Life on the Preservation, US Edition (26 page)

“Well... perhaps especially not me.” It was funny, really. When Charles had been Travis Dugan in that little jerkwater town of Chewelah, he had longed to be himself. To that end he eventually
declared
himself. And he never again pretended to be attracted to girls. But neither had he ever found a companion of his own sexual persuasion. So here he was, a thirty-three-year-old virgin. Yes, he was himself, with a new name, but the same unfulfilled longings. Alone. Except it wasn’t only Travis and Charles sitting across from Curtis Sarmir in the Contour – it was also the Curator. In fact, it was mostly the Curator’s presence subsuming what had been Travis-Charles.

Self-consciously, he adjusted his Kangol cap.

“You and your hats,” Curtis said. “In someone else I might consider it affected. But hats suit you.”

“I like hats,” Charles admitted.

Curtis tilted his stem glass back, finishing his third Cosmo. He set the glass down very precisely. Fingertips lightly touching the stem, he raised his eyes and said:

“Why you –
especially?”

“Excuse me?”

“Especially
not
an expert on sex.”

“Oh. Well. I’ve never actually had real sex.”

“I understand.”

“You do?”

“Of course. It’s hardly unique, a lifetime of pretending to be what everyone expects you to be. Do you know you’re wearing that cap backwards?”

“I am?” Charles removed the cap and looked at it. “But the little kangaroo is in the front. That’s right, isn’t it?”

It was how the original Charles Noble wore his cap.

Curtis
tsked
and took the cap away from him and turned it around, placing it back on Charles’s head with both hands, fitting it with care, as if it were a crown.

“Frontwards suits you better, cap-wise. There. You look very hip now.”

Charles gave him a cosmopolitan smile.

“Poor man,” Curtis said. “Locked in the closet all by yourself for
how
many years?”

A
COUPLE OF
hours later Charles left Curtis’s bed and shut himself in the bathroom. A tea light burned in a pewter dish, which was sufficient. He didn’t turn on the overhead bulbs. A handsome, somewhat plump man with thinning brown hair and distant eyes regarded him from the mirror over the sink. The Curator swam to the surface of those eyes and saw more than the mirror captured. Before his star-dwelling soma, before jellyfish evolution and before absorption into the Cloud, he had been a bipedal creature not dissimilar to the one now looking back at him. Inhabiting the human simulacrum – becoming it – had triggered this memory.

“I am Charles Noble,” the face in the mirror said. A speaking head, mobile lips, hinged jaw, and slippery, muscled tongue – a borrowed android puppet. Charles Noble: who was already a fabrication in the mind of Travis Dugan, and before Travis the name, the
character
, a fabrication in the mind of a forgotten novelist.

The Curator concentrated to erase and create himself. Name was function, and
Curator
had no function here

“I am Charles Noble.”

Because that was preferable to the alternative, which was:
I am nobody.

Looking down, he cupped his genitals in his hand, exuding unfamiliar tenderness towards his new body and the new things it had shown him it could do. Tender and lonely and a little sad, he ran warm water in the sink and used a soapy cloth to wash his penis. When he was done he dried himself and deposited the wet cloth and hand towel in the hamper.

Charles started back to bed, where loneliness and confusion might be dispelled. He wasn’t sure he belonged there, but he didn’t seem to have anyplace else to go or anyone else to be.

His clothes were folded neatly on the black leather ottoman, where Curtis had thoughtfully placed them, the Kangol cap on top. Charles paused.

Back in the bathroom he stood before the mirror, this time with his cap on. Finally he recognized himself. Almost. He turned the cap around, putting the little kangaroo in back. The face in the mirror smiled and it was him.

“Hello, Charles.”

I
AN TRIED TO
push himself off Kylie’s body, but she held him tight.

“Stay like this,” she said. “Just a little longer.”

“We have to do stuff.”

“Not yet. Please.”

“Okay. But there isn’t much time.”

“There’s a day, the over-and-over day.”

“Who are you?” he said. “I mean really.”

“Just a girl from Oakdale.”

“How did you get here?”

“I flew through the Dome in a jet. If you hit it fast enough you can tunnel through from the outside.”

“It’s all true, then. Nothing in the city is real.”

“No,” she said. “We are. We’re real.” She loosened her embrace, and Ian pushed himself up, hands planted flat on the mattress, their sticky bodies coming apart. His face directly above hers, he said, “God, you’re beautiful.”

“So are you.”

He rolled away from her and stood up. The apartment was filled with pale morning light. He shuffled into the kitchen on weak legs, obeying some physical memory, somatic reflex. Like he was
supposed
to be making a cup of coffee at this moment. Lying in bed with Kylie wasn’t part of the script. He watched his hands take down a cup from the cabinet, scoop dark roast into a Melitta filter, pick up the kettle and fill it with tap water. Watched himself, but not in the free-floating dissociative manner he sometimes experienced it, as if he were separate from his body; this was more like his body
owned
him, as if he were a passenger existing in the electrical impulses between brain and muscle. After a couple of minutes, he consciously asserted himself. “Stop it,” he said out loud, to his body, to the hand grasping the kettle. And the hand set the kettle down on a cold burner, and Ian stood back from the stove. Kylie was right behind him and he bumped into her.

“That was scary,” he said.

“What was?”

“It was like my body wanted to do its own thing.”

She put her arms around him and squeezed him hard. “I like this body. Ian, how did you get here, into the Dome? Did you fly like me?”

“No, I was always here.”

“But you’re real. If you weren’t real you wouldn’t have stayed with me when the day started over.”

“The Advent,” Ian said.

“The what?”

“Advent. It’s what the days are called in here. The guy who runs it all told me.”

“What guy who runs it all?”

“He called himself the Curator.”

“Is he one of the aliens in the bright, spinny ships?”

“No. Listen–” His cell phone started ringing. “Oh, fuck. That’s Zach.” Kylie released him and he grabbed the phone off the bedside table, slipped it open, said, “Hi.”

Cautious silence on the line, then Zach said, “Good morning?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m coming over.”

“No. I mean, I’ll call you back.”

“Damn it, don–”

Ian closed his phone and tossed it on the bed. “This is so nuts. I’m supposed to ride to Pullman today. I’m supposed to see Sarah.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Kylie said. “But she isn’t there, Ian.”

“How do we really
know
that?”

“She isn’t there because Pullman isn’t there. The world isn’t there, not the world the way you probably remember it.”

Ian closed his eyes. “I’ve felt this coming for a long time. But I guess nobody really knows what it’s like to lose your mind until it actually happens.”

“You haven’t lost your mind and you know it.”

“Yeah, I guess. But crazy people never believe they’re crazy.”

“So... what, you want to believe you’re crazy because that would mean you
aren’t
crazy, since crazy people never believe they’re crazy?”

“Something like that.”

“I knew a crazy guy. He was the real thing. He wanted to cut me so I couldn’t have orgasms.
He
didn’t think he was crazy. It was like God’s work to him.”

“Cut you?”

“You know, like in the
National Geographic?
”

“I have to get out of here.” Ian pulled on pants and shoes and a sweatshirt, grabbed his keys.

“Not out of the city,” Kylie said. “You can’t.”

“I know. I just have to clear my head.”

A couple of minutes later he was straddling the Indian, jabbing his key in the ignition. Kylie came around the end of the alley and stood blocking it. “If you try to leave the city, you know what will happen?”

“Yeah, some weird shit. Whatever.”

“I kept you with me in bed. I did it on purpose. I had a
feeling
about you. I knew you were real, like me. I knew we were real together, Ian. Please don’t go.”

While she talked, Ian went through his cold start routine. Cold starting the Chief was usually a bitch. So he was surprised when he stood on the kicker and the bike came alive on the first try, the engine farting and shuddering. Ian rolled unsteadily to the end of the alley. Kylie still blocked the way. She had pulled on jeans and the flimsy olive drab t-shirt but nothing else. Her skin looked almost translucently pale. The sight of her little bare feet on the grimy concrete tugged at something in his chest.

“I have to
go
,” he said. “I’ll come back, but I need to go first.”

“Just tell me one thing, okay?”

“What?”

“Why are you different, why are you like me? If you didn’t come from outside, then how does that work?”

“I’m a ghost,” Ian said.

“If you don’t want to tell me then don’t tell me.” She stepped aside.

He dug the spare apartment key out of his pants and tossed it to her. “You’re gonna freeze your toes out here.”

“If you come back, I’ll be here.”

He throttled into the street, glanced at her in the jiggly mirror before leaning into the first turn, saw her white, white feet picking gingerly up the steps to his building. He felt a pang of separation, and it was much sharper than the guilt stabbing at his heart with little hesitant thrusts. Guilt about Sarah. Subtract all the bizarre shit from the situation, and what you had left was a guy cheating on his girlfriend. Ian tried to get behind the idea. It should have been easy. He was so used to bashing himself over the head with his own failures. But. But... Kylie was so
right
for him. She made everything and everyone who came before her look like a mistake.

Just before he hit the ramp that would carry him to the floating bridge, he throttled back and tucked the Chief into the curb, letting traffic rumble past him. Trying to ride to Pullman was stupid. He knew that. There
was
no Pullman, and there was no Sarah Darbro, not anymore. Crossing the bridge meant exactly one thing: Ian wussing out again. Bashing himself over the head, yeah, but mostly it was running away. His specialty. He would hit the bubble and maybe that would erase his mind, the way the Curator had wanted it to be. Then he would just be his usual clueless self in the forever repeating clueless world. Way easier than manning up.

Fuck that.

K
YLIE WAS IN
the shower, scrubbing at her body with a soapy face cloth, luxuriating in her first real honest-to-God hot shower in over two years. She heard the apartment door open, and stopped scrubbing. She turned the shower off and stood dripping in the tub, listening. Then Ian said, “I’m back.”

Ian!

“I’ll be right out!” She rinsed the soap off her body, dried herself with one of Ian’s cheap, threadbare blue towels, then quickly pulled on a black t-shirt and a pair of cargo pants she’d found in the closet. They were girl’s clothes, way too small for Ian, but too big for Kylie. She rolled the pant legs to her ankles. Using a corner of the towel she wiped the fog off the mirror and checked herself out. Her hair was the only really bad thing.

The smell of good, strong coffee hit her as soon as she stepped out of the steamy bathroom. Ian was sitting at his Salvation Army desk holding two disposable cups, the word Vivace’s printed in red letters on the sides. He handed her one.

“Thanks,” she said. “You came back. I love it that you came back. What’s wrong?”

“Those are Sarah’s clothes.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I wondered–”

“It’s okay.”

“She was your girlfriend?”

“Yeah. Only I guess it’s more complicated than that.”

“It always is.”

“We broke up. Kind of. Only she didn’t know it, and I wasn’t positive myself.”

“Been there.”

“It’s like I wanted her to be far away. I didn’t want to not have her, but I didn’t want to owe her anything. Does that make sense?”

“Not really. But I’ve been there, too, only on the wrong side of it. What are you thinking now, that you want her again? Instead of me? I mean, if you could.”

“No.”

“The truth?”

“Yeah. Besides, she’s not even out there anymore, right?”

“Don’t say it like it’s
your
fault.”

He shrugged, his face expressionless, like he was hating himself for wanting Kylie’s sympathy.

She put her cup down and sat in his lap facing him, her legs straddling his thighs. The office chair creaked back on loose springs. She brought her nose right up to his, so close his eyes seemed to come together. “Ian, we have to deal with what’s real, right now. Not mistakes or regrets or maybes.”

“I know.”

“You and I have something really, really special going on here. Don’t you feel it, too?”

“Yeah, I do.”

She drew back a little. “You hesitated.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She kissed his mouth then stood up. “So it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. Now tell me really how you got here. I know you’re not a fake person, like everybody else. You’re as real as it gets.”

“I already told you. I’m a ghost, or I guess not a ghost exactly but–”

“Whoa. I think I’m going to want to lie down for this. Come on.”

She pulled him out of the chair, and they lay next to each other on the bed. Ian started touching her, pushing her t-shirt up, caressing her bare belly. She tugged her shirt down and took his hand in hers. “Talk first.” She gave his hand a reassuring squeeze, to let him know she wasn’t
against
having sex again, just not at this exact moment.