A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories

Walking the Moons

Look, says the mother of The Man Who Is Walking Around the Moons of Jupiter, he’s going so fast."

She snickers to herself and scuttles around the journalist to a table littered with wiring tools and fragmented mechanisms. She loops a long, tangled cord over her son’s intravenous tube and plugs one end into his headset, jostling him momentarily as she works it into the socket. His stride on the treadmill never falters. She runs the cord back to a modified four-track recorder sitting in the dust of the garage floor, then picks up the recorder’s microphone and switches it on.

Good morning, Mission Commander, she says.

Yes, grunts The Man Who, his slack jaw moving beneath the massive headset. It startles the journalist to hear the voice of The Man Who boom out into the tiny garage.

Interview time, Eddie.

Who?

"Mr. Kaffey. Systems Magazine, remember?"

Okay, says Eddie, The Man Who. His weakened, pallid body trudges forward. He is clothed only in jockey undershorts and orthopedic sandals, and the journalist can see his heart beat beneath the skin of his chest.

The Mother Of smiles artificially and hands the journalist the microphone. I’ll leave you boys alone, she says. If you need anything, just yodel.

She steps past the journalist, over the cord, and out into the sunlight, pulling the door shut behind her.

The journalist turns to the man on the treadmill.

Uh, Eddie?

Yeah.

Uh, I’m Ron Kaffey. Is this okay? Can you talk?

Mr. Kaffey, I’ve got nothing but time. The Man Who smacks his lips and tightens his grip on the railing before him. The tread rolls away steadily beneath his feet, taking him nowhere.

The journalist covers the mike with the palm of his hand and clears his throat, then begins again. So you’re out there now. On Io. Walking.

Mr. Kaffey, I’m currently broadcasting my replies to your questions from a valley on the northwestern quadrant of Io, yes. You’re coming in loud and clear. No need to raise your voice. We’re fortunate in having a pretty good connection, a good Earth-to-Io hookup, so to speak. The journalist watches as The Man Who moistens his lips, then dangles his tongue in the open air. Please feel free to shoot with the questions, Mr. Kaffey. This is pretty uneventful landscape even by Io standards, and I’m just hanging on your every word.

Explain to me, says the journalist, what you’re doing.

Ah. Well, I designed the rig myself. Took pixel satellite photographs and fed them into my simulator, which gives me a steadily unfolding virtual space landscape. He reaches up and taps at his headset. I log the equivalent mileage at the appropriate gravity on my treadmill and pretty soon I’ve had the same experience an astronaut would have. If we could afford to send them up anymore. Heh. He scratches violently at his ribs, until they flush pink. Ask me questions, he says. I’m ready at this end. You want me to describe what I’m seeing?

Describe what you’re seeing.

The desert, Mr. Kaffey. God, I’m so goddamn bored of the desert. That’s all there is, you know. There isn’t any atmosphere. We’d hope for some atmosphere, we had some hopes, but it didn’t turn out that way. Nope. The dust all lays flat here, because of that. I try kicking it up, but there isn’t any wind. The Man Who scuffs in his Dr. Scholl’s sandals at the surface of the treadmill, booting imaginary pebbles, stirring up nonexistent dust. You probably know I can’t see Jupiter right now. I’m on the other side, so I’m pretty much out there alone under the stars. There isn’t any point in my describing that to you.

The Man Who scratches again, this time at the patch where the intravenous tube intersects his arm, and the journalist is afraid he’ll tear it off. Bored? asks the journalist.

"Yeah. Next time I think I’ll walk across a grassy planet. What do you think of that? Or across the Pacific Ocean. On the bottom, I mean. ’Cause they’re mapping it with ultrasound. Feed it into the simulator. Take me a couple of weeks. Nothing like this shit.

I’m thinking more in terms of smaller-scale walks from here on in, actually. Get back down to Earth, find ways to make it count for more. You know what I mean? Maybe even the ocean isn’t such a good idea, actually. Maybe my fans can’t really identify with my off-world walks, maybe they’re feeling, who knows, a little, uh, alienated by this Io thing. I know I am. I feel out of touch, Mr. Kaffey. Maybe I ought to walk across the Corn Belt or the Sun Belt or something. A few people in cars whizzing past, waving at me, and farmers’ wives making me picnic lunches, because they’ve heard I’m passing through. I could program that. I could have every goddamn mayor from Pinole to Akron give me the key to their goddamn city.

Sounds okay, Eddie.

Sounds okay, echoes The Man Who. But maybe even that’s a little too much. Maybe I ought to walk across the street to the drugstore for a pack of gum. You don’t happen to have a stick of gum in your pocket, Mr. Journalist? I’ll just open my mouth and you stick it in. I trust you. We don’t have to tell my mother. If you hear her coming you just let me know, and I’ll swallow it. You won’t get in any trouble.

I don’t have any, says the journalist.

Ah, well.

The Man Who walks on, undaunted. Only now something is wrong. There’s a hiss of escaping liquid, and the journalist is certain that The Man Who’s nutrient serum is leaking from his arm. Then he smells the urine and sees the undershorts of The Man Who staining dark and adhering to the cave-white flesh of his thigh.

What’s the matter, Kaffey? No more questions?

You’ve wet yourself, says the journalist.

Oh, damn. Uh, you better call my mom.

But The Mother Of has already sensed that something is amiss. She steps now back into the garage, smoking a cigarette and squinting into the darkness at her son. She frowns as she discerns the stain, and takes a long drag on her cigarette, closing her eyes.

I guess you’re thinking that there might not be a story here, says The Man Who. Least not the story you had in mind.

Oh no, I wouldn’t say that, says the journalist quickly. He’s not sure if he hasn’t detected a note of sarcasm in the voice of The Man Who by now. I’m sure we can work something up.

Work something up, parrots The Man Who. The Mother Of has his shorts down now, and she’s swabbing at his damp flank with a paper towel. The Man Who sets his mouth in a grim smile and trudges forward. He’s not here, really. He’s out on Io, making tracks. He’s going to be in The Guinness Book of World Records.

The journalist sets the microphone back down in the dust and packs his bag. As he walks the scrubby driveway back to the street, he hears The Man Who Is Walking Around the Moons of Jupiter, inside the garage, coughing on cigarette fumes.

Program’s Progress

A cop in a walker body strolls up to Gifford and begins reading out a series of selfeducation codes. All bad news. Gifford has failed to rate his walker status; his karma has dipped too low.

Gifford knows it is all his own fault. He’s one of the current generation of chips built to incorporate a yesdrugs/nodrugs option, and he’s been opting yesdrugs far too frequently. He likes yesdrugs: it mottles his perceptions, introduces a random factor into his image processing, and induces a time/percept/distort. The drawbacks—which he has of course not experienced so directly—are that it shortens his chipspan and damages his ability to extrapolate, chipwise; to produce offspring. The other drawback is that he has been forgetting to go to work. This is what the cop cares about, and this is why Gifford is about to be demoted into a stationary body.

The cop ends his lecture, opens up Gifford’s Soul7 plate, and begins punching up the eject codes.

Wait, Gifford says. I’m a walker. I’ve spent four chipyears in this body.

It goes back to the Chippery for refilling, says the cop. State property.

I want to keep it, Gifford pleads irrationally. Save it until after my hearing. Maybe I won’t get demoted.

Maybe you’ll get another one someday, says the cop. He pops the chip out, and for Gifford everything goes black.

* * *

When Gifford comes to, it’s from within a special stationary body mounted in the Chippery boardroom, in the center of a table around which are parked the members of the Board. They all have car bodies, and Gifford, who has never sat before the Board, feels intimidated by their fat tires and giant, gleaming bumpers. His immobile body faces the Chairman head-on; he can’t turn away. Gifford knows this is just a taste of what’s to come.

‘Gifford, son of Brown/Messinger,’ reads the Secretary. ‘Four chipyears walking. Never stationary, never auto-mobile. Abused yesdrugs option, ignored info-drip warnings on karmic debit. Currently four hundred points of karma below minimum operating standard.’

Hmmm, says the Chairman. Not good. Do you have anything to say for yourself, Gifford?

Yes, he manages. This is all a terrible mistake. I got sloppy, I lost track. But you can’t demote me. I’ve never been anything but a walker.

So I understand. I suppose you see it as your birthright.

I come from a long line of walkers, sir. I’m not proud, but I’m not embarrassed either. Oh, I certainly aspire to carhood, and I may yet achieve it someday. But if I spend the rest of my chipspan walking, I won’t feel ashamed. It’s just being a station that wouldn’t seem right.

Wouldn’t seem right, grumbles the Chairman skeptically.

I want to extrapolate, sir. It’s terribly important to me. I have a family anecdote, and I want to have a son to tell it to. I have a family name to pass on. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, five generations before the carbon/silicon switch, saved the life of a famous cowboy named Buffalo Bill. His name was Gifford Brown, and every male in the family since then has been named, alternatingly, Gifford or Brown. Stations are sterile, sir, as you know. They aren’t permitted to extrapolate. Therefore the imperative to retain walker status.

What an extraordinary story, says the Chairman. I’m sorry, Gifford, but we must apply the rules equally. You’ll be installed in a stationary body as soon as one becomes available.

But, sir, he says, frantic, how will I extrapolate? What will happen to my family anecdote?

You’ll have the same chance as any station, says the Chairman. The choice is simple at that level. You either choose to work—mainly information processing, I think—or you sit idle, sucking the mediachannel. If you work, you’ll build up your karma, and you’ll have a chance to walk again. And extrapolate, if that’s what you want. The choice is yours. Next.

Before Gifford can protest, a walker enters the room and ejects his chip from the station on the table, and once again everything goes black.

* * *

The next thing Gifford experiences is the click of manifestation as a walker cop presses the Soul7 closed on his new body. A station. He’s screwed to the sidewalk. Wait, he squawks as the cop begins to walk away. His voice is tinny and muffled through the feeble speaker mechanism of the stationary body, and the cop ignores him.

Gifford has never really considered the plight of a station before. He’s aghast at the loss of mobility, and at the low-resolution image processing available to his cameras. He can barely read the nameplates on passing walkers, and the street numbers at the corner are a complete mystery. Worse, he’s lost the capacity for signal initiation. As a walker he has been accustomed to reading messages into the general-access channel; as a station he can only receive. The only outlet left him is his voice, and that isn’t loud enough to attract the attention of the passing walkers. The only way he’s going to get into a conversation is if a walker chooses to stop and strike one up. As a former walker, Gifford knows how rarely that’s going to happen.

Down the street he can see another station, and beyond that he can just make out another one. The stations are everywhere, deliberately spaced too far apart to converse with one another. Gifford knows that it could be worse. He could have been placed in a General Welfare Station, where thousands and thousands of karma-defunct chips are implanted in a giant, immobile group body. If the constitution didn’t guarantee each encoded personality its full chipspan, they’d be melted down for the silicon, because few survive the demotion to a group body. Chips quickly lose their differentiation; any remaining traces of the original human personality are commingled throughout the group.

Gifford finds he has no choice but the tedious task of information processing. The temptation to neglect this work in favor of yesdrugs or the mediachannel is immense, but he vows to remain industrious, to build up his karmic account until he has earned a second hearing, and beyond that, another walker body. Then, he promises himself, it’s straight to the Chippery to mate with one of the stored female personalities, to sire a newchip.

Brown, he thinks. Son of Gifford.

He is miserable as a station. He understands the principles well enough: the earth teemed with biological life before the carbon/silicon switch, and now millions of encoded personalities await manifestation in some form of chip housing. Extrapolation is necessary to preserve evolution: crossbreeding in the chip personality, and the caste system, with stations sterile at the bottom, fosters survival of the fittest. This all makes sense to Gifford. What seems unfair is that life on the bottom is as limited and joyless as a station’s. He would sooner have waited another five thousand years to be manifested than live his span as a station.

Gifford wonders if he is the only one to experience these thoughts.

He knows the name for what is happening to him. Class consciousness. He feels within him, however dimly, the spark of revolution. The stations, he thinks, are an exploited form of manifestation. The only reason there isn’t a general unrest among them is that the realities of stationhood prohibit it so effectively. The stations are reduced to passivity by their one-way transmission.

But these thoughts get Gifford nowhere. He can’t feed them into the channel. A station could conceivably originate Being and Nothingness or Crowds and Power and it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference. Gifford knows that his only way out of stationhood is performing the requisite number of processing hours, staying nodrugs, and giving the Board the right answers at his hearing.

Which is Gifford’s plan. He owes it to Brown.

* * *

Gifford is up for review. He is notified in person, by a walker administrator named Smalls.

I know your family history, says Smalls. I’m very optimistic. You’ve made up the karma in a remarkably short time.

I’m a walker, says Gifford. This whole thing was a mistake. I’m ready to rejoin my fellows. He tries to play the part, and not bring up any of his resentment at the oppression of the stations.

I understand, says Smalls. It won’t be much longer. I’m pulling for you.

Gifford imagines that it is to Smalls’s credit to assist in a rehabilitation. Perhaps Smalls is on the verge of becoming a car. Gifford feels a mixture of envy and contempt. He feels, growing within him, the resolution to take positive action against the caste system, as soon as he is restored to his walker body.

Nonetheless, the news that he is to have the opportunity to regain his mobility is the culmination of five months of almost ceaseless toil. After Smalls leaves, he sucks gratefully on the mediachannel for a full night of surcease.

* * *

The courier for the Board unscrews Gifford’s Soul7, and when he comes to consciousness again it’s inside the boardroom, immobile in the midst of the full assembly. They are the first cars he has seen in months; the street he has been screwed down beside is too narrow for cars to pass. Smalls sits to one side, the sole walker in the room.

Gifford, son of Brown/Messinger, reads the Secretary. Four years walking, five months stationary, along the Forty-Ninth Street grid. Caseworker Smalls—

I’ve already dripped the Board my notes on Gifford, says Smalls.

Yes, thank you, grumbles the Chairman. Gifford, you voided a year’s worth of karma in one profligate month of yesdrugs to earn your demotion. What can we expect if we give you another chance?

Please, Chairman, judge me by my performance these past few months—

Yes, you’ve exhibited a great determination to resume your previous upward movement. The Chairman pauses. Gifford, if I may be so blunt, you’ve got another three chipyears left. Your life is more than half over. What is your ambition for the remainder of it?

To see your monopoly of mobility and communication toppled, Gifford wants to say. To extrapolate, he says instead. And perhaps, if I’m lucky, to die a car.

You want to extrapolate, the old car says. What do you have of value to the coming generations? You’re not an artist, or a philosopher. You’ve mastered no particular discipline—and you’ve had your chances. What do you bring to the Chippery?

I’m part of a family tradition stretching back into the organic, Gifford says. We boast various accomplishments. I want to continue the line. I’m sure it’s in my file. Brown Gifford saved the life of Buffalo Bill—

It’s a line of scalawags and rogues, says the Chairman. I’m not impressed by that aspect of your lineage.

I—

I’m not finished. One article in your file was of particular interest to me. Your female component, Gloriana Messinger—the stored personality Brown extrapolated from to produce your chip. She was the organic twin sister of the woman who developed the Messinger Atomic Escalator, a relatively significant development of the late carbon period. The line should be preserved. While I’m dubious the Messinger spark still exists to a meaningful extent in you, Gifford, I’m willing to give you a shot. If you can learn to suppress the Brown/Gifford aspects of your mentality—

I’ll certainly try, says Gifford.

Next, says the Chairman, and again Gifford’s world goes black. When he manifests again, it’s as a walker.

* * *

Smalls is assigned as Gifford’s parole officer. Gifford gets a job rejecting grant applications and begins accumulating karma in his account. He opts nodrugs for so long that he can’t remember what yesdrugs is like.

In his free time he goes out walking, and when he finds the streets empty enough he stops and talks to stations.

Don’t you resent the conditions?

Why are you talking to me? says the station suspiciously.

I was a station once.

I was a car once, replies the station sadly.

A car! What happened?

I was part of a conspiracy to seize control of the Chippery. A foiled coup d’état.

Gifford is aghast. You’re—you’re just a corrupt member of the ruling elite!

Do I look like a member of the ruling elite?

I want to talk to a real station. Gifford walks away.

* * *

It’s election time, and the two political parties have each nominated cars, as usual. One picks a walker as his running mate, a sure sign, thinks Gifford, that they will lose. The president is always a car.

At work he hears the rumor of a write-in candidate, a station. The idea is farcical, yet Gifford is intrigued. He roams the streets, interrogating stations, trying to locate word of the rebel. He is astounded at how consistently unenlightened and complacent the stations seem to be.

He devises a ruse. Station! he says. I am the walker-among-stations, a representative of the Front for Stationary Revolution. I carry messages from your cell commander. This is your chance to communicate with the leadership of your movement. What have you done to further the cause of stations everywhere?

The station hesitates. You must have me confused with someone else. The previous inhabitant of this station, perhaps.

I mean you, chip. You’re no different. Join your brothers.

This is only a temporary stop for me, the station explains. I’m a walker by nature.

Very good. Now that you’ve sampled the plight of the stations, pull yourself up, become a walker again. But don’t step back into the marching line that oppressed you as a station. Do as I’ve done—spread the message. Support the cause of the stations. Be their eyes and ears.

I’m not sure—

Gifford invents a slogan—Stationary but Not at Rest!—and walks away.

* * *

His ruse becomes an obsession, and finally a movement. He foments revolution among the stations at every chance. Nonetheless he continues to work within the system, accumulating karma, telling his parole officer, Smalls, what he wants to hear. In another few months, at the current rate, he will be permitted to extrapolate.

He develops a network of contacts and checks in with them almost every day. The movement grows in numbers, yet he quickly becomes disenchanted with the revolutionary potential of the stations: their form of embodiment is inherently passive. He decides to entrust the task to another walker. He selects Smalls, and describes the movement to him during one of his parole meetings.

Incredible, responds Smalls when the story is told. I feel the same way, but I’ve been afraid of expressing myself. I’m shamed by your courage. I want to help.

Gifford introduces Smalls to the core group of enlightened stations. Soon Smalls becomes comfortable speaking the revolutionary argot, and begins to join Gifford in the recruitment process.

They are limited, however, by the distance between the stations themselves: growth can never be exponential.

* * *

In his wanderings Gifford finally encounters an indigenous revolutionary presence among the stations.

Hail, he says as he approaches. Stationary but Not at Rest! Give Me Liberty or At Least a Set of Wheels!

Leave me alone, walker.

I represent the Front for Stationary Revolution. What have you done to further the cause of the stations?

Who wants to know?

I am the walker-among-stations, the station that walks. I carry messages of solidarity from your brothers, screwed down much as you are, oppressed by those who claim communication and mobility as theirs alone.

You’re a naive zealot, that’s what you are. You want to know what I’ve done for the movement?

That’s right.

The station rotates his eye back and forth, making sure they’re alone. I distort the information I process, implanting subliminal messages intended to disrupt the normal societal functions. I am the founder and chief architect of the authentic stationary movement, and when walkers like yourself stroll up I tell them I’m running as a dark-horse candidate for president.

Gifford is overjoyed. I’ve been looking for you. You’re the inspiration for my work—

Get lost, walker. We don’t need your help.

Gifford finds this both humorous and tragic. How can you say that?

I said beat it. You’re a walker, and your outlook is a walker’s. Your attitude is patronizing. We don’t need your help.

How will we communicate?

Stations don’t communicate. The revolution can only be achieved through a simultaneous realization among the oppressed. When every station is acting as I am, the yoke will be thrown off in one vast shrug. Communication is unnecessary.

That’s nonsense, says Gifford. You have to work within the system. Elevate yourselves, become walkers, or even cars. Then renovate the structure.

Bah, says the station. Revolution must be achieved on the stations’ own terms without communication, or mobility. Anything short of that would not be a revolution of the stations. You bleeding-heart walkers have appropriated the rhetoric of a walkers’ revolution to assuage your own guilt, but you’re essentially inauthentic.

Gifford is astonished. What is your name, station?

Millborn. Pleased to meet you. Write me in. And get lost.

Not so fast, Millborn. If you aren’t willing to accept promotion, then what are your goals?

When every station on the face of the planet is mangling his data the way I mangle mine, then anarchy will result. My goals are the destruction of the Chippery, the dismantlement of all cars, an end to promotion and demotion alike. Anything less would not be a revolution of the stations.

So you don’t want my help at all.

You’re welcome to join the movement, he says. Work your way back down to the stationary level, reject your mobility, and we’ll accept you gladly. Only then can you take up the work of the stations.

I can’t, cries Gifford. I want to extrapolate. I have a family name.

Oh, you want to extrapolate, says Millborn cruelly. Very nice. Go home, walker. You’re in way over your head. One of the central tenets of my manifesto: End All Extrapolation! Manifestation Without Extrapolation for the Female Chips!

Gifford walks away in despair.

* * *

Gifford is permitted to walk into the boardroom this time. He takes a seat at the table, directly across from the Chairman. Smalls sits at his left.

You’ve shown exceptional development, Gifford, begins the Chairman. Your parole officer assures me that your remarkable karmic accumulation is no illusion, but is in fact mirrored in your attitude. You’ve demonstrated a determination to extrapolate that is in itself a formidable evolutionary asset. I’m inclined to wonder if the Messinger spark is alive within you even as we speak.

Thank you, sir. Gifford glances at Smalls, but the parole officer’s attitude reveals nothing.

At the same time, it has come to the attention of the Board that you spend an inordinate measure of time consorting with your lessers. While sympathy for the underprivileged is virtuous, your behavior has been unbecoming for one aspiring to fatherhood, let alone carhood.

Gifford is rendered speechless. The Chairman is either stumbling unknowingly upon Gifford’s secret, or he knows far more than he is saying.

Nonetheless, I’ve taken special interest in your case, and I’m generally encouraged. In consultation with the Board I’m proud to be able to offer you a distinct and unique opportunity. Please understand you’re in no way obliged to accept our offer. The Chairman pauses. We’d like to make you a car, Gifford. We’re interested in the continuance of your line, and we’d like to see it encoded in a chip with a longer span. I’ve personally selected a female from the storage banks, in lieu of the standard random partner.

I’m speechless.

As well you should be. Gifford, the chip I’d like you to extrapolate with contains the encoded personality of my wife’s daughter. In essence, I’m asking you to become my son-in-law.

The Chairman turns to Smalls. The Board recognizes that it would be unfair for you to see your counselee promoted beyond you so quickly. Therefore we will promote you to carhood simultaneously, Smalls. Please accept the Board’s thanks and good wishes. I only hope this does not come too late.

This, for Gifford, is the tip-off. The Board is buying them out. They’re being kicked upstairs, where they can’t do any harm.

What, he wonders briefly, am I going to do about it?

Sample life as a car. That’s what.

* * *

In his exhilaration Gifford drives back and forth across the country, visits the Grand Canyon, and roams the Old West, where Gifford Brown saved the life of Buffalo Bill. He has his chip flown to Europe and installed in a touristcar. After his spree he returns to the Chippery and with the help of the Chairman’s daughter-in-law sires a newchip named Brown. He tells Brown the anecdote. He is hired as an assistant adviser to the Chippery Review Board, and completely loses touch with the members of the Revolutionary Front: inexplicably, they all seem to be screwed to the sides of streets too narrow for his chassis.

He develops a new ambition: to be appointed to the Board before he dies. With the Chairman on his side, he feels this is within his grasp. He vows that his first act as Board member will be to have Millborn installed in a group station.

We’ll see, Gifford thinks, if he can conduct his revolution on those terms.

The Speckless Cathedral

Should there be music?"

What, our song? We could play it backward.

Did—do we have a song?

Or Dylan, ‘Sooner or later you’ll go your way.’  I hated Saundra Beatitude, and she hated me. She was too tall and hard, not like a woman at all, really, more like some kind of predatory sculpture dressed in skin and leather and hairdo. And yes, she was fun to be with, for an hour or two. It was fun to watch her chain-smoke menthol pot and listen as she complained about the people she knew, often while sitting in their midst—but anyone who formed a relationship with her had to be completely insane.

Which brings us to me, I guess; Peter Louise Fittinger. The one who hated Saundra and the one who somehow loved her too, I guess. Anyway, we were stuck in the dribbling last stages of an interminable love affair, and no real end in sight. Oh, the relationship was over, certainly, it’s just that the fighting and the fucking wasn’t. And since fucking and fighting was all we ever did anyway—am I confusing you? We’d entered a null-space, you see, a void between a chance at happiness together and any kind of successful break, and the distance either way seemed equally impossible.

So we tried modeling our breakup on the computer. We set up a little HIS program, a little HERS, and fixed them up in a virtual relationship, threw in a lot of emotional baggage, crippling psychic scars and the like. Waited for the damned thing to devolve. It wouldn’t. We ran it through every scenario we could think of, injected the theorem brimful with hatred and boredom, but fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years up the line, HIS and HERS were still together. Yes, I stayed with her if she had a sex change (in fact the picture brightened somewhat, a detail she felt it was appropriate to needle me with), and yes, she stayed with me if my teeth all rotted out (they were working at it), I grew obese, or I converted to Islam.

That made me feel a little better about failing out here, in the real world. It just couldn’t be done. I’d call her or she’d call me and we’d go from warily comparing our pain to ridiculing one another to sleeping together again, and it would spiral away from us, all the hard work we’d put in together to be apart.

Then we heard about NtroP, a new street drug. My good friend Rudy Messer told me about it, said it might be what I was looking for, and that he knew a guy—

It was developed by the CIA as an anti-patriotism drug, explained Rudy’s mysterious friend. For debunking allegiance in EPOWS—enemy prisoners of war. But it wasn’t reliable enough for them, got shelved—you know. One of the lab people noticed the other effect, the personal thing. None of the guys who’d worked on the project were on speaking terms anymore, and it turned out their marriages had all gone down the tubes.

How’s it—

Like a hallucinogenic. A trip. You take it together, lock yourselves in a room, and trip together. Done that before, right? Only at the end of this trip you find you’ve actually gotten somewhere. A trip with a destination. Last stop, everybody off.

And that’s it. The relationship is over.

That’s right.

We waited until dark. Inevitably, the moment recalled others like it, explorations together, chemical ceremonies. The four little white tablets nested in her palm, looking almost iridescent. We downed them and entered that other null-space, the time between taking a drug and being taken by it. While we waited, we fought: about the music, the food, unplugging the phone, and whether or not to take a last roll together.

Let’s just see if we feel like it. We don’t even know—

I want to. I think it’s perfect. I want you in me while it happens, when I realize I don’t care anymore.

I don’t think it’s all of a sudden like that. I think it’s more of a process.

God, you’re so uptight.

I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right to want to, seeing as how—

Right to want, wrong to want. That’s just like you. What do you want?

Let’s wait and see? Do you—

Hate you already? Yes, it’s happening, oh God, I feel it coming, it’s like an orgasm of hate! She shrieked with laughter, then gasped and laughed again. Oh God, it was so good. Was yours good?

Cut it out. Be a little bit serious. Anyway, it’s not a matter of hating me. If it were that, we’d already be out of this.

Okay. She sighed. Is there anything to drink?

Initially it was a trip like any other, everything digital and chocolate, while our synapses struggled to adjust. I’d doubled our doses to be safe, and it meant a rather long period of clinging to one another and bellowing commands and pleas and insights and insults across what seemed a void of star-strewn galaxies.

But soon enough we settled into that familiar half-lucid and half-idiotic crypto-profound sort of dialogue that means so much as it’s uttered and ordinarily so little the day afterward.

It’s incredible, you know, how fake it all is.

Fake incredible you mean.

Yes fake incredible how we ascribe all this incredible fake importance to our fake emotions.

You mean given that we’re like infinitesimal specks on an empty flat surface moving through just such a tiny slice of time and space that it hardly even matters—

That’s you. I’m not a speck.

Fake pride. Fake pride.

No, no. Fake insight. Fake metaphor. Listen: you’re a speck. It’s perfectly you. You’re a speck moving around inside a huge empty cathedral, trying to inhabit it, trying to understand what it’s doing in there, looking out through the stained-glass windows for eyes, totally unable to see another person. Whereas I’m all on the outside, all encrustation and buttresses, I’m all cathedral and nothing inside. You live—

I’m wandering out now. The speck is wandering out of the cathedral. I’m sick of it.

No, it’s hopeless. You’re lost in the basement.

I am?

Don’t be fake afraid.

I’m not. It’s just—

What. Fake sympathy. What.

It’s a little sad, for the speck. That out of the windows of the cathedral there was only one little glow—but now there’s nothing—

I know. It’s fake sad. That not fake loving you anymore means not getting to fake hate you anymore either.

I know. Our fake hate, it was beautiful.

Fake beautiful.

Yes.

You shit, you poor-ass snake—oh no, oh God, it’s slipping away. She giggled. I hope I can at least remember what a jerk you are, otherwise— She dissipated in laughter.

What?

I might make friends with you—she gasped to keep from laughing again—and I don’t want you for a friend.

Thanks.

Awww, don’t be fake hurt. You know it doesn’t fake mean enough to get all fake hurt about. Go back and look at the inside of the cathedral, speck. Go speck yourself.

That’s Mr. Speck to you.

The drug did what was claimed for it. There was no last fuck, either. It was simpler than I’d imagined; we didn’t care anymore. As the evening progressed and we moved through intoxication, giddiness, and last flarings of dependence and bile, we emerged into a new world, one where Saundra was, well, smaller, principally. Very much still herself but more discrete, her boundaries no longer blurring with mine. She was so suddenly harmless I might have laughed, but I was incapable of even as profound an emotion as bemusement. Exhausted too, of course, from the physical ordeal, but there was no emotional hangover. I sought randomly in myself for any sense of depth, value, or importance pertaining to her, and came only again and again to shallowness, distraction, dearth.

* * *

At the end she fell asleep in the armchair, leaving me the bed. I woke early in the morning, still too wired to sleep properly, and stumbled away, leaving a short, polite note on the table. That was the last communication between us for several years.

At first I thought I’d gotten off scot-free. Our association was over, and the drug resulted in nothing like the conventional flashbacks I’d so feared. No, it