The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  “Okay.”

  He got up and left the room. She followed him to the porch. The dog was still moping around on the sidewalk with his piece of yellow rope. He lifted his head hopefully when they appeared.

  “Go home,” Brian said.

  The dog stared at him, tongue lolling.

  “Maybe there’s nobody at home,” Olivia said.

  “Nobody alive, you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Buster just likes to follow people and hope they’ll play with him. Everything isn’t a tragedy even when everything could be.”

  “Buster?” Olivia said. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

  “Sure. Buster lives a block over.”

  Brian leaned on the porch rail and dug the heel of his hand into the small of his back. Olivia knew she was supposed to touch him, but held back and hated herself for it. It was coming, the terrible thing she had to do.

  “Is it real?” Brian said.

  Olivia didn’t reply.

  He turned. “Is it really real? The goddamn probability machine.”

  “Brian, I think I can still fix everything. I’m strong enough now to try.” It was true. The post-halo headache had all but vanished. She knew she could use the link again whenever she was ready. She could have done it sooner, maybe back in Clewson.

  Brian smiled sadly and shook his head.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nobody can fix everything, Liv. All us grown-ups know that.”

  “Then I’m not a grown-up.” She winced inwardly as soon as the words passed her lips.

  Brian said, “I love you, you know.”

  “I love you, too.” Olivia’s words sounded perfunctory, but she didn’t feel that way. She did love Brian. Why couldn’t she say it with conviction, even now?

  “I know you do,” he said. “I’m going to go up and see my mom now.”

  “I don’t think your dad wants you to.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  Brian hugged her. Olivia’s arms hung at her sides. “Bri.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll be right back.”

  He walked into the house, and Olivia stood there. Buster shook his yellow rope at her.

  “Go home,” Olivia said more harshly than she intended. The dog stared at her.

  Olivia went back into the house, where she did not want to go. She walked around the empty rooms that somehow didn’t feel empty. She remembered her own family home outside Seattle. In the long-lost days before her mother died, Olivia had never felt alone, not even when she was by herself. Later, she felt alone all the time, right up to this very minute.

  She grimaced, a stab of loneliness plunging deeper than usual. Her own father had been born in New Jersey and moved to Washington State before she was born. Olivia’s grandparents on his side of the family had both died before Olivia had grown old enough to be aware of them, except as the senders of spectacularly uninspiring Christmas gifts. Breast cancer got her grandmother, just as it later got Olivia’s own mother. Her grandfather died a few years later, of a bad, or maybe broken, heart. Although Olivia never let herself romanticize that stuff. Hearts didn’t break from grief; they failed because the grieving (usually) man fails to take care of his health once his wife is gone. That’s what she told herself.

  Rohana, of course, now lived in Jaipur.

  If Jaipur still existed. And at that moment, in a rush of pessimism, Olivia was certain that it didn’t, was certain Rohana was gone. She tried to push the thought out of her head. But it stuck like a poisonous thorn. If Rohana was gone, it was the end of repair attempts.

  Brian came down the stairs looking like he weighed two hundred pounds more than he had when he went up.

  “Mom’s got it.”

  There was no question what “it” was.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Dad looked up when I opened the door, but he didn’t say anything. He’s lying on the bed next to her.”

  Olivia wanted to say she could fix it, or she wanted to be someplace else, anywhere else—even back in the Disaster, when the Disaster seemed contained in another part of the world. All that was a lie, though, a lie she’d told herself.

  “My parents didn’t ask for this,” Brian said.

  “Of course not.”

  “But I went into the Old City on purpose. You told me not to come, but I did. I’m an adult and I made a choice.”

  “Brian, please don’t.”

  “In real life you don’t get do-overs.”

  Olivia couldn’t speak.

  “In real life you take chances, solve your own problems, or fail to solve them. It’s not fair to make other people pay for your own mistakes. You agree?”

  “Brian.” Her voice trembled. “Quit it. You’re too young to lecture me about life.”

  “I’m not talking about your mistake,” he said, ignoring her. “Look, I’m not sure I believe in the probability machine. But if it’s real, and it all happened the way you say it did, then it’s not your fault. You didn’t know what you were doing. You just wanted me to live. That’s natural. I’m talking about my mistake.”

  “Goddamn it, Bri, I told you not to come with me that day. I told you.”

  He stepped closer. “Liv, you see that I can’t let everybody else pay for my mistake. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Getting involved with me in the first place was a mistake.”

  He moved closer and put his hands on her shoulders. “That’s just you feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s okay. I get it.”

  “You can be pretty smug.” She didn’t mean it . . . or maybe she did a little.

  “You’re right. I’m working on it.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew four or five dried jai ba leaves. “I filched these a couple of nights ago on the road, when Alvaro was sleeping.”

  A trapdoor opened under Olivia’s feet, but like a cartoon character she didn’t have the sense to fall through it yet.

  “Come on,” Brian said. “Don’t make me responsible for all this.”

  * * *

  Brian’s parents had converted his old bedroom into a combination study/guest room. It was a sunny space with friendly blue walls, a white pine desk, and a matching bed and dresser. It wasn’t a memorial room, the way some parents treat a kid’s bedroom after he’s grown up and moved away, with mementos and pictures everywhere. Olivia pulled the shade, took her shoes off, and sat on the bed. Brian handed her the jai ba leaves. She looked up at him. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Olivia said.

  “You’re the one who used to tell me life wasn’t fair.”

  “Bri, there has to be another way.”

  “There isn’t. You know there isn’t. You already tried the other ways, and they all made things worse.” His fingertips brushed her cheek. “I love you.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “That’s not the traditional response. I’m going downstairs now, so you can concentrate.”

  Olivia blinked away tears, but more replaced them. She couldn’t bring herself to hold him one last time. Reaching for him would only validate the reality she rejected. It was like being paralyzed. What was the point, anyway? What was the point of trying to hold on to something you knew was going to disappear?

  “I’m a coward,” she said.

  “Who isn’t? Hey, don’t sweat it. There’s probably no probability machine anyway.”

  She watched him go out the door, turn, nod at her, and pull the door shut.

  Olivia wiped her eyes roughly. She put the leaves in her mouth and began to grind them between her molars, releasing the bitter taste. She lay back, trying to hold off emotion but drowning in it anyway. She used to be so good at holding off emotion.

  Her lips and tongue became numb, and she spat out the leaves. Swiftly, her sense of her physical surroundings retreated, and she became aware of the link. Deep down, the
glimmering spokes of the probability halo drew her—

  And just like that, she was back in the torture cell. She could turn away from it, as she had done before, but she didn’t. Not this time. She ached with all her heart to reject it, to try another way. But it was too late for that and, finally, she knew it.

  Her resistance gone, Olivia reached out . . .

  * * *

  Sometime later, she opened her eyes. The world gathered into her senses. Brian’s room in the family house, the shade drawn. Just the way she remembered it. Olivia felt disoriented, not ready to get up and face the new reality. Right now she existed in a world of possibilities, if not probabilities.

  But there was only one present truth.

  She sensed it rising, a memory scaffold lifting out of the fog. In the hall outside the bedroom door, the floorboards creaked. The doorknob moved hesitatingly, a metallic rasp—the knob turning in its loose collar. The door opened, and Brian came through.

  “Brian!” She sat up, almost blind with relief. But something was wrong.

  “It’s all right,” John Anker said. “You must have had a bad dream.”

  Part III

  The Disaster

  Twenty-Nine

  A bad dream.

  One that she wasn’t ever going to wake up from.

  Grief overwhelmed her. She fell back on the bed, sandbagged. She was no different from anyone else. All disasters were personal, and her personal disaster had blinded her. Whatever she’d told herself every time she entered the halo and failed to choose Jacob’s probability, the truth was simple and obvious. She had wanted Brian to live.

  Brian’s father stood in the doorway, looking enough like his son that for a moment Olivia had thought . . .

  But no.

  Brian was dead. Mission accomplished.

  “I’m sorry,” John Anker said. “I heard you cry out. Can I get you anything? Karen went to the store, but she’ll be back soon.”

  “I’m all right. Thanks, Mr. Anker.” Memories tangled in Olivia’s mind. She tried to sort them. Without Brian, what was she doing in his parents’ house?

  “John. Please call me John.”

  Olivia tried to smile. It felt wooden.

  “Well,” John said, “I’ll let you rest.”

  He withdrew, pulling the door shut. Olivia stared at it, and a new memory scaffold began to rise.

  Brian died under the madrassa in Aleppo’s Old City, his blood bubbling and spurting around her fingers. Jodee Abadi was also dead, shot through the chest by Kalashnikov rounds. Those two sacrifices so that Jacob could die, too, and the release of variola could be stopped.

  On the other side of the balance sheet, millions who had lost their lives in Olivia’s probability choices now lived. The smallpox attacks never occurred. The nukes never flew. The positive side of the world’s ledger prevailed—for now. But only for now. Olivia thought of the González effect—“Apparently we needed the Iraq War”—and her stomach clenched. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Shepherds had been in the business of creating crises to avoid crisis points. And that included the good Shepherds. If Andrew’s faction ever regained possession of the link, it would be much worse. Olivia could see only one winner: the Disaster.

  She sat up and put her feet on the floor. The post-halo headache was mild compared to her previous experiences. Of course it was; this time she had chosen an end point much closer to the most probable one, the end point that saved the world. The man with the scarred face was never in the torture cell, was never there to save Jacob. She touched the back of her neck, felt the seam of raised flesh. Whatever else had changed, the link remained securely zipped inside her head. She hated knowing it was there.

  More of the memory scaffold revealed itself. Olivia saw the path she had taken to arrive at this house. After Brian died, Olivia had remained in Aleppo another ten days or so, but she couldn’t concentrate on her job. She knew she was avoiding something she had no right to avoid. She was a witness, and Brian’s parents deserved her firsthand account. Before he died, Olivia had promised Brian she would deliver it.

  She departed the Middle East and traveled straight to Oregon.

  While other probability choices had resulted in a change of location when she emerged from the halo, this one hadn’t. Perhaps because there was only one destination possible. Still, it was odd that nothing else had changed.

  She had shown up at their door, travel-beaten. And despite their own grief, they had welcomed her into their home and consoled her. Olivia could almost not fathom that level of empathy. She thought of her own lost home, her estrangement from her stepmother, and tears had threatened a second Great Flood.

  And that’s how she came to be in Brian’s old bedroom, where Karen and John Anker had insisted she lie down and rest. Olivia had protested, but it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. Besides, she’d been about to fall over.

  Olivia put on her shoes and stood up. She stopped by the desk, her heart clenching. Here was one change: a childhood picture of Brian. He looked about five years old, sitting on a rocking horse, all cowboyed up with his hat and six-shooters. Had someone sat in here weeping over this memory?

  She found the bathroom down the hall, splashed cold water on her face, combed her fingers through her dirty hair. A haunted, dripping face gazed back at her. She drank water from the tap, patted her face dry with a hand towel, straightened her blouse. She could smell her own sweat and felt embarrassed. All she wanted to do now was leave.

  “My wife will be back soon,” John Anker said. “I wish you’d stay for dinner.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t.” Olivia could almost see Brian shaking his head. Always one foot out the door, right?

  “At least wait for Karen to come home. She’ll want to say goodbye.”

  Olivia made herself agree to wait, although every ounce of her wanted nothing more than to get out of there and lose herself in the oblivion of the road.

  “Can I get you anything while we wait?” John asked.

  How about a bottle of gin and a motel room?

  “No thanks.”

  “I want to ask you something. It’s a favor, I’m afraid.”

  “Go ahead, John.”

  “It’s about, well . . . Brian’s body.”

  Olivia kept her expression neutral, though inside, her new, fragile barriers were collapsing like walls made of matchsticks.

  “They have him over there. We want to bring him home. That’s all we want. But the government—theirs and ours—makes it so complicated, it’s, well . . . it’s overwhelming. Karen and I, we thought since you’ve been there you might know what to do.”

  “I’m sorry, John. I don’t have a clue. I’ll try to find out something and call you, okay?”

  John Anker nodded once, tight-lipped, his own interior barriers in ruins. “Thank you,” he said.

  * * *

  She sat behind the wheel of her rental, the engine purring, her phone in her hand with Rohana’s profile active. A single touch and Olivia could be talking to her stepmother. Only hours ago she had thought Rohana might be out of reach forever, gone in the nuclear flash of Olivia’s bad choices—the opportunity for reconciliation obliterated. Now she had another chance, and she couldn’t bring herself to take it. The biggest thing on her mind was Brian. If she brought him up with Rohana—“A friend of mine died”—Olivia wouldn’t be able to contain the ferocious pain straining to get out. And she was afraid that Rohana would comfort her again. That was really it. That was all it ever was. She was afraid. If Brian had lived to see his mother restored to life, he would have been ecstatic, and he would have shown it. All Olivia did was retreat; what the hell was she so afraid of? It wasn’t a fair comparison, though. Her personal disaster balance sheet was deep in negative territory. Brian and Jodee were dead, and would stay that way.

  Olivia dropped her phone into the cup holder.

  The plan was simply to drive. Destination irrelevant. So it was weird when she found herself catching the ramp to I-
5 northbound, headed for a very definite place—Brian’s apartment in West Seattle. The “home” she’d never been to, not in this probability stream. A place without witnesses to her vulnerability. She knew where Brian’s spare key was hidden, in a little plastic box in the garden plot in front of his building. At least she hoped that was still true in the current probability stream. A tractor-trailer blasted past her before she could merge. The rental shuddered, and she thought of Astina, alive again in the world, another check on the positive side of the balance sheet.

  * * *

  Olivia filled the apartment with voices and alcohol. She was avoiding the other thing she knew she had to do but was afraid to. News unwound in every room, projecting out of every device—and none of it was sufficiently distracting. Then grief performed a reverse miracle, turning gin into water. After a long day and a pint of Hendrick’s she found herself stark staring sober and no closer to sleep than she had been two hours ago. This despite being barely able to keep her eyes open during the drive from Portland.

  Olivia pushed herself off the sofa, ice clicking in her tumbler, and shuffled toward the kitchen. Her slippers slapped her bare feet as she passed through a BBC America projection streaming from her IsnGlas tablet. A reporter interviewed a weeping man. In the background, a child in a headscarf stood dwarfed by the ruined landscape while a cat circulated around her legs. Olivia stopped and turned back. A montage of images cycled past, some kind of historical retrospective of Western interventions in the Middle East. Night vision shock and awe. Saddam’s statue came down. A crowd cheered, and the dead added up. Olivia thought, Because Jacob allowed a photographer to take a picture. The González effect.

  Olivia fingered the ridge of scar tissue on the back of her neck. She could hide out with all the gin in the world and it wouldn’t make any difference. She couldn’t ignore her responsibility. Olivia would never deliberately access the probability machine again. But the machine continued to grind away, or whatever it did, under Aleppo. Waiting for the next Shepherd to enter the halo and shuffle reality. If not Olivia, then someone else. She could spend the rest of her life ignoring her responsibility. But when she died, the link would migrate. And she couldn’t be certain she herself wouldn’t use it again. The first time she linked, she had done so unconsciously, and it had created a chain of events that brought the world to its knees. What if, lost in a resurrection dream, she did it again? No. She couldn’t risk it.