Circuit Of Heaven (2 page)

“Disorienting?”

“The Bin. You’re only just in.”

She nodded. “Six weeks. But I suppose I told you that already last night.”

“Yes.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed and motioned for him to sit down, but he remained standing. “Do you have strange dreams when you’re first in?”

He furrowed his brow and shook his head. “Dreams? No, I’ve never heard of that.”

“To tell you the truth, Winston—it’s Winston, isn’t it?—I don’t remember how we met.”

“I bought you a drink in the bar.”

She nodded, contemplating the tangle of rumpled sheets. She couldn’t even remember going into the bar. “I apparently didn’t need it.”

“Maybe we can make a fresh start,” he said hopefully. “Just forget about last night.”

“That’s easy.” She laughed. “I’ve already forgotten it.” She’d been afraid he’d be all over her, but now he was polite, almost formal. I must’ve laid on the lonely-little-girl bit a little thick last night, she thought, and now he feels sorry for me. Truth was, she felt sorry for herself. The last six weeks was a series of hotel rooms. No friends to speak of. Even her old band had quit or wandered away. She wasn’t sure what had become of them.

“So what do you say? Seven-thirty? I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’d like to meet some people.”

“Wonderful!” He bowed again, excusing himself and letting himself out before she even had the chance to stand up. Maybe my instincts about him were wrong, she told herself. Maybe he’s okay.

She finished her coffee, pushed the icon for another cup, and was reminded again of
Star Trek
. But this time it struck her—she’d never seen
Star Trek
. It was an old TV show, she knew that, but there hadn’t been any TV since before she was born. The only TV she could’ve seen was playing in the corner in some period virtual. But there it was, this memory of some guy in a funny uniform—Captain Kirk, his name was—taking a cup of coffee out of the wall just as she had done. Who the hell is Captain Kirk? she wondered. How do I know this? She shook her head, figuring she was just hungover, still spooked by her dream.

SHE
NEEDED
TO
GET
OUT
, DO
SOMETHING
.
SHE
HUNTED
through her bag and found a letter from her agent listing her dates for the next several weeks. In the letter was the number of the hotel where her new band was staying. She called and got John, the bass player. He had the visual turned off, so she didn’t get a look at him, and his voice was low and muffled. She told him she wanted to meet the band at the club in the morning so they could rehearse before tomorrow night.

“No problem,” he said.

“How’s eleven?”

“No problem.”

“So what’re you doing today?”

“Sleeping.”

“See you tomorrow morning, then.”

She hung up the phone and pulled her address book out of her bag. She looked through it. It was mostly empty, nobody in it she could really call a good friend, just acquaintances—other musicians, her agent, some club owners, little more than voiceless faces in her memory and some of them not even that. She finished her coffee and went down to the lobby.

HER
HOTEL
WAS
ONE
OF
THE
“RESTORED”
ONES
OFF
DU-pont Circle. In the real world, the place was a ruin. But in the Bin, the lobby was done up turn-of-the-century with lots of brass and etched glass and fiber-optic light fixtures sprouting out of sconces.

She went into the restaurant, sat in the corner chewing on a bagel and drinking another cup of coffee, watching all the tourists and their families planning their days with maps and brochures. She imagined herself one of the little girls, crawling on her daddy’s lap as he pointed out the pictures of the places they would go. Behind her, a table burst into laughter, and she rose from her chair and left without looking back.

I’ll be a tourist myself, she thought—the monuments today, galleries tomorrow, the White House and the Capitol the next day. I’ve only seen pictures of those places. Maybe I’ll even meet somebody. You couldn’t tell. They said it was easy in here. They said everything was easy in here.

She spent most of the day going to the monuments—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Rogers—the famous dead. But it was the living she watched. Thousands of them. A few were by themselves—busy people on their way to someplace, or drugged-out zombies who didn’t care where they were going. But most were with somebody—a friend, a child, a lover. She watched their faces, their hands gesturing, the way they leaned this way and that as they spoke to each other. The way they sometimes touched.

All the while she kept thinking about Angelina and her dream. The crowded streets. The bright windows. She’d been inside a world she’d only read about in books or seen in a virtual. She could still smell the cars and the wet streets. She wondered if she might be cracking up. There were scare stories about people going into the Bin and breaking up like a virtual in a thunderstorm, that there were flaws in the crystalline structure of the Bin, and you could find yourself in nightmarish worlds that made no sense, completely alone. But in my dream, she thought, I wasn’t alone. I was inside Angelina.

BY
MIDAFTERNOON
,
SHE
WAS
WANDERING
THROUGH
THE
largest and most crowded monument, the Rogers Memorial. There were exhibits covering every aspect of Newman Rogers’ life, detailing his every achievement, but the center of attention was an enormous holograph of him, towering over the central hall, delivering his last speech—the day
ALMA
went on-line—over and over again.

He was a tiny man, blown up to be forty feet tall. The Savior of Mankind. The podium came to his chest so that those who stood too close in front couldn’t see his face and had to content themselves with his baggy pants. His soft, reedy voice echoed through the hall, and though people were jammed in on every side, the only sounds were shuffling feet, and here and there, someone crying.

Justine worked her way up the escalators to the thirdfloor balcony. She wanted to see his face. By the time she squeezed into a place at the rail, he was coming to the end of his speech. He took off his glasses and laid them on the podium, rubbed his enormous eyes. When he opened them, he was looking directly at Justine—

I have only one more thing to say before we change the world, forever—for that’s what we’re doing, you know. I’d hoped that one of the other speakers, more qualified than myself, would’ve said it first, and let me off the hook. But it’s only fair that it should be me, since I’m the one who got us here
.

There are those who have said that by ending death, by eating from the tree of Life, we sin by presuming to be gods. I confess I sympathize with their views. I can only pray that God grants us a godlike wisdom to match our cleverness
.

There are more—like the other speakers here today—who seem to think that with the end of death, the human task is finished; that with the end of death, comes the easy life of Olympians; that with the end of death, comes the end of God—for who needs Him anymore, now that we’ve built our own heaven? To these people, I would like to quote from the Book of Job
—

Is not God in the height of heaven
?

And behold the height of the stars, how high

they are
!

And thou sayest, How doth God know
?

Can he judge through the dark cloud
?

Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he

seeth not
;

and he walketh in the circuit of heaven
.

The story goes that he muttered, “Turn the damn thing on,” as he left the podium, but if he did, it wasn’t recorded on this holograph. It flickered and began again: Newman Rogers noisily spreading his notes on the podium, his hair blowing across his face, waiting for the applause to die down so that he might speak, looking, Justine decided, sadder than any man she’d ever seen.

She searched the faces of the crowd, one by one, not sure what she hoped to find there. There were others, like her, who were crying, but she couldn’t tell whether they were crying for him or for his sentiments. She lowered her head and pushed through the crowd, brushing tears from her eyes.

SHE
SET
OUT
IN NO
PARTICULAR
DIRECTION
,
HURRYING
AT first, then slowing her pace. She was here now. This was home. She should take in the spring, enjoy walking down streets free of wild dogs and wild men. She didn’t remember much of her life before she came in. That must be part of the disorientation Winston mentioned. It’s probably not anything I
want
to remember, she thought.

It was still hours before she was to meet Winston at the hotel. She took one side street, then another, trying to get away from the buzz of so many people. Pretty soon, she was wandering through a residential neighborhood of nineteenth-century rowhouses, neatly trimmed hedges, and flower beds lining the sidewalk. She imagined herself opening one of the little iron gates and mounting the steps to knock on one of the heavy wooden doors framed in stained glass.
Hi, my name’s Justin, she’d say, I’m new here
.

And they would say,
Why come in, dear, and have a cup of tea
.

She closed her eyes and let the daydream dissolve. When she opened them, she noticed a wooden sign hanging over a narrow brick stairway that descended to a basement shop:

WARREN
G. MENSO

Books on All Subjects

Ancient and Modern

She didn’t know how she’d missed the sign before. She looked up and down the street. It was the only shop visible in either direction. Maybe what I need is a book, she thought. Prop myself up in bed and lose myself in a novel. She descended the moss-stained steps, breathing in the smell of damp stone. She pushed open the door, and a brass bell rang above her head, but no one appeared to greet her, and no one sat at the rolltop desk beside the door. A maze of pine shelving radiated from the doorway in all directions. Yellowing, hand-lettered index cards were thumbtacked here and there—
History, Romance, Horror, Art, Classics, Science Fiction, Mystery
. Each sign had an arrow like this → to show the way. She chose
Classics
and walked down the narrow aisle, running her fingers along the spines of old, jacketless hardbacks.

She took one down, read a sentence or two, put it back, got another one. The old book smell of the place filled her with contentment. She loved to read. She hesitated as she started to take another book from the shelf. What have I read? she asked herself. Her head was full of authors and titles; she even knew something about them.
Wuthering Heights
was by Emily Bronte. It was the story of Cathy and Heathcliff. But when it came to whether she’d read a particular book or not, she couldn’t be sure.

She scanned the shelves for a familiar title, and a faded green book with gold on the spine caught her eye. She tilted her head to read the title—
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier. She took it down. It was familiar, but she couldn’t remember ever reading it. She opened it and read the beginning—

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited
.

She took it as a sign that the story began with a dream, just as her day had. She clutched the book to her chest and decided to spend the rest of the afternoon at Manderley with Rebecca—whoever she might turn out to be.

She heard someone clearing his throat and turned to find a little old man standing at the end of the aisle, a dreamy smile on his face. His body was slightly stooped, and he leaned on a cane, grasping it with bony hands. His hair was as white as paper. His wrinkled skin looked like cracked glaze on an ancient vase.

“It’s a wonderful book, isn’t it?” he said. Even his fluting voice was old and worn.

She blushed and looked down at the book she still clutched to her chest like a life preserver. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve read it.”

He nodded, still smiling. “You’ve never seen anyone who looks so old, have you?”

“I’m sorry—”

He waved his cane a few inches above the floor and settled back onto it. “Don’t be ridiculous. I know I’m a curiosity. Why would a sane man look like this in here?” He chuckled to himself. “But I don’t want to forget I’m getting old, goddamnit. Be a hundred, week from today.” He winked at her. “I want to look the part.”

“I think you look wonderful,” she said, and she meant it. There was something endearing about him, even noble. “I was just surprised.”

He studied her for a moment, his head nodding almost imperceptibly. She didn’t know if this nodding was another symptom of his age or something else—approval, she guessed from the light in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “But for me there is no beauty like a young woman’s in all the world, and you are a most beautiful young woman.”

She blushed again. “Thank you. You must be Mr. Menso.”

“That’s me.” He bowed over his cane and righted himself.

“I’m Justin Ingham,” she said, and stuck out her right hand. He took it in his left, holding onto his cane with his right. He had a gentle touch, turning her hand over as if examining it, admiring it. There was nothing lecherous about it. Her hand in his looked young and beautiful. But his is beautiful too, she thought.