by Jerry
(((It’s time for me to put my imprimatur on this already too unwieldy piece of ephemera from a long-ago world on whose inhabitants a recharged sun continues to shine. I now rewind to restore 0.0.’s unprofessional out-take of Mac’s Last Tape, as the Four Questions have come to be known around the shop, and to Mac’s and Tally’s final scene. Yes, of course they remain together, at least in this chronology, and that will please my superior when I send up the finished work. She likes a happy ending.
(((But I’ll not recapitulate what already exists. Unlike O.O., I, E.E.E., prefer to let the story tell itself. Listen:)))
This is MacSwan. I want to get these things on tape before I forget them. Some things are fading already, as if they were influencing me. I say they, sounding paranoid, hinting manipulation by nameless villains. Maybe I am nuts but I’m determined to recap these events before they vanish from my memory and everybody else’s.
Here’s the list. These things are not figments of my imagination. They happened. And the unidentified aliens, nameless as they choose to be, are to blame, directly or indirectly.
One. Time stopped for 14 hours as the sun stood still in the sky. We’re supposed to believe the aliens were recharging our sun, out of the goodness of their hearts, using something called nordium. Or were they extracting rare components from our sun and our earth and fusing them into something still more scarce and valuable? Maybe we need to know what makes nordium so important to them. Then we’ll know what we can do with it.
The aliens, through Busky Kimp, gave the Snowmobile Rider a wondrous tunneling tool. Or were the passages bored in wartime as geologists prospected for oil or thermal energy or scarce minerals and chemicals? It doesn’t seem possible that the Snowmobile Rider alone could have carved anything so commodious as those storage chambers. Storage of what? Was it nordium? Was it something more than nordium? The main ingredient of a weapon? A cure for all ills?
What is the treasure beneath our dear strange northern land? Surely it’s infinitely more valuable than anything our quaint money-digger friend Busky Kimp could imagine. Nordium-schmordium! What are the aliens really taking from us?
I knew more about those caves once. I was in them with Tally, in her lab, and I described it all on tape. I’ve rewound to there but that part of the tape has been wiped. By whom? How? Why!
Two. Pirt reverted to primeval savagery and killed the fawn Tally was nursing back to health. That’s what they want us to believe; to say, “Golly, our own hunters shoot cows by mistake, don’t they?” Yeah? Surely in the vastness of the time that Pirt was in their control they programmed him to do exactly, not approximately, what they wanted. Why they should bring this grief on Tally I can’t imagine. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it shows they can’t completely control others—Pirt or any of us. It would be useful to know if there are such limits to their power.
Three. Pirt tried to rape my wife. Am I to overlook this as a boyish impulse? Oh sure, even infant males have erections, and they would have me believe the incident was no more than that. But I need a better explanation. Maybe Pirt’s previous romantic adventure the one with the circus midget, failed to start a child and the aliens got him to try again with Tally. Why? To leave an alien-dominated creature on Earth when they took Pirt away, or in case something happened to him? Will there be a successor to Pirt?
Four. The Snowmobile Rider—shouldn’t I remember who that was?—fired at Pirt as he was taking off in a spaceship camouflaged as a water tower. The spaceship attained escape velocity and lofted Pirt to a rendezvous with the aliens. But the story we are left with is that an abandoned wooden water tower was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Even my station’s news broadcasts reported it that way. Never have I known such complete selfcensorship by the media, including our own crusading Bernie O’Neill.
There is no way to explain all of this except through alien intervention. Surely the aliens have powers that enable them to reorder our lives and thoughts to accommodate their plans and schemes, to exploit our weakness, to overcome our own will . . .
What am I saying? What was I thinking? I had important things in mind when I came here to my office to make this recording before going with Tally to the bus station to meet our new Summer Resident. Ah, well, it’s all right . . . I’ll ask Tally. She’ll remember.
Mitch and Tally MacSwan were driving to the bus terminal to meet the new group of kids from the city. One of them would be theirs until Labor Day.
As they took the rise and drove along the hill that led to town Tally said: “What a shame that water tower is gone.” Mac had to think hard to remember the old-fashioned wooden tower. “It burned, didn’t it.”
“I think so. How long ago? I can’t recall.”
“Neither can I. There was something about it. Didn’t you have special name for it?”
“No, you did,” Tally told him. “You called it the nineteenth century spaceship.”
“Why did I do that?”
“Because of its shape and because it was made of wood. It stood on end, pointing to the heavens. There, you can just make out the remains of its base. You said it looked like a big Fourth of July rocket.”
“I did?” Mac said. “I barely remember.”
He had slowed to look at the charred stumps, just visible in the weeds at the far side of the gully. There on the hill the highway was a two-lane no-passing zone and a car behind them honked.
They drove on. After a bit Tally said: “I wonder what kind of young one we’ll have this time? Last summer was so pleasant. Quiet, but nice.”
“I forget his name,” Mac said. “The new one, I mean.”
“Her name,” Tally said. “A little girl. She’s called Prit. A nickname. When I asked for more information they said Prit is short for Pretty because her real name is Polly. A dark beauty, to judge by her picture.”
“Prit,” MacSwan said. “Well, I hope we can show her an interesting summer.”
LAZULI
Elissa Malcohn
Amy knows her name means “beloved.” The knowledge is no comfort.
She sits on her bed, breathing hard. Her Lazuli doll, Amykins, is propped by her pillow and wedged into a corner where the walls of her bedroom meet. Her soft clothclone’s face bears the real girl’s features from the time Amy was three; now Amy is five. Amykins doesn’t grow, but now her preprogrammed knowledge is making her cry tap water.
Dry-eyed, Amy realizes what time it is. She gets busy.
“You have to let me touch you,” she tells the doll, lifting it from the covers. The doll cringes. “I don’t want to hurt you, I promise you I won’t hurt you, I have to hide you now.”
How can a doll tremble? The computer in Amykins isn’t that good; no, Amy is trembling, that’s it. Amy’s trembling. She can’t cry any more but she can still tremble; Amykins can cry. Faithfully Amy fills her with water every day; the day Amykins can’t cry is the day Amy will kill herself.
“It’s all right, it’s going to be all right. I won’t let him find you, can’t you turn yourself off if he finds you? You’re a computer, you can do that.” She begins to open drawers; no, her father would look in all the drawers. Her fingers fumble with the small knobs. Under the bed? No, he found Amykins under the bed before, he knows to look there.
There’s no place left. No place left.
If Daddy can’t find Amykins, he’ll take Amy.
No, mustn’t think of that. Mustn’t.
As Amy opens her closet door the door to her bedroom swings open. Her father stands on the transom, in shirttails. With his rough, burly hand he covers the pink roses on her wallpaper where the light switch is. The overhead lamp blazes and Amykins’ tiny chest pumps in and out. Or is it Amy’s? No, Amy trembles. No, Amy breathes hard, too. She clutches Amykins hard to her and the chemically treated syntheskin discolors into bruises. She shouts, once: “No!”
“Give her to me.” Gruff.
“No, please.” Amy’s voice is tired, defeated. “Please. Don’t.”
Amy closes her eyes.
“Give her to me,” her father says, “or I’ll take her myself.”
The window is behind Amy. She could jump. She and Amykins could jump. They could turn themselves off together. They could.
Again, Amy can feel her arms leaving her, holding Amykins out to him. Don’t, arms. Don’t. You don’t want to do this. Two years and no one’s touched her. They’ve all touched Amykins.
Amy doesn’t remember being three years old. Trembling, she hands over the doll.
Her father grabs it and swings it under his arm, like a football. He slams the door behind him. Shaking now, Amy snuggles under the covers and presses her pillow hard around her ears.
There’s a bottle of brandy in the bottom drawer of my desk. I refill my coffee cup.
Ben, my boss, sits in front of me and watches distastefully.
“Want a sip?” I ask.
“The day you come in drunk is the day I take that away from you,” he says.
“A simple yes or no will do. I was showing some common courtesy. Look—” I show him my favorite file, the fat one, bursting with triplicate and quadruplicate copies logjammed on my desk. “This woman comes in, doesn’t give her real name and gives me her ex-husband’s address. Child abuse report; the kid’s in his custody. I send my people there, he gives us his daughter without a hitch and we find nothing physically wrong. No recent burns, breaks or scars. The child’s disturbed as all hell, that’s plain, but physically she’s healthy as a horse. I put the file away. The mother comes in again—yes, she says she’s the mother, that much she admits to. And she comes again. Four times this month, once a week, like clockwork.”
“So what are you asking me?”
“I don’t want to keep putting this file away. I have a personal stake in this, you know.”
“Yes, I know.” Gently, he pries my fingers from my scalp, where I’ve begun to scratch my head again. Already my fingernails sport tiny scabs and a bit of blood.
Ben shakes his head and frowns at me. “Why do I keep telling you not to get drunk?”
I smile at him. “If you let me investigate this case I’ll let you keep telling me not to get drunk. I’ll even let you tell me over a couple of beers.”
He hefts the file and shakes his head again. “All right.” He lifts his hand to clap me on the shoulder and hesitates at the last moment. I can take a friendly clap on the shoulder, my nerves just go all dead, that’s all. Ben understands this. He’s like the older brother I never had.
He doesn’t know what to do with his fingers. He jams his hands in his pockets. “Shit. I guess it’s the thought that counts.”
I giggle. “Yeah. Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Mornings would go like this: when I was in elementary school my father would be the first of us to rise. He would go down to the kitchen and cook the first of two breakfasts: for my mother, and then for me. My mother would wake next, go down to the dinette and breakfast; then as in later years my father would not sit down but serve her deftly and efficiently, scooping up plates of food as soon as she had cleaned them and placing more food before her.
By the time I was seven, my hair had some length and my father took to braiding it while I ate breakfast. Painstakingly, as though in a trance, he would part my hair at the center, over and over and over, until he’d obtained a perfectly straight, needle-thin part that perfectly bisected my head. The same trance he would fall into as he chopped my soft boiled egg, looping the mixture of white and yolk with my fork until he reached a whipped froth. He would chop short, quick, fast, bent intently over the bowl with fierce determination. I dared not interrupt him.
When he plaited my hair into pigtails I had to keep still. How could I keep still as I ate his enormous preparation for me? He pulled steadily, rhythmically, executing perfect braids as long as I kept still or he’d have to do them over, jerking me into place.
Finally one day I didn’t want to eat.
My father was behind me, braiding. “Why aren’t you eating?”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said.
“What do you mean you don’t feel like it? When I tell you to eat you’ll eat!”
I began to cry. My stomach was in knots. “No!” I said resolutely. “I don’t want this!”
Infuriated, he grabbed me by the chin. “How dare you disobey me!” he screamed, a high-pitched, boy’s hysteria. “I’ll teach you to disobey your father!”
He jerked my chin and neck up, then down to open my jaw, and held it. I began to tremble violently. With his other hand he grabbed a piece of toast, jammed it into my mouth and down my throat, his fingers between my lips. First the toast. Then the bacon. I squirmed in his arms, screaming, trying to spit out the food that he kept pushing back in, until I broke free and ran to the bathroom to vomit. And cry. And vomit.
1 kept the bathroom door locked. He didn’t call. I needed to steady myself, it was time, soon, to be leaving for school. I could not tell my mother, she was a romantic, glorifying in the time when I would get to know boys. She would tell me, “You chase them until they catch you.”
When I felt ready, when my eyes were slightly red-rimmed and most of my tears dry, I stoically stepped out of the bathroom and walked past my glowering father, dragged on my coat and picked up my schoolbooks. He said not a word—no threats, no pleas, no apologies.
Nor did he apologize after he would start to hit me and could not stop, one slap per word, each word repeated over and over. Whenever a man on the television would yell I would crouch in my bed underneath the covers, sure it was him, sure I had done something I hadn’t remembered doing but he’d remember I did it. And through it all, his screaming at the heavens: “What did I do to deserve this?”
Years later, I’d tell him, “You scare me. I hate you.”
He’d glower at me again and grumble, “I don’t care.” My mother would tell me he loved me.
My hands are at my head again. I force them into my lap.
Ben is going to let me go after this case. I can hardly wait.
Amy’s eyes are wide open as her father dumps Amykins at the foot of her bed. She stills her trembling; let him think she’s asleep.
Why doesn’t Mother come home? I can’t do this all by myself!
The door shuts quietly behind her. Now she hears a tiny cry. Amykins’ circuitry knows that Amy is awake and allows the tears to come.
“Shh. Not so loud,” Amy cautions. She doesn’t like to quiet Amykins but her sense of caution is strong. “Here.” She cradles the doll to her nightie and it sobs into her chest.
There is enough moonlight to see new scars on the syntheskin. For some reason, Amy doesn’t dare take out a flashlight. Somehow she knows that if she does, Amykins will scream.
The doll feels sticky in her hands. Apologizing, wanting to bring her to a sink and fresh water, Amy collects the tears dropping from clothclone eyes and uses the hem of her nightie as a cleaning rag. She wrinkles her nose at the heavy smell of musk and wants to cry, if nothing else, to add her own tears to the cleansing process. Amykins pees a tablespoon of tap water onto the bunched cotton that Amy holds.
By morning all visible scars will be gone as the syntheskin chemically renews itself. The memory core, resting in a chip behind Amykins’ eyes, will store everything.
“Mr. Purcell? My name is Peggy Sinclair. I’m from the agency.”
“What else is new?” Jovial, a bit tired. Slightly harassed. No sign of hostility, or secrecy. We are talking on the phone; I wish I could see his face . . . or Amy’s.
“Mr. Purcell, I’m the one who’s been sending inspectors to your apartment.”
“Oh,” he says, amused. “So you’re the one.” His tone becomes serious. “Can you tell me what all these visits are going to do to Amy? I mean, she’s just started kindergarten and none of her classmates—I mean, really, isn’t this a bit too much attention for her own good?”
>
“Your wife made another report, Mr. Purcell—”
“Ex-wife, please. Honestly, what would you expect from a woman denied custody of her child? At least I’m not an outpatient, know what I mean?”
Ah, so that was why. “I know what you mean. When may I see you and Amy?”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”
“Tuesday all right? Four in the afternoon?”
I hear a sigh on the phone. “Oh, all right.” A pause. “I can tell you’re somebody’s boss.”
Hot damn, I can clearly see what his smile must look like. It’s too gentle.
I drop the phone back in its cradle. Ben peels my fingers from my head and fills them with my coffee cup.
I take a sip. “Ugh. This is coffee.”
“That’s a coffee cup.”
“That’s beside the point. Hey, what are you doing here? I’m not your only lackey.”
“You’re working. That gets you preferential treatment.”
I stare at him. “You got problems with the help?”
“No,” he says, thoughtfully. “Reports are down. You’re the busiest one here.”
I’ve got a hefty pile of folders including my fat one, but the load isn’t all that much. “I like preferential treatment,” I say blandly. “I’ll keep working.”
“Atta girl.”
“Don’t call me girl.”
“Atta woman.”
“Better.”
Daddy must love me. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bought Amykins for me. For him. I’m confused.