The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (22 page)

You could, in other words, testify against your own murderer
after
you had died. 

The next night he heard the printer start. Something told him he should look and because he did, he found her once more: 

. . . I send you this I send you the night is darkening round me the wild winds coldly blow but a tyrant spell has bound me and I cannot cannot go the giant trees are bending their bare boughs weighed with snow and the storm is fast descending and yet I cannot cannot go clouds beyond clouds above me waste beyond waste below but nothing can move me I will not will not cannot go how I wish how I wish I had even once made words like these for you. . . . 

He sat amazed. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever read. He copied it fast—seeing those blue eyes, feeling the brush of a woman’s hand on his—and sat waiting for more. 

When nothing else with her code appeared, he got up and made himself some lunch. 

On Monday, after the meeting for all of the fixers at the hall at Central, he drove out to Sheriff’s Aviation, a portable computer—the smallest and cheapest he could find at Fedco—in a Samsonite briefcase on the seat beside him. When he arrived, he put the briefcase in the cockpit of the Bell and went in to give McKinney his hour. 

“You ever want to try the new firing range, Klinger—it’s
automated
—I’ll let you fire an H an’ K infrared g-launcher, or a galvanic Ingram—” 

“Sure . . .” 

“You tell me when and we’ll do it.
You
say, Klinger. You’ll be the only fixer who’s ever fired a skin-wired machine pistol, believe me.” 

“That would be great, McKinney. I gotta go. Thanks.” 

He plugged the old home Osterizer in—the one he’d rewired for the purpose—set the little jury-rigged timer for random ignition, and over the next hour watched the static appear intermittently and the printer turn words and sentences into incoherent letters—the kind Central and the J.D. so hated. Then he called Davis, told him the digitizer was acting up again, and smiled when Davis swallowed it, allowing him a maximum (“A maximum, Klinger, you hear?”) of three overnighters for the upcoming week. 

“Thank you, sir.” 

He had the air conditioner going in forty minutes and the mini-PC from his apartment sexing the recorder in twenty, its “applepie program” doing exactly what he hoped it would, the PC set to block the Osterizer ignition when her ID registered. As long as no one else got assigned to the Mojave, the PC would be able to work day and night in peace, checking the transmissions for her ID and copying only those transmissions. 

That was all he wanted—to have all of her transmissions, his own tapes of them, and to copy them out with his good hand. 

On a Wednesday, the next time he went to the shack, he found two: 

. . . when I was child on Wiegkland Avenue just across the street from Jordan High School there was a tree that smelled funny and had stiff leaves and everyone carved or sprayed names on it I remember buying a packet of seeds I remember looking for a place to plant them and I remember thinking you can’t plant seeds in cement can you— 

Real interference from a solar flare or gravity shift had lost the rest on both the shack’s receiver and his own PC, but the second was intact: 

. . . when I went to see my brother up north when he wrote me to tell me where but don’t tell anyone else and I got there he said no one knows where I am and I said I know I know where you are and he said that didn’t matter because no one knows where you are Linda I said I do he said yes you do and we laughed and that was the last time I saw him ever. . . . 

He copied them, hand shaking, refolded the continuous printer sheets and taped the copied transmissions to the wall over the printer. The first one he had ever copied was in his wallet. He got it out and taped it up, too. 

That night, when he closed his eyes, he saw the buckled asphalt and concrete of the Great Quake. When his mother’s and father’s faces appeared, he handled it as he always did—making himself see moonlight on the surface of the Witness and nothing else. But this time saw
her,
too, and found himself wondering what those days had been like for
her
. He saw her running down a street, buildings falling. He saw himself holding her—both of them standing still in the middle of everything, barely breathing. He saw them kneel on an endless park lawn where nothing—nothing at all—could fall on them, where nothing could hurt them. 

His sheet was wet in the morning, but he left it. It would dry in the heat by noon. 

The next morning, coffee in his good hand, he picked up the night’s printouts from the tray under the printer and began to read. He found one and it made him dizzy. 

. . . why do you ask for poetry why do you ask for words less real than those you send me on blind air when I am not sure I even remember when I waked I saw that I saw not cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee come live with me and be my love but thank you for asking. . . . 

He stared at the words and when the chill, moving through him like winter wind on the sand, faded away, he knew why he’d felt it. 

Perhaps it was only a voice speaking to the nothingness, trying to keep itself company. Perhaps she was only speaking to herself, to someone from her past, someone who had loved poetry as much as she had. Perhaps it was only one of these things— 

But as he read it again he felt the chill again— 

He felt that she was
answering him
— 

That she had somehow heard him and was answering him. 

That night he got up suddenly from the cot, turned on the light, and stared at the printer. There was no transmitter—there was no transmitter at
any
Witness as far as he knew. But there had to be one somewhere. 

Others had tried. The original experimenters had transmitted messages to particular
names,
particular IDs (syntactic personalities and photon configurations), and to the Limbo at large, and answers had, at least on occasion, indeed come back. They had come back tomorrow, or yesterday, five weeks ago, a year from now. Like telepathy in the old dream experiments at the Maimonides Dream Center, the afterlife had no reason to respect time and space. And the ghosts themselves often had a sense of humor, dark as it was. Asked about the assassinations of presidents and premiers, they had sent back: 

. . . Kennedy and Castro and Elvis are alive and working at Johnny Rocket’s. . . . 

Asked about the murder of a little girl named Mary, they had answered: 

. . . Mary had a little lamb little lamb little lamb Mary had a little something someone wanted. . . . 

They had even sent back a bad limerick: 

. . . There was a physicist named Fred 

who tried to talk to the dead 

but try as he might 

he got it wrong 

One of the senders was of course named Fred. 

Somebody had a transmitter somewhere. If she were answering him, he would find it and use it— 

Because she was answering him
— 

Because
by answering him she was making sure he would look for it, making sure he would find it, and send a message to her. 

He spent much of the next week at Central—asking gently about it, joking about it, making fun of the original experimenters, the foolishness of trying to talk to ghosts. There was no such equipment at Central, he learned from the other techs. Only the R&D geeks at Justice had such things, and maybe even they didn’t anymore. In any case, it would have been such an outrageous crime for a fixer to try that it wasn’t even listed as one. It was Tompai who said this, laughing. Klinger laughed with him. 

It was the poet William Wordsworth she was quoting, he discovered. And Stephen Spender, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes. He had found them in the indexes of first and last lines of poetry—indexes he hadn’t even known existed—on a computer in the university library in Riverside. It was Emily Brontë she had sent to him last. It was the poetry of others, yes, but it was poetry she had loved. 

Without the ID, he would never have recognized it two days later as hers: 

. . . when he told me to lie down I said listen motherfucker I’ve laid down for you for ten years I’m not going to lay down again when he hit me my teeth broke my head snapped back against the wall I put my hands to my face and screamed I was going to cut his balls off before I’d lay down for him for him again when he pulled out the razor and told me to get down on the bed on my hands and knees or he’d cut my lips and nose off like he’d done to someone else I did it I did I got down on my hands and knees and he cut my legs I screamed I tried to get away but he was cutting into my stomach and I screamed cocksucker and then I couldn’t scream anymore I couldn’t see all I could feel was that tugging in my stomach and I let go and I died. . . . 

When the printer stopped, he stared. He didn’t want to look at the words again. He didn’t know what he was feeling. It was her, but it wasn’t. 

How stupid could he have been?
No
life was just poetry—a string of beautiful moments in time. Every life had pain and rage. She wasn’t an angel. She was a human being, and as he realized this, he knew he loved her. 

He read it again, trying to make his body stop shaking. It would not, and as it continued to shake he felt something shift inside him, the way it did when he’d look at the stars at night and feel free and then, all of a sudden, remember his mother and father. 

When he began to cry, it amazed him. What it felt like—after so long. 

As he copied the transmission by hand, he watched another begin: 

. . . a shudder in the loins the broken wall the burning roof and tower I remember the burning I was a little girl and the city burned for days in all the papers it was history and I was living it but I was a little girl do you remember the fires were you even born then? 

She’d been intelligent. That was clear to him now. She’d been well read. She’d been a romantic, but she’d known the harsher side of life, too. A man—a man she had known—had killed her.
Why?
The man had killed another woman, too—the same way he had killed her. Wasn’t that what the transmission meant? 

The computers had flagged her by now. They had put together
razor
and
I died
and all the rest multivariately, had a pattern, knew it was a murder. They’d be back-searching the transmissions for the ones with her ID, compiling rapidly. 

That night, in the shack, Klinger tried to remember his father’s eyes—not closed, in the coffin, but back before the Quake. 

As he lay in the darkness, he saw for the first time that when he’d first started reading the transcripts, he had actually been looking for any “voice” that had sounded like his father’s . . . or his mother’s . . . and how insane that had been. 

The Quake had happened five years before he became a fixer. 

No ghost ever transmitted for more than a year. 

The next morning, bright and early, he called Davis from the shack and told him he was sick and wouldn’t be making it in. When Davis asked him how the problem was, Klinger told him he thought he’d finally gotten it straightened out. “Good, Klinger,” Davis said. “We’ve got a meeting tomorrow. Get well, guy.” Davis would find out what was happening if Sheriff’s Aviation records ever passed his desk; but they hadn’t yet, and it was worth the risk. 

She was broadcasting a lot now. There might be a dozen transmissions on any given day. He wanted to be there for all of them. 

The first came in at 11:00 A.M. 

. . . who are you to tell me you hear me who are you to speak of love to me? 

He felt the chill again. All that was missing was his
name
. If she would only say it:
John. John K.
 

He waited. 

There were no more transmissions. 

As all of the fixers waited the next morning for the meeting to start, Corley played with a portable digitizer in the folding chair beside him and a new kid, just out of Poly, leafed through a medical-benefits brochure. When the kid went out to use the bathroom, Klinger said to Corley: 

“Corley, any way I could get a name to go with an ID?” 

Corley looked at him. 

“You really
are
fucking crazy. Don’t you ever
listen
at these meetings? Reading a transcript is a fucking misdemeanor. Anything to do with an ID is a fucking felony!”