by Brian Hodge
"I'll tell you what, Mr. Bryce. I can't ask Paavo to do it, but if you want to manage the work yourself, you may put a phone in your father's room. The phone jacks are quite old, so you'll have to fuss with whatever they do to make them fit the new phones."
"I can put in new jacks."
"Good. Then you'll be able to check on your father whenever you're worried."
He nodded. "That would help," he said. "I'll pay part of your phone bill."
She waved it off. "If it gets to be an expense, I'll let you know."
He went looking for a hardware store and found a Menards twelve miles away sharing a dying strip mall with Lilliputian boutiques and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Back with a crimp tool, hardware and a new phone, he kneeled at the baseboard of his father's room.
"You don't have to do this, son," the old man said, and Denny knew he was pleased. Even though his father would probably never use it, maybe not even pick it up if it rang. He was registering the attention, the fuss over him by the flesh of his flesh.
And Denny in turn prolonged the dependency of father on son. "It's a button phone, Dad. Big oversize buttons, and they light up as soon as you lift the receiver. Just push the numbers you want. Okay? It's easier than a rotary dial. And I'm writing my phone number right here at the base in big numbers. See?"
He could have set the speed dial so his father only had to push one button, but he couldn't count on him remembering that or even following instructions if they were written down. So he was betting on habit. His father would understand that it was a phone number written at the base, and might even recognize whose it was or at least figure that it had to be his son's. It was better than nothing, because this was his dad, and yeah, it mattered whether he was shaved or had the right shirt on. Because if he stopped preparing for life each day, then he was that much closer to becoming part of the rapacious mystery that had devoured all but the final two of the Bryce dynasty, and Denny wasn't ready to let him go, or to go it alone to extinction. Not by a long shot. So he shaved him and clipped his nails, which were so brittle that they puffed powder into the air, and helped him into a nice cream-colored pastel long-sleeve of light cotton that Beth Bryce had bought at Target. "Didn't cut you, did I, old man?" he said, even though he had nicked a tiny wen in the crease around his mouth. And then he let the old man lie down, all spruced up with nowhere to go, and kissed him on the forehead and said good-bye.
He hadn't forgotten the crows though. So he spent the next half hour cleaning out the dryer drum with a pair of gloves on and putting the rank, feathered travesties with their blue-lidded eyes into a plastic garbage bag. The two dark passages on the far end of the laundry room yawned like railroad tunnels, and he had the feeling that something kinetic was building there, as if a huge engine was gathering power in the blackness. A long, mournful whistle from the right-of-way across the road cued into his thoughts, and he wondered just what way station this farmhouse was in the destiny of its earthly inhabitants.
Chapter 23
Amber sat in the middle of her bed, rocking. The huge oak corner posts were rooted to the floor, but the sideboards creaked: her nocturnal lullaby, sung to herself whenever she felt insecure. Her thoughts were flying and her heart was pounding from bad dreams, but gradually both slowed to match the rhythm and the sound she was making. As anxiety subsided, she stopped rocking, slumped, slept. Three times during the night she sat up and resumed her catharsis, and three times it worked its magic and she went back to sleep. The midmorning sun found her kneeling in the middle of the mattress, bowed over the pillow in her lap.
Why hadn't anyone called her?
She should have known then that something was wrong. Sometimes if her mother thought she had been restless, she let her sleep. Though even then she would hear the house murmuring drowsily and the smell of bacon and toast might drift under her door. Other doors would click shut, and Ruta's shrill complaints would start. Someone might laugh, toilets would flush, faucets would run, or the Philco radio in the parlor would drone with news. But today, with the sun through the slats already striping the far wall, there was dead silence.
And no Aarfie.
The only time that the house stayed quiet like this was when her mother wanted to surprise her, like on Christmas or her birthday. So now she tasted a vague excitement, because the only thing she could think of was that her mother had painted Aarfie back. That's why everyone was being so quiet. Not because they were scared and hunkered down in their rooms, like she had thought at first, but because they were all waiting for her to be surprised when she saw Aarfie again.
Only, why didn't he bark?
So then she thought it probably wasn't Aarfie, and her spirits fell a little. Still, you couldn't be sure he wasn't coming back. The painting had to dry. So she stayed kneeling in the middle of the mattress, not wanting to end hope. But the house was so quiet.
Exhaustion, in fact, had stolen a scene from Amber just after dawn when the household had begun to stir. The earliest murmurs—Paavo's, Helen's, and Beverly's self-conscious voices—hadn't penetrated her sleep. The three of them had been sitting in the parlor, not wanting to awaken anyone else, when suddenly a fourth person had appeared and demanded: "Who are you?"
"Who are we?" Helen had said. "Are you walking in your sleep?"
And then there had been a long pause. And then Beverly, trembling and with awe, had said: "It's not her. It's not her."
And that left the hush Amber awakened to later—the hush of retreat and stifled whispers and abject fear. For two hours no one had stirred except that fourth person, who wandered the house and yard that were so changed from the mid 60s when she had last seen them. It was her tread that awakened the sleeper, as she came down the familiar hall to the familiar room and without knocking opened the bedroom door.
You couldn't tell which one of them screamed first. Twin screams. Twin faces. Twin Ambers.
Amber One stood on the mattress; Amber Two took a step backward but clung to the door handle as if welded there by an electric current. In the far reaches of the house everyone else knew what they were discovering. Welcome to your new pet, Amber One. Ditto, Amber Two. Much better than a toy collie, eh? Your own Barbie doll come to life. But there are going to be some problems. Who gets to wear what, sleep where? And who gets Ken? You get the picture, don't you, girls? You are sisters, but you've still only got one life—
Ariel could have told them of each other's existence, of course. Told one or both of them. But it was an experiment, after all, and the politics of the thing were yet to be determined. A little leverage for the creator, let's say. No telling exactly how it was going to go. Let them sort it out, discover enmity, fear. Because they didn't know yet if they could coexist. And Ariel was betting they could not.
She had gotten the idea with Marjorie's doppelganger. A copy of a copy. Not like painting a natural-born person, who, if they were still naturally alive, would then cease to exist. No, she could make them proliferate like rabbits, all alive at the same time. What fun! Of course, there was a certain moral inertia that had to be dealt with. The mere sanctity of life for one; divine providence for another. But why should she be bound by purely mortal concepts? Creation was the very antithesis of rules. She would not be bound by the tiny voice of a fleeting moment of time out of eternity. That first morning after her intended suicide, lying on the Chesterfield, hearing Amber's little-girl voice call out "Mother?" after so many decades—that was one such tiny voice. You couldn't get too sentimental about life when your power effectively meant the end of death. No one could understand this who had not performed the magic by their own hand. Holy or hell-spawned magic, it didn't matter. The power was the same.
"We must all invent God for ourselves."
—Ariel Leppa, New Eden, 2001
Not that she believed a scintilla less than what she had always believed about God. But she had finally separated it from man's inhumanity to man. Need a war? God will provide. Need genocide? God will provide. Hate, into
lerance, dominance, insecurity, greed, fear, ego—all sanctified through the next prophet. Or the last, if you were too lazy to start your own reformation. God on the dashboard. God in plastic icons. God made real by accumulated dust. (We are proud of our humility, and absolutely obstinate about our open-mindedness.)
The only way you could really know anything about God was to be ostracized from the marketplace of divinity. Blessed are the alienated. Blessed are those upon whom derision and cruelty are heaped by their so-called friends for the first seven decades of their lives. That was how you came to know God. And if you happened upon the dust of creation, well, my, my, but it could be fun! So Ariel was over the sentimentality. One Amber. Ten Ambers. Count them on Sesame Street. No matter. A commodity now. All the same. So let the two Ambers downstairs sort it out for a while. No chance they would get along with each other. And the dynamics of not getting along would be instructive to Ariel.
But she was dead wrong about that. Two little girls, each inhabiting the other's life, not quite united, not quite independent, were like hostages to each other. Hostages and captors. So don't forget the old Stockholm syndrome. Make your captor into your friend. And that is why, as soon as the dual screams were uttered, the two Ambers immediately registered the fact that the other one was afraid.
It was reassuring, if only marginally. It meant that some robotic assault by a mindless impostor of themselves was not under way. Each was tensed for whatever came next, but when nothing came, the edge of alarm dulled. The insatiable stares softened. Anxiety ebbed.
An imagined dialogue went through each of their minds, questions that seemed to be answered before they were asked. Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing here? The answers would obviously be the same for both of them. So when the first words were actually spoken, the question was not about themselves. It was about the person who had created them.
"Why did she do this?" Amber One murmured breathlessly, sinking back to her knees on the bed.
Amber Two let go of the doorknob and for the first time dared glance around the room. It was no longer yesterday's room, but a new one. Different paint, different pictures on the wall, everything out of place except the bed and the dresser. Her glance darted back. "How long have you been here?"
"A year."
"A year? Then it must be true. She said I was gone for a long time."
"Did she tell you about before? About the climbing accident and being crippled and all?"
"She said I died. She said I was forty-four when I died. It was scary. I thought she was crazy or kidding me, but she looked so old, and … and everything really is different." She edged into the room, puzzling at the CDs piled on the floor. "But I can't believe this."
"Believe it. It threw me for a long time too, because you feel the same way you always did. You keep thinking it's going to go back the way it was. But you can't go to school or anywhere now. Mom's afraid of what will happen if people come here, so you can't make friends. I've only been shopping twice, and both times she drove me straight there and straight back and wouldn't let me talk to anyone when we went in the stores."
"Freaky."
"Freaky is uncool."
Amber Two looked stricken. And the look only deepened over the next half hour as too much of thirty-six missing years replaced too much of yesterday too fast. The cassette player was a boom box, John Lennon was dead, beads and bell-bottoms were ancient history, tattoos and body piercing were in, shoes looked funny, hats were plain, cars looked like trucks, cells were phones, songs were videos, and TV shows had funny names like Malcolm in the Middle—all this coming from her mirror image in a blur of words and magazine pages.
Amber One was getting frustrated too, because how could you explain karaoke and a dubber to someone who only knew vinyl records? But she couldn't restrain herself, and she scrambled on and off the mattress, retrieving Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books and makeup with glitter until she saw her twin's face flag hot with tears, and then she stopped.
"You can't go back, you know," she said.
"Yeah." Big sniff, pressing the back of her hand to her nose.
"Just about everyone here was dead, and now at least they're alive. We're alive. So we must be better off."
"Yeah."
"Except …"
"What?"
"Nothing. You didn't see a painting of me up in the studio, did you—I mean, like a second one of you?"
"Uh-uh." She shook her head. "Just the one. And a bunch of Mom's friends. I guess I met some of them down here. Weird."
"They're old, but they're not that bad. Except for Ruta—she needs to take a chill pill. Sometimes they're grouchy, but they give you stuff."
"What's a chill pill?"
"I mean she's all hyper and all."
"Oh." She touched the dresser. "Are there any other kids here?"
"No. Just us."
A speculative look passed between them, the thinnest bridge, swaying with uncertainty.
"I guess … in a way … we're sisters," said the Amber on the bed.
“Yeah.”
"Maybe that's why she made you."'
"I don't know. It's hard to know what she thinks. She's so old now, so different. It's spooky to see her like that."
"Did she tell you what she can do with the pictures?"
"What d'you mean?"
"She can paint them out. She can make us disappear. She can make anyone disappear. In fact, she already has."
Renewed fear flashed green in her counterpart's eyes.
"She's done it to people in the house. And Dad is in a wheelchair—did she tell you that?"
“No.”
"And Aarfie's dead."
"She said he ran out in front of a pickup truck."
"That was a long time ago. She brought him back, and then he was killed again."
"How?"
"By … by something else that got painted."
The newly incarnated version of herself looked sicker and sicker as these revelations unfolded, but Amber One continued on. She had a full year of her own disorientation to unload, a year of loneliness, a year of gossip, a year of pent-up freakish isolation from any kind of peer. And that single year had thirty-six more years of lost time in it. Zipped up like a compressed computer file ("Oh yeah—I haven't told you about computers. We don't have one, but everything is computers now.") And almost in the same breath she was telling her about the red spider in the bathtub and the thing that killed Paavo the first time. Amber in Horrorland. Incomprehensible stuff. And it wasn't just family history. By definition the dawn of the twenty-first century carried its own estrangement. So to the newly arrived child the fantastic aberrations brought about by their mother were hardly distinguishable from the realities of cargo pants and spiked hair, and naked people right on television, and herky-jerky music shared through ear buds by the two Ambers—"That's Britney Spears, only you gotta see the video." And the re-education went on until the ancient munchkins beyond the bedroom walls crept out of their rooms again and the household began to rustle and sigh with movement, with cautious conversations, with water running and the smell of tomato soup and tuna fish from the kitchen. The two girls ended up side by side, looking at their twin reflections in the dresser mirror: Amber One with slightly darker skin from the summer's sun and faint scratches on her cheek; Amber Two with slightly darker hair for lack of a summer's sun.
"So if we're sisters, then it's share and share alike, okay?" said Amber One. "It'll be spifferific, you'll see. You'll get used to everything, and I'll help you. Okay?"
"Okay."
And they played and shared for six days, and God looked down from Her studio at Her handiwork and saw that it was good…. And She was furious! So on the seventh day She called Amber One up to her studio and said, "You've certainly taken to your little soul mate, haven't you? I'll bet you've shared all your secrets by now. But it's so confusing. I thought I'd be able to tell you apart, and here you are, so alike that you might as well be the
same person—which, come to think of it, you are." And then She rummaged through the stack of canvases leaning against the wall and pulled up two, and Amber began to tremble because they looked exactly alike. "Just like these paintings of you, my dear. Can you tell which is which? I can. I suppose I'll have to paint one of you out, if it gets too confusing. But which one? What a dilemma. Let's see, what kind of test could I use? I know. The paint. Whichever one of you brings back my paint, that's the one who stays."
Chapter 24
Martin Bryce saw flames before he woke up. Saw flames and smelled smoke and heard Tiffany screaming for him. So when he opened his eyes, he was already agitated, already trying to swing his shoulder across his body to sit up.
He blinked at the room, yellow in the glow from the night-light. Beth was dead, and this was the place where his son had brought him. There were old people here, mostly women. He knew these things, but that didn't quiet the other impression. The fire. Tiffany. He could no longer trust the evidence of his senses.
On his second try he rolled to a sitting position and sat breathing hard, waiting for the dizziness to subside. He coughed once, and when his heart had been given ample notice of what was to come, he felt around with his bare feet for his slippers and stood up. A smaller wave of dizziness was accommodated by another rise in blood pressure, and then his heart was thudding strongly and steadily. He reached out for his robe on the chair, fell a few inches short, took a step, reached again. His arms felt like plumb bobs, but the act of swathing himself invigorated the muscles somewhat. Fitting on his glasses with both hands, he wandered into the corridor.
Without pondering why, he took the small fire extinguisher off the wall and lugged it with him through the house to the parlor. There he turned around twice in the gloom before locating the shadowy front door. When he stood in the front yard a few feet from the porch, he looked around again and took stock. He didn't specifically remember his previous midnight forays, but he felt a familiar imperative. This was right: coming outside … the path around the side of the farmhouse … the big pile of rubble that smelled of smoke out back. The barn fire had affected him profoundly. Like a long-awaited beacon on a dark journey, it linked where he had been with where he must go. Shuffling through the dust in his slippers, he passed around the side of the house.