The thing’s breath, hot and foul, touched the back of her neck, and an electrical sensation danced along her spine. Her muscles tensed as adrenalin kicked in. The predator’s shadow, crouched and still, hung just off to her right. She tried to judge the distance, but the other shadow, a little further out and behind, complicated the calculation. Little Brother had just risen above the tree line, and she tried to remember what they had taught her. Triangulate. Pia, about thirty degrees above the horizon, approached zenith. Little Brother was about twelve. Pia would cast the darker shadow. She could feel the vircat tense, its movement nearly imperceptible. Perspiration rolled down her forehead. She had to decide. Now. She jumped and whirled around, swinging her long knife, point forward, toward the vircat. Miscalculation. The thing’s huge claw came down on her shoulder with a terrible ripping sound, and Gretel deVoid fell hard under the full weight of the cat.
The vircat disappeared, and Gretel stood, shaking her head. “Damn, I don’t think I’ll ever get this right.”
“You’re doing just fine, Gretel.” Toxine’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “Your calculations just need to come more quickly. Practice. Shall we try again?”
“I can’t, Toxine. I have homework to do tonight.”
“Very well,” said Toxine, as the nighttime forest, with its two moons, faded, and the classroom at Universidad de Simon Bolivar appeared around Gretel. Toxine looked at Gretel approvingly. “You are a brave girl, you know.”
Self-conscious, Gretel looked at the floor.
“How are things going with your dad?”
“I haven’t told him, yet. I still haven’t figured out what to say.”
“That will come too, my dear. Now off to your homework, eh?”
“Thanks, Toxine,” said Gretel.
Jessie Larivee disconnected from the grid and sighed. The confrontation with her dad on Tuesday still disturbed her. Since she had begun classes in August, a silence had fallen over their household. She had let it go too far. Cedar had urged her to act, but she could never work up the nerve. Her dad was hopelessly out-of-date. He barely had a clue about anything outside work. Talking to Jolene would be easier, although Jessie had neither seen nor heard from her mother in nearly six years. Cedar insisted she needed to talk to Jolene. She said she knew how to track her down. Jessie wasn’t convinced about the wisdom of that, so she had confided in Toxine. Toxine, too, had urged her to talk to both of them. “You know,” she said, “you may be leaving them, forever. You need to say your goodbyes.”
Toxine was her best friend on New Life, after Cedar. Forest Survival was her favorite class. The older girl, Toxine, was at Master Level, and had taken Gretel on as her protégé, helping her through the tough exam preparation. The Sweetland sim was as close to the real thing as a sim could come, and with the new citspec mods, you could smell the odors and feel the ground beneath your feet, as though it was some solid, real thing. Even the claws of the vircat ripping through her shoulder left a lingering discomfort. Not pain, exactly, but more like the scratchy stinging that comes when you reach barehanded through a blackberry bramble. Most other sims had not yet been programmed for the new mods, but it was only a matter of time before almost every sim on the grid would be hyper-sensed.
Her coder friend Pox claimed to have worked on the Sweetland sim, but she didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She thought he might be a bit of a braggart. “You should try the glitch sex script I wrote for the Sweetland sim, cherie,” he had said, earlier in the day, with his cute French accent, and she laughed at him. “I suppose you want to try it out with me?”
“You know, as the designer, I could show you how to get the most out of it,” he replied.
“A product demonstration. How romantic,” she laughed. “Well, it so happens that I plan to remain a virgin until I marry.”
“You are a virgin?” He pretended astonishment. “What a pity.”
She thought that would put an end to it, but of course Pox immediately proposed marriage, and when she turned him down, he feigned disappointment for a few moments, then began to talk about programming nanobot neurotransmitters. Pox Americano was Toxine’s brother. A real nerd, but Jessie’s type of nerd. She had to admit to herself that a sex script sounded hot. Maybe, just before they left for Sweetland in a few weeks…
Jessie shook herself out of an evolving fantasy. Homework. She had a bunch of homework to do for her Immigration classes. Hormones would have to wait.
* * *
“Jessie,” Dad called from the living room, “please take out the recycling.”
“In a minute, Dad.” She waited for his objection. It came like lightning.
“Now,” he shouted.
She wondered why she put up this pointless resistance. It was a habit from her childhood, when occasionally she got away with it. No more. And yet she couldn’t help herself. “You have a stubborn gene,” Grandma Amy used to say. “Got it from your Grandpa.”
Jessie sighed and marched to the kitchen with heavy feet, to the nook where the recycling containers spilled over onto the floor. She rounded up the stray cartons and bottles, and fitted them into the bins as best she could, leaving a scattered few behind. Then she carried them down the hall to the back door. The door to the alley stairway was grimy and reinforced with thick steel plates. The lock disengaged with a heavy thunk as she turned the knob. She dragged the bins out onto the landing.
The mist that had been falling earlier in the day had subsided, and the Portland sky showed signs of clearing. The alley was wet, and standing pools of rainwater filled the depressions in the aging pavement. Coming from the shadows, she heard a voice she recognized, but the words were muddled and incoherent. There was a rustling sound at the garbage dumpster. If not for the familiar mumbling cadence, Jessie might have thought rats were scuttling through the dumpster in the filthy alley. She stopped at the top of the stairs so she wouldn’t frighten him. “Alan,” she called, “are you hungry?”
“Jessie,” came the pleading reply, “I’m looking for something to eat. You got something for me to eat?”
She still couldn’t see him, but the edge of his cart protruded from behind the fence which shielded the dumpster from the street. She set the recycling bins down at the foot of the steps.
“If you’ll put these bins out for me, I’ll go get something for you.”
She returned to the apartment and tiptoed back into the kitchen. Dad was probably oblivious on the couch. She worried about him. Nearly every evening, he came home and vanished into some netherworld. He might as well be a gridhead. At least on the grid, you can learn things and interact with people.
She opened the tiny fridge quietly. She couldn’t let Dad know about Alan. He would freak. Alan was a war vet, about her dad’s age, she guessed. She suspected that Alan was schizophrenic, and maybe mentally challenged. He seemed harmless enough, always coming around on recycle days. Jessie took to feeding him leftovers, if they had them, heating them in the infrared oven, or the fred, as the kids called it. But, sometimes she would take him a new carton of beans or a peanut butter sandwich. Then, she would sit on the bottom step and talk to him while he ate.
Today they had leftovers, and Jessie heated a plate of sauteed veggies with tofu on brown rice, being careful to take it out before the fred’s alarm sounded. It was some pre-packaged dinner, which slightly disgusted her, and was, therefore, uneaten. She was well aware of the irony — that the world was starving. That there were days at the end of every month when she and her dad went hungry. And yet she still acted spoiled and picky. Helping Alan eased her guilt, she supposed.
“Got a nice, hot dinner for you tonight, Alan,” she said as she descended the steps. She noticed that the recycle bins were still at the bottom of the steps where she left them. Alan had a short attention span, and she would have to remind him.
“Alan,” she called out. Why didn’t he answer? Had he moved on down the alley?
“Just put it on the step, Jessie,” he said, finally, from behind the dumpster, his voice hesitant. “I’ll get it in a minute.”
Something was wrong. This wasn’t like Alan, whose loneliness was as acute as his hunger. If he hadn’t told her as much, she could see it in his face, hear it in his attempts to hold her attention. Most nights she awkwardly found herself interrupting him, saying, “Goodnight, Alan. Dad’s going to get worried about me.” She put the dinner on the step and picked up one of the bins, carrying it around to the pick up area. Alan stood there in the shadows, unmoving, except for his hand, which he instinctively raised to cover his face. But not before she caught sight of the split eyelid and swollen, mangled lip. One side of his face carried a huge purple bruise.
“Alan, what happened to you?”
“I don’t want you to see me like this, Jessie. I don’t want to scare you.”
“What happened to you, Alan?” she repeated.
“Some fucking gestapos beat me up. They kicked me in the face. They said that I was sleeping in their place. But, I been sleeping there, Jessie. I been sleeping there since summer, fucking bastards.” Alan punched a fist in the air above his head, staring wildly at some phantom opponent. His voice was intense, but barely above a whisper. “Who had a fucking election and elected you fucking assholes dictator of the fucking planet? I didn’t have no chance. The bastards come down on me like a fucking Blitzkrieg from the USA fucking Air Force. Like I was some fucking peasant in fucking Afghanistan or something. Jesus Christ, take me to Sweetland. Jesus Christ.”
Jessie stepped back, frightened. She had never seen him so angry before. “Take it easy, Alan,” she croaked, weakly. But, he just wrapped his arms around his torso and said, “Jesus Christ,” over and over, rocking on his heels until the rhythm of his mantra seemed to calm him.
Finally, Jessie extended her hand. “Come. Dinner’s getting cold.”
He refused to take her hand, but he followed her to the back steps, where she brushed away the flies and pushed the synthetic plate at him. He grabbed it and began shoveling the now cold food into his mouth, wincing at the pain from his injured face. She made a few attempts at conversation, but he just stared down the alley with a blank look; his eyes glazed over in confusion.
Then he vomited. The dinner he had just eaten spewed over the apartment stairs, mixed with blood, and reeking of alcohol. “God, Alan,” she said, “you need to get some medical help.”
“No, no, no,” he whispered. “They won’t help me. Leeches. They use leeches. Suck your blood dry. That’s what they do. They suck you until you’re dead. Fucking hospitals. Fucking doctors. Just wanna go to Sweetland. Can you help me go to Sweetland, little girl?” His eyes were glassed over in a teary film.
Jessie’s stomach knotted with worry and nausea from the stench of vomit. Think. What can you do? Her own eyes were tearing, now. Take some time to think this out.
“Wait here, Alan,” she said. “I gotta go get something to clean up this mess. I’ll figure out something.” She ran up the stairs to the building’s custodial closet on the second floor, and grabbed a bucket and mop. As she filled the bucket, she considered how to convince Alan to go find some help. There was a free clinic up on Burnside, but how could she get him to go?
She dragged the bucket back down the hall to the rear door, and pushed it open. Alan was nowhere in sight. She left the bucket on the landing and bounded down the stairs. “Alan,” she called. She looked into the dumpster cage, then ran down the alley to the street, searching for his cart, calling his name. But he had vanished.
——
©2008-2009 by Duane Poncy
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