They push, step by step, deeper into the State and the animal shadows them for a while and then disappears. The plain gives way to patchy, untended fields that slope gently down into a valley. They pass people dressed in yellow tending an apple orchard and a building with a spire looming behind them topped off with something carved out of metal, a slashing symbol unknown to either Evie or Farris. They continue on, warming in the afternoon sun, sometimes Evie leading, sometimes Farris. They walk in silence mostly, their strides in sync for minutes at a time.
Until the drones come, appearing in the form of something resembling hawks, complete with feathers, soaring high and screechless. Evie has a memory—as faint as the undercoating of paint—of throwing pebbles at large birds like that. Not quite: her handing Kate small stones and she hauling off and whipping them at the sky not to hit them but to make them dive as if at insects. They had gotten the idea from watching bats at dusk above the open field drop and rise in sharp, impossible rhythms. Just trying to pick one out and follow it was enough to set your eyes in a sort of waking REM.
There are two of them, then three, against the gray afternoon sky. Those slow, looping circles in the air that were so familiar.
“Are they ours?” Farris asks, still watching the sky.
Evie, standing behind him, considers, yet again, the star-shaped symbol scarred onto the back of Farris’s neck. To their east is an enormous grasslands, stretching to the far horizon. To their west is much the same, with pale mountains rising in the distance. They stand upon something like a farm-to-market road, dipping and rising ahead of them and then curving off into the unseeable distance.
“The one on the left is, maybe,” Evie says. It’s meant as a joke; the drones are in continual motion, continually exchanging places in the sky. There is no left or right drone. It’s a test, of sorts, to see if Farris will smile.
He doesn’t.
*
After two hours of walking at a good clip without stopping, everything looks the same. Which is to say, everything looks just slightly different, somehow. Repetition and difference. Wasn’t that how one of the theorists Evie studied under characterized our present age? Was it repetition with difference, or and difference? Also: Empty time. In the dry air of that classroom in the cool basement library Evie had fallen in love with the translated words of philosopher D., even though later that semester, drunk at the Brickhouse on a cold winter night, she would learn from the philosophy students that no one in philosophy considered D. a real philosopher. What is he then? Evie asked. An aphorist, they said, made into a philosopher by English departments.
*
That night, as Farris and Evie sleep near the side of the road beneath one of the shapeless thorn apple trees that had begun to appear, Evie listens as Farris talks in his sleep. Some of the words are familiar:
State…
Instructions…
Firestorm…
Jinxed…
While others seem to be two words put together into something familiar:
Out-push…
Day-gold-by…
Open-waste…
And yet others are alien to Evie:
Cuitlaxcolli…
*
In the morning they keep walking. The State stretches on and on, encompassing its own useless, undulating fields. Day after day, toward the chaos and catastrophe of the well. Evie’s repair kit with its small metal objects wrapped individually in oiled cloths weighs heavily on her back in a small leather knapsack. On the third day the grass fields change to barren, dusty land, and then back to grass.
The lack of objects on the horizon intrigues and then spooks Evie, who recalls the plane of immanence from her useless theory-training, the horizontal moment of thought and all that. She understands that in order to repair the well she will have to destroy it. That was prerequisite for the emergence of any new System. She will need to get to the root of the infection. In this phase of the State’s long collapse, to be an engineer, as she is, means to be a destroyer, not a designer, of objects. But in order to destroy them properly one has to know how they were built in the first place.
On the fifth day, they arrive at a quarry, the first sign that they are nearing the well. Evie knows that some sections have been quarried hundreds of kilometers from where it was built, so the well might still be days ahead. The bitter smell of limestone fills the air and Evie can’t help thinking of the smell of blood from the cut-throated animal. Large ruts in the earth indicating the direction the limestone had been transported run due north, towards the well. Looking down into the quarry she sees that at the bottom, perched on a large rock in the middle of a pool of turquoise water, there are several of the drones they had seen in the sky earlier. Again, Evie thinks of Kate and her pebble throwing, and of how, on the night before she disappeared, home from university for the summer, her hair shorter than Evie had ever seen it before, they had gone to the zoo, and how in the enormous walk-in aviary, so full of sound, she first suggested that some of the birds weren’t real at all.
*
The quarry a few hours behind them, Evie and Farris rest at the side of the road.
“We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, “from the animal.”
“Why?”
“As a reminder. Maybe a tusk.”
“There were no tusks.”
“I should have said ‘the.’ There was only one tusk. Someone or something else must have taken the other.”
This was the most Farris has said since the beginning of the journey.
“Or the tail,” Farris continues. “Tusk or tail.”
“What tail? There wasn’t any tail.”
Farris gives Evie a look that tells her to stop or to be careful, but Evie keeps talking.
“We looked at the same animal, Farris, dead on the road. There were no tusks. There was no tail.”
“Perhaps you failed to see them because of the blood.”
“I saw what you saw. The same thing.”
“Well. We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, and they are back where they began.
*
Before nightfall they pass another larger quarry. The landscape is more rugged now, with outcroppings of mossy rocks and scattered pine trees. By the light of the campfire, Evie studies the back of her left hand, looking for movement in the design. Her thoughts drift ahead to the well, not as a structure but as an event, an event that the State wants her to contain, as if meaning could ever be anything other than deferred, and in this deferral not nothingness but the revelation of absolute absence. A structurally unreadable sign, that’s what the well had become, and yet she was to engineer its repair, as if a breach that great could be repaired. The question was: why has the State sent her on a mission to repair a well that, they must know, is beyond repair?
During the night, beneath the stars, the sky full of silent drones, more than she could possibly imagine, Evie dreams of letters, and then those letters in the shape of a word: Cuitlaxcolli.
The next day, under the bright hot sun, they arrive at a false well, prior to the well itself. Quarried and built around the same time as the original well, this one’s purposes remained obscure. Its stone rim rises impressively from the landscape: its clean limestone lines that make an enormous circle, its sheer whiteness in the sun, the way it seems somehow to divide nature from itself.
As they approach, the well wall looms higher than it appears possible, as if it has grown as they have come nearer. At least ten meters high and stretching enormous distances as it curves around to meet itself again. On the other side of the curving wall, presumably, the well itself, as deep as the imagination would allow. As they enter its cool shadow it appears that it has emerged out of the earth rather than being built upon it. A flock of drones passes silently overhead, their shadows racing across the plain toward Evie and Farris and then disappearing into the well wall’s shadow.
After half a day’s westerly walk parallel to the false well, they reach the end and head
north again, the well receding in the distance. Soon, the plain gives way to outcroppings of trees and they stop at a good-sized lake where they gather water, catch fish, and rest. And then north again into a vast pine forest that holds the cool air and seems untouched by the will of the State. For most of the time Evie walks in front and on the straight parts Farris follows in sync, step for step, so that it sounds to Evie as if she is walking alone. In these long stretches she wonders what the differences are, really, between the false well and the real well they are headed toward. At certain points the forest is so thick with trees that she feels it difficult to generate any thought at all, and so she walks without thinking, her legs mechanically carrying her forward. Without knowing how it happened her hands have become sticky with pine sap.
They reverse positions: now Evie follows Farris. The forest stretches on and on as if only to create the very conditions of its own existence. Evie imagines for a while that the forest is the well. As a child she had heard that the well had been stuffed with bodies of the State’s enemies, so that it was really a graveyard. A mass grave. And other stories that it wasn’t built by the State at all, but by the kingdom or whatever it was that the State had conquered hundreds of years ago. And others yet that it wasn’t a well even but something natural, something of nature itself. The well appeared and disappeared from history books. Often it was spoken of, and then suddenly it was not. It appeared on stamps and then those stamps were confiscated, along with the envelopes they were affixed to. A story made the rounds that those without limbs had had them forcibly removed to eradicate the symbols of the well that had been tattooed upon them. Then just as suddenly the well was heralded on all the State’s banners. The well became a natural resource and then, the next week, a toxic waste site. A documentary about the well’s early existence was shown on television and the following night the same documentary was re-advertised as a feature film masquerading as a documentary.
It’s safe to say that people of Evie’s generation were raised to have a schizophrenic relationship with the well, at once desiring and detesting it, acknowledging its existence and then disavowing it, and on and on. As darkness seeps into the pine forest Evie thinks about this, and then suddenly realizes that Farris is gone. Evie stops, calls out his name. It’s the first time she has spoken all day and the sound of her own voice startles her.
“Farris,” she calls out, and the name just hangs there in the air for a moment and then disappears, along with Farris himself.
Suddenly Evie feels stupid standing alone in the forest. So she keeps walking, alone, until it’s too dark to continue.
And then she makes her camp for the night.
*
As she sleeps in the dark, Evie cannot have known that the black sky has filled with silent drones so completely autonomous that even to their ground controllers their purpose is obscure, or that the forest ferns produce haploid spores that travel impossible distances, or that her lost sister Kate is sleeping also on some other patch of the earth, or that she has not yet even arrived at the deepest part of the forest, or that the animals that have followed her and Farris earlier are still nearby and that they aren’t animals at all but, like the drones, machines in the guise of animals, created by the State for the simple reason that they could be created and once created set loose to explore, as if the State, having already discovered and mapped itself, created these things to experience itself anew, not through the eyes of humans but machines, and not to collect information but to forget information so that it could be discovered again as if for the first time, or that one theory of the well—being debated at this very moment by functionaries of the State—was that the well existed only insofar as it receded from view, a perpetually vanishing vanishing point, and that Evie’s useless, carefully tended tools are already antiques aged beyond use and that she has been on this journey for a very, very long time, not days but months. Or years.
*
In the morning she continues, without Farris, passing through the thickest part of the forest and then out into an expanse of grasslands that give way to a village whose flags bear woven symbols that Evie has not seen before. Three men with wooden rifles spot her on the outskirts and follow her casually as she takes the road that skirts the town. They don’t threaten her. She imagines that, if she had wanted to, they would allow her to enter the village.
It’s not that she misses Farris—what is there to miss?—but rather that she misses the idea of Farris’s presence, as quiet and unobtrusive and even menacing as it was. As Evie leaves the village, the road straightens out and after a few miles takes her by another lime quarry, larger than the previous one, an impossibly sharp-angled cube subtracted from the earth, a pool of bright, glass-flat turquoise water at the bottom. She stands at the edge, peering in, and knows that the well is not far off, and that the stone from this quarry had been used to build it. Three very large birds circle silently in the sky above her, and she senses she’s being watched in a way she hasn’t felt before.
If it’s true that the drones have evolved somehow as self-sustaining machines detached from the State itself, then why did the State allow them to exist? What data could they possibly be gathering and transmitting, and to whom or what? Evie suddenly feels the urge to shoot one down, to watch it with the eyes of an insurgent spiral into the turquoise water far below. Better yet to have it fall at her feet so that she could, with her bare hands, determine once and for all what it was made of, where evolution had taken it. What would it feel like to grab hold of the neck of one of those things and squeeze until the lights or cameras or whatever its eyes were made of went out? Did it store the data it collected or just transmit it raw and unfiltered to the nearest antenna tower? Could it fly alone or did it need the others (they always appeared in flocks) to navigate?
That night, Evie sleeps near the edge of the quarry not hoping to sleepwalk over the edge into the pit but not hoping not to either as the night sky fills again with drones flocking and scattering in silence and shitting whatever it is that machines shit, the exhaust not of animals but of engines, engines of thought and malice now detached from their makers and flying amok in the sky above the land of the State upon which Evie sleeps, swooping down close to her in the night, dragging their birdlike feet across the top of the tall prairie grass, their machine thoughts unformed and digitally rigid but beginning to expand beyond the binary into something sentient in an animal sort of way.
Evie sleeps. The earth spins. The State expands and contracts in the night like a breathing creature. And the well arranges itself in anticipation of her arrival.
In the pale morning light, Evie has a beautiful thought, not a memory exactly, but a thought built on a memory, of Kate, showing her the chipped and scarred teak box where she kept her cigarettes lined up neatly like the dead wrapped tightly in white muslin, her fingertips nicotine-stained or else just faintly yellow in the sunlight, the thought beautiful not because it was beautiful but simply because it refused to turn itself into a narrative as so many of her thoughts did, and that was the power of Kate before she disappeared and, to her great surprise and happiness, even now after she was gone: her absolute refusal to become a part of anyone’s story. Kate had managed to detour almost any conversation into what Evie, in the months before Kate disappeared, would think of as a sort of metaphysical swampland, where first you agreed to this, and then to that, and then also conceded x, y, and z, and before you knew it you were laughing with her about the absurdity of, say, believing that the sun exists.
If this were one of those horror movies where the demon or spirit was always off screen then Kate would remain—as she is now—out of sight and off the page. Not that she’s demonic and not that Evie’s thoughts tend, of late, to be spectral, or that gathering herself to sleep less than one statute mile away from the well doesn’t make her miss Kate even more, because what would she say about this whole mess Evie was in other than to divert it to some other level, deeper or higher, what did it matter as long as i
t was diverted in the endless way that flocks of tree swallows move in assembling and disassembling pixels across the sky. Kate’s cigarettes, the closest she ever came to real rebellion, the way she shut her eyes when Evie lit one for her, leaning in close to her, some secret sisterly information shared between them of the sort that would take years to decode. The way she lit her cigarette off hers, Evie before she became Evie, and before the missed call that would result in Kate’s disappearance from the known places of this world.
A dead world. Of course they had both fantasized about it, though not in a post-apocalyptic way. Their thoughts, when they ran together as in the moment with the shared cigarettes on the roof of Kate’s flat, conjured a world devoid of the objects that gave rise to artifacts and then to meaning. How to think without thinking, and would a dead planet make such a thing possible? Back then the State had just deployed the first generation of drones-as-birds, and they hadn’t figured out how to land them in trees yet, and the whole thing was comical, really, to watch them try to perch on a branch only to end up tangled and dying there, depowered, until one of the freelance retrieval units came to bag them and return them at the depot. It was Kate who first spoke about how the drones might very well be the first step in the direction of lifelessness. The denaturing of nature, its living creatures replaced one by one by dead things, like Evie’s crablike ribcage and its preposterous sternum self-coding in symmetrical offshoots.
In the meantime of Evie’s memory Kate flicked her smoked-down cig off the roof and leaned back and sighed and Evie reached over (and this was years ago and miles of unstrung human thought away from where Evie was now, near the real well) and picked up her fallen blue barrette which she held in the palm of her hand for her like a live, trembling cricket, the smallness of its heart beating against her skin. She closed the cigarette box then opened it again and they commenced with the same cig-lighting ritual and she banished the thought that between the moments of the closing and opening of the box the cigarettes they had just smoked replaced themselves (as if through magic) and if Kate noticed this too she didn’t let on in the least but simply let Evie light hers off of her own precisely as she had minutes earlier and that’s when Kate asked her again, this time in a way she could understand, about a dead world, something along the lines of are we on a dead world with living things or a living world with dead things? and then laughed as if to withdraw her question before Evie could take it seriously, which was her way, Kate’s.
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Page 12