Hearing him describe our relationship in these terms gave me pause. I recalled the conversation in which Tan had asserted that something central to the idea of life died when one was uploaded into Heaven—Vang’s uncharacteristic claim to an emotional debt caused me to think that he might well be, as she’d described her parents, a colored shadow, a cunningly contrived representation of the original. I hoped that this was not the case; I hoped that he was alive in every respect.
“I have to go,” I said. “Business, you understand. But I have some news that may be of interest to you.”
“Oh?” he said eagerly. “Tell me.”
“I’ve invested heavily in Sony, and through negotiation, I’ve arranged for one of your old companies—Intertech of Hanoi—to be placed in charge of overseeing the virtual environment. I would expect you’re soon going to see some changes in your particular part of Heaven.”
He seemed nonplussed, then a look of alarm dawned on his face. “What are you going to do?”
“Me? Not a thing.” I smiled, and the act of smiling weakened my emotional restraint—a business skill I had not yet perfected—and let anger roughen my voice. “It’s much more agreeable to have your dirty work handled by others, don’t you think?”
On occasion, Tan and I manage to rekindle an intimacy that reminds us of the days when we first were lovers, but these occasions never last for long, and our relationship is plagued by the lapses into neutrality or worse—indifference that tends to plague any two people who have spent ten years in each other’s company. In our case these lapses are often accompanied by bouts of self-destructive behavior. It seems we’re punishing ourselves for having experienced what we consider an undeserved happiness. Even our most honest infidelities are inclined to be of the degrading sort. I understand this. The beach at Vung Tau, once the foundation of our union, has been replaced by a night on Yen Phu Street in Binh Khoi, and no edifice built upon such imperfect stone could be other than cracked and deficient. Nonetheless, we both realize that whatever our portion of contentment in this world, we are fated to seek it together.
From time to time, I receive a communication from Vang. He does not look well, and his tone is always desperate, cajoling. I tell myself that I should relent and restore him to the afterlife for which he contracted; but I am not highly motivated in that regard. If there truly is something that dies when one ascends to Heaven, I fear it has already died in me, and I blame Vang for this.
Seven years after my talk with Vang, Tan and I attended a performance of the circus in the village of Loc Noi. There was a new James Bond Cochise, Kai and Kim had become pretty teenagers, both Tranh and Mei were thinner, but otherwise things were much the same. We sat in the main tent after the show and reminisced. The troupe—Mei in particular—were unnerved by my bodyguards, but all in all, it was a pleasant reunion.
After a while, I excused myself and went to see the major. He was huddled in his tent, visible by the weird flickerings in his eyes…though as my vision adapted to the dark, I was able make out the cowled shape of his head against the canvas backdrop. Tranh had told me he did not expect the major to live much longer, and now that I was close to him, I found that his infirmity was palpable, I could hear it in his labored breath. I asked if he knew who I was, and he replied without inflection, as he had so many years before, “Philip.” I’d hoped that he would be more forthcoming, because I still felt akin to him, related through the cryptic character of our separate histories, and I thought that he might once have sensed that kinship, that he’d had some diffuse knowledge of the choices I confronted, and had designed the story of Firebase Ruby for my benefit, shaping it as a cautionary tale—one I’d failed to heed. But perhaps I’d read too much into what was sheer coincidence. I touched his hand, and his breath caught, then shuddered forth, heavy as a sob. All that remained for him were a few stories, a few hours in the light. I tried to think of something I could do to ease his last days, but I knew death was the only mercy that could mend him.
Mei invited Tan and I to spend the night in the trailer—for old times sake, she said—and we were of no mind to refuse. We both yearned for those old times, despite neither of us believing that we could recapture them. Watching Tan prepare for bed, it seemed to me that she had grown too vivid for the drab surroundings, her beauty become too cultivated and too lush. But when she slipped in beside me, when we began to make love on that creaky bunk, the years fell away and she felt like a girl in my arms, tremulous and new to such customs, and I was newly awakened to her charms. She drifted off to sleep afterward with her head on my chest, and as I lay there trying to quiet my breath so not to wake her, it came to me that future and past were joined in the darkness that enclosed us, two black rivers flowing together, and I understood that while the circus would go its own way in the morning and we would go ours, those rivers, too, were forever joined—we shared a confluence and a wandering course, and a moment proof against the world’s denial, and we would always be a troupe, Kim and Kai, Mei and Tranh, Tan and I, and the major…that living ghost who, like myself, was the figment of a tragic past he never knew, or—if, indeed, he knew it—with which he could never come to terms. It was a bond that could not save us, from either our enemies or ourselves, but it held out a hope of simple glory, a promise truer than Heaven. Illusory or not, all our wars would continue until their cause was long-forgotten under the banner of Radiant Green Star.
Only Partly Here
There are legends in the pit. Phantoms and apparitions. The men who work at Ground Zero joke about them, but their laughter is nervous and wired. Bobby doesn’t believe the stories, yet he’s prepared to believe something weird might happen. The place feels so empty. Like even the ghosts are gone. All that sudden vacancy, who knows what might have entered in? Two nights ago on the graveyard shift, some guy claimed he saw a faceless figure wearing a black spiky headdress standing near the pit wall. The job breaks everybody down. Marriages are falling apart. People keep losing it one way or another.
Fights, freak-outs, fits of weeping. It’s the smell of burning metal that seeps up from the earth, the ceremonial stillness of the workers after they uncover a body, the whispers that come when there is no wind. It’s the things you find. The week before, scraping at the rubble with a hoe, like an archaeologist investigating a buried temple, Bobby spotted a woman’s shoe sticking up out of the ground. A perfect shoe, so pretty and sleek and lustrous. Covered in blue silk. Then he reached for it and realized that it wasn’t stuck—it was only half a shoe, with delicate scorching along the ripped edge. Now sometimes when he closes his eyes he sees the shoe. He’s glad he isn’t married. He doesn’t think he has much to bring to a relationship.
That evening Bobby’s taking his dinner break, perched on a girder at the edge of the pit along with Mazurek and Pineo, when they switch on the lights. They all hate how the pit looks in the lights. It’s an out-take from The X-Files—the excavation of an alien ship under hot white lamps smoking from the cold; the shard left from the framework of the north tower glittering silver and strange, like the wreckage of a cosmic machine. The three men remain silent for a bit, then Mazurek goes back to bitching about Jason Giambi signing with the Yankees. You catch the interview he did with Werner Wolf? He’s a moron! First time the crowd gets on him, it’s gonna be like when you yell at a dog. The guy’s gonna fucking crumble. Pineo disagrees, and Mazurek asks Bobby what he thinks.
“Bobby don’t give a shit about baseball,” says Pineo. “My boy’s a Jets fan.”
Mazurek, a thick-necked, fiftyish man whose face appears to be fashioned of interlocking squares of pale muscle, says, “The Jets…fuck!”
“They’re play-off bound,” says Bobby cheerfully.
Mazurek crumples the wax paper his sandwich was folded in. “They gonna drop dead in the first round like always.”
“It’s more interesting than being a Yankee fan,” says Bobby. “The Yankees are too corporate to be interesting.”
‘“Too corporat
e to be interesting’?” Mazurek stares. “You really are a geek, y’know that?”
“That’s me. The geek.”
“Whyn’t you go the fuck back to school, boy? Fuck you doing here, anyway?”
“Take it easy, Carl! Chill!” Pineo—nervous, thin, lively, curly black hair spilling from beneath his hard hat—puts a hand on Mazurek’s arm, and Mazurek knocks it aside. Anger tightens his leathery skin; the creases in his neck show white. “What’s it with you? You taking notes for your fucking thesis?” he asks Bobby. “Playing tourist?”
Bobby looks down at the apple in his hand—it seems too shiny to be edible. “Just cleaning up is all. You know.”
Mazurek’s eyes dart to the side, then he lowers his head and gives it a savage shake. “Okay,” he says in a subdued voice. “Yeah…fuck. Okay.”
Midnight, after the shift ends, they walk over to the Blue Lady. Bobby doesn’t altogether understand why the three of them continue to hang out there. Maybe because they once went to the bar after work and it felt pretty good, so they return every night in hopes of having it feel that good again. You can’t head straight home; you have to decompress. Mazurek’s wife gives him constant shit about the practice—she calls the bar and screams over the phone. Pineo just split with his girlfriend. The guy with whom Bobby shares an apartment grins when he sees him, but the grin is anxious—like he’s afraid Bobby is bringing back some contagion from the pit. Which maybe he is. The first time he went to Ground Zero, he came home with a cough and a touch of fever, and he recalls thinking that the place was responsible. Now, though, either he’s immune or else he’s sick all the time and doesn’t notice.
Two hookers at a table by the door check them out as they enter, then go back to reading the Post. Roman the barman, gray-haired and thick-waisted, orders his face into respectful lines, says, “Hey guys!” and sets them up with beers and shots. When they started coming in he treated them with almost religious deference, until Mazurek yelled at him, saying he didn’t want to hear that hero crap while he was trying to unwind—he got enough of it from the fuckass jocks and movie stars who visit Ground Zero to have their pictures taken. Though angry, he was far more articulate than usual in his demand for normal treatment, and this caused Bobby to speculate that if Mazurek were transported thousands of miles from the pit and not just a few blocks, his IQ would increase exponentially.
The slim brunette in the business suit is down at the end of the bar again, sitting beneath the blue neon silhouette of a dancing woman. She’s been coming in every night for about a week. Late twenties. Hair styled short, an expensive kind of punky look. Fashion-model hair. Eyebrows thick and slanted, like accents grave. Sharp-featured, on the brittle side of pretty, or maybe she’s not that pretty, maybe she is so well-dressed, her make-up done so skillfully, that the effect is of a businesslike prettiness, of prettiness reined in by the magic of brush and multiple applicators, and beneath this artwork she is, in actuality, rather plain. Nice body, though. Trim and well-tended. She wears the same expression of stony neutrality that Bobby sees every morning on the faces of the women who charge up from under the earth, disgorged from the D train, prepared to resist Manhattan for another day. Guys will approach her, assuming she’s a hooker doing a kind of Hitler office-bitch thing in order to attract men searching for a woman they can use and abuse as a surrogate for one who makes their life hell every day from nine to five, and she will say something to them and they will immediately walk away. Bobby and Pineo always try to guess what she says. That night, after a couple of shots, Bobby goes over and sits beside her. She smells expensive. Her perfume like the essence of some exotic flower or fruit he’s only seen in magazine pictures.
“I’ve just been to a funeral,” she says wearily, staring into her drink. “So, please…Okay?”
“That what you tell everybody?” he asks. “All the guys who hit on you?”
A fretful line cuts her brow. “Please!”
“No, really. I’ll go. All I want to know…that what you always say?”
She makes no response.
“It is,” he says. “Isn’t it?”
“It’s not entirely a lie.” Her eyes are spooky, the dark rims of the pale irises extraordinarily well-defined. “It’s intended as a lie, but it’s true in a way.”
“But that’s what you say, right? To everybody?”
“This is why you came over? You’re not hitting on me?”
“No, I…I mean, maybe…I thought…”
“So what you’re saying, you weren’t intending to hit on me. You wanted to know what I say to men when they come over. But now you’re not certain of your intent? Maybe you were deceiving yourself as to your motives? Or maybe now you sense I might be receptive, you’ll take the opportunity to hit on me, though that wasn’t your initial intent. Does that about sum it up?”
“I suppose,” he says.
She gives him a cautious look. “Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery be designed to engage me?”
“I’ll go away, okay? But that’s what you said to them, right?”
She points to the barman, who’s talking to Mazurek. “Roman tells me you work at Ground Zero.”
The question unsettles Bobby, leads him to suspect that she’s a disaster groupie, looking for a taste of the pit, but he says, “Yeah.”
“It’s really…” She does a little shivery shrug. “Strange.”
“Strange. I guess that covers it.”
“That’s not what I wanted to say. I can’t think of the right word to describe what it does to me.”
“You been down in it?”
“No, I can’t get any closer than here. I just can’t. But…” She makes a swirling gesture with her fingers. “You can feel it here. You might not notice, because you’re down there all the time. That’s why I come here. Everybody’s going on with their lives, but I’m not ready. I need to feel it. To understand it. You’re taking it away piece by piece, but the more you take away, it’s like you’re uncovering something else.”
“Y’know, I don’t want to think about this now.” He gets to his feet. “But I guess I know why you want to.”
“Probably it’s fucked up of me, huh?”
“Yeah, probably,” says Bobby, and walks away.
“She’s still looking at you, man,” Pineo says as Bobby settles beside him. “What you doing back here? You could be fucking that.”
“She’s a freak,” Bobby tells him.
“So she’s a freak! Even better!” Pineo turns to the other two men. “You believe this asshole? He could be fucking that bitch over there, yet here he sits.”
Affecting a superior smile, Roman says, “You don’t fuck them, pal. They fuck you.”
He nudges Mazurek’s arm as though seeking confirmation from a peer, a man of experience like himself, and Mazurek, gazing at his grungy reflection in the mirror behind the bar, says distractedly, weakly, “I could use another shot.”
The following afternoon Bobby unearths a disk of hard black rubber from beneath some cement debris. It’s four inches across, thicker at the center than at the edges, shaped like a little UFO. Try as he might, he can think of no possible purpose it might serve, and he wonders if it had something to do with the fall of the towers. Perhaps there is a black seed like this at the heart of every disaster. He shows it to Pineo, asks his opinion, and Pineo, as expected, says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Part of a machine.” Bobby knows Pineo is right. The disk is a widget, one of those undistinguished yet indispensable objects without which elevators will not rise or refrigerators will not cool; but there are no marks on it, no holes or grooves to indicate that it fits inside a machine. He imagines it whirling inside a cone of blue radiance, registering some inexplicable process.
He thinks about the disk all evening, assigning it various values. It is the irreducible distillate of the event, a perfectly formed residue. It is a wicked sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual function is understood by
only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God. He intends to take the disk back to his apartment and put it next to the half-shoe and all the rest of the items he has collected in the pit. But that night when he enters the Blue Lady and sees the brunette at the end of the bar, on impulse he goes over and drops the disk on the counter next to her elbow.
“Brought you something,” he says.
She glances at it, pokes it with a forefinger and sets it wobbling. “What is it?”
He shrugs. “Just something I found.”
“At Ground Zero?”
“Uh-huh.”
She pushes the disk away. “Didn’t I make myself plain last night?”
Bobby says, “Yeah…sure,” but isn’t sure he grasps her meaning.
“I want to understand what happened…what’s happening now,” she says. “I want what’s mine, you know. I want to understand exactly what it’s done to me. I need to understand it. I’m not into souvenirs.”
“Okay,” Bobby says.
“‘Okay.’” She says this mockingly. “God, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re on medication!”
A Sinatra song, “All Or Nothing At All,” flows from the jukebox—a soothing musical syrup that overwhelms the chatter of hookers and drunks and commentary from the TV mounted behind the bar, which is showing chunks of Afghanistan blowing up into clouds of brown smoke. The crawl running at the bottom of the screen testifies that the estimate of the death toll at Ground Zero has been reduced to just below five thousand; the amount of debris removed from the pit now exceeds one million tons. The numbers seem meaningless, interchangeable. A million lives, five thousand tons. A ludicrous score that measures no real result.
“I’m sorry,” the brunette says. “I know it must take a toll, doing what you do. I’m impatient with everyone these days.”
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 47