Duplex (4 page)

“How did you know I was crying?” Mary asked, sniffling.

But it was too late; the sorcerer had left the stall.

The dactilo port filled the bathroom with its sudden infusion of brilliant blue-violet light. Mary folded herself over her knees and burst into tears; from her head came the soundless commotion of a port set on vibrate. “MARY! MARY!” said the robots. “MARY! MARY!” It sounded like $@&!!**$$#!!! Mary pulled herself together and returned to the restaurant.

Eddie was sitting exactly as she’d left him, only now there was food on the table in front of him getting cold.

“Why didn’t you start without me?” Mary asked. She felt the way she often did after crying, like there wasn’t as much of her as there’d been before.

When she took her seat she could feel the sorcerer’s body aligned perfectly with her own, back to back, on the other side of the booth, exuding heat through the leather upholstery. If she moved to get away from him he moved too. “Look,” she said. “They gave us the shad anyway.”

The fish was positioned in the exact middle of her plate next to the sac containing its roe. At three o’clock there was a mound of creamed corn, a corn muffin at six; Mary couldn’t recognize the items at nine and twelve. “This isn’t what we ordered,” she said, pushing the food around with her fork. She made a face. “I waited and waited,” she whispered. “It was awful. Did you forget?”

Eddie leaned toward Mary; there was a lewd curl to his lip. “It was
her
doing,” he mouthed, pointing. “She was acting really weird.”

“How do you mean?”

“Shh,” Eddie said. “I don’t want
him
to hear. She came over here while you were gone and when the waiter arrived she placed the order but she hadn’t even opened the menu. She told me not to worry and when I said, worry about what, she looked at me like I was kidding. She told me every thing would be OK in the end.”

In the next booth sat the sorcerer’s date, Miss Vicks, clad in luminous black satin and coughing as she exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke that arose, tapering from top to bottom like a ghost in the empty darkness above Mary’s head. Smoking was against the law but the sorcerer was beyond the law and so by extension was his companion, who looked so little like their old elementary school teacher it was hard to believe her capable of teaching anybody anything. Then again, they’d never seen her on a date before.

“I’ve heard the band is supposed to be out of this world,” Miss Vicks was saying, ashing her barely smoked cigarette in the remains of her dinner.

Mary slid across her seat to the side of the booth nearest the wall, and the sorcerer slid with her.

“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.

“Nothing,” Mary said. Her upper lip was moist with perspiration. “Let’s ask for the check, shall we?”

“The band, Vicky?” the sorcerer was saying. “Good luck getting
me
on the dance floor.”

Later at the prom Mary rested her head on Eddie’s shoulder. This was what the girlfriend was supposed to do. She tried to hear his heartbeat through the fabric of his tuxedo jacket, and the fact that she wasn’t sure whether she could hear it made her think about how hard it was for any girl to ever know whether her love was being returned. The gymnasium had been transformed, showers of tiny colored lights completely masking the dark wood walls and the scuffed hardwood floor and the narrow balcony that circled the upper level where Eddie and his fellow athletes ran laps in inclement weather and where the chaperones were now passing around a bottle of vodka.

The theme was the Rain of Beads, which some teachers had objected to as inappropriate, but their objections had been overridden by the prom committee. If it wasn’t possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present’s cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living? Red lights for blood and yellow for plasma and blue for tears—human beings needed to be proud they were made of such things!

Couples twirled snowflake-like past Mary and Eddie, who were barely moving. No one’s gown was as perfect as hers, not even the prom queen’s. A photographer snapped several shots for the local newspaper, capturing the pair from behind, a few of Mary’s moist brown locks escaping the upsweep of her do, the fingers of Eddie’s one hand tight around her waist and the other outspread across her shoulder blades. Everyone had seen Eddie fly sideways above center field with that same hand outspread, the ball nesting in his glove like an egg. He had been scouted by the major leagues—unlike most of his classmates, Eddie had a future.

The king and queen of the prom presided over the affair from their separate thrones, holding hands. These were Roy Duffy and Cindy XA—the vote hadn’t even been close. Who handsomer than Roy in his beaded tux, who prettier than Cindy in her matching gown? Would the king and queen have sex following the dance like most of the other couples? They’d been seen kissing in the field parking lot after baseball practice. Roy’s knuckleball was all but unhittable; Cindy could assume positions the other cheer leaders only dreamed of.

The irony was not lost on any of us that despite the theme there was a robot on the throne.

T
HE STORY OF THE RAIN OF BEADS GOES BACK FAR enough to seem like it never really happened. The girl I first heard it from was always telling stories—she was one of the older girls and all the little girls were in awe of her. We were sitting on the porch stoop one night in late summer, trading cards. This was what you did if you were a girl—it was your calling. The cards were separated into packs according to category: still lives, famous paintings, horses, dogs. Most of the trading cards had been bought in a store and had an unpleasant texture that made them less desirable than the jokers stolen from the decks of cards everyone’s parents used for bridge or poker. These playing cards were larger and smoother to the touch and often came in pairs. The girl wanted a black horse to complete the pair with her white horse. Her name was Janice.

Generally speaking the adults on the block considered her a liar. She said her mother beat her with a willow branch and she had stripes on her back to prove it. She said humans had been right when they said the world was flat and round like a coin and you could fall off the edge. Many things everyone had been told weren’t real turned out to be real. The world had edges but you couldn’t see them going, only when you were trying to come back. Janice also said she had a brother who died of leukemia and that, amazingly enough, turned out to be true. Like everyone else, she could push buttons on a console and find out whatever she wanted to know about anybody or anything. For this reason she kept everything exceptional about herself hidden.

Janice’s parents were at work all day long. She was their only living child and they loved her dearly, though the older she got the harder it was for them to show it. Her mother worked in a lab at the university; her father sold the other fathers clothing. The newlyweds in the house that was the other half of theirs were paid to keep an eye on her when she got home from school, but the whole street knew they spent every waking hour in bed. If she got lonely she had the family pet for company. She taught the dog to balance a cracker on his nose until she said OK, and then he’d dip his head and let the cracker drop to the floor and then he’d eat it.

The afternoons had a way of stretching endlessly in all directions as if time were taffy, something a person could get caught in. Janice said time was different now. It used to be sadder. The couple next door fought to get themselves in the mood. They would scream at one another and then Janice could hear the bedsprings creaking through the wall behind her parents’ headboard.

Once there was a girl, Janice said. Like most girls, she was a sap. By now everyone was listening, even the girls who were pretending not to.

In the beginning the fair tree of the Void abounded with flowers, Janice said, acts of compassion of many kinds. The fair tree of the Void also lacked compassion. The two trees sprang from one seed—think of it like code, she suggested—and for that reason there was but one fruit. The girl in the story spent a lot of time, like most girls, wishing for love. If she could have been cut open the boy she had a crush on would have been able to see her inner markings, even though they were practically invisible, like the black dots inside a banana. As it was he never had a chance.

He was a nice person but for some reason he thought it would be funny to pass the girl a note asking her to meet him at the Woodard mansion after school. He lived one block over, Janice said, above the movie theater; he probably got the idea to send the note from some friend. The theater was a family business and that’s why to this day they never showed funny movies.

After she returned home the girl washed the breakfast dishes. She stood there with her head bowed, crying into the sink, leaving the nape of her neck exposed all the way through the many different layers of her house and the debris floating in the upper atmosphere to the X-ray vision of the operational apparatus of the scow hovering in the air above.

Think of them like gods, Janice said, because that’s what they are. The nape of a human neck is especially easy to see through—that’s why they love it when we bow our heads. It doesn’t have anything to do with praying. Prayers bore them.

Unlike the boy she had a crush on the apparatus could see through the girl perfectly; it knew it wasn’t meant for her but that didn’t stop it. It was her fate, which had nothing to do with love. It had nothing to do with the boy and the note, either. Things just worked out this way sometimes.

Janice leaned in close; her attention to personal hygiene left a lot to be desired, and her breath was often stale. Everyone knew she’d stolen the fair tree of the Void somewhere, since her vocabulary wasn’t normally that impressive.

Do you know why the girl was crying? Janice asked. She was crying because she felt sorry for the world and everyone in it. The world was sadder then, too, and she wanted everyone to be happy like she was, meeting the boy. If she hadn’t wanted that, things would be different now, though not the way she hoped. After she dried the dishes the girl put on her jacket and got on her bike and started out, even though she’d promised her mother and father she wouldn’t go anywhere before they arrived home from work. The bike was a red Schwinn with a bell and a basket over the handlebars, sort of like the bike Mary used to have before she married the sorcerer and moved to town.

It was the time of day when the moon and sun are both out at once. The girl rode to the end of the block, across the vacant lot and up the hill past the school and the water tower and over the trestle bridge. The shadow of the scow rode behind her, tapping her onward like a cat toying with the mouse it’s about to eat. She loved pumping her legs, feeling her heart beating—from above it was the size of the end of a pencil. The street ran along the western edge of the Woodard Estate and the only way in was a driveway so overgrown with vines she would have ridden right past it if it weren’t for the two goddesses crouched atop pillars at the entryway. “Young lady!” Aphrodite called. “Over here!” She was missing her nose, but Athena was missing her whole head, which was a pity since what the girl needed to hear more than anything at this point was the voice of reason.

I’m not telling her name, Janice said, so don’t bother to ask. It would make it hard to pay attention to the story.

At first the driveway was almost impassable, and the girl had to get down off her bike to wheel it in. She could see little eyes suspended in the thicket of bushes on either side of her, could hear the sound of small things moving under the blanket of vines, but she was too excited to feel frightened. The light was behaving the way it always did at the end of the day, the sun having hit bottom like an apple thrown down a well. Perhaps this is why she didn’t notice when the driveway began to change before her very eyes.

Now the lamps went on, guiding her footsteps. Mechanical things are able to communicate with one another, the way mushrooms grow out of a single long strand of fungus underground. The road was clear of brush and laid with paving stones and up ahead she could see the mansion, the windows brightly lit.

Very eyes, someone said. What are very eyes?

Shh! said someone else.

Inside the mansion the scow’s operational apparatus was waiting for her. The system was much less sophisticated in those days. It was a young man, but everything was not quite right about him. Still, it was extremely handsome, in an overly polished, highly buffed way. It could dance, like most robots, better than humans, and the girl was clumsy on her feet. Her father said she could trip on a smooth linoleum floor. She knew right away she’d been tricked, but she didn’t mind, because it was giving her its special pleading look, the one it had been designed to give her, to win her heart. It had nothing to do with love! It was her fate, remember? It could come from out of nowhere and mow a person down just like sickness, and no matter how many things the doctors did to try to stop it, no matter how many machines they brought in or how many parts of the sick person’s body they replaced with parts of a healthy person’s body, it kept moving, killing everything in its path, until all that was left was a jar of ashes.

She was a nice middle-class girl and he was a garbage man, which is the way this often happened in movies. And then he would turn out to be a prince or something like that.

They danced and they danced; the robot knew exactly how to lead the girl to make it seem like she knew what she was doing, and the music helped as well, because it was coming from a peardrum. Next time, he said, bring your friends. He encouraged her to imagine herself whirling among them, the most graceful and beautiful one in the bunch, stirring their envy, because after all she deserved to be envied, he said, just look at you!

It was then she noticed the mirror that ran along the entire side of the ballroom. How can that be, she thought, for the windowpanes reflected in it were missing or broken, with pieces of glass still stuck in the frames like knives, and the outside of the building was overgrown with a thick net of creeper that kept the whole thing from falling in a heap. The dancing partner looked handsomer than ever, the girl herself like a fluid shapeless sac of parts held together by skin and the skin pulsing with blood and pink with smudges here and there of hair and blowing panels of fabric. Meanwhile the creeper was filling with more and more gray-brown birds, hundreds of tiny bright eyes and beaks, cheeping and fluffing their wings.

This was the way robots viewed living flesh ever since they’d been granted the gift of color-sightedness and prophecy to compensate for the fact that they would never know love. In the robot universe there were six windows through which the sun rose, six windows through which the sun set, and the stars moved around opening and shutting the windows like servants. Even though they had no interest in the way humans measured time or how the planets affected their actions, the robots knew Mercury retrograde was a point of crisis for them, inaugurating a period of voluptuous activity, one that would grow more and more intense as the days grew shorter.

Really, it told her. Bring your friends! It told her there was a nice surprise in store for her if she did.

When the girl got home her shoes were torn to ribbons. Her father sat there in his easy chair in his white shirt and khaki pants, looking through his reading glasses at her worn-out shoes, the expression on his face like that of a person going through a closet trying to find some worthless article of clothing he suddenly realized he wanted more than anything. His hair had turned gray at the temples but was otherwise thick and black, his skin mostly unwrinkled. He hadn’t changed that much since when he was a boy, really—the girl was the one who had changed. I’m not made of money, you know, her father said and the girl laughed, because who
was?
People weren’t made of paper or metal. That was what made them people.

The next day she returned to the mansion, only this time she took her friends. Girls can talk other girls into doing things with them by making it seem like it’s the “in” thing to do, like trading cards or taking ballet lessons or going all the way or entering a religious order. When Eddie signed with the Rockets it wasn’t because he would have felt left out if he didn’t. He loved to play baseball—boys have always been more blatantly competitive and they enjoy roughhousing. Still, for the girl to get her friends to go with her she had to twist the truth. Another thing girls do is lie to get what they want. For instance she didn’t mention the mirror or that there was only the one dance partner.

How many friends did she take? someone asked. Because I think I know this story.

Lots, Janice said. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Twenty? All the girls from her class, anyway. It was the first generation of girls.

That’s not the way the story goes, someone else said. There should be
twelve.

But Janice wasn’t telling “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” That was make-believe. This was history.

The girls got to the mansion just as it was getting dark. Like now, Janice said, only night was sadder then. The wind was blowing and it was starting to rain, real rain, not what came later. O western wind when wilt thou blow that the small rain down can rain. Poets used to write things like that. The mansion windows were ablaze and the girls could hear music, very sweet and exciting, strings and horns and woodwinds and maybe, just maybe, if only they’d been listening more closely, if only they’d stopped their endless chatter and paid attention for a change, they also might have heard the
tap-a-tap-tap
of the peardrum.

A peardrum, in case you don’t know, Janice said, is shaped like a guitar and has three strings, but only two pegs to tune them with, and a little square box attached to the side for keeping fairies. They’re the most beautiful fairies of all; their faces are like crystal but alive, with real eyes that can see and the sweetest little tongues! You never want to let them out, though. They have no regard for human life.

Of course there were enough dance partners to go around—one of the beauties of the operational apparatus was that it could be reproduced infinitely and at the drop of a hat. Every girl thought her partner was the handsomest and that she was the loveliest girl in the room. The later it got the harder it was to hear a thing over the noise of the orchestra and the dancers’ feet and the wind and the rain and the gray-brown birds. The girls were never able to compare notes to figure out what was happening—dictators gather crowds for the same reason. The rain swept in through the broken windows. The wind blew away the girls’ dresses. They were too busy thinking how ugly all the other girls looked to look at themselves in the mirror.

No one noticed when the first girl got taken up.

Taken up where? someone asked.

I
would have noticed, said someone else.

Janice whirled around. You don’t notice anything, she said. None of you do! She pointed at the cigar box in my lap. It was empty. Did you see her stealing your cards? she asked. They’re your ticket out of here! Don’t you know anything? Where are your mothers and fathers? Shouldn’t they be calling you in right about now?