Not Dark Yet (2 page)

The branches were covered in a fine layer of dried mud and were humid to the touch, but he stacked them in the hearth and held the flame of his camping lighter close to them until they finally caught fire. The light flickered over the night-dark walls and exhaled small breaths of heat which only emphasized the chill in the rest of the room. When the fire had consumed the wood he didn’t go outside to replace it, but undressed to his t-shirt and boxer briefs, pushed the mattress to the hearth, rolled his thin sleeping bag out on it, and fell asleep, even though it was barely six o’clock in the evening.

The next morning he put on running pants and trainers and went out on the deck. The air was sharp and fresh, easily bypassing his single layer of fabric, stealing the heat from his body, but the sensation only made him more alert. Far to the southwest and northwest were the neighboring farms: wooden houses, barns, courtyards, gardens. Except for them the moor held only heather and wild grass. He drank in the bright autumn light, the cold wind, the smell of vegetation and soil, and it felt like something sublimated and left him. He leapt from the unpainted deck and into the flowering heather, the ground firm and dry, not soft and sodden like he had expected, and began to run.

He continued west down the slope of the plain, feeling like he could run all the way to the summits in the distance. It made him think of a story he had read, about a dead man and a blackbird who traveled through a decaying, atrophied world to reduce the heat from the sun. Because the man was dead he needed no rest, and the two crossed a wide moor for days before they ascended into the mountains. Now he wanted to do the same, continue without stop until he reached the round blue peaks that bordered the moor. It looked like it would take at least two
days of running. He wasn’t back to that level yet, so it would provide him with a nice goal for the future. He tried to remember which town or county lay on the other side of the peaks, but failed to recall a mental map of the region, his mind unwilling to hold onto anything but the mountains and the heather and the fragrance of the heath.

When the sun glimmered above the peaks, the slanting rays stung his eyes and warmed his skin. The silvery morning light made him feel transparent, clear as glass. He squinted and grinned and ran on in the bright morning until the cabin and its small outhouse were dark spots behind him, and he seemed to be equally distant from it and the peaks. Then he continued back through the vegetation for a long while and arrived at the cabin just as the sun completed its brief autumnal arc in the sky and started falling behind the mountains.

3

HE THOUGHT HIS ARRIVAL ON THE MOOR HAD gone unseen, but the next day people appeared. From the mattress by the hearth he saw shadows moving behind the curtains in the kitchen window. He let the visitors do whatever they wished and pretended not to notice. He wasn’t doing anything that was interesting to watch anyway.

“I see a ghost in there,” a child commented through the door. Someone shushed her and retreated from the deck, their steps shivering the old planks.

“The natives are restless,” he texted Michael.

“Be careful,” Michael wrote back.

“Always,” he replied.

“When are you coming back home?”

“I just got here.”

“What does the cabin look like?”

“Not bad. As in the photos.”

“I miss you,” Michael wrote.

“I’ll be home again soon,” he replied, with no other reassurance than that.

The next day there were even more people, three middle-aged men and a woman, who knocked quietly on his door and introduced themselves as Eric, Pieter, Mark, and Eloise, neighbors. He shook their hands and returned their smiles and let them inside. They filed into the cabin, cluttering the entrance with their shoes, spreading the smell of sweaty feet and the sound of steps on the blood-red hardwood floor. Then they squeezed together on the dusty sofa with pained looks on their faces, while he apologized for the lack of additional seating.

He took out some mugs from the cupboard and asked the guests if they wanted tea. At first they declined, but then they said yes, that would be lovely, so he had to turn on the gas and light the stove and rinse the dusty cups in the sink and heat water in the dimpled kettle and take out some tea bags from his backpack and talk.

“Who are you, where are you from, what are you doing here?” they asked, but in more roundabout terms. He told them that he was from a city south along the coast and that he had recently bought the cabin and its plot. The visitors were from the neighboring farms and after a while he gathered that they wished to lease his land for an agricultural project. They must already have decided that he was no farmer and unlikely to attempt to grow anything on his own.

“You really want to rent the heath?” he nearly blurted out, but stopped himself in time and just said, “Yes, yes, yes.”

They smiled and said, “We’ll come over again soon and tell you more about our plans.”

When they left, he crawled to the panorama window to remain out of sight.

“That wasn’t so difficult,” one of the men said as they sauntered down toward the farms in the southwest.

“Mind your chatter,” came the reply.

He huffed and crept back to the fading fire in the hearth. The moor was only heather and low shrubs. Wasn’t it too cold, the soil too barren to grow anything here?

4

THE CONTINENT’S SPACE ORGANIZATION WAS seeking new recruits for their manned exploration program. It was mentioned in the news only briefly, one story among dozens of others, soon drowned out by subsequent news cycles, but to him it stood out. Those selected as astronauts might be among the first humans to land on Mars. Since most space projects took decades to advance from the first concept to the final launch, the space organization must be well underway in developing the technology and experience needed for the trip.

He sat on the fake ship floor with the laptop plugged into the single outlet from the solar panels on the roof. He had yearned to go to Mars since he was old enough to understand the concept of other worlds. It didn’t matter if the place was inhospitable and remote, had too little air and was too cold and dry. The desire to travel there remained the same. He did wonder if the challenges of cosmic radiation, lack of nutrition, loss of bone and muscle mass, and weakening of the immune system that would happen during the long journey to Mars and back had been solved, and searched for information on the space organization’s web pages. He found few answers, but nevertheless returned to the application page and filled out the information
the space organization wanted, storing the form online to send later.

Lastly, he took a visual and spatial perception test necessary for the application; he predicted the next geometric shape in a sequence, rotated variously colored blocks in his mind until he could almost reach out and turn them with his hands, and read the numbers off black and white square and round gauges while a timer in the corner rushed the seconds away. When he was done it had grown dark and the log from the wood he had bought in the town center earlier in the day had died out in the hearth. He switched the laptop off, texted Michael goodnight, undressed, and curled up inside the sleeping bag.

“I’ll let you leave on one condition,” Michael had said the last night before he left for the cabin.

He turned on the pillow toward Michael. “I will come back. I promise.”

“It’s not that,” Michael said.

“OK, what is it, then?”

Michael drew a breath. “That you text me ‘Goodnight and I love you’ every night before you go to sleep.”

He looked at Michael. By now he must know he loved him.

He spent the days running and hiking on the moor, forming various routes around the islets of birches, mounds of bilberry, and troughs of cloudberry and cup lichen interspersed in the heather. When he needed more food and firewood, he walked to the town center. In the evenings he watched the news and popular science documentaries on the laptop while it used the power harvested from the sun.

He read about the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, the largest structure the astronomers had found so far in the universe, a wall of filaments of galaxy clusters ten billion light years across. In its brightly glowing web each tiny point of light was
not a star, but an entire galaxy containing billions and billions of stars, many with their own planets, moons, and asteroid fields. He tried to imagine something as large and encompassing as the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, but it was so impossible, so unimaginable, that he had to go outside on the deck and see for himself the stars that gleamed above the heath.

The next morning the neighbors were there again, as they had said they would be, the two youngest, bringing with them a barking, medium-sized dog on a leash. He told them to leave the pet outside and invited them in.

“Would you like some tea?” he said, like last time.

“Yes, please,” they said, like last time.

He padded to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. The faucet gargled and spat a few times before it ran smooth with clear, clean water. He put the old steel on the stove and lit the blue-burning gas with a match. As he handed the visitors their cups, one of the glass containers slipped from his hands, spun upward, and started on a trajectory toward the floor. Before he had time to think, his body had already reacted, caught the cup with open palms, and handed it to them. They grinned and cheered. He smiled, fetched the kettle and the tea bags, poured the hot water into their waiting cups, and sat down on the floor in front of them.

“We plan to use the change in climate to grow barley, rye, and wheat, low-pH winter varieties, of course,” the thirty-something woman who he remembered had introduced herself as Eloise, said. “That’s what our project is about.”

“But there’s just heather and mud here,” he said.

“It’s become a lot warmer than it used to,” her companion, Mark, said. “With the right treatment and seeds, the moor will be fertile enough.”

He thought of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and how it contained everything that was possible, all that could
exist in its part of the universe, connecting it with the rest of the cosmos, leaving out nothing, accepting everything.

“I will let you use the land,” he said. “For free. Just give me a little of whatever it yields.”

“That’s a deal,” Eloise said and held out her hand. “Thank you so much. We will give you our contract and copies of the research and preparations we have done on the project, as well as the monthly progress reports we make for our investors.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing them,” he said. He shook their hands one by one, a warm and sturdy pressure against his skin.

“So you’ll be staying then?” Mark, Eloise’s husband, said.

“Yes,” he said. “At least for a while.”

5

FROM THEIR PRONE POSITIONS BEHIND A HALF-CRUMBLED wall, Kepler gave him the wind speed, wind direction, and distance to the far edge of the dirt road a few hundred meters ahead and six floors below them. The distance differed slightly from the number he had measured himself.

“You must be joking,” he said and disputed the result to see if he could work Kepler up a little, although he knew the spotter was right and adjusted his sights accordingly.

There was plenty of time. They had set out early and he had driven Kepler hard through the burned-down, bombed-out streets, past the vehicle cadavers and the mounds of debris, to the third tallest building that was still standing on their stretch of the road, and up through the gutted, wind-shorn structure. He wondered how Kepler had made it through the intense training required by the special unit, because the man huffed and puffed even after short lengths of travel and occasionally had problems concealing himself because of the size of his body. For that reason he sometimes chose routes through the rubble he knew would tire Kepler and had smaller or narrower hiding places, but the man was so observant he always found a wall segment or pile large enough to hide behind, and had the emotional
resilience not to complain to him about it. Today, Kepler had been panting the whole time, but when the spotter set the booby traps in the stairs below, it had been with calm and steady hands.

Kepler lifted his rangefinder binoculars without moving any other part of his body and repeated the distance he had measured earlier with a confidence born from careful consideration and long-time experience, not simply stubbornness or the need to be right.

“Where the hell are you pointing that thing?” he replied.

“At your dick, or I wouldn’t be able to see it,” Kepler said and laughed from deep inside his belly.

“Someday, Kepler,” he said, “you’ll make a good spouse for another man.”

“I suppose you would know,” Kepler said and laughed again.

He had been open about his sexual orientation; he wasn’t the only one in the unit, and he thought he’d be able to handle any idiot remarks. The others had been surprisingly open-minded and made fewer comments and jokes than he’d expected, although one or two kept their distance, especially during social events or nights off. Kepler had made no such move and remained outgoing and talkative with him. That annoyed him too, that Kepler was more tolerant of him than he was of Kepler.