Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

Dear John

I don’t know if this happens to other writers, but I often dream I’m leafing through magazines that carry my stories. Normally, I just look at the magazine in the dream and say, “oh, yes, that’s mine.” In this dream I got smart and read it. It was Dear John. When I woke, I still found the idea that we would create human beings simply for our physical gratification interesting and repulsive in equal parts. So I had to write it.

The night was cool. A soft breeze blew from the ocean, bringing with it a taste of salt and a feel of humidity.

The humidity clung to my platinum blonde hair, making it sticky and messing the lustrous waves that took so long to arrange. Good thing the beauty mark on my face wasn’t painted on; good thing my make up was permanent and couldn’t blur.

I smiled, and walked back and forth along the cracked sidewalk. Smile, smile, wiggle of hips, smile, smile, I looked adoringly at the glide cars passing by, silently, their drivers hiding behind the safe anonymity of darkened windows.

Click, click, click, my high-heels beating a rhythmic, monotonous sound against the pavement. Click, click, click.

My ankles hurt, as did my feet, from their unnatural position.

Zoom, zoom, zoom, the cars gliding by, one after the other, all featureless ovoids in different colors, like someone had raided a giant Easter egg basket and sped each of the eggs out on the highway. Now and then, an egg stopped, the shell opened, and a John came out.

Just what every little girl wanted for Easter.

I’ve never seen an Easter basket. But I remembered the twentieth century vids and educational material that they’d made me watch in the crèche: Easter with the eggs, and Christmas with trees and lights. It must have been some time to live in, the early twentieth century.

For all I knew, so was the second. Surely the Johns in those Easter-egg cars seemed to be having a blast. They talked of colonies on Mars, of a robotics revolution, of life spans extended to twice what they were twenty years ago.

But it didn’t matter to me. My lifespan was the same I’d been created with, and my life was this: click, click, click of heels across the pavement, back and forth, ignoring the other Marilyns. And the Racquels and the Elizabeths and all the others. Time to socialize with them at the dorm that night. Not now. Now it was time to smile, smile, smile and look sexy.

Now and then a John would stop and approach one of us, and extend his credgem, like a little clear marble, for approval. And then, if the authenticators disguised as golden bracelets on our wrists clicked their approval, then one of us would take the John to the office, and do what we’d been so well trained to do.

They’d trained us never to act tired, never to act bored. To take our clothes off. To take the Johns’ clothes off. To exclaim over their bodies, their big muscles, their all-male square shoulder—seven if we saw none of those.

They trained us to lay down in the prepared bed—sanitized for your protection—and spread wide, as they bumped and ground.

They taught us to smile, smile, smile.

Sometimes the Johns wanted to talk to me as if I were her. The other. The Marilyn.

I indulged them and prattled about my films, my love life.

How Joe jilted me and Jack did me wrong and how no one ever understood my artistic soul. Until this John.

Then the John would leave, and I used the cleaning spray down there—sanitized for your protection—and it was back to walking outside on the sidewalk.

“Hello,” he said.

He stood five steps away from me, and there was no parked car in sight. Just this man, over six feet tall, with light brown curls and sparkling blue eyes and a disarming smile.

I smiled back, as I’d been taught to do, and practiced for so many hours in front of the mirror, making my lips just so, so that the Johns would find them irresistible.

“Well, hello there,” I drawled, in my sexiest, breathiest voice.

He looked away, at the stream of cars, zooming by, then back at me, his smile not dimmed, but managing somehow to give the impression of shyness. “I was wondering,” he says. “How much it would be for an hour.”

I couldn’t place his accent, which was strange enough, considering how many people I got through here everyday. “Thirty creed units for an hour,” I said. “Sixty for the whole night.” Hardly worth it now, with the night half gone. But I still had to say it, with the big smile, and the slight wiggle of the hips.

He grinned. “Not tonight. I don’t have sixty. I’ll see next time. Tonight it will have to be thirty.” He handed me the credgem, an unembossed, clear one.

I popped it into the authenticator—the oval attachment dangling from what looked like a heavy gold bracelet on my wrist. I smiled while I waited.

He wore a well-cut suit, with an odd design, like the ones they wore in all those twentieth century vids that they’d made me watch in the crèche. It was black and emphasized his square shoulders, his narrow waist. But the cut was strange. It had to be a revival thing.

He smiled back at me as if he, too, had been to the crèche and practiced, a smile that would make your insides melt.

The gem cleared, and emptied. Thirty cred units was all he had.

I looked at him, surprised, because after all, a man like that exuded money, the feel of never having had to do anything he didn’t want to.

I led him to the offices, a block away, in a tall, grey tower, put up expressly for the purpose. Inside were cubicles, barely large enough to accommodate a large, comfortable bed, its sheets pulled back invitingly, and a broad band set across the white linen. The band said sanitized for your protection and was put there by the robots who cleaned the room afterwards.

He laughed at it; laughed, laughed as if he’d never been to a doxy room before, never seen anything like that.

He undresses himself, with an impatient eagerness that gives me no time to do more than react—to his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, his golden skin.

Then he undresses me, and he takes his time: he takes his time to explore my skin, my heavy breasts, my curvaceous legs. He tastes, touches all of it, before bringing me down to the bed with him, before laying between my legs, before shouting with joy above me.

“What’s your name?” I asked him, as he pulled his underwear and pants back on and fastened the buttons of his retro shirt.

I’d never asked them that. One doesn’t. But this time had been different, different in a way I couldn’t even say.

He looked at me, his eyes veiled and blue and mysterious, like the midnight sky over the ancient sea. “John,” he says.

I should have known. They all were John.

After the shift, when I slid into my mercifully solitary bed in the dorm, I dreamed of John. John, with his broad shoulders, his golden brown hair, his blue eyes.

Why would a man like that go to a doxy?

For the dream, I supposed, the dream that I was her, the illusion of making love to a twentieth century sex goddess.

But he’d never asked. He’d never asked about them.

The next night was cooler, the breeze from the sea heavier, nearer a gale.

Fewer cars glided by.

The other Marilyns and I—all twenty of us who worked this street—walked back and forth smiling, smiling, but not a car stopped for the first two hours.

I was jealous of the Marilyn who stood on the little square grate on the pavement, the warm air blowing from the grate blowing up her skirt while she pretended to try to hold it down and laughed. At least my legs would have been warm.

But that was not my beat, so I walked back and forth, wiggle, wiggle, click, click.

“Hello?” He stood a few steps away from me, as if he’d followed me from behind, for a while.

“Oh. Hi there,” I said, and smiled. “John, isn’t it?”

He nodded, and grinned, really big, and handed me the gem. There were sixty cred units in there, and I could have kissed him, and cried with relief, because he was taking me off the streets for the night.

He undresses me slowly; he undresses teasingly.

Like the children in those vids at the crèche, we explore each other’s body like we’re unwrapping Christmas gifts, savoring the suspense as much as the discovery of what’s really inside.

And then we make love, slowly, slowly. We make love. Not screw and grunt, not pump and jerk. Love. Slow. In every permutation.

Afterwards we lay together, in each other’s arms.

“I was hoping you’d get me again,” I said, as I lean on his broad, sweat-slick shoulder, and smell the scent of worn out male, the scent of love making thick in the air.

He looked up at me, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion.

“Me and not one of the other Marilyns,” I said, nuzzling his neck, at the edge where the soft skin became rough with closely shaven beard.

He blinked. “I was looking for you.”

For me. I’d dreamed of that, but it was nonsense. “You couldn’t have been,” I said. “We’re all alike. All the Marilyns.”

He grinned. “No, you’re not. I know the way you walk, your expressions. That’s learned. Not what you get from being someone’s clone.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. No one who hadn’t worked with clones knew we were different from each other at all. Or different from the originals. “You know a lot about clones. What are you? A genetic engineer at one of the fancy labs around here?”

He laughed. He laughed a long time, and then had trouble recovering his breath. When he did, he said, “No. No. I’m just visiting town. I’m not from around here.”

Afterwards, I called myself several kinds of idiot. What genetic engineer would use a disposable credit gem with only what he must pay for a doxy service? Engineers were rolling in credits, had expense accounts on company credigems.

He didn’t come back the next night, nor the next. It was just the regulars, the other Johns, who emerged from those egg-like multicolored cars, and bumped and ground by the hour.

Then one night, two months after, a dusty, travel-stained car stopped, near me, and as I turned, swaying my hips and smiling, he emerged.

“John” I said.

He smiled. “You remember me.”

He had enough for the night.

We make love like castaways on an alien shore, who grasp each other in desperation. We cling and writhe in the sweaty bed, the sanitation band broken, the sheets wrinkled and thrown onto the floor in haphazard joy.

“Where did you go?” I asked him, laying spent beside his golden, sweaty body. “Where did you go?”

He laughed, a laughter that betrayed joy, not amusement. “Missed me, babe, did you?”

I nodded.

“I went…. To other places. I’m…. I lecture… In schools,” he said.

I thought that explained the retro suit, and I didn’t say anything.

Later in the night, though, he asked me how old I was.

“Twelve,” I said. “Seven years out of the crèche, two years to go.”

He looked grave, serious. “How do they do it?” he asked. “How do they do it, when they choose to end you?”

“When senescence sets in, they give us a lethal injection,” I said. “It saves us the pain of aging and the troubles of old age.” Straight out of the book from the crèche.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Bullshit. It saves them the trouble of feeding you, of looking after you in your old age. You make them all the money they want, and then they just put you down, when your tissues start degenerating, as the tissues of clones will.”

I looked at him, surprised. Humans don’t usually care that much.

He took a deep breath. He looked like a drowning man. “I am fourteen,” he said. “They put us to death by shooting us. By recreating his assassination. Big to do in Dallas. Every year.”

His features fall into place with an almost physical sound, an almost physical pain. That’s who he is, I think, Jack.

I blinked at him.

“Just another clone, you’re right,” he said. “Just another clone.”

“But….” I said. “The credigems, the car….”

He grins. “I take them. I figured out how to glitch the system long ago. We sleep in these temporary buildings, while we’re touring, and I have figured out how to tamper with the alarm.

How to tamper with the computer, too, so that the sensors on my bed tell them I’m still there.”

“But….” I said. What company would put up with it? They paid big money for the tissues of the people they cloned. Probably a lot bigger money for his than for mine. They would have to get their money’s worth, right?

He shrugged. “I’ve heard them talk once. They say its in the baseline personality that I’ll break the rules. So they have to put up with it.” His eyes filled with tears, as he turned to me—his eyes like the sea rising. “Do you still want me? Do you still want me now that you know what I am?”

I shrugged. “You’re nothing I’m not.” I buried my face in his hair and nibbled at his ear.

He sighed. “I don’t have much time,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll come back to L.A. again. Another month, at most, and then they’ll put me down. Before I show signs of aging.”

He tells me he read about them, Marilyn and Jack. He, the original went by Jack, which is why John calls himself John. Or Johnny.

Like me, he doesn’t know if it’s true or not, about the originals; if they ever got together. But my Johnny is alone. He was the only one cloned of all of Jack’s family. He didn’t even have clone-twins. Jack is cloned at the rate of one a year. They move through the crèche system, through their appearance-tours one at a time, one succeeding the other. And he needed something, some human anchor.

He chose me because I looked older than the others.

He says there’s a difference in the walk, a difference in the oh-so-practiced smile.

He tells me loves me.

“You don’t need to go back,” I said. It was close to dawn and we’d had sex countless times. Now we lay together in each other’s arms. “You don’t need to go back. You’ve stolen the car. We should run. My clients tell me there are still wilderness areas. We could get lost in one of those. No one would ever find us there. No one would. They wouldn’t even look. Too expensive for two models near the end of their cycle.”

“They get a lot of money from the to-do in Dallas,” he said. He pulled gently away from me and sat at the edge of the bed, putting his shirt and pants on. “Lots of nuts get to dress up and reenact it all—to be assassins and policemen. I read about it. I cracked their system. The other one, the younger one of me is ready to leave the crèche.”

He put his cuff links on. Cuff links. I’d only seen them in vids before. But for some reason, those little pieces of jewelry look incredibly sexy, very masculine. The embodiment of a by-gone era. He snapped them on, without looking, like he did that every day.

He probably did.

“Besides,” he said. “The sensor I rigged will tell them if I’m gone after dawn. I couldn’t rig it that far. They know my proclivities, and they work around them. And you’ll be missed.”

I looked at the dot on my finger. The dot indicated how many hours I had left on my shift. It pulsed, one, two. One, two. “We have two hours. I won’t be missed for two hours. We could get lost in some wilderness in two hours. I know we could. There’s a place called Death Valley. I’d rather die there, than you dying somewhere without me.”

He laughs, and takes me in his arms, and twirls me around and around the small space in the room. “Let’s. Let’s. Life is short, and I’m tired of doing what I have to do. Let’s. It might be doomed, but it’s worth a try.”

A try was all we got. They spotted us by the ID box of the car, before we even flew out of L.A.

They seemed to think our attempt was very funny.

They took Johnny with them, took me back to the offices and the dorms. They put an ankle marker on me, that will tell them if I leave the part of the street assigned to me.

Every night I walk, and I smile, and I wave.

Last week, I asked a client about the thing in Dallas—and he showed me the whole show on his pocket newsy.

Bullets tearing into the golden flesh, ripping into the soft brown curls.

It hurt me, as if they’d ripped into my heart, but I forced myself to watch it all, to watch it to the end.

I could run again, force them to kill me. But what’s there to run to? Soon my own end will come, in less than two years. There will be the cold bite of the injection on my arm, and then nothing.

The church people say my kind has no souls.

Life is short, and then you die.

But for a couple of months I was alive. For a couple of months I had my dear John.

Johnny, Johnny, I hardly knew you.