“Thanks for taking me,” Lilac whispered, and I knew she was saying goodbye—I would never see her again. I wanted to tell her to be careful, to mind this Diana—she has to want something from you. It was the caretaker in me, impossible to shake.
The front of the house lit up, the door creaking open—Tina, in her gingham robe. When she saw Lilac, she raised an arm to her face in reflexive alarm. “Who is that?” she hissed, struggling a mask out of her pocket, over her nose and mouth.
“She came to see Mrs. Crozier.”
“You opened our doors to an unregistered guest?”
“She couldn’t be a carrier. She’s a companion.” I felt embarrassed calling Lilac that in front of her, as if I’d sworn, used a slur.
“There are protocols in place for a reason. To protect the residents. To protect us!” That’s when I saw it, how scared she was of the companion, of me.
I met Tina’s eyes, certain she was overreacting, that she’d forgive me. She’d been like a mother to me all those years of caretaking, helped me to see Jedediah Smith as home.
“Please, Tina. I promise—”
But Tina did not want to hear it. She lifted a quivering finger, jabbed it in my direction. “That’s it,” she said, “you are gone.”
I took a few steps toward her, begging, “Tina, please. You know what will happen to me.”
“José!” she shouted.
“Wait,” I said. But José was coming out the door, wielding his Taser. “Wait!”
“Come on then,” Lilac said in her exasperated teenage way. She put her hand out—how could I say no? I took it, warm, smooth, alive.
JAKOB
SIBERIA, RUSSIA
It should have been obvious to me that Clarence was no real agent. He had no skills as a salesman, no art with a pitch. But Sydney was gone, no word, no notice, just poof—cleaved from my world like bone marrow from my hip. I bore the scar from when I donated to that dying child Sydney discovered, the one I was a match with. The parents had agreed to say wonderful things about me, to make me appear kind. I needed that at the time, having shot down a skyful of I8s that terrible afternoon they’d hounded me poolside. Too many margaritas and a weapon ready—not a good idea. The tabfeeds streamed my crazed screaming and shooting for weeks. No one was injured, but my career nearly died.
The plane descended below the cloud line, the snow stretching like sky. As we drew closer, I saw the white was pocked with small round lakes, iced over and glaring in the dim pre-dawn. “Wasn’t there a hurricane? I would have preferred an island.”
Clarence gazed at me unsmiling, hands folded on his lap in a show of doughy middle-aged patience. “You are big now,” he said. “Colossal. You are Jakob Sonne. But as you know, fame is short-lived.”
“How long, in your estimation, do I have?”
“Eighteen months. Tops.” He said all this despite my turn as a pirate who falls in love with the companion he’s taken hostage, a top-of-the-line skin job who could pass for human. The film was both a box-office and a critical hit. And my star was on the rise—finally! They say my skin is the perfect hue to appeal across demographics, my well-documented dalliances with both men and women only add to my draw, and my skills, well, I’ve been honing my craft since before I could read, when Sydney would whisper me my lines from off-camera. Still, I hadn’t worked in more than a year, and it was like I was turning slowly to stone, starting with my heart and coursing out from there, soon to be forgotten, never really known in the first place.
“So, why are we wasting time? I should be taking on as many projects as possible.”
“Think of this as an opportunity for an extension on life.” He uncrossed his legs, smiled, recrossed. His suit must have been expensive. We had traveled thousands of miles from Moscow, yet he remained unwrinkled. “My team has already crunched the data. The publicity from sponsoring a controversial—dare I say revolutionary?—project such as this has the potential to be transformative. It’s exactly the kind of project that extends the life of a star.”
“Just how long might a project like this extend my life?”
“Well, indefinitely. See, you can do it again and again, turning yourself into whatever it is the people need.”
“And what is it they need today?”
“Why, you, my darling, surrounded by the largest population of wild polar bears known to man.”
* * *
It was pelting snow, the landing rough. The small private plane skitter-hopped down the icy runway, and I had the quick sick feeling of being outside of control. Probably just hungover, I figured. I’d woken in Moscow, in a strange bed, and it wasn’t the first time I’d ended up on a new friend’s private jet, blinked awake in a foreign country. Clarence had been there, seated in the corner, fingers webbed over the bulge of his stomach. “The studio sent me to fetch you,” he’d said, “but first, I’m going to save you.”
The only saving I needed was from the studio’s ironclad contract—they had me for three more movies, and every script they sent over was worse than the last. I was hopeless, not working and tense, fighting with Greta and spending too many nights in the company of strangers and their drugs.
I stepped out into the icy wind, the slanted snow, taking in the vastness. I’d lived my whole life in LA, throbbing with people. Freeways were always gridlocked, coastal locations near impossible to reach since the seawalls were compromised in a particularly destructive El Niño, Highway 1 shut down for stretches. Usually we’d chopper in to locations, never mind the cost of fuel, just to stay on schedule. There wasn’t a place left in LA that wasn’t crawling with people, nowhere you could go without getting touched, breathed on, rubbed up against. Until the quarantine. Being a celebrity gave me leeway when it came to leaving my house in the Hills, but I had already been hiding by then, sequestering myself except for work or to flee a fight with Greta, which usually meant a string of sleepless nights, bouncing among parties until I could forget it all, wake empty and naked but never alone.
Past the tiny airport was a stand of trees bent to the side as if under some invisible weight. I tilted my head, trying to right them in my vision.
By the time I reached the idling Hummer, my eyelashes were frozen.
“Welcome to Siberia.” Clarence smiled from under a giant fur hat, like Soviet Sean Connery, whose film history I’d researched heavily when they were considering me for Bond. I’d lost the part by a hair to that Maldivian fellow. Sydney always swore it was a sympathy casting, the boy’s island home swallowed by rising seas, the first country to be lost entirely. I pictured the little Dutch boy who saved his town by plugging a leaky dam with his finger, the tiny hero of Haarlem, a favorite of my boyhood tutor, suggesting civic responsibility, something he said was sorely lacking among the youth, among us all, frankly.
In my opinion, it was a poor casting choice, not because the Maldivian was a bad actor but because he was a reminder—people don’t see Bond for reminders of their troubles. It doesn’t matter how skilled we actors are, how Method we’re willing to go; we all come with our own narratives braided into each film we star in, encoded into every scene we dramatize. How can we ask our fans to disconnect our lives from our work when we ourselves cannot? Even now I can feel each character coursing through me as if I’m accumulating souls.
Now, this place with its endless snowfields would have made an excellent backdrop for an action sequence, easy to feel the world’s problems give way, like a glacier collapsing into ocean.
A young woman in a knit cap with brittle blond hair turned in the driver’s seat. “Go? Yes?”
“Yes,” Clarence said, “go.”
I had forgotten the city’s name and looked for a sign, but dawn had yet to break, and it was so blustery all I saw was a forest of dwarf trees, wiry branches dressed in snow.
The girl eyed me in the rearview. “You are famous actor, no?”
“Some would say so.”
“Very handsome.” She grinned, her teeth terribly overl
apped though she had the loveliest skin, blue-toned, lineless.
“Thank you.” I glanced up at the sky, not quite night, not quite day either, and empty. Normally it buzzed with I8s, even in the worst of storms. “Where are they?”
“This is a closed city. No outside media,” Clarence said.
“How is that going to help us?”
“It is very guerrilla, this approach. Raw footage will be leaked on personal feeds until it gains traction. That’s how we work, under the illusion that this is not some sort of publicity stunt.”
I could see the city ahead, the wall of cement apartment complexes, all the same height, in a mazelike pattern. At odd angles the buildings appeared nearly normal; then we’d pass a collapsed side, a corner gone, gray building tumbling to white snow, a shading effect.
“What’s happened here?” I asked Clarence.
“You saw all those lakes from the airplane, yes? The permafrost is giving way.”
There was an enormous sports arena, its back end a bare frame as if it had been abandoned midconstruction, what looked like a burnt person on a stake in the central plaza.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?”
The woman let out a laugh, loud and vicious. “That is scarecrow. We do it to welcome the spring.”
“This is your spring?” I didn’t mean to sound so horrified.
We entered an older part of town, white stone buildings with the beauteous baroque feeling of Saint Petersburg sticking up over the even roofline. “Look at that,” I breathed out.
“Ah, they are nice, no? This was Gulag under Stalin. Many exiles from the West.”
The buildings—nearly all of them—were five stories. It created a strange effect, such a sharp horizon, leveling the snow-packed tundra. The way they wormed and turned, the boxing-in of space. “Why do they square off like that?”
The woman said something in Russian, Clarence translating: “See how they create courtyards? Tiny pockets or microclimates.”
“I see, snow walls.”
“Fortification,” the woman said.
* * *
We left the city behind, the road mere skin over the shifting permafrost. I thought of the time I played a young Anton Chekhov, one of my first films, art house, no budget, with a beautiful costar, choleraic, dying. It was part of her gimmick, a truly dying girl playing a dying girl. Behind the scenes it was a horror show, the dying, the diarrhea, a wasting sickness. When filming wrapped, I was certain she’d succumb, I’d never see her again, but she toddled up to the premiere in a flouncy tulle gown, so fresh-faced, her skin aglow, a younger, brighter version of herself—the credit the studio must have invested into this transformation that was not a transformation, my goodness—and her career, it exploded.
In the circle I ran in I’d mingled with my fair share of companions, mostly people who’d agreed to upload before they’d passed and stayed in the custody of their families, others rented out to strangers. Plenty of people were so afraid of dying they’d sign up to entertain bored homeschooled children or farty old men, even perverts—there were all sorts. And all varieties too, from sad rolling cans to skin jobs, the best of which appeared human to the untrained eye. But this was the first actor I’d known to give up the body for her craft, and as I held her elbow on the red carpet, smiling into the frenzied I8s, I couldn’t decide whether to hug or shake her.
Out the window I scanned the snowfields for what felt like miles. It wasn’t until I saw an animal—a dog, or maybe a fox—darting through the snow that I realized how empty this place was. I’d seen no one, not a single living person, in the whole of the city.
“Jesus, this place is dead.”
“Yes.” The woman nodded. “Very few people left.”
Clarence fussed with his hat. “When nickel prices weakened and reserves dwindled, pretty much everyone left. Now the mines bleed poison. The soil, the air, the whole place is noxious.”
“We have strong constitution and good spirits.”
“I would like to try some of your spirits,” I joked. The woman looked startled in the rearview, eyes flickering to Clarence.
“He means vodka. He’s being funny, the clever type of funny.” I wanted to tell Clarence to stop it—he was embarrassing me! It was no way for an agent to act.
“I am driver, not bartender.” The girl frowned ahead at the road.
“You know, Bo here was once in a film,” Clarence said in a sorry attempt to make peace.
I was angry with him, humiliated, a little sick even. Perhaps it was the Hummer’s mad bumping, but I jumped right on shamelessly. This woman, with her savage eyes—she had me on my toes. “Were you?”
“No big deal. It was documentary.”
“Really. What was it called?”
She said something in Russian, a title that took a full breath to deliver.
“I bet it was a hit.”
“It was tired.”
“You mean boring, darling,” Clarence said.
“Yes, very boring.”
“What was it about?” I asked.
“Reindeer.”
Clarence leaned over the front seat, hugging the headrest. “Show him.”
The girl smiled, revealing her terrible teeth.
* * *
I could see black on the horizon, what looked like stone, only shifting. Great packs of reindeer bolted as the Hummer crunched over snow.
“Jesus. There must be thousands.” The arc and fold, the currents. They went on so far I couldn’t see any end, dark waves of satin shimmering in the snow glare.
“Yes. They take over.”
“Is this safe?”
Bo grinned as she lit a cigarette, not bothering to crack the window. “Reindeer antlers are weapons and representations of power both.”
“I thought you said we were here for polar bears.”
Clarence reached over the seat to steal Bo’s cigarette. He shot a gray cloud out his nostrils, sneezed, passed it back. “They are the stars, yes, but it’s magnificent, don’t you think? This place is theirs.”
I nodded, not wanting them to know how terrified I was. What if the reindeer got spooked, would they stampede? Surely a herd this huge could trample a Hummer, no problem. “Why are there so many of them?”
“Many animals shift north in the warming. Reindeer come here each winter in greater numbers.”
Mercifully, Clarence yawned. “Shall we head back? I could use a shower.”
“Yes, let’s,” I agreed.
“Bo here has prepared some talking points for you. You could give them a read.”
“I would like that.” I could feel her watching me in the rearview. I gave her my signature smile, sly, toothless, slightly half-cocked, yet she merely blinked back at me, eyes finding the road, and it hurt how much I wanted her to like me.
* * *
The hotel was more of a B and B, a stuffy two-story house owned by a tiny woman with an exuberant chest. She was seated near the window under a UV lamp, eyes behind goggles, her blouse half-buttoned. Clarence greeted her in pitch-perfect Russian. Then he led me upstairs like he knew the place.
My room was a shoebox on the second floor, paper-thin curtains, no screen, no network. “In the whole town?”
“It is a closed city,” Clarence said.
“What does that mean?”
“No unauthorized entry, no I8s, no network. You should enjoy it, the space, the quiet. Tomorrow we will visit the refuge.”
“These lines—have you read them? More biodiversity exists in our virgin fields than in all of Amazonia, the rich scent of flowers intoxicating even to insects, so exhilarated by this place they would rather commit suicide than drink human blood. I don’t mean to criticize, but perhaps they might come off—oh, I don’t know—a bit stiff, don’t you agree?”
“Don’t think of it as a script. All we’re trying to do is draw attention to the animals that have congregated here, to help the local people get international wildlife refuge status, so they can rec
eive a little funding, bring in some scientists, open this city. It’s a chance for them to reinvent themselves, and for you too.”
“What time is it?” I felt terribly low-energy.
Clarence had yet to take off that Soviet Sean Connery hat. He must have been desperately hot, yet he appeared unfazed. “It’s been a long day. Why don’t you take a rest?”
The sky, it was night black now, riddled with more stars than I’d ever imagined. “I thought the sun was rising! Not setting.” I spun with the sensation, so out of sync with the earth’s rhythm, though it certainly wasn’t the first time I’d lost a day. “How will I know when to wake up?”
“You’ll be fine. Close your eyes, count to ten, and I guarantee you’ll fall fast asleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”
I went down the hall to the bathroom to wash my face, wondering whether it was safe to use the local water, when I saw them from the top of the stairs, Clarence huddled with Bo in the foyer, arm over her shoulders, a comfortable closeness, as if they knew one another intimately.
I didn’t like the way it made me feel, seeing them like that. Shutting myself back into the room, I took off my pants and cycled through some yoga poses, trying to remember if Greta was angry with me. We’d been on and off for so long I’d forgotten where we’d left things. I wanted to screen her—where was my phone? I’ve always hated the things, with their urgency, bothersome and invasive—but in this room, this house, without its screens, its network? Needless to say, I felt awfully alone.
* * *
Clarence had been right! I’d done what he said, closed my eyes, counted to ten, and magically I’d fallen asleep. Only when I woke, I was famished. It was dark out, the house quiet, and I wondered at the time. There was no clock in the room, so I sneaked downstairs to the kitchen full of potted plants, hanging from the ceiling, on the countertops, clustered in the corners of the floor. Spray bottles littered the table, and when I hit the lights, the whole room glowed with soft fluorescence. I was raiding the cabinet when I saw it, the small screen mounted on the wall—Clarence had lied to me! I searched my name, curious to see what the tabfeeds had to say about my absence. The first hit blinked Livefeed, and there I was on a beach barren save some doe-eyed child, definitely not Greta, I8s circling as we fondled. There was some passionate kissing, an ass was grabbed. Jesus, a Speedo—I’m wearing a Speedo! The screen blinked: Ibiza. I had never, it was not me, how could it be?
The Companions Page 6
