Jim and the Flims (6 page)

“I feel like death is stalking me,” I told nurse Alice as she wheeled me back to my room. “My wife died last August. Her name was Val. We thought she was pregnant, but it was cancer.”

“I remember that case,” said Alice after a pause. “I was on duty that day.”

“They incinerated Val and the baby,” I said, my voice catching. “I never got to say good-bye.”

“The hospital's public safety precautions can be a little zealous,” said Alice in a calming tone. “But sometimes it's for the best.”

“I don't know what to think anymore,” I said, wanting to prolong our chat. “I feel like anything at all can fall apart. From one moment to the next.”

“You're going to be okay, Jim,” said Alice, patting my shoulder. “You're a strong man. You're recuperating very fast.”

By the morning of the third day, they'd decided that my seizures could have been an isolated fluke. I wasn't very eager to be leave the hospital. I felt safe in there. But they said that I should go home that afternoon and taper off the antiseizure drugs on my own. And we'd see what happened next.

Lunch came and went as I lay there worrying. And then, just before it was time for me to check out, nurse Alice led a woman into my room.

“She says she's your new wife!” said Alice, her kind lips parting in an innocent smile. “I didn't know.”

For a crazy instant I thought Alice was bringing the dead Val back to me. But, no, my guest was a tall, well-formed young woman with her curly brown hair in a ponytail. A woman with aged, knowing eyes. She looked familiar, but I couldn't quite—

“Weena Wesson?” said the woman. She mimed eating ice cream with a spoon. Of course. The new clerk from Mahalo Gelato. The woman who'd possibly come from the basement of that crumbling Victorian house.

“How did you know I was here?” I challenged Weena, suspicious and afraid.

“Pull yourself together, Mr. Oster,” said nurse Alice reprovingly. “Be glad you have a partner who cares for you.”

6: Weena Wesson

W
eena called a cab and rode with me to my house. I was reasonably glad to have her along. She was, after all, an attractive woman. But...

“Wife?” I said.

“I had to say that so they'd let me in,” said Weena. “I'm quite the intriguer.” She gave me a sly look. “Or perhaps you did marry me, but you forgot?”

I let this one slide. “It's weird to be outside again,” I remarked, happy to be in the back seat next to her, our thighs touching, the two of us watching the world scroll by. “I was only in the hospital for those three days, but I feel like everything's changed. I never really understood deep down that I myself am going to die. Not even after losing my wife, Val.”

“Did you glimpse the afterworld?” asked Weena. “During your apoplectic attack?”

“I didn't see jack shit. There isn't any afterworld.”

“Oh yes indeed there is,” said Weena, and I was glad to hear her contradict me. “I've lived there for many a year,” she continued. “You people still on Earth full-time—you're less fanciful than we astral travelers.”

Maybe Weena was saying she'd emerged from that slime-filled cellar that I'd seen under the green Victorian. Or maybe she was just being whimsical. Or maybe she was comparing men to women in some vaguely disparaging way. In any case, we'd reached my house. I noticed a small cardboard box on my porch.

“What's that?” I asked Weena, already guessing the answer.

“Some meager possessions that I've acquired this week,” said Weena, in her curiously old-fashioned diction. “I don't have a proper place to stay. And I have special interest in you. So I've formed the plan of rooming here. Can you pay the driver? I have but little cash—I took the bus to the hospital. But never fear, I'll contribute to your rent next month. And I'll bring home masses of free ice cream. When it's a week old, they discard it.”

The driver was mildly interested in all this—I could tell from the quiet, attentive way he was holding his head—although ostensibly he was gazing out through the windshield. Weena gave me a big grin—although, once again, her eyes seemed calculating and hard. Clearly this some kind of baroque scam, but she was putting on such a good front of being chirpy and sexy and quaint that I didn't really mind. Anyway, it's not like I had much to lose.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “You can live with me for now, Weena. Welcome.”

The cab drove off and we were on my porch, me and my pretend wife. Droog appeared, whining and jumping up on me. I hoped he'd been able to scavenge food from around the neighborhood. Dick and Diane Simly would never think of caring for a renter's dog.

Feeling a little dizzy, I filled Droog's water dish and poured out some kibble from the bag I kept in a cupboard on the porch wall. He set to work slurping and crunching.

“Good boy,” I said. “Meet Weena. Weena, meet Droog.”

“He and I became acquainted this morning,” said Weena. “He tolerates me.”

“What kind of name is Weena, anyway,” I demanded, feeling suspicious again.

“It's from my grandmother,” she said. “She hailed from the subcontinent, and her full name was Praweena. Unbar your door, please. I'm bursting.”

“The bathroom's over there,” I said as we stepped inside. “But I still don't get how you found me.”

“I have secret channels,” said Weena, tossing her head. She pecked a little kiss onto my cheek. “I'll return anon.”

I sat on my couch, thinking things over. My house was calm and quiet, a shady shelter from the July sun. Would the house have noticed if I'd died? Did a house think? Would the Simlys have rented it out right away? What would have happened to my stuff? Would anyone have come to my funeral?

“Here I am, little husband,” said Weena. She'd combed her hair and freshened up her lipstick. She was watching my every move.

“I want you to understand that I'm not completely slushed,” I said sternly. “I'm happy if you live with me for awhile, but not if you continually bullshit me.”

“How much truth can you handle?” Weena produced one of her giggles and held up her hands as if measuring the variable size of a fish. “A wee scrap? A vast lump?”

“Let's start with that crumbling Victorian house. You came from there, right?”

“Very well then, yes. You opened the portal from my world. And when we met face to face in Mahalo Gelato, I became quite sure that you're the man I seek. You'd already acted as my doorman, and I realized you could be my, my postman as well. So I—” She made a gesture of shaking on sprinkles.

I felt odd, as if my living room were stretching away from me, with Weena's face a pale disk at the other end.

“You—you drugged me?” This part hadn't occurred to me before. “You deliberately gave me those seizures?”

“I'd wager the sprinkles saved your life,” said Weena. “They enriched your personality and gave you strength. You would have had the apoplectic fit in any case—this was your fate.”

“What
are
the sprinkles?” I asked, more and more confused.

“Souls? Oh, never mind that. I'll just tell you that I harvested sprinkles on my way here from Flimsy. And that they served as a tonic to give you pep. And now you'll be able to host a jiva, and you'll be fit to battle that horrible yuel. The Graf must have smuggled the yuel over here. Do you know that right now the yuel is rutting under the Santa Cruz pier? The imbecilic sea lions believe him to be one of them! But soon the yuel will attack us and...”

Weena stopped, clapped her hand over her mouth and bulged her eyes at me. I couldn't tell whether it was a laugh or a scream that she was holding back. Obviously she liked being dramatic.

“Flimsy?” I echoed, groping for the right question. “Yuel?”

“I'm sure you take me for a madwoman,” she said, lowering her hands. “I've chattered enough. Consider instead—the alabaster mounds of my breasts.” Weena pulled her T-shirt over her head and unhooked her bra. “Alluring, yes? Caress me, Jim. We'll recline on your bed.”

So we did that. The love-making was great, once I got up to speed. Weena was patient, and funny, and then hot. And that old-fashioned accent of hers made it the more exciting.

Afterwards, lying in bed next to her, I stared at the old frosted-glass light fixture on my low ceiling. I seemed to see the tint of the glass changing in slow waves, the faint pastel hues amping up and down, as if I were diddling the world's color balance sliders.

“I can teep what you see,” murmured Weena.

“Teep—” I said. “Is that supposed to mean telepathy?” I kept having the uneasy feeling that Weena was a little crazy, or that she was totally putting me on. “If you can teep me, why can't I teep you?”

“You have no jiva as yet,” said Weena. “This I will soon remedy. And then your mind will unfold like a spring jonquil. And you'll have the strength of three men. For now, the action of the sprinkles has already raised your vim. Swaying your inner vibrations is an occult technique for glimpsing the inner essence. Flimsy lies inside every electrical particle, you see. As you oscillate your vibrations, fix your attention on one particular object—perhaps that lamp on your dresser. And observe.”

So I relaxed, and let the swaying begin again, and now I noticed that as the colors shifted, my lamp began to look like a cloud of bright dots. It was as if I were seeing the swarms of electrons around the lamp's atoms—as if my mind were a scanning-tunneling microscope. In my trance-like state, I perceived that each of the electrons was the same, and that each of them was somehow very vast. One single hidden form lurked within each. The mysterious Flimsy.

But—was I really forming these impressions myself? Or was Weena somehow putting them into my mind? Feeling myself under siege, I turned away from the lamp and glanced out the window. And now I seemed to see a demonic blue baboon, with his hairless skin rippling like the surface of a windblown—

“What!?!” I cried, sitting bolt upright. The world snapped back to being Santa Cruz on a mid-summer day. “Did you see that, that—monster?” My heart was pounding like it would jump out of my chest. “Is it real?”

“That's the self-image of the yuel I was talking about,” said Weena. “He's teeping us, to some small extent.”

“Is he coming here?”

“He's unlikely to attack unless cornered. For now he's occupied beneath the Santa Cruz pier. As you know, he's presently wearing the form of a bull sea lion. Yuels can change their bodies quite readily, you see. This particular yuel plucked the sea lion image from your mind behind the green house where I slumbered.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Yes, yes, Jim, you're a crucial player in a cosmic drama. But before your special delivery mission, you need to recover from your indisposition. I'll unpack my box now. I brought some food to share. Lentils and rice. My grandmother Praweena taught me to cook.”

In other words, the yuel was the blue slug that Header the surfer had dropped onto the ground. But I postponed discussing this any further. I was just happy to be living with a woman again. For his part, Droog tolerated Weena, without getting overly close.

For the next couple of days Weena and I stayed away from touchy conversation topics. In the mornings, she went in to work the day shift at Mahalo Gelato—she helped to make the ice cream as well as selling it in the afternoons. She got her pay every day, and she'd immediately spend it on clothes from the surf and skate shops downtown. She was fascinated by the Santa Cruz street fashions.

While she worked and shopped, I passed my time on my own. I stayed away from the pier and I didn't try swaying the colors again. I didn't want to face any yuels without Weena around.

I was finding it hard to settle down. Those sprinkles—or my seizures—had screwed up my ability to kill time. In the mornings I'd scan through my old SF paperbacks and pop science books, looking for something to read. And then I'd cruise the neighborhood.

Walking around with Droog, I'd look for people to chat with. Not that I was so good at chatting just now. Even with old friends, I'd freeze up after a few pleasantries, with the muscles of my cheeks bending my mouth into a fake smile. I wanted to talk about the inevitability of death and about whether Flimsy was real—but there was no way I could get those kinds of conversations going, especially with my friends wondering if my trip to the hospital meant that I'd lost my marbles.

On the second day that I was home, I tried to repeat the complicated path I'd taken to Yucca Street and the crumbling green house that day—but I didn't seem able to get all the turns right.

Home alone in my house, I noticed that smells had begun to seem overly intense—I'm talking about the odors of drains, garbage, or ordinary food. The meaty, oily scent of the skin fragments in the electric razor became so disgusting to me that I only shaved every few days. Most of the time I had a bum's dark stubble.

Weena didn't mind if I shaved. She seemed to have no preconceptions about how people should look or behave. In the evenings she'd wear her latest new clothes. We'd drink together, play the radio, and sometimes I'd tell her about what was going on inside my head.

“I feel like my mind is a giant warehouse where an earthquake knocked everything off the racks,” I told her one evening as I fondled my soft stubble. “I have to reshelve things one by one. I'm like—oh, that's a shovel, that's a pot holder, that's a quartz crystal, that's my first day of nursery school.”

“Shelves,” mused Weena. She was wearing a black denim miniskirt with platform flip-flops and a long-sleeved red cotton jersey. “I often classify things by colors. Like ice-cream flavors. In my mind, I have all the cornflower blue things on one shelf, all the turmeric yellows on another, all the thistle greens on another, and so forth. I learned thousands of different color names at my job today. The manger let me explore with her computer. How far they've come. I memorized an online color dictionary from the National Bureau of Standards.”