Fractal Paisleys

by Paul Di Filippo

  Junius. Junius Weatherall. And of course you know what all the kids call me.

  June. That’s when they’re being kind. Otherwise it’s Junie. Or even Junie-Moonie.

  Can you ever, ever, ever in your life imagine getting some girl to take you seriously or romantically when you’re weighed down with a name like June? There you are on a date, things are getting hot, and what does she say? “Kiss me—June!” Yeah, right. In your dreams.

  I tried changing my name once, tried getting all the adults and kids I knew to call me by a better one. Nothing fancy, just James, that way I could even keep my old initials. James Weatherall, good old Jim. But no matter how hard I insisted, everyone from the teachers on down just kept right on calling me Junius or June. After a while, I got sick of hearing myself beg, so I just sighed and gave up, like with everything else I ever tried.

  But anyway, none of this hypothetical stuff matters anymore, cuz this is the day and the hour and almost the very minute when I’m gonna really do it.

  But unlike the rest of my fucked-up, substandard life, I’m gonna make sure all the conditions under my control are just right.

  First I put my favorite Slayer tape in our crappy Wal-mart boombox and set it for continuous play. I push the volume knob up to max, and when the tin walls of our “house” are vibrating, I go into the “kitchen” (really just a different corner of the trailer). The plumbing of the sink full of greasy dishes is hidden by a raw plywood cupboard with its door missing and an old shirt tacked up in its place. Pushing the shirt aside, I take out the half-full bottle of peach-flavored brandy which Mom bought once to make some kinda fancy recipe from Woman’s World that turned out to be like this inedible chunky slime. Carrying the bottle, I go into Mom’s “bedroom,” where I drop to my knees. Supporting myself with the hand that holds the bottle, I root around under the bed with my free hand, feeling for what I need among the soap opera magazines, slippers, and dust-kitties.

  Sure enough, its still there.

  My worthless, had-to-go-and-croak Dad’s shotgun.

  With the brandy in one hand and the shotgun in the other, I get to my feet, shuffle back to the couch and plop down, my head about two inches away from the boombox speakers.

  First I crack the barrel of the gun. The two shells are still in there, just like they have been ever since I can remember. Hope they’re not too old to fire. Why Mom keeps the gun—why she keeps it loaded— I can’t say. Maybe she’s scared of living alone, with just a kid for protection. Maybe she wants to have the same option open to her that I’m gonna use today. Whatever. All that matters is that the gun is here and ready. I close it up and lay it down beside me on the couch.

  Then I get to work on the brandy.

  I never really drank more than a beer or two before. Maybe some champagne at a wedding once. But the brandy, which is so sweet as to be beyond nasty, goes down okay. In between swigs, I just let the music rattle me like a streetperson’s cup full of change. It’s kinda soothing in its own weird way. Every now and then I reach out and stroke the gun. The barrels are cold, like the railing on Zepplin’s stairway to heaven, the handle is smooth like an old catcher’s mitt. I wonder if my Dad ever killed anything with it. I’ll use it when I finish the liquor, I figure.

  The Slayer tape cycles through twice and is starting on the third time, and there’s only about a quarter-inch left in the bottle. My head is spinning like a turbocharged clothesdryer and every familiar piece of junk in the trailer has acquired a twin and a fuzzy halo. The jelly jar still holding the dried dead flowers Mom picked last summer, the opened box of corn flakes, the TV with only half an antenna (except now it has two). But I’m not worried about being able to get the gun positioned in my mouth and pulling the triggers—the idea still looks good to me—cuz after all how hard can it be? I mean, it’s not brain surgery, right?

  Then I think, oh, yeah—it is. Funny, real funny.

  I look blurrily at the nearly empty bottle, raise it like I’m making a toast to someone, then start it toward my lips. But before I can down the final gulp of booze, I start to shiver in a major way.

  This shivering is not nerves. Or not just nerves, anyhow. I suddenly realize how cold it is in the trailer. I can hardly feel my fingers, in fact. Shit, our propane must have run out! Mom said she was gonna order a new tank later this week. Damn! It must be about as cold inside this dump as it is out. Hell, I could freeze to death! Wouldn’t that be great, they find me stiff as a board with the shotgun ready but unused. I can see the headlines now. “Major Teenage Jerk Bungles Suicide Attempt by Freezing To Death. Those Who Knew Him Not Surprised. ‘He Was Always A Fuckup,’ Say Classmates.”

  I’ve got to get warm somehow, or I’m not gonna be able to stay awake enough to blow my brains out.

  Looking around the trailer for the nearest blanket or coat, I spot the sweater.

  Mom bought this sweater last week at the Salvation Army for maybe a dollar seventy-five. I have never seen an uglier, sleazier one in my whole life. It doesn’t look even knitted so much as it looks like the hide they stripped intact off of some butt-ugly animal. It’s a jacket type—what do they call them, cardigans?—but it’s got no buttons or buttonholes along its edges, so I assume it was handmade by somebody’s Alzheimer-type grandmother who didn’t really foresee the need for buttons. The sleeves have these gay-looking ribbed cuffs on them that manage to seem both loose and confining. The whole shapeless, baggy, oversized thing is fuzzy like an angora cat that just got goosed up the ass with a zillion volts. But absolutely the worst, wormiest feature of this whole worthless substandard sweater is its color. It’s a kind of puke-tinted olive, or a shit-colored beige, or a bruised-banana brown. Words fail me to describe this horrible shade.

  When Mom came in the trailer with a week ago and held it proudly up, I just looked at it silently for a minute or so, then said, “Customers will definitely tip you more when you’re wearing that, cuz they’ll think you’re a retarded feeb.”

  She got mad at me then and threw the sweater at me. I ducked, and it ended up half-draped over a chair, where it s stayed ever since, neither Mom nor me wanting to admit its existence. Now, too dizzy to stand, I lean across the couch, snag a corner of the sweater and pull it to me.

  I must be really drunk, cuz the piece of clothing seems to crawl toward me, like something alive. I hardly use any effort, and suddenly it’s in my lap.

  I go to put an arm in one sleeve, then pause.

  Is this really the outfit I wanna be found dead in?

  But then my shivers get worse, and I realize it’s this sweater or nothing, cuz I’m too wasted to reach anything else, and unless I get warm this whole farce will be over. I’ll pass out and when I wake up I won’t be able to shoot myself cuz I’ll be sober again, and my substandard life will drag on forever, or at least till I’m thirty years old and ready to retire or something.

  So soon I’m wearing the sweater, its buttonless front leaving a three-inch-wide stripe of my Stussy tee shirt showing. Man, this hideous garment is really warm ! It’s like having some big ugly but affectionate dog draped over me.

  Now I can get down to business.

  I chug the last of the fruity booze. Then I pick up the shotgun, swing its barrels to point at myself. It’s awkward holding it reversed, and my wrist start to strain, but I figure the pressure won’t last too long. Holding it at an upward angle, I move it toward my open mouth.

  Then a flash from across the trailer catches my eye, and I stop moving.

  It’s me, my reflection, in the tall skinny unframed mirror leaning against a wall that Mom uses to check herself out before work each day

  I see a guy with long brown hair parted in the middle and caught up behind his ears, an open sweater showing his tee-shirt, with something like a microphone stand aimed at his face. The sight hypnotizes me.

  It is Kurt Cobain on MTV Unplugged, from December of 1993, when we still had cable. All that’s missing is the guitar. All that’s added are my zits.

>   Well, well, well. So that’s what I was aiming subconsciously for all along. And I never even really liked his music. Too much whining. It bugs me that even my going-away-gesture is not original. At least I’m not playing one of his tapes. Oh, well, I guess there’s only so many ways to do it.

  I start the gun barrels moving to where I can clamp my teeth down on Death.

  As I shift position slightly, the left edge of the sweater closes the gap across my chest at one spot, making contact with the right side.

  Instantly, the whole front of the sweater zips closed with a sound like velcro separating. At the same time I feel a tickling at the back of my neck, where the collar touches it.

  Weirded out, I decide instantly that now’s the time to do it, before I can lose my mind entirely.

  I mentally say goodbye, then will my fingers to squeeze the triggers.

  But nothing happens.

  My fingers are as rigid as frozen fishsticks.

  At the same instant, words light up my brain.

  Neural subject mismatch. Failure mode potential.

  But it’s not me thinking the strange words. It’s someone—or something—else.

  Accessing subject memories for historical pointers. Extremely weak referents. Synthesizing from available data. Repositioning internal chronolocator. Circa three point five years post-target-date. Acknowledged: mission failure likelihood one hundred percent. Energy reserves thirty percent. Fallback mode now operational.

  While this nonsense is flashing through my head, I’m desperately trying to do something, anything! Lower the gun, pull the trigger, jump up, call for help. Nothing. I’m a zombie, trapped in my own body.

  I think about the tickle I felt on my neck. Has this devil sweater put like some kinda tap into my brain? Maybe it’s a new kinda Salvation Army recruitment trick…?

  Just as I start to panic helplessly in my head like a roach in a roach motel, things begin to happen.

  My arms lower the gun to the couch and my hands drop it. I stand up. I start to walk toward the door of the trailer.

  “Hey,” I weakly say, and then when I find I can talk again, yell, “What’s going on here!?”

  We need transportation, says what I gotta assume is the voice of the sweater in my head.

  “Transportation? For what? Where are you taking me?”

  To the urban conglomeration known in pre-Rectification times as Seattle.

  “Seattle!” I scream. All thoughts of suicide have been driven from my brain. Surprisingly so have any traces of drunkenness. “That’s more’n a hundred miles from here! If I’m not home for supper, Mom will kill me!”

  Hyperbole, and not relevant to the mission.

  I’m still being carried by my own traitor body toward the door. As I pass the kitchen table, I helplessly witness my sneaky weasel body grabbing a butter knife.

  “Mission!” I yell to the air. “What fucking mission?”

  Having failed to save my primary target, I am now attempting to reach one of my secondary targets, as stored in the mission rescue-table.

  My hand that’s not holding the butter knife is turning the doorknob and I’m opening the door. A blast of frigid air hits me—then I suddenly don’t feel the cold!

  “Hey, what’d you do?”

  I merely adjusted upward your threshold to external temperature conditions that would normally result in bodily discomfort.

  I’m down the three steps from the trailer door to the littered snowy ground, and trotting with perfect ease toward the parking lot. A chained dog barks from across the park.

  “I—I can’t believe this! What the hell are you? An alien? That’s it, you’re some kinda evil outtaspace body-snatching thing!”

  The calm mechanical voice in my head manages to sound a little peeved, like I offended its dignity. I am of human origin, and my functions are pro-Gaian. But we need not discuss this now. My resources are low, and I must concentrate on the task at hand.

  The lot is half full of the kinda old junks that people who have to live in a trailer park usually own. Approaching the first one, I try the door handle against my will. Locked. I move on to the next. And the next, and the next—

  The fourth—a twenty-year-old Toronado with its bumpersticker that says GRACE HAPPENS that I think belongs to that grouchy drunk, Mister Harris—is unlocked. I crack the door and slide in. Then my hands are busy with the butter knife and the ignition. Soon I’m twisting two wires together. The motor cranks, noisy and reluctant. Using my foot, the sweater pumps the gas, the motor catches more sincerely, I shift into gear, and start to pull out of the lot.

  “Hey, I can’t drive!” I tell the sweater. “I never took any lessons, and I don’t even have a permit!”

  But I can, it says back. And as a Turing-level Four construct, I am automatically licensed by my manufacturer to participate in all human activities consistent with my abilities.

  We’re pulling out of the trailer park lot and heading north on 243. A ways off to my right is the Columbia River, its slow cold waters shining with sprinkles of holly-jolly winter sunlight. I wish I was in the river with lead weights strapped to my body.

  “You idiot!” I tell the sweater, as it accelerates smoothly, pulls the car’s nose out to pass a slow truck ahead of us, and then slips back into our lane as neat as some pro stock-car racer. “You may be licensed for some grand construction tour on the fucking Planet of the Vampire Sweaters or wherever it is that you come from! But here you are riding the body of fifteen-year-old kid without a license and driving a stolen car! If a cop catches us, it’ll be the freaking end of the ride! And what about your mission then, huh? How are you gonna accomplish it in jail?”

  You seem worried, says the sweater, although there is no need. The mission is solely my responsibility, although I admit that I would be stranded and helpless without the temporary loan of your somatic extensions. Would you like me to disconnect your senses? Perhaps you would worry less if you had no incoming data to misinterpret…?

  “No! No!” I think about how helpless I felt back in the trailer when I couldn’t even talk, and imagine being trapped blind and deaf inside my own head. “No, please don’t shut off my eyes or ears or anything else! I don’t need less information, I need more! I just wanna know what’s going on here!”

  A not unreasonable request. Allow me to gain access to the freeway first, where less of my dwindling resources will be needed for maneuvering, and then I shall explain.

  I begin to relax a little, unbracing my mental muscles. “Okay, fine. Maybe we can be, like, partners, right?” I hope that sounds reasonable, and that the sweater can’t read my mind. Just let me get control back, and we’ll see how fast I can strip this itchy, stitchy monster off!

  When the sweater replies, I think I’ve managed to fool it. That is the conventional method of operation between post-Rectification humans and such as I.

  I keep quiet until we pick up Route 90 heading west. Soon we’re cruising smoothly along at seventy MPH. I hope Mister Harris’ ancient Toronado can take this kind of punishment, cuz I’ve never seen him drive it faster than thirty-five on his way to the liquor store. I realize that for the past few seconds I’ve actually been kinda enjoying being behind the wheel of a stolen fast car heading to a big city on some kinda mysterious errand, even if I’m not doing the actual driving. But I force myself to remember the likely consequences of this insane stunt, and my excitement disappears.

  After about half an hour, when I figure I’ve given the sweater enough time to settle down, I say, “Um, Mister Sweater, sir, you were gonna fill me in on our mission…?”

  There’s something like a sigh in my head. Yes, my failed task. If I were not operating so close to my own pre-programmed extinction, I would already have dumped the whole audiovisual database into your brain, and you’d be able simply to remember it all. But as matters stand, I must converse in this time-consuming, low-energy manner. And the baud rate is appalling.…

  This talk about the monster dyin
g gives me hope, but I try to hide it. “Well, I’m sorry you’re not feeling better, Mister Sweater. But if you could just fill me in on the basics, like…?”

  Of course. The outline and implications of my mission are quite simple, although the practical details are extremely rarefied. I am a highly complex artifact constructed from the nanoscale up, originating approximately a century into your future. I was sent back in time to save the life of a certain individual named Mister Kurt Cobain. Perhaps you have heard of him…?

  I can’t stop a laugh. “Heard of him! Of course I’ve heard of him! But I’m surprised anyone way up there in the future ever did.”

  The individual known as Kurt Cobain was a pivotal instrument in birthing the very timeline I come from. The incredible music he created in his thirties and forties, the millions of individuals he inspired, before he succumbed to one of the new antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis— He was perhaps the single most influential creative individual of your era. His life ramified down the decades. But even more importantly, perhaps, was the way he raised his daughter. It was she who, as an adult, actually— The sweater breaks off.

  “C’mon, man. The daughter, Beanie-weenie or whatever they named her. What’d she do that was so important?”

  I am sorry. The indigenes of this period may not share that information. I have perhaps already said too much.…

  I think about what the sweater has said. Something bothers me, and I try to put it into words. “The way you talk, Cobain lived on, raised his daughter, she did something important, your world was born. If all of that’s already happened, then why did you have to come back in time to make it happen?”

  Because secret records show that we—that I—did.