Quicksand
When the mini-robots dismantled a hundred million buildings — restaurants, schools, libraries, office parks, railroad stations, bottle manufacturing plants — people were already near exhaustion from the global economic collapse, the oceanic fallout profusion and the loss of a generation who never returned from the moon. Now children, grown men and women, doctors, teachers, engineers and people such as Ben Whistler asked themselves again and again if dismantlement was an extinction level event, because for all anybody knew the self-replicating mini-robots could obliterate all but a fraction of terrestrial life in a new era of great dying, of never fitting to a place, or the place tipped beyond livable and the fear of that was so blinding that the most Ben could do was stop designing cars for one minute, unwrap a meat bar and chew it.
His wife Polly shivered on the roof of their house and watched two comets rise against the night sky — twin silver rings woven in singular ascent, paired for celestial lifetimes, a century since they visited Earth — together forever and the air was cold but quiet so Polly held her knees close and reclined her neck to describe their orbit, glowing, rising and fading as the heavens lost dominion to the day. She closed her eyes to steal the memory. She heard gunfire.
The two wound into one.
Five shots. Then again. And a siren.
Polly stood and squinted at the neighboring houses. She hadn’t heard gunfire in seven hours and she’d slept for three. The shots meant the robots were close, someone defending their home from a scrambling mass of mechanized screwdrivers, electromagnetic nail removers, glue steamers and thermite bombs. Polly counted nine dismantled homes on their street — two in the last month alone, but she never talked to Ben about it. She didn’t talk to Ben about the neighborhood because when she’d told him about seeing a newborn puppy in the street, bleating at the still warm breast of its dying mother, his face did nothing and he smiled at her as though she was talking about subfrequency adhesion protocols.
She closed and opened her eyes — remembered the silver band in the sky. Terrible, even as she cowered down from the roof, she thought — to survive.
She paced the neighborhood until noon. Then she saw her neighbor Madge Leery from the end of the cul-de-sac, crying as she bleached the lawn. Polly approached her with caution and, kneeling to level with her neighbor, asked if the woman needed help. Was she all right, was the bleach stinging her eyes? Madge said, “No, no — for heaven’s sake the bleach doesn’t bother me.”
The two of them stood on the street and listened to a memory of sprinklers.
Polly said, “Doesn’t bother me anymore either,” aside from the tears — Madge started to say — but didn’t and they met each other on the sidewalk and, hand to hand, changed the shape they were in. Aside from the tears, they remembered how they got there — they had stopped listening to music and didn’t fix the streetlights and lost their jobs and the carnival was deserted and the elephants scattered and now their neighborhoods were dismantling and the lovely music was gone for so long they blamed themselves for surviving. That bothered their eyes, the pain of apology — lowering their heads in thanks ‘to the brilliance of the day and strength to resist a sibilant decay,’ they prayed and then were silent.
Polly was silent at dinner for a long time while Ben read the same mail he’d read for the last week. She asked him if he’d heard anything about the promotion and he shook his head. He spent all his free time at work and he worked all the time because he believed in making safe and efficient cars. He was expecting a letter from his boss but there hadn’t been mail in a week so maybe the mail was dismantled. Polly finished eating, folded her napkin on the plate and went bed.
In the night she woke and listened for the absence of her husbands heart. She left the bed and climbed back up to the roof. She sat, eyes closed, listening to the wind as it swept a fury of beige nanoparticulates down from the northern deserts — a fine powder that coated the city, bonded itself to every house, car, boulevard and bus stop. She had lived with the dust for twenty years, the whole city had and still nobody knew how to clean it and paint didn’t adhere so people stopped painting. Polly stopped painting and became an engineer. After a while everyone forgot about paint. Polly opened her eyes to the scarred night and remembered the not noticing and, she wept.
It is more than I can bear, she whispered to her thumb, bit the nail and kissed her ring.
During daylight she sought relief in people, walking among the ruins if only to be near other bodies. She stopped at store windows to watch their empty eyes, the loss of their difference and the shuffle of their feet. She went shopping with Madge and they overheard a man in the milk line saying he wished he hadn’t lived so well when he had the chance. “I’m disgusted,” he said, “selfish.” Madge offered to buy him an ice cream and he laughed for the first time in a week, introduced himself as Dave, winked at Madge and gave her a spare milk number. His hair was scraggly and he was predominantly dust but when he smiled Madge saw his teeth so she tucked the card in her purse and tried to smile back a thank you.
“I remember,” Madge said, “when people were nice.”
“Of course, I remember kindness,” he turned his palms up. “Do you remember what life was like before any of this happened? What the hell? What the hell happened?”
“The world used to be better,” Polly said. “People used to see things… remember when people washed their cars?”
“I remember that,” Dave said, “I remember the world being together before it started coming apart — but it was coming apart for a long time before the robots got this bad. Don’t forget we had a part in this… doesn’t matter now though does it? No matter what we do it’ll be undone and I heard on the radio that nobody has plans to do nothing about nothing, because everything already failed. This, all this, breaks me up inside.”
“Someone should do something,” Madge said, “someone who cares.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Polly, said, “We care and look at us. I can’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth. Madge you need about three weeks sleep and Dave, no offense but you look like you haven’t seen a mirror since the mini-robot proliferation began. I don’t remember the first time or the last time I gave up on the world, but I feel bad about it every time — I don’t know if caring is enough anymore.”
“I’ll probably kill myself sooner or later,” Madge sighed.
Dave laughed. “If I didn’t hate myself so much I’d be relieved to know I’m not alone.”
Madge and Dave smiled together and Polly kicked at the oily dirt.
“Listen,” Dave said, “Tonight we all believe in me, don’t we?”
“Why not?” Madge said. “We need to believe in something or we’ll keep drifting apart as the world winds down around us.” She giggled.
“We heard about me on the radio right?” Dave said, “I’m be crying for your call if you know where to find me.” He handed Polly his other milk number and she shook his words around in her head but they didn’t line up.
Dave took a step away from her. “I thought you knew what I was saying — but I ain’t that smart,” and he watched his hands shake. He tried to look at himself but all he saw was arms and legs and stomach. “You know where to find me,” he said, then he turned and ran and Madge started crying.
Polly slapped her, but Madge didn’t stop crying.
She went home refused to leave her bed. She didn’t eat and barely breathed between convulsant sobs. Polly sat with her and brought her chips of ice and a damp washcloth. Madge said, “one of these days I’ll either die or stop crying,” but nothing changed for several days, then she fell asleep.
Polly covered her in a light wool blanket, locked the door and went home to make dinner because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Ben. He couldn’t remember either, but they sat across from each other eating turnips and food paste and they held hands across the table, gazing into each other, a familiar tune playing on the hi-fi — calling them back from somewhere — broadcasting in radio frequency the words and music of Wind Upman, a faint but focused live rendition of “I Sing My Part,” just approaching the first chorus as Polly and Ben bent together, kneeling across the table to kiss, because this was their song—
If nobody got a tambourine anymore
Nobody at all but the company store
Then I don’t have a reason to sing and dance
Cause I only got a nickel for a pair of pants
My heart needs you so much
I’m cryi-i-ing for your touch,
I’m dyi-i-ng for another call
Hold me tight against the fall
Ben smushed his face into Polly’s, jamming her lip with her teeth.
“Ouch,” she said. They peered at each other, husband and wife touching their hands to injured lips and for a moment they thought they didn’t feel anything except the suspicion there nothing left between them but a love song.
“We need to try this again, with feelings,” she told him, “Like the first time we heard that song and you asked me to dance this dance with you.”
“Sure,” he said.
“I love you,” she said, “I want you to know that. I want you to remember.”
Ben remembered when he was five years old and he heard Wind sing “Victoria Falls” and chewed his fingernails bloody from the glass-shattering pitch of Wind’s operatic falsetto. Ben considered his bandaged fingers a testament to his fondness for the music. His admiration lasted long beyond the singer’s last note and years later, seeing his face in his wife’s eyes, he faltered. “I’m sorry,” he said. In the chill of night he left for work.
And he loved the way she fluttered through the universe
And she loved the way he muttered through his only verse
Part Two
All You Get From Love is a Love Song
Polly woke at midnight. Ben was gone, but the song stayed with her. She hummed it to herself as she left home. She sang it in her head and walked to the end of the cul-de-sac. She opened Madge’s house with as little incidental noise as possible. She made two cups of mint tea and brought them to the bedroom. She opened the curtains and sat with the loneliness of Madge.
She carried the frail woman to the bathroom and ran cold water over her but failed at revival. Madge was not asleep or comatose, but she was alive and Polly wrapped towels around her, held her tight, tried to keep her warm and sang to her in a whisper, I believe in we and I sing my part, and I’m calling from the fall, crying for the call. We believe in me, but I ain’t smart—
We believe in me.
Polly stopped singing. The guy from the milk line had said that. She tried to remember the rest of what he’d said, that he heard about something on the radio and he’d be crying for a phone call. Then he had said something that made Madge cry herself catatonic — he quoted the song and he said,you know where to find me. She sang the rest of the song to Madge and by the end she knew where to find Dave and if he had done this to Madge he might be able to undo it.
And I’m asking for your hand,
Cryi-i-ing for the call.
I believe in we and I sing my part
I’m singing at your bandstand,
Every night this fall.
We believe in me, but I ain’t smart
She found him at the bandstand. The rickety hulk of it, a stucco shell backing a circular stage, was worse for neglect but perhaps avoided dismantlement because of it. The shell drew a broad shadow across the stage and the skeletons of dead elm trees glowed in moonlit relief to a dark sky on a night without fire. The city had exhausted itself, the last of humanity was quelled and quartered, the mini-robots paused on recharge and, for last evening of fall, silence held the night.
Dave was cleaner and less dusty, he’d made an effort. She approached him and he looked over her shoulder with such intensity that she looked back. Saw nothing.
“I wasn’t followed,” she said.
“What would make you say something like that?” He was baffled. “Have you been followed before?”
“No,” she said, “I just — you were looking over my shoulder.”
He laughed, “I was looking for Madge.”
“She didn’t come with me,” Polly said, wishing she hadn’t and then, remembering why she was there added, “She won’t wake up and I thought maybe the song, the lyrics had switched her brain off with neurolinguistic programming or hypnosis. I hoped—”
“That was a pick-up line,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I don’t believe that. I heard “Nothing About Something” on the radio too. You thought we knew what you were talking about — you thought we were somebody else?”
“You should stop now, okay. Stop talking please, I can help her.”
“How?” Polly shivered against the wind. She sighed, and again.
“I have a friend, he — he has a calming touch for the burdened soul. I could bring him.”
“I don’t know,” Polly, said, “I don’t know about that. I’m not sure what that means and I don’t understand you even being here if you weren’t speaking in code because the bandstand is part of the song and I don’t want anything to happen to Madge so if you keep lying to me I’ll need a another reason to trust you.”
He leaned forward and kissed her and she leaned back into him. She looped her foot behind his ankle, placed her hands on his chest and, with a knee to his groin, tripped him to the ground. He didn’t shout, whimper or disparage her. He lay on his back and held his hands in front of his face.
“I met my husband here.” Polly said.
“If Madge has been catatonic for more than seventy-two hours she could be near death. I’ve seen this happen before — I know this guy helped me and some and some other people and when I saw you at the milk line I thought you noticed, I thought you were one of them. And I also thought you were cute.”
“Who is us?”
“Us are me and some other people who don’t want the world unraveled.”
Polly knew what raveling meant. Dave said it meant resetting the food chain and he said he’d be at Madge’s in two hours, with his friend. He said, “I don’t care if you’re there or not,” got to his feet, backed away from her into the night and was gone among the trees.
Polly noticed his absence and returned to Madge’s house.
Twenty minutes later Dave arrived with an old man named Bill. Polly told them to wait in the kitchen while she dressed Madge, propped her up in the bed, tidied the room and put the blanket over her friend. She squeezed Madge’s cool hand and returned to the kitchen.
“Bill is here to help us.” Dave said.
Bill almost nodded, he was heavy, with fuzzy hair and a magician’s mustache and his heart was so enlarged by years of cardiomyopathy that it could carry the guilt of more men than one.
They brought him to Madge, lay his body beside hers and touched their hands together. Dave rocked on his heels and Polly chewed her lip and she didn’t look at him. She watched the four paned shadow of a window glide across the floor and climb the nightstand. Madge blinked her dry eyes as the light touched her face.
“Did I lose weight?” Madge asked.
“Yes,” Polly said.
Madge glanced at Bill beside her, then she looked at Dave and her skin reflected the warmth of sunset. “We have work to do, don’t we?”
Dave nodded the weight on his shoulders. “Work is a word for it,” he said, because rebuilding is more than work and overcoming an entropic cycle of apathy and demolition takes a group strategy of fighting or attempting to placate the mini-robots, creating defensive construction technologies and sustaining faith in the efficacy of human endeavor.
“I want to help,” Polly said. Dave heard the crack of resignation in her voice and knew she meant it. He needed all the help he could get.
“Take his hand,” Dave told her. “Touch his hand, fill him with your tears.”
“I’m sorry,” she told Bill.
“I forgive you,” the old man said and he withered from her touch.
She found gravity less noticeable. She thought she might weigh less than before because the other options — celestial realignment, planetary mass reduction, and orbital obliviation — were preposterous and she didn’t have time to worry about her weight. She was an engineer, she understood machines and she wanted to do more than work.
She had her hair done twice that week, but Ben either didn’t know or didn’t care how bad things had become and he was in the majority. He often spent time with his coworkers, because networking is the key to success. He told himself he was a real up-and-comer. After he brushed his teeth, he looked at himself in the mirror and said, “I am a real up-and-comer.”
“That’s what I keep hearing,” Polly said, but Ben didn’t smile because this wasn’t about the promotion. He was able to perform his job overseeing the manufacture of a magnetically stable telmocite alloy for a small car manufacturers but he didn’t know who was buying all the small cars, because he never saw them on the road. He asked about the sustainability of their business model in a lunchroom conversation that afternoon and his coworkers shook their heads, smirked.
An hour later Ben’s boss told him, “The other people in the office are starting to complain about your bizarre personal habits.”
“What habits?” Ben didn’t want to lose his job. He wanted a promotion.
“Just cut it out, okay?” his boss said.
Ben really wanted to cut out any bizarre habits, but could not recall what his habits were, or whether they were bizarre. He was not given to bouts of crying, although when he was a young man he cried the day Wind Upman stopped singing because Wind had brought everyone so much joy over the years, calling the square dances that introduced their parents and every Saturday night dancing at the bandstand and singing about the promenade, the allemande and the flutter wheel. As children, Ben and Polly met at one of those dances where everyone bowed to their corners and bowed to their partners and do-si-doed into a long and lasting love until Wind, without so much as a tip of the hat, stopped singing — twenty years ago, Ben’s first week at the job. It didn’t matter anymore. It was silly to even think about how different life was before everyone forgot how to smile, before the initial toxicity occurrence killed the fish and the crops, before the anabolic mold chewed through stucco and left city buildings bare and crumbling, before anyone died or the children left or the sun disappeared behind a permanent slag of gray. There was little point in reminiscing about a time that could never be, about the long summer days of childhood, about Wind Upman and your honeymoon.
The man sure could sing a song, though. The way he sang “Daisy Trigger” was enough to make someone understand that when life gets you down you just need to do something nice for yourself, like get that new sweater you’ve been wanting and after you put it on get back up and keep trying because life is for the living and you want to sing from the rooftops—
Daisy Trigger she’s looking for fun
My handicap is a sand trap in one
Daisy Trigger was my cute little fawn
Broke my clubs and now she’s gone
Now she’s gone, now she’s gone away
Now she’s gone, now she’s gone, gone,
Gone away
Ben heard it on the radio that afternoon — If I keep getting old but the world doesn’t end, I’ll keep singing this song, except to my friends — and he stopped reorganizing molecules long enough to call Polly — Come hear my song and patch these holes, we’ll all sing along when you heal your soul.
“Hi,” he said.
“Ben?” She shouted over a racket of motor and metal.
“What’s that sound,” he said, “where are you?”“I’m vacuuming,” she said.
“I’ve decided,” he said. “I know—”
“I can’t hear you,” she said, “We’ll talk later.” She ended the call, put her earplugs back in and returned to the dynamo cutter she’d installed in Madge’s garage along with a fridge sized metal box containing a seven-axis laser mill that could craft a chunk of aircraft aluminum into a holographic depiction of a raccoon climbing along the branch of a willow to eat from the nest of a sparrow, but couldn’t touch telmocite.
Dave had captured and disabled a mini-robot he discovered drilling holes in the pylons under a freeway overpass. He brought the machine to Madge’s garage where Polly dismantled it and undertook a study of its shiny little body, the four equal limbs and sensor that glowed like an emerald lozenge. The mini-robots were blank and expressionless. Polly tested the molecular integrity of their armor and determined that the telmocite was magnetically unstable.
She repurposed the laser mill to emit phugoid phases of attractive and repulsive forces that dissolved the metal and they tested the weapon on a team of robots that swarmed a ski lodge. Polly was pleased with how it burned through multiple waves of invading mini-robots and she felt little guilt about the razor-sharp telmocite fragments that for years to come would cut the feet of children as they ran, barefoot like primitives, through the scalped hills of the country club in search of undigested kernels of corn in the still warm shit of elephants.
Part Three
The Great Divide
Ben came home to a pile of lumber and bricks. Everything, including their house was in pieces — from the picture frames to the post and lintel. It looked like garbage. He got back in the car and stared at the rubble. Then got out and walked over to it and looked at it some more. He made certain Polly wasn’t trapped under it all and then got back in the car. He was hungry and he needed to find his wife. He started the car and pulled out of the driveway. heading for the food station on Ninth Avenue.
He drove through the dirty old shame of his former town, a place that once gleamed with the rosy cheeks of youngsters delighting in cotton candy, elephant rides, and music. He grew up in that place and he had a red wagon but there were no wagons anymore and where had all the neon gone? Why were so many oilcans on fire? Didn’t there used to be windows? Who was that guy at the gas station masturbating on a dog? Why was that bicycle half-dissolved in a puddle of acid? This was a town that once knew how to host a marching band, an ice cream social, a cakewalk, a three-dollar circus. Now the clocks were all wrong.
Half a mile later he swerved to avoid the hotel that collapsed in front of him as a mass of mini-robots cluttered to the pavement. The window next to Ben shattered and he put a hand on his head to make sure — he was an alert driver and he swerved away, looking for something to put between him and the destruction. Scanning the street for cover, he saw three pedestrians, weapons flailing, as they sprinted to an old van and he saw the hood of his car torn away when the roof turned around, the left tire exploded and the car turned sharply, flipped, rolled nine times and caught fire before skidding to halt in the Dairy Queen parking lot. The fuel tank ruptured and gasoline spilled onto the concrete.
He kicked at the windshield until kaleidoscoped safety glass peeled away from the frame and provided him with an exit. He pulled himself through, cutting his leg on the cracked dashboard and losing one shoe in the compressed space between the seat and the steering wheel. He rolled through the flames on the hood and he dove through the front door of the Dairy Queen just as the car exploded with enough force to shatter the picture windows adorned with hand-painted ice cream cones and a thousand transparent splinters sliced his skin and eyes, tearing his lungs with a piercing cloud of silicate and he wondered exactly what it was that he had wanted to eat.
He couldn’t remember the last time he wished for something but he wished then. He wished the Dairy Queen was still open so he could buy himself an ice cream to numb the burning sensation caused by the fire, because the front of the building was fast ablaze and threatening the integrity of Ben’s hope for a quiet ease into neutral.
He pulled himself behind the counter. The ice cream cooler smelled of cheese and was filled with flies. The deep fryer was rancid and fishy and the Blizzard cake display case was yellowing and cracked, oozing a greasy sludge onto the floor where children once stood and pressed their noses to the glass, imagining the sweet delight of frozen novelties.
He ran to the back door, slipped on the gooey floor and screamed as an explosion-sharpened protrusion sliced his left kneecap clean off. Then his leg folded backward at the bend, ripping muscle and connective tissue and tearing the cartilage. He pulled himself in front of it, sliding across the broken glass, the injured leg dangling behind him. He pulled himself up by the back door and, grabbing a mop from an old bucket and sticking the business end under his armpit, hobbled his way out of there on the brittle crutch. He crept along the back wall and peered around the side of the building at his burning car. He heard screaming behind the flame and smoke and started toward it.
The wall above him exploded and a chunk of it smacked his head. An arm grabbed him around the neck and pulled him back behind the building, pushed him to the ground. He tilted his head around and saw Polly smiling in the corner of his eye.
“Are you here?” He choked.
“I’m sorry,” she said and, before he asked what for, she picked him up, held him across her shoulders and carried him, low over the Dairy Queen parking lot to a dismantled bank two blocks down. She cut his clothes off with a letter opener and searched for the source of his bleeding. Aside from the missing kneecap there was no single source, his skin merely oozed fluid. She asked him not to move and he noticed, for the first time in a long time, how she was dressed. She had on dusty cargo pants, a flak jacket and polarized ballistic safety glasses, a pistol holstered to her utility belt.
“Are you coming from somewhere?” He said.
“Yes,” she said, “I am. Now hold still. I don’t want to sever anything. Your skin in filled with glass fragments and I need to remove them or you’ll bleed out. This will be very painful but it is important that you keep still. Do you think you can do that?”
“I don’t. No, no I don’t understand, you—”
“Ben,” she said, “I love you.”
“Nothing for the pain?”
“I’ll talk you through it,” she said. She stretched a length of duct tape on his arm. She pressed gently and peeled back a crush of bloody shivers. She told Ben why she was sorry and he held still, steadfast — he was accustomed to pain. He concentrated on not moving his fingers and everything else followed and Polly told him she’d been spending her time engineering a way to stop the dismantlement. She applied peroxide after each stripping but it didn’t stop the bleeding so she injected him with fibrinogen thrombin catalyst and twenty-eight seconds later he was covered in a loose scab of fibrin that boiled his nerves, reduced his essence to a molecule, grew him a neocartilage kneecap and Ben had no consciousness at all until the shot of epinephrine hit. Then he felt something.
“I too love you,” he said from underwater.
Polly switched her head to the screech of miniature metal and told Ben to get the hell up now and maybe, she thought, maybe she was given to wishful thinking because he couldn’t want to go anywhere, not with that scab. From her rucksack she pulled metal tubes, bolts, laser targeting devices and electromagnetic coils. Ben was impressed with his wife right then. She appeared to be acting calm. She was, in fact, calm.
“If they come for you lie down,” she didn’t look at him, intent on assembling her machine.
“Why would they—”
“—They burned the neighbors dog,” she said, “So if you’re in their way, don’t bark. Lie down.”
The whir and hum of servo-articulation shook the dust and Polly readied her weapon. She waited until Ben heard them too and they looked at each other the way they did when their parents died. She bent to kiss his cracked lips and he watched her rise away from him, shoulder her weapon and run. She stopped, crouched behind a pile of safety deposit boxes and held a hand mirror to the street, checked both ways before continuing and for a moment Polly and Ben stopped wondering why their world was so filled with litter and concrete, dust, robots, pain, a magazine stand burned to a crisp amid a hyper-resistant mold infusion, prefabricated behavior specification issues, Zapit Rayz, love songs and other forms of junk imported from the basement as a surrogate for home when all they really wanted was to live, together in peace, without the scorn of machines.
She looked back at the bank remains and Ben saw her standing there, saluting him, blurry through the dust as she whispered, I love you, steadied herself, aimed the cannon and loosed a beam of magnetism. He felt his heart beat. Once. Then Polly stopped firing, lowered her weapon and ducked an incoming demolition charge. She shouted through the explosion but neither one of them understood it.
Polly scurried back from the menace, running down the street, leading the mini-robots away from her husband and she was lifting a manhole cover open when Ben saw her fall. She turned to him and their eyes met through a cracked teller window as her face contorted in pain and Ben’s hypercoagulated scabs cracked and flaked from his body, revealing a warm translucence of scar.
Brilliant in the orange glow of a weekday afternoon, he was healed. He stood and ran towards his wife as she continued firing. The robots marched toward them and when the beam of her cannon glanced the alloyed armor Ben saw the robots close for the first time and recognized his designs in their bodies — tiny vertical cars with legs instead of wheels.
They were the new models, with magnetic shielding.
He called her name. To warn her, he shouted.
“Lie down,” she yelled back. “Lie down. I’ll come for you.”
She wrenched open the manhole with the butt of her gun and dove under the street.
“Leave her alone,” Ben shouted and the throng of mini-robots split in two, half of them following Polly and the others, attracted by his frantic waving, descending on Ben. He lay down before they got to him and in an instant he was bound so tightly in wire he could barely breathe. Twenty robots hoisted the metallic Ben-cocoon upon their shoulders and carried him from the dismantled bank. Through the wire he saw his burning car, the imploded Dairy Queen and the clouds of nerve toxin rising from the storm drains.
Part Four
Two for a Nickel, One for a Dime
Polly had her gas mask on before she hit the concrete, rolled when she got there — didn’t break a bone and was back on her feet — gathered together, ready to evade the ring and chatter of metal on metal as the robots tracked her through rusting city pipes. The long dry darkness of it pressed against her, holding her body together in specific gravity. She was only the sound of her heartbeat moving south by compass.
On the second day she saw the light and walked out of the earth into a dry lakebed. She sat on a rock and wished for water. She sweated out a whole day and a night, blind with light and thirst, dreaming the robots had forgotten about her, left her to dry away as her husband suffered beneath their cruelty, because not every song is a love song and we can get along if we get it together.
Just bless my soul and my heart of leather — Ben dreamed on the shoulders of mini-robots, carrying him home to their mountain headquarters where they dropped his wire bound body on a concrete floor, stuck electrodes in his spleen and removed his reverie.
A dozen robots encircled him and were still.
“Hello,” Ben peeped. The robots whirred to a higher note and hit him with ninety thousand volts of bladder shattering electricity. He stopped speaking but the shocks kept coming so he talked because when he talked they only fried him every ten minutes instead of every two. He had no idea what the mini-robots wanted but assumed it was information. He couldn’t imagine what information he had so he confessed everything — that there were no better days, that he took off his shoes at the movies, that he wrote notes to God and carbon-copied the whole factory, that he called all participants of interplanetary occupation on the public address system, that he inhaled Jell-O through his nose every day in the lunchroom, that he used the women’s room after everyone went home, that he shaved his elbows and blow-dried his back and ate sandwiches one layer at a time and answered his phone with the screech of a dying pheasant and in the end he confessed that not only was the pain of electricity in danger of killing him but he was running out of bizarre personal habits to confess.
The shocks didn’t stop and the pain in his body grew worse, but he learned to find enough mental clarity between shocks to realize he might not have covered the topic the mini-robots were interested in, because perhaps somewhere in his brain was exactly the piece of information they sought. He knew he must know something or they wouldn’t be torturing him. The robots refused to give him even the slightest indication of where to begin looking. They glowed in silence — Write your own words and sing along.
I didn’t even sing it, you sang it along and Polly thought it was terrible to survive, but knew it was the value of every blessed day and she took it. She bathed herself in dirt and was back to the sewers. She traveled blind, with ears attuned to absence of machinery and when she stopped she oriented herself along the city’s geometry in the direction of home. She assembled with Madge and Dave in the garage and lamented the impotence of their weapons.
“Back the drawing square.” Dave said.
Madge accused him of always trying to fix everything. He told her to be quiet.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “Don’t tell me anything.”
Dave dropped his shoulders and thought about speaking. Then he thought better and looked at Polly.
“Dave’s right,” she said. “This isn’t something we give up on, because there isn’t anything else.”
“That’s fine,” Madge said. “I just don’t see the point of working together if we’re going in different directions. This feel like an awful lot of failure.”
“Madge,” Dave said.
“Dave,” Madge said, a certain smallness between them.
“Whatever this is,” Polly waved her finger between them, “I don’t have time for it. We need to upgrade our technology and… Madge, I need you to remember this is not the moment of our decay.”
Madge sniffled to herself, said she didn’t want to let anyone down.
“Where the hell is Bill?” Polly asked. Madge and Dave looked away. “You’ve got to be kidding me?”
“No,” Dave said, “They took him.”
The mini-robots had captured Bill as he wept beside a mailbox, singing his burdens away and they wired him to a chair, carried him to their caves and waited for a confession. From his own cage, Ben watched the old man, balding with a handlebar moustache and congestive heart failure, as he shivered in pain and the robots left them alone together.
“I can’t believe this,” the man said to Ben.
“How’d they catch you?”
He pushed his chin up to his nose, “I’m easy to find.” He said, “I mean I can’t believe they won’t kill me. I can’t stand still being alive. I really hate myself for it. There must have been something I could have done, something to stop all those…”
“Please,” Ben said. “I think we shouldn’t talk.”
“Because they brought us here for a reason,” The man said. “They put the two of us in a room together because they want us to talk. They work like that. They plan everything, and the two of us talking right now, the two of us specifically — they have a reason for that.”
“I don’t know if they need a reason.” Ben said. “I was just trying to find my wife.”
“I know your wife,” the man said. He paused. “When I die, I’m going to fill that hole in your chest with guilt.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ben said. Every twelve hours they fed him through a straw.
They man was given only water and after two days his stomach was cramped with pain and he started talking again.
“I’m coming over to get some of that food next time.” he said when Ben’s food was administered. Eventually he became so hungry that his body convulsed. He shook with some violence and the chair tottered. He stopped, grinned.
“This is going to work!” the man cheered. He moved as much of himself as possible to the left of his restraints and when he bounced back to the right the left legs lifted off the floor in an arc that stalled at the tipping point before sending the man crashing down. His head slammed on the concrete with a crunch and he choked and coughed — his eyes bulged. His throat rattled out a final breath that seared Ben’s nostrils with the stench of liver.
The voltage increased and Ben started humming. He had a song stuck in his head, a Wind Upman song, but he could never quite grasp it. When the pain ended the dream ended and trying to piece it together was a waste of his precious clarity. He just wanted to sing the song. Sing the song about love and how living in the atlas won’t ever get you home and living where you don’t live is living alone.
The pain stopped. When it came back, he sang the song again, and again the pain instantly vanished at the first note of an Upman tune. Ben sang every song he knew and he sang them with Wind’s signature epiglottal flip on the low notes and he sang them in his sleep.
You’ll never hear me on the radio
I’m singing at a frequency far below
Your common ears
I’m just a man with a one-man show
But I need your help to get back home
For so many years
The mini-robots assembled about him, swaying to the song.
They approached him in single file, each one carefully extending a laser and severing one by one the thousands of wires that encircled his body until, several hours later, Ben felt the release of his ribs when the last bond was cut. He lay there for a long time, just breathing. He enjoyed breathing more than anything he’d ever done in his life. He stretched and peeled back the cocoon along the laser-cut seam. He stumbled across the floor, falling dangerously close to the line of mini-robots, who immediately scurried out of the way.
Were they afraid he would fall on them? He pulled himself up on his shoed foot and he sang, I Don’t Want to Sing Songs et cetera. I just want to be a stut-stut-stuttereh, and the robots stuck to their circle, their green eyes pulsating at him. They did not advance or make any sudden or threatening movements. He kept singing and the mini-robots pulled away from him, clearing a path. Their motorcar bodies gleaming at attention, shoulder to shoulder in an armored corridor as they led him from the caves.
Part Five
I Don’t Want to Sing Songs About Death (No More)
Ben bumbled down the mountain, stayed true to his foot and shoe, found a road and followed it. Walking felt good, except for the pain. He was weak and his joints ached but he didn’t stop singing, hoping he might remember a verse he had never heard, while from dark corners and distant rooftops the mini-robots tracked him with telescopic vision and mapped his movements by the brightening light that strung his notes in song. Ben knew they were following as he sang his way through the dismantled shame of his former town where the clocks were all wrong and even yesteryear’s bandstand was spray-painted, cracked and abandoned.
Ben walked right up kicked the bandstand for being there and the sound echoed around and then died. He kicked it again and the edge of a board came loose. He kept kicking. He kicked out enough boards to make a hole in the base, opening up a passage to the cool dark space under the stage. At the very least it was a roof over his head. He crawled inside and coughed and pulled his collar over his mouth at the dust and stink of rotting rodents and he choked again and vomited onto the front of his shirt and this was the closest he knew to home.
When the morning came he burrowed deeper under the stage to avoid the light. He crawled along the interior wall and slammed his head into a barrel. The impact caused his head to hurt and the barrel to issue a vibrato but nonetheless pitch-perfect C flat. Ben rapped his knuckles on it and three different notes chimed from the metal. He ran his hands over the surface and found that parts of it were covered with fabric — and it seemed to have arms. He checked for legs. There were legs, and a head too.
Ben shook as he remembered those days so many years ago when Wind Upman sang in his bright red coat and tails, eyes spinning like firecrackers as his mouth flapped out each word in perfect pitch and his metallic body resonated like a corporeal tuning fork.
Then one day somebody unplugged him and everything went to hell after that. Nobody plugged him back in, either because they didn’t remember or didn’t care, or maybe it was the Mayor’s fault for issuing the decree, or little Timmy Jugs, who in a fit of grief over the absence of song stabbed his dog to death with a fork and then kicked it. Maybe it was because of the guys who didn’t show up to fix the bridge, or maybe it was just because everybody stopped singing that Timmy’s mom became a prostitute. Ben remembered something about that but he wanted to hear Wind sing.
Ben kicked at the wall and twenty minutes later he had a hole big enough to pull them into the light and he appreciated the meaning of faith in the red-suited, perfectly tuned man who lay before him. He lifted the man to standing and propped him against the bandstand. The body was covered with rust and grime and a thousand tiny mushrooms. Ben found Wind’s cord and plugged it into the stage. He wiped the mud from Wind’s solar panels.
The voice spun to life, “Wind Upman, Sir,” the Wind Upman said. He extended his hand and Ben shook it. It was hard to keep believing all these years.”
“I’m Ben,” Ben said. “Sir.”
“Ben,” Wind replied, “I do believe I knew you when you were a boy. You’re the child who chewed his fingernails until they bled.”
“That could have been me, sure.”
“What happened to you, son? You used to be a real up-and-comer.”
“We have all been dying inside since the day you stopped singing,” Ben said, “and that was before things got really bad with the robots. Now there is so little of us left.”
“My boy,” Wind said, “I am here to fill your dreams with love.”
“Do you think you can still sing?” Ben asked.
“I suppose I could,” The Wind Upman said. “Any requests from the audience?”
Ben thought about that for a minute. He thought about what it must have been like living under the bandstand for so many years, not the least glimmer of light on your solar panels, unable to move or think or sing, just dead asleep with your batteries run out. He didn’t want to sing songs about death anymore, and requested the song about that.
“Please insert a nickel,” Wind said.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said. He didn’t have a nickel to his name. “I’m flat busted. I was captured and they took everything and all I have left is the memory of your songs. So if you wouldn’t mind just this once, if just this once you could sing ‘I Don’t Want to Sing Songs About Death” for all your fans, for all the people who found through you a light in the darkness. Consider it an encore for those of us who never stopped believing you’d be coming back this way, that you’d stand on this stage once again.”
“Please insert a nickel,” Wind said.
“Sing, please!” Ben gripped the man by his lapel, tore the jacket and yelled at him — I know you really want to make me right, I’ll fix supper and you’ll fix me upper, don’t you want to take me home tonight — and beat his fist upon the hollow chest and called out to the heavens. He chewed his nails. He shook Wind so furiously that the man began to rattle and ring, so Ben kicked him and kept kicking him until the coin box broke off and then he kicked that, smashed it open and a stream of coins trickled into the mud. Ben picked them up by the handful, wiped the mud off on his pants and as he inserted them one by one into Wind’s palm, the man began to sing.
I was born alone on the factory floor.
Just nuts and bolts and nothing more.
Ain’t never had a nickel to call my own.
Just the lonely life of an old dog bone.
Ben clapped, cried and laughed. Behind him a solitary mini-robot whirred with escalating pitch. Ben didn’t notice the robot’s silent approach, but he realized it didn’t matter to him if he was dismantled right then, because he had set something right in the world. He chewed his fingernails with abandon as the song continued and Wind launched into another, finding his voice again, his tonality and rhythm, and by the time he got to the second chorus the two of them were surrounded by a thousand cooing mini-robots whose beeps and bipples provided the full and perfect accompaniment to the music and lyrics of Wind Upman. Ben swayed to the music and opened his bleeding fingers in laughter.
Come hear my song
And patch these holes
We’ll all sing along
And I’ll heal your soul
Two mini-robots climbed onto the stage, extracted horsehair brushes from beneath their armor and scrubbed away at Wind’s shoes. Two more approached and, with needle and thread, took to mending his trousers. Wind sang to them, his face green from their sensors as delight tremored in his voice — if I’m a fixer upper, then fix me supper — and they clamored to his repair.
They swelled in ranks and volume with each crescendo and their music echoed through the broken city traveling on a hazy breeze to the ears of Polly, who searched the rusting alleys for her husband and knew the song from memory. She shivered, pulled herself from the rubble of despair and followed the notes of her childhood. Tears streamed down her face and washed away the soot and anger that had settled into the fine wrinkles around her mouth. She cradled her weapon and took off at a run.
She saw Ben sitting on the edge of the bandstand, swaying gently in time to the music, laughing and singing with the old wind-up man. She recognized it, the same one that was bolted to the stage all those years ago and it hadn’t aged well — the face paint had cracked, chipped and peeled away to rusting steel beneath. The clothes were eaten away and hung in tatters from his mechanical body, exposing the metal rod that attached his torso to his spindly legs.
Sometimes I think I got pack it in,
Pull the plug, ain’t never gonna win.
Teeming with robots, Wind Upman wrapped his arms around Ben who cackled with laughter. Polly watched her husband’s contorted face and saw the terror of his condition, heard his bleating cries and knew enough to stop — to breathe, because Ben was alive and for that she felt peace, but his hands were covered in blood and he needed her.
She raised her weapon against the far away music that echoed around her.
I’ll keep singing songs for the company store,
But I won’t sing songs about death no more.
And as the song paused for a breath, Polly drew a laser crosshair on the on the wind-up man. With a press of the trigger, she dispersed his head while the last note still rang and the headless machine continued to dance — fueling the final gyrations of every robot beneath him before they scattered, slumped and stooped where they stood — gears sputtering to a halt in the midday light, hydraulics steaming as the cooling systems shut down and green eyes dimmed. The wind was over and the silence of their gathering rippled throughout the city as people stopped, listened, looked to the sky for answers and remembered how they got there.
A raccoon crawled from a dumpster and met the day with nocturnal eyes. A child, pulling himself to the windowsill, witnessed a man climb from a storm drain and brush himself off. The man smiled at the raccoon and strolled away. He passed running but empty cars as the drivers joined him, shuffling across the city in one direction and Dave lifted his feet higher with each step, marching to silence as an elephant matched his step and whole families, office staffs and twenty-year shut-ins followed the grand grey animals to a long forgotten home.
Dave saw smoke from the fairgrounds and tightened his step, the elephant clopping beside him as someone brushed against him. Turning, he saw Madge walking with him. Their fingers touched and their hands wound together, sealing the moment in grace — a memory of silence between them. Step to step as they approached the bandstand and watched Ben fall to his knees, weeping into the charred and twisted absence of Wind’s head. He lifted his head to the silence and saw Polly running through the mass of tiny cars.
“Mrs. Whistler,” he called, “Will you take my hand and dance this dance with me?”
Polly reached for her husband, pulled him away from the smoldering carcass, kissed him hard on the lips and they embraced as the first faint rays of sun in years peeked through the smoke, refracted upon the brilliant telmocite shields of the prostate mini-robots and danced in upon their tearful faces.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he said.
“With all my heart.”
“With all my heart.”
And merciful winds cleared the smoke and carried the sounds of someday spinning home from the Dairy Queen and The Great Divide and the two wound into one. Cup and pin on the promenade. Two wound into one. Bow to your partner. Bow to your corner.
Weave your rings together.
