Spin

  The sky sparked with strange light. Not the unadulterated light of the Spinning universe, which would have killed us on the spot. Instead it was a series of snapshots of the sky, consecutive midnights compressed into microseconds, afterimages fading like the pop of a flashbulb; then the same sky a century or a millennium later, like sequences in a surreal movie. Some of the frames were blurred long-exposures, starlight and moonlight become ghostly orbs or circles or scimitars. Some were crisp and quickly fading stills. Toward the north the lines and circles in the sky were narrower, their radii relatively small, while the equatorial stars were more restless, waltzing over huge ellipses. Full and half and waning moons blinked from horizon to horizon in pale orange transparencies. The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.

  And it all moved.

  Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. “So alive,” Diane said.

  There is a prejudice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive; things that don’t are dead. The living worm twines under the dead and static rock. Stars and planets move, but only according to the inert laws of gravitation: a stone may fall but is not alive, and orbital motion is only the same falling indefinitely prolonged.

  But extend our mayfly existence, as the Hypotheticals had, and the distinction blurs. Stars are born, live, die, and bequeath their elementary ashes to newer stars. The sum of their various motions is not simple but unimaginably complex, a dance of attraction and velocity, beautiful but frightening. Frightening because, like an earthquake, the writhing stars made mutable what ought to be solid. Frightening because our deepest organic secrets, our couplings and our messy acts of reproduction, turn out not to be secrets after all: the stars are also bleeding and laboring. No single thing abides, but all things flow. I couldn’t remember where I had read that.

  “Heraclitus,” Diane said.

  I wasn’t aware that I’d said it aloud.

  “All those years,” Diane said, “back at the Big House, all those fucking wasted years, I knew—”

  I put my finger on her lips. I knew what she had known.

  “I want to go back inside,” she said. “I want to go back to the bedroom.”

  We didn’t pull the blinds. The spinning, kinetic stars cast their light into the room and in the darkness the patterns played over my skin and Diane’s in focusless images, the way city lights shine through a rain-streaked window, silently, sinuously. We said nothing because words would have been an impediment. Words would have been lies. We made love wordlessly, and only when it was over did I find myself thinking, Let this abide. Just this.

  We were asleep when the sky once more darkened, when the celestial fireworks finally dimmed and disappeared. The Chinese attack had amounted to little more than a gesture. Thousands had died as a result of the global panic, but there had been no direct casualties on Earth—or, presumably, among the Hypotheticals.

  The sun rose on schedule the next morning.

  The buzz of the house phone woke me. I was alone in bed. Diane took the call in another room and came in to tell me it was Jase, he said the roads were clear and he was on his way back.

  She had showered and dressed and she smelled like soap and starched cotton. “And that’s it?” I said. “Simon shows up and you drive away? Last night means nothing?”

  She sat down on the bed next to me. “Last night never meant that I wouldn’t leave with Simon.”

  “I thought it meant more.”

  “It meant more than I can possibly say. But it doesn’t erase the past. I’ve made promises and I have a faith and those things put certain boundaries on my life.”

  She sounded unconvinced. I said, “A faith. Tell me you don’t believe in this shit.”

  She stood up, frowning.

  “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But maybe I need to be around someone who does.”

  I packed and loaded my luggage into the Hyundai before Jase and Simon got back. Diane watched from the porch as I closed the lid of the trunk.

  “I’ll call you,” she said.

  “You do that,” I told her.

  4 X 109 A.D.

  I broke another lamp during one of my fits of fever.

  This time Diane managed to conceal it from the concierge. She had bribed the housekeeping staff to exchange clean for dirty linen at the door every second morning rather than have a maid make up the room and risk finding me delirious. Cases of dengue, cholera, and human CVWS had cropped up at the local hospital within the last six months. I didn’t want to wake up in an epidemiological ward next to a quarantine case.

  “What worries me,” Diane said, “is what might happen when I’m not here.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Not if the fever spikes.”

  “Then it’s a matter of luck and timing. Are you planning to go somewhere?”

  “Only the usual. But I mean, in an emergency. Or if I can’t get back to the room for some reason.”

  “What kind of emergency?”

  She shrugged. “It’s hypothetical,” she said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but.

  But I didn’t press her about it. There was nothing I could do to improve the situation except cooperate.

  I was beginning the second week of the treatment, approaching the crisis. The Martian drug had accumulated to some critical level in my blood and tissues. Even when the fevers subsided I felt disoriented, confused. The purely physical side effects were no fun either. Joint pain. Jaundice. Rash, if by “rash” you mean the sensation of having your skin slough off, layer by layer, exposing flesh almost as raw as an open wound. Some nights I slept for four or five hours—five was my record, I think—and woke in a slurry of dander, which Diane would clean from the blood-pocked bed while I shifted arthritically to a bedside chair.

  I came to distrust even my most lucid moments. Just as often what I felt was a purely hallucinatory clarity, the world overbright and hyperdefined, words and memory cogged like gears in a runaway engine.

  Bad for me. Maybe worse for Diane, who had to do bedpan duty during the times I was incontinent. In a way she was returning a favor. I had been with her when she endured this phase of the struggle herself. But that had been many years ago.

  Most nights she slept beside me, though I don’t know how she stood it. She kept a careful distance between us—at times just the pressure of the cotton sheet was painful enough to make me weep—but the almost subliminal sense of her presence was soothing.

  On the really bad nights, when in my thrashing I might have thrown out an arm and hurt her, she curled up on the flower-print settee by the balcony doors.

  She didn’t say much about her trips into Padang. I knew approximately what she was doing there: making connections with pursers and cargo masters, pricing out options for a transit of the Arch. Dangerous work. If anything made me feel worse than the effects of the drug it was watching Diane walk out the door into a potentially violent Asian demimonde with no more protection than a pocket-sized can of Mace and her own considerable courage.

  But even that intolerable risk was better than getting caught.

  They—and by “they” I mean agents of the Chaykin administration or their allies in Jakarta—were interested in us for a number of reasons. Because of the drug, of course, and more important the several digital copies of the Martian archives we were carrying. And they would have loved to interrogate us about Jason’s last hours: the monologue I had witnessed and recorded, everything he had told me about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin, knowledge only Jason had possessed.

  I slept and woke, and she was gone.

  I spent an hour watching the balcony curtains move, watching sunlight angle up the visible leg of the Arch, daydreaming about the Seychelles.

  Ever been to t
he Seychelles? Me neither. What was running in my head was an old PBS documentary I had once seen. The Seychelles are tropical islands, home to tortoises and coco de mer and a dozen varieties of rare birds. Geologically, they’re all that remains of an ancient continent that once linked Asia and South America, long before the evolution of modern humans.

  Dreams, Diane once said, are metaphors gone feral. The reason I dreamed about the Seychelles (I imagined her telling me) was because I felt submerged, ancient, almost extinct.

  Like a drowning continent, awash in the prospect of my own transformation.

  I slept again. Woke, and she still wasn’t there.

  Woke in the dark, still alone and knowing that by now too much time had passed. Bad sign. In the past, Diane had always come back by nightfall.

  I’d been thrashing in my sleep. The cotton sheet lay puddled on the floor, barely visible in the light reflected by the plaster ceiling from the street outside. I was chilly but too sore to reach over and retrieve it.

  The sky outside was exquisitely clear. If I gritted my teeth and inclined my head to the left I could see a few bright stars through the glass balcony doors. I entertained myself with the idea that in absolute terms some of those stars might be younger than I was.

  I tried not to think about Diane and where she might be and what might be happening to her.

  And eventually I fell asleep with the starlight burning through my eyelids, phosphorescent ghosts floating in the reddish dark.

  Morning.

  At least I thought it was morning. There was daylight beyond the window now. Someone, most likely the maid, knocked twice and said something testy in Malay from the hall. And went away again.

  Now I was genuinely worried, though in this particular phase of the treatment the anxiety came through as a muddled peevishness. What had possessed Diane to stay away so intolerably long, and why wasn’t she here to hold my hand and sponge my forehead? The idea that she might have come to harm was unwelcome, unproven, inadmissible before the court.

  Still, the plastic bottle of water by the bed had been empty since at least yesterday or longer, my lips were chapped to the point of cracking, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had hobbled to the toilet. If I didn’t want my kidneys to shut down altogether I’d have to fetch water from the bathroom tap.

  But it was hard enough just sitting up without screaming. The act of levering my legs over the side of the mattress was nearly unendurable, as if my bones and cartilage had been replaced with broken glass and rusty razors.

  And although I tried to distract myself by thinking of something else (the Seychelles, the sky), even that feeble anodyne was distorted by the lens of the fever. I imagined I heard Jason’s voice behind me, Jason asking me to get him something—a rag, a chamois; his hands were dirty. I came out of the bathroom with a washcloth instead of a glass of water and was halfway back to bed before I realized my mistake. Stupid. Start again. Take the empty water bottle this time. Fill it all the way up. Fill it to brimming. Follow the drinking gourd.

  Handing him a chamois in the garden shed behind the Big House where the landscapers kept their tools.

  He would have been about twelve years old. Early summer, a couple of years before the Spin.

  Sip water and taste time. Here comes memory again.

  I was surprised when Jason suggested we try to fix the gardener’s gas mower. The gardener at the Big House was an irritable Belgian named De Meyer, who chain-smoked Gauloises and would only shrug sourly when we spoke to him. He had been cursing the mower because it coughed smoke and stalled every few minutes. Why do him a favor? But it was the intellectual challenge that fascinated Jase. He told me he’d been up past midnight researching gasoline engines on the Internet. His curiosity was piqued. He said he wanted to see what one looked like in vivo. The fact that I didn’t know what in vivo meant made the prospect sound doubly interesting. I said I’d be happy to help.

  In fact I did little more than watch while he positioned the mower over a dozen sheets of yesterday’s Washington Post and began his examination. This was inside the musty but private tool shed at the back of the lawn, where the air reeked of oil and gasoline, fertilizer and herbicide. Bags of lawn seed and bark mulch spilled from raw pine shelves among the spavined blades and splintered handles of garden tools. We weren’t supposed to play in the tool shed. Usually it was locked. Jason had taken the key from a rack inside the basement door.

  It was a hot Friday afternoon outside and I didn’t mind being in there watching him work; it was both instructive and oddly soothing. First he inspected the machine, stretching his body along the floor beside it. He patiently ran his fingers over the cowling, locating the screw heads, and when he was satisfied he removed the screws and set them aside, in order, and the housing next to them when he lifted it off.

  And so into the deep workings of the machine. Somehow Jason had taught himself or intuited the use of a ratchet driver and a torque wrench. His moves were sometimes tentative but never uncertain. He worked like an artist or an athlete—nuanced, knowing, conscious of his own limitations. He had disassembled every part he could reach and laid them all out on the grease-blackened pages of the Post like an anatomical illustration when the shed door squealed open and we both jumped.

  E. D. Lawton had come home early.

  “Shit,” I whispered, which won me a hard look from the senior Lawton. He stood in the doorway in an immaculately tailored gray suit, surveying the wreckage, while Jason and I stared at our feet, as instinctively guilty as if we’d been caught with a copy of Penthouse.

  “Are you fixing that or vandalizing it?” he asked finally, his tone conveying the mixture of contempt and disdain that was E. D. Lawton’s verbal signature, a trick he had mastered so long ago it was second nature to him now.

  “Sir,” Jason said meekly. “Fixing it.”

  “I see. Is it your lawn mower?”

  “No, of course not, but I thought Mr. De Meyer might like it if I—”

  “But it’s not Mr. De Meyer’s lawn mower, either, is it? Mr. De Meyer doesn’t own his own tools. He’d be collecting welfare if I didn’t hire him every summer. It happens to be my lawn mower.” E.D. let the silence expand until it was almost painful. Then he said, “Have you found the problem?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet? Then you’d better get on with it.”

  Jason looked almost supernaturally relieved. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I thought after dinner I’d—”

  “No. Not after dinner. You took it apart, you fix it and put it back together. Then you can eat.” E.D. turned his unwelcome attention my way. “Go home, Tyler. I don’t want to find you in here again. You ought to know better.”

  I scurried out into the afternoon glare, blinking.

  He didn’t catch me in the shed again, but only because I was careful to avoid him. I was back later that night—after ten, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw light still leaking from the crevice under the shed door. I took a leftover chicken leg from the refrigerator, wrapped it in tinfoil, and hustled over under cover of darkness. Whispered to Jase, who doused the light long enough for me slip inside unseen.

  He was covered in Maori tattoos of grease and oil, and the mower engine was still only halfway reassembled. After he’d wolfed down a few bites of chicken I asked him what was taking so long.

  “I could put it back together in fifteen minutes,” he said. “But it wouldn’t work. The hard part is figuring out exactly what’s wrong. Plus I keep making it worse. If I try to clean the fuel line I get air inside it. Or the rubber cracks. Nothing’s in very good shape. There’s a hairline fracture in the carburetor housing, but I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t have spare parts. Or the right tools. I’m not even sure what the right tools are.” His face wrinkled, and for a moment I thought he might cry.

  “So give up,” I said. “Go tell E.D. you’re sorry and let him take it out of your allowance or whatever.”

  He stared at me as
if I had said something noble but ridiculously naive. “No, Tyler. Thanks, but I won’t be doing that.”

  “Why not?”

  But he didn’t answer. Just set aside the chicken leg and returned to the scattered pieces of his folly.

  I was about to leave when there was another ultraquiet knock at the door. Jason gestured at me to douse the light. He cracked the door and let his sister in.

  She was obviously terrified E.D. would find her here. She wouldn’t speak above a whisper. But, like me, she’d brought Jase something. Not a chicken leg. A wireless Internet browser the size of her palm.

  Jason’s face lit up when he saw it. “Diane!” he said.

  She shushed him and gave me a nervous sideways smile. “It’s just a gadget,” she whispered, and nodded at us both before she slipped out again.

  “She knows better,” Jason said after she left. “The gadget’s trivial. It’s the network that’s useful. Not the gadget but the network.”

  Within the hour he was consulting a group of West Coast gearheads who modified small engines for remote-control robotics competitions. By midnight he had rigged temporary repairs for the mower’s dozen infirmities. I left, snuck home, and watched from my bedroom window when he summoned his father.E.D. traipsed out of the Big House in pajamas and an open flannel shirt and stood with his arms crossed while Jason powered up the mower, the sound of it incongruous in the early-morning dark. E.D. listened a few moments, then shrugged and beckoned Jason back in the house.

  Jase, hovering at the door, saw my light across the lawn and gave me a little covert wave of his hand.

  Of course, the repairs were temporary. The Gauloises-smoking gardener showed up the following Wednesday and had trimmed about half the lawn when the mower seized and died for good and all. Listening from the shade of the treeline we learned at least a dozen useful Flemish curses. Jason, whose memory was very nearly eidetic, took a shine to Godverdomme mijn kloten miljardedju!—literally, “God damn my balls a million times Jesus!” according to what Jason pieced together from the Dutch/English dictionary in the Rice school library. For the next few months he used the expression whenever he broke a shoelace or crashed a computer.