The Lost Books of the Odyssey
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Epub ISBN: 9781448181179
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VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Zachary Mason 2017
Zachary Mason has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017
First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224098243
BELOW HER ARE the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide. The Bay is a negative space around them, its leaden ripples picked out in the moonlight. There is, Irina realizes, a pattern in the flawed latticework of lights, something deeper than the incidental geometry of buildings and streetlight, to which the city has, unwitting, conformed itself, and, with this revelation, what she had taken for single lights expand into constellations, and each of their lights is a constellation in itself, luminescent forms in an endless descent, and the city is like a nebula, radiant with meaning, and this is how she finally knows she’s dreaming.
She is aware, now, that she’s on a plane, her forehead resting against the window, is aware of her slow, even breathing, of the awkward abandon of her legs skewed out in front of her. She caught the last shuttle from Los Angeles to San Francisco, leaving after midnight from a terminal abandoned by everyone but the drones scrubbing the floors. Now, twenty thousand feet in the air, she is alone, the plane following the sky’s ley lines of its own accord, like a mute, friendly animal that knows the way home. Even in the dream’s residue this gives her pause, automated commercial aviation only having come about when she was a teenager, but she thinks how, with access to the eyes of satellites and databases of the windforms and cloud-forms and aircraft in the sky, the plane can see all the night at once.
She remembers the camera set unobtrusively into the seatback—perhaps in some distant darkened office-park there is an attendant, bored, lonely, her fingernails digging crescents into her coffee cup, face awash in LED glow, who is watching her, and worries, briefly, at her stillness, but is reassured by the motion behind her eyelids, and does the attendant feel some vast compassion for her charges adrift in this dark gulf of sky?
The plane banks and she comes fully awake. A loudspeaker offers muffled advice that she automatically ignores. Out the window she sees the imbricated panels of the wing shift slightly, the airflow whitely visible. Below her, the Bay and the ragged scrawl of lights, but now they are entirely legible and entirely banal—the glitter from the spires of the new downtown, the shoals of the office parks, the favelas glowing like cyclopean piles of cinders. She feels lighter, now; she is descending.
THE STINGING IMPACT of Kern’s palms against the cool concrete and he’s up and off again, flowing over the rooftop jumble of the favela’s density. The night’s celebrants and their predators have dispersed, and the workers are just stirring, so his progress has no witness but the flags and laundry shivering in the wind.
A canyon opens before him, a gap in the fabric of the rooftops—discipline requires that he never break stride, so he gauges his footing and leaps, glimpsing balconies below him, the cables criss-crossing the void—the momentary coldness of the rift’s exhalation. Landing, he’s grateful for the concrete’s roughness, its traction, how it makes the favelas his playground.
A drone like a bulbous, dog-sized ant methodically deposits a new layer of concrete on the wall before him; it slowly lifts its mauve plastic head to scan him but he is up, over and past. Illegal, that kind of robot; their hum, ubiquitous this time of day, will be gone by the time people are working. Another night and whatever it’s building will be finished, its weight added to the ever-burgeoning city.
The concrete seems to give, slightly, under his feet; perhaps an illusion, born of his speed, or perhaps this block is overbuilt, and unstable. He has seen the sinkholes, the fractured declivities, the rubble intermixed with splintered furniture, scattered clothes, all the sad relics of ruined private lives. He has explored the settling ruins of recent collapse, remembers the cramped incidental geometry of the unplanned mazes, the terror of masses shifting above him. He runs faster, as though pursued, breath steaming, feet seeming barely to touch the ground.
Now the rooftops slope down and he is infused with a terrible lightness as he leaps over prisms of broken concrete, the slope reminding him that there were hills under the favelas, once, and he wonders if the favelas’ broken contour mirrors the hills’ hidden swell. He has never found bare earth, there, just tunnels, tiers and old rooms ever deeper, and below them the ancient buildings, the basements and sewers, the forgotten warrens in the dark. There were wonders down there, they said, if you knew the way—a brothel in a long room lit by a single bulb, a secret club where men played chess and no one ever spoke, a swimming pool full of seawater, tiled in lapis.
Before him is an aluminum water tower, once a chemical tanker, protruding from the roof like an egg set on end. He gathers momentum and launches himself up, its crudely welded ladder creaking as it takes his weight, and then he is perched on top, the tanker shifting, vibrating with the slosh of its thousands of gallons. As his breathing slows and his sweat dries he takes in the pale moonlight on the water, the silver clouds enveloping the bridges, traces with his eyes the map of his secret byways through San Francisco. Something about the light on downtown’s towers makes it seem remote, incorruptible, a place outside of time.
THALES STUMBLES, CATCHES the wall, clings to it, suddenly woozy.
He looks over his shoulder at his brother Helio, sees his dawning horror, realizes this might be serious.
His upper lip is wet. Touching it, his fingers come away red, but taking his hand from the wall was a mistake because he loses all sense of where he is in space until he finds himself on the floor, which is covered in wet sand, coarse and cold against his cheek, reeking of ocean.
They’re in a tunnel from the beach, under the corniche. The seaward mouth is an oculus of variegated blue. The tunnel’s acoustics make the wave’s crash ring.
Black wave of nausea, then he’s vomiting. Gouts of red darker than blood should be. That’s bad, he’s thinking, as the spasm climaxes.
“We need some help here,” Helio is shouting to the bodyguard who is also, Thales remembers, a nurse, and who, from the footsteps, is coming at a run.
Shadows kneeling around him. A needle pierces his shoulder.
“This will help you breathe,” says the bodyguard-who-is-a-nurse, his voice too calm, it seems like he should be more upset in honor of the occasion, and then a plastic mask is pressed over his nose and mouth.
Black military boots by his face. Beyond them, white lines slide down the glowing circle of celestial blue—waves, perhaps—but they won’t come into focus, so he looks at the weave of shoelaces, the scuffs and scratches on the black leather, the grains of sand stuck to the rubber sole. His implant will record this moment in every detail, as it records every moment, so perfectly he’s come to feel that nothing is lost to time.
Oxygen hisses into the mask, chills his lungs.
“Medevac drone incoming in … ninety-one seconds. Eighty-nine,” a bodyguard says hoarsely.
A girl in a crocheted bikini has stopped in the tunnel mouth, her fingertips at her lips, like she’s just seen the saddest thing in the world. The men kneeling around him are like statues, immovable and remote. He tries to roll to face the wall but they hold him down. I don’t want to be here for this, he thinks, and retreats into his implant’s memory.
The tunnel and his pain dissolve, and there’s the recollection of the last two weeks, there in their entirety, sharp and undecayed. He skims over the surface of the hours—there’s the clinic, the beaches, the many books on the theory of numbers, the freeways of Los Angeles as seen through the hardened windows of the armored town car—and finally alights on the first moments of the implant’s record, when he was waking up in a hospital bed in a room he didn’t know. A window framed the early light on a strange sea—it wasn’t Leblon, maybe not even in Rio. His mother, looking haggard, was drowsing by the bed; waking, she crushed his hand in hers, bent to kiss his cheek and, he thought, breathe in his hair. Beside her sat a stranger, tie but no jacket, perhaps a doctor, immersed in his tablet.
Something was stuck to Thales’ chest—his fingers found a thick pad of gauze, and another on his forehead—had he been injured? He couldn’t recall, and he couldn’t look away from the restless sea, because, incredibly, its changing shapes persisted in his memory, a new memory, another memory, and every moment as though immured in glass, as clear as the little poetry he had by heart, and he wondered if it was a hallucination, or the side effect of some drug.
“How are you?” asked his mother, her voice thick, smoothing back his hair, careful of the bandage, and he saw her relax when his eyes focused on hers. There was the memory of his words, and the memory of the memory, and then the memory of that, echoing on until his attention shifted.
“What happened?” he asked. A beat of silence while his mother worked out what to say, which meant it was bad, which was, come to think of it, obvious.
“There was an attack,” she said. “An assassination. You were wounded, and your father was killed. It was political.” He reached for sadness but felt only surprise that the old man had run out of tricks; he wondered if his father’s demise would turn out to be staged, if, like Sherlock Holmes, he was not dead but just in hiding, waiting for the right moment to dramatically reappear. “Rio was untenable,” his mother went on, “and the doctors you needed wouldn’t come to Brazil, so I brought you here, to Los Angeles, with your brothers. We’ll leave for the U.S. proper once we get visas and you’re well enough to travel.”
“I was hurt?”
“A sniper fired armor-piercing rounds at your father’s car,” the stranger says, standing. American, with an intensity and an absolute confidence, his cologne redolent of river water and orchids. “You were hit twice. You suffered a pierced lung and major cranial ablation. You’ve been in an induced coma for three weeks. I operated on you for twenty-six hours.” The surgeon’s motions seemed excessively controlled, as though he refused to let his fatigue show.
“I’m remembering things.”
“That’s your implant. It’s about two inches under the bandage on your forehead. It took over the function of the unviable tissue, and so saved your life. The expanded memory is a side effect, a kind of bonus.” The surgeon looked at his tablet and smiled, the first crack in an otherwise impenetrable professional facade. “The installation was … complex, but I’m happy to say it’s working perfectly.”
Thales had read about memory implants, had wondered what it would be like, had never thought to learn. “But those never really worked,” he said. “The memory thing worked, but the people who got them usually died.”
Impassive, distant, compassionate, the surgeon said, “There is absolutely no doubt that the implant will improve both the quality and the duration of your life.”
And then he’s back in the tunnel feeling like he’s choking as someone stuffs a glove into his mouth and now he’s biting down on the leather and cotton as a lozenge of white light—reflected from someone’s watch?—skitters across the ceiling. His muscles are trembling—is he cold?—and someone is holding his head on their lap, and he wants to say he’s going to be sick again but the tunnel is dark and its roof seems far away and as though from a distance he hears Helio say, “You’re going to be fine!”
Someone is complaining that the medevac has been delayed by two minutes, its flight path went over the wrong neighborhood and someone shot at it, it’s rerouting, fuck LA, in Brazil they’d know not to fly over the fucking favelas.
His awareness narrows to a single mote of light, the implant diligently recording.
Then it’s time to let go of everything, and then he does, and the implant quietly turns itself off.
He wakes up in a hospital bed in a room he now knows well. Out the window the early light shines on the Pacific. Through the window he sees the sun shining on the sea and is aware of the rules of light’s motion through space.
He touches his upper lip—his fingers come away clean. There are gauze bandages on his chest and forehead.
The sea heaves and shifts but its shapes slip away from him. He wonders if the implant is broken, and what happened, and, confusedly, if this is anesthesia annihilating time.
His mother isn’t there, but the surgeon is sitting by the bed; he looks up from his tablet and says, “We need to ask you some questions.”
WHATEVER LIMINAL GRACE informs airports—some sense of perpetual arrival and departure, of being in an anonymous crowd united in separation from their proper lives—is absent now; the terminal stinks of disinfectant, and stalls blink garishly, trying to sell her perfume, T-shirts, duty-free alcohol, things Irina could not ever imagine wanting, and she has a sudden and overwhelming sense that the trip was a mistake, that she does not after all need the money, and wishes with all her being that she hadn’t come.
The terminal funnels her to the entry checkpoint; they make you go through security again, when you get off a plane from LA, an uncomfortable reminder of how bad things are in that city. On the customs card she lists her profession as “computational translator,” as accurate a description as any. This late there’s only one guard, who stops reading the news on his phone long enough to take her card and wave her through the humming scan tunnel but she stops, says, “I have an implant,” fishing through her purse for the letter on FAA letterhead certifying that, yes, she has a cranial implant, yes, it is the legal kind, no, it is not construed as a munition. With it, she forgets nothing. Only a few dozen people ever got her kind, less than ten are left, and she dreads questions. (Even the simplest implants are getting phased out—you used to need one to be a combat officer in the Marines, but the technology never really matured and now no one much uses them.) The guard reads the letter, eyes her skull with professional interest (she always wears bangs, against this very eventuality), and says, “Is it one of those direct connections to the net?” As he seems kind, and is without swagger, she delays her course toward hotel and sleep long enough to muster a smile and say, “It’s memory,” then retrieves the letter in the same motion that carries her into the scanner. The screen of the guard’s laptop is reflected in the chromed walls; she sees herself as a ghost, walking, bones and the hardware in her bag glowing slightly, as does the arc of the device just behind her forehead.
As she rides the conveyor belts past empty storefronts, a closed Koffee Kiosk senses her gaze and illuminates itself, its marquee displaying helically frothed cappuccinos twirling through an abstract mathematical space. A direct connection to the net, she reflects, feels like an airport at night (the implant has this feature, but she almost always keeps it turned off)—something about being bombarded by sterile, impersonal and ultimately vacuous information, though part of her wishes that the Koffee Kiosk were open; she briefly considers turning on her wireless, cracking the Kiosk’s security as she would an eggshell, making it give her coffee.
Finally, the double doors to the outside, their surfaces glowing with a last, desperate attempt to sell her discount fares to Gdansk, Helsinki, Reykjavík, and then they whisk open. As the cool outside air envelops her, the sense that place is fundamentally negotiable—endemic, she suspects, to airports—departs.
On the curb, she smells the chaparral in the hills, the fog, and knows where she is. As though in acknowledgment of this, a drone cab pulls to the front of the empty taxi queue. It’s painted bright green, marking it as robotic. She gets in and a video screen on the inside of the door lights up; a software agent appears, a sort of sexy cartoon librarian who says, “Welcome to … the San Francisco Airport! Where can I take you tonight?” and beams. Her business being the inner lives of AIs, she knows exactly how little this one has, and touches the small button on the screen that dismisses the friendly interface. “Destination, please,” says a calm, genderless voice. She finds the option that brings up a keyboard on the screen and types in the name of the hotel.
The cab winds its way through the labyrinth of over-and underpasses that lead out of the airport and onto the freeway, where it pulls into the designated drone lanes. A semi barrels past, its hood a prickling, insect-splattered expanse of stubby antennae, cameras, other protuberances that she can’t identify but that must be sensors of some kind; she can’t help but read the windowless cab as the face of a blind man with his visual prosthetic. The tank rushes by and she glimpses colored stickers indicating a payload of extreme toxicity. She feels a stab of pity for the people who once drove trucks long distances, how boring their lives must have been. There are stories, probably urban legends, about drone trucks disappearing, usually in the fog, in the mountains where radio signals get distorted, their cargoes of industrial solvents, Italian shoes, heirloom tomatoes surfacing in distant markets. Myths, most likely, grounded in occasional database errors, and in the slight eeriness of the things, roaring through the night with their sightless faces.
A drone Mercedes passes her, the light of streetlamps revealing a middle-aged suit looking absurdly vulnerable as he nods over a closed laptop. There was a psychological shift, with drone cars, that made people act less like they were in semipublic and more like they were in their bedrooms. She often saw people getting dressed, men bucking in the confined space to get their legs into pants, women putting on makeup or stockings, anonymity substituting for privacy. Now there’s a car full of kids, the boys drinking whisky from cans, the girls’ faces glowing, laughing at nothing, off on an endless cruise through the night, converging, briefly, at bars, but always believing that the final destination, some desirable center, is elsewhere, a promise never realized, and so, with blood alcohol no impediment to motion, they are, with each arrival, already preparing to disappear; she wants to disappear with them.
Waking, she stumbles out of the cab into predawn fog and the smell of the sea; the hotel, beige and sterile, is entirely devoid of a sense of place. This quiet hour, she thinks, of fatigue poison, suicide, ghosts.
There’s a guard in a little booth by the concrete planters that keep anyone from driving too close to the hotel; he ignores her, and at first she thinks he’s breaking down his rifle but then sees that he’s watching television on its display. She has a vision of rounds raining down on the hotel while the indifferent guard flips channels.
Although she is not a gun person, at all, she recognizes the guard’s rifle, an anti-armor Heckler & Koch, the same weapon used on the virtual battlefields of her most recent contract; she’d spent a week trying to persuade the house AI of a Santa Monica defense firm to take an interest in a tactical simulation, and then, interest taken, to make its army win. Surprisingly, the simulation was beautiful, with the bright arcs of missiles, the airborne drones like flocks of easily startled birds, the strike zones of the weapons satellites like cloud shadows scudding over the hills.
In the empty lobby the lights are dimmed. Her phone shows her the way through the corridors.
Her room is the color of the dry grass in the hills. She checks mail on her phone. Inevitably, there’s a reminder from her agent about her meeting at Water and Power Capital Management in now alarmingly few hours. She drops the phone on the floor.
She looks out the window—there’s a sense of glittering immanence, of menace, almost, over the salt flats—then regrets not brushing her teeth as she shrugs out of her clothes and falls into bed, glad of the silence and of the guard, out front with his gun, keeping the world at a distance.
THE CONCRETE IS still cooling under Kern’s back when the moon starts to set. Under the faded sky the favelas’ rooftops are a plain of undulating shadow, fractured by the glowing faults of the alleys and the streets. Lifting his head, he sees the Bay and across it the firelight flaring among Oakland’s ruined towers. The wind brings cooking oil, sewage, the sea. Ear to the concrete, he hears music’s muted subterranean pulse.
His phone chimes as a text arrives. Phone framed on pale night, the message one word: Working? The sender is anonymized, but only Lares has the new number. Tempting just to lie there, and watch the night progress, but his restlessness is growing, so he texts back Yes, and an instant later gets another message with an image of the night’s mark and his latest GPS.
Corded muscle on the stranger’s arms, billowing thunderheads tattooed on his shoulders, a studied gangster’s gravitas. Another text: Touch him up and bring his phone to me. He memorizes the GPS, then deletes all. Springing to his feet, he stretches through the moment’s dizziness and then lopes off across the rooftops.
A vertical plane of light rises from a wide fissure in the concrete before him. He starts to sprint and as the fear rises he launches himself from the edge, floating, for a moment, and in the light rising from the street below he casts a skyward shadow, and then the balconies of the far wall are rushing toward him, then the shock of impact in his palms, knees and soles, his eyes just inches from the stratified concrete, and then once again he’s pushed off into the air.
He lands running, stumbles, jogs off the last of his momentum, unscathed, euphoric, though the descent is easy, on these surfaces, if you commit yourself, which he’s done now many times. (The first time, when he’d only seen it done in videos, it had taken an hour to work up to the jump). As he wasn’t hurt, he won’t be hurt, and for tonight he is invincible.
The pulse of the music is louder on the street. It’s a carnival night, which he likes, for the shattering music and the fires and the strobe lights that make a strange country of the favela’s familiar mazes, and because there will be crowds, mostly drunk, making it easy for him to fade away. Lares, who is particular about words, says it’s not technically carnival, but more like this floating world, which Kern first thought referred to the levels flooded by the Bay—he’s found basements where you can hear the tide race—but it turned out to be Japanese; he forgot the details but retains a sense of lantern light and sake jars, of hot water clattering into tubs, of ragged samurai walking through the cold mud singing, and as the bass vibrates in his bones he’s floating over the surface of things, exultant and detached as he closes on his victim.
Dank corridors with closed doors, mulched paper squelching underfoot, reek of urine. A family place—mothers had their children piss in the throughways to keep the working girls away. An old man with a too-wide grin, dressed as though for church, calls out to him, full of unctuous concern—is he entirely well—is he hungry, perhaps? Kern shakes his head just perceptibly and the old man laughs, says he’s sorry, he hadn’t recognized him, would never have spoken so to a resident of such standing. Go with him and you’d get a meal, fall asleep, wake up in a brothel. It didn’t seem fair, kids making it this far just to be picked off by a pimp who seemed to think that it was funny. The gang kids hated people like that, caught them and hurt them whenever they could, prone, afterwards, to sentimental monologues on sisters disappeared.
A momentary silence, shocking in its suddenness, ringing in his ears. It passes, as he moves on, but there are places like that, here and there, islands of quiet, implied by the ways that shape warps sound. They move, as people build, and he imagines the silences projected from high above, like spotlights roaming the surface of the city.
The sky is intermittent strips of indigo, and the street—dark even in the day—is lit sporadically by bioluminescent strips stuck to the walls. He dodges into the gaps in the gathering crowd, making a game of it but one with an urgency, and someone shouts “Woo!” as Kern slips by, not touching him but passing near enough to feel his heat, and he knows he should slow down, avoid notice, but needs to be in motion.
He rounds a corner into a wall of darkness and deafening sound and then a blinding flash of light. The music is from everywhere, the stereos built into the walls and the floor—there are guys who are into that, who spend weeks and their own money getting it just right. Every strobe flash brings a static image of the dancers in their ecstasy, like a sequence of luminous stills, and he retains details that would otherwise be lost—the hair of a girl in mid-jump splayed out like a corona, her eyes shut tight, her smile raw, inward, somehow like a child’s, the skinny shirtless boy turning to watch her, the beads of sweat flying from his forehead. On a concrete stage there’s an elfin-looking girl screaming into a microphone and she has black lipstick and black eyeliner and a torn, sweat-stained army T-shirt, and she can’t weigh more than ninety pounds—she’s what Kayla would call one of the banshee cases—and it’s like she’s been possessed by something terrible that’s working out its pain through her disintegrating vocals. A pulse of darkness, like going into a tunnel, and then the next strobe shows the way.
He checks his position on his phone, scans the teeming faces when the next light comes. So many, and though it’s only been minutes the mark is surely gone, but the mass of dancers opens up and there he is.
Kern pulls on the thick leather gloves he got from a gardener for someone’s credit card and reminds himself to breathe. There are brown stains on the knuckles that won’t scrub out. Remembering fragments of jumbled meditations, he tries to slow his heart.
The music is the soundtrack for what he’s about to do and he must be near a speaker because the noise is on the verge of obliterating his consciousness, and no one is really watching and no one will really care but still he finds he doesn’t want to hurt this stranger, not really, and he stands there foolishly, pulling at his gloves, but then he remembers a story he read on his laptop, one from Iceland about men who had the souls of wolves, berserkers, they called them, and they were usually soft-spoken and unassuming till they went into battle and then something shifted deep within them and their mouths foamed and they chewed the corners of their shields as the wolf rose up through them to swallow their hearts and their pity and the last vestiges of their fear. Come, he thinks, calling to the wolf in the music’s barrage, even though he knows it’s just a story, but then it comes, and he is ravening.
Hands shoved in pockets, eyes lowered, he advances on his victim. Now his heart is calm and his fear has become something poisonous and almost like affection. Annihilating echoes roll between the concrete cliffs in the periodic dark. The mark glances at him, but Kern is staring off into space, not even a person, just so much empty air.
The mark’s loneliness is evident in the way he watches the girls, and how he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. There’s something in one of the mark’s pockets and for a moment Kern worries it’s a gun but it’s too bulky and then he notices the paint on the mark’s shirt and realizes he’s a tagger, that it’s a spray can in his pocket. Kern sees him decide to leave, start shouldering his way toward an alley, and knows his moment.
Music so overwhelming it’s like silence as he runs through the momentary darkness, leaps on the strobe flash, and as it ends drives his elbow down through the space where the mark’s skull was, but hits nothing, lands kneeling, and holds the position—though it’s not necessary, is even self-consciously cinematic—until the next flash shows the mark, eyes wide, hands raised, backing away.
They run flat out and when the dark comes Kern feels he’s standing still. The next flash shows the mark losing ground, and with the next he’s gone but Kern intuits that he’s slipped into another, narrower alley, and the next flash shows him pressed against the wall, and in his momentary glimpse of the mark’s face Kern sees his decision to stand and fight.
Pain blooms in Kern’s hand as the mark’s orbital shatters, and then the mark is on the ground, Kern astride his chest, throwing punches unimpeded, and the mark’s face is like an outraged child’s, successive strobes revealing his progress from shock to misery and finally to a blankness, almost an abandonment, and then more bone collapses, which is probably enough.
Leaving the alley with the mark’s phone in his pocket, he sees men rushing toward him, mouths open and teeth bared as they shout things he can’t hear. He turns to meet them, flooded with rage, welcoming death, knowing that he won’t lose, can’t lose, will live forever, but then he recalls his discipline, and with it reason, and with the next strobe he runs at the wall, finds traction, jumps, grabs a balcony, is up, vanishes.
IRINA DREAMS OF blue rubber gloved hands, the rush of pure oxygen, and the pain, perceived through the shock and anesthesia as a terrible cold, a continent of ice afloat in dark water.
She wakes, and that numbness is still with her, as is the exact record of her restless sleep: the rough silk of the hotel sheets, the weight of the duvet, her sporadic motion as the hours passed, the novae bursting and fading behind her sleeping eyes.
She sits up, sees her clothes draped on the distressed leather of the club chair across from the bed, the sort of chair that serves only as an impromptu clothes rack or a place from which to watch one’s lover, sleeping, if one has a lover, which she does not, nor has for some time, a line of thought best abandoned.
The hotel room is podlike, expensive and forgettable. The open curtains frame a view of the whitely glistening salt; beyond them, in darkness, the Bay. Her phone blinks, probably with queries about wake-up calls, morning coffee, but she ignores it, stares out the window, noticing once again how this part of the world, where so much has happened, looks like nothing in particular.
She only watches television in hotel rooms, needing to fill their chilly banality with any kind of human noise. The wide black rectangle of screen shows a rubicund Japanese politico insisting that Japan has the right to deploy missile platforms in space, three coyotes padding through the empty streets of Santa Fe, a hotel burning in the atolls that are all that’s left of that peninsula that used to be a state, and a South Korean official attributing the disappearance of one of their newest drone submarines to a software error—the ship is considered lost at sea. The missing ship appears on screen—it’s black, seamless, somehow cetacean-looking.
The salt flats look like plains of snow and she thinks of her childhood, obliterated decades ago on an icy Virginia road. She remembers the car’s terrible rotational velocity, her mother’s hand on her father’s shoulder; then lying on her back in a room without windows, listening to her respirator’s hiss and sigh. There was nothing to see but the white ceiling and, sometimes, the nurses leaning over her. She found she remembered everything—how the light changed on the ceiling, every little sound from the corridor, how the nurses looked every time she’d seen them; she could tell how long they’d been on shift from the darkness around their eyes. When the blue-eyed nurse took the tube out of Irina’s mouth she started talking: “And she’s powered up. Are you sure? Is the implant working? How’s her EEG? It’s all good—we’re recording. Is she awake? Not yet. Can she hear what we’re saying?” The nurse’s blue eyes widening.
The possibility of sleep is gone. She kicks back the duvet, on the theory that the cold will make bed and sleep more appealing, and goes to stand by the window, cradling her forehead in her hand. A ship’s light out on the Bay. What good this ship, she thinks, this salt, this restive night, and is on the verge of wiping them away from her other memory, but she hesitates, then saves the indigo of the Bay, the chill, her melancholy.
KERN’S LAPTOP BLEATS, and in the moment of waking he is up, though his body aches, as it always aches, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. Dizzy with sleep, he is stretching his shoulders when, at the laptop’s signal, the espresso machine—spoil of an unlocked condo—winks on, huffs loudly and begins to steam.
The low room is dark but for the faint glows from the light well and from his laptop’s screen, just enough to illuminate the espresso frothing into his one chipped cup. The room is cold, this early, except near the space heater, salvage from the landfills, wired to a fuel cell with a shiny spot where the serial number once was, the severed stubs of steel bolts gleaming rawly.
He sips coffee, tells himself it makes him feel more awake. The phone he took from the mark is on the floor by the laptop. He dreamed he heard a voice from it, perhaps a woman’s, but it’s not possible—there’s no signal this deep under the surface. Later, when the sun is down, he’ll run it over to Lares, get paid.
Before he’s ready, his laptop chimes, and it’s time to work the heavy bag. The bag hangs from the ceiling on a rusted chain, swaddled in silver duct tape, mottled with dark stains, a mass of shadow. He circles it, poised on the balls of his feet, hands by his temples, his weariness subsumed in the familiarity of the stance. The laptop chimes again and he shuffles his left foot to the side and pivots on its ball as he turns his hip and throws his right leg at the bag, his technique unfolding effortlessly. A moment of sweet stasis, awareness of the bag’s mass, the room’s emptiness, his own exhaustion, and then when the kick lands the bag spasms, and there’s a sharp pain in his shin, but less than there was a year ago, and the books say that in another year the pain will be gone. He’s just recovered his stance when once again the laptop chimes and once again he kicks.
The room was on the surface when he found it, years ago, abandoned in an epidemic’s wake. He hadn’t been strong, then, as he’s strong now, and was able to hold onto it only because so many had died. He’d been shivering with fever in his huddle of blankets when a paramedic in scarred blue armor eased his head in through the door, wary kindness in the blue eyes above the dust mask, a muddy jail tattoo on his neck. He’d said something in English, which Kern had barely understood, then, and left in moments, leaving two bottles of water, vitamins, and an octagonal green pill he’d swallowed less in hope than resignation. Now the room is buried under new construction, some fifty feet below the surface, and the light well, once his preferred route of access, has become occluded, tortuous, and too narrow for his shoulders; to reach the outside, now, he has to navigate a warren of tunnels and lightless stairwells in the dark. It’s better that way, he finds, a safe feeling, and the other residents must agree, because no one has put up even the cheapest bioluminescent strips.
Through the light well he hears a woman gently scolding her children, who will be late, she says, for school. Farther away, another woman sings a song he almost knows, and for a moment he thinks of home. As he strikes the bag again a breath of wind brings frying dough, cooking oil, coffee, the day.
Yet another chime. He remembers Kayla singing to him. Is she still up, he wonders, and does she have a new lover, and does she ever think of him? He wrenches his thoughts back, chastising himself for wasting even a moment, and for having failed already, so early in the day. He kicks the bag hard enough to crush a rib cage—his shin feels shattered, but the bag caroms into the wall.
Five hundred and ninety-six kicks later, his vision greying, his breath ragged, the laptop chimes twice. He staggers away from the bag, but neither sits nor puts his hands on his knees. He doesn’t feel like vomiting, this time, which is progress. When he can breathe through his nose again he scrapes himself dry with a towel already stiff with dried sweat.
Eyes closed, he runs through the move in his mind, correcting the subtleties of balance, the nuances of technique. Soon the laptop will chime again, and again he will attack the bag with a narrow technical ferocity, coming another step closer to total purity of spirit and keeping out the void that’s all around him.
THALES’ CHAIR IS on the edge of the terrace, inches from the empty air. Far below him, waves bellow and dissolve into foam, sometimes so loud that they keep him from sleeping. He wonders where his mother is—there’s no railing, and it would be easy to take a step forward and go tumbling into space. The coastline is concave here and across the water the surf shimmers before the grey masses of the beachward favelas, where the poor dwell, where he has never been, a ghost Los Angeles shimmering in a heat haze below the real city.
The breeze catches the awning above him, its shadow undulating over the Cartesian grid of the black basalt tiles, and he thinks of the equations describing its rippling curve, the elegant entanglement of position and motion. With an effort, he pushes mathematics from his mind, as the surgeon says he must, if he’s to improve, and focuses on the world: the weave and texture of his white linen trousers, the Corbusier table beside him, the water beading on the heavy crystal tumbler, its wedge of lemon entombed in ice.
He closes his eyes, and the details of the water glass have already vanished. This is how it was before the implant, he supposes, though in fact the memories of that time are scarce—he looks down at the water, sees the orange surf buoys bobbing in the swell, remembers how, the last time he saw them, he’d thought of their house deep in the Amazonian jungle, the river flowing past it in full flood; swimming in the “safe zone” denoted by buoys, the prehistoric menace of the crocodiles sliding down the muddy bank into the tea-colored water.
They’re in the rooftop suite of the St. Mark Hotel, which his mother had said was the best that was practical but even so leaves him feeling exposed, with the constant hum of drone traffic overhead, and the lines of sight from the terrace to the rooftops of distant buildings, like an invitation to a sniper’s bullet; he misses the sense of hermetic insulation of the family compound in Leblon and the hotels they’d stayed in when they still had money. Since his father’s death and their flight to LA he’s overheard his mother on the phone trying to arrange high-interest loans secured on frozen assets in Rio, on the house she built in the mountains around Los Angeles, and even to get new architectural commissions, though she hasn’t practiced in many years, but he’s made a point of pretending not to notice.
His brothers, Helio and Marco Aurelio, will come and find him soon, and greet him with back-slapping false bonhomie. (He suspects they’re glad to be out of Rio, regard LA as an adventure—Marco Aurelio had been expelled from his college for choking someone half to death at a party, and Helio had been brought up on rape charges, though they’d soon been quashed—a columnist who’d said the family was Brazil’s answer to the Julio-Claudian dynasty had never worked again.) They’ll see the book beside his water glass—Ramanujan’s Analytical Theory of Numbers—and look disconsolate but say nothing as they take him away from the hotel and out into the city, and the day will be the same as every other. He’ll pass the morning in the humid jiu-jitsu studio of the Malibu Athletic Club, watching them roll on the blue mats in white gis. In the afternoon he’ll wait in the dunes wishing he had his book with him as his brothers ply the waves on their longboards, and when the sun sets their friends will gather, the cauliflower-eared jiu-jitsu players and their slim-waisted girls, and all watch the fading light through a serene cannabis haze. His brothers pity him, but take pains to hide it; he accepts their charity without resentment, for to him they are no more than vacant, handsome animals, moved solely by instinct, blind to all the beauty of mathematics and the world.
A wave closes with the shore, and as it approaches the narrow beach below the cliff its vitreous curvature furls and collapses, and the equations of hydrodynamics rise in his mind, but the white foam is unanalyzable; the world around him shivers, then, and fractures into a meaningless chaos of atoms and light. Where the water glass was there’s an illegible confusion of reflections; he sees the warped light of migraine, and closes his eyes.
Luminous patterns burn inside his eyelids. He opens his eyes onto a blur of pinions, white motion, refracted light. The headache intensifies, and he starts to panic, but he’s going to the clinic in the evening, and the surgeon, a competent man, will help him; he draws a deep breath, focuses, and the blur resolves into a gull hovering over the table, its churning wings glowing in the sunlight, red eyes on the untouched omelette on the rough porcelain plate.
THE MATCH FLARES and fades, and then the next, and the next. The face of the man flicking matches into life and tossing them into the darkness is that of her first surgeon, and Irina is calm, lost in the slow sequence of conflagrations, and she thinks she’ll be content to watch forever but then the surgeon says, “These are the seconds, you know, burning away,” and lights another. In the dream she laughs and says, “Nothing is lost, or ever will be,” and summons forth all the recent images of the matches burning and fading out, delighting in her power, but the surgeon shakes his head and points at her stomach and looking down at a point just above her navel (she is naked, now) she sees a black spot so tiny it ought to be imperceptible, and as she tries, futilely, to scrape it away with her fingernails she can feel the tainted cells’ surging reproduction as they boil outward into clean tissue. The black spot widens before her eyes—it hesitates, as her immune system rallies, then surges again. As it reaches bone, she feels cold.
She sits up in the hotel bed and turns off her phone’s alarm; the sound of waves hissing over sand stops abruptly, leaving only room tone—voices reflected down corridors, the hum of the air-conditioning, distant traffic. In her bag are pills that offer sleep, or worse than sleep, but she’s already late, and the client pays well, and more years of life come dear, so, moving herself like a marionette, she gets out of bed.
Brushing her teeth, the little lines around her eyes are a legible fraction of a millimeter deeper, the visible consequence of another bad night, and what other, less obvious damage has her restlessness caused, damage not reparable by any decent plastic surgeon. “So get to work,” she tells her reflection.
In the early light the hotel lobby seems oddly tragic, suggesting a valiant determination not to waste the morning. Other souls rush by, coffees in hand, immersed in their phones or having energetic conversations with the air. Most are younger than she is, bustling young things from the vast reaches of the middle middle technocracy; a pretty, somehow Midwestern-looking girl with roses in her cheeks, clad in the Armani of seasons past, is all but hyperventilating as she berates a cloud of invisible subordinates who have apparently failed to establish a link between networks in Reykjavík and Poznan. Irina tries to imagine feeling so much emotion over infrastructure, thinks that, medical bills or no, she may have to be less frugal about hotels.
In the cab, the fog glows with diffuse morning light, a migraine light, and she puts on her sunglasses, closes her eyes. Her face, reflected in the chrome of the cab’s dash, looks closed, remote, arrogant, a mask formed over an interior darkness. She tries a smile, convinces no one. They’ll see her essential strangeness, but let them; her mind turns to the cathedral vastnesses of the AIs’ memories.