Circuit Of Heaven (3 page)

“I am most pleased to meet you, Justine. Most pleased.” He squeezed her hand and let it go.

“I love your shop,” she said.

“Thank you, my dear.”

“How much do I owe you for this book?”

He waved his cane again. “Nothing. Don’t use money. Damned nuisance. Why do we need money in here? I know people don’t want to give it up, don’t want to change a thing, want everything to be precisely what they were used to. Hell with that. Change is exactly what this place needs, don’t you think?” He swept his arm to take in the whole Bin.

A pair of legs in dark brown trousers walked past the windows that ran along the ceiling at street level. “I certainly wanted a change this morning,” she said. “But I really don’t know what the Bin needs. I haven’t been in that long.”

“Well, I don’t know what it needs either—though God knows I’ve tried to figure it out—and I’ve been in here since we cranked it up.” He cocked his head to one side. “You don’t sound too happy about being in here.”

“No, it’s fine. I just don’t know anyone.”

“Well, now you know me. You need to get out. Meet people.”

“I’m going to a dinner party tonight.”

He studied her again, nodding his head. She liked him and hoped they might become friends. She smiled back at him, and neither one of them said anything, until it was his turn to blush. “Forgive my staring,” he said, bowing again, this time in apology. “You see, you remind me of someone I knew a very long time ago. You have a certain quality she had, a special something.” He looked at her with his sad, wrinkled eyes. “We were sweethearts.”

She was touched by the old-fashioned word, and his great, sad eyes, but she didn’t know what to say, though he didn’t seem to expect her to say anything.

He cleared his throat and pointed at
Rebecca
. “It’s a swell book. You’ll love it. Sure you don’t want anything else? Got everything here. Like the sign says—all subjects, ancient and modern.”

He wants to find me another book, Justine thought, give another gift to someone who reminds him of his sweetheart. “Do you have anything on dreams?” she asked.

“Follow me.” He led her through several twists and turns to a dead end where a dozen shelves of books about dreams filled the wall. She stared at them stupidly, no idea what to look for.

“What aspect of dreams were you interested in?” Mr. Menso asked.

“Interpretation, I guess. I had an unusual dream this morning, and I want to figure it out. I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

“How unusual?” he asked.

“It was so real,” she said, and ended up telling him her dream from beginning to end. She felt comfortable with Mr. Menso, snug inside his labyrinth of books. He listened intently the whole while.

He plucked a book off the shelf and handed it to her. “This is what you need.”

Lucid Dreaming: The Gateway to Your Hidden Selves
, it said. By Gwenna R. Morse. It was a slim paperback. On the cover a woman was holding a door open, about to step across the threshold into a moonlit landscape of tree-covered hills, fields, and flowers. In the distance were the spires and towers of a magnificent city. Beneath the trees a circle of women danced. Justine turned it over in her hands. “This will help me interpret my dream?”

He dismissed the thought with a wave of his cane. “Interpretation. Freudian mumbo jumbo. Waste of time. No, this book will teach you how to enter into your dreams and take charge of them.” He rapped the floor with his cane to punctuate his words.

Justine laughed nervously. “Why would I want to do that?”

He leaned toward her confidentially. “To understand the dreamer, Justine. Dreams are mere shadows. Only the dreamer is real.”

“But that’s just it. Angelina doesn’t seem like some shadow to me. She seems real.”

He danced his eyebrows and grinned at her. “Maybe she’s dreaming of you, my dear.”

She rocked her head from side to side in exaggerated confusion. “Mr. Menso, you’re making my brain hurt.”

He chuckled, bobbing his head up and down. “You’re right. You’re right. You are beautiful. You are young. It is spring. You shouldn’t be cooped up in here with a dotty old man.” He turned and led her back to the front door.

“I am most delighted you came to see me today, Justine.”

“This has been the very best part of my day,” she said, hugging him hard. She kissed his cheek, and his skin on her lips was as dry as paper. He held open the door, and with some difficulty, followed her up the steps to the street. She promised to come see him again before she left D.C.

A block away she looked back, and he was still standing there, watching her. She waved, and he raised his hand to his lips and blew her a kiss. What a sweet man, she thought. What a dear, sweet man.

SHE
WAS
STILL
ELATED
WHEN
SHE
GOT
BACK
TO
HER
HOTEL
. She’d made her first friend in the Bin. She stretched out on the bed with a cup of hot cocoa and read far enough in
Rebecca
to find out that Rebecca wasn’t the heroine, but her new husband’s dead wife—whose presence hung over the new bride’s life like a cloud. Justine liked the heroine. She reminded her of herself—or at least the way she wanted to see herself—a little bit afraid of everything, but brave nonetheless. Brave enough to love her husband against the odds. She found her elation bleeding away, however, as she read of the young girl’s seemingly hopeless love for a man who’d already had the perfect wife.

She grew drowsy from reading and set
Rebecca
aside. She picked up the dream book, thinking she’d nap and use whatever secrets it might give her. She opened it up and read the first paragraph:

Each of us possesses a myriad of identities: who we are, who we were, who we wish we were, who we’ve dreaded becoming. These selves live side by side in the world of our dreams. When, in the midst of a vivid dream, you become aware that you are dreaming, seize the power this moment has granted you: Interrogate the denizens of your dreamworld, shape this world to your desires, enter into the world you have created, and take possession of the boundless domains of your Self
.

This all sounded like pretty silly stuff to Justine. She flipped back to the publication date: copyright 1997. No wonder. The heyday of claptrap. All of a sudden she didn’t feel like sleeping anymore. She didn’t feel up to interrogating any dream denizens. She tossed the dream book aside. I still feel lonely, she thought. Hanging out with my Selves isn’t likely to change that, no matter how many are lurking in there.

She had more time than she needed to get ready for dinner, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She got out of bed and tried on all the dresses in her closet, spent an hour fussing with her hair. She wanted to look beautiful, like Mr. Menso said. She was young, and it was spring.

She was sitting in the lobby, waiting for Winston, by seven o’clock.

IT
WAS
NEMO’S
TWENTY-FIRST
BIRTHDAY
,
AND
HE was on his way to visit his parents in the Bin, riding the Metro from Richmond to D.C. It’d been Christmas since he’d seen them last. Twice a year was about all he could handle.

Most of the time, it didn’t bother him much anymore—it’d been eleven years, after all. But every time he went to see them he’d watch the world slide by outside the window, listen to the clatter of the wheels on the rails, and remember when they went into the Bin. Then he’d get mad all over, just as if he were ten years old again.

He’d figured for a long time that his parents were going in. It was only a matter of when. They talked over dinner about people they knew who’d already gone or were about to go, their voices thick with envy they thought Nemo was too young to notice. Then they’d cut him a guilty look and ask how things were going at school.

He knew he was the snag—the only reason they weren’t in already. Mom wasn’t sure she could leave her baby boy, and Dad wasn’t sure he could put up with her weeping and wailing once he talked her into it. But there’d never been any doubt they’d go sooner or later. Often these friends they talked about had a kid, and Dad would say, “They placed him in a fine school,” and Mom would add brightly, “He visits them several times a week.”

Of course, Nemo knew the “fine school” was one of the dozens of half-ass boarding schools that’d sprung up like fungus on a rotting log so that parents with an itch to jump into the Bin would have someplace to ditch their kids, and that junior could only “visit” for twelve hours at a stretch before his autonomic nervous system started wacking out. But he didn’t say anything. He just chewed on his meat and told them everything was fine at his school, too.

So he wasn’t surprised when he came home one afternoon to find his parents sitting around the kitchen table with a Construct who looked like Lawrence the Dragon from the kids’ virtual. He was obviously a Caretaker, a Construct made to look after rich kids. Dad had found a way around Mom’s guilt.

“Look, Nemo!” Dad said like somebody out of a commercial. “It’s Lawrence the Dragon!” As if, at ten, he gave a shit about a virtual for four-year-olds.

The Construct looked pretty much like the cartoon character. His eyes were the same bottle green, the same color as the scales that covered his body. But the Construct’s eyes, as they looked into Nemo’s, weren’t bright with the maniacal cheer his namesake’s exuded. They were kind and penetrating and apologetic. The Construct could see that Nemo knew why he was there. He rose to his feet like Jack’s beanstalk—seven feet tall at least. “Pleased to meet you, Nemo,” he said in a lilting British accent, nothing like the cartoon character’s nasal bleat.

Nemo took the scaly hand and squeezed it. The scales weren’t hard as he’d expected. They felt like thin pieces of leather. “Hi,” he said back. Nemo didn’t mind that Lawrence looked like a giant lizard. He knew it was only a gene splice.

“Why don’t you show Lawrence your room?” Dad said with his usual subtlety. Mom looked like she was sitting in the middle of one of her virtual soaps, at one of the weekly crises in the plot.

Lawrence and Nemo went up to his room in silence. Lawrence had to duck at the landing to keep from hitting his head. Nemo could almost hear his parents holding their breath, waiting for him to be out of earshot, so they could talk about how it went. What did they expect? “Oh goody! You’re going to abandon me”?

Nemo flipped on the lights and shoved some books off his bed to give Lawrence someplace to sit down. Nemo stretched out on the three-legged sofa he’d hauled down from the attic and propped up on a cinder block. Most of his room was furnished with stuff he’d gotten from the attic—his grandmother’s stuff. He never really knew her. She died when he was only five. She could’ve saved herself by going into the Bin, but she hadn’t wanted to. Nemo’s mom always got upset when she talked about her mother, so they hardly ever talked about her. Nemo had gotten to know her through her stuff in the attic—the CDs and videos and photographs and scrapbooks. There was even a stack of her diaries. He read them late at night, keeping them a secret from his mom and dad. When he was little, she was his secret friend. When he got a little older, she seemed like his secret lover.

Lawrence had made himself comfortable on the bed, stretching out, his huge feet dangling over the edge of the bed, his hands—the size of baseball gloves—behind his head.

“They’re going into the Bin, right?” Nemo asked.

Lawrence nodded. “Bet you’re pretty P.O.‘d,” he said in a thick Texas accent.

“It’s no big deal,” Nemo lied, imagining the years ahead of him, rotting in some dorm until he was eighteen or the law changed, whichever came first. Then they’d expect him to join dear old Mum and Dad in the Bin forever. They could stuff that idea. He was never going in.

Lawrence was watching him from the bed, letting him feel sorry for himself. “What’re your real names?” Nemo asked him, trying to be smart.

“Lawrence.”

“I mean your
real
names. Aren’t you made up of bits and pieces of a bunch of different people, who used to be real, with their own names?”

Nemo thought Lawrence smiled, but he couldn’t be sure. “That’s right. But our name’s Lawrence, now.”

Nemo figured Lawrence was just holding out on him. “My science teacher says that when they started making you guys, you weren’t supposed to remember who you used to be, but no matter what they did, you remembered anyway, because self-consciousness reconstitutes itself from any significant portion of the whole person.” Nemo was quite good in science and, at ten, quite proud of the fact.

This time he was sure it was a smile, but he didn’t know what was so damn funny, and he wasn’t about to let that slow him down. “He said that when all those self-consciousnesses wake up stuck inside some lizard body or something weird, taking care of kids or being policemen or some other crap job, they must be pretty pissed off. He said a Construct has three or four names at least—but the one he tells you isn’t real. It’s like a brand name or something.”

Lawrence bobbed his head up and down slowly. The smile was gone. His voice had an edge to it no cartoon dragon’s ever had. “Your science teacher’s about half right and half stupid. We don’t use those other names anymore. Those people are dead, you understand? Name’s Lawrence, if that’s okay with you and your science teacher.”

Nemo finally realized he was being a jerk. “I’m sorry, Lawrence,” he said, and he meant it.

Lawrence shrugged. “No offense taken. You got a right to know who you’re dealing with.”

“I thought you guys were illegal,” he said, but he’d taken the smart out of his voice

“We’re one of the last ones made. Your parents pulled some strings to get us.”

“Uncle Winston?” Uncle Winston was Mom’s brother, a senator, the family hot shit. The family visited him every Sunday in the Bin, had tea in the garden, or in front of a roaring fire.

“That’s the man,” Lawrence said.