After James (29 page)

From the street came a dull roar, what might have been a low cheer a few blocks away. A shuddering energy moved through the windowpane. Outside, the crowds moved as before.

“What's happening?” I asked. “I mean, exactly what?”

Now he looked at me as if he'd just realized I was standing there. His eyes were dark mouths.

He said, “This is the new weather.” I thought again of human systems grown so large no one can know their nature. He bent forward and examined one of the pictures. A protester with a bandana over his face sat against a concrete wall. There were burn marks or bloodstains on his arms. “I know this one,” he said. Did he mean the picture or the protester in the picture? “Two days after this was taken…This boy's dead.”

Of course he was. All was murder without end. For some reason I thought of the two versions of “Çodhir,” the one in the Poet's hand and the one I'd made from his words. And
now I preferred his. What did I mean? I meant that knowing there was an order to put the lines into, I wanted the disorder after all. Not chaos, but order-into-chaos. I wanted to bust up the decor. If you trust the decor you're a fool.

I turned to him but he stayed facing the collage. I reached across and grabbed the front of his shirt—when I touched him I felt a kind of spark in my skull—and pivoted him toward me. He had weight, substance. He was bigger, stronger, but he allowed this. I felt that if I pushed him through the window, he'd allow that too, and the allowances were infuriating, but he took my hands, turned them open, pushed me back one step. He pressed down on my shoulders, as if telling me to stay put.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Are we in danger?”

Nothing in his face seemed expressly unkind, I thought, and at that moment an explosion sounded and the window shivered in its frame. The glass misted over and then it blew open and I was thrown against the wall. The back of my head hit something hard. I didn't lose consciousness but it was several seconds before I put together what had happened. The jet of water had struck me in the chest and was gone again within moments. As I looked around I saw the Poet was gone too. My hands were bloody, glass in the palms. I got to my feet and looked out just as he ran into the thick braid of turmoil where the police and citizens fought. When he reached midstreet, as if they'd been waiting for him, the police line surged forward. There was another loud crack and more shouting, people running, falling, being run over, dragged off. A cannon stream knocked them down and then
it was all short bursts, the way the cops ran, sudden percussives, the way they fired, shooting gas at angles from antlered guns. At close quarters the weapon of choice was their boots. They stomped and kicked like common thugs. Through it all a tall man fell—was it him? I thought so—and was circled and claimed by cops and I couldn't see a thing.

I ran around to the entrance and passed beside the metal detector. The guard was at the door holding back people wanting shelter inside. He looked at me gravely and held up a hand. When the cannon swept by again and cleared petitioners from the steps he unlocked the door and opened it fast and shoved me outside. My eyes and throat closed immediately. I tried to look across to where I'd seen the Poet on the ground but the space now belonged to the police, in helmets and gas masks, advancing in ragged phalanx, gathering the citizens they could, dragging them behind the line. I fell into a thin, broken file, people crouched and clutching blindly, fetal, crawling. One of them poured water into her eyes and then handed me the plastic bottle and I did the same and passed it on. All of us were coughing. Out of the gas and water the masked cops were coming at us in twos and threes like figures in a dream, selecting at random, pulling us away. One of them pointed at me and came running, another cop behind him, passing other protesters. They were after me and I turned to run too late. The lead cop had me by the hair and kicked at my knees until I fell, and the two of them grabbed my arms and started dragging me just as three men with T-shirts wrapped over their faces ran at them. Someone took up my legs. I couldn't breathe and tried to say so but nothing
came out, the experience was beyond words in that moment. Then all in an instant my feet were on the ground again and the young men hurled themselves at the cops and knocked one of them down as the other retreated and signalled something to the troops behind him. I was free and the masked young men were beating the cop when the water hit us.

I shot backward along the brick street and the pain seemed both general and multiply located, both sudden and timeless, and in the tumble I was there and in the future something like the one that came to be as the water advanced upon me and spun me, wouldn't let me go, and I passed by people running, catching discontinued scenes, reeling past people carrying others by the legs and arms, people tending others down the side streets, a column of smoke shunting into view and away, past barriers, shouting, and came to a stop. I looked up at apartment windows above the chaos, people standing behind them, closed away, and the figures were shadows, the shadows various, observing the spectacle.

T
he world continued to act upon me. I influenced events very little. Unlike in literature, character was not fate. Fate was unbelievably itself. Staring out from the unlikely present I found each possible future equally implausible, though one of them began to take shape along the Canada-U.S. border where, under a concealing canopy of maples, I rented a house in a woods. I lived off a small sum Dominic advanced to me from his will. In early November came the days of first snow. The place had a busted furnace and a woodstove. I burned firewood and sawed and chopped to replenish the pile, a daily routine in my unpeopled life. In the mornings and late afternoons I handwrote stories I found hard to believe, including the one you're now reading. To protect the vulnerable, I changed details and names, including my own. Amanda is not Amanda, Durant not Durant, the poem “August” not “August,” and so on. These measures are acts of delusion or faith in the idea that an audience awaits and some reader somewhere will see what's true.

Amanda and I didn't get our Italian reunion. From Istanbul I flew to Rome but never left the airport. A man with aviator glasses peeking out of his shirt pocket seemed to be following me through the Fiumicino terminal, or at least he was always behind me as I detoured, ducked into a washroom, stood a distance from the screens listing baggage carousels. I left my bag unclaimed for several minutes, waiting for him to claim his and leave, until finally we were the last two waiting, pretending the two last bags weren't ours. I claimed mine, went through security, headed straight for an Air Canada desk, and booked a flight to Montreal.

For six hours I camped out near the gate. Nothing that could be called my state could also be called stable. In a wi-fi lounge with free stations I wrote to Amanda and Durant, explaining nothing in detail. I wrote of a change of plans, of “forces able to inhabit our obsessions,” and sounded unreliable to myself, knowing I couldn't explain the further intricacies of what I knew or how I'd come to know it. In my bag was the fugitive hard drive. “Reality and paranoia both present a seamless fabric of truth and fantasy,” I wrote. “Implausibility is no longer a measure of anything. If it was the Poet whom I met in Istanbul, his presence there was like his presence in the poems. I have to believe that he communicated to me, though I can't know the full meaning of the communication.” He had broken some protocol and taken a risk to make contact. He had wanted to be known, or for me to know that I was known. And he'd succeeded and paid for it. Under the cover of riot control, using police thuggery, the Shadowy Apparatus (I used the term ironically and not) had reclaimed him and had tried to claim me.

Half a day later I was back in Dominic's house, helping him organize, pack boxes, and decide what to do with the materials of his life. My last email exchanges with Amanda and Durant were written and collected on Dominic's laptop. I learned that Pierluigi and the Keyholers had gone dark, fearing reprisals. No one else took cover. Amanda was looking forward to The Hague. A friend who worked on political killings in Guatemala had promised to give her access to secret records. She still hoped to learn who'd killed her brother. I said I was getting off the grid, and wished her well, and asked her to imagine a day when we could meet again. Just picturing this day, I said, would bring it closer.

Durant decided to stay where he was for a few more weeks, dismissing my direct warning that he move out of Carlo's building and return to his life in California. “But I need a new point of focus, James. I've decided to resume my work on genetic transferences. The unknown world is endlessly interesting.” Without prompting, he confided that, in his quiet times, he hoped his daughter would return to him.

I understood hope, the need to believe in whatever thin evidence of fixed meaning could connect the future with a past that seemed to go on forever.

In the woods I lived bookless, offline. With no cellphone or computer I sent my mailing address to Durant via Larunda College in an unsigned, handwritten letter, glued and taped at the seal. At random intervals I checked the mailbox I rented in the second-nearest town, where business was slow and I could see if anyone was watching, but there was no reply.

In time the work of writing prose and of pre-grieving Dominic, whom I knew I would never see or speak to again, changed my imagination. I was no longer subject to cha-chas, or at least their character matured. My lateral thoughts seemed to fire to more purpose, as if they'd finally left their youth. And living alone without human contact for days at a time, with no screens, no voices but those from a radio I seldom turned on, set my brain waves into a pleasing rhythm as they formed and rolled and broke upon the shore of my new world.

At night I walked along the edge of a ravine behind the house, then into woods and fields. The stars, if not the satellites, hung above in a trusted disregard of me and my little world. At their unimaginable distances they offer a picture of a cosmos that could never have been. Some stars are already long dead, others extinguished more recently, all have shifted, but there they all are, seeming present. Knowing of the lie inside the heavens (knowing not the specific lie but of the lie's existence) layers the simple amazement of stargazing, one of the few things we have in common with the earliest humans who, if they believed anything could be told from the stars, saw in them not the past but the future.

And yet when I got turned around in the fields one night I used the North Star to mark my direction and find my way home, an experience that reminded me of navigational poetic images and recovered something of those readings at Three Sheets—the site's very name used seagoing imagery—that had drawn me in the first place. I thought of Dante's story of Ulysses's last voyage, into the unknown
world, and of canto XX of
The Inferno
, where Virgil leads the poet through a treatise on seers and diviners. For Dante a prophet was above all a great reader, someone for whom the book of the future, the
magno volume
of God's mind, lies open. All these challenges to God and His knowledge landed people in one or another circle of hell. I understood something of the dumb vanity of those who seek omnipresence and all-knowingness. Not that I believed in Dante's God, or even that of my parents, but some otherworldly dimension had been added to my pre-existing sense of wonderment. I had always found my transports in the physical and experiential world mediated through arts and technology. Now as I wrote I felt the company of distinct presences. These can't be described as angels or demons because the presences weren't divine or diabolic. They had no designs on me. The closest word might be drawn from that set of terms for
ghost
, except these beings weren't supernatural, but supramaterial. The phenomenon eludes direct description.

I came to believe in the there/not-thereness of invisible beings. They were with me all day and began to appear in the stories I wrote. I chose not to think of them any differently than I did the people who had been visible to me, and to one another, Durant and Amanda and others, or than I did my mother and father, still near me in the dark.

And in spite of myself and of Dante, for weeks while writing I began to see scenes from the future in vivid, waking dreams. In one of these I was in the parking lot of a diner somewhere in the west of this continent. With me was Amanda. It seemed we'd just met up. As we approached the
entrance, the glass door opened and a woman about our age, maybe older, stepped out. She and I looked at each other and she hesitated for just a second in a moment of recognition or false recognition—we both felt it—and then passed by. I didn't turn but watched her reflection in the door as I held it open. In the parking lot the woman looked at me briefly, then got into her car. I joined Amanda inside and she gestured with her head and eyes to the end of the diner. There, in the last row of red-and-chrome booths, Durant sat not just by himself, but existentially alone, his face barely familiar for being totally open. He looked at us the way the woman had, and again a recognition sparked and died. He didn't know us, or didn't know how he knew us. Moment to moment the dream formed in front of me as I followed it in prose, but it stalled there before we approached him and, while other waking dreams have since come and gone, dreams in which I am absent except as the engine of them, and that suggest possible worlds strangely connected to one another through me, it all ended in that place, and my two American friends never appeared to me again.

S
ince the summer Celia turned twelve her father had taken her on expeditions. He led teams of interchangeable members, opening plague pits in London, coring ice in Siberia, hose-blasting permafrost in the far north full of perfectly intact, extinct creatures, while some grad student who'd pulled the duty to look after her demonstrated the care involved in brushing and screening soil for the tiny bones of long-gone lizards or birds. Three Junes ago they revived the practice for the first time since she left for university. Now he was summering in France, living alone in the Cévennes. A team had come and gone. Once a week he visited friends in a lab ninety minutes
away in Montpellier, but most days he spent in the mountains, on foot.

She pictured him wandering out of the mellifluous French landscape and into a cold, soundless house full of other people's furniture and dishes. He'd have dinner with a magazine splayed open beside his plate, following the plot twists, red herrings, and cliffhangers in
Nature
and
Science.
The rest of his time was a mystery to her. Before a visit she liked knowing the sum of his hours, the daily whole she was being added to. It was strange to think of a day as a sum, but there was comfort in imagining numbers unattached to time and money, luggage charges, seat designations next to sneezers, infection and mortality rates.

She'd been in transit for fifteen hours and had slept maybe two. In final approach she looked down at morning in Paris, bright city, oddly flat. The Eiffel Tower, so small in person, like a male movie star. Even the high-rises of La Défense seemed like just the beginning of a vision, a dream interrupted, sketched out and half-realized at a safe distance to the west of the old realities, the beautiful districts, proportioned, ornate, storied in the richer sense.

On the ground things were loud and chaotic. That her suitcase seemed heavier on this side of the Atlantic complicated the boarding of trains. When she finally took her seat on the TGV she turned on her phone. The only new text was from Indrani, looking after Hartley for the week. “Walked him, he pooped. Now eating popcorn in front of HBO. He's coughing up kernels on my rug.” She almost
laughed, almost cried, good lord. She fell asleep at three hundred kilometres an hour.

At the Montpellier train station he was lit with a kind of chemiluminescence. Something just below the skin held differently. “You look good, Dad. Great pigmentation.” He said he had something exciting to tell her.

They drove through a landscape of hard plains, rock outcroppings, sudden sheer faces. His hands cupped the steering wheel, left wrist curled at eleven o'clock, right at three, then to the stick shift, then back. He glanced at her repeatedly as he spoke. She watched his avid blue eyes, his long jaw working the words and lines. He said a local friend had given him a map of the unexplored cliffs and he'd been investigating as he could. The hikes were physically hard—was she in shape?—but his joints liked the climate. He could still balance on a foothold, still scramble on loose ground. After a couple of weeks the friend, a German he wanted her to meet, told him to focus on the least accessible of the promising rock faces, and several days ago for three hours he'd cut a path that emerged above a treeline. After no more than a minute along a barely navigable ledge, he came to a deep, uncrossable crevasse, and there on the other side, a cave mouth.

“There seems to be no research on this cave. I'm sure no one knows of it. And it's perfectly protected. If it opens up, if it doesn't just run to a full stop in the dark, there could be thousands of years of artifacts inside. Tens of thousands. Neanderthals and humans lived around here at the same
time. I've been waiting for you. Tomorrow we'll climb with a ladder. We'll go in together.”

He looked at her a long time and the car drifted to the shoulder before he corrected it.

“Okay. That's pretty exciting. Wonderful.”

“Wonder's the very thing that makes us human. There are lots of theories about Neanderthal extinction but it came down to a lack of imagination.”

She'd imagined her arrival, an embrace, an almost wordless greeting, and a slow gathering of the moment. Now she was here and there'd been no arrival. Their reunions often began on the topic of her sister, but Chrissy was generating little concern these days. Still he might have waited to tell her about the cave. Maybe he was afraid of recognizing her, or of failing to—she was aging, changing, about to enter important years for a childless single woman with a career—and so he'd put something between them that they'd have to pass back and forth. She'd wait a day before getting around to life updates, a new position he'd approve of at the company, a brief romance come and gone, a health scare come and gone. She supposed she wouldn't tell him about an unwanted pregnancy come and gone. Or at least a surprise pregnancy, and given the precautions a bit of a mystery one. It seemed to have come and gone on its own, as if it had nothing to do with her, or as if she had failed a test of grace, not that she believed in grace or even really understood what it pretended to be.

“They died off very suddenly, the Neanderthals. Twenty-eight thousand years ago, in Gibraltar, staring at the sea. They
weren't crossers of oceans. Leaps of faith didn't occur to them. Whereas we
Homo sapiens
, well, here we are.”

Here they were, driving down into a gorge of steep light. A whitewater river ran next to the road. She watched the crests and considered his hopes that the visit might be marked by a great discovery. His world had always been larger than hers. His enthusiasms had taken him to the top of the extinction field. Her mind didn't work the same way. When she was being hard on herself she would say she was, as a scientific researcher, at best only dogged.

They were barely to his house, one-storey, terra-cotta floors, at the base of a mountain, and she had just showered and changed clothes when he announced they were going out to have dinner with his new German friend. He said the friend wasn't a woman, no, and that Celia would see right to the heart of him, this man, and find there “a nest of essential questions.” She pictured such a nest, tangled into smooth form, saucer-shaped, greyly reflective. She'd noticed this about herself, how her mind became suggestive and picture-prone when her sleep got messed up. Her body thought it was still in Vancouver. She used to trust her body, its distant early warnings and blunt reminders, but lately it had struck its own secret agenda and lost its sense of humour. It would arrive properly rested in a day or two. Until then she'd have to float around on her own, a hovering face, talking and smiling, waiting to close its eyes.

The nearest village was stone. It must have once been merely itself but now was picturesque. Red roofs crowded together
in some ancient improvisation below a huge chateau estate with its own forest. The chateau, their destination, had been divided into apartments, most of them owned by what her father described as “kickabout heirs” of the French upper middle class. Their host, Armin Koss, greeted them in the ungroomed gravel parking area and led them through enormous doors into his first-floor home. He was thin but strong-looking, about forty, his face darkly tanned. His body and hands moved with casual precision.

The apartment opened onto a stone patio at the back of the chateau. At dinner they sat overlooking a little river and a pretty falls about thirty metres upstream. They spoke of air travel, her father's summer house in Oregon, a resident species of bat, the local watershed. Twice Celia caught Koss looking at her fingers on her wineglass, once at her breasts, and momentarily losing his focus on whatever her father was talking about, sonar or rock erosion. When her father paused to eat, Koss asked Celia about her work.

“She can't tell you much,” her father said, mouth half-full of trout. “Private companies. They feed on secrecy clauses and blood oaths.”

She smiled. It struck her that she didn't really know where she was, the name of the town, the history of the chateau. It was unsettling, the state of not knowing. She was expected to speak.

“Whatever moves the ball down the field, as one of my team leaders says.”

“I don't understand,” said Koss.

“The ball is knowledge,” she said.

“The ball is profit. It's not knowledge. It's not even pigskin. It's boner pills.”

Only now, in the pre-twilight, did she notice that his hair had grown wispy.

“This is an old argument between us,” she said. “I work as a researcher for a drug company. This is my ongoing sin. Lately I've been reading about stimulated astrocyte cells and anhedonia, the inability to take pleasure in pleasurable things. The wine's good, isn't it, Dad?”

“They're not even properly medical.” His forehead was pursed in a familiar disbelief. “My dear brilliant girl here is in the so-called lifestyle drugs division. The motto is ‘Longer Living, Better Life.' ” She expected him to add his usual line, that her “monkeyshine operation” really “puts the sham in shamanism,” but he left it out this time.

“For the record,” she said, “I'm not brilliant, never was. But I began as a virologist. Dad wants me to work at a university and practise some imaginary pure science that will save us from the coming plague to end all plagues. He doesn't know that lately I'm doing that very thing for my profit-crazed company. We hope to find a wonder drug and sell people their lives back.”

“You're doing viruses? Is that true? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I just got here.”

He straightened in his chair and nodded, as if judiciously.

“I'm sorry. Sometimes I won't shut up. Armin, tell Celia where your money comes from.”

When he drank or his blood was up her father was prone
to blunt questions and commands. Koss seemed unsurprised. He said that “as a child” he'd designed an early, long-lost generation of video games. Bigger talents had surpassed him, and now he was simply at work “practising enlightenment.” The phrase sounded more North American West Coast than German, but maybe the distinctions were dated.

“Armin spends his days following his passions. Art and wine.” The two had met at a nearby farmers' market. Koss said their first shared interest was a local terroir that produced the very Mas de Daumas Gassac she was drinking. Her father had never had a tolerance for spiritual types, or artists who hadn't lived in caves and been dead for seventeen thousand years. She guessed that the men had been brought together by loneliness. The rest of the chateau was dark. There had been only one car in the parking area. The other tenants were apparently elsewhere in these months.

New sounds reached them from the water. Five or six teenagers, boys and girls, were wading in the shallow river above the falls. Celia could barely see them, bodies dimly lucent and contoured under a nearly full moon. Her French was minimal and the kids were a little too far away, but the voices were full of laughter and daring.

“I don't know much about gaming,” she said to Koss. “Even the old kinds. I mix up how things move, horses and bishops.”

“Gaming is a beautiful distraction, nothing more. My big success was a kind of murder mystery in an old house. The player moves his character through the rooms, spots clues or false clues. He turns around suddenly to see shadows
disappearing down hallways. And of course there are bodies. One at the beginning, more by the end.”

Her father had entered the kind of shaped silence that often preceded a pronouncement.

“What was the best clue?” she asked.

“The clues changed play to play, but I took some pride in the distant barking dog. The player might think to ask why it was barking and why it suddenly stopped.”

“I don't suppose it just dozed off,” said Celia.

“The point of the game is to produce fear you don't have to be scared of. Empty fear is like humour. It makes life richer by opening the spirit.”

“You won't believe it, Lia, but Armin has been teaching me about spiritual practices. It might be the wine every night but I seem to be buying in.”

He was right, she didn't believe it and wouldn't indulge him.

“Aren't the most popular games pretty violent?” she asked. “Some fantasies inspire kids to join armies.”

“Designers find the criticisms…innocent. These worlds aren't real.”

“But they come from somewhere and they go somewhere. For things that aren't real they make a very large wake in reality.”

The wake from his lucrative murder game was currently topping up their wineglasses.

“Maybe you're right,” said Koss. “Yes, I agree. Of course.”

His assent was transparently false and she saw immediately that Koss intended the transparency. And he'd calculated,
correctly, that Celia would catch it and her father would not. The man was sly, she decided. Whatever he was doing in their company, he'd been doing it at half speed.

“Of scientists, I know the chemist Kekulé,” said Koss. “His revelation about the structure of benzene came to him in a dream of a snake eating its tail. The symbol is called the ouroboros.”

“I'm named after him, you know, Lia. After Kekulé.”

“The self-consuming snake appears in many cultures.” Koss was evidently a sampler of wisdoms. “In the ancient world. In the Book of the Dead. In Hindu folk myths it represents creation calling itself to life.”

“Beautiful,” said her father. She had never heard him utter the word, not even to describe an arrangement of nucleotides.

“And here I thought benzene was just a petrochemical carcinogen,” she said.

Something in the teenagers' voices changed. They were no louder but a new random cadence had taken up. One of the boys leapt out past the falls and cannonballed into the water. The drop was five or six metres. He surfaced with a yelp and then another launched himself out and down.