by Greg Hrbek
Still, go looking.
You won’t find him in the room downstairs, or in the bedroom. But through a window onto the back yard, you will notice a light in the trees. Go out there, cross the lawn, and stand by the door of the gazebo. He is inside. Writing in the light of a camping lantern, by hand in a notebook. Address him through the screen.
“Dad.”
The pen will stop moving. Perhaps only coincidentally. He didn’t hear you. Just a pause in composition. But then he closes the notebook and caps the pen and turns to you and says: “Hey.”
“Hey.” (Open the door.) “What is this, like, your new office?”
“Sort of.”
The little screened-in outbuilding is furnished with a rattan couch; a small glass table, on which the lantern is set; and a lawn chair, in which you now seat yourself. Notice, on the couch, in addition to the notebook and the pen, a couple of old-fashioned books, a pod and a pair of earphones. And something else. A print-out, a picture. Grainy and ghostly, like a diagnostic medical image.
“Where were you tonight?” he asks.
“Nowhere.”
He sees what you’re looking at. His eyes go from you to the picture and back to you again. A moth is outside, trying to get in. Wings beating against the wire mesh of the window screen in a kind of code.
I knew what it was even as he gave it to me and said: “It’s the photo you wanted. I zoomed into the sunglasses. That’s the reflection.” The strange thing is, I couldn’t see it at first. Couldn’t see the thing I was consciously looking for: a girl of eight or nine, holding a camera or a phone in front of her eyes. I couldn’t see that. Still, I thought: I have not been wrong. I haven’t. He altered the image … Then suddenly the truth was obvious and clear. I saw through the illusion of the white and black pattern. The flowing lines that seemed to be the lightplay of an aurora were actually strands of long hair (there must have been a wind coming off the ocean). A sloping shape, almost whited out by a brightness that could only be the sky, became the outline of an arm and shoulder. The darker vertical line was the strap of a swimsuit top; and the dark blur making it hard to discern a face was the device that had taken the picture in which she herself had been captured.
“It’s her,” I said.
“I know it seems that way,” my father said.
“It is.”
“Dorian—”
“How did you do it? Erase everything. I search her name and there’s nothing—not even deep-archived.”
“Dodo, listen to me.”
“Don’t call me that. She made up that name.”
“You’re seeing something that isn’t there. So am I. It’s happening to me now.”
“What is,” I said.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s what I’m writing. I don’t know where the words are coming from. Something’s going on. Maybe in the water supply or in something like milk that we consume on a regular basis. I don’t think it could be airborne, but— A kind of hallucinogen. A drug that affects memory …”
Soon as he says it, he wishes he hadn’t. Because he does not himself believe it. A drug in the water? If they were under the influence of some kind of chemical, so would countless others be. There’d be widespread reports of people remembering family, friends, lovers who never existed. No, this isn’t pandemic. It’s specific. To us. Us. Yes, us. It’s happening to me now. Nothing’s happening. You’re simply seeing what you want to see. She’s nothing but a dream. The pregnancy was real. And it might’ve been a girl—is that what you’re thinking? And it might’ve been yours. All of it is possible. Okay, fine. Let’s say it was yours (which there’s an even chance it wasn’t), and it was a girl and you kept it and had it. So one day, eight years later, you could’ve been on a beach in California and she could’ve taken a picture of you and her mother and her brother (and herself), and let’s say ten years after that she was in the city when the thing happened, just like Dorian says she was, and let’s say she died there. How did you—all of you—forget all that? Maybe that’s it. Maybe what’s it. The drug. It doesn’t create false memories, it erases real ones. Christ, would you listen to yourself … Listening, insofar as words not spoken aloud can be heard again in memory; and as Mitch listens, he speaks further still, saying it can’t be that kind of drug either, because a life cannot be made to vanish totally: not from the cloud, nor from the mind. Yes, certain links can rot, or be deliberately broken. But Dorian said it himself. There are archives. It’s the same with memory. We can take a pill for grief or trauma. Mitigate the pain of a loss. Even forget the day it happened, the specifics of the event. But we can’t erase a life. The life will always be a part of us, and always will have been a life. And if some force came hurtling out of the sky over San Francisco, not a hijacked plane or a meteor but something infinitely more powerful, enough to crash entire systems of reality … if that’s what happened that day over the bridge and she was there, then all this—the words I am writing, the dreams my son is dreaming, the photo his hands are holding now—these things would be recovered fragments of the life we lost …
Stand up now.
Don’t let him go away thinking: I am still alone, my father won’t listen or believe, no one ever will. Say: “Dorian.” Stop him. Hold him still. Hold him. Over his head, notice a moth clinging to the window screen. Pale green. Eyespots on the tapered hind wings. Not an uncommon type but rarely seen, for its existence is so brief. Because of your light, perhaps it will not die in darkness.
13
This is the season when thunderstorms form as if summoned by a wizard, over one town or city but not another, golf-ball-size hail falling in one area while somewhere else the wind twists itself into a whirling funnel. In Kathryn Wakefield’s office in the provincial appeals bureau on the twelfth floor of Agency Building 3, the text of a severe weather warning streams along the bottom of the computer screen—
… THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES UNTIL 5:30 P.M.: ALBANY, DELAWARE, GREENE …
—while she looks through a plate glass window down at Empire Plaza, at the flux of human bodies, dozens of people walking on differing paths, each on his or her own small and private journey, and yet all of them (she is thinking) somehow united, part of a choreography of motion around the giant quadrilateral of the reflecting pool, which now, at this hour of the middle afternoon, is showing an image of a bruising sky so color-saturated and sharply focused it might be made not of light and water but of megapixels. She is looking down at the plaza when it happens.
The tone.
A high-pitched, nails-on-a-blackboard screak. But she does not reach for her mobile device. Doesn’t stop the signal, though the signal will keep sounding until she touches the screen and opens the message. Instead, she keeps watching the plaza, all the people whose personal paths through the collective transit had appeared to her, a few moments ago, at once volitional and predetermined. She watches them come to a stop. All of them—all of a sudden—motionless. Holding their phones, touching the screens, stopping the signal, reading the message. Well, not all. Here and there, Kathryn notices, a pedestrian hasn’t even paused, hasn’t broken his stride, as if terrorism does not pertain to him …
Five minutes later, she is in the garage under the plaza. In her little plug-in, in a jam of vehicles inching toward the exits. It will take upwards of thirty minutes to simply get out onto the street. Then she still has to get down the hill to the on-ramp. Could be an hour before she’s even on the highway. Think about alternate routes. Problem is: this is a specific threat against capital cities, based on intelligence credible enough for the threat level to be raised to severe, meaning attacks are almost certainly going to happen. Every artery out of the city will be clogged, not only with commuters, but every resident with enough brains to get beyond a potential hot zone of radiation. She tries her husband again. No good. The networks are overwhelmed. Nothing to do but sit still and inch forward. A driver further ahead leans on his horn for seconds on end—and the sound, as it echoes through the sub
terranean chamber, brings tears to her eyes. And then she sees. Someone, in an attempt to back out of a space and join the line, is refusing to give up his claim on the queue, while the person he is trying to precede, won’t back up to let him in, or perhaps can’t because the next car is up against his rear bumper. The ultimate effect, after a revving of engines and a yelping of tires is of the interjected vehicle being rammed, at a forty-five degree angle, into the rear of another parked car, setting off its alarm. Someone else, two cars ahead, attempts an end-run around all of this, causing a new collision. Cover your ears with your hands. Open your mouth. Maybe if you scream, all these goddamn fucking people will prove to be nothing but ingredients of a nightmare.
Twenty or so miles north, in the town where she should be, the sky appears to Dorian Wakefield exactly as it had appeared to his mother in the surface of the calm water twelve stories below her office window … While she was staring out of that window, Dorian was walking through the ruins of the old race track, thinking back on what his father had said the night before, feeling that there was something to be done now, something they had to do, he and his father, both of them together, in order to … (This is where he lost his sense of direction.) To do what? Dorian doesn’t know. All he knows is that his father believes him. But is belief in the claim of another an admission of dishonesty? The question is: Do you believe him, when he’s been lying to you for so long, when all of them … This was the argument he was feeling inside himself when it happened.
The tone.
For a few moments, Dorian didn’t really hear it; or, rather, the temporal lobe of his brain failed to interpret it correctly. Because of the cicadas. Because the tone of the advisory system (a combination of sine waves in the 800–1000Hz range) bears a striking resemblance to the song cycle of a periodical insect. The delay lasted a few moments only. Then the neurons in his auditory cortex responded, and Dorian Wakefield felt his heart catch fire. Like millions of others from the Original Thirteen to the Acquired Territories, he reached for his mobile device. Touched the screen. Stopped the signal. Read the text of the alert. Saw the time and thought: She is still at work. He stood there long enough to try a call—“due to a surge in wireless traffic”—and then started running. Across the thicketed infield, past the dead tote boards and toward the ruins of the main building, making for the pavilion where he’d locked his bike, while overhead the sky took on colorations suggestive of the bruise that had faded at last from his face, so that, despite the clear and present fear that his mother might not get out of the capital before something went down, the image on his mindscreen was Karim coming towards him across a green lawn and drawing his arm back and the sensation in his gut seemed to be the convulsive pain of a fist striking him there. By the time he reached the pavilion and the fountain, he was gasping for breath, as if all the air had been forced out of him once again. He went down on his knees beside the bike and grabbed at the locking mechanism. Four numbered disks that he had turned probably a thousand times to a combination that he had chosen—and that he now cannot remember. He closes his eyes. Thunder. Like giant pieces of sky smashing into each other and subducting. Then the numbers come to him and the lock is open; and as he stands up on the pedals and starts pumping, a drop of rain hits his face, another his arm. A moment of silence all across the environment (magicicada does not chorus in the rain)—and then a noise like innumerable bullets being shot down from the sky onto rooftops, foliage, concrete. Suddenly, the air is half water. Sensation as reference (var rain : Rain = dream of Rain), so that, despite absorption in clear and present fears, he is also seeing-as-accessing a dream authored and saved on 07.02.2038 in which it was pouring rain and a muezzin was chanting. Karim was there, though he looked like Omar … I could feel the rain soaking through my clothes, warm like blood; and I understood that Karim was the muezzin and if I just kept him there in that storm, he would begin to experience a sensation like the one I was experiencing now, one of drowning caused by moving through a downpour of water while taking the deep and rapid breaths of someone in a state of terror. Gag and spit. Is there a taste to it? One there shouldn’t be? And I feel something, too. On my skin. That’s called water. No, like a burning. Are you sure? No, I mean, I don’t know. You’re imagining that. But it’s possible, isn’t it. To fly a plane carrying a nerve, blood, or blister agent into a line of storm clouds. Yeah. Calm down, stop breathing so hard. I can’t, I think there’s a taste in my mouth. And watch where you’re going. It’ll take her hours to get home. Red light. She’s probably not even on the highway yet. (Car coming from the left; braking, hydroplaning, barely missing him.) Hello, what did I just say, are you trying to get us killed? (Eyes burning, too. But don’t your eyes always burn a little when you’re crying?)
We live, day to day, with the chance of something violent, something tragic happening at any moment. Yet wondering when suggests the possibility (however faint) of if, allowing for the hope that the thing you fear may not happen after all. But when you know when, you can’t hope against the coming. All you can do is wait … And that is what Karim Hassad had been doing ever since that day at the mosque, when his old friend had told him: Within the week. Some time in the next seven days. I don’t know what, I just know soon. Now, listen. Give me your number. After which the two had parted company. Karim was brought home by Mrs. Mahfouz, and he found Jaddi at the kitchen table, cleaning his gun: inserting a small brush into one of the parts.
“How was masjid?” the old guy asked.
“Good.”
He nodded, but didn’t look up until Karim said he’d met someone there. “A boy like me, from a camp.” And that was when Karim started lying. Saying first that the boy had been interned in the Wyoming Territory; and second, that the boy and his parents were now living with extended family in a town twenty minutes away. “He invited me over tomorrow,” Karim said. “Can I go?” The reaction on the old guy’s face was not one Karim had seen so far. An expression that reminded Karim of the way the nuns had looked at him back in Dakota when he would nod in the affirmative after being asked: Are you staying away from Dream? But then the tension, like a thin layer of ice quickly melting, was gone, and the old guy said, “Sure, bud.”
The next day, Karim was with Yassim in the backseat of a car being driven by a man who had introduced himself to Jaddi as Yassim’s uncle, Faraj. The man (maybe his real name was Faraj, maybe it wasn’t) had been polite and amiable at the house; in the car, he shook off that personality, and adjusting the rearview mirror so he could see Karim and Karim could see him, explained in Arabic that there was not much time now. “If you had made contact three weeks ago, when you were told to. But because you failed in that simple task, we must move you quickly toward your goal, which will now be a shared one. A new era is about to begin. Within the week, the first lines of a new chapter are going to be written. We will give you a role in this heroic epic, and the action you perform will be added to the like actions of a thousand other shahids, each one of you like unto a wave which when joined together will form an ocean, and all of you will live as heroes in Paradise. But we will not tolerate any further problems from you. Am I understood so far?” Karim nodded, and Yassim said, “You’ll have no problems from us, Uncle. You just tell us where to go and we’ll be there.” The drive ended in a rural area, on what seemed to be an abandoned farm. Yassim got out, Karim got out. The first thing Karim noticed was the barking of a dog. As usual, the buzzing of the insects was all around him. But he had become, in a sense, deaf to that noise, so all he seemed to hear was the dog, which judging by the hoarseness of its voice, had been barking for a long time without cease. “I already did this,” Yassim said. “Did what?” Karim said. The man, motioning to the boys, walked toward a building painted the color of dry blood. Inside there, Karim realized after a few steps, was where the dog was. And as he perceived also that the building (the word came to him: barn) was falling apart—walls buckling, roof crumbling—Karim was blindsided by the thought of his mother telling hi
m about a time, the summer before they were interned (he was three), when they had been at the beach, making a sandcastle, and a wave came and it fell apart, “and you started crying, habibi, and scolding the ocean.” Door opening. Sunlit inside because of a hole in the roof; and leashed to a post, the dog. Whose barking, at the sight of them, changed from a distress signal beyond hope to a wild expression of thanksgiving directed at the beings who had finally responded. When he saw the gun in the man’s hand, Karim thought: Where did that come from? The man walked up to the dog, pushed the gun into the short coat shrink-wrapped around the ribcage, and then shot. The animal yelped and leaped sideways: the leash stopped it short, and so it sat humbled in the dust. Blood dripped from fur matted with blood. It opened its mouth and hacked. The man said: “Now, take this—” (a different weapon in hand, a knife with a long curved blade) “—and cut the throat.” In the three days since cutting that throat, Karim has come to see that it is true: He had not so much killed a living thing as ended the suffering of a pointless life. For what kind of life is it to be chained up, alone and starving. And how are we—me and Yassim (and don’t forget Hazem)—any different from such a dog? They fenced us in and made us orphans and the hunger we feel can never go away. Not in this world. So what will it be to take up a knife and cut our own throats? And amid or laid over (or perhaps running simultaneously with) this voice-as-feeling was the image-made-from-story of a beach and a wave and a castle made of sand, and his mother; and all of this thought-as-seen when suddenly—from his phone and scaring the shit out of him—came the tone. Which he had known was coming. But foreknowledge of the coming was no protection. To the contrary, foreknowledge only pushed his fear into a dimension without boundaries.