by Michael Helm
For six hours I camped out near the gate. Nothing that could be called my state could also be called stable. In a wi-fi lounge with free stations I wrote to Amanda and Durant, explaining nothing in detail. I wrote of a change of plans, of “forces able to inhabit our obsessions,” and sounded unreliable to myself, knowing I couldn’t explain the further intricacies of what I knew or how I’d come to know it. In my bag was the fugitive hard drive. “Reality and paranoia both present a seamless fabric of truth and fantasy,” I wrote. “Implausibility is no longer a measure of anything. If it was the Poet whom I met in Istanbul, his presence there was like his presence in the poems. I have to believe that he communicated to me, though I can’t know the full meaning of the communication.” He had broken some protocol and taken a risk to make contact. He had wanted to be known, or for me to know that I was known. And he’d succeeded and paid for it. Under the cover of riot control, using police thuggery, the Shadowy Apparatus (I used the term ironically and not) had reclaimed him and had tried to claim me.
Half a day later I was back in Dominic’s house, helping him organize, pack boxes, and decide what to do with the materials of his life. My last email exchanges with Amanda and Durant were written and collected on Dominic’s laptop. I learned that Pierluigi and the Keyholers had gone dark, fearing reprisals. No one else took cover. Amanda was looking forward to The Hague. A friend who worked on political killings in Guatemala had promised to give her access to secret records. She still hoped to learn who’d killed her brother. I said I was getting off the grid, and wished her well, and asked her to imagine a day when we could meet again. Just picturing this day, I said, would bring it closer.
Durant decided to stay where he was for a few more weeks, dismissing my direct warning that he move out of Carlo’s building and return to his life in California. “But I need a new point of focus, James. I’ve decided to resume my work on genetic transferences. The unknown world is endlessly interesting.” Without prompting, he confided that, in his quiet times, he hoped his daughter would return to him.
I understood hope, the need to believe in whatever thin evidence of fixed meaning could connect the future with a past that seemed to go on forever.
In the woods I lived bookless, offline. With no cellphone or computer I sent my mailing address to Durant via Larunda College in an unsigned, handwritten letter, glued and taped at the seal. At random intervals I checked the mailbox I rented in the second-nearest town, where business was slow and I could see if anyone was watching, but there was no reply.
In time the work of writing prose and of pre-grieving Dominic, whom I knew I would never see or speak to again, changed my imagination. I was no longer subject to cha-chas, or at least their character matured. My lateral thoughts seemed to fire to more purpose, as if they’d finally left their youth. And living alone without human contact for days at a time, with no screens, no voices but those from a radio I seldom turned on, set my brain waves into a pleasing rhythm as they formed and rolled and broke upon the shore of my new world.
At night I walked along the edge of a ravine behind the house, then into woods and fields. The stars, if not the satellites, hung above in a trusted disregard of me and my little world. At their unimaginable distances they offer a picture of a cosmos that could never have been. Some stars are already long dead, others extinguished more recently, all have shifted, but there they all are, seeming present. Knowing of the lie inside the heavens (knowing not the specific lie but of the lie’s existence) layers the simple amazement of stargazing, one of the few things we have in common with the earliest humans who, if they believed anything could be told from the stars, saw in them not the past but the future.
And yet when I got turned around in the fields one night I used the North Star to mark my direction and find my way home, an experience that reminded me of navigational poetic images and recovered something of those readings at Three Sheets—the site’s very name used seagoing imagery—that had drawn me in the first place. I thought of Dante’s story of Ulysses’s last voyage, into the unknown world, and of canto XX of The Inferno, where Virgil leads the poet through a treatise on seers and diviners. For Dante a prophet was above all a great reader, someone for whom the book of the future, the magno volume of God’s mind, lies open. All these challenges to God and His knowledge landed people in one or another circle of hell. I understood something of the dumb vanity of those who seek omnipresence and all-knowingness. Not that I believed in Dante’s God, or even that of my parents, but some otherworldly dimension had been added to my pre-existing sense of wonderment. I had always found my transports in the physical and experiential world mediated through arts and technology. Now as I wrote I felt the company of distinct presences. These can’t be described as angels or demons because the presences weren’t divine or diabolic. They had no designs on me. The closest word might be drawn from that set of terms for ghost, except these beings weren’t supernatural, but supramaterial. The phenomenon eludes direct description.
I came to believe in the there/not-thereness of invisible beings. They were with me all day and began to appear in the stories I wrote. I chose not to think of them any differently than I did the people who had been visible to me, and to one another, Durant and Amanda and others, or than I did my mother and father, still near me in the dark.
And in spite of myself and of Dante, for weeks while writing I began to see scenes from the future in vivid, waking dreams. In one of these I was in the parking lot of a diner somewhere in the west of this continent. With me was Amanda. It seemed we’d just met up. As we approached the entrance, the glass door opened and a woman about our age, maybe older, stepped out. She and I looked at each other and she hesitated for just a second in a moment of recognition or false recognition—we both felt it—and then passed by. I didn’t turn but watched her reflection in the door as I held it open. In the parking lot the woman looked at me briefly, then got into her car. I joined Amanda inside and she gestured with her head and eyes to the end of the diner. There, in the last row of red-and-chrome booths, Durant sat not just by himself, but existentially alone, his face barely familiar for being totally open. He looked at us the way the woman had, and again a recognition sparked and died. He didn’t know us, or didn’t know how he knew us. Moment to moment the dream formed in front of me as I followed it in prose, but it stalled there before we approached him and, while other waking dreams have since come and gone, dreams in which I am absent except as the engine of them, and that suggest possible worlds strangely connected to one another through me, it all ended in that place, and my two American friends never appeared to me again.
PART III
The Boy in the Water
1
Since the summer Celia turned twelve her father had taken her on expeditions. He led teams of interchangeable members, opening plague pits in London, coring ice in Siberia, hose-blasting permafrost in the far north full of perfectly intact, extinct creatures, while some grad student who’d pulled the duty to look after her demonstrated the care involved in brushing and screening soil for the tiny bones of long-gone lizards or birds. Three Junes ago they revived the practice for the first time since she left for university. Now he was summering in France, living alone in the Cévennes. A team had come and gone. Once a week he visited friends in a lab ninety minutes away in Montpellier, but most days he spent in the mountains, on foot.
She pictured him wandering out of the mellifluous French landscape and into a cold, soundless house full of other people’s furniture and dishes. He’d have dinner with a magazine splayed open beside his plate, following the plot twists, red herrings, and cliffhangers in Nature and Science. The rest of his time was a mystery to her. Before a visit she liked knowing the sum of his hours, the daily whole she was being added to. It was strange to think of a day as a sum, but there was comfort in imagining numbers unattached to time and money, luggage charges, seat designations next to sneezers, infection and mortality rates.
She’d been in transit
for fifteen hours and had slept maybe two. In final approach she looked down at morning in Paris, bright city, oddly flat. The Eiffel Tower, so small in person, like a male movie star. Even the high-rises of La Défense seemed like just the beginning of a vision, a dream interrupted, sketched out and half-realized at a safe distance to the west of the old realities, the beautiful districts, proportioned, ornate, storied in the richer sense.
On the ground things were loud and chaotic. That her suitcase seemed heavier on this side of the Atlantic complicated the boarding of trains. When she finally took her seat on the TGV she turned on her phone. The only new text was from Indrani, looking after Hartley for the week. “Walked him, he pooped. Now eating popcorn in front of HBO. He’s coughing up kernels on my rug.” She almost laughed, almost cried, good lord. She fell asleep at three hundred kilometres an hour.
—
At the Montpellier train station he was lit with a kind of chemiluminescence. Something just below the skin held differently. “You look good, Dad. Great pigmentation.” He said he had something exciting to tell her.
They drove through a landscape of hard plains, rock outcroppings, sudden sheer faces. His hands cupped the steering wheel, left wrist curled at eleven o’clock, right at three, then to the stick shift, then back. He glanced at her repeatedly as he spoke. She watched his avid blue eyes, his long jaw working the words and lines. He said a local friend had given him a map of the unexplored cliffs and he’d been investigating as he could. The hikes were physically hard—was she in shape?—but his joints liked the climate. He could still balance on a foothold, still scramble on loose ground. After a couple of weeks the friend, a German he wanted her to meet, told him to focus on the least accessible of the promising rock faces, and several days ago for three hours he’d cut a path that emerged above a treeline. After no more than a minute along a barely navigable ledge, he came to a deep, uncrossable crevasse, and there on the other side, a cave mouth.
“There seems to be no research on this cave. I’m sure no one knows of it. And it’s perfectly protected. If it opens up, if it doesn’t just run to a full stop in the dark, there could be thousands of years of artifacts inside. Tens of thousands. Neanderthals and humans lived around here at the same time. I’ve been waiting for you. Tomorrow we’ll climb with a ladder. We’ll go in together.”
He looked at her a long time and the car drifted to the shoulder before he corrected it.
“Okay. That’s pretty exciting. Wonderful.”
“Wonder’s the very thing that makes us human. There are lots of theories about Neanderthal extinction but it came down to a lack of imagination.”
She’d imagined her arrival, an embrace, an almost wordless greeting, and a slow gathering of the moment. Now she was here and there’d been no arrival. Their reunions often began on the topic of her sister, but Chrissy was generating little concern these days. Still he might have waited to tell her about the cave. Maybe he was afraid of recognizing her, or of failing to—she was aging, changing, about to enter important years for a childless single woman with a career—and so he’d put something between them that they’d have to pass back and forth. She’d wait a day before getting around to life updates, a new position he’d approve of at the company, a brief romance come and gone, a health scare come and gone. She supposed she wouldn’t tell him about an unwanted pregnancy come and gone. Or at least a surprise pregnancy, and given the precautions a bit of a mystery one. It seemed to have come and gone on its own, as if it had nothing to do with her, or as if she had failed a test of grace, not that she believed in grace or even really understood what it pretended to be.
“They died off very suddenly, the Neanderthals. Twenty-eight thousand years ago, in Gibraltar, staring at the sea. They weren’t crossers of oceans. Leaps of faith didn’t occur to them. Whereas we Homo sapiens, well, here we are.”
Here they were, driving down into a gorge of steep light. A whitewater river ran next to the road. She watched the crests and considered his hopes that the visit might be marked by a great discovery. His world had always been larger than hers. His enthusiasms had taken him to the top of the extinction field. Her mind didn’t work the same way. When she was being hard on herself she would say she was, as a scientific researcher, at best only dogged.
They were barely to his house, one-storey, terra-cotta floors, at the base of a mountain, and she had just showered and changed clothes when he announced they were going out to have dinner with his new German friend. He said the friend wasn’t a woman, no, and that Celia would see right to the heart of him, this man, and find there “a nest of essential questions.” She pictured such a nest, tangled into smooth form, saucer-shaped, greyly reflective. She’d noticed this about herself, how her mind became suggestive and picture-prone when her sleep got messed up. Her body thought it was still in Vancouver. She used to trust her body, its distant early warnings and blunt reminders, but lately it had struck its own secret agenda and lost its sense of humour. It would arrive properly rested in a day or two. Until then she’d have to float around on her own, a hovering face, talking and smiling, waiting to close its eyes.
—
The nearest village was stone. It must have once been merely itself but now was picturesque. Red roofs crowded together in some ancient improvisation below a huge chateau estate with its own forest. The chateau, their destination, had been divided into apartments, most of them owned by what her father described as “kickabout heirs” of the French upper middle class. Their host, Armin Koss, greeted them in the ungroomed gravel parking area and led them through enormous doors into his first-floor home. He was thin but strong-looking, about forty, his face darkly tanned. His body and hands moved with casual precision.
The apartment opened onto a stone patio at the back of the chateau. At dinner they sat overlooking a little river and a pretty falls about thirty metres upstream. They spoke of air travel, her father’s summer house in Oregon, a resident species of bat, the local watershed. Twice Celia caught Koss looking at her fingers on her wineglass, once at her breasts, and momentarily losing his focus on whatever her father was talking about, sonar or rock erosion. When her father paused to eat, Koss asked Celia about her work.
“She can’t tell you much,” her father said, mouth half-full of trout. “Private companies. They feed on secrecy clauses and blood oaths.”
She smiled. It struck her that she didn’t really know where she was, the name of the town, the history of the chateau. It was unsettling, the state of not knowing. She was expected to speak.
“Whatever moves the ball down the field, as one of my team leaders says.”
“I don’t understand,” said Koss.
“The ball is knowledge,” she said.
“The ball is profit. It’s not knowledge. It’s not even pigskin. It’s boner pills.”
Only now, in the pre-twilight, did she notice that his hair had grown wispy.
“This is an old argument between us,” she said. “I work as a researcher for a drug company. This is my ongoing sin. Lately I’ve been reading about stimulated astrocyte cells and anhedonia, the inability to take pleasure in pleasurable things. The wine’s good, isn’t it, Dad?”
“They’re not even properly medical.” His forehead was pursed in a familiar disbelief. “My dear brilliant girl here is in the so-called lifestyle drugs division. The motto is ‘Longer Living, Better Life.’ ” She expected him to add his usual line, that her “monkeyshine operation” really “puts the sham in shamanism,” but he left it out this time.
“For the record,” she said, “I’m not brilliant, never was. But I began as a virologist. Dad wants me to work at a university and practise some imaginary pure science that will save us from the coming plague to end all plagues. He doesn’t know that lately I’m doing that very thing for my profit-crazed company. We hope to find a wonder drug and sell people their lives back.”
“You’re doing viruses? Is that true? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I j
ust got here.”
He straightened in his chair and nodded, as if judiciously.
“I’m sorry. Sometimes I won’t shut up. Armin, tell Celia where your money comes from.”
When he drank or his blood was up her father was prone to blunt questions and commands. Koss seemed unsurprised. He said that “as a child” he’d designed an early, long-lost generation of video games. Bigger talents had surpassed him, and now he was simply at work “practising enlightenment.” The phrase sounded more North American West Coast than German, but maybe the distinctions were dated.
“Armin spends his days following his passions. Art and wine.” The two had met at a nearby farmers’ market. Koss said their first shared interest was a local terroir that produced the very Mas de Daumas Gassac she was drinking. Her father had never had a tolerance for spiritual types, or artists who hadn’t lived in caves and been dead for seventeen thousand years. She guessed that the men had been brought together by loneliness. The rest of the chateau was dark. There had been only one car in the parking area. The other tenants were apparently elsewhere in these months.
New sounds reached them from the water. Five or six teenagers, boys and girls, were wading in the shallow river above the falls. Celia could barely see them, bodies dimly lucent and contoured under a nearly full moon. Her French was minimal and the kids were a little too far away, but the voices were full of laughter and daring.