The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  He laughed, a sound more like a cry. “I gave it up,” he said. “Licorice—that gum was from Italy. I used to buy it from the import store, by the box. The only licorice strong enough—turned your spit black, your teeth and tongue black. But that day, CJIS, I was frantic, because I knew they were dead, my family, I just somehow knew my family was dead, that they were all dead. And I got through the security and ran through the rows of bodies, lifting white sheets off people’s faces, each time thinking I’d see one of my girls, but I only saw the faces of strangers, dead faces. I never saw my girls, never found them. I was eating my licorice that whole time, a nervous habit, but the next morning I ate a piece of that gum and the smell of licorice filled my mind with all those dead faces. I spit it out—”

  “You’re still looking for your girls,” I said. “You think I’ll be able to help you find them.”

  “Why now?” he asked. “Why did you come now?”

  “I don’t control it,” I said. “There are shapes that appear in nature—the shapes of seashells, the spiral shapes of some galaxies. Snowflakes, the swirl pattern of seeds on a sunflower’s face, on and on. You see this same pattern repeated everywhere. Leaf fronds, the way a toilet flushes.”

  “Fractals,” said Brock. “The same pattern, repeated forever.”

  “Quantum foam grows like that, too,” I said. “It’s shaped like that. There is a set of numbers that makes those shapes, called Fibonacci numbers—that shape is everywhere in nature. I don’t have to travel this far, or I can travel much farther, but the protocol for most investigations is that we travel about nineteen years, 6,765 days. I came with the hope that the truth would reveal itself in time. I came to investigate the death of Patrick Mursult and the murder of his family.”

  “Why? Why him? What’s his life worth?” Brock asked, but he didn’t want to hear my answers about Libra or the Terminus—he was burrowed deep within himself. After a moment he said, “So this physicist said he enjoyed my company, enjoyed talking with someone who wanted to believe him, and said he wanted ice cream after lunch. There’s a Baskin-Robbins right next door to TJ’s, so I took him over, we ate ice cream cones together. All theoretical, he told me. He was bullshitting me maybe, but as we were leaving, he said that if I ever met a traveler, I should capture him, put him in handcuffs, lock him away in solitary. Supermax. Lock him away without a key and keep him alive for as long as possible, alive and comfortable, because the moment he dies or goes back through that wall of doors, back to the real present, the true present, everything I know about life—every memory I have, everything, every person I’d ever known, every atom in existence—will disappear.”

  “Blink out,” I said.

  “Gone,” said Brock.

  “We call that the butterfly in the bell jar,” I said. “It’s happened to people like me. Being held captive in these futures by people who can’t face the awareness of their nonexistence.”

  “But what would happen if I came back with you? Could you bring me back?”

  “I could,” I said, knowing the case history, the quasi-legal status of individuals NSC ships brought home from futures, the strange lives of these doppelgängers, people we called echoes.

  “I could see her again,” said Brock. “My girls. I could . . . I could hold them, couldn’t I?”

  “You’d only bring confusion and pain,” I said. “You’d only scare your girls. They’d see you as you are now, as an old man who bears a strong resemblance to their father. Your wife will joke that William Brock, her husband, might look like you when he’s an old man. If you tried to go home, you would be a double, nothing more. They wouldn’t want you. You’d be an echo of William Brock, you wouldn’t be William Brock. Ask yourself—how much do you love them? Do you truly love Rashonda, your wife? She already has her husband. Do you truly love your daughters? They already have their father.”

  Brock coughed, a guttural sound, either wild laughter or choking on grief. He drew his weapon, the Glock pistol he had already used to kill that night. He pointed at my sternum, and my heart dissolved. If he were to shoot me, I felt that my blood would never stop flowing.

  “I could keep you comfortable here,” he said.

  “Were Egan and Zwerger going to keep me comfortable here?” I asked.

  “They didn’t know what you were,” said Brock. “There are people who know. A colleague of mine, Whittaker. He’d ordered you to be questioned, imprisoned. ‘Grey Dove,’ he said. Egan and Zwerger were going to hold you, but they didn’t know why. What is the term you used? A butterfly?”

  “A butterfly in a bell jar,” I said.

  “Funny thing,” said Brock. “Nestor called me a few months ago. I was surprised as hell. Out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from Nestor in years. He says, ‘I just saw Shannon Moss, can you believe it? Hasn’t changed a day.’ I knew I had you then. I knew I had you. I told him to turn you over, but he says it was just in passing, said you spoke for a few minutes and then you were gone. I worked every connection I have in the Bureau, told everyone that if you ever turned up, to let me know. This friend of mine, Whittaker? He called earlier tonight, said he had Grey Dove. I begged him, I made calls, I begged everyone I could, I pulled strings, lobbied to give the order to bring you to Uniontown, where I could intercept you. On some level in my gut, I still didn’t believe—just because you turned up here, what did it prove? But you haven’t aged, Shannon.”

  “Think of your love for them,” I said.

  “My wife and kids are still alive,” said Brock. “They’re still alive where you come from.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can keep them safe,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “What will happen to me here? When you go, what will happen to all this pain?”

  “There is no you,” I said. “There is no pain.”

  Brock placed the gun in his mouth and shot. The top of his head opened, blood poured from every hole. Brock’s body slipped from the booth to the floor, crimson spreading in a grid along the tile grout. The clerks ran over, one of them screaming. I shook, struggled to breathe—but my life hung in the balance here, in this moment. One clerk stood transfixed by the bleeding body, but the other clerk was already on the phone. I pulled Brock’s keys from his pocket and hurried from the store, seeing their mouths open but hearing no sound, only the blaring ring of temporary deafness caused by the gun blast. I fumbled with Brock’s ignition—how long from here to Virginia? How long before the police were searching for this car? The engine caught, and I drove. Case notes on Marian, my notebooks—lost, irretrievably lost. What had I gained? Nicole. Libra. Hyldekrugger. Nestor, I thought—imagining that he waited for me out on his porch, looking over his yard at dusk, Buick barking at the cars on 151. I imagined Nestor spotting headlights of every passing car, wondering which car would be mine. The night seemed deeper than any night. I thought of Nestor as I drove, thought of his lips, his body so familiar to me now, the constellation of freckles over his heart. Hoping he would forgive me—forgive me for always disappearing, but soon there would be nothing to forgive, soon there would be nothing.

  PART THREE

  1997

  Where are the snows of yesteryear?

  —FRANÇOIS VILLON, “Ballad of Women of Times Past”

  ONE

  The Grey Dove was tethered to terra firma by bursts of negative energy called a Casimir line—for Moss, a three-month return through the void of quantum foam. The wounds she’d suffered in the orchard had healed, but their psychological effects would linger. She woke from nightmares thinking she’d heard screams. Floating in her sleeping cabin’s dim light, sweating and claustrophobic, listening to the whir of the life-support system as she emerged from dreams of Charles Cobb, a dark shape smothering her, the scent of fruit blossoms pulling at the edges of her memory . . .

  Voices swam through the Grey Dove—auditory hallucinations, but they sounded like Nestor’s voice when he spoke her name in the night. Or she would startle at the
crack of a gunshot and realize the sound was nothing but the sound of Brock’s suicide reverberating in her mind. The gas-station cafeteria, the flow of blood. She played music to drown out the noises in the silence. She wrote notes in pencil and erased them, a method for memorization—Esperance, the Terminus followed Libra—imagining crystallized space. So much of what she had heard was extraordinary, beyond her comprehension. Where is Esperance? she wrote. Can NSC return there? She drew a polygon in the stomach of a man. Autopsy. Nicole had seemed to recognize her that last night—but she recognized me as Courtney Gimm, she wrote. Shauna had said Hyldekrugger and Cobb ID’d her as “Courtney Gimm.”

  Elizabeth Remarque, she wrote, then erased the name. She wrote it again: Remarque.

  Where was Libra?

  She erased the question.

  When?

  —

  The engineers at the Black Vale who had observed the Grey Dove’s launch to Deep Waters now saw her return within a moment of her launch, disappearing and reappearing in the span of a heartbeat, the ship merely shimmering even though Moss had lived for over a year during that time. The days’ transit from the Black Vale to Earth filled her with anxiety, true time counting against Marian now. Where was she? Already lost, her body left to the woods? Or somewhere else, alive? The Grey Dove pierced Earth’s atmosphere, flaring like a burning filament, and landed at Apollo Soucek under cover of night. NSC engineers assisted Moss from the cockpit and ferried her to the “clean room,” an on-base house with a view of the Atlantic. The three-month journey through quantum foam was sufficient quarantine, time enough for any exotic viruses Moss might have contracted from the future to have incubated and run their course. Even so, her first few hours in the clean room were spent with doctors in hazmat suits inspecting her body for traces of illness. Culture swabs, blood work. The last of her doctors left a little after 3:00 a.m. Moss drew a bath, soaked away three months of the Grey Dove’s circulated air. She hadn’t noticed how she’d aged during the past year, but she realized now, swiping away a streak of fog to examine herself in the bathroom mirror. She saw a striking resemblance to her mother. Confused as to how old she really was. Biologically, she must be closing in on forty, she thought, but she had lost track. Thirty-nine? Chronologically, she should only be twenty-seven. Moss bundled her hair in a towel, wrapped another towel around her body. Almost four in the morning. She hesitated at the hour but called Brock’s cell.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  Her eyes filled at the sound of his voice. Still alive, she thought, swallowing back tears, relieved that his suicide bore as little weight as a daydream.

  “Brock, this is Shannon,” she said.

  “Where have you been? It’s been days. I haven’t heard from you,” he said—and Moss heard a woman’s voice soft in the background, “Who is it, baby?”

  Brock was alive, his wife was alive, his little girls sound asleep. Moss closed her eyes and saw flashes of color that looked like veins traced in light. Exhaustion, she knew. A year since Marian had vanished—No, only seven days—

  “I can’t talk for long,” she said. “Not tonight. I’ll be back with you in a few days, but you have to listen to me. Do you have a pen?”

  “Hold on. Yeah, go ahead.”

  “Jared Bietak, Charles Cobb, Karl Hyldekrugger, Nicole Onyongo,” she said.

  “We talked with Nicole Onyongo,” said Brock. “Nestor questioned her for several hours, tracked her down using license-plate information the lodge kept. Identified her as the woman in the Polaroids we recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence—she’s been having an affair with Mursult but isn’t connected. She was distraught but cooperative, answered everything we asked. Nothing panned out.”

  “We need her,” said Moss.

  “We haven’t been able to get back in touch with her,” said Brock, unwelcome news. Moss tried to remember what will happen. Nicole had been questioned by the FBI, by Nestor—but she had been threatened by her husband, Jared Bietak. She had gone into hiding, Moss remembered. Out of reach.

  “Please keep trying to track her down,” she said. “She knows more than she told you.”

  “I’ll send someone to her apartment, see if we can pick her up,” said Brock. “Who are the others?”

  “Persons of suspicion,” said Moss. “I think these men are the killers, Brock. I think they killed Mursult, his family. Put out their names, take them into custody. I don’t know which one pulled the trigger on Mursult or who took Marian or the family, but they’re all involved. Now listen closely. I need you to search a location. Bring a K9 unit, trained to mark human remains.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s an access route labeled TR-31 on some forestry maps of the Blackwater Gorge,” she said. “An old logging route, easy to miss. Take that access route uphill. You’ll eventually come to a clearing.”

  “What am I going to find?” said Brock.

  “Look for piles of stones set out as markers. They’re called cairns. Small stacks of flat stones. Search wherever you find the markers. But it is imperative, absolutely imperative, that your men aren’t seen by anyone. Do you understand? Search that site, but no one can see you. I believe that the actor or actors have accessed or will access this site. If they’re made aware of your presence, we might lose our chance.”

  “Will I find Marian?” he asked.

  Already the future receded from her, like images half retrieved from dreams or like her memories were waves breaking against the shores of the real, washing away. She was cold, exhausted and cold, and visions played in the darkness of her closed eyes like lucid dreams. She saw Nestor, the forest in the night, pine sap, damp stone, a beautiful place to rest.

  “Moss, is this about Marian?” asked Brock.

  “I don’t know what you’ll find,” she said. “I hope nothing.”

  She slept for sixteen hours. When she woke, she worked through the paperwork that Naval Space Command required to document every IFT. The packet resembled a tax book: Assurance of Fact and Statement of Faith, with Sheet 34 and Waivers 1–13. Her portion began on page 6 of 116 pages. Line 1: Did you witness any event that might compromise the national security of the United States of America? She spooled the first worksheet into her electric typewriter, three empty lines. On April 19, 1998, she typed, the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) facility located in Clarksburg, West Virginia, will be attacked. A thousand people will die, killed by sarin gas delivered through the fire-suppression system . . .

  A quick breakfast the following morning, then her debriefing: a seaman drove her to the NCIS Resident Unit office, where she was shown into the conference room, a cramped space with mustard-colored walls. A single chair at the front table, a microphone, her name printed on a cardboard table tent. NSC brass from Dahlgren clustered together, talking. She spotted Admiral Annesley, who would question her. She recognized NCIS special agents from the Norfolk field office. O’Connor was there, in his seventies but spry. His nose was bulbous, lined with violet veins. His creased forehead and the wrinkles beneath his eyes were like a map of rivers run dry. O’Connor smiled when he saw her, worked his way to her. His eyes seemed like they should belong to a younger man—they belied his age, sparkling with a rich blue vitality.

  “How long have you been gone?” he asked.

  “Arrived September 2015, stayed through the spring,” said Moss. “With travel time about a year, slightly longer.”

  “Just make sure you put in for OT pay and to count toward your retirement,” he said. “Talk with Human Resources when you have a chance. You must be getting close?”

  “To retirement? I think I’m about thirty-nine, biologically,” said Moss. “A few years yet. If I met some of my high-school friends, they would think . . . I don’t know what they’d think. Twelve years older than they are. They’d think I wasn’t taking care of myself.”

  O’Connor laughed. “I’m older than my father,” he said.

  These debriefings were called informal, b
ut Moss, who had gone through seven of these productions, knew what significance they carried. This roomful of men would evaluate her performance over the next several hours, would consider the overall viability of her operation. She was nervous, doubting herself—doubting her memories, worried she would contradict herself. A cassette recorder had been placed near her on the table, a stenographer typed her words. The Navy representatives sat together like a bell choir, deep blue uniforms, the sleeves heavy with golden stripes and piping. They watched intently as Moss read her opening statement, a summary of her IFT. She spoke about the crimes of the crewmen of the USS Libra, their alleged mutiny, their alleged participation in the murder of Patrick Mursult and his family. Admiral Annesley was genial, but his mind sprang like a lawyer’s, questioning Moss and cross-examining her answers. A politician, one of Reagan’s men, with smallish eyes that gleamed like dark gems, seeming to smile even as he peeled away at Moss’s responses—his onslaught abating only when Moss described the death of Elizabeth Remarque. A pervasive grief settled over the assembly—many of the men here had known Remarque personally, it seemed. Remarque had suffered a public execution, according to Nicole’s story, and Moss told them how Remarque’s corpse had been paraded among the sailors in the mess. Annesley was curious about Libra, curious to hear Nicole’s story of Esperance a second time, confirming that the planet was in NGC 5055, the Sunflower Galaxy. Had Libra brought the Terminus to Earth, then? Moss surmised that Libra had been responsible—that at any rate it was certainly the first ship to observe the Terminus, rather than the USS Taurus, as had been previously thought. What do you believe was the mental state of the surviving crew? Moss described Nicole’s abuse at the hands of Jared Bietak and her subsequent troubles with drug addition. Annesley picked at her answers but didn’t linger over this part of the interview. Rather he surprised Moss by his overriding interest in the cancer cure, something she initially mentioned only to color her description of the IFT. He wanted to learn about her mother’s cancer, when she was diagnosed, her initial surgeries, and how she had apparently been healed—who had healed her, how she had been chosen for the clinical trials.