Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Sudoku by Ruhan Zhao.

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  This month's second SF Sudoku is of intermediate difficulty and is solved using the letters EIMOPRSTW. Rearrange the following letters for a famous SF writer: E, I, M, O, P, R, S, T, and W. The answers for both the Sudoku puzzles and the anagrams can be found below our classified ads. The solution to each puzzle is independent of the others. We've inverted the answers to the anagrams so you don't come upon them by accident.

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  Sudoku by Lee Martin.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  GIRL IN THE EMPTY APARTMENT

  by Jack Skillingstead

  The present story is loosely connected to a group of tales the author has been writing about the consciousness evolution of the human race. He tells us, “I think of these as ‘Harbinger’ stories, and a couple of them have appeared in Asimov's already. Like those others, ‘Girl in the Empty Apartment’ is a ‘true’ story—truth being that borderland between experience and hallucination."

  Someone was going to die.

  My name is Joe Skadan. These were the days of phantom invaders, unexplained disappearances, and Homeland insecurities. I stood in the back of the Context Theater on Capital Hill, Seattle, nursing a few insecurities of my own; the bottle of crappy Zinfandel hung loosely in my left fist, demolished over the duration of the third act. Me and the bottle. Free tickets guaranteed there were only two empty seats in the house. Mine and the one my girlfriend was supposed to have occupied. Cheryl hadn't come, though, and I couldn't take sitting next to that empty chair.

  The third act ended with the monologist (my cranky alter-ego) putting his hand over the gun on his desk while the lights adjusted, turning him into a dark cipher. Artsy as hell. The prop gun was actually my own .38, minus the ammo clip and none in the chamber. Kind of a family heirloom, stepfather-to-son. The question is left hanging: Who's he going to use that gun on? This character's interior darkness had become a filter that warped the entire world.

  A beat of silence followed the final lighting adjustment. It was hot and stuffy in the theater. Programs rustled. Somebody coughed. Then the applause started, thank God. There were even a few appreciative whistles. The lights came up and the cast took their bows.

  I slumped against the wall and breathed out. The Only Important Philosophical Question, my first fully staged play, had successfully concluded its maiden performance in front of a live audience. I was twenty-six years old.

  Fifty or so sweaty audience members shuffled past me. The Context had been a transmission shop in a former incarnation, and not a particularly well ventilated one. I hopped onstage and grabbed my gun, put it in a paper bag, then wandered outside for a smoke. In those days I smoked like crazy—the days after the advent of the Harbingers. Or, as I preferred to think of them: the mass hallucination. One morning the world woke up with a headache. Dreams became strange, disturbing, inhabited by “Harbingers,” which the dreamers occasionally described as conscious trees, or something. Rumors abounded. The juiciest being that large numbers of people had disappeared without a trace.

  Some of the audience lingered in front of the theater, talking about the play. Mostly they seemed impressed by all that stage blood in the second act fantasy. It was weird to hear strangers discussing my work. I didn't much like it, and wished I could stuff the play back inside my head, where it had festered in its lonely way for years.

  As the last of the audience wandered off, I noticed a girl sitting on a patch of grass looking at the moon. Tear tracks shone on her cheeks like little snail trails. She was only about eighteen. Cheryl's failure to show had cut deep, and my instinct was to slink off and lick the wound. Instead I asked this girl if she was all right.

  “Oh, yes. It's just so beautiful."

  I flicked ash, adjusted my glasses, followed her gaze. “The moon?"

  “Sure. I've been staying in the Arctic Circle up there."

  “Doesn't that get cold?"

  “It's not that kind of Arctic Circle."

  She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the heel of her hand and stood up—rather gracefully, considering the dress she wore. A tarnished gold fabric, intricately pleated, that wound around her like flowing water, or the ridged skin of some exotic tree. She had a generous mouth and kindly eyes.

  “You're Joe Skadan,” she said.

  “Yeah."

  “You wrote the play."

  I nodded. “How did you know me?"

  “You're famous on the moon."

  “All right."

  “Can I walk with you, Joe?"

  “If you want."

  “I'm Nichole."

  In my mind I depersonalized her with a character tag: MOON GIRL. I did this sort of thing more and more frequently, estranging myself from the world. The part of me that resisted this estrangement grew weaker by the day. Like the child I'd once been, locked in the closet, weeping from belt lashes, subdued and enfeebled by darkness, listening to the sound of Charlie, my stepdad, stomping off to work on Mom next. Before things turned bad she used to swoon about Charlie's blue eyes, “Just like Paul Newman's!” Charlie liked to fold that belt over and snap it together with a whip-crack sound, to let me know he was coming. Where there's smoke there's fire, he used to say, accusing me endlessly of transgressions I hadn't even considered.

  MOON GIRL and I walked along. It was one of those pellucid Seattle evenings, the royal sky inviting stars to join the moon. Mechanically, I asked, “What did you think of the show?"

  “It was different. Did Kafka really say that, about the only important philosophical question being whether or not you should kill yourself ?"

  “I think so, but I never could verify the quote. Maybe I made it up. Who cares? I thought about calling it, What's So Grand About Guignol? but that seemed too jokey, though it fit with the bloody stuff."

  “It's Woody Allen meets Taxi Driver,” she said.

  I looked at her. That description, same wording, was scribbled in a notebook back in my apartment. Coincidences made me uncomfortable.

  “Maybe I'm your secret muse,” MOON GIRL said, as if she knew what I was thinking.

  “You don't even know me."

  “Or I do, just a little."

  “That dress is strange,” I said, to change the subject.

  “Does it seem familiar?"

  “I don't know."

  The dress almost shimmered, exuding energy. Or maybe I'd had too much wine, or I was a poor judge of energy exudations. Who knows?

  “You've had dreams,” she said.

  “Everybody dreams."

  I thought of my mother's birch, a little tree she'd claimed as her own even though it just happened to be growing in the backyard of the cruddy duplex we'd rented. I'd been dreaming about it for weeks now. The tree had been a private thing between my mother and me, excluding Charlie. While he was at work we sat under it for “Elvis picnics,” which meant peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and Cokes. I still remember the checkered pattern of the blanket and the way the leaf shade swayed over us; a portion of my secret landscape. Another was the piece of sky I could see from my bedroom. Sometimes I'd put my comic down and stare at the night of moon and stars, and it was like a promise of freedom.

  Arctic Circle. Not the polar regions but a seventies vintage burger franchise Mom used to work in when she was a teenager. My real dad, another swoony teen, would come in and “make eyes” at her. The way I pictured it was like a scene from Happy Days. Safe and innocent as a chocolate malt. I have only a vague memory of him, and I may even have made that up. Mom had been a romantic all right. The freeway accident that killed my dad took a lot of that out of her, though. And Charlie took the rest. Arctic Circle. I really hated coincidences.

  “It's a Neodandi,” MOON GIRL said, referring to her dress. “The designer had dreams, too. Now you're kind of having the same dream. The world is changing, Joe. What do yo
u think of the Harbingers?"

  “I don't think of them."

  We had arrived at the corner of Broadway and East Thomas. A man I'd tagged HOMELESS VET sat on the sidewalk in his usual spot, like a deflated thing. His beard grew almost to his muddy eyes. He thrust an old Starbucks cup at us, and a few coins rattled in the bottom.

  “I served my country,” he said, his standard line.

  Nichole dropped in a quarter.

  “Anyway, see you around,” I said to her. I didn't want her following me all the way home.

  “Good night, Joe."

  “Yeah, good night."

  I snapped the remainder of my cigarette to the sidewalk. HOMELESS VET reached for it, pinched the lit end between thumb and forefinger. My mind began to deconstruct him: nails like cracked chips of yellow-stained plastic, wiry hair and beard, moist eyes nested in wrinkles—separate labeled parts, not a man at all. I halted the process by an act of will. Once you take the homeless guy apart it's easy to keep going.

  The girl was halfway down the block in her crazy energy dress. Nichole. Unaccountably her name stuck, the objectifying MOON GIRL tag dropping away like a dead leaf.

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  Cheryl London called. I was sitting in the kitchen drinking a beer and watching a girl in the window of the building across the street. This girl, whom I'd tagged THE EXHIBITIONIST, liked to keep her blinds open while she dressed and undressed. Sometimes she lay topless on her bed reading magazines. Her performances lacked real carnality, though. The thing about THE EXHIBITIONIST was that she may not have existed. My mind played tricks on me all the time. Only they weren't good tricks like which cup is the pea under. I seemed to know too much about THE EXHIBITIONIST. Her window was probably thirty yards from my kitchen. Yet I could see details, some of which weren't even in my line of sight. I knew, for instance, that she had a Donnie Darko movie poster on the wall. Sometimes, lying in bed thinking about her, I wondered if she was a dream I was telling myself. I never had a girl in high school, though there was always one out of reach whose sweetness I longed for. I imagined the safe harbor of relationships, and denied them to myself almost pathologically. Nichole looked like the kind of girl I used to moon about. MOONGIRL. So did THE EXHIBITIONIST.

  Anyway, when I picked up the phone and heard Cheryl's voice I averted my gaze.

  “Are you busy?” she asked.

  “No. What's going on, where have you been?"

  “I'm at Six Arms. Meet me?"

  I walked downstairs with an unlit cigarette in the corner of my mouth. The building manager came out of his apartment and reminded me The Dublin was a non-smoking building.

  “It's not lit,” I said.

  THE MANAGER was a balding Swede with a thick gut. In the summer he wore wife-beater shirts that showed off his hairy shoulders. Occasionally I was late with the rent, and we were both cranky about it. He was the crankiest, though. I think he would have loved to evict me.

  “I smell smoke up there sometimes,” he said.

  “Not mine,” I said and pushed through the door.

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  She was sitting in a booth by the window, her hair like bleached silk in the bar light. Cheryl was my first and only girlfriend. We had met at the University. She had taken Introduction To Twentieth Century Theater as an elective, aced it, and returned her full attention to more serious matters. I barely pulled a C, then dropped out before the next semester. Cheryl now had a government job that required a secret clearance. Since the Harbinger Event it demanded more and more of her time. I sat across from her and lit a cigarette.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said.

  “You're welcome,” I said, the wrong way.

  “Let's try to be grownups. Please?"

  “Are you dumping me?"

  “Joe."

  “You're dumping me."

  She looked out the window at East Pine Street.

  My heart lugged like something too tired to continue. The sounds of the restaurant grated on my nerves, the music, voices barking, clatter of dishes from the kitchen. I looked through the reflection of Cheryl's face in the window.

  “We don't work,” she said. “We're too different."

  “When did you figure this out?"

  “I guess I've always known it."

  My stomach clenched.

  “Cheryl—"

  Finally she looked at me.

  “Sometimes we don't even seem to live on the same planet,” she said. “You don't have any friends. You stay up all night. I don't understand you anymore and I don't think I ever really did. It's like you're slipping away."

  “I'm right here."

  “I'm sorry, Joe. But there's something so wrong. I mean with you. I don't blame you for it. It's not your fault, I know that. But it is your fault if you don't do anything about it. You won't even see a therapist. And it could be even bigger than you think. Gerry says—"

  “Mr. Homeland."

  She had been mentioning some guy from a special division of Homeland Security. She seemed to think he was a fascinating son of a bitch.

  “This is too upsetting,” Cheryl said. “I have to go."

  She stood up.

  “Hey, wait a minute."

  I grabbed her wrist and started to rise from my chair. She pulled away.

  “Don't,” she said. “It's hard enough."

  She wouldn't meet my eyes. Then she was gone, walking out of the bar and my life. She was the only one I'd ever told about Charlie. I even showed her the scars like white worms on my body. Now I wished I hadn't. I sat back down. My hands were shaking. For hours I remained in that booth, smoking, drinking pints of Nitro Stout. The clatter and clamor of the bar jagged through me. The voices of people were like the barking and grunts of animals. I tried to fight this vision, but now I was fighting alone.

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  I had three days off and I spent them in my apartment. Charlie's .38 sat on the kitchen counter, a chrome plated object of meditation. Chekhov said if you display a gun in the first act it had better go off by the third. My first act started right after Charlie's third concluded. I had curled fetally in the closet where he'd thrown me after the latest beating. There was the usual shouting and screaming, then the first shot, followed by ringing silence. The coats and sweaters hanging over me were like animal pelts in the dark. Charlie was a hunter and I'd once watched him clumsily skin out a doe. When I vomited he grabbed me by the back of the neck, furious, and pushed my face into the reeking pelt. That blood stench. Charlie's smell.

  After the first shot he walked right up to the closet door in his heavy steel-toed factory boots. His breath was ragged. I waited, my knees drawn up, my chest aching. After a while he retreated back down the hall to the bedroom. A minute later there was a second discharge. I would have starved in that closet if a neighbor hadn't heard the shots and called the police. When they finally broke into our half of the duplex I wouldn't come out. They had to drag me from the closet. I was nine. In a way I never did come out.

  There had been a note, in Charlie's crooked scrawl: No choice. I'd spent the rest of my life pretending there were choices. Just to show him. But maybe there weren't after all. Maybe the self-determined life was as illusory as THE EXHIBITIONIST.

  Sunday night I drank the last Red Hook in my refrigerator, plugged a cigarette in my mouth, grabbed a lighter, and headed out for a smoke. I didn't even know what time it was.

  I was on the second floor at the end of the hall, next to a door that led to the open back stairs above the trash dumpsters. The apartment across the hall was empty and in the early stages of renovation. THE MANAGER was doing the work himself. Slowly. I suspected him of dragging out the job so he would have an excuse to hang around my floor.

  The door to the empty apartment opened, but it wasn't THE MANAGER. The weird girl I'd met the night of my play's opening stepped out. She had changed to Levi's and a white blouse, and she had a plastic trash bag in her right hand. I stared at her as I would a horned Cyclops.

&
nbsp; “Hi, Joe."

  I took the unlit cigarette out of my mouth.

  “It's Nichole, right?"

  “Right. I'm always surprising you, aren't I."

  “Uh-huh."

  “Well this should really surprise you. We're neighbors!"

  Behind her I could see the vacant apartment. THE MANAGER had been doing some drywall work. Powdery white dust lay in a drift across the hardwood floor. Nichole pulled the door shut. The rational world shifted under my feet. I mean it shifted more.

  She followed me outside with her little trash bag. Was it a prop? From the landing, the moon was big and white among carbon paper clouds. Pretty in a Hallmark way. The landing and stairs were liberally spattered with pigeon shit, however. I lit up, inhaled, blew smoke out the side of my mouth.

  “It's nice here,” Nichole said.

  “Delightful. Don't you miss the moon?"

  “It's right up there.” She smiled. “Come over some time, neighbor. We'll have an ice cream cone and chat."

  “That apartment's empty."

  “Only if you think it is,” she said, and winked.

  I watched her go down the stairs, drop her trash in the dumpster and proceed into the night. MOON GIRL. Nichole. I finished my cigarette.

  * * * *

  I worked part time in a warehouse belonging to the Boeing Company. The Homeland boys picked me up in the parking lot. Two men in dark suits with those American flag lapel pins stepped toward me, one on each side.

  “Joseph Skadan?"

  “Yeah."

  “Federal Agents.” They flashed their credentials. “We have to ask you to come with us."

  “You're asking?"

  The one who had spoken smiled without parting his lips.

  “No choice, I'm afraid."