Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  Typing sounds. “Done.”

  “Always a pleasure, Maya.”

  “Hang in there, I. Let me know about that hooker. Or hookers. Don’t be shy, now.”

  “Goodbye, Maya,” she says, and ends the call.

  While she was talking, Philip sent another text—they have a reservation at Fantôme, in SOMA, but not for hours, which makes the afternoon a long stretch of dead time. She could probably go hang around his offices but it would be pitiful to be seen to have nothing to do. Tempting to nap there in the back of the cab, like it’s a tiny hotel room, endlessly in motion; she’d run up a bill, but the cost would be minute compared to what she’s getting from Water and Power, and compared to the cost of the Mayo would scarcely count as loose change.

  She remembers her last visit to the Mayo, now ten months past, the long road to the clinic weaving through the green shadows of the wooded plain. Expensively unobtrusive, the clinic, like a boutique hotel in the prairie style. The staff’s fathomless politeness and oddly uniform beauty was chilling, somehow, and she never set eyes on another patron, as they call them, supposes they’re paying for discretion as much as longer life (and how they pay, and exponentially more as they get older). But however flocculent the towels, however luminous the marble of the tubs, the fulcrum of the trip is the succession of injections that preface the narcotized haze and the febrile days in bed hallucinating mandalas on the whitewashed walls as the tailored retroviruses knit up her frayed DNA, overwriting all the past year’s errors and erosion. When she’d packed her bags with shaky hands a girl of the most vivid youth and vitality took her arm and guided her, still nodding, out into the daylight and down the manicured gravel path to the waiting town car and as she helped Irina maneuver her inert limbs into the air-conditioned dark the girl said, “Go in good health, and we hope to see you next year!” the same thing they said every year, and even in her fog Irina sifted her tone for irony, as the only choices are to come back or to decay, and to miss even a single year is to pass the point of no return.

  She remembers the TV blaring in the first class Alitalia lounge in London Heathrow—willowy blond Keri Kendrick, last year’s cinema darling, faced an unseen interviewer, pale blue eyes widening with passionate sincerity as she said, “It was a deeply spiritual decision. For me, life is a succession of seasons, and right now it’s the season of motherhood. I finally realized that I don’t need the Mayo to be happy, and I don’t care if my decision is quote-unquote ‘terrible and irrevocable.’” Put another way, she could no longer open a movie and her alcoholic husband-slash-manager had squandered most of her wealth. That’s me, Irina thinks, the first time I have a bad year, and the cab and its pointless motion start to feel like a prison and a metaphor for the vanity of her life. She thinks of all the flights leaving SFO, and how she’s now constrained to linger.

  Rain starts pattering on the roof of the cab. She’s lost track of where they are but knows the favelas are nearby, as though she can feel their penumbra.

  A girl hurries by wearing a man’s long dark coat with the sleeves rolled up; it looks like it’s expensive, or once was—she probably got it from the ebays or a thrift store. She has a frayed ammo bag for a purse, and there are dark rings under her eyes, though she can’t be more than twenty, like she’s hungover but too young to mind it, and somehow Irina knows that though the girl lives in the favelas she is not of them, a daughter of the upper middle class out having an adventure, and she thinks of her own youth—still there, perfectly preserved—and of her months in Singapore, her own brief withdrawal from living cities and the world.

  The girl disappears into the crowd, and now it’s raining harder. “You wouldn’t believe it, sweetie,” she says, “but I used to be punk,” then worries the cab will interpret this as new instructions. She checks the time on her phone, though she knows she has hours, and then, indulgently, lets her months in Singapore rise up in her memory.

  At the time, the experience had seemed to be one of singular importance; now she preserves the memory, in all its vastness, out of a careful respect for her past selves. Straining a little, she can hold all that summer in her mind at once, as a sort of porous, four-dimensional solid, she and her friends streaks of color twining among the ponderous hypervolumes of the buildings, the sinuous masses of the changing tides. But this isn’t how a person should see the world, she reminds herself, and lets the days of that summer play over her in sequence.

  She was twenty and Singapore was drowning. Most of the people had left—garbage ran in the tide race between buildings, and Malay looters plied the waters downtown—and the government did little more than post edicts online demanding Confucian fortitude and virtue. Young people from all over had converged there to roost among the sinking towers, that last summer of the city’s viability, and, having no need to work, and no ties to bind her, she’d joined them.

  Construction drones were just getting cheap and spavined older models were all over the rooftops. She built herself a room on top of an old glass-and-steel skyscraper, its base flooded, her room and the other itinerants’ clustered like swallows’ nests. The trip was nominally educational—she was enrolled at the national university—but she rarely went to class and someone told her that most of the teachers had left the city.

  Such stores as weren’t sunk were empty, but a boy on her rooftop had a boat and would take her to the market ships down from Malaysia; the ships’ holds, creaking, rusty and as long as a landing strip, were full of multicolored piles of gemlike fruit, crates of tinned beef, oranges, milk, the dizzying stench of durian. She and her new friends often made grand plans—snorkeling expeditions, trips to the wreck of the Raffles Hotel—but these ambitions rarely materialized; most days they woke in the afternoon and spent the nights at parties on the lowest unflooded levels—dance music and strobe lights, the sweat of strangers, long-haired boys burning marijuana by the bale, the music’s pauses filled with the reverberation of the waves.

  It was a beautifully disposable youth. When it was time to go, people would just leave, rarely saying goodbye, their rooms left to the next squatter. One girl sealed over the door to her room, forever preserving the wilted Kerouac paperbacks and empty vodka bottles. Irina left the day she noticed that her tower was listing. A few of the kids spoke of staying forever, of founding families among the waves, of building mansions out of concrete and raising them ever higher as the seas rose—a mistake, she thought, as their interlude, like the city, had a term.

  She wonders whether her room is above water, still, or has sunk, become the abode of rays and fishes, and lets the tremendous mass of old data sink once again into the dark.

  She’s kept equally detailed recollections of old lovers. Someday, if she has children, she will edit these, and leave her descendants this eidetic record of her life, and will they be abashed to know her so completely?

  Her afternoon with Water and Power is in the periphery of her awareness, there toward the surface of her memory, and she’s about to let it dissolve—she’ll retain her memories of their AIs, which is technically a breach of contract, but one she commits all the time, and no one has ever been the wiser—but she finds herself disliking Cromwell and Magda more than seems reasonable, given how often she’s worked for worse.

  She calls up her ten minutes in Cromwell’s office, holding all of it in her mind, sees how when she’d walked into his office, he’d looked up from his laptop and for a tenth of a second he had a strange expression comprised of wonder and fear and superiority, like a man who knew a secret.

  It could be anything, is probably nothing, but now she is intent, and sees how quickly he’d closed his laptop, the Cycladic figures on his desk, the grey at the great man’s temples, the almost tangible light, and there it is: his laptop had faced away from her but there in the antique affectation of his eyeglasses there’s a reflection of its screen, and zooming in she sees a browser window, and though most of the text is too small to read there are many sequences of legible numbers, probably
GPS coordinates, and above them all is a single word, MNEMOSYNE.

  16

  Circumference

  In the town car on the way back to the hotel Thales feels a lucidity bordering on euphoria and his mind is like a searchlight moving over the surface of the city. A gap between buildings frames a rectangle of the dull lunar gold of the dry mountains and the wildfires’ swathes of black ash and he remembers their flight into Los Angeles, how the plane had banked over the golden mountains and then the shock of his first sight of the city, the dull glare of the vast plain of concrete and glass, which seemed to have no limit, its far boundary lost in the enveloping smog, and he’d remembered that someone had said God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference doesn’t exist.

  The car shudders over concentric rings of fissured concrete characteristic of an exploded IED—placed by whom, he wonders, and what, here, had they expected political violence to accomplish?—and now there’s a row of dying, dessicated palms that must once have been meant to evoke a Polynesian tropicality, though Los Angeles has always been a desert, and never more than now.

  It’s not at all like Rio, he thinks, because Rio is like … what? He tries to remember but can only come up with a handful of images—his school, their home, a beach—though he’s lived most of his life there.

  Another car follows his on the turn off from the freeway onto the surface streets of Venice Beach, and he realizes that it’s been behind him for miles, and in fact is the same model as his own, though filthy, like it hasn’t been washed in weeks.

  The other car pulls alongside. Seconds pass and nothing happens. Heart racing, he’s ready to give the command that would put the car on full alert and elicit its focused aggression, but if this other party were really determined to hurt him they could already have started shooting, and he wants to know if they’re really following him, and if so why, so even though it’s almost certainly a mistake he lowers his window.

  His reflection in the black glass of the other car’s window and the hot sunlight on his face but as the road turns the light’s angle changes and the other car’s window becomes translucent enough for him to see that it’s probably a woman, on the other side, and then his car makes the sharp turn onto the shielded ramp leading down into the St. Mark’s garage which makes the other car vanish.

  17

  Tunnel

  Rain washes in sheets over the cab’s windshield as Irina opens a map in her other memory. The map shows the whole world but the Mnemosyne coordinates are all in San Francisco, so apparently it’s a local thing. Each coordinate has an extra number, which at first leaves her nonplussed, but then she realizes it’s probably altitude, which means that these locations are mostly underground.

  The closest one is ten minutes away by foot, and several hundred feet down, which must put it in the BART tunnels. The mystery of the thing is stirring. She must be ever deeper in breach with W&P, but that’s what lawyers are for. Strangely happy, she tells the cab to pull over.

  She turns on her implant’s wireless and finds a site called Urban Underground, which is an atlas of the spaces below the cities of the world, cobbled together by generations of urban explorers. There’s a list of the city’s points of access to the subterranean world, and she feels like Alice on the threshold of Wonderland with all its rigors and absurdity (she’s always been told she resembles the photograph of Alice Liddell as a young woman in her garden). The nearest is in a restaurant called Boulevardier, which seems to have been around for centuries, and to offer access to the old infrastructure of the city; in its basement bar is a staircase leading down into the BART tunnels, which should put her at the right depth, and about a quarter of a horizontal mile from her chosen Mnemosyne coordinates. The site says the restaurant staff are used to people slipping in and disappearing.

  She opens the door and wind blasts rain into the cab, like it wants to keep her there; she takes a breath, ducks into the wind and runs for an awning.

  She draws the gaze of a soldier in power armor in the middle of the street. Helmet retracted, he wears a sodden, dripping camouflage hat, and how does he keep the water from getting inside? The armor is wearing him, she thinks, taking in the roses in his wet, sunburned cheeks; barely old enough to shave, and death in the missiles in the pods on his back. With his head protruding from the massive steel body he looks like a parable of masculine insecurity, a boy trying to present himself as robot and gorilla.

  Meeting her eye, he flashes his authority-face, and then, reflexively, looks down at her chest; she’s wearing a thin shirt of midnight-blue linen, now rain-damp and clinging. Embarrassed, he turns away and makes a show of waving on cars whose hulls seem to vibrate in the downpour, unaware that she’s warmed to him, a little, for the humanity of his gesture; she’s reminded of an old boyfriend, how, deep in REM, he’d pull her close, stiffen against her as dawn lit the windows.

  The rain lags, a gap in the clouds opening onto white depths, a tower of empty space culminating in a blue disc of sky; the air is sweet, now, redolent of eucalyptus, maybe jasmine; there are private gardens on the city’s rooftops, though few know they’re there—she remembers spending New Year’s Eve in one, leaning on the rail in the glow of Christmas lights looking down at the traffic and the revelers crawling by. She feels thankful for the gardens, and for the rain, wonders if without them the city would always smell like piss and decay.

  * * *

  Boulevardier is lit with dim red light and even this early in the afternoon there are pairs of silhouettes hunched intimately over their drinks and when the maître d’ accosts her she murmurs something about meeting friends and brushes past him toward the stairs leading down into the bar.

  Even darker, down there, and there’s a table full of women convulsed with shrill, manic laughter, a reminder of why she’s always preferred the company of men. The red velvet and shadows and extravagant deco chandeliers put her in mind of the Paris Metro. There are black-and-white photographs of what must be seraglios, some abandoned ones with pillars crumbling and others populated by fleshy beauties disporting themselves in the bath, and it’s all persuasive enough that she can accept the illusion that this place is about absinthe and decadence and sin and not just a basement with a decorative motif.

  As per the directions on Urban Underground, she finds a closet next door to the ladies’. Taped to the door is a legal notice disclaiming responsibility for what happens to anyone who chooses to go through. Opening it, she finds a narrow and plainly ancient staircase leading down between water-stained red brick walls, the product of some more ancient building code, or perhaps preceding them. It occurs to her that, not trusting her phone’s battery, she should go and find a flashlight, but then, as though her thought had called it into being, she sees a heavy-duty industrial flashlight in shatterproof yellow plastic, hanging from a nail driven into the smirched brick wall.

  A few steps down, she hesitates, imagining getting lost, inhaling spores or stumbling on a coven of broken people who can’t function in the light, but it’s a point of pride, now, to continue, and what else could be as interesting, so she goes on into the dark.

  * * *

  The service corridor is ankle deep with crushed coffee cups, papier-mâchéd newspaper, dead leaves, used condoms—she wonders who would find BART infrastructure romantic. The intermittent fluorescent strip-lighting shows a path of crushed litter and bootprints worn down the center of the corridor. The walls are completely covered with jagged overlapping graffiti scrawls, like a continuum of largely illegible words, or of forms inspired by words, and for a moment she fancies it’s a mineralogical property of the concrete that, in this darkness, in the waves of pressure from the passing trains, it exude these vibrant, vaguely calligraphic lines.

  There’s a grating low on the side of the corridor, opening into darkness. She hears the onrushing rattle of metal, and then the train roars by, almost close enough to touch; yellow strobe flashes of its windows and frozen passengers, and for a moment
she feels absurdly exposed, but then the train is gone in a gust of ozone and cold earth.

  She comes to a round metal door set in the wall, the graffiti warped to accommodate its shape. On the door is a joyfully grinning death’s head, apparently recently painted—she’s reluctant to touch it, but does, and finds to her relief that the paint’s not wet. Under the layered paint, the maker’s name, she assumes, is written in raised capitals. She deciphers them by touch: BRAUMANN MANUFACTURING, SINGAPORE.

  She expects the door to be locked, and at first it won’t move—that’s it, she thinks, my journey over—but then it swings open under the slight pressure from her hand.

  Dark, within. She fishes the high beam out of her bag, suddenly reluctant to leave the relative security of the service corridor’s light. She imagines some morlock vagrant wandering the tunnels, finding the door, locking her in, leaving her too deep for cell service, far from any help. Taking a breath, she ducks through the door, pulls it almost shut.

  The high beam picks out isolated graffitos on the rough walls; they’re spaced out, here, and seem to have been made with greater care, as though this was the place for the really serious vandals to follow their muse, hidden from the world and the BART police. How did it feel, she wonders, when that farmer first saw the horses in the cave in Lascaux? The dim tunnel recedes in the distance before her.

  As she goes on, the graffiti gets less frequent and more baroque; the avant-garde of urban art in this waste below the world. There’s a sort of rebus that might be a manticore made out of indecipherable, almost Arabic calligraphy, the monster’s smile idiotic and baleful. She almost misses a tessellation of UFOs on the ceiling. There’s the story, written in careful lowercase letters bounded by an intricate knotwork, of a maintenance man taking care of his dying and increasingly senile mother.

  When she finds it, she thinks at first that it’s a water stain running from floor to ceiling. Homogenous from a distance, on close inspection it’s a mat of minutely interlocking blue and green spikes, suffused with vital energy, as though it were about to burst apart. The fugue hits her then—she sees desert, empty highways, shallow seas—and then vanishes as she drops her light.