Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “Do you have my essence?”

  “Maybe,” she says, almost laughing.

  “So who am I?”

  “Well now. I hardly like to say. But you move, as our large friend would say, like a mantis, or as I would say like a dancer, though that’s not a comparison you’d like. You’re part scholar, in your way, and part wild animal. I get the sense that you spend a lot of time alone.”

  “If you know me so well, then what am I going to do?”

  “What you need to, I’m guessing, though with every second we wait here there’s a better chance I’ll have a close-up view of your blood pooling on the pavement, so maybe you could find a way to hurry up.”

  * * *

  When Kayla comes out of the door she’s wearing a man’s coat cinched tight. She’s still in her makeup, so thick she looks like an actor in those Japanese plays.

  He’s afraid she’ll be unkind but when she sees him she embraces him, an embrace he holds a beat too long, but as she pulls away she gives him a kiss on the cheek. “You look great. Are you waiting for me? You’re waiting for me, aren’t you. It’s sweet of you but you can’t do this, okay?” she says in her little girl’s voice, and he breathes in her sweat, the stale cigarette smoke; her pupils are pinpricks in the alley’s little light.

  “I don’t mind,” he says, wet with rain, suppressing his shivering. “How about I walk you home.”

  “You should have called.” He didn’t because she never picks up, but doesn’t say so.

  “They were asking about you,” she says, suddenly full of wonder; her teeth are straight and white, a reminder that she was rich once, or at least her family was. “Like gangsters, but with real money. They were asking if I knew where you were, said they’d pay anyone who could tell them, and now here you are. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “I’m in bad trouble,” he says, talking too fast. “I’ve got to go away and I might not be coming back. I’m going to get a passport and I might not ever get to see you again, and I think I killed someone but I had to.” He stops when he sees her realize something and in a hopeless, inward voice she says, “But I guess they’d probably have caught you anyway.”

  “What?”

  “But you’re strong, aren’t you,” she says. “I’ve seen you knock out guys twice your size. You can take care of yourself.”

  He takes her limp hand, but she snatches it away, saying, “I can’t do this,” and then she’s striding away, which amazes him, because he’d thought that he’d somehow find the right thing to say, and it’s hard not to follow her, but he’s determined to keep his dignity, such as it is, a goal to cling to as his despair rises, and he’s wondering if there’ll be fighting on the rooftops tonight when she stops and turns back to him—humiliatingly, his heart rises—and calls, “Get out of here! You’re not safe. Don’t trust anyone—not anyone, okay? Would you please just run?” and then she’s gone into the crowd.

  “This Lares who makes the passports,” the ghost says.

  “Yeah,” says Kern, glad that at least she’d cared a little.

  “Where does he live?”

  “Deep. The old levels.”

  “Easy to find?”

  “Almost impossible, if you don’t know the way.”

  “Ever take your little friend there?”

  “Once, to show her his game.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to run her down and choke her ass out?”

  “What?”

  “Kidding! Now let’s go see Lares. You’d better run.”

  21

  Someone

  Thales sits sweating in the hot sun on the patio over the hotel’s private beach and even behind his sunglasses the day is too bright. A container ship floats on the horizon among masses of clouds that could be mistaken for cities and closer to shore one of his brothers whoops from within the luminous green cavern of a cresting wave, which then collapses, burying him in foam, his surfboard shooting out to jag and bob on the water. The fences separating the hotel’s beach from the public one are topped with concertina wire, and even at this distance he can see the starving dogs roaming the sand speckled with filth and the vagrants huddled under ragged sheets of white plastic against the sun, and he reflects that if his family still had their money they’d be in a hotel good enough that this poverty would be invisible.

  The tables are packed claustrophobically close and he turns in annoyance when a waiter bumps his shoulder which is when he sees the woman coming onto the patio from the hotel. She looks worried as she scans the tables, like she’s painfully late to meet someone, and then he realizes that the assurance of her bearing has distracted him from her ragged hair, her deep sunburn, the clothes she might have been sleeping in for days, and then he sees her gaze settle on him.

  She starts pushing toward him through the press of tables and he half stands, wondering if he should retreat, but she’s already standing over him and about to speak but catches herself, looks amazed, says, “I know you. You’re the Brazilian prime minister’s son,” and with that everything is changed because he’s never seen her before in his life and what safety he has depends on his anonymity but she seems surprised more than hostile and he’s worried that the people around them will have overheard but they’re eating oysters, swilling prosecco, chattering away. Over her shoulder he sees two paunchy hotel guards coming at a trot, their uniforms of a noticeably better cut than the local cops’, and now they’re picking their way among the tables.

  “We need to talk,” she says, sounding urgent, almost desperate. “I followed you from the clinic. Our interests overlap.”

  “How’s that?” he says, wondering how she knew him and how he can get her to tell him and already convinced he’s missing some crucial piece of context.

  “We’re both victims,” she says, and he can tell it makes her angry but even so she delivers the line so precisely that he has a sense of her interior chill, and he notices that under the grime she’s about his mother’s age, or rather agelessness, though somehow unmaternal—she’s someone, not someone’s mom—so she must have had money, once, and a lot of it, and wonders what violence, addiction or bad luck brought her to this pass. “Was your family killed too?” he asks.

  Her face becomes still for a moment and then she says, “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. That’s the thing. I can’t remember anything. There was a drowning city and a friend I lost, and I don’t think I was ever really loved, and I don’t know how I got to Los Angeles.”

  He notices the scar on her forehead and guesses that she, too, has the implant, which means she could be suffering from the dementia of her implant’s decay, which could be a foretaste of his own future.

  As the guards arrive and ask her if she’s a guest in a way that makes it clear they know she’s not he takes money from his pocket and proffers it, saying, “Here—good luck,” but as the guards lift her to her feet her composure cracks for the first time and she swats the bills out of his hand and cries, “You’re not listening to me!”

  He’s weighing the risk of letting her stay against the chance he could get her to tell him how she knew he had the implant but it’s a nondecision because with the guards events have already acquired a momentum and the most he can offer her is a moment of respect before she’s trundled away so he meets her eyes and says, “I’m listening.”

  “How much do you remember?” she asks though it’s more like a challenge than a question, and then the guards have taken her by the elbows and are leading her away, the other guests barely seeming to register her passage.

  Half an hour later he’s still staring blankly at the sea. He can recall a few scenes from Brazil—the house in the forest, beating his irascible uncle at chess on his tenth birthday, the airtight security around the house in Leblon—but there’s nothing else from his life before Los Angeles.

  22

  Shapes Purely

  Gradations of white and shadow and masses of vapor comprise forms withou
t names as Irina’s dream iterates through her memories of clouds. The cirrus layer seen from the window of a plane over the Midwestern desert becomes the fog over Keflavík airport and now the thunderheads looming over the sweltering Singapore rooftops, and she struggles to articulate their textures and complexity, but vainly, for beyond the crude jargon of meteorology there are no words. In her frustration she remembers the clouds drawn on the wall of the glyphs down in the tunnel, which, she realizes, have a secret form, or not so secret, because they’re just letters, however stylized, spelling “LEdERER,” like a signature.

  She sits up in bed, still seeing the tunnel, not knowing where she is, but there’s the pattering of rain on the windows, water sluicing through gutters, the muted rush of traffic, and as she situates herself in the Doric she realizes that hotels have a smell, wool and furniture polish and faint burning dust. The blinds are closed so she turns on the lamp and across from her in the mirror is a bleary woman with damp, disordered hair, naked to the waist amid a tangled mass of blankets, her abs well-defined thanks to a tweaked metabolism, which is surely someone’s idea of pornography, and for a moment she wishes she knew whose, and how to find him.

  Her bag is out of reach but the room’s remote is on the bedside table so she turns on the TV, making the hotel room a cave full of light. She finds a search engine on the TV and queries on “Lederer graffiti,” and her intuition must have been right because the first result is from a site called ExArt, which bills itself as the comprehensive resource for guerrilla and street art, and the snippet reads, “Lederer, or LEdERER, is the nom de guerre of a West Coast graffiti artist (real name undisclosed) known for the manic detail of his images and for his alleged non-neurotypicality.”

  The second result is a documentary that opens with a shot of a man, presumably Lederer, Hispanic, perhaps forty, sitting with his back to a graffiti-covered wall. He seems oblivious to the presence of the camera, staring into space so intently that at first she thinks he’s drunk, then that he’s meditating. The graffiti behind him is a riot of intertwining botanical forms, denser than any actual forest. He looks rough, less artist than thug, and clouds must be his thing because there’s a stylized thunderhead tattooed on his shoulder.

  He says, “One morning and I was sitting by the window watching the traffic go by and everything just … it was like the meaning drained away right before my eyes. All that was left were shapes, shapes purely. I was afraid at first, but then I was just interested, because it was like I was seeing for the first time, like this was what had always been there.

  “I was married, then, and we had a new baby. We had a condo on a gated street in Dogpatch and a share in a car. Maybe it was a choice—my ex insisted it was—but if it was I’d already made it. She found me sitting there, just looking at the street, and tried to talk to me, and then she got scared and called an ambulance. It was only when the paramedic was shining a light into my eyes and enunciating that I’d probably had a stroke that I was able to tell them I was fine, and to go away.”

  Smash cut to a still image of a smiling woman with dark hair holding a baby—it could be a portrait of a young mother from any era since the invention of the camera.

  Lederer says, “She wanted me to see a neurologist, said I could die. Later she said that I was no kind of a man if I just abandoned them, and she was right, about that and about everything, but it didn’t matter, because I was already gone. My life had been my family, but after the stroke, or whatever, my road-to-Damascus moment, I was only interested in what I saw, and in drawing.

  “I don’t remember if I actually quit my job or just stopped showing up. I do remember that when I was still at home I drew over every inch of the bedroom walls while my wife was at work. I heard she had it painted over, later, because she was angry, which is a shame because now I guess it’d be worth something.

  “I’d been a tagger when I was a kid but I stopped in high school when I got serious about life. My tag was 1DEATH, one word, all caps. Sometime after I bailed I sat in an empty room writing 1DEATH in a drawing pad, over and over, but changing and rearranging letters, until it morphed into LEdERER”—he draws the letters in the air, and, in the film, his finger leaves a glowing trail—“and that felt right.”

  She turns on closed captioning and fast forwards. Doctors debate at speed whether he suffered a genuine vascular event, or just wanted an excuse to abandon his family and maybe an angle for marketing his art. Comparisons to Gauguin, Lucian Freud, Wei Tao, Abraxas. The manic enthusiasm of the critic who brought him to the art world’s notice. Lederer working in the waste spaces of San Francisco, his murals reminding her of the art of autistic savants, though less purely mimetic—they’re composed largely of faces, vegetation, the elements of buildings, and never a glyph in sight. In the film’s final scene Lederer is starting a new mural on a blank wall while complex cello music plays and subtitles announce that he hasn’t seen his ex-wife or daughter in seven years, then lists his recent sale prices from the galleries representing him in Vancouver, Manhattan and San Francisco.

  She opens the site of the Vancouver gallery and scrolls through Lederer’s paintings until she comes to his photographic prints, which surprises her, as photography doesn’t really seem like his medium. The first shows a city seen from the deck of a boat, maybe LA, but it’s hard to be sure since only the center of the image is in focus. The next shows the chaises longues on the pool deck of a washed-out white hotel that’s probably the newly renovated Chateau Marmont, and the next a pretty eurasian girl in panties and a T-shirt looking at the camera and putting on her lipstick as though in a mirror, and then Irina realizes that she can see flyspeck and tarnish, so there was a mirror, and she’s wondering about micro-cameras when it dawns on her that the girl is the camera, that this is a recording of her visual percept, that only the centers of the images are in high resolution because that’s how vision works, though it’s an easy thing to miss. She wonders if the girl has an implant—it’s hard to get that much detail uninvasively, at least outside a lab.

  The next photo shows gleaming multicolored spheres laid out geometrically in bins—it’s fruit in the hold of a ship, and she responds viscerally, recognizing the heat, the stench of the durian, the nausea of the roll, that the ship is down from Malaysia to work Singapore’s waters, because this is an image from her memory.

  She checks all the details, checks them again—there’s no question but that it’s hers. It’s not possible—her implant is secure to the point of eccentricity—but there it is. Shivering, she remembers how young she was, how she’d only been in Singapore a week, had felt the world was opening.

  She sits straight up in bed, clutching the duvet. Maybe it’s a hardware error. She runs the implant’s diagnostic program—wafts of cinnamon, leather, vodka, ash, flickers of the canariest of yellows, fathomless crystal blue, absolute black, then a sequence of pure tones without context—but all the tests are nominal.

  Unbelievable that there was a breach, but that it happened seems to be certain. There are, she realizes, practical issues—the security of her bank accounts and clients’ data, the irrefutable evidence of her sporadic contempt for the law and frequent breaches of contract—but for now she can only focus on the profundity of the violation and the fact that the inmost structures of her being have been dispersed out into the world.

  Something cracks in her and she throws the remote at the TV as hard as she can, really putting her shoulder into it, but it bounces off harmlessly so she turns on her wireless and blasts through the TV’s security and overloads its power supply which starts sparking like a firework; it’s a childish gesture, she thinks, as the flash of rage fades, but at least the hotel probably won’t know it was her, and now the abstract geometrics spasming across the TV screen are settling into a deep crystalline blue, the same as the color from her implant’s diagnostics, which somehow seems natural, as though her history pervaded everything, and the world were the palace of her memory.

  23

 
; Finish Up

  Lares’ room was about three hundred feet below the surface, which meant it had been there about five years.

  Dark, down in the tunnels, and always cool, no matter how hot it is outside, something about the physics. Kern counts the turns, scrambles down decrepit ladders by phone light—there are no markers, as the people who live here know the way and want their privacy. He refuses to think of the time he found a body here by touch. It’s important not to make a mistake, as Lares has a thing for booby traps, the more complex, the better. The street sounds are distant. It’s a kind of peace.

  The lightless narrow corridors all look the same, but when he thinks he’s at the right place he says, “It’s me, man. Open up,” into the dark. Waits. Lares’ disembodied, staticky voice: “Come on down. I unlocked the door.”

  How many times has he come here with whatever wallet, watch or phone Lares had assigned him to fetch. Sometimes it was second-story work, but more often it was just a mugging, which he always found exhilarating, which was troubling, because it seemed more like a bully’s feeling than his. There was a time when he came by to ask Lares about his more difficult reading—the books on Zen, especially, often made no sense—for Lares had read everything, and liked to hold forth; they’ve never been friends, exactly, but Lares seemed to accept him, as he did almost no one else, perhaps seeing in Kern’s single-mindedness a mirror of his own. Lately, though, Lares has been getting more remote, as though slipping ever farther out of humanity’s orbit, and Kern reminds himself not to presume.

  Five turns later he’s in Lares’ room, dark but for the light of all the monitors. From a corner comes the tapping of keys; eyes adjusting, he sees Lares there, engrossed in his laptop, at work on his game, like always, his eyes reflecting the code scrolling by.