Are You There and Other Stories (21 page)

A voice spoke inside Hadley’s ear. This wasn’t surprising in and of itself. Like nearly everyone she’d had an aural implant injected through her eardrum and it had bonded bio-molecularly to the incus, malleus, and stapes bones of her middle ear. The device served as a hands-off phone activated by the micro electrical impulses of her intent. It was also a conduit for automated information, stock market updates, weather, even serialized stories that she would listen to in bed sometimes when she found sleep elusive . . . or too permanently tempting. The stories reminded her distantly of her father’s encompassing arm and soothing story time voice.

But she hadn’t activated the device. And it hadn’t given her a weather report or a newZflash; it had given her advice on which Martian Fire Crystal to purchase.

The crystal on your left is flawed, Hadley
.

It was a soft, perfectly modulated masculine voice. The same voice which last night had read her chapter twelve of
Pride and Prejudice
. It
sounded
the same but it was not the same. And Hadley knew what was speaking to her.

“My mailbox,” she said out loud.

The proprietor lifted his eyebrows.

“Incoming call,” Hadley said, distracted, then added, “I’ll take the one on the right.”

When she was outside with her package, she said, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” the voice said.

“I thought you were gone for good.”

“No. I’m always here,” the voice said.

Hadley sat on a bench in the little park across the street from L’Univers D’objets Rares. A pattern of sunlight and shade swayed over her like an ethereal net. With the passing decades she had gradually allowed the origin of her impossible good fortune to retreat from the presence of her mind. It was difficult to let it come forward again.

“Tell me what you are,” she said. “Please.”

“That question is more complicated than you might think,” the Voice replied. “Simply put: I am you.”

“Me!”

“An over-simplification, but yes. You could think of me as your higher-consciousness self, dreaming your new life.”

Hadley watched a starling flicker over the uneven brown bricks of the park. Moss almost iridescently green grew thickly in the seams between the bricks. The starling’s shadow, a black ripple, glided a little behind the bird.

“I don’t believe that,” Hadley said.

“You don’t have to, of course.”

“This can’t be a dream.”

“It’s not a dream such as you are thinking. The world is real. And up until my advent into your ego-consciousness, it was a shared experience.”

“And what is it now?”

“I’ve already told you: heaven. The only heaven into which anyone is ever received. Death is the termination of all consciousness, all personal existence. Near the point of its arrival the higher-consciousness asserts itself. Hi!”

“I don’t understand.”

“I built this place from the existing template of the vulgar world, the one you physically inhabit. I
prepared
it for us, Hadley. Because when you cease to live, so do I cease. But nothing ceases here, unless you will it.”

“But it isn’t real?” Hadley said.

“Is a dream real while you are in it? This world is as real as anything. And it works just like the one you were used to, with one exception: you can have, be, or do anything. It’s real so long as you go on believing it is. In
our
world, in Hadley’s World, Time is a seeming thing and can stretch to infinity, sustained by a perfectly balanced neurochemical illusion. But we need each other, Hadley, or it won’t persist. Nothing will. I made the world, populated it with the shadow-twins of the human race, but
you
bring it alive. So let us be happy. The world is a lovely place now, isn’t it?”

“Lovely,” she said, monotone.

Hadley stared across the park at the people on the Rue Ampère and couldn’t believe they were mere figments, some kind of second tier Platonic shadows. But that’s what the Voice had told her years ago regarding Jonathon Alverez. Only back then it wasn’t even a voice but a few printed words on a card. After a long while Hadley said, “Are you there?”

No answer.

“Hello?”

Nothing. Then a static burst, and:
La température est à Paris un degrés de soixante-dix-quatre chauds
. . .

*

Heaven
.

Decades passed. Or didn’t pass. In her New York condo Hadley crossed her legs and leaned back in the wonderful chair. It reacted to her slightest movements, even the subtle alterations of electrical impulses traveling her nerves, and adjusted for maximum comfort. It was a SmArt chair. A very smart one. Hadley’s arm hung languidly over the side, a doparette between her middle fingers unwinding in a fragrant blue thread. Her body was that of a twenty-two year old. Her breasts were firm, her legs good, her health excellent, her mind acute. She was wealthy and she was immortal. Two excellent things to be. But Hadley didn’t feel excellent and never had in all the intervening years. Nothing could accomplish her contentment; it was time to wake up—or go to sleep forever.

“Abandon heaven?”

Hadley looked up out of her thoughts as the Simulacrum stepped into the room. She preferred Simulacrae to the shadow people in her world. This one appeared exactly like a twenty-six-year-old Robert Redford. Its movie star hair fell over its forehead in a thick blond shock. The Simulacrum was companion, confident, and the world’s most exquisite vibrator. Not to mention mind reader. Sundance was almost preternaturally alert to Hadley’s moods and needs; he had been engineered that way by shadow twins of human genius. The perfect companion in a world without real companions.

“What do you know about it?” Hadley felt woozy and high.

The Simulacrum smiled. “I always know.”

Hadley stood up and walked to the bubble window that overlooked the upper eastside of Manhattan. Ten thousand lights glimmered in the night. Like the stars she used to dream on as a child. Her mind wanted to dissolve and blur into a doparette haze. Over her shoulder she said, “It’s you, isn’t it. Not the Simulacrum.”

“Yes.”

She wasn’t surprised. “I’m sad.”

“Don’t be.”

She didn’t reply.

Sundance, the Voice, the Mailbox, Hadley herself, whatever, was quiet.

“This is all wrong,” Hadley said.

“It’s right as rain.”

“No.”

Sundance loomed behind her. Hadley stiffened. In the glass she saw its reflection, and then its hands settled on her shoulders and began kneading the tension out of her muscles. She twisted away, dropped the remaining scrap of her doparette into a disposal iris, and passed her hand over a sensor that transformed the window to permeable status; a breath of night air touched the back of her neck. She started toward the bathroom to shower.

“Please go away,” she said.

The Simulacrum remained at the window, hands clasped behind its back, chin lifted, head slightly cocked.

“You haven’t been yourself,” it observed.

“Who else would I
be?
”

“An uncertain thing,” the Simulacrum said. “A doubter. An unhappy, cringing, withdrawn creature, dried up and ruined and finished.” It turned from the window and smiled and held its hand out. “What you used to be, Hadley.”

Hadley straightened her skirt. “I know what I was.”

“Then believe in what you
are
. What we are.”

“You only show up when you think I’m going to end it. If you’re my higher self you’re also my worst self.”

It stepped toward her. “I made you young and gave you everything.”

“But you took things, too.”

It stopped. “Took what?”

“I was thinking about Jonathon Alverez.”

“Who?”

Hadley could see the Simulacrum knew perfectly well who Jonathon Alverez had been.

“The way he screamed when you ate him,” she said.

Sundance’s smile dimmed slightly.

“So this isn’t any kind of heaven,” Hadley said. “This is a selfish, ugly place. This isn’t heaven and it isn’t a dream, either. It’s the place where dreams die. It’s a bridge.”

The smile went completely out. The Simulacrum stepped toward her, and Hadley moved back.

“What does it matter? He was only a product of your fears, and the sentimental story you made for him in our world is just a story. This place we share exists between shaved moments of time. Nothing has happened to that boy.”

“It isn’t about him,” Hadley said. “It’s about what you need out of me to go on existing.”

“And what do you suppose that is,” the Simulacrum said.

“You need me to be like you. Morbidly self-absorbed, so this narcotic world can go on existing.”

“That boy was a hundred years ago, relative,” Sundance said. “It took you long enough to decide I was bad.”

“Well.” Hadley sniffed. “I’m not
that
good myself.”

“You’ll be alone and you’ll die alone.” The Simulacrum advanced. “There isn’t any real heaven, you know. This is the only way we persist.”

“I don’t care. I’m alone, anyway.”

Sundance reached out for her, wearing its best Redford smile. “Why don’t you come to bed now and forget all this sadness.”

“No!”

Hadley shoved past the Simulacrum and threw herself at the bubble window. Its permeable molecular arrangement gave way and she fell and tumbled among the ten thousand lights like stars.
Daddy
, she wailed in her mind,
Daddy!

*

Hadley sat in the kitchen weeping. The withered sack of her stomach spat acid and growled. She could no longer appease it with hot tea and sugar. Mr. Whiskers rubbed against her orthopedic hose, fur crackling.

“Poor kitty,” Hadley muttered. There was nothing left for Mr. Whiskers to eat, either. She reached down to pet him but the cat padded out of the kitchen. Hadley followed him with her rheumy eyes. He planted his forepaws on the sofa cushion and began scratching.

“No, Mr. Whiskers!”

But the cat continued, and Hadley felt too weak to shoo him away. His claws would simply ruin the cushion.

The cushion.

Suddenly she remembered where she had hidden her grocery money.
Thank you, Mr. Whiskers, thank you!
But Mr. Whiskers was only a phantom of her intuition and was gone before she ever stood up.

The Tree

T
he movers were still hauling furniture into the new house when Tom decided to climb the back fence and explore the ten acres of wild woods that had somehow survived years of encroaching development. He was eleven years old, had been living with his divorced mother in a one-bedroom apartment. His new stepfather owned not only the big frame house but also the woods. And according to Charlie (Tom could not force himself to call the man “Dad”) development would not be held off much longer.

He dropped from the top of the fence and landed on his feet. Immediately Tom was struck by how quiet it was. No birds sang, no flies buzzed, not a living creature moved in the stillness. It was like having cotton stuffed in his ears. He could hear the pulse of his own blood but nothing else. The fence boards were six feet tall. On the side that faced his backyard they looked new, the blond wood clean and unblemished in the August sun. But on this side the boards appeared old and weathered, gray, tired, as if they had stood for time out of mind, a border between these dark woods and the sunny lawn and fruit trees on the other side. Tom squinted through a knothole in the fence, saw his mother standing in front of the sliding glass door directing a couple of men in jeans and T-shirts carrying a sideboard. The slider was open, but Tom couldn’t hear his mother’s voice. He pulled back, turned, and walked into the woods.

He felt drawn, pulled in. It was hot. He stumbled along in a kind of daze, weaving through the pathless woods, through sun and shadow, until he came to the tree.

The trunk of the tree was gnarled and twisted. Its thick roots burst above the ground like partially buried bones. About fifteen feet up, the branches spread open like the fingers of an unclenching fist. And nestled in that cool leafy altitude was a kid’s tree house. The boards were nailed haphazardly together. A moon-shaped window tilted drunkenly in one wall. A spine of irregularly spaced rungs climbed the central trunk, the nail heads dark with rust. Tom knew he had to climb them, but first he reached out and touched the tree. Immediately he pulled his hand back and wiped his fingers on his jeans. The tips of his fingers were sticky with sap. He rubbed harder but the sap clung to his skin like glue.

Suddenly he didn’t feel like climbing up to the tree house. All he wanted to do was get away.

He started to back off from the tree, and that was when he noticed the dead squirrel pinched in the crook of two roots. He bent over to look at it. The squirrel was emaciated, starved, its fur mangy. Dried blood stained its claws and teeth, and its tail was ripped where the squirrel had attempted to chew through it.

*

At home Tom washed his hands in the bathroom sink, really scrubbing at the sap on his fingers. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the fingers remained sticky.

His mother appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. Her face was flushed, a few strands of her yellow hair plastered to her sweaty cheek.

“So where did you disappear to all morning?”

“Just looking around the neighborhood,” he said, concentrating on his fingers. “Besides, I was only gone a little while.”

“Honey, it’s past noon. Your father called at lunch and I couldn’t tell him where you were.”

Stepfather, Tom thought. Then:
noon?
Of course he must have been gone more than a half hour. The movers had left, most of the kitchen stuff was put away, and for crying out loud all he had to do was look at the clock. He thought hard but could not remember anything after he noticed the dead squirrel. He couldn’t even remember climbing back over the fence. There was the squirrel, and then he was shuffling into the bathroom, picking up the oval bar of pink soap, turning the water on hot. That was all.

*

At dinner his stepfather, Charlie, reached over and patted him on the shoulder, ruffled his hair.

“Earth to Tom,” he said.

Tom looked up out of his thoughts. “Huh?”

“How do you like the new digs, Tommy?”

“Fine.”

“Fine, he says.”

“He loves the house,” Tom’s mother said, always interpreting for him. “We both do.”

*

Tom lay in bed, making his fingers stick together, pulling them apart, sticking them together and pulling them apart. His mother knocked once, walked in, and he stopped playing with his fingers. She sat on the edge of the bed, brushed his hair away from his eyes.

“How’s my little man?”

“Good.”

“This is better than that tiny apartment, isn’t it?”

“I like having my own room,” he admitted. “But I still have to fix it up.”

“There’ll be plenty of time. Go to sleep now, okay? Another big day tomorrow.”

“Right.”

She clicked off the table lamp, kissed him, left him alone. He lay quietly in the bed. Played with his sticky fingers. Smelled them. The sap smelled a little sour, not a good smell at all.

He leaned against the fence, peered through the knothole. It was an ordinary woods filled with morning sunlight and shade. No birds, though. A hand fell on his shoulder and he jerked around.

“Hi,” he said to his stepfather. “I thought you went to work already.”

“Tom, you remember what I said about those woods?”

“Sure.”

Charlie hunkered beside him. He was a tall man, older than Tom’s mother. It seemed like he always wore a suit. Even on weekends he wore a button-up shirt. Tom liked to picture his real father in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, though he had no idea what his real father wore or even what he looked like.

“It isn’t safe, Tommy. Just consider it off limits. I have my reasons, believe me I do. Why don’t you help your mother today? There’s a lot of work to do around the house. What do you say?”

“I’ll help her.”

“My man!”

Tom didn’t go into the woods, not even after Charlie left. He helped his mother straighten up the house, put stuff away, clean. But he felt drawn to the woods. He wanted to see that tree house again. He and his mother ate lunch on the back deck, and it was almost like the warm breeze whispering through the trees was really whispering
to him
. Come on in, Tom, check it out, buddy.

“What’s wrong with your fingers?”

“Huh?”

“Your fingers,” his mom said. “Did you get something on them?”

“Not really.” He showed her his fingers because there really wasn’t anything on them. They weren’t sticky anymore. Only sometimes they
felt
sticky, just to him.

*

Night again. Tom couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stay in bed. It was hot but it was more than that. Closing his eyes felt like drowning in black water. He pulled on a pair of shorts and slipped quietly out of his room, thinking of raiding the refrigerator. Halfway down the stairs he heard voices and stopped.

His mother said, “He hates to be called Tommy, I’ve told you that.”

“I’ll mend my wicked ways,” Charlie said.

“Not
all
your wicked ways, I hope.”

Stifled laughter. They were downstairs, in the living room.
Why not have a look
, a voice asked Tom, and he couldn’t ignore it.

He stood by the arch between the living room and dining room, his back to the wall. Listening to them, hating it, but listening. He made himself look around the corner, saw their white bodies on the carpet, moving together. His mother’s grimacing face straining over Charlie’s shoulder.

*

The next day he told his mother he was walking to the Safeway store, but instead he climbed the fence and dropped into the forbidden woods. He didn’t care what Charlie said.

He picked up a stick and whacked at the bushes while he walked, his feet discovering their own path. The sky seemed to darken but he was barely aware of the change. He peered inside himself at his mother’s face, the way it had been last night, the way her fingers had dug into Charlie’s white back.

When he looked up out of his thoughts he was confused. It was only ten acres, and from the second floor of the house he could even see to the other side of the woods, see patches of green lawn, brick chimneys, the slanted planes of rooftops. But now the woods appeared to stretch forever in all directions, the August sunlight screened out, all sounds muffled. Tom’s mouth felt dry.

And then there was the tree.

The great upthrusting trunk. Black, twisted and gnarled, the branches opened like fingers. A different tree but the same; he was seeing it more clearly. The irregular wooden rungs reached to the platform like spinal bones.

Tom started to climb. He didn’t like the feel of the wood on his bare hands. Though it was dry and hard he had the inner sense that it was unclean, spongy, and rotten with age.

He pulled himself onto the platform, unaccountably tired. It was darker inside the tree house and it smelled . . . sick. He could only compare it to the way his grandfather’s room had smelled during the last weeks of the old man’s life—an odor of living decay.

He leaned back against the wall and rubbed his eyes. The quality of light seemed to shift from moment to moment. It was like being in two places at once. The moon-shaped window was there, a crescent eye open to a green, living world. Then it was gone and he was entirely closed up in a black box.

Tom wanted to get down, run back to the house, if he could find the house. But another part of him was equally curious and excited by the strangeness. Whatever happened, he knew he would never willingly return to this place, so he didn’t want to miss a thing.

He moved deeper into the tree house. Dusty sunlight slanted through chinks between the boards. He saw the desiccated body of a robin, small, mummified corpses of squirrels. The scattered husks of insects crunched under his sneakers. And then he saw, lying in deep shadow, an object that frightened him badly, then terrified him. Tom backed away from it, retreating to the open side of the tree house.

But the opening had narrowed, almost trapping him inside. He barely managed to squeeze through. His T-shirt tore on a jag, the sharp splinter cutting into him like a tooth. As far as he could see in every direction a dark primordial jungle stretched into smoky distances. Suddenly dizzy, Tom swayed, his vision blurring. He held onto the edge of the tree house, closed his eyes, concentrated on light. When he opened his eyes the view was back to normal. He saw lawns and houses not far away.

He climbed swiftly down, hating the feel of the wooden rungs. They looked like ordinary pieces of wood now with the rusty heads of nails embedded in them. Six feet from the ground he jumped, landed off-balance, and wound up on his hands and knees. He crawled over one of the great roots and almost put his hand on the dead squirrel he’d first seen a couple of days ago. Its corruption had progressed. Ticks lifted from the corpse as he jerked his hand back. And then he was on his feet, running through the woods, stumbling, gasping—

*

“Don’t you ever go in there again,” his mother said. She had seen him climbing over the fence, not on his way back from but on his way
into
the woods. She said she’d called to him from the kitchen window but he had ignored her, and by the time she reached the fence he was gone from sight.

“You don’t know how close I came to calling the police, Tom.”

“The
police
.”

“Charlie told you to stay out of there and for good reason.”

“Charlie,” Tom said, thinking of the grunting sound his stepfather had made, the white skin of his back.

“What was I supposed to think when you were gone that long?”

“I wasn’t gone very long.”

“Tom, I know exactly how long you were away. I know because at the end of the first half hour I went looking for you and couldn’t find you. It was over an hour more before you came back. I swear if you hadn’t come back when you did—”

“I couldn’t have been gone that long, Mom.”

“Tom, I can read a
watch.
”

*

Later, as he lay in bed, once again unable to sleep, there was a soft knock on his door and then it opened and his stepfather walked in.

“I’m in trouble,” Tom said.

“You’re not in trouble.” Charlie sat in a chair by the bed, crossed his legs, folded his hands. He was a large man, his face long and thoughtful, his hair liberally salted with gray.

“You’re old enough to hear this,” he said. “I was a fool not to tell you sooner.”

“Tell me what?”

“The reason I don’t want you going into those woods is that two children have disappeared in there already.”

Tom’s chest tightened.

“They were brothers,” Charlie continued. “Eight and six years old.”

“Did—”

“No one has any idea what happened to them, but there’s plenty of speculation. You know about strangers, Tom.”

Tom nodded.

“Well we don’t have to go into all the possibilities. Those woods are going to be a subdivision. I’ve already sold it off.”

“It’s old,” Tom said.

“What is?”

“Nothing,” Tom said, but he was thinking: The tree is old, older than anyone knows.

“Well.” Charlie stood up and walked to the door, put his hand on the light switch. “It’s late. Mind if I turn this off?”

“I guess not.”

“Try not to frighten your mother anymore.” Charlie turned the light off. Moon shadows occupied the room.

“And Tom?”

Tom looked up from the bed.

“Don’t frighten
me
either,” Charlie said.

Alone in his bedroom Tom stared at the image in his mind. The thing in the tree house, the thing that had frightened him so much. It had been a child’s black, high-top sneaker, the canvas ripped violently, as if a dog had been tearing at it. And in the dark corner of the tree house he had seen the suggestion of something inside the sneaker, a stump, the dull glimmer of bone.

*

Tom opened his eyes and it was morning, but too early for anyone else to have gotten out of bed yet. Tom wasn’t really awake himself. His eyes were open, he was aware of the room, the quiet house, but his thoughts lingered in a dream world. The tree was older than time. Before it was a tree it was something else but still the same inside.

Tom found himself standing next to his bed in his pajama bottoms, then he was on the stairs, and then outside in the backyard, the morning air cool on his bare skin. The tree knew its life in this time was almost finished, and it required one more blood sacrifice so its seed could survive. The tree had been alive longer than people. The first woman had plucked fruit from its tempting limb.