Ben and I snuck away from the backyard barbecue and disappeared into the woods. Eight years old and most anyone our age would do it to pass around a beer confiscated from the ill-guarded cooler, or a cigarette from a poorly-hidden carton, maybe a pinch of coke from my off-to-war brother Ron's stash inside the dust jacket of his Finnegans Wake, right there in the plain sight of all and everything. But it wasn't any of that.
Ben, ten years old, played a permanent timidity and turned wild once outside. He charged through the woods with complete disregard for the old paths we used for mountain biking on our rickety thin-wheeled street bikes. Each branch he parted snapped back and hit me in the throat or groin and Ben laughed an evil, high-pitched cackle while I was getting cut and smacked all while rife with paranoia of deer ticks.
A rusty barbed-wire fence snaked along the long-discarded property line. Ben slid under, agile as an eel, found a free space for his fingers, gripped two rows and pulled them up for me to crawl under, waiting for him to release their tension and impale me with tetanus. But he didn't, and when I got up and brushed the dirt off my bare knees Ben was already sprinting through the growing dark of the woods. I followed the noise.
I didn't ask any questions. I didn't even give a direct answer when Ben delivered his mission objective, way back a million miles beyond us, in the clearly-demarcated civilization of fresh-mowed lawns and I simply went along with it because… well…
Too fast a pace for my asthma. Running well past exhaustion and the tunnelvision that usually prompted the use of the inhaler that was back on the drafting desk in my room. Expecting to die right there, young and innocent, death by misadventure, death, at long last, by the influence of the impish Benjamin S. Meridien. Death chasing the promise of more death, for the living to stand around a dead animal and poke it with sticks, probe at all the entrails dug out by the elusive North American long-clawed bearwolf.
And the strength gone from my legs and my arms splayed like a skydiver but no soft air to cushion me, only a tangle of fallen branches from unremembered thunderstorms. A momentarily blackout from the collision and the phantom return to consciousness, suddenly looking up at a clearing and Ben, from a low angle in the dying light, looked giant with his hands on his hips, his crooked spine held straight and his eyes down. My pupils grew and I saw that he was shaking his head.
Then the stench; that terrible stench worse than death. Not fresh death, that reek of hot blood and clammy flesh. And it was past the regular smell of some post-death bloating, some rotten fish flopping on wet soil past the receding waters of a flooded lake. We were in a place where all the scavengers had taken their share, leaving behind the truly wretched parts of a dead husk. The odor curled in my nostrils, nose pinched shut before the rotten air slipped down my throat and triggered a hard gag.
Ben, unaffected or posturing - or both - produced a penlight and shined it on the clearing. Sinewy bones. Coagulated blood. Swarms of silent flies laying eggs on scraps of spoiled meat. A grizzly end for something unidentifiable had Ben not told me, lured me out to the spot to stare at a dead horse that had broken free of my neighbor's ranch, got lost in the billions of acres of uncleared Oakriver woods, fell victim to some malady or ambushed by the few predators still left in such sparse trees.
There was nothing left. Ben's posture shifted slightly and, even from behind, silhouetted by the growing intensity of the penlight as the lingering light left the sky, I could tell he was disappointed. He wanted to show me something that was no longer there.
He turned and, in the dark, he had no face.
"Well…" he said.
Sometime later, when evening turned to night, when night turned to those void hours when all diurnal animals retreated to their dens and lairs and caves and nests and safe, quiet places, the last few drunks were kicked out and my mother and father argued about something. It was the clatter of dinner-party dishes that kept me up, eyes fully open in a near-pitch room, a window allowing the pale moon to wash over my sheets. I got up and turned on the lamp of my drafting desk, sat at the highbacked stool in front of it. A blank piece of paper was in the brackets, and I found myself reflexively picking up my mechanical pencil, giving it two clicks, hand hovering over the paper but no image in my head to draw. There were only words inside.
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And now: Robert Meridien Kraid or Meridien Kay or the true Meridien K or any one of those names said aloud and I'd turn my head, no use hiding any one of them, a mere name for that man in the corner, the man scared of shadows, the man like his brother and father, the Western Man who, like all Western Men, prefers a quiet madness. Waiting for it to descend upon this modest stake out in that grand stretch of Nowhere, hidden in plain sight on this vast, undeterred Post-American landmass. The oldest man alive at forty-two years. Never married, never divorced, no sons or daughters, no family except two dogs, Laika and Rinna, a snow-white Siberian husky with piercing blue eyes and a fox-red British labrador who was either bursting with life or dead asleep, passed out on couched like she was dead and---
And--
And here I sit. Here I type. Willing my own consciousness into existence each passing moment. Keeping thoughts alive. Treading old memories like chewing fossilized gum from a pack of bargain-bin baseball cards.
But a sort of comfort to it. That base comfort that, if nothing else, I survived. Those staggering numbers of dead and I walked that tightrope above the tall razorwire fence guarding the Camp of the Living and the Camp of the Dead. Each crowding up against the chainlink and poking fingers through, captured either way, trapped, a sort of rote enslavement, no real misery, just an inherent knowledge that you need to get out out out--!
See?
I've been working on self-control. I'm finally alone when I let the dogs out in the morning and let them sniff out the acres and acres and acres. I'm alone on this old farm. Shabby furniture in a few rooms in the main house, this sprawling complex for me to explore, to repair or let it fall into quaint ruin. Climbing the tall ladder at the end of the abandoned barn and watching the birds build their spring nests in the rafters. Up on the flat roof of the stables, binocs up to my eyes and watching Laika and Rinna make diplomatic contact with the wolves that snuck onto the property where the fence wasn't mended in the woods. Wolves and dogs circling each other, knowing We're Not So Different, You And I and, after some time, canines play-fighting and fleeing whenever I approached, even with a big steak wrapped in butcher's paper because that's what they want, right? And--
Deep breath. Eyes shut. It's good that I can only see the present now. The present of this place. The present of my age, of the way I look in the mirror, skinny and hollow like so many men who Came Back; the present of my solitude, my dogs, my word processor, my pages. I've isolated myself from the past so that memories are so disconnected they play out like the movies directed by my uncle, so far disconnected from the actual tactility of all things past.
I write this down not so that I don't forget. It's impossible to forget. I may lose everything in my mind some day but not my memory. But this, itself, is for a purpose I haven't yet figured. It's not bullshit caution about getting seduced by an ideal when you're impossibly young - fifteen, like most boys - nor about the abstract horror of fighting a war that lacked neither moral conviction nor substantial military gain or loss. This is not a historical record. This is a document. A pile of printed pages that someone will find when I die, when they find this place sometime, somehow, and along with an old man bent on the floor in a bloodless death, they'll find these pages and do… well, they'll do whatever they wish with them. Into the hearth or a wastebin or read by someone curious wondering why a man with no possessions had toiled over this account of all and everything. Then they'll hopelessly try to find out if any of this actually happened.
It's that… There is something very frightening to me. About myself. Something in my nature. Something incurable, if "cure" is even in the same vicinity as the correct word. Something uncompromising, like the daily movements of superglaciers, not the orneriness of an old, shrunken man, but a Last Testament, about a man who fought in that giant shrug of a war, came back alive and grappled more with all the years surrounding than those spent off in the desert or the woods or the border; the wide-open bliss of the AO. I'm one man in a thunderstorm, defiantly holding a metal pole above my head in the middle of an overgrown field. A man who has doused his home in gasoline and holds a match an inch above the long liquid fuse.
I'm--
I'm a man who simply left. Who made no goodbyes. Who slipped out of civilized comfort in the night, in the Hour of the Coward. Who, the next day, emptied a bank account paid by the government for services rendered, went off the grid and lost his own name. Drove west, hit the coast and tried that, oceanside and surfing the beach break at dawn. Tasted the salty air, looked up at that white-hot sun filtered down through the marine climate and it felt warm and inviting like a childhood blanket. Impossible nonetheless, like my guilt forbade anything of that nature. Raged against my better judgment and went on one final tour of my outgrown memories, back to the netherscape of Newport and Easthaven and perfectly-kept houses in stasis, awaiting the return of owners who no longer wanted anything to do with them. Went to New York, turned invisible in all those millions of streetwalkers, saw the Monument and felt nothing.
So I found this place. I bought empty rooms and filled them with a simple contentment, an appreciation for calming emptiness, this place devoid of all that fractured decor that reminds you of the innumerable shards of life and memory that define most people. Not like I didn't think about my father, my mother, my brother, the generations that came before and none that will come after. Not so much the Fall but the End of the House of Kraid. A willing extinction. Peaceful as euthanasia.
You know where I am. Let me tell you about where I've been. Let me tell you what happened in the future.
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The first NASA facility I toured was like walking through a museum. Old landers and models of spacecraft and spacesuits that looked more fit for giant insectoid aliens than plain men.
Names lasered into the sort of metal-stone, standing close enough to read them, alphabetical, no years or units, the bare minimum if only to say, See? We Remember, Now Leave Us Alone Thanks.
Mock hospital rooms in the mock hospital at Command in Houston. A digital wall clock with hours, seconds, parts of seconds, day of the week, day of the month, month and year. Three forty-two and thirty-eight, thirty-nine seconds in the a.m. on Sunday, June 7, 2048, and the injection given to me forty-eight hours prior was making things rather unpleasant. Floaty dream-hallucinations like gargoyles mounted on the corners of the ceiling, all making obscene gestures to each other, masturbatory movements with stone hands and stone jaws agape in orgasmic faces and the hawhawhaw of gravel voices deep as the growl of Satan himself.
no goodbyes. No hints of the exodus, of the long-gestating move out to Nowhere. The opposite of my father, who fled from a dead wife, a lost son, another son about to spiral off. I was the man about to have it all: engaged to a beautiful woman; surrounded by loving caring thoughtful interesting intelligent friends and neighbors; quite well-off from mystery paychecks, and all I had to do was live on a loop for seventeen years; about to break ground on a large house of my own design; and all that usual shit we all use for insulation against the rather brutal fact that every last person on this earth lives and dies alone with their own thoughts; that however much we are crowded by other bodies, we're trapped inside our brains, trapped inside a bone cage, living underwater with an oxygen tank as your flesh rots away, waiting for the air to give out when you hit a hundred-ten, a hundred-twenty with the freakish lifespans these days.
A few years after it had happened, after the crash and the knowledge that, miracle of miracles, we'd actually survive… in that haze of time on Red, I came to look fondly on my first hibernation; how stupid it was to be afraid, how thrilling, how exciting, how all of us had become national celebrities despite NASA trying to keep everything under wraps lest the Chinese get any copycat ideas and--
The way they taught history was so rote and they still kept scratching their heads why kids were always falling asleep in class. Chalk it up to bored teachers or bland textbooks, or maybe be so daring as to look deeper into the imaginations of six-year-olds trying to parse the violent, anachronistic, daring, lucky, racist, baffling origins of our infant nation. It's ultimately up to you to decide whatever you want as the Truth.
The door wasn't going to let me through.
sat on the front steps of my house on the hill and smoked one joint, then another, then had a third beer, pissed in my shrubs and went inside to get a fourth beer and third joint. My eroding thoughts tumbled around like a pocketful of coins accidentally washed and put in the dryer and banging around. Nothing stuck and I liked it; I liked the way chemicals gave me that bliss of Nothing. I imagine that that's what drew my dad to the Void and why he stayed up there and where was he now--? and all and everything, all and everything, MK, keep on soldiering like those old, infinite days--
They - capital-T They - wined and dined me with the presentation, down to touring an understaffed Mission Control exactly like the movies, endless rows of computers and a giant war-room screen at the head. I climbed in old Soyuz landers and barely fit, all with that kind of We Don't Do Those Sort Of Things Anymore smile. But I could never really shake the vibe of all the whole place. Here was this scientist - me - who didn't know shit about rockets or propulsion or being an astronaut, yet I was getting a comped ticket on the highest-profile exploratory mission in the history of mankind.
Not much of a surprise when, later, I went to a secondary building that was nothing but white halls and a few framed black-and-white photographs, freed of all the bric-a-brac reserved for grade-school fieldtrips. A place for raw science and tech, no luminous saltwater aquariums in their waiting room.
The magazine spread on the table: Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, Science, Nature, National Geographic, dentist-office staples but addressed to individual people and not the Center, like people brought in their old mags for the random civs coming through for screening, not even a receptionist behind the empty desk, phones ringing that were never picked up. I sifted through the magazines and stopped once I saw the crooked grin of Benjamin Meridien on Time, probably the best smile they could get out of him, all the BB-gun scars retouched off his face, "TIME" in their typeface and in the corner "THE NEW FACE OF MARS?" and, below, "Dr. Benjamin Meridien and an unlikely team at Newport University--" and I chucked it back on the table. Then I flipped in over so I wouldn't see his goddamn mug any longer than necessary.
I buried the rest of the magazines, sat with my left hand on my left knee, right hand on my right, counting up and down in my head, fortunately no wall clock to gauge slow time, slow like clouds tracking imperceptibly on a calm day.
"John?"
Name called quiet and soft by a fifty-something, appropriately-rotund man, grey hair and a well-groomed grey beard, trying so hard to project that Science air but he was a psych and I could smell it a mile away. That's what I was there for anyway, and I stood and followed him into the corridor of open doors to empty offices, the tangible sign of the gutting of the Agency, which wasn't by any means private knowledge but--
The psych held out his arm, waited for me to go in first and sit on a grey two-seater sofa as he slid onto his rollerchair by an aging computer. Seated and looking at diplomas framed at canted angles, dust on the frame lips; in the rest of the cluttered office were filing cabinets, a few impressionistic art prints, stacks of paper, endless stacks of paper like mine and like Ben's, that itself more a common bond of commiseration for professionals far more than business-casual dress and fuel-efficient sedans and polite family talk and job gripes, most of them about the layers of public funding getting stripped by the year and--
"So, Dr. Kraid… how about John? Can I call you John?"
"Sure."
"You can call me Dan, John."
This Dr. Dan strained forward, arm cutting through the chilled air of the office, almost tipping over the chair to shake my hand, refusing to get off the seat, seeking some greeting in that deadzone between the Patients on the couch or the chairs and the Doctor in his seat. No civ psych but a NASA psych; no difference anyhow and--
Handshake and, "Nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you," mirrored back.
Bad memories of those sort of offices. Brought in to talk about my father both before and after his death, brought in before and after Rid had his screening and all the intervals of treatment. My own clandestine meetings when I seemed to spend a whole year in a funk, only to get a vial of poison pills, pop them for a few months, tire of the side effects, then go off and bury myself in something else, too deep to come up to the surface and see how fucked up I was getting and--
A stack dropped onto the desk, my Dossier, my File, a print-out of everything ever typed about me, and, by the size of it, it probably reached all the way back to grade school when I picked fights to get a reaction out of the teachers, to let them know they were dealing with a true madman when I showed no method, no reason, no rationale for going up to an enemy or a best friend or a random kid and socking him in the face. Probably high-school transcript and all the Oakriver Daily articles about pimply John D. Kraid illegally sending homemade rockets into orbit, rockets up to the moon to impact and spell out patterns in the dust; experiments with biospheres bridging high school into early college, biospheres not like those novelties you buy at nature shops but room-sized bubbles, plant life animal life and all their hangers-on - parasites, bacteria, rogue microorganisms - unknowingly working together to create a living space; and my freshman-year transfer out of the history department into an intensive crash-course in every known branch of science so I could catch up on all those lectures and labs I missed.
And all those things buried; hidden; lied as lost. The family tree oozing poison from its bark. The chronic instability of a man with a scattered psychiatric reference every time I felt I was once-and-for-all spiraling out of control, scrip pills and I was on my way. Wondering if it'd fool the whitecoat, if I could talk my way out of it, if it was a dealbreaker for the mission since Ben… well, since Ben had as much baggage as I did but never tried to treat it, simply let it ride and self-medicate, a flask never far from arm's reach and--
"One kid."
"Pardon?" I asked.
Dr. Dan reading from the cover sheet and, "You've got a boy."
He looked at me, wanted me to fill in the blank.
"Yeah. Ridley."
"How old?"
"Two."
No secret notation on paper. Just examining the sheet like he was fact-checking my life.
"Wife?"
"Yeah."
"How long have you been--?"
He pointed to my glazed ring and I gave a long verbalized pause, tried to remember how many years it was before Rid was born since that was the first big landmark, was still dragging the number up through the swamp of thoughts before the psych supplied the info and I thought it accurate.
"A son and a wife," Dr. Dan said. "Everything going well at home?"
"Yeah. Of course. The same… stuff… that happens."
A hand to his chin but his posture still open and inviting.
"What… 'stuff?'"
"Oh, you know, arguments, fringe fights, the stock, uh, discipline. Nothing out of the ordinary," and I spied his wedding band and I seized an initiative and tried to give the soft sell and, "But you probably know what that's like."
Straight up he said, "I do… I do…" and he paged through the file and then he looked up and said, "Mars is far away."
Like he was testing our physical measurements and, "Yeah. Yeah, it is."
"Six months."
"By current standards."
"Six months in space without your family."
"Well, my best friend is coming along. I don't think I'll have a shortage of crew with which to interact. And, hell, I'll be clinically dead for most of the trip. Gotta count for something, right?"
A sort of dark look on Dr. Dan's face, like he went too far down the wrong track and was trying to back up and correct it and, "Well, no, John, that's, um, not what I'm getting at."
Now, cutting through my millions of years alive and it was so clear then when the doctor said, "There's no current plan to get back, John, nor have you formulated one with Dr. Meridien."
But I just looked at him, blinked a few times, calmly said, "What's wrong with that?" without seeing it right there in front of my eyes.
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Families. Families with vets. Vets standing, vets in uniform, vets in plainclothes, vets in wheelchairs. Vets in groups and vets alone. Vets like me, straddling that nonsense line between an old guard and a civilian not worth his weight in horseshit. Men reading names and making rubbings with tracing paper and thick crayon; an autograph from the dead.
"Caf" wasn't on there. Neither was Gremlin, Six-Four, or Terra. Nor the rest of 716 that had passed: Slug, Candy, Chronos, Z, Horse, Mars, and Pointman. Some odd relief that Caf's birthname, Paul Adam Atwater, wasn't there, nor was mine, not like they kept any tabs on us, not like we were declared KIA, not like they'd add anyone's name who offed themselves Stateside, like all those times when someone miraculously fell onto maglev tracks right before a train hissed into its station. Death in Pakistan, death in China, death by one's own quaking hand, death by surprise, death by accident, death like The Man waiting at the end of a very long corridor.
New York, 2074: Robert Meridien Kraid, codename Meridien K, veteran of some sort of war, doing his duty and visiting the Memorial and showing his face somewhere slightly too public, no way to slip out like he was a curious civ, even though anyone with experience could tell that, by the way he moved, he'd been overseas a long, long time.
There was the held-breath, uncertain anticipation and the obvious dread that I'd run into one of us five survivors from the fearsome 716. Maybe Terra with a wife and a daughter, finally able to grow that beard he always wanted. Six-Four might come if he collected his molting brain with a dustpan and, if he did, he'd certainly come alone. I never imagined that Gremlin would get out of that VH. Far too institutionalized to leave; same as what would've happened to me if Caf didn't swoop me up. I always knew Gremlin would get caught in the cracks or, if released back into the wild, he'd find solace on a mountain he could claim his own, shed his humanity piecemeal until he was his own legend, a ten-foot-tall shaman covered in bearskin and a crown of antlers, victim to terrified natives trying to snap his elusive picture.
The maglev back to my not-far Manhattan hotel, wanting to get on the train because it was too damn hot and my feet hurt and I was sick of all those fucking people swarming over something that should've never been built at all. On the train itself everyone engaged in those polite rules, that etiquette of every man an island to himself, parents scorning children daring to speak above a whisper. The rush of buildings I didn't know outside of photographs. But that was Old Manhattan, and now the New was built almost on top of it, higher into the sky, the urban canyon so deep the sun only shined at zenith noon. I had never been there before the war - Which war? like a comic monologue starting in my head - and it was quiet in the daytime hours, all that finance and business and those suits and taxis migrated elsewhere across the world as those old United States spewed a great plume of volcanic ash that spread to all corners of the globe to root like a weed; the origins settled under a shadow, hibernating, not so much nursing wounds to eventually strike back but lapsing into a retired existence, far too tired to do much else.
My hotel room without a television, everything else Smart, lamps turning on right as I reached for them, faucets running, showers blasting with barely a thought. I was going to call down to the front desk to see if they could switch it off but I didn't want the thinly-aliased Robert Gregory to raise any eyebrows. Why would someone want to turn those knobs and lock those doors? they might reasonably ask but they were all in their early twenties, putting in time on the job while studying something impossibly esoteric in grad school; and they had lived all their years with the bone-dumb conveniences of all those hidden machines so eager to please. So I stripped down to my boxers and my white undershirt and laid diagonally across the bed with half a sheet over my flank, and when the room was certain, it drew the blinds and turned on a soothing repetitive noise and dropped the temp two degrees and I was out, out and tumbling down and down and down and
awake on damp pillows. Vague recollections of a restless dream. I stood up quick and manually parted the curtains and it was night, all those golden streetlights and the lights in and on the tall buildings, singular windows lit up every few floors creating an empty mosaic.
And then down there, street level, the pavement and sidewalk cracks. Out in a city that gave off no vibe. I followed a cluster of kids who were dressed for going out: guys in expensive dress shirts with cuffs folded with geometric precision, slathered in that type of really strong cologne that was in fashion, then; girls in Going-Out Tops (borrowed vocabulary), no purses, mid-thigh-length skirts or tight jeans or tighter plain black pants that made me far too self-conscious for a man twenty years their senior, forgetting myself for a man who never had any bad intentions in the whole of his life.
A side-street like all of New York had piled in. Bars, clubs, venues, tattooed kids out front smoking cigarettes and blowing smoke into the night air like it ain't no thing. The group I followed went elsewhere. I walked slow down the center of the pedestrian street and looked into fade-out doorways, not quite deciding but certainly not condemning. I was a tourist.
"Hey."
A clear voice from the murk below high steps leading into a brownstone.
"You."
I stopped. The voice appeared: a man, the dinginess of homelessness all over him, dirty face and hair and hands.
"Spare some for a vet, eh?"
It wasn't the first time it had happened. Homeless vet faces covered in alley shadows, coming closer to me as I fingered the knife in my pocket. Each instance closer until I saw the skin on their face pulled back in the death-mask of some type of ghastly withdrawal. I could see their bones, and they weren't Gremlin, they weren't Six-Four, and they weren't Terra.
And even if they were, would they--?
I grabbed a fistful of bills in my pocket and handed them over to the man and quickly walked away. It could've been a few bucks or a few hundred. I wasn't counting. I'd be gone soon enough. I went to New York, duty fulfilled, that same pilgrimage that seemed necessary for everyone who had ever worn a uniform or for anyone morbidly curious to read inscribed names they had never heard of.
But I wasn't bitter. Bitterness had been left so far behind, back before the AO; back sometime at The Base With No Name, when I trained with eleven young men who were as confused and scared and void and violent as I was; and once we reduced our lives to the rote simplicity of training and, later, in the AO, there wasn't any room for bitterness, or cynicism, or even the hate that misguided brass tried to instill in us.
It was so far past that it seemed ridiculous, and I found it funny only once I was driving west across the vast network of highways that snaked into the Midwest. I was a few hours outside Memphis when I finally laughed aloud.
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And the chill. My god, the chill. Anatomically, my body was shutting down and going cold, my brain clinging to consciousness, trying to jumpstart everything, like when you have that hard almost-asleep twinge that feels like falling when it's really your whole nervous network giving an electrical kick because it actually thinks you're dying. Between the tremors and the twitching and the skewed perception of imbalanced brain chemistry, it was impossible to tell if it was me or the room moving; if the room was really inside M1 already and rocketing past the winking, tapdancing moon and out toward that red red dream, red as heathen blood and…
And…
How, then, I was tripping before they wheeled me out and gassed me again and my last waking thought was about trying to think of the lyrics of this one song by this one band who made a concept album about a Mars mission, and this particular song was eerily accurate about the whole hibernation process. And, now, I want to pull my hair out and break all the windows and rip down the steel of my home here in New K and everything over in Arc Hollow and Meridienton and Byrrhs Point and Fort Pillar and all those settlements beyond and rage and rage about how the thought of Karen or Ridley or Bobby crossed my mind, how I rationalized everything that I did and that it wasn't any worse than a divorce but what a smug little shit I was, smiling up at the ceiling of the ship that took us to the moon, then to the rugged shape of M1 in moonsync before they stuffed me in the coffin for good and shut the lid and filled my body with enough blackout for a five-month sleep.
And how, here, I try to make good by putting on a false smile when I go to the facility and read to the children whose faces are all so similar, the children who haunt my dreams, who grow bunched together in vats like overbred fish, all plugged into the same daisy-chained umbilical cord. How I was there one day when there was, as Soledas put it, a "misstep," and I watched him as he puts on his gloves and mask and emptied a tank with a ruptured, tainted filter; how he couldn't transplant the string - about a dozen in total - because he was out of tubes. Soledas kind of shrugged and cut each second-term fetus from its cord and I saw each kind of give a quick spasm of unremembered death; and I watched him put them on a cart and wheel them over to the wall incinerator and open up the metal panel and toss each into the chute. I thought I was hallucinating when I heard them giving off one last shriek, even though they were dead, when they felt the abrasive lick of flames. Turned out it was Soledas' teapot's harsh whistle, and when Soledas finished we sat outside and had tea. Soledas usually had tea inside since he was used to the reek of harsh chemicals and burning flesh and dirty vats and all that nastiness, but for my sake we drank outside. I was nice and polite and after two cups I said I had some other business and left and went back to my old house above the old bunkers of Arc Hollow and start shaking and shaking and I couldn't figure out why, and I thought I'd erupt in tears but it never happened. So I drank until I passed out and woke up on the bathroom floor next to a garbage can a fifth full with watery vomit.
I don't even bother to entertain the thought to do what Ben did because, in my hideous vanity, I didn't want to be accused of copping his style.
I think about how we all eventually stopped living in the Hollow and used it as a place to work so that we could go home at night and be by ourselves and mull over our old thoughts. Some of the guys I never see anymore, but except for Rolfs - who died when he fell off a scaffold at the Fort and broke his neck when he hit the ground a hundred feet below - everyone's still alive on the continent. But they might as well be dead; dead in the cemetery with Ben and Rolfs and The Boy, who drowned when he was four.
We quite plainly went our separate ways. There were
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I might as well mix nihilism with arrogance: Fine, go live in your cities; just don't try to ram the locked gate on the dirt road leading to where I live with dogs and my thoughts lest you want to be on the receiving end of three-round bursts from a stolen AP fired without remorse.
Unlike most things in my life, that time I made a clean break. No erosion, no weardown, no long acid drip burning through a metal plate. It was even more a snap decision than taking that bus out of Chicago. One day the thought occurred at a stronger frequency than usual and I got up early and dressed nice and packed a bag and a few books and slipped out the front door while Lauren was still asleep or at least pretending.
I'll admit, though, that when Inca burst out her doggie door and came up doggie-smiling and followed me around to the gate, I almost turned on my heels and went right back.
Because of a dog.
And now I turn around in this triangular-ceilinged loft in my main house and see Laika and Rinna asleep right next to each other, something so mammalian but something I could never fully embrace. Around people, I feel more alien than ever. By myself, I'm the same sort of chewed-up human as everyone else on this whole world, and while most get by through a kind of mutual desperation, I need to go off on my own and walk through the woods at night and listen to the owls to remind myself that--
I went to all my banks and withdrew everything, prepared to give a flimsy lie about moving to Kenya for missionary work if anyone even asked. But no one did. Between the last two banks I pulled up to a mailbox. I took a form from my glovebox - Voluntary Termination of Veteran Benefits - and filled it out, no name required, just the digits of my primary bank account. I sealed it and fed it into the slot. At a fuel station three towns over I plugged in for a supercharge and went inside the minimart and made smalltalk with the high-school student working her shift before first period. We watched CNN Headline News and, while my car - with a trunk full of raw cash - fueled, we caught the cycle: civil war in sub-Saharan Africa; euphoric financial analysts glowing from the Dow's all-time high at the prior night's closing bell; a plane crash right after takeoff in Madrid, over two-hundred dead in a flaming fireball and its choking black smoke; yet another successful clone of the once-extinct American cave lion.
"Like anyone wants to eat a lion?" the student at the register asked to no one in particular, both our eyes on the screen, any out-loud ruminations directed at the television.
"Well, it's a symbol," I said.
"Of what?" she asked.
A triumphant ding and the countertop screen showed my car was refilled and displayed the amount owed. I produced my wallet and instinctively reached for a credit card before riffling through a few paper bills and handing them over. She made change and handed me dirty old coins.
"Receipt?"
"Nah."
"Have a good one."
I smiled. Nodded. Went back to the car. Booted the systems, didn't bother with the nav, started driving toward the freeway.
Idle thoughts: Like how the longest I had been away from Caf were those two years in the VH when Lauren jailbroke him. How time with Caf was maybe the reason behind all of it, how I'd wake up and go to the main house for the morning routine of coffee, bagels, the newspaper, talk about current events that was cleaned up considerably once Charlie was old enough to understand. How, no matter what, the war was always staring me in the face. That, even if Lauren and I got married and went away somewhere, Paul Adam Atwater or Caf or Paul Cafferty would've become my brother-in-law, and something about that bothered me. Like how some days he'd come home with a glum look on his face, like he was about to say that, somehow, word got to him that Gremlin or Six-Four or Terra had killed themselves or were killed or went on a killing spree or something kind of understandably ghastly; and how it was never the case; and how I never told Caf this fear, but he definitely knew.
At the freeway, the signs directed me toward cities: Sun Lake that way, Brighton the other. The floating compass on the dash pointed north, so I went left, and the orb bobbled in its soup and pointed west.
0
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Prep for the first stasis from the moon to M1 to awakening five months later: It was a giddiness like counting down seconds on the last hour of the last day of school; like finding a great climbing tree in the woods and getting up so high you're above the treeline and you can see what the suburb really looks like; tall trees obscuring all our meek houses and buildings and people and pets and cars; the whole of the world really a forest, and our tiny civilization a passing fad, and I'd sit up on those treetops for hours and sway in the breeze--
Then the MK team up on a superpowered, modded M3 in mars-sync. We were all in shorts and t-shirts and no socks and cold and teeth chattering in the hibernation bay, standing in front of all our separate rooms with separate coffins as Podrezov did the final systems check and purged the trace gasses in our air supply. We had too many things to do to get drugged, so even the claustrophobes would have to brave the tight blue coffin before we could stick in our IVs and secure our masks and hear our heartbeats loud as drums in our ears and wait for the chems to sneak into our blood and put us out for millions upon millions upon millions--
Thinking of the calculations as I alternated between standing on my left foot then right foot on that ice-cold psuedometal floor. Last doubts, same as wondering if you remembered your matching ties two hours into a roadtrip to a convention. But The Meridienkraid Initiative was on a scale that had never been done before. The calculations were full of nonsense numbers. We only had c and g and a few overextended constants smashed up against fuel estimates for, say, two-hundred years (or was it two-hundred million?) hence, when we'd be out there in a Void truer than any, out past the heliopause and goodbye to old Sol and its System. But, oh no, we wouldn't be there to see it, to experience it, to wonder at the dead beauty of space and it didn't really matter because a lot of us were used to it by then.
Ben told me it was like deciding to start a life of crime or joining the mob or something. Because when you go, you can't turn back, the gears only rotate in one direction. And there's no one there to save you.
There's a sadness to how utterly alone all of us were, but we shrugged it off over morning coffee, told apocryphal tales about women we'd fucked who were in absolute awe at how motherfucking brave we were right before the shove-off to Red. No different than women with fetishes for men in military uniforms.
And my sons and my wife and my mother and the ghost of my father taking turns haunting abstract dreams, so fractured I didn't even know what happened until I woke up in that coffin, pushed the lid open, and stepped out into the New World.
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I knew that History wasn't a static entity but ever-changing, the world spinning so fast no one has time to chronicle the whole of all and everything. But maybe all this - all of this - had harmless origins:
When I was three or four I'd tromp around the woods of Newport toward this one big pond. I'd get there and, even though I could easily see the other end, I, Meriwether Lewis or William Clark (one or the other, since the whole thing seemed so secretive I didn't dare bring anyone else), declared that the vast Pacific had been reached, and I planted a stick in the ground that I imagined was a flag flying majestic in the wind, bald eagles soaring overhead, all that sort of baseline patriotism they drill into students.
Maybe that's why my stunted emotional development brought me back to that childhood fantasy and guided me west toward the upper California-Oregon border, pressed right against all that Pacific blue.
Williamston, only a day and a half behind, was relegated to that deep mindspace shared with a mostly-unremembered childhood in Newport, the old house in Easthaven, and the apartment and its Desert in Chicago. Still, I felt like a rogue, for good reason: Driving a car with regional plates made void once I left the outermost cloisters of the Midwest, hauling eyebrow-raising loads of paper cash, and completely devoid of an actual identity once I had closed the book on Meridien Thomas Kay and, for all I knew, there was a gravestone somewhere with ROBERT MERIDIEN KRAID, 2033-2XXX, BELOVED SON, BROTHER. No mention of the Forces; all that whitewashed away, might as well put my date of death as the exact second I stepped on that bus, a clockwork life from 2033 to 2048, that magic year.
And that relative lawlessness was the most liberating thing I have ever felt in the whole of my life.
Out somewhere past the splayed limbs of Sacramento until I hit those mythical highways overlooking the wolfeye-blue ocean, foamy white peaks on the waves in those restless waters. I cruised with the windows open, hair blasted from its careful part and blinking every few seconds to wink out the stray grit, but I needed that sensation, I needed that out-of-body experience of freedom that I never got from checking out of the Castle or when I was yanked out of the VH by Caf.
An exit sign that read my mind: "BEACH" and an arrow, and the single serpentine road pounded out of the jagged cliffside went down to an unattended strip of deserted asphalt with white parking lines.
Outside the car, over the curb separating the lot from the beach and I unlaced my boots and removed them and took off my socks and stuffed them in my boots and carried them in my right hand. The sand was cool and soft beneath my feet as I walked all the way down toward the shore.
It was October. The beach was empty. No surfers fooled around on the baby waves; no kids threw down boogie boards at the tideline and skidded along the lapping water while dogs with kerchiefs tied around their necks chased after them. It was as surreal as the rest of the country, that New Country that had sprung up when I was gone, like I had passed through a portal to that fabled land where no men cast shadows; where the sunlight was pale and never burnt your white skin; where each man had an island to himself, an island with a vast metropolis he ruled as king, crown and scepter and a robe lined with dragon scales; a land more immaterial than any fantasy or science-fiction dreamscape.
I had never seen the Atlantic and had only flown high over the Pacific, only once in a plane with windows right before that Year off no one wanted. And there I stood with my toes sinking in wet sand, the tide lapping at my feet and the cuffs of my dampening khakis but I didn't care. I was prepared to confront the urge to hastily strip naked and dive into that liquid sky. But it didn't well up inside me as powerful, I imagined, as the urge to feel the wound and the blood whenever I got shot.
And what about those first men? Lewis and Clark? The Natives who made the trek long before them? Did they see all that, choke on the realization that they stood at the very edge of the world and could go no farther? Just that shoulder-shrug of Well… and turning around and going home?
Like that long walk past the wire with Caf, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I went back to my car after I sat on the sand and grabbed fistfuls of it and counted how long it took for all the grains to slip through. I had some thoughts that I'll keep to myself. Something welled up inside and I felt that clenched-jaw feeling that I was about to cry for some reason. There was no one around so I let it come out. To my surprise it was, instead, a single laugh, almost a scoff, since I had crossed the entire country from the VH to Williamston (though I had yet to visit New York and the Monument; that came later) to sit on an empty beach, picturesque as any postcard and idly sit there, idle as the horizon, that imaginary line between sea and sky nearly invisible from the distance haze and all that blue.
On the drive I had seen a few quaint one-and-a-half-level beach houses on the hills. In those late months of the calendar year, it wasn't surprising that most had those FOR RENT signs in a bold red typeface against black. All that distressed wood from the salty wind appealed to me, like it was an outward expression of my own ragged self and my ragged life.
I had written down the phone numbers on the signs as I slowly passed. First I needed to head into some town to buy a new satphone. I foresaw the forms for the phone package and that ominous dotted line for a name and a signature. After mulling that question for a time, the answer was so obvious that I was smiling as I walked back to the car.
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"John Kraid," I growled over whatever malady had made its home in the back of my throat and turned my voice to one befitting a stone golem. A hoarseness from shouting over jackhammers in Hsu's mine, then something that had turned into a partial cold, maybe from all that dampness so far underground.
A cold wind blew down off mountains and didn't make my fever any better. Inside my head I was on fire, though my skin confused the breeze for sheets of ice shattering into a million pieces and melting down into my muscles and bones.
"John…" with as much force I could push past strained vocal chords, "Kraid!"
There was no status light, no cheerful robotic voice, nothing but a steel door, nothing to betray the fact that my house was alive, that it was afraid a deeper-voiced man than its master was trying to break in. An idiot decision to install voice ident when I could've done a thumbpad or code or hid a damn key under a damn rock and Open you fucking door!
Fucking Soledas. One of his pets broke into my house and I came home before the ten-year-old trespasser could steal anything. I saw him immediately on the upper level and only a quick "Hey!" on my end and the kid took a bad step and fell down the steep staircase and broke his jaw and left-leg tibia and I had to drive him all the way to the hospital at Fort Pillar, only to get chewed out by Soledas for, apparently, nearly killing one of his gene therapy labrats and--
"John Kraid you fucking goddamn inanimate door open up because I'm freezing my goddamn balls off out here you hairy cunt-sweat!"
And of course the lock clicked off and I got inside and sealed myself from the elements. I took off Ben's old snowmobiling gloves, my wool coat, my watch cap, my threadbare scarf, my vulcanized-rubber overboots, my regular canvas boots beneath. I was wearing two layers of clothes and barely kept warm from my survey up on the ridge of Peak 3, looking out at the Northern Sea and aimlessly, unsuccessfully brainstorming a way to punch a hole in the Stormwall or somehow launch over it, maybe repair the Lander and shoot through it, like how you can pass your finger through a flame real quick and not get burned.
Up the stairs to the second-floor landing and the dark rooms, then up the darker third half-flight to the study, totally blind from the blackout shades but I knew my way through. Peering out the window as my pupils shrank, though it was a murkier day than usual.
The room was messy in that sort-of-organized way. I knew that my star chart for the second quadrant was underneath all the torn-out pages from old astronomy tradejournals about quasars. Another trait inherited by Ben, just habit, not some bullshit like I'd remember him everytime I stood in the center of the room with my hands on his hips and thought everything so fuckin' messy that I should either clean it up or shove it in a biobag and set it alight in the gravel firepit behind the house.
I settled into the lopsided chair I built myself based off a rough sketch from one of the guys (don't remember who), pushed myself forward on the ball-bearing wheels to sit flush with my smelly particleboard desk.
Looking outside was always a mistake. Past was a view of those cracked mountains, perched on the very northern edge of the continent, guarding passage to yet another impassable stretch of that infinite ocean. I stared out like it was an unmoving television, watching the stormclouds try to cross the mountains but held back by the taller peaks. Every day a few slipped past for the daily rain that let the northern pine forest flourish and turned most of the drainage valley into mud. On a bright day you could see a swarm of dumbbots clearing a wide switchback road up the ridge, the same as… well…
It had been about a year since we all came together and realized that our collective avoidance of everyone else was based on a lot of unfounded bitterness. Soledas brought his kids, what he collectively referred to as Generation 1, the oldest of which were about ten or eleven--
(Impossible to tell, of course, because we were too exhausted thinking about Time to figure out anyone's real age. It wasn't until we'd go months at a time, sometimes years without seeing someone for it to be a bit of a shock to see Intihar starting to bald, or Vedran getting grey in the temples, or all of us getting creased wrinkles here or there, or my eyebags starting to resemble my father's thick worm-purple sacks under his eyes. We were all on anti-aging drugs and even though we were, technically, millions of years old, those hints that we weren't invincible godkings evoked all kinds of reactions; all of which we kept to ourselves.)
--and kind of grouped together behind Soledas since neither party knew what to do, and then we converged and shook hands and introduced ourselves and were taken aback by the fact that those kids had test-tubes names, like A6 or X21 and--
But the reason we all came together was because we calculated we'd run out of metal in the vague future, so we trekked out to the mountains by my distant house and found it was rich in metals that none of us had encountered before. Even with all the machines, we pitched in stringing lights through the shafts, built the support beams, the emergency air pockets for that nightmare of a prospective cave-in, coming out after long shifts underground and absolutely exhausted and out into that cruel sun or the sporadic shade of midday, driving home with sleepy eyes.
Hoday and Podrezov hunkered down and found a bunch of instructional books and decided they'd be our resident metallurgists, along with a half-dozen apprentices plucked from Generation 1 (those deemed "ready" by Soledas to learn a trade and to leave the comfort of their sheltered existence in the ghost town of the Hollow). H and Pod had a foundry up and running while we were still trying to figure out exactly what the hell was trapped down in that rock. Before we could name any raw elements, the two metalmen had already crafted all sorts of alloys for any purpose: construction; conductive wiring; scrap; stuff so fucking hard it couldn't even be shaped, two heavy Rovers driving in opposite direction, trying to pull it apart, wheels spinning and it wouldn't crack or even bend. But--
and the fever pulsed in my head. Swimming thoughts. Sick, knowing I'd be sick as a dog in the coming hours and days… and all that work to do, that weariness of chapped lips on the windy crags. That inapplicable maxim: It's hard work, but someone has to do it. My day was over and it was time for sleep, but I knew that sleep would never come, and I didn't want to drink myself to Oblivion while nursing a virus we bastards had accidentally taken across the universe. Curled up in my bed with sheets pulled tight would make it worse; nothing worse than waking up on a bed of damp sheets, waking up in the middle of the sunny night and changing my shirt and crossing the ice-cold air to the frozen bathroom. I wanted to be somewhere but I didn't know where that was. So I
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Nonsense stoned thoughts. More amusing than television at any rate.
Enough distance had been placed between me and that halcyon past of death and dying. The AO, Easthaven, whatever. All the same in a bullshit karmic sense.
I saw the mailtruck winding up the hill. I abandoned my beer and joint and went into the house proper, stayed out of eyesight. A polite, unanthropomorphized robot drove the truck and deposited my mail, or lack thereof, with a crane-game claw and went on its way. I didn't want it to see me. So I hid below the windowframe until I heard the metal mailbox shut and the car roll over the crest of the hill and around the leafy bend so I got up.
Out the main door and to the porch door. I opened it for the millionth time but snagged my elbow on a bent nail that had materialized from an alternate dimension. Moving through a haze that was immediately cut when I saw the blood on my elbow, drip drip dripping onto the blue-painted wood floor of the porch, then outside so I could bleed out onto the grass, and in my inebriation it made perfect sense to pull off a sock and tie it tight as the fabric reddened and didn't show signs of letting up.
I looked at the blood trail. Another stupid realization that I was its source. A mad scientist could've sprang from the bushes and collected a sample and created a whole clone army of Meridien K's. But it didn't happen.
My blood down there. My father's blood and his own father's. And all the things that came with it. The baggage. The ferocity. The freakish memory. The height and the blue eyes and the hairy toes. The ability to pivot and be this nice goofy affable guy and then get into an argument of murderous yelling, Ridley and myself fighting with words and then fists, punching the snot out of each other while our dad watched a bit before pulling us off and not forcing any apology like most parents, letting us work it out in our own way, even if it lead to more proxy fights on the long road toward a reconciliation that never panned out.
Didn't really matter. By all logic, I was the last Kraid on Planet Earth.
The blood was soon gone as the ground drank it up like water.
--long walks out past the wire--
I went into my fenceless backyard and wanted to take an axe to all those dead trees.
There's the truth and there's the lie and there's the lie they want to hear like when we were in front of those bright bright lights and shadows asked us questions and we played the whole ruse that we were fighting their war when the truth couldn't be farther from that banality.
A rabbit was nibbling on my garden and I took a few quick steps forward with a cartoon "Rar!" and arms raised like a long-limbed t-rex and the rabbit fled but I knew it'd be back.
I liked being in prison. The Castle. I was good at it. Pure routine. Fit like a custom suit, the suit my dad bought me when I graduated high school, standing there in an old-school tailor in a dimly-lit Chicago building in the Loop, in my boxers and a t-shirt while an old Asian man wrapped a tape measure around all my limbs and I wonder, now, if I had killed anyone he knew and blah blah blah.
On my couch, supine, tracing the cracks in the ceiling. Trying to find where the lines ended and what caused it. No other answer but stress or, more likely, Time, capital-T Time, the only Time I ever knew.
I hadn't taken my medication in a few days and I was swimming in plain air. Probably was what death felt like or close enough; purgatory, maybe, or those last moments, like how
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Ridley had a theory: That, the moment immediately before you die, your brain goes into a self-induced coma and slows time to infinity, and in that infinity you whisk yourself away to Heaven or Hell or whatever it is you believe in or want to believe in. He reasoned it as the only logical explanation of an afterlife in a society that had long rejected simple theism.
FUCK.
The pen just exploded and… nm
That all of I things I wish that
Or moreso than ever is that nagging pull of hypotheticals especially regarding the events of the past X years on Meridienkraid, might as well simply be Kraid, now, but--
I want it to be around if
A hurricane of typed and laser-printed and red-penned pages in a cyclone when a window blew open and a breeze all the way from Japan decided to make my life chaos and--
what I'd do with it. Broken out of the armory on MK-1 - like anyone was going to fire a live round on a goddamn spaceship? - and Every House With A Gun like a campaign promise. Moreso a definite reaction to The Incident that left Soledas in the hospital for a… a… month?... after getting gored by a pointy-horned Meridienkraid goat that had come off down the mountains once we laid down all that fresh green grass. Like we were supposed to go around with rifles all the time? Too real for our infantile fantasy of the Frontier. Instead it built a paranoia or, at worst, distrust. Stray thoughts thinking about all those guns and how any one of them could go off with a slipped finger.
home no more than a house on a hill. Nothing inside. No photographs, no effects, I didn't like that, didn't like to surround myself with anything that made it seem tomblike.
I can't pinpoint the exact moment I met Benjamin Scott Meridien. The two-year age gap made it impossible for anything substantive between us in grade school, given the rigid K-6 hierarchy that made fraternization not only impossible but foolish, opening yourself up to all the cruelty of runty upperclassmen. But I had seen him out there on the recess blacktop or on the bus home across the curving hills and stagnant lands of Oakriver, that most unassuming of all suburban landscapes to background a glazed-over childhood.
spare memories:
He told me this and it must have been an idea he hadn't fully thought through. He found a fault in his own logic, furrowed his brow and said, "But… then how do you discern the difference between your life and what you perceive as life?"
"It's impossible to distinguish, like solipsism," I said. "You know, that idea that you're the only person in the world who exists."
"I don't think I can use the scientific method to test this experiment," he said.
He was five when he told me this. I didn't know if I should've been proud or if I should've been Worried.
Trace any family far enough into the dark corners of closets and you'll find the success or the misery or the madness you wanted to find since, invariably, it's all there. And--
[Illegible.]
I have more memories of my father, William Douglas Kraid (impossible to think of him in any terms apart from his full, formal name), than I let most people believe. Why should I spill all I know about a dead man? He's not going to rise from his grave and brush off the soil and dictate his life story. I imagine it'd be rather hard without a head; and even if he could reach out his tendrils and collect all his scattered ashes across the corners of the globe and reform, you'd find yourself staring at this man who placed the shotgun very precisely in his mouth, blowing clean through the back of his head and, from of the immense concussion of the blast, his eyes popped out and his nose crumbled and when I found him he was a Halloween ghoul, more a piece of garish shock art than flesh and bone and blood.
Time, Ridley's Time: One infinite, gaping moment; how it was what it'd probably feel like to drift out an airlock and hit the event horizon of a black hole right before, in theory, you'd get ripped apart by the sheer raggedness of spacetime, distorted like Ridley's guitar, draining all the color out of the strings under the dreamy sheen of delayed fuzz, the same sound as a rocket leaving the fragile grip of the earth. My lost son Ridley: Having experienced all that can be experienced by any trip up to the Void… all of it in his head… that whole universe, that exoverse, that megaverse, that innerverse trapped between his ears, inside a lumpy mass of tissue in the gooey vat of his head. A stark image of him sitting under a thousand-year-old tree, eyes closed and breath calm and metered, eyes opened and his blue-grey irises on fire with knowledge, an Enlightenment far deeper and far grander than what Siddhartha saw, than what Hubble saw, than what any of us outerspace sailors have seen. My once-son the prophet, now, by any measure of time or Time, burnt to ash and given to the wind, or shoved into a hole in the ground, or maybe in the deep freeze in a lab, or a ship, a great Ark with our last treasured remnants, sailing away from earth once the sun turned or turns red and greedy and claims Mercury, then Venus, then--
My dad father, William, exists now only in memories as faded and dusty as pre-digital photographs. He timed his suicide well: Myself old enough to know what suicide was, why some walked down that shadowed path; young enough to shirk the needs of a father and Adapt to a life without him; a life beyond him. Maybe he did it too late. I could sense it, like an arctic wolf catching a scent of fresh meat through frozen nostrils. My father as the alpha man, the omega man, a template of horror whenever I see or feel or think I'm turning into him; or when my sons remind me of him and the latent, prehistoric memory he left behind.
The first true scarecrow man I knew. Summer days in the open woods of our Oakriver backyard, clearing debris from a storm. My father in a white t-shirt darkened with sweat, dark brown work pants, his skinny arms and skinny legs making him more fabric than flesh. In those Last Days he shed weight like he was terminally ill, but, for him, it was as simple as a profound spiritual crisis, a countdown that, once it hit Zero, he'd simply disappear… how The Western Man Prefers A Quiet Madness. Shut, locked doors and no sound on the other end, just soles on the floor but no weight on them, like a ghost was moving shoes around and there was no man pacing from bookshelf to bookshelf.
Trapped in a silent movie without the intertitles; without the lead character skittering across a soundstage on an undercranked camera, schizo movements, movements like terrified tiny songbirds, no in-between, no transition; without the black-and-white men and women visibly talking or yelling or screaming on screen and their voices lost, truncated to few-word cards between the cuts. William Douglas Kraid conjured by ghosts, married to a woman who materialized from nowhere and and and
i can't even remember the sound of his voice, if he even had one. Mute in mind and memory and that's law as much as anything. Pursed lips like the last cowboy, no need for words when action would do the trick, a stiff jaw-punch to our next-door neighbor one time when my mother was tending yard-border flowers and the neighbor talked to her too friendly and touched her arm in a too-playful way and my father came out of the dark garage with a crowbar, fortunately dropped it onto the grass, his fist like thunder and fury and a whole mountain crashing into his target, this academic dweeb of a man, glasses cracked and flying off his face, William Douglas Kraid turning back without a single word or sound and heading to the garage, picking up the crowbar and disappearing into shadow as the neighbor yelled and threatened legal bullshit, would've marched over to my father for satisfaction save for the knowledge that the neighbor would get the crowbar if he did, and my father returned to his shadow, sensed me watching from the second-floor window, he knew I saw it even though he never looked up, never said anything.
and he spat on the ground like when a Car pulled up and two Officers came out and knocked on the door and gave their paltry words to my father at the door, my mother in the kitchen collapsing against the pantry and sob sob sobbing, the Officers about to present a folded, glass-encased American flag as my father invisibly worked up a great mass of saliva and spat in the face of a Major and knocked the case from the young Lieutenant's hands and it shattered on the ground and a young man was dead and gone forever but the Officers didn't give a shit, they had a Car full of flags, were doing the rounds that day, angrily went on their way and my father went inside the house and eased the front door shut and left that flag bunched up on the grass until I snuck out that night and picked it up and hid it in my closet, somehow terrified that I'd get found out, that it'd be taken from me, the flag secretly spirited each move from one house to another and another and another - this after my grandfather's flag in my father's Workshop simply vanished - until I left it in Easthaven for Ridley to find because I didn't want it, didn't need it, wasn't afraid of memories but not fond of entertaining dark thoughts all throughout those sunny summer days of a dead brother who became another picture on the mantle of the Kraids who had lived and died until I threw away the photo, reasoned that my imperfect memory was a better fit for me, John Douglas Kraid growing into his own skin, becoming in that old past a man as my father was becoming less of a man, no, less human by the passing day, until I thought he'd start to walk on all fours or drag his knuckles or bark at neighborhood dogs with a foaming mouth.
In public, in public places, indoor spaces there'd be a red-backlit or green-backlit sign for the fire code, EXIT by doors no one ever used. My father looked at them with his blank look, with those colorless eyes that saw a million miles out, saw into the very core of the churning earth, saw in and through and past time and Time, was about to let his consciousness melt into the dark energy of the universe and leave behind a worn-out shell, outgrown clothes and skin and bones of a man whose mind had long since left the world. Those signs spoke to him like they were imperative and not instructive; suggesting an action, not marking a place where you ran to save yourself from the flames.
"My Exit" he called it in those madman scrawlings I found in the margins of his first-edition book collection, the first time I ever cried about it when I saw them, all in red pen; cried like a kid launching off his bicycle and skinning his knee on rockhard asphalt, cried like a lunatic all by myself in a big empty house, cried not for the man or the idea but out of absolute terror, that, one day, His Exit would become My Exit. But he wouldn't be waiting somewhere for me because there is no hallowed place where all the dead men go along with the dead bears and the dead wolves and the dead crows. No Valhalla with its swords and shields and spears and great long table of breastplates and proud warriors pounding heady ale. No vanilla heaven on mushy clouds underfoot, no harp lessons from women with vivid eyes who'd let you Have them with a mere thought, God was no prude, He knew what men wanted. No hell with its perpetual flames, no successive circles of Dante, no Rivers of the Damned guarded by skeleton oarsmen, no horror of melted flesh and skull-searing pain until your eyes popped free from their sockets and you had to grope blind through a pile of moaning, naked corpses lest you spend eternity blind. No purgatory and its waiting room, its idleness, its torture, there with earth's waste and wasted, too tired to wait for that white door to open and invite you in, out back the way you came but no, not the same, the world out there an earth turned dead and windy in the fallout of an unknown holocaust that none remembered. The realization that you're dead; the impossible realization.
I look down and see the crooked claw of my left hand, a stick of a smeary grey mineral in my hands, all our pens long since exhausted, no proper pencils but who bothered to write anyway? Writing up on my highest floor with the mountains out there, both near and far in so many fractured ways. I should be down in the cellar with all the cold air and the dimness and the food preserves; or out on some chewed-up plain, perched on an uncomfortable rock and bracing 'gainst the wind, gusts strong enough to tear papers from my hand, to take this chronicle and scatter it all across this bastard paradise New World of ours, take the sheets and blow them over the Stormwall to the sentient aliens on the Dark Continent, so they could pick it up with translucent hands and stare with ovoid eyes at the dingy scratches of that ancient tongue of American English, a language a mere few deaths away from extinction.
O, memory! with all the woe of a Shakespearean soliloquy, a spotlight on an empty stage, so bright you imagine a crowd of hundreds out there in those red-velvet seats but there's no one there. Ordered thoughts about everything that has happened prior to the constant Now, designated N, placed in the semblance of continuity so that we have N+∞ or N-∞ and
lizard-terror, forgetting all my lines and tumbling into that familiar fissure, arms outstretched and my fingernails scrape along the edges until I slow and stop and wonder if I'm hanging above the whole of the universe or below it or somewhere no one knows, where I'll never be found, where I'll scream from the abyss to nothing greater than that airless, mute Void.
I need to own up everything horrible and evil I have done; all the things no one had the courage to call me on, not even Ben. Karen dead and unmourned; Ridley sent off to die and, when he came back in one piece, I couldn't process, had already written him off as dead (and I think he did, too); then Bobby dropped off in Chicago and I sped back to Easthaven and Mars Mars Mars on the brain, Never Look Back like a mantra pinned up on a cubicle walls next to pictures of children in those frames with plastic flowers on the upper-left and lower-right edges and--
The profane liberation of it all. Benjamin Meridien: His death was my death. Now I am free to live a second time… out here so far from everything once known. Comfortable on a hostile world made tame. Meridienkraid songbirds and Meridienkraid reptiles as harmless as terrestrial robins and backyard toads, lost, trying to find their way back to the bog and--
I don't know…
I don't want my life to be some rumination of time… death… loss…
[Several pages have been torn out.]
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Spend five years in a POW camp where each and every day is, at its essence, utterly the same, and you'll forgive me if I seem to lose track of specific time. Not confusion over the pointless days of the week - though whenever the market was crowded I knew it must've been Saturday or Sunday, if they even still called it that, what with this Mainland nonsense and all - but hours, days… months… years... Only the vague sensation that I was growing older. No real changes beyond most things cosmetic: My eyebags; a phantom straightening of my spine that made me taller, made me loom like those scarecrows perched high on crosses my grandma put up on her organic farm; my bones more visible, my flesh like sallow bleached paper. But mirror looks and Ridley's grimace was still there, no grey hairs, no receding hairline, all part of the grand conspiracy that they put something in the water, maybe, so that even the most wretched of us would live long past a hundred. Maybe as long as those deepspace astronauts, frozen and thawed out on long trips to the Jovian System and its harsh moons, searching for something as base and plentiful as water ice--
--handwritten pages, longhand like a first-grader writing with his non-dominant hand, penmanship like abstract art, script my dogs could read better than me.
Proximity things wore at the edge of my meager concept of safety in California. Kids too old to be riding bikes coming all the way up the hill to leer at me, a leer with a self-projected disgust as I sat on the front step and smoked and drank and read books bought from garagesales. Like I was The Last Analog Man. And cars - old cars with that biodiesel roar and tank-like rumble - that came up the curve of the hill and slowed as they passed, even if I was hidden safe inside. I didn't like it. It played on all the void fear I thought I had shed with my old skin.
July Four, 2076. Tricentennial. Awakened to gunshots and mortars and CAS. In bed I opened my eyes blissfully slow, at peace, some thought like Finally… that crossed my mind, that the Forces were finally coming to take me home, to drop a big fat bomb - swollen like a beehive, "BOMB" stenciled on the side like the unexploded one that plopped down into the Castle's courtyard - down my chimney and blow that shack into a tornado of wood-splinter shrapnel, create so much intense pressure that I would be totally liquefied, invisible in the ruins, seeping into the ground of Mother Earth.
I stepped out of the window in the upper loft and carefully climbed up the very top of the roof and watched an airshow over the Bay down at the base of the hills where the town sat snug in its Pacific cove. July Four still as Independence Day No. 1, when a bunch of paunchy, wigged slaveowners sat around and, with frilly handwriting and quill pens, wrote a document that was unprecedented in its absolute incredulity. Independence from the royal crown? Are you fucking insane? Shut the fuck up, pay the taxes, avoid a nasty bloody war that no one would ever truly forgive. Fuck Matters of Principle; I swallowed most of those and shit them out in the Castle, flushed down a grav toilet to a septic tank emptied by a truck and dumped god knows where--
My load-out wasn't nearly as fun as the full kit when running ops in the AO. Stateside: Old combat boots because, shit, it didn't necessarily meant I was in the Forces; analog, twelve-hour wristwatch; wedding band I bought at a pawn shop in Las Vegas; thrift-store clothes: dark work khakis like my father and his before him, a blue-collar warehouse shirt with the "STAFF" namepatch ripped off; the (stolen) dogtags of my uncle, worn on a thin cord that didn't betray what was underneath my shirt, pinned to my chest after having so long been tucked in the bottom of my footlocker in The Base With No Name and Tent City and the AO and those million FOBs before the final FOB X and the miracle of getting it recovered after the Castle; two black pens in my breastpocket; satphone in my right pocket that was never used, was there just in case, I figured, I had to call in a fire mission.
Off down the switchbacks of the hills in my car, not feeling up for the suicide chug back up on a bicycle after the no-brakes thrill going down. Not more than a mile from my personal hermitville and cars were doubleparked and pedestrians clogged the sidewalks and I scanned for a threat that was never there…
…Blending with the crowd, too tall and singular amid all those families, the warehouse shirt a disguise, like I got off shift from a hardass boss who didn't let his muscle take the Fourth off. The crowd like a bunch of European ex-pats, clustered around the parade like it was an ode to a naive, mythic past that never happened, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or the whole pantheon of Greek and Roman demigods. That garish display of front-and-center, in-the-red patriotism, too distorted with crowd buzz and rogue firecracking-tossing hooligans to get a clear snapshot of any precise moment. Uncle Sams on stilts and fake beards and wrapped up in all those Old American colors, their suits wrinkled from the closet where they spent the other three-hundred sixty-four days of the year. Founding Fathers on a float with Ted Roosevelt, posing for a faux Rushmore as kids in redwhiteblue threw candy from ice cream buckets to the kids in the crowd. Small-business owners idling in the beds of pick-ups, waving, smiling, See? I Love This Country Too! Shop At My Store!
Straining for an eyeline. Up on the concrete shelf of the front of the ancient library and checking the vanishing point of the parade. The crack of rifles approaching. And the distance brought foreground: Forces guards in Class A duds, pure Regs, young but so old in their sandwich-hats with all those pins on them, that scared, scarred look in their eyes like they could flip a switch and turn wild-eyed, snap into Soldier Mode and wipe out the whole fuckin' ville. Old America's attack dogs held on a short leash.
Lockstep march and banners and flags carried - the stars and stripes and the white triangle on black - and AP rifles shouldered, close to the same APs I used, my hands mentally field-stripping it, knowing all the bits of metal that needed grease and the others that only needed a good rubdown or a spit-shine. A lull in the parade and they readied their rifles, obeyed the orders called out by their sergeant, aimed at a forty-five degree angle, FIRE and oh god that sound, a sudden ache in my heart as the spent casings popped out the side and smelled like burnt brass and brave kids scurrying out to grab the hot metal…
…And I found myself following the Regs down the parade route like predator and prey, everyone all around plugging their ears waiting for the gunshots and I didn't even blink. A sound as familiar as my own rising heartbeat in silent rooms; one side of my head pressed against a pillow, praying for sleep as the static rises and rises-- And then the parade fizzled out into a street fair, face-painting and cotton candy and self-labeled artists sitting quietly by their knick-knacks.
Not far off, a lopsided scene from somewhere: Two mil-spec AVs with the marching Regs crowding around, drinking from opaque plastic cups filled from a keg. Boys with a unit patch but a naked sleeve where the deployment patch was supposed to go. Ribbons for bullshit like passing Basic and firing off an AP and hitting a target twenty feet away and simply being in the Forces during wartime, didn't matter whether or not you actually fought anything, didn't really matter to me, one Bronze Star, Purple Hearts on two of the guys who looked completely fine, the hell with it, not my world anymore, I would've had between four and eight of 'em anyway and--
Young men so in love with their dress-up game that they didn't even see or sense me sneak up as I took an AP and simply carried it away down the side streets toward my hidden car. I yanked out the mag, full of alien-to-me 5.56, checked the chamber and let a bullet fall out, stupid green Regs, bullet picked up and pocketed, walking down the streets with a rifle over my shoulder and I must've worn enough confidence since the few people that passed on the other side of the street didn't gawk and point and think I was about to shoot up their fragile semblance of a community.
Back to my car and back to my house and a nap on my couch and I woke up with the AP in my hands, a loaded safety-off weapon, wasn't alarmed, wasn't surprised. I knew that I could pretend all I wanted but I wasn't going back, couldn't go back, and I was up as the evening light filtered in through the high windows and I got a glass of water and could feel the presence of the rifle back in the main room. I paused in the glow of the kitchen and cast my shadow over it, until I could barely see that black metal. I wasn't sure
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Once we finished the mine the machines took over. Perfect sentience, sturdy-wheeled robots going into the noxious places of that earth and digging out all the scraps we needed to fashion insulated cable, a resource more precious than fresh water. Everyone scattered again to their corners of the continent they kept to themselves; either hatching an ingenious plan for the hostile takeover of all the great Kingdom of Meridienkraid or simply bored and tired, that deep tiredness that compounds every wake-up, that makes the wait for morning coffee more agonizing each passing morning, an animalistic urge to walk out on those endless plains and lie down in a spot of shade and close your eyes and will Death upon you, let your soul wander free through the great Void as your shell is carried to the cemetery up on the Hill.
Intihar went off on his horse to the deep south, where a vast peninsula stuck out like a fist into the Southern Ocean. Last I heard he named the settlement Pale Water because of the way the foamy surf clung to the shore and turned the multicolored water a sort of milky hue. Doesn't matter. Something drove another splinter between every one of us. Time, maybe, like most things. Intihar was always moving around, never stayed put, restless as a pioneer, letting slip old mil discipline and growing bearded and wild-haired; at one point he was like a son to me and now he became this stranger… no different than past experiments anyhow.
Intihar tapped into whatever reckless, cramped yearning that brought us here in the first place, so many years ago, ages since I first met him as a kid bouncing around inside a spaceship… I saw in him that broad-shouldered, dark-shadowed look of Ben and the absolute terror of my neutral eyes. He rode that horse like he was Paul Revere on his Midnight Ride - impossible history fading away, no better'n myth - and more than a few steeds threw him off and had that mean spirit that made us shoot them instead of tapping into our gentler nature to teach them stillness. A few weeks in Soledas' Lab, tweaks to give our equines superstamina and a calm heart, ponies turned to stallions not long off the line. And I remember the last time Intihar rode off, with only a canvas ruck on the back of his white horse and his initiative, the sheer audacity to make a city out of sticks and stones and waddle and daub. And off he went, and no one wanted to bother him any more.
Distance between us turned to apathy, and then that apathy turned to ambivalence, and that led to an unguarded, unjustified worry, an anxiety that had no root nor apparent manifestation. He wasn't going to mass a test-tube army and show up in Nomad Valley - as open and blank as a medieval battlefield - with men in phalanx formations thumping their spears 'gainst shields before letting fly endless volleys of arrows shot from longbows. And me, one mere man, pierce my heart once, cut off my head and I am dead.
"Godspeed!" shouted once in jest, then in earnest, then never again as Intihar's form receded.
But you see? This is simply the way things transpired over time, so much Time, time spent alone and apart, to go wild with your own thoughts, to rampage through the past, to laugh and spit and grin and grimace and reject all and everything or accept it as the saving grace that brought you here among the godmen.
Like how Parish set off in a skiff for the Stormwall with no tricks, no tactics, simply the iron will not to turn back; and how he disappeared into the lightning clouds and was never heard from again. Either o'er there with the Meridienkraid men or the raw emptiness of the Dark Continent or quick work of the hungry, opportunistic fish that took a bite out of your foot if you weren't careful. Maybe he drifted down into that underground cavern Ben and I once mapped for him; maybe his last sight and last thought was the beauty of that underwater glow, that Life thrived in the most strange of places, a smile upon his face as his capsized boat came down around him and he breathed in deep and let the freshwater fill his lungs and give him no breath and let him die a violent, wrenching death in the depths.
Tap tap tap on the desk, on rocks outdoors, against the fabric of my pants and the soft flesh underneath: A brown porcelain band on the fourth finger of my left hand, the same dark brown as the leather on my wristwatch before that leather faded in our endless sunlight. An indestructible ring like it held the undying soul of a pagan demon, scratch scratch scratch when I knocked on glass and windows, when I was working in the dirt among all the sharp rocks, rattling like my teeth as I threw sticks of homemade dynamite down into the big gaping hole of the mine and felt the whole earth shudder, waiting, almost praying for a cave-in even though they'd yank me out by the leg, tied to a big machine up the shaft. The ring not tight enough to break circulation but impossible to remove, water and butter and grease and everything shy of the jaws of life and the damn thing wouldn't come off. A few gave that Look, that whole John… Just Shatter It Already and they didn't see it, didn't see the bold significance of such a cavalier act.
Well, shit…
Back in the Hollow for the eclipse. All us survivors back from our self-constructed lives… our comforts same as Red, same as the dead memory of Blue, no blown-out summers and heart-of-ice winters from the chubby-cheeked wind god and his damn jetstream. All of us clad in handmade clothes that looked like a convergence of so many alien cultures, all of our old clothes far too worn to keep around anymore, reduced to smelly fuel on a nighttime campfire. Soledas leading out the Meridienkraid children in color-coded uniforms designating Generations, the younger ones clumped together, the older ones mute as big brothers, the Alpha keeping tabs on the whole since they listened more to one of their own than their collective Father, a coil of our DNA in each; Intihar's splinter Generation - but no Intihar - in black militia gear and holstered truncheons; Davidson in tweed and corduroy like a professor, fluent in his complete Meridien language that we were all behind in understanding, him going around and greeting us and refusing to speak English and receiving lukewarm, curt responses, his kid acolytes chattering away in that Latin-sounding, contraction-heavy slang-dialect; Hsu with a cane because of a broken leg but the cane made him look so very, very old; Vedran in glasses that magnified his eyes by a factor of at least four; Elliott, alone, squinting in the mild light, sipping from a flask and flinching with every pull, scowling at shadows, finally the firm-voiced leader I had trained as my Replacement ever since Red; Hoday in full kit, twice his size, fresh from working on something or other than needed a lot of cable, tape and glue; and Podrezov, the new Mountainman of us, a big shaggy beard and his pet brown bear cub that nuzzled up to all of us and understood perfect Russian and was unnerving but harmless as Hsu's sheepdogs.
It was raining but the clouds were to the west and the eastern Near Sea was clear and bright and fine, just fine for an eclipse as we let the kids set up the boats and launch them. We all put on our ponchos and piled in the boats and went out as the rain drove in, rain like god forgot to turn off a faucet.
How many eclipses? How many since…? And since…?
Each man saw his own visions when Little Brother cut into the arc of Prime and cast the world in prismatic surreality. The younger Generations gasped in wonder and quietly whispered Meridien to each other. Most of them had never seen it before.
Shrugging off that maybe I'm getting too old for this too-easy lapse into cynicism, especially after Soledas, to our total shock, finally figured how old we actually were and how freakishly long we'd live, a number that stretched all the way into eternity-- Counting down until it ended rather than counting up since it started. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe it was something else. Something in the wrinkles in that tiresome consciousness, pulsing from memory to memory to find something that seemed like
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The night of the Fourth I sat on my roof and watched fireworks on all three-hundred sixty points of the circle. A panorama of a celebration that has long since been moot. I had the AP and tucked it into my shoulder and during the bomb-blast bombast of the fireworks I shot off live rounds over the Bay, felt that bliss of recoil but all else had lost its magic. I didn't even get the underwater wash in my ears after the shot; probably too deaf to register it. And a brief flashback Over There and then back on the roof of a rented house in northern California firing a stolen AP, wasn't mine, didn't have all the scratches and all the grooves and all the custom jobs I did over those ten years racing around the AO like hot-rodding high-schoolers jonesin' for a drag race or any other fantasy that'd never happen.
Two quick shots up at the moon and the Rim. Fast bullets losing the fight against gravity and hitting the water somewhere at the end of the parabola. The two shells out the ejection port, rolled down the roof and collected in the rain gutter until I shimmied down and fished them out, tossed them up and down in my palm as the heat cooled off the brass. I pocketed them. Down in the house proper and pretending the fireworks were CAS, trying to shake a latent jitter lest I go running off in the night chasing down a string of AVs that weren't there.
The AP in the crook of my arm as I sat on the back deck and blew pale smoke up into the greasy sky. All extraneous sound died down except the stray pop of strings of firecrackers. The AP with a full mag minus two. No harm if I popped of a few and--
Too stoned or not stoned enough. Mudthoughts flowing through the sedimentary rock of my brain. My time on the coast had worn out; no eternal happiness living so close to water, that elixir of all human and inhuman life. I held that image in my head, an image for as long as I can accurately remember. Old thought-jokes that I'd call my eventual house Nowhere, so that when people asked where I was going, I could look them in the eye and, with all seriousness, say, "I am going Nowhere."
My car had already been packed for weeks. I needed to find my Home, not a house. I had been looking at maps and figured a good place to start. Just needed to pack one last suitcase with clothes and tuck a few hundred-dollar bills under the vase on the main table for the phantom landlord.
There was only one place I needed to go first; and no, it wasn't the Past or a theoretical place; it was someplace physical, someplace old, someplace I've already been, now, and a place that came and went and is now gone forever.
But it was all that stood between me and Nowhere.
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I do, though, remember the way he stood; how he stood when he, team captain, picked his squad for the fifteen-minute pick-up game of basketball at recess. Ben Meridien, eight years old in the mighty grade of Four, hands on hips, erect posture but something elusive, that X that separates, if nothing else, the leaders and the led. Everyone else had that droopy Kid look, where you don't know what to do with your gangly hands and too-big handed-down clothes or horrid posture and you had this terrible flailing form when running. Not Ben. It was like he had already grown into his skin while I was still there, back in the dust with all the rest, only an abnormal skill at math that separated me from all the big-eared, toothy-grinned second graders at the puckish age of six.
Ben and I were pitted against each other during the all-school math competition, a Very Serious Thing then, two in-class qualification rounds before the main event in the gym on a Saturday, then the winners got a plaque on the Wall of Plaques or a college scholarship to Somewhere or prize money or a calculator watch, I don't really remember.
Ben and I nabbed perfect scores so they had to do the victory ceremony later so they could get a second plaque. We stood there on opposite ends of the held-aloft trophy, the 2014 entry would have two winners inscribed on the wood base of the gleaming bowl, which had never happened before (and, last I checked, had never happened after); and no one had ever scored perfect in the history of the competition.
So Ben Meridien became an abstraction. Both of each a bit insecure in the way our minds ran laps around most kids, cranial activity siphoned off somewhere and pumped into the math region. And it was like Ben decided I was the Enemy, but I never got anything more than a sneer in chance hallway passings or on the schoolbus home.
His name was always spit out too fast and I thought it was something like "Meridjin." He seemed white as anyone else, but you know the way kids are, and I figured he was a Middle Eastern sleeper agent, stealing all the rightful glory of a true-American boy: me.
It didn't help that our doctor fathers, Dr. Kraid and Dr. Meridien, were both at work at the Oakriver College Robotics Laboratory. (Nevermind the fact that I didn't learn about their coexistence until The Old Man was dead.) Dr. Meridien, charismatic as his son, somehow kicked off a friendship with my father, who often needed the use of force required for a heavy, glacial stone to socialize; that, or alcohol. Soon enough the whole merged group was myself, my brother Ron, my father William, my mother Beatrice; and Dr. Robert Meridien ("Mr. Meridien," the man said. "Forget about all this 'doctor' nonsense. Call me Rob if you want."), his wife Ellie, and their lone son Benjamin before I split for Newport.
False enemies turned ambivalent, then an alliance, then a brittle friendship until a year had passed and we realized we needed to start acting like adults; at seven and nine years, respectively.
If only we had known how far--
On Hundred-Meter Hill in the breezing of late afternoon, sitting cross-legged in a pair of grass-stained khakis and a white shirt missing the sleeve buttons. Swatting away fluorescent butterflies swarming down from their haven somewhere hidden nearby. A necessary pastime to sit by the tombstone and scrape the lichen and moss from the inscription. A cemetery already wearing into the ground, much like how all those bones down there were probably liquefied, chewed up by the microbes we poured all over the dressed, slightly-rotten dead. Ashes. Dust. That old Christian ritual for all us non-believers.
I always went up to the Hill when I visited the Hollow and gave my lectures, in halting Meridien, to Generation 1, once they were old enough to take diligent notes and pay close attention when I took them to the optics tower, a hundred rickety feet up a shaky steel structure, eyes pressed to the sunproof scope and those alien galaxies more familiar on each passing glance.
Like how they always say Children Are The Future? Well, from a purely survival standpoint, then yes, they will outlive us and, by dint of logic, become the future. But what if it's a future bereft of wonder, curiosity, artistry…?
So I stuck around, made appearances while the rest of the original Colonists retired to their self-built mansions and lounged like sedentary reptiles for the remainder of their hundreds of years alive on a bright fresh new rock. But once they turned the gears of civilization, once they could see the whole of the world not quite moving against them but away from them, well… that was one reason we left Red, and no one was in any hurry to fix the partly-junked M3 and try our chances elsewhere. None of us had another long stretch of hard years to terraform another rock and plant a flag and start the process again.
The Generations weren't as abstractly frightening once you got to know them. Soledas made the mistake of being too friendly, too kind, too lenient, and they ran all over him. Hundreds of shrieking boys in the dorm abutting his Lab, perfect as angels when they came to my classroom, Soledas watching like it was a magic trick, and all I was doing was emulating my father and many before him. All it took was a stern gaze, an erect posture, and the element of the random terror of publicly quizzing random students to put them in line. (Problem was they had no anxiety about being wrong in front of their class.)
The boys, after all, knew what I was doing once they were older. One of my favorite students, a boy named Touren, became my teaching assistant when the eldest were ready for university studies; that is, those who didn't want to ship out to Fort Pillar and join Intihar's budding intergalactic army for the peace and security of all of Meridienkraid.
Years, maybe… decades…
On a creaky chair barely stable enough to support my lean weight in one of the four-story buildings speckled throughout the U grounds.
"Thomas?"
Touren was the only one to say it without sideways intent. I was revered on campus, sure; revered, but that didn't stop the nicknames. Barely visibly older than the other Colonists but I became The Old Man. My nickname translated from Meridien - which I learned to speak, more or less, by trial and error - to English, then "The Old Man" to "T.O.M." to Tom to Thomas and I figured why the hell not? A bit confusing and counterintuitive if a professor had the same surname as half the planet's name, and semester by semester it became far too intensive to explain it - and to explain Ben - to my undergrads, especially those outside the tentacle grip of astronomy or physics. I became Professor Thomas, and while some knew a speck of truth, it didn't mean much. The Generations, after all, were allowed to choose their own names once cognizant. Why shouldn't I adopt the same custom?
And while Touren had his house near campus, he drove over near the northwest shores with his sailboat and sailed the waters of the Northern Sea and crept closer and closer to the Stormwall like it was a game of will. I didn't watch from the higher places of my house, but it was always a relief when he came back and bid goodnight before driving back to the Hollow to all his friends and Soledas in his Lab… Soledas doing whatever it is that a man does in a laboratory where he can create or manipulate or reconstruct any species of plant or animal that ever lived, way back on--
--and no one was buried anymore but there was an understanding about the graves up on Hundred-Meter Hill and how they were expressively forbidden for a reason that shifted from season to season. Sometime a straight lie - the only Lie we'd ever tell them - about how dead bodies gave off radiation and that I, Spaceman, was immune to that and could go up on the Hill and run mercurial tests, when really I sat there and read the newspaper or a Meridien translation of one of our English paperbacks, struggling with the words and wishing yawns were accompanied by a pink sky, but that was how things were, and I was in no rush to change them. I was the one who had gone to Meridienkraid, after all. Could've stayed on Blue Red.
I stood up from the grave and read it carefully like I had done a million times. I imagined a long shadow cast from the rectangular headstone, though by the way the sun was positioned it was impossible. Not even the tree that had grown twenty feet tall provided much shade. A thousand years since Ben's death, since I had become the elder statesman of Meridienkraid, since I got rid of the shell of John Kraid and took whatever name was at the top of the scrap heap. So I stood and imagined that I stepped out of the shadow, and I started off down the Hill to my Rover and back to New K.
Every time I descended that Hill, I always imagined half-transparent Ghost Ben sitting on the tombstone, perched upon it like a benevolent vulture. He never stared pointedly at me and demanded things be done for his undying soul. He was always eating a piece of fruit and admiring the color of the sky and the flocks of birds. I catalog it now, same with all those other
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July Four, 2056. An eventful year. I had shot Z a few months prior, and in the autumn I'd watch Horse take an RPG to the chest on a scrap of bum real estate that probably didn't even have a name.
But the past was past and the future unknown.
It was one of those typical MTC patrols that went nowhere, until Elephant contacted Six-Four and said we were too deep to justify driving the AVs but not deep enough to pull back. Out of our AVs with self-rigged electric fans blasting away the sweat beneath those black clothes, god forbid we wear armor or anything ridiculous like helmets that'd only make it hotter and stickier.
We kept running into elements of Chinese. A pocket here, a pocket there, and we were taking them all out in short, controlled bursts, but it's not like it was invisible and mute; their buddies might pick up their radio chatter, and if anyone came over to take a look, they'd find field-stripped Chinese or tall men in black picking apart the findings; or nothing at all. Most likely they'd get ambushed by aforementioned black-uniformed men. We were all irritated because no engagement ever went one-hundred percent perfect, didn't feel like a Unit op if someone was about to get away in a Chinese AV before we took out the heavier weapons that Gremlin - his turn - hauled around. A smoke whoosh and the curved air-tail of a half-rocket, half-grenade we called AV Poppers, which would kind of slam into the side of an enemy AV and send all four tires popping out in a controlled blast. It'd never kill the driver for some reason, who'd often play a hidey-game around the corners of the AV and we'd flank him and try not to get caught in a goddamn crossfire.
Four days of it and it was already two days longer than most ops. Low enough on ammo we were taking Chinese mags and ripping out the bullets, 7.62 x 51mm NATO, same as ours. Running out of AP mags and binding the bullets together with electrical tape along the sides of the gun. Sleeping in weeds and short on bug repellant. And while none of us were patriots in that fake sort of sense (like, these days, who'd have the gall to call themselves a "patriot" beyond any grandstanding pol?), our runner had promised we'd get back for the July Four cookout and get hot brisket or pulled pork and eat it out on red-and-white-tableclothed picnic tables and pretend, for once, we weren't somewhere where it was hot and hostile and nasty and mean-faced and bad-intentioned. Not like any of us were that type. We just wanted better food than our usual chop.
The kind of desperation like the last mile of long run; a string of finals before a big fat break filled with drugs and Oblivion. We were low on water, on food, on bullets… on anything except the rail-straight morale of living for the silent objective.
Off one of the dead Chinese we took maps and decoded them best as we could, marking the sort of sites that they likely wouldn't move because of a few kids in black.
"Hey Caf, check this out."
Caf came over and crouched down with his rifle as I sat on a rock with my AP across my knees. It was a fake-leather journal kept by one of the dead Chinese. That kind of Prize that, if you weren't hollow enough, if you didn't have the stomach like a Unit man, might make you go soft. Pictures of a wife and kids floated out when I picked it up; looked at the pic, didn't bother to put it back. For whatever reason it was in Cantonese, my comprehension of which was fairly terrible compared to my conversational Mandarin. And the guy's handwriting was its own battle. But I read it; dry and professional like a true soldier's notes. There were mentions of things we did - what 716 had done - like taking out attack helos and sabotaging the power grid for most of the border and blowing up a hell of a lot of roads, no doubt it was us, the hot-shits of the AO.
"Check this out, Caf, everyone, check this out. Apparently they call us 'The Men in the Dust.'"
It didn't have nearly the intended effect. The guys nodded to themselves, didn't see how absolutely cool it was, that we, cold-blooded icers, either struck so much fear or had enough notoriety to get nicknamed by The Claw. I thought it badass: Men like a mirage, materialized and risen from the dust, the inanimate.
We were all clumped in the same thicket, listening to the high breeze in the trees that never came down to our level. No one was taking charge; not that anyone pulled rank, but something needed to be done.
I looked at our map and saw a clearing in the woods that cut wide open. The topography indicated a gentle rise of about seventy-five feet to twin bunkers, behind which were open-air mortar pits, probably pre-sighted for the mouth of the woods near the grass lane of the approach. It wasn't far from our position; I could see the bald hilltop through the branches.
The guys smelled a scheme. They gathered round the map.
"There. Right there," I pointed, circled it in red, and that was all that needed to be said. The men nodded to each other, silently separated into two teams, one for each machine gun. No mention that it was a total batshit run, borderline wishful suicide, we could probably call in CAS if we could lase it. Instead we picked up our guns and ran a gear check as we pushed out of the brush and onto the alley of unkempt grass.
A walk turned to a jog, then we accelerated to a run as we neared the end of the open mouth of the plains. I was in the front but Caf overtook me, cupped one hand by his mouth and yelled out this strange whoop, like he was about to start corralling horses.
I rounded the corner and saw the thick tracer of a .50 coming in far too hot. I shoved Caf down behind a pile of boulders as I felt a bullet kiss my earlobe. Caf got up, almost offended, no time for that, a zigzag, straight-up charge on those bunker slits. Muzzle flashes like War Two guns at Normandy, blindfiring at the slits like that'd convince them we were shooting with any semblance of accuracy. And the bullets hit all around and chewed up the dirt and even the trees far back and we advanced and advanced until it became a terrible roar and I secondguessed the decision I made when in the safety of the thicket. Bullets ate the turf right in front of me all the way up to the bunker. They were leading me too fast, and I unclipped and tossed two frags inside when I was right on top of them and I heard that sickening crunch of bone and stone and blood and I went around and took a position outside the smoky remnant of the bunker's rear.
The other team had taken the second gun and emptied two mags into the pillbox, not in the mood to take any chances. I was crouched when a Chinese man exited my hole. He was unarmed. His eyes were fixed in the direction opposite we had come, down toward another no man's land of empty, unmined plains. I was about to pop him but it wasn't my gunshot that made his head burst. Caf ran up, dust swirling around the hot barrel of his AP. The newly-partly-headless man was prostrate and Caf flipped him over and roughly checked him for intel, roughed him up more aggressively than I probably would've done.
We found nothing and had a few minor injuries. Six-Four was tangentially hit; a Chinese bullet triggered a flare on his back and that had burnt out his radio supertransmitter. He had a finger tight in one ear, trying to get a fix with his monotone and there was no response. At the same time, Terra sort of crumpled to the ground and immediately assured us he was okay, gingerly pulled up his pant leg and revealed that his bones didn't quite look the way they were supposed to look. Always so strange that bullets rarely fucked us up; it was always a weird movement that ripped tendons or caused a stress fracture.
July Four on a hill in Nowhere, China. One man down and no comms. No evac.
I slid my rifle into the magbrace on my back.
"Best head back to the FOB. Or the AVs, if they're still there."
"What?" from no one in particular.
"Well, waiting isn't going to do anything. The rest of you stay here. I'll be back in a day."
I didn't even turn to see their protest as I was off down the hill. Once I passed the turn of the clearing I checked my left arm, where a bullet had gotten too close and took a chunk out of the wrinkly part on the tip of my elbow. I was more upset that it had ripped my uniform.
And soon enough it was evening and sunset, sundown and twilight, as true a field of night stars as any. And fireflies like a dream or waking hallucination from sheer exhaustion.
It reminded me of Easthaven. Like when, at night, I went out to the mailbox to get the post. The neighborhood of most of my life, but I could always feel a latent hostility on that street. The houses up the hill were dark… When it rained it left a briny taste on my tongue… Windy and the leaves blew down and clogged the gutters… I hated it, I hated it all, hated it the way a blind man hates the sun… And then turning back to my own house and its lights inside… The neighborhood and its quiet. The crooked grin of woods contained neatly in backyards, fenced in, the way they stared at me, pockets here and there that went unchecked grew unruly, rebelled against arbitrary borders.
I always wanted to disappear into those woods. Just disappear like a lizard under a rock.
That's me.
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History doesn't repeat; it just treads water.
-Robert Meridien Kraid
Nowhere, 2132
(Survivors)
Jack Kentala - November 14, 2011 / April 30, 2012 - Burnsville, Minnesota, USA
