Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  When at last the worst of it passed he rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet, brushed himself off, and began walking back toward his office building. Christ, this day was one for the books; first the business with the credit card, then his driver’s license, and then the goddamn coughing fit. Oh, brother—if this wasn’t one fucked up day then his name wasn’t … wasn’t ….

  He stopped, nearly causing the women walking behind to plow into his back and drop everything she was carrying. She cursed at him under her breath and gave him the stink-eye on her way past. He didn’t care. He couldn’t remember his name.

  Okay, hold on, hold on, just take it easy, don’t flip out. It had been a bad morning; okay, yes, no argument there. Bad morning, after a worse night’s non-sleep. The stuff with the cards, it had just thrown him, just caught him off-guard, that was all. Hell, there were probably times in everyone’s lives when they momentarily forgot their name; it was no big deal. I mean, c’mon, how often do you think of yourself by name, anyway? The name is something for others to identify you with, so if every once in a while you skip a groove and can’t remember it, it doesn’t mean you’ve actually forgotten it.

  Right?

  He closed his eyes and placed his hands in front of him, palms out, as if preparing to stop something about to plow into him. He took a series of deep breaths, clearing his mind of as many cobwebs as possible, and then opened his eyes, looked at his hands, and said, “No biggie. No need to push the panic button. See there, my friend? You’re good. You’re good. You’re Good Ol’ …”

  Good Ol’ Name’s-Not-There-Anymore, that’s who.

  He decided that something must be seriously wrong. Maybe he was coming down with something, a virus, the flu, something that would explain all of this. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately, he’d been less than his usual sharp self—more than one of his coworkers had told him that—and everyone knew that lack of sleep could really mess with you in more ways than one, because if you don’t sleep enough to dream, it was possible that your mind would start to dream while you were awake, or even cause hallucinations like not being to see your name on a card, or remember what it is, or—

  He started coughing again, much more violently than a few minutes ago, and this time it was clear that he was coughing up dust and reflected against the curtain of that dust, as if being shone on it through a powerful projector, the ones and zeroes of the rushing binary code scrolled through the dust, cutting off wherever the cloud curved or dissipated.

  Go home, he told himself. Go check in with the supervisor, finish the last little bit of coding, and go home.

  When he stepped off the elevator onto his floor he was at once dizzy and slightly nauseated; he was definitely getting sick. He wiped the sweat from his brow and was making his way through the maze of cubicles toward his own work area when one of the floor’s security guards stopped him.

  “Can I help you?”

  He looked at the guard. “Steve, c’mon, don’t mess with me—I feel terrible.” He attempted to move past the guard again but this time Steve moved quickly in front of him and held him in place.

  “I need to see your floor pass, sir.”

  “This isn’t funny, Steve.”

  The guard checked his own badge, which identified him only as S. Henderson. “I’m not sure how it is you know my name, buddy, but it don’t change the fact that I need to see your floor pass.”

  “Fine.” He was in no mood for this. He reached inside his coat to unclip his laminated employee I.D. from his pocket and shove it in Steve’s face, but it wasn’t there. He looked at the security guard, and then pulled open his coat for a better view. Maybe the damn thing had just slipped, or maybe it was in his shirt pocket and he’d just forgotten he’d put it there.

  “I, uh … I can’t seem to find my I.D. card,” he said. The guard took hold of his arm and began to gently but firmly lead him back toward the elevators. He began to cough again, feeling dry and hollow. He stopped for a moment to steady himself. The security seemed to understand that he wasn’t well and didn’t force him to continue walking, but did keep hold of his upper arm.

  He wiped his face with his handkerchief and looked over the guard’s soldier toward his own workspace and wasn’t at all surprised to see himself sitting there, coding away.

  A pain behind his left eye caused the lid to twitch, so he closed his eye and held the lid in place with his index finger. Looking only through his right eye, he saw that the him at his desk was flat, glossy, and two-dimensional; was, in fact, a larger version of his laminated employee I.D. Opening his left eye, he closed his right. The him that was his employee I.D. was now a him-shaped scrolling mass of binary code. He opened both eyes; the him at his desk was now a three-dimensional, corporeal human being. The him at the desk saw the other him—the first him—staring, and rose from the desk to stand at the guard’s side.

  “I’m sorry, Steve, I should have said something,” said the second him. “I have an appointment with this gentleman.”

  “He doesn’t have a floor pass.”

  “That’s my bad,” said second him, producing a laminated clip-on badge from his jacket pocket. “I meant to leave this down at Reception but forgot.”

  “Okay, then,” said the security guard. “Sorry about the mix-up, sir. No hard feelings?”

  “No,” he said; he knew it was him, he recognized his voice. The guard walked away.

  “Why the hell did you come back here?” asked second him, grabbing his arm and pulling him toward the restrooms.

  “Would you—Jesus, let go! Would you please walk in front of me?”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you’re on my left, you’re nothing but binary code, and when you’re on my right, you’re a laminated card.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.” He walked in front. “I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of this yet.”

  “The hang of what?”

  “Living comfortably in the lie of your ‘I’. This existence thing, it takes a lot out of you. No pun intended.”

  Entering the restroom, second him locked the door behind them. “Do you need to sit down or throw up or something?”

  “I don’t think so.” He steadied himself on one of the sinks and ran some cold water, soaking his handkerchief and then wiping it across his face before holding it against the back of his neck.

  “Are you trying to take over?” he asked second him.

  “No. That’s not even close to what’s going on.”

  “Then … what?”

  Second him looked at him with something like pity. “You never remember how this process works. It doesn’t matter how many times we—you—go through this, you never remember. I think it’s because you find it so frightening that you block it out.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Rebirth, you silly sock monkey. Rebirth. You’ve—we’ve—been doing this since … since I-don’t-know-when. The first time I clearly remember it was around the time we helped execute de Launay and de Flesselles after the Bastille fell. I think we were still us until after the Fête de la Fédération. Hell, who keeps track anymore?”

  He looked at himself in the mirror. His cheeks were sunken, as were his eyes. Leaning in, he saw something reflected in his eyes—perhaps from his eyes, behind the retinas. Dusty binary code.

  “Is it always this fast, this … hurtful?”

  “Hurtful? Huh, that’s a new one. I guess … yes, I guess it is—at least for whichever one of us—you—they—is the first. Me, it feels a little shaky, like maybe my blood sugar is low and I need to grab a candy bar, but that’ll pass.”

  He touched his cheek. Part of it seemed to crack, a patch of dried plaster.

  “Why do we do this?” he asked. “Why is this perpetual rebirth needed?”

  Second him looked down at the floor and shook his head. “I have no idea, friend. I guess we weren’t privy to that particular memo.”

  He looked at the reflection o
f second him in the mirror. “Will you remember me? Will you remember everything that I remember?”

  “Memories may be knotted up in the lie of the ‘I’ and the deception of nouns, but they are what forms us, like it or not. Yes, I’ll remember you and I’ll have your memories. Someday I’ll be where you are and the other me will ask the same question.”

  He nodded his head and watched his reflection. With a series of soft, dry sounds, his head began collapsing inward, his features crumbling and flaking away as his face fell back, split open from the center, belched out a cloud of binary encoded dust, and began to dissolve.

  Can you tell me what my name was? He didn’t think he’d asked this out loud since he had no throat remaining, but second him heard nonetheless.

  “What does it matter, friend? Of all the lies we embrace to give our existence the illusion of a deeper and more profound meaning, the illusion of the name is arguably the worst of them all.”

  His clothing fell in on itself as his flesh turned to dust, and soon they were simply a pile of rags abandoned on the floor. The dust that had been him swirled in the air before second him, who, smiling, stepped into it and breathed deeply, pulling in the particles and codes and microscopic bits of flesh that had been what he once was. His last lungful of his former self was pulled in a bit too deeply and he gave out a small cough, but expelled nothing of himself. Looking in the mirror, he patted down his hair, adjusted his tie, and straightened his jacket.

  “Once more, with feelers,” he said aloud, laughing at their private joke, and then unlocked the door and returned to work. Behind him, the rag pile shrank, clear plastic sheets tossed onto a fire, until there was only a small section of red handkerchief that swirled like a spatter of blood circling a drain before fading away.

  Chow Hound

  Introduction by Jessica McHugh

  Terror presents itself in unpredictable ways. Some of us fear the dark – the emptiness, the uncertainty, the way shadows eagerly shift into all manner of monsters. Some of us fear the monsters themselves – their hunger beyond human appetites and the mad deviances swirling in lawless minds. Some fear those monstrous qualities germinating in humanity, transforming us into beasts with kind eyes and silver tongues that a lifetime of good deeds can’t cure, powerless against our own unnatural hunger and depravity.

  When faced with terror, we have three options – fight, run, or surrender – and each inflicts fresh torture. To fight is to be battered, broken, and witness to your own defeat. To run is to be pursued, perhaps for a torturous eternity. And to surrender is to be shamed, even publically, for as long as the monster deems your life worth ruining.

  But what if your greatest terror is clean and soft? What if it can coo and cry for you? Smile, need, and love you? And for all of its torments, what if that terror can coax you into loving it back, or even nurturing its survival above your own?

  Gary Braunbeck tackles that issue with all the wit and deftness you’ve come to expect from his work, and this foray into bizarro territory from this master storyteller yields a deliciously bitter fruit that disturbed my emotions and turned my stomach long after reading. If I weren’t already one half of a child-free couple, it might have been enough to put me off little ones forever.

  Chow Hound

  “. . . the child in the womb

  It sayeth the young man’s courting

  It hath brought hunger and palsey to bed, lyeth

  between the young bride and her bridegroom . . .”

  —Ezra Pound, With Usara

  The baby cries and eats, then shits, pisses, and sleeps. From the moment Russell and his wife brought the thing home it has been this way. Russell asks his wife, “Why won’t it shut up?” and she responds by smiling at him as she lifts the baby to her breast and says, “Him’s just a little ol’ chow hound, that’s all him is.” This said more to the baby than to Russell. She’s like that now, everything she says has to include the baby, everything they do has to be done in its presence, even their lovemaking—if you can call it that; usually she shakes her head and says, “It’s too soon,” and Russell gets angry and she acquiesces by masturbating him. All passionless, all done with the baby in the room.

  Russell can’t stand the chronic caterwauling; he’s had an incessant headache for weeks. People at work have begun telling him he doesn’t look so hot. “Fatherhood taking it out of you, is it?” they ask, then smile, and Russell has to press his fists against his legs in order to keep from knocking their teeth out. Three in the morning and the thing is at it again. Russell’s wife rolls over and jams an elbow in his side once, twice, three times until he awakens.

  “. . . your turn,” she mumbles, then drops back asleep.

  Russell pulls himself out of bed and shambles over to the crib, staring down at the tiny mass of pink corpulence that his wife tells him is his son.

  Its arms and legs are in the air, flailing and kicking as its torso heaves and the high-pitched, ragged cries pierce the night.

  Russell blinks—

  —and suddenly it is many years ago when he was a boy, lying in bed and listening to his mother’s strangled cries from his parents’ bedroom. He fears that his father might be hurting her and jumps out of bed and runs to their door flinging it open just as his father rolls off of his mother, and Russell sees the stiff thing jutting from between his father’s legs, then looks at his mother and sees the slick slit between her thighs and thinks DAD PUNCHED A HOLE IN HER AND SHE’LL DIE—

  —blinking away the memory, Russell reaches down and lifts the baby.

  Chow hound. Eat, eat, eat. And it’s never enough.

  Three in the morning. And Russell once again gets an attack of the dawn terrors, feeling panicked and afraid, thinking that this is all wrong, he’s not supposed to be here doing this, he’s taken someone else’s place and out there in the night someone somewhere is living the life that was supposed to be his, a life with passion and success and no wailing baby that drags him from sleep.

  These feelings soon pass.

  In the refrigerator he finds the bottles of breast milk. He shakes one, shoves it in the microwave, and waits for the buzzer to sound.

  As the milk warms he stares at the baby, thinking that he should be proud and knowing that he isn’t. He doesn’t look a thing like him or his wife. Soft and pink, its head seems far too big for its body, like the figures he used to make from wads of clay when he was a child. He remembers the way he used to lay the figures up on a table top, then smash them into a heap with his hand. The memory makes him smile.

  The buzzer sounds and he takes out the bottle, checks to see if the milk’s too hot, then shoves the nipple in the baby’s mouth.

  Russell watches it eat, this squirming proof of his own mortality, and knows that the baby will be walking around long after he himself is dead. In forty years it may hear a piece of music that Russell might have fallen in love with, or see a film that Russell would have enjoyed, or touch a woman that—

  —Russell blinks, pressing the bottle into the baby’s mouth with more force than is necessary. He imagines himself and the baby, a few years from now, walking hand in hand across a field that begins sloping uphill slightly, so the walk becomes difficult and Russell tells the little chow hound who is his son, “Take my hand.” The child does, and they ascend to the top. The sun is shining and there are wildflowers all around and the grass is golden and ruffled by the soft breeze. The child giggles and looks at Russell, then tugs hard at his arm and they stumble, the hill suddenly sloping downward, and Russell has to dig in his heels to keep from going ass-over-teakettle but it’s too late, his balance is shot to hell and he slams to the ground, sliding down the hill, then grinding to a stop at the edge of a cliff, his arm dangling over the edge, and he sees that it drops straight down hundreds of feet to a maze of jagged rocks and he panics, thinking of the child who is now running down the hill with tremendous force, so he pushes himself up and shoots out an arm to catch the child who is going faster and screamin
g because it can’t stop the momentum, and Russell is suddenly filled with the fear of fatherly love and vows to save the child, but at the last second it jumps over his head and Russell rolls over, not thinking about the rocks below, and tries to catch his son, but instead of tumbling down towards the rocks the child takes flight, rising toward the clouds as Russell slides over the edge and the rocks rise up to meet him—