Jala leaped out of the car. By the time I had Diane on the quay—on foot, leaning hard into me, the jute litter abandoned—Jala was already conducting a heated argument in English with the man at the head of the gangway: if not the ship’s captain or pilot then someone with similar authority, a squat man with Sikh headgear and a grimly clenched jaw.
“It was agreed months ago,” Jala was saying.
“—but this weather—”
“—in any weather—”
“—but without approval from the Port Authority—”
“—yes but there is no Port Authority—look!”
Jala meant the gesture to be rhetorical. But he was waving his hand at the fuel and gas bunkers near the main gate when one of the tanks exploded.
I didn’t see it. The concussion pushed me into the concrete and I felt the heat of it on the back of my neck. The sound was huge but arrived like an afterthought. I rolled onto my back as soon as I could move, ears ringing. The Avigas, I thought. Or whatever else they stored here. Benzene. Kerosene. Fuel oil, even crude palm oil. The fire must have spread, or the unschooled police had fired their weapons in an unwise direction. I turned my head to look for Diane and found her beside me, looking back, more puzzled than frightened. I thought: I can’t hear the rain. But there was another, distinctly audible, more frightening sound: the ping of falling debris. Shards of metal, some burning. Ping, as they struck the concrete quay or the steel deck of the Capetown Maru.
“Heads down,” Jala was shouting, his voice watery, submerged: “Heads down, everybody heads down!”
I tried to cover Diane’s body with mine. Burning metal fell around us like hail or splashed into the dark water beyond the ship for a few interminable seconds. Then it simply stopped. Nothing fell except the rain, soft as the whisper of brushed cymbals.
We lifted ourselves up. Jala was already pushing bodies across the gangway, casting fearful glances back at the flames. “That might not be the last! Get on board, all of you, go on, go on!” He steered the villagers past the Capetown’s crew, who were extinguishing deck fires and casting off lines.
Smoke blew toward us, obscuring the violence ashore. I helped Diane aboard. She winced at every step, and her wound had started leaking into her bandages. We were last up the gangway. A couple of sailors began to draw the aluminum structure in behind us, hands on the winches but eyes darting toward the pillar of fire back ashore.
Capetown Maru’s engines thrummed under the deck. Jala saw me and came to take Diane’s other arm. Diane registered his presence and said, “Are we safe?”
“Not until we clear the harbor.”
Across the green-gray water horns and whistles sounded. Every mobile ship was making for open ocean. Jala looked back at the quay and stiffened. “Your luggage,” he said.
It had been loaded onto one of the small cargo-haulers. Two battered hard shell cases full of paper and pharmaceuticals and digital memory. Still sitting there, abandoned.
“Run that gangway back,” Jala said to the deck hands.
They blinked at him, uncertain of his authority. The first mate had left for the bridge. Jala puffed up his chest and said something fierce in a language I didn’t recognize. The sailors shrugged and reeled the extendable walk back to the quay.
The ship’s engines sounded a deeper note.
I ran across the gangway, corrugated aluminum ringing underfoot. Grabbed the cases. Took a last look back. Down at the landward end of the quay a detachment of a dozen or so uniformed New Reformasi began to run toward the Capetown Maru. “Cast off,” Jala was shouting as if he owned the ship, “cast off, quickly now, quickly!”
The scaffolding began to retreat. I threw the luggage onboard and scrambled after it.
Made the deck before the ship began to move.
Then another Avigas tank erupted, and we were all thrown down by the concussion.
By Dreams Surrounded
The nightly battles between road pirates and the CHP made for difficult traveling at the best of times. The flicker made it worse. During a flicker episode any kind of unnecessary travel was officially discouraged, but that didn’t stop people from trying to reach family and friends or in some cases simply getting in their cars to drive until they ran out of gas or time. I quick-packed a couple of suitcases with anything I didn’t want to leave behind, including the archival records Jase had given me.
Tonight the Alvarado Freeway was clotted with traffic and I-8 wasn’t moving much faster. I had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdity of what I was attempting to do.
Running to the rescue of another man’s wife, a woman I had once cared about more than was really good for me. When I closed my eyes and tried to picture Diane Lawton there was no coherent image anymore, only a blurred montage of moments and gestures. Diane brushing back her hair with one hand and leaning into the coat of St. Augustine, her dog. Diane smuggling an Internet link to her brother in the tool shed where a lawn mower lay deconstructed on the floor. Diane reading Victorian poetry in a patch of willow shade, smiling at something in the text I hadn’t understood: Summer ripens at all hours, or, The infant child is not aware…
Diane, whose subtlest looks and gestures had always implied that she loved me, at least tentatively, but who had always been restrained by forces I didn’t understand: her father, Jason, the Spin. It was the Spin, I thought, that had bound us and separated us, locked us in adjoining but doorless rooms.
I was past El Centro when the radio reported “significant” police activity west of Yuma and traffic backed up for at least three miles at the state line. I decided not to risk the long delay and turned onto a local connector—it looked promising on the map—through empty desert north, meaning to pick up I-10 where it crossed the state border near Blythe.
The road was less crowded but still busy. The flicker made the world seem inverted, brighter above than below. Every so often an especially thick vein of light writhed from the northern to the southern horizon as if a fracture had opened in the Spin membrane, fragments of the hurried universe burning through.
I thought about the phone in my pocket, Diane’s phone, the number Simon had called. I couldn’t call back: I didn’t have a return number for Diane and the ranch—if they were still on the ranch—was unlisted. I just wanted it to ring again. Wanted it and dreaded it.
The traffic was bad again where the road approached the state highway near Palo Verde. It was after midnight now and I was making maybe thirty miles per hour at best. I thought about sleeping. I needed sleep. Decided it might be better to sleep, to give up for the night and give the traffic time to clear. But I didn’t want to sleep in the car. The only stationary cars I’d seen had been abandoned and looted, trunks agape like startled mouths.
South of a little town called Ripley I spotted a sun-faded and sand-blasted LODGING sign, briefly visible in the headlights, and a two-lane, barely paved road exiting the highway. I took the turn. Five minutes later I was at a gated compound that was or once had been a motel, a strip of rooms two stories tall horseshoed around a swimming pool that looked empty under the flickering sky. I stepped out of the car and pushed the buzzer.
The gate was remote controlled, the kind you could roll back from a control panel safely distant, and it was equipped with a palm-sized video camera on a high pole. The camera swiveled to examine me as a speaker mounted at car-window height crackled to life. From somewhere, from the motel’s bunker or lobby, I was able to hear a few bars of music. Not programmed music, just something playing in the background. Then a voice. Brusque, metallic, and unfriendly. “We’re not taking guests tonight.”
After a few moments I reached out and pushed the buzzer again.
The voice returned. “What part of that didn’t you understand?”
I said, “I can pay cash if it makes a difference. I won’t quibble about the price.”
“No sale. Sorry, partner.”
“Okay, hang on…look, I can sleep in the car, but would it be all right if I pul
led in just to get a little protection? Maybe park around back where I can’t be seen from the road?”
Longer pause. I listened to a trumpet chase a snare drum. The song was naggingly familiar.
“Sorry. Not tonight. Please move along.”
More silence. More minutes passed. A cricket sawed away in the little palm and pea-gravel oasis in front of the motel. I pushed the buzzer again.
The proprietor came back quickly. “I gotta tell you, we’re armed and slightly pissed off in here. It would be better if you just hit the road.”
“‘Harlem Air Shaft,’” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“The song you’re playing. Ellington, right? ‘Harlem Air Shaft.’ Sounds like his fifties band.”
Another long pause, though the speaker was still live. I was almost certain I was right, though I hadn’t heard the Duke Ellington tune for years.
Then the music stopped, the thin thread of it cut off in midbeat. “Anybody else in that car with you?”
I rolled the window down and switched on the overhead light. The camera panned, then swiveled back to me.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. Tell me who plays trumpet on that cut and I’ll spring the gate.”
Trumpet? When I thought of Duke Ellington’s midfifties band I thought of Paul Gonsalvez, but Gonsalvez played sax. There had been a handful of trumpeters. Cat Anderson? Willie Cook? It had been too long.
“Ray Nance,” I said.
“Nope. Clark Terry. But I guess you can come in anyway.”
The owner came out to meet me when I pulled up in front of the lobby. He was a tall man, maybe forty, in jeans and a loose plaid shirt. He looked me over carefully.
“No offense,” he said, “but the first time this happened—” He gestured at the sky, the flicker that turned his skin yellow and the stucco walls a sickly ocher. “Well, when they closed the border at Blythe I had people fighting for rooms. I mean literally fighting. Couple guys pulled weapons on me, right there where you’re standing. Any money I made that night I paid for twice over in maintenance. People drinking in the rooms, puking, tearing the shit out of things. It was even worse up on ten. Night clerk at the Days Inn out toward Ehrenberg was stabbed to death. That’s when I installed the security fence, right after that. Now, soon as the flicker starts, I just turn off the VACANCY light and lock up until it’s over.”
“And play Duke,” I said.
He smiled. We went inside so I could register. “Duke,” he said, “or Pops, or Diz. Miles if I’m in the mood for it.” The true fan’s first-name intimacy with the dead. “Nothing after about 1965.” The lobby was a bleakly lit and generically carpeted room done up in ancient western motifs, but through a door to the proprietor’s inner sanctum—it looked like he lived here—more music trickled out. He inspected the credit card I offered him.
“Dr. Dupree,” he said, putting out his hand. “I’m Allen Fulton. Are you headed into Arizona?”
I told him I’d been bounced off the Interstate down by the border.
“I’m not sure you’ll do any better on ten. Nights like this it seems like everybody in Los Angeles wants to move east. Like the flicker’s some kind of earthquake or tidal wave.”
“I’ll be back on the road before long.”
He handed me a key. “Get a little sleep. Always good advice.”
“The card’s okay? If you want cash—”
“Card’s good as cash as long the world doesn’t end. And if it does I don’t suppose I’ll have time to regret it.”
He laughed. I tried to smile.
Ten minutes later I was lying fully clothed on a hard bed in a room that smelled of potpourri-scented antiseptic and too-damp air-conditioning, wondering whether I should have stayed on the road. I put the phone at the bedside and closed my eyes and slept without hesitation.
And woke less than an hour later, alert without knowing why.
I sat up and scanned the room, charting gray shapes and darkness against memory. My attention eventually settled on the pallid rectangle of the window, the yellow curtain that had been pulsing with light when I checked in.
The flicker had stopped.
Which should have made it easier to sleep, this gentler darkness, but I knew in the way one knows such things that sleep had become impossible. I had corralled it for a brief time but now it had jumped the fence, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
I made coffee in the little courtesy percolator and drank a cup. Half an hour later I checked my watch again. Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. Might as well shower and get back on the road.
I dressed and walked down the silent concrete walkway to the motel lobby, expecting to drop the key in a mail slot; but Fulton, the owner, was still awake, television light pulsing from his back room. He put his head out when he heard me rattle the door.
He looked peculiar. A little drunk, maybe a little stoned. He blinked at me until he recognized me. “Dr. Dupree,” he said.
“Sorry to bother you again. I need to get back on the road. Thank you for your hospitality, though.”
“No need to explain,” he said. “I wish you the best of luck. Hope you get somewhere before dawn.”
“I hope so, too.”
“Me, I’m just watching it on television.”
“Oh?”
Suddenly I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
“With the sound turned down. I don’t want to wake Jody. Did I mention Jody? My daughter. She’s ten. Her mom lives in La Jolla with a furniture repairman. Jody spends the summers with me. Out here in the desert, what a fate, huh?”
“Yeah, well—”
“But I don’t want to wake her.” He looked suddenly somber. “Is that wrong? Just to let her sleep through it? Or as long as she can? Or maybe I should wake her up. Come to think of it, she’s never seen ’em. Ten years old. Never seen ’em. I guess this is her last chance.”
“Sorry, I’m not sure I understand—”
“They’re different, though. They’re not the way I remember. Not that I was ever any kind of expert…but in the old days, if you spent enough nights out here, you’d kind of get familiar with ’em.”
“Familiar with what?”
He blinked. “The stars,” he said.
We went out by the empty swimming pool to look at the sky.
The pool hadn’t been filled for a long time. Dust and sand had duned at the bottom of it, and someone had tagged the walls with ballooning purple graffiti. Wind rattled a steel sign (NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY) against the links of the fence. The wind was warm and from the east.
The stars.
“See?” he said. “Different. I don’t see any of the old constellations. Everything looks kind of…scattered.”
A few billion years will do that. Everything ages, even the sky; everything tends toward maximum entropy, disorder, randomness. The galaxy in which we live had been racked by invisible violence on a great scale over the last three billion years, had swirled its contents together with a smaller satellite galaxy (M41 in the old catalogs) until the stars were spread across the sky in a meaningless sprawl. It was like looking at the rude hand of time.
Fulton said, “You okay there, Dr. Dupree? Maybe you ought to sit down.”
Too numb to stand, yes. I sat on the rubberized concrete with my feet dangling into the shallow-end declivity of the pool, still staring up. I had never seen anything as beautiful or as terrifying.
“Only a few hours before sunrise,” Fulton said mournfully.
Here. Farther east, somewhere over the Atlantic, the sun must already have breached the horizon. I wanted to ask him about that, but I was interrupted by a small voice from the shadows near the lobby door. “Dad? I could hear you talking.” That would be Jody, the daughter. She took a tentative step closer. She was wearing white pajamas and a pair of unlaced sneakers to protect her feet. She had a broad, plain-but-pretty face and sleepy eyes.
“Com
e on over, darlin’,” Fulton said. “Get on up on my shoulders and have a look at the sky.”
She clambered aboard, still puzzled. Fulton stood, hands on her ankles, lifting her that much closer to the glittering dark.
“Look,” he said, smiling despite the tears that had begun to track down his face. “Look there, Jody. Look how far you can see tonight! Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything.”
I stopped back at the room to check the TV for news—Fulton said most of the cable news stations were still broadcasting.
The flicker had ended an hour ago. It had simply vanished, along with the Spin membrane. The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet.
The sun.
Three billion years and change older than it had been when the Spin sealed it away. I tried to remember what Jase had told me about the current condition of the sun. Deadly, no question; we were out of the habitable zone; that was common knowledge. The image of boiling oceans had been mooted in the press; but had we reached that point yet? Dead by noon, or did we have until the end of the week?
Did it matter?
I turned on the motel room’s small video panel and found a live broadcast from New York City. Major panic had not yet set in. Too many people were still asleep or had foregone the morning commute when they woke up and saw the stars and drew the obvious conclusions. The crew at this particular cable newsroom, as if in a fever dream of journalistic heroism, had set up a rooftop camera pointed east from the top of Todt Hill on Staten Island. The light was dim, the eastern sky brightening but still void. A pair of barely-holding-it-together anchors read to each other from freshly faxed bulletins.
There had been no intelligible link with Europe since the end of the flicker, they said. This might be due to electrostatic interference, the unmediated sunlight washing out aerostat-linked signals. It was too soon to draw dire conclusions. “And as always,” one of the newscasters said, “although we don’t have official reaction yet, the best advice is to stay put and stay tuned until we sort all this out. I don’t think it would be inappropriate to ask people to remain in their homes if at all possible.”
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