In Spirit

by Pat Forde

  Or maybe she was hugging the spent fireman just because he looked like he needed it.

  Raed didn't have to wonder whether this sort of thing had actually happened after 9/11—he'd seen it happen, in the streets of Brooklyn just hours after the towers came down. He'd seen strangers walk straight up to a weeping member of New York's Finest, and spontaneously embrace the policeman. New Yorkers had reached out to each other in ways that had surprised Raed that day.... Again falling spray clouded his view of what was going on, Ground Zero became a swirling gray, began sliding away, and—

  He was back, praise be, he was back.

  Pulling off the breather-mask, Raed gasped in mouthfuls of air and blinked out through the bars of his cage at the hundred-odd other projectors beyond the pane of Plexiglas, writhing and walking in their suspended states, ghosting back to other places and other times, if all this was to be believed.

  No, no, no, he would not believe. Turning back to the team assisting him, he saw the veiled psychologist saying something to him from outside the cage, and again offering him a questioning thumbs-up, wanting to know if he was okay.

  Raed gave her a thumbs-down.

  She entered the cage immediately, her eyes alight behind the burqa—with concern? With contempt? “Are you unable to continue?” she asked him, fingers poised over her slate to make another note.

  “Can't you project me somewhere else?"

  “Perhaps.” She tapped in her note, glanced back at the researchers manning the controls, shrugged, then said to Raed, “I'm obliged to remind you: you can withdraw from our program at any time, if you don't feel up for it."

  She made it sound as though quitting was the obvious choice. Maybe she expected him to give up, go back to his cell in Lew and simply rot away for the rest of his days.... But the crack that had opened deep within Raed was wider now. It was swallowing the walls he'd built to hold the outside world out—his mind's labyrinthine safe-house was losing whole rooms to that yawning insidious divide-inside. So he didn't know if he could just give up and go back. It was surely not so easy as this wide-eyed woman made it sound.

  Anyway, he was not about to give up.

  “Send me where you will,” he told the woman, waving her dismissively out of the cage, all the while thinking please let it be just a simulation! Bracing himself again as the beams shimmered on and the rift reopened, twirling the cage's bars away, tunneling him back to—

  A living-room in someone's house.

  Raed dropped softly onto a pine floor in front of an antique cabinet, bounced once, fell forward onto hands and knees, and looked around at the spindly legs of furniture handcrafted from some dark wood. He got to his feet easily, but saw no one down the hall of the house's ground floor. Was he in some suburb of New York? Raed peered out a shaded front window onto a lawn gleaming in the Sun. The street at the end of the lawn looked broad and sleepy under large trees; there was no traffic, and the houses across the street were widely separated.

  He doubted he was in New York.

  The cage-operators must have heard the request he'd made to “project somewhere else” through his breather-microphone.... That, or they'd really missed the target this time.

  No, it's just a simulation.

  Again, the light filtering through the trees onto the lawn suggested it was early morning; so did the dew still gleaming on the grass. Perhaps there were people still upstairs, getting ready for work. Raed cautiously made his way up to the second floor, and peeked even more cautiously into each of the floor's rooms: guest bedroom, master bedroom, a spacious bathroom, a small office. The house appeared to be empty.

  A window at the back of the office was partially open, so Raed slipped inside the room, glanced through the window over a side lawn at a neighbor's clapboard house, then tried to put his arm out beneath the window. He had to push his hand right through the mesh-screen meant to keep the bugs out; he felt only a little gluey resistance. He got his arm completely out, but that was all—the window, presumably left open for air, wasn't open enough for him to squeeze his head or chest out. And as hard as Raed pushed on the window-frame itself, he couldn't budge it wider. He couldn't move things in this world.

  So leaving the office, he looked in again at the windows of the guest bedroom and the bathroom, found them all closed. The master bedroom at the back of the house had a big window, but it was closed too, and curtained for privacy.... Lying on a big bed beneath the window was a cream-colored blouse, a black skirt folded neatly, a frilly pink bathrobe. The sight of the clothing reminded Raed powerfully of Haifa, his wife. His eyes went helplessly to the framed photo on the bedside table, which showed a couple hugging on a beach. The woman was laughing. The man was bent to kiss her neck. Almost certainly a photo of the couple whose bedroom Raed was standing in—and placed on that table, he guessed, by the woman, as a proud memento of her happiness.

  No such photos of Raed and Haifa existed, not even in his memory. What Raed remembered most when he thought of Haifa was her fear of him. He hadn't treated her well, especially in the final years, when his cousin Nazir's beliefs took a stronger and stronger hold over him. Turning away from this thought, Raed caught a shaft of sunlight streaming through a partly-open door in a corner of the bedroom. Stepping over to it, he discovered a bright bathroom, the morning Sun pouring gloriously down through a big skylight. After ensuring the bathroom was empty, he eased round the door into the Sun-filled space—only to find more woman's things arranged on the long counter. Skin creams, make-up, hair clips, a big brush with fine black strands wrapped about its bristles....

  To his surprise, Raed found himself in the grip of an unbearably lonely longing he'd thought he'd gotten rid of ages ago—as though he'd just eased round a partially-open door into a room in his head he'd thought he'd lost the key to. Mixed in with the longing was an intense sense of lost opportunity. For Haifa had edged more and more toward moderation in America, whereas Raed had arrived a moderate and only became a devout in those last few years before the towers came down, under Nazir's tutelage. And after the towers fell, after his fear grew and his family was taken from him, Raed gradually lost his devotion altogether.

  So it was unpleasant now to recall how he'd fought to keep Haifa under his thumb, forcing her to accept a fundamentalism he hadn't believed in when they'd married as teenagers. The innocent boy he'd been became a kind of monster, a fanatic to be feared during those final years of freedom, before he'd melted down into something else entirely during the first decade of imprisonment.

  Melted down into what, though?

  Raed had been careful not to step in front of the bathroom's long mirror. Now he took a look, and saw—

  No reflection of himself.

  It was the eeriest thing, as though he was ... what did they call it? A vampire. Raed was a kind of vampire in this past.

  But if he was supposed to be back in September of 2001 again, wouldn't he then look young again? Raed's hands were still veined, mottled with middle age. He ran one hand through his hair, tracing the receding hairline, then ran the hand back down over his bony brow and over the breather-mask to his chin and throat. Clean-shaven, as he'd been back in 2001, to attract less attention in America. For a while, he'd grown a proper beard in prison. But a few years later, Lew started handing the new shaving gels out to prisoners—offering the prospect of a wipe-on, wash-off mirrorless shave—so Raed went back to clean-shaven again. He'd grown too used to the routine, during the years leading up to 9/11. Routine was the key to staying sane in prison.

  Routines like avoiding mirrors.

  Raed was glad he cast no reflection; he hated to think what he looked like now. A ghost of the young man he'd been for sure, his thick dark hair turned thin, his strong face turned gaunt, the high cheekbones of his people sticking out too much now.... But his fear of mirrors wasn't really about becoming old, was it?

  Another surprising memory breaking free from a locked storeroom in his mind: Raed realized he'd started avoiding mirrors before
he went to prison. He'd avoided them immediately after 9/11 because he'd looked so awful. He'd looked twisted, like a monster even to himself—

  Raed wriggled out of the narrow bathroom door and fled the bedroom, almost tumbled back down the stairs, forgetting how tricky walking was on an intangible carpet covering soft slippery wood beneath. When he reached the bottom—and got back to his feet—he began looking for a way out, wandering through the handful of rooms; living room, dining room, the long hall with its open coat-filled closet, a downstairs bathroom, a cozy den with a fireplace. Each of the rooms exhibited a down-to-the-last-detail visual authenticity, and each was a living space that made a mockery of the concrete cell he called home. None of the rooms, however, offered him a way to get outside.

  Raed felt the wholly believable reality of this American home closing in on him, reducing the number of rooms for him to hide in in his mind.

  The last room on the ground floor he managed to squeeze into was a blindingly bright back kitchen. One whole wall of the kitchen was floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in the sun and letting Raed look out over a patio and a long yard. Raed walked right up to the windows—one was actually a glass patio-door—and gasped at the vista before him: beyond a picket fence at the end of the yard, the land dropped through rolling green hills down to a small steepled village about a mile away. The village stood on the edge of a sunlit ocean, the waves sparkling off to a distant horizon.

  Nothing Raed had seen in thirty years looked more like home!

  It was not the home he'd been born into, a small village that had stood near waves of desert sand. No, this was the American ideal of home: a peaceful village with quaint clapboard houses and colonial buildings, like something out of a story book—a story Raed had lived for a time. He'd been a preteen when he'd arrived in America, and had lived all the years of his adulthood on American soil, so he knew its stories, knew its dreams....

  The dream-house he was in now looked like it might be on the shores of Rhode Island. He and Haifa had driven along that shoreline after Raed finished a bit of “security reconnaissance” at the airport in Boston. During their seaside drive, Raed had derided the storybook villages they'd passed through. Now he could not remember why the sightseeing had left him so unimpressed, or why had he'd been so eager to obey the organization ordering him to Boston in the first place. He must have been hiding in rooms in his head even before he'd reached prison. Hiding from the reality he'd lived in, hiding in a seventh-century corner of his mind and ignoring the twenty-first-century America around him.... But that was another Raed, not the middle-aged ghost from the future standing in this kitchen, looking with longing on the village down below, a wholly magical place Raed was ready to believe in.

  He felt his throat tightening with emotion. He wanted to be back in this past, simulation or no simulation. He wanted to break free of the harness holding him to 2033 and wander down into that peaceful perfect village, buy a coffee in a shop, sit and listen to people talk, and never look back.

  They'd said if he participated in their program he would get to see “the outside world again, in a way.” Is this what they'd meant? If so, the psychologists had cheated him. The scene before him was so pristine it was heartbreaking to look upon. And Raed couldn't so much as step out to the backyard.

  Then he remembered what the researcher Francis told him about volunteers sticking their hands through glass. So he began to try, pushing hard against the glass of the patio-door, and gradually feeling his fingers sink into a surface like glue that had almost hardened. But after several minutes, he'd only managed to get the tips of two forefingers to peek through the other side of the glass. And he did not want to be stuck here if people arrived, came into the kitchen, and brushed up against him.

  As he stood drawing his fingers back out, Raed glanced around the kitchen, and saw a calendar facing him from the nearest wall. It was open to September 2001, and on the week of September 11 the words TOM IN L.A. were marked across several days. The calendar could not tell him what day this was, of course; but Raed knew, oh, he knew. He turned back to the glass door, focused on freeing his fingers. That's when he noticed the reverse-reflection of the digital clock on the stove at the back of the kitchen behind him. He turned completely around to see if he was reading it right.

  8:45 am.

  One minute to go on the last pristine morning of the world. One minute before the first of the four planes would hit its target. Raed drank in the view beyond the glass door for another few seconds, wishing this last moment could last forever, bracing himself for ... 8:46 am.

  Nothing happened. Naturally, New York was far from Rhode Island. His fingers finally popped free, and he stood there flexing his hand before realizing he was hearing a soft buzzing from somewhere. The front doorbell? No, it had be something close, in the kitchen. Raed walked around the room, and ended up beside the phone, which was ringing really loudly when he was right beside it. The ringing stopped, and an answering machine adjacent to the phone clicked on. A woman's voice announced, “We're not here, but you can leave us a message.” Then the caller began to speak:

  “Angie, I'm ... it's Tom,” a male voice said, and Raed's eyes shot to the calendar. TOM IN L.A.

  “My flight's been hijacked,” Tom continued all too calmly. “I'll try to call again, but don't know if there'll be time. Whatever happens, Angie, know that I love—"

  Raed leapt away before he heard the end of the message, knowing the sound would drop off faster than it should—and it did, the rest of Tom's words to Angie unable to reach across a foot more of kitchen floor. He backed all way into the patio door, disturbed and disbelieving. How could a man caught on any of those planes have been so calm?

  It was a question Raed had asked himself over and over the day before 9/11. That was the day he'd driven his cousins across the state border into Connecticut and booked them into a motel on the Massachusetts border for the final night of their lives. Chipmunk-cheeked Nazir. And thin-faced Sayf, always skeletally thin, more than a little obsessed-looking. But Sayf and Nazir had both been calm and controlled during that afternoon drive through the Connecticut countryside, mentally preparing to sacrifice themselves when the morning came. They'd met with their cell-leader less than an hour before the long drive began, and had been let in on the target of their mission a little early because their leader trusted them. Nevertheless, Nazir broke down and let Raed in on their terrible secret before they reached the motel because Raed was kin, the last member of their family who would see Nazir and Sayf alive. After his cousins booked into the motel under assumed names—the names later published under their photos in the papers—Raed stayed in their room with them for a few hours before driving back home to Brooklyn alone, wondering all the way how his cousins could have been so calm.

  Raed saw the light on the answering machine start to blink. He walked toward it slowly—wanting to be sure it was finished recording—then stared down at the damned machine, hoping the cage-operators didn't make him wait in this house until Angie came home and listened to what was on it. But at least, he thought, as the kitchen began to slide sideways away from him, at least Tom had said what needed to be said to his wife—

  Back, back in the present, and breathing hard.

  Raed shook his head, wanting to rid himself of the sad end to such a beautiful dream, a beautiful simulation. He gazed blearily through the yellow bars, saw the hundred other spherical cages beyond the Plexiglas, scattered across the main projection arena. A hundred other volunteers were hanging in their harnesses, looking strangely blurred, squirming and swaying in midair. Folding back across N-space to a hundred lost moments in history?

  It can't be.

  “Feeling all right, Raed?"

  The woman psychologist was already in the cage below him again, waving a hand before his eyes to get his attention.

  He dragged the breather down again.

  “I feel...."

  “What?” She waited, one hand poised over her slate.

/>   Lost, he wanted to say. Full of lost opportunities. Raed had heard passengers had contacted their loved ones from those doomed planes, but ... he hadn't ever contacted Haifa to tell her his own feelings—because he hadn't realized how strong his love for her really was until too many years had passed, and it was much too late. So the acid dose of heartbreak filling him now was as much for himself as for the man who'd left that bittersweet message.

  Raed peered down at the psychologist, knowing he was already losing tonight's game badly. “You can't make me believe,” he said to her, no longer wanting to play any more games. “You can't convince me I'm really seeing the past, I don't care what you show me."

  The woman nodded, tapping away at the slate. “What you believe is entirely up to you. And what you do where we send you—that's up to you too."

  “What is there to do,” Raed retorted, “when I'm just as cooped up back there as I am in Lewisburg?"

  “You really want to find out?"

  Raed let out a long shuddering breath, unsure whether this veiled and proper young woman sounded hopeful for the first time—or whether she was trying to warn him about what was coming next. But he was sure of the answer to her question. Some part of him did want to find out. Something was stirring down in the crack through the core of his being: an ashen yearning to go back there and confront whatever they would show him.

  “Yes,” he sighed. “Send me again."

  The look in the psychologist's wide black eyes subtly changed. Surprise? She whirled, exited the cage, and conferred with the two operators sitting at their consoles. And Raed closed his eyes, knowing it didn't really matter where they projected him to this time, because what he'd told the psychologist was the truth: he wouldn't, couldn't bring himself to believe that he was folding through “N-space” back to—