The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  A tall fence, curved inward at the top, fixed into the top of the balustrade, had once formed a barricade around the perimeter of the platform; many sections remained, but not all. Alicia had saved a little water. She drank it now. How sweet it was, the scavenged rain. She experienced a profound sense of the interconnectedness of all things, the eternal rising and falling of life—how the water, which had begun as the sea, had ascended, gathered into clouds, and descended from the sky as rain, to be gathered in the pots she’d laid. Now it had become a part of her.

  Alicia sat on the balustrade. Below, on the outer side, was a small ledge. She rotated her body, using her hands to assist her disobedient legs over the rail. Faced away from the building, she scooted a few inches forward on the concrete until her feet touched the ledge. How did one do it? How did one say farewell to the world? She took a long breath and let the air out slowly. She realized she was crying. Not with sadness—no, not that—although her tears did not seem unrelated to sadness. They were tears of sadness and happiness conjoined, everything over and done.

  My darling, my Rose.

  Pushing with her palms, she drew herself erect. Space jumped away beneath her; she pointed her eyes to the sky.

  Rose, I am coming. I will be with you soon.

  Some might have said she fell. Others, that she flew. Both were true. Alicia Donadio—Alicia of Blades, the New Thing, Captain of the Watch and Soldier of the Expeditionary—would die as she had lived.

  Always soaring.

  Night came on.

  Amy was somewhere in New Jersey. She had left the main thoroughfares behind, moving into the wild backcountry. Her arms and legs were heavy, full of a deep, almost pleasurable exhaustion. As darkness fell, she made her camp in a field of winking fireflies, ate her simple supper, and lay down beneath the stars.

  Come to me, she thought.

  All around her, and all above, the small lights of heaven danced. A stout full moon rose from the trees, sharpening the shadows.

  I’m waiting for you. I’ll always wait. Come to me.

  A pure silence; not even the air was moving. Time passed in its languid course. Then, like the brush of a feather inside her:

  Amy.

  At the far edge of the field, in the boughs of the trees, she saw and heard a rustling; Peter dropped down. He had just eaten, a squirrel or mouse perhaps, or some small bird; she could feel his contentment, the rich satisfaction he had taken in the act, like waves of warmth washing through her blood. Amy rose as he moved toward her, passing among the fireflies. There were so many, it was as if he—as if the two of them—were swimming together in a sea of stars. Amy. His voice like a soft wind of longing, breathing her name. Amy, Amy, Amy.

  She raised her hand; Peter did the same. The gap between them closed. Their fingers meshed and fell together, the soft pressure of Peter’s palm against her own.

  Am I … ?

  She nodded. —Yes.

  And … I’m yours? I belong to you?

  She sensed his confusion. The trauma was still fresh, the disorientation. She tightened her fingers, pressing their palms together, and held his eyes with hers.

  —You are mine, and I am yours. We belong to each other, you and I.

  A pause, then: We are each other’s. You are mine and I am yours.

  —Yes, Peter.

  Peter. He held the thought for a moment. I am Peter.

  She cupped his cheek.

  —Yes.

  I am Peter Jaxon.

  Her vision swam with tears. The moonlit night was fantastically still, everything held in abeyance, the two of them like actors on a stage of dark wings with a single spotlight falling upon them.

  —Yes, that is who you are. You are my Peter.

  And you are my Amy.

  As she made her way west—and then for many years after—he was to come to her each night in this manner. The conversation would be repeated countless times, like a chant or prayer. Each visit was as if it were the first; at the start he retained no memory, either of the previous nights or of the events that had preceded them, as if he were a wholly novel creature in the world, born anew each night. But slowly, as the years became decades, the man inside the body—the essential spirit—reasserted itself. Never would he speak again, though they would talk of many things, words flowing through the touch of their hands, the two of them alone among the stars.

  But that came later. Now, standing in the field of fireflies, beneath the summer moon, he asked her:

  Where are we going?

  She smiled through her tears.

  —Home, said Amy. My Peter, my love. We are going home.

  Michael had cleared the harbor. Over the transom, the image of the city grew faint. The moment of decision was upon him. South, as he’d told Amy, or a new direction entirely?

  It wasn’t even a question.

  He tacked the Nautilus, turning in a northeasterly direction. The wind was fair, the seas light, with a gentle green color. The following afternoon he rounded the tip of Long Island and leapt into open sea. Three days after leaving New York, he made landfall at Nantucket. The island was arrestingly beautiful, with long beaches of pure white sand and crashing surf. There appeared to be no buildings at all, or none he could see; all traces of civilization had been swept away by the ocean’s hand. Anchored in a sheltered cove, he made his final calculations, and at dawn, he set sail again.

  Soon the ocean changed. It grew darker, with a solemn look. He had passed into a wild zone, far from any land. He felt not fear but excitement and, beneath this, a thrilling rightness. His boat, his Nautilus, was sound; he had the wind and sea and stars to guide him. He hoped to reach the English coast in twenty-three days, though perhaps that wouldn’t happen. There were many variables. Maybe it would take a month, or longer; maybe he’d end up in France, or even Spain. It didn’t matter.

  Michael Fisher was going to find what was out there.

  84

  Fanning came to awareness of his surroundings slowly, and in parts. First there was a sensation of cold sand on his feet; this was followed by the sound of waves, gently pushing upon a tranquil shore. After an unknown interval of time had passed, other facts emerged. It was night. Stars thick as powder lay across a sky of velvety blackness, immeasurably deep. The air was cool and still, as after a daylong rain. Above and behind him, atop a steep bluff of eelgrass and beach plum, were houses; their white faces shone faintly with the reflected light of the moon, which was ascending from the sea.

  He began to walk. The hems of his trousers were damp; he seemed to have mislaid his shoes, or else he had arrived in this place without them. He had no destination in mind, merely a sense that walking was something the situation called for. The unanticipated nature of his circumstances, its feeling of elastic reality, aroused in him no anxiety. Quite the contrary: everything felt inevitable, reassuringly so. When he tried to recall anything that might have happened prior to his being in this place, he could think of nothing. He knew who he was, yet his personal history seemed devoid of narrative coherence. There was a time, he knew, when he had been a child. And yet that period of his life, like all others, registered only as a collection of emotional and sensory impressions with a metaphoric aspect. His mother and his father, for example, resided in his memory not as individuated beings but as a feeling of warmth and safety, like being cradled in a bath. The town where he’d grown up, whose name he did not recall, was not a discrete civic unit of buildings and streets but a view through a window screen of rain pattering upon summer leaves. It was all very peculiar, not unsettling but simply unexpected, especially the fact that his adult life seemed almost completely unknown to him. He knew that in his life he had been happy, also sad; for a long time he had been very, very lonely. Yet when he tried to reconstruct the circumstances, all he remembered was a clock.

  For a great while, in this unforeseen and generally pleasant state of un-remembering, he made his way down the broad boulevard of sand at the water’s edge. The moon, havi
ng cleared the horizon, had ceased its upward arc. The tide was high, boastfully so, the sky immense. At length he became aware of a figure in the distance. For a time the figure grew no closer; then, with a telescoping quality, the gap began to narrow.

  Liz was sitting on the sand with her arms wrapped around her shins, gazing over the water. She was wearing a white dress of some diaphanous material, light as a nightgown; her feet, like his, were bare. He vaguely recalled that something had happened to her, very unfortunate, though he couldn’t say what that thing might have been; she had gone away, that was all, and now she had returned. He was happy, very happy to see her, and although she indicated no awareness of his presence, he felt very much as if she were expecting him.

  “Liz, hello.”

  She looked up at him; her eyes twinkled with starlight. “Well, there you are,” she said, smiling. “I was wondering when you’d get here. Do you have something for me?”

  In fact, he did. He was holding her glasses. How curious this fact was.

  “May I have them, please?”

  She accepted the glasses, turned her face once again toward the water, and put them on. “There,” she remarked, with a nod of satisfaction, “that’s much better. I can’t see a damn thing without them. All of this beauty was practically wasted on me, if you want to know the truth. But now I can see everything just fine.”

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you sit?”

  He lowered himself onto the sand beside her.

  “That is an excellent question,” Liz said. “The beach, would be the answer. This is the beach.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  She touched a finger to her lips. “Now, isn’t that funny. Even just a few minutes ago, I think I would have said for quite some time. But now that you’re here, it doesn’t seem like very much at all.”

  “Are we alone?”

  “Alone? Yes, I should think so.” She paused; a look of mischief came into her face. “You don’t recognize any of this, do you? That’s all right; it takes a little while to adjust. Believe me, when I first got here, I didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

  He looked around. It was true; he had been in this place.

  “I always wondered,” Liz continued. “What would have happened if you had kissed me that night? How would our lives have been different? Of course, you might well have, if I hadn’t gotten so drunk. What a self-pitying fool I made of myself. The whole thing was totally my fault from the get-go.”

  At once he remembered. The beach below her parents’ house on Cape Cod: that’s where they were. The place where, long ago, he had let life pass by, failing to say what his heart knew.

  “How are we … here?”

  “Oh, I think ‘how’ is not the question.”

  “What’s the question, then?”

  “The question, Tim, is ‘why.’ ”

  She was looking at him absorbedly. It was a gaze meant to comfort, as if he were ill. She had taken his hand in hers without his quite being aware it. It felt warm as a cup of tea.

  “It’s all right,” she said softly. “You can let it out now.”

  Suddenly his mind seemed to plunge. He remembered everything. The past reared up inside him, complete. He saw faces; he inhabited days; he lived the hour of his birth and each that followed. He felt as if he were choking; his lungs could find no air.

  “That’s all you have to do, is let it out.”

  She had put her arms around him. He was trembling, weeping, such tears as he had never wept in his life. All his sorrows, all his pain, the terrible things he’d done.

  “Everything is forgiven, my darling, my love. All is forgiven, nothing is lost. Everything you have loved will come back to you. That is why you have come.”

  He moaned and shook. He cast his cries upward to the heavens. The waves moved in and out in their ancient rhythm; the stars poured down their primordial light upon him.

  I’m here, Liz, his Liz, was saying. It’s over now, everything will be all right. Oh, beloved, I am here.

  It took some time. It took days, weeks, years. But this was unimportant. It would pass in a blink, not even. All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.

  XIII

  The Mountain and the Stars

  And thence we came forth, to see again the stars.

  —DANTE ALIGHIERI, INFERNO

  85

  “Shut it off,” Lore said.

  Rand stared at her, expressionless. They were on the engineering deck—heat stifling, air throbbing with the engines’ rhythmic roar. Rand’s broad, bare chest shone with sweat.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  They were down to their last ten thousand pounds of fuel.

  “Please,” Lore said, “don’t argue with me. It’s not like we have a choice.”

  Rand raised the radio to his mouth. “That’s it, gents. We’re powering down. Weir, switch the generator to the auxiliary bus—bilges, lights, and desalinators only.”

  A crackle, then Weir’s voice came through: “Lore said that?”

  “Yeah, she said it. I’m looking right at her.”

  A moment passed; the thrumming ceased, replaced by a low electrical hum. Above them caged bulbs flickered, failed, then, as if with reluctance, sparked back to life.

  “So that’s it?” Rand asked. “We’re dead in the water?”

  Lore had no answer to that.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it that way.”

  She made some vague gesture. “Forget it.”

  “I know you did your best. Everyone does.”

  She had nothing to say. They were twenty thousand tons of steel, drifting in the ocean.

  “Maybe something will still work out,” Rand offered.

  Lore ascended through the ship to the deck and climbed the stairs to the pilothouse. It was the morning of their thirty-ninth day at sea, the equatorial sun already blazing like a furnace. Not a breath of wind moved the air; the sea was absolutely flat. Many of the passengers were camped on deck, huddled in the shade of canvas shelters. On the charting table were the sheets of thick, fibrous paper on which Lore had run her final computations. The currents when they’d rounded the Horn had nearly stopped them cold; running at full throttle, they had barely powered through, huge waves blasting over the deck, everybody vomiting helplessly. They had made it eventually, but day by day, as Lore watched the fuel gauges drop, the cost grew painfully evident. They had stripped everything they could and jettisoned it into the sea: pieces of bulkhead, doors, the loading crane. Anything to reduce weight, to buy one more mile with the fuel they had. It wasn’t enough. They had come up five hundred miles short.

  Caleb entered the pilothouse. Like Rand, he was shirtless, the skin of his shoulders and cheeks flaking with sunburn. “What’s going on? Why did we stop?”

  From the helm, Lore shook her head.

  “Jesus.” For a second he seemed dazed, then looked up. “How long?”

  “We can keep the desalinators running about a week.”

  “And then?”

  “I really don’t know, Caleb.”

  He had the look of a man who needed to sit down. He took a place on the bench by the chart table. “People are going to figure it out, Lore. We can’t just turn off the engines and not tell them anything.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “We could lie, I guess.”

  “There’s an idea. Why don’t you come up with something?”

  Her sense of failure was overwhelming; she had spoken too curtly. “Sorry, you didn’t deserve that.”

  Caleb took a long breath. “It’s all right, I get it.”

  “Tell everyone it’s just a minor repair, nothing to worry about,” Lore said. “That should buy us a day or two.”

  Caleb stood and put one hand on her shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “I mean it, Lore. It’s just bad l
uck.” He tightened his grip, giving her a sharp squeeze that offered no comfort at all. “I’ll put the word out.”

  After he’d gone, she sat alone for a time. She was exhausted, filthy, beaten. Without its engines, the ship felt soulless, inert as stone.

  I’m sorry, Michael, she thought, I did everything I could, but it wasn’t enough.

  She dropped her face to her hands.

  It was late in the day when she descended into the hull. She met Sara as the woman was closing the door to Greer’s cabin.

  “How is he?”

  Sara shook her head tersely: not well. “I don’t see how thing can go on much longer.” She paused, then said, “Caleb told me about the engines.”

  Lore nodded halfheartedly.

  “Well, let me know if I can do anything to help. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.”

  “You’re not the first to say that.”

  When Lore said nothing else, Sara sighed. “See if you can get him to eat. I left a tray by his cot.”

  She watched the woman move down the passageway, then quietly turned the handle and stepped inside. The air had an unwashed smell of sweat and urine and sour breath and something else, like fermenting fruit. Greer was lying faceup on his bunk with a sheet pulled to his chin, his arms lying at his sides. At first Lore thought he was dozing—he slept most of the time now—but at the sound of her entry, he rotated his face toward her.

  “I wondered when I’d see you.”

  Lore drew a stool to the edge of the cot. The man was a shadow of a shadow, a shell of bones. His flesh, a sickly yellow, possessed a damp, translucent appearance, like the inner layers of an onion.

  “I guess you noticed,” she said.

  “Hard not to.”

  “Don’t try to cheer me up, okay? A lot of people are doing that, and it’s already getting old. Now, what’s this I hear about you not eating?”

  “Hardly seems worth the bother.”

  “Nonsense. Let’s scoot you up.”

  He was too weak to rise off the mattress on his own; Lore drew him to a sitting position and wedged a pillow between his back and the bulkhead.