The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (21 page)

If it was night, he would sit for a moment in the Bell and watch the moths—like little ghosts—batter themselves against the single bulb by the shack’s front door. If there was a moon, he would remember what the Witness itself—the kilometer-long, open tank of water—looked like with the moonlight on its surface and wish he had hovered over it longer. He would find himself wondering how many weeks or months he had before Central got the funds for a new detector-translator system and his life would have to change: With new equipment he wouldn’t be able to justify so many visits, wouldn’t be able to come out like this every few days, lying about “recurrent problems.” 

Then he would go inside, sit down at the little card table in the shack and do what no fixer—no one in his position—was supposed to do: He would read the transcripts of what the Witness—listening day and night for the voices of the
just-dead
—had picked up from the Limbo. 

Whether it was simply against policy, or a misdemeanor, or a felony to read the transcripts, he could not remember, but he had been doing it now for months. It was simply a function of the amount of time he spent at this station, when other fixers were always on the move. Since he spent as much time here as he could—attending to the problems of a first-generation system and fabricating problems when he needed to—his “crime” had evolved logically enough, hadn’t it? He wanted to be out here away from the city, and so he was—two or three times a week. He’d had a radio for a while, and a video player small enough to fit on the card table beside the coffee maker, and later a few books, but these, he’d discovered, had been “baggage” from the city, and really had no place here. The transcripts belonged when so many other things did not, and one day he had begun to read them. He was the
living,
after all, and they were the
dead,
and here at least—at the Mojave Witness—that was all there was. 

Had he been like all the other fixers, the techs who kept the Witnesses all over Southern California working, Davis, his supervisor, would have moved him from one station to another throughout the Seventh District, all 200,000 square kilometers of it, and he would probably never have started reading. But Davis knew he liked the desert—
needed
it in his own way—and a fixer as good as he was, winner of Central’s Troubleshooter Award three out of five years, got what he wanted. What he wanted was this station. The
voices
—the transcripts in front of him on the table—were the ones that had come
here
. Not to Camel’s Back overlooking San Diego Bay, or Camp Pendleton’s Witness with its view of Pacific breakers, or Mullholland’s, or El Centro’s, but here—to the high desert, to the cold, dry peace of its winters, to the dreamy heat of its summers, to a place where there were no human voices other than these. Even he wasn’t a voice here. He didn’t sing. He didn’t talk to himself like a desert rat. He didn’t play the radio or VCR. It felt wrong to, so he didn’t. 

Had he loved the city, as fixers like Corley and Tompai seemed to, the transcripts wouldn’t have interested him either. For people like them—who liked hanging out in the tech lobby at Central, even had fun playing with the design software on their assigned terminals in their assigned cubicles with the fluorescent lighting—the living were very much alive. And the
just-dead
—their voices, the transcripts of their ethereal babble—were just that: ghosts, gone, moving on. 

For him, month by month, the opposite had somehow become true. 

The Justice Department, under whose legal jurisdiction the Witnesses operated, required printouts as well as tapes—a hedge against malfunction or criminal sabotage—and so the transcripts were printed on a simple printer even as the transmissions were being received and tapes being made; and one night, alone, reluctant to return the Bell 420 to the Sheriff’s Aviation helipad, or himself to his apartment in Corona, he had started reading. 

On August 16, six days before his twenty-seventh birthday, in the meanest heat of the upper-desert summer, he phoned from his apartment in Corona and informed Davis that he’d need another overnighter at the Witness. Davis, of course, swore. 

“Jesus Christ, you’re spending a helluva lot of time up there, Klinger.” 

“It’s the translator drive, sir. You know how old the boards are.” And then he added: “I don’t like spending my nights out there any more than you would.” 

He held his breath. 

“Bullshit, Klinger, but when the new system comes in, you won’t have to. Try to make it in to Central on Monday at least, will you?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

When the man’s image was gone from the phonescreen by his bed, Klinger started to breathe again. 

If Central was expecting the new equipment any time soon, Davis would have told him, wouldn’t he? 

He drove through the heat of the Inland Empire to Sheriff’s Aviation headquarters in Rialto, where, if he was willing to listen to McKinney talk weapons for an hour—over coffee, in the snack bar—the old pot-bellied bigot would let him take the Bell 420 again, instead of some county ground vehicle, which was all the J.D. agreement with the County of San Bernardino required. It wasn’t that he didn’t like McKinney. McKinney was the one who’d taught him—ignoring his prosthesis kindly—to fly in the days when Klinger would spend his off-hours hanging around the airport like some P.D. wannabe. Like some deranged uncle, McKinney seemed to want Klinger to have the very best, so of course he liked the man. It was just the constant talking. Sometimes it drove Klinger crazy. 

But he listened again, and again McKinney gave him the helicopter, and again Klinger lifted off into the heat of summer. 

That afternoon the air conditioning in the shack went out. He didn’t need to step outside and check the tap lines that ran to the nearest power-line support tower a quarter kilometer away. Everything else was working. He got down on his hands and knees and pulled the thing apart. A box of spare parts he’d collected over the past months was under the card table, and when he discovered he didn’t have the part he needed—an alternator—he got up calmly and plugged in the swamp cooler, the one he’d bought with his own money. He closed the one blind, got out the Reynolds Wrap, and did the window. The equipment could operate at up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit without any trouble, so the air conditioner was for the living, and as a consequence, in Central’s eyes, didn’t really matter. He knew it was the heat that helped keep other fixers away. “You want the Mojave?” Tompai had once said. “You can
have
it. You’re already dead, Klinger.” 

It wasn’t true. He’d never felt more alive than he did when he was out here under the stars, cool or sweaty, thinking about life and reading the printouts. It was the morgue of the living—the
cities
—that made him feel like a corpse, and the feeling wasn’t getting any better. He went to his apartment—he went to Central—less and less, and the only thing that really worried him was how long he had before the new equipment arrived. 

The vast swimming pools with their open water and immense cement walls—the “receivers” large enough to register the oscillation of neutrinos in which the computers could find the “voices” of the
just-dead
—would last forever, but the first-generation hardware, like flesh and bone, was wearing out. 

He had the shack’s aluminum door propped open with a rock and the holes in the screen door covered with tape, but the tape had lost its stick and the bugs, attracted by his reading light, were getting in anyway. He was dripping sweat on the transcripts as he tried to read. They were the usual. The babble . . . the technical recitations . . . the private memories. . . . 

. . . Christ died for me I lived for him I died for him he lived for me. . . . 

. . . longitudinal studies of the astroglia provide some support for this idea astrocytes in the rat undergo their final divisions. . . . 

. . . but when I went back years later and stood on the hillside behind the house closed my eyes I could see the kids I could hear them playing the way they did the way they laughed and shouted before Dorothy died. . . . 

His eyes were very tired when he came across it: 

. . . for when I was writing I was in golden places a golden palace with crystal windows and silver chandeliers my dress was finest satin and diamonds sat shining in my black hair then I put away my book and the smells came in through the rotting walls and rats ran over my feet my satin turned to rags and the only things shining in my hair were lice the lice of my life as I knew it then. . . . 

He read it again, sitting up straighter. It was beautiful. It was poetry, some of the prettiest he had come across. He had discovered long ago that in general the dead weren’t
poets
. They were ordinary people, souls floating free of bodies at last, thoughts held together for a little while, lodged, as the textbooks put it, somewhere beyond the electromagnetic, “in one of the particle fields, making their detectable oscillations in low-energy neutrinos bound to the gravitational potential well of the Earth.” But nevertheless, people. 

More often than not they said very unpoetic things, like: 

. . . where the hell am I? 

Or: 

. . . if she had only bought her dresses discount she would have had more money for the trip but would she listen to me no she would never listen to me. . . . 

Or: 

. . . and then I slipped her panties off and put my face. . . . 

This was different. It wasn’t even the poetic feeling of the words. Poetry in books—in school all those years—had never interested him. The Bell 420 had more poetry, he’d told Corley once.
Flying
was more poetry than any poem. But here a woman—he assumed it was a woman—had died, and even in her death (especially in her death?) she could speak to herself so beautifully. She could
think
and
feel
so beautifully about life, even after leaving it. 

She, too, was flying, it occurred to him. Not with a chopper, but with words. 

As he copied it out—on lined notebook paper, with his good hand—he recalled something in the fixer’s manual about this, too. Whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony to copy a transmission, he could not remember. It was probably a felony. 

He went to sleep at last on the cot by the card table, wondering how she had died. He could see her face, but only vaguely, in the dark. 

Two weeks later he found her again. He could not have said what it was that made him so sure. Maybe the word
lice,
but probably other things as well. He couldn’t check. He hadn’t written down her ID. He wrote it down now: A266920. 

. . . I once slept under a bridge I didn’t have lice in my hair like the woman who wrote that book it was like a river below me but it was cement with a trickle of water it wasn’t the rivers I dreamt of I once slept in a pipe that time I ran away and that night I dreamt of rivers. . . . 

Later that day, under the same ID, he found: 

. . . laugh child life laugh life is beautiful was written on the wall under the bridge by the mattress the old blood on it even now I dream that I am only a dream because when I was alive my dreams were as real as that blood. . . . 

Had she been a poet herself—in real life? Someone who’d done well in English in school, like so many girls did when boys didn’t? Was this all from
books,
ones she had loved? Had she
really
run away, been homeless, slept under bridges? Or were these daydreams, someone else’s stories? 

She loved words. He could tell that. But that was all he knew. 

He thought about her all day, and that night dreamed about a girl who looked a little like Erika, his last girlfriend—the one two years ago who hadn’t, for some reason, minded his prosthesis—but also like a girl he had seen years ago in an old photograph from the sixties or seventies: Flowers in her hair . . . blue eyes . . . an old Victorian house behind her . . . thinner than Erika would ever be. 

All a fixer had to know was the machines, a little theory, and “policy.” But you didn’t spend two years at Polytech for a T.A. in Witness Engineering without picking up the rest. There were a lot of jokes and tall tales—like the one about the ghost that had followed a fixer named Nakamura all the way around the world, from one Witness to another, until he went insane—just because he read a transcript. It was a joke, but also a warning:
Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.
 

The most exciting thing that ever really happened to a fixer was a solar flare seizure in the photon detectors or an anomalous shutdown of the translators, and even those got to be routine. You heard about sabotage—when the cases were big and ongoing—but he’d never met a fixer who’d actually had to deal with it. And the transmissions behaved the way they were supposed to behave . . . like any “hard” paranormal phenomenon. The ghosts didn’t communicate with one another, it seemed; the transmissions came in at random; and finally, a few days or weeks or months after the body’s death, they just stopped coming altogether. The point was to record what could be recorded before the “ghost” moved on, which they all did. If the ghost was a murder victim, what a Witness heard might contain enough to help the prosecution. Legally it was as good as a deathbed confession. Except in cases of established pre-death insanity, correlations with fact had been too high for the legal system to ignore.