by K. Chess
When the mother asked that—who is in charge here—they should have known she was going to make a scene. But the attacks were so recent, so shocking, the implications so unclear. They’d only been evacuating people for six hours. Not knowing what it meant, I hadn’t even called my son to tell him goodbye. The process wasn’t smooth, the stakes not quite evident. Not to the soldiers manning the checkpoint and providing perimeter support. Not to the unchosen people outside the ropes on the graves. Not to us—strangers waiting in a line beyond the second checkpoint, knowing that in a minute the buzzer would buzz to signify that we must be ready to move, the scientists would power up their machines, the mirage we’d been warned about but which none of us could quite imagine yet would hang in the air, and the tone would buzz a second time indicating that we must step forward, all together.
None of us anticipated trouble from the mother. We wondered which end of the line she would join, who would take her hand and how her palm would feel—soft or callused, damp or papery dry. We wondered who would watch her boys as she left, who would help the man with her baby. One of the guards, we decided. Perhaps one of the young women in the green canvas deployment uniform would put aside her automated-fire gun.
Then, the mother called him forward, that man who’d followed her. “This is my husband,” she said in a resonant voice that carried. “This is my love. But I am the mother of his children—they came from me and only I know how to look after them. They cannot do without me. Let him go in my place. Let me stay.”
You were supposed to decline before you got to the cemetery, so they could pick someone else.
An officer stepped forward, a sub-commander, not the highest guy there. “Come with me,” he said. “We’ll talk about it outside.” And instead of ushering her through the second checkpoint—that propitious checkpoint for which the lottery authorized her—the sub-commander walked her back the wrong way, through the first checkpoint.
That was her death, right there. But she didn’t know it yet.
She looked around at the crowd, and the baby looked around at the crowd too. We let out a sigh. “I’m sorry,” the sub-commander said to her. “You’ve had it explained to you already. It’s nontransferable.”
“The lottery wasn’t done fairly,” the mother said. “He never had a chance!” By the fence, her husband lowered his head, as if he were embarrassed. He rubbed his hand against the close-cut head of one of his sons.
“I’m sorry,” the sub-commander said again. He gave a signal, and two of the younger guards left their posts and came to stand behind him. “Rules are rules, ma’am.”
“What does it matter to you?” she asked. “You need one hundred. Why does it matter who?”
I’ve talked to other UDPs from later lots. The crowds grew until they sealed off Calvary, all 365 acres of it, permitting no one to watch anymore. But this family—this man and woman, these boys and baby—they all stayed. They watched us depart.
Once the Gate achieved full power, I couldn’t see them anymore. I only had eyes for the gap, the blue hole. I couldn’t see them when I stepped into it, into pearlescent haze like an oil slick suspended in the air, when I stepped from one snowy day and into another. But I knew they were in the crowd, watching the ninety-nine of us leave them behind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hel woke the next day thinking she was all right, but as soon as she sat up, her headache came pouring out of some hiding place like a python dropping coil after exploratory coil from a tree. The clock by the side of the bed said 13:00, which meant it was really noon—she’d forgotten to adjust it for daylight savings time a week or so ago.
Next to her in bed, Vikram slept, his face relaxed with mouth slightly open, his hands folded together and tucked under his cheek in praying position. He looked peaceful. She forced herself to sit. A sweating glass of water sat on the windowsill next to three capsules of acetaminophen. She vaguely remembered filling the glass the night before and counting out the medicine. Now, she thanked her drunk self as she downed the water and pills in one gulp.
If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?
The bedroom door creaked behind her. She set about making coffee and finding something she could stand to eat without vomming. She jammed two slices of bread into the weird vertical slots on the toaster, got the coffee machine going, and sat down on the high chair at the small table in the kitchen–living room area of the apartment to wait. Through the pain of the headache, she felt herself filled with an uncommon sense of direction, an unfamiliar purposefulness.
She was finally in charge now—no one else. She had to take action to keep it that way.
First, she’d need the two playing cards, which she’d left in her pants pocket. She snuck back to the bedroom as quietly as she could and found the right pair of jeans crumpled on the floor of the closet. As she eased the door closed again, Vikram murmured something, moving his hands and burrowing his face into the pillow, but he didn’t wake. What he said was incomprehensible to her, words in Bengali—his first language, but one she rarely heard him speak. Perhaps, if things were different, she would have had to wait through mystifying Saturday evening phone calls home, guessing by the expressiveness of his tone what he was saying. Perhaps he would have taken Hel home to New Jersey and his mother or sisters would have said disapproving things about her in Bengali and Vikram would have answered back—sharply, perhaps, or gently—and Hel would have sat there, fuming at her inability to understand what was going on, never knowing how good they had it.
Back in the kitchen, the toaster snapped up, sending one piece of toast skidding across the counter and onto the unswept floor. She scooped it into the trash and crammed the other piece into her mouth, then took out an aluminum mixing bowl and placed both found playing cards inside. She felt she’d dreamed it all up, that queen, but there she was, looking straight at her with her black eyes, impolitely direct in a way no Truth deck figure ever dared. Hel lit two matches, tossed them into the bowl.
There.
While the cards smoldered, she sat back down, chewing her toast, feeling not particularly mystical. It was more like cleaning house. She never spent much time missing her sister, but for the first time in years, she thought that if she could link to Seff right now, talk to her on the screen, she’d do it. Oh well. To the bowl, she added more lit matches and a crumpled page from an old takeout menu. The stench of burning plastic filled the room, but it took a few more menus to get the cards to really catch, the edges finally curling, the face of the queen and the eight little hearts turning brown and then black, leaving behind indistinguishable ashes. This was good. It felt good, healthy. Like fertilizing a field by plowing under a cover crop.
The question: how to proceed with Donaldson. How would the other woman interpret Hel’s appearance outside her home? Should Hel ask Donaldson again for what she wanted, or should she attempt to take it by force? What was the best way to approach her now?
Truth. She knew, of course, that cartomancy was just storytelling, not real magic, that it all came from her. The Rider-Waite look-alike Tarot Vikram gave her as a gift a year ago felt almost right—the exact expressions of the figures and the details were unfamiliar, but their postures and positions and actions were still those of old friends. But she’d never tried to use it to foretell.
She found that knockoff deck in the jumbled kitchen junk drawer and took it back to the living room. She did not lay out cards for a proper reading. She wasn’t ready yet. Instead, she reclined on the couch with the deck in its still new-looking box resting on her chest, hands crossed over it, and concentrated on her question. As she did so, she remembered her last hours with her personal ordinator, when she knew there was nothing she could do to keep it from dying.
Initially, they’d confiscated all UDP possessions in the cemetery, but a week or so into Debrief, her shoulder bag reappeared in the dorms along with most of her lotmates’ things, its contents searched through but unmolested. After that, she kept the ordin
ator always powered off and hidden under the pillow in her bunk, but she knew that wouldn’t preserve it. No matter what she did, the energy cell would eventually lose its charge and fade, and once it was gone, her files would be lost, like treasures locked in a safe with no combination. One day, in a last-ditch attempt to preserve what was most important to her, she borrowed a phone equipped with a camera from the shift commander. Other UDPs left her alone, watching TV on the opposite end of the common room while she sat cross-legged on a folding chair, ordinator on the table before her. She slid the display and the command unit out of their case for what she knew would probably be the last time, and fit them together.
She worked as methodically, as desperately, as a diver swimming for the surface with a limited tank of air; panic would not help her cause. One by one, she accessed the images she’d stored on the device over the years, photographing the screen whenever she came upon one she hoped to save. There were too many. Fleeting moments rolled past, and Hel pressed the camera-phone button over and over again to preserve each digital simulacrum digitally. She did not stop to think about what she was doing: taking pictures of pictures, imposing one new remove, an additional step away from the sensory experience. The files on the ordinator presented themselves chronologically, earliest first, but as she moved through worthless memories of her post–Alt Service travels and early years of medical training, she stopped, skipped ahead—years ahead—to the birth of her son. Agitated but unsentimental, Hel revisited Jonas’s infancy, toddlerhood, and young childhood. (Now, she had printouts of some of those secondhand pictures—that face she loved at various ages and in various places, always framed by the edge of the ordinator’s screen. She kept these pictures in an album she couldn’t bear to look at. How apt that dying was also the word used to describe what happened to a manmade device that could no longer be powered.)
Breathe, she’d told herself, that day in the dorm. She was a diver, swimming. She was saving her own life. No. Breathe deeper—from the diaphragm. Blood, stop racing. Heart, stop throbbing so. Clinically, she’d known what a panic attack was, but had never experienced one. Breathe.
That feeling. Why was it back now?
She lay on the couch and remembered, years earlier, lying on another couch on some quiet afternoon with her arms around her son—this was when he was three or four, when she and Raym were still together—how warm and heavy Jonas had felt in her arms and how vehemently, how distinctly his heart had beaten.
The heart is a very strong muscle; it cannot burst.
It was in the early days of subway riding that Vikram handed her this deck, still in a paper bag from the New Age gift shop where he bought it, and asked her how, in the light of all that had happened, she could bring herself to believe in preordained purpose.
She’d turned her mind from her lost son. She’d taken Vikram’s hand, large and clammy. “We’re here. How can we not?”
Now, she withdrew the deck from the box and let the cards move in her hands, pips, faces, and trumps arranging themselves in the order they wanted to rest. On the coffee table, she laid one card before her. In the voice of that long-ago girl at the party: This card is you.
Then, the other cards, the words in their order, an incantation. This is your disguise. This is your past; this, your future. This card is above you. This is below you. Your house. Your lover. She turned the cards over quickly, one after another, their symbolic possibilities registering only at the subconscious level she’d developed through long practice.
Your riddle. Here, she paused. Strength, a trump card depicting a woman prying open the jaws of a lion. (It was a tiger, Hel recalled, in the Truth deck.) What did that mean? Courage, patience, resolve, control. In her case, a failure of these things. A failure, so far, to get what she wanted through peaceful means.
She laid out the last card, your answer.
The Three of Pentacles. Pentacles were the same as Loaves, the suit that represented the earth element. In the Three, a young apprentice in an apron stood on a bench with tools upraised, reaching high to work on the design—three circles—in a cathedral cornice. Older architects crowded around with rolled-up plans. There to advise him, but also praising his work. Assistance, collaboration, teamwork.
Teresa Klay.
“Wes should be out of the shower in just a second,” Ari said. “I just heard him turn the fan off. That means he’s probably standing in there in the steam, drying his beard and admiring himself.”
Vikram sat on a stool in the living room part of the grimy Lower East Side studio while, three feet away, Ari tidied the kitchen. Almost three years of Reintegration Education with Wes, and he’d never seen the man’s apartment or met his fiancé.
“Can’t I help or something?”
“No!” Ari began to toss clean dishes from the drainer into their places in the cabinet. “Seriously, that’s OK.”
Wes came in, still pulling on a shirt. Vikram took in the other tattoos and cutting marks that snaked across his upper body. Wes tugged down the hem, concealing an uncensored lucky swastika just above his hip. “Hey, man. What’s up?” Wes grabbed a handful of mixed silverware from a can next to the sink and began sorting it into a drawer, forks with forks and knives with knives.
“I got some news from Dwayne and wanted to ask your opinion. Maybe we could take a walk, when you’re done with that?” The apartment felt as crowded as his own head today—concern for Hel vying with Dwayne’s proposal.
“Sure thing.” Wes dropped a kiss on Ari’s cheek. Then he and Vikram descended the narrow stairs to the street. The day was unseasonably warm for November, the late afternoon sun shining right into their eyes as they walked toward the avenue. “So, what do you want?”
“Dwayne says he wants to let me use the house.”
You and your girl. For your museum. That was how Dwayne put it, on the phone. Then, as if trying to undercut his own generosity as much as possible: No one’s trying to buy in this neighborhood, anyway. I’ve had it on the market for weeks and haven’t even gotten other calls.
“He wants to draw up a legal document giving me the lease for some token amount every month. All I’d need to do is help finish the renovation and cover the property taxes.”
“He told you?” Wes asked. “That’s terrific, man!”
“Wait, you knew he was thinking about this?”
“Yeah. But that’s great news, right? This means you can pull together the exhibit thing!”
“Yeah, well, it’s going to take a lot of money, though, won’t it? The living room ceiling looks like it’s about to cave in, plus there’s all those scary water stains on the back of the house. And the upstairs has still got old Mrs. Defoe stuff packed in to the rafters—”
“Whoa! Calm down! We just have to finish cleaning the place up and then we’ll figure out a way to pay for incidentals. We can try one of those—what do they call them? Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding? Have you heard of that? Get online, ask our friends and family to throw in ten bucks, and we’ll be in business in no time.”
“None of us UDPs have any friends or family,” Vikram pointed out. “They’re all dead.” He saw the look on Wes’s face. “Sorry—sorry.”
“Even so, we can take care of a lot ourselves, don’t you think? I can do basic electrician work—I’m not a guild member or whatever you need to be in this world, but no one’s going to check, right?—and Ari’s sister is really handy. Dwayne probably knows some other people who can help.”
“He obviously doesn’t. He’s been relying on two aliens with nothing better to do to help him under the table, remember.”
“OK, fine. But we’ll ask around. And anything we can’t figure out ourselves, we can probably watch videos of on the internet. We can learn how to hang drywall together; it’ll be fun. And the best part is, we don’t have to worry about preserving anything! You know what I mean? No need to bend over backward to save the original woodwork or whatever. Face it—Sleight never touched it, anyway.”
The
thought depressed Vikram, though he had to acknowledge its truth.
The world could still end. This one, this world, his miraculous backup. Carbon dioxide pollution was worse here and every year warmer than the last. It was possible that Vikram and the others had avoided dying in a nuclear conflict only to be drowned by a rising sea.
He’d seen a picture exhibit of identical twins adopted out as children to separate families. In some cases, the pairs were unrecognizable as siblings. One twin might be wrinkled and stooped from decades of fieldwork, while his brother had soft hands and expensive clothes. One sister healthy, the other with H-scarred arms and a thousand-yard stare. Was this the right analogy for his world and this one, starting the same and hurtling off to two wholly different fates?
But it wasn’t all choice. They shared their genes.
Two million years ago, a lava field under Yosemite eighty kilometers long and twenty wide caused an eruption that brought on an ice age and winnowed the human population down to perhaps thousands. Vikram had read that the groundwork was laid already for another such explosion. If—when—it happened, he would know that a mirror-image disaster was happening across the impenetrable universal divide. The same plates and chemicals, the same gases and particles. The same eruption wreaking similar havoc on an already ruined, unreachable world. Or a meteor could hit Earth, a meteor on a path determined through all of cosmic time. The two universes like estranged brothers crumpling in tandem, each man clutching at his chest, felled by a shared tendency. It could happen that way to the whole world.