The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (16 page)

And no record of Kate after that night.

*

The well. What about the well? It was a question posed by Evie to Farris, as a sort of test.

“Farris,” she says, as they make their way the next day across a plain, “what’s your plan concerning the well?”

“To help you repair it.” He’s walking in front of Evie, leading the way. The sky has
brightened, and the sun’s making the earth beneath their feet, it seems to Evie, somehow softer.

“What makes you think I’m going to repair it?”

With this, Farris stops and turns to her. A look—an almost threatening look, or worse, demonic—crosses his face and then just as quickly vanishes. He smiles, fingers a cigarette from his pocket, lights it (in a procedural sort of way) takes a drag, and offers it to Evie. To be friendly Evie obliges and passes it back.

“You know,” says Farris, “they warned me you might say that.”

“Warned? They?”

In the near distance, an animal of some sort, black and low, crosses the plain. It makes a noise, a muted howl. It stops, and then moves again, and then stops. Evie feels the paint moving again on the back of her left hand, and she glances down to see it swirling slowly, counterclockwise, in purples and browns, like a bruise. The animal is closer now and they can see the black, shiny hair standing up on its back, thick like wire. It makes another sound, and Evie pictures the noise as red horizontal sound bars reaching low across the ground towards her and she understands or thinks she understands that if she can get close enough to the animal or whatever it is to hear the sound up close it would be significant and have meaning.

They push, step by step, deeper into the State and the animal shadows them for a while and then disappears. The plain gives way to patchy, untended fields that slope gently down
into a valley. They pass people dressed in yellow tending an apple orchard and a building with a spire looming behind them topped off with something carved out of metal, a slashing symbol unknown to either Evie or Farris. They continue on, warming in the afternoon sun, sometimes Evie leading, sometimes Farris. They walk in silence mostly, their strides in sync for minutes at a time.

Until the drones come, appearing in the form of something resembling hawks, complete with feathers, soaring high and screechless. Evie has a memory—as faint as the undercoating of paint—of throwing pebbles at large birds like that. Not quite: her handing Kate small stones and she hauling off and whipping them at the sky not to hit them but to make them dive as if at insects. They had gotten the idea from watching bats at dusk above the open field drop and rise in sharp, impossible rhythms. Just trying to pick one out and follow it was enough to set your eyes in a sort of waking REM.

There are two of them, then three, against the gray afternoon sky. Those slow, looping circles in the air that were so familiar.

“Are they ours?” Farris asks, still watching the sky.

Evie, standing behind him, considers, yet again, the star-shaped symbol scarred onto the back of Farris’s neck. To their east is an enormous grasslands, stretching to the far horizon. To their west is much the same, with pale mountains rising in the distance. They stand upon something like a farm-to-market road, dipping and rising ahead of them and then curving off into the unseeable distance.

“The one on the left is, maybe,” Evie says. It’s meant as a joke; the drones are in continual motion, continually exchanging places in the sky. There is no
left
or
right
drone. It’s a test, of sorts, to see if Farris will smile.

He doesn’t.

*

After two hours of walking at a good clip without stopping, everything looks the same. Which is to say, everything looks just slightly
different
, somehow. Repetition and difference. Wasn’t that how one of the theorists Evie studied under characterized our present age? Was it
repetition with difference
, or
and
difference? Also:
Empty time
. In the dry air of that classroom in the cool basement library Evie had fallen in love with the translated words of philosopher D., even though later that semester, drunk at the Brickhouse on a cold winter night, she would learn from the philosophy students that no one in philosophy considered D. a real philosopher.
What is he then?
Evie asked.
An aphorist
, they said,
made into a philosopher by English departments
.

*

That night, as Farris and Evie sleep near the side of the road beneath one of the shapeless thorn apple trees that had begun to appear, Evie listens as Farris talks in his sleep. Some of the words are familiar:

State…

Instructions…

Firestorm…

Jinxed…

While others seem to be two words put together into something familiar:

Out-push…

Day-gold-by…

Open-waste…

And yet others are alien to Evie:

Cuitlaxcolli…

*

In the morning they keep walking. The State stretches on and on, encompassing its own useless, undulating fields. Day after day, toward the chaos and catastrophe of the well. Evie’s repair kit with its small metal objects wrapped individually in oiled cloths weighs heavily on her back in a small leather knapsack. On the third day the grass fields change to barren, dusty land, and then back to grass.

The lack of objects on the horizon intrigues and then spooks Evie, who recalls
the plane of immanence
from her useless theory-training, the horizontal moment of thought and all that. She understands that in order to repair the well she will have to destroy it. That was prerequisite for the emergence of any new System. She will need to get to the
root
of the infection. In this phase of the State’s long collapse, to be an engineer, as she is, means to be a destroyer, not a designer, of objects. But in order to destroy them properly one has to know how they were built in the first place.

On the fifth day, they arrive at a quarry, the first sign that they are nearing the well. Evie knows that some sections have been quarried hundreds of kilometers from where it was built, so the well might still be days ahead. The bitter smell of limestone fills the air and Evie can’t help thinking of the smell of blood from the cut-throated animal. Large ruts in the earth indicating the direction
the limestone had been transported run due north, towards the well. Looking down into the quarry she sees that at the bottom, perched on a large rock in the middle of a pool of turquoise water, there are several of the drones they had seen in the sky earlier. Again, Evie thinks of Kate and her pebble throwing, and of how, on the night before she disappeared, home from university for the summer, her hair shorter than Evie had ever seen it before, they had gone to the zoo, and how in the enormous walk-in aviary, so full of sound, she first suggested that some of the birds weren’t real at all.

*

The quarry a few hours behind them, Evie and Farris rest at the side of the road.

“We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, “from the animal.”

“Why?”

“As a reminder. Maybe a tusk.”

“There were no tusks.”

“I should have said ‘the.’ There was only one tusk. Someone or something else must have taken the other.”

This was the most Farris has said since the beginning of the journey.

“Or the tail,” Farris continues. “Tusk or tail.”

“What tail? There wasn’t any tail.”

Farris gives Evie a look that tells her to stop or to be careful, but Evie keeps talking.

“We looked at the same animal, Farris, dead on the road. There were no tusks. There was no tail.”

“Perhaps you failed to see them because of the blood.”

“I saw what you saw. The same thing.”

“Well. We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, and they are back where they began.

*

Before nightfall they pass another larger quarry. The landscape is more rugged now, with outcroppings of mossy rocks and scattered pine trees. By the light of the campfire, Evie studies the back of her left hand, looking for movement in the design. Her thoughts drift ahead to the well, not as a structure but as an event, an event that the State wants her to contain, as if meaning could ever be anything other than deferred, and in this deferral not nothingness but the revelation of absolute absence. A structurally unreadable sign, that’s what the well had become, and yet she was to engineer its repair, as if a breach that great could be repaired. The question was: why has the State sent her on a mission to repair a well that, they must know, is beyond repair?

During the night, beneath the stars, the sky full of silent drones, more than she could possibly imagine, Evie dreams of letters, and then those letters in the shape of a word:
Cuitlaxcolli.

The next day, under the bright hot sun, they arrive at a false well, prior to the well itself. Quarried and built around the same time as the original well, this one’s purposes remained obscure. Its stone rim rises impressively from the landscape: its clean limestone lines that make an enormous circle, its sheer whiteness in the sun, the way it seems somehow to divide nature from itself.

As they approach, the well wall looms higher than it appears possible, as if it has grown
as they have come nearer. At least ten meters high and stretching enormous distances as it curves around to meet itself again. On the other side of the curving wall, presumably, the well itself, as deep as the imagination would allow. As they enter its cool shadow it appears that it has emerged out of the earth rather than being built upon it. A flock of drones passes silently overhead, their shadows racing across the plain toward Evie and Farris and then disappearing into the well wall’s shadow.

After half a day’s westerly walk parallel to the false well, they reach the end and head north again, the well receding in the distance. Soon, the plain gives way to outcroppings of trees and they stop at a good-sized lake where they gather water, catch fish, and rest. And then north again into a vast pine forest that holds the cool air and seems untouched by the will of the State. For most of the time Evie walks in front and on the straight parts Farris follows in sync, step for step, so that it sounds to Evie as if she is walking alone. In these long stretches she wonders what the differences are, really, between the false well and the real well they are headed toward. At certain points the forest is so thick with trees that she feels it difficult to generate any thought at all, and so she walks without thinking, her legs mechanically carrying her forward. Without knowing how it happened her hands have become sticky with pine sap.

They reverse positions: now Evie follows Farris. The forest stretches on and on as if only to create the very conditions of its own existence. Evie imagines for a while that the
forest
is
the well. As a child she had heard that the well had been stuffed with bodies of the State’s enemies, so that it was really a graveyard. A mass grave. And other stories that it wasn’t built by the State at all, but by the kingdom or whatever it was that the State had conquered hundreds of years ago. And others yet that it wasn’t a well even but something natural, something of nature itself. The well appeared and disappeared from history books. Often it was spoken of, and then suddenly it was not. It appeared on stamps and then those stamps were confiscated, along with the envelopes they were affixed to. A story made the rounds that those without limbs had had them forcibly removed to eradicate the symbols of the well that had been tattooed upon them. Then just as suddenly the well was heralded on all the State’s banners. The well became a natural resource and then, the next week, a toxic waste site. A documentary about the well’s early existence was shown on television and the following night the same documentary was re-advertised as a feature film masquerading as a documentary.

It’s safe to say that people of Evie’s generation were raised to have a schizophrenic relationship with the well, at once desiring and detesting it, acknowledging its existence and then disavowing it, and on and on. As darkness seeps into the pine forest Evie thinks about this, and then suddenly realizes that Farris is gone. Evie stops, calls out his name. It’s the first time she has spoken all day and the sound of her own voice startles her.

“Farris,” she calls out, and the name just
hangs there in the air for a moment and then disappears, along with Farris himself.