by Bob Proehl
“We do,” says Cedric. “But work should be rewarding. I make a point never to do a job purely for the money.”
“That’s a good policy,” says Carrie. “But sometimes you have to put food on the table.” She spreads her hands to indicate the ridiculous variety in front of them.
“I’m sorry you won’t be staying with us longer,” says the mayor. “You said this was your first run. Is it?”
“First time here, yes,” says Carrie. “But like I said, not a run. Small private job. Picking up a bowling trophy or something for some rich”—she almost says idiot—“person.”
“Do you have the address?” Mayor Pam asks. “I could have someone escort you.”
Carrie bites her lip and sighs. “I haven’t been entirely honest,” she says. “The thing I’m picking up? It’s not a bowling trophy. It’s a porn collection. Weird fetish stuff. And the person I’m working for?” She looks at Cedric. “It’s a name you’d know. Big Bishop Foundation higher-up. A job like this, part of what they pay for is discretion.”
Cedric grins. “Everyone’s entitled to their little kinks,” he says.
“I’m good with a map,” Carrie says. “I’m assuming the street names are all the same.”
Mayor Pam chuckles. “Nothing’s changed here, Liz,” she says. “The things that have, we’ve worked very hard to change them back.”
“We’ll get there,” Cedric says, patting her hand. “The Path to Return; the very phrase means so many things.”
“So many,” says Mayor Pam absently, staring into Cedric’s eyes. Carrie wonders if they’re fucking. She wonders what Cedric’s ability is and how often he’s used it on Mayor Pam.
“You should write down the address where Liz will be staying,” Cedric says.
“Of course,” says Mayor Pam, jotting it on a beverage napkin.
“Maybe we could provide a safe for your room,” Cedric suggests. “In the interest of discretion.”
“You’ve both done so much already,” Carrie says. “I think the traditional brown paper bag will be enough to keep prying eyes away.” This gets both of them laughing, loud overdone laughter older people use to show they’re comfortable with things like pornography. Feeling marginally safe, Carrie barehands a crab puff, tosses it in her mouth, and washes it down with a gulp of wine.
* * *
—
Working streetlights give the impression that everything is fine. The horror movie cliché of the sputtering light gets its power from the comfort functioning infrastructure gives. Boulder is working. Boulder is fine.
Carrie makes her way through an open-air mall that’s lit up like daylight, strings of high-watt bulbs hung between lampposts like garlands. In front of restaurants and bars, middle-aged couples chat drunkenly and clink glasses together. She never imagined any place in the Wastes could feel so normal.
Carrie spots the couple and immediately makes herself invisible. To anyone else, they look like a pair on a bad date, but Carrie’s known them for years. Martin Scholl was a student with her at Bishop, one of the fliers who helped catch the shooter on Public Day. He’d been working with the National Parks Service but signed on with the Faction after fighting broke out at Bishop. Thandi Nneka’s a shapeshifter who did relief work for most of the war, running into war zones after the fighting had moved elsewhere. The bombing of the Houston school had been the last straw, and she joined the Faction for the tail end of the war.
They sit not talking, not touching their drinks. Martin’s gotten soft, with a hipster beard and a paunch. Thandi makes herself look older than she is to fit in with the middle-aged crowd. They’re watching people with more attention than the activity requires. The fact they’re relaxed makes Carrie more nervous than she’d be if they were actively looking for her. They’re stationed here, she thinks. They’re guarding something. And if there’re two, there are three more nearby.
Carrie pushes herself deeper down, below her passive state, under slippiness, into a place where she turns away people’s attention. Miquel called it her “homeless leper” state. She holds it together as she comes to the end of the pedestrian mall and turns onto 13th Street and the address the voice on the phone gave her to memorize two days ago, the only time they spoke.
Boulder reestablished itself as a tourist spot after the war. People who couldn’t afford to live there might manage a short stay, a chance to remind themselves what life used to be like. The hotels thrive, and the Boulderado, a 1950s relic that had been struggling before the war, was a wild success because of the way its nostalgia skipped over the war and the years leading up to it, which now seemed tainted. It suggests an era not only before people knew about Resonants but before they existed.
Carrie follows an elderly couple into the Boulderado, ducking into a coat room and scanning the lobby. She marks security cameras in each corner, swiveling to cover the full room. She skirts around the edges of the lobby toward the elevators, out of sight of at least two of the cameras.
She steps into an elevator behind three middle-aged ladies too absorbed in themselves to notice her even if she was visible. She rides up to the fifteenth floor with them, then back down to the eleventh. The hallway is empty, no cameras, and Carrie comes back up to visibility. Plush carpet muffling her footsteps, she walks to room 1107.
Carrie raps her knuckles on the door, which is different from the others on this floor: dark carved wood rather than painted metal. She’s certain this has all been a joke and the other three members of the Bloom are waiting behind the door, the couple from the restaurant on the way up in the elevator behind her.
The dead bolt clacks. With a protest from the hinges, the door swings open. A black woman in her sixties stands in the doorway. She wears a loose sweater, and she smiles. Carrie knows she knows the woman but can’t place her. She’s from too long ago, another life. Behind the woman, at a table with three chessboards, there’s a girl at the end of her teens with dark skin, bright blue eyes, and tight spirals of hair that fall around her face like a fountain of sparks. The older woman smiles at Carrie, then turns to the girl.
“Look, Emmeline,” Kimani Moore says. “We have a guest.”
The first time Kevin Bishop met Raymond Glover was in April 1940 on the train from Albany to Santa Fe. A second-year grad student in the physics department at Columbia, Kevin had been approached by a man in a dark suit in a bar on the East Side that was not generally patronized by men in dark suits. It was a bar Kevin frequented hoping to be approached, only to go home drunk and bitter no one but the bartender had said a word to him. He’d wonder later if the man chose to approach him there to imply a threat of revelation in his offer to join the war effort—visiting, much less frequenting, an establishment like that would violate the university’s code of conduct—but he didn’t think about it at the time. He wanted to join. He was susceptible to the promise of combating evil with science, but the true appeal lay in the rumors of what the work would encompass. No one was talking, but the silence had its own shape, and the list of scientists who had up and left tenured positions, disappearing overnight, suggested something of grandeur. The man in the suit wiped off the bar in front of him with a handkerchief before deigning to touch it and spun lines to Kevin about honor and country, but he knew to promise Kevin the outermost boundaries of science. A week later Kevin was on a late-night bus to Albany to take the train west from there the next morning. The man said not to go directly. Even in the bustle and thrum of Penn Station, his exit might be noted.
The slim envelope the man gave him for expenses didn’t contain enough cash for a berth, and the first night Kevin slept in his seat. The strain on his back woke him eventually, and he moved to the observation car, hoping for an open bench. He passed through the club car, which was empty save for a young man who raised a glass of whiskey at him and nodded as if they were regular commuters on this line, used to seeing each other every day.
Kevin passed him without comment and sprawled out on the hard bench of the observation car, tucking his wallet down the front of his pants for safety. The next morning, he woke to the sounds of enthusiastic children yelping at the view of the plains, city kids with cramped concepts of space calling for their parents to come see the vast expanse of nothing.
In his suitcase, he had papers and journals: Fermi on the Chicago Pile-1, Bethe on experimental nuclear dynamics. It seemed risky to bring them out, as if he’d be revealing his identity. He dug in his bag for something less conspicuous and found a yellowing copy of Zeitschrift für Physik with an old paper by Leo Szilard about Maxwell’s demon. It was one of Szilard’s first publications, written in German, which could raise suspicions, albeit the wrong ones. Fishing out his glasses and keeping the journal in his lap to obscure the title, he started in. He slogged through what he could of the article, interspersed with abortive attempts to nap. Time took on a static quality, one he’d think about for years afterward. The end point of his trip was set, the course inevitable. The train ride felt like something that already had happened or was always already happening. He was between New York and Santa Fe, a point strung out into a line so that the Kevin Bishop in Buffalo, in Cleveland and Chicago and Kansas City, had a form of existence, too, a ghost of him that was yet to come and already was. It was comforting and unsettling at once.
That night, back pain once again drove him out of his seat, wading through the sea of snoring, drooling humanity to find six feet of horizontal space. In the club car, the same handsome man raised another glass of whiskey, contributing to Kevin’s sense that time wasn’t behaving as it should. The population of the train had turned over almost completely at Chicago, and Kevin was surprised to see him. He went to pass through toward the observation car, but the man grabbed his bare wrist.
“Do you buy what he’s selling?” he asked.
Kevin stopped, his sport coat tucked under his arm. He looked at the man blankly.
“Kaufst du was er verkauft?” the man said, his German crisp and academic. “Figuring the spent entropy of the demon into the system. The effort to do the information collection and sorting. Do you think it outsmarts Maxwell?”
“I’m not sure I care,” Kevin said. “It’s a game.”
“There is no demon, there are no chambers,” the man said. “A very Eastern approach. I don’t think Siz would approve. He takes his thought experiments seriously. I heard after he read Schrödinger’s paper, he was spotted luring stray cats in Hell’s Kitchen.”
“I took a class with him last year,” Kevin said. “He’s very practically minded. Nuts and bolts stuff.”
“Who has time for thought experiments while the world burns?” the man said. He stood up, dauntingly tall, and summoned the sleepy bartender. “What’s your poison?” he asked Kevin.
“Gin and soda,” Kevin said. The man looked at him as if he’d farted in church. He reached across the bar and stopped the bartender from picking up the soda siphon.
“Give my friend a respectable drink,” he said. “A gin martini, vermouth from a fresh bottle if you have one. And another scotch for me.” The bartender obliged, and the man insisted Kevin take the chair next to him. Intrigued in equal parts by the man’s breezy mention of a mind like Szilard and the stark silent-film-star lines of the man’s face, Kevin obliged as well.
“If you studied with Siz, you must be at Columbia,” the man said, clinking his glass against Kevin’s and sloshing a drop of gin onto the table. Kevin nodded and worried the surface of his drink with the speared olives. “Princeton, myself,” the man said. “I imagine we’re headed to the same place.”
The man who recruited Kevin had been clear that he was to speak to no one about where he was going. They might be German, he’d said. They might be one of ours. Either one may kill you if they know what you are.
“I’m on sabbatical, is all,” Kevin said, avoiding the man’s avid gaze.
He threw Kevin a quick wink. “Me, too,” he said. “Constitutional in the desert. Doctors say it’ll be good for my lungs.”
“Dry air,” Kevin said.
“I think it’s a problem of time,” the man said after a pause. Kevin looked at him, confused. “The demon. Entropy increases as time moves forward, yes. But it decreases as time moves backward.”
“Time doesn’t move backward,” Kevin said.
“I’m not convinced it moves at all,” the man said. “Like you said, there is no demon, there are no chambers.”
“I didn’t say that,” Kevin said.
The man waved this off. “It’s information,” he said. “It exists in a permanent state. You can roll it backward and forward in your mind like a kid moving a toy train back and forth on a track. The system contains all of it. The chaos at the beginning, the neatly sorted molecules at the end. The demon reporting for work in the morning, eager to get down to the business of organization, the demon clocking out at night, eyes bleary from tracking the speed of molecules, shoulder stiff from opening and shutting the door. All of it always happening.”
This idea hewed so close to the thoughts Kevin had been having earlier that it seemed he might have fallen into a dream in which he talked himself through the puzzle his brain had banged up against all day. The train lurched, spilling gin onto Kevin’s pants. The handsome man was up with a handkerchief immediately, dabbing at the spot.
“You don’t look like you’re going to make it all the way west,” he said.
“I couldn’t spring for a berth,” Kevin said. “I’ve been sleeping sitting up the last two nights.”
The man fished a key out of the inner pocket of his jacket. “Go get some kip,” he said. “Push the clothes and such off to the floor and take a rest.”
The key glinted wondrously in the dim light of the club car, promising rest. “I couldn’t,” Kevin said.
“I’m not using it anyway,” he said. “Can’t sleep. I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve.”
“I normally wouldn’t,” Kevin said.
“I don’t think normal is an issue for you and me,” he said. He grabbed Kevin’s hand in a full, hearty shake, the key pressing into his palm. “Raymond Glover,” he said. “Maybe we’ll run into each other out there in the desert. In the dry air.”
“Bishop,” Kevin said. “Kevin.” His brain swam with gin and exhaustion and something more significant and impairing than both.
* * *
—
Raymond Glover didn’t join Kevin that night, but the next, knocking gently on the door of the berth. Raymond had given him the key and with it the power to say no but must have known he wouldn’t. He had to be read as straight so he didn’t get the shit kicked out of him, but he had to be legible as gay if he didn’t want to be irrevocably alone. Kevin tried to send signals while also not sending them. Misreading signals could get his teeth kicked in. It was a dance. Those who knew the steps did better for themselves than more attractive or charming men who couldn’t communicate who they were or recognize their own.
Kevin was surprised how easily Raymond knew what he was and responded to it. When Kevin woke with Raymond crammed into the small cot next to him, he attributed it to echolocation on Raymond’s part. Raymond believed he deserved to be loved and assumed Kevin would love him. Working off a lifetime of evidence, Kevin was convinced he couldn’t be loved and was fundamentally unworthy of affection, and his attempts to passively solicit it, sitting by himself in bars or staring at his reflection in Third Avenue shop windows late at night, had been doomed by his own conviction that they were doomed. The dreamlike quality of the trip became amplified, losing its form in Raymond’s arms. Distance was a ticking clock as their destination approached and with it the end of the affair. The thing Kevin wanted was approaching, and it would destroy this thing he’d barely dared to want.
* * *
—
They elec
ted to report a day late. There wasn’t much negotiation; neither had been explicit about why he was in New Mexico. The train got in late, and they took adjoining rooms at the Hotel St. Francis. The next morning he watched the clock over Raymond’s shoulder as checkout time slipped by, followed by his appointment time. Late that afternoon while Raymond showered, Kevin called the number the man in the suit had given him.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” he said. “The train was delayed out of Chicago and just now got in.”
“That’s funny,” said the woman on the other end. “We had a whole crew come in fine on the train from last night.” Kevin hemmed and hawed, and the woman chuckled. “It’s fine, Mr. Bishop,” she said. “Perfectly normal to get cold feet. You’re not our first late arrival. A little advice, though?”
“Please,” he said.
“A bad truth serves better than a good lie in this man’s army.”
“I’m not in the army,” Kevin said.
“Mr. Bishop, you are deeper in it than the boys in the trenches,” she said. “You’ll do well to remember that. Be sure you’re here tomorrow, bright and early.” She clicked off, and he heard the last drips of water falling in the bathroom.
* * *
—
Keeping up appearances, they said their goodbyes in the room, making love one last time. Raymond swore he heard cleaners making their rounds in the hallways and bit down on Kevin’s hand as he came. Kevin left first and was settling his bill when Raymond came down. They didn’t acknowledge each other in the lobby, or out front as the valet summoned Raymond a cab, which he didn’t offer to share. Kevin asked directions. The valet rolled his eyes when he saw the address.
“East Palace is three blocks over,” he said, throwing his arm in the direction Raymond’s cab had gone. “If you hurry, you can catch the last guy’s tail.”
