Light Years

by Emily Ziff Griffin

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” Kamal says softly as we exit the front gates onto the empty industrial streets of downtown LA.

  “Time is such a—I don’t even know what the word is,” I say. “How often do I bargain with time, asking for more, or wishing it would speed up? My father died less than twelve hours ago. If I knew then what I know now, I could have saved him. If time had behaved a little differently maybe he would still be alive.”

  “Or maybe you’d be dead,” Kamal counters.

  “I guess that’s true.” I stop again. We stand under the buzz of streetlamps, a hot breeze whistling through the palms high above. “We need to do something. I need to get people to understand what is actually happening.”

  Kamal searches my face. “What happened back there, when you closed your eyes? It looked like you disappeared to somewhere else.”

  “I did, sort of. It was like I went inside myself, inside my body. I pictured the virus trying to attack me. And then I used my mind to disarm it.”

  “Okay,” he says slowly. “Assuming that’s not quite as bizarre as it sounds, how can you get other people to do that?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.” However powerful I might’ve felt as those squealing red balls vanished into nothing, now I’m just a girl with a dead father and a strange condition standing on a street corner three thousand miles from home. “We should just figure out a way back to Brooklyn.”

  We keep walking.

  “It’s nearly midnight,” he says, thinking. “I suggest we find a hotel, take an actual shower, sleep, maybe even eat something. Then try and find a car in the morning.”

  My eyes brighten. “You had me at shower,” I reply.

  It’s a four-mile trek across a desolate downtown to The Ritz. Darkened office towers loom empty and ghostly over everything. We pass a stretch of homeless people camped out along the sidewalk, their stray shopping carts piled high with trash and old clothes. An empty suitcase lies sprawled against a chain-link fence with a scrawny dog asleep inside. It all looks like it was here long before ARNS. I wonder if the people here even know the difference.

  It’s 1:00 a.m. when we arrive and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been so tired in all my life. We peer through locked doors at a lone, masked receptionist behind a desk.

  “May I help you?” Her voice breaks the still air, pinched through an intercom.

  Kamal pulls out his Black Amex and holds it up against the door. “We need a room, please,” he says.

  A moment later, a massive block of a man appears in a security guard uniform. He squints at Kamal’s card, then opens the door. There’s no one else in sight.

  “We’d like the best room you have,” Kamal tells the woman behind the desk.

  Within minutes we are on our way up to a three-thousand-square-foot suite that seems to overlook the entire world.

  We walk into the room and a white-gloved bellman begins turning on lamps. “Apologies, but our dining options are limited in light of the situation,” he says. He has trouble looking at either of us. My chest starts to feel warm. “But we do have some items. They are marked on your in-room menu.”

  Kamal hands him a twenty-dollar bill. “Thank you.”

  The bellman nods and heads for the door.

  “Wait,” I say. He stops and turns back. I stare at him, not sure at first why I called him. “Do you know anyone who’s sick?” I ask finally.

  He looks down at his shoes. His shoulders form a cave around his chest. “My wife, I think. She’s a nurse. When she came home from her shift this morning … She’s …” He can’t finish the sentence.

  I pull up my mask, sensing it will help if he can see my face.

  “I know this is going to sound like the craziest thing you’ve ever heard. And I know I look like I’ve been sleeping on the street for a week, but you have to believe what I’m about to say. Can you trust me?” Heat is building behind my ribs. “I’m not crazy; I’m not on drugs. I’m just really smart. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he replies. His voice is tight, his eyes narrow.

  “Okay?” I insist.

  “Yes, okay,” he says, more sure.

  “You have to believe it completely, with, like, your whole self. ARNS is real, but it’s not real. It kills you by messing with your brain chemistry. When you really understand and internalize the truth of that statement, the symptoms will reverse.”

  The bellman stares at me.

  “Tell your wife she needs to tell her brain that she is not dying, that she is healthy and going to survive.”

  I pause, searching for a sign of acceptance in his expression. I try to will the warmth I am feeling toward him somehow, like with the man who stole our car.

  “You have a good night, ma’am.” He turns and walks out.

  “Fuck,” I blurt out as the door closes behind him.

  I go over to the terrace door and walk out onto the deck. Kamal follows. He pulls off his mask and looks at me. He’s standing so close I forget everything but his smell for a second.

  “I don’t know what’s next or what to do, how to help people or stop this. I feel like an idiot,” I tell him.

  “You’re not an idiot.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Me too.”

  Alone together, our faces bare, it’s like we are right back to that night in my garden. The dawn threatening to arrive, my mother’s raspberry bush overflowing with fruit, the quiet drone of the earth’s motion underscoring everything.

  And now, all these months later, his hand is on my face. Soft, but firm enough that I lean into it just slightly. I feel the roughness of his skin. I smell his smell on his fingers.

  “Are you sure about all this, about the cure?”

  “I don’t have proof, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “It’s not. I’m asking if you’re sure.”

  “I am.”

  “Then we made it,” he says, so close he’s whispering.

  My eyes hold his gaze comfortably, like a marble in my palm. “Made it where?” I ask.

  “To the rest of ever.” His lips find their way into a grin before he leans in and kisses me.

  We stumble back inside. He pushes me up against a window. We’re kissing rough, like we’ll never get enough. He pulls my shirt off and his warm hands slide along the surface of my skin. My legs start to go numb. Colors flood my view. I tap my foot three times and press my back against the cool glass pane. The smell of pine weaves a cloud around my face.

  He pulls his shirt over his head and we fall to the couch. His strong arms flex on either side of me. I wrap my hands around them as his chest hovers and his hips press against mine.

  It’s just waves. Slow, amazing, overwhelming waves. I want it to stop. I want it to never end.

  “I think,” he says, breathless after a minute. “We should leave this here. Much as I would prefer not to.”

  “Okay,” I say. My heart is beating like hummingbird wings. Our bodies slowly find stillness and we stay like that, our faces close, everything on fire. My hands trace the curves of his shoulders.

  “I think,” I begin, “I’m going to take a shower.”

  He smiles. “That’s not going to help my self-control efforts.”

  I smile back. “That’s part of my motivation.”

  “You’re very, very cruel,” he whispers. We kiss again. Then I get up and go into the bathroom.

  I step into the marble stall. Hot water pours over my skin in sheets. I replay the past ten minutes in quick cuts—glimpses of his face, his body, interspersed with bursts of coral and silver.

  The lemon scent of the soap brings me back to the present. I look out through the glass shower door. My eyes shine in the mirror. I feel beautiful. I feel like myself.

  I scrub my body clean, then pause on my scar as the soapy water spirals down the drain. I think back to Bell, how he stopped and stared at it. Evans too. The shape or the very existence of it, this rough patch on my smooth skin. It must surprise peop
le.

  I dry off and pull clean clothes from my pack. There’s my father’s knife. I take it out and rest the handle in my palm. I feel its weight, its power. I think back to the face of the dead man lying on the ground. I shiver.

  “I ordered food,” Kamal calls from the other room.

  I put the knife back in my bag and get dressed.

  I come out and find Kamal lying on the bed watching the flatscreen. “They’re confirming Bell’s ID’ed the virus,” he says. “They still don’t understand how it destroys the nervous system, though.”

  I stare at the television. An image of Bell in frat boy–handsome, presidential mode. I feel foolish when I think about how badly I wanted to impress him.

  “Look at him,” I mumble. “In the middle of killing millions of people and he looks like the guy you’d want to be your dad.” The word sends my heart into my stomach. I’d let myself forget again.

  Kamal clicks off the TV. “Come here,” he says. I lie down next to him and settle in his arms.

  “Is this weird?” I ask.

  “Which part? The pandemic? You solving the greatest mystery of the twenty-first century? The next president being a sociopath?”

  I laugh. “No. You and me.” My legs tingle as I look at him.

  “It’s weird that it’s normal. Don’t you think?” Yeah. He kisses my head. “I’m gonna take a shower too. An exceptionally cold, cold shower.” He gets up and goes into the bathroom.

  I pick up my phone and open my photos. There’s the note from my dad. LU: MAKE SOMETHING OF YOURSELF.

  I hear a crash from the other room. I jump up. What the fuck was that? I go into the living room. The terrace door is still open and a small tree is on its side. I go out and stand it back up. The wind gusts and it almost falls again. The leaves shake as I hold its trunk steady.

  I look up at the sky. “What?” I mutter. The wind stops and the leaves fall still. I go back inside.

  I grab my laptop and take a seat in the living room. As I sit staring at the screen, I imagine my father in his music room. He’s at the piano with a blank piece of paper in front of him.

  Make something of yourself.

  I hear it differently now. It’s not an imperative toward success. It’s a call to create. It’s an invitation to translate myself, my own experience, into something that can be experienced by someone else.

  I open my lexicon of sensory episodes. There are 1,143 entries. These are my disturbances, my waves. Emotions, colors, sounds, vibrations, sensations—all of them reducible to wavelengths, to bits of data. All of them, together, a kind of language.

  I write a piece of code that converts the lexicon into visual and auditory building blocks—waves of color and bursts of sound that mimic on the screen my past sensing of different feelings. This is the material.

  The LightYears analysis of the world’s feelings will be the blueprint and the blank screen, the piece of land.

  It’s a simple program: Take the data of human sentiment generated by a piece of online content and translate it into a flowing, swelling mass of colors and swirls, twisting, intersecting lines, deep drones and mind-bending tones—all according to my lexicon. My unique sensory perception and the world’s emotions combined into a single piece of original content.

  I put in the Hugo video analysis to test it. Won’t compile.

  “Shit.” I look up to see Kamal in a towel, watching me from the doorway. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “A while. I tried talking, but you didn’t hear me.”

  “Sorry.” My eyes drift to his bare torso, then snap back to my screen. “I’m trying to do something.”

  “Okay.” He comes and sits next to me.

  I fix a couple of errors and try it again. Still not working. More fixes and another test. Now I’ve got something. I pair my laptop’s Bluetooth with the massive sixty-five-inch flatscreen.

  “Turn off the lights,” I instruct Kamal. He does.

  We sit in darkness and I hit Play.

  Bursts of red flood us in what almost feels like three dimensions. They surge over each other, like an ocean of blood—wave after wave moving toward us as menacing bass tones moan and whine underneath the visuals.

  The red swirls together with purple, yellow, and brown, then the colors gather into themselves, almost vanishing into darkness at the point in the analysis when #hisnameishugo first appeared. And then everything erupts again in a heart shape, like a time-lapse flower blooming all at once—the red heart of humanity exploding in every direction, and the warped noise of a whirring engine gurgling into silence.

  The data itself—the original text—is invisible, replaced by color and sound, translated by the alchemy of my senses into the expression of an unseen dimension. It’s like a message from another world.

  I feel ill. It’s as if those red raging orbs inside my body have returned. And they are unstoppable. A crushing weight presses down like I’m being buried under a flow of wet cement. I feel feverish, weak, dizzy.

  I try to shake it off. I tap my foot and feel the couch. It’s just waves. Choose the light.

  I turn to Kamal and realize he’s curled up on the couch. He’s shaking.

  “It’s not real,” I tell him.

  But my words, my tricks, are powerless. I start shivering. My lungs constrict. I’m coughing. I fall to my knees on the plush carpet. I cling to the edge of the coffee table and glance back out the terrace door. The wind is rattling the glass.

  The tree tips over again.

  “We need to undo it,” Kamal mumbles.

  I stare at the tree on its side. I imagine picking it up as Kamal’s words register. An impulse courses through me. It’s just a fragment of comprehension, like I’m searching for a word I can’t quite recall.

  What if? I think. What if. I look down at the keyboard and back at the final image on the screen, the heart torn to pieces.

  I command the program to play the compilation in reverse.

  “Look at the screen,” I manage to say.

  We watch as the broken, disparate fragments of emotion, the waves of discordant colors and the droning, soul-crushing din transform into a rush of beautiful shapes and sounds.

  Played in reverse, the tones are vibrant and joyful. They seem to strike my deepest insides, then reverberate through my veins, healing each cell as they go. Rich reds swell into each other. The image of the heart being made whole seems to leap from the screen and dive into my eyes. Red and yellow melt together into the most exquisite shade of orange I have ever seen—it feels like sunlight pouring over my freezing skin.

  My breath calms. The dizziness stops. The red orbs once again seem to evaporate into the ether. Separation dissolves and I feel weightless.

  I look at Kamal. He’s smiling like he’s high.

  “I feel normal,” he says. “Except not, actually. Are we floating?”

  “I dunno. Maybe?”

  “You made that. How did you make that?”

  I scramble for my phone. “I have to get it to Merz.”

  I draft the message: I’m sending you something. You have to put it up. Forget the votes; just do it. It’s a cure. Ask Phoebe if you think I’m crazy. Send.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Kamal mutters as his eyes flutter closed, that smile still plastered to his face. “I love you.” He says it so quietly I can’t be sure it’s what I heard, but my vision ripples silver and my legs go numb.

  “Kamal,” I say softly. But he’s asleep.

  I get up and start to pace. The amber light of the city bleeds in through the windows and I’m thinking of Janine. I have so much I want to tell her. I remember how Ron kept on talking to Jordana, how he said she was dead, not gone.

  I open my texts and touch Janine’s name. My fingers hover over the keys as I try to figure out where to begin. But I can’t; there’s too much.

  Then, a message from Merz: OK.

  Good. I compress my video and send it. I look over at Kamal asleep. Will he remember w
hat he said when he wakes up? Am I supposed to say it back?

  I lay a blanket over him, then tune the TV to FLN, mute it, and wait.

  I feel how I used to sometimes before a swim meet. It was like a spark in my belly when I knew I should be nervous but I wasn’t. That feeling always meant I was going to swim well.

  An hour passes and then another. No video.

  I watch the endless cycle of news reports. I think of my dad on our couch, how upset he was about Hugo. Why wasn’t I able to save him?

  My watch buzzes. Merz: Video about to break.

  I sit forward with my laptop. There it is, live on Front Line’s site. I bring the link into LightYears. A hum fills my head. My heart booms in my ears.

  It’s a slow build, tracking first overseas where it isn’t the middle of the night. Kabul, Berlin, Tokyo. Seconds become minutes and the curves begin to generate. The responses begin to emerge. Words and phrases come bursting to the front of the text cloud.

  Bliss. Magical. Connection.

  The curving lines bend and arc, then hit a peak. The word Cure blazes to the front.

  It’s working.

  I jump up in a wave of orange. It’s fucking working.

  I go to the windows. Twinkling lights stretch as far as my eye can see, then disappear into the dark void of the ocean way beyond. I picture my father out there in that emptiness. I see him watching what is happening. He’s standing shoulder to shoulder with everyone who has ever died, with everyone who has ever lived.

  Always together, never apart. Me, him, all of us everywhere. The rest of ever.

  I look back at the screen. The data keeps pouring in. The word Cure still holds top position. Pervasive Sentiment: Love.

  Time warps as I stand on the crest of an imaginary wave. Heat builds behind my heart. Separation once again dissolves.

  I reach to wake Kamal. He has to see this, to feel this.

  But before I can, a banging on the door. I am jolted back to the confines of the room.

  An instantaneous spark of blue. I ignore it. For some dumb reason, hunger maybe, I ignore it.

  I rush to the door and whip it open. A face, and before I can make a sound, I’m flooded with an avalanche of scent: a heap of just-cut roses.