Are You There and Other Stories by Jack Skillingstead Read Free Book Online

on the couch we shared, one leg drawn up and tucked under, her face alive, eyes questing.
    “I already told you: Because you’d have to die.”
    “I thought that was you being metaphorical.”
    I shook my head, patted the case of pills now replaced in the cargo pocket of my pants.
    “I’m in these pills,” I said. “The ‘me’ you’re now talking to. But it isn’t the me I left behind when I climbed into the Tank.” I sipped my coffee. “There’s no official line on that, by the way. It’s just my personal theory.”
    “It’s kind of neurotic.”
    “Kind of.”
    “I don’t even think you really believe it.”
    I shrugged. “That’s your prerogative.”
    For a while we didn’t talk.
    “It does get lonely out here sometimes,” Kim said.
    “Yes.”
    Her bedroom was nicer than the guest room. With the lights out, she dialed to transparency three of the walls and the ceiling, and it was like lying out in the open with a billion stars overhead and the trees waving at us. I touched her naked belly and kissed her. Time unwound deliciously, but eventually wound back up tight as a watch spring and resumed ticking.
    We lay on our backs, staring up, limbs entwined. The stars wheeled imperceptibly. I couldn’t see Tau Boo, and that was fine with me.
    “Why did you do it, then?” she asked.
    “Because it felt good. Plus, you seemed to be enjoying yourself as well.”
    “Not that. Why did you want to be an Eye.”
    “Oh. I wanted to see things that no one else could see, ever. I wanted to travel farther than it was possible for a man physically to travel. Pure ego. Which is slightly ironic.”
    “Worth it?”
    I thought of things, the weird aquamarine sky of the fourth planet, the texture of nitrogen-heavy atmosphere. Those quicksilver pools. But I also recalled the ripping away of my personality, and how all those wonders in my mind’s eye were like something I’d read about or seen pictures of—unless I went off the pill and allowed myself to become pregnant with chaos. Then it was all real and all indistinguishable, without meaning.
    “No,” I said, “it wasn’t worth it.”
    “When I think about it,” Kim said, “it feels like escape.”
    “There’s that too, yes.”
    In the morning, I kissed her bare shoulder while she slept. I traced my fingers lightly down her arm, pausing at the white scars on her wrist. She woke up and pulled her arm away. I kissed her neck, and we made love again.
    Later, I felt disinclined to return to the Project compound and equally disinclined to check in, which I was required to do.
    “Why don’t you stay here,” Kim said.
    It sounded good. I swallowed my daily dose of personality with my first cup of coffee. In fact, I made a habit of it every morning I woke up lying next to Kim. Some nights, we fell asleep having neglected to dial the walls back to opacity, and I awakened with the vulnerable illusion that we were outdoors. Once, I felt like I was being watched, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a doe observing us from the lawn.
    I began to discover my health and some measure of happiness that I hadn’t previously known. Before, always, I’d been a loner. Kim’s story was essentially my story, with variations. It was partly what had driven me to the Tau Boo Project. But for those two weeks, living with Kim Pham, I wasn’t alone, not in the usual sense. This was something new in my world. It was good. But it could also give me that feeling I had when I woke up in the open with something wild watching me.
    One morning, the last morning, I woke up in our indoor-outdoor bedroom and found Kim weeping. Her back was to me, her face buried in her pillow. Her shoulders made little hitching movements with her sobs. I touched her hair.
    “What’s wrong?”
    Her voice muffled by the pillow, she said, “I can’t stand anymore leaving.”
    “Hey—”
    She turned into me, her eyes red from crying. “I mean it,” she said. “I couldn’t stand anymore.”
    I held