She was home. There was only one thing now that could be done, she was certain. Was that Rostock gesturing from beyond the grave, touched by the finger of God: its placing, tracing and erasing? She would never have believed such things before, and did not quite believe them now. Not quite. But she couldn’t deny or ignore the ghostly other source of inspiration. It lurked there at the edge of vision, moving now. Moving directly towards her.
—
She dressed in dark clothes. She found close-fitting leather gloves and a scarf to pull tightly around her throat. She pulled on a wool watchman’s cap that she used when she ran in the winter. And she saw herself in the reflection of the living room window, cat burglar, girl spy. She gazed through her own features to the bright-lit shore beyond. A single yellow building there.
The city was pooled shadows and adorned with jewelled lights. The trees made patterns in the darkness, twigs and branches lacing overhead as she crossed the park. No cackling or cawing. No crows in sight.
She set out at 10:30 p.m., to honour the hour. A night breeze was sifting through the empty branches. She could hear them rustling, shivering and whispering against one another, a thousand voices. Smells too, her senses alive. Distant smoke, a fungal note. Algae on rocks. The background odour of fishy decay. Beach and trees. Botany. Biology. She crossed the park and emerged under the mercury gold of the street lights on the bridge.
She climbed the arc of the bridge, up under the flickering Deco lanterns. Turning seaward onto Beach Avenue, she had only a few blocks to walk to reach Nicola Street. And there she stood in front of the building she had admired for so many years. She was breathing very evenly. No nerves. Even her anger was stilled, as if the confrontation she was precipitating just then was more essential than anger could accommodate. She was at essentials now. Highly reduced, concentrated essentials relating to destruction, even death. And her body seemed to be reserving her adrenalin for future use.
She crossed the street, black Converse All Stars silent on the pavement. She walked in a steady line towards the glass front doors—the bank of buzzers, the nameplates. Inside a wall of mailboxes. The lobby was empty. Catherine peered in and considered options, then had the sensation of watching herself do something that she had not thought about and could not have predicted. As if controlled by someone else entirely, she pulled back from the glass, descended the steps. She went around the side of the building, into the alley. All the way back to the rear of the structure, where the recycling and the garbage bins sat solemn in the darkness. Beyond those, the hydro meter boxes. Taped behind one of them, a set of keys. Apartment 50.
Catherine was inside. She was in the elevator. And at the right door, the key slid into the lock and gave her the sense of returning, repeating an action that she had carried out so many times before.
The effect of being inside was intoxicating. She was surging with energies, buzzing yet oddly calm, the darkness inexplicably familiar. The apartment was much bigger and of course laid out differently than her own across the water. But she knew the rooms and surfaces. The long line of the bookshelves there. The sheen of the marble in the entrance foyer and the hardwood hallway stretching to the left towards the bedrooms at the back of the suite. She felt the kitchen opening to her right. And she moved in that direction, running her hands along the counter edges, the smooth handles of the cabinets. On the counters, evidence of the busy person who ate on the fly as Catherine did herself. Starbucks instant coffee, Clif bars, packages of kimchi ramen. Catherine moved out through the kitchen’s far door and into the dining room, then around the corner. And here she entered the living room, the apartment’s main space.
It was much grander than any place she’d ever lived. And yet nothing about it seemed strange. Those bookshelves. Those sleek low chairs. The abstract paintings on the darkened walls, the Scandinavian glasswork, the square stone slabs around the fireplace. All things that she might herself have selected. And through the window that anchored the space, Catherine saw False Creek from the reversed view, looking south now instead of north. Here was a room of spectacular sunsets, Catherine thought, where the light would die operatically, glowing and then failing in these wood surfaces, winking in the glass and mirrors. Red sky at night.
To Catherine’s left, through the living room, there was a small study with a writing desk, two computer monitors and a keyboard, more built-in shelves and a wide work surface covered in papers and photographs. Catherine fingered the papers and was again unsurprised to find evidence of the same focus that she herself typically brought to things. Evidence here of that same attention, that same gaze only directed back at her. Photos of the Warehouse. Many photos from inside: the teepee, the ping-pong table, the pods, the workstations. Photos of employees: Kalmar, Hapok, Arwen. Other things that really only she should know. DIY financial statements. Meeting agendas and minutes. A copy of a strategic plan that Catherine had not even shared with the leadership team. She wondered briefly who had seen that one. Morris, maybe? Had Phil? Wasn’t Phil really the ultimate insider in the DIY story? He’d been there at the germinal moment with his subtle introduction of the ingestible battery. He’d guided her towards patents she needed to assemble. He’d even absented himself at crucial moments. Gone to Saturna Island so he didn’t have to sign off on that original partnership agreement with Morris. Letting Stephanie Gorman take his place so that none of his other persuasions would have the look of conflict about them. He knew the upsides. He knew what DIY could be. He’d had the blueprint all along because she’d shared everything with him, and much of what she’d shared might as well have come out of Phil’s own head.
Phil. Oh Phil. She was in a heightened sensory state. Streaming the moment in distinct smells and sounds and images. She was alive to every way in which she could take the measure of this space and situation. The way the light dissolved to shadow. The way the carpet smelled of fibre and must. The way the stainless steel refrigerator hummed in two distinct and assonant tones, a distant burble from the kitchen. Catherine thought of Phil again, wondering and wondering. Focusing with dark intensity. Could all this be Phil?
She was at the wide front window again. There was a faint gleaming, the suggestion of her own reflection, and the slopes of Kitsilano beyond. She hung in suspension over these images, cars whisking to the right and left along Beach Avenue below, the water seething black and silver. Across the way, the dim silhouette of buildings. Lights on in a random pattern. Orange. Grey. The blackest black. And behind the vertical blinds, next to her hand, a pair of binoculars on a tripod, presenting themselves for use at that perfect moment.
Catherine fixed on these with sudden understanding. They were at a certain height. They were aimed a certain direction. There could be no doubt about how they had been used and used again. She bent to them, slowly. Warm light. Sandy textures. A very long view. Without touching the instrument or the focus, she knew it immediately. Those lintels. Those blinds. She’d left them open and so all was plain. Ogden Avenue. Her apartment building. Her living room window. Her interior spaces. All there to see in the dusty low light.
Catherine’s breathing slowed. Her body settled into what were now the obvious symmetries. Because there was a person in Catherine’s apartment too. Of course, there had to be a person to complete the scene. Catherine watched through the binoculars and felt her focus sharpening, her limbs loose but ready. A person who moved into the room from the rear, coming down the short corridor that led to her bedroom. Walking calmly into space. First a darkness over bluish grey, then a clearer shape, reaching out, flicking on the apartment lights.
Ogden Avenue. Her space a glowing orange sphere. All details revealed. There she was, intensely more like Catherine Bach than Catherine’s own reflection. The same curious face and resolute chin, the same way of folding the hands, the same height, weight. Red hair, check. Grey-green eyes, she was certain. Catherine watching and breathing, suffused in the moment, a sense of threat certainly, a sense of some ending to the story now onr
ushing. She should be afraid, she thought. But she was instead rising to the provocation. Kate Speir was in her apartment. Kate Speir with a kettle, boiling water, making tea. Kate Speir on the couch with her own Toby. Holding the phone. Using the phone. Catherine’s complete replacement.
Less than a kilometre away across the cold darkness and the freezing waves, Catherine watched from a place that belonged to the other. Catherine gazing, observing. Infected by everything. And just that moment, Kate rose from the sofa and made her own way to Catherine’s window. Her face now at the glass, eyes hooded with one hand. They were looking at one another. Their gazes met unmistakably. Met and held. Kate and Cate. Each one locked in apprehension of the other just as Catherine heard the sound of the front door opening far behind her. The figure in her own apartment shimmering, fading, vanishing. Now materializing as a voice in the hall in the apartment where she now stood. A woman’s voice. A voice she knew. A man’s voice too, muffled through the walls.
Doppelgänger, Ankou, Fylgia, Fetch.
I do not exist but for that which might wish to destroy me.
The voices had advanced into the kitchen of the apartment. The man and the woman. The light there came on, flooding into the dining room and partway towards Catherine in the still-darkened living room, with no thought of escape. She’d come that far across the distance, farther than the others. Catherine was the last one and she would complete this crossing. Her adrenalin in full release, her heart pounding, sweat on her arms, muscles tremoring with potential, hands balled into fists. Those shapes now sheathed around her, feathers, beaks and claws, the murmur of murder as the woman’s silhouette appeared at the edge of the dining room, moving past the table and chairs, hand to the doorframe. Stopping there, everything shuddering from movement to utter stillness.
Catherine stepped forward. One stride and then another. Kate Speir did not retreat, did not speak or move. Her hands hung loosely at her sides. And even in the low light, Catherine could see the same woman she’d seen through the binoculars a moment before, those infinitely multiplying similarities between them. Fine features and a spray of freckles. Ginger hair. Emerald eyes. Deep reservoirs of resolve and a shared object of bottomless desire.
Catherine and Kate Speir, face to face in the silence, in the pixelated blue. Surely something ended here. And as if in response to that very thought—which seemed to emerge not from Catherine’s consciousness at all, but to shape itself in the space between the two women—the vision again swept through her. The noise of the explosion and the roiling of black smoke in the cabin. The drink trolley smashing her legs. Pinned to the roof as her world tipped around her, poised at the top of that long fall. All that was solid in the world, all that was real, leached away. She saw the Warehouse dissolving upwards, pods and whiteboards ascending, artwork and ping-pong tables. Papers and estimates and best-laid plans, sifting upwards in fragments and particles, remnants and bits. The black hole once again did its work. Only this time it did not split her, it didn’t deposit her on two sides of the universe at once. Catherine experienced instead a crushing unity in those seconds as she and Kate Speir held each other in their gaze. And around Catherine, those black shapes, thudding and beating their wings, those birds in their tightening shroud, their wings and beaks and claws touching her on the arms and legs and face, their shuddering bodies began to spiral inwards, re-entering her. And as they did so, they winked out of existence one by one, extinguishing themselves in the deep saline sea that was her own chest, her own heart.
Silence in the room. But now, a small movement. Kate Speir raised a single finger. Wait here. Then she turned and went back through the dining room and the kitchen.
Catherine was dizzy. Her ears ringing. She sank into a chair. And from the back of the apartment, somewhere near the doors, a short and muffled exchange.
I have to deal with something.
The man’s response came in decisive tones. Let me help.
But Kate’s voice was the firmer. No. You have to leave, now.
The sound of keys and a door closing. Soft footfalls. And then Speir was in the room again coming slowly towards Catherine, sitting opposite. A person sure of the decisions she’d made and proud of the results, her progress among the men who dominated her field. Her projects, including this one that brought the two of them together, the assembly of a great and complex thing that would change global security and surveillance practices more than any single program since the SR-71 spy plane. Think of a spy plane that flies within.
There had been nodding heads and impressed expressions around that boardroom table the day Speir announced it.
And now Speir found herself face to face in the reluctant light with the final piece of the puzzle she’d set out to complete. A woman so similar to herself that they might have been twinned. A woman whose expression suggested she’d been listening to Speir carefully for a very long time, perhaps so carefully as to have heard Speir’s own thoughts.
Catherine Bach was the woman in question. And Kate Speir could see that she had arrived here furious, crazed with frustration. But that something new was minting itself in the room, something neither of them could have expected. They’d at last closed the distance between them. And when they were close enough to hear each other breathe, the symmetries of the moment were revealed by a mechanism that neither of them would ever fully understand, but to which they would thereafter, on occasion, silently acknowledge a debt of gratitude.
“I’m Catherine Bach,” said Catherine.
“My name is Kate Speir,” said Speir.
“I’m a survivor of Air France Flight 801,” Catherine said.
Speir nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’ve been told.”
“What’s really significant about that,” Catherine said, “is the fact that there should have been no survivors.”
Speir was looking at Catherine carefully. Finally, she said, “Well we can’t always obey the laws of physics, now, can we?”
Catherine inhaled and exhaled. Big breaths. Perhaps it was, in the end, as simple as that: King needed Hawking as much as Hawking needed King. You had to break the rules that were unbreakable. To be human somehow depended on it.
Catherine on a bridge in the pouring rain. Catherine without a look back over her shoulder. In her apartment. Her couch, her teapot. Her cat Toby. Her black glass front window over which the blinds could now be slowly but firmly drawn.
FOUR
Near is
And difficult to grasp, the God.
But where danger threatens
that which saves from it also grows.
—FRIEDRICH HOLDERIN, “PATMOS”
BALLINACARRIG
SHE WALKED BACK TO HER OWN APARTMENT in the rain that broke when she left Kensington Place. Streets dancing and sparkling with the sudden deluge. Cars pluming through the shallow lakes that the overwhelmed storm sewers left along the curbs. She was soaked to the skin by the time she reached her own front door. Upstairs to an empty front room. A hungry tabby purring at her freezing ankles. She didn’t check the bedroom or the closets. There was nobody there. It was just her and her own reflection in the black glass of her front window. Then she drew the blinds and that was gone too. She was alone.
She towelled off and fed Toby. Then she called Phil, because it was Phil to whom this announcement had to be made, one way or the other. “You should be the first to know,” she said. “I’m sending Gorman the signed papers tomorrow. Mako wins.”
That woke him up. What had happened?
“Phil, so much has happened,” Catherine said. “I’m thinking I don’t know the half of it. But for now, that’s it. I’m done.”
What else could she say? She felt guilt about the earlier flush of thoughts, the idea that this friend of fifteen years could have been working against her. But something had been amiss a long time. She might know even less in that moment than when it all began. And even if Phil had nothing to do with any of it, she wouldn’t be able to help him understand that she
’d been in that apartment, eye to eye with Kate Speir, realizing in a cyclonic second that she’d been desperately wrong about everything. That there was no other her in the room or in the world, no duplicate. And in their differences, Kate and Cate were safe, one from the other.
“Well,” Phil said, “I’m surprised, I won’t lie. But I’m glad you seem at peace with the outcome.”
“Peace?” Catherine said. And while she tried to hide the bitterness she was feeling, it still came out as if she’d spat the word.
Phil pressed on, being Phil. So he was talking about her holidays now. The right thing for the moment. Get away. What about Maui? Seemed Phil had recently purchased a place there in Lahaina. Lovely beach, permanently good weather. She could get away and stay away as long as she pleased.
How convenient that she might vanish, Catherine thought.
“Take your sister,” Phil was saying. “It can be a little dull on your own.”
Catherine had to get off the phone. Enough decisions about places and people and objectives for one day. Sleep was taking her as she stood. So she hung up and she slept, deeply and without dreams. And in the morning, at breakfast with her sister, she didn’t mention Phil or Maui at all, knowing the one would open into a hundred new questions and the other just didn’t seem quite like the ending that the story of DIY required.
Valerie, for her part, sensed the sea change before Catherine said a word. Catherine could see her reading the new expression and body language. And when Catherine came clean and told Val that she’d sent a letter accepting the offer, her sister’s own expression and body language were plain to read. Her shoulders slumped. Her mouth opened, then closed. Finally, she said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe you’re letting go.”
The Rule of Stephens Page 19