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

and was examining its exotic components with the aid of a magnifying lens and a battery-operated light of high intensity. He had removed his jacket and was wearing a black sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. His forearms were hairy. A tattoo of blue thorns braceleted his right wrist. He was quiet for a considerable time, his attention focused. Kylie drank her second espresso, like the queen of the world, like it was nothing to just ask for coffee this good and get it.
    “Well?” she said.
    “Ah.”
    “What?”
    “Ah, what is this thing?”
    “You said you didn’t need to know.”
    “I don’t need to know, I just want to know. After all, according to you I’m betting my immortal soul that I can fix it, so it’d be nice to know what it does.”
    “We don’t always get to know the nice things, do we?” Kylie said. “Besides I don’t believe in souls. That was just something to say.” Something her mother had told her, she thought. The Old Men didn’t talk about souls. They talked about zoos.
    “You sure downed that coffee fast. You want to go for three?”
    “Yeah.”
    He chuckled and gave her a couple of dollars and she went to the bar and got another espresso, head buzzing in a very good way.
    “It’s a locator,” she said, taking pity on him, after returning to the table and sitting down.
    “Yeah? What’s it locate?”
    “The city’s Eternity Core.”
    “Oh, that explains everything. What’s an eternity core?”
    “It’s an alien machine that generates an energy field around the city and preserves it in a sixteen hour time loop.”
    “Gotchya.”
    “ Now can you fix it?”
    “Just point out one thing.”
    She slurped up her third espresso. “Okay.”
    “What’s the power source? I don’t see anything that even vaguely resembles a battery.”
    She leaned in close, their foreheads practically touching. She pointed with the chipped nail of her pinky finger.
    “I think it’s that coily thing,” she said.
    He grunted. She didn’t draw back. She was smelling him, smelling his skin. He lifted his gaze from the guts of the locator. His eyes were pale blue, the irises circled with black rings.
    “You’re kind of a spooky chick,” he said.
    “Kind of.”
    “I like spooky.”
    “Where I come from,” Kylie said, “almost all the men are impotent.”
    “Yeah?”
    She nodded.
    “Where do you come from,” he asked, “the east side?”
    “East side of hell.”
    “Sounds like it,” he said.
    She kissed him, impulsively, her blood singing with caffeine and long-unrequited pheromones. Then she sat back and wiped her lips with her palm and stared hard at him.
    “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said.
    “ Me .”
    “Just fix the locator, okay?”
    “Spooky,” he said, picking up a screwdriver with a blade not much bigger than a spider’s leg.
    A little while later she came back from the bathroom and he had put the locator together and was puzzling over the touchpad. He had found the power button. The two inch square display glowed the blue of cold starlight. She slipped it from his hand and activated the grid. A pinhead hotspot immediately began blinking.
    “It work okay?” Toby asked.
    “Yes.” She hesitated, then said, “Let’s go for a drive. I’ll navigate.”
    They did that.
    Kylie liked the little round canary car. It felt luxurious and utilitarian at the same time. Letting the locator guide her, she directed Toby. After many false turns and an accumulated two point six miles on the odometer, she said:
    “Stop. No, keep going, but not too fast.”
    The car juddered as he manipulated clutch, brake, and accelerator. They rolled past a closed store front on the street level of a four story building on First Avenue, some kind of sex shop, the plate glass soaped and brown butcher paper tacked up on the inside.
    Two men in cheap business suits loitered in front of the building. Tourists.
    Kylie scrunched down in her seat.
    “Don’t look at those guys,” she said.