by Exurb1a
I woke up hungover the next morning and went walking through the city for a bit. Actually it was quite lovely, I decided – forests and parks in unexpected places, the men handsome, the women gorgeous, sidestreets brimming with improvised art. I bought some cigarettes for the first time in three years and had a smoke sitting on a monument somewhere near the main university.
An email came in, a reply from the author of the article. No pleasantries, just: “Tonight 7:30,” and a map location, a bar a few miles away from my hotel. I had dinner somewhere, I forget, went back to the hotel and put on the plainest clothes I could find and tried to look as unkempt as possible. Found the place easily enough.
The bar was full and loud and I thought about turning around. A group was sat on a bench outside smoking, already half-cut. “Dr. Hare,” someone called out, a guy in his late twenties with a head like an egg. He introduced himself as the author of the article.
“You’re uglier in real life,” he said.
“Thanks. I only came here to tell you to go fuck yourself. So, go fuck yourself.”
“Great. Is that everything?”
I stood without moving, unsure what to say next. The music blared from inside. Dick-features nodded to the table. A drink was already waiting for me. I sat down.
No one else at the table seemed to mind me being there. Dick-features knew quite a bit about my research already and asked a few basic questions. I told him all about the burial research grant and the renewed EU interest in Thrace and all that and he listened for a while, then interrupted with some dumb rant about the EU taking advantage of smaller countries. The rant continued into the five-minute mark. His friends stopped talking and turned to listen and he raised his voice. I realised I was not there as a nemesis, but an ear.
“…just another example of someone less skilled coming in and taking a good Bulgarian academic's job and-”
“Are you going to let him speak, or just talk him to death?” said a girl from the other end of the table. Dick-features betrayed a small hint of shame. The girl was absurdly beautiful, to me anyway. Pale, dark-haired, freckled, the kind of eyes that were totally unreadable. Her accent was thick but more out of apathy than lack of practice.
“Umm,” I murmured. “I get it. There are plenty of good archaeologists here. But look, this is my speciality. I'm the only foreigner on the project at the moment. Any findings will go straight to the Bulgarian government.”
“Why are you interested?” dick-features said.
“Well…” I started.
“He doesn't think they're burial mounds,” the girl said. “Not enough human remains were found inside. He thinks they're part of some other religious ceremony.”
“Right,” I said. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. Obviously she’d read one of my papers. I wasn't used to Brits doing that, let alone a Bulgarian. “The mounds and tombs don't follow a set design. You'd expect them to if they're just for burying the dead. Something else might be going on.”
“Like what?” dick-features muttered. “Aliens?”
“Probably not aliens, no. Something unusual though.”
“Well great. You must be so much smarter than us stupid Balkan peasants. Thank God you-”
“If you'd actually bothered to finish your MA, maybe you'd have the funding instead,” the girl snapped at dick-features and switched to Bulgarian for a minute or two and delivered what sounded like a fairly stern demolition of his character. The language was actually quite lovely-sounding, I decided. Dick-features said something unpleasant back, then went inside. The conversation returned to normal and everyone stayed in Bulgarian. I sat there for a few minutes feeling wicked uncomfortable, invisible suddenly. Then I finished my beer and stood to make back to the hotel. The pale girl came around the table and took dick-features' place, introduced herself as you.
“I don't think you're right, but your working is good,” you said.
“Cheers.”
Your eyes were still unreadable, but intense as hell. They didn't waver or wander off while you spoke, just tore in like little brown hooks.
“I'm sorry about him. Don't take it personally,” you said.
“It's fine. You read my paper?”
“Enough to get the idea.”
“Why?”
“They were all bitching about you. I wondered how bad it was. I didn't think it was so terrible.”
You were a mathematician not long out of your PhD, working in geophysics at the time. Brain circuits kicked in, the ancient ones – trying to work out if you had a boyfriend, trying to work out if you were taking more than an academic interest in me. You and dick-features had dated a while but his drinking became a problem, you said. He came out briefly, noticed you in his spot, and stared daggers at me. So that felt pretty good.
Four beers in and you developed a halo. You knew as much about Copernicus as you did Rammstein, liked David Lynch, hated astrology. I sensed an education was coming.
Which was exactly what I got. Your friends went home around one and we stayed up until the next morning. You drank me under the table. The witty ripostes died off in the first few hours and we turned to arguing about politics. I decided you knew your stuff, and perhaps not all of it was posturing. Just the vast majority. Marx was smart, you said, but shouldn’t be taken literally. Engels was clunky and outdated. Emerging digital technologies would bring about a resurgence in communism and do away with all the bureaucracy. And so on and so on and so on…
You took me down backstreets, to bars needing passwords for entry, to restaurants open all night, to nightclubs where the music worked in polyrhythms – Balkan stuff, and most of the alcohol was strong and unfamiliar. Every street had some historical significance. This is where so and so was shot. Whatever her name was lived and died in that apartment.
Maybe it was the context or the alcohol, I don’t know – but the city swam into proper focus. It was bearable, even likeable. No, I loved it.
You wouldn't reveal anything personal whatsoever, just parried the question and changed the subject. Talk of how capitalism might not be the worst thing in the world was met with an eye roll and a rant about some angry Slovenian philosopher. So that's how you knew dick-features and the others, it turned out. They weren't all archaeologists, they were communists, the new digital sort who went to meetings in shared workspaces. Back then I had no idea communism was largely unpopular with the Bulgarian youth. Your crowd was more niche than I realised, you especially.
I tried to hold my tongue but booze got the better of me. Right, I said, and what about the millions of people communism killed last century?
Oh, you said. That was people, not communism.
Right. Okay.
Besides, you said. If you want to use that argument, what about the millions of people capitalism killed with its oil wars and sweatshops?
I sensed a trick was in progress but couldn't tell what it was. This is how people are convinced by new ideas, I decided. Not with logic and decent arguments, but by someone being pretty and compelling enough, or sufficiently older than you, or smarter, or wiser. What dumb monkeys we all still are, huh. And I was yet another one. I caught myself agreeing with your position now and then. That was the beginning of the stripping of my foundations.
By sunrise we weren't being all that nice anymore, but sweet Jesus you were beautiful; the streetlights colouring your cheeks a dirty orange and bringing out your dimples. We sat by the National Palace of Culture and drank beer after beer after beer. The sky was radioactive pink and the city was deserted. All ideals were possible in that hour. The future was Lego pieces waiting to be snapped together into something infinite and perfect that would never hurt or get boring.
“That was fun, see you around,” you said suddenly and strolled off around seven. No warning, no mention of needing to be somewhere, nothing.
What had I done wrong? I should’ve ribbed you more, I decided. Towards sunrise I’d started agreeing too much, letting my guard down. You got off o
n adversity. I realised that back then already.
All your heady political stuff had been charming the night before, but the second you left it just made me angry. I liked you too much already.
I wrote a sarcastic email the next evening inviting you out again in a sort of roundabout way so it didn’t sound desperate. I deleted it after some thought. No, fuck it - I wasn't going to be pathetic.
I flew back and worked my arse off for the next six months and thought about you maybe a few times. I found you online and followed your research. The parts I could understand were certainly interesting enough, using a new type of ultrasound to map out ancient buried structures, then modelling the results with a clever algorithm of your own creation.
One day dick-features wrote a particularly inflammatory article about how the European Union was pushing its anti-human agendas in the form of money lending. I signed up for an account with the newspaper’s website under an alias and wrote something like, “If you don’t like it, feel free to leave. We won’t miss you.”
The next day you dropped me an email after following the comments section, I guess: “Still sucking Adam Smith’s dick, I see.”
“He had nicer hair than Stalin. You knew it was me?” I wrote back.
“Obviously. Are you back in Bulgaria?”
A moment to plan a strategy. Then a small geographical lie: “Yes.”
“Want to trade insults?”
“Yup.”
I booked a flight for the next morning.
We didn’t do unpleasant pleasantries that time around. I went to your place.
You were infinitely more reachable in bed than out of it. Clothes off, you made passing remarks about your family, about your overbearing mother and your political father. No surprise with the latter. You even asked me sincere questions about my life once or twice.
I went out to get coffee and those weird rolls with spinach you all eat and we had breakfast in bed. No talk of Marx or Engels.
You took a nap on my arm. I smelled your hair a bit. Jasmine and some exotic spice. My stomach was full of jostling needles. With great disgust I realised I was happy.
Out the window and the streets were grey and the paving slabs were muddled. The taxis violated every traffic law competitively with each other, it seemed. The mountain watched the whole scene from a reasonable distance. I had fallen in love, I decided, with this unlikely city. Like loving a woman, it wasn’t something in particular that sent one over the edge. It was a conspiracy of many factors that by themselves were unremarkable, even ugly sometimes. But together they fit seamlessly into a beautiful geometry, the kind of geometry that had been waiting there all along; grey streets, muddled slabs, all of it. And below all that in Sofia, amid the people, in the culture, waited a bubbling and old appreciation for classical art, for honest love, for arguments in the street, for beer. This was not England. It was something realer and weirder and far more gorgeous.
And there was you of course, lending your sheen to everything. I was afraid suddenly, afraid now I knew I was reliant on you staying in my life.
That point, that minute, was the beginning of the good days, of still thinking of each other as fun enigmas, when everything had a wisp of mystery to it. I started flying over every other week. We learned the language of each other, slowly, and I tried learning your country's language too. (Gendered numbers: yes, that seems like an entirely reasonable way to construct grammar...)
You would only answer personal questions on your own terms, when you decided. You preferred screwing in the morning to the evening. You adopted a street dog when you were little called Venera, but she was run over a few months later. You told me you had no middle name but this was a lie and it was Boyanova. Just before you fell asleep, you’d sometimes tell me you loved me. This was on very special occasions, but I waited in anticipation most evenings anyway.
Like all your stuff left behind in the house, all your mannerisms are here too: how you made your tea, hung your coat, blew your nose.
Did you leave me, Polly?
If you left me, fuck, just write and say so. I’ll cope somehow.
But this. This is unbearable.
B x
4.
The Navigator pulled his selfsense out of Argie.
“There’s more,” she said.
“I’ve seen enough.” The timepass tea had started to wear off. The world was moving at a normal pace again. “So, your daughter ran for the hills, did she? Did a bunk like all the other infants?”
Argie stared at the sleeping dream fountain. “Something like that.”
The Navigator lit a cigarette. “They’re not like us, the new infants.”
“But she was made from my selfsense.”
The Navigator shook his head. “That really doesn’t matter. Think about it. You’re an Original Migrant. You might not remember coming in here-”
“I don’t.”
“And neither do I, but something persists in us, deep down in the selfsense. Something left over from the sapien days. These manufactured infants, they’re made fresh. No monkey tendencies hiding down in their psychology. Your infant escaped to the upper tiers, didn’t she?” Argie nodded. “Same as all the others. They stick around for a while, try to make the best of it. But imagine all the stories they hear about Lemuria, or Indigo. If someone told you about heaven, wouldn’t you want to go? And that’s why you want to travel up-tier, isn’t it? To find her.” Argie went to speak. The Navigator put up a hand. “I should tell you that even in the unlikely event we do find her, she won’t come back with us. You understand that don’t you?”
“I’m her mother,” Argie said quietly.
“And what do you think that means to her now? Fuck all, I guarantee it. How much allegiance would you give to a germ? That’s what we are from her perspective these days.”
“And what do you know about it?”
“More than I’m comfortable with. You’ve never been to the upper tiers. You can’t imagine how it is up there. They’re building heaven.”
Heaven, Argie thought. A sapien concept: the promise of eternal life beyond death. Only natural that their descendants should actually try to build the damn thing. “If you were in my position you’d do the same,” she said.
“If I was ignorant, yes. Unfortunately I’m not.”
A pregnant silence held out. “Are you Indigo or Lemurian?” Argie said finally.
The Navigator turned to her with tired eyes and his entire body seemed to give up its rigidity and he dropped the cigarette into the ashtray, still burning. Then in a gravel voice: “My deep history is gone, same as yours. All I can remember is patches of Indigo. I lived there a long, long time. I’ve heard what you lot think of it. You’re not always wrong. The denizens up there eat music and smell light. Sometimes they merge their thoughts. Other times they spend a thousand years alone in burrows of their own making and bury down into some mathematical problem without distraction. Time moves at least a factor of ten faster than down here. Plus, whole sectors are made up of denizens too altered to reintegrate with the general population. They’ve cut out their language faculty, or supercharged it; expanded their selfsenses, or shrunk them. Some spend a thousand years as a stone or a nebula just to find out how it feels.”
“How can anyone be a nebula?”
“Have you given even a second to thinking about what you are, really? On a fundamental level? Everything is beyond comprehension when you get deep enough. Nebulae are the least of it. I did my time among the stars as a red giant, a white dwarf. I spent a century as an ocean just to know the land. I spent a century as the land just to know the ocean. I met my lover in the atmosphere of a gas giant. We spent millennia in its eddies. She was exotic, even for an Indigo. She only spoke in light. It got me curious about modifying senses, so I chose that path. There are surgeons up there, you know. They’ll turn you into any creature you can imagine, cover you in a thousand eyes, ten million arms.”
“Yet here you are down here, in t
he Ape Cellar…”
“Even paradise has its rules. One in particular will get you kicked out without hesitation. My lover and I grew curious about fully merging our selfsenses into a unity. True love, ha ha.”
“How?”
“Don’t ask me about the specifics, it’s complicated, but certainly theoretically possible. Plenty of Indigos have tried. Both selfsenses are merged with one another, memories, inclinations, aspirations, all of it. That's the idea anyway.” He let that settle.
“And?” Argie said.
The Navigator sighed. “Whatever runs Indigo has eyes everywhere, it seems. The procedure was detected before it had even begun. Immediate exile. And so here I am in this primitive toilet of a tier. They took most of my memories as penance; my lover, all of it. Her face is gone, her name too. It’s closer to trying to remember a dream now. Every day a little more of it escapes me.”
“That’s barbaric. How can they-”
“They do what they like. I knew the rules. Enjoy paradise, they said. Just stay away from the fucking apples. We heard their warning and still ate from the tree. They're worried about the death of individuality, I suppose. Imagine if they all merged. It’d be the end of Indigo. Probably the end of the whole of Arcadia too, given long enough.” He tried to smile cheerfully. “Still, a little of my time there is with me. Enough to remember how to get around.”
“I’m sorry,” Argie said gently.
“Likewise,” The Navigator replied. “Because you won’t get your daughter back, however hard you try. If you can accept that before we dive into all of this then it’ll be much easier when it heads south.”
“So you’ll take me?”
