by Stephen King
And when she dreamed, she dreamed like me, of falling and falling and falling.
Dr. Brandon told me the dreams would go away soon, once I got used to the job, and they did. Mine would, at least.
40% increased nightmares, and here mine had stopped. But maybe for the wrong reasons.
“Go on sweetheart,” I said to her, picking her burnt fingernails off the floor. “You can do it.”
Girls like her didn’t cry, not often, but her tears were like cigarette ash, burning and black. And the day I learned she’d gone on her last job, heart pulled out of her throat as she shifted back through the walls after opening the front doors for a rush job, I picked up my keycard, walked out of the building, went home, and sobbed.
My husband put his arms around me and said, “Maybe you should quit. The stress is too much.”
“We know what’s going to happen to us, you know, even if they don’t tell us,” White said to me, eyes like burning static.
“Gene?”
Her death didn’t make me want to run, it made me want to return to The Lab and pick up the fingernails of another girl off the floor. I wanted to press back the bleeding heart with my palms on her chest. Even if I stopped caring, the price of being that close to blood, I could still do that.
I sat in the simulated sunlight café, eating a vanilla macaroon and watching a scarlet ibis dip its beak into the fronds in a glass-like pool. On the way to the café, Aiden called me.
“I heard you got fired,” she said.
“I didn’t get fired.”
“We’ve got to figure out what’s going on. I play poker Friday nights with one of the administrators. I could unlock your file and get you into the building—”
“Now you sound like the one who needs a psychological evaluation,” I said.
I suppose I should’ve felt the upheaval of leaving the building, without warning or explanation, after all those years of employment. Not knowing when I’d return should’ve been a violent thing, like a Gordian knot dripping with stomach acid, an angry pulse in the center where it couldn’t get out.
But I only felt a stillness, like for the first time in a long time the storm brewing in my head, making my thoughts incomprehensible and dark, was cleared.
“Yeah,” Aiden said, and she sighed. “It’s a silly idea. I just don’t know what’s going on.”
“Your job is safe,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
I entered the café, the sunlight brushing the backs of my hands, I ordered a latte and the aforementioned vanilla macaroon, phone cradled to my ear, and sat near the pond in the back. In the late afternoon, the café was nearly empty, enough for me to hear the sounds of humming insects through the walls.
“You still there?” I asked Aiden.
“Yeah, I’m thinking. It’s just, we’ve been working together for so long.”
I said nothing.
“Hey, it wasn’t your fault. The girl,” she said.
“Maybe not,” I wrote. “But there are plenty of things that are.”
Another pause.
If I looked into the space beyond the projection of simulated sunlight, into that dark dense space between the wall and the sensors, I started seeing ghosts made out of sparks. Ghosts that existed only in the in between, between a grounded object and one pushed outward.
“You remember what happened with Dr. Enslein?” Aiden asked.
. . .
“Why the cranes?” I asked Dr. Enslein, while he was signing my copy of The Melded Genius on his international book tour.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“The cranes,” I said. “Why are the girls taught to fold cranes?”
“Are you with the press?” he asked.
“No sir,” I said.
Behind him a girl sat, her back to the line going out the door, her pink dress unzipped and revealing the layout of her protruding spine. It didn’t seem like a real body part, but something holographic, simulated, a real spine wouldn’t be on a girl constantly humming and vibrating to frequencies we couldn’t comprehend.
Dr. Enslein wouldn’t tell the audience that when a girl was molecularly structured, they had about 7 or 8 shifts before death, before the entire infrastructure collapsed and her heart and knees and brain gave out.
“I know about the rapid firing in the basal ganglia,” I said. “The Blepharospasm that affects the eyes, the increased neurological decay. I understand before the cranes, the girls would often break their fingers or bite off the tips because of the speeding up of the nervous system. But why pink cranes?”
“Who do you work for?” he asked.
Behind me a group of young graduate students, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and blazers too expensive for actual scientists, jostled me.
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir. I work for a private firm.”
He sighed, obviously debating whether he should call security to have me removed and potentially slow down the line even more. But, he chose to speak.
“We knew we had to keep the girls occupied, and in such a way that was uniform and easily taught, but complex enough so that their minds could focus,” he said. “And my daughter. Well, she loved origami.”
The girl, her lips like a trapped hummingbird, leaned over and whispered something in Dr. Einslein’s ear.
“She wants to talk to you,” Dr. Enslein said.
“About what?”
“Come around the table, you’re holding up the line.”
One of the graduate students let out an exasperated sigh. I slipped around the table and headed toward the girl. The air around her was hothouse warm. I knelt beside her, my knees crushing a crane.
“I heard,” she whispered. “Y-you work with people like me.”
“Yes I do,” I said.
“You’re good at what you do.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going through a divorce.”
The skin around her eyes shone with bruises from the rapid fluttering of her eyelashes.
I didn’t know why I told her that, why it slipped out of my mouth so easily, when I’d been holding onto it tight for months, trapped between my throat. Like she reached through me, faster than I could perceive, and grabbed it with no resistance.
“M-maybe I-I’ll see you again,” she said. “And then y-you can tell me you’re doing good.”
A finished crane dropped from her fingers. She glanced up at the line, at Dr. Enslein, who was bent over signing another copy of The Melded Genius. Then her body lurched forward, and she broke apart.
It was like watching a person transform into living color, her fingernails into trails of sand, her hair into an empty gorge. Her skin melted away, revealing the smears of her blood and ribs and spine, for less than a second hovering in space, before they too dissolved.
She rushed forward.
In less than a second, she reassembled in the center of the crowded auditorium, the force of her arrival pushing people out of her circumference. Dr. Enslein stood up, knocking a stack of books over.
“Anna!”
I swear, she looked back at me. Like an insect, she looked back, without moving anything except her neck. And she couldn’t smile, not with the humming composition of her face, but it was almost as if she wanted to.
Then she looked up, and shot through the ceiling.
Dr. Enslein shouted for security. People caught in her path patted their bodies, as if to make sure she hadn’t ripped out pieces of them on her way through. Others began crying or heading for the exits. A few seconds later, the fire alarms went off.
I slipped out the performer’s exit before anyone could question me about what happened. I left the building and walked through an alleyway through the dark, heading toward the streets under groaning, titanium walls, between lights like bullets coming through club windows. And I found myself looking up at the sky, beyond the steel wiring, which I never did anymore. The sight of those mile long buildings shooting into space, as if the curvature of the earth would be slic
ed apart by their piercing height, always made me feel as if I was shrinking.
But I was looking for her. Of perhaps, whatever remained of her, glittering scraps of bones and skin. And I thought of White, long dead by that point, her fingertips exploding into supernovas.
“Where do they go when the work is finished?”
Maybe pieces of all of them were up there in between the fortresses of the city. Maybe when they burst apart, their heads and tongues and brains, their molecules kept shifting, over and over and over, in and out of darkened vaults and computer banks. Never able to be caught.
A small comfort for a manager of living time bombs, for the one who attempts to ease the transition into a melting death.
My phone rang. It was my soon to be ex-husband, now living in temporary housing about a mile north.
He often called in those days to ask if I’d seen one of his knickknacks—the Peruvian rug, the stuffed raccoon paw, the blue clay vase he broke in four pieces. He spoke in this quavering, desperate way—a child lost in the dark warehouse of his toys.
I imagined answering the phone.
“I could’ve sworn I left those soap antlers in the closet,” he’d said.
And I’d pause, trying to refrain from saying. “Stop calling me. You don’t care about any of these things and I certainly don’t either. You will not find answers in clinging to dust-covered, useless relics you collected searching for the thing that is you.”
Trying to refrain from saying, “Find someone to fuck so you’ll stop calling me.”
Imagining, after taking a deep breath.
After looking up and imagining supernovas of skin and glittering, superspeed ropes of nerves.
After a silent wish on an airplane I mistook for a star.
Saying:
“I don’t know where your fucking antlers are. I don’t want to bury myself in quiet distractions but you’ll always be consumed with searching for them. One day things are going to change at The Lab, and I want to be there.”
Yeah, I know, I’m probably going to forget this moment ever happened, with the girl and the sky and the instantaneous epiphany that what I’m doing means something. And as the months drag on I’m going to even more apathetic and cynical and hopeless. But maybe one day when a girl explodes, I’ll be able to pick up the pieces and put them back together. That seems worth the cost. That seems worth losing some of my humanity.”
And after a pause, he’d respond:
“I’ve taken up leather tanning. Did you know the tanning process is written about in Homer’s Iliad?”
I couldn’t help it. I leaned against a nearby building, dizzy and nauseous. I turned my phone off, and I smiled.
Alone at that roadside café, I could breathe. I thought it must’ve been something in the air, the cloying dirt sticking to the inside of my lungs. The Lab psychologists told us it was “Beneficial to the girl’s well-being” to occasionally show them clear skies, roads free of dark metal and disco light. I always wondered why they thought this unfiltered air was beneficial to anyone.
But it wasn’t the air that was the problem—it was the constricting of my chest.
A man walked in with a girl, and they sat down at an adjacent booth. The girl’s skin vibrated, her fingernails chipped, fingers like the music of a theremin. They spoke in low tones, the girl nodding, nodding, folding, folding.
The man got up to go to the restroom. I glanced sideways at the girl, who waited for that moment to sob. She stopped folding the cranes, pushing them out of the way with her elbow to give herself the room to collapse face first onto the table.
“Hey,” I said, my voice soft.
She didn’t respond.
“Hey,” I said a bit louder. “I know you’re from The Lab. I know what they want you to do.”
She glanced at me, her tears boiling on her face. Looked at me like a question.
“I just want you to know, there’s another way.”
And I pointed up.
THE CAUSE
LAURA LEE BAHR
Part 1 - Dead Loves and Dirty Cash
I was looking to get a word from my kid, instead I got news there’d be no more words. He had been unceremoniously popped and what of it?
What was I gonna do about it?
His name was Theo P. The kids in the neighborhood called him “The Fish,” but I insisted on calling him by his given name. He was one of my better and long-trained squeals in the Fairfax district, but still only 14 years old. Train a kid for years to survive it all and then he gets popped in some random raid. It happens, and more and more in this day and age. Old house on the hill folks live what seems like forever while the God-Knock street kids regularly take the dirt dive for a look sideways at the wrong Syg-man in uniform.
Sure, it happens, but it hurt more than I was used to.
There was nothing to do about it because I was nothing but a shadow in this world anyhow. Nothing to do but buy a bottle and start on it as I took the scenic route back to the office, feeling damn sorry about everything this crummy world had given and taken.
Theo P. was a kid who cracked wise. He appreciated my style the way only a kid can—by imitating it and then going for it harder. He wore a suit and a fedora. He studied the phrases and would teach them to me, come up with new words and new slang. He was the one who started calling him and his types ‘squeals.’ He had a memory for everything—facts, figures, dates, visuals—and he could sing/speak out what he’d figured out so you wished you could remember, too.
I found him when he was seven, barely up to my waist in height. He was trying to hustle me into just some cubes of Rattail. When I wasn’t interested in that, he wanted to get me down for some hot synthetics and prosthetics. He was funny about it. He told me he didn’t know the last time I looked in the mirror, but I could use a better nose and maybe a good night’s sleep. I told him he could use a better job, and he said didn’t he know it.
I bought him lunch and started training him. He ribbed me a lot about the way I dressed, the way I talked, and the way I paid in cash. But even as he was ribbing me I could see he was a bit in awe of it. It gave him an idea of something else he could be.
The kid was whipsmart, and he liked history: Civil War battles, Protestant Revolution, French Revolution. He particularly loved the tales of workers from the Industrial Revolution, especially the Luddites. He called me “Ludd,” which I knew coming from him was a real compliment.
“Ludd” was how they all got to know me in the Fairfax district, thanks to Theo P. I was pretty sure he was gonna get radicalized when he hit his later teens, met the right God-Knock, and he’d start trying to destroy the machines. Dying for a cause and being remembered. That was written all over him. But he died just because, just because he happened to be walking when some sprays of bullets went flying. That was beyond tragedy. That was the sort of thing that let you know that nothing mattered anyhow, anyway.
When I made it back to the office, she was waiting for me.
I was pretty much as she had left me two decades before, weepy-eyed and stinking of Jack.
She wasn’t the type to keep it to herself.
“Well, I guess there’s comfort that some things don’t change,” she said.
“Don’t fix what ain’t broke,” I said, thinking she was commenting on the suit, the tie, a bottle in a paper bag and an old school smoke, straight outta last century and what of it? I’ve made a point of blank refusal of this hyper-drive into hyper-space hyperbolic brave new world, and it’s kept me cool when everything else on the planet’s overheating, so I took it as a compliment.
But truth was, I didn’t match her to her face or that cut to her voice. She wasn’t anybody I thought I’d met before. That’s how different she was. Then again, when I woke up some mornings that’s the way I felt about this whole goddamned city.
So I took a long look at her, then a swig from my bottle in the brown paper and licked my lips a little and then grimaced at the picture she presented.
<
br /> A pretty woman is a complex system of problems. Because a pretty woman only has as much power as she has pretty—and that’s like oil and water and kind hearts—a dwindling resource. She was a sunset. Everything was lighting up the most beautiful it would ever be again before it faded. You knew it wouldn’t last much longer. Look while you could.
So I looked.
And she liked the way I looked at her because she started to glow with it.
“Hank, it’s me,” she said. “Danika.” And her hand touched mine.
And it came back like a fever.
I remember touching her skin, her arms, her face. Her thighs wrapped around me. A look in her gray eyes, pupils large and rolling, her mouth an open O, her hair red and falling over both of our faces like a curtain.
I remember her saying, “I need you,” “Don’t leave me,” and “Help.” I remember punching someone, blood on my knuckles from his nose, my hand hurting.
I remember falling in love and then I remember her saying goodbye. It couldn’t have been more than a month. Maybe two.
I remember the cascade of her voice and how I loved it when she told me stories. What stories? What did she tell me?
I remember …
But maybe I don’t.
Where are those drives? Where are those files? It was before everything was in the clouds on the drives in the sky, before everything rained down on us all in a storm. Before everyone let the machines beneath their skin, everyone but the God-Knocks, the Anarchists and me. Before the time we all knew, whether or not we believed it, that we were going to die.
And we still could remember on our own.
I am still trying to remember on my own. It makes me an anomaly to try. It also makes me a fool to try because I drink too much.
Her perfume was different now but beneath it was her same smell. That smell was bringing me to where we were when she left. Yes. Drunk and teary.
“Why?” I had asked.