by Jerry
He takes the steps of the iron staircase two at a time. His feet ringing with that peculiar dry echo which is the signature of the arcade’s cavernous crystal roof.
Outside the gated entrance, pale orange sunlight is falling onto the damp pavement. There is ozone in the air from last night’s thunderstorm. I sense it percolating into his bloodstream, invigorating him.
Still, he doesn’t look back.
Jilliane chattered spryly as she drove us out to the Warren, the first time I’d ever been in a power car. It wasn’t a commune, she told me, it didn’t have rules. More like a club, a country retreat. The only entrance qualification was wealth.
How much wealth, I didn’t realise until we emerged from the picket of woodland which surrounded it. The protective band of Spanish oaks enclosed a patch of meadowland over a mile wide, with a vast crater in the middle. Seven executive tilt-fans were parked around the edge. Camels grazed peacefully between them.
“It’s an old granite quarry,” Jilliane explained. “Perfect for us.”
The crate was terraced with concentric balconies, like an amphitheatre, completely tiled in slabs of white marble. Two-hundred penthouse apartments stared out over the central pool with its fountains and statues and willow trees.
I was given a guest suite for the night; the most bioware intense environment I’d ever seen. The walls were polyp, inlaid with glowing lumstrips; furniture was pseudo-amorphous, jelly pillows which conformed to verbal orders; food and drink came direct from a secretor. Jilliane turned up the next morning. She ordered a pillow into chair form and sat behind my table, placing a phone wafer on the steel-hard surface.
“We would like to hire your body for a year,” she asked.
“To do what?”
“As a repository for someone else’s thoughts.”
“You mean affinity sensorium?” I’d heard of that, someone old, bedridden, seeing the world through another set of eyes, a youth’s, mobile and vigorous. The thought left me feeling queasy; not that I would’ve minded acting as a highly-paid remote-tourist, not if seeing was all there was to it. But there’d be every sense and action involved—eating, peeing, farting, sex—all put on exhibition.
“No,” said Jilliane. “The principle has been taken a stage further at the Warren. We’re proposing a thoughtswap with my great great grandfather.”
That cooled me. Thinking of a year spent prisoner in an emancipated incontinent body. Wondering just how far I’d go for the money. It’s always an interesting question, in abstract. “Where is he?”
“I’m right below you,” said a male voice from the wafer.
“Grandpa died seventy-two years ago,” Jilliane said levelly. “His memories were translated directly into a bioware neural network.”
“Bloody boring, though,” said the voice. “You can only get so much entertainment from sensorium memories, they begin to pale after a time. I like to get out and about once in a while. It keeps me sane.”
I looked at Jilliane in a daze. She nodded shortly.
“If you can afford all this, why not simply buy yourself a clone body?” I asked.
“This is the wrong world for me,” said the voice. “It’s stalled. There’s no ambition out there, no interest in accomplishment. It’s just a phase, a mass wintermind season. When it’s over, when the ozone’s back and England has snow again, then I’ll come out for good.”
“And me?” I asked. “What would I do during this year?”
“We have a vast library of sensorium memories,” said Jilliane. “You can indulge yourself in any way you like.” There was a note in her voice, a twang of success. My question had been acceptance. She’d seen much more than build and youth in that Cannock pub. She’d seen I could handle the concept, someone so blued out with drifting they’d take the money as a cheap escape.
Nottingham’s docks were similar to Stone’s, but on a larger scale. Five of those big basins strung out in a line. Barge traffic was thick; wharfs piled high with cargoes; porters, captains, and merchants shouting gamely.
Halson and Lori stood together on Slowdancer’s deck to say goodbye, holding each other close. Their faces said it all, long and uncertain, sorrow for the fool and his hopeless pursuit.
Hot humid air hangs cloyingly over the dock, rich with the smells of ripening food. I’m threading my way past giant pyramids of apples, a desperate tangle of exhilaration and qualms, focussed inwards.
All I have brought is questions, for Catherine, for myself. I say I love her, what if she asks me to give my body back to Gilchrist? Do I love her that much, or is it selfish love? A lust to relive the past year again and again, myself cast as a pale shadow of Gilchrist. Their time together was almost unbearably good, the mythical sanctum of fulfilment at the end of the drifter’s road. The reason I started out.
I leave the bedlam of the docks behind me and set off towards the arcade, walking without hesitation down the familiar maze of streets which I’ve never seen before.
Soon now, soon I’ll know. Catherine will show me my naked self. I’m afraid.
FURIOUS WEATHERS
Robert Frazier
One foot forward, then the other . . . I am running down to the wharves at Bunker’s Cove. Our old house of unpainted clapboards has long since been gutted for a fancy summer home. The bait company shut down, the pilings for the lobster pound have rotted and now rip free with the tides, and up by the highway the Samples family runs a modem Irving station with a quick grocery and a three-washer laundromat on the side. But that’s not what I see as my soles slap the black pavement. There’s an all-consuming storm of blackness around me—entropy, annihilation, zero time—and somehow I’m running back through the years to my father.
The last time I saw him, the snow clouds advanced in angry gray curtains that dropped over Frenchman Bay and scraped the tops of the pines on Stave Island across the inlet. It was after the Christmas of Ninety-Two, and Dad labored each morning at the sawhorse in the side yard.
He’d trail shavings through the back entry and carry an envelope of bitter cold around him that seemed to emanate from his overalls and his black and tan wool coat. He tended the heating stove. I would take the kindling from where he dumped it, the snow that crusted the edges of the wood turning to slush on the kitchen linoleum while I stuffed the short sticks into the cook stove with knotted newspapers and paper trash.
That morning, when I lit it with a waxed butter wrapper, I bent to the dark mouth of the stove box to smell the first resinous smoke off the wood, before it caught in a crackling superheated rush of flame.
Dad coughed behind me, deliberate as he always was when giving advice. “Looks ugly towards Bangor, Nattie. If you’re stoppin’ at Bean’s along the way, I’d leave soon. Could be a white-out by afternoon. Seamless as bone.”
I stood up straight, spun around. He was seated by a table painted with about twenty coats of navy blue enamel, bent over a cup of coffee I had brewed with his electric pot. He’d kept his black watch cap on, and his eyes were closed. He let the steam loosen the frozen muscles of his face and billow over the backs of his trembling hands. His skin was thickened everywhere by the sun and salt water, and just as grooved as the granite shoreline outside the kitchen window. He’d never been a native up here, but the furious weathers of the mid-coast had ground him, shaped him like a cobble until he dressed and acted and almost talked like the other lobstermen who lived in the cove. It had taken him more than two decades to forget my mother, her college friends, the books, the intellectual talk of his youth. Now he was doing his best to forget me.
“That’s bull. That seamless-as-bone stuff. This is coastal climate, not goddamned Mount Katahdin!”
His blue eyes snapped wide open. “I think you should go,” he said.
“Look, I have to leave sometime. Accept it. There’s no use in pushing me away just to get it over with.”
“I guess I’m used to it.” A defensive tone swelled into his voice. “Livin’ alone, that is.”
/> “Trouble is, Dad, you never got used to it.”
His eyes looked rheumy, and I thought I understood, for just a moment, why he was so short with me when I returned home for holidays and summer visits. His long, attenuated ache of loneliness. The inevitable decay and aging. I could do nothing about them, and had to turn away. I didn’t know how sick he was then. With deliberate care, I pawed through the wood stacked by the stove for a few smallish logs.
“Well,” he said. “We could go for a hike out on Stave. The tide’s right for anchoring the .38 off the Eagle’s Nest a couple hours. Is that copacetic?”
I tossed my choices back on the wood stack and started to lay bread and sandwich fixings out on the counter beside the refrigerator.
“What’s copacetic mean?”
“Well, well. My Natalie, the famous astrophysicist, has to ask what a big word means.” His eyes twinkled with laughter. He took a long sip from his cup and tucked a graying curl of his blond hair behind one ear.
“Just seeing if you remembered,” I said.
“Tell me again about Cornell, then. What’s this study you’re so fired up to get back to?”
“We’re working on entropy modeling.”
“You mean chaos theory and other means for monitoring signs of instability in galactic bodies. I read an article comparing a few far-out theories. Seems they favor the meteorological approach. Anti-matter storms of mutual annihilation, collapse that eats the cores from galaxies. Joey Samples, of all people, had a new Scientific American in the stack of magazines in his crapper down at the bait house. The one with a DNA fragment diagrammed on the cover that looked like a lobster tail.”
“You’ve got the right background,” I said.
I slapped mayonnaise on his stale Pepperidge Farm bread like I was caulking boards on a punky boat hull. This was my real Dad.
He said, “But there’s problems, right? Glitches.”
“Yes. Our model for pre-quasar conditions can’t be trusted. If it is correct, then, it turns out, the present state of the Milky Way is dangerous. Our galaxy fits seven of our eight parameters.”
“Hmmm.” He coughed, a bark from deep in his chest. “Everything has to go sometime.”
I said, “I haven’t heard you talk like this for a long time.”
He spoke loud at me, sharp and serious as a nail.
“Just seein’ if you remembered.”
I’m rounding the comer by the Milbridge house. Then the Wilkins garage. Then Haffner’s cottage. Then the Samples’ mailbox set on an anchor chain welded in a twist like a model of a nucleic acid, or of a solar flare. I keep running, my feet gliding out before me. Left then right then left.
That yellowjacket summer of my eighteenth birthday, the sun hammered relentless as a funeral bell against the dry soil. The corn grew stunted, emerald leaves edged with papery brown. Withered blueberries resembled buckshot on the low bushes. Worry crossed people’s faces in constant waves, like heat rising from the tarmac. And the insects buzzed about the wharves in funnellike clouds of black and gold.
I sat outside in the shadow of the bait company shed on the middle wharf and took telephone orders for the Samples brothers. They were selling anything they could dredge, and I made enough, along with clerking nights at the L. L. Bean outlet in Ellsworth, to cover the gaps in my tuition.
“I hear it’s sunspots,” Joey said as he popped open one of the bottles of Orange Crush he kept chilled in the slop from the ice machine. Joey’s face was handsome in a rugged way, wide yet bony with high cheekbones and a thin mouth. He wore his brown hair slicked back, and a plain white tee-shirt and chinos. His fingers were stained yellow from nicotine. “It’s sunspots at the bottom of this.”
“Bottom of what?” I said, feigning ignorance.
“The drought, girl. Gotta be a reason for it. God builds his reasons into the way things is.”
“You know what I wish?” I said. I batted away some of the flies and wasps that swarmed around the door to the fish shed, attuned to the acrid smell of meat.
Joey gave me a brooding look; his dark eyes smoldered. “What?”
“I wish he’d forget his reasons for yellowjackets.”
Joey’s laugh rang out, always pure as a saint’s in the rane moments it came.
“Got some real news,” Dad said as he stepped around the side of the shed. He wiped engine grease from his hands with a scrap of towel. He’d heard us talking from down in the hold of the 38 Special. “It just came over the scanner. Seems that last night God forgot someone up at the nuthouse in South Bangor.”
I felt as if a fist connected with my bowels. I let the name out with an explosion of breath.
“Rafe Wilkins . . .”
He continued in a monotone. “Pulled an electric wire through the ceiling plaster and hung himself on it.”
“Guess that’s that.” Joey whistled low and looked at me. “Won’t be no shadow over you now, girl. Rafe’ll never show his face here again.”
Joey swished a gulp of Crush around between his teeth and spit over the edge of the wharf into the rock-weed drying at low tide. The insects were on it in an instant. My stomach flip-flopped.
He said, “You can punch out early if you want.”
I looked to Dad. He was staring at Joey with the wary look of a man who’d just discovered his best friend had fallen in love with his daughter. Which, of course, Joey hadn’t.
“I think not,” I said. “I’m going to give the Lobstering Coop at Corea another call at four. See if we can deal them the best price for Friday. We might unload another ton. Ton and a half.”
Joey said to Dad, “You’re a lucky man, Mike McCloskey. If you’d had two more towheads like her, I’d hire ’em all.”
Dad shrugged.
Then a light rain began to spackle the wide boards on the dock with stains the size of dimes. A feather of cotton clouds obscured the sun, and more sped behind them. The rain intensified, then fell in buckets. Dad ducked into the shed, but I danced a jig as Joey shook his bottle and sprayed me with sticky soda pop. And it was right then that I knew what I wanted to study more than anything at the university: the way things were. The cosmic structure of the way things were.
My left leg extends in a graceful stretch toward the road ahead. It seems to take longer than it should. I’m caught up in acrobatic stillness. The heat swells at my back. My foot, at last, touches down beside a shattered clam shell. My foot is that of a young girl.
The incident with Rafe Wilkins happened when I was fourteen, on a day when the skies were clear and the waves in the bay were the pale blue-green of the glass insulators on the telephone poles by Route One. Dad was out pulling traps on the 38 Special. I’d taken a picnic bag and our bird identification binoculars to Lily Pond, my private swimming place at the foot of the Hillside Cemetery in South Gouldsboro.
Spring had been unusually wet, and the numerous hard green thimbles of the wild raspberries looked like they’d make a record harvest. Day lilies burst from their stems. Mustard painted the high fields in a brilliant buttery glow, and spikes of fireweed swayed in the breezes that raked the boggy ground on the far side of the pond below. I sat with my towel and lunch on a worn rocky outcropping marked by the scat of a bear.
I was at an age when I felt I could handle any situation; the bear did not worry me. I’d seen teeth marks on a bear tree during my hike in, plus several gnawed tubers of jack-in-the-pulpit and a place where it had torn a hole in the ground to eat a nest of yellowjackets. A noble cause, that. So I held the heavy binoculars and hoped to spot the black fur of the animal as it cut a swath through the high grasses and stands of flowers. I must have looked down on the pond for an hour, noting the birds and the plants. In fact, I was so engrossed within the tunnel-vision perceptions of the lenses that I didn’t hear the man approach me from behind.
“You Missy McCloskey,” the voice said.
I looked up. Wilkins stood tall as a pillar beside me. Black shaggy hair and beard. A pinched face. Bloodshot
eyes round as marbles.
“You got food in that poke?”
It wasn’t really a question. People in the cove called Wilkins a simple man, even a stupid one when hard liquor exposed their meaner sides. He was retarded, but with a special talent which often confused easy definitions or labels for his behavior. He could sniff a handout or a dollar-to-be-lent with the unerring accuracy of a bloodhound tracking coon.
I wasn’t surprised to find him in the pasture.
“Yeah. Two sandwiches. Want one?”
Wilkins took a sandwich and peeled it open like a book. He looked very much like a child. I imagined him saying the order of ingredients inside his head. Bread. Mayonnaise. Ham. Lettuce. Swiss cheese. Mayonnaise. Bread. He closed the sandwich and wolfed it in four bites, hardly stopping to chew.
“Whatalso.” He slurred the words together.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve got to go. I’m tracking a bear.”
He said, “You.”
It was impossible to tell what he meant by the word.
I gathered my stuff and stood to inspect the scat close up, then moved down the slope closer to the pond and the woods that lined the west side. Wilkins followed.
“You show me,” he said. I assumed he meant the rest of my lunch. Or maybe where the bear hid. When he hit me, my neck snapped sideways and dark ink flooded my head, pocked with flashes of copper. I fell like a stone.
“Show me,” he said and got down on his knees in the grass and pinned me, running a hand over the slick material of my bathing suit.
“Show me. Show me how. Show me.”
He covered my mouth with one hand and tore the material, which exposed my breasts and crotch, but he couldn’t rip the suit completely off me. It cut into my calves where I twisted under him.
He raised me a balled fist. “I hit.”
I pretended to faint, hoping he’d give me enough air to fill my lungs . . . and scream. But he pressed hard on me with his body, forcing my wind out. His pants were down. I could feel his manhood poking against my ribs, my stomach. I smelled the whiskey on his shirt, and I was scared then. Numb with fear at what would happen. He squirmed around, started to moan.