On the way back to his room, Gustavo peered out of a porthole and shielded his eyes from a setting sun like a glowing ember. He thought of Frost…
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
There was a Wayãpi myth of the Great Fire that Ends the World, but Gustavo couldn’t remember where the fire came from. Did it come from the starry skies? Or did it come from people? The Wayãpi themselves stole fire from the jaguar, when they were still animals and birds and the jaguar roamed in human form. With the power of fire, the Wayãpi learned to speak; they became human while the jaguar became an animal that could only roar in anger. Was being human about power? What about the power of destruction?
A woman passed behind him in the corridor, ripping on the nail beds of four fingers with bloody teeth. Gustavo couldn’t catch what she was muttering.
It wouldn’t be long before the ship anchored. There were announcements over the speakers, what Jack had called the pipes, that alternated prayers from the New Testament with instructions for gearing up and reporting to a lifeboat. Gustavo reached the entrance to the crew lounge and heard loud male voices.
“Government called for good helicopter pilots,” one stated. “They were flying them to South America, where they need to be able to take off and land vertically in the jungle.”
Gustavo peeked in and saw a few men seated at a table in the corner of the lounge. The voice belonged to a big young man called Ned, who was slouched over a fan of playing cards.
“Who says there’s still a need?” another man said. “Who says there’s still a government? We’ve been at sea for almost five months.”
“All that matters,” Ned replied, “is the defense effort at the equator. Captain Weber said so himself. So if there’s still an Effort, then I’m the helicopter pilot to find it.”
Ned cursed his “shit cards” and said he was going to “hit the head.” Gustavo backpedaled just as Ned exited the lounge.
“You are traveling to the South American equator?” Gustavo asked, nearly breathless.
The big Coastie startled and looked down. Ned had met Gustavo during a night of drinking under the Northern Lights. He had been quiet and watchful in Gustavo’s presence. I’ve never met a Nobel Prize winner, he finally said sheepishly.
“Well, I’m flying to Fort Hood in Texas,” Ned said after a pause. “If it’s still there. Our military was transporting personnel and supplies to the European spaceport in French Guiana. I’m hoping to catch a ride south.”
“Show me where you will go,” Gustavo commanded, pulling out the folded map he kept in his pocket.
Ned bent down and located the mouth of the Amazon River where it chipped and fissured the southern continent like the rim of a ceramic bowl. His index finger traced north along the coast, past the Oyapock River, to French Guiana.
“Here,” he said. “I think.”
Gustavo’s insides felt the heat of a terrifying hope. If the young man was to be believed—and Gustavo had grown accustomed to suspending all belief a long time ago—Gustavo wouldn’t have to die in this frigid and barren place. He had traveled to the snowy edge of the earth, and now he could go home.
* * *
CAPTAIN WEBER PAUSED by a porthole on his way to the weapons locker. Fog blocked first light; it was difficult to see where the Puget Sound of Washington ended and where fog and rain clouds began. Weber was grateful for the low visibility. No one on the coast would be able to see Healy until she drew close to anchor by the docks. There was no need to attract trouble when they would find it soon enough.
The fog wouldn’t help Healy’s pilot, however. Weber couldn’t help a smile when he thought of Ned Brandt, a strapping, clear-eyed young man with an unpredictable depth of character. When he wasn’t losing his shirt at poker in the crew lounge, Ned was reading Steinbeck novels while eating twigs of jerky. On deck, he was the first to lend a hand to the other crewmembers or scientists. Backbreaking labor and long hours never stopped him from smiling or remarking on the beauty of cerulean water. He even used the word cerulean before farting into the wind as he paused to admire. Weber wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but he did.
The captain walked to the ship’s weapons locker and found Ned waiting in a flight suit. As soon as Healy passed the mouth of Commencement Bay, he would lift off.
“Well, this is one way to get out of gambling debt,” Weber joked as he reached into his pocket for a key.
Ned’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. His face was young but also freckled with exposure.
“The defense effort could use me,” Ned reminded him.
It could use a Hail Mary more than anything, but Weber only nodded. Ned tried to thank him again for the extra fuel, but it wasn’t necessary. Ned was the ship’s sole pilot, so the fuel in the Dolphin helicopter’s tank would only go to waste. Weber had ordered his men to drain the Dolphin and pack up the Jayhawk with as many canisters as she could hold.
“What’s your plan B, son? Just in case you can’t hitch a ride south from Fort Hood,” he asked Ned, but they both knew he meant, Just in case there is no Fort Hood.
Ned said that he was still working on a plan B. The captain pursed his lips and nodded.
“Sir, something I want you to know,” Ned said. “When I picked Healy for assignment, I was picking you.”
Ned offered his hand, but the captain embraced him briefly and patted his meaty shoulder.
“Godspeed,” he blessed. “Now, let’s get you armed.”
Weber unlocked the weapons locker and lifted a semiautomatic rifle from the rack.
“We’re not talking polar bears or hostile smugglers anymore,” Weber conceded, “but the same rule applies: When you need to shoot, you shoot. Period.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Ned took the rifle, but his eyes lifted back up to the gun rack.
“Have you decided who’s gonna get the rest?”
Weber frowned and averted his eyes.
“I’m advising them to travel in groups and protect each other.”
It wasn’t an answer because Weber didn’t have an answer. There was no right way to divvy up a small number of firearms among a large crew about to make a run for their lives. He had looked at the problem six ways to Sunday and still couldn’t determine a just decision.
“You said ‘them,’” Ned said. “You’re not headed to Lewis-McChord with the others?”
Weber shook his head and said he was headed for the Cascade Mountains and would take his chances on his own, like Ned. The younger man gave a quizzical smile.
“The funny thing of it is,” Ned said, “I’m not going alone.”
TWENTY-NINE
We Are Born of Love
Chongqing, China
1986
ZHEN’S MOTHER HAD no tolerance for her daughter’s dried tears and the shame prescribed by others. She understood that Zhen was a girl with a very slight facial deformity, and for that she was bullied and made to feel less than worthless, a bad element that needed to be stamped out of a community. But Zhen was beloved by a family that had fought too long and hard to give in now.
“Words don’t draw blood,” her mother insisted. “You don’t know real suffering.”
She paused from chopping garlic for their dinner and wiped her hands on her apron. This was usually when her mother began telling horrific stories that Zhen knew by heart and still feared, but Zhen was twelve years old. While she tried to be invisible outside the safety of home, she was testing her voice inside it—especially with her mother.
“You don’t know what I know,” Zhen said quietly. “Because you’re not me.”
The logic was faultless, but her mother still looked stricken. Zhen used the silence to continue.
“No older boys called you a shit-eating sewer rat because of this,” she said, pointing to her upper lip.
Zhen’s scars had paled, but her upper lip was still slightly lifted and skewed from reconstructive surgery.
“T
hey have a point,” Zhen admitted. “I do look like a rodent or rabbit, without the whiskers.”
What she didn’t say was, No one will want to kiss this mouth.
The girls at school talked about boys incessantly, but Zhen could only listen at a distance. She might wear the same uniform, but she was not one of them. She was different in too many ways. Zhen knew it. They knew it. And knowing made it all the worse.
Zhen walked past her mother into the family room. The Lius still didn’t have a TV like most of their neighbors in the apartment building, much to Zhen’s disappointment; she found the science and near magic of broadcast images fascinating. Zhen’s father said that the Liu family didn’t spend carelessly on appliances; they invested in their children. Zhen had had two facial surgeries before she was old enough to remember. Kuo, her older brother by four years, had been privately tutored in several foreign languages during secondary school and now studied in Cambridge, England. Despite these large investments, the Liu family wasn’t struggling. Comrade Liu was the manager at the Chongqing power station and was held in high esteem. The family owned a nice dining table set carved from rosewood. A sofa sat against the wall, framed photographs covered the walls, and a bookshelf was full of hardbacks with titles such as Power System Engineering, Electric Fields and Circuits, Thermodynamics, Differential Calculus, and the latest cookbooks gifted to Zhen’s mother to inspire her utilitarian meals.
Zhen folded her coat over the arm of the sofa before she continued down a small hallway. Their apartment in Chongqing had two bedrooms: Zhen’s parents slept in the larger master bedroom, and her grandfather now slept in the smaller one. He had come to live with the family over a year ago after his wife passed. Zhen didn’t mind sleeping on the sofa and moving her clothes into neat piles against the family room wall. Her paternal grandfather was a national hero, a mathematician who had survived the Cultural Revolution by working for the military’s intelligence unit as a cryptographer. On the other side of her family, Zhen’s maternal grandparents were university professors before they were labeled class enemies and sent to laogai camps, never to be seen again—no bodies, no graves.
Zhen saw cigarette smoke hanging in a haze by the smaller bedroom door. One would think that Zhen’s grandfather loved cigarettes more than anything in life, but he had to love her more, because he stubbed them out in a ceramic ashtray whenever she visited. Zhen never complained, but he knew the smoke made her cough. She knocked on the bedroom door and waited, and then knocked again. Her grandfather slept a lot; living so many decades was exhausting.
When Zhen entered the musty bedroom, her grandfather was sitting up in one of the twin beds. He lay against pillows propped against the wall. A quilted blanket covered the lower half of his thin body. His brown face creased with a sunken, toothless smile, like the fissures of a walnut. Zhen took heart. How could she be all the ugly things her bullies claimed while in the loving arms of such an important family?
Her grandfather plucked his dentures from the bedside table while Zhen unzipped her backpack and pulled out a thin stack of papers. She didn’t want to show schoolwork, only her personal investigations: Zhen work. Her grandfather nodded as he inspected her technical drawings.
“Part of our wall clock,” he said, pointing to plastic cogs rendered in the silvery graphite of Zhen’s pencils.
She had flipped their clock over on its face to get to the black plastic cartridge that attached to the hour, minute, and second hands. Using her father’s tiny screwdriver, Zhen had opened the cartridge and disassembled the inner workings piece by piece. After close inspection, Zhen drew several pieces on a page at three times the scale in near perfect proportion. Finally, Zhen rubbed her pencil eraser through thick applications of graphite, creating white smudges that mimicked light reflecting off copper wiring or the glossy dark surface of a battery cylinder.
When her grandfather handed back the stack of drawings, Zhen flipped on the bedside lamp beside them. She tapped her stack on the nightstand to square up the edges, then held it up to the light. Her papers looked as translucent as the skins of a pan-seared onion. Clock pieces on every page overlapped in their original configuration. Zhen’s grandfather even saw the plastic teeth of several cogs interlock. He smiled and embraced his granddaughter with pride. The stench of stale cigarettes and sweat made Zhen breathe through her mouth, but she still held him tight.
“And it worked when you put the pieces back together?” her grandfather asked.
He often told Zhen that his full approval had to be short lived because she was young, and it was the job of the young to learn and improve. Zhen released his narrow shoulders and nodded quickly.
“And you hung it back on the wall before your mother noticed your tinkering?” he added.
Zhen giggled and instinctually covered her smile with her hand. When she was younger, she couldn’t remember how many years ago exactly, Zhen had tried every facial expression she could think of in front of a mirror. Both smiling and frowning tugged on the scars below her nose and exaggerated them. After this discovery, Zhen covered her mouth when she felt it stretch with expression. The habit made her grandfather very sad.
“Please don’t hide your smile,” he reminded her.
Zhen slowly moved her hand; she couldn’t deny her grandfather anything.
“When I was young and strong, I protected my family from the entire Red Army,” he muttered, “and now I can’t even protect them from ordinary assholes.”
He sighed and pointed to her drawings to change the subject. The tip of his finger rested on the sketch of a tiny cylinder of metal that Zhen couldn’t open without fear of breaking it.
“And what do you think is inside this?” he asked.
“The thing that keeps the time?”
It was the only part of the equation that was missing. Zhen’s eyes could trace the transition of electric power that began with the battery and ended in the mechanical power of a stepping motor that moved the cogs that turned the hands—but where was the precision and control? Zhen’s grandfather didn’t seem too surprised or disappointed when she had no further guesses.
“What was the one word printed on the clockface?” he prodded.
“Quartz?”
He lifted his eyebrows. And here Zhen always thought it was the name of a company, not a mineral inside! She tried to ask questions, but a fit of coughing and wheezing gasps interrupted her grandfather’s answers.
“Ask your father about quartz crystal oscillators when he gets home from work,” he finally managed to say. “I shouldn’t have all the fun.”
Zhen’s grandfather lay back on his pillows, spent, exposing the bony knob of his throat. He had only one more question for her, the same question he always asked before gently patting her on the shoulder to dismiss her.
“And your mathematics?”
He had pushed his children and grandchildren toward the useful profession of engineering for their own safety and sanity; pure mathematics was once considered a pastime for bourgeois intellectuals, and cryptography led to obsession and madness. Whatever the application, however, math was the universal language at its foundation. This language was innate to the Liu family, such that they could not only speak it from a young age but sing with full lungs. Zhen assured her grandfather that her test scores were very good. Only after he pressed her did Zhen admit that they were perfect.
When she stepped into the hallway, her mother was silently standing close to the bedroom door. She turned and walked back to the family room. Zhen followed, quietly repeating her grandfather’s request for his afternoon tea and his comment that the afternoon noodle broth didn’t have enough Sichuan pepper.
Zhen’s mother turned and planted her feet.
“I get angry at you sometimes,” she admitted.
Zhen hung her head as she sat on the sofa and pulled books and worksheets out of her backpack. She hoped her mother would leave her to concentrate on schoolwork—not that she needed concentration. Zhen often got in troub
le with her math teacher because she never wrote out equations, just the answers. Doing calculations in her head was much faster and allowed more time for Zhen to sit at her desk and think of more interesting equations. Her teacher knew better than to accuse Zhen of cheating, but he often lectured the class on the dangers of arrogance as he paced up and down rows of desks, pausing at Zhen’s. He was very wrong. Zhen didn’t enjoy watching her classmates struggle with solutions that came to her instantly. It didn’t make her feel superior that she had a better handle on mathematics than her teacher; it just made her feel more alone.
“It’s not that I don’t care,” her mother insisted. “It’s that I care too much. When you let those bullies hurt you, you let them hurt me.”
Zhen nodded and swallowed hard. Her eyes stung.
“You must be brave,” her mother pleaded. “Wear your skin armor.”
In the Zhou dynasty, warriors had stretched dried rhino skin into coats of armor. The grandmother who had told these stories to Zhen’s mother was taken away and never returned. Zhen’s mother didn’t have her own mother. She only had Zhen.
“I will be brave,” Zhen promised out loud.
Light reflections swam in her mother’s dark eyes, a purer white than Zhen could achieve with the strenuous rubbing of her pencil eraser.
“A quartz oscillator is a tiny crystal cut from quartz in the shape of a tuning fork,” her mother said, sniffing a runny nose.
Zhen listened as her mother explained the properties of quartz: after applying a voltage, the mineral could vibrate back and forth an exact number of times per second, creating an electrical signal with a precise frequency. This was the precision and control that was missing.
The Effort Page 25