Tom O'Bedlam

  “Dr. Lewis is with a client, Mr. Ferguson.”

  “Tell her I want to talk with her, then. Pronto, soon as she’s done.” He slapped the disconnect and put both his hands over his face and pressed hard. He managed to take two or three deep breaths. Then the phone bleeped: the computer was talking to him again.

  “Do you still want that outside line, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “No. Yes. Yeah, sure.” When he got the tone he keyed in Lacy’s number in San Francisco. Seven-fifteen in the morning; would she be up yet? Four rings. Slept somewhere else last night, kid? I wouldn’t be surprised. Then he wondered why he suspected that. For all he could remember, she lived like a nun. Maybe the pick isn’t as thorough as you think, he told himself.

  On the fifth ring she answered, sounding furry and vague.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Ed, baby.”

  “Ed? Ed!” Awake in a flash. “Oh, sweet, how are you doing? I’ve been thinking about you so much—”

  “Listen, there’s trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “About the weekend.”

  “Yes?” Suddenly very cool, very remote.

  “They won’t give me leave. They say I’ve had a setback, that I have to go in the tank for an extra rinsing.”

  “I’ve got everything booked, honey! It’s all set up!”

  “Next weekend?”

  She was quiet a little while. “I’m not sure I can, next weekend.”

  “Oh.”

  “Even if you can’t get leave, couldn’t I come over there? You said there’s a house for conjugal visits, didn’t you? And—”

  “You aren’t conjugal, Lacy.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. He could feel the subzero chill coming up out of the telephone speaker.

  He said, “Anyway, that isn’t the point. I’m going to be in the tank all weekend. By the time they get done with me, I won’t know my ass from my elbow. And I can’t have visitors.”

  “I’m sorry, Ed.”

  “So am I. You don’t know how sorry I am.”

  Another silence. Then: “How are you doing, anyway?”

  “I’m okay. I’m not letting these bastards get to me.”

  “You still remember me?”

  “You know I do, baby. I can see that red hair shining. I can see you sitting there high up above me going for a big one.”

  “Oh, honey—”

  “I love you, Lacy.”

  “I love you too. You miss me, Ed? Really?”

  “You know how much.”

  “It’s really shitty, about this weekend. You and me walking along the beach in Mendo—”

  “Don’t make it any harder,” he said. “You know I would if I could.”

  “I had so much to tell you, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “There’s a funny thing. About our space project—you remember?”

  “Sure I remember,” he said.

  But there must have been a perceptible jiggle in his voice, because she said, “I mean, the one when we were trying to sell mind-trips to Betelgeuse Five, that one. I had a dream the other day that I took one. A mind-trip. That I really went to some other star, you know?”

  He said, “You can’t start believing your own scams, baby.”

  “It was the realest thing. There was a red sun in the sky and a blue one. And I saw a big golden thing with horns standing on a block of white stone, some kind of space monster, and it reached out to me, it seemed to be beckoning to me. It was like a giant. It was almost like a god. And in the sky—”

  “Listen, baby, this call is costing me a fortune.”

  “Just let me tell you. It wasn’t any ordinary dream. It was like real, Ed. I saw the trees of this planet, I saw the bugs, even, and they weren’t like our trees or bugs, and—but the funny thing was, it was just the sort of gig we were trying to sell people, the one they sent you up for, and—”

  “Lacy, hey. They’re calling me to go down to the therapy session.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Will I see you next weekend? I can hear all the rest of it then.”

  “I’m not sure, next weekend. I told you, it doesn’t look good.”

  “Try for it, Lacy. I miss you so damn much.”

  “Yeah, Ed. Me too.”

  It didn’t sound convincing, how much she missed him. The bitch, he thought. Anger surged in him. If she had been within reach he would have slapped her around. And then he realized that none of this was her fault, that she had been primed to come tomorrow, that it was his wife who had scrambled things up. He couldn’t expect Lacy to keep herself on ice indefinitely, week after week. Quickly he went through one of the anger exercises Dr. Lewis had shown him.

  He said as tenderly as he knew how, “I love you, Lacy. I wish I could see you tomorrow. You know that.”

  He signed off. Then he touched his ring. “Request wife,” Ferguson said.

  His recorded voice replied, “Wife: Mariela Johnston. Birthday August seventh. She’ll be thirty-three this summer. You married her in Honolulu on July fourth, 2098. She’s hot stuff but you can’t stand her any more. Your lawyer is checking to see if you’ve got grounds for an annulment.”

  Fine, he thought. But obviously nothing’s happened about that yet. And here she comes for her conjugal, wiping out Lacy’s weekend. Shit. Shit. Hanging in there for the community property, I bet that’s what she’s doing. The good little wife, coming for the conjugal.

  There was a tap at the door.

  “Who?” Ferguson called.

  “Alleluia,” said the most musical female voice he had ever heard.

  Something stirred in his muddled and mutilated memory bank, but he was unable to get hold of it. He touched his ring and said, “Request Alleluia.”

  “Fellow patient at Nepenthe Center. Synthetic woman, terrific body, very fucked-up personality. You’ve been screwing her on and off all summer.”

  He stared at the ring in disbelief. Screwing a synthetic? You must have been awfully hard up, kiddo. But if the recorder says so, it must be so.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  When he saw her, he started believing what the ring had told him. Synthetic or not, he could easily imagine himself going to bed with her. She had presence. She could pass for real. She was beautiful beyond all plausibility, too, the way synthetics usually were. Laser-star looks, long legs, creamy skin, tumbling black hair, perfect face. She wore something thin and shimmering, with nipples showing through. With the light from the hallway behind her, he saw the black pubic triangle plainly too. He had never really understood why they bothered putting pubic hair on the imitation people, unless it was to keep them from getting recognized too easily for what they were; but you recognized them anyway because they were better looking than any natural person could ever hope to be.

  She glided into the room and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Why? Don’t I look okay?”

  “Extremely tense. Jumpy, edgy, irritated. Maybe this is the way you always look, but you don’t look relaxed.”

  “Irritated? Shit, yes, I’m irritated. There’ve been complications,” he said. “The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I don’t like it. It’s messed me up very bad.” He shook his head. “Hell, this is no way to start a conversation, is it? Try again. Hello there, you. Alleluia. Allie.”

  She smiled. “I’m sorry. Hello. You’re Ed Ferguson, aren’t you?”

  “You bet your pretty ass I am.”

  “I had a note under my pillow that said I ought to go introduce myself to you first thing after pick. I think I do this every morning, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” he said, although he had no more memory of it than she did. He rose and went to her, and pulled her to him and they kissed, and he ran his hands up over her breasts. They felt the way he imagined a fourteen-year-old’s breasts would feel, hard as plastic but warmer. “We do this every morning, yes. We get acquainted again. Alleluia, Ed. Ed, Alleluia. Very ple
ased to make your acquaintance. See? That’s the system.”

  “It’s almost worth having to do pick,” she said. “To get acquainted again. Each time is like the first time, isn’t it?” She laughed and snuggled against his chest. “Let’s go take a walk in the woods this afternoon, okay? Your roommates will be getting back here soon.”

  “I can’t go this afternoon, Allie.”

  “Can’t?”

  “The irritating complication I was speaking of. Got a visitor at ten-thirty. My wife. She’s coming on a conjugal.”

  She moved back from him, looking pained. “I didn’t know you had a wife, Ed.”

  “Neither did I, till the communications computer reminded me. She was supposed to come Tuesday, but somehow she’s arriving today instead. So the woods are out, sweetheart.”

  “We still have three hours.”

  “Conjugal is supposed to be conjugal,” Ferguson said. “You understand? If I could I would, you know that, but today I’m just not free. All right? She’ll be gone Sunday afternoon and then we can play. Is that all right?”

  He saw the anger in her eyes, and it scared him. Women’s anger always did; but Alleluia’s anger was special even as women’s anger went, because she was special. If she wanted to, he knew, she could pull his arms and legs off the way you’d pull the wings off a fly. Synthetic people were amazingly strong. And this one was an emotionally disturbed synthetic person, and she was standing between him and the door. He flicked a glance at the phone, wondering if he could thumb the plate fast enough to call for help before she pounced.

  But she didn’t pounce. She went through some internal exercise—he saw the muscles moving in her cheeks—and calmed herself. “All right,” she said. “After she goes. Your wife.”

  “You know I’d rather be off playing with you.”

  The artificial woman nodded abstractly. She seemed to be drifting off into some distant realm before his eyes.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Quietly she said, “I’m not sure. There’s something been bothering me, and it happened again last night.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Don’t laugh. I’ve been having funny dreams, Ed.”

  “Dreams?”

  She hesitated. “I think I’m seeing other worlds. One’s all green, with a green sky and green clouds, and the people look like they’re made out of glass. Do you ever have dreams like that?”

  “I don’t remember any of my dreams,” he said quietly. “They pick them out of me, first thing in the morning. You dreamed of another world, did you? How come you remember that, if you’ve been picked this morning?”

  “A couple of them. The green world was one. My dreams seem to stay with me, you know? I suppose because I’m a synthetic. Maybe the pick doesn’t always work right on me. There’s another world I’ve seen once or twice, with two suns in the sky.”

  Ferguson caught his breath sharply.

  She said, “One’s red, and the other one—”

  “—is blue?”

  “Blue, yes!” she said. “You’ve seen it too?”

  He felt the chills starting to run down his back. This is crazy, he thought. “And there was a big golden thing with horns, standing on a block of white stone?”

  “You have seen it! You have!”

  “Jesus suffering Christ,” Ferguson said.

  5

  IT was the third day since Charley had managed to get the ground-effect van started up. They were down out of the foothills now, into the sweltering eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley. So far, so good, Tom thought. Maybe they’d let him travel with them all the way to San Francisco.

  “Look at this godforsaken crappy place,” Charley said. “My grandfather came from around here. He was a goddamned rich man, my grandfather. Cotton, wheat, corn, I don’t know what. He had eighty men working for him, you know?”

  It was hard to believe that this had been farming country only thirty or forty years back. For sure, nobody was farming much here any more. The land was starting to go back to desert, the way it had been four hundred years ago, before the irrigation canals. Under the summer heat everything was brown and twisted and dead.

  “What’s that town off there?” Buffalo asked.

  “I don’t think anybody remembers,” Charley said.

  “It’s Fresno,” said the man named Tamale, who was full of information, all of it wrong.

  “Shit,” Charley said. “Fresno’s way down in the south, don’t you know that? And don’t tell me Sacramento, neither. Sacto’s out thisaway. Anyhow, those are cities. This thing’s just a town, and nobody remembers its name, I bet.”

  Buffalo said, “They got towns in Egypt ten thousand years old, everybody remembers their name. This place, you leave it alone thirty years, who the hell knows anything?”

  “Let’s go over there,” Charley said. “Maybe there’s something useful still lying around. Let’s go scratch some.”

  “Scratch scratch,” said the little Latino one they called Mujer, and all of them laughed.

  Tom had traveled with scratchers before. He preferred that to traveling with bandidos. It was safer in a lot of ways. Sooner or later bandidos did something so dumb that they wound up getting wiped out. Scratchers were better at looking after their own skins. On the average they weren’t as wild as bandidos, and maybe a little smarter. What scratchers did was a mix of scavenging and banditry, whatever worked, whatever they had to do to stay alive as they moved around the outskirts of the cities. Sometimes they killed, but only when they had to, never just for the fun of it. Tom felt easy falling in with this bunch. He hoped he could stay with them at least as far as San Francisco. If not, well, that was okay too. Whatever happened was okay. There was no other way to live, was there, but to accept whatever happened? But he preferred to keep on traveling with Charley and his scratchers. They would look after him. This was rough country out here. It was rough country everywhere, but this was rougher than most.

  And he figured he was safe with them. He had become a sort of mascot for them, a good-luck charm.

  It wasn’t the first time he had played that role. Tom knew that to a certain kind of person, someone like him was desirable to have around. They regarded him as crazy but not particularly dangerous or unpleasant—crazy in a nice way—and somebody like that had some appeal for men of that sort. You needed all the luck you could get, and a crazy like Tom had to be lucky to have lived as long as he had, wandering around on the edge of the world. So now he was their pet. They all liked him, Buffalo and Tamale and Mujer, Rupe and Choke and Nicholas, and especially Charley, of course. All but Stidge. Stidge still hated him, probably always would, because he had gotten beaten up on Tom’s account. But Stidge didn’t dare lay a hand on him, out of fear of Charley, or maybe just because he thought it would bring bad luck. Whatever. Tom didn’t care what reason, so long as Stidge kept away from him.

  “Look at that place,” Charley kept saying. “Look at it!”

  It was dismal, all right. Broken streets, slabs of asphalt rising at steep tilts everywhere, the shells of houses, dry grass poking up through shattered pavement. Sand creeping in from the fields. A couple of dead cars lying on their sides, everything stripped.

  “They must have had one mean war here,” Mujer said.

  “Not here,” said Choke, the skeleton-looking one with the crisscross scars on his forehead. “Weren’t no war here. The war was back east of here, dummy—Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, where they dropped the dust.”

  “Anyhow,” said Buffalo, “dust don’t smash a town up like this. Dust just garbage it all with hard stuff, so you burn when you touch anything.”

  “So what did this?” Mujer wanted to know.

  “The people moving away, that’s what did it,” Charley said in a very quiet voice. “You think these towns repair themselves? The people left because there wasn’t any more farming here, maybe too much dust in the air bringing hard stuff from the dead states, or maybe it was because the canal broke so
mewhere up north and nobody knew how to fix it. I don’t know. But they move on, off to Frisco or down south, and then the pipes rust and you get an earthquake or two and nobody’s here to fix anything and it all gets worse and worse, and then the scratchers move in to grab what’s left. You don’t need no bombs to destroy a place. You don’t need anything. Let it be, and it just falls apart. They didn’t build these places to last, like they built Egypt, hey, Buffalo? They built them for thirty, forty years, and the thirty-forty years, they used up.”

  “Shit,” Mujer said. “What a world we got!”

  “We’ll go to San Francisco,” said Charley. “It’s not so bad there. Spend the summer. At least it’s cool there, the fog, the breeze.”

  “What a screwed-up world,” said Mujer.

  Tom, standing a little way apart from them, said, “For the indignation of the Lord is upon all the nations, and His fury upon all their armies: He hath utterly destroyed them, He hath delivered them to the slaughter.”

  “What’s the looney saying now?” Stidge asked.

  “It’s the Bible,” said Buffalo. “Don’t you know the Bible?”

  “And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.”

  Charley said, “You know it all by heart?”

  “A lot of it,” said Tom. “I was a preacher for a time.”

  “Whereabouts was that?”

  “Up there,” Tom said, jerking his thumb over his right shoulder. “Idaho. Washington State, some.”

  “You’ve been around.”

  “Some.”

  “You ever been really east?”

  Tom looked at him. “You mean, New York, Chicago, like that?”

  “Like that, yeah.”

  “How?” Tom said. “Fly?”

  “Yeah,” said Mujer, laughing. “Fly! On a broomstick!”

  “They once did,” Tamale said. “Coast to coast. You get on a plane in San Francisco, it take you to New York, three hours. My father told me that.”

  “Three hours,” said Stidge. “Shit. That’s just shit.”

  “Three hours,” Tamale repeated. “Who you calling shit?” He had his knife out. “You calling my father shit? Go on, call it again. Call my mother something too, Stidge. Go on. Go on.”