Are You There and Other Stories (10 page)

“What did the police say?”

“Random act. No one has been arrested, but it hasn’t been that long. Can we talk about something else now?”

“What was the mystery story?”

“Jesus. It was a
mystery
. Even to me. She kept it to herself. She shouldn’t have bothered. I’m
not
ambitious.”

I reached for my beer but didn’t want it and didn’t pick it up. Fatigue overtook me like a gray wave. All of a sudden I could barely keep my eyes open, my post-passenger buzz failing with characteristic abruptness.

“I have to sleep,” I said.

“You look like somebody just hit you in the head with a hammer.”

“Roughly correct.”

I paid the bill. In the parking lot I fumbled the keys out of my pocket, dropped them on the ground. I leaned over, but it was Rhonda’s hand that picked them up, her nails finely shaped and painted the faintest mauve.

*

In my dreams Cynthia was real. Not just a memory, or a desire, or a longing, or a regret. Dreams resemble loops, or the other way around. There is no distance. Imagine being able to turn on your favorite dream at will. Imagine the risen dead.

*

I woke in my apartment, on my bed, in a straggle of blue TV light filtered through layered strata of dope. It was hot. Rhonda Reppo sat with her legs crossed and locked in a Zen lotus. Her legs were bare, and she was wearing one of my sleeveless T’s.

“What—” I started, but my throat was too dry to make much more than a croak. She turned her head, and I swallowed a couple of times and tried again: “What are you doing here?”

“I got your address out of your wallet and drove you home. I didn’t want to leave you sleeping in your car, so I walked you up here. Every time we stopped, like at the lobby door or the elevator, you started sliding. So I’m not going to carry you, right? I tried to keep you moving. Got your apartment open, but then what? Let you hit the floor and leave you? Then I’m thinking I’m not cabbing it all the way back to my co-op. So you’re my ride, but also I was thinking we could kill Franz together, if you’re game.”

“You better quit smoking that shit.” I rubbed my face, stood up like somebody rising out of a sucking tub of mud, and shambled over to the refrigerator. It was mostly empty, except for a few bottles of beer and one of water. It was water I needed. I chugged on the half-empty bottle, letting the cool air from the open refer dry my sweat.

Rhonda touched my bare shoulder. I’d known she was there, and didn’t flinch. She trailed her nails down my back. It felt good, but I said, “Don’t,” and she stopped. I capped the bottle, replaced it on the shelf, swung the door shut and turned. She had stopped touching me but she hadn’t retreated an inch. Her breasts filled out my T-shirt, dark nipples visible through white ribbed cotton.

“You’re a nice guy,” she said.

“I have my moments.”

“Loyal.”

“To a fault.” I moved past her, picked up my keys. “I’ll drive you home now.”

“You didn’t say whether or not you were game. There’s this guy in my troupe? He kind of plays at the street theater thing. In real life he’s some kind of techie. I asked him once if he could screw with a passenger while he was riding, and this guy, Tony, he said sure. He said he could make a gizmo that would scramble the passenger like breakfast eggs, but you’d have to be right on the portal. And I could be on it, that’s not a problem.”

“Nobody’s killing Thixton. Nobody’s killing anybody.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. She still hadn’t moved. The TV light pulsed on her legs.

I clutched my car keys, stared at her.

“You’re not the only one,” she said. “Franz has many rides. He can buy what he wants and he buys lives.”

My head hurt. How long had I slept? It was dark, the time stamp in the corner of the TV said 2 a.m., but what day was it?

“With us,” Rhonda said, “it’s like a seedy romance, almost. He gets off on the artsy-girl bullshit. In some of his other lives he gets darker. You’re a nice guy, but you need to know how much your memories cost.”

“Get dressed,” I said.

“Franz talks to me,” she said. “He shows me things, like that boy. He knows I’m scared and he likes it.”

“Get dressed, Rhonda.”

She did, and neither of us spoke another word.

*

My hands were clean. But somebody else’s were dirty. I was able to ignore this fact for a while, though I knew it would eventually claim me. Meanwhile my drug protocol continued apace and I was well on the road to permanently altering my memory centers—I was on the road to having Cynthia back. Then one night, drunk, trying to write a feature about the role of block captains in co-op districts I became suddenly enraged and threw my beer bottle at the wall hard enough to wake up the unknown occupant of the adjoining apartment. He thumped the wall a couple of times, but it was nothing compared to the thumping going on inside my head. And for the millionth time since Rhonda told me about Thixton’s other lives, I wondered what story Cyn had been chasing and who had decided to terminate her investigation.

I closed out my newsfile and buzzed Rhonda Reppo’s terminal. It was about three o’clock in the morning. After a moment she answered, a dark, grainy image insert opening in the corner of the screen.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I said.

“Don’t you?”

“Not much.”

A tiny coal brightened and dimmed in front of her face. “So,” she said.

“You can’t get at a man like Thixton. He has money and he has political connections, police connections. Even with proof you couldn’t expose him. Say you have names, particulars. The cops would collar me for participating in an illegal Passenger arrangement and never bother with the rest of it. Or I write the story, fly it by my editor, whom I’ve never met in person, by the way. He wouldn’t run it. I’d be lucky if he didn’t fire me. What’s more I’d find myself audited, some government agency raping every data point out of my soul until they found something good to nail me with. I’m a threat to security. Isn’t everybody?”

“I never said anything about getting Franz that way,” Rhonda said. The tiny glow in the dark image, waiting.

“This gizmo,” I said. “What will it really
do
to him?”

“In a perfect world, he’ll be a drooling vegetable.”

“The world isn’t perfect.”

“Usually not,” she said.

“And what do you need me for? Why haven’t you just done it when he’s over there with my body?”

The ember of dope glowed bright, subsided. After a long while she said, “Maybe there’s a chance he won’t be the only vegetable to come out of the deal.”

“And I’m a nice guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

*

My night came around. I wanted to call it off but didn’t. I was nervous, and when I lay down it was with little expectation of sleep. The next thing I knew I was in a strange bedroom, tumbling backward, a bright ceiling light stabbing into my eyes, somebody gasping for air. I fell through a long gap in cognitive reality before I hit the floor, cracking the back of my head a solid blow. But it was the button-locus of pain at the base of my skull that really hurt. I writhed on my back, eyes squeezed shut. A cool hand touched my cheek. Rhonda Reppo’s voice, soothing:
No, it’s all right, it’s all right
. . .

*

Bad memories haunted me, and not all of them were my own. Now when I slept a nasty residue of Franz Thixton fumed up, and ghosts of his perverted deeds and desires spooked through the night marshes of my dreams. More than once I’d seen Cynthia on those marshes, and it was no longer memory enhancers I craved but a memory suppressant.

A month after we’d scrambled Thixton like “breakfast eggs,” in a lost hour past midnight, I turned to my terminal, its flat blue light the only illumination in my apartment. I buzzed Rhonda Reppo and presently a box opened in the corner of the screen.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find out.”

“Find out what?” Rhonda said, after a moment.

“Whether what’s inside is what counts.”

Light streaked when she pulled the joint away from her mouth. She said, “I guess I’m ready for a ride, if you are.”

Scatter

I
was enjoying the memory of a single malt scotch I had once drunk in a Las Vegas casino back around ought ’49, when I sensed someone enter my office. I let the scotch go (Glenfiddich, $22 a shot) and came forward.

She stood clutching her handbag in front of her. She was wearing a green skirt in an iridescent fish scale design with a matching jacket. The skirt clung to her hips like a second skin. Holy mackerel! And she wore one of those hats that look like neuro netting with feathers.

“Please take a seat,” I said.

The only seat in the office placed her in front of a retinal scanner. Before she had her pack of smokeless c’s out of her handbag I knew everything about her, from her name (Kari Tolerico), to her yearly Kotex consumption, the brand of coffee she preferred, and her multiple online ID’s, and not to mention that unfortunate polyp she’d had lasered out of her most intimate recesses.

She lit up, crossed her legs, and waited. Fairly impressive. Most of my prospective clients, when confronted with an empty office and a disembodied voice, tended to fidget. Kari Tolerico was not the fidgeting type.

I chose to appear behind my desk as Robert Mitchum, circa 1947, the
Out Of The Past
era. Fully colorized for contemporary sensibilities, of course.

“How can I help you, Ms. Tolerico?”

“There’s going to be a murder.”

“Is there?”

“It’s a plot to kill my lover’s husband.”

“What makes you think such a thing?”

She shrugged, her jacket gleaming like an oil slick.

“Intuition,” she said.

“And—?”

“Poison.”

“Intuition and poison. It sounds like somebody or other’s autobiography.”

“Does it? I’m not a reader.”

“You’re not missing much,” I said. “Just the distilled and refined thoughts, art, philosophy, and history of the human race.”

“I see.”

“Seeing’s good, too,” I said.

“Are you a reader then, Mr. Frye?”

“I was before circumstances forced me to surrender corporal existence. Now I can only read books that I’d already read, that are in my memory vault. Anything new is scanned, and I can access the text, but it’s not like holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.”

“What a romantic you are.”

“Yeah, I’m Byronesque. Let’s get back to the poison, Ms. Tolerico.”

“Actually it’s more of a viral infection.”

“Huh?”

Suddenly the taste of Glenfiddich came forward, burning at the back of the throat I didn’t have. With an effort of concentration, I managed to quell the sensation. But another immediately took its place. The sensation of urine-wet sheets gone cold on my little boy body.

“You don’t look well, Mr. Frye.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Not at all. That hound dog face you’re wearing is getting all grainy and flickery, too.”

Damn
it. I shuffled her data, hunting for the clue I must have missed, the thread, the inconsistency. My Mitchum biolo stood, leaned over the desk, and stretched out his arm to point at the woman’s betraying eye. Any reasonable person would have flinched. Ms. Tolerico merely grinned and batted her pretty lashes.

“What did you do?” I said.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Frye.”

“I’m sure you do.”

The wet sheets went away, and I found myself experiencing a memorable orgasm. This orgasm had occurred on the same day that I’d enjoyed my twenty-two dollar Glenfiddich. That had been a hell of a lucky day. Accompanying the orgasm was the scent and taste of the woman’s perfume.
La Bon Nuit
was the name of the perfume. Molly was the name of the woman. Later she became my wife, and later still she shoved me off a five-story balcony—more or less accidentally—and I suddenly found myself on a new career path.

I cried out, shook the orgasm
off
, but by then my office was empty.

I accessed the broadcaster on 2nd and Vine, planted myself as Richard Widmark,
Kiss Of Death
period, in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my building. Some people walked though me, momentarily scattering the microscopic swarm that allowed me to flirt with physical existence. A few who weren’t paying attention sidestepped at the last moment, and I endured the usual taunts from the anti-biolo contingent. I could sympathize. Before I went incorporeal all the glinty crap on practically every sidewalk used to irritate me, too. And I wasn’t sad to see the city ban biolos from public restaurants, either. But it’s amazing how a five-story plunge followed by a sudden stop can change your perspective on things.

A kid with a fashionably flayed earlobe passed by on his wheel and waggled his hand around in my head. It was several seconds before the nano flakes could gather light in an orderly fashion and transmit it back to my “eyes.” I waited, all the while fending off a chaotic assault of memory sensation.

Just as I regained my vision, Kari Tolerico emerged from the building. I stepped in front of her. She walked through me without a word. I scattered, reconstituted, and turned to follow. I felt like tying her to a chair and hurling her down a staircase.

“Hold on,” I said.

She ignored me, and for a moment I thought she might be one of the estimated twelve percent of the population who had declined an Aural Wave implant. I had the figures down cold, because my Redmond-based company had coordinated the local advertising blitz.
Catch The Wave!
was our brilliant hook.

“Ms.—”

“Stop bothering me.”

“Lady, I haven’t
started
bothering you.”

“Then don’t.”

“Who are you?”

“Jesus, you
scanned
me.”

“Okay.
Why
are you? As in: Why are you fucking with my upload? And how did you do it?”

She ignored me again. And we were approaching the outside range of the broadcaster. There were plenty of others, and I knew the location of every one in the city, but I was rapidly becoming incapable of holding a coherent thought. I stopped at the flickering limit of the broadcaster, and she walked on.

“Why!” I shouted.

The sensation of numbingly cold surf foamed around my ankles, undermining the sand beneath my feet.

Kari Tolerico threw me a saucy look over her shoulder and said:

“Favor for a friend.”

Then I let go.

*

It smothered me, a blizzard of sensation and memory, facts and fancies, a short-circuited synopsiscopic not-so-merry-go-round.

I fled to a strong memory of sanctuary: the bedroom in my childhood house. Slamming the door, I simultaneously constructed barricades fashioned from the steady sensation of security and acceptance that had prevailed during the period of childhood that I originally occupied this room. The chaos yammered outside the door. It made scratchy rat sounds in the walls, battered softly and insistently at the window.

But it couldn’t get in.

Which was great, except neither could I get out. It beat going insane, though. I paced around my little room. The bed was made up with a baseball themed bedspread and pillowcase. My bookshelf was well stocked with prepubescent adventures (I was still a couple of years early for the pubescent adventures that I would download and hide under the mattress.

Downloading porno. That gave me an idea.

I fired up the terminal on my school desk and punched in the access code for my agency files. Fortunately, dream logic prevailed, and the data began to flow; I had a narrow conduit to the real world. The world outside my scrambled engrams.

I scrolled the Kari Tolerico file. It was slow work. Beyond the barricaded walls of my child’s bedroom I could have immersed my being in the file, let it soak through, a filter catching potential clues.

But here it took hours (relative time) to hunt through Tolerico’s info, even after dismissing the dross of her grocery bills, library and digi rental, etc. Her insurance and medical records yielded routine mosaics.

Something heavy thumped against the window.

Giving my better judgment a pass, I got up and tilted the blinds open. Fishsticks, my ex-wife’s ex-border collie, was mooshed against the glass, blood gouting from his mouth, body heaving. Just the way he looked that day the van hit him in the parking lot of the Seabreeze. Molly had screamed when she saw him. Some start to a vacation. She’d blamed me, of course. Well, I let him off the leash. We had gone to our Seaside condo to try to fix things and instead wound up with a dead pet and a fresh load of recriminations. And later on we wound up with an almost-dead me. I’m the first to admit that one weekend at the seashore is unlikely to retrieve a romance buried under eleven years of estrangement. Standing out in the salty breeze on the balcony, trying to put my arms around Molly who was having none of it, I’d said something stupid like, “You’d rather be up here with Fishsticks.” We were both drunk. She shoved me hard, and I tipped over the rail. I guess she loved that damn dog.

I closed the blinds.

Good old Fishsticks. Molly liked goofy names. With that thought, something clicked. I addressed the terminal again, hunted down Ms. Tolerico’s net monikers. I
thought
one of them had a familiar ring. Surga Can. A term of endearment, back when Molly and I had shared such things.

I composed a brief message and routed it to every one of Kari Tolerico’s mail accounts, work and private. When she opened her primary account from her cell, I nailed her location. Hours if not days may have passed in my bedroom, but out in the real world only minutes had elapsed since I evaporated on 2nd Avenue.

She didn’t reply to my message.

If I wanted answers I’d have to brave the storm, only bravery didn’t have much to do with it. All things being equal, it was more a matter of abject surrender to a suicidally stupid impulse. But it was either that or spend the rest of eternity in my nine-year-old self’s bedroom.

I opened the door—

*

—and came forward.

Hell’s own sensorium awaited me. I slogged through kisses and constipation, the one swat on the ass my father ever gave me—and a few erotically intended ones from a certain female companion in later years as well. The taste of heavily salted yams. Farts and the smell of pickle juice. Headaches, drunken euphoria, sushi, vomit erupting up my throat, tears, falling from the Seabreeze balcony, turning over in midair, drunk, leaving my stomach on the fifth floor.

Before I struck with a paralyzing, tissue-tearing, bone-breaking smack, I side-slipped into a projector two blocks north of the last one I’d used, and as Kirk Douglas (
Bad And The Beautiful
, 1952) I fell into stride with the Tolerico woman. Most of the old time tough guys were out of copyright, fortunately.

“Guess who,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake.”

“Now don’t be that way. Surga Can.”

She stopped walking. So did I. A fat woman on a wheel glided through me. I scattered and reconstituted. Ms. Tolerico and I faced each other across from a micropark. A squirrel, representing the park’s contingent of fauna, twitched halfway up a spindly birch and watched us.

“Tell me,” I said. “What I already know.”

She took a moment to light a smokeless c, while I grimaced under the continuous assault of chaos. I could only take a little more. If I didn’t flee back to my safe room, my core personality would shred and join the Madhatter’s fucking tea party.

“She wants you dead,” Ms. Tolerico said.

“I
am
dead.”

“Then she wants you gone. She can’t stand it, you haunting around like a ghost or something. It drives her crazy.”

“Molly.”

“You want my advice?”

“Not especially.”

“Let it go. Don’t fight. Then it’ll be over. Rest in peace. Get it?”

“What did you use?”

“Let it all go, Frye. Be happy.”

She snapped her c at the squirrel and walked away.

I almost didn’t make it back to my room.

*

Hunkered over my little kid’s terminal, I pecked out a message to my ex-wife. In some ways, I had kept in better touch with her since my death. But this particular message was tough. For a long time I got no further than: Dear Molly. Well, there were distractions aplenty. It sounded like a Lovecraftian army of rats in the walls. I got up and pressed my ear to the wall for a few moments. Not rats; voices. Squealy little voices that scrabbled frantically for a way in.

Dear Molly: You pushed me off the balcony and all, but isn’t this a bit much? It won’t obliterate me, you know. I’ll persist and it’ll be hell. Worse than Hell. Please help. Call Surga Can off.

I sent it and started waiting. Reduced to a nine by ten foot room, the texture and content of my memory vault was still impressive, if limited. I flipped through a couple of the flashprint books, boy’s adventure stuff. And I was like one of those pictures of the guy looking at a picture of a guy looking at a picture, looking . . . Except I was myself a memory, looking at a memory, which was full of memories, etc.

I put the book away.

On my knees I found my baseball glove and ball under the bed. Cool! I threw the ball into the glove a few times. I guess it would have been cooler if I’d had my nine-year-old’s sensibilities.

I checked the flatscreen. No message.

I risked another look out the window. It was kind of like looking out the window of Dorothy’s house while it careened around that tornado.
Things
drifted across my vision. School buses, hedges, tennis shoes, toys, faces (auntie Em!), and on and on. If I got closer to the glass I picked up smells, closer still and it was flavor ghosts, closer yet and a vibrating stew of emotion made me draw back abruptly.

I turned away, breathing funny. The image of an envelope was tumbling around the flatscreen. I had mail.

Sitting on the kid’s chair, my knees halfway to my armpits, I opened the letter. It was succinct:

Huh?
— Molly.

Damn it.

*

In corporeal life I’d been slightly rich and more than slightly bored. The rich part had allowed me to have an incorporeal existence after the plunge. But one thing I wasn’t going to do with Daniel Frye’s life, Part Deux, was run a business. At least, not a large business with managers and scores of employees and headaches and all that. Almost immediately after my death, I cashed out, disbursed a healthy mini-fortune Molly’s way, then built me a detective agency with one employee: Myself. And I was
good
at it.