Those That Wake

by Jesse Karp

  "What about it, Remak? What's it supposed to mean?" Mike said, tired of the man's fascinated manner.

  Remak shook his head and shrugged.

  "I don't know. But it's not normal."

  "Not normal." Mike smiled despite himself. "That's huge. Thanks."

  After a rest and politely turning their backs for one another to relieve themselves, they went on. The ground was not on a slope here, but it was cracked and uneven in places and it would be easy to twist an ankle or trip. Laura was in jeans with a light, loose shirt and had tied her loose sweater around her waist, her father's Mets cap shading her eyes. She had sneakers on, and Mal, in loose cargo pants and a T-shirt that strained at his chest and shoulders, wore tough leather boots with heavy soles. Mike unfortunately had been in loafers when he had returned to the school with Remak, and he slowed the entire group down, cursing and stumbling along. He wore the khakis and casual button-down shirt that was the uniform of the modern urban teacher.

  When they had first begun their climb, seeing Remak in the suit and tie had made Laura think of James Bond, a government agent invading enemy strongholds, fighting on catwalks, and leaping from moving vehicles, all in his perpetually immaculate tuxedo.

  Remak was not James Bond. He had discarded his tie and jacket almost as soon as they'd started climbing, revealing the gun at the small of his back. His white shirt and blue pants were now anything but immaculate. They were dirtied, scuffed, torn in places, with rock powder ground into them. The shoes were no better, dull and scratched. He had also removed his glasses for the climb, the lenses through which he examined the world. All four of them were dirty and sweating and scuffed, but Remak, in what was left of that suit, seemed the most like a castaway, without dignity, the trappings of civilization slipping away.

  They walked and stumbled for a little more than two hours, plus a half hour stop to rest in the middle. Eventually, the squat mountain with trees on top that was in front of them became larger and larger, and the squat mountain with trees on top that was behind them got smaller and smaller. When the ground started to slope upward again, Laura slowed to a stop and Mike happily took the signal.

  "Mal, Jon," Laura said. "Why don't we break here?"

  Mal, many steps ahead for the entire journey, stopped, turned around, and walked the few steps back to them. The four formed a vague circle and sat down heavily on the hard ground.

  "I don't know when it's going to get dark in this place," Remak said, "but why don't we see if we can get a little sleep here?" There was eager agreement to that, and they awkwardly attempted to arrange themselves comfortably on a ground that made it all but impossible.

  "Do you think we should keep a guard up or something?" Mal asked.

  "I'll go first." Remak nodded tiredly, stiffly returning to his feet.

  "I'm okay," Mal said. "I'll go first. You get some sleep."

  "Sure," Mike said. "So you can ogle your new girlfriend all night."

  Mal looked away without responding, and Laura made a tart face at Mike, though, frankly, it was not the worst idea she'd ever heard.

  Remak nodded and looked back down for a spot with no lumps.

  "We were going to go see the school play this week," Laura said after a few moments of windless silence, searching for some evidence that another world still existed somewhere. "My best friend, Rachel, is in it. They're doing Bye Bye Birdie, and my dad had been in a production back in high school. He'd played Birdie. Some nights, after he had too much wine with dinner, he'd sing that song about being sincere and pretend to try to get my mom to faint."

  "We were going to close the gym early on Tuesday," Mal said, "and have a party for this guy Norman. He's turning ninety, but he still comes in every day and does a half hour with the jump rope and the five-pound weights. He does it slow, but he does it."

  "You work at a gym?" Laura asked.

  "Yeah, after school. Not like a sports club or anything. It's a small place, for ex-boxers and up-and-comers to train, programs for kids, that kind of thing."

  "Where is it?"

  "Jericho's Canvas, way downtown, on Greenwich and Edgar."

  "Jericho?" Remak asked. "Is that your name?"

  "Yeah."

  "Are you related to Max Jericho?"

  "He was my father." Mal let it go as if he were confessing something.

  "Really?" Mike said, sitting up a little. "Max Jericho was your father?"

  "Yeah."

  "Who's Max Jericho?" Laura asked, her bright eyes perking up with interest.

  "Best amateur boxer that ever lived," Mike said, lying back down, trying to show that he wasn't that impressed. "Maybe."

  "Some sports writers used to say he could have gone toe to toe with Tyson if he'd had the chance," Remak said.

  "What happened?" Laura asked Mal.

  "He wasn't very"—Mal tilted his head from side to side—"cooperative."

  Laura looked at him a little longer, then settled herself back as Mal rose up and started treading a few steps off.

  She was going to ask him about school, who might miss him there, but her mind was tugged away, thinking about Isabel, her eyes open, unsurprised, their defiance gone. Talking and angry one second, and then Brath, and then not talking or angry or even human anymore. It made her think of the dream she'd had on the train coming back from Manhattan, the weird suffocating dream. She was going to mention the dream then, but just in the act of thinking about it, sleep found her again.

  When they started up again, Remak informed them that his watch read 7:24 a.m. The sky, the light, the temperature, were all the same.

  It was much easier going up this mountain than down the last one, despite the fact that Mike's legs were so stiff that the calves and thigh muscles seized up several times in the first hour and they had to stop a few times to let them loosen as he grumbled and sulked about it. This mountain seemed to be about the same height as the last one, but its slope was far more gradual, at least on this face.

  Here it was just walking. Walking and walking and walking forever, with a rest here and there, until the last thirty minutes or so required them to make intermittent use of their raw, throbbing hands.

  They made it to the top and looked back at the other mountain. Just like that one, the one they were on was mainly flat but sprouted a tight, impenetrable forest of trees. They might have gone off in one of the other directions along the journey, but there had been nothing there, just sprawling granite with the occasional rise of squat mountain as far as the eye could see. At one point, Remak announced that he saw, or thought he saw, moving figures impossibly far in the distance. But when they all stopped to look, the movement had vanished, or had never been there to begin with.

  They also could have traced the base of this mountain to the other side, but the slope, as they could all see, was gentle and thus would be easier going than the last. The thinking was that atop the mountain, they might be able to see something of significance.

  So they were up here, with no choice but to try to skirt the forest and get around to the other side of the mountain. They moved in single file along a ledge that was so narrow in places that Laura's throat clenched up and her stomach muscles quivered. At one point along a particularly slim stretch, with limbs and branches and dry, pale brambles trying to force them off into space, she actually found her hands gently shaking.

  They were all hungry and dreadfully thirsty, but none of them mentioned it. Remak had them all sucking on pebbles, to keep saliva in their mouths. Mike, whose cracked lips had started to bleed, didn't find the pebble helping much and didn't hesitate to announce it. Laura could hardly disagree. In fact, the pebble felt odd in her mouth, not quite soft, but not solid the way she would expect a rock to feel.

  Mal, out in front as usual, had come to a small niche in the trees, affording them an amorphous clearing of some ten feet around to stop and take a rest in.

  "There's another opening, a bigger one, I think," Mal said to them after leaning out from the edge and
scanning what lay ahead of them. "Like where we woke up on the last mountain. That should bring us around to the other side, anyway. But it looks like rough going."

  Tired faces gazed back at him.

  "I'll see how it is," he said, always stepping up first, not bragging, just accepting that he was the one who was going to do it. "If there's anything there worth looking at, I'll see if we can make the going a little easier."

  "Wait," Laura said. "The forest is thick, but there are some openings low down here. I think I could crawl through."

  "I don't think that's a great idea," Mal said.

  "You shouldn't do that," Remak told her.

  "Fine," Mike said.

  "No." Laura knelt down on aching thighs, squinting into the depths of the brambles. "I can get through here."

  Remak came over to study it, Mal following the operation with concern on his usually somber face.

  "Laura," Remak said. "You can't see all the way through. The path may curve off in the wrong direction, or cut off in a dead end."

  "It's got to be better than making Mal climb along the edge over a drop that could kill him." She looked at Remak seriously. "Don't you think?"

  He stood up, glanced at Mal, and adjusted his glasses silently.

  "Okay, then." She tugged on her thick sweater, tucked her Mets cap onto her head, and got down on her hands and knees.

  "Be careful. Seriously," Mal said, causing Mike to roll his eyes.

  She squirmed into the gap, and dry branches refused to snap as she forced her way through, instead flicking back and stinging her through the protection of her sweater. It was difficult going. The long, thin sticks pricked at her, pulling at her sweater and gouging holes into it. Even the leaves, dry and sharp like the edges of paper, caught in her ponytail and tugged stubbornly at her head. She put her hand up to protect her face as she shimmied along, but more than once a branch flicked back and slashed a red mark on her cheeks.

  Then, finally, her hand came through to the clearing. She struggled until the top of her body was clear, and then dragged her legs out and came staggering to her feet just inches from the edge of the cliff. Blinking sweat out of her eyes, she finally surveyed the opening she had come into and was hit with such a force of shock that she almost stumbled back off the cliff and went tumbling to her death.

  Isabel was there, her body lying exactly how they had left it on the other mountain. It was, in fact, the same clearing in every way: the size and shape of it, the pale grass Laura had woken up on, the outcropping Mal had begun the descent with. And across the way, over a long expanse of cracked granite, was another mountain, with trees jutting from its top. The mountain they had just come up. The mountain they were on now.

  Laura stood, tight and still, afraid to move for fear of disturbing the space around her and shattering the universe apart. It was so shocking that she almost didn't register the single difference between the clearing now and the clearing the last time she had seen it: Brath was gone.

  THE PRISON

  "IT'S CALLED A self-contiguous tesseract," Remak said. They were all in the smaller clearing again. All their faces were turned toward him, and each showed a teetering inability to encompass what Laura had told them on her return.

  "A tesseract is a cube," Mike said, shaking his head, seeking to dismiss Remak, even in the face of a screaming void of alternatives.

  "It's a theoretical cube, actually," Laura said, reeling off information as if by rote. "A shape that extends into a fifth dimension. Inside is a space larger than the construct can physically contain in four dimensions." She looked around at an array of astonished faces.

  "My first boyfriend was a science geek," she explained, unsure whether to laugh or cry at the memory dredged up from another life. "He did a huge project on them. It was all I heard about for weeks, and I had to keep running him through it for the presentation."

  "It's bigger on the inside than on the outside?" Mal's somber eyes had gone a little wild, searching for a way to understand an enemy beyond his grasp.

  "Yes," Remak said, once he was sure that Laura had no more to add. "I've heard of research being done to create a tesseract, ideally something portable. Something the size of, say, a briefcase, which you could store an entire battalion's equipment in. I understand that there's a current school of thought that says black holes are tesseracts, that whole other universes exist within them." He pushed on into the imponderables, every inch the scientist.

  "So you're saying that we're in a black hole?" Mike asked angrily.

  "No, no, that's just incidental."

  "But"—Laura put her hand up, as though this were a classroom and Remak the teacher—"we are in some kind of enclosed space, like a room, aren't we?"

  "Not enclosed, exactly. Somewhere on Earth, there's an aperture, and this aperture opens into a space that coincides with a fifth dimension. But the space doesn't extend infinitely. In this case, it appears to be self-contiguous; that is to say, it folds back around on itself, meets its own edges. It's only"—he squinted and shrugged—"maybe six miles across, maybe less."

  "And that's why we're on the same mountain again," Laura said, "because the end of this place just leads right back to the beginning of it."

  "More or less. Its boundaries are only conceptual. It's enclosed in the sense that you can't continue to walk over new ground forever. Maybe 'finite' would be a better word than 'enclosed.'"

  "Who cares what word you use?" Mike said. "You're only guessing, anyway. You don't know what this is. We could all be hypnotized somewhere, or drugged, and none of this is really happening at all."

  "No. Too much interaction for that." Remak shook his head. "Too much time going by. There's no sense of compression or dilation. This is a real place, and we're really in it. And it also explains what's so special about this 'goddamned wilderness,' as you called it, and why they put us here in particular. Once we were dead, authorities could scour the entire planet and still never find us."

  "At least it has a name," Mal said.

  "So what?" Mike said.

  "If it has a name," Mal said, suddenly looking back at him hard, "then it's known, it's understood. We're not fighting God."

  "Not just that," Laura said. "He said there's an aperture somewhere. If there's a way in, there's a way out."

  They all looked at Remak, waiting for him to point it out to them. Instead, he looked as if his collar were suddenly too tight.

  "There's an aperture, yes. But I have no idea how it's sealed, or even if it can be unsealed. I don't know what it would look like, or if it would be visible at all. And considering it only needs to be large enough to fit a person through, a finite space of about six miles suddenly becomes a lot larger than it seems."

  "What about Brath?" Mal said. "He's not there anymore." He put his thumb toward the nearby clearing where Isabel's body still rested. "Laura said she looked over the edge and he wasn't climbing down."

  "I didn't see him between here and the next mountain, either," Laura added, and then shook her head and moved her hands uncertainly. "The other this mountain," she corrected himself.

  "There is that," Remak allowed. "Provided he isn't out of sight somewhere, that may mean that he can come and go or that they can take him and reinsert him at their convenience."

  "If they can do that," Mal said, "then they know we're still alive. If just keeping us in this prison isn't good enough, then why not send back an army with machine guns to get us?"

  "Resources," Remak said. "Or value. Maybe we're just not worth that much trouble. For whatever reason, whoever they are, they have access to something like this"—he waved his hand around him at the forest and the mountain and the sky—"but they don't have the facility for something like that. Furthermore, I'm fairly confident that they can't see us or hear us in here now."

  "Why?" Mal wanted to know.

  "In a normal forest, you can set up microphones that transmit to wherever you are, or you can use aircraft. Not here. You wouldn't be able to tran
smit into or out of this space, as our cells can attest, and I know there aren't any aircraft flying by. Whatever information they have they've either gotten from Brath or they're going to get from Brath."

  "Wait." Laura was shaking her head. "The aperture. Why would the door be down there somewhere? Wouldn't it be as close to where we woke up as possible? I mean, why come through in the middle of the field down there, then drag all of us up the mountain and leave us in that spot?"

  "That's"—Remak gave it a second—"true." He looked down at the hard ground, searching the dry, lifeless grass with careful eyes.

  "And there was no one in the clearing when Brath left," Mal threw in. "So, if they send someone back through, he'll expect the area to be clear."

  There was suddenly an energy pulsing through the group of them, their bodies recharged with purpose.

  Getting back to the first clearing was a hair-raising maneuver. Only Laura was small enough to make it through the woods, so moving around the slim ledge around the side was their only choice.

  Mal went first, his feet with only a slim lip to tread, and the handholds that stuck out poking and gouging at him. Often he had to put all his weight on his arms and shoulders, his body just hanging out over a long drop. And he had to assist Remak and Mike, guiding each one of them, establishing hand- and footholds. In some instances, he had to give up one of his own handholds and steady his companion traveler, supporting both of them with only the strength of his one arm. The tree limbs were surprisingly stubborn and wiry for such lifeless-looking things, as though this was to be their state for eternity. Like an old photograph, everything in it was dead, but also changeless and preserved forever.

  Mal's arms and legs ached fiercely by the time the rest of the group met Laura in the clearing. They stood milling about, each anxious to stay clear of the vicinity in which Isabel rested, motionless and terrifying.

  "I don't know what this is going to look like," Remak said, "or what direction it's going to come from or when—"

  "Or if," Mike interjected.

  "Or if," Remak allowed.