Author: admin

“It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained.” From “Landor’s Cottage,” The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, p. 619.

* * *

It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained. Sarah drew herself nose to nose with a tiny glass unicorn, one of dozens of figures standing on motionless display in a lit curio cabinet.

She turned and ran her index finger lightly along the frilly edge of a bedspread in the enormous doll house. In each room a doll–perfectly to scale–went about some business or another. The mother doll, with her graceful chignon and real lace collar, sat alone sipping coffee at a table set for twelve, her tiny chin raised slightly, her eyes far away, almost pensive. In the next room the father doll sat at a miniature rollback desk with a tiny green velvet blotter, head in hands, bent over a stack of papers with real writing on them. Sara imagined that, with a magnifying glass, she might be able to read the words on those pages–no bigger than postage stamps, thinner than tissue paper–and decipher a root cause for the gloom that pervaded the rooms of that make-believe house.

Beyond the dollhouse was a massive white wrought-iron bed covered in crisp white linens. The spread at first appeared polka-dotted, but on closer inspection was hand-embroidered with little baskets of purple flowers, each one slightly different from its neighbors. Hung from a hook on the ceiling was  a sheer white canopy with purple scalloped edges. Sarah drew it lightly aside to see, raised up against the pillows, an army of porcelain dolls, their eyes fixed forward beneath curving lashes. Some were old, dressed in pinafores and heeled boots, others looked almost modern, in saddle shoes and mini skirts.

Sarah sat carefully on the bed, wincing as it squeaked in objection to her weight.

She had not been in that many other girls’ rooms. There was Shelly Parker, who stood with Sarah at the bus stop each morning, half under and half outside of the rectangle of shade thrown by the awning of the life insurance company. The broker never had any clients that early but was against kids loitering on his doorstep just the same. Shelly’s family was born-again Christian, some sort of fundamentalist Baptist sect. They went to church three times a week, and Shelly’s room was decorated with Precious Moments figurines and framed prints of Thomas Kincaid paintings–warmly lit cottages hugged tight by gardens brimming with blue and pink hydrangeas and bud roses–an old person’s idea of what a young girl might like.

Tabitha Lamott’s room, she could see, was also heavy with adult notions of childhood. But it was also fascinating. With rekindled resolve, Sarah waited, hands in her lap, to meet her new friend.

“As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived.” Watership Down, by Richard Adams, p. 112.

* * *

As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived. To begin with, Sharon needed a sturdy table. And one morning–after scuttling the kids out the door to school, settling for wet hair and a shift dress, and heading for the train–the universe provided her with one. There, two houses down and across the alley, was one of those giant wooden spools for industrial cable, propped against a chain link fence an a utility pole. It was the sort of thing college kids would use for a coffee table. The girls Sharon had shared an apartment with all those years ago might actually have had one. She had a vague recollection of it, strewn with ashtrays and bottles of cheap beer.

Sharon approached the thing for a closer inspection. Then, looking first one way and then the other down the alley, she gave it an appraising kick. Nice. Solid. She hastily rolled it across the alley and through her back gate, depositing it in a forgotten corner of her yard. For good measure, she covered it with an old paint-streaked tarp before glancing with alarm at her watch and tripping off once more to the train.

Getting the thing into the basement the next day did not go at all according to plan. The “controlled roll” she had envisioned was, as it turned out, a physics lesson waiting to happen. As always, between gravity and things wheel-shaped, all was dispatched with no undue delay. There wasn’t much left for Sharon to do but stand back and, later, plaster over the rather large depression in the basement wall.

A week later the makeshift table was ensconced in its own little corner of Sharon’s basement, next to the dust-furred hulk of her husband’s old rowing machine and stacked milk crates full of memorabilia from track meets and dance recitals. The table was covered in an assortment of textiles, found objects, inks and dyes, adhesives of all kinds, and sketchbooks–stacks and stacks of dusty old, elastic-corded moleskin sketchbooks, each with the year printed neatly on the inside cover.

And it was in this way, like iron shavings dancing in the path of a magnet, that the scattered bits of Sharon Belthower began to collide and adhere to one another. An old energy stuttered to life and flowed, once again, up and down her arms, pooling into her fingertips, stiff and lethargic; fingers that had almost forgotten what it was to create.

“The man was cold as an albino frog.” Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, p. 104

* * *

“The man was cold as an albino frog.” What did that even mean, Shari wondered. Paul made the comment in an offhand way, in response to her first tentative questioning. His blunt aspect could signal an opening. It could just as well be a warning to change the subject. After ten months together, you would think she could read him.

They’d arrived at the same time, tucked themselves into the corner booth by the stairs, and ordered their usual Chianti and carbonara to split–a student’s date-night splurge. Shari was in the second year of her MFA program, spending long hours scribbling away in coffee shops or typing at the old desk she’d jammed into one corner of their studio apartment. Paul was a medical student. Today had been his team’s first day of dissection. A real human cadaver. Just like an 80’s movie. Gross Anatomy or Flatliners. Things hadn’t changed much. The best way to learn to write was still to sit down and write; the best way to learn about the human body was still to cut it open and look inside.

She was morbidly fascinated by the prospect. But the thing about the frog caught her off guard. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an albino frog. Much less felt one.”

“They had a tank full of them, in the bar I used to work at in Chicago. I had to fish out a dead one once.” She made a face. “People used to throw popcorn in. Not a good idea, apparently.”

Shari sipped her wine. She’d never actually seen a dead body. Animal or human. She kept picturing the white foamed rubber underside of Haribo frog gummies. And then that made her think of the waxy white sweet bricks of vanilla Tootsie Rolls, the blue-wrapped ones in the Halloween variety pack. She pictured a human figure composed of these two substances, scalpels slicing through it to reveal … what? Red raspberry filling? Breached cavities spilling rainbow-colored Nerds onto the metal table, coils of glistening red licorice, cloudy membranous sacs the color of blue raspberry blow pops, yellow and orange tissue spongy to the touch, like marshmallow circus peanuts.

“Hello? Earth to Shari.” Paul touched her hand gently. “Mind if we talk about something else? Trust me, it won’t do anything for your appetite.”

She smiled. “Of course. You’re probably starving.”

“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?” Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, p. 268.

* * *

“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?”

The man made a notation in one column of a steno book and, looking up, tucked the pencil behind his ear. It was an old Col-Erase, a copy-editor’s pencil, one end blue and the other red. Detective Markle hadn’t seen one of those in years.

His mother had edited the personal ads and obituaries in their local paper for decades. “All those people, Joey, seeking and seeking, never looking at what’s right in front of them.” He had a sudden vision of her, looking up from her desk, the blue tip of her pencil resting pensively on her lower lip. She’d had a drawer full of pencils like that, in slim little boxes, a dozen per box. Markle wondered if this man had a similar stash, hauled off from some going-out-of-business sale. Or maybe someone was still making the things, a rolling river of them dropping neatly from a conveyor belt , robotic hands pressing the gummed flaps of the boxes closed.

Markle resurfaced, shook his head slightly. He glanced longingly at the wisps of stem rising from the man’s coffee cup. It had been a long night.

“Well sir, the girl’s mother said she comes in here quite a bit.”

“She does. After school mostly. Sometimes on the weekends.”

“A bookworm huh?”

The man didn’t seem to think the comment required a response. Markle glanced around. It was a tight little shop, with dusty towers of used books spilling from makeshift shelves, piled so high in front of the windows that the place felt like a basement. It wasn’t someplace you would guess a junior-high-school girl would frequent.

“When would you say you saw her last?”

“Oh, I don’t know, about a week and a half ago? If you give me a second I can tell you.” The man licked his finger and rifled through the pages of the steno book. “Here, June 12. She bought this. Cash, of course.”

Markle looked. Seattle on Ten Dollars a Day.

“Seattle’s pretty far from here.”

“It is.”

“Would you please call me? If you see her. Her folks are real worried.” He handed the man his card.

“I’ll do that.”

* * *

The man waited until the tinkling bell over the door was silent, then said “You can come out now.”

The toes of two scuffed sneakers could be seen behind the stacks.

“He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm.” Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, p. 261.

* * *

He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. What she’d placed there, heavy and cool, folding his fingers around it and giving them a slight squeeze as she turned away, was a key.

Looking up, his eyes met hers for a split second, before she disappeared into the crush of people on the concourse. He made as if to follow her, but saw in an instant that it was hopeless. The crowd spilled forward, a river breaking free of a dam, down half a dozen platforms and onto waiting trains, some already whistling and chuffing, like racehorses anxious to start from their gates. He would not find her again. Not today.

He cursed himself, silently, for not grasping her arm, pulling her to him. He’d been afraid of making a scene. But with all this chaos, he might have gotten her safely away from  here.

It was a large brass key. Not modern. An old warded lock key, with a filigreed bow. The scrollwork there suggested, possibly, a stylized letter “G.” The rectangular bit was broad and flat, with little notched cutouts branching across its surface but never meeting, like a tiny map showing the dead-end passages of a garden maze. He had seen a key like this, once before.

“You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you?” A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, p. 27.

* * *

“You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you? It’s what she does, after all.”

“Sure. But facts and inferences drawn from facts are different.”

James looked up from his microscope. “So what are you saying?”

At the next workstation Joe screwed two halves of a plastic petri dish together, affixed it with a label, and slid it into an empty slot in a large gridded tray. “I’m saying, James, that FALDA is results–driven.” He articulated the last two words carefully, but quietly, Stressing their significance.

James thought about this for a moment, then began typing figures into the wireless keyboard he used with his tablet, which never left his side, in or out of the lab.

They all had one. It was Compact protocol. Keep your data with you. Upload it at the end of the day to a secure server. Researchers could not access each other’s data, could not even access their own data, except through the official weekly and monthly reports, which were notoriously cryptic.

The idea behind FALDA (the Fibril Analytics-Led Data Assemblage)  had been a simple one. Let the computers decide the course of the research. Scientists had been looking for a cure for cancer for decades with–in Joe’s view–only modest success. The problem was that experiments going on in different labs around the world, with different sources of funding, testing the various hypotheses of ego-driven researchers, were uncoordinated, full of redundancies and inefficiencies.

With FALDA, the strands of data were fed through a uniform series of algorithms. Researchers around the world were suddenly working together, waking up each morning to slightly altered or sometimes completely new instructions, based on FALDA’s high-powered processing of the previous day’s global data dump. No researcher directed the course of the experiments. And only a select few on the Review Council had access to FALDA’s decision-making process.

James stopped typing and swiveled his chair around to face Joe. “What you’re suggesting is not possible,” he said, so quietly he could almost not be heard.

Joe nodded. “I know. Listen, if you don’t believe me, fine. But just let me show you this one thing.”