The Time of Quarantine, page 16
Will’s first reaction was to be entertained.
And for a while—a long time really—he had been.
A man walks out of the desert to set in play an act of substitution and replacement so exact that no one even notices—really, who would not be impressed? Of course Will did not know—could not have known—that his own connection to the bald man’s arrival was not going to last, that in time he, too, was going to forget that there had ever been a physicist, lanky or not. He couldn’t have known this, and even if he had, there’d have been no way to circumvent it. For even as the next presenter launched into her research on famine trajectories, the memory of the man walking out of the desert was starting to fade.
And then the two women appeared, not together but simultaneously—the long-awaited poet, who arrived one morning in the midst of great commotion, and an otherwise phantom woman in gray, apparently manifest only to him. Everyone gathered to welcome the poet, who’d survived—incredibly—a night in the desert and a trip over roads that had not been passable in more than a quarter of a century. The poet—another replacement, but for whom?—arrived with a good deal of noise, dusty but animated.
Do I have a story to tell you, she’d exclaimed just before being whisked away.
But the woman in gray made no noise at all.
Will hardly believed in either of them at first, no more than he’d believed in Peter. How did they get here? But neither could the scientist in him dismiss the evidence as each was clearly persisting—the one, the poet, heartbreakingly young; and the other, ageless and remote, more a shadow—or idea—of a person than a real, corporeal being. More, Will thought, a sensation, for although she appeared to him often, as soon as she knew he had seen her—a very small woman in a modest gray suit and shimmering headscarf—she’d scurry away, but not before something, Will’s sensation, had passed between them. And then she’d be gone, as if she’d never been there at all.
At first Will had rejected the idea of her outright. Just back from his noon hour walk and late for a session, he’d been rushing, breathless and wet from dousing himself to wash off the sweat before going in, when he’d noticed her hovering just down the hallway.
Hovering, he thought, the word coming into his head as if from elsewhere.
More than usually dehydrated, Will pulled up short—a gray suit in this heat, a stranger, a woman. Impossible—he was hallucinating.
Maybe he should drink the water instead.
But no, she was still there, at the end of a corridor that led to an unfinished wing. And she was looking at him—Will was certain of that. She’d been looking the whole time—as he poured the water from the drinking pitcher over his head, then shook out his hair and wiped his face with the hem of his t-shirt. She’d watched him until he looked up, and then she had slipped away.
That was the first time.
In the days that followed, she was everywhere—or, there and then not, over and over, disappearing into areas of the complex that, like the balcony of his room, had yet to be constructed. Sometimes, she’d be waiting at the bottom of stairs that led nowhere, or beside a limp agave in blistering heat, at the bar when no one was looking. He’d seen her through windows, her face a transient moon, or poised on a stoop he knew for certain was not there—outside, was that Peter’s room?
Two things about her were constant: that she hovered and always wore gray.
The poet had her place at the table and was already everybody’s favorite. But the woman in gray appeared only to him, and if he wasn’t going mad altogether, seemed also to appear as if for him.
Soon, Will came to like it—her—or the sensation of her, that glimpse out the corner of his eye when he knew he’d been followed, the tiny agitation of the place where she had just been that stirred something deep in him. Not love—Will had never been in love that he knew. But maybe a little bit like love, the way she would be present all and only for him, the sly curve of her shoulder as she turned away, the shimmer of gray that persisted even when she was gone. How could Will say what it was? He had been to some parties as a boy or young man, had even kissed a girl on occasion, and had learned to imagine the bodies of women in his solitary acts of love. He had experienced desire. But in the end, he’d chosen numbers, which he’d found every bit as abstracted and provocative as the woman who haunted him now.
Will came to think of her as the woman in gray—all and only in gray, so utterly out of place on the compound as to seem imported, her charcoals and steels, gunmetals and pearls working, somehow, to contain her, not in the manner of Remainders, but yet so profoundly misaligned as to suggest that the body—her body—had its true location elsewhere. And in certain light, Will would have sworn, it left an afterimage, something he could almost—but not quite—touch.
Meantime, the bald man—Peter—persisted, unruly and undisciplined, challenging their protocols and reason. Sometimes all it took to derail an afternoon’s session was for him to look at the presenter, turning his gaze—sometimes hot, sometimes cool—toward whomever might be speaking, glancing skeptically from person to data. More often, he’d launch in himself, his voice cracking open and his skull throbbing weirdly, as keen for argument as Will was for walking. Then it wouldn’t matter who had the floor or how much time remained, Peter would go on and on, the torrent of words spewing out in tiny, sizzling surprises. Really, it was dizzying sometimes. Peter did like to talk—that much was clear—but it all came out in a rush, as if he had to say everything at once, and it sometimes seemed to Will that he’d never heard language used quite this way before, with little gaps between, urgent and loose with association, and ever more expansive as, unable to contain it, Peter himself grew huge. But not with meaning—something else, something old.
Others suspected him of being in collusion with the Foundation, but what kind of sense did that make? Since Peter arrived, nothing made sense—Peter, the one-man resistance team, but resistance to what?
Do the math, he’d say, grinning across the table at Will, the Foundation is screwed.
The Foundation, the leader countered acidly, is us.
Well, sure, Peter said, and that vain little artist you keep in your computer. How much did you pay for him anyway? Or them? Peter waved at the others. How much did you pay for all of them together?
Saying this, Peter smiled, but with something so beatific about him as to make the rest of them seem crudely stuck to their hypotheses and algorithms, their hapless, pedestrian facts, their sloth. And yet Will knew—he had looked—Peter had no research to share, nothing written on the pages in his portfolio, no data. Instead, he seemed to be there only to disrupt things, although, like the rest of them, he drank, and relished the tender, the succulent meats they were still served every meal with unabashed pleasure.
Sometimes, a blue parrot sat on his shoulder. Sometimes, his bald head pulsed.
And sometimes he plied Will with vodka, and sometimes the poet called Lyda drank with them.
Will liked that, liked having the poet around, who, unlike the woman in gray, was utterly corporeal and short on facts, although she had a certain knack for words. It wasn’t the words Will liked so much as her body, as solid and grounded, as frankly sensual as the other’s was fleeting, and when sometimes after dinner they stayed late in Peter’s room, he could not help but touch it—touch her—as furtively and often as he could, brushing her shoulder as he passed by for more ice, reaching out to pat her hand for added emphasis, helping her with her sweater when the night got cool. Each time, the body—the poet’s body, Lyda’s body—startled Will with its warmth and palpability, and he’d flush the same flush just the thought of the woman in gray could provoke in him now.
And Peter let them. More and more he let them touch and be touched by each other while he sat back holding forth—and watching.
Think of me as your token post-humanist, he told them one night, the glass wall of his room opened out to the world. Think of a rock as a rock; a shoe, a decaying remnant of something before. Imagine, he’d said, the archaeology of it—red spike heels, steel shanks, Vibram soles forever.
Will twisted the stem of his glass and forced himself not to look down at his own Vibram soles, worn to a smooth patina.
Shoes, Peter said—that’s what will be left when we’re gone.
Numb from the vodka and fatigue, Will looked out on the desolate valley that, emptied of people, was achingly beautiful—until the phantom woman appeared among the rocks.
Peter speared the fat stuffed olive in his drink and popped it in his mouth, clearly savoring the moment before adding, almost as an afterthought, what would you do if you were the last man on earth?
Or woman, Will thought, on the verge of asking Peter about his apparition, but what could he possibly say—look there, the one dressed in gray only I can see? Instead, he just bent to kiss the top of Lyda’s head and left for bed.
Not that Will could sleep these days, preoccupied and baited.
And so he took to walking more and more each day, harder and farther and deeper out into the washes, up the ravines, down to the floor of the valley where he would set a punishing pace across the parched crust of earth and try to imagine it green, with trees. But it never mattered where he’d gone or how late he was getting back, the woman in gray would be waiting for him, poised like an animal and set to dart off. Sometimes, he tried to lure her out, leaving sessions early or following traces of jasmine through unused portions of the compound. It got to where even the idea of her was enough to excite him.
Oh, Will thought, ok. But it wasn’t, because he could not—he could not—stop thinking about her, wanting her, the delicate knot of gray silk at the nape of her neck, the discreet turn away at his glance.
A few times, he tried to engage her. He’d wave, calling out, hot enough for you? He tried to be friendly. The same grave regard, the same subtle evasion.
Once he tried to grab her, just the wrist, to see if she’d stop. It wasn’t a violent gesture, only impulsive—stay, who are you? But then for several days she didn’t appear at all.
Will knew he’d have to say something soon, but when he did, it only made things worse.
Her? Peter said, when Will finally asked. She’s just a court reporter, what did you think?
A what? Will didn’t know quite how to respond.
Oh, you know, a person who writes down what other people say.
They were sitting, all three of them, in Peter’s room again, their six legs slung over the ledge where the balcony was supposed to be, and Peter was giving them vodka again much better than the vodka they could get at the bar, although where he managed to get it, Will didn’t even want to know. He didn’t want to know now, either, about the court reporter. That Peter saw her too was not so surprising, although it could make him jealous if he thought about it too much. But he found the idea of her transcribing their words deeply unsettling for no reason he could say. The concept of a personal privacy was so obsolete by then it would have been naïve to assume they were not being recorded, down to their asides and hems and haws—he’d probably signed consent forms even before his initial application was complete. But the idea of a human mediation, which he knew to be fallible, was archaic, and it bothered Will. It really did.
Until he considered her hands—the clots of the sounds of the syllables that formed in his mouth moving through the tips of her fingers—and something not entirely unpleasant shifted inside him.
But where were they keeping her anyway? Where did she go?
Beside him, Peter was wearing a worn gauzy shirt and shorts as brief as the play clothes of a child, revealing thighs as smooth and poreless as his scalp, the little round knobs of his knees pulled taut and white. Not a hair on his body, Will noted.
You spent too much time at that think tank of yours, Peter said. Didn’t they ever let you out?
Will shrugged, looking up uneasily. Isn’t that what the sensors are for?
Have you even talked to her? I know she wants to talk to you.
Saying this, Peter looked strangely restrained, as if he might go on, but then did not.
What I’d give for a fiddle right now, Will said.
Lyda placed her warm hand on his thigh. What reporter?
As she spoke, the moon eased from behind the last clouds, flooding the valley with light and Will with a sanguine feeling. Right or wrong, for just this moment, the woman in gray was nowhere and the world was peaceful and lovely. Just for the moment, hardly more than a heartbeat, Will could accept, be content with, all this and only this—the heat of the vodka inside him, the moon, Peter benign to one side and Lyda, hot, to the other. Then Will emptied his mind even of that as a powerful serenity flowed through him that left him feeling keenly—unnaturally, perhaps, but nonetheless potently—alive, made both conscious and coherent by the ever diminishing space between two points in which everything remains not just possible but necessary.
Maybe, he thought from nowhere, they should just take a Ranger and go.
Not yet, Peter said.
What?
He means, Lyda said.
Stick with me, Will said. I’m in charge of the variable.
She won’t hurt you, Peter said.
The olives had a peppery bite—jalapeno?—the vodka, smooth and icy. With nothing else to do, Will kept on drinking until Peter seemed, again, a man like other men, and Will’s vision of him walking out of the desert no more unlikely than this new one of them walking back into it.
By the time Will finally found her in the tiny inside corner of his computer screen, it seemed to him he’d looked for her everywhere—behind the diaphanous screen on which they projected their presentations, inside pocket walls, just above or below the last finished floors. By now, he’d grown attached to the idea of her, everywhere and nowhere, the woman and her stenograph machine, a blur of precision on the arc of the sound of their words—his words—as they worked their way into her perfect cup of ear—spiralling through its outer shell and dark inner chambers, over the miniscule bones, up the throbbing auditory nerve to her cerebral cortex, then back down her slender neck and arms to hands that transcribed the world. Will had imagined all this, but he had never, not once, imagined her so close—inside his small computer screen where she’d replaced the little artist just as surely as Peter had replaced the lanky physicist no one remembered.
The woman’s sudden appearance there, just to the left of his hand in the corner of the image—but only his—reduced the proceedings to a distant murmur. That can’t be. But there, indeed, she was, sitting erect in her tiny chair, legs primly crossed at the heels, and with a tiny table before her where she typed on a tinier machine. But she wasn’t really typing, Will knew—something else. Will tried to imagine what it might be like, taking his own words apart in his head, disassembling them into their different parts, but stripped of cogent sound and meaning, they were nothing but noise. How did she do it, he wondered?
Seeing her there, it was hard not to touch her—to lift his smallest finger and place it on her body, but she was so small he didn’t want to hurt her. And, on the other side of the table, Peter was watching.
You don’t have any idea how lucky you are, the leader was saying. Things are bad out there. Use your sunscreen, wear a hat—by law, you’re Foundation investments.
Below, the woman smiled, but the smile seemed to belong to another time and world. Now Will could see how easy it was to have missed her, reduced to such a tiny node of light and motionless save for the flutter of her extraordinary fingers across the surface of her miniature machine, reducing their proceedings—Will himself—to nothing more than insensible syllabic code—dth, uunnng, phlaat.
But it wasn’t like that, Will knew. It wasn’t like that at all.
Then she did move—such a slight movement, maybe not even a real movement. But no, she’d uncrossed and re-crossed her ankles, realigning her body into an exact mirror image of its prior self, and in that moment another image came to Will—not the image, not even the idea of the image, but the thing itself—of him on the inside of the computer screen touching her.
And this was how it happened that Will found himself kneeling before her at last as she continued her transcription oblivious of him, his hands on her knees, sheathed by the sheerest of stockings, and then on the collar of her gray blouse, and then—so softly it barely even counted as a touch—on the snaps at the bands on her wrists and what lay beneath.
Afterwards, he could not wait for this to happen again.
In the days that followed, Will like to imagine her in a real court, her posture perfect, her demeanor as fixed and unobtrusive as any court reporter, but with her extraordinary fingers doing to the outer world what they had done, already, to him. Will imagined her head bowed discreetly toward the floor, her eyes averted, demure but determined as the flutter of her hands pressed ever forward in a kind of duet between her and the attorney, the one the silent partner to the other who was speaking, or a call and response, that must have sometimes felt a little bit like sex.
And then, because now he could not stop himself, he would slip back to find her.
At first, their lovemaking had been confined to the small computer screen embedded in the sculptured conference table, made ever more extravagant and poignant by the dire presentations going on above and the severity of Helen’s gray wardrobe. They began without words, using, mostly, their hands, the uncanny movement of skin against skin, like another language altogether. Neither one of them had ever encountered such articulate hands, and while their tongues would grow swollen and clumsy inside them, their bodies trembled from the fluency of a single touch—one finger—so delicate it hardly counted as physical touch.
