Life on the Preservation, US Edition (35 page)

T
WO MINUTES TO
midnight. Zero hour. He straddled the idling Chief in the breakdown lane about fifty yards south of the Aurora Bridge deck. His heart was beating like something desperately afraid, hiding within the cavity of his chest with its eyes closed. The Chief’s engine sounded like a blender full of gravel. Cars blasted by him at forty miles an hour, red taillights fleeing down the highway like lost-soul eyes down a well. Ian babied the throttle, keeping the Indian alive.

Now at the moment of action, he asked himself:
What if I’m still on the Preservation?

Really. It could be a trick. What made
him
such an expert? Maybe all the Curator had to do was perform a couple of adjustments and the Advents got longer. Maybe an Advent could last a whole year. Ian would never know it. He would just ride into the bubble, thinking he was on his way to Oakdale and Kylie. Instead, he would be stuck, and re-gen with a blank mind. The trick added up. His fearful estrangement from the supposedly ‘normal’ people around him, even his own sister – was it the old feeling he always experienced, or was it an accurate perception of a non-human world that he had been fooled into believing was gone – another Preservation mind-fuck? The Curator had rejected Ian’s android sister and friend (forget what he said about
Ian
doing the rejecting). But Ian was different. To get rid of
him
the Curator had to trick Ian into rejecting
himself
.

So don’t fall for it; go home.

Barricade yourself in the apartment and paint juju pictures and magic words all over the walls to keep the big bad fake world out.

Ian considered it, seriously. He crept the bike forward, rolling along the breakdown lane to a side street that dropped off the highway just ahead of the bridge. If he crossed the margin,
if
he made it all the way to Oakdale on his father’s piece-of-shit Indian,
if
he found Kylie –
if
all those ifs happened, it would prove the world was a real place. Because Kylie was not a regenerating android fake; she was the only real person he’d ever known. The only person he’d allowed to be that way.

He checked the clock on his phone. Midnight was happening.

He waited for a break in the traffic then cranked the throttle and roared onto the bridge and through his fear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

OAKDALE, WA., OCTOBER, 2011

T
HE
O
LYMPIC
R
EGAL
never met a first run movie. Two years after the rest of the world sold out every show,
Star Trek
meandered into Oakdale. Kylie scrunched down in the back row with a sixteen ounce Pepsi and a small popcorn. She sipped on the Pepsi once in a while but didn’t have an appetite for the popcorn. Slouched so low in her seat, she enjoyed a better view of the silhouetted heads occupying the row in front of her than she did of the movie. Which was fine. She came here to turn her brain off for a couple of hours; the movie was irrelevant.

She liked the guy playing Captain Kirk, though.

He was supposed to be some kind of bad boy in the first part of the movie, and Kylie liked bad boys. She liked them but she didn’t believe in them, not in real life. She
used
to believe a bad boy would rescue her from the smothering tedium of Oakdale. But the real life bad boys she had screwed around with were nothing like James Kirk, let alone James Dean. Mostly they were pathetic jerk offs – with one or two minor exceptions.

Now she had herself a bad
man
. And that was a whole other thing. Last Saturday, at three thousand feet over Dyes Inlet, bouncing along in Father Jim’s little red and white Cessna, the father figure in her life had pushed his big knuckly old man hand between her legs and left it there. Fortunately she was wearing jeans. Neither she nor Jim mentioned the hand. He kneaded her thigh, caressed her in a rough, proprietary fashion. Scared, Kylie wanted to lock her thighs together, but she couldn’t do that and work the Cessna’s rudder pedals. Jim went right on conducting the weekly flying lesson, his voice instructing her through the headset.

“Make a shallow left turn then level out and head for that peninsula, where you see the blue water tower.”

Kylie started the turn. The nose dipped and the airspeed came up. She was flustered, shaking.

Sternly, Father Jim said, “Ease the yoke back. Make a level turn. Eyes on the
ball
, Kylie.”

The ‘ball’ was a little black ball that kind of floated in and out of a box on an instrument. As long as you kept the black ball perfectly centered in the box the plane remained in a clean level turn. It wasn’t
hard
to do – except maybe when the flight instructor had his hand jammed between your legs.

He never moved his hand further up her thigh, never touched her
there
. Never said anything about it. Never changed the script. They were having their flying lesson. Situation normal. Kylie had known Father Jim since she was six years old. She trusted him. He had filled a big gap in her life. A big gap left by her real father. Jim was strong, understanding, helpful. Like the best uncle. Everything he did seemed to be important, non-frivolous. She trusted him. If he told her to do something it must be the right thing to do.

When he left his hand between her legs and didn’t speak of it or try to otherwise fondle her, there must have been
something
right about it. Thinking about it later, she actually wondered if it was really some part of the flying lesson. Like he was using his hand to steady her leg? Her mind so much wanted it to be that way that it presented her with false but supportive details and self-doubts. How bad a person
was Kylie
that she could think for one second Father Jim would touch her sexually? What kind of dirty mind did she have, anyway?

That was a week ago.

Tomorrow, Saturday, was another flying lesson. And slouching in the back of the Olympic Regal, Kylie asked herself: would she be there? She was on the verge of the most important decision of her life, and there were no bad boys to rescue her from it.

A
FTER THE MOVIE
, she dumped her popcorn and Pepsi in one of the big red trash cans in the lobby. The concession lights were already off, the popcorn machine emptied and clean, and a nine-year-old girl was pushing a little carpet sweeper around the blue rug even as a hundred or so people strolled through on their way out. The Olympic was a one man operation. One man and one daughter. Sandy helped her father every Friday and Saturday night. Sandy’s mother was dead, and Ralph DeVris seemed brittle these days. Sandy was a
good
daughter, but Kylie sometimes wondered how many more Fridays and Saturdays she would be willing to surrender, as she got older, became a teenager. At least Sandy
had
a father. Most of the town pitied her and Ralph, but Kylie felt envy.

Kylie ducked into the bathroom, and when she came out she was the last person in the theater besides Sandy and Ralph.

“Goodnight, Kylie,” he said. After his wife died he had lost a ton of weight, but in the last year he had resumed packing it on. His belly sagged over the waist of his khakis like dough sagging over the edge of a pie pan.

“Goodnight,” she said, and pushed through the glass door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. A few people lingered, talking about the movie. She knew a couple of the girls, Sandra and Tiffany.

“Hey!” Sandra said. “We didn’t even know you were
in
there.”

“I was kind of in the back.”

Sandra was tall, with a body that boys loved to sniff around but a horsy face that kept real relationships at bay – at least in the inbred little jerkwater town of Oakdale. Tiffany was her opposite number, a movie star face on a squat little hobbit body. Kylie liked them both because they were smart and unaffected and social outsiders. But at the moment, she wanted to be alone.

Across the street, sitting on the coolest motorcycle Kylie had ever seen, a boy was watching them. He wore a leather jacket over a black hoodie. His silver half-helmet dangled by the chin strap from the handlebar. He had long black hair, which normally was a turn-off for Kylie. But not this time.

Sandra said, “Do you know that guy?”

“No.”

“He’s looking right at you,” Tiffany said.

“He’s looking at all of us.”

“No he isn’t.”

“Whatever.”

“Come on with us to the diner,” Sandra said.

“That guy is really
looking
at you,” Tiffany said.

“I think you’re right,” Kylie said. “Hey,” she called across the street. “What do you think you’re staring at?”

“
Don’t,
” Tiffany said. “Geeze.”

He didn’t appear dangerous. Did and didn’t. He wasn’t serial killer dangerous, but there was definitely an edge, something
up
with him. He smiled, which even from across the street looked forced and unnatural, then dismounted the bike and walked over, hands stuffed in his tight jeans, like a self-conscious way to show he was safe or something.

“Oh, God,” Sandra said. “Here he comes.”

Kylie wasn’t afraid, but she was also aware that Mr. DeVris was in the lobby right behind her and there were still plenty of people strolling around the streets. It wasn’t like Oakdale was New York City, where some crazy guy could probably cut her up like a side of beef in the middle of Times Square without anybody bothering him.

When he got closer he didn’t look quite so young. He wasn’t
old
, but he wasn’t a schoolboy, either. The first words out of his mouth were so unexpected that she laughed.

“Is your name Kylie?” His second words were, “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. How’d you know my name?”

“I guessed?”

“I don’t think so.”

Tiffany and Sandra gaped at them.

“You’re right. I didn’t guess. We sort of know each other, but it’s in a weird way.”

“Do tell,” Kylie said, because she thought it made her sound sophisticated.

“Yeah, do tell,” Tiffany said.

Kylie shot her a look. “Weren’t you guys going to the diner?”

“Yeah,
with you
.” Sandra made big are-you-crazy eyes at her.

Kylie ignored her. She felt totally reckless. The movie hadn’t taken her mind off tomorrow’s flying lesson. The whole week had only intensified her anxiety; and she was farther than ever from making a decision But now, for the first time, talking to this stranger, she felt
clear
. And she wasn’t going to let that clear feeling go, not yet.

“So what’s your name, since you already know mine?”

“Ian.”

Behind him, Tiffany mouthed the word
fake
.

“And what’s this weird way we supposedly know each other?”

He glanced back at Tiffany and Sandra. “Uh, can we walk? I mean just around here. I’ll try to explain it.”

“I guess so.”

Sandra wagged her hands. “Kylie–”

“I’ll meet you guys at the diner in a few minutes. Okay?”

“You better,” Tiffany said.

T
HEY WALKED.
I
AN
kept his hands in his pockets. All the way from Seattle he had pictured this moment and tried to imagine what he would say that wouldn’t make him sound like a lunatic. Last night he rented a room at the Motel 6 a few miles down the highway. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and no matter how hard he tried to think of the right words there simply weren’t any to cover this situation. He had finally given up, hoping vaguely that if he found Kylie she would somehow recognize him, even though he hadn’t known her as an android, and only androids had the dream connection to their originals in 2011.“Look,” he finally said, “what if we were the only real people in the world?”

“That’s dumb. We’re not.”

“But what if we were?”

“Are you going to tell me how you knew my name or not?”

He took a deep breath and sighed, “We used to know each other in the future.”

Kylie laughed. “That’s original.”

“It’s true.”

“You’re a time traveler from the future, is that it? Come on, we’re walking back this way now.”

They had reached the end of the street, the edge of Oakdale’s business district. Kylie turned back the way they had come – back to all the lights and people. Was she afraid of him? Ian stood with his hands in his pockets, feeling frustrated and a little hopeless.

Kylie waved him forward. “Well, come on, future-man.”

He shook his head. “What I said? It’s true. But not exactly the way it sounds like.”

“You didn’t say
anything
except we knew each other in the future. That’s
obviously
not true.”

He walked with her again, back towards the Regal. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But look, all I’m saying is you should think seriously about moving to Seattle before next October fifth.”

“Why?”

“If I told you, you’d laugh at me again.”

“I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at something you
said
. There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, whatever. Look, I want to give you something.” From his back pocket he withdrew a folded piece of paper. Last night in the motel room he had carefully printed his name, phone number and address on the paper. He handed it to Kylie and she unfolded it, frowned, looked puzzled, almost irritated.

“Why are you giving me this? Who are you? Just tell me.”

He ached to tell her. But the more detail he presented her with the less she would believe him. Kylie was real – which meant this world was real – but she didn’t know him and he couldn’t explain anything to her. She wouldn’t accept his story, not a word of it, no matter how sincere he was. He had known this yesterday, had known it when he sat across the street on his bike, waiting for her to come out of the theater. And he knew it more than ever right at this painful moment. Emotion tightened his throat, choking off his next words. He swallowed hard. This was the thing he always feared, wasn’t it? You let someone in, you
love
someone, and they leave you. It was so freaking simple and the pain was so easy to avoid: Don’t love. It wasn’t Kylie’s fault. She didn’t even know she had left him, since she had never met him in the first place.