Hey, don’t fuck with me.
The Nurse
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
KENNY FADE
ARE WE THERE YET, ARE WE THERE YET, DADDY, ARE WE THERE YET?
Kenny Fade opened his eyes, still screaming, except instead of lying in a hospital bed he was standing in the doorway of a vacuum repair store. A sign on the wall said Brick’s Fix Your Hoover in dingy red letters. Upright vacuums stood in a group, like schoolkids waiting for the bus. Chrome attachments and coils of hose hung from the ceiling in rows. In the corner, a broken-down soda machine hummed loudly. It was the old kind with knobs and neon pipettes, and a nickel coin slot. Across the front it said Sour White.
“Hello?”
Under a dingy lamp was an old Formica desk, covered with parts and rusty tools. At the desk stood a man with an enormous head and a crappy old sweater. Behind him was a poster of a society woman standing in a coffin. She was holding a poodle in one hand and a diamond in the other. You Can’t Take It With You was written underneath.
“Hi,” the guy said. “Welcome to the Virtuality. I’m Brick, your counterman and Central Scrutinizer.”
Kenny took a step forward and rubbed his eyes. It was the doctor. “Sorry, I’m a little dazed. Are we still in the hospital?”
“Actually, Piece, you were never at the hospital.”
Kenny cleared his throat. “Where’s Dayna? And Rose?”
Brick thought about it. “That’s a tricky philosophical question, Piece. Where are they? Where were they? Were they even they? We could spend all afternoon on it.”
Kenny put his elbows on the counter. “Why do you keep calling me Piece?”
Brick conked himself with a roller brush. “Sorry. I’m working on my street lingo. It’s a subroutine called Generation Bridge. I came up with Piece myself. As in piece of the puzzle. Like how we all are one, whether we want to be or not.”
“You’re not really a doctor, are you?” Kenny asked.
Brick nodded. “Yeah, sorry, Chief. That’s just a role I have to play. The doctor here, the therapist there. Tons of lines to remember. Plus, the program’s really buggy. Half the time I’m just fixing code.”
“You’re making zero sense,” Kenny said, holding both arms over his head and forming a big zero.
Brick pinched his eyelid. “Okay, why don’t we start at the beginning?”
“Good idea.”
“For one thing, you are so totally dead.”
Kenny looked down at his feet, his big red size-thirteen Dikes. They didn’t feel dead.
“Freckle and Zac, right? They gave you twenty bucks to pull my chain?”
“Nope,” Brick said. “This is the Returns Department. It’s where you go when being dead doesn’t take.”
“Hey, ASSHATS!” Kenny yelled. “You can come out now.”
When no one came out, Kenny started to get scared. The man with the enormous head stared at him.
“But I’ve never been here in my life.”
Brick finished the assembly of an intake valve and laid it carefully next to a pile of tiny motors.
“It’s true, you’ve never been here in your life. But you have been here in someone else’s. A bunch of times.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KENNY’S DEAD
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, DEAD, ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, ROCK
So this is supposed to be heaven?” Kenny said.
Brick tapped his nose with a screwdriver. “Well, that’s one way to look at it. Depending, you know, on your preferred text. There’s Old Testament thunder and plagues. There’s the New Testament routine, which, to be honest, goes a bit overboard with the leper-kissing. We’ve also got a Koran Oasis and Figs simulation I could boot up. And, of course, there’s the Nietzsche Dark And Lonely Room package, although people keep complaining there aren’t enough candles. It’s all in the catalog.”
“What catalog?”
“The one you read before you spin the big wheel.”
Brick pulled aside a curtain. Behind him was a huge game show wheel with names of occupations written inside different colored triangles, like FRENCH REVOLUTION GUILLOTINE OPERATOR and UNDERGROUND GRAPHIC ARTIST and MOM OF SIX DIFFICULT CHILDREN and TANNED CELEBRITY GYNECOLOGIST and HOT SHIT YOUNGER BROTHER and CROUCHING BEHIND A WALL AT WACO and SPEEDO SEWING TECHNICIAN and MENOPAUSAL SEATTLE POETESS and LEADER OF ZOMBIE RESISTANCE. The last one just said U PICK ’EM.
“I’m in the mental ward, aren’t I?”
Brick raised his eyebrows. “Most people can’t wait to take a spin at being someone else. No more paying bills, no more trudging to the bus in the snow. Teachers? Parents? Bullies? Gone.” He spun the wheel as a demonstration. A red stopper clicketyclacked on the pegs, finally landing on FIRST PLUMBER TO SCALE EVEREST.
“So?”
“So you take a spin, drink a can of code, and shut your eyes. We play the best movie ever made, where you’re the lead character, over and over again. Most people lie back and enjoy it. But you, Chief? For some reason, you keep turning the projector off.”
Kenny pressed his temples with the palms of his hands. “So was I just Keith Richards? John Holmes? The King of Siam?”
Brick laughed. “This time? You were you. Being Kenny was your fantasy. The whole basketball thing? The whole Dayna and her tight outfit deal?” Brick winked and gave Kenny a thumbs-up. “Nice spin. Hot piece of code.”
Kenny decided he was definitely still in the hospital. They’d given him the wrong drugs. It was time to find a doctor who wasn’t insane and could fill him with the right drugs.
“Don’t,” Brick said.
Kenny walked to the front door. He grabbed the handle, flung it open, and almost stepped into blackness. Except within that blackness brilliant constellations winked, so close he could almost reach out and poke them. There were pink nebulae, meteors, huge swirling galaxies puffing with dust. His foot dangled out over a welcome mat that floated in the doorway. It was missing letters so that it just spelled elco.
“I’m in a vacuum store,” Kenny said, almost laughing. “In the middle of space?”
“I know, I know,” Brick said.
“Okay,” Kenny admitted, trying to calm himself. “The whole basketball team thing? And Dayna? And being popular and all? It did feel sort of… fake. I mean, it was fun, but there was definitely something off.”
“Now you’re talking.”
Kenny nodded. “You know, it sounds weird, but I actually feel a little better. I mean, at least things are finally making some kind of sense. I pretty much thought I was losing it.”
“Keep that new understanding in mind, dude, ’cause there’s this one other thing? The thing I haven’t mentioned yet? You might want to sit down.”
“What,” Kenny said, not sitting, “could possibly be more ridiculous than what you’ve already told me?”
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“You, dude, are a girl.”
Kenny gave Brick the finger.
“Hey, now,” Brick said.
Kenny walked over to a display of chrome suction tubes and looked at his reflection, for once clean and clear as day. He seemed to be about eighteen. And a whole lot shorter. With dyed black hair and dumb Goth-bangs and a Doktah Jack and the Kevorkians tour shirt that held a pair of perky breasts. It was true. It was totally, completely true.
He was a freaking girl.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SOPHIE IN THE LIGHT
THE STORY WITHIN THE STORY WITHIN THE STORE
Actually, dude, your name is Sophie. Though some people call you Gothika. Or Columbine-a. Or Test…”
“Yeah, I get it,” Sophie said.
“Kenny Fade? Doesn’t exist. Well, there is a Kenny, but that’d be your younger brother. You spun a fantasy version of his life, where he’s good-looking and athletic and so forth.”
Old Spice? She was just Old Spice?
“But my Kenny has no friends. My Kenny weighs three hundred pounds. My Kenny reads comic b
ooks.”
“True,” Brick said. “Reads them and collects them and hides them under his bed.”
Sophie thought about it. “If everything that just happened was a fantasy, who was Dayna?”
“Dayna was code, Babe.” Brick laughed. “She was a code babe. A numeric variable based on your memories. You know an actual Dayna, yes? And the others that made their way into your fantasy? A freckled boy, for instance?”
Sophie blushed.
“Memories gather around the Personality Formulate like ivy.”
“But I was just in the caf two seconds ago,” Sophie said. “How could I have been Kenny Fade all that time? All the games and classes and driving around in a Jeep?”
Brick smiled proudly. “Your Kenny-ness was about a minute and a half of program, running-time wise. While you’re standing there blinking, or sort of staring into space, a whole life can unfold. The clock moves exponentially faster in the Virtuality.”
Sophie began touching herself randomly, which seemed vaguely illegal, still getting used to having contours. She ran her hands along her sides, over her bra and down her back. Kenny Fade’s memories fell like something melting onto her neck, the team, school, Dayna, Zac.
“It almost was like I could feel myself banging around in that big, lanky boy,” she whispered.
“Yeah, that shouldn’t happen,” Brick said sheepishly. “We’re working on it. Code overflow. Platform issues.”
Little amounts of Sophie began seeping back in as well. Trish, Lake, school. Her classes. The Rumor. She looked at Brick again. Her jaw started to pulse. He had an enormous head and there was a big hole in his sweater.
“Wait a minute—Mr. Puglisi?”
Brick blushed, from the chin up. He slowly turned the nameplate on his desk around. It said Brick Puglisi in big block letters.
“Your first name is Brick?”
“It wasn’t my choice,” he admitted.
“But what are you doing here?”
“I work here. I’m The Counselor 2.0.”
“But what about your office? What about school?”
“Never been. You came to see me.” He pointed at a door in the corner that said Counselor’s Office.
Sophie thought about it. She’d never actually seen Mr. Puglisi in the hallway, had never seen him at lunch or the faculty table or talking to other students. A rush of stark cold madness surged through her, from her toes all the way to her hairline.
He giggled. “How’s it feel? You’re dead and you’re nuts.”
It was true, Sophie thought. She was crazy as a shit-throwing monkey. “So why tell me all this now?”
“It’s your birthday,” Mr. Puglisi said. “Time for you to go back and fulfill your purpose.”
“What if I don’t want to go back?”
Mr. Puglisi looked over his shoulder, and then leaned in.
“Dead? Not dead? Software? Reality? That’s for your Kants and Humes and Spinozas. Your hippies and self-helpers and evangelists. Bottom line, your injection has spent a year gestating, and now you’re ready. We all, in the end, have a purpose.”
“What’s mine?”
“From what I understand, you’ve already been told.”
Sophie closed her eyes. The Nurse. Go to the lab. Picture book. Nutrika.
“Bringing her Kenny’s comic book? That’s my great purpose?”
Mr. Puglisi shrugged. He put his finger on the big wheel. “Ready to spin?”
“No.”
“Do it anyway.”
Sophie leaned over and flicked it with her middle finger. The wheel tore around clockwise, the red flipper clacking maniacally. EMBEZZLING ACCOUNT MANAGER went by. For an agonizing second the flipper rested on TUNA BARGE GUTTER AND SCALER before falling one last notch to NO CHANGE.
“Wow,” Mr. Puglisi said. “What are the odds?”
“So I’ll be me?” Sophie asked. “Not anyone special?”
“But you are special.”
“Go screw.”
Mr. Puglisi reached into his pocket for a nickel. He yanked a can of Sour White from the ancient soda machine. “Liquid code. Doesn’t work without it.”
The rim was crusty and smelled like ammonia. Sophie held it to her lips, the soda hot and cold at the same time. It tasted like bad milk and burning plastic and antifreeze and raw sugar. It also made her very, very nauseous, which was just like old times. Old Kenny Fade times. She closed her eyes and felt herself slipping… in.
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CHAPTER TWENTY
LAKE MCLEAN
KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE
Sophie wheeled me into the caf grumpy and medieval-looking, still pouting from the night before.
People at the tables around us were having fun, laughing, joking. It was a rowdy Friday, sunny outside. Sophie didn’t join in, or even look up, hunched over her sketch pad, going seriously GQ on
Aaron Agar.
“Maybe you should collect some of his hair,” I said. “Make a voodoo doll.”
She ignored me. Or maybe she was trying to decide whether or not to give me the finger.
Her brother sat at a table across from us with the guy who pretended to be German. “Why don’t you invite him over?” I said.
“Who, Aaron?” she said, alarmed.
“No, Kenny.”
Sophie gave a halfhearted wave.
Kenny walked over and put down a stack of funny books that spread out like a deck of cards. One slid in front of me.
“This any good?”
“A classic,” he beamed, spinning it so I could see better. “The early Ion Crusher Wolf rules.”
“Tell me about it.”
He looked up for a second, not sure how enthusiastic to be. “You mean tell me about it, like, please explain more, or tell me about it, like, you already know what I’m talking about so please stop boring you?’
I smiled. “Please explain more.”
“Um, well, the Razor Rodriguez stuff on Amazin’ Kid Kabul? Oh, man, that’s some awesome art. And then there’s this new series, Suck… well, never mind about that. Anyway, I prefer more obscure titles, like Tasty Carpet Tales, or Connoisseur Mannoisseur.”
I readjusted my chair while he pulled a comic from heavy plastic. “This, though, is my favorite.”
The cover showed a thick-jawed robot shooting laser beams from its eyes while standing atop a pile of unconscious henchmen. Kenny opened to the centerfold, which was a nurse in a fighting crouch, her hands up like a cat’s claws. It was actually beautifully drawn. Sophie’s head snapped up, her mouth wide open.
Kenny held out one finger. “See, Manny Solo, who I suppose you would call Destruktor-Bot’s sidekick, although I’ve always found that to be a derogatory—”
Fade to Blue Page 7