After the meal he leans back with his bare feet flat on the floor and his hands folded together on his gut, stuffed with starch and butter and meat and grease, buzzed from the beer. His wife usually doesn’t involve him in parenting decisions, just signs the consent forms and checks the movie ratings herself. But for once she’s actually consulting him about the kids, leaning across the table with her chin on the placemat, toying absentmindedly with the tab on a can.
“There are these acne pills Sophie keeps asking to try.”
“She gets like a single pimple at a time.”
“Should we let her or not?”
“For one zit?”
“So no.”
Then:
“Do you think Jaden is getting picked on?”
“What makes you say that?”
“He keeps coming home with ripped clothes.”
“He’s just wild.”
“You’re sure?”
Wash feels a flush of pride. He likes when his wife asks his opinion. Maybe it’s only because of the anniversary weekend, but he hopes it signals a permanent change.
“I got us something,” Mia says suddenly, pushing up off of the table to stand, looking almost giddy. She goes out to the car, pops the trunk, digs under a tarp, and comes back lugging an unmarked cardboard box topped with a silver bow. The present is nearly as long as the table.
Wash takes ahold of the flap and rips through the tape.
Lifts the lid.
A rifle.
“Whoa,” Wash says.
The gun lies on a pad of foam. Carbon barrel. Walnut stock. A repeater. A bolt-action. He reaches into the box, but then hesitates, looking to her for permission.
“Take it out,” Mia laughs.
The moment he picks up the rifle a sense of relief washes over him. Like having a severed limb suddenly reattached. A natural extension of his body. Automatically he pulls the bolt back to check whether the chamber is empty, then shuts the breech and raises the gun, butt to his shoulder, stock on his cheek, his eye at the scope, testing the sights. The smell of the oil. The feel of the trigger. He can already tell that he’s skilled with this thing.
“Are we allowed to have this?” Wash says.
“You’re not, but technically I’m the owner, I did all the research, and as long as you don’t have access, we’re in the clear, so we’ll just keep the gun in the safe and if anybody ever asks then we’ll say that you don’t know the combo. And honestly, on my honor, I did want to have a gun in the house again just in case of intruders. A pistol or a shotgun probably would have been better for that, though. I went with this because of you. You can use it for target shooting out back, even use it for deer hunting if you want. I thought it all through. We’ll just be careful. Nobody’s going to know.”
His chair creaks as she settles onto his lap.
He’s overwhelmed.
“I love you,” Wash says, without meaning to, the words just coming out.
He sets the rifle onto the table to kiss her, but an expression of alarm flashes across her face, and before he can lean closer she drops her head, with her chin to her sternum. Confused, he waits for her to look back up. Her hands rest on his shoulders. Her ass weighs on his thighs. She’s trembling suddenly. No, he realizes, she’s crying.
He can’t remember ever seeing her cry before.
The sight scares him.
“What’s wrong?” Wash frowns.
When she finally responds she speaks in a murmur.
“You’re hardly you at all anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re just so different.”
“Different how?”
Mia goes silent for a moment.
“You never did dishes before.”
“Well, it wasn’t my job back then, right?” Wash says.
“I mean at home,” Mia explodes, shoving him in frustration, startling him.
“But after the meatloaf, you told me that’s how things worked, was you doing the cooking and me doing the dishes,” Wash says.
“I was kidding, I didn’t think you’d actually do them, but then you got up from the table after we finished eating and you just started washing dishes, you’d never washed a dish in that house before in your life, you never used to play games with the kids, you never used to bring the kids along hunting, I always had to nag you to fix things around the house and even after you were done fixing things then you’d get on me for nagging you, I could barely get you to give the kids a ride somewhere without you throwing a fit, all you wanted to do was work and hunt and be alone in the woods, or rant at me about political stuff that there was nothing I could do anything about, we don’t even fight anymore, I tried to pretend that you’re the same but you’re not, you’re the same body, you move the same, you smell the same, you talk the same, you taste the same, but the rest of you is gone, you don’t remember the tomato juice when I was pregnant with Jaden, you don’t remember the fire alarm after I gave birth to Sophie, everything that used to have a secret meaning between us now is just a thing, to you a hay bale is just a hay bale, a batting helmet is just a batting helmet, a mosquito bite is just a mosquito bite, and that’s not what they are to me,” Mia cries, hitting his chest with her fists, “we lost our past, we lost our history,” hitting his chest with her fists, “and you deserved it,” a fist, “I didn’t,” a fist, “not me.”
Wash sits there in terror, letting her beat on him, until finally she clutches his tee in her hands and sinks her head into his chest in exhaustion. His skin tingles with pain where the blows landed. His heart pounds from the shock of being struck. Wash glances at the blotchy sunspots on his hands, the faint scars on his fingers, the bone spurs on his heels, the brittle calluses on his soles, relics of years he can’t remember living. He’s never felt so much like a stranger in this body.
He’s almost too shaken to speak.
“Which one do you want?” Wash says.
“Which what?”
“Which me?”
Mia heaves a sigh, then lifts her head, turns her face away, and rises off of him. She shuffles toward the bathroom. “I never would’ve gotten a gun again if you were the way you used to be.”
Midnight. He lies next to his wife in the dark. The sheets are thinner than at home. The pillows are harder than at home. He can’t remember ever having spent a night away from home before. He’s gotten so used to falling asleep with her nuzzled against him that trying to fall asleep with her facing away from him is intensely lonely. His feet are cold. An owl hoots down by the reservoir.
Does he love his wife?
Did he ever love his wife before?
* * *
Lindsay is sitting on the chair in the living room. She’s wearing the same outfit as every month. She tucks her hair behind her ears, then bends to grab a toy from the floor, a plastic bone that squeaks when squeezed.
“This is the last time we’ll have to meet,” Lindsay says.
“We’re done?”
Lindsay looks up with a smile.
“Next month will mark a full year since your wipe. By the standards of our justice department, you’ve been officially reintroduced to your life. Congratulations.”
Lindsay tosses the toy down the hallway.
Biscuit takes off running.
Wash thinks.
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“What happens if you commit another crime after you’ve had a wipe like mine? What else could they even do to me if they’ve already taken everything?”
“They took the memories you had back then. You have new memories they could take.”
Wash frowns.
“If you’re being sentenced to a partial wipe, a shorter sentence is better than a longer sentence, of course. But for a life sentence, the numbers are meaningless. Is it worse when a sixty-year-old dies than when a six-year-old dies? Of course not. The length of a life has nothing to do with the weight of
the loss.”
Wash settles back into the couch, folding his arms across his chest, tucking his hands into his pits.
“That’s important for you to understand,” Lindsay says.
Wash glances over.
“You have another life you could lose now,” Lindsay says.
Biscuit drops the bone back onto the floor.
Lindsay reaches down.
“How do you feel, Washington?”
“I feel really good,” Wash says.
* * *
Mia calls him into the bathroom. She’s sitting on the lid of the toilet in drawstring sweatpants and a baggy undershirt. The pregnancy test is lying on the side of the tub.
“We’re both going to remember this one,” Mia says, smiling up at him.
His kids barge into the bathroom a moment later, already fighting about what to name the baby.
Wash goes shopping for a crib with his family, pushing a cart down the bright aisles of a department store as swing music plays over the speakers. Wash reclines on a checkered blanket at the park as fireworks burst in the sky above his family, shimmering and fading. Wash hunches over the wastebasket in the bedroom, clipping the nails on his fingers as his wife pops the battery from a watch on the dresser. Wash leans over the sink in the bathroom, tweezing a hair from his nose as his wife gathers dirty towels from the hook on the door. Wash shoots holes into a target shaped like the silhouette of a person as his kids watch from the stump of an oak tree, sipping cans of soda. And wherever he’s at, and whatever he’s doing, there’s something that’s stuck in his mind like a jingle, nagging him.
He sits on the porch with the dog. Rain drips from the awning. Silks are showing on the husks of corn across the road. Summer is already almost gone. Behind him, through the screens in the windows, sounds of his family talking drift out of the house.
Sometimes he does want to be alone. Sometimes he feels so lazy that he wants to refuse to help with chores. Sometimes he gets so tense that he has an urge to punch a wall.
But maybe all of that is trivial compared to how he used to be.
Is he a different person now?
Has he been becoming somebody new?
Or does he have some soul, an inborn nature, a congenital personality, that’s bound to express itself eventually?
The academic year hasn’t started yet, but the athletic seasons have begun. He’s on the way to pick up the kids from practice when he passes the library. His eyes flick from the road to the rearview, watching the library fade into the distance as the truck rushes on toward the school.
Knowing who he was might not even be an option. What he did might never even have made the news. And he’s already running late anyway. But still his hands clench tight around the wheel.
Swearing, he hangs a U-ey, swinging the truck back around.
He parks at the library.
“I need to use a computer,” Wash says.
The librarian asks him for identification, registers him for an account, and then brings him over to a computer. All that time he’s thinking, what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing, imagining his kids waiting for him by the fence at the school. The librarian heads back to the reference desk.
His hands are trembling as he reaches for the keyboard.
He logs onto the computer, pulls up a browser, and searches his name.
The screen blinks as the results appear.
Nothing. A pop star with his name. A goalie. A beach resort with his name. A monument. He’s not there.
He skims through again to be sure, and then laughs out loud in relief.
The temptation was a mirage all along.
Wash swivels on the chair to stand, then thinks of something, and hesitates.
He turns back around.
Puts his fingers on the keyboard.
Tries his name plus his town.
The screen blinks as the results change.
His heart leaps.
He’s there.
The list of articles seems to scroll on forever.
The headlines alone are enough to send a beat of rage pulsing through him.
Wash runs his hands over his mouth, glancing at the daylight streaming into the library through the door beyond the computer, trying to decide whether to leave now or to keep reading, flashing through all of the memories he has from the past year that he could lose. Jaden grinning in amazement after choking on the lozenge in the driveway. Sophie cracking up laughing after the crow fell out of the tree. Mia treading water at the reservoir in a white one-piece, glancing at him with a casual expression before suddenly lunging over to dunk him. Jaden lying on the linoleum in the kitchen in cutoff shorts, gripping him by the ankle, begging to be taken to the go-kart track. Jaden whirling around the yard with a lit sparkler. Mia swinging by the diner on a day off from the hospital, hair piled into a bun, trench coat damp with rain, splitting a slice of cherry pie with him while he’s on break. Sophie standing under the light in the kitchen in pajamas, holding him by the arm, upset by a dream about a ghost. Sophie singing into a lit sparkler like a microphone. Mia arranging gourds on the porch. Mia brushing icicles from the awning. Mia sweating into a damp washcloth, deliriously rambling about how much she loves him, as he crouches by the bed with the wastebasket, waiting there in case she pukes again. The dog watching a butterfly flutter down the hallway, then turning to look at him, as if waiting for an explanation. His kids dancing around the dead buck, boots tromping through snowy ferns, gloved hands raised in celebration, lit by the dazzling sunbeams spiking through the branches of the trees, and afterward driving back to the house with the deer in the bed of the truck, the mighty antlers rising into the air out the window behind the cab, the kids chattering to each other on the seat next to him, hats both off, hair all disheveled, and later eating bowls of cereal in the kitchen in thermal underwear together as the kids recount the story of the hunt with wild gestures, while his wife sits across the table in a plaid nightgown, smiling over a mug of black tea. The secret experiences that nobody else shared. The joy of discovering the chocolate stash hidden in the aluminum tin in the basement. The habit he’s made of visiting the glittering display of chandeliers and pendants and lamps and sconces whenever he goes to the hardware store, marveling at the rich glow of the mingled lights, filtered through the tinted glass and the colored shades. The sense of destiny when a bottle of cola suddenly plunked into the dispenser of a vending machine at the shopping mall as he was walking out of the bathroom. The fear and the awe and the wonder of seeing a monstrous tornado churn in the sky above the town, the funnel spiraling down from the clouds, the tip just about to touch the ground.
Wash sits back in the chair, looking from the door to the computer, biting his lip as he wavers, torn between the possibility of having a future and the possibility of having a past. But only for a moment. Because when he thinks about it, he knows who he is. He already knows what he’ll do.
S. P. SOMTOW
Another Avatar
from Amazing Stories
The laws of nature are very much like the laws of Thailand; you can get around them if you know the right people.
—The Tall Old Man
One day, a tall old man stands in the doorway and says he has come for me. He says we shall go on a journey. When I ask him why, he tells me this: “So that one day you shall stand in a doorway, and you shall tell a boy that you have come to take him on a journey. And when he asks why, you shall tell him, ‘So that one day you shall stand in a doorway such as this, and say these words to a child such as yourself.’”
My journey has been long, yet I have not reached the time when I shall stand in a stranger’s doorway and call out to an unknown youth. It all unfolds in a continuous long present, yesterday and today all jumbled up like a basket of silk scraps in the fabric market.
Back then, to the twenty-first century. The breath of the Dragon Jade had not yet warmed the world. It was a time when children on street corners cried out that the wor
ld was ending, little knowing it had already ended.
Back also to a city. A teeming city, exotic to some. A city of metal spires and desolate landfills, of glass malls and porcelain pagodas, a city that, in those days, remade itself nightly in the moments before dawn so that you could sometimes wake in the morning not knowing where you were; if you’ve lived there, you’d know, and if you haven’t, no amount of explaining will ever be enough.
I’ll tell you everything I know, and it will all come out in one big jumble, and sometimes you’ll believe me, and sometimes you’ll say it can’t be so, but stay with me. Every event in the world has at least two explanations: one that is fact, and one that is the truth.
Bangkok, the early twenty-first century. A Catholic orphanage beside a Buddhist temple, a Hindu shrine abutting an internet café, and all this sandwiched between high-rises and a shanty town; that’s where the tall old man first comes to me.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 5