The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

“Why did this happen?” I asked. “What was the motive?”

  “Antigovernment paranoia,” said Njoku. “Inspired by Timothy McVeigh, more than likely. Torgersen had purchased blueprints of the CJIS facility from a militia member active in West Virginia. He must have figured that destroying CJIS would cripple government law enforcement.”

  Njoku refilled our cups with tea, placed two manila envelopes on the table between us, both sealed. One envelope was marked MURSULT, PATRICK. The other, MURSULT, MARIAN.

  Whatever hopes I harbored that Marian Mursult would have been found alive, safe, in the years between her disappearance and now dissolved at the sight of her name. I tore open the seal on Marian’s file, slid out the thin sheaf of papers, and wept when I saw a photograph of partially buried bone fragments, a rush of mourning that had pent up in my heart ever since learning that the girl was missing. Marian’s remains had been found in the summer of 2004, buried in the vast wilderness of the Blackwater Gorge. A photograph of the site showed a nondescript patch of mud in a verdant forest. Another showed bones in the earth. Despite the recovered remains, no suspects other than her father had ever emerged and no criminal charges were ever filed. Njoku had collected a few newspaper clippings from the time, the papers already yellowed. Another run of the familiar picture of Marian from the Amber Alert. A few quotes from Brock—reaffirming an already established narrative that Patrick Mursult had murdered his wife and children before killing himself. A confusion, there—Patrick Mursult had been executed, clearly a homicide. I scanned the news items, the obituary. Only an aunt and an uncle from Ohio to feel the relief at Marian’s discovery, to bear the public grief—and then it was over, the Mursult family filed away.

  “The file’s wrong,” I said. “Patrick Mursult was murdered. He didn’t kill himself.”

  “The decision was made by NCIS and the FBI to control the narrative to the public, the media. A story of murder/suicide helped close up outside inquiries. We continued to investigate Mursult’s murder, but nothing turned up. The trail ran cold.”

  “Hikers found her,” I said.

  “A fluke. Nothing stays buried,” said Njoku. “When her remains were discovered, one of our guys reconvened with the FBI, but nothing was discovered to warrant reopening the case.”

  “She’s still alive. Marian might be still alive where I come from,” I told him, setting aside Marian’s file as if the pages themselves were fragile.

  I opened the file MURSULT, PATRICK.

  A swift-boat gunner in Vietnam, the connection to Elric Fleece confirmed. Pictures of the two men together on their boat, Fleece lean, almost unrecognizable from the obese body we’d cut down from the tree made of bones, younger. The file contained photographs of the mirrored room, the sculptures. The pictures of Kennedy, the Challenger, the swift boat covered in chips of fingernails.

  “What about this?” I asked him. “Anything with the fingernails?”

  “They were all Elric Fleece’s,” said Njoku. “No break there.”

  “Any guess as to what the ‘ship made of nails to carry the dead’ is?”

  “It should be in the notes. A Viking myth, something about the end of the world.”

  I found the annotation: Naglfar—a ship constructed from the fingernails of the dead, sails the end of the world to wage war against the gods.

  Another set of photographs, copies of the twenty-four explicit Polaroids we had found in Fleece’s house, in the duffel bag in his spare room: Nicole Onyongo.

  “This woman was identified?” I asked. “Who is this?”

  “A day or two after Patrick Mursult’s body was discovered,” said Njoku, “Special Agent Philip Nestor tracked her down, using license-plate information the lodge kept. Questioned her, but she wasn’t involved in our homicides beyond a sexual relationship with Mursult. She’d been having an affair with Mursult for a number of years but was shocked and saddened by what he was wrapped up in, what happened to his family. I remember she took the news of his death very hard.”

  Nicole Onyongo, a registered nurse at the Donnell House, hospice care associated with a hospital in Washington, Pennsylvania. Her address was up to date, the Castle Tower apartments not far from her place of work—notes about her life, her routine. It looked like she spent most every day shift at the Donnell House before heading to a nearby bar, the May’rz Inn, where she drank until walking home at night. One of the pictures in the file was a copy of the woman’s work ID—she was stunning, almost intimidating. Her eyes were a light shade of hazel. I compared her work ID to the sex pictures, the same rich color of skin. How did she strike up a relationship with a man like Patrick Mursult?

  “Nestor interviewed her? I’ll want to see any paperwork he kept about this woman,” I said.

  “We can track him down,” said Njoku. “He was never briefed about Deep Waters, and he left the FBI some years ago. I think he sells guns.”

  “Nestor?” I asked. Not uncommon for FBI agents to make the jump into a second career, parlay their leadership skills into higher-paying office jobs, but selling firearms was a surprise. I’m not sure why—I’d only worked with Nestor for an afternoon, I didn’t know him, but I’d thought of him since then, an infatuation. Soft-spoken, a photographer. I wanted to hold him apart from the jocks and gun geeks I met on the job, but maybe I was imagining Nestor as something he wasn’t. Or maybe something had happened to him since I’d known him, something that had changed him. Strange paths lives can take. I thought of Nestor’s story of his father, doorways in the forest that led to other forests. “Yeah, I’ll track him down. See what he can tell me.”

  “Anyone else you’ll want to talk with, anyone associated with the investigation?” he asked. “We can reach out on your behalf.”

  “The woman, Onyongo,” I said, and I considered speaking with Brock—but Brock was dangerous to me here. He had been briefed about Deep Waters, he’d known about Deep Space then, and it was possible he had learned about Deep Time in the intervening years. We were trained to avoid contact with government or military personnel who might understand the mechanics of time travel, who might understand that our appearance in their world meant their world would cease once we left. I knew an agent once, had known her as a twenty-four-year-old woman when she launched and saw her a few months later, after she’d returned to terra firma, deteriorated with weariness and old age. She had been imprisoned in her IFT by someone from the Department of Homeland Security, was kept as an inmate at Holman supermax for over fifty years. We called what she endured becoming a “butterfly in a bell jar,” a present danger to agents working in Deep Time. If Brock knew about time travel, he might capture me here and hold me for as long as I could be kept alive. “Only Nicole Onyongo and Nestor,” I said. “At least at first. But I’ll make contact with both of them on my own. I don’t want to approach them as law enforcement. They might clam up.”

  Investigating cold cases almost twenty years gone. Disheartening how little progress had been made in this investigation in all this time, as if the Mursult deaths were simply a fluke of violence, stormy weather that struck and was swept away. Still, new information would shake out. Tracking down Nestor, tracking down Nicole Onyongo, interviewing her myself—people will often speak freely about tragedies long buried, will say things that they wouldn’t have said in the heat of their involvement. Relationships evolve, sour—people who wouldn’t have talked then might talk now.

  I flipped back to Mursult’s service record. “Still not much,” I said. Unauthorized absence, desertion. Zodiac, Libra. “What about this?” I asked. “Any information about Libra? Or Zodiac? O’Connor tasked me to discover anything about Libra and why Mursult and Elric Fleece weren’t accounted for.”

  “Nothing,” said Njoku. “Their appearance remains unexplained. Libra is still assumed lost.”

  There was a slim document, a perfect-bound booklet, the cover illustrated with the icon of the Naval Space Command, a gold anchor and ropes spanning an image of the globe. There was a second ic
on as well—a woman with flowing auburn hair raising a set of golden scales, the figure outlined by the house-shaped constellation.

  United States Navy, Naval Space Command, Crew List, USS LIBRA.

  I flipped to Petty Officer First Class Patrick Mursult, Special Warfare Operator, and saw his photograph, flint-hard before the American flag, dress blues and white combination cap. Elric Fleece was here, too, rated as Electrician’s Mate—nothing like the obese suicide I’d seen, but handsome, with full lips, and studious in thick-lensed glasses. He’d worked odd jobs as an electrician, I remembered—and in this photo he looked like an earnest graduate student. I had no trouble imagining this man tinkering with motherboards in a basement workshop cluttered with wires, a soldering iron in his hands.

  “NCIS tracked surviving relatives of every sailor listed for Libra, but we were asking questions about ghosts,” said Njoku. “Mursult and Fleece were posthumously convicted of desertion. We assume they weren’t on Libra when it launched.”

  Libra’s commander was a woman, Elizabeth Remarque—I scanned her service record. An academic, a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT. Her hair was silvery, a feathery pixie cut. She was a young woman when she was given command—born in 1951, she would have been thirty-four when she launched. Her eyes were deep blue, matching the star field of the flag behind her.

  “I knew Commander Remarque,” said Njoku. “She was a friend.”

  “Did you serve together?”

  “I was the agent afloat on the USS Cancer,” said Njoku. “Remarque was our engineer officer, distinguished herself—she saved all our lives. They gave her command of Libra because of how she handled herself on Cancer.”

  “Only three Zodiac ships survived,” I said. “The Cancer—”

  “We launched in 1984, were scheduled to make five separate jumps to Deep Time, but Remarque discovered problems with the O-ring seals on the B-L Drive,” said Njoku. “The seals were brittle, weren’t holding up—a common problem with ships of that era. We all thought the B-L would misfire or explode. We thought we would all die, were certain of it, like we were living our last days in a floating tomb. But Remarque and her team went to work. They made eighteen separate space walks over the course of a month, replaced what they could, rebuilt the rest. Our commander aborted the rest of the mission, ordered us to sail home. The B-L drive held.”

  “You did complete a jump, though?” I asked. “The Cancer must have been the last ship to see a future without the Terminus.”

  “We sailed five thousand years,” said Njoku. “And I saw . . . wonders, Shannon. Wonders I will never comprehend. The oceans were thick like honey. Fifty-five billion people or more. Deserts—everything sand-swept. The old cities had fallen away, but new cities were built, entire cities in the shape of black pyramids, pyramids carried on the shoulders of the millions who lived in their shade. Entire generations were born, lived, and died beneath the cities they carried. Moving cities, wandering to find water. The people below were starving, naked, subsisting on scraps and detritus left by the kings who lived inside the pyramids.”

  “Maybe the Terminus is a mercy,” I said.

  Njoku snapped from his reverie. “I can tell you the rich were doing well for themselves,” he said. “Inside the pyramids were pleasure gardens, grottoes, fountains. Our crew was welcomed like we were long-lost children, prodigals shown every comfort. Every illness cured if you could afford the cure. And some people had left their bodies entirely, had become immortal, living as waves of light—but once they could no longer die, the immortals begged for death, because life without the passage of time becomes meaningless. It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.”

  Njoku finished the last of his tea, checked the time—nearing ten at night. “I should let you sleep,” he said, “but I’m curious. What was the last moment you remember before coming here?”

  “Hale-Bopp was in the sky,” I said.

  Njoku’s smile seeped through his concentration. “Of course, of course I remember—I remember that time very well. You launched in March, didn’t you? Of 1997, my God. I was stationed at the Boston office—so I’m still in Boston, in terra firma. I was collaborating on a project with physicists at MIT. Wave-function collapse. Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots. Just a few weeks later, I met Jayla . . . She was a professor of saxophone performance, played in a trio at the time. I remember watching her play, I remember the sounds she made, her fingers pressing the keys, the sound of her breath. We’ve been married now for seventeen years, but oh, I remember that time.”

  “So in terra firma, you only have a few weeks to live before your life changes forever,” I said.

  “Lovely, Shannon. That is a lovely thought.”

  “I am ready to relieve you,” I said once we shook hands good night—the traditional phrasing NSC sailors spoke on parting, the tacit acknowledgment that when I returned home aboard the Grey Dove, every moment of Njoku’s life that had been lived after March of 1997 would blink out of existence—this entire universe, the fully formed entirety of this IFT would vanish as suddenly as a passing thought. Rather than the traditional response of “I am ready to be relieved,” however, Njoku merely smiled.

  “It was difficult to accept that my life was an illusion,” he said. “Whether you’re NCIS or NSC, when you’re told the secrets of Deep Waters, you agree that you might have to lay down your life for your country—that theoretically, at any moment, you might come into the realization that your life is an illusion. You rationalize it, you say that soldiers give their lives for their country, that police officers give their lives . . . ‘They lay down their lives,’ for a greater good . . . But still, even though I know the physics, on some level I refused to believe that if I ever encountered you, Shannon Moss, it would prove that this entire universe was just some sort of ‘pocket universe’ that would blink out once you’d left. When O’Connor assigned you to me, it was like he handed down my death sentence. Can you understand that? I’m married, I have children, and my children have grown and are ready to have children of their own, but every happy moment in my life was tempered by knowing that what I was experiencing wasn’t real.”

  “But you are real where I come from. You’ll still live this life,” I said.

  “Dr. Wally Njoku might be real, he might meet Jayla in a few weeks, like you said, he might even have a family, but he won’t have the same family. What are the odds of one particular spermatozoon fertilizing one particular egg? Njoku might have children, but they won’t be the same children, they won’t be mine. He’ll be happy, but it won’t be my happiness—”

  “I know,” I told him. “I understand, I do.”

  “But I came to accept that my existence is an illusion. Have you ever seen a flower called the ‘falling star’ as it blooms?” he asked. “I saw one—this was several years ago, in summer. I was taking a walk with Jayla when we passed a neighbor’s garden and noticed a certain flower in early bloom. She pointed it out to me, and I was transfixed. A single stem, every bud perfectly symmetrical—the color was orange, almost like fire. I was struck because the first two buds to bloom, at the base of the stem, were in full flower, but the next two buds up the line had only just begun to bloom, the next two buds were smaller still, and so on, all the way up to the tip of the stem, where the flowers were merely two closed buds that had yet to open at all. This was the Crocosmia, the ‘Lucifer,’ but Jayla knew it as the falling star. I understand that we physicists interpret existences as something like a symptom of wave-function collapse, some quantum illusion to exploit, a brief fermata of indeterminacy, but I prefer to think of myself and all my selves as the falling star, every permutation of every choice I’ve ever made and ever will make existing in every moment, forever. ‘Merrily, merrily’—isn’t that what the truest sailors say? Nothing blinks out, nothing ends. Everything exists, always exists. Life is but a dream, Shannon. Self is the only illusion.”

  —

  I left Oceana the following mor
ning, in the car that had been requisitioned for me, a beige sedan. I drove from Naval Air Station Oceana north through D.C. to pick up the Pennsylvania Turnpike West, thinking of the falling star. My car was electric, battery-powered, the engine silent, a constant worry that I had slipped into neutral and was coasting. Caffeine helped me overcome the sensation of being caught in a waking dream—I ordered a black coffee at a Starbucks near an outlet mall in Fredericksburg. Country music on the radio, songs I’d never heard before and might not ever hear again, but once the mountains turned FM into static, I scanned AM until I found a minister speaking about the Resurrection. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?—something Nestor had asked me. Through the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel. Isolated houses, tobacco barns fallen into ruin. I watched hawks circle above conical saltcellars. What had this drive been like the last time I’d made it—less than a year ago in my world, but almost twenty years ago in this one? What had the scenery been? Trying to figure out what was new, what was lost. Yards full of junk and houses lined with rusted scaffolding. Communications towers, a white church in a valley near Breezewood. Newer service plazas, motion-sensor toilets that flushed by themselves. I had to charge my engine by plugging in. The changes of the intervening years registered more acutely as I neared Canonsburg—industrial parks and gleaming office cubes and sprouts of housing developments in what had once been only vacant green hills. The hills were cluttered with white windmills, lazily spinning, and I saw entire fields of solar panels where there had once been crops. Driving into Canonsburg still felt like coming home. The drive downhill on Morganza was the same, as was the Pizza Hut that edged Chartiers Creek.

  I checked with the Canonsburg Police Department and found my mom still alive, her address listed as Room 405 at Townville Health and Rehabilitation. Up the hill on Barr, already dusk when I pulled in to the lot. Women in wheelchairs taking in the evening air, old men smoking. Jeopardy! in the rec room, a hand of euchre—I scanned the card players, nervous to see her, wondering how much she’d changed. An elevator to the fourth floor, framed paintings of cottages, flora. Mom often said she never wanted to end up in a place like this, said I should kill her before I let that happen.