Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  Raymond rolled off the bed and approached the table.

  The monitor remained blank. He turned his head. The speaker hissed white noise at him.

  Had he dreamed the knocking?

  He opened a drawer in the work table and removed the big clasp knife. At the door he pressed his ear to the cool metal and listened but could hear nothing. That didn’t tell him anything. The shelter was like a bank vault. There could have been a brass band performing on the other side of the door, and he wouldn’t have heard it. For that matter he would not have been able to hear any knocking.

  Raymond chewed his lip, wiped his sweaty palm on his thigh. He folded open the knife then cranked the door partway aside, knife ready. Stale air and the empty tunnel. He listened for a while then cranked the door shut again.

  “Be a good dog,” Raymond said, back in his chair before the remote.

  He wiggled the cable connection. The monitor blinked on, showing a very low angle on a carpeted floor and a blank wall. Robbie was in rest-mode. A rectangle of rosy morning light lay upon the wall and carpet. A shadow, something unidentifiable, quivered in the rectangle. Sunlight passing through a curtain? A glass of water on the sill? Raymond slumped in his chair and watched the monitor. He considered activating Robbie, but waited. Time passed. His breathing resumed a restful rhythm. His mind dwelt on the quiver of light in a meditative way, as if he were a child on the dreamy precipice of sleep. A girl’s voice said: Let’s go for a walk, boy.

  Auto-activated by her voice, Robbie the Rover switched to Natural Dog mode and stood up. Raymond heard a chain jingle. Then they were walking. Raymond kept his hand off the controls. The girl walked a little ahead, pulling the chain. She passed through a door, and Raymond followed after her.

  It was a gorgeous day.

  Brilliant sunshine, a verdant expanse of lawn, leaves flickering in a summer breeze. Raymond’s heart ached a little; he had been underground a long time. The girl led him to a park. There were other children and dogs. Real dogs, no doubt. Even if the alien replacements didn’t recognize him for what he was, they would—the real dogs.

  But they didn’t.

  Raymond sat tense before the RC, as another little girl approached them with a dog of her own, a fidgety toy poodle. The smaller dog barked its head off. Rover remained aloof, his programming instructing him to refrain from excessive barking, even at the cost of verisimilitude. Raymond took over control and made Robbie bark a few times in his deep retriever voice. The poodle trotted behind him to sniff his asshole. This was it. At least this was it if he didn’t do something.

  He resumed manual control of Robbie the Rover, swung the artificial dog around, and made him bark. The poodle barked back and even snapped at Robbie’s face.

  “Cosette, come here!” the other girl shouted, and she pulled the toy poodle away. Raymond immediately suppressed Robbie’s barking.

  “Uh oh,” the girl with the toy poodle said. She had picked up “Cosette” and was holding the little dog in her right arm as she quickly bent forward, reaching for something on the ground. Then her hand came up fast and she appeared to pet Robbie. The simulacrum was getting a lot of love. Raymond felt obscurely jealous.

  “Nice doggy,” the girl said, holding Cosette close. The poodle sniffed at Robbie, her face up close to the one functioning lens.

  “What’s his name,” the young girl said to Raymond’s young girl.

  “We don’t know,” she said. “My dad sort of found him.”

  “Are you keeping him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you call him Mobia?” the other girl said. At least it sounded like “Mobia.” Raymond clicked his tongue.

  “Maybe,” Raymond’s girl said.

  “Maybe not,” Raymond said.

  “I think they’re okay together now,” the other girl said. “Want to let them play?”

  “Sure.”

  Raymond closed his eyes. Even on Natural Dog mode Robbie wouldn’t be able to convincingly play with a real dog. Raymond opened his eyes and reached forward, intending to flip on Natural Dog anyway, since there was nothing else to do. The image on the monitor was bouncing wildly. For a moment he thought it was another malfunction in the video feed. But then he realized it was bouncing because Robbie was running. The mechanical toy dog was chasing the real toy poodle, gamboling around the park, randomly changing directions. Impossible. The simulacrum couldn’t do that stuff. And besides, Raymond hadn’t touched the controller. He watched until the poodle got tired of running and the two of them settled down. Then Raymond tried to resume direct control. It didn’t work. He swiveled the joystick, snapped the toggle back and forth between Natural and Direct, all to no avail. Cosette sniffed Robbie’s asshole to her heart’s content, and Robbie returned the gesture. Raymond rocked back in his chair. “What the hell?” he said.

  *

  After that the simulacrum remained beyond Ray’s control. All he could do was watch. Which he did—obsessively. He sat for hours in front of the RC monitor. He ate his meals there, napped there. Robbie—renamed Mobia by his adoptive family—enjoyed a completely integrated life, or simulation of a life. Besides the little girl the family consisted of two adults, the man who had rescued Robbie, and his wife. They all had weird names that Raymond could never quite hear. The man’s name sounded like Gitzer. The mother’s name was Natvizia, or something. They both called the little girl by a name that sounded like Spavitz. Were they Romanian? Darker possibilities loomed. But whatever they were they all doted on “Mobia.” They petted him, played games with him, constantly told him what a good boy he was. At first Raymond was baffled. After a while his bafflement turned to envy. Mobia had a life; Raymond lived in a hole.

  One day Raymond awakened from a nap and raised his face to a dead screen. His own haggard reflection stared back at him. He sat up in his creaky chair, his back stiff. He wiggled the cable connection on the back of the monitor, turned it on and off. Nothing helped. The screen remained blank.

  The shelter felt smaller and lonelier than ever. Raymond played music to dispel the constant drone of the generator. Knowing depression would overcome him if he didn’t stay active, he ran on the treadmill. It was hard to get started, but once he was jogging along he didn’t want to stop. He ran until the sweat was pouring off his body and he could barely see from his salt-stinging eyes. He kept looking at the dark monitor, hoping it would come on. It didn’t. He bargained with the Universe. If he could manage to run for an additional fifteen minutes the Universe would let the picture come back. After fifteen minutes, however, the monitor was still blank. Raymond extended the bargain to thirty minutes, then to an hour. He had already been on the treadmill for ninety minutes. He failed to make it to the end of the additional hour. His leg cramped, he stumbled and fell.

  Clutching the twitching muscle in his calf, he began to cry. He dragged himself to the bed and lay there waiting for the pain to subside. Only the physical half of it did.

  *

  A girl was laughing. Raymond swam up out of churning dreams. A dog barked. He turned his head. Light poured from the monitor. Raymond rolled off the bed and stumbled over to the table, overwhelmed with relief.

  The little girl, Spavitz or whatever her name was, knelt at the end of the hallway in the neat suburban-style home.

  “Silly!” she said. “It came out again, didn’t it.”

  She rolled something down the hardwood floor like a Lilliputian bowling ball. Red and brown and white, with a copper glint.

  Robbie’s eye.

  Raymond stopped breathing. Robbie the Rover looked down at his own eye then back up at the girl, who had come closer. “It’s okay, Mobia. We’ll just pop it back in. Unless you want to trade for a blue one.” Spavitz hooked her index finger into the corner of her own eye—and popped it out of the socket.

  Raymond made a strangling sound and shoved back from the table, almost overturning his chair. The girl held her blue eyeball up, comparing it to Robbie’s brown one.
/>   “No,” Raymond said.

  Spavitz pushed Robbie’s eye into her own socket. The eye bulged, too big for the orbit, throwing off the symmetry of her face.

  “Nope,” she said. “Not gonna fit, boy.”

  Mobia barked.

  Spavitz hooked the eyeball out and thumbed it into the dog’s head, then replaced her blue one.

  “There,” she said. “That’s all better.” And then she got very close to Robbie’s good lens and spoke directly into it. “It’s really all better now, Raymond.”

  Raymond gasped.

  “You can come out now,” the girl said.

  Raymond shook his head. His mouth had gone dry.

  “We know you’re there,” Spavitz said. “You can be one of us, like Mobia.”

  Raymond hit a button and the screen went black. He grabbed the power cord, yanked it out of the RC unit and flung it down like a dead snake.

  *

  Raymond sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing his eyes. He reached for the cup of cold tea he’d left on the floor. When? He’d lost track of time, grown gaunt. Many days had passed since he killed the RC unit. His mind alternated between irrational frenzy and dull resignation. Resigned to what, exactly, he couldn’t have said. A half-eaten fiber biscuit lay on the bed next to his pillow. He picked it up and took a listless bite.

  At the work table he slumped in his chair, facing the blank monitor.

  “I know you’re not real,” he said. “There’s no Spavitz, no Mobia, no Gitzer. No Donner or Blitzin or Rudolf, either, for that matter.”

  He bit into the stale biscuit, tore a hunk off and chewed doggedly. His own haggard reflection watched him.

  “I know you’re not real,” he said, spitting fragments of biscuit.

  The cold light from a single panel dimmed then brightened. Raymond looked around the confining shelter, his mouth open and half full of chewed biscuit. When the generator finally died he would be entombed in darkness with nothing but the sound of his own breathing. The shelter was vented to the surface, so there was no danger of suffocation, at least.

  But to live in constant darkness . . .

  Raymond washed down the biscuit with the remains of his tea, then bent over and picked up the power cord and plugged it back into the remote control. His fingers hovered over the On switch. He had to have one more look.

  Raymond pushed the On button.

  An image gathered. Warm afternoon sunlight quivered briefly on a distant wall, then the generator quit, stranding Raymond in the dark.

  *

  Raymond crawled through the narrow tunnel until he emerged blinking into sunlight like some lost and blinded thing.

  A vehicle flashed by on the highway.

  Raymond stood up in the prickly brambles and started to walk. When the rift opened they blended into the human population, made it stronger than it had ever before been. Perhaps it wasn’t an invasion at all, but a miraculous relationship. That was the meaning of the warping funnel that killed Samantha. Her death was an accident in the service of a greater good; it was meaningful. And he, Raymond, must already be one of them. Otherwise how could he possibly have endured?

  He stood at the edge of the highway and thought about Spavitz and her family in the sunny little house. They were more than human. Kinder, more durable, safer. From the park came the sound of children laughing and shouting. As yet no one had seen him; there was time to go back. He slipped the clasp knife out and folded it open. Was he one of them or not? He pulled up his shirt and placed the edge of the blade against his skin. After a moment he drew the blade across. What he saw astonished him.

  Strangers on a Bus

  A single passenger boarded the Greyhound in Idaho Falls: A young man in blue jeans, black T-shirt, and leather jacket. Freya Hoepner, who was sitting beside one of the few unoccupied seats, glanced at him then looked down at the page of the book she wasn’t reading. The words lay in meaningless order under her gaze. In her mind she heard other words, recently snarled at her: Bitch; and: I’m done with you; and: Leave the fucking cat.

  For once in her life, she wanted to be alone.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?”

  She looked up. He wasn’t so young after all, maybe forty. The man hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and there were dark discolorations under his eyes. But he was otherwise attractive, in a lost man-boy way that appealed to Freya despite her recent experience. She shrugged one shoulder and looked back at the meaningless page. The man sat beside her, invading the bubble into which she had retreated since leaving Seattle that morning.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “A book.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It seems to be crap,” Freya said.

  Air brakes hissed, as if exasperated, and the bus lurched out of the station.

  *

  Heading south on I-15, Freya watched a wound open in the western sky. She was thinking about her cat, Mr. Pickwick. The cab had arrived, and Freya had stood in the alley behind the apartment building, holding her small suitcase in one hand and a cat treat in the other. She had called Picky’s name over and over, tearfully, knees bent, hand outstretched. She had just wanted to say goodbye. Then Roger slapped the treat out of her hand and said, “Forget the fucking cat.” Mr. Pickwick had been the last good thing she lost in Seattle, coming after her pride.

  “Personally,” said the man sitting beside her on the bus, “I prefer the classics.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Twain; Shakespeare; Tolstoy. Dickens. Over crap, I mean. Have you read Dickens?”

  “Yes.”

  “No kidding? You never run into people who read real books. Hardly ever.”

  “I’m a teacher,” Freya said.

  “Where do you teach?”

  “Nowhere. I quit. But I used to teach junior high school in Phoenix.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  Because I’m a fool, she thought.

  “I suppose I was tired of it,” she said.

  “Eh. What’s your favorite Dickens?”

  Freya shrugged one shoulder again, not really wanting the conversation to continue.

  “Mine’s David Copperfield,” the man said.

  “Everybody says that,” Freya said. “Or Oliver Twist.”

  “So what’s yours? Pickwick Papers, I bet.”

  “God, no. Our Mutual Friend. Pickwick isn’t even a novel.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but—”

  “It’s okay, if you don’t feel like talking. I don’t usually talk so much myself. It’s interesting to look at people, though. Look at people I don’t know and try to figure them out. Have you ever done that? My name’s Neil, by the way.”

  “Freya,” Freya said.

  “That’s unusual. I like that name. Hey, see that guy?”

  Neil inclined his head toward her and dropped his voice. He pointed at a bald-headed, beefy man across the aisle, reading a magazine. Neil pointed in a funny way, his elbow tucked against his ribs, index finger slightly crooked, as if he were trying to point without pointing. Freya looked briefly at the bald-headed man. A gold ring glinted dully against his earlobe.

  “If you had to make up something about him, what would it be?” Neil asked.

  Freya wasn’t in the mood. She drummed her fingers on the open page of the book, shook her head.

  “A kid would probably make up a story about him being a professional wrestler,” Neil said, “or maybe a genie, if the kid was young enough. But a grown-up would more likely think he’s a biker, or a truck driver. Something like that. Of course he might also be a salesman, or a beekeeper, or an unemployed aerospace engineer. Something that goes against his appearance type. Not that it would matter what anybody made up, right? Since you’d never known him, he might as well be what you make up about him. In your mind there’d be no difference whether he was a broker, or a genie. It’s all the same. When you’re thinking about him he’s in your
world. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Freya forced a smile, then looked out the window. She looked out the window until her neck started to hurt, until the sunset wound desaturated and twilight overtook the world. Finally, when she no longer sensed her seat companion waiting for her, she slowly faced forward, her neck painfully stiff, and closed her eyes, pretending sleep.

  *

  And then she did sleep—or dozed, anyway. But came forward out of troubled, disjointed, hectoring thoughts when she heard the man, Neil, weeping. She opened her eyes a crack, turned her head the merest portion of an inch. He was bent forward, his face in his hands, trying not to make a sound, his shoulders hitching with suppressed sobs. The bus rumbled along. Reading lights shone over random seats, but not theirs, not Freya’s and Neil’s.

  Freya rose out of her self-absorption. She became her Virgonian urge to help. It was the same urge that had prompted her to answer Roger’s instant-message in the Yahoo chat room (ASTROLOGY 2). Roger who was always needling people, challenging their sincerity, their “hokey” beliefs. She thought she had perceived his real self; his insecure, unhappy, wounded nature. He could be so charming and vulnerable, once she penetrated his barriers. Right. Until she moved in and he became his other real self. The one who lapsed into thoughtless cruelty, who became controlling and angry, even during sex. So Freya’s urge to help didn’t always serve her well, but she could not resist it. Her one and only irresistible quality: She had to help.

  Glancing at the bald man (genie-wrestler-trucker), Freya leaned over and, tentatively, touched Neil’s back.

  “Are you all right?”

  Same thing she had asked Roger in her first private message.

  Neil became very still. Freya withdrew her hand. Slowly, Neil sat back. In the dimness he appeared older (or maybe just his age), almost haggard. His shaggy head and old-man-tired eyes.

  “I guess I’m not,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Sorry.”

  “I was only resting my eyes,” Freya said.

  “I’m not usually such a baby. Or a blabbermouth, for that matter.”