Noise (20 page)

The truth is, we knew that “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” That when we followed people into the darkness—into the dust, the smoke, the holes in the earth—that it was a form of drowning. We knew Charybdis would be dark, down below. That when we thought about drawing things in—into our coffer in the fort; into our wide, blue eyes in that parking lot in Slade; into dew-traps or rain barrels—we wouldn’t be able to force them back out. Currents only go one way, just like the Spirit of God, moving upon the face of the waters.

There was never going to be any return trip. I didn’t enjoy
that week in the river, fly-fishing. I never knew my grandfather, so I couldn’t care that he drowned.

The Jacks lifted all the corpses with the elevator, including the one with the mask who’d run from the outpost when we opened fire. The one who was ready with a mask of his own, who had the bullet in his gun, waiting, waiting for the first one down the stairs.

Levi was the first one down, so he took the mole’s bullet through his neck. This was as close as he came to the Promised Land—a view across the River Jordan of those dusty, red Canaanite hills. God had fucked Moses over, too, for hitting that rock instead of talking to it. For its water. The Israelites had never had a philosophy for keeping water—for keeping resources—so they had to draw everything they needed from the sky, from rocks, from the people who already lived in the Promised Land. They had to take everything from somebody else.

Everyone always forgets that God parted the River Jordan, too. But only after the right people had died.

When we weren’t transcribing ’casts or updating inventories, or training on wooden dummies, Levi and I had made other Plans. Like sailing.

We wanted to sail, because that’s what our Romantic idols and fantasy-book heroes did. He inherited a twelve-foot day-sailer in bad repair, which we stored at my mother’s house. It was only designed for one person, but we would both fit. That was the Plan. Some summer, we’d repair it. Get it ready. Be nothing but flotsam as the wind moved us in ways that defied normal motion.

•   •   •

The mole gave Levi a way out—to find amaranths underground—with the bullet in that gun. Ahead of his time, ahead of the classic Greeks whom he could finally talk to. Ahead of their relatives listening to gibberish at Delphi. Listening to repeated things from the future, from seventh graders in classrooms. From the intelligence that lay in wait for them to quit being ancient.

By the time Matthew finally flushed that mole out and cut his throat, Levi was already dead.

Last made bricks to build walls for his dead
.

The thing about oracles is that they talk back.

I tried to convince myself once, when I was a teenager, that I felt God. Alone in the sanctuary, accompanying my mom on an evening errand to the church. I stared at the ceiling and drew deep breath as quickly as I could. I told our youth minister in his ball cap that I had felt Him. That I was blessed.

But in the end, it was only the wind and the rain, making noise in the darkness.

“FIVE” (“ADDITIONS AND RECRUITMENT”)

(cont’d)

[3] (i) While your Group grows, so do others. (ii) One of the primary deterrents to assault or Forage is a sufficiently large Group, accompanied by a sufficiently large defense force. (iii) This competition for resource security among groups creates a perpetual-motion phenomenon as all race in size toward Collapse. (iv) This phenomenon is unavoidable, but with careful attention to distrust and unrest among your Group, you can delay such Failure such that your Group yet exists while others Collapse. (v) As others Collapse, your Group may Forage their lives and resources. (vi) When no significantly sized Group exists within range to oppose yours, Failure recovery will be faster and simpler.

[4] (i) The precise skills and abilities you will seek in your Additions will be situation-specific. Several you should watch for (and can rarely have too many of) include medical personnel, experienced educators, physical laborers, engineers, tailors, and combatants. Of particular value are either doctors or midwives capable of safely managing births, since procreation is unlikely to decrease, even following the Collapse of Old Trade.

[5] (i) The sooner you can recruit, establish, and support a medical community, the sooner you can enhance your Group in the form of temporary visas. (ii) Seekers of particular professional communities, such as those who wish their children safely born, can exchange goods and materials for the services of your specialist communities and a temporary stay in your Place—a visa. (iii) This reduces the immediate need for and
risk of external Foraging. (iv) This capitalizes on the energy expenditure of others and conserves your own.

[6] (i) Recruiters who range from the Place to seek Additions should be capable of and willing to commit acts of violence, as very often their survival will depend upon it. (ii) Outfit your recruiters with the best your militia has to offer in arms, equipment, and armor. (iii) Recruiters should be effective at personal stealth, and they should be able to withstand torture, should they be captured by opposition Groups. (iv) It is advised that recruiters be equipped with poison or some similar device for eliminating themselves, lest opposition Groups Forage valuable intelligence from them.

[7] (i) Recruiters should double as spies and saboteurs. (ii) They should be personable and should appear trustworthy. (iii) Only Members with unflagging loyalty to the Group (or whose loyalty can be ensured by the continued presence of valuables at your Place) are eligible for this service.

w
e were in the L part of the Nike site, which had housed the missile magazines. One of three parts to a site like this. The whole of the part was about forty acres, which was plenty of room. The storm hadn’t abated. I wasn’t ready to leave.

The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn’t matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading
Mythology
, must have been beautiful. It doesn’t matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn’t have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn’t matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and
raised to every other emotional exponent—and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place.

It was our turn to rest. Mine and Four’s. We were using an inflatable mattress in one of the old control rooms. A small, cement cube. There were scars on the walls where electrical outlets had been, back during the Project—I saw them before we clicked off our light. We had to share the mattress, which was fine. Everyone did, in turns.

“Are you okay?” Four asked.

But the Other—waiting, waiting, for you to be the first one down, into the darkness, with the immortal flowers and everything everyone ever said, ancient or not, listening to the oracle or not, about love—is, of course, yourself. A wave function that measures everything you want about and for yourself, while necessarily being nothing else, otherwise you would already be this other person. Because it’s nice not to be alone.

She was on her side, lying on the serpent arm. I could tell because I could feel her breath, which helped me orient in the darkness. I didn’t have maps for girls in dark rooms. I wasn’t carrying a compass. These walls were feet-thick cement, for protection from the exhaust of the climbing missiles, if the Guard had to launch them.

“It’s nice not to be alone,” I said.

•   •   •

That’s the reason. The problem. The point. The reduction of self to absolute zero—nothing but the quiet in the darkness, like Orpheus on his way down, defying the laws of normal motion.

Four moved closer. I could smell us better, when she came close, stinking in the darkness. Smelling like death and fire and sweat. All the things from the underworld, where you spoke into the darkness, sounding distance the way bats do, trying not to
look back, or you’ll lose her
.

“But are you okay?” she asked.

“I saw this coming.”

“What?”

“In Slade, on the Wailing Wall.”

She touched my face. “Wait, what? You saw, like, a picture?”

“I saw this.”

“What is
this
, Hiram?”

“The darkness,” I said. “The solitude. Everything.”

After we formed our first secret society. After we taught ourselves, adolescents in the woods, to smoke and to write poetry and to be unafraid. After we taught ourselves to revere, above all things, Love, so we could reduce ourselves to absolute zero and no longer feel those every-day adolescent deaths. After we had codified, structured, and mythified our struggle to be Ready for All Things, we learned that our Narrative was a better “we” than “we” were. It was totemic, and we called it a “knighthood.”

After these things, everything Collapsed, because the Narrative did not imply a Group—it implied a mob, a collection of individuals, each of us struggling individually not to be alone.

•   •   •

Four closed the darkness between us. “Tell me what you saw, Hiram.”

“How could it have been real?”

“Hiram.”

“I saw darkness,” I said. “A square, painted black. Nothing.
My
tag was in the corner.”

She was quiet for a minute.

“That doesn’t mean anything. Your tag was probably a trick of the light.”

“There wasn’t any light, so I didn’t look back because it might have been real. And it was.”

“You didn’t see anything. You just think you did. You saw what you wanted to see.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It meant everything.”

Really, we disbanded the knighthood because Jon and I took girlfriends, and for once, when we tried to sound our own distances in the dark, there were people sounding back, and they were girls. Which made it difficult to believe that our knighthood was real.

We didn’t have time for rites in the woods, or Friday nights at Adam’s, to game until four in the morning. The feeling of someone’s flesh other than our own, beneath our fingers—the sensation of small places between lips and eyelids. These were new physics, and they meant everything more than everything else.

It was Collapse, and it was better than everything that came before it. Than everybody. It was the Event.

•   •   •

“Hush,” Four said.

Her lips were chapped where she pressed them against my nose. A kiss so barely happening, it was the only thought in the darkness. She kissed the way moths might, when there isn’t a lamp sucking at them, a Charybdis with no teeth. With nothing but heat and light—what would be left when they dropped the bombs and the Nikes weren’t fast enough. When the blasted earth developed wings and fluttered toward the fires in ways that defied normal motion. In ways that couldn’t be real.

Four’s kiss was bomb physics against my nose. It was ground zero in the darkness, and we’d been pushed into the underworld, through the smoke, underwater—before we’d even seen the flash.

Because that’s how it would go.

This was not Collapse. This was something else.

I let the kiss think me.

We’d told ourselves how it would go, how things would remain, when our ideas about love were still soft, because we couldn’t afford what it would do to us to cross that Rubicon. There was no going back once you set up the hardware and put the final edges on your ideas about love and sharpness. Then, you were ready, terribly.

Adam graduated a year before I did, and he went away, to Slade. To school. The Plan had been that I would come a year later, after Jon and I graduated. Jon wasn’t going to school. He had other plans, and he married the girl who bore his son.

•   •   •

Four was so close, her lips a moth’s wing from mine. Her labret the only thing between us. This was something else, at least.

I spoke into her mouth: “I thought you … liked girls.”

“I do.”

“But—”

She spoke quietly. “I like boys, too. Moron.”

Oh.

It was nice to not be alone. We had found a way out, Four and I. One of many that included holes in the earth, columns of smoke, underwater fairylands, and whirlpools with teeth. That included the guns and the noose and the roadside bomb in Irby. Which had malfunctioned and blown apart its crew before we were in range.

It included the bullet from the gun in the hands of the mole who’d been ready. Down here, in the bunker. Waiting, waiting for the first down the stairs.

We’d had …
a Plan…
, and it included …
a Place, a Group, and an Event Exit Strategy….
, to get out, to make it to Slade. To keep our adolescent Narratives alive.

But I hadn’t followed it. I went west, following Her, and when I finally returned from the desert, another year later, I could see in Adam’s eyes what it had meant to him to be Secondary.

“SIX” (“POLICING, MILITIA SERVICE, AND THE NECESSARY LIES OF PROSPERITY”)

SEC. “I” (“POLICING”)

[1] (i) When your Group reaches sufficient size that you need a system of law enforcement, your police force must comprise civilians. (ii) Do not use your militia to police your civilians. (iii) Situate informants within your police force to ensure it does not abuse your civilian Membership. (iv) Disclose all policing activities to your Group. (v) Do not use excessive force.

II.

“MILITIA SERVICE”