The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (17 page)

Suddenly Evie feels stupid standing alone in the forest. So she keeps walking, alone, until it’s too dark to continue.

And then she makes her camp for the night.

*

As she sleeps in the dark, Evie cannot have known that the black sky has filled with silent drones so completely autonomous that even to their ground controllers their purpose is obscure, or that the forest ferns produce haploid spores that travel impossible distances, or that her lost sister Kate is sleeping also on some other patch of the earth, or that she has not yet even arrived at the deepest part of the forest, or that the animals that have followed her and Farris earlier are still nearby and that they aren’t animals at all but, like the drones, machines in the guise of animals, created by the State for the simple reason that they could be created and once created set loose to explore, as if the State, having already discovered and mapped itself, created these things to experience itself anew, not through the eyes of humans but machines, and not to collect information but to
forget
information so that it could be discovered again as if for the first time, or that one theory of the well—being debated at this very moment by functionaries of the State—was that the well existed only insofar as it receded from view, a perpetually vanishing vanishing point, and that Evie’s useless, carefully tended tools are already antiques aged beyond use and that she has been on this
journey for a very, very long time, not days but months. Or years.

*

In the morning she continues, without Farris, passing through the thickest part of the forest and then out into an expanse of grasslands that give way to a village whose flags bear woven symbols that Evie has not seen before. Three men with wooden rifles spot her on the outskirts and follow her casually as she takes the road that skirts the town. They don’t threaten her. She imagines that, if she had wanted to, they would allow her to enter the village.

It’s not that she misses Farris—what is there to miss?—but rather that she misses the idea of Farris’s presence, as quiet and unobtrusive and even menacing as it was. As Evie leaves the village, the road straightens out and after a few miles takes her by another lime quarry, larger than the previous one, an impossibly sharp-angled cube subtracted from the earth, a pool of bright, glass-flat turquoise water at the bottom. She stands at the edge, peering in, and knows that the well is not far off, and that the stone from this quarry had been used to build it. Three very large birds circle silently in the sky above her, and she senses she’s being watched in a way she hasn’t felt before.

If it’s true that the drones have evolved somehow as self-sustaining machines detached from the State itself, then why did the State allow them to exist? What data could they possibly be gathering and transmitting, and to whom or what? Evie suddenly feels the urge to shoot one down, to watch it with the eyes of
an insurgent spiral into the turquoise water far below. Better yet to have it fall at her feet so that she could, with her bare hands, determine once and for all what it was made of, where evolution had taken it. What would it feel like to grab hold of the neck of one of those things and squeeze until the lights or cameras or whatever its eyes were made of went out? Did it store the data it collected or just transmit it raw and unfiltered to the nearest antenna tower? Could it fly alone or did it need the others (they always appeared in flocks) to navigate?

That night, Evie sleeps near the edge of the quarry not hoping to sleepwalk over the edge into the pit but not hoping not to either as the night sky fills again with drones flocking and scattering in silence and shitting whatever it is that machines shit, the exhaust not of animals but of engines, engines of thought and malice now detached from their makers and flying amok in the sky above the land of the State upon which Evie sleeps, swooping down close to her in the night, dragging their birdlike feet across the top of the tall prairie grass, their machine thoughts unformed and digitally rigid but beginning to expand beyond the binary into something sentient in an animal sort of way.

Evie sleeps. The earth spins. The State expands and contracts in the night like a breathing creature. And the well arranges itself in anticipation of her arrival.

In the pale morning light, Evie has a beautiful thought, not a memory exactly, but a thought built on a memory, of Kate, showing her the chipped and scarred teak box where she
kept her cigarettes lined up neatly like the dead wrapped tightly in white muslin, her fingertips nicotine-stained or else just faintly yellow in the sunlight, the thought beautiful not because it was beautiful but simply because it refused to turn itself into a narrative as so many of her thoughts did, and that was the power of Kate before she disappeared and, to her great surprise and happiness, even now after she was gone: her absolute refusal to become a part of anyone’s story. Kate had managed to detour almost any conversation into what Evie, in the months before Kate disappeared, would think of as a sort of metaphysical swampland, where first you agreed to this, and then to that, and then also conceded x, y, and z, and before you knew it you were laughing with her about the absurdity of, say, believing that the sun exists.

If this were one of those horror movies where the demon or spirit was always off screen then Kate would remain—as she is now—out of sight and off the page. Not that she’s demonic and not that Evie’s thoughts tend, of late, to be spectral, or that gathering herself to sleep less than one statute mile away from the well doesn’t make her miss Kate even more, because what would she say about this whole mess Evie was in other than to divert it to some other level, deeper or higher, what did it matter as long as it was diverted in the endless way that flocks of tree swallows move in assembling and disassembling pixels across the sky. Kate’s cigarettes, the closest she ever came to real rebellion, the way she shut her eyes when Evie lit one for her, leaning in close to her, some secret sisterly information shared
between them of the sort that would take years to decode. The way she lit her cigarette off hers, Evie before she became
Evie
, and before the missed call that would result in Kate’s disappearance from the known places of this world.

A dead world. Of course they had both fantasized about it, though not in a post-apocalyptic way. Their thoughts, when they ran together as in the moment with the shared cigarettes on the roof of Kate’s flat, conjured a world devoid of the objects that gave rise to artifacts and then to meaning. How to think without thinking, and would a dead planet make such a thing possible? Back then the State had just deployed the first generation of drones-as-birds, and they hadn’t figured out how to land them in trees yet, and the whole thing was comical, really, to watch them try to perch on a branch only to end up tangled and dying there, depowered, until one of the freelance retrieval units came to bag them and return them at the depot. It was Kate who first spoke about how the drones might very well be the first step in the direction of lifelessness. The denaturing of nature, its living creatures replaced one by one by dead things, like Evie’s crablike ribcage and its preposterous sternum self-coding in symmetrical offshoots.

In the meantime of Evie’s memory Kate flicked her smoked-down cig off the roof and leaned back and sighed and Evie reached over (and this was years ago and miles of unstrung human thought away from where Evie was now, near the real well) and picked up her fallen blue barrette which she held in the palm of her hand for her like a live, trembling cricket, the
smallness of its heart beating against her skin. She closed the cigarette box then opened it again and they commenced with the same cig-lighting ritual and she banished the thought that between the moments of the closing and opening of the box the cigarettes they had just smoked replaced themselves (as if through magic) and if Kate noticed this too she didn’t let on in the least but simply let Evie light hers off of her own precisely as she had minutes earlier and that’s when Kate asked her again, this time in a way she could understand, about a dead world, something along the lines of
are we on a dead world with living things or a living world with dead things?
and then laughed as if to withdraw her question before Evie could take it seriously, which was her way, Kate’s.

In a sense the question answered itself when a lone drone drifted across the sky, apparently having broken away from the flock and she lifted her hand to wave at the bird, which back then they built with enormous twenty-meter wing spans that modeled her own wobbling thought and unfastened gravity so as to rise and fall on the updrafted heat from the earth. The drone’s slow shadow dragged across the city streets below as real as the shadow of a bird not stuffed with wires, but actual bird-blood and wire-thin bones that, dried out, seem as fragile as straw of the sort that no cigarette box or bone box could preserve any more than anarchist thoughts disguised as blood-red oil-dripped paintings in some Soho art gallery could stay on walls in frames gazed upon by doomed children lost deeper and deeper in their longings and volcanic breaking of tens
and twenties as the family that shouldn’t have turned off I-90 but stayed on the interstate built and abandoned and rebuilt by the State’s most prolific technicians. Evie feels the massively parallel signature sequencing that sparks between them, the 10 feet of DNA coiled into a microscopic nucleus, sister and sister not uterine or agnate but full, the ragged sentimentality of nostalgia for the future (because in the future all bonds are severed) tugging at her in an unforgiving, psychopathic way, as if the State and its fucking black drones could ever see into Kate’s heart or the synapse flashes that inspired her fragile hand to touch her heart or hold a cigarette to her lips or close her eyes to black out the stupid life-affirming symbols of her era that came now faster and faster in clichéd binaries of ones and zeroes strung out like the video-game junkies from her middle-school years, blinking their way awkwardly into the reality of the real world,
this
world, not some other double-screened once removed from the finger touch of riverbank mud or the suicide of a skyscraper diver, his thoughts splattered across sidewalks and plate glass storefront windows, and if Evie shuddered to think that Kate might take this sort of leap first, without her, understanding that the drones accumulated into the textures and fabrics of reality, the DNA coils that linked enemy States so that every war was really brother versus brother and sister versus sister well, then at least one of them had gone first into the void.

And in the pale morning light Evie (now back in the present) abandoned by Farris and walled-in by thoughts of wells and the family
she would never raise or those gardens out back in the 7 o’clock sun she would never tend, guiding her son’s or daughter’s uncalloused hands into the to-be-seeded furrows and yet deeper-welled furrows of the mind to protect them from the soft-thought walkabouts of the State itself, schooled now in a sort of
Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam
self-understanding, Evie’s thoughts still fleeing back back back to Kate on the roof despite her best efforts to press forward, her cigarettes and the way the wooden matches that lit them kept striking and unstriking in her mind, her guillotine eyelids and the minimalist precision of her thoughts like notes or silence, the timed silence of 4’33’’ as if the Commonwealth of Nations number signs could legislate the counting-down-till-death beats of her heart, or how, when the immense drones glided too close overhead you could hear something whirring in them, you wondered whether they could hear the whirring inside you.

How Evie’s thoughts tend to collapse in on each other as she nears the well so that it amounts to an act of violent psychological excavation to bring them to the surface pure and clean and uninfected. And that very same Evie up on two legs making her way across a grasslands spotted with oak trees, the false well fading behind her and the landscape now dotted with lime quarries large and small and some unfinished as if the levied stone was not pure enough. Shaking out grains of sand from her hair from where she slept and them scattering and the sound of thunder as they fall to the ground. Thought, and the thought of thought, pulling itself apart at the seams.
And reaching the well at last. A long line of limestone cubes set one after the other, hardly a well at all, cubes about as large as small automobiles. A mockery of a well, devoid of any sort of clear intention. Long dry grasses growing between and around the stones that encircle the supposed deepness of the well itself, the stones demarcating nothing from nothing, the natural world as banal on this side as on that. Hardly worth dividing. Evie collapsing and then recovering beneath the unevenness of her thoughts splitting into splinters and then rearranging into wholes, swirling into Kate, the complete and utter breakdown of object relations, the stones themselves separated and unattached, the well there on the other side deep and black and as endless as

The well.

Welling in or out a dead world.

And she, Evie, going to destroy it all.

When I arrive the next morning at the motel Laing’s not there. The room door is unlocked. There is a box fan that I don’t remember seeing before set up on the table going full speed. And reams of papers loosely stacked in a dozen or so piles on the bed, each one with a stone or asphalt chunk to keep them from being blown around. I’m relieved he’s not there. Beside the fan there’s a micro-recorder that I hadn’t noticed when I first came in. I switch off the fan, sit down, and press play: