Spin (58 page)

“Oh, God. That sounds so saccharine. I prefer to think of them as tributes. They’re quite chaste, really, if you read them closely. Unsigned. Your mother received them when we were both at university. She was dating your father then, and she could hardly show them to
him
—he was writing her letters of his own. So she shared them with me.”

“She never found out who wrote them?”

“No. Never.”

“She must have been curious.”

“Of course. But she was already engaged to Marcus by that time. She started dating Marcus Dupree when Marcus and E.D. were setting up their first business, designing and manufacturing high altitude balloons back when aerostats were what Marcus called ‘blue sky’ technology: a little crazy, a little idealistic. Belinda called Marcus and E.D. ‘the Zeppelin brothers.’ So I guess we were the Zeppelin sisters, Belinda and I. Because that’s when I started flirting with E.D. In a way, Tyler, my entire marriage was nothing more than an attempt to keep your mother as a friend.”

“The letters—”

“Interesting, isn’t it, that she kept them all these years? Eventually I asked her why. Why not just throw them away? She said, ‘Because they’re sincere.’ It was her way of honoring whoever had written them. The last one arrived a week before her wedding. None after that. And a year later I married E.D. Even as couples we were inseparable, did she ever tell you that? We vacationed together, we went to movies together. Belinda came to the hospital when the twins were born and I was waiting at the door when she brought
you
home for the first time. But all that ended when Marcus had his accident. Your father was a wonderful man, Tyler, very earthy, very funny—the only person who could make E.D. laugh. Reckless to a fault, though. Belinda was absolutely devastated when he died. And not just emotionally. Marcus had burned through most of their savings and Belinda spent what was left servicing the mortgage on their house in Pasadena. So when E.D. moved east and we made an offer on this place it seemed perfectly natural to invite her to use the guest house.”

“In exchange for housekeeping,” I said.

“That was E.D.‘s idea. I just wanted Belinda close by. My marriage wasn’t as successful as hers had been. Quite the opposite. By that time Belinda was more or less the only friend I had. Almost a confidante.” Carol smiled. “Almost.”

“That’s why you want to keep the letters? Because they’re part of your history with her?”

She smiled as if at a slow-witted child. “No, Tyler. I told you. They’re
mine
.” Her smile thinned. “Don’t look so dumbfounded. Your mother was as uncomplicatedly heterosexual as any woman I have ever met. I simply had the misfortune to fall in love with her. To fall in love with her so abjectly that I would do anything—even marry a man who seemed, even in the beginning, a little distasteful—in order to keep her close. And in all that time, Tyler, in all those silent years, I never told her how I felt. Never, except in these letters. I was pleased she kept them, even though they always seemed a little dangerous, like something explosive or radioactive, hidden in plain sight, evidence of my own foolishness. When your mother died—I mean the very day she died—I panicked a little; I tried to hide the box; I thought about destroying the letters but I couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to do it; and then, after E.D. divorced me, when there was no one left to deceive, I simply took them for myself. Because, you see, they’re
mine
. They’ve always been mine.”

I didn’t know what to say. Carol saw my expression and shook her head sadly. She put her fragile hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.”

So I spent four weeks in a motel room in Vermont nursing Diane through her recovery.

Her physical recovery, I should say. The emotional trauma she’d suffered at the Condon ranch and after had left her exhausted and withdrawn. Diane had closed her eyes on a world that seemed to be ending and opened them on a world without compass points. It was not in my power to make this right for her.

So I was cautiously helpful. I explained what needed to be explained. I made no demands and I made it clear that I expected no reward.

Her interest in the changed world awoke gradually. She asked about the sun, restored to its benevolent aspect, and I told her what Jason had told me: the Spin membrane was still in place even though the temporal enclosure had ended; it was protecting the Earth the way it always had, editing lethal radiation into a simulacrum of sunlight acceptable to the planet’s ecosystem.

“So why did they turn it off for seven days?”

“They turned it
down
, not entirely
off
. And they did it so something could pass through the membrane.”

“That thing in the Indian Ocean.”

“Yes.”

She asked me to play the recording of Jason’s last hours, and she wept as she listened. She asked about his ashes. Had E.D. taken them away or had Carol kept them? (Neither. Carol had pressed the urn into my hands and told me to dispose of them any way I deemed appropriate. “The awful truth, Tyler, is that you knew him better than I did. Jason was a cipher to me. His father’s son. But you were his friend.”)

We watched the world rediscover itself. The mass burials finally ended; the bereaved and frightened survivors began to understand that the planet had reacquired a future, however strange that future might turn out to be. For our generation it was a stunning reversal. The mantle of extinction had fallen from our shoulders; what would we do without it? What would we do, now that we were no longer doomed but merely mortal?

We saw the video footage from the Indian Ocean of the monstrous structure that had embedded itself in the skin of the planet, seawater still boiling to steam where it came into contact with the enormous pillars. The Arch, people began to call it, or the Archway, not only because of its shape but. because ships at sea had returned to port with stories of lost navigational beacons, peculiar weather, spinning compasses, and a wild coastline where no continent should have been. Various navies were promptly dispatched. Jason’s testament hinted at the explanation, but only a few people had the advantage of having heard it—myself, Diane, and the dozen or so who had received it in the mail.

She began to exercise a little every day, jogging a dirt path behind the motel as the weather cooled, coming back with the scent of fallen leaves and woodsmoke in her hair. Her appetite improved, and so did the menu in the coffee shop. Food delivery had been restored; the domestic economy was creaking back into motion.

We learned that Mars, too, had been un-Spun. Signals had passed between the two planets; President Lomax, in one of his rally-‘round-the-flag speeches, even hinted that the manned space program would be resumed, a first step toward establishing ongoing relations with what he called (with suspicious exuberance) “our sister planet.”

We talked about the past. We talked about the future.

What we did not do was fall into each other’s arms.

We knew each other too well, or not well enough. We had a past but no present. And Diane was wracked with anxiety by Simon’s disappearance outside Manassas.

“He very nearly let you die,” I reminded her.

“Not intentionally. He’s not vicious. You know that.”

“Then he’s dangerously naive.”

Diane closed her eyes meditatively. Then she said, “There’s a phrase Pastor Bob Kobel liked to use back at Jordan Tabernacle. ‘His heart cried out to God.’ If it describes anyone, it describes Simon. But you have to parse the sentence. ‘His heart cried out’—I think that’s all of us, it’s universal. You, Simon, me, Jason. Even Carol. Even E.D. When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy: I think that’s what it was for Jason; I think that’s what I didn’t understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence.” She brushed her hair away from her forehead and I saw that her arm, which had been so perilously thin, was round and strong once more. “I think the cry that rose up from Simon’s heart was the purest human sound in the world. But no, he’s not a good judge of character; yes, he’s naive; which is why he cycled through so many styles of faith, New Kingdom, Jordan Tabernacle, the Condon ranch… anything, as long as it was plainspoken and addressed the need for human significance.”

“Even if it killed you?”

“I didn’t say he’s wise. I’m saying he’s not wicked.” Later I came to recognize this kind of discourse: she was talking like a Fourth. Detached but engaged. Intimate but objective. I didn’t dislike it, but it made the hair on my neck stand up from time to time.

Not long after I declared her completely healthy Diane told me she wanted to leave. I asked her where she meant to go.

She had to find Simon, she said. She had to “settle things,” one way or another. They were, after all, still married. It mattered to her whether he had lived or died.

I reminded her she didn’t have money to spend or a place of her own to stay. She said she’d get by somehow. So I gave her one of the credit cards Jason had supplied me, along with a warning that I couldn’t guarantee it—I had no idea who was paying the premium, what the credit limit might be, or whether someone might eventually track it to her.

She asked how she could get in touch with me.

“Just call,” I said. She had my number, the number I had paid for and preserved these many years, attached to a phone I had carried even though it seldom rang.

Then I drove her to the local bus depot, where she vanished into a crowd of displaced tourists who had been stranded by the end of the Spin.

The phone rang six months later, when the newspapers were still running banner headlines about “the new world” and the cable channels had begun to carry video footage of a rocky, wild headland “somewhere across the Archway.”

By this time hundreds of vessels large and small had made the crossing. Some were big-science expeditions, I.G.Y. and U.N. sanctioned, with American naval escorts and embedded press pools. Some were private charters. Some were fishing trawlers, which came back to port with their holds full of a catch that could pass for cod in a dim light. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, but “arch cod” had infiltrated every major Asian market by the time the ban came down. It proved to be edible and nutritious. Which was, as Jase might have said, a clue: when the fish were subjected to DNA analysis their genome suggested a remote terrestrial ancestry. The new world was not merely hospitable, it seemed to have been stocked with humanity in mind.

“I found Simon,” Diane said.

“And?”

“He’s living in a trailer park outside Wilmington. He picks up a little money doing household repairs—bikes, toasters, that kind of thing. Otherwise he collects welfare and attends a little Pentecostal church.”

“Was he happy to see you?”

“He wouldn’t stop apologizing for what happened at the Condon ranch. He said he wanted to make it up to me. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my life easier.”

I gripped the phone a little more tightly. “What did you tell him?”

“That I wanted a divorce. He agreed. And he said something else. He said I’d changed, that there was something different about me. He couldn’t put his finger on it. But I don’t think he liked it.”

A whiff of brimstone, perhaps.

“Tyler?” Diane said. “Have I changed that much?”

“Everything changes,” I said.

Her next important call came a year later. I was in Montreal, thanks in part to Jason’s counterfeit ID, waiting for my immigrant status to be officialized and assisting at an outpatient clinic in Outremont.

Since my last conversation with Diane, the basic dynamics Of the Arch had been worked out. The facts were confounding to anyone who conceived of the Archway as a static machine or a simple “door,” but look at it the way Jason had—as a complex, conscious entity capable of perceiving and manipulating events within its domain—and it made more sense.

Two worlds had been connected through the Arch, but only for manned ocean vessels transiting from the south.

Consider what that means. For a breeze, an ocean current, or a migrant bird the Arch was nothing more than a couple of fixed pillars between the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. They all moved unimpeded around and through the Arch space, as did any ship traveling from north to south.

But cross the equator by ship from the south at ninety degrees east of Greenwich and you’d find yourself looking back at the Arch from an unknown sea under a strange sky, untold light-years from the Earth.

In the city of Madras an ambitious if not quite legal cruise service had produced a series of English-language posters announcing easy travel to friendly planet! Interpol closed the business down—the U.N. was still trying to regulate passage in those days—but the posters had it just about right. How could such things be? Ask the Hypotheticals.

Diane’s divorce had been finalized, she told me, but she was out of work and out of prospects. “I thought if I could join you…” She sounded tentative and not at all like a Fourth, or what I imagined a Fourth ought to sound like. “If that would be all right. Frankly I need a little help. Finding a place and, you know, getting settled.”

So I arranged a clinic job for her and submitted the immigration paperwork. She joined me in Montreal that autumn.

It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults.

These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and “pioneers,” many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.