FATA MORGANA
THE air is dry, and it hurts our lungs. We breathe, and the dry soil crunches under our splayed, birdlike toes. The sun, a bloated red mass over the horizon, taints the scraggly cacti black-violet. It is distorted at its base as it sinks upward into the horizon, bulging out in green shimmers.
“Hello, Mama,” I say to the mirage.
“Again, child?” the mirage shimmers back.
“Yeah, sorry,” I say, bowing my head sheepishly.
“Who?” the mirage shrieks. “Who’s getting my son killed?” It’s holding the sun from rising with sheer force of voice.
“Mama!” I whine, “You know I don’t need help to die.”
“Actually,” says Alan, now that he’s tuned into the mirage’s absurd form of communication, “I’m afraid it is entirely my fault.”
It is entirely the right thing to say. “Oh my,” the mirage says. A large cloud rises from the desert floor to cover the face of the sun for a moment with a monstrous, coquettish, wink. “Didn’t expect it to be you. Mordred, dear, introduce us, for form’s sake at least.”
No, no, no. I have a chance here, and I don’t need my mother screwing it up. “You’re holding up the night. You need to go now.”
“Don’t be like that,” the mirage says.
“Surely an introduction won’t hurt?” whispers Alan to me. I shake my head. He raises an eyebrow, then subsides.
“Good night, Mama,” I say. I have a chance here, and I don’t need my mother screwing it up.
She finally seems to get the message, because she lets the sun go. It springs up from the edge of the desert, rising rapidly.
“Good night, Mama,” I say.
“Yes, um… rest well,” says Alan.
“Rest?” the mirage dances. It makes the buildings look giddy, for a moment. “There’s no rest in the night, dear. But you know all about that.” All the buildings overhead start turning their glass-eye windows orange with courage; night is coming. “Busy, busy, busy,” Mother murmurs, as the sundisc becomes bisected by the outline of the city above us. Finally, she disappears behind the skyline.
Alan and I exchange a look—his, slightly puzzled, mine embarrassed. Mothers—what can you do?
“Shall we head on then?” asks Alan.
I clear my throat. “To dinner?” I ask.
“Why not,” he says.
Greatly daring, I put my hand in his as we start walking across the Desert.
THE shadows cast by the cacti, the rocks, the red-stained boulders, even the buildings overhead—they grow longer with every breath. The air shudders in fear as the dark shapes start growing heads, fingers, legs, eyes like raptor-teeth.
Alan and I walk faster.
We’re not fast enough—by the time we reach the Restaurant, the line to be seated is annoyingly long, populated by shades like us.
“Oh dear,” says Alan, “this is going to take a while.”
Turning to him, I grin my most troublemaker-smug smile. “Give me a moment,” I say. “I know a guy.”
THE Maître d’ himself leads us to a table.
“And what will you be having today?” he asks.
“What’s good tonight?”
“The double ninth festival is on,” he says, “and somebody just died in Mexico. Excellent atole.”
“I… I think I had the Mexican last time,” says my date.
“Chinese, then,” I decide for us.
“One Hong Kong, right away,” says the Maître d’.
The walls of the restaurant shift, become green paisley with white ricepaper paintings of fat-bellied Adepts. The lights overhead, a string of paper lanterns criss-crossing the beams of the wooden ceiling, illuminate a man in the corner, bowing at a mandolin. The strains of music wrap around us, bringing with them the earthy smell of rice.
A bowl of rice, an upright pair of chopsticks stuck in its center, is placed before my date.
“Um,” I say, “what about me?”
The Maître d’ has been replaced by a bored-looking blonde woman. Her only concession to the atmosphere is a red apron tied over her Pan-Am uniform.
“Sorry,” she says, “no food for you.”
“What about Mexican?”
“No food for you.”
“None at all?” I ask in desperation. There must be something.
She tilts her head to one side, considering. “Maybe some pemmican?”
“Fine,” I say with a sigh. Better than nothing. “Pemmican it is.”
The walls behind me shift now, becoming a wooden palisade. A TV descends from the ceiling overhead. Loud sounds of battle issue from its speakers, followed by sporadic dialogue:
“Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.”
“Oh, they are ghosts.”
A wooden platter is put in front of me, strips of dried meat on it. As I reach for the food, my partner grabs my wrist.
“Don’t,” he says quietly.
“Whyever not?” I ask, trying to twist my hand away from him. His grip is iron.
“Because you’re a vegetarian.” He smiles at me, but does not let go.
“I am?” Really, I am? What a thing to be. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” he says. And he’s right—the smell of the meat makes me sweat, nausea crawling its way up my gullet.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Rest room.”
Immediately, he lets go of my wrist. Rising, I rush to the wooden doors at the far end of the restaurant.
THE rest room has no stalls or urinals, just a large marble sink jutting out of the wall, a tap above the sink, a large gilt-framed mirror above the tap. The breathless nausea retreats as I wash my hands, splash some water on my face. Pinpoints of red, like needle-marks, are appearing on my forearms, my veins blooming like branches, purple-yellow, up my left arm, across my throat, up the side of my chin, to my cheek.
They reach my eyes.
Fuck.
I forgot myself. And Gabe’s Demon or other has Gen-Mai. And Alan’s outside, at the Restaurant, with me. The Restaurant! We need to return to Earth, dead or no, and… Gen-Mai. Gabe still has her. Sweet gods, this is a disaster.
“Alan!” I come charging out of the restroom. “Alan, we need to get back to Earth. That psychopath has Gen-Mai!”
Alan is just putting his chopsticks down, the bowl in front of him empty. “Um,” he says, “I don’t think I can go back. It’s taken us a long time to get this far.”
“Sir, if I may be of assistance,” says the Maître d’, coming upon our table like a whisper, “the exit signs are working.”
Neon-red emergency-exit LEDs light up all around the room. There are doors under every sign.
“That’s new,” I mutter to the Maître d’. “Since when does the Restaurant worry about emergencies?”
“We have to comply with code, sir,” he says reproachfully. “If you’ll follow me?”
The door he leads us to hides a lift behind it. We get inside, and I draw the creaky metal grill across the front. Alan starts cranking the lever. Flakes of gold light surround him, dancing around his head like Tinkerbelle wannabes. The lift descends in little jerks.
WE STAND in front of a two-story brick house. The air smells unfamiliar, of city and leaded gasoline.
My black robes stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of the street—the men around us are dressed in tweed and trousers.
This time has naught to do with me.
Turning to Alan, I notice he is staring at the front door of the house ahead of us, a very strange look on his face.
“I keep coming back here,” he murmurs. “Always.”
Always? “You remember things, then?”
“I doubt it, though our shared lexicon may make it sound like I do. Language, you know, evolved with an implicit assumption of memory. No, I just look at what is going on and do something about it, make a mark, or empty something, then I move, just a little bit, either forwards or backwards, which suggests something new to think about.”
“The entirety of creation is your ticker tape? Alan, you confound me.”
“It’s really very simple.”
For Alan Turing, sure. “So. Um. Do you think we can save—” Impossible things seem to be his speciality.
“No!” he says, turning away from the door of the house. “I’m already dead.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“I’m quite sure,” he says, then raises a hand to wave at someone across the street—a woman in a brown skirt. But she passes by without looking at us.
“Fine.” I say. Grabbing his hand, I drag him away from the house, and into a street, heedless of the intermittent traffic.
“What are you doing?” he asks as we reach the corner of the block.
“If we have to spend the time here,” I say, over my shoulder, “I’d rather do it somewhere else.”
“You don’t have to stay,” he says. “I’ll find a way out eventually, I’m sure.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, abandon the man I love in the middle of the Churchill’s third reign.”
Alan’s sudden stop takes me by surprise, my grip around his arm loosening.
“You’re not in love,” he says, and now there is no hesitation to his voice at all. “You are addicted to a Demon.”
A cab passes right through me as I laugh. “I’m dead,” I say as I finally manage to straighten up. There is a constriction around my lungs, something tight, that tears at me with every breath I take. I decide to ignore it. “A ghost, just like you. No Demons here.”
Alan can’t deny the truth of that, logician that he is. “But I do not love you,” he says.
“I know. So?” Taking up his hand again, I start walking. This time he follows, speeds up, till he is walking beside me.
“So? Don’t you understand? I can never love you!”
“Not as a ghost,” I say. The space around us is blurring with our speed as I stop running, letting time run around us instead. “But eventually. Surely you’re not going to put off your rebirth forever?”
We are in sight of the Thames. This close to the great river, the ground is wet with souls.
As we reach London Bridge, everything around us grows blurry, the buildings and people and automobiles and lampposts wreathed in mist and distance. The surface of the river below us is hidden under a thick cloud of fog.
“Oh, I’m fully intending to be reborn,” begins Alan, “but—”
“Then sink!” I shout as I push him into the fetid river. I wait for the splash that tells me he is in the water before I follow.
THE cold of the river turns to ice just under its surface. Thankfully, the stench is gone. The world rights itself, and London-that-was spans the sky overhead, even as the snow crunches underfoot.
The Desert is far more populated this time; souls cluster thickly, shuffling through the arctic expanse toward a smudge of shadow in the far distance.
Alan and I look down at the ground, white, littered with specks of mica. If I were to drop to my knees and peer closely, I know I would find yet another expanse of snow inside each speck, filled with more souls, shuffling toward darkness.
“So many dead,” I marvel.
“The war,” Alan says, “it will be decades before the backlog processes itself.”
“Ah.”
The shadow eventually resolves into a sprawling train platform, steel poles separating the milling herd of souls from the ones on the platform itself, standing in orderly lines.
Men and women in white uniforms with polished black buttons do duty as conductors, weighing each soul as it passes through the gate. The lineup is very long. And I know if I were to drop to my knees and look down, every speck of snow would be another ground for souls to walk on, toward the station.
“Oh dear,” says Alan, “this is going to take a while.”
Turning to him, I grin my most troublemaker-smug smile. “Give me a moment,” I say. “I know a guy.”
THE Station-Master herself opens up a counter for us. Lighter than a feather, the passenger beside me passes through the turnstile immediately. I, however, make the scales dip.
“Sorry,” says the Station-Master. “Two coins for you, sir.”
Digging frantically in my pockets, I realize I have no coins at all. I close my eyes, feeling the tops of my eyelids with my fingers, just in case. No coins. The other passenger is looking on with concern.
“Here,” says the Station-Master, “let me look at your heart. As long as that’s intact, I can….” She reaches through the collar of my robes, gropes around my chest for a moment. Searing pain stabs at me, like a memory of… something.
The Station-Master’s fingers come away stained with blood.
“Sorry, no,” she says. “You’ll have to do duty.”
WE’RE friends now, the other passenger and I, and out of the kindness of his heart—still intact—he helps me meet my quota.
It is our task to process the dead—he weighs half of them, I take coins from the rest. We send the ones that need to be chest-groped back to the Station-Master’s line, thank you very much, sorry for the inconvenience.
Trains come and go.
We’re very good at sorting souls, and it is two working for one, so there is that. But we’re still not done when the Station-Master walks up to us.
“You can go,” she says, “The timetable has been updated.” She proceeds to wave me through the turnstile, and a train pulls up at the station.
My friend leads me away from the locomotive end of the train, toward a compartment in the middle.
“I always take this one,” he says, by way of explanation.
“Then so shall I,” I smile. As we pass in front of the very last window to the compartment, I catch sight of a frightening man in the glass; black robes, long Power-whitened hair, a sinister smirk on his lips, arched brows over colorless eyes.
Fuck.
I forgot myself. And Alan’s about to board a train to….
“Alan!” I reach out to grab his hand. “We need to get back to Earth. That psychopath has Gen-Mai!”
Alan turns to me, a quizzical look on his face. “That’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” he says.
We are? “We are?”
“Yes,” he replies, a hint of impatience in his voice. “But it’s not working.”
“How can you tell?” I ask.
He points to the side of the compartment—there are hundreds of chalk marks, in groups of five. Alan adds another to the tally.
“You always ask the same questions,” he says.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“Well, come along,” he says, stepping into the train.
NOBODY follows us into this particular compartment. Alan and I sit across from each other on red plastic seats, the width of the train between us. The doors chime and shut, and we start accelerating away from the station.
The train emerges from the underground very quickly. Behind Alan’s head, the scenery outside passes by in a blur of color, autumn reds on trees.
Soon a thump is heard over the sound of the rails, and there is rattling movement in the accordion-like walkway connecting us to the next compartment. The door slides open, a young boy stumbles through with a tray slung around his neck. For a moment the sheer noise of the train is deafening. Then it becomes muted again as the boy slides the door shut.
“Coffee, sirs?” he asks, dressed in shorts and button-down blue shirt, an Oliver Twist-like cap on his head.
“No thank you,” I say politely. “I’m never touching another drop as long as I live.”
“Giving up coffee?” asks Alan. “However will you function?”
We look at each other and break out into laughter. Even the serving boy smiles.
“I’ll find something else,” I say, holding Alan’s gaze. “Love has been known to promote alertness in certain patients.”
Laughter fades. “Demon addiction,” Alan says, “may feel a lot like love.” His eyes go from deep blue to a lighter shade as his pupils contract. Truth has a certain flavor on this train. It taints the air with the faint smell of lilies.
The serving boy sits down beside Alan and hands him a cookie from his tray.
“Gingerbread,” says Alan in surprise, taking a bite.
“And yet,” I say, smiling at my dearly departed mathematician, “I am dead now. And I still love you.”
The serving boy smiles at me, approvingly almost, and tosses me a cookie from his pocket. Chewy chocolate chip. The scent of funeral lilies grows stronger.
“But I never knew you before I died—I cannot love you!”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Think you I know not the ways of the dead?”
Alan breaks eye contact, looks down at his hands. He presents such a depressed picture that I cannot leave the conversation alone.
“So who do you love—no jealousy, I’m honestly curious. You must have loved, when you were alive?”
“Deeply,” he answers, without looking up. “But year by year the memories and fanciful imaginings became more and more unlikely, and one by one they were stripped of any relation to things that were real. All the old friends of my childhood came tumbling out of the closet, and I was left with the dark core of an idea. It moved me deeply. And then I died.”
The words are personal, and their meaning escapes me. But I want to know this dark core of his, this thing he has kept on loving long after death. “And what were you moved by?”
“Complexity. One thing morphing into another. A machine, morphing into a living, breathing friend.”
“You’re in love with the concept of AI?”
“The conceit of AI, perhaps. But yes, I am.”
“How could I ever compete with that?” My tone is carefully playful. Alan doesn’t answer me till the loud noise from the connection is closed off with the sliding door.
“You cannot,” he says, looking into my eyes. His pupils have contracted, his eyes going from a deep blue to a lighter, colder shade.
The young boy shakes his head, hands me the last cookie from his tray—macadamia nut—then stands up and moves off down the length of the train to the next compartment.
I take a breath to reply but the air is choked with the smell of lilies, cloying and thick. Instead of speaking, I am forced to cough and splutter as Alan looks on in concern. By the time I recover, the train has started shuddering as it decelerates. A feedback squeal is followed by a modulated alto voice over the intercom, speaking in Japanese.
“Last station?” I say, looking over at Alan in confusion. “But…”
“The train stops here,” he says. “Every time.”
It shouldn’t. “Why? We paid the fare—it should take us right to the end.”
“We have to walk from here,” says Alan, standing up and moving toward the exit doors.
WE STAND in front of a two-story brick house. The air smells unfamiliar, of city and leaded gasoline.
Alan raises his hand to wave at someone across the street.
A thought occurs. “Alan, did you commit suicide?” Or are some branches of the post-war civil service less civil than advertised?
Alan looks at me, grim. “That’s what Wikipedia says, isn’t it? Must be true.”
“Is it? You can tell me, I can’t do a thing about it.” We both know the dead have no energy for vengeance, not for someone else’s dying.
“I don’t remember,” he says and starts walking.
Better leave it alone, then, if I want to get laid sometime in the next millennium.
A FEW blocks away from the brick house the ground abruptly drops away. There is a sand dune in front of us, waves frozen on its surface at impossibly oblique angles. A signpost is planted into the ground, right at the edge of the sand, a single lone arrow pointing down, into the mist.
“Who goes around putting signposts up?” I mutter.
“I….” My desert guide looks up, then back the way we came. “I have some vague thought that perhaps I did.”
“Goto statements are bad style,” I say to him, grinning.
“Well I had to work with the materials at hand, didn’t I?” He steps forward, turning his body slightly away from me.
“Don’t be like that,” I say. “I was just teasing.”
“Are you coming or not?” he asks.
“And what if I don’t?” I’m in half a mood to sit down right here and not go any farther. Sand deserts are hard walking; all that hot grit finding its way into your shoes, a face full of powdered glass with every gust of wind.
“You know full well I’m not going to leave you alone.” He turns around and holds a hand out to me.
“It’s just,” I say, reaching out to hold his hand, “it’s very steep.” Maybe I can pull him back.
“Does it bother you?” he asks, his expression the most adorable mixture between concern and hesitation., “We can’t go back.”
“We could,” I say. “Everything is possible.” And sand deserts are hard walking; all that hot grit finds its way into your shoes, a face full of powdered glass with every gust of wind.
He looks at me with those frighteningly blue eyes. “Love can move mountains?” he says, a sad smile on his face. “But I am not in love with you.”
There are no other souls around to blame if I let out the howling in me. So instead, I smile back. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that.” But now he has, so I suppose we should move forward.
Dropping his hand, I step into the sand.
WE CLIMB. I teach Alan the cross step required to climb the side of a dune, then the careful considerations of walking along the ridge.
“But I am not in love with you,” says Alan, dismayed, as I catch him from taking a tumble down the ridge. His dignity must be protected; I step back as soon as he has his balance again.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that.” I smile.
“Ah,” he says. “When did you know?” He’s not looking at me but at the horizon, a hand raised to shade his eyes against the glare.
“Unequal intensities,” I reply, mirroring his posture, “create a difference in potential. The hairs on your arms rise with the knowing of it. I’ve always known.”
Finally, he turns around. The sun behind him makes a halo of his hair. “So why did you persist? You know very well the dead have no potential for attachment.”
“I had hoped it would be different. With you. For me.” The sun burns very brightly, and Alan is shifting to one side. Sunspots are dancing in my eyes now, in green and purple.
“That is rather cruel of you, Prince,” he says. He sounds upset. Why in the world would he be upset?
It earns a shrug from me, and an advance down to the base of the ridge. “Yes, well, if I can’t be cruel to myself, who else can I be cruel to?”
“Stop,” says Alan, “Mordred, stop.”
“What?” I ask, turning back. Now it is my turn to retreat a bit, back into the ankle-deep sand at the dune’s base. Deep blue shadow hides this place from the sun. The air is cooler, offering some brief respite.
Alan does not respond, simply slides down the sand and starts skirting the dune in front of us. Now I must push myself to keep pace with him.
In the distance, where the heat rises to meet the shuddering air, there is a very large tent, striped white and blue.
Heat breaks the grains of sand apart, drawing forth the dead. Sand is inert; the dead come slowly, one labored reaction after another. Still, by the time we make it to the Theater, there is an ant colony’s worth of souls lined up ahead of us.
“Oh dear,” says Alan, “this is going to take a while.”
Turning to him, I grin my most troublemaker-smug smile. “Give me a moment,” I say. “I know a guy.”
THE Playwright himself hands us our parts, and pushes us onstage.
“WHAT a strange play this is! Seven mouths to move, but only two of us to say the lines?”
“Let us do this—you take half of them, I’ll take the other.”
“I can play Leonella and The Lady and… that doesn’t work does it?”
“No, you’ll have to play The Tyrant and Leonella and The Page, and I’ll be The Guard and The Lady and Votarius.”
“So who plays Govianus? I don’t want to play Govianus.”
“Neither do I. Let us do this—you take half his lines, I’ll take the other.”
“Fair. Let us begin.”
Repetitive Recursion.
The Lady, a virtuous and tragic Queen.
The Tyrant, the Usurper.
Govianus, the King, Dispossessed.
Votarius, an Intermediary.
Leonella, a Maid-In-Waiting.
The Guard, the Tyrant at a point further in the timeline.
The Page, the Lady via an intermediately.
Act I: The One And The Only.
Scene I: Politics of State.
[Enter The Lady and The Tyrant]
The Tyrant:
Thou art a star.
.
.
.
Scene II: Where Choices Are Made.
The Lady:
Art thou greater than Govianus?
.
.
.
Scene III: A Whole Lot of Running About.
The Lady:
Thou art as tragic as a broken machine.
.
.
.
Scene IV: Reducing the Tyrant to Tears.
The Lady:
Art thou weaker than The Guard?
.
.
.
Scene V: The Slaughter.
The Lady:
Thou art as dark as the difference between thyself and a king.
.
.
.
SCENE VI: My Heart.
The Tyrant:
Open Your Heart!
.
.
.
SCENE VII: There is No Beginning Nor End To The Wheel of Time.
[Exeunt]
WILD applause is heard amidst the cacophony of flash bulbs going off. Blinking, shielding my eyes from the intermittent magnesium-bright light, I look out over the surging crowd. Cameras are held aloft, single lens eyes open in adoration, daguerreotypes without covers and SLRs from the fifties, and here and there, the telltale LCD glow of digital displays.
Something grabs my hand, breaking my hypnotic communion with the bright points in the crowd. Looking down, I see a blue-veined hand in mine, unfamiliar. The skin is warm.
“Shall we leave?”
I look up to meet the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen.
“They’re asking for an encore,” I say, grinning at my lead. We’ve performed many plays here together.
“One more then,” he says, smiling back. “Shakespeare again?”
“Why not?”
We stumble backstage laughing, hand in hand, for the costumers to wait on us. But the crowd is here too.
Screaming women, for the most part, holding pens and markers, held back by theater security. I grab pens without looking, scribble something absently onto whatever is passed to me. Paper, mostly, but one woman wants me to sign her arm. Our eyes meet, my partner’s and mine, over the out-thrust pens, and we exchange a private, sardonic smile.
WE ARE almost done with the autographs when something heavier than paper is handed to me.
“Please, please, could you please sign my iPad?” asks a young child. “I’ve got a picture of you!”
The image on the screen is strange. Arresting. A tight closeup of one of the leads, a man with long white hair and gray eyes, dressed in a ragged black pinstripe suit.
Time passes.
“Hamlet, are you ready?” My partner, all ghosted up in a sheet with holes cut out for eyes, is holding my cardboard sword for me.
“My name,” I say, still looking down into the eyes in the picture. “is Mordred.”
“No, you’re Hamlet. Unless you want to play Ophelia? Could switch it up if you’re bored—I do Rosencrantz every other day.” The ghost beckons, a nervous set to its posture.
With a sigh I walk up to him and rip the sheet off. “Alan,” I say. “You’re Alan. And we have to get back to Earth.”
He looks at me. “Already?”
“Yes.”
The crowd backstage loses interest as soon as Alan takes off the sheet, turning instead to another couple emerging from the dressing rooms. A contemporary piece, the next one, I think—they’re dressed in the height of pre-Napoleonic formal wear.
Unnoticed, Alan and I slip out through a fire exit and into an alley at the back of the theater. Soot-covered brick rises to the two sides of us for an uncountable number of floors. The small strip of visible sky overhead boils with leaden clouds.
“This way,” says Alan.