The vast swimming pools with their open water and immense cement walls—the “receivers” large enough to register the oscillation of neutrinos in which the computers could find the “voices” of the just-dead—would last forever, but the first-generation hardware, like flesh and bone, was wearing out.
He had the shack’s aluminum door propped open with a rock and the holes in the screen door covered with tape, but the tape had lost its stick and the bugs, attracted by his reading light, were getting in anyway. He was dripping sweat on the transcripts as he tried to read. They were the usual. The babble . . . the technical recitations . . . the private memories. . . .
. . . Christ died for me I lived for him I died for him he lived for me. . . .
. . . longitudinal studies of the astroglia provide some support for this idea astrocytes in the rat undergo their final divisions. . . .
. . . but when I went back years later and stood on the hillside behind the house closed my eyes I could see the kids I could hear them playing the way they did the way they laughed and shouted before Dorothy died. . . .
His eyes were very tired when he came across it:
. . . for when I was writing I was in golden places a golden palace with crystal windows and silver chandeliers my dress was finest satin and diamonds sat shining in my black hair then I put away my book and the smells came in through the rotting walls and rats ran over my feet my satin turned to rags and the only things shining in my hair were lice the lice of my life as I knew it then. . . .
He read it again, sitting up straighter. It was beautiful. It was poetry, some of the prettiest he had come across. He had discovered long ago that in general the dead weren’t poets. They were ordinary people, souls floating free of bodies at last, thoughts held together for a little while, lodged, as the textbooks put it, somewhere beyond the electromagnetic, “in one of the particle fields, making their detectable oscillations in low-energy neutrinos bound to the gravitational potential well of the Earth.” But nevertheless, people.
More often than not they said very unpoetic things, like:
. . . where the hell am I?
Or:
. . . if she had only bought her dresses discount she would have had more money for the trip but would she listen to me no she would never listen to me. . . .
Or:
. . . and then I slipped her panties off and put my face. . . .
This was different. It wasn’t even the poetic feeling of the words. Poetry in books—in school all those years—had never interested him. The Bell 420 had more poetry, he’d told Corley once. Flying was more poetry than any poem. But here a woman—he assumed it was a woman—had died, and even in her death (especially in her death?) she could speak to herself so beautifully. She could think and feel so beautifully about life, even after leaving it.
She, too, was flying, it occurred to him. Not with a chopper, but with words.
As he copied it out—on lined notebook paper, with his good hand—he recalled something in the fixer’s manual about this, too. Whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony to copy a transmission, he could not remember. It was probably a felony.
He went to sleep at last on the cot by the card table, wondering how she had died. He could see her face, but only vaguely, in the dark.
Two weeks later he found her again. He could not have said what it was that made him so sure. Maybe the word lice, but probably other things as well. He couldn’t check. He hadn’t written down her ID. He wrote it down now: A266920.
. . . I once slept under a bridge I didn’t have lice in my hair like the woman who wrote that book it was like a river below me but it was cement with a trickle of water it wasn’t the rivers I dreamt of I once slept in a pipe that time I ran away and that night I dreamt of rivers. . . .
Later that day, under the same ID, he found:
. . . laugh child life laugh life is beautiful was written on the wall under the bridge by the mattress the old blood on it even now I dream that I am only a dream because when I was alive my dreams were as real as that blood. . . .
Had she been a poet herself—in real life? Someone who’d done well in English in school, like so many girls did when boys didn’t? Was this all from books, ones she had loved? Had she really run away, been homeless, slept under bridges? Or were these daydreams, someone else’s stories?
She loved words. He could tell that. But that was all he knew.
He thought about her all day, and that night dreamed about a girl who looked a little like Erika, his last girlfriend—the one two years ago who hadn’t, for some reason, minded his prosthesis—but also like a girl he had seen years ago in an old photograph from the sixties or seventies: Flowers in her hair . . . blue eyes . . . an old Victorian house behind her . . . thinner than Erika would ever be.
All a fixer had to know was the machines, a little theory, and “policy.” But you didn’t spend two years at Polytech for a T.A. in Witness Engineering without picking up the rest. There were a lot of jokes and tall tales—like the one about the ghost that had followed a fixer named Nakamura all the way around the world, from one Witness to another, until he went insane—just because he read a transcript. It was a joke, but also a warning: Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.
The most exciting thing that ever really happened to a fixer was a solar flare seizure in the photon detectors or an anomalous shutdown of the translators, and even those got to be routine. You heard about sabotage—when the cases were big and ongoing—but he’d never met a fixer who’d actually had to deal with it. And the transmissions behaved the way they were supposed to behave . . . like any “hard” paranormal phenomenon. The ghosts didn’t communicate with one another, it seemed; the transmissions came in at random; and finally, a few days or weeks or months after the body’s death, they just stopped coming altogether. The point was to record what could be recorded before the “ghost” moved on, which they all did. If the ghost was a murder victim, what a Witness heard might contain enough to help the prosecution. Legally it was as good as a deathbed confession. Except in cases of established pre-death insanity, correlations with fact had been too high for the legal system to ignore.
You could, in other words, testify against your own murderer after you had died.
The next night he heard the printer start. Something told him he should look and because he did, he found her once more:
. . . I send you this I send you the night is darkening round me the wild winds coldly blow but a tyrant spell has bound me and I cannot cannot go the giant trees are bending their bare boughs weighed with snow and the storm is fast descending and yet I cannot cannot go clouds beyond clouds above me waste beyond waste below but nothing can move me I will not will not cannot go how I wish how I wish I had even once made words like these for you. . . .
He sat amazed. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever read. He copied it fast—seeing those blue eyes, feeling the brush of a woman’s hand on his—and sat waiting for more.
When nothing else with her code appeared, he got up and made himself some lunch.
On Monday, after the meeting for all of the fixers at the hall at Central, he drove out to Sheriff’s Aviation, a portable computer—the smallest and cheapest he could find at Fedco—in a Samsonite briefcase on the seat beside him. When he arrived, he put the briefcase in the cockpit of the Bell and went in to give McKinney his hour.
“You ever want to try the new firing range, Klinger—it’s automated—I’ll let you fire an H an’ K infrared g-launcher, or a galvanic Ingram—”
“Sure . . .”
“You tell me when and we’ll do it. You say, Klinger. You’ll be the only fixer who’s ever fired a skin-wired machine pistol, believe me.”
“That would be great, McKinney. I gotta go. Thanks.”
He plugged the old home Osterizer in—the one he’d rewired for the purpose—set the little jury-rigged timer for random ignition, and over the next hour watched the static appear intermittently and the printer turn words and s
entences into incoherent letters—the kind Central and the J.D. so hated. Then he called Davis, told him the digitizer was acting up again, and smiled when Davis swallowed it, allowing him a maximum (“A maximum, Klinger, you hear?”) of three overnighters for the upcoming week.
“Thank you, sir.”
He had the air conditioner going in forty minutes and the mini-PC from his apartment sexing the recorder in twenty, its “applepie program” doing exactly what he hoped it would, the PC set to block the Osterizer ignition when her ID registered. As long as no one else got assigned to the Mojave, the PC would be able to work day and night in peace, checking the transmissions for her ID and copying only those transmissions.
That was all he wanted—to have all of her transmissions, his own tapes of them, and to copy them out with his good hand.
On a Wednesday, the next time he went to the shack, he found two:
. . . when I was child on Wiegkland Avenue just across the street from Jordan High School there was a tree that smelled funny and had stiff leaves and everyone carved or sprayed names on it I remember buying a packet of seeds I remember looking for a place to plant them and I remember thinking you can’t plant seeds in cement can you—
Real interference from a solar flare or gravity shift had lost the rest on both the shack’s receiver and his own PC, but the second was intact:
. . . when I went to see my brother up north when he wrote me to tell me where but don’t tell anyone else and I got there he said no one knows where I am and I said I know I know where you are and he said that didn’t matter because no one knows where you are Linda I said I do he said yes you do and we laughed and that was the last time I saw him ever. . . .
He copied them, hand shaking, refolded the continuous printer sheets and taped the copied transmissions to the wall over the printer. The first one he had ever copied was in his wallet. He got it out and taped it up, too.
That night, when he closed his eyes, he saw the buckled asphalt and concrete of the Great Quake. When his mother’s and father’s faces appeared, he handled it as he always did—making himself see moonlight on the surface of the Witness and nothing else. But this time saw her, too, and found himself wondering what those days had been like for her. He saw her running down a street, buildings falling. He saw himself holding her—both of them standing still in the middle of everything, barely breathing. He saw them kneel on an endless park lawn where nothing—nothing at all—could fall on them, where nothing could hurt them.
His sheet was wet in the morning, but he left it. It would dry in the heat by noon.
The next morning, coffee in his good hand, he picked up the night’s printouts from the tray under the printer and began to read. He found one and it made him dizzy.
. . . why do you ask for poetry why do you ask for words less real than those you send me on blind air when I am not sure I even remember when I waked I saw that I saw not cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee come live with me and be my love but thank you for asking. . . .
He stared at the words and when the chill, moving through him like winter wind on the sand, faded away, he knew why he’d felt it.
Perhaps it was only a voice speaking to the nothingness, trying to keep itself company. Perhaps she was only speaking to herself, to someone from her past, someone who had loved poetry as much as she had. Perhaps it was only one of these things—
But as he read it again he felt the chill again—
He felt that she was answering him—
That she had somehow heard him and was answering him.
That night he got up suddenly from the cot, turned on the light, and stared at the printer. There was no transmitter—there was no transmitter at any Witness as far as he knew. But there had to be one somewhere.
Others had tried. The original experimenters had transmitted messages to particular names, particular IDs (syntactic personalities and photon configurations), and to the Limbo at large, and answers had, at least on occasion, indeed come back. They had come back tomorrow, or yesterday, five weeks ago, a year from now. Like telepathy in the old dream experiments at the Maimonides Dream Center, the afterlife had no reason to respect time and space. And the ghosts themselves often had a sense of humor, dark as it was. Asked about the assassinations of presidents and premiers, they had sent back:
. . . Kennedy and Castro and Elvis are alive and working at Johnny Rocket’s. . . .
Asked about the murder of a little girl named Mary, they had answered:
. . . Mary had a little lamb little lamb little lamb Mary had a little something someone wanted. . . .
They had even sent back a bad limerick:
. . . There was a physicist named Fred
who tried to talk to the dead
but try as he might
he got it wrong
One of the senders was of course named Fred.
Somebody had a transmitter somewhere. If she were answering him, he would find it and use it—
Because she was answering him—
Because by answering him she was making sure he would look for it, making sure he would find it, and send a message to her.
He spent much of the next week at Central—asking gently about it, joking about it, making fun of the original experimenters, the foolishness of trying to talk to ghosts. There was no such equipment at Central, he learned from the other techs. Only the R&D geeks at Justice had such things, and maybe even they didn’t anymore. In any case, it would have been such an outrageous crime for a fixer to try that it wasn’t even listed as one. It was Tompai who said this, laughing. Klinger laughed with him.
It was the poet William Wordsworth she was quoting, he discovered. And Stephen Spender, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes. He had found them in the indexes of first and last lines of poetry—indexes he hadn’t even known existed—on a computer in the university library in Riverside. It was Emily Brontë she had sent to him last. It was the poetry of others, yes, but it was poetry she had loved.
Without the ID, he would never have recognized it two days later as hers:
. . . when he told me to lie down I said listen motherfucker I’ve laid down for you for ten years I’m not going to lay down again when he hit me my teeth broke my head snapped back against the wall I put my hands to my face and screamed I was going to cut his balls off before I’d lay down for him for him again when he pulled out the razor and told me to get down on the bed on my hands and knees or he’d cut my lips and nose off like he’d done to someone else I did it I did I got down on my hands and knees and he cut my legs I screamed I tried to get away but he was cutting into my stomach and I screamed cocksucker and then I couldn’t scream anymore I couldn’t see all I could feel was that tugging in my stomach and I let go and I died. . . .
When the printer stopped, he stared. He didn’t want to look at the words again. He didn’t know what he was feeling. It was her, but it wasn’t.
How stupid could he have been? No life was just poetry—a string of beautiful moments in time. Every life had pain and rage. She wasn’t an angel. She was a human being, and as he realized this, he knew he loved her.
He read it again, trying to make his body stop shaking. It would not, and as it continued to shake he felt something shift inside him, the way it did when he’d look at the stars at night and feel free and then, all of a sudden, remember his mother and father.
When he began to cry, it amazed him. What it felt like—after so long.
As he copied the transmission by hand, he watched another begin:
. . . a shudder in the loins the broken wall the burning roof and tower I remember the burning I was a little girl and the city burned for days in all the papers it was history and I was living it but I was a little girl do you remember the fires were you even born then?
She’d been intelligent. That was clear to him now. She’d been well read. She’d been a romantic, but she’d known the harsher side of life, too. A man—a man she had known—had killed her. Why? Th
e man had killed another woman, too—the same way he had killed her. Wasn’t that what the transmission meant?
The computers had flagged her by now. They had put together razor and I died and all the rest multivariately, had a pattern, knew it was a murder. They’d be back-searching the transmissions for the ones with her ID, compiling rapidly.
That night, in the shack, Klinger tried to remember his father’s eyes—not closed, in the coffin, but back before the Quake.
As he lay in the darkness, he saw for the first time that when he’d first started reading the transcripts, he had actually been looking for any “voice” that had sounded like his father’s . . . or his mother’s . . . and how insane that had been.
The Quake had happened five years before he became a fixer.
No ghost ever transmitted for more than a year.
The next morning, bright and early, he called Davis from the shack and told him he was sick and wouldn’t be making it in. When Davis asked him how the problem was, Klinger told him he thought he’d finally gotten it straightened out. “Good, Klinger,” Davis said. “We’ve got a meeting tomorrow. Get well, guy.” Davis would find out what was happening if Sheriff’s Aviation records ever passed his desk; but they hadn’t yet, and it was worth the risk.
The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Page 16