“We got the Humana research contract today.”
“Why, Roman, that’s wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me?” She pouted. “We ate dinner together and you let me babble on about the garden and Mrs. Peasley’s orchids and you never said anything about it.”
“That’s because it has nothing to do with me. My team got the contract with their work.”
“Roman—”
“Wait.”
He looked around the bedroom. It had delicately patterned wallpaper and rugs on the floor. It was a graceful and relaxing room, all of it Abigail’s doing. His night table was much larger than hers because he always piled six months’ worth of reading into it.
“Everyone’s covering for me. They know what I’ve done in the past, and they try to make me look good. But I’m useless. You’re covering for me. Aren’t you, Abigail? If you really think about it, you know something’s happening to me. Something that can only end one way. I’m sure that in your nightstand somewhere there’s a book on senile dementia. I don’t have to explain anything to you.”
She looked away. “I wouldn’t keep it somewhere so easy for you to find.”
The beautiful room suddenly looked threatening. The shadows on the wall cast by Abigail’s crystal-shaded lamp were ominous looming monsters. This wasn’t his room. He no longer had anything to do with it. The books in the night table would remain forever unread or, if read, would be soon forgotten. He fell forward and she held him.
“I can’t make you responsible for me,” he said. “I can’t do that to you. I can’t ruin your life.”
“No, Roman. I’ll always take care of you, no matter what happens.” Her voice was fierce. “I love you.”
“I know. But it won’t be me you’re caring for. It will be a hysterical beast with no memory and no sense. I won’t even be able to appreciate what you are doing for me. I’ll scream at you, run away and get lost, shit in my pants.”
She drew in a long breath.
“And you know what? Right now I could make the decision to kill myself—”
“No! God, Roman, you’re fine. You’re having a few memory lapses. I hate to tell you, but that comes with age. I have them. We all do. You can live a full life along with the rest of us. Don’t be such a perfectionist.”
“Yes. Now I have the capacity to make a decision to end it, if I choose. But now I don’t need to make a decision like that. My personality is still whole. Battered, but still there. But when enough of my mind is gone that I am a useless burden, I won’t be able to make the decision. It’s damnable. When I’m a drooling idiot who shits in his pants and makes your life a living, daily hell, I won’t have the sense to end it. I’ll be miserable, terrified, hysterical. And I’ll keep on living. And none of these living wills can arrange it. They can avoid heroic measures, take someone off life support, but they can’t actually kill anyone.”
“But what about me?” Her voice was sharp. “Is that it, then? You have a problem, you make the decision, and I’m left to pick up whatever pieces are left? I’m supposed to abide by whatever decision you make?”
“That’s not fair.” He hadn’t expected an argument. But what, then? Simple acquiescence? This was Abigail.
“Who’s being unfair?” She gasped. “When you think there’s not enough of you left to love, you’ll just end yourself.”
“Abigail, I love and care for you. I won’t always be able to say that. Someday that love will vanish along with my mind. Allow me the right to live as the kind of human being I want to be. You don’t want a paltry sick thing to take care of as a reminder of the man I once was. I think that after several years of that you will forget what it was about me that you once loved.”
So they cried together, the way they had in their earliest days with each other, when it seemed that it would never work and they would have to spend their whole lives apart.
❖
Roman stood in the living room in confusion. It was night outside. He remembered it being morning not more than a couple of minutes before. He had been getting ready to go to the office. There were important things to do there.
But no. He had retired from Hyperneuron. People from the office sometimes came to visit, but they never stayed long. Roman didn’t notice because he couldn’t pay that much attention. He offered them glasses of lemonade, sometimes bringing in second and third ones while their first was yet unfinished. Elaine had left in tears once. Roman didn’t know why.
Gerald came every week. Often Roman didn’t recognize him.
But Roman wanted something. He was out here for some reason. “Abigail!” he screamed. “Where’s my... my... tool?”
His hair was neatly combed, he was dressed, clean. He didn’t know that.
Abigail appeared at the door. “What is it, honey?”
“My tool, dammit, my tool. My... cutting...” He waved his hands.
“Your scissors?”
“Yes, yes, yes! You stole them. You threw them away.”
“I haven’t even seen them, Roman.”
“You always say that. Why are they gone, then?” He grinned at her, pleased at having caught her in her lie.
“Please, Roman.” She was near tears. “You do this every time you lose something.”
“I didn’t lose them!” He screamed until his throat hurt. “You threw them out!” He stalked off, leaving her at the door.
He wandered into his study. It was neat now. It had been so long since he’d worked in there that Abigail had stacked everything neatly and kept it dusted.
“Tell Abigail that you would like some spinach pies from the Greek bakery.” The computer’s voice was calm.
“Wha—?”
“Some spinach pies. They carry them at the all-night convenience store over on River Street. One of the small benefits of yuppification. Spanakopita at midnight. You haven’t had them for a while, and you used to like them a lot. Be polite, Roman. Please. You are being cruel to Abigail.”
Roman ran back out into the living room. He cried. “I’m sorry, Pookie, I’m sorry.” He grabbed her and held her in a death grip. “I want, I want....”
“What, Roman?” She looked into his eyes.
“I want a spinach pie,” he finally said triumphantly. “They have them on River Street. I like spinach pies.”
“All right, Roman. I’ll get some for you.” Delighted at having some concrete and easily satisfied desire on his part, Abigail drove off into the night, though she knew he would have forgotten about them by the time she got back.
“Get the plastic sheet,” the computer commanded.
“What?”
“The plastic sheet. It’s under the back porcli where you put it.”
“I don’t remember any plastic sheet.”
“I don’t care if you remember it or not. Go get it and bring it in here.”
Obediently, clumsily, Roman dragged in the heavy roll of plastic and spread it out on the study floor in obedience to the computer’s instructions.
With a loud click the secure drawer slid open. Roman reached in and pulled out the pistol. He stared at it in wonder.
“The safety’s on the side. Push it up. You know what to do.” The computer’s voice was sad. “I waited a long time, Roman. Perhaps too long. I just couldn’t do it.”
And indeed, though much of his mind was gone, Roman did know what to do. “Will this make Abigail happy?” He lay down on the plastic sheet.
“No, it won’t. But you have to do it.”
The pistol’s muzzle was cold on the roof of his mouth.
❖
“Jesus,” Gerald said at the doorway. “Jesus Christ.” He’d heard the gunshot from the driveway and had immediately known what it meant. He’d let himself in with his key. Roman Maitland’s body lay twisted on the study floor, blood spattered from the hole torn in the back of his head. The plastic sheet had caught the blood that welled out.
“Why did he call me and then not wait?” Gerald was almost angry with his friend. “
He sounded so sensible.”
“He didn’t call you. I did. Glad you could make it, Gerald.” Gerald stared around the study in terror. His friend was dead. But his friend’s voice came from the speakers.
“A ghost,” he whispered. “All that fancy electronics and software, and all Roman has succeeded in doing is making a ghost.” He giggled. “God, science marches on.”
“Don’t be an ass.” Roman’s voice was severe. “We have things to do. Abigail will be home soon. I sent her on a meaningless errand to buy some spinach pies. I like spinach pies a lot. I’ll miss them.”
“I like them too. I’ll eat them for you.”
“Thanks.” There was no trace of sarcasm in the computer’s voice.
Gerald stared at the field memories, having no better place to address. “Are you really in there, Roman?”
“It’s not me. Just an amazing simulation. I’ll say goodbye to you, then to Abigail, and then you can call the police. I hear her car in the driveway now. Meet her at the front door. Try to make it easy on her. She’ll be pissed off at me, but that can’t be helped. Goodbye, Gerald. You were as good a friend as a man could ask for.”
Abigail stepped through the door with the plastic bag from the convenience store hanging on her wrist. As soon as she saw Gerald’s face, she knew what had happened.
“Damn him! Damn him to hell! He always liked stupid tricks like that. He liked pointing over my shoulder to make me look. He never got over it.”
She went into the study and put her hand on her husband’s forehead. His face was scrunched up from the shock of the bullet, making him look like a child tasting something bitter.
“I’m sorry, Abigail,” the computer said with Roman’s voice. “I loved you too much to stay.”
She didn’t look up. “I know, Roman. It must have been hard to watch yourself fade away like that.”
“It was. But even harder to watch you suffer it. Thank you. I love you.”
“I love you.” She walked slowly out of the room, bent over like a lonely old woman.
“Can I come around and talk with you sometimes?” Gerald sat down in a chair.
“No. I am not Roman Maitland. Get that through your thick skull, Gerald. I am a machine. And my job is finished. Roman didn’t give me any choice about that. And I’m glad. You can write directly on the screen. Write the word ‘zeugma.’ To the screen’s response write atrophy.’ To the second response write ‘fair voyage.’ Goodbye, Gerald.”
Gerald pulled a light pen from the drawer. When he wrote “zeugma” the parchment sheet said, COMMAND TO ERASE MEMORY STORE. ARE YOU SURE?
He wrote “atrophy.”
THIS INITIATES COMPLETE ERASURE. ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN?
He wrote “fair voyage.”
ERASURE INITIATED.
The parchment sheet flickered with internal light. One by one, the indicator lights on the field memories faded out. A distant piece of Mozart played on the speakers and faded also.
“I’ll call the police.” Gerald looked down at his friend’s dead body, then looked back.
On the sheet were the words COMMENCE ENTRY.
The end of my vacation was announced with typical abruptness. I was in the caldarium, the hot pool, at the Baths of Titus, in Rome. The rotunda was lit by the afternoon sun coming through the hole in the center of the dome, and mist clung to the hot water in the pool. I relaxed, feeling nobly Roman, in one of the bathing boxes that surrounded the central water. I had a foreskin, since it would not do to be mistaken for a Jew. The fashion in male appendages varied so much according to time and place that my foreskin was attached by something approximating physiological Velcro. I had spent the day at the Forum, exchanging scandalous rumors with citizens about the Emperor Hadrian and his beloved, the boy Antinoüs, and what creative use they might make of the Apis bulls during their visit to Egypt, a visit that I knew, though my gossip-mongers didn’t, would end in Antinoüs’s death by drowning in the Nile. I had also taken a walk over to look at the continuing reconstruction of the Pantheon, and finished the day in one of the reading rooms of the new Ulpian Library with a few pages from Suetonius’s Lives of Famous Whores, one of the more charming works of group biography that I’ve ever read. I only wished that I was allowed to have a copy made. The water was searingly hot, and I was at peace, looking forward to a dinner party at the house of the irritating but entertaining poet Juvenal.
“Mathias!” a thin reedy voice exclaimed. “How at ease you look, like a chicken being poached. I envy you your serene state, so soon, alas, to end.” I glanced around, but there was no one close enough to hear. There never was, he planned things that way, but I always check. It makes me feel like I have some charge over things.
“Marienbad,” I said. “Are you all right in there?”
“Perfectly, old friend! One branch of my phylum has disported itself for years in the hot waters of Yellowstone. We are a resilient race, remember, quite unlike your sensitive species.”
Marienbad rested on the bottom of the pool of the caldarium. He looked like a flat fish, a ray or something, I’ve never quite figured out what, covered with red-and-green Christmas tree lights, with tentacles around his edge. One of his many eyes rose up on a stalk and examined me.
“Your rest has done you well! Now, let us be on our way.”
“Wait, Marienbad! Can’t you give me just a minute to—”
It was worthless. Once he gets something into that aquatic mind of his, there’s nothing I can do about it. The Baths, with their intricate tiling, statues, and spouting dolphins, disappeared, like a slow fade in a movie. The hot water, unfortunately, disappeared along with it, and I found myself with my bare ass resting in ice water. I jumped up with a shriek, and leaped out of the water onto the twisted roots of some huge coniferous tree. I now shivered on the edge of a clear cold lake. The bright light of day, after the darkness of the Baths, was blinding. I squinted. In the distance, across the water, were what looked like icy peaks gleaming in the sun. A fish broke the water, and a biting wind did its best to freeze me solid.
“Marienbad!” I yelled. “Where the hell am I? Why do you do this to me?”
There was a stirring in the water beneath the roots, and Marienbad appeared on the sand, about three feet below the surface. “Is it not beautiful? This is what your geologists have called Lake Athabasca, someday to become Lake Michigan. The glaciers have retreated, but the escape of meltwaters is blocked to the south by the terminal moraine. Excuse me a moment.” He vanished into the deeper water.
I looked toward what I had thought were mountains: a mile-high continental ice sheet. Marienbad had dropped me in the middle of the Würm glaciation totally naked. So there was a wormhole between Rome in 130 CE and northern Illinois in 10,000 BCE. The memory modifications I had gotten from my employment by Marienbad made sure that I would remember that fact, along with everything else, including the other two thousand or so wormholes already in my memory. The space-time matrix around Earth was so lousy with them that the more I learned about them the more surprised I was that anyone managed to stay in his own time and place for more than a couple of days. I wrapped my arms around myself and curled into a ball. It didn’t help. The wind sliced through me like a cleaver through calfs liver.
Marienbad reappeared, a wriggling fish in his tentacles. He proceeded to bite its head off. “Ah, delicious. Are you more alert now, old friend?”
“Alert?” I talked through chattering teeth. “In a very few moments, I will be dead.”
“Mathias, you are forever difficult, and have no faith in me. Did I not hire you from your tedious archivist’s post and give you the run of the centuries? Do I not defend your interests at all times, keeping various of my colleagues from eating you, or stuffing you for their collections? Do I not—”
“Get to the point, dammit!” I screamed.
“All right, all right. Behind the tree, with the rucksack. No faith. He has no faith.”
I crawled around to the oth
er side of the tree, my limbs already numb. Piled over the rucksack was a huge fur robe, large enough for the Jolly Green Giant, with the fur on the inside. I crawled in, wrapped it tightly around me, and just lay there for about ten minutes, shaking desperately, until I felt warm again. I poked my head out. One of Marienbad’s eyes was looking at me. “Are you now prepared for converse?” he said, in a coldly annoyed voice.
“Yes. Now that I have at least some chance of surviving to the end of the conversation, we can talk.” I looked at the fur I had wrapped around me and wondered what manner of beast it had come from. It was very rough. A giant ground sloth? A saber-toothed cat? Maybe a young woolly mammoth. I didn’t even want to think about what manner of being that huge robe had been made for. The different millennia of Earth’s history, as I had gradually found out during the course of my employment with Marienbad, played host to some four dozen species of aliens from all the planets of the galaxy, and most of them were quite unpleasant.
“I have a job for you, Mathias Pomeranz.” I hate it when he uses my full name. That means that he is acting in his official capacity as my superior officer in the Transtemporal Constabulary. “I must use your remarkable skills to track down a desperate criminal. His name is Kinbarn, and his place of origin is a planet that circles the star you know as Deneb.”
“What has he done?”
“He is a dangerous addict, with a most reprehensible stimulation habit.”
“And what might that be?”
“Religious revelation. Extreme caution is advised.”
❖
I slogged up the mud hill with the rest of the pilgrims. It was raining. It always rains in the Île de France during April, even in 1227 CE. That’s what makes it so green in May. But it wasn’t May. It was April. My felt hat was soaked through, and my cloak was about to be. My feet sloshed in my shoes, which in turn sucked in and out of the mud with every step. I occasionally lost a shoe in the mud and had to go back for it. The wet wood of my staff was rubbing my hands raw. My vacation was over, and I was back at work.
By evening the rain had stopped, and we had reached the town of Chartres. The towers of the cathedral caught the last rays of the sunset. It was the hour of Vespers, and from within came the sound of plainsong, and the bells rang out over the countryside. We made it in for the chanting of the Magnificat. The cathedral was dramatic in the dying light of the late afternoon as the torches were being lit, but we were herded out rather briskly once the altar had been censed and the service was over. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims like us were treated basically as tourists with no money, the lowest of the low. We would have to wait until tomorrow to see anything.
The Breath of Suspension Page 9