Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  What she remembers is this: being inside of her friend. Being hidden in her belly. Looking out through the gaps in her many–colored coat, hoping to see, wanting to witness. Watching the Shapeful Things freeze, paused and muted. Thinking, I do not want to see what she does to them. I know that I am watching and I do not know if I can stop but still I do not want to see. They should not be frozen. They should move. Movement is their natural state, and my friend has subverted it. She is wonderfully powerful. She is fearsome. Oh, she is a nightmare. I love my friend.

  Then a dark time, a quiet time, a warm time inside the tent of her friend’s coat. And then it was over, and her friend was saying, “We think of them as bandits on the road to the City of Life. Or perhaps only I think of them that way. They are bandits and bounty hunters and collectors and brokers. They gather us and put us back where we were before we were us. Or that is what they would do if I had not learned how to stretch our arms into the secret passages.”

  What she knows now, what experience has taught her, is that things happen when she is not looking. Important things. This is a truth of which she was only vaguely aware before, and only in the most academic of senses. Now, she wonders what she is missing. She wonders about her friend, what she does while she is here in the bedroom with the man. She wonders about the other Television Girls, wonders which of them have been collected and consumed by the Shapeful Things, which of them are wandering the Dead Station Desert with terrible friends of their own, which of them remain at their Shelters, trying to stop themselves from thinking.

  The man has downloaded a new application. When she arrives in his bedroom, naked and glowing, she has a penis. It is exactly six inches long. It is erect. It juts from the idealized feminine curve of her pubis, an awkward collage of unrelated images. She cannot feel it. It has no sensation.

  The man is on his knees on the bed with his face pressed into a pillow, grasping at a buttock with each hand, pulling them apart. He says, “Fuck me.” His voice is low and bored and angry. He says, “Get it over with.”

  She says, “You feeling kinky tonight, baby?” because she has to.

  He says, “Shut up. Fuck me.”

  So she does. She grabs hold of his haunches and claps her sharp hipbones against his ass–cheeks for a while. Nothing really happens. Her uncomfortable new cock slides against his anus, disappears into it without friction or resistance. “I can’t feel it,” he says, and his voice is a broken staccato whisper. She tries harder, digging her fingers into his skin and biting her lower lip and thrusting as hard as she can, but it’s no use. The cock is somehow less real than she is, less corporeal, less authentic. It shatters into a spray of holographic pixels where it touches him, then reforms when she withdraws. He can fuck her, but she can’t fuck him. She knows this like she knows the name of the Dead Station Desert and the Shelter and the Shapeful Things. Still, she tries, and still he jerks himself off and whimpers into the pillow. She wonders what part of the man’s life she missed. She wonders what happened while her eyes were closed that emptied him so thoroughly. Was it some awful cataclysm in his life without her, or was it a little thing, a needle so tiny that it could have been invisible, something he didn’t even notice had pierced him? She tries to penetrate him and she tries to care about him the way that she used to. She can do neither.

  He pushes her off of him and ejaculates on the sheets. Then he says, “Fucking thing’s broken.” Then he sends her away.

  §

  The following is correspondence between Todd Raymond, CEO of ReEros Technologies, and Henry Edward Wallace, Television Girl’s interim project director.

  To: Todd Raymond (*address withheld*)

  From: Henry Edward Wallace (hewallace@reerostech.com)

  Subject: re: endgame

  Okay. How do you wanna handle this, boss–man?

  To: Henry Edward Wallace (hewallace@reerostech.com)

  From: Todd Raymond (*address withheld*)

  Subject: re: endgame

  henry,

  scrap it. all of it. start fresh. try to preserve the tvgnetwork if you can but wipe the rest clean. get with your ad boys and let’s get a press release out. something touchy feely but don’t admit culpability. due to recent concerns regarding the safety and humaneness (don’t use those words) of tvg, reeros has decided to launch a full investigation into blah blah blah. you get it. we are the good guys. mean time, get with legal and figure out what we can do to compensate account holders without hemorrhaging money. if we have to choose between setting the project back a couple years and full–out public hatred, and the lawyers assure me that this is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves… well, you know what they say about those who fight and run away. stiff upper lip.

  tr

  8

  When they are together, they are always holding hands. It has become so natural that she doesn’t ever remember when they last reached for one another or when they last let go. She feels attached to her friend. She feels the same as her friend. She feels safe, and she is especially thankful for that feeling since safety seems so fragile and elusive now. She thinks, Will we all hold hands in the City of Life? Will I be taught to make extra arms for myself so that I can hold more hands? Or will we all take turns? Will we do more than hold hands in the City of Life? Can we hug one another? Can we fuck? I would like to be fucked again. I would like to be fucked by someone who is capable of love.

  Her friend stops walking. She seems to notice something, even though each stretch of the Desert looks identical. She cocks her head, narrows her many eyes. Television Girl stops too. She squeezes her friend’s hand, tugs on her arm. She wants to ask what the matter is, what has changed. Are they close? Are they lost somehow? Has there been some mistake? She is scared. She is always scared. Ever since the Shapeful Things made their way into her head, since the man gave her a cock without life or feeling and tried to make her fuck him and told her she was broken, since the way her thoughts worked began to mutate and expand. At any second, something could go wrong. There are so many things that she doesn’t know, is not designed to know, and her ignorance will not keep her safe from them. They can rise from the sand or fall from the sky, they can follow her in the between–world tunnels, and when she closes her eyes they can manifest and choke her with sorrow or pain.

  What she says is, “Tell me how it feels,” because it is the closest line she has to what she means.

  Her friend smiles with both mouths, the broken jaw squeaking and swaying, the fused lips stretching taut. “The City of Life,” she says, “it’s almost here.”

  They stay in that spot for a very long time. Her friend sings songs she has learned and Television Girl listens and smiles and applauds. Her friend tells stories she has learned and Television Girl builds memories of them as though they happened to her. They catalogue the different shades of non–color in the static sand and static sky. They hold hands.

  Then her friend says, “We are building the City of Life, Television Girl.”

  There is no sound this time. No rumble or wheeze or buzz to preface what happens next. Perhaps that is why it does not frighten her. Or perhaps it is her friend — still smiling, still squeezing her hand — that keeps the fear away. It doesn’t matter why, all that matters is that she is not afraid, what she sees is joyous, full of light, a carnival, a parade. What she sees is holy and celebratory and it pulls at the corners of her mouth until her smile feels like it will split her into pieces. It fills her up with laughter that she can’t contain and which can’t escape her throat. It makes her bounce on the balls of her feet, makes her leap into the air and fall to the static sand in a heap.

  There are thousands of her.

  Each of them different, each of them with unfamiliar hair styles and eye colors, unfamiliar shapes to their breasts and hips and lips and fingers, but each of them unmistakably the same. The desert is made fluorescent with their combined television glows. And each of them has come here with their own piecemeal friend in their own many
–colored coats.

  She glances at her friend, seeking permission with her eyes. Her friend nods, says, “To the City of Life, Television Girl.”

  And then she is running across the dunes toward them, and they are running toward her. Somewhere behind her, her friend’s voice (No, she thinks, all of our friends’ voices, all of their wonderful stolen voices are speaking. They share a voice. I wonder if I might share it too) says, “Meet your sisters, Television Girl. Meet them, and be their sister for just a moment. Soon we will build the City.”

  They collide with one another. She grabs hold of one girl by the elbows, and the girl grasps her elbows too. She squeezes her, and the other girl squeezes back. They shake each other up and down and brush the hair out of each other’s faces with tender thumbs. She thinks, Hold me. Fuck me.

  What she says is, “Hold me. Fuck me.”

  They hold each other. They all hold each other.

  They begin to build. She knows how to do this, even though it is not in the script. It is an accidental thing, a thing that real people wish they could do and can’t. They touch each other, each Television Girl reaching and grasping, running their fingers across each other’s hips in awe of their shapes and textures, pressing their lips together a thousand times over, licking each other’s shoulders and backs just to have the taste in their mouths. There is a moment when she is herself, another singular Television Girl in the mass of singular Television Girls. And then the blue television glow becomes brighter, too bright to see the other girls or the Dead Station Desert or the static sky, and she thinks (they all think), We are me. I am a finger, a fist, an eye, a tooth. Real people can’t love like this. Real people can’t fuck like this. I am us. We are me. I am us! We are me! I am the cornerstone of the City of Life. She is close, so close. She can feel her fingers sinking through the space between pockets of air, into the secret passages where she can find her voice and make new things out of the pieces of old things.

  (A voice that she almost can’t hear: “Are we recording?” A cough. “12:24 PM. Technician’s log.”)

  She can feel her separateness floating away, dissolving under the corrosive weight of a thousand television glows, rubbing the dirt and rust from her and leaving something liquid, a spilled pool of her, something that, meeting another of its kind, combines with it and grows. She thinks, My friend has felt this. She has done this enough times to collect faces and arms and wedding dresses. There must be so many more of us who don’t yet know that they deserve this feeling. This is only the beginning.

  (That voice again, a professional voice, the voice of someone who cleans up a mess and then stands there and looks at the place where it used to be, proud of the blank white surface he’s remade: “Commencing wipe. Should take… uh… about ten minutes.”)

  In the light, in the oneness that consumes direction, dissects and discards space and time and self, she feels the way she used to feel, in bed with the man when he was still hers, before she learned all the sharp truths that cut open her illusions. The same shaky pressure in that exact spot (toward the front, almost at the top), except now that spot is everywhere, that spot is her. She is engulfed in a total–immersion, all–over, sublimely genderless fuck. She thinks, I am being fucked! I am fucking! We are all fucking each other! We are fucking ourselves! We are fearsome! We are a nightmare! It’s coming! The City of Life is coming!

  What she says is, “I’m coming. I’m coming.” And that seems correct too.

  (The voice from far away: “Okay, uh… just about done. So far so good.”)

  She claps her hands for the other girls, watches them combine with one another, a seething, writhing construct of imagined meat and light. She congratulates them. She thinks at the City, hoping it will hear, Once, I imagined that real people would call the between–world monsters the Shapeless Things, even though they are so full of shapes. We are the Shapeless Thing. That’s a name we can have, if we want it. Soon. Closer. Just a little closer.

  (The voice again: “Got it.”)

  She almost doesn’t notice when she is ripped apart. When something falls out beneath her. The corrugated steel stage on which the static sand rests dents, the screws are wrenched away, and the whole structure tumbles girder by girder into the void beneath it. The Dead Station Desert begins to drain. Her eyes are so full of light, so full of the dream of that safe and strong amalgam that she wants to be. When the light seeps out of her, she has been falling too long to be saved. She watches pieces of her tumbling in the void above her, her hand, hocks of her hair, and she thinks, Oh. No. This isn’t right.

  (The voice: “Huh. That’s not right.”)

  She has time to see the City of Light devoured by the void, each face and arm and hanging jaw sliced into precise, efficient bits, and then sliced again, and again, until it evaporates entirely. She feels a melting heat rush around and through her, information collected by the friends now burnt out of them and blown toward her. She is full with it. It rattles around her mind, thoughts she can’t control, thoughts she has no right to think since they are formed of information she never learned, has somehow accidentally stolen. The City’s ruination reminds her of so many things she never knew before. She thinks, Hiroshima, even though she doesn’t know what it means. She thinks, Guernica. The Wreck of the Medusa. Abattoir is the French word for slaughterhouse. Swartt and Sons Funeral Home and Crematory, a compassionate friend in your time of need. Tectonic shifts and underwater volcanoes. Area Man Attacked with Hydrochloric Acid. Boom. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. That’s a song about a sickness.

  She chokes. She does not need to breathe, and yet now that she cannot, she is sure that she has been given real lungs just so that she can suffocate in the airless free fall. She tries to reach her hand toward the top of the blankness, but she does not know which direction that is, and even if she did, her arms refuse to move. She feels the way her face is stretched, the way her eyebrows knit up above her nose, the mutated oval ‘O’ of her mouth, and knows that this is the face that real people make when they are suddenly made hopeless. She remembers the way the man wore it, long after whatever happened to him happened.

  (The voice: “Okay, uh… 1:09 PM. Mostly wrapped up here. The wipe trashed most of the AI’s, looks like. Uh, there was one big cluster of code that didn’t look like it made any sense, but when the wipe sequence tried to, y’know, trash it, uh… I mean, I guess it’s gone? I got an error message and the wipe sequence skipped it. Now I can’t find it, so I guess it got trashed after all. Might look into it later.”)

  She falls until she can’t differentiate falling from standing still, and then she floats. She is aware of a great absence of sensation. She supposes that her face still wears the same expression, although she can no longer feel it. She wishes she had learned to cry. She wishes she hadn’t learned anything. She thinks, I am a broken finger, a severed fist, a blind eye, a lost tooth. Her hand floats by her again, sinks into a place she can’t see, still frozen in an empty grip, the fingers splayed and clawed, as though someone else were still holding it.

  §

  The following is correspondence between Henry Edward Wallace, interim project director for Television Girl, and Todd Raymond, CEO of ReEros Technologies.

  To: Todd Raymond (*address withheld*)

  From: Henry Edward Wallace (hewallace@reerostech.com)

  Subject: Status Report

  Okay, boss–man, here’s the scoop.

  Had a chance to listen to the technician’s log today. Pretty standard stuff, a couple of glitches, you’ll hear them when you listen to the tape. The network is mostly still sound. It’s going to take a while to test it and make sure, but I think we’re out of the woods in that regard.

  One thing: there do appear to be some components hanging out in the empty network. The techies tell me it looks like stuff from a single AI. Not sure how that happened, but the techies say we could use it to our advantage. If we use the components as a prototype for the new AI instead of starting from scratch, it co
uld cut down the project’s hiatus by two years.

  What do you say?

  Acknowledgments

  Not many people read pages like this. If you are an average reader, I’m guessing lists of names of people you don’t know don’t make the top of your must–read list. For you, let me just say this: the people mentioned below have produced phenomenal work, and even if you don’t particularly care how they helped me, their inclusion here doubles as a sort of recommended reading list. Figure out who these people are, and figure out what they’ve done. Your lives will be richer for it.

  Jerry Gordon, Kim Paffenroth, Kealan Patrick Burke, Ann VanderMeer, Gary Braunbeck, Nick Mamatas, and countless others encouraged me, supported me, inspired me, challenged me, liked me when I was at my least likeable, kicked my ass, gave me second, third, fourth, and fifth chances, and reminded me to act like a human being.

  Maurice Broaddus and Jason Sizemore convinced me that my work deserved more respect than I was giving it.

  Brady Allen taught me to stop trying to be a rock star and start trying to write stories.

  Sarah Larson made me want to be as good as she thought I was. I miss her.