Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “Like her,” he says. “Look at her. It’s never occurred to her to question that her story is the center of the narrative. But only this fragment of her life will survive.”

  “If you call it survival,” she says, chin cupped on hand, contemplating her gin and tonic, which Philip has always called the blood of dead empire. “It’s more like imprisonment, under glass, forever. Like Nimue and Merlin. Waters may rise, and cities crumble, but I’ll always have this light on your face and the water running down the windows.”

  “I’m happy here,” he says. “Let’s never leave.”

  “Done,” she says. “I’ll always be here with you.”

  “Strange to think of the boy I was, still with you. I suppose you’re there too, at least since you were twelve. How strange it must be for you, how your personal history is a crystalline museum, until the point where, I suppose, it must darken.”

  She imagines the severe boy he’d been standing behind her in his second-hand pea coat torn at the shoulder, how he’d be moved by the light, disdainful of their consumption, how he’d stare in bemused dismay at the elegant man across from her. She takes a sip of wine.

  “Yes?” he says.

  She says, “You’re standing right behind me, in judgment, and you have no mercy.”

  “I’d expect no less,” he says, seeming pleased. “Tell him not to work so hard. Or maybe harder. Another drink?”

  “It’s different with me,” she says. “I don’t really have past selves. It’s all one big present. There is nothing of me that fades.”

  “Nor suffers a sea change,” he says. “But isn’t that awful? Every little wound open forever?”

  She smiles, makes a vague, expansive gesture, her hands tracing circles in the air.

  He says, “I’d forgotten how rewarding it can be to get you drunk.”

  “I wish I could remember the future,” she says, resting her forehead briefly on her palm, and if the other patrons see, well, let them, they’ll barely remember it. “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. I wish I could just slip up and down the timeline as I pleased. It’s almost what I do anyway.”

  A pause in which they listen to the rain and then he says, “I have news. Something I have to tell you. Of the most improbable kind.”

  “You’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?”

  “No. Worse. I met a girl. She used to be a model but she didn’t mean it. Now she’s a biologist. Lepidoptery. Butterflies and moths, you know,” he says airily.

  She waits for the punch line. “And…?”

  “And we’re giving it, as they say, a whirl. She’s moving in. Nuptials would appear to be imminent.”

  “You’re marrying a model with a butterfly net.”

  “With anyone else I’d deny it. What am I supposed to say? ‘Yes, but she’s hot’? ‘With the approach of middle age I’ve learned to compromise my once noble principles’? ‘Nabokov liked it so it’s probably okay’?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’d like her. She’s hot and stacked. Kidding. Well, in spirit. Seriously, though. She keeps me calm. She says that’s her job.”

  “It’s a big one.”

  He smiles at her.

  “I have more to tell you,” he says. “Though I hardly know how. Simply, I suppose.”

  She reaches across the table and covers his mouth with her hand because she knows what he’s going to say, and it’s like she’s turning her will against the ironclad decree of inexorable fate but what else is there to do, and he takes her wrist gently and removes her hand but her resources are not exhausted and she sings a single long, clear note to drown him out (remembering lessons in a dusty room that was a ballet studio most of the time, mirrors everywhere, the piano, the barre), and she does it well, even beautifully, so he has to stop to listen, and all the other diners are looking. She sustains it for as long as she can, thinks she might sustain it forever, even as her wind fades and her vision starts to go. Scattered applause from the other tables and someone shouts “Encore!” and “Bravissima!” as Philip kisses her palm, puts her hand to his cheek, and says, “No more trips to the Mayo.”

  She starts to argue, starts to cry, but he says, “I’m spending my entire life driving my company hard enough so it grows fast enough that I can pay for the fucking Mayo. I hardly see Ann-Elise. If I have just one bad year it’s all for nothing anyway. I’m going to try to live my life instead of tending it like a bonsai.”

  She had always supposed they would attend each other’s funerals, would welcome the next century together, and perhaps the next, and if there were long stretches of silence between them there would still always be a return and within moments of his walking in the door it would be like they’d never parted, and sometimes they’d be lovers and sometimes not but there would always be a next thing. Holding his gaze, she snuffs the candle with her palm.

  “You look like I announced end-stage cancer.”

  “In a way you did.”

  “Well, I guess this is goodbye, give or take fifty years.”

  “You’re being stupid. There’s no going back. Is life worth so little that you’re in a hurry to leave it?”

  “Life is worth so much that I’m in a hurry to live it.”

  “So you can have your little model,” she says, distressed by the sneer in her voice but unable to suppress it. “And maybe a family and a handful of decades in which you do nothing important and then you’ll die and be forgotten. That’s your plan.”

  “As opposed to what, my dear. I tried. I have one hundred and thirteen scars on my palm to prove it. I had to have surgery to get feeling in my thumb back. I took my shot, but I’m not Newton, and wasting the years in vain has ceased to appeal.”

  “You had intuitions. I remember.”

  “And if I had a dozen lifetimes I might pursue them, but not even the Mayo can get me that. Though, who knows, technology evolves, by the time I’m old there might be a solution.”

  “There won’t be.”

  “I know,” he says gently, and then, “But you’ll never lose me. I’ll always be right here.”

  A black wind rises and sweeps through the room, extinguishing the candles and swallowing the voices and the echoes and every particle of light and carrying them back down into her other memory’s stillness, leaving her in silence and solitude and the blood-red dark behind her eyelids, and she’s tempted to remain here in this peace, but then, with just the slightest exertion of her will, the candles are flickering again, and once again the restaurant is full, and there’s Philip sitting across from her.

  “Even now we’re in your memory,” Philip says. “There behind your elegantly marred forehead.” The daylight is gone, now, the guards on the street invisible, no sign of the outside but the drumming of the rain. The other tables have emptied and filled and in the candlelight everyone looks happy, like their lives are replete, and there’s a woman, blond and ripe, who will run to fat soon but is, for now, beautiful, standing in the doorway, smiling radiantly at someone inside, looking like she’s just thought of something to say.

  A hand on her wrist. She opens her eyes, finds their waiter, worried, looking down at her. The restaurant is empty, the candle a crater of cold wax. The waiter says he is sorry, may he call her a cab, is her boyfriend coming back, in any case they’re closed.

  28

  Departure

  The crush leaving the train car carries Kern along, and if it had been a time for picking pockets he’d have done just fine. As the press slows before the escalator he scans the faces for bad intentions but no one meets his eyes and almost all of them are absorbed in their phones. A gaggle of teenage girls, mostly blond, skin glowing, all in the same red tracksuits, get on the escalator behind him; their loud, careless voices are audible even over the shriek of the departing train, the hot wind of its passage washing over him. The girls laugh noisily as they rise out of darkness into garish light.

  He steps off the escalator int
o a tunnel of milky, translucent glass, like a vast elongated soap bubble; everyone else strides by him purposefully. A dispassionate, oddly beautiful female voice that seems to come from everywhere enunciates an endless list of cities, numbers, letters, times. There are tall video panels every twenty feet showing fog rolling over the bridges, raindrops iridescent on trembling bamboo leaves, the red light of a desert morning moving over a woman’s tranquil face.

  The tracksuited girls sweep by, and each panel, at their approach, switches to a juddering montage of well-dressed, feral-looking women glaring haughtily at the camera, an ad, he realizes, for makeup. A fat man with a Cognitive Openware T-shirt, wearing those chunky sneakers that programmers seem to like, gets an ad for Lotus, at which Kern brightens—Fist of the Southern Lotus, starring Montana Chiao, is one of his favorite movies—but there’s no kung fu, just a brightly colored little car that looks like a robotic piece of candy. At Kern’s approach the panels revert to fog enveloping bridges.

  The tunnel branches, blinking signs pointing the way to things that mean nothing to him. The ghost says, “You want ticketing.”

  The ticketing hall is the biggest room he’s ever seen; the roof, high overhead, looks like it’s billowing away. Long serpentine lines lead to booths where uniformed women, mostly, talk to worn-looking customers, and he’s reminded of the long queues for Red Cross vaccinations. Five feet away are two cops in body armor with machine guns, one with a mustache and the other a girl, drinking coffee from paper cups marked Koffee Kiosk—the girl’s eyes light on him, move on.

  Windows maybe a hundred feet high frame the runway and the taxiing planes, visible in the dark as complexes of points of light in motion, and sometimes lights on the tarmac reveal the graceful curve of fuselage, and it’s like looking into an aquarium, or perhaps the depths of the sea, with huge creatures sliding by, intent on their own inscrutable business, utterly indifferent to the other side of the glass.

  There are people sleeping on benches and the floor before the windows, using backpacks and hand luggage as pillows. The ghost says, “A lot of kids with layovers camp out here, so you can expect to be left alone. So. This is a decision point. Where do you want to go? It can be anywhere in the world.”

  He’s not sure how to respond, can’t think of a place that means anything.

  “If you’re at a loss,” she says, “then how about Vancouver?”

  “What would I do there?”

  “What would you do anywhere? You have enough money for some very good hotels. And anyway, when the heat dies down in a few weeks, you’ll be coming to LA to get me, right?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “You could go to Franz Josef Land,” she says. “It’s the party spot now, what Singapore used to be.”

  The windows are mirrors and he automatically starts to shadow box, just indicating the moves so as not to draw attention, and remembers that his life is dedicated not to survival but to perfection. “Thailand,” he says. “I want to go to Thailand. I can train there. They invented kickboxing. I’ve never had a real coach.”

  “There you go,” she says. “Thailand. Your dollar’ll go farther, and it’s sure out of the way.”

  * * *

  “Window or aisle?” asks the gate agent, who seems kind. Kern regards her blankly.

  The ghost is starting to speak when the agent says, “I mean, would you like to sit next to the window, or next to the aisle? If you sit by the aisle you have a little more room, but you might like the window—the dawn over the ocean is something to see.”

  “Window, please.”

  Her fingers fly over the keyboard, her proficiency reminding him of Lares. “You depart for Bangkok in fourteen hours. Checking bags?”

  “No.”

  “If you happen to have forgotten anything, there’s a store in the domestic concourse that sells clothes, toiletries, even luggage. It’s open all the time.”

  * * *

  Lying huddled under a bench, he turns his face to the wall and pulls his new sleeping bag close. The ghost had said to sleep, that it was as safe as a police station, but there are voices, footsteps, a constant sense of people in motion. He looks up at stapled fabric, aluminum struts. On the wall before his eyes is an ethernet port, like a little ziggurat of negative space. He roots through his new canvas carryall—there are his new clothes, a new tablet and a multipack of cables that should have a charger for the phone—finds a T-shirt and puts it over his eyes.

  He remembers following Kayla one night down silent streets of San Francisco, lit by lamps and the fog’s faint glow, how she said they had to keep moving because she was searching for something, had been searching a long time, though he didn’t think she really was, it was more like poetry than that there was something she actually needed to find, and he felt like it was his work to watch over her in the night. She said she was in search of the miraculous, and she knew it was there because someone found it long ago, this Boss Djinn Adder, who sounded like the villain in a martial arts movie, but she’d said he was actually Dutch, and an artist, who was lost at sea. And now the memory has graded into a dream where they’ve come at last to a long, empty beach under a lightening sky and sit on the cold sand watching the breakers rumble in. She starts to cry, and he tries, helplessly, to comfort her, and since they’re alone he pulls off her jeans, which she tolerates, though she isn’t really paying attention as he opens her legs, is just watching the sky over his shoulder. He watches her face, and is happy, but then he looks away just for a second, and when he looks back she’s gone. Sand falls from his hands and face as he searches blindly among the crumbling dunes.

  “Hey now,” says the ghost. “Wake up, okay? Wake up. You’re having a bad dream. Hush now. People will hear you.”

  He returns to the present, though he knows the dream will be there if he closes his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says, blinking, waking up fast; he tries to think of a question to ask. “Tell me about Los Angeles. How you broke in, if you did.”

  “Well, that’s a story,” she says, and he wills her to keep talking; her voice is hushed and intimate, a private voice, and he lets it envelop him, feeling almost like she’s talking to herself, like all these words have been pent up and waiting. “It was the day the LAPD officially disbanded. Not that it really mattered, as the emergency administration was already in place, but it felt like the end, and capital was fleeing the city, and I was on the verge of giving up. I was with my friend Sonia, that day, and she was taking my picture in what had been downtown Santa Monica. An aesthete, was Sonia. She kept saying how the light loved me, how I was so perfect I almost disappeared. The low waves broke behind her, washing the street, the white foam dissolving on the crumbling asphalt. She said she was making a record of the city’s last days. You’d think people would be scared, but most of them were just giddy—there were celebrations that day, and riots, and they were expecting fires. The sun was just setting when the first fireworks went off over the water, the sails of the yachts illuminated in the flashes, and the concussions ricocheted off the wall at my back, and I smiled from my emptiness as her camera strobed.

  “The wind brought sparks that blinked out in the surf and Sonia said, ‘It’s starting.’ I looked up toward the hills, saw grey columns of smoke rising. I looked back, was blinded by more flashes, and as the sun set the fireworks began in earnest, bursting over the water, their reports a continuum, their light showing Sonia, intent on her camera, absorbed in her imagery.

  “So much beauty, she said, as things come apart. I thought of the massifs of dirty white smoke that filled the skies when I drove west on the road through the fires on the plains. How the fire lit the night. They’d said it was the last fire, on the radio, that the ecology was changing, had changed, that the plains were desert now.

  “She had a car, a drone, armored, a hand-me-down from her father, who used to be a famous director. I was falling asleep but Sonia got excited when she thought she heard a bullet ricochet off the hull. As always, she had
pills. I remember picking them off her palm, the muted colors like codes or flags or the neon light of cities. I swallowed them dry and my mind flared, then darkened.

  “I wouldn’t have said anything, without the pills. I’ve forgotten most of it, thank god, but the gist was that I didn’t have the money to survive, or to leave, and her father was rich, and I would live anywhere, and maybe he could use me in something, she knew how the camera loved me, and at some point I saw she’d stopped listening, was staring out the window at the smoke in the sky. She was sorry, she said, but her trust was nearly depleted, and her father had lost his money when the markets fell—they kept up appearances but there wasn’t much left.

  “When we got to the yacht I took more pills. I felt like I’d fallen into my own private film noir. It was a party, mostly her father’s friends. It was dark, on the yacht, I don’t know why, just a few candles burning. From the prow I watched the city lights recede.

  “She introduced me to her godfather, but a wall had come down between me and the world and I made the decision to slip over the side. I had a water glass of vodka and the water was warm and I thought it might be pleasant, and I thought I might not notice it at all, and the world seemed flattened, somehow, the fireworks’ nebulae almost close enough to touch, and I wondered how they’d look as I drifted down toward the reef. A beautiful death, I thought, one that might become a story.

  “But Sonia found me and took the glass from my hand and brought me to the back of the boat where she said there was someone I needed to meet. It was very dark and at first I didn’t see him, he was sitting so still. Sonia whispered in his ear and left and he asked to see my face so I used the light from my phone though I couldn’t bear for him to look at me, and I knew my fear would show, so I became someone else, which allowed me to be present and to smile charmingly when he told me I was beautiful.