In such situations, while outwardly you’re alert to every small shift or turn, changes in light, in movements around you, your own heartbeat or breathing, inwardly you’re floating free, allowing your mind to do what it does best unpinned. Thoughts skitter, burn, and flare out, some shapeless, others barbed. As I scurried from sillion to sillion, bench to stairway to arcade, thoughts of childhood, books, folk songs, populism and political exhaustion accompanied me.
All I wanted was for my life, when you picked it up in your hands, to have some weight to it, Fran once told me. Rain coming down then outside our TBH as it was now on city streets, the two of us waiting for nightfall and go codes, foxhole reeking of processed food, stale air, unwashed bodies.
Within months of that, the GK virus had carved away fully a sixth of our population, especially among the elderly, infants and the chronically ill, all those with compromised immune systems, poor general health, low physical reserves.
Explanations for the virus? Natural selection at work in an overpopulated world, willful thinning of the herd by intellectual or financial elitists, Biblical cleansing, our own current government’s research gone amiss, biologic agents introduced by any of a dozen or more current enemies.
Or that old friend happenstance.
Substantive as they were, Li’s and my excursions had yielded little more than an anecdotal accounting of the city as it stood, along with instances of kindness, cruelty, anxiety and insouciance in fairly equal measure, in every conceivable shape or form.
Crews were busily tearing out the forest of digital billboards at city center, these having recently been judged (depending on the assessor) unaesthetic or ineffective.
The dry riverbed, cemented over years ago, was now being uncemented on its way to becoming a canal complete with boats and waterside city parks. Government-stamped posters with artists’ renditions of the final result hung everywhere. Those of a cynical disposition well might wonder where funds for this massive project originated. More positive souls might choose not to take note of the disrepair in surrounding streets.
Repeatedly as we moved through the city we encountered flash-mob protests. Participants assembled without preamble at rail stations, on street corners, in the city’s open spaces. Most protestors were young, some looked as though they’d awakened earlier in the day from Rip Van Winkle naps. They’d demonstrate, sometimes with silence and dialogue cards, other times with chants or improvised songs, and within minutes fade back into the crowd, before authorities showed up.
“We’re chasing shadows at midnight,” Merritt Li says one day.
And I hear Fran, another day, another time, saying “We’re the shadow of shadows.”
We’d come in country under cover of night, the two of us, and trekked on foot miles inland. The sky was starting to lighten and birds to sing when we reached the extraction point. Joon Kaas had not spoken a word the whole time, from the moment we breached his room. He had looked up and nodded, risen and gone ahead of us when signalled to do so. Now at the clearing he lowered his head, to pray I think, before meeting Fran’s eyes (instinctively aware she was prime) and nodding again, whether in surrender or some fashion of absolution I can’t say.
“He knew,” she said after.
That we were coming. Of course he did. And how it had to end.
Later I would understand that for most of his countrymen, thousands of them cast onto the streets and huddled together in houses, the eternally poor and forgotten, those without influence who went on scratching out a bare subsistence as terrible engines fell to earth all around them, Joon Kaas was a savior. With his passing, much of what he had worked to put in place, his challenges to privilege and to authority, new laws and mandates, new protections, began one by one to disappear.
Perhaps more than anything else, we’ve enslaved ourselves to the grand notion of progress. In our minds we’ve left behind yesterday’s errors, last year’s lack of knowledge and crude half measures. Now we’re headed straight up the slope, getting better and better, getting it right. But really we go on hauling along these sacks of goods we can’t let go of, can’t get rid of, tearing apart our world only to rebuild it to the old image.
In 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish congregation for inveighing against those who promoted ignorance and irrational beliefs in order to lead citizens to act against their own best interests, to embrace conformism and orthodoxy, to surrender freedom for security. This, even though Dutch society had long agreed upon liberty, individual rights and freedom of thought. Four hundred years down the road, not much has changed. Same hazard signs at the roadside. Same crooked roads.
It was in the last months of the struggle, while I was over the border in Free Alaska commandeering armaments, that I first felt the gears slipping. Four degrees coldly Fahrenheit outside. With a wind that felt to be removing skin slice by micrometric slice. Fortunately I was inside, and alone, when it happened, having just entered a safe house there. I remembered walking in and stepping towards the bathroom. Now I was on the floor, with urine puddled about me. How long? Five, six minutes by my timer. Vision blurred—a consequence of the fall? Taste of metal, copper, in the back of my throat. And I couldn’t move.
That was far too familiar, a replay of week after week in rehab, frantically sending messages to legs, arms and hands that refused to comply, Abraham urging me on.
I doubt the immobility lasted more than a minute, but hours of panic got packed into it. I began to remember other stutters and misfires, each gone unremarked at the time. Now they took on weight, bore down.
“What are you thinking?” Fran will ask not long after, on our visit to Merritt Li’s final foothold.
“An old sea diver’s creed,” I tell her, unsure myself of the connection, thinking of the fighters we took down there, of Merritt Li going down, of my own fall and my jacked-up system, “the one thing a diver forgets at great periclass="underline" If it moves, it wants to kill you.”
Then I tell her what happened at the safe house, what it means. Simple physics, really. Put more current in the wire, it burns out faster.
“When did you know?”
“From the first, at some level—wordlessly. One sleepless morning in Toledo I got up, tapped in, and pulled the records. I wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. They had little idea what I could do.”
I, the soft machinery that was me, was failing. Sparks failed to catch, messages misfired, data was corrupted.
I had, I supposed, a few months left.
We never knew how Merritt Li came to be there.
His and my courses were set so as to bring the two of us together, close enough to rendezvous anyway, every three hours. When he didn’t show at the old waterworks, I went looking. We both carried ancient low-frequency ’sponders we thought wouldn’t be tapped. Guess we were wrong. They knew I was coming.
He had two of them back against a wall of stacked, partly crushed vehicles, tanklike cruisers from the last century. Two others, halfway across a bare dirt clearing hard as steel, had turned away to intercept me. Where numbers five and six came from I have no idea, they dropped out of nowhere like Dorothy.