The Time of Quarantine, page 18
Behind them, solid and completely corporeal, Lyda watched without judgment as the woman expanded in space. She was smaller than normal, with a bland countenance and shapely head, bald beneath her gray silk scarf. Another one, Lyda thought, but what she said, after a decent pause, was, ok. Then, not unkindly, you can’t go in those. And she turned to rummage in her pack until she found a gray sweatshirt and pants, which she tossed, also not unkindly, to the woman, saying, please hurry, we don’t have much time.
Moments later, the three of them were running out across the grounds of the compound, the fleet barefooted woman in gray leading the way and Lyda and Will jogging heavily behind, weighted down with small packs and the parrot in a cage shaped like a bell. They wore thin, wicking garments and light running shoes but, made clumsy by the things they carried, stumbled along the rocky ground while the woman in gray ran on ahead, swift and light and seeming to hover just a hair above the earth, toward where Peter was waiting beside a Ranger—for them.
HELEN
Helen wants not to hover. More than anything, she wants her feet to go all the way to the earth, touch the dirt there like Will’s and Lyda’s, sending up little puffs of chemical laden dust and making small sounds—boom, boom, boom. Helen wants to be subject, like them, to gravity, but in her mind, there’s a split that divides each moment of running—step by step—into a separate moment of hovering, along with the knowledge that no matter how closely she attaches herself to it, there will always be another layer above, beneath—a layer, she knows, and a gap—the gap between moments, consciousness, body, earth. And this—this impossible suspension—has been going on ever since she left the courtroom with Peter in a kind of perpetual division, each moment separated from the moment before and after, each defined by the space that surrounds it, or as if she has entered her own moment of transcription where things can fold seamlessly together and fully be.
In fact, she imagines, it could be a state of grace, although it doesn’t feel like that—not yet, anyway. Something more has to happen first.
Now, as she runs, she lifts one hand to the crown of her dusty head and tries to stop, with her singular touch, the circular thinking that begins and ends exactly here and that includes, before the screen and the man who pulled her from it, the trial, the defendant, his gaze, and before even that, Remainders, the rabbit, the lettuce, the father, the heart-wrenching sounds of the dying of the world. It’s not a line but a circle, and it’s cumulative, layer after layer.
But the thinking goes on and on, and after a time, the running stops instead, as Helen’s pulled up short by the curious thought: she could come to like it.
Helen looks down at her hands: what would happen if she were to clap them, as if to call out, enough, enough of this for you. But because she also understands that nothing she can do will change the course of what is going to happen now—will restore the world to what it was before Peter lured her into his portal and then, with a barely discernible shift in her consciousness, out into this, she does nothing. Her hands do not clap. They hang at her sides. She just stands there instead, hardly even breathing, as the others catch up and she whispers, it’s just over the hill now, and then we can go.
Go where, no one thinks. They can’t think this because it has already happened that for them there remains just the span of this one, long night, by the end of which there will be stars, or not. Each, in her own way, knows this. And even if the morning finds them wandering lost and alone in the desert without water, they will still have the solace of having left. Lyda is so young it can’t mean yet to her what it means to the others—the going. But it means—and looking at her now, Helen sees this—something else, like falling.
In this moment, with the Foundation Ranger waiting just over the hill and the other two people beside her—new people, still flush from running—the wind in Lyda’s hair, the earth thumping soundly beneath Will’s feet, their conjoined breath—Helen feels more unsettled than at any time since the day her father sent her off to camp and said—his parting words—ok kiddo, you’re on your own now, but you should really do something about that hair.
The hair fell out, clump after clump. Later, the noise came in.
It was a curse, Helen saw now, to be sensitive. But hadn’t she always felt like this?
There were things she could still remember from before. She could remember her mother’s hairbrush that was made from the actual bristles of boars, with bits of straw-colored hair caught in its teeth, remnants of her mother’s body. She could remember a ring, a deep green stone anchored by four small diamonds that was very, very old. She could remember the shape of her mother’s shoulders, the tuneless humming as she’d walked away—but that, Helen knew, was the memory capsule, still working in her. For how could she remember that, when she had been so young?
And of course she remembered her father’s tomatoes. Sometimes it just seemed sad, him and his backyard tomatoes, year after year, the digging, the watering, the initial hopefulness, as though he somehow believed if he could produce even one vine that did not wither before the fruit grew plump and plentiful, where hummingbirds swarmed, he could make it up to her, the lack of a mother, who had only ever wanted to protect her. But no place in the next part of the history of the world was going to be safe, and the tomatoes did die, and Helen’s mother did what she did, and all her father ever grew successfully was lettuce. He grew it and the rabbit ate it and he went on watering his failed tomatoes long after they had shrivelled and collapsed. In the wind the dried stalks rustled, the first of Helen’s sounds.
If only Helen’s father had not given up so soon, if he’d tasted even one of the few small tomatoes that actually did grow (she had and they were sweet), however misshapen or splotched, maybe her own life would be different. Helen did not go so far as to think her adaptation might have failed or that he might even have allowed her to have it reversed (there were ways to do that now), but maybe she’d have ended up in another, more youthful boarding house, full of people with futures and plans. Maybe she’d have gotten farther in the pull-down training menu, well beyond C to maybe “mechanic,” “pugilist,” “solicitor.” She might have been a writer, like Lyda.
Reporting hadn’t been that bad, though, for a job. It was ok, until Peter. Even Peter was ok, but seeing him now, in the desert, waiting to herd them together into the air-conditioned comfort of the stolen Ranger, Helen wonders what she’s missed. There’s a word that might help, if she could only call it up. It’s floating out there just beyond her reach of mind, elusive in that space between being and not-being that constitutes, for her, a split of consciousness. And then it comes to her.
Apart, she thinks. A man apart.
It’s amazing, Peter says, how great the capacity for human adaptation really is. You don’t know, you can’t have any idea, Peter says.
But of course Helen can. And they both know it.
Maybe it’s not so long since he led her from the courtroom, down the vertical walls of the building and out through the trees. Not so long, anyway, as all those years when he’d eluded infrared detection before coming out—impossibly—whole. But if everyone else in the world found the idea of him loathsome, Helen, at least, appreciated how his body so fitted the dimensions of the space it occupied as to create a node of perfect silence. Wherever Peter was, no sound leaked out, none at all, although sometimes, Helen noticed, there was light. How beautiful he is, Helen sees now, and again the brainy light that fills his head, brightest in the back where his adaptation has attached, like a tiny jewel or decoration—or a tattoo.
No, not just beautiful—powerful—a powerful beauty.
And suddenly the night and the valley and the earth beneath their feet seem tenuous as never before, anchored by the two southern mountains—one white, one black—each the negative image of the other.
For now Helen remembers everything at once—how in the middle of the trial, her hands, without warning, had gone heavy and inert in an uncanny interruption that was not so much a glitch as a pause and that affected everyone at once. A lawyer gesticulated mid-air, another fiercely frowned. And Helen’s hands—her own never still hands—lay motionless before her, stalled in the courtroom stripped of sound and motion and as if without a will of their own. Only Peter moved, and he moved like water, letting loose his restraints and rising from his plexi dome to release her, forever—to choose her, forever. Helen remembers his smile, tender and benign, just before he let loose his second wave of virus, the one that piggybacked on her own courtroom transcripts to delete all trace and memory of them.
And then they were gone.
Ok? he seemed to say, like a boy who had asked for a dance.
And now he waits at the cab of the Ranger, watching them approach—Helen, hovering, Will and Lyda—the one who threw the baggy clothes at her and the other who pulled her from inside the machine—cumbersome and lumbering, but they’ll do. Will looks sturdy enough—stable—his edges finite, grounded. And Lyda is good with words. They’ll both do. They are properly aligned. They fill up their spaces, not as well, as fully, as Peter but enough.
But yet, how human they look, Helen thinks with a shock of recognition, how terribly vulnerable.
THE RANGER
They drive a long time in the air-conditioned comfort of the Foundation Ranger, high above the crusted surface of the earth. They drive in silence, each avoiding the other, the world going by mile after mile on the outside, while on the inside, it is cool and muffled, like sleep. Maybe, Will thinks vaguely, Lyda’s fissure will be finite. Or maybe, Peter will let him drive. Will would like that—he’d head south, toward the white mountain. He’d get them out of here.
In cup holders to the side of each seat, blue water bottles glisten—one each, and maybe some stray ones in the back. Ahead, the two bald heads rise like moons from the headrests, and in the wells between seats, two GPS modules, apparently scrambled. From time to time, Will fidgets with his, but the data remains a garbled sludge of code.
Leave it alone, Helen says at last. You can’t fix it now.
Shush, Peter warns.
They drive and drive. Around them, the earth breaks and folds, the reds and ochres of it washed gray in the moonlight.
Once, long ago, she and Will had gone out together. They’d taken a Ranger—maybe this very one—and driven all the way to dunes made of ash. Helen remembers this now, remembers following him up the silky dune, digging her feet in as hard as she could to make the powdery substance from deep inside the earth fall away from her as it did from him, the whole universe shifting around him. But no, not a mark, not a single print, as if her feet had found the exact steps of his, fitting herself to them—or as if she had no mass at all.
And on that other, final night, when the stars started crackling, Helen hadn’t wanted to leave. Lie here, she had thought, with me, and it won’t take long. Freedom is as close as your nearest major vein. For this was still the kind of thing that could break Helen’s heart—the damp crust of sand at Will’s eyelids, the clicking of his teeth when he bent to kiss her, data, the thought of his bones, burnished by sun, cupped in the low bowl of this lethal place.
But now the driving seems endless, as though the valley people had once crossed on foot or in an hour were somehow expanding, the lip of its edge receding forever ahead as, all around them, a subtle darkness pulls and pushes.
Peter says that distances in the desert are deceptive.
A low humming runs through the van.
When the Ranger finally does get hung up on the bottom of a wash, they’re not even halfway out.
But how can that be?
Lyda does not think at first that this is her wash—it’s not bottomless after all, but in fact has the broad floor they are driving along now. It’s been a long time—eons, maybe—since water ran through here, and the rocks that have settled are luminous and massive enough that when Peter runs the Ranger into them, they don’t budge.
Want me to drive? Will offers.
But Peter says nothing, just keeps his eye ahead, driving ever deeper into what is beginning to seem more like a gorge until, finally, there’s a crunching, a hapless ratcheting back and forth, followed by a shuddering stillness that subsides only slowly into the eerie recognition that this is where he’s been taking them all along.
Will lets out a long, low whistle, ok.
Oh Peter, Lyda says, not again—you promised.
On the inside of the van, she presses her face against a window that’s already losing the last trace of air conditioning, even as Helen reaches back to pat her hand, don’t worry. Will considers the flank of the gorge rising high on either side, the moon a white round hovering above and unimaginably far away. Both of the women are pale and small, and in the driver’s seat, Peter hasn’t moved, hasn’t shifted his hands on the steering wheel or offered reassurance or even, Will thinks bleakly, tried reverse.
I thought you said, he says, you knew what you were doing. I thought you had a plan.
Peter half turns toward Will, a strange, almost quizzical expression on his face, then blinks and steps out of the car, letting in a blast of air so hot and desiccated that even Helen lays her forehead, like Lyda, against the last cool remnants of window as though to drink it in, before she, too, gets out of the van to join Peter.
We’re going to have to ditch the Ranger, and this time he really is talking, and go. The words, as smooth and fixed as stones, seem to have been here all along, just waiting for Peter to say them. There used to be a road here, huh.
You don’t have to do this for me, Helen says, as now Will emerges, dishevelled and dazed, and starts to stretch his amazing—his corporeal—body. Do it for them.
The air tastes rotten, this muted world a jagged and unlikely place for four such paths to have crossed, but it seems to Helen now that she has known this all along—known it all—and as each part of this long night’s before and after plays itself out, she welcomes it with a kind of recognition. Already everything hurts—her head, her body, her skin, but Peter looks like things are turning out ok.
You get the bird, he tells Lyda, suddenly in charge again. Will, water.
Then he turns to Helen, brushing his hand lightly over her head to pull the scarf off, and something passes between them.
You too—it’s time. Let’s go.
Behind them, some grumbling, from Lyda, bent over in the van and rummaging for something in the darkness, and Will is bent over her, too, speaking so softly that no one—not even Helen—can hear. But seeing her white leg stretched out behind her, something stirs inside Helen, even before Will puts his hand on Lyda’s thigh, just where the muscle flexes.
Then, like that, Lyda finds the shoe she’s looking for, and puts it on, and ties it, and things settle back into place.
Where are we anyway, she calls out, reaching back in for the birdcage and shaking her head a bit, as if to clear it—wash, socks, bird.
This isn’t my wash, she says. My wash went on forever.
But Lyda’s not so sure anymore, for it seems to her the wash is deepening and widening as she speaks, but what does it matter? Everyone is moving now, springing back into action, efficiency itself, and no one is listening to her.
Peter, too, is moving forward—moving all of them forward—already striding fast across the bottom of the bottomless wash—while Will stuffs water bottles into his knapsack, and Helen hovers between them. Inside the cage, the blue parrot squawks, as Lyda clasps its handle, worn and burnished like bones, to pull it out and come along.
Come along, Lyda. Come here, come here.
But it’s heavy and it’s awkward, and if only Lyda had a little more time, although already they are walking along the same path—Peter, then Helen, then Will, and finally her with the bird in its cage and the sounds of their footsteps crunching along a little bit after them. Lyda’s glad she found her shoes, it’s so rocky where they are, following Peter down the wash that seems deeper now than it seemed only moments before—a deepening wash that bends and curves as it follows the ancient path of water. From time to time, Peter calls something back, but no one can hear him because of the bell of silence that has closed over the world. They can’t hear—only Helen can hear, but Helen can’t sort the words out—but after a while they do begin to see where Peter is headed—what looks like a high, loose jumble of rocks and, above that, a shelf and a hole in the earth at the end of the endless wash.
Suddenly Helen does something strange—an impulse—and turns to cross back over the part of the desert she has already traversed, going not forward, toward Peter and Will, but backward, toward Lyda, who is trailing the others a bit because of the bird and its cage.
No, yes, wait, the words spill loose from her mouth like pieces of light.
Well now, she says, when she gets back to where Lyda is still moving forward.
And then she takes Lyda’s hand—the other hand, the one without the birdcage in it—a simple enough gesture and the lightest of touch, but it stops them both.
Head for the lava tube, Will shouts back, each of his steps taking him farther away. We’ll meet you at the lava tube.
And then he’s running to catch up to Peter, who is moving fast now, leaving them all behind.
But that’s ok—Helen’s in no hurry. Lyda’s got her shoes on and they can take their time. That’s all that’s left for them now, is time. Maybe Helen should know how much that is, but Helen’s just a conduit, a thread through which everything passes. And what she’s doing now—helping Lyda—isn’t prescience anyway, but common decency.
That birdcage sure looks heavy.
A little rest won’t hurt.
And so Helen, still holding Lyda’s hand, leads her with the bird and its cage shaped like a bell away from the trail Peter has made to the level lip of a rock, like a table or a bench, on which they will sit for a while, resting, and looking like nothing so much as two women exchanging gentle female gossip.
