Asimov's SF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Time passed, or she passed through time. She slept and half-slept. The urge to use the bathroom came and went. She was a little thirsty for a while, but not enough to get up. She wasn't hungry at all.

  She started whistling “Some Enchanted Evening” and then sang it all the way through to the end, screeching but hitting the high notes, words so effortless it was more as if they were sliding through her than being remembered. “Ne ... ver ... let ... Her ... GO.”

  But everybody had to let everybody go. Sometimes that broke her heart. Sometimes it soothed her from the inside out.

  “I ... sang ... that song ... in ... high school ... choir.”

  Already in her mind, her reply flew to him without any act of will. “Sing with me.”

  Together they sang most of the score of South Pacific. Both of them faded in and out. It embarrassed her a little to be singing “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” with a handsome young man. “Cockeyed Optimist” still choked her up. More than once she got tired and let the Lost Astronaut take the lead, but she never stopped singing altogether and on “Bali Hai” she held the melody while he made harmonies around it, and she got chills.

  When they'd sung all the songs in the show, there was what Inez hoped was a companionable silence and not loss of contact. She wondered what time it was, and wondered why it mattered. If she sat up she could probably see the clock, but she didn't want to sit up, she didn't want to move at all. It was sometime during the night; the picture window framed only darkness and the inside of the house was full of darkness, too.

  Usually she could gauge the time of day by the nature of her hunger. If she felt slightly queasy, phlegmy and acidic, it meant she hadn't eaten breakfast yet. If she was relatively comfortable and the idea of hunger suddenly occurred to her with no physical longing to back it up, it probably meant lunchtime, and lunch was always a hard decision, because if she ate she'd often pay for it with drowsiness the rest of the day and if she didn't eat mid-afternoon vertigo could make her sit down wherever she was. Being absolutely famished indicated she was late for suppertime, and someday she might not even bother with cooking—she'd devour her evening meal raw, chicken and eggs and corn meal and all.

  As far as she could tell, she wasn't the least bit hungry right now. Maybe she was dead. That would be interesting. Maybe she was floating in space with the Lost Astronaut, or toward him. Did you experience hunger differently when you were lost?

  Her body let her know she wasn't dead and she was still right here on earth and it was time to get up off the floor. After several false starts and much struggle, she managed to hang onto the edge of the couch and get herself to her knees, noticing her own thin arms like warped Q-tips pulling and pushing. Waiting to catch her balance, she glanced over at the window again.

  At first she thought it was just the dark of the yard, but the black went deeper than that, reminding her of long vacation trips at night, gazing through the windshield at the yellowed edge of the road and the dizzying nothing beyond. The view through the window had that sad taste of nothingness, but streaked through with shimmering colored dust, floating gray stone orbs, distant suns flaming, a rushing through panicked breath and beyond.

  This, this is what you see?

  She waited a while, not so much for an answer as for the strength and courage and balance to go on with the process of getting to her feet. When she got there, she worked her way into her room, noticing how she was shuffling and swaying, and changed the clothes that she had soiled while she lay on the floor. All of this would be exceedingly distressing if she thought about it, so she didn't.

  Instead, she thought about Daniel, and suddenly thought she remembered his number, and tried calling him again, dialing the number several times and getting all sorts of recorded messages about disconnects and full mailboxes and other numbers you were supposed to dial that made no sense to her. When had she last cleaned the dingy yellow phone? It struck her how bits of everyday life—sweat from a palm, peanut butter and syrup from fingers, dirt from under nails—came off onto other pieces of everyday life, transferred into other people's lives without anybody really being aware of it.

  The phone was dirty, and it wasn't working anyway, and she didn't want it in her hand. Maybe, she told herself bitterly, a message from Daniel would just fly into her head. Or maybe she'd just never hear anything of him again.

  The list of emergency numbers Ken had so many years ago taped to the wall above the phone gave her an idea. Did emergency numbers ever change? She punched the buttons carefully but without confidence. A flat voice answered, and it was the right number after all.

  Inez spoke quickly because she didn't know what to say now that she'd made the connection. “Yes, officer? I have some information? About a missing person?” Hearing how all her sentences were ending in question marks, she resolved to correct that if she got a chance to speak again.

  She waited as she was transferred, then waited some more as the officer got her papers and pen ready. Was this really the proper response to an emergency? The world was landmined with peril, even when you went to those designated to help.

  “Yes. Well, his name is Casey Liebler.” Now the words were overly declarative. She was sure she must be frowning; Ken used to tease her about frowning whenever she tried to concentrate. “They call him the Dead—” She stopped. “He is the lost astronaut, the one the media is so obsessed with.” This last sounded ridiculous, as if there were more than one lost astronaut the world had to contend with.

  She needed no special talent to divine the police officer's change in attitude. It was plain in her voice as she asked a series of irrelevant questions no doubt meant to test a caller's competency. Inez tried again to provide the important information about the Lost Astronaut, in different words this time.

  The woman was using that awful “active listening” technique. Eventually Inez just hung up. Well, she'd tried, she told herself desolately.

  Then her fingers were pushing the numbers again, quite involuntarily, quite beyond her ability to stop, the very thing she'd been dreading since she'd been diagnosed, the wild spasms of Parkinson's. But it wasn't that. It was those oversized metallic fingers guiding hers to the right buttons. She saw them, felt the slick pressure against her knuckles and nails, and wasn't scared then. When the number was complete the gloved hand rudely shoved the receiver against her head, warm damp plastic carrying debris from other lives onto her skin and hair.

  “Clarence Eng, Operations,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yes, well. Please excuse my interruption, but I have, well, a little information concerning your Casey Liebler.” Astonished by her own brashness, Inez made herself refrain from whistling and then from giddy speculation about what time it was where Clarence Eng was still at work.

  “How did you get this number?”

  Startled by the question and the aggressive tone, especially after she had been polite, Inez managed, “I beg your pardon?”

  “I asked how you got this phone number.”

  “I looked it up,” she told him petulantly.

  “Impossible. This is a secure number. Who gave you this phone number?”

  Ken used to say, No good deed goes unpunished, and he'd had a point, though she hadn't admitted it to him. All too often stray thoughts had demonstrated to her that people were annoyed by the kindness of others. “I lied,” she said, her face burning. “I didn't know how to explain. He gave me the numbers.”

  “Who?”

  “Casey Liebler.” Closing her eyes, she saw the face of the Lost Astronaut.

  “This isn't the least bit amusing, you know. Who is this?”

  She took a breath and gave him her hame, her full address including zip code, her phone number and social security number. “I would not be giving you that information if I was just some sort of—prankster.” This was a bluff; they both knew a prankster could make up or steal all that information.

  “Then maybe you're just crazy.”

  �
��Maybe I am. I am open to that possibility, I assure you.” At least he hadn't said “senile.”

  The room tilted sharply. Inez grabbed the rolled edge of the kitchen counter. Light smeared across her vision like glare on a window. Nauseated, she wondered a bit wildly whether she'd had breakfast yet.

  She swore she heard faint music, nothing she'd ever heard before yet almost familiar, mythical or mechanical. A wide band of glistening particles roared by like the wing of a dragon. Where it had passed through the wall she saw metal sanded thin, random corrosions, exposed tubes and wires. She found herself gripping nonexistent controls. Nothing works ... anymore.

  “What was that?” Mr. Eng's annoyed, officious voice brought her back, but vast ribbons of dust, radioactive winds, smoldering suns, planets with the life turned out of them still filled her kitchen and living room, passed in and out of walls and furniture. Vista after dark vista overlapped her back yard where the children's tire swing used to be and just last year, when she'd still been able to venture that far on her own, she'd found a little bell in the weeds, tarnished but with clapper intact, and she'd stood in the middle of the yard and rung it, amazed to be making the music of the ages. She didn't know where the bell was now, after she'd rescued it from the weeds. She didn't need to know in order to have the music.

  “What do you mean?” she asked Mr. Eng, stalling for time, and with her other, silent voice seeking the Lost Astronaut's ear, screeching Please! What do you want me to tell him!

  “You said, ‘Nothing works anymore.'”

  She sighed. “Well, Mr. Eng. That pretty much sums it up.”

  Suddenly narrow blue and green lines segmented her walls, spreading in a curved pattern across ceiling and floor, passing through furniture and those astronomical artifacts she was coming to see as more and more like furniture, the interior décor of some endless strange room where Casey Liebler now spent his days and nights. Then the writing arrived like the words floating up into the window of one of those fortune telling Magic 8-Balls. Numbers mostly. Streams of numbers in a variety of colors, broken here and there with brutal words: malfunction, unreadable, unknown, error, lost location.

  “Well, I'm really quite busy. I'm going to hang up, Mrs—”

  “It's Miss now, I suppose. You were friends, weren't you?”

  “What?”

  “You and Captain Liebler, your missing friend. Your families knew each other.” There was a long pause. Around her the great electronic display flashed violently in alarm. At some distance she heard the electric scream of the warning speaker, felt the trembling hand frantically seeking the spot, breaking something, silencing it. The most surprising and chilling thing was that she knew exactly what all this was.

  Then Mr. Eng spoke quietly. “We had regular dinners, all of us. Our wives, our children, all of us good friends. Companions. I played cello—not very well, mind you—not all of us are Yo-Yo Ma. He was much better at his violin. He led, I followed, sometimes all the way ‘til dawn.”

  “But after the accident it changed, didn't it?”

  “He was lost in a very dark place. Irretrievable. Look, how could you know? Who have you talked to?”

  “He is full of regret, you know. He wishes it had not been that way. And he knows that you will seriously consider anything I have to say.” This last was all her own and she sent a desperate apology to Casey Liebler.

  “Yes. Okay. Please. Whatever you want to tell me.”

  And so with only a nudge now and then from the Lost Astronaut, Inez Baird described for Clarence Eng what had taken over her kitchen and living room and almost unbearably opened up her life which had become so constricted lately, so small, and now suddenly seemed to have no edges. Finally making use of that silly forty-foot cord James had connected to her kitchen phone because she couldn't keep track of a cell phone or a cordless, she wandered around the house and outside onto the patio, doing her best to describe the ways all that dust and rock moved, the actions and appearance of those flaming suns, the qualities of those sad floating worlds and a few that somehow seemed not so sad except that they were utterly out of reach. She almost told him about Daniel, but that would distract them both; the subject at hand was hard enough and she had to really focus. In conclusion she read off for him the cold words and numbers etched in midair, and she even tried to replicate the accompanying sound, as much like a musical chant as the alarm she guessed it was.

  He thanked her. He said he had a lot to go over, various theories to consider. He said he would be back in contact. She hoped he would, but all this had taken a lot out of her so the hope was muted and weak. She had trouble getting the phone back on the hook and didn't even try to roll up the cord, just left it in a tangle on the counter and the floor. If somebody came to check on her they'd probably take that as one more sign that she could no longer keep her house in order, but right now Inez didn't care.

  The need to rest was overwhelming. She managed to get into bed and under the covers, then got up again almost immediately because she thought she heard someone at the door, at the window. Finding no one, she went to bed again, to be roused by an insistent phone call, but there was only the dial tone when she picked up the receiver. Most of the night—it might even have been two nights, with a smeary day between them—she spent in semi-consciousness agitated and then soothed and then agitated again by music she could just barely hear.

  At one point, she was standing in her living room, steadying herself on the back of the couch, feeling so tired, so lost and precarious, staring out the picture window into her dark and endless back yard, singing. And what answered her, low at first, then climbing in volume and sweetness until it made the hair on her arms stand out, was a violin.

  “You brought it with you?” she asked the dark.

  Only ... in my memory, but I play it every day. The crying of his violin penetrated to the nerve, but it was the kind of crying that made her happy to be alive, reminded her of every beautiful thing.

  The darkness ran with pinpoints of light. Planets like bright coins spun. In the distance of centuries suns burst apart, seeding the universe with death songs and birth songs and songs about life just going on its way.

  “I am here,” she sang. “I am here.” Radioactive wind warmed her to tears.

  drum

  the thought of a drum, the roll and thump, the beat in her blood and bones

  drumming

  had been going on for a while before she was really aware of it, as if she had come in in the middle of a concert. Did Casey Liebler play the drums, too? But of course it was Daniel

  drumming

  drumming, maybe sending her a message but she didn't think so, only drumming or thinking about drumming and she was picking up his thoughts. She made herself as open as she could.

  The drumming had stopped, or something had happened to her reception of it. But it had been there, clear and alien as could be. She was shaking.

  Daniel must still be alive, then. Or maybe not—for all Inez knew, the thoughts of dead people still floated around in the universe and sometimes into her mind. Given what she'd been experienceing in the past few days—or hours, or weeks, however long it was—anything was possible.

  Nothing else remarkable happened for a while. Sun came in through the picture window. A squirrel and a jay—maybe that same jay—were arguing; Inez smiled at their ruckus. She noticed now that her clothes were dirty, chose not to think about how long it had been since she'd changed them or how they'd gotten so soiled, decided to risk taking a shower. Closing the bathroom door and the shower curtain made her a little claustrophobic, and she was alone in the house (except for the Lost Astrunaut, who maybe could see her anyway, which made her blush). She left everything open.

  Forgetting how hard the faucets were to turn, she flinched at the too-hot and then too-cold water but managed to get it right and stand under the spray with one hand gripping the bar she'd told James not to install and the other awkwardly maneuvering shampoo, soap, washcloth. She drop
ped the lid to the conditioner, got shampoo in her eyes, and couldn't manage the loofah for her back, but the shower was luxurious and no catastrophes happened. It didn't matter that she couldn't get herself completely dried off. The clean clothes felt good.

  Triumphant to have accomplished all that, and noting that during the whole process there'd been nothing in her mind but thoughts of what she was doing, Inez was combing her hair, so wispy now that it hardly needed combing, when she heard someone call her name. “Just a minute,” she answered. But her voice didn't carry and the person came on into the house as people often did. She didn't mind, it was better than having to get up and down to answer the door.

  She emerged from the bathroom to find that girl from the agency with her groceries. Usually Inez had her put them away, but today for some reason she didn't want her to stay that long. It took a few repetitions of “No, thanks, I'll get it” and “I like to do for myself when I can” and “It's easier for me to find things when I'm the one who puts them away,” and she hoped she wasn't being rude. Finally the girl accepted the money for the groceries and left, promising to come back next week.

  Only then did Inez notice the mop leaned up against the counter. There was a perfectly good mop somewhere around here. Was that a hint that her house wasn't clean? For a minute the girl's audacity made her mad, and she considered calling the agency to complain and demand a refund of the cost of the mop. But she let it go. She had other things on her mind.

  Nobody came to see her for the next few days, nobody called, nobody answered the phone when she called, and she didn't leave messages. On TV, among Oprah and Dr. Phil and news about the war that angered her and news about a spelling bee that made her proud and commercials that shocked her to laughter, there was one reference to Casey Liebler, not even a whole story, just an aside in a piece about the space program, as if he were already only a footnote in history. He's still alive, she visualized sending back across the airwaves to those glib announcers. Once she positioned herself right in front of the set in a stance she'd learned in a long-ago aerobics class, feet shoulder-width apart and weight over center. Holding onto the TV cabinet but still swaying, she informed them in her loudest, firmest voice, “He's still alive. He can still be found.”