She stopped at the light before the freeway. The man in the car next to her had his radio turned up loud and she listened to it eagerly, forgetting her tiredness. A song came to an end, loud and discordant. The announcer gave the title and then another voice came on. “They came from beyond the stars,” the voice said, “and Earth trembled beneath their rule.”
Who were they talking about? She watched the light anxiously, hoping that it wouldn’t turn green. Were they talking about a movie? If it was a movie, she knew, then it wasn’t real. But if it was real … “Coming to a theater near you!” the radio blared. The light changed and the car sped away.
It was a movie then. But suppose there were people … people from the stars … “Turn left on to the freeway and then push the button.” Dammit. She had almost forgotten and gone straight, eager to follow the car with the radio. She turned left and went home.
At home the voice told her to make a hamburger, and after dinner directed her to the half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. She wondered if the voice liked jigsaw puzzles because the instructions for the night never varied: “Find the next piece and push the button.” This was the third puzzle she had done. The cover showed an open tin filled with different colored jelly beans. Before the jigsaw puzzles the voice had told her to embroider. Once it had directed her to buy a woodworking set, but the set had been so hard she had collapsed in tears. The voice’s even, mechanical tone had started to sound sadistic. The next evening the voice told her to embroider. It had never mentioned the woodworking set again and she had thrown it out stealthily, piece by piece.
The puzzles were relaxing, like alphabetizing. She started to think about the commercial on the radio again. Suppose the voice had come from the stars, suppose people from the stars had taken her over, and others, and were about to … to … She couldn’t think what. Or maybe she was from the stars, sent here to observe and report back about life on Earth. Only she didn’t have the faintest idea what life on Earth was like.
She started to pick up a piece and then stopped. Could people live on the stars? There were probably books about it, but she couldn’t afford a book. The voice kept careful track of her money. She stood and went to the window and back to the coffee table. The night was hot and she was strangely restless. The commercial had given her a new idea, her first new idea in a long time.
Finally she walked to the door and went outside. Behind her the voice said, “Find the next piece and push the button,” but she ignored it. She looked up. Bright stars swam across the vast sky, a splendid and infinite array. She had never seen anything so beautiful, so much of a contrast to the finite, precisely-measured instructions of the voice. Her throat hurt to look at it. Finally after a long time she looked away.
A young man stood in front of the apartment next to hers, watching her. In the light from his apartment she could see that he was smiling. For a confused moment she wondered if she wanted to kiss him. Then he said, “It’s really somethin’, isn’t it?”
She didn’t understand what he meant. Of course it was something. Everything was something. What a stupid thing to say. She nodded, flustered, and went back to her apartment. The jigsaw puzzle was waiting, and she sat down to it with relief.
The next day there was a check for her on the desk at the office. She looked at it carefully, as she had looked at the ten or twelve checks she had gotten over the year at the office, though they never varied. “Pay to the order of Vivian Stearns,” the check said. Was that her name? Did most people have two names like that, or only one, or three or four? The woman at the supermarket, for example, had a nametag that said her name was Ruby.
She was glad to get the check because it meant the voice would let her off early to cash it. She typed for the rest of the morning and went to the cafeteria for lunch. “Hot, isn’t it?” the woman behind the counter said. Vivian hesitated a long moment and then said, “It’s really something.” The woman nodded and gave her her tuna fish sandwich.
She went back to work feeling almost gleeful. So that was what the man last night had meant! She should have said, “Yeah, it really is,” and then they could have had a long talk about the stars, and she could have asked him whether people lived on them, and then she could have invited him to her apartment—No, the voice was there. Well, maybe he would have invited her to his apartment, and she would have found out if he had a voice too.
She was sitting down to the afternoon’s work—stamping papers—when she remembered the relief she felt last night back in her apartment. Why had she been so anxious to get away from him? A thought came to her—a horrible thought—and she said, “Oh, no,” aloud, though she was usually so careful not to say anything the voice might hear. What if she had once had a life like everyone else’s—dancing and movies and vacations—but it had gotten too complicated? What if she had gotten frightened, if she could no longer bear to talk to people because of all the ways they might misunderstand her and she misunderstand them, what if she had gotten more and more frightened, more and more confused, and finally, to simplify everything, she had set up the voice herself? What if she had arranged to work for a company, and to get paid by them, without ever seeing anyone? Her heart was pounding now, and the blood throbbed in her ears so that she could no longer hear the voice. What if there was no bad bargain, no people from the stars—what if she had done it all herself?
The wave of dizziness passed and she heard the voice say, “Stamp the papers on the desk and push the button.” Could that be her voice? She had always thought it was a man’s, but she didn’t know what her voice sounded like. Shaking, she looked at the check again. As usual the signature was illegible. The company name on the check was Aramco, and the address a post office box. Was there a way to find out who they were?
After a few hours the voice told her to leave the office and go to the bank. It was 3:30 by the clock in the car. She was glad to get out of the heat and into the air-conditioned bank. Two people behind her in line were talking quietly. “She said she had a miscarriage but I’ll bet it was an abortion,” one of them said.
“But why?” the other one said. “Why would she do that?”
“To get back at her husband,” said the first one. “Because he had that affair. You remember.”
As usual Vivian listened intently. Was that what had happened to her? A miscarriage, an abortion, a husband who had an affair, a screaming fight, driving off in the night with no destination in mind, crying in the car like that woman she had seen once? Life could be so horrible, so complicated. Would she take it back if she could? Did she really want to know?
When she reached the teller she decided that she did. She cashed the check, asked for a money order to pay her rent, and while the teller was filling out the money order asked, “Do you know—Is there any way to tell who sends me this check? I mean, where it comes from?”
The teller looked at her for a long moment. “Honey, you mean you don’t know?” she said finally.
“I—No, I don’t.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t know who you work for,” the teller said.
Vivian nodded. She wished she hadn’t said anything. Behind her the line stirred impatiently.
“I guess—Hell, I don’t know.” The teller thought a moment. “I guess I would go to this post office here and watch who goes to the box,” she said. “The post office is just around the corner. There’s no way I can tell you who they are—I don’t have access to those records.”
Vivian nodded again. “Thanks,” she said finally. She picked up her cash and the money order and tried not to look as if she were running from the room. The two people next in line were still deep in conversation.
She drove home and, on the voice’s instruction, put the money order in the manager’s mailbox, Box #1. There was a Box #7, corresponding to the number of her apartment, but she had never seen anything in it. She wondered, as she did every month, what would happen if she didn’t pay the rent, if she saved the money until she had en
ough to start over somewhere else, in an apartment without a large black button. Would they evict her? Once on the bus she had seen an advertisement that said, “Evicted? Legal Aid can help.” She had wanted to copy down the phone number but hadn’t dared. And no one else had been paying the slightest attention to the ads; maybe it was wrong somehow.
After dinner she could not concentrate on the jigsaw puzzle. “I guess I would go to this post office here,” the woman at the bank had said. What if she just went? The voice would think she was taking an extraordinarily long time to find the next piece in the puzzle. But so what? She got up, went to the window, went back to the puzzle. The heat of the evening was stifling. She wished she had an air conditioner. Maybe she could take the fan home from the office. No, that was crazy. What was wrong with her? It was no wonder she needed a voice to tell her what to do—she was a freak, filled with wild emotions, not to be trusted to make her own decisions.
“Find the next piece and push the button,” the voice said. And the next piece, and the next, and so on until she died. What right did the voice have? She deserved to know. She would go to the post office, she would confront them, him or her, and … and … And what? She couldn’t think, could only hear the pounding of her heart. After I find this next piece, she thought. No, she thought. Do it now.
Before she could change her mind she picked up her purse and left the apartment. She looked up at the sky, the myriad stars, and felt a little safer. Nothing bad could happen to her beneath that bright canopy. She got in the car and turned the key.
When she heard the voice she thought she would die. It was true, then: the voice watched her at every moment, knew exactly what she was up to. She waited for her punishment. The voice repeated three times before she heard the words. “Go to Main Street and push the button,” it said. The voice thought it was morning! She felt silly with relief. The voice thought it was morning and was sending her to the supermarket. The voice was stupid, stupider than she’d ever hoped. Escape was easy. Why hadn’t she done this before?
She drove away from the curb before she realized the voice wasn’t going to tell her what to do next. She had to figure out her own itinerary. She thought of all the streets in the city, most of which she had never seen, separating and coming together in a great maze. What if she just drove away, threading through the city endlessly, timing herself by the dashboard clock to return in an hour? What if she got lost? The thought made her giddy. Then she remembered her determination. She thought she could find the way to the bank, and the post office, the woman at the bank had said, was just around the corner.
The city looked strange at night, different, as though it had another life. Two cars flashed their lights at her, on and off, on and off, before she realized she hadn’t turned the car’s lights on. She missed two turns and had to backtrack, once for fifteen minutes, spellbound by the dark night and the lights of the city, like stars scattered on Earth.
The post office was dark when she finally found it. No, she thought, despairing. I didn’t know. It’s not fair. She got out of the car to make sure. The post office was closed. She peered through the window, trying to see something in the gloom, then read the hours painted on the glass door, 9-5 Monday through Friday, 9-12 Saturday.
That teller must be crazy, she thought. How could I watch the post office during the day, every day this week? Doesn’t she think I work? She went back to the car and sat for a long time. She felt frustrated, blocked at every turn. The voice was far too clever for her. So what if she had escaped it for a night? The voice would have her back. She was still a prisoner.
The depression came on her again, and this time she couldn’t stop it by following the voice’s instructions. She started the car and headed home. “Go to Main Street and push the button,” the voice said. Shut up, she thought. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
The man from the apartment next door was outside again when she drove up. “Hi,” he said when she got out of the car.
“Hi,” she said.
“This heat is amazing, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. He seemed to want more from her. “It’s really something,” she said.
“You know, on nights like this I just want to get away,” he said. “Just get into my car and drive. You know what I mean?”
She stared at him. He had said exactly what she was thinking. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I know.”
“Where would you go?” he said. “If you could. Anywhere at all.”
That was a hard one. She only knew the city, and the names of a few other cities she had seen while typing addresses. But which one should she say? Maybe a city from a billboard. She didn’t want him to think she was stupid. He already thinks you’re stupid, she thought. Most people don’t take this long answering a simple question. Look at the expression on his face. She thought of their conversation last night and said finally, looking at the stars, “Up there?”
He laughed. “I’m with you,” he said. “I’m Russ, by the way. Your new neighbor. And you?”
“Vivian,” she said, since he had given only one name. Maybe he only had one.
“Okay, Vivian,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”
“Bye,” she said. She went into her apartment. “Find the next piece and push the button,” the voice said immediately. She closed the door quickly, hoping he hadn’t heard.
The voice got her to bed at eleven and then stopped. From eleven to seven in the morning was her time, time to think lazily and to dream. She usually fell asleep after about fifteen minutes. Tonight she wondered if she would sleep at all.
Lying there in the dark she called up a picture of Russ. Did he think she was good-looking? She had only one mirror, a small hand-held one, and what she had seen in it was discouraging. She was too pale, especially in comparison with the women on the billboards, and there was something else wrong with her face—it was too square, maybe, or too angular. The voice had never let her buy the advertised cosmetics and she didn’t know what to do with them if it had.
He had liked her answer, though. What had he said? I’m going too. No, he’d said, I’m with you. She sat upright in bed as a new idea came to her. What if he had meant just that, that he was with her? What if he was from the stars, from the stars like she was, and he had come to take her home? In that case she had said exactly the right thing. But when would he take her? Tomorrow, maybe, or the next day. She saw a group of people on a large ship, standing and talking and laughing, and one of them saying, “But what are they like? What are people on Earth like?” And she would laugh and say, “They’re so strange. You wouldn’t believe it. They have expressions like, ‘It’s really something.’ I mean, what does that mean?”
But the man—Russ—had taught her that expression. So he couldn’t be from the stars, could he? She had invented the whole thing, and only because—because she didn’t want to think about her other new theory. That she had set up the voice. That she was jailer and prisoner both. And that—even more terrifying—if she had set it up she could stop it. There was nothing to prevent her from never following the voice’s commands again.
She drifted toward sleep. “I’m with you,” the man had said. “I just want to get away. Just get into my car and drive … Where would you go?”
She awoke the next day feeling profoundly different. I did it, she thought. Last night. I really did it. I got away. When the voice told her to wear her brown suit she put on her red dress instead and pushed the button. The voice calmly went on to the next instruction. She cooked her egg for five minutes instead of three. I can do it, she thought. Look, I’m doing it.
She felt dizzy with freedom. I’m going to go, she thought. I’m going to escape. Today. She had to stop, to rest her head on the coffee table, before the trembling would go away. Maybe last night Russ had given her a message from the people who lived on the stars. Just get away, he’d said. It was a little like the voice’s instructions, but not as specific. And probably Russ is just some guy who’s moved n
ext door, she thought, but I need to believe he’s giving me instructions. Just for now. I don’t know if I can make it on my own.
She stepped outside. I can go anywhere, she thought. At the thought she nearly turned and went back inside the apartment, but she forced herself to go on. When she passed Russ’s apartment she wanted to stop, to knock on his door and see if he had more instructions for her, something more specific. Instead she went to the car and got in.
“Go to Main Street and push the button,” the voice said as she started the car. She laughed out loud. She had known the voice was going to say that, but the voice hadn’t known that she knew it. The voice was stupid, stupider than she was.
She turned the car around in a neighbor’s driveway and headed toward Main Street. No, wait, she thought, panicking. What am I doing? Her hand reached out to push the button. “Turn left on Main Street and drive until Eleventh Street,” the voice said, “and push the button.” All right, she thought. I’ll go to the supermarket and get on the freeway near there. She hoped she would do it. Panic was guiding her moves now, and she was no longer as certain as she was this morning. She gripped the steering wheel tightly.
“Turn left on Eleventh Street,” the voice said, “park at the supermarket and push the button.” She drove on, watching the supermarket come up closer and closer on the right. Her hands on the steering wheel were clenched, bloodless. Russ wants you to do this, she thought. No. I want to do this. She passed the supermarket and turned onto the freeway.
For a moment she thought the strange noise she heard was the voice. Then she realized she was crying, crying and laughing both. “Turn left on Eleventh Street,” the voice said. She hit the button, hit it again and again, listening in wonder as the voice measured out day after day she would not have to live. She drove on, into the unimaginable future.
Travellers in Magic Page 22