After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  Cessini, standing alone in the bathroom, brushed his teeth with dry baking soda, and spit.

  He adjusted his bearing in the dark of his room. His pupils swelled and moonlight broke through his vertical blinds. He felt his way toward his bed. A small shadow formed along the edge of the water pond in the glass tank on his shelf.

  He clicked on the stem of his penlight with his thumb and shined a local moon spot of light. His mangrove rivulus lay on its side in the sand, a fin angled up into the air. Its eyes stared long, but still moved and saw him. Its mouth opened and closed in shallow gasps that became thinner and further between.

  Cessini lifted a small oral syringe from the shelf, and with the top removed from the glass tank, reached in past both elbows. He drew up two teaspoons of water into the syringe from the pool at the base of the log and dribbled a few drops onto the back of his fish. It seemed to look his way, its breath seemed to relax, and as it aged in its final wetted moments on its shore, it somehow seemed to be happier in the company of water after all.

  Cessini left his little creature to its own silent peace and sat down on the edge of his bed. He mourned a moment that would soon come for his friend. Their time together dripped away as the mantle-breath of his bellows lamp counted down by threes. In the quiet, he heard Meg fall to weeping in her bed next door through the wall. What he overheard must have been true. Maybe she was the more pained of them all. He lowered his penlight away from the tank and returned his rivulus to its shadow.

  He pulled his cover up to his chin in the absence of breath, rested his temple to his pillow, and let the weight of his head sink in. If anything good had come of that fair, it was that he knew that Meg, in her silence, was more like him than he had ever believed. They were different, but equals. And though muffled by a wall, he could still hear her cry. What pain worse than no heart could Robin have possibly sworn away in her oath to a doctor named Luegner?

  Five years before at Cessini and Meg’s first fair together, Meg had taken his elbow and walked him away from his tears. The shadows of younger memories shifted across his mind as he heard her weep herself to sleep, then fall deeper into the night’s silence. If he breathed his last breath, he would tell her the truth. He had heard. And she didn’t have to be alone anymore. He could take care of her, too, and with that, he knew, it was time for him to grow up.

  ELEVEN

  SHE WAS HERSELF

  A BLUE, SETTLED haze made visibility poor as Cessini’s nighttime victor, Ceeborn, came into focus and searched out over a darkened, wet expanse below him. He was stronger, more determined; braver, not at all fearful of the water rushing beneath the platform of the gondola he was riding. Waves covered by a membranous skin rushed by below as he traversed a cavernous tank. The gondola’s platform was hung by fibrous tendons that spanned the inside of the tank from one fleshy wall to another. He grasped the frame of the platform in his fists and leaned his body farther out over the waves. Light from the gondola’s four corner posts helped with spots through the darkness as he searched for the source of the cry of his name.

  “Ceeborn! Over here, help! Can you help me?” Daniel called as he struggled to stay afloat at the surface.

  Ceeborn let go of the gondola’s post and dove headfirst, breaking through the skin that covered the water.

  The water in the tank was warm and divine, and beneath its quiet turbulence it was serene. But Daniel’s legs treaded high above, so Ceeborn swam up from underwater and surfaced beside him.

  “You’re here,” Daniel said as he grappled for life, dragging them down together, and locked in a struggling embrace. An undertow pulled them into a deeper current, and as Daniel drowned, the contortion of his face was awful, his mouth gasping. Ceeborn let go and watched Daniel’s last glimmer of life drown away into a deeper funnel of water and through the aperture of a valve in the wall.

  Another body floated up at the surface and broke the gondola’s light rays that sliced through the water. It was Meg. Her arms swished at her sides. He raced up. She was scared and alive. Her face was blue from the chill.

  “Ceeme, can you help?” she asked as the waves overtook her face.

  He supported her head and waist in his hands. He tread water as strong as he could. He took in a swallow. “Don’t worry. I got you.”

  The faster he kicked, the more the water’s covering skin churned and entangled his legs. He had to let her go. She could float on her own.

  “I’ll get help,” he said. He swallowed hard and unclenched her grip from holding his arm. He dove back under the water and swam as fast as he could in the blackened morass until the skin wrapped down and entangled his body. He saw a light ahead and—

  Cessini awoke as himself in a sweat, lying on the edge of his bed, wrapped in his sheet. His left leg dangled from kicking. The penlight was dim on the floor where he had dropped it. The pores of his skin were a hot flash of pain.

  He stopped at the kitchen door before entering. Meg, Daniel, and Robin, seated at the kitchen table for breakfast, looked exhausted. Meg had cereal, Daniel coffee. Robin’s plate had only unbuttered toast and, beside it, a prescription bottle of antacid. She didn’t look healthy.

  Daniel reached clear past a white sugar bowl with a teaspoon in its open top. He picked up a shaker of salt, turned it over for a pour into his black mug—then slapped his hand to his forehead. “What the hell did I just do?” His drink was ruined.

  “At least it’s not meconium,” Meg said. She smiled to Cessini as he walked in, treading lightly.

  “Is that really appropriate?” Robin said.

  “I dunno,” Meg said. “In school we just learned every new baby has it.”

  Cessini sat at the table’s fourth seat. He lifted a teaspoon of the white sugar from its bowl, holding the handle between the reddened tips of his fingers. “You’re alive,” he said to Daniel. “It could have been worse.”

  Daniel shoved his salted mug aside, and then drove his elbow hard onto the table, pointing his finger. He had their attention. “Water is like technology. It’s everywhere.”

  “Except water is not always so good,” Cessini said.

  “Yes, water is good. Water flows through sprinkler pipes to protect the servers that run the commerce of the world. Ships transport goods on water. Jets leave contrails of water in the sky. We couldn’t grow food without water. We wouldn’t eat without water. And you, Cessini,” he slammed his palm on the table, “you are the only person on this planet who is reactive to water. Who cannot tolerate water. Who would die from a shower of water. Who still thinks technology and water don’t mix.”

  Cessini stared, he didn’t move a muscle. Daniel saw Robin and Meg’s fright and he stopped. He lowered his hands. “But they do mix. You and I mix. We have to. We have to put the past behind us. And whatever happens from here, I’ll take the heat, but there’re going to be questions to answer.”

  “No way, not me,” Meg said and laughed. She took a big bite of her cereal and dribbled. “I’m not going to jail with you two. Nuh-uh. Count me out of that.”

  Robin threw her toast on her plate. She looked like she was going to be sick. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? I’ve got nothing to hide. No more secrets from me. I’m a new ‘me’ this morning, it feels great, and I like it,” Meg said. She wiped her mouth hard with a crumpled napkin. “The sun is still shining. The world is still spinning. What could possibly go wrong from here?”

  Robin slammed her fist on her plate. “Don’t say that! Just eat your food.”

  “It’s alright, I’m here. Everything’s good. Calm down,” Daniel said.

  “No, everything is not good. Can’t you see? You’re not a bad man, you’re an absent man.” She grabbed hold of Cessini’s forearm on the table. “He reaches out to you, you push him away. It’s conditioning. He’s learning distance. Distance you’ll regret.” She let go of her grip and Cessini’s skin tone returned. “Maybe the fire was a good thing, something to free you from your work so you won’
t have to go on living with the slow burning guilt of losing your son.”

  Daniel was stilled. Beyond the kitchen pass-through window, the living room wall screen flashed soft-white with a gentle ring tone. Dr. Luegner’s static face appeared.

  “Dr. Luegner,” Robin said as she jumped up from the table. “It’s good to see you.”

  The border of the wall screen opened wider on Luegner and settled its frame on a conciliatory, cobalt blue. He was wearing a navy pinstripe suit with a dark blue shirt. He tugged the cuffs from under his sleeves. “Hello, Robin. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. I’m doing fine.”

  Daniel got up from the table, went around the pass-through wall, and stood in front of the living room screen.

  “I did some looking. We’re doing an old mainframe installation,” Luegner said. “Part public, part private.”

  “Where?” Daniel asked.

  Cessini tiptoed the three steps down into the living room. Daniel gestured him forward. They sat together on the couch. Robin stayed at the stairs with Meg held at her front. She draped her arms over Meg’s shoulders in a protective embrace.

  “It’s a research lab,” Luegner said. “You’ll do fine there. Supervise the install and operations. The university bought an old exaflop machine from our refresh cycle.”

  “Fine,” Daniel said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s in a good place. DigiSci is consolidating its data centers. We’re decommissioning an old 220,000-square-foot facility that does nothing but process health records. Apparently, you can do all of that in a couple of modules now. From what I understand, everything at your old facility was live-live duplicated, so again, from what I gather, it’s not the end of the world, yet. Hell, one module of that old dinosaur warehouse you just took offline can fit in nothing but two rows of eight cabinets now.”

  Daniel sank deeper into the couch. He reached his arm around Cessini.

  “Six-month trip,” Luegner said. “Set up the system. Take Robin and Meg. You might even like it there and stay. Until all this blows over.” It sounded like a dream, but the screen’s frame measured through cyan to a sickened viridian. “Looks like you’ll be headed for an improvement,” Luegner said. “Maybe we’ll even put in wet servers, all encased in liquid, so no air cooling is necessary. We could save ninety-seven percent on power alone.”

  “But where we’d be going,” Cessini asked, “what the university bought, is still air-cooled, right? No liquid?”

  “That’s right,” Luegner said. “Two CRACs, one for each side of the room, air cooled. No liquid.”

  “Where is it?” Daniel asked.

  “Hobart,” Luegner said. The screen flipped an image of the earth to the southern hemisphere and a narrower viewfield zoomed down from the sky to a green, mountainous island between Antarctica and the mainland of Australia.

  “Tasmania?” Daniel asked.

  “Maybe half a world but still just a call away,” Luegner said.

  Daniel took his salt with his wounds and agreed. “I appreciate your doing this for me.”

  “I’m not doing it for you,” Luegner said, then looked over to Robin and Meg standing before her. “I’m doing it for them.”

  Robin lowered her shaking hand from her mouth and tightened it onto Meg’s shoulder. Meg reached up and brought it farther down to cover her pounding chest. Robin mouthed to Luegner on the screen, “Thank you.”

  Cessini fixed on Meg’s stark gaze, and then turned back to Luegner on the screen.

  “Okay, then, we’ll take it,” Daniel said before Cessini could speak.

  Then Luegner was gone from the screen with nothing but a glance at Cessini, and a word. “Good.”

  *

  Water vapor condensed in the contrail of the plane that flew west and was visible for hundreds of miles, though nobody floated below on the waves of the Pacific to see. Cessini rested his forehead against the window over the clouds. The greater the distance, he thought, the better. A new life was about to begin.

  He thought he could even escape the tube of the plane and walk his way to the end of the earth on the clouds, if it weren’t for their disguise of water that would scorch his feet as if walking on a hotbed of coals. Then a hole in the clouds and the shimmering vastness of ocean water below was enough to turn him away.

  It seemed so very strange at the time, but the off-axis twist he suffered before the fire had now passed into history, nothing but a single page torn from a book of confusion. He sat and faced due west in the direction they flew. Meg clacked away on her tablet in her middle seat at his left shoulder, while Robin sat beside her, and Daniel was across the aisle. They were safe in their passage, but one thought remained: Robin’s indelible oath of silence that still stoked the tremors in her hand now covered their escape that seemed too easy. She looked over, and as the plane tilted for another southernly bank on their way, he turned away and rested his forehead against the window for its view.

  “What are you thinking about?” Meg asked without looking up from her game.

  “Nothing . . . us . . . the sky,” he said without turning. “I was thinking I could walk across the sky.”

  “What do you mean? What about us? We’re going. That’s that.”

  “I know. Are you doing okay?”

  “Obviously.” She held up Sea Turtle Rescue on her screen. “You want to play, ‘fortunately-unfortunately’?” On her screen, two hatchlings scrambled to the edge of a beach. She brought the tablet back to her lap and clicked the hatchlings forward toward the foam of a wave at the surf. She hurried the rear one’s flippering of the sand so it could catch up with its bigger sibling. The runt of the two had four blue rings tagged on its shell for her identification. The larger turtle seemed fine in the water. The smaller’s swimming frenzy was about to begin.

  “Fortunately, water doesn’t bother me anymore.”

  “Plsh,” Meg scoffed and clacked the keys. “No, seriously, I’ll start with ‘fortunately.’ Then you say something that’s ‘unfortunately.’ We’re on a plane, so we’ll start with something that moves like a bike, a car, a train, then go bigger. Okay? Fortunately, on a bike you can peddle around. Unfortunately, your legs get tired if you . . .” she dangled.

  “I don’t know. What?” he said, then added, “Fortunately, I’m still building my spaceship.”

  “No. That’s not how you play. I say something ‘fortunately,’ then you say something ‘unfortunately.’”

  “Fortunately, I remember every one of those days back then, when you and I sat and worked at the table in our office. I said I was going to build a spaceship where water doesn’t matter, and I will.”

  “Oh, forget it,” she said and pushed him back. “If you don’t want to play, can you at least change the window?” She returned to her keys. “Get rid of the clouds and put on a show. Trees, the city we’re going to, anything . . . dirt!”

  Cessini smirked toward the window with its passing clouds. She thrust herself over him for the window’s lower control and flipped it to random mosaic. The window’s screen rolled into a kaleidoscope of city parks turning to shards of colors that turned in on their ends. “Good, now leave it,” she said and sat back. Then he tiptoed his fingers to the window’s control and flipped it back to his clouds.

  “Mom!” she said.

  He poked her. She was herself. And the more she fought back, the more he relished her being at his side.

  “Work it out,” Robin said, reading her ScrollFlex in her seat.

  He grabbed Meg’s tablet by its wings. She shrieked.

  “Take our picture. Take our picture,” he said as she punched his arm.

  “That’s a great idea,” Robin said as she rotated her ScrollFlex to vertical. She ran her thumb down the screen’s length and it became transparent. “Since you’ll probably want to remember this wonderfully peaceful trip for the rest of your lives. Ready?”

  He tossed the tablet back to Meg, flipped the window back to mosaic, and
hugged her tight into the shared armrest of their seats.

  Robin flicked her finger against the top right, dog-eared corner of the ScrollFlex screen and captured their pep as a photo. Then with her quick tug and release the screen recoiled into its beige, cylindrical carry case. “Now, both of you be quiet so I can close my eyes,” she said.

  Daniel studied a work screen with pages of manuals across the aisle. He cleared a page of its detail and looked with the raise of an eyebrow. “Are you done now?”

  Cessini looked around and over the headrests. There were plenty of other people on the plane. He pushed Meg away with a quiet, “Shhh,” and they settled back into their seats. He swiped the window back to their mutually annoying clouds.

  “What if we hate it there?” he asked. “We don’t know anyone.”

  “You didn’t know anyone back home,” Meg said. “And, fortunately, where we’re going, they don’t know you.” She was right, and who was he to argue on such a long flight?

  The next time he woke beside her, a new turbulence buffeted the descent of their smaller plane transfer from the mainland to the island. He lifted the plain window shade and saw the approach of land ahead. The shoreline was a broken puzzle over water. Country houses and single shops pricked the coastal green hills. Buildings seemed to multiply into a city whose growth fingered its way up the lowland slopes toward the majestic, flattened peak of Mount Wellington.

  They left the watery blue depths far behind, and the dry, green view ahead grew firmer as the plane swayed unnervingly in the winds on their final descent. The wheels hit hard and Cessini’s hands bit into the fronts of his armrests. Flaps braked, engines reversed. The plane was controlled into a turn and then wound down for the relaxed start of the taxi.

  “We’re here,” Meg said, simple as that.

  Soon enough, Daniel was hunched over the steering wheel of their rented Jeep and peered up through the windshield for a full view of the clear sky. They drove up the lower foothills of the mountain to where the road branched right under a canopy of trees and a neighborhood was nestled along the edge of a forested trail. Daniel pulled to a stop at the curb of an old English house at the end of the drive. And to all four, but Cessini in particular, there was no doubt in their minds. Treeline Drive was theirs. This place was their new home.