Travellers in Magic (28 page)

She turned down Elm Street and pushed the button. The voice directed her to 820 Elm Street, #206. She parked the car and climbed the steps to the second story office. As she put her key in the door she could hear the voice inside the office start up immediately: “Turn on the lights and push the button.”

Number 206 was a small windowless room with only a desk, a chair, a typewriter, a filing cabinet and a fan that was on all year, winter and summer. The fluorescent lights overhead stuttered as she flicked the switch and then stayed on. She went to the desk and pushed the large black button on the right hand side.

“Alphabetize the papers on the desk and file them in the filing cabinet, then push the button,” the voice said. She relaxed a little. Alphabetizing wasn't too bad, was almost fun if you didn't mind the voice in the background coming on once every thirty seconds. It gave you time to think. She hated typing, because her back hurt her after an hour, and she hated tearing apart carbons because her hands got covered with the black carbon, but alphabetizing was all right. She sat down and started putting the papers in stacks.

The voice was the only thing she could remember. On her good days she thought there must have been a life before the voice, but on bad days she wondered if the voice had started when she was born and had never let her go. She could remember back only about a year, but there was really no evidence that the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that had been any different. Certainly she could not imagine what her childhood would have been like if the voice hadn't been there.

Sometimes she thought that somewhere along the line she must have made a bad bargain, and that this was the consequence. Whenever she thought that she would try and try to remember what that bargain had been, because if she could remember it she might be able to get free of it. But she could remember nothing before her one room apartment, her car, her work, and the voice connecting them all like beads on a string.

At other times she thought that everyone had a voice in her car, her home, her office, that that was just the way life was. The woman at the checkstand in the supermarket probably had one, and the man who fixed her car, and some of the people on the bus, the ones who seemed barely alive. Maybe, she sometimes thought, everyone forgets their life overnight. Maybe something went wrong and I'm the only one who remembers. That would explain the overelaborate instructions, the ones that go on and on until I'm ready to scream. If people really didn't remember they'd need instructions like that to get them through the day.

But as always the explanation failed to satisfy her. It didn't explain the others, the woman she had seen dancing (dancing!) in the street, the teenage boys with the loud radios, the couples arguing with each other or quietly holding hands, the woman she had once seen in her rear-view mirror crying quietly inside her car. And the coffee shops and movie theaters where people seemed to go, the billboards for vacations in Rio or Paris, parties in the apartment above hers, the fireworks she had once seen flower over the city like a blessing. And anyway, most people seemed to have a radio in their cars instead of a black button; she had looked.

She wondered what it would be like to go to a movie, to take a vacation. Sometimes when she put her key in the door of her apartment and heard the voice start up inside she wanted to run away and never come back. Sometimes when she saw couples kissing in the street she felt happiness and yearning and desire and loneliness, and other feelings she had no words for. She wondered if other people felt these things or if she was unique, or if they felt them more than she did, if their lives were a riot of sensations.

She felt a sharp pang of envy and put her head on the desk for a moment. Her life, the only one she had, was being wasted. “Alphabetize the papers on the desk and file them in the filing cabinet, then push the button,” the voice said. She had almost forgotten it. It didn't do to become depressed, she knew, though she had moments of black depression several times a day. She hurried to finish and pushed the button. “Go to the cafeteria on the corner for lunch,” the voice said, “come back and push the button.”

She wondered what the voice would have said if she'd finished before lunch, if that would have made any difference. She wondered what would happen if she were to go somewhere else for lunch, but as far as she knew the cafeteria was the only place to eat in the neighborhood. She left the office—the door locked behind her—and went to the corner. “A tuna fish sandwich, please,” she said to the woman behind the counter at the cafeteria. They were the first words she had spoken all day.

In the afternoon she typed itemized lists of things the company was shipping—auto parts, it looked like, though the last time she had typed a list it had been furniture. When she finished the voice directed her to her car and then to a gas station where she filled up her tank.

“Turn on to Second Street and then push the button,” the voice said when she started the car. The voice was taking her to the freeway and then home. For once she didn't mind the instructions. She was tired and hungry and incapable of thought, and wanted only to go home.

She stopped at the light before the freeway. The man in the car next to her had his radio turned up loud and she listened to it eagerly, forgetting her tiredness. A song came to an end, loud and discordant. The announcer gave the title and then another voice came on. “They came from beyond the stars,” the voice said, “and Earth trembled beneath their rule.”

Who were they talking about? She watched the light anxiously, hoping that it wouldn't turn green. Were they talking about a movie? If it was a movie, she knew, then it wasn't real. But if it was real … “Coming to a theater near you!” the radio blared. The light changed and the car sped away.

It was a movie then. But suppose there were people … people from the stars … “Turn left on to the freeway and then push the button.” Dammit. She had almost forgotten and gone straight, eager to follow the car with the radio. She turned left and went home.

At home the voice told her to make a hamburger, and after dinner directed her to the half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. She wondered if the voice liked jigsaw puzzles because the instructions for the night never varied: “Find the next piece and push the button.” This was the third puzzle she had done. The cover showed an open tin filled with different colored jelly beans. Before the jigsaw puzzles the voice had told her to embroider. Once it had directed her to buy a woodworking set, but the set had been so hard she had collapsed in tears. The voice's even, mechanical tone had started to sound sadistic. The next evening the voice told her to embroider. It had never mentioned the woodworking set again and she had thrown it out stealthily, piece by piece.

The puzzles were relaxing, like alphabetizing. She started to think about the commercial on the radio again. Suppose the voice had come from the stars, suppose people from the stars had taken her over, and others, and were about to … to … She couldn't think what. Or maybe
she
was from the stars, sent here to observe and report back about life on Earth. Only she didn't have the faintest idea what life on Earth was like.

She started to pick up a piece and then stopped. Could people live on the stars? There were probably books about it, but she couldn't afford a book. The voice kept careful track of her money. She stood and went to the window and back to the coffee table. The night was hot and she was strangely restless. The commercial had given her a new idea, her first new idea in a long time.

Finally she walked to the door and went outside. Behind her the voice said, “Find the next piece and push the button,” but she ignored it. She looked up. Bright stars swam across the vast sky, a splendid and infinite array. She had never seen anything so beautiful, so much of a contrast to the finite, precisely-measured instructions of the voice. Her throat hurt to look at it. Finally after a long time she looked away.

A young man stood in front of the apartment next to hers, watching her. In the light from his apartment she could see that he was smiling. For a confused moment she wondered if she wanted to kiss him. Then he said, “It's really somethin', isn't it?”

She didn't understand what he meant. Of course it was something. Everything was something. What a stupid thing to say. She nodded, flustered, and went back to her apartment. The jigsaw puzzle was waiting, and she sat down to it with relief.

The next day there was a check for her on the desk at the office. She looked at it carefully, as she had looked at the ten or twelve checks she had gotten over the year at the office, though they never varied. “Pay to the order of Vivian Stearns,” the check said. Was that her name? Did most people have two names like that, or only one, or three or four? The woman at the supermarket, for example, had a nametag that said her name was Ruby.

She was glad to get the check because it meant the voice would let her off early to cash it. She typed for the rest of the morning and went to the cafeteria for lunch. “Hot, isn't it?” the woman behind the counter said. Vivian hesitated a long moment and then said, “It's really something.” The woman nodded and gave her her tuna fish sandwich.

She went back to work feeling almost gleeful. So that was what the man last night had meant! She should have said, “Yeah, it really is,” and then they could have had a long talk about the stars, and she could have asked him whether people lived on them, and then she could have invited him to her apartment—No, the voice was there. Well, maybe he would have invited her to his apartment, and she would have found out if he had a voice too.

She was sitting down to the afternoon's work—stamping papers—when she remembered the relief she felt last night back in her apartment. Why had she been so anxious to get away from him? A thought came to her—a horrible thought—and she said, “Oh, no,” aloud, though she was usually so careful not to say anything the voice might hear. What if she had once had a life like everyone else's—dancing and movies and vacations—but it had gotten too complicated? What if she had gotten frightened, if she could no longer bear to talk to people because of all the ways they might misunderstand her and she misunderstand them, what if she had gotten more and more frightened, more and more confused, and finally, to simplify everything, she had set up the voice herself? What if she had arranged to work for a company, and to get paid by them, without ever seeing anyone? Her heart was pounding now, and the blood throbbed in her ears so that she could no longer hear the voice. What if there was no bad bargain, no people from the stars—what if she had done it all herself?

The wave of dizziness passed and she heard the voice say, “Stamp the papers on the desk and push the button.” Could that be her voice? She had always thought it was a man's, but she didn't know what her voice sounded like. Shaking, she looked at the check again. As usual the signature was illegible. The company name on the check was Aramco, and the address a post office box. Was there a way to find out who they were?

After a few hours the voice told her to leave the office and go to the bank. It was 3:30 by the clock in the car. She was glad to get out of the heat and into the air-conditioned bank. Two people behind her in line were talking quietly. “She said she had a miscarriage but I'll bet it was an abortion,” one of them said.

“But why?” the other one said. “Why would she do that?”

“To get back at her husband,” said the first one. “Because he had that affair. You remember.”

As usual Vivian listened intently. Was that what had happened to her? A miscarriage, an abortion, a husband who had an affair, a screaming fight, driving off in the night with no destination in mind, crying in the car like that woman she had seen once? Life could be so horrible, so complicated. Would she take it back if she could? Did she really want to know?

When she reached the teller she decided that she did. She cashed the check, asked for a money order to pay her rent, and while the teller was filling out the money order asked, “Do you know—Is there any way to tell who sends me this check? I mean, where it comes from?”

The teller looked at her for a long moment. “Honey, you mean you don't
know
?” she said finally.

“I—No, I don't.”

“You mean to tell me you don't know who you work for,” the teller said.

Vivian nodded. She wished she hadn't said anything. Behind her the line stirred impatiently.

“I guess—Hell, I don't know.” The teller thought a moment. “I guess I would go to this post office here and watch who goes to the box,” she said. “The post office is just around the corner. There's no way I can tell you who they are—I don't have access to those records.”

Vivian nodded again. “Thanks,” she said finally. She picked up her cash and the money order and tried not to look as if she were running from the room. The two people next in line were still deep in conversation.

She drove home and, on the voice's instruction, put the money order in the manager's mailbox, Box #1. There was a Box #7, corresponding to the number of her apartment, but she had never seen anything in it. She wondered, as she did every month, what would happen if she didn't pay the rent, if she saved the money until she had enough to start over somewhere else, in an apartment without a large black button. Would they evict her? Once on the bus she had seen an advertisement that said, “Evicted? Legal Aid can help.” She had wanted to copy down the phone number but hadn't dared. And no one else had been paying the slightest attention to the ads; maybe it was wrong somehow.

After dinner she could not concentrate on the jigsaw puzzle. “I guess I would go to this post office here,” the woman at the bank had said. What if she just went? The voice would think she was taking an extraordinarily long time to find the next piece in the puzzle. But so what? She got up, went to the window, went back to the puzzle. The heat of the evening was stifling. She wished she had an air conditioner. Maybe she could take the fan home from the office. No, that was crazy. What was wrong with her? It was no wonder she needed a voice to tell her what to do—she was a freak, filled with wild emotions, not to be trusted to make her own decisions.