WHEN VIN WOKE FROM THE crèche a fourth time, his world was both too small and too large for him. Above the underground office lay the basement of the house and above that the surface of the earth and then the sky, and the only way to live was by being a part of it all, so that imagining became a survival skill and dreaming the foremost skill of every individual who is alone.
And as for companionship, Kim and Bill had lives of their own; all companions did. They were swept up in their own dreams, the consequences of their own decisions, directions of their making that must be different from his because there is just too much raw possibility in the universe for any two lives to follow the same course. Possibility was the stuff of the universe; difference the material of time.
When he exited the casket and left Nerdean’s office, he left his limp behind in another world as if it was a sloughed-off skin. He walked around the huge house that he had just that very day inherited from a likeminded creature, a man with his same name who had also conveniently left a body behind for him to inhabit. Sophie lay on her bed near the dining room’s picture window, alertly watching small birds in trees just across the street, her long, cream-colored fur catching cloud-filtered sunlight, her mouth quivering in ecstatic, predatory anticipation. “Ah, ah, ah,” she said, in her cat voice.
It was nine-thirty in the morning and her dish was empty. When she heard him opening a can of food, she jumped down two levels from her perch and ran across the dining room to join him in the kitchen.
He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t want to know how people he loved had fared within this particular sliver of eternity. He was only a stranger here, and would travel further afield.
FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE attempted to stay in the crèche for more than twenty-four hours. After arranging for Corey Nahabedian to feed Sophie for a week, he set the system to start what the files described as a “multi-shot,” the same mode Mona was using. In a multi-shot, the subject had a short shot, returned to a crèche, and then was briefly revived. If the subject exited the crèche, the cycle aborted. Otherwise, the subject went back into partial-torpor, and took another shot. He didn’t quite understand how a multi-shot could work, given the shell game that the crèche was playing with bodies and minds, but he had decided to try it.
DARK, MUDDY GROUND SPINS AS if the whole world were a thrown disk, then hits him in the face. Soft and heavy sludge pushes into his mouth, his cut lips and cheeks. His teeth hurt. Face down in muck near the splinters of something, he shudders and angles his chin up, leaving his forehead embedded while opening a gap to breathe from the side of his mouth. The world shakes and booms. He waits.
He must pull his face from the earth. Pain lancing neck and shoulders, the furrow of a sharp edge crosses his jaw—a helmet’s chinstrap—these things press him as he raises his head. A man, craggy and broken, is gibbering in his mind. The man tugs the muscles of the body Vin inhabits, makes them spasm.
Vin moves jaw and tongue as regions recover from numbness. Sound of gunfire. A high, deafening whistle comes and goes. The air shakes with distant thumps. The broken ground he is on is a mix of bodies and dirt. The crèche has sent him to another bad place.
He is breathing, this body whole but hollow, as if abandoned. He finds its owner, the madman who is now begging him—begging anyone—to act, to move. The madman is searching in the firmament of his own mind for a hole to crawl into. He will give over the reins of his body if Vin guarantees a crushing defeat of all enemies. Or if he doesn’t. Vin pulls and pushes their shared body up to its knees.
The body aches with cold and injuries. Vin stumbles to standing. The air hums. A great fat sun with fiery cheeks strolls over distant hills. The corpses may rise up to dance in rhythms of sky. Is that his old friend opening a bloody breast to let in the raw wind? He is a good friend. A fine, generous man. Sadly, his name is shattered. Vin should splash a bucket of water on his filthy head and clean his crusted face and close his split mouth. If he can find the pieces of his jaw.
Fields turned by battle lose their place in the world. These might be fields anywhere. This is no place. Oh, my brothers, Vin thinks as he staggers, why such a mess? Why carve such bits and pieces off your bodies to strew all around, so careless with meaty arms and gut, or this toe that should be tapping stones or this face with paled lips puckering to whistle songs of grief?
He bends to touch the face, squats and presses its bony forehead, draws three fingers across a mud spattered eye, tries to close it but it won’t. Instead, he scrapes grit into the eyeball and the helmet falls backward, pulling off the crown. Vin and the madman reflect on the lack of discipline. Any man would be disappointed to make a show like this at the end. The madman takes the reigns of their body and lifts the helmet, filled as it is with skull and brains. He digs within to ensure no one is hiding.
No one is, but the tiny, bristly hairs and the bloody gunk and bits of skull are frightening. The madman has little schooling, but Vin knows that each of the billions of cells of blood and brain includes a unique string of DNA, the double-helical chain that was this man’s signature on his contract with eternity.
“I know it now,” the madman yells, triumphant. “I saw it in my own mind. You are saying that these numberless, twisting worms have already eaten him. Poor love.”
“No,” Vin replies. “Those twisting worms are proteins that are a part of him. They are his blueprint, his design.”
“Oh, I am a fool for words,” says the madman, who feels grubby and abashed before Vin’s angelic knowledge.
Time to walk. Most bullets fly out of one direction and into another. Is it better to go where bullets come from, or where they’re going to? Questions. Going where they come from may put you behind them, which has benefits, surely. Going where they’re headed may offer company, if you could walk beside them. So, which direction is the better choice? The madman makes a worried sound and grabs his tongue with his filthy left hand.
Vin makes a choice. He has died before within the crèche, and survived it.
“Oh, you have, have you?” demands the madman, his broken head popping up like a gopher in Vin’s thoughts. Vin doesn’t answer. Making the body move is hard going. He doesn’t have a lot of energy left for being thoughtful.
Staggering and falling and rising ensues. Vin is in Africa, in the body of a mercenary fighting EPLF rebels in a conflict he knows nothing about. He’s never been to Africa before. (“Born here,” corrects the madman.)
He’s dizzy and in great pain. The body he’s in is insane, and the world is spinning and stopping. The hours begin to drag by.
HIS SHOT WITH THE MADMAN ended during a firefight—bullets twanging through humid air and into thick plants that sprayed green shrapnel. When he awoke inside the crèche, he was too stunned to summon the presence of mind to exit. He slid into a second shot . . .
. . . IN WHICH HE EXPERIENCES A lot of sex, with many different people. The shot begins as a tessellation of bright sensory moments, a musk of bodies and perfumes that gently unstitches him. There are soft chests and others firm and geometric, wide caramel aureoles and pink-rimmed, vanishingly small buttons, gooseflesh along slick lengths of skin leading to innies, and others to outies. He lies on his back and things happen. He rises to his knees and acts. The first time he begins to organize a full sense of himself his prostate becomes a ringing wave and he gets lost again.
Vin has only had a few partners, and has never had sex with men. There are many men and a few women here. But when his host runs a palm over a bearded face and pulls it to him, Vin’s understanding of himself is irrelevant. Elian, his host, is alert and more than happy, is expert in responding to and intensifying a coupling. Elian’s delight is already faceted and Vin only adds another lens. During pauses, recollections of Kim form and fade, smells recall her, the weight and feel of bodies and limbs evoke ghostly memories.
Elian is lying on his back, exhausted, his limbs over other healthy limbs. He stretches and stands, makes a joke that Vin doesn’t proce
ss. He’s on a large yacht in a lovely, island-bound cove, a young body that feels most comfortable wrapped around other bodies and that’s now clothed in a mild breeze. He may be a prostitute, though Elian bridles at the term. After Vin’s day in combat, the surrender of this shot and possibly the drugs in Elian’s system make surfaces tilt and slide unexpectedly, lips stretch and then relax, bruise-like circles around eye sockets swell and recede, voices waver as if jostled by bubbles that are wishing themselves toward breathable air. Elian seems to be keeping Vin at a distance, as if Vin were a crawling sensation that could lead him to a bad trip.
For hours Vin doesn’t try to influence Elian, just tries to remember that he’s a separate person. It’s difficult to decode Elian’s perspective. There is drowsing, then more nuzzling, drinking and snorting, straining and smoking, a return of other naked bodies.
A flock of vivid green parrots are loose on the yacht and in slack moments when Vin sees their curious faces or startles at their piercing cries he wonders whether they might be phantoms. A gray wire-haired dog sits on a green cushion beneath two of the green parrots. If he is hallucinating, Vin might be seeing the ghost of his dog Xiao Hui, Gao Cheng’s doomed companion.
Elian has a terror of mixing the wrong drugs and dying at an anonymous anchorage. Between the bouts of confusing sex with roaming packs of hedonists, Vin tries to make various pills, powders and pipes on offer seem unappealing, and tries to keep Elian hydrated. At one point, as Elian drifts in and out of sleep, Vin experiments with suggesting that he change his life, maybe steal away with a companion and settle down. Elian seems to be ignoring him, until—just as Vin is wondering whether direct communication is possible—Elian says aloud, but softly, “Okay, but without fucking what are we for?” Which might be a response.
Though Elian’s love of sex is genuine, he wants other things as well, he’s just unsure what. He wants desperately to be away from the yacht, but he has trouble thinking of other ways to live. Vin tries to envision alternatives but the drugs are still making it difficult to maintain his own coherence. In the end, Vin can’t overcome the nihilism of Elian’s commitment to partying, even though it limits and may kill him. Again, Vin is in a person he couldn’t imagine without the crèche, a person who doesn’t think about the questions that obsess Vin. For example, Elian never asks himself what’s “real” and what isn’t.
CHAPTER 14
The Freedom to Choose
Vin dragged one of the wooden chairs from the dining table over to the picture window and was watching things move on Puget Sound as he tried to define a word that appeared and disappeared in his mind—equilerium: a balance of reality and dream in simultaneous tension and compression.
He had spent what felt like a long time with the madman, and had a lot of bloody fighting in recent memory—with enemies, friends (mostly accidental), rats and at least one spiky plant. He might have fought with himself near the end. Then there was the yacht. First, brutality and pity, and then a world full of bodies that were healthy, sinuous, inviting and hungry for him. And his own frail self stretched nearly to vapor connecting those places.
When he came up from Nerdean’s office, he might have remembered to lock the apartment behind him, but maybe not. He looked for Sophie. He wanted to show her a rat. She would have scrapped with it like a tiger. But he didn’t bring any rats back with him and couldn’t find Sophie.
Why did he make such enormous jumps from one shot to the next? He was the common element. The shots connected through him in some way, but the device didn’t seem to register any of the kinds of differences that human beings valued. And contemplating probability was useless. If there were infinite worlds that contained Churchill and infinite infinities that didn’t, what were the chances that he would land in Churchill? Arithmeticians might say, divide the single infinity inhabited by Churchill by the infinite infinities without him. But how would that work with real things? You could pair up moments with Churchill and moments without him forever. Was probability a trick that only worked with numbers? And if a shot didn’t narrow probability (because the crèche always pointed at infinity), then what did it mean for the crèche to “aim”? Did the surrogates he inhabited reach toward him—were he and the surrogates aiming at each other, the crèche connecting them through rage or despair? He watched the lovely light and gentle scatter of activity beyond the big window and concluded that the crèche wasn’t a place to attempt romantic self-discovery.
“Hey sweetie,” the house said, in bird talk. “Hey sweetie.”
It was a friendly sound but it startled him and his hands and arms shook with sudden, nonspecific fear. He tried to calm himself. This house was safe. He would be okay.
“Hey sweetie,” the house said again. It was friendly.
He stood and walked across the room, then down the short flight of stairs, and opened the door to find Mona outside.
“I see you’re surviving alright,” she said.
“Am I?” He felt like poison soup.
“Looks like it to me.” She stepped past him into the house.
He returned to his chair and lay down in front of it. He could hear Mona moving around behind him.
“Bad one?” she asked.
“That’s all it is, isn’t it? A bad trip.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. He heard her moving around in the kitchen. She said, “I mean, I think that’s a pretty self-involved way to look at it, but, yeah, sure. I’m not going to argue with you.”
“You almost killed me. You nearly pushed me down the chute.”
“Oh, c’mon. I didn’t push you. And to be clear, you and I have never met before. You just showed up in this world, just now. Anyway, let’s say I did scare you, how was I supposed to know how jumpy you were? And think about how I must have felt. Shit. I was as shocked as you. One minute you’re hopping with surprise, which is delightful to watch and makes me happy, and the next you’re wriggling over the chute like a terrified chihuahua. At least you lived. In this world. I must have called an ambulance.”
“I thought Kim did that.”
“Maybe. Who knows? I probably did too. Anyway, you’re not the guy I scared and neither of us were in this world when it happened, so, bygones, right?”
“I can’t talk about this.” He propped himself up to a sitting position.
“Sure. Get something to eat. Maybe take a nap.”
“I’m afraid to sleep.”
“Oh.” She walked to the window. “Anyone in the crèches now?”
“No. Why are you back?”
That surprised her. “You don’t mind if I camp here, do you? I need a place to live. Maybe in one of the bedrooms, upstairs?”
“Why don’t you stay in the apartment?”
“Because you can lock me in.”
“You told me you might be dangerous.” Vin felt a little defensive on this point. “You were the one who warned me.”
“Well, anyone could be dangerous. Jesus. I probably didn’t think you were going to put me in a damn cage. You’ve got to trust somebody. When you lock me in I have to go back into the crèche just to step outside.”
Vin hadn’t thought of it like that. “Why didn’t you use the walkie-talkie then? That’s why we put it there.”
“I shouldn’t have to ask.”
AT SOME POINT HE SLIPPED to the floor and drowsed off. Then he heard paper unwrapping and smelled greasy takeout and shook himself and pulled the forest-green sheet over his shoulders as he stood. Mona was at the table with a large hamburger in both hands, a paper carton of fries in front of her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“I’ve been thinking. I’m really lucky you’re here. Did you have anyone to talk to?”
She made a sour face, as if the burger tasted bad. “I’m not your confessor. I’m not here for you.” She chewed for a moment, then said, “It wouldn’t have done any good. But I could have talked to one of the others if I wanted to.”
“I haven’t s
een any others yet.”
“I thought you said there was another woman when you first found it.”
“Nerdean,” he said.
“Oh, right. Sure.” She waved the idea away.
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Nerdean? No one I ever met has talked to Nerdean.” She took a bite. “And I would know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
Vin pressed his eyes closed and walked to the table. “How many shots have you done?”
“Lots. I usually changed every couple of days.”
“You stayed in a long time. You were just traveling?”
“Yeah.” She set down the burger and picked up a glass of water.
“But if you didn’t come out you couldn’t know whether your kids were alive.”
She took a long drink from the glass.
“If you were looking for your kids, like you said, you would do short shots, the shortest possible. Then each time you would come out and check how the world was different, whether they were alive.”
“Maybe.”
“But you didn’t. So, what were you doing then?”
She shifted her weight in the chair. “That’s pretty fucking personal. Fucking intrusive.”
He pulled around a chair and sat at the end of the table. “Maybe you’ve been waiting for someone to ask you about it.”
“Don’t try to rescue me,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter, does it? I had a life, and now I don’t. Now I just go out into whatever that is. I’m never getting my life back. Even if I found my kids, I’m not the same anymore, am I? I’d be a shit parent now. And I’d be taking them from someone else.” She bent to her left and fished a quarter from her jeans, pinned it on its edge on the table, and flicked it with an index finger, making it spin in place. They both watched. She waved a hand over it as it fell. “I can go to the other side now. I see through all this.”
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