Elvissey (2 page)

"I be boppin'-" Weber began.

"I be boppin'-" I replayed. My husband John, his
name-said I knacked lingo; he didn't, and sat lipstill in
Slab, eating apricot slices from his bag of dried fruit, which
almost exclusively made up his daylight diet. One of us had
to master background; it essentialled plain that we understand what the natives were saying when we confronted.

"-at the high school hoop," Weber concluded.

"I be boppin' at the high school hoop-"

"Hold," Conrad interrupted, extending a hand the shade
and texture of undyed surimi. "Errored."

Weber's face so reddened that stroke seemed readied to
cut him free. "Sourced here, sourced there," he said, fingertapping the screen.

"Don't," his monitor voiced in woman's gentle tones.

"Excuse. Sourced all the same, Conrad," Weber went on.
"Midfifties term, present in all media. In High School Confidential, plus-"

Conrad shook his head. "1958 cinescript jumbled into
low vernacular black English, urb class." He paused, as if
only now noting my own urb class; eyed my lightening darkness, the yet-evident kink of my hair. Convincing himself
he'd not offended, he proceeded sans exegesis or after-word.
"Inapplicable for situation. Next."

"Demonstrable proof available," Weber insisted. "Stand
corrected."

"Ignore, Bonney," said Conrad. "Proceed, Weber."

That linguists so incomprehensibled as they did didn't
surprise; their degreed specialty ,/as the Elizabethan period,
not America's nineteen-fifties. But if we were to return to
our world with anyone-as Dryco intended-it wouldn't be
Shakespeare; at Dryco's demand, they adapted for the duration of our prep.

"Proof postsession," Weber said. "Waste time, want time.
Next, then. Phrase me, please."

John's hands trembled as if palsied; his rising fear evidenced pure. I watched as he attempted meditation, appearing, after a moment, not to breathe.

"Complexities," Weber warned, examining the screen.
"Replay tripartite with ongoing phrasing. Set?" I nodded.
"My baby. Iterate, Bonney."

"My name's so unpronounceable?" I asked; wasn't answered. They so deafened to my words that I felt no greater
than a lesser preposition.

"My baby," Conrad said. "Iterate."

"My baby-"

"Not be-be," he corrected. "Bay-bee. Replay."

"Bay-bee," I replayed. "My bay-bee-"

"Rocks me."

"Rocks me-"

John so stilled that others might have marveled that he be
alive. A fly settled on his nose; stroked its legs against themselves as if to self-immolate, then wandered across his closed
eyes; buzzed, and flew away. When John lapped his hands his
knuckles whitened more than I'd ever seen them pale.

"-with a steady roll," concluded Weber.

"With a steady roll."

"Replay in toto," said Conrad.

"My bay-bee rocks me with a steady roll."

"She's got, she's got," said Weber.

"Demetaform," said Conrad.

If Dryco could regood itself-regood, therefore, our
world-there was naught to believe that my husband and I
would not eventually regood ourselves as well, in like manner, to like effect. This we told ourselves, timeover time,
until we almost believed it.

"Ears open, Bonney," said Conrad, jarring me. "Demeta-
form phrase given as requested."

"Love bites when it strikes," I suggested. Again, they nodded. John's eyelids peeled open; he shuddered, seeming
beaten by his dreams out of a restless sleep. He unpocketed
a bottle of small blue pills; Dryco's standard eyedots and
smile were imprinted upon each tablet. Three hours sole
could pass between closings, no more, no less. Swallowing
dry, he fixed a doorways stare; shook, and resettled. There
was so much he could have seen if he hadn't looked so hard.
Meditation, medication; both essentialled, neither changed.
Regooded or not, his unscratchables still itched.

"Which is the universe? Fortean or Joycean? Who tells?"
asked Professor Mora, who taught Historical Inference;
Guess and Grab, I rephrased. "The shadow world is, by its
nature, shadowed." His room was on Schermerhorn Hall's
ninth. The building was once a science center; in its womb
the Manhattan Project conceived. "Notions of two spatial
structures at once independent and interrelated were intolerable concepts until reality demonstrated other, fifteen
years past."

We surely inhaled so much radiation, interiored, as exteri-
ored. John and I transversed the campus topside, strolling
along ramps inset for the physically challenged. Our fellow
students formicated through tunnels underneath, battening
their stores for winter. That afternoon, John and I stared
into Jersey sunset, as if seeking literal, rather than metaphorical, blindness; sighted instead a herald, an unforecast spark,
appearing as a match Godness struck against heaven.

Wish I may, John whispered as the spark faded. Wish I
might.

We wished; in lieu of the doable that was all to be done.
Fate, chance, kismet, term it as willed: to have seen, as we
had, an old missile erasing itself against the atmosphere as
its orbit knew inevitable decay was a vision as rare as that of
a robin in springtime; most often they lowered over desert or
taiga or sea, sprinkling the clouds with isotopes to later
baptize us in soft burning rain. I fancied, at its sight; imagined Venus, rising on her own accord, the morning star
slipped free of her perpetual transit's unbreakable noose.

"Science explains rotational balance essentialed to superimposed earths," Mora continued. "Accounts for observable
non-Keplerian orbital dynamics. Explanations for similarity
divergence between worlds and nonconcurrent progression
of their respective human timelines are the concern of art,
mayhap, rather than science. Certainly nothing in our history explains."

Nothing in history explains why something goes wrong. John and I stared into the curtain before which Mora paced,
seeing in its nub's sparkling texture a moonshadowed
beach's color. Scrawling its dune with tracings of light, he
inscribed dates; they washed away as he wrote them.

"What occurs there seems not always what happened
here. Less so, as time passes. In the other world it is presently
late April, 1954. Peopled expeditions previous-yeared
yielded inconsistent data owing to mortality of all responsive
participants save three. From the two Russians, little forthcame and less was told. From the third, Biggerstaff, we
gained such awareness as we've possessed of that world's
existence, one summer weekend in 1939. Their 1939."

In our fifteen-year transit through cosmic haphazards
John and I slid across surfaces seeming smooth from afar,
suffering irreparable scars in the flames our contact raised.
Our similarity divergence developed as unexpectedly as it
had for the two worlds, for like reasons undoubted: multitudinous though unguessable, foreseen yet Cassandraed,
known because ignored.

"Mayhap inference and induction gained us not enough,
it was thought. There inhered challenge, thus. How to answer unanswerables?"

Where did love for John end, and hate begin? How deep
did each lie buried beneath anger's eversettling mud? Did
love essential a coeval hate? Must those emotions deepen
from acute into chronic so synchronically? Must only
enough love linger to so pain its inevitable decay?

"Last month, in correlation with the E project, we at last
broke off a new shard of their glass," Mora said. "An icicle
fallen from a plane overhead."

Did we want our love to end? Did we need it to end? Did
it matter?

"A minireceiver was guided through the Flushing Window, across the zone, for sixteen minutes, seizing and relaying the other world's radio transmissions in immediate
range."

Chance attracted us, experience repelled; what bound us
was as enigmaed as the true nature of that only-imaginable
world.

"Reception peripheralled. Static and fade were unavoidable, enhancement notwithstanding. Keep minded of this,
giving ear," said Mora.

As John's medication, taken the hour earlier, soaked into
its hold, he first expressed nothing but inexpressible rage;
then his look became no look at all. I turned from him,
feeling my own anger flower; I couldn't save him from himself, by myself, and the assistance of others only hurt all the
more. Underdesk I took my husband's hand, in my grasp
feeling a fish snatched from water. Pressing my fingers into
his numbness I fought to draw his blood through his veins
anew, warming his graying skin if but for a shard of history,
a shiver of time.

"Insert your present into theirs," said Mora, petting his
machine as if hoping he could bring it to climax. "Hear the
unseeable. Quilt the patchwork assembled. This is what
awaits." Disarticulate voices spurted from the speakers, near
yet afar, shouts across canyons lowed into ears. We heard
silence; then, a song.

"Sh-boom, sh-boom-!"

Lessons memorized in Antecedental Ur-Beat class awared
me that these voices, white as bones, were Crew-Cut notes,
and not those of the Chords. Their song faded; medleyed
vocalese drifted across the range.

"Pepsi-Cola hits the spot"

"-every day at this time by Listerine-"

=that doggie in the window-"

John's eyes refocused as he drew further inward, stealing
from Mora, from me, from another world's words. He unjacketed a worn black book; studied its pages as if seeking
answers to questions never guessed applicable.

`--and the prices go down, down, down-"

"-dozens reported seeing the saucers in the skies over
Washington last night, and on radar screens-"

Jake oversaw Security during John's initiation, seventeen
years past; upon graduation, following the blooding, John
and all acceptables were gifted with Jake's hymnal Knifelife.
In its pages Jake provided for his charges' inspiration enabling enough that they might ignore the day presently
entrapping and look ahead to the one that, likely, would
follow: one perhaps better, perhaps worse; a fresh day regardless, its evanescent security as yet unaborted by event.

11
-as we join Reg Berman and the gang at the Marine
barracks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard-"

Days after meeting John, at once knowing the love I'd
never lose, however hard I tried, I met Jake, who avoided the
look of others' eyes. Overhanging him I fancied a cloud so
black as his suit was white; I realized only afterward that I was
taller than Jake. He said little, and that gnomic; John told
me that in justifiable mood Jake killed with a wink, and
though I prodded, he left that remark to be taken as metaphor to be demetaformed as I chose. Jake vanished soon
after, coming back from the place where we'd be going: in
his class Mora had earlier recounted how Jake accompanied
Biggerstaff on that initial transgression into that other
world; how, returning, he'd been somehow lost, somewhere
inbetween. Whether he lingered there, no one could say.

"-that the Spirit of Light should overwhelm the Sons of
Darkness-"

`-nine out of ten doctors recommend Camels-"

John had been Dryco's Security Head for three years. He
oversaw what had been, implemented that which was
becoming; forever provided security to all save himself.
Mora frowned, seeing John ignore the lesson; yet attempted
no punishment, surely recalling responses of other guards,
seen at other times. In the classroom dim Mora's face appeared so livid as John's, as if for his chieftain's funeral he'd
painted it with ash.

"-travel the Interstate, you'll be glad you did-"

"In Berlin, Chancellor Speer-"

Regooding of Dryco Security's five hundred departmental
units necessitated that they begin a program of medication
to assist in curbing their long-conditioned reactions. One
hundred and seventy-four had suicided in the six months
since.

"Now's the time for Jell-O-"

Indirectly and overtly, my husband smothered me beneath more emotions than I could bear, killing me so surely,
if not so slowly, as they killed him: still I stayed with him;
couldn't abandon, felt compelled to accompany, wherever
he went.

"Why, then-"

Whenever he went.

"Why, then, with all this strength," the voice said: Eisenhower's voice. President there too, we induced, and sounding enough like ours as to chill; again I remembered what
was first told, that their world was no less real, nor more
unreal, than ours. "Why should we be worrying at times
about what the world is doing to us?"

Worry, rather, about what we'd allowed it to do. John
continued to regard Jakeisms; I vizzed the page he studied,
saw its single printed line: Sharpest knives leave sweetest
wounds.

"-this increase of power from the mere musket and the
little cannon," their Ike went on, "to the hydrogen bomb in
a single lifetime is indicative of the things that have happened to us."

What wounds had we inflicted upon ourselves that we
didn't even feel? Which had we asked for? Which, wanted?
Which, needed? Which, deserved?