by Joe Hill
When my portal opens, a faceless creature is standing there. It’s tall and roughly shaped, like a dust storm or a swarm of gnats. There are dimples where its eyes should be, but I feel like it’s watching me anyway. It takes my credit card, holds it for a moment, and then hands it back.
Olive, backers—please keep in mind that I’m still paying off my student loans.
Oh, I also got a comment on this page from Olive. Three comments. I guess she does have reception. Olive, I’m coming anyway, kid. You can’t stop me. I may not be the best older sister in the world, but I can do this.
Update #4 • Jun 27, 2015
This Is the Land of the Dead
This is what they don’t tell you about the land of the dead: it looks and smells like some approximation of your entire life, but in muted colors and shifting scents—sunscreen, then smoke, then raspberry shaving cream. When I step through the portal I see layers of images shimmering in front of me: the street where I grew up, my current bedroom, my ex-fiancé’s house, my college dorm, all in grays and creams and beiges. They undulate back and forth, as if the land of the dead is trying to decide which is the most comforting, and settles on our childhood street. It smells like cedar and blood.
Partying here seems like an impossibility. This is the sort of place where I’d cry or scream or eat water ice or have an existential crisis or drown myself in a memory. I would cut my hair here, all of it, in ragged chunks off my skull. But this does not look like a place with cocktails. There is no club music, only the sound of birds.
Update #5 • Jun 27, 2015
Olive Located
It takes me a while to find Olive. The road stretches and meanders and doesn’t lead me exactly where I want to go, like in a dream. I twist through fragments of memory. I see the Girl Scout campground where I bit off a chunk of my tongue tripping into the cold fire pit. I see an empty kitchen, a pot of soup boiling over on the stove. I see the dorm where I lost my virginity, the white cinder block bare of decorations, the whole room ringing hollowly, like a bell.
Then I come upon a two-story house. My childhood home. Well, ours. She is in the living room; I can see her red hair through the window. I open the front door. She is on the couch, the green couch where we both stayed when we had the chicken pox, where we had scratched each other’s raw, blistered backs in our sleep.
When she looks up and sees me, she begins screaming.
I haven’t held my sister in so long, not since we were children. She is like something starving, an animal with too many bones, and she pushes against me. She has been crying for so long, her voice falls away. She punches me with her fists, but it is like a bee bumping up against a windowpane.
Update #6 • Jun 27, 2015
Heading Home
She tells me she is going to stay. I say to her, “You cannot stay.” She says, “We can bring Mom and Dad back with us, it’ll be different,” and I say no, it doesn’t work that way. I only have enough spell ingredients for two people, and besides, only visitors can leave, not the committed. The land of the dead is the worst kind of hospital. “How did you get here?” she asks. “Magic,” I say, and it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, even if I’m not. She says “I hate you,” and I say “Sure.”
I pick her up from the couch and carry her across the threshold of the house. I drop her to her feet and then pull her through the streets. I remind her that we are all each other has. She pulls against my grip around her wrist, a balloon angling for freedom. “Let me go,” she shouts, “please.” “No,” I say. We flit back past my memories, and the images waver like someone has just bumped into a projector. We come back to the portal, beyond which is the playground, glowing faintly in the watery dawn.
But when I reach out to touch it, someone materializes in front of us. A woman with sad eyes and a floppy sunhat, like she is a hipster, or going to the beach in 1948. She points to me.
“You can go,” she says. Then she looks at Olive. “You,” she says, “need to stay. You know that.”
Comments
Olive R about 2 days ago
Don’t come for me.
Susan Jameson about 2 days ago
Ursula, I am so sorry!!!! Let me know if I can do anything else. Your parents were great people I cannot believe this has happened. You’re a great sister, Olive is so lucky.
David Mantis about 2 days ago
Donat’d! Good luck, Ursula.
Olive R about 1 day ago
Don’t come.
Lucille L about 6 hours ago
Ursula, have the cops managed to get ahold of you? They found something new. Ursula, please call me ASAP.
Olive R about 6 hours ago
Don’t.
Lucille L about 4 hours ago
Ursula, check your DMs. I need to talk to you, it’s very important.
Olive R about 1 hour ago
Do you remember when we were little girls, and you took me to that abandoned convenience store parking lot where Dad taught us to ride our bikes? The thunderstorm? You were so scared, even more scared than me, I think, and you said “We have to go inside” and broke the glass door with a rock. And we were inside, and the shelves were empty and dirty, and we just sat and watched the lightning bleach the sky and the rain go horizontal. I think that was the last time we really connected. You squeezed me so hard it left black-and-blue marks, but I felt so safe. What were we so afraid of, after that? We just stopped talking. I don’t know why. You’re a tightass and neurotic as hell but I love you anyway.
I came over to Mom and Dad’s early, to catch you. I was going to ask you if you wanted to go partying with me in the land of the dead. Just so we could hang out. I know you’re not much of a partier, but I don’t know. Sometimes people unexpectedly love dancing. You seem like the kind of person who would unexpectedly love dancing. Or karaoke.
They’re going to ask you what happened. Just tell them I came over too early. For once in my life, I was even better than on time.
Messages
Lucille L
Jun 27, 2015
Jesus, Ursula, stop traveling, shut down this page, come home. Fuck. Ursula, just look.
www.cnn.com/2015/6/26/us/daughters-body-found-near-murder-suicide.
Lucille L
Jun 27, 2015
I’m so sorry. She was in the woods behind the house. They weren’t looking for her, at first, that’s why they didn’t find her.
Lucille L
Jun 27, 2015
Ursula, are you there?
Lucille L
Jun 28, 2015
Ursula?
CAT RAMBO
Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable
FROM Clarkesworld Magazine
ANTONY BOUGHT THE kit at Fry’s in the gray three months after Mindy’s death. He swam in and out of fog those days, but he still went frequently to the electronics store and drifted through its aisles, examining hard drives, routers, televisions, microphones, video games, garden lights, refrigerators, ice cream makers, rice cookers, all with the same degree of interest. Which was to say little to none, barely a twitch on the meter. A jump of the arrow from E up to one.
A way to kill time. So were the evenings, watching reality shows and working his way methodically through a few joints. If pot hadn’t been legal in Seattle, it would’ve been booze, he knew, but instead the long, hard, lonely evening hours were a haze of blue smoke until he finally found himself nodding off and hauled himself into bed for a few hours of precious oblivion.
He prized those periods of nothingness.
Each day began with that horrible moment when he put a hand out to touch Mindy’s shoulder—Hey, honey, I had this awful dream you died, in a boating accident, no less, when was the last time we were on a boat. Then the stomach-dropping realization, sudden as stepping out into an elevator shaft.
Not.
A.
Dream.
His mother called him every day at first, but he couldn’t manage the responses. Let alone the conv
ersational give-and-take.
That saddened him. Made him feel guilty, too. He was the only child his mother still had nearby. Both of his sisters had stayed on the other coast and were distant now as then. Still angry at his mother for unimaginable transgressions during their high school years. They both had been excellent at holding a grudge all their lives. He was the only child who’d been willing to take some responsibility for her, had helped her move out to this coast in fact.
He loved her. Bought her presents. That was how the cat, a small tortoiseshell kitten, had entered her life, riding in his coat pocket, a clot of black and orange fur, tiny triangular face split between the colors.
His mother had named it, as with all her animals, palindromically. Taco Cat, like God Dog and Dribybird the parakeet.
She loved that cat about as much as she’d ever loved anything. His mother had always been stolid and self-contained, but he knew she missed the cat even now, a year after its death.
She deserved something to fill her days. He wondered if they’d been as gray as his were nowadays, ever since his father died. He thought—hoped, perhaps—that wasn’t true.
Maybe you did get over it with time.
He read somewhere that older people did better, were happier, if they had something they could care for. Taco had been that and now that prop was gone.
He’d replace it.
The kit was one of those late-night things. Infomercial fodder. Clone a beloved pet. Take the sample and send it into their labs. Have a perfect replica delivered within three months. A box five hundred times larger than it needed to be, holding only the test tube in which you would put the fragments of hair or claw material that were required.
He teased clumps from the wire brush he’d taken from his mother’s, poked it with a forefinger into the test tube’s depths. Stoppered it with a blunt plastic round.
Used his shunt to scan in the bar code on its side and beam it to the mailing center. A drone pecked at his apartment window, three floors up. Colored UPS brown. He could see other brightly colored shipping drones, colored red and green for the holidays, zipping around closer to the street. He authenticated it, staring into its inquisitive eye, and received the confirmation number displayed to one side, hovering in the air before it disappeared.
He was part of the last generation to know what life was like without a shunt. He got one in college, finally, had sold all the gold coins his aunt Mick, who died in the seventh Gulf War, had left him, and he never regretted that.
Life was so much more reliable with the shunt. It made sure you didn’t overeat by making you feel satiated after just a few mouthfuls or let you sleep as long and deep as you liked, and even take part in preprogrammed dreams. You could use it to upload knowledge packs, particularly if you had augmented memory. It let you remember everyone’s face and every date and time you ever needed to. It was like minor superpowers.
How awesome to live inside the future. Or it should have been.
He’d never thought much about his existence before Mindy. Then all of a sudden he wanted a life, a life together full of jokes only they shared. Him cooking her ginger pancakes and spending Sunday mornings lazing in shunt-enhanced sex, pleasurable and languorous and amazing.
He was leaving after a dinner of enchiladas unsatisfyingly sauced, their edges crisp and brown, stabbing the mouth. His mother hadn’t mentioned Mindy outright, but she patted him on the upper arm as he paused to slip on his jacket. The gesture was unusual, outside her usual air-kiss intimacies.
He said, “Do you have Taco’s old brush?”
“In the cupboard.”
It shook him to see all the cat’s things, gathered in careful memorial. He didn’t associate sentimentality with his mother. Loss did that to you, perhaps. Though she’d endured his father’s loss without such a display. At least he thought so. He tried to think back to his father’s death. How long had it taken her to send all those shirts and ties and suits to St. Vincent de Paul’s thrift shop? Not long. He remembered railing at her angrily about it. He’d planned on wearing all those clothes, two sizes too big for his sixteen-year-old frame, someday.
“It doesn’t pay to get attached,” she’d said. Her dry eyes infuriated him even further. She’d hugged her arms to herself and returned his angry stare.
He still had things to make up to her for. This would help even the scales so tipped by all his adolescent anger and outbreaks.
BCSS sent him an envelope. The language of the thick packet was dense: an opportunity extended him to participate in a test program.
Clone a human.
Give him Mindy back.
He said, “I don’t understand how it’s possible. I know you can replicate her body, but her mind?”
Dr. Avosh’s eyes were clearly artificial, flat circles of emerald green. What did it say about her, that she didn’t even bother to try to hide her augmentations?
She said, “We create a matrix of artificial memories. Easy nowadays.”
“But where do those memories come from?”
“We have more material than you would think. Social media, public records, and some information garnered from the shunt itself.”
That startled him. “Shunts don’t record things.” There had been plenty of legal battles over that.
“No,” Dr. Avosh said. “That’s a misconception most people share. While the original versions only recorded what you wanted them to, and had limited memory space, the current versions record a great deal. It’s simply inadmissible in court.” One of her pupils was markedly larger than the other. As he looked at it, it ratcheted even further wide.
“Are you recording this right now?” he asked.
“It’s my policy to record everything.”
“In case you ever need to be replicated.”
She shook her head, then hesitated. “Not really. There are so many reasons to do so.”
“Are they real memories?”
“Are you asking if they are detailed memories? No. More like a memory of a memory, and obviously there will be gaps. It won’t be quite the same for you, but for her it will be much smoother. She’ll believe herself to be the actual Mindy. We recommend you not talk to her about the actual circumstances until at least six months have passed.”
Mindy. The smell of her hair when he buried his nose in it, inhaling the scent as delicious as cinnamon or roses, a musky edge that always tugged at the edges of his erotic consciousness.
There was no way he could say no.
“You said this was a new process. How many times has it been done?”
“This is the third trial batch of subjects. The first time we’re using people in your situation.”
“My situation?”
Papers on her desk whispered against each other as she fiddled with them. “Recently bereaved. We’re curious to see how much the spouse’s memory can augment the process and reinforce beliefs.”
She paused. “And I must tell you that the company doesn’t cover the entire cost.”
He’d met Mindy on the R train, heading from his Bay Ridge apartment up into Manhattan to work for the BWSS. He’d handled their computer systems, going in late at night to work through the morning hours maintaining the message boards the BWSS scientists used.
You saw the same people on the train sometimes. He’d noticed her right away: small and birdlike. Always smiling, in a way you didn’t hit in NYC. Curious and unafraid, chatting with the woman beside her one day, looking at kid pictures, the next day helping an old man to a seat.
That was Mindy. Friendly. Finally one day she plopped down beside him and said, “Here we go!”
Why she’d said it, she didn’t know, she told him later, but indeed they went, first chatting daily, then going for coffee and then, with perfect amity, dating, engagement, marriage in a small chapel attended only by close friends and family.
She had so many friends and they seemed to welcome him into the circle, saying, “Take care of her!”
He
had. Until the accident.
Now every day that dizzying fall into the realization she wasn’t there.
Any price was worth paying to avoid that.
But costly, so costly. He’d plundered his 401(k), his IRAs, taken out a second mortgage. Cut his bills to the bone and still had to ask his mother for money.
She provided it without question once she found out what it was for.
They drew as much as they could on his memories, which meant going in every day for two weeks in a row, sitting there talking about his relationship with Mindy, his history, where they’d gone on their honeymoon, and what a typical trip to the grocery store was like, and where each piece of their bedroom furniture had come from. Dr. Avosh said that was good. The stronger the relationship with him was, the more quickly the cloned Mindy would adjust.
His mother didn’t ask about the results or the loan she’d made him to pay for the process. He thought perhaps she was trying to keep him from getting his hopes up too far, but as he aged, increasingly he realized he didn’t understand his mother, didn’t understand the parts of her that she had kept closed away from her family. It was only in his forties that they had become something like close.
Instead, they talked about the day-to-day drama of her apartment building. He grew interested despite himself, even though the stories were so small, concerning misplaced mail or who shoveled the front walk.
He said, “I got you a present. It should arrive next week. According to the tracking number it’s being prepared for shipment right now.”
“Should I ask what it is?”
He found himself smiling and the expression almost startled him. How long had it been since the gray had lifted momentarily? Too long.