by Adam Felber
—Tammy.
By the time the truck collided with the tree, the President was already dashing across the street, his head filled with a cold, nutrient-free liquid that felt nothing at all like blood.
Grant was closer than that, and had a better view than anyone. He saw the old bum kneel in the street, saw the truck bearing down on him, saw it swerve first, brake second, and then straighten out just in time to head directly at Johnny and Deb and some old lady behind them.
Everything about Grant that was rational knew that there would be no time for him to do anything. Still, his legs were moving, his eyes focused on Deb. By the time he saw her eyes widen as she took in the fact of what was about to happen, he realized that the best he could hope for was to reach her just in time to get killed with her. Still, he was running, propelled toward her on legs that didn’t exactly feel like his own. By the time that there was no time left at all, he was off the ground, leaping toward Deb, taking in the old woman behind her, reaching out across a space that was just too wide, but then, suddenly, feeling contact—
There was an impact, and a noise so loud that it sounded very faint in his ears.
At just about that precise moment, Leonora Decaté opened the basement door, flicked on the light switch with an automatic motion, looked down at the bottom of the stairway, and screamed.
The sparrow, startled back to awareness by the sudden noise, found its wings free and launched itself skyward from the man’s hand, flapping exultantly through the night air, over the loud and incomprehensible scene below it, above the treacherous treetops, toward home. It did not look back, not once, mainly because birds never do.
Chapter 15
Dear Diary,
That’s why the robots had cleared out for the evening—the whole Square reeked of humanity. Crazy, clumsy, random humanity. It smelled good. It had been a while. Gives a girl some hope.
Bernie was just sitting there in the street with a dazed look on his face. I heaved him up to his feet and he came to, more or less. Bernie’s always like this when he’s done doin some “task for the Lord.” He kinda takes a day or two to reset. I guess the Lord really takes it out of him. But who am I to talk?
Bernie needed to get back to Central Square. Took me an hour to drag him through the downpour, but it was okay. Speaking of crazy, some kid threw himself in front of the truck that Bernie diverted at the last second, trying to save his girlfriend or something. Heroic, maybe. Stupid, definitely. Now:
1650—French comedy duo La Fontanelle & Claude finally retire their literary alter ego “René Descartes,” bringing to an end their most elaborate prank. Inscrutably, young Louis IV orders all record of La Fontanelle & Claude destroyed, which pretty much removes all the fun irony from some of their best stuff.
1659—Aurangzeb, last of the Mogul emperors, starts more trouble with the Hindus and confiscates a lot of their valuables, this time mostly to fund an early production of “No, No, Nanette.” He suspects, correctly, that this will come back to bite him on the ass.
1666—The final remnants of the Australian Empire launch a last-ditch full-scale assault on London and are wiped out in the ensuing holocaust.
America is filling up with white people, which forces the Atlanteans to impersonate Native Americans, whom they’d conquered and wiped out only a few decades before. It’s all pretty awkward for everybody.
1676—Nuar Fazib al Bernstein, the famous Turkish courtesan and inventor, loses her first and only child to a nursery accident. Burying herself in her work, she builds the world’s first fully autonomous self-replicating robot, the Mark 1, and the modern world is born.
Grant opened his eyes and saw that he was in heaven.
Heaven was a place where the grass was soft, where a warm, clean rain fell, and where—most important—he was eternally embracing Deborah Johnstone.
And some old lady.
It was the old lady’s presence that made Grant suspect that this was not the afterlife (which he’d never actually believed in, anyway). He lifted his left arm so that the stranger could roll away while he replayed the events of the past few moments.
He’d jumped in front of the truck. Arms outstretched. He’d reached for Deb. At the last moment, he’d widened his arms to encompass the terrified old lady (not that old, really) and let his momentum knock them all to the grass. He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to make that decision in such a short time, but he’d done it. So, if his memory was accurate, there’d be a park around them and a crashed truck very nearby.
He looked up. It checked out.
Strangely calm, he returned his attention to Deb beneath him. She, too, had been looking around and was now returning to the body on top of her.
“You … It … Wow, Grant.”
“Yeah,” said Grant, just as the calm he was feeling turned out to be an extraordinarily short-lived stage in his state of shock. He began to shake. He looked at Deb beneath him, alive, unhurt, beautiful as ever. Grant couldn’t believe it—there, laid out beneath him, perfect, complete, was Deborah Johnstone, the Undiscovered Country. He fought a sudden feeling of déjà vu BUT HE COULDN’T REMEMBER WHY [BK SYS OP 311117]. His eyes blurred.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“I’m—I’m …” he said eloquently. He then found that he didn’t have the strength for self-censorship at the moment. “I love you,” he said, nullifying six months of careful footwork and ineffectual strategizing. And because he’d blown it now, he kissed her. Her lips were as pillowy soft as he’d imagined so often, but the difference between the thought and the deed was startling.
The rain, warm and soft, began to fall more steadily.
He lifted his head again, awaiting the inevitable judgment. She was trembling a bit, too, though that was kind of par for the course when you’ve just been a few inches away from bloody extermination. “You realize,” she said, her voice shaking a bit, “that you doing this is the moral equivalent of molesting me when I was drunk the other night.”
“Last night,” Grant pointed out, unable to control his idiotically didactic tendencies any more than his bare emotions, “and, in retrospect, I wish I’d done that, too.”
Deb stared at him, considering, biting her lower lip in the way teen movie actresses are universally coached to do. Grant found himself holding his breath.
A few inches away, inside Deb’s head, the action was no less intense. She’d almost died, yes, but that was taking a back seat to the current situation. Grant’s declaration had been startling, though in retrospect she realized it shouldn’t be. And that three-word bomb had been dropped on her many times before, as one might expect. But not by Grant—not by goofy, brilliant, unwittingly lovable Grant. Had she ever been in the position of needing to look for opportunities rather than merely considering various offers, she might have thought of it herself. She might, in fact, be in love with him, too. It could be, she thought, reasonable. It might not be just an artifact of having my life saved and being in an incredibly powerful and sudden thunderstorm and being pressed up against a male body.
Or, of course, it might be exactly that. Or partly. Shit Happens: That’s the guiding principle behind why theory and practice are separate things, why sports teams actually play the games, and why no one has any idea what they’re talking about when they talk about love. In any case:
“You know, I think I love you, too.”
“You—you’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Pretty sure of it, now that I’m saying it.”
“Get outa here.”
“I might, if you’d get your big ol’ carcass off me.”
“No chance of that, then.”
What followed was slightly hysterical laughter, a warm and torrential downpour, and more kissing.
Earl Anderson dashed around the tree with the truck partially embedded in it. The driver seemed to be okay, which meant that Earl could kill him when he had the time. But he didn’t now. Tammy might be twenty yards off, lying broken near a park bench, or brutally
crushed between the fender and the tree, or—
—lying on the ground right next to the kid who had saved her.
Earl just stood there a second, catching his breath, feeling the icy liquid in his temples subside. As he watched Tammy roll over, get to her feet, and brush herself off, he found himself checking again and again that he was indeed seeing her. Yes, he kept saying to himself. It is Tammy. And she’s okay.
It took him quite a few moments to remember that he was there, too, that he could actually go over to her.
“That was quite an entrance, lady. Welcome to Hahvahd Squeh.”
She looked up at him, jumped a little, smiled, looked at the truck, started to say something clever, began to cry, and then opted just to throw her arms around him.
She had a lot to tell him: the outcome of the siege (he’d heard), his legal status (he was, by and large, okay), what she’d gone through (he had no idea), how much she’d missed him and worried (he knew, he knew, but of course he needed to hear it). For now, though, just standing there in the new rain pressed up against each other was more than enough.
At last Earl turned, his arm still around her waist, and moved toward the kid, who was grappling passionately with the other girl he’d rescued.
Earl bent down a bit. He began to hear sirens in the distance, so he didn’t have time to wait. “‘Scuse me….’ Scuse me, young man.” The kid looked up. The girl beneath him was a stunner. Good for you, kid, thought Earl.
“Listen,” he said once he was sure the kid was listening, “I have to get going, but I want to thank you for saving my wife. Not that there’s any way to thank someone for that, but, still, a man’s got to try….”
“Yes, bless you,” added Tammy.
The kid looked at them for a minute, perplexed, and then seemed to recognize Tammy. He smiled, embarrassed, gleeful, distracted. “Anytime,” he said. And just like that, he went back to kissing his girlfriend.
Earl and Tammy looked at each other. There was nothing else to say, really. And they were getting really wet.
“I found this little Tex-Mex place where that coffee shop used to be,” he said.
“Sounds lovely. I’m half starved,” said Tammy, and ten minutes later they were ordering margaritas.
Chapter 16
WHEN DR. SCHRÖDINGER suddenly pointed across the park, we watched the whole thing, yet we had the sense that we were seeing only the end of the process. We were sure Dr. Schrödinger would point out that such a coincidence of events, this apparently intentional “machine,” is only truly assembled in retrospect, and to speak of the “device’s” “purpose” was meaningless, but it was impressive nonetheless: the bird-laden bag, the vagrant’s insane rescue, the truck veering away, the youth saving the two women (we couldn’t see what happened to the other youth, and feared the worst), the gross but understandable public displays of affection, all of it. Very understandable, really—they’d been within a hair’s breadth of extinction. They were alive.
There was a sudden pain in my temple, and I turned to see if old Dr. Schrödinger had struck me in pursuit of proving some obscure and lunatic point.
But he was gone. Slipped away in the confusion. I didn’t see him anywhere.
“I”?
Indeed. “I.” That seemed to make sense all of a sudden, and when I considered Dr. Schrödinger’s last question, I realized that with his absence there was now only one of us on the bench. One of me, that is.
One of me. That thought just hung there in my head for a while, not connecting to anything. We—I—felt groggy and strange, unsure of anything for the moment. So many thoughts were trying to get my attention that they’d created an impassable bottleneck.
It began to rain, becoming a downpour almost immediately. That much I was aware of. Automatically I got up, and it seemed that I knew where my car was, and I knew the way home, and going home was the most prudent course of action, and that would suffice for now.
The rain was a torrent now, and laughing youths were running through the sparkling streets. Over at the scene of the accident there were police shouting at the truck driver, who seemed to want to stay in his truck forever. He seemed as dazed as I was by it all. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a truck driver, and in that instant realized that I was not, in fact, a truck driver. That was a start, at least, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to construct all the details of my life through the process of elimination.
I didn’t hurry. The rain felt good, cleansing, and I was utterly soaked already. The rain colored me in, defining all the parts of my (singular) body for me as it touched them. It felt like a shower running down my back, like a massage running down my limbs, like tears running down my face.
No, it occurred to me, there were tears running down my face. How very odd, I thought, how very, very odd.
There wasn’t a lot that Officer Jack Kennedy could do other than stand around. Leonora didn’t want to be held, not by him, maybe not by anybody. He knew the police investigators, he’d helped them, but they were gone now, along with the body. Leonora had flown into a rage or two, and he’d been unable to offer her much of anything. But now Leonora was quiet, roaming the house without a purpose, inexplicably clutching the wicker duck from the mantelpiece to her chest.
He couldn’t pretend he really knew the kid, couldn’t even pretend he knew Leonora well enough to know exactly how she felt about the kid. And he was at a total loss to explain how a kid they had all been talking to a couple of hours ago, who wasn’t even in the house, could be lying dead in the basement in a state that even a rookie could tell was a couple of days dead.
“You sure about that?” he’d asked the investigator.
“Sure, lookit him. Blood’s dry, cold as a rock, yadda yadda yadda. Lookit, there’s some decomposition already—right here. Sorry ’bout that, ma’am.” Leonora had gasped and excused herself yet again. The investigator continued, “Look, Jack, this kid’s been here a coupla days, no matter who you think you saw. He’s cold—two days minimum. ’Course, you know that.” Jack knew that, of course. But he’d asked anyway, because it made absolutely no sense at all. Fuckin’ kids. What was this one trying to pull, anyway? Whatever it was, it was over, that was a sure thing. The kid was dead now, a shotgun blast to the head, no matter what had happened earlier. That was the fact that Jack Kennedy was going to cling to, something to keep his head straight. The rest would fade away.
Now, as Jack sat in the kitchen, formulating a respectable retreat from this suddenly complicated relationship, Leonora wandered the house, clutching the duck, which she’d never really liked but had kept in her house because it had fascinated the young Johnny Felix Decaté, who didn’t exist anymore. Unlike almost everyone else, Leonora would never completely accept Johnny’s death. Or at least she’d remain aware of the contradictions behind it. The fact of it, she supposed, was inescapable. Seeing his mutilated face had the effect of dispelling any doubt in that regard. But she’d seen him walk out, she kept thinking, in drag no less. She laughed, remembered the body, gasped, walked into another room again, walked around and around, wandering as erratically as her thoughts.
She couldn’t go back to this afternoon and prove to Jack and the coroner and herself what she believed to have been true. This afternoon was gone, and whatever truth it held was gone with it. There was just an aging woman with a dead grandson and a wicker duck, stepping distractedly out onto the porch in her bathrobe.
She sat on the step, only partially shielded from the pouring rain, which had now completely flooded the streets and turned her lawn into a sea, utterly erasing any sign of the kids who’d been there all weekend. She had phone calls to make. Her son and daughter-in-law and niece, of course, needed to know. It was only fair that she call them soon.
Fair. What on earth was fair about this? Johnny had moved in to be closer to his life and maybe spend some extra time with his grandma and save some money on rent, and now he’d accidentally killed himself with her dead husband’s g
un. In what way could one describe that as fair, when there was nothing but goodwill on all sides as far as the eye could see?
As far as she could see. Leonora was bright enough to see that she couldn’t see all that far. She spun the duck between her hands. The duck, balanced between two index fingers pressed against its beak and its tail respectively, didn’t spin very well at all. Wobbly. Without a head, she thought, a duck would be more or less a feathery football, and you’d be able to throw it in a perfect spiral. Everything, she thought childishly, would run smoother without heads.
A sound made her look up, and she saw Johnny’s three friends approaching the house, still thirty yards or so up the street. Even at this distance, even in the unceasing deluge, she could tell that they were bewildered, that they were coming to see if Johnny had somehow returned home (which he had, she supposed, somehow). She heaved an uneven sigh and began to rise as she steeled herself to tell them as much as she understood. Good practice for the phone calls.
As she stood, the wicker duck slipped from her hands. It hit the step below her, tail-first, bounced to the step below that, beak-first, and then tumbled onto the flooded lawn. Somehow it landed in the water right side up, and it floated there for a moment, looking for all the world like … like a duck.
There was a current of sorts, and the wicker duck was carried a little ways out onto the lawn, where it caught a breeze and was pulled even farther away. There it somehow got caught in the current of the deluge, the current that covered the street and sidewalk and flowed downhill. Sometimes it seemed to submerge or get knocked over, but the head always rose back into view as it was carried away from the house. The three friends and the old woman stood there watching as the duck swam more and more confidently with the current, its head high above the waters, as proud as a ridiculous wicker duck could ever look, swimming or floating, farther and farther away, until it disappeared from view.