Life on the Preservation, US Edition (34 page)

Ian found his phone and slid it open. The tiny date/time in the corner display read: 5-Oct-11.

He felt more
there
– in the 2012 Preservation – than
here
, in the mundane Seattle apartment he woke up in every day. But he had no doubt of where – and
when
– this was. The Curator had told him the Preservation androids drew their illusion of life from connections across a space-time rift to the sleeping minds of the real Seattle population. When the Preservation Dome collapsed, so did the connection.

And Ian woke up. Remembering.

“This is too weird.”

He looked around the room, which was the usual disaster. Notably absent: the smell of markers and paint; his Goya murals were gone, erased by the reality shift, the walls and ceiling restored to blank plaster. No, not erased. In the real apartment they had never existed in the first place.

His old backpack slumped in a corner of the closet like a dead dog. He’d flung it there when he quit
getting up
, quit bombing the city, quit the midnight world of spray cans and outrunning the police. Since then, life hadn’t been so good. Not that it had been exactly
good
before. But at least graffiti used to shatter the recurring tedium and low-grade depression. Now he was in full-on drone mode most of the time, unless he was high.

Except that wasn’t true anymore. Now was then. And Ian had brought something back across the Preservation dream warp or whatever you called it.

A purpose.

He swung the backpack out by the straps and unzipped it on the bed.
This is a test of the National Reality-Check Network
. A few cans, a random palette of markers. He grabbed the black marker and uncapped it. The tip was pristine. It would be, though, even if he were still living on the Preservation. But his walls presented dingy, blank faces, except for the Nihiljizum poster. The nightmare ‘stay’ murals were gone. That more than anything else proved he was where he was.

Kneeling on the bed, he applied the black marker to the wall next to his pillow and wrote:
know WHO you are
. Immediately, his good feeling began to ascend. He jumped up on the mattress, jazzed and excited, and wrote the same words on the ceiling. A reminder. He proceeded to letter the same reminder onto the wall over his desk, the kitchen cabinet where he kept his coffee mugs, the apartment door (changing markers by now, the black one gone dry) – even the bathroom mirror, the fresh green marker squeaking on the glass.

When he finished, there wasn’t a direction he could look or a room he could retreat to without seeing at least one
know WHO you are.

That was good. Because Ian
did
know who he was, knew that if he wasn’t careful he would start doubting the whole thing. And as soon as he doubted it, the reality of the Preservation would begin to slip away from him. Which would be bad, considering Ian and Ian alone knew the exact day on which the world would end.

But he didn’t really believe he would lose track of that knowledge. Because he had something beautiful and perfect in his head that was more effective than all the reminders he’d just put up.

Kylie was alive. Here, in this now, Kylie was alive.

“H
OW’S IT GOING
?” he said to Zach on the phone.

“How’s it going?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. How’s it going with you?”

“Fantastic. Man, when you woke up today, did you remember a dream?”

“Ah, no.”

“Did you have a really bad headache?”

“What are you smoking?”

“I’m just asking you a question.”

“No, I didn’t have a headache,” Zach said.

“And you really don’t remember anything?”

“Anything like
what?
”

“Nothing. Never mind. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Dude, whatever.”

Square one.

H
E SAT IN
a Starbucks on Second Avenue with his sister, who was sipping green tea. Ian slurped at a double latte. It tasted burned. Well, it was Starbucks.

“Icky, how
are
you?”

“Fine, good. Really good.”

“You look tired.”

“I’m a little tired.” Why did she always have to do the big sister thing, like she was filling in for their mother? And how easy it was to slip right back into their accustomed relationship. Understandable on Vanessa’s side; she knew nothing of the future Preservation or the evolved relationship her android would share with him.

“Well. It’s good to finally see you again,” she said. “It’s been so long. I’m glad you called.”

“Yeah. Listen, Ness. Do you remember anything... strange?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Strange how?”

“Just strange. What I’m talking about is a dream. Or you might think it was a dream. It’s hard to explain.”

She gave him a long, measuring look. “Icky, what is it?”

Like Zach, she remembered nothing. Ian began to lose his high feeling; he couldn’t help it. On the Preservation it had been relatively easy to ‘wake up’ an android. But here in the real world how would he ever convince real people that the world was going to end in a year and he, the ultimate loser, was humanity’s only chance? He couldn’t begin to say it. Vanessa would think he was crazy. “It’s nothing. Never mind.”

“Okay, Icky. By the way, I found something you might want to see.”

“What?”

“Let me show you.”

She rummaged in her handbag and took out a little green book with a tied binding. It looked old. She handed it to Ian. On the front was the word JOURNAL.

“What’s this?”

“Mom’s diary, from when she was a teenager.”

“You’re kidding. Where’d you get it?”

“That box of personal stuff Dad left. I’ve had it in a storage locker for years. I never wanted to look at it. To be honest, I didn’t want to be reminded of the past. My life is good now, Icky. Good enough, anyway. But when you called I thought about the box and decided to go through it, so we could divide it up or whatever you wanted to do. There were a lot of pictures, birth certificates, that kind of stuff. The diary was in the bottom of the box.”

Ian opened the little green book. The paper had a faint, musty smell. He read the first page. It was written in blue ink, an eccentric flowing script, cursive mixed with slanted block printing. Exactly the way Ian wrote longhand. The date at the top of the page was June 2, 1965. His mother had written, exuberantly:
Last day of school, yah!

Ian looked up from the page. Vanessa was grinning. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“It’s like a different person wrote it.”

“Not a different person, Icky. The same person, but one we never knew. Although I think I saw her a little bit when I was a kid. When things were more all right. Before she started to slip away?”

“I guess I just got the slipping away part.”

Ian turned a few pages over. The girl his mother had been was so alive and
excited
about everything. Not the withdrawn, brooding mother he knew, the woman who cried for no reason, who cut herself, who cared too much then didn’t care at all, about anything. The woman who swallowed a whole lot of pills, then took a bath.

Vanessa touched his arm. “Why don’t you come out to my place this weekend and we’ll go through the box together?”

Instinctively, he wanted to pull his arm away from her touch. He fought the instinct. Waking up here was like waking up in a room he’d carefully arranged and was loath by habit and fear to change. Part of the arrangement consisted of booby-traps designed to keep him safe and alone. He turned a page over in his mother’s diary. Some boy kissed her at the movies. What did it even mean, that his mother could have been the girl in this diary? Was anybody one complete person through their life?

“Icky, what about coming over Saturday? There’s a great Thai place right around the–

“I’ll see what’s happening and give you a call.”

“Please come, Icky.”

“I will. I’m just saying I’ll give you a call first is all. I don’t really leave the city that much.”

“I live in
Wallingford
. That’s not leaving the city.”

North of the suicide bridge,
Ian thought. “I’ll call,” he said.

“All right, Icky. You keep the diary, okay? I’ve already looked through it.”

“Thanks.”

His phone rang.

“But I’ll be disappointed, if you don’t come,” Vanessa said. “I mean it.”

“I have to get this.” He opened his phone. It was Juan, a guy he worked with at Charlie’s.

“Ian, man, are you coming in or what?”

“I don’t know. I have the day off, I thought.”

“Since when?”

Since a year from now, when I bump shifts so I can ride the Chief to Pullman and see my girlfriend. Oh yeah, the girlfriend who isn’t even my girlfriend anymore.

“Since never, I guess. Sorry, man. I’m on my way.”

S
URREAL.
F
RYING UP
orders, scraping bubbling grease off the hot top, the usual riot of clanging pans and dishes, the stifling heat. Ian re-enacted the moves he’d made hundreds of times before: building sandwiches, omelets, frying meat and onions. His body could have performed this function by itself. In fact, it was, as he checked out mentally, watching his hands doing their tasks. This wasn’t the out-of-body weirdness he’d experienced repeatedly on the Preservation but rather a return to his usual estrangement. The faces of waitresses appeared at the order window like a series of animated masks. Juan sweated, joked, rocked and swayed, his hands flying over the hot-top, like some fantastic wind-up thing. For Ian, the real world wasn’t that different from the world of android fakes; he could almost x-ray-vision see the biological mechanics of meat and bone through Juan’s skin.

One year until the end of the world.

Ian put his spatula down. “Gotta take a break.”

“You can’t take no break now, Cholo!”

The order wheel sprouted new slips as fast as they plucked the old ones off. “Got to. Sorry.”

Ian walked out of the kitchen. On the loading dock he removed his apron and stared at the sky. It was a typical October gray. He had this idea he was going to throw the apron in the dumpster and go do something important, because the world was soon ending and he was the only one who knew it. Of course, he didn’t know
what
important thing he was going to do, but it had to be more important than frying another Monte Cristo sandwich.

Behind him, the door squeaked open on its rusty spring hinge and Carla, the head waitress, said, “Juan says if you’re out here to please come back because otherwise he’s gonna have a stroke.”

Ian’s mind grasped at future disaster, but for a year he would still have to pay the rent and eat. “Yeah, okay.”

He slowly put his apron back on.

S
IX HOURS LATER
he was back at the apartment, standing in a hot shower. He planted his hands on the wall and let scalding hot water pound the back of his neck. The sharp reality of the Preservation had softened and dimmed and now dwelt in his mind like an ordinarily vivid dream. By tomorrow what would it be? Gone, like any other dream? A few drifty pieces?

He cranked the shower off.

Standing in front of the sink with his toothbrush, he wiped a film of steam off the mirror – and the heel of his hand came away green.

know WHO you are

H
E STRETCHED OUT
on the bed and cracked his mother’s diary. Most entries were short, less than a page, sometimes only a line or two. He read the entire diary, looking for any reference to depression, any hint of seriously bad mental states – looking for the dark turn in the road. But it wasn’t there. The closest it came was stuff like:
Sad. Margaret’s brother has cancer. I made her a card, but I can’t do anything to cheer her up. I wish I could. Now I need somebody to cheer me up, too.

How was this the same person he knew as ‘mother’?

Know who you are
. Did he? Would a night’s sleep dull the picture of himself he now held in his mind? Would the Preservation and all that happened there be ‘just a dream’ like in some bullshit story? Because he did know himself, Ian could see the future, all right. This morning, realizing Kylie was out there, alive, he had been filled with excitement and something like joy. Of course, she wouldn’t know him. She would be just like Ness and Zach. There was no real point in approaching her. So he would, what, just pick up his life where he left it last night when he fell asleep? And Kylie could be the ultimate ‘safe’ girl for him – conveniently distant. The ultimate safe girl, since in this timeframe he hadn’t even met her, had never shared even one intimate hour with her. In 2011, Kylie was no more to him than a longing dream. Had at least some of that first joy been based on the perfectly balanced estrangement of the situation? Kylie would never dump him, never require a mutual declaration of love – would never require
anything
, since she didn’t even know he existed.

And it could get worse.

By tomorrow, he would begin to doubt she even existed beyond the idea he held of her inside his own head. Things were already becoming slippery. Was Kylie just a girl he had a dream about and thought the dream was real? He could sleep-walk through the next year. And this time when the Hunters burned down the world and the Preservation sprang up, Ian might not return to haunt his android. It was his
suicide
that made him reach back to life. This time there would be no Sarah-situation. Knowing it was coming, he would make sure it never occurred.

So in the end, there would be no one to wake up the androids. Christ, there might not even be a Preservation. According to the Curator, Ian himself had ‘Lensed’ it into existence.

He needed to remember what was going on. He needed to stay
on top
of it. Otherwise, slippage. And when the world ended, so would he. There would be no Preservation, no android people to wake up, and nobody to wake them up if there were.

The end.

H
E NEVER KNEW
Kylie’s last name. But Google ‘Kylie Oakdale Facebook’, and you get a headshot of an achingly familiar face – not a mask but a memory toggle activating a flood of emotion. Maybe one of the memory toggle’s favorite things turns out to be Friday night movies at the little town’s Olympic Regal Cinema.