The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  “Dijo que estaba rendido. Pero luego, así nomás—”

  Morag has missed it. I repeat it as best I can.

  “That’s the accent from hell, D.”

  “Just tell me what it means.”

  She listens in to the conversation for a minute. “I think she’s complaining about her boyfriend being perpetually horny. ‘He said he was simply exhausted.’ ”

  “No no. Translate the whole thing. ‘Dijo que estan rendo—’ ”

  “ ‘Dijo que estaba rendido. Pero luego, así nomás.’ It means: ‘He said he was simply exhausted. But then, just like that’—What’s the matter?”

  “Reminds me of something. Así nomás—Así nomás—”

  Then I get it.

  The nurses in my room, just before the nightmare. Treinta personas in the mountains of New Zealand. Así nomás, desaparecieron.

  “I’m not exactly up with the news, M. What happened in New Zealand?”

  “You’ve heard the headlines, you’ve heard everything. Thirty-seven people, to be exact. Some kind of multifamily camping trip on the North Island. It’s like Uyuni, they’re saying—probably just because it’s another volcano. A place called Ruapehu. About three thousand meters, lots of glaciers and snowfields.”

  “And they’ve not found them?”

  She shakes her head, obviously thinks I’m avoiding the real subject of conversation, looks me in the eye. “D, are you ready to tell me what happened up there?”

  Not yet, no. But will I ever be? Probably not. I take a deep breath, fill my lungs until they hurt, then let go.

  “Sure. I’m ready.”

  “So start at the beginning and be methodical for once. You need to tell me every detail, and I need to hear it.”

  As we walk down toward the water, I take her through the days of hiking and climbing. She interrupts, asks for detail, makes me backtrack. When I get to the “accident,” I don’t describe how weird it felt, or the light and heat that I only half-remember anyway, or mention Mom’s voice. But I tell her everything else as I remember it. I even describe what it was like to cut the rope. To watch her fall. To have that image stuck in my head.

  “I had the sense that she saw something above us, wanted to get a closer look, and was saying something about it to Rosko. But what could be up there? A group of tourists stepping out of a bus?”

  “Would she have been OK, if it hadn’t been for the rockfall?”

  “Maybe. She put herself in an incredibly exposed position. But we were almost at the top. Knowing her, she could have done the last couple of hundred feet free.”

  “Free?”

  “I mean without a rope or anything. The way you’d climb a fence or a pile of rubble. Just hand-over-hand scrambling.”

  “People do that? On, like, a vertical cliff face?”

  “Good climbers, in the right conditions, yes. Mom, probably with one hand tied behind her back. She was that good.”

  We’ve done a long loop through the gray streets. I ache all over. But the wind has died and the fresh salt air feels wonderful. Should tell her about the vial, but can’t—not yet. Also I can’t tell her, yet, about my irrational, ridiculous, completely settled conviction that there’s more to her death than falling rock.

  Dad and Stefan are in the lobby. The words body and paperwork float over to me before they turn and see us.

  “Wondered where you two had gone. Fresh air?”

  I nod. He’s thinking about saying, Don’t do that. Don’t disappear on me, but he manages to suppress it. “I checked in with the medevac company,” he says. “I never interfered with Iona’s expeditions except to insist that she carry the most expensive travel insurance money could buy. Turns out they’ll fly all of us back to Seattle in our own plane, Rosko in a hospital bed and all. The doctors have confirmed they can’t do the next round of surgery here. We might as well take him all the way back.”

  “When?”

  “Nearest available plane’s in Montevideo. Maybe early tomorrow.”

  We look at each other for a long awkward moment, then he reaches out awkwardly and hugs me. Stefan and Morag get the hint, melt from the scene, and we go over to a group of squarish institutional armchairs in an otherwise empty corner of the lobby. I’m waiting for some profundity about Mom. Instead he just points to my bandaged hands.

  “Tell me about the injuries.”

  “Right one’s worse, in the short run anyway. A cut that went through some tendon and right down to the bone. Plus superficial frost damage. Plus I ripped off the thumbnail. Only lasting damage is, I may or may not ever get back full extension in the middle finger.”

  “A terrible disability. You’ll have to be polite to people. What else?”

  I hold up the left hand. “Frostbite. All five fingernails, and apparently when they brought me in they thought I’d lose most of the fingers too, but they only had to take off the first knuckle of my pinkie.”

  Dad grimaces as if this is the most gruesome injury he has ever heard described. “How did you get the bruise on the side of your face?”

  I don’t want to go there. “A lot of things happened very fast, Dad. It’s nothing. After what happened up there, all of this is nothing.”

  That’s my attempt at, Hey, it’s OK, we can talk about Mom if you want. But he bites his bottom lip, runs a hand through his hair, and changes the subject. “I was with Derek Partridge,” he says. “When I got Gabi’s message. Seeing Derek was why I flew to Boston in the first place, not the stupid interview.”

  “Partridge with the bad bow ties? Guy you knew at Harvard?”

  “You remember him then.”

  “British historian with a thing about ancient libraries. Bit of a lunatic.”

  “He is a bit of a lunatic, yes. Strange ideas about all sorts of things. Highly respected scholar when I first worked with him. Excellent linguist, a dozen serious books on the culture of the Greeks and Romans. Then Harvard started to find the stuff about Atlantis embarrassing, eased him into early retirement.”

  “He still working?”

  “Like a demon. Fat new book this year and another on the way. He commutes between Boston, London, and Rome, where he survives on a diet of red wine and cheese in the messiest office I’ve ever seen.”

  He tries to smile; his mouth makes it, but not his eyes. He’s talking about Partridge for the same reason that Morag talked about Quinn—a way of not talking about what we still don’t have words for. His obsession with his work, his belief that it’s the most important thing in the world, has always been annoying, easy to make fun of, but I get wanting a refuge from reality right now.

  “He sent me a message, wanted to see me urgently, said he had something exciting to share. Well, I had something exciting to share too—I hadn’t yet told him about the Phaistos fragment at Babylon. Morag was happy to head off and do her own thing for the day. Me and Derek—”

  He lets out a big sigh. “It was so normal, Daniel. Not a care. Just two old friends enjoying a day out. We ate pasta puttanesca and hazelnut gelato at an Italian place in the South End. Talked about old times. Talked about work. Took a walk by the river. The best of ordinary life. While you were down here, watching your mother die.”

  “What did he want to talk about?”

  “Several hours of getting around to the point is just Derek’s way, and I wasn’t in a hurry. I assumed the big reveal would be, you know, ‘Bill, I have found evidence that in 200 BCE the library at Alexandria installed gender-neutral toilets.’ My mind was mainly on flying home that evening, blitzing through some overdue grading, and then tackling the Akkadian material. Instead, I’m standing on Weeks Bridge with him, enjoying the sunshine, when he blurts out this amazing story about where he thinks I can find dozens of Phaistos Disks. It even sounds plausible, in a nutty, extravagant, typically Derek kind of way.”

  “I guess nutty is what he does best. What’s he come up with now?”

  He dismisses it with a wave of his hand, as if there’s s
omething wrong with dwelling on the trivia of scholarship when we should be consoling each other. But I sense the conflict between his desire to talk about Mom and his desire to avoid talking about her. I’m conflicted too: hurt, angry, resentful, and at the same time aware that I ought to be feeling as sorry for him as I feel for myself. So I press him to tell me more. And it’s good, because for five or ten minutes we have something to talk to each other about that’s not personal, not painful. Just a wild yarn involving a lost book called the Geographika.

  The real world intrudes again in the form of Stefan Eisler, who’s hovering at a discreet distance in the background.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but Rosko is awake again. Gabi and Morag are with him now.”

  Two sentences. The first makes me happy; the second produces a stab of childish anger. I’ve imagined introducing Morag to Rosko, basked in imaginary pride, and that moment, that piece of emotional candy, has been taken away from me. Stupid. Get a grip. I cast around for a harmless, normal topic of conversation.

  “Meant to ask you earlier, Stefan. Where are the Colberts?”

  “I forgot to tell you, Daniel. Already gone. They left early this morning.”

  “Left for home? Just like that?”

  “Apparently Sophie’s father is ill. Édouard apologized for not waiting long enough to see Bill and Morag, but they managed to get a couple of last-minute seats on a flight to Paris. You were still asleep when the airport shuttle arrived.” He looks at his watch. “They’ll be almost back by now. Said to wish you luck, and they’d see us again in Seattle. Maybe in a week or so.”

  Strange. But Dad doesn’t react, except to thank Stefan and tell him that we’ll follow him upstairs in a minute. We watch him go back over to the elevators. Then Dad pulls out his phone, thumbs at it clumsily, stares at it as if seeking some crucial piece of information. Then he passes it to me.

  “Derek was just getting to the meat of his story, talking at two hundred words a minute, when I got the text from Gabi. I’ve always hated texting.”

  There are two words on the screen, in all caps. CALL NOW.

  “The instant I saw it, I knew one of you was dead.”

  “Just intuition? I didn’t think you believed in that.” I’m mocking him, can’t help it, but he’s completely unfazed.

  “Intuition has nothing to do with it. If there had been an accident, she would have said, ‘Daniel broke wrist. Summit climb abandoned. All safe.’ Something like that. Not ‘Call now.’ ”

  “Then how did you know it wasn’t Rosko?”

  He looks round to make sure that Stefan has really gone. “Try to put yourself in my shoes. I love you, Daniel. I may not be good at showing it, but I love you. And I would have given away the world for your mother. So do you know what that does to you? What it does, the next thought in my head was, Let it be Rosko. Please, please, let it be Rosko who has died. Let it be Stefan and Gabi who have lost their only child.”

  He wants me to tell him that’s understandable. Natural. Forgivable. Which it is. But I can’t say the words, because I’m thinking how terrible it is that my own feelings so closely mirror his. Why couldn’t he be the parent who died? Why couldn’t I be left with the loving, engaged, competent one?

  He looks out of the window. Probably reading my mind. I try to make up for it and blurt out:

  “We had a good climb, Dad. A beautiful climb. There was a rockfall, right near the summit. It was sudden. She didn’t suffer.”

  He nods, as if thanking me. Tears are coming down his cheek, one after another, like inchworms dropping down a thread. I follow his gaze out into the slush-clotted street, and we sit there in a kind of companionable agony. Which is good, or as good as it can be. But then I ruin the moment by saying what I’m thinking.

  “I can still hear her voice.”

  I suppose a religious person might actually be comforted by that. I’m not. And Dad looks at me as if I’ve just hit him.

  PART II:

  THE AKKADIAN VERSION

  CHAPTER 8

  BEYOND THE MERELY HUMAN

  The house feels as if its north wall has been torn away: her absence fills every corner like a freezing wind.

  And it’s as if each object associated with her is speaking to me, or trying to. In the living room, under a chair, a novel she was halfway through, face down on the floor with the spine bent back. In the bathroom, her shampoo. In the kitchen, the fifty-item spice rack that I built, that we stocked together, that now I can’t even use without first reorganizing the little round bottles and then reading the labels aloud, as if reminding her what we have. Their bedroom feels like trespassing, but I go in there too, pass my eyes over her clothes, her shoes, her almost nonexistent cosmetics. I even roam through the attic, where I find the picture books she once read to me, a stuffed giraffe called Lamarck she once gave to me, a third-grade school report I don’t like to think of her reading. (Daniel is trying hard. Translation: “Nice kid. Basically a dope.”)

  There’s only one room I don’t enter, not immediately: her study. It’s a cozy little finished space in the unfinished basement, wedged between table tennis and the laundry. That first day back, I go down there, open the door, look in. The picture on her desk is still there: a fading snap of us camping on Vancouver Island when I was six. I hesitate, almost step across the threshold, close the door again.

  Every one of these reminders brings me back to what she said, an hour before she died: It’s just a news story, nothing to do with me. But I feel this terrible, personal sense of loss.

  Yes.

  As if I knew them all.

  Yes. Yes, Mom: me too. And I understand, I do: my job is to work out why. I’m jet-lagged, but I’m also beset by almost total insomnia. The first night home, I lie awake in the dark, my mind twitching. The second night, I get up, long after Dad and Morag are asleep, and tiptoe down to the basement in my boxers and robe. Open that door. Sit up in her chair all night, at her computer, hunting.

  By early morning I’ve gathered thirty or forty small news stories from around the world. Each one may (or may not) be an unexplained disappearance. Names, ages, times, and coordinates. Kilimanjaro and Kamchatka. Nagaland in northeast India and Changbaishan in North Korea. Galveston. Lisbon. Tel Aviv. I even discover that survivors have allegedly been found, some of them in “an Alzheimer’s-like condition,” in the Mandara Mountains, an alien-planet landscape on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon.

  Toward dawn I put it all in a spreadsheet and key each case to an online map, complete with color-coded digital thumbtacks. The tacks tell me which cases involve groups versus individuals, which ones still have missing adults or missing children, which ones come with reports of an explosion. There are also one or two cases I can switch to gray immediately: looked suspicious, but turned out to be an accidental drowning, a suicide, or the four fishing buddies in Nunavut who were found sleeping off a boozy seal hunt on a different island from the one they said they were headed for.

  By four in the morning I have a backache, headache, eyes full of sand. I consider going to bed, but it’s pointless—despite everything, I’ve never been so awake in my life. So I wander into the kitchen, decide that cooking will take my mind off things. Cinnamon-pecan sticky buns. From scratch: not the white-glazed garbage you buy at the grocery store but an ultrabuttery yeasted dough, drowned in a lava of nuts and caramelizing sugar. Takes an hour to put together, another for the dough to rise, but as soon as they’re in the oven the smell draws Dad downstairs.

  “Morning, Daniel. Sleep OK?”

  He’s peering at me with concern, but doesn’t know what else to say.

  “Fine.”

  Morag follows a minute later. “That smells wicked, D. Got me up at least five minutes early.” She flips on the radio, sits at the place I’ve laid out. They’re two bites in, grunting their appreciation for my culinary skills, when the announcer mentions one of the “disappearance” stories and says he’s going to cut to some comments by the founde
r of the Seraphim—as if Julius Quinn, like the president or the pope, is an obvious choice now for some comforting wisdom in troubled times. When he’s asked about the disappearances, then in the same breath about what the Christian fundamentalists call Rapture, he laughs his soft, kindly laugh, like someone appreciating a joke:

  “As I foresaw, the time of our Anabasis is here. And these so-called disappearances show, I believe, that enlightened individuals are already finding the stairway, even by themselves. They have learned the language of the Architects, or learned enough of it for their minds to transition to dimensions beyond the merely human. This process is our destiny, preordained and unstoppable, and it is not to be feared but celebrated. We were once animals, and became human. In the same way, we will pass beyond the merely human. In the end, all of us will be transformed, the world left behind, the eternal opened up to us. And it will be a paradise far beyond all the petty, unimaginative daydreams to which the world’s religions have attached that name. It will be infinity.”

  The guy on the radio clearly has no clue what to make of this, beyond the fact that he’s supposed to sound all impressed and respectful. Morag seems impressed too, in her sarcastic way. “So, you explain a few people gone missing with the theory that they wore the right organic hemp, and repeated the right spells as the sun came up, and now they’ve become immortal! I mean, wow. What’s Quinn’s secret? When your average holy hoke-merchant says that kind of crap, it’s because they’re suffering from low blood sugar, or forgot to take their lithium, and only fools take them seriously.”

  “A lot of fools are taking Quinn seriously,” I point out.

  “I know, I know. And I can totally see why people drop everything and follow this guy.”

  “You think he’s persuasive?”

  “Oh aye, Daniel, totally. No, I don’t. In fact I want to grab his followers by the collar, and shake them, and say, ‘Where were you people, when they handed out the bullshit detectors?’ But if you’re already trained from childhood to believe in God, and a personal afterlife, and then Quinn comes along and tells you it’s not about being good so that you can get to heaven but about actually becoming a god, well, I can see why millions of people are buying it.”