Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  * * *

  Waking, she stumbles out of the cab into predawn fog and the smell of the sea; the hotel, beige and sterile, is entirely devoid of a sense of place. This quiet hour, she thinks, of fatigue poison, suicide, ghosts.

  There’s a guard in a little booth by the concrete planters that keep anyone from driving too close to the hotel; he ignores her, and at first she thinks he’s breaking down his rifle but then sees that he’s watching television on its display. She has a vision of rounds raining down on the hotel while the indifferent guard flips channels.

  Although she is not a gun person, at all, she recognizes the guard’s rifle, an anti-armor Heckler & Koch, the same weapon used on the virtual battlefields of her most recent contract; she’d spent a week trying to persuade the house AI of a Santa Monica defense firm to take an interest in a tactical simulation, and then, interest taken, to make its army win. Surprisingly, the simulation was beautiful, with the bright arcs of missiles, the airborne drones like flocks of easily startled birds, the strike zones of the weapons satellites like cloud shadows scudding over the hills.

  In the empty lobby the lights are dimmed. Her phone shows her the way through the corridors.

  Her room is the color of the dry grass in the hills. She checks mail on her phone. Inevitably, there’s a reminder from her agent about her meeting at Water and Power Capital Management in now alarmingly few hours. She drops the phone on the floor.

  She looks out the window—there’s a sense of glittering immanence, of menace, almost, over the salt flats—then regrets not brushing her teeth as she shrugs out of her clothes and falls into bed, glad of the silence and of the guard, out front with his gun, keeping the world at a distance.

  5

  Working

  The concrete is still cooling under Kern’s back when the moon starts to set. Under the faded sky the favelas’ rooftops are a plain of undulating shadow, fractured by the glowing faults of the alleys and the streets. Lifting his head, he sees the Bay and across it the firelight flaring among Oakland’s ruined towers. The wind brings cooking oil, sewage, the sea. Ear to the concrete, he hears music’s muted subterranean pulse.

  His phone chimes as a text arrives. Phone framed on pale night, the message one word: Working? The sender is anonymized, but only Lares has the new number. Tempting just to lie there, and watch the night progress, but his restlessness is growing, so he texts back Yes, and an instant later gets another message with an image of the night’s mark and his latest GPS.

  Corded muscle on the stranger’s arms, billowing thunderheads tattooed on his shoulders, a studied gangster’s gravitas. Another text: Touch him up and bring his phone to me. He memorizes the GPS, then deletes all. Springing to his feet, he stretches through the moment’s dizziness and then lopes off across the rooftops.

  A vertical plane of light rises from a wide fissure in the concrete before him. He starts to sprint and as the fear rises he launches himself from the edge, floating, for a moment, and in the light rising from the street below he casts a skyward shadow, and then the balconies of the far wall are rushing toward him, then the shock of impact in his palms, knees and soles, his eyes just inches from the stratified concrete, and then once again he’s pushed off into the air.

  He lands running, stumbles, jogs off the last of his momentum, unscathed, euphoric, though the descent is easy, on these surfaces, if you commit yourself, which he’s done now many times. (The first time, when he’d only seen it done in videos, it had taken an hour to work up to the jump). As he wasn’t hurt, he won’t be hurt, and for tonight he is invincible.

  The pulse of the music is louder on the street. It’s a carnival night, which he likes, for the shattering music and the fires and the strobe lights that make a strange country of the favela’s familiar mazes, and because there will be crowds, mostly drunk, making it easy for him to fade away. Lares, who is particular about words, says it’s not technically carnival, but more like this floating world, which Kern first thought referred to the levels flooded by the Bay—he’s found basements where you can hear the tide race—but it turned out to be Japanese; he forgot the details but retains a sense of lantern light and sake jars, of hot water clattering into tubs, of ragged samurai walking through the cold mud singing, and as the bass vibrates in his bones he’s floating over the surface of things, exultant and detached as he closes on his victim.

  Dank corridors with closed doors, mulched paper squelching underfoot, reek of urine. A family place—mothers had their children piss in the throughways to keep the working girls away. An old man with a too-wide grin, dressed as though for church, calls out to him, full of unctuous concern—is he entirely well—is he hungry, perhaps? Kern shakes his head just perceptibly and the old man laughs, says he’s sorry, he hadn’t recognized him, would never have spoken so to a resident of such standing. Go with him and you’d get a meal, fall asleep, wake up in a brothel. It didn’t seem fair, kids making it this far just to be picked off by a pimp who seemed to think that it was funny. The gang kids hated people like that, caught them and hurt them whenever they could, prone, afterwards, to sentimental monologues on sisters disappeared.

  A momentary silence, shocking in its suddenness, ringing in his ears. It passes, as he moves on, but there are places like that, here and there, islands of quiet, implied by the ways that shape warps sound. They move, as people build, and he imagines the silences projected from high above, like spotlights roaming the surface of the city.

  The sky is intermittent strips of indigo, and the street—dark even in the day—is lit sporadically by bioluminescent strips stuck to the walls. He dodges into the gaps in the gathering crowd, making a game of it but one with an urgency, and someone shouts “Woo!” as Kern slips by, not touching him but passing near enough to feel his heat, and he knows he should slow down, avoid notice, but needs to be in motion.

  He rounds a corner into a wall of darkness and deafening sound and then a blinding flash of light. The music is from everywhere, the stereos built into the walls and the floor—there are guys who are into that, who spend weeks and their own money getting it just right. Every strobe flash brings a static image of the dancers in their ecstasy, like a sequence of luminous stills, and he retains details that would otherwise be lost—the hair of a girl in mid-jump splayed out like a corona, her eyes shut tight, her smile raw, inward, somehow like a child’s, the skinny shirtless boy turning to watch her, the beads of sweat flying from his forehead. On a concrete stage there’s an elfin-looking girl screaming into a microphone and she has black lipstick and black eyeliner and a torn, sweat-stained army T-shirt, and she can’t weigh more than ninety pounds—she’s what Kayla would call one of the banshee cases—and it’s like she’s been possessed by something terrible that’s working out its pain through her disintegrating vocals. A pulse of darkness, like going into a tunnel, and then the next strobe shows the way.

  He checks his position on his phone, scans the teeming faces when the next light comes. So many, and though it’s only been minutes the mark is surely gone, but the mass of dancers opens up and there he is.

  Kern pulls on the thick leather gloves he got from a gardener for someone’s credit card and reminds himself to breathe. There are brown stains on the knuckles that won’t scrub out. Remembering fragments of jumbled meditations, he tries to slow his heart.

  The music is the soundtrack for what he’s about to do and he must be near a speaker because the noise is on the verge of obliterating his consciousness, and no one is really watching and no one will really care but still he finds he doesn’t want to hurt this stranger, not really, and he stands there foolishly, pulling at his gloves, but then he remembers a story he read on his laptop, one from Iceland about men who had the souls of wolves, berserkers, they called them, and they were usually soft-spoken and unassuming till they went into battle and then something shifted deep within them and their mouths foamed and they chewed the corners of their shields as the wolf rose up through them to swallow their hearts an
d their pity and the last vestiges of their fear. Come, he thinks, calling to the wolf in the music’s barrage, even though he knows it’s just a story, but then it comes, and he is ravening.

  Hands shoved in pockets, eyes lowered, he advances on his victim. Now his heart is calm and his fear has become something poisonous and almost like affection. Annihilating echoes roll between the concrete cliffs in the periodic dark. The mark glances at him, but Kern is staring off into space, not even a person, just so much empty air.

  The mark’s loneliness is evident in the way he watches the girls, and how he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. There’s something in one of the mark’s pockets and for a moment Kern worries it’s a gun but it’s too bulky and then he notices the paint on the mark’s shirt and realizes he’s a tagger, that it’s a spray can in his pocket. Kern sees him decide to leave, start shouldering his way toward an alley, and knows his moment.

  Music so overwhelming it’s like silence as he runs through the momentary darkness, leaps on the strobe flash, and as it ends drives his elbow down through the space where the mark’s skull was, but hits nothing, lands kneeling, and holds the position—though it’s not necessary, is even self-consciously cinematic—until the next flash shows the mark, eyes wide, hands raised, backing away.

  They run flat out and when the dark comes Kern feels he’s standing still. The next flash shows the mark losing ground, and with the next he’s gone but Kern intuits that he’s slipped into another, narrower alley, and the next flash shows him pressed against the wall, and in his momentary glimpse of the mark’s face Kern sees his decision to stand and fight.

  Pain blooms in Kern’s hand as the mark’s orbital shatters, and then the mark is on the ground, Kern astride his chest, throwing punches unimpeded, and the mark’s face is like an outraged child’s, successive strobes revealing his progress from shock to misery and finally to a blankness, almost an abandonment, and then more bone collapses, which is probably enough.

  Leaving the alley with the mark’s phone in his pocket, he sees men rushing toward him, mouths open and teeth bared as they shout things he can’t hear. He turns to meet them, flooded with rage, welcoming death, knowing that he won’t lose, can’t lose, will live forever, but then he recalls his discipline, and with it reason, and with the next strobe he runs at the wall, finds traction, jumps, grabs a balcony, is up, vanishes.

  6

  What Forgetting Is

  Irina dreams of blue rubber gloved hands, the rush of pure oxygen, and the pain, perceived through the shock and anesthesia as a terrible cold, a continent of ice afloat in dark water.

  She wakes, and that numbness is still with her, as is the exact record of her restless sleep: the rough silk of the hotel sheets, the weight of the duvet, her sporadic motion as the hours passed, the novae bursting and fading behind her sleeping eyes.

  She sits up, sees her clothes draped on the distressed leather of the club chair across from the bed, the sort of chair that serves only as an impromptu clothes rack or a place from which to watch one’s lover, sleeping, if one has a lover, which she does not, nor has for some time, a line of thought best abandoned.

  The hotel room is podlike, expensive and forgettable. The open curtains frame a view of the whitely glistening salt; beyond them, in darkness, the Bay. Her phone blinks, probably with queries about wake-up calls, morning coffee, but she ignores it, stares out the window, noticing once again how this part of the world, where so much has happened, looks like nothing in particular.

  She only watches television in hotel rooms, needing to fill their chilly banality with any kind of human noise. The wide black rectangle of screen shows a rubicund Japanese politico insisting that Japan has the right to deploy missile platforms in space, three coyotes padding through the empty streets of Santa Fe, a hotel burning in the atolls that are all that’s left of that peninsula that used to be a state, and a South Korean official attributing the disappearance of one of their newest drone submarines to a software error—the ship is considered lost at sea. The missing ship appears on screen—it’s black, seamless, somehow cetacean-looking.

  The salt flats look like plains of snow and she thinks of her childhood, obliterated decades ago on an icy Virginia road. She remembers the car’s terrible rotational velocity, her mother’s hand on her father’s shoulder; then lying on her back in a room without windows, listening to her respirator’s hiss and sigh. There was nothing to see but the white ceiling and, sometimes, the nurses leaning over her. She found she remembered everything—how the light changed on the ceiling, every little sound from the corridor, how the nurses looked every time she’d seen them; she could tell how long they’d been on shift from the darkness around their eyes. When the blue-eyed nurse took the tube out of Irina’s mouth she started talking: “And she’s powered up. Are you sure? Is the implant working? How’s her EEG? It’s all good—we’re recording. Is she awake? Not yet. Can she hear what we’re saying?” The nurse’s blue eyes widening.

  The possibility of sleep is gone. She kicks back the duvet, on the theory that the cold will make bed and sleep more appealing, and goes to stand by the window, cradling her forehead in her hand. A ship’s light out on the Bay. What good this ship, she thinks, this salt, this restive night, and is on the verge of wiping them away from her other memory, but she hesitates, then saves the indigo of the Bay, the chill, her melancholy.

  7

  Discipline

  Kern’s laptop bleats, and in the moment of waking he is up, though his body aches, as it always aches, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. Dizzy with sleep, he is stretching his shoulders when, at the laptop’s signal, the espresso machine—spoil of an unlocked condo—winks on, huffs loudly and begins to steam.

  The low room is dark but for the faint glows from the light well and from his laptop’s screen, just enough to illuminate the espresso frothing into his one chipped cup. The room is cold, this early, except near the space heater, salvage from the landfills, wired to a fuel cell with a shiny spot where the serial number once was, the severed stubs of steel bolts gleaming rawly.

  He sips coffee, tells himself it makes him feel more awake. The phone he took from the mark is on the floor by the laptop. He dreamed he heard a voice from it, perhaps a woman’s, but it’s not possible—there’s no signal this deep under the surface. Later, when the sun is down, he’ll run it over to Lares, get paid.

  Before he’s ready, his laptop chimes, and it’s time to work the heavy bag. The bag hangs from the ceiling on a rusted chain, swaddled in silver duct tape, mottled with dark stains, a mass of shadow. He circles it, poised on the balls of his feet, hands by his temples, his weariness subsumed in the familiarity of the stance. The laptop chimes again and he shuffles his left foot to the side and pivots on its ball as he turns his hip and throws his right leg at the bag, his technique unfolding effortlessly. A moment of sweet stasis, awareness of the bag’s mass, the room’s emptiness, his own exhaustion, and then when the kick lands the bag spasms, and there’s a sharp pain in his shin, but less than there was a year ago, and the books say that in another year the pain will be gone. He’s just recovered his stance when once again the laptop chimes and once again he kicks.

  The room was on the surface when he found it, years ago, abandoned in an epidemic’s wake. He hadn’t been strong, then, as he’s strong now, and was able to hold onto it only because so many had died. He’d been shivering with fever in his huddle of blankets when a paramedic in scarred blue armor eased his head in through the door, wary kindness in the blue eyes above the dust mask, a muddy jail tattoo on his neck. He’d said something in English, which Kern had barely understood, then, and left in moments, leaving two bottles of water, vitamins, and an octagonal green pill he’d swallowed less in hope than resignation. Now the room is buried under new construction, some fifty feet below the surface, and the light well, once his preferred route of access, has become occluded, tortuous, and too narrow for his shoulders; to reach the outside, now, he has to
navigate a warren of tunnels and lightless stairwells in the dark. It’s better that way, he finds, a safe feeling, and the other residents must agree, because no one has put up even the cheapest bioluminescent strips.

  Through the light well he hears a woman gently scolding her children, who will be late, she says, for school. Farther away, another woman sings a song he almost knows, and for a moment he thinks of home. As he strikes the bag again a breath of wind brings frying dough, cooking oil, coffee, the day.

  Yet another chime. He remembers Kayla singing to him. Is she still up, he wonders, and does she have a new lover, and does she ever think of him? He wrenches his thoughts back, chastising himself for wasting even a moment, and for having failed already, so early in the day. He kicks the bag hard enough to crush a rib cage—his shin feels shattered, but the bag caroms into the wall.

  Five hundred and ninety-six kicks later, his vision greying, his breath ragged, the laptop chimes twice. He staggers away from the bag, but neither sits nor puts his hands on his knees. He doesn’t feel like vomiting, this time, which is progress. When he can breathe through his nose again he scrapes himself dry with a towel already stiff with dried sweat.

  Eyes closed, he runs through the move in his mind, correcting the subtleties of balance, the nuances of technique. Soon the laptop will chime again, and again he will attack the bag with a narrow technical ferocity, coming another step closer to total purity of spirit and keeping out the void that’s all around him.