Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2

by Various Writers

  Jimmy asks if I heard about Connie Parkins. He blows smoke out of his nose. “Took off with Sandy Morton’s old man. Heading up and up and up, I heard.”

  Always goes down like that, I tell him. I ask for another beer. Tell the bartender “go cheap.” It feels good to be sitting in here and drinking. Lidreaders are such shit, honestly.

  “Figured Connie Parkins for an old oak, you know,” says Jimmy. Oak trees lined the lake down by the park. The trees had weathered a lot—storms and skirmishes—over the years. We called anyone who stayed too long in town an old oak.

  “Everybody’s going,” I say.

  “It’s all the rage,” Jimmy agrees.

  I buy Jimmy a couple more beers and spare him the last of Polly’s squares. I notice he’s got a little tic: every now and again, he blinks really fast like he’s got something in his eye. I don’t say anything about it, just like I try not to look at the stump where his left arm used to be.

  We close the bar. It’s 4 a.m. We stumble out of the hole into a magnificent false dawn, and that’s when Jimmy tells me about the deal.

  He says it pretty straightforward: there’s a guy outside town, an old man spotted with age, and this old man lives on a farm, got a bunch of junk in his barns, real old machinery, broke-down tractors, an old-fashioned combine, this and that. Real old, Jimmy says with emphasis, rusted out, junked stuff. This old man said he had a shredded El Camino lying around, engine hanging out like guts. Old man, Jimmy says, offered him a thousand smackeroos to get it running, get the car out of his barn, don’t care how, don’t care where it goes so long as he goes with it. “And he’ll give me a thou for it, done deal, spit and shake, all that, ‘my ticket out of here,’ the old man says, and I’m thinking the same. ‘Head west to the beanstalk, get with the rest of them,’ is what he tells me.”

  Jimmy stretches out on the hood of somebody’s parked car outside the hole. I look at him strangely because his face is lit up like a moon and just as pale, and he’s looking up at something I can’t see. He scratches the stub where his left arm used to be. I wonder if Jimmy thanked his lucky stars he was right-handed. It isn’t something you can ask.

  Anyway, I’m pretty envious of Jimmy’s situation, but he isn’t asking for help. Instead, he asks for another cigarette. I shrug and show him the empty pack, and he leads me down a back alley behind the bar to a trash bin. He tears open a black garbage bag with his teeth and, with his good arm, roots around inside until he finds a couple of smokes that were smoked down to the filter. He calls these cigarettes stale beauties. I light one for him.

  “You need any help fixing it up?” I finally ask him.

  “The El Camino?” he asks.

  “The El Camino,” I say, lighting another stale beauty for him.

  After a moment, Jimmy shrugs. “Sure,” he says, “why not?”

  I ask him how much he’ll give me. I’m thinking of Polly—not just about the money I stole from her, which I want to pay back, but of her in low-grav, mojito in hand. She’d really like that.

  Jimmy says he’ll do most of the work. Says one-armed don’t mean brain dead. But he blinks really fast after that; in the quiet night, it sounds like a moth beating its wings against a streetlight.

  “But how much?” I try not to sound desperate.

  Jimmy says three hundred, but not until we’re in orbit.

  “Four hundred.” I tell him how Polly looks at herself in the mirror every morning and tells me she’s wasting away at the gas station. That her face is more transparent every day, and one day I’ll wake up and I won’t even see her in the bed next to me because she’ll be invisible. You’re too plugged in to that lidreader, I always tell her, but I see her point.

  Jimmy says three hundred. I think: prideful son of a b, but don’t haggle any further. I want to get out more than I care about the dough.

  “Okay. When do we get cracking?”

  Jimmy comes over before Polly wakes up for work, like I asked. I know she won’t understand why I called in sick to the office to work on a broken old car, even if the point is to get out of here, so it’s best if I’m not around when she gets up. Anyway, Jimmy’s standing at my doorstep with a forty in a paper sack in his hand. A warning from the newsfeed app on my lidreader tells me about big explosions not too far from town, telling me to stay inside. I barely notice.

  “How do you do,” Jimmy says through my torn-up screen door.

  “Head’s splitting,” I tell him and point to his forty. “Mind if I?” Jimmy hands it to me and I take a quick, refreshing swig. I say I’m back. Jimmy laughs. Then I hear Polly rustling around in the bedroom at the back of our little apartment. I cringe, afraid to look behind me. “Let’s hit it.”

  We have to walk to this guy’s farm because neither of us owns a vehicle—otherwise, we probably would’ve risked going through the battle lines in the west a long time ago. Jimmy says the old man told him it was a couple miles outside of town. A windmill you can see from the road, that’s the place. It’s sunny, with a few thin clouds, and getting hot. I try to access the coolyourself app but, of course, the service has been interrupted, and I blink like an idiot. Along the way, we share Jimmy’s forty and it seems to keep the growing heat off. Still, by the time we reach the edge of town, my neck and forehead feel watered-down.

  Jimmy talks about the army as we walk. Sounds like a dull ache in the back of your head. “Remember when we were kids and the enemy wasn’t a blip on the screen, but a real person? You had to see them face to face—well, most of the time—and you knew what you were doing, killing a person?”

  “I never killed anybody when I was a kid.”

  “You know what I mean,” Jimmy says. “Nowadays, it’s point and click.” He gestures at the place his left arm used to be. “That’s how come I kept this. Docs said they could give me another, grow it in some lab with some of my cells, look and act good as new. No way, I told them. I want to remember this.”

  We walked in silence for a bit. Then he continued, “Was minding my own business on patrol and sweating half to death in that goddamn Arizonan heat, and I stepped on it. Just blew straight up, this mine. Biggest sound I ever heard. This ear still rings like it’s always dying. How I got the tic too.” Jimmy points to his blinking eyes. “Nothing works right now.

  “Anyway, I woke up in a hospital, missing an arm.” He kind of laughs before going on. “Few of my buddies said I went after it. Said I didn’t pass out like I thought. Found it in a ditch fifteen yards away. Charred the way dad used to make steaks. Said I picked it up and waved to them with it, can you imagine? I don’t remember a goddamn thing.” He looks at me with beady, dark eyes. “Isn’t that funny?”

  I tell him my sides are splitting.

  “Hey,” Jimmy says after awhile. “I got shocked by that fence back when I was just a kid.” He points to a rickety-looking thing enclosing a pasture with some grazing horses. “That fence is electric,” he says. “You ever been shocked by a fence?”

  I haven’t.

  “It feels like getting socked.” Jimmy smiles crookedly, and blinks a lot. “But then your feet get all warm.”

  I’m going on about how this heat makes me feel like I’ve just been socked anyway, and my feet are warm from the booze. I didn’t need any electric fence to tell me that. Jimmy tells me it isn’t the same and I know it.

  Then he points to the windmill, a thing of antiquity and metal, looming like it has some great power over the fields, creaking in the dry wind so that it sounds either like a train stuttering to a stop or a hungry bird circling above. Jimmy says he sees the barn yonder and starts walking, heedless of the ticks and chiggers, through the switchgrass crowding up against the asphalt. I follow him warily and keep my eyes on the ground, spreading grass ceremoniously before me with my arms, until we come to a property line encircled by an old wooden fence that is rotting and worn out from the rain or lack of rain or both. Jimmy climbs the fence and stands atop its rotting wood, looking out across the meadow and low h
ills, and outstretches his one good arm like a broken scarecrow.

  He grins at me and hops off.

  The barn is locked, but the lock has rusted—Jimmy picks up a two-by-four lying lonely in a patch of star-of-Bethlehems and knocks the lock open with one hard swoop. He opens the heavy barn doors, and the smell of wood rot and dead grass and old straw mixes with the smell of oil and leather and machinery. In the middle of the barn, elevated on four stone slabs, is the El Camino.

  Jimmy says, “What do we think?

  “It don’t look all that banged-up.”

  “It ain’t in bad shape, agreed. But every car’s got a secret.”

  “You know anything about them? Cars?”

  Jimmy eyes me funny. “Sure I do.” He looks around a bit. Says the car is an antique, from the last century sometime. The leather seats have been ripped up, most likely by a stray cat. Jimmy points with his good arm to a thick line of rust framing the exterior. The tires look warped and low, and he kicks a metal pipe with his foot. Pops the top and tinkers around inside. He says the engine could be worse for wear. Tinkers around some more, and doesn’t say much as he checks the belts and the battery. Jimmy gets down on his back, scoots himself underneath the car with his legs and checks whatever is underneath the car to check. I stand there in the barn with my hands in my pockets, and all I can think of is Polly and getting her out of this town, out of her dead-end job at the gas station, and how I’d like to see her bone density dropping as we wander the dark side of the moon.

  Jimmy says pull me out from under here.

  I grab both of his legs, pull him out from under the El Camino, and help him up off the barn’s dirt floor. “How’s it looking?”

  “Don’t see what’s wrong yet,” Jimmy says, and gets in the driver’s side.

  “That a good thing?”

  “Depends on what’s wrong, I guess.” He fiddles around with the side mirrors and the steering wheel, and taps the gauges in the car with the tip of his finger.

  “You know what I can’t understand?” Jimmy says. “I can’t understand how it was my arm got blown off.”

  I try not to look dumbfounded.

  Jimmy opens the glove compartment, starts pulling out papers and old napkins. “I mean it was my leg that stepped on the damn thing.”

  My lidreader flashes a warning I ignore just moments before thunder cracks heavily across the sky.

  “My leg,” Jimmy says again. “But here I am, with two good working, functional, exceptional, wondrous left foot, right foot legs, and only one arm. I can march, but I can’t hunt. Does that make sense?”

  I don’t know if I should remind him the doctors wanted to give him a new arm or if I should agree with anything he’s saying or not, so I keep quiet.

  Jimmy finds whatever he was looking for in the glove compartment. “I can walk from Houston to Omaha if I wanted to.” He dangles the car keys in front of me and smiles. “But the government says I’m no longer allowed to handle a weapon or operate a motor vehicle. Isn’t that stupid?” Jimmy laughs. “I mean, what year is this?”

  Jimmy puts the key in the ignition and turns it. There is a faint zzzing as the El Camino’s engine tries to turn over. Jimmy steps out of the car and pops the top again, and looks at the engine. I clap my hands absently, kind of bored. Jimmy looks up, eyeing my hands, and I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking he wishes he had two hands to drive this clunker. It’s going to be fun zooming over the countryside, outrunning the Western Liberation Front forces, making our way to the beanstalk.

  I ask him “Does it hurt?”, though I don’t know why. I don’t want to know, don’t want to think about it. I’d rather think of drinking with Polly on the Moon. God, I think, she’d look beautiful in the dull light of a low-grav bar.

  “People tell stories of ghost pain and whatnot. I don’t know. I guess it hurts. I wake up sweating a lot, but who knows what from. Might be my heater’s cranked up too high.”

  He goes to the back of the car, opens the fuel tank and sniffs it. “She’s got enough gas,” he says. “But I think I figured out the problem.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Fuel pump.”

  “Well,” I say after a moment. “You know how to fix it?”

  He blinks crazily, trying to access something. “Sure enough,” he says. “It’s a two-armed job, so you’ll have to do it.”

  “I’m no mechanic,” I tell him.

  Jimmy’s smiling from ear to ear. “I’ll give you directions, but we’re going to need some things from town.”

  We walk back to town, and I think of stopping by the house to see if Polly’s at home to tell her about the El Camino and the promise of cash and getaway, and how we’re finally getting out of this town. I know she isn’t home, though, and even if she called in sick to work like she sometimes did, she’d be pissed that I took her thirty-five dollars and called in sick myself. She wouldn’t want to hear how my small theft from her purse had given us such good luck; no, she’d just look at me like I was nine years old.

  Jimmy mentions stopping by the gas station where Polly works. The station also sells automotive parts and fireworks. He says he’s got credit there because the owner knows him and feels sorry for him like everybody does. I tell him it’s a bad idea, that any contact with Polly is a bad idea before we get the car up and running. “The other automotive store went out of business,” he says, so there’s nothing for it.

  When we get to the gas station, though, Polly’s nowhere to be found.

  Jimmy purchases a gas can, a replacement pump, and a couple of battery-operated drills. As promised, we don’t pay a dime for the tools. I think this day might turn out just fine.

  It’s on the way back to the barn, of course, that we run into Polly.

  She’s standing on the sidewalk across the street, waiting for the light to change from red to green. Her hand is shielding her eyes from the sun, which means the sunglasses app on her lidreader isn’t working either, and she sees us walking along toward the corner. Polly double-takes and calls my name. I try not to cringe visibly. She has her hair in a ponytail, which used to get me excited, bobbing up and down like that, but now I know it means she’s mad enough to not care what her hair looks like.

  “Howdy,” I call out to her. I don’t ask why she wasn’t at the station when we dropped in.

  Ignoring the big red hand that means don’t walk, Polly crosses the street. There’s no traffic anyway, not since the war started coming our way and everybody left.

  “Where’ve you been all day?” she says, stomping up. “I saw the email you sent to your office.” That means she’s hacking into my lidreader.

  “I’ve been out with Jimmy. You remember Jimmy?”

  Polly says hello to Jimmy. Jimmy asks if she can spare a square, and I start squirming in the heat. Polly digs through her purse and doesn’t find the cigarettes that I took last night, and that must trigger something in her brain to check for everything else: lipstick, tissues, driver’s license, and, of course, the thirty-five bucks from her cookbooks. I’m trying not to look guilty.

  She eyes me like I have jaundice and asks, “Where’s the money?”

  I shrug. It’s Jimmy who speaks up. Says he’s got a deal. Tells her about the old man and the El Camino, and that stupid electric fence, and how the car has a broken fuel pump. Then he holds up the bag filled with parts and tools for a visual, and the whole time, Polly’s standing with her arms folded across her breasts, her nostrils flaring.

  He says, “Once we get the car running, we can zoom past the battle lines so fast they won’t even hear us until we’re already gone. It’s a safe bet.”

  Jimmy tells her about my side of the cut too, the three hundred, and that this is everybody’s ticket out of here. I used to think you could talk to Polly like Jimmy’s talking to her. I used to believe she would listen. She’s not even hearing three hundred. She’s not hearing fuel pump. She’s not hearing ticket out of here. She’s not hearing moon rocks and mojitos. She�
��s not hearing Sea of Tranquility.

  What Polly hears is I took the thirty-five big ones she made from selling her beloved cookbooks. She’s hearing we smoked her squares. She’s hearing big failed plans for the future.

  Jimmy’s finished, and Polly’s still standing with her arms crossed. Her eyes are raging. She shoots me an email via lidreader. My eyes blink as I scan it. It tells me go home and this’ll blow over. I remind her Jimmy needs us. She asks why. I answer her, explaining about his missing arm, how he blinks like a madman and how I think there’s something wrong, some kind of malfunction, and that he might get himself killed. I don’t know if that last bit is true, but I don’t tell Polly that I don’t know.

  Polly says hush. She says it out loud. She tells us the full thou, let alone three hundred, won’t get us halfway with the way I smoke and drink and gamble. I’m not a big fan of her telling the world my flaws.

  The sun is so hot, and we’re standing by a bank that seems to be closing in on us. Everywhere, buildings are shimmering and golden, and I wonder aloud if this is what it’s like moments before an earthquake. I try to access my coolyourself lidreader app again, but nothing happens. Sweating is terrible.

  There is a low boom like a palm slapping water, and then the ground shifts beneath me and lifts. Chunks of the bank across the street are falling all around, a shower of rock and brick. I hear another sound like the sound of Polly screaming. Then I don’t hear anything at all. A warning, in big black letters, scrolls across my lidreader, advising me to take cover from attacking WLF forces. Then my lidreader goes scrambled.

  The shadow of a fighter plane crossing the sky crosses the street. Jimmy pushes me down. My head smacks the sidewalk. The street smells like cement and garbage and gasoline and hot.

  Jimmy’s yelling something at me, showing me the bag of tools. He’s blinking really fast. He pushes the bag into my arms. Then my ears can hear again, though all sound is muffled. Jimmy says, “We got to move!”

  “Polly?” I say.