by Neil Gaiman
It was 1985 when the man with horn-rimmed spectacles walked into my house.
My wife was at her mother’s that week. Things had got a bit tense, and she’d moved out to buy herself some “breathing room.” She said I was getting on her nerves. But if I was getting on anyone’s nerves, I think they must have been my own. It seemed like I knew what was going to happen all the time. Not just me: it seemed like everyone knew what was going to happen. Like we were sleepwalking through our lives for the tenth or the twentieth or the hundredth time.
I wanted to tell Sandra, but somehow I knew better, knew I’d lose her if I opened my mouth. Still, I seemed to be losing her anyway. So I was sitting in the lounge watching The Tube on Channel Four and drinking a mug of tea, and feeling sorry for myself.
The man with the horn-rimmed specs walked into my house like he owned the place. He checked his watch.
“Right,” he said. “Time to go. You’ll be piloting something pretty close to a PL-47.”
Even people with Graceful clearance weren’t meant to know about PL-47s. I’d flown a prototype a dozen times. Looked like a teacup, flew like something from Star Wars.
“Shouldn’t I leave a note for Sandra?” I asked.
“No,” he said, flatly. “Now, sit down on the floor and breathe deeply and regularly. In, out, in, out.”
It never occurred to me to argue with him, or to disobey. I sat down on the floor, and I began to breathe, slowly, in and out and out and in and…
In.
Out.
In.
A wrenching. The worst pain I’ve ever felt. I was choking.
In.
Out.
I was screaming, but I could hear my voice and I wasn’t screaming. All I could hear was a low bubbling moan.
In.
Out.
It was like being born. It wasn’t comfortable, or pleasant. It was the breathing carried me through it, through all the pain and the darkness and the bubbling in my lungs. I opened my eyes. I was lying on a metal disk about eight feet across. I was naked, wet, and surrounded by a sprawl of cables. They were retracting, moving away from me, like scared worms or nervous brightly colored snakes.
I looked down at my body. No body hair, no scars, no wrinkles. I wondered how old I was, in real terms. Eighteen? Twenty? I couldn’t tell.
There was a glass screen set into the floor of the metal disk. It flickered and came to life. I was staring at the man in the horn-rimmed spectacles.
“Do you remember?” he asked. “You should be able to access most of your memory for the moment.”
“I think so,” I told him.
“You’ll be in a PL-47,” he said. “We’ve just finished building it. Pretty much had to go back to first principles, come forward. Modify some factories to construct it. We’ll have another batch of them finished by tomorrow. Right now we’ve only got one.”
“So if this doesn’t work, you’ve got replacements for me.”
“If we survive that long,” he said. “Another missile bombardment started about fifteen minutes ago. Took out most of Australia. We project that it’s still a prelude to the real bombing.”
“What are they dropping? Nuclear weapons?”
“Rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Uh-huh. Rocks. Asteroids. Big ones. We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us.”
“You’re joking.”
“Wish I was.” The screen went dull.
The metal disk I was riding had been navigating its way through a tangle of cables and a world of sleeping naked people. It had slipped over sharp microchip towers and softly glowing silicone spires.
The PL-47 was waiting for me at the top of a metal mountain. Tiny metal crabs scuttled across it, polishing and checking every last rivet and stud.
I walked inside on tree trunk legs that still trembled and shook from lack of use. I sat down in the pilot’s chair and was thrilled to realize that it had been built for me. It fitted. I strapped myself down. My hands began to go through warm-up sequence. Cables crept over my arms. I felt something plugging into the base of my spine, something else moving in and connecting at the top of my neck.
My perception of the ship expanded radically. I had it in 360 degrees, above, below. I was the ship, while at the same time, I was sitting in the cabin, activating the launch codes.
“Good luck,” said the horn-rimmed man on a tiny screen to my left.
“Thank you. Can I ask one last question?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Why me?”
“Well,” he said, “the short answer is that you were designed to do this. We’ve improved a little on the basic human design in your case. You’re bigger. You’re much faster. You have improved processing speeds and reaction times.”
“I’m not faster. I’m big, but I’m clumsy.”
“Not in real life,” he said. “That’s just in the world.”
And I took off.
I never saw the aliens, if there were any aliens, but I saw their ship. It looked like fungus or seaweed: the whole thing was organic, an enormous glimmering thing, orbiting the moon. It looked like something you’d see growing on a rotting log, half-submerged under the sea. It was the size of Tasmania.
Two-hundred mile-long sticky tendrils were dragging asteroids of various sizes behind them. It reminded me a little of the trailing tendrils of a Portuguese Man O’ War, that strange compound sea creature: four inseparable organisms that dream they are one.
They started throwing rocks at me as I got a couple of hundred thousand miles away.
My fingers were activating the missile bay, aiming at a floating nucleus, while I wondered what I was doing. I wasn’t saving the world I knew. That world was imaginary: a sequence of ones and zeroes. If I was saving anything, I was saving a nightmare….
But if the nightmare died, the dream was dead, too.
There was a girl named Susan. I remembered her from a ghost life long gone. I wondered if she was still alive. (Had it been a couple of hours ago? Or a couple of lifetimes?) I supposed she was dangling hairless from cables somewhere, with no memory of a miserable, paranoid giant.
I was so close I could see the ripples of the creature’s skin. The rocks were getting smaller and more accurate. I dodged and wove and skimmed to avoid them. Part of me was just admiring the economy of the thing: no expensive explosives to build and buy, no lasers, no nukes. Just good old kinetic energy: big rocks.
If one of those things had hit the ship I would have been dead. Simple as that.
The only way to avoid them was to outrun them. So I kept running.
The nucleus was staring at me. It was an eye of some kind. I was certain of it.
I was less than a hundred yards away from the nucleus when I let the payload go. Then I ran.
I wasn’t quite out of range when the thing imploded. It was like fireworks—beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. And then there was nothing but a faint trace of glitter and dust….
“I did it!” I screamed. “I did it! I fucking well did it!”
The screen flickered. Horn-rimmed spectacles were staring at me. There was no real face behind them anymore. Just a loose approximation of concern and interest, like a blurred cartoon. “You did it,” he agreed.
“Now, where do I bring this thing down?” I asked.
There was a hesitation, then, “You don’t. We didn’t design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources.”
“So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?”
He nodded. “That’s pretty much it. Yes.”
The lights began to dim. One by one, the controls were going out. I lost my 360-degree perception of the ship. It was just me, strapped to a chair in the middle of nowhere, inside a flying teacup.
“How long do I have?”
“We’re closing down all your systems, but you’ve got a couple of hours, at least.
We’re not going to evacuate the remaining air. That would be inhuman.”
“You know, in the world I came from, they would have given me a medal.”
“Obviously, we’re grateful.”
“So you can’t come up with any more tangible way to express your gratitude?”
“Not really. You’re a disposable part. A unit. We can’t mourn you any more than a wasps’ nest mourns the death of a single wasp. It’s not sensible and it’s not viable to bring you back.”
“And you don’t want this kind of firepower coming back toward the Earth, where it could potentially be used against you?”
“As you say.”
And then the screen went dark, with not so much as a good-bye. Do not adjust your set, I thought. Reality is at fault.
You become very aware of your breathing, when you only have a couple of hours of air remaining. In. Hold. Out. Hold. In. Hold. Out. Hold….
I sat there strapped to my seat in the half-dark, and I waited, and I thought. Then I said, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
A beat. The screen flickered with patterns. “Yes?”
“I have a request. Listen. You—you people, machines, whatever you are—you owe me one. Right? I mean I saved all your lives.”
“Continue.”
“I’ve got a couple of hours left. Yes?”
“About fifty-seven minutes.”
“Can you plug me back into the…the real world. The other world. The one I came from?”
“Mm? I don’t know. I’ll see.” Dark screen once more.
I sat and breathed, in and out, in and out, while I waited. I felt very peaceful. If it wasn’t for having less than an hour to live, I’d have felt just great.
The screen glowed. There was no picture, no pattern, no nothing. Just a gentle glow. And a voice, half in my head, half out of it, said, “You got a deal.”
There was a sharp pain at the base of my skull. Then blackness, for several minutes.
Then this.
That was fifteen years ago: 1984. I went back into computers. I own my computer store on the Tottenham Court Road. And now, as we head toward the new millennium, I’m writing this down. This time around, I married Susan. It took me a couple of months to find her. We have a son.
I’m nearly forty. People of my kind don’t live much longer than that, on the whole. Our hearts stop. When you read this, I’ll be dead. You’ll know that I’m dead. You’ll have seen a coffin big enough for two men dropped into a hole.
But know this, Susan, my sweet: my true coffin is orbiting the moon. It looks like a flying teacup. They gave me back the world, and you, for a little while. Last time I told you, or someone like you, the truth, or what I knew of it, you walked out on me. And maybe that wasn’t you, and I wasn’t me, but I don’t dare risk it again. So I’m going to write this down, and you’ll be given it with the rest of my papers when I’m gone. Good-bye.
They may be heartless, unfeeling, computerized bastards, leeching off the minds of what’s left of humanity. But I can’t help feeling grateful to them.
I’ll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life.
PAGES FROM A JOURNAL FOUND IN A SHOEBOX LEFT IN A GREYHOUND BUS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TULSA, OKLAHOMA, AND LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
Monday the 28th
I guess I’ve been following Scarlet for a long time now. Yesterday I was in Las Vegas. Walking across the parking lot of a casino, I found a postcard. There was a word written on it in crimson lipstick. One word: Remember. On the other side of the postcard was a highway in Montana.
I don’t remember what it is I’m meant to remember. I’m on the road now, driving north.
Tuesday the 29th
I’m in Montana, or maybe Nebraska. I’m writing this in a motel. There’s a wind gusting outside my room, and I drink black motel coffee, just like I’ll drink it tomorrow night and the night after that. In a small-town diner today I heard someone say her name. “Scarlet’s on the road,” said the man. He was a traffic cop, and he changed the subject when I got close and listened.
He was talking about a head-on collision. The broken glass glittered on the road like diamonds. He called me “Ma’am,” politely.
Wednesday the 30th
“It’s not the work that gets to you so bad,” said the woman. “It’s the way that people stare.” She was shivering. It was a cold night and she wasn’t dressed for it.
“I’m looking for Scarlet,” I told her.
She squeezed my hand with hers, then she touched my cheek, so gently. “Keep looking, hon,” she said. “You’ll find her when you’re ready.” Then she sashayed on down the street.
I wasn’t in a small town any longer. Maybe I was in Saint Louis. How can you tell if you’re in Saint Louis? I looked for some kind of arch, something linking East and West, but if it was there I missed it.
Later, I crossed a river.
Thursday the 31st
There were blueberries growing wild by the side of the road. A red thread was caught in the bushes. I’m scared that I’m looking for something that does not exist anymore. Maybe it never did.
I spoke to a woman I used to love today, in a café in the desert. She’s a waitress there, a long time ago.
“I thought I was your destination,” she told me. “Looks like I was just another stop on the line.”
I couldn’t say anything to make it better. She couldn’t hear me. I should have asked if she knew where Scarlet was.
Friday the 32nd
I dreamed of Scarlet last night. She was huge and wild, and she was hunting for me. In my dream, I knew what she looked like. When I woke I was in a pickup truck parked by the side of the road. There was a man shining a flashlight in the window at me. He called me “Sir” and asked me for ID.
I told him who I thought I was and who I was looking for. He just laughed and walked away, shaking his head. He was humming a song I didn’t know. I drove the pickup south, into the morning. Sometimes I fear this is becoming an obsession. She’s walking. I’m driving. Why is she always so far ahead of me?
Saturday the 1st
I found a shoebox that I keep things in. In a Jacksonville McDonald’s I ate a quarter pounder with cheese and a chocolate milkshake, and I spread everything I keep in the shoebox out on the table in front of me: the red thread from the blueberry bush; the postcard; a Polaroid photograph I found in some fennel-blown wasteland beside Sunset Boulevard—it shows two girls whispering secrets, their faces blurred; an audio cassette; some golden glitter in a tiny bottle I was given in Washington, D.C.; pages I’ve torn from books and magazines. A casino chip. This journal.
“When you die,” says a dark-haired woman at the next table, “they can make you into diamonds now. It’s scientific. That’s how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.”
Sunday the 2nd
The paths that ghosts follow are written on the land in old words. Ghosts don’t take the interstate. They walk. Is that what I’m following here? Sometimes it seems like I’m looking out through her eyes. Sometimes it feels like she’s looking out through mine.
I’m in Wilmington, North Carolina. I write this on an empty beach, while the sunlight glitters on the sea, and I feel so alone.
We make it up as we go along. Don’t we?
Monday the 3rd
I was in Baltimore, standing on a sidewalk in the light fall rain, wondering where I was going. I think I saw Scarlet in a car, coming toward me. She was a passenger. I could not see her face, but her hair was red. The woman who drove the car, an elderly pickup truck, was fat and happy, and her hair was long and black. Her skin was dark.
I slept that night in the house of a man I did not know. When I woke, he said, “She’s in Boston.”
“Who?”
“The one you’re looking for.”
I asked how he knew, but he wouldn’t talk to me. After a while he asked me to leave, and, soon enough, I did. I want to go home. If I knew where it was, I would. Instead I hit
the road.
Tuesday the 4th
Passing Newark at midday, I could see the tip of New York, already smudged dark by dust in the air, now scumbled into night by a thunderstorm. It could have been the end of the world.
I think the world will end in black-and-white, like an old movie. (Hair as black as coal, sugar, skin as white as snow.) Maybe as long as we have colors we can keep going. (Lips as red as blood, I keep reminding myself.)
I made Boston in the early evening. I find myself looking for her in mirrors and reflections. Some days I remember when the white people came to this land, and when the black people stumbled ashore in chains. I remember when the red people walked to this land, when the land was younger.
I remember when the land was alone.
“How can you sell your mother?” That was what the first people said, when asked to sell the land they walked upon.
Wednesday the 5th
She spoke to me last night. I’m certain it was her. I passed a pay phone on the street in Metairie, LA. It rang, I picked up the handset.
“Are you okay?” said a voice.
“Who is this?” I asked. “Maybe you have a wrong number.”
“Maybe I do,” she said. “But are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Know that you are loved,” she said. And I knew that it had to be her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her too, but by then she’d already put down the phone. If it was her. She was only there for a moment. Maybe it was a wrong number, but I don’t think so.
I’m so close now. I buy a postcard from a homeless guy on the sidewalk with a blanket of stuff, and I write Remember on it, in lipstick, so now I won’t ever forget, but the wind comes up and carries it away, and just for now I guess I’m going to keep on walking.
HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES
“Come on,” said Vic. “It’ll be great.”
“No, it won’t,” I said, although I’d lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.
“It’ll be brilliant,” said Vic, for the hundredth time. “Girls! Girls! Girls!” He grinned with white teeth.