Head Full of Mountains (7 page)

Crospinal encountered no dogs, no spirits along the way. Not even in the gangplanks, where apparitions tended to congregate: they’d flicker there, around the tungsten lights. The pen was entirely silent and deserted. The atmosphere seemed grey, thick. The sound of his soles on the tiles was muted. A very faint hiss, and a shudder, from the engines.

Chilling fluids that had embalmed him still coursed inside his body; he suspected the sensation might linger forever, as if his blood had been swapped, or at least tagged with a new component.

How could there be no dogs the entire way back? He stepped into the throne room, where he had been born, where he had lain awake in his daybed, staring up, unable to sleep because of the pain, where father was tethered and where haptics played, and he knew everything had changed, not just the composition of his blood, or the composition of the cabinets, or his girlfriend’s fading love.

Dropping to his knees—for they had given out, at last—bursting when they hit the prayer mat, Crospinal did not cry out. No words or exclamations came. No tears, either, no howl. He wiped his face with the back of a chilly hand and looked again:

Against the cold, matte luminescence of the gate, and the array of banks behind father’s corpse, Crospinal saw his own reflection, a rather surprised expression on his face, gaunt, and awful-looking. His shorn hair, his filthy uniform, tattered and plastered to his body, dark with moisture the exhausted capillaries could not handle.

Father’s body lay cooling among draining tubes and conduits. He must have tried to rise, one last time, but collapsed off his throne.

Nutrient pumps were stopped; the gate was still.

Crospinal eventually leaned in, at a loss, then moved his face forward, to kiss the grey forehead, but a tangled morass of tethers prevented him from getting close enough.

Liquid spilled onto the tiles between father’s thin legs, and if the processor of a uniform died with the wearer, then the liquid was most likely urine, spilling from the reservoir.

There was actually a sense of relief. Crospinal was mortified to feel it. He looked down at the meat and bones, all wrapped up nicely in a Kevlar and nylon sac. Life, and the suffering it brought, was over. Inconceivable that this mass of failed flesh had once moved, educated, tried to nurture.

Crospinal nudged the body with the toe of his boot.

Dead meat.

All that remained was dead meat.

This was nowhere near the despair that had first torn into Crospinal when father made him kneel, to tell him of the illness, and of its sentence. The cruel joke that was mortality.

Life,
father said, confessing,
is always waning. From birth. For every breath, creeping closer to endtime, to nothing. A parabola. Rise and fall. Such is the definition of being alive.

Crospinal never understood or accepted why the finality of death would be a part of the arrangement. The loss of awareness, of experience, the cessation, was a cataclysm. An abhorrence. How could anyone be expected to understand such futility?

Father’s open mouth, black blood on his tongue. Eyes open, too, glazed, like stray ephemera.

No dogs barked in the halls. No thrum of fluids through conduits. Apparitions, which had accompanied Crospinal throughout his life, the dozens of projections, the lanky spirits, and the elusive wisps, all extinguished.

Some time later, maybe an hour, maybe more, tinkering within the banks of father’s gate, searching the plates and stilled screens for some clue how to continue, a reason to keep going, he thought again about throwing himself over a railing. Just like he had thrown that poor, treacherous animal. But suicide, even now, seemed too
dramatic
. He would wait until tomorrow, or the day after that—

A resounding claxon, from the hall outside, caused the pen to tremble, as if struck. Crospinal clapped his mitts over his ears.

Though his legs were still sore—always sore—he pushed himself up with his knuckles and stood. Was the pen coming apart already?

Heading through the exit in his stiff-legged, awkward gait, alarms shattered Crospinal. Every controller in the world had gone mad. They zipped down the hall in both directions, shrieking. A dispenser ran by and, as red lights flashed, blinding, from harmer’s corner all the way to the opal room and back again, fell flat and did not get up. Sounds vibrated in Crospinal’s bones and skull and he could not conceive what was happening. A growing wind tore at his uniform. He fought to stay on his feet, but when the air was finally sucked away in a great rush, it took Crospinal with it.

Living proof of the deficiencies of the body, the final consequence of existence, coda to years of pointlessness and deterioration, was fully revealed shortly after he turned eight. This was the cusp of
the year of thought
. Father, particularly maudlin that morning, stood, arms at his sides, face downcast. Ozone hints in the air: the gate was heating up, haptics brewing, steeped influx pumping free. Crospinal waited on the prayer mat with his own limbs throbbing and his smile fading.

The year of action, coming to a close, had contained little action. Failure hung in the pen, confirmed by father’s drawn expression, rising slowly, to make eye contact. “I have something to show you.”

Sitting in his daybed, Crospinal had felt a rare tinge of excitement.
A new year.

But hopes for a spectacular or even a lame party faded pretty quickly.

He looked at his swollen knees, his crooked knees, straining the fabric. He had not changed out of his uniform since the wheelroom.

Who knew what the year of thought would bring?

In silence, Crospinal and father shared stale yellow torte-flavoured pellets and had cups of lemonade, dispensed drip by drip from the spigot, with settings on
festiv
e
.

Apparitions were elsewhere, out haunting halls. Maybe they were trapped in father’s head. The yelp of anxious dogs, beyond the pen, swelled and faded. There were tiny threads whipping from above father’s eyes, each one directing a ghost.

The lesson, post-celebration—such as it was—and post-prayer, concerned math skills. Crospinal recalled vaguely threatening shapes of triangles and the smoother, organic forms of the ellipse. He stood among them as they whispered about axis and vertices. Then, abruptly, he found himself immersed in a different haptic, which blossomed, supplanting the tutorial: startled, he tried to step back—

A shape, a beast, hovered before him, as large as himself. Black, with thin, scaly legs; flattened, feathered arms; a half-opened beak. His perspective moved around it. Hyper-detailed, bigger than life, this was no hazy projection of a device, no scripted character, but a
creature
, like himself, captured by eyes of the world, reconstituted here, with photons from the gate.

Inert
. Flesh compromised, seething, he saw now, with tiny pinworms. He watched the flesh come apart, feathers fall. Dark eyes, nearly closed, shrivelled. There was no life.

Carried through the projection (he could not see father, beyond the illusions), Crospinal, barely audible, said,
“What is this?”

“A bird. A crow.”

“I know that,” he snapped. “That’s not what I meant.”

“You’ve seen them, in the garden, flying up by the ceiling. There are several, come to live with us. They came for you. This is what a crow looks like, up close. But the heart has stopped beating, Crospie.”

“I know what a crow is,” he said. “But what does the rest mean?” He had peed a bit into the bladder, and the processor was whirring. He picked at his nostril, which was clogged again.

“Once that crow flew, and looked down upon us. I need to show this to you, Crospie. I have to. I’ve not the courage to come clean. You’re a civilized boy. You’ve been raised above the darkness of ignorance. You’re my future. . . . But you need to know that no heart can beat forever. Even passed down, from one to the other. Our bodies will fail.”

The haptic of the crow flickered. Behind swinging cables, father’s eyes shone. Crospinal stared. “What is all this?”

“I’m sorry,” father said. “After life comes endtime. Nothing.”

Of course the concept of extinction had been a malignant nugget at Crospinal’s core, since birth, no doubt. But now the last piece had fallen. To see this broken body, this decay, and know its import, he felt himself growing heavier, falling.

“The body took months to decompose,” father mumbled. “Decay is slow here, but inevitable, and just as efficient.”

Seeking adequate words when there were none and never could be, Crospinal said, “Will you end,
like this?” He indicated the reconstruction as the bones grew exposed, worms visible inside, churning. “Will you collapse, decompose? Like this? Will your heart stop?”

Beyond the haptic, father also looked at the corpse. They saw, perhaps, different visions, neither good. The future, like the past, meant nothing. That was the lesson. Brief moments of false progress, awareness, seeking understanding, but ultimately rare worms ate your flesh. And then nothing.
Endtime.

Father must have nodded reluctant acknowledgement, for tubes rustled.

“What about me?” Crospinal’s voice cracked. “Will I expire, too? Will my heart stop?”

Another nod. “Though not for many years. And there are means of prolonging a life. You’re too young to worry about cessation and endtime. There’s plenty to learn, carry knowledge, and pass it on. You’re young, Crospie. You need to know. We live to pass the light from ourselves to others.”

The haptic vanished.

“Others? What others?” Yet Crospinal was numbed by implications imposed on the already arduous state of being alive. There was no possibility to ever return to his previous condition, where he had remained oblivious from the truth. Feeling hunched and bent, he hated father for giving him life, and he hated himself for feeling this way. Never again would he cling to the precarious idea that everything needed to continue living, the way he had been living, would be provided forever. He would one day die an older version of the same crippled boy he was today. Ideals, on the very first morning of the year of thought, were for deluded fools. A caul had been yanked away, leaving a very different child standing there, exposed, at eight years old.

Crospinal woke with the usual aches in the bones of both knees, and in his wrists now, which had also started to hurt. Through the thin material of his mitts, he could see that the white scars, revealed under the cuff of his sleeves, were inflamed. His rickets got worse each day. Ambulation was increasingly difficult. He fumbled with grasped objects, joints popping when he moved. Climbing anything was a hazard.

He was dying.

They both were. Sooner or later.

“Dad,” he said. “My legs hurt so much.”

Father hid, ashamed, behind his crown.

He wanted father to suffer.

Every so often—after prayer of thanks to the refuge, for forming, and for the food pellets, and the uniforms, for the metallic walls and the structures that had solidified around them, for the halogens—there was an escape, or entertainment haptic (though Crospinal realized, even at a young age, that father came to enjoy these events much more than he did). Over the first years, the escapes were simple, of course, primary shapes and colours, interacting benignly, with no plot, drifting among soft edges and ambient, soothing sounds. They would both ingest a few pellets, brewed special. Crospinal would lie on his stomach and sometimes even doze as he was taken into the story’s realm. Father came along, too, and Crospinal knew him within as various representations: sometimes a fuzzy glow, or a kindly animal, or more like his true form, a man, but untethered, like he must have once looked, pre-pen. Smiling with teeth whiter than possible, father recited vocabulary lessons and basic rhymes, sang comforting songs, warned about the future, and tried, so hard, to recall evidence of the past.

By the year of cognitive leaps, the tone of the escapes changed. Other characters were introduced, with more complex roles. There was the thin giant who proselytized, rather obviously, about the dangers of microbes, and a ridiculous light screen who always wanted Crospinal to hug its virtual form.

Though encouraged to actively participate, Crospinal felt growing frustrations at the overall unsubtle agendas, and at his lack of ability to steer the haptic’s narratives; he would like to have guided the stories in directions he wanted, toward answers and stimulation he sought, yet the majority of his reactions and questions in the stories only caused the characters to hesitate, or frown, until he relented, and chose a more appropriate response, in a fashion less challenging to father.

After a long bout of sleepless nights (a fairly common event), father once confronted Crospinal—as he stood there, open-mouthed—saying that the clips were prepared with love, and why did Crospinal have to ruin them all the time with his disdain for everything and his bad attitude and his inability to appreciate a wholesome plot. But this particular incident happened before father discovered that one of the solution conduits feeding him from the bank was cracked, letting a trickle of enzymes come into contact with the air of the pen, and thus ferment: father felt not quite himself. When relative equilibrium had regained, apologies were profuse, the cable capped (by Crospinal’s own two hands), but as father often said,
damage was done
.

The outbursts happened several times.

When he was older, Crospinal either took part in the escapes with passivity, surrendering to the incomplete stories or stuttering narratives—telling father afterward that he had enjoyed the entertainment very much, and had learned a lesson, thank you—or skipped the shows altogether, and the preceding prayer times, returning from his perambulations less and less frequently, and for shorter amounts of time, to face father’s consternation, admonishments, and the anxieties inherent in his apparitions.

The only entertainment worthwhile to Crospinal were the ones when father abandoned haptics altogether, drifting off into a state of longing so comforting to Crospinal that, on the prayer mat, somewhat delirious himself, he would cease rubbing his knees and close his eyes in anticipation, awaiting the story, which would spill from father’s own lips, his voice altered, as if he were somehow dreaming, stories that would sweep Crospinal away, offer him a solace that had proven impossible to retain, and which he’d tried to replace, for some time now, by sojourns to the cabinets, and by meeting, and falling in love with, his ethereal girlfriend.

“Picture this,” was how it began. Father, lifting his face, moist-eyed already, looking as if he were being transported from the pen, once again freed of the tethers that bound him, as if he were removed from the deterioration of life that was making itself increasingly evident with each passing day, to both father and son. Crospinal, hoping to be transported also, whispered the words back to his dad in such a way that it had to be catalyst for the visions he hoped to receive.

“I had seen the view, a world of ash, swept under the flame-red star.
Endtime
. I came awake, in a blue uniform, and I ran. Winds circled, tearing ash from its place, spinning into parched vortexes. I looked out a porthole. The ship had changed. I was being hunted. I could feel them, whoever they were, hunting me. This was not where I was meant to be. An event had occurred, while I slept, changing me, changing all of us, changing everything. I was looking outside, at a dead world. Sometimes I think I was born, staring out that porthole, my mind coalescing, without past or history. Yet at other times I recall the other world, a lush world
, my home
. With a blue sky, and cold sea, and a line of craggy mountains.”