Beautiful Wreck (2 page)

I floated the symbols and stats. Mateus Vida was imposing even in teeny yellow shorts. They glowed against his dark skin. Information wafted beside him, telling me he stood six feet tall. Beside his bald head, white letters read,
Weight: 83 kg (184 pounds). Reach: 188 cm (74 inches)
. I read a litany of Black Belts:
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Judo, Taekwondo
. He specialized in Muay Thai.

“That’s kickboxing,” Jeff told me, and he gestured at the cage, poking at the stats with the same finger that held his plastic cup of beer. Some of it seeped into my authentic jeans.

They all had Viking style bynames, just like Aud the Deep Minded, Eirik Bloodaxe. Here stood Vida the Locust. His opponent was Yusef “Superior” Cruz, a self-important choice of name, I thought. At six feet tall, 186 pounds, and with a couple of similar Black Belts, he seemed to my untrained eye to be a fair match for Vida.

I found moments that weren’t ugly. Time seemed to stretch out and I could appreciate a snapshot of two men tumbling in midair, one lifted high like a dancer. The sour face of a referee looking at me from between a wrestler’s legs. But those moments of clarity were scarce. Mostly, it was a kind of grueling hugging on the floor, with grunting and some vicious punches. Bodies would sometimes slam into the cage, right in front of us, and adrenalin left my hands and feet tingling. Sprays of blood and spit just missed us. I pretended it was true. I let the stats drop and watched.

The fight was brief. Just three minutes of circling, jabbing, inviting with bared teeth. There were a few terrible punches, hard and gross. I couldn’t imagine being hit even once and getting up again, let alone so many times. Cruz circled, waiting, wanting to hit, to take down. And then Vida kicked him.

It wasn’t just a kick to the shins or belly or even the chest. From a standing position, he kicked him in the face. Time slowed down, literally now, for the replay. The kick was elegant. Vida’s leg was poetry, long and accurate, the ball of his foot smashing up from under Cruz’s chin. The man’s face rippled like rubber.

Then time rushed forward again and he hit the mat, knocked cold. Everyone flew to their feet with the madness of shock, outrage, and glee. Tall, cheering bodies obscured me on every side. I could still just see the cage. Vida was spinning in a tight circle, ecstatic, fists clenched in triumph. He looked like a giant figure skater corkscrewing down, down into the mat. Down onto one knee.

A metallic screech split my head—a brutal ripping sensation in my brain. My hands flew to my ears, but the wrenching was deep inside and I couldn’t reach it. Something unfathomably delicate was tearing. I shut my eyes.

And opened them to see the ocean.

The green waves were almost black, laced with white foam in the moonlight. I knelt, my hands sinking into cold, moist sand. Every grain felt sharp and clear. The last ripples of a wave reached close to me, like fingers searching blindly for my knees. A glow cast the beach in bluish white. I turned to it, and it dazzled. Mammoth letters lit the sky, each at least three stories high. They were brilliant against a black expanse of space.
STEEPLECHASE
. In smaller letters,
THE FUN FACTORY
fought to outglow dozens of swags of white bulbs, tiers of them climbing the facade of a fairy tale castle.

My head ached and drifted onto my shoulder, making the scene cant. A hundred people seemed to slide off the tilting boardwalk. They were lit with colors of the dead, faces blue under a million incandescent bulbs and shadowed by the brims of broad hats. A hundred ankle-length skirts caught and riffled in unison by a sharp wind off the water. It blew my hair forward and blocked out my view. A strong smell, like salt and fish, burned behind my eyes.

I felt a rushing, fast building roar of applause and chanting. “Vida! Vida!” The audience crushed me. I swayed into Jeff, and he dropped heavily to his seat, the glow of cheering on his cheeks and in his eyes. He seemed unaffected by the ripping sensation, the exterior view. I hadn’t seen him at the beach. I’d felt sand and wind and water. An outdoor scenario? Without Jeff or Morgan. I’d been alone there.

Vida spoke to a reporter in Portuguese, the words flowing, scrolling through the air in English a moment ahead of the human translator who was programmed to be there, just like he had been on that historic night. Vida was thanking people, his family, his trainer. “How does it feel to be middleweight champion of the world?” He grinned. Smiled for the flashing cameras.

He was given a massive silver belt, so big it covered his considerable abs, and he held it across himself to show it off, but he didn’t fasten it. Instead, he approached Cruz and placed the belt at his opponent’s feet. The champion bent low over it and touched his head to the mat. He looked like a knight, pledging allegiance to the man he’d just knocked flat with a kick to the face. It was one of the things I understood intellectually, but never did get in my heart. That you could beat each other so savagely, and then bow down to one another, honorable brothers. I knew many words for it in Old Norse, for honor. I knew it existed. I saw it. But it wasn’t mine.

The Future
City of Iceland

“What happened in there?” I tried to ask between kisses, from under the weight of Jeff’s sweet-smelling body and searching mouth. He had me pinned against the wall outside my building, my insides starting to melt in his heat. I struggled to remember my question. “With the beach?”

“What?” He was distracted, shoving kisses at my mouth.

“When everyone was cheering at the end.” I got one arm free and pushed at his chest. “For a second I was outside by the ocean.”

“Huh.” He paused briefly, his troubleshooting mind engaged, but then his body took over again and he swept the hair off my neck and bent to kiss it. “You must have been in a botched test for a second.” He nuzzled into me. “I’ll look at it tomorrow.” We forgot it in a clumsy press of bodies against the wall, a deeper kiss.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want him. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I fell into a daze of skin and tongues and our long blond hair mingling, and there were moments of stark beauty. I would look down at him, at us, and I would see how fair and pretty we were, and I would feel nothing. Or no, I would feel something, and it was flat as scents in the tank.

Outside my door tonight, he pushed his hips into me. We never did meet. It was as though some emotional mismatch was echoed in the body, a truer judge than the mind. Jeff gave up and pulled away, disappointed, but not really upset. He didn’t wonder why I wanted to be alone, didn’t worry about whether I loved him or even wanted him. I’d see him at the lab. He’d pour me coffee and we would smile, he would wink.

He’d never know what I did instead, on nights when I went home alone.

I zipped up my snowsuit and pulled on big, spiked boots. I left by the back door of my building, the one for the odd people like me who went beyond the gate. I stepped into the night and started walking up the waves of a motionless sea.

My building backed up into the glacier—the only one left, stabilized and gutted by the same company that owned the tank. Past the back gate, the white expanse I walked on stretched forever, an ocean frozen in the midst of rolling and crashing. Marbled darkest green and white, ancient and unmoving. I read that there were once thirteen glaciers, some of them unfathomable at fifteen times this size or more, far beyond anywhere I could see.

When I climbed high enough, I turned back to see the Atlantic Ocean twenty miles away. Towers of glass and metal filled every space between me and that water. A million lights glowed steadily in windows, never stirring with any breeze or breath. Twenty million people lived there, not caring that their flames could never flicker. Buildings piled on each other like boulders. A cairn, a grave mound for the walking dead.

I whispered to them all, an ancient lullaby.

Everyone settled.

I said the words from the Farm Notes, a Viking Age diary I had translated.

Goodnight to
smali
and
kyr
and
hross
. To sheep and cows and horsies.

To grassy field, rough walls.

To stars and hearth and strong house. To woods and whales and sea.

I whispered sleepy words of young girls, their braids lit by fire.

The ends of my own long braids glowed pale in the night. Warm, synthetic flur scratched my forehead and cheeks, but my nose and lips felt nothing. I stiffly kissed my gloved palm and raised my hand to let it free, in case it might reach someone.

I went inside to read.

W
ALL SCREENS GLOWED WITH A VERDANT PASTURE FULL OF
flowers and horses—the few colors in my neutral apartment. My bare toes gripped the grooves in the kitchen tiles, my boots and suit discarded on the living room floor. While I waited for the coffee machine to choke and whir to life, I told my contacts I wanted to see the diary.

Jeff said it was impossible to feel the moment when the opaque tint closed like an iris from every side, covering the eyes for reading. I always thought I did, though. I could almost hear a snick, like a lock turning.

The letters jumped to life. The scan of the ancient book showed them as they’d been written, the common alphabet, not sacred runes. Letters so tiny, traveling down the pages of birch bark that had been worked into a rough paper. Along the edges and top, upside down, words small enough to fit dozens of observations on each precious sheet. The ink had spread until the words were almost unreadable, as if they’d been worked with a bristly brush.

I’d done my own translation, and I could recall every word choice, every line and turn of phrase. I would read it all again anyway.

I’d found the diary in a disused museum—a Viking ruin that sat three levels under the city. There were open stacks of electronic files, compiled when someone used to care and then never deleted. They contained the dating of stones, comprehensive lists of artifacts, notated images of spindles and combs and scoops to clean out ears. One wooden doll. Its cracked form was cradled in an electronic grave.

Among the jumble of information, someone had collected snips and quotes from later sagas, from the stories attributed to the family who once lived there. They told of a formidable chieftain with eyes of precious metal and a face like death itself, a man who could form new gods from his own hands. His wife was a shape shifter. It was fanciful and electric and very Viking.

But even in such a dramatic household, someone must have spun the thread. Someone fed the children, stoked the fire, strung up the fish.

I dug around in the database and found her. The farm wife. Among a bunch of ancient scientific papers about the devastation of Iceland’s forests, behind long lists of extinct animals, lumbering auks and leaping salmon, there sat her diary.