by Jerry
And he smiles. He tells her about his day in time; bits and pieces, here and there among the minutes they can find for themselves.
Bits and pieces. Everything is built of bits and pieces, here and there, like love—like houses of straw.
They will need to sleep themselves, when their Primaries sleep. But monitors need a little time as well—an hour here or there, a meal, a quick hello—to be themselves, unlinked, unpsynched, unplugged, and naked. They find a little time in the commissaries, out of their rooms, out of the monitoring stations (their homes is what those are: monitoring couches that are beds besides, beside the porcelain and the food-prep areas). They sneak away, they side-step it awhile, before they go off to sleep with alarm units plugged in and reading the Primary signals, waiting to wake them before
the Primary stirs from a sleep, too brief and too sweet. . . . A monitor finds a Primary’s convenience convenient.
But a monitor gets to dream her own dreams. Or his own nightmares. A monitor gets to grab a few minutes for something like a life.
In between and among.
Which is how they found each other—in between and among.
And it is how they fell in love.
Bits and pieces.
ONE DAY THIS HAPPENS: They meet and smile shyly. They do not eat. He reaches out his hand; she takes it. Or she reaches, and he takes hers: it doesn’t matter now; it doesn’t matter anymore. Hands are held, and smiles exchanged, shyly.
“How did. . .?”
“I don’t. . . .”
“Was it. . .?”
“Wonderful. . . .”
His Primary met her Primary—and hers, his—that day, somehow. A miracle, maybe. Cruel or kind, a miracle. And their Primaries smiled, and the smiles turned to touch. And the touch, to passion.
They made love as Primaries and—not driven, not driving—as monitors and in the back seat, then, that day, watching in wonder and waiting for the sleep of a Primary, waiting to see each other, waiting and eager. And when they meet, they smile shyly. And make love in the minutes that they have for a first time and a second, wondering at the miracle of it, at the lives on either side of everything; touching both ways, all ways; and spent, finally. Then briefly to sleep h,” she says. “You’ll never guess——”
And he won’t at all. He doesn’t even try. He has his own thing to tell her, this day, and he waits. He smiles a bit as she speaks, a distracted and bittersweet smile. And it is distracted and bittersweet that he is feeling—more bitter than sweet, perhaps—and his turn is coming.
He waits.
They have minutes. She looks into his eyes: There is something wrong, she sees, something in the blue that is not sky and is not ice. Something sad and far away and too, too close.
“What is it?”
“I’m going in tomorrow. I’ve been called.”
She pales at this. She looks in his eyes and looks away. “Do you know. . .?”
He shakes his head. “I’ve been called,” he says simply. “I’ve been called.” It says all of these things—too much, enough, and nothing.
He has been called. He says no more.
WHEN SHE SEES him again, he is blind.
Where, oh where, are his blue, blue eyes? She lost herself once and always in those eyes, and they are gone. Has she lost herself? Is she gone thereby? She doesn’t know, but he has lost his eyes. Dark sockets mark where the sky had been—where the sea had shown—cavernous and cold. She looks, and she looks away. His eyes are gone.
Or not—his Primary wears new eyes this day. His eyes—cut from him and given to his Primary. Or not given to the Primary, as much as reclaimed by the Primary. He has been grown a clone for parts: a monitor clone, maybe, but a medi-clone certainly. And now his eyes are their eyes—his and his Primary’s—as they have always been, in fact, his Primary eyes. Now his Primary has custody, and now he has the night.
She wants to run away. She wants to gather him up to her.
He smiles at her, blindly. It is odd in that it is eyeless, this smile. The skin wrinkles about the sockets, but there is no warmth in this. It is odd, this smile.
“I will see you tomorrow,” he tells her.
He cannot see her now. He cannot see her tears, and he is too new to blindness to hear the grief in her breathing. “I will see you in psynch.” When he is linked and psynched, he will still see what his Primary sees: her Primary and so her. “Yes,” she says, taking his hand and kissing it. “Yes.”
But she does not know what she means.
IT IS FUNNY: it is funny how the world works. It is later: it is more than days later; it is not yet years later. It is later, and enough so that they have gotten by some of it—not all of it, but some. Enough, maybe. But maybe not.
She sees the blue of his eyes in his Primary when her Primary sees his, and he sees her, eyes and all, the same way. They see in psynch, and it is not enough, but they touch together and it is what they have right now: a life removed, once at least, and many times again, likely.
It is what they have, and it is not enough.
And by the time it is enough, by the time they have learned how to live with it somewaysomehow, something else happens.
SHE TOUCHED his hand, and said nothing. By now, he knew how to hear the things his eyes kept from him. He heard the silence, her silence, and the things it held.
“What’s wrong?” He had not seen her today. His Primary had argued with hers some days ago, and the rift remained, for now. It was painful, and it was who they were.
“What’s wrong?” He asked this again.
She did not know how to say it to make it kind or gentle; she did not know how to say it at all.
So she said it quickly.
“She died today. She killed herself. I go up tomorrow.” Her Primary was dead; it does not matter how, not now, not then. It does not matter. Her Primary was dead; and because of who she was, she would take the place of her Primary—and who she had been—and take the world, and what the world was. It was why she had been a monitor, after all: to gracefully, seamlessly, slide into the life that was now waiting for an occupant, into the life-to-let that lay before her.
She would go up. She would become her Primary.
She would have a life.
SHE WOULD HAVE what she would have, and he would stay behind, blind and bound to whatever kind of a life would be left him. Blind and bound. Behind.
He wept. No—eyeless, he sobbed, and broke upon those sobs, on the backs of them, moving on waves of grief to crash on dark shores. And she wept as well, yet grew excited, anticipating. A life. She would have a life.
“I will bring you up,” she said. “I will find you and kill you and bring you up. Then we will have lives and a life,” she said, “together.”
He smiled at her, sadly, and she wished she could read his eyes, the dark of his eyes, the depths. She thought of the sky, and she wished these things.
“I will find you and kill you, your Primary,” she promised.
And he shook his blind head heavily, and, “Yes, please. Do this thing, so that we may be together, please. You are what I know of life. Please do this thing,” he said in a voice like dark and brittle stone, shaking his heavy, blind head and seeming to shrink.
She left him, wondering what he had not seen, wondering what he had heard. She left him with resolve: she would bring him up.
She left him in confusion, and sorrow. She left, more than anything, excited.
And she would bring him up.
THE NEXT DAY, she goes up. She is told what to expect; she is given a persona, she becomes an entity in the eyes of certain law, and she is given a full life. She is given the world of her Primary, and her Primary’s part in that world, and all that had wrapped around her Primary now wraps around her.
She is given her Primary’s name. She has not had a name before; no monitor does. She is given the name, and she takes it.
It is the way of the thing.
She plays with her name a long ti
me, getting used to it, making it hers. Until now, she has known that these were syllables to which her Primary responded, but somehow she was separate from that response. She herself was nameless, and could attach no more significance to the sound of that name than she could to words like quince or murmur.
And she plays with her new life, getting used to that as well. Somehow, it is easier to assume the life than the name. She does not think about this too much; she does not think about this at all. At all.
At all.
A day comes. A special day. His Primary has requested to see her. He knows what has happened: that she has gone up, that she is dead and replaced, that the way is walked by a fleshly ghost. He knows this and must meet the ghost.
And she must prepare her a murder, she thinks; she must prepare her this.
So it is that she acquires blades and beams, projectiles and poisons, things of death. She will choose from these when she must; that she has them now will allow that to happen at all. She knows what his Primary looks like: him. She has seen him as monitor and through her own Primary. She will know him.
She is prepared.
“Hello,” he says when he arrives. And he says her name. He is shy, tentative, uncertain. It is possible that he is in some way responsible for the death of her Primary, bur she does not, somehow, know this. A monitor watches, but a monitor does not read minds.
He is shy and uncertain, and so he comes head bowed before her.
Gun, she thinks, garotte; dagger. Dirk.
And he is shy before her.
“Hello,” she says, in her turn.
“Do you know me?”
“Yes. I do.”
“I loved her. You. I love you. I think. This is so hard.”
She nods. It is hard, but she knows what must be done. Then—and doubt—she does not. For if she brings him up, he will come up blind, still blind, and be so always, because so much is done, and no more. There are no spare parts for the spare part, and the eyes would die so soon, too soon.
And then he looks up. He looks at her. Into her eyes, and smiles.
And she looks at him, and into his eyes—his eyes—into his sea-blue, swelling eyes before she can stop or look away, and knows that she cannot kill him and that she cannot keep him, not kill the one, not keep the other, and that she cannot turn away. She knows that she must somehow have both and neither, always and never, forever.
She looks into those eyes then, smiling sadly at someone who is not in the room with them, watching every move.
“And I love you,” she says, shaking her heavy head.
“I love you,” she says from behind a bittersweet smile.
And she stares, forever frozen, into blue, blue eyes.
1997
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS
Brian A. Hopkins
Twilight.
Central Park’s northwest corner.
A businessman alone with the wind.
In 1998 the city erected a sign here warning intrepid or addled tourists that the northern perimeter, which borders on Harlem, was unsafe after dark. It was signed by the Chief of Police, Central Park Precinct, whose office is located a safe distance away on the south side of the reservoir. On this particular summer night that office is empty, as it was all day and the day before. The Chief of Police, it seems, forgot to show up for work.
In the years it’s been up, the sign has suffered the weather and graffiti, the latter so layered that it’s virtually impossible to make out the original words. No matter, less than ten percent of the people in New York City remember how to read. Studying the sign, the disheveled man in the grey suit is more likely to recognize the gang symbols emblazoned on it. Singular symbols are better retained in the hippocampus.
Unlike almost every other sign in the park—in fact, almost every other sign in the nation—this one hasn’t been replaced with a proximity-activated, audio sign. The reason for this is a simple one: by 2001 the violence in question no longer existed. Violence requires hate, and hate requires cognizance of past transgressions.
The man in the grey suit ponders the sign for a moment, waiting perhaps for it to address him, but prolonged contemplation requires more mental faculty than he’s capable of mustering. Shortly, he shrugs and moves on, following the trails to the south.
The trees whisper in the warm moonlight, their leaves rustling like the old women digging through their knitting bags on the park benches. The grass smells of cutting. The gravel under his feet makes a satisfying crunch that is comfortably familiar. He’s made this walk before, but he can’t remember when. A jogger passes without meeting his eye. An old man and his collie meander from tree to tree.
A speaker mounted in an ancient silver maple comes to life as the man in the grey suit walks by. “Good evening, citizen. If you’re lost or confused, don’t let that frighten you. This is perfectly normal. Locate an identification panel along the trail for assistance.”
Proceeding south, he watches for such a panel, but even in these times the park is intended as a place to lose oneself. Identification panels are few and far between. He finds two, but both have been smashed. All that remains is the audio unit which politely, repeatedly, asks him to place his hand against the recognition plate to be scanned. The recognition plate is beyond repair, its glass face a spider web of bright-edged shards, its plastic housing spilling wires and electronics.
He begins to worry. A quick search through his pockets turns up some loose bills and change, a half roll of Rolaids, and a scrap of paper. No wallet. No identification. On the paper is written, “Heckscher Puppet House” (though he fails to interpret these symbols as words).
A billboard beside the trail shows him where the Puppet House is located. The billboard is automated and fully functional. It’s free of graffiti, as if some unwritten code designates it as off limits, as if the youths who defaced the warning sign respected the necessity of the park map. The man in the grey suit matches the sequence of symbols on the paper to a numbered index. All he has to do then is touch the index number. The Puppet House is situated on the south side of the 843-acre park. Distance, however, has little meaning for him. Without knowing how far he’s walked in the past and, therefore, how far he’s capable of walking now, he can’t relate to this impending journey.
After the billboard shows him where Heckscher’s Puppet House can be found, he asks it a rather simple question.
“Who am I?”
“Do not be alarmed, citizen. You can obtain that information from the nearest Identification Panel.” It promptly highlights the nearest panel on the map for him, but it’s one of the two broken ones he’s already located. When he informs it of the vandalism, the billboard politely replies that it will notify the Chief of Police.
We spent so many years overlooking the obvious. Alzheimer’s was the clue, but we failed to grasp the warning Mother Nature was giving us. Because we noticed it was abundant in the autopsied brains of deceased Alzheimer’s patients, we spent years researching apolipoprotein E (ApoE) which normally helps transport cholesterol in the blood. We sensed there was a link, and even as early as 1993 we knew the gene that codes for the ApoE-4 allele was an Alzheimer’s indicator. Those with two ApoE-4 genes are virtually guaranteed of contracting the disease. But genetics were still slightly out of our reach in the nineties, and all we could really do was what we always do with something we don’t understand: we play the game of haruspication, drilling and cutting and sifting through what the disease leaves us, picking at the remains of its victims in search of a future without the disease. A common enough mistake. A tried and true fallacy of modern medicine.
We should have been looking at healthy brains, not just the brains of those who had died from Alzheimer’s.
In 1993, we even had within our hands a simple test for Alzheimer’s. Neurobiologists had discovered that a particular channel molecule that allows potassium ions to move in and out of cells is missing or nonfunctional in people with Alzheimer’s. It was known that these potassium
ions play a key role in the formation of memories. What we couldn’t identify was what was devouring the potassium channels. What was too unbelievable, though it lay right behind our very noses, was that an enemy had infiltrated our minds.
—Emery, Peter D., “One Who Remembers,” Epidemiology Monthly, Sept. 2005 (undistributed).
Following a bridle path, he continues past the tennis courts and down the west bank of the reservoir. The wind off the water is cool and moist, easing some of the tension and fear building within him. From here he can see the glass and concrete buildings on Central Park West. He’s actually close enough to hear traffic if there were any, but the only thing running this late is the underground public transportation. Looking across the reservoir he can also see the buildings fronting Fifth Avenue, including the Guggenheim Museum, but the most impressive buildings are all to the south.
There’s a working identification panel where the bridle path veers around the south bank of the reservoir. As he approaches the panel, a man with a baseball bat slips from the dark woods and rushes forward. “Good evening, citizen . . .” begins the panel.
“Wait!” shouts the man in the grey suit.
The man with the bat doesn’t hesitate. Putting his shoulders to the task, he takes one mighty swing at the box. The identification panel explodes in a shower of sparks and crackling blue cessation.
“Hey!”
The man with the bat shrugs sheepishly, the smile on his face catching the moonlight. “Sorry, friend,” he pants, “but you’re honestly better off this way.”
The grey-suited man hardly looks convinced. “Why did you do that?”
“Because the damn things are nothing more than placebos. You think they’re helping you, but they’re not. It’s like the little pocket computers everyone’s using or the notepads those who can still read and write carry. You reach the point where you can no longer assimilate everything they have to tell you, friend. Stand and listen to one of those panels long enough and you’ll forget what information you were originally asking for.”