When I see the water falling, flowing over and through everything, it confirms something we have known subconsciously all along, that the world itself is a river and gravity has us all, destined for the ocean.
She pulls her coat over yesterday’s clothes and walks into the downpour, though it is less now. As the morning warms gaps open in the gray-clouded sky. The wet air moves with a cool breeze against the skin of her cheeks. Always it rains, this solemn storm. For years it comes down, weeping sulfuric over the tragedy of the Earth. Was this your plan, Dad? she thinks. You know it overran rivers and opened lakes when the ocean heaved. Whole cities met atlantean fates as dams failed and the water rushed forth. As if within the glaciers were every sin of man, their dissolution brought reckoning. Even the scientists, activists and environmentalists were unprepared for the catastrophes of the twenty-first century. The water never stopped. Nuclear dawn set fire to the seas and refugee nations burned. Rivers ran with the bodies of the poor.
Now plants and machines clean the skies, but still there is so much. The Earth is turning. The atmosphere is huge and resilient. Mankind survives, rising even still, along for the ride. I thought we might choke, she remembers. Change is inevitable, like a wave it answers only to gravity. Time doesn’t notice my pain, it hardly winces at genocide—a stone on the tide. I’m but a firefly in the wind. ‘Swim’ is all it says.
Some eulogy for men . . .
She holds one hand to her side, feeling a crack in her ribs. I think this might be when I lose my mind. You were my light, Orion, in this broken world. Migrants came in rags to the renaissance cities. Science was a star in the vastness of our mistakes. Of course there was no plan, Dad. I know. The world is blind as we tumble through the dark. In this year, so long since that rapture, death is impossible. It was. Yet something in us is still broken. Will it always be? We don’t even know what it is. The wind moves, and she wonders desperately if angels could ever truly live, behind the cold sky.
It wasn’t simply men that died, when Atlas heaved. Superstition and greed met consequence head on, so that only science was left standing. There was a rift in this that Harmony felt perpetually in the middle of. There are few answers yet, in all our books, she would think, but I know that god is in these trees. I feel it. There is awareness in the universe, if there is awareness in me. Whatever it is that the soul is made of, emotions and ideas, passion and love, it could be recycled, like the body. Is intention, like atoms, immortal?
Pain’s a waste, she pleads now, fighting to just breathe as she walks through the rain, pulling her black hood down. Orion is in the clouds playing vids, in a fellatio orgy with Siddhartha and a dozen pretty girls. Harmony almost laughs for a second, but she cannot let it out, for tears hang on its end.
The world has too many.
Too many dreams in this river.
There’s no escaping that he has no problems now, superstitions of purgatory notwithstanding. Orion has no fear and no end. Does he have everything—anything? He doesn’t have me. Gazing up at the sky she cannot even imagine a jeweled city in the darkness of those celestial currents.
So much death, she thinks. So many. So many. So many have died. So many have slept through life. Too much pain. What is it to you? She wishes god could feel her pain—like a flood, rushing from her every pore, from her eyes, filling her throat. It’s not enough. I don’t have that many tears. The rain quickens.
Electrocars swim past.
The Integration Complex is unsympathetic, white, low and wide, on a great golden hill rising into the mountains, at the edge of the industrial sector of Halcyon. Harmony has never been there before, and she is the only one there now. At her back, on the path, the city softly shines. A gold light, in the shape of a bare cross, glows over the black glass door. A gentle voice grants her passage, “What’s lived is not undone.” Inside, lights come on to guide her. Perfectly silent, they ignite along a rail ahead, and stealthily fade when she has passed. She is the only life in the windowless halls, and so now steps softly, passing closed doors.
Coming beneath an archway and through a tinted automatic door, she enters a rounded chamber. It is a large, empty, silver-blue oval, and there she finds him, alone. He rests before her on a plain steel stretcher, pale, uncovered in his casual clothes. Even now he looks strong. For a second she expects him to breathe.
The body does not move.
Approaching his side, she slows her pace, able to see fine details in his ashen cheek. A tremor runs through her as she reaches for his hand. It is blackened and cold, and she jerks away at the first touch. Staring at the tubes running from his wrists, she wonders what they are filling him with. As she continues to waver an image flickers through her brain of their most recent night together. His arms on the bed beside her were strong; he was in her body, filling her. Unable to tear her eyes from his vacant face, his apathetically straight mouth, she aches to scream.
She backs away from the empty form, turns, and hastily flees the silent violence of his oppressive, sterile tomb. The light glows ahead of her down the hall.