I went around feeling foggy and indistinct for two weeks. I stopped being hungry. I stopped trying to eat. I barely even read any books. I took a lot of baths, which Nebbie liked. I thought about going to the beach but I couldn't face buying a bathing suit. I did karate a lot. I listened to Prince.
Then I remembered my dad's birthday was coming up, so I dragged myself out to look for a present to send him. Stopped at ShopRite for some cat food. I had double coupons for Fancy Feast Beef and Liver. Not that I needed double coupons considering that my food bill these days was nil.
I wandered up and down the aisles in a sentimental fashion, remembering all the foods I used to love. Fudgetown Cookies. Bachman Pretzel Logs. Nestle Quik. Cocoa Crispies.
I stopped. There, between Apple Jacks and Lucky Charms, I saw something that made me forget Cocoa Krispies.
Cookie Starfishes.
Little brown starfishes dotted with chocolate chips.
Miles's nasal voice sounded in the imagined space between my ears.
'I can just see the newspaper headline: Cookie Starfishes. A Fair Lawn, NJ woman has mysteriously disappeared, to be replaced by an abnormally large starfish in her bathtub. The starfish was discovered reading Ringworld Engineers and eating a Hershey bar.'
I glanced around furtively. Nobody seemed to be looking at me, but I felt like the eye of the world was boring into the back of my head. I had a sense of malevolent, overarching awareness lurking somewhere above and behind me, invisible. I reached out and picked up the box.
They must be new. I'd walked down this aisle every week for years, and I'd never seen this cereal. There was a free rubber starfish toy advertised on every box.
I steadied myself. 'Whoa, now, girl,' I muttered. I pushed my cart to the customer service counter and waited behind a woman with four kids who had to return a jumbo box of Yankee Doodles because it was stale. I wondered how old the Yankee Doodles had to be before they got stale. Maybe about 400 years, considering that the half-life of a Yankee Doodle was about an aeon thanks to all the preservatives. Gotta love 'em, though, right?
'Are these new?' I said when it was my turn.
'Don't tell me those are stale, too!' said the clerk, sighing. Then, when I explained, she said, 'Yeah, they just came out. There's a coupon in our circular – do you want it?'
She handed me a newsprint advertising flier. Save fifteen cents on Cookie Starfishes.
'You can collect the box tops and get a free action figure from the show,' she added.
'The show?'
'Yeah, it's a cartoon, you know?'
I tried to laugh but coughed instead.
'You got kids?' she added. 'If you had kids, you'd know the show. I guess you don't watch much daytime TV.'
'No,' I said faintly. 'I'm usually at work. Um . . . what's it about?'
She laughed. 'Oh, I don't know, you'd have to ask a kid if you want to really understand it. These famous wizards, they got turned into cookies by this evil sorcerer, and they're in the shape of starfish, and they, like, go spinning through the galaxy trying to get back to being wizards again but they never can, but they, like, save a lot of planets from destruction and stuff. It's silly. My kids love it, though. Go figure.'
I bought the cereal and went to my car in a daze. Like a thought-daze, but without the thought.
You keep finding yourself at a loss. You're trying to wrap your head around something and you don't know what it is, and neither does anybody else. You can't nail down even one corner of it and every time you try the friggin' thing comes whipping back and slaps you in the face like a wet bedsheet you're trying to hang out on a windy day. But you don't even realize this much, not when it's happening, because everything's going off on a level below any phrasing or imagery that you ever ran across.
All you know is: you can't sit still.
You want to eat the entire menu of the Palace Diner but you can't even choke down a rice cake.
You shake all over.
Have I been saying 'you'?
Well, there you go. See?
I don't even know which world I'm in anymore.
The fact that Cookie Starfishes existed at all gave me a pins-and-needles feeling all down my face. I drove to Paramus Park feeling like an automaton.
I parked near A&S. Then, just as I was getting out of my car, some guy took a handicapped space even though he could walk just fine. There was a big sale, and everybody else was lining up for spaces and cruising around looking – I'd been circling for twenty minutes – but this jerk figured he was special and just took a space right by the door. He didn't even have the courtesy to limp.
I guess it was the not-eating part that made me speak up. They say if you feed a dog raw meat it'll become vicious. I hadn't been eating raw meat or hardly anything else at all, and I was going through most of the day feeling trembly and weak. When I saw the guy take that parking space, though, my blood seemed to return from wherever blood hides when you don't feel good, and heat rushed though my body. I started gasping for breath, and I felt my heart pounding as if I was running. It beat so hard that it hurt the inside of my chest. I was also shaking violently.
I marched up to the guy and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked surprised as he turned around.
'These parking spaces,’ I said, 'are reserved for the handicapped. You have no right to park there.'
He turned away even before I'd finished speaking. 'Mind your own business,’ he threw over his shoulder. 'Fat bitch.'
'I might be fat but you're an inconsiderate jerk,’ I shouted after him.
He gave me the finger.
I threw my hands up in the air.
'You so have it coming to you,’ I said. 'We'll see about you.'
But nobody was paying attention to either of us, and within seconds he vanished between racks of Lacoste shirts on sale for twenty-five percent off.
I was supposed to be buying a present for my dad's birthday but I clean forgot about it. I turned and went back to the parking lot, still oozing anger from every pore. I saw the guy's car: it was a blue Chevy Impala.
I stood off the car in a horse stance and gave it a side kick. I didn't focus. I didn't do a test kick to see if I had the right 'ma'. (Fight distance in Japanese. See? I know my terminology.) I just kicked it as hard as I darn could.
To my shock, a dent appeared in the door.
I put my hand over my mouth and looked around. I half-expected police to materialize from out of helicopters and drag me off to jail, but no one even seemed to notice.
I checked out the dent. It was pretty good.
I wanted to do it again and find out if it was a fluke, but I was too scared. I scurried off to my own car and pulled out of my space. A rusty station wagon containing an enormous family of Middle Eastern-looking people swiftly replaced my car. An old guy in a Mercedes hit his horn, disputing their right to the space, and they gestured colorfully at him, laughing. He scowled at me as if it was my fault, so I flicked my chin at him, Italian-style.
I've never done anything like that before. My mother always taught me better. But it's kind of fun.
That night, I didn't even bother to try eating. I ironed my gi and raced off to class. I dented a car!
When I got to the dojo I went straight up to the water bag and whaled it with a side kick. It rocked and spun and the chains holding it up squealed.
'Whoa-ho!' called Troy from the weight room. 'Yo, Adrienne! Eye of the Tiger!'
Troy was really into Rocky.
'That's all right,' I said. 'You could make fun of me. I don't mind.'
'No, seriously, I wasn't kidding, that was some kick.'
I looked away, embarrassed. Miss Cooper came over and said, 'Well, you've got some power going on there, Cookie. Now, can I make a suggestion?'
I bowed to her. Could she make a suggestion? She's a black belt and I'm barely a purple belt. Could she make a suggestion!
'Try the kick slowly'
'I can never do it slow,' I said apologetical
ly.
'Just try. Stand on one foot. That's it. Now when you pick up your other foot, make sure you keep it level.'
Make sure you keep it level. I'm gonna fall over in a minute . . . I'm shaking and swaying.
'That's it, now extend it out sloooowly . . . keep your foot level, oops, try again . . .'
Miss Cooper worked with me for about ten minutes but I couldn't get it.
'That's OK,' she said. 'You'll get it, you just need to work on your form.'
I thanked her profusely and bowed several times.
The thing is, after that I couldn't kick at all. Whatever grace my outrage had lent me, it was gone. For the whole class I kept kicking like a spaz, and once I actually slipped in somebody's sweat and fell over. In spite of this, after class Miss Cooper came up to me and asked if I wanted to join the demonstration team.
'I need another woman for the pocketbook-and-broom segment,’ she said. 'We meet after class on Monday nights and go over the routine. I'm sure you could learn it.'
I doubted that, but I had nothing else to do. I said yes.
The next day, I marched back into work and told Gunther that I was fine. I wanted to fly.
'I admit things haven't been going that well without you . . .' he began. He looked at some papers on his desk. He was flushed and his tie was askew. He chucked his pencil across the desk and sighed. 'I just don't know if it's a good idea. We're in a very tricky position right now, and I find it hard to believe you're going to be up to it.'
'This is what I do. This is what I can really, really do. Let me do it. Please.'
Gunther sighed again. 'OK, we'll give it a try. Just remember, it's my head on the block.'
it bakes cakes
The sunless light is failing by the time you find your way back to Serge. You know Galante can't come in time, but you have to do something. At first you think you've got the wrong coordinates. You see the lake-sized well; you see the submerged missile; you see the shorn-off sides of the Grid. But you don't see Serge.
Then you realize that the well has changed its configuration. Serge is there, surrounded by golems. Her ray gun and incinerator have fallen in the well, but she's still got a crossbow and she's using it. Machine Front crossbow bolts have been engineered with what you assume is some kind of nerve agent, but derived from the Grid itself. They have the power to temporarily shut down a golem if they hit a vital point. Their beauty lies in the fact that they don't give the golem the satisfaction of martyrdom and multiple replication, yet by temporarily putting it out of commission they can save a soldier's life. Problem is, a guy has to be a hell of a good shot to disable a golem in battle armor.
Serge must be a pretty good shot. You can see several fallen golems draped over sections of the Grid or lying in shallow pools on the edges of the well. Most of them are big: males, remnants of the First Wave soldiers whose bodies were taken by the well. You wish you could get in closer, but that's impossible for Gossamer, who already has to execute some pretty slick maneuvers just to get a clear view past the drifting tendrils of the Grid's upper layers. Up here, cloying odors drift across you and Gossamer like rainbowed smoke; you try to ignore them and focus on the details of Serge's situation.
It looks like she's on an island, surrounded by the well like a moat. She has solid Grid in a radius of maybe twenty feet around her; there are three golem bodies here. The rest are scattered in the shallows of the well or on the foundation of the Grid on the other side of the moat-like channel. You can see where the Grid has rearranged itself to isolate her, and slowly, chillingly, you realize that the well is closing in on Serge.
You are so upset to discover this that you have to take Gossamer up and out for a little while. You can't hold the nex when your mind is all emotional and distracted. Your own body makes too many demands when you're upset. So you go for a sunshot glide in the beautiful topsmoke, soaking in the colors that the sourceless Gridlight makes when it hits all those motes of pollen and refracts. The light is softening. Darkness will come soon.
Sometimes when you fly at night you think you could maybe get a handle on the Grid. But how do you get a handle on a verb? The thing isn't a 'thing' at all, it's a function, it's a process, it's the very shiftingness of information states in the world. That's why it changes depending on how you look at it, what you are, how your very own tissues are interacting with its billion-packed substrates of variable sets and supersets. It's a flash in the mind's eye, a tease, the fleeting breath of life in a moment of possibility. Miraculous, really, that it hangs together for you at all, and a testament to the solid-state behavior of your species's hardware. And nothing more.
And yet.
And yet.
And yet, darn it.
It makes things. It bakes cakes. If it had known you were coming it would have.
When you watch these people play out their behaviors against the backdrop of the Grid, you edit the scenery heavily. You make branches and foundation and well, you make up and down, you make color, you make continuity. You must, because they must, and their visual filters force the Grid to conform to shapes that their minds can process.
But what about Gossamer's mind? Gossamer is an indigene. You are an Earthling.The two of you are sewn together with a crummy piece of experimental hardware that may or may not offer you a true rendering of each other. Surely it should enable you to see into things more deeply than the guys on the ground can. Gossamer is part of the Grid. She answers its calls, smells its moments, suspects its desires and anticipates its whims, which are written on her in flight-shape and windtaste.
The guys never take off their goggles, because if they saw the Grid too clearly their little brains would shrivel up and croak – or, in the case of Klaski, croquet.
What about you. Cookie the Spy?
Could you find out more if you tried?
Do you plan to buy the party line until everything's too messed up to save?
There are no transmissions from Machine Front, who must have received your distress call by now. Galante is on her way, but the convoy is too slow. Too slow.
You can only watch. The well of the animate isn't made of water. It's a complex of cells and its consistency is variable. It seems to be able to configure itself into solid Grid or liquid – this according to rules that nobody has figured out yet. That's how the Grid keeps you guessing: wells form and disappear and re-form in different places. Boles liquefy and pollen hardens and the whole package seethes and wavers in Gossamer's eyes, which are also somehow made of the same stuff as the Grid.
There is Serge in her battle armor. Battle is our defining metaphor for progress. When really it's about hanging on. Sheer persistence. The romance of battle never dies, even though it usually messes up a lot more than it saves. Gossamer lets you watch Serge being surrounded, by feet and then by inches. The golems stand around in the branches and on the foundation, some of them partially submerged in the well like corpses half-risen from a mass grave. They watch as Serge's footing begins to give. She tries to attach herself to branches with cabling from her battle suit, but the branches melt away and puffs of drugged smoke replace them. She staggers, keels, sits like a cat recovering from anaesthetic: all grace gone.
Beneath Serge, the Grid begins to melt.
It takes her like quicksand. It takes her like a snake eating a mouse. It takes her head last.
You watch the whole thing.
Gossamer hangs like a handkerchief in the windless sky, accu-mulating pollen and sinking slowly so that you find yourself zooming in to see Serge in ever-increasing detail as she is swallowed by the Grid. You are forced to watch her taut, concentrating face as she turns her mouth to the sky. You see her breathing quicken to an impossible pant. You see her pupils dilate. Her smoky skin takes on a cool hue. She doesn't attempt to move. You admire her discipline: she knows that if she moves she'll sink instantly. To the last she hangs on, refusing to panic, because rescue is still possible.
She knows this because Gossamer is there, b
earing witness. Gossamer must be bringing her hope.
Better hope than despair, right?
You wonder what she's thinking. You want to look away, but you don't let yourself. You see the fluid of the animate flow into her mouth and fill it. She coughs it out several times before it finally covers her. Her eyes are still open as her face blurs. She sinks by inches.
Major Galante arrives four hours later, it's all over by then. The golems have gone back into the well. Gossamer is near exhaustion and wants nothing but to go to roost in the canopy. A mass of metal and plastic and flashing lights breaks the stillness. Queen songs blare out into the Grid announcing the arrival of the rescuers; but it's too late. Serge has vanished in the depths.
The message comes in, as cold as Machine Front knows how to be.
YOUR PERFORMANCE UNSATISFACTORY. RETURN TO X FOR REASSIGNMENT AND REPROGRAMMING. NOW.
That's bullshit but you are in shock. You don't argue. You start to rise and take bearings for your journey back to the convoy, but you can't get height. Gossamer struggles and at first you think she's just too tired to rise. Then you feel the rending of your wing. You feel the air rush turn wild and bumpy against your ventral side. You see the Grid whirling toward you and then away as if you were a spinning yo-yo, and in the last instant before you lose the nex, you glimpse a small figure in batle armor squatting on a looping arm of the Grid. You are falling directly toward her. Just as she brings her crossbow down to her side and smiles up at you with satisfaction, you recognize Major Arla Gonzalez.
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I sat in my plastic chair, looking at a blue TV screen for nearly a half-hour. I didn't know what to do. I wanted so badly to talk to someone, to find some help; but what would Gunther say? He'd warned me not to come back to work yet, and I hadn't listened.
I had to tell him. Gunther was the only person who could possibly make sense of what had just happened to me. I got a legal pad and a Papermate and wrote down as much as I could remember in note form, in case I lost my cool when I was talking to Gunther and left out something important. My penmanship looked childish and unfamiliar, probably because my hand was shaking. I was going to ask him about the cereal, too. I was going to ask him about that worksheet he'd made me do. We were going to set a few things straight, I decided.
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