The town car’s headlights illuminate the stones and the streamers of fog as it jolts over the steep pitted dirt road. Once again Thales dials his mother’s cell from his own but, like all the family’s secured electronics, his phone is mired in firewalls that make even the basic things nearly impossible, and once again his cell’s screen flashes CONNECTION UNAVAILABLE, but now the road crests and levels out and there in the headlights is the house.
He sits in the car, watching steam billow from the square pool of black water and dissolve in the wind. Smoking mirror, he thinks, form erupting out of nothing, driven by the temperature differential between the hot water and the cold night air. The pool, fed by a hot spring, is cut from the coarse granite of the mountain, the grey of the concrete of the low house behind it.
She’d designed the house before he was born, when she was barely older than he is now. In the library of their house back in Rio there’s a photograph of her at the building site, sitting on the boulder that’s still there by the pool. She was very thin then, and entirely serious, staring past the camera as though unaware of its existence. She’d never been to architecture school, had just traveled the world when she was young and had no money, drawing and redrawing the great buildings, trying to render their essences with maximum economy of line. She’d spent three nights in a copse of trees at the base of the Acropolis, and later had shared the basement of a squat in the 16th arrondissement with runaways and junkies. He’d found an old interview on a long-defunct blog where she’d said she viewed the mountain house as an exercise in pure form, and as a sort of ossuary, the only place she’d want to leave her bones.
Turning off the car’s lights, he sees light in the house’s windows.
He gets out of the car. It’s cold there, and smells of rock, dust, fog. Sharp fragments of glass scattered on the rocks—his brothers sometimes come here with girls and bottles of wine. They deride the house, even as they used its isolation, saying it’s eerie, like all their mother’s aesthetic fancies, just stark water, stone and wind, a lot of nothing in the middle of nowhere, not seeing, as he does, how the house, with its rough planes of crumbling grey stone and its trickles of black water, is like geology abstracted from erosion.
His phone finds the house network; he gestures over its screen to unlock the doors.
The front door swings open under his hand. Inside, it’s really just one room, not very big, and feels less like a house than a temple, or a library, or maybe a tomb—his mother, in the interview, had said her influences included the library of Alexandria, Taliesin West, Ryōan-ji and Louis Kahn. No one there, and no sign of his mom. He sees that the cushions have been pulled from the couches set in the walls to make a sort of nest on the floor, probably his brothers’ doing, and he worries he’ll step on a stray condom. The back door is ajar, probably through their carelessness. He wonders how long the lights have been on.
Standing in the doorway, he hears rock clatter in the dark behind him. For a moment he stands there, perfectly still, willing it to have been the wind, and he could retreat to the car and the protection of its armament but it’s twenty feet away and feels unattainable. It’s still somehow unbelievable that some stranger would really try to hurt him, even after what happened, and he wonders if this is often what people think right before they die; how fitting, though, to leave his bones by the square black pool. He waits, listening, decides it was nothing, but when he finally he goes inside he locks the front and back doors.
His mother’s computer is on the desk before the one large window. It dates back to the decade before he was born, but she’s particular about her vintage hardware, insisting that she can only work with what she knows. It’s a museum piece, but functional, and it occurs to him that it’s probably too old to support the protocols that hamstring every other secure family device, so maybe for once he can make a fucking phone call.
The computer wakes at his touch. Its interface is quaint, but intuitive enough, and it’s easy to find the program for making calls because it’s the last one that was used. It won’t work, he thinks, keying in his mother’s number, but then it starts to ring.
The ringing goes on and on, and he’s about to hang up when his mother, half asleep, picks up and says, “Hello?”
“I’m glad I found you,” he says.
“Helio?” she says groggily. “Is that you?”
“No, Mother,” he says, unable to control his irritation. “It’s me. Good lord.”
“Marco Aurelio?” she says.
“Yes, exactly. This is Marco Aurelio. I dropped fifty IQ points, changed my name and started smoking reefer. I’m calling from the mountain house.”
“Who is this?”
“Who do you think? I’ve been looking for you. It’s probably nothing but I thought I heard someone outside.”
“Thales? Baby? I’ve missed you so much,” she says, and it’s just like her to get so emotional over nothing and most likely she is drunk.
“That’s fine, Mom, but something isn’t right.”
“Where are you?”
“The mountain house, like I told you.”
“I’m going to come get you. I’m coming right now. Don’t go anywhere. Is anyone with you?”
“I’m fine, no one’s with me. Are you at the hotel? I can just come back.”
“Baby, is it really you?”
Annoyed by her sentimentality, he’s on the verge of saying something cutting but the call drops. He tries to call again but just gets network errors.
He stares out at the wisps of fog, remembers reading that the aesthetes of feudal Japan would spend hours watching the steam rising from bowls of hot tea, and then, in the stray light from the windows, he sees someone’s silhouette on the mountain.
He ducks down out of the window’s lines of sight, and he realizes the house, which was never meant for defense, has become a trap. No weapons here, just books. This is an ossuary, he remembers, built to hold the family bones. He imagines a sniper with his sights trained on the door, smoking cigarette after cigarette, as blasé as if he were hunting a deer; he imagines soldiers out in the night, poised to fire a grenade through the window but waiting till one of them, grinning and exhilarated, finishes telling a dirty story. Finally it occurs to him to turn off the light.
He runs his hands over the rough concrete in the dark, wonders irrelevantly if it’s drone-built, but no, it’s too old—when his mother was young builder drones were a strictly military thing, used mostly for raising bunkers in the North Americans’ interminable desert wars.
Uselessly, he tries to intuit his hunters’ thoughts, guess their lapses in attention. He curses his worthless phone, then realizes that he can use it. Before he can think, and therefore hesitate, he scrambles to the door, presses a button to light up his phone, and as he flings the door open throws his phone as far as he can, hoping it will draw their eyes and perhaps their fire. Running for the car, he hears the phone bounce on the rocks.
The car’s door recognizes his fingerprints, unlocks. He slams it shut behind him. “Maximum offensive footing,” he says, as the crash seat envelops him. “Take us home.”
Insulated from the night, he relaxes a little. He wonders if they’ll find his phone on the talus, maybe keep it as a trophy or search it for usable intelligence—he hopes it will be as useless to them as it was to him. He wonders if there was really an enemy or if it was just one of the vagrants who haunts the wastes beyond cities.
And then as the car turns there’s a girl in the headlights, looking right into his eyes, and in the high beams she looks overexposed, her face a mask of light. Clouds of dust rise glowing around her. Time seems to slow. At first he thinks its the madwoman from the hotel but, no, she’s younger, maybe Asian. The car is accelerating toward her, its forward guns whirring as they spin up. He’s going to tell it to stand down, though he knows it’s too late, but before he can speak or the car can fire she’s gone, must have leapt out of the way, the car passing through the space where she was standing.