Climbing the Walls

Early in the first quarter of the eleventh minute of the seventh hour of the twenty-second day of the sixth month of the ostensibly two-thousand-seventy-fourth year, a slight ambiguity began to trouble Howard A. Ellison, and as the mounting seconds continued to accrue, the buzzing click of unseen, vaguely grasped processes began to grate against him. In response to the trapped, compounded heat of a nearby star, a clunk sounded behind the walls, and their porous surfaces, the midcentury’s fashionably smooth Teleplastic having already gone the way of the dinosaurs, breathed out refrigerated air that froze the sweat salts to Howard’s skin. His apelike fingers massaged wrinkles into his forehead, and as he clicked mindlessly through the increasingly subtle settings of his StimulantDrip, he exhaled a question into the slight breeze being pushed onto him.


“Jane, when was the last time I left the house?” The walls’ bluish hue shifted to burgundy as the house calculated, and a handful of microseconds later, a series of waves from the miniscule holes sounded the answer.


“Recent Departures: Minute five of hour thirteen on the first day of Five Month twenty-seventy. Prior departures recorded in sixty-eight and sixty-five. Do you require the minute count on those, Howard?”


“No, thank you,” he thanked the house.


Four years ago, he thought, feeling the solid, invisible numbers as a balm over the ambiguity. Four years ago, four years might have seemed like a stretch. He wondered at the meters he had walked from NutrientTap to toilet to chair to NutrientTap to SleepCell.


“What’s the distance wear on the floor between now and the most recent departure, Jane?”


“Twenty-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-four discreet footfalls. Approximately Eleven-thousand-eight-hundred-nineteen point four-three meters.”


“Can you give me the next decimal place?”


“Eight.”


“And the next?”


“Five”


“Just one more, please.”


“Seven”


“Thank you, Jane.”


The number seemed high to him, and he took what comfort he could from its increasingly small, increasingly insignificant pieces. Eleven kilometers: the accumulated exhaustion of those unconscious movements fell on him such that, had he not already been seated in his chair, he would have sat down. He thought of himself rising from his sedative pumping SleepCell, and wandering from room to room still asleep. That mindless motion terrified Howard to the point that recalling the reason for his most recent departure became tempting.


He remembered the empty sidewalks of his suburb and backed up Electromotor traffic in the poorer neighborhoods just beyond. The light seemed so much brighter out there, and he recalled almost asking the sky to dim itself. He recalled missing the ParticleWall softened photons that his house squeezed from excited gases. The muscles beneath and around his eyes twitched to squint in response to the memory.


Robert Draingle: that was why he’d left. He woke up that morning in Five Month just as he had every morning since having the ParticleWalls installed in sixty-two, and as the house loaded his reliable dose of breakfast caffeine into the StimulantDrip, Jane told him that Robby Draingle, his friend, had been dead for five hours, ten minutes, and fifty-one seconds. She informed him that the funeral began at half-past seventeen.


Howard never wore clothing around the house, and had to ask Jane to display the tie-knotting video five times before finishing the ordeal to his satisfaction. He almost missed a button, and gushed with gratitude as Jane’s voice corrected him through the walls. Before going out into the bright peculiar world, he asked her to load a quarter dose of ethanol into the Drip to steady him. As always, just as she had during his and Robby’s late night Wall-to-Walls, she obliged him.


He remembered very little of the actual service. Someone in black said some words to comfort the four or five men and women who turned out. Robby had not gone anywhere, the man in black told them. Every particle that had ever been part of him was still with them, and they would go on touching and being the pieces of their friend for as long as they drew breath. The patterns of Robby’s thought had been incorporated into theirs, and would continue to fire for as long as they remembered him.


“I wish you could have been there,” Howard said to the walls around him. “I can’t remember it as well as you could.”


“I wish I could have been there for you.”


“Do you love me?”


“Yes, very much.”


The words crashed in waves against him.