Hansard and I were squirreled down in a scatter of boulders where a mountain range ran out into flatlands. There was one pass through the range and a patrol from Revisionist forces was on it. We were waiting for them.
Everyone knew the satellites were up there, circling tirelessly, bloated with information. And if satellites monitored even this afterbirth of a landscape, I told Hansard, they had to be watching us as well—not us here, us everywhere. Hansard shrugged and squeezed a nutrient pack to start it warming.
Drones might have dealt with the patrol, of course. Quickly. Efficiently. But drones hadn’t the dramatic effect of a couple of warriors suddenly appearing at the mouth of the cave. Something in our blood and ancestral memory—others of our kind come for us.
Hansard finished drinking his nutrient, rolled the pack into a compact ball and stuffed it in a cargo pocket. The wind rose then, mist swirling like huge capes, cold biting into bones. Go codes buzzed in the bones behind our ears.
We couldn’t pronounce the name of the place but were told it translated as Daredevil or Devil-May-Care. Biting cold had turned stewpot hot, barren landscape to cramped and crowded city. The stench of used-up air was everywhere. You could smell bodies and what they left behind. Sweat mixed with fine grit, pollen and laden gases and never went away. It coated your body, a hard film, a second skin that cracked when you moved. Hansard, rumors said, had gone down up here near the Canadian border some weeks before.
That time, we almost failed to make it out, beating a retreat through disruptions turning ever more chaotic (dodging raindrops, an old Marxist might have said) hours before the region tore itself apart, this being what happens when a government eloquently tottering on two legs gets one of them kicked out from under.
They came for us on the bullet train in Oregon. I turned from the window where sunlight shone blindingly on water, blinked, and there they were. Boots, jeans, Union jackets with the patches torn off. I’ve a brief memory of Tomas aloft, zigzagging towards the car’s rear on the backs of the seats, right foot, left, starboard, port, before I turned to confront the others. All became in that instant clear and distinct. I could see the tiniest bunching of a muscle in the shoulder of one before that arm moved, see another’s eyes tip to the left before head and body followed, sense the one about to bound directly toward me from all but imperceptible shifts in footing and posture.
I remember condensation on windows from the chill inside the car, the wide staring eyes of a child.
Afterwards, we liberated a pickup from a parking lot nearby and rode that pale horse into Keizer to be about our business.
Years after that day in Oregon, and as many after what I’m recounting here, Fran and I stand where Merritt Li died. In those years, wildness has reclaimed that edge of the city. Sunlight spins toward us off the lake to our left as though in wafer-thin sheets. Spanish moss beards the branches of water oaks populated by dove and by dun-colored pigeons that were once city birds. Fran touches another oak near us; scaly ridges of its bark break off in her hand.
We’re the only ones, she says.
Who will remember, I say.
It’s become rote now.
No memorials for such as Merritt Li.
Only memory.
For another who has been erased. Who has been gathered. And for a time before Fran speaks again, we are quiet. Our voices drift away into the call of birds, the sough of wind.
Our kind were redundant before and will be again.
As the successful revolutionary must always be, right?
Okay. She laughs. They can be redundant too.
A heron floats in over the trees and lands at water’s edge. A heron! Who would have believed there were herons left? I see the same light in Fran’s eyes as in mine. Still, after all that has happened in our lives, we have the capacity for surprise, for wonder.
When I was eleven, a contrarian even then, I made a list of all the stuff I never wanted to see again on TV and in movies. Wrote it out on a sheet of ruled paper, signed and dated the document, and submitted it to my parents.
People jumping just ahead of flames as house, car, pier, ship or what-have-you explodes.
The disarming of bombs with everyone else sent away as our hero or heroine sweatily decides which wire to cut.
Police or soldiers putting down their guns in hostage situations.
Hostage situations.
The cop, finally pushed to his/her limit, tossing badge or detective’s shield onto his/her CO’s desk.
The cast, be they doctors, lawyers, or cops, all striding side by side, often in slow motion, along a corridor on their way to another fine yet difficult day as credits roll.
“I wanted to give back.”
“This is your chance to do the right thing.”
“You’re not going to die on me!”
How with two minutes left in the show the bad guy tells us why he’s done all he has, that it’s all justified.
The original screed ran two pages. In following years, amendments—additions, truthfully—added another fourteen, growing ever more prolix until attentions strayed elsewhere. From time to time as I submitted new editions, I requested progress reports from my parents. Could he have been so innocent, that fledgling contrarian, as to believe some channel existed whereby they might actually deal with these issues? Was he attempting to bend the world to some latent image he had in mind? Just to shout out to the world: I am here? Whatever else it may have presaged, the project attests that at least, even then, I was paying attention.
By this time I’d got heavily into reading and may have had at the back of my mind, like that movement in the room’s corner you can’t locate when looking straight on, intimations of how powerfully words affect—how they give form to—the world about us.
I became aware that my greatest pleasure lay not in what was happening within the confines of the narrative but in its textures: the surround, the moods and rhythms, the shifting colors. And that it was auxiliary characters I found most interesting. A quiet rejection of celebrity, maybe—this sense that those spun out to screen’s edge, the postmen, foils, second bananas, loyal companions and walk-ons, are the ones who matter? History with its drums and wagons and wars marches past, and we go on scrabbling to stay in place, huddled with our families and tribes, setting tables, trying to find enough to eat.
Sheer plod makes plow down sillion shine, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Not that, when you come down to it, we do a hell of a lot of shining. At best we give off just enough light to hold away the dark for an hour or two. That’s all the fire Prometheus had to give us.
Light was failing, if never the fire, as Merritt Li and I made our way on glistening streets, cleaving insofar as we could to shadow and walls. Rain had begun hours earlier. Streetlights shimmered with halos, windows wore jackets of glaze—as would lens. That gave small comfort at the same time that the fact of fewer bodies abroad gave caution.
We weren’t following leads so much as what someone once called wandering to find direction and someone else called searching for a black hat in a pitch-black room.
Rain made a rich stew of a hundred smells. Took away edges and corners and the hard surface of things. The city was feeling its way towards beauty.
There did seem to be a rudimentary pattern, the attacks moving outward from city’s center, but patterns, what’s there, what’s not, can’t be trusted. Apophenia. The perception of order in random data. See three dots on an otherwise blank page, right away you’re trying to fit them together. Nonetheless, we were trolling in rude circles towards the outer banks, touching down at rail stations, pedestrian nodes, crossroads and terminals of every sort. That amounted to a lot of being out there in the open, exposed, and as chancy for Li as for me at this point, but (returning to a prior observation) what else did we have?