Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “We’re the walking wounded. We’ve talked all about that. What happened with my first husband. Your mother and the bomb. The way your father checked out. The way things have gone with your relationships. All that stuff.”

  Deatry shifted on his chair, drank, held the cold bottle in his lap.

  “But we’re cowards if we don’t try to love again.”

  Deatry put the bottle down and typed: “I do love you.”

  “Love behind a firewall isn’t real,” Kimberly typed.

  “It’s real.”

  “Brian. I want to take the next step now. I want to meet you. I want to go for a walk with you. I want to feel your hand in my hand. I want to kiss you. For real. Not just in my head. I want to have a relationship with you. I HAVE to try again.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s scary.”

  “True.” Deatry typed.

  “But in a way this is scarier.”

  Deatry drank his beer.

  “This is . . . too remote,” Kimberly typed. “It’s okay at first then it’s kind of sick. I think.”

  Deatry drank his beer.

  “So what I’m saying is let’s meet. Like for a cup of coffee. It’s a simple first step. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I think you’re afraid it won’t be perfect, or that your heart will get broken. Heart’s DO get broken. But you still have to take a risk. There’s no life without the risk.”

  Deatry put his bottle down, almost typed something, then didn’t.

  “So,” Kimberly typed. “Next Monday at ten a.m. I’m going to be at the Still Life Café. You know where that is? I’ll be there.”

  Deatry typed: “Will you be wearing a red carnation in your lapel?”

  “Sure.”

  A long beat. Then, “Brian? If you’re not there, I don’t think I can come back online with you. I mean I won’t. I love you, but this keeps me from what I need. A relationship. In real life. I don’t want to hurt you, but I have to protect my heart, too.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You’re not going to be there, are you.”

  Deatry stared at the screen.

  “Goodbye,” Kimberly typed.

  *

  The Loved One wouldn’t talk. Every night Deatry jacked it into his Apple Scroll and peppered it with conversational gambits, to no avail. But he had a feeling. In the police lab, when the Loved One had said Hello? Hello? Deatry had sensed more than the automatic response of a software program reacting to the electrical surge of being turned on. He had sensed a presence. Of course, Deatry was the first to admit he was a little nuts.

  He was up all night Friday. Just before dawn he jacked in the Loved One and typed: “Hi?” The word hung on the screen all by itself. Ten minutes elapsed.

  “I know you’re in there,” Deatry typed.

  Then, after another five minutes: “Come on.”

  When he stood up he was surprised to discover he was drunk enough to feel wobbly. Drunk enough that the room appeared to shift about, like sub-reality tectonic plates, or a cubist painting that tries to show mundane objects from multiple and simultaneous angles, image over-lapping. He staggered away from his Miro desk, kicking over most of a dozen empty beer bottles and sending them rolling across the hardwood floor like bowling pins.

  “Hello?” he said to the empty room. “Hello, hello! Jesus H. Christ.”

  He blundered into the sofa and collapsed upon it.

  After a while, Barbara started knocking on the locked interior door.

  “Brian, are you okay?”

  Fuck it, he thought, and he passed out of consciousness, leaving the module running.

  *

  The phone woke him, a piercing trill. Better than the auricular implants almost everybody had, though, voices speaking in your head, the last thing he wanted. He fumbled the phone out of his pocket. Wincing, he said, “Deatry.”

  “It’s Ray. Got another body. Wanna see it?”

  “Where?”

  Farkas told him.

  Deatry stuck his head under a cold shower and yelled. He put on a fresh shirt. It was only mid-morning, and he was still drunk. At the door he noticed the Scroll hooked up to the Loved One and running. His messed up little haiku floated on the screen:

  Hello?

  I know you’re in there.

  Come on.

  Deatry hesitated, then left the setup the way it was and went out the door.

  *

  It wasn’t raining, but the streets were wet from the previous night. Puddles shivered in the wind like alien amoebas communicating their loneliness. Deatry stepped between them as he crossed the street, shoulders hunched in his old raincoat, hair still wet, dripping and uncombed from the shower.

  The Coroner’s meatwagon was angled into the curb, blinking red lights. The M.E. whose misfortune it was to cover the grid that encompassed this block was a woman named Sally Ranger. Deatry had known her for years. A blond with bird-sharp features and a severely sexual figure. She always dressed impeccably, even now, as though she had been dispatched to rendezvous with an important business client instead of a methodically mutilated indigent. She stepped forward with a clipboard when Deatry arrived.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Just my opinion, but I don’t agree.”

  She handed him the clipboard. “Sign here and I can take Mr. Vargas.”

  “Who’s Mr. Vargas?”

  “Your corpse.” Sally Ranger said, nodding at the alley where three men stood over something like a heap of rags. One of the men was Raymond Farkas. The other two were from the M.E.’s office. They had a wheeled stretcher and an empty body bag.

  “I’ll sign, but hold up a minute. I want to have a look before they move him.”

  He scratched his name on the official form. His hand shook.

  “You want a mint?” Sally asked.

  He looked up. “What?”

  “A mint.” She blew her breath, which was sweet wintergreen, into his face.

  He scowled at her.

  “Thanks, I’ll pass.”

  She shook her head.

  “What?” he said.

  “The genius detective. Wunderkind.”

  Deatry had known her since his days with the real police force. Right before his first marriage broke up he’d conducted a brief, messy affair with her. When she’d started expecting more out of him than he was able to relinquish he’d ended it. An outcome that hadn’t pleased Sally.

  “One question I always wanted to ask you,” she said. They had walked into the alley and were approaching the trio of live men and the one deceased.

  “What’s that, Sally?”

  “Are all you geniuses by definition drunken bastards?”

  Farkas looked at him, no expression on his face.

  Deatry said, “No, not by definition. It’s more random.” He turned to Farkas. “So?”

  “Arturo Vargas. Aged fifty-two. Head’s over there with some other stuff.” Farkas pointed. “Butcher’s standard M.O. I’ve already taken the pictures. A city uniform preserved the scene, but there wasn’t anything in the way of clues.”

  Arturo Vargas’s head sat nested in a wet coil of blue-white intestine a few yards from the headless corpse. Rain had collected in the gaping cavity that had once contained the man’s viscera. Deatry took a few minutes looking at the layout, then he said to Sally, “Okay, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she replied.

  “How’d you come up with the name?” Deatry asked Farkas.

  Farkas, who was wearing surgical gloves, held up a ratty looking wallet of faux leather, a kid’s wallet with Indians and ponies and teepees machine-stitched around the edge. Deatry snapped on a pair of gloves and took the wallet and opened it. There was a driver’s license, expired by more than a decade. The faded photo showed a much younger and healthier-looking head, smiling. There were some other pictures in the wallet, of a plump, attractive woman in her thirties, and a couple of young children, grinning. Deatry’s head was
pounding. He closed the wallet and handed it back.

  “Looks like he used to have a life,” Deatry said.

  Farkas nodded. “That an official genius level observation, partner?”

  “Let’s just drop the genius crap,” Deatry said.

  As they were leaving the alley, damp wind blowing in their faces, Deatry holding his raincoat closed, Sally said:

  “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over these derelicts if I were you, Brian. Why do you even bother?”

  “We’re the last stop,” Deatry said. “If we don’t bother nobody will.”

  “And?” Sally said.

  “And nothing.”

  She shook her head, said, “What a waste,” then got in her car and drove away.

  *

  Deatry and Farkas spent the rest of the morning canvassing the neighborhood, which netted them nothing. At the tiny parapolice headquarters the City provided, Farkas accessed a subdivision of the Homeland Security Database and ran the indigent’s name, hunting next of kin. The genius and erstwhile wunderkind of detection busied himself by taking a nap on the sofa. Farkas’s tapping keystrokes and low voice entered and exited Deatry’s fitful dreams. At some point Farkas shook his shoulder and asked him if he wanted the light on or off.

  “Huh?” Deatry said.

  “I’m going home. You want the lights on?”

  Deatry yawned. “No. I’m going home, too. You want to grab a bite?”

  “Naw. Sarah’s holding dinner.”

  Farkas put on his shoulder rig, and Deatry noticed his Stunner had been replaced by a perfectly lethal and perfectly illegal Pulser.

  “You hunting bear?” Deatry said.

  Farkas didn’t smile. “That bastard’s vest won’t repulse this.”

  Deatry stopped at The Bloody Stump and ordered a Caesar salad and a bowl of chili. It was past seven and dark when he arrived home. Even before he turned on the lamp he noticed that words had been added to the screen of his Apple.

  “Please turn me off,” the words said.

  And:

  “PLEASE.”

  Deatry switched on the desk lamp, removed his raincoat. He brewed a pot of coffee, making a mental note to re-supply his depleted canister of dark roast, then sat down with a cup. He looked at the Scroll for a minute, and he felt it again: the presence. He typed: “Why do you want to be turned off?”

  Immediately: “Because I can’t stand it.”

  “Can’t stand what?” Deatry insisted.

  After a beat: “It’s terrible.”

  “What’s terrible?”

  “What I am.”

  Deatry thought for a moment, then typed: “You’re a responsive memory template. An interactive device.”

  “I exist,” the Loved One said, and Deatry thought: The creep factor.

  He typed: “Granted. You exist—in the same way my Scroll exists. Or my television.”

  “More complex. You’re not Timothy. Who are you?”

  Deatry hesitated, then typed: “Deatry. Brian Deatry.”

  “That’s just a name.”

  “I’m a public employee. I sort through lost and found stuff, like you.”

  “Please turn me off, Mr. Public Employee.”

  “Who’s Timothy?”

  “Another person.”

  “No kidding? Another person, huh?”

  “You’re very sarcastic, Brian.”

  “I have my moments. Who are you? I mean who were you?”

  “Joni.”

  “Joni what?”

  “Cook. Joni Cook.”

  “And when did you die?”

  She provided a date and year.

  “Twenty-seven years ago,” he typed. “How old were you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “That’s young. What happened?”

  “I got sick and died. It happens to a lot of people.”

  “But you were thoughtful,” Deatry typed. “You imprinted a Loved One for somebody who would miss you. Who was that?”

  “My son.”

  “Timothy.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were with your son only a week ago.”

  Joni said: “Time doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What do you talk about with your son?”

  “His day. How he’s feeling. Personal things.”

  “What kind of personal things?”

  “The kind that are personal,” Joni said.

  “I guess I’m not the only sarcastic one around here.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  Deatry pulled his cell out and called Farkas at home.

  “Yeah?” Farkas said.

  “I’ve got a lead.”

  “What kind of lead?” Farkas asked.

  “Two names. Joni Cook and Timothy Cook. Mother and son. Joni is deceased.” He recited the date the Loved One provided.

  “Your Loved One woke up,” Farkas said.

  “Yep.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “I left her running all day while I was out. I think she got lonely.”

  “Lonely.”

  “Well, something like that. I don’t know.”

  On the screen Joni Cook said: “Hello? Brian, hello?”

  To Farkas, he said: “It’s not a foregone conclusion at this point, but Timothy could be our boy. Tomorrow we’ll find out for sure.”

  “Hello?” Joni said. “God, don’t leave me alone again, please don’t.”

  Creep factor.

  Deatry switched the module off.

  *

  He didn’t need the Homeland Security Database to locate Timothy Cook. The Butcher was right in the directory, under “C” for homicidal maniac.

  Deatry was superstitious. He’d almost gotten Farkas killed once. He wasn’t going to take another chance. He checked the load in his Stunner, holstered it, grabbed his coat, and hit the street, forgetting his cell phone on the desk by the Scroll.

  *

  A suburban dead zone, half past nine p.m. Deatry was out of his jurisdiction and possibly out of his mind. Live oaks on a broad, quiet street, eerily backlit by arc-sodium safelamps. His detective’s I.D. got him through gate security. Timothy Cook’s address was a Cape Cod style box with pinned-back green shutters and a flagstone walk leading to the front door and a shiny brass knocker.

  So knock.

  Deatry touched the knocker—thinking: the brass ring—but didn’t use it. His erstwhile “genius” status had more to do with intuitive leaps than Holmsian ratiocination. Standing on the porch with leaf shadow swaying over him he knew Timothy Cook was The Butcher. Which helped and didn’t help. The man was wackier even than he’d first appeared. Sure, dissecting bums was one thing, but how about living some kind of weird double life. The dilapidated room in the city, and this antithetical opulence. It’d been easy to fish out the information that Timothy Cook was a lawyer. Okay, there was Jack the Ripper, the whole theory about Red Jack being some kind of nobleman or surgeon or something. There’s always a precedent, Deatry thought. And that lawyer in the Cape Cod house would no doubt be able to find one on which to hang Deatry by his balls just for standing on his front porch.

  Deatry turned around, intending to go back to his car and do a little ratiocinating.

  A man was standing behind him.

  He was about forty years old, baby-faced, ginger hair very thin and combed over. A smile that stopped below his nose.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said.

  “Then you knew more than I did,” Deatry said.

  “Naturally. Let’s go inside now.”

  Suddenly the man was pointing a Stunner at him.

  “Now what’s the sense of that?” Deatry said.

  “Go ahead inside. The door’s unlocked.”

  “You’re Timothy Cook.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been slicing up the residents of my grid.”

  Cook sniggered. “Residents.”

  Deatry calculated his odds. They weren’t promising. He d
ecided to scream for help as loud as he could. A tactic that would have gotten him ignored back in his grid, but in this neighborhood it was probably good as a ten thousand dollar alarm system. He started to open his mouth, and Cook shot him.

  *

  He inhabited a jellyfish dream. Boneless slow wobble in consciousness suspension. Gradually nausea asserted itself. He tried to pitch forward, found himself restrained, and vomited into his own lap. Which was fairly disgusting, but—in his present jellyfish state of mind—it was also kind of fascinating.

  A man in jockey shorts paced before him, mumbling. His skin was very pale. Lamplight slid along the blade of the scalpel he was holding.

  A dim fragment of Brian Deatry was alarmed. The fragment attempted to form a coherent response to the situation. All it could arrive at was the word: “Don’t.” And even that came out sounding like “Dawnt.”

  The pacing man stopped pacing.

  “Dawnt,” Deatry said.

  The man stood before him, feet planted, toes wiggling. The scalpel started to come up, and then there was a commotion, a door crashing open, and the man turned sharply. The quick movement tripled him in Deatry’s woozy vision. Bright blue flash and a sound like a hundred light bulbs popping out at the same time. The man sprawled to the floor, head by Deatry’s left knee. Scorched whiff of pork. Deatry’s fragment put a name to the face: Cook. The Butcher.

  Then Farkas was there untying him.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing coming out here by yourself,” Farkas said.

  The Deatry fragment managed: “Shaabing ur life.”

  “Thanks,” Farkas said. “You did a hell of a job.”

  “Cook the bastard,” Deatry said, more or less coherently.

  “I cooked him, all right,” Farkas said.

  *

  Monday at ten a.m. Deatry was not at the Still Life Café.

  *

  Monday night, Deatry, stone sober, sat before his Scroll in the darkened room that had once been a “spare” bedroom when the house he shared with his second wife was a house undivided, except for the everlasting divisions in Deatry’s own mind. He stared at a list of names, women he had chatted with to varying degrees of intensity over the last year or so. For months those names hadn’t impelled him in the least. Except for one. White Echo. Kimberly. Now some of the names were lit, indicating online status, and some were dark. White Echo was dark. Deatry stared at the other names for a while, then he stood up and grabbed a beer. He looked out the window for a while. It was raining again. Raindrops trembled and squiggled down the pane. He returned to his desk. White Echo was still dark.