Broken: A Plague Journal (40 page)

Dozens of miles away, the probe erupted in its Gauss tube. Maire’s Enemy companions flickered for an instant as their physics attempted to make sense of never having existed. Timesweep. She buffered them. She held them in place.

Which gave her an idea.

She walked quickly, eagerly to a console on one wall of the command, reached into the display and activated the upload link. Somewhere in the bowels of the room, a churning began. The display confirmed: there was a full pattern trapped in the buffer. Someone’s soul hadn’t made it to the probe.

She cooked him.

Hours passed, and she threw the download tank’s hatch open. A tall, gray-eyed man crumpled to the floor with a splash and a thud.

“James Richter.” Her grin was fangs and dimples. “Welcome to my future.”

Richter wretched phased silica onto the floor. He tried to crawl to his hands and knees, but squeaked back down in a weak, naked pile.

He looked up at her. “Hope?”

“Walk with me?”

“Paul...”

“Please?”

Judith Command was being systematically dismantled around them, the billions, trillions of soldats perdus uploaded into a pattern cache that Paul would carry. The bubble around the non-place had developed great cracks on its periphery, and in places, the blackness of the unknown beyond shined down through.

They walked to the edge, the place where they could look down into the Timestream. The Alpha Point sparked an eternity below them. As they walked, his hand was close enough to Alina’s so that she could hold it, if she wanted. We know the distances between us; we test the lines and hope someone crosses.

Theirs was a heartbroken silence built of everything that had gone wrong, all the fights over nothing, the context of them, the place and time out of time in which they lived. They were both machines built from life’s flickers.

They sat on the edge and still said nothing. Their hands were still close enough to hold.

Their feet dangled down over the universe.

He said, “It was good.”

She said, “I know.”

A thousand other lives tried to crawl into that moment, a thousand other faces, but as he sat there dying, Paul looked only at Alina. The angle of her jaw, the patterns of her freckles, the flare of her nose, eyes that smiled, upturned, even when she was crying. A thousand other faces tried but failed to replace her.

We can count down our final moments in the stillness between another’s heartbeats.

We can search for a perfect moment and realize that we’ve already lived it.

We can ravel a ball of silver, wear a filament of it on our wrists. We can hear the music across the water, the stars falling above, and we can dance, reach out for a hand. The world falling apart around us, and none of it matters. Life is a series of moments, of splendor, of misery, the finest line woven between. We can sit on the edge with the love of our lives and not say anything at all.

He reached out, withdrew. They looked down at existence. He coughed.

She turned back to the bubble’s center. “I think they’re ready.”

He looked. Judith Command was empty, except for them. There was wind, and it was cold.

“Are you?”

“No.”

They looked into each other’s eyes for the first time in months. Years. Time had no meaning at the edges.

He held out his hand.

She smiled. Her eyes were wet. He was bleeding metal.

There were echoes.

She took his hand and jumped off the edge.

They fell, but in that scale, they were motionless. Judith Command raced away above them, the bubble’s edges cracking and releasing, great plates of metallish shattering down toward them, the whole of the last fort erupting and falling. And they flew, hands held, eyes open, as shards of Command danced around them. They wove, hands held, between the pieces.

They pulled toward each other, arms frantic, grasping, bodies shuddering to relearn their symmetries, to reseat the way they fit together perfectly. They tumbled, hands held, down into the past, into the deepest night, the places hidden away for lifetimes.

Paul wrapped his arms around Alina, couldn’t hold her close enough. He pulled back, looked into her colorless blue eyes, remembered the taste of her, gone so long now, tumbling, hands held, end over end, a dizzying, frightening descent, picking up speed, whirling, faster, faster, and Command was nothing above them, a cascade of countless fragments running alongside.

He never looked away. Reached out, one hand shimmering, one hand clasping hers, so small and perfect. It was a beautiful hand that he couldn’t see, enveloped in his own, but he could feel it, contact, reached out, one hand shimmering, and called the silver to him, the detritus of Judith Command, and it came, an ocean of metal, swarming, singing around them, wrapping and protecting, enveloping, consuming. He would protect her. He would hold her close. And it formed around them, hands held, silver forming and reforming, merging with him, the finest silver web spidering through him. She didn’t look away from the horror of him as he shifted, merged, became something else. She was caught in an expanse within him. She was encapsulated inside of him, a ship, a living ship of silver, the last of Command, the machine sea, and an ancient silent song. She looked up and saw the last of the light before he closed around her, the pattern cache falling into place above, sparking to almost-life, his hand changing, snaking, draping. His face a distended mess of metal, and then flat, and then nothing. It was dark inside of him. It was quiet. She was cold. He never looked away.

remember me
remember me on the wind
in the autumn
please remember me
the reflection

The interface webs dug into her.

and I loved you. Know that I loved you.

They fell.

 “Are you leaving?”

She stood in the doorway, her back to him. Heard him roll over and crawl deeper into their bed, pulling sheets around him in the cool autumn morning. The window was open. He was asleep. He’d spoken in dream.

She walked the short hallway to the bathroom, business, and returned. Levered comforters from him and wrapped herself. Draped an arm around him. He took her hand. Squeezed. He was asleep and she wasn’t.

He’s writing me in.

She felt his heartbeat, traced the scar on his chest.

Something wormed within her, something without meaning, intangible and cold. She’d be leaving soon, but not yet. The layers of meaning in his sleep-mumbled question drew focus on lines in her heart. He expected her to leave—and she would, eventually. That something spoke through his dream, that something was aware of the future while his eyes were closed and his heart was slow, that was the break.

So she held him tighter. She would leave tiny notes in hidden places. She would wake him up by crawling on top of him. She would smile into the window light, and he would fall in love in that moment. He would push her hair back from her eyes. She wouldn’t leave yet. The question echoed.

Are you leaving?

He lay there with his eyes closed, rolled to the left, his arm coming to rest on a pillow, a space, reached farther, and remembered that he was alone.

Opened his eyes to find the cat staring at him from the banister bounding the landing. The cat resented him. He had been a cat person before he got one.

Swung his right leg, muscled straight so as not to aggravate the shattered knee and its cap of scar tissue, to the cold tile. Wiped sleep from his eyes and craved a cigarette. Looped chicken legs into gray boxers and sat on the edge of the bed. There had been a picture on his nightstand. There had been books. Itineraries folded between pages. A booth photo. There had been many things.

Stood and pulled cotton over his sex. Jeans.

The stairs were narrow and tall, and he wondered the shapes of the people who had built them. The stairs were built to trip him. He’d bought replacement treads and two tubes of adhesive, but he’d forgotten to improve, and now there was no time.

Down right angles into the kitchen, and he was still alone. There were birds outside. The cat made angry barking sounds and tried to trip him for food.

Through empty rooms filled with many things into a cracked leather chair on wheels. The floor was tilted, and he could roll the length of the office with no effort. It was difficult to remain in place before the monitor.

Hooked glasses around his ears and there was an empty inbox. Grabbed yesterday’s used coffee cup, three grounds, not much of a reading, at its bottom. There was a spoon. It circled as he walked, its bottom edge gummed to the cup with the residue of hardened hazelnut creamer. She had been allergic. He could drink that now.

His body woke him most days at 8:57, and he couldn’t remember what significance that time had or why it had been imprinted on his body.

The paper was late again. He could tell because he looked out the patio door and couldn’t see it sopping mud water in the puddled divot that was the end of his driveway. Sometimes it was in the ditch. He felt like an adult, reading newspapers that were delivered to him three hundred sixty days each year. He kept them stacked in a milk crate in his kitchen, out of the reach of the cat, which had once mistaken that archive for its litter box. The highlight of most days was the bra advertisements in the sale papers.

To the bathroom, still looking for tiny notes pressed into the edge of the mirror.

Four Kinney Brand acetaminophen tablets. Water. Two more to be safe.

He looked at pill bottles and ignored them.

Watered the cat. Stared for too long at a small ceramic vase, two dried yellow shoots of bamboo. He’d soaked them in his dishpan. Spent hours pondering their revival. Had decided to let them die.

Measured fifteen scoops of generic coffee into the twelve-cup maker, added water, waited, withdrew three. To the kitchen table. The first sip. The first smoke. He looked out the window and watched blue jays toss seed to the new concrete of the veranda. The cat wagged its tail and chattered. The coffee was hot and bitter. Considered the distance to the refrigerator to retrieve the creamer. Scratch flicker click. He breathed deeply of the smoke. It calmed him.

There had been other mornings, other coffee, places without cats. Eggs. The Tony Danza show. No underpants and yes plaid shirts. Messy morning hair and breath. The way people intersect.

There had been other mornings in other cities, or in cities at all. He looked out the window and saw fifty beef cattle across the road. He heard geese. The grass was too long; it was his responsibility.

Stirred the coffee and wondered if he’d painted himself into a corner. Two gallons of paint had been enough for eight corners, but there was still so much to do.

The kitchen had an island. He’d bought two stools for it in the hope of someday sitting with her. He’d have coffee; she could have tea. He could boil water. Quiet mornings sitting together. That’s all he wanted. Counted the chairs in his house, the seating surfaces: twenty-four. There was one of him.

Swished the coffee in his mouth and swallowed. Chained a smoke to it.

Went to the bathroom and ate an antacid tablet, because when all you consume is nicotine and caffeine, the stomach attempts to burn itself apart. Two more painkillers to be unsafe.