Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  She had decorated this place herself, but since her departure, Bob had been pulling it slowly but inexorably into his own style. Restaurant containers filled the cooler. He had hung up several old pictures scavenged from the last remodel, which Belinda had designed the fabric for. The pictures showed leaves and golden light and flowers like great white cups drowning in blue water. They did not match the pink and orange carpet underfoot; they made it look old and shoddy. She did not like pictures of water. The tank in the Matrimony office had creeped her out.

  She realized Father Bob was talking to her.

  She said, “What?”

  “Are you okay?” He got up from the sofa and peered at her. Behind him on the wall, the pictures undulated and swayed as though they were windows to some vast, tide-drawn lake.

  “Sure,” she said. “I was just thinking about what it was like, growing up with you and Father Anton.” She liked the new place better; she liked the tiny balcony, the view out onto the park. Here was quieter, certainly, a bit more privileged, but there was something to be said for the hubbub that surrounded them, the people swinging past on the zip lines, taking a shortcut across the space rather than circle around the living area.

  “You had a better childhood than I did,” he said. It was a familiar refrain and she tuned out the details of how his family had worked maintenance for years and finally been given the chance to emigrate to this Building, far above the ruined, rotting planet. The food riots. The cold.

  She knew Bob had begged on the street and he’d been rather good at it. The same charm and glibness that served him well running the restaurant had allowed him to cajole money, food, a couch to sleep on from people. He had lived a nomadic, room-to-curb existence for several years before becoming more established. He had moved in with Anton two years before they had decided to have Belinda. And life was good now for him. They could afford surrogates to do their daily work, let them concentrate on important things.

  Belinda was a Creative type, always had been, and she did appreciate the chance at that which Anton and Bob’s bloodlines had bought her, not having had to fight her way out of a less interesting job. She liked what she did and she was good at it.

  Buzzing bees, colored violet and licorice and steel, swarmed through the air and she almost flinched.

  “Why do you keep that Chip?” Bob said. “You’re not a child anymore, Belinda. You don’t need constant entertainment.”

  “It makes me think of things differently,” she said. “It keeps me on my toes.”

  She liked her unexpected world, hidden from most. She liked to know that she, and she alone, could see the faces in the wall work, the swords in the grass, the walking trees that paraded across the park every dark, late, when almost everyone was sleeping, the surrogates in the closet unless Bingo had taken his to bed already.

  Sometimes Belinda wondered what life would be like without the surrogates. Most of the time she didn’t. The surrogates were there to do their work, but also in case one of them wanted sex when the other didn’t. Two weeks after the marriage, Belinda didn’t feel like it, so Bingo brought his surrogate in and fucked it there in the bed beside her.

  After that she felt aroused. When Bingo just turned over, she went and got her own surrogate. Its rubbery cock stood up like a dildo, caramel colored. It went down on her, lips vibrating as she writhed, then fucked her. She thought that maybe Bingo would rouse again, that they’d fall into an endless sexual loop, but he kept snoring.

  It surprised her how much she thought about that act afterwards. The surrogates were engineered deliberately so they didn’t look like real people. Their eyes didn’t track right and there was an odd translucency to their flesh. So it hadn’t been as though it was another person Bingo had been focusing on, his eyes half-closed, looking somewhere inside himself. Had he been thinking about her? She felt oddly reluctant to ask, even though they were always frank with each other about what they liked and didn’t like in bed.

  On Bingo’s birthday, Belinda made a cake by mixing the contents of one packet with another and letting it set inside a plastic shaping ring. She did it herself and frosted it, painting the white surface with green fish, punk flowers, yellow guitars. The cake sang to her as she painted it and later as she woke Bingo in the morning, singing his favorite song with the cake, “Baby baby flower baby.”

  She got home earlier than Bingo and she took to using the surrogate when she first did, then showering so she met him, freshly washed and ready, in the hallway, on the kitchen table, on the balcony. Today she fucked it and then showered while it and the other surrogate put up green and pink streamers that she’d pocketed from work.

  Several of his friends and hers came over for dinner. She privately considered his friends brittle, and she’d heard him call hers vapid. Alfa and Veronika wrote musicals; Jonny and Leeza were clothing buyers. Veronika had an Insanity Chip too, but she made a point of saying that she did it for the sake of Creativity.

  “It lets you drill down into the psyche of the really great artists,” she enthused. “Van Gogh. Pound. Bacon. Doesn’t it help you think up some really great designs, Belinda-baby?”

  “Sure,” Belinda said. She looked around. She had printed up some of the fabric swatches from work. They hung on the walls in odd trapezoidal shapes, angled in and out like blueprints of rocks. She wished she hadn’t picked yellow for the curtains but she changed her mind when daffodil butterflies flew out of the fabric and spelled out words in the air: Go Belinda you’re great.

  Bingo flirted with Veronika; he asked her what her Chip made her see and gave her wide-eyed looks that were almost, but not quite mocking. Veronika bit into it and wouldn’t stop talking. Over her head, Bingo gave Belinda ironic glances until she got the hiccups from suppressing giggles.

  They drank wine and ate and played cards. Belinda had a hard time focusing on the hands, and Bingo said, a little irritably, “Can’t you manage to keep track of the simplest thing?”

  It made her want to cry, and that made the cards even blurrier.

  “Oh, baby,” Bingo said, instantly contrite. He took her cards and put them face down on the table; he brought her hand to his lips, kissing at them. “Baby, I’m sorry, what’s wrong?”

  She lied. “It was something I saw. Something the Chip showed me.”

  He frowned. Much later, after they’d gone to bed, he said, “Why do you keep the Chip? You have me now.”

  “It makes the world less boring,” she said.

  “Don’t I do enough of that for you?”

  She faltered, not sure what to say. “But there are times when I’m not with you,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything, there in the darkness, and after a while, she said, “I could get the Chip modified so it doesn’t go off when you’re around.” The words came out of her mouth and swelled like glowing balloons, colored coral and amber and pumpkin and gold.

  “All right,” he said quickly.

  The next day she had the modification made. It was easy She rode home on the elevator on waves of blue, and her feet turned into fish, into birds, into kittens, and then Bingo was walking down the corridor towards her and everything was gone.

  It was odd that evening, sitting across the table from him to eat food that stayed still and silent on the plate. She curled up next to him on the sofa and they held each other in the grey quiet, while the purple diamonds stood statue-still on the wall.

  When Bingo wasn’t around, she could fuck the surrogate and ride silver rails of scent, could press her hands on his skin and feel centipedes coiling underneath, could see his eyes full of daffodils and roses.

  Sometimes she hid from Bingo, stepped into the closet and closed her eyes. The clothing wrapped its arms around her and she sailed away into stars and fireworks. She could feel him outside the doorway like a leaden eye, a cloud of smoke. She wanted Adam to sneak up behind him and then…she wasn’t sure what. She wasn’t sure what at all. And so she squeezed her eyes tighter and thought of light
and its equations, like numbers on the inside of her head, and tried to dream even though she’d been forced awake.

  It wasn’t enough. She began to think she had agreed to things too quickly. She said to Bingo, “What if I had the Chip gimmicked so it was just a little bleed-through when you’re around?”

  His face darkened. “Why?”

  “It helps me think,” she said. She fussed with the food on the counter in front of her, making dinner. She laid a slice of bread on each plate, then a slice of cheese at an angle, so the food formed an eight-pointed star.

  “Are you having trouble thinking?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “But only when you’re with me.”

  “Never mind,” she said. She poured white sauce over the cheese in a spiral and sprinkled it with green flakes. She could feel him watching her.

  “I want you to be happy, Belinda, you know that,” he said.

  Then why do you want me to be something different than I am, she wondered. But she didn’t speak the words aloud. It was the first time she’d ever censored herself for Bingo’s sake and that night she lay awake, wondering what it meant. Bingo breathed beside her, the long slow sounds of sleep, and didn’t stir when she got up and went into the other room.

  There, without Bingo, an enormous golden figure eight hung in the air, blazing with a meaning she couldn’t guess at. She sat down on the sofa. Her surrogate stirred in its closet, emerged, sat down beside her. It was ready to do whatever she liked, but all she did was take its hand, flesh and plastic intertwining.

  The next day Bingo said, “You could get rid of the Chip. It’s silly. People laugh at you for having it.”

  That struck her to the quick. “Who’s laughing at me?”

  “Everyone,” Bingo said. “Your friends and mine. Even Bob and Anton think it’s funny.”

  She thought that might not be true. She thought of Bob, sitting with his own surrogate, her discarded one, a plastic family. She knew that it was wrong to think of them like that, she knew it was like befriending a toaster or a clock. But then Bingo left the room and their toaster smiled at her, chirped hello, and slid out two pieces of toast, perfect and brown, just the way she liked them, even though she hadn’t planned on breakfast.

  When she came home from work, Veronika was sitting on the couch.

  “Bingo let me in,” she said. “But he went to get some groceries. Belinda, darling, I’ve got to talk to you about something.”

  “The Chip,” Belinda said. She looked at Veronika, at the glossy red hair, the wide eyes.

  “Bingo thinks you want something else, that’s why you won’t give up the Chip.”

  Veronika’s face was too solicitous. Belinda thought about the two of them discussing her, discussing the Chip. Discussing Bingo’s dissatisfaction. It felt like a terrible betrayal.

  “Get out,” she said.

  She expected Bingo to bring it up again that night, but instead he said, “Have you ever thought we might change our marriage, make it a triad?”

  “I don’t want to marry Veronika,” she said without preamble. He flushed at the accuracy of the guess. She said, “Isn’t your surrogate enough?”

  “I have a surrogate,” he said. “I don’t have you.”

  It made her sound like a possession, like a thing, like a toaster. She didn’t know what to say, how to reassure him that he didn’t need her.

  His voice was tired. “Let’s go to bed. Think about it. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

  She left in the middle of the night as he slept. She travelled to Floor 77, to one of the many building offices that never closed. Riding in the elevator, the buttons sang to her, the carpet advised, the lights shed waves of warmth that settled on her like a feather cloak.

  In the morning, he said, “Have you thought of it?” But she went on talking to the cabinets.

  He said, “I thought you made it so the Chip doesn’t work when I’m around!”

  “It’s a fine morning,” Belinda said to the table, watching the wood grain melt and puddle. And then she turned and left without looking at him, because she didn’t see him anymore and only a tickle of memory remained.

  LUCYNA’S GAZE

  Gregory Frost

  She’s not very far away from me. Her head is canted a little. Her eyes don’t meet mine. So shy. It’s been like that always with her—that demure pose, those eyelids half-lowered, which I’ve always taken as an invitation to move nearer, move to the side, make her look up. I’ve almost done that more than once. In the bakery, more than once.

  She has what they call a heart-shaped face, with the wide cheeks and a tiny cleft in her sharp chin. A valentine heart.

  From here, also I can see her foot, just the one, extended toward me as if she thinks she is Cinderella and I’m to be the prince, fitting the slipper onto her foot. The two of us. Happily ever after—now, there is a dream.

  Her name is Lucyna.

  The first time I saw her was back when I drove the delivery van for Ryszard. I was twenty-three then, a medical student who had run out of money for school. Who knows what we were delivering—probably furniture. Furniture constituted most of what we delivered then. Mind you, this was before “furniture” became a euphemism for guns.

  That hybrid-fuel van of his, it barely could make the mountains, the engine always backfiring and rattling and threatening to strand us.

  Ryszard went off someplace. Maybe he was lunching with a customer. He liked to do that, pretend to be comfortably well off, a playboy of the world who could buy your meal while he steered the conversation to reveal that he was educated, could have been anything he wanted—doctor, advocate, priest even—but who preferred the vagabond life of taking orders and delivering the goods. He would even sometimes get me to call him on my cell so that he could pretend to be receiving an important conference call. It was a pathetic act really. Even I knew it, and if I knew it, everyone did. Nevertheless, I owe him for his pathetic act, because his leaving me alone is how I met Lucyna.

  Her village wasn’t much of a place. Built on a hillside, with one street of worn and broken paving stones surely as old as Napoleon’s army. The street snaked down between the buildings, out the lower end and down a perilous slope to run flat along the river. We must have delivered to a dozen such places, all of them tiny, mountainous, distrustful of the modern world despite their cell phones, computers, and little satellite dishes. The more the world got in through the cracks of their lives, the more they distrusted it. And they were hardly wrong, were they? (I am quite sure I’m taking forever to get to the point, as they say, but it isn’t as if we’re going anywhere, is it?)

  I parked the van and walked into the bakery to get something of my own to eat, and there she was. She would have been seventeen or eighteen then. She stood behind the varnished wooden counter. I remember that she was handing a round loaf of bread half-wrapped in brown paper to a customer. I don’t recall the customer at all. Lucyna, though—she had a bandana upon her head that gathered up her hair, very gypsy-like. With her arm outstretched a small tuft of dark hair showed in her armpit. Her arm itself was the golden color of gingerbread and her face was dusted with flour. She must surely have been there since four or five in the morning, probably she’d arrived at about the time I climbed into the truck with Ryszard. At least, I was quite willing to pretend this, even to believe it and so forge an illusory link to her in this way. Bread loaves filled the angled shelves behind her, making her seem to be surrounded by gold like one of those Byzantine icons scarved in foil haloes.

  For a moment as I approached she glanced my way, looking straight at me, bold in her assessment, but as quickly she cut me loose, her gaze rolled away, her eyelids descended, exactly like now, exactly like every time I saw her after that, as if something more interesting just a little to the side of me had captured her attention, a pleasant memory of laughing children or of carrying laundry down to the river in the company of other women, and which caused her to smile the
slightest bit as she blushed at her own forwardness.

  I recall that I ordered a pastry, a creme-filled confection, and she placed it on the tiny piece of parchment paper and handed it across to me, and our fingers touched. She abandoned her shyness then and looked me in the eyes and I, with what self-assurance I do not know, asked her what her name was, and she answered me in a voice that sounded surprised to be speaking her name. As quickly her eyes shifted away and focused elsewhere, and I had the odd sensation of watching someone look into the future, seeing what fate might await the two of us if she dared to say more. It was a foolish idea, I suppose, but now I’ve seen this future, I understand how one would want to know.

  Then we parted. I took my pastry out of the shop and out of her world. I hoped that she watched me leave, but I didn’t turn back and look, didn’t want to be so obvious. It was enough of a triumph that I had her name in my keeping.

  Of course it was months and months before Ryszard and I returned to that village, and time moved along there as it did wherever I drove. When I saw her again, it was like the very first, save that I think her little teasing smile grew somewhat, the amusement of my reappearance become larger for her, but not so that her eyes would hold mine. Her shyness like a veil never fell away.

  And so over the next two years I must have returned perhaps seven or eight times. I always went into the bakery, whether Ryszard had anything to do there or not. In that space of time she married someone and became pregnant with a child. I’m sure I burned with jealousy when I discovered this, cursing myself for having not spoken up. A ludicrous notion, given our circumstances. Besides, nothing between us had changed, and she glowed with happiness that time, and the next, when the baby had come. I was happy for her but I regretted not being its cause. By then Ryszard and I were moving things other than furniture, and being paid more money for the risk. The world, too, was moving in a certain direction that was in keeping with our new cargo. I had enough set aside now to return to medical school, but I’d fallen in love with the danger of what we were doing just as I had fallen in love with my fantastical notion of Lucyna. It comes as no surprise to you that the world does not concern itself with such private dreams.