Life on the Preservation, US Edition (18 page)

Kylie sat still, not experimenting.

“Let’s not waste gas,” Billy said.

She moved the clutch and nudged the throttle. The bike jerked forward. She braked hard, and Billy thumped against her. “Fuck,” he said, sounding weak and pained. “What are you stopping for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ, Kylie.”

She timidly rotated the throttle. The Honda rolled onto the broken highway.

“That’s good, that’s good.” Billy slurred his words. Kylie wished they were back in the Oakdale house watching
Tombstone
or
Say Anything
. She wished it more than anything, but wishing wasn’t going to restore what was gone. She cranked the throttle a little more. With the added speed they caught up to Linda and passed her. Kylie glanced back at the SAB. When she looked forward she saw a section of her lane missing, cracked off and sunk several feet. She swerved, over reacting, crossed the road toward the ditch, swerved back the other way, cutting it too sharply and accidentally applying more throttle. The bike surged and rocked. Billy slumped against her back, a dead weight, and started slipping off the saddle. Kylie twisted around, trying to hold him up, but he was too heavy. She lost control of the bike and dumped them on the road.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

“I
T’S TIME TO
address your situation,” the Boogeyman in the deerstalker hat said. “
Our
situation.”

Ian backed away from him. “Who are you?”

“Nominally, the curator of this place.”

“Curator of a
strip club?
”

“The Seattle Preservation. In truth, though, I’m curator of nothing. You really don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

“What
I’m
doing. I’m not doing anything.”

“Wholly unconscious of your role. Astonishing.”

Water slopped onto tiles behind Ian. He flinched and resisted a morbid urge to turn around.

“Ignore that,” the Curator said.

“Where’s my friend, where’s Zach?”

“You have no friends here.”

Water slopped and splashed on the tiles.

“I’m leaving,” Ian said.

“I’m afraid not. Hunters are on the Preservation now. Of necessity it is impossible to either leave or enter this structure until they depart. We are bound in camouflage. During previous Advents, Hunters have leveled the city, but it did them no good. Hunter technology is brutishly linear. You will remain with me for a time.”

“Advents are days?
The
day, the one that repeats?”

The Curator nodded. “It’s a temporal illusion, drawn mostly from the original inhabitants while they sleep.”

“Original… I don’t get it.”

“Outside this structure the Preservation is populated by regenerating androids, shadow people if you will, their memory matrices derived from the city’s original population. The Preservation creates a space-time rift and draws on their sleeping minds to recreate conscious-seeming simulacrums. Even the city is merely a recurring representation of the original inhabitants’ perceptions of their city. Amazing that you’ve brought all this into existence, even drew me out of the Cloud to fulfill the meaningless function of Curator. And yet you are completely unaware.”

Ian wasn’t listening. He stared at the door behind the Curator. “I really want to get out of here now.”

“As I’ve mentioned, that isn’t yet possible.”

Ian stepped around the Curator, who did not attempt to stop him. The door was so solidly immovable the knob might have been cemented to a wall only painted to
look
like a door. Ian put his shoulder against it and shoved. Surprisingly, the door cracked away from the jamb and Ian stumbled forward. But not onto the sidewalk. Instead he was in another room. This one was glaringly white and lacked defining dimensions. He turned – and the Curator was there, sitting in a bathtub filled with murky water, naked except for a porkpie hat. His saggy female breasts floated in the bathwater. The room without walls was steamy and, paradoxically, claustrophobic.

“I would be delighted if you left–” the Curator said.

Ian’s mouth had gone dry.

“–but not in the sense you are thinking. I wish you to relinquish the Ian Palmer android. Once that is accomplished, this ersatz Preservation can end and I can rejoin the Cloud. Perhaps.”

“I don’t know what you’re
talking
about.”

The Curator sighed. “Never mind. This event is too deeply imprinted. We will seek something related.”

The Curator stood up in the tub. Ian looked away.

“Don’t be squeamish.”

Ian’s heart pounded. “
What
are you?”

“Good question. It’s one I’ve been asking myself lately. Now be still. I am attempting to solve our present dilemma. Come to me.”

The light changed, became less glaring. Ian turned slowly. A giant jellyfish swayed before him. It was wearing a Tyrolean hat with a red feather. Ian recoiled, gasping, and tripped over his own feet. What he fell into was something like warm Karo syrup embedded with star dust. “Wrong way,” the jellyfish said. “I’ve been probing you. Now – behold.”

A pseudopod snaked out of the Curator’s body. Ian flinched, threw his arm up. The room altered drastically, transforming between one moment and the next. Now it was Sarah’s apartment, the one she had left when she moved to Pullman to resume college. The Curator, reverted to his human-looking self, wearing a Mariners baseball cap and standing at the foot of Sarah’s bed, frowned.

On the bed someone was fucking Sarah. The someone’s body was extremely tense, even the cheeks of his pumping ass. His pale body was shiny with sweat. There was a blue cross tattooed behind his left shoulder, throwing off blue ink light. Ian stood paralyzed, watching. He knew the man was tense because he was concentrating on
not
concentrating, on for once losing himself in unconscious immersion and trust. Sarah’s eyes were closed and she held the man with her arms and legs. Suddenly the man cried out – and then continued crying. Sobbing as if grief-stricken. The man was Ian himself. Sarah held him while he cried. It had been the first time he arrived at real surrender, and it had frightened him.

“A crucial element,” the Curator said. “This memory is not so deeply imprinted, though. Here we can perhaps successfully perform a manipulation.”

Ian, observing all this, was crying along with his past-self.

The Curator removed his cap, then put it back on and tugged it down snug by the bill. “There, there,” he said. “Let’s make it all better.”

Once again his past-self was stroking away into past-Sarah. It went on and on until it didn’t go on any more, and past-Ian rolled off, unsatisfied but safe – his standard conclusion. Past-Sarah asked what was wrong.
Nothing’s wrong. I’m tired, I don’t know.
Then the scene shifted and past-Sarah was gone, and past-Ian, alone on a different bed, his own bed, came in his hand and did not cry.

“There’s more,” the Curator said, and Ian turned. The Curator stood at the end of a short hall, facing the open door of the bathroom. Ian joined him; he didn’t have any choice. Yet
another
past-self stood before the medicine cabinet. This one was wearing boxer shorts. His shoulders slumped. Dark bruising discolored the skin under his exhausted eyes. In his left hand were two prescription bottles. That day he didn’t go to see Sarah, didn’t call her, pretended she didn’t exist, and then tried to find escape from himself in a can of spray paint and failed – all of it failed, his whole life. The prescriptions were phony, obtained over the internet through illegal transactions. Duplicates of his mother’s suicide pills. The past-self examined a third prescription bottle, studying the label for long moments, before putting it back on the shelf, and the other two as well, shaking his head. In this version the dilemma never occurred, because Ian had never fully surrendered to Sarah – he had maintained critical distance. Safe detachment.

The present Ian moved his lips.
But that’s not what happened
.

“No, but it will do.” The Curator took Ian’s arm and led him away. They walked right through a solid wall to enter a room thumping with disco music. A girl in a bright pink wig wearing nothing but a thong was grinding her crotch up and down a pole. A spot light bathed her in a dusty cone.

“XXX GIRLZ in a less tranquil manifestation,” the Curator said. Now he wore an outrageous pimp hat, purple with white fur trim. He waved his hand and the music ceased – not only the music but every sound in the room that wasn’t made by Ian and the Curator. “Sit down and relax for a while, why don’t you?” The Curator pulled a chair out, the chair legs scraping loud on the hardwood floor. He placed a hand on Ian’s shoulder and pushed him gently down. Ian did not resist. He felt stunned. The silent stripper humped the pole and licked her lips in a sensuality as phony as Ian’s Xanax prescription.

“I don’t believe any of this.”

“Of course you do.”

“What… what were we looking at back there, that other me–?”

“Externalized memories. It was necessary to make changes, where changes could be made. Your traumas haunt you, so now you’re haunting them.”

Ian looked away from the girl and straight at the Curator. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if that other stuff about androids is true, then what am
I
doing here?”

“Excellent question. Before, you asked what I am. What
you
are, is more to the point.”

“I’m just
me
.”

“True but incomplete. Presently you are a non-physical entity inhabiting a recurring android, interweaving with its memory matrix, which is being generated by your own mind across a space-time rift manufactured by the Preservation Dome. A Dome that wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t Lensed it into existence to begin with.”

Ian rubbed his forehead. In high school he had compulsively ingested, inhaled or injected every drug he could get his hands on. Acid had produced the wildest disconnect from consensus reality.

Until now.

Ian
longed
for a consensus reality he could stand in. He glanced at the silent pole-humping stripper. Was any of this really happening?
Had
he taken the pills in his medicine cabinet, and were they straining his mind through some kind of psychedelic filter? Sleeping pills didn’t do that. Even super powerful sleeping pills. But when you died, didn’t your brain flood with neurochemicals that created hallucinations? He’d read that somewhere. On the other hand, he didn’t feel dead.

“Hey,” he said, “do you think it’s possible to mix sleeping pills, beer and spray paint and come up with lysergic acid?”

“This Preservation came into existence because of
you
. Because of your Lensing ability.”

“I don’t even get what that means.”

“It means,” the Curator said, “you are much more than you know you are. Preservation templates exist eternally in the Cloud. Once they were intended as museums – interactive dioramas of civilizations destroyed by Hunter cleansing missions. Civilizations the Cloud had selected and secretly guided. Eventually the Cloud lost interest in Preservation museums, though. Eventually it lost interest in everything but its own expansion.”

“Even if believed that – and I don’t – what I’m saying, none of that has anything to do with
me.
”

“It has everything to do with you. This Preservation came into existence because you Lensed it into existence.”

At the edge of the stage, which was only a couple of feet from Ian, the pink-wigged stripper bent over, shoved her ass out and wiggled it. The thong strap vanished between firmly rounded cheeks. Ian scooted his chair around so her ass wasn’t right in his face.

The Curator leaned across the table. “I have begun to forget things. I am becoming what I appear to be: a human android. But I used to be one of the billions comprising the Cloud. I was one with them. The Cloud directed numerous races towards transphysical evolution. It created Preservations for the benefit of material-based civilizations. Educational pointers, you might say. But this Preservation, the one
you
Lensed it into existence, is functionally isolated. The Cloud doesn’t even know it exists.”

“What you’re saying, it couldn’t happen. I keep telling you, I’m nobody, I’m
me
. I don’t ‘Lens’ things. I’m a fuckup, end of story.”

The Curator shook his head emphatically. “No. You are an extremely rare anomaly. I know, because I am one myself. Out of billions, one may evolve Lensing abilities. Even with that given, you are hundreds of years ahead of where you should be, based on what the Cloud had so far accomplished with your race.

“When you terminated your physical body, your consciousness persisted. It wanted the world back, which at the same moment was undergoing annihilation by the Hunters. Without knowing what you did, you Lensed the Preservation matrix out of the Cloud, complete with a regenerating android of yourself – an ideal receptacle. It received you, and has gone on receiving you, Advent after Advent.”

Ian looked at the stripper. She was making love to the pole again.

“It will require one Advent outside this structure for your new memories to fully weave into your android’s matrix. Upon the following Advent, your mind will be scoured of Sarah. Once this secondary conflict has vanished you perhaps will vanish as well, no longer compelled to worry after the unfortunate manner of your death, which in turn may release your android to exist on its own terms. At that point the Preservation may cease – along with your obsession. And I, too, will be released.”

“Okay, cool.” Ian stood up. His legs were weak and he almost sat down again. “I have to go.”

“You may. The Hunters have given up, for now; the current Advent is routine.”

Ian turned. “What do these Hunters have such a hard-on about, anyway? What did we ever do to them?”

“Nothing. The Hunters consider Cloud interference a menace, one that grows more powerful with each absorption. Hunters eradicate any civilization the Cloud has prepared for transphysical evolution. It’s not personal. Goodbye.”