Steve Rasnic Tem - Unknown.pdf

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UNKNOWN
Steve Rasnic Tem
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
Steve has stories forthcoming in Albedo One, That Mysterious Door
(Fantasy and SF about Maine), Matter and Dark Discoveries . His new
novel, written in collaboration with his wife Melanie Tem, and expanding on
their award-winning novella, is The Man on the Ceiling , a March 2008
release from Discoveries.
* * * *
Not for the first time he decides to go nameless. Moves to a city where they
don’t know him. Tells no one of his new whereabouts. Chooses a new
name using identification documents he’s paid a fortune for, then avoids
using that expensive new name as much as possible.
“And your name?” they might ask at a bus stop or in the park.
“You can just call me Buddy,” he replies. Most do so without blinking
an eye.
Then he spends months trying to erase both the new name and the
old name from his consciousness.
The process is not particularly difficult for him. He doesn’t open his
mail—drops it into the trash without a glance. He fills out only those forms
he cannot avoid, looking away when he scribbles a bit of graffiti that may or
may not be his signature. He answers to “Buddy,” but for him “Buddy” is no
more identifying than “Hey, you.”
He deals with neither banks nor doctors. He isn’t naive enough to think
that he’s achieved total anonymity—no doubt his persona has been
digitized in a number of different ways. But he doesn’t think much about it.
He does not avoid photographs, but always makes sure he is part of a
 
group, which as far as he is concerned is far more anonymous than never
having been photographed at all. Similarly, he rejects the life of the hermit,
and wraps himself in crowds. He tries to make himself as frequently seen
as lampposts and trees.
You would expect such a man to avoid diaries as if they were
forbidden tomes of black lore, but he keeps his religiously, using it to report
concise, nonjudgmental observations, the only reporting suitable, he thinks,
for an anonymous observer:
Two dogs were run over in the street today. A car avoided the first
animal, then plowed into the second. At the same moment the car
behind ran over the first dog. The men climbed from their cars and swore
at each other. A nearby child was hysterical. No one went to the child,
who cried for thirty-six minutes, fifteen seconds. Most would think such
lengthy hysteria impossible, but an accurate watch cannot be denied.
Eventually a female police officer came and led the child away.
The temperature was forty-five degrees at eight a.m., climbing to
seventy-six degrees at noon. At 142 Lincoln Street a dark man in a white
T-shirt and green pants sat on the front step and watched the sky. At
intervals varying between fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-two
seconds the man wiped tears from his eyes. He said nothing when the
old woman in the blue dress split her grocery bag. A can of peas rolled
under a parked white Oldsmobile. She did not see it and left it behind
after she’d gathered the spilled groceries. At five p.m. the man stood up
slowly and went inside. His shoulders and knees appeared to struggle
with gravity. A man in a brown suit passed him going out the door,
walking very fast.
There are eight green bottles and a dead cat in the alley across the
street. A man enters the alley and counts them every day. He looks at
the cat and tries to determine if it has been moved. A newspaper lies
beside the cat but he does not reach down and cover the cat with it. He
prefers to remain nameless.
The nameless man wanders down the street with a water bottle in his
hand. At every third corner he stops and takes three swallows. At some
point in the past he has fainted from dehydration and is determined to avoid
such incidents in the future. He continues down the street until he finds a
crowd to join. For the rest of the day he moves from crowd to crowd,
holding the water bottle, drinking his swallows but trying not to be too
obvious about it, trying not to be seen. Both unknown and unknowable, he is
 
a part of the grand movement of the world, he thinks, and there are others
who need the moisture far more than he.
At the end of the day the man strips off his shirt and stares at himself
in the mirror. He drips what’s left of the water over his head. It is a kind of
baptism, he thinks, but will not pursue the idea. He imagines the remaining
dust of the day dissolving from him, freeing him from this time and place.
In the morning the traffic noise begins early, at precisely five fifteen
a.m. The man without a name dresses in clean gray slacks and a light blue
shirt. He puts a newspaper he will not read under his arm and walks out
onto the hot concrete. He strolls at a steady pace down the sidewalk with no
destination in mind. The man from the day before is again sitting out on the
front step crying, silently but unmistakably to those willing to notice. The
man with no name walks past the crying man, pretending not to notice.
The man who will not be named slips into a mass of people on their
way to work. Their movements and intentions toward movement make an
intricate pattern of gravity and emotional force the nameless man has come
to understand and predict. He moves with them as if within a migratory herd
of long duration as they pound the pavements, casting off one member
after another at bus stops and subway entrances. He is aware of the
unhealing carcinoma under one dark man’s ear, a young woman’s
blackened eye, the bleeding forearm of an elderly Jew where the skin has
been scrubbed raw. The man without a name smells the stink of fear that
leaks from pores swaddled in clothing bought with a great deal of money
and very little taste. The nameless man tastes the horror in the mouths of
those who cannot speak it, yet speaks none of it himself.
He walks and walks with no destination in mind, with no name and its
burden of past association to stop him.
“Bob!” The voice breaks through the back of his head. “Bob, is that
you?”
The man who has no name turns and looks at the woman who has
stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, her hands thrown up to her face as if
in joy or grief.
“I thought I’d never see you again!” she cries, and runs toward him,
throws her arms around him. He flinches, but allows her to do what she
feels she must do. The woman suddenly removes her arms and steps
back. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
 
The nameless man does not think in terms of right or wrong and so
says nothing.
“You act like you don’t even know me.”
The man without a name recognizes the fatigue in the woman’s eyes,
which had been there every time he saw her. “Mary,” he says, knowing that
isn’t the name of her secret heart—it is only the name she shares with
others—but she has never shared her secret name with him so Mary is all
he can use.
“Bob, you’ve been gone for months—is that all you have to say to
me?”
He looks at her, wondering what he can possibly say to her, thinking
he’d have to be a genius in order to know the right thing to say. “I wouldn’t
want to hurt you,” he finally begins, telling her the truth. “Believe me, I would
give anything not to hurt you. We could have been married—I know that’s
what you wanted. Maybe I wanted it, too. Maybe I still want it. We could be
married and I believe we would have had a successful marriage by the
usual standards. No huge betrayals, no precipitous decline in affection,
certainly none of the arguing that continues at a low burn for years before
finally erupting into something more than painful and possibly dangerous.
We would have had children and I’m sure we would have raised those
children well.”
Somehow he thinks saying those things will in some small degree be
comforting. But he has always been stupid in relationships, and he is being
stupid now.
“Then why did you leave ?” She is screaming at him. He doesn’t think
he’s ever seen her screaming before. “You just threw it all away! There’s
something wrong with you!”
“I’m not going to say that you’re incorrect about that.” He looks down,
unable to look directly into those angry eyes. “But if we had married, whom
would you have married? In our relatively short time together, how much did
you really learn about me? How much would you have known after three
years? Five years? How much do I even understand myself? I would try to
be honest with you, but am I going to tell you things I think will make you
dislike me?”
“So how is that different from any other relationship?”
 
“I don’t think it is. I don’t know. Is my ‘self’ anything more than a
random accumulation of brain cells? These things that are me, are they
anything more than accidental?”
“Bob...”
“You call me that name, but does it identify me any more precisely
than any other? It’s a label my parents gave me, and the government finds
convenient, like a label on a file so that you can find it among all the other
files. But you can put anything you want into that file, can’t you? If I married
you I would have been Bob with wife and kids and a house at a specific
address in an all too specific neighborhood, working at any of a number of
possible occupations, with benefits. I would have been well-adjusted. I
would have been happy. But I’m not at all sure it would have been right.”
She stares at him for a long time. When she leaves without saying
anything more, he feels embarrassed, but relieved.
The nameless man returns to his hotel room and sits in an
overstuffed chair the texture of battered skin. He has moved this chair to
face the window so that he might have a fresh breeze on his face. He
replays his conversation with Mary. He feels genuinely sorry that he has hurt
her but he is anxious about something much more important right now: what
if she tells others where to find him?
What if she finds some way to get in touch with his parents?
He has never seriously considered the possibility before. Once she
asked to meet his parents and he told her he hadn’t spoken to them in
years. Which was perfectly true. When she asked him about what had
happened he told her it was too painful for him to talk about, but that
someday they would. The first part of that statement had been basically true
but even then he’d known he wouldn’t be around long enough for the
second part. He’s already made a few too many mistakes with her, giving
her his real first name and inadvertently revealing the state where he had
been born (and where his parents, as far as he knows, still live). Those two
items shouldn’t be enough to track down his history but who knew how
many other slips he might have made? That’s what happened when you got
close to someone. Perhaps she had just enough information, and perhaps
she was angry enough, to contact his parents.
He tries to imagine the resulting conversation, the trading of stories,
the bonding of these people who cannot fathom his odd behavior.
Contemplating it makes him ill. He thinks about them visiting one another,
 

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