by K. Chess
You never meant to leave him.
Yes I did. Are you kidding? They called my number and I went.
You couldn’t have saved him, though. There’s no way. You wouldn’t have done him any good by staying behind.
Still.
I don’t think you should beat yourself up.
I can’t help it.
Think about it logically. What do you think you were supposed to do?
I don’t know.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
William Sleight stayed at the Califone Hotel. After his son died, he holed up in a luxury suite for weeks. Daniel, the archivist from the public library, had showed Hel a digitized copy of the hotel’s registry book, found in the Brooklyn Collection. In later years, the elder Sleight never talked or wrote about the period of time surrounding his son’s death, the period—just over a year—when he himself had vanished. Daniel had to do a lot of work to put together the pieces.
He had showed Hel everything he had when she went to visit him after her trip to the school upstate. “See here,” Daniel had said, spreading papers in front of her on the desk in his overheated office. “First, Sleight Sr. stayed at the Califone. Here’s him checking in. Then, two weeks later, he checked out, and there’s no record of where he went. The big town house he owned in Brooklyn Heights that had been his primary residence, he closed it up, see? His brother Hiram worked for the Suffolk County DA, so most of his private correspondence is at the state archive up in Albany, but there’s no indication that William told Hiram where he was going. Hiram went back and forth with the NorthKing Baking Soda board of directors about William’s whereabouts when William first stopped attending meetings, said the family was looking for him.” Daniel indicated a pile of letter facsimiles, written in a dense, ornate hand. “Hiram thought he might be traveling abroad, but I think the better bet is his property in Brownsville.”
“Brownsville?”
Daniel pushed forward a deed. “Yeah, he’d bought a parcel of land out there in the early years of his marriage, when he was on the make. The cottage was old—left over from when the Dutch used to farm out there—but Sleight was probably going to knock it down and put up tenements for the influx of poor European Jews, like everyone was doing. He just never got around to it. Then, all of a sudden, about a year after his son’s drowning, Sleight Sr. got rid of it. The whole Brownsville parcel. I think that’s where he’d been living after he left the hotel—in the cottage there.”
“The painting,” Hel asked. “What about that?”
“No known connection to Sleight Sr. No paper trail at all, after 1909.”
She imagined the grieving father at the Califone. Beds made up every day, but never slept in. Food on trays, untouched. Tall windows, their curtains drawn. Just like his adult son in another world, typing away with paper over the panes, William Sleight would have prevented all light from entering the suite. He would not want to be able to distinguish day from night.
How might he have grieved?
She imagined Sleight cross-legged on the floor, cards spread in front of him. Asking, where is he? Where is he now? Where did he go? She imagined him sifting through the cards, searching in vain for a picture of the tiger with red-stained teeth that he could, perhaps, feel, gnawing at his vitals.
But that didn’t make sense. No Truth deck. No tiger. Those belonged to her, not William Sleight. How had he lived through those first days?
William Sleight paced. He ordered room-service meals and then left the plates of food to congeal under their cloches. He stared at the paneled walls. Poured bourbon from a crystal decanter into a crystal glass. Lit his pipe with Califone matches. He picked up the telephone receiver, put it down. Dropped the glass. Threw the pipe.
The father of the dead boy tried to convince himself that he’d done nothing wrong. He’d sent Ezra away to be educated when it became unsuitable—impossible—for him to look after the growing child on his own. There’d been no reason to suspect danger. His son wrote him tormented letters to which he’d seldom found time to respond. Since he hadn’t known it would be permanent, their separation hadn’t even pained him. This was William Sleight’s secret shame. Only now was he sensible of what he’d lost.
And then, of all places, he’d gone to Brownsville.
“What happened to the cottage?” Hel asked. “You said he sold it?”
“No, he transferred it to a Mrs. Effie Washington.” Daniel pointed out the name on the deed. “I guess she’d been his housekeeper at the big house in Brooklyn Heights. Look at the date on the deed—just about a year and a half after Ezra’s death. That’s when I can pick up a paper trail for William again. Like his life starts back up. It’s a funny thing. You never stop feeling a death, but at some point, the pain stops being so sharp.”
“Does it.”
Hel imagined William Sleight in the cottage, neither comforted nor disturbed by the specter of his grown son who might otherwise have written tales of horror in that very room. William Sleight, perfectly unaware, kneeling on the boards, just as Hel had knelt on the grass between two graves—searching, feeling. And in front of William, she imagined the painting. The Shipwreck.
There was no record of the painting in Sleight Sr.’s possession. She was making it up, but that didn’t matter. The fantasy—William staring into George Lowery’s masterwork, propped up against the wall in the cottage—it felt true. His only son had drowned, after all, just like the painted sailor. Where else would he look for rescue?
William almost touching it, the pads of all ten fingers a fraction of an inch away. The big canvas, tall as a growing boy. As delicate, as wonderfully made. How senseless. How unpredictable. He might have seen the painting as a door, and wondered how it could be unlocked. In extremities of drink and laudanum and grief, he might have viewed the heavy gold frame as a gate that could be stepped through, a threshold that could be breached. Crossed.
“You’re telling me,” Wes said to Vikram, “that this old woman Lida Cristaudo was the first person to come through.”
“Yes,” Vikram said. “First official.” He’d brought Wes to the cottage to show him The Shipwreck. They’d entered by the back door, into the cleaned-out kitchen. Sundown came early on the shortest days of the dying year, but a security light over the neighbor’s back steps shone straight in through the dusty glass of the unobstructed windows.
Wes leaned against one of the counters. “No, wait.” He let his head fall backward, striking a cabinet door with a resonant thonk. “I’m still trying to figure this out. You talked to this woman? And didn’t mention anything about her to us?”
“I’m sorry. It was a lot to process.” He hadn’t thought about it at the time but really, as a UDP, Wes deserved to know everything Vikram had learned. Dwayne too, with all he’d done for them.
Wes didn’t seem angry. “This is exactly what your project needed all along! It’s much better than Oliveira. You need to track her down again. Other than you, has she talked to anyone about this? Been interviewed by the news or something?”
“I gathered she’d been interviewed by the government—thoroughly. She seemed kind of shell-shocked.”
“Of course she would be! She’s the first of our kind.”
“Technically the second, if you count that graduate student Cristaudo told me about. But that woman probably ended up in a completely different world from us where the South won the Civil War or Asia colonized the Americas.”
Wes stood. “Are you going to show me this painting or what?”
“Hold on. I’ve got to go get the light.” Vikram moved with caution through the blackness of the living room, kicking out gingerly with his feet as he stepped to make sure he didn’t trip. He didn’t run into anything but couldn’t find the battery-powered lantern where he’d left it in the vestibule by the main door. Pressing the home button on his phone, he turned the illuminated screen toward the baseboards. “Hey, I can’t find Dwayne’s lantern. Bring your phone and help me look.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t have it with me.” Wes’s general shape was barely visible, silhouetted in the kitchen doorway now. “It’s pay-as-you-go. I didn’t pay this month?”
“Here.” Vikram tossed him his cigarette lighter. Wes caught it, struck the wheel. The flickering flame showed just what Vikram’s phone had: an empty place where he would have sworn the lantern should be. “Huh. I must have left it upstairs this morning.”
“Maybe we’ll find it up there. Man, I hate these lighters. The metal gets all hot under your thumb.” Wes let the flame go out.
They climbed the stairs, Vikram leading the way, shadows dancing just out of reach all around. He felt like he did during his rounds at the warehouse. But there was no sense of isolation here. The walls of the silent house were nothing but a fragile barrier between him and everyone else in the neighborhood, everyone carrying on their own activities. Dogs barked. A nearby TV sang to them. The subway sighed on its tracks. A car alarm went off on the avenue. He and Wes were alone, but not alone. This feeling, as if the veil between him and others were permeable. Other worlds, side by side. Other possibilities, lives unlived.
Maybe that was what Sleight had meant. Every big city has its ghosts.
“Do you smell something?” Wes asked in a quiet voice.
Vikram did, something sharp and acrid, chemical, yet somehow pleasant. Like the smell of the fuel when, as a boy, he’d gone to the station to fill a jerrican for Sanjay’s blazer. When he reached the top of the flight—the half bath and smaller bedroom to the right, the large bedroom with The Shipwreck to the left—he paused. Behind him, Wes said nothing.
Vikram turned left and then, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he knocked on the door. Three sharp raps.
He waited for a ghost to invite them in.
After what felt like a full minute but couldn’t have been, Wes pushed past him, lighter lit. With the door open, the smell came out to them stronger, a bright coffee-turpentine miasma. Alcohol. No—pine, licorice.
Gasoline.
Through the open door, Vikram saw the tumbled field of possessions, as disordered as he had left them. He saw the narrow path that led to the wall where the painting hung. It all dimmed as the screen of his phone turned off; for a moment, the only source of light was the flame in Wes’s hand. “Put that out,” Vikram said.
“Good idea,” said a voice from inside the room.
The light went out abruptly—maybe Wes dropped it in shock—and in the pitch darkness that followed, Vikram searched his memory to identify the woman who had just spoken. Where had he heard that voice before?
It wasn’t hard to figure out. This morning. Just this morning, over green tea.
“Teresa.” He thumbed the button to reactivate the phone. “What are you doing here?”
There she stood, the painting behind her just discernible. Trapezoids of blue at her sides, sea and ice, and a further triangle of sea between her wide-planted legs. Sunset sky and gilded frame.
“I didn’t expect anyone here,” she said. She kicked at a red plastic jug by her foot. “You’d better get out. There’s about to be a house fire.”
A million considerations flew unmoored through Vikram’s head as if suddenly set free from gravity, floating and bumping like objects in a space shuttle after liftoff. He knew that vehicles sometimes burned in neighborhoods like Brownsville—vandals set abandoned cars ablaze or joyriders burned their targets to hide evidence. But what happened if a whole house went up, so close to other buildings? All the people vulnerable to hurt: the TV watchers, the yellers and screamers, the laughers, the music players. Even the dogs.
And Hel never even got to see the painting. A tragedy.
He batted away the junk thoughts, the cobwebs. Was Wes still behind him in the dark? He didn’t dare turn to see. “You want me to leave,” he said to Klay. “What will you do once I leave?”
She didn’t speak.
“You’ll light it all on fire,” he answered for her. “But if I stand here and block the doorway, you won’t. You can’t, because you don’t want to die yourself.” He was still working through it. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
“This isn’t a movie,” Teresa Klay said. “There’s not that much fuel. I was conservative. Even if I light it up while we’re still in the room, I think we’ll both have time to get out before the floorboards catch fire. It would depend on how long you can resist the compulsion of your basic survival instincts. The painting, though? It’s pretty soaked with lighter fluid. It’s already done for. So there’s nothing really to save.”
“Wes!” Vikram called out without taking his eyes from the blank dark oval of Klay’s face. “Hey, Wes!”
No answer from behind him.
“He took off.” Klay pulled something from her pocket. A cheap plastic cylinder lighter like Vikram’s, the lighter he’d just tossed to Wes. This one was patterned with soccer balls. “I used to be a scientist,” she said. “But it didn’t make me happy. Then I discovered art. Art saved my life.” The grind of the wheel and the flame.
“Happy,” Vikram repeated stupidly. He was missing something crucial. “Why are you doing this?”
Klay shrugged. The Bic stayed lit. “It’s like The Pyronauts. Sometimes you burn because it’s your job. And other times, to send a message.”
The Pyronauts. How would she know about that?
Before Vikram got his security gig, there was a period of unemployment. He sat in his apartment and watched cable television all day. When the TV made him feel like dying, he reminded himself that this was an essential part of his education. This was how all immigrants learned about America, these days.
He loved to watch people with problems he didn’t share—unruly families, exotic illnesses, addictions and compulsions of all kinds. He was especially intrigued by the phenomenon known as hoarding. Vikram—who owned only the one stuffed backpack’s worth of books, himself—had watched demented denizens be parted by force from the mountains of things that had rendered their houses unlivable. On the shows, a counselor would help a hoarder to sort and discard. When the victim of this help proved incapable, the counselor did the work without the hoarder’s participation. Well-meaning family members rented construction Dumpsters to cart away all the rubbish.
Reality TV, this type of program was called. He watched men and women be ousted from the nests they had built, the worlds that surrounded and sustained them. Watching this moved him. He wept, and felt a secret satisfaction when they wept, too.
From his TV habit, he knew the terminology. Some hoarders left clear spaces between their clots and clogs. Others made goat paths that allowed them to move over the piles in the room. A floor’s surface might be completely covered, but there were still ways of getting through that became part of the internal geography of the room. These ways were uneven and treacherous but passable.
When Hel appeared—when she entered Sleight’s bedroom through the door behind Vikram—she took in the flotsam that lapped at the walls faster than he would have believed possible. Before he could speak, before Klay could speak, Hel was vaulting over the piles at a run, finding footholds and handholds, Mrs. Defoe’s stuff crunching, breaking, collapsing under her weight, and yet in a blink, she’d gotten around behind Klay and looped an arm around her neck.
Vikram pressed the button on his phone to light the screen once again. “Hel.”
She didn’t acknowledge him. “You know I carry a knife,” she said, right in Teresa Klay’s ear. “You must know that about me. I’m an otolaryngologist. That means an ear, nose, and throat specialist. I know exactly what I’m doing. Put that lighter out. And tell me where my book is.”
In the gloom, Vikram could just make out Hel’s hands. There was no knife. Gripped tight in Hel’s fingers, something utterly the wrong shape to be a weapon pushed harmlessly against the soft part of Klay’s throat.
John Gund lay on the ground. In the distance, the lookout point outside the city’s entrance loomed. He watched the guardhouse atop the sca
ffold burn.
This was the highest structure around, though in the stunted, blackened landscape, nothing else remained to compare. The little house—the size of a garden shed or small garage—perched atop spindly ten-meter-tall legs, reachable by a zigzag of stairs, fifteen half-flight switchbacks. It had been guarded from the waves of immolation that had passed across the earth since the aliens’ departure. Once, park rangers with heliographs and passenger pigeons guarded the forest from this perch, alert for accidental fires. Now, the birds were dead, and there was no one to signal to, no one aboveground. Still, to this day, a watchperson staffed it at all times. No enemy approach would take Vic City by surprise.
John Gund watched the conflagration wreck the cabin. The tower’s metal legs and platform could not be destroyed so easily. They would endure. If materials for a new shelter could not be found, future watchers would crouch out in the open as punishment for letting Asyl approach their safehold.
When he’d woken at the filling station to find her gone, John Gund felt a sense of unreality, patting the empty place next to him, sure that he was dreaming. But no—she must have left at first light. He realized he should have anticipated it. He stepped outside the tent. No more sign of her than there had been of Aitch a few days before.
Taking stock of what remained in their campsite, he noted that in addition to her bedroll, she’d packed a few days’ rations, her flame pistol, and a spare tank. More disturbing was the presence of her helmet, which she’d left outside, placed deliberately over the ashes of the fire he’d made for companionship the day before. Through the clear plexi faceplate, he could make out a charred length of chair leg.
He gathered up the rest of his gear as quickly as he could, loading the essentials into his knapsack, hiding what he couldn’t carry inside the old ice chest, a cache to which he could return at a later time. He lashed her helmet to his belt. It was valuable—irreplaceable—and she would need it later. When she came to her senses. If too much damage had not been done.
