Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  I must confess that Doucet’s mysterious injunction tempered my pleasures somewhat, as in the back of my mind I pondered what she intended to discuss.

  Still, I did not find myself outside her office door till three hours later.

  Apparently, I was the last to arrive, since I found Doucet, Giraud and Bilal awaiting me. And Maroh too! The Crimson Corsair was balancing a brawny vacuous gigolo on each knee, but dismissed them upon my entrance.

  Doucet spoke first. “Bilal, this city project has been great fun. Very entertaining and enlightening. I truly feel I understand our distant ancestors much better. The congestion, the hurrying, the competition, the filth, the forced intimacy! The angst and frustration and ennui and rage that a city creates—it explains many historical incidents so well.”

  “Yes,” I chimed in. “I’ve come to appreciate this whole city weltanschauung, despite finding the concept noxious at first. Job well done, Bilal!”

  Doucet nodded, and continued. “But even given all that, I’m growing tired and bored. I want to get back to my elysian precincts.”

  Maroh chimed in. “Me too. This gig is growing old.”

  Giraud said, “Life on land was always only my secondary choice.”

  Bilal looked to me. I saw no way to let him down easy.

  “I confess to feeling a certain staleness as well, my little friend. It’s been fun, but—”

  For a moment, Bilal said nothing. But then he began to laugh uproariously.

  “I thought you four would never get around to this! I am so much over this whole city thing, I could vomit!”

  “Wonderful,” said Doucet. “Then we can abandon this?”

  “We shall do more than merely walk away! Part of every city’s history is its defeat and extinction! It’s inherent in the medium. We must bring down Whistle-Pig City with all suitable panache, grandeur and fanfare!”

  “What method do you propose?” asked Giraud.

  “Why limit ourselves to one catastrophe? Let us have everything! Floods, flames and frost! Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and alien invasions! A meteor strike. A plague. Multiple plagues!”

  An avid light shone in Maroh’s eyes. “I am fully onboard!”

  “What are we waiting for!”

  And so we commenced the destruction of Whistle-Pig City. From our aerial vantage on a comfortable aerostat pavilion with all conceivable luxuries, we were able to enjoy all the cataclysms we triggered in sequence and simultaneously.

  First the streets became full of cankerous corpses, victims of several inventive diseases. On a climate rollercoaster, citizens shivered, then perspired, dying of heat and freezing. Giraud raised floods that temporarily washed the avenues clean. Then, upon the impact of a smallish asteroid some distance away, the earth shook and cracked while lava flowed. Buildings tumbled on all sides, cathedrals, palaces, malls and museums coming down to crush survivors. From the start the air was filled with a symphony of curses, screams, prayers, weeping and vain affirmations of faith. The commingled noises seemed to express the true soul of the city and its inhabitants.

  “Isn’t this delightful?” inquired Maroh from her couch.

  “Incredibly aesthetic,” I said. “Could you please pass the soma?”

  We brought in a dozen intergalactic battlewagons manned by the fearsome Harkoy Crusaders to decimate further, and to take away slaves for the Salt Mines of Lapidus IX. Finally, the few remaining whistle-pigs were blown away by the most majestic series of hurricanes and tornadoes that Earth had ever seen.

  In the end, all that remained was the original acreage of churned plain littered with megatons of debris, nothing larger than a sofa.

  When the spectacle was ended, we all congratulated each other and went our separate ways.

  Several years later, my quantum aetheric communicator pinged, and I found Bilal’s face imaged before me.

  “Yes, my little monster, you call for good reason?”

  His ugly face showed excitement. “Indeed! I have just stumbled upon the most engaging concept from the past.”

  “As big and entertaining as cities?”

  “Vaster, and more fun!”

  “And that would be?”

  “Have you ever heard of a magical land called Hollywood?”

  Emily St. John Mandel

  1.

  A strange incident in October:

  Victor returned to the showroom for the fourth time in two weeks, after hours. He just wanted to look at the Lamborghini through the glass. He was stalking the car, if he was being honest with himself. He’d taken it on two test drives, memorized the technical specifications, gazed at photos of it in online galleries, read reviews by the lucky professionals who drive fast cars for a living. He’d told himself that if he still loved the car a week after the second test drive, he would do it, he’d commit, he’d stop obsessing and write the check, and the car would be his. Victor made what seemed to him to be an obscenely high income. He had no debt, no dependents, owned his home outright, had paid off his parents’ mortgage, and lived well below his means. He wanted the car.

  It was a clear night, unseasonably warm, and Victor was all but alone on the street. The Aventador SV Coupé had its own spotlight on the showroom floor, but it seemed to Victor that it almost emitted its own light. It was a brilliant yellow. He loved it.

  Victor was so enchanted by the car that he didn’t notice the man approaching on the sidewalk.

  “You’re admiring the car,” the man said. He had a slight accent that Victor couldn’t place. He was about Victor’s age, early thirties, wearing a midrange beige suit and a gray trench coat. The coat’s shoulders were wet, as if the man had just walked through a rainstorm, but to the best of Victor’s knowledge, the sky had been clear all day.

  “Do I know you?” Victor asked. “We’ve met, right? You look familiar.”

  “Listen,” the man said, “I don’t have a lot of time. I’ll give you $10,000 if you don’t buy that car.”

  Victor blinked. The strangeness of the offer aside, he was a man for whom $10,000 wasn’t a particularly impressive sum of money.

  “There’s a lot at stake,” the man said. “I wish I could tell you.” He had a fervor about him that made Victor a little nervous. Victor was certain he’d seen him before but couldn’t place him.

  “Why would you pay me…?”

  “I don’t have much time,” the man said. “Do we have a deal?” and Victor knew he should be kind—it was clear to him by now that the man wasn’t well—but it was ten p.m. and he hadn’t had dinner yet, he’d been working hundred-hour weeks, and he was just so tired, the workload was relentless, lately he’d started to wonder if he even actually enjoyed being a lawyer or if his entire life was possibly a ghastly mistake, and now this lunatic on the sidewalk was trying to get between Victor and his beautiful car.

  “I know it’s strange,” the man was saying, with rising desperation. “I’m risking my job being here and talking to you like this, but if you would please, please just consider—” but the car was Victor’s joy and his solace, so he turned and walked away without saying another word. He glanced over his shoulder a block later and the man had disappeared, the empty sidewalk awash in the showroom’s white light. Victor bought the car the following morning, and had more or less forgotten the encounter by the end of the week.

  2.

  Three weeks later, at two a.m. on a Thursday in November, Rose sat up gasping in her bed. The details were already fading as she switched on the light, but she was certain it was the same nightmare that had woken her the previous two nights: an impression of noise and chaos and then behind that something silent and overwhelming, a kind of cloud, a borderless rapidly approaching thing that wanted to engulf her. There were tears on her face. Rose knew from previous nights that further sleep was impossible, so she showered and dressed and caught the 4:35 train.

  The others on the train at that hour were mostly financial-industry maniacs, eyes bright in the shine of their tablets and la
ptops and phones, sending and receiving messages from Europe, where their counterparts were drinking second cups of coffee and starting to think about lunch, and Asia, where late-afternoon shadows were lengthening over the streets. Rose took a seat by the window in an empty row, rested her forehead on the glass, and drifted into a twilight state that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t consciousness, towns appearing and receding between intervals of trees. When had she last been so tired? Rose felt slightly delirious, her heart beating too quickly, thoughts clouded. She wished she could remember the specifics of the dream. She woke with a start as the train pulled into Grand Central, stepped out onto the filthy platform, and made her way with the others up into the cathedral of the main concourse, still quiet at this hour. On the downtown subway she sat with her eyes closed, trying to gather herself, until the train reached the southern tip of the island and she climbed the stairs into cool air and morning light.

  Rose had started work at Gattler Fitzpatrick six months earlier, which is to say two months after her husband had been remanded into custody. The firm—three attorneys, a paralegal, and now Rose—occupied a shared office space just off Wall Street. On the 14th floor of a glass tower, a rotating cast of companies leased various combinations of cubicles, offices with views of other towers, and offices with views of the cubicles. Gattler Fitzpatrick had one of the more expensive suites: three offices and a reception desk in a secluded corner. When Rose arrived for her job interview, she turned a corner to walk down a silent row of cubicles and found it unexpectedly populated, people typing or talking on their phones, audible only when she was almost upon them, row upon row in their little gray squares.

  Rose had worried about the gap in her résumé, the abyss of five years between the executive assistant position in Midtown and the present moment, but the truth proved surprisingly adaptable. She had been married for some time to a man with money, she explained to Jared Gattler in the job interview—his gaze flickered to her ringless left hand—and she’d stopped working at his invitation, but now they were separated and she wanted to be self-sufficient. All of this was perfectly true. Gattler didn’t need to know that they’d been separated by the federal prison system.

  Gattler was in his mid-seventies, shorter than Rose, with a feverish complexion and the fatalism of people whose professional lives are played out in divorce court.

  “Half my clients,” he said, “the women, I mean, they’re divorcing guys who don’t actually make much money. Small players. I’m talking guys who can barely support one household at the level to which these people are accustomed, let alone two.” Rose nodded, interested. “My clients, they’re not idiots per se, but they just can’t get it through their pretty little heads that the situation’s changed. They just can’t absorb the fantastical notion that they’re going to have to be on the 7:40 train to the city just like everyone else. They just want to putter around town doing whatever it is they do, getting their hair done, going for lunch, whatever. I’m not sexist, you understand.”

  “Of course not.” Their pretty little heads, Rose thought. In the fantasy version of that moment she rose with quiet dignity, walked out of the office without saying another word, and met her husband for drinks to commiserate.

  “I’m just talking about a lack of connection to reality,” Gattler said. “Nothing to do with gender per se, not saying anyone’s less intelligent. All I’m saying is some of my clients, these are people who live in a fantasy world where they’ve never had to be adults.”

  “An entitlement issue,” Rose said, because she was down to her last $200 and couldn’t afford to walk out of this or any other office. From the way Gattler’s eyes brightened, she knew the job was hers.

  “Exactly,” he said, “that’s exactly it. Whereas I look at you, it seems to me you’re showing a little initiative here.”

  “Well, I’ve never wanted to be dependent on anyone else,” Rose said. This was only theoretically true. If she’d never wanted to be dependent on anyone else, then how had it happened so easily? On the train back to Westchester County, she’d stared out the window at the suburbs and the summer trees, and of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier. She’d worked so hard all her life, and when her husband had extended a raft, it was easier to stop swimming and float. Where was Daniel at this moment? She imagined him waiting in a cafeteria lineup, reading in his cell, doing pushups in a sunlit yard. Westchester was a blur of green. Rose played the game she’d been playing since childhood: You look at the surface of the passing woods, the screen of trees, then you adjust your eyes to look past the screen and into the interior, where sunlight catches on tree branches and leaves shine translucent in the shadows, and it’s like seeing an entirely different place. The interior of the kingdom versus the castle wall.

  At Gattler Fitzpatrick, Rose did the filing, handled scheduling for Gattler and another attorney, straightened up the little waiting room between clients, maintained a vase of fresh flowers on the reception desk. At five o’clock every day, she joined the evening crowd flowing north to Grand Central Terminal. She bought a prepared meal for dinner in the market and boarded a MetroNorth train back to Scarsdale, where she was renting an au pair’s suite above a garage within walking distance of the train station. She heated her dinner in the microwave and ate alone, read the news and watched television for a while, went to bed early, rose and returned to work earlier than she needed to the next day. It was possible to imagine years slipping past like this, decades, and there was comfort in the thought.

  There was nothing Rose wanted more than a predictable life. When she arrived at work and stepped off the elevators, she always walked through the cubicles instead of going around, because they reminded her of a maze on the grounds of a particular castle in England that she’d visited with Daniel in her former life.

  On that Thursday morning in November, the cubicle maze was empty—it wasn’t yet seven a.m.—and Rose took a circuitous route, enjoying the silence. In the quiet and order of the 14th floor, the nightmare that had woken her seemed very distant. The morning passed without incident—filing, coffee, phone calls, scheduling, a salad and too-sweet iced tea for lunch—and then the long afternoon stretched before her. More filing, a weepy client in the waiting area, a gale of laughter from a conference room around two p.m., more coffee, a bright blue ring on the finger of a woman who pressed the button on the elevator on the way back up from Starbucks, a flash of pink socks beneath the gray suit of a worker in the cubicles, a moment of dull stupid panic when she thought she’d lost a file. She moved through the day with a feeling of floating, a little undone from too much caffeine and too little sleep, light-headed, heart pounding, cup after cup of coffee that left her with something that wasn’t exactly a headache, more like a pulsing suggestion of phantom lights in the periphery of her vision, her hands trembling a little. At four o’clock, Mr. Thursday arrived.

  Rose didn’t know his name. Gattler wasn’t the kind of man who appreciated unnecessary inquiries, and his calendar provided no clues. The entry, which had been set up to recur every Thursday until the end of time, read “Thursday mtg” and nothing else. Mr. Thursday was more or less Rose’s age, somewhere in his early thirties, a thin man in an aggressively nondescript beige suit who emerged from the cubicle labyrinth at precisely four o’clock every Thursday, nodded politely on his way past her desk, and disappeared into Gattler’s office.

  Was there something unusual in the way Mr. Thursday glanced at her that afternoon? He nodded, as always, an unhappy aspect to his expression, and it seemed to her that he held her gaze a beat too long, which led Rose to suspect that perhaps the sleep deprivation was making her look worse than she’d thought. She confirmed this suspicion in the ladies’ room mirror: dark circles under her eyes, a fixed and somewhat glassy quality to her stare. She had recently reached the age when sleep deprivation made her look not just tired, but slightly older. Mr. Thursday was still in Gattler’s office when she left
at five o’clock.

  It was raining by then. She had no umbrella, but there was a certain pleasure in this. She liked the sharp, cold of rain on her uncovered head. By the time she reached the stairs of Bowling Green Station, the dull wasteland of the day had somewhat dissipated, burned off by the cold and rain and lights, the evening acquiring a certain momentum. An uptown train was arriving just as she reached the platform, and she stepped aboard with the feeling of being involved in some pleasant choreography, but then the train reached Union Square, and all momentum came to a halt. The doors opened but didn’t close. The train didn’t leave the station. The car filled up, a crush of commuters who closed their eyes to concentrate on their music, or stared at their phones or at books, or stared at nothing. The announcement came after five or ten minutes: train going out of service, everyone please exit. There was no further explanation. The passengers shuffled out onto the already crowded platform, some muttering curses but most closed up in a resigned or furious silence.

  The sleep deprivation had made her mildly deranged, Rose decided, and that was why this moment felt like déjà vu. She’d been here before, hadn’t she? Here, in this moment, exiting this train? The woman beside her wore a beautiful blue wool coat, and Rose was certain that she’d seen this coat before, but not somewhere else: She’d seen the coat before in this moment, exiting this train, here. Every face in the crowd looked somehow familiar. She was dizzy. The train doors closed behind the last of the passengers, and the cars stood empty and alight. The crowd swelled dangerously on the platform, a mass of damp coats and hot, stale breath and tinny music from headphones, scents of hairspray, coffee, cologne, a McDonald’s bag, a cloying jasmine perfume that made Rose want to gag. The out-of-service train didn’t move, and no trains arrived on the opposite platform. Rose had never liked crowds, and it seemed to her that if she didn’t get out of the subway she might faint in the crush, so she began inching her way toward the stairs in a series of tiny half-steps, excusing herself again and again. It was difficult to get enough air. Rose couldn’t shake the terrible sense of following a script, of being an actor in a movie she’d already seen. She fought her way up the final staircase out of the station and emerged gasping into the evening air.