Just the engine’s roar, the cone of light juddering over the black road before him, the dust in the light. Accelerator floored, the engine redlining, but despite the speed Thales feels like he’s floating, like nothing is changing or ever will till the car rounds a bend and there below him, all at once, the city’s sweep, its highways’ lights. For a moment he knows he’s dreaming but it slips away as his gaze settles on the spires of downtown where a gap among the towers implies some wide public square, the kind where freezing winds rush unimpeded over the treeless fields and the snow crunches underfoot as he makes his way toward the ice-choked creek to wait for a woman he doubts will ever really come, and now the bitter cold and the sepia stains on the Palladian facades tell him this isn’t Los Angeles at all but some other, more ancient city. In fact the buildings are rotting, reverting to geology under their furs of vegetation, and over these ruins rises a tower, black even in the dawn’s light, and his heart rises as his gaze follows it up to where its heights are lost in the celestial blue of morning, and the answers he needs are at its apex, if only he can reach it, and he’ll hunt it down the nights, and he’ll hunt it down the years, but he keeps losing his way among the cul-de-sacs and the endless winding streets, and it’s not long until he realizes he’s in the city’s derelict periphery, and hasn’t seen the tower in a long time, for the city is many cities, concentric and innumerable, and he’s forever lost the core.
No, he thinks, as he hastens past the shattered husks of strip malls and favelas like concrete cancers rising into the air, for there must be a way, as there’s always a way, and now he feels like a bird of prey, detached and intent, like pure perspective circling over the city, its thousands of square miles glittering vacantly in the sun, vast and unmeaning, but then he finds something in that ocean of emptiness, locks on, is falling …
It’s pure structure, what he’s found, and somehow mathematical, but he finds he can’t articulate it, not even a little, and it’s like the feeling of watching waves breaking, before the implant, a riot of form of which nothing can be said, and it’s terrifying, because his inarticulacy could be the effect of his injuries, which would mean he’s falling apart, so he compels himself to focus, and manages to tell himself that what he’s found is like a map, one showing what’s under the surface of things, and now his steps are echoing coldly in a windowless concrete corridor, some nameless liminal unfinished space, and he comes to an alcove lit by a flickering bulb in a dusty cage where EXIT TO CENTRAL is stenciled on a steel door in black letters. No handle, and there’s a screen by the door but it doesn’t wake. He presses his ear to the door, hears what could be static or maybe the sea. He steps back out into the corridor which branches and rebranches again and he’s wondering where he’s going when he finds another alcove with another door, this one marked SERVICE ACCESS and it opens at his touch …
The dream changes abruptly and he wonders if his implant is working again, because there in his mind is an expanse of frozen time, the memories of a young woman in a hotel room with her boyfriend, and he sees their interval all at once like a four-dimensional solid—there’s the stark winter light, how it changes by the second, the awkwardness of their lovemaking, how their pulses are visible in their flesh, the duvet changing shape under the incidental stresses, and he’s unmoved by their intimacy except in that it seems fitting that life should strive to chain forward through time. There are other spans of static memory and, there, a point of motion, a vortex drawing innumerable shards and splinters of memory and fitting them together like the pieces of a mosaic, and as he looks into its churning core there’s a flash impression of misery and determination and the streets of Los Angeles slipping past behind a town car’s windows. Now he sees another vortex (flash of verdant, manicured garden, its walls several stories high, security drones tracing lazy arcs in the air over the fountains) and then still another, which makes him flash on frozen time and a view of vortices and with a sense of rising through levels he gasps, sits up, is awake.
He’s sitting on the floor of an elevator in the St. Mark. Floors tick by—the elevator is ascending toward the penthouse, where his family has their suite. He’s not sure how he got here—did he have a syncope while he was trying to go home? The dream’s unease is still with him, and his fear of finding proof of his decline. “Major cranial ablation” had been the surgeon’s memorable turn of phrase. He thinks of the disturbed woman who’d accosted him, how she’d been radiant with unhappiness, and wonders how she wound up living on her own, apparently abandoned by her family; at least this hasn’t happened to him—he’ll find his mother, tell her what’s happening, see if she knows what to do.
The elevator stops, opens onto the verdure of the walled rooftop garden, its smell of its wet moss and earth. It’s like an opulent, manicured jungle. The path to their suite winds off under the branches.
The scanner pulses green under his palm and the front door opens onto a clutter of his brothers’ suitcases, scattered clothes, a sand-encrusted surfboard, but no one seems to be home. In the hall before his mother’s room are architectural drawings of ancient buildings and Piranesi’s studies of nonexistent prisons, and though her door is closed there are faint sounds within that could be voices—she’s probably lying in bed with the blinds drawn, listening to books. “Mom?” he calls, sotto voce, suddenly reluctant to violate the stillness. “It’s me. Can I come in?”
No response. Perhaps she’s asleep. He knocks—still nothing. Maybe he should let her sleep but he knocks again, and then louder, and it occurs to him that he has yet to see the inside of her room—in fact he doesn’t think he’s seen her since his collapse. “Mom?” he says again, trying the doorknob—locked, so she must be within. “I think someone recognized me. I think we’re in trouble.” He smacks the door with the ham of his fist which is rude but still there’s no response so she’s either asleep or deliberately ignoring him. Frustration overcoming manners, he kicks the door, then kicks it harder, then harder still. The hotel’s interior doors are thin, built more for privacy than security, and he’s winding up for the kick that will break it down when the door swings gently open.
He feels profound relief as he steps into the dark room and the words comes pouring out as he says, “Something’s gone wrong. There was a stranger who I think followed me from the clinic and I think she has the implant dementia but she seemed to know who I was and she asked me what I remember but I remember almost nothing, and at the clinic they told me things were going badly, but it felt like a threat. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mom?” As his eyes adjust he sees that the darkness isn’t absolute, that there’s a little light from a TV, dimmed by a blanket thrown over the screen, that that’s where the voices are coming from, though his mother hates television, won’t watch it even on long flights, and he wonders if she’s herself these days.
He pulls the blanket off of the TV like a magician doing a trick and on the screen there’s a religious show, the sweating preacher apoplectic and pleading as websites and fragments of scripture scroll by. In the full glare of the television’s light he sees that the room has no bed, and no books, just an old couch covered in duvets, and gin bottles, mostly empty, scattered on the floor among half-burned votive candles adorned with beaming Jesuses and serene Virgins, though his mother despises religion, and there’s no good apparent explanation—has she for some reason given the room to a maid? There’s no sense of her presence at all; he knows she’s been drinking since they came to the Protectorates but he can’t believe she’s this far gone.
Back outside the garden looks ancient, and threatening, a residual pocket of the Mesozoic just biding its time; he resists an urge to look behind the cycads. He listens to the wind moving the branches and it occurs to him that it’s late and he could go inside and to bed and assume everything will have resolved itself by morning but he still has the lucidity he’s felt since the clinic, which makes him feel like a kind of ethereal detective, and sleep seems less important than finding his mother, who’s probably in her house in the mountains, because he doesn’t know where else she’d go in Los Angeles.