, “I went back to the Men’s Room but she wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Lori paused. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “The urine analyzer thing.”

  She snorted, and resumed caressing his body through his cotton T-shirt.

  “You almost had me believing that,” she said, suddenly tugging his shirt up to expose his skin.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The hotel doesn’t have anything like that. I asked.”

  He frowned a
t her.

  She pinched his nipple, which he didn’t like. “Hey,” she said, “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. God knows.”

  “God knows,” he said, then snapped his head to the side, afraid that she would noticed the anomalous component of the secret mechanism on the other pillow, but it wasn’t there; he’d put it under the bed before he went downstairs. Lori grabbed his jaw and turned his face toward her again and kissed him then licked his chest and bit his nipple. Again with the nipple. She liked it a little rough. He could understand that. Sometimes you had to make it hurt to get a true response. He understood that, but Sara hadn’t.

  Later, in the last balancing strokes of their love-making, when he could have fallen either into fleeting transcendence or the gravity of failure, he pictured the voice of his imagination, the Midwestern farm girl, and how she would hold him so dear within her body while a warm country breeze from the open window caressed his back.

  *

  Afterward they lay together. He turned the lights off but he could see her face, the phony perfection of it, in the dim poolside light that filtered through the curtains. He reached out and touched her cheek with his fingertips, traced her jaw line, lightly brushed her lips.

  “Do you ever think about having this removed,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were open, staring at him.

  “I mean do you always think you need it, the SuperM job? What if you were just yourself?”

  “Doug?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t have a SuperM job. This is my real face.”

  He didn’t believe her. “Oh,” he said.

  “I mean it. I told you that about the SuperM because my face scares men, I think.”

  “Scares them?”

  “Men are intimidated by my looks. They always have been. It’s not my fault. It’s them, they think I’m snooty or superior. It’s lonely for me, believe it or not. Sometimes I tell men that it’s a SuperM face, and it lets them relax, like they’re with a ‘normal’ girl with insecurities and everything. I do have insecurities, of course. I know it’s crazy. But I really am a normal girl. They should make an anti-SuperM face, for girls who don’t want to be objects anymore.”

  “Nobody would buy them,” Doug said.

  “Not even me,” she said.

  *

  It became apparent that she planned to stay the whole night. Douglas made some internal adjustments and accepted the situation. He watched the green jewel light of the World-Window until Lori’s breathing assumed the rhythm of sleep, and then he reached over and turned on the lamp. Soft light lay over her perfect features. Well, not perfect, exactly. No SuperM job was without flaws, of course. But there were never obvious flaws such as these incipient crow’s feet. Douglas’s fingers hovered over Lori’s face, her eyes, which were nictitating in REM sleep already. Are you real, he thought. The voice, he was now prepared to believe, had not been real. The knock on the door was still an open question. It could have been a distraction of his mind, trying to divert him away from the gun; the mechanism attempting to save itself. It was possible, he admitted it. He had to learn to control the false things his mind sometimes told him. Control them without the terrible drugs. He could do it.

  All he needed to go on was one real, genuine thing in the world. One person he could touch. One voice that wasn’t only in his head. One connection to despoil the chaotic impulse of the gun.

  He touched Lori’s forehead.

  SuperM had a stretched, almost plasticized feel at various crucial points where it transformed the more recalcitrant imperfections of physiognomy. The worry lines, crow’s feet, under-eye pouches. Now his fingertips discovered a truth:

  Lori’s face was real.

  Her eyes fluttered briefly. She yawned, made a deep hmmmm sound, did not wake.

  Douglass fitted himself to her body, allowing himself to do that, to cross the gulf, resting his head upon her chest where it met her shoulder. He felt himself finally begin to relax out of his fear. Tears seeped from his eyes. He was tempted to wake Lori and tell her he knew she was real. Instead he tried to relax, allow sleep to draw him down, down to the last peaceful grotto, where Lori’s heartbeat filled his void.

  Suddenly he lifted his head, wide awake and separate again. He frowned, lowered his head, placing his ear directly over Lori’s chest.

  He held his breath.

  Under the steady, seemingly organic, beating of Lori’s heart, he detected, faintly, faintly, a mechanical clockwork ticking.

  What You Are About to See

  It sat in a cold room.

  Outside that room a Marine handed me an insulated suit. I slipped it on over my street clothes. The Marine punched a code into a numeric keypad attached to the wall. The lock snapped open on the heavy door, the Marine nodded, I entered.

  Andy McCaslin, who looked like an over-dressed turnip in his insulted suit, greeted me and shook my hand. I’d known Andy for twenty-five years, since our days in Special Forces. Now we both worked for the N.S.A., though you could say my acronym was lowercase. I operated on the margins of the Agency, a contract player, an accomplished extractor of information from reluctant sources. My line of work required a special temperament, which I possessed and which Andy most assuredly did not. He was a true believer in the rightness of the cause, procedure, good guys and bad. I was like Andy’s shadow twin. He stood in the light, casting something dark and faceless, which was me.

  It remained seated—if you could call that sitting. Its legs, all six of them, coiled and braided like a nest of lavender snakes on top of which the alien’s frail torso rested. That torso resembled the upper body of a starving child, laddered ribs under parchment skin and a big stretched belly full of nothing. It watched us with eyes like two thumbnail chips of anthracite.

  “Welcome to the new world order,” Andy said, his breath condensing in little gray puffs.

  “Thanks. Anything out of Squidward yet?”

  “Told us it was in our own best interests to let him go, then when we wouldn’t it shut up. Only ‘shut up’ isn’t quite accurate, since it doesn’t vocalize. You hear the words in your head, or sometimes there’s just a picture. It was the picture it put in the secretary’s head that’s got everybody’s panties in a knot.”

  “What picture?”

  “Genocidal carnage on a planet-wide scale.”

  “Sounds friendly enough.”

  “There’s a backroom theory that Squidward was just showing the secretary his own secret wet dream. Anyway, accepting its assertions of friendliness at face value is not up to me. Off the record, though, my intuition tells me its intentions are benign.”

  “You look tired, Andy.”

  “I feel a little off,” he said.

  “Does Squidward always stare like that?”

  “Always.”

  “You’re certain it still has the ability to communicate? Maybe the environment’s making it sick.”

  “Not according to the medical people. Of course, nothing’s certain, except that Squidward is a non-terrestrial creature possessed of an advanced technology. Those facts are deductible. By the way, the advanced technology in question is currently bundled in a hanger not far from here. What’s left looks like a weather balloon fed through a shredder. Ironic?”

  “Very.” I hunched my shoulders. “Cold in here.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Squidward likes it that way, I bet.”

  “Loves it.”

  “Have you considered warming things up?”

  Andy gave me a sideways look. “You thinking of changing the interro-gation protocols?”

  “If I am it wouldn’t be in that direction.”

  “No CIA gulag in Romania, eh.”

  “Never heard of such a thing.”

  “I’d like to think you hadn’t.”

  Actually I was well familiar with the place, only it was in Guatemala, not Romania. At its mention a variety of horrors arose in my mind. Some of them
had faces attached. I regarded them dispassionately, as I had when I saw them in actuality all those years ago, and then I replaced them in the vault from which their muffled screams troubled me from time to time.

  Andy’s face went slack and pale.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. All of a sudden I feel like I’m not really standing here.”

  He smiled thinly, and I thought he was going to faint. But as I reached out to him I suddenly felt dizzy myself, afloat, contingent. I swayed, like balancing on the edge of a tall building. Squidward sat in its coil of snakes, staring. . . .

  *

  Now return to a particular watershed moment in the life of one Brian Kinney, a.k.a: me. Two years ago. If years mean anything in the present context.

  I was a lousy drunk. Lack of experience. My father, on the other hand, had been an accomplished drunk. Legendary, almost. As a consequence of his example I had spent my life cultivating a morbid sobriety, which my wife managed to interrupt by an act of infidelity. Never mind that she needed to do it before she completely drowned in my legendary uncommunicative self-isolation. The way I viewed things at the time: she betrayed me for no reason other than her own wayward carnality. You’d think I’d have known better; I’d spent my nasty little career understanding and manipulating the psychology of others.

  Anyway, I went and got stinking drunk, which was easy enough. It was the drive home that was the killer. The speedometer needle floated between blurred pairs of numbers. By deliberate force of will (I was hell on force of will) I could bring the numbers into momentary clarity, but that required dropping my gaze from the roller-coaster road sweeping under my headlight beams—not necessarily a good idea. Four. Five. Was that right? What was the limit?

  Good question.

  What was the limit?

  I decided it wasn’t the four whiskeys with beer chasers. No, it was the look on Connie’s face when I waved the surveillance transcript at her like a starter’s flag (Race you to the end of the marriage; go!). Not contrite, guilty apologetic, remorseful. Not even angry, outraged, indignant.