Complete Short Fiction, page 82
And she was running, as fast as she could on her stiff, high-heeled cowboy boots, her coat tight around her thighs. In a few steps, not even thinking about it, Paula had caught up with her, grabbed her waist, and swung her around. Rue struggled for a moment, then gave up. Her mother had always been much stronger and faster than her. Demoizle, even in his software-upgraded teenage companion incarnation, rarely carried fitness channels.
“Damn you!” Paula shouted. “Think about what you’re doing.”
Rue turned her head away. “Please let me go.”
“Just think!”
“Please!” Rue wailed. “I don’t want to be who I am. I’m not anybody. I turned Demoizle off, canceled the contract. He’ll be gone when you get home.”
Despite herself, Paula felt a pang of loss, one carefully calculated by the designers of the interface. That damn blue bunny was the creature that knew Rue best. Now, he too had vanished.
“Let go!”
For a long moment Paula’s arms would not respond. Then, finally, Paula managed to drop them to her sides, and do as she was asked.
“On her sixth birthday the Pursang girl was . . . here, forty-six-and-a-half inches tall.” Nate was reading from a computer-generated list.
Frank, one of the other workers, made a ragged pencil mark on the wall.
“And on her eighth birthday . . .”
They were building a family history into the house. Here, in one of the attic rooms, the wall was covered with the marks of children’s heights, evidence that they had always lived here, ever since being brought back squalling from the hospital. Once all the marks were up, they would oxidize and age that portion of wall.
Paula had done as much cabinet work as she was willing to do that day, and had wandered in to see what the other guys were doing. Misty holograms filled the other end of the room, each of them of a corner of some house, with height marks. Each of the images was something a child remembered—Paula recognized the wall of her kitchen, where she had, irregularly, marked Rue’s growth until somehow they had both forgotten about it around her tenth birthday. These strands of memory were being braided together.
“You have kids, Paula?” Nate was next to her, and, damn it, he did smell nice.
“Me? N-no. No. Never had the time.”
“I don’t have any either, but that’s not why.”
She wasn’t going to ask why. She didn’t want to talk to him. He was too nice. She didn’t want nice, no matter how nice-looking.
“Fast work on that drawer.”
“Thanks.” She moved a little away from him, and he returned his attention to the marks, even though they were almost done.
No kidding, fast work. Her assignment had been to build in a drawer that had little faces and letters scratched through the varnish in a childish scrawl. That hadn’t been too hard—the original of that drawer was in her pantry. Rue had done it at age six. Paula hadn’t had the heart to punish her. She’d done it not long after her height had been marked with a pen-knife-sharpened pencil on the wall. . . .
“Look at this one.” Frank held up a lead Napoleonic soldier with a missing leg. “Manny Ortega lost this under the floorboards of his attic at home when he was nine.” He slid it under a loose board. “They plan to find it sometime this next winter. Manny will get put to work rebuilding this old attic, and a piece of his past will reappear.” They had finished the attic only last week, but a lot of work, and some specialized fungi, had made it look decades old.
These workers were serious, dedicated to their work, and insanely well paid. The structures they created had to match the mental structures of the people who would be living in them. The constraints were fiendishly difficult and precise. All the different pasts of these people would finally fit together in this house like a complex joint, one that held itself together without glue or screw.
The multiple panes of the dormer window refracted slightly varying views of the yard. A man walked slowly there, a man with an erect posture, but a sadness in the hang of his head.
“So, Paula, do you think—” Nate began, but she was already on her feet and out of the attic.
Her former husband was heading around the corner of the house. She sprinted down the creaking wood stairs, almost sliding off on the sawdust and wood scraps, and ran out the back of the house. Another huge beech spread its branches there. With a desperate leap that used up her last reserves of strength, she got her hands on the smooth bark and pulled herself up.
Mark came slowly around the corner of the house, looking up at it. He didn’t look happy. She knew him. The house was a fake, and he knew it, and it bothered him. Miriam-Selina had badgered him into this plan, and he was regretting it even before it came to pass. But he would work at it. He always kept working at things. He only gave them up if they were utterly impossible.
“Pssst,” she said. “Hey, Mister. Want to buy some leaves?” She pulled off a handful, let them sift down. “Beech. Very rare. Could get some maple, if you want, but it’ll cost you.”
He stood stock still for a long moment, not looking up at where she sat, as if he had expected her to be there all along, feared it, but was still not reconciled to it.
“Hello, Paula,” he said. “I thought it was you the workers mentioned. The magical weekend worker.”
“One of a kind, that’s me.”
“Paula, I’m sorry. But we’re going to do it. All of it. We have to. You know what our daughter—”
She cut him off before he could tell her what Rue had become. “I know. Do you think you can recreate innocence? Here in this garden?”
“You know me better than that.” He smiled wearily. “I don’t think anything of the sort. But I have to try, Paula. You know I have to try.”
“Miracle of . . . Miriam-Selina, right? She wants it.”
His face stiffened. That was the wrong approach. No matter what problems they might be having, an attack on Miriam-Selina would just make him clamp his shell shut. Paula was the wrong person to be asking any questions.
“I’m sorry, Mark. But I want to know. I want to understand . . . you’re going to take her memories and reattach them, right?”
“As many as we can.”
“Give me an example. I just want to know.”
“Remember when she broke her leg . . . bicycling?”
“Yes,” she said. His barely noticeable pause indicated doubt about the story he had been given by both Paula and Rue.
“Well, there’s a spot down the hill here. A place with some loose rock. Mountain biking, going too fast, she slid right off the trail . . . we carried her back up to the house.”
“We?”
“Miriam and I.” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Miriam found her.”
“What team work! Actually, you know, Rue took off from school in the middle of the day in a friend’s car. They all got drunk, egged on the driver, and he finally rammed the car into traffic barrier. He was killed. We didn’t want to tell you. You say that happened on the hill down here? Tricky driving. Have fun fitting that memory in.”
“Oh, Paula,” he said.
She jumped off her branch, landing lightly in front of him. He seemed smaller than she remembered, and lighter. His clothes were loose on him. He looked levelly at her with his blue eyes, the eyes Rue had gotten. Paula had forgotten how much she liked looking at him.
“This is impossible,” he said, so softly and quickly that she could barely hear him. “Impossible.” He distractedly scratched the top of his head, a well-remembered and well-loved gesture.
“Well, really, Mark,” she said. “You didn’t expect this to be easy, did you?”
“No.”
They found themselves walking together across the wide lawn. The leaves had exploded on the trees, and the substructure of branches, so visible a week or so ago, had almost completely disappeared. The white houses were stern and crisp against their sifting green backdrop. It seemed like a place Mark would want to live. But Miriam-Selina? Nothing rustic about that girl, that was for sure. No amount of hay-mowing, frog-catching memories would keep her from going crazy here.
Mark must know that. He wasn’t stupid.
“Are you putting a Tergiversator in the basement?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “That one’s yours. I couldn’t take it.”
“It’s not mine. It’s ours.”
It’s ours. Was it stupid that the phrase almost made her cry? Damn it, she’d cheated on the son of a bitch. Her own inability to sign up to the demands of marriage had destroyed them. Ours. Nothing was ours anymore. Not even Rue.
“Yeah, well.” They paused at the edge of the trees. Sap still dripped from the newly cut boughs. “Rue wants to try. She really does.”
“I know,” Paula managed. Just for an instant she’d had a feeling of reconciliation, as if, somehow, it would all go away and be what it was. Or what it should have been. But the moment was gone, and she remembered Mark’s deep stubbornness. He was deceptively mild, accommodating, willing to make allowances . . . but when he reached his limit, he reached it, and didn’t ever come back from it. For all she knew, he went to bed every night desiring Paula Pursang desperately, and tossed around with the night sweats. He would deal with it. He’d never come back.
“Then I won’t be the one to stand in her way,” Paula said, and turned and left him there by the still-bleeding edge of the forest, a look of disappointment in his eyes.
The guys were gone from upstairs. All of them, that is, besides Nate. He faked nonchalance, but she knew he was attracted to her. She could get involved with him, have a good few months, maybe start to get over all this, before it all fell apart again. Another screechy revolution of the piss-rusted hamster wheel that was her life.
“Nate,” she said. “Do you remember your childhood?”
“Want my childhood?” He knelt, came up with a double handful of wood shavings. “Smell.” She did, inhaling the delicate dry odor of paper-thin oak. “My dad. He was a woodworker too, though just as a hobby, in his basement after work. He always let me help him, when I was old enough. But when I was little I remember crawling around under his workbench, looking at his feet. It always smelled just like this under there.” He grinned, at her, at everything. “I’m bringing him up here next weekend. He’s creaky, he’ll have trouble getting up the stairs, but he’ll want to see everything. He’s jealous. I do for a living what he did for fun. Maybe you’d like to meet him.”
“Sure,” she said. “I love guys who use their parents to charm me.” And she turned away, not letting him know whether she was encouraging him or not.
“So, Virgie, how are the kids?” Paula slung a box of tools into the back of the truck. Some of her older employees had warned her about doing that. One day, they said, something would just go spoing somewhere in her back, and she would never be the same again. It was inevitable, they said.
“Ah, those little monsters? Who gives a fuck? Let their dad pay for their drugs, sex, and TV. He can afford it.”
There was nothing affectionate in Virgie’s tone. Paula glanced at her, a little frightened. Virgie had lost weight since the start of the project. Her round face had gained definition. Certainly, those hard lines had not been there before.
“Don’t give me that ‘bad mom’ look, Paula honey. There’s a point when you just have to cut your losses, right? You, of all people, should know all about it.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Paula.” Virgie leaned against the side of the panel truck and relaxed her shoulders. “Just, when I think about how long I worked for those miserable kids . . . you know, I can’t remember a single time they were ever nice to me. Ever, from birth. Nasty, self-absorbed creatures. They got all their father’s traits.”
Paula stared at Virgie’s red-angry face. Was this the woman who painted frescoes with her daughter and spent free afternoons cheering on her son’s always-losing Little League team? No happy memories? She looked up at the now-beautiful Greek Revival house that stood in the squalor of Crow’s Fields. She knew where memories came from.
“Leo?” She shouted up the dark stairs. She could hear him moving around up there, in his crisp new office.
“Come on up.” His voice was calm.
The office had a low, sloping ceiling, and two dormer windows. Leo sat at a vast empty desk. And why should there be anything on it? Memories had no substance.
“Damn it.” Paula’s anger had grown as she climbed the stairs until it strained against the narrow walls of the house. “Can’t you leave poor Virgie alone? Her life is damn hard enough as it is.”
He looked at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, his gaze that of a tired and irritable pig.
“She just took the route you rejected,” he said. “She felt like she was a duck imprinted on a boot, obsessed with it, thinking it was something other than what it clearly was. Biological, nothing she could do about it. By eliminating the releaser from her memories, I eliminated the imprinting as well. She’s free now.”
“Free to do what? You’ve eliminated a good chunk of her life. What did you replace them with?”
“TV.” He grinned. He loved shoving the TV thing at her. “What else? Oh, a few generic bad child memories. I mostly stretched the ones she had to fill in the blanks. Now she doesn’t mourn what happened. She is, instead, glad.”
Paula slumped into a chair. “How could you do that?”
“She asked me,” he said. “She paid me. I’m giving all your workers a deal. Good job on the house, they deserve it.”
Paula had a lot of good memories of Rue, and a lot of bad ones as well. Should she give up the good ones, the ones Rue was taking with her to the Kaman-Trumbull-Ortega co-op? If she erased them here and Rue redrew them there, then it would really be as if they had moved, flying like butterflies from one piece of reality to another.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Rue won’t remember a thing about me. I’ll just disappear.”
“You gave her up, didn’t you? Without a fight. Someone else is going to create your daughter’s life.”
She remembered Mark’s final look of disappointment. He had wanted her to fight, even if it led to nothing but pain. But she wanted only the best for her daughter. So she had let him have his way. Why should that so disappoint him?
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “That’s right. Do you have anything to drink in here?”
“Of course,” he answered. “This is my office.”
Bourbon, this time, not rum, but equally good. A few more days and the last details of the house would be complete. What would Leo do here then, sitting alone in his perfectly recreated structure?
“You’re a failure, aren’t you, Leo?”
“That’s the thanks I get for giving you my whisky?” He drained his glass. “Damn right, I’m a failure. I’m reduced to sticking memories into the brains of divorced women, so that they have a decent explanation for their own misery. Sure, I stuck in a brilliant gleam of light from a broken glass, the sight of a child running freely away down a street lined with huge brick buildings, the complicated hasp of an old trunk in the attic . . . but do you think she’ll ever notice? There’s no point to art.” He poured more, hand shaking. “I just fulfill requests. Dyeing Easter eggs, scraping wax off, the smell of a candle . . . I can do it. Make it realer than real. If the memory is bright enough, it can light up an entire life.”
Of course it was Leo whom Kaman-Trumbull-Ortega had hired to modify Rue’s memories. That was probably why he’d hired Paula Pursang Construction in the first place. He wanted to see the other side, the source for the memories he was reattaching. It was just a little game to him. What else did he have left to play?
“It really happened, Leo. I know it did. To me, if not to her.” She even remembered being burned by a drop of boiling dye. The leftover colored powder was still somewhere in the back of a cabinet. She’d never thrown it out.
“I’m not saying it didn’t.” He had hunched his shoulders in expectation of a storm of rage from her. Her calmness surprised him. Jerkily, as if working corroded joints, he lowered his shoulders. “But the problem with memory is that people so seldom pay attention to what’s really important. Life just slides by and leaves nothing behind it. So I have to boost the memory up, make it real, something chewed and tasted before being swallowed. I’ll work it. Don’t worry.” She wasn’t used to seeing him nervous. The expression seemed oddly natural on his face. She wanted to see it there more often. “You won’t be gone. . . .”
“Thanks for nothing, Leo. So I’ll be there, somewhere, in the background of a nonexistent happy scene of dyeing Easter eggs. You’re a genius. But why waste your time on me? Why don’t you change your own past? You can be as artistic with that as you want.”
“And live out my life with my memories my own fragile, brilliant creations? You don’t know anything, Paula. Not a thing.” He glared at her, but he had no power to frighten her anymore. “You want me to remember my great successes? Reality, sad to say, is pretty obdurate.”
Paula stood up. “That’s just what I wanted to hear, Leo. Just right. So, you’re addicted to reality. It’s too much for the rest of us, but you, you like the way you are, the way you turned out, despite the sad sickness of it all. You’ve failed at your art, but you like reality so much that you won’t even give up that failure!”
“A damn shame,” he said, setting his empty glass carefully down on the serenely empty desk. “But there it is. My painful secret.”
Paula, unable to stand him any more, unable to look at him, left the house she had rebuilt and did not look back at it.
Summer had come and gone, and autumn was shaking the leaves from the trees. Paula Pursang stood at the top of a ladder in a place she didn’t want to be, fixing something about the window frame . . . she had forgotten exactly what, or why it was thought appropriate that she be the one to do it. This wasn’t her project. This wasn’t her house.
