Eating Memories (30 page)

Mark didn’t answer, The silence might have meant that, for the first time, he was jealous; it might simply have meant he hadn’t the strength. Jeremy listened to the hiss of oxygen through the tubes, the feeble rattling of Mark’s breath.

“Isaac Abrams told me he called you,” Jeremy said. “So you know where I am.”

Mark opened his trembling mouth as though to speak, but instead sucked in a labored, strangled breath. In his eyes was a drowning-man panic.

The nurse leaned forward, adjusted the oxygen, settled him higher on the pillows, With a tissue she mopped the spittle from his chin.

She finished and stood back. Mark was, in an exhausted sort of way, breathing again.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you, but I need your help,” Jeremy said, searching the ruined face for the man he’d once known. “I’m getting readings I don’t understand.”

Mark blinked slowly. The spark of curiosity in his eyes had burned out, smothered under the ash of terror.

“I’m lost,” Jeremy admitted. “There’s unexpected—”

Mark’s lungs rattled. His eyes wavered closed.

“He’s getting tired,” the nurse said from beyond the range of the phone’s camera.

He’s dying,
Jeremy thought, feeling an urge to grasp the image in the screen, to feel the pixels run through his fingers like grains of ionized sand.

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Please. There’s an anomaly, Mark. He’s still alive,” Jeremy told him. “Do you hear me? Bill Taft’s still alive. I hear his voice. His family does, too.”

Suddenly the eyes opened. The face suffused with bewildering longing, a look of bottled hope.

“You can’t imagine how eerie it is,” Jeremy went on. “Hearing that voice coming from nowhere. It’s—”

A clogged-drain rattle. A ragged gasp. Mark’s sunken chest fluttered. He was trying, it seemed, to sit up.

“Don’t upset him,” the nurse said. “He needs his rest.”

“Just a minute, please. Mark. I’m coming to see you next week. I promise. But before I do, I need—”

A week would be too long, he knew. Like Bill Taft, Mark was left with too little air. “I need—”

Jeremy stopped himself, considering the importance of the Bible, considering the terror behind Mark’s gaze.

“Let him sleep,” the nurse said.

“Bill Taft sounds happy,” Jeremy said in a rush. “He sounds just fine, Mark. I know it doesn’t make sense, but the Tink he’s in .
. .
I think he’s created something. I think he’s created an existence. It’s—”

Just before the nurse broke the connection, Jeremy saw Mark’s fear supplanted by ravenous hope. Gently he closed the phone’s case and sat with it cradled in his arms.

After a while he rose and walked into the meadow to stand with the other dying man. “When I was eight years old,” he told the moving light, “I trapped fireflies in a jar.”

They had been beautiful, winking on his night-shrouded dresser. He’d ridden to sleep in their glow.

“But people are careless,” he explained. “God forgets things.”

And magic couldn’t be bottled. That was the truth Jeremy couldn’t allow Mark to know.

“My fault. I forgot to poke holes in the jar’s lid, you see,” Jeremy said to the flashing beacons. “They suffocated as I slept.”

Jeremy thought of his negligent hand on the suitcase, his indifferent fingers on the knob. The small, lifeless bodies at the bottom of the jar. Bill Taft beat himself against his quantum glass as Jeremy the plodder, guardian of fireflies, kept watch.

Author’s Note:
When Mike Mara was editor of the Dallas Life Magazine, he called me one day to tell me that he was going to put four pieces of original fiction in the magazine for Christmas, and did I have a story? “Sure!” said I, lying like hell. I knew he would need a short-short, and I have never been known for really short fiction. But then I started thinking about my novel Happy Policeman, and I imagined a kid stuck behind the line
—
a big city kinda kid, and his nightmarish, never-ending trip to the country. Then the kid started telling me the story and
—
guess what?
—
the story that he told me was this perfect, seasonal short-short.

You’d think I’d get used to it, right? The geeks at school go, “Get a life.” Or, “Oh, wa-a-a.” I don’t know why it doesn’t get any easier, OK? I mean, it’s more than wanting to hang out at the mall or at Blockbuster. I always had the hots for Julia Roberts. I wonder if she’s still alive. If any of them are.

Sometimes I start thinking about movies and television. Malls and Chinese restaurants. Julia Roberts and Mom and Dad. That’s when I get on my bike, no matter what time it is, and run out to the Line—it’s not like Gran’s gonna freak and put my picture on a milk carton, you know?—And that’s when I start digging in the dirt like a nut-case, sort of like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
knocking on that bathroom door.

He-e-e-ere s Kevin!

Holidays are the worst. You’re going along OK, maybe forgetting that cool in Dweeb City is a big initial belt buckle and a Garth Brooks hat. Maybe I’m even getting used to Gran and her arts and craftsy bean pictures. And he-e-e-ere’ s Christmas! knocking down your door with an ax.

So three weeks before my second Christmas marooned in Geekville—and, not that I’m counting, but also two years and nine months since the start of the granny visit from hell—here I am, pulling up grass and dirt in the dark. Right. Like I could really dig my way out. Then I realize a Torku’s sitting there, watching me totally lose it:

So I start in on the Torku, even though Gran says that since they feed us, we ought to try to be nice. So what? Who cares that they give free Hamburger Helper to the local yokel grocery, the kind of place where they stock Chung King in gourmet?

Anyway, Mr. Personality sits like a fat freckled rock while I tell him how
real
aliens beam around instead of driving geeky UPS vans. They bust out of your chest. They eat dogs. They do antigrav stuff to your bike. I ask where
he
went to alien school. And then I tell him
real
aliens wouldn’t put a Line around some snoozer Texas town so they could save blue jeans and kicker music and the 4-Hicks Club. They’d put a Line up around the world and save everybody. Everybody. That’s what a real alien would do. And he goes, “Why do you think something bad happened?”

Sometimes you gotta wonder how they ever made it across space.

I go, “Look, this town? We’re the only survivors. Maybe you guys dropped bombs on the other people, or maybe it wasn’t your fault, and there was some weird disease that killed everybody else. All I know is, we’re in a homeboy zoo. But something really bad had to happen, because if Dad was alive, he would’ve come got me out.”

Man, oh, man. It’s pretty cold out there by the Line at one in the morning. I start thinking about Dad and about how Christmases used to be, with 6-foot-tall fir trees, and pumpkin pies, and Santa Claus cookies, and I remember Gran saying, “Not so much fuss this year,” and all of a sudden I’m boo-hooing.

“You have not seen what has happened to the ones behind the line. How do you know that what has happened is bad?” the Torku goes.

“I don’t!”
And—it’s weird, OK?—but these words start corning out of my mouth and I didn’t even know I was gonna say them, or how important they’d be. What I say is: “And it’s the not knowing that scares me.”

So this dork Torku goes, “Well.” Just like that. Then he tells me I have a very novel way of looking at things, and would I like a ride back to town? Like the thrill of my life would be riding in his big-deal UPS van.

No way, l tell him. He leaves. There I am, alone again in Dweebland.

So a week later Gran puts up the tree, the fake dollar-ninety-eight kind that sits on top of a table. She goes for broke—puts on all six lights and all three ornaments. Then she sets out some presents and some potpourri that’s supposed to smell like pine. The-e-c-ere’ s Christmas!

The next Saturday when she goes to macramé or candlemaking or whatever the Geritol set’s into, I stay home and—get this—rnake cookies

Anyway, here I am, up to the elbows in flour,
The Joy of Cooking
propped open—a cookie-making maniac—and the doorbell rings. When I open the front door, I see old Torku’s come to visit. He tells me he’s been thinking about what I’d said
.

I have to invite him in, otherwise he’s spend the day on the porch, a mud statue. I take him to the kitchen. He. plops as much of that speckled butt as he can fit into one of Gran’s rattan chairs and he goes, “What is behind the oven door?”

I tell him I’m making cookies, that my mom taught me how. And while I’m explaining that cookies are a really important part of Christmas, and how I used to help Mom make pumpkin pies and com bread dressing, I look out the window and see the top of the Line over the trees. Yesterday it was red and white like peppermint candy. Today it’s kind of a faded tart with little pink flowers, and I remember that Mom had a blouse with tiny flowers like that.

It happens so fast that I don’t see it coming. Like smashing your thumb with a hammer—so quick you don’t even cry. Only this pain’s down in my chest, and it hurts so bad I can’t breathe.

And old Torku goes, “What is behind the oven door?”

I kinda gasp out, “Oh, man, gimme a break. It’s
cookies!”

He goes, “How do you know that?”

I tell him because I put them there.

So he goes, “Then you have missed the point,” and before I can figure but what he means, he waves toward the cupboard and says, “What is in there?”

I tell him cans and spaghetti and stuff.

“It is a kitty.”

Wait. Wait a minute. Let’s think about this.

I mean, he came all the way from another planet. Got to have
something
going for him, right? So I go to the cupboard and peek in. Tomato paste. Canned green beans.

He goes, “You have ruined it by looking. Just before you opened the door, there was a striped kitty.”

I close the cupboard. “Get real. You couldn’t see in. How do you know?”

“Because I put the kitty in there. Now I have put it back.” So, like a doofus, I look inside. If there’s a cat, it’s doing this killer imitation of Campbell’s soup.

And Torku goes, “How can I be certain what is in the oven, even if I remember putting something inside? And if no knowledge is absolute then, why should I be afraid of what is in the cupboard? This is why the Line exists: The
not
seeing is the miracle.”

What he says weirds me out. I’m standing there, right? And I nearly get it. Like, I’m staring into the cupboard, and I can smell that stupid potpourri, I can smell the cookies baking, and I know if I looked around I’d see that cheap tree and all the dirty pans I’m gonna have to wash, but my nose is telling me it’s Christmas. Aw, man. It’s Christmas. I can feel someone behind me, and for a minute, just a minute, it’s Mom.

I hold my breath and turn around real slow. The Torku’s prying himself out of the chair. I ask him if he wants some cookies to take with him, you know, for the rest of the guys. He says no
.
And just like Mom always taught me, l walk him to the door.

On the way, we pass the tree. Under it is this rectangular box that’s gotta be clothes. I already shook it, so I know it’s a shirt. And if it came from Gran, it’s gotta be something that’s basic fashion for the Grand Ole Opry.

But still, it’s one of the all-time great-looking gifts, wrapped in the Christmas paper they make for guys—gold foil with brown and red and dark-green leaves. It looks like something you’d go duck hunting with. I hand the box to old Dorku. “Merry Christmas.”

He freaks, sort of freezes in place, like nobody’s ever given him a present before.

Is this great, or what? Man. The potpourri’s putting out pine scent like crazy, and the cookies I baked smell like heaven. No doubt about it. Christmas.

I go, “Hey. Get into the season, OK? This is part of the cookie and pine tree thing I was telling you about. Once a year, we pick out something special, wrap it in foil paper, and give it to somebody. This one’s yours.”

He nods, real serious. I watch him waddle down the steps, carrying that box.

See? What’s cool is, he’ll never open it. He’ll never know all it is is a dorky Western shirt. He’ll never realize that the paper it’s wrapped in is better than what’s inside. I want to call after him, “It’s a tabby cat!” but I don’t.

If his Torku friends ask what’s in it, he’ll say, “a Ranger’s coffee mug” or “Addison Airport.” That’s what’s so totally cool.

It’s chilly on the porch, so cold my breath comes out in a fog. I go back inside. The house is warm, the way it feels in winter—not like April, you know? But warm like someone just put their arms around you. When the timer dings, I walk into the kitchen and take the last batch of cookies from the oven.

There’s lots of trees in Dweebland, that’s the only neat thing here. If I stand at the window, I can see a whole forest. The leaves already fell, so it’s gray except for the cedar. Behind the house is a 30-foot wall the color of Mom’s blouse.

Here’s the thing—If you don’t open the present, anything can be inside, A cat. Fair Park. I mean, is that what the Line’s all about?

One thing I’m sure of: For the first time I can picture Mom alive. It’s a week till Christmas there, too, and she’s feeling kinda sad. But it’s all right. I know the house smells of that 6-foot-tall fir, and everything’s almost like it should be. Like it was. It’s 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and it’s cloudy. The air’s hazy and cold and blue, but I know the kitchen’s warm and bright. And sure as I’m standing here, I know she’s baking cookies.