Year Zero (32 page)

A second man passed his hands through the fire. Soon others were doing it, too, singeing the hairs on their wrists. Burning themselves back to consciousness.

“Shaa!”
the tall John suddenly declared. He raised his hand out. The word hardly needed translation, though Izzy provided it in a whisper.
The sun!

Men looked at John. They lifted their heads to the light. Another man shouted out,
“Look, the sky! The sky is good!”
He was Ezra, who would lie facing the wall of his cell for hours, humming under his breath.

“Khee-rroo-taa,”
said another.
Freedom.
That broke the ice. Murmurs greeted this opinion, maybe yes, maybe no. Even if they didn’t speak, their faces thawed. Foreheads wrinkled or knit. Mouths made shapes. Their nostrils flared, sampling the air. Eyes came alive. You could see the wheels beginning to turn again.

“I died,” a man stated.

“Is this Rome?” one asked.

Nathan Lee had thought about it. In their shoes, or shower sandals as it were, Rome would have been his own explanation.

One of the silent, nameless men spoke sharply. He was of medium height with olive skin and quick eyes. “Egypt.” He said it with complete certainty.

They looked at him. “No,” said Matthew. He had little hair. “I have been to Egypt. This is not Egypt.”

The nameless man made a long, stern reply, and Nathan Lee’s Aramaic was suddenly depleted. He understood none of it. He glanced at Izzy, who was intent on the words. Whatever was said, it had a sobering effect on the rest of them. Their optimism turned cold. Faces darkened.

Nathan Lee made a signal to the cameras. The steel door opened behind them. A cart wheeled into view, and the door closed.

On top of the cart lay a lamb, spit-roasted whole by one of the Captain’s guards.

The feast was more than a way for the men to break the ice. It came straight out of Nathan Lee’s bag of anthro tricks.
Commensality,
it was called, or communal tabling. Once you saw how people ate together, how they pulled rank or shared, you had most of the tribe figured out.

From the fire, the group stared at the lamb suspiciously. It sat there in the sun, head erect like a Sphinx. The smell of cooked meat overcame most of their doubts.

“Why?” questioned one man.

“They feed us,” said another.

A small band walked over to examine the food.

Izzy hung back with Nathan Lee.

“What was that Egypt thing all about?” Nathan Lee asked in a whisper.

“I’m not certain,” said Izzy. “He said something about how they’ve been brought out of Jordan, down into Egypt. Into the iron furnace. Where the sky is made of bronze.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? The metal walls in their cells, maybe?”

“No idea. You want me to ask him?”

“Too soon,” said Nathan Lee. “Just keep your ears open. It looks like the feast is about to begin.”

After some discussion, the men decided to transport the food back to the fire. Several of them carried the lamb over by hand. Others toted plastic jugs of water and sacks of food from under the cart. They stoked the fire higher—the guards had left plenty of logs—and sat in a large, crowded circle.

The food rallied them. Nathan Lee had scrounged jars of cocktail olives and bags of dried dates. One of the bakeries had committed some bread. The loaves steamed when the men broke them open. Soon they were all pulling meat from the lamb with their fingers.

The meal went on for hours.

The sky and food worked magic on them. With greasy chins and full stomachs, the clones began to talk, at first quietly, then with more clarity and excitement. Even two thousand years ago, they would have been unknown to each other. Jerusalem in the first century had probably contained fifty thousand people or more. At the height of religious festivals, thousands more from throughout the land had poured through the gates. For the time being, though they had Jerusalem—and now their captivity—in common, everyone was equally a stranger.

Men stood to walk off their fullness. The cameras jinked right and left, their remote operators trying to follow everyone. The drowsy ones pillowed their heads on their arms and took naps beneath the tree.

The sight of human faces and the sound of their own language revived them with amazing speed. The inconsolable ones who howled at night were pacified. Men held each other’s hands and walked in the sunlight. Some chattered like long-lost cousins, Izzy eavesdropping at their heels. Matthew and others wandered about with tears running down their faces. Ezra and Jacob kept bursting into great laughs hailing God in the heavens.

Sitting on his heels, Nathan Lee let the rhythm of the yard gather around him. Several clones had begun aggressively striding around the perimeter in clockwise circles, their sandals slapping. A man faced each of the walls and proclaimed his name with a thump of his chest. Two others, philosophers or
magi
perhaps, entered some deep discussion about the meaning of the parking stripes.

The man who held his attention most was the fugitive. He kept apart from the rest, quietly circling the walls. There was no impatience in him. He didn’t look up at the sky. He didn’t examine the walls. Nathan Lee could tell he was already thinking of escape.

Now that they were mixed together, the clones’ differences became more apparent. In their steel cells, they were mainly distinct because of their behavioral tics. But out here in the open air, moving about, you could see the variety of men whose remains—for one reason or another—had come to litter the roadside beyond the walls of old Jerusalem. There were tall men, squat men, lively men, wary introverts. Soon their words and the way they walked were revealing the men they had been, bullies, sorcerers, merchants, herders, sycophants, slaves, and peasants. They had come from many places before ending up at Golgotha.

Not everyone entered into the company. One poor fellow stood in place, hooting over his shoulder, possessed. Another developed the sudden urge to publicly masturbate, and was driven away with annoyed shouts. But aside from these broken misfits, there was remarkably little mental illness. For men who had been so badly abused, they had done a remarkable job at holding onto their dignity.

A bark of recognition suddenly echoed in the courtyard. Two of the clones embraced and began shouting excitedly. Izzy lingered by them, then came over and squatted beside Nathan Lee. Apparently one of the men was the great-grandfather of the other. They had died ninety years apart, but looked like identical twins, both of them twenty-five years old and with hawk noses and tight black curls. They kept touching each other’s faces.

Another shout of recognition: Izzy listened. Two of the men had been crucified back to back. They had never seen each other’s faces, but somehow recognized each other’s voices. With great animated disbelief, each felt the other’s limbs and checked for the lash wounds and broken bones that had marked their last days together. Weeping, one told of the other’s final breaths. He said it had been like watching his own child die.

A
LL AFTERNOON
their discoveries unfolded. More and more, they began to piece together family ties or identify neighboring villages or shared trades. Before Nathan Lee’s eyes, they were becoming a tribe, fused by their lost worlds and this strange new heaven or hell.

Like a bird of prey, Izzy cast off and came back, bearing new stories. “It’s too much, too much,” he kept saying to Nathan Lee. “I’m missing so much. They’re giving me a headache.” Then he would fly off again to snag more tales.

Three men came over and stood above Nathan Lee. “Who are you?” they asked.

“Nathaniel,” he said.

“Where is your village?”

“Gurrr-byaa, td’oo-rraa-n’e,”
he answered.
North. The mountains.
He and Izzy had decided that was the safest disguise for him, a mountain yokel on the far edges of Aramaic country.

One asked him something about Jerusalem. Guessing, he answered,
“saa-paarr-chee.”
He had been a traveler. That seemed to satisfy them, and they continued their rounds, interrogating other prisoners. Gathering a database, Nathan Lee realized. Organizing.

He steeped in the words, gaining the cadence, expanding his grasp. Aramaic was not a pretty language, heavy on consonants, very guttural, very macho. Helped out by their body language, he was able to pick up the gist of some of their conversations.

One topic of fascination was their new bodies. They talked about their bodies as if they were exotic animals. It didn’t matter if they had died when they were seventeen or seventy; Miranda’s magic had resurrected them in their physical prime. Their bodies were metabolically twenty-five years old…and free of their previous defects. The marks of their crucifixion were erased.

Most were satisfied with the new vessels into which they had been born. Slaves who had been tattooed for ownership seemed lost without their tattoos. Men whose broken bones had set crookedly two thousand years ago, or whose spines had grown bent, were awestruck by their new bodies. Warriors who had lost an arm or leg were whole again. Skin diseases, gout, and arthritis had vanished. The jury seemed to be mixed. Resurrection was bad, but also good.

“I was never this tall,” one marveled.

Another patted his soft belly and pulled at the fat. “I look like a rich man,” he gloated.

They opened their robes to compare lab scars or show how birth-marks had been erased. They gestured at their genitalia with disgust, and Nathan Lee finally understood that they were scandalized to find their circumcisions reversed.

“Who said life would be easy?” a big man said.

“Why are we here?”

“When will my family arrive?”

They were irrepressible. The yard had been swept of debris, but they found all kinds of strange artifacts: a bottle cap, a pair of sunglasses some scientist had left perched on one of the tree branches, pieces of wire, nails, and several dollars’ worth of nickels, pennies, and quarters. The coins were examined and debated with great interest.

As the sun sank, the pit grew colder. They added more logs to the fire. Someone broke off a bough of green needles and laid it on the flames, and a pungent smoke rose up. Men gathered, mumbling prayers, passing their hands through the smoke, drawing it into their lungs. It was a universal habit. All you needed for an altar was a place out of the wind.

A group formed and began kneeling and prostrating, touching their foreheads to the ground. “How can that be?” Nathan Lee muttered to Izzy. “Mohammed wasn’t born for another five hundred years.”

“Where do you think the Muslims picked up the habit?” Izzy asked. “From the early Christians. Do you hear them?”

“Abwoon d’bwashmaya,”
they chanted together.
“Nethqadash shmakh, teytey makuthakh.”

“Our father in heaven, sacred is thy name, thy kingdom come,”
Izzy translated. His eyes were gleaming. “It’s the Lord’s Prayer, pretty much the way Jesus would have spoken it.”

Nathan Lee darted a glance at the cameras and all were fixed on the knot of primitive Christians. For the most part, the Christians were ignored by the other clones. It would have been just one more New Age cult to them. In fact, only two of the clones seemed to be paying the slightest attention. One was the man so certain this was Egypt, and his eyes were narrowed and musing. The other was the fugitive, who stood back, as if he had been thrown into a pit of lions.

S
EPTEMBER

O
nce upon a time, Joab was a shepherd from Hebron. Now he was a tree climber. Nathan Lee had never seen a man, or boy, love climbing through branches so much. Probably there had never been such a beautiful, tall tree in Hebron. When he wasn’t scrambling up and down the tree, Joab was off at a distance, watching it. None of the other men thought Joab’s behavior odd, so Nathan Lee dismissed it.

Then one morning, high in the tree, he saw a bluejay struggling in a spider web that was large and nearly invisible. Quick as a monkey, Joab raced up the limbs. The spider web, it turned out, was a net made of threads from his robe. Joab’s hand gently closed over the frantic bird, and he descended to the fire.

By this time, the clones were all aware of his capture, and they gathered to see. There was some discussion about its color and size, and whether it was good enough. Finally, Lazarus took the jay from Joab’s hands. With a twist, he broke the bird’s neck. Then he spread its blue wings wide open and laid the bird on the flames.

Nathan Lee thought they meant to eat the bird. But men began swaying and mumbling. One cantor sang a prayer. The Christians bunched together and prostrated like Muslims. Men filed past, holding little charms in the smoke, or passed their fingers through the heat and held it to their foreheads or eyes or hearts. Others watched closely, academically, remarking on stages of the bird’s incineration.

That was the first of the burnt sacrifices.

L
OS
A
LAMOS WATCHED
the clones in awe.

Thanks to the plague, the city had already become a treasure chest of the exotic and beautiful. One of the Japanese scientists had brought the original
Sunflowers
by Van Gogh. There were a dozen Charles Russells and Frederic Remingtons, two Paul Klees, a carved ivory tower from the Ming period which required a magnifying glass to see all its dragons, coin collections, private libraries of signed, first edition books, framed letters written by Presidents, African masks, several Martian meteorites, a Triceratops skull, and more.

Their little paradise on the hill had drawn precious objects to it like a magnet. There was no lack of supply: soldiers had raided empty museums, long-haul truckers had brought pawn, commune leaders from the valley bartered urban loot for food, and eleventh-hour arrivals like Nathan Lee had showed up at the gate with treasures and rare talents to bribe their way inside. Last winter, a troupe of Bolshoi Ballet dancers had been granted entrée. The Cowboy Junkies got through the fence when their lead singer, a Canadian beauty named Margo, bewitched the guards with an a cappella rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun.” The list went on: pianists, painters, the Denver symphony, Hollywood actors, and novelists now sheltered here, singing for their supper. Little girls learned arabesques from some of the greatest ballerinas. The city was treated to opera, exhibitions, and world class music.

But until now they had seen nothing like the clones. Their fascination went beyond the city’s hunger for news that was not bad, or for a secret that could safely be told, or for mere entertainment. It resembled the voyeurism of their plague surfing, but was something else entirely. Watching dams crumble and cities burn and plague victims transmitting their last thoughts from basements and high-rise holdouts or from that rope village in the redwoods had become predictable and mundane. Satellites occassionally streaked through the night sky like fiery meteorites. Such things were the unmaking of a world they had helped make.

But with the debut of Nathan Lee’s time travelers, the city suddenly gained a lost world. It was alien, and yet oddly, vaguely familiar. It was like visiting the moon.

The Year Zero Hour had its roots in a bootleg video of the Lord’s Prayer “event” patched together at home by one of the Captain’s guards. Copies of the tape were passed from hand to hand, one computer to another. Nathan Lee was much too busy to pay attention to the growing excitement. Sensing something extraordinary, the Office of Public Affairs became involved. One night in their second week in the yard of the sun, the clones went prime time on the city’s cable network. Nathan Lee was startled to see them on television. The boys were a hit and didn’t even know it.

It was an odd creature, this hour of jumpy, edited scenes with English subtitles. The early black-and-white footage looked like something from a convenience store security camera. More sophisticated cameras were installed on the yard’s walls, more sound dishes. The production quality jumped when a famous Hollywood director, who had been granted safe haven within Los Alamos, volunteered his services. A Mideastern soundtrack was added to the beginning and end of the Hour. There was no narrator to guide the viewer, no segues to pull the pieces together, no thread to follow, just clones gossiping in a dead language while they sat around a fire or walked in circles.

Each held faith with one god or another. Like men tugging on a rope, they had pulled their rituals with them through the veil of time. Besides the burnt offerings, they made charms and amulets and prayer beads, and tied red twine around their wrists or throats or draped strings over one shoulder. A few tattooed each other’s faces and arms with charcoal paste and a nail.

Izzy came up with the idea of bringing raw materials into the yard. Soon the clones were making sandals, braiding rope, fashioning lyres, playing flutes, cooking, running a small bazaar, hammering copper, making jewelry, drawing graffiti on the walls. John the Second, as they called him, the shorter one, proved to be quite an artist, spending day after day on a big picture of a fishing boat.

“W
HAT HAVE YOU UNLEASHED
?” Miranda asked Nathan Lee one night. They were in the Necro Archives. It was very late. She had begun appearing in the archives more often.
Knock, knock,
she would say. Generally it was near midnight when the hallways were empty and the lab was quiet.

Nathan Lee had taken to eating and sleeping in the archives to save time. Four weeks had passed, but it felt like four months. He had never been so busy. Here among the bones, he raced to keep up with their resurrected flesh and blood. He had not meant to get caught up in their lives; indeed he had wanted not to. This was supposed to be a way of passing time, of outwaiting Ochs and getting on with his journey, nothing more. So he told himself.

He did everything in his power to remain true to Grace. He had gotten one of the people in satellite imagery to computer-enhance his muddy, ruined snapshot of her, and kept the result in a frame on a shelf in the archives. It was supposed to be a daily reminder, but the enhancement had altered her features subtly, turning her into someone he no longer quite recognized. She was less real than ever. He struggled with that.

But each day brought him deeper into the world of Year Zero. Well past midnight he labored over his notes and watched tapes, patching together kinship charts, weaving strands of men’s stories, hunting for clues. Before dawn, Izzy would show up and they would plot the coming day’s strategy.

Miranda essentially lived in the building now, too. The virus had shifted shape again. Over the past two years, it had revved up to a killing speed of twelve days, tearing through populations like a shotgun blast. This latest strain was slower-moving, though. The telltale symptoms of glassy skin and early amnesia didn’t manifest for a week, and the deadly erosion of executive function in the brain could take a month. This was good, and bad. It gave the illusion of maybe burning itself out, though people knew better than to believe that. But the virus was finally beginning to act more normally, at least for a virus. That suggested the first stirrings of co-evolution.

“It wants to tango,” Miranda told him. “Every parasite does. They want a dance partner who shares their tempo, a host to co-evolve with. Man and Corfu just don’t seem very well suited for each other. But we have to keep trying.”

There were rumors that Miranda was on to something new. No one knew what. She never talked about it on these nightly visits to Nathan Lee’s “office.”

He was always careful, for her sake. He made sure the door stayed wide open while she visited. He kept his hands to himself, no friendly pats, no little bunny hugs. Lab romances were everywhere. Tongues wagged. She didn’t need that. She was a child. He felt a hundred years older than her. So he ruled himself. Plato would have been proud.

They sat facing each other, almost knee to knee, not quite touching. He was brown from the sun, she was pale. Three video screens stood on a table to one side, each playing the day’s tapes from different cameras in the yard. The volume was off. “Are those men gambling?” Miranda asked.

Nathan Lee glanced over. “Games of chance. It fits, don’t you think.”

She pointed at another screen. Joab was squatting over the day’s catch, a sparrow with its wings bound, and a squirrel in a cage made of woven pine strips. “He sells them,” said Nathan Lee. “It’s like a souk.” He touched the volume button. The sound of haggling rose up. A line of men stood before several merchants sitting on their heels with little collections of junk spread in front of them.

“Sandals? Pine cones?” she said. “Are those statues of women?”

“Or fetishes. Made out of bread balls. They’re very creative. Anything they can find. They love to barter. It starts the minute they hit the yard. They swap and dicker all day long. It’s a way to be together. A village is forming. See that man, he’s a fortune-teller. And this guy? He makes bracelets from colored thread and pieces of lamb tendon. And him? He’s the professional ear cleaner.”

“You’re not serious.”

The man was squatting to one side of his client, plying a wire and a shaved twig with the concentration of a neurosurgeon. “You’ve never been to the Third World,” he said.

“What’s with this one?” A man was walking around with twine holding a piece of folded cloth against his forehead.

“Headache medicine. Magic cloth. One of his friends said a spell into it. It seems to work for him.”

Nathan Lee turned the volume off and sat down again. Miranda turned from the images and leaned against the table. “Cavendish called,” she said. “He’s on the war path.”

Nathan Lee tensed. Ochs had Cavendish. He had Miranda. The allegiances were plain. “About what?” he asked.

“He wants to know what’s your point with all this?” She patted one of the TVs. “I told him it’s a discovery process. You’re going to ask the clones about the plague.”

“That’s coming,” Nathan Lee said. “There’s only so far we can push in a day.”

“Cavendish says it’s a stunt. He wants to shut you down,” she said. “He issued a deport order on you.”

“What?” Nathan Lee was stunned. The pencil slipped from his fingers.
It was over, just like that?
He wanted to object. It was too soon. He hadn’t found his answer yet. But he had only himself to blame. He’d let himself be seduced by this alternate reality. He’d created it, himself. The clones were none of his business. They’d lived their lives. He should have been living his, spending every minute hunting for his enemy.

“Ochs,” he said. Maybe there was still time. He could hide in one of the canyons, or in the forest. Eventually Ochs had to show himself. But Nathan Lee knew that was futile. Security was everywhere.

“Ochs?” she said. “I’m sure he’s been whispering his poison about you. But Cavendish has his own good reasons to rid of you. You’re a threat to his rule.”

“Cavendish? What have I ever done to him?” He’d never even met the man, only seen pictures of him. Depending on who you were talking to, the Director’s growing seclusion was due to some disfiguring disease on top of the maladies he already suffered, or a ploy to boost his omnipresence, the sense that he was everywhere and nowhere at any given moment. Miranda said it was simply the wages of paranoia. Regardless, Cavendish had strayed from the family of man a long time ago. He was like one of the physicists’ quarks or whiffles, whatever they called their subatomic ricochets. Chaos theory, but without the theory.

“He’s convinced I’m trying to overthrow him,” said Miranda. “Through you.”

“That’s absurd.”

“No, he’s absolutely right.” Miranda smiled. “I am using you. Don’t look so shocked. You’re using me. That’s how it goes, right? One big vicious cycle.” She didn’t sound ruthless, more like a kid trying to act tough.

“I’m not much of a weapon,” he said. “Why should Cavendish worry?”

“The city’s coming together. A shadow city. A confederacy. I met with some of the other lab directors. They’re noticing the changes, too. The monthly stats are coming in. Fewer people are taking sick leave. More new experiments are starting up. Drug overdoses are down. Morale’s up. It’s like a darkness lifting.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“No one can put their finger on it. But somehow it has to do with this Year Zero thing,” she said. “Nothing else correlates. Science by day, animal sacrifices by night. People are glued to the tube. They’re invested. That’s not the word. Enchanted. Oh,” she added, “did I mention, human testing has tapered to a fraction of what it was.”

“And you’re saying the clones are responsible?”

“They’re part of it. This sea change in attitude all dates to your yard.”

“That’s hard to believe.” But he felt it himself. The yard inhabited him. The little tribe of clones had conquered death. They had outlived the apocalypse and joined hands. Paradise was now.