Everything I recognized seemed properly positioned in its correct location. And yet, something still seemed off. Clayton noticed the thoughtful narrowing of my eyes.
“Too clean,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“If you’re wondering what’s wrong, what’s off . . .” Clayton indicated the skyline. “The buildings are too clean.”
I looked again and realized he was correct. Every stone, every pane of glass, every beam of steel was spotless. Each building, from older landmarks, to buildings so new I didn’t even recognize them, seemed freshly cast from giant molds. This was where the artifice lay. I realized what I regarded now was not a true city, organically grown over time, but an artificially constructed world. And like all constructed things, it must serve some purpose.
Clayton turned and headed back toward the stairs. “Time to head down.”
Selberg eagerly awaited our return to camp.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Door was locked.”
“The door was locked? Why . . . couldn’t . . . why don’t we just break it down?”
“What if strangers came to your house?” Clayton unslung his rifle. “And broke your door down? How would you respond?”
“I’d call the police.”
“And if you had a gun in the house?”
“I . . .” Selberg began, and then stammered. “I’m not sure.”
“We don’t have any idea what’s behind that door. Whatever built all this,” Clayton indicated the city around us, “could defend itself with something much worse than a gun. And knocking down doors isn’t a good way to start off relationships. Or am I wrong?”
“No . . .” Selberg said. “But if it invites us in?”
Clayton looked back up toward the building. In daylight, the windows looked vacant, black panes of glass that reflected nothing. Casually Clayton opened a tin of chewing tobacco and placed a large wad inside his cheek.
“If something with the power to do all this invites us in,” he said, “we won’t have a choice. We go.”
As the strange, artificial sunlight grew stronger, the air gradually warmed again.
I found Charlotte beneath the low overhang of a tree in Central Park, seated on a bench, intently studying something in her lap.
As I approached, she looked up and smiled. I pointed up to the roof of the building Clayton and I had explored. “You should see the view.”
She laughed. “So there are more than these couple blocks?”
“There’s the entire island of Manhattan.”
“Well, I guess you’ve got your big find.” Spread across her knee was a piece of parchment paper the height and width of a bed pillow. The paper was a rubbing, a thin film of gray black charcoal etched with white lettering. “The Rosetta Stone rubbing we found with the dead French soldier. I think I figured it out.”
I reached down and took the rubbing from her lap. The lettering was as I remembered, lines of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the longer scripted lines of Demotic, then the shorter more familiar Greek letters. The paper itself was a heavy parchment, with a hard, waxen feel.
“My Greek was a little rusty,” she admitted, “but I worked through it.” At her feet lay a leather-bound sketchbook. She handed the book to me. “This is what I got.”
Written across the page were the words The shadow of memory.
“What do you think it means?” Charlotte asked.
“Not sure. The Egyptians felt that a part of a person’s soul was contained within their shadow. So this reference to shadow might have something to do with the soul, or the memory of the soul.”
“On the back of the rubbing, there was a single line written in French.”
“Written by who?”
“Probably the soldier himself.” Charlotte turned the sketchbook page. “I translated that as well.”
Across the page, written in Charlotte’s careful script were five words.
The start begins in Colomb.
I studied the sentence, trying to decipher more meaning. I could think of nothing. Charlotte studied the puzzled look on my face. “I’m not sure what it means either,” she said.
“Colomb? Is that a city?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “I’ve never heard of it, but maybe in Napoleon’s time.”
A French soldier had traveled across Egypt and died just before reaching his destination. His body had lain in a tunnel far below the sands for over a hundred years. Whatever mission he had been on had long since been forgotten. But this mission had been of such importance that a man had risked miles of burning desert and given his life for it.
The start begins in Colomb.
The start of what? Even if we found Colomb, we still wouldn’t know what we were looking for. The letters began to blur before my eyes, and I looked up from the notebook in frustration. In the distance, farther down the park, Nasir and Selberg sat against their packs, playing cards. Clayton leaned against the base of the statue in the center of the circle reading. Above him towered the giant figure of—
I slapped my forehead. Of course. I growled in frustration at my own stupidity.
“What is it?” Charlotte asked.
“Colomb. That’s the French spelling of Columbus. Colomb isn’t a place, it’s a person.” I pointed west, where the statue of Christopher Columbus rose from the center of the circle named after him. “The start begins here.”
Excited, we began walking back toward the rest of our group.
Charlotte followed alongside me. “But why ‘in Colomb’?”
“Because I think we’re meant to look inside the statue itself.”
The shrine to Christopher Columbus stood atop a granite column decorated with bronze reliefs of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The column itself was affixed to a large pedestal, the entire monument rising almost eighty feet above the circle. In my New York, it was one of those landmarks that scores of people passed each day without ever noticing the intricacies of its design.
The circle itself was composed of an inner and outer ring, each with plantings and benches and fountains. In this place, the fountain was off. But during a normal day, streams of water would jet into the air, while on the outside, traffic packed the roadway, taxis and cars bumper to bumper, fighting for space as they crawled through Midtown traffic. In the silent, empty street beneath the sand, without the distractions of noise and movement, the monument to the famed explorer had a powerful, quiet solemnity.
The monument’s base was composed of a few large steps of granite brick, and a pedestal inscribed with raised reliefs that depicted scenes from the exploration. In one, Columbus appeared to have landed on the New World, his foot touching down on the shore, his face looking out away from the sea. In his hand, he held a small, egg-shaped object. I began a slow inspection of this image, looking for anything that might conceal a hiding point. Just beneath the explorer’s foot, I saw a thin fissure in the stone about six inches in width. Putting my fingers against the crack, I pressed, and a small square of stone rotated in the pedestal, revealing a hiding place beneath.
Inside was a single United States quarter.
I reached in and pulled out the coin. The metal was cool to touch. The weight and size was as I remembered. The face was inscribed with the familiar bust of George Washington, and in all respects, the quarter appeared normal, except there was no date, only a space along the bottom edge inscribed with the word Panopticon.
We all took turns inspecting the quarter, but aside from the lack of a date, we could find nothing unusual about the coin. It had clearly been hidden, but for what purpose?
“Panopticon . . . wasn’t that in the subway tunnel below?” Selberg said.
Opticon, I assumed, had something to do with the eyes. Or vision. I was pretty sure there was something with a similar name from Greek mythology, but the exact meaning eluded me.
“It’s a type of prison,” Clayton said. “The panopticon. It’s a priso
n designed so that every inmate can be watched at the same time.”
“How do you know that?” Selberg said, his voice tinged with an unmistakable thread of jealousy.
“I know prisons. This one was unique. It was circular, with the cells on the outer edges, and in the center was an observation tower. The jailer could see any prisoner at any time, but was concealed in the tower, so none of the prisoners would know when they were being observed.”
“So someone was watching the prisoners all the time?” Charlotte said.
Clayton shook his head. “Not all the time. But that’s the point. It didn’t have to be all the time. Because the jailer was concealed from view, prisoners never knew when they were being watched.”
We stood in silence. I suddenly felt the vulnerability of our position. Manhattan was a city of windows, hundreds of thousands of them, and behind each window could be something watching. This whole place was a panopticon. We were trapped, prisoners beneath the Earth, surrounded by invisible eyes and countless places to hide and observe.
Eventually the excitement over the new find began to dissipate. I put the quarter into my pocket and the rest of the crew wandered off. Only Selberg remained. He surveyed the circle to make sure the others were out of hearing range, then lowered his voice. “I say we take a look around during the daylight.”
“What direction?”
Selberg nodded across the circle toward the opening of Eighth Avenue. “Walk down the avenue a bit. See what we see?”
I noticed Selberg had two packs on his back, one strapped over the other. “For samples,” he said as we began to walk. “This is our world. Just distinctly more advanced. The technology down here . . . well, to be blunt,” he flashed me an awkward smile, then looked back over his shoulder, “would be worth a fortune.”
“Ah . . . what happened to the purity of academic research?”
“I spent thirty years of my life in academia. I’ve got a tired little apartment filled with a couple tired suits, some tired furniture, and a runner-up letter from the Nobel Prize committee. That’s the sum total of the purity of my academic research. That’s the first half of my life. For the next half, some money would be nice.” Selberg nodded back toward the statue of Columbus. The explorer stood, hand on hip, staring out into the vast reaches of lower Manhattan. “What do you think he was doing in 1492? Pro bono work?”
“No. I guess not.”
“First thing Columbus and his investors did when they discovered the New World was try to figure how they could make money. Slavery. Gold. This wasn’t exploration to benefit mankind. It was exploration for profit. Columbus was a bad guy. And they give him a national holiday. The ends justify the means.”
The streets were eerily quiet. No, I corrected myself, this wasn’t just quiet, this was the complete absence of sound. And in that vacuum of noise, the drum of our footsteps, the creak of the leather straps on my back, even the occasional muffled pop of an ankle or a knee joint all seemed amplified, until I was sure that if there was anything out there, it could not fail to hear us approaching, the sound of our movements as ear-shattering as the approach of a freight train over rough track.
But if there was anything out there, there was no indication of movement.
As we walked, I inspected the buildings around us. Everything had a too-large feel. A world built for giants. Corporate headquarters surrounded us, barren spaces, sparse and antiseptic as hospital waiting areas.
The only sense of human habitation came from the few small grocery stores with empty shelves, but even those blurred together with their buffet lunch advertisements and bland signage. Convenient Foods. Lunch Stop. Grab ’n’ Go. Empty chairs and tables set along the curb waiting for customers. A coffee shop with a green awning and photographs of oversized coffee beans in the window. A dentist’s office.
I tried to recall the doorways of the Eighth Avenue of my memory but failed. Since arriving in Egypt, my time in New York City seemed to belong to someone else. Another lifetime so completely separate from my own that I felt as if I was trying to connect with someone else’s memories. The details were faded and fuzzy, incomplete radio chatter. Broken bits of information between the static.
Selberg stopped short, his head cocked at an angle.
I stood next to him. My hand moved to my pistol. “What is it?”
“I heard something,” Selberg said. “There. Hear it?”
Somewhere in the distance, a telephone rang.
Selberg’s eyes were half-closed, a man trying to parse out a single distant sound. Then slowly he nodded and pointed. “Sounds like east.”
We moved quickly now, eager to reach the sound before it cut off. This city was so empty that sound carried, and the ringing grew louder as we moved but still seemed elusively in the distance. We passed the FAO Schwarz, its rows of limp stuffed animals and wooden soldiers visible through the window, then the Bergdorf Goodman and a Tiffany & Company, both stores ominously dark and quiet, a fortune in jewelry on display in the window.
The phone was on the corner of Fifty-First and Fifth, the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral rising up beyond. Higher above that, I could see the fog that shrouded the island. The ringing continued, the hollow sound reverberating off the canyon walls of the empty buildings. I broke into a jog, half-afraid the ringing would end before I reached its source.
For such a devoutly clean environment, the phone was surprisingly battered. It was a boxy, metal pay phone, scratched and battered, hanging on a metal column. A sticker of an Easter egg was placed on the phone’s side, with loose wires hanging from the bottom. Instinctively I reached to answer the call, then paused. My hand hovered in midair.
Selberg was excited, his cheeks flushed with exertion, his eyes large. “Well you have to answer. Something is reaching out to us.”
“What the hell do I say?”
“Make it something good.”
I felt an intense crush of nerves. “Something good?”
“You’re speaking for the human race now,” Selberg said. “This may be a first in the course of human existence.”
“You want to do it?”
Selberg shook his head, backed away. “I’m not good on the phone.”
Slowly I lifted the telephone from the cradle, held the receiver to my ear, and said the only thing that came to mind. “Hello?”
The line clicked dead. I clicked the metal tab up and down. Nothing. Slowly I hung up the handset and stared. The phone remained silent. The street corner around us remained empty. But something out there had reached out to us. Some force beyond my ability to understand had wanted to speak. And for whatever reason, it had chosen a battered, old pay phone as its way to communicate.
Pay phone.
Slowly, I pushed my hand into my pocket until my fingers touched metal. I pulled the quarter out and studied the face of it. Ran my finger over the word Panopticon engraved on the front.
I slid the quarter into the pay slot and heard a solid clunk of metal as it dropped into the machine. Then I lifted the receiver from the cradle and held it to my ear. First, silence, then the electric pulses moved over wires from a distant location and transmitted to my ear as sound.
The phone crackled with static, then I heard the sound of breaking glass. I knew someone was there. I could hear heavy, labored breathing. The sound of someone or something struggling to live? Faintly, I heard running feet. A door slammed. And the breathing continued.
The hairs on my neck began to rise. Something here was familiar. Something ominous. And even if my brain couldn’t register what it was, my body instinctively reacted and I felt afraid.
I gripped the receiver and looked down empty Fifth Avenue. I had the fleeting impression that something moved around a corner a few blocks south. The briefest passage of a shadow beyond the corner of a Chase Bank branch. I focused my attention, but whatever it might have been was gone. The phone crackled more static. “Hello? Anyone there?”
The breathing continued, and I felt c
ertain that whatever was on the other end of the line was distinctly human. Selberg met my eyes and mouthed the words, “What is it?”
I shook my head and turned. I couldn’t afford to be distracted now. I had a feeling that whatever was about to happen was of immense importance. The breathing labored for a few moments more. Then the person on the line swallowed. Someone was getting ready to speak. And somehow I knew the words would be English. Something that I could understand.
After a painfully long pause, I heard a feeble whisper. A voice made fragile by pain and so tenuous that I could not tell if it came from a man or a woman.
Two words.
“Help . . . me . . .”
And then the line went dead. I held the receiver in my hand dumbly, then clicked rapidly up and down on the cradle. I listened to a long, electric hiss, and then a steady tone hummed in my ear. Carefully I placed the receiver back in the cradle.
From inside the phone box I heard a mechanical clunk. Then something light and metallic pinged inside the change slot. I pushed on the door with my finger, and inside, tucked into the small reservoir, I felt hard, familiar ridges. I dug into the change channel and pulled out the object.
I turned toward Selberg and opened my hand to show him. Sitting on my palm was a single metal key. I thought of the apartment Clayton and I had found. Locked doors needed keys.
I told Selberg what I had heard on the phone.
“Did you recognize the voice?” Selberg asked.
“No. I don’t know. Familiar maybe,” I said, but already the familiarity was beginning to fade. As if talking to Selberg had somehow broken the delicate spell of remembering and washed everything from my brain.
I pocketed the key and turned away from the phone.
By the time we reached camp, the sky had begun to grow dark once more. Here, the day seemed to be slightly shorter than aboveground. Again, like the first night, the heavens grew dark, not by degrees, but in a single swift motion. Like someone blowing out a candle. I was organizing our meager supply of rations when night came. In my surprise, one of the canteens, now only half-filled with water, slipped from my hand and rattled loudly on the concrete sidewalk.
The Memory Agent Page 6