Void Star

by Zachary Mason

“I’m not sure. Styrszinski is off in the Caucasus, last I heard, making a survey of all the animals and plants, but it’s been years since he answered email.” She thought of the old biologist, his interminable digressive monologues on natural history, while Constantin wished he’d met him, studied harder, been someone else. “There was that boy in Brazil, the prime minister’s son, but I understand the family’s been in lockdown since his father was assassinated. There’s Stasi, that German performance artist who blew his trust fund getting the implant even though he was in perfect health—he’s still alive, but he’s been stuck in the same endlessly branching run-on sentence for the last seven years. I like to think that, on some level, he’s very happy.” Strange, they both thought, how one needed to talk even when one’s thoughts were open.

  “There are things I need you to know,” he said, wanting to linger on in her, as the world darkened, but only in his eyes. He remembered a house on the cliffs in the Dodecanese, reachable by boat when the wind was calm, not at all when it was blowing. The house was old and his mother had renovated endlessly while he hid in the shadows of its courtyard and slept in its garden in the sun. He remembered sitting on the edge of a dam his father built, daydreaming about flying over the precipitous slope of stained white concrete. He remembered the bank of a frozen river in what Irina thought was Hyde Park in winter, waiting in the cold till the woman came, how he hadn’t cared how little cover the brush afforded, the heat of her skin, how cold the snow. She left first, telling him to wait lest someone see, and he sat there studying the impression her body had left behind. Much later, after their final, bitter parting, he had taken to walking through the park past her window, whenever he was in London, and looking at the light there, or its absence, but he never saw her again, and now he never would. He remembered telling his father that his old injuries were worsening, how the old man had stood up behind his desk, face turning red as he lifted a finger like a pompous orator and swore to move the course of scientific history through sheer force of will. At least you were loved, Irina thought, though the memories, it seemed, could almost be anyone’s, as though the major images of a life were dealt randomly from a fixed deck of cards. He remembered skiing over new powder down a mountain’s sheer flank, rapt in the ancient game with gravity and snow, how he desired always to be on that mountain, any mountain, every mountain in the world.

  His eyes had closed, and his breathing was shallow. He thought of an old woman closing his fingers over the pomegranate seeds staining his palm, perhaps his grandmother, but by then he was thinking in Greek, and she tried not to see the monitor that showed his blood oxygen falling. He clung to her hand, still wanting to live, regretting the pill that would have given him another hour, which, on her arrival, he had put aside because he hadn’t wanted to keep her.

  His words in her mind. Tell me stories. Give me a part of you. Something to take with me. Don’t let me be alone.

  She gave him her summer in Singapore, the liberty and solitude, the waves’ reverberation in the emptying downtown. She gave him the day she’d opened her first Swiss bank account, how adult she’d felt when she signed the papers. She gave him the cold in the cheap hotel on the outskirts of Boston, how she had paid for it because her lover, Philip, her first, had had no money at all. How thin he’d been, her fingers counting his ribs under his frayed, worn shirt. His body was like a child’s, though she hadn’t seen it at the time. They’d held each other under the one thin duvet as he whispered on and on about what he’d noticed and his ambitions and then something shifted in him and his eloquence, which she valued, had vanished, supplanted by a need that had surprised her, and, accepting it, she’d felt oddly maternal as she’d guided him in.

  By then Constantin’s breathing had become chains of gasps, and his other memory accumulated little more than his nausea and pain and the clarity of her sensorium. She cast about for some last, great thing to give him at the end and settled on her night on the deck of a tramp steamer in the equatorial Pacific. She’d kept waking and drifting off again, eager to see the space elevator, and finally there it was, like a column of darkness, at least at the base, a thin vertical absence of stars. Her father had told her it was mankind’s great ambition to build a tower that pierced the sky, an elevator into low orbit that would link the terrestrial and sidereal spheres, a phrase she is almost sure of—it sounds like him—though the memory has a vagueness, like all her memories from before the implant, and she half suspects she made it up. And they’d almost done it, he’d said, though the tower, built, had been abandoned, victim of the deflating economy and spectacular failures of engineering. It had never borne a single payload into space, a scandal in its day, but all that had been long ago, decades before her birth, and for her the tower had only ever been the most elegiac of ruins.

  Constantin’s eyes moved randomly behind his lids and he thought he was dreaming her and her grief felt unmanageable but sharing her story let her focus on him. The steamer had reached the atoll at dawn, the tower red as blood in the new day’s light, tapering inward as it rose into the sky, its shadow stretching to the limits of the west. Though the sun had scarcely cleared the ocean, heat shimmered over the jungle that covered the atoll; once there had been a city there, the unimaginatively named Base Camp, its rotting structures now become steep-sided green hills. Titanic buttresses rose around the tower’s base, the clean lines of their geometry blurred with overgrowth, and she found them thrilling, like the monuments of a lost civilization, which, she supposed, they almost were.

  Gulls rose in cacophonous masses as she stepped onto the reeking, guano-caked pier. She had an old but carefully serviced Colt revolver in her pocket—she didn’t like guns, but it seemed necessary to have it if she was going to travel that far beyond the pale of the law. She sat on a rusting bollard, clutching her serious technical expeditionary backpack and dangling her feet over the water as she watched the ship sail away.

  She wasn’t the first to visit. Fifteen years ago an Italian hippie had come and explored and written a guidebook that she’d found buried on his long forgotten blog. With a crudely machine-translated English version on her phone, she’d picked her way over the wide, low valleys that had once been thoroughfares. As she got closer to the tower it was occluded by the buttresses but she soon found her way to the ascending spiral of the ramp around the base. Giorgio’s notes assured her it was sound, made to support the heaviest construction equipment, unlikely to collapse even after a thousand years. It was a while before she realized that what she’d taken for cracks in the buttresses were in fact inscriptions in many languages, perhaps all languages, and every one some version of “I am the first stone in the road to the stars.”

  The bottom of the ramp was covered with graffiti but as she climbed the graffiti became sparser. The ramp was made of something very hard and probably lighter than it looked, one of those replacements for concrete that hadn’t quite worked out. Here and there green shoots grew in tiny cracks, the species of the plants changing as she ascended, and she’d reflected that all the seeds must have been carried by the wind.

  She’d meant to study the elevator’s architecture, as long as she was on it, but she found she just wanted to keep climbing. Her legs were soon aching, and, confronted with the blue gulf of space, she could scarcely bring herself to approach the ramp’s edge, but still she climbed, infused with a sense of the most radiant purpose, for the tower was the symbol of all that was forever out of reach, and at night, in her bedroll, the tower’s promise and the thought of its apex and the glittering light of the stars were almost more than she could bear, but neither intense contemplation nor orgasm nor her understanding of the physics nor the exact record of the stars’ shimmerings helped at all, and the strain was such that she’d thought she’d come apart, lying there high above the world, though of course all that had happened was that she’d fallen asleep, and then she noticed that Constantin’s blood oxygen had settled at zero, and that his breathing had stopped. She looked into his other
memory, the last eleven years of his life’s experience fixed forever in deep strata of data, immobile now, and somehow cold. Of course, she thought, I should have known, this is what death is, this stillness in memory.

  25

  Just Leaving the Station

  Kern is in a tunnel about ten minutes from Lares’ room and there’s a little light filtering down from high above and it seems to brighten and darken with his heartbeat, though he feels perfectly calm, and oddly detached from his body.

  “Watch your breathing,” says the ghost. “Easy. Long exhalation. There you go. You can handle it. Your heart is a soldier’s, and you’ve seen worse than this.”

  “Where now?” His voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, like it might be someone else’s.

  “The subway, to the airport. It’s way past time.”

  “Won’t it make me visible?”

  “It won’t matter, if you can make it to the station. Transportation infrastructure is highly secured. It’s suicide to try a hit in an airport.”

  * * *

  The train’s doors sigh shut, sealing them in. A raw edge of panic as its engines heave to life, but now there’s nowhere to go. Waft of chewing gum, motor oil, damp humanity, and then, as the train accelerates, the shrill harmonics of metal under strain. He remembers Lares saying that a train is like time, or history, irresistible in its momentum, its future unseen but coming on fast, and unavoidably.

  He pretends to ignore the other passengers, who look rich, or at least no poorer than the favela’s better-heeled bohemians. Across from him is a couple, older, like someone’s parents but good-looking, speaking Spanish over the train’s roar and squeal. In a dry tone the man says, “So, really, you can see how very useful it all was,” and the woman—dark haired with small, freckled features—laughs, showing her gums, and Kern, helplessly, remembers a dark-haired woman sitting him down on a stool, working over his scalp with probing fingers, hunting down lice as the light faded in the window, the smell of something cooking. He remembers the house of white stone, the heat on white sand and the sharpness of her fear when she heard the wasp whine that he realizes, now, could only have been aerial drones, invisibly high overhead. He’s read that where the breath goes, the body follows, so he inhales, willing away the tension in his back, the heat around his eyes. There must have been some moment of final parting, but it’s gone, and all he remembers of the aftermath is walking north through the desert in the company of weary strangers, how the hard-faced, sunburned coyotes had cursed him, told him to go where he was wanted and tried to run him off, but it was better to be cursed than to have no place at all, and sometimes, after dark, the women gave him water. At night he’d gone off by himself, always half-awake, listening, lest the others go away. Near the border, the night sky was full of drones, their shadows gliding over the bright constellations as they fought their duels in the upper air, proxies in a war he’d never heard of. Minutes of stillness punctuated by the rapid flares of missiles firing like flurries of shooting stars, then detonations’ flashes illuminating the ragged contrails, and a few seconds later shock waves rumbling over the desert.

  The train banks, centripetal force pushing him back into his seat, and now the woman across the aisle looks like no one, a stranger. He looks out the window—black, dust-furred infrastructure, leftover space, occasional flashes of graffiti passing too quickly to be attributed. A hint of salt on the air, and he thinks of the enormous pumps that keep the tunnels from flooding. The wheels clatter on the track, and all the other passengers seem to be asleep, or staring blankly into space, serenely confident the train will take them where they need to go. The woman laughs again; Kern closes his eyes, thinks that he must be in the present, that the present is gone once the thought has formed, that the present is a train that’s just leaving the station.

  26

  Nonexistent Prisons

  Just the engine’s roar, the cone of light juddering over the black road before him, the dust in the light. Accelerator floored, the engine redlining, but despite the speed Thales feels like he’s floating, like nothing is changing or ever will till the car rounds a bend and there below him, all at once, the city’s sweep, its highways’ lights. For a moment he knows he’s dreaming but it slips away as his gaze settles on the spires of downtown where a gap among the towers implies some wide public square, the kind where freezing winds rush unimpeded over the treeless fields and the snow crunches underfoot as he makes his way toward the ice-choked creek to wait for a woman he doubts will ever really come, and now the bitter cold and the sepia stains on the Palladian facades tell him this isn’t Los Angeles at all but some other, more ancient city. In fact the buildings are rotting, reverting to geology under their furs of vegetation, and over these ruins rises a tower, black even in the dawn’s light, and his heart rises as his gaze follows it up to where its heights are lost in the celestial blue of morning, and the answers he needs are at its apex, if only he can reach it, and he’ll hunt it down the nights, and he’ll hunt it down the years, but he keeps losing his way among the cul-de-sacs and the endless winding streets, and it’s not long until he realizes he’s in the city’s derelict periphery, and hasn’t seen the tower in a long time, for the city is many cities, concentric and innumerable, and he’s forever lost the core.

  No, he thinks, as he hastens past the shattered husks of strip malls and favelas like concrete cancers rising into the air, for there must be a way, as there’s always a way, and now he feels like a bird of prey, detached and intent, like pure perspective circling over the city, its thousands of square miles glittering vacantly in the sun, vast and unmeaning, but then he finds something in that ocean of emptiness, locks on, is falling …

  It’s pure structure, what he’s found, and somehow mathematical, but he finds he can’t articulate it, not even a little, and it’s like the feeling of watching waves breaking, before the implant, a riot of form of which nothing can be said, and it’s terrifying, because his inarticulacy could be the effect of his injuries, which would mean he’s falling apart, so he compels himself to focus, and manages to tell himself that what he’s found is like a map, one showing what’s under the surface of things, and now his steps are echoing coldly in a windowless concrete corridor, some nameless liminal unfinished space, and he comes to an alcove lit by a flickering bulb in a dusty cage where EXIT TO CENTRAL is stenciled on a steel door in black letters. No handle, and there’s a screen by the door but it doesn’t wake. He presses his ear to the door, hears what could be static or maybe the sea. He steps back out into the corridor which branches and rebranches again and he’s wondering where he’s going when he finds another alcove with another door, this one marked SERVICE ACCESS and it opens at his touch …

  The dream changes abruptly and he wonders if his implant is working again, because there in his mind is an expanse of frozen time, the memories of a young woman in a hotel room with her boyfriend, and he sees their interval all at once like a four-dimensional solid—there’s the stark winter light, how it changes by the second, the awkwardness of their lovemaking, how their pulses are visible in their flesh, the duvet changing shape under the incidental stresses, and he’s unmoved by their intimacy except in that it seems fitting that life should strive to chain forward through time. There are other spans of static memory and, there, a point of motion, a vortex drawing innumerable shards and splinters of memory and fitting them together like the pieces of a mosaic, and as he looks into its churning core there’s a flash impression of misery and determination and the streets of Los Angeles slipping past behind a town car’s windows. Now he sees another vortex (flash of verdant, manicured garden, its walls several stories high, security drones tracing lazy arcs in the air over the fountains) and then still another, which makes him flash on frozen time and a view of vortices and with a sense of rising through levels he gasps, sits up, is awake.

  He’s sitting on the floor of an elevator in the St. Mark. Floors tick by—the elevator is ascending toward the penthous
e, where his family has their suite. He’s not sure how he got here—did he have a syncope while he was trying to go home? The dream’s unease is still with him, and his fear of finding proof of his decline. “Major cranial ablation” had been the surgeon’s memorable turn of phrase. He thinks of the disturbed woman who’d accosted him, how she’d been radiant with unhappiness, and wonders how she wound up living on her own, apparently abandoned by her family; at least this hasn’t happened to him—he’ll find his mother, tell her what’s happening, see if she knows what to do.

  The elevator stops, opens onto the verdure of the walled rooftop garden, its smell of its wet moss and earth. It’s like an opulent, manicured jungle. The path to their suite winds off under the branches.

  The scanner pulses green under his palm and the front door opens onto a clutter of his brothers’ suitcases, scattered clothes, a sand-encrusted surfboard, but no one seems to be home. In the hall before his mother’s room are architectural drawings of ancient buildings and Piranesi’s studies of nonexistent prisons, and though her door is closed there are faint sounds within that could be voices—she’s probably lying in bed with the blinds drawn, listening to books. “Mom?” he calls, sotto voce, suddenly reluctant to violate the stillness. “It’s me. Can I come in?”

  No response. Perhaps she’s asleep. He knocks—still nothing. Maybe he should let her sleep but he knocks again, and then louder, and it occurs to him that he has yet to see the inside of her room—in fact he doesn’t think he’s seen her since his collapse. “Mom?” he says again, trying the doorknob—locked, so she must be within. “I think someone recognized me. I think we’re in trouble.” He smacks the door with the ham of his fist which is rude but still there’s no response so she’s either asleep or deliberately ignoring him. Frustration overcoming manners, he kicks the door, then kicks it harder, then harder still. The hotel’s interior doors are thin, built more for privacy than security, and he’s winding up for the kick that will break it down when the door swings gently open.