by Kelly Link
Police or soldiers putting down their guns in hostage situations.
Hostage situations.
The cop, finally pushed to his/her limit, tossing badge or detective’s shield onto his/her CO’s desk.
The cast, be they doctors, lawyers, or cops, all striding side by side, often in slow motion, along a corridor on their way to another fine yet difficult day as credits roll.
“I wanted to give back.”
“This is your chance to do the right thing.”
“You’re not going to die on me!”
How with two minutes left in the show the bad guy tells us why he’s done all he has, that it’s all justified.
The original screed ran two pages. In following years, amendments—additions, truthfully—added another fourteen, growing ever more prolix until attentions strayed elsewhere. From time to time as I submitted new editions, I requested progress reports from my parents. Could he have been so innocent, that fledgling contrarian, as to believe some channel existed whereby they might actually deal with these issues? Was he attempting to bend the world to some latent image he had in mind? Just to shout out to the world: I am here? Whatever else it may have presaged, the project attests that at least, even then, I was paying attention.
By this time I’d got heavily into reading and may have had at the back of my mind, like that movement in the room’s corner you can’t locate when looking straight on, intimations of how powerfully words affect—how they give form to—the world about us.
I became aware that my greatest pleasure lay not in what was happening within the confines of the narrative but in its textures: the surround, the moods and rhythms, the shifting colors. And that it was auxiliary characters I found most interesting. A quiet rejection of celebrity, maybe—this sense that those spun out to screen’s edge, the postmen, foils, second bananas, loyal companions and walk-ons, are the ones who matter? History with its drums and wagons and wars marches past, and we go on scrabbling to stay in place, huddled with our families and tribes, setting tables, trying to find enough to eat.
Sheer plod makes plow down sillion shine, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Not that, when you come down to it, we do a hell of a lot of shining. At best we give off just enough light to hold away the dark for an hour or two. That’s all the fire Prometheus had to give us.
Light was failing, if never the fire, as Merritt Li and I made our way on glistening streets, cleaving insofar as we could to shadow and walls. Rain had begun hours earlier. Streetlights shimmered with halos, windows wore jackets of glaze—as would lens. That gave small comfort at the same time that the fact of fewer bodies abroad gave caution.
We weren’t following leads so much as what someone once called wandering to find direction and someone else called searching for a black hat in a pitch-black room.
Rain made a rich stew of a hundred smells. Took away edges and corners and the hard surface of things. The city was feeling its way towards beauty.
There did seem to be a rudimentary pattern, the attacks moving outward from city’s center, but patterns, what’s there, what’s not, can’t be trusted. Apophenia. The perception of order in random data. See three dots on an otherwise blank page, right away you’re trying to fit them together. Nonetheless, we were trolling in rude circles towards the outer banks, touching down at rail stations, pedestrian nodes, crossroads and terminals of every sort. That amounted to a lot of being out there in the open, exposed, and as chancy for Li as for me at this point, but (returning to a prior observation) what else did we have?
In such situations, while outwardly you’re alert to every small shift or turn, changes in light, in movements around you, your own heartbeat or breathing, inwardly you’re floating free, allowing your mind to do what it does best unpinned. Thoughts skitter, burn, and flare out, some shapeless, others barbed. As I scurried from sillion to sillion, bench to stairway to arcade, thoughts of childhood, books, folk songs, populism and political exhaustion accompanied me.
All I wanted was for my life, when you picked it up in your hands, to have some weight to it, Fran once told me. Rain coming down then outside our TBH as it was now on city streets, the two of us waiting for nightfall and go codes, foxhole reeking of processed food, stale air, unwashed bodies.
Within months of that, the GK virus had carved away fully a sixth of our population, especially among the elderly, infants and the chronically ill, all those with compromised immune systems, poor general health, low physical reserves.
Explanations for the virus? Natural selection at work in an overpopulated world, willful thinning of the herd by intellectual or financial elitists, Biblical cleansing, our own current government’s research gone amiss, biologic agents introduced by any of a dozen or more current enemies.
Or that old friend happenstance.
Substantive as they were, Li’s and my excursions had yielded little more than an anecdotal accounting of the city as it stood, along with instances of kindness, cruelty, anxiety and insouciance in fairly equal measure, in every conceivable shape or form.
Crews were busily tearing out the forest of digital billboards at city center, these having recently been judged (depending on the assessor) unaesthetic or ineffective.
The dry riverbed, cemented over years ago, was now being uncemented on its way to becoming a canal complete with boats and waterside city parks. Government-stamped posters with artists’ renditions of the final result hung everywhere. Those of a cynical disposition well might wonder where funds for this massive project originated. More positive souls might choose not to take note of the disrepair in surrounding streets.
Repeatedly as we moved through the city we encountered flash-mob protests. Participants assembled without preamble at rail stations, on street corners, in the city’s open spaces. Most protestors were young, some looked as though they’d awakened earlier in the day from Rip Van Winkle naps. They’d demonstrate, sometimes with silence and dialogue cards, other times with chants or improvised songs, and within minutes fade back into the crowd, before authorities showed up.
“We’re chasing shadows at midnight,” Merritt Li says one day.
And I hear Fran, another day, another time, saying “We’re the shadow of shadows.”
We’d come in country under cover of night, the two of us, and trekked on foot miles inland. The sky was starting to lighten and birds to sing when we reached the extraction point. Joon Kaas had not spoken a word the whole time, from the moment we breached his room. He had looked up and nodded, risen and gone ahead of us when signalled to do so. Now at the clearing he lowered his head, to pray I think, before meeting Fran’s eyes (instinctively aware she was prime) and nodding again, whether in surrender or some fashion of absolution I can’t say.
“He knew,” she said after.
That we were coming. Of course he did. And how it had to end.
Later I would understand that for most of his countrymen, thousands of them cast onto the streets and huddled together in houses, the eternally poor and forgotten, those without influence who went on scratching out a bare subsistence as terrible engines fell to earth all around them, Joon Kaas was a savior. With his passing, much of what he had worked to put in place, his challenges to privilege and to authority, new laws and mandates, new protections, began one by one to disappear.
Perhaps more than anything else, we’ve enslaved ourselves to the grand notion of progress. In our minds we’ve left behind yesterday’s errors, last year’s lack of knowledge and crude half measures. Now we’re headed straight up the slope, getting better and better, getting it right. But really we go on hauling along these sacks of goods we can’t let go of, can’t get rid of, tearing apart our world only to rebuild it to the old image.
In 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish congregation for inveighing against those who promoted ignorance and irrational beliefs in order to lead citizens to act a
gainst their own best interests, to embrace conformism and orthodoxy, to surrender freedom for security. This, even though Dutch society had long agreed upon liberty, individual rights and freedom of thought. Four hundred years down the road, not much has changed. Same hazard signs at the roadside. Same crooked roads.
It was in the last months of the struggle, while I was over the border in Free Alaska commandeering armaments, that I first felt the gears slipping. Four degrees coldly Fahrenheit outside. With a wind that felt to be removing skin slice by micrometric slice. Fortunately I was inside, and alone, when it happened, having just entered a safe house there. I remembered walking in and stepping towards the bathroom. Now I was on the floor, with urine puddled about me. How long? Five, six minutes by my timer. Vision blurred—a consequence of the fall? Taste of metal, copper, in the back of my throat. And I couldn’t move.
That was far too familiar, a replay of week after week in rehab, frantically sending messages to legs, arms and hands that refused to comply, Abraham urging me on.
I doubt the immobility lasted more than a minute, but hours of panic got packed into it. I began to remember other stutters and misfires, each gone unremarked at the time. Now they took on weight, bore down.
“What are you thinking?” Fran will ask not long after, on our visit to Merritt Li’s final foothold.
“An old sea diver’s creed,” I tell her, unsure myself of the connection, thinking of the fighters we took down there, of Merritt Li going down, of my own fall and my jacked-up system, “the one thing a diver forgets at great peril: If it moves, it wants to kill you.”
Then I tell her what happened at the safe house, what it means. Simple physics, really. Put more current in the wire, it burns out faster.
“When did you know?”
“From the first, at some level—wordlessly. One sleepless morning in Toledo I got up, tapped in, and pulled the records. I wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. They had little idea what I could do.”
I, the soft machinery that was me, was failing. Sparks failed to catch, messages misfired, data was corrupted.
I had, I supposed, a few months left.
7.
We never knew how Merritt Li came to be there.
His and my courses were set so as to bring the two of us together, close enough to rendezvous anyway, every three hours. When he didn’t show at the old waterworks, I went looking. We both carried ancient low-frequency ’sponders we thought wouldn’t be tapped. Guess we were wrong. They knew I was coming.
He had two of them back against a wall of stacked, partly crushed vehicles, tanklike cruisers from the last century. Two others, halfway across a bare dirt clearing hard as steel, had turned away to intercept me. Where numbers five and six came from I have no idea, they dropped out of nowhere like Dorothy.
A couple of them had weapons we’d never seen, the kind that, if you go looking, don’t exist. Focused toxin’s my guess. Or some fry-brain electronic equivalent. I saw nothing, no muzzle flash, no recoil, no exhaust, when one of those locked on Li lifted his handgun, but I saw the result. Li went down convulsing, limbs thrashing independently as though they belonged to different bodies.
Three of the four coming for me fell almost at the same time, one down, two down, three, without sound or obvious reason. Once I’d dealt with the fourth and looked again, the two by Li were on the ground and still. The whole sequence in just under sixteen seconds.
Movement atop a battered steel shed to the right took my attention, as it was meant to do.
Never show yourself against the sky.
Unless you’re purposefully announcing yourself, of course.
She came down in three stages, over the side and catch with the left, swing to the right, drop and turn. Faultless as ever. No sign of what weapon she’d used. I recalled her late interest in antiquities, blowpipes and the like. One violinist wants shiny new and perfectly functional, another’s always looking for old and funky, an instrument that makes you work to get the music out.
Her hair was cropped short and had tight curls of gray like steel filings in it. The row of geometrical earrings, circle, square, triangle, cross, was gone from the left ear. Otherwise not much had changed. Musculature stood out in the glisten of sweat on her skin. Yellow T-shirt, green pants.
“Interesting choice of clothing for someone doing her best to be invisible.”
“Figured if it came to it and I stood dead still, they might take me for a vegetable.”
Blood had pooled in Li’s face, turning it purple, then burst in a scatter of darker splotches across it. Limbs were rigid. No respiration, no pulse. A pandemic of that: No pulse or respiration in the ones she’d put down either.
“Here we go leaving a mess behind us,” I said.
“Ah, well.”
“With a bigger mess waiting ahead.”
“Ah, well again.” She snatched the mystery weapons from those by Li. “We hit the floor with whoever shows up on our dance card.” Then looked around. “No eyes out here. No trackers.”
“Chosen for it. So they’re not government.”
“Who can say?” At the time we believed them to be a single team, didn’t understand there were three factions at work, a tangle of forces.
Fran had dropped to a squat and was breaking down one of the weapons. “Indications are, they think of themselves as freedom fighters. Then again, who doesn’t? Freedom from taxes, bureaucracy, using the wrong texts at school? Or maybe they just want to tear the house down. Maybe we should have asked them.”
She stood and brought over the gutted weapon. “Ever seen a power source like that?” A bright blue marble with no apparent harness or connection, spinning gyroscopically in a chamber not much larger than itself. “Have to wonder what else they have.”
“Six less footmen, for a start.”
“There’ll be backup. We should be missing.”
“Missing, we’re good at.”
“Have been till now.”
She retrieved the second weapon and we started away. Darkness had begun unfurling from the ground and the air smelled of rain. Insects called to one another from trees and high grass, invisibly.
“When I was a child,” Fran said, “no more than four or five, there was a cricket that sang outside my window every night. I’d go to bed, lie there in the dark and listen to it sing, night after night. Then one night it didn’t. I knew it was dead, whatever dead was, and I cried.”
Fran as a child, crying, I could scarcely picture. “Why were these six, and the others, on you?”
She pulled the power source from the first weapon, discarded its carcass. “They weren’t.”
She’d been working a private job much like that of mine back before the team in dark gray cars came for me, and stumbled onto something that wasn’t right. She finished the job and took to side roads, kicking over traces till she realized that both job and not-rightness were come-ons. Hand-tied lures, she said, designed to bring her out. So out she came. They were stalking her. She was stalking them, coming in and out of sight. Getting a fix on them. Who they might be, how many.
“They were moving around in teams, randomly, and about where you’d expect, train stations, transfer points. They’d see me, hang back, never close. Which was how I knew it went deeper. So I stepped it up.”
“And they stepped in.”
“Maybe they got impatient. Maybe like me they decided to push to see what pushed back. And I sent a message up the line to you—which is what they anticipated.”
By this time we were moving towards the central city but on back streets long forsaken, block after block of abandoned warehouses and storage facilities from a past in which people were driven to accumulate so much that it spilled over. We’d spotted a few stragglers of the kind that, once seen, quickly vanish. Tree dwellers brought to earth, I think of them, on the ground but never quite of th
is world.
8.
A razor-cold January morning. Snow falling past the windows—silently, but you can’t help looking that way again and again, listening. How could something take over the world to such degree and make no sound? The room’s warmth moved in slow tides toward the windows, tugging at our skin as it passed by. Even the machines were silent as I did my best to become one with them.
Abraham watched and paced me, speaking in low tones about Ethical Suicides back during our string of interim governments.
“Not much there when you go looking. . . . Loosen up, I can see your shoulders knotting. . . . Barely enough information to chew on. . . . Breathe. Everything comes from the breathing. . . . ”
I’d often wondered how a man with such leanings could possibly wind up working where he did. Were his intimations a furtive challenge, a testing?
“This is difficult for us to grasp, but you have to look back, to the sense of powerlessness that got tapped into. People were convinced that government, that the country itself, was broken and couldn’t be repaired. They saw an endless cycle of paralysis and decay about which they could do nothing. ES’s were not about themselves, they were about something much larger.”
I stopped to catch breath and shake muscles loose. Took the water bottle from Abraham. Eager electrolytes swarmed within. “Absolute altruism? In addition to which, they acted knowing their actions would come to nothing?”
“That’s how it looks to us. To them, who can say? Can we ever appraise the time in which we act?” Abraham stacked virtual weights on the upper-body pulleys, thought a moment and dialed it down a notch. “You’re skeptical.”
“Of more and more every day.”
“With good reason.” He reached for the water bottle at the very moment I held it out. Another dead soldier had become a joke between us.
Shortly thereafter, as had become our custom, sheathed in featherweight warmsuits, we were walking the grounds. Snow still fell, but lightly, haltingly. “When I first came, not so many years ago,” Abraham said, “there were still dove in the trees, calling to one another. It was the loneliest sound I’d ever heard.”
