He looked down and nodded. Kaye’s thoughts were familiar. “So what can we do about it?” he said. People flowed past them and out, trailing behind them the sour smell of moist clothes and perspiration. From the open door a chilling draft blew in from the night.
“There’s plenty we can do,” Kaye said. “The world’s just waiting for us to do it. Is your email address still the same?”
“Yes, it is,” he said. If Kaye had had his address all this time, why hadn’t he mailed?
“Good,” Kaye said, backing up toward the dais. “I have to run now, finish things up here. Thanks for coming to the meeting. I’ll send you an email shortly, it’s easier to explain in private.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you live here, by the way?”
“No,” Kaye said, turning away from him. “Talk with you soon.”
He let the crowd carry him out the door and down the stairs. Outside, it was dark and quiet and the familiar drizzle had started again. The rest of the audience vanished into the night one by one and two by two, and soon there was just him and the pier and the waves that surged in from far out at sea.
20
THE NEXT DAY, HAVING MET KAYE SEEMED LIKE A dream. He could barely remember what Kaye had said and what he had said and why. Yet he knew he hadn’t said what he’d imagined saying if Kaye recognized him, and he hadn’t said what he most wanted to. There had been too many people around for that. He ought to have asked Kaye to talk in private, but since Kaye had been busy, his students and co-speakers waiting for him, it had seemed that Kaye would say no, so he hadn’t done that. Next time, he thought. Next time they would chat more and he would say what he needed to.
And Kaye was not living on the coast? Where was he staying? Still in the city? Then why was he holding lectures out of town? The assistant professor could easily have gotten twice the audience at the university, particularly if he was still popular among the students.
He slept until the afternoon sun woke him by brightening the panorama window and gleaming above the mountains in the west. He got up, turned on the laptop, and checked his mail. No new messages.
He changed into training clothes and shoes, and ran along the fields, whose edges were more clearly defined and drier than before. The air was chilly. With the heather and bilberry shrub gone, their gamey fragrance had been replaced by something less wild and more familiar: soil and dirt. In the distance a flock of sparrows lifted from the ground, but he hadn’t seen as large a gathering as that which had warmed him earlier in the fall. The sunlight was sharp but pale, and he turned his face toward it to soak up what little warmth it held.
When he returned to the cabin the sun had already sunk to darkness. He kicked off his muddy trainers, left them on the deck to dry, and went inside to wake the laptop from its sleeping mode. No new mail. He returned outside, attached the rubber hose to the tap, undressed, and showered in the cold water on the veranda. Then he dried, threw the moist t-shirt, sweatpants, and socks up on the banister, and hurried back to the warmth inside.
There he pulled on soft indoor clothes: a pair of faded light blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and a gray cardigan he had borrowed from his father. He checked the mail again before he filled the old pot with water and made oat porridge with blueberry jam. After he had eaten he found a couple of IQ tests online, and completed them as fast as he could. He assumed similar tests would be part of the astronaut selection process. When he needed a break, he put on the headlamp, went outside to the pile of logs he had stacked against the southern wall, and retrieved a few. The pile was down to twenty or thirty pieces of pale birch trunk speckled with black. He doubted the neighbors would be happy if he cut down the few birches that were left between the fields, so he would have to hike to the town center for more firewood. Besides, it would be nice to have a swim in the municipal pool, the ocean was far away and he missed it. The town pool would make a decent substitute, although it wouldn’t be as private as the one at home.
He returned inside, placed the logs in the hearth, and lit them with the lighter from the top drawer in the kitchen. As his breath and body settled, he stared into the flames for a long while. Then he checked his mail once more, before he undressed, and went to bed in the sleeping bag on the mattress. Right before he fell away the white light flared up inside him, engulfing him. Then there was nothing he lacked, nothing he had to do. It was a break from the world and its concerns. It happened every night, a quiet reset back to himself. Only when the morning arrived would he once again grow a body and mind and become human again.
21
IN HIS DREAMS THE OCEAN WAS ILLUMINED BY ITS own clarity, as the enlightened mind is said to be. The brightness seared him. It was so cold the sea surface was sluggish with ice. His right hand ached. He thought of the screws and plates that had been drilled into his fingers and joints when he broke them last summer and how the metal now must be contracting in the polar conditions.
The ship that carried his parents and brother and him was white and colonial-looking, of the type he had seen in old movies about murders on the broad rivers of the southern continent. His family members pushed open the round-eyed door of the cabin to a wall of icy, dazzling air. All around them the ocean bristled with the frost-bearded masts and chimneys of the countless vessels it had caught.
“Your father and I have been invited to dine with the captain,” his mother said. She was dressed in a red silk gown and looked like she had in her mid-thirties, decades ago.
“Which one of them?” his brother said. Katsuhiro was of his current age and wearing the navy-blue oilskin jacket that hung in the hallway at home in the honeycomb towers.
“No, no, your mother and I need to have something to ourselves,” his father said, also much younger than in waking life, dressed in his best morning coat, with his black hair slicked back as he had in pictures from his twenties. They watched their parents vanish up the canvas-flanked stairs to the top deck.
“I’ll follow them, find out where they’re going,” Katsuhiro said.
“No, don’t,” he said. “They’ll be back soon. We can do something else in the mean time.”
His brother pouted in reply, then continued to the deck below.
There was a rush in the air, a warmth and a glow, as if the sun had managed to burn through the clouds. On the mattress, far, far away, he felt a pull, an attraction, like that which works between two magnets, but was unable to change or cease the dream. With a keening wail a plane shot past him and into the still, bright water. The airliner crashed down with almost no splash, and sank with the sound of the passengers’ desperate screams behind the windows barely audible and very far away. The fear in the crowd’s faces as they fought to break out of the sinking plane, and the knowledge that they would not, was louder and more piercing than their cries for help. As the plane turned like a sleepy whale in the water and sank into the luminous depths, the sea gave only a single ripple as acknowledgment of the disaster before it grew still.
Out on the white plain of frozen, half-sunken wrecks that was the graveyard ocean, one or two steel bodies gently moved and creaked as if in sympathy with, or in domino-effect from, the new arrival. The frost and ice on the jutting bows and piercing masts were snot-yellow, as was the color of their sun-bleached paint. He even spotted the rotund outline and mesh body of an airship out there, yet even in the dream he knew that few airships had ever made it to the sky, much less the polar regions.
As he watched the overcast pale heavens, another plane came down, roared past just above his head, spewing a desperate heat and the stench of gasoline on fire like the draft from a barbecue grill in the summer. He ducked and turned to follow the descent. The fuselage broke up in a shower of smaller pieces before it hit the water, then sank as discreetly and as quietly as the plane that had preceded it. This time he was too far away to hear the screams and cries of the passengers, and was grateful for that.
Almost immediately one of the many cruise ships that roamed the water’s ice-swollen
surface, weaving carefully in and out between the wrecks, steered toward the remnants of the fallen. The side of the ship that faced the now-burning victim fuselage was filled with passengers who pointed and yelled to announce the disaster to their fellow travelers. But no life boats were lowered, no life jackets hurled into the still water, no mayday sent out, because they were all there voluntarily, enjoying the sight of the jetsam going down and thanking the multitude of gods that it wasn’t them. As the frozen wrecks out on the oceanic plain rearranged themselves once more to make room for the newcomer another cruiser approached the recent crash.
But beneath him, the ship he was on was also slowly going down. It was already up to the mid-deck railing in bright teal waves. He gazed into the liquid stillness and saw people in evening finery swim from the ship’s windows and out into the searing water. He wondered if his brother and parents were among them, but refused to follow the escaping passengers with his eyes. Instead, he noticed that streams of bubbles were bursting forth from the windows on the lower decks because they had loosened in their frames from the chill and insistency of the ocean.
Now the upper deck had nearly drowned, as if the ship voluntarily let the sea into itself and was embracing it, instead of fighting to keep it out and remain on the surface. Cold wavelets nipped at his naked feet, and he hurried to climb a steel ladder on the wall of the bridge. Another sunken ship was close. Sometime in the past it had settled peacefully on the bottom and now only peeked the apex of its bow, a corner of the roof, and the tallest of its masts above the ice. As he prepared to jump to the other wreck, he saw that other cruise ships were approaching the vessel he was about to leave. They were all ablaze in the flashlight from a thousand cameras, going off to no avail in the bright ocean-light, eager to watch the sinking of the others while already taking in water themselves.
He woke up feeling more tired than when he went to bed, and bleary-eyed from too much sleep. The first thing he did was turn on the laptop and check his mail. A jolt of tension shot through him. There was a message from Kaye:
My dear friend,
I’m so glad you made contact. I sense that you wished to talk more about my work and current situation. This makes me delighted as there are many opportunities with us, which I would be very happy to see you take up.
I’d like to speak with you again in the new year. Please advise.
At first he was so elated that Kaye wanted to meet again that he didn’t reflect on the letter. But as the initial joy receded, he read the mail again and again and found the tone and wording businesslike and stiff, not at all like the brief, informal messages they had exchanged in the city. He wasn’t certain what Kaye wanted from him, but he was too happy not to reply with a date and time to meet.
22
HE DREADED GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS, TO the city, to his family, to the questions, but he had promised Michael and Katsuhiro that he would.
He phoned Beanie to let her know he was planning to return for a brief visit.
“You’re coming home for Christmas?” Beanie said. “When? I’ll stay with Andy over the holidays, he’ll be pleased.” Beanie laughed, sounding a little nervous. He imagined her glancing about in the apartment, assessing what had to be cleaned and how many days she had left till he was there.
“No need for that,” he said. “I’ll take the sofa. I’m just stopping by for a few days. I have to travel south right after New Year’s.”
“But it’s your apartment, your bed,” Beanie said.
“It’s been your apartment for the last months,” he said. “Just give me some clean sheets and the second duvet and I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” Beanie sounded much less tense than before.
“Of course I’m sure,” he said.
“All right. When will you get here?”
“I’ll arrive the evening before the family dinner,” he said. He didn’t want to stay for long in the apartment when it was full of Beanie’s belongings.
“Super!” Beanie said. “The cats and I will be waiting for you.”
“How are they?” he said in order to move the conversation over to a less difficult subject.
“They have been absolute darlings,” Beanie said. “Eating well, purring loudly, curling up to me in bed every night. I love them.”
“I miss you all,” he said and meant it.
“We’ve missed you too and I know the cats are looking forward to seeing you again,” Beanie said. “We all are.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing you as well,” he said.
He wanted to call Michael too, but knowing that if he did, the second thing Michael would ask was how long he’d stay, stopped him. Beanie would disseminate the news anyway.
There wasn’t much to pack. All his good clothes were in the apartment, the gifts he ordered had been sent to the post office in the train station by the honeycomb towers, and the winter and training clothes he had in the cabin would not be needed in the city. He took only the small backpack and it was half full at best, with clean underwear, his wool scarf, leather gloves, wallet, and phone. He walked to the train platform in the foredawn, following the path that snaked through the underbrush. The morning was cold and fog-filled, with a peculiar scent of expectation.
When the train arrived the cars were almost full and he had to push his way through three compartments before he found an empty seat behind two elderly couples that were playing cards. The seat was partially blocked by the seniors’ many pieces of luggage, which there was no room for in the overfilled racks by the door. Even the shelf above the windows was full of bags and backpacks and clothing.
“Pardon me,” he said, squeezing past the pensioners’ suitcases. The far seat was hidden by thick coats and scarves hung on the hook by the window. He put his backpack on the floor and sat down in the aisle seat. As the train arrived at the stops along the coast, it became increasingly delayed and the compartment more and more crowded. In the warm and heavy air he fell asleep between the luggage and the passengers standing in the aisle. Outside, the day brightened slowly, but the light was gray and wan, and would remain only for a few hours. As opposed to earlier in the winter, now the trees in the valleys and the mountainsides were bare, with only the occasional green conifer.
When the train finally clacked into the central train station in his home city, in a web of glinting rails and overhead wires, it had grown dark and most of the passengers were asleep. He picked up his backpack, queued for the doors, and stepped out on the familiar concrete. The wall of noise from people and traffic, the orange glare from the sodium lamps, the scent of sweat, perfume, exhaust, and cigarette smoke, made his months in the mountains instantly vanish.
Another crowded, warm, and noise-filled train took him from the city central to the subterranean steel and glass corridors of the station by the apartment buildings. Bobbing with the crowd, not attempting to run ahead or lag behind, he moved with the throng out the tunnels, up through the park, and into the parking lots below the high-rises. The five six-sided structures rose nineteen floors above the asphalt, the illumination from their rows of windows glittering in the winter night.
He rang the doorbell and took out the keys, but Beanie opened the door before he could use them. She shrieked and threw her arms around him with such force that he stumbled backward and the red, white-trimmed velour hat she was wearing fell to the floor. Beanie smelled of licorice and cigarettes and the perfume from some jeans designer he couldn’t recall the name of, but which he strongly associated with her, and hugged her hard.
He had hoped for a quiet evening before the big family dinner, but past the door, in the clearly newly cleaned and tidied apartment, stood Michael and Katsuhiro. They waited patiently until Beanie had pulled him inside and closed and locked the door, and when he could finally embrace Michael, it was like he had never been gone at all.
23
HE CAME BACK FROM SLEEP IN BLOCKS, FRAGMENTS of being. First he was an arm lying on top of the duvet which the rest
of his body slept beneath. Then, somehow, he was the cobalt-colored glass lamp on the table at the end of the sofa. After that he was cat paws stepping on his chest, and finally, he was a face that woke up and took in the room.
The cat that approached him was the cream-colored one, the smallest and gentlest of the two felines he shared the apartment with. She sniffed his nose, and gave him slow, loving blinks with her elongated, copper-colored eyes. He stroked her soft, warm back and she purred loudly and kneaded the duvet with her paws. The living room was silent and gray, and beyond his feet that pressed against the armrest at the far end of the sofa shone the window which filled the north wall. Beyond the glass was the balcony, which didn’t reach further out than the length of a small table and two chairs, separated from the neighboring verandas by narrow concrete walls. Above the tall glass railing the sky was filled with clouds, looking like mist, thoughts, misconceptions.
When he lived in the apartment he used to enjoy lying on the sofa, seeing nothing but the edge of the veranda ceiling and the sky, and pretending he was in a parachute, a balloon, or a plane. Now he might have the chance of actually living in the heavens, but in a vessel which would be hurtling toward another planet. The thought brought apprehension, a slight tightness in his chest, but also a rush of joy and excitement. What if he made it through the tests? What if he had the chance to go to Mars?
It would, of course, only happen after years, perhaps decades of learning, training, and simulating. First there would be the basic knowledge for astronauts: piloting, parachuting, experiencing high gravity in centrifuge and microgravity in parabolic flight, learning the general aspects and procedures of current spacecraft, launch systems, and orbital habitat. Then the more detailed and specialized knowledge of the function and structure of specific parts of the spacecraft and orbital habitat, training inside full-scale models and in underwater tanks, both at the astronaut facility of the continent’s space organization and those on other continents. If he were selected for a mission, the training would be narrowed down to the specific needs for that flight: the scientific experiments, technological upgrades, or mechanical maintenance to be performed.
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