The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  After her bath she pulled on a fresh top and panties and drew aside the heavy curtain on the room’s only window. In the dusk, three peacekeepers walked past on the street below. Two more slouched under an unlit streetlamp a block away. All the civilians had apparently dispersed, except for a woman in a full burka, who hurried into the Ramsis Hotel lobby at the other end of the street. In the alley across from the Baron, a man struck a match and held it cupped near his face.

  But not just any man: It was him. Crazy Hair.

  He shook the match out, and the tip of a cigarette glowed.

  “Who the hell are you?” Olivia muttered.

  * * *

  She dressed quickly, applied a layer of moleskin to her blister, and limped down to the lobby. As she started to push through the outside door, the desk clerk called to her, “Miss, the curfew.”

  She stopped. The goddamn curfew. “I’m just having a look.”

  On the sidewalk, a couple of streetlamps had come to life. The peacekeepers turned toward her. Across the street, the alley was empty. Or the man had extinguished his cigarette and withdrawn into the shadows. Boots clicked on the pavement as one of the peacekeepers strode toward her. Olivia raised her hand, made a little wave, and retreated into the hotel.

  The desk clerk followed her into the bar, where he magically became a bartender. A couple of men sat in the corner, drinking beer and speaking French. A lone fixture cast dismal illumination, which was absorbed by the heavy furniture. With the curfew, she wouldn’t be able to see Brian again until tomorrow. Olivia ordered a gin martini. Some of the bottles on the backbar were empty and covered with dust, but what the hell.

  “We used to be the best hotel in all of Syria,” the bartender said. “Presidents stayed here.” He shrugged. “But that’s over now.”

  Olivia drank her martini fast and returned to her room.

  She sat at the desk and booted her tablet, attached her report to an email, and sent it to The Beat via her encrypted mail server. Moments later, a chat request began blinking for her attention. Olivia accepted the request. A 3D chat window opened, like a little box holding her editor’s head and a detail of The Beat’s London office.

  “Livvie, you’re back online. I was getting worried. Everything all right?”

  “Not quite. A friend of mine got shot. Two friends, actually.”

  “Oh, God.” Helen Fischer was in her late fifties, wore her hair short and silvered. She had great cheekbones.

  “Brian’s all right,” Olivia said. “Not all right, but you know what I mean. He’s hurt, but it’s not as bad as it could have been. I haven’t been able to track down Jodee, but he didn’t look too bad off, either.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “I’m fine, Helen. Really.”

  “I’m reading your piece as we speak, by the way. It’s good, as usual. This one wraps up the series. What’s next?”

  Olivia stared at the chat box, her brain suddenly devoid of ideas. “Eh. I don’t know?”

  “That’s a first.”

  “There’s tons going on. I’m just tired. Have you heard anything about a bioweapon getting smuggled out of Aleppo?”

  “No.” Helen looked sharply interested. “What kind of bioweapon?”

  “Weaponized anthrax, or something worse.”

  “This is a real thing?”

  “I don’t know. Some BBC people were talking.”

  “There’s nothing trending. Something you want to look at?”

  “Maybe. I’ll ask around, see if there’s anything there.” She’d already asked around a bit, but it wouldn’t hurt to look some more. “Helen? Can you advance me some money?”

  “For the bioweapon story?”

  “For anything. Yeah, the bioweapon story. Sure.”

  Helen removed her glasses and leaned forward, the tiny rendering of her head, no bigger than a mouse’s head, seeming to come off the tablet. “Livvie, are you sure you’re all right? You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve been out there a long time.”

  By “out there” she meant the chaotic places. The Disaster. Olivia had seen a lot, experienced a lot. She had survived . . . but it was different now. Brian made it different. For the first time since childhood, Olivia might as well have FRAGILE stamped on her forehead in big red letters. Or HANDLE WITH CARE. That’s probably what Helen was seeing, without knowing it. Maybe Olivia had always been one of the broken people, or one of the about-to-break people. But now she felt like one. And she didn’t like it.

  “I’m going to get some sleep, Helen.”

  “Take care of yourself. Wait. There. I just transferred your fee for exclusive rights to the bioweapon story.”

  “What if there isn’t a bioweapon story?”

  “Then a different story. I know you, Livvie. You’ll scrounge up something.”

  * * *

  She couldn’t sleep. It was cooler at night, but not in this room, which was like an oven turned off but still holding heat from the human-casserole-baking temperature of midday. No longer hot enough to produce a nice crust, but plenty hot enough to baste Olivia in her own sweat.

  Finally she gave up trying for natural sleep and dug out the Nytol, swallowed a tablet, and lay back down. A while later, rosy light trembled on her eyelids, rousing her . . . and she smelled smoke.

  Olivia rolled off the bed and stumbled to the window. Fires burned as far as she could see, but it wasn’t Aleppo. It was home: Seattle. Even the sky was burning in red and black striations of smoke and flame. It looked like the end of the world. Olivia opened her mouth to scream. Searing hot wind scorched her throat—

  And she sat up in bed, choking and gasping.

  A fucking dream. But so real, like a full-immersion movie.

  She worked her parched mouth, trying to produce some spit. A water bottle sat on the dresser. She started to swing her legs off the bed—but stopped.

  Someone was standing outside her door.

  She saw the toes of his shoes in the gap at the bottom. Assuming it was a he.

  Assuming it was Crazy Hair.

  Was the door even locked? There was a key to turn from the inside, but had she done that? She couldn’t remember. Slowly, she put her feet on the floor and stood up. The boards creaked. Instantly the shoes disappeared, and hurried footsteps retreated down the hall. Olivia grabbed her shirt and yanked the door open in time to catch a glimpse of a man hunching down the stairs, pursued by his own grotesque shadow.

  In the morning, by the time she arrived at the hospital, Olivia had decided to leave Syria and go back to Seattle with Brian.

  Five

  Eight days later, in Seattle, Brian said, “Here I go.” He looked like a man in custody: This way to the execution chamber. Or a man with bad news, the worst news: I’m sorry to tell you this, but we’ve found an inoperable mass. It’s time to get your affairs in order.

  Or a man going to meet his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend for coffee.

  Time to get your affair in order.

  Olivia sat on the sofa with a cold can of Interurban IPA, watching him. Brian had been on a walking cast and crutches for a week, but he hadn’t yet walked out to see Ryleigh Magaw. Until yesterday, he hadn’t even told the poor woman he was home. “The timing’s not right,” he kept saying. Meanwhile, Olivia found life in his cramped one-bedroom West Seattle apartment increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn’t Brian’s family pictures everywhere announcing he was a package deal, or his challenging decorative choices, such as the R2-D2–shaped waste can in the kitchen. It was Ryleigh: the unseen presence. Brian’s not quite officially ex-girlfriend was like a third roommate, occupying her own space inside their heads. Sometimes (like practically every minute of the day) Olivia wondered what she was doing here.

  “Nobody’s forcing you to do this, you know.” Olivia plucked at the beer can tab, making it buzz like an African thumb pia
no.

  He smiled gloomily. “We both know I have to. It’s already been too long, and it isn’t fair to you or Ryleigh.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you want to tell her.”

  “That’s only normal.”

  “Look, if it’s causing you so much pain . . .”

  “Of course it’s causing pain,” Brian said. “What else could it do?”

  Olivia slumped. “Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea.”

  “Quit looking for the exit, Liv.” He sighed. “This stuff isn’t free.”

  “What stuff?”

  “This.” He lifted one crutch and waved it around. “Us, being with each other. Besides, you’ve never even met Ryleigh. I’m the one dumping her. It sounded easier back in Aleppo.”

  “I know.”

  “And it does hurt.”

  “Bri, I know.”

  “Do you?”

  Olivia stopped plucking at the beer can tab. “You think I don’t?”

  He looked away, as if he were listening to a secret advisor Olivia couldn’t hear. Falling into Brian’s arms had been easy, because Olivia had ample experience falling into men’s arms—and falling right back out of them at her convenience. She should have stayed in Aleppo.

  “Anyway,” Brian said, “my Uber’s waiting.”

  With other men it had been easy to avoid painful breakups. Step one: Don’t start a serious relationship. Step two: See step one. Classic fear of abandonment. She knew that. Get out before you got hurt, before you had to feel even a dim approximation of the pain you felt when your parents left you. But with Brian, she had discarded her own cardinal rule: Stay free.

  Now she hated the idea of losing him. And the idea was all the more sharply real after mistaking him for dead back in Aleppo.

  “Hey, Bri?” He looked back at her. “I’m sorry. And I hope it’s not too awful.”

  He nodded. “I’ll call. Unless she kills me. Which she might.” He looked closely at Olivia, as if sensing her inner turmoil. “What’s wrong?”

  In the torture cell she had covered his mouth with hers, desperately trying to blow life back into him. It was still the most vivid part of the alternate memory. Brian’s lips, cold and lifeless as rubber. But what had started out as the “primary” memory was now submerged and secondary in her mind. The new memory line, the one in which Brian had not died, had taken over. But some of the worst parts of the other one still poked through.

  “Liv?”

  She hesitated to say what was occupying her thoughts. “It’s just . . . that two-memory thing.”

  “It’s still bothering you?”

  She looked up. “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should see your doctor.”

  “I already saw him.”

  “What? When did you do that?”

  “Last week.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I would have, if it had turned out to be anything.” She didn’t like feeling defensive, but . . . she felt defensive.

  “So what did he tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Okay, not nothing. He said what I described feeling right after hitting my head sounded exactly like a concussion. Headache, nausea, confusion. Everything but the blackout. And I’m not even sure about that part. There was a moment when I thought I was going to faint. Maybe I did.”

  Brian nodded. “So there it is.”

  “No. There it isn’t. A concussion doesn’t give you two memories of the same thing.”

  “You just said you felt confused after you hit your head. Did you tell the doctor that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that made sense.”

  Brian looked at her, waiting.

  “Look,” Olivia said, “forget it. I was just confused, am confused. Whatever.”

  “Are you thinking about seeing someone else?”

  “Like who?”

  “Another doctor,” Brian said. “A different kind of doctor.”

  “What, like a psychiatrist?”

  He shrugged.

  “Hell no,” she said.

  “Okay, then don’t. Liv, you’re all right. It’s just some weird . . . thing. Some stress thing.”

  “Right.”

  Brian pushed his glasses up. “Anyway, I have to go get this Ryleigh business over with.”

  “Okay.”

  He planted his crutches and swung between them, heading for the door.

  “Wait.” Olivia jumped up, ran over, and hugged him awkwardly under his crutches. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. Hey, you know in a couple more days I won’t need these stupid crutches. Maybe I should wait.”

  “Good luck, Brian.”

  “Right. Here I go.”

  She stepped back. Did she want him to go dump Ryleigh, or did she want him to stay, let it hang on, so it would be easier for Olivia to dump him? That would have been her usual strategy in this situation. Except she would never have let herself get into this situation in the first place.

  “Was there something else?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  After he left, Olivia twanged the tab on her IPA, muttered “Happy days,” and drank.

  * * *

  Two hours passed and Brian didn’t call or text. Coffee with the old girlfriend. Got it. Olivia’s usual reaction would have been to help herself to another beer, shrug it off, pretend she didn’t care. In the past, she hadn’t needed to pretend. For the millionth time she checked her phone for messages. Nothing. In her mind, Brian and Ryleigh held hands across the table at Starbucks (the least cool coffee shop in West Seattle), exchanging soulful looks. Of course it’s causing pain, he’d said before he left.

  Olivia felt sick to her stomach. She wished she could feel something else, like anger. Or trust. Especially trust. She needed a stronger emotion, or a more positive one, to push aside the emotion that was making her feel abandoned. Anger was always good for that. But her anger tank was empty. And she was new to the idea of trusting people not to leave her when she desperately needed them to stay.

  Enough. She stood up and grabbed her keys. Two hours and she was reduced to a level of emotional insecurity reserved for thirteen-year-olds. A walk around the block would clear her head.

  On the coffee table her phone started bleeping and a chat request spun over the device like a silver coin. International chat request. Disappointed but curious, Olivia picked up the Gates-7 and finger-flicked the spinning icon. After a brief twinkle of instability, the spinning coin ballooned into a virtual bubble the size of a coaster. The bubble contained the image of Helen Fischer’s head. She looked tired.

  “Helen—”

  “Hi,” Helen said. “There’s something going on. I need to ask you a question.”

  Olivia peered at the chat bubble. Helen looked exhausted. “What time is it over there in London?”

  “Middle of the night. Never mind that. A few weeks ago you asked me if I had heard anything about a hot biological getting smuggled out of Aleppo. You remember that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you said you talked to a couple of BBC guys, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Names?”

  “They didn’t know anything,” Olivia said. “I mean, the one guy seemed freaked out, I guess. But he didn’t know anything. It was all rumors. Everybody—”

  “Livvie, do you remember the names or not? I’m trying to cover all possible angles, and I’m constrained.”

  Olivia noticed Helen was wearing a bathrobe. It was hard to see much detail in a chat bubble, but that was definitely a bathrobe. And Helen’s hair was disheveled, her face drawn and pale. Olivia had never seen the editor of The Beat, live or in chat, look anything less than impeccably put together. There’s something going on.

  “I’ll get my notebook,” Olivia said.

  From the bedroom closet shelf she pulled down her travel bag, which she had neglected to full
y unpack after returning from Aleppo with Brian. Because she traveled so much, she had packing and unpacking down to a science, but since Aleppo, her life had gotten sloppy. Unpacking? In a way, she never unpacked. Olivia always kept a go-bag ready, since she never knew when the Disaster would call. Brian hated her go-bag. “It means you’re never fully where you are,” he said. Which was a valid point. But was the current state of her bag a positive sign or merely the reflection of her muddled feelings about commitment? It wasn’t a go-bag, but it wasn’t a stay-bag, either.

  The black edge of her work journal poked out of a side pocket on the bag. She grabbed it and returned to the front room.

  Helen’s bubble-enclosed face was popping Tylenol or some other pill.

  “Okay.” Olivia flipped through pages to find the right date. “Toria Westby. Video reporter. The driver, all I’ve got for him is ‘Mike.’ But they were a team. He’s the one who was so worried.” But he didn’t have any real information about a smuggled biological weapon—or hadn’t appeared to. “Helen, are you all right? You don’t look well.”

  “Fever, aches and pains. Probably the flu. Thanks for the names.”

  “Tell me what’s happening.”

  Helen looked down for several moments. When she raised her head and peered out of the bubble again, her eyes were red. Was she crying? Sick or not, that wasn’t something Helen Fischer would do, not while talking with a professional connection. Olivia held the phone up, the chat bubble suspended inches from her nose.

  “We’re breaking this tomorrow,” Helen said. “We aren’t the only ones. But you better believe we’re going to be first.”

  “Breaking what tomorrow?”

  “Contagion. In Europe, England, the Indian subcontinent, Australia, China. And the United States.”

  All the air seemed to go out of the room. It felt like the day Olivia’s father died, just sitting there in his favorite chair, fifty-two years old and in good health, tennis twice a week, eating right, or right enough, and boom—a heart attack. Olivia, only seventeen at the time, had found him slumped over the arm of the chair, as if he’d dropped something on the rug. It was an antique Mughal rug he had imported himself. If you dropped something on it—a peanut, your house key, almost anything—it instantly vanished into the intricate pattern.