Circuit Of Heaven (10 page)

He ran over to them, hoping he wouldn’t fall over anything in the darkness. The only light came from maintenance robots, white metal cylinders bristling with appendages, moving up and down along the track, plugging their sensors into the train. If the robots had taken any notice of them, they gave no sign of it. Nemo crouched beside Rosalind and looked around. He could make out the curved wall of the round building at the front of the train. There was only one track going into it. There was a switch a few yards behind the train where the tracks forked in two before heading out the massive doors that’d apparently opened to admit them.

A quiet whirring sound brought his attention back to the train. The sides of the cars were rising slowly like birds opening their wings. The robots were all in a row shining their spotlights inside where bodies were stacked from floor to ceiling. One of the arms was dangling down, a woman’s, maybe twenty-five or thirty years old, fully dressed, looking like she’d just lain down for a nap. She was on her side, perched precariously, facing Nemo. She looked like she might roll out onto the concrete any moment. One of the robots reached out with a shovel-like extension and pushed her back into place.

There was a low rumble, all the robots glided back, and a tunnel opened in the side of the round building. The train rolled through the opening, and the tunnel closed behind it. A few seconds later there was a loud roar that rumbled on and on like thunder in the summertime, only louder, as if they were up in the clouds, in the middle of it. When it stopped, the round wall opened itself up again, and the train emerged, radiating an intense heat Nemo could feel on his face even through the bitter cold.

The cars were completely empty. Not even any ashes. Their sides slowly closed, and the switch in front of the doors threw. The train started moving. The doors parted just as it reached them and closed immediately behind the last car.

For some minutes, nobody said anything. The air still smelled like hot metal. The robots sat in a silent row alongside the track, their limbs at rest.

Finally, Nemo said, “How are we going to get out of here?”

Rosalind was still staring at the concrete cylinder, completely quiet now. She gave no sign she’d even heard him. Jonathan was looking at the doors that led outside. “We could make a dash for it when the next train comes,” he said.

“It’d run you down,” Rosalind said in a dead, flat voice, not taking her eyes off the curved wall where the tunnel had appeared.

“Then we run for it when the next train leaves,” Jonathan said.

They all knew what that meant. They’d have to stay in here with another trainload of bodies. “There’s not enough time,” Rosalind said.

The switch threw again, and the doors opened, blinding them for a second. A new train rolled in, and they watched the whole thing again.

When the train disappeared into the tunnel, Rosalind said in the same flat voice, “We have to ride out on it like we came in.”

“It’ll burn your hands off,” Nemo said.

She turned slowly toward him as the roar started up again inside the cylinder. Even if she’d tried to say anything else, he wouldn’t have been able to hear her. She took off her jacket and peeled off her sweatshirt, cut it apart with the wirecutters. She put her jacket back on and wrapped her hands with the pieces of her sweatshirt. Nemo followed her example, but the zipper on his jacket had broken, and he couldn’t get it closed. He gave up and let it hang open, then wound his hands in his shirt. Jonathan had silently followed their examples.

They lay down beneath the rails in front of the doors. When the train covered him, Nemo clenched his teeth and seized hold of the X. He could smell his shirt scorching. The flesh between his thumb and forefinger on his right hand seared with pain as he got too close to the metal, and he tried to adjust his grip to distribute the pain. The heat blasted his face and chest, his eyes filling with sweat, blinding him. He hooked one foot over the metal, then the other, but the first one slipped off as the rubber heel of his boot melted just as the switch threw and the train started moving. He held his leg stiff, bobbing up and down only a foot above the ties. His hands felt as if he were clutching hot coals. With a lurch, the train stopped at the gates, and he wanted to let go. His leg cramped, and he watched it dip inevitably toward the roadbed. “God,” he prayed. “Please, God.”

The train jerked into motion, and he almost lost his grip. He counted to ten slowly and deliberately to make sure he’d cleared the fence, then let go, hitting his head hard, skidding on the ballast. He opened his eyes and stared into the deep blue sky, holding his blistered palms up into the air, knowing he’d never be the same.

THAT
NIGHT
ROSALIND
CAME
TO
HIS
HOUSE
AND
UP TO
HIS
room with bandages and ointment. She dressed the cuts on his back and the burns on his hands. His face and chest and stomach were bright red, starting to blister. She dabbed on ointment and rubbed it in, said, “I’m sorry,” each time he flinched. Her own face was red, and there was a cut on her left hand, but she was relatively unscathed, on the outside at least.

They made love standing in the middle of the room, wincing with pain when they grazed each other’s wounds.

They never talked about her moving in. She just stayed there. Her father didn’t seem to mind. Everybody, even Nemo himself, seemed happy for them. But Rosalind, even though she’d made it all happen, never seemed any happier except for brief moments like that first time they made love, or sometimes singing in the shower, her voice ringing off the tiles.

She’d been changed, too, her anger transformed into something darker, but she never would talk about it. After twenty-three months, she left Nemo a letter saying she was going into the Bin to find her mother. When Nemo went to tell Peter that his daughter was gone, he’d said, “She’s not my daughter anymore.”

She’d kept her mother’s picture on the mantel in their bedroom. He’d wake up and find her sitting up in bed staring at it in the flickering light. The note she left him was taped to the mantelpiece. The ashes of her mother’s photograph fluttered on the coals. He laid the one page letter over them and watched it burst into flames, then moved all his stuff to the bedroom down the hall.

Like he’d told Justine, he didn’t want to find Rosalind. He knew where she was, exactly how she’d gotten there, still had nightmares where he saw her in the flames. He knew the precise path to take if he wanted to follow her. It was the same path that led to Justine. He looked out at the dark night. The glow of the crematorium was long behind him. Flashes of lightning glowed and died. Barely audible over the sound of the train was the rumble of distant thunder. Rain hissed against the glass. It was as if he could still hear the roar of the incinerator, Jonathan whispering, “Souls.”

NORTHSIDE
STATION
WAS
ONLY
FOUR
BLOCKS
FROM
NEMO’S house, but he had to cut around a pack of wild dogs and ended up going ten blocks to get home. He was in no hurry. The rain had stopped, and the sky was clearing, the moon hanging overhead. He wasn’t ready to go home, but there was no place else to go.

Justine hadn’t had it quite right about him and Rosalind. They were never really that close. They’d seen death together, and they were both terrified. But they’d made different things of their visions. Hers led her into the Bin, just as Nemo’s seemed to keep him out.

Whenever he thought of going in, which he did more often than he admitted to anyone, he heard the roar of that fire, and it felt like a warning, a cryptic message from the gods. It was like the story of Oedipus Lawrence had told him. Like Oedipus, he didn’t know enough to understand what he should do, or even to understand what he was being warned against. He knew that every one of those people he saw consumed lived on in the Bin, never having to face death again, that in a sense they hadn’t really died at all, and it made perfect sense to follow them. And he knew that if he didn’t, he could very well live his whole life out here and die, and still not understand the roar of that fire, still not understand what the gods were trying to say to him—because maybe there weren’t any gods to be understood. But if there weren’t, what was the point of conquering death? What was the point of anything?

AS HE
CAME
UP
HIS
FRONT
STEPS
, HE
WAS
LOST
IN
THESE
thoughts. Otherwise he would’ve noticed the squeak of the porch swing or the shadow of a man in the moonlight.

He bent over the front door lock and fumbled with his keys in the darkness. He’d just found the keyhole when an unfamiliar voice said, “Good evening, Nemo,” and he jumped, his keys falling to the porch with a clatter.

He peered into the darkness and made out the shape of a tall, rail-thin man, his long legs stretched out in front of him, swinging back and forth in the swing as if the wind blew him. “Do I know you?” Nemo asked.

“I’m a friend of Peter’s,” he said. “Rosalind’s father. He said you were a young man of strong convictions and feelings, particularly about the evils of the Bin.”

Nemo had sounded off to Peter the night Rosalind had gone in. Nemo’d been about halfway crazy, and Peter had been there for years. No telling what he’d told this guy. “So who’re you? And why’re you on my porch in the middle of the night?”

“Call me Gabriel. I was waiting for you.”

“Did you talk to Lawrence? Did he tell you to wait?”

“Lawrence. That would be your Construct.”

Nemo caught the superior sneer in his tone. “Caretaker. Now why don’t you tell me what the fuck you’re doing here, so I can go to bed.”

“Fair enough.” The man stood up. He seemed nearly as tall as Lawrence, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds. “Peter said you might be someone I should meet.”

“And then what?”

“You are something of a mystery, Nemo. You are of sound mind, with no apparent religious affiliation to prevent you from going into the Bin, and yet you stay out. Why is that Nemo?”

“Well, it’s not so I can stand here in the middle of the night talking to you. I’m going to bed now. Why don’t you take a hike?”

Just then the front door opened and Lawrence ducked through it holding a lantern. He held it up high, and Nemo saw Gabriel in the glare, his long silver hair was swept back, hanging down past his shoulders, his beard reaching his belt. His eyes were large and deep-set, unblinking in the light. He smiled humorlessly, a thin line in the mass of hair. “Good evening,” he said to Lawrence, who didn’t say a thing. Gabriel vaulted the porch rail, his hair streaming behind him, and dropped to the ground. “We’ll be in touch, Mr. Nemo,” he called from the darkness. “We’ll be in touch.”

Lawrence was still peering after him. Lawrence had incredible night vision. His borrowed genes had come from a nocturnal lizard.

“Where’s he headed?” Nemo asked.

“He’s going in the side door of Jonathan’s house. Peter’s room, we believe. He did say it was Peter who recommended he make your acquaintance.”

“You were listening at the door?”

“We heard your keys fall. We were merely performing our duties.”

“I can pick up my own keys, Lawrence.”

Lawrence wagged his head at Nemo’s ingratitude. “That is not the task to which we were referring. We’ve been observing our visitor for perhaps ten minutes when you arrived.”

“How did he know I was coming home? Who the hell was that guy?”

“We would hazard a guess that he is a member of the underground.”

Nemo knew such a thing existed, of course. Everybody did. But he’d never actually met anyone on the inside. A bunch of crazies hellbent on destroying the Bin—might as well try to destroy Everest. “What could he want from me?”

“Your anger, of course. Revolutions always require a great deal of anger.”

“I’m not
that
angry.”

“We would say our visitor quite disagrees and has plans for you.” Lawrence gestured with the lantern toward the open door. “At present, however, it’s time for a proper meal, and then on to beddies. We’ve had quite the birthday, haven’t we, Nemo?”

“Screw you, Lawrence.”

“There, there. Now you see? That’s the very anger of which we were speaking.”

JUSTINE
WAS
DREAMING
AGAIN
.

She was an old woman, moving through her house with a feather duster, doing some last minute tidying up. She’d sent the nurse to the market, wanting the house to herself. She was expecting a caller, a young man from the college, who’d looked and sounded so nice over the phone, though she couldn’t quite remember his name. She never had visitors anymore. Her daughter used to come see her, but now there was only this hateful woman showing up in her place.

She took a list out of her pocket. She checked off the items one by one: She had made cookies. She had made coffee. The tea things were ready. She had even, with much effort (all that stooping and lifting) cleaned the cat box, though now she caught the inevitable scent of fresh cat shit in the air. They queued up when she changed the litter, all three of them, to christen it.

Who are you
? Justine asked.

But the old woman paid her no mind, shuffling down the hall to the utility room, now reeking of catshit. The cats lay sprawled on the dryer, no doubt exhausted from their efforts. She opened the cabinet above their heads, but they didn’t stir. She took out a new box of plastic bags. She’d used the last one in the old box changing the litter. Shoving Ishmael, a big black tom, to one side with her elbow, she set the box down on top of the dryer. With her thumb, she pushed as hard as she could on the perforated line, but the
E-Z
Open Flap wouldn’t budge.

She shuffled back into the kitchen and returned with a steak knife. She positioned the box against the dryer controls to hold it in place and, placing the knife blade on the perforation, leaned her weight against it. The blade broke through and plunged into the bags. She almost lost her balance, but managed to steady herself on the dryer. The cats flopped over, repositioning themselves. She pulled the box to her by tugging on the knife handle. When she had it in her grasp, she pulled the knife loose from the bags and sawed at the cardboard until she had a hole big enough for her fingers. She groped around, and finally snared one. Her fingers ached with the effort. She started tugging at it, and at first she thought it wasn’t going to come loose, then it popped out, the box spinning across the top of the dryer, as she stumbled backwards, the plastic bag in her hand, flailing the air to keep her balance. Her back hit the wall, and she managed to right herself, just as one of the cats, a Siamese named Sasha, stretched out his hind legs and kicked the box of plastic bags over the edge of the dryer, so that it fell between the wall and the dryer.