by Neil Clarke
“Up here.” Already poised on the lowest support, I squatted to peer at Shah through the door. “If we climb ten feet, we’ll be out of range. It’s only a couple of floors till we’re in the open. If we go that way,” I pointed down the other staircase, “we’ll be chased all the way by those sonic weapons. Right into the clubs of the police.”
Shah stood where I’d left him, in the middle of the floor. The drones had begun to give out their warning whine. He reached out. That’s what I’ll always remember. At the last moment, Shah put out his hand. It was this image I held in my mind as the second attack hit and my vision blurred and everything around us began to break and fall.
I leapt for a higher handhold. The stairwell moaned around me, an echo of the resonance pattern building outside. I scrambled for purchase, kicking my toes against the wall, remembering with dismay the dozens of chin-ups I’d been able to do as a younger man. A nail or bolt must have raked my arm. By the time I got halfway up the shaft, I was leaving crooked trails of blood on the wall.
Adrenaline is a wonderful drug. Hearing the booming and cracking below, I groped for the next beam, then the next. Scrambling and heaving, muscles blazing, I dragged myself out of range of Colm’s weapons, crawling into that desolate stretch where the building stood open to the wind and stars. I clung like a baby to the nearest girder, holding fast to a structure that had begun to sway scarily with each gust. A shock of noise came from below, a pop and boom like a canon discharging. I was still trying to get a grip on the steel when the dust clouds began to circle and stir, a rumble of rotors climbed the dark, and Karen, guiding the company copter, plucked me away into the safety of the sky.
11
The typical improvised explosive device is a load of cheap, often plastic explosives, triggered by spark and packed with shrapnel. Ordinary scrap metal, launched by the blast, can snip vital arteries and mangle limbs. For the enterprising terrorist, insurgent, or sadist, a disposable phone makes a handy trigger. But simple pressure plates are lower in cost, easy to construct, and a staple in the trade of dealing death.
During the height of America’s oil wars, making such a bomb could cost somewhat less than buying a new video game system. The blast power ranged from an ineffective fizzle to a blow strong enough to flip an armored truck, launch an engine block onto a roof, or strip the face off a concrete building.
This is the cruel technology that lies behind the strange fate of Abdul Shah.
A subtle danger of an IED is the shock wave that ripples out from the blast. A surging front of compacted air, it slams the brain into the case of the skull, pops the ears with a drop in pressure, and hit its victims with a one-two punch, as a second wave of compressed air flows into the void left by the first. The result is a double-whammy blow to the head, a savage pulse of compression and expansion that rips through a brain at half the speed of a bullet, straining tissues, frothing blood, making the cerebrum swell like a sponge.
This is the injury that flooded VA hospitals, thirty years ago, with a homecoming army of zombie soldiers. Men who were whole in body and sound of limb, but who frightened their families and puzzled their government by exhibiting bizarre swings in mood. Amnesia, personality changes, confusion: the symptoms tended to worsen with time. Blast Disease, the veterans call it in our day. A steady loss of mental function, atrophying limbs, crushing depression. Even, yes, hallucinations. A slow-acting epidemic that has soldiers Abdul Shah’s age committing suicide in droves.
All this I learned in a late-night search through the history pages. Shah learned it, too, when he got his disability discharge, thirty years ago, and came home from the wind-whipped plateaus of central Asia. The army hospitals were too full to hold him. The homeland doctors had no idea how to treat him. His friends and family couldn’t understand why he seemed so lost within himself, so changed. Why did Shah ignore their questions, even their loving gestures, in favor of a strange and brooding obsession that he’d brought back with him from the Persian Plateau?
He drifted west for a while, lured by the solitude of the American heartland, then wandered south to the Mexican border. Eventually, he found himself holed up in a cove to the south of St. Thomas, half a mile from the tourist traps of Charlotte Amalie, shielded by a forested ridge from the Norwegian boats and the bright town lights. Nothing lay ahead of him but the waters of East Gregerie Channel, a view past Cowell Point to the open sea. It was there, known and tolerated as a local eccentric, in a nylon tent rigged to the salt-whitened trees, that Abdul Shah begun to hunt within himself for the secret knowledge he had brought back from war.
It was memory that sustained him, in those lonely years. The army doctors told him that the blast of the bomb had left a galaxy of bubbles fermenting in his brain. A rush of merciless pressure, a void of near-vacuum: these arcane forces had whipped Shah’s mind like cream, inciting a kind of decompression of the soul.
Tiny bubbles . . . Shah pictured them sometimes, twinkling up from a place deep within him, effervescing into his conscious thoughts. They reminded him of memory, those bright seeds of death—the way stray moments can wink, evanescent, out of the gulf of the long-forgotten past. Sensory impressions: the texture of old wallpaper; the hard, clear odor of a sidewalk after rain. Images came to him unbidden, isolated, as he lay on the stones of his tropical beach. Sprinklers jetting in a city park, concrete pillars spitting bright falling water, his mother’s finger tracing arcs of liquid as she spoke the Arabic word for attraction. Gravity, magnetism, desire: the modern magic of unseen fields. And more: the green faces of children submersed in a city pool, hair storming in black licks around their cheeks; the sweet, dusty smell of a hardware store. Often Shah thought of the religious billboard that had loomed over the highway near his Brooklyn home, lurid with the painted gods of the Christians: a kneeling woman, a bearded man whom Shah, as a child, had mistaken for Santa Claus. And in the straw between them, a glowing, golden child.
“We are the true Americans,” his mother told him once. “We came here, traveled here, chose to be here. That is the only true American: someone who claims this country as home.” Abdul had looked at his small hands and thought, I came here, yes. But where am I from?
The memories—they were neither happy nor sad. They gripped him, however, because they were true. Time had sharpened their truth and confirmed their worth. As he sat on that Caribbean beach, watching the giant cruise ships travel past Sprat Point, the sights and sensations of Shah’s present life took on, themselves, the glamour of the past. The whining, bobbing progress of motorboats in the strait. The thump and rustle of startled iguanas leaping out of the shoreline pines. By day, Shah tramped among the island’s weedy ruins, British embrasures, abandoned World War II barracks, the fast-rotting detritus of a failed tourist center. Sometimes kids still kayaked out from the port, hiding with their beers and designer drugs in the fallen estates on the eastern shore; at night he heard their monkey-like cries whooping through the sea grape and the wooded heights. Civilization lay all around him, yet he felt himself as blessedly alone as a man alive in the last days of the earth. And in this state of strange and deepening joy, Shah thought about the desert road where he had nearly lost his life—and began to reconstruct, slowly and painfully, the vision he had been granted there.
The bomb that wounded Abdul Shah was fashioned, records indicate, of one hundred-and-fifty-six pounds of PE-4 wired to a British garage-door opener, packed with propane tanks into a trash disposal unit. It detonated five feet to the left of the driver of Shah’s Humvee, shearing away two-fifths of the vehicle, killing three of the four passengers, flipping the chunk of metal that remained into a roadside drainage culvert.
When Shah woke two days later, in the field hospital at Kandahar Air Field, groggy from blood loss, bandaged around the head, he found himself in a drafty compartment of a building rigged from cheap wood and old shipping containers. By that time he was already beginning to forget the details of the remote and peculiar place to which the near-fatal
blast had delivered him. But in the silence of his tropical retreat, in the hermitage he fastened for himself, years later, out of twenty square yards of nylon tenting—incredibly, impossibly—it came back.
An iconic image was his first recollection. A dark tunnel, a light at the end. Most dying people see nothing more. But Shah went further. He crossed the tunnel, reached the light. And he pushed his way—or perhaps he was forced—out of the confines of our world.
His first thought was that the smoke from the bomb had enveloped him. Black smoke, oily, heavy and opaque. A moment’s observation convinced him, however, that the blackness around him was structured and firm. A kind of frozen darkness constituted the huge walls rising on every side, as well as the roof high over his head—a slick, greasy material that Shah would later compare to volcanic glass. Fashioned into thick columns, this substance stretched into the emptiness above, supporting a vaulted ceiling as remote as a stormy sky. The scale of the construction was cosmic, absurd, like a cathedral molded from the matter of dead suns. Striving later to describe what he had seen, Shah could find no analog, no explanation—save to say that this was nothing human beings had created.
Lifting his head, he saw that his body itself was other than human—a form unrecognizable, even slightly insubstantial. Yet these words, Shah insisted—sight, head, body—were approximations to what he perceived. He “saw” nothing, “felt” nothing, but knew where he was, with the disembodied knowledge that arrives in dreams. And in this same manner, through this same strange clairvoyance, Shah realized that he was not alone.
They lay all around him, thousands, perhaps millions of figures, reposing, prone, in the infinite dark. No shroud covered them, no sound disturbed their sleep. Shah surmised that they were neither dreaming nor awake, but resting in a state much richer than consciousness, more lucid than the unreal figments of dreams.
A voice spoke, or a mind touched his (again, Shah struggled to find the proper words). He sensed a presence communing with him, both distant and near, like a monster beneath his bed.
Be still. (But it was not a voice, Shah insisted, so much as an extension of that dreamlike understanding.) You have slipped through the barrier, but you will soon return.
Where am I? Shah tried to speak. But speech, motion, even ordinary thought, all were impossible in that strange place. He could only think, with a speech-like force: What am I?
If the voice had been capable of laughter, its mirth would have echoed endlessly in the recesses of that measureless space. You were visited. Now, for a moment, you have become the visitor. The currents that carried you here will soon reverse, and you will remember nothing of this place.
Currents?
You lie in the company of the last sleepers, at the end of time.
As he heard those words (or received into himself, like a jolt of air, the knowledge implicit in those words), Shah understood . . . but it was rather as if he had begun to remember something he had always known.
He had come to the edge of existence, the end of all worlds. A trick of time had delivered him here, to a place where the last living beings rested, the dwindling population of a dying universe. In this latter day, suns and galaxies had dissolved, the bonds of existence had grown dim. What Shah saw was a failing illusion, a shadowplay cast on a thinning screen. Soon, even this frail fabric would decay, and the life of the cosmos would come to its close. No civilizations would again be built, no new worlds or suns would reappear. But in this dying instant, this final tick of time, the beings around him practiced a last art. They had learned to return to what had come before, and to revisit the things that had been.
Even as he learned this, Shah felt a pressure, as if the strange tide that had cast him here were now reversing, dragging him back to his old life. He struggled to move, sensing a different mind, one alien and strong, already striving to reclaim his body. Forcing himself to rise, Shah gained a last glimpse of the great vault in which those countless beings, faint and softly pale, lay like dreamers in a night with no dawn.
They are revisiting the lives, said the voice, that have passed away, and remembering the moments of former ages. No future lies before them. The past cannot be changed. But they have this: the power to return to what was lost. Through the souls and bodies of those who lived before, they relive, a final time, what will never be again.
Show me. Shah made his demand in desperation, even as the pressure grew on his mind, even as his spirit twisted and writhed like water above a drain. Show me what they see.
Again, the voice laughed with a strength beyond sound. Very well. You will soon forget. But if you wish, you may visit with us, this one time—
12
And here Shah’s story ended, in a burst of deadly sound.
He told me all this in the empty room of his tower, in that brief respite between the charge of the police and the final assault of the sonic cannons. I believe he spoke for ten minutes at most, lingering on the smallest details. His leisurely manner, his painstaking account, maddened and baffled me at the time. But I don’t believe, now, he ever hoped to convince me. Only to convey, somehow, what it meant, what he had been trying to track or rediscover, in the course of his lonely and drifting life.
The sun is rising, Carter, making gleams on the hotel towers. From the rooftop bistros along the river, I can hear the tinkle of coffee cups. I’ve talked into this recorder through the night, half hallucinating, half in a trance, sometimes reading the scraps of disjointed journals I wrote in a post-traumatic haze. I hope your transcribers and redactors can make something out of this marathon ramble. I tried, God knows. I tried to tell the truth.
And why, I wonder. Why share this with you? Why tell this story to the man who has always hated me, always fought me, always sought to ruin me?
Because you asked for it, I suppose. Because you were there for my first wife and my last, and for all the mistakes and lovers in between. Because you were with me in those days on the fifty-seventh floor, when we fought like two driven single men for the fortune and glory we thought we deserved. Because you know me, Carter, who I am and who I was, and you’re probably the only son of a bitch who does.
Shah reached out. That’s the part that haunts me. He put out his hand, before the last blast hit, before the ground turned to dust beneath his feet. Even as he sank through his dissolving tower, through the crumbling ruins and the rising clouds, he kept his hand out, fingers curled, as if to take hold of something I couldn’t see.
It was a violent wave of sound, tearing through Shah’s head on a desert road, that gave him the vision that changed his life. In later years, he studied the physics of sensation, the tangled mechanics of the human brain. Maybe, at the end, with new shockwaves in his skull, Shah found a way back to that world, the dreamers lying at the end of time. Maybe they showed it to him again, the vision he never had a chance to describe. It could be that in the last instant of his life, Shah reached for the hands of Egyptian priests, or the startled eyes of a prehistoric child. Or he may have visited you, or me, in forgotten moments of our idealistic past. Perhaps he looked into the void between the stars, and before he died, he watched suns rising over alien worlds you and I can never imagine.
Quite probably, it all means nothing. Abdul Shah had a brain that by his own admission was full of holes. Men and women with his injuries are lying in the Walter Reed psych wards, now, hiding under their hospital beds from memories of historic wars.
But I remember those six strange hours, the throb of soundwaves through my mind, and the visitation I nearly received. I remember other stray moments of my life, when a weird vibration passed through me, a second soul seemed to clasp my own, as if I had been possessed, invaded, by a presence greater than myself.
I remember this:
A day, years ago, when my first wife and I moved to a new home. We came east, leaving the desiccated outskirts of Phoenix for the humid greenery of the Georgia suburbs. No squatter camps troubled my thoughts back then, no sonic weapons, no impact
assessments. I had recently accepted my position at Aerux. I was looking forward to starting my career.
We were still settling in, when on a certain morning, we found we couldn’t stop our daughter from crying. She was only a baby, less than half a year old, and we held her, fed her, rocked her, soothed her, carried her on a weary circuit through the house. We ran in an hour through the usual cures, the breast, the diaper, the temperature, the light. But with her little fists, she fought free of our caresses, rolling in our arms, reaching, like a fierce little inchworm, for the windows and the world outside.
I gave in. I took her outdoors. A spring rain had begun to fall, dripping from the roof of our tumbledown veranda, and I saw that her eyes were tracking every drop. I marched into the yard, the rain drizzling on us both, gentle and cool, a prickling presence on my skin. In the open, with my wife yelling at me from the door, I looked into my daughter’s eyes.
What are they thinking, our little ones? We look into their faces, but we can’t know what they see, what they understand with their bright new minds. My daughter’s mouth hung open. At five months, she was already full of memory. We had come from a land of dry earth and empty skies, and I realized she had never seen the rain.
Maybe I’m a fool. Maybe Abdul Shah duped me, as he seduced so many other lost souls. But I know this: that a full ten minutes passed, on that long-ago day, in which my daughter scarcely moved or breathed, but lay with reverent stillness in my arms, watching water fall from the sky. I could have sworn at the time, and I would still swear now, that something came to visit us then, hovering behind her eyes. I felt so joyous I was afraid. She lowered her eyes and looked into my mine, and an awesome intelligence stared into me, full of wonder and longing and a strange, vast regret. It was as if my daughter understood, not only sensations I had forgotten, but ones I hadn’t yet begun to feel. As if she knew, even in that early stage of life, that she was seeing all things for the first and last time.
