Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “You’re not trying.”

  “Give me some help.”

  “I’m like a second tier observer now,” I said. “When I’m pointed at first tier reality, I can absorb it mostly okay, but second tier reality—electronic media, for instance—gets scrambled because I’m already a step away.”

  “I thought you said you were a half step away.”

  I sipped my latte and looked out the window at slow traffic. Sean tapped his pen on the table. “All right, all right,” he said. “Sorry. It’s just pretty farfetched.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyway, why do you get to rewind the event thing? No offense, but what makes you so special?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the only one. Maybe there are others and we just don’t know about it.”

  “It’s never happened to me.”

  “A lot of things have never happened to you. That doesn’t mean they don’t happen to other people. And maybe after a while, the rewinder forgets that he ever did rewind.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Yeah, perhaps.”

  Then Sean said, “Hey, I just remembered what makes you so special.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You got blown up last month.”

  “True.”

  “But that’s not all that happened. You also got to save somebody’s life.”

  “On the rewind.”

  “Right, that’s what I mean. You got to make a deliberate moral decision. You think it’s BS, but I believe in the moral Universe, the moral God-consciousness. Maybe you’re right about people, maybe a lot of people are getting to rewind. Maybe that’s how God increases moral consciousness in the world, which equals love, which equals higher consciousness. God consciousness.” Sean gripped his pen, looking pleased with himself.

  “That’s nice,” I said, “but your theory falls apart, because I didn’t make a moral decision. All I did was react, unaware of any personal consequences.”

  “So you wouldn’t have saved her if you’d known you couldn’t watch TV anymore?”

  “Or hear a voice on a telephone, or work a computer, or lately even an electronic cash register? If I knew it would get worse, like it is getting worse? If I thought it would make me incapable of functioning in modern society? If I thought this mild background buzz might get louder and more insistent until I thought I would go out of my mind? I don’t know, man. But I guess at that point it certainly would become a decision instead of a reaction.”

  “You’re right,” Sean said. “The theory doesn’t hold water. But it’s still cool, and I’m going to write a poem about it. I’m going to call it The Jihad Bomb Theory of Moral God-Consciousness.”

  “Do that,” I said.

  *

  So I had to find out. Naturally I had to find out. There was a constant buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t hear it much during the day, but in the stillness of the night it was insistent and distracting, robbing me of sleep. I thought maybe it had something to do with all the broadcast and microwave signals in the air. I sat on my sofa and began thinking about the beer garden, Janice Burnley, and the bombs.

  *

  Sean removed his little round poet’s glasses and wiped the lenses on his T-shirt. Sunlight slanted though the window of Dante’s, shining up the amber pints on the table before us. I was now living in a Universe where The Jihad Bomb Theory of Moral God-Consciousness did not as yet exist. Looking over Sean’s shoulder I could see the Mariner’s game on ESPN. I hadn’t touched my beer yet. Sean listened to everything I told him. He’s a good listener, but I can tell when he thinks I’m full of it. That didn’t really matter, though. I just wanted to say it all out loud, as a way of organizing and understanding my thoughts, such as they were.

  “So you went back to your apartment and rewound everything again?” he said. “Rewind is the right word?”

  “Yeah. I found out I could do that.”

  “And this time you let things go back to the way they were originally?”

  “Yes.”

  “The girl died. But you say she lived in your other version?”

  “I let her die.”

  He frowned at me. “Cut it out.”

  “It’s true.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. I watched it all again. I pulled her up, looked into her eyes, and then the second bomb went off and cut her in half.”

  “Okay, okay. Then what?”

  “Then nothing. I’m here, all my senses intact, and the future looks promising.”

  “Except?”

  “Except I let the girl die.”

  “So you said.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” I said. “For quite a while, during my latest convalescence, I ragged on myself for not checking her out last time, finding out all I could about her when I had the chance. Talk to her, at least.”

  “The girl with the Hepburn eyes.”

  “Yeah, Janice. Janice Burnley. Anyway, I wished I’d found out what kind of a person she was, whether she was—”

  “A good person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whether she kicks her dog, runs red lights, cheats on her boyfriend? Or volunteers at some retirement home and adopts stray cats?”

  I shrugged. “Something like that, I guess. But then I figured it didn’t matter. Because that’s not part of the decision. It’s whether or not I can do the right thing, and whether or not I even know what the right thing is. The point being, now I have a decision to make. A real decision.”

  “To rewind or not to rewind, that is the question.”

  I shaped my lips into a smile and nodded. “Yeah.”

  Throngs moved outside the window of this bar on the Ave. Normal people on their way through life. Maybe a certain percentage of them had rewound. Who knows? A scraggly man sat on the sidewalk across the street with a hand-lettered sign and a mangy dog curled beside him. He looked like one of those guys who hears things nobody else hears, maybe, who knows, a constant mosquito whine that has drilled into his brain until his thoughts have broken up and can never quite come together again.

  “So if I play along,” Sean said, “and assume all this wild shit is true, then what’s next? What are you going to do?”

  “That’s a good question,” I said, but I wasn’t really there anymore. I could hear acoustic guitar music, and there was a young woman looking away from me, one young woman out of millions I would never know, and my hand reached out until my fingertips touched the cold, moisture-filmed glass of beer, and it all started again for the last time.

  The Apprentice

  Danny St. Charles woke up every morning to the sound of his mother dying. Her violent coughing fits tore through the flimsy walls of their trailer. He was only eight but he knew it was the cigarettes. Hadn’t he dreamed of his mother coughing until smoke seeped from her bleeding eyes? Hadn’t he seen her, in his dream, reach down her throat to pull out a shred of tissue like peach pulp spotted black with rot?

  One spring day Danny stayed home sick from school, and his mother stayed home from her job at the bakery to take care of him. As she leaned over him in his bed to delicately slip the glass thermometer from under his tongue, he tried to breathe her good smell and ignore the stale over-scent of smoke.

  “You’ve got a fever, Honey-love.”

  “Can I go to school?”

  “Nope.”

  “Awesome.” School bored Danny; the work was easy but irrelevant, and he felt so different from the other kids. He would always be different.

  “I’ll ‘awesome’ you, buddy.” She ruffled his hair and they smiled at each other. Later she fell asleep reading a magazine on the couch, so only Danny knew about the cat. He possessed a vague sense of all the animals in the trailer village and a few, mostly the domesticated cats and dogs, he could reach out to at any given moment and know their mood. Sometimes if they were distressed or in pain he heard them cry inside his head. Amber, the MacClosky’s tabby, did more than cry. Danny fe
lt her pain like a tin jag stitching through his stomach. He dropped his Superman comic and bent over in empathetic pain. It passed in a moment, leaving him with the sick feeling his mild fever had failed to inflict upon him.

  Danny got out of bed, dressed, and put on his coat. As he crept by his sleeping mother he passed through her aura of yellow anxiety. She was worried about money, about missing a day of work. He left the trailer with a slight sense of guilt. He was sick enough to skip school but not too sick to find out what happened to Amber.

  A pair of black skid marks slashed across the narrow street a block away. Amber lay smashed against the curb, purple insides erupting out of her yellow fur. When Danny saw the Old Woman approaching he withdrew behind a parked truck and crouched low, watching underneath the chassis. The Old Woman walked slowly, as if in pain. He had never seen her before but as she came nearer the short hairs stirred on the back of his neck. She stopped and looked down at the cat for a moment, then she reached into a cloth bag slung over her shoulder and took out a Popsicle stick and what looked like a spice jar. Lowering herself with evident strain to one knee, she scraped something into the spice jar then capped it, giving the lid a good, hard twist. And then she turned her head sideways and looked straight at Danny under the truck. Her left eye was milky white, with the bare shadow of a pupil. That whole side of her face sagged, her cheek like a wrinkled pouch, the left side of her mouth twisted into a permanent frown. After a moment she stood slowly and Danny did the same, as if compelled by her magnetic gaze.

  “Cat’s blood,” she said, shaking the little spice jar. “Very good. But you must collect it while it’s fresh.”

  Danny, stepping cautiously out from behind the truck, said, “What’s it good for?”

  “Cures, mostly.”

  “Like when you’re sick?”

  The Old Woman nodded. “How old are you Danny?”

  He told her eight. It wasn’t until later that he wondered how she knew his name.

  “Had the chicken pox or measles yet?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, I had the measles but not the chicken pox.”

  “If you get them I’ll cure you,” the Old Woman said.

  “Okay,” Danny said, believing absolutely that she could do what she said.

  Her good eye held him, the pupil a shiny marble as black as the other eye was white.

  “We’re two of a kind, aren’t we, Danny?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trust me, boy. Now come, follow. I’ll show you things.”

  She turned deliberately away and began to shuffle off. Danny felt powerfully compelled to go after her. Only the thought of his mother waking to discover him gone prevented him from trotting behind the Old Woman like an obedient puppy. Even so, he found he could not easily turn his gaze aside; he had to back off, tripping over the curb, stumbling. His fever seemed to gain intensity. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. The woman halted and looked over her bony shoulder at him, her black eye widening in surprise.

  “My, you’re a strong one, aren’t you,” she said.

  At which point Danny wrenched himself free and ran home.

  *

  Later his mind sought in vein for the Old Woman. She did know him. She knew him in a way that even his mother could not. Danny was certain of this. The word “witch” recurred in his thoughts. It wasn’t the true, exact name for her, but it was as close as he could come. Her eyes inhabited his dreams, but awake he could not find her.

  *

  The next day he went to school, and on his way home after getting off the bus he wandered an unaccustomed route through the sprawling trailer park. The spring air was sharp and clear. But Danny was barely aware of his surroundings. He looked down as he walked, following some inexplicable inner directive. Suddenly the Old Woman spoke to him and he raised his head sharply.

  “Why so glum?” she said. “Never mind. I know.” She was sitting in a kitchen chair, leaning back against the side of a yellow doublewide on the chair’s back legs. The toes of her boots pointed down. The shadow of her dangling feet and chair swayed out across the aluminum siding.

  “You made me come,” Danny said, understanding the truth of the statement as soon as he spoke the words.

  “There aren’t any coincidences,” the Old Woman said. “I thought I’d come to this miserable place to die. Instead I cast the bones and saw a boy. You.”

  He squinted. “Do you know me?” he said.

  “In a way, boy.” She regarded him down the long, white slope of her nose and then abruptly bent forward, bringing the front legs of the chair down with a sharp little crack on the bare cement porch. Danny flinched back. The Old Woman leaned at him, her elbows propped on her skinny thighs. Her black skirt, sagging between her legs like a sling, held a wooden box. Her hungry, black eye and dead, white eye seemed to enlarge before him and ascend beyond his mortal vision to hang suspended like twin-opposite moons. She was speaking to him but he could barely hear her. Then she sat back and the moons were only eyes again.

  “What . . . ?” Danny said, blinking.

  “I said you’re perfectly right. About your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  “You could fix it,” the Old Woman said. “The cancer. I could give you something.”

  Danny had trouble with his breathing. “You mean like the cat’s blood?”

  “More powerful than cat’s blood. But you would have to do it all yourself—and do it just right or it wouldn’t work. You can follow instructions, can’t you, boy?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  The Old Woman lifted the box from the sling of her skirt. It was about a foot long and less than half as wide. The wood was shiny and scratched. There was an eye carved into the lid. The upper and lower arcs of the eye were formed by two snakes eating each other’s tails. She opened the hinged lid so Danny could see the snake eye but not the contents of the box. After rooting about for a minute with a bony index finger the Old Woman said, “Ah,” and picked out a silver needle.

  “Take this,” she said. “Prick your finger with it. The tip must be wet with your own blood. Then prick one of her cigarettes. Make certain she smokes it within the hour.”

  Danny held the needle up in the sunlight, making it flash.

  “What will happen?”

  “I told you.”

  “But how?”

  “If you don’t want it . . .” She started to reach for the needle but he snatched it away.

  “Good,” she said, smiling. “This will bind us. Now go away and do as I told you. Show me how obedient you can be. If you want your mother to live, that is.”

  Danny’s gaze shifted to the box, still open in the Old Woman’s hands. She slapped the lid down and glared hard at him with her moon eyes.

  “Scat!” she said, and he did.

  *

  He watched his mother from the kitchen window. She was hanging sheets on the clothesline in the cramped backyard; the dryer had broken a month ago and they couldn’t afford to have it fixed. The breeze billowed the damp, white sheets around her like angel wings.

  Her purse sat open on the table, the red and white pack of Marlboros plainly visible. He grabbed them, the cellophane overwrap crinkling softly in his hand. This was her second pack of the day and only a couple of cigarettes were missing. He slid one part way out, put the pack down, then produced the Old Woman’s needle from his coat pocket. Biting his lip he braced his left thumb against the middle knuckle of his left index finger and after the briefest hesitation he poked at the bulging end of his thumb with the point of the needle. It stung. A shiny drop of blood swelled out. A smear of it glistened on the silver needle. He corked the punctured thumb into his mouth and sucked hard. Then he quickly inserted the needle into the protruding cigarette, giving it a little twist in the dry paper cylinder just in front of the filter.

  A minute later when his mother came into the kitchen the Marlboro pack was lying on top of the contents of her open purse again, t
he magicked cigarette poking out like in a magazine ad. She chose it immediately, without a second glance, and lit up. She was thin, her face lined and careworn and beautiful.

  “Good day at school?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She kissed him and tousled his hair before she sat down with the remnants of Sunday’s paper. It usually took her about a week to finish the big Sunday edition. She sat forward, her right elbow on the table, the cigarette cocked between the first two fingers of her right hand, pale smoke twinning to the nicotine-stained ceiling. After a minute or so she looked up, just with her eyes.

  “What are you staring at, Honey-love?”

  Danny shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Finish your homework?”

  “No, I just got home.”

  She lifted an eloquent eyebrow. Danny retrieved the snack of sliced apples (slightly brown from sitting out), crackers, and American cheese she had left for him on the counter next to the sink. He started for his room and the small school desk she had bought for him at a yard sale. This was the routine. As in: “You know the routine, bub.” Sometimes, like now, she didn’t even have to say it. But he paused on his way out of the kitchen to look at her again. She raised her other eyebrow.

  “I love you, Mom.” The words squeaked out around the hard lump in his throat.

  “Well, ditto, doll. Now hit the books and make me proud. Danny? We’ll talk when you’re done, okay?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  In his room he tried to concentrate on his math worksheet but the numbers looked like little people all twisted into suffering contortions. He put his pencil down and picked up the needle. This was his real lesson, the first one of his life. And the Old Woman was his teacher. Just touching the needle, now that he had used it, brought him into sympathy with the Old Woman’s secret life. He knew her name, though that was not important. He knew she was a very wicked person. And he also saw her as a child, no older than himself, discovering her abilities and immediately using them in evil ways. She had taken lives, beginning with her own father’s. Perhaps he had deserved it. Danny saw his face bloated with blood and rage. He struck with his hands, his belt, even a stout piece of stove wood. But his death had been the beginning of a long corruption for the Old Woman. She, too, had teachers: a gypsy woman in the apartment complex she and her mother moved to; a boyfriend, when she was fifteen, who stuck needles of a different sort into his arms and whom she murdered for the snake-eye box; a few others down the years. And now she was weakened, felled by a bright bursting in her brain. She had come here to the trailer village to live with a nephew whom she hated and very much wanted to destroy. She needed his help for that, Danny’s. Her apprentice. His fresh innocent power. The nephew was like her father had been, hitting, pushing, hurting . . .