The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

Julia doesn't raise her head. She frowns in concentration at a point somewhere past Venya's right hip. Her hair is gray shot with black, a negative of two decades ago. Kyle must have decided to have it cut into something short and easy to maintain; Julia wouldn't have had an opinion.

  "How you doing, Jay?" Venya says to her.

  Her eyes remain fixed on empty air.

  "The same," Kyle says.

  He pulls a key from his shorts pocket and unlocks the RV. Julia follows him inside automatically. It's cooler inside, but not by much, and the air smells of ripening fruit. Kyle starts the RV's engine to boost the air conditioning.

  The vehicle looks new—probably a rental—but Kyle and Julia seem to have been living in it for several weeks. The counters are crowded with food wrappers, unopened groceries, and stacks of paper plates. Books and papers cover the little table and most of the seats.

  Julia sits at the kitchen table. Kyle fills a plastic cup with ice from the small fridge, pours in some water from a collapsible jug, and sets it down in front of her. She lifts it to her lips without blinking.

  "How about you?" Kyle says. "I've got beer, bourbon, juice—"

  "Some of that water would be good." Venya restacks some books that have spilled across the bench seat and sits down opposite Julia.

  Kyle fills a cup for Venya, then opens a bag of dried apricots and sets it down on the table facing his sister. Without shifting her gaze from the tabletop, Julia reaches into the bag and puts an apricot in her mouth.

  "I was driving out here from the airport," Venya says. Kyle gulps down a cup of water and starts refilling it. "I'd forgotten how empty the highways are. I'd look down at the dash and realize I'd covered forty miles without realizing it. I thought, this must be what it's like for Julia. Autopilot."

  "Julia's driving a lot these days," he says. "And I'm still the road she follows." He finishes the second cup-full. "I'm going to get a clean shirt on. You okay with her?" Before she can answer he says, "What am I talking about, you did it for seven years."

  What he doesn't say: seven years, not twenty-three.

  Watching Julia eat is still an unnerving experience. She chews methodically, swallows, and reaches for another piece of fruit, automatic as eating movie popcorn in the dark. The entire time her eyes are focused on some inner landscape.

  "How long has it been since the last time she was awake?" Venya calls back.

  "Three weeks?" A note of embarrassment in his voice. "Maybe three and a half."

  "That can't be," Venya says.

  Kyle comes back into the main cabin wearing a faded blue t-shirt. "It's gotten a lot worse since you were with her, Venya. At Stanford she was never gone longer than what, a couple of days?"

  "Julia called me two nights ago," Venya says. "A voicemail message. She said she was calling from the Dead Horse parking lot."

  "That's impossible." But he's looking at Julia. "She must have come awake at night. I don't leave her alone—" He shakes his head. "I don't. She must have come awake in the middle of the night and snuck out."

  Julia lifts her plastic cup and sets it down without sipping; it's empty. Kyle takes it from her and refills it.

  "What did she say?" he asks. "On the phone." From the middle of the mess on the counter he picks up a glass—a real glass, not plastic—and blows into it.

  "Not much. She said you two were staying here at the park. She's working on a hard problem. Something important."

  He unscrews the cap from a half-full bottle of Canadian Mist and pours a couple of inches. "That's true. Then again . . ." He smiles.

  Then again, Julia is always working on a hard problem. Even in undergrad, when she resurfaced from one of her "away" times, she'd start writing furiously, page after page, as if she'd memorized a book she'd written in her head and had to get it down before it evaporated. She'd talk as she wrote—explaining, elaborating, answering Venya's questions—making Venya feel that she was part of the solution, some necessary element in the equation.

  Kyle holds up the bottle but Venya shakes her head. He shrugs and sips from his glass.

  Venya says, "She said she needed me to come down, before it was too late."

  Kyle's grin falters, and for a moment he looks a decade older.

  "How bad is it?" Venya asks. "How much is she gone?"

  "Ah." He turns the glass in his fingers. He takes a big sip, then presses his lips together. "The past couple of years she's been away more than she's been awake," he says finally. "The trend line's pretty clear. We always knew lock-in was the probable end point." He says it matter-of-factly, as if he's practiced saying it out loud.

  "This has to be tough on you," Venya says.

  He shrugs, and the smile is back. "She's my sister. And her work is important. She really does need someone to help her organize it and get it out there."

  "I read your book," Venya says. "The cover had her name on it, but I knew those sentences were yours."

  He laughs, nods. "Julia's much too addicted to passive voice for pop science." He lifts his glass. "Thank you, and congratulations—you're the only one of our thirteen readers to have seen through the charade." He tosses back his drink, sets down the glass, and claps his hands. "But enough about us imposters! Let me get you settled in, and we'll do some barbecue."

  Julia stares at the tabletop as if it holds an equation about to unravel.

  The cement shower stalls of the campground washhouse remind Venya of the first semester in college, the year she met Julia. Venya stands in the cold stall for a long while with her head bowed, letting the hot water drum the crown of her skull and pool around her veined feet. She thinks, This is exactly how I found Julia that day.

  They'd only been roommates for a few weeks, two first-year women assigned to each other by the University of Illinois mainframe. Julia came from money, her clothes made that clear. She was pale and beautiful and solemn, like one of those medieval portraits of a saint. She rarely spoke, and only an occasional, fragile smile betrayed her nervousness.

  Venya was a little put out by the girl's reserve. She'd come to school with the idea, picked up from God knows where, that college roommates were automatically best friends. They'd decide on posters together, share clothes and shots of Southern Comfort, hold back each other's hair when they puked. But after a few days of trying to get the skinny, quiet girl to open up, Venya had almost gotten used to the idea that Julia was going to be little more than a silent reading machine that lived on the other side of the room.

  One morning during the third week, Venya woke up late, dashed into the big bathroom they shared with the other girls on the floor, and quickly brushed her teeth to get rid of the dead-shoe taste of stale beer in her mouth. As usual, Julia had gotten up before her, and Venya saw the girl's green robe hanging outside one of the stalls, the shower running. Venya went off to her back-to-back morning classes, then to lunch. It was 12:30 or 1:00 before she went back up to her floor to drop off her books and take a pee.

  Julia's green robe still hung on the hook, and the shower was still running.

  Venya must have called Julia's name—that would have been the natural thing—but she only remembered running to the rubber curtain and yanking it aside. Julia stood under the spray, looking down at her feet. The water was still running hot, thanks to the industrial-sized boilers in the building, but the woman still shivered. When Venya grabbed her arm, Julia immediately stepped out of the stall to stand beside her.

  Venya couldn't get her to speak, make eye contact, or even change expression. But Julia obligingly allowed herself to be dried off, led back to the room, and tucked into bed. She lay there with her eyes open, staring past the ceiling.

  Venya's first thought was that someone had dropped LSD into Julia's breakfast. But the symptoms were all wrong—no acid trip, good or bad, was this calm—and in fact the symptoms didn't match any drug she had experience with (and she'd experienced more than her share). She didn't want to get Julia in trouble, but she finally decided to call the R.A.,
who called the paramedics, who took Julia to the ER.

  Julia snapped out of it sometime during the night. She suddenly sat up in the hospital bed, looked over at Venya, and asked for pen and paper. The doctor on duty shook his head disbelievingly; he made it clear to Venya that he thought Julia had been faking the whole thing. Julia apologized, but kept scribbling.

  At four a.m. her family arrived. A thirteen-year-old boy bounded into the room and jumped onto the bed next to Julia. Her father and mother came next. Professor Dad, as Venya instantly decided to call him, shook her hand, thanked her for staying with his daughter. Professor Mom sat down in the chair next to the window, holding a silver pen in her fingers like a cigarette she was dying to light. Julia said hello to each of them, and immediately returned to her writing. The boy kept up a running comedic monologue: about Julia's gown, the age of the hospital, the fat nurse by the front desk. Even then Kyle was the entertainer, the performer, the distracter. So it took Venya some time to figure out that the parents were arguing. It took her even longer to realize that the argument had been going on for years.

  Professor Dad made oblique references to Julia's room at home; Professor Mom scowled and shook her head. "She needs help," she said at one point. "Professional help." There were no questions, no talk about what had happened in the shower: Julia had "disappeared" before, evidently, and would disappear again.

  Later Venya would hear the whole medical history, how when Julia was a child they diagnosed her mental absences as petit mal seizures. After CAT scans turned up nothing, they called it mild autism. As she grew older and the gaps grew longer, they started calling it Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was just a fancy name for multiple personalities. One psychiatrist thought there was a "monitor" personality who could perform daily tasks while the Julia personality went somewhere else. But Julia never bought the Sybil explanation. When she "woke up" she remembered most of what had happened while she was out. It didn't feel like there was another personality in her. And she knew the difference between the two states—she knew when she'd been out.

  The way Julia described it, her condition was the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder: she couldn't stop paying attention. An idea would occur to her, and then she'd hop on that train of thought and follow it right out of Dodge. She was missing some neurochemical switchman who could move her attention from reverie to awareness of the outside world.

  But in the hospital, Venya understood only that Dad wanted Julia to come home, and Mom wanted her to stay in a hospital, any hospital.

  And Julia?

  The girl stopped writing. She put down the pen, folded the papers in half, then in half again. Her expression was tight, and her eyes shone with unshed tears. "I can do this," she said finally.

  They didn't seem to hear her. Her father and mother continued to argue in their cool, knife-edged voices.

  Kyle turned to Venya and silently mouthed: Do something.

  Venya looked away, but the idea had been planted. A terrible, awful, stupid idea.

  She raised her hand, and the professors dutifully stopped talking. "How often?" Venya asked. They turned their attention to her, as if regarding her from podiums at the far end of a great lecture hall. "How often does this happen?"

  Professor Dad shrugged. "Hardly ever, anymore. She made it through senior year without—"

  "That's not true," Julia said quietly. She caught Venya's eye and held her gaze. "Three or four times a week, a couple hours at a time. But they're getting longer."

  Venya nodded, as if this made perfect sense. She stared at the shiny hospital floor so she wouldn't have to see the entire family looking at her.

  Keep your mouth shut, she told herself. This is not your problem.

  "Okay," she said. "I'll do it." She offered to watch over Julia for the rest of that semester. Only a semester.

  Venya still doesn't know why she did it.

  There was nothing in their relationship to that point that obligated her to help. The offer made sense only in terms of what came after, as if the next seven years—in which she led Julia through undergrad and grad school, and along the way became Julia's best friend and then, eventually, her lover—caused her to speak at that moment.

  Julia accepted Venya's offer without comment.

  They eat their dinner at the picnic table, in the shadow cast by the bulk of the RV. Six p.m. in September and it's still in the nineties, but the lack of humidity makes for a 20-degree difference between sun and shade. All around the campground, people fire up grills and pull open bags of chips. At the campsite next to them a van full of twenty-something Germans laugh and argue. The sky hangs over them, huge and blue and cloudless.

  "It's beautiful out here," Venya says. "I can see why you came."

  "I figured Julia could work anywhere, and if she came awake maybe she'd like seeing this place again." He dabs mustard from Julia's cheek and she continues to chew her chicken breast obliviously. "This was the last vacation our family took together before Mom died."

  Professor Mom killed herself when Julia was in grad school; Venya went with Julia to the funeral. Professor Dad checked out in a completely different way. He took a position in Spain, and soon after found a new wife. Everyone in the family, Venya thinks, has a talent for absence. Everyone except Kyle.

  "What about you?" Kyle says. "Did you ever make a family? Two kids, cocker spaniel, house in the suburbs?"

  "I have a son," she says. "He started college last year. His mom and I broke up a few years ago, but we all get along. He's a good kid."

  "A son? That's great!" he says, meaning it. "It sounds like you've had a good life."

  "Good enough. And what about you? Ever find someone?"

  "Julia's the only woman in my life." He laughs, forcing it a little. "Well, I've had a few relationships. I'm just not very good at keeping them going, and with Julia . . . I stay pretty busy. Here, I want to show you something."

  He went into the RV and came out with a fresh bottle of Canadian Mist and two glasses in the fingers of one hand, and a big three-ring binder under his arm. "You remember this?" He sets down the bottle and glasses and shows her the binder cover: "HOW TO DO IT."

  "My God," Venya says, and takes it from him.

  "It's not the same cover, had to change that a couple times. But some of the original stuff you put in is still there. Still accurate."

  When Venya decided she had to leave, she gave Kyle a binder like this. Operating instructions for Julia. Names of doctors, prescription dosages, favorite foods, sleeping schedule, shoe and clothing sizes . . . everything, down to the kind of toothpaste Julia liked. The binder is much thicker now.

  "It's all there," he says. "The trust fund accounts, computer passwords, insurance papers."

  Venya isn't sure what to say. "You're a good brother."

  "Yeah, well. I am my sister's keeper." He sets the binder at the end of the table.

  They lapse into silence. Venya pushes the last of the baked beans around on her paper plate. Kyle drinks.

  "You have something you want to say," Kyle says.

  Venya exhales. "True." She takes the remaining glass and splashes a bit of the whiskey into it. She swirls it around, inhaling the sharp scent, watching the liquid ride the sides of the glass. She's never particularly liked hard liquor.

  "When she comes out of it," Venya begins. "Do you talk about how she's feeling?" He waits for her to explain. "You said the absences were growing longer. Eventually . . . You called it lock-in. She's got to think about that. Does she feel trapped?"

  He smiles, tight-lipped. "I don't think so."

  "Kyle, you can tell me."

  "I would know," he says. "We've always understood each other. We don't have to talk about it." He sips from his glass. "When Julia comes back, all she wants to talk about is her work. Non-stop Q.M. She just starts scribbling, because she doesn't have much time before she goes away again. Even before she resigned from New Mexico I was helping her write up her papers—not just the layman
stuff, the journal articles." He gestured toward the RV. "I should show you the stuff she's turning out now. She's dismantling Everett-Wheeler and the other interpretations. I can't follow the math anymore, but that's not important. The job now is to organize the notes and get it into the hands of people who can understand her. This is her chance to get into the history books, Venya. She wants to follow it."

  "What if she follows it so far she can't find her way back?" she says. "What if she can't stop from disappearing for good?"

  "I don't think she'd mind," he says. "In there, that's where her real life is. Everything out here is just . . . distraction."

  "You don't know that," Venya says. "When we were together, she was afraid of getting lost. We talked about it. We didn't call it 'lock-in' then, but that's what she was afraid of."

  "So?"

  "So, I made her a promise."

  He stares at her.

  "I think that's why she called me, Kyle. Because she's getting close." Because she's afraid you won't be able to do what she needs.

  He puts up his hands. His laugh is brittle. "Don't take my word for it, then. Ask her yourself."

  Venya smoothes back a stray hair blowing across Julia's eyes. "I'll need some matches," she says.

  Venya clears a length of the RV counter and sets out the baggie of grass and the rolling papers. A bong would be better—cooled smoke is best—but Venya didn't want to put one through airport security. It was nerve-wracking enough just to pack the marijuana, rolled up and hidden in her tampon box.

  She shakes out a little of the grass onto the paper. She hasn't rolled a joint in years, but motor memory guides her hands. In the end she spills only a little of the pot.

  "This is your plan?" Kyle says. "Get my sister high."

  "It worked in college." Twenty-five, thirty years ago. Marijuana screwed with Julia's focus, derailed the train—if the concentration of THC was high enough. Venya's co-worker assured her that the pot was near-medical-grade, but there was no way to know if it would be enough.

  Venya sits cross-legged on the floor of the vehicle, almost under the table. Kyle guides Julia until she's lying face up on the floor with her head on Venya's lap, staring at the ceiling. Kyle lights the joint for her, and Venya breathes with it to get it going.