“Mona,” he said. She turned to look at him and shook her head in incomprehension.
“Do I know you?” she asked. She shook her head again, startled.
He walked into the kitchen and pulled a long knife from the wooden block. Her gaze flicked to the knife then back to his face.
He said, “Downstairs, did you do that?”
“No. No.” She drew back in shock. “I would never do that.”
He walked to where she was sitting and brought the knife close to her cheek, the blade just below her eyes. “But you have done that at least once before, haven’t you? To your own family.”
She looked up at him. She wasn’t scared. She didn’t care. Why should he believe anything she said? He brought the long blade to her throat, just below her chin so that when she breathed her skin pushed against it. It was a sharp knife. The cut would be firm and fast.
“They were shot,” she said, her voice level. “I don’t have a gun. I don’t even know who they are.”
He tried to remember how Kim and Trina were killed. Kim’s jaw destroyed, perhaps the back of her head gone. He took a step away from Mona and suddenly the lightness left his limbs. He sucked in air until his chest felt like it might explode. He lowered himself onto the edge of a chair, slipped into the center.
“I could never do that,” Mona said, hatred straining her voice. “But I think you’re someone who could, aren’t you?”
The words stilled everything else. He didn’t know. His body vibrated, struck by passing seconds.
“Maybe you did do it.” Mona’s voice was throaty. She spoke slowly but she wasn’t accusing, only evaluating him, reading him as if what he was were plainly written in his face, on his body. “Here or in another world, you could lose your temper. Just like that. Couldn’t you?” But then her head sagged again as if the room were filling with all of the disappointment of life. “And after that,” she said, “you’d just go on, wouldn’t you? Because what choice would you have?”
A wire broke inside him. A machine in his mind that enraged and aimed him, automated decisions, would defend itself by destroying her and him. He placed the knife on the table between them.
NEITHER OF THEM HAD MOVED and Vin had almost regained control of himself when they heard the front door open. Mona was tilted forward, staring blankly. Vin felt welded to the chair but his head could turn. He said, “Joaquin?” and Mona looked up.
Joaquin was staring, unblinking, at Mona. At his side was an enormous revolver, the kind that doesn’t fill a hand as much as consume it.
“I’m sorry,” Joaquin said to Mona. “Please. Please, come back.”
Other than the look of loathing frozen on her features, Mona hadn’t moved, but everything about her was different. She was alert.
“You know each other?” Vin said.
Joaquin’s mouth tightened in acknowledgement of Vin’s presence. “I asked you to stay in this house, Vin, in the hope that you would find her. We are married. She killed my children.” As Vin struggled to reshape his past around this new information, Joaquin continued. “She was a general contractor. She built this house. She introduced me to Nerdean. Through email.”
“It was an accident.” Mona’s voice was low, controlled. “They weren’t supposed to be there.”
Vin said, “What about my daughter? And Kim?”
Joaquin’s mouth fell open slightly and he took a longer breath. “I am sorry, Vin, about Kim and . . . I am truly sorry about them. I needed Kim to show me the machine. You lied to me, Vin.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did,” Joaquin shouted the second word, his face flushing, eyes clenching, spit flying from his mouth. He regained his balance at the edge of the stairs and said with effort, “I wanted you to find my wife so I might help her. Because she is dangerous and I did not want this”—he stopped talking, stared at Vin and said—“or anything like this to happen. But you would not stop lying to me. Even when your pretext was transparent, you lied. You did this.”
The gun was aimed at Vin again and an asymmetry caught his eye. A single coppery glint showed on one side of the big revolver’s barrel.
He caught a blur in his peripheral vision. Mona had risen and was flying toward Joaquin.
It was not a sound—more a cataclysmic motion of the house. The gunshot blew the air out of the room and threw the three of them together into a new world, a universe birthed in that shaved second of violence. Blood sprayed from Mona’s back and the huge picture window behind her cackled and shivered into an obscuring web of stilled moments.
Mona straightened. It was as if she had been cored, the back of her robe red from the spasm of blood, but she didn’t even look at her wound. She took a staggering step toward Joaquin. A tinny crack, crack—the sound of the gun’s hammer falling on empty chambers.
Mona had the knife in her right hand. She swayed away from Joaquin, almost tipped and fell backward, but then miraculously swayed the other way. She took three more falling steps and shoved the knife deep into his gut.
His face went taut. Mona pressed forward and jerked up on the knife, pulling the long blade through him. As they pressed into each other, their bodies held upright by their opposing weight, Joaquin’s face paled and the stalk of his neck wilted.
Mona made a sound, a soft chuckle of blood bubbling from her mouth. Vin ran to them as they sank to the floor, leaning into each other. He kneeled in the spreading pool of their blood, reached a hand to Mona’s shoulder. She blinked as if returning to life and looked at him, her eyes rolling, head not moving.
“Vin,” she said, struggling to form the word, her shallow breath seething between bloody teeth. She and Joaquin were fused in a gory mess. Vin couldn’t see what had happened to her.
Vin said, “Let go. Let go of the knife.”
She didn’t let go, and as he strained to pull Joaquin away from her, tendrils of viscera came too, spinning apart at the knife’s edge as it slid out of his gut. Joaquin’s body collapsed to the side and Vin pushed it away. Then he pressed on Mona’s wrist and gently took the knife from her.
She folded to one side and he helped her onto her back. She was wide-eyed, staring upward. “I’m going to die.”
“Yes. I think so.”
“I used accelerants. My babies weren’t supposed to be there.”
“What can I do?”
“It’s okay. It was a fight I needed.” Her eyes closed but she was still breathing.
VIN WORKED QUICKLY. MONA WAS not a large woman and adrenaline lent him strength. He tore strips from the robe, which separated cleanly, and used the robe’s sash to tie the strips tightly against her wounds. As he carried her into the chute, remnants of the robe caught on its lid—he simply tore them apart and continued with his fireman’s carry.
She hadn’t spoken since he’d picked her up. When he laid her in the first casket she was pale but still alive. He could see her shallow breathing and as he removed the sash and pieces of robe he felt her pulse whispering through her cool flesh. Nerdean’s office was busy with muted scurrying sounds, scrapes and squeals from the damaged third casket that was still battling through its cycle of rejuvenation.
“You didn’t call the EMTs . . .” Mona came to as he was finishing his frantic work on a keyboard. The third casket entered a quiet phase in its cycle and her voice was a hoarse whisper. He stepped quickly to the side of her casket.
“Thank you,” she said, twisting her head slightly to look at him. Her eyes were clear but her voice was fading.
“I don’t know if this will work.”
“That’s okay,” Mona said. She was going to embark on a shot, one way or another. He found the sedatives and bottled water and she managed to swallow a pill.
“I found another password,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, so I can set how far—”
But her eyes drifted slowly shut and he knew she had been pulled under. She was still breathing. He ran to the computer and pressed a fi
nal key to fire the shot. The lid of the first casket lowered with smooth precision and sealed her in.
HE DIDN’T KNOW IF SHE’D make it to Armageddon, didn’t know if she’d even survive until the shot started, but it seemed possible. The crèche was designed to incubate, to support, nurture and heal the body, no matter what else it might do.
He sat for between ten and thirty minutes with the third casket grumbling through the end of its cycle of rejuvenation. Shortly after it finally fell silent, he recalled himself. He stood and walked to the first casket and placed his hand on its transparent pane. The mist cleared and he saw Mona floating peaceably in the slightly rust-tinged broth.
On the desktop, Kim’s phone buzzed. He had retrieved it and placed the baby monitor outside the front door. It was notifying him of noise. The casket’s transparent pane sighed and misted as he lifted his hand and hurried to the desk. He heard the shriek of police sirens and closed down the monitoring app, silencing it. A police forensics team would definitely find the chute, and Nerdean’s office.
In the urgent quiet, he peeled off his bloody robe, sat at a keyboard and opened the controls for the third casket. He keyed in a command and the third casket’s lid lifted with a squawk. At least it could still open. That was a good sign.
More of the batteries along the far wall had gone dark. He wasn’t sure whether the casket would work for even a short shot, and he didn’t know of any way to use it without landing another version of himself in the mess that he was running from. Maybe even infinite versions. But he hadn’t made this mess. Did he have a responsibility to stay in it? At least Mona’s body might die, so no other version of her would end up in this shithole. Her death would free her from this particular world.
He checked the duration, and then pulled the slider for the third casket all the way to the left, as close to the label NEAR as it would go. He had the presence of mind to worry for a moment about what near might actually mean—might the crèche project him into a version of his own mind? But he left the slider alone. Mona may have chosen to go down fighting, but Vin did not want to return to Armageddon.
IT’S LATE AND CHILLY AND he’s sitting on a concrete staircase looking out at the glittering Seattle skyline from the south shoulder of Queen Anne Hill. His name is William Marigold and he’s thinking about smoking a cigarette. He used to smoke and he misses it.
The sarcococca ruscifolia is near the end of its bloom but still managing to spread its delicious, spicy vanilla scent. The smell might not be so bright if he hadn’t quit smoking when he did, many years ago.
Fragrant sweet box is the plant’s common name. It was one of his favorites when he cared about things. The flowers are small and humble but when they’re in bloom they can pack a breeze with a scent so fine it can stop a jogger cold. He’s seen puzzled, spandex-clad runners halt midstride and then follow their noses around the foliage, sniffing nearby plants, looking for the source of their pleasure. The flowers are so modest that sometimes people don’t think to smell them. Once you know the secret though, you look for them. If you still possess that magic feeling of giving a damn.
William looks up at the shadow-clotted sky. He’s been thinking a lot about eternity and how close it always is. One single motion can take a person from useless to infinite.
Vin is in William’s head and the dull, burdensome sense of being in a place—the almost unendurable weight of the sky above and the weight of being in a body and pressing down on cement and dirt—alerts him to his existence. The crèche did this to him.
“The crèche?” William thinks. “What’s that?”
“Oh no,” Vin thinks. “He can hear me, like the cannibal.”
“No, I’m a vegetarian.”
“Oh. Like Bill.”
“No, I prefer William.”
William stands—a prickling pain in his left knee. He rubs his right elbow to check that the bump beneath his flesh hasn’t gotten any larger. His doctor says it’s benign, only a fat deposit embedded in the flesh near his joint. It may be, but it’s also an intrusion in his body, a thing that shouldn’t be there.
It’s a warm winter night. Unseasonable is the old term. Presaging doom is the new, more accurate way to think about it. Thirty to thirty-five billion metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. Probably more now. Warming the surface of the earth as if it were a green pea in a convection oven. But William stopped tracking all that long ago. He stopped seeing the point. Any one person is able to recognize and avoid danger, but the human species as a whole is incapable of responding to it effectively. The human species will defeat life at last and the earth will sizzle under the solar lamp until it becomes a dry shell.
Once he stopped caring, the world opened a great distance between itself and him. Even the air, mild against his skin, reaches him now only by crossing a gulf. As he walks up the slope toward the basement apartment that he rents near a park, he sees himself walking as if he were hovering above and behind his own body.
He’s imagining the perspective. Of course, he knows that. But if he could actually see himself from that perspective, he would see that the crown of his head is shiny with grease and thick with embedded flakes of dandruff. It’s like that no matter how often he cleans it or how well he grooms himself. It’s a sad fact that the memory of only a few sneering rebuffs from people you might have loved can leave permanent, grimy streaks on your self-image.
Though the globe is warming, a warmer winter is pleasant for most people. In that way, temperature change is like a helium balloon, very nice, inspiring even, when you first notice it—vivid and colorful, defying gravity—until it pops. Then it becomes an elastic environmental poison.
At the top of the hill he turns back to look at the skyline while he catches his breath. Vin notices that some buildings are missing.
“Oh?” thinks William. “Why is that?”
“Well, I guess they must not have been built yet. But you shouldn’t listen to me. I think you have enough to worry about.”
“Okay,” William responds meekly.
“Do I frighten you?” asks Vin.
“No. I’m much too frightened by real things to be frightened by an imaginary voice in my head.”
“I’m not imaginary.”
“That’s what they all would say, I’m sure.”
“You have other voices?”
“I might have. But what I mean is, all psychotic voices would tell you that they’re real. That’s a part of the illness, isn’t it?”
“Are you psychotic?”
“I suppose I might be. I’m talking with a voice in my head. You might be a psychotic break. I suppose. But I don’t really care. One more reason to kill myself.”
Vin is silent after that remark, but William doesn’t care whether Vin responds. William sniffs and places the palm of his hand against the end of his nose, which is cold and starting to drip. He wipes his palm against it, then wipes his hand on the side of his parka and keeps walking.
“Don’t kill yourself.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know you, but—”
“Interesting.”
“—I can tell you that this has been a particularly shitty day—”
“Yes, I agree. Another one.”
William doesn’t so much dismiss Vin as just move on, as if Vin were a thing that should dissolve when neglected. William begins to think about the question of weight, and how much exactly is pressing on him. He steps through a lengthy back-of-the-envelope type of estimate, figuring the weight of the atmosphere at sea level in the mid-Northern latitudes (excluding the vast exosphere, whose contribution would be negligible), the height of Queen Anne Hill and the resulting height of his shoulders above sea level. He concludes that roughly 2093.5 pounds per square foot is bearing down on his head and shoulders, which confirms his expectation that simply standing up in this world is a burden.
Observing William working through his mental estimate, Vin is impressed, but can’t help remarking, “That�
��s a whole lot of work to shave off a total of only twenty or so pounds per square foot from the standard atmospheric weight at sea level.”
“I do it because I’d really prefer not to exaggerate,” thinks William. “Once more, the truth is frightening enough.”
VIN DOESN’T BRING UP HIS real concern until they reach William’s apartment, a dank claustrophobic studio in the basement beneath a large Craftsman house that squats across the street from the West Queen Anne Playfield. William flips on the overhead light as he enters but the bulb barely wakes the comatose room. The apartment’s small windows are covered with blackout curtains, the furnishings old and abused—a faded, light-blue, broken-backed sofa; a recliner covered in a frayed floral pattern, its cushions pancaked by years of reckless flopping down. Slips of paper spread like a scatter of severed wings over a small breakfast table, glossy magazines in a slumping stack beside the couch.
“Are you still there, voice?” William asks himself.
“Yes,” says Vin.
“What’s your name?”
“If I’m in your head, shouldn’t I have the same name you have?”
“Well, do you?”
“Vin. My name is Vin.”
“I see. So my suspicion was correct. You are a robust enough hallucination to have your own name,” thinks William. “That is depressing.”
“No. No,” Vin thinks. “It’s not fair to trick me into saying things that will make you feel worse. And I’m not a hallucination, I’m real.”
“There is no conceivable way that you could be anything other than the kind of short circuit in my mental function that I’ve been anticipating now for years.”
“Yes, there is,” Vin says, surprising himself with a decision. “And I’m going tell you exactly how. But first, I want to get something straight with you. That whole thing about estimating the weight on your shoulders, atmospheric pressure doesn’t work that way and you know it. It presses in all directions, it doesn’t just drop a ton of weight on your shoulders. You just calculated a single vector to validate how you feel, but it operates in a system.”
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