by John Langan
A car door slammed. The special-effects show I was the center of stopped—blinked out like a popped bubble. The rainbow haze, the images on the windows, the heat baking my skin, the air too thick to breathe—not to mention the root cause of all of them, the invisible film coating me—fled, exorcised by the sharp clap of metal meeting metal. I bent over, gulping air. When I straightened, Roger was striding across the lawn to me, his expression a struggle between concern and annoyance. I tried to speak, but was too busy taking air in to spare any for explanations. The mountains were still there. Only long enough for me to verify that, yes, they were sand-colored, and then I was staring at the empty sky. Roger said, "What? What is it?"
"I—"
"You what? Are you all right?"
I shook my head side to side.
"What's wrong?"
The best I could do was shake my head again.
"You've seen something, haven't you?" He might have been accusing me of a particularly distasteful crime.
I nodded.
"Another vision of Ted? Of what you think is Ted?"
I shook my head. "No," I said. "Mountains. I saw mountains."
"Mountains?" Roger said. "What mountains? What did they look like?"
"Tall," I said, "sandy. There," I added, pointing to sky behind the house.
"Like the Himalayas?"
"I don't know," I said, "I guess."
Roger gestured toward the line of Frenchman's Mountain. "Not like that?"
"Definitely not."
"My God," he said, "I think you've seen something."
"Do you?" I said, finally finding my voice. "What was it that clued you in? Was it when I said I'd seen something, or was it that part about me seeing something?"
"I mean something important," Roger said. "Come inside—I'll show you." He turned and strode toward the house, ignoring the car and our dinner in his haste. I followed more slowly, stopping at the car to retrieve the brown paper bag on the front passenger seat. Funny, the things that seem important to you. Inside, I deposited the take-out on one of the tables in the hallway and trailed upstairs.
Roger was in his office, standing over the futon to the left. Do you know, for all the times I'd stood outside this room during the wee small hours, I hadn't seen it during the day for weeks? When I'd been here in the a.m., I'd been too occupied watching Roger study his strange map to attend to the rest of the office. It wasn't substantially different from before—the changes I noticed were by and large ones of degree. The bookcases and walls were hung with more maps, more points on which were connected to one another by pieces of thread. Roger had started using different-colored thread. I couldn't tell what each color signified. The tabletop model had gained an extra layer of buildings on all sides, as well as a new group of figures meant to be attackers. There were pictures scattered around it, three-by-fives that appeared to be of Kabul—a few showed American troops in close-up.
"Here," Roger said, ducking his head under a thread as he advanced holding an oversized book out to me. It was open to a two-page spread of mountains. I took the book from him and studied the image. "That was what you saw," he said.
"Could be." I wasn't sure. The photograph showed a cluster of mountains that looked approximately like what I'd seen filling the sky—same worn outline, same grooves carved into the sides, same dull yellow color—but there was something missing from it.
"Those are the Asmai Mountains," Roger said. "From the spot where Ted was killed, they are visible in the distance—if you look straight down the street on which his patrol was traveling, you can see them."
The sensation of life—of energy—that was what the photo lacked. "So you think this is a message from Ted?"
"I 'think' nothing. It can be nothing else."
"Maybe," I said, handing the book back to him. "I wonder why you didn't see them."
"I wasn't here," Roger said, returning the book to a pile on the futon. "Obviously, there was only a certain time at which Ted could communicate with us, and when that moment arrived, he had to send his communiqué, regardless of who was there to receive it."
"You mean, even if it was only me."
"I didn't—"
"Never mind," I said. "I find it interesting that you're willing to believe me on this, but you won't believe any of what really matters."
"It isn't that I don't believe you saw something in the restaurant," Roger said, "I don't agree with your interpretation of what you saw. I'm sure it isn't right. It can't be. Don't you see? What you've just seen proves that Ted isn't a monster—that he's continuing to reach out to us."
"That wasn't exactly what I had in mind," I said. "For what it's worth, whatever I saw out there proves nothing one way or the other—except maybe that Ted was involved in it." I held up my hand to block his reply. "What I meant was, you have no problem crediting my viewing mountains on the other side of the globe, but you can't accept that I saw you making your deal in the police cell."
"This again? My Faustian bargain? What will it take for you to abandon this nonsense?"
"Your admitting to it would be nice," I said, "but I'm willing to settle for you lifting the curse."
He crossed his arms. "I have told you already, I am not going to do that. It is a matter of principle. I refuse to validate your representation of me as some type of fiend."
"Even if it saves your son?"
"It will not save Ted. Its sole purpose is my humiliation." Roger pushed past me out of the room. "If you will excuse me, I am going down to dinner."
I went to call after him that I'd brought it in, then thought better of it. If he didn't notice the bag sitting on the hall table, let him search the car for it. Picturing the confusion on his face as he felt under the seats gave me more pleasure than it should have.
I wanted a look at the photos around the model. They were sprinkled with a fine layer of dirt—no doubt taken from or near the place where Ted had died. There were maybe two-dozen pictures, about half of which were of Kabul—including six that showed the square where the ambush had occurred. Judging from the scorch marks and bullet holes decorating the buildings, the photos post-dated the attack. The last picture in the series showed a shallow depression at its center; it took me a second to pick up on the charred ground and process that this was it, this was the spot where Ted had been torn apart by the RPG. Do you know, despite what I'd seen within the last hour, the picture of that scoop out of the earth, that burnt emptiness, was more deeply shocking than any of it? It was like, here was the thing itself—here was death in all its brute simplicity. Roger had lined up that picture, I saw, with the spot on the model where the figures of Ted and the old man jostled for space with the grenade fragment inside the red circle.
The remaining pictures were of young men I was reasonably sure were other members of Ted's squad. Unlike the photos of the city, which appeared to have been taken all on the same day, the shots of the soldiers went back months. Some guys were in full dress uniform, others in fatigues, still others dressed as Afghans. I didn't know any of their faces. I wondered if Roger did, if he'd recognized them from his and Joanne's visits to Ted's bases. Whether he knew them or not, I was certain that, were I to flip over any of the pictures, I'd find not only their names, but every last bit of information about them and their relationship to Ted that Roger had been able to cram into the space.
On my way out of the office, I paused at the photo of the place where Ted's life had come to an end. Here was the blank spot at the center of things. Without it, the square was just a square, the soldiers just soldiers. With it, the square became a site of loss, the soldiers a company of the grieving.
I also paused to study Roger's doorway map, more crowded with notations than ever. The newer ones were so small it was difficult to read them, but roughly half appeared to be notes on the history of the place. These went back several hundred years, but Roger had employed a personal shorthand that rendered everything except the dates impossible to decipher. The other half of the n
ew notes looked like astrological symbols. I'd never paid much attention to those kinds of things, but I was pretty sure I recognized the symbols for the moon and the crab, Cancer, as parts of short, apparently nonsensical equations. I thought I'd seen this kind of math on more elaborate horoscopes—they had something to do with the positions of the planets—or the stars—or both. The shorthand history and the astrological calculations had been written in gold ink. The center of the map, that white circle with Ted's old mirror inside it, remained pristine.
As I walked down the stairs to join Roger, an unpleasant comparison occurred to me: Roger's doorway map reminded me of Rudolph de Castries's misshapen star design. The comparison wasn't exact—the second I made it, I was aware of all the things they didn't have in common. Rudolph's design was meant to be realized in three-dimensional space; Roger's appeared confined to the page. Rudolph employed a definite, if irregular, shape; although there was that circle at the center of Roger's map, what appeared to be the point of it, the endless accumulation of detail, didn't seem arranged in any pattern. Rudolph's star was intended to establish certain points at which you would perform further actions; Roger's map was an end in and of itself.
Somehow, though, those differences didn't seem as pronounced as I wanted them to. What was more important—more significant—was the way they both tried to shape space, to identify and delimit the edges of certain events. I don't know. Phrased this way, the similarity sounds as if it was more about me than it was about them. I was reasonably sure Roger hadn't been studying the writings of Rudolph de Castries. If he had, he'd have produced a different map. I'd already asked him about the map; he'd already explained its purpose—and admitted to not understanding why he'd glued Ted's old mirror to the map. If I were to ask him about the latest information he'd added, I knew he would attribute it to his ongoing desire to understand the circumstances of Ted's death in all possible dimensions, including their relation to such larger contexts as the square's history and the position of the heavens.
That last one, though—I mean, it was at least evidence that Roger's obsession was running way out of hand. As if the rest of it hadn't been. I know. In the interest of fairness, I asked him about it over the take-out he'd ordered from the diner. He gave me the answer I'd anticipated, in pretty much the exact words. He was suspicious. Now that I had revealed what I'd see him do—excuse me, what I thought I'd seen him do—everything I said had to be examined for hidden meaning. He ended his explanation with, "What makes you ask?"
"Just curious," I said. "You have to admit, astrology isn't the first reference point you'd choose."
"It wasn't." Touché.
"How did you start?"
"Why?"
"For God's sake, Roger, stop acting like I'm the bad cop and you're the suspect. I'm asking because I want to know. If you don't want to tell me, then say so."
He was silent, chewing his Monte Cristo. Then he said, "I could not find an adequate map. As you will have noticed, you can order a great variety of maps, including satellite pictures. But I could not locate a map that showed me the site where Ted's patrol had been ambushed in sufficient detail, so I decided I would have to draft my own. I began with the location where he had died, and worked outward from there. After I had established the locations and dimensions of the square's buildings, the map still felt—incomplete, full of large, vacant spaces. I suppose you might say my decision to use those spaces to record the specifics of Ted's death was motivated as much by aesthetics—or something approximating aesthetics—as anything.
"Having listed the facts I had, there was still too much white space visible. If I thought about the event mathematically, however, there was plenty left to write. I switched inks and began listing those facts. Along the way, I learned a few more details about what you might call the written side of things and added them. Once I was finished with the math, there was less blank paper to see; less, but still too much. Especially inside the circle I had drawn around the spot where Ted had died—the first thing I had done once I'd established the spot's exact coordinates. All manner of information crowded the circle's circumference, but from the start I would not intrude on it.
"Finally, I recalled Ted's old shaving mirror. I sought it out and added it to the map. For a few days, I was so pleased with my decision that I left the map alone. I attempted to ignore the map, focused on reading and sending off inquiries via snail- and e-mail. No matter how much work I did, however, how tired I was at the end of the day, the map drew my attention to itself—those white patches seemed as large as ice-fields. I started to cast around for other information, turning first to the square's history—what I should call its deep history, as opposed to the more recent events I'd explored—and second to its astrology—as I've said, not in the interest of fortune telling, but as another way to fix what happened to Ted.
"And yes, before you diagnose, I am well aware that Freud would view my activity as the most elaborate kind of sublimation. Because an action can be interpreted one way, though, does not mean it must be. While such was not my conscious intent, I believe I may have been constructing what the Tibetans call a spirit map."
Here we were with the Tibetans again. "Which is?"
"A chart of the course a spirit takes when it exits this world and enters the bardo. Its purpose is to project the spirit's path as best as possible, in order to guide the prayers of those left behind."
"What's next?"
"What do you mean?"
"For your spirit map. You've approached Ted's death in terms of immediate and longer-term history, of science and superstition. What's next?"
"As yet, I'm uncertain. I have not exhausted either the square's history or its astrological dimensions."
I nodded. "What are you praying for?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You said the purpose of a spirit map is to help direct the prayers of the bereaved. I'm curious as to what this map has told you."
"I don't think about it in those terms—not exactly. I don't engage in formal prayers—I suppose you might say I view my work as my prayer. You know the goal of that work: to see Ted at peace."
"And you won't consider—"
"No," Roger said. "I don't know why you insist on returning to this subject." He stood and carried his dishes to the sink.
"Because I think it'll help," I said to his back.
"You're wrong."
"How do you know? What do you have to lose by trying?"
"It's not a question of what I have to lose. It's what I have to gain, which is nothing." He finished rinsing his dishes, set them on the dishrack, and turned to leave. He said, "Must you continue to raise this topic at every chance you get? Can't you give me some peace?" Before I could reply, he left the kitchen.
Talk about touching a nerve. Melodramatic exits were becoming Roger's specialty. He couldn't see it was a case of methinks the lady doth protest too much. There was a possibility I was mistaken, but with every angry denial, Roger solidified my belief that I was onto something big.
Unfortunately, it was a big something I had no idea what to do with. I mean, I couldn't very well lift the curse for Roger—I was pretty sure the marriage bond didn't extend that far. Each time I raised the possibility of his doing so seemed to push Roger that much further in the opposite direction. I carried my dishes to the sink and, when I was done with them, walked into the living room.
There was more for me to read about Rudolph de Castries, if I chose. There were at least ten possibly relevant articles online. I didn't choose, though. I had had my fill of the bizarre for one day. I clicked on the TV, and there was the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter just beginning. Have I mentioned how much I hate that film? I'm sure I must've. I swear, you and I could not have made more of a hash of that novel if we'd tried. You would think that a novel that's lasted a hundred and fifty years might have something going for it, but, oh no, not when it comes to Hollywood! Sorry. I could rant like this for hours. What a waste! What a waste of a g
reat cast! All that money—wasted! If I wanted a distraction, I could ask for no better, and with Roger safely out of earshot, I was free to yell at the screen all I wanted. I set the remote on the couch beside me, and settled in for two hours of travesty.