by David Arnold
Her close encounter with the Metal Masks never felt far away. The image of what they’d done to the blue-lipped family in the back room of the station, and just as Nico had burned the place down so as to wipe clean those images, she found she did not want to bring them here.
“You almost . . . ?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re—you know—you.”
“I’m glad you’re you too.”
Nico wanted to spill herself: I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a boarded-up Farmhouse, she would say. I’d like to spend the next eighteen letting some light in. She would tell Lennon of her search for the ageless love, the kind that doesn’t leave. And if not lovers, let them be trees, bursting from the ground, branches swaying, growing toward each other, a dendrochronology intertwined, as if they’d spent many lives together, born in different places around the world at different times, but always finding their way back to each other.
“You wanna know what I thought?” he asked. “The first time I saw you?”
“How dumb I was for setting that station on fire?”
“After that.”
Had he gotten closer? They seemed closer.
“I don’t really know how to explain it,” he said. “I guess it’s like—you know how we look at stars from Earth and we think they’re beautiful? But we don’t really know what they look like, or how they behave. All we know is how they look from here, or what we’ve read. But there are some people who actually went up there. Into space, I mean.”
“You’re kind of a space nerd, aren’t you?”
“As such, I know that there have been a select few humans who have gotten close enough to a star to either confirm or deny its beauty. Seeing you felt like that.”
Nico pretended not to know what he meant. “You’re saying I’m a star.”
“Oh my God, you’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
“I’m just having a little trouble decoding your space metaphor.”
He was closer. Though she wasn’t sure how, was the thing.
Also, Harry had abandoned them for a dusty couch in the corner, something about their changing proximity scaring him off. Bye, dog.
“It wasn’t just that I thought you were beautiful, or whatever,” said Lennon. “It was like—you confirmed that kind of beauty existed.”
There were times when Nico wondered if feelings could sense an opening, and that was why the strongest ones came all at once: disappointment at Harry’s disinterest led to a longing to hear the wafer-thin pages of her mother’s Bible, which led to the aftertaste of her father’s stale tea, and maybe more than anything, unending sadness at Kit’s absence. And yet, for all these feelings, there was a simpler one at play: a desire to feel Lennon’s face in her hands. Right or wrong, there it was—she could hardly ignore it.
“Kalology.”
“Was that a word?” he asked. She could hear the sound of his lips as they moved, which, she didn’t know that was a thing. And now she realized how he was getting closer without moving: she was moving.
“My dad loved ologies,” she said. “The studies of, you know? Geology, theology, anthropology, zoology. Rarer ones too, ones I never saw in books.”
“Kalology being the study of . . .”
“Human beauty.”
A weight like a blanket fell over them, a rare moment in which Nico felt tied to the old world by some ancient, built-in thing. And when they kissed it felt explosive and microscopic, warm and cold; she was a river and a mountain, a young child, a wise and aged woman. He asked if it was okay, as if she hadn’t been edging closer to him this whole time, but she said, “Yes,” because she loved that he asked.
They spent much of the night studying each other, these new masters of kalology. Time turned in on itself, and the lifeless dark of the room turned bright, and later, sharing a sleeping bag, Nico brushed her hand across Lennon’s face, felt his hair in her hands, finally.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“That look on your face is not nothing.”
She was lost in him, and wanted to stay there, but out came the words. “The first day I met Kit, he said he wished you could come with him to the Isles of Shoals.”
The glow in Lennon’s eyes changed. “Really?”
“He told me you couldn’t, though, because Boston was your destiny.” This close to each other, eyes locked, for a second, she forgot they weren’t the same person. And she wondered if he could read her mind: Was Kit right? Is Boston your destiny? And are destinies chiseled in stone?
But he kissed her again, and her questions melted right along with everything else.
Years later Nico would turn this night over in her mind, inspect it from all angles, wonder if it ever really existed. She would daydream of coming back to this moment in this random riverside house where she’d discovered love, her first and only visit to that elusive legend of a country. And there, finding the ghost of her younger self tucked beside a boy, she would tap them both on their blushing-bare shoulders, and whisper, Even in a world where Fly exterminates Human, this has not changed: that one person might find beauty in another.
THE DELIVERER
By the time I get home, it’s almost two a.m.
Echo is asleep on the couch.
In the kitchen, on the island counter, a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, fragments of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night spread all over the place. I guess he found the puzzle stash in the upstairs closet.
At least he’s done a little exploring.
Yesterday Echo got the grand tour: I started with the solar panels, then moved on to the ten-thousand-gallon harvesting tank; I showed him the garden, the chickens in their fortress-coop, and told him the whens and hows of my maintenance schedule, the calendar outlining feedings and plantings, harvestings and all necessary upkeeps. “This is just my system, though. You may come up with your own.”
Echo said nothing. Just stood there, looking around, a statue barely come to life.
I showed him how to work the stove and refrigerator. “Light begets light,” I said, flipping the kitchen light off, then back on.
Not a word.
We moved to the living room, the glass wall, and I pulled a record off the shelf, Miles Davis, showed him where to place the stylus, how to turn on the receiver. I showed him the water-filtration system. “This is the most important thing in the house,” I said, and told him the only way to survive was to stay healthy. “I consume only the water that comes through this filter. And I eat no meat. When the house is yours, you can do what you want. But I’m thirty-six and I’m alive.”
I took him downstairs, showed him the cavernous storehouse. We walked up and down the aisles of freeze-dried foods, lighters, medical supplies, cinnamon. I handed him the spreadsheets, showed him how to keep track of everything so it lasted. “You have three years of rations, if you’re smart about it.”
He never said a word.
And I began to see my house through new eyes: the bathroom was filthy, the water pressure not nearly what it once was; the cellar storehouse looked like a ransacked shell; and my circle in the rock wall—countless hours spent chiseling, creating—Echo didn’t even notice.
I watch him now, asleep on the couch.
The notes under most entries assure me that his silence is normal. A few Lives even theorize about the levity of the house, and how, even if we’d had someone to talk to in the early days, we most likely would have chosen silence too. Echo seems to prefer solitude, which, if not a prerequisite for living here, will surely work in his favor. And while my House by the Solar Cliffs cannot give him his old life back, it may, perhaps, give him a life back.
I should go to bed.
I should change out of the biosuit, shower, and sleep.
But I don’t. Instead I set my helmet on the coun
ter beside a thousand pieces of Starry Night, pull out a bottle of wine, uncork, and drink deeply. Straight from the bottle. Seize the fucking day, for tomorrow I say goodbye—to the wine, the showers, the eggs, all of it.
I pull out the third Red Book, flip it over. On the back cover, using a kitchen knife, I etch a line through the number 160.
Over and out.
“Godspeed, 161.”
I shut the Book, drink, stare up at the spot where the Architect had hung himself; I still see him clearly, his body in the late stages of decomposition. I think of the hours it took to get him down, to bury him in the backyard, and I think that word— decompose—lacks the proper gravity. A long, deep drink as it occurs to me that I will never know who he was, where he came from, why, how, or if he built this place. Was this his Noah’s Ark? He’d killed himself before the Flies hit North America, which made the Ark theory seem a bit extreme. But then he’d also produced a biosuit to withstand a swarm attack, so maybe. Probably, I’m overthinking it. Probably, he was just one in a long line of paranoid survivalists.
“You’re only paranoid until you’re right.”
Gulp the wine now, and whether it’s the presence of Echo, the knowledge of what tomorrow will bring, or the not-knowing what comes after, the essence of my eternal memory feels like a thread on a spool spinning in the wrong direction.
For years I’ve daydreamed of life after the Red Books; now it’s almost here, I can’t seem to summon those dreams, day or otherwise.
I sit at the kitchen counter, try to finish the puzzle.
I can’t finish the puzzle.
Fuck the puzzle.
Finish the bottle instead.
I should go to bed. But then, who would drink this second bottle of wine, which magicked itself from the cabinet? Uncorked now, down the hatch she goes. Almost three a.m., no matter. If there was ever a reason to get sloshed . . .
A sudden need for air, and so I take the bottle out the back door, and as I drink, I let the cold night drink me, and I wonder if nighttime fosters brooding, or if brooding brings the night. I pass the tank, and the Architect’s grave, a little trickle of wine on the snow, not too much. “You’re dead,” I mumble, “and the dead don’t thirst,” and I must be stepping all over Echo’s spring harvest, but c’est la vie, life goes on, Life after Life, and just a few more steps to the cliff now, that sheer drop, the tip of the upside-down V, the open air begging for someone to show the birds a thing or two—
Stop at the edge.
Drink, and drink the view.
Miles of uninhabited winter-white and dark green, a thousand-piece puzzle connecting the sky and stars and moon. Wine seriously tastes better from the bottle, but no matter how much I drink, I cannot shake the image of them jumping from this very spot, memories from one Life bleeding into another, and the more Lives I live, the sharper these transport imprints become, images from the early Lives, even, of gruesome survival before the house, and what’s the fucking point? Why am I here? Just a pawn in some elaborate orchestrated reality, doomed to live over and over again, and in so doing, never really live at all? I can’t stop the Flies, I can’t stop the Flu, all I have are my peripheral adjustments and this bottle of wine. Maybe the world is a record, and I’m a scratch on the vinyl, a cut in the concentric circles, doomed to play the same seven notes over and over again. Maybe the world needs to be picked up, let down in another place. Maybe it needs to move on from me, to be traded for something without so many scratches. There are times when I feel everything, and times when I feel nothing, and both seem equally painful, so which is it now, which is this, and shit, I’m drunk.
I look down at the multitude of solar panels, such great lengths the Architect had taken in the name of self-preservation—only to decide his self wasn’t worth preserving. And here, at the edge of the world, my kingdom in the clouds, I understand his final motivation. His untold want had been the same achievement of all creatures great and small: a proper ending. I throw my arms open, let the cold air have me, and I scream, wondering how many more numbers will be carved into the back of the Red Books before I achieve my own ending.
“Hey.”
It takes a second for the voice to register.
I turn to find Echo standing there, wind blowing through his hair, lips blue. Between the biosuit insulation and the second bottle of wine, I hadn’t realized how cold it was.
“You’re not going to jump, are you?” he asks.
I drink. Look from the view, back to him—shake my head.
A few seconds pass, then he says, “I have a question.” Our eyes connect and just when I think it’s coming, the question I’ve been dreading ever since first removing my helmet in front of him—Do I know you from somewhere?—his eyes lighten, and he says, “I need help finishing the puzzle.”
I take another drink, look up at the stars, and then back at him. “Not really a question. But okay.”
Inside, he puts on a pot of water for coffee. We piece Van Gogh back together, swirly stars, the moon like an eye, and I think how glad I am that my 153rd Life had thought to bring Echo here, how suited he is to this place.
“I’ve never done one of these before,” he says, wedging two pieces together. “How’s it feel once it’s finished?”
I open my mouth to say something—clip one piece of star into another—and smile. “It’s not really about the finished thing. More about the process of putting it together.”
I have asked the stars many questions; this is the first time they’ve answered.
NICO
Tracks
They’d gotten an early start, hoping to hit Manchester by midmorning. Seven tallies on her hand now. Tonight there would be eight, and her father would ring the Bell, and for better or worse, she would finally know the full extent of his un-blossoming.
Most of the walk so far had been spent in silence. Little more than how’d you sleep followed by good, you? It wasn’t shame or embarrassment that kept the pleasantries artificial; it was the light of day—the light of this day—that painted the events of last night in hazy shades.
They came to a place where three clustered bridges crossed to the east bank of the Merrimack: one, a paved road, clearly meant for cars; one, rotted wood, and narrower, most likely for people; and one for the train tracks. Nico and Lennon stood for a moment in front of this last bridge, watching the tracks disappear over the water into unknown lands on the other side. They held hands as Lennon said a few words, but all Nico could hear was Kit explaining crossties, and how there were people to build trains, people to drive trains, people to ride them, people to load them. I wish I could ride a train someday, he’d said that morning, in the shadow of the Cormorant.
“Maybe now you can,” she whispered.
Illuminations
Nico walked alone.
Twenty yards up, Harry trotted beside Lennon, two peas in a pod. She watched with mixed emotions and a bag devoid of jerky, bribery no longer an option. They began to play the Game, and when Harry ran ahead, Lennon turned, half smiled; her mixed emotions reunited, and she dreamed of a world where destinations were people instead of places.
Ahead, Lennon stopped walking, pointed at something to the west. “Look.”
Either this particular section of the river had brought them closer to the road, or vice versa, because when Nico looked where Lennon was pointing, she saw a large billboard between a gap in the trees:
NEXT EXIT
BLESSED CHURCH OF THE RISEN SAVIOR
NOW VOYAGER
“SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND”
“Like from Echo’s story,” he said, once Nico caught up to him. “When Voyager goes to Manchester, remember? The Bellringer, or whatever. He says that.”
Nico imagined her father, one hand through the railing of the attic deck, as if reaching for the trees. The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, he would
say. Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.
“It’s Whitman,” she said.
“What?”
Tell him.
And just when she thought she couldn’t, she opened her mouth and the truth fell out. As they walked, she told Lennon everything: how Echo’s story was one version of a story she’d heard her whole life; how her father had once been a geophysicist and, according to him, had worked for the government under the pretext of a company called Kairos to study a geological anomaly in a riverside mill; how, like Voyager, she had been sent to Manchester to find this anomaly; and how scared she was that it didn’t exist.
Lennon didn’t say anything at first. When he finally did speak, it wasn’t at all what she was expecting. “Did you know the ancient Greeks had two words for time?”
“How in the world do you know that?”
“I told you.” He held up his Boston skyline wristwatch. “Jean was obsessed with this stuff.”
“Okay.”
“So one of those words was chronos. Where we get the word chronological, a timeline the way we think of it. The other was kairos,” and Nico felt her face warm as Lennon explained how Kairos was the god of opportunity, how the word had evolved, how archers had begun using it to denote the exact moment in which an arrow should be fired in order to pierce its target with maximum force. “The opportune moment,” he said. “The kairotic moment. An opening in time.”
“What’s your point?”
“We just saw a sign that has a phrase from your dad’s story painted on it. We already know the Cormorant is real, and Echo’s mom told him the same story, so at the very least we know your dad wasn’t making it all up. I guess my point is—maybe it had to be this way. Maybe, if your dad told you the truth years ago, you would have tried to leave then, only it wouldn’t have been the right time. Maybe this is your kairotic moment.”
