The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 32

  Zeinab raises an eyebrow—pierced, now—and when she smiles her teeth look all the brighter against her black lipstick. “I guess that’s one possibility, but if I made you up inside my head and did a really good job of it, I’d probably want you to say something like that. To make you be more real.”

  “But—so could—”

  “Although I guess it is weird that we’re always doing stuff you remember. Maybe you should come over to my place sometime!”

  Madeleine feels her stomach seizing up.

  “Or maybe it’s time travel,” says Zeinab, thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s one of those weird things where I’m actually from your future and am meeting you in your past, and then when you meet me in your future, I haven’t met you yet, but you know all about me—”

  “Zeinab—I don’t think—”

  Madeline feels wakefulness press a knife’s edge against the memory’s skin, and she backs away from that, shakes her head, clings to the smell of crushed grass and coming summer, with its long days of reading and swimming and cycling and her father talking to her about math and her mother teaching her to knit and the imminent prospect of seeing R-rated films in the cinema—

  —but she can’t, quite, and she is shivering, naked, in her bathroom, with the last of the shower’s steam vanishing off the mirror as she starts to cry.

  “I must say,” says Clarice, rather quietly, “that this is distressing news.”

  It’s been a month since Madeleine last saw Clarice, and where before she felt resistant to her probing, wanting only to solve a very specific problem, she now feels like a mess, a bowl’s worth of overcooked spaghetti. If before Clarice made her feel like a stubborn child, now Madeleine feels like a child who knows she’s about to be punished.

  “I had hoped,” says Clarice, adjusting her glasses, “that encouraging you to talk to this avatar would help you understand the mechanisms of your grief, but from what you’ve told me, it sounds more like you’ve been indulging in a damaging fantasy world.”

  “It’s not a fantasy world,” says Madeleine, with less snap than she’d like—she sounds, to her own ears, sullen, defensive. “It’s my memory.”

  “The experience of which puts you at risk and makes you lose time. And Zeinab isn’t part of your memories.”

  “No, but—” she bites her lip.

  “But what?”

  “But—couldn’t Zeinab be real? I mean,” hastily, before Clarice’s look sharpens too hard, “couldn’t she be a repressed memory, like you said?”

  “A repressed memory with whom you talk about recent television, and who suddenly features in all your memories?” Clarice shakes her head.

  “But—talking to her helps, it makes it so much easier to control—”

  “Madeleine, tell me if I’m missing anything here. You’re seeking triggers in order to relive your memories for their own sake—not as exposure therapy, not to dismantle those triggers, not to understand Zeinab’s origins, but to have a . . . companion? Dalliance?”

  Clarice is so kind and sympathetic that Madeleine wants simultaneously to cry and to punch her in the face.

  She wants to say, what you’re missing is that I’ve been happy. What you’re missing is that for the first time in years I don’t feel like a disease waiting to happen or a problem to be solved until I’m back in the now, until she and I are apart.

  But there is sand in her throat and it hurts too much to speak.

  “I think,” says Clarice, with a gentleness that beggars Madeleine’s belief, “that it’s time we discussed admitting you into more comprehensive care.”

  She sees Zeinab again when, on the cusp of sleep in a hospital bed, she experiences the sensation of falling from a great height, and plunges into—

  —the week after her mother’s death, when Madeleine couldn’t sleep without waking in a panic, convinced her mother had walked out of the house and into the street, or fallen down the stairs, or taken the wrong pills at the wrong time, only to recall she’d already died and there was nothing left for her to remember.

  She is in bed, and Zeinab is there next to her, and Zeinab is a woman in her thirties, staring at her strangely, as if she is only now seeing her for the first time, and Madeleine starts to cry and Zeinab holds her tightly while Madeleine buries her face in Zeinab’s shoulder, and says she loves her and doesn’t want to lose her but she has to go, they won’t let her stay, she’s insane and she can’t keep living in the past but there is no one left here for her, no one.

  “I love you too,” says Zeinab, and there is something fierce in it, and wondering, and desperate. “I love you too. I’m here. I promise you, I’m here.”

  Madeleine is not sure she’s awake when she hears people arguing outside her door.

  She hears “serious bodily harm” and “what evidence” and “rights adviser,” then “very irregular” and “I assure you,” traded back and forth in low voices. She drifts in and out of wakefulness, wonders muzzily if she consented to being drugged or if she only dreamt that she did, turns over, falls back asleep.

  When she wakes again, Zeinab is sitting at the foot of her bed.

  Madeleine stares at her.

  “I figured out how we know each other,” says Zeinab, whose hair is waist-length now, straightened, who is wearing a white silk blouse and a sharp black jacket, high heels, and looks like she belongs in an action film. “How I know you, I guess. I mean,” she smiles, looks down, shy—Zeinab has never been shy, but there is the dimple where Madeleine expects it—“where I know you from. The clinical trial, for the Alzheimer’s drug—we were in the same group. I didn’t recognize you until I saw you as an adult. I remembered because of all the people there, I thought—you looked—” her voice drops a bit, as if remembering, suddenly, that she isn’t talking to herself, “lost. I wanted to talk to you, but it felt weird, like, hi, I guess we have family histories in common, want to get coffee?”

  She runs her hand through her hair, exhales, not quite able to look at Madeleine while Madeleine stares at her as if she’s a fairy turning into a hummingbird that could, any second, fly away.

  “So not long after the trial I start having these hallucinations, and there’s always this girl in them, and it freaks me out. But I keep it to myself, because—I don’t know, because I want to see what happens. Because it’s not more debilitating than a daydream, really, and I start to get the hang of it—feeling it come on, walking myself to a seat, letting it happen. Sometimes I can stop it, too, though that’s harder. I take time off work, I read about, I don’t know, mystic visions, shit like that, the kind of things I used to wish were real in high school. I figure even if you’re not real—”

  Zeinab looks at her now, and there are tears streaking Madeleine’s cheeks, and Zeinab’s smile is small and sad and hopeful, too, “—even if you’re not real, well, I’ll take an imaginary friend who’s pretty great over work friends who are mostly acquaintances, you know? Because you were always real to me.”

  Zeinab reaches out to take Madeleine’s hand. Madeleine squeezes it, swallows, shakes her head.

  “I—even if I’m not—if this isn’t a dream,” Madeleine half-chuckles through tears, wipes at her cheek, “I think I probably have to stay here for a while.”

  Zeinab grins, now, a twist of mischief in it. “Not at all. You’re being discharged today. Your rights adviser was very persuasive.”

  Madeleine blinks. Zeinab leans in closer, conspiratorial.

  “That’s me. I’m your rights adviser. Just don’t tell anyone I’m doing pro bono stuff: I’ll never hear the end of it at the office.”

  Madeleine feels something in her unclench and melt, and she hugs Zeinab to her and holds her and is held by her.

  “Whatever’s happening to us,” Zeinab says, quietly, “we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

  “Okay,” says Madeleine, and as she does Zeinab pulls back to kiss her forehead, and the scent of her is clear and clean, like grapefruit and salt, and as Zeinab’s
lips brush her skin she—

  —is in precisely the same place, but someone’s with her in her head, remembering Zeinab’s kiss and her smell and for the first time in a very long time, Madeleine feels—knows, with irrevocable certainty—that she has a future.

  OUR LADY OF THE OPEN ROAD

  SARAH PINSKER

  Sarah Pinsker’s fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, and Uncanny and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, Accessing the Future, and numerous Year’s Bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages. In 2019, Sarah also published her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories, and her first novel, A Song for a New Day.

  “Our Lady of the Open Road” is a love song to live shows and life as a traveling musician. It won the Nebula Award in 2016.

  THE NEEDLE ON THE VEGGIE oil tank read flat empty by the time we came to China Grove. A giant pink and purple fiberglass dragon loomed over the entrance, refugee from some shuttered local amusement park, no doubt; it looked more medieval than Chinese. The parking lot held a mix of Chauffeurs and manual farm trucks, but I didn’t spot any other greasers, so I pulled in.

  “Cutting it close, Luce?” Silva put down his book and leaned over to peer at the gauge.

  “There hasn’t been anything but farms for the last fifty miles. Serves me right for trying a road we haven’t been down before.”

  “Where are we?” asked Jacky from the bed in the back of the van. I glanced in the rearview. He caught my eye and gave an enthusiastic wave. His microbraids spilled forward from whatever he’d been using to tether them, and he gathered them back into a thick ponytail.

  Silva answered before I could. “Nowhere, Indiana. Go back to sleep.”

  “Will do.” Without music or engine to drown him out, Jacky’s snores filled the van again a second later. He’d been touring with us for a year now, so we’d gotten used to the snores. To be honest, I envied him his ability to fall asleep that fast.

  I glanced at Silva. “You want to do the asking for once?”

  He grinned and held up both forearms, tattooed every inch. “You know it’s not me.”

  “There’s such a thing as sleeves, you know.” I pulled my windbreaker off the back of my seat and flapped it at him, even though I knew he was right. In the Midwest, approaching a new restaurant for the first time, it was never him, between the tattoos and the spiky blue hair. Never Jacky for the pox scars on his cheeks, even though they were clearly long healed. That left me.

  My bad knee buckled as I swung from the driver’s seat. I bent to clutch it and my lower back spasmed just to the right of my spine, that momentary pain that told me to rethink all my life’s choices.

  “What are you doing?” Silva asked through the open door.

  “Tying my shoe.” There was no need to lie, but I did it anyway. Pride or vanity or something akin. He was only two years younger than me, and neither of us jumped off our amps much anymore. If I ached from the drive, he probably ached, too.

  The backs of my thighs were all pins and needles, and my shirt was damp with sweat. I took a moment to lean against Daisy the Diesel and stretch in the hot air. I smelled myself: not great after four days with no shower, but not unbearable.

  The doors opened into a foyer, red and gold and black. I didn’t even notice the blond hostess in her red qipao until she stepped away from the wallpaper.

  “Dining alone?” she asked. Beyond her, a roomful of faces turned in my direction. This wasn’t really the kind of place that attracted tourists, especially not these days, this far off the interstate.

  “No, um, actually, I was wondering if I could speak to the chef or the owner? It’ll only take a minute.” I was pretty sure I had timed our stop for after their dinner rush. Most of the diners looked to be eating or pushing their plates aside.

  The owner and chef were the same person. I’d been expecting another blond Midwesterner, but he was legit Chinese. He had never heard of a van that ran on grease. I did the not-quite-pleading thing. On stage I aimed for fierce, but in jeans and runners and a ponytail, I could fake a down-on-her-luck Midwest momma. The trick was not to push it.

  He looked a little confused by my request, but at least he was willing to consider it. “Come to the kitchen door after we close and show me. Ten, ten thirty.”

  It was nine; not too bad. I walked back to the van. Silva was still in the passenger seat, but reading a trifold menu. He must have ducked in behind me to grab it. “They serve a bread basket with lo mein. And spaghetti and meatballs. Where are we?”

  “Nowhere, Indiana.” I echoed back at him.

  We sat in the dark van and watched the customers trickle out. I could mostly guess from their looks which ones would be getting into the trucks and which into the Chauffeurs. Every once in a while, a big guy in work boots and a trucker cap surprised me by squeezing himself into some little self-driving thing. The game passed the time, in any case.

  A middle-aged cowboy wandered over to stare at our van. I pegged him for a legit rancher from a distance, but as he came closer I noticed a clerical collar beneath the embroidered shirt. His boots shone and he had a paunch falling over an old rodeo belt; the incongruous image of a bull-riding minister made me laugh. He startled when he realized I was watching him.

  He made a motion for me to lower my window.

  “Maryland plates!” he said. “I used to live in Hagerstown.”

  I smiled, though I’d only ever passed through Hagerstown.

  “Used to drive a church van that looked kinda like yours, too, just out of high school. Less duct tape, though. Whatcha doing out here?”

  “Touring. Band.”

  “No kidding! You look familiar. Have I heard of you?”

  “Cassis Fire,” I said, taking the question as a prompt for a name. “We had it painted on the side for a while, but then we figured out we got pulled over less when we were incognito.”

  “Don’t think I know the name. I used to have a band, back before . . .” His voice trailed off, and neither of us needed him to finish his sentence. There were several “back befores” he could be referring to, but they all amounted to the same thing. Back before StageHolo and SportsHolo made it easier to stay home. Back before most people got scared out of congregating anywhere they didn’t know everybody.

  “You’re not playing around here, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Columbus, Ohio. Tomorrow night.”

  “I figured. Couldn’t think of a place you’d play nearby.”

  “Not our kind of music, anyway,” I agreed. I didn’t know what music he liked, but this was a safe bet.

  “Not any kind. Oh well. Nice chatting with you. I’ll look you up on StageHolo.”

  He turned away.

  “We’re not on StageHolo,” I called to his back, though maybe not loud enough for him to hear. He waved as his Chauffeur drove him off the lot.

  “Luce, you’re a terrible salesperson,” Silva said to me.

  “What?” I hadn’t realized he’d been paying attention.

  “You know he recognized you. All you had to do was say your name instead of the band’s. Or ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ He’d have paid for dinner for all of us, then bought every T-shirt and download code we have.”

  “And then he’d listen to them and realize the music we make now is nothing like the music we made then. And even if he liked it, he’d never go to a show. At best he’d send a message saying how much he wished we were on StageHolo.”

  “Which we could be . . .”

  “Which we won’t be.” Silva knew better than to argue with me on that one. It was our only real source of disagreement.

  The neon “open” sign in the restaurant’s window blinked out, and I took the cue to put the key back in the ignition. The glowplug light came on, and I started the van back up.

&n
bsp; My movement roused Jacky again. “Where are we now?”

  I didn’t bother answering.

  As I had guessed, the owner hadn’t quite understood what I was asking for. I gave him the engine tour, showing him the custom oil filter and the dual tanks. “We still need regular diesel to start, then switch to the veggie oil tank. Not too much more to it than that.”

  “It’s legal?”

  Legal enough. There was a gray area wherein perhaps technically we were skirting the fuel tax. By our reasoning, though, we were also skirting the reasons for the fuel tax. We’d be the ones who got in trouble, anyway. Not him.

  “Of course,” I said, then changed the subject. “And the best part is that it makes the van smell like egg rolls.”

  He smiled. We got a whole tankful out of him, and a bag full of food he’d have otherwise chucked out, as well.

  The guys were over the moon about the food. Dumpster diving behind a restaurant or Superwally would have been our next order of business, so anything that hadn’t made a stop in a garbage can on its way to us was haute cuisine as far as we were concerned. Silva took the lo mein—no complimentary bread—screwed together his travel chopsticks, and handed mine to me from the glove compartment. I grabbed some kind of moo shu without the pancakes, and Jacky woke again to snag the third container.

  “Can we go someplace?” Silva asked, waving chopsticks at the window.

  “Got anything in mind on a Tuesday night in the boonies?”

  Jacky was up for something, too. “Laser tag? Laser bowling?”

  Sometimes the age gap was a chasm. I turned in my seat to side-eye the kid. “One vote for lasers.”

  “I dunno,” said Silva. “Just a bar? If I have to spend another hour in this van I’m going to scream.”

  I took a few bites while I considered. We wouldn’t be too welcome anywhere around here, between our odor and our look, not to mention the simple fact that we were strangers. On the other hand, the more outlets I gave these guys for legit fun, the less likely they were to come up with something that would get us in trouble. “If we see a bar or a bowling joint before someplace to sleep, sure.”