Eating Memories (29 page)

“All this says something about time, Monique,” Tammi said, coming forward and grasping her arm. Under her fingers the flesh was firm. “I can touch you, you see? I can smell the marijuana smoke and the river mud. It’s cold out here and sometimes I find myself shivering. Is this a dream?”

“Cold?” Mike laughed. “Hey, old lady. It’s not cold.”

She whirled on him, dropping Monique’s arm. “Colder than in Arizona, where Monique and I ended up. Monique’s husband dies, you see? And her kids get tired of caring for her. But I never did.” She turned. Monique had dropped back into the shadows near the stairs. The hardness had fled her face under the fierce assault of bewilderment. “I never, ever left you, except when you pushed me away. We lived together until you got married and later we ended up sharing a room in the retirement home. Christ, Monique. We’ve been friends our whole goddamned lives.”

“You’re freaking her out, man!” Kevin shouted. “Can’t you see that? Leave her the fuck alone!”

Tammi took a step forward towards her. “This is important,” she said. “Do you remember?”

“Go away,” Monique whimpered. “I never did anything to you. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

Over the messy tie-dyed shirt dangled the gold heart charm Tammi had given her their senior high school year. They’d been best friends since age eight. She was eighty-seven now, and Tammi still cherished that necklace’s identical twin, the one Monique had given her. Snatching a hand out, Tammi caught the delicate gold chain and jerked, snapping the links and spilling the charm to the concrete where it landed with an anticlimactic little clink.

Monique put her hands to her chest disbelievingly, as though Tammi had pulled from her a throbbing crimson heart and not the tiny gold one which lay on the floor.

“There now, dear,” Tammi said wryly. “I think you’ll remember that.”

* * *

But it was Tammi who didn’t remember. She couldn’t recall awakening. Didn’t remember getting dressed. Tammi was standing by her friend’s wheelchair, gazing down on her. Monique was having one of her bad days.

Monique’s sheet was awry, the empty bed slept in, but the neighboring bed was made up in severe hospital lines. Tammi’s eyes scanned the clean, dusted top of the nightstand.

Where were her pictures? she wondered. There had been a snapshot of herself and Monique together at Monterey in 1969, a photo of her own long-dead parents next to that, and a picture of herself receiving the Emmy. The top of the nightstand had been a sort of visual summary of her life.

“Did you envy me for never marrying?” she asked Monique. “I used to be jealous of you when we were kids. You were always the pretty one. The popular one.”

Monique’s eyes were closed. Tammi would have thought she was sleeping but for the irregular rise and fall of her friend’s chest, the occasional flutter of her eyelids. The nurses had obviously given her something for the pain.

“Before you married I hated you sometimes,” Tammi said. “And after your brats came I just wound up pitying you. Did you know that? Is that why you hid my pictures?”

With a groan, Monique lifted her head from her fallen chest to stare out the window. Outside the sun was shining. The green of the lawn stretched thin until it petered out tiredly in the desert. Tammi stared at the gleaming sand, the dun hills beyond.

“Oh, crap. I love you, Monique. Talk to me.”

But Monique refused to meet the demands of Tammi’ s gaze.

“I broke your friendship chain. Do you remember?”

Monique seemed as though she were going to sleep.

“You were nineteen and I was eighty-seven. I didn’t think I had the strength to snap it, but it was more fragile than I had imagined. Was our relationship that flimsy?”

When Monique didn’t answer, Tammi knelt down at the side of the chair and stared into her friend’s face, suddenly realizing Monique’s pain didn’t spring simply from arthritis or from simple old age. She was dying. Monique was weeping slow, fat, silent tears.

“Hey,” Tammi whispered gently. “You remember when we were kids and we used to spend the night together? We’d make popcorn and pecan fudge and watch old Dracula movies? You remember that? Jesus. I was there to help when Jason was born, came all the way from New York, took two weeks’ vacation to be there. And when I left, remember how you cried and said you wished we could be kids again?”

In some piece of time, she knew, Monique was a coltish teenager, at the height of her beauty. Closing her eyes and picturing her friend, she still remembered her not at eighty-six but at nineteen, the time of her greatest, most defiant, potential.

“Christ. Of course you wanted to be young again. I was always plain. Rebellion didn’t flatter me as much.”

Tammi stood and turned.

She was in the dark place again, hearing the youthful voices beyond like music from another room. Blind, confused, she staggered back. Instead of touching Monique’s wheelchair, she stumbled into a wall.

The collision brought her up short. Something terrifying breathed stertorously in the comer. Without wanting to turn, she found her head swiveling to the sound.

She saw lights where she thought no lights could be.

The lights flickered, Christmas-tree gay, across the bed where an elderly woman lay curled into a .grotesque fetal coil, the position of a terminal Alzheimer’s patient. It looked as though old age were bending the woman’s body so as better to fit death’s sterile, dark womb.

Tammi walked forward and bent down to the old woman. A thin line of spittle ran from the gaping mouth. The twig arms were drawn up, the tortured hands at the chest were twisted and stiff.

The face. Oh. The face was much too familiar.

She jerked back, colliding hard enough with a monitor that the blow should have knocked it down. The machine never moved.

Tammi inched around the machine, floating like a heavy fog. She couldn’t feel the carpet under her feet, nor the strain of her body’s weight on her aging ankles.

I’m dreaming, she told herself.

But beyond the bed of the old woman a dead boy laughed. A young girl’s voice rang out with clear, happy promise.

Tammi turned away from the laughter and gazed out of the blackness towards a sunlit room where the elderly Monique sat, wheelchair-bound, dozing morphine dreams.

Love drew Tammi out of the dark.

Down the hall Mother Aerobics had put a new CD into the player, and the music echoed down the hushed corridor.

Tammi stopped in a spot of sunlight by the wheelchair.

Monique didn’t look up, but that didn’t matter. Like a faithful priestess, Tammi had cared for her during the births of her children, the death of her husband. She’d been there through popcorn and pillow-fight nights. They were bound by a thousand cherry Coke secrets and a hundred small hurts, three quarters of a century of self-inflicted injuries.

Tammi cocked her head and eavesdropped on the seductive lies of the music. For a short and glorious while an entire generation had believed they were born to be wild.

“Listen, Monique,” Tammi whispered affectionately. “Listen. They’re playing your song.”

Author’s Note:
All my life I’ve loved reading about strange happenings. I’m as addicted as Fox Mulder that way. The most horrific phenomenon I’ve encountered during my sensationalized reading escapades has concerned the few reported instances in which people vanished from sight, sometimes in front of witnesses. The folks would never be seen again, but they could be heard—somehow become invisible captives in an invisible world, calling for help. Oooooooh. Sends chills up the spine, doesn’t it? When I was eight years old or so I remember being afraid to turn over in bed, lest I fall into some dreaded Other Dimension. This kind of stuff, plus the fiction of Ted Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, marked me for life.

I know you’ll ask, so I’ll just say it straight out: I hated Heinlein. Yes. Even the juveniles.

Five-year-old Kimberly ran across the twilight field, blond hair flying, small legs pumping, arms upraised. She chased her father’s voice as she might have chased fireflies.

Jeremy paused in his work to look. Now here, now there, Kimberly darted, the voice forever an arm’s length away. The red lights on the EM monitors waxed and waned with the drift of the Tink.

Jeremy noticed with shock how accurate she was, how honed the radar of her need. More intuitive than he, he thought, glancing at the laptop across his knees. The data’s pattern was frustrating, elusive, like an almost-remembered dream.

Frowning, Jeremy glanced up. In the center of the field Kimberly had stopped, wrapping her arms tightly around air. Her small face was bruised by the dying light, her head cradled to the side as though waiting for strong arms to lift her.

“Kimberly!’

At the terror-stricken shout, Jeremy flinched and turned around. Mrs. Taft stood, a shadow in the dusk, behind him.

“Kimberly! You come back here! You come back now!”

Softly, Jeremy said, “I doubt another Tink will form, Mrs. Taft. There’s no need to be afraid.”

Her tone was woven with razor-wire panic. “Kimberly? You hear me? You get on in the house!”

Without a word, the little .girl trudged through the thigh-deep grass toward the yellow window-beacons of the farmhouse.

Mrs. Taft stood for a moment, her worried gaze following her daughter’s progress. “Brought you dinner,” she finally said, handing him the basket she held in her left hand.

Jeremy took it, eying the other basket in her right. “You didn’t have to,” he said.

Ruby
—At the soft whisper, Mrs. Taft raised her head. The breeze lifted invisible fingers to toy with her chestnut hair. “He’s calling me again,” she told Jeremy. “Thought you said he couldn’t do that.”

Jeremy glanced at the empty field. The EM monitors flickered one-by-one in no apparent pattern, like the haunting of fireflies. “If’s not what we expected.”

“Then you don’t know everything.”

He didn’t bother to reply. He was an interloper in Mrs. Taft’s rural meadow; an intruder in the wonderland of Mark’s truth.

“Tink,” she whispered. “That’s a funny name. Shouldn’t put a ninny name to something so terrible.”

Ruby please. Touch me. Can’t you—
Mr
.
Taft’s voice came faint, carried on the wind’s breath. The trapped man’s entreaties had, over the last day and a half, reduced from the where-am-I’s, the what’s-happening-to-me’s, to form the thick sediment of need.

“It’s an observer in a kink in space-time,” Jeremy explained. He remembered the night they put a name to it, Mark talking of quantum mechanics, Jeremy a half-step behind, the magic just out of reach. “Mark and I considered ‘stink,’ but the connotation . . .” He stopped, ashamed, his fragile grin fading like the day.

Ruby
—The
whisper held a pillow-soft, reconciled sorrow. Not three yards distant, an EM beacon flickered and then steadied to a bright, red glow.

Mrs. Taft took a step forward and then another, inching fearfully toward the light, the basket held out as though she prayed the food would be taken, not her.

At the beacon she halted and put the basket down.

Ruby. Please
—

The glow turned her tears crimson as her namesake. It looked for a moment as though she wept blood. Suddenly her courage failed and, shaking her head, obviously angry at her own fear, she stepped back.

“It’s an unbelievably rare phenomenon, Mrs. Taft. I really don’t think another one will form,” Jeremy said.

Her voice was sodden and bitter, words wrung from a vinegared sponge. “‘I don’t think’ this. ‘I don’t think’ that. Don’t you know nothing for sure?”

“No,” he admitted. The data was so confusing that only Mark could have known. Mark had chased his bright answers with the same passion he had pursued his smooth-skinned boys.

I should have been enough for you, Jeremy had told him after learning of Mark’s treachery, their shared illness.

Don’t you understand by now?
Mark, the deceiver, had asked.
Haven’t I taught you anything? The universe is hungry for new experiences, Jer. And inside us are fractals of that appetite. Nothing and no one is ever enough.

After a while Mrs. Taft left. Realizing it was time for his pill, he carried the laptop and the basket to the van. Sitting with the back doors open to the evening, Jeremy peered under the checkered cloth. She’d made fried chicken again, Mr. Taft’s favorite.

When Jeremy had taken his medication and had finished eating, he heard a rustling in the grass. A moment later Mrs. Taft emerged into the van’s rectangular spill of light.

“Come to take the basket,” she said.

He handed her the basket of biscuit crumbs, of chicken bones. “Excellent dinner again, Mrs. Taft. You really don’t have to bother.”

“No bother,” she said, plucking the basket from his fingers. A furtive glance over her shoulder. Jeremy knew she was searching the dark grass.

“He’s quiet now,” she said.

Perhaps Bill Taft was dead. Jeremy took a deep breath. The night air tasted of mown hay, of damp earth. In the woods by the creek tree frogs sang vespers. “Yes.”

“Maybe he’s asleep,” she murmured. “That’s good. It’s best when he’s asleep. When he’s awake and calling, he sounds so—”

Bill Taft sounded so afraid.

After a moment she perched on the bumper and stared off into the gloom. “It dark where he is?”

“I don’t know,” Mark would have made stars, Jeremy knew, Mark would have created galaxies. He doubted the creativity of Bill Taft.

“He ever coming back?”

No, Jeremy thought; but he wasn’t brave enough to tell her. It was Mrs. Taft who was made up of courage. Mrs. Taft, who believed in monsters; who stood and faced them alone.

“He sounds so tired,” she said, her own voice weary.

Bill Taft wasn’t simply tired. He was running out of air. When the Tink opened, it must have sucked in a limited supply, and now he was suffocating. “Yes,” he agreed. “He does.”

“Tell me again,” she said without taking her gaze from the dark, star-ceilinged field.

He told her the story as he had dozens of times, wondering if she didn’t yet understand, or if the telling simply made the night less lonely. “Spacetime has the consistency of foam,” ‘he said. “And the pattern that makes up the galaxies is repeated, smaller and smaller, down to the tiniest particles. Imagine that our universe is the beer and micro-universes the froth. Tiny, potential universes bubble up all the time. Mr. Taft walked into this field and encountered one which was just opening up. Because the universe now had an observer, it became stable.”

When she didn’t comment, he went on. “Mark explained once that it was like God played with dollhouses. When they were empty, the dollhouses would appear and disappear. Once a doll had been placed in them, though, the dollhouse had to stick around. Mark could explain this better,” he said with bitterness. “Everything came easy to Mark. He was always quick with analogy. Quick with anything.”

Jeremy had learned from Mark that good stories should be brief. Mrs. Taft was an intelligent woman, but
one of simple words. After the first few tellings he had dropped puzzling phrases like “fractals,” like “quantum tunneling,” and “Big Bangs.”

Glancing to Mrs. Taft, he saw her nod in appreciation. Her voice. Though, was hard. “God should have been more careful.”

Out in the meadow a beacon flickered briefly, Bill Taft, restless in dream.

“Mark,” she said. “You talked about him before.”

“Yes. Mark. Dr. Guthrie. He conceived the theory, and we worked on it together.” Jeremy pressed his lips together hard. “He was—” His voice flickered and died like an EM beacon sensing transient life. “He is—a fine physicist.”

“Sometimes I think I won’t never hear him again,” she said.

For a disorienting moment, Jeremy thought she was talking about Mark and wondered how she knew.

“My Bill doesn’t hear me when I call.”

“No,” Jeremy said as gently as the truth allowed. “No. I doubt he does.”

After a while she took the empty basket and walked to the house, leaving the full one behind.

When she had gone, Jeremy sat, the laptop across his legs, reviewing his data. He drank one beer, and then another, not seeing, but sensing the net of uncaring foam tickle the inside walls of the can.

At midnight the beacons flickered.

Ruby. Where
—Bill
Taft called as he, wandered the empty field.

Jeremy drained his beer and put his can down at the end of the neat row of five others. Swaying a little, he walked out into the meadow. Whenever he approached, the voice of Bill Taft moved out of reach.

“I caught fireflies once,” he whispered to the dying man. “Like God, I put them in a jar.”

Ruby
—The
voice moved away, slippery as the breeze. To the back of the meadow a flutter of red. Bill Taft in his quantum bottle. Bill Taft left in Jeremy’s incapable, careless hands.

If you were going to cheat, you should have been more careful,
he’d told Mark.
You should have taken precautions.

Jeremy’s one hand had been clutching his suitcase’s handle, his other grasped the doorknob. .

Please don’t leave,
Mark had said
.

No wonder you weren’t content with me. I was always just a plodder,
Jeremy had muttered
. If God had given me your sort of genius, I would have eaten right. Would have worn my seatbelt. Wouldn’t have staked my life on the safety of a condom. Oh, shit, Mark. The thing that makes me the most angry is that you threw it all away.

Mark’s expression had been woeful, contrite.
There isn’t any God, Jer. Just infinite probabilities.

With a sigh Jeremy gave up ego’s battle. He walked back to the van, lifted the phone’s screen and dialed the familiar number.

A hard-faced gray-haired woman answered. On the other side of the room, a television was playing quietly. An old movie, Jeremy noticed. One about black and white cowboys riding a monochrome meadow.

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said in surprise. His lips felt numb, his tongue beer-mushy. “I’ve got—maybe I dialed the wrong number. I was wanting to reach Dr. Mark Guthrie.”

“I’m his night nurse. Do you know what time it is?” the woman shot back.

Blearily, Jeremy glanced at his watch.

“It’s one o’clock in the damned morning,” she continued. “And Dr. Guthrie’s ill—”

“I know,” he snapped. “I know that, but this is important. He’ll want to talk to me. I’ve discovered something vital about his theory. Tell him Jeremy Schoen’s calling. This will amuse him: tell him that, as usual, I’m in over my head.”

She put him on hold. The delay was so long that Jeremy nearly rebuilt the bulwark of his self-esteem brick by crumbling brick. By the time the picture on the screen blinked on again, he’d decided he could handle the problem himself and had almost hung up.

It was the nurse again. She whispered. “He’s awake. I know he wants to .hear from you, but don’t tire him out.”

Displayed on a nightstand was the miscellany of illness: an army of pill bottles; a pitcher of water, which, by the adherent, bubbles, had stood long enough to go flat.

And an open Bible. Jeremy’s gaze riveted on the incongruity, its marker lying across its pages like a stripe of blood.

The woman’s plump hand went out to the monitor and its attendant camera. The picture in the screen began to turn.

No, Jeremy thought in alarm, realizing what the presence of the Bible must mean.

Too late. Far too late for apologies. Mark was suddenly there, inert on the bed, bridled by oxygen tubes. In the months since Jeremy had seen him, the soft flesh of his face had weathered to the skull’s bedrock. On his cheeks he wore the purple hearts of Karposi’s sarcoma. His stick hands were lying over .his chest, the bone at the wrist naked and round as a marble.

Oh, Mark
—Jeremy’s
mind’s voice was as weary as Bill Taft’s. “I’ve been meaning to come by,” Jeremy lied fitfully. “I just haven’t had the time, what with the treatments and my work. “ Mark’ s work, his mind corrected. “Well,” he said with false cheer. “I’m in remission now, and the doctors think I’ll be just fine.”