Ghosts of Punktown (20 page)

     They discussed what to order, and as they did, Swift felt like a voyeur...an interloper within his own body. He wanted to retreat from them, leave them to each other. He wanted to see no more. But he was helpless, trapped
within her, until the preset 15 minutes had elapsed. It was a very long 15 minutes. He wanted to sob to be released, to close her eyes and see no more. But he couldn’t control her actions now anymore than he had when she was alive.

     “I love you, honey,” Laz said suddenly. Swift met his eyes again. The man’s seemed on the verge of filling up. “You don’t believe it, but I do.”

     “I believe you, hon,” she told him. “I do believe you.” Swift felt the muscles of her face shift into a smile. “Please...let’s not talk about anything today, okay? Let’s just enjoy our meal.”

     “Yes, honey. Yes...okay.”

     Talane broke a section from the translucent red flesh, and popped it into her mouth. It was both delicious and very sour.

6B

     Swift sat in his chair with his head drooping forward, his chin on his chest. Tears crawled down his face.

     The wrong memory. Not the one he’d been looking for. No...not the one.

     Why hadn’t Laz grabbed her hair in this reminiscence, as Talane had told Swift he had done one time? Why hadn’t he seized her arm, called her a cunt, accused her of fucking this man or that or Swift, by name? Swift, who Laz had once called in a drunken rage? (Swift hadn’t answered.) Why had Laz been gentle, loving, instead? Why did he have to have tears of pain in his eyes?

     And why had Swift felt a tightening in Talane’s throat as she fought against her own tears?

     The three of them, in tears.

     Swift could have sworn that Talane had told him their date had been her first time to
The Arbor
. If she had indeed said that, then she had lied.

     He still felt wet and dripping and half drowned from having been submerged in the past, but he needed to dive right back in, because if he didn’t follow through with his momentum then he might never find the strength to do this again. And because he wanted to banish what he had just witnessed – experience
him
and Talane together, as he had intended.

     He sat up straighter, collected himself enough to tend to the remote. He swallowed with a click, swallowed whatever hesitation remained, then depressed the key that would release the second of the measured out doses of memory.

     A skewed moment or two before his identity and hers aligned in a way that satisfied the clockwork of his brain. She was an invader in his mind, or he an invader in hers – host and parasite blurred – but he hung back passively and let her carry them both forward. If this was the day he had been searching for, then he had his own memories of it. But his were not enough.

     This time, there was a glass of Merlot in front of her, dark like a chalice of ceremonial blood. This time when she reached to bring it to her lips, Swift saw her nails were painted black.

     Swift sat opposite her, and his own voice sounded peculiar to him coming from outside his head. Talking with him was like talking to a mirror that answered back, but did not follow his lead. He said to her, “You two had quite a nice conversation going.” He smiled – Swift knew his own face well enough to recognize the smile held no humor – and nodded in the direction of someone who had just left. Talane didn’t follow the gesture, but she didn’t have to; Swift recalled who it was he had referred to. Their waiter. He recalled that the young waiter and Talane had chatted amicably beyond the time it took for the man to take their orders. The man had barely noticed Swift. “I can call him back if you want.”

     “Please stop.” Talane avoided that vitriolic smile by focusing on her salad, probed through it with the tip of her steak knife as if in search of something.

     “No, really, if you’d rather spend our short time together with him instead I’ll go and leave you to it.”

     “I asked you to stop, okay? For the love of God.”

     He felt her shifting foot come into contact with something under the table. She looked down, and Swift saw it was one of the circular fruit, fallen and soggy with rot. Her saw that her toenails were painted black, too. When she kicked the fruit away from her a little, the motion stirred up some gnats that had been feasting on it.

     A burst of children’s laughter caused Talane to turn her head. She spotted three mutant children at an outer table of
The Arbor
, being shooed away by another waiter as he collected the dishes of his departed customers. The mutants had grabbed several uneaten rolls.

     This was it – these children – the element that made this memory special to Swift. He knew that in a few more minutes, the children would make their way to this table, and beg for some coins to buy something in the food court. One of them would have a winning smile despite the fact that his hairless head was shaped like a human heart, weird protruding growths like valves and all. After some playful, teasing banter in which Talane would offer to buy them lunch rather than give them the coins (which she and Swift knew they’d use to play games in the mall’s arcade instead), Talane would relent and give them the money but still invite them to join her and Swift for lunch. This time he wouldn’t be jealous for sharing her company. She and Swift and the three boys would joke and mock each other and eat like a strange little family, and it would be fun and different and warm.

     But it would be several more minutes before the boys worked their way over here, and in the meantime there was a cold sore on the floor of her mouth that she kept worrying with the tip of her tongue. He didn’t know if it was laziness or masochism that had kept her from banishing it easily with a drop of medicine.

     He had been silent for a few minutes while they chewed, but as if he couldn’t swallow his unsavory thoughts, as if he just couldn’t stop himself, he finally continued, “Have you noticed that you’re giving me less and less of your precious time? We used to see each other almost every day. You remember those days?”

     “That was before Laz suspected things.”

     As if he hadn’t heard her, he continued, “Then it was a few times a week. And now here we are down to maybe once or twice a week, for one or two hours, and –”

     “It’s that I’m not fucking you enough, huh?” she asked without looking up at him.

     “It isn’t about fucking! Is that all you think I think of you?

     “Sometimes I don’t know what you think of me.”

     He leaned across the table toward her abruptly, as if he meant to do her violence. “What the fuck does that mean? You love to turn things around on me, don’t you? You know perfectly well what I think of you. That isn’t the question between us. The question is what
you
think. What
you
want. How important I am to you, and what you intend to do about it...if anything.”

     She didn’t say anything, but one of the gnats floated up past her face, like one of her nanomites come to proudly show off the wings it had grown on its own.

     Swift then perceived an odd sensation or impression, like another VT channel’s programming bleeding over into the one he was watching. It was a faint image of Laz laughing. Laz was sitting opposite Talane as Swift sat opposite her now – and it was at
The Arbor
restaurant, in fact. Swift realized what he was experiencing. Talane was thinking back to that earlier date at
The Arbor
, with Laz. Had they laughed together before or after the brief recollection of it that Swift had sampled? Whatever the case, he knew she was either comparing that time with now, or worse, even longing for it. A memory within this memory.

     “Hello?” the past Swift said to her, and the present Swift cringed at his own words. “Did you hear me? Or maybe you’d prefer if I called our waiter back.” Talane raised her eyes to see him twisting around in his chair and lifting his arm as if to snap his fingers. “Garcon,” he called. “Hey, Garcon!”

     “Please stop,” she hissed at him pleadingly. “Please, will you just st–”

     ...

     He didn’t know how long it had been from the time the recording cut off, until now – opening his eyes and lifting his head from his crossed arms to find himself seated at his kitchen table with a congregation of empty Knickerson bottles and his extractor resting before him. His shirt was off, and he was cold, and his head ached as if he had jammed the tip of the extractor into his skull between his eyes...instead of pressing it to his bony arm, and ordering the nanomites – every last one of them – to march out of his system and into the cartridge that was inserted into the instrument. It was still in there. He saw its silvery-gray contents glittering. It was a snake’s poison, that he had sucked out of himself. A snake’s poison that he had been mad to put into himself.

     Also resting on the table, like another medical instrument, was the beam-emitting cutting gun he kept in his freezer lest it overheat. At some point in the hours past, he had apparently considered whether this might be a better instrument of empathy. An ultimate kind of empathy. But now as he took it in, he was so reluctant to touch the gun that he didn’t even feel an imperative to return it to the cold.

     It was a thud at his apartment’s door that had awakened him. Maybe there had been others preceding it. Another came now. With a groan of pain, Swift pushed himself up from the table, tottered toward the door, leaned against it as he activated the security view screen. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw out there.

     “Jenny,” he mumbled.

     Through the speaker came a drowned, gurgling voice. “I felt that you were ready for me to return.”

     Swift hesitated a moment or two, as if he might take offense to this statement, as if he might protest. But then he opened his door, and stepped aside to let the Sufferer enter.

7

     As he closed his apartment’s door, Swift thought he saw the being – who had come to a stop near the kitchen table, having dragged its steaming, wheeled cart behind it – incline its body to take in the articles spread upon the table’s surface. As if to divert its attention from the gun, Swift said, “I removed all the nanomites from my body.”

     “Yes – I had sensed that.”

     “So I won’t be as unique a brew to you anymore, Jenny. Sorry for that.”

     The otherworlder did not turn toward him. The bubbling voice issuing from its cart said, “I would like you to put them into me.”

     Swift stepped away from the door and swayed dizzily before he caught himself, though his stomach wasn’t done reeling. His first impulse was to tell the Sufferer to fuck off. This was
Talane
, her concentrated essence, not some drug for a pain junky to ingest. Did he want this being, with its own mission of self-loathing, privy to her every thought, fear, desire, dream? Everything she had ever felt for Swift, for her husband, for her mother, for herself? From the soft, cloudy consciousness of infancy to the moment when she had recorded this data at her work place? Maybe the Sufferer was of the erroneous assumption that the recording went further than that – to the moment when a sufficient amount of blood cells had trickled out of her body, like an evacuation of nanomites, for her to achieve the oblivion she sought. That had to be the vein of gold his guest hungered for, right there. That final, missing scene.

     “If you want to experience her death, it’s not there,” Swift in
formed it. “The data ends when --”