Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  There he discovered that the refrigerator was wrong. No orange juice, no 7-Up, no raw materials for enchiladas. Instead he found two six packs of Heineken, a pizza box, some leftover Chinese takeout, a few half-pint bottles of Perrier. Over the hum of the refrigerator he heard David, his voice choked with emotion, say, “My life ended that night.”

  Nick closed the refrigerator and stared at his reflection in the window above the kitchen sink. “‘My life ended that night,’“ he mouthed, and watched himself mime putting a finger down his throat. Then he washed his face in the sink, trying to scrub away the fear and jealousy and despair.

  As he turned from the sink, looking for someplace to throw his paper towels, he saw that morning’s News and Observer on the butcher block table. The headline read, “Quayle apologizes for State of Union blunder.”

  “Oh my God,” Nick said.

  It was not, then, a merger of two worlds. It was a hostile takeover where one world vanished and one remained. The trees and cats and skyscrapers the reporter had been talking about belonged to someone other than Nick. David was not the intruder; like he’d been saying all along, David lived here.

  Nick looked at Angela where she sat in highly-charged conversation with David on the couch and did the math. Angela was not an intruder here either, world of origin notwithstanding. There was only one person who didn’t fit in the equation, and Nick had been staring at his reflection only moments before.

  5. Nick had caught Angela on the rebound, and he knew he’d never have had a chance with her otherwise. He’d still been in Austin when David died, still been married to his first wife, still involved in an affair that was about to turn publicly sour in a narrow circle of acquaintance. He was writing code then for a small software house called Computics and thinking more and more about North Carolina.

  Computics had a customer named Richard who sold medical information systems in the Raleigh area. On a business trip in 1995 Richard had shown Nick around the Triangle and Nick had been impressed with how green everything was, how it rained even in August. Summer rain in Texas was only a distant memory. When everything fell apart in Austin the next year—divorce, threats of more layoffs at Computics, another summer of rationed water and parched brown lawns—Nick packed it in and headed east. Richard helped him find a job and an apartment, and at his New Year’s party four months later he introduced Nick to Angela.

  Nick was graceful for a man his size, and he’d taken the trouble to dress well that night: charcoal suit, silk tie, cufflinks. Somehow he summoned the nerve to ask Angela to dance. She’d been drinking for the first time since David’s funeral that June and it was the champagne that said yes.

  A year and a half into the marriage Nick insisted on therapy, where Angela complained that Nick was too much in control, that he wanted her but didn’t need her, that he didn’t truly need anyone. In the third week she admitted that she loved Nick, but not in the way she’d loved David. She was afraid to love anyone that much again.

  Nick slept in the guest house for a month or so after that, wanting to leave but imprisoned by his desire for her. Finally that desire became stronger than his anger and they began to make love again. He moved back into the bedroom and their attempt at therapy became, like David, one more thing they didn’t discuss. Life was good again, or at least comfortable, until one day he came home and his pickup was red and David was waiting for him in the living room.

  7. David fixed mushroom omelets and they ate on TV trays in the den. Nick suppressed the thought that this was how the world ended, with neither bang nor whimper, but with CNN analyzing it to death.

  After dinner Nick did the dishes and then took the portable phone into the darkened formal living room. The lines were jammed, but after half an hour he managed to reach his mother in San Antonio. She was fine, she said, but this duplicate version of herself kept following her around and talking incessantly. Nick nodded silently; his father was dead, then, in this world too. His mother supposed she would just have to put up with the inconvenience. Then the duplicate got on the phone and seemed unable to understand why he wasn’t calling from Austin.

  After he hung up he sat in the darkness for a long time. Eventually he switched the phone on again, and after a dozen attempts got through to directory assistance. He tried Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill without finding a listing for his name. He tried again in Austin and this time the computer-generated voice recited a phone number—not his old one, but an exchange that Nick recognized as West Lake Hills, a big step up from his old neighborhood east of I-35.

  That knowledge made it even harder to call. He could hear a voice saying, “I wondered when I’d hear from you,” a tired and put-upon voice that Nick suddenly realized was that of his father, the fat, balding, sweaty and selfish man Nick had spent his whole life trying not to turn into.

  If it had been the other way around, if Nick had been flush and his other self in Austin broke and desperate, Nick would have reached out to him in a heartbeat. But this way, to have to call from a position of weakness, even with no intent of asking for help, was more than he could bring himself to do.

  He put the phone down, an immense sense of loss flowering slowly in his mind. He went out the sliding glass door at the back of the kitchen and crossed the patio to the guest apartment, a free-standing building that in Texas he would have called an abuelita, a grandmother’s house. It was unlocked. He switched on the light to face what his logical mind had assured him he would find there: all of his books gone, all his vinyl albums and CDs, the bookshelves he’d put together and stained by hand, the Heathkit amp he’d built in college, his Math Cup from high school, all gone.

  David’s guest house instead contained a chair, a double bed with a white chambray spread and no headboard, a pair of framed Impressionist prints on the walls. A green banker’s lamp bowed over the night stand, resting on top of a 1997 almanac and a John Grisham novel.

  Nick sat on the bed and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the room hadn’t changed. It was full of absence. No favorite T-shirts, no photos of old girlfriends, no plastic model of the Space Shuttle from eighth grade. Every physical object that meant anything to him was gone.

  11. By the time Nick got back to the den, the many-worlds theory of the Doctors Berlin had expanded to fill the gap left by any other rational explanation. CNN now referred to the crisis as the “Prime Event” and their art department had produced a graphic showing twin Earths just touching edges inside an infinity symbol.

  At seven PM eastern time, CNN estimated the population of Mexico City at 60 million, a figure Nick could not meaningfully comprehend. Much of the city was on fire by 8:00 and the smoke, on top of the already lethal pollution, quickly sent population estimates downward. The sidewalks were choked with corpses of the very young and very old, and the reporters began to speak in hushed voices about typhus and cholera.

  Despite warnings, LA drivers began to head out into the worst traffic jam in California history. Meanwhile, gang members cruised the fringes of enemy turf, waiting to mow down newly arrived doubles of rival gang members as they appeared. “Too many f*cking Crips already, man,” a young Blood told reporters, his “fuck” censored by a faint beep. “I ain’t sharing with no f*cking Primes.”

  Airline traffic had come to a complete halt as nearly empty planes disappeared from airport gates and hangers, only to land minutes later fully laden with Primes. There were no rental cars, hotel rooms, or clean public rest rooms to be found in North America. Restaurants were out of food, service stations out of gas, ATMs out of money.

  Eight o’clock Thursday night in Durham was 3 AM Friday in Moscow and along the Palestinian border; 5 AM in Sarajevo; ten in the morning in Beijing. Around the world everyone was poised for 5 PM ethnic cleansing time, taking an example from the LA gangs, or more likely not needing one.

  At nine Angela switched to a local channel and learned that banks were limiting withdrawals to $100 per day per account, and holding all checks until the
federal government told them exactly what their exposure was. Meanwhile local police departments asked all off-duty officers—prime or otherwise—to show up for night duty at banks, groceries, convenience stores, malls, and emergency rooms.

  At ten o’clock Nick stood up. “Look, I can’t just sit here and watch this any more.”

  Angela stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “This is only the most devastating event since, what, the extinction of the dinosaurs?”

  “At least the dinosaurs didn’t sit around watching comet reports on CNN,” Nick said. “I can’t do anything about what’s happening, and I can’t just sit here and passively soak up any more second-hand pain and suffering. I’m full up.”

  Nick saw he was keeping Angela from the next round of disasters. He turned to David and said, “I know I don’t have any right to ask this...”

  “Of course you’ll stay here,” David said. “Take the guest house for as long as you need. I should think you already know where everything is.”

  “Yes. Thank you.” The less charitable part of Nick’s personality knew David wouldn’t think of turning them out, not while Angela was part of the equation.

  He picked up a handful of newspapers and magazines in the living room and went back outside.

  13. He was exhausted, and he badly wanted Angela to find him asleep if she did happen to look in. Two troubled marriages had taught him that sleeping well could indeed be the best revenge, but that night his twitchy nerves made it hopeless. After half an hour of flinging himself from one side of the bed to the other he switched on the banker’s lamp and reached for the almanac.

  He verified that Dan Quayle was President, impossible as it had seemed at first. In this universe—David’s World, as he’d come to think of it, not without bitterness—Clinton had been caught en flagrante two days before the 1992 election and the press had crucified him. Bush had not only won, but solidified a new era of conservatism. Quayle rode the rising backlash against affirmative action, foreigners, feminism, and welfare straight into the White House.

  What surprised Nick was how little difference it had made in the end. Time magazine featured Saddam, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandella cheek to jowl with faces Nick had never seen before: a Father Dominguez who was leading an armed insurrection in the Yucatan; Selma Jones, US ambassador to China, who was urging favored nation status for the totalitarian regime; Davy Davis, teen heartthrob, who had the Ricky Nelson role in the upcoming feature film version of Ozzie and Harriet. But for all he knew, Selma Jones had been ambassador to China in his world as well, and Nick had never kept up with matinee idols.

  The thing that really seized his attention was a three-page spread on the man who’d just been anointed the richest in the world: Harvey Chambers, CEO of the Computics empire headquartered in Austin, Texas.

  Nick, like everyone else in the business, had many times heard the story of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the point-and-click interface they’d invented for one of their pipe-dream projects. In Nick’s World, Steve Jobs saw a demo and went home to build the first Macintosh. Bill Gates saw the Mac, and then there was Windows.

  In David’s World Harvey Chambers saw the demo first. He was a comics fan, so instead of windows his operating system had “panels,” and instead of dialog boxes it had “captions” and “balloons.” Parents didn’t get it, but kids did, and the first computer-savvy generation grew up on Computics. Chambers avoided Apple’s fatal error and licensed out his hardware designs to third party vendors, concentrating his own efforts on software—first games, then study aids, then office suites, growing up with his customers. Jobs and Gates never had a chance.

  Like Gates in the world Nick came from, Chambers was locked in a battle with the Department of Justice. With a Republican that Chambers had helped elect in the White House, presiding over a Republican Congress, Justice never had a chance.

  In Nick’s World, Computics had never pioneered anything. Chambers had sold the struggling company in the late eighties and retired to Mexico to do some serious drinking. The people who’d known him said he’d had too much ambition and too little luck, a combination they thought would kill him in the end.

  Nick’s rich double in Austin no doubt worked for this gleaming, world-beating Computics, pickup long ago traded for a hunter green sport utility, the Wall Street Journal delivered every morning so he could check his stocks as he sat in his overstuffed leather armchair, careful to avoid wrinkling his Brooks Brothers suit. It was a scab Nick should have been able to pick at successfully for quite a while, but instead his attention kept drifting to more fundamental questions.

  Like how he was going to live, for one. Angela would have work—it didn’t take a Nostradamus to predict a shortage of doctors. The computer industry, however, looked like it could be in a serious recession as people concentrated on the basics of food, shelter, and transportation. All the things Nick no longer had.

  The thought of the Angela-shaped hole in this world brought him to the toughest question of all. He and Angela. Angela and David.

  He woke at some point before dawn with Angela curled into his back, holding him. The knowledge of something terribly wrong nagged at his memory, just within reach, but he shied away from it and dove back into sleep.

  17. David was the perfect gentleman. He made breakfast for Nick in the morning while Angela slept in, and gave him a robe to put on after his shower. He even found a couple of old T-shirts and a pair of sweat pants that Nick was able to fit into. While Nick tried to wake up, David went about his business, making reassuring noises on the phone to his most important clients without communicating any real data. He seemed to function in some gray area between the law and finance, and Nick was content not to know any more than that. “It’s too early to tell,” David said into the phone, to one client after another. “We’ll just have to see how this all falls out.”

  On the news that morning they had an explanation, of sorts, for the red pickup. The two Doctors Berlin, now instant celebrities, were explaining the situation in terms of conservation of angular momentum (the primes who appeared in cars or planes were already moving at a high rate of speed) and conservation of mass and energy in a closed system (twice as many people, but only the same number of cars, planes, bicycles, and so on). Anyone who’d been driving at the time of the Prime Event had ended up in a car from David’s World that wasn’t in use at the time. Cars had disappeared from dealerships and rental agencies and even locked garages, then turned up on the highway with people like Nick behind the wheel.

  “Improbable as this sounds,” one of the doctors said on the TV in the next room, “there’s a precedent for matter relocating itself like this. All the way back in 1964, Bell’s Theorem projected this kind of behavior from subatomic particles into the macrocosmic world.”

  Meanwhile, repo agents were already out in force, and the reporters expected steady growth in that sector of the economy for at least the next few weeks.

  The news didn’t help the clenched feeling in the pit of Nick’s stomach. He watched Angela stumble in and sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and knew he had to get moving. If he went back to bed and pulled the covers over his head like he wanted to, he might never come out. The next time David was between calls, Nick said, “I’m going in to work.”

  “Why?” Angela said.

  “Because I have to at least try. I can’t just keep sitting here.”

  “Be careful,” David said. “They say traffic is even worse today than last night.”

  Nick bent over to kiss Angela goodbye and she turned away at the last second, putting one arm around his neck and squeezing briefly. Her self-consciousness was palpable and Nick attributed it to David being there in the room, watching. Nothing had happened between Angela and David yet, Nick was sure, but he knew he was an idiot to walk out and leave them alone there together.

  Nonetheless he turned away and started toward the door, and David followed him. “Listen,” David said, and Nick turned to s
ee him holding out two twenty-dollar bills. “Think of it as a loan, if you must. You can’t go out there with empty pockets.”

  He was right, of course. Nick had no idea how much gas there was in the truck, and he had nothing to take for lunch. “Thanks,” he said, the word leaving a numb spot on his tongue.

  He turned the red pickup around and waited at the head of the driveway until, with a resigned nod and a flick of the hand, a middle-aged man finally let him join the slow parade of cars. On the commercial stations the drive-to-work crews hashed over the news with morbid humor, inviting people to call in with their most humiliating prime story. Nick escaped to a university station playing Mozart.

  What most surprised him were the numbers of people on foot. Most were men, some with their thumbs out, some just walking with their heads down, postures closed against the morning chill. There was menace in the hard metal of the other cars, and Nick kept turning the radio down because he thought he heard something: a collision, a scream.

  Just before the 54/55 exit, he saw a late model Honda and a Ford Explorer pulled over on the shoulder and two men, one black, one white, shoving and grabbing at each other beside the cars. As Nick slowly rolled past he could see the tight, weary expressions on their faces. Two miles later he saw a squad car stopped on the westbound side, and a cop forcing someone face down onto the hood.

  For minutes at a time, one or another of the walking men would keep pace with Nick’s truck as it inched forward. Once Nick turned his head and found one of the men staring in at him through the passenger window. The man’s gaze was flat, empty of emotion. As if, Nick thought, the absence of hope had stranded him in an eternal present, without envy or expectation. Nick averted his eyes, his desire to offer a ride utterly quashed by the images of violence he’d seen throughout the long night on the television screen, and by the ugliness he’d already witnessed that morning through the windshield of his truck.