by K. Chess
“They’re animals,” the big stick said. The partner, this was—the quiet one. He said it sadly and he wasn’t talking to me, so I knew he wasn’t trying to goad me. He meant it.
I wished I could have agreed, but I didn’t. “Animals don’t do that,” I told him. “Only people.”
CHAPTER FIVE
On Tuesday, Hel arrived more than half an hour later than she’d said she’d be. The library building—different from the one she remembered—was a white wedge decorated in gold, like an Egyptian tomb. She spotted Klay right away camped out at a small metal table, one of several set up in front of the entrance, each one shaded by its own beach umbrella. Klay’s bare legs extended beyond the shadow, stippled with goose bumps.
“Hey,” Hel puffed, breathing heavily from the walk from the subway. “I’m sorry, I would have sent you a message but I couldn’t get signal underground.”
Klay offered a bemused smile. “It’s fine, really.” In the bright morning light of Grand Army Plaza, she looked younger than she had in the dim midnight reception room. Her wide face, her shorts, her impatient manner, her clunky plastic watch that resembled what a schoolgirl would wear in Hel’s world: the overall effect was of an adolescent summer camp counselor, or the director of a standard five play—someone insecure in her power yet exasperated by its limits. But Hel would have to swallow her doubts and make peace with this flunky. She’d left the precious book in Donaldson’s hands, a hostage and an act of faith. Klay stood, gathering notebook and tablet from the table. “Ready to go in? We can do some digital searches of the archived newspapers for Ezra Sleight and William Sleight. And if there’s anything on paper in the Brooklyn Collection—letters or photos or whatever—I can get us access. The archivist here owes me a favor.”
Hel took in the people at the other tables around them—prosperous-looking families, women with strollers engineered with as much sophistication as the one-person pods adults drove at home. The green and maroon awnings on the buildings along Prospect Park West stretched out bravely in the sun, crisp and bright. A vendor sold organic ice cream from a cart. The Victorian-era urns flanking the park entrance—cast-iron vessels with twined cast-iron snakes for handles—stood at even intervals around the edge of the plaza. In her world, these were defaced by graffiti and several of them were missing. “You know, someone slipped me off here once. Robbed me at knifepoint. Practically right on this spot.”
For the first time, Klay seemed interested in her. “What was it like?”
What it was like. “In the ’60s, they routed the BQE through here, and it really tore up the neighborhood. Prospect Heights went downhill after that. It wasn’t nice like this at all. I’m not sure whose idea it was to put the highway so close to the park—maybe there was some graft or bribery involved—the Queens triads, I don’t know.” How might Sleight’s visiting aliens have viewed it, in their wise detachment? “It’s better the way you have things.” She gestured at the treaded tires of a nearby stroller. “With all the coffee shops and the dog biscuit bakeries and stuff.”
Her neighborhood under the overpasses, the way it used to be. Run-down brownstones and Hispaniolan restaurants and old Irish bars alongside newer spit clubs and payday advance shops. All the trash, trash everywhere. Cherries loitering on the street corners and young gangsters casting their nets, pinching their sniff, smoking their dross and their crack and their H. But she’d loved that first apartment she and Raym bought together. Her neighborhood.
There had to be a way to observe without being brought down. Oliveira accomplished it beautifully in his articles, noting the differences in the worlds and making them amusing for an imagined audience while remaining untouched himself. Skating the surfaces: this was the key to remembering without remembering. She understood intellectually, but she’d struggled for three long years to master it, and she was ready to give up.
“Actually,” said Klay, “what I meant was, like, what was it like to get, uh, slipped off.”
“That’s a personal question.” Hel felt the knife, heavy in her pocket. A new blade was the first thing she’d bought, once she had her own money. She realized that her other hand had risen on its own to cover her mouth. She put it down in her lap.
“OK, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I was just interested. I grew up in this neighborhood.”
She was waiting. And Hel needed her, needed her help. This neighborhood. Hel tried to imagine where and how Klay had grown up, but she didn’t have the imaginative empathy at the moment. She didn’t care. She held her silence.
At last, Klay broke eye contact, checked her watch. “Let’s go inside and get a computer.”
Vikram and Kabir waited together in the shack across the parking lot from the storage warehouse, watching the second hand trace its way around the circle of the clock mounted above the door. Vikram, the assigned guard for the third shift, occupied the only chair. Kabir, who was killing time before his occasional second job, collecting the change from all the machines at his cousin’s chain of laundromats, leaned against the file cabinet, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. His body blocked most of the output of the space heater.
“Why don’t you get out of here?” Vikram asked.
“By the time I get home, it’ll be time for me to leave again. It’s a wasted trip. Plus, it’s warm in here.”
“Well, I’m not doing my tour until you leave.”
“Why are you so concerned?”
“The boss will see you on the camera.” Vikram felt his irritation like a stomachache, low in his abdomen. “You’re not supposed to hang around if you’re off-duty. Waiting for you to leave is putting me behind.”
“Please,” Kabir said. “Do feel free to go anytime you want, Professor. I promise to behave myself perfectly while you are gone. Or if you like, I’ll come along on your tour. Just give me one of the hand warmers.”
It was Kabir who’d introduced Vikram to the miraculous shake-to-activate chemical hand warmer packets. Vikram had recently bought himself a family-sized bag of them at Costco. He threw Kabir a packet and grabbed his flashlight from the desk. “Fine. Let’s go, then. Now.”
Kabir pulled the door of the shed closed behind them and followed. They walked across the smooth blacktop, laid the week before, its aggressive black-hole blackness evident even in the dark of this moonless night. The burned-rubber smell filled Vikram’s nostrils and he found himself humming a song he’d forgotten, one that had been everywhere a few summers ago, the last summer he spent at home—constantly on the radio and over the speakers in stores and blasting from the portable players of kids walking down the street—a song he’d wished never to hear again and now never would.
Every summer, when he was growing up in Jersey, they would repave the parking lot of the vacuum depot near his parents’ place. Vikram and his sisters would hike there in the middle of the night, the laces of their roller shoes tied together for ease of carrying, slung over their shoulders. The lot sloped downhill. They glided down the smooth surface, shouting at each other. The three of them raced, or sometimes they would make a train, crouching low to build up speed and then, at Vikram’s count, standing tall.
“Have you seen any strange-colored lights in the warehouse recently?” he asked Kabir as he swiped them into the building. “Lights that go out?” He’d written up the incident a few weeks ago in the shift log like he was supposed to, but he’d tried hard to keep the notes as brief and as sane-sounding as possible. Anyway, he was pretty sure Kabir never checked the log.
“Lights? Do you mean the green flash? It’s a common illusion, when the sun sets over the ocean or any unobstructed horizon. Some people think it’s aliens, but actually, there’s a scientific explanation having to do with the refraction of light.”
“Yeah, thanks, but that’s definitely not what I’m talking about.”
“Don’t be offended,” Kabir said. “I didn’t mean aliens, like the slur. I really meant extraterrestrials.”
“I know. Besides,
sticks and stones. Come on.” They entered the elevator, and Vikram put in the keycard and pushed the button for the top floor. “It sounds crazy, this green flash thing.”
“To be honest, you sounds a little crazy, too. What are you talking about, strange-colored?”
“Never mind. Nothing. You’d know what I meant if you’d seen it.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“Not lights in the sky. Lights in one of the units. Blue. But when I tried to find the room, it was just gone. And no one was in there.”
“Please tell me you’re making things up to frighten me. Because this job already gives me heartburn. I’m thinking about going to the laundromats full-time. I’m not a young man. Only, I don’t like night work. I need my eight hours.” Kabir sighed. “I would not be at either of these jobs if I was qualified to do anything else.”
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“You’re not fooling me. You’re an educated man. I think you love this job.”
They walked together to the end of the corridor, their footsteps echoing. Vikram shined his beam in a pattern of arcs up ahead of them, like someone on the beach marking the sand with a long stick. He felt bolder in Kabir’s presence than he did when completing these rounds alone, but he missed the up-prickle of the hair on his arms, the tingle of alertness.
Kabir opened the door to the fire stairs and waved Vikram in. “After you, Professor.”
They cleared four in silence.
On three, Vikram said, “This is where it was coming from last time. You didn’t see any glow from out in the lot, did you? I know I didn’t.”
“No,” Kabir said.
“Then you can relax. We would have seen it already.”
They left the stairs and entered the third-floor corridor. “It’s so dark,” Kabir said. “I should have brought my flashlight too.”
“Are you always this jumpy?”
The last days of any month meant lots of renters all over the city moving in and out of their apartments. In the self-storage business, that translated to new tenants getting units and old tenants emptying them out. Sometimes, people just stopped paying; after the deposit ran out, the storage company hired someone to haul away the junk, selling whatever looked valuable first, disposing of the rest. During the day, this hallway they traversed would be crowded with customers hauling boxes, pushing dollies, fumbling with padlocks, yelling at each other to hold the doors of the keycard-operated elevator. These people with their stuff—an amount, a sheer volume of possessions none of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand had yet had time to accumulate. During open hours, the doors would be open, some of the units packed tight with neat boxes or jammed full of black plastic trash bags. Other units held instrument cases, collections that took up too much room in tiny apartments, antiques people didn’t want but couldn’t bear to sell, shrouded canvases belonging to artists who couldn’t hang all their work.
As they approached the bend in the hallway, he thought he saw it. It was as tenuous as the horizon in the east an hour before sunrise. They rounded the corner, and it was unmistakable now, emitting from a center unit on the left-hand side. Kabir clutched at Vikram’s arm and they stopped, still yards away. The light seemed to reach toward them from the crack under the door, blue like the phosphorescence of some eerie deep-sea organism. Blue like the Gate itself.
Kabir began to speak, but Vikram shushed him before he could get out any words. He clicked off his Maglite and they waited together in the glow. There was no sound, besides the creak of Kabir’s shoes as he shifted his weight and Vikram’s own rapid breathing. No sound from inside the storage unit.
They waited there until the light turned off, dropping them into darkness like a bucket into a well. Vikram remembered the silent children’s ward inside the old mental hospital.
“I’m going to break the door down,” he whispered.
“No.”
“I’m going to do it.”
“You can’t,” Kabir said. “It’s against the rules. It’s against the law. It’s trespassing.”
Everything he said was true.
Equally true was this fact: part of Vikram didn’t want to know what was on the other side.
Klay drove them to the boarding school. Defunct for three-quarters of a century, the estate had been sold at auction, then passed from owner to owner until a group of weavers and ceramics artists took it over for a gallery and studio space. Klay hadn’t been able to reach anyone on the phone, but the gallery’s website confirmed that the house was open to the public today, still appointed with its original, historic furnishings.
Klay’s SUV was an older, boxy model of Buick called a Rendezvous and its interior, which could seat seven, seemed cavernous to Hel. One hundred thirty klicks north of the city on the Taconic Parkway, a yellow sports car swerved into their lane without signaling and almost ran them into the ditch, then zoomed ahead. “A cancer on you, you fucker!” Hel yelled after it. She’d been told repeatedly that this was not an acceptable way of cursing in this world, but she hadn’t stopped saying it. She fumbled for the button to roll down the window, but was too slow to make the gesture she intended; the car sped off in a cloud of dust. Across from her in the driver’s seat—enormously far away—Klay smiled. Her two front teeth were very slightly crooked, one overlapping the other in a way Hel might have found charming under other circumstances. “Your people can’t drive,” Hel told her.
“That’s exactly what everyone says about UDPs, you know.”
“Really?” The Rendezvous’s general shape, its blocky angles, reminded Hel of a huge version of her own beloved pod, a two-person 2010 Kusama Kinetic with a forward hatch, bought new. It got twenty-one kilometers to the liter. She’d kept the Kinetic clean, swept the upholstery once a week. It never even lost that new smell. She wondered who was driving it now—whether it was sitting in the rented parking space where she’d left it, hopelessly irradiated, or whether an enterprising survivor had gotten it started and driven it west. She hoped so. West toward California. How far might they have traveled?
“How did you afford a car, Teresa?” Where Hel came from, even a used pod would have been out of reach for an unguilded young person without a proper profession.
The GPS on Klay’s phone spoke. She followed its directions off the Taconic and onto US 44 toward the Connecticut border. She tapped impatiently on the center console with her free hand, in time to nothing. “Let’s get in there and get this over with.”
“I’m not trying to waste your time.”
“I’m sorry,” Klay said. “I guess I’m being rude. It’s nothing personal. I just have other things to do. Meeting with Ayanna at three.”
“What’s she like to work for?”
“Smart, organized, it’s a great opportunity. I don’t know. How about that guy with the pinchers? What’s he like to work for?”
“Oliveira? They’re pincers, not pinchers.” She stared through the window. “He knows how to get things done. And I don’t work for him.”
“I thought he sent you to the party.”
“No. It’s my idea, this whole thing. He’s actually not very into it.”
“But that article that quoted him, last month. That Ostalgie thing.”
Hel remembered. A reporter covering the adjustment of UDPs as a human-interest story for the upcoming third anniversary of their crossing had published an article in the New York Times blog. The reporter compared the feelings of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand to the mourning of some East Berliners for their lost culture after the fall of the wall, whatever that was. (Despite the lack of a physical barrier in her own divided Western Europe, some of the same things had happened—a phone call between the AMFR and the Germans, the visit of an American president—but it had all unfolded at a much faster pace. The Latin American communists had stayed out of it for once, and everyone from Braunschweig to Bucharest had been wearing blue jeans and listening to Detroit-crafted pop music as early as 1974.) “
UDPs are refugees from a place that no longer exists,” the Times piece read. “Many of these people still think of their true home as the past, a past that is so utterly inaccessible, it exists now only in their memories.” Then, the reporter had quoted his words directly: “As Dr. Oliveira puts it, ‘There is nowhere for us to go back to.’”
“I guess you think it wouldn’t be that hard, huh? Adjusting to this world?”
“What? I never said that.”
“You’ll never understand what it’s like. Yes, I’m a mess. I admit it. But you would be too, if you were in my position.”
“Sure,” said Klay. “I’m sure I would be.”
A billboard outside the town limits named the sites of historical interest—the mansion among them. Hel looked out at the ranch-style houses on the outskirts as they gave way to the grander, older houses of town. They followed the automated directions of the GPS into a dead little town center: a movie theater with a marquee that had been turned into a shoe store, a specialty shop that sold hiking equipment, a tattoo and piercing business, and two insurance offices. The remaining storefronts stood vacant. None of the metered parking was taken.
Klay guided the Rendezvous down a side street and into a gravel parking lot. Ahead, the old house loomed, unexpectedly large—a tall, half-timbered Tudor with a stone foundation and jutting stone chimneys. Squares of shake in overlapping patterns like fish scales clothed the upper stories. Leaden Xs held diamond-shaped panes in place. “This is it.”
Finally here, where all signs could not have been expunged. “Wow,” Hel said. “Where’s the lake?”
There were two other vehicles in the lot—a van and the yellow sports car that had passed them fifteen minutes before. “Behave yourself,” Klay said.
The biggest sign of all, in its gilt frame just inside, waiting to be documented. She took off for the house alone, already seeing it. She knew just where it was supposed to hang. Up ahead, the formal entrance in its portico, double doors made of carved oak, a modern placard with gallery hours detracting somewhat from the grandeur. She left Klay on the slate path, pushing her way inside, stepping into the foyer, high-ceilinged and grim, just the way she had imagined it. Like a child, she wanted to run. Hel crossed the room with eyes half-closed, making herself wait until she stood at the bottom step of the grand stairway before looking for the painting. She had imagined the ship, the sky, the ice so many times, and it shouldn’t matter to her—it was a pale substitute for the things that actually mattered to her—and yet her breath came short with the anticipation. The rope. The hand. She turned around. Someone was calling to her, a woman’s voice was speaking, but she shut it out.
