by Liz Harmer
Once he’d pressed the door closed, ensured that the light on the lock was blinking red and put the key into a back pocket, he found there were tears in his eyes, that his heart was pounding. Sweat pooled at his armpits and lower back, sticking his shirt to his skin. He ran from the hall and into the quad, over the soft turf and past one triangular contortion and another, until he found Benji attempting to pull his muscled body farther than it could go, lunging and reaching.
“Inhale. Exhale.” A woman was speaking into a mike from some unseen spot. “Now re-e-e-each back into downward dog. Take your time. Hold for five breaths. Breathe.”
Benji spotted him and stood. His round, clean-shaven face hadn’t broken a sweat. “Hey, Dreyer,” he said.
“You seen Doors?”
Benji appraised him coolly. “He’s not somewhere out in the quad?”
“I can’t see him.”
“Did you check Zahra’s room?”
Brandon took his meaning, but barely, and told Benji he’d do that. On his way back down the hall, he nodded at security-badged Gordie, and then at Simon, receiving indifferent smiles in response.
At Zahra’s room he knocked. Waited. Knocked again.
“Yeah?”
“Zee? It’s me.”
She was in a thin tank top and tight shorts, the sort of thing she liked to wear to sleep. Her expression was sober. Later, Brandon would obsess over this: Had it been tinged with wistfulness or guilt? Had it held regret, or longing? Or perhaps, he would think too late, she was feeling trapped, and that thing like shame flicking through her eyes had been a cry for help.
Her room was more austere than it needed to be, everything a shade of tan or off-white, nothing on the walls. Even the lamps appeared uncomfortable with their small decorative flourishes, their resemblance to Ionic columns. Shirtless salt-and-pepper Doors with his white linen pants blended into all this muted monochrome, bent over his notebook at the kitchen desk. He looked up at Brandon, beamed a smile and looked back down. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” Brandon said. He was perfectly in the moment, not thinking ahead, not reflecting. He took Zahra’s two thin elbows in his hands. “I have to talk to you,” he said. Port’s tug remained a confusion at the back of his mind. He put his lips on her cheek, knowing it was a desperate move, knowing she couldn’t stand a show of feeling.
She pulled back from him and smirked. That flicker of something like fear, or shame, had disappeared from her expression. She backed up toward Doors.
“I need to talk to you,” he said again. “Can you meet me downstairs?”
“What is it you need to talk about, Brandon?” Doors turned his attention to him. A flashlight held to the eyes.
“If you don’t mind, it’s just that—”
He saw that Zahra was waiting for him to realize what she and Doors were up to. Maybe that was what had been in her eyes: Zahra, braless in her tank top; Doors, shirtless and barefoot at the desk; the rumpled sheets. But he was not going to be theatrical, was not going to give them anything, was not going to shout like someone on a lowbrow television show, was not going to say What the fuck or even What the hell, was not going to betray how betrayed he felt. Maybe he was a person of feeling—so what? That didn’t mean he was going to ask questions whose answers were plain.
Later he would comb through each second of this encounter, each more horrible in retrospect, more heartbreaking and full of questions he didn’t think to ask. Later he’d wonder if Zahra’s fear—it was the electricity of her fear that had charged the air—was directed at him or at Doors. He’d wonder how much of what she’d told him about her life was true. He knew everything, or so he’d thought: her early immigration, her ability to detach as though selfhood were a raincoat you snapped on and off, her ability to leave her friends on the playground if they bored her, her fear of abandonment, her desire for him, Brandon, her knack for statistical analysis, the poker tours she’d played in and won, always winning, in love with being loved, fully aware of the effect her long body and cool regard had on men. And women too, sometimes. Thus, she and Doors were made for each other. Thus, perhaps, she had some control over the flickering in those brown eyes, and maybe he was caught in a liar’s paradox. (“I’m a born liar,” she’d told Brandon once. “Your body can’t lie,” he’d said, feeling her flesh respond to his touch, his mouth, the arching of backs and limbs, the hardening of nipples. “Of course it can,” she had said.)
But in the moment, Brandon felt none of the things he would feel later. Doors put his pen down and came to stand next to Zahra. He put his hand on Zahra’s back. He towered over them both and smiled.
“We’re not together anymore,” Zahra said. “You and I.”
This poise and serenity was exactly what made him want to take her with him.
“We’re all adults, here, free to make adult decisions,” Doors said.
For the first time, Doors seemed to Brandon like a revenant of his own father, who might have said just such an inane thing.
“We’re all adults here,” Brandon mimicked in a growl. “So why are you sneaking around?”
“We aren’t. We’re being perfectly forthright,” Doors said. “I knew that you would feel betrayed by this relationship, but I also knew that you would find out sooner or later. We weren’t trying to hide anything, only to have a little privacy. Surely you can understand.”
“Privacy!” Brandon said. “Oh, yes. Surely. I understand.”
“Brandon, my old friend. You are a lover. You are a romantic. The way you see the world is beautiful, and it has been an asset to our corporation for these many years. But your feelings are not entitlements. You do not own the things you love.”
“Ownership, privacy.” Brandon’s tone was still sarcastic, but he felt helpless and weary. “Look, pal. I’m going to stop you there. We’ve got bigger things to worry about than me and my feelings for Zahra.”
“Pal?”
“You’ve got bigger things to worry about, anyway.”
“We have some business, do we?” Doors said.
“We do.” Underneath his bravado, Brandon chastised himself. What did he think he was going to do? Expose Doors’ evil or ineptitude? Go into the quad, demand the yoga teacher’s headset and rally the people into a new and better democracy?
“Why are you so…tousled?” Doors cocked his head.
“I’ve always admired your diction,” Brandon said, attempting a sarcastic imitation of the German accent. “I’m tousled because I have recently made some surprising discoveries about the port.”
Doors gave a big Buddha smile of peace and goodwill. He tented his fingers into a triangle. “Yes, I know,” he said. “You found the information about Nellie Young. You are very disturbed about the possibility that people are leaving against their own will. You are disturbed that Kate Generato seems to have left us again through port.”
“Are you surveilling me?”
“One doesn’t need surveillance when one can intuit with a high degree of accuracy. And what could he mean, do you think, my Zahra? What could he mean ‘against their own will’? How old-fashioned, what a fascinating belief about free will our old friend seems to have.”
Zahra sat on the bed with her legs crossed and hugged a white pillow to her chest. Doors was calm and patient, wearing a zoned-in look Brandon recognized, the look he had only rarely assumed in the days before the grid went down, but which now persistently plastered his face. Doors had changed so utterly at the beginning of Year Zero—“You have not been abandoned!”—that Brandon had forgotten the volatility he’d witnessed in the years before then. How many times had it been Brandon’s hard work to calm him, to keep him quiet or seated, to balance out his intensity with jokes, or to counterbalance the mania for invention with the easy air of logic and coolheadedness?
“What did you do?” Brandon said.
“I don’t know what you mean, Brandon. Zahra, do you know what he means?”
Zahra shook her he
ad.
“What did we do? Did you know?”
“You are my dearest friend, Brandon.”
“I thought I was. I thought you were.” Brandon, too, sat on the edge of the bed.
“You needn’t be afraid of me,” Doors said.
“I’m not afraid.”
“It’s written on your face: pupils, beads of sweat. Your bottom lip is quivering.”
“Fuck you, Doors.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s have it.”
“What?” Brandon was exhausted. Gravity was stronger in this room. Doors was a weight, a force.
“About time you stand up to me. I knew you had it in you.”
“I thought you couldn’t take this garbage,” Brandon said to Zahra.
“A couple things, Dreyer. A couple of things you need to consider. First of all, I have been telling you since the beginning what I believed about the ports. I told you on day one. This is not and has never been a conspiracy. We are and have always been transparent. People knew what they were getting into, pardon the pun.”
“I was just in port-hall,” Brandon said. “People did not know that. People did not know that port was inciting them to unzip and jump in. I didn’t know that it was so strong, that it could lure. If I didn’t know, how could the masses have known? I don’t think people were knowingly buying a fucking manipulation machine. A rapist. And we need to acknowledge that what happened with Kate Generato was an anomaly, that she was very sick. People can not come back.”
Zahra’s eyes told him to calm down.
“Brandon, I’ve always found you to be one of the most guileless people I’ve ever known. It is the source of my deep trust of you, but it is also a thing that keeps you from seeing.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
Doors unlocked his intense gaze. All three of them were now sitting on the bed.
“You don’t need to be afraid,” said Doors. “Not of me. So we knew that port was more than we understood it at first to be. Sounds insane, sounds dangerous, but it wasn’t. Port can sort. Port can think. Do you hear what I’m saying? It’s a beautiful thing when consciousness arises from an unexpected place, and we must attune. We must attune.”
Normally, Brandon ate up this shit: it was just like his long monologues about yoga and mass meditation and what such practices might affect on the quantum level.
“We’ve attuned. Haven’t we, Zahra,” Doors said.
Zahra nodded and gave Brandon a tight smile.
“You’ve attuned,” Brandon said to her. Then, addressing Doors, he said, “What about Kate Generato? She was out of her mind.”
“Oh, Brandon. I need you to think a little harder. Go outside of your own limited humanism. What is it exactly that makes a human life so valuable?” Doors put his hand on Zahra’s bare shoulder. “I would have hoped that after finding this Nellie Young data, you would come to me. You would have seen that just because a port can—what would the word be—induce?—desire—you would have seen that I am still the Albrecht Doors you’ve always known and trusted. That nothing will have changed. What do we have if we don’t have loyalty? I expected more from you, Brandon Dreyer.”
“What does that mean? This was a test? Of my loyalty?” Brandon put his hands to his cheeks and scratched. “Did Nellie Young really write what I found in the archive?”
“Everything you discovered was real,” Doors said. “But the more important question is whether you are loyal to me, your friend, your good close friend, or whether you are loyal to your idea of me. How easily you gave up trusting me.”
“I didn’t. I did come to you.”
“You went to the port. You went to Zahra.”
“We must attune?” Brandon said, looking to Zahra, who looked away. “I can attune.”
“You ought to have,” Doors said. “But it’s a bit late for that now. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Chapter
9
THE GUILTY PARTIES
So, he was a fool. The only thing Brandon had not divulged before Doors ushered him out, though it was likely Doors knew it anyway, was that he was going to leave PINA, with or without permission.
Zahra’s pity was on him like a sweat stain, spreading as he bolted from her room to his own, where he mashed things into his backpack. Batteries, compass, and above all, water were his main concerns. He’d find maps later, in gas stations along the way. He left the room and stopped for more water, filling steel canteens and clipping them onto the hooks on either side of the bag. He used up every last ration coupon, even the ones he’d been hoarding, and when the woman at the dispensary clicked the tap down with an eyebrow raised at him, he gave her the stupidest smile he could manage. Didn’t say Been so thirsty lately or Just stocking up for a not-so-rainy day like some kind of amateur.
Then he went down to the latrine access, a long hallway leading to a door at what had once been the back of the building, several floors directly below the boardrooms. It was the only point of exit to the wilderness outside the compound. He walked past the guards, pretending his bowels were cramping, though they weren’t anymore. He nodded his way past them—Jedi mind trick; they nodded back—and out to the back forest, where dozens of port-a-johns had been set up on their deeply dug holes, far enough out and downland so that they could not interfere with the groundwater of the wells.
Because he could not think what else to do, he stashed his backpack behind a tree and went inside one of the vacant blue pods and closed himself in with the dim air, with its excretory smells and heavy chemical air freshener that seemed to singe the nostrils.
For the time it took to do his business, but no longer, he put out of his mind the way it felt to be this far from the security of the compound, whose sleek walls were unclimbable, whose doors were thick and impenetrable. And manned. After, hiding like a frightened child, he saw the truth of the situation. If the world was gone, if people had disappeared like Doors’ experimental rodents and raccoons walking into what looked like total annihilation, then they—he—had done it. They who remained were here because they were in on it, even him, Brandon, Brandon-the-guileless, Brandon-the-fool. And what they’d done had made it so that their compound was free-floating and lonesome as a space pod, and the world outside as vast and indifferent as deep space. Doors had stepped up and become what he now was—false source of calm and happiness, supplier of endless platitudes—precisely because others were inclined to terror and worry.
How long could things remain stable? What happened when they ran out of resources, ran out of booze, or of water? They’d have to expand outward, and for all their technical knowledge, they knew nothing at all about how to do that. With the clarity of desperation, Brandon saw that they should have been working hard all this time, should be planning to send out more than four people at a time. Especially since the world outside was filled with ports, magnetic sinkholes aglow with whatever one most deeply desired.
Brandon knew that Doors must have called a decisive emergency meeting of the twelve by now, but it seemed that no one had come out to the johns to find him. No one came rushing out, calling his name, banging on doors. When he finally left the pod, the only people he encountered were a few other bathroom users. They were vaguely recognizable, like those people he used to see at the same transit station, way back when. You could be homesick for anything, he thought. Even for the rush of trains, for the urine stink of a station’s concrete floors. None of these other latrine-users noticed when he ducked behind the rows of potties and into the thicker woods.
Once hidden in the trees, Brandon swung his pack around, rummaging. Weaponry, of course, was the thing he’d forgotten to find and pack. He could use a stainless steel water bottle as a bludgeon—that would be his only hope. Doors had allowed no access to guns for the twelve, allowed them no weapons training, had waved away every such suggestion in meetings. Only the security detail had received guns. “Democracy has always been a farce.” Prick.
The days of going online to ask PINA for
help and instructions would never return. He’d have to go back and arm himself. Clearly, his escape had needed more careful planning. Or, maybe he really did have free will. Maybe if he went back, Doors wouldn’t detain him. Maybe he could go back and leave again later, in good faith; or he’d insist on manning the rescue mission and leave that way.
But it was beautiful out here, trees reaching for sun as though in salutation, all neck and torso, all reach, the smell of pine like air you could actually stand to breathe. And at least there were still redwoods, ancient trees to outlast everyone. He jogged a little, just to feel how his feet could lift off the needle-covered forest floor. As he drew close enough to see cracks of light between the trees that revealed the rows of plastic johns on the perimeter of the compound, he heard rustling. His heart flew in panic, and he tried to shush himself, the beating now in his ears, so he could assess the danger.
It wasn’t a bear. It was voices, three distinct male ones. He crouched behind a tree and listened.
Deep bass: “Yeah, three.”
Southern drawl: “And you got it all packed up?”
Bass: “Right-o.”
Drawl: “Sourced out the old stations, ready for a fight.”
Bass: “Yup.”
There was a silence, and then the third voice said, “There doesn’t need to be a fight if all goes well.”
Bass: “How are the numbers looking?”
Drawl: “We’re at about fifteen. Seven women, three children, us, plus two other guys.”
Bass: “Holding steady, then.”
Third voice: “Safer that way.”
After this came a long pause filled with the idyllic sounds of birds and their chirrups, coos and caws. A chipmunk peeped out of a hole in the trunk of a nearby tree, rose on its hind legs and gazed at him. Just sounded like escapees or something, too small to be a rebellion. There was the shirk-shirk sound of a knife whittling wood, and he swiveled his head towards it.
