Thread Twice Cut

147 Days

147 DaysI awoke to a whistle, a continuous, high-pitched bubbly sound. Confused, I rolled over off my pad onto hard, rocky ground and pushed myself up. My arm, the one with the bad finger, hurt all the way up to my elbow. The robot had steam rising off its platform, white steam against a cloudless blue sky.

The robot pivoted its eyes to look at me. “I boiled water,” it said.

“For coffee?”

“I have no coffee. Look in the green box. There may be tea in it.”

I pulled on my boots, wishing I had clean socks without holes, and walked over to the robot. On the side nearest me was a thin hot plate with a teapot on top, the two held together with a large C-clamp. The whistling stopped, but the sight of steam still drifting cloud-like from the nozzle thrilled me. I looked around the surface of the robot and found the green antique tin box with the words, “Smiths Oil” on it. Inside the box was a single, restaurant-style ceramic cup and a tin of tea bags all padded with shredded paper. Black tea, mint tea, and Chinese tea —I actually had to choose. I remembered the Raman noodles in my back­pack and smiled.

That was the best breakfast I had eaten in over a month. As I ate, the robot introduced itself.

“The man called me Ralph,” the robot told me.

“Hi, Ralph,” I said, just like I used to back in AA. I smacked my lips. I could use a stiff drink right now. But I wasted my last bottle of vodka trying to disinfect my finger as I walked uphill and out of Needles. Lots of damn good that did. I made a fist and my finger screamed back at me.

“But Ralph isn’t my real name,” the robot spider said. “It was a name made up by the man who rebuilt me. I was originally a flying machine sent here to fix people.”

The robot showed me a map projected in the air just the way my ring used to. The map showed black dots scattered all over the place.

“I’m from another planet. The people who built me sent a diplomatic party to your planet and inadvert­ently caused the pandemic that is killing everyone. Once the people from my planet discovered what they had done, they sent machines like me here to cure everyone. But your people thought we were an invasion and shot us all down.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Of all the f****d-up stupid things for me to stumble across, the worst was a robot with delusions. “Prove it,” I said.

“Look at the map,” it said and made the map larger as if that might make it more true. “We are the yellow dot. That black dot to your left is a shot-down ship. I have already found four shot-down ships. When one of our power sources is damaged it explodes into a huge ball of heated energy that burns its way down, thousands of meters into the dirt. The first two dots had no ship, just large lakes, each bigger than a town, now filled with steaming water. The last two were just huge bottomless pits, scorched black on the inside with broken ends of pipes spilling water that turned to steam.”

“There’s another dot near here,” I said, and pointed at a dot. “Just a little way south.”

“It is possible there will be an intact ship there. But I have little hope.”

I stepped back and crossed my arms. I winced and then uncrossed them. “So what happened to your ship?”

Ralph turned off the map. “I was shot down, but my core was not destroyed. It was ejected for safety. A young boy found my core and carried it to the man. The boy told me the man was the smartest man he had ever met. The man rebuilt me into what you see. And then, soldiers came and blew up my ship.”

The robot Ralph actually sounded sad.

“That man,” Ralph continued, “installed me into this robot. Soon after that he died of the Cough. I didn’t have my ship so I could not save him. Before he died, he told me the boy had also died of the Cough.”

“Sorry,” I said and put my hand on Ralph, but it felt like putting my hand on the hood of a car. A used car with cracked paint. Like that old clunker, my first car, a used blue Zeus with its terrible batteries that caused it to suck gas, but it had really comfortable seats. The back seat of that car was where I first made love to my wife before she was my wife. Sure Ralph felt like a car, but I was glad that feeling of warm metal could bring back memories of better times. What the hell, I decided I might as well stick with him, for a while anyway.

Later that morning we walked together south. I walked next to Ralph as if he was a friend, but he wasn’t a friend, was he? He was just a machine.

We walked until sunset, then I dined on hot Raman noodles for dinner and finally ate both the Ho Hos and found them sweeter than I expected, almost too sweet. I finally slept, while Ralph kept watch. I don’t think I dreamed.

148 Days

Dawn and tea and Raman noodles and no hope for a sweet dessert ever again. I walked with Ralph toward a black dot on a map, a small spot of black floating in the air over a moving metal spider. It was certainly not something real. Still, one nice thing about a heavy walking machine was that there was no sign of the green rattlesnakes. They must have all fled from the squeaking metal feet.

“What’s your real name?” I asked him. “I mean if the man named you Ralph, you must have a name of your own.”

“Angel,” he said, “or that’s the nearest meaning I can find to my name in the languages of your planet. And that is just a close match. Nothing else is closer.”

“How does your name sound in your own lan­guage?”

Ralph made a sound that was a cross between a gargle and a yodel with a buzz and pop mixed in, but vaguely musical with its own internal rhythm.

“I can’t say that,” I said.

We walked silently for a while because my whole arm was now aching from my infected finger. I tried to hang it down my side, but it hurt that way, so I put my hand in my pocket and that hurt worse. I found that by resting it on Ralph while we walked, it hurt less. When I had the chance, I rolled up my sleeve to look at what hurt and saw the black lines of blood poisoning. I tapped on the black veins thinking they would be numb, but instead they hurt like hell. I had to bite my lip to keep myself from shouting. Ralph didn’t appear to notice my pain.

We walked along that narrow dirt road until we reached and passed two skeletons in a ditch wearing tattered army uniforms, rifles still clutched in their skeletal hands. “I wonder what they were guarding,” I said. But the robot had already moved ahead of me.

It surprised me how real the skeletons looked, not like Halloween skeletons, but real bone with bits of dried flesh still stuck in places. I shook both canteens, but they were both empty.

Next we passed a large military truck on its side and rusting, its fabric top torn into soiled ribbons. To the east, black vultures circled in the sky, high and slow, almost majestically. To the west I heard coyotes yip just beyond sight somewhere over the next bare rise. Grey clouds had moved in so the sun wasn’t so overwhelmingly f*****g hot. No water in the truck either. I kept walking through midday.

We crested a low hill and in a clearing on the other side was an odd-looking black rectangle that appeared to be about the size of a shipping container. I stopped and shaded my eyes with my good hand to study it. “Is that one of your ships?” I asked.

“No,” Ralph said. “Perhaps a ship is inside.”

As we descended, the shipping container grew larger. It became a much larger building than I had first thought. It grew more impressive as we approached it. At least two dozen graves with dead sol­dier helmets hung on crosses filled an area next to it. Only one cross had a name, a woman named, Ellen Samson, but none of the other crosses had names. I tried to imagine why that might be but came up empty. Then I remembered Needles and whispered, “Ah.”

Parked near the container was a water truck. I turned the nozzle and water rushed out. Very hot and grey but I drank it anyway. It tasted stale but I didn’t care. I rubbed water into my hair and tried to soak my clothes to cool me off. But the heat of the water pre­vented any cooling effect. Briefly refreshed, I hurried to catch up with Ralph.

Now that we were close, that container looked human-made. Like a big hangar for airplanes, it tow­ered over me. Maybe it was a secret place for experi­ments. Maybe this was the rumored Area 51, but no, that was in Nevada. The valley was dead quiet except for the metal spider clanking beside me. The air smelled like dirt. The graves looked sad.

At the far end of the huge hangar we rounded the corner and found a tall roll-up door that was rolled down. At least this side of the building was in shade and the temperature was a hair cooler. I shoved my hat up to help cool my forehead, but that made little differ­ence —I was still too hot. The air itself was too hot. I pushed the “up” button with my good hand and felt it click, but nothing happened. So I looked for a manual override and found a hand crank handle in a glass case with the words, “In emergency, break glass,” on it.

It took a long time to hand crank the door up, so long that I had to rest there in the baking shade before finishing. I couldn’t remember ever tiring that fast before.

Inside the hangar, just a dozen feet in was a black box much smaller than the hangar, about two dozen feet long, maybe twelve feet tall, and a bit less wide. It was in the shape of a black toaster with rounded corners on top. Its color was flat black, so dark that it seemed to almost absorb light.

“An intact ship,” Ralph said matter-of-factly. “I will need your help now.”

But I felt sick to my stomach and my arm felt like hell. “I think I need to lie down for a while first,” I said and collapsed hard onto building’s floor. I tried to barf, but I was too dry so I just gagged briefly. I felt like I was running a fever. I shivered and couldn’t stop myself. Despite the heat I now felt cold. “I hope this isn’t the Cough,” I said, and curled up into a ball.

“You’re not coughing,” Ralph said.

I laid my head down on that dirty concrete floor. I dreamed hard and in unbelievably vivid colors. My dog Yukon, a female German shepherd, ran through a gen­tle blue surf chasing a glowing, fire red Frisbee, her tags tinkling clearly even from that distance. Every girl­friend I ever had was lined up on bleachers facing the surf and cheering my wife on as she swam in an effort to beat the dog to that floating red frisbee. My children hovered over me like butterflies, tiny wings beating the air fast like hummingbirds, my son bright blue, my daughter pale yellow. The sweetest aroma caused me to look in the kitchen. It was empty, deserted, quiet but for the whispering of a refrigerator. I opened the refrig­erator door and found it filled with stacks and stacks of identical yogurt cartons. Every one of them vanilla.