Double Vision

by Tricia Sullivan

  'Just one,’ I said.

  'Go ahead, knock yourself out.' He sat back on his heels and watched me take the candy. He meant to be ironic but the truth is, that Lifesaver earned its name. It hit my tongue and my brain like the first sunrise of spring must hit the Eskimos.

  'You know who that was on the phone just now?'

  Like I cared. 'George Lucas wanting to make the Spazmonia! movie?' I said dully.

  'Gloria. She told me.'

  'Oh.'

  'Oh.'

  'I guess you think I'm having a breakdown, too,’ I said.

  Miles said, 'Gloria said you left a bunch of stuff there. She's going to bring it to karate tomorrow night.'

  I took another Lifesaver. I didn't suck it actively, in case it made me sick. I just let it lie on my tongue. Having any foreign body in my mouth, even a toothbrush, lately made me want to gag.

  'Do you need any help with these people, Cookie?'

  'What kind of help?'

  Miles said, 'The other night at your mom's house I got a weird feeling off your boss . . . Wolfgang?'

  'Gunther.'

  'Him, yeah. I don't like the way he talks about you.'

  Bizarrely, I heard myself defending Gunther. 'He's a really nice guy! You don't even know him.'

  'OK. If you say so.' Miles didn't sound convinced.

  'So, I was looking at your text game,' I said brightly, desperate to change the subject. 'Is that the one you were telling me about?'

  'Quark? Yeah. I'm stuck right now. There's this underground chamber, see, and I can't find my way out of it. The game keeps describing something about ropes, but you can't climb them and you can't carry them and nothing happens when you pull them . . . it's some kind of trick and it's driving me nuts.'

  I nodded slowly.

  'Is there anything about. . . dogs . . . in that game? Or battle armor?'

  'No – why? Do you think you figured something out?'

  'Maybe. Can I take you up on that offer after all?'

  'You mean you want the computer? Cool. Yeah, sure.' He grinned and picked up a little fanged horse. 'Do you think the inside of a Nightmare's mouth should be red or green?'

  Late that afternoon a thunderstorm did roar down, and I had to go home and close windows and sing Nebbie out from under the bed with the theme from Cats. Miles set up the computer for me and showed me how to use it. After he left, I also dragged out Mom's color TV and set that up, too.

  I had to take down a lot of books and rearranged my Dewar's crates until I had the TV and the screen of Miles's computer where I wanted them. Between this disruption to my paperback library and the intrusion of my mother's effects, the apartment was now more or less a maze of shoulder-high piles of heterogeneous stuff. Nebbie would have been in heaven, except for the fact that Rocky really liked her and she didn't feel the same.

  I made lemonade.

  Normally I'd eat cake with this (remember the Trixie Belden?) But I was beyond cake now. I was wearing size 14 jogging shorts. And a halter top. I felt like a kid again.

  'OK, we'll warm up with something easy. It's only words on a screen. No pictures. It's just D&D,' I told myself and I squared off against the Apple IIe Miles had set up for me. 'It can't jump out and get you.'

  See, I thought that Quark would be a good way to get myself used to the idea of doing it on my own. I hadn't watched real TV for years, not since the first hauntings began. I was too scared.

  I thought that maybe I should try to pick up where I'd left off, so I had asked Miles to save the game at the point where he was stuck and let me try working on it. He had explained the basic commands. I didn't listen much. I was hoping that I'd find out everything I needed to know just by reading.

  There were more thunderstorms. I remember hearing the first peals of thunder, because in her fright Nebbie knocked over a bust of Brahms that had belonged to my mother. It was hollowed out and Mom used to keep her stash in there ('in case of a raid,' she told us kids seriously). A plastic bag hit the carpet and a sprinkling of pot spilled out. Nebbie probably thought it was catnip because she licked it.

  After that, I was lost to the world.

  The Swatch had various dials and buttons, all very tiny and difficult to manipulate. As light grew about her she saw that incised on the edge were the characters CAPT. B. SERGE N76. She studied the wristband for a long time trying to remember how to operate it. Fabrique au Suisse, it said. She flipped it open. Dante, she thought. How to call Dante? She couldn't remember. When she tried to operate the watch a visual floated out of it. It was not Dante's face. It was a train. A girl and a guy, kissing on the step, the girl's foot coming off the ground like a dog pointing. A little song. 'Say goodbye a little longer/Make it last a little longer/Give your breath long-lasting freshness with Big Red.'

  She snapped the holo down. She flashed a memory of the way she had felt the first time she had seen what intestines looked like. Her tongue seemed to be clogging her throat. She had a sense of betrayal, as if the world was declaring itself to be something more obscene and ludicrous than she'd heretofore been led to believe.

  She didn't want to know those kinds of secrets. She stood up.

  Visually, the Grid was overwhelming from this angle. She kept tilting her head back to try and take it all in, which was impossible. She turned and looked up and turned again, steadying herself against a branch of the thing with one hand. From the point where her hand touched she saw a faint puff of dust, and an odor came slithering towards her nose. She also felt something in her skin, a kind of shiver that brought the hairs to attention on the back of her neck.

  Surface area, she found herself thinking. It has a huge amount of exposure, very high surface-area-to-volume ratio.

  That idea sank through her mind like a stone in a muddy pond. She didn't have another thought as such for a while. She took her hand off the branch, and instantly there was a reaction in her head. The second thought took the form of a niggling irritation that she should have even bothered to think the first thing.

  You know this already. You know all about the Grid, as much as any guy. Why don't you get with it already?

  She could almost hear this one, in her mind. It had an accent, a stubborn twang that refused to change no matter how far its owner traveled from her place of origin.

  Texas.

  The word lodged in her memory like a burr in a horse's tail. She took a deep breath. Whatever she had been recalling, it was gone. Texas?

  Then: Horse?

  Burr?

  She sat down with her back to the bole of the Grid. There was a faint thrum within the material, which was ever-so-slightly yielding – not like wood, more like some kind of plastic but with a current going through it, if that were possible.

  A few things had come back different.

  She heard a rhythmic clicking from inside her thorax at all times. It was not a heartbeat or a pacemaker or anything like that. It was more like a chorus of crickets sounding from beneath her skin, making wild rhythms. The chorus moved around within her trunk randomly, or maybe according to an algorithm too complex for her to figure out: the angles of the branches? Orientation like a compass? Temperature, or chemical composition of the air? Who knew?

  Plus, she could no longer remember what human time felt like. The time she experienced was Grid Time, and its pace was roughly equivalent to attention. Sometimes it flowed thick and sweet like Caro syrup. Sometimes it was staggered and disconnected, crunchy, lively as Rice Krispies when you first pour the milk in. Sometimes it seemed to have colors, even, like Jell-O. Time was just a game that played in her mind. Her Swatch was no help. The digital display was now written in Roman numerals, which she had only mastered well enough to pass the quiz in fifth-grade math. And Time itself seemed to have acquired an analogous character: it altered its quality in a tangible way, like Ls changing to Ms or whatever; V becoming less when you put a I in front of it, and so on. It wasn't linear anymore. It wasn't intuitive to her. Time seemed to have the power to cha
nge itself retroactively.

  I pulled back. This was hard going. My eyes were stinging and aching. The room had gotten dark and the luminous print on the screen seemed to attack my corneas. I felt exhausted. I got up, stretched, rubbed my eyes, and looked at the screen again.

  I could see a flashing cursor and a question mark inviting my response.

  I tried to remember what Miles had said about how to play these games. You entered simple phrases, like 'Take rock' or 'Jump chasm.' But all I could think of were questions.

  One letter at a time, I typed:

  What can she do?

  I pressed 'enter.'

  Her heart does not beat. She does not breathe. She can go in the well and come out again at a different point.

  She can smell the Grid pollen just like Gossamer.

  She can probe inside the golems but there is no reality there.

  Is she part of the Grid now?

  She is in a room with a two-way mirror. The Grid can see her, but she can't see it. Or so it seems.

  Because she's filled with loneliness. Her physical needs have been erased, but her sense of isolation is so enormous that it bleeds over into the empty spaces that once held hunger and thirst and tiredness, until loneliness becomes something as urgent as pain. She reaches inwardly, reaches, reaches for contact with something like herself.

  The Grid isn't it.

  The Grid as a physical presence reminds her of the insides of a TV, with plastic and wire physical forms that have nothing to do with how the thing hits you at the business end. She doesn't know what the Grid is but she does know that the cables and lightning rods and sculpted tree-faxes of its sensory structure are illusory or at best, misleading.

  What about the children?

  She can't get inside them. From the outside, they seem electrified, speeded-up, jerky. Their voices seem to be able to imitate any sound at all, however unlikely, and their music doesn't follow the rules of music. They seldom speak words and when they do she doesn't understand the language and it sounds processed, like Herbie Hancock's voice in that so-called song, 'Rockit'.

  She feels disappointed by this because she thinks it means they aren't real, either, and in her loneliness she couldn't bear that.

  I sat back. This was depressing. I ought to go to bed, I thought. Still, there would be no job to go to the next day. I could sleep late. I heard the disk drive whirring. I flipped up the control panel to turn off the computer, and more text scrolled down in a burst.

  Then she touched one of them.

  It happened while she was wandering from one well pool to another, examining the radiance of the Grid where it scored the surface of the well, and the crosshatching of shadows that traced byzantine shapes on the dull roof of sky.

  She was engaged in a theoretical panic. She wasn't breathing and her heart wasn't beating that she was aware of, which robbed her of all ability to experience her own emotions. The Grid had her. It was inside her. It was free to operate, was affecting her thoughts for whatever sinister purposes of its own at this very moment, and just the idea of this made her afraid to think. She felt like she had a tapeworm in her brain.

  Then the girl shot out of the well in front of her like a macabre otter. In the Gridlight the girl's skin was the dark green of an angry goddess's, and the well fluid falling off her in sheets left her polished to a high shine, like a dressage horse on show day. She uttered an inarticulate noise, her tongue thrashing in her mouth, and snapped her fingers in Serge's face. Serge, or whatever Serge had become, reached out reflexively and seized the girl's wrist.

  It was warm. It was sinewy, and the veins pulsed as they bridged the tendons. The Grid, too, pulsed with Las Vegasian enthusiasm, slave to the light and the random. And Serge's heart shuddered into action. Blood drummed in her ears. Saliva moved at the tip of her tongue. She took a startled, fiery breath.

  The girl was deep in Serge's personal space, which normally extended to a radius of several feet beyond her physical body. She got all up in Serge's face and cried, 'Ghaad-d-d-aaaag-huh-huh!' The utterance went on for several seconds before Serge shoved the girl away with a frightened violence.

  'Get off me!' Serge croaked. 'Quit playing Night of the Living Dead. I'm sorry, OK? Shit happens. I'm sorry for what you are. I'm sorry I'm grossed-out by you. I shouldn't be, right? Now I'm one of you, we're all one big screwed-up family'

  She sat down and put her head in her hands. That didn't help. Instead of not beating at all, now her heart was beating too fast and her breathing coming too quick and too toxic. With real physical panic on the verge of claiming her, she pulled a Bilbo Baggins and groped in her pockets. She was hoping for a Snickers actually, but she had given her last one to Gonzalez.

  There was something else in her pocket.

  It was a metal oblong, narrow and as long as her hand. It had little rectangular holes all along its length. It was heavy, but partially hollow. There was a spiky thing with a knob coming out of one end. It had had a brand name, something beginning with a K, but she'd rubbed it out. She remembered doing that, when she first came here. She remembered playing it, to remind herself of the smell of sage.

  She blew into it experimentally. A tune started up without her planning it; she felt she was listening more than she was playing, pouring the sound over herself. The sound was bringing back her world, pulling her memories up by their roots.

  She slid it back and forth across her hps as she blew, using her free hand to warble in front of the exit point for the blown air. For their part, the girls listened and echoed and responded with their own bizarre assortment of soundmaking.

  'It ain't what I'd call bluegrass,' Serge said eventually, breaking off. 'But it keeps me breathing, don't it?'

  And she played some more. The dead and terrible feeling started to recede. Music always did that: made the world less a collection of passive objects being manipulated by people, and more a living vein of time packaged in many shapes and forms. She realized this now and, in the same moment, she understood something about the Grid. Its very refusal to be nailed down in object form made it musical. The Grid held the line, or curve, or membrane, or dodecahedron, between the possible and the actual. She rode inside this thought like it was a racecar changing direction at 180 m.p.h. until she lost control of it and it broke up.

  The sound was all around her now. It issued not from mouths, but from air. Her little harmonica sounded plaintive and weird in the Grid's sonic clutch.

  She didn't dare stop.

  This playing was Serge swimming in the Grid's sound. It was the only way she had to hold herself together in the rapids of time and position. There were no words for what was happening through her soundmaking. It was not about food or sleep or sex or fighting or helping or communicating, even. It wasn't about exchanging information. It was about not flying apart into smithereens. Not giving in to the undifferentiated wasteland. Not being an unperson. Yet.

  She thought: Yes. Music is the faultline. Music is the crack in the egg, the vibration of birth, the fulfillment of chickenhood, funky or otherwise.

  Funky or otherwise? Dipshit.

  She put the harmonica down. She felt exhausted. But she was remembering who she had been.

  'I know what you're thinking,' she said. As one their faces swiveled to her, as flowers to a light source. 'You're thinking you can hog-tie me with a length of my own filtration tubing, then get hold of my Swatch and do your funky bring-out-your-dead thing with it in the well.'

  Then she laughed.

  'See, I know you're thinking that because that's what I would do, and y'all are just like me. Well, half me. If y'all had your daddy's impulsive streak y'all would've tried it by now already.'

  She shook her head.

  'Six would shit himself if he knew.

  'Do you guys understand what I'm saying or what?

  'It sure would be easier on me if there was just one of you. I feel real outnumbered especially the way y'all are just staring at me.'

  One gol
em sat down. The others slipped away among the branches. She didn't know if they had dematerialized or were just hiding.

  'We-hell,' she barked nervously. 'So you do understand. Wuh-ho.

  'OK, well, I got some questions.

  'Why don't I feel hungry? Why don't I have to pee?

  'Am I dead? Am I one of you and if so, like, what am I supposed to do now?

  'Is there, like, an orientation or something?'

  She waited a while after each of these questions. The child was watching her closely, but Serge could not read her expression. The Grid kept humming and crackling restlessly.

  'So you don't want to talk.' Serge's voice took on an authoritative tone. It was as if she resented having shown her vulnerability and now had to make up for it by coming over all General Patton-ish.

  'You know,' Serge said, pausing for effect and to hawk and spit into the well. 'If this was a TV movie we'd all be coming to terms with our differences and getting our family values up to speed here. We'd be talking it over and I'd be uncovering some damn, like, gruff fondness for y'all. You'd come up to me with a bunch of Grid-flowers or some sh*t and I'd start crying and say I'm sorry I didn't have you even though I'm not and hell, who knows, we might even hug, and sh*t. I'd probably like that. No chestnuts, I really would. I want to solve this, you guys got to believe me. But the way this is going I

  can't see that happening. I guess I'm just not getting any cuddle factor off you guys whatsoever. What I see is me, dead, and you guys going on being. . . weird. . . forever. Just in and out of that well, never growing up, never growing old, never dying. I can't put my finger on exactly why that is more of a dead-dog bummer than me being dead, but somehow it is. Somehow just picturing that picture makes me want to puke up a lung.'

  The girl got up and started to move off through the Grid. The others were visible in the shadows, joining her, climbing away. They were leaving her behind. She didn't want to be alone.

  'It's just too ugly,' said Serge. 'And it's too weird, and I'm not doing it.'

  But they were disappearing, and soon she would be alone. She sat there for a short while, listening to her persistent heart and the fast ticking in her chest that sounded suspiciously like a bomb, and pretty soon she sprang up and followed them. She could smell the Grid urging her on, dictating on a cellular level. It was in her veins, in the tide of her heart now. Her heart that these half-life children had started again after what should have been a final silence.