"I'll look for them," he said, and got up from the computer to go do just that. She turned away, and he watched her go, and then—without realizing it—sat down at the keyboard again.
Hours later, screaming and in tears, she came back and told him he could take that big Bekins storage box, if he ever found it, and jam it up his spreading ass!
The razor was beginning to strike bone.
The computer had grown larger. It seemed to be bursting out of its metal case. The word bloated came to mind. Chris had begun to perceive a strange, almost lopsided aspect to the machine, as if it were off-balance, from the shifting of weight, the addition of new cargo. And it continued to take sips from his hands. And he was forgetting many things now. Not the least of which was the precise moment when Sharilyn had left.
He knew she was gone, because he couldn't find her anywhere in the house. But he couldn't exactly parse the circumstances that had driven her away. Had it been one of the fights? Or the fact that he sat before the PC night and day now, growing paler, getting foggier in the mind with each passing hour? Could it have been that? Or perhaps it was the moment she came downstairs and saw him feeding one of the neon tetras to the computer. Perhaps it was that moment. Maybe not. He couldn't remember.
The house was always silent.
Cobwebs refused to grow.
He sat in darkness, the only light provided by the monitor—a sickly blue-green abyss across which fleeting sighs and portents scuttled like crippled creatures. The figures and letters would bump against the perimeter of the screen, fumble for a moment as if lost in the wilderness, and then run back into the center of the information field, where they would vanish with tiny squeals.
Chris worked with his eyes closed most of the time. He had lost the need to see what the computer was asking. But through his fingertips the machine drank and drank, never seeming to slake its thirst, never seeming to get its fill. Bloated and cockeyed in shape, but always sucking from Chris whatever he had left.
He tried to remember when his mother had died. He knew she was gone...just as others had gone...but he couldn't exactly say who those others were. Yet he remembered her face. The sweetest smile. And a phrase she used to say:
"Woof woof a goldfish."
It meant nothing, really; but she would use it when he—or anyone—was coming on too strong, being a bully, threatening in some silly way, like a guy in a car on the street who thought he had been cut off, making insulting remarks. His mother, with that sweet sweet smile, would lean out and say, "Woof woof a goldfish!" It was so much nicer than giving someone the finger. He loved his mother. Where was she?
He called out, but there was no answer. The house was silent.
In the third week since first blood had been drawn, the computer began to speak to him. But he couldn't understand a word it said. And the voice made his head hurt. Like a huge empty auditorium in which taiko drummers played endlessly.
Two days later, a thunderstorm hit the tri-state area with a power and a ferocity that reminded old-timers of the great storm of 1936. And the dam stopped producing electricity when a spike of lightning as thick as a city block hit the transformer station; and the power went out; and the computer went dead. Or dormant.
It continued to glow, that diseased bluish-green color, but it wasn't alert, it wasn't breathing as deeply, it wasn't draining him. It went somnolent, torpid, waiting.
Chris felt like a junkie going into terminal withdrawal. He fell from the ergonomic chair, and lay on his side for hours. The pain in his head, and the pain in his hips, and the pain in his hands—radiating all the way to his shoulders—left him paralyzed. Lying there cuculiform, curled like a conch shell, absent the sound of any living sea.
For hours the storm raged around the house, battering and lashing the windows with the malevolence of ancient enemies. And by morning, when light crept through the sooty windows, Chris crawled to the bathroom and ran water into the tub and managed to drag himself over the porcelain lip and fell face-forward into the freezing ocean. He thought he'd die!
The pain was excruciating, shadowlines of agony racing down from his eyes and cheeks into his neck, paralyzing his upper body, disemboweling him, reducing him to the jelly cold of infinite vacuum. He tried to struggle out of the tub, lurching back with his shoulders, trying to get purchase with his scrabbling feet against the tiles of the bathroom. His head and upper body were submerged, his torso half-in, half-out of the tundra oblivion. He screamed, there in the water, and bubbles, only bubbles broke the surface. He wrenched himself back, thrashing, managing to get one arm outside the tub, over the enamel edge. But it was enough.
He fell to the floor, teeth chattering, eyes white and rolled up in his head like shrunken scrotums, like brine shrimp left in the desert. He passed out, and it was sweet relief.
He thought he remembered his mother's smile.
It was night again. He could see the blind eyes of the living room windows from where he lay on his side on the carpet. The only light in the room was from the computer. It had tried to crawl to him, to feed, but the power had been off for too long. Had it been a day, two...three days or a week...? Chris had no idea. He felt dehydrated, and hurting in every paper-thin plane of his skin.
It had to have been more than a few days, because he was so weak he couldn't move. He tried, and only a finger spasmed. But then, he had been drained before the storm had smashed them, and lying here for an endless time would only have emptied him the more.
He could see the PC, over there, halfway between its work-station and his twisted body. It had come down off the ledge, had managed to get partway toward him, and then had, itself, collapsed.
Its mouth was open, glittering blue-green bytes drooling from its fanged aperture.
Chris knew something was wrong; something was wrong with him. He should not be lying on the carpet, he should not be weak, he should be frightened of that machine over there.
But he couldn't remember.
Couldn't remember who he was, or why he was here, or what he should be doing. To save himself. To rise. To think about matters that mattered. There had been people, of that he was sure. People who had known him, had cared for him; but he couldn't recall what the words cared for him meant.
And he saw the PC trembling.
It inched across the carpet. Slowly, like a broken-backed horse struggling for the cool mud of a ditch. Chris watched it come.
The phosphorescent aura of its passage across the room was like strobe tracers in a long shot of the turnpike. It left a trail, like a slug, glittering and corrosive.
Dragging the umbilicus of its power cord, the three-pronged plug jumping and twitching like a severed chicken body seeking its head, the PC came closer. Chris lay on his side and watched, unable to move, unable to defend himself...
What did that mean: defend himself?
He thought about it, tried to put the phrase together. Oh, yes, he thought, I know what that means. Defend myself. I know. It means it's time to be fed, and I have to make myself available.
With the strength of a drowning man, he scissored his legs against the carpet, pushing himself across the space between himself and the oncoming computer. The cord twitched and dragged itself behind the carcass of the PC. Chris rolled to one side, out of the computer's path, and shinnied his way in a herky-jerky rolling way till he could get the cord in his mouth. He closed his lips around the cord, and continued to roll and frog-kick and drag himself to the wall. The outlet was at eye-level.
He got close to the baseboard, and fainted again.
When he awoke, the computer was close to his feet, and the lights were on in the living room. Oh, wonderful, he thought, now it can feed. Lovely. Lovely.
He drew himself together at the hips, then extended his upper torso, the cord clenched between his teeth, and moved another six inches to the baseboard. And again. And once more. Now he was lying with his cheek against the cool hardwood floor; and the plug lay just below the outlet.
&nbs
p; The computer scraped the floor, byte drool etching an acid alphabet in the pegged wood floor. I'll help you, Chris tried to whisper. I'll plug you in and you can drink.
He didn't understand why the PC was so impatient. He was trying to help. He would help, even if the machine was being impatient.
With the last of his strength, he dragged his arm around his body, and grasped the plug. He tried ever so hard to raise the plug, to insert the triple prong into the slots and hole. But his strength was gone. He was empty. His head had been sucked dry of all knowledge, his body drained of all
energy, his arteries dusty with emptiness. The PC was whimpering at his feet like an asthmatic infant.
Friend, he thought, my old dearest friend. He wanted to say, be patient, I'm coming, I'll get you fed yet, I'll set the table and billow the napkin into your lap. Hold on, old friend.
And from some small reservoir of unknown value, some untilled patch of muscle, he found an inch worth of foot-pounds of energy, and he thrust the plug into the power point.
The energy spike exploded straight through the heart of the PC. It had been lurking there in the web, waiting to be tapped, and as the plug drove home, Chris speared the computer with a coruscating spike of energy that blew the feeding keyboard into dust. Chris was showered with sparks. And darkness closed over him again.
When he came to, he was lying curled in a foetal rictus, every fiber of his body crying for a soft breeze, a gentle touch. But he could think...he could reason.
And he knew what had happened to him. The long banquet that had transpired in this dark house. Sharilyn was gone, his family was gone, and he had very nearly been taken.
But now, by chance, he had saved himself. Unknowing, without sense or purpose, he had saved himself from the thing that drank, the device that dined. He would begin to crawl toward the kitchen, to pull down a box of saltines, to kick the table and make a desiccated tangerine fall from the bowl up there. He would live. By chance, but yes, he would live. And it was chance that lived on the side of human reason. Always.
Nothing of the insensate hungering world could defeat a thinking entity, a creature of breezes and sweet smiles.
Then he heard the sound of lips smacking, of soft and distressing music; and he stared across the living room.
The television licked its lips and winked at him.
Jane Doe #112
Shadows of lives unloved, as milky as opal glass, moved through the French Quarter that night. And one begged leave, and separated from the group to see an old friend.
Bourbon Street was only minimally less chaotic than usual. It was two days till the Spring Break deluge of horny fraternity boys and young women seemingly unable to keep their t-shirts on.
The queue outside Chris Owens's club moved swiftly for the last show. Inside, the entertainer was just starting the third chorus of "Rescue Me" when she looked out into the audience and saw the pale shadow of a face she hadn't seen in twenty years.
For a moment she faltered, but no one noticed. She had been a star on Bourbon Street for twenty years; they wouldn't know that the face staring up palely at her was that of a woman who had been dead for two decades.
Doris Burton sat in the smoky center of a cheering mob half-smashed on Hurricanes; and she stared up at Chris Owens with eyes as quietly gray and distant as the surface of the moon. The last time Chris had seen those eyes, they had been looking out of a newspaper article about the car crash over in Haskell County, when Doris had been killed.
Her parents wouldn't let her go over to the funeral. It was a piece of Texas distance, from Jones County over to Haskell. She had never forgotten Doris, and she had always felt guilty that she'd never gotten to say goodbye.
Now she felt the past worming its way into her present. It couldn't possibly be. She danced to the edge of the stage and looked directly at her. It was Doris. As she had been twenty years ago.
The woman in the audience was almost transparent in the bleed of light from the baby spots and pinlights washing Chris as she worked. Trying to keep up with the beat, Chris could swear she could see the table full of Kiwanis behind Doris. It threw her off...but no one would notice.
Doris moved her lips. Hello, Chris.
Then she smiled. That same gentle smile of an awkward young woman that had first bound them together as friends.
Chris felt her heart squeeze, and tears threatened to run her makeup. She fought back the sorrow, and smiled at her dead friend. Then Doris rose, made a tiny goodbye movement with her left hand, and left the club.
Chris Owens did not disappoint her audience that night. She never disappointed them. But she was only working at half the energy. Even so, they would never know.
That night, the Orleans Parish Morgue logged in its one hundred and twelfth unknown female subject. The toe was tagged JANE DOE #112 and was laid on the cold tile floor in the hallway. As usual, the refrigerators were full.
Ben Laborde took his foot off the accelerator as he barreled north on the I-10 past St. Charles Parish, and kicked the goddammed air conditioner one last time. It was dead. The mechanism on the ’78 Corollas had been lemons when they were fresh off the showroom floor, and twelve years of inept service had not bettered the condition. Now it had given out totally; and Ben could feel the sweat beginning to form a tsunami at his hairline. He cranked down the window and was rewarded with a blast of mugginess off the elevated expressway that made him blink and painfully exhale hot breath. Off to his left the Bonnet Carre Spillway—actually seventeen miles of fetid swamp with a name far too high above its station—stretched behind him as an appropriate farewell to New Orleans, to Louisiana, to twenty-two years of an existence he was now in the process of chucking. The blue Toyota gathered speed again as he punched the accelerator, and he thought, So long, N'wallins; I give you back to the 'gators.
Somewhere north lay Chicago, and a fresh start.
When he thought back across the years, when he paused to contemplate how fast and how complexly he had lived, he sometimes thought he had been through half a dozen different existences. Half a dozen different lives, as memorable and filled with events as might have been endured by a basketball team with one extra guy waiting on the bench.
Now he was chucking it all. Again. For the half-dozenth time in his forty-one years.
Ben Laborde had run off when he was ten, had worked the crops across the bread basket of America, had schooled himself, had run with gangs of itinerant farm laborers, had gone into the army at nineteen, had become an MP, had mustered out and been accepted to the FBI, had packed that in after four years and become a harness bull in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriffs Department, had been promoted to Detective, and had had his tin pulled two years ago for throwing a pimp through the show window of an antique shop on Rue Toulouse. The pimp had been on the muscle with someone in the Department, and that was that for Detective Benjamin Paul Laborde.
He had become a repairman for ATMs, but two years fixing the bank teller machines had driven him most of the way into total craziness. And then, there was that group of pale gray people that kept following him...
He looked in the rearview. The expressway was nearly empty behind him. If he was being tracked, they had to be very good; and very far behind him. But the thought had impinged, and he cranked up the speed.
There had been six of them for the last year. Six men and women, as pale as the juice at the bottom of a bucket of steamed clams. But when he had seen them out of the corner of his eye the night before last, moving through the crowd on Bourbon Street, there had only been five.
He couldn't understand why he was so frightened of them.
He had thought more than once, more than a hundred times in the past year, that he should simply step into a doorway, wait for them to catch up, then brace them. But every time he started to do just that...the fear grabbed him.
So he had decided to chuck it all. Again. And go.
He wasn't at all certain if not having the Police Positive on his hip made any d
ifference.
The nagging thought kept chewing on him: would a bullet stop them?
He ran, but the Corolla didn't have anything more to give. He thought grimly, even if I could go ten times as fast it probably wouldn't be fast enough.
Chicago was dark. Perhaps a brownout. The city lay around him as ugly and desperate as he felt. The trip north had been uneventful, but nonetheless dismaying. Stopping only briefly for food and gas, he had driven straight through. Now he had to find a place to live, a new job of some menial sort till he could get his hooks set, and then...perhaps...he could decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.
As best he could discern, he hadn't been followed. (Yet when he had pulled in at a bar in Bloomington, Indiana, and had been sitting there nursing the Cutty and water, he had seen, in the backbar mirror, the street outside. And for a moment, five sickly white faces peering in at him.)
(But when he had swiveled for a direct look, only the empty street lay beyond the window. He had paid up and left quickly.)
Laborde had never spent much time in Chicago. He barely knew the city. A few nights around Rush Street, some drinking with buddies in an apartment in a debutante's condo facing out on the Shore Drive, dinner one night in Old Town. But he had the sense that staying in the center of the city was not smart. He didn't know why, but he felt the push to keep going; and he did. Out the other side and into Evanston.
It was quieter here. Northwestern University, old homes lining Dempster Street, the headquarters of The Women's Christian Temperance Union. Maybe he'd take night courses. Get a job in a printing plant. Sell cars. Plenty of action and danger in those choices.
He drove through to Skokie and found a rooming house. It had been years since he'd stayed in a rooming house. Motels, that was the story now. Had been for forty years. He tried to remember where he'd last lived, in which town, in which life, that had provided rooming houses. He couldn't recall. Any more than he could recall when he'd owned a Studebaker Commander, the car that Raymond Loewy had designed. Or the last time he had heard The Green Hornet on the radio.