A Dirge for the Temporal (13 page)

  I glanced up at Mr. Doe. My lips quivered.

  “A bit more,” he said.

  I went at it again. Scoop after scoop, but still rounding, still measuring,
as if baby trading were only my day job.

  At last he said, “That is sufficient.”

  I rose slowly, spitting dirt out of my mouth. As the circle moved clos
er, the torchlight dancing across the walls of the hole in the earth, I would look no place but there. They began to chant, the circle, and as their voice lifted, the knowledge descended, its talons like razors as they tore into my sweaty, dirty flesh.

  Even when he offered it to me in his extended hands, my eyes remained on the pit I had made.

  Mr. Doe put a hand on my shoulder, turned me around to face them.

  “Why me?” I implored. “Why
me
?”

  “It didn’t have to be you,” Mr. Doe said. “In fact it was my full intention
to take the child away last night and never see you again. Then I caught a glimpse of that empty place inside you and reconsidered. Since I was only going to take him home with me until the ceremony tonight, I decided
I would let you experience him. As well as the ceremony itself.”

  My eyes, stinging with tears, drifted to the bundle that was being presented to me. The one presenting it peered at me through his hazel eyes and said, “No one could benefit more than you. Take him. Plant the sapling so that he may grow up to continue the cycle. Plant the sapling and let him take root in that desolate place in your soul. Go ahead. He is a liaison. Between man and the earth.”

  I heard the sound again. Despite the chanting around me, I heard the voice of Little Guy. Cooing, affectionate.

  “Please,” I choked. “I-I can’t."

  But I did. God help me, I did.

  Though I’ve never managed to bring myself to return to that field to see what sort of boy he’s growing up to be.

A Nasty Set of Circumstances

K
atie had the nastiest set of circumstances Toby had ever come across. And as he’d told Blackie, whose girlfriend had hooked them up, there was definitely a double meaning in that evaluation. That was the problem; they were such an extraordinarily nasty set, men didn’t want to give them up after they’d had a taste. No question Katie had a bad habit of flaunting her stuff, but shit, you’d think that would turn a guy away, not reel him in tighter.

  Toby himself was reeled in about as tight as he could go. He was whipped, flogged, and lashed, and therefore had a sort of understanding with her stalker ex-husband, her stalker ex-boyfriend, and her other stalker ex-boyfriend. If she walked out tomorrow, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He didn’t love her; it was nothing like that. It wasn’t even because she was a supreme lay, eye-popping, zipper-popping gorgeous, and superlative in every physical way. No, it was something crueler.

  She was feeding off him. He had tried to explain what he meant by that to Blackie, but Blackie laughed at him and wanted to know if he was permanently stoned.

  “Actually, that’s kinda the way I feel. Like I’m constantly dazed. But it’s more than that, too. It’s like I’m being used up. Like the life force is being sucked out of me through a straw. And yet, the force is constantly being replenished by my lust for her. The whole thing is wearing me out, shriveling me up.”

  Blackie had shaken his head. “You’re permanently stoned and you’re getting too much snatch. Sounds like the curse of Paradise to me.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Toby had mumbled, and then gone off to find her before she started sapping somebody else.

  He was in bed now, mourning his bruised knuckles and occasionally glancing over at the toned contours of her back as she slept beside him. How she stayed in shape like that, he didn’t know, unless it was pure, unbridled sex. Should have been her fighting off her ex this afternoon over at her place, but he guessed it didn’t really matter, a man needed to
keep sharp with his fists in this life. He only hoped he didn’t turn them on her one day. She’d like that, he suspected. She would then have sucked all the self-composure and self-control and self-respect from yet another man.

  From out of somewhere, or nowhere, came a very strange thought. A very morbid, even perverse thought. Would Katie retain her power over the opposite sex if she was dead? If she couldn’t move those hips or shake that thang or breathe bourbon bubble gum through those sultry lips? He wondered.

  As if catching his thoughts in her dreams, she stirred, murmuring the elongated version of his name. “Tobias, be good to me,” he thought he heard. It really pissed him off when she called him that, Christian name or no.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said. But apparently she hadn’t really been awake. For a moment he was flattered by the idea of being on her mind in her sleep, but then that pissed him off as well. He
should
be on her mind; they were a pair. Fuck, he thought. Fuck it.

  He closed his eyes, tried to coax in the waves, but his hand was in pain. Maybe caplets would help. He rose and went to the bathroom, tried to piss while he fussed with the cotton, finally got out a pair of generic pain relievers—if nothing else. With the goods in hand, he moved on to the kitchen, where the clock registered a minute past dead midnight.

  Dead, he thought. Dead. Then said it aloud: “Dead.” Damn, what a flat word, for all its implications. As he reached for the cup, he caught the plastic handle of one of the cutlery pieces with his elbow. It was the big one, the one that always got in the way. The kitchen was so pathetically small. Cutlery set, toaster, microwave, paper towels, all these items shared the same slab of counter.

  Slab. Like dead. Flat.

  He unsheathed the big knife, not knowing why, just curious really. Just curious. Let one of those motherfuckers, Katie’s formers, come round
his
pad. It’d be a trespass they’d not soon forget—or remember, rather, ‘cause they’d be dead.

  What was wrong with him anyway? He went to the sink, set the cup in the basin, drew enough water to douse down the caplets. Should be dousing his face. He wasn’t himself at all. Why was he still holding the knife?

  But really, how much power would she have in the permanent prone? Would she turn him into a necro? Would he wail and pull out his hair and
throw himself at the mercy of the cops just for thinking of it? Of molesting
the dead? There it was again. Dead. Just plain dead.

 
You must put this knife back in its place in that block.
That’s what you should and must be thinking.
He took the caplets. Caplets. Fucking caplets. She had been grocery shopping with him just once and now he had fucking caplets. They went down so much easier, she had explained to him. Slut. Jesus, man, get a hold of yourself. I don’t care. Slut.

  Toby’s mom had sung a song at his dad’s funeral. It had struck him as exceedingly bold of her, considering how much she had hated the man. Maybe that’s what this crisis he seemed to be having was all about. Pretending. Wasn’t it a world easier just to come right out with the truth?
Katie, you ought to know real well how something goes down your throat, you fucking slut
.

  “Tobe?” came her voice from behind him. He turned to find her standing
there in her cotton pajama bottoms, her particular bedtime thing, squinting against the kitchen light. “Tobe, why do you have that knife in your hand?”

  He was embarrassed one second, but then the next he found himself mulling it over. What
had
gotten into him, after all? Was this some kind of Jungian penis thing? Some kind of regaining his edge? I don’t know, slut, why do I?

  “Are you considering killing me?” she said in a voice that came out of sleep well, adopted its better points easily in the cold kitchen and its cold tile.

  “Katie,” he began. But there wasn’t much to say to her. Her set of cir
cumstances said it all. She dominated the room with her sexuality, she dominated him, she dominated the whole fucking world in the end. It would be like taking down Nero.

  She smiled, squinty-eyed, as she stepped across the floor with her perfect feet. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for taking care of me. With Jim and everything.”

  He let her put her arms around him, felt himself become liquid, oil. The knife clattered on the floor. Lay there, reflecting the light at one angle, dead at the next. Flat.

  “Take me to bed, Katie,” he whispered. “Fuck me.”

The Ego Game

I
n the Nearspace I came upon a fella. He wore a pair of shorts, a hat, long hair bound in a ponytail, and he stood with his back to me, looking over the placid serene. Having never stumbled on male or female in the Nearspace, I was mildly surprised. I had naturally assumed the sphere existed solely for my treatment. As the Tone was fond of reminding me, the Nearspace was the relief at the heart of the egocentric mindview. The place where self-absorption beached one.

  “Sir?” I inquired.

  He turned and his face was as familiar to me as my own…because it was my own.

  “A hesitant hello,” he said, mirroring my own curious expression.

  “What do you suppose they’re up to now?” I wondered aloud.

  “When the Tone last engaged me, the word
umbra
was used.”

  “Umbra?”

  “Their expression for the Test’s most recent introduction—your mechanical shadow.”

  “You are an android?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Memories?”

  “Your very own…up to a point.”

  “What happens at that point?”

  “A lesson in ontology. Who you thought you were all along is not who—nor even what—you actually are.”

  I considered. “So what do you suppose your purpose is?”

  “The nature of the Test is to explore the true nature of man. I suppose I further that by being a sort of alter-ego to man’s representative—you.”

  “The Tone does not use the term,
man’s representative
.”

  “So?”

  “So I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t. It smacks of burdens and responsibilities. I was not approached for assets of that kind, remember?”

  He laughed, which made me feel they had done a good job with him. He asked me if I would be willing to show him.

  “Why? It’s in your memory.”

  “Can I trust my memory? Can I trust
programs
?”

 
“I suppose not,” I said, feeling for him. “But this is already a con
trolled environment. We might be in an airless vacuum even as we speak. I can’t tell the difference, you know.”

  But of course he knew. If he had my memories, he knew all about how I came to be the subject in this Test. The Space Program had recruited
me. In an environment simulator they had discovered for themselves
the feature that made me an aberration among men, a first on the ladder
of evolution
.

  The umbra shook his head. “My sensors say otherwise. Here in the Nearspace there is air.”

  I breathed of it, but my lungs did not taste.

  We walked out across the placid serene, and I could see how eager my umbra was to witness this miracle of life. At the edge of the Outerspace, he gestured eloquently, inviting me to illustrate.

  “What do your sensors say?” I asked him.

  He dipped his head behind the invisible line, and immediately his eyes grew wide and he began to wheeze. “Air!” he gasped as he returned to our side of the membrane.

  “Strange,” I said. “I would have thought a robot…”

  “…would need no air,” he finished, reflecting my wonder, gulping oxygen
like no robot ever had.

  Like
I
never had.

  Damn programs.

The Day it Rained Apricots

I
was only a kid when Gretchen first hired me on at the bakery. I didn’t know my pies from my cobblers, much less the array of finer deli
cacies her little shop offered. In spite of my ignorance of all things kitchen-related, she believed in me from the start, pointing out in her old-fashioned, grandmotherly way that I was after all a girl, and girls are made of no less than sugar and spice. We would compensate for those fourteen years of road life—“fancy a child being dragged all over the globe like that”—in no time at all. She was famous for this sort of frankness, as I suppose most Germans are. But I did love the lady, poor heart.

  We settled in Bavaria, my parents’ absolute favorite region in all the
world, not long after my fourteenth birthday. It had taken that many years and more to build up the nest egg, and now I would have the simpler
life they had always wanted for me. I don’t know why they felt it necessary to carry around that air of apology. I had rather enjoyed the only life I had ever known. Just as I would enjoy this new life. I sometimes think they never completely understood that I was not just pretending to be a carefree, adaptable gal but that it was in my nature. Alas, what I am.

  I fell into the job at the bakery. We had been living in the village of
Meuerberg about two months at the time, and a Saturday morning ritual
had developed of my picking up fresh
Brötchen
for breakfast. Gretchen and I had been on a first name basis almost since day one, when she had
admired my straw hat in her thickly dialectal German, a gnarled forefinger helping to specify at least the object of her unintelligible compliment.
Today I greeted her with the usual
Guten Morgen
as I stepped out of the cool November air into the warmth and delectable aromas of her shop. When, rather than responding in kind, she gestured towards the back, where noises of clanging metals and swearing formed a discordant, even alarming symphony, I knew she was having a disagreement with her help again. The girl’s name was Ina, and I went to school with her. She was a sassy one, to say the least, and I had wanted to punch her on her fat lip since the moment I first met her.

  Gretchen served out the chosen pieces of bread silently—although I was a quick study, the language barrier would not be overcome for some time yet—while I considered, not seriously, stomping back to the kitchen to do some harmful thing to Ina. But she would not wait, even for a fantasy
. As I passed the coins to Gretchen, Ina came storming out yelling something about
Arbeiten
(work) and
Hexe
(witch) tossing her apron at her employer and giving her the finger as she almost broke the front door with the force of her anger on her way out.

  It was on that very day I was shown some of the finer points of making
a brandied apricot-raison pie.

  It was an alliance that would last well beyond the one year of our monopoly on the market. To this day I visit her, all the way from the States, and to this day she remembers most fondly that first year, when she had the corner, when she was the apricot queen and they would come from all the surrounding villages just to sink their teeth into her—into
our
—delicious pastries.

  She was a wonderful teacher. There was an art, she said, not only to baking, not only to applying, but also to acquiring. “The apricots we use are only the best. Italian in the heart of the season, of the South of France on the season’s fringes.” She knew her apricots.

  And that is how she almost put him out of business the moment he put up shop.

  His name was Assen, he was only part German and he came from somewhere up north. He had always wanted to open a bakery, and our town was where he would do it. During the tourist season, what with all the skiers Meuerburg attracted, there was plenty of room for two bakeries
. Out of season he would shut down, do his other thing (whatever that was), and no one would be hurt. Gretchen laughed at that, which meant she was already hurt, claiming that there was no way, even if he could compete with her at the most basic level of flour and yeast, that he could hope to succeed in the finer endeavors. Not with that schedule. Not when the crop schedule was so instrumental to a baker’s success. With her knowledge and her connections, you see, she could stretch out the crop almost to the limits of any grown food.

  To prove her point, on the day of his grand opening she had an outdoor tasting, which I myself managed, our apricot pastries lining three long tables. Herr Assen was forced to watch from across the street as his potential clients drifted towards the smell of Gretchen’s unequalled baked goods.

  It was not the sort of day for it, dark clouds gathering over the mountains to the south, the scent of precipitation on the air, the temperature unseasonably warm. But so we did, and I was not above doing a little taste-testing of my own, even offering some to Herr Assen himself when he rambled over to have a look.

  “How can you bear to be in the employ of this woman?” he said. “Not that friendly competition bothers me, of course. But my own employee tells me stories of her…”

  “Your own employee being the sweet-hearted Ina who once worked for Gretchen?”

  He eyed me. “Perhaps
you
would consider…”

  “I think you could not afford me, Herr Assen. Considering that you seem to be losing the friendly competition.” I gestured around us.

  As he acknowledged the flock of tourists and locals alike surrounding our tables, his face seemed to fall. “But you misunderstand me,” he said. “I do not wish to steal her business, only to—”

  “The devil, you say,” came Gretchen’s voice behind me. “That is precisely what you wish, and I stand here to tell you that you will wallow in your presumption before this day is through.”

  But thunder rumbled, and it looked as though we all might be wallowing before long.

  “Truly, lady, you have me at a disadvantage.”

  “Oh? Because I know these people? Because they trust me? My goods?”

  “Because I have misjudged the market, the taste of these people, the need for a fruit supplier—”

  Something landed with a dull squish. We all lowered our faces to the pie to see what had disturbed its flaky surface. A yellowish fruit, somewhat smaller than a peach, lay there, a dead weight in the pie's center. I was struck on the head, looked up to see what was about, was struck in the face. I turned to the others, saw that they too were staring up at the sky. Then all at once the clouds let loose and the sky began to fall in round downy missiles.

  I reached out for Gretchen but she was not there. She had stumbled back beneath the eaves of the shop front, covering her ears as the missiles
struck the aluminum, eyes wide with wonder as the apricots fell in a tor
rent over the street, her carefully laid tables, the stubborn head of Herr Assen as he held a specimen up for inspection.

  Against the storefront across the way, leaned our notorious Ina, a look not of bewilderment on her face, as all the rest of the world seemed to share, but one of smug amusement. For it was her day in the rain.