Life on the Preservation, US Edition (3 page)

R
EPEAT.
T
HEN GRAB
a cup of Joe.

I
AN
P
ALMER CAME
to himself at the kitchen counter of his studio apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Wearing only boxer shorts, he was pouring steaming hot water into a single-cup Melitta coffee filter – like watching himself perform a familiar task, not quite there yet. His senses assembled themselves haltingly. The aroma of the coffee, Colombian roast fresh ground from Espresso Vivace, drew him forth. He lifted away the filter in its little plastic holder, still dripping, and set it atop a crusty pile of dishes in the sink. Almost fully present now, he added a dollop of heavy cream to his coffee, slopping some onto the counter. He set the carton down, his hand trembling. Staring at the hand, he clenched it into a tight, shaking fist, then flexed the fingers a couple of times. It seemed all right now, the tremor gone. Ian picked up his coffee mug and carried it into the other room.

The hardwood floor was cold under his bare feet. He stopped abruptly. Three pill bottles stood on the bedside table with their caps removed. Ian closed his eyes, trying to remember, then opened them again. If he had taken the pills he wouldn’t be standing here. Yet he seemed to remember taking them, or was it the intention he remembered? He couldn’t distinguish.

Ian’s heart began to beat rapidly. His breath shortened. He put his mug down and capped the bottles, deliberately not acknowledging the depleted quantities, moving fast, like a kid hiding his pornography before the door opened. He returned the bottles to the bathroom, catching a glimpse, when he slammed the mirrored cabinet, of his sweat-shiny face.

Standing at the window with his coffee, he racked the blinds up, his breathing and heartbeat under control again. In the alley twenty feet below, his restored 1947 Indian Chief leaned on its kick-stand, front wheel with its distinctive wide-flaring fender cocked over. Not really
his
bike. His Dad had given him two parting gifts. He didn’t want either one but kept them both. That was three years ago. The other ‘gift’ was kind of a family heirloom: .38 Police Special. Fucking
Dragnet
gun. It had belonged to Ian’s grandfather, originally. Ian wrapped it in a towel, stuffed it in a shoebox and put it way back on the closet shelf. Out of easy reach and temptation. He knew it was there, though. Like the prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet.

The sun, low-angled and rising, lit up the Chief’s brake cover and winked on dull, spotted chrome. The “magnificent machine” as his father used to refer to it, was looking tired; Ian rode the Chief but didn’t take care of it beyond the rare oil change. He knew approaching a vintage bike in this manner was tantamount to slow murder, but so what? For Ian, the Chief was basic transportation, and maybe a grudge on wheels.

“Stupid,” he said, not meaning the bike.

He thumbed Sarah’s speed-dial number on his cell. This was the thing he had dreaded. Sarah thought he was coming to see her, but that wasn’t going to happen. With any luck at all she would be asleep and he could leave a message, delay the inevitable break-up conversation. The phone began to ring in her dorm room at WSU, two hundred and eighty-five miles east, in Pullman, Washington. Except Ian suddenly had the eerie feeling it
wasn’t
ringing in Pullman. He had the even more eerie feeling Pullman didn’t even
exist
.

While the phone rang through, Ian let the tension in his mind go slack – a meditative technique a therapist had taught him back in high school. It was the only useful thing he retained from six months of sessions. That guy had been waiting the whole time for Ian to break down, but Ian never did. And at night he was WHO and nobody could touch him or ever would.

For a suspended moment between rings, raindrops appeared on the Chief’s red paint job, cracked leather seat, and chrome. Ian’s eyes widened and he threw his attention forward again. The slack disappeared, and so did the raindrops. It was a brilliantly sunny morning in Seattle. October fifth, 2012,
I’m losing it,
he thought.

Sarah picked up. “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

Sleepy sounds. Then: “Ian? What
time
is it?”

Like an echo with variations:
What time
is
it?
Or:
Baby, what time is it?

Deja Voodoo.

“It’s early. Seven-ish.”

“Is something wrong?”

Or:
What’s wrong?
or
What’s the matter, Ian?

Like he’d had this conversation already, more than once, perhaps dozens of times. Or was
about
to have it only a few seconds ahead of the present moment, and the dialogue was still fluid. The words felt both remote and too close, almost as if he were talking to himself – or with some kind of souped-up Eliza program. Listening to Sarah’s responses, he wondered if a really sophisticated program might trick him into believing he was conversing with a human being.

“Ian? Are you there?”

Am I?
he thought.

The super-Eliza idea was beyond paranoid. Other echoes traveled up from a buried place: his mother raving; bloody Pollock art on the kitchen walls. And later: a lifeless manikin in the tub. He hadn’t actually
seen
her body, only heard his father, drunk, describe it. What was real? Ian was used to restraining these echoes and phantoms, and he did so now, bringing the force of his will down like a wall of steel.

Empty air on the phone line. He could feel Sarah, or the program, waiting to speak echoes.

Ian killed the connection.

The real Sarah Darbro would call him back. But his cell didn’t ring. So she wasn’t real. Or it could mean that she knew he had been wanting to break up with her and had decided that this was his idiot method of doing it. What she couldn’t know, what he found impossible to explain, was that he was as desperate
not
to break up with her as he was
to
break up with her. Distance and intimacy was the irreconcilable equation of his life.

He sipped his coffee, gazed out the window, and experimented with his elastic concentration. Wet Indian, dry Indian. Sun flared across the dirty window pane. Shadows occupied the room then instantly retreated. Ian began to lose himself.

The phone rang. It wasn’t Sarah
or
Super Eliza.

Ten minutes later Ian shambled into Espresso Vivace. The familiar aromas, the voices of a dozen overlapping conversations, the expected baristas (Cyndi of the Peter Pan hair and plaid shirt waved at him) – the world ordered itself around him. He bought a double cappuccino. All the tables – Formica-topped ‘kitchen’ tables and bent chrome chairs with vinyl seats – were occupied, so he sat at the wrap-around counter. Other people at the counter stared at their phones, thumb-stabbing virtual keyboards like they were trying to crack the secret code and release their souls from the little boxes. Ian watched Cyndi and the other baristas work and didn’t let his mind wander or, God forbid, go
slack
.

After a while his best friend Zach came in and sat on the stool next to him “Man oh man,” Zach said.

“Hey.”

Zach was lanky and round-shouldered, with a shaved head that really didn’t improve his looks much, and a pair of square, black plastic-framed geek glasses that he was always punching back up the bridge of his nose. On any other day Ian would have been surprised or even amazed to see his friend at this hour of the morning. But this wasn’t any other day. Zach had called him.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Zach said.

“What’s happening?”

“You’re not going to fucking believe me.”

“I might.”

“Seriously, you won’t.”

“I won’t unless you
tell
me.”

Zach looked around the room at the other customers, swiveling on his stool to make sure he didn’t miss anyone. Then he leaned into Ian.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s like – ‘
they’re here
’.”

“Who’s here?”

“I don’t know.”

“
Zach
.”

“Okay, okay. There’s this guy. I call him the Boogeyman. He’s like stalking me or something. And he doesn’t belong here. I mean I don’t even think he’s human. Except in some other way he
does
belong here, and
we’re
the ones who don’t belong.”

“Thanks for including me. It’s a game idea, right?”

At twenty-two, Zach was a staff writer for a Bellevue-based game company called Mindwerks, and he was very good. His most popular creation was a ‘future noir Western’ called
Peacemaker
, a game that ratcheted the violence into the M zone and beyond. Ian had known Zach since grade school. At Mindwerks Zach pulled down 90k; Ian grilled things at Charlie’s and didn’t declare his tips.

“Come
on
,” Zach said.

“Okay, okay. Tell me about the Boogeyman. And trust me, I’ve got something even weirder to tell you.”

Zach pushed his glasses up with his index finger. “Yeah?”

Ian picked up his empty cup, put it down, studied his hand for tremors. “Yeah, but you go first.”

“Okay, look. I wake up today and I’m majorly weirded out. For one thing, what the fuck am I doing awake at seven A.M.? It’s unnatural. But I have this feeling that I’ve got to get
moving
. There’s shit to do, only I don’t know what it is, right? The other thing, it’s not like I usually wake up, especially on a freaking Saturday. It’s like all of a sudden I’m
there
, wide-awake. Practically before I know it I’m up eating a bear claw. I mean there’s no wake-up transition. I’m on my feet and the day is rockin’.”

Something uncoiled in Ian’s stomach.
Repeat. Then grab a cup of joe.

“I’m all anxious and nervous,” Zach said. “So I call you. It’s like I’m
supposed
to call you. I’ve got this energy and I’ve got to do something with it. On the way here I pass a guy sitting on that bench across from my building. And I
recognize
him. Not like, Hey, it’s good old Bob. I mean I don’t know how I recognize him. But this is what I think. I think I recognize him the same way a rabbit recognizes a fox, even though it’s never seen one. It’s like
genetic
memory. You always recognize the predators. I walk by him, and the predator feeling is all over me.”

“What did he do?” Ian said.

“Nothing. Sat there with this dopy look on his face. I keep walking. And all this shit rises up in my head. The whole Boogeyman thing. Like I’ve known about that guy forever. Now get this.” He gripped Ian’s arm, digging his fingers in.

“
What?
” Ian said.

Zach glanced at Cyndi, who was kind of watching them while she slung espresso, then whispered. “I think we – I mean you and me, bro – are the only rabbits in town.”

Ian stared at him.

“Tell me yours,” Zach said.

He told Zach about the phone conversation with Sarah that was full of echoes and déjà vu’s. For now he kept the slack mind trick to himself.

“I started getting the idea that I was talking to
myself
,” Ian finished. “Or to some kind of super Eliza program.”

“What’s an Eliza program?”

“Back in the sixties this guy Weizenbaum wrote a program that imitated a basic psychiatric interview by rephrasing people’s statements. It fooled everybody.”

“That’s cool,” Zach said.

“Yeah, but this
isn’t
cool. This is scary.” Ian rubbed his forehead. “Don’t you get it? What if there isn’t any real Sarah out there? Do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Call somebody. I mean somebody who doesn’t live in the city. Call your brother.”

“Why?”

“I want to know if your conversation echoes like mine did.”

“It won’t.” Zach didn’t sound too sure.

“Call.”

Zach thumbed in a text. “I never actually call him.”

A moment later Zach’s phone chimed.

“What’s he say?” Ian asked.

“Sent a fucking smiley face.”

“Is that normal? Hey, what’s wrong?”

“The Boogeyman. Shit, he’s coming in.”

The Boogeyman walked into Espresso Vivace. Ian watched him closely. Zach fidgeted with his glasses.

“That’s him?” Ian asked.

“Yeah.”

“He looks harmless.”

Zach’s Boogeyman was maybe twenty pounds overweight. He wore tan Dockers, an REI Gore-Tex parka and a Mariners baseball cap. Standing in line on the other side of the wrap-around counter, he glanced at Ian and Zach but his gaze didn’t linger. He ordered something and paid for it. Presently the cashier handed him a to-go cup and a scone, and he left.

“See?” Zach said.

“See what?”

“He acted so fucking normal.”

“He
was
normal. Though not for this neighborhood.”

“Didn’t you get the vibe?”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t notice anything weird about him.”

“No, I mean: come
on
. Let’s follow him.” Zach stood up.

Ian remained on his stool. “Following people is crazy.”

“So what?”

Ian gestured to Cyndi. She came over. “What’s up with you two?” she said.

“Did you see that guy with the Mariners cap a minute ago?”

“Sure.”

“What’d you think of him?”

“A harmless dork. He bought a lemon scone.”

“See?” Ian said to Zach.

Zach was on his feet. “Can we please go before we lose him?”

“Okay, okay.”

They followed the Boogeyman to Broadway, hanging back a discreet distance. Ian, nocturnal as a bat, found the early morning ambience disorienting. Capitol Hill, and Broadway in particular, was ground zero for the city’s GLBT sub-culture. In this neighborhood of gay couples, severe haircuts, aggressive piercings and chains, leather, transgender experiments, fashionable and unfashionable tats, runaway kids and junkies, the Boogeyman’s yuppie-lite presentation should have stood out like a crust of Wonder Bread in a bowl of jambalaya. Instead, he almost fit in with the crazy early-bird types on their way to work – Zach’s Boogeyman with his scone and coffee and bland, touristy gawking.

“What the fuck is
that?
” Zach said, pointing at WHO CARES spray-painted on the side of Dick’s Drive-In. “I thought you quit.”