Complete Short Fiction, page 80
Paula continued to make dinner, even though it was clear Rue would not be eating it. She only half-watched the kitchen computer demonstrate the proper wrist technique for mixing her hollandaise and give her suggestions on resisting curdling. It noted that her burner was a little too hot, and reduced it for her. It also told her the pH was high. She thought about arguing with it, then added another squirt of lemon juice.
Rue had had a childhood. She just hadn’t spent much of it with her mother. Paula remembered Rue lying on a couch. She was about five. The storms of the breakup were raging all around her, but she didn’t see them. She stared off into space, seeing the entertainment channel pushed directly into her optic nerve. They’d selected quality programming for her, the last thing they managed to agree on. By age ten she had seen more than any adult in any previous era could possibly have experienced. With direct-experience feedback she’d probed beneath the seas and gone to the planets. Rue had run with dinosaurs and climbed the staircase of the DNA double helix.
This whole situation had already occurred in embryo. As she ladled the finished sauce over a piece of broiled mahi mahi, Paula felt like she was experiencing it again, only this time finally understanding it.
She had taken Rue on a picnic. It was a rare event, Paula had been working hard keeping her company from going under, but she had managed to get the hired wallboarders and tapers all set up, so that she was free for the afternoon. She and Rue drove out to a small town out in the woods and set their tablecloth up on the grass of a mown field, near a puddle left from recent rains. Waterstriders skittered nervously across the surface.
Paula caught a trembling of light on an unmown stalk of grass.
“Look, Rue! It’s a Tiger Swallowtail.” The incredibly large black-striped yellow butterfly calmly moved its wings as if displaying itself. “Rue . . .”
But Rue was off playing with her imaginary playmate. Not a playmate she’d thought up herself, Paula thought uncomfortably, but one generated by the communication system into which she was linked. Paula had let her choose the parameters herself for her tenth birthday. The system expert assistant had helped Rue through the selection menus, guiding her according to the programming tastes revealed over the previous five years, all of which it had on record. Demoizle, a clever, fuzzy blue bunny, was the perfect playmate for Rue. Unctuously polite to Paula, Demoizle drove her crazy.
“Rue . . . Demoizle. This butterfly is really quite something. You should both see it.” Didn’t her program selection have a lot of nature shows? Paula remembered selecting that. But that was mostly orcas eating sea lions and weird worms that lived in deep-sea volcanoes. Nothing so dull as a real butterfly doing nothing more interesting than resting. A slight breeze tossed the grass, but the Tiger Swallowtail clung in its place, as if taunting her.
“Hey, Rue!” Demoizle called, hopping across the tall grass. “I think it’s time for a . . . Sookie!” It rolled an image of the round candy across its back like a show-off basketball player. The candy glowed ruby red. Despite the fact that it was just sugar and a weird red-berry flavor nature had not had the wit to create, Paula found herself wanting to eat one.
“Hey, Mom, can Demoizle and I have a Sookie?”
“I was just setting out our lunch. How about—”
But Rue had already dug into the picnic basket, grabbed a handful, and was off, giggling. Perfect imaginary playmate or not, a lot of advertising came along with Demoizle’s programming. Acquiescing to that was the only way Paula could afford the high-end connection. The system-end that was Demoizle monitored Rue, and could even call an emergency response team if necessary. It was the perfect companion. A lot of working parents depended on them. Plus, since the advertising was so powerful and relentless, Paula never had to worry about what Rue would want. She was able to supply all her daughter’s needs by subscribing to the quick-purchase program the advertisers provided free.
Perhaps Demoizle was the form that the house computer took when it gave Rue legal advice. It had been a long time since Paula had checked the interface parameters. She sat down to eat. The fish was perfect, the sauce thick and rich. She wanted to throw her plate against the wall.
“Mom?” Rue’s voice drifted tentatively into the kitchen. “Could you come in here?”
Rue lay already in bed, under her covers. Her leather coat, her gloves, her boots, all her armor was now neatly arranged on a chair, ready to be put on the next morning.
With her freshly brushed shining hair, which Paula now recognized as an ineffective gesture of peace, Rue looked impossibly young. Looked her age, in other words, a girl not yet a woman with her covers pulled demurely up to her neck. She had even pulled stuffed animals out of whatever cabinets they had been stored in, presents from some now-forgotten relatives of Mark’s. Rue had never played with them, at least not since Demoizle’s appearance. They didn’t talk or move. They were just dumb lumps of stuffing and fake fur. The teddy bear’s limbs stuck out stiffly, and he was as clean and fresh as if he’d just that moment been pulled from his box, and thus utterly unloved. Rue had put one arm around him, but she didn’t really care about him. He had no name, for no imagination had ever been exerted to give him life.
“Could you tell me a story, Mom? It’s been a long time. . . . I’m kind of sleepy, it would be nice.”
That was absurd. Fourteen was much too old for bedtime stories, and Paula was in no way used to telling them. Rue had always had her own entertainment to put her to sleep. The sound of it had always whispered under the door. Paula sat down on the edge of the bed. Rue was just giving her something to do, something that made her feel like a mother.
“A long time ago, there was a young woman named Sara. She lived in . . . Persia, and she wanted to get married. But every time she found a husband, an evil demon named Asmodeus killed her bridegroom on their wedding night.”
It was odd, how that had floated up. Paula’s grandmother had told her the story of Tobit when Paula had been just a little girl. She remembered the lingering almond-and-chocolate smell of the cocoa and the crispness of the overstarched sheets. It was an odd Bible story, but Paula could remember it, and that was the important thing. She described how Tobias, whom she called Toby, came across the country with the archangel Raphael, married Sara, and drove off Asmodeus.
“Asmodeus was captured and imprisoned by Raphael in a deep dark prison. Raphael, you see, was Toby’s guardian angel.”
“What color were his feathers?” Rue, who didn’t seem particularly interested in the story, managed to force the question out.
“Guardian angels don’t have wings with feathers,” Paula said, suddenly inspired. “They have brightly colored wings like butterflies.” And Raphael, she hoped and prayed, had the yellow-and-black wings of a Tiger Swallowtail.
“That’s good,” Rue said. “I’ll go to sleep now.”
“Good night, dear.”
Paula put the dishes in the washer, then noticed a brightly colored brochure lying on the counter. Superimposed on a photo of a handsome collection of Colonial Revival houses amid huge dark maples, a goodparts version of a New England town, was the title OUR NEW FAMILY. Oh, God, she thought. A brochure to advertise a family? Nice houses, though. She wouldn’t mind living there herself.
Inside a bunch of happy children played some obsolete game, ring-around-the-rosie, or something. Their heads were thrown back in laughter and their long hair streamed like comets. One she recognized as Miriam-Selina’s daughter Kali, another as a younger Rue, brought together here with the other children of the proposed family through the miracle of computer image creation. Their parents, Mark among them, watched adoringly. It was an image impossible to create with a single camera shot: everyone was in perfect focus. And Mark’s teeth had been straightened.
Paula tore the brochure into tiny pieces, stuffed it down the garbage disposal, and went to bed.
“Look, boss, you gotta understand,” Virgie said. “Leo’s a retired madman.” She fluffed her hair, then set her hard hat back down on it.
Paula watched the level readout as the array of hydraulic jacks lowered the house down onto its newly poured concrete foundation. The house was small and ugly, sided in asphalt, and many of its windows were already cracked. She waited tensely for one of them to shatter, but the house just groaned once when it touched its new foundation. Her team checked the alignment of the sill, then pulled out the jacks and threw them on the truck. The damn things were rented, and not cheap.
“You mean he’s retired from being mad?” Paula said, as she checked the foundation for cracks. She’d caught the pourer trying to stiff her on the percentage aggregate. You had to watch everything.
“Hardly. He seems to be more freelancing, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure . . .”
The scrofulous little house had been hauled out of a neighborhood of similarly abused old structures, its old foundation hole to be turned into a swimming pool for the house in front. But, Paula wondered as she looked around at the warehouses, weeds, and broken concrete of this abandoned industrial area, why would the owner want to move it here? Unless he really was mad, in which case maybe taking the job hadn’t been such a good idea.
Virgie divined her worry. “It’s okay, it’s just something he’s set on doing. He wants a good restoration, he’s got the bucks, we’re all right.”
Virgie was a kick-ass carpenter, but she didn’t know squat about business. Still, she’d gotten a good contract with this Leo. Hidden somewhere under the asphalt shingles, the rotted window frames, the hideous wallpaper, was a Greek Revival house from 1838, and Leo was willing to pay to have it restored to its original glory.
“How’d you meet this guy, anyway?” Paula asked. Just behind the house was a rusted chain-link fence. On the other side was a hill of garbage, mostly broken bottles. With luck, by midsummer weeds would have concealed the worst of it.
Virgie tugged at her belt, then shrugged. “I came to Leo to save my marriage.”
“It didn’t work.” Paula didn’t want to be harsh, but Virgie did tend to go on about it.
“Well, no . . . but that wasn’t Leo’s fault.” Virgie squatted against the foundation wall, letting her hanging tools rest on the ground.
“Karl was always really busy. His job was important, he worked for that insurance company, they had a lot of cases all over, big ones. He was always away, and it was rough on the kids. Oh, he did his best. He’d taperecord bedtime stories for them while he was driving from the airport to his hotel, though sometimes he’d yell at other drivers and forget to edit it out. He would have them fax him their homework, and he’d talk it over with them. He had to be away on Marty’s birthday, and I played a recording of him singing ‘Happy Birthday’ . . . he really does have a good voice, you know. He sang in college. Marty just cried. You’d think kids nowadays would be the ones who realized how irrelevant whether he was actually physically there or not was. After all, they grew up with all this stuff. They’re all interconnected.”
It was when Virgie defended her ex-husband that things got bad. Paula wondered if Mark ever defended her actions to others. It was a weird thing wronged lovers did, and it always made friends furious.
“So I brought them to Leo. Leo’s a memory man, I think you knew that. Implantation, design. Used to be a bigwig at some company, don’t know how that fell out. This was pretty easy for him, he probably could have done it in his sleep. After all, all the stuff was there. He just had to turn it real. When he was done, Marty and Lisa remembered their dad being there for everything. Helping with the homework. Singing at the birthday party. He just grafted memories from when he was there over onto places when he wasn’t. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I was kind of ashamed, you know, going to a service to get the kids to love their father. Plus, it cost a bundle, most of what I saved.”
This threw a new light on what had happened. Virgie’s husband had soon requested a divorce, and kept the children. Their love for him was relatively uncomplicated, and thus easier for them to deal with, than their relationship with their not-entirely consistent mother.
Virgie looked up at her. “And you know how he let me know he wanted a divorce? By fax.”
The restructuring of Leo’s house proved to be a great job for Paula’s team. They stripped the asphalt shingles off, and the rotting, ancient clapboards underneath. The huge, old sheathing boards were still in good shape, so they sealed them with house wrap and nailed up fresh clapboards. They sucked almost everything out of the inside of the house, finding corncob insulation between some of the studs.
Leo was a big, hairy bear of a man, sexily sloppy, gloomy. As they tore apart and rebuilt his house, he crouched in an upstairs room, beneath the flapping blue plastic tarp that had replaced an out-of-period dormer and did . . . well, whatever it was he did.
He only came down when the crew finished. On the third day, Paula was there when he did, making sure the tools were all arranged in the corner. Leo let them store on the site, saving her a good hour hauling the stuff off the truck and into her basement when she was through, so the least she could do was see that everything was out of his way.
“Why here?” she asked. “This area’s a nightmare.” They had already cleaned spray-painted graffiti off the foundations.
“This is where the house originally stood. I checked out the records. Here in Crow’s Fields.”
“This isn’t Crow’s Fields anymore.”
“Gotta start somewhere.” Leo heated up a can of soup, poured a glass of whiskey, ripped chunks of bread off and stuffed them into his mouth, all as if he was completely alone.
“Start what?”
“Getting this place to remember to remember what it once was.” He sat down and slurped soup.
Once woodlands, swamp, farmer’s field—now abandoned warehouses, shabby rubble-strewn lots, useless parking lots. Who the hell cared?
“You mean what it really was?”
He shifted in the beat-up old dining room chair he used at his kitchen table. It creaked perilously. Dried remnants of milk and cereal were still on the tablecloth in front of him, generations of them.
“You know, people give me a lot of shit about what I do, but when they need me, they come here.” He scratched vigorously in his beard with blunt fingers. “I used to make a lot of money, you know. A lot of money. I was Engram’s chief designer. But then, I dunno, I got afflicted with art.” He paused over the initial vowel. “Aaht. Bad thing, for a professional. Interferes with your work something terrible. Regular people don’t need memories that blaze like stained-glass windows. It just disturbs them.”
Paula thought about Rue, her Rue, perambulating around those solemn houses in the woods, part of her new family. It was a fashion, of course, these colonies, far from malls and overlit parking structures. Did fourteen-year-olds think that kind of thing was cool now? Paula wondered how much it had cost someone to get them to think that, and what money stood to be made from it.
“So how do you choose memories that won’t drive people crazy? How do you fit them in with everything else?”
Leo snorted. “You know, everyone can’t just remember growing up in the Swiss Family Robinson. Rubs up against things too hard. ‘Hey, when I was a kid, me and my whole family, we lived in a tree.’ Nope, no way. World’s not ready for shit like that. Not yet, anyway. Once it gets accepted that it’s all . . . well, not fictional, no one wants to admit that, but nonconsensus, then you can go with whatever past you want. Whatever you’re comfortable with. After all, it formed your personality, so it has as much reality as it needs, right?”
Maybe it really was that simple. Maybe it would all be fine, and Rue would still remember that Paula was her mother.
The hill seemed to go on forever. Paula slid her butt back on her seat and concentrated on keeping her back straight as she pedaled. Her lungs and her quads burned, but she kept the pace up, feeling her heart pounding in her chest. Keep the cadence high, push your stomach out when you breathe, she knew the damn rules . . . she cranked past an old farmhouse with a long view out across blue-and-green hills. A blossoming apple orchard stretched out behind it. She rubbed sweat off her forehead with the back of her glove, then tilted her helmet back forward. She’d pulled the bicycle out of the basement that morning, first time this spring. She’d been busy. It still had late-fall muck all over it, and she’d spent a good two hours cleaning, lubricating, adjusting. And now she was still trying to pretend to herself that she was just out on a long, get-the-kinks-out ride.
By the time Paula got to the crest of the hill, she felt like throwing up. She pulled the top off her water bottle, drained it, then rested forward on her handlebars. The long view was gone here, on the top of the hill, blocked out by the huge maple trees.
It had been easy to find the land the family co-op was building on. It had been purchased recently, and they’d had to file a whole slew of building permits. She just wanted to take a look at it, that was all, and think about what she was going to do. Rue had her rights, but a mother had her rights too.
She pushed off and whizzed down the hill. The road was a little rough, but it was her reward for having climbed up. The delicate spring leaves blurred at the edges of her vision. She felt the cool air on every square inch of her skin, through the tight Lycra of her bib shorts and the synthetic of her jersey.
She hit the brakes. Cobham Road. That was it. If she’d managed to drift past it, she might have been able to keep herself from turning around and climbing back up to get to it. She coasted down the road. A dump truck, a Bobcat, a pile of four-by-fours. She was there. She leaned her bike against a tree and walked slowly up the dirt driveway, its route marked by stakes with fluorescent tape on the ends. They’d curved it neatly past two ancient beech trees. Ahead, the compound’s five buildings looked even more like a small New England town in person than they did in the advertising brochure.
