“Yeah, you were all on another planet.” Dodd looked over at Sheila. She glared back at him. Uh-oh, he thought.
Toby, Bob and Denise said their goodbyes and exited gracefully, leaving Sheila behind in the apartment. As soon as the door was shut she said, “Are you throwing me out, too?”
“You can stay if you want to go to sleep.” Dodd pushed a button on the computer panel beside the door, starting the routine that would shut off the lights and silently take phone messages.
There was a solid, loud clunk as the front door locked itself.
“I want to watch Travels a little longer,” Sheila said.
“It’s two in the morning.”
Sheila’s expression softened. Now she was pouting. “Can’t I watch it for just a little bit?”
“Sheila, look! Even if I go to sleep right now, I’ll only get three-and-a-half hours in before I have to get up and go to work!”
“Please?”
“I don’t function well with only three-and-a-half hours sleep! Can’t you understand that?”
“Oh, come on – please?” She made a big pout.
Dodd tromped angrily over to the video components and turned them back on. He adjusted the volume and said, “Please don’t turn this up.” He walked out of the room and down the hall to his bedroom, closing the door behind him and falling into bed.
Within minutes she had turned the volume up.
Dodd was angry for a while, but then he relaxed as the music worked on him. It was nice, really. It was also haunting, seeming to spin through time from eternity, passing through him and on … it was sparking, pure. It brought images to mind of the rolling Travels sphere, flashing its colors as it bounced along a virgin beach, bouncing on and on, never slowing, never stopping, taking him into his dreams, becoming his dreams, displacing his dreams.
2. MUTANT
The setting sun was fat, red – a globe of hell descending to the ocean.
And he was staring at it.
His eyes began to char and burn in his head.
Saul exhaled sharply and forced himself to look away. The setting sun was real despite the effects of the drug. It was real and he shouldn’t be staring at it. He held his left hand against his closed eyes and felt a distant sensation of pain. Colors swam under his eyelids, brightly glowing shapes and patterns, shifting and melting and forming new ones. His right hand held his drink; he took a sip and then blindly sat it down where he could find it again without having to open his eyes. Over the railing came the distant booming hiss of ocean waves crashing ashore – the sound was altered by the Mataphin drug, giving him the distinct impression of someone whispering to him through a cardboard tube.
Saul took several long, deep breaths, easing his muscles, relaxing and clearing his mind. The patterns became less random, the colors more subdued. In the center of his mind’s eye he imagined a sphere, the Travels sphere, imagined it rolling along.
As he relaxed the image solidified, became three-dimensional. He was entering dream-state, but with the aid of the Mataphin drug he was not losing consciousness.
I’m almost there, he thought.
Saul watched the ball rolling through iridescent red and black landscapes; through oddly symmetrical forests where the leaves shone like neon; through glassy, shimmering shores where all the rocks had perfectly flat tops where moisture collected in tiny, glowing beads. Perfect images, flawless movements as graceful as running water. I’m there, he thought. I’m there. He moved his hand in slow motion toward the recorder in his pocket, the input plugged right into the base of his skull. His finger touched the record button.
There was a sudden scream, a sound as loud as an air-raid siren. Saul’s body jerked and his eyes opened wide. He felt as if someone had hit him over the head with a chair. “Mirro!” he yelled. “Mirrrrooo!” No one answered him, and the baby kept crying.
Trying to ignore the shrieks, Saul took a few deep breaths and closed his eyes, watching the visions. He tried to bring back the clarity, the flow and balance, but every time the mournful scream reached a crescendo his visions shattered like glass plates. He was never going to get any work done with the baby crying. Saul sat up, calling out his wife’s name again. There was still no answer, so he stood up and walked through the hanging beads into the house, cringing at the shrieks, trying to keep his balance under the effects of the drug.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he muttered emptily. “Oh honey, what’s wrong?” He stroked his daughter’s flaccid skin, trying to calm her. She was 14 years old, weighted over 400 pounds and had the brain the size of a small lizard. A product of her mother’s continued use of “Lottalove,” the pheromone perfume she wore when she and Saul were first married.
His daughter settled down and grinned at him, gurgling as he gently stroked her stomach. Her enormous round face wrinkled grotesquely with the grin, drool running down her cheek and mingling with tears. Her eyes and mouth were tiny, her hair fine and golden. Her arms and legs were very short. From the smell of her, she needed her diaper changed.
“Oh god,” Saul muttered, standing over her and trying to prepare himself for the task. Changing the diaper of a 400-pound perpetual baby was, for him, a half-hour job. As he was preparing the bedside hoist he heard the front door open and, hoping it was his wife, called out, “Is that you?”
“Silly question,” her voice came back. “Anyone would answer that ‘yes.’”
Saul frowned. “The baby was crying. Where were you?”
“Seeing Vicky. Are you getting any work done?” She appeared in the doorway of their daughter’s room, scantly clad and looking as if she’d been asleep. There was something different about her this evening, it took Saul a few minutes to figure out what it was. The tips of her golden hair had been dyed powder blue. “Oh,”
she said, sniffing the air, “time for a change-change.”
“I was about to do it.”
“Oh, it takes you forever. Go on, get back to work.”
Saul turned and walked out of the room, brushing past her in the doorway. “Could you stay and keep her quiet, please?” he said as he walked down the hallway. “At least until I come down?”
“Sorry honey,” she said.
“Yeah,” he muttered, thinking: If you weren’t so fucking sorry maybe we could stick this freak child of yours into a Home.
Or better yet into one of those euthanasia centers. We could live like royalty on the money we spend keeping that thing alive.
Saul stopped in mid-stride, standing in the long west-wing hall, horrified at his own thoughts. Is that me? he wondered. Is that really me? My god, it must be the drug. It must be. The Mataphin amplifies … it must be amplifying my resentment. I don’t wish death for her, poor baby, it’s not her fault she’s like that.
Saul made his way back to the oceanfront porch, taking deep breaths to clear his mind of the ugliness and depression. He settled himself into the couch and sipped his drink, closing his eyes, seeing the red of the sunset through his eyelids. It looked like fire. Raging red fire, sprays of molten rock, and through it rolled the sphere, the Travels sphere, and with it came relaxation and peace. The fire faded, other images came to mind, beautiful images luxurious and deep, the ball rolling and rebounding and Saul followed along behind it, watching closely, controlling its direction, forgetting about his mutant daughter and bisexual wife and his lost chance to have a true family. The sphere led the way.
Soon he arrived to where he wanted to be, and he slid his hand up to the small recorder in his pocket, and pushed record.
3. TESTICLES
Dodd was groggy and ill tempered when he left his apartment for work the next morning. When the house computer woke him at 5:30 AM the television in the front room was still going, the 24-hour Travels channel continuing its coverage of the rolling ball with no interruptions or commercial breaks. Sheila was asleep so there was no argument from her when he turned the TV off, but by the time he had showered, shaved, dressed and eaten breakfast she was awake again and the Travels channel was back on the screen.
The anarchists in his garage were already gone, but he found a note of thanks spray-painted on one of the walls. “BEWARE THE
ANTICHRIST AI” it read, luminous red words outlined in black. They had dug through his boxes of junk and taken a few cooking utensils. This made Dodd mad, not because he had cherished the old stained utensils – far from it, they were junk – but it was the way they had just taken it, they hadn’t even thought about asking. And the spray paint! He was going to have to paint the whole wall to cover it, and he’d have to do it soon, too – the apartment management was seldom understanding in this sort of thing. Dodd was sure that somewhere in his lease agreement was the clause “Letting anarchists sleep in your garage unit is terms for expulsion.”