“And the other?”
“‘Barnaby’s Glue for Wood: no glue works better on wood. Guaranteed.’ Maybe ‘wood glue’ and ‘glue for wood’ are like baking soda and baking powder,” Katherine said. “You know, they sound the same but they’re actually for really different things, like curing indigestion versus making cookies.”
“But what could either ‘wood glue’ or ‘glue for wood’ possibly do except glue pieces of wood together?”
“I don’t know, Jeremiah. Why does baking soda get used for indigestion and keeping the freezer from smelling bad and presumably something to do with baking?”
“You’re sure neither bottle says anything about bandoras, or antique musical instruments in general.”
“If you want to see for yourself, be my guest,” said Katherine, handing him the two bottles as he fumbled to put down the clamp and file.
Then he froze, mid-fumble, as far behind them the huge metallic door hissed open. Katherine’s eyes grew wide and she pantomimed a shush.
“Hello?” called a man. The vast room distorted his voice, making it echo eerily. “Is someone in here?”
“Put it all down,” whispered Katherine. “Quietly.”
“Hello?” called the man again.
As he had sworn in triplicate, Jeremiah did as Katherine instructed instantly and without question. Every scratch and scrape of tool against particle board shelf boomed like thunder in his ears. He could hear footsteps now: the man was walking towards their aisle.
“Follow. Me,” whispered Katherine.
She led Jeremiah deeper into the storeroom, all the way to the far end of their aisle, where they managed to hide around the edge of the shelf just before the man turned into the same aisle. She and Jeremiah stood there, shoulder to shoulder, trying not to breathe, as the footsteps came closer and closer. The footsteps went on for so long that several times Jeremiah was sure that the man was just about to come around the corner, when finally they stopped. The man was muttering—Jeremiah strained to make out the words.
“World enough and time, my lady,” the man was saying. “World enough and time.”
Tubes and buckets scratched and knocked against the shelves and each other as the man searched for something. Then he must have found it, because the footsteps receded, quicker than they had approached. At the other end of the room, the door hissed open and closed again, but not before the man switched off the lights, plunging Jeremiah and Katherine in total darkness.
Or not quite total. As the shock wore off and the burn of artificial illumination left their eyes, Jeremiah and Katherine found that the wall they had been facing was not just a wall, but one of the holo-portals sprinkled throughout the halls of the ship. Usually they played on 24 hour loops of sunsets and sunrises over open seas and distant forested islands. This holo-portal, however, had either been turned off or had broken and, being inaccessible to guests, never been repaired, and through the thick glass Jeremiah could see something he had not seen once in the nearly two years he had journeyed among them: the stars.
And what stars they were. Nothing like the rare pinpricks of light he had learned to pick out against the great wash of light pollution back in Detroit, or even the creamy belt he had witnessed a few times on camping trips into the still-accessible parts of the Canadian Territories. The holo-portal was not large—a circle of thick glass perhaps 6 feet in diameter—but through that circle of glass thousands of stars shot their light like arrows of subtle color. How had Jeremiah ever imagined that stars were white? Just at a glance he saw fifteen different blues and reds and pinks and yellows he could barely distinguish but never could have named, all glowing steadily behind a curtain of sparkling golden plasma where space dust vaporized against the ship’s shields. And here he was, amid and among all these balls of distant fire, in a tin can full of frozen food and wood glue and an AWOL iguana and a bunch of human souls in the pursuit of happiness or something like it, all zipping along through the void at what was still an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
Jeremiah realized that he was hardly breathing, and that Katherine was hardly breathing, and that she must realize that he was hardly breathing, too. Their shoulders were still touching, though by now Jeremiah couldn’t tell where his ended and hers began. They were cohabitating a spell, a state where the entire world had been stripped down to such a few essentials that it was impossible not to share them completely and in complete awareness of their sharing, and even a word to that effect—or any effect—would shatter the entire experience like a dropped wineglass.
“I think it’s safe now,” said Katherine finally. “Wait here—I’ll get the lights.”
Jeremiah waited, hoping that she would think better of it and come back and try to find a way back with him to that moment among the stars, but the lights came on and the stars vanished and he took the clamp and file and the wood glue and glue for wood, just to be safe, and found Katherine by the door. They said nothing the whole walk back to the suite, and their eyes met not once.
9
Behind the Glass
Still Saturday (8 days until arrival)
Back in his days on the folk circuit in Detroit, Jeremiah had been known for three things. First, for being an honest-to-goodness demon on the five-string banjo, possibly the second coming of Earl Scruggs himself; second, for becoming infatuated with every female unfortunate enough to appear on stage with him more than once (and a good fraction of the females who did not); and third and finally, for squandering his God-given talent on account of criminal laziness. But only two of these things were actually true—or at most two and a half—because Jeremiah was not lazy. Which was to say, whether or not he was a captain of personal industry, laziness had nothing to do with Jeremiah’s squandering of his ferocious talent.
Yes, after an initial period of dedication to the banjo, he had practiced less and less, until finally he did not practice at all, touching the strings only when he took the stage to perform. Yes, at some point he even stopped performing, and showed no signs of resuming. Those were the facts of the case, and more charitable judges might have assigned only partial blame to laziness, reserving some fraction for the heartache and stress Jeremiah must have undergone as he and Lana Peterson navigated the long, tortured disentangling of both their personal and professional arrangements. But in fact—though the heartache and stress were real enough—Jeremiah’s refusal to practice was a contributing factor to, not a side effect of, said breakup. The reason Jeremiah never practiced the banjo, the reason he eventually stopped playing at all, and even studying or listening to music—which reason he had never told anyone, and never planned to—was the glass. Which was ironic, Jeremiah recognized, because without music, he might never have known he was living behind it in the first place.
The story as Jeremiah told it later involved a drifter who knocked on his door one night and taught him his first folk song—“Kisses Sweeter than Wine”—in exchange for a hot meal and a place to sleep. When Jeremiah woke up, the drifter was gone, having stolen some food and jewelry and left his banjo in exchange.
The true circumstances were decidedly less romantic. Uncle Leo—who made a point of listening only to the popular music of the day—had accidentally downloaded to his PED a copy of Pete Seeger singing “Turn, Turn, Turn (To Everything There Is a Season),” confusing the track for a popular artist of the day, CarnAge, performing his own composition “Turn Turn Turn (That Ass Around).” One night Jeremiah—having invaded Uncle Leo’s office in his absence—happened to hear it by a simple twist of shuffle-play. But the reality of the effect the song had on Jeremiah was, if anything, more dramatic than his fabrication of the vagrant troubadour.
The very first line caught Jeremiah like a fish-hook in his heart, and before he could take stock of what had happened, the song had yanked on the line and was pulling him along with dizzying speed and a deep ache in his chest. If he’d had the presence of mind, Jeremiah might have suspected a coronary, but he could not spare
attention for anything except the hook in his heart and the line pulling him somewhere he had never been. The hook was pulling him out of the city, through forests and plains dotted with lakes he had only seen in waves, so quickly he barely skimmed the ground. It seemed the song might even pull a new version of himself right from his own chest, like a locust splitting its skin. And then: bump.
He hit a wall of glass.
Suddenly Jeremiah was no longer being pulled by the music. He was just sitting there, in his Uncle Leo’s chair in his Uncle Leo’s office, where he was not supposed to be, listening to a folk song on the exquisite speakers of Uncle Leo’s PED and feeling that he needed to catch his breath. Meanwhile that deep music had gone rolling on like a storm somewhere else, off into a silent distance that Jeremiah now realized was the realm of Real Life, where Real Love and Real Pain and Real Joy and all those things he’d never experienced really happened—dragging his heart along but leaving him behind.
For a long time afterwards, Jeremiah had believed that he would someday make it to the other side of the glass—because he believed that one day the music would take him there. He’d had faith. When he had picked up his first beaten-up acoustic guitar and learned his first C chord, he’d had faith. When he picked up his first banjo (even more beaten-up) and felt the strings answer his fingers as the guitar had never done, he’d had faith. As he put the music he loved under the undergraduate magnifying glass, he’d had faith, and again as he peered at it closer through the graduate microscope. As he fell in love over and over again with the singers who stood next to him as he hit the glass on stage—and then as he fell hardest of all for Lana, whose voice and heart were both like a broken bell—he’d had faith. And during all those hours of practice, the hours of listening, the hours of meticulously breaking down the songs of the old masters and mistresses until his fingers cramped and cut and bled, he’d kept the faith. Someday the glass would break.
But not only had “someday” never come—not only was Jeremiah’s faith never rewarded—it seemed to be mocked. His undeniable talent came to feel not like a gift or a glass-cutting tool, but an insult. Because the better he played—the deeper the hook set in his heart, the closer his fingers recreated this impossible music from the past—the harder he slammed into the same unbreaking glass, and the more it hurt.
Slowly, with the repeated slammings, Jeremiah had it beaten into him: the glass wall keeping him from Real Life wasn’t normal glass. It wasn’t even Plexiglass. This was ShopGlass—the stuff they used in downtown Detroit. The stuff he’d seen turn a grenade during the Election Night Riots. The stuff that simply didn’t shatter. And it wasn’t there by accident—it was there as a joke. A cosmic goof, of which Jeremiah was the butt. That glass was never meant for him to break, it was meant for him to bump into—like a rake in a slapstick was meant to be stepped on. The joke wasn’t malevolent, it wasn’t personal, but it wasn’t particularly funny either, and over time Jeremiah decided that—if he couldn’t live in Real Life with Real Joy and Real Sadness and all the rest of it—then he’d pass his days in light pursuits and ironic approaches, as far away from that damn glass as he could possibly get.
So the banjo had fallen by the wayside, and Lana too, and making or even listening to music at all. So he had tried his hand at several ways of doing nothing until, growing weary of Uncle Leo’s many objections to his wasting his life, Jeremiah had eventually financed a ticket on the Einstein IV—a ticket to a comfortable future where he could surround himself with distractions and try to forget that the rest of this business with the music and Real Life and the glass had ever happened.
As Jeremiah lay awake on the sofa, however, that Real Life business would not let him sleep. The moment with Katherine had stirred it all up again, and become mixed up with it, so that in his reveries it was not Lana standing and singing by his side but Katherine—who was also sitting there with him in Uncle Leo’s office, her shoulder touching his, as the first line of “Turn” hooked his heart for the very first time. And whenever Jeremiah’s buzzing half dreams turned to the wall of glass she was there too, breathing in harmony and watching as the music shot out beyond it and continued forever into a field of endless, subtly colored stars.
But something else kept Jeremiah awake as well—something out of tune and even sinister, though he could not put his finger on just why. After all, what had happened—in the journalistic, “just the facts ma’am” sense of the word—was that a man had arrived to the supply room, called out to see if someone else was present, removed something from the shelves while reciting a line of famous poetry under his breath, and left. Arguably barring the poetry, there was nothing unusual in this occurrence: looking for something in the storeroom and taking it out was, after all, the point of having a storeroom. But something about the experience had spooked Jeremiah, and slowly his thoughts turned from the stars and his shoulder touching Katherine’s and towards what exactly that man had been looking for in the storeroom—and why—so that when Jeremiah finally managed to fall asleep it was with the firm expectation of bad news in the morning.
10
It Is What It Is
Sunday (7 days until arrival)
In the morning Jeremiah emerged from his shower to find Reynolds waiting for him on the couch. He was holding a black notebook.
“Bearer of bad news, I’m afraid,” Reynolds said.
“How’d you get in?”
“Katherine let me in. She’s gone back to sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The worst part of our job,” said Reynolds, standing up stiffly. “General Clerical. Come with me, son. I’ll explain when we get there.”
He tugged the end of his mustache that pointed away from the hall harder than ever, as if just this once he wished events would not be able to pull him away.
Jeremiah followed Reynolds out of the employee quarters and into the halls of passenger cabins. They passed through the blocks one by one—A, B, C, all the way to H block, and then past the numbered rooms, 02, 03, 04, until they came to the end of the hall and cabin H06. Boyle’s cabin.
Standing outside the door was The Specimen. Six foot six, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, he wore the blue suit of a 20th-century plainclothes detective, and wore it distressingly well. Standing with his arms crossed and his feet exactly shoulder width apart, the very picture of stability and strength and unauthorized passage denied, he was more door-like than the door itself.
“Jeremiah Brown,” said Reynolds, “this is John Battle, head of security for the Einstein IV. John, Jeremiah.”
John Battle nodded in Jeremiah’s general direction but did not offer his hand.
“Nothing’s been touched, Mr. Reynolds,” said The Specimen.
“Thank you, John,” said Mr. Reynolds. “Come on, Jeremiah.”
Reynolds tapped his keycard and the door opened. Jeremiah had already guessed what he was about to see, but that did not mean he was prepared for it.
Boyle lay on the bed, arms at his sides. His face had relaxed, but he still looked angry—his cheeks already sunken and his mouth slack but frowning. Someone—probably The Specimen—had tried to close his eyes, but the lids had come slightly open.
“Room service found him this morning,” said Reynolds. “He had a standing order for toast and tea at 6 a.m. A week from Earth, too—it’s a damn shame.”
“What happened to him?” Jeremiah asked.
“Punched his own ticket,” Reynolds said, and pointed at the empty cup on the night table, and the can of pesticide lying next to it. “Nasty way to go. I only saw him a few times, when he came into the office for help with his PED, but he always seemed like a tortured soul. Hope he’s at peace now. Take this.” He handed the notebook to Jeremiah and pulled a sheet over Boyle’s body. “As General Clerical it’s our duty to inventory his effects before security can seal the room.”
Reynolds worked his way through Boyle’s quarters in efficient, organized fashion, calling out each item and waiting
for confirmation.
“Toothbrush, blue.”
“Got it.”
“Hairbrush, black. Hairbrush, black.”
“Sorry, got it.”
There wasn’t much to inventory: clothes and toiletries, travel documents, a picture of a woman—Boyle’s ex-wife, Jeremiah assumed—with pen scribbled over her face.
“That’s all,” said Reynolds, relieving Jeremiah of the black notebook. “Come on.” He activated the door.
“What happens next?” asked Jeremiah.
“John here will call medical to deal with the body—we’re all set, John.”
The Specimen nodded and began speaking low into a communication device secreted in his cuff.
“But I mean—do we notify his next of kin or anything?”
“None listed, no one to notify. Now if you’ll excuse me, other duties call.”
“Not even his ex-wife?” said Jeremiah. “We could track her down—I think he said her name was Elizabeth. I mean, a human being is dead—don’t we have to tell someone?”
Reynolds turned around. He took off his glasses, blew some dust off the lenses, and sighed.
“Sometimes, Jeremiah, there’s just no one to tell and nothing to do.”
“Write down what color toothbrush he had, ship the body off, and get back to work? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I understand,” said Reynolds. “The first one is always rough. How about if you take the rest of the day off? I’ll cover the desk, and maybe you can do something with Katherine. And then tomorrow, back to the needs of our guests who are still among the living. All right?”
Reynolds’s chest rose and fell in a “harumph” motion, which he seemed to intend as a comforting expression of stoicism in the face of life’s vagaries. He gave Jeremiah a rough pat on the shoulder before striding off.
“Confirmed,” The Specimen was saying into his cuff, “the package is ready for pickup.”
World Enough (And Time) Page 9
