Ghosts of Punktown Read online

  The machine itself was primarily made of black metal, borne on two large rubber-treaded wheels. A few intensely blue lights gleamed or blinked across its surface like stars on a solidified chunk of space, and steam or some other vapor wafted out of a grille in one side. Also, set into a cavity was a glass container of a glowing blue fluid. A rubber tube ran from the machine to the otherworlder’s mouth, into which it disappeared, though it had no lips to pucker around it.

  “What is it you want?” Swift growled, hesitating outside his flat. “You selling those gadgets door-to-door, are you? Got a vacuum already.”

  “I know you,” came a flat, burbling voice from the grille in the machine. More steam coughed from it in time with the translated words, and the luminous blue fluid bubbled. “I would like you to know of me, as well.”

  “What do you mean, you know me?” Swift asked, trying not to seem startled at hearing the entity speak.

  “We Sufferers experience empathy almost telepathically. Not the words in your head, but the flavor of your feelings. I have tasted your pain, your self-destructive self-loathing, and I know the flavor of it as akin to our own. We are kindred.”

  “Yeah, sure, I knew it was something like that. Well, the hell we’re kindred. My pain is real, not a fucking fetish. You just want to feed off it, don’t you? Not enough pain of your own, you fucking vampire? No, you aren’t a vampire – you’re just a big blob of tofu, aren’t you? No flavor of your own, and you want to steal mine.”

  “It is not something I can take from you, only experience.”

  “Why should I let you experience my pain?”

  “It may be therapeutic for you, not to live your pain alone.”

  Swift barked a nervous laugh, less angry now and more disoriented, thrown off kilter, instead. “Oh, so you’re a therapist, are you? Is that what you’re selling door-to-door?”

  “We can suffer together,” the thing said simply, its mouth not moving around that tube, but the steam puffing out, the fluid gurgling along with each word.

  Finally Swift registered that the being had referred to its race not as the Bliss, but as the Sufferers.

  “Suit yourself, if you want to play,” he said, a little bitterly, a little tremulously, as he turned his back on the creature and unlocked his door. But he left it open behind him as he entered his flat...and he heard the two rubber wheels rolling after him.

  The entity stood just inside the threshold and watched as he poured himself some of the new Merlot. Glass in hand, Swift started to cross the room again so as to close and lock his apartment door, but before he could do so a single, skeletal black limb unfolded from the Bliss’s contraption, reached out and closed and locked the door itself. Swift stopped in his tracks, but for now took this action as courtesy and not threat.

  Considering the otherworlder, he said, “You called your kind the Sufferers.”

  “We are aware of the misconceptions you and other races harbor for us. We are not here in Punktown to sin...but to atone for our sins. We perceive our bodies as corrupt vehicles that must be punished until they die and shed their debased matter, so that our liberated essence might move on to the realm of souls. We despise our physical existence, we are miserable and deserve to be miserable until we are purged in death, and this is why we indulge in our humiliations. Our suffering.”

  “Well then,” Swift said, absorbing this. “And here I thought you were just a plain old heathen like me. Because there’s one of the big differences between you and me right there, mate. I don’t believe in a soul.”

  “Then I suffer for your blindness, in addition to your pain.”

  “You don’t suffer for me. You want me to be in pain, so you can lick it up.”

  “I relish your pain,” the Sufferer said, “but I wish you no ill will.”

  Swift laughed, as he pulled up a chair to sit in. He didn’t offer one to his guest. “You’re the politest vampire I’ve ever met. Aren’t you, my Jenny Haniver?”

  The creature did not ask him to explain “Jenny Haniver.” Either it gleaned the meaning through its gift of empathy, or dismissed it as of no significance. Instead, the Sufferer said, “It is very curious, in that I almost have the sense of two presences in your one body. Two souls in a single vehicle...”

  Swift sat up straighter in his chair, his cynical smirk collapsing. “You can feel that? You can sense Talane inside me?”

  “Talane.” An exhalation of vapor with the word, and it uncoiled like ectoplasm. “Explain.”

  And so he did. About him and Talane working together. Then loving together. About Talane’s suicide. The smuggling out of work of her memories, embodied in the nanomites that resided in him like ants preserved in amber. “You speak of empathy,” he croaked, his eyes by now fixed on some spot on the floor beyond his patiently standing guest. “By taking in her memories, I wasn’t so much thinking of remembering Talane as empathizing with her in the way I should have when she was alive. I’d like to activate the nanomites inside me, more and more of them until she eclipses me. Until she is alive again and I am gone. If only I could do that, huh? Take my leave to make room for her alone, so she could live again in place of me...take possession of this sorry vehicle, as you call it. That seems to me to be a fair trade, for the price of my blindness to her soul before. That blindness that you have pointed out to me, Jenny.” He looked up to the being as if remembering its presence at last.

  Silent all this time as it listened, Jenny – as Swift had dubbed the sexless being – finally said, “Your suffering is unique. I have never tasted its like before.”

  “Yes,” said Swift, holding up a fresh glass of Merlot to the light. “A fine vintage.” His eyes hardened as they returned to the Sufferer, and he got up from his chair. “I think you should leave now, Jenny – I’ve let you inside my head long enough for one day. It’s crowded enough already in there as it is.”

  “Let me stay with you a time.”

  “No, I don’t need a roommate. Go, please. I’ve had enough of this.”

  “As you wish.” The robotic arm from the translation rig reached out to unlock and open the door, then retracted. The ungainly being turned about, dragging the cart after itself. Swift followed to tend to the door. Without looking back at him as it began making its way toward the elevator, Jenny said, “I will know when you are ready to see me again.”

  6A

  For a second, consecutive day, Swift called in sick to work. His flat felt invaded by the doughy painted face of his team leader, Ramona Conte, on his computer screen. As expected, she told him he’d need a doctor’s note before returning to work if he should be out for a third day, but she was a little more sympathetic than he’d have expected, and she informed him that their supervisor, Dave, had called in sick for the second day in a row, too. In a confidential tone, she added, “I think Dave’s been under too much pressure, but I don’t know if it’s work or something at home – I caught him crying at his desk the other day. He was a wreck, the poor guy.” Then she seemed to think better of sharing this information, set her face in a harder and more typical cast, and muttered a sour good-bye.

  Swift couldn’t even picture his supervisor, so afflicted with masculinity, shedding tears at all, let alone sobbing at his desk. An odd speculation occurred to Swift. He recalled Dave itching at his ear, and thinking – hoping – that one of Talane’s “earwigs” still nested there. But what if she had used that same nanomite in her memory experiments, previously? What if that same irritating creature still carried its programmed long-chain molecules, and these had in whole or in part been released somehow into Dave’s system? Swift imagined a weird, spreading plague of such creatures, each bearing some particle of Talane, its own terrorist’s bomb of pure suffering, infecting everyone at work. Reproducing somehow, until all of Punktown sobbed as one great anguished soul.

  But he didn’t care for the idea of Dave sharing Talane’s intimate pain, and he hoped it was something unrelated, as Ramona had conjectured. Talane’s pain w
as for Swift alone.

  Yesterday, all day, he had been torn about whether or not to purposely awaken some of the nanomites inside him, order them to release their molecules in the appropriate area of his brain, so that he could experience the information they bore. Live those memories, just as Talane had. Be Talane, if only for a few minutes. If he had the courage.

  Today, he had stayed home with the determination – with a suicide’s fatalism – to do it.

  He had sent a copy of Talane’s control program from his work computer to his home computer. If this was ever discovered he would claim to have been doing research at home. And wasn’t he? Research into the enigmas of love? Along with his new injector and extractor he had also purchased a nano remote from the same medical supply outlet. He linked this with the control program, and then, sitting at his computer, considered where to begin. What little taste of Talane to start with, a sip of the soup to see if it was too scalding to take in.

  What mysteries might be unveiled, what surprises await him in her mind? Just how bad had it really been with her spouse? Sometimes Swift had wondered if she kept things from him so he wouldn’t worry, or seek out her husband for a violent confrontation. Since her death he had several times fantasized that she wasn’t, in fact, a suicide, but had been murdered by her husband in a fit of jealousy. Better that she had died in the name of her love for Swift than from the confusion and despair he had inspired. But he recognized that this was only a fantasy. A pathetic dream of exoneration. He didn’t want dreams, but truth. He wanted to taste the love she had had for him. Live their love from her point of view.

  And where to start exploring her memories, but with his own memories?

  He thought of times with her that, at least for him, had been the most meaningful. After a few minutes of reflection along these lines, he focused on a morning they had played hooky together, both calling in sick to work and visiting Punktown’s vast Canberra Mall. He couldn’t think of the exact date, only the year, so he did a key search of the memory file instead. Recalling the name of the restaurant where they had brunched, he typed in the year and keywords CANBERRA MALL and THE ARBOR.

  He ran the search, and came up with two results. A little perplexing; he recollected only one time they had eaten there, but then they had gone to so many restaurants all over the city that he could have forgotten an occasion. The first result had a core memory of 72 minutes’ duration, the second 55 minutes, but he could section these into smaller units, and decided on limiting his initial experience to 15 minutes, taken from the center of the whole...in this case, the first result from his search.

  He transferred the information for the portioned out data to his remote. Then, after taking in a long shaky breath – and settling back in his chair like a pilot bracing for takeoff – he thumbed a key on the remote, commanding the nanomite or nanomites associated with the memory to arouse from hibernation.

  He closed his eyes to make a blank screen of his mind, but soon found this wasn’t necessary. Either his own vision was switched off, as his mind tried to make sense of this influx of another person’s perspective, or he became unconscious of it as the recorded memories blossomed into real time. There was still a bit of an overlap of personas – his did not go to sleep – but Swift receded into the copilot’s seat. He became like Scrooge, he would think later, watching a younger version of himself while he remained an unseen ghost of the future.

  He saw leaves, motionless for an absence of breeze. Red as any autumn tree could aspire to, but always this red, and bearing fruit indigenous to Oasis which – while tasting quite like limes – had the circular shape of doughnuts, with a pale green rind. His eyes – her eyes – trailed among the broken ceiling of leaves, with the ceiling of the mall much higher above that, a petrified sky. Her gaze idled amidst the dangling fruit, like rings corroded with verdigris, as a glass was raised to her lips. Swift tasted salt on the glass’s rim, tasted a Margarita. He had never known Talane to drink a Margarita.

  Her eyes lowered. The slender but sturdy trunk of a tree grew up through a hole in the center of each table. And across from this table sat Talane’s husband, Laz. He was shorter but fuller than Swift, his face roundish and of a healthy complexion. But his eyes looked a little troubled, wary. Swift had met him in person once at a company function, when he had accompanied Talane as her guest, and they had shaken hands then. Laz had looked less troubled that day. It was before he had suspected Talane of her affair.

  “Good, honey?” Laz reached across the table, and Swift felt the man’s fingers close around his own, as their hands had joined at that function. But this time the man’s thumb stroked the top of his hand.

  “Good,” Talane said. Swift’s heart, in the background, gave a little lurch at hearing her voice again. But it had an unusual quality to it, hearing it as he did within her own skull. The way her voice had sounded to herself.

  Swift withdrew his hand gently, and picked up one of the circular fruit. Had it fallen to the table or had one of them plucked it down? Lowering his eyes from Laz, he saw that the nails of his long slim fingers were painted red. He took up his steak knife, and began cutting away the rough green rind.

  “You look beautiful with your hair like that,” Laz said.

  Like what? Swift wondered. How was her long black hair different today? Parted on the side rather than in the middle, in a curtain partly obscuring one large dark eye? Gathered up in a bun behind her? Something special for this occasion? What was this occasion?

  “Thanks,” she said remotely.

  Laz seemed to hesitate, and then asked, “Are you okay? You seem far away.”

  Swift raised his eyes to him again. “Please, Laz. I’m okay.” But the man’s face appeared unconvinced. This time it was Swift who reached across the table, to give Laz’s hand a brief squeeze. “I’m okay. Can we order now?”

  Laz nodded, and dropped his eyes to the menu screen set into the table. Swift lowered his gaze again, too, his eyes only half focused on the menu’s text as he continued flaying the fruit. Its flesh was delicate and veiny, and as vivid a red as the tree’s leaves.

  They discussed what to order, and as they did, Swift felt like a voyeur...an interloper within his own body. He wanted to retreat from them, leave them to each other. He wanted to see no more. But he was helpless, trapped within her, until the preset 15 minutes had elapsed. It was a very long 15 minutes. He wanted to sob to be released, to close her eyes and see no more. But he couldn’t control her actions now anymore than he had when she was alive.

  “I love you, honey,” Laz said suddenly. Swift met his eyes again. The man’s seemed on the verge of filling up. “You don’t believe it, but I do.”

  “I believe you, hon,” she told him. “I do believe you.” Swift felt the muscles of her face shift into a smile. “Please...let’s not talk about anything today, okay? Let’s just enjoy our meal.”

  “Yes, honey. Yes...okay.”

  Talane broke a section from the translucent red flesh, and popped it into her mouth. It was both delicious and very sour.

  6B

  Swift sat in his chair with his head drooping forward, his chin on his chest. Tears crawled down his face.

  The wrong memory. Not the one he’d been looking for. No...not the one.

  Why hadn’t Laz grabbed her hair in this reminiscence, as Talane had told Swift he had done one time? Why hadn’t he seized her arm, called her a cunt, accused her of fucking this man or that or Swift, by name? Swift, who Laz had once called in a drunken rage? (Swift hadn’t answered.) Why had Laz been gentle, loving, instead? Why did he have to have tears of pain in his eyes?

  And why had Swift felt a tightening in Talane’s throat as she fought against her own tears?

  The three of them, in tears.

  Swift could have sworn that Talane had told him their date had been her first time to The Arbor. If she had indeed said that, then she had lied.

  He still felt wet and dripping and half drowned from having been submerged in
the past, but he needed to dive right back in, because if he didn’t follow through with his momentum then he might never find the strength to do this again. And because he wanted to banish what he had just witnessed – experience him and Talane together, as he had intended.

  He sat up straighter, collected himself enough to tend to the remote. He swallowed with a click, swallowed whatever hesitation remained, then depressed the key that would release the second of the measured out doses of memory.

  A skewed moment or two before his identity and hers aligned in a way that satisfied the clockwork of his brain. She was an invader in his mind, or he an invader in hers – host and parasite blurred – but he hung back passively and let her carry them both forward. If this was the day he had been searching for, then he had his own memories of it. But his were not enough.