The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  She gets two pieces of information.

  One: the pistol in his hand has been fired. She tries to get more history from it but she fails. Wherever it’s been is someplace that she can’t follow.

  Two: he’s been near the blade. She doesn’t understand how this could be possible—he doesn’t know where it is, or how to get to it; that’s the whole reason they’ve hired her—but she’s sure of it, she can feel its signatures all over him, surrounding him like an ambience or a tint.

  He’s saying words. He’s saying, “That’s the thing, see. Everybody loves sugar. I’m talking the whole world. And it’s because of energy. If sugar does anything it does that. It gives you cheap, fast energy. And magic—all magic is is just working with energy. Get enough energy and you can arrange it into patterns and then you can do stuff with it. Eat enough sugar and you can keep yourself alive—that’s the easy part. You can do other stuff, too. You can punch a hole in the world.”

  She opens her eyes, fixes him with a glance. He stops talking. “You were with the blade,” she says.

  Pig breaks off, raises his eyebrows in a bland expression of interest. “What’s that?” he says.

  “The blade,” Maja says. “You were with it. Just now. You—observed it.”

  “Not exactly,” Pig says.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she says. “I can’t do my job if you lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you,” Pig says.

  “You went away and now you’re back and I can feel the blade all over you. Its flavor. So how are you not lying to me?”

  “I didn’t say no,” Pig says. “I said not exactly.”

  “Explain,” Maja says, out of patience.

  “Man,” Pig says, rolling his eyes, “I liked you better before you became a person who asks so many questions.” He says this, although Maja’s not actually sure that he did.

  “Explain,” she says again.

  “Fine,” Pig says, shrugging. “The blade we’re looking for—? It’s not, it’s not—how would you say it?—it’s not a stand-alone thing. It’s a piece of a thing.”

  “A piece of—?” She frowns. “A piece of what kind of thing?”

  “It’s a piece of a larger blade,” Pig says. “It’s the tip. Of a sword. That was broken.” He shifts here, moving into a singsongy mode that sounds like he’s reciting something, a sequence of facts that he’s recited to people for a long time, or perhaps had recited to him. “Broken in 1803, by slaves, at the Battle of Vertières, in the colony of Saint-Domingue. Broken into six major pieces.”

  “OK,” Maja says. “So the blade that I’m after—it’s one of six.”

  “It’s six of six,” Pig says.

  Maja blinks.

  “The piece that you’re after is the last one,” Pig says. “We have the others.”

  “We,” Maja says.

  “The Foundation,” Pig says.

  “Righteous Hand,” Maja confirms.

  “Yeah,” Pig says. “My father and me. That’s why we hired you. To find the last piece. We’re rebuilding the sword.”

  He gives off the impression of being slightly bored now, seems to be winding the conversation up. But Maja’s not ready to quit just yet; she’s still puzzling through what he’s saying.

  “OK,” she says. “So the signature I’m picking up off of you right now—”

  “It’s the other pieces,” Pig says. “The rest of the sword. I just went to the place where we keep it.”

  “But it’s not a place,” Maja says, after a moment.

  Pig looks at her. “I’m not sure I follow you,” he says, something faintly teasing in his tone, like he’s playing dumb and wants her to know it.

  “If it’s a place,” Maja says, “I should have been able to find you when you were there. If it had been anywhere on earth I should have been able to find you.”

  “I don’t know if I’d say it’s on earth, exactly,” Pig says. “Where is it?” Maja asks.

  “Well,” Pig says. “If it’s not a place, is where really the question you want to be asking?”

  “When?” Maja asks, thinking of Pig’s sundered history. “When is it? Are you traveling to a different time?”

  “It’s not a place,” Pig says. “It’s not a time.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “What,” he says. “That’s the question. What is it. It’s sort of all around space and time. It’s like—if you think of everything that happens in space and time as happening on a stage, everything that we know about happening as part of like, a put-on, a show—theater—then this thing, this thing that I’m talking about, is sort of like backstage, like the miles of service corridor back there, like the trapdoors and pits and shit down under the stage, the catwalks up above the stage. It’s all the fucking apparatus that we don’t normally see as we stumble around, existing blindly, groping from one minute to the next. All the fucking mechanics that keep the show running. People who do magic call it the Inside.”

  She nods. She feels satisfied by this explanation; it’s like snapping one more piece into a puzzle that’s she’s been trying to complete for years. Because she knows the space he’s describing. She’s never entered it, like Pig just did, but she knows that it’s what she’s accessing when she traces the histories of things, their passage. It’s where all the records are kept. It’s how she can do what she does.

  “You gotta watch out, of course, ’cause, you know, there’s weird shit that lives in there: like monsters? They die good enough when you shoot ’em”—he holds up his pistol by way of illustration before shoving it down into his waistband—“but then twice as many come back at you; it’s pretty fucked up. But that kinda works in our favor. They seem to want to guard the space so you can exploit the shit out of that, use ’em like a built-in security system. As long as our prop closet, or whatever you want to call it, is surrounded by like a teeming mass of a million angry worms, I can sleep pretty easy trusting that no one is gonna fuck with my sword.”

  “The prop closet,” Maja says.

  “To stick with the theatrical thing,” Pig says. “The metaphor or whatever the shit.”

  “I get it,” Maja says.

  “It’s, how would you say, apt,” Pig says. “Because the sword is exactly like any other prop. You want to keep it out of view until it’s time.”

  “Time for what?” Maja says.

  “Time for it to come on stage,” Pig says, starting the car again, “and do its thing.”

  “And what is that?” Maja asks. She has to tread cautiously here: this is the kind of question that normally she would never put forth. Part of what clients like about her, usually, is that she doesn’t ask them why they want what they want. But this case is different. The blade is powerful: she remembers the fireworks that went off in her head when she looked directly at it. And she feels the beginnings of a reservation at the idea of putting something that powerful in the hands of Pig—who, like the Archive said, might take first prize among all the fucked-up people she’s ever worked with. So she asks, even though it feels to her like stepping out onto an expanse of thin ice. “What is its thing? What is it meant to do?”

  Pig seems to take no offense to the question; he just answers. “It’s meant to build an empire,” Pig says. “An empire for the white race. It’s meant, as my dad puts it, to be a weapon fit for the hand of a king, a king before which the inferior races of the world will bow, as they did in ages past, blah blah blah.”

  Maja tries to envision it: Unger as the head of an empire, Pig as his heir. Improbable: but if she’s learned anything from studying the history of Europe it’s that the people in power almost never match your model of what the people in power should, ideally, be like.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” she asks. “Do you think it will serve that purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” Pig says, merging back into the flow of traffic on the highway. “I do think it’ll fuck shit up pretty bad, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it worth gi
ving it at least a try. ’Cause shit right now is boring as hell.”

  23

  GAPS

  As they wind deeper into the cleft of the Valley, Ulysses proposes a plan. He agrees to take Ollie to the farm, and he proposes to drop her at the end of the driveway and he’ll sit there and wait for some reasonable span of time. Just in case it doesn’t go well.

  “Five minutes,” Ollie suggests. That’ll be enough to make sure that they’ll let her in. That’s the thing she’s been afraid of, all this time: that if she ever went back to the farm, back home, they wouldn’t let her come in. She remembers the last night she was there, stumbling down the porch steps with her bags clumsily slung over her shoulders, leaving; she could hear Donald close the door behind her and in that moment she knew, or thought she knew, that he was closing it permanently. Don’t ever come back here, he’d screamed, through the broken window. Exile, banishment: she felt these things as truths, deep in her body, indelible. It’s only today that she’s been able to consider the question of whether she was wrong. Just considering the question is terrifying, but she’s trying it. Maybe she wasn’t in exile. Maybe Donald never had the power to banish her after all, the power to cut her off from her son. Maybe she was foolish to have extended that to him. On that night, that final night, he had loomed large in her mind, taking on a terrible status, that of a god or a tyrant; but maybe he was just a guy, a guy who was angry and sad. Maybe they were just two people who needed to work their shit out. Maybe they still could. She feels like she’ll know the second she knocks on the door.

  “Five minutes is all I need,” she says. Ulysses gives her a look.

  “I’ll wait an hour,” he says. “In an hour you can actually know something.”

  It takes less time to get there than she thinks it will. In her memory the distance between the farm and the city seems vast. One hundred fifty miles! When you live in the city, and home and work and everyone you ever spend time with all fall within a circle no larger than ten miles in diameter, anything outside of that begins to seem impossibly far away, some sort of fabled distant land. But then you get in somebody’s car and then it seems like you’re there, right away, you’re seeing the sign made out of a disused barn door, you’re reading the words that you yourself helped to paint: ILLUMINATED FARMS. It seems like it took almost no time at all, to close the gap.

  Ulysses kills the engine. Ollie looks at the familiar length of curving driveway, flanked by a pair of unruly sycamores.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” he asks.

  “Maybe want is the wrong word,” Ollie says. “But no. Yeah. I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Ulysses says. “You know. In case you’re not.”

  “I appreciate it,” says Ollie. She pinches the bridge of her nose for a long time. Then she opens her eyes and gathers up her messenger bag, with Guychardson’s box safe inside of it. With her free hand, she opens the door, and then steps out into the driveway and begins to walk. She doesn’t look back.

  The house comes into view. She can see that the windows are open. She can see the stirring of curtains, curtains that she made. She can hear the hum of a fan. And as she draws closer she repeats Ulysses’s words, You’re sure you want to do this. Not quite a question when he said them. She repeats her answer: Maybe want is the wrong word.

  And as she takes a step onto the porch, she thinks: Of course want is the wrong word. This is the last place she ever wanted to return to. She’s spent a year trying to forget everything about this farm and her life here. A year spent trying not to fix the past. Because it’s stupid to try to do that. You can’t fix the past, not unless you cheat, not unless you’re willing to cut space and time and fight the faceless monsters that live back there. And she won’t cheat.

  So why are you even here? she asks.

  Because this isn’t trying to fix the past, she tells herself. This is fixing the future.

  She stands there on the porch, where she used to sit. She remembers the things she used to do here: sorting potatoes into plastic bins, knocking dirt off turnips, holding her child on her knees.

  She crosses the porch, stands in front of the door. She does not knock. She cannot bring herself to knock. She’s passed through this door probably thousands of times and never once lifted her hand to knock on it.

  This is my home, she tells herself.

  Not anymore, it isn’t, comes the reply.

  Nevertheless, she lifts her hand and puts it on the handle of the door. She opens it and sticks her head in.

  She tries to call out hello but her voice doesn’t seem to want to work in here. The word comes out as a whisper. Maybe it never comes out at all.

  She steps the rest of the way inside. The vision she had a few days ago led her to expect some of the mess she sees here, in the kitchen: the drift of cardboard boxes stacked against one wall. Loose bits of air packaging collecting in the corners. The counter overtaken with a spread of dirty pots and pans.

  She crosses through, into the dining room. The table still has Donald’s compound bow on it, now restrung. She drops her bag on the table just like she used to do, at the end of a long day, just to feel what it feels like to give in to the habitual, once again, after this long year.

  It doesn’t feel bad.

  And then, just like he used to do, Donald walks into the room. He walks into the room and he looks at her.

  And when he sees her he stops walking, and it’s not like it used to be at all. It wouldn’t be, it couldn’t be, it can’t be. Of course it can’t. He appears, for a moment, to hold his breath. He blinks very rapidly.

  “Holy hell,” he says finally. “Are you OK?”

  She thinks that maybe this is the question she would most have wanted him to ask, although she doesn’t have an answer.

  “I saw what happened—” he begins. “At Carnage—”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I got your message. And I just—I hope you don’t mind that I’m here—”

  “No,” Donald says, taking a step closer to her. Closing the gap. “Not at all—”

  “It’s just—it just felt important—to see you and Jesse—”

  Donald comes in to hold her.

  “Is this OK?” he asks, as his arms go around her, in the old, familiar way.

  “I think so,” Ollie says. “I don’t know,” she says next, although her arms are going around him, too. “Is it OK for you?”

  “I think so,” Donald says, murmuring it down into her ear. “I—yes.”

  Looking over his shoulder, she watches as Jesse enters the room. Her son, standing there, at last. He’s not wearing clown makeup, for which she experiences the briefest moment of gratitude, a moment dashed when she witnesses the expression on his face when he first sees her. It’s an expression of confusion, maybe even alarm: the look of seeing your father embraced by a stranger. She will never forget seeing these emotions cross the face of her child upon her reappearance. She will remember the sight for the rest of her life.

  The expression itself passes quickly, however; it’s replaced by surprise, elation. “Mom—?” Jesse blurts.

  She releases Donald and opens her arms, hoping that her son will come to her, nearly praying, incanting in her head a loop of please, please, please. Let him come to me. And he does. He slams into her with all the ferocity that his boy’s body can contain, and she wraps it in her strong arms.

  And Donald wraps his arms around the both of them, and just like that the circle—the circle of Ollie and Donald and Jesse, broken long ago—reforms. Maybe not forever. Maybe just for a moment, just for as long as it takes for this moment, in which they hang together, to resolve. Maybe the moment will end, and they’ll rise, and they’ll begin to argue, and the circle will come apart again. Ollie doesn’t know. They could break apart at any time. But for right now she holds Jesse, and Donald holds them both, and all three together they wait for the future to hit.

  24

  HERE

  Maja and Pig cam
e off the highway a while ago, and have been driving along a two-lane road flanked by thick stands of trees, by occasional long walls made of stone. She watches out the passenger-side window and observes the topology of these stacked stones as they flicker past: the softened edges of granite taken from creeks, the harder edges of bluestone cut from the earth. She begins to derive a sense of the hundreds of quarries in this part of the state: she holds their interrelationship in her head like a map. A network of holes in her mind. A sense that, taken together, understood as one shape, they would form some single system, a set of secret passageways, interlinking at some depth to which she has not yet delved.

  She recognizes this as an error, a fantasy of escape. The dream of having some place where she could deny the awareness of whatever lies ahead. Really just a wish to return to her childhood closet, the place where she used to hide. Not that hiding ever helped her, not that it ever made the future less frightening. The only thing that ever helped was just to keep looking, clear-eyed, toward whatever was yet to come.

  And so she blinks the fantasy away impatiently and turns her attention away from the passenger-side window and looks instead out through the windshield, straight at where they’re going. She reconcentrates on the trace of the blade, which passed up this very road, beneath the arches of these trees, through this August light, less than an hour ago. Its trail so clear.

  They descend into a vale, shadows drifting across the car. Before long, a driveway comes into view, twenty yards ahead, flanked by a pair of giant sycamores. The trail of the blade emerges from a Buick, just barely visible beyond the second of the big trees, and leads up the driveway.

  “Stop the car,” Maja says.

  Pig pulls over onto the shoulder.

  “It’s here,” she says.

  Pig kills the engine. “This is it, then,” he says. “End of the road.”