After James (36 page)

The parentheses man who'd approached her gave up, drifted into the crowd. When the curator walked into the main gallery, Celia went back inside. She passed through quietly and unobserved. The curator and the headscarf woman were huddled with their phones. Celia returned to the narrow room,
After James
, now empty, and looked into the last box.

In it was a flood. The water carried Koss-Lia past floating wooden swing seats and mailboxes, a column of smoke shunting into view and away. She tumbled under the surface and up again, reeling past crows hopping in branches in stark alarm. The surface was not constant, it moved at varied speeds. Blood furled in the current and the animation sped up, shapes streaked into colours, night changed to morning in all of three seconds. She'd washed up in the crotch of a tree. Shadows swept across her and slowed into real time. She dropped from the tree and crawled, mudslick, the last human.
But no, another shadow covered her now, a looming human shape. She lifted her head, the video shifted to Koss-Lia's perspective, but she saw no one. She looked down at the shadow, fully there, and again looked up and now there was a small boy, looking at her. End of box.

She felt nothing or at least not whatever she assumed viewers were supposed to feel, a hopeful ending. Somewhere in the fuller story, box to box, someone would have gone missing. Who was it and had anyone noticed?

Except for possibly being cheap and sentimental, the ending didn't disturb her, not like the earlier boxes had, the ones with scenes from her real life. What disturbed her came later, the next day on the transatlantic flight. All around were screens playing the same or nearly the same movies and TV shows, staggered at different intervals, and she would not admit that her father had disappeared, would not acknowledge the dread she felt, and she looked out the window at the bright table of water, thinking, how many times in one year will I cross this ocean? The screen map was in Spanish. Océano Atlántico. When she sounded it out to herself, for a moment, she felt suddenly alone, with no one around, no passengers, no plane even, just a lofted mind, and then just as surely it all resumed around her and she remembered two moments from the previous night.

She pictured the curator on his cellphone as she'd seen him through the gallery window. His brief smile, there and gone, had escaped him, she realized. He'd corrected himself
but she'd seen the smile, and now she wondered if the whole gallery had been the stage. Maybe the hologram had been a misdirection, and she'd really sold it. Had Koss vandalized his own show? If so, he must have seen her, recognized her, but instead of doing anything real like coming forward and addressing the crowd, introducing her, or at least speaking to her, he'd played his found advantage to the end.

She'd left the gallery feeling hollow. The crowd had mostly dispersed. She formed a vague intention of heading for a cross street to catch a cab. Walking behind her, close enough for her to hear, was the English-speaking couple who'd tried to guess what would happen next at each box. She recognized their voices and was happy to hear them again. The overheard conversation, little bursts of shared meaning, kept her feet on the ground.

“Where did you go?” The woman sounded American.

“I was looking for that guy who was here when I came in.” The voice was maybe Nordic but his English was near perfect. “The Turkish guy selling drugs to the art lovers.”

“I keep getting propositioned by Turks and Spaniards and Greeks. The continent's collapsing into Germany.”

“He said he had something that makes you see ghosts.”

A cab approached from the other direction and Celia flagged it. It U-turned and came to the curb and the couple ran past her, the woman nearly brushing her shoulder, and got in. As the man closed the door she stepped to the window and bent down, peering through the glass at them, but they didn't see her and were laughing with the driver, who checked his side mirror and pulled away.

Now in the plane, looking at the water, trying not to look at the screens, she was struck by the obvious truth that she was a ghost, a ghost who made her way in the world, unaware that she was a ghost. That was why the drug dealer had been alarmed to see her. He had the drug in him and knew her for what she was and it sent him down the street.

How long had she been in this state? Since the cave day. She'd first had the intuition as they descended the mountain. She was dead, not just dead inside, but dead inside the mountain. Her father was there, too, with her in the chamber. He was missing from this world, the outer one, so of course she couldn't find him. But how had she managed to book plane tickets and hotel rooms? How had she done the work at the dig and secured an ancient tooth to carry around in a bag? Now that she thought of it she couldn't remember details about the actual transactions at counters and reception desks, but then that was sometimes the experience of travelling. It suspended you in a state of nonthought, nonperception. She recalled being in the presence of others, the people at the dig and in the gallery, but all actual conversations could have been old ones that echoed in the present, remote exchanges with her father and sister. Maybe all that she thought of as recent had happened long ago. The present was populated entirely with returns from the past.

And yet here she was in the plane, in her own seat. She turned and looked at the young man beside her. He wore headphones and stared grimly ahead at his movie and seemed not to notice her at all.

“Is it good?”

He didn't hear her. She reached over and tapped his screen with her finger—had she ever done anything so intrusive?—and asked the question again.

His mouth opened slightly. He was looking at her finger, or where her finger had touched his screen, and then he touched the screen himself and put the movie on pause. He took his headphones off and looked at them as if he'd never seen them before, then looked at Celia.

“It's all right,” he said. She told herself to remember this, being addressed. The young man said the movie was about an Iraqi man in Texas who returns from prison to his new hometown, where everyone else is white or Mexican. “He did time for arson but they all think he's guilty of murder but they never found a body so we don't know for sure.”

Celia nodded. It all made beautiful sense to her.

She said, “It's very hard to hang on to, a whole life.”

“I guess. Did you want out?”

“No thanks.”

She turned, comfortably seated and alive, and looked at the sky. She touched her finger to the bottom lip of the plastic window moulding. Below, the shadow of the plane moved along a bank of white clouds and she felt someone, maybe herself, looking down at her in the real plane from a distant place and time.

I
t was a small place verging a small town. He entered the diner wearing a green canvas vest, cargo pants, walking shoes, intent expression, sun hat in hand. She slid out of the booth and hugged him, no longer than usual, and she remembered he always felt smaller and lighter than she expected, and they took their positions with a view of the highway and distant mountains.

The waitress was in her forties, bob cut, name-tagged Deena. She took their orders by memory, said them back wrongly, and took them again and was gone.

On the table Celia placed the tube with the ancient tooth inside it. He held it up to the window and looked at it briefly, nodded, dropped it into his shirt pocket. From another pocket he produced a small spotted doll of wire and leather and set it before her, a gift.

“A Hopi boy was selling them. They're not sacred in themselves, as I understand it, not like the larger ones. This is Little Fire God.”

She left the little god on the formica surface to act as it would. Witness, arbiter, junk. The place was half-full, a few diners at the counter. The neighbouring booths were empty. He reached across and took her coffee and sipped it. His hand tilted slightly at the wrist, as if the cup were heavy. His movements were muted. He seemed underslept or enduring an excess of gravity.

“China,” she said.

“I didn't specifically say.”

“You said somewhere vast and foreign.”

“With a distant early warning system for outbreaks in the remote villages and a history of controlling the news.”

“China.”

She'd picked up his message between flights, in Toronto. His voice had sounded doubled, as if on relay. He said if she was willing to change her route home he could meet her the next day in New Mexico. A ticket was waiting for her at the American Airlines desk. More details to follow. Here they came.

He said he'd been “spirited away.” In low tones of divulgence he said that a few years ago he'd been invited to give a talk on extinctions and ancient disease at a national laboratory. He became a kind of consultant, “or really just a name on a list,” in exchange for access to the world's best genetic-sequencing technology. Nothing had ever been asked of him, but last week he'd been waiting for a plane out of Cozumel and the first one to land after the storm had come for him, a small jet carrying two strangers, a government medical officer and a woman in uniform. The man and
woman seemed the more plausible for being easy to picture, Celia thought, picturing them two-dimensionally. They'd called him into the field, briefed him on the plane.

Days of half-formed thoughts presented themselves to her all at once to be dismissed—the thought that he was sick or drowned or lying in thick greenery somewhere, victimized, that Koss had given him a psychoactive drug, that he'd been detained at some airport, unable to call—and yet her concern hung on, as did her childish hurt.

He said he was part of a small team of men and women with deep, specific knowledge, all of them stunned out of their lives. He'd slept twenty hours in five days. In prop planes and vans they travelled to the village and saw the results of the outbreak, mortal trouble in the many hundreds, and then to a large city in the large unnamed country, working with local virologists. The outbreak was yet unreported. The government seemed to think that containing the news meant containing the virus. He hadn't known his messages weren't getting through to her. They'd been blocked by state authorities.

“You've been in China. For the U.S. government.”

“We're cooperating.”

“You mean China and the CDC?”

“No.”

That's why they were in New Mexico, she realized. There was a military national lab ninety miles from the diner. It also explained why he'd known which airports she'd be flying through. She'd been tracked.

Nothing he'd said was so hard to believe, not when you were in the business and knew what she knew, true stories that
other people would think were from movies or disaster-preparedness scenarios. And China was the least surprise of all. The place incubated annual flus, SARS, MERS, enterovirus 71. What was hard to believe was how he'd come to be there.

“You have government friends in bioweaponry.”

“Biodefence. It seems impossible, I know. But you better be happy they're on the job.”

He'd been brought to a Chinese government research centre. Now he spoke of illegal foreign weapons stockpiles.

“Any country, the secret labs are all huge. Here they drive cars from building to building. There, I was left alone for a minute in a basement fridge, three acres big.”

He said he wasn't sure why he was allowed to see what he'd seen except that his minder was also his translator and wasn't very good at either job. Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe he wanted others to know.

“To know what?”

“That a certain former superpower has acres of aerosolized plague.”

The world refused to stop going on around them. The lunch counter was fuller now. Celia wondered, as she did sometimes in this country, how many in the place were carrying guns or had them in their cars. There were ten times more guns down here than there were Canadians in Canada. Knowing what a person came to know, it was work, every day, to take a generous view of the species.

“And you told your military friends here.”

“They suspected but had no proof. They wanted to know if it was secure. But empires break apart. Nothing's
secure. It only takes one drunken idiot. And we all have stockpiles of those.”

Deena brought their food. Out the window was a narrow band of notched, vertebrate clouds. Her anxiety from the past few days was now redirecting or changing to something else, the usual abstract horror with too many points of focus.

He said the outbreak was of some new virus, a variation on something itself still not clearly identified. It killed its host slowly, the better for wide transmission. Of bigger concern, it seemed airborne. He'd been to a makeshift ward holding thirty or forty patients, more streaming in each hour. He tried to say he wasn't a medical doctor, but his handlers dressed him in a biohazard suit and marched him out with these people in their tortured postures. All ages, weak and dying. Reverse-pressure air ducts led to a far wall and a huge fan high up turned slowly and strobed the figures in light and shadow so that they seemed in motion. Their faces contorted in sole notes of pain. He was having trouble telling her the specifics. He said he wouldn't speak of them again.

He asked if she'd seen the strange sunset last night. In fact she had. It had stood ominously, high panelled darks in red, behind the scene she watched from a Santa Fe motel balcony. Pickups and family vans pulled in and out of a parking lot between a True Value and a Liquor Barn. She was jet-lagged and grimy—she had rerouted, her bag had not—and didn't need a sleep aid, but out she went, across the lot. She returned with a screw-top bottle of California merlot and sat on her little balcony, and the
sun was still hanging on, and the voices seemed to come from the electric lights, and for a few seconds she couldn't have said where she was or the day or month.

When the air chilled she moved to the bed with the bottle half-empty. The TV's aspect was set wrong, everything flattened, the alarmed weatherwoman's map of North America looked stepped on, while on other channels wars raged, refugees gathered, men cracked jokes, polar bears almost drowned. She was lost in the channels when her phone buzzed.

“It's Hartley,” said Indrani. “He's gone.” She went over the events repeatedly until Celia had to tell her to stop. She'd taken him up to North Vancouver, to Lynn Canyon Park and their usual spot, creekside. Indrani sat on a large round rock and checked the cell reception to make her weekly call to her brother. Celia knew the rock and could see her vividly, right down to the incipient varicose vein that ran over her shin where it emerged from her skirt. Hartley stood staring into the white water for fish to bark at, ignoring a small group of young people, university student types, who were cooing at him to visit. Only when they broke out sandwiches did he consent to be friendly, walking over, wagging vaguely. A few minutes later when she clicked off the phone she noticed the kids were gone and so was Hartley. She called but he didn't appear. She assumed he'd followed them out. The light was dying and the park would close in minutes. By the time she got to the parking area, her little blue Yaris was the only car. She stayed by it until a bald man in a uniform came to tell her
to leave. She explained about Hartley. He closed the park gate and let her backtrack to the creek in the half dark. Of course Hartley was nowhere. “The guy said it was the kids, you can't trust the kids around here. He said there'd been no sign of cougar.” Indrani was speaking too fast, in the voice of a woman who'd just lost her only real friend's dog. Together they formed a plan. Indrani would return to the park the next morning and hand out pictures of Hartley with both of their phone numbers. For a few minutes they couldn't stop repeating assertions about the complexity of large parks and the stupidity of certain dogs, and then Celia needed to get off the call. She showered and slept and her dreams wrung her out.

Her bag arrived at the motel room door just before checkout. She changed clothes and set off for the town whose coordinates he'd texted to her. A cheap paper map led her to open desert road where fragments of the previous night's dreams returned. She'd been on a rocky plain somewhere with smoke in the distance. There were women in black chadors walking ahead of her and she was a trotting, panting animal, behind them. The women slowed and looked off along the length of their shadows in the lowering sun and the horizon turned silver and when Celia looked back to the sun the women were gone and she felt herself pulled along by a torrent and she was Hartley, running west. The thing that was her and her dog passed into the city, their city, creek to river, river to harbour, out past Burrard Inlet into English Bay, the Georgia Strait, south past the Gulf Islands, across the border into the Juan de Fuca, and out with the tide to the
Pacific. She floated without effort, unafraid, and the tide shifted and she washed up on a wide empty beach, scenting something wonderful on the air. She woke up crying but still dreaming and in her dream she walked out into the night along neighbourhood streets of sleeping arts-and-crafts houses and then she was on Jericho Beach sitting on one of the long timber logs laid out parallel to the waterline and looking at the freighters dimly lit against West Vancouver, tucked into the pocket of the measureless feeling she'd had looking out from the cave mouth in France.

She checked her speed, which seemed wrong, and then remembered the numbers were in miles, not kilometres. She thought of caves and towns, places people gathered against fear. In the West of the new century was a state of incipience so pervasive that when, every so often, close to home, you lost something, when it slipped over the edge, gone for good, you felt the shame of relief finally to have had your fear endorsed. Only then, in the diner, with the whiff of disinfectant rising from the formica, did she remember that in the dream she'd detected a faint note of urine, as if some animal, four-footed or two, had marked her dreamscape as his own. He had spread his entire genome into the imaginary earth. We used to think our bodies and lives were ours alone. But even the stories of them were told and read differently now in the languages of science. Today a life seemed borderless or the borders had been redrawn by technologies and their mock infinitudes. Consciously or not, we kept emitting ourselves. Even our traumas, it turned out, imprinted genetically. Our sharpest memories could be pissed along, if not pissed away.
And so the smell. Someone in his unique code, there and fully absent, had been with her on the beach in her dream.

He said he had pictures to show her and passed her his phone. He'd taken them thereabouts the previous day, shots of petroglyphs and presumed sacred places. She paused over a young boy riding a donkey, the only image with life in the frame.

“My picture albums online,” she said. “Those were mine, for us.”

She could read his every motion so that when he sat back and cocked his head to look at her the way he looked at a problem in the field, shards that didn't add up, she realized it hadn't been him. They arrived at the next thought together.

“Your sister, she doesn't always consider the consequences.”

“She does, actually.”

Koss had given Chrissy a way to infuriate Celia through the pretense of claiming her for art.

“I thought you'd assented. I'm surprised Armin didn't tell me he'd contacted her.” His very name uncoloured things. “I know you think I misread him, Lia. It's hard to accept that you might have a point. But he gave me a lot of direction.”

“ ‘Gave.' Past tense?”

“In Cozumel he told me he was disappearing, wouldn't say where to. In the art world, you disappear and people sell it. The story, the mystery, the disappearance itself. I think he might be at the chateau. Or else he's here somewhere, in America.” He
glanced out the window, as if Koss might walk by. “I'm told you routed home through Berlin. You saw the show?”

“I thought I might find you.”

“The idea was I'd collect you in Troy and surprise you with a trip to the show. It's in London next,
Apokalypse.
The gallery wants to play up the mystery-woman angle. They want to make you the new Mona Lisa.”

She was a better Picasso, all cubes and planes, having lost perspective on what used to be her life. Along the row of booths she could see the tops of a few heads above the seat backs, dipping to the forks and spoons, bobbing up again, each in its world of thought.

“I'm thinking of getting off the grid,” she said. “Leaving my job and just moving to the middle of nowhere.”