Ebesen stands by him, wearing his first new shirt in years. His trousers, too, can only be a goodbye gift, if for no other reason than that they fit. Of course we have to run it alone. That's the whole beauty of fake reality.
Vulgamott pretends not to hear him. News is something a civilized person shouldn't have to do more than watch. What if it doesn't work?
Nothing ever works, Ebesen reminds him. That's why we keep fixing it.
But in this room, the room of shared experience, the group show comes off without a hitch.
45
The room that holds you falls away. Space opens out in every direction, too big to see across, the biggest single opening that has ever surrounded you. Your eyes need time to adjust to the size of it, the glare. A single dome rises so high above you, its shell might as well be the thing it stands for. It hovers over a nimbus of forty windows, suspended on a crown of light.
In the mystery of sealed volumes, the space is larger than its container. At ground level, under the angeled pendentives, beneath the lofty clerestory hung on its massive piers, your body shrinks to a single bit, the smallest switch in paradise's registers. Here is the oblivion life has always wanted — the chance to fade back into the scale that birthed it.
Your eyes start ignorant, but slowly get knowledge. Pillars from the earth's four corners, stolen or permanently borrowed, display all stone's available hues. The walls are enameled with living pictures. The floor plan is too richly scalloped to decode. All you can do is wander, deeper in.
Only movement reveals the room's full size. You drift forward, setting in motion free currents of air. The eddies cascade, accumulating into trade winds that whip through the open nave. The winds collect in pressure zones and fronts. They rise and cool; their moisture condenses in tiny thunderheads that soon, off in the bays beyond the north arcade, break out in a time-lapse storm. Rain falls and evaporates again, before it can moisten the dark floor tiles.
Somewhere above your head, the carved stone capitals seethe. Spandrels unfurl their runner of vines. Out of those tangles of carved leaves, there coil denser strands. Surprised, you point. And pointing, you rise. You draw near the carvings, through more space than you'd gauged. The vines sharpen and swell. Up close, they turn into knotted hanks of macromolecule, twinning and twining in the air's interstices. Hovering in a nimbus to the east — the needle's Jerusalem, the map's Mecca — a mother cowers, holding her infant in front of her like a shield. On the child's face, a plan already hatches: all-out subversion of the omnipotent State, the bafflement of vested interests, the last defeat of matter. The mother's face is pure fear. She's lost her baby already. She looks out to the west, on the chasm in front of her, on her boy's future, his fate as a political, his inevitable death at the hands of the authorities whose only goal is ever to preserve the domestic peace. Around the doomed nuclear family, huge black medallions proclaim the name of God and his servants: Allah, Mohammed, Ali… Perched below these in the apse, a ghostly sphere spins: the world's nations, their parti-colored surfaces swirling like oil streaks on a stirred puddle. Their colors flare and go dark and, after an endless pause, blaze through their cycle again.
The space seeps music. Its score breathes in time with your breath, a chamber symphony beginning in your inner ear and traveling outward. The pitches take on the line of your thoughts and give you others.
You stumble upon a safe haven, just off the sacristy. A corner outfitted just for you, with provisions, clothes, a place to clean up and rest. You can stay here for good, all human needs met. You sit on a cane chair and crane your neck out the window, looking out onto the sea, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn.
A shattering barrage drives you from this paradise. You run back into the violated nave, where phantom crusaders and holy warriors now close for battle up and down the columned aisles. The great church goes pure theater. Grainy, mosaic footage plays against the paint-stripped tympana, digital clips from the earth's flaming islands: human chains, laser-guided night shots of bunkers erupting, walls shorn up and hammered back down again.
You try to flee. But now the bombardment rips right through you. This violence is harmless, as innocent as any projected image. You rise up and watch in awful fascination. It plays out in every corner: the first war, the war over pictures, the showdown that imprisons you. The blasts explode in the name of a project too large to figure out, a game whose ends care nothing about your own.
Across the invented gulf of space, shells detonate. Fresh explosions rip through the giant hall, each one touching off others. Stone by stone, St. Sophia collapses into a cavernous ruin.
Up from the cracks around you lick tiny tongues of green. A jungle springs up, and in the jungle, a naked, couched Eve, pointing with wonder at the fires all around her.
Then you hear what can only be the buzzing of insects. They mass you, a sudden swarm of flat, paper bees, no bigger than your thumb, the work of a child with a new paint box. They form a fireman's bucket brigade, flying up into the gallery, each carrying between its legs a colored square. One by one, they add their point of color to the damaged portraits: a wasted Christ, a ravaged Baptist, a Madonna who cannot for the life of her figure out why she's been drawn into this hopeless endeavor.
Paper bees patch at the mosaic, stone by stone. They race the spread of the vegetation. They buzz in insect single file, relentless, returning empty to the hive, to your hands, for refilling. With a child's labored realism, they rebuild the length of the damaged stone bodies. They reach the feet, freeing the captives. The images step from their wall down into the jungled nave, rejoin you where you lie, stricken with insight, in the undergrowth.
The inner church goes dark; fluorescents blaze back on. Transcendence collapses again to the width of a walk-in closet. The future's clients — the demo buyers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — remove their shuttered glasses. They look upon the alien world that drags them back. They wince in the flush of light, squinting to make things out.
Inside this room, the world re-forms itself. Outside, there is no saying. Against the real, perhaps must plead no contest. But from the demonstration room, no one walks out the way he came.
46
The morning that Muhammad comes for you, you already expect him.
Your ears have attuned to subaudible frequencies. You hear a message in his step, from miles down the locked corridor. You hear upheaval in his voice, even before he speaks.
He thinks he wakes you. "We Arabs have a saying. Rise before the sun, because the earth steals the hours before dawn from Paradise."
He makes you pack your ridiculous sack of belongings, as you have packed so many times before. An old game, this terrorism. They have it down. But gone already, you've become immune, free of hope, safe from all belief. You do as he says, obeying with nothing more than the pointless shell of your body.
His voice hides a note of relief, a sympathy for you, so far as anyone can feel sympathy for another. The care cuts into you. It riddles you with chances, each one more terrible than the last.
He takes you off the chain. Panic descends when he leads you, blindfolded, into the hall. Men call out to you in Arabic, touch you on the back, applauding your shoulders. They take you to certain death, or worse. Now, before dawn, in the hours stolen from paradise. The single fact of your existence, the one that ought to be purely private, beyond history, past politics, even your death will be played out on any number of stages, not one of them your own.
This time, they do not tape you, a minor mercy worse than any harshness. They place you loose into the coffin, one last training in asphyxiation before the final run. You pray for a merciful death, as you have prayed before, racked on this transmission as the truck slams against the cratered streets. You pray, knowing your prayers do nothing. This is part of what has broken in your brain: to keep asking, knowing there are no answers but chance.