Meeting Again
Light glowed from strips on the ceiling of Nerdean’s office. Vin forced a weak cough over a scratchiness at the back of his throat. He shifted his weight, feeling the moist warmth of the casket’s soft walls after the cycle of revival—when the crèche coaxes its subject back into the real world. He raised himself far enough to grab the lip of the casket, then pulled upright.
His groan reminded him to listen for the air conditioner whispering in the background. It had come on before the lid opened, to manage humidity and air composition as liquids from the casket evaporated. When he left the crèche, the lid would close and the device would initiate the cycle of rejuvenation, sterilizing its interior, running self-diagnoses and replenishing consumables.
He stretched, relishing the tension in his healthy muscles, the absence of pain. His body worked, his limbs were useful. Moments ago, he had been lying on stony, uneven ground, unable to move his head. He stepped out of the casket and backed against it, hungry to feel it pressing into healthy skin.
He stood and retrieved his robe, its soft cloth raising goose pimples as he pulled it on and walked to the chute. He was tired and reluctant to climb the ladder but didn’t want to stay in the office with the ghosts from his dream. After the ladder, he went to the second floor where Sophie was sleeping on the inflatable bed.
He woke with a need to get as far away from the house as he could. He fed Sophie because she insisted and then almost ran out the front door. Something about going up and away from the house, getting above it, made him feel better as he climbed the stairs to Marshall Park. He sat on a wooden bench at the overlook but couldn’t think clearly.
He understood why he might dream about being a man like Winston Churchill, but why have such a vivid dream about being Bucky Wright, a walking casualty? No part of Vin wanted that.
He wanted to be in a crowd. He hurried to Queen Anne Avenue, all the way down Denny, and then walked along First into Belltown. He went all the way to the Pike Place Market, where he slipped into the slow scuffle of tourists. Eventually he crossed the street and ordered a slice of pizza at a quiet store facing the market.
While eating, he idly unlocked his phone and opened his contacts. In the B’s, his list jumped from Tom Biny to Blue Highway Games, which was wrong. It took him a moment to realize that it was wrong because “Bill” was missing. He typed “Bi” into search and only “Tom Biny” came up. Bill didn’t. He stared at the phone, closed the list and opened it again, but Bill still wasn’t there. He power-cycled, eating and watching the colorful craft market across the street as his phone turned off and then came back on. Bill still wasn’t in his contacts.
He tapped out Bill’s seven-digit number. “Stanley, been-there-done-that-not-interested,” said an unfamiliar man’s voice after the second ring.
“What?” Vin said, “is Bill there?”
“Nope. Stanley’s here. Only Stanley. Wrong number.”
Vin said, “Thanks,” hung up, and tried again. Stanley said, “Never call again, please,” and hung up. Vin tapped out the number again, this time with the area code, though he shouldn’t need it, but the call went straight to voice mail: “Stanley knows who you are, but not why you’re calling.”
After the short tone, Vin said, “My friend had this number, I think, yesterday. I’m worried that something might have happened to him. Did you just get this number, today, or yesterday?” He left his own number and hung up.
He called customer service and asked if there were any circumstances that would lead his mobile service provider to remove a contact from his phone. He felt uncomfortable asking, as if he were addled and paranoid. He was told that the service provider could not access or change his personal contacts. Vin ate and pondered. Could he have been so distracted by the crèche that he’d accidentally deleted Bill’s info and was misremembering Bill’s number?
He wandered out of the pizza place and over to the small but busy park at the north end of the market where a totem pole overlooked Puget Sound. Beefy bike police in blue and black were chatting and surveying the unraveled souls who nodded off on benches between tourists and office workers. Vin found a seat as far from the police as possible. A guy wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, his face a blizzard of frayed black hair, ambled past trailing a cloud of stink.
“Hey,” a muscular policeman called at the guy, then pounded quickly toward him. The blanketed guy turned and stared numbly. Though he hadn’t done anything wrong, Vin got to his feet and hurried across the street. He headed north on Western Avenue.
He felt like a burglar as he let himself back into Nerdean’s. It wasn’t his house. He didn’t belong there and its strangeness wasn’t his strangeness. When he came up the stairs, a woman was sitting in the vast dining room backed by the wide picture window.
A sway of light umber skin, bare neck and shoulders above a black dress with an orange floral print. She was looking at the back of her hand. He had come in quietly and was frozen and silent as she turned her gaze to the picture window. When she turned toward him a thousand points of cold rose out of his legs, skimmed along his spine, robbed him of breath and lifted the individual hairs at the nape of his neck and the back of his scalp.
She stood up and said, “Hi! So, where do you want to go first?” Then, “Vin, are you okay?”
For a moment, breathing was difficult. He both did and did not recognize her. She was older than she got to be, but definitely was who she was. And her eyes—she was relaxed, even tentative, but her eyes were bright with a vulnerability he had forgotten. She smiled, concerned, and waited for him to respond.
“Kim?” was all he could say.
She shook her head, waiting for the greeting she’d imagined. “What’s going on? Vin?”
Time shifted, the river of time. If time was a river, Vin had stepped out of it. He had crossed it and was on the side where everything was catawampus and events could occur in any direction, the side where people who had died could step out of a slice of sunlight and ask if you were okay.
Her confidence broke. “Do you still want to go?” she asked.
The deafening, skittering chill rushed through him again. He took a half step closer to her, drawn by an urge to see her breathe.
“Vin?” she repeated with a note of panic. He saw tiny movements around her mouth, at the base of her throat. Was that her pulse flickering beneath her skin or was it his own pulse pounding into his eyes?
“I’m sorry,” he said, and wasn’t himself enough to prevent the next question that came to mind. “Can I touch you?”
“What? No,” she half laughed—a lost fragment of a remembered musical phrase—and straightened from her twist of self-doubt as she took a step back, “not like this. You weirdo. What’s gotten into you?”
There are ways to distinguish events that can be happening from events that can’t. For example, if you share a room with a person who stands and talks, then—almost by definition—that person is not dead.
He said, “You’re here.”
“Did you forget? We have a date.” He could see her struggling to be chipper, also not an attribute of the dead.
After Kim’s death, Vin had had terribly sad conversations with her that he only vaguely remembered. But they’d both admitted wrenching things. That had been fine. You could talk to a dead person, and listen to one. But no one should hear the voice of a dead person.
He said, “A date?”
“Yes. You said you didn’t know how to furnish the house. I said we should go look together. Do you remember?” She was concerned. Was she thinking that he had been resurrected?
“Kim?”
“Yes?”
“I’m, uhm—sit down.”
His legs gave way but he was near a chair and managed to shift into it. When he hit, it nearly tipped. It was a flimsy chair and needed to be replaced.
“I’ll get some water,” she said.
When she pushed a plastic glass at him, he said, “New furniture would be good.”
“Yeah.” She squatted beside him. “You remember? You wanted me to come here.” She touched the back of her hand to his forehead. Checking for fever. Her hand was cool. She smelled of lavender hair product and perspiration.
He put the glass to his lips but didn’t drink. He stared at her. “Thanks.” He rested the glass on his leg. Their faces were close and she was alive.
“Should you lie down?” Her breath was warm.
He leaned back. A tin of mints was wedged into the pocket of her bag (black fabric, white floral print). Maybe the same mints she used to like, flecked with hot-pepper oil. The summer after his first year away, when she had just graduated from high school, they were standing in the entryway of her family’s house. He had come to see her for the first time—her, and not Bill—and had asked her out. She had been wearing green sweats and one of those beanie hats that hid her hair and emphasized the bones of her broad face. She told him she was busy, and as he recovered she’d said she would be busy on every night he asked about, but she had been smiling and had one of those mints on her tongue and he wondered whether she was teasing and how she would respond if he asked again and then he realized they were alone in her family’s house. He saw that she was aware of it too, the awareness filling the air between them.
In a hurt, clumsy way, he had said, “Well, okay. I’ve got to go.” And as she nodded, years ago, her uncertain smile had blossomed into the broader, more confident smile that he was familiar with. He had thought about that smile for years after, and wondered whether she might have been sheltering a second, softer smile within the one she’d showed him. He had wondered if it might have been the empty house rather than his presence that had given her pause.
Her hand touched his, pulling him to the present. “What’s going on?”
He saw that the current trajectory of their interaction would lead to an emergency room visit, where he would have to explain that she was dead. (And a whisper in the closet of his darkest fears suggested that if they left the house, Kim would melt back to memory.) He needed to explain her impossibility to her, but also had to acknowledge that she seemed to believe she wasn’t dead. He had to get past his denial of a sensual truth: she was here, despite the fierce opposition of his intellect.
He said, “I have something to show you.”
Within the dynamic field of irresistible existence, one outrageous truth deserves another. He would show her Nerdean’s office, even though the idea of descending with her into that pale tract of technological voodoo was heart-stopping. After all, the device down there must have been the thing responsible for restarting her heart.
She stood beside him in the dark room as his foot fumbled and then found the square of raised carpet and pressed down. There was the soft sound of carpet against carpet and then light spilled up from below.
Kim’s voice came low from the back of her throat. “What is that?”
“That’s what I want to show you. Down there.”
She took a step forward and flinched back and then leaned toward it. “What is it?”
“We have to go down. I can’t explain without showing you. Follow me. It’s safe. I promise.”
“I’m not going down there. What is it?”
“A thing, a machine with racks of servers and—Nerdean, the woman who owns this house, made it all. It’s a kind of dream inducer. I don’t know what else it does.” He waited for her to understand how important that sentence was but she didn’t respond in any way so he said, “She’s down there, in it.”
“She’s down that hole, in a machine?”
“It’s her laboratory down there. I think she’s experimenting on herself.”
“Hey,” Kim called down, “Hey.”
“No, no. She’s sleeping.”
“She’s sleeping down there, in a machine?”
“Yes. It’s an incredibly complex system—bio-stimulation, neural response management, a mind-body interface, torpor induction, broad-spectrum synthetic nutrients, maybe skin and hair rejuvenation. I don’t know. I think it might augment creativity. I think she might be trying to make herself smarter. I don’t understand it all. I need help understanding.”
Kim watched him closely as he talked. She took a step away from the chute. “You want my help?”
Vin nodded and started down. When he got all the way down to the floor of the office, he called up, “Come down.” His voice sounded flat under the acoustic tiles.
“Vin, please—step away from the ladder.”
He retreated to the chairs, near the desk.
“Are you far away?”
“Yes.” He heard the faint sound of her moving, positioning herself on the ladder.
“Will this door shut on me?”
“It opens automatically when you come up.”
Another pause and then the rasp of her feet against metal. She descended slowly. At the bottom she stepped off the ladder and stood leaning forward, braced like an explorer.
She turned in a slow half circle, taking in the strangeness of the room, the eggshell chairs, the stacks of servers, the wall of batteries, and then fixing her gaze on the three caskets. Her eyes widened as she took in their shape, reading hints of the room’s purpose in the lighting strips and the transparent panes. When she looked at him, he saw fascination beneath her surprise, curiosity and courage overcoming her fear, but she was still immune to her own miraculous strangeness.
She sat in the eggshell chair closest to the chute, leaning away from its curved back. From the farthest chair, he told her as methodically as possible how he had found the chute and what had happened between his first conversation with Joaquin and his dream of being Bucky. She seemed fascinated by the sheer strangeness of their situation, as he was.
He tried not to stare as much as he wanted to, not to show that he was rattling inside like chimes in a wind tunnel. When he mentioned Bill, she put up a hand and stopped him, lowered it after a moment and shook her head and asked him to keep going. When he slipped in the fact that she had been dead, she blinked, asked a minor clarifying question—“This whole time?”—but let him continue.
When he got to, “You appeared here,” she interrupted with, “You invited me . . . ,” but stopped as she looked around the room. She couldn’t argue a small point about a past event while their surroundings were conspiring to twist the present into knots.
He put a hand on the desktop, felt its chill. “You see why I don’t know what’s going on?”
“Can I see the notebook?”
Both notebooks, his and Nerdean’s, were near his hand. He pushed them forward, then stood, lifted them and walked them to her. “You only need one of these. The other is everything I just told you. In case anything happens to me.”
“What do you think would happen?”
“I don’t know. Anything. I mean, you’re here.”
She flinched and then reached out and picked up Nerdean’s notebook and opened it and scanned the first pages. “You don’t know what’s going on, or whether this is safe, whatever it is, but you went in? Twice?”
“Yes.”
“That must be why you didn’t answer yesterday when I came by. But, didn’t you say there was someone else in there?”
“Nerdean.”
“The woman who owns this house? And you said she was sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it empty now?”
It was true. The first casket was empty and clean, like the others.
They searched. Vin called Joaquin but he didn’t answer and Vin didn’t know what to say on a message so he hung up. Having moved nothing, dropped nothing and picked up nothing—as mysteriously as Kim had appeared—Nerdean had disappeared, leaving no hint at all that she had been in the casket.
Kim leaned against the island as he picked up Sophie’s food dish and began to rinse it in the sink, his index finger burrowing into the remainder of Sophie’s previous meal, a dried brown gunk. It calmed him to focus closely on what he was doing, even as he was mildly repulsed by a mental image of the cultivation of small animals, caged hens swelling like fat bacteria in a large damp petri dish of a factory before being rousted by numbed workers who shackled their feet so they’d hang upside down as they were dragged through a paralyzing electric bath, their throats cut, blood drained, bodies plucked, shredded and ground, passed on a belt through an oven, pressed and canned, the cans stacked on a pallet and shipped from one country to another, one state to another, to a central warehouse and then all the way to a local grocery; and from there in his car to this house where he would peel open the sealed band of metal and scoop out a gelatinous pâté, a cream of chicken bodies, mash and stir it on a ceramic plate like this one so that Sophie—a cat who had appeared out of nowhere and therefore had only a dubious claim on existence—could nourish herself on a small portion of it and leave the rest to dry into this cadaverous glue he was now rinsing into the garbage disposal. Shreds of nausea laced through him as he consoled himself with the recollection that the cat food had also only recently appeared. It was also only half real.
He set the scrubbed dish in the dishwasher and got a clean one from a shelf above, another from a set of five he didn’t remember having before Sophie showed up. He opened a new can and scooped out its contents, mashed them and set the dish near Sophie’s water. Sophie ate ravenously, as if the food in her stomach had disappeared when he came out of the crèche. She purred as she ate and he petted her cheek, noticing that she had dark spots at the ends of her paws. He remembered her paws being white.
Kim was leaning against the island, prepared to leave, her purse on the floor beside her.
He straightened and took a step toward the counter. “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m glad you’re here.”
She nodded. She was watching Sophie gulp her food, her arms crossed.
“Can you stay here tonight,” he asked, “with me? It’s a big house.” He wasn’t sure he wanted her to stay though. If there were something wrong with him, he might be better off alone.
She touched his arm. “No. I’m going to leave.” She held up the notebook. “Are you okay if I take this?”
“I didn’t know you—” he said quickly, but her head tilted. Something about how he was saying it bothered her. He started again. “Where would you take it?” he asked.
She took a breath as the things that they didn’t know about each other waited for her response. “Maybe, to the secret lab under my apartment?” she said. “We didn’t get a notebook with ours.”
“You’ll bring it back?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t show it to anyone.”
“I won’t.” She folded open the front cover and slowly fanned through the pages. “Do you want to come with me?”
It was easier to look at Sophie than at Kim. “I can’t,” he said.
“Why?”
She had worn that dress to join him shopping. He said, “It wasn’t the day you were expecting, was it?”
She laughed, “No.”
“Whatever this is, I’m going to stay and try to figure it out.”
“Okay, I understand.” She picked up her purse and pulled the strap over her shoulder. “But, do you think that might be a mistake? To stay here? I mean, I don’t understand what’s happening. I definitely need some time to process—all this. But, just a little while ago, you told me that I was dead, and you also said that there’s a woman who’s skeletally thin and who’s missing, and you think that she’s probably in this house, hiding.”
Vin had to say it sooner or later. “I—I can accept that I’ve been wrong about some things. But, Kim, I do not now, and never have believed in ghosts.”
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that.”
