Jim and the Flims by Rudy Rucker Page B

mysterious Flimsy.
    But—was I really forming these impressions myself? Or was Weena somehow putting them into my mind? Feeling myself under siege, I turned away from the lamp and glanced out the window. And now I seemed to see a demonic blue baboon, with his hairless skin rippling like the surface of a windblown—
    â€œWhat!?!” I cried, sitting bolt upright. The world snapped back to being Santa Cruz on a mid-summer day. “Did you see that, that—monster?” My heart was pounding like it would jump out of my chest. “Is it real?”
    â€œThat’s the self-image of the yuel I was talking about,” said Weena. “He’s teeping us, to some small extent.”
    â€œIs he coming here?”
    â€œHe’s unlikely to attack unless cornered. For now he’s occupied beneath the Santa Cruz pier. As you know, he’s presently wearing the form of a bull sea lion. Yuels can change their bodies quite readily, you see. This particular yuel plucked the sea lion image from your mind behind the green house where I slumbered.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Yes, yes, Jim, you’re a crucial player in a cosmic drama. But before your special delivery mission, you need to recover from your indisposition. I’ll unpack my box now. I brought some food to share. Lentils and rice. My grandmother Praweena taught me to cook.”
    In other words, the yuel was the blue slug that Header the surfer had dropped onto the ground. But I postponed discussing this any further. I was just happy to be living with a woman again. For his part, Droog tolerated Weena, without getting overly close.
    For the next couple of days Weena and I stayed away from touchy conversation topics. In the mornings, she went in to work the day shift at Mahalo Gelato—she helped to make the ice cream as well as selling it in the afternoons. She got her pay every day, and she’d immediately spend it on clothes from the surf and skate shops downtown. She was fascinated by the Santa Cruz street fashions.
    While she worked and shopped, I passed my time on my own. I stayed away from the pier and I didn’t try swaying the colors again. I didn’t want to face any yuels without Weena around.
    I was finding it hard to settle down. Those sprinkles—or my seizures—had screwed up my ability to kill time. In the mornings I’d scan through my old SF paperbacks and pop science books, looking for something to read. And then I’d cruise the neighborhood.
    Walking around with Droog, I’d look for people to chat with. Not that I was so good at chatting just now. Even with old friends, I’d freeze up after a few pleasantries, with the muscles of my cheeks bending my mouth into a fake smile. I wanted to talk about the inevitability of death and about whether Flimsy was real—but there was no way I could get those kinds of conversations going, especially with my friends wondering if my trip to the hospital meant that I’d lost my marbles.
    On the second day that I was home, I tried to repeat the complicated path I’d taken to Yucca Street and the crumbling green house that day—but I didn’t seem able to get all the turns right.
    Home alone in my house, I noticed that smells had begun to seem overly intense—I’m talking about the odors of drains, garbage, or ordinary food. The meaty, oily scent of the skin fragments in the electric razor became so disgusting to me that I only shaved every few days. Most of the time I had a bum’s dark stubble.
    Weena didn’t mind if I shaved. She seemed to have no preconceptions about how people should look or behave. In the evenings she’d wear her latest new clothes. We’d drink together, play the radio, and sometimes I’d tell her about what was going on inside my head.
    â€œI feel like my mind is a giant warehouse where an earthquake knocked everything off the racks,” I told her one evening as I fondled