Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 20

Soon Skinner could stand. He wobbled with 167 and 218 steadying him on either side. He could only stay upright for a minute or so but it was something. The little nan.o.bots or whatever the h.e.l.l they were were obviously working overtime in his spinal column. He wanted to walk through the field just beyond the window. He imagined his arms stretched out to either side, the feathery heads of waist-high gra.s.ses sweeping through his palms, catching their seed pods in the crooks between his fingers, the satisfying rip of seeds separating from stalks. The sun rose on the drizzly day that Skinner finally took his first steps. The clones let him walk about five feet before insisting that he sit again.

"Are they supposed to feel like my real legs?" Skinner asked.

"I don't know," 167 said. "I've never had to relearn how to use my legs."

"Beats me," 218 said. "The most extreme thing I've ever used this transmitter for was psoriasis."

"What about your swollen left nut?" 167 said.

"Correction. And my swollen left nut."

For the next three days, Skinner tried walking farther distances. At first he could rationalize the something-isn't-right feeling as the simple weirdness of having to relearn how to walk. His legs jerked, twitched, flopped, kicked, and propelled him across the ground. After a week of regaining his strength, the sheer oddness of his gait wasn't going away.

"What the h.e.l.l," Skinner said, shuffle-stepping then high-kicking his way across the field. "Why can't I walk normally?"

"Idiot," 167 muttered to his clone brother.

"Hey, I wasn't the one who claimed to be a Bionet expert," 218 said.

The two snarled at each other while Skinner danced through the gra.s.s, added a pirouette, then strutted like a cowboy with saddle rash. "I hate this! I want my real legs back!"

The clones bickered all the way home, Skinner prancing and cursing behind them. At the cabin he gathered his belongings and stood with his left knee wobbling Elvis-like, as if preparing to perform the Electric Slide. The clones stood in front of him looking awfully embarra.s.sed.

"You guys saved my life. I thank you for that."

"Technically, the fishbot saved your life," 167 said.

"Which reminds me. We gotta get that thing fixed," said 218.

Skinner embraced the clones and asked them for directions to the Cascade Highway. They pointed him toward the logging road and with a nod, the old man duckwalked into the forest. Half an hour later the road intersected with the highway, and an hour after that he made it to the trailhead where his RV was parked. The mobile container of a previous life shocked him when he climbed into it, with its framed pictures and inert mementos. He put it in gear and stepped on the accelerator.

As Skinner stood in front of his daughter's building his hand crawled inside his jacket to flip the safety on his Coca-Cola. He looked down and realized what his hand was doing. Shoppers entered the flower shop across the street, a cyclist coasted through the intersection; nothing external was awry. But there was his heart again, quickening under his ribs. Once inside the building he found himself sweating and had to stop at the landing of the first flight of stairs. He unholstered his c.o.ke and proceeded. When he came to Roon and Dot's floor he pa.s.sed through what felt like an invisible heat blast of death. Panting, he kicked open the door of the condominium, firearm drawn.

Blood all over the place. Broken furniture. Pictures ripped off walls. A woman's hand on the coffee table, palm up as if beckoning the owner to come back and claim it.

The kitchen. His daughter. Pots and pans.

Bedroom. Parts of bodies in the hallway. Bullet casings.

Skinner got to the bathroom and found the upper half of his wife in the bathtub, clutching a Bionet transmitter, and the lower half of her body sitting on the toilet. Her eyelids fluttered. He clutched her head and kissed her and wept. "Chiho, Chiho, Chiho."

"Al?" Her voice sc.r.a.ped the word through his head.

"Tell me who did this."

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Who were they-"

"Is it you? The old you? Which one of you are you?"

"Come on, old girl, we'll fix you. Just hang on to that signal."

"Oh Al, f.u.c.k you. I'm going to die."

"I'm not going to let you leave me. No. Pull it together, soldier."

"Why'd you do it, Al? Are you . . . are you still on a mission?"

"Where's the boy?"

"Newmans. Alki."

"I need you, Chiho. Don't go."

Staring straight ahead Chiho reached up to touch his face. "I loved you. That's . . . the most f.u.c.ked-up . . . part of this whole . . ."

"Okay. Okay, you go. You go, my love."

Skinner reached into the tub and found the transmitter's OFF switch, touched it, and was done.

Thirteen hours pa.s.sed.

Dark outside. Sitting on the floor holding his dead wife's hand, Skinner finally let go, picked up the transmitter, and typed in his code.

"Welcome! What can I do for you today?" the transmitter chirped.

"Make me combat-ready," he said.

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 7.

I checked into the New YorkNew York hotel and collected my thoughts for a week. I ordered room service, watched TV, and stared out the window at the Strip. I started going out, walking at night, along wide sidewalks littered with flyers for escort services. I pa.s.sed among the drunk, the dest.i.tute, the h.o.r.n.y, and the wealthy like I was the only one who knew a bomb was about to go off. Like someone out of the Bible in this t.i.tty bar wasteland. Inebriated bachelorettes howling through limo sun roofs turned into centaurs farting exhaust. Cigar smoke and sunscreen. A bride in a maternity wedding dress. The carnal desperation of neon. I considered my fellow human beings and thought that it wasn't that we'd become animals, it's that we'd always been animals. Watching a gang of fraternity boys muscling through a casino esplanade was like watching ancient tribesmen, all of them bent on mating after the kill. The women appeared to be fixated on two primary consumer goods-shoes and handbags-as if they lived in a long-forgotten civilization now survived only by its baskets and trinkets. I didn't belong to these people. I didn't feel better than them, I just felt alien. In fact, I saw how happy they appeared to be and I envied them for it. I imagined the moment it would all stop, the silent pause before the plants withered and the rivers ran with blood. My bones rattled with the coming apocalypse. What could I do but cower in my room, ordering french fries and lobster and surf and turf, sitting naked on the floor watching the obscene glitter persist with its monied seductions on the other side of a bulletproof window?

After I got bored of the Strip I started going on walks to downtown Vegas. Between the Strip and downtown was a desolate stretch of p.o.r.no stores, bars, old department store buildings that had risen in the sixties and now sold vintage clothing and old showgirl outfits. I crossed this littered zone stunned and out of my element and came to realize that the shock I'd suffered after Nick tried to kill me had never really dissipated, it had just moved outward from my body, encompa.s.sing everything I witnessed. A stripper ground her bald v.a.g.i.n.a against a bra.s.s pole. A transvest.i.te who wasn't fooling anyone scrounged change from his quaking hand to pay for video poker at a 7-Eleven. Then the downtown hub with its great mustached men from Texas and smoke-ravaged faces all around. Most of these eyes had gone out, become black and capable of reading only a deck's worth of symbols, the spinning signifiers on a slot machine. But if you looked hard enough you could see that they knew what I knew. They knew there was a time limit, even if they hadn't come to admit it to themselves. They knew all this was about to disappear, so they could be forgiven for believing the most sensible course of action was to order another round. I found a table in a gambling house saloon and ordered myself a whiskey. What a cowboy, right? I hadn't been drinking since I got here but this seemed a good place to start. I was sitting there nursing my drink when a guy dressed as a giant carrot sat down next to me.

I'm sorry, a- A carrot. His face was painted orange, poking out from under the leafy stem. The suit was made of felt and foam. You know, like any suit designed to look like food. His arms were in white long johns, ending in cartoonish, puffy white gloves. He asked if he could join me. I said sure. The c.o.c.ktail waitress came by and asked if he wanted anything. He told her a Jim Beam neat. Then he extended his gloved hand and introduced himself as Tex, Man of a Thousand Flavors.

We sat for a while half watching the sports book. His drink came and he took a big swallow. I asked him what he did for a living. He said he dressed up as food for the openings of various restaurants and handed me his business card. Then he offered me a free smoothie coupon.

I told him I didn't need a smoothie coupon.

Then he said, "I thought I should warn you about trying to track down Mr. Kirkpatrick."

I told him to go on.

"Back in the early nineties I had a friend named Forrest who got wrapped up like you, trying to figure out who Mr. Kirkpatrick was," he told me. "He was a good guy-copywriter, worked mostly on traffic safety brochures. Lonely, s.e.xually confused. Was sleeping with my girlfriend behind my back, though that's not really pertinent to my whole tale here. Anyway, Forrest started working for this company called Third Eye Communications. Early new-media consulting firm or something like that. It was hard to tell exactly what they did. He telecommuted, so he was never really in touch with anyone from the rest of the company besides his immediate supervisor. And my friend, he wanted to climb the ladder, right? He got in his head this nutty idea that he needed to prove to the boss what a great a.s.set he was, how he was capable of more than seatbelt warnings and drunk-driving newsletters. So he learned that Mr. Kirkpatrick was the CEO and he became determined to find him and make his case. He was pretty naive about what it meant to work for a corporation. The more he tried to get in touch with Mr. Kirkpatrick, the more it seemed that the guy didn't even exist, that he was just some marketing concept, a caricature of a visionary. Forrest went a little crazy. He became fixated on this idea that physical reality had undergone a fundamental transformation thanks to television. He kept drawing this figure over and over." Can I have a pen?

Sure. Here.

So Tex took a napkin and drew something that looked like this.

Tex said, "This is what's called a hypercube. It's a four-dimensional object. You can think of it as a cube within a cube. The cube on the inside grows as the outside cube shrinks. So the content and context are constantly trading places. There's a porousness between realities, see? Forrest was convinced that the Internet was about to become our contextual reality while physical reality turned into content."

I asked Tex what had happened to this Forrest guy.

He said, "Some teens tripping on LSD crashed their pickup truck into the house he was renting, which was sitting over a bomb shelter. The whole place collapsed into the shelter but Forrest managed to escape. Then I punched him in the nose for sleeping with my girlfriend. I haven't seen him since."

As I listened to Tex's story I wondered if he was the one who'd gone crazy. But I'd seen some wild s.h.i.+t in the last year or so. Talking to a guy dressed as a root vegetable knocking back Jim Beam was sort of the least of it.

"What I'm saying," Tex said, "is that it's not too late to go back to your old life. You had a good thing going there for a while. A life of leisure, living off your millions. You can still return to San Francisco and live with Wyatt and Erika, you can join the board of a nonprofit and build schools in Cambodia or distribute free books to migrant workers, whatever. You don't have to pursue this guy."

I said, "It's all I have left."

Tex shook his carrot head. He told me I could do as I pleased. He was really just looking out for my best interests. He had no motivation for getting in touch with me beyond that. I guess I believed him. He picked up the tab, shook my hand with his hilarious glove, and got up to go. But as he did, he said, "Oh, wait. The coupon." He slid it across the bar. I thanked him and folded it and put it in my inner jacket pocket. I watched him leave through the smoky bar.

A week or so pa.s.sed. I started wondering about my true purpose here in Vegas and concluded that I was supposed to witness something. Keep my head low, don't drink more than a couple c.o.c.ktails a night, stay away from the gambling tables. I went to shows. I f.u.c.king saw Carrot Top. Cirque du Soleil, Crazy Girls, the Blue Man Group. When I needed one I called an escort. I walked among tourists of all ages and ethnicities and shades of moral rect.i.tude, just watching them. Looking for signs of what I was supposed to do next.

It was the smoothie coupon.

Very perceptive of you. Yes, it was the smoothie coupon. I found it in my pocket one night and sort of boredly read it while eating my room service dinner. There was an address, a photo of the strip mall smoothie shop, a dancing pineapple for a logo. I Google-mapped the address and saw it was about a mile off the Strip on Flamingo. The strip mall had a Jiffy Lube, a tux rental place, those kinds of businesses. The smoothie shop was between a Vietnamese grocery and a commercial real estate office. I went in and ordered my sixteen-ounce smoothie. The place was empty, just a teenage girl behind the counter. I asked her if she knew Tex. She seemed annoyed I had asked her a question not related to my power boost and said no. Outside, drinking the smoothie, I wandered over to the commercial real estate company. It was a s.h.i.+tty office, with photocopied listings for properties taped to the inside of the window. Most of the listings looked pretty bleached out by the sun. This place wasn't doing much business. There were old warehouses for sale, a gas station, sad, sun-baked properties in the city's more industrial and forgotten zones. And there was a listing for the Kirkpatrick Academy. It was the exact same picture from the brochure. Same white building, same pasture. The place was for sale for a couple million bucks. I dropped the smoothie. Then, without even thinking, I went inside and told the first person I saw that I wanted to buy it.

NEW YORK ALKI.

First, the wall: thirty feet thick, twenty stories of reinforced poured concrete, constructed to reconfigure the coastline without Puget Sound's tidal meddling. A dozen locks s.p.a.ced around the wall sucked in barges loaded with raw materials and spat out barges laden with soil, entire houses, coils of telephone wire, murdered trees. This brand-new ancient city appeared in mists as Abby held tight to the ferry's upper-deck rail. Buildings clawed their way cloudward and the work songs of newmans echoed through the streets as battalions with numbers in the faceless thousands marched in formation to celebrate new conquests of engineering. Cranes and helicopters lowered masonry and I-beams, great steel frames and slabs of granite and tinted gla.s.s and wiring, countless right angles, sun glinting off the geometry. After pa.s.sing through the locks the ferry docked at Battery Park, lurching awkwardly to a stop. Not a person who disembarked could do so without craning his or her head at this miraculous reb.u.t.tal to the forces that poisoned dreams, this gobsmackingly contradictory, otherworldly, ingenious masterpiece. Abby'd seen footage of the late New York City, watched movies set in its boroughs, scrutinized cinematic representations of its shrieking subways and museums and trading room floors, but nothing, nothing, nothing could have prepared her for the scope of this majesty. She felt she might die of awe.

A long row of rickety fold-out tables staffed by disabled newmans in wheelchairs processed the newcomers. These were former workers whose limbs had given out, been amputated or lost in accidents. They were, however, still capable of speaking and processing social information-all they needed for that was a brain and a pair of eyeb.a.l.l.s. When Abby reached the head of the line, a male newman with a name tag that read "Neal" prompted her to fill out her information on a note card with a pencil stub.

"How long do you expect to visit?" Neal asked.

"I don't know. Maybe a couple months?"

"Are you interested in staying in any particular neighborhood?"

"Maybe Greenwich Village?"

"Ah, yes, here we are, Abby Fogg. We've got a nice nine-hundred-square-foot condo in the Village, fully furnished, with the amenities of a woman in publis.h.i.+ng. Her name was Sylvie Yarrow."

"Works for me."

"Fantastic. Here's your orientation packet! Cabs are to your left." The newman handed Abby a manila folder containing a key to her new apartment, a two-month E-ZPa.s.s, some coupons for pizza and dry-cleaning, and a map of the city. Taking a deep breath, Abby stepped into the fractured grid.

The apartment was nothing special but it suited Abby fine. Everything in the place appeared as it had the morning before the city vanished from the face of the earth, the morning of Manhattan's last scan and backup, from the stone and steel composing the building to the six inches of dental floss curled in the bathroom sink. The scan-involving some really far-out software and a b.u.t.t-load of satellites-had been performed under quasilegal circ.u.mstances by a company called Argus Industries, who'd intended to replicate New York City for a full-immersion gaming environment. The transformation of Bainbridge Island into Manhattan wasn't so much a matter of building a to-scale model as downloading the backed-up version of the city in which every molecule was accounted for. There'd been some glitches. Abby spotted a few in Sylvie's apartment right away. A cross section of an incompletely rendered coffee cup sat on the kitchen counter, and the aquarium had been filled with concrete instead of water. A few of the books on the shelves were missing actual words. Everything down to the graffiti and faded posters on the walls was being resurrected by insanely efficient and tireless newman labor, but there were still spots here and there that needed work.

Standing in the bedroom Abby thought this was the closest she'd ever get to living in the era to which she truly belonged.

Abby spent two hours studying the contents of the apartment with an intruder's giddy concentration. Sylvie Yarrow had been an editor at a publis.h.i.+ng company headquartered in midtown. Single, with a taste for j.a.panese-print clothing that looked to be Abby's size exactly. Three bookcases dominated the s.p.a.ce, bursting with hardbacks. The kitchen table had yielded its surface to ma.n.u.scripts under consideration, great cursed reams of paper bearing words doomed to obscurity. The kitchen was fully stocked, and apparently Sylvie'd had a thing for olives, there being a dozen varieties preserved in jars in the fridge door. Abby hated olives. These would have to go.

Pictures of Sylvie's parents.

A framed, signed broadside of John Ashbery's "Just Walking Around."

A TV set, a j.a.panese cat figurine. Birth-control pills.

Abby took a seat on the sofa and spoke to the previous owner. "Even though this is a re-creation of your stuff, I'll take care of it like it still belongs to you."

She felt stupid as soon as she said this prayer of thanks or whatever it was. It appeared that Sylvie Yarrow had just stepped out and would return at any moment, that she hadn't in fact died in a flash hundreds of years before. Miraculously, the clothes in the closet still smelled like a woman.

The phone rang. A chunky black thing connected to the kitchen wall, with a coiled cord running from the receiver to the box. After the sixth ring Abby picked up and said h.e.l.lo.

A man's voice coughed out a greeting and said Sylvie's name like a question.

Abby replied, "No, I mean, yes, this is her apartment."

"Right, right. I know you're not Sylvie. But her apartment is occupied now, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess. Who is this?"

"Sorry, I'm Bertrand. I was Sylvie's boyfriend before the FUS."

"What do you mean?"

"Yes, no, I mean I'm not really Bertrand. But I landed Bertrand's apartment up here on West Sixty-third. My name's actually Gavin? I got here last month? I've been going through Bertrand's stuff, trying to figure out who he was, who he knew, what kinds of things he did. I'm wearing his clothes. He's got a pretty sweet apartment. How's yours?"

"Mine's fine."

"Bertrand was some kind of industrial designer. Designed stuff like computer printers and cell-phone cases. I've got a picture of him and Sylvie right here. You're cute. I mean she was."

Abby touched a picture of Sylvie and Bertrand magneted to the fridge. Even though Gavin was talking about someone else, Abby still protectively folded her arms over her chest as if Bertrand/Gavin was bringing secrets of her own out into the open.

"Bertrand was a bald guy?" Abby said, "Kind of tall? Black-frame gla.s.ses?"

"That was me all right," Gavin said.

"I thought you were Gavin."

"Right, right. It's tricky. You know, a month ago there was me-Gavin-and there was Bertrand, and we were two separate people. I mean, I'm gay. It's a little freaky to me to represent a straight guy. But I don't know, something about wearing his clothes, eating his food, reading his books. Now it's like I inhabit the guy. As if I just stepped into a museum but instead of exhibits there are all these lives on display. And the whole place is run by newmans, the ones actually doing all the work, so we humans just get to come in and start acting out the lives of people who died at the beginning of the FUS."

Gavin reminded Abby of old boyfriends, guys of limited intelligence and half-baked ambitions. Guys who got too excited about plans that never came to fruition. College sports enthusiasts. "Like we're wearing ghosts," she said.

"Exactly," Gavin said. "Can I trust you with something? As someone representing the girlfriend of the guy I'm representing?"

"Sure, okay."

"I think I'm having Bertrand's dreams. I dreamed about you two nights ago. In the dream you were Sylvie but your voice was exactly the same as your voice right now. I thought I could figure out what I was supposed to do with my life in this city. But it got hijacked by Bertrand's life. I'm eating different foods. I listen to strange old German electronic music. I make references to books I've never even read."

Abby nodded. "This city is a kind of afterlife."

None of this belonged to her. Not the asphalt and billboards she could see from the window, not the furnis.h.i.+ngs of this one-woman apartment. It was as though she had come into possession of an artifact she had no idea how to protect. Stepping from the building into the street she inhaled to the point of flattening her nostrils and swallowed particles of dust from the infancy of construction. Two cabbies conducted a shouting match in a long-extinct African tongue. She picked a direction-uptown-and started walking. Everywhere these false-looking humanoid figures with Manga features and plastic hair trotted out of buildings and conveyed themselves earnestly toward new projects. Here and there empty spots where buildings were supposed to go gaped like horrible wounds. The rectangle comprised of Tenth and Eleventh streets and Fifth and Sixth avenues remained as it had been on Bainbridge, a gra.s.sy patch of suburban houses and part of an elementary school. It appeared as though a gigantic buzz saw had cut around this swath of the island. The cross section of a two-story house immediately bordered Sixth Avenue, its rooms like chambers of a heart revealed in ultrasound. Behind that house, part of a crumbled two-lane road ab.u.t.ted what was now Eleventh. It wouldn't be long before the contents of this block were sc.r.a.ped like icing off a cupcake and dumped onto one of the outgoing barges, the leftover s.p.a.ce erupting in mirrored office buildings. A garbage truck loaded with meticulously replicated pieces of the dead city's trash-Styrofoam packing material, fast-food cups, kitty litter-lumbered by. Abby paused in a doorway to catch her breath. This place, this dream, what was it? A video game mating with physical reality? A movie set? The overcrowded bas.e.m.e.nt of some demented dreamer's vision of Heaven?