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The Disintegration Loops
By Ray Nayler
["The Disintegration Loops" originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction November/December 2019 ]
It’s not all death rays.
We reverse-engineered good technology off that saucer too: tech that can do more than destroy. From cancer cures in a hypo to terraplanes to turkeys that cook themselves — a whole world of modern convenience.
But even the good tech comes at a cost.
When the OSS caught up to me that day, I’d landed my terraplane just off Beacon Chain One, along the California coast. I’d seen a fire from up above and swung down to see if there was something I could do to help.
A convertible Ford terraplane full of joyriding teenagers had tumbled out of the sky and smashed through one of those giant election billboards of Mr. Roosevelt’s. In this billboard, Roosevelt is standing tall and trim, waving to you and you alone. The city of the future rises over his shoulders in the background, electric blue. I don’t know why President Roosevelt even bothers running an election campaign: he’ll win his seventh term by a landslide, no matter which scarecrow the Republicans prop up to run against him.
The terraplane was a shattered carapace of burning synthetics and deformed metal. It had punched a hole through the plywood of the city of the future and Mr. Roosevelt’s raised hand, then gouged a jagged scar through the earth to its resting place. Teen joyriders were scattered in the grass. A blonde in a flowery dress was laying on her side, dead, without a scratch on her, her clothes perfectly arranged, as if she had fallen asleep in the sun. I’d seen bodies like hers in the war: they are the worst, because your mind keeps telling you they are about to stand up and start walking around. Your mind is ready for blood and gore, but not for people who just stop being alive, without a mark on them. Someone — one of the other drivers who had stopped to help — had put a jacket over her, as if to keep her warm.
There were already police and firemen on the scene. An ambulance had landed too, though what was needed was a coroner’s van. They should just send the coroner’s van out first. Almost nobody ever survives a terraplane accident.
Alvin Greenly tapped me on my shoulder, and I swear I almost hugged him when I saw him. He was something from the here and now, a real living person in tortoiseshell glasses and a sharp-looking tailored car coat with a silk driving scarf tucked into the collar. Not some corpse pulling at my worst memories of the war.
“Heya, Sylvia . . .” He paused, seeing the look on my face. “Jeez, Sylvia — you look almost happy to see me.”
“I hope you keep a journal for posterity,” I said. “Because it’s a one-time deal.”
“I’ll be sure to write it down,” he grinned. “Look: sorry to chase you down like this, but we need you back at the lab. Dan’ll drive your Merc back. You can ride with me. We’ll talk on the way.”
We floated back to the lab through another false California fall day. Fall comes about fifteen times a year in California. It lasts for three or four crisp, clear days, and then is swept away by a blast of winter — or summer, or spring. There’s no sequence to it. Even the oaks are confused: some species drop their leaves for a winter that never really comes. Others keep them all year round. And why not? In California, people can go bare-legged in January or wear a jacket in June. Everyone is out of sync. They walk around with smiles on their faces for reasons nobody east of the Sierras would understand, and with sun-drenched miseries in their hearts that are only possible here.
I’m from Boston, so I prefer my seasons and my people predictable, not sudden as a cold front on a summer day. But the loops make me a good living, so whether I like California or not, it’s home.
I was in my senior year of undergrad for psychology at the University of California at Berkeley when OpsLab recruited me for their little experiment with the loops. I saw their ad pasted up on an advertising pillar outside the Student Union. There was plenty of testing going on at the University of California up in Berkeley, in those days just after the war. Lots of experiments, in dozens of lab buildings that were springing up all over campus like mushrooms after a rain. I’d already participated in a bunch of psychology experiments for one or another of the university labs. They were easy money, which I needed.
The tech boom in California was a product of President Roosevelt’s genius. He understood right away that the government couldn’t do all the engineering related to the saucer’s tech themselves. So the military and the FBI kept some of it, but after the war ended they gave most of it up to the universities to study and develop. The university labs kept the patents on their research, and sold the commercial rights to the big companies to run with. The result was a second Gold Rush. Soon, it seemed like the University of California owned half the state, and Lockheed-Boeing-Douglas and Bell-IBM owned the rest of it. Everyone was doing the same dance. We called it the Golden State Two-Step. Step 1: go to the University of California on your G.I. Bill to get your engineering degree. Step 2: get a job in one of the “industries.”
I went to the University, same as everyone else, but I took psychology, not engineering. That seemed like a funny choice, to a lot of people: after all, I had been an Army whiz kid with an officer’s rank in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps, running the targeting systems for the rays. But after the war, I didn’t want to keep going with engineering. Maybe something was busted inside me by what happened —by what we did — in Berlin and Warsaw and Konigsberg. Maybe, I thought, if I had the right tools, I could fix whatever was wrong with my mind.
Ten undergrads went into OpsLab on that bright day in Berkeley in May, probably all thinking the same thing as I did: just another experiment. Easy money.
When they took the Loop Set off me a few hours later, I shook my head, answered their questions, and then went out to the lab courtyard. I lit up a Lucky and sat under the cherry tree. My hands were shaking so bad, I could barely get the cigarette to my lips. I was thinking all kinds of crazy things.
A white coat went running by. Then another one. I just sat there smoking. The cherry tree was in full blossom. Its petals danced around me in the air. I felt like I was going mad.
“My name is Sylvia Aldstatt,” I found myself saying over and over between drags on my Lucky. “And not anything else. Just Sylvia Aldstatt, and that’s all.”
After a few minutes I heard the sirens.
The other nine participants were dead.
That was how my career piloting the loops got started. The government guys at OpsLab had this technology — really spooky stuff — but nobody could use it without dying. Nobody but me. They couldn’t figure out why, but for obvious reasons they weren’t going to be recruiting volunteers for another round of experiments any time soon.
So I piloted the loops for the OSS, and in the meantime I got my undergraduate degree and started on my doctorate. But I still hadn’t figured out how to fix whatever was busted inside me.
There were plenty of perks to piloting the loops. I didn’t have to spend a day in the lab more than two or three times in a month, and the amount of money they were paying me was — well, let’s just say it helped me leave a lot of worries behind.
They tried to recruit me into the OSS, but I said I would remain freelance and civilian or walk away. It annoyed them, having a freelancer in their midst, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
The loops took a lot out of me. The whole day after a session was a waste: I couldn’t do anything except lay around in bed. But I got to lay around in bed in a tidy little modern house I’d purchased on Alameda Island, just across the bay from San Francisco, with a housekeeper and a gardener and a rooftop garage, and when I got over the headaches I got to drive my cherry-red convertible Mercury terraplane over the San Francisco Bay and down the coast, and land it on a beach I had all to myself because the suckers were all elsewhere, working. I figured the headaches and confusion and everything else were a small price to pay.
The only demand the OpsLab girls and boys made of me was that I carry a tangletracker in my purse. The thing wasn’t any bigger than a tube of lipstick. They kept its mate in their offices so they could trace me whenever they needed. “Careful with this little baby,” the skinny fritz lab tech had told me when he handed it to me: “We haven’t been able to reverse engineer this tech yet: this is an original artifact, off the saucer itself. There are only six pairs in existence. It’s worth more than this building. Basically the only things we have that are more valuable in this lab are the Loop Sets — and you.”
“And don’t you forget it,” I told him.
* * *
So that was how Alvin found me that day — that little tangletracker. My government leash. And now we were back at OpsLab, and my day at the beach was kaput.
They had the subject hooked up already, boxed in by white curtains. Not seeing the subjects keeps me from getting false positives. The thick, rubber-sheathed cables trailed out from under the curtains like vines, leading to my chair.
They’ve modified my chair to make it more comfortable on my request, padding it up and shifting things around, but the damn thing still looks like a dentist’s chair, and the headset still looks like a beauty salon hairdryer designed by the Spanish Inquisition.
“You sure you don’t want a cigarette first? Calm your nerves?” Alvin said as I was getting buckled in.
“Clock’s ticking. Let’s get this started.”
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the twentieth floor or so. I’m a woman — my nails are painted cherry red, on long, slender hands. I’m playing with a matchbook, turning it over its corners on the tablecloth. I’m looking out the window, occasionally glancing at the jazz band playing in the corner of the room. There’s a man at the table with me, but I’m not looking at him. “Janice,” he says. “Are you listening to me? None of this is what you think.”
I get up and walk through the room, barely turning my head. I must have been here many times, because I orient myself with ease. I find the ladies’ room, but don’t go in the stall — instead, I go straight to the mirror, fix a wayward strand of hair, open my purse to do a bit of maintenance. There isn’t much to fix — I’ve got one of those immaculate faces, bloodless and cool as a marble bust. It’s a face that started out perfect, and then was powdered to a mask.
Then there’s a loop inside the loop: another memory. Most of my awareness slips away from the powder room sink, although the shadow of me is still there, dabbing at my lipstick. In the sub-loop I’m in an apartment. Dark. A terraplane just passed too close to my window, and woke me. I turn over to go back to sleep, push out a hand. It’s a big bed, there is a lot of empty space next to me. I sit up in the dark. A feeling of panic. I move through the apartment to the living room. A man’s shadow is outlined against the window, lit up by the lights of the street below. He’s whispering into his hand, held up near his face. I stop. I must be only ten feet from him, but he doesn’t know I’m there.
“Devyatnatsat,” he says. “Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
And a third loop leads in from there. I’m in the ladies’ room, blotting lipstick. But I’m also in a darkened living room of an apartment, standing ten feet behind a man speaking Russian into the palm of his hand. And I’m also in bed, in that same apartment, but some other time, and I hear — faintly, through the wall — “Devyatnatsat. Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.” My eyes are open in the dark, staring at the gauze of curtains glowing with ambient light from the street below.
There is a knock at the bathroom door. The two internal loops collapse, and I’m back in the outer loop. “Go away.” I say. “You’ve taken enough from me. My whole life.”
“Just for the record,” the voice whispers from behind the door, “We’re the good guys.”
I barely have time to register the movement of the bathroom stall’s door from the corner of my eye. I hear the hiss of the gas gun. I feel arms catching me as I collapse. “And none of us wanted this,” a voice, muffled by a gas mask, says in my ear. The loop stretches, almost tears here, but fragments remain . . . darkness. The sound of a terraplane engine. Some sort of rough material over me, my wrists and ankles and knees bound. A radio is playing. My stomach lurches as a terraplane tilts. There are breaks in the loop, gaps. A voice says: “Nada nam togda prosto naidti drugoy vkhod.” I am falling. Wind through the rough fabric on my face. A shattering cold. Dark and water and claustrophobia. Another missing piece. Then a terrible pain, and I am rising . . .
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the twentieth floor or so . . .
END LOOP, I signal.
* * *
“That’s really it?” Special Agent Lake from the FBI takes off his government issue glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. I already know this gesture of his already, better than I want to. We’ve been over this three times.
I’m standing by the window, looking out at the cherry tree’s blossoms in the courtyard. So many blossoms drifting in the air. So many blossoms, carpeting the courtyard in a delicate pink. And yet so many left on the tree, as if the process will go on forever, all year, without ceasing. I know, though, that the cherry tree will soon be in full leaf, and the blossoms will be gone. What seems endless never really is.
“It’s not magic,” Alvin says. He’s pacing the other side of the room. “The loops give us access to some memories, but we don’t get to choose which ones. Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes the loops are elaborate: there’s days of material, a whole world of recall, more detailed than a book or a film, and relatively stable. But those loops are the rare exception. Maybe one or two out of a hundred. Most of the time, what we get is what we saw here: short loops of the very latest memories, fragmentary and unstable. Maybe, if we are lucky, the subject has perceived some detail that gives us a clue. But the details people remember aren’t always the ones which would be important to an investigation.”
“Well, she’ll just have to go back in and get more. We need answers. What a fiasco. What are we paying you people?”
This case must be a big deal: Agent Lake is scared, and like most men, when he’s scared he gets angry, just like a little boy.
“You’re paying me an awful lot,” I say. “And Alvin’s telling the facts. We’re using a technology we don’t understand, to do something it was probably never meant to do. And the loops killed everyone else who tried to pilot them. That leaves me as the only living rhesus monkey who knows which levers to pull. But you’re in luck: I don’t have a problem with going back in. It’s my job, after all.”
Alvin starts to protest, but I silence him with a hand. “But you should know, Agent Lake: the loops generally don’t get better. They don’t get more intelligible: they get less so. Every time we access them, they change.”
‘What do you mean?” Lake asks. He’s frustrated. I guess he thought this was going to be like a trip to the cigarette machine — pull on a knob and your favorite brand pops right out.
Alvin gives me a look, and I nod. Let him explain it. Men love explaining things.
I turn back to looking at the cherry blossoms. I’m still going over the loop in my mind, trying to see if I can get more out of it — a glimpsed face, a whispered name. The FBI man’s not the only one who wishes the loops would give them what they’re looking for.
Alvin sketches on a note pad. “Okay. Here. Imagine you’ve got a piece of magnetic tape, like in a reel to reel. Let’s say you snip off a section, a small loop. You take just that section, seal the ends together, and run it over the heads. Over and over. What will happen?”
“You’ll hear the same thing, over and over.” Lake says.
“Yes, for a while. But what will also happen is the tape will fall apart from wear over time. The more you play it, the more it decays, breaks down from the friction of the head. The coating peels away, the tape stretches and flakes and warps. You might start out with a little snippet of jazz horns, but you’ll eventually end up with just a bunch of clicks and empty space. It’s the same here, but worse. Every time a loop is played back, it decays rapidly. So maybe you can only play it three or four times before it is completely unintelligible. But there’s something else: the loops accrue other material. We call the loops ‘sticky.’ They pick things up. Interference. Some of it is from inside the subject’s mind — other memories, images from dreams, maybe. But some of it appears to come from elsewhere. It might come from inside the mind of the pilot, or emerge out of a process we don’t understand, like dust on the heads of a reel-to-reel, or flaws in the magnetic tape. It’s a bit like our own memories: every time we access them, we change them — add material into them from the present, or leave something out, or move something around. The memories we access most of all become the least reliable. But in the case of the loops, the process happens much more quickly. This leads to false information, garbled material that can be more misleading than helpful.”
Agent Lake took a drink of water. “So our best chance at the truth is already behind us.”
I interrupt. “Not necessarily. Sometimes, what comes up the second or third time is helpful to an investigation. It’s just . . . more confusing. It gets harder to pilot through, more distressing. But give me half an hour to rest. I’ll give it another shot for you.”
Lake went out to get a sandwich or something at the OpsLab cafeteria. His hands were shaking. Usually the G-Men are cool and composed, but this one looked like he wouldn’t be able to brush his teeth without getting the toothbrush stuck up his nose.
“Good explanation,” I said to Alvin. “Your doodle is awful, though.” I say, pointing at the bunch of loops and tangles Alvin had scrawled on the pad. “You need to work on your art skills.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I need to work on a lot of things.”
You’ve got to give Alvin credit: he’s not like a lot of other men, who will look for any opportunity to pull a woman down — both figuratively and literally. He’s been my partner on the loops project for two years now, and he’s never done anything but support me.
Men have had to eat a lot of crow since the DeMob Riots, when women refused to give up their factory and office jobs after the war, and the enlisted women who had been working the tech with General Lamarr — women like me, for example — decided maybe we just weren’t interested in putting our aprons on and returning back to what life had been like before Hitler and Tojo shook the beehive. A lot of women paid with their lives for the rights we won fighting under Rosie the Riveter’s banner. We made some men pay with theirs, too. You ask me, it was worth it.
It’s been hard for the men, though, coming back from the battlefields to a world where many women make more than they do, and don’t want to play dress-up for them anymore. Some men have really gone under the waves. But some, like Alvin, learned to swim. Or maybe they just knew how to swim already.
“So, who is Agent Lake?” I ask. “Counterintelligence?”
“For sure. Sounds to me like we’re dealing with the Russians. I guess they’re still trying to level the balance.”
I remember ashes blowing down a street in Konigsberg. Russian tanks exhaling the ashes of their crews when you opened the hatches, Russian planes dropping from the sky, clouds of ashes in their cockpits. “Guess I can’t blame them.”
“You kidding?” Alvin said. “The Soviet Union would have enslaved half of Europe.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But we’ll never really know that for sure, will we? Sure, we saw the signs. Poland, Yugoslavia. But after Patton pushed them back to the gates of Moscow and they signed the truce, what have we seen? Just them trying to rebuild their country after the Nazis tore it apart. With Stalin dead, and Zhukov at the reins, they’ve been pretty much minding their own business in the ruins.”
“I guess minding their own business is about all they can afford to do,” Alvin said. “For now.”
“And considering what we helped Chiang Kai-shek do to their commie friends in China,” I continued, “And the ruins we left in Germany, and the butchery here at Manzanar, maybe the Russians really are the good guys now. Who knows?”
Alvin shook his head. “Jesus, Sylvia. Even in here, I wouldn’t say things like that. Manzanar? Are you really going to bring that up?”
“I killed enough Germans and Russians in the war, Alvin. I can say whatever I want. I earned that. Besides, Alvin — we’ve got so many Nazis working on our team now, it must look to the Russians as though Hitler won the war after all.”
“Oh, come on, Sylvia. That’s not fair. We need the German minds so we can keep our edge. And they’re not all Nazis, for Christ’s sake. Most of them are just decent, hardworking guys. What were we supposed to do? Leave them there in the ruins, boiling nettles for soup and gathering coal from bombed-out houses? Throwing cobblestones at the police patrols? There’s nothing left of their country. And a lot of them were just regular German Army. You can’t judge a whole people by what some crazy bastards at the top do.”
“Why not? We sure judged the Japanese for what Tojo pulled. Even our own citizens.”
That got him. Red blossomed out of Alvin’s collar, climbed up his neck into his cheeks. “You know I don’t agree with what happened at Manzanar, Sylvia. That got out of hand. And there was a trial, and people were court-martialed. Jesus — we executed a general over that. We aren’t monsters, Sylvia.”
“Well, maybe not. But you know what they say, Alvin.”
“What’s that?”
“That you can’t spell OSS without the SS.”
He winced. “Ouch. Okay, I have to admit, that’s a pretty good one.”
“Before I go back in the loops, I want to look at the subject.”
Alvin shook his head. “That’s not a good idea.”
“I know who she is. I saw my face . . .” I hesitated a second. “I saw her face in the bathroom mirror. I know she’s the daughter of the President of the University of California. Janice Walker. Socialite extraordinaire, the Bay Area Beauty. I read a paper or two — yeah, Alvin, I read the papers. Don’t look at me like that. I read them on the beach between naps. I want to take a look at her. Maybe looking at her will make the loops cough something up.”
“You don’t have to go back in, Sylvia. You know that, right? We’re the OSS — we’re the bigger fish. We can always brush the FBI off, say it’s their investigation, and we can’t risk our resources for it. This is their problem, after all.”
“You’re the OSS,” I remind him. “I’m just a highly paid mercenary. And it’s not always about agency politics, you know. Sometimes, people just want to do the right thing. Your concern for me is real cute, though. I’ll put a little checkmark down next to your name somewhere. I will.”
* * *
Well, what did I expect to see? She looked like someone who had been thrown out of a terraplane into the water, and then hooked and dragged through the black waters of the San Francisco Bay for miles by a night trawler. In the cold room, post autopsy, with a sheet draped over her body, her battered and swollen face haloed by the Loop Set’s apparatus, she looked like exactly what she was — a human being reduced to nothing, robbed of her vitality and life by someone’s dirty games. It made me angry.
“I’m ready.” I said. “Let’s get back in there.”
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the ninetieth floor or so. I’m playing with a matchbook, turning it over its corners on the table. Looking out the window, glancing at the jazz band playing. The band has a rhesus monkey on trumpet. He is soloing, playing a mournful tune through the mute. He’s in a little red bellboy’s costume, and he’s got a bunch of vacuum tubes sticking out from all over his little head. As he plays, the vacuum tubes glow and dim in patterns that follow the notes he’s playing. There’s a man at the table with me, but I’m not looking at him. His face, I think. Just show me his face. “Janice?” he says. “Are you listening to me? None of this is thinking you. The monkey is what thinks you.”
I get up and walk through the room, barely turning my head. The bartender is laying in the corner of the room on his back, polishing a glass. “Devyatnatsat,” he says. “Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
In the ladies’ room I go straight to the mirror, fix a wayward strand of hair. There isn’t much to fix: I’ve got no face at all. Just a porcelain mask tied to my head with a nice red ribbon.
Then there’s a loop inside the loop. I’m in an apartment. Dark. A Stuka just buzzed too close to my window, and woke me. I sit up. A feeling of panic. I move through the apartment in the dark, into the living room. The big windows have the curtains pulled aside. Outside, a Stuka, in flames, corkscrews across the sky. The ashes of a man float in my living room, near the window. They drift apart, then coalesce again into human form. I can see the red glow of the burning Stuka through him, the anti-aircraft fire rising through the air, streaking through the translucent torso of the dissolved man. He’s speaking:
“Devyatnatsat,” the ash man says. “Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
I’m in the ladies’ room, straightening my mask. I’m in a darkened living room of an apartment, standing ten feet behind an ash-cloud of a man speaking Russian into the palm of his hand. And I’m in bed, in that same apartment, some other time, and I hear — faintly, through the wall — “Devyatnatsat. Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
There is a knock at the bathroom door. The other two internal loops collapse. I’m back in the bar. “Go away.” I say. “You’ve taken enough from me. My whole life.”
The monkey is standing on the counter by the sink, still playing his solo. His little halo of vacuum tubes glows orange. I can see every detail: the filaments in the tubes, the dust on the glass, his dark eyes. He takes his little lips away from his trumpet. “Just for the record,” he whispers, “We’re the good guys.” He places the trumpet to his lips, and the gas hisses out from its bell, green and thick.
I feel arms catching me as I collapse. “And none of us wanted this,” a voice, muffled by a gas mask, says in my ear. The loop stretches, almost tears away here, but fragments remain . . . darkness. I feel my stomach lurch as the terraplane turns sharply. There are breaks in the loop. It is starting to wear thin, to shred. A voice says: “In that case, we’ll just need to find another way in.” It’s in Russian, but somehow I understand it perfectly.
Hands on my shoulders. I am falling. Shattering cold. Dark and water and claustrophobia. Another missing piece. Then a terrible pain, and I am rising . . . I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the twentieth floor or so . . . END LOOP? I get the question in my head, from the outside world.
LET IT PLAY, I signal back. LET IT PLAY.
The loop skips. I am in the bar. I am already up, walking through the room. The bartender is laying in the corner of the room on his back, polishing a glass. “Nineteen,” he says. “Twenty-One. Seven. End transmission.”
In the bathroom mirror I see my battered and swollen face, haloed by the Loop Set’s apparatus. I am soaking wet. Water is pooled on the floor. The loop stretches, warps. Nearly breaks. Then, through the mirror, I see a living room. The curtains pulled aside. A Stuka, in flames, corkscrews across the sky. The ashes of a man float near the window. The red glow of the burning Stuka through him, the anti-aircraft fire rising through the air, streaking through the translucent torso of the dissolved man. He’s speaking:
“Nineteen,” the ash man says. “Twenty-one. Seven. End transmission.”
There is a knock at the bathroom door. “Go away.” I say. “You’ve taken enough from me. My whole life.”
The monkey is standing on the counter by the sink. His corona of vacuum tubes glows ember orange. I cansee every detail: the filaments in the tubes, the dust on the glass, his dark eyes. He roots through my purse, pulls out a tube of lipstick. “There’s another number,” the monkey says. “She forgot, but I remember.” He turns, and begins writing with the lipstick on the bathroom mirror. As he writes each letter and number, the vacuum tubes on his skull flicker and pulse, as if spelling the sequence out in some lighted code. 4B 57 48. I can feel the sequence in my head, like a magnetic flow from the loop apparatus.
The monkey hops down from the counter, adjusts the gold-braided collar of his suit. As he opens the door to go out, he turns to me. “Just for the record,” he says, “We’re the good guys.”
The loop breaks.
* * *
“What’s with the monkey?”
Agent Lake is in an overcoat — a ghost plaid number, a bit too flashy for an FBI man, in my opinion. We’re in the courtyard. They are trying to warm me in the sun. They’ve got me covered in a Pendleton blanket someone found. I feel ridiculous. I’ve been shivering for twenty minutes. My teeth are chattering. I can’t get over the idea that I’m wet, though of course I’m not. Alvin is administering cocoa to me like he’s my grandma and I just fell out of a rowboat. What I really need, though, is six gin gimlets.
Agent Lake repeats the question. “What’s with the monkey?”
“Damned if I know,” I say. “I didn’t make him up.” But as I say the words, they ring a little false. What “I” am I talking about? Someone made him up — either her, or me, or the “us” the loops create, when I inhabit her position in whatever is left of her.
“What is he — like a symbol or something?”
“Of what?” I snap. “Our secret, primitive human nature? The power and threat of science? It’s like the Russian I could suddenly understand in the loop: there’s plenty in there that works in ways we can’t grasp. I don’t know what it all means. Maybe it means nothing at all. We’re playing with tech none of us understand.”
Agent Lake doesn’t feel like boxing with me. “Well, it doesn’t much matter. That number sequence is a license plate number, and . . .” He pauses, like he’s considering something in his G-Man brain. Doing the math. He decides he should tell us. “Well, we ran the number, and it matches up to someone who’s been in our sights for a while. So . . . it’s too bad you didn’t get a face . . . but it doesn’t really matter. You came through for us. We owe you guys.”
“It won’t be admissible,” I say.
“It makes no difference,” Agent Lake says, matter-of-factly. “We won’t be settling this in the courts.” He adjusts his overcoat, then thinks again and takes it off. It’s too hot for an overcoat, even though the morning made it look like it was going to be a cold, drizzly day. “Well, since the three of us are the only ones authorized to know what was seen in the loops, I guess we’re the only ones who will ever know how important your work was. So, just so you know — I really appreciate what you uncovered.”
I shrug. “It’s all part of the job.”
Agent Lake folds his overcoat under his arm. “Jesus, this weather. You don’t know how to dress for it. California, right?”
“Uber alles,” I reply.
Alvin gives me a dirty look. But Agent Lake doesn’t even hear my wisecrack. He’s already somewhere else — chasing down his suspect, solving a case, I suppose.
After he leaves, I turn to Alvin. “Listen: I want to go in again. There’s more there.”
Alvin shakes his head. “You’re trembling all over. Your eyes are bloodshot, your blood pressure is up. You need to take it easy.”
“There’s something else there. I can feel it.”
“We can consider it tomorrow. Maybe. But for today — you’re done. And you know it.”
“No. One more time. There has to be more there.”
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, taller than any I’ve ever been in, must be the hundredth floor. Outside the window a Stuka, in flames, tumbles across the sky. The ashes of a man sit at the table across from me. I can see the port of Oakland through him, the firefly lights of terraplanes drifting over the night city, the burning planes and streaks of flak arcing through the translucent torso of the dissolved man. He’s speaking:
“Nineteen,” the ash man says. “Twenty-one. Seven. End transmission.”
The loop skips.
I am in the bathroom. The vacuum tubes haloed around my drowned face shudder and flicker like candles in a draft.
Show me his face, I think. Just show me his face, and we will hunt him down for you.
In the mirror, I shake my head. She shakes her head, and speaks directly to me, from where she is, or where she was, or where I imagine her to be, or some mix of all of the above, or from none of them.
Her drowned mouth says the words. “No. Enough killing. And after all, maybe they are the good guys. Have you ever thought of that?”
I hear the hiss of the gas, bleeding through the ventilation in the bathroom.
He murdered you. He took everything from you. Show me his face! Why are you hiding him?
The vacuum tubes screwed into our skull tremble out the patterns: 4B 57 48. I can feel the numbers in my head.
I need more. His face!
The gas is a green fog. The loop warps, stretching time like a melted recording.
“Just for the record,” she says to the mirror, looking out of her eyes but into mine: “Berlin. Konigsberg. Tokyo. Okinawa. Just for the record — Manzinar. Amache. Manchuria.”
He murdered you, Janice. Who cares what his cause was? Show me HIS FACE.
Green gas writhes like seaweed around our drowned face in the mirror. We shake our head, studded with its guttering halo of vacuum tubes.
“No.”
The loop breaks.
Alvin and two other lab techs have to help me out of my chair this time. They practically carry me down the hall. They move a space heater into Alvin’s office and cocoon me in that Pendleton blanket again. Techs run around with thermometers, stethoscopes, pressure cuffs. Someone asks me to count backwards from a hundred. Some Fritz jackass shows me a series of geometrical shapes on cards until I swat him away. They leave me be for a while. I stop shivering. But the feeling of failure remains.
Alvin comes in, sits down behind his desk. There isn’t a scrap of paper on it. There are no pictures either. Just a blotter, with a pen placed neatly at its center, and a blank pad of paper. The only thing on the walls in the office is a framed photo of Alvin and a woman who must be his mother, standing on the porch of some dismal looking farmhouse. Alvin is just a kid in the picture, in a fresh, clean Army uniform, with a big grin on his face. There is a blur of a dog at his feet, just a smear of dog smile and wagging tail, too fast for the shutter to catch. The picture could have been taken thirty years ago. We’re so much older now: older than we should be, if you only counted the years that have passed.
“How are you feeling?”
I feel like I’ve been gnawed on by a shark and then rolled in the breakers for an hour. “I feel ok, I guess.” I say. “Physically. But the loop has completely disintegrated, and I got nothing of use.”
“It’s all right,” Alvin says. “You know that’s how the loops are. They get garbled, fall apart. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“It’s not just that. It’s also — it’s hard to explain.”
“Take your time, Sylvia.”
“I think she took his side. In the end. Against me. She . . . we were tangled up in there, and somehow, she saw into me. She saw the things I did, during the war, the things we all did, and she weighed them in the balance, and then . . . she took their side.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Alvin said. “There’s nothing left of her in there. There’s no conscious entity. All you are piloting through are just loops of neural activity, like an echo in the skull. You’re just passing through dead memories. This is misplaced guilt talking, plus some neural activity the loops are picking up from you and the environment. Static. The loops are sticky — we’ve seen it before. Don’t let it get to you.”
“That’s one theory. But the truth is, the loops are like everything else we took off that saucer — alien. Beyond us. We just guess at how they work. We don’t really know anything.”
Alvin tilts back in his chair, stares up at the ceiling.
“Maybe it wasn’t her, Sylvia. Maybe it was you judging yourself. And maybe it’s time you stopped it. We all did things we regret during the war, Sylvia. They were the things we had to do. And we have to live with those things in our head . . . but the dead aren’t judging us, for Christ’s sake. That simply can’t be. The dead stay dead.”
“I hope you’re right, Alvin.”
He keeps staring at the ceiling, avoiding my eyes. “If I’m not, then god help us all.”
I’m so caught up, always, in my own traumas, that I forget we are all carrying our own ghosts around with us. Our whispering specters. The OSS parachuted Alvin into a shattered, Fascist Yugoslavia in 1943 to help organize Serb resistance. I wonder, sometimes, what midnight knifings and garrotings he carries around in his skull, how many Ustashe reprisals he feels personally responsible for. How many villagers were hanged in retaliation for what he did? How much literal blood did he wash off his hands, scrub out of his sleeves and collars? At least I did most of my killing at a distance.
Now I’m torturing him, stirring up his ghosts. I need to put a stop to this.
“Alvin?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to the bar. And this time, when you put me to bed, you need to take my shoes off. You can’t let me sleep in my shoes. My feet hurt like hell the next day, and it just isn’t sanitary.”
“Agreed,” he says with his sad, relieved smile.
“And if you lecture me about drinking too much tomorrow, I am going to punch you in the throat.”
“Okay,” he says.
* * *
Alvin is as good as his word. When I wake up that night, the clock reads 3:36 a.m. I’m still in my gingham dress, but I am properly tucked in under the covers, and my shoes are on the nightstand. My head doesn’t hurt that much: I can still feel a bit of the alcohol in my system, but it’s unlikely I really drank too much: when I’m worn out by piloting the loops, the exhaustion usually catches up to me no more than three gimlets in. Alvin probably had to carry me from the terraplane. It’s a nice image: he must have looked like Frankenstein’s Monster about to throw a little girl down a well. I bet the neighbors loved it.
I get up from the bed and make my way to the bathroom, not bothering to turn on a light until I’m standing in front of the sink. When I pull the chain and the light comes on, the face in the mirror is tired, but it is my own face: my own dark Jewish eyebrows and my own solid, handsome Jewish nose. I love that nose, those eyebrows, that face that houses me, the cascade of my nation’s songs and poems dancing in my genes like a Torah scroll unravelling.
They’ve been trying to murder us all for thousands of years, but we have resisted. The Nazis came the closest to doing us in, but we crushed them. That is something, I think. That is something to be proud of: the liberation of the camps, the rescue of my people. That might make at least some of it worth it.
I know I was dreaming of the war again, because I see the war around me, as if the walls of my bathroom were just glassy membranes between myself here in Alameda, California, and myself then.
This is my own loop: the moment I return to over and over. Unter Den Linden, fall 1944. The fallen leaves of the trees pinwheel and tumble in the wind. I see myself, my hair pulled back under my helmet, my face smudged with dirt.
This is the unreliability of memory: I see myself in a sort of medium film-reel shot, at an angle that is impossible — an angle my mind has invented, through some perverse effort of its own, to render this scene more effective. I’ve climbed down out of my Jeep to admire the leaves on this crisp fall day. Hitler is kaput, and all of us think the war is over. Nobody knows yet that the allies will turn on one another: that the war will go on for another year as Patton and our allied forces, plus what’s left of the German Wehrmacht, recommissioned by Patton as the Free German Army, drive Stalin and his Red Army back out of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Prussia, out of the Balkans and the Baltic states. And the war will go on in the Pacific after a shattered Japan surrenders, as we join with Chiang Kai-shek in his butchery of the Chinese Communists.
But here, on Unter den Linden, there is peace. The autumn leaves are beautiful, and I can see the Brandenburg Gate at its terminus. G.I.s have landed a few Jeeps near its steps. A couple of them have cameras, and are snapping pictures for their families back home. They are smiling, whooping, goofing around like the young boys and girls they are, happy to take off the masks of war. I walk slowly toward them, as if in a dream, while the leaves heave and scatter around my feet. I’m going to join them, smile and laugh with them. Everything will be all right. I’m staring up at the fall glory of the trees. The city is so quiet here — just the sound of military motors at a distance, the shouts of the victors up ahead, the laughter and the dry rattle of the autumn breeze through the leaves.
And then I turn and I see it: my footprints, leading from my Jeep to where I am standing. Under the thin veil of flame-tinted leaves, the trail of my footprints is sunk deep in the ashes of Berlin’s last defenders — ashes that carpet the ground everywhere in the city, an inch thick. And I put my hand over my mouth to muffle my screams.
And here, in my own bathroom, I do the same, covering my mouth, though at least the screams have long since stopped. I wish this loop would fall apart the way the others do — but it never does. It just goes around and around forever. If they ever hook my body up to the Loop Set one day, I’ll be one of those rare cases where there are hundreds of loops to read, whole short stories and novels of material. I can’t forget anything, no matter how much I’d like to.
I am about to turn the taps on, see if I can wash this all away, when I hear the sound of the lock’s tumblers on my front door engaging, and the creak of the door’s hinges as it is slowly swung open.
I don’t freeze, like they do in the movies, with some dumb look of terror on my face: I shut the bathroom light off. My eyes don’t adjust to the dark immediately, but I know my own house. Treading lightly, avoiding the boards that squeak in the hallway, I make my way from the bathroom back toward the bedroom, where I keep a little surprise for whoever has broken into my house waiting in the nightstand. From over where the hallway turns to descend the stairs, I hear the creak of the second riser.
I’m nearly at the bedroom when the bleed-off from the death ray’s field hits me, lifting me an inch off the ground, coursing through every pore of my skin, churning my stomach as my balance fails. I see the flash at the end of the hall. It is so bright, even just bouncing off the wall, that it lights the whole hallway up like a skeleton in an x-ray. I barely manage to get a hand out before falling to my knees.
A two-beat pause, and I hear Alvin’s voice. “Sylvia? Is that you?”
“Alvin?”
“It’s safe, Sylvia. You can come down.”
Alvin is standing at the foot of the stairs with a death day long gun in his arms. It’s one of the new models. The military techs have tried to make it less cumbersome, but the thing still looks like a sawed-off Kirby vacuum cleaner mated with the grill of a Mercury Terraplane. Alvin doesn’t have his glasses on, and his hair is mussed up, from sleeping on my couch. He looks like a twelve-year old boy who just woke up from a bad dream.
On the wall, almost halfway up the staircase, the shadows of two human outlines are flash-burned into my wallpaper. The shadows are both wearing fedoras, and the one in front, you can see, has just turned toward the other one to caution or quiet him. You can see, as well, the outlines of their drawn pistols. It’s like a still from a movie.
What’s left of the men that made the outlines drifts in a haze over the stairwell, and snows down in flakes of ash over my living room set.
“Agent Lake,” Alvin says. “And his co-conspirator — probably the man with the gas gun in the bathroom in the loop.”
“You stayed,” I say rather stupidly in answer.
“I had a bad feeling,” Alvin says. “I thought it might be better if I slept here on the couch. Just to be safe.”
I look at the death ray in his arms. “You brought along a lot of firepower for just a bad feeling.”
Alvin glances down at the gun. “It was a really bad feeling.” He sets the gun down on my coffee table. “I was carrying you out of the bar, and I was almost certain I glimpsed Agent Lake’s stupid flashy overcoat, looking in a shop window down the street at eleven at night. So I dropped you off, put you to bed, and then I drove off, landed a few blocks over, and came in through the back door.”
“Just in case.”
“Yeah. Just in case.”
“Anything else you want to tell me, Alvin? Any other reasons you may have had for disintegrating people in my parlor?”
“Well . . . it’s not my case, but I could lob some guesses as to why the two of them were here. I think you’ll find Agent Lake was a pretty fluent speaker of Russian, and that he drove a vehicle with the license plate number 4B 57 48, and that he and Janice Walker had a secret relationship that ended . . . rather poorly. She must have gotten on to who he was working for. He must have thought she was going to expose him.”
For a moment I see, again, that drowned face in the mirror, wreathed in undulating fronds of green gas. “Just for the record,” Janice’s dead mouth says, “Berlin. Konigsberg. Tokyo. Okinawa. Just for the record — Manzinar. Amache. Manchuria.”
“Or maybe she was a co-conspirator,” I say to Alvin. “A fellow traveler, and just came to know too much.”
‘Perfectly likely as well. The investigation will probably piece some of it together, but I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”
As he’s talking, Alvin is dialing the phone on my side table. “Dispatch? Yes. Sequence is 56-92-30. I need a team to Alameda Island. Home of Sylvia Aldstatt. Yes, right away. And you may want to send an armed team to my residence as well. Yes, combat-prepped. Authorization sequence is 55-99-01. My authority.”
He hangs the phone up, looks at me standing at the top of the stairs.
“The FBI Counterintelligence Unit has a real problem, it seems. Right at its heart.”
“It would appear that way.”
“I took off your shoes this time, just like you asked.”
“Yes, I appreciate that.”
“You talk a lot of nonsense after two gimlets.”
“I’m aware of that. You look like a lost little boy without your glasses, and your hair looks stupid.”
Alvin brings a hand up to smooth his ridiculous cowlick, and grins. “Well, you know — that’s why I joined the army in the first place. Helmets. Hides a cowlick like a charm.”
“You should have stayed in uniform.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Why not let OSS know beforehand that you were expecting trouble? Get someone else to do the heavy lifting?”
Alvin gestured at my coffee table. And now I notice, next to the death ray gun, that he’s got a little workshop going on. He’s disassembled one of my nice new lamps, and withdrawn a little spider of a listening device from it. There are two more next to it.
“Oh, I see. Looks like you’ve been busy.”
“Yeah.” He presses two fingers vertically against his upper lip — the Hitler moustache sign for Nazis. I nod.
“Nice trick Lake managed to pull,” I say. “Getting assigned to the investigation of his own crime.”
“I guess he just had to know if we would be able to get anything that could lead back to him. See if he could find out first, maybe get the drop on us and whoever the commies haven’t managed to flip yet over in FBI Counterintelligence. He must have thought there was more you found out, something you weren’t telling him. He made the same mistake that always brings down a spy: he had to be certain.”
“Well, he’s certain now,” I said. “Nothing could be more certain.”
Alvin glanced at his handiwork, the two outlines flash-burned into the wallpaper, and then quickly looked away. You never really get used to it. You just change the subject. And that’s what Alvin did. “What I really want to know is — since you’re the psychologist — where did the monkey come from?”
“Oh, I think the monkey probably symbolizes you, Alvin. There’s more than a family resemblance. If you want a second opinion, though, feel free to walk over to Doctor Freud’s laboratory and discuss it with him.”
“I should have seen that one coming, I suppose. Years with you, and I still walk straight in to your wisecracks.”
“Don’t take it too hard. After all, the monkey’s a snappy dresser, and a useful little guy to have around. Now excuse me while I change into something a bit less wrinkled, before the clean-up crew shows up. I hope it doesn’t take too long — you have work to do back at the lab, and god knows you need your beauty sleep, Alvin.”
Thank goodness you are all right, I want to say. This could have gone a hundred different ways. Thank goodness you are here, and we are here, and ghosts remain ghosts. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it’s all we’ve got, and I’m glad to still be in it. Thanks for that, Alvin.
But I don’t say those things. Instead I say: “As for me, I think once I get you people out of my house I’ll go back to bed. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll float down the coast a few hundred miles, see what the beaches in Santa Monica are up to lately. It’s getting too cold up here, and all this action just makes me tired.”
The Disintegration Loops
By Ray Nayler
["The Disintegration Loops" originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction November/December 2019 ]
It’s not all death rays.
We reverse-engineered good technology off that saucer too: tech that can do more than destroy. From cancer cures in a hypo to terraplanes to turkeys that cook themselves — a whole world of modern convenience.
But even the good tech comes at a cost.
When the OSS caught up to me that day, I’d landed my terraplane just off Beacon Chain One, along the California coast. I’d seen a fire from up above and swung down to see if there was something I could do to help.
A convertible Ford terraplane full of joyriding teenagers had tumbled out of the sky and smashed through one of those giant election billboards of Mr. Roosevelt’s. In this billboard, Roosevelt is standing tall and trim, waving to you and you alone. The city of the future rises over his shoulders in the background, electric blue. I don’t know why President Roosevelt even bothers running an election campaign: he’ll win his seventh term by a landslide, no matter which scarecrow the Republicans prop up to run against him.
The terraplane was a shattered carapace of burning synthetics and deformed metal. It had punched a hole through the plywood of the city of the future and Mr. Roosevelt’s raised hand, then gouged a jagged scar through the earth to its resting place. Teen joyriders were scattered in the grass. A blonde in a flowery dress was laying on her side, dead, without a scratch on her, her clothes perfectly arranged, as if she had fallen asleep in the sun. I’d seen bodies like hers in the war: they are the worst, because your mind keeps telling you they are about to stand up and start walking around. Your mind is ready for blood and gore, but not for people who just stop being alive, without a mark on them. Someone — one of the other drivers who had stopped to help — had put a jacket over her, as if to keep her warm.
There were already police and firemen on the scene. An ambulance had landed too, though what was needed was a coroner’s van. They should just send the coroner’s van out first. Almost nobody ever survives a terraplane accident.
Alvin Greenly tapped me on my shoulder, and I swear I almost hugged him when I saw him. He was something from the here and now, a real living person in tortoiseshell glasses and a sharp-looking tailored car coat with a silk driving scarf tucked into the collar. Not some corpse pulling at my worst memories of the war.
“Heya, Sylvia . . .” He paused, seeing the look on my face. “Jeez, Sylvia — you look almost happy to see me.”
“I hope you keep a journal for posterity,” I said. “Because it’s a one-time deal.”
“I’ll be sure to write it down,” he grinned. “Look: sorry to chase you down like this, but we need you back at the lab. Dan’ll drive your Merc back. You can ride with me. We’ll talk on the way.”
We floated back to the lab through another false California fall day. Fall comes about fifteen times a year in California. It lasts for three or four crisp, clear days, and then is swept away by a blast of winter — or summer, or spring. There’s no sequence to it. Even the oaks are confused: some species drop their leaves for a winter that never really comes. Others keep them all year round. And why not? In California, people can go bare-legged in January or wear a jacket in June. Everyone is out of sync. They walk around with smiles on their faces for reasons nobody east of the Sierras would understand, and with sun-drenched miseries in their hearts that are only possible here.
I’m from Boston, so I prefer my seasons and my people predictable, not sudden as a cold front on a summer day. But the loops make me a good living, so whether I like California or not, it’s home.
I was in my senior year of undergrad for psychology at the University of California at Berkeley when OpsLab recruited me for their little experiment with the loops. I saw their ad pasted up on an advertising pillar outside the Student Union. There was plenty of testing going on at the University of California up in Berkeley, in those days just after the war. Lots of experiments, in dozens of lab buildings that were springing up all over campus like mushrooms after a rain. I’d already participated in a bunch of psychology experiments for one or another of the university labs. They were easy money, which I needed.
The tech boom in California was a product of President Roosevelt’s genius. He understood right away that the government couldn’t do all the engineering related to the saucer’s tech themselves. So the military and the FBI kept some of it, but after the war ended they gave most of it up to the universities to study and develop. The university labs kept the patents on their research, and sold the commercial rights to the big companies to run with. The result was a second Gold Rush. Soon, it seemed like the University of California owned half the state, and Lockheed-Boeing-Douglas and Bell-IBM owned the rest of it. Everyone was doing the same dance. We called it the Golden State Two-Step. Step 1: go to the University of California on your G.I. Bill to get your engineering degree. Step 2: get a job in one of the “industries.”
I went to the University, same as everyone else, but I took psychology, not engineering. That seemed like a funny choice, to a lot of people: after all, I had been an Army whiz kid with an officer’s rank in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps, running the targeting systems for the rays. But after the war, I didn’t want to keep going with engineering. Maybe something was busted inside me by what happened —by what we did — in Berlin and Warsaw and Konigsberg. Maybe, I thought, if I had the right tools, I could fix whatever was wrong with my mind.
Ten undergrads went into OpsLab on that bright day in Berkeley in May, probably all thinking the same thing as I did: just another experiment. Easy money.
When they took the Loop Set off me a few hours later, I shook my head, answered their questions, and then went out to the lab courtyard. I lit up a Lucky and sat under the cherry tree. My hands were shaking so bad, I could barely get the cigarette to my lips. I was thinking all kinds of crazy things.
A white coat went running by. Then another one. I just sat there smoking. The cherry tree was in full blossom. Its petals danced around me in the air. I felt like I was going mad.
“My name is Sylvia Aldstatt,” I found myself saying over and over between drags on my Lucky. “And not anything else. Just Sylvia Aldstatt, and that’s all.”
After a few minutes I heard the sirens.
The other nine participants were dead.
That was how my career piloting the loops got started. The government guys at OpsLab had this technology — really spooky stuff — but nobody could use it without dying. Nobody but me. They couldn’t figure out why, but for obvious reasons they weren’t going to be recruiting volunteers for another round of experiments any time soon.
So I piloted the loops for the OSS, and in the meantime I got my undergraduate degree and started on my doctorate. But I still hadn’t figured out how to fix whatever was busted inside me.
There were plenty of perks to piloting the loops. I didn’t have to spend a day in the lab more than two or three times in a month, and the amount of money they were paying me was — well, let’s just say it helped me leave a lot of worries behind.
They tried to recruit me into the OSS, but I said I would remain freelance and civilian or walk away. It annoyed them, having a freelancer in their midst, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
The loops took a lot out of me. The whole day after a session was a waste: I couldn’t do anything except lay around in bed. But I got to lay around in bed in a tidy little modern house I’d purchased on Alameda Island, just across the bay from San Francisco, with a housekeeper and a gardener and a rooftop garage, and when I got over the headaches I got to drive my cherry-red convertible Mercury terraplane over the San Francisco Bay and down the coast, and land it on a beach I had all to myself because the suckers were all elsewhere, working. I figured the headaches and confusion and everything else were a small price to pay.
The only demand the OpsLab girls and boys made of me was that I carry a tangletracker in my purse. The thing wasn’t any bigger than a tube of lipstick. They kept its mate in their offices so they could trace me whenever they needed. “Careful with this little baby,” the skinny fritz lab tech had told me when he handed it to me: “We haven’t been able to reverse engineer this tech yet: this is an original artifact, off the saucer itself. There are only six pairs in existence. It’s worth more than this building. Basically the only things we have that are more valuable in this lab are the Loop Sets — and you.”
“And don’t you forget it,” I told him.
* * *
So that was how Alvin found me that day — that little tangletracker. My government leash. And now we were back at OpsLab, and my day at the beach was kaput.
They had the subject hooked up already, boxed in by white curtains. Not seeing the subjects keeps me from getting false positives. The thick, rubber-sheathed cables trailed out from under the curtains like vines, leading to my chair.
They’ve modified my chair to make it more comfortable on my request, padding it up and shifting things around, but the damn thing still looks like a dentist’s chair, and the headset still looks like a beauty salon hairdryer designed by the Spanish Inquisition.
“You sure you don’t want a cigarette first? Calm your nerves?” Alvin said as I was getting buckled in.
“Clock’s ticking. Let’s get this started.”
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the twentieth floor or so. I’m a woman — my nails are painted cherry red, on long, slender hands. I’m playing with a matchbook, turning it over its corners on the tablecloth. I’m looking out the window, occasionally glancing at the jazz band playing in the corner of the room. There’s a man at the table with me, but I’m not looking at him. “Janice,” he says. “Are you listening to me? None of this is what you think.”
I get up and walk through the room, barely turning my head. I must have been here many times, because I orient myself with ease. I find the ladies’ room, but don’t go in the stall — instead, I go straight to the mirror, fix a wayward strand of hair, open my purse to do a bit of maintenance. There isn’t much to fix — I’ve got one of those immaculate faces, bloodless and cool as a marble bust. It’s a face that started out perfect, and then was powdered to a mask.
Then there’s a loop inside the loop: another memory. Most of my awareness slips away from the powder room sink, although the shadow of me is still there, dabbing at my lipstick. In the sub-loop I’m in an apartment. Dark. A terraplane just passed too close to my window, and woke me. I turn over to go back to sleep, push out a hand. It’s a big bed, there is a lot of empty space next to me. I sit up in the dark. A feeling of panic. I move through the apartment to the living room. A man’s shadow is outlined against the window, lit up by the lights of the street below. He’s whispering into his hand, held up near his face. I stop. I must be only ten feet from him, but he doesn’t know I’m there.
“Devyatnatsat,” he says. “Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
And a third loop leads in from there. I’m in the ladies’ room, blotting lipstick. But I’m also in a darkened living room of an apartment, standing ten feet behind a man speaking Russian into the palm of his hand. And I’m also in bed, in that same apartment, but some other time, and I hear — faintly, through the wall — “Devyatnatsat. Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.” My eyes are open in the dark, staring at the gauze of curtains glowing with ambient light from the street below.
There is a knock at the bathroom door. The two internal loops collapse, and I’m back in the outer loop. “Go away.” I say. “You’ve taken enough from me. My whole life.”
“Just for the record,” the voice whispers from behind the door, “We’re the good guys.”
I barely have time to register the movement of the bathroom stall’s door from the corner of my eye. I hear the hiss of the gas gun. I feel arms catching me as I collapse. “And none of us wanted this,” a voice, muffled by a gas mask, says in my ear. The loop stretches, almost tears here, but fragments remain . . . darkness. The sound of a terraplane engine. Some sort of rough material over me, my wrists and ankles and knees bound. A radio is playing. My stomach lurches as a terraplane tilts. There are breaks in the loop, gaps. A voice says: “Nada nam togda prosto naidti drugoy vkhod.” I am falling. Wind through the rough fabric on my face. A shattering cold. Dark and water and claustrophobia. Another missing piece. Then a terrible pain, and I am rising . . .
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the twentieth floor or so . . .
END LOOP, I signal.
* * *
“That’s really it?” Special Agent Lake from the FBI takes off his government issue glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. I already know this gesture of his already, better than I want to. We’ve been over this three times.
I’m standing by the window, looking out at the cherry tree’s blossoms in the courtyard. So many blossoms drifting in the air. So many blossoms, carpeting the courtyard in a delicate pink. And yet so many left on the tree, as if the process will go on forever, all year, without ceasing. I know, though, that the cherry tree will soon be in full leaf, and the blossoms will be gone. What seems endless never really is.
“It’s not magic,” Alvin says. He’s pacing the other side of the room. “The loops give us access to some memories, but we don’t get to choose which ones. Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes the loops are elaborate: there’s days of material, a whole world of recall, more detailed than a book or a film, and relatively stable. But those loops are the rare exception. Maybe one or two out of a hundred. Most of the time, what we get is what we saw here: short loops of the very latest memories, fragmentary and unstable. Maybe, if we are lucky, the subject has perceived some detail that gives us a clue. But the details people remember aren’t always the ones which would be important to an investigation.”
“Well, she’ll just have to go back in and get more. We need answers. What a fiasco. What are we paying you people?”
This case must be a big deal: Agent Lake is scared, and like most men, when he’s scared he gets angry, just like a little boy.
“You’re paying me an awful lot,” I say. “And Alvin’s telling the facts. We’re using a technology we don’t understand, to do something it was probably never meant to do. And the loops killed everyone else who tried to pilot them. That leaves me as the only living rhesus monkey who knows which levers to pull. But you’re in luck: I don’t have a problem with going back in. It’s my job, after all.”
Alvin starts to protest, but I silence him with a hand. “But you should know, Agent Lake: the loops generally don’t get better. They don’t get more intelligible: they get less so. Every time we access them, they change.”
‘What do you mean?” Lake asks. He’s frustrated. I guess he thought this was going to be like a trip to the cigarette machine — pull on a knob and your favorite brand pops right out.
Alvin gives me a look, and I nod. Let him explain it. Men love explaining things.
I turn back to looking at the cherry blossoms. I’m still going over the loop in my mind, trying to see if I can get more out of it — a glimpsed face, a whispered name. The FBI man’s not the only one who wishes the loops would give them what they’re looking for.
Alvin sketches on a note pad. “Okay. Here. Imagine you’ve got a piece of magnetic tape, like in a reel to reel. Let’s say you snip off a section, a small loop. You take just that section, seal the ends together, and run it over the heads. Over and over. What will happen?”
“You’ll hear the same thing, over and over.” Lake says.
“Yes, for a while. But what will also happen is the tape will fall apart from wear over time. The more you play it, the more it decays, breaks down from the friction of the head. The coating peels away, the tape stretches and flakes and warps. You might start out with a little snippet of jazz horns, but you’ll eventually end up with just a bunch of clicks and empty space. It’s the same here, but worse. Every time a loop is played back, it decays rapidly. So maybe you can only play it three or four times before it is completely unintelligible. But there’s something else: the loops accrue other material. We call the loops ‘sticky.’ They pick things up. Interference. Some of it is from inside the subject’s mind — other memories, images from dreams, maybe. But some of it appears to come from elsewhere. It might come from inside the mind of the pilot, or emerge out of a process we don’t understand, like dust on the heads of a reel-to-reel, or flaws in the magnetic tape. It’s a bit like our own memories: every time we access them, we change them — add material into them from the present, or leave something out, or move something around. The memories we access most of all become the least reliable. But in the case of the loops, the process happens much more quickly. This leads to false information, garbled material that can be more misleading than helpful.”
Agent Lake took a drink of water. “So our best chance at the truth is already behind us.”
I interrupt. “Not necessarily. Sometimes, what comes up the second or third time is helpful to an investigation. It’s just . . . more confusing. It gets harder to pilot through, more distressing. But give me half an hour to rest. I’ll give it another shot for you.”
Lake went out to get a sandwich or something at the OpsLab cafeteria. His hands were shaking. Usually the G-Men are cool and composed, but this one looked like he wouldn’t be able to brush his teeth without getting the toothbrush stuck up his nose.
“Good explanation,” I said to Alvin. “Your doodle is awful, though.” I say, pointing at the bunch of loops and tangles Alvin had scrawled on the pad. “You need to work on your art skills.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I need to work on a lot of things.”
You’ve got to give Alvin credit: he’s not like a lot of other men, who will look for any opportunity to pull a woman down — both figuratively and literally. He’s been my partner on the loops project for two years now, and he’s never done anything but support me.
Men have had to eat a lot of crow since the DeMob Riots, when women refused to give up their factory and office jobs after the war, and the enlisted women who had been working the tech with General Lamarr — women like me, for example — decided maybe we just weren’t interested in putting our aprons on and returning back to what life had been like before Hitler and Tojo shook the beehive. A lot of women paid with their lives for the rights we won fighting under Rosie the Riveter’s banner. We made some men pay with theirs, too. You ask me, it was worth it.
It’s been hard for the men, though, coming back from the battlefields to a world where many women make more than they do, and don’t want to play dress-up for them anymore. Some men have really gone under the waves. But some, like Alvin, learned to swim. Or maybe they just knew how to swim already.
“So, who is Agent Lake?” I ask. “Counterintelligence?”
“For sure. Sounds to me like we’re dealing with the Russians. I guess they’re still trying to level the balance.”
I remember ashes blowing down a street in Konigsberg. Russian tanks exhaling the ashes of their crews when you opened the hatches, Russian planes dropping from the sky, clouds of ashes in their cockpits. “Guess I can’t blame them.”
“You kidding?” Alvin said. “The Soviet Union would have enslaved half of Europe.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But we’ll never really know that for sure, will we? Sure, we saw the signs. Poland, Yugoslavia. But after Patton pushed them back to the gates of Moscow and they signed the truce, what have we seen? Just them trying to rebuild their country after the Nazis tore it apart. With Stalin dead, and Zhukov at the reins, they’ve been pretty much minding their own business in the ruins.”
“I guess minding their own business is about all they can afford to do,” Alvin said. “For now.”
“And considering what we helped Chiang Kai-shek do to their commie friends in China,” I continued, “And the ruins we left in Germany, and the butchery here at Manzanar, maybe the Russians really are the good guys now. Who knows?”
Alvin shook his head. “Jesus, Sylvia. Even in here, I wouldn’t say things like that. Manzanar? Are you really going to bring that up?”
“I killed enough Germans and Russians in the war, Alvin. I can say whatever I want. I earned that. Besides, Alvin — we’ve got so many Nazis working on our team now, it must look to the Russians as though Hitler won the war after all.”
“Oh, come on, Sylvia. That’s not fair. We need the German minds so we can keep our edge. And they’re not all Nazis, for Christ’s sake. Most of them are just decent, hardworking guys. What were we supposed to do? Leave them there in the ruins, boiling nettles for soup and gathering coal from bombed-out houses? Throwing cobblestones at the police patrols? There’s nothing left of their country. And a lot of them were just regular German Army. You can’t judge a whole people by what some crazy bastards at the top do.”
“Why not? We sure judged the Japanese for what Tojo pulled. Even our own citizens.”
That got him. Red blossomed out of Alvin’s collar, climbed up his neck into his cheeks. “You know I don’t agree with what happened at Manzanar, Sylvia. That got out of hand. And there was a trial, and people were court-martialed. Jesus — we executed a general over that. We aren’t monsters, Sylvia.”
“Well, maybe not. But you know what they say, Alvin.”
“What’s that?”
“That you can’t spell OSS without the SS.”
He winced. “Ouch. Okay, I have to admit, that’s a pretty good one.”
“Before I go back in the loops, I want to look at the subject.”
Alvin shook his head. “That’s not a good idea.”
“I know who she is. I saw my face . . .” I hesitated a second. “I saw her face in the bathroom mirror. I know she’s the daughter of the President of the University of California. Janice Walker. Socialite extraordinaire, the Bay Area Beauty. I read a paper or two — yeah, Alvin, I read the papers. Don’t look at me like that. I read them on the beach between naps. I want to take a look at her. Maybe looking at her will make the loops cough something up.”
“You don’t have to go back in, Sylvia. You know that, right? We’re the OSS — we’re the bigger fish. We can always brush the FBI off, say it’s their investigation, and we can’t risk our resources for it. This is their problem, after all.”
“You’re the OSS,” I remind him. “I’m just a highly paid mercenary. And it’s not always about agency politics, you know. Sometimes, people just want to do the right thing. Your concern for me is real cute, though. I’ll put a little checkmark down next to your name somewhere. I will.”
* * *
Well, what did I expect to see? She looked like someone who had been thrown out of a terraplane into the water, and then hooked and dragged through the black waters of the San Francisco Bay for miles by a night trawler. In the cold room, post autopsy, with a sheet draped over her body, her battered and swollen face haloed by the Loop Set’s apparatus, she looked like exactly what she was — a human being reduced to nothing, robbed of her vitality and life by someone’s dirty games. It made me angry.
“I’m ready.” I said. “Let’s get back in there.”
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the ninetieth floor or so. I’m playing with a matchbook, turning it over its corners on the table. Looking out the window, glancing at the jazz band playing. The band has a rhesus monkey on trumpet. He is soloing, playing a mournful tune through the mute. He’s in a little red bellboy’s costume, and he’s got a bunch of vacuum tubes sticking out from all over his little head. As he plays, the vacuum tubes glow and dim in patterns that follow the notes he’s playing. There’s a man at the table with me, but I’m not looking at him. His face, I think. Just show me his face. “Janice?” he says. “Are you listening to me? None of this is thinking you. The monkey is what thinks you.”
I get up and walk through the room, barely turning my head. The bartender is laying in the corner of the room on his back, polishing a glass. “Devyatnatsat,” he says. “Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
In the ladies’ room I go straight to the mirror, fix a wayward strand of hair. There isn’t much to fix: I’ve got no face at all. Just a porcelain mask tied to my head with a nice red ribbon.
Then there’s a loop inside the loop. I’m in an apartment. Dark. A Stuka just buzzed too close to my window, and woke me. I sit up. A feeling of panic. I move through the apartment in the dark, into the living room. The big windows have the curtains pulled aside. Outside, a Stuka, in flames, corkscrews across the sky. The ashes of a man float in my living room, near the window. They drift apart, then coalesce again into human form. I can see the red glow of the burning Stuka through him, the anti-aircraft fire rising through the air, streaking through the translucent torso of the dissolved man. He’s speaking:
“Devyatnatsat,” the ash man says. “Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
I’m in the ladies’ room, straightening my mask. I’m in a darkened living room of an apartment, standing ten feet behind an ash-cloud of a man speaking Russian into the palm of his hand. And I’m in bed, in that same apartment, some other time, and I hear — faintly, through the wall — “Devyatnatsat. Dvatsat odin. Sem. Konets peredachi.”
There is a knock at the bathroom door. The other two internal loops collapse. I’m back in the bar. “Go away.” I say. “You’ve taken enough from me. My whole life.”
The monkey is standing on the counter by the sink, still playing his solo. His little halo of vacuum tubes glows orange. I can see every detail: the filaments in the tubes, the dust on the glass, his dark eyes. He takes his little lips away from his trumpet. “Just for the record,” he whispers, “We’re the good guys.” He places the trumpet to his lips, and the gas hisses out from its bell, green and thick.
I feel arms catching me as I collapse. “And none of us wanted this,” a voice, muffled by a gas mask, says in my ear. The loop stretches, almost tears away here, but fragments remain . . . darkness. I feel my stomach lurch as the terraplane turns sharply. There are breaks in the loop. It is starting to wear thin, to shred. A voice says: “In that case, we’ll just need to find another way in.” It’s in Russian, but somehow I understand it perfectly.
Hands on my shoulders. I am falling. Shattering cold. Dark and water and claustrophobia. Another missing piece. Then a terrible pain, and I am rising . . . I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, must be the twentieth floor or so . . . END LOOP? I get the question in my head, from the outside world.
LET IT PLAY, I signal back. LET IT PLAY.
The loop skips. I am in the bar. I am already up, walking through the room. The bartender is laying in the corner of the room on his back, polishing a glass. “Nineteen,” he says. “Twenty-One. Seven. End transmission.”
In the bathroom mirror I see my battered and swollen face, haloed by the Loop Set’s apparatus. I am soaking wet. Water is pooled on the floor. The loop stretches, warps. Nearly breaks. Then, through the mirror, I see a living room. The curtains pulled aside. A Stuka, in flames, corkscrews across the sky. The ashes of a man float near the window. The red glow of the burning Stuka through him, the anti-aircraft fire rising through the air, streaking through the translucent torso of the dissolved man. He’s speaking:
“Nineteen,” the ash man says. “Twenty-one. Seven. End transmission.”
There is a knock at the bathroom door. “Go away.” I say. “You’ve taken enough from me. My whole life.”
The monkey is standing on the counter by the sink. His corona of vacuum tubes glows ember orange. I cansee every detail: the filaments in the tubes, the dust on the glass, his dark eyes. He roots through my purse, pulls out a tube of lipstick. “There’s another number,” the monkey says. “She forgot, but I remember.” He turns, and begins writing with the lipstick on the bathroom mirror. As he writes each letter and number, the vacuum tubes on his skull flicker and pulse, as if spelling the sequence out in some lighted code. 4B 57 48. I can feel the sequence in my head, like a magnetic flow from the loop apparatus.
The monkey hops down from the counter, adjusts the gold-braided collar of his suit. As he opens the door to go out, he turns to me. “Just for the record,” he says, “We’re the good guys.”
The loop breaks.
* * *
“What’s with the monkey?”
Agent Lake is in an overcoat — a ghost plaid number, a bit too flashy for an FBI man, in my opinion. We’re in the courtyard. They are trying to warm me in the sun. They’ve got me covered in a Pendleton blanket someone found. I feel ridiculous. I’ve been shivering for twenty minutes. My teeth are chattering. I can’t get over the idea that I’m wet, though of course I’m not. Alvin is administering cocoa to me like he’s my grandma and I just fell out of a rowboat. What I really need, though, is six gin gimlets.
Agent Lake repeats the question. “What’s with the monkey?”
“Damned if I know,” I say. “I didn’t make him up.” But as I say the words, they ring a little false. What “I” am I talking about? Someone made him up — either her, or me, or the “us” the loops create, when I inhabit her position in whatever is left of her.
“What is he — like a symbol or something?”
“Of what?” I snap. “Our secret, primitive human nature? The power and threat of science? It’s like the Russian I could suddenly understand in the loop: there’s plenty in there that works in ways we can’t grasp. I don’t know what it all means. Maybe it means nothing at all. We’re playing with tech none of us understand.”
Agent Lake doesn’t feel like boxing with me. “Well, it doesn’t much matter. That number sequence is a license plate number, and . . .” He pauses, like he’s considering something in his G-Man brain. Doing the math. He decides he should tell us. “Well, we ran the number, and it matches up to someone who’s been in our sights for a while. So . . . it’s too bad you didn’t get a face . . . but it doesn’t really matter. You came through for us. We owe you guys.”
“It won’t be admissible,” I say.
“It makes no difference,” Agent Lake says, matter-of-factly. “We won’t be settling this in the courts.” He adjusts his overcoat, then thinks again and takes it off. It’s too hot for an overcoat, even though the morning made it look like it was going to be a cold, drizzly day. “Well, since the three of us are the only ones authorized to know what was seen in the loops, I guess we’re the only ones who will ever know how important your work was. So, just so you know — I really appreciate what you uncovered.”
I shrug. “It’s all part of the job.”
Agent Lake folds his overcoat under his arm. “Jesus, this weather. You don’t know how to dress for it. California, right?”
“Uber alles,” I reply.
Alvin gives me a dirty look. But Agent Lake doesn’t even hear my wisecrack. He’s already somewhere else — chasing down his suspect, solving a case, I suppose.
After he leaves, I turn to Alvin. “Listen: I want to go in again. There’s more there.”
Alvin shakes his head. “You’re trembling all over. Your eyes are bloodshot, your blood pressure is up. You need to take it easy.”
“There’s something else there. I can feel it.”
“We can consider it tomorrow. Maybe. But for today — you’re done. And you know it.”
“No. One more time. There has to be more there.”
I’m in a bar. Glass windows looking out over the Port of Oakland. Tall building, taller than any I’ve ever been in, must be the hundredth floor. Outside the window a Stuka, in flames, tumbles across the sky. The ashes of a man sit at the table across from me. I can see the port of Oakland through him, the firefly lights of terraplanes drifting over the night city, the burning planes and streaks of flak arcing through the translucent torso of the dissolved man. He’s speaking:
“Nineteen,” the ash man says. “Twenty-one. Seven. End transmission.”
The loop skips.
I am in the bathroom. The vacuum tubes haloed around my drowned face shudder and flicker like candles in a draft.
Show me his face, I think. Just show me his face, and we will hunt him down for you.
In the mirror, I shake my head. She shakes her head, and speaks directly to me, from where she is, or where she was, or where I imagine her to be, or some mix of all of the above, or from none of them.
Her drowned mouth says the words. “No. Enough killing. And after all, maybe they are the good guys. Have you ever thought of that?”
I hear the hiss of the gas, bleeding through the ventilation in the bathroom.
He murdered you. He took everything from you. Show me his face! Why are you hiding him?
The vacuum tubes screwed into our skull tremble out the patterns: 4B 57 48. I can feel the numbers in my head.
I need more. His face!
The gas is a green fog. The loop warps, stretching time like a melted recording.
“Just for the record,” she says to the mirror, looking out of her eyes but into mine: “Berlin. Konigsberg. Tokyo. Okinawa. Just for the record — Manzinar. Amache. Manchuria.”
He murdered you, Janice. Who cares what his cause was? Show me HIS FACE.
Green gas writhes like seaweed around our drowned face in the mirror. We shake our head, studded with its guttering halo of vacuum tubes.
“No.”
The loop breaks.
Alvin and two other lab techs have to help me out of my chair this time. They practically carry me down the hall. They move a space heater into Alvin’s office and cocoon me in that Pendleton blanket again. Techs run around with thermometers, stethoscopes, pressure cuffs. Someone asks me to count backwards from a hundred. Some Fritz jackass shows me a series of geometrical shapes on cards until I swat him away. They leave me be for a while. I stop shivering. But the feeling of failure remains.
Alvin comes in, sits down behind his desk. There isn’t a scrap of paper on it. There are no pictures either. Just a blotter, with a pen placed neatly at its center, and a blank pad of paper. The only thing on the walls in the office is a framed photo of Alvin and a woman who must be his mother, standing on the porch of some dismal looking farmhouse. Alvin is just a kid in the picture, in a fresh, clean Army uniform, with a big grin on his face. There is a blur of a dog at his feet, just a smear of dog smile and wagging tail, too fast for the shutter to catch. The picture could have been taken thirty years ago. We’re so much older now: older than we should be, if you only counted the years that have passed.
“How are you feeling?”
I feel like I’ve been gnawed on by a shark and then rolled in the breakers for an hour. “I feel ok, I guess.” I say. “Physically. But the loop has completely disintegrated, and I got nothing of use.”
“It’s all right,” Alvin says. “You know that’s how the loops are. They get garbled, fall apart. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“It’s not just that. It’s also — it’s hard to explain.”
“Take your time, Sylvia.”
“I think she took his side. In the end. Against me. She . . . we were tangled up in there, and somehow, she saw into me. She saw the things I did, during the war, the things we all did, and she weighed them in the balance, and then . . . she took their side.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Alvin said. “There’s nothing left of her in there. There’s no conscious entity. All you are piloting through are just loops of neural activity, like an echo in the skull. You’re just passing through dead memories. This is misplaced guilt talking, plus some neural activity the loops are picking up from you and the environment. Static. The loops are sticky — we’ve seen it before. Don’t let it get to you.”
“That’s one theory. But the truth is, the loops are like everything else we took off that saucer — alien. Beyond us. We just guess at how they work. We don’t really know anything.”
Alvin tilts back in his chair, stares up at the ceiling.
“Maybe it wasn’t her, Sylvia. Maybe it was you judging yourself. And maybe it’s time you stopped it. We all did things we regret during the war, Sylvia. They were the things we had to do. And we have to live with those things in our head . . . but the dead aren’t judging us, for Christ’s sake. That simply can’t be. The dead stay dead.”
“I hope you’re right, Alvin.”
He keeps staring at the ceiling, avoiding my eyes. “If I’m not, then god help us all.”
I’m so caught up, always, in my own traumas, that I forget we are all carrying our own ghosts around with us. Our whispering specters. The OSS parachuted Alvin into a shattered, Fascist Yugoslavia in 1943 to help organize Serb resistance. I wonder, sometimes, what midnight knifings and garrotings he carries around in his skull, how many Ustashe reprisals he feels personally responsible for. How many villagers were hanged in retaliation for what he did? How much literal blood did he wash off his hands, scrub out of his sleeves and collars? At least I did most of my killing at a distance.
Now I’m torturing him, stirring up his ghosts. I need to put a stop to this.
“Alvin?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to the bar. And this time, when you put me to bed, you need to take my shoes off. You can’t let me sleep in my shoes. My feet hurt like hell the next day, and it just isn’t sanitary.”
“Agreed,” he says with his sad, relieved smile.
“And if you lecture me about drinking too much tomorrow, I am going to punch you in the throat.”
“Okay,” he says.
* * *
Alvin is as good as his word. When I wake up that night, the clock reads 3:36 a.m. I’m still in my gingham dress, but I am properly tucked in under the covers, and my shoes are on the nightstand. My head doesn’t hurt that much: I can still feel a bit of the alcohol in my system, but it’s unlikely I really drank too much: when I’m worn out by piloting the loops, the exhaustion usually catches up to me no more than three gimlets in. Alvin probably had to carry me from the terraplane. It’s a nice image: he must have looked like Frankenstein’s Monster about to throw a little girl down a well. I bet the neighbors loved it.
I get up from the bed and make my way to the bathroom, not bothering to turn on a light until I’m standing in front of the sink. When I pull the chain and the light comes on, the face in the mirror is tired, but it is my own face: my own dark Jewish eyebrows and my own solid, handsome Jewish nose. I love that nose, those eyebrows, that face that houses me, the cascade of my nation’s songs and poems dancing in my genes like a Torah scroll unravelling.
They’ve been trying to murder us all for thousands of years, but we have resisted. The Nazis came the closest to doing us in, but we crushed them. That is something, I think. That is something to be proud of: the liberation of the camps, the rescue of my people. That might make at least some of it worth it.
I know I was dreaming of the war again, because I see the war around me, as if the walls of my bathroom were just glassy membranes between myself here in Alameda, California, and myself then.
This is my own loop: the moment I return to over and over. Unter Den Linden, fall 1944. The fallen leaves of the trees pinwheel and tumble in the wind. I see myself, my hair pulled back under my helmet, my face smudged with dirt.
This is the unreliability of memory: I see myself in a sort of medium film-reel shot, at an angle that is impossible — an angle my mind has invented, through some perverse effort of its own, to render this scene more effective. I’ve climbed down out of my Jeep to admire the leaves on this crisp fall day. Hitler is kaput, and all of us think the war is over. Nobody knows yet that the allies will turn on one another: that the war will go on for another year as Patton and our allied forces, plus what’s left of the German Wehrmacht, recommissioned by Patton as the Free German Army, drive Stalin and his Red Army back out of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Prussia, out of the Balkans and the Baltic states. And the war will go on in the Pacific after a shattered Japan surrenders, as we join with Chiang Kai-shek in his butchery of the Chinese Communists.
But here, on Unter den Linden, there is peace. The autumn leaves are beautiful, and I can see the Brandenburg Gate at its terminus. G.I.s have landed a few Jeeps near its steps. A couple of them have cameras, and are snapping pictures for their families back home. They are smiling, whooping, goofing around like the young boys and girls they are, happy to take off the masks of war. I walk slowly toward them, as if in a dream, while the leaves heave and scatter around my feet. I’m going to join them, smile and laugh with them. Everything will be all right. I’m staring up at the fall glory of the trees. The city is so quiet here — just the sound of military motors at a distance, the shouts of the victors up ahead, the laughter and the dry rattle of the autumn breeze through the leaves.
And then I turn and I see it: my footprints, leading from my Jeep to where I am standing. Under the thin veil of flame-tinted leaves, the trail of my footprints is sunk deep in the ashes of Berlin’s last defenders — ashes that carpet the ground everywhere in the city, an inch thick. And I put my hand over my mouth to muffle my screams.
And here, in my own bathroom, I do the same, covering my mouth, though at least the screams have long since stopped. I wish this loop would fall apart the way the others do — but it never does. It just goes around and around forever. If they ever hook my body up to the Loop Set one day, I’ll be one of those rare cases where there are hundreds of loops to read, whole short stories and novels of material. I can’t forget anything, no matter how much I’d like to.
I am about to turn the taps on, see if I can wash this all away, when I hear the sound of the lock’s tumblers on my front door engaging, and the creak of the door’s hinges as it is slowly swung open.
I don’t freeze, like they do in the movies, with some dumb look of terror on my face: I shut the bathroom light off. My eyes don’t adjust to the dark immediately, but I know my own house. Treading lightly, avoiding the boards that squeak in the hallway, I make my way from the bathroom back toward the bedroom, where I keep a little surprise for whoever has broken into my house waiting in the nightstand. From over where the hallway turns to descend the stairs, I hear the creak of the second riser.
I’m nearly at the bedroom when the bleed-off from the death ray’s field hits me, lifting me an inch off the ground, coursing through every pore of my skin, churning my stomach as my balance fails. I see the flash at the end of the hall. It is so bright, even just bouncing off the wall, that it lights the whole hallway up like a skeleton in an x-ray. I barely manage to get a hand out before falling to my knees.
A two-beat pause, and I hear Alvin’s voice. “Sylvia? Is that you?”
“Alvin?”
“It’s safe, Sylvia. You can come down.”
Alvin is standing at the foot of the stairs with a death day long gun in his arms. It’s one of the new models. The military techs have tried to make it less cumbersome, but the thing still looks like a sawed-off Kirby vacuum cleaner mated with the grill of a Mercury Terraplane. Alvin doesn’t have his glasses on, and his hair is mussed up, from sleeping on my couch. He looks like a twelve-year old boy who just woke up from a bad dream.
On the wall, almost halfway up the staircase, the shadows of two human outlines are flash-burned into my wallpaper. The shadows are both wearing fedoras, and the one in front, you can see, has just turned toward the other one to caution or quiet him. You can see, as well, the outlines of their drawn pistols. It’s like a still from a movie.
What’s left of the men that made the outlines drifts in a haze over the stairwell, and snows down in flakes of ash over my living room set.
“Agent Lake,” Alvin says. “And his co-conspirator — probably the man with the gas gun in the bathroom in the loop.”
“You stayed,” I say rather stupidly in answer.
“I had a bad feeling,” Alvin says. “I thought it might be better if I slept here on the couch. Just to be safe.”
I look at the death ray in his arms. “You brought along a lot of firepower for just a bad feeling.”
Alvin glances down at the gun. “It was a really bad feeling.” He sets the gun down on my coffee table. “I was carrying you out of the bar, and I was almost certain I glimpsed Agent Lake’s stupid flashy overcoat, looking in a shop window down the street at eleven at night. So I dropped you off, put you to bed, and then I drove off, landed a few blocks over, and came in through the back door.”
“Just in case.”
“Yeah. Just in case.”
“Anything else you want to tell me, Alvin? Any other reasons you may have had for disintegrating people in my parlor?”
“Well . . . it’s not my case, but I could lob some guesses as to why the two of them were here. I think you’ll find Agent Lake was a pretty fluent speaker of Russian, and that he drove a vehicle with the license plate number 4B 57 48, and that he and Janice Walker had a secret relationship that ended . . . rather poorly. She must have gotten on to who he was working for. He must have thought she was going to expose him.”
For a moment I see, again, that drowned face in the mirror, wreathed in undulating fronds of green gas. “Just for the record,” Janice’s dead mouth says, “Berlin. Konigsberg. Tokyo. Okinawa. Just for the record — Manzinar. Amache. Manchuria.”
“Or maybe she was a co-conspirator,” I say to Alvin. “A fellow traveler, and just came to know too much.”
‘Perfectly likely as well. The investigation will probably piece some of it together, but I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”
As he’s talking, Alvin is dialing the phone on my side table. “Dispatch? Yes. Sequence is 56-92-30. I need a team to Alameda Island. Home of Sylvia Aldstatt. Yes, right away. And you may want to send an armed team to my residence as well. Yes, combat-prepped. Authorization sequence is 55-99-01. My authority.”
He hangs the phone up, looks at me standing at the top of the stairs.
“The FBI Counterintelligence Unit has a real problem, it seems. Right at its heart.”
“It would appear that way.”
“I took off your shoes this time, just like you asked.”
“Yes, I appreciate that.”
“You talk a lot of nonsense after two gimlets.”
“I’m aware of that. You look like a lost little boy without your glasses, and your hair looks stupid.”
Alvin brings a hand up to smooth his ridiculous cowlick, and grins. “Well, you know — that’s why I joined the army in the first place. Helmets. Hides a cowlick like a charm.”
“You should have stayed in uniform.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Why not let OSS know beforehand that you were expecting trouble? Get someone else to do the heavy lifting?”
Alvin gestured at my coffee table. And now I notice, next to the death ray gun, that he’s got a little workshop going on. He’s disassembled one of my nice new lamps, and withdrawn a little spider of a listening device from it. There are two more next to it.
“Oh, I see. Looks like you’ve been busy.”
“Yeah.” He presses two fingers vertically against his upper lip — the Hitler moustache sign for Nazis. I nod.
“Nice trick Lake managed to pull,” I say. “Getting assigned to the investigation of his own crime.”
“I guess he just had to know if we would be able to get anything that could lead back to him. See if he could find out first, maybe get the drop on us and whoever the commies haven’t managed to flip yet over in FBI Counterintelligence. He must have thought there was more you found out, something you weren’t telling him. He made the same mistake that always brings down a spy: he had to be certain.”
“Well, he’s certain now,” I said. “Nothing could be more certain.”
Alvin glanced at his handiwork, the two outlines flash-burned into the wallpaper, and then quickly looked away. You never really get used to it. You just change the subject. And that’s what Alvin did. “What I really want to know is — since you’re the psychologist — where did the monkey come from?”
“Oh, I think the monkey probably symbolizes you, Alvin. There’s more than a family resemblance. If you want a second opinion, though, feel free to walk over to Doctor Freud’s laboratory and discuss it with him.”
“I should have seen that one coming, I suppose. Years with you, and I still walk straight in to your wisecracks.”
“Don’t take it too hard. After all, the monkey’s a snappy dresser, and a useful little guy to have around. Now excuse me while I change into something a bit less wrinkled, before the clean-up crew shows up. I hope it doesn’t take too long — you have work to do back at the lab, and god knows you need your beauty sleep, Alvin.”
Thank goodness you are all right, I want to say. This could have gone a hundred different ways. Thank goodness you are here, and we are here, and ghosts remain ghosts. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it’s all we’ve got, and I’m glad to still be in it. Thanks for that, Alvin.
But I don’t say those things. Instead I say: “As for me, I think once I get you people out of my house I’ll go back to bed. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll float down the coast a few hundred miles, see what the beaches in Santa Monica are up to lately. It’s getting too cold up here, and all this action just makes me tired.”