Annie Anders

Miss Brownie laid out two of her chintz dresses, and one of her cotton ones, on the bed in her bedroom upstairs. A big prom was coming up today, and she knew she had to look really pretty for her boyfriend Justin, who was, at that moment, leaning up against the white picket fence outside the house, of course all the time thinking about Miss Brownie. Meanwhile, Lady Jane hopped up the stairs inside to go into Miss Brownie's bedroom.

"Look at all those nice dresses!" she said.

Miss Brownie turned and said: "Which one do like best?"

Lady Jane stared at each dress in turn. "I like the plain cotton one. Put it on!"

Miss Brownie pulled off her shorts and t-shirt to become naked. She pulled the dress over her head and adjusted it at her feet. She looked in her mirror and saw a beautiful girl.

"That will look good at the prom," said Lady Jane. "Let us go outside and have some tea. No, let us trade things with each other first."

"That sounds good," said Miss Brownie.

They went downstairs and outside, sometimes bumping into each other in their frantic hurry.

At a table outside the house Miss Brownie put a big bead down. "What is for trade?"

Lady Jane put a poodle on the table. "How is this?"

"Great! Trade!"

Miss Brownie took the poodle, and Lady Jane took the bead.

"Okay, so, we've got to have the prom. I can make it happen in the bathtub. I'll tape strings up around on the edges, and make a sign for prom. Can I do that?"

Annie put down her Miss Brownie and Lady Jane dolls and went downstairs, where she found her mother, Mrs. Anders, in the kitchen clanging together eggs and sugar into a thick mix for a lemon meringue pie. Both mother and daughter had jet-black hair; the elder's was tied back in a tail while the latter's was all over the place.

Annie asked: "Can I use the bathtub for a bit? I want to have a prom for my dolls, and I need a dance-floor."

Mrs. Anders looked up at the clock of the stove. "For an hour? How'd that be?"

"That'd be enough. I don't have songs for more."

"Fine. Clean up after, though."

"I will."

Annie proceeded into the crafts room off the dining room, where her brother was lying on the settee with a copy of Popular Mechanics. He said: "Hey, kid, what's up?"

"I'm going to give my dolls a prom."

Her brother snorted: "Which one's going home pregnant?"

Annie didn't have an answer so she didn't answer. Instead she opened a drawer and got out a bit of blue paper, a marker, tape, and some string. "It'll be happening in the bathtub, so if you got to go, please do it now."

The brother said: "Thanks for the warning, but I think I'm okay for now."

Annie went back to the hallway just in time to see the front door burst open as her father charged, calling: "The damn garage door's stuck again!"

The clanging stopped and his wife came into the hallway to say: "Again?"

"Yes, again." He looked down and smiled. "Hi, Annie! Look, I need some muscle outside, to get the wheels back in their groove. Groovy, si? Care to give me your magnificent aid?"

Annie said: "Sure, Dad!" She put the marker and paper and stuff down on the third step from the bottom and followed her father out into the late summer afternoon. Annie looked down the street at suburban houses and cars but saw nothing interesting, not even a mangy cat.

The garage door was only half-open, at a diagonal that should have been either horizontal or vertical. Her father demonstrated, by attempting to, and failing to, raise or lower it. He asked: "Does school start next week or the week after?"

"The week after."

"Ah. Okay, here, little girl." Her grabbed her hands and put them on the bottom of the door. "When I say go, lift your feet so your whole weight is on it."

She saw this to be a serious business, and called: "Roger."

Her father ducked into the garage and clanged out a chisel from a toolbox and got onto a wooden chair. He reached up and got the chisel in position, then said: "Okay, lift your feet!"

Annie lifted up her feet and hung. Metal scraped on rust, and SNAP!

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Her forehead hurt and her father's face was looking down at hers. "Annie? Annie!"

She murmured something and rubbed her head.

"Geez, it just gave way all of a sudden. Are you okay?"

She sat up and shook her head. The hurt was going away. "I'm okay," she said queasily. "I hit my head."

Mother was at the door. "What's happened, Bob?"

"It's nothing, she hit her head on the ... I don't know, the door, or the driveway."

"Is she bleeding?"

"No, nothing. You're okay, right?"

Though Annie's head hurt, she knew she was otherwise okay. "Just a little shooken up, that's all. Let me...."

She stood up and brushed off her pants and blouse. "See? It's okay, I'm fine."

She took a step, and was steady. Her parents were paying close attention. Annie pushed at her mother's legs to get inside into the hallway.

("It just gave way.")

("You should have been more careful.")

("It was an accident.")

Annie looked at the stairs and remembered she was in the middle of doing something that involved a dance upstairs and that the things on the stairs were for that. She gathered up the paper and so on. She looked back at her parents and asked: "Can I go on with ... what I was doing?"

"You're sure you're okay?"

"Yes, fine. I'm little, so my head didn't fall far," a line that became anecdotal in the family's future lore.

"Okay," her mother said. "Then get on with it," she said. "The prom awaits!"

Annie went up the stairs and into her room with the stationery stuff. There were a couple pieces of stitched-together cloth and nylon she'd didn't know anything about on her bed and she shoved it aside to sit down and feel her head; she felt a good-sized bump there. Smacked by the green metal door of her own house's garage.

She must've been hit harder than she'd thought, because she had an idea in her head there was a prom about to happen in the upper floor of her house, when and where of course that couldn't be the case. There was no room for such a thing. Three bedrooms and a small living room, no room at all for anything like a big dance. She wondered where she'd gotten the idea from. Someone must've been lying to her.

Her eye was attracted by an elaborate cardboard box, open on one side. Inside the box was a horizontal piece of cardboard that effectively cut the interior into two, and a couple vertical pieces to the top and bottom made four chambers in all. Each chamber had more things made of cardboard inside them, plus little bits of coloured plastic here and there. In one of the chambers there was a kind of a thing made of pink plastic with cloth all over it and a patch of brown hair sticking out one end. Annie noticed there was another thing of pink plastic and cloth beside the box, one with yellow hair sticking out. She picked the latter up and looked at it from all sides. Some little indents were on one side of it. She ran her finger across the grooves, wondering what they meant.

 

Annie couldn't see any of the faces of the audience while she stood on the stage in the backroom of a tavern in the big city not too terribly far from her childhood home, rhyming off her poetic lines about nature and what it really meant to her and, by extension, to everyone. The taverners, mostly her university-age peers and partially from the university she attended, sounded more attentive than they had seemed during the readings of the three previous rhapsodists--or perhaps she only perceived it to be so, seeing as she had been in the thick of them, the audience, during the last hour, and thus had been subjected more proximately to the idle clatter of glasses, ashtrays, sneers, and sotto voce sexual propositions. The words left her lips with the lightness she was accustomed to, like lines merely discovered scrawled into the granite of a billion years.

She concluded by saying: "Thank you," and the applause was warm, like they had really understood her. Maybe someone out there had gotten it--but she really doubted it; no-one could possibly understand by viewing the top of an iceberg the shape of the mass below the water's surface. In any case, it was a performance, and she was better known after it than before.

She returned to the table and Greg patted her on the back as if he knew that a kiss would have been inappropriate with so many eyes on her. She took up the pilsner glass and drained it dry. She then said: "I think that went well." She could once again see the people around her: city people, yes, to whom nature was alien, but no bloodline had ever managed to sideline entirely the white tooth and the red claw.

A woman named Esmerelda Tan then took the stage and started speaking, looking down at some sheets of paper all the time, and no-one in the audience failed but to remark mentally on the difference between this featurette and the last. The sheets of paper Ms Tan seemed reliant upon made all the difference, such was the remark: She should look up more, in the general opinion.

Finally, mercifully, some forty-five minutes later all available contributors to New Areas 47 had had their say and the thoughts of those in the close quarters of the beer-hall turned to musicians, escape, and drugs. An older woman quite out of place sat down at Annie's table, pulled out a notepad, and quickly said: "Hello I'm from the Mail and I'm reporting on new and exciting voices in poetry."

Annie happened to have a fresh glass in front of her and she drank some before saying: "Voices, huh?" a bit drunk and getting drunker.

"Yes such as yours. I'm just an observer tonight so this isn't an interview though that may come soon. Though I must say I thought your contributions to be the best of all in my opinion."

"How many do you have in your opinion?"

"What?"

Annie shrugged: "Oh, never mind."

The older woman said: "Ah. I'm only here for some fact-checking. Some details in other words. You last name it's A N D E R is that correct?"

Annie said: "Sounds good to me. Sure, why not? Whatever you said, it's good."

"Excellent good. Now I copied down some lines of verse you read up there--"

"--Recited--"

"--Yes recited up there and I want to know if I got them right."

The woman set down in front of Annie a notebook with some squiggly lines set down, more horizontally than vertically. The woman said: "So look them over and make any whatever corrections to what I wrote."

Annie took another drink and pretended to understand that which was before her, if only as a joke. Her glass was nearly empty. What kind of tavern was this? If this was my tavern, I'd never let a girl's glass get so low without a refill. She said: "It looks okay as far as I can tell. If you want you can get a copy of the journal or whatever to make sure."

The woman pulled from out of nowhere a copy of New Areas 47. "I have one already thanks. But I don't know if these lines" (here she indicated her notebook) "are the same as these lines" (here she indicated the journal). "I have to be scrupulously accurate you know."

Annie smiled falsely. "I'm sure they're close enough. My amanuensis is highly trained." (Under the table she squeezed Greg's knee.)

"Your aman.... Okay then! Oh, by the way, what are you studying?"

"I'm in molecular biology."

"Goodness! That doesn't sound too artistic to me!"

This was a new one on Annie. She thought for a moment, then: "I can't imagine."

Greg interrupted: "Scientists may actually be better poets than non-scientists. Like, um, Boris Pasternak. Alfred Doblin? Maybe they're more careful about their diction and so on."

Annie blurted: "Yeah, you're more careful about the distinction between that and which if it might end up causing shit to blow up!"

"I see," said the woman. She put New Areas 47 back in her bag along with her notebook. "I wish you all the best."

She left the table.

Annie said: "Where's the waitress?"

"Maybe she's off having a smoke," Greg offered.

"I'm too tired to go to the bar. Ah me." She looked around. "Everyone's going or gone."

"We could head over to my place and listen to some records."

"Naw. Too much work." She got up unsteadily. "I'm going home."

"We should pay the tab though."

She shook her head. "Why bother? I'm not thinking I'm going to be back here anytime soon."

He knew what she meant. "The model is essentially unsustainable."

"What a dumb word, essentially. A space-filler for ... blah-blah-blah-ly."

They got outside clutching the same amount of money as they'd had when they'd entered.

She put her arms around him. "Let's walk. Maybe I like walking."

"It's been my experience that you do."

She laughed. "I'm so glad I got you to imagine things for me!"

 

It was a dark and stormy night. Jake and Gry, already having turned off the highway onto a county road and off the country road to a rural route, turned their wheels onto a new blacktop down a further nine miles before coming to a gate with a speaker-box beside it. Gry (who was driving) stuck her head out in the rain and shouted: "Pfizer calling!"

Receiving no response, she shouted: "Hello! It's rain--"

And that's when the gate swung open inwardly.

She drove them up to a great doorway. Two lackeys with umbrellas rushed to get the pair in from out the wet.

The lackeys took their wet coats and disappeared, possibly for forever.

They looked around the entrance hall. It was very quiet and clinical and small, without a hint of anything approaching flair. Doors led right and left while a double door lay straight in front of them.

"I hear footsteps," said Jake.

"Yes, but coming from where?"

The double doors opened to reveal a slight woman dressed in a white chemist's gown. She came forward and offered her hand. "You're the Pfizer people," she said.

Gry said: "Yes, I'm Doctor Gry Griff, and this is Doctor Jacob Tannholdt."

"Pleased to make your acquaintance. Well, come along with me. Let's go into Boardroom B. It's just down this way."

Into the building they went, down this hall and that, with nothing but a faint electrical hum preceding and following them. The woman took them into a large room where a coffee set was laid out in all its Styrofoam glory.

The three sat down, with the woman facing the pair. The woman unsnapped a satchel to produce a small document folder. "Coffee?"

Jake poured out two cups, one for himself and one for Gry, saying: "Thank you."

The woman looked up. "Don't thank me; it was someone else's doing."

For fifteen minutes the woman outlined her research and her discoveries, with little emotion. She had created and was prepared to manufacture a psychotropic drug that reduced the anxiety inherent in individuals who found themselves incapable of dreaming due to a malfunction of the ventral tegmental area. "The agent, further to the aforementioned dopamine stimulation, also re-routes acetylcholine and its related endorphins from the frontal cortex to the hippocampus, thereby encouraging the phantasmical ideation associated with the so-called REM state. In other words, it allows non-dreamers to dream like normal people."

Gry looked over the charts included with the clinical research. She noted that yes there were some impressive points of association indicative of a success--yet: "Though this is impressive, we at Pfizer have a legal problem in that we know of no such distress-causing condition indexed in any way whatsoever in the DSM-5. Unless you can tie your pharmaceutical to a condition, I can see no way it can be prescribed for anything."

Jake touched her arm. "I think we should keep an open mind here for a moment. Who knows where this kind of stuff could lead?"

The woman smiled. "Yes, that's the spirit! So I've laid out all the theoretical materials here in this room. Rather dry material, I know."

Jake interrupted: "Oh no it's all so fascinating! I can imagine hundreds if not thousands of applications!"

Gry leaned forward. "You say you've got something to show, now that you've told?"

The woman laughed lightly. "Oh yes! You see that door over there?"

Jake and Gry turned their heads and saw, for what they thought was the first time, a door.

"We've got some of our prize subjects we can introduce to you. They're expecting us. Heavens!"

A loud boom of thunder shook the room.

"It is a dark and stormy night out there!"

She got up from the table and gestured to the Pfizer pair to follow. The door opened onto a hallway that reminded both of their clinical research days. All the lighting was fluorescent and sickly green, the floor was cheap tile scrubbed nearly translucent by strong chemistry, and the walls had metal rails running alongside between evenly-spaced doors all closed. The hall looked like it went on forever into the distance. Plus they could hear a new set of noises too ambiguous to not unsettle the hairs on the backs of their necks.

The woman said: "I've arranged for two of our star participants to enjoy a meal for us. Plus we'll be having some entertainment." She opened a door to reveal a fine dining room made up in mid-century modern. At a pine table sat a man wearing a wool cardigan and slacks and a woman in a sleeveless blouse and slender pants. They both jumped up from the table, shouting: "Annie! Annie!"

"Oh, friends. I've brought a couple of my fellow chemists here to meet you."

The man came forward to shake hands with Gry and Jake. "Put 'er there!"

The woman said: "Stop it, Rob. You're scaring them!"

Gry asked Annie: "So, is this a folie à deux?"

Annie replied: "Not quite that. I'm sure you'll catch on soon enough." She turned to the participants. "Are we having the lobster bisque to start?"

"Laura's been working all afternoon on it, by golly!"

Gry managed to turn to Jake to say: "This is making me feel a bit sick."

"There's something very wrong here," was his reply.

Annie shouted at the deux: "Cool it down now! Be Stan Kenton."

"Be Stan Kenton. Be Stan Kenton." The Rob and the Laura smoothly sat down, crossed their legs, and lit up slender cigarettes.

Gry sat down on the couch and started to cry. "I've done a terrible thing."

Jake sat beside her and put his arm around her. "It's not your fault, darling. If it wasn't for this weather...."

Metal scraped on rust, and SNAP!

-   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jake regained consciousness first. His back hurt. Why was he sleeping sitting up? He was in a chair, obviously. He got use of his eyes and saw he was in a room--Boardroom B. He looked over at Gry, whose eyes were opening. She turned her head and said: "I had such a strange dream."

"About Rob and Laura Petrie?"

Before Gry could reply, a woman said, "Enough games. I put my pharmaceutical concoction into your coffee. You fabulated or imagined or dreamed all of it. You say there was a sitcom involved? I kind of remember television. For me, these days, it's just noise."

Gry shook out her webs and said: "Sorry. That was all my imagination?"

"You never left this room."

"The recovery seems speedy," said Jake. "There may be some applications for it."

Gry: "Maybe not as an approved drug, but something grey-market...."

The woman went to the only door in the room and told her guests: "I think you've seen enough. You've understood what I've done here. So," she shrugged: "It's documented. No-one's here but us. I've sent my servants home."

Woozily Gry and Jake got out of their chairs and followed the woman out of the room and down hallways to the entranceway.

Jake said: "Thanks for the demonstration. It was quite amazing."

The woman said: "Perhaps it was. But it was a failure. The drug is a failure." She looked out into the rain. "But we will get it right one day. We'll get it as right as rain."

 

 

Anne was sitting in her dining room alone when the metal cooking thing came walking in. It made its daily noise of buzzes and plops while Anne stared at it blankly but carefully, gauging, as she did so, what amount of her mind had left her forever overnight, and finally nodded. The metal cooking thing walked out of the room after buzzing and pressing a roundness on the wall. A bright square of squealing lights came on. Anne stared at it to feel cut off and to not understand. She couldn't imagine what had brought her there but she knew she had been there for some time. Very faint impulses seemed to be in her head battering against some thick wall. If only she knew how everything had happened she could know how to ... what? She didn't know. The thing walked in with a tray and set it down and fiddled with it. There was a piece of meat, a beefsteak, and carrots and potatoes. Anne picked up the fork as the thing stood immobile but seemingly turned to the bright square. Anne ate slowly with all attention as the buzzing from the bright square continued loudly. Whatever the thing was doing, it was beyond her. She finished eating, the thing buzzed and plopped, and it took away the tray. Anne stood up and walked over to one of the windows that looked out upon a broad expanse of lawn and the lake beyond. The other metal thing was out there, messing around with the flower beds, digging in dirt. Anne noticed the day, that it was a sunny day, it was a sunny day in spring. She saw there was a chair outside and she knew the chair and it was time to get reacquainted with the chair. She opened the white door with the glass panels and stepped outside. The weather was as nice as it had looked. Birds sounded everywhere. She sat down and looked out at the lake. A couple boats were out there, out in the distance. Anne had signed onto the package deal her company had brokered: a nice two-year sabbatical, for the senior member emeritus of the firm, the revolutionary who had changed big psychotropic forever, and so on, in recognition of, she couldn't remember the rest. For an hour she stared at the middle distance, remembering what she could about her life, marking the moments she could hazily recall, and working some numbers proving she knew more dead people than living. But maybe there was something other than the numbers that mattered. Qualification. But even with, the past was much better, though hard to see, harder to see than the three boats out on the lake. I am tired and sleepy. I can get up, go back inside, go back to bed. I don't think I have anything to do today. I haven't seen anyone for at least two days. I'm getting up.

She got out of the chair she was sitting in, turned towards the white door, and caught her right foot on the chair. Falling, she put out her hands, but that was not enough to save her from the sharp edge of the steel deck table that she hit right on the

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Was it consciousness she lost, or did consciousness lose her? She rolled onto her back and her hand went up to her head, to where she'd struck it. For a few minutes she simply opened and closed her mouth like she was a fish, trying to taste blood but not tasting anything at all. A buzz got through her ears, past the ringing, and then she made out that someone was speaking to her, saying: "Oh, Miss Anders! Such a fall you have taken! Can you hear me? Are you all right?"

Annie got her eyes open and to focus, and she was looking straight up, up into the face of Lady Jane. Lady Jane!

"Oh, Lady Jane! It's you! What happened to me?"

Lady Jane put her hand on Annie's forehead. "Do you think you are okay? Should I get a doctor?"

"I don't think that's necessary. But please, don't help me get up, at least not yet. I'm winded, that's all."

She heard the white door open and a familiar voice say: "What has happened?"

Lady Jane said: "The madame has had a fall. She says she is okay."

Anne looked at the new face. Miss Brownie. Of all people! She said: "How wonderful to see you both here. It's been quite some time. Where have you been?"

Miss Brownie said: "Should we call an ambulance?"

Lady Jane said: "I believe we should get her inside before we assess."

Anne rolled over and struggled to her feet. She was still shaky. She put her hand to her head. A little bump was there. She looked at her hand and her hand was clean. "I'm okay, girls. It was just a bit of a shock, a bit of a fall." This was to reassure the girls, but to her mind there had been a psychological change. Everything seemed a bit brighter somehow. "Yes, help me inside."

The girls took her, arm by arm, and slowly moved her to the door. Miss Brownie opened it and together they brought Annie indoors. Annie heard a man and a woman in there, having an argument about some third person, a female person apparently. She looked, and saw that these two people were the inhabitants of the bright square. It was a moving picture-show. She remembered hearing about things like that--lost like a stone beneath the mountain of things she had never been able to really understand.

Lady Jane said: "Sit down here, madam. We have a medical specialist on staff, and it will attend to you in five to ten minutes." Lady Jane and Miss Brownie exchanged silent nods before the former left the room.

"How are you feeling now?" asked Miss Brownie.

"I'm fine," Anne said. "I've got my senses back."

"That is good, madam."

"I should be getting back to work soon." She nearly asked what month it was. "There are more directions I want to take the company in. I can see a whole pile of possibilities."

"Certainly. After the specialist."

"I can probably read my poems."

"Of course."

"I have to call my brother."

"I do not know you have a brother."

A man in a blue jacket was on the bright square, and he was trying to sell Anne some pills.