by Richard Farr
It’s like I’m the one who’s been drugged. It’s like my own body is flooding itself with some powerful homemade narcotic. I get to a point where it’s obvious, and just a dull matter of fact, that Rosko is within minutes of dying, and that I will quickly follow.
“Daniel! Rosko! Can you hear me?”
When Sophie Colbert reaches us, the sun is still well up in the sky. But we’ve been on the ledge for six or seven hours, we’re in shadow, and I’m so hypothermic that when they reach us a few minutes later I can neither talk nor move. Someone gets a jacket onto me and feeds me lukewarm liquid through a straw, then asks a lot of questions that I may or may not be answering intelligibly. At one point I think that they’ve dropped me, that I’m falling. I don’t even care.
Somehow they get us both off the mountain. A chopper arrives and is unbearably noisy. After an airlift to the hospital in Punta Arenas, I see four people rushing a gurney down a corridor. They look like an Olympic bobsled team, about to jump aboard. There’s something comical about it until I realize that Rosko is already on the bobsled. I’m just conscious enough to think: They’re hurrying. So he’s not dead.
Two nurses poke me, examine me, feed me more hot liquids, lower me into a cocoon of heated blankets. No idea what time it is, but it’s dark outside by the time they hook me up to an IV full of drugs. I’m so exhausted that I would be asleep in minutes even without any chemical assistance, but I must be alert enough to know that something’s in my system, because I can feel the way—quite different from ordinary tiredness—that the edges of my attention start to blur and fray. I’m also alert enough, despite the blurring, to hear what the nurses say to each other as they leave the room.
“¿Viste el noticiero vespertino? Dicen que más de treinta.”
“¿Dónde?”
“En unas montañas de Nueva Zelanda.”
“¿Treinta personas?”
“Sí. Así nomás, ¡desaparecieron!”
Never studied Spanish, but I must have gotten a few shreds of it from somewhere: News. More than thirty. Mountains in New Zealand. As I slip down into nothingness, the word desaparecieron sends an adrenaline chill through my veins.
Disappeared.
Right after that, like a fall through thin ice on a lake, I crash through the membrane of unconsciousness and carry on down, down, down into nightmare.
CHAPTER 5
INTO THE PLAIN OF SHINAR
A dark shape that seems tireless and fast is chasing me over moonlit dunes. A predator. It has been closing on me for miles. The landscape would be beautiful, but there’s no end to it, no exit, and I am nearing the point of collapse. When I’m forced to stop and gasp for air, I glance back, gauging how much the distance has closed, trying to work out who or what it is.
The quality of the dream turns from stress and panic to a deeper kind of terror when eventually I get it: what’s chasing me is like the smoky figure I saw hovering above Mom. Still can’t identify it though. It’s tall, and menacing, with a dark glow, if that makes any sense.
We’re on a sharp ridge now. On my left, the steep face of the dune is silvered with light. On my right, dark gray fades rapidly to black. I plunge onward, and my chest feels as if a giant’s hands are wringing it like a sponge. The figure closes to perhaps only fifty feet behind me. In a last, desperate bid for freedom, I launch myself down the silvery side of the dune, glancing back to see if it follows. It stops on the ridge, and the moon catches its face.
The thing looks down on me with the cold hostility of a hunter watching its prey.
I can identify it now. Oh yes.
It’s my own double.
My self.
I turn again and fling my body farther down the slope. But the soft sand grabs at my shins, trapping me. As I fight the sand, looking frantically around, the figure comes down behind me, more leisurely now because more certain, and its motion causes the sand to avalanche. The soft flow imprisons me, burying me to my waist, then my chest, then my neck. I’m swimming, struggling, twisted around enough to see the dark silhouette immediately above and behind me. It takes another step, deliberately kicking up sand. Then, in a voice that’s surprisingly mild, friendly even, it speaks to me in lilting warm words I cannot understand. And smiles. I have time for one last gulp of air before the warm rush of grains cascades against my cheek, flows up over my face and eyes, buries me.
As I begin the final helpless struggle against the instinct to breathe again, as I try to come to terms with the idea that seconds from now my self will be extinguished forever, I perceive in my mind’s eye what I had not noticed before. The figure above me on the dune is not quite my double after all. Not a mirror image or a clone. Hard to describe, but it’s kind of a perfected version of me; taller, better looking, a kind of original from which I might be the photocopy.
That face puts me back on the mountain, at the extremity of my cold, my fear, my conviction that I am about to die. And then Mom’s voice is with me again. Fuzzed with static now, weaker, farther away. And not comforting, but crying out.
Help me Daniel help me Daniel help me.
I wake up in the dark, clammy and breathless, heart hammering. After the initial shock, I sit for a long time in the unfamiliar hospital room, listening to the traffic. I feel like an insomniac, like sleep will never happen again, like I will sit here, with the dream and the climb looping around in my mind, forever. But as gray predawn light starts to soak in through the blinds, a wave of tiredness surprises me. I lie back down, pull the blankets tight around me, fall back into real sleep. And, as if in compensation for the nightmare, I have a second dream that’s not really a dream because it’s almost pure memory.
It’s four months ago, the Sunday after last Thanksgiving, and I’m in serious pain two-thirds of the way around my first-ever marathon. Headed up Lake Washington Boulevard, wind-driven rain in my face, I feel as if it’s totally plausible that my legs will simply break off. The eighteenth mile alone is ten miles long. When I see the new Russian girl handing out Gatorade at mile nineteen, I’m intrigued—and flooded with relief by the excuse to stop. So I glance at my watch, decide to allow my legs a full sixty-second vacation, and take the cup of Gatorade she’s holding out.
“Yekaterina Cerenkov? I get that right?”
Her eyebrows arch. “Everyone call me Kit. Is easier.”
“My name’s Daniel. I don’t go to a regular school, but Julia Shubin’s a friend and she sent me a picture of her with you and Ella Hardy. So, uh, I recognized you.”
“Yes,” she drawls. “Julia mentions you last week also, first day I am at school. Mentions you about three time I think. ‘Such nice guy,’ she says. ‘Travels all the time.’ Maybe she fancy you?”
“Oh no,” I say, too quickly. “We’re just friends. I’m homeschooled, so, uh—”
“Your mother teach you at home, yes, she explain that. Interesting crazy American idea. Son of big languages professor, yes? William Calder? See my mother over there? Natazscha Cerenkov. She is working also at university.”
She gestures to a knot of people huddled under an awning twenty or thirty feet away. One is a middle-aged version of Kit—shorter, broader, with exactly the same mouth, the hair in a sensible knot.
“Another linguist?”
“Genetics. This program on brain. Where language comes from, what is consciousness. Australian guy, yes? David something?”
“David Maynard Jones. But everyone calls him Mayo. Your mother’s studying the Babblers too, huh?”
“That too. But my mother is interested in more way back. You know, hominids. Neanderthals. Different shape the voice box in gorilla, blah blah. She say her main researches are”—she slows down, half-closes her eyes, and reads the words off from some inner image, wrapping her lips mockingly around the unfamiliar syllables—“epigenetics, paleolinguistics, and the mammalian box proteins.”
She lets her eyes go wide for a second, as if to say, I hope you’re impressed. But that’s not the message. “Don’t
worry,” she says. “I have no idea what it means also.”
“You a Babbler too?”
“I speak only the Russian and the not good English.”
“That’s OK. I speak only English, and about ten sentences in French, and the not good Greek.”
“Greek, yes. My mother tells me about your father’s work. The famous Disk.”
“Disks,” I say, mock-importantly. “The first one was found in 1908. Few years ago, Dad and I found more. We just spent another summer vacation out there.”
She reaches out and almost-but-not-quite brushes my cheek with her curled index finger. I register a little electric shock of anticipation, and disappointment, when the expected touch doesn’t happen.
“Is still nice tan.”
“Thanks. Worked on it every day. You just moved here from Russia?”
“Saint Petersburg.”
I gesture at the conga line of wet, grimacing masochists. “Not a runner?”
She shrugs. “Five kilometer I do sometime, yes,” she says. “Ten maybe.”
I truly look at her then. Tall, yes. Straight hair so pale it’s almost white. Spooky green eyes. But it’s the lopsided smile that hooks me.
“So what made you volunteer at the water station?”
“One of my mother’s students running today, asked us to come. Carl Yates?”
“Bates. Tall guy with a beard. I’ve met him.”
“Seems nice.”
I nod. Carl Bates: big, rangy, shaggy-headed parody of a science postdoc, complete with Minnesota accent, round steel glasses, work boots, and a red plaid lumberjack’s shirt. According to Dad he crunches data for the “Australian guy” Kit mentioned—who, to quote Dad, is digging around in people’s skulls, trying to find out where consciousness is located. Glancing at my watch, I see that the minute’s rest I allowed myself is long gone. But who cares—I just acquired, from a lopsided smile, a whole new level of energy and purpose.
“Better keep moving,” I say casually. “Promised myself I’d do it in under four hours. But hey, I just had an idea. We should run together in next year’s race.”
“Whole marathon? Me?” Her eyebrows arch again.
“Why not? The oldest competitor today is eighty-two. You can do it, no problem. It’s just a matter of putting in the training—and I need someone to train with.”
She holds my gaze for a long, appraising moment, her face perfectly still, her hair flexing like metal in the wind.
“Well? You interested?”
She can tell I’m flirting with her. I can tell she doesn’t mind. That smile again. Oh God.
“Could be, Daniel Calder. Could be.” She points north. “But under four hours you are saying? So go. I want to be able congratulate you.”
Even in reality, I spent the rest of the race imagining in great detail all the ways I wanted Kit Cerenkov to congratulate me. And even though the final mile felt like an invitation to a heart attack, I finished in three hours, fifty-nine minutes, and forty-four seconds.
In the dream, though—
What can I say? It’s a dream.
In the dream, I don’t leave the water station quite so quickly. Instead I look her in the eye and say to her, Hey, fifteen more seconds won’t hurt. I reach out and echo her gesture, touching her gently on the cheek with my fingertips. And then I lean in slowly, giving her plenty of time to step away if she wants to. But she doesn’t want to. And we don’t care that we’re surrounded by people, including her mother. And our lips brush together like feathers in the most delicate suggestion of a kiss.
That would be a good final image. But dreams are strange; the last thing in it is not the touch of Kit’s lips, but a vividly real image of someone I scarcely know at all and never actually saw on race day. In the dream, as I turn to rejoin the stream of runners, Natazscha begins to wave enthusiastically, and I see Carl Bates pass right in front of me, pounding along Lake Washington Boulevard in a drenched tank top, skinny legs pumping erratically, race number flapping in the wind, a look of manic determination on his face.
Should be comical. But his eyes slide over me for a moment; there’s something in them, or not in them, that frightens me.
It’s light, when I wake up the second time. My door is open, and a doctor with a clipboard is standing just outside in the corridor talking to Gabi Eisler. In educated, precise, slightly accented English, he’s discussing Rosko’s long list of injuries. As I listen, I think about exactly how the accident on the tower caused those injuries. It’s only then that the central fact comes back to me, like a boxer’s direct hit in the middle of my chest. There are three people in my mind’s video of the climb. One of them is me. One of them is Rosko. And one of them, with the familiar wavy brown hair and the yellow climbing suit, is dead.
When people lose someone close to them, they’re supposed to rage and weep. Or sit stone-faced, staring into the distance, grappling privately with the scale of the great absence inside them. Me, right now? I feel as if there is something wrong with my breathing. I feel a completely nameless and causeless fear. Also an urgency, like I must hurry, but it’s not yet clear why, or for what. When I try to step outside myself and find words for this odd constellation of emotions, the first two that come to mind are anxiety and panic.
Part of it’s just that the idea of Mom being dead is surreal. Not to be taken seriously—like an especially sick joke that will sooner or later be revealed as merely a sick joke. But there’s no comfort in the other direction either. The religious idea, the idea that she has survived death, seems worse. Guess it’s Dad’s influence: Nobody but a child believes Fido is sniffing the Eternal Fire Hydrant in doggie paradise. So why believe that “eternity”—whatever the hell that means—is waiting for us?
I don’t know.
Neither why you’d believe it, nor what it means.
I want to know, but I don’t.
They’ve put me in a small, plain room, pale green with a dark-green tile floor. Out of the window I can see the snow-covered rooftops of Punta Arenas and a gun-gray surface that could be a giant empty parking lot—the Strait of Magellan. I roll my shoulders and neck, then flex my arms and legs, testing. When I tense my right leg, it feels as if someone has just hit me in the knee with a hammer.
When Gabi sees that I’m awake, she comes to sit on the side of my bed, puts her hand on mine. “How do you feel, Daniel?”
“Sore. That’s all.”
She gives me a long, skeptical look. Has the sense not to even mention Mom, but waits, offering me the opportunity to say more.
“OK, so I don’t know how I feel. I’m too close to it. I—”
I glance around the room, searching for some words on which to hang the emotions you’re supposed to have when you wake up in a hospital room to the knowledge that you just watched your mother die. But all I have is the anxiety. And the images, the endless loop of inner video like a tune I can’t get rid of, in which she’s falling falling falling.
“I can’t imagine her not being here, Gabi. Some big part of me is sure she’s still here. What about Rosko?”
“Yesterday, when we got here, I thought we would lose him. His heart almost stopped beating. Then he was in surgery for a long time. He has some bad injuries, but I think he will be OK.”
“We’ll have to contact my father.”
“Done. I spoke to Bill myself. He knows everything. They’re on their way here now.”
“From Seattle?”
“They were still in Boston when I reached him.”
Dad and Morag, already exhausted from too much travel: I picture them at a ticket counter, as they trade west for south. Then lining up at the gate. Then sitting in yet another airplane, too stunned to talk, as they cut a grim vertical slash down the face of the earth. Dad deals with unpleasant things by burying his head in work, and that’s how he’ll be dealing with the news of Mom’s death: solving some obscure problem from 2000 BCE, just to get away from the present. Morag can be the same way, but I imagine
her trying hard to be the adult, putting her own feelings on hold as best she can in order to coax Dad into talking.
Gabi touched my arm to get my attention. “Do you think you can eat some breakfast?”
The idea of food makes me want to gag. At the same time I’m empty, light-headed and hungry.
“Toast, maybe? Coffee?”
What I’m actually craving is tea—specifically, the British blend Mom gave me a taste for. Wickedly strong black Assam, steeped in boiling water for five full minutes and then clouded with milk. But if I ask for that they’ll get it hopelessly wrong. Coffee’s a safer bet.
“I’ll see if I can get them to bring you something. Check this out while you’re waiting.” She reaches over to a chair and hands me a tablet.
“What is it?”
“A clip from Bill’s Boston interview. I thought you might like to see it before they get here.”
She’s right, in a way. Just seeing Dad and Morag on the screen, just hearing their voices and being reminded they’re real, is good for me. It’s even better, somehow, knowing that I’m not seeing them in real time. This video is from just after the rockfall. Several hours before they knew. A time of innocence.
Dad has never moved an inch toward the Hollywood tweedy professor stereotype. He has on lime-green look-at-me designer glasses, a Pink Floyd concert T, skinny faded jeans, and fraying red Converse hi-tops. A handful of gel holds up the graying spikes up top. His black leather jacket is slung over the back of his chair as if he just happened to drop by. When the camera closes in you can read the lapel button: “May Cause Irritation.” Next to him, Morag is dressed all in black, as usual: black canvas sneakers, black cotton cargo pants, black denim jacket over a black T. She looks neither excited nor bored, just sits there watching the two men and waiting to speak. And wait she does, because at first the interviewer doesn’t much notice she’s there.
He’s a blond man in his thirties. Khaki chinos, blue button-down under a navy blazer, tasseled loafers: he looks like someone who wants to be a professor too, and has heard them described, but has never seen one. His opening question refers in just one sentence to Babel, the library, and the impossible Phaistos fragment. Dad knows exactly how to act the Scholarly Authority in these situations, takes the whole thing in his stride:
