All the Birds in the Sky(95)

“Yeah.” Laurence looked for clean socks. There had to be clean socks. He couldn’t face this without clean socks. “Except, again, you’re being shortsighted. What happens to you if our whole industrial civilization implodes? If there’s no more fuel, no electricity to recharge the Caddies? Or if the whole world goes down in a nuclear daisy chain?”

He pulled some pants on and realized his T-shirt was sweat stained and gross. Why did he even care how he looked? It was pure neurosis.

“Three minutes,” Peregrine said.

Laurence felt panic overtake him. It was 2:15 in the morning, the lights were all out except for the glow of the Caddy screen, and he was shirtless and dirty, with no place to run. He was not ready, he would never be ready, he had stopped being ready a while ago when he let go of his first, strongest anger. He looked at the tiny window of his bedroom, and at the staircase that led up to the vacant front part where Isobel was supposed to be. The house was an obstacle course of clutter, the backyard a wild tangle. He thought of a thousand hiding places and no escape routes.

He hyperventilated and choked on spit and pounded his own chest, while the darkness grew until it was bigger than he could encompass. He found shirt, shoes, still paralyzed. Peregrine kept trying to carry on their stupid conversation, as if that mattered now, while also saying “two minutes.” Peregrine added, “I think you’re just disappointed that I haven’t transformed the entire planet, or become some sort of artificial deity, which seems like a misapprehension of the nature of consciousness, artificial or otherwise. A true deity, by definition, would be outside physicality, or unaffected by whatever vessel contained it.”

“Not now.” Laurence was torn between looking for a weapon, making a mad dash for it, and fixing his hair and rebrushing his teeth, which he’d brushed a few hours before. Except he couldn’t fight, he had no place to run, and he didn’t want to primp for this. All this time as a mad scientist, why didn’t he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life.

“What am I going to do?” Laurence said.

“Answer the door,” Peregrine said. “In about one minute.”

“Jesus. Fuck. I can’t, I’m losing my mind. Does she know about you? Of course she doesn’t. What am I going to do. I can’t face this. I’m going blind. I always thought the term ‘blind panic’ was a metaphor, but it turns out not. Peregrine, I need to get out of here. Can you hide me, man?”

A thudding, cracking sound made Laurence jump. He realized it was a knock on the front door, which had caught him off guard even though he’d been expecting it. There was no way that it had been a full minute since Peregrine said “one minute.” He was sure he was visibly shaking, and you could smell the terror on him. He tried to reach for the outrage that he had been so full of not long ago. Why was outrage only available when useless?

He found some dignity in the back pocket of his newly acquired pants and walked up into the main apartment, only tripping once. Or twice. And then he reached the door as it vibrated again. He pulled it open.

He had not been prepared for her to be so unfairly beautiful.

The only light source in the whole place was a small flashlight, probably LED based, in her tiny hand. It cast a glow that was pale but not ghostly, up onto her small breasts, visible in her lacey tank top, and her rounded chin and perfect resolute mouth. She wasn’t smiling but she was making something like eye contact. She looked calm. Her eyes were dazzling. She was holding a Caddy in one hand and had a satchel over her shoulder. Looking at her dark serious eyes and her pale, brave face, Laurence felt a rush of emotion that caught him off guard. For a picosecond he did not care that she had destroyed the machine, he just wanted to embrace her and laugh for joy. Then he remembered and felt everything lock up again, instant tetanus.

“Hi, Laurence,” Patricia said, her posture straight and her body poised, as if she could fight an army of ninjas at any moment. She seemed way more grown-up and self-assured than the last time he had seen her. “It’s good to see you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to give you your grandmother’s ring back.” She reached into her hoodie pocket and came out with a tiny black cube.

Laurence didn’t take it from her palm.

“I thought you had to keep that,” Laurence said. “Or else Priya would be pulled back into the nightmarish dimension where gravity is a strong force.”

“Yeah. That. Well, I decided I don’t like Priya that much,” Patricia said. At Laurence’s stony look, she added: “That was a joke. Joking here. Nobody is going to be pulled into any kind of void if I give you this ring back.” She held it up to him.

He looked at the nugget of felt. “Why not?”

“I realized that enough time has passed and it’s probably safe.” That sounded like total garbage, and Laurence just stared. She added: “Okay, not really. I guess I’ve gotten much better at Trickster magic since then. And…” She paused because whatever came next was difficult to say, especially when fidgeting on someone’s doorstep in total darkness.

Laurence waited it out. Patricia searched for the right words. He didn’t let her off the hook by filling the silence.

“I mean…” Patricia looked unbearably sad for a second, then she pushed ahead. “I guess I wound up playing a much bigger trick on you than just tricking you into giving up your ring, didn’t I? Even if I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I became your lover and part of your life, and then I … well, you know what I did. And the antigravity machine that sent Priya away, the one that this ring was offered to save her from, became part of the doomsday machine that I wrecked. So I don’t need it anymore, because I wound up building a much bigger wheel around the smaller wheel. And I guess, in a way, this ring is tainted for me.”