Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (60 page)

“And now this woman,” Ptolema says, pushing aside the first photo to reveal a second. The woman in this one is as striking as the first was plain. She’s sitting on a park bench reading a paperback. Her white hair is cut in a bob. “I snapped this on St. Stephen’s Green yesterday.”

“The twins,” says black braids and chews at a thumbnail. “The albinos. One of them. Think that’s the one calls herself Ivoire. That’s her mac, yeah? Always wears that thing, if it’s rainin’ or not. Yeah, that’s Ivy.”

“Ivy?”

“Yeah, Ivoire,” says the redhead.

“But Ivoire – Ivy – and the Twisby woman, you’ve never seen the two of them together, have you?”

“No,” replies the redhead. “That’s not the way it works.”

Ptolema sets aside the second photo, and there’s one below it that could be the same person. Same face. Same cornsilk hair and haircut, same pale complexion, same startling blue eyes. She’s sitting beneath a tree, also reading a paperback. They are, in fact, both reading the same book, which is plain upon close inspection: Kurt Vonnegut’s
Cat’s Cradle.

“No. Yeah. That one’s the other. Bête, I mean,” black braids says around her thumb. “Feckin’ bitch, in on what they’re doin’ to her own sister. Just wrong, by anyone’s standards. Not just her sister, either. But guess you – ”

“ – already know the twins are also lovers?” interrupts Ptolema. “Yes. We know that. And the two of you have spoken with all three of these individuals?”

“That’s why we’re here, innit?” asks black braids.

Ptolema returns the photos to the folder, the folder to the satchel, and she fastens the strap again. She returns the iPod to her pocket.

“That all?” asks the redhead.

“No,” Ptolema says. “That’s us just getting started. But it’s enough for this morning. We’ll talk again tomorrow night. I trust you two know Beshoff’s, on O’Connell.”

The redhead nods. “We know it.”

“Eight o’clock. And at least
consider
being on time, will you?”

The redhead moves the unlit cigarette between her fingers the way a magician might a coin. But then, she is a magician, isn’t she? “My associate and I will take it under consideration, guv’ner.” She’s trying to sound cocky, but she’s rattled. That’s good.

Ptolema pays them both, even if it’s only a formality and she doubts either of them needs the money. Then again, if they aren’t lying and they’ve actually severed ties with Julia Set, they could be poor as fucking church mice.

“Eight. Beshoff’s. Don’t you keep me waiting again.”

They slide out of the booth, one after the other. Before the pair turn to leave, the redhead grins and says, “Like you have a choice.”

When they’ve gone, Ptolema considers getting another cup of coffee, maybe even something to eat. Instead, she keeps her seat and lets her eyes trace the angles and drink in the backlit colors of the stained-glass windows until her phone rings.

2.

Anybody Could Write a True Story

(9/28/2012)

It’s dawn, unless it’s sunset. I’m sitting on the mattress, and Sixty Six is sitting on the other side of the room listening to me. It isn’t true to say that she never speaks, but it’s true to say that she very rarely ever speaks. I talk enough for the both of us, and if it bothers her she has never said so. Watching the sun rise, or set, I’ve been talking, this time, about expectation effects, straying into the Gettier problem, propositional knowledge, epistomology, observer-expectancy and subject-expectancy effects. I will not say that she is enduring my rambling patiently, or politely, because Sixty Six is not blessed with an overabundance of either of these qualities. I am the nattering; she the hush-hush. Yeah, and then, without warning, she reaches for the rifle on the floor, rises to her knees, rests the gun on the attic windowsill, and fires five shots –
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang
– in quick tattoo succession. I don’t have to look to know that she’s dropped one or two or several of the demons that have marched out of the sea.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march…Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Who wrote that? I cannot remember now. The pain, the dope, the way horror can turn to the mundane, to existential shock, it’s all made a sieve of my mind, and now memories slip straight through. You’d never know, Bête, that I was who I was two months ago. You’d never know me, I fear. Sixty Six lingers a moment at the window, then sets her gun aside and goes back to her place on the floor. She’s not unpretty, despite the darkness like bruises that surrounds her oddly golden eyes. Her ebony hair hangs in unkempt dreadlocks, except when she ties it back. Almost always she keeps it tied back, out of her face. (The lead in my pencil breaks, and I have to stop to sharpen it again with my pocket knife.) There are days and nights (though the two are now, here, hardly distinguishable, one from the other) when I fancy her my shaded, sooty twin. But don’t think me unfaithful, Bête. The air in the attic is still jangling from the gunfire, but I ask her if she’d like me to stop nattering; she knows it’s what happens when I get nervous. And I’m almost always nervous, unless I’m on the street or on the beach and those things are coming at us and I don’t have to think about anything but the sword in my hand cutting them down. Then I am calm, and the pain fades away, no matter how long it’s been since my last fix. Sixty Six shrugs. She shrugs a lot, but I do try to talk less. I’m getting on my own nerves. Down on West Main, I hear more shots, other soldiers sent here to do no good whatsoever, unless we are actually holding the line and the demons haven’t made it off Deer Isle to the mainland. But, how is that even possible? We can barricade the bridge and shut down the fishermen and ferries, and the CDC and DOD and X and Y and the Sons and Daughters of Machiavelli can all do their very best, even the endlessly circling patrol boats we have been told patrol Eggemoggin Reach and the rest of the bay. We can do all that, but we can’t see what’s going on
below
the sea, now can we? Below the
surface
of the sea. So, I think there are the usual lies, though I try to pretend otherwise. I’m here to do the job I’m here to do, to flap my wings and set distant hurricanes in motion. That’s what I’m here to do, to mind
sensitive dependence on initial conditions,
the voyeur of utter destruction as beauty, marking micro-changes in deterministic non-linear, non-random systems. No, no. Not marking them. Setting them in motion. Whatever it was out there Sixty Six just put down, well, the death or deaths sent ripples, as did the bullets, and her every move during the act, and the weight of the gun on the sill, and my interrupted words and thoughts. And a million other variables that will have so many repercussions to echo down history to come. History of the future, that’s what we are making. Maybe the rest are fighting the scourge, but not us. We only
seem
to be soldiers against these interlopers; we are actually instigators, toppling dominoes, setting in motion. “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” 1963,
Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences,
20 (2): 130–141, Dr. Edward Norton Lorenz (also author of the concept of strange attractors, near and dear), an MIT alumnus just like Father. I have written equations on the attic wall, for old time’s sake and more for comfort. I’ve stopped trying to explain them to Sixty Six, because I’m pretty sure it bores her almost enough to turn that rifle on me. There’s no theory in
her
chaos. She doesn’t need theory when she’s so adept at the practice. The magic I do not believe in swirls around her, before my very eyes, but I’m not ever again going to believe what I see, and I know that. I sometimes wonder if behind her dirty face and smudgy eyes Sixty Six harbors an intelligence to put us both to shame, dearest Bête. If she has any other name – and she must – she’s never going to let it slip. A time or two, she’s whispered this or that about her past, and, by the way, she can’t be more than, I don’t know, twenty. Twenty-two. Her mother sent her away to…a hospital? I’m not sure, but it shows. I check my wristwatch, which tells me that
is
sunset out there. Well, if watches even work in this event horizon that was once an island off the coast of Maine, notable only for its granite quarries, the Haystack craft school, lobsters, the one-time home of Buckminster Fuller. In
Travels with Charley,
Steinbeck wrote, “One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle.” So, how long
has
this place been wrong, and was it always set to be the epicenter for this plague? Was it always damned? Have we – all the shadow people – been sitting back for centuries or millennia waiting for this to begin? Or did a butterfly only recently flap its wings? Sixty Six is staring at the window and eating from a bag of stale Funyuns. We eat what we can find in what is left of the grocery stores and convenience stores and restaurants. That’s not much, but the heroin has mostly killed my appetite, and Sixty Six, she doesn’t seem to mind the slim bill of fare this ruin offers. I believe she could live off candy bars and Skittles. A wonder she has any teeth left. She looks away from the window and says to me, “We should go soon.” By which she means, I understand, that if we wait much longer I might miss the drop, my week’s supply of dope to keep the agony at arm’s length. The pain they gave me so I’ll be a good marionette, as if taking you away from me weren’t enough. I think it’s cancer, but there’s no way to know. Not like I can get to a doctor. There were a couple here in Stonington, but they died shortly after the first wave rose up and slithered across the sand and docks and over the seawalls. I got only Vicodin and Percoset at first, then oxycodone, then the heroin. The stations of my walk to addiction to make of me a junkie. Anything to dull the pain. The needle and the blade, because I haven’t mentioned (or have I?) that the pain fades completely away – I mean
entirely
– whenever the killing starts. Numbness is my reward for being a good tin soldier, a dutiful agent with initiative, who only rarely receives direct orders, who acts on her own recognizance. And, Bête, here’s the rub, I am becoming precisely that, and I mean without worrying about your safety, without the carrot-on-a-stick, without any coercion. I am beginning to feel as though I was almost meant to come here and to be what I have become, these days and this island and Ivoire set on an inevitable intersecting path from the birth of the universe, Planck Time, zero to ~10
⁻⁴³
seconds, and there was never any doubt that this is how it would go. Sixty Six is up, pulling that pink filthy hoodie over her head, reaching for her coat. She tosses me my coat, too. And my pack. So, sorry Bête, that’s all now.
What rough beast slouches
time. Time to fight the thunder and the lightning and the obscuring mists that roll in from the wicked, wicked sea.

3.

A Wolf at the Door/It Girl. Rag Doll

(5/7/2112)

The village barge moves listlessly south, and Johnson has spent the past fifteen minutes gazing out a starboard porthole, towards the vast salt marshes cradling the ruins of Old Boston. His grandfather was a meteorologist who served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, long ago back then, the IPCC’s direst predictions never went so high as seven goddamn meters of new ocean by the turn of the century. Surprise, motherfuckers. The air through the open porthole smells of the poisoned sea, and for one whose spent too much of his life cowering amongst industrial squalor, it’s a welcome smell. A comforting smell. Out here, a man can still be free, or he may at least manage to
pretend
he is still free. All this water is under the jurisdiction of the Far Shore Navy, expanded U.S. territorial since a quarter century ago. But, this far north, mostly they have their hands too full up with contraband from the cross-Arctic smugglers out of Russia and the Northern European Union to spare much time for drifters. Ahmed says something, something that he makes sound urgent. Ahmed makes almost everything sound urgent. Johnson closes the brass hatch. The hinges squeak. There’s an undeniable melancholy to the skeletal remains of those distant, marsh-bound skyscrapers, only half visible through the haze. Melancholy, but hypnotic, and so it’s sort of a relief, whatever Ahmed’s on about.

Ahmed is sitting in front of one of the antique QD-LED monitors, data streaming down the screen like amber rain, bathing his face in amber light. Ahmed Andrushchenko is not a man who is well in the head, and lately his periods of lucidity have grown fewer and farther between. But Johnson doesn’t mind his company. Plus, the man’s obsessions with all the ways history might have gone, but didn’t, help to pass empty hours when the comfort of the sea and the village sounds drifting down from above and up from below, the motion of the barge on the waves, are not sufficient. Almost always, he’s harmless enough, is Ahmed Andrushchenko, and when he begins drifting towards the bad days, Johnson always manages to keep him from tearing up the cabin they share below the markets. Different rhythms soothe different people, and Ahmed says that Johnson’s voice soothes his tattered mind.

“It won’t last very long,” Johnson tells him, “before a backtrace snips you.”

“Fuck them,” barks Ahmed, without daring to take his eyes off the screen. These fleeting uplinks to one or another satellites are too precious to him.

“One day, they’ll trail you, and the entire village is gonna lose input and output, all because one man couldn’t keep his eyes on the now and tomorrow.”

Johnson, whose first name is Bartleby, but no one’s called him that since he was a boy, he sits down in his bunk and sighs. “You can be one selfish prick,” he says.

“And
you
can be a nearsighted cunt,” Ahmed says.

Johnson shakes his head and stares at the walls of the cabin, decorated with Ahmed’s collection of pinned Lepidoptera, almost every one of these species extinct fifty years or more. He buys them off the merchant skiffs, or, more often, barters his mechanical and process skills for the butterflies. No questions ever asked, naturally, but Johnson knows most have been looted from the unreclamated ruins of museums or stolen from other collectors’ private vaults.

These
butterflies, at least, will never again flap their wings.

Today, Ahmed is chasing the twin again, the one who proved dominant, the one who proved the force with which to be reckoned when push came to shove all the world off its foundations. He spends as much time chasing the albino as he spends mulling over the taxonomy of his bugs, picking through conspiracies printed on decades-old buckypages and teslin sheets. As much time – more, really – than he spends muttering at inattentive Johnson about the Martian refugees and their dead air since the war, or the lights over Africa and Argentina, or the strategic excise bioweapons that are rumored to have been deployed over India when it withdrew from the Global Population Control Initiative.

“She’s here,” says Ahmed. “You have to read between the undercode, then filter that through a few archeo El Gama and syncryption algorithms, but she’s here all over. Shitbirds didn’t think she could spin chess, but they were sorely mistaken, my skeptical friend.”

“I never said I was a skeptic,” Johnson mumbles, no matter how little of Ahmed’s absurdities he doesn’t believe; he says it any way.

“See, now that’s all middlegame,” Ahmed says, and taps on the screen. “You never get much of her middlegame. Most of it’s sunk too deeply in the sats. But, fuck me, this is only ‘26, and she’s already got king safety down to an art. She’s hitting the internationals so hard even their material advantages have been pummeled into irrelevance. Oh, she’s moving to a very violent position. That strategy is beautiful.”

“Give the devil her due,” Johnson says.

“Goddamn right.”

“You best spool and close it down now, Ahmed. I’m not kidding. I’m the one who’ll catch fuck and back if you get the ordinances on us.”

“My friend, you ought to see this. I wish you could appreciate – ”

“C’mon, Ahmed.”

Ahmed’s fingers are dancing over the keys fast as a screw from a ten-penny whore, but Johnson’s been counting and Ahmed’s gone over the eight-second mark. Johnson might as well be a gust of wind seven miles away.

Ahmed calls out the moves, tongue almost as fast as his fingers.

“42.cxd4+ exd4 43.Kd3 Kb4 44…” and he trails off.

“Okay,” Johnson says, getting up, crossing the cabin while Ahmed is still too caught up in the twin’s mythical corporate game of chess to see him coming. “I try to play nice, and you know that.” Johnson presses the downlink key, and the screen goes a solid wash of amber light. He braces himself for the full fury of Ahmed thwarted. The man’s brown eyes are all at once choked with anger.

“You don’t
do
that, Ahmed,” Johnson warns. “You don’t even
think
it. How many teeth you got left you can afford to lose?”

And there’s a good argument. The fire in Ahmed’s eyes begins to flicker out, and he sits staring at the monitor.

“I was getting close,” he says disconsolately.

“Yeah, you were. Getting close to buying the whole barge a pudgy good fine.” And Johnson pulls the cover down over the cabin’s wall unit. Then he goes back to his bunk.

“You think they don’t want us to think she was never real?” asks Ahmed.

“Who’s ‘they’?” Johnson asks back, even though he knows the answer perfectly well. This is their own game of chess, the one the two men play every few days.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. Isn’t that the way it goes? “What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?”

“They, you idiot.
They
.”

“Don’t call me an idiot, Ahmed. I don’t like it when you call me an idiot.”

“You think I am a lunatic.”

Johnson rubs his eyes. He didn’t know, until this moment, how tired he was.

“I think you need another route to time displacement, that’s all. This ain’t healthy. In fact, this is dangerous, cutting into the feeds like that. And Jesus, I’m tired of telling you this. How many times have I told you that?”

“She was a genius,” Ahmed says, almost whispering. “But that does not mean someone could not have interceded
before
she reached middlegame.”

“Your book says someone did. A whole several someones, if I recall.”

Ahmed has two books, actually. Two genuine analog books from back before:
A Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies
and
The White Queen.

“I mean to say…” but then it’s as if he forgets what he’s saying, loses his train of thought before the sentence is hardly begun.

“I know what you mean to say, Ahmed. Don’t let it eat at you. I know what you mean, so don’t worry.”

“Here is the day,” says Ahmed, and this time he actually is whispering, and Johnson almost doesn’t catch the words. Also, just as he says it, the
Argyle Shoestring
takes a rogue wave across her bow and rocks to port, so there’s another distraction. But
Here is the day
, that’s a folk hand-me-down, a scribble in the margin of paranoia, what some believe were the last words from the twin before the sky went black and the night came crashing down so, so long ago. Read that bit as you will, literally or figuratively.

“Right, well,” Johnson tells his cabin mate. “This is what I’ve heard.”

And then Johnson turns back to the porthole glass and watches the sun sinking over the Massachusetts horizon while Ahmed goes to his trunk to get the plastic chess set.