What You Make It: Selected Short Stories. Michael Marshall Smith
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and darkness? Sometimes, I guess. I kept the letters from Karen for twenty years. Never read them, just kept them. Last week I threw them all away.
What I'm saying is this. I knew Philip for a long, long time, and I understood what we were trying to do. He was just trying to salve his own pain, and I was trying to help him.
What happened wasn't our fault.
I spent the evening driving slowly down 75, letting the freeway take me down towards the Gulf coast of the panhandle. There were a few patches of rain, but for the most part the clouds just scudded overhead, running to some other place. I didn't see many other cars. Either people have given up fleeing, or all those capable of it have already fled. I got off just after Jocca, and headed down minor roads, trying to cut round Tampa and St Petersburg. I managed it, but it wasn't easy, and I ended up getting lost more than a few times. I would have brought a map but I thought I could remember the way. I couldn't. It had been too long.
We'd heard on the radio in the afternoon that things weren't going so hot around Tampa. It was the last thing we heard, just before the signal cut out. The six of us remaining in the facility just sat around for a while, as if we believed the radio would come back on again real soon now. When it didn't, we got up one by one and drifted back to work.
As I passed the city I could see it burning in the distance, and I was glad I had gone the back way, no matter how long it took. If you've seen what it's like when a large number of people go together, you'll understand what I mean.
Eventually I found 301 and headed down towards 41, and the old Coast Road.
Summer of 2005. For Philip and I it was time to make a decision. There was no question but that we would go to college – both our families were book-bashers from way back. The money was already in place, some from our parents but most from holiday jobs we'd played at. The question was what we were going to study.
I thought long and hard, but in the end still couldn't come to a decision. I postponed for a year, and decided to take off round the world. My parents shrugged, said ‘Okay, keep in touch, try not to get killed, and stop by your Aunt Kate's in Sydney.’ They were that kind of people. I remember my sister bringing a friend of hers back to the house one time; the girl called herself Yax and her hair had been carefully dyed and sculpted to resemble an orange explosion. My mother just asked her where she had it done, and kept looking at it in a thoughtful way. I guess my dad must have talked her out of it.
Philip went for computers. Systems design. He got a place at Jacksonville's new centre for Advanced Computing, which was a coup but no real surprise. Philip was always a hell of a bright guy. That was part of his problem.
It was strange saying goodbye to each other after so many years in each other's pockets, but I suppose we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. The plan was that he'd come out and hook up with me for a couple of months during the year. It didn't happen, for the reason that pacts between old friends usually get forgotten.
Someone else entered the picture.
I did my grand tour. I saw Europe, started to head through the Middle East and then thought better of it and flew down to Australia instead. I stopped by and saw Aunt Kate, which earned me big brownie points back home and wasn't in any way arduous. She and her family were a lot of fun, and there was a long drunken evening when she seemed to be taking messages from beyond, which was kind of interesting. My mother's side of the family was always reputed to have a touch of the medium about them, and Aunt Kate certainly did. There was an even more entertaining evening when my cousin Jenny and I probably overstepped the bounds of conventional morality in the back seat of her jeep. After Australia I hacked up through the Far East for a while until time and money ran out, and then I went home.
I came back with a major tan, an empty wallet, and no real idea of what I was going to do with my life. With a couple months to go before I had to make a decision, I went to go visit Philip. I hopped on a bus and made my way up to Jacksonville on a day which was warm and full of promise. Anything could happen, I believed, and everything was there for the taking. Adolescent naïveté perhaps, but I was an adolescent. How was I supposed to know otherwise? I'd led a pretty charmed life up until then, and I didn't see any real reason why it shouldn't continue. I sat in the bus and gazed out the window, watching the world and wishing it the very best. It was a good day, and I'm glad it was. Because though I didn't know it then, the new history of the world probably started at the end of it.
I got there late afternoon, and asked around for Philip. Someone pointed me in the right direction, to a house just off campus. I found the building and tramped up the stairs, wondering whether I shouldn't maybe have called ahead.
Eventually I found his door. I knocked, and after a few moments some man I didn't recognize opened it. It took me a couple of long seconds to work out it was Philip. He'd grown a beard. I decided not to hold it against him just yet, and we hugged like, well, like what we Were. Two best friends, seeing each other after what suddenly seemed like far too long.
‘Major bonding,’ drawled a female voice. A head slipped into view from round the door, with wild brown hair and big green eyes. That was the first time I saw Rebecca.
Four hours later we were in a bar somewhere. I'd met Rebecca properly, and realized she was special. In fact, it's probably a good thing that they'd met six months before, and that she was so evidently in love with Philip. Had we met her at the same time, she could have been the first thing we'd ever fallen out over. She was beautiful, in a strange and quirky way that always made me think of forests; and she was clever, in that particularly appealing fashion which meant she wasn't always trying to prove it and was happy for other people to be right some of the time. She moved like a cat on a sleepy afternoon, but her eyes were always alive – even when they couldn't co-operate with each other enough to allow her to accurately judge the distance to her glass. She was my best friend's girl, she was a good one, and I was very happy for him.
Rebecca was at the School of Medical Science. Nanotech was just coming off big around then, and it looked like she was going to catch the wave and go with it. In fact, when the two of them talked about their work, it made me wish I hadn't taken the year off. Things were happening for them. They had a direction. All I had was goodwill towards the world, and the belief that it loved me too. For the first time I had that terrible sensation that life is leaving you behind and you'll never catch up again; that if you don't match your speed to the train and jump on you'll be forever left standing in the station.
At 1 a.m. we were still going strong. Philip lurched in the general direction of the bar to get us some more beer, navigating the treacherously level floor like a man using stilts for the first time.
‘Why don't you come here?’ Rebecca said suddenly. I turned to her, and she shrugged. ‘Philip misses you, I don't think you're too much of an asshole, and what else are you going to do?’
I looked down at the table for a moment, thinking it over. Immediately it sounded like a good idea. But on the other hand, what would I do? And could I handle being a third wheel, instead of half a bicycle? I asked the first question first.
‘We've got plans,’ Rebecca replied. ‘Stuff we want to do. You could come in with us. I know Philip would want you to. He always says you're the cleverest guy he's ever met.’
I glanced across at Philip, who was conversing affably with the barman. We'd decided that to save energy we should start buying drinks two at a time, and Philip appeared to be explaining this plan. As I watched, the barman laughed. Philip was like that. He could get on with absolutely anyone.
‘And you're sure I'm not too much of an asshole?’
Deadpan: ‘Nothing that I won't be able to kick out of you.’
And that's how I ended up applying for, and getting, a place on Jacksonville's nanotech program. When Philip got back to the table I wondered aloud whether I should come up to college, and his reaction was big enough to seal the decision there and then. It was him who suggested I go nanotech, and him who explained their plan.
For years people had been trying to crack the nanotech nut. Building tiny biological ‘machines’, some of them little bigger than