Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  I feel guilty leaving Jerry angry and scared back there. She’s right. She’s always been a friend. And maybe she’s right on another account, that Akira didn’t save me—she just made me feel alive again.

  I step to the front door and am about to yank it open theatrically. I don’t even know why. But before I can wrap my hand around the antique knob, I hear the song behind me. I turn. It’s faint. And it’s coming from Jerry’s sculpture, which is stuck on the rendering of Ascalon’s ray piercing the heart of Sessho-seki. A burst of red feedback hurts my ears, and then the song is gone. The stuck image vibrates, then morphs. It’s now a girl in a red sweater, the one from the painting. Her back is turned. “She killed me,” she mumbles. “But I am still here.” Then the sculpture reverts back to normal, and the girl is transformed into Houdini.

  I want to march back into Jerry’s room and pry the truth from her. But for all I know, she’s already pinged the police. Or she’s waiting for me with the hand cannon I know she keeps in her nightstand drawer.

  I get in my SEAL and take off. I try to ping Jerry. To apologize, I tell myself. But maybe I still want to grill her. No response. She’s probably already blocked me, and I don’t blame her. The sun hasn’t risen yet. I’ll try again in the morning.

  I point my SEAL down and head to lower altitude. And that’s when I see them. A huge crowd is gathered on the beach. Hundreds of people, a thousand maybe, lined up down the coast. A patient crowd. A somber one. The opposite of a mob. They’re taking turns stepping into the water like they’re about to be baptized. But they aren’t there for purification. They’re floating lit holo lanterns in honor of Akira Kimura. Hundreds of specks of light drifting on the ocean surface. Not a single one strong enough to reveal what lurks beneath, but enough light to comfort babies trying to sleep in the dark.

  I raise my altitude. I cannot believe how much the red song has shaken me. I cannot believe Akira Kimura might have had a child and hidden her from the world. I cannot believe that I pulled a knife on one of my closest friends. Or that for a split second there, I was ready to use it.

  I tell my iE to replay Jerry’s sculpture morphing from Ascalon to the girl in the red sweater. There is no music. No image. No girl in a red sweater. There’s just a crazy old man with his back to a door, holding his ears.

  She killed me. But I am still here.

  I know I heard it. The voice made my stomach churn because it reminded me of stale beer. But my iE didn’t pick up any of it. Just move forward, I tell myself. Forget it and just move on, or your jaw will tingle, your hands and chest will rattle, and you’ll suffocate.

  She killed me. This is the voice of a victim heard by a man who, no matter how hard he tries to forget, knows what killing is.

  9

  When the sun finally rises, I’m standing, sleep deprived, near Fissure 8 of the volcano that has been spewing lava continuously for thousands of years. Over 150 years ago, there was a town here. Before that, a village, probably. One populated by actual natives during a time before the culture died out and the population was completely assimilated. I kick at the black rock with the toe of my boot. It’s solid. Some islanders have resurrected the gods of the natives and believe that their fire goddess was preparing to make new life, new land, because she knew the end was coming soon and wanted to get a head start on recreating the world. Others of them believe she continued to spew after the asteroid because she was upset we beat it. The stories of the native gods are very old now, older than electric opera, older than digi-rapture blues. Even older than the hip-hop I caught the tail end of. Music, like the gods, is having a tough time hanging in what Jerry would call “The Pantheon of the Iconic.” Not everything survived that damn asteroid, even though it didn’t hit.

  Speaking of pantheons, my iE feed is running a talking-head program about where Akira sits in the Greatest Scientists of All Time Hall of Fame. It’s mindless dribble that’s preferable to the sound of the hydro-drill tearing through lava rock in front of the single katakana grave. When I told Akeem Buhari what I needed help with last night on my way to Jerry’s, he was at the world-famous Friday Night Prawn Bake at the island’s theme park. Neo-hippies, all tat-dyed black, drag a wild boar to the stream and leave it there while they prep their sweet potato and buried protein. After the other food is prepped, the prawn catchers return to the boar and tourists follow with their iEs set to record. The catchers pull a now swollen boar from the stream, its distended belly undulating, ripples that stretch the skin to its limits. They toss the boar on a smoldering fire. The ripples beneath its crackling skin become violent. The belly bulges more, and whatever is under the skin appears to be hitting full boil. Little pincers puncture the skin, and little holes whistle out gas. Finally, the carcass bursts open, and hundreds of frenzied prawns swarm from the boar’s belly, angry from the heat, and frantically crawl over each other to avoid falling in the fire. Minutes later, what’s left of the chaotic free-for-all is a heap of dead prawns, tails tucked under their carapaces, stewing in bubbling pork fat. I’ve been to the Friday Night Prawn Bake with Akeem a number of times. Like most of my other friends who have at one time or another called me their best friend or only friend, Akeem is one of The Money. He spends his on exotic foods, like chicken eggs, a protein source replaced years ago by farmed, unstressed aquaculture and algae after disease decimated chickens all over the world. Akeem stops the drill. “How did I let you talk me into this?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I’ve never exhumed a grave before. Feels creepy.”

  “I don’t think it’s a grave. Just a marker for something.”

  “Well, how deep then?” he asks.

  “Deep enough to hit jackpot.”

  Akeem shrugs and starts up the drill. “I can cook the perfect egg,” he yells while drilling through the grave.

  “Oh, yeah? How?”

  “Are you kidding? You ask me to dig up a grave or whatever, and now you want my perfect egg recipe? Where you even gonna get one?”

  The drill, a machine that used to have to be the size of a small building but can now fold up and be transported like a tent, chops through lava rock. He’s only half joking. The funny thing about The Money is that most of them are very paranoid. Always weary of meeting people. Always wondering what someone wants from them. Always waiting for the question that starts with the word “can” and ends with “me.” It’s tough to blame them. It’s paranoia based on personal experience. The Money and I have a silent mutual understanding. I almost never ask for anything, and if I do, it’s for their expertise. In turn, they act like I’m not a Less Than.

  Akeem, who is now The Money, made his fortune mapping and mining the bottom of the ocean for geothermal energy, which helped make the migration of resources from the continent to underwater cities possible. Now, the food is here. The desalinated water, pure from the deep, is here. The jobs—plastic skimming, construction, recycling—they are here. And like a lot of self-made men and women who’ve spent their life relentlessly angling and eventually catching their monster fish in this channel of great migration, Akeem’s bored out of his mind. Getting him to help me dig was easy. He wasn’t really doing shit anyway.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Akeem says. “Water’s involved.”

  The drill grinds past the six-foot mark. No coffin. “An egg ring and a pan on low heat,” I say, safety glasses on, still gazing into the hole. “A teaspoon of water and cover.”

  “Fucking detective know-it-all,” Akeem says.

  I shrug. “I was around when all the chickens died. Still a kid, but my dad loved eggs.”

  The drill breaks through. Akeem tells his iE to pull the bit up. We both look over the edge of the hole. “Interesting,” Akeem says. He cracks a bio flare and drops it in. It clunks on the bottom. “How deep?” I ask.

  “At least a hundred feet.”

  “Spelunking?” I ask.

&nbs
p; Akeem looks around. He’s a big guy, hulkish, but softened by age and money. Most guys built like him age sadly, limbs wilted by atrophy, bellies a solid jelly. But he’s got the kind of body that seems to resent the ease of technology. “This makes me nervous,” he says. “The islanders don’t like people digging around here. They might think we’re fucking with their juju. Can’t even see them coming, them all tat-dyed black. For all we know, they could be crawling toward us on all this lava rock.”

  “Natives,” I scoff.

  “Fine, hippies,” Akeem says.

  “You’re not curious?”

  “You got a weapon on you?” Akeem asks.

  “I got you. You must be pushing 260 by now.”

  He laughs. “I’m being serious.”

  “I have a rail gun packed in the SEAL.”

  “I thought those were illegal?”

  I shrug. “I was issued one back when things were crazy. Sessho-seki days. Honestly, I don’t even know if it works anymore. Almost forgot I still had it.”

  Akeem smiles. “Screw it. I’ll get the rope and remote winch us down.”

  He steps to the auto drill rig and sets up the winch. “I ever tell you about Panit, the Thai stuntman I used to hang with?”

  “Yeah,” I say, still staring down into the hole, squinting, searching for wafts. “He wanted you to finance his big budget epic with him as the star.”

  “Wanted me to? I ended up doing it.”

  I look up. “Really?”

  Akeem drops the rope down the hole and hands me grip gloves. “Oh yeah. It was the worst piece of entertainment ever made. Panit, the poor guy, couldn’t even talk in front of the camera, so he’d just stop saying his lines and start elbowing and kneeing stuff around him.”

  I laugh. “Never saw it.”

  “No one did.”

  “What happened to Panit?”

  Akeem shakes his head and smiles. “Beats me. That’s the funny part. I gave him the money to make his epic, and guess what?”

  “What?”

  Akeem grabs the rope. “He never forgave me.”

  I nod. Akeem smirks at me. “I do this for you, you aren’t going to do the same thing, right?”

  “Hold a grudge against you forever?”

  Akeem nods. “We’re going down a hole. When people do that, they tend not to like what they find there.”

  “I’m an expert at finding what I don’t like. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Okay then,” Akeem says. “Let’s go.”

  The winch lowers Akeem into the hole. I grab the rope and follow. It’s funny. Akeem didn’t ask me whose name was on the headstone. Didn’t react to there not being a coffin or any remains buried there. And hasn’t mentioned Akira once. I envy him.

  But I knew it the moment I saw it. The moment I stood in front of it and stepped on the now-dead flowers.

  The one I gave up. She killed me.

  The name on the tombstone was Ascalon Lee.

  10

  When Akeem and I hit the bottom of the hole, he lights up a couple more bio flares and tosses them to our left and right. We immediately see that we’re not in a hole, but in a huge cavern, its walls lined with old buildings. We’re standing on what appears to be the beginning of a cobblestone path. I take off my grip gloves. Each building is a relic. Some in the style of twenty-first century tropical tourist traps. Others even older. Japanese village architecture. A multicultural ghost town. “These flares are powerful,” I say.

  Akeem takes off his grip gloves. “I used to use these on ocean floor surveys, on the bottom of the midnight zone. The sun can’t even go that deep. You’re damn right they’re powerful.” Akeem looks around. “But I’ve never dug anything up like this before.”

  And he’s right. This is strange. An excavation of sorts. But this isn’t the town that got rolled over with lava a century-and-a-half back. Nothing looks old—it’s all in good condition. The architecture is just nostalgic, like the classic seaplanes people like to fly for fun, some painted patina with rocket engines.

  “What do you think?” I ask. “This isn’t some village that was naturally protected from years of lava rolling over it, right?”

  Akeem shakes his head. He rubs his hand against the cavern wall. “That’s impossible. This is all pretty newly dug.” He looks at the buildings. “Freshly built. A few years old at the most. Expensive as hell and almost impossible to do in secret. Who?”

  “Who else?”

  Akeem nods. “Akira Kimura.”

  Akira was originally from Japan. She finished her BS at the University of Tokyo when she was eleven years old. After she got her first PhD in astrophysics a couple years later, she ended up here to get her second PhD in astronomy and help improve what even back then were the most powerful telescopes in the world. She told me once that, like most people who move to an island, she hated it at first. Island fever, she said. Plus, she was a fourteen-year-old kid who’d been sent alone to a strange place. But after a while, she realized it didn’t matter. She never got out much anyway.

  Akeem and I begin walking down the cobbled path. To the left, a small shop with trinkets like pineapple magnets and fake flower necklaces in its window. To the right, a Zen temple fronted by a garden, perfect circles etched in sand. A big rock sits in the garden, and I wonder if it’s Sessho-seki. The Killing Rock in Japanese myth. As the story goes, the rock was the corpse of Tamamo-no-Mae, the nine-tailed fox. The one that killed anyone who came near her. That was what Akira named the asteroid after. As a fourteen-year-old coming to a strange new place, I wonder if she held on to folklore tighter than most of us with the same family roots. If the stories were like old friends that gave her comfort. She didn’t talk to me much about those first years in America. And I met her much later. And like most people, she didn’t care for talking about the hard times.

  “My dad used to tell me stories,” Akeem says. “When Akira started building Ascalon, racist crackpots accused her of being a Japanese sleeper agent looking for revenge for World War II. They thought she was gonna make a robot Godzilla monster that would stomp all over America.”

  “Yeah, some used to joke that The Savior’s Eye should be slanted.”

  Akeem shakes his head. “Wow. Well, we’ve come a long way.”

  I think about that as we pass a small kiosk for diving tours to the left. I’ve only seen it once but recognize it immediately. A re-creation of the tiny flotilla way out in the cut. I remember the guide. Leathered, lean, muscular, a deep diver. Built like a true explorer of the unknown deep, like my dad, a true hydronaut. The storefront window houses old-school scuba gear—masks without gills. Fins without mini-propellers. I remember the day the tour guide put them on and we went, together, down to the bottom. I can smell his impending doom, and see the graceful, efficient flutter of his fins sink into darkness. I shut it all out. Like Akira, I try not to think about the hard times.

  I focus on what that time meant, the slaying of The Killing Rock, and to me and just about everyone else, we had come a long way. For the first time in our history, we all had a common enemy. We all hated the same thing and fought it and prayed against it together. After Ascalon saved the world, violent crime plummeted. I stopped carrying a gun decades ago. And I’ll admit, for years, I was bored out of my mind. There wasn’t much for me to solve. But after a generation passed, the rates started slowly climbing again. And I started thinking that hate must always exist. It worried me what would fill the hate void that Ascalon left. Nothing had emerged as the frontrunner yet. Most old folks like me would say the world now is still a better place than it was before Ascalon, the opposite of what generation after generation of old men have said about the state of the world for most of human existence. Kids nowadays. The degradation of morality and hard work. Hell in a handbasket. Even some ancient Roman once said, “a progeny yet more corrupt.” I figured
the old men were always wrong, because if they were right, we would’ve destroyed ourselves long before Sessho-seki headed our way and almost did it for us. But we’ve still got time to make it worse. Like Jerry’s sculpture, worse is a work in progress that’s perhaps being created in our underwater scrapers and Earth-core fueled towers. Or maybe it’s percolating in the patches of humanity abandoned on the continent, where they wait for The Great Leachate to stop dripping its poison into the Wheatbelt or for the new seacrapers and float burbs to be built in California Nevada Fingers.

  Akeem and I pass a replica of the front of some East Coast-style science building. Probably the one where Akira got her PhD in astrophysics. Old-style speakers on wooden poles crackle, then play string-plucked native music. Music I remember playing at shuttle field gates back in the day while I waited to board for my trip to the continent.

  Akeem looks up at the dome above us. “Fancy,” he says. “Like lidded food.”

  “What?”

  “You know, a silver-platter meal.”

  “You really are The Money.”

  “Stop it.” Akeem playfully punches my shoulder.

  I’m still facing the dive shop. Walking backward like my toddler, and I don’t even realize it until I hear Akeem. “Hey,” he says. “Stop getting distracted. There’s nowhere to take a dip here.”

  I nod and turn around. We reach the end of the path. A modest, one-story pagoda-style house roofed with tiles that curve into arches, walled with sliding wood and paper doors. “Akira once told me these old houses were cut with perfect notches and puzzled together,” I say. “That back then, they didn’t use nails to build them.”