The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  The eye of God is on fire, and the pupil is black. “Libra is caught inside the Vardogger,” she said. There is a whirlpool of fire, and it burns through every existence. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Inside the Vardogger there are paths that open from the trees. You saw it. Libra is caught inside there, and so is the Terminus somehow, or a part of the Terminus. Like a pocket universe, almost like it’s in a different time, or not in time at all. Njoku said thin spaces exist outside time . . .”

  “SEAL Team 13 has been searching near the Red Run,” said O’Connor, “but Commander Brunner hasn’t found anything like you’re describing.”

  “You can slip inside it,” said Moss, remembering when she’d been lost in the thin space, as easily as losing her way in the woods. “But there’s a trick to it. I don’t know the path that leads to Libra. And there’s something you should see, in the Grey Dove’s computer, a message you recorded for yourself. The Vardogger is dangerous, if you stray from the path, but Hyldekrugger uses it like a gate.”

  Reverberations, copies, universes opening in the pines. She was spread thin, thinning, and as she lay in her hospital bed long after O’Connor had left, she closed her eyes and saw the vortex of fire spreading from Libra like the incandescent rays of a black sun, or like a burning eye searching for her. I am an echo; the woman in the orange space suit had been reality. The woman in the orange space suit had been Shannon Moss. That woman is dead. You’re here now. Everything was thin—her body, her bed, the medication dripping through her, the clinic, the base, the world—everything seemed like wrapping paper, something she could tear away to reveal only emptiness. She peered into herself and saw nothing. She felt that if she plunged her nails into her skin and ripped open her chest, only darkness would spill from her.

  Agitated, that night, insomnia as she watched the minutes of her bedside clock tick between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00, her thoughts an anxious jumble. Tossing, her pillows warm and too lumpy, but even more bothersome were the twitching phantom cramps that irritated her missing leg. The sensations came and went regularly, but affected Moss most acutely when she was stressed. Lying on the stiff hospital mattress, staring at the ceiling, she could feel that first cut the surgeons had made, felt it plain as day, across her shinbone when they had tried to amputate low to save her knee. She knew that her foot and ankle were gone—she no longer felt her foot—but it seemed the rest of her leg might still be there. It was almost as if she could reach down to touch her left knee, but there was nothing there. Blankets, sheets. Cramps in her calf, racing up her thigh, agonizing; even looking down and staring where her leg wasn’t wouldn’t help. Mirror therapy brought relief, and in the morning she asked her nurses if they could find her a long mirror, at least as long as her leg. Her nurses found a mirror hanging on the back of a closet door and brought it to her. Moss reclined backward in her bed, fixed one edge of the mirror snug against her groin. She looked down the length of the reflection. Two legs instead of one. A simple trick, one that shouldn’t work but did: her mind responded as if she had two legs again. She curled her toes, rolled her ankle, flexed her knee, scratched itches, and rubbed out cramps, touching her right leg but bringing relief to the reflection.

  The nurses liked her, but they coddled her, asking if she needed help with her walker or her wheelchair, or if she could dress herself, or use the toilet. Moss seethed at the idea of helplessness, that the absence of her leg was the most present thing about her. An echo or not, I can use the bathroom by myself, she thought, and remembered all those bitter women she’d met in her support groups, the women who cursed everything and everyone, who seemed hate-filled and spiteful and loathed anyone who noticed their disabilities. Moss opened herself to some of that similar vitriol, letting it pour into her like gasoline, and she became prickly, snapping unfairly at her nurses when they offered her help in getting to the cafeteria for dinner—she knew she was being unfair, but that anger cut against her despair. An echo, I don’t exist, I’m an echo. Mobility was essential, her independence.

  “I need my prosthetist from Pittsburgh,” Moss eventually told her nurse. “Laura. She’s in my files. I need her.”

  Moss had developed a professional intimacy with Laura over the years, Laura the only civilian medical professional Moss visited on a regular basis. Laura understood aspects of Moss’s body better even than Moss did. She was familiar with Moss’s residual limb, knew the type of liner Moss preferred, the sensitivity of her skin, already knew the location of Moss’s bony protuberances, her body type, and where her weight would fall. Regular appointments at Union Prosthetics in Pittsburgh for adjustments and resizing, salmon walls and gray carpeting, Union like a dentist’s office except for the attached fabrication shop, a commotion of plaster and plastic limbs and equipment for cutting and sanding, sheets of carbon-fiber and anatomical models of arms and legs. Laura was aware of Moss’s peculiar circumstances and was accommodating; she had passed the government background checks, signed the nondisclosure agreement, and was often able to make the trip to Apollo Soucek at a moment’s notice for emergency refitting and repairs.

  “Are you all right?” Laura asked early the following morning when Moss arrived at the examination room in her wheelchair. “That’s all I want to know. Tell me you’re all right,” she said, her riot of brown curls wrestled into a ponytail, her eyes taking in Moss’s transformation: her once-pert nose now off axis, her weight loss, the startling gaps in her teeth.

  “I’m fine,” said Moss.

  Chatting about The X-Files as they set to work, Laura prepared Moss’s limb, chose a liner to roll over Moss’s stump and thigh. Significant shrinkage in the limb, Moss had been compensating for the changing circumference by adding padding to her socket and wearing extra layers of socks. As Laura massaged out tension to help cast a relaxed shape, however, Moss realized just how lean her residual limb was compared to her right thigh, how bony it seemed, how shriveled.

  “My leg . . . looks so small,” said Moss. “Is that normal?”

  “How does it feel?”

  “I think it feels all right.”

  “Then it’s all right,” said Laura, swathing Moss’s limb with plastic wrap, tight without pressure over the liner, smoothing out creases and wrinkles in the wrap as she rolled. She measured Moss’s thigh with yellow measuring tape and a heavy metal caliper and wrapped Moss’s limb in bandages sopping with plaster of paris. Laura’s hands were confident, molding the cast, handling Moss’s leg without delicacy.

  “I made arrangements with Booden Prosthetics. They’ll let me use their fabrication shop again,” said Laura, sliding the plaster cast from Moss’s thigh once it had set up, her mold for the carbon-fiber fabricated socket—a hollow space matching the shape of the limb.

  “I’ll need another C-Leg,” said Moss.

  “It took you six months to get your hands on a C-Leg,” said Laura. “I’ll be able to get you a 3R60.”

  The 3R60 from Otto Bock was a stance-flexion joint, secure but mechanical. “Damn,” said Moss. Without the computerized C-Leg joint, walking would feel like relearning a stick shift after years of automatic transmission.

  “I get it,” said Laura, “but if you want the C-Leg, then don’t lose yours.”

  “I know, I know—”

  “Besides, the 3R60 is good,” said Laura. “You’ll lose some of the mobility you had with the C-Leg, but you’ll be stable. I’ll bring the first socket to you this afternoon, have you try it out. We’ll make our adjustments, and you should be good to go by tomorrow.”

  “And then you’re hitting the beach?” asked Moss.

  “You think I came all this way just to see you?”

  —

  The new prosthetic socket gloved Moss’s thigh, but the movement of the 3R60 was different from what she was accustomed to, the knee joint a spring-loaded swing, the entire prosthesis a weight of metal. Her gait was altered, a conspicuous limp as she made her way from her food-court table to the top of the escalator, peering over the ra
iling at the vast lower floor of Tysons Corner. She knew what Durr had been wearing when she died in the future and so assumed that the lawyer would be wearing the same blaring royal-blue suit this afternoon as well, for her lunch meeting with Dr. Peter Driscoll. Moss scanned the shoppers below, seeing the tops of their heads and their shoulders, the bags they carried, and although Carla Durr with her carroty orange curls and her blue suit should be easy to spot, Moss found no sign of her. She made her way back to her table, one she’d chosen for the clean sightlines to the Five Guys burger stand, every step tentative, having to trust her mechanical knee to lock when she needed to put her weight on the joint, to unlatch and swing when she needed to step.

  “Still no sign of her,” said Moss into the microphone clipped to her lapel.

  “It’s early yet,” said O’Connor through her earpiece.

  But it wasn’t early, it was after three o’clock, nearing three-thirty, and Moss knew that Carla Durr’s time of death was at three-forty, approximately.

  “Any sign of the shooter?” she asked. A Caucasian male in black military fatigues was all she could describe of Durr’s killer, but just like Durr’s royal-blue skirt suit, a man in black fatigues should be easy to find. O’Connor had arranged for patrol cars from Fairfax County to scan the parking lot, and there were additional county police officers in the mall as well, plainclothes officers stationed near every entrance.

  “Not yet,” said Njoku’s voice through her earpiece. Njoku was stationed with another NCIS special agent in the food court, O’Connor below near the foot of the escalators.

  Imagining how all this might play out: Someone would spot Durr, Moss thought, and arrest her. Or if no one spotted her in time, Moss would see the lawyer as she ascended on the escalator to the food court. Or one of the patrolmen might spot the shooter, maybe Hyldekrugger himself—the police were under orders to stop and arrest anyone fitting the description of the shooter, any male in black fatigues. By now a short line had developed at the Five Guys burger stand. Moss tried to remember, hadn’t Carla Durr already received her food when she was killed? The image of that potential crime scene flashed in her mind: Durr’s body sprawled in front of the hamburger counter, blood slicking the floor, several shots in her back and head. Carla Durr would need to get in line now to have time to order, to receive her order, and be gunned down in the next few minutes. Moss looked frantically across the food court, to spot the man in fatigues, anyone suspicious, but she saw only groups of teenage girls and mothers with strollers, middle-aged men holding their wives’ bags.

  Three-forty came and went, and a few minutes after four O’Connor’s voice spoke through their earpieces: “We have to close up shop.” NCIS warrants for pre-crime intervention were written only for specific windows of time, only for specific circumstances, constrained by the constitutional rights of individuals who had not yet committed the crimes they would be arrested for. The lawyer Carla Durr had never shown. What had happened? Maybe the extra police presence had scared off the gunman, but that wouldn’t explain why Durr hadn’t made it for her hamburger meeting with Dr. Driscoll. Durr wasn’t here, Driscoll wasn’t here, there was no gunman. Something had changed from the future that Moss knew, but it could have been anything—flat tire, indigestion, Durr grown too scared to meet with Driscoll, or she was already dead. Moss was annoyed at having wasted everyone’s time, but failed operations like this were a matter of course when serving pre-crime warrants. She’d been on plenty of operations where the circumstances had changed from the expected future, and nothing was accomplished. Moss had supplied the information that led to this abortive operation, which meant paperwork, but, more important, she owed the others involved the customary rounds of drinks special agents bought when their predictions failed.

  Moss woke early the following morning, anxious for her debriefing with Admiral Annesley. She dressed in a charcoal-gray skirt-suit and silky blouse, and made it to NCIS headquarters with plenty of time to go over the notes she’d prepared about her IFT and to fine-tune her statement about her request for the pre-crime warrant. A few minutes before the debriefing was set to start, however, O’Connor brought her a fresh cup of coffee and let her know that the debriefing had been postponed. “Annesley called just a few minutes ago,” he said. A relief, in some ways, being spared the scrutiny of a roomful of men, some of whom would whisper about how she looked, how she used to look.

  “You’ll need to write up your reports,” said O’Connor, “and I’m sure you’ll be called in to talk eventually, but the Navy is taking over, Shannon. Not every facet of the investigation, but the thin space, Libra. Carla Durr. They’re all military matters now. We’re through.”

  “I understand,” said Moss. She knew that eventually, when Hyldekrugger was captured, or Cobb, or the others, they would be held in military prisons and tried in courts-martial. She would be called on to testify, to work with the prosecution, but her role in this investigation would be finished. Even so, having the military take over the investigation before any arrests had been made was disappointing, leaving behind work only half finished.

  “What about Carla Durr?” Moss asked. “If the Navy’s taking over, is she dead? Did we miss her?”

  “She’s very much alive,” said O’Connor. “I talked with Admiral Annesley that first night you returned, told him your theory about the Terminus, what you’d learned in your IFT. He was keen on finding Durr. And just this morning when he called, he told me the Navy had already arrested Carla Durr. She was already in the Navy’s custody when we were out at Tysons Corner waiting for her to show. So you saved her life, Shannon. But she’s out of our hands now.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Staying at a hotel in Chevy Chase,” said O’Connor. “The Navy filled the parking lot with military trucks, battered down her door—D.C. SWAT handled the operation. It was all over in fifteen minutes. Someone working with the admiral questioned her for several hours and then let her go. NCIS was never involved, strictly military.”

  “All the death we’ve seen,” said Moss, like she’d been punctured and deflated. “All the killing, Mursult’s children—it all led to her. And we never had a chance to speak with her. The Navy questioned her for a few hours and just let her go, and we never had a chance. What about the FBI?”

  “I’m meeting with the director this evening,” said O’Connor. “They’re moving forward on their investigation into the chemical-weapons lab we discovered at Buckhannon, and so are we. Domestic terrorism, the homicides. Jurisdiction’s a nightmare on this one. We’ll be untangling strands of this investigation for years.”

  She worked with O’Connor over the course of the afternoon, translating her notes into a summary to send over to the admiral’s office in Dahlgren. O’Connor remarked on how tired Moss seemed. “Take some time,” he said.

  “I think I’ll head home,” she said.

  “William Brock’s funeral service is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” said O’Connor. “In Pittsburgh. You can represent our office if you’re up for it.”

  She was weary. Brock’s death seemed from another lifetime. “Of course,” she said.

  —

  Over a thousand police officers in dress uniform from cities across the nation had gathered at St. Paul Cathedral in Pittsburgh, a cavalcade of men and women standing at attention along Fifth Avenue as the family arrived in limousines. The cathedral was crowded with friends and colleagues, but Moss made her way to an open seat in a rear pew rather than shake hands with people she only vaguely knew from crime scenes. Brock’s casket was near the altar, draped in an American flag.

  She spotted Nestor during the homily; he sat toward the front, his arm in a sling. Nestor might look for her, she thought, might wonder if she were here, where she was sitting, might want to sit with her, Moss a victim of the same blast that had taken Brock’s life. But when she thought of Nestor, she remembered him shooting Vivian in the woods and preferred to avoid him even if it was unfair to judge a man for things
he hadn’t done. The director of the FBI and the attorney general of the United States each offered words, the director presenting Brock’s wife with the FBI Memorial Star and announcing that Special Agent in Charge William Brock would be designated a service martyr, his name added to the other engraved names in the FBI Hall of Honor. Rashonda Brock and her two daughters were led from the memorial, grieving but proud. Moss waited while the front rows cleared, mourners walking down the center aisle. Nestor looked her way, but his eyes passed over her. She thought of what she must look like now and realized he hadn’t recognized her.

  She slipped out a side door to a quiet courtyard, avoiding the chance of encountering Nestor or anyone else she knew on the cathedral stairs. A motorcade had formed along Fifth. Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Police motorcycles with lights flashing guided the hearses and the escort cars away from the church, a long train of police cars following. They were headed to the airport, where the casket would be flown to Texas for the family funeral and burial.

  Moss visited her mother that night. An enduring image of her mother, alone in the kitchen, only the single kitchen light on, going through her envelopes of Reader’s Digest cutouts, the rest of the house dark. Moss used to wonder if this was how she would remember her mother long after her mother had died, but now she knew that the Terminus would rob her of even this. Moss had called after Brock’s memorial and told her mother she was coming over, trying to prepare her for her injuries. She’d told her mother over the phone that she’d been in a car crash, that she would be fine, but the moment her mother saw her, she stood from the kitchen table.

  “Let me look at you,” she said, angling her daughter’s chin toward the light. “Whoever he is, leave him.”

  Moss sighed. “I told you how this happened. I was in an agency car, and a truck ran a red light—”