Head Full of Mountains

by Head Full of Mountains (retail) (epub)

  “You’re an abomination. You speak like a passenger, you’re invisible, but you’re not on the roster. You don’t know Luella. That was a hundred years ago.”

  “There’s people in the cabinets. Do you understand what I’m saying? Other people.”

  “I can hardly hear you.”

  “You need to listen.”

  Her eyes seemed dark, like holes. The projection of her face slid apart and then back together again and her ghosts stuttered from sight.

  “I’m father’s only son. And that’s why you need to listen. You need to help me. Didn’t you hear anything I said?” He was shouting now, trembling. “You won’t tell me anything? Or get my girlfriend for me?”

  The woman’s stare became as cold as the fluid Crospinal had inhaled. He breathed hard through his nose. How could he be invisible? Behind the woman, in the realm of manifestations, a second person shifted, the thin specter, but not his girlfriend. Only now it occurred to Crospinal that he might have said too much, that this ethereal woman, who most likely projected from the same place, would not assist him; possibly, unbelievably, she had designs to attempt the opposite. Had his girlfriend not warned him?

  “I see you now,” said the woman quietly. “I can just see you. An outline. You’ve been compromised. Polluted. You won’t come any closer to the hub. You won’t—”

  Letting go of the grip, and pulling his hands from the holes, Crospinal cut the connection: the stern manifestation vanished from the recess, as did her faint companion, though her angry tones continued to echo as Crospinal, coughing and hacking, wiping at his mouth now, backed out.

  Dogs chased him. A game, and he was laughing, but his bladder tightened every time one of the apparitions nearly caught him, and he thought about calling the game off time after time but never did. What could dogs do, with teeth of light?

  That wasn’t the point.

  Along oxbow perimeter—climbing in a slow spiral up the inside of oxbow’s walls—and from there into a long connector that dripped with composites, Crospie hobbled, and the dogs pursued, pretending to be slow, like him. Father said activity was good for his knees. He was reaching father’s limit. The dogs were fading, their energy interrupted and patchy.

  Crospinal stopped, rubbing at his legs. He leaned against a railing and looked back. He was crying. The dogs panted, flickering in and out.

  “Come back now, Crospie,” they barked. “Let’s go back, back, back!”

  “I won,” said Crospinal.

  “You did,” they agreed, wavering. “You’re faster. Stronger. You’re the strongest child. Now let’s go back.”

  Their voices, too, crackled and faded; they were starting to whine.

  Of course Crospinal was the strongest child, the fastest child. He was the only child. Normally, he liked to hear apparitions say these things, even if they were just father’s puppets, echoing father’s desires. He turned away. “I’ve never been down there before.” Indicating with his chin, and not for the first time, the entrance to a dim opening, a hallway subsumed nearly entirely by masses of shifting construction, which appeared no different than a dozen such openings, all leading away from the pen into parts unknown.

  “You’d best not go, Crospie. This is far enough. One day, but not now. Let’s go back. You’re not ready, Crospie. Not safe! Not safe! We need to go back.”

  “Back, back, back,” barked the others.

  Because he’d faked a step toward the forbidden.

  This was the year of independent thinking. His fifth. He was a big boy now. He could run faster than a dog. They didn’t need to pretend, for his sake. Sometimes, Crospinal wondered if father expected him to defy the rules, making the moments they spent together moments of criticism and judgement, and thus pushing him away. What other reason could the tensions and pressures be for? Each day was a test he failed.

  Walking toward the opening, the end of a grate under his boots (part of him wishing the dogs did have a way of stopping him), he said, “I’m gonna do it. I’m leaving.”

  “Don’t mess around!” The agitated barks did not sound right. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  He stood in the mouth of the hallway and looked. Ambients surged within, detecting him. The passage went on and on, until the dimness obscured it. He heard fluids, dripping. The temptations and threats that father so often outlined and worried about hardly seemed in evidence: the hallway was quiet, softly lit.

  Then, from within, came another sound, though he somehow heard it with more than his ears, in his whole body, calling to him, and his breath caught in his throat. The name had not been what father had given him, but an unfamiliar one, a name he’d not heard before, a name the world offered to him.

  He looked behind again, to see if the dogs were implicated in this encounter, or what their reaction might be, but the dogs had been recalled and were no longer there.

  When he returned to the dream cabinets, drawn there, the thick fluid still dripped from the edge of the grill, soundless. The strip of carpet remained darker green, with moisture squishy under his boots. The light that had accompanied him during his submersion was no longer evident. Shivers racked Crospinal. Aspects were shifting, he realized, more than just the eternal transfigurations of the landscape, more than the encroaching dark. He spat into his left mitt and let the spittle roil there. His breath was stale and cold, as if he were already dead.

  Eyeing the row of cabinets, Crospinal considered his own for some time, staring, but going no closer, as if it might pounce. Had it betrayed him, or taken him some place sacred? The creatures were looking for him. He ducked under the strange girder and, from outside, slowly closed the door, felt it click into place. The handle, as always, fit into his grip, suggesting he should climb inside one more time, close his eyes, and dream. . . .

  All is forgiven, Crospinal. Won’t happen again. Sorry about that. . . .

  He let go and stepped back.

  The idiot controller was nowhere to be seen.

  As he approached the sealed cabinets, he wondered if the face he’d seen in the dream had truly been Luella’s. He’d glimpsed it for only a second, and through a visor, yet the idea that people were inside—if not his sibling—was powerful. Could Luella be inside one of these cabinets? Was this as far as she’d made it, when she left the pen? Perhaps he should not trust a dream’s allusions.

  He placed his tingling hands against the surface of the secure door.

  Elements of the wonder he had seen in haptics from childhood had still been in evidence on Luella’s face, even in sleep, even in that instant.

  Grabbing the handle, Crospinal yanked hard, suddenly, trying to surprise either the closed cabinet or perhaps his own sluggish systems. Nothing happened, either way. Memories of his failed attempts at father’s list of chores mocked him. Always memories, always failures, always mocking. He tugged again, pulling the handle over and over but there was no give.

  The chestplate made a strange sound, guttural and bass, and his processor hissed in response.

  Crospinal encountered no dogs, no spirits along the way. Not even in the gangplanks, where apparitions tended to congregate: they’d flicker there, around the tungsten lights. The pen was entirely silent and deserted. The atmosphere seemed grey, thick. The sound of his soles on the tiles was muted. A very faint hiss, and a shudder, from the engines.

  Chilling fluids that had embalmed him still coursed inside his body; he suspected the sensation might linger forever, as if his blood had been swapped, or at least tagged with a new component.

  How could there be no dogs the entire way back? He stepped into the throne room, where he had been born, where he had lain awake in his daybed, staring up, unable to sleep because of the pain, where father was tethered and where haptics played, and he knew everything had changed, not just the composition of his blood, or the composition of the cabinets, or his girlfriend’s fading love.

  Dropping to his
knees—for they had given out, at last—bursting when they hit the prayer mat, Crospinal did not cry out. No words or exclamations came. No tears, either, no howl. He wiped his face with the back of a chilly hand and looked again:

  Against the cold, matte luminescence of the gate, and the array of banks behind father’s corpse, Crospinal saw his own reflection, a rather surprised expression on his face, gaunt, and awful-looking. His shorn hair, his filthy uniform, tattered and plastered to his body, dark with moisture the exhausted capillaries could not handle.

  Father’s body lay cooling among draining tubes and conduits. He must have tried to rise, one last time, but collapsed off his throne.

  Nutrient pumps were stopped; the gate was still.

  Crospinal eventually leaned in, at a loss, then moved his face forward, to kiss the grey forehead, but a tangled morass of tethers prevented him from getting close enough.

  Liquid spilled onto the tiles between father’s thin legs, and if the processor of a uniform died with the wearer, then the liquid was most likely urine, spilling from the reservoir.

  There was actually a sense of relief. Crospinal was mortified to feel it. He looked down at the meat and bones, all wrapped up nicely in a Kevlar and nylon sac. Life, and the suffering it brought, was over. Inconceivable that this mass of failed flesh had once moved, educated, tried to nurture.

  Crospinal nudged the body with the toe of his boot.

  Dead meat.

  All that remained was dead meat.

  This was nowhere near the despair that had first torn into Crospinal when father made him kneel, to tell him of the illness, and of its sentence. The cruel joke that was mortality.

  Life, father said, confessing, is always waning. From birth. For every breath, creeping closer to endtime, to nothing. A parabola. Rise and fall. Such is the definition of being alive.

  Crospinal never understood or accepted why the finality of death would be a part of the arrangement. The loss of awareness, of experience, the cessation, was a cataclysm. An abhorrence. How could anyone be expected to understand such futility?

  Father’s open mouth, black blood on his tongue. Eyes open, too, glazed, like stray ephemera.

  No dogs barked in the halls. No thrum of fluids through conduits. Apparitions, which had accompanied Crospinal throughout his life, the dozens of projections, the lanky spirits, and the elusive wisps, all extinguished.

  Some time later, maybe an hour, maybe more, tinkering within the banks of father’s gate, searching the plates and stilled screens for some clue how to continue, a reason to keep going, he thought again about throwing himself over a railing. Just like he had thrown that poor, treacherous animal. But suicide, even now, seemed too dramatic. He would wait until tomorrow, or the day after that—

  A resounding claxon, from the hall outside, caused the pen to tremble, as if struck. Crospinal clapped his mitts over his ears.

  Though his legs were still sore—always sore—he pushed himself up with his knuckles and stood. Was the pen coming apart already?

  Heading through the exit in his stiff-legged, awkward gait, alarms shattered Crospinal. Every controller in the world had gone mad. They zipped down the hall in both directions, shrieking. A dispenser ran by and, as red lights flashed, blinding, from harmer’s corner all the way to the opal room and back again, fell flat and did not get up. Sounds vibrated in Crospinal’s bones and skull and he could not conceive what was happening. A growing wind tore at his uniform. He fought to stay on his feet, but when the air was finally sucked away in a great rush, it took Crospinal with it.

  THE METAL RAT

  Living proof of the deficiencies of the body, the final consequence of existence, coda to years of pointlessness and deterioration, was fully revealed shortly after he turned eight. This was the cusp of the year of thought. Father, particularly maudlin that morning, stood, arms at his sides, face downcast. Ozone hints in the air: the gate was heating up, haptics brewing, steeped influx pumping free. Crospinal waited on the prayer mat with his own limbs throbbing and his smile fading.

  The year of action, coming to a close, had contained little action. Failure hung in the pen, confirmed by father’s drawn expression, rising slowly, to make eye contact. “I have something to show you.”

  Sitting in his daybed, Crospinal had felt a rare tinge of excitement. A new year.

  But hopes for a spectacular or even a lame party faded pretty quickly.

  He looked at his swollen knees, his crooked knees, straining the fabric. He had not changed out of his uniform since the wheelroom.

  Who knew what the year of thought would bring?

  In silence, Crospinal and father shared stale yellow torte-flavoured pellets and had cups of lemonade, dispensed drip by drip from the spigot, with settings on festive.

  Apparitions were elsewhere, out haunting halls. Maybe they were trapped in father’s head. The yelp of anxious dogs, beyond the pen, swelled and faded. There were tiny threads whipping from above father’s eyes, each one directing a ghost.

  The lesson, post-celebration—such as it was—and post-prayer, concerned math skills. Crospinal recalled vaguely threatening shapes of triangles and the smoother, organic forms of the ellipse. He stood among them as they whispered about axis and vertices. Then, abruptly, he found himself immersed in a different haptic, which blossomed, supplanting the tutorial: startled, he tried to step back—

  A shape, a beast, hovered before him, as large as himself. Black, with thin, scaly legs; flattened, feathered arms; a half-opened beak. His perspective moved around it. Hyper-detailed, bigger than life, this was no hazy projection of a device, no scripted character, but a creature, like himself, captured by eyes of the world, reconstituted here, with photons from the gate.

  Inert. Flesh compromised, seething, he saw now, with tiny pinworms. He watched the flesh come apart, feathers fall. Dark eyes, nearly closed, shrivelled. There was no life.

  Carried through the projection (he could not see father, beyond the illusions), Crospinal, barely audible, said, “What is this?”

  “A bird. A crow.”

  “I know that,” he snapped. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You’ve seen them, in the garden, flying up by the ceiling. There are several, come to live with us. They came for you. This is what a crow looks like, up close. But the heart has stopped beating, Crospie.”

  “I know what a crow is,” he said. “But what does the rest mean?” He had peed a bit into the bladder, and the processor was whirring. He picked at his nostril, which was clogged again.

  “Once that crow flew, and looked down upon us. I need to show this to you, Crospie. I have to. I’ve not the courage to come clean. You’re a civilized boy. You’ve been raised above the darkness of ignorance. You’re my future. . . . But you need to know that no heart can beat forever. Even passed down, from one to the other. Our bodies will fail.”

  The haptic of the crow flickered. Behind swinging cables, father’s eyes shone. Crospinal stared. “What is all this?”

  “I’m sorry,” father said. “After life comes endtime. Nothing.”

  Of course the concept of extinction had been a malignant nugget at Crospinal’s core, since birth, no doubt. But now the last piece had fallen. To see this broken body, this decay, and know its import, he felt himself growing heavier, falling.

  “The body took months to decompose,” father mumbled. “Decay is slow here, but inevitable, and just as efficient.”

  Seeking adequate words when there were none and never could be, Crospinal said, “Will you end, like this?” He indicated the reconstruction as the bones grew exposed, worms visible inside, churning. “Will you collapse, decompose? Like this? Will your heart stop?”

  Beyond the haptic, father also looked at the corpse. They saw, perhaps, different visions, neither good. The future, like the past, meant nothing. That was the lesson. Brief moments of false progress, awareness, seeking unde
rstanding, but ultimately rare worms ate your flesh. And then nothing. Endtime.

  Father must have nodded reluctant acknowledgement, for tubes rustled.

  “What about me?” Crospinal’s voice cracked. “Will I expire, too? Will my heart stop?”

  Another nod. “Though not for many years. And there are means of prolonging a life. You’re too young to worry about cessation and endtime. There’s plenty to learn, carry knowledge, and pass it on. You’re young, Crospie. You need to know. We live to pass the light from ourselves to others.”

  The haptic vanished.

  “Others? What others?” Yet Crospinal was numbed by implications imposed on the already arduous state of being alive. There was no possibility to ever return to his previous condition, where he had remained oblivious from the truth. Feeling hunched and bent, he hated father for giving him life, and he hated himself for feeling this way. Never again would he cling to the precarious idea that everything needed to continue living, the way he had been living, would be provided forever. He would one day die an older version of the same crippled boy he was today. Ideals, on the very first morning of the year of thought, were for deluded fools. A caul had been yanked away, leaving a very different child standing there, exposed, at eight years old.

  Crospinal woke with the usual aches in the bones of both knees, and in his wrists now, which had also started to hurt. Through the thin material of his mitts, he could see that the white scars, revealed under the cuff of his sleeves, were inflamed. His rickets got worse each day. Ambulation was increasingly difficult. He fumbled with grasped objects, joints popping when he moved. Climbing anything was a hazard.