BY THE TIME I return to the research pod, the purple nanopolymer looming gaudy and self-conscious over the pale ruins, the others are almost done eating. Winnie hands me a bowl and gestures at the crumbling block of concrete next to Victor.
“Where’s Fearless Leader?” I ask, tugging on the tiny foil strip of the heating nub.
“18A, I think,” Victor says. “Near the river.”
I’m almost too excited to eat, and I’m grateful for the two minutes my food takes to heat up. I feel like I’m a little kid again—or no, like the day my acceptance letter came. Sitting there with winter sun and icy air coming in through my window as sharp as a knife but not feeling it, instead something hot ballooning inside of me till it seemed to push into every corner of the room, reading it and re-reading it again and again. I am angry that my body needed to put the book down to eat.
I force myself to mechanically spoon up the too-salty, reconstituted pasta while my mind races. What I hoped to find here was never anything as good as this. A first-hand account of the Setback! Of course everything before is valuable, of course everything afterwards is valuable. Of course it is. But we have so many of those, and we have so very few of those three years themselves. Particularly in blockade cities. Off the top of my head, based on the literature review I did last semester, we have a grand total of six verifiable documents.
All four of us are studying different things, so it’s not fair to compare what I’ve found with what they’re going to find, but still. I could dance.
After lunch, when the others are gone, I feed my paper bowl into the digester, and then much more carefully feed the book into the scanner, after three diagnostic checks. Overkill, I guess. But this book is so precious, I simply can’t risk it.
This isn’t just my master’s degree. This is my obsession, it’s my life in a way; it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to know about. Why some cities and not others is the small question. But the large question is: What happened? Why does no one know? Why do even the people who lived through it not know? Why do my parents, my grandparents not know?
And then this, this miracle book. Maybe it will not answer any of these questions. Maybe it will peter out in a splatter of blood. I’ve had my heart broken before.
But the hope, the hope of it all, in this soft ancient paper, in the blockily tumbled edges of it, the smell of it. It’s not even a proper journal, it’s a poetry book, thick, one of those anthologies they give to first-year English students, with wide margins—probably why the writer picked it. I would have overlooked it if it hadn’t been meant for us to find, displayed with a sign, a scrawled note on the walclass="underline" BOOK. So many books were burned for fuel in these cities when people couldn’t get out to get wood or charcoal. The writing—smudged and tiny but impeccable—winds around and around each central poem in the wide margins. You can’t help but think of something circling the drain. No. Less morbid. They lived, after all—lived long enough to write dozens of pages after the Invasion.
I thought it was encoded at first, but it’s just that the lines crisscross and meander as they circle. It’s not hidden. It was meant to be read. Maybe not by me. And of course, in my line of research, there’s always that little nagging thought—would they mind if I read it? If I touched it, scanned it, reproduced it, published it? I often get the impression that they would hate it. It seems so disrespectful to the dead.
Maybe not in this case though; this writer, I feel certain, would be excited to know that we are studying it now. That the ‘world’ of which they spoke started over again, picking up what pieces still remained, building something clumsy and slow and new, but (we hope) good.
I would tell them: I know. I know. It’s been fifty years and we haven’t yet figured out what happened. But we’re doing our best to answer the questions. Make sense of it all, write a story out of history, which is not in and of itself a story—which tells us it is, because one event causes another, but it isn’t. Not really. It’s a series of scary fairytales to tell children in the dark.
Still shaking, I take out my own notebook, key to a fresh page, and begin to write.
May 3
A cool, clear day. Glad the everpresent clouds finally lifted; I see them on the horizon though, waiting to pounce. Do you think They affect the weather at all? I asked V.
He shrugged. It does seem different now, he said at last. But I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Nightmares were bad last night. Faces swimming from the darkness, angular and harsh; staring eyes, membranes, flickering things like wings. The problem is that nothing They possess can actually be thought of as analogous to anything that anything on Earth possesses, if that makes any sense. Even mouths, eyes, all wrong. I heard Their songs chanting and wailing, and woke up screaming. Then I realized I had not dreamt the hollow, echoing booms of something striking the cement in the canal outside the flat. I know that sound.
This morning I found the expected: a dead man in the canal—a dead stranger, which should be impossible now, in this empty city. Still I studied his silvery, fallen-in face, hoping for recognition. He had drowned; I knew the bluish tone of the skin. A pearly sliver of eye white, no iris, showed under his upper lids.
He must have fallen into the canal running from Them and couldn’t get back out. I suppose that’s a better death than the one They would have given him. And yet in Their rage They’d still mauled the poor body. The statues and the sentinels sometimes move like the bigger ones, that herky-jerky movement—so swiftly it seems to be in the seconds between seconds, or so slowly they seem perfectly still.
I exhausted myself trying to haul him out. My back hurts now as I write. When V. came over we pulled him out together, then performed the necessary theatrics of death and stood around awkwardly for a while as if waiting for applause, or for someone to heckle us.
We should say a few words, I said after a while. I did not say: Because it may be our fault that the sentinels came upon him; why else would he be here? I thought: Let’s give him a decent burial. Decent always means guilty.
How strange that I do not know his face, V. said, and then folded his hands and quoted some poem I did not know. The unexpected piety of the young! He fixed his gaze upon the bright empty sky, then lost all his sense, as often happens now, and nearly fell into the canal himself. I dragged him back at the last minute. I heard nothing.
I washed the dead man’s jacket after dinner. Before all this, I never would have worn such a thing; but now, now… I have so little, I carry everything I own on my back, I have made peace with it. The jacket will be temporary as we are all temporary. Like moving flats every couple of months and forgetting them at once. There is only now, there is no then. Must keep reminding myself of that. And keep this diary, to remember the now.
I must try to make entries every day instead of just when I’m too exhausted to do anything else.
Every day for years I’ve thought: I’ll only get more tired, not less. And every day it turns out to be true. I thought I would have passed some kind of… event horizon of exhaustion by this point, but still the body digs up its reserves of strength from somewhere, as if it were a vein of metal buried so deep that no human art could ever find it, let alone extract it.
No mirror in this room. But I tried on the jacket a minute ago. Even damp, it is warm when it’s zipped up, and hangs almost to the middle of my thighs. The punctures in it are cruciform, X-shaped; they beg the question: What made them? But there are so many potential answers.
Jacket hung back up to dry. I’ll wear it tomorrow, when we go shopping.