The crush leaving the train car carries Kern along, and if it had been a time for picking pockets he’d have done just fine. As the press slows before the escalator he scans the faces for bad intentions but no one meets his eyes and almost all of them are absorbed in their phones. A gaggle of teenage girls, mostly blond, skin glowing, all in the same red tracksuits, get on the escalator behind him; their loud, careless voices are audible even over the shriek of the departing train, the hot wind of its passage washing over him. The girls laugh noisily as they rise out of darkness into garish light.
He steps off the escalator into a tunnel of milky, translucent glass, like a vast elongated soap bubble; everyone else strides by him purposefully. A dispassionate, oddly beautiful female voice that seems to come from everywhere enunciates an endless list of cities, numbers, letters, times. There are tall video panels every twenty feet showing fog rolling over the bridges, raindrops iridescent on trembling bamboo leaves, the red light of a desert morning moving over a woman’s tranquil face.
The tracksuited girls sweep by, and each panel, at their approach, switches to a juddering montage of well-dressed, feral-looking women glaring haughtily at the camera, an ad, he realizes, for makeup. A fat man with a Cognitive Openware T-shirt, wearing those chunky sneakers that programmers seem to like, gets an ad for Lotus, at which Kern brightens—Fist of the Southern Lotus, starring Montana Chiao, is one of his favorite movies—but there’s no kung fu, just a brightly colored little car that looks like a robotic piece of candy. At Kern’s approach the panels revert to fog enveloping bridges.
The tunnel branches, blinking signs pointing the way to things that mean nothing to him. The ghost says, “You want ticketing.”
The ticketing hall is the biggest room he’s ever seen; the roof, high overhead, looks like it’s billowing away. Long serpentine lines lead to booths where uniformed women, mostly, talk to worn-looking customers, and he’s reminded of the long queues for Red Cross vaccinations. Five feet away are two cops in body armor with machine guns, one with a mustache and the other a girl, drinking coffee from paper cups marked Koffee Kiosk—the girl’s eyes light on him, move on.
Windows maybe a hundred feet high frame the runway and the taxiing planes, visible in the dark as complexes of points of light in motion, and sometimes lights on the tarmac reveal the graceful curve of fuselage, and it’s like looking into an aquarium, or perhaps the depths of the sea, with huge creatures sliding by, intent on their own inscrutable business, utterly indifferent to the other side of the glass.
There are people sleeping on benches and the floor before the windows, using backpacks and hand luggage as pillows. The ghost says, “A lot of kids with layovers camp out here, so you can expect to be left alone. So. This is a decision point. Where do you want to go? It can be anywhere in the world.”
He’s not sure how to respond, can’t think of a place that means anything.
“If you’re at a loss,” she says, “then how about Vancouver?”
“What would I do there?”
“What would you do anywhere? You have enough money for some very good hotels. And anyway, when the heat dies down in a few weeks, you’ll be coming to LA to get me, right?”
“Of course,” he says.
“You could go to Franz Josef Land,” she says. “It’s the party spot now, what Singapore used to be.”
The windows are mirrors and he automatically starts to shadow box, just indicating the moves so as not to draw attention, and remembers that his life is dedicated not to survival but to perfection. “Thailand,” he says. “I want to go to Thailand. I can train there. They invented kickboxing. I’ve never had a real coach.”
“There you go,” she says. “Thailand. Your dollar’ll go farther, and it’s sure out of the way.”
* * *
“Window or aisle?” asks the gate agent, who seems kind. Kern regards her blankly.
The ghost is starting to speak when the agent says, “I mean, would you like to sit next to the window, or next to the aisle? If you sit by the aisle you have a little more room, but you might like the window—the dawn over the ocean is something to see.”
“Window, please.”
Her fingers fly over the keyboard, her proficiency reminding him of Lares. “You depart for Bangkok in fourteen hours. Checking bags?”
“No.”
“If you happen to have forgotten anything, there’s a store in the domestic concourse that sells clothes, toiletries, even luggage. It’s open all the time.”
* * *
Lying huddled under a bench, he turns his face to the wall and pulls his new sleeping bag close. The ghost had said to sleep, that it was as safe as a police station, but there are voices, footsteps, a constant sense of people in motion. He looks up at stapled fabric, aluminum struts. On the wall before his eyes is an ethernet port, like a little ziggurat of negative space. He roots through his new canvas carryall—there are his new clothes, a new tablet and a multipack of cables that should have a charger for the phone—finds a T-shirt and puts it over his eyes.
He remembers following Kayla one night down silent streets of San Francisco, lit by lamps and the fog’s faint glow, how she said they had to keep moving because she was searching for something, had been searching a long time, though he didn’t think she really was, it was more like poetry than that there was something she actually needed to find, and he felt like it was his work to watch over her in the night. She said she was in search of the miraculous, and she knew it was there because someone found it long ago, this Boss Djinn Adder, who sounded like the villain in a martial arts movie, but she’d said he was actually Dutch, and an artist, who was lost at sea. And now the memory has graded into a dream where they’ve come at last to a long, empty beach under a lightening sky and sit on the cold sand watching the breakers rumble in. She starts to cry, and he tries, helplessly, to comfort her, and since they’re alone he pulls off her jeans, which she tolerates, though she isn’t really paying attention as he opens her legs, is just watching the sky over his shoulder. He watches her face, and is happy, but then he looks away just for a second, and when he looks back she’s gone. Sand falls from his hands and face as he searches blindly among the crumbling dunes.
“Hey now,” says the ghost. “Wake up, okay? Wake up. You’re having a bad dream. Hush now. People will hear you.”
He returns to the present, though he knows the dream will be there if he closes his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says, blinking, waking up fast; he tries to think of a question to ask. “Tell me about Los Angeles. How you broke in, if you did.”
“Well, that’s a story,” she says, and he wills her to keep talking; her voice is hushed and intimate, a private voice, and he lets it envelop him, feeling almost like she’s talking to herself, like all these words have been pent up and waiting. “It was the day the LAPD officially disbanded. Not that it really mattered, as the emergency administration was already in place, but it felt like the end, and capital was fleeing the city, and I was on the verge of giving up. I was with my friend Sonia, that day, and she was taking my picture in what had been downtown Santa Monica. An aesthete, was Sonia. She kept saying how the light loved me, how I was so perfect I almost disappeared. The low waves broke behind her, washing the street, the white foam dissolving on the crumbling asphalt. She said she was making a record of the city’s last days. You’d think people would be scared, but most of them were just giddy—there were celebrations that day, and riots, and they were expecting fires. The sun was just setting when the first fireworks went off over the water, the sails of the yachts illuminated in the flashes, and the concussions ricocheted off the wall at my back, and I smiled from my emptiness as her camera strobed.
“The wind brought sparks that blinked out in the surf and Sonia said, ‘It’s starting.’ I looked up toward the hills, saw grey columns of smoke rising. I looked back, was blinded by more flashes, and as the sun set the fireworks began in earnest, bursting over the water, their reports a continuum, their light showing Sonia, intent on her camera, absorbed in her imagery.
“So much beauty, she said, as things come apart. I thought of the massifs of dirty white smoke that filled the skies when I drove west on the road through the fires on the plains. How the fire lit the night. They’d said it was the last fire, on the radio, that the ecology was changing, had changed, that the plains were desert now.
“She had a car, a drone, armored, a hand-me-down from her father, who used to be a famous director. I was falling asleep but Sonia got excited when she thought she heard a bullet ricochet off the hull. As always, she had pills. I remember picking them off her palm, the muted colors like codes or flags or the neon light of cities. I swallowed them dry and my mind flared, then darkened.
“I wouldn’t have said anything, without the pills. I’ve forgotten most of it, thank god, but the gist was that I didn’t have the money to survive, or to leave, and her father was rich, and I would live anywhere, and maybe he could use me in something, she knew how the camera loved me, and at some point I saw she’d stopped listening, was staring out the window at the smoke in the sky. She was sorry, she said, but her trust was nearly depleted, and her father had lost his money when the markets fell—they kept up appearances but there wasn’t much left.
“When we got to the yacht I took more pills. I felt like I’d fallen into my own private film noir. It was a party, mostly her father’s friends. It was dark, on the yacht, I don’t know why, just a few candles burning. From the prow I watched the city lights recede.
“She introduced me to her godfather, but a wall had come down between me and the world and I made the decision to slip over the side. I had a water glass of vodka and the water was warm and I thought it might be pleasant, and I thought I might not notice it at all, and the world seemed flattened, somehow, the fireworks’ nebulae almost close enough to touch, and I wondered how they’d look as I drifted down toward the reef. A beautiful death, I thought, one that might become a story.
“But Sonia found me and took the glass from my hand and brought me to the back of the boat where she said there was someone I needed to meet. It was very dark and at first I didn’t see him, he was sitting so still. Sonia whispered in his ear and left and he asked to see my face so I used the light from my phone though I couldn’t bear for him to look at me, and I knew my fear would show, so I became someone else, which allowed me to be present and to smile charmingly when he told me I was beautiful.
“He said, ‘Sonia tells me you desire entrée and will take extraordinary steps to get it,’ and though his voice was cold I sat on his knee and held my face inches from his but he said, ‘No. Not that. Not just that. It’s actually much more than that. I consider it my duty to lay it out clearly.’
“He said he needed my memories, that he’d use them to make me a new kind of star. I’d have to get surgery so they could put in an implant to harvest them. He said that it was dangerous, that some of the patients didn’t last long, but if I wanted to risk it he’d open every door for me. He said some of the implants helped you remember things, but mine wouldn’t, because he wanted me to be normal.”
“How was a memory implant going to make you a new kind of star?” Kern asks, because she seems to have lost her flow.
“He told me not to worry about it. I didn’t want to press him, but I thought maybe it was some way for an audience to feel what I felt directly.” Kern imagines strangers watching his own thoughts, their reactions veering between boredom and disgust. “I didn’t mind so much,” she says. “It’d just be another way of acting. Acting is always like being totally naked, if you do it right.”
“So what was your answer?” asks Kern.
“I said yes. Of course I said yes. Are you sure you want to hear this? I don’t have anyone else to talk to and I’m afraid I’m rambling on.”
“No. Talk. Please,” says Kern, eyes closed, drifting.
“His assistant was with him on the yacht. She was also his girlfriend, or at least wished she was. I knew she loathed me like only an older, plainer woman can loathe a younger, prettier rival, and that she resented being a cliché, but what scared me was her pity.
“That night he took me up to his beach house in Malibu. I never said goodbye to Sonia. Later I heard she’d died. On the drive up the coast I had to tell myself to be careful about hope.
“His house was down a canyon, right on the beach, miles from anything, made of a sequence of interlinking glass boxes. One of the boxes was his bedroom, the damp sand layered knee-high against the glass. He asked me to undress and walk around, like I was there alone, but first I wanted him to turn off all the house cameras.
“‘Is there no trust?’ he asked, but like he thought it was funny, and I said I’d be happy to walk home in the dark. So he did it, and in fact he didn’t really seem to care—the whole thing felt like it was just a gesture, his way of closing the deal.
“I woke in the middle of the night. The bedside table was covered with books, paper ones, and pill bottles, which I thought would be the usual prescription downers but they had these long chemical names and didn’t seem to be from a pharmacy. I googled him from the bathroom—Cromwell was his name—and found out that he was rich, which I could see, and that he was old, which I couldn’t, because he looked about forty-five. I got back into bed and watched the waves shatter on the glass and felt like my real life was beginning.
“I woke again before dawn and he offered me a car but I was restless so I wanted to walk. Nothing out there but land and sea, and the sun was still behind the mountains. My sandals were impractical so I went barefoot. The asphalt was cold at first but then the sun warmed it. I came to a charging station on the Pacific Coast Highway and the attendant wouldn’t look me in the eye when he sold me my morning coffee—I can only imagine the story he put me in, with my little dress and sweaty back and dirty feet. I went on down the highway, drinking my coffee, until my phone found a signal.
“They had to do the surgery offshore. A legal technicality, said Hiro, my chaperone, on the way to LAX.
“I’d never been in a plane before, much less a private one. The hospital was on an island in Japan, one of the ones that used to be Indonesia.
“The surgeon was kind. He took me aside and asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this, tried to tell me the odds I’d leave the table alive, and the probability of later complications, and I wavered, but I hadn’t seen any other chances so I said I was certain. After that he was detached, like I’d gone from being a person to an object of study.
“I’d expected the anesthesia to be like nothing but the surgeon said there’d be dreams, the ‘subjectivity of the implant meshing with the cortical tissue,’ and while I was under I remembered driving down through the hills toward the city, how the valley was a sea of light scarred by LAX and the freeways.”
“Did Cromwell keep his word?” asks Kern, wanting it to be a fairy tale, though it’s obvious it ended badly.
“In his way. There were screen tests, always on closed stages, where the soundproofing was so perfect you could hear your heart beat. The directors, who were never on-site, gave orders through the speakers like the voice of god, but nothing panned out, though I gave it everything I had. Hiro said to be patient, and meanwhile I had a lot of clothes and money.
“The loneliness was worse, which was almost unbelievable, and some nights I took a limo and went out looking for beautiful boys on the streets. They were always so happy when I told them to get in, though they usually looked like they couldn’t believe it was happening.
“Sometimes Hiro would come by with a laptop and a data cable and plug it into the socket just under my ear. I asked him why it couldn’t be wireless and he said that wireless wasn’t ever totally secure. I hated it—it was like my soul was draining away, though it felt like nothing, but I didn’t say anything, and would’ve tolerated more.
“Hiro was actually very nice to me, though I think he’s psychotic. I was seeing this guy for a while, Johann, who’d been a boxer in Germany, and was getting work as an action lead. One night in the Four Seasons he drank too much and started getting mean, but just when I was starting to actually get worried, Hiro let himself into our suite, casually, like he’d come to change the sheets. Johann was steroid-big and got right in his face and started screaming but Hiro just giggled, like literally giggled, and when he went for Johann he was so relaxed it was actually unsettling. He broke all the bones in Johann’s face with a highball glass—he was conscientious about it, double-checking to make sure he hadn’t missed any. I never saw Johann after that, and later I heard that Hiro had worked for the cartels before joining the private sector, that there’d been a price on his head for years.
“They’d said the implant wouldn’t affect my memory but they must have been wrong, because everything from the moment I got it is a lot clearer. But they must have gotten what they needed because one day I woke up in this goddamned house, and so far I haven’t seen anyone but my surgeon.”
“Why would they do that?” asks Kern.
“He gave me these jobs, at first, the surgeon. Hardware installation, mostly, and I had to do them all through the phone, the one you have now, but there must have been something going on behind the scenes, because now Hiro’s trying to get it back. At first I was expecting him to kick down the door any minute but now it seems like I’m on my own.”
“Do you have internet?”
“There’s nothing, no connectivity except the link to your phone.”
Kern holds up the phone, wondering why it would be her only portal onto the world. A winking red light probably means low battery. “I should recharge,” says Kern. He fishes the multipack out of his carryall, tears it open with his teeth, finds the charger. He runs his fingers over the phone, looking for the power socket, finds both that and what feels like a standard ethernet port.
In the little light he looks at the snarl of cables and connectors left in the multipack; among them is an ethernet cable.
“What are you doing?” asks the ghost.
“Maybe we can get you wired,” says Kern, plugging the ethernet cable into the wall jack, then into the jack in the phone. Little green lights on the phone start flashing.
“There you go,” he says, eyes closing, clutching the phone, using his carryall for a pillow. “Now you’re connected.”
The ghost says nothing.