by Alan Averill
The passengers stare at the man. The man stares back. Then he smiles. His smile gets wider and wider, almost contagiously so, before he finally raises his eyebrows and addresses the stunned travelers.
“Holy shit!” he says cheerfully. “I don’t believe that worked!”
Then, before anyone can respond, he forces open the rear door of the plane, leaps onto the runway tarmac, and goes running off into the sunshine of another beautiful Los Angeles morning.
chapter five
The floor won’t come clean. Samira’s been trying for something like seven hours, but no matter how much she scrubs, there’s always one more spot to find. Currently, she’s crouched over a piece of darkened tile near the foot of the stove, running a sponge across it with mad abandon. Each time she pushes the sponge forward, the tile is clean. But whenever she pulls it back, a small red streak appears. The rest of her apartment floor—all four hundred square feet of it—shines with almost insane brilliance. An immune-deficient person could perform surgery on this floor while eating a sandwich and come out with fewer germs than when he started. And yet there’s the one stupid streak.
It’s starting to drive her mad.
She’s on a set of bruised hands and knees, wearing nothing but a weathered army-issue T-shirt and a pair of black boxer shorts. The room smells so strongly of bleach that her eyes burn. She’s gone through three sponges already, scrubbing and scrubbing until they dissolved into a ragged pile of yellow fibers. But still she keeps at it. It’s that damn red streak: it taunts her like something from a Lady Macbeth fever dream.
Forward, clean. Back, red. Forward, clean. Back, red.
She’s crying again, either from fumes or frustration or a combination of both. Her hands have been gripping sponges for so long that her fingers are stuck in a permanent claw. Her knees are screaming in pain from being pressed against the tile of her cheap Brooklyn walk-up. But she keeps going.
Gotta get that red streak. Gotta get it. Then you can rest.
Samira pulls back on the sponge, and the streak returns, larger and more vibrant than ever. She makes a tiny noise of frustration and dips the sponge into her bleach bucket, an action that causes pain to fire up her arm and straight to her head. She cries out and drops the sponge, pulling her left hand back to her chest and holding it with the right as if it might try to break off and run away. Her knuckles on fire, she curls into a small ball on the floor, shuts her eyes as tightly as she can, and waits for the worst of the pain to go away. For a second, she’s afraid that she’s going to pass out, but eventually the agony begins to diminish. It’s not gone by any means, but it’s no longer the same stabbing intensity it was a few moments ago.
Samira rolls on her back and opens her eyes, staring up into the dim yellow glow of her kitchen light. As she does, she sees small feathers of dust clinging to the edges of the fixture and makes a mental note to remove them once she can stand. A quick glance at her fridge and stove reveal them to be showroom clean, and for this she’s thankful—if she had to clean the appliances, she might just lose it altogether.
Her apartment contains a single window, which she’s opened to allow some of the fumes to escape. As she lies on the floor and debates whether or not to look at her hand, she can hear a group of people moving on the street below. They’re laughing and screaming and drunk, and for a brief second she feels terribly envious. But then a memory shoves its way into her mind: a severed head, eyes open, rotting in the desert sun. The tongue has been removed and the word traitor carved into the forehead. At this thought, Samira’s envy dissolves into grief. She knew the owner of the head once—had even been to his house for tea—but now he was just one more anonymous horror to add to the list.
Samira shakes her head to clear the vision, then turns her attention to the injured hand. Where her knuckles should have contained skin, there were just four red blots. She looks from the knuckles to the floor and back again and suddenly realizes the identity of the mysterious red streak: she’s been cleaning her own blood off the floor for the better part of an hour.
“Oh, great,” she mutters. “Now I have to throw the sponge away.”
A combination of adrenaline and insomnia makes this a funny thought, and she starts giggling madly. She rolls on her side and giggles some more, then uses her good hand to push herself to her feet. Swaying unsteadily, still giggling, she walks out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, where she tosses bottles and ointments to the ground one after another until she finally finds a roll of medical gauze and a tube of Neosporin. Thus armed, Samira sits on the toilet—which could use a good scrubbing, even though she knows she gave it one yesterday—squeezes a copious amount of first-aid gel over her knuckles, and begins to wrap the bandage around her hand. She works quickly and without thought, and soon her hand looks like a lopsided baseball. Satisfied, she seals the ends of the gauze to each other with a bit of medical tape, then stares at her new digit to see if any blood will soak through. The pain is starting to return in full force, and she dimly wonders if she has any more Oxycontin floating around.
Samira is in the process of bending down and looking under her sink for rogue pills when she’s interrupted by a bell. She can’t figure out where the noise is coming from, so she stands and wanders drunkenly back into the studio portion of her studio apartment. The noise seems familiar in a vague kind of way, but she’s having trouble placing it.
“Phone?” Samira asks the empty air in front of her. “Is that my phone?”
It’s been weeks since anyone actually called her, long enough that Samira has forgotten the sound of her own cell. But as the ringing continues, a familiar feeling begins to come back. “Yeah,” she says again. “That’s my phone. Now where did I…”
Turning on unsteady feet, she moves in a slow circle until the noise gets louder. After a series of fits and starts, she shuffles over to a gleaming white countertop and peers behind a large teapot, where her phone is sitting in its charger and merrily chirping away. Samira stares at the screen, her vision blurring from the pain of her ravaged hand, until she finally makes out the words UNKNOWN CALLER.
“I don’t know who that is,” she says to the teapot. When the vessel doesn’t respond, she extends her good hand to the phone and slowly picks it up. The device is halfway to her ear before she hears noise coming from the speaker, a kind of whistling, airy sound that reminds her of a convoy driving at speed through a sandstorm.
“Hello?” she croaks, her voice hoarse from the chemical fumes permeating her apartment.
“Sam?” screams a cheerful voice from the other end. “Sam, is that really you?”
Samira blinks a few times, causing her vision to blur even further. Sam? No one calls me Sam. No one has called me that since…
“Who is this?”
“It’s me!”
“Who is this?” she says, more forcefully than before.
“It’s me, Sam! It’s Tak!”
The phone slips out of Samira’s hand and clatters to the floor. She can hear a voice coming from it, but it sounds very far away. Her blurry vision compresses down even further until all she can see is a colorful flowered teapot floating in an ocean of inky blackness. I’ve gone insane, she thinks, as bright white sparkles begin fluttering in front of the teapot. This is it. I’ve finally cracked. So long, reality. I hope the Section 8 ward is clean.
She feels faint, but somehow manages to pull herself together. The sparkles slowly fade, the blackness retreats, and light returns to her world. Moving like a victim at a bad hypnotism show, she reaches down for the phone and once again puts it to her ear. “You’re dead,” she whispers at the voice on the other end of the line. “You’re dead, you can’t call me, you’re dead.”
“I’m not dead, Sam.”
“You hung yourself in a motel room. There was a funeral. You’re dead.”
“Sam, I swear to God, I’m not dead. I was going to hang myself, but then this company called and I went to work for them and they faked my death.�
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“I don’t believe you,” says Samira, as her lower lip trembles. “I’m going to hang up now.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” shouts the voice. “Okay, listen, you remember that night where you and me drove to that club to see Kelly’s band, and he was so stoned he only played, like, three songs before he knocked over his keyboard and stormed off the stage? And what about when we went down to the beach and I almost drowned and you had to pull me out of the water? Huh? Come on, you have to remember that!…Oh! Oh, oh! I kissed you! On the mouth! I kissed you in the back of Hilary’s car and you said your dad was gonna kill me and I said ‘Banzai!’ and you thought that was really funny. Come on, Sam! It’s me!”
Samira’s legs give out at this point, and she slowly slides down the side of her counter and onto the bleach-coated floor. She wants to say something, but she’s crying far too hard to make any words come out. Part of Samira’s brain is screaming at her to stop with the crying and say something sensible, but all she can concentrate on is the fact that her friend is alive; the emotion of this discovery is overwhelming everything else.
“Sam,” says Tak again. “Sam, are you there?”
“Tak. Oh my God, Tak, where have you been?”
The background whistling sound is louder now, and Samira suddenly realizes that Tak is driving a car and talking at the same time. Judging by the howl of the wind, he must be moving incredibly fast. “Jesus, Sam, I’m sorry!” he screams. “I’m so fucking sorry! I couldn’t tell you I was okay, I couldn’t take the risk. The guys I work for are really terrible people, and I don’t know what they would have done.”
“Listen,” he continues, “I’ll explain everything when I see you. But I need you to do something. It’s the most important thing you’re ever going to do in your life, so you have to do exactly what I say. All right?”
Samira nods, realizes that Tak can’t see her, and manages to squeak out a noise of agreement. Her vision blurs again, then alights on the streak of blood next to the bucket. There is a brief, wonderful moment when she realizes that she doesn’t give a damn about the unclean patch of tile, then Tak starts speaking again.
“There’s a TransAir flight leaving JFK in eleven hours,” he says. “It’s going to Omaha, Nebraska, and you have to be on it.”
“What? Tak, no. I…I can’t get on a plane.”
“You have to.”
Samira suddenly feels a very strong urge to put down the phone and find a new sponge. “Tak, I can’t even ride a subway. Look, you’ve been gone a long time, and there’s…A lot of stuff happened to me, and…I can’t. I can’t do it.”
There’s a noise on the other end that sounds like a siren. Tak doesn’t speak for a few seconds, and Samira can almost feel the fear coming from his side of the call. But then the siren wails past his car and off into the distance, and he’s back on the line.
“Christ, that scared the hell out of me!” he says with maniacal good cheer. “Okay, so it’s TransAir flight 607. Pack a bag and get on it. And don’t check anything—carry-on only, all right?”
“I can’t.”
“Goddammit, Samira, listen to me! Twenty-two hours from now, something insane is going to happen, and I can’t get to you in time. Okay? I’m in the middle of Nevada, and I have to keep stealing cars every few hours, and it’s really slowing me down! So I can’t make it to New York. You’re going to have to come to me.”
“You’re stealing cars?”
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of angry guys with guns chasing me, so I can’t stay in the same car for more than a few hours at a time. But listen, I don’t have time for this. I have to get a new phone before they start tracing me.”
“What’s in twenty-two hours?” asks Samira. “What happens?”
“You’re gonna die,” says Tak.
This pulls Samira short. Her friend says it with such finality that she has no fear he might be making it up or exaggerating. He clearly believes this to be true. “Tak, wait. I don’t understand—”
“I know. Okay? I know, I know, I know. I can’t explain it now, I’ve only got like twenty seconds left here, and then I gotta go. Just get on the plane.”
The thought of getting on a plane, of locking herself in that tiny space with all of those people, makes Samira’s stomach clench. She feels the word “no” drift from her lungs and up to her lips, but before she can get it out, her eyes move back to the bucket and the red streak on the floor. You have to go, she thinks in a sudden moment of clarity. If you don’t, you’ll stay here and clean things until the army bundles you in a plane and sends you off to the mountains to shoot at goat herders and get blown up by an IED. You have to go.
“Okay,” she says finally. “Okay.”
“Banzai! That’s my Sam! Okay, I’ve gotta…Oh, wait! Wait, wait! Don’t eat anything! Not a thing! Empty stomach!”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Good! We’ll eat when you get here. Super important. Okay, I gotta run. See ya in fifteen hours!”
There is a loud click as the phone goes dead. Samira drops the cell and slowly rises to her feet. Her army-issue duffel bag is in a pile near the front door—she dropped it there when she came home from her last tour of duty and never bothered to move it. Inside are a few shirts, a couple of pairs of pants, some underwear, and a copy of her favorite Murakami book. She looks at the duffel for an eternity, the smell of bleach and blood filling her nostrils, then lets her gaze move to the red streak at the foot of the stove.
You don’t need to pack yet. You don’t have to. You can finish cleaning that spot. And there’s the dust on the light. Remember that? You need to clean that. You’ve got time. You can do it before you go. You’ve got hours before the flight…. And maybe you don’t need to catch it at all. There’s so much to do here. So much to clean.
Half an hour later, a dazed-looking girl in a yellow sundress hails a cab and promises the driver an extra fifty if he can get to JFK in twenty minutes.
They make it in fifteen.
amends
chapter six
Charles Yates stands on the flat white roof of the building he designed and watches the fiery corona of Earth’s nearest star begin its ascent over the Australian Outback. His right hand holds a yellow pencil worn to a stub, while his left contains a battered black notebook. Inside the notebook is an almost incomprehensible series of sketches, equations, and essays written in ending stream of tiny capital letters. A normal person flipping through the notebook would likely dismiss it as the ramblings of a madman, and one look at the owner, with his unkempt grey hair and thick, engineer glasses, would only help to confirm this suspicion.
But if the reader is not a normal person and is instead, say, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, the notebook would be a different thing altogether. Near the front, for example, written in faded blue ink, is a schematic for a device that can focus light into a narrow, powerful beam. The scientist would instantly recognize this as a laser and probably think little more of the subject. If, however, he happened to glance at the date at the top of the page and see that it read 1954, the sketch would become much more interesting—and the scientist might begin to wonder how this man, this odd little man in a dirty lab coat who looked like some kind of homeless grandfather, had sketched a laser some six years before it was invented by a man named Theodore Maiman.
The scientist would flip through the pages now, eyes growing wide as he read. Here is a device that can capture and store images electronically, put to paper nearly a decade before the first digital camera was constructed. There is a page of notes that seemed to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem in a way far more elegant and clever than the solution that would be presented some twenty years later. And look! Scribbled in the margins of a page, a casual afterthought, is a way to double the efficiency of semiconductors.
But as the pages turn, and the years move toward the millennium, the writings start to become incomprehensible. Phrases like “Schwarzschild wormhole” and “cosmic string” begin to pe
pper the pages, along with cryptic notes such as “Must remember to test this later” and “Find the girl from Shelby.” There are designs for batteries and cold-fusion reactors and geothermal-heat transference systems; equations for faster-than-light travel and infinite mass reduction; fantastic rants about nanomachines and red-shift measurements and the capturing of the Higgs boson particle. And as the two numerals at the front of the year shift from 19 to 20, the pages become compressed with notations and concepts so advanced that the clever scientist would simply lower the book with trembling hands and wonder why his lifetime of achievements suddenly felt so meaningless and empty.
But if the scientist ever tried to meet the genius behind these ideas, it would be a most terrible mistake. For when he looked into the eyes of the notebook’s author, he would see that the rare and amazing mind which placed these thoughts to paper was, to put it in technical terms, completely batshit insane. And at this point, he would have to smile and nod and back away slowly, fearful to turn around lest the author began to howl crazed laughter before lodging a fire axe between his shoulder blades.
But Charles Yates did not worry about such reactions because he never allowed his notebook to be read. The only person who had so much as glimpsed inside it was a brilliant young grad student named Judith Halford—and that single look had convinced her to abandon a promising scientific career and follow him to the end of the Earth. And now, nearly fifteen years later, their long partnership was about to come to fruition.
