After James
Page 33
“And you told your military friends here.”
“They suspected but had no proof. They wanted to know if it was secure. But empires break apart. Nothing’s secure. It only takes one drunken idiot. And we all have stockpiles of those.”
Deena brought their food. Out the window was a narrow band of notched, vertebrate clouds. Her anxiety from the past few days was now redirecting or changing to something else, the usual abstract horror with too many points of focus.
He said the outbreak was of some new virus, a variation on something itself still not clearly identified. It killed its host slowly, the better for wide transmission. Of bigger concern, it seemed airborne. He’d been to a makeshift ward holding thirty or forty patients, more streaming in each hour. He tried to say he wasn’t a medical doctor, but his handlers dressed him in a biohazard suit and marched him out with these people in their tortured postures. All ages, weak and dying. Reverse-pressure air ducts led to a far wall and a huge fan high up turned slowly and strobed the figures in light and shadow so that they seemed in motion. Their faces contorted in sole notes of pain. He was having trouble telling her the specifics. He said he wouldn’t speak of them again.
—
He asked if she’d seen the strange sunset last night. In fact she had. It had stood ominously, high panelled darks in red, behind the scene she watched from a Santa Fe motel balcony. Pickups and family vans pulled in and out of a parking lot between a True Value and a Liquor Barn. She was jet-lagged and grimy—she had rerouted, her bag had not—and didn’t need a sleep aid, but out she went, across the lot. She returned with a screw-top bottle of California merlot and sat on her little balcony, and the sun was still hanging on, and the voices seemed to come from the electric lights, and for a few seconds she couldn’t have said where she was or the day or month.
When the air chilled she moved to the bed with the bottle half-empty. The TV’s aspect was set wrong, everything flattened, the alarmed weatherwoman’s map of North America looked stepped on, while on other channels wars raged, refugees gathered, men cracked jokes, polar bears almost drowned. She was lost in the channels when her phone buzzed.
“It’s Hartley,” said Indrani. “He’s gone.” She went over the events repeatedly until Celia had to tell her to stop. She’d taken him up to North Vancouver, to Lynn Canyon Park and their usual spot, creekside. Indrani sat on a large round rock and checked the cell reception to make her weekly call to her brother. Celia knew the rock and could see her vividly, right down to the incipient varicose vein that ran over her shin where it emerged from her skirt. Hartley stood staring into the white water for fish to bark at, ignoring a small group of young people, university student types, who were cooing at him to visit. Only when they broke out sandwiches did he consent to be friendly, walking over, wagging vaguely. A few minutes later when she clicked off the phone she noticed the kids were gone and so was Hartley. She called but he didn’t appear. She assumed he’d followed them out. The light was dying and the park would close in minutes. By the time she got to the parking area, her little blue Yaris was the only car. She stayed by it until a bald man in a uniform came to tell her to leave. She explained about Hartley. He closed the park gate and let her backtrack to the creek in the half dark. Of course Hartley was nowhere. “The guy said it was the kids, you can’t trust the kids around here. He said there’d been no sign of cougar.” Indrani was speaking too fast, in the voice of a woman who’d just lost her only real friend’s dog. Together they formed a plan. Indrani would return to the park the next morning and hand out pictures of Hartley with both of their phone numbers. For a few minutes they couldn’t stop repeating assertions about the complexity of large parks and the stupidity of certain dogs, and then Celia needed to get off the call. She showered and slept and her dreams wrung her out.
Her bag arrived at the motel room door just before checkout. She changed clothes and set off for the town whose coordinates he’d texted to her. A cheap paper map led her to open desert road where fragments of the previous night’s dreams returned. She’d been on a rocky plain somewhere with smoke in the distance. There were women in black chadors walking ahead of her and she was a trotting, panting animal, behind them. The women slowed and looked off along the length of their shadows in the lowering sun and the horizon turned silver and when Celia looked back to the sun the women were gone and she felt herself pulled along by a torrent and she was Hartley, running west. The thing that was her and her dog passed into the city, their city, creek to river, river to harbour, out past Burrard Inlet into English Bay, the Georgia Strait, south past the Gulf Islands, across the border into the Juan de Fuca, and out with the tide to the Pacific. She floated without effort, unafraid, and the tide shifted and she washed up on a wide empty beach, scenting something wonderful on the air. She woke up crying but still dreaming and in her dream she walked out into the night along neighbourhood streets of sleeping arts-and-crafts houses and then she was on Jericho Beach sitting on one of the long timber logs laid out parallel to the waterline and looking at the freighters dimly lit against West Vancouver, tucked into the pocket of the measureless feeling she’d had looking out from the cave mouth in France.
She checked her speed, which seemed wrong, and then remembered the numbers were in miles, not kilometres. She thought of caves and towns, places people gathered against fear. In the West of the new century was a state of incipience so pervasive that when, every so often, close to home, you lost something, when it slipped over the edge, gone for good, you felt the shame of relief finally to have had your fear endorsed. Only then, in the diner, with the whiff of disinfectant rising from the formica, did she remember that in the dream she’d detected a faint note of urine, as if some animal, four-footed or two, had marked her dreamscape as his own. He had spread his entire genome into the imaginary earth. We used to think our bodies and lives were ours alone. But even the stories of them were told and read differently now in the languages of science. Today a life seemed borderless or the borders had been redrawn by technologies and their mock infinitudes. Consciously or not, we kept emitting ourselves. Even our traumas, it turned out, imprinted genetically. Our sharpest memories could be pissed along, if not pissed away. And so the smell. Someone in his unique code, there and fully absent, had been with her on the beach in her dream.
—
He said he had pictures to show her and passed her his phone. He’d taken them thereabouts the previous day, shots of petroglyphs and presumed sacred places. She paused over a young boy riding a donkey, the only image with life in the frame.
“My picture albums online,” she said. “Those were mine, for us.”
She could read his every motion so that when he sat back and cocked his head to look at her the way he looked at a problem in the field, shards that didn’t add up, she realized it hadn’t been him. They arrived at the next thought together.
“Your sister, she doesn’t always consider the consequences.”
“She does, actually.”
Koss had given Chrissy a way to infuriate Celia through the pretense of claiming her for art.
“I thought you’d assented. I’m surprised Armin didn’t tell me he’d contacted her.” His very name uncoloured things. “I know you think I misread him, Lia. It’s hard to accept that you might have a point. But he gave me a lot of direction.”
“ ‘Gave.’ Past tense?”
“In Cozumel he told me he was disappearing, wouldn’t say where to. In the art world, you disappear and people sell it. The story, the mystery, the disappearance itself. I think he might be at the chateau. Or else he’s here somewhere, in America.” He glanced out the window, as if Koss might walk by. “I’m told you routed home through Berlin. You saw the show?”
“I thought I might find you.”
“The idea was I’d collect you in Troy and surprise you with a trip to the show. It’s in London next, Apokalypse. The gallery wants to play up the mystery-woman angle. They want to make you the new Mona Lisa.”
“I’m thinking of getting off the grid,” she said. “Leaving my job and just moving to the middle of nowhere.”
He stopped chewing his french fry, stopped his hand midway to the plate. The coming end of the world was one thing, but the idea she might quit her job really alarmed him. She said she’d been thinking about it, indirectly, even unconsciously, not in a way she’d articulated to herself.
The moment ended, the chewing resumed.
“Why would you do that?”
She looked at him, this man who carried gods in his pockets. They were inside the floating particles of dozens of old conversations. Now and then over the years it seemed they’d switch positions, the wandering one and the one too bound to a sensible mind. She didn’t know her position now. At least that was something.
“I’ve had a strange time.”
“Since the cave.”
“I don’t know when it began. I just need it to end.” If she described it to him he’d say that a strangeness had been visited upon her, and she would have to decide if she should tell him about the lost pregnancy. She supposed that the memory lapses, her vivid moments of déjà vu in the gallery, her fanciful notions of being a ghost, these could be made sense of as the mind’s casting around for understanding after the body had sized things up and declined to bring a new life into the world. At the time, the loss hadn’t devastated her but it did contain meaning, and in not pursuing this meaning, she’d left herself open to further losses.
A wind kicked up a tall dust devil and held it before them briefly before dashing it against the window. When it was gone he kept looking out to where it had appeared.
“Some Apaches think that up in the Superstition Mountains there’s a bottomless hole that connects to the lower world, and the winds that blow up into ours cause havoc and dust storms.”
“I hope you’re not planning to crawl down it,” she said.
“It’s what you’re considering.”
“Like father, like daughter.”
“But I haven’t quit my life. When I’m done at the lab I’m heading to Colorado to see old friends. There’s an ancient dry lakebed up there with hundreds of extinct species perfectly preserved.”
Extinction was all the rage now, he said. Funds were streaming in. His academic friends would put him up for a few days in a grand hotel. The oldest bones by day, the newest cocktails at sundown.
“Will you tell your friends about China?”
“They’ll all know soon enough.”
“What do they make of the new you? There can’t be a lot of god seekers among them.”
He smiled. “I seem to make some of them nervous.”
“They must like that you still tickle the ivories now and then.”
He described the Colorado lakebed. The ivories to be tickled there belonged to mastodons.
“Mammut americanum,” she said.
“That’s my girl. And giant ground sloths and Castoroides beavers the size of black bears.” He described the creatures drinking in the shallow water when an earthquake liquefied the sand. They dropped a few feet, struggled. The quake ended and they were trapped, some with their heads above water, some below. “Whole families lost where they stood. I’m still amazed at such a finding but the terribleness of it stays longer in the throat than it used to.”
The conversation was full of deathbeds. She wanted free of it but the time was theirs and they drew it along, outlasting the lunch crowd, through the end of Deena’s shift, they kept talking, about lakes and monsters, ancient calendars and codices and number systems, and Celia realized, and knew her father realized, that they were each preparing the other for an ending. One would lose the other before long. How could they know such a thing? She saw the thought take hold in him. He looked away again, out the window.
“Here’s an idea,” she said. “This time that I’m taking off, what if I took it with you? What if you promised to stop flying around and I came to live with you for a while?”
He’d reject the offer. He’d find the setup custodial.
“I’d love you to live with me. But I won’t stop the flying around. I’m going after things, Lia.”
They’d reached an impasse. It was terrifying. When the dishes were cleared away, they finally fell silent, and Celia felt her state progressing toward the absurd. Had she already considered getting off the grid, or had learning of Koss’s disappearance sparked the idea? There he was again, robbing her of something, a clean, sure gesture. All these disappearances promised some final perfection of irony.
“I have a car to return, a plane to catch. Thanks for the little god.”
She took her gift from the table and pocketed it.
“There are more of those handmade dolls now than there are mountain gorillas or finless porpoises.”
They couldn’t help themselves. Nowhere a safe parting line.
She got to her feet and he looked suddenly lost. He stood and they hugged. She turned and walked the length of the diner. Against a heaviness in her limbs she reduced all thought to pure motion. As she stepped through the door, a woman moved past her and a young man caught the door and held it for Celia, who nodded to him. They were eye to eye in a flash of recognition, though at the same time she knew they’d never met. She was in the parking lot, at her rented car, when she turned around and saw him looking in the reflection of the door, which he was holding at an angle to see her. Then he stepped inside and the next thing she knew she was on the highway.
—
In the distance the dust devils began to appear in numbers, four or five at a time. She drove past broken scrub, wire fences and cattle gates, short trees bent and swollen at the joints, an old silver car plugged dead in its ruts years ago. She tried to call Indrani for an update on Hartley but had entered a cold spot and the call wouldn’t send. The highway ran on in cursive tarpatch. Cacti and creosote, an apron of burlap desert spread to the base of a low mountain.
Miles passed without a cell signal and in time the signs stopped rolling up. No distance to Santa Fe, no posted speed limits or highway number. Without the markers she crossed into the pure size and duration of the great west of things. A small dark cloud out ahead of a mass had assumed the shape of a black flint carving and then it stalled and seemed to penetrate the torso of the larger cloud. She’d seen it, a rudely tooled piece of rock, flat black stone, and could still sort of feel it in her thoughts, vivid, particular, and she wondered what the species had done to itself, what utility there was, in evolving the power to see likenesses. The persistent presence in mind of things that are not. She was coming around to the idea.
The road surface changed and a white noise set in. She drove into yellowing sky and the more distant mountains lost their shadows and then themselves were lost. She was either at the onset of something huge or already in its aftermath. What she felt wasn’t fear but a whirling certainty. A high wall of approaching dust was drawing over all, a shuttering lid, closing the mountains, the plain. As she slowed and before the black road disappeared she saw or thought she saw the square cab of a pickup at some distance in the mirror but then the mirror was shut too. On the signal arm she found the lights, the wipers fore and aft, but nothing helped. She needed to move to the shoulder but what if the truck lost its line and didn’t see her in time, there was no seeing anything now. She tried to stay in motion but could not and drifted over, trying to feel the edge of the road through the tires. She stopped. A headwind blew the dark to other darks of different intensities.
She looked for the truck to loom up and move by her but it wouldn’t appear. Imaginary things stay in the mirror but real things come to pass. What was real would come to pass, all things and their kinds come to pass.
From nowhere a deer bu
ck shot out of the murk and slammed itself into her hood. It fell, struggled up and fell again, its antlers cantilevered as if hung too far forward, got up and bounded off with one front leg flopping uselessly as the hail began with two clean pops and then set in full force all at once in a crushing sound filled with trace frequencies. The stones shot off her windshield and danced before her and when it seemed they couldn’t fall any harder the wind reversed and the windshield cleared for a few seconds as if to let her read the ice denting the hood in a storm of notational symbols. And then there it was, the truck, square behind her, sitting more or less on her tail. The caution lights flashed—she’d forgotten to put hers on—and up high sat a figure in the seat, motionless, waiting.
She kept checking her gauges, she didn’t know why. The hammering sky drove out all thought. Then a shock of sharp webbings on the glass and they were coming down like grapefruits and the whole windshield bent inward and separated and punched sheetform into the car. She felt the wind as she drew her legs up and threw herself over the seat onto the floor but the rear window was blooming constellations and now it shattered, the hail ricocheting off the back dash and bursting around her like cut-glass tumblers, and she couldn’t find cover for her head. Beneath the passenger’s seat a little plastic man, some kind of armoured superhero, lay lost and perfectly protected. A blue, articulated arm. Then the strike. A stone hit the back of her head and she almost passed out but the pain broke clean through and she was taking more direct hits when the door opened and someone had her by the ankles. She struggled and kicked but this creature was hugging her knees now and drew her out. At her feet she saw not a head but a spade head with arms and a voice shouted at her, a flat spade for a head covering and the handle fixed in place along the spine, shouted to get under the car. She hit the ground and rolled even as she was pushed under the chassis. The legs ran back to the truck and she dropped her face to the asphalt and said three times over what the fuck.