Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  But I couldn’t be comforted by the familiar concrete sidewalks with their lawned edgings and the white-panel houses set back in their mature front gardens, knowing now that it could all turn, in a twist of malicious imagination, to a psychotic nightmare tunnel, a maze devised by the wizards to torture the creatures stuck in this trap. The ground was unsteady beneath my feet, able to fall away at any moment, and the depth of my skull and the pit of my stomach began to throb with a sort of psychic motion sickness. Yearning for the solidity of hard, real concrete under my feet, I moved my hand behind my neck, touching the toggle there, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off. For one thing, I’d lose sight of Eloise’s beacon, still floating, though less ostentatiously, above the position of David’s house; but more than that, I was afraid of what I’d see.

  So I walked on, the scuff of my footsteps too loud on the sidewalk, echoing off the walls of the houses that leant in like silent witnesses to an atrocity. It was a strange thought to come up with here, among the motionless trees and the temperate flowers of this catalogue street. How many people lived along these roads? And where were they? All holed up, attached to their devices, like Eloise? Or somewhere else?

  The stillness had become so pervasive that I was startled when a bright-blue bird flashed across my path, followed by another pair from a high sycamore bole threaded with Spanish moss, down across the road, and camouflaging themselves on a hydrangea bush in front of an unexpectedly shabby house. Then another blue flash followed, and three more, five, eight – until it was a silent swarm of blue squalling across my path. Locusts, I thought for a moment, as the haze expanded towards me, and only now – as the blue shapes whirred past my face and around me, sheening in iridescent waves as they tilted, the individuals still too fast to examine, but the mass taking form, like a swirl-school of paper fish balling and sliding around me – did I hear the slightest whisper of their speeding arc through the air. I had to strain to hear, but a voice resolved out of the wisping hiss, in time with a tickle on my skin like a tiny feather of down travelling over my limbs: ‘You want to feel someone, but here is nobody to touch.’

  Then the blue stopped and fell, coating the ground where it died, feathery flakes like the dust of a butterfly’s wings, in royal and cobalt and indigo and electric oil, coating every surface. The whisper died off into utter silence again, and the colour settled. It was less a sound of a shuffle that brought her to my attention then, than the feeling that I was being watched – by something more intense than these houses, or the presences behind The I. In the static air, the sensation of being scrutinised by a warm-blooded intelligence was so focussed, it had a heft, it almost buzzed in the vacuous space. I glanced to my left and saw her standing still in front of the shabby house, which was cladded in a rusted sanatorium green, a mottled and diseased colour that made me think of the morgue where I had seen the little girl. As the blue powder dissolved, the front lot of the house stood out in mortified contrast to its lush and exemplary neighbours: all that was left of the hedges and shrubs in the front garden were dead twigs poking out of ashy, leached soil and hard nubs of grass roots, pale like maggots, as if they were scrabbling in the dark towards some distant light, knotted between clumps of dogged weeds where a lawn had probably grown.

  The woman stood on the bottom step of the house’s porch that was flaked and weathered, and as I looked – as The I detected me focussing on the detail of the rotting wood – I smelled a less animal waft this time, a smell of damp decay. A shattered lamp on the porch sputtered with a watery brown light, flickering the artist in and out of silhouette. Like before, she was wearing a long dress, this time in the shimmering blue of today’s emotion, all the way to cover her feet, and her long hair, black painted through with silver, hung loose over her shoulders and down her back.

  ‘Welcome to my house,’ she said.

  I did my best to smile, wondering for the first time what body I was wearing on Vidal’s interface, and how I appeared. ‘I saw your daughter,’ I said, not knowing any more delicate way to raise the issue. Any conversation in this place was tenuous. There was no time to skirt.

  She frowned, and the colour seeped out of her dress like water draining from a tub, the blue revealing a monochrome grey in its wake. Ashen, I thought at first, and then I saw the colour drifting off in an eddy of breeze that had picked up around the woman. ‘My daughter is gone,’ she said, and her face slowly cycled from the smooth, iconic composition to a weary, drawn and lined mask. Not a mask, I told myself. This is her real face; this is the mother in mourning. ‘I think she’s dead,’ she added, as her knees gave in and she crumpled to the ground, her head bowed and her back rounded over the emptiness she cradled in her lap.

  I came towards her and squatted down in front of her, afraid to touch her, but reaching out nonetheless, and finding that beneath the rough sackcloth she was both firm and malleable, both warm and touched with the ice of death. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not. I saw her yesterday. She is alive, and very brave. She was wearing the shirt you made her, with a panda made of dots. I remembered the dots you showed me when we met last time.’

  The artist looked up at me, a jaundiced yellow around her black irises, the lids rimmed red. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Outside. In Stanton. You know where that is?’

  She nodded. ‘She’s alive?’

  ‘And doing good things. She’s helping other children survive when they get out of Green Valley.’

  She looked back down at her folded arms, the invisible bundle she nurtured there. ‘Good. Don’t bring her back here. They cannot live here. Nobody should live here.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ I said with a confidence I didn’t believe. ‘Rainbow knows how to wean people off The I. Maybe she can help you too.’

  ‘I can’t live here. Or there,’ she said. ‘People like us can’t live anywhere.’ Us? I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant, if she was implicating me too, but my voice died as her sackcloth dress started to twist around her torso, tightening around her arms and twisting them around, tighter and tighter, the audible crackle of her joints ricocheting in the still air, until she was locked in a straitjacket. She looked up at me with a vacant stare, and a line of drool escaped the corner of her narrow lips and I had to watch it sliding down to her chin, hanging on her jawline, and then stretch and fall. I watched where it landed in the barren soil, a pointless little bloom of moisture in the stagnant earth, and when I looked back up at her, the dress was restored to its free flow, but the woman inside it had disappeared. All that remained was her voice, a fading echo: ‘There is no home.’

  25 David’s house appeared as I’d last seen it, the neat, colonial bungalow elegantly matching the subdued opulence of its neighbours. The Spanish moss and subtropical foliage, too lush to be native to our part of the country, looked as Zeroth had imported it when they’d established Green Valley twenty years ago: the integrated, healthy campus town they imagined everyone working in once all workers had been freed by Zeroth technology from the shackles of heavy industry and the grinding commute. It had been a seductive vision, and even I had to credit them with the audacity and hope that having a motivating vision required, no matter how it had been corrupted.

  As familiar as the street was, though, the empty windows glaring across at me were discomforting. I could feel the vacancy. I was walking through nothing more than a photograph of what Green Valley once was. Beneath my feet, around me in the dead air, was the real Green Valley, and I was still too afraid to look at it. Without The I’s aversion control, I couldn’t quell the feeling that the houses around me were all empty, that where once there had lived a thriving and hopeful population, pioneering into a limitless virtual realm, there was now only a cold void. It would have been some light relief to see a jogger or a cyclist like those installed at the town square and the park, or to hear a dog bark. But here in the suburban expanse, it was almost as if the simulation wasn’t trying to impress me; the sky was a uniform, sullen, yellowin
g grey, and the only sound I could hear apart from my own footsteps echoing on the concrete and my breathing too loud in my chest was a groaning creak from the trees’ branches, and a tight and rhythmic tap against the wood. Deathwatch beetles, I thought, and wondered whether it was Eloise or Gina Orban, Vidal or Jamie Egus himself putting on this morbid show for my benefit.

  I went up the porch steps, and as I swiped my hand over the wooden railing, a splinter jagged and bit into my skin between my thumb and forefinger. I yanked my hand back and turned to catch as much of the gloomy light as I could, then picked at the throbbing wound until I found where the dark splinter had gone in. Sliding my thumbnail under the sharp end of the splinter, I drew it out carefully, as a swelling bead of blood welled up out of the tunnel. I put my hand to my mouth and sucked the blood away before approaching the front door and knocking.

  The door budged open as I knocked. I pushed it wide and stepped into the entranceway that led through to the sitting room I had seen before. This was David’s home still, the place where I’d seen him four days ago; for a deluded moment, I allowed my tight shoulders to relax and the familiar veneer to comfort and anchor me. Then I noticed it: the cheese sandwich on the green ceramic plate at the corner of the coffee table. Three perfect half-moon bites, the sprig of tomato leaf balanced on the edge of the plate. The single tiger-striped sock lying in the middle of the pristine dove-grey carpet. The red-and-blue wooden truck on its side, four building blocks spilled out, spelling Z, K, A, S.

  Vidal’s interface didn’t suppress the icy scrawl that shivered over my skin. ‘Hello? Eloise? David?’

  All I heard in response was a white-noise hush. I paced a few steps further into the living room of this catalogue home and bent to inspect the toy truck. I righted it on its chunky wheels and drove it over the carpet, feeling the smooth finish of the wood as I pressed it into the lush pile. Had Kira played with this toy? It felt real. I picked the K block up and turned it in my fingers – Ks on all six sides. The other blocks too – only Z, A and S. I dropped them into the back of the truck, deliberately making a noise to test the simulation, wanting to catch it out in its lie, half expecting them to disappear silently as I dropped them, proving their fakeness. But they clacked together with a convincing echo. I held the K block for last, turning and turning her initial in my fingers. Kira. The reason I was here.

  I dropped the block, hearing its echo die in the waiting silence.

  Then, a sudden waft of air and a scream.

  A child.

  A shriek, joined by another, and more: laughter.

  As if tuning into another frequency, the house brought up the sound of children playing nearby. I stood and walked through the living room into a wide, open kitchen, furnished with unmarked stainless steel and polished granite, unsullied cream tiles on the floor.

  The sound of the children was louder now, as if they were in the back garden outside, through the French doors from the kitchen. But there was nobody out in the mist-shaded garden, a small patch of immaculate lawn bounded by newly varnished wood-panel fencing. A slam and a scream, running feet and a thump. Right past me; right through me. A bursting balloon. Another series of children’s shrieks. Nobody was here, but they were freezing my blood.

  Although I might have explained it away as some programmer’s whim, my primitive brain knew I was in the presence of ghosts. Taut with fear, I felt the sweat rise on my entire body, physically repelling me from the kitchen and making me run across the living room, through the hall and to the front door. I’d only feel safe when I—

  ‘Lucie.’

  Eloise was standing on the turn of the staircase, wearing a naked man’s body, like she had before. Her sickly-pale, yellowish mottled skin patchy with wiry smears of black hair, her ribs showing, her dick shrivelled atrophically into itself. Somehow, this mottled authenticity was the most trustworthy thing I’d seen today. I scrutinised her for a while and, feeling the ghosts flee, glanced back into the living room. The toy truck I had righted was on its side again, the blocks reset into their spilt pattern. Z, K, A, S.

  When I looked back at Eloise, she was coming down the stairs, covering her genitals with her right hand in a nod to decorum.

  ‘Thanks for the directions. I was stuck in some sort of thicket.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eloise said, skirting around me and leading me towards the strange room where I’d seen her last time. ‘That happens sometimes.’ I looked at the sagging skin on her butt as she walked, the spine and shoulder bones jutting – Eloise’s avatar appeared to be starving.

  She turned into the room, and I expected to see the psychedelic meadow with its rainbow-gushing unicorn, but when I turned in, there was Eloise, now clothed in jeans and a plain green T-shirt, greying dark hair scraped carelessly back into a ponytail, sitting on her office chair at a plain white desk in the middle of a small study carpeted in navy blue. Is this you? I wanted to ask her.

  She indicated the chair at the head of the desk. My legs were tired, but I didn’t sit. ‘Can you tell me where David is? I need to talk to him.’

  ‘A drink? Anything?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Where’s David?’

  ‘I told you. At a meeting. Why are you here, Lucie? I can understand coming in once, for jollies. Gawping tourist. But not again. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t belong here, and you should go home.’

  I stepped towards her. ‘I have something important to tell him about his daughter.’

  ‘Which one?’

  It’s The I, I told myself; it’s The I that’s blunting her. I needed to talk to her carefully, or I’d never find David. ‘Kira, of course.’

  ‘Oh, Kira,’ she said. ‘Yes, she’s gone too.’

  Her voice had taken on that vague blur that I’d heard in David’s, so I slapped my hand on the desktop to try to snap her out of it. I’d trusted David; and he’d trusted this woman with Odille’s daughter. ‘Kira’s the little girl you’ve been looking after as your own daughter, Eloise. You must remember her, or else she’ll be gone for ever. You don’t have any others.’

  ‘Is that what David told you? That we didn’t have other children?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The triplets. He told you they were fake? An animation?’ Coughing as she exercised her atrophied voice. ‘A primitive subroutine? He told you that?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  But she slammed the chair back and stood, grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the office.

  ‘Let me go,’ I said. ‘Take your hands off me.’ But she was pulling me up the stairs. I let her draw me upwards, drag me along the corridor, past the bedroom David had shown me, the bedroom where Kira had been abducted, and through the next door along into another bedroom. This one had three little beds lined up along one blank wall and an expanse of brown carpeting leading to them. The carpet was vacant, making the room lopsided, as if the beds had been stashed to the side and the other contents cleared – it was more like a storeroom than a bedroom. But lying in the middle of the carpet were three pieces of paper with coloured scrawls over them, and I remembered the triplets drawing at the table in Kira’s bedroom. I stepped closer and squatted down to the pages. Three identical drawings. Black rams, yellow eyes, hanging head-down from a hook, blood spilling from the gash in its neck.

  ‘I tried to be understanding,’ she said as she watched me recoil from the images. ‘I tried to forgive him for his negligence, forgive him for his unforgivable sins, because negligence was my sin too. Together, so caught in the simulation, we left them to die. I gave him time to work through his mourning. Grief can fuck you up. But he disappeared, Lucie, somewhere I can’t get him back.’ Now, in the bedroom, at the foot of that bed where the sheets were sweat-stained and crumpled, she stopped and turned to me. ‘If you want to remember his children, remember them all.’

  She reached to the back of my neck, gripped, and pulled.

  A foul smell hit my face and rocked me back at the same time
as darkness blotted the world; the background hum of life disappeared, replaced by a small, regular drip in the corner of the room. My eyes were squeezed shut, limiting the sudden onslaught of information. It was too much for my mind to analyse the new threats or locate and estimate the dripping sound, the keening groan emanating from the floor. My instinct told me to clasp my hands over my ears and curl foetal on the floor, block it all out until I could deal with it, bit by bit. Still, despite my spasming back and the shake in my knees, I stood upright. It wasn’t bravery that kept me standing – it was terror of falling into what was covering the floor. Because the ground was soft, shifting with my weight, a sticky pull slurping as I stepped backwards.

  The rasp of distressed lungs close to my ear. ‘This is what he wants to deny. This is who he’s trying to forget.’ Her voice hitching. Then, when I didn’t move, she barked, ‘Open your fucking eyes, Lucie!’

  And I did. God help me.

  In the gloom, resolving, the three blackened, bloated, sundered little corpses, neatly aligned, dissolving into a mould-caked bedspread.

  26 I turned then and ran, Eloise calling after me. ‘Their names were Zara, Anya and Sabine. Add them to your list of the forgotten.’

  I ran down the disintegrating stairs, tripping on the water-eaten, dark-stained carpet, landing knee and elbow first, tumbling over when the banister gave way as my head and shoulder smashed into it. Numb to the pain, I rushed on, casting only a glance at the waste-strewn floor of the living room, the rug blackened with blooms of mould and animal smears, back through the cracked and smeared plate glass of the kitchen doors, pale tendrils of some subterranean ivy reaching through shards towards feeble points of brown electric light. Outside the windows, it was cavern dark.

  Flinging the front door back so hard that the rusted top hinge gave way, pulling a shard of the door frame away with it, I ran out through the benighted gravel and dead sticks of the remnants of David’s real garden, and into the road.