by Michael Helm
The second box gave no clues, yet the feeling of familiarity persisted, became almost acute in its refusal to hold still. It produced a kind of déjà vu that she understood would be particular to her only, so strange were the conditions. Lia, Koss-Lia, was sitting at a computer, extracting something from a plastic bag. She plugged the thing into a port. On her screen up came a scene and the camera zoomed in until the new image filled the light box. A woman not Koss-Lia was leaving the same house, in summer, to meet someone arriving in a brown-and-orange pickup. The truck stopped and a dyed-blond young woman emerged. End of box.
A space had opened near the entryway and now she saw on the wall the title for this part of the show. After James. The words dropped inside her for a few moments before going off. She’d told no one the name of her lost child. She said something aloud. The room seemed to move at great speed.
A new sound came from the adjoining gallery. The lights were dimmed in all the rooms and people turned to face the little stage and podium. It was rare anymore, she thought, this feeling of everyone looking at the same thing in real time. The narrow room began to empty into the larger one and she stepped into the human stream and looked back. A few viewers were staying to the end of the story.
And so she was at the back of the crowd when it began, barely able to see the speaker. She looked for her father and Koss but it was hopeless. A young black woman in a light blue headscarf introduced a man whom Celia took to be the curator of the show. He wore a charcoal, collared shirt. His hair was close-cropped. From where she was standing he could have been thirty or sixty. He stepped to the microphone without smile or greeting. She couldn’t follow his remarks but now and then an English word or name or quotation came clear. She heard “John Dewey” and “William James Lecturer.” She heard, in clean English, “the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip.” The crowd waited, bored and patient, for him to finish and introduce Koss, wherever he was, somewhere on the floor, presumably. All at once she felt someone looking at her. She turned, saw no one, and remembered she’d had these little moments now and then in the past few weeks. They came to her, saying, I’ve found you, and then they disappeared and she forgot them, the specific character of them, until the next one spoke.
Finally, without the slightest finishing gesture that Celia could detect, the curator moved away and sat on a chair beside the headscarf woman. The lights brightened for a moment and then the room went almost dark and there at the microphone, like an apparition, was Koss himself.
It wasn’t clear where he had come from, a magician’s trick entrance. He was standing with his arms at his sides, looking downward, as if at papers on the podium, though not quite. He looked as he’d looked at the chateau, same hair, though now dressed casually in an orange T-shirt printed with some design she couldn’t make out. He rocked slightly forward and back once. When his voice came she felt the first pinch, a slight shudder. The voice sounded wrong, was mic’d differently than the others had been, and now something was stirring in the crowd. There were whispers and shushes. A woman standing about fifteen feet in front of Celia turned around open-mouthed and made a shocked expression at someone, her boyfriend, and Koss rocked back and forth. It was the same movement exactly and Celia realized only then that he was on a loop. His voice was flat and declarative, recorded, in keeping with Koss-not-Koss, false-Koss, the artist there and not, present not-present, holographic-Koss. She detected no tone of apology. Some people were pushing forward to the image, others drifting back or turning and leaving. A few looked pleased, some confused, others were nodding, apparently certain that they knew what point was being made. Celia wanted to stop them, ask them what it was they thought they were seeing.
When she reached the foot of the riser he rocked once again. She examined the others close by. It was obvious now that her father wasn’t here. No one noticed her, she was among several who’d come closer to look, and just as Koss said what sounded like the title of the show, she stepped onto the riser. Holding steady through the surge in her blood to be so close to him, his presence and specific, immaculate absence, in a gesture she thought of as a refusal of her consent, she passed her hand into him at chest level and let the colours spill onto her arm and the hologram and voice continued on their loops. She withdrew her hand and looked out at the crowd. Those near the stage stared dumbly, delightedly, and seemed to think she was part of the event, as of course she must be, breaking the illusion, the continuity, in a show called Apokalypse. Then she saw a lone figure at the back of the room. He wore jeans and a black hooded jacket, the hood was deep, it obscured his face. Only when he lifted his hand did she see the object, and at that moment she was taken by her elbow. With the nervous look of someone appeasing a madwoman, the curator gestured for her to return to the floor.
Just as Koss’s voice cut out and his image died there came the first explosion from the back of the room. The hooded man raised the hatchet again and smashed a second box, which fell to the floor, and he struck it again and stepped to a third and smashed it and now he was on the run as men from the audience rushed him and he made the door and the crowd opened like a hand.
The gallery emptied onto the street. The curator and the headscarf woman who’d introduced him were standing over the destroyed boxes. Celia stepped off the riser and passed through the room and out onto Lindenstraße. People stood along the sidewalk, on the street, looking this way and that, some still holding their wineglasses. Presumably others were off in pursuit. A young man with something tattooed on the side of his neck, parentheses, approached and said something in German, then asked in English, “Are you the woman in the boxes?” Celia looked back into the gallery through the window. The curator was on his cellphone, talking, a brief smile. The headscarf woman was using her phone to take pictures of the wreckage. She shot and tapped, shot and showed the curator, who nodded and tapped.
The parentheses man who’d approached her gave up, drifted into the crowd. When the curator walked into the main gallery, Celia went back inside. She passed through quietly and unobserved. The curator and the headscarf woman were huddled with their phones. Celia returned to the narrow room, After James, now empty, and looked into the last box.
In it was a flood. The water carried Koss-Lia past floating wooden swing seats and mailboxes, a column of smoke shunting into view and away. She tumbled under the surface and up again, reeling past crows hopping in branches in stark alarm. The surface was not constant, it moved at varied speeds. Blood furled in the current and the animation sped up, shapes streaked into colours, night changed to morning in all of three seconds. She’d washed up in the crotch of a tree. Shadows swept across her and slowed into real time. She dropped from the tree and crawled, mudslick, the last human. But no, another shadow covered her now, a looming human shape. She lifted her head, the video shifted to Koss-Lia’s perspective, but she saw no one. She looked down at the shadow, fully there, and again looked up and now there was a small boy, looking at her. End of box.
—
She felt nothing or at least not whatever she assumed viewers were supposed to feel, a hopeful ending. Somewhere in the fuller story, box to box, someone would have gone missing. Who was it and had anyone noticed?
Except for possibly being cheap and sentimental, the ending didn’t disturb her, not like the earlier boxes had, the ones with scenes from her real life. What disturbed her came later, the next day on the transatlantic flight. All around were screens playing the same or nearly the same movies and TV shows, staggered at different intervals, and she would not admit that her father had disappeared, would not acknowledge the dread she felt, and she looked out the window at the bright table of water, thinking, how many times in one year will I cross this ocean? The screen map was in Spanish. Océano Atlántico. When she sounded it out to herself, for a moment, she felt suddenly alone, with no one around, no passengers, no plane even, just a lofted mind, and then just as surely it all resumed around her and she remembered two moments from the previous night.
> She pictured the curator on his cellphone as she’d seen him through the gallery window. His brief smile, there and gone, had escaped him, she realized. He’d corrected himself but she’d seen the smile, and now she wondered if the whole gallery had been the stage. Maybe the hologram had been a misdirection, and she’d really sold it. Had Koss vandalized his own show? If so, he must have seen her, recognized her, but instead of doing anything real like coming forward and addressing the crowd, introducing her, or at least speaking to her, he’d played his found advantage to the end.
She’d left the gallery feeling hollow. The crowd had mostly dispersed. She formed a vague intention of heading for a cross street to catch a cab. Walking behind her, close enough for her to hear, was the English-speaking couple who’d tried to guess what would happen next at each box. She recognized their voices and was happy to hear them again. The overheard conversation, little bursts of shared meaning, kept her feet on the ground.
“Where did you go?” The woman sounded American.
“I was looking for that guy who was here when I came in.” The voice was maybe Nordic but his English was near perfect. “The Turkish guy selling drugs to the art lovers.”
“I keep getting propositioned by Turks and Spaniards and Greeks. The continent’s collapsing into Germany.”
“He said he had something that makes you see ghosts.”
A cab approached from the other direction and Celia flagged it. It U-turned and came to the curb and the couple ran past her, the woman nearly brushing her shoulder, and got in. As the man closed the door she stepped to the window and bent down, peering through the glass at them, but they didn’t see her and were laughing with the driver, who checked his side mirror and pulled away.
Now in the plane, looking at the water, trying not to look at the screens, she was struck by the obvious truth that she was a ghost, a ghost who made her way in the world, unaware that she was a ghost. That was why the drug dealer had been alarmed to see her. He had the drug in him and knew her for what she was and it sent him down the street.
How long had she been in this state? Since the cave day. She’d first had the intuition as they descended the mountain. She was dead, not just dead inside, but dead inside the mountain. Her father was there, too, with her in the chamber. He was missing from this world, the outer one, so of course she couldn’t find him. But how had she managed to book plane tickets and hotel rooms? How had she done the work at the dig and secured an ancient tooth to carry around in a bag? Now that she thought of it she couldn’t remember details about the actual transactions at counters and reception desks, but then that was sometimes the experience of travelling. It suspended you in a state of nonthought, nonperception. She recalled being in the presence of others, the people at the dig and in the gallery, but all actual conversations could have been old ones that echoed in the present, remote exchanges with her father and sister. Maybe all that she thought of as recent had happened long ago. The present was populated entirely with returns from the past.
And yet here she was in the plane, in her own seat. She turned and looked at the young man beside her. He wore headphones and stared grimly ahead at his movie and seemed not to notice her at all.
“Is it good?”
He didn’t hear her. She reached over and tapped his screen with her finger—had she ever done anything so intrusive?—and asked the question again.
His mouth opened slightly. He was looking at her finger, or where her finger had touched his screen, and then he touched the screen himself and put the movie on pause. He took his headphones off and looked at them as if he’d never seen them before, then looked at Celia.
“It’s all right,” he said. She told herself to remember this, being addressed. The young man said the movie was about an Iraqi man in Texas who returns from prison to his new hometown, where everyone else is white or Mexican. “He did time for arson but they all think he’s guilty of murder but they never found a body so we don’t know for sure.”
Celia nodded. It all made beautiful sense to her.
She said, “It’s very hard to hang on to, a whole life.”
“I guess. Did you want out?”
“No thanks.”
She turned, comfortably seated and alive, and looked at the sky. She touched her finger to the bottom lip of the plastic window moulding. Below, the shadow of the plane moved along a bank of white clouds and she felt someone, maybe herself, looking down at her in the real plane from a distant place and time.
5
It was a small place verging a small town. He entered the diner wearing a green canvas vest, cargo pants, walking shoes, intent expression, sun hat in hand. She slid out of the booth and hugged him, no longer than usual, and she remembered he always felt smaller and lighter than she expected, and they took their positions with a view of the highway and distant mountains.
The waitress was in her forties, bob cut, name-tagged Deena. She took their orders by memory, said them back wrongly, and took them again and was gone.
On the table Celia placed the tube with the ancient tooth inside it. He held it up to the window and looked at it briefly, nodded, dropped it into his shirt pocket. From another pocket he produced a small spotted doll of wire and leather and set it before her, a gift.
“A Hopi boy was selling them. They’re not sacred in themselves, as I understand it, not like the larger ones. This is Little Fire God.”
She left the little god on the formica surface to act as it would. Witness, arbiter, junk. The place was half-full, a few diners at the counter. The neighbouring booths were empty. He reached across and took her coffee and sipped it. His hand tilted slightly at the wrist, as if the cup were heavy. His movements were muted. He seemed underslept or enduring an excess of gravity.
“China,” she said.
“I didn’t specifically say.”
“You said somewhere vast and foreign.”
“With a distant early warning system for outbreaks in the remote villages and a history of controlling the news.”
“China.”
She’d picked up his message between flights, in Toronto. His voice had sounded doubled, as if on relay. He said if she was willing to change her route home he could meet her the next day in New Mexico. A ticket was waiting for her at the American Airlines desk. More details to follow. Here they came.
He said he’d been “spirited away.” In low tones of divulgence he said that a few years ago he’d been invited to give a talk on extinctions and ancient disease at a national laboratory. He became a kind of consultant, “or really just a name on a list,” in exchange for access to the world’s best genetic-sequencing technology. Nothing had ever been asked of him, but last week he’d been waiting for a plane out of Cozumel and the first one to land after the storm had come for him, a small jet carrying two strangers, a government medical officer and a woman in uniform. The man and woman seemed the more plausible for being easy to picture, Celia thought, picturing them two-dimensionally. They’d called him into the field, briefed him on the plane.
Days of half-formed thoughts presented themselves to her all at once to be dismissed—the thought that he was sick or drowned or lying in thick greenery somewhere, victimized, that Koss had given him a psychoactive drug, that he’d been detained at some airport, unable to call—and yet her concern hung on, as did her childish hurt.
He said he was part of a small team of men and women with deep, specific knowledge, all of them stunned out of their lives. He’d slept twenty hours in five days. In prop planes and vans they travelled to the village and saw the results of the outbreak, mortal trouble in the many hundreds, and then to a large city in the large unnamed country, working with local virologists. The outbreak was yet unreported. The government seemed to think that containing the news meant containing the virus. He hadn’t known his messages weren’t getting through to her. They’d been blocked by state authorities.
“You’ve been in China. For the U.S. government.”
“We’
re cooperating.”
“You mean China and the CDC?”
“No.”
That’s why they were in New Mexico, she realized. There was a military national lab ninety miles from the diner. It also explained why he’d known which airports she’d be flying through. She’d been tracked.
Nothing he’d said was so hard to believe, not when you were in the business and knew what she knew, true stories that other people would think were from movies or disaster-preparedness scenarios. And China was the least surprise of all. The place incubated annual flus, SARS, MERS, enterovirus 71. What was hard to believe was how he’d come to be there.
“You have government friends in bioweaponry.”
“Biodefence. It seems impossible, I know. But you better be happy they’re on the job.”
He’d been brought to a Chinese government research centre. Now he spoke of illegal foreign weapons stockpiles.
“Any country, the secret labs are all huge. Here they drive cars from building to building. There, I was left alone for a minute in a basement fridge, three acres big.”
He said he wasn’t sure why he was allowed to see what he’d seen except that his minder was also his translator and wasn’t very good at either job. Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe he wanted others to know.
“To know what?”
“That a certain former superpower has acres of aerosolized plague.”
The world refused to stop going on around them. The lunch counter was fuller now. Celia wondered, as she did sometimes in this country, how many in the place were carrying guns or had them in their cars. There were ten times more guns down here than there were Canadians in Canada. Knowing what a person came to know, it was work, every day, to take a generous view of the species.