“Maybe we should turn up the fire,” Lewis said.
“Quiet,” Stuart said.
It did seem colder. And the underground sounds, the pressure of all that earth and snow above, seemed to press down a little harder. He imagined the room had gotten smaller. If he opened his eyes now, he would see the walls just a few inches from the table. Marilyn would be there like an unhappy spirit—always hanging around hoping, on the one hand, she wasn’t bothering anyone, and weepy, on the other hand, because she was unable to have much impact on the living. He could see the flickering candlelight through his eyelids.
Then there was a breeze.
Of course, there could be no breeze in the silo. This was a breeze produced by his belief. It was the wind that would blow the ghost of his dead wife into the parlor of the ICBM silo. There was a rustle of cloth, like the thighs of someone sneaking around in tight jeans. Then tiptoes through dead leaves.
The breeze became the gentle huff of breath on his cheek.
Someone whispered, very close, her lips just brushing his ear, “Both sexes of alligators bellow.”
It didn’t sound like Marilyn, and certainly not like anything Marilyn would say. She might have been like that a long, long time ago. Bright eyes and big smile, and the way she had moved just made your fingers itch to unwrap her, but nothing like that these days. These days she was the coughing woman. The whimpering woman. The I-don’t-mean-to-bother-you-but-I-must-moan woman. Both sexes of alligators bellow. Such a wet thought. And there was the smell of lemons.
Elizabeth gasped. Then there was silence again. Stuart listened carefully but he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t imagining the sounds of something drifting around the table delivering little messages from the great beyond.
He wanted to see her.
He opened his eyes. Marilyn wasn’t in the room. Bill’s chin had tipped down to his chest. He might have fallen asleep. Elizabeth, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, was sitting up very straight and seemed to be struggling to hear something. Slow tears streaked Lewis’ cheeks.
Where had Marilyn gone? Had she been there at all? The entire point of the supernatural was the willingness to fool yourself. So had he succeeded in fooling himself about the breeze and the lips on his ear and the voice? He cleared his throat.
Bill sighed and raised his head. Elizabeth opened her eyes. Lewis pushed up from the table and turned away.
“Well, that was weird,” Bill said.
“Where’s Marilyn?” Elizabeth stood up.
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Stuart said.
Lewis poured himself a fresh drink. “Maybe she just went to bed,” he said without turning back to them.
Stuart looked around the dining room and then the rooms immediately connected to it, but Marilyn was not to be found.
“Frankly, I’m a little worried,” Elizabeth said. “She did look pretty green even before she became a ghost.”
“Okay,” Stuart said. “Let’s split up and look for her.”
“That’s what they always say in the movies,” Lewis said.
“Oh, shut up, Lewis,” Elizabeth said.
Outside in the corridor there was a hum that Stuart hadn’t noticed before. Maybe he had not been perfectly still and listening before. “I’ll go this way,” he said.
He checked all of the rooms and passages on his way to the missile hole. When he got to the hole itself and saw her standing there in the wedge of light from the corridor, he was surprised at how unsurprised he was. She had changed into her nightgown and white silk robe. She was barefoot and her feet were faintly blue. She was looking straight at him. She hardly ever looked straight at him these days. Maybe becoming a ghost had given her new knowledge, new strength, a kind of cosmic aikido. He approached her. If he were to reach out and touch her, his hand would pass right through her.
He put out his hand and pushed. She fell back into the hole. A moment later he heard the splash.
In a single instant, belief became reality. He turned away and moved to the door. She might have been feebly calling his name had she really been down there, but she wasn’t really down there. Marilyn couldn’t swim which was probably why they had not yet swum with the sharks on xmas eve. She wouldn’t be anywhere near a hole filled with maybe a hundred feet of cold water. He closed the corridor door and walked slowly back toward the dining room.
You can believe your life into any state you want, he decided. Reality is plastic. You mold it. You pretend things into existence.
There would be big changes to make back home. He’d take some time off school, surely all of next term. Maybe go to Europe to get over this.
Maybe buy a BMW.
Bill came out of the shadows like a sudden psycho. He had a crazy grin on his face.
“Bill,” Stuart said.
“We found her,” Bill said. “Hey, here she is now.”
Elizabeth came into the corridor pushing Marilyn in ahead of her. Lewis appeared with his drink.
“Safe and sound,” Elizabeth said.
Marilyn’s feet were still blue. She still wore her white silk robe over her nightgown.
“Doesn’t she make a good ghost?” Elizabeth said.
Marilyn didn’t speak but she didn’t turn her eyes down either.
“Well, it’s been fun, kids,” Bill said, “but I’m for bed.”
“Me, too,” Elizabeth said quickly.
“Not me,” Lewis said.
“Oh, you can stay up all night drinking if you want,” Elizabeth said.
Marilyn moved away down the corridor toward the bedrooms. Stuart followed. What else was there to do?
Once in the bedroom, he sat down on the bed and tugged off his shoes. Marilyn hadn’t moved away from the door. He could feel her eyes on him, but when he looked up at her, she switched off the light, leaving nothing but an afterimage of sadness and contempt.
He could hear water dripping on concrete.
He felt buried alive in the absolute darkness. Was she still there by the door? Had she ever really been there?
“Say something,” he said.
Nothing.
“Please,” he said.
Maybe he had imagined her, after all.
“Boo,” she said.
Mom’s Little Friends
Because he wouldn’t understand, we left Mom’s German shepherd Toby leashed to the big black roll bar in the back of Ada’s pickup truck, and because Mom’s hands were tied behind her back and because her ankles were lashed together, we had some trouble wrestling her out of the cab and onto the bridge.
My sister Ada rolled her over, a little roughly, I thought, and checked the knots. I had faith in those knots. Ada was a rancher from Arizona and knew how to tie things up. I made sure Mom’s sweater was buttoned. I jerked her green and white housedress back down over her pasty knees. I made sure her boots were tightly tied.
The breeze sweeping down the gorge made the gray curls above her forehead quiver. The wind seemed to move the steel bridge a little, too, but that may have been my imagination. Even from up here, I could smell the river and hear its gravelly whisper. Black birds circled and complained in the clear blue sky above us. The sun was a hot spotlight in the chilly thin mountain air. Toby paced back and forth in the truck bed, whining and pulling at his leash and watching us closely.
“What about the glasses, Barry?” Ada tapped a fingernail on the lenses of Mom’s fragile wire-rimmed glasses.
“Please, don’t do this, children.”
“Shut up, Jessica.” Ada spoke not to our mother but to Mom’s interface with her nanopeople. When Dr. Holly Ketchum (Mom, that is) introduced a colony of nanopeople into her own body, it was seen by many as a bold new step. It had, after all, never before been done under controlled conditions. Nano
technology held such promise—long life and good health, a kind of immortality, really.
So how did it work out? What one word would sum it all up?
Well, “whoops” might be a good choice.
The problem was that after a few generations, that is to say, after a few hours, the nanopeople became convinced that their world shouldn’t take any unnecessary chances. It made no sense to the nanopeople to let their world endanger herself. Jessica claimed that individually, nanopeople were as adventurous as anyone else. “But put yourself in our place, Barry,” she’d once said to me. “Would you let your world put sticks on her feet and go speeding down a snowy mountain at 60 miles an hour? Or swim with sharks? Be reasonable.”
Mom looked like a TV grandmother these days—plump, rosy cheeks, and translucent white skin. Her nanopeople could have fixed her vision easily enough, but they thought the glasses would make her more cautious in most situations. They could have left her appearance at its natural 48 years or even made her look younger, but they chose this cookie-cutting, slow-shuffling granny look to discourage relationships that might turn out to be dangerous. They could have left her mind alone; instead they struck her silly. A slow-moving stupid world is a world that takes no chances.
Jessica had been created to explain things to Mom. She was really a network of nanopeople working in shifts to produce the illusion that called itself Jessica. The nanopeople, invisible, sentient, self-replicating robots of nanotechnology, simply thought more quickly than big people. If Mom were struggling to access a multisyllabic word, there could be a week’s worth of shift changes among the nanopeople running the Jessica interface. In fact, a nanoperson could come into existence, grow up, get trained, find a mate, write poetry, procreate, rise to the top of a career, screw up a relationship, get cynical, and die in the time it took Mom to cook up a batch of brownies.
The real horror, I suppose, was that while individual nanopeople might come and go, as a society, they intended to keep Mom alive and stupid pretty much forever.
I plucked the glasses from her face. “I’ll save these for you, Jessica, just in case you ever need them again.” I gave her a look I hoped was menacing and let my remarks just sit there for a moment, then I sat Mom up and leaned her against the bridge railing. “There’s still time for negotiation, Jessica,” I said.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Barry.” Jessica was doing what the nanopeople thought was Mom’s voice. I wasn’t fooled. Mom never whined. Not the old Mom anyway. At least we had the nanopeople’s attention these days. At first, Jessica had not bothered to even acknowledge our existence. Then we started pushing Mom into water over her head, and Jessica decided to talk to us.
I tied the big rubber bands to Mom’s boots.
“The word is bungee, Jessica,” Ada said.
My sister was becoming one scary chick, I thought, what with her horse tattoo and western hat and the ever-present toothpick in the corner of her mouth. It was almost like she was enjoying this. Or maybe she was just a better actor. I remembered how she’d cried on the phone the night she called me home from graduate school in Oregon, how she kept saying Mom had nothing on her mind but cookies, cookies and cakes and those little flaky things with sweet red crap in the middle, and I need your help Barry, I can’t do this alone Barry. I’d gotten verbal assurance from my advisor in the physics department that I could take a leave of absence and had bussed to Tucson the very next day.
Mom made me a pie when I got home.
I took Mom under the arms, and Ada grabbed her feet. We swung her like a sack of laundry, and on the count of three, tossed her over the side of the bridge. Toby went crazy, barking and pulling at his leash, in the back of Ada’s truck.
We put our hands on the bridge rail and watched Mom fall and fall toward the river, the long bungee bands trailing behind her, and listened to her scream—well, listened to someone scream, anyway; when it was Jessica, it was a howl of frustration and terror, but when it was Mom, it was an exuberant whoop! Or maybe I was imagining things. Maybe I didn’t have the faith Ada had in this plan to get the nanopeople out of Mom.
We watched Mom bounce like a yo-yo on the end of her bungee bands, her housedress hanging down over her head. We decided to let her swing awhile. Ada unpacked our picnic lunch and we settled down on the bridge to eat.
As we munched and sipped, I heard a small voice calling, “Help, help,” but I decided to ignore it.
“So, Ada,” I said. “How come Mom’s nanopeople don’t transform her into something that can climb up the rubber bands? A giant spider, say.”
“I call the answer to that my King Kong Theory,” Ada said. “I’ll bet the nanopeople can see in Mom’s memory that picture of Kong on the Empire State Building with all the airplanes buzzing around and shooting. Or some other picture like that. The thing with these guys is safety first and always.”
Those far away cries for help were getting to me. I gave Ada a sidelong glance. I didn’t want my big sister to think I was wimping out on her. “So, shall we pull her up?” I tried to sound casual.
“I suppose.” Ada took another bite of her sandwich then tossed it into the basket.
We pulled Mom up.
“So, Jessica,” Ada said. “You want to do that again?”
“No!”
“Let’s talk then.”
Jessica let Mom’s chin fall to her chest and was quiet for a minute or so. Then she raised Mom’s head. “What do you want? How can we make you stop this?”
“Get out of Mom!” I shouted, and Ada gave me a sharp look. I had no talent for diplomacy.
“That’s pretty much what we want, Jessica,” Ada said. “We need to discuss the terms of your eviction.”
“That is an absurd notion,” Jessica said. “Each one of us lives a life every bit as important and significant as yours, Ada. You just move more slowly. You’re just bigger. None of that signifies. Have you no empathy? Holly is our world. This is the only world the People have ever known. Just where do you suppose we could go?”
“We have an idea about that.” Ada signaled me with her eyes.
I got up and walked to the truck and untied Toby’s leash. With a great leap of joy, he bounded out of the bed of the truck. Tail wagging, trying to look everywhere at once, nose to the ground, nose in the air, he dragged me back to Mom and Ada. I convinced him to sit down in front of Mom. Taking advantage of the fact that she was tied up, he licked her face. I often wondered whether the dog knew this was Mom. He seemed to like this dowdy little person, but this person was always around these days, and it seemed to me his enthusiasm for her was somehow of a lower quality than the worship he had always had for Mom. Maybe he’d just gotten used to Jessica.
“We want you to move to Toby,” Ada said.
Toby’s ears stiffened at the sound of his name, and he looked up at Ada.
Jessica was quiet for a moment. Then she made Mom’s soft grandmother mouth a hard line. “You want us to move into a dog?” She sounded incredulous.
“You got it,” Ada said.
“You want an entire civilization, billions of us, each with definite ideas and hopes and dreams, to just shuffle off to another world? You think that generations of tradition and deeply felt religion and philosophy can be tossed aside? You think we’ll move into a dog?”
“I think she’s got it,” Ada said.
“We won’t do it,” Jessica said. “And we won’t discuss it further.” She closed Mom’s mouth and squeezed Mom’s eyes tightly shut.
“Hey! Wait a minute!” I yelled.
“Never mind, Barry.” Ada grabbed Mom’s feet and gave me a sharp look.
I got the message. I took Mom under the arms, and we tossed her over the side again. Toby just sat there for a moment like he couldn’t believe his eyes, then he jumped up and put his front paws up on t
he railing and watched Mom bounce.
When we pulled her up this time and propped her against the bridge railing, I looked closely into her wild eyes, hoping, I guess, for a little momness. Not a chance. It was clear we’d finally pissed off her little friends. Big things were happening in Mom. Her face twisted into a horrible grimace, her cheeks puffed out and her eyes bulged. She suddenly spit a huge stream of green stuff at us. We jumped out of the way.
“She’s mine.” The voice was deep and male, a truly scary demon voice. “You can’t have her.”
“Ah, Jessica,” Ada said. She took off her cowgirl hat and used it to swat Mom on the side of the head. “We’ve seen those movies, too. If you’re not going to be serious, we’re going to throw you over again.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Jessica said in her usual Jessica voice. “There have been uprisings since we talked last. People have died. Listen to me, Ada. Barry. People have died. People every bit as real as you. Good people. How can you continue this?”
“But you’re destroying our mother!” I said.
“One person for the good of billions! And besides she wouldn’t be destroyed.”
“This one person is our mother,” Ada said. “And that’s where you’re in trouble. We won’t quit. Mom would rather be dead than stupid. Let’s throw her over again, Barry.”
“Wait!” Jessica said. “That’s not true. What you just said. You forget we’re inside here. We have access that you don’t have. We talk to Holly all the time. We’re not monsters. Holly is our Mother World.”
“Then why do you keep her stupid?” Ada asked.
“Not stupid.” Jessica sounded sincere, but I didn’t buy it. “Content. Holly is our mother, but she is also our child to be guided, much as you mold and guide your own world.”
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 5