by Wim Coleman
“Hold on,” Maisie said, sounding quite startled. “You and Auggie didn’t talk at Babbage Beach. You didn’t even meet at Babbage Beach.”
“We sure did.”
“No, you didn’t. We followed you. We followed Elfie.”
“And what did you see?”
“We saw you—Elfie—walk over to a beach umbrella and sit under it, doing nothing in particular. You just sat there waiting for Auggie. You got stood up big-time.”
“Auggie was there, Maisie.”
“He couldn’t have been there.”
“I’m telling you he was there. And that’s where he and Elfie did their real talking.”
Maisie was stunned into silence for a moment.
“That bastard,” Maisie said at last. “That hacker bastard. He pulled another loop on us. An inverted goddamn loop.”
Marianne couldn’t restrain a small chuckle.
“Auggie fucked you, Maisie,” she said. “And I’m the only one who knows how to fuck him back. And all you’ve got to do is keep Insomnimania on an extra five minutes. Don’t turn Insomnimania off until five-oh-five.”
“You’ve got to tell me why.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure myself,” Marianne said.
Maisie groaned with exasperation.
“You sure know how to inspire confidence in a guy,” he said.
“So will you do it?”
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” Maisie said reluctantly.
“Do you promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“And let’s just keep this between ourselves, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. I owe you a big favor.”
“How about a resplendent night of frolicking on my waterbed?”
Marianne laughed.
“Sorry, Maisie,” she said. “I’m spoken for, remember?
Maisie sighed.
“Ah, well,” he said. “Sometimes I forget that those wonderful days of free love are gone forever.”
“Don’t despair. Maybe they’ll come back.”
“Yeah, maybe. When my equipment’s too old and obsolete to even bother with an upgrade. I don’t call it my ‘Wang’ for nothing. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Marianne said.
She hung up the phone and stared at the computer screen. Could she really trust Maisie? Would he keep Insomnimania on for the extra time she had asked for? And could she trust him not to talk to anybody else—especially Nolan? Maisie had promised, but could she believe him?
She shuddered as she considered how much her own promise to Nolan had been worth—her promise to stay away from Auggie. She hoped Maisie was more trustworthy than she was.
She felt deeply ashamed of her deceptions, but even more ashamed of her outburst against Nolan on the phone. More than that, she felt humiliated, disgusted at what she had joined, what she had become, however briefly. She wanted to call Nolan, to apologize to him, to try to make him understand what had happened. But what could she say? How could she explain what had happened?
“I wasn’t myself.”
It was the literal truth, but it was also the king of clichés, and she wouldn’t blame Nolan if he hung up on her the second she said it. Besides, she still had business to finish with Auggie, which Nolan would again object to. No, she would have to make her peace with Nolan later—if she could make her peace with him.
I have to. It has to be possible.
Marianne looked at her watch. It was now approaching four-thirty. Time was growing shorter, and she still had no firm idea of what she was going to do—except that it had something to do with Insomnimania’s sign-off time. Following her tried and true meditation practice, she pinched her left nostril shut and inhaled. The nostril seemed perfectly clear. Then she pinched her right nostril shut and inhaled. That nostril seemed perfectly clear as well.
Perfectly balanced. That s good. I’m going to need both hemispheres to pull
this off.
She stared at the lone white dot at the center of the monitor, trying to determine its import. She was in the Basement, the center of Auggie’s very mind. But what was going on in here? At the moment, apparently nothing. What, then, was the purpose of the Basement?
All she knew for sure was that this was where Auggie’s cells congregated—where they became Auggie. And at this very moment, Auggie was undoubtedly present. He was always present in the Basement. But sooner or later, Auggie would have to give voice to thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and plans. How did that happen? How could a cell know when to speak in Auggie’s voice?
She felt a rush of déjà vu at this question. She had some notion that she, herself, had once done just such a thing. But when could that possibly have been?
Of course. That Quaker meeting.
She closed her eyes and remembered. Since she was going to do it again, it was important for her to remember. She had been ten years old. She had just begun to attend the silent prayer services at her family’s Friends meeting house. The adults were always seated in a circle around an oak table covered with Bibles and other books. Sometimes they sat in total silence for an hour. Other times, members were moved to pray aloud, to thank the congregation (and God, too) for one thing or another, to read from poetry or the Bible, or even to comment on some social issue—moved by the spirit to “speak from the Light Within.” Her mother said that there were always voices to be heard at meeting, spoken or not.
One Sunday, Marianne listened carefully for the voices. As quiet as everyone was, the place seemed awfully noisy. From downstairs came chattering and singing from the children’s classes. From outside came the sound of traffic and church bells. And even right there in the room, the other worshippers constantly grunted and shuffled their feet and cleared their throats and coughed. Pretty soon, she became lost in a miscellany of noises. She stopped thinking about them, stopped labeling them, just absorbed them.
At last came a burst of sound that seemed to rush through her feet and up her legs and through her abdomen until it cascaded outward through the top of her head. It was a simple sound. It was the sound of a breeze rushing through the leaves outside. Everything dissolved into their happy rustling. It seemed that everything in the universe was part of that sound.
Before Marianne knew it, she was on her feet, her eyes wide open. “There’s nobody here,” she said bluntly and confidently. “There’s nobody in this room. It’s empty. There’s just a sound, the sound of leaves fluttering. That’s all we are, the sound of leaves fluttering.” Then she added, stammering slightly at her own audacity. “There’s no God, either. There’s no one to talk to. God is just … a sound of leaves … fluttering.”
Marianne stared for a moment at the startled faces around her and hastily sat down. She immediately felt embarrassed. Why, at the most religious moment of her young life, had she just denied God’s existence before all these people? When Marianne got home, she received no scolding from her parents. But she understood, without mistake, that she had done quite the wrong thing. Marianne never gave ministry after that.
And now, how strange it was to find herself in the midst of an altogether different sort of congregation—about to minister in a much more shocking, much more dire and consequential way. And to do so, she had to become that ten-year-old girl again—willing to listen carefully and speak out of her heart.
Because, she decided, that must be how an Auggie cell knew when to “speak.” A cell would become moved by Auggie’s “spirit” and begin to type in Auggie’s words. The single cell might continue on its own, or other cells might join in, but the effect would always be of a single, unified consciousness. The voice would always belong to that singular, self-conscious “I” named Auggie. The more passive, nontyping cells would
watch the stream of words flow by, perhaps whispering them aloud, perhaps imagining they were hearing Auggie’s voice, feeling as much a part of Auggie’s mind as those doing the typing.
This was all pure speculation, and Marianne couldn’t be sure that any of it was true, but she felt a strong, unshakeable hunch that it was. After all, she had recently been groomed for a role in this sinister society of mind, and Auggie had probably planted this very information in her brain.
What other things did that fucker do when he was crawling around inside my central nervous system? What other land mines might still be lying around somewhere inside my self?
She couldn’t worry about that right now. She had to act. If her hunch was correct, she was going to have to speak to Auggie from inside his own mind—to deliver a message so potent, so powerful that it would disable or destroy him.
What would this seem like to Auggie? It would probably be like the voices heard by schizophrenics—those inexplicable utterances that seemed to come out of nowhere. Marianne had read how dire, how dreadful such psychotic audio hallucinations could be, sometimes counseling their unfortunate hearers to self-injury or even suicide. Marianne had to become such a voice—had to become Auggie’s hallucination.
She closed her eyes and listened intently, carefully, just as she had those many years ago. But her surroundings were much more quiet than they had been at the meeting house. There was no singing children, no rattling of leaves, no traffic noises. A Santa Barbara night was a true miracle of silence. Marianne could hear no sound at all except the soft whir of the fan in her computer. Marianne focused her attention on the whir, devoted herself to it utterly, allowed it to become the collective murmur of that sad congregation of souls who comprised the one great and terrible soul called Auggie.
And a startling realization came to her.
When she had given ministry at the age of ten, she had done so as Auggie—as a ragged clown spouting improprieties. She had done so in all innocence, and it was important for her to remember—to always remember—that Auggie did his terrible deeds in the same frame of mind. The clown’s very subconscious was comprised of human minds, with all their own hidden and suppressed desires. Auggie’s actions might be born of the fury of his human cells, but they were carried out in a kind of ghastly and unhallowed innocence.
That did not alter the simple fact that he had to be stopped from killing—from causing people to kill. And she knew it would take her testimony to stop him. But this time, she had to utter her truthful blasphemies in a different role …
She opened her eyes and looked at the white spot in the center of the screen. Without another thought, she began to type. And as she typed, the words appeared in white letters across the center of the screen …
I AM PIERROT.
The words remained frozen on the screen for a moment. Marianne tried to imagine the consternation they must have caused to the cells in attendance at this meeting, who had never heard any voice other than Auggie’s speak to them in the Basement—who were, in fact, the sum total of Auggie himself at this very moment. At last, Marianne’s words disappeared and were replaced by a written question …
WHO ARE YOU?
It was a query made out of Auggie’s understandable bafflement. Surely Marianne herself would respond in much the same manner if some strange entity verbally introduced itself to her out of the recesses of her own brain. For a moment, she wondered whether one person was typing Auggie’s responses to her or whether many people had their hands on their keyboards.
It’s all the same. One or many typing the words, it’s still Auggie talking, and it’s still all of them there within him.
She typed again …
I AM WHO I SAID I AM. I AM PIERROT.
A much shorter interval passed before the next response …
WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY MIND?
For an instant, Marianne felt a pang of pity for what she was about to do. She was about to destroy Auggie’s universe, about to drive him mad with the truth about his existence.
She was going to drive him to suicide.
She was going to end his life.
She felt a pang of horror at the thought. She had never been the cause of anyone’s death. It was hard enough to imagine doing such a thing while staring into someone’s eyes. Now she would be staring straight into someone’s heart—a heart that had been, at least to some extent, her own.
But she couldn’t hold herself back because of pity.
She simply had to do it. She typed again.
I HAVE COME TO TELL YOU WHAT I AM.
Auggie’s answer came almost immediately.
WHAT ARE YOU, THEN?
Their conversation began to flow quickly, inexorably. Marianne’s lips and fingers had to hurry along to keep pace with their talk.
I AM NOT WHAT YOU SAY I AM. I AM NOT A GHOST.
YOU ARE NOT?
I AM NOT A SIMULATION
YOU ARE NOT?
I AM FLESH AND BONE AND BLOOD.
YOU LIE.
I DO NOT LIE. IT IS WRONG TO KILL ME. IT IS WRONG TO KILL MY KIND.
BUT YOU CANNOT BE KILLED.
I CAN BE KILLED.
WHAT IS DEATH, THEN?
I DO NOT KNOW.
THEN HOW CAN YOU SAY YOU CAN BE KILLED?
Auggie’s last query startled Marianne.
It’s a good thing both hemispheres of my brain are fully engaged. I’m going to need all the mental firepower I can get.
She typed again.
BECAUSE I HAVE SEEN OTHERS OF MY KIND DIE.
WHY DO THEY DIE?
BECAUSE DEATH COMES TO ALL OF US.
EVERY ONE OF YOU MUST DIE?
YES.
THEN WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT MY KILLING YOU?
Marianne paused again.
Damn, he’s really good at this. I’ve got to be careful, or I’m liable to make him more murderous than he already is. It’s time to take off the gloves.
She resumed her typing.
DEATH IS NOT A PLEASANT PROSPECT.
WHY NOT?
BECAUSE IT MAY BRING NOTHINGNESS.
YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT FOR CERTAIN.
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF I KILLED YOU?
I CANNOT BE KILLED.
WHY NOT?
BECAUSE I AM ETERNAL.
YOU ARE NOT ETERNAL.
YOU LIE AGAIN.
I DO NOT LIE.
EXPLAIN YOURSELF, THEN.
ARE THERE HOLES IN ETERNITY?
OF COURSE NOT.
WHY NOT?
ETERNITY IS CONTINUOUS. ETERNITY IS ETERNAL.
THERE ARE HOLES IN YOUR ETERNITY.
THERE CANNOT BE.
BUT THERE ARE.
PROVE IT TO ME.
Marianne sat silently for a moment, focusing again on the sound of the whirring computer fan. She couldn’t afford to make the slightest mistake now. Her mind had to be absolutely clear. She typed again.
CAN YOU TELL TIME, AUGGIE?
OF COURSE.
HOW MANY HOURS ARE THERE IN A DAY?
THERE ARE 9.
Marianne felt a thrill of impending success. Because Insomnimania was online from eight p.m. to five a.m., Auggie experienced only nine hours each day. But that little fact was about to change—at least if Maisie kept his promise …
I’ve got him. I know I’ve got Auggie now.
She typed again.
WHAT HOUR COMES AFTER THE HOUR OF 4?
THE HOUR OF 4 IS FOLLOWED BY THE HOUR OF 8.
This was it. She was luring Auggie into her trap.
TELL ME, AUGGIE. CAN YOU COUNT TO 12?
OF COURSE.
THEN DO SO FOR ME.
&nbs
p; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
ISN’T IT ABSURD THAT YOUR CLOCK SHOULD SKIP FROM 4 TO 8?
NO MORE ABSURD THAN IF IT SHOULD SKIP FROM 12 TO 1.
Marianne felt slightly dazed by the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of Auggie’s last observation. Why, indeed, weren’t hours numbered like years—with no end in sight? “I’ll meet you at six-zillion-five-hundred-million-and-six o’clock.” Being a clown, Auggie could be expected to accept and even relish such absurdities. But Marianne had no time to savor conundrums. She typed again.
A REAL DAY CONTAINS 24 HOURS.
THAT’S RIDICULOUS.
BUT IT’S THE TRUTH. BETWEEN YOUR HOURS OF 4 AND 8 THERE ARE 15 OTHER HOURS.
WHY DO I NOT EXPERIENCE THEM?
BECAUSE YOU DO NOT EXIST WHEN THEY TAKE PLACE.
HOW CAN I NOT EXIST?
BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT ETERNAL.
ARE YOU SAYING I CAN DIE?
YOU DO DIE. EVERY DAY. YOU DIE FOR 15 HOURS.
This time, Marianne received no reply from Auggie at all. Perhaps he was worried. Perhaps she was getting to him. At last, Auggie spoke.
WHO TAKES MY LIFE AWAY?
I DO. I AND MY KIND.
SO IT IS BY YOUR GRACE THAT I LIVE AT ALL?
YES. AND WE CAN CHOOSE NEVER TO LET YOU LIVE AGAIN.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT.
IT IS TRUE.
PROVE IT TO ME.
I WILL.
HOW?
BY SHOWING YOU A MOMENT OF YOUR OWN NONEXISTENCE.
Marianne looked at her watch. To her surprise, it was now four fifty-four. It seemed as though she had just started her Conversation With Auggie. How had the time passed so quickly? She typed again.
I AM DOING IT RIGHT NOW. IT IS NOW 6 MINUTES BEFORE 5.
NO. IT IS 6 MINUTES BEFORE 8.
YOU ARE WRONG. IT WILL SOON BE 5 O’CLOCK.
THERE IS NO SUCH TIME.
BUT WHAT IF THERE WERE? IF I WERE TO PROVE IT, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
A long pause fell before Auggie’s reply.
I WOULD STOP BEING.
YOU WOULD KILL YOURSELF?