This isn’t in your field, Weir, not something you can punch into the number cruncher. Leave it for the shrink.
He pulled into the parking lot on top of the mesa. Shay gaped at the concrete towers.
“You’ve never seen that building before, have you?” A growing dryness in his throat.
“No.” She couldn’t seem to drag her eyes from it.
Shay Garrett had driven up here just four days before to collect him for a luncheon date.
Marek walked around to open her door. “You’d better come in with me.”
She hung back as he led her to the sidewalk. Her arm trembled when he took it and he glanced up at the futuristic building … an impression of a series of towers connected by cubes, colored a muted pink to blend with the green of pine and reddish-pink rock of the mountain backdrop. Blue-green tinted windows like square eyes, the tiny balconies between like noses. Impressive yes, but not frightening.
Shay hesitated at the glass doors but he drew her into the lobby. Because of the change in his fiancée, Marek was suddenly aware of the sterile straight lines of the place. The silence broken only by the echoing click of their heels on terrazzo.
“Dr. Weir,” the guard greeted him from behind his waist-high enclosure.
Shay stared at the television monitors.
“Evening, Harry.” Marek signed the off-hours register and led her to a back elevator.
“Shay, it’s not only this place. You don’t know me either, do you?” he asked when the door had closed on them.
She grabbed his arm as they descended to the basement, looking at the floor and then the walls. “I think you must be the devil himself.”
She flung her arms around his neck when the elevator door opened.
“Then why did you come out with me this evening?”
“Because I’m weak and can’t resist the chance to ride in your wonderful automobile.” The strange woman inside the familiar body seemed suddenly to realize her position. She blushed and moved away. “And because I have a foolish curiosity to know more than I need to. It’s sure to be the death of me.”
The exaggerated slowness of her speech, the rather archaic arrangement of her words … and she’s even forgotten what it’s like to ride in cars and elevators. Marek considered amnesia and rejected it for insanity. Yet there was a consistency about her that appeared sane.
“This place has no scent,” she whispered as they walked down the hall. “All places smell of something.”
“What did you expect, the smell of sulfur?” He looked into frightened eyes. “Shay, I don’t know what’s happened to you but I’m not meaning to scare you. This is just the place where I work. It isn’t hell and I’m not the devil.”
He checked the monitor outside the computer room to see what stage his program had reached and found it listed in the output status. “Relax, please. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
But inside the computer room the normal clicking, clacking, sloshing, rattling of various peripheral machines all at different rates and tones over the constant roar of the cooling system seemed to belie his words. He grabbed his stack of cards and the printout from a shelf in the output bin and got Shay away from the place.
Back in the elevator, he glanced over the printout sheet of the numerical storm model he was building and decided his theories were all awash here too. “I want to drop this off in my office,” he said to Shay and then thought aloud, “Either the programmer goofed or …”
Marek was so irritated with the errors in his model that he walked into Martin as they stepped into the hall.
“Shay, you remember Martin Black.” Marek stopped to pick up the book he’d knocked from Martin’s hand. No, you probably don’t.
“How do you do,” Shay answered formally.
“Sorry to hear about your grandmother, Shay, and the postponement of your wedding. Don’t wait too long, will you? The world’ll be a safer place once you get this young swinger out of circulation.” Martin laughed, patted her shoulder and disappeared into the elevator.
When Marek unlocked the door at the end of the hall, Shay seemed reluctant to go outside.
“I promise I won’t throw you over the parapet.”
“This is like a strange castle,” she said as they walked the open catwalk to his tower room.
“Well, you’ve already seen the dungeons so it can’t get any worse, can it?”
Marek laid the computer cards and printout on his desk. Shay moved to the window.
It was barely dusk but the automatically timed lights blazed the map of the city streets below.
“So many lights …”
“So much for the energy crunch, huh?”
“I hadn’t realized the town had grown this vast.”
“Yeah … uh … Shay, let me take another quick look at this.”
Sitting at the desk he scanned the printout sheets. He could hear her moving about the room, writing on the blackboard.
Marek looked up once to see her examining titles in one of the bookcases. He went back to his coded numbers, only to be interrupted again.
“You must be the devil.” Shay pointed to the photographs of thunderclouds and lightning on one wall. “You made the storm that caused the mirror to … no, that’s foolish.” She covered her face with her hands. A lock of platinum hair escaped the puritanical bun she’d affected.
“If I’m the devil, I could make a storm or a mirror or whatever. But I’m not and I don’t make them, I study them … storms that is.” In his heart, Marek knew hers was a disturbed mind, a case of sudden insanity. But his mind wouldn’t buy it.
“Shay, to my older colleagues I’m a cloud dynamicist by day and a swinging single at night. To your parents I’m the monster who’s offered to take their daughter away from them.” He stood to hold her but she moved away. “To you, I thought I was the man you were going to marry, but suddenly I’m a devil. Right now I don’t know who I am.” I’m not a bit sure who you are either.
Then he noticed the ornate chalk scrawl on a lower corner of the blackboard, I am Brandy. It wasn’t in Shay’s handwriting.
“Brandy, who –”
“We buried her his morning,” his fiancée said.
Something in her voice sent a superstitious thrill along the higher reaches of his spine.
Marek watched Shay sit silently through the movie, her body stiff, her eyes never leaving the screen. As if this is her first film.
“What did you think of it?” he asked as they walked back to the car.
“It was a very … interesting play. But cold. Such horrid things happening to those poor people.” A streetlight glistened on wet cheeks as she looked up at him. “And no sympathy for them … no hope.”
Marek had come to expect nothing but cold technique and brittle feeling in films. He had come to accept and enjoy it. But if this’d been the first he’d seen, would he have said much the same thing?
“This abortion that was done to the young girl,” Shay said thoughtfully. “Was it really to kill an unborn child?”
“Yes. But it didn’t happen, Shay, in that movie any more than it would in a play. It’s just a story to …” Marek stopped, wondering at the need to make so inane an explanation to an adult.
“But this abortion is practiced in life here … now?”
“Yes.”
Marek took Shay to her old favorite, McDonald’s. They had a running joke about her taste for the fast-food fare and usually went there after a movie.
But tonight the quarter-pound burger was undercooked, the bun soggy, the fries too salty and she asked if there was alcohol in her Coke.
Marek wondered if the wedding would take place at all. The change in Shay seemed so complete. Was it wise for her parents to wait for their friend Gale to return before seeking professional help?
He had a powerful urge to take her to his apartment as he probably would have the old Shay. But he couldn’t take advantage of her confusion now.
She pushed the h
alf-finished meal away and looked directly into his eyes, quickening something in him he hadn’t known was there.
6
Brandy sat at the breakfast table with Shay’s parents. The marvelous clothes-washing machine hummed in the pantry. The electric coffee maker gurgled on the counter and her head pounded from late-night pleading with the wedding mirror.
And then, over it all, Brandy McCabe heard the sound of church bells. “Is it Sunday … here?”
“It’s Sunday everywhere, Shay.” Jerry looked up from his newspaper.
“I would like to go to church,” Brandy whispered.
“Church.” Rachael carefully lowered the spoonful of grapefruit she’d just brought to her lips. “What church?”
“The Presbyterian church, of course.”
“Of course.” Rachael exchanged a glance with her husband.
“Didn’t I … my grandmother go there?”
“Bran? She didn’t belong to any church, did she, Rachael?”
“No. But my grandmother, Sophie McCabe, took me to the Presbyterian church when I lived with her. Thora K. hauled me into Nederland to Sunday school. I don’t remember Mom ever going along.”
“I would like to go to Sophie McCabe’s church then.” Just saying her mother’s name brought tears to the borrowed eyes. “Please?”
“Okay, honey. Don’t cry. Jerry, can you find yesterday’s paper? It’ll have the time of the services.”
“You’ll have to take her. I’ve got a golf date with your brothers.” He left the room and returned with another paper. “Why not the Lutheran church? That’s where you dragged us during your famous six-month conversion when you were thirteen.”
As they hurried to finish breakfast, Brandy marveled at their eagerness to please their daughter. Even when they suspected her mind. Rachael helped her choose proper clothing without comment and they rushed to the carriage house, which had a cemented floor now and barely enough room to contain the large automobile.
It wasn’t until she identified Boulder Creek that she realized the broad boulevard along which they sped was the Water Street of her time. Gone were the railroad tracks, the shacks of the poor, the houses of prostitution and gambling. Seeing the latter abominations missing on such a beautiful Sunday morning, Brandy thought it possible that God had not abandoned Boulder after all. She felt a welling of relief and determined to put the wicked Mr. Weir from her mind.
The Gingerbread House seemed to be almost all that was left of the Boulder she’d known. Except the mortuary, which she’d recognized as the Trevors’ mansion, where she might have become mistress had she married Mr. Trevors. Odd how the sturdy buildings, meant to last the ages, had disappeared in less than a century.
The First Presbyterian Church was now but a corner of a far larger building tacked on around it. To the right of the entryway, doors opened to the sanctuary and Brandy was comforted to see it much the same as she remembered. Except that it was empty on a Sunday morning. She turned to Rachael in surprise.
“You must be visitors.” An elderly lady with legs as bare as theirs came up to them. “That’s the chapel now. Lovely isn’t it? Used to be the sanctuary. It’s been restored you know. The new one is over here. You’d better hurry, I think the service is about to begin.” She led them to a vast auditorium that was so crowded they had to sit in a front pew.
No subdued chatter of friends. No crying of babes. Scarcely any coughing or clearing of throats. Just a man playing a piano softly. Brandy glanced over Shay’s shoulder, amazed to find so many people congregated in such silence, apparently as much strangers to each other as they were to her. She saw only two youngsters.
An enormous wooden cross, straight and unadorned, seemed built into the wall in front of her. Below it, she made out the chancel by its raised platform but was at a loss to identify the altar. There was only a long narrow table, a few chairs and a lectern.
Members of the choir sat robed and expressionless.
Cold white walls and sharp graceless angles reminded her of Marek’s NCAR, which to herself she’d dubbed the devil’s castle.
A man appeared at the lectern to discuss collecting money from the congregation for a new organ and Brandy felt more at home. But the sum required was staggering.
The choir sang. The minister led them through a program of singing, speaking and answering unfamiliar to her. She understood his lengthy sermon even less but gathered he’d made a minute study of the least-known portions of the Bible and surmised that mankind could survive only by finding the key to unlock the mysterious solutions hidden in the Scriptures. He did assure them that God still existed.
If God was in this place, he didn’t speak to Brandy. But the congregation followed the minister’s words with rapt attention. The young man sitting next to her actually took notes and Brandy could feel his intensity. Was there nothing relaxed about Shay’s world?
She longed for the stirring words of the Reverend Dr. Wilson and the warm presence of Sophie and Elton. John McCabe gave generously of his wealth to the church but rarely attended.
Beside her, Rachael Garrett squirmed and tried to hide her yawns.
When it was over, they were admonished to shake hands with those next to them. The intense young man stuck his pencil between his teeth, gave her a clammy handclasp and stared right through her.
On Monday morning Rachael announced she must work because of something called a “deadline” and would Shay please stay nearby in the “den.”
She led Brandy to the cellar, where instead of the coal bins, fruit-and-vegetable storage, and giant furnace, there was now a series of smaller rooms. The one in which she left Brandy had a cushioned carpet, deep sofa and chairs, and walls lined with bookcases. At one end stood a polished box with a glass front resembling those she’d seen at the devil’s castle with Marek. “Zenith Solid-State Chromacolor II” was printed on a panel beside the gray glass and beneath these meaningless words two rectangular buttons. One labeled “Chromatic” and the other, “Off/On.”
The Off/On wouldn’t turn so she punched it. The box began to talk and she backed away until she was sure what else it would do. A flash of colored dots on the glass formed into a moving picture of a slender woman running along a sidewalk.
“Aren’t you glad you use Dial?” the box asked.
Brandy backed to the sofa and sank into it.
The runner vanished and, while music played, the picture of a large room appeared where many women sat in elevated rows of chairs. A lone woman sat on a platform in front of them.
A man who looked young but had silver hair walked among the chairs and held out a stick on the end of a black rope. A woman would stand, lean toward the stick and ask a question of the lady on the platform.
The discussion had much to do with love, sex, self-stimulation, intimacy, foreplay, climax, masturbation, sexual intercourse, orgasm, and the stupidity of men while making love. All this constantly interspersed with the words “you know.”
She slid deeper into the cushions of the sofa with the guilty suspicion she was witnessing a public discussion of cleaving unto. Shay’s face grew hot. Brandy’s curiosity had already gotten her into enough trouble.
But every time one of those women said “you know,” Brandy wanted to shout, “No, I don’t know.”
She scanned the spines of the shelved books until she came across a dictionary. Brandy didn’t know the correct spelling and it took her some time to locate “masturbation,” which led her to “genitals” and “genitalia.” She decided it meant the self-abuse she’d read of in a book on health that had warned such activities led to insanity and the mysterious female diseases.
There followed a series of game shows. People jumped about, screaming and acting embarrassingly silly.
And constantly interrupting all of this were short plays to advertise an array of wares. Here women, all as slender as Shay, set great store by the scrubbing of floors, ovens and windows. By the polishing of commodes and the spots from glassware.
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Yet the entire time Brandy’d been in Shay’s world she’d yet to see Rachael so much as pick up a dust rag.
But after dinner that evening Brandy demonstrated she could load the dishwasher and fill it with soap powder.
Then she went back to the picture box in the cellar.
When she climbed the stairs, Shay’s eyes burned, her body felt sluggish. Too exhausted to plead with the wedding mirror, Brandy fell into bed, only to wake often from bad dreams.
But the picture box held her captive for the rest of the week while Rachael worked next door, often clicking a typewriting machine much different from those Brandy’d seen used in the bank.
“At least it keeps her from wandering,” she overheard Jerry tell his wife.
One morning a young couple arrived to solve the problem of how Rachael kept the Gingerbread House so tidy by ignoring it. Laughing, quarreling, cursing, they swept through the upstairs and down. Dust flew. A noisy metal machine sucked grit from the rugs.
The girl, Sarah, wore three earrings dangling from holes in the lobe of one ear. Chris stared moodily through thick spectacles but moved swiftly. Just before they left he handed Rachael a sheaf of papers.
“Chris, I’ve told you I don’t know anything about poetry and other than the little magazines I don’t know where you’d find a market for it. Everybody’s writing it, but nobody’s buying it.”
“Little mags don’t pay anything. Think I want to clean houses all my life?”
“Then write something someone wants to read.”
“Don’t see why anybody’d want to read the garbage you write.”
“Have you ever read any of it?”
“I know it’s for kids and it isn’t poetry so who needs it?” He grabbed the papers and the money she offered and slammed the door on his way out.
“Don’t mind him.” Sarah rolled her eyes under a heap of hair with frayed ends. “He doesn’t buy poetry either.”
Rachael settled herself in a chair across the desk from Gale Sampson in his office. “Well?”
“Well, nothing. She wouldn’t talk to me.” Gale relit his pipe and tossed the match into an ashtray filled with matches instead of ash. He was one of those men who smoked matches. “Oh, she was coolly polite but whenever I broached any topic to get her started, she looked at me as if I were being impertinent and clammed up.”