by Lev Grossman
“I can’t believe people are going to work now,” said Hollis.
“Mm.” Peters shook his fist at the other cars. “Do you people know you’re alive? Crawling along, in your little metal coffins—”
Hollis reached down to where the beer was, around his feet, and opened a can. He toasted them discreetly.
* * *
When they reached the entrance ramp to the turnpike the traffic became heavier and Peters slowed down. For a long time the highway ran between two huge cliffs of bare red rock, with slicks of water running down them where blasting had exposed underground springs.
Hollis’s eyes blurred, and he didn’t even notice they were back in the city until they drove under the bridge into Allston. Harvard Avenue was congested, and they inched along it towards the intersection with Brighton.
“Where are you going to park?” said Hollis.
“I don’t know.” Peters rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Probably I’ll just put it in the lot across from Blake’s and walk home.”
“I have that ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ song in my head. I can’t get it out.”
“Whoa,” said Peters. “Eighties kitsch alert.”
There was a slow light at the corner of Commonwealth. Hollis watched the people crossing in front of them on the crosswalk.
With the light behind it her blond hair was dark.
Peters drove a few extra blocks up the hill and made a U-turn to get on the right side of the street in front of Hollis’s stoop. They both noticed at the same time that the sky was full of birds, smallish and black, swarms of them, crossing above the street in great, silent waves that constantly changed their size and shape. Each individual stood out clearly and distinctly against the white background of the sky. Hollis and Peters watched for a minute or so, looking up blearily through the windshield, until the flock had dwindled down to a thin scattering, then a couple of isolated groups, and then finally a few frantic stragglers flapping desperately along after the others.
“Geese,” said Peters.
“Can’t be,” Hollis said. “Geese are way bigger than that. And don’t they fly in V’s?”
“I guess. I wasn’t really sure if that was a myth or not.”
Hollis opened the door.
“Anyway, I’ll see you tonight.”
“I’ll call you,” said Peters.
“Right.”
He shut the door behind him, and Peters gave him a bra sign through the window.
It was disorienting to be out in the cold on the sidewalk in the early morning—the sunlight seemed to be coming at him from the wrong side. Peters peeled out, dead leaves flying up into the air in his wake. An old woman who lived in the building was on her way out as Hollis went in, and she nodded and murmured something to him in a Russian accent.
I am an android, a sophisticated computer endowed with the form of a human simulacrum.
When Hollis reached his door, he realized he didn’t have his keys. He checked his pants pockets, and his overcoat, but they weren’t there. He tried to remember what he’d done with them—he’d taken them out of his pocket and put them somewhere, but now he couldn’t seem to remember where. He stood there for a few minutes in the darkness of the hallway, with his hand on his forehead. He was very tired. The tiny glass-and-metal eye of the peephole stared dully back at him. He looked down at the scratched wood around the keyhole on his door, then up and down the empty, badly lit hallway.
After a long time, he put his hand on the doorknob and pushed in on it, without turning.
The door opened.
CHAPTER 8
FRIDAY, 3:30 P.M.
It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and Hollis was standing waiting for the Green Line trolley. It was overcast. Cars tore past him in both directions. It was Friday—people were getting out of work early to start the weekend.
He stood inside a plastic shelter on the platform. There was a subway map on the wall, covered with unreadable black graffiti signatures written with a paint pen. Hollis took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and checked it against the map. It was a page torn out of a road atlas. He’d circled one of the intersections on it with a Magic Marker.
He still needed a shave, but he felt better now that he’d slept. He’d gotten up at three, taken a shower, and had some breakfast. The sun was already low on the horizon behind the clouds. Looking back up the hill, he could see the single oversized headlight of the inbound train shining in the distance, still half a mile away, but it would take five more minutes for it to work its way down to where he was waiting.
A circle of old retirees was standing around under the shelter next to him.
“Yeah, I gave it to her,” said a white-haired, red-faced man. “I said, ‘Listen, you wanna talk about rubbers? Save it for the bridge club.’”
They broke up laughing.
“You told her.”
“I certainly did. ‘Save it for the bridge club,’ I said.”
He shook his head.
“She didn’t know what to say.”
Honest, Officer, he threw himself right onto the tracks. I couldn’t stop him.
When the train pulled in it was already mostly filled with sporty, well-fed BC students heading into the city. Hollis got on and rode standing up, hanging on to a steel post, so he could look out the window. The train was incredibly slow—it stopped at every corner, all the way along Commonwealth Ave. into the city.
While it waited at a red light, Hollis spotted a woman about his age standing on the curb with her back to him. Her hair was dyed blond, and it was piled up on top of her head in a careless, complicated, but somehow elegant heap. She was wearing a denim jacket with a giant mandala scribbled on the back in black ballpoint pen.
I read an electron emission signature, sir. A life form.
Let me tek you away from all zees.
The train picked up some speed as they rolled out of the residential neighborhood into BU, and the clacking of the wheels accelerated and crescendoed. From where he was standing Hollis could look down into the interiors of the cars moving along past him, and down onto the sidewalks, where assorted college students were pushing past each other, wearing sweaters and carrying their books and backpacks: punks, jocks, artsy types, frat boys.
Soon your pitiful little planet will be mine. Oh yes—quite soon.
The tracks sloped down, cement walls rose up in the windows on both sides, and suddenly the train was underground. Hollis’s reflection appeared in front of him in the window against the blackness of the tunnel. Every couple of minutes the lights would flicker out for a second or two, leaving the car in a dimness that was strangely intimate: it was a small, dark room full of strangers.
More and more of the people getting on and off were wearing office clothes. Hollis got out at Government Center, five stops down the line. When he stepped out of the subway station he found himself on the corner of a huge, open brick plaza. It was deserted except for a few vendors selling flowers and newspapers and hot pretzels. Litter slid and tumbled across it in the freezing wind. Flags from different countries flapped on a row of white flagpoles.
Hollis set off across the square. The air felt colder and brisker here, and it tasted salty—he was getting close to the sea. Clouds of fine, powdery dust swirled across the bare brick. One of the cafés on the square had a giant metal teakettle mounted on its storefront. Real steam was coming out of the spout.
Hollis took out the piece of paper again and looked at it as he walked. He turned it around a few times, until it was oriented the same way he was, then he put it away.
I have seen the best minds of my generation.
He cut through Quincy Market, threading his way through crowds of tourists without slowing down. A tall, skinny magician in a tuxedo was doing tricks with ropes and knots in the middle of a ring of spectators. The peripheral highway that ran along the docks came up suddenly, only a block past the market. There was nowhere to cross it legally, but he waited on the shoulde
r for a while for a break in traffic, surrounded by broken glass and black, charred-looking blowout pads.
“You can’t ride back in the rain, Hollis. Wait a few minutes.”
“I can’t exactly stay here, can I?” he said bitterly. “Anyway, it’s not raining anymore.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Eileen went over to the window and pulled up the blinds. They looked out through the black bars of the fire escape. Night was falling.
“Is it?” said Hollis. “I can’t really tell.”
“I guess I can’t tell either.”
They listened for the sound of rain.
“Anyway,” she said. “Take an umbrella.”
The road cleared for a minute. He jogged across a few lanes of black asphalt worn shiny with age, jumped over a guardrail, and suddenly he was at the docks. Two enormous splintery gray timber wharfs jutted out into the harbor in front of him. The New England Aquarium stood at the end of them, on a double row of massive concrete pilings.
A scum of foam and floating trash bobbed around the base of the pilings, but farther out in the main harbor the water was blue and clean. The air was chilly. Seagulls wheeled and cried overhead. Hollis could see as far as Logan Airport on the far side of the bay, where every couple of minutes another plane took off or landed, weirdly out of sync with the roar of its engine because of the time delay as the sound traveled across the harbor. Tiny indigo-blue lights winked on and off, all along the runways.
You weel tek me to Cuba.
It took him a few minutes to walk out to the end of the wharfs; they were longer than they looked. It was late afternoon, and there was no line at the ticket booth. The woman at the register had straight red hair, and her oval face was startlingly pale and colorless, like an ivory cameo. She looked up from the paperback she was reading: Culture and Anarchy.
“Just one today?” she said.
Hollis nodded.
“You know, we’ll be closing in about an hour.”
“That’s all right,” he said. He took out his wallet and opened it. It was empty.
He took out his Visa.
“Can I charge this?” he said. She took his card, zipped it through a reader, and handed it back with the credit card form and a ballpoint pen.
My good woman, have you any idea what this signature might one day be worth?
He pushed his way inside through the heavy glass doors. The aquarium was set up on one long spiral ramp that sloped gently upwards, with the tanks arranged along the walls on both sides in no particular order. The rest of the visitors were mostly children with their parents or in groups from their schools. The constant shouting made an echoey roar in the darkness. They paid no attention to Hollis as he drifted through them.
The only light came from the tanks themselves, but as his eyes adapted Hollis was able to make out the faces of the people around him in the soft, TV-like glow that filtered out through the water. He strolled past the first few tanks, looking over the shoulders of the people clustered around them. The fish that lived close to the surface had tanks built to look like sunny ponds or tide pools, with bright lights overhead and sand and fake reeds around the edges, but most of the tanks were darker, more somber, to simulate conditions deep underwater. The weird, distorted fish that lived in the deepest strata of the ocean were kept in almost total darkness. Sometimes Hollis had to stare at a tank for a few minutes before the outlines of a giant grouper finally appeared in the gloom, or a horrible flounder, or a few floating nautiluses.
Halfway up, the spiral ramp opened out into a landing with some displays on it for children, and a counter with a row of flimsy cardboard zoetrope wheels. Hollis went over to one and put his eye up to the viewing slot. He spun it.
Inside, a tiny black-and-white line drawing of a ray frantically flapped its wings up and down in jerky stop-motion animation.
The Devilfish!
Hollis stood up sharply. He looked around, blinking. The roar of the crowd went on around him without stopping, and a kid behind him was waiting to look. He stepped aside.
Watch for the sign of the black fish.
Wandering slowly up the spiraling ramp, Hollis stopped at every tank, one by one. The air had a nice, humid, briny smell. Most of the interesting exhibits were from the tropics: a pack of piranhas floating together peacefully in a South American stream; a forest of fluorescent anemones with huge spidery prawns wandering through it; an octopus huddled in the corner of a bare glass cell.
“Choose carefully,” said the old man. “Each gateway leads to a different world.”
Hollis spent a long time watching a tank that was split into two parts, half air and half water. It was supposed to be a tropical rainforest that had been flooded by a seasonal monsoon. Big, fleshy fishes floated around in it like toy balloons, drifting between the giant buttress roots of plastic trees, wavering their tiny fins almost imperceptibly to keep themselves upright. Fake vines lolled along the surface of the water, and tree frogs clung to the leaves of fake jungle plants. He moved on.
When he reached the top floor the hallway started sloping back down again, and one whole wall was taken up by the aquarium’s main attraction: an enormous round tank that ran the full height of the building. The fish swam around and around the outer edge of the tank in endless, hypnotic circles, all in the same direction, accompanied by sea turtles and a few long, sinewy sharks. As Hollis walked slowly around and down, the light from the tank gradually grew deeper and softer, greener, dreamier. A massive emerald moray eel drifted by, undulating itself sideways through the coral crags. He found himself becoming more and more thoroughly entranced.
When he was near the bottom of the tank—he could see the sandy floor a few meters farther down—a commotion started back up at the surface. Something was splashing around, children were shrieking happily, and an amplified voice was giving some kind of educational lecture. The angle was bad, but way up above him, through the green haze, he thought he could see a pair of bare pink legs dangling down through the shifting, mirrorlike undersurface of the water.
Then the person plunged the rest of the way through: it was a scuba diver. She sank down for a few seconds, passively, getting her bearings and waiting for the bubbles to clear, then she started swimming, carefully merging herself into the flow of the circulating throng of fish. She had a mesh bag slung around her neck, and she fed the sharks from it, passing out chunks of bait with a kind of sowing motion. The sharks would nose up to her and take them right from her hand, flashing multiple rows of gray teeth at her for one thrilling moment and then moving on again with an indifferent, businesslike air.
Hollis watched for a minute, then started walking again. He lost track of the diver’s progress. Then a pair of black rubber flippers appeared at the top of the window next to him, followed by a pair of long, slender, bare legs, and a torso in a form-fitting black wet suit.
Her face was level with his, and their eyes met through the glass. Hollis froze.
It was Xanthe.
The mask covered most of her face, but there was no question who it was. She didn’t react—in fact, she seemed to look right through him. She blinked once, but she made no sign that she recognized him. As he stared back at her Hollis wondered if Xanthe could even see him through the thick glass of the tank. She went past him in slow motion, dropping gracefully down through the water, looking out at him without seeming to register his presence at all, and when she was almost gone he reached out across the railing and tapped gently on the glass, once, twice, with his fingertips, but it was too late. The last streamers of her hair were trailing out of sight. He pressed his forehead up against the warm glass, but all he could see was the top of her head, retreating down and away from him.
The truth hurts.
A woman’s voice was speaking over the loudspeakers: the aquarium would be closing in ten minutes. Hollis walked the rest of the way down to the lobby without stopping, or even glancing at the tank.
&
nbsp; When he pushed back out through the front doors it was nearly five o’clock, and the cloudy sunlight was weaker. He could see it was only a few more minutes before the sun would disappear behind the downtown skyscrapers. Hollis stood in front of the glass doors, arms folded, squinting at the sudden brightness and watching the families sitting around on benches around a green pool where a few tame harbor seals were playing.
It was cold out. He hugged his green overcoat around him.
It was late by the time he knocked on Eileen’s door.
“Hollis,” she said, when she opened it. “Listen—”
“Wait.” He held up his hands. “Please wait. Just wait a second.”
She closed the door behind him and went over and sat down on the bed. Her weight caused one of the pillows to topple over the edge onto the floor.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“Just give me a second—”
“Hollis—”
“Would you just give me a second, please?” he said. “Could I please finish what I was going to say, before you break up with me?”
He went over to the bed and sat down next to her. Her room had a certain characteristic smell, because of a special shampoo she used.
He didn’t say anything.
After a little while she took his hand, without looking at him.
“Hollis? Can we be serious for a minute?”
The wind blew straight through Hollis’s short blond hair, chilling his scalp. He went over to the railing looking out over the harbor and kicked some sand off the pavement to watch it splash into the water. Helium-voiced children talked and yelled as they filed out of the aquarium. Long, gentle swells rolled in through the harbor mouth, coming in from the open ocean and sweeping on past the wooden pilings without slowing down, moving out of sight underneath him to break against the cement of the harbor wall.
The time for waiting is past. We must act now.
CHAPTER 9
