Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

You are exhilarated.

  You are drunken.

  You are alive.

  *

  It was after three o’clock in the morning when Nolan got home from the Insomnimania office. He and his four companions had decided to give up speculating about Auggie before their hypotheses lapsed into pure science fiction—if, indeed, they had not already crossed that line. Everybody was completely exhausted, and no further progress could be made until Pritchard figured out how to hack his way into Auggie’s elusive “Basement.”

  But despite his exhaustion, Nolan was not yet ready to collapse into bed. He had one last matter to attend to—one that he had been impatient to take care of for hours now.

  As he picked up the telephone to dial Marianne’s number, he felt his hands shake and his heart pound—he wasn’t sure whether from anger or fear. He listened anxiously as Marianne’s phone began to ring, wondering what to do if he got her answering machine. Should he hang up, or should he vent his feelings into the tape recorder? He hoped she would pick up. It would make things simpler if she picked up—though probably not a whole lot more pleasant.

  The phone rang once, then twice, then a third time. Nolan knew that the answering machine would pick up after the fourth ring. But the fourth ring never came. Nolan heard Marianne’s voice. She sounded barely awake.

  “Hello?” Marianne asked groggily.

  “Did I catch you asleep?” Nolan said, unable to keep an edge of indignation out of his voice.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s three fifteen in the morning, that’s what time it is,” Nolan said, pacing the room. “So did I catch you asleep or didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Marianne said wearily. “You caught me asleep.”

  “Good,” Nolan growled. “I’m glad. I’m goddamn thrilled. It’s the least I could do after the way you’ve been messing with my head.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw you tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “On Insomnimania. Talking to Auggie. All of us saw you.”

  “‘All of us’?” Who the hell’s ‘all of us’?”

  “Pritchard, Maisie, Clayton, Gusfield—all of us. We watched what happened. We listened.”

  “Well, thank you so very much for respecting my privacy,” Marianne said, sounding more awake now—and more than a little angry.

  “And thank you very much for lying to me!” Nolan retorted, pacing the floor in growing agitation.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about when you promised to stay the hell away from Insomnimania, away from Auggie.

  “It wasn’t any of your business to begin with.”

  “It wasn’t? Well, fine. Why didn’t you say so right at the start?”

  Nolan hated to hear himself sounding like this. He reminded himself that he had really been more frightened than angry. He didn’t want to be angry. He took a deep breath and spoke more gently.

  “Marianne, the guys and I talked about this thing for hours on end tonight. And we came to some pretty incredible conclusions. And we’re starting to realize how dangerous Auggie really is—much more dangerous than any of us ever even imagined. Don’t you understand how worried I am for your safety? Don’t you understand how much it scared me to see you in there with that goddamn clown? Don’t you know how much I love you?”

  Suddenly, Nolan was shaken by the sound of Marianne’s laughter. The sound was cold, heartless, barely even human.

  “You love me?” she said. “And who, Nolan, do you mean by me? Some Santa Barbara fashion plate, maybe—some classy dame you can brag about to your cop friends? Or perhaps that bosomy, oversexed little elf you helped create for the infoworld? Which ‘me’ do you ‘love’? Marianne or Elfie? And which of those ‘me’s’ do you honestly think is more real?”

  Marianne was nearly shouting now. The cell phone felt heavy in Nolan’s trembling hand—almost too heavy to hold.

  “And who, Nolan, did you see in Insomnimania tonight?” Marianne raged on. “You didn’t see Marianne, did you? That’s because your precious Marianne wasn’t there. That’s because your precious Marianne isn’t anywhere. Your precious Marianne doesn’t even exist. She’s just a ghost, a simulation, a product of your immature, adolescent, sexually stunted little mind. Grow up, Nolan. Grow up and get a life.”

  Nolan was stunned into silence. Neither he nor Marianne spoke for a moment.

  “Go to bed, Nolan,” Marianne said at last. “Go to bed and get a good night’s sleep. But before you do, take a good look at your face in your bathroom mirror. Take a real good look, Nolan. Your face is white. It’s white and characterless with narrow little eyes and lips. It’s the face of a ghost. You’re white all over and you think you know everything and you think you’re in charge of everything. But you’re not. Your whole damned world is racing out of control and you can’t do a fucking thing about it. Think about it, Nolan. Sleep on it and think about it.”

  Marianne hung up. Nolan stood in the middle of his living room, dazed and shocked.

  He snapped his cell phone shut.

  He collapsed into his armchair. He felt a terrible aching in his chest—a pain he knew came from the sheer cruelty of Marianne’s words.

  How could she say such things to me? Why would she say such things to me?

  He felt the tears fill his eyes. And slowly—ever so gradually—he began to weep.

  How long has it been since I’ve cried?

  He could think of no time since Louise was killed. And even then, he had wept more from his awful, horrific bewilderment than from grief. Grief itself had always come to him as a clean, tearless emotion—complete and undeniable, but always tearless. His grief over Louise’s death had been tearless, as had been his grievings over his parents’ deaths. It took profound bewilderment to make Nolan weep.

  For days and even weeks now, he had been terribly confused and frustrated by the seeming omnipotence, the seeming incomprehensibility of Auggie. But the joy of Marianne, his certainty that they were building a caring, lasting relationship, had been his defense against despair. And now it had only taken Marianne’s awful words to turn loose the floodgates of bewilderment.

  “What does it mean?” he whispered to himself. “What on earth does it mean?”

  He ran Marianne’s inscrutable questions and pronouncements through his dazed, despairing brain.

  “Which ‘me’ do you ‘love’?” she had demanded. “Marianne or Elfie? And which of those ‘me’s’ do you honestly think is more real?”

  Then she had said, “Your precious Marianne doesn’t even exist.”

  Then he replayed the strangest declaration of all …

  “You’re white all over and you think you know everything and you think you’re in charge of everything.”

  Slowly and inexorably, a realization began to sweep through Nolan’s mind.

  His tears stopped.

  He began to understand.

  The White Clown. She was describing me as the White Clown.

  Then the truth hit him in a terrifying flash.

  That wasn’t Marianne. That was Auggie. I was talking to Auggie!

  *

  Marianne reached up and haltingly placed her cordless phone back on her desk. Then she collapsed onto the floor again, where she had found herself in a dead sleep when Nolan’s call had come.

  Feeling a terrible pain in her stomach and chest, she curled herself up in a fetal position. She remembered her awful words to Nolan.

  What have I done? What on earth have I done?

  Then she thought that she was not experiencing her own pain at all, but Nolan’s—the pain she had so cruelly and deliberately inflicted upon him. He was the most loving man she had ever known, and she had treated hi
m monstrously.

  Why?

  And how had she wound up on the floor like this? What had happened during the night? She dimly remembered that she—or Elfie—had found Auggie, had experienced some sort of encounter with Auggie, but she couldn’t recall what had taken place between them.

  She fought to remember. She used the pain to bring it back to her mind. It was like rising up through water—rising up from the murky, dark bottom of a deep pool. The light changed slowly, refracted through the water, becoming brighter and brighter as she neared the surface. Marianne used the pain, imagining that it was in her lungs, that it came from being submerged too long without air. She imagined herself rising up out of the murkiness into the radiating light.

  And at last, she surfaced.

  She gasped for breath.

  Her head had broken through into the brilliant blaze of memory.

  She knew what had happened.

  A seduction.

  Yes, that was exactly the word for it. It had been a seduction of the mind, not the body. She had become Auggie. She could remember being Auggie. She could remember every detail of the entire episode. She knew she wasn’t meant to remember—that Auggie intended the whole experience to remain lost in an amnesiac fog. But the pain had brought it hack, had brought her memories bursting to the surface. It was the pain of loving someone dearly and hurting him terribly.

  Auggie had been a superb seducer. He had flattered her. He had described her as a perfect creature. He had assured her that she was capable of love. And, most powerfully of all, he had meant every word of it. Last night, he had made Marianne into one of his parts, into one of his cells.

  But to become a part of Auggie and remain a part of Auggie, one had to hold a loveless void in the deepest recesses of one’s heart. Perhaps even a few short weeks ago, Auggie might have captured and kept her. But no longer. Now she had thrust herself out of her sterile and empty existence. Now she had Nolan.

  Because she loved Nolan, because Nolan loved her, because of the very hurt she had inflicted on him, and because of her own vicarious and visceral experience of Nolan’s hurt—she was free. Auggie had lost Marianne. He had lost her because she had no emotional hollowness for him to fill.

  Marianne pulled herself carefully to her feet and walked toward her computer. She felt fragile and drained of resources, emptied of all her energy. But she knew there was another effort yet to he made, although she was not sure exactly what it was she had to do.

  She sat down at her desk and stared at the slowly mutating patterns of her screen-saver. When she had collapsed, she had been in the Basement—that subterranean realm where Auggie’s cells merged into one. She remembered having been one of those shapeless figures melding together in Auggie’s candlelit dressing room.

  And now, when a touch of her finger made the screen-saver vanish, what would appear? Would she find herself in the Basement again? Was she in any danger of being dragged back into Auggie’s mind again, if only temporarily?

  “Fat chance,” she murmured defiantly.

  She shoved the computer mouse. But instead of the Basement, Insomnimania’s desktop maze appeared, displaying the way to Babbage Beach and the Speakers’ Corner and Casino del Camino.

  “Damn,” Marianne whispered. “Where’s the Basement? Where the hell did it go?”

  Then she remembered Auggie’s command to Elfie, his instruction to murmur in unison with him …

  “The words that will bring us together.”

  Without another thought, Marianne typed the words …

  “Auggie is Auggie”

  … and struck the return key.

  The desktop maze disappeared into a blaze of glaring whiteness. The whiteness filled the screen for a moment, then shrank into a horizontal line across the middle of the screen. Then the line collapsed into a little white dot in the center of a surrounding blackness.

  Just like an old TV screen. Marianne remembered how televisions used to look when they were turned off—a single white speck of white light burning in the middle of the screen for a few seconds afterward.

  But this speck of light didn’t disappear. It hung there in the center of the screen, suggestively, hauntingly. When Elfie had fallen out of Babbage Beach into this darkness, she had supposed this light to be the end of a deep, dark tunnel.

  And what of the underground catacombs, Auggie’s dressing room, the door leading to a stage wildly draped with dangling scenery and marionettes? They must have been only suggestions—perhaps written across the screen, but more probably spoken to Marianne over her computer speaker.

  Marianne felt an awestricken chill.

  I am here. I am in Auggie’s Basement. I am inside Auggie’s mind.

  And with a deeper chill, she realized she was not alone. The Basement was filled with other silent souls, Auggie’s cells, scattered across the entire nation. How many did Auggie hold enraptured? A handful? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? More? She had no way of knowing.

  But she knew that a man in Omaha had killed for Auggie, as Auggie—a man doubtless not normally a killer. And in actuality, the man himself wasn’t a killer even after the killing, not even after his hands had held a gun and fired a fatal shot. And somewhere, probably not so far away, was the woman whose hands had held Renee beneath the water—but the woman herself had killed no one at all. In Marianne’s mind, the woman in the silver dress turned and opened her red lips as if to speak.

  Perhaps the woman wanted to say, “It wasn’t me. It was Auggie.”

  But she vanished before she could utter the words.

  For the first time, Marianne felt sympathy for that fearful image she had so often imagined. What kind of unremembered nightmares did that woman have—did all those other people have? Had her unheard words been a plea for help?

  Or were their lives such nightmares that they had abandoned their own selves to participate in something larger? Marianne shuddered as she remembered how close she had been to joining them.

  More likely, they live the lives of sleepwalkers. Their unexpressed rage finds its way to Auggie. They do not act out their anger. The action belongs to Auggie. And the more of them there are, the more violence he can do.

  But how could this be? Marianne had spoken with Auggie, had gotten to know him intimately, had almost become him, but through it all she sensed no real anger, no real aggression about him.

  “We are perfect creatures, you and I,” Auggie had told her.

  Perhaps it was true in its way, but it was also the philosophy of a child. For indeed, Auggie was a child—a child who saw his own outbursts as a harmless game. But what if a child were a giant among insects? Such a child’s rage would he destructive, however playful it might seem.

  Marianne knew that she, alone among all of Auggie’s confidantes, was not a part of his mind. She was an unhypnotized invader. And somehow it was now within her power to stop Auggie once and for all.

  It was in her power to kill him.

  As she searched her mind for the final key to the puzzle, she remembered Auggie’s insistent, arrogant, but at the same time bitterly lonely litany …

  “I’m eternal,” he had said.

  Marianne glanced at her watch. It was now approaching four o’clock. In another hour, Insomnimania would go off for the night. And when Insomnimania went off, so would the Basement.

  Insomnimania begins at eight o’clock at night and ends at five o’clock in the morning.

  Vaguely and instinctively, Marianne knew that Insomnimania’s oddly elitist insistence on keeping such eccentric hours held the key to Auggie’s undoing.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Insomnimania office. Maisie answered the phone. To Marianne’s surprise, Maisie didn’t sound particularly tired—just his usual, slightly stoned-out self.

  “H
i, Maisie,” she said. “It’s Marianne. I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  “Naw,” Maisie said. “I don’t sleep.”

  “Never?”

  “Not for the last twenty years or so. Just kind of lost the habit, somehow.”

  “I thought people died if they never slept.”

  “Maybe they do, and maybe I did. Maybe I’m a vampire. So what can I do for you?”

  “Listen, does Insomnimania have to go off-line right at five o’clock?”

  “It is company policy, yeah.”

  “Does it always go off exactly at five?”

  “We’re fastidious about it. The way the VAX is programmed, it gets to four-fifty-nine and fifty-nine seconds, then zap, it’s gone.”

  “I need you to make an exception tonight.”

  “What kind of exception are we talking here?”

  “Keep Insomnimania on for another five minutes.”

  A silence fell over the phone line.

  “You’re up to something, aren’t you?” Maisie asked uneasily.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Marianne replied.

  “Listen, lady, take my advice and don’t try anything heroic,” Maisie grumbled. “You’re in big-shit trouble with your boyfriend as it is, and I don’t want to get you into any more trouble. I don’t want to get myself in any trouble, either. We saw you in Insomnimania tonight. We saw you and Auggie.”

  “You mean you saw Elfie and Auggie.”

  “Yeah, well, same difference. Nolan’s plenty pissed with you.”

  Then a startling possibility crossed Marianne’s mind. Did the men at Insomnimania know as much about her seduction as she did? Had they followed her into the Basement itself? And if so, had they already taken some sort of action against Auggie?

  “So you listened in,” Marianne said.

  “Hey, it wasn’t my idea. The others ganged up on me.”

  “You heard everything Elfie and Auggie said to each other in Ernie’s Bar.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you heard everything they said to each other on Babbage Beach, too.”