The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 13

  “I told you,” Stella said. “The seat of my consciousness is on the move.”

  Corey shook her head.

  “The seat of your consciousness is where you picture yourself. It’s where you feel the center of who you are emanates. Where is the seat of your consciousness, dear?”

  The young woman sat in a chair next to the bed. Now the side of her face was clearly in view. Fine, blonde hair that fell to just above her shoulders. High cheekbones. A mouth that turned down when she wasn’t smiling, so she often looked pensive. Stella tried to remember when her own face was so unlined.

  “In me?” said Corey.

  “Yes, but where within you? Try this. Close your eyes and just listen. Where are you, your essence, the seat of your consciousness?”

  For a minute, neither woman made a sound.

  Corey laughed. “Between my ears, just behind my eyes.”

  Stella sighed. “Yes, that’s where it would be. But what if you couldn’t hear or see? What if your only sense was of touch? Would the seat of your consciousness be in your hands then?”

  Corey’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She stood. “The night nurse and your dinner will be here soon. Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”

  “No, dear. I’m enjoying my independence,” she said from the medical sensor.

  A voice Corey didn’t hear often said inside her ear, “This is the mattress speaking. The sheets are soiled and need attention.”

  After the night nurse came and they changed the sheets—the old woman seemed almost weightless as they transferred her to and from the bed—Corey put on her coat. Her hands smelled of antiseptic. The nurse, a solid-looking woman with sturdy calves, stood in the doorway into Stella’s room, her arms crossed. “I don’t give her a week at this rate,” she said. “Nutrients aren’t being absorbed. She dehydrates easily. Next coma will be her last.”

  Corey felt a sudden itchiness in her eyes, but she resisted the impulse to rub them. “I know.”

  “I’ve got another patient signed up in her spot at the end of the month. It’ll be a scheduling problem if this one hangs on that long.”

  It wasn’t until Corey reached the park across the street from the building that she let herself cry. The park bench said, “You are upset. Can I contact a counseling service for you?”

  Corey blew her nose. The air smelled of elm and warm streets, and the afternoon sun cast long shadows of buildings and trees across the lawn. Traffic hummed quietly on all sides. A few feet in front of her, four small gray birds pecked at the sidewalk. They moved in little hops from one spot to the next, tapping for a moment, then straightening to look for threats. Corey leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees, a tissue hanging from one hand.

  One of the birds hopped toward her, its black eyes like pencil tips glistening in its feather-smooth head. The bird cocked its head to one side, then the other, looking at her. It pecked at a seed on the cement, then looked at her again. Corey half expected the bird’s voice to erupt in her ear. “What are you staring at?” it might ask, or “Any bread crumbs?” But the bird was mute. The tiny intelligence functioned on its own. Corey pressed her palm on her belly. Still flat. The doctor had said there was a heartbeat, but she couldn’t feel it. The doctor had said, “We’ll throw it away. Just a handful of cells. An annoyance, no more.” How big was it growing inside her now? Was it as big as a wren? Where was its voice?

  When Corey went to bed, she stayed awake for hours watching the shadows from the tree outside her window play across her ceiling. As she finally grew drowsy, the shadows took the shape of small gray birds, hopping from tile to tile.

  Stella didn’t feel tired in the least. If she concentrated, she realized she could identify a sound’s location. All she needed was to triangulate from the microphones. A minuscule scritching sound behind the closed doors under the counter told her a mouse was hard at work. The night nurse’s steady tapping of the pencil on the table while she contemplated a crossword puzzle seemed as distinct as a bell. She heard the pencil’s beat echo from the walls, and without accessing video, she could see the room like a bat, each tap clarifying the dimensions.

  Stella chuckled. Maybe what she could do would be to order a remote control sensing device. Something she could direct through the interface. She could walk the streets again, or at least her senses could go.

  The medical sensor clicked. A valve opened inside to release a dose of something from Stella’s I.V. line. She moved her consciousness into the sensitive machine. Of all the devices in the room, the medical sensor provided the most information. Her own pulse was a sound, a feeling and a color, throbbing like a dull red sun. Her breathing rasped in rainbow hues, dazzling in the medical sensor’s perception. Her body’s temperature registered in numbers and grid lines, the coolness of her fingers and feet, the warmth of her chest and stomach.

  She watched herself on the bed, probed her organs, listened to the crackle of air through her nose, the snap of her lips as they separated for another breath, the gurgle of her intestines.

  After a couple hundred steady beats of her tired heart, Stella realized the sound of her breathing had changed. The snore vibrated in the room, stopped for a moment, resumed.

  The mouse paused in its investigations in the cabinet. The night nurse kept tapping.

  I’m sleeping, Stella thought. I’m wide awake and sleeping. How interesting.

  The tram from Corey’s apartment to work was only half full. Across the aisle, a man, a woman and a five-year-old girl hunched over a coloring book. The girl said, “I’m making the sky purple because purple is Mommy’s favorite.” The woman smiled. She wore a yellow blouse and pants that left most of her midriff bare. No lines on her slender belly. She’s never been pregnant, Corey thought. Pregnant. The word itself felt alien in Corey’s head. No queasiness for the yellow-blouse lady. Of course not. Corey couldn’t picture what it would be like to sit on the tram, her belly gravid and alive with motion. She’d read that a pregnant mother could feel the baby kicking inside. What was that like? Little fleshy earthquakes. People would stare. She shuddered.

  “I like purple too,” said the child.

  The man tousled the girl’s hair. He was Harlow’s age. How had the man and woman got together? Had his wife said I love you first? Did she know then that she loved him?

  Corey closed her eyes and rested the side of her head against the window until she reached her stop.

  The family exited first. Corey gripped the handrail near the door, waiting for them to leave. The little girl turned and held up a broken crayon to her dad. He took it, shrugged, and dropped it in a waste bin on the sidewalk.

  Was it alive? Corey thought. Did it have a voice, and what was it thinking now, laying in the dark among thrown away paper and empty soft drink containers? Did they talk among themselves, the tiny voices, the thrown away, knowing the recycler would pick them up soon?

  “Good day, ma’am,” the waste bin announced in her inner ear when Corey touched it.

  She snatched her hand back.

  A voice mail awaited her in the office. “I’ve had a cancellation, so we can schedule your procedure for tomorrow if that would be convenient,” said her doctor. “If you don’t mind, a couple of interns have expressed interest in observing. Your condition really is quite fascinating.”

  The night nurse came in from Stella’s room. “She’s gone under for the last time. Another coma,” she declared as she put on her coat. “I’d give her twenty-four hours, tops.”

  Corey felt her shoulders drop, a physical unleashing, as if the muscles had died. “No.”

  The nurse buttoned her coat, her face a closed door. “We knew it was on the way. She was used up.”

  When the nurse left, Corey sat in her chair, her hands resting limply on her legs. She realized she’d been staring at them for some time, when a thin keening voice echoed in her ear. Not words, just a long howl of grief and loss, but so quiet she thought at first it might be a sub
conscious sound, a part of her imagination.

  She found the pencil in the bottom drawer, but instead of the length she’d left it the day before, it had been sharpened down to its last inch. There was almost more eraser than pencil. From end to end, it didn’t reach to both sides of her palm.

  “What happened?” she said.

  The sobbing continued. It would be so easy for her to block it out. A simple adjustment and the pencil would no longer be able to talk to her. Harlow could do it. He walked through a world of tiny voices screened to silence. But she didn’t. She waited until the cries settled down.

  Finally the pencil gasped, “Crossword puzzles.”

  “Huh?”

  “All night, crossword puzzles. The nurse writes and writes and writes, then resharpens. Always, always resharpening. I’m a splinter away from annihilation.”

  “Toss him in here,” said the trashcan.

  “No, don’t,” said the pen from the desktop. “The pencil’s a good egg. Do you know there’s a couple thousand jokes stored on his chip? And he makes up new ones all the time.”

  “My pencil makes up jokes?” Corey rolled the wood between her palms.

  “I have skills,” said the pencil. “I have other interests.”

  “Well, let’s hear one.”

  The pencil hesitated. “Okay. How about this? Did you hear the joke about the pencil?”

  Corey shook her head and then said, “No.”

  “Never mind. It’s pointless.”

  The pen snickered.

  Corey looked at the pencil incredulously. “That’s terrible. I can’t believe I listened to that.” She put it on the desk and stood.

  “Maybe this one will be better,” said the pencil. “Where do pencil vampires come from?”

  Corey picked up the pen and put in her blouse pocket, then moved to the doorway between her office and Stella’s room.

  “Pencil-vania,” the pencil said across the distance.

  If anything, Stella appeared even smaller than she had yesterday. Her mouth hung open; her chest was still. Corey stepped toward her, then Stella gasped and sucked in a raspy breath.

  Red lights flashed on the medical sensor. Electrolytes dangerously low, read one display. Blood oxygen dangerously low, read another. Brain patterns indicate serious distress, reported a third. Corey tapped the communication interface. Hospital contacted and no heroic measure order confirmed said the note. Stella’s heartbeat pinged forlornly from the medical sensor.

  Corey’s hand quivered when she touched Stella’s forehead. “Where are you, Stella? Where’s the seat of your consciousness now?”

  But Stella couldn’t process the question. She heard the words without sorting them into meaning. Colors pressed in on her, and sounds, and the shape of smells, all confused and muddled. This is death, she thought. I can fight it, if I can just find myself. So she moved as best she could through the forms and notes and blustery textures that batted against her. I’m dying! My mind is collapsing upon itself. She could see an abyss around her. A sucking blackness just beyond the chaos on every side. Maybe I’m already dead! She tried moving her hands, but she couldn’t feel them. She felt nothing at all. A tumbling. A falling down. An endless repetition of glassy ringing like crystal wind chimes behind cotton walls.

  Stella would have wept if she could, but she fought instead. If I can grab something. If I can center myself, all will not be lost. And the ringing continued. Was it a voice echoed and transformed? Was it the sluggish firing of her last brain cells like a Fourth of July sparkler nearly gone dead?

  Corey sat beside the old woman’s bed for an hour. Each life sign’s graph slid slowly down. The pulse barely twitched every couple of seconds, sounding its tiny tone. The pause between them was excruciating. Even Stella’s smell seemed stale, as if she’d already passed on and had gone bad.

  Finally, after Stella’s dying sounds became a background noise, the door to the outer office opened, startling Corey out of her chair, but Stella didn’t move when Harlow came into the room, his hands jammed into his pockets, and his always careless hair waving across his forehead.

  “Last call, isn’t it?” he said. “I’d better get those papers signed or we’ll be postmortem, and what a mess that would be.”

  “I have to talk to you,” Corey said. “It’s important.”

  He smiled. “I know you liked Stella, but she’s gone now. You’ll get a severance package and a good recommendation. Don’t worry.”

  Corey blinked. For a second what he said didn’t make sense to her. The blood rose to her face, and for an instant it was if he was breathing on her again, warm and tense, a half beat from the end.

  “No, it’s not that. I’m pregnant.”

  Harlow moved to the other side of the bed. “I suppose we’ll have to return all this equipment. Do you know if it’s rented, or did Stella buy it?”

  Corey’s hands rested on the back of the chair by the bed. She could feel the sweat on her neck. Harlow was looking at Stella’s interface box on the wall behind her head.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said again.

  “Bad timing, that,” said Harlow. “But you’ll come up with another job in no time. You could delay delivery if you want. All the better companies give you a few months either way. A buddy of mine and his wife didn’t take delivery for sixteen months because he got cold feet.”

  “No, Harlow, you don’t understand. I’m pregnant. Me. I’m physically with child.” She pressed her hand against her stomach. “There’s a baby in here. Your baby.”

  He blinked back at her, then his brow furrowed. “I didn’t order a baby. I haven’t even deposited anywhere.”

  “In me, you did, the old-fashioned way. It’s not supposed to happen, but we’re going to be parents.”

  Harlow didn’t speak.

  “I thought you should know,” said Corey.

  “You’re pregnant?”

  The pen piped up in Corey’s ear. “I told you he was an idiot.”

  “And he chews pencils,” said the pencil from the other room.

  “It’s in you? Like a parasite?” Harlow’s nose wrinkled as if he’d smelled something distasteful. “What a bother.”

  “My doctor wants me to make an appointment.” Corey’s hands covered her stomach that still felt flat and familiar. “Soon.” She felt as if she were playacting. A real pregnant woman wouldn’t feel so… so normal. Maybe she could just shake her head to wake up. Stella wouldn’t be dying. Harlow would wait for her at her desk for long talks, his lovely eyes locked on her own. She’d still know the long anticipation of his fingers on her top blouse button, toying, toying, toying, and always a second away from committing.

  “It’s just a toss-away,” said Harlow. “Get a reset at the doctor’s office and start from scratch. Plus, you probably have a good malpractice lawsuit. Nobody gets pregnant nowadays.” He pushed away from Stella’s bed. “How about our lease? Are we committed to paying for the room until the end of the month, or do they prorate it?”

  A muscle in the corner of Corey’s mouth twitched. Suddenly, she wanted to take a handful of his wavy hair and jerk it out by the roots. “I don’t know.” She moved next to the medical sensor. The device’s cool, smooth surface slid beneath her fingers. Stella’s heart beat quietly in the background.

  “Lend me your pen,” he said. “I’ll sign these papers now.” He took it, then wrote on the documents, awkwardly across his knee. “There, she’s still alive, and I’ve taken care of this.” The pen clicked open and closed twice under his thumb. “The pen skips,” he said, flicking it into the trashcan as he left, where it clattered loudly.

  The peace in the room after the door snapped shut lasted for only a second before the trashcan said to the pen, “Ahh, I knew you’d come back. They always come back.”

  “The bastard,” said the pencil.

  “Save me!” cried the pen.

  Corey covered her face with her hands, “Oh, just shut up, all of you.” She leaned her ba
ckside against the medical sensor to keep from collapsing to the floor.

  Several long sobs later, she shook her head as if she were trying to wake up, then wiped her hands hard on her pants legs. “I knew that would happen,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t care, Stella.”

  Stella, or course, didn’t answer. Her lips were parted, her head, turned to one side; her eyelids, thin as parchment, didn’t move. She looked like the photograph of a woman rather than the woman herself. Corey sat in the chair next to the bed and touched the old woman’s fingers that dangled over the guard rail. No response, but Corey didn’t expect any. A few minutes later she realized Stella’s heartbeat wasn’t pinging from the medical sensor.

  Silence consumed the room.

  “Where’d you go?” said Corey, feeling so much like a ten-year-old that her adult voice surprised her.

  Somewhere else, in a clattering chaos of shapes and sounds and rough currents, the question echoed. Stella heard it from a dozen directions, repeating and looping on itself until it became a refrain boiled down to “Go, go, go.” She reached out as best she could, but she had no hands to grab with. She could only follow, so she did. Drifting after the strongest sound, driving her forward, urging, “Go, go, go.” Stella didn’t know: was she lost or found? Was she still herself, or was she fragmenting, breaking into pieces in the sloppy overload of textures and odors? Still, she moved, because there was nothing else to do, and as she did, she thought she saw a place she recognized. Is this the afterlife? she thought. Is that my angel?

  She tried so hard to see.

  Corey let Stella’s cold fingers rest against her own. The room looked surreal to her in its stillness. The white cabinets. The refrigerator. The clean walls exactly the same as they’d been yesterday and the day before, but now as different as sleep from waking. She hesitated to move. It would break the spell. Stella would become just a dead and fading memory. For now, though, Stella’s touch was real. Corey stayed motionless, almost afraid to breathe, not really thinking. Then, she saw a tiny speck creeping along the baseboard beneath the bed, a beetle making its way across the room, and, soon, she heard a gentle scratching within the wall behind the cabinets, and she realized there must be a mouse there, fending for itself. She almost smiled at the thought when another movement caught her eye: the television mounted in the room’s corner had rotated slightly toward her.