Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I think I was having a dream about Andy McCaslin. It woke me up.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy I knew from the Rangers, long time ago. I told you about him. We were friends.”

  Connie suppressed a yawn. “He died, didn’t he? You never said how.”

  “Covert op in Central America. He found himself in the custody of some rebels.”

  “Oh.”

  “They kept him alive for weeks while they interrogated him.”

  “God. Are you—”

  “That was decades ago, Con. Dreams are strange, sometimes.”

  I slipped out of the bed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Have some tea and think for a while. My night’s shot anyway.”

  “Want company?”

  “Maybe I’ll sit by myself. Go back to sleep. You’ve got an early one.”

  “Sure? I could make some eggs or something.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  But I wasn’t. In my basement office, consoling tea near at hand, I contemplated my dead friend and concluded he wasn’t supposed to be that way. My old dreams of pain surged up out of the place at the bottom of my mind, the place that enclosed Andy and what I knew had happened to him, the place of batteries and alligator clips, hemp ropes, sharpened bamboo slivers, the vault of horrors far worse than any I’d endured as a child and from which I fled to the serenity of an office cubicle and regular hours.

  But that wasn’t supposed to have happened, not to Andy. I rubbed my temple, eyes closed in the dim basement office, and suddenly a word spoke itself on my lips:

  Squidward.

  *

  My name is Brian Kinney, and today I am not an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic who could not restrain his demons. During my childhood those demons frequently emerged to torment me and my mother. Dad’s goodness, which was true and present, was not enough to balance the equation between pain and love. I had been skewing toward my own demon-haunted landscape when Andy McCaslin took my gun from my hand and balanced out the equation for me.

  My new world order.

  *

  I’m driving through the moonless Arizona desert at two o’clock in the morning, looking for a turn-off that doesn’t exist. After an hour or so a peculiar, hovering pink light appears in the distance, far off the road. I slow, angle onto the berm, ease the Outback down to the desert floor, and go bucketing overland toward the light.

  *

  A giant pink soap bubble hovered above the 7-Eleven. Reflective lights inside the bubble appeared to track away into infinity. It was hard not to stare at it. I got out of my car and entered the store. The Indian gentleman in the lavender suit emerged from the cold storage run, a small suitcase in his left hand.

  “What goes on?” I said.

  “You remember,” he said, more command than comment.

  And at that instant I did remember. Not just the bits and pieces that had drawn me out here but everything.

  “My survival imperative sought for a Probability equation by which my death could be avoided. You are now inhabiting that equation. With your permission I will, too.”

  “What do you need my permission for?”

  “You would be the author of my death so you must also be the willing author of my continued existence. A law of probability and balance.”

  I thought about Connie back home in bed, the unfathomable cruelty of my former Probability, the feeling of restored sanity. Like waking up in the life I should have had in the first place. But I also thought of Andy, and I knew it had to go back.

  “No,” I said to Squidward.

  “You must.”

  “Not if my friend has to die. By the way, isn’t it a little warm for you?”

  Squidward smiled. “I’m already in my ship.”

  “Only if I allow it.”

  “You will, I hope.”

  “It’s the feathery thing,” I said.

  “Behold.”

  In my mind’s eye images of unimaginable carnage appeared then winked out. I staggered.

  “I am a Monitor, coded to your world’s psychic evolution from birth,” Squidward said. “I subtly shuffle the broad Probabilities in order to prevent what you have just seen. Without me there is a high probability of worldwide military and environmental catastrophe. Such eventualities may be avoided and your species may survive to evolve into an advanced civilization.”

  “That sounds swell, but I don’t believe you. You’ve been doing plenty of shuffling in captivity. With that power why do you need anything from me?”

  “That’s merely my survival imperative, drawing on etheric energy from my ship’s transphysical manifestation. My survival, and perhaps your world’s, depend on you permitting this Probability to dominate.”

  I didn’t allow myself to think about it.

  “Let the original Probability resume,” I said.

  “Please,” Squidward said.

  “Let it go back to the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “There are no ‘supposed to be’ Probability Equations.”

  I crossed my arms.

  Squidward put his suitcase down. “Then because of what you are you will doom me. My probabilities concluded.”

  “Because of what I am.”

  “Yes.”

  *

  Shuffle.

  *

  My name is Brian Kinney, and I am the sum total of the experience inflicted upon me.

  But not only that. I hope.

  *

  The Tahoe’s deadly acceleration. Sudden synaptic realization across the Probabilities: You are about to murder your wife. The Vault of Screams yawns open.

  Will.

  Hanging on the wheel, foot fumbling between pedals.

  That big green Rubbermaid trashcan bouncing over the hood, contents erupting against the windshield. It was just garbage, though.

  Then a very sudden stop when the Tahoe plows into the low brick and wrought iron property wall. Gut punch of the steering wheel, rupturing something inside my body. And don’t forget a side of razor ribs.

  Around the middle of my longish convalescence Connie arrives during visiting hours, and eventually a second convalescence begins. A convalescence of the heart. Not mine in particular, or Connie’s, but the one we shared in common. The one we had systematically poisoned over the preceding ten years. Okay, the one I had systematically poisoned.

  Watershed event.

  Happy ending?

  *

  It sat in a cold room.

  Outside that room I watched a perfectly squared-away Marine enter a code into the cipher pad. I was the sum total of my inflicted experience, but it was the new math. The door opened, like a bank vault. Andy McCaslin looked at me with a puzzled expression.

  He was alone in the room.

  Rescue Mission

  Michael Pennington floated in Mona’s amniotic chamber, fully immersed, naked and erect, zened out. The cortical cable looped lazily around him. Womb Hole traveling. His gills palpitated; Mona’s quantum consciousness saturated the environment with a billion Qubits, and Michael’s Anima combined with Mona’s super animus and drove the starship along a dodgy vector through the Pleiades.

  Until a distraction occurred.

  Like a Siren call, it pierced to the center of Michael’s consciousness. His body twisted, eyes opening in heavy fluid. At the same instant Mona, cued to Michael’s every impulse, veered in space. Somewhere, alarms rang.

  *

  Mona interrupted the navigation cycle, retracted Michael’s cortical cable, and gently expelled him into the delivery chamber. Vacuums activated, sucking at him. He pushed past them, into the larger chamber beyond, still swooning on the borderland of Ship State. A blurry figure floated toward him: Natalie. She caught him and held him.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Mona spat you out. And we’re on a new course.” She touched his face. “Your eyes are all pup
il. I’m going to give you something.”

  “Hmm,” Michael said.

  He felt the sting in his left arm. After a moment his head cleared.

  “Let’s get you properly cleaned up,” Natalie said.

  He was weak, post Ship State, and he let her touch him, but said: “The Proxy can help me.”

  “You want it to?”

  “It’s capable.”

  “You have a thing for the Proxy?”

  The Proxy, a rudimentary biomech, was an extension of Mona, though lacking in gender-specific characteristics.

  “Not exactly.”

  “We have a thing.”

  “Nat, our ‘thing’ was a mistake. If we’d known we were going to team on this mission we would never have thinged.”

  “Wouldn’t we have?”

  “No.”

  She released him and they drifted apart. Michael scratched his head. Tiny cerulean spheres of amniotic residue swarmed about him.

  “You can be kind of a bastard, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll send the Proxy.”

  *

  Mona transitioned into orbit around the wrong planet. It rolled beneath them, a world mostly green, a little blue, brushed with cloud white.

  “That’s not Meropa IV,” Natalie said, floating onto the bridge with a bulb of coffee.

  “No,” Michael said, not looking away from the monitor.

  “So what is it?”

  “A planet.”

  “Gosh. So that’s a planet.” Natalie propelled herself up to the monitor. “And what are we doing here, when we have vital cargo for the Meropa IV colony?”

  “There’s time,” Michael said, the Siren call still sounding deep in his mind. “This is important.”

  “This is important? What about Meropa IV?”

  Michael pushed away from the console.

  “I’m going down,” he said.

  *

  Once he was strapped securely into the Drop Ship, Natalie said:

  “You shouldn’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re acting strange. I mean stranger than usual.”

  “That’s it?” Michael said, going through his pre-flight routine.

  “Also, I have a feeling,” Natalie said.

  “You’re always having those.”

  “It’s human,” Natalie said.

  “So I understand.”

  “Even you had feelings once upon a time. Does New San Francisco ring any bells?”

  “Steeples full. I’m losing my window, by the way. Can we drop now?”

  “Why do I think you and Mona have a secret?”

  “I have no idea why you think that.”

  Natalie looked pained. “Why are you so mean to me?”

  Michael couldn’t look at her.

  “Do you have a secret?” Natalie said.

  He fingered a nav display, hanging like a ghostly vapor in front of his face. “I’m going to miss my damn window.”

  She dropped him.

  *

  The Drop Ship jolted through entry fire and became an air vehicle. The planet rushed up. Cloud swirls blew past. Michael descended toward a dense, continent-wide jungle.

  Mona said: “I’m still unable to acquire the signal.”

  “I told you: The signal’s in my head.”

  “I’m beginning to agree with Natalie.”

  “Don’t go human on me,” Michael said. “Taking over manual control now.”

  He touched the proper sequence but Mona did not relinquish the helm.

  “Let go,” Michael said.

  “Perhaps you should reconsider. Further observation from orbit could yield—”

  He hit the emergency override, which keyed to his genetic code. Mona fell silent, and Michael guided the Ship down to a clearing in the jungle.

  Or what looked like a clearing.

  A sensor indicated touchdown, but the ship’s feet sank into muck. Michael stared at his instrument displays. The ship rocked back, canted over, stopped.

  Mona said: “You’re still overriding me. I can’t lift off.”

  “We just landed.”

  “We’re sinking, not landing.”

  “What’s going on,” Natalie said on a different channel.

  “Nothing,” Michael said.

  Mona cut across channels: “We’ve touched down in a bog! We—”

  Michael switched off the audio for both Mona and Natalie. He released his safety restraints and popped the hatch, compelled, almost as if he were in the grip of a biological urge.

  His helmet stifled him. He didn’t really need it, did he? Michael screwed it to the left and lifted it off. The air was humid, sickly fragrant. He clambered out of his seat, wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped over the side and into the sucking mire and began groping for shore. The more he struggled forward the deeper he sank. Fear and adrenaline momentarily flushed the fog from his mind.

  “Mona, help!”

  But his helmet was off and Mona could not reply.

  Then, strangely, he stopped sinking. The mire buoyed him up and carried him forward toward the shore as several figures emerged from the jungle. His feet found purchase and he walked on solid ground, his flight suit heavy and streaming. The figures weren’t from the jungle; they were part of the jungle—trees that looked like women, or perhaps women who looked like trees. One stepped creakingly forward, a green, mossy tangle swinging between its knobby tree trunk legs. It extended a limb with three twig fingers. Irregular plugs of amber resin gleamed like eyes in what passed for a face. Michael’s thoughts groped in the drugged fragrance of the jungle. He reached out and felt human flesh, smooth and cool and living, and a girl’s hand closed on his and drew him forth.

  *

  They opened his mind and shook it until the needed thing fell out. Mona was there but wrong. They shook harder and found Natalie:

  New San Francisco, Mars, a scoured-sky day under the Great Equatorial Dome. Down time between Outbounds. The sidewalk table had a view toward Tharsis. Olympus Mons wore a diaphanous veil of cloud, but Michael looked away to watch Natalie approach in her little round glasses, the black lenses blanking her eyes.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the worlds you had to pick mine,” he said; Michael was obsessed with ancient movies.

  She removed her glasses and squinted at him.

  “What?”

  “Old movie reference. Two people with a past meet unexpectedly in a foreign city.”

  “But we don’t have a past. And this was planned, though I guess you could call it unexpected.”

  “I have a feeling we’re about to.”

  “About to what?”

  “Make a past out of this present.”

  She sat down.

  “You’re a strange man, and I don’t mean the gills. Also, this isn’t a foreign city. What are you drinking?”

  “Red Rust Ale.”

  “Philistine. Order me a chardonnay.”

  He did, and the waiter brought it in a large stem glass.

  “I bet this is the part you like best,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “The flirting, the newness, the excitement. Especially because we aren’t supposed to fraternize.”

  “There are good reasons for that non-fraternization rule,” he said, smiling.

  She sipped her wine. He watched her, thinking: she’s right. And also thinking, less honestly: it doesn’t mean anything to her, not really. And hating himself a little, but still wanting her even though he knew in a while he wouldn’t be able to tolerate her closeness. That’s how it always worked with him. Automatic protective instinct; caring was just another word for grieving. But Natalie was a peer, not his usual adventure. An instinct he couldn’t identify informed him he was in a very dangerous place. He ignored it and had another beer while Natalie finished her glass of wine.

  “Did you say you had a room around here someplace?” she said.

  He put his bot
tle down. “I may have said that, yes.”

  *

  The narcotic jungle exhaled. Michael, sprawled on the moss-covered, softly decaying corpse of a fallen tree, drifted in and out of awareness. He saw things that weren’t there, or perhaps were there but other than what they appeared to be. Insects like animated beans trundled over his face, his neck, the backs of his hands. He was sweating inside his flight suit. Something spoke in wooden gutturals, incomprehensible. The sounds gradually resolved into understandable English.

  “Kiss me?”

  Michael blinked. He sat up. The steaming jungle was gone. He was sitting in an upholstered hotel chair and a woman was kneeling beside him. He recognized the room. The woman looked at him with large, shiny amber eyes. The planes of her cheeks were too angular, too smooth.

  Michael worked his mouth. His tongue felt dry and dead as a piece of cracked leather.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  Her mouth turned down stiffly and she rocked back and seemed to blend into the wall, which was patterned to resemble a dense green tangle of vine.

  Michael closed his eyes.

  *

  Time passed like a muddy dream, and there were others.

  *

  They all called themselves Natalie. One liked to take walks with him in the rain, like that girl he had known in college. Michael, watching from his bedroom window, wasn’t surprised to see it out there with its umbrella. His breath fogged the faux leaded glass, and the tricky molecular structure of the pane, dialed wide to semi-permeable, seemed to breathe back into his face. Internal realities overlapped. This wasn’t New San Francisco or even old San Francisco on Earth. It was his lost home in upstate New York. (As a child Michael used to play with the window, throwing snowballs from the front yard, delighting in how they strained through onto the sill inside his room. His mother had been something other than delighted, though.)

  Michael, staring at the thing waiting for him down there, pulled at his bottom lip. He clenched his right fist until it shook, resisting. But eventually he surrendered and turned away from the window. On the stairs reality lost focus. The walls became spongy and mottled, like the skin of a mushroom. The stairs were made of the same stuff. His boots sank into them and he stumbled downward and out into the light of the foyer. That was wrong, he thought, and looking back he saw an organic orifice, like a moist wound, and then it was simply a stairwell climbing upward, with framed photographs of his family hung at staggered intervals. Dead people.