There’s something under the bed. Black.
She freezes.
She goes down on her knees, peering.
Touches it. Her carry-on. She slides it out. Unzipped, her clothing wadded, bulging out. She runs her hands through them, touch telling her she finds jeans, sweater, the cold slick nylon shell of the Rickson’s. But the Stasi envelope isn’t there, and neither is the Luggage Label bag. No phone, no iBook, no wallet, no passport.
Her Parco boots have been squashed flat and jammed into one of the outer pockets.
She stands and finds the tie, at the back of her neck, that frees her from the bare-ass flannel clown gown. Stands naked in greenish fluorescent twilight, then bends and starts feeling for her clothes. She can’t find socks, but underpants, jeans, a black T-shirt will have to do. She sits on the edge of the hospital bed to tie the Parco boots.
And then it occurs to her that of course the door will be locked. It has to be.
It isn’t. The institutional thumb-push depresses smoothly. She feels the door shift slightly on its hinges. Opens it.
Corridor, yes; hospital, no. High school?
A wall of faded turquoise lockers with small, three-digit number plates. Strip lighting. Synthetic floor the color of cork.
Looks left: The corridor terminates in brown fire doors. Looks right: glass doors with push bars, sunlight.
Easy choice.
Torn between the desire to run and the desire to pass, if possible, for someone with a reason to be here, wherever and whatever here is, she tries to open the door and step out normally.
The sun blinds her. Non-Moscow air, smelling of summer vegetation. Shading her eyes with her wrist, she walks forward, toward a statue lost in dazzle. Lenin, aerodynamic to the point of featurelessness, molded in white concrete, pointing the proletariat forward like some kind of giant Marxist lawn jockey.
She turns and looks back. She seems to have just walked out of an ugly sixties orange brick community college, topped with a crenellated structure of concrete resembling the crown the Statue of Liberty wears, windows between each upthrust peak.
But she’s not sticking around to see any more of it. She sees a dry grassy incline, a beaten, unofficial path, and follows that, into a shallow ravine or gully, drainage of some kind, and out of the building’s line of sight.
The crushed yellow grass of the path is dotted with flattened cigarette filters, bottle caps, bits of foil.
She keeps going, until she finds herself in a dusty grotto of bushes, a natural hiding place and evidently a popular one. Bottle and cans, crumpled papers, a desiccated condom slung from a twig like part of the life cycle of some large insect. A bower of love, then, as well.
She crouches, getting her breath, listening for indications of pursuit.
She hears the ordinary sound of a jet, somewhere overhead.
The path leads out the far side and loses itself in a tumble of glacier-rounded rocks, a seasonal streambed. She follows these through thicker, greener vegetation, to where the path appears again, climbing the side of the ravine.
At its top, she sees the fence.
Newer than the building, concrete white and unweathered at the foot of each galvanized pole. Ordinary chain-link, topped with wire. Though the wire, she sees, walking slowly up to it, is barbed, not razor, and two strands only.
She looks back and sees the very tips of the crenellations atop the red brick building.
She extends her finger. Takes a breath. Taps the chain-link as lightly, as quickly as she can. No shock, though she supposes Klaxons may have just been set off, high on the walls of barracks full of bored and waiting men, heavily armed.
She looks at the chain-link and at the toes of her Parco boots. Not a good match. Summers in Tennessee had taught her that nothing climbed chain-link better than cowboy boots. You just stuck the toes straight in and walked right up. The Parco boots have toes that aren’t narrow enough, and only lightly cleated soles.
She sits in the dust, unties, tightens, and reties them, takes off the Rickson’s and knots its sleeves as tightly around her waist as she can.
Stands, looking up.
Sun at the zenith. She hears an electric bell. Lunch?
She hooks her fingers in the chain-link and goes up, leaning back and using her body weight to help keep the soles of her boots flat against the fence. It’s the hard way, but the only way in these shoes. It hurts, but then the fingers of both hands are around the two-inch crosspiece at the top, inches below the lower strand of barbed wire.
She lets go carefully, with her left hand, reaches down, unties the jacket sleeves, and whips the Rickson’s up and over, draping it across the upper strand of wire.
She almost loses it, maneuvering to get one leg up and over, but then she has it, straddling the Rickson’s, already feeling the tooth of one barb finding its way through layers of lovingly crafted otaku nylon and mil-spec interlining.
Getting the other leg over to this side, the outside, is harder. She makes it an exercise. Smoothness, please. Grace. There is no hurry. (There is, because her wrists are trembling.) Then she has to unhook the Rickson’s. She could leave it there but she won’t. She tells herself she won’t because they’d see where she went over, but really she just won’t.
She hears it rip, her feet slip on the chain-link, and she lands on her ass in the dust, the Rickson’s in her right hand.
She gets up stiffly, looks at the jacket’s shredded back, and puts it on.
SHE stops when the sun tells her she’s probably three hours out from the fence.
There’s been steadily less vegetation, just more of this dry, reddish soil, no sign of a road, and no water. Her supplies consist of a very nice, hand-turned toothpick from the hotel in Tokyo, and a cellophane-wrapped mint she guesses is from London.
She’s starting to wonder whether this might not be Siberia, and to wish she knew more about Siberia, to allow for a more educated guess. The trouble is, it looks more like her idea of the Australian outback, but more barren. She hasn’t seen a bird, or bug, or anything at all, aside from crossing a curve of faint tire tracks about an hour back, which she now thinks she probably should have followed.
She sits down in the dust, sucks on her toothpick, and tries not to think about her feet, which hurt like hell.
She’s got blisters in there she’s trying not to think about, and certainly doesn’t want to look at. She decides she’ll try tearing up whatever’s inside the Rickson’s, to wrap her feet with.
She becomes aware of the sound of a jet, like part of the landscape, and wonders what she might think of it if she didn’t know what it was. Were there still people in the world who wouldn’t recognize that sound for what it is? She doesn’t know.
Wincing, she gets to her feet and starts walking, sucking on the toothpick. It makes her mouth less dry.
SUNSET seems to take a very long time, here. Fantastic shades of red.
When she realizes she won’t be able to keep walking in the dark, she gives up and sits down.
“Well fucked,” she says, an expression of Damien’s that seems to cover things.
She gets out her mint, unwraps it, and puts it in her mouth.
It’s starting to get cold. She unties the sleeves of the Rickson’s, puts it on, and zips it up. She can feel the chill on her back, still, because it’s in tatters now, where she tore out strips of the interlining to use to bind her feet. They’d helped, a little, but she doubts she’s going to be able to do much more walking, even when the sun comes up.
She’s trying not to suck on the mint, because that’ll make it go faster. Probably she should take it out and save it for later, but she has nowhere to put it. She unzips the cigarette pocket on the jacket’s left sleeve, discovering the card from the curry house, the one Baranov had written Stella’s address on. She looks at his precise brown italics, the color of dried blood, until it’s too dark to read them.
The stars are coming out.
After a while, when her
eyes have adjusted, she realizes she can see two towers of light, off in the distance, in the direction she thinks she’s been walking in. They aren’t like the memorial display from Ground Zero, but like the towers of her dream, in London, only fainter, farther away.
“You aren’t supposed to be in Siberia,” she says to them.
And then she knows he’s there.
“I think I might die here,” she says. “I mean, I think I could.”
You might, he says.
“Will I?”
I wouldn’t know.
“But aren’t you dead?”
Hard to say.
“Was that you in the music, last night?”
Hallucination.
“I thought it was Mom’s EVP, finally.”
No comment.
She smiles. “That dream, in London?”
No comment.
“I love you.”
I know you do. I have to go.
“Why?”
Listen.
And he’s gone, and this time, she somehow knows, for good.
And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.
40.
THE DREAM ACADEMY
The helicopter passes directly overhead, but the searchlight goes swooping far off, to the side, away from her. Close enough that she can see details of its oblong yellow undercarriage illuminated by a red running light.
Then the searchlight winks off, and she watches the red light dwindle.
The towers are gone.
She hears the helicopter, coming back.
It hovers, about fifty yards away, and the beam snaps out again, through the prop-blown dust, to find her.
She shields her eyes. Between her fingers she watches it settle to the ground, a clumsy-looking thing, its fuselage nearly rectangular. A figure jumps down from the door in its side and walks toward her, throwing a vast unsteady shadow into the light and dust.
She hears the rotors beginning to slow, thrumming down, counting their way to stasis.
He walks up to her out of the glare and stops, about six feet away, his back to the glare.
“Cayce Pollard?”
“Who are you?”
“Parkaboy.”
This doesn’t seem to want to process at all. Finally she asks, “Who started the thread that gave Completism its first formal basis?”
“Maurice.”
“In response to what?”
“A post by Dave-in-Arizona, theoretical limits to live action.”
“Parkaboy? Is that you?”
He walks around to where it’s his turn to face into the light, and she sees a man with reddish, receding hair, combed straight back. He wears OD surplus combat trousers, a heavy black shirt open over a white T-shirt, and a large pair of binoculars slung across his chest. These have huge, goggle-like eyepieces, but taper to a single tube the size and shape of a flashlight.
He reaches into a shirt pocket and pulls out a card. Stepping forward, he offers it to her. She takes it and squints, through the dust in her eyes and the hard white light, at
PETER GILBERT
MIDDLE-AGED WHITE GUY
“SINCE 1967”
She looks up at him.
“Music business,” he says. “In Chicago, if you’re a certain type of musician, you need one.”
“One what?”
“M-A-W-G. Mawg.” He hunkers down, two yards away, careful to give her space. “Can you walk? There’s a medic in the copter.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I thought you might have changed your mind.”
“About what?”
“You just broke out of the only prison in Russia that people actively try to break into.”
“They do?”
“The Dream Academy, they call it. That’s where one particular batch of Volkov’s people took you, after Mama fed you too much roofie.”
“What—?”
“Rohypnol. Date-rape stuff. Could’ve killed you, but that’s our Mama. You had a paradoxical reaction, though. Supposed to make you anybody’s kitten, but it looked like you’d gone medieval on her.”
“Did I? Were you there?”
“No. I was just checking in when the ambulance and the police arrived. You know that scene in old movies, when the cowboy’s dying of thirst in the desert, and the cavalry arrives, and they say, ‘Drink this, but not too much’?”
She stares at him.
He unclips a plastic canteen from his belt and passes it to her.
She takes a mouthful, swishes it around, spits it out, then drinks.
“Mama was still trying to lobby for control of the situation, looked to me,” he says, “but with a bloody nose and one eye swollen shut, it was hard for her to be convincing.”
“You knew it was her?”
“No. Wouldn’t have known it was you, either, if I hadn’t heard ‘Pollard,’ or something like it, about five times. Actually I’d seen a couple of pictures, on Google, but you weren’t exactly looking your best, on that gurney there. Seemed to me that the lady with the nosebleed, though, she was pushing so hard that she was on the verge of getting arrested. I think she was arguing they should just take you up to your room and she’d stay with you. Then three guys in black leather coats showed up, and everyone but Mama went instantly deferential. You just sort of evaporated, with your little gurney, no more muss, and Mama went with the coats, looking none too happy about it. Me, I was feeling left out. I checked my e-mail. One from you, with Stella’s address. I e-mailed her. Told her I was your friend, and what I’d just seen. Thirty minutes later I was in a BMW with a blue flasher and a fresh set of black coats, running reds and doing downtown Moscow in the wrong lane. Next thing I knew, I was up in one of the Seven Sisters, with Volkov—”
“Sisters?”
“Little old Commie Gothic skyscrapers with wedding-cake frills. Very high-end real estate. Your Mr. Bigend—”
“Bigend?”
“And Stella. Plus a bunch of Volkovites and this Chinese hacker from Oklahoma—”
“Boone?”
“The guy who’s been hacking your hotmail for Bigend.”
She remembers the room in Hongo, Boone cabling his laptop to hers.
“Excuse me,” he said, then, “but that dust you’ve been rolling in has way too much titanium in it. You’ve probably already exceeded your MDR on that stuff. Why don’t you let me get the medic over here to help get you to the helicopter?” He takes the canteen, drinks, caps it, puts it back on his belt.
“Titanium?”
“Soviet eco-disaster. Not as big as drying up the Aral Sea, but you’ve been hiking down the middle of a forty-mile strip of catastrophic industrial pollution, about two miles wide. I think you want to have a very in-depth shower.”
“Where are we?”
“About eight hundred miles north of Moscow.”
“What day?”
“Friday night. You went under Wednesday, and you were out until whenever you woke up today. I think they probably sedated you.”
She tries to get to her feet, but suddenly he’s there, hands on her shoulders. “Don’t. Stay put.” The weird one-eyed binoculars are dangling a few inches from her face. He straightens up, turning into the glare. He waves to the helicopter. “If they hadn’t had these night-vision glasses,” he says, over his shoulder, “we might not have found you.”
“WHAT do you know about the Russian prison system?” he asks her. They’re both wearing big greasy beige plastic headsets with microphones and green curly cords. The ear cups have enough soundproofing to muffle the roar of the engine, but he sounds like he’s down a fairly deep well.
“That it’s not fun?”
“HIV and tuberculosis are endemic. It gets worse from there. Where we’re going is
basically a privatized prison.”
“Privatized?”
“A bold New Russian entrepreneurial experiment. Their version of CCA, Cornell Corrections, Wackenhut. Regular prison system is a nightmare, real and present danger to the public health. If they wanted to set up an operation to breed new strains of drug-resistant TB, they probably couldn’t do a better job than their prisons are already doing. Some people think AIDS, in this country, in a few more years, will look like the Black Death, and the prisons aren’t helping that either. So when one of Volkov’s corporations decides to set up a test operation, where healthy, motivated prisoners can lead healthy, motivated lives, plus receive training and career direction, who’s going to stand in the way?”
“That’s where the footage is rendered?”
“And what motivates these model prisoners? Self-interest. They’re healthy to begin with, otherwise they wouldn’t have been chosen for this. If they stay in the regular system, they aren’t going to be. That’s one. Two is that when they get here, they see it isn’t a bad deal at all. It’s coed, and the food is a lot better than what a lot of people in this country make do with. Three is that they get paid for their labor. Not a fortune, but they can bank it, or send it home to their families. There’s thirty channels on satellite and a video library, and they can order books and CDs. No Net access, though. No web browsing. No phones. That’s an instant ticket back to TB Land. And there’s only one choice, though, in occupational training.”
“They render the footage?”
“All of it.” He offers her the canteen. “How are your feet?”
She waves it away. “Okay unless I move them.”
“We’re almost there,” he says, pointing forward, through the plastic nose. “Final motivating factor that keeps the campers here: Volkov. Probably the name’s never mentioned, but if you were an inmate, and Russian, which of course they all are, I think you’d get the drift.”