Her eyes squeezed shut, sending another couple of tears down her face. Her shoulders shook.
“Ellen,” he persisted. “How are you doing? Have you been eating?”
“My babies,” she said. “My babies . . .” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She shivered, then slowly relaxed. Her head tilted to one side, and her arms drifted down until they hung by her sides. She’d smeared the wet dirt around her eyes, giving herself a raccoon look. She no longer saw him.
“Leave her alone, for Christ’s sake.” Marvin didn’t turn to see who was speaking. “Let her be with her kids. Jesus. Bloody busybody. You’re not a doctor anymore. You never were.”
Marvin stood unmoving until he heard footsteps recede behind him. Then, carefully not looking to see which of his neighbours it had been, he turned away from Ellen and continued on his way home.
A figure sat in a shadowy corner of his porch. Gwen, of course. He smiled, then hid the smile with a frown.
The figure stood. It was a man, vaguely familiar. Definitely not Gwen.
The disappointment Marvin felt embarrassed him. No matter how many times he told her to stop pestering him, stop trying to mother a man twice her age, he was honest enough with himself to admit it was nice to have a pretty young woman around. Especially one who, for no good reason Marvin could see, insisted on caring for a grumpy old bachelor.
“Doctor Perlman.” The young man (well, young by Marvin’s standards, anyhow—he didn’t quite look thirty) had a furtive look that put Marvin’s hackles up. “I need to talk to you.”
“Oh?” Marvin climbed the steps and opened his front door. “Stewart, isn’t it? Your mom lives over on Harper Street?”
“Mom moved to the city,” the man said. “But yeah. I’m Stewart.” He followed Marvin inside, and the two of them took seats in Marvin’s front room.
Stewart fidgeted, raking fingers through his greasy dark hair and scratching at a line of red blotches along his jaw. He avoided Marvin’s eyes, opening his mouth as if about to speak and then closing it again.
“Looks like you’ve got a bit of psoriasis there,” Marvin observed. “You could swing by the clinic downtown. Glider tech would clear that right up.”
That got the other man’s attention. He met Marvin’s gaze, his eyes hot with accusation. “They’re not touching me with their dirty alien technology.”
Marvin nodded. “I can respect that.” He lived by the same creed, though the creeping indignities of age were undermining his resolve. No one made eyeglasses anymore. If his vision got much worse, he might just get it fixed, and if he was going to have nanobots in his bloodstream anyway, why would he keep the ache in his knees?
For now, though, his principles remained intact.
“I mean, look at us.” Stewart flapped an arm toward the street outside. “It’s not just the addicts. We’re as dependant as children. It’s what they want!”
The last part was nonsense—as near as Marvin could tell, the Gliders didn’t care one way or the other about humanity—but he found himself nodding in agreement. People as a whole were on the wrong path, and they just kept going, getting farther and farther from where they ought to be.
“You can’t tell me it doesn’t bother you. I mean, you’re a doctor, right?”
Marvin scowled.
“They made a joke of your whole profession! How long were you a doctor before the Gliders came?”
“I wasn’t,” Marvin muttered. “I was still in medical school when July Nine happened.”
“Exactly! All those years of school, and here you are, obsolete.”
Marvin did his best to glare a hole in the man. “Did you have some sort of point?”
Stewart kept talking, oblivious. “You’re like a symbol for what’s happened to us. Everything good and noble, made pointless. Irrelevant.”
Marvin looked at the iron poker beside his fireplace and thought about bashing Stewart over the head. Just because he agreed with every word didn’t mean he wanted to hear someone spell it out. “Do no harm,” he murmured under his breath.
“What was that?” Stewart leaned forward, making his head an excellent target.
Suppressing the thought, Marvin snapped, “I said you’re an idi—”
The doorbell rang, and Stewart stiffened. “Are you expecting someone?”
“Yes.”
Stewart stood. “Do you mind if I go out your back door?”
“Be my guest. Or rather, stop being my guest.” Marvin pointed toward the kitchen.
Stewart was out the back door and gone by the time Marvin got the front door open. A young woman stood on the porch, smiling brightly and holding up a bag of groceries. “Organic vegetables.” She moved past him, assuming she was welcome. “I’ll put them in the crisper, okay?”
The problem was, Gwen was welcome. Hiding his smile was difficult, even with Stewart’s visit fresh in his memory. “Organic, schmorganic,” he muttered, and followed her into the kitchen.
“Have you been eating, Marvin?”
“Yes.”
She was as oblivious to the edge in his voice as Stewart had been. “What have you eaten? I bet it came out of shrink wrap.”
Reminding her that she wasn’t his mother would just amuse her. He leaned against the kitchen doorway and watched her put the groceries away, a slim, vibrant woman with black hair drawn high over her head in a bun that accentuated the long brown column of her neck. She was beautiful, and so full of life she single-handedly revived his faith in humanity’s future.
Not an easy task, that.
“You don’t need to take care of me, you know.”
She ignored him, of course.
“Shouldn’t you be out with your young man? What’s his name? Porter?”
Her gaze swung to him, and she scowled. “Peter.” She shook her head. “No, Peter and I will be spending time together sometime after he apologizes. Or the freezing over of Hell. Whichever comes first.” She turned back to the bags of groceries. “Why are men so irrational, Marvin?”
“It’s all women’s fault,” he explained. “You drive us crazy.”
She snorted in reply, but there was amusement in it. “Yeah, that’s it.”
She chattered as she moved around the kitchen, clanking pans and opening cupboards. “I’m going to make you a kale soup. You’ll love it.” Her head peeked up from behind the counter, her one visible eye crinkling in amusement. “I know you’re annoyed with me, but one bite of this soup and all will be forgiven. Trust me.” Her head dropped out of sight. “Ah, here it is.”
“I saw Ellen today,” he said.
“Ellen.” Gwen’s voice was muffled. Then she stood up, holding his biggest saucepan. “Someone needs to pry that damned capacitor off her skull.”
Marvin blinked. “Come on,” he said, even though he’d interrupted Ellen’s reveries not an hour before. “She just wants to be with her kids.”
“Yeah, well, it’s time she learned to let go. It’s been, what? Ten years?”
Has it really been that long? And she’s still . . . “Being a mother was all she had,” he protested weakly. “Her kids were her life.”
Gwen set the saucepan on the counter. There was compassion in her face, but there was an uncompromising hardness, too. “Grief is one thing. Ten years in a trance is something else entirely.” She shook her head. “Ten years, Marvin!” Gwen planted hands on her rounded hips. “Her kids are gone. Whatever life she might have found for herself is gone too.”
He stared at her, wanting to argue. Memory addiction was the biggest sickness facing the human race today. It devoured people. It blighted lives. But Ellen was a special case. How could you begrudge a mother the chance to be with her babies?
“I’m grateful the Gliders found us,” Gwen said. “Lord knows. Wit
hout them . . .” She shivered. “But I look at Ellen and I almost wish they never came.” She shrugged, her voice a bit pointed as she said, “But there’s no use dwelling on what might have been.”
He stayed silent as Gwen started sharpening one of his knives, her voice a little too casual as she said, “You’re a lot like her, you know.”
He stiffened. “I’ve never even owned a capacitor!”
The bun on the top of her head bobbed as she nodded. “True. But you lost something, and it consumes you, and you’re completely stuck in the past.”
He sputtered. “That’s preposterous. I’m the only person around here who’s not stuck in the past.”
“All through High School you did homework every night and studied all weekend while your friends were out having fun,” she recited. “You had to make sure your marks were high. Straight A’s. That’s how you get into the best schools. Then four interminable years getting a degree in molecular biology, and that was before you even started actual medical school.” She fixed him with a baleful eye. “Any of this sound familiar?”
He squirmed. “I may have mentioned it once or twice—”
She snorted.
“Well, it’s all true!”
“And it’s all twenty years in the past!”
Marvin’s cheeks went hot. “Well, if I’m so bloody hard to put up with, maybe you should—”
“Oh, no.” Her voice was a whipcrack, and he flinched. She waggled the sharpening steel at him. “You’re not throwing me out, not after I brought all this food over. We’re going to have dinner together, and you’re going to like it.”
They glared at each other for a long moment, and the absurdity of it was too much for him. He said, “Yes, Ma’am,” in his most contrite voice. Gwen maintained her glower for another second, and then both of them dissolved into laughter.
The kale soup tasted better than it smelled. At first, he ate it dutifully, but by the end he was glad when she didn’t take the leftovers with her.
The only sour note came as she was stacking their bowls in his dishwasher. “How’s Tommy?” she said, her voice gentle.
He didn’t answer, just shook his head, and she came over and squeezed his forearm. “I’m sorry. I’ll come by in a couple of days, okay? Call me if you need anything. Remember to eat.” She gave him a peck on the cheek and headed for the door.
“I’m a grown man, Gwen.”
“I know.” His grumpiness, as always, rolled off her without making an impression. “Bye.”
He watched her go, feeling a couple of decades fall away as if they’d never happened. She was so much healthier than the pinched waif he met twenty years before. Just a kid, but a kid under a sentence of death. It wasn’t an official consultation. Her parents were afraid of the aliens, who’d turned the world upside-down just by showing up and saying hello. They wanted a second opinion before they took her to the Glider clinic. They wanted a human opinion.
The diagnosis was pretty straightforward. Cancer. It was all through her body. He wanted to recommend aggressive chemotherapy and radiation. The chances of it saving her were slight, and if it worked, the odds of the cancer coming back were high. But she’d have a chance.
Except you couldn’t get chemo and radiation anymore. No one was making the drugs. The machines were in mothballs. Marvin, feeling like a traitor to his beliefs, told her parents to take her to the clinic. A week later, she was playing outside with her friends. Within a month, the shadows under her eyes were gone and she was as healthy as any other kid.
Gwen hadn’t been gone for five minutes before Marvin heard a tapping at the front door. It was Stewart again. Marvin let him in.
“Have you been hanging around outside all this time?”
Stewart didn’t answer, just stood fidgeting in the front hall. “I’ve heard you complain about the Gliders,” he said. “I know you don’t like them.” The fidgeting stopped, and he looked Marvin in the eye. “How serious are you about that?”
Marvin gave him a long, careful look. “If there was something I could do, I would do it. But . . .”
“Maybe there is,” Stewart said. “Maybe you can help.”
He looked deadly serious. The problem was he also looked like a schmuck. A dangerous fool.
But . . . to send the Gliders packing! The dream was irresistible. Impossible, but irresistible. “You have a plan of some sort?” Marvin heard the sarcasm in his own voice and wondered if he should bother suppressing it.
Stewart scowled. “We have a plan. We’re organized. We’re reclaiming our planet.” He looked Marvin up and down, curling a lip. “I’m not sharing the details with an old windbag who’s all talk. Call me if you remember where your balls went.” He left the house, slamming the door behind him.
The drive to Taber took more than an hour, time Marvin spent trying to distract himself. The coming visit would be ugly. Pointless. Still, he had to make an attempt.
Cathy answered his knock and let him in without a word. Tommy sat in the backyard, a string of drool on his chin. Marvin took a seat opposite him. “Hey, Tommy. It’s me. Uncle Marvin.”
Tommy didn’t reply, of course. He had the gauntness of a long-term coma patient. He ate once or twice a day, but never enough. Sometimes he spoke to Cathy during meals, but he was never entirely there. He always had at least half his attention in the past. Now, without the urgency of hunger to compel him, he gave himself to his memories completely.
“I was thinking about you on the drive up,” Marvin said. “I was remembering that time I taught you to throw a football. You remember that day?” You remember it a damn sight better than I do, if it was good enough to make your playlist. You bloody useless vegetable. “I don’t suppose you want to chuck a football around now?” Marvin’s words sounded foolish to his own ears, but he ploughed ahead anyway. “It’s a special memory to me, that day. Not so special that I’m going to piss away my life reliving it, mind you. But special. Today could be special too. If you let it.”
The boy stared past Marvin’s shoulders with unfocussed eyes. Except he wasn’t a boy any longer, other than inside his brain. There was grey in his short-cropped hair.
Marvin spent another half an hour talking aimlessly, feeling his blood pressure climb ever so slowly. The urge to shake the boy until he roused from his trance was strong. Marvin had tried that before. It hadn’t ended well.
“I might not visit you anymore,” Marvin said. “I’m not sure there’s a point. Not if you don’t even know I’m here. Not if you don’t care.”
Tommy didn’t respond.
“Do you ever think of me while you’re zoned out?” Marvin hated the peevish sound of his own voice. “Do you replay that afternoon with the football?” He felt his hands curl into frustrated fists. “Did I ruin your life that day? Was the afternoon just a little too good? So good you can’t help going back there, again and again?”
Marvin stood, pacing back and forth with short, agitated steps. “I can’t relive that day, you know. One of the best days I ever had. But it hurts too much to think about it now.” He planted his hands on his hips and glared down at the oblivious face of his nephew. “I think I’m immune to this stupid memory addiction. No good memories to look back on. Just study and work and homework, and then more study. Nothing I ever need to repeat.” He jabbed a finger at Tommy, feeling like a fool but unable to stop himself. “You kids these days, you don’t know what it was like—”
He seemed to hear Gwen laughing at him in his head. He lowered his arm, flushing. “Anyway,” he said, “you should come back to us. Once in a while, at least. Maybe make some new memories. Don’t you get bored, going back to the same days over and over?”
Tommy didn’t get bored, he knew. The capacitor experience was so complete, so immersive, that you didn’t just get the sights and sounds. You got your feelings from back
then, even your thoughts. Every surprise was a surprise all over again. The sweetness of the moment remained just as sweet. What could compete with that?
“Goodbye, Tommy,” he said, and headed for his car.
When he got home, he called Stewart. “I’m in,” he said. “This plague has to stop. Whatever you’re doing, I’m in.”
Marvin made the long walk from his house to the centre of town all alone. It wouldn’t do to be seen with his co-conspirators.
He wasn’t sure how big the conspiracy was. Stewart sat on the steps of the library building with Nate, a man who looked enough like him to be a brother or a cousin. The two of them fooled with their phones and carefully ignored him. For all Marvin knew, this was the whole cabal.
The air-conditioned interior of the Fort Museum was pleasant after the summer heat outside. Marvin stood in the doorway with goosebumps pebbling his arms, waiting for his eyes to adjust. It was years since he’d been in the building, and much had changed. A corridor to his right led to the parade ground and museum displays. To his left, though, was a new feature. A high counter, the space above filled by thick plate glass.
“Hello, Doc. Haven’t seen you in a while.” A security guard stood behind the counter, his voice echoing from hidden speakers. It was a young Chinese man with a cheerful, unsuspicious face, and Marvin’s conscience reproached him.
He thought of Tommy and suppressed his remorse. “Keith Lau. Is your mom still at the clinic?”
Keith nodded. “She keeps talking about retiring, but she can’t seem to quit. She loves it there.”
You’re not just deceiving the boy, you’re going to get his mother fired, too. He dismissed the thought. If the aliens could be driven away, employment would be better for everyone. Real jobs, doing something that mattered, not just handing out alien potions.
He moved closer to the counter and glanced around. There was no one else on Marvin’s side of the glass, and he couldn’t see anyone but Keith on the far side. “Do you have the Glider in there?”
Keith grinned and lowered his voice. “Arrived yesterday. The big speech is tomorrow afternoon. I guess they’ll come pick him up the day after that.”
Seasons Between Us Page 36
