by Dan Simmons
Jeremy slides from the bed without waking Gail. She is curled on her side with one hand lifted to her cheek; she is smiling ever so slightly. Jeremy walks barefoot to the study, crosses to his desk, and carefully opens the lower right-hand drawer. It is there, wrapped in old rags, under the empty folders he had laid atop it the day his brother-in-law had given it to him. The .38 Smith & Wesson is the same one Jeremy had thrown into the water that morning when he had come across Vanni Fucci in Florida—the nick in the stock and dullness along the lower part of the barrel is the same—but it is here now. He lifts it, breaks the cylinder, and sees the brass circles of the six cartridges firmly in place. The roughened grip is firm against his palm, the metal of the trigger guard slightly cool.
Jeremy tries to make no sound as he moves from the study to the head of the stairway, from the stairway through the dining room to the door to the kitchen. It is very dim, but his eyes have adapted. From where he stands he can make out the pale white phantom of the refrigerator and he jumps when its recycling pump chunks on. Jeremy lowers the revolver to his side again and waits.
The screen door is slightly ajar and now it swings open and then closed again. A shadow slips across the tile.
The movement startles Jeremy and he takes a step forward and lifts the .38 a second before he lowers it again. Gernisavien, the tough-minded little calico, crosses the floor to brush against his legs impatiently. Then she twitches her tail, paces back to the refrigerator, looks up at Jeremy meaningfully, and crosses back to brush against him with even less patience.
Jeremy kneels to rub her neck. The pistol looks idiotic in his hand. Taking a long breath, he sets the weapon on the kitchen counter and uses both hands to pet his cat.
The moon is rising the next evening by the time they have a late dinner. Electric lights in the house do not work, but all other electricity seems to be flowing. The steaks come from the freezer in the basement, the ice-cold beers from the refrigerator, and the charcoal from one of several bags left in the garage. They sit out back near the old pump while the steaks sizzle on the grill. Gernisavien crouches expectantly at the foot of one of the big, old wooden lawn chairs despite the fact that she has been well fed only moments earlier.
Jeremy is wearing his favorite pair of cotton chinos and his light blue work shirt; Gail has slipped into the loose, white cotton dress she often wears on trips. The sounds tonight are the same they have heard from this backyard so many times before: crickets, night birds from the orchard, variations of frog sounds from the darkness near the stream, and an occasional flutter of sparrows from the barn. They set one of their two kerosene lanterns on the picnic table as they prepare the meal, and Gail lights candles as well. Later, as they eat, they douse the lantern so as to better see the stars.
Jeremy has served the steaks on thick paper plates and their knives make crisscross patterns on the white. Their meal consists of the steaks, wine from the still-well-stocked basement, and a simple salad from the garden with ample fresh radishes and onions.
Even with the crescent moon rising, the stars are incredibly clear. Jeremy remembers the night they had lain out in the hammock together and waited to catch a glimpse of the space shuttle floating across the sky like a windblown ember. He realizes that the stars are even clearer tonight because there are no reflected lights from Philadelphia or the tollway to dim the sky’s glory.
Gail leans forward even before the meal is finished. Where are we, Jerry? Her mindtouch is as gentle as possible so as not to bring on the headaches.
Jeremy takes a sip of wine. “What’s wrong with just being home, kiddo?”
There’s nothing wrong with being home. But where are we?
Jeremy concentrates on turning a radish in his fingers. It had tasted salty and cool.
Gail looks toward the dark line of trees at the edge of the orchard. Fireflies blink there. What is this place?
Gail, what’s the last thing you remember?
“I remember dying,” she says softly.
The words hit Jeremy like a blow to the solar plexus. For a moment he cannot frame his thoughts.
Gail continues, although her soft voice is husky. “We’ve never believed in an afterlife, Jerry.” Uncle Buddy … “After we’re dead we help the grass and flowers grow, Beanie. Everything else is a crock of shit.”
“No, no, kiddo,” says Jeremy, and moves his dish and glass aside. He leans forward and touches her arm. “There’s another explanation.…” Before he can begin it, the floodgates give way and they are inundated with the images he has held from her: burning the house … the fishing shack in Florida … Vanni Fucci … the dead days on the streets of Denver … Miz Morgan and the cold house …
“Oh, Jerry, my God … my God …” Gail has recoiled in her seat and now covers her face with her hands.
Jeremy comes around the table, grips her upper arms firmly, and lowers his cheek to hers. Miz Morgan … the steel teeth … the cold house … the anesthesia of poker … the flight east with Don Leoni’s thugs … the hospital … the dying child … a moment’s contact … falling.
“Oh, Jerry!” Gail sobs against his shoulder. She has suffered his months of hell in a violent moment of pain. She is suffering his own grief and the echoed insanity of that grief. Now they weep together for a moment. Then Jeremy kisses her tears away, wipes her face with the loose tail of his work shirt, and moves away to pour them each some more wine.
Where are we, Jerry?
He hands her a glass and takes a moment to sip from his. Insects chorus from out behind the barn. Their home glows pale in the moonlight, the kitchen windows warm with the light from their other kerosene lantern inside. He whispers, “What do you remember about waking up here, kiddo?”
They have already shared some of the images, but trying to put it into words sharpens their memories. “Darkness,” whispers Gail. “Then the soft light. The empty place. Rocking. Being rocked. Being held. And then walking. The sunrise. Finding you.”
Jeremy nods. He runs his finger around the rim of the wineglass. I think we’re with Robby. The boy. I think we’re in his mind.
Gail’s head snaps back as if she has been slapped. The blind boy …???????? She looks around her and then extends a shaking hand toward the table. She grips the edge tightly and the glasses vibrate. When she lets go, it is only to raise her hand to touch her own cheek. “Then nothing here is real? We’re in a dream?” I’m really dead and you’re only dreaming that I’m here?
“No,” says Jeremy loudly enough that Gernisavien moves quickly under a chair. He can see her tail twitching in the soft light from candles and stars. “No,” he says more softly, “that’s not it. I’m sure that’s not it. Remember Jacob’s research?”
Gail is too shaken to speak aloud. Yes. Even her mindtouch is tiny, almost lost in the low night sounds.
Well, continues Jeremy, holding her attention with the force of his will, you remember then that Jacob was sure that my analysis was correct … that the human personality was a complex standing wavefront … a sort of metahologram holding a few million smaller holograms.…
Jerry, I don’t see how this can help—
“Damn it, kiddo, it does help!” He leans closer again and rubs her upper arms, feeling the goose bumps there. “Listen, please.…”
Okay.
“If Jacob and I were right … that the personality is this complex wavefront which interprets a reality consisting of collapsing probability wavefronts, then the personality certainly couldn’t survive brain death. The mind may work as both generator and interferometer all in one, but both of those functions would be extinguished with the death of the brain.…”
Then how … how can I …?
He sits next to her again, keeping one arm firmly around her. Gernisavien comes out from under the chair and jumps on Gail’s lap, eager to share their warmth. They both keep one hand busy petting the calico while Jeremy continues talking softly.
“Okay, let’s just think about this a minute. You wer
en’t just a memory or a sense impression to me, kiddo. For over nine years we were essentially one person with two bodies. That’s why when you … that’s why I went crazy afterward, tried to shut my ability down completely. Only I couldn’t do it. It’s as if I was tuned to darker and darker wavelengths of human thought, just spiraling down through …”
Gail glances up from petting Gernisavien. She looks fearfully at the darkness down by the stream. The dark under the bed. “But how can it be so real if it’s just a dream?”
Jeremy touches her cheek. “Gail, it’s not just a dream. Listen. You were in my mind, but not just as a memory. You were there. The night you … that night when I was at Barnegat Light … the night your body died … you joined me, you leaped to my mind as if it were a lifeboat.”
No, how could …
“Think, Gail. Our ability was working well. It was the ultimate mindtouch. That complex hologram that’s you didn’t have to perish … you just leaped to the only other interferometer in the universe that could contain it … my mind. Only my ego sense or id or superego or whatever the hell keeps us sane and separate from all the barrage of our senses, not to mention separating us from the babble of all those minds, that part of me kept telling me that I was only sensing a memory of you.”
They sat in silence for a moment, each remembering. Big Two-Hearted River, offered Gail. Jeremy could see that she did remember fragments of the time he was at the Florida fishing camp.
“You were a figment of my imagination,” he said aloud, “but only in the way that our own personalities are figments of our own imaginations.” Probability waves collapsing on a beach of pure space-time. Schrödinger curves, their plots speaking in a language purer than speech. Vague Attractors of Kolmogorov winding around resonance islands of quasi-periodic sanity amid foaming layers of chaos.
“Think in a human language,” whispers Gail. She pinches his side.
Jeremy jumps away from the pinch, smiles, and holds the cat down as it prepares to leap away. “I mean,” he says softly, “that we were both dead until a blind, deaf, retarded child ripped us out of one world and offered us another in its place.”
Gail frowns slightly. The candles have burned out, but her white dress and pale skin continue to glow in the starlight and moonlight. “You mean we’re in Robby’s mind and it’s as real as the real world?” She frowns again at the sound of that.
He shakes his head. “Not quite. When I broke through to Robby, I tapped into a closed system. The poor bastard had almost no data to use in constructing a model of the real world … touch, I guess, scent, and a hell of a lot of pain, from what the nurses knew about his past … so he probably didn’t depend much on what little he could sense of the external world in defining his interior universe.”
Gernisavien leaped away and trotted off into the darkness as if she had urgent business somewhere. Knowing cats, Gail and Jeremy both guessed that she did. Jeremy also could stay still no longer; he stood and began pacing back and forth in the dark, never getting so far from Gail that he could not reach out and touch her.
My mistake, he continued, was in underestimating … no, in never really thinking about the power that Robby might have in that world. This world. When I broke through to him … planning just to share a few sight and sound images … he pulled me in, kiddo. And with me, you.
The wind comes up a bit and moves the leaves of the orchard. Their soft rustling has the edge of a sad, end-of-summer sound to it.
“All right,” Gail says after a moment. “We’re both existing as a couple of your squiggly personality holograms in this child’s mind.” She taps the table hard. “And it feels real. But why is our house here? And the garage? And …” She gestures helplessly at the night around them and the stars overhead.
I think Robby liked what he saw in our minds, kiddo. I think he preferred our polluted old Pennsylvania countryside to the landscape he’d built for himself during his lonely years.
Gail nods slowly. “But it’s not really our countryside, is it? I mean, we can’t drive into Philadelphia in the morning, right? Chuck Gilpen’s not going to show up with one of his new girlfriends, is he?”
I don’t know, kiddo. I don’t think so. My guess is that there’s been some judicious editing going on. We’re “real” because our holographic structure is intact, but all the rest of this is an artifact that Robby allows.
Gail rubs her arms again. An artifact that Robby allows. You make him sound like God, Jerry.
He clears his throat and glances skyward. The stars are still there. “Well,” he whispers, “in a real sense he is God right now. At least for us.”
Gail’s thoughts are scurrying like the field mice that Gernisavien is probably out chasing. “All right, he’s God, and I’m alive, and we’re both here … but what do we do now, Jerry?”
We go to bed, sent Jeremy, and he took her hand and led her into their home.
EYES I DARE NOT MEET
Jeremy dreams of rocking back and forth in a darkness deeper than his dream can convey; he dreams of sleeping with mildewed blankets against his cheek, of rough wool against lacerated skin, and of being struck by unseen hands. He dreams of lying broken and battered in a pit full of human shit while rain drips on his upturned face. He dreams of drowning.
In Jeremy’s dream he is watching with growing curiosity as two people make love on a golden hillside. He floats through a white room where people have no shape, are only voices, and where the voice-bodies shimmer to the heartbeat of an invisible machine.
He is swimming and can feel the tug of inexorable planetary forces in the pull of the riptide. Jeremy is just able to resist the deadly current by exerting all of his energy, but he can feel himself tiring, can feel the tide pulling him out to deeper water. Just as the waves close over him he vents a final shout of despair and loss.
He cries out his own name.
Jeremy awakes with the shout still echoing in his mind. The details of the dream fracture and flee before he can grasp them. He sits up quickly in bed. Gail is gone.
He has almost reached the door of their bedroom before he hears her voice calling to him from the side yard. He returns to the window.
She is dressed in a blue smock and is waving her arms at him. By the time he is downstairs she has thrown half a dozen items into their old wicker basket and is boiling water to make iced tea. “Come on, sleepyhead,” she says, grinning at him. “I have a surprise for you.”
“I’m not sure we need any more surprises,” he mumbles. Gernisavien is back and moving between their legs, occasionally rubbing up against a chair leg as if offering affection to the chair.
“This one we do,” she says, and is upstairs, humming and thrashing around in the closet.
“Let me shower and get some coffee,” he says, and stops. Where does the water come from? The electric lights had not been working yesterday, but the taps had all functioned.
Before he can ponder the question further, Gail is back in the kitchen and handing him the picnic basket. “No shower. No coffee. Come on.”
Gernisavien follows reluctantly as Gail leads them up and over the hill where the highway once had been. They cross meadows to the east and then climb a final hill that is steeper than any he can remember in this part of Pennsylvania. At the summit Jeremy lets the picnic basket drop from a suddenly nerveless hand.
“Holy shit,” he whispers.
In the valley where the turnpike had been there is now an ocean.
“Holy shit,” he says again softly, almost reverently.
It is the curve of beach so familiar to them from their trips to Barnegat Light along the New Jersey shore, but now there is no lighthouse, no island, and the coastline stretching north and south looks more like some remote stretch of cliffs along the Pacific than any rim of the Atlantic that Jeremy has ever seen. The hillside they have been climbing was actually the rear slope of a mountain that drops off several hundred feet on its east side to the beach and breakers below. The rocky summit t
hey are standing on seems strangely familiar to Jeremy, and recognition slowly dawns.
Big Slide Mountain, confirms Gail. Our honeymoon.
Jeremy nods. His mouth is still open. He does not find it necessary to remind her that Big Slide Mountain had been in the New York Adirondacks, hundreds of miles from the sea.
They picnic on the beach just north of where the sheer face of the mountain catches the morning sun. Gernisavien has to be carried down the final stretch of steep slope, and once set down, she runs off to hunt insects in the dune grass. The air smells of salt and rotting vegetation and clean summer breezes. Far out to sea, gulls wheel and pivot while their cries make minor counterpoint to the crash of surf.
“Holy shit,” Jeremy says a final time. He sets the picnic basket down and tosses the blanket onto the sand.
Gail laughs and tugs off her smock. She is wearing a dark one-piece suit underneath.
Jeremy collapses onto the blanket. “Is that why you went upstairs?” he manages between laughs. “To get a suit? Afraid the lifeguards will toss you out if they see you skinny-dipping?”
She kicks sand at him and runs to the water. Her dive is clean and perfectly timed and she cuts into the surf like an arrow. Jeremy watches her as she swims out twenty yards, treads water as another breaker rolls by under her, and then paddles in to where she can stand. He can see by the way her shoulders are hunched and by the sight of her nipples raised under the thin Lycra that she is freezing.
“Come on in!” she calls, just managing to grin without having her teeth chatter. “The water’s fine!”
Jeremy laughs again, steps out of his Top-Siders, gets out of his clothes in three quick movements, and runs down the wet shingle of beach. She is waiting for him with open but goose-bumpy arms when he comes up spluttering from his dive.
After their picnic breakfast of croissants and iced tea from the Thermos, they lie back among the dunes to get out of the rising wind. Gernisavien returns to stare at them, finds nothing interesting, and goes back to the high grasses. From where they lie they can see the sun climbing higher and throwing new shadows along the uneven face of the mountain south of them.