Life on the Preservation, US Edition (28 page)

“I wouldn’t know it necessarily,” Vanessa said. “Maybe Zach would just deliberately not come back.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Zach said.

“But I don’t know you wouldn’t.”

“That’s true,” Kylie said

“Come on, you guys,” Ian said. “Help me out here.”

“Icky, reality simply can’t be what you’re saying it is.”

“Maybe we’re all on an un-reality show,” Zach said.

Vanessa and Kylie laughed.

“Come
on
, you guys,” Ian said.

Vanessa touched Ian’s hand and said, “It makes more sense if I walk over the margin, don’t you think?”

“No. Then you’d just be gone again. You wouldn’t remember anything, and we’d have to start all over. Look, I promise you Zach won’t fake it.”

“I promise, too,” Zach said.

“What do you say, Ness?”

“I suppose it can’t hurt anything.”

Ian stood up. “Great. Let’s go.”

“Sit down a minute,” Vanessa said, then excused herself to the bathroom. She was gone ten minutes, and when she returned she appeared composed and serious.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go ahead then.”

T
HEY PILED INTO
Zach’s VW, picked up Aurora Avenue North. “Stop on the Queen Anne side of the bridge,” Ian said.

“I know, I know.” Zach pulled out of the traffic stream, parked on a residential street a little ways up the east slope of Queen Anne Hill. They got out and walked back down to the bridge. Traffic thundered by. It was windy on the pedestrian walkway. Vanessa hung close to Ian, her arm looped through his. Normally he would have rejected this prolonged physical contact. But he was getting over that, he was becoming more human about it. Yet another reason – maybe the main reason – for waking up Vanessa and Zach. You can’t have human contact without a few humans to contact
with
– even if they were only androids who believed they were human. Kylie was real, but was one person enough?

“Icky, if this doesn’t happen, if there’s no bubble, I want you to be calm about it.”

“I’m calm,” he said. “And I’m not crazy. The bubble’s there. The only thing I’m worried about is that you won’t believe it when Zach doesn’t come back.”

“All right, Icky, let’s get this over with.”

A big moving van rumbled past them. The walkway vibrated. They crossed about three quarters of the bridge’s twenty-nine-hundred-foot-length then Ian made everybody stop. “Not any farther. We’re not sure where it starts.”

“Right,” Zach said.

Kylie leaned on the rail, looking at the view east. Boats moved along the ship canal a hundred and seventy feet below. Industrial gray paint was flaking off the rail like dead skin off a zombie. A sign bolted on just below the rail advised suicidal types to take advantage of a 24hr hotline. Blue and white emergency phone boxes were stationed at intervals along the bridge. Was Ian the only one who even noticed them?

“I was talking to you on the phone when you hit the bridge,” he said to Vanessa. “Couple of seconds later there was this little static sound, and you were gone.”

“Icky, I’m not gone.”

“You know what I mean.”

Vanessa looked at him worriedly, and Ian almost stopped believing himself. Like he had to fight to keep the insane truth alive in his head, even with Kylie to help him.

“Okay, I’m going,” Zach said. “Ready?”

“Maybe I should go instead,” Ian said.

“No!” Kylie grabbed his other arm and held on tight. “You’re
not
wiping your memory.”

“Okay, okay. But I was thinking... how do I really know for sure I’m not crazy?”

“Don’t go there. We’ve already talked about that.”

Vanessa, who had been watching them both very closely, said, “Icky, you’re scaring me.” A tractor trailer rig blasted by, the slipstream gust buffeting them, shaking the bridge. “I think maybe we should all go back to my office and talk about this.”

Ian hated the way she was looking at him. He supposed it was the same look he used to give
her
. A mixture of pain, pity and fear. Poor, poor Ness on the psych ward. Poor Icky on the suicide bridge with a head full of aliens. “Damn it,” he said, “that would just waste time.”

“All right, already,” Zach said. “You three keep fighting. I’m going to take the long walk.”

Zach started off, his gait overly nonchalant, one hand in his jeans pocket, the other swinging widely. He paused just before the end of the bridge. “I’m still me!” he shouted back at them over the traffic noise.

Ian waved him on. “Keep going.”

Zach waved, turned away from them, put his head down and
ran
for the end of the bridge.

“You know,” Vanessa said, “this won’t prove anything. Your friend is really putting his heart into it, though.”

Well beyond the bridge, Zach was still running, elbows pumping away.

“It’s not him anymore,” Ian said.

“It certainly looks like him.”

“It’s not.”

Zach ran until he passed out of sight.

“For goodness sake,” Vanessa said, and she started walking toward the end of the bridge, the wind belling her overcoat out behind her.

“Ness, wait.” He caught up with her. “Don’t do it.”

“Listen, why don’t you call him and tell him to come back.”

“That won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“It’s like I told you about the Eliza conversations. Remember?”

“Text him.”

“Come on, Ness. Oh, fuck it.” He produced his phone and thumbed:
Get your ass back here.

The return text was a smiley face emoticon. He showed it to Vanessa. “Zach’s
gone
,” he said. “He’s back in the bubble. We won’t see him again until the next Advent.”

“That’s bad for one very good reason,” Vanessa said.

“What reason?”

“He’s got the car keys.”

She smiled but he stared at her and shook his head, feeling bleak. Waking up Ness or anybody else was hopeless. Zach was just some kind of special case. An android with a corrupted memory matrix, like the Curator had said. After a moment Vanessa reached out and squeezed Ian’s hand. “Walk with me, Icky. I don’t know what’s going on with you and your friends, but I think it will be good if we walk together. Nothing will happen. Do it with me. Prove to yourself that everything’s okay. Then if Zach doesn’t come back, we’ll catch a cab downtown and get my car.”

“Ness, you don’t understand.”

“Icky. It’s all right. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“It’s not all right.”

She pulled gently at his hand.

“Come, walk with me.”

“No.”

Kylie grabbed his other hand. “That’s right. No.”

Vanessa sighed. “Watch me, then.”

“Don’t do it, Ness.”

“There’s no Dome, Icky. Let me show you now. I’ll walk past the end of the bridge and turn around. I promise.” He let go of her hand. “Be right back,” she said, smiling.

“Sure,” Ian said.

Vanessa stepped briskly away. She paused near the end of the bridge, shrugged and waved, then continued on. After that she didn’t wave anymore or look back. The traffic roared by. Ian put his arm around Kylie.

“Fuck it,” she said.

T
HEY CAUGHT A
bus back to Capitol Hill. It passed Dick’s Drive-In on Broadway, the parking-lot wall still wearing Ian’s WHO CARES. It would wear it forever, since there would never be a ‘next day’ to sandblast it away or paint it over. Kind of like having a piece on permanent display in a museum. Ian shook his head; he’d hit the mainstream.

The bus stopped, and they stepped down to the sidewalk. Kylie’s face lit up. She pointed at a storefront across the street.
Salon Mimi
in pink neon script shone over a glass door. “Do you have any money left?”

“Some.”

“I really, really want to get my hair done.”

“What’s wrong with your hair?”

She gave him a look, and Ian reached for his wallet to see what he had. Two twenties turned out to be enough for a shampoo and basic cut. He slouched in a chair yawning over an idiotic fashion magazine while a very young Latin chick ‘did’ Kylie’s hair. It took forever but it didn’t matter because the day was forever. Women occupied all four chairs in the little salon. Crappy fusion music played above the sound of sinks and blow dryers and babble. All normal. As long as Ian didn’t think about it. Boring but normal, like real life. But when his mind started tracking off in the direction of android people he felt his depression rising. Only he and Kylie were real – and he wasn’t so sure about himself. He pictured the other people in Salon Mimi as soulless automatons, utterly clueless, the Latin girl pawing and combing and cutting at Kylie’s head, and it was all so weird and creepy he just wanted to get away and forget he knew the truth. But then Kylie stood up, and her smile was like a sun igniting through his gloom.

“How do I look?” she said.

T
HEY MADE LAZY
love. Ian’s erection would not sustain. Kylie didn’t seem to mind. She took his hand and showed him where and how to touch her, what she liked, and he became absorbed in the lesson until she reached orgasm. But when she reached for him, he said, “I don’t think I can.”

“It’s okay. You’re tired. We don’t get our sleep time because the day stops at midnight.”

“Yeah.”

She snuggled against his chest. “Sleep now,” she said in a little-kid voice.

Ian closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. After a while he opened them again. Kylie was already out, her mouth open a little bit. Traffic noise filtered up from the street. He stared at the ceiling, remembered floating toward it, disembodied, after taking all the pills. He wasn’t blocking it anymore – that had really happened, he told himself.

He slid carefully away from Kylie and stood naked beside the bed. Something thumped against the wall in the next apartment. Ian started. His heart thudded, and he pressed his hand flat to his chest. Jeans, t-shirts, wadded-up socks, paperback books and sketchpads cluttered the floor. Ian bent down and picked up a sketchpad and black Sharpie, sat at his desk and started working out a possible piece. The parking-lot WHO CARES was the last thing he put up. Right after that, the Preservation started. WHO CARES would never go away. That didn’t feel right. Graffiti wasn’t museum art. It was
supposed
to vanish because it was supposed to piss people off and make them want to erase it. Beyond that, WHO CARES sucked as a piece; it was his suicide note. After painting something that bad there wasn’t anything left to do
but
kill yourself.

On the sketchpad he tried: WHO ARE WE under a crooked city skyline, scribbled that out, shaded in a WHO ARE YOU (annoyed by the existence of Daltrey and Townshend, but maybe going with it anyway) and a line of blank silhouette people, maybe do one with a face, or just big wide Miyazaki eyes, or one filled in red, some such cute shit. Maybe too cute. It would probably require a stencil, if he wanted to pull it off on a mass scale – which is what he was thinking.

Ian scribbled over his new sketch and tossed the pad on to a pile of dirty laundry. What he really needed to scribble out was the parking-lot WHO CARES. Still restless, he pulled Kylie’s locator over. The plastic case was cracked. Rolling it under an eight-hundred-pound motorcycle will do that. He thumbed the ON button. Nothing happened. He unscrewed the back and pried the cover off. Circuit board, diodes, two lithium batteries like shiny slugs the diameter of nickels. One of the batteries was loose. He pushed firmly down on it, making sure the little spring clips engaged. Using a jeweler’s tool, he checked the solder points, probing around randomly. Everything looked good. He flipped the device, grid face-up. This time when he thumbed the ON button the grid lit up, pale blue. It was supposed to locate the Preservation machinery, but if the whole city was a generated construct, the EM field or whatever equally distributed, there might not be any central point
to
locate. So the whole grid lights up, instead of a single point.

Ian wondered if it would read any different if he took it to XXX GIRLZ.

He put the thing face down, poked around in the back some more, then pushed it away. Not happening. He needed to
do
something, get out of the apartment. Kylie slept like a dead person. Ian grabbed his hoodie and keys.

"C
AN
I
TALK
to the manager?” Ian said.

The guy in the blue Dick’s Drive-In shirt was about fifty, heavyset, with iron gray hair. He tapped the nameplate pinned to his chest. The plate said: Tom Masterjohn. And under that: MANAGER. “That’s me,” he said.

“Somebody did your wall. That graffiti?”

“So I noticed.”

“I was wondering, are you going to fix it?”

“Why?”

Ian shrugged. “It’s kind of lousy.”

“It’s an
eyesore
,” Tom said. “And you bet I’m going to fix it. I have to, according to city ordinance. Tomorrow I got a guy coming out.”

“I’ll do it today, right now. For free.”

Tom squinted. “Why would you do that?”

“Look, I used to do graffiti but I don’t anymore. I mean, I was like addicted to it? But I got busted a few years ago. Now I hit these meetings, like NA, you know? It helps me, if I go around cleaning up bad graffiti. It’s part of my twelve step. Making amends?”

“I didn’t know they had twelve step for that.”

“They do.”

“I can’t pay you.”

“I don’t care. It’s one of my steps.”

I
AN HUNKERED IN
the parking lot and poured paint from a gallon can into a metal tray.
Beige
paint. It rippled thickly. He set the can down and picked up the dry roller, gave it a spin with his fingers, then pushed it into the paint, rolling it forward and back, slopping some paint over the low end of the pan. He stood and pulled the dripping roller down the wall, making a wide, slash through WHO. After a moment, he repositioned the roller and pushed it up at an opposite, intersecting angle, creating a big beige X through the green WHO. Ex-ing out his suicide. The new paint was supposed to match the wall, but it was brighter and gleaming wet. Ian smirked. He was doing his civic duty. Maybe the mayor would give him a medal. He pictured Ned Beatty or some other asshole actor handing him the Key To The City, flashbulbs popping off, applause. Tonight he would hit the streets with his spray cans, do the whole fucking city. Why not? He was jazzed for it, and he didn’t have to worry much about getting caught. It would all be erased with the next Advent. Basically, Seattle was his Etch-A-Sketch. His forever wall.