by Jesse Karp
“Go.”
Mal brusquely took Rose’s hand.
“Take the route we discussed,” Remak directed the decoy, who was positioned just around the far corner, never having laid eyes on any of them. He didn’t even know who he was speaking to on the cell, only that his orders had come from very high up. “Start now,” Remak ordered. “Now.” He nodded again at Mal, and Rose was pulled toward the juncture of the two buildings, too fast. She winced as her face was about to crack into concrete.
But instead, her body moved forward, unimpeded. She opened her eyes to find that, guided by Mal, she was standing at the edge of . . . a park. Wildly, her eyes whipped back to Mal before she could even take in its details. The park, easily hundreds of square feet in size, had without any doubt whatsoever not been there between the two apartment buildings a moment before. Or, she realized as her brain began to put things in order, it had been there all along. She had just forgotten to notice it. It was not the experience of suddenly seeing something that had been hidden, but more of suddenly remembering to look.
She looked behind her, but Remak and his limo were gone. Now there was only more park, identical to the one she was standing in. Sounds from the real world—cars, people—became distended, warped into a mushy drone that echoed across the expanse of cracking concrete, rang off the rusting curves and arrays of metal meant to bring joy to daring children. Benches hunkered at the sides, peeling paint with no pigment.
Even beyond its forlorn desperation, the place was wrong, faded. The shadows themselves felt pale and grainy, as though Rose were watching them through a screen that was losing its clarity. The dingy light of a colorless sky fell down on them like dust.
“This is one of the forgotten places,” she said.
Mal nodded. “They can’t trace me here. No one can find me here. Or you. The Idea we fought, it made these places happen, it took the forgotten places in our minds and pushed them out of the world. It wanted to carve off pieces of our existence, to make the world grow smaller around us.”
She looked at the walls of the apartment buildings vaulting up on either side, the windows lining up in neat rows. What did the people inside see when they looked out their windows? Or did they even know they had those windows anymore?
“It’s so big,” Rose said. “And it just went away from people’s minds?”
“The size doesn’t matter,” Mal said. “There’s a housing project up in the Bronx, seven buildings, thousands of apartments, thousands of yards surrounding them. They were abandoned, and now they’re forgotten. And the world is that much smaller.”
“Seven buildings,” Rose echoed. “But what was this park? How could an entire city just forget a park in the middle of where they live?”
Mal chose a spot on the fading walls, sparing himself the painful view.
“A woman was attacked here one night, beaten, stabbed, raped while she bled to death. She screamed for help, screamed until she died.”
“Why didn’t the police come?” Rose’s voice was almost lost in her fear of the answer.
“No one called them,” Mal said. “Thirty-eight people saw what happened out their windows, thirty-eight people heard her dying. No one came. No one called.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It was all over newsblogs and the HD.”
“I never heard about it.”
Mal would still not look at the place.
“You just forgot,” he said. “Everyone did.”
“How? How could people forget something like that?”
“Some things we forget because they fade from memory. Other things we make ourselves forget, because we’re scared of them. Or ashamed.” Finally, he looked down at her again. “I’m sorry, but I need you to stay here until I’m back. So I know that you’re safe.”
She searched his eyes when he said it, but couldn’t find what she was looking for.
“How do I get out?”
“It takes a long time to learn that. If you walk off one edge”—he pointed at the space behind them where there should have been a street but there was only more park—“you just walk in at the other.” He pointed at the far side of the park, where the egress revealed—again—more park where there should have been a street. It was distant, but, squinting, Rose could swear she actually saw the figures of Mal and herself standing there.
“I’ll come back and get you,” Mal concluded.
“But what if you can’t, Mal?”
Mal looked at the fading walls around them.
“Watch me leave. You’ll see the street. You’ll lose it again, but remember where it is. You can make yourself see it eventually. Don’t use your eyes. Just remember to see it.”
“What about Remak?” she asked. “Can he get me?”
“No. His energy can’t reach in here. The neuropleth he travels in doesn’t exist in this place. That’s why it’s forgotten.”
The last word echoed through the terrible space and died with unnatural abruptness, as though the air itself were too tired to carry the sound. She was desperate not to be alone here.
“What did Remak mean when he said you had to do something for him? What is he holding over you?”
She looked at him through the shafts of inert light, cutting through the limbs of the single skeletal tree. Her eyes were pleading, and all he could do was turn away.
“What about your brother, Mal?” she asked, gambling for anything she could get from him. “Remak said you had a brother named Tommy. Don’t you owe me at least that?”
“Tommy lives away from here, out in the country,” Mal answered, without turning back to her, still trying to keep this part of his life hidden, even as he said it. “Tommy and Annie, his wife. I send them money, when I can.”
“Why aren’t you with them, Mal?”
“They don’t remember me.”
“You could try to fix that, couldn’t you?”
“Remembering me,” Mal’s voice came, but because she couldn’t see his face, it felt almost disembodied, “wouldn’t make their lives any better.”
“What about Laura?” she asked, shocking even herself by bringing it out between them. “Does she remember you?”
He was so still that when he finally spoke, she started.
“Watch me go,” he said. He took two steps toward the opening, then stopped and turned around. “You don’t deserve this, Rose. I’m sorry. But I need you to be safe, and this is the best I can do.”
She let the words fill her heart, then nodded, not trusting her voice to hold steady.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, then turned away and walked out to a sidewalk that she suddenly remembered was there. She blinked, and it was gone, leaving the concrete and rusting metal, the flaking benches and impenetrable, forgotten walls.
Rose knew about being alone. Until Mal had come to her, she barely ever spoke but to answer questions at work, and yet being with Mal sometimes made the isolation resound even more powerfully. Loneliness was no stranger to Rose. But this was a sort of solitude she had never imagined.
Aaron
THE BOY GLARED AT LAURA with a smoldering superiority that she could not hope to match, but she glared back for all she was worth. They stood there, glaring in the open field, until an agonized snuffling broke them from their death match and Dunphy teetered up onto his knees, rising over the line of grass, both hands clutching his nose.
Laura was the first to break away and look at Dunphy. A big red splotch was plastered across the center of his face, visible around the hands that presumably kept the remainder of his lifeblood from pouring out. She turned back on the boy.
“You’d better get him to a hospital,” she said.
The boy slowly let his eyes creep away from his target, as though she had live ammunition trained on him.
“Excellent,” he said. “Well done, Mr. Dunphy. Worth every penny.”
Laura shot him a look of astonishment, then went over to Dunphy, took him by an arm, an
d lent her strength to his huge body, pulling him up to his feet. He tottered for a moment, collected his balance, then looked to her for his next move. She slowly walked him, one foot at a time, through the tall grass, back toward the cars.
“Sorry, Laura, sorry,” he mewled pathetically over and over again as they went. It came out garbled and mushy. Laura just barely managed to hold herself back from apologizing for the shocking assault. He had, after all, come at her first, and she hadn’t even been aware what she was capable of.
Halfway to the car, she craned her head over her shoulder.
“Coming?” she called to the lone figure, following their progress from his unmoving position in the field.
Unhurriedly, he caught up with them by the time they got to the car. Even so, Laura had to get Dunphy’s keys, open his door, and set him in the back seat by herself. His torso and legs folded around his damaged crotch sent waves of queasiness through Laura’s gut.
She turned to the boy and held out the keys.
“What do you expect me to do with those?” he said.
“Drive him to the hospital.”
“I’m fourteen. I can’t drive a car.” He said it like she was an unmitigated fool for having suggested it.
“Oh my living Christ,” she said, turning back and struggling Dunphy into the back seat of her own car. Sweating and out of breath, she leaned on the roof and looked at the boy. “What’s your name?”
“I’m not going to tell you my name.” Obviously.
“Just tell me your first name. Make up a goddamned name for all I care, or I’ll make one up for you.” Years of babysitting the neighbors’ three boys had taught Laura how to be tough with punks.
“Eleanor Roosevelt,” he said, unapologetically.
“Fine. Listen, Eleanor—”
“You can call me Mrs. Roosevelt.”
“Seriously? Right. Okay. Mrs. Roosevelt, get into the car next to Dunphy. We’re going to drop him off, and then we have a lot to talk about.”
“I’d say so,” he said, and much to Laura’s surprise, he got right into the car without another word.
But for Dunphy’s intermittent moans and garbled attempts at semi-lucid communication, no one spoke. Laura cruised just above the speed limit back toward town. She’d never been pulled over here, but now was surely not the time for it. She’d never been to the hospital around here, either, but her mother had demanded that she know where it was before she even got to campus.
She weaved through sparse late afternoon traffic, turned onto Columbia Street, and eventually pulled to a stop across from the emergency room. She killed the engine and twisted her body around so she was facing the back seat as best she could.
“All right, Dunphy. Can you make it in there by yourself?”
He looked out with already blue and swelling eyes at the big glass doors across the street, as though it were some impossible expanse of desert.
“Go,” said the boy, unceremoniously. “Would you just go, already?”
With monotonous exertion, Dunphy pushed out the door, labored out, and moved in slow motion across the street.
“It would really cap things off nicely,” the boy said, unable to pull his eyes from Dunphy’s mesmerizing performance, “if he were hit by a car right now.”
“So difficult to find good help these days,” Laura said, meaning for it to be cutting, but finding that, like everything else, it bounced off his nimbus of superiority. It did, however, get the boy to turn back to her with bored eyes that bespoke how tedious this was all going to be. On the seat next to him and the door Dunphy had just used, bloody handprints blazed a smeared trail.
“Let’s cut right to the business of this business,” the boy said, the words tumbling out with no awkward phrasing or enunciation, as natural as if Laura’s seventy-year-old English professor were saying them. “I will pay you an eye-widening amount to tell me where the Librarian is.”
“I don’t know who this Librarian is you’re talking about, but if I did, you can believe me when I say that I would tell you whatever I could just to get you out of my life.”
He made his shoulders slump in melodramatic disappointment.
“Must it be this way? Must it? I already know you have the information I want.”
“Okay,” she said, in a starting-fresh tone of voice. “Let’s go from here: How do you know I have this information?”
“I heard you talking about it.”
“When was I talking about it?”
“June of last year.”
“June of—” She blinked herself to a stop. “Just how long have you been following me?”
“I have not been ‘following’ you,” he said, offended by the idea. “I’ve been surveilling you. And not long enough. Your conversation of June of last year was what made me notice you to begin with. It took some time to find you after that. Your records over the last year were a tricky business to decipher.”
That he was deciphering her records, surveilling her, clearly should have been setting off all sorts of warning bells. But now they were getting somewhere, somewhere that maybe even could help Laura.
“What did I say, exactly? When? To who?”
“To whom,” he corrected.
“Seriously? Weren’t you the one who didn’t want to waste time?”
“This isn’t a waste of time? Do you need me to prove what I know by describing every moment of your life over a nine-month period before you just accept my offer and give me what I want?”
“Let’s suppose something for the time being,” she said without a trace of condescension, a trait that came naturally to her and that more than one doctor and professor had told her would prove valuable in the career she sought to pursue. “Let’s suppose that all the assumptions you’ve made about me aren’t true. You’ve collected data, but it’s obviously incomplete, because you still need information from me. So there are some areas that you’ve had to fill in with theory. Is that fair to say?”
He looked at her, his eyebrow cocking skeptically, but he nodded, prepared to play along for the time being.
“Okay,” she went on. “If you grant all that, then I’m ready to make a deal. Let’s pursue a path to the answers you want, by giving me the answers I want. It doesn’t cost you anything to answer my questions, right? When we get to your information, I’ll give you everything I know about it, and you don’t even have to pay me a cent.”
He stared at her, his lips twisting in a decision: Could she possibly be as guileless as she seemed? Clearly, he was not used to or comfortable dealing with people who had nothing to hide. Ultimately, though, her logic was unassailable. Even if he wasn’t assured of getting the information he wanted, answering her questions cost him nothing.
“Yes, fine,” he said with only an echo of grudge.
“So what did I say June of last year, where was I, and to whom was I speaking?”
“Shall I just show you? That would be easier.”
Laura’s heart beat a little faster.
“Yes,” she said, the word nearly catching in her throat.
“I’m feeding it to your cell right now.”
She reached down to get it, realized it was still in her room, collecting dust in the shadows under her bed.
“I, uh, don’t have it with me,” she said, already knowing the reaction she would get.
“You don’t have your cell with you,” he said, letting it hang there between them, drenched in disdain.
She searched the side of his head for his cellpatch, which she was sure he had. It took her a moment, though. It was smaller, no more than a quarter inch in diameter, and flesh colored as well, nearly invisible.
“You must have cellenses to go with that thing. Can I see it through those?”
“The lenses are fused to my irises.”
“What?” She squinted at his eyes, saw nothing unusual. “I thought the contact lens version wasn’t even available yet.”
“It’s not. To people like you.”
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br /> Who the hell was this kid?
“I suppose,” he said, “the hospital has a paycell somewhere.”
They stood in the cold, medicinal hallway, huddled around the small screen of a paycell, and Laura watched herself doing things she’d never done, in a place she’d never been. On the screen, she was in a public station of some kind, all white and chrome. The camera was focused tightly on her, so it was impossible to make out exactly where she was, but the sound of crowds bubbled in the background, even announcements on a PA system crackled indistinguishably.
She saw her face, but it was tense, unfamiliar. It was carrying something with it she didn’t know or understand. Though that Laura was no older than she was now, obviously, she felt almost as though she were looking at an adult version of herself. There was another figure, close to her. A big figure, a boy, with dark, close-cut hair and broad shoulders. For an instant, she assumed it was Josh. But then, even from the back, the face not visible from the angle they were watching, there was something that was clearly not Josh about him. He stood, rock-like in his stillness, attending the stranger Laura with him on the screen. But even so, there was an unmistakable strength in him that Josh simply lacked, a sense of stubborn immovability in the tension of his shoulders, the angle of his head.
Laura’s body tingled. How could she possibly make those assumptions about someone she had never met simply from the back? Ridiculous.
“Then maybe what we need to do,” the Laura on the screen said, the sound of her voice obviously enhanced, since she appeared to be whispering, “is go back to the Librarian.”
The male she was speaking to said something, and she strained to hear it, catch even the sound of his voice. But it was a one-word response and swallowed by the ambient noise.
“I know we could find him again,” the screen Laura said in the paycell. “I know he would speak to us.”
There was a pause as the two figures stared at each other. Then they both saw something at the same time and moved away, off the screen, which flickered gray and went to static.
Laura looked up at the boy next to her as though coming out of a daze.
