Going, Going, Gone

by Jack Womack

  * * *

  Even though I’d figured we’d hop another cab, once we popped back out into the free and clear I saw we were in a parking garage, same as any you’ve ever seen except that this one was shiny bathroom white. When cars drifted past us, looking more like bugs than krautwagons ever looked, I couldn’t help but marvel at how quietly they ran.

  ‘Oh,’ Eulie said when I noted this, ‘they’re electric’

  After walking down a series of spirals we reached her car, a pathetic little runabout that looked like something FAO Schwarz’d sell to the Kennedy boys to put in their nephews’ stockings. A pink bunion with Radio Flyer wheels is the only fair way to describe it. She must have been hauling pig iron in the trunk; the thing didn’t sit five inches off the ground.

  ‘What kind is it?’

  ‘Stimray,’ she said, waving her hands over the car’s side. Nothing happened. She started pounding the roof till the doors came open.

  ‘Double as a lawn mower?’ I asked, squeezing myself inside. I could have rested my chin on my knees if the seat hadn’t strapped me down so tight the second I sat down in it. While not a half hour earlier that would have probably made me jump up and run off screaming. I couldn’t help but be aware of how quickly I was getting used to the way things worked out in the territories. Eulie pressed a sky-blue button on the floor with her foot and we slid out, gliding through the aisles until we emerged at what looked like the Harlem River – it was too narrow to be either the Hudson or the East. She edged the car along a narrow ramp running across the river and then onto a much bigger expressway, one that vaguely resembled the Cross-Bronx except that it had eight lanes, not eighteen, and ran across what must have been Manhattan. Bright green signs proclaimed it to be the Morrie Feldman Transitory.

  I asked, of course. ‘Unknown. Major Deegan, JoeDiMaggio. Who knows.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked, but her mind was on what lay ahead. Transitory, so-called; seemed more like a parking lot than a highway. For over a half hour we rolled slowly along, surrounded by six or seven thousand other cars the same size. There were also what looked like trucks, but they were twice as big as the ones I was used to; nearly as big as locomotive engines. Everybody tried to steer clear of those beasts; it’d be like a rowboat getting in the way of the Queen Alexandra if you changed lanes at the wrong moment.

  The real breath-stopper, though, were the buses. From where we were I could count fifteen to twenty at any given moment. They were half the size of the trucks, but the people hanging onto the sides, and lying on the roof, sort of fattened them up. As we crept past them I could see that there were hand-holds and foot-ledges stuck all over the sides of the buses. The commuters must have been used to travelling this way; a lot of them were looking at tiny little movie players they wore strapped to their chests. As we crept up the ramp leading to the GW bridge – the bridge looked the same here as it did in my New York, except that here it was painted Army green – I saw one of the passengers on a bus some fifty feet ahead of us lose his footing, and tumble down into the traffic.

  ‘Eulie,’ I said, trying to see if he’d landed on a hood or something, but spotting neither hair nor hide, ‘didn’t you see that? He fell off. Shouldn’t we stop?’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, genuinely puzzled. Four lanes to our right, I saw another commuter slip down between the lanes. As we continued across the bridge – moving a little faster by that point, maybe ten miles an hour – others came loose, here and there, from other buses, and I realized that this must be one of this place’s drawbacks of commuting. Never saw one of them get up, once they fell. After a half hour more we reached the Jersey side, and by the time we passed under the Fort Lee exit sign I’d stopped counting.

  These people work in the city?’

  ‘Workers and drones unhiving,’ she said.

  ‘What do they do? Office work?’

  ‘Whatever’s essentialled.’

  She turned onto a six-lane highway that wasn’t as crowded as the bridge had been; then, pulling onto another ramp, steered us onto the New Jersey Turnpike. This almost looked like home – fourteen big lanes, plenty of space, and everyone speeding along – except our turnpike wasn’t walled off on either side by tall green and grey glass buildings. None of these buildings had any signs; none of them had any windows – the walls were glass, but you couldn’t see in, and I felt safe in assuming that no one could see out.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Maplewood,’

  ‘Wouldn’t the tunnel have been closer?’

  A blink, a stare: recognition. ‘Tunnel’s flooded.’

  I looked over to my left. There weren’t quite as many buildings along the road in this stretch, and I could catch glimpses of New York’s taller buildings – the Empire State, notably, and several other taller, boxier towers. ‘How’s that possible?’

  ‘Rising water table necessitated the shift north. Before my birthing.’

  ‘Manhattan’s flooded?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Eulie,’ I said. ‘It was my fault Chlojo was killed. If I hadn’t –’

  ‘If she didn’t guard me,’ she said. ‘Six, half dozen, twelve either way.’

  That was the last she said of her big friend; I supposed that it wasn’t so much different from falling off a bus in the long run. The farther we got from New York the more there was to see, to a point, even though the sun – that is, the light that shone through the clouds – was going down. Most of it, however, looked about the same here as it did there – power lines, buildings, bits and pieces of what was left of the Meadowlands. If I didn’t look too closely it almost seemed as if I was back where I came from, heading out to visit Newark or Jersey City. By now I’d been up close to thirty-odd hours, and I felt Morpheus starting to get the upper hand. Somewhere around the time Eulie made a right onto a new highway, I let him put me in a full nelson, and snoozed.

  It had seemed like only a couple of minutes passed before I felt the car bumping up and down; it felt as if Eulie, for some reason, had decided to use the Erie-Lackawanna tracks the rest of the way home. When I opened my eyes it was twilight, and we were on local streets. Headlights were blue, streetlights were yellow, and, surprisingly, stoplights were red and green.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, looking out the window, instinctively reaching for the lock, though there didn’t seem to be one.

  ‘Maplewood,’ Eulie said. Her face was pinkish in the dash’s purple light.

  ‘What happened to it?’

  Eulie shook her head, and we stopped at a light as it turned red. A bug, or bird, hit the windshield; there was a bright colourless flash and a sizzling sound, and whatever it was, was gone. We were driving through a neighbourhood that must have been built in the teens or twenties – or would have been built then, on my turf – the kind with enormous old houses, and elm and chestnut trees on both sides of the street, and green lawns; cars in the driveways, and kids on the sidewalk. Eulie’s Maplewood didn’t look quite that respectable. Almost all the houses we passed – the ones still standing – were boarded up, or burned out. Some had collapsed in on themselves, but in a few there were lights on in the parts that were still standing. Most of the trees along the streets we bumped along were stumps, or stubby, or even broken off halfway up. The yards were worn into dust, or blanketed with little cars. Everything in the neighbourhood looked like the white trash had been sharecropping too long without a foreman.

  This is a substandard area,’ Eulie said, pulling out as the light changed to green; she must have seen the look on my face. ‘I’m gated.’

  I didn’t have the faintest idea what she meant, and was just as glad. There wasn’t anyone else on the street, whether walking or driving. If it weren’t for the lights I saw in the houses I’d have assumed the entire state had been emptied out. In another five minutes or so we drove up to a high concrete wall that blocked the entire street. Although I thought she’d have to get out and walk over and touch it, she didn’t; all she did wa
s punch in some keys on the dashboard and a heavy metal gate in the middle of the wall rose, and we rolled through. Eulie’s neighbourhood seemed never to have been as well-to-do, but it was in somewhat better shape – every house, and every yard, was surrounded by a high fence of some kind – wood, iron, chicken wire – and every wall was topped with rolls of sharpened wire. There were no cars parked on the street; the owners kept their vehicles in the driveway, within each fenced-off perimeter.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, easing the car to the right. A beige metal gate opened as we rolled through it. She pressed a button and the car switched off. ‘Home,’ she said, removing the steering wheel. The doors of the car sprang open and, within five minutes, I’d extricated myself. Now that it was night I was beginning to see stars in the sky, when I looked to the west; the clouds were clearing off. In the direction of New York, the heavens were fiery-red. Eulie tapped in another code on a panel attached to the fence, and opened the front door of her house. It was a little place, the equivalent of her car; there were four small rooms, but it felt comfortable. In her front room was a leather couch almost as long as the house, a low glass table; bookcases without books, a plant with blue and red leaves. On the wall facing the couch was what appeared to be a big grey mirror.

  ‘I need changing,’ she said. ‘You’ve never seen TV?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Television.’

  I nodded, remembering her saying the word. ‘I’m curious.’

  She smiled. ‘Catkiller.’

  Once you got used to it, it was hard not to watch TV. Before heading into the shower Eulie showed me how the switcher worked and how to find the channels. She received four thousand and ninety-three; there were more, she said, but she didn’t want to pay to bring in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For the first few minutes, it was painful to watch; the programmes that came on the air were louder than any movie I’d ever seen, even after I turned down the volume; and the pictures came so fast and furious that I didn’t see how anyone could make sense of what was shown. Then, suddenly, I got used to it. Watching TV was like watching a stew boil – you never knew what would suddenly come into view before sinking back down again. Eulie could have been in the shower for two weeks and I wouldn’t have noticed. As I flipped through the channels, clicking them off, what I thought at first to be a black and white movie caught my eye, or rather my ear; I knew I’d heard the voices before. There were four people in a living room set, and as I listened I matched the voices to the faces I’d seen in radio guides. I was watching, stuck to the channel like glue, when Eulie strolled out of the shower, heavily towelled from top to bottom. ‘“I Love Lucy?”’

  ‘I’ve heard this one before,’ I said. ‘Nothing looks like I pictured it.’

  She pressed something on the table and a number appeared at the bottom of the screen. ‘Livonia network. Show’s almost a century old. How have you heard this?’

  ‘It was on the radio,’ I said. She turned it off. ‘Hey, wait.’

  Eulie unturbaned her head and shook her hair loose. ‘You’ll zone. You’re already deadeyed.’ Like her, I thought, but didn’t say it. Once the set was off I heard the outer world again – beeping sounds that must have been sirens in the distance, whirling noises somewhere overhead, a low hum that never stopped. ‘Quiet, finally. How are you?’

  ‘Bearable,’ I said. ‘You?’ She nodded. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were from the future? It’d have been a hard sell, granted, but everything would have made a lot more sense a lot sooner –’

  ‘It’s more complicated than it seems,’ she said. ‘We’re not from the future. Not your future, anyway.’

  ‘Eulie, please –’

  ‘If our world was yours, this might be your future, yes,’ she said. ‘But your world is different. Not just in look and feel. It’s a different place, entirely.’ She took something out of a pocket in one of her towels and ran it over her hair. As I looked, it dried. ‘How explain that, simply?’

  ‘I don’t know. Give it a try, though –’

  Even before she started I could have told her there wasn’t any real point, but I liked the sound of her voice so much I just sat and listened. ‘Our worlds coexist, separate but equal. You understand?’

  ‘Which one gets the short end of the stick?’

  ‘No, Walter, not like that. We don’t exist in the same time. We’re years ahead of you, or you’re years behind. Depends on which side you’re on.’ She sat down on the couch next to me. ‘There are different paths in the garden, and we’re many paths later.’

  There was nothing I could do but buy it. ‘How do you get from one side to the other?’

  ‘Holes in the fence, they’ve been called. Slip through, slip back.’

  ‘Does Dryco have anything to do with it?’ I asked, pretty much failing to get the idea, but giving her credit for trying.

  ‘No, it tries to advantage the situation, but –’

  ‘What does Dryco do, anyway?’

  She looked at me as if I asked her why the sun was shiny. ‘Everything.’

  ‘If it’s a company it must be a business,’ I said. ‘If it’s a business it must make something. If it makes something, it must sell what it makes. So what does it do?’

  ‘Dryco doesn’t do. Dryco is.’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Lookabout,’ Eulie said, and guided her hand in a wide circle, as if to take in the room, and everything that lay outside the house as well. ‘All seen and unseen.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying a different tack. ‘You said it runs itself, or did until recently. How?’

  She took a deep breath, as if trying to remember. ‘It replicates, organizes, controls, commodities. Expands or impands as needed.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Until recent developments, under the guidance of Alice.’ ‘Is Alice the old lady?’

  She shook her head. ‘You know about computers?’

  ‘You mean like Univac?’ A second earlier, until I conjured up the deadeyes once again, she’d looked ten years earlier. ‘Never mind. So Alice is the one wheeling, dealing, stealing –?’

  ‘She was, until the manifestations began,’ Eulie said. ‘For forty years, communicating first through the Drydens, then Mister O’Malley, then through herself. Madam let her. Then, four months ago, when the problems first evidenced, her systems began to negate. The day before yesterday, she blued.’ She rested her head on my shoulder. ‘That was when we came to get you.’

  ‘Eulie,’ I said, ‘what’s going on? What’s happening?’

  ‘Uncertain,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, isn’t good.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Indications specify that our worlds are starting to occupy the same time as well as the same space.’ I’m sure she knew that some essential concepts eluded me, and so she tried to explain further, picking up what appeared to be a couple of small ceramic coasters from the table. ‘Say each of these represent our respective worlds. Now say they are trying to be on the same place at the table at the same time.’

  ‘One on top of the other,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘Both touching the table in the same place.’

  ‘How?’ Again, she shook her head. ‘It’s not possible?’ ‘No.’

  ‘What caused it?’ I asked.

  ‘Evidence of longtime disturbances in the field between. The initial breach between worlds, perhaps. The presence in the field of Jake, the person you’ve been seeing. Your ghost. He, and the woman he was with, were members of the second transitory group, following the first, thirty years ago. It’s unclear why he continues to exist, or if his presence was the precipitory factor.’

  She held her hands out in front of her, as if she herself didn’t understand what she knew. ‘He’s not a ghost?’ I asked.

  ‘He is,’ she said, ‘but he isn’t dead.’

  Yellow lights flashed through the living room drapes, and for an instant I thought some kind of landing party was going to come crashi
ng through the door and ask to see our passports. Nothing happened; I heard more beeping, somewhere in the distance, and the sound of breaking glass. I picked up one of the coasters and looked at it. At first I’d thought it was ceramic; then, when I touched it, realized it was something else. ‘What’ll happen when both coasters touch the table at the same time?’

  ‘Unforeseeable.’

  ‘Will we still be here?’

  ‘Something will,’ she said. ‘A third world, perhaps.’

  ‘Will we be in it?’

  ‘Unknowable.’

  There wasn’t much she had to add, and even little I could think of to ask. Maybe I was still under the influence of Pi; if so, I wasn’t sure if this was a trip I wanted to come back from. All of a sudden I began to have a very hard time breathing. ‘You got a back yard?’ I asked. ‘I need some fresh air.’

  ‘There’s interior recirculation.’

  ‘Outside air,’ I said. ‘Please?’

  ‘Of course,’ Eulie said, standing. She walked down the hall towards what I gathered to be her bedroom, disappearing for a minute or two. While she was gone I spotted a few photos on the wall and gave them a look-see. Didn’t spot anyone who might have been her father, or boyfriend; in one shot she stood on some kind of bridge with a dead-pale woman who looked her age. In another, Eulie didn’t look older than ten or eleven – it was definitely her, the eyes gave her away. There was a different woman in that shot, one who looked maybe twenty or thirty years older. I turned away from them when Eulie reappeared; she’d put on a long white robe that closed in the front although it didn’t have buttons or zippers.

  ‘Your mother?’ I asked, pointing at the photo. She nodded. ‘Is she –’

  Eulie looked at the picture as if trying to remember who either of them might have been. ‘No. She sold herself.’ ‘Come again?’