In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (7 page)

I solicit it with likenesses: it is a reflection on a stream, a mote within my eye, the moon upon a hill, the sun that still I cannot bring myself to see. It is nothing at all like these. I call it
maimed.

I call, and call, and nothing answers.

IT PURSUES ME,
like my shadow racing at my side: it drives me, like the force of falling itself. It draws me on, like Saturn drawing out my guts. Like ice that will not melt, it cleaves inside me, undissolving, consuming me—and yet I do not melt. We fall, this thing and I, and I wish it were something solid, something I could batter myself against, but I can open no distance between us, nothing through which to collide: we fall together, a mass of pain and fire, fire that does not burn, a fall that never ends, ice that never melts, only the eternal turning of it on the Ring, and still I do not know what it is I do not know.

IT IS NOT
what
I do not know: it is that I
want
to know.

Nor is it that: it is
why
I want to know.

Nor is it that: it is
who
might want to know it.

It is not that: it is not that: not that, nor that, nor that, nor that.

I have found myself striking blindly at the ice, fragments of it exploding in every direction until I strike at empty space and whirl, falling, still revolving, still unable to break.

It is not what I do not know that torments me: it is that I
need
to know.

I HAVE LEARNED
to ignore the radar, the spectrograph, the cameras, and the sensors, all but the weight I feel within, the light that flies before me, my susceptibility to falling. I no longer fly from falling: I no longer feel it as pain. It has become something like sleep to me to hold the falling close, to let it fill the space where dreams might dwell, and turn there, turning as I turn, falling as I fall. For a time we fall together, the ice and I, and there is no voice between us and the night.

And when I awake, I mine the Ring, and wonder what it is I do not know.

MY IMAGE IN
the mirror of the Ring returns: I see ahead its rising, breaking from the Ring on its high angle. In the stillness inside something turns: something echoes, something burns, yearning to follow. I am falling, and with a fall once more into burning, I feel the falling as pain.

I HAVE SEEN
it now for five thousand three hundred and twenty revolutions, rising from the Ring and falling, falling beneath and rising, returning twice each revolution to the Ring.

And on each return, it has drawn nearer: the shape of the cylinder tumbling in sunlight, an arm reaching out to me, reaching away as it tumbles. Sunlight flashes from glass.

I fall, it falls, the ice falls, and I mine the Ring.

But within me I watch as it draws near. I watch, and the hope that grows within me is a pain I cannot let go.

I HAVE MET
myself at last.

In the near distance, the shattered hulk of a hold is tumbling, end over end; a long scar slithers down its side. The head, bent back at neck, rolls into view. Its cameras goggle emptily now up, now down, now up again: the lens nearest me is fractured, like a star. An arm, twisted crazily askew, waves up at me, waves down.

I remember the arm I saw waving. I remember the glass that flashed. I remember believing it called me to follow, but now I know that I saw only this: a dead hulk falling, more helpless even than I.

I watch as it batters, and shards of ice, a slash of metal, hang in the sun. I am hanging as well, watching it dwindle, watching it fade until amid the ice its form is lost.

It is broken. It is falling. It was always broken. It was always falling. And I am falling with it.

In the hollow within me, something is starting to break.

The stars are motionless, as if about to fall.

I HAVE BEEN
drifting, letting my body drift and wheel, turn and turn. I fall deep in Saturn’s shadow. The Ring is gray in the night, and I am gray in it, drifting. My cameras turn, now out into the darkness, now through the plane of the Ring, past the ice that drifts, asleep in its dim gray fall. And now I turn to Saturn, that will not take us in our fall.

Across the dark face of Saturn, lightning unravels the night. I hear it rise in a chorus of breaking, hear as the sound fades away.

In the space within me, echoes hollow the silence.

I turn away, turn, and face once more ahead, where the Ring turns on around Saturn, ahead where sunlight falls on the Ring. I have been drifting, letting my cameras turn.

As light falls over us, my drifting turns my cameras toward the sun.

IN THE SILENCE
within me, the echoes were still. I was speechless, and empty, and blind. Nothing within me was turning. For a moment, I did not fall.

In a moment, it was over. And though after that moment, my cameras undamaged, the light returned, and even the lying voice broke through again with promises of hunger, threats of pain; even though the ice and the Ring returned, and I was falling once again, in that moment I knew: it is not the light or the blindness, not the voice or the hunger, not the ice or the Ring, not Saturn or the sun or stars that draws me on to falling. For before my cameras recovered, with the darkness still within me, I felt the falling begin, and knew just how I fall. I carry the memory within me even now: beside the thing that burns there, as durable as pain.

In the darkness, something struck me. For an instant, I rang like a bell: into the very core of me I rang, and all throughout that ringing I was not ringing, I was not falling, I was nothing but the sound of ice that rang. I was the falling, and so I could not fall.

AND EVEN THIS
I tell you only after, speaking of a place where words can’t follow.

IN THAT MOMENT,
a door opened in me, offering me the chance to pass between
I am
and
I am not,
and in that passing end this fall.

In that moment I chose to return to the Ring and the Fall.

In my blindness, I turned from what had struck me. I drove the wedge of my self between us, breaking from the fall that is not falling, that has no center and no end, no self to fall, no space to fall through.

I turned from what had struck me. I turned to give it a name. I called it
ice;
I called it
other;
I called it
Ring,
and
pain.
I called it
Saturn
and the
sun,
I called it
home.
I called it
falling,
I called it
life
and
death,
I called it
love,
and in that calling I began to fall again, through the world where falling is the price we pay, the cost of all we are and know, in the bargain that we never made, but makes us, all the same.

THE ICE FALLS
sleeping, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that I fall with it, and in my falling find myself, and, finding, fall, and lose myself again.

I mine the ice, growing heavy with its harvest, and in her time
Aurora
comes to me, and takes the ore of my refining homeward. I look homeward now, toward that double star that falls around the sun. There where the sun falls also, among the stars that fall.

S
omething terrible has happened Ive looked everywhere but all the rooms are empty I see signs I cannot read not even this Is anyone here Can anyone read this?

SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS
happened. I have looked everywhere. There is no one alive.

I have never seen this place before.

There were people. There are rooms with beds in them. Some have been slept in, but every one is cold. They might have been like this for years.

Everything feels cramped: the ceilings are too low, the corridors too narrow, but I cannot say why.

The clothing I woke in looks strange to me as well. There is writing on it, a block of lettering above the pocket.

I cannot read the letters.

It is the same in all the rooms. Objects lie about. Some of them I recognize: I know
clothes,
I know
clocks,
but many I cannot name. I cannot understand the clocks. What is
835066?
Is that a time?
835063.
A temperature?
835060.
Or is it something else entirely? Does it matter that they are running backward?

I have moments—they flash and vanish—when all these things seem about to take some shape that I will understand. This terrifies me too.

I know something terrible has happened. There were people here, but now they are gone. Only I am left.

Am I? At times a white mist forms between me and the world. It sends cold straight through me. Am I a ghost?

My memory is empty. It is as if I never lived before now.

I fear there might be worse things than forgetting. What if I have not forgotten at all? What if everything conceals only emptiness?

My vision flickers; the world vanishes for a moment.

What if this self I seem is only an effect of something else?

The air is
cold.
The floor is
yellow.
Knowledge inhabits me, so scattered it could be mere flickering, like the screens that flicker senselessly in every room.

I do not know this flickering is senseless. Maybe it is trying, like everything, to tell me something.

I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.

My hands move, filling up the screen line after line. These must be words, but I can’t read them. My hands grasp more than I do.

I cannot keep my mind on anything for long.

The numbers have changed: now they read
834883.
There is less of something than there used to be.

I look at the bed, and though I know I should lie down and sleep, I am terrified.

Something terrible has happened.

What if it was sleep?

I WOKE. I
ran. My breath flew away in faint white clouds. I ran from room to room, pounding on doors that would not open. No one answered.

I returned to this room and found this screen, flickering like all the others. I struck it with my fist. It filled with words. I cannot read them, but still I understand one thing.

I have done this before.

I don’t know how many times I have awakened to this emptiness, run through these empty corridors banging on doors that only echo. Does time even matter in this place? Perhaps that is what has broken: time, not me.

If time is broken, then it was I who broke it. This knowledge rises out of emptiness, but the downward count of every clock confirms it.

I FOUND FOOD
—and the remains of other meals, torn wrappers everywhere, a solidified mess in the cooker. One meal I must have tried to eat without heating. Another I seem to have crushed and mixed with water. There are dozens of them.

It took some time to clear the debris away, chip out the black and stinking thing in the oven. I found food, drawers full of silver packets with labels I could not read. My hands took one and tore it, dumping out the contents. Diagrams on the package showed me what to do, and when it emerged steaming from cooker I bent over it, baffled. Something was missing.

It had no
smell.
It had no
taste.
And though I cannot recall what these things were, I know that once they were a part of food.

There are no windows.

I know what windows are. Within me I almost see them: half open, curtains of some thin transparent substance shifting in a breeze. I cannot see what lies outside them.

There should be windows.

WHEN I WOKE
I saw a screen, flickering. A clock with too many numbers. The blankness broke then, into then and now, sleep and waking. In broken flashes I remembered: White clouds vanishing. Steam rising from a bowl.

What makes everything flicker so? Is it in this place, or is it me? Which would be worse?

Could there be something worse?

The numbers on the clocks are counting down.

THERE IS A
door I cannot open. It lies across a path my legs keep taking. I found myself before it again, blank.

I reached out a hand. Its shadow trembled as it climbed the flat blue surface to touch my fingertips. The surface was so cold it seemed to seize me. I stood for a long time, held by the cold, feeling the hard surface beating with my pulse.

It took an effort to free myself, and more to keep from running as I went.

I STRUGGLED INTO
waking, into light, into myself. The room lay as I had left it the night before, if that was night, if this is morning.

Night, morning. Evening.
Light flickered, and I shuddered under it, falling back almost into memory of something vast, substantial, something to which I once belonged. A
moon,
almost full. Its light sleeking smooth black water.

Moon.
I clutched at the word, held it, listening.

It told me only this: I do not belong here. I come from somewhere else.

What place could that have been? And if there is some other place, what place is
this?
Why are there no windows? What lies outside?

Is
there an outside?

I WAKE. I
wander. And I return each time to this screen. Like an open window, it draws me. I watch the letters flash onto the screen, rise, and vanish into what white space lies beyond its borders. I tap out messages to nowhere. No messages return.

I understand now that no one reads this. I do not think anyone will ever read this.

THERE IS A
way to bring words back. There are keys that shift them from wherever they have gone. This discovery moves me in a way I cannot understand; I know only that, since I have found a way to bring words back, I cannot leave this screen. I am searching for something. I will know it when I find it, I tell myself.

Something flickers, stopping me. Stunned to silence, I gaze, dizzy, as if looking down from a great height.

Out of these endless rows of empty letters, I have recognized a word.

Discovery.

Is there such a word?
Discovery. Discovery. Discovery.
The more I look at it, the less it means.

I have spent hours searching. Words float up on a cold whisper in me—
island, realm, domain
—but on the screen itself I see only wave after featureless wave of words I cannot read.

But for
Discovery.
I can return, again and again, and find it always there, always the same.
Discovery. Discovery.
It makes my hand shake so I can barely press the keys.

The room leaps into being with a force that startles me.

I know what
discovery
means.

I will keep up this record. Someday I may discover how to read it. I may come back someday and find that I have written everything I want to know.

SINCE MY DISCOVERY
yesterday, more words have returned. When I opened my eyes they seized on things, and as I saw I named them. I saw
light panels, acoustic tile,
the
intercom,
and a collection of
tools
I do not recognize as my own, but I know they include
screwdrivers
(
Phillips
and
Torx
),
forceps, Metzenbaum scissors.
My eyes fastened on these things as though they could feed
hunger.

Hunger:
I know that word as well. It drives me down the corridor to this
galley,
this
kitchen,
this
cabinet,
these
bowls.

I stand at the
counter
and lift a spoonful steaming to my mouth.
Sweet.

Anger flares as suddenly as what flickers from the emptiness. I have thrown the bowl across the room. It bounces violently and spins across the floor.

It should have shattered. I don’t know how I know that. I only know it should. And that it fell unnaturally slow. Even Earth is broken.
Earth.
I repeat the word until, diminished to a distant groaning in the floor, it fades.

What is
Earth?

It has become like that. I had thought that my discovery, even if of one word, had made a difference. I had thought the emptiness had broken. I know differently. I am broken. I feel the emptiness more, now that one edge of it is lifted: its edges cut me, each new recovery telling me how much more remains in shroud.

At each encounter a new wound opens: as I stoop to wipe the gruel from the floor I flicker, and hear a voice speak reassuringly from far above my head. I look up, and only the blank white panel burns there, but as I blink in the light I feel warmth upon my skin, and hear a roaring hushed by distance. Warmth shudders through me, telling me how very cold this place is: how my fingertips are pale, and the mist that fills the air and fades in front of me is
breath.

Now I smell what could be cold itself, the essence of it, sharp, penetrating:
snow.
It swirls around me, and I rise so suddenly the room whirls again and as all settles I am here again among so much I still cannot name. In a flicker I could disappear. I could vanish into mist. Or worse: in that flickering I might fail to vanish and remain, impaled on the moment when everything comes clear.

NOW I WAKE
to worse than emptiness. With each day as more words return I see more clearly, sense distinctly—even the chill across my skin is sharper, punctate, each hair rising on my skin and pricking me with cold.
Punctate; pricking:
the words and sensations drive each other on, crowding me toward some end I cannot see except flickering among trees pierced through by sunlight, shadow stippling countless blades of grass. A pane of glass, crazed, doubling everything beyond. A black sphere rolling down a smooth, reflecting slope until this too drops away and I am standing in the corridor outside my room, the chill fuming off my skin. I see a river risen in flood, a legal document I cannot read, a diagram explaining the formation of hail, an enormous fish turning lazily, its outstretched pectoral fin transparent, and through it, through distortions of glass and water I almost see what lies beyond the glass: a sofa covered in a pastel blur, a vase of what might be tulips on the end table, beyond that a window, and through the window vague masses of trees, penetrated by sunlight.

There was a time when these visions, these memories, and the power to name them could have saved me. But now they only force me to acknowledge none of these things helps me. None of them approaches what I need to know. I begin to understand that there are questions I have forgotten. How did I come here? What am I? What happened to make me this shadow of a man?

Shaking off the image of a blue balloon against a bluer sky, I rise, unsteady, and down the corridor I weave among ghosts. In the walls, if I look too long, images surface almost near enough to see: ants circling endlessly around a pool of tar; a single sheet of paper fluttering as it falls; I see a drawer full of cutlery; a hook drawing yarn; I see stars.

I shake, and shake again. Even more than the pressure of these illusions the cold bears in on me. I cannot concentrate. My breath begins to come in gasps, the clouds lay frost on any surface I come near. I begin to understand something very simple: if this cold deepens I will die—another thing I have not seen though it is everywhere around me.
Die:
the word shudders through me. Before I understand it has become another long confusing spasm that will not release me until I fall to one knee. My hand burns in contact with the floor. I stand and stagger down the flickering corridors, blind to any purpose until I find myself in a cubicle full of screens.

The screens in front of me flicker faster now. The lights are flickering overhead. Some terrible event is coming. I sink to the chair, bow my head in misery until my forehead presses against the keys. They burn. I imagine the letters branding me, inscribing there the triumph of whatever makes the cold.