by Jack Skillingstead
Jack Skillingstead reports that he is hard at work on a novel-length version of his story, “Life on the Preservation” (June 2006). In Jack’s latest tale for us, the elusive nature of both reality and cats finally becomes clear to Hadley Yeager and this realization gives her one last chance to say...
* * * *
Hadley Yeager was old and widowed and miserable. She hadn’t always been that way. She used to be younger and in possession of a breathing husband. Actually, she had been the possession. And the misery had been constant and enduring. Now Hadley couldn’t find her grocery money. She had hidden it because she was worried about that dark boy breaking in and robbing her. But she couldn’t remember where she’d hidden it. Hadley was hungry, and if she didn’t find the money soon things wouldn’t be pleasant. Not that they were, generally.
Hadley sat in the kitchen and cried. Her stomach ached with hunger. Briefly she wished she owned a cat. Franklin (or Soopy, or Mrs. Pussyfoot, or Mr. Whiskers) would rub against her leg and purr and be a comfort. But there would also be the horrid droppings and the sofa shredded, and probably Franklin would make her sneeze. Then she remembered Franklin was the name of her husband (even his name sometimes drifted away from her), and she determined to put the whole idea out of her mind.
Hadley started to stand up and a wave of dizziness swelled through her. The room seemed to darken, then it passed and her vision cleared and she stood up more steadily. She would stop crying and fetch the mail. No one normal wrote to her anymore, but, once in a while, among the bills, there was an envelope proclaiming her a WINNER!!!! and these cheered her until she recalled the truth.
She peeked out the curtains first. The street was empty. She put on her coat and let herself out, mumbling, “Be good, Mr. Whiskers,” and she pulled the door shut extra hard so the cat wouldn’t get away. Cats were clever, but they couldn’t open doors that were properly shut.
Hadley’s joints ached terribly in the cold. By the time she had hobbled to the mailbox she had almost forgotten what she was doing outside. One time she had become confused walking home from the grocery store. Everything had looked strange and unfamiliar and she didn’t know anyone or what to do. The sky had been white and glaring, and her joints tormented her. Hadley had stood in one place so long, searching for a recognizable sign, that her arm became tired and she dropped the grocery bag, spilling grapes like little green marbles. That was the first time she had become aware of the dark boy. As she started to bend over he had suddenly been there, snatching up her bag with his big brown paw and thrusting it at her. Hadley’s heart had quailed, but he simply rode away on his bike, knees pumping as high as his armpits. Watching him swing around the corner she had suddenly recognized the street.
Now Hadley looked back at her house, hoping to see Mr. Whiskers in the window, but he wasn’t there. She glanced around, confused, and saw the boy coming. He was wearing his too-big coat and riding his too-small bicycle, wobbling back and forth. At the same instant she remembered that Mr. Whiskers wasn’t a real cat and that she lived alone in the house she had once shared with her husband who never touched her during the last decades of their marriage. The house with paint like dead skin flaking and peeling off and the lawn overcome by weeds.
The boy stopped a short distance away and stood straddling his bike and looking at her. She wiped her eyes because she was sad about Mr. Whiskers.
“Hey, lady, are you okay?”
“Of course I am! You’re from Honduras.” She got Honduras from a picture in one of the National Geographic magazines Franklin used to subscribe to, or maybe it was a magazine that had been in the house when she was a child. Pictures and real people and things were all mixed up in Hadley’s mind.
“No, I’m not,” the dark boy said
“And you’re the one spray-painting everything.” Hadley’s voice quavered. The strangled, threatening loops and knots of paint appeared on fences and signs and even the walls of houses. One had appeared on the wall of her house.
“I don’t do that,” the boy said, hunched inside his giant purple-blue puffy coat. “That’s some dumb little kids.”
Hadley sniffed and turned away. Then she squinted, for there were too many mailboxes. She counted them to make sure. The new one was on the end, right next to hers. Somehow it fit on the board under the little moss-covered roof, even though, Hadley felt certain, there hadn’t been room. Well. She glanced at the boy, who was still watching her. She didn’t want him to rob her but there wasn’t anything she could do about it if he did. She decided to grab her mail and hold it in both hands until she got back to her front door.
She quickly opened the mailbox and reached in, keeping her eye on the boy. It was cold inside the box, like the interior of a freezer. Her fingers touched something like a postcard. She pulled it out. A three- by five-inch piece of white cardstock with these words printed neatly in the middle: LOOK IN THE SOFA CUSHION.
She had taken it out of the new mailbox by mistake. She started to replace it but didn’t. In her own mailbox she found an electric bill and an advertisement. When she looked up, the dreadful spray-painting boy from Mexico was gone. She closed both mailboxes and was startled to notice the new one now had her name HADLEY etched in gold letters on the door.
* * * *
LOOK IN THE SOFA CUSHION.
Hadley was preparing tea for her grumbling stomach when her mind made the connection. She shuffled into the living room with her empty cup hanging from a crooked finger. The sofa was almost thirty years old, the floral print faded, the cushions lumpy and compressed. One of the delivery men from The Furniture Mart had pinched his finger backing up the stairs and said “Shit,” the only time that word had been spoken in the house, Hadley believed. She remembered wincing and being glad Franklin was at work. The delivery man had been even darker than the spray-painting boy.
She unzipped the cushion on the side where she habitually sat to watch TV. Her hand (like a palsied, sinewy chicken claw) reached in and groped at the crumbling foam until she found the envelope with her grocery money.
* * * *
Hadley lay awake staring at the ceiling and inhabiting her bone pain. The moon had come in and printed shadows all over. She never could sleep anyway. In her recurring dream a darkspun wicked thing whispered around the doors and windows of her house, seeking entry. A thing made of shadows and poison webs and evil intent. Dreading sleep, dreading the wicked thing, Hadley reached out and turned the lamp on, picked up her glasses and the card from the bedside table.
LOOK IN THE SOFA CUSHION.
The card was real.
She got up and put on her robe and slippers. She retrieved a flashlight from the kitchen and went outside and made her way to the mailbox. The moon was everywhere, and the cold breeze, and rustling sounds. Her slippers scuffed on the pavement, her feet especially ached with the cold. She pointed her flashlight at the new mailbox and saw her name shimmer in gold letters. She hobbled straight to it, hesitated, then pulled open the little door.
The mailbox was full of stars.
She stepped back. All of the night sky seemed to be compressed inside the mailbox, all the star-filled night skies she had ever seen, all the ones she had gazed at when she was a young girl who dreamed and would have liked a kiss, long before she ever met Franklin. (A memory surfaced: standing next to her father in the backyard of the Arlington house while he pointed out constellations and told their mythical stories).
Hadley moved closer, intending to flip the door shut. She was afraid and wanted to go back inside where it was safe. But it seemed wrong to leave the mailbox open. She reached a trembling hand toward the door. Something white floated up among the stars and presented itself to her.
YOUR PAIN IS GONE.
Hadley turned the card over. The back was blank. She started toward the house, walking spryly, then stopped. Her joints did not hurt. She bent her right leg at the knee. No pain. She clutched the card in her hand and hurried to the house. She felt almost like she could run again!
* * * *
YOUR BOWELS ARE HEALTHY
YOUR VISION IS PERFECT
YOUR HEATING BILL IS PAID
* * * *
Franklin had been mean, not at all like her father, who had been a kind, brooding man who liked to gather her in with his big arm and read stories to her—all this goodness ruined when he walked out of the house one evening and never returned; later they found his poor body broken at the foot of the Magnolia Street Bridge. A leap that changed everything, everything, and led eventually to Franklin.
The dark boy lingered on his bicycle in front of Hadley’s house. She frowned. Hadley’s husband had been mean but he had also, perhaps, been right about “them” ruining the neighborhood. They were like an alien incursion. Such attitudes ran contrary to Hadley’s deepest intuitive currents and the sense of fairness her father had instilled. But it was hard always going against Franklin, even if it was only in the silent place inside her heart. And Franklin had been strong, as her father had once seemed to be. Also, what did fairness mean anymore? Her father hadn’t been fair when he jumped off the bridge, abandoning her forever. Eventually she came to accept her husband’s views. Now here was this one boy always watching her, asking if she was all right. Of course she was all right!
DO YOU WANT HIM TO GO AWAY?
It was the first time the mailbox had asked her a question. She had gone to the box, and the dark boy had been on her mind, his awful spray-painting. And somehow it was as if he were to blame for everything: the old house that was ugly and smelled bad, the bills that baffled her, the arid decades of her marriage, the dreadful wattled thing in the mirror. After thinking about it for two days she turned the card over and carefully printed YES on the back. The next time she looked the mailbox was empty, as if it were waiting for her reply, and she placed the card in it, swung the flag up, but didn’t shut the door. The card lay white and innocent, waiting for stars. She wanted to take it back, but a willful, contrary urge made her slap the door shut and walk quickly away.
* * * *
She peeked between the curtains and watched the boy. He coasted by on his bicycle but stopped just past the mailboxes and rolled backward, using his feet. He stopped the way someone would stop if he had heard his name called. The dark boy looked around, but it was a cold day and he was the only one on the street. Suddenly his head jerked toward Hadley’s special mailbox. She couldn’t see his face, but something about the way he moved, the attitude of his body, suggested he was afraid. Don’t, Hadley thought, but it was too late to take the card back, and the boy reached out and opened the mailbox. Something yanked him off his bike. He staggered to one knee, his right hand thrust into the box. He shook his head, dazed or unbelieving. Then the mailbox ate him, jerking him in first by the arm. He screamed and Hadley heard the scream and would hear it forever after that. The boy’s body collapsed into the small aperture. His big puffy coat stripped off him, his legs kicking and jerking. The whole row of mailboxes shuddered violently, doors dropping open, bits of green moss shaking off the little slanted roof. It took only seconds.
Hadley’s breath halted in her chest. No one else appeared on the street. The door of Hadley’s special mailbox hung open, like the doors of the other five mailboxes. The dark boy’s coat lay on the ground, white stuffing foaming out of the torn sleeve.
Hadley was crying and her legs shook as she crossed the street. She closed the mailboxes one at a time, and when she got to her special mailbox there was something waiting for her.
HE WASN’T REAL
She gathered up the puffy coat and all but ran back to her house.
* * * *
YOU ARE GROWING YOUNGER
It was spring. Hadley was walking. Her bones did not hurt and her head was clear and she was perhaps twenty years younger than she had been two months ago. In this condition she did not feel so afraid of her neighbors and of the world, and she had begun to remember herself, who she had been before everything turned bitter.
She walked by a neatly maintained ranch house with gingerbread trim and a flower garden. Hadley had once kept a garden of her own. She missed it and thought she might start a new one.
A swarthy middle-aged woman, bent over, wearing a sagging green sweater and brown shoes came out the front door of the house and waved to her. Hadley did not know the woman but stopped.
“Oh, you’re too young,” the woman said. “I thought you were the lady from the white house on the next block.”
“I am,” Hadley said.
The woman narrowed her eyes at her, then said, “Oh. Well, you don’t know me.”
Hadley smiled politely.
“But you knew my son.” Her voice shook when she said “my son.” “I am Mrs. Alverez. Anita Alverez, Jonathan’s mother.”
“I don’t—”
“He worried about you,” the woman said. “He told me he used to ask if you were all right.”
In her mind Hadley saw the puffy coat stuffed behind Franklin’s workbench in the basement.
“His grandmother—my mother—died last summer. Her mind was gone. It was hard for Jonathan.” Mrs. Alverez looked away. “He cried so much when she died.” Mrs. Alverez moved her hands vaguely.
“I’m sorry,” Hadley said.
Tears spilled down Mrs. Alverez’s cheeks and she did not look at Hadley. “He was a good boy.”
* * * *
HE WASN’T REAL
Hadley did not comprehend this message. She had grown younger and more vigorous but still she slept like an old woman. Fitfully and in fear of dreams, of the darkspun wicked thing. Her mind was sharp and she remembered herself, her better nature, and she knew Mrs. Alverez was right: her son had been a good boy.
Hadley carefully printed a question on the back of the HE WASN’T REAL card and replaced it in the mailbox. What do you mean? she had written. The next day a new card was present.
THIS IS HEAVEN
* * * *
Thirty-five years later Hadley was depressed and attempting to alleviate that condition by shopping. It was that or the sleeping pills back at the Hotel Chateaubriand. L’Univers D’objets Rares was located on the exclusive Rue Ampère. The dapper man in the neat black zip-suit had brought forth the Martian Fire Crystals and was awaiting her judgment, peeved at Hadley’s bored response to the rarities.
A voice spoke inside Hadley’s ear. This wasn’t surprising in and of itself. Like nearly everyone, she’d had an aural implant injected through her eardrum, and it had bonded bio-molecularly to the incus, malleus, and stapes bones of her middle ear. The device served as a hands-off phone activated by the micro-electrical impulses of her intent. It was also a conduit for automated information, stock market updates, weather, even serialized stories that she would listen to in bed sometimes when she found sleep elusive ... or too permanently tempting. The stories reminded her distantly of her father’s encompassing arm and soothing story time voice.
But she hadn’t activated the device. And it hadn’t given her a weather report or a newZflash; it had given her advice on which Martian Fire Crystal to purchase.
The crystal on your left is flawed, Hadley.
It was a soft, perfectly modulated masculine voice. The same voice which last night had read her chapter twelve of Pride and Prejudice. It sounded the same, but it was not the same. And Hadley knew what was speaking to her.
“My mailbox,” she said out loud.
The proprietor lifted his eyebrows.
“Incoming call,” Hadley said, distracted, then added, “I’ll take the one on the right.”
When she was outside with her package, she said, “It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the voice said.
“I thought you were gone for good.”
“No. I’m always here,” the voice said.
Hadley sat on a bench in the little park across the street from L’Univers D’objets Rares. A pattern of sunlight and shade swayed over her like an ethereal net. With the passing decades she had gradually allowed the origin of her impossible good fortune to retreat from the presence of her mind. It was difficult to let it come forward again.
“Tell me what you are,” she said. “Please.”
“That question is more complicated than you might think,” the Voice replied. “Simply put: I am you.”
“Me!”
“An over-simplification, but yes. You could think of me as your higher-consciousness self, dreaming your new life.”
Hadley watched a starling flicker over the uneven brown bricks of the park. Moss almost iridescently green grew thickly in the seams between the bricks. The starling’s shadow, a black ripple, glided a little behind the bird.
“I don’t believe that,” Hadley said.
“You don’t have to, of course.”
“This can’t be a dream.”
“It’s not a dream such as you are thinking. The world is real. And up until my advent into your ego-consciousness, it was a shared experience.”
“And what is it now?”
“I’ve already told you: Heaven. The only Heaven into which anyone is ever received. Death is the termination of all consciousness, all personal existence. Near the point of its arrival the higher consciousness asserts itself. Hi!”
“I don’t understand.”
“I built this place from the existing template of the vulgar world, the one you physically inhabit. I prepared it for us, Hadley. Because when you cease to live, so do I cease. But nothing ceases here, unless you will it.”
“But it isn’t real?” Hadley said.
“Is a dream real while you are in it? This world is as real as anything. And it works just like the one you were used to, with one exception: you can have, be, or do anything. It’s real so long as you go on believing it is. In our world, in Hadley’s World, Time is a seeming thing and can stretch to infinity, sustained by a perfectly balanced neurochemical illusion. But we need each other, Hadley, or it won’t persist. Nothing will. I made the world, populated it with the shadow-twins of the human race, but you bring it alive. So let us be happy. The world is a lovely place now, isn’t it?”
“Lovely,” she said, her voice a monotone.
Hadley stared across the park at the people on the Rue Ampère and couldn’t believe they were mere figments, some kind of second tier Platonic shadows. But that’s what the Voice had told her years ago regarding Jonathan Alverez. Only back then it wasn’t even a voice but a few printed words on a card. After a long while Hadley said, “Are you there?”
No answer.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Then a static burst, and: La température est à Paris un degrés de soixante-dix-quatre chauds....
* * * *
Heaven.
Decades passed. Or didn’t pass. In her New York condo, Hadley crossed her legs and leaned back in the wonderful chair. It reacted to her slightest movements, even the subtle alterations of electrical impulses traveling her nerves, and adjusted for maximum comfort. It was a SmArt chair. A very smart one. Hadley’s arm hung languidly over the side, a doparette between her middle fingers unwinding in a fragrant blue thread. Her body was that of a twenty-two-year-old. Her breasts were firm, her legs good, her health excellent, her mind acute. She was wealthy and she was immortal. Two excellent things to be. But Hadley didn’t feel excellent and never had in all the intervening years. Nothing could grant her contentment; it was time to wake up—or go to sleep forever.
“Abandon Heaven?”
Hadley looked up out of her thoughts as the Simulacrum stepped into the room. She preferred Simulacra to the shadow people in her world. This one appeared exactly like a twenty-six-year-old Robert Redford. Its movie star hair fell over its forehead in a thick blond shock. The Simulacrum was a companion, confidant, and the world’s most exquisite vibrator. Not to mention mind reader. Sundance was almost preternaturally alert to Hadley’s moods and needs; he had been engineered that way by shadow twins of human genius. The perfect companion in a world without real companions.
“What do you know about it?” Hadley felt woozy and high.
The Simulacrum smiled. “I always know.”
Hadley stood up and walked to the bubble window that overlooked the upper east side of Manhattan. Ten thousand lights glimmered in the night. Like the stars she used to dream on as a child. Her mind wanted to dissolve and blur into a doparette haze. Over her shoulder she said, “It’s you, isn’t it. Not the Simulacrum.”
“Yes.”
She wasn’t surprised. “I’m sad.”
“Don’t be.”
She didn’t reply.
Sundance, the Voice, the Mailbox, Hadley herself, whatever, was quiet.
“This is all wrong,” Hadley said.
“It’s right as rain.”
“No.”
Sundance loomed behind her. Hadley stiffened. In the glass she saw its reflection, and then its hands settled on her shoulders and began kneading the tension out of her muscles. She twisted away, dropped the remaining scrap of her doparette into a disposal iris, and passed her hand over a sensor that transformed the window to permeable status; a breath of night air touched the back of her neck. She started towards the bathroom to shower.
“Please go away,” she said.
The Simulacrum remained at the window, hands clasped behind its back, chin lifted, head slightly cocked.
“You haven’t been yourself,” it observed.
“Who else would I be?”
“An uncertain thing,” the Simulacrum said. “A doubter. An unhappy, cringing, withdrawn creature, dried up and ruined and finished.” It turned from the window and smiled and held its hand out. “What you used to be, Hadley.”
Hadley straightened her skirt. “I know what I was.”
“Then believe in what you are. What we are.”
“You only show up when you think I’m going to end it. If you’re my higher self you’re also my worst self.”
It stepped toward her. “I made you young and gave you everything.”
“But you took things, too.”
It stopped. “Took what?”
“I was thinking about Jonathan Alverez.”
“Who?”
Hadley could see the Simulacrum knew perfectly well who Jonathan Alverez had been.
“The way he screamed when you ate him,” she said.
Sundance’s smile dimmed slightly.
“So this isn’t any kind of heaven,” Hadley said. “This is a selfish, ugly place. This isn’t heaven and it isn’t a dream, either. It’s the place where dreams die. It’s a bridge.”
The smile went completely out. The Simulacrum stepped toward her, and Hadley moved back.
“What does it matter? He was only a product of your fears, and the sentimental story you made for him in our world is just a story. This place we share exists between shaved moments of time. Nothing has happened to that boy.”
“It isn’t about him,” Hadley said. “It’s about what you need out of me to go on existing.”
“And what do you suppose that is,” the Simulacrum said.
“You need me to be like you. Morbidly self-absorbed, so this narcotic world can go on existing.”
“That boy was a hundred years ago, relative,” Sundance said. “It took you long enough to decide I was bad.”
“Well.” Hadley sniffed. “I’m not that good myself.”
“You’ll be alone and you’ll die alone.” The Simulacrum advanced. “There isn’t any real Heaven, you know. This is the only way we persist.”
“I don’t care. I’m alone, anyway.”
Sundance reached out for her, wearing its best Redford smile. “Why don’t you come to bed now and forget all this sadness.”
“No!”
Hadley shoved past the Simulacrum and threw herself at the bubble window. Its permeable molecular arrangement gave way and she fell and tumbled among the ten thousand lights like stars. Daddy, she wailed in her mind, Daddy!
* * * *
Hadley sat in the kitchen weeping. The withered sack of her stomach spat acid and growled. She could no longer appease it with hot tea and sugar. Mr. Whiskers rubbed against her orthopedic hose, fur crackling.
“Poor kitty,” Hadley muttered. There was nothing left for Mr. Whiskers to eat, either. She reached down to pet him but the cat padded out of the kitchen. Hadley followed him with her rheumy eyes. He planted his forepaws on the sofa cushion and began scratching.
“No, Mr. Whiskers!”
But the cat continued, and Hadley felt too weak to shoo him away. His claws would simply ruin the cushion.
The cushion.
Suddenly she remembered where she had hidden her grocery money. Thank you, Mr. Whiskers, thank you! But Mr. Whiskers was only a phantom of her intuition and was gone before she ever stood up.