The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  He climbed out of the car and starting walking back down the road. Goran followed. “Could you show me the exact location of the car when it was hit?”

  “I’ll try.” They continued down the slope for another ten meters, then Goran turned around and walked slowly back up, glancing left and right. “About here.”

  Mark joined him at the spot and examined the pavement for a number of yards in every direction. Nothing. Of course, it had happened fifteen months ago. “I need to picture it. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I was approaching the turn. There was a bang. The windshield went white, with all those little lines. I thought at first it was a rock.”

  “Just one shot?”

  “I think so. Since it seemed to have hit the right side, I turned left. Whatever it was, rock or whatever, I was afraid of another, so I drove the car off the road and down into the bushes. Over here.”

  Mark followed him to the road edge and looked down the slope. There was a four-foot-wide band of gravel, then the ubiquitous cover of waist-high plants with gnarled branches and leathery leaves—he wondered if they called it “maquis” here, too. A few meters farther up the verge he could see a place where some of the bushes looked shorter. “Maybe there,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  Mark climbed down, mines be damned, and looked closer. He could see scarring on some of the branches. Two bushes looked as though they’d been nearly uprooted. He sifted through the stones for a minute and found a dozen or so cubes of safety glass. “This must be the place,” he said up to Goran, who’d remained on the roadbed. He lay down among the bushes, on his back.

  Goran called down, “Are you okay?”

  The sky was so clear and light-flooded, so blindingly blue. On the left there was a contrail from probably a military aircraft, and straight overhead a thin smudge of cloud, like an attempted erasure with one of those worthless latex nubs. Stargazing would be excellent in this dry and remote terrain. “What did Susan want to talk to you about?” Mark asked the sky. “During the drive.”

  Goran’s voice floated down to him. “She thought the UN official was an idiot. In love with himself. She’d spent the last two days with him, and he’d been flirting with her.”

  “Doing what?”

  “The usual stuff.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Putting his hands on her when talking. Her arm, her hip. Telling her she was beautiful.” Mark couldn’t see Goran, but it sounded like he’d braved the mines as well and come partway down the slope. “He’d invited her back to his room the night before. Maybe you shouldn’t tell anyone I said this.”

  God forbid I should embarrass the fellow, Mark thought.

  “Since he could hardly speak Spanish, and I understand it pretty well, she told me these things in the front seat, while he sat in the back. Probably the car noise made it hard for him to hear anything. And also maybe she thought if she sat in the back, he’d insist on sitting with her.”

  Mark could feel a number of sharp stones pressing into his back. On a discomfort scale of one to ten, it counted as a one. The bushes smelled like creosote and thyme. There was a tiny lavender flower with five petals at the end of one branch. Just one flower, out of all the branches in Mark’s view. “Do you remember what Susan was saying just before the shot?”

  “Nothing. Her complaints about the guy were all in the first ten minutes. She laughed at him—I wanted to hit him—a lot of these UN people are stupid members of rich families, sent off to do something where if they fuck up no one cares much, or it never comes out. After that we just drove. The windows were open, it was noisy.”

  Then the shot, the fracturing safety glass, the car veering to the left and sliding down the slope. The autopsy specified the bullet. It was something called an M75 ball, fired from a Zastava M76 sniper rifle. It had a mass of thirteen grams and traveled at 760 meters per second. That translated into 3750 joules of kinetic energy, equivalent to a bowling ball dropped from a height of 180 feet. But the bullet expended some of its energy on the windshield and then, with its full metal jacket, and missing Susan’s ribs, it went right through her, with enough energy left over to tear through her seat back and the lower part of the rear seat. It probably lodged somewhere in the metal chassis between the rear wheels. If it had gone through her lung, or through her neck without hitting a major artery, she might have survived. “And after?” Mark asked. “Did she say anything?” The intensity of human desire to know a loved one’s last words. Mark wondered at it, but felt it nonetheless.

  “I put the car down off the road, it was quiet, I think I said, ’Is everyone okay?’ And the UN guy was down on the floor in the back and he said, ‘Was that a shot?’ And it’s strange, but it was only then I realized it might have been a bullet. I looked at your sister and . . . Do you want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was leaning against the passenger door, with her head down. I said, ‘Are you okay?’ and she said, I think she said, ‘Jesus, what was that?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and then she said, ‘Something hit me really hard,’ and I leaned over, and that’s when I saw the blood.” Goran stopped.

  “Please keep going.”

  “I think I said something like, ‘Oh my god, you’ve been shot!’ and she said, ‘Figures.’ I think she was trying to make light of it. Then the pain must have kicked in. She didn’t say anything after that. I took off my shirt and pressed it on the wound on her front. We stayed in the car because we didn’t know where the sniper was, we were afraid of also being shot.”

  “Of course.”

  “So we didn’t move her, and she was bleeding into the seat and I couldn’t see it.”

  “She never said anything else?”

  “No. She was in a lot of pain. She was making sounds of . . . of great pain, of . . . what’s the word . . . agony. I am very sorry to tell you that. It was terrible to hear. After a few minutes, she got quieter. We had no radio phones with us, and it was another maybe ten minutes before another car came by, a local villager, and we decided the sniper had left, or wouldn’t shoot anymore, or anyway we had to risk it, so we moved her into the other car, and that’s when I saw how much blood there was on the seat cushions.”

  “And she died on the way to the hospital.”

  “No, we drove her to a hospital in Mostar. She was still alive when the people from the ER took her out of the car.”

  “The report said DOA.”

  “That’s incorrect.”

  Some unmeasurable period of silence went by. Some ants, or some other sort of sociable insects, had found Mark. The smudge of cloud had dissipated, and the contrail had drifted south, widening and blurring. “I’m guessing that the UN guy was sitting behind you, rather than behind my sister,” Mark said. “Before the shot.”

  “Yes, I think that’s right.”

  He would have done this if he was still trying to flirt, so that he could see her profile, try to engage her in conversation. The windows open, the noise of the hot wind and the car. She was in the front seat because he had been pestering her for two days. The shot came through her seat and missed him entirely because he was sitting behind the driver so that he could continue to pester her.

  She had told Mark once, years after it had happened: she was eighteen, bumming around in Florida, and saw an ad for a cook on a yacht that was going sailing in the Caribbean. She inquired, got the job. Two days out, it became clear the captain wanted sex more than he wanted cooking. And he got it. “I wasn’t raped,” Susan said. “Or at least, not violently. I finally went along just to stop the hassle. It seemed easier. I was disgusted with myself for being so naive about the job. We got to some island and I jumped ship. And ever since I’ve been disgusted with myself for giving in to him like that. But look at this sick shit: he forced himself on me, and I’m mad at myself.”

 
“Are you okay?” Goran asked again.

  “I just want to lie here a little longer, if that’s okay,” Mark said.

  “Sure.”

  Mark could hear Goran going back up the slope. Every now and then a crawling insect bit him. On a scale of one to ten it was less than .01. Goran had wanted to hit the man from the UN. Perhaps he’d liked Susan. Maybe Susan sat in the front seat not only because she disliked the UN man, but because she liked Goran. He seemed a good man. She was older than him, taller. Maybe the sniper shot her instead of Goran because she was the biggest target in the car. Or maybe he shot her because, even with all the hatred he reserved for Muslims (if he was a Croat), or for Croats (if he was a Muslim), he had a little extra hatred to spare for the only woman in the car, this meddling foreign bitch.

  Had it comforted Susan that Goran was with her? She was so far from home. But then, Mark wasn’t sure if she thought of a “home,” the way he did. Goran no doubt felt terrible about what happened. Being human, he probably irrationally felt responsible. Maybe that’s why he wanted to remember that she was still alive when they reached the hospital. Maybe she was still alive, but moribund, and the hospital listed her as DOA to make the paperwork simpler. Or maybe someone in the hospital didn’t like meddling foreign bitches, either.

  Mark knew what a Fiat 128 looked like because when he was eleven years old it was one of the last Matchbox cars he bought. He’d never paid much attention to real cars. His Fiat 128 was painted a color he’d always thought of as raspberry chocolate. No other car in his collection had a color like it. By the time he bought it, he was too old to play the game in which he dropped a blanket and then drove his cars around the folds. But lying now among the bushes, enduring the absurdly small pain of the stones in his back and the insects biting him and the heat of the sun, he closed his eyes and saw his delicious Fiat 128 turning right to ascend laterally the slope of the hill, then left at the first switchback, and he could see the whole terrain below him, and the sniper’s hiding place, and all the possible trajectories, and he couldn’t help himself, he imagined taking hold of the Fiat and swerving it right and left, avoiding the shot, then scooting it safely down into the bushes made of modeler’s moss, admiring how realistic it all was.

  2013

  7:16 p.m., July 8, 2013

  Dear Mette,

  I hope you’re well. Please say hello to your mother for me. I wrote a “data set” about my sister, who died many years ago.

  Data Set: Cabin Fever

  For our two-week family vacation in the summer of 1971 my parents rented a cabin on a lake in New Hampshire.

  It rained for two weeks.

  I was eleven and my sister was sixteen.

  My sister and I played as many card games as we could stand, then we got bored.

  My sister fought with my parents.

  My parents fought with each other.

  My mother proposed we all go see a movie.

  She had noticed that Song of Norway was playing in a nearby town.

  My sister and I didn’t want to see Song of Norway, we wanted to see the other movie playing at that theater, The Anderson Tapes.

  That movie is too violent, my mother said.

  Song of Norway is too stupid, my sister said.

  It’s about the composer Edvard Grieg, my mother said.

  Jesus, who cares? my sister said.

  It has beautiful photography of Norway, my mother said.

  Man, I can’t wait, my sister said.

  I loved classical music, and even I didn’t want to see Song of Norway.

  But my mother wouldn’t let it go.

  Don’t you want to see it, Mark? she kept asking me.

  This was strange, because she usually didn’t care about movies.

  We went to see Song of Norway.

  It was terrible.

  Even my mother hated it.

  She called the actor who played Grieg “a whiny little twerp with a weak chin.”

  She said every time his lower lip trembled she wanted to punch him in the face.

  My sister was good at recognizing leverage when she had it.

  Two days later we went to see The Anderson Tapes.

  It was violent and sexy.

  My sister and I loved it.

  On the merits of the movie my mother made no comment.

  She confined herself to expressing the hope that maybe now my sister would shut up.

  And my sister did, in a way.

  Going to see The Anderson Tapes was the last thing she ever did with our family.

  I can’t tell whether I’m burdening you with these things. Whenever I write one, I don’t know what to do with it.

  Love,

  Your Father

  8:05 p.m., July 8, 2013

  well they’re kind of depressing

  11:10 p.m., July 8, 2013

  I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t intend them to be. I’ll stop.

  11:14 p.m., July 8, 2013

  don’t do that

  probably it’s just me

  when did your sister die?

  11:19 p.m., July 8, 2013

  May 1993. I was thinking about her a lot in the last few weeks and then I realized it had been 20 years. I think it’s interesting how the subconscious mind can keep track of time passing, and even seems to prefer round numbers. If we had twelve fingers, I probably wouldn’t be remembering her so vividly until 2017

  11:22 p.m., July 8, 2013

  old man! you made the exact same lame joke when you sent me the thing about your dad a couple of years ago.

  11:24 p.m., July 8, 2013

  wow that’s embarrassing

  11:25 p.m., July 8, 2013

  nah, it’s natural. what are you, sixty now? you’re getting stupid right on schedule

  11:27 p.m., July 8, 2013

  this 54-year-old relic needs to go to bed

  “probably it’s just me” you said. things ok with you?

  12:23 a.m., July 9, 2013

  up and down

  wondering about the meaning of life

  12:26 a.m., July 9, 2013

  whenever students of mine brought this up, I always used to say, “of course there’s no meaning, so what?” Strangely, this never seemed to cheer them. Then I heard a colleague say, “Life may have no meaning, but it can have purpose.” I liked that. So that’s now what I tell my depressed students

  any more thoughts about college?

  12:31 a.m., July 9, 2013

  still don’t see why I need it; I like this job I got a few weeks ago, maybe I mentioned it? a startup in Vinegar Hill, developing code for 3D imaging effects

  video games are huge, so it pays well

  I wanted to ask you, Newman has an article on Cantor and set theory and it’s gotten me interested in the Continuum Hypothesis, this whole issue of using different models to prove the unprovability of a theorem. I have some questions, I’ll write them up tonight while you’re recharging your old-brain batteries and you’ll see them in the morning, okay?

  12:34 a.m., July 9, 2013

  sure; some of this is hard stuff

  remember I’m an astronomer, not a mathematician. I’ll do my best

  good night

  Friday, February 19, 2016

  A man and a woman are arguing in an upscale apartment. The argument has something to do with an errand the man has just run that the woman thinks was foolish and probably dangerous. Your first choice is, do you want to be the man or the woman? If you choose to be the man, you have a number of ways of conducting the argument, and you might even get physical, and there might be consequences to these choices down the line, but the short-term result is the same. The woman locks you outside on the balcony. You see New Yor
k City below you. You are on the 86th floor of a residential tower in lower Manhattan. The streets below you are canals. If at any point during the previous argument you had looked at your implanted wrist terminal, you would have seen that the year is 2120. You might also have seen the latest news report that some government agency you’ve never heard of is looking for you. Your second major choice: Do you climb over the balcony railing and negotiate the narrow ledge to the adjoining apartment’s balcony, or do you call your impetuous and untrustworthy contact in building security and tell him to come up and “talk sense” into the woman?

  If you choose to be the woman, you also have a number of ways of conducting the argument, which might also have consequences later. But once again, the short-term result is the same. The man will try to kill you. Your second major choice is, do you kill the man in self-defense, or do you flee the apartment and—discovering that the stairway door is locked—heed the urgings of a mysterious woman who beckons to you to join her in the elevator?

  The game, as Mette envisioned it back when she was interested in things (and still thought of gender as binary), would eventually require the player to make ten major choices—that is, ones leading to a branch in the narrative, with no possible return to the alternative choice. The player’s game could be saved only on top of the previous save, so choice was permachoice. There would be scores of minor decisions to make—dialogue options, which door to go through, whether or not to pick up an object. The player would not know which choices were the major ones. One consequence of the minor choices was that they would affect the way in which the next major choice was presented, thus influencing the likelihood that the player would choose one option over the other. Since there were a total of ten bifurcations, there were 1024 possible endings to the game, occurring in 256 differentiated portions of 32 basic worlds. For example, in one ending the player might be drinking a mai tai on a sunstruck beach with a loved companion of chosen gender (sorry!) and species. In another, Earth suffers a worldwide nuclear apocalypse. In another, the player is condemned for life to labor on an asteroidal mining colony. Of the 1024 possible endings, 916 exist somewhere on the spectrum between unhappy and horrifically miserable; 96 are mixed (e.g., you’re alive, but lonely; you’re a heroine, but everyone hates you; you won the war, but lost your legs). Only 12 endings are happy. (Little secret: 10 of those 12 are reserved for the female.)