Life on the Preservation, US Edition (29 page)

He slapped some more beige on the Dick’s Drive-In wall and rolled it out like a house painter.

An hour later he ambled back to the apartment, feeling pretty good. It was almost a shame to wake Kylie up. Ian felt like he had his mojo back, like he didn’t
need
somebody else. The not-needing was a familiar feeling, like coming home to an empty house. It was a
safe
feeling. He glanced at the sky, which was a pure, blameless blue – the kind of blue he occasionally used in pieces. Something flickered in the periphery of his vision. He turned his head sharply, but it was gone, if it had been there in the first place – a weird flickery light, like a clear glass ball spinning in the sun, hovering right over Ian’s building.

He started walking faster.

Anxiety buzzed through him, killing the safe feeling. His mojo checked out. He didn’t really want an empty house. It felt like he’d been coming home to an empty house since he was twelve years old, and he was sick of it.

He started running.

He let himself into the building and ran up the stairs. In the hall outside his apartment, everything felt wrong. He keyed back the dead-bolt and pushed through the door.

Kylie was gone.

He stared at the empty bed, glanced into the empty bathroom, stepped quickly to the kitchen. “Kylie–?”

She wasn’t in the kitchen.

A dreadful weight settled in his stomach. He searched the apartment again, which was stupid. But maybe she had left a note.

There was no note.

But there were other things. Sarah’s cargo pants, which Kylie had been wearing before stripping for bed. And her Converse high-top sneakers and socks, the socks balled up and stuffed in the sneakers at the foot of the bed.
She must have found something different to wear
, Ian told himself.

Yeah, like what?

Her own clothes. She probably dug them out of the laundry. Hadn’t Ian bitched at her for wearing Sarah’s clothes? That didn’t explain the shoes, but maybe she had sandals or something in her leather coat. Which didn’t explain why the
coat
was still draped over the wicker chair, except it was warm out and she didn’t need it. But Kylie wore that coat constantly, whenever they went out. She wouldn’t leave it in the apartment. Oh, fuck, what did he know about what she would do or not do? He’d just
met
her.

Ian grabbed up his keys again and headed out the door.

T
HE CITY WAS
full of automatons, androids – fake people. Blanks. Thousands of them. And one real girl. Ian had no idea where to even begin looking. The Chief started reluctantly, coughing and grinding in protest. He babied the throttle for a while, until the engine smoothed out as much as it ever did, then popped the clutch and accelerated out of the alley. He cruised the streets around his building, steadily broadening the circuit, watching the sidewalks, trying to catch sight of a girl he feared was gone for good.

More than once he rumbled by Zach’s condo. On every pass he looked at the third floor bay window. Zach was gone, too, over the margin, along with Vanessa.Fake people thronged the sidewalks, and he felt like one himself. Ian Palmer, at home in the empty house.

He retreated to the apartment and locked the door. His stomach knotted with hunger and loneliness. He couldn’t even think about food. Evening arrived. The usual sounds of occupation occurred in adjacent apartments. Ian flopped on the bed, toed his shoes off, tried to sleep away the rest of the Advent, hoping Kylie would return with the fresh day, somehow. Maybe she would parachute out of the sky, or he would open his eyes and she would simply be there next to him – the magic girlfriend, the one who got through the bubble and all his walls.

He couldn’t sleep. Listening to the thumpings, muffled voices and footsteps in the other apartments was like being surrounded by alien forces.

He flung himself off the bed and punched on the MP3. Nine Inch Nails raked up the stale air. Ian grabbed the sketchpad he’d tossed earlier. WHO ARE WE, scribbled over. He flipped to a clean page, hovered his pen over it, made a couple of decisive slashes. His pen felt constricted by the margins of the paper. He dropped both of them and went for his markers.

Fuck it, then.

He yanked the bed away from the wall. Dust bunnies ghosted for cover. He ripped down the Nihiljizum poster, popping thumbtacks. That cleared the space, gave him a canvas seven feet tall by maybe fifteen long. He smoothed his hand over the uneven surface of old plaster, the off-white coat sterile as two weeks in rehab.

He started small. Lying on his stomach, working with colored markers at baseboard level, he put up miniature variations of WHO ARE YOU until he landed on one he liked:
know WHO you are
– the lowercase letters broken-bone sharp, the WHO a trippy riff on his usual signature, not flabby old-school crap like what he’d done on the parking lot. These were preliminary sketches. In his mind he began to see the big picture.

The apartment was hot. He peeled off his t-shirt, jeans and socks, grabbed beer and spray cans. He took a deep pull on the Alaskan Amber, considered the wall, then triggered the Sabotaz blue, like spraying free sky into a W. After an hour, even with the windows open, the fumes hung like sweet poison. Blowback speckled his abs. His trigger finger wore a black and blue hoodie, and his head swam with the noxious vapors. He put his tools down, rummaged in the closet for the surplus respirator, a thing he rarely utilized, and went back to work. Now he was sucking air through micro filters, which was better than fainting.

This wall wasn’t like his street stuff. Was and wasn’t. He never took so much time on one piece. Linger this long on a city overpass, a parking-lot wall, whatever, his ass would be grass. But he wanted to get this first one perfect, like it was some kind of master template. He saturated his attention with details, turning the piece into a fucking mural. A dark city took shape. A city of soulless automatons, intermittently spark-lit with the awakened. In his absorption, Ian barely registered the ticking of rain at the windows. He was lost in a corner of the wall, smudging a human silhouette with his thumb, sweating under his mask, when shadows began to spin out of the paint. He hunkered back, blinked sweat and incomprehension out of his eyes.

The Advent was upon him.

He moved to the middle of the room, tore his mask off and tensed every muscle, staring hard straight into the Wall World. Queasiness wormed through his stomach, then light burst over him with shocking abruptness. Instantly the apartment was back in its usual configuration, bed shoved against the wall. It took him a moment to realize the difference of this Advent.

His mural was still there.

The Nihiljizum poster was restored, thumbtacked back in place, covering part of the cityscape mural – but his piece remained. Ian held up his empty hands. He had been gripping a spray can in one but the can was gone. So was the respirator. But his fingers were still paint-stained, his abs speckled with blowback.

“Holy shit. Kylie, Kylie!” He jumped up, checked every room, all empty.

Back in the living room, his wall was fading out. The sharpness dimmed away gradually, details vanishing. But it didn’t dim out altogether. When the rapid fading halted, he could still see the piece, but it was very faint, as though it had been covered over with a cheap coat of latex. Ian got up close, moved his fingertips lightly over the wall. He had made something that stayed, like his last WHO CARES. But this was different. He didn’t make this in the real world but during a Preservation Advent. That was significant.

But Kylie was still gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I
AN DIDN’T WAIT.
When his cell rang he was standing under Zach’s bay window.

“Man,” Zach said, “are you–”

“I’m right here. Look out your window.”

Zach appeared at the window, phone pressed to the side of his grinning face. He waved then disappeared. A minute later he banged out the back door of the building.

“I remember all kinds of shit,” he said. “What happened after I went into the bubble?”

“Ness still didn’t believe us, so she went in after you. Then Kylie and I bussed it home. She fell asleep and I went out, when I got back she was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“I want us to look for Kylie while we’re waiting for my sister to come through.”

“Look
where?
”

“I got an idea. Her grandparents’ house on Queen Anne. It’s the only place I can think of where she might turn up.”

O
N THE WAY
, Zach hit a drive-through Tully’s and bought double lattes and scones (“for the stake-out”), neither of which Ian wanted. He drank the coffee, though, out of automatic force of habit. They parked across the street from the yellow frame house with the live oaks in the front yard. Zach slurped at his coffee through the little hole in the spill-proof lid, bit into his frosted scone. Frosted crumbs rained onto his lap and he brushed them off.

“If this Preservation shit was a game it would suck. We never get anywhere. It’s like there’s no place
to
get. And the game keeps restarting. We can’t even beat the first fucking level.”

“We’re getting somewhere,” Ian said.

“Yeah?”

“If my sister re-gens and remembers like you do, then it means we woke her up. Which means we can maybe wake up other people, too.”

“Okay, but then what?”

“How do I know? But it’s not first level.”

Ian picked up his coffee, held it a moment, then replaced it in the cup holder.

“One cool thing is we’re immortal,” Zach said.

Ian looked at him. “No, we’re not.”

“Hell yeah, we are. Look, we’re stuck in this one day and we’re in a zoo or whatever it is. But it could go on forever, right? And every Advent we start out the same age. So, in a way, we’re immortal. I can get behind that.”

“You’re not immortal,” Ian said. He needed the bathroom.

“I don’t mean like
immortal
immortal. Just in the re-gen sense.”

“You can only be immortal if you’re alive in the first place.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

Zach started to bite into his scone then put it down. “Wait a minute. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Tell me.”

“You won’t like it,” Ian said, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. He had this idea of waking up as many androids as he could, but he wasn’t so sure that would mean they were really
alive
. It was like a two-step process. Step one: clue the phony person into the fact that he
is
a phony person. Step two: convince the ‘awake’ phony person that he counts, anyway. Maybe he could make androids stay like the faded painting on the wall of his apartment. Only, Ian didn’t feel like doing step one right at the moment. All he wanted to do was find Kylie – the only real girl in Seattle.

“So I won’t like it,” Zach said. “Tell me anyway.”

Ian sighed. “Okay. You aren’t what you think you are.”

“What do I think I am?”

“You think you’re Zach.”

“I am Zach.”

Ian stared at him.

“Okay,” Zach said, “then who am I supposed be?”

“Not who, what. You’re a regenerating android created by the Preservation. Like a robot, kind of.”

“A robot?”

“Not really a robot.”

“What, then?”

“An android, a perfect copy of the real you.”

“I don’t get it. How’d you come up with that bullshit?”

“The Curator said it.”

“Said
what
, exactly?”

“There’s a real you but he lives like a year in the past, before the Hunters blew everything up. The android draws from the real you but it isn’t the real you, it
uses
the real you to
seem
real. This is some kind of fucked up museum. Get it? It’s a human museum. You’re part of it, but you aren’t you.”

“Oh, sure, yeah. Thanks for explaining. Are you out of your fucking
mind?
”

“Maybe.”

“Because that shit you’re saying doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re right. Never mind.”

“I’m
me
,” Zach said.

“
Okay.
”

“Don’t say ‘okay’ like that. Fuck you.”

“Okay – I mean all right, I won’t. Look. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Damn straight.”

“I’m sorry.”

Zach finished his scone like he had a grudge against it, following it down with the last of his now-cold coffee. “Wait a minute,” he said. “If I’m an android thing then so are you, right? So what are you so high and fucking mighty getting on my case about?”

“I’m not getting on your case.”

“And I don’t get what the big difference is. Even if what you say is true, we might as well be us, since–”

“I’m not an android.”

“You’re not.”

Ian looked away. “I mean, I am and I’m not. According to the Curator I died right when they made the Preservation. Now I’m haunting my re-gen body, like it’s a house or something. Like I’m a ghost?”

“That’s messed up,” Zach said. “You aren’t a fucking ghost.”

“Ghost or whatever. Not a ghost. That part’s too complicated.”

“I’m not as dumb as I look.”

“I didn’t mean–”

Zach nodded slowly, staring at him.

“Okay, okay,” Ian said. “The Curator said I was like a genetic marker. The Cloud was messing with human evolution, trying to get us to evolve out of our bodies eventually, and–”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. So it could absorb us or something.”

“So you’re a marker. Whatever that is.”

“Right. And I’m way ahead of the evolution. So when I died I didn’t actually die, I just went out of my body and then dove back into the android. Look, I’m just telling you what the Curator told me.”

Zach looked out the window for a long while, thinking. Finally he appeared to come to some important conclusion. “Are you going to eat your scone?”

“No.”

“Can I have it?”

“Help yourself.”