Adams ladder, p.12
Adam's Ladder, page 12
“It was your idea,” he mutters. “You fucking do it.”
But Fern isn’t here. She’s in her flat, far from the scene of the crime, no doubt sipping Chardonnay and waiting for his call.
He’ll try, he decides. He’ll take it step by step and see how far he gets. He turns and exits the bathroom, goes downstairs and into the kitchen and over to the knife block. He selects the sharpest knife they have and goes upstairs again, feeling suddenly heavy and breathless, the knife dangling from his hand, the end of the handle pinched between his thumb and index finger as if it’s something he wants to disassociate himself from as much as possible.
When he re-enters the bathroom, he feels as if the imaginary virus he’s been trying to suppress is starting to gain the upper hand. His skin and eyes feel hot and feverish; his head throbs; his legs feel hollow. His heart pounds in swift, queasy beats that he can feel not only in his chest, but also in his throat and fingertips.
Chris is still slumped in the water, her head on one side, chin almost resting on her right shoulder. He kneels beside the bath and lifts her left arm with his left hand, and presses the tip of the blade against a pale blue vein on her wrist. A bit more pressure and then one swift stroke upwards to her elbow, that’s all he needs to do. Like slicing open a breast of chicken. He doesn’t know how much blood there will be, or whether it will spurt, but as long as he doesn’t get in the way of it and make the police wonder where the escaping blood went to, it’ll be fine.
One swift stroke. Do it now and in two seconds it’ll be over. Come on, be brave. It’s easy.
He takes a deep breath, the muscles bunching and tightening in his hand and forearm.
And that’s when Chris opens her eyes, turns to look at him and says, “Undersound.”
Clay jumps back like a startled cat, and he feels a sort of jolt in his head, as if his thoughts have been diverted onto a new track. The knife clatters from his hand and his backward momentum causes him to land hard on his backside and bang his head on the sink. When he is again able to focus he gapes at his wife.
Only it is no longer his wife. It is a young man with spectacles and a neatly trimmed beard. And he is not naked; he is wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and jeans. And there is no water in the bath. It is dry and empty.
Clay can only gape as waves of reaction, not unlike fever, ripple through his body. He tries to raise himself, but his arms feel weak, boneless. Finally he manages to speak, though his voice is cracked, almost a sob.
“Who are you?”
“His name’s Richard,” says a voice from the bathroom doorway. “He saw what you were going to do to me.”
Chris is standing there, leaning on the stick she uses to hobble about when she’s not using her wheelchair, and the expression on her face is everything that Clay dreaded seeing—hurt and anger and terrible, terrible betrayal. It fills him with such a deep and unbearable shame that he wants to cover his face like a child, curl into a ball, close his eyes in the hope that if he wishes hard enough he’ll blink out of existence.
But he doesn’t do any of these things. He jerks his gaze away from Chris, wincing as if she’s slapped him, and looks again at the young man now rising from the bath.
“I don’t understand,” he says, his voice almost a whimper. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
The young man—Richard—turns to Chris and asks in a soft voice, “Would you like me to leave you two alone? I can wait in the next room.” He glances at Clay, but is still speaking to Chris when he adds, “You’ll be quite safe now.”
“No,” Chris says, her voice so brittle that Clay knows immediately how terribly hurt she is, how close to tears. “I’d like you to stay. If you don’t mind, that is.”
“Of course,” Richard says.
He steps out of the bath and perches himself on the side of it and clasps his hands between his knees.
“What’s going on?” Clay pleads. “Won’t someone tell me?”
“You tried to kill me, that’s what’s going on,” Chris snaps. She hobbles into the room and her eyes are full of awful accusation. “How could you, Clay?”
“I’m sorry,” Clay whimpers. “I’m sorry, I didn’t …” But his voice trails off.
“Mean it?” suggests Chris. “But you did, didn’t you? You did mean it? Didn’t he, Richard?”
The young man sighs. “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry.”
Clay knows he has no right to feel indignant, but there is nevertheless a spark of indignation in his voice when he again asks the young man, “Who are you? Why are you here?”
Richard glances at Chris, as if seeking permission to answer the question, and then he sighs and says, “I’m one of the new people.”
“What does that mean?” Clay asks.
“There are more and more of us.” Richard speaks softly and haltingly, as if he feels uncomfortable, or is unsure how to explain himself. “But we don’t advertise our … gifts. On the other hand, we can’t ignore them—or at least, I can’t. We … we hear the undersound. At least, that’s what the people who I know are like me call it. It’s like there’s an … an extra muscle in our brains that opens and allows us to see what other people can’t. Not yet anyway. But I think they will. Like I say, we’re growing in number. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just the next step.”
He shrugs apologetically, then adds, “We’re not all the same, but in my case events from the future throw echoes back into the past, and I hear them.”
“The undersound,” Clay mutters.
Richard nods eagerly. “That’s right. It’s random. I can’t control it. I don’t know whether I see what I see for a reason, or whether I just see the things that have the most … resonance. The most emotional baggage.”
Clay wonders whether he’s dreaming this, or has perhaps gone mad. He feels distress, and not only because of what he’s been through, and of the way Chris is looking at him. It’s like the rug of existence has been pulled from under his feet, like everything he trusted and believed in has suddenly been revealed as a mirage, an illusion.
“Richard came to me,” Chris says, every syllable she utters a chip of cold fury, “and he told me what you were planning to do. I was … appalled. Upset. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. But he said there might be a way out, there might still be hope. If he could only get you to regret it, to not carry it through …” She sags then, and her voice cracks, and tears run down her cheeks.
“But I couldn’t,” Richard says, and there is anguish on his face too. “I’m sorry.”
He goes to Chris and puts his arms around her, and she sobs into his shoulder. When he next looks at Clay his eyes are full of contempt. “As well as seeing into the future, I can manipulate people’s thoughts and senses. I can mess with their heads. It’s easy. I gave you the chance to back out. To change your mind. But you didn’t.”
“I wanted to,” Clay whispers. “Believe me, I wanted to.”
Chris turns her tear-stained face towards him and suddenly screeches, “But not enough! Not enough!”
Clay shrinks back as her voice echoes off the blue walls, the white tiles.
“She wants you to go,” Richard says calmly, his arms still wrapped protectively around Chris.
“But I can’t,” Clay bleats. “She needs me.”
“She doesn’t need you. I see a future where she doesn’t need you.”
Desperation makes Clay angry. “What do you know? What do you know about anything? Chris and I have been together for thirty years. We were together before you were born!”
“Nevertheless—” Richard begins, but Clay cuts him off.
“Nevertheless nothing. I’ll talk to Chris about this, not you. We don’t need you. We’ll talk it out. We’ll—”
“Go, Clay.” Her voice is bleak and the words seem somehow final.
“You don’t mean that,” he says. His voice becomes a pleading whine once again. “We need to talk this through, Chris. We need to discuss it like two—”
“Go!” she shouts. “And don’t ever come back.”
“But where?” he says. “Where will I go?”
Her lips peel back over her teeth in an expression that is somewhere between a grin and a snarl. “That’s not my problem.”
He barely remembers clambering to his feet, staggering downstairs, exiting the house, but all at once Clay is in his car. He is sitting behind the wheel and he is shaking and crying, and he doesn’t know what to do.
His phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out in a daze.
The message reads: Did you get my last text? Have you done it yet? What’s happening?
He stares at the message for a long time. And then he extends a trembling finger over the keypad. He’s shaking so much it takes him several minutes, but at last he types his reply.
It’s over.
A LAUGHING MATTER
Erinn L. Kemper
Curtis scowled into the spotlight, waiting for the laugh-app din of monkey chatter, dolphin squeaks, and old-timey car horns to die down. Did everyone in the audience tonight have an implant? A surge of pig snorts and gecko chirps came when some guy near the back of the club unleashed the famous Vincent Price laugh from Thriller. Dude must have paid a fair chunk for that one—most real people’s emotions were trademarked, even the dead ones.
A woman seated in the first row of tables, dressed classy in a white, silk, button-down top, placed her gin and tonic on a coaster. Her lips curved up and parted in expectation. She had to have the real thing.
Curtis continued with the bit, even though he knew it wasn’t funny. Didn’t have to be funny these days. People were here to laugh, and they’d use any lame gag as an excuse.
“These emotion-apps are old news, anyways. Next thing you know they’ll have the app change how we walk. We’ll have hundreds of blissed out happy-in-love saps hogging the sidewalk. Skipping hand in hand, tip-toeing through the tulips, going all Gene-Kelly-Singing-in-the-Rain,” a pause for an Al Pacino ‘hoo-ah’ from a stock-broker-type at the bar, “and come Monday morning it will be a freaking invasion of the undead as we all shuffle and lurch our way to the office. The Zombie App-pocalypse.”
With his arms out front, Curtis mimicked the gait of a drunken sleepwalker, moaning ‘coffeeeee’ and rolling his eyes. He tried to focus on the way the audience’s mouths grinned wide, eyes streaming helpless tears as they lost themselves to the simple pleasure of yucking it up. But tonight he couldn’t tune out the sounds—gales of seagull and parrot calls, arty types emitting banjo flourishes, wind chimes, waterfall static.
The classy woman clapped and nodded, and into a slight lull, opened her brightly lip-sticked mouth to unleash a loud, sputtering fart. Those at tables near her turned and pointed, some applauded, their own laugh-apps sounding in appreciation, which only brought louder, more ass-rippingly wet bleats of flatulence from the woman.
“Yeah, yeah.” Curtis sighed.
The audience didn’t even notice when he slid the mic back into the stand and walked off stage.
From the velvet-draped shadows backstage, Jimmy, the club owner, raised his eyebrows, and gestured at the spot-lit floor. “You got ten more minutes.”
“Fuck it, Jim. I quit.” Curtis headed for the door.
Outside, neon lights cast rippling reflections on the rain-washed pavement. From the karaoke bar next door to the Stand and Deliver comedy club came the eerie power-chord and drum-throbbing intro to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The singer kicked in, voice-implant to sound like Mariah Carey. People paid for the stupidest shit.
Curtis shivered. He’d forgotten his coat inside—his trademark Harris Tweed with elbow patches. Good riddance. He hunched his shoulders against the wet autumn chill and ran for the subway entrance. He dug into his wallet for his subway pass, glancing at the clear plastic window where he kept the picture of Emmie—turned now so a square of white showed. He couldn’t bring himself to take the picture out. Or to look at it. Not yet.
The train to Brooklyn pulled up and he stepped on, then wondered what he was doing. No way did he want to go home. Jimmy had probably already called there to tell him to collect his stupid jacket, which meant Sandra would be waiting to ‘talk.’ Her constant need to ‘talk’ had prompted him to ‘lose’ his mobile—a move she called passive aggressive, but he considered preservation of his sanity.
Curtis leaned back against the train window and let the vibrations fill his head until his eardrums tickled. He used to love doing his thing on stage, especially when Sandra came to his shows. She’d sit in the front in her punky out-for-the-night duds and grin up at him, eyes shining. They’d take the train home and as they rushed to undress she’d repeat her favorite bits in a terrible impression of the New Hampshire accent he played up during his act, while he slid his hands from her breasts down the supple curve of her hip. She would laugh at the lines all over again, then gasp when his fingers found the wetness of her. It had been a long time since he’d heard her laugh—since before Emmie’s death.
A gentle cooing accompanied by a thrumming purr interrupted his thoughts. He opened his eyes. A young couple sat across from him, rocking side-to-side with the motion of the train. The dude’s head nestled on his girlfriend’s shoulder, his hair swept forward to cover his eyes. She ran her mirror-nailed fingertips back and forth across his palm. Impossible to say which one was the dove and which the cat, but their affection-apps made nearby passengers shake their heads and smile. Young love.
He remembered relishing the pleasure of fingertips on flesh. Eyes closed so the world reduced to just that—her body, her breath, their heat. Then their world grew a little, made room for the life that quickened inside Sandra. Oh how fragile bubbles are, how it hurts when their luminous skin bursts and the chaos and noise rushes in.
Curtis got off at his stop, walked up to the street and turned right instead of left. The choice between a bottle and home came easy tonight.
~
“Can you tell me what you mean by that, Sandra?” Janet, their couple’s therapist, put her palms on her lap and leaned forward, her expression open, encouraging. “And if you don’t mind, could you turn off your phone for the rest of the session.”
Sandra had been seeing Janet before her pregnancy, to deal with her social media addiction. During bed rest in her last trimester she’d gotten hooked all over again. She’d tried to stop using on her own—for a while, anyways. Then that day when Mrs. Green from next door crouched outside their house in the burbs with a scrub brush and a bottle of bleach to get rid of the blood stain, Sandra had shut the blinds and turned on her device. She hardly looked up anymore.
Now she and Curtis saw Janet together, though they always arrived separately.
Sandra picked up her phone and pressed the off-button, then placed it face-down on the coffee table. “I don’t know how to talk to him. I think we need to actually say how we feel—speak about it—so we maybe can get on with our lives. But then that feels terrible. Getting on with our lives. As though we’re forgetting.”
Curtis sat tight to the arm of the love seat, giving Sandra lots of room, his arms and legs crossed, his jacket draped over his lap. Jimmy had delivered the jacket in person, guessing they’d moved back to their apartment in the city. He came with a check and a plea for Curtis to return to work.
“You know how many of you guys have been quittin’?” Jimmy scratched the stubble that salt and peppered his chin. “The new guys, the ones that bring the apps into their routine, improv their bits commenting on all the funky sounds—man, they just aren’t funny. All they’re doin’ is giving the crowd an excuse to show off their tech. What about when the trend moves on? Maybe folks’ll want some actual comedy. Right? We can’t go forever without real laughter.”
Curtis had no answer for that. It felt like forever since he’d heard a real laugh. What if the next trend brought something worse?
“Curtis, you with us?” Janet smiled and tilted her head toward Sandra, reminding him his job for the moment was to listen.
Sandra sniffed and continued. “I’m logging on way less. I’m trying really hard. He’s just so closed off. He won’t get an implant, even though he knows it would be good for him. Help him show what he’s feeling. He’s exactly the kind of person they were made for.”
“Can you explain why you won’t consider an implant?”
Curtis pressed deeper into the back of the couch. Both woman stared at him, Janet with her cool grey eyes, Sandra’s eyes filling with tears.
“You lot, psychologists or whatever, made it to help people, but it’s become a bastardization of itself, all the weird sounds. People get off being all emotional. Wallowing or stoking their anger just so they can transmit whatever new app they’ve got. Not to express what’s really inside them, what’s hurting or making them angry.”
Janet nodded. “But the emotions are real.”
“Sure,” Curtis said, “and so are mine. But there’s no way those chuckle-heads who come to the club are using their apps for therapy. Not all of them. It’s just trendy. I don’t need to squawk like a chicken to show my feelings. I’ll show them in my own way.”
Sandra wiped her nose with a tissue. “Right now that’s by shutting down, not talking at all. It’s like living with a piece of furniture instead of a husband. I figured when he went back to work it’d maybe, I don’t know, open up that part of him that shut down.” She twisted the tissue and clenched it in her fist. “You’re not accomplishing anything by quitting your job on top of quitting your marriage.”
“I’m not quitting our marriage.”
Sandra just stared at him. Her body shuddered and her face scrunched up. A blink turned her tears loose.
