Objects of Worship (25 page)

How could an entire universe be annihilated so
casually?

I wept.

I remembered my wife. It felt like a lifetime since I’d
last seen Janet. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge
to hold her, to taste her. The smell of her skin came back to
me, and my heart ached with desire to see her again.

But perhaps it was time for all of this to end. Quickly.
Painlessly. For another world, perhaps a better world, to be
born from this one’s destruction.

Perhaps I was full of shit — justifying a monstrous offer
I could not bring myself to refuse.

I took Kali’s hand. While Hunter and the Preservers still
battled, we raced for the unguarded portal and stepped
into another world, a world only Jake Kurtz could have
imagined.

Distorted cars litter the bridge, quantum ice fractalling
outward from their engines, from the circuits of their
dashboards. The ice has burst from their chassis, creating
random new configurations of ice, technology, and anatomy.

There was no warning. In one moment the world
changed: this is the ice age.

On our bicycles, Mark and I zigzag through the
permanently stalled traffic. I try not to stare at the damaged
bodies. But Mark is too engrossed to notice my queasiness.
Too giddy. Goofy, even. For so many reasons, we were right
to leave. Already, his face is brighter.

“Hey, Martha . . . Did you see that couple in the blue
SUV?”

I wish I hadn’t: ice snaked around their heads, crushing
them together.

“Did you see — ”

No, I didn’t see. I don’t look. At least I try not to. Mark
copes in his own way; I can’t fault him for doing it differently.
He never told me how he lost his parents, and I never told
him how I lost mine. I should be numb to such sights by
now. In the city, they’d become part of the landscape; we’d
ignored them. We’d been too cold to notice. Too cold to care.
Barely out of the city, and already we’re both thawing — at
least a little.

I can’t bring myself to tell him to stop. So I just pedal
faster. I race off the Jacques Cartier Bridge onto the
highway, where the number of cars on the road decreases
with distance, leaving Montreal behind, heading for . . .

. . . For a new world? Maybe. A different world, at least. I
just want us to belong somewhere.

People say the whole planet is like this now. But how
can they be sure? Nothing works anymore. No television,
no telephones, no computers, no radios. There’s no way to
communicate.

But they must be right. If the rest of the world were still
intact, someone would have rescued us by now. The Army.
The United States. Someone. Anyone.

“Martha!”

I look back, and Mark is pedalling hard to catch up to
me.

I love how the wind lifts his long, dark hair. His smile
is like a little boy’s. Already, I’ve forgiven him for being so
morbid, for being so wrapped up in his grotesque passion
that he couldn’t notice my distress.

Since I’ve known him, Mark has always protected me.
Now he’s relaxing about that. I like him even more this
way.

He catches up to me, and we stop. We gaze at the
transmuted cityscape we are leaving behind.

The sunlight’s reflection almost blinds me; ice blankets
the Island of Montreal. The skyscrapers of the financial
district have been transformed into macabre, twisted spires.
The tall downtown hotels bulge with ice — the tumorous
limbs of a tentacled leviathan. Like a bed of gems, the city
catches the sunlight and glows. Even the heat generated
by all this light cannot dispel the cold. The air carries an
autumn chill, even though it’s mid-July. The ice radiates
cold. It never melts; it’s so hard it can’t even break.

The Quantum Cross, the icon of the city’s new order,
rests atop Mount Royal.

I close my eyes, not yet ready to cry. Eager to forget. But
the memories come anyway.

All I did was shut my eyes, and the world took on a new
shape.

Sunday afternoon: my sister in the upstairs bathroom,
obsessing over her looks; my parents driving out to the
airport to meet Grandma. Me: by the living room window,
reading a book, curled up in the coziest armchair. I can’t
remember which book.

Here’s what I remember: the sky was radiantly blue, and
the sunlight hit the window with a harsh brightness. I had
a slight headache. From reading, from the light.

Music: a trance/jungle mix spun in the CD player.
I closed my eyes. The music stopped abruptly. I heard
a weird crunching sound. A cool wave washed over me.
My eyes snapped open. The television looked like a cubist
mobile of the Milky Way. In place of the stereo, a crystal
statue of a lizard demon crowned with looping horns. The
lamps were now surrealist bouquets. Pearly spikes punched
through the walls, especially near electrical outlets and
lightswitches.

In the distance, screams rose against the background of
cold silence.

I shivered.

My sister, Jocelyne, would never meet her boyfriend again.
In the upstairs bathroom I found her skull, neck, and chest
skewered by the ice sprouting from her hairdryer.

I hurried outside, onto streets lined with transformed
buildings, arrayed with wrecked, deformed vehicles. Wires
barbed with ice dangled from poles and walls, lay splattered
all over. An instant alien landscape transposed onto a
familiar urban grid.

I ran. It was all I could do. I ran, trying to escape the
affected zone. I ran. And ran.

Until I stumbled on my parents’ car. They were smeared
on the seat leather, pulverized by the ice.

I looked around. I’d reached the expressway. As far as I
could see, there was evidence of the transformation. For the
first time I noticed the new shape of the giant electric cross
atop Mount Royal: a violent explosion frozen midblast.
Towering over the city, the metamorphosed cross kept a
vigil over this new world, claiming dominion.

Since that first day, I hadn’t ventured outside. How long
ago had that been? I was almost out of food. I awoke
sporadically. Sometimes I snacked on stale crackers. I’d
exhausted the canned goods. Days ago? Weeks?

In this new ice age, the ceaseless hum of automobile
traffic had finally been quieted. The sound of airplanes no
longer wafted down from above.

The city was silent. Cold and silent. I felt that silence in
the hollow of my bones. The cold had seeped into me, had
hardened my insides, had slowed the beat of my heart.

I stared out the window at the unchanging landscape
and fell asleep again, to dreams of silent jets falling from
the sky.

Even in my dreams, I heard him. Yet, I stayed asleep.
The sounds of him taking and releasing his breath replaced
the silenced engines.

Eventually, I woke, his presence gradually imprinting
itself on me. And then I saw him: sitting on the edge of my
bed.

He said, “Hi,” neither smiling nor frowning. Waiting.
He had long black hair, and he was maybe a year or two
older — almost a man. But he had the face of a little boy, and
dark eyes so big that I saw deep into him, saw how he’d been
hurt by the coldness of the world. Although I had never met
him before, I knew him. In that moment I knew him.

“My name is Mark,” he said; louder than a whisper, but
without inflection.

I rested my head on his thigh. The touch of his callused
fingertips against my scalp shot sparks of warmth through
my body, began thawing the cold that had settled within
me. I filled my lungs with air. The smell of his sweat eased
the flow of my blood. I let go of my breath and moaned
drowsily. I fell asleep again. No more falling jets. Finally,
I rested.

“Quantum ice. Call it
quantum ice
.” Daniel coined the term.
The expression stuck. We heard it whispered everywhere
by Montrealers who roamed their transfigured city like
zombies.

Daniel was Mark’s brother, but they were so different.
Mark was tall and calm. Handsome. Daniel was short and
nervous. Funny looking, in a bad way. And loud. Always
chattering, listening to himself rhapsodize. His eyes were
wild, always darting here and there, unable to focus on
anything, or on anyone.

We saw Daniel infrequently. Usually when he wanted to
bum food off his brother. Mark wanted him to stay with us,
but, to my relief, Daniel resisted the idea. He’d disappear for
days, waiting for Mark to fall asleep before he wandered off.

Daniel had his theory about the ice age. A bomb, he
thought. A quantum bomb. The project of the rogue R&D
department of some corporate weapons manufacturer.
He claimed his blogging community used to keep track
of things like that. He said reality — physics — had been
changed at a fundamental level. Old technologies no longer
worked. We needed a new scientific paradigm. Other things
might have changed. Our bodies might not work quite the
same way anymore. Nature might have changed. The food
chain. The air. Gravity.

Daniel was a bit younger than I was; he certainly couldn’t
have been more than fifteen. He looked like the type who,
before the ice age, got beat up on his way home from school.
But the ice age had changed him; it had changed everyone.
Daniel spoke with the intensity of the insane. A prophet
desperate to convert his audience.

He was full of shit. Daniel was as ignorant as the rest of
us. Nobody could know the truth. Maybe the ice had really
been caused by aliens, or by magic, or . . . Maybe God had
sneezed, or something. Probably, yes, it had been a bomb.
Did it really matter? We couldn’t bring back the dead.
Besides, there was no proof anything beyond electrical
technology had been affected. Fractals of quantum ice had
erupted from the cores of our machines, from the wires
that carried electricity, from the circuits and engines that
fed on electric power. It had taken at most a few seconds
between when everything stopped working and when the
quantum ice appeared and expanded.

The state of the world: this strange new ice age.

Society had broken down. No social workers swooping
down on orphaned kids. We had to take care of ourselves
now. No more school. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss the jerks
staring at my suddenly developed breasts. I didn’t miss
the other girls thinking I was too bookish and nerdy to be
friends with.

Some fears make you flee, others make you stay. Mark
said hundreds of thousands of people had already left the
city. Many more must have died. At least a million people, we
estimated. In hospitals. In cars. In elevators. On escalators.
In front of computers. Using appliances. Snapping photos.
Shooting videos. Taking food out of the fridge. Carrying a
phone in your pocket meant ice bored into your pelvis. The
technology that triggered the ice was everywhere.

The corpses, too, were everywhere. The city should
have reeked of rot and decay, but the ice preserved what it
touched. I ignored the dead. Every day, no matter where we
went, Mark and I saw the bodies claimed by the ice, but we
never mentioned them.

There were still thousands of survivors who had stayed
behind. They wandered the streets, lost, alone, barely aware
of each other. The cold seeped into everyone.

Mark kept me warm, but I still hadn’t thawed completely.
I hadn’t even cried yet. The placid coolness of the ice age,
that utter absence of emotion, was almost comforting.

Together, Mark and I fought off the encroaching cold.

We
played
hide-and-seek
in
deserted
malls.
The
electronics shops were frozen supernovas.

We explored the metro tunnels. The flames of hand-held
torches, reflected on blooms of quantum ice, lit our way.

We walked on rooftops, holding hands, the ice-encrusted
city spread below us.

At night, Mark spooned me. We went to bed with our clothes
on. I took his hand and slipped it under my shirt, holding it
tight against my stomach. He nuzzled my hair.

He always woke before me. Always came back with
scavenged food.

One day, maybe we’d kiss.

Daniel acquired followers. He changed his name to Danny
Quantum and started believing his own hype. It was creepy,
the way these lost people gravitated toward him — obeyed
him, even. Orphaned kids. Businessmen in suits that had
known better days. Middle-aged women with hungry,
desperate looks. Cybergeeks bereft of their only lifeline.

Daniel and his followers gathered in the heart of the
city, on Mount Royal, below that monstrous thing that had
once been a cross. Daniel turned it into the symbol of his
new religion. He didn’t use the word
religion
, but that’s what
it was.

Mark brought me to Daniel’s sermons. Daniel didn’t use
the word
sermon
, but that’s what they were.

Feel-good catchphrases tinted with Nietzsche. New
Age gobbledygook rationalized with scientific jargon.
Cyberpunk
animism.
Catholic
pomp
sprinkled
with
evangelical alarmism. Eroticized psychobabble. Robert Bly
mixed with Timothy Leary.