Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  Even so, I didn’t spend as much time at the beach as most of my friends; half the time, you’d find me wrapped up in a book, probably science fiction, or down at the park, where I often went because it was empty most of the time, to be alone—alone to write my vaguely quasi-mystical, too-earnest-by-half poetry and rambling journal entries.

  And, of course, after I got the stereo, I’d often sit in my bedroom at home listening to tunes, on headphones if the Ps were home, cranked to the nines if they weren’t. It was a relief getting that system after only having my parents’ creaky old stereo before. So naturally a lot of my money after that went to records, buying things I’d wanted for a while but held out on for want of a decent system—mostly Beatles, Hendrix, Zep, Yes, Tull, King Crimson, ELP, stuff like that—but also more esoteric stuff. Shakti with John McLaughlin—send you on a trip every time, stoned or not. Vangelis, Eno, Can, Hawking Teds, Bartok string quartets (which led me to the late Beethoven quartets), John Cage—I swallowed Silence whole—take your pick. My friends and I were always turning each other onto weird shit.

  Sure, I still wanted a car—but the desire had turned more wistful than anything, something it was easy to put off, especially as work was an easy half-hour bike ride away.

  One weekend my parents decided to take a mini-vacation. It was March, I’d just turned eighteen, so naturally I threw a party. Nothing particularly disastrous happened, I managed to connect with someone who could get us a couple of kegs, it was a good party. You know the story.

  What made it significant was two things.

  First, I met Sherry at that party, though I never did figure out who brought her. Maybe she just wandered in. And sure, it was a year and a half before I actually got to know her very well—before she, ahem, grabbed me rather forcefully by the hand and proceeded to fuck my brains out on a regular basis—my first lover, whew.

  And second, ol’ Dan was just a little too slow cleaning up the house the day after, the parents got home early (of course), I caught hell, and was given till a month after graduation in June to pack my bags and get out. Which meant I was on my own four months earlier than in my other life, which meant rent once again ate any car plans or even any further record-buying I might’ve had in mind. (Mostly, it ruined my dope-buying budget for the first six months.)

  In my other life, I never threw that party, didn’t meet Sherry at all, didn’t get thrown out of the house early, moved into a different shared house than I had otherwise and so met Joe Wasserly, eventually bought the Datsun from him, and—yep—died a virgin.

  Did I say it was easy that first time, figuring out the differences between my two lives? Well, I suppose it was. But the hard part was still to come—learning how to deal with what those differences implied.

  As I left the restaurant to walk the few blocks to Sherry’s apartment, a wordless dazzle filling my head, I had only the merest inkling of what was in store—though at the time that inkling seemed to fill the world.

  * * *

  My memories of Sherry were acute—numerous and varied, round and soft and sweet like her body, full of hidden places and unexpected textures. As I floated along the sidewalk under the swaying palm trees, staring up at the sun stuttering through the fronds, unbidden images streamed through my mind, a whole gallery of discrete moments and feelings flowing one into another.

  Moonlight melting across her cheek, her nose, her lips as she turned to look at me in the night—moonlight catching in her eyes. Bedsheet slipping from curve of hip. The fan of her hair across her back, strands slipping, slipping, tumbling from her shoulders as I rode her from behind—the insanely sweet swelling of her ass rising to meet me, moist suckling womanhood tugging me home again. At every stroke tracing with dancing fingertips the flickering pattern of eucalyptus leaves cast by the moon across her back, her voice moaning my name with such hunger as to stop the breath in my throat and crack my frenzied heart.

  Talking out our mutually intense reactions to reading Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, the furrow that deepens her brow: “No, don’t crawl under a rock, she doesn’t want you under a rock, she wants you to honestly feel what it’s like being Joanna—it’s a gift, a whole life experience you wouldn’t ever know any other way, can’t you understand that?” Me: “But that’s what I’m saying—it’s one of the most gut-wrenching books I’ve ever read—and understanding it is what makes me want to crawl under a rock!” Sherry: “But that’s exactly what tells me you didn’t get it!”

  The boardwalk at blazing noon—Sherry crouched by a cardboard box full of squalling kittens, chatting with the old hippie who was trying to get her to take the itty tabby she cooed over in her lap, me standing awkwardly by, feeling silly teenage jealousy. I crouched down beside her just as the hippie said something—I didn’t catch what it was—and Sherry threw her head back and laughed, brown hair flying and catching the sun in its strands: click. That was the moment stuck in my head, the brilliance of her eyes, the joy of her laughter—an entire landscape in the sound.

  And through it all what astounded me the most was the sheer intensity of bodily memory. So many of my memories of her were rooted in my flesh, the feel of her in my arms, the heft of her, the warp and woof of her under my hands, beneath my lips. Her body filled every fiber of my flesh every bit as much as her face and eyes filled my inner eye, every bit as much as her breath and voice and laugh—even her gurgling tummy!—filled my inner ear. All this, the scent of her hair, her breath, her skin, the pouting salten sweetness of her cunny—it all joined, became one place, flush with the warm dark cavern of my being: our bodies the flesh vessels where our spirits rolled and played like children delirious with new summer.

  In all my lives, before or after, I have never felt so deeply what I felt in that moment. Never again have I known with such utter newness and freshness and exuberant vitality what it is to love and be loved: one gesture, a long-fingered hand raised high to caress the sun.

  * * *

  However much my memories of Sherry were a part of me, moments of happiness accumulated over many months, still they came to me now for the first time, all at once, a single wave filling me with astonished delight. I realized how ironic this was, that I should feel such overwhelming joy from experiences I’d never had, with a woman I’d never met!

  So it was that I passed under the tiled, pseudo-Spanish archway into the courtyard of Sherry’s apartment building, laughing and shaking my head and almost skipping with anticipation—anxious butterflies filling my belly, frantic for escape—and walked around the sun-filled swimming pool to the stairs that led up to her door.

  I paused there, looking up, not quite believing that any of this could be real.

  “Too much, man, this is just too much.”

  Actually, it wasn’t enough: I took the steps two at a time.

  Apartment 27. Rapid, rolling knocks: my usual, ha!

  Muffled footsteps, rattle of chain, and the door opened.

  A big smile spreading Sherry’s face, which, when she got a good look at me, immediately faded, became a frown. For a split second I thought she didn’t know me, that all my memories were a form of insanity, a cruel joke and nothing more. But then she spoke, and I remembered in the same instant how I looked.

  “Ah, Danny, Jesus, look at you, you look terrible!”

  “Thanks, Sher, I love you too.”

  “You dip.” She laughed and, with an exasperated “C’mere,” gave me a quick hug. It was the eeriest feeling, as if a woman met in an especially vivid dream had suddenly come to life, was there to dispel the sadness of a dream lost to waking.

  Sherry gingerly touched the corner of my mouth, near the split. She sighed. “Well, I guess I won’t be kissing you anytime soon.”

  “But I thought you liked kissing ripped and torn lip-flesh.”

  “Only if your teeth are thoroughly brushed.” She idly examined the scrape on my left shoulder.

  “I brushed this morning.”

  “Uh-huh.” There was a much lon
ger and deeper scrape down the underside of my left forearm.

  I lifted my T-shirt to show her a third on my hip. Her lips came together in a moue. “Ahhh, poor bay-beee,” she said with playful sarcasm.

  I made to “goo-goo” right back at her, but moving my lips to shape the sound cracked the dried blood suturing the split, so all I managed was a surprised “OW!”

  Sherry laughed. “You dummy, for once you’re just going to have to keep your mouth shut!” I glared comically at her, and she grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the living room.

  “Come on, time to put this aloe plant to use.” She pushed me toward the couch by the big front windows. I sat down in the sunlight and cool breeze coming in through the screen, and watched with appreciation as she walked into the kitchen, amazed all over again, amazed at how relaxed I was, at how easy it was to talk to her.

  I heard her rummaging through a drawer of utensils. “You want some apple juice?” she called. “I have a straw.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “’Kay.” Sherry came back out—expression all business-like—with a roll of paper towels under one arm, a roll of gauze and white bandage tape in one hand, a paring knife in the other. She sat facing me on the couch, drawing one tan leg up and tucking foot under knee.

  I couldn’t help but notice the pale blue satin of her shorts had pulled tight at the crotch, outlining her pussy. I stared shamelessly.

  With three fingers Sherry flicked me smartly up under the chin, just hard enough to make my lip throb and my gaze rise high enough to meet hers.

  “Hey!”

  “‘Hey’ yourself, Mr. One-Track. You wanna save your drooling for later?” But she was smiling, that particular pouting smile—one mouth corner tucked down, one curling up—she sometimes got when it was my turn to be tied with silk scarves to the posts of her bed, and she was still contemplating her newest ways for driving me wild. Then again, she sometimes got that same look just as I fell into one of her traps during our frequent debates on any of a number of topics. Intellectually, she could out-argue me every time.

  But then her look changed, and with calm care she took the aloe vera in its unfired pot down from the sill and cradled it in her lap, chose a blade and cut it deftly with the knife, stripped the toothy leaf down to its moist heart.

  * * *

  I wish the stars would stop spinning. I wish the stars would stop orbiting me like I was some ultimately minor sun, last blood-red light squeezed from its collapsing heart.

  A billion vertical streaks make of my invisible cocoon a womb of light. I know I tumble, I know the stars are fixed, and yet this knowing is meaningless. My body tells me I am at equilibrium; my body tells me I rest at stillpoint. Only the sounds of my own breathing and the slow surge of inner tides distinguishes any moment from any other. But this alone is not enough, this organic pulse without beginning or end. Whatever sanity remains to me requires change, requires incident and contrast to survive. Yet there is no fixed object to catch my sight. The night wraps me round in threads of starlight, and against this shifting screen I have only memories to project—memories of an almost terrifying vividness.

  Save one last faint glimmering, all dreams are dead. I wish—

  * * *

  The soft glide of aloe vera across the pebbly scrape on my upper arm sent more than chills through my body, raised more than goose bumps on the curve of a shoulder, along the flank of an arm. For a brief moment, Sherry’s simplest healing touch made of my body a door into memory.

  From the blue pine that stood outside my childhood home, sunlight cast swaying shadow-branches across the curtains. As I watched from where I lay curled up in bed, this lulling image suddenly swelled and grew bleary, and it was a moment before I realized—remembering—that I was crying. Shadow and light pooled and dripped and ran together, and many colors flowed from their mixing.

  But then the memory dissolved, like those long-ago tears ebbing from my eyes. Dimly I sensed the desolation at the heart of that image. A child’s desolation. How old was I? Five, I know now: five, or six. Remembering, I wondered what was wrong. What had happened?

  All was forgotten under Sherry’s ministrations. Gently she lay a forefinger under my lower lip, dabbed with the aloe at the split, her hazel eyes all clarity and focus.

  But returning now across a century’s span to that instant of remembering, I can keep the door ajar with an inward glance. The door, as in a breeze, swings wide. I step through, and snuggle once more into the child I was, to cry again the tears of a child who is with me even now.

  Nikhil Singh

  I live in the smoking ruins of myself. Eating memories till I’m sick. Light another cyberette. My own design. Room is ozone-stale with them. Been thinking through the new vessel. Mapping changes. Cyberette’s tuned too tight. Frequency distortion along the subcranial neuro-relays. Calculated overheat. Less punch than most neuronarc. Fine for regular use—maybe. Drifting off the pleather slab, cross to the window wall. Glass depolarizes—Neurocropolis vistas. High-level views. In the scratch-mark clouds, strato-loops lattice. Glassy people-pipes. Sky-web. Lower for closer. Suborbital express runs cross-planet. One rung up—orbital village. Had doll-chops to go orbital. Stayed downside. Sometimes I travel. No matter the meridian. Neurocropolis is everywhere.

  * * *

  No exit for three weeks. Solid grind. Walls are tight. In the lab, vessel crucifies a gel-pod. Ribcage out in butterfly mode. Components noodle up dry-gel suspension. Stare for an hour. Enhanced optics—macro/micro. Get lost in dust forests sometimes. Distant windows. Eventually, give up. Residual analogue headache. Recharge cyberette. Recently tagged a box of video vintage. Real tape. Delivery drone dropped an icebox. Around forty cassettes. Took a week building a machine to dump magnetic reels. Most permanently damaged. Talk I couldn’t understand. Dead languages. Grade is often blurry, impressionist. Random sequences. Can’t stop dosing on memory. Obsessive downgrade. Total regression. Can’t even lift holo from the tapes. Reads glitch-fog round the room. Jurassic intake, this flat-screening. Primitive in comparison to the mental ice-bucket of a used drone’s sensory dump. Different flavours, though. Slow burn. Old school. Hooked me. Difficulty inputting long hauls. Analogue exposure scrambles optics. Sideways information. Too much noise. Things that wouldn’t phase, edge me now. Trouble with emotion. Comes with the eye-job, they say. Possible. Go in and out. A sequence of gradually thickening depressions. Thick like tasteless syrup. Glitch-fog. Video problems. Some difficulty telling where fugues end. Processor got me down. Drain another cyberette. To the red. Charge, repeat. Latency buzz. Big synaptics. Working the vessel. Calibrate arm and hip servos. After a while, I’m back on the slab.

  * * *

  Alert wakes me. Drone must have circuited. Brush off heavy liquid—dreams. Buzz it in, crack airlock to listen. Staircases are old stone. Languid stylus of needle heels, somewhere far below. Wrote that gait. Haven’t seen Phaedra in three weeks. Left her on the side of a highway. Lollipops and a one-piece. Took my mark on the slab, activate a second. Just as it rises, drone knocks, enters. She’s in Cleopatra mode. Geometric black bob. Melanin counter low pale. Colour scheme 456. Cigarette burns down through stained fingers. Purely cosmetic. Phaedra is my exact height. We go straight into “the scene”. Script design tests protocols. I pull solid data. Enough to trade heavy industrial. Drone gives me a tired, pretty smile. Soft, bony arms wrap my neck. Then we’re inside. Automatically cross to the kitchenette, to brew coffee. She saunters to the second slab, collapses photogenically.

  “Please, no more coffee,” she moans.

  Haven’t seen coffee in ten years. Just scene-talk. Cracking a freezer, retrieve the vodka bottle. Full to the brim. Jet-black industrial lubricant. Drone will read liquor. All in the script. No echoes through the lounge. Reactive surfaces absorb sound. Blotting paper for the ear. That was the sales pitch. Phaedra’s gleaming shell-coat lies near the window wall. She’s on her back, needle heel tracing the floor. Tiles run a groove from repetit
ion. Have to fix that. Camera poises shift seamlessly across the drone.

  “You look dead,” I observe.

  Phaedra pouts, rolling as I pass the bottle.

  “How was your loop?” I ask, snagging her clutch.

  She takes a long swallow. I time it.

  “Eight hours down the drain,” she replies, wiping a bright black mouth across her hand.

  Watches me pop the clutch. Light a cigarette. Usually on limited intake. But these are so light. Barely taste them.

  “Shame, baby. Out of cigarettes?”

  “Don’t smoke,” I counter.

  Phaedra sits up abruptly, slouching. Sulking. New mannerisms. Learned, then incorporated. She drains more “vodka”, retrieving her cigarette from a nearby ashtray.

  “How was your shoot?” I ask.

  “Which one?” she teases, sinking back, holding my eye.

  “Previous.”

  Drone freezes a microsecond. Loads data sets. Deviates from script.

  “Somebody put a hook through my face,” she smiles.

  “Regeneration?”

  “Complete.”

  “Location?”

  “Storage unit. Mid-ocean station complex. Five citizens.”

  “Response?”

  “Inoculated.”

  Phaedra carries a wide spectrum. Administrable personality shifters. Fluent in chemical and neuro. Subtle, self-numbing hypodermic points map her body. Rape and assault are chemically collared. Neurological overdub. Taken for roaming playbots, my drones are effective. Highly adaptive. Organic development through interactive experientials—a speciality. Orbital grade. Vessels appear identical in reset. Each had become unique. Offenders have no knowledge of their reprogramming. Impulses are simply overwritten. Neurocropolis—an all-male populace. Strategic, ever-present maintenance, my personal experiment. I’m sure others do it. Never seen a female. Only holograms. Women rule from above the clouds. Breeding strictly orbital. That’s the script, anyway. Phaedra flashes a coy smile.