by K. Chess
He began to walk. Though this section of the Never was not within their patrol area, they’d skirted it on their westernmost circuits many times, and John Gund sometimes visited Vic City on his furloughs. He climbed the ring of hills and passed down into a valley he knew, shaped like a cupped palm. On a clear, bright day like today, it was easy to imagine how pleasant these outskirts must have been Before. It wasn’t long before he spotted Asyl up ahead, moving at the same pace he was. A tiny speck. His eyesight had faded as he aged; he couldn’t make out anything more than a vague person-shape, but the quality of its movements told him it was she.
If she happened to look back over her shoulder, she would see John Gund. Maybe she already had. But her lead was too great for either of them to be heard over the wind; she couldn’t tell him to stay back.
John Gund couldn’t hope to follow Aitch’s trail on his own. He didn’t have the tracking skills. Had Asyl abandoned the trail in hopes of asking the sentries which way he had passed? Or was this slow descent also the path Aitch had walked before them?
The house atop the watchtower appeared on the faraway ridge, dark against a pale blue sky, like a floating castle. Soon enough, his eyes made out the threadlike scaffolding that held it up. It swayed a little, as it was designed to do.
The watchers up there would have a powerful spyglass. They would see her uniform. They would also see that her helmet was missing.
John Gund reached the bottom of the valley as Asyl arrived at the far side of the bowl. She stopped at the foot of the tower. On high, the door of the watch post opened, and a figure stepped out. Asyl exchanged words with the sentinel. Or at least, that seemed probable. The wind roared, sucking her words away. Then, the ladder he couldn’t quite see must have been extended in invitation, and she began to climb. John Gund increased his speed, trotting now, his breath fogging the face shield. Her helmet struck him in a steady rhythm as it swung from his belt. He tracked the formless mote he knew to be Asyl, moving up and up and up. She gained the platform. She stood on the deck. She entered the little house.
A full minute later, he spied the smoke. At first, it appeared pale gray, wispy, and he doubted his eyes. Though why should he have? Fires were his livelihood now. They were all men’s livelihood.
(And all women’s, too, Hel was sure Sleight had meant.)
Then, the smoke became dense and dark, as full of portent as a thundercloud. Black smoke bubbled out of the cabin at an acute angle, carried fast on the breeze. Any pyronaut could read the signs. Asyl had gone into the house to parley for information on Aitch. Now, minutes later, the structure was on fire.
John Gund ran. He ran until his lungs ached, until his exertions overwhelmed the ventilation system in his suit and his face shield turned opaque, ran blind until one foot landed in a hole—the abandoned den of some poor animal, extinct now—and he twisted his ankle and fell. He couldn’t wait for the shield to clear. He removed his helmet. Took his first unprotected breath in years, expecting it to sting, to sear.
But it didn’t. The sky domed above him, still blue, the way it had always been Before. Fingers of flame poked up through the roof of the guard post. He knew the pale yellow color of a fire fed by good fuel and plenty of oxygen. The same air John Gund took now, unfiltered, into his lungs.
One human figure, an undifferentiated blur, clung to the ladder. He or she had climbed partway down and now tarried at the level just below the inferno, as if trying to decide on a course of action, though it was clear to John Gund that the fire would not be extinguished, that no power could save the guardhouse now. The platform at the top of the scaffold glowed like a furnace. Veils of fire obscured the little house’s walls, its collapsing roof. The line of smoke was an arrow in the sky, pointing it out; the open door its molten orange heart. No one trapped within could survive such a crucible.
Yet he could see only one person. Was it a guard there on the ladder? Or was it Asyl?
John Gund clutched at his ankle and thought of Asyl’s God, who lifted people from the hottest of fires. Wasn’t hers the shape he couldn’t quite identify? Wasn’t it? He would have to get closer to know, but he didn’t try to rise from the ground yet.
He was a sinner, too weak to have deserved salvation—or was it his very weakness that had preserved him? That was what John Gund thought to himself just then. Or something along those lines; Hel couldn’t quite remember the terms he’d used to berate himself. He was too late. He’d made himself too late.
Hel had to read it again, to know the rest for sure.
An hour before they would enter Sleight’s house together, Hel and Dwayne stood in front of a grave, the cold stone incised with Shawn Sealy’s name and the dates he had lived. There was the patch of grass that was all the real estate he had in the world.
“What do you do here?” she’d asked.
“I’m going to talk to him now. Just like I would if you weren’t with me. I’m going to concentrate on what I want to tell him and I’m going to say it in my head. Even though he can’t hear it. I’m not crazy. I know he ain’t really here. Still, it makes me think of him, standing on this spot.” Dwayne’s gaze swept the nearby graves, with their flowers and stuffed toys and miniature Christmas trees. “You don’t really have anywhere to go, for Jonas.” He said her son’s name carefully. “Do you?”
“No,” she whispered.
She could put down the bouquet of poinsettias she was still carrying, right here on Shawn Sealy’s grave. Their spade-shaped cloth leaves were dyed a red as bright as oxygenated blood. She remembered what that looked like, when you made the first incision. The body’s protest; the most alive thing she knew of. She wanted to lay them down here.
As she started to crouch, Dwayne touched her arm, stopping her. “Please.” His hand on her bicep gave a little apologetic squeeze. “Please don’t. I just mean, maybe you should save those for your Jonas. Find it. Figure out where.”
Now, Hel counted. The big man with the tattoos she’d seen on the way in had been running through the empty lot behind the cottage for the avenue, which meant that four of them now remained. Dwayne in the upstairs hallway. Vikram aghast in the bedroom doorway. Klay struggling with her here, in the small clearing in front of the painting. One, two, three, four. The place reeked of fuel. Was The Shipwreck already irreparably damaged? Gas was a solvent, just like paint thinner.
Only more volatile.
“If you don’t want to die, right now,” Hel said, keeping her voice even, “your only choice is to put out that lighter. If you burn this house, I swear I will cut your jugular.” She pushed the stem of the plastic flower harder against her antagonist’s bared throat. Klay stood a few inches taller than Hel but had a slighter frame. Her hair, loosened from its tie, tickled Hel’s nose. Hel heard Vikram’s voice, heard that he was speaking, but couldn’t focus on what he said; it didn’t matter right now.
Klay did not let the Bic go out, but she didn’t drop it into the widening pool, either. She groped out with her free hand, reaching blindly for what she believed was a blade, but Hel held her wrist tight, keeping it immobile, and tried not to sneeze from all the dust in this place.
The Shipwreck, somehow right here where she’d sensed it would be. “Where did you find it? Why did you bring it here to burn?”
“I didn’t,” said Klay, bucking in her arms. “It was here. Your boyfriend told me.”
The wail of an approaching siren became audible. “They’re coming for you, shitfoot,” Hel said. “Stop moving.” She was still thinking it through. William Sleight had owned this house. Perhaps he’d recalled Ezra’s fascination with the painting and asked after it, perhaps the headmistress of the school gave it to the grieving father. Perhaps William bought it outright and the record of the sale had been destroyed. Klay’s body went stiff, but Hel didn’t relax her hold. “Now, the lighter. Give it to me.” Perhaps William Sleight crept into the foyer in the dead of night and stole the painting—the painting that failed to save his son—and brought it ba
ck here. She was not in a position to judge.
And it didn’t matter how it happened. The painting had been here, all these years, hidden from a world indifferent to its survival. Now recovered, only to be annihilated.
Hel felt Klay’s pulse, its ardent thrumming, and thought of lying on the couch and holding her son. Of his small heart. The memory took over her whole being, coursed through her synapses like a wave. Jonas. His smell. The plastic flower in her hand, which she still needed to give to him, and this house, which she needed to save.
“Just so you know, I took your book,” Klay said. “I burned that first thing.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Vikram knelt in front of the painting now, and Hel heard the anger in his voice and thought he must be addressing her, but no, he was talking to Klay.
“Let me tell you both something.” Klay twisted her shoulders, testing Hel’s grip. “Your so-called project? Collecting UDPs’ little treasures? Your book by a dead author, a crumpled-up tract from some religion that forced all its members to stay behind and kill themselves, a bottle of wine created from a variety that doesn’t exist in a vineyard that’s been nuked, a dead baby’s goddamn shoe? That’s not educational. It’s just sad.”
Vikram wasn’t listening. “You ruined the painting! You destroyed the book! Why would you do that, when Hel needs them so badly?”
No, Hel wanted to say. Not just me.
“Your world wasn’t that great, just because it was yours. Who would want to put its morbid relics on display? Why not just leave them buried?”
It’s for all of us. But that wasn’t right. Hel had been selfish in her grief. All the while she’d reached for something that could not be touched, he’d been reaching back to her in generosity. Vikram, her lover. The two of them missing each other in the dark.
Hel found she had no anger to summon. She could only defend Klay. “She’s not one of us. She doesn’t understand.”
“She is! She should.” Vikram stood. He slapped the lighter from Klay’s hand, and time seemed to stop for a second, but it was only a disposable lighter, after all. Once it was out of her grasp, the flame went out, as Vikram must have known it would. The Bic dropped to the floor with a plastic clatter. “She’s a UDP too—aren’t you? You worked with the scientists who built the Gate. Admit it! Here, can you turn her around? I can’t see her in the dark.”
It didn’t make sense. There was no way to hide one’s status. Special requirements had to be met. Employers had to be notified. How would Donaldson not know? “Impossible,” Hel said aloud, doing her best to maneuver the smaller woman toward the brighter hallway as Klay resisted passively, relaxing all her muscles. “She would have been debriefed, she would be going to meetings like us. How would the Reintegration Education and Adjustment Counseling Authority not know about her? It’s impossible.”
“Not if she came through before everyone else, before anyone knew to be on the lookout. I know who she is! She’s the test.”
“There was a test?” Hel let go without thinking. She didn’t understand.
Dwayne had found the camping lantern. He turned it on, pointed it at Teresa Klay. They all looked at her.
“I burned your book. I did. I did it.” Her glasses had been pushed askew, but her eyes did not stray from Hel’s. “I’m not one of you. I wouldn’t go back, not even if it was possible. And believe me, it isn’t.”
A marvel, Hel thought, the ferocity of her determination to destroy all evidence of her past, when her past and Hel’s were as ephemeral as anyone else’s—neither to be held, nor fully released.
Now Dwayne swung the lantern toward the painting. She could see its surface, dappled and marred by streaks of discoloration where the gasoline had touched it. The desperate hand rubbed out. She saw it and wondered: Where was the impact? Staring at the place in the ocean where she knew the artist had painted that drowning sailor, she remembered how it had been for her, the first time she’d thought The Shipwreck gone, in the old school upstate. She didn’t feel that now.
Klay by the lakeside, telling her to breathe. Klay on the bench, her arm around Hel’s shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter, really,” Hel said, not sure to whom she was speaking. She reached out for Klay, who looked as if she were about to bolt for the stairs. She wrapped her arms around her, an authoritarian hug. In that moment, she reminded herself of Seff, comforting Hel and berating her at the same time. The sirens wailed louder now, very near. “You know, oil paint itself is flammable. You didn’t need the extra fuel.”
Something with hard edges poked against her stomach. Hel lifted the tail of Klay’s shirt. Tucked into her waistband, a paperback.
“No! I burned it up,” Klay insisted, even as Hel drew it out.
The paper cover, robin’s egg blue.
Hel held it between them, in the light. After a moment, Vikram reached out, lifted it from her hands.
Vikram waited under the overhang by the entrance of the Home Depot in Jamaica as the snow swept down at an angle. He watched plows clear the lot, watched another inch accumulate, and watched it cleared a second time before he spotted a pickup with an extended cab skidding in from 168th Street and slaloming around the cart corral. Hel stepped out of the driver’s side, bundled up in a parka he didn’t recognize. The wind lifted tendrils of her black hair, sending them dancing. She beckoned at him, then got back in.
Pulling up his hood, Vikram closed the distance between them. All the way, the snow found his unprotected face like a swarm of tiny, stinging insects. He fumbled for the door handle. “What?”
“Still fifteen minutes before they open,” she said. “I thought you might want to wait out of the weather.”
The big cab felt small to him. The two of them hadn’t been alone in a room together since Hel had come to Jerome Avenue to move her things out of his apartment, more than a year ago. They’d both agreed that was a good idea, at the time.
“Thanks,” Vikram said now.
“Thanks for not cancelling on me, like everyone else.”
Before leaving his house, he’d double-checked the online message-board service Hel used now to organize volunteers. There was her post: still on! with no comments. “Not a problem,” he said. He took off his gloves, flexed his fingers. They stung as circulation returned. “Nice ride, by the way. Who does it belong to?”
“Hector. You’ve been to a couple of workdays—I think you must have met him. Tall Puerto Rican guy with glasses? He helped Eden do the power washing.”
“It’s awfully high off the ground. And that little bench seat back there? Is that really necessary?”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Hel said. “Can’t transport a bunch of sheetrock on the subway.”
After that, they sat, not talking. Air from the vents blew on them, painfully hot, and on the other side of the glass, the silent storm progressed without other human witnesses. It would have been nice to think that maybe all the Home Depot employees had been given the day off at the last minute, but Vikram was acquainted with capitalism’s demands and doubted it. He was starting to worry about conditions on the roads back to Brownsville, though. The longer this took, the more dangerous it would be for Hel to drive with her load to the building the FDNY had saved and cleared.
Not that she wasn’t capable. He knew she was.
Hurt, he’d stayed away. When he came to a workday as a New Year’s resolution, he found a different woman, one who knew how to wire a switch and seal a corner. She seemed to be everywhere, delegating tasks to volunteers, defusing an argument she hadn’t even started. Happier than he’d ever seen her. Asking for help, when she needed it.
He tried not to take it personally.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Hel said. “Do you think we should leave?”
Just then, a kid in an orange vest came out and unlocked the front doors.
The cavernous store felt deserted. They couldn’t find anyone to ask for directions, so they walked aimlessly. Each aisle they pe
ered down bristled with objects and tools. Vikram wasn’t sure which should be familiar and which were safely foreign. “Do you know what sheetrock looks like?”
“Yeah. I looked it up. It’s like a big sheet of . . .” She waved her hands. “I don’t know. Wall.”
“It’s big, right? I feel like it would be with the lumber. Definitely around the edge somewhere.” They circled the perimeter and found it in Building Materials. Vikram helped her load four-foot-by-eight-foot panels onto a low cart, and together, they guided it toward the front.
“You normally have your class,” she said. “On Thursday mornings. Don’t you?”
“It’s in the afternoon. Anyway, it’s cancelled.” He was taking a contemporary poetry class at CUNY in the Heights. It touched him so, the thought of Hel asking after him, that he stopped pushing his end. “How did you know about that?”
She’d stopped walking too. “I’m glad. I’d hate for you to miss out, for this.”
I would do anything for you.
No. Not appropriate. He swallowed the words. “I know the cottage is important.”
At the automatic checkout, she scanned and paid. “Have you ever heard that most couples divorce when their child dies?” Receipt paper from the machine sifted through her fingers. “It’s just too much trauma. Even though they shared the experience, it tears them apart.”
“Yes. I think I’ve read that.”
She put her gloved hand on his arm. “But what happened to us was sort of the opposite of that, don’t you think?”
“If that’s true,” he said, “what do you think it means?” All the aspects of his world and Hel’s that were gone, all the people and places they would never see again. And weighing against these deficiencies, the few things they’d saved. He felt the press of her fingers. “Maybe you and I know too much about each other to ever start fresh. Have you ever thought of that?”
“No,” she said. “You still love me. It’s good that you know me. And I like that you were there with me to see it.” With a heave, she got the cart of drywall moving again.
