Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  In the big foyer, the world glitters behind double glass doors. Tiffany hesitates just out of range of the electric eye and takes a deep breath. Going out reminds her of the scuba diving she used to love so much, a plunge, a dropping down, an immersing into a peculiar world of shattered light and immeasurable shadow. When she takes a step forward, the doors slide open with a blare of sunlike trumpets. She steps through onto grey walkway. Green spreads out and menaces while white flames rise in pillars and swell. A fanged mouth gleams in the green.

  “Let your eyes adjust. It be just your eyes. And the light.”

  A passing orderly ignores her comment. She reminds herself, no more talking out loud, and begins her walk down to the bus shelter at the bottom of the hill. The green resolves itself into ice plant, tufted with purple flowers, each water-conserving spike somewhat tooth-shaped, and trees, rather typical cypresses, not twisted vampire forms writhing in sun fire. The white and bloated towers become hospital buildings. The view makes sense again. It takes a few seconds, at times, for her recently grown axons, the neurons firing in a new order, to cross-connect and control sensory overload. Names, which swarmed round her brain like so many tiny flies circling above fruit, have all settled down again, each in its proper place. She glances back, savoring labels, rejoicing in the ability to label. Enclosed lawn. Door. Window. And distantly, in the blueness of the bay, water. And nearer by, her own head. She touches the back of her head. Hand. Takes out the bad hand and looks at it. Palm of her hand, crisscrossed though it be by scars, paper-cut-thin scars, where the surgeons sliced in to reattach major nerves. Puts the bad hand back in the pocket of the Forty-Niner jacket.

  “My hand.” Damn. Speaking again.

  But no one hears. The bus shelter, an open hut of plexipanel and chrome, stands empty beside an empty street under the overhead wires for the electric buses. By leaving early, she’s beaten the change of shift from the hospital; she’ll get a seat on the bus, here near the end of its long run from downtown. It will trundle a few blocks to the ocean, pause, turn, and then head back along Geary Boulevard, but Tiffany will transfer off long before it reaches the concrete and glass jumble that used to be the heart of the City. Across the street the long row of pastel stucco houses, stuck together cheek by jowl, gleam in the warm November sun. House. Window. Door. About half the houses have their windows boarded up, doors nailed shut, roofs peeling and crumbling. The rest, judging from the improvised curtains, flowered bedsheets or the red-and-yellow stripes that the Brazilians like so much, shelter refugees. On the tiny porches, behind rusting grates, sit stacks of baskets and cardboard boxes, flowing with things, unrecognizable piles of cloth and packets. On a couple of the porches toddlers, dressed only in dirty diapers or a little shirt, clutch the safety gates and stare out like prisoners. Tiffany yawns. The sun is too warm, deadly warm. She can remember cold Novembers, when the fog lay thick on the Bay and the hills, or it would rain, sometimes even three days in a row. She remembers her mother picking her up at day care, and how they would run giggling through the cold rain to their warm house with light glowing in the windows. Her sister would be home before them, because she was old enough to have her own front door key and let herself in after school, but not old enough to pick Tiffany up from day care. Water. Hand. The palm of her hand, stiff and reluctant to move. She was never left alone to curl her hands round metal bars and stare down empty streets. Her mother, an Army widow, was never forced to work for near-slave wages as these Brazilian mothers are.

  Orange and white, the electric bus glides up to the stop. Blue sparks flash as its connector rods tremble, sway then slip from the overhead wires and fall, bouncing and flaring, onto the roof. Tiffany boards, sliding her FastPass into the computerized slot, squeezing out of the stout operator’s way as she clatters down the stairs to get the rods back up and power back on. Tiffany spots her favorite seat, a single jammed in across from the back door, where no one can sit directly beside her, and heads for it. As the bus shudders and sparks appear outside the back window, the handful of passengers all mutter to themselves or their companions.

  “Jeez, they can put a man on Mars, but they can’t build a decent trolley.”

  Spoken aloud again, but fortunately she’s passing a plump old woman, laden with shopping bags, who smiles and nods agreement, just as if Tiffany had in fact been speaking to her. Tiffany smiles in return, hurries to her chosen seat, scrunches down in it, stretching her long legs into the aisle, pulling them back, stretching them out again since the trolley’s mostly empty. Being inside a small metal space can be very difficult, and today she feels the walls shrinking . . . or do they swell? They move somehow, at any rate, and eat up the space around her. She takes a deep breath and stares across the aisle to the door. And the window. And hospital hill outside the window. Swearing under her breath the operator hurries up the front steps and into her tiny compartment. The computer beeps once, announces that the next stop will be Land’s End, and signals the operator to begin. Just as the bus swings out into the street, Tiffany sees a man running, or rather trotting, for the bus. The operator ignores him, the bus pulls away, he stands waving his arms and calling down half-heard imprecations.

  Tiffany turns in her seat to keep him in view a moment longer. A little man, slightly stooped, wearing a black suit over a white shirt and a black vest, and a plump black hat of great age, he raises one fist and shakes it in the direction of the fleeing trolley. She cannot see clearly, but she thinks she noticed a long lock of grey hair dangling at either side of a bushy grey beard, and a mass of grey hair spouting from under his hat. Since she spent nearly two years stationed in Israel, she can guess that he’s one of the last of the Orthodox, clinging to a way of dress already old-fashioned when his great-grandfather’s generation brought it to the Promised Land. But what, of course, is he doing here in San Francisco, home of all the world’s gentiles, refugees from a hundred countries, gathered over hundreds of years, where nothing could be less pure, where the very land itself partakes of two mingled natures, water and earth blending inexorably as the tides rise day by day and chew at the shore, and water and air mix into fog. Somewhere, no doubt, he has found a place selling kosher food, or at least food that he can convince himself to be pure enough to eat. She would shrug the problem away, remind herself that it’s none of her business, if his image would only unstick itself from her mind. Yet for a long time, as the bus lumbers beside the seawall that once was Ocean Beach, she can see him in her memory, dressed in black and yelling curses upon all things too impatient to wait for one old man, his thin arms waving, his hands curled into fists.

  Just at the end of the line, the bus breaks down. In mid-announcement the computer dies, the lights go off, the rods fall with a thump and pronounced lack of sparks onto the roof. The other passengers sigh and mutter remarks, thankful that they’re transferring to another bus, rise and gather parcels, clatter off behind the operator, who trots to the rear and begins working the wires again. Tiffany scrunches down farther in her seat and watches the wires twitch and flutter outside the rear window as the operator raises the connecting rods, makes contact, settles them onto the wires. Nothing happens. No hum, no lights, no computerized voice apologizing for the interruption to service. A sudden flash of orange-and-green uniform, the operator appears in the back doorway.

  “Might’s well get on off. ’Nother bus waiting just ahead anyhow.”

  Tiffany goes out the back door and steps into the long cold sweep of shadow cast by the seawall. Out across the Pacific the sun is dropping fast toward the horizon, but thanks to the forty-foot-high reinforced-concrete wall that runs all the way down San Francisco’s western border (continuing on south, as well, to protect Daly City, Pacifica, Half Moon Bay, those little towns long since swallowed up by Bay City sprawl), no one will ever stand on Ocean Beach and watch it set again. The beach lies under ten feet of water, anyway. Shivering a little she passes the other ex-passengers, walks up the line of buses, neatly arranged in a half-moon of a
turnaround, and finds the other Geary bus at the head of the line. Its door, though, is shut, and its operator stands conferring with a little clot of Muni people back by the newly-dead bus. Termination incident. Soon a mechanic will arrive, and there will be a resurrection event. Wiring. All in the wiring.

  The seawall makes Tiffany nervous, it looms so high and cold, splattered with red graffiti, black obscenities, green and purple tags from one gang or another. How they get up so high to scribble and paint amazes her, as does their determination. As she studies the wall, she thinks she might see a couple of cracks in it, down near the bottom where it counts. When she looks at the ground immediately below the cracks, she finds depressions, as if the asphalt were just starting to sink, as if a rift were just starting to develop. She steps to one side, squints: the depressions exist, all right, still shallow but an inexorable sign that the sea is eating away at the base of the wall. No doubt it can be patched or propped to give this boulevard and the public housing on its far side a stay of execution. For how long? She prefers not to think of that.

  She walks a little way forward out of the shadow, but the sun hurts her eyes; she paces back, scowling at the clot of trolley operators, wishing someone would open the door and let her sit down, paces into the sun again and turns to look up the boulevard. The old man in black is heading toward them, trotting along all stoop-shouldered, one arm crooked so he can keep one hand firmly on his hat. A short block away he stops, stares at the bus, does a visible double take at the clot of operators and the grumbling passengers. She can see him abruptly hunch his thin shoulders, waggle his head, then turn and hurry off, dashing up a side-street and disappearing into the public housing, a sprawl of beige stucco ziggurats, brindled with graffiti.

  “Almost like he ripped something off or something.” Damn. Did it again.

  No one notices. The operators have progressed to waving their hands and swearing over the dead bus; the ex-passengers have migrated closer to listen. Tiffany shifts her weight from one foot to another, breathes slowly and deeply, wonders if she’s too warm, decides against taking the jacket off, shifts her weight again. She feels the rage starting, a sliver of glass deep in her mind, pushing and slicing its way toward the surface, forcing the long tendons in her neck to tighten and her jaw to clench. She refuses to give in. It’s all in the wiring. She is not truly angry. She turns and strides back along the line of buses, walks fast, whips around and strides down the street on the outside of the line, where no one can see her fighting the rage. All in the wiring. Not their fault. All in the . . .

  Suddenly she realizes that her bad hand is clenching. The rage vanishes in a whoop of delight that she turns into a cough. For a long moment she stands in the middle of the empty street and smiles, merely grins at the sunlight, at the sky, the asphalt, the beige ziggurats, the dead bus. The hand aches, the fingers straighten; she ignores the ache, clenches her fist again. Hurts, a stab of fire along the nerves, a tingling. She laughs and strides back to the sidewalk, where the operator is opening the doors of the bus at the head of the line. The passengers are staring at her. She gives them all a brilliant, impartial smile and takes her place at the end of the line. Door. Window. Behind her, wall. In her pocket, hand. Clenched fist. Palm of the hand. Pain. Who cares?

  She finds her favorite seat, scrunches down into it, and makes an effort to stop smiling, to assume the polite mask of indrawn attention that people wear, sitting on buses. The hand tingles, then subsides into an ache. She remembers the last cup of juice that she drank at the hospital, realizes that in the random way they have, the drugs have finally blasted through the blocked connections or knit up the ravelled sleeve of neural tissue or whatever it is, exactly, that they do do. Months ago Dr. Rosas explained the drugs, drew little pictures, brought better pictures up on screen from video files, spent a patient hour repeating her explanations, but although Tiffany heard the words, although they even at that moment made a kind of sense, especially associated with the pictures, she cannot remember the information now. Only the words, “protein sheath,” dangle in her mind, disconnected yet profoundly meaningful. She will ask again on Monday, she decides. If, of course, she can remember.

  Even though other passengers pile on at every stop, even though people soon crowd in front of her and close to her, the wave of good feeling carries Tiffany all the way through the trolley ride, sweeps her off the bus at Sixth Avenue and in a warm mental foam floats her down the cross street, one long block, to the bookstore just around the corner on Clement. As she lingers in front of the bins of cheap used paper-books, though, the wave recedes. This bookstore has existed longer than she has; her mother shopped for storybooks here when she herself was a little girl.

  That, Tiffany knows. But in her memories from before the war, the store stands right on the corner, not several doors down. It looks much the same as this store does now, the memory-store is merely a corner store, not a flush-to-the-sidewalk store. The discrepancy makes her shake her head hard. She turns and looks back at the broad street, crammed with pedestrians hurrying along between the bus lanes, and at the sidewalks, packed with the bins and barrows of the various peddlers—a woman selling shao mai here, a man with sausage rolls there, a table of cheap clothes, wooden crates of spatulas and ladles. Overhead the sky is darkening to the velvet blue that means sunset and night, when white lights will stab and shatter the world. She should take her transfer to the stop on Sixth and get the streetcar for home. On the other hand, the bookstore seems to invite her in with its yellow light and a quilt of colors beyond the windows: the shelves inside, all stacked with book cartridges and paper-books, red and blue and yellow. She walks through the door.

  In this particular store the science fiction section lies all the way to the back. As she makes her way through the narrow aisles, past heaped and jumbled sensations of bright covers, holograph scenes of far places, the shiny 3-D portraits of authors, the occasional poster talking at her in a tinny voice, and as other customers cross her path or block her way, women burdened with shopping bags and one precious novel to take them to some better place in their minds, children clutching shiny comics to their chests, old men holding news cartridges that need refilling, she begins to breathe a little fast, to feel sweat form and bead on her back and upper hp, but she forces herself to walk slowly, to breathe slowly, to concentrate on keeping her bad hand in its pocket and the good hand from knocking stacks of cartridges to the floor, until she reaches a relatively open space in front of the correct shelves, where she can let the tension ease.

  The nearby posters start talking as soon as they sense a warm organic presence in front of them. Although she automatically ignores the babble of tinkling blurbs, Tiffany stares at the pictures for a long time. Starships against dark galactic skies, aliens holding beautiful artifacts, landscapes never seen, washed by strangely-colored seas, stretching out to jagged mountains, dotted with trees that never grew—they all glow with fascinations that swarming Earth and the barren dullness of Mars and Moon will never match. If she cannot find Hunter’s Night, she decides, she will buy a new book and see how well she can follow it. Since she’s always loved reading, every few weeks she buys a new book, takes it home, spends an hour or so making slow sense out of letters that used to form words automatically, trying to make the words once deciphered form into mental pictures and meanings and sounds, the way they always used to before, easily and magically. So far she’s always given up after two or three pages or two or three screens. Dr. Rosas suggests that she buy kids’ books, but the doings of clothed animals and small children have not yet been able to hold the interest of a woman come back from four years of war. If she could only find Hunter’s Night. She’s sure that it would be different, reading again the one book that she can remember reading, and this time she would find out how the damn thing ended.

  Since she cannot just remember and match the name she carries in her head with the names she finds on the cartridge labels or the spines of paper-books, she fishes in the cargo poc
ket of her pants for the slip of paper she always carries. Some weeks ago she printed out Allonsby’s name and the book title in big blocky letters with black ink, a template of sorts. She finds the slots allotted to the ‘A’s’ on the shelves and goes through them slowly, hesitantly, dreading the disappointment which does indeed come. A-D, A-L-L, A-L-L-E, A-N. She holds the paper up, squints back and forth between her own printing and the long line of names on label and spine. No A-L-L-O’s at all. Not one. No Allonsby, no nobody.

  “Damn!”

  “Help you, Miz?”

  Tiffany yelps, spins, sees a young man, slender, black, hands up over his face as he steps back fast. With a gulp for air she catches herself, stands still, gulps again, feels sweat run down the small of her back, lowers her good hand.

  “Jesus God I’m sorry. Dint see you come up, dint see you at all, kid.”

  “You a vet, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s cool. My brother he’s a vet. I understand. Sorry I startled you. You dunt have to feel bad. Really.”

  She takes a last deep breath, lets it out very slowly, tosses her head once, shoves her bad hand deeper into one jacket pocket and puts her piece of paper away in the other. The boy—he’s maybe seventeen—manages a tentative smile. She sees then the name tag pinned to his shirt: J-O-S-H. Josh. An employee.