The interior of the town car is dark as a cavern, cramped by the thickness of the armor of the hull. No sound, there, but for the muffled creak of leather as Thales shifts in his seat. The windows, set to black, don’t show him his reflection.
As the car accelerates, the crash seat folds itself around him with a ginger, almost maternal, precision. The map of Venice Beach on the dimmed seatback display shows him leaving the hotel’s garage, passing beyond the last of its defenses—there’s a faint vibration as the car’s weapons come online. There will be other cars, he knows, pulling out beside him, empty and identical, a fleet of sacrificial distractions, and in each, he imagines, there is a false, other Thales, bound for someplace else.
His father died in a car like this, Thales in the seat beside him. He tries to summon the memory, but of course there’s nothing, just an absence, and images from after the fact, which is probably a kindness. That car’s armament was the same as this one’s, but his mother says the risk is less, with his father gone, that now his uncles are the focus of the violence. (Even so he feels her constant tension, her new fear of strangers.)
In the weeks after the attack, she’d barely let him leave their suite, had spent all day reading to him and holding his hand; once, when he was having a clear day, she’d taken him to a tiny, beautiful house she’d built as a young woman in the mountains over LA, back when she still worked as an architect, but recently she’s been staying in her room—he suspects she’s been drinking—and once again he’s going to the clinic alone. He doesn’t have his math book, so he closes his eyes, sinks deeper into the seat, wonders what the odds are that he’ll reach the clinic whole.
* * *
He wakes with a start as the car turns and the mini-fridge clinks. Opening it, he finds two splits of champagne, one open and half-empty, its carbonation fading—his brothers must have been using the car. As he shuts the fridge the car stops, the door sighing open onto too much light, and as he covers his eyes he’s momentarily convinced that he’s denying himself the specifics of his death, but in fact there’s no ambush, just the clinic’s courtyard.
The car is parked in a garden of raked sand and a few irregular stones, placed with studied randomness, and low pines whose wind-bent forms suggest endurance in the face of extremity. The curved walls are high and sheer, defining a cylinder of air and light; he looks straight up into dust motes burning in the sun. Behind the car, the foot-thick steel gate closes soundlessly, sealing him in.
A girl in clinic livery approaches—young and pretty, he notes distantly—her posture conveying both welcome and submission. He wonders if the better clinics have always been modeled on elegant hotels, perhaps to conceal their underlying horror.
Within, the clinic is cool and dark and the girl says they’ve lowered the lights for him, to minimize the potential for—she frowns—disturbance; she looks him full in the eyes and her face, which might hold pity, is a landscape of uncertainty and of a significance into which he feels himself falling and though he looks immediately away the migraine flickers and he finds himself staring into a twisted blur of curvature and fangs but he exhales carefully and stills his mind and the blur ripples and resolves into a white porcelain vase with blue Chinese dragons on its stand by the reception desk.
The girl sends him down a corridor alone and he starts to feel steady, almost poised, probably capable of facing the morning, and this isn’t least because the tessellations of the floor’s tile are predictable without being intricate or even interesting and then, deep within the clinic, he opens a door onto an office as enshadowed as a tomb where the only color is the muted red of a Persian rug on the weathered hardwood floor. His surgeon is there, behind his desk, perfectly still, studying his phone, and Thales notes the clarity with which the little light picks out his features.
“Is it more physical therapy today?” Thales asks, feeling edgy, trying for a weary familiarity.
The surgeon says, “Actually, I have some questions for you.” The lack of greeting or preamble is off-putting, somehow worrisome, and then, like a conjurer, the surgeon produces a handful of small metal objects and sets them on the table. Their surfaces glitter in the narrow halogen beam, their faces reflecting the room, and the other objects’ reflections, which starts to draw him in. When the physician says, “What do you see here?” he rallies and says, “The platonic solids, cast in metal, maybe tungsten, each about four inches on the longest axis, about the length of the last two joints of a finger.”
“Good,” says the physician, and Thales scans him for signs of hope or satisfaction, but he remains impassive as he puts a tablet on the desk. He says, “I need you to interpret this for me,” and plays a video.
It shows a close-up on a woman—handsome, young, or actually not young but young-looking—and she’s sitting in some kind of sloped theater by herself, her phone in her hands, her thumbs moving. She has a thousand-yard stare, or perhaps a million—it’s a private face, and a vulnerable one, reflecting an absolute immersion, and the light playing over her is so bright it looks like she’s in a cinema, and if she is then what’s the film that’s gripped her so completely? He could try to explain all this, but he’s tired, and he wants to go home, to the hotel if he must, ideally to Rio, though the Rio house won’t quite come to mind. Nothing much is happening on the screen, though for some reason it’s hard to look away, perhaps because of the tension in her face. For a moment he wonders if this is meant to be art, though it seems way beyond the surgeon’s likely tolerance for the avant-garde. He rallies, finds words, and with an effort says, “She’s in a theater. She’s maybe about forty. I don’t think she knows that anyone’s watching.”
“Why is she there?” asks the surgeon, with an irritating serenity that reminds Thales of the Provisional Authority immigration police. “What does she want?”
“I have no idea,” he says, as politely as he can, and he’s ashamed of his evident petulance as he says, “Maybe you could explain to me why you’re asking me these questions?”
“I’m evaluating your prospects.”
“Prospects?” Thinking how his father had wanted him to study law instead of math and physics, which he’d said were respectable but essentially middle class.
“I need to assess the severity of your impairment. Your implant saved your life, but created new problems, and we’ve come to a crossroads in your treatment.”
Thales tries to interrupt but the surgeon talks over him. “There are two protocols. In one, we wind down treatment and transition you back to a fully independent life. Unfortunately, this option is available only to the rarest, highest-performing patients. The other option, the one for most patients, is, in essence, to keep you as comfortable as possible through the course of your decline, so please do your best in the testing today.”
It’s absurd, and so sudden—he wants to call his mother, get a second opinion, maybe even call the family counsel, who must have offices in the U.S., though in the stress of the moment the firm’s name eludes him, and why in god’s name haven’t they told him this before? He immediately sees that the answer is that they didn’t want to worry him in vain, and so, in the space of this brief and quiet chat, his life has been transformed, and to resist already seems as futile as throwing punches at the wind. The surgeon says, “Here’s the next one.”
The tablet plays a clip showing an old man sitting at a wide desk. It’s shot from above, backlit, low-res, maybe from a security camera. The old man reminds Thales of his father’s political friends with their immaculately cultivated health, his age less in his face than in his stillness.
A woman enters the frame, very slight, her hair long and dark.
“It looks like you’re going to make it,” she says, sitting on his lap, but he says nothing.
“It looks like you’re going to make it,” she says again, coaxingly, as though trying to persuade a child to accept good news. “Are you happy?”
The old man says, “Once upon a time there was a king who owned everything but was afraid to die. But there was an angel, who lived far away in the northern aurora, and one night it spoke to him from the dark, saying it could grant eternal life, but its speech was all but unintelligible, less like speech than the Arctic wind. The king found a seeress who, having passed through the kingdom of death, spoke the tongues of both angels and men, for he didn’t know if the angel was from the hosts of the righteous or the fallen, and he knew he would need her when it came time to enslave them. The king and the angel bargained, and it finally gave him what he wanted, taking, in its avarice, half his treasure, for the angels spun palaces of molecular gold in the high empyrean. The king thought, Now, finally, I alone of all the men who have ever lived need not fear time. Replete in this knowledge, he closed his eyes and slept, unworried, for the first time since he’d been a boy. Waking, he found that everyone he knew had died. Looking out the window of his tower he saw that his kingdom was buried in ice.”
Thales draws breath to start to try to unpack the parable but his eyes are full of golden filaments hanging in the sky and the seeress hovering at the doorway of the kingdom of death, and that, he thinks, is the gate I have passed through, but, far from speaking the tongues of angels, I can barely speak the tongues of men, and he imagines himself turning and going back through the doorway while the seeress watches with jaded curiosity, and all the while the angel is trying to ask him if the king can be trusted but can’t find the words.
The surgeon is watching him so he tries to find something to say but now the tablet glows with migraine light, as though revealed in its insubstantiality, and the couple’s faces have become membranes without meaning. He’s going to plead for more time or another chance or try to invoke his family’s power but the surgeon says, “No,” shaking his head, and Thales can already see that his resistance is futile, and then the surgeon says, “But you’re not alone.”
“You know, I think I am,” says Thales, trying to swallow his tears.
“I want you to succeed,” the surgeon says. “I’ll boost your working memory. Let’s see if that helps.”
“Through my implant?” Thales says as the surgeon’s fingers trace patterns over his tablet’s screen.
The glare diminishes, but Thales says, “Everything feels the same.”
“Look again,” says the surgeon, and when Thales looks back at the screen the video is playing again and he finds he feels more awake and sees the significance of all the details, in fact it’s almost pressing at him how she clings to him, how he’s adjusted his legs to accommodate her weight, how two of his fingers have found the exposed skin of the small of her back, how plain she’d be but for her clothes and the tenderness in her face when she touches him.
“I’m so sorry you won’t be with me,” the old man says. “I did try.”
“Maybe you’ll figure it out.”
“I refuse to proffer false hope.”
“Well, I’m happy,” she says, but like he’s the one who needs comfort.
“But how shall I get along without you through all the time to come? How shall I ever find anyone as dear?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“But you are, and in about ten years,” the old man says, making an effort to say this matter-of-factly.
“Ten years is a lifetime,” she says.
“Ten years is an eye-blink. It will pass, and then comes the next thing.”
“For you, there will always be a next thing,” she says. “It’s what you wanted.”
The old man stares into space, then says, “When I was a young man I went to Iceland. I had no real reason—I just wanted to go—I liked their poetry and I wanted to see the world. It was the end of the season, the summer fading, and I rented a car and left Reykjavík, the city, their only city, then, behind. Now to think of Iceland is to think of software but back then there was nothing, just the empty island and the glaciers, remote and menacing, the waste at the heart of a place no one went. It was already evening and I didn’t know where I was going, didn’t even know where I’d sleep, and I was afraid, hurtling along the ring road, as I lost the light. I hadn’t even remembered to bring a coat. It was painterly, the graded shadows of the mountains, the color of distance, the ghosts of shape.”
“Now you can go back.”
“That Iceland is gone. It’s arable now. Cultivated. All tourist traps and code factories. But that’s not the point. It’s how I feel. This future I’m approaching.”
“I’ve stood between you and the world for a while now,” she says, “and I’d do it forever, if I could, but soon enough you’ll have to get along without me.”
“The world doesn’t suit me.”
“Then you’ll reshape it.”
“And if I can’t, then that other door is open.”
“Other door?”
“Pills. Heights. I don’t much like guns. These are the doors that lead out of eternity.”
“I don’t like to hear these things,” she says.
“I didn’t tell you, did I,” the old man says, recollecting himself. “They’ve changed the terms. Akemi no longer suffices—now they want Ms. Sunden too. Not what I had expected to come of her visit, and I can’t imagine she told us much of the truth, but it doesn’t matter. There’s just the one game in town, so I’ll touch my cap and hop to it.”
“Your good friend Irina,” the woman says bitterly.
“She’s interesting. Unique. An intermediate kind of thing. You can’t begrudge me my interesting friends—I’ve been collecting them since before you were born.”
“Wonderful. She can keep you company through the ages.” Her voice sounds toxic and artificial.
“We’ll see. She’s essentially mercenary, and her price is within my means. Hiro keeps encouraging me to take more direct action, but I’m not yet prepared to accept his standard of ethics. I haven’t told you about Hiro, have I? He handles my disavowables. His résumé is a demon’s. You’ll never meet him. In any case, most likely that will work out, one way or another, and most likely Hiro will get the phone, last night’s debacle notwithstanding, and soon after that I’ll have no real limits. I’ll hold more power than any one man since, oh, Genghis Khan. I’ll be able to make things whole, and I’ll have everything I’ve ever wanted, except for one thing.”
As the old man grips her hand the scene and in fact the clinic seem to be floating away and Thales realizes how tired he is, more tired than he’s ever been before, and the migraine is coming, and though he knows he should keep fighting to try to make an impression on the surgeon it’s no longer in him to act and he slumps in his chair feeling that the clinic and the surgeon are remote and insubstantial and have nothing to do with him.
Somewhere, the surgeon is saying, “I need to make changes but I’m not sure where.”
Thales is distantly aware of the surgeon doing something on his tablet and then, spontaneously, Thales vividly recalls the evening light on the brick wall of an empty storefront on the Westside. The surgeon does something else, and Thales recalls the shifting weight of a glass of water in his hand.
“What did you experience?” asks the surgeon.
“A wall. A glass of water,” Thales says, surprised out of his torpor. “What are you doing?”
“So that was episodic and sensory memory. Let’s try again.”
The physician does something else to his phone, and Thales curls up in his chair, wholly spent.
“What was that like?” asks the surgeon, but Thales has pulled his knees to his chest and now sees nothing but black and grey moiré patterns and in fact feels nothing but a flicker of interest in the logic of his dissolution.
“There,” says the surgeon. “Maybe that’s it. Let’s see if it works.”
Thales is suddenly wide awake. “What did you do?” he asks, though in the moment of asking he knows, in fact it’s obvious that the surgeon is accessing his thoughts through his implant, and in his clarity he realizes that his clarity is new, and presumably artificial, and he wonders how long he’ll get to keep it.
“Good,” says the surgeon. “I’ve locked it at high activation. Now we can work.” Thales nods and forces himself to smile, the better to conceal his burgeoning anger at this casual manipulation of the structures of his innermost being, though perhaps this is mere petulance and he should tolerate what’s necessary for his recovery, but now in his acuity it’s like his thoughts are tumbling forward and he sees that the surgeon’s story doesn’t hold together—the protocols amount less to treatment than to a veiled threat and if the videos with the strangers were part of a clinical test they’d probably feel anodyne and as though they’d been scripted for some particular purpose instead of essentially opaque and highly specific—and Thales feels like he’s become a detective sifting the evidence of the world as he searches for a plausible motive behind the surgeon’s actions; it seems like the surgeon wants him to be biddable and inclined to answer questions but the only things that are certain are that information is still missing and that the surgeon has lied.