Secret Lives (7 page)

But later: in deep winter, in the bronzed dusk of a day when the snowflakes fell slowly and silently onto her deck while the lizards gathered around her despite the chill, Gayle felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, a surge of mingled joy and sadness in which every detail around her was magnified and more intense; it made her shudder and wrap her arms around her shoulders. And she no longer felt the need to know
why
.

JOHN AND MAUREEN DAVEY

John and Maureen Davey lead productive, fast-paced lives as the founders and owners of the world infamous “Jayde Design: Building, Computing, & Publishing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design,” although recently their company split like rapidly mutating cells into “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, & Computing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design” and “Jayde Designs: Building, Management, & Surveying—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design.” To simplify matters, John sometimes makes up letterhead for himself that reads “John Davey: Builder by Trade, Surveyor by Profession, Writer by Hobby.”

“Sometimes,” Maureen has been known to say to John, “I think we have taken on too much. Sometimes I think there are small third-world countries that have less work to do than Jayde Design and Jayde Designs.”

Then John smiles his clandestine smile and the sudden light in his eyes and the light in her eyes display a perfect harmony of secrecy.

Neither he nor Maureen ever let on to their friends about the particulars of their secret life, however—a life they carve out for themselves in the minutes, the seconds, the moments, at which their over-active brains are not pulsing toward the solution to some multi-faceted consultancy, contracting, or design problem. (It is theorized by one of their friends, in fact, that the energy caused by the firing of neurons in John and Maureen’s heads has been harnessed by the aliens who live on a planet circling a dying star—a white dwarf—and that this energy alone has kept the star from imploding, and thus John and Maureen are not just responsible for a multi-faceted business, but also for keeping alive an entire alien race, although this is, of course, speculation, not a secret life at all, and at no point in the immediate future will John and Maureen change their moniker to “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, Computing, & Enabling the Survival of Alien Intelligent Life Across the Galaxy”.)

What is their secret life? When they can grab the time, they work together as Inventors of the Impractical—conceiving of inventions that would, perhaps, be universally admired in a parallel universe but which (they realize) may never be appreciated in this one. Together, they draw out the designs, they pencil in the descriptions on graph paper. They debate (over drinks) the pros and cons of each invention.

“Plastic,” he will say in a stray moment when Jayde Design(s) does not require their attention.

“Breathing tube,” she will say hours later, in another free second, with an almost lascivious smile.

“Furniture saver,” he will say, the next day, in the car, with a leer.

“Pets!” she will reply that evening, over dinner, giving him a long hug.

Shortly thereafter an invention is born that allows a pet owner to wrap his or her dog or cat in a plastic sheath complete with hole in the back and an air tube—providing for full freedom of movement, but negating any possible injury to furniture from fur, hairball, or claws.

“No more need to cover the furniture in plastic,” Maureen says, looking down at the finished design, breathless, happy.

“Cut off the problem at the source,” John says, hugging her.

“Totally impractical,” Maureen says. “Completely fool-hardy.”

“I love it!” John says.

The next day, they will let their idea out in to the world. Curl up the graph paper, stick it in a bottle of glimmery old green glass, stopper it, and send it on its way—by river by tossing into the open window of a car by sneaking it into someone’s briefcase by mailing it to Timbuktu by any of a thousand means.

John likes to think that whatever their delivery system, their idea will end up with someone or somewhere it can be of use.

Maureen just likes to think that someone somewhere will be amused.

Regardless, they are soon onto the next thing. A fashionable handle to clip onto the existing handle of an old suitcase! A suit with small globes of aquariums hanging from it! A pillow that doubles as a hibachi! Just so long as the idea works those few neurons not busy with their day job. Just so long as it is fun, secret, and, above all,
theirs
.

BOWEN MARSHALL

Bowen Marshall is an aspiring librarian who believes his sister leads a more interesting life just because, at the age of seventeen, she moved to San Francisco to become an artist and circus performer. However, Bowen is mistaken in his assumption about his sibling. Being a circus performer requires a Herculean commitment of time to repetitive, boring practice, usually in close quarters in smelly, animal-feces-encrusted circus tents inhabited by lots of unsavory, tattered characters who might have looked Romantic and fun from a distance but are revolting up-close. Not to mention the “excitement” of being an artist. There is nothing particularly exciting about snobbish gallery owners, ignorant art buyers, and slowly starving to death from a lack of steady income.

Besides, Bowen’s secret life would make even an adrenaline junky Navy SEAL weak with envy. Every night, about an hour into sleep, Bowen begins to dream of a fantasy land. First, the smells come to him: rich sandalwood and the exact freshness of a breeze that runnels across a stretch of clear, clean pond water. Then, the sounds: the rustling of leaves in a sensual wind, the staccato stamp-stamp of some animal moving through the underbrush, a hint of a bird-call, an owl perhaps, flying through the dusk. A taste of lime, a hint of mint. And when he opens his eyes in dream, he is there, with the somehow comforting hulk of a mountain range in the distance, and the splay of moonlight across his hands. He is sitting by a pool of water, in rich, deep mud, and when he staggers to the water’s edge and looks into its depths, he sees not just the reflection of the moon but also his face, transformed.

Every night, it is a different face, of some creature from myth or nonsense rhymes. Each night, he delights in the power of the creature he has become, whether it be the powerful leg thrusts of the jackalope as it thunders across prairie beneath the mountains’ gaze or the thick muscular
slide
of a giant snake, belly ridges catching with itchy delight against an underbrush of dead, crinkly leaves. And with each incarnation, the concurrent amplification of his senses: eyesight that can pierce through the bark of trees to reveal the insects tunneling through its pulp; or hearing so acute that he can sense a droplet of water falling from the wing of a wasp in flight a hundred miles away; or taste that can bring him the brine of the far-off, long lost Old Sea, wrapped in the tang of seaweed and salt.

From each dream, he wakes refreshed but with no memory of his adventures, while in the land he has left for the day, some creature dreams the details of
his
daily life with a similar amnesiac’s satisfaction.

You could join a thousand circuses for a thousand years and never experience what Bowen experiences in his sleep, and which the cells, the blood, the flesh of his body still retain even if his conscious mind does not.

Someday, Bowen will wake up during his dream, and his life will be more riotous with color and light than he could possibly imagine . . .

RICH DEMARS

Rich Demars runs a gas-driven power plant that uses landfill methane. Once a nuclear operator on a submarine near Corpus Christie, he is a man with a full appreciation for the uses of energy, and the application of those uses. There are stories he could tell about his life on the submarine, but he chooses to keep them to himself. No one would believe him anyway. But his submarine secrets are not the only ones he keeps from his friends and family. The other set of secrets would not be believed either . . . “except when their utter and devastating truthfulness shall be revealed in the fullness of time” as he sometimes mutters during the slow times at the power plant. “Then they’ll understand. They’ll
all
understand.”

For, in his off hours, Demars works for a worldwide secret society dedicated to returning the Earth to the rule of an obscure sect of Mesopotamian magicians and priests. These priests and magicians have kept their bloodlines pure down through the trials of thousands of years, and kept their plans intact as well. It may be the most secret of all secret organizations in the history of the world.

Using the library in his home town—specifically, that marvelous invention the inter-library loan—Demars has been instrumental in helping the society realize its goals. For it was Demars who discovered the location of the legendary Euphrates Tablet, with all that connotates. It was Demars who figured out the best cell phone plan and got the entire sect to adopt it. And it was Demars who came up with the idea of a monthly newsletter, which he now edits. (The newsletter has no bylines and no masthead; it has no name and it has no mailing address; it also has no English letters, as it is written all in cuneiform—thus ensuring that infidels and other undesirables cannot read it, although also ensuring that each newsletter is hundreds of pages long, for not only is cuneiform somewhat cumbersome in execution, but many members of the sect are ancient and insist on the use of large letters for their aged eyes.)

As Demars looks out over the landfill, when he realizes what he has hidden under all of that waste, and what it will one day do . . . a glimmer of a gleam comes into his eyes. He has a well-defined sense of imagination. He can already see the transformation. For, when the sect’s work is complete, a vortex in time will open and the Mesopotamian past will seep into the American present, devouring it whole. The mighty Euphrates, twined to its twin, will barrel through and flood the land. What will happen to Demars then, he neither knows nor cares. Let the elders of that ancient river valley decide his fate, along with all the rest. It is entirely possible he will remain on as the editor of the newsletter, at the very least.

TERRY TIDWELL

Terry Tidwell is a builder, a bookworm, and a beer drinker. Of late, however, he has become obsessed with 18th-century automata.

One night, out with friends, he bumped into a homeless man. A miasma of sweat, funk, and mustiness blew over Tidwell as he held the man in his arms, in one of those unplanned moments that permeate every life, one that to an observer might even look like a reunion of old friends.

The man’s face, hidden by salt-and-pepper whiskers, imploded in an unmistakable grimace as he flailed to get free and as Tidwell held on long enough to make sure the man would not gain his freedom by falling.

Released, the man stumbled to the curb as cars passed behind him, and glared at Tidwell.

“Watch yourself,” he growled.

As he took a step back, Tidwell noticed something peculiar about the man’s left eye. It was completely black, without a hint of white, and when the man blinked, Tidwell swore he could see ridges in his eyelid, as if the object lodged in the orbit was not an eye at all, but something entirely more mechanical.

“Sorry,” Tidwell said, taking another step back, his friends waiting for him up ahead.

He turned to go, a shiver of fear making him hurry, but the man came up behind him and caught him by the arm. His grip was as strong and implacable as that of a robot arm.

“Vaucanson had a duck you know,” the man hissed in Tidwell’s ear. “He had a duck, and it broke. But it wasn’t my fault. You’d think they’d know that by now. Vaucanson. Vaucanson has a lot to answer for.”

The man released Tidwell.

Tidwell whirled around, stared at the man, opened his mouth to speak, but found he had nothing to say. He simply wanted to get away from the man as quickly as possible.

One of his friends had walked back to help Tidwell and now said, “Do you want me to call the police?”

Tidwell stared at the man with the impossible eye and the man with the impossible eye stared back.

“No,” Tidwell said, “but let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Vaucanson’s duck. Find it,” the man said, “and you’ll find a whole lot more. My time is done. I’ve nothing left to find it with.” A look of unexpected sympathy on the man’s face. “Good luck,” he said softly—and then as Tidwell and his friend looked on with bewilderment, the man ran down the sidewalk with almost preternatural speed and into the night.

Much later, when he got home, he could still feel the man’s grip on his arm. That grip had left two uniform welts that took a fortnight to heal.

As might be expected, Tidwell could not forget his encounter with the homeless man. He played it over and over in his mind. For one thing, the more he thought about the man, the more the man seemed familiar to him, as if he had once known him, but no matter how long or hard he tried to penetrate the fog surrounding that particular mystery, it remained a mystery for quite some time.

So, instead, in his free time, Tidwell decided to find out about the duck and about Vawkansun, if either had ever truly existed. He would have liked to have forgotten about both the duck and Vawkansun, but since he dreamed every night of a magical duck and a shadowy man with a V monogrammed on his shirt, this was impossible.

“You going out with us tonight?” one of his friends would ask and Tidwell would reply, “I’m not feeling too good tonight. I think I’ll just stay in.” And then he would go down to the local library to research “Vawkansun.”

It didn’t take long to realize that such a duck and such a man, Vaucanson, had existed—in France in the 18th-century. In a moldy old book of facts, water-damaged and coffee-stained, he found the following entry:

One of the most famous automata was built by a French engineer named Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s. His ingenious mechanical duck moved like a duck, ate like a duck, and digested fish like a duck. The duck had a weight inside connected to over a thousand moving parts. Vaucanson, by trial and error, made these parts move together to make the duck move and give it the illusion of life. It even had a rubber tube for its digestive track. The duck and other automata made Vaucanson famous, and he traveled for many years exhibiting his duck and other machines around Europe. Although he collected honors for his work, he also collected scorn from those who believed he had employed infernal means to create his duck. After a time, he fell out of favor and took a position managing silk-mills in the countryside. Most of his creations were destroyed in a fire a year after Vaucanson died, but the miraculous duck was spotted in 1805 by the famed poet Goethe in the collection of an Austrian antiques enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian died and the collection auctioned off to pay his debts. The duck has not been seen since. Even in 1805, Goethe had reported that the duck looked mangy and had “digestive problems.” Strange sounds came from inside the automata, and it is likely it ceased to function shortly after 1806, when it was sold to an anonymous buyer. Vaucanson’s relatives have often claimed that the duck was Vaucanson’s most prized possession and that he believed it held the key to solving several scientific mysteries.