… and it’s like a koan, how the glyphs seethe and shimmer, interweaving and dissolving faster than he can follow, and the harder he tries the faster they slip away. He tries for a broader view, sees he’s had that thought before, that it punctuates the recent past like the poppies in a dense field of flowers, and he remembers the poppies in the vase by his bed in the St. Mark, their forms repeated infinitely down the fractions of the seconds, his opiated fog, how his mother sat by him and held his hand, how the shifting tensions in the muscles of her face encoded every shiver of feeling, and once again he wonders what ghosts are if not this sense of presence. Needing distraction, he looks inward, and it’s like a koan, how the glyphs seethe and shimmer, interweaving and dissolving faster than he can follow, and the harder he tries the faster they slip away …
A jolt, and then he’s trying to read new glyphs, but they’re too simple, just dark blocky lumps on a ruby base, and he realizes he’s staring at the Persian rug on the office floor, that the tablet has fallen from his hand because the ground moved, is moving, it’s an earthquake, which he’s heard can happen in LA.
He doesn’t know what to do—is he supposed to take cover in a doorframe?—and then the earth stills. He picks up the tablet, careful to keep his eyes averted from its screen, and shuts it down.
He steps into the corridor. No sign of the surgeon. Got it! Meet you where? he texts Akemi. There’s a cyclical vitreous ringing from the direction of the lobby, which he finds abandoned, the receptionist gone from her desk. The noise is coming from one of the white vases with the blue Chinese dragons wobbling on its pedestal. He stills it with his palm, feeling the porcelain’s cool. The pendant lights are swaying. Outrageous but somehow typical that the clinic staff have fled.
Out in the courtyard there’s a thick haze in the air and it smells like the sea, though the beach is at least a mile away. Late afternoon shadows on the shot-up town car and the minimalist garden; the sun glitters on the spent round where he threw it on the sand. His phone chimes—the text failed—network not found. No obvious way to open the gate, and no one to ask how. A trickle of black water seeps under it, darkens the asphalt, bleeds into the sand.
He tries to go back into the clinic but now the glass doors won’t open, and the lights inside are off. Power failure, but shouldn’t there be an emergency generator? Peering into the shadows, he sees the Chinese vases are missing from their stands, but it’s too dark to see any fragments on the floor.
The world buckles again, the town car swaying on its axles as the spent round dances on the miniature dunes forming spontaneously in the sand. A section of the high wall is leaning inward, and by the time it’s in his mind to dodge out of the way it’s collapsed, just like that, burying the town car, blinding him with dust.
The earth is still again. He wipes his eyes, stares intently at the remainder of the wall. Could it be just slightly out of true? In any case it’s certain that the courtyard isn’t safe so he scrambles up the slope of new rubble.
Nearing the top, he knows what he’s about to see and then does see that the street’s become a tide race. Tsunami, he thinks. The water running in the street comes up to the cars’ doors; it’s rapid, filthy, thick with debris. Most of the buildings are dark, their lower floors covered in mud and silt, their specificity washed away. As he wonders where the people went a body floats by.
He drops down to a sandbar in the lee of an overturned truck. A library of objects washes past, a trash-can lid and a pink plastic doll and a phone and sodden plastic bags and all the nameless components of machines and cities. He listens to the water’s roar, its intricacy. This strikes him as an occasion for plucky self-reliance but no plan comes to mind and then he remembers tsunamis come in sequences.
Cigarette smoke on the air—there’s a woman sitting on the roof of a half-drowned car. Her clothes and hair are dry. It’s the same woman who attacked his car, Our Lady of the Drones, the ragged woman’s more presentable twin.
He wades toward her, the detritus in the water bumping him like inquisitive fish. Her eyes are closed, like she’s lost in thought, and a cigarette is burning in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “who are you?”
She opens her eyes, looks down at him, smiles. “I’m a magician,” she says.
He stares at her. Is she hurt, mad, in shock?
“For real,” she says. “Want to see a trick?” Without waiting for an answer she reaches down and plunges her cigarette into the water. It hisses as it’s submerged, but when she pulls it out the ember is still burning.
“How did you do that?”
“It’s easy when you know the secrets of the universe. God, I missed these,” she says, dragging. “Never thought I’d have another. Come sit by me.” She pats the roof beside her.
He clambers up, the car’s roof sagging under the added weight. The woman extends an empty hand which at first he thinks she wants him to shake but she makes a fist, unclenches it, and now on her palm there’s a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” she asks.
Thales shakes his head. She has no obvious wounds, and is intact enough for remarkable sleights of hand, but there could be some more subtle trauma. “Are you all right? Did you send your drones for help?”
“As for my health, I’m as well as can be expected,” she says. “But no drones, I’m afraid.” Something seems to occur to her; she looks abstracted and tense as dark water surges around the car, almost immersing it, and then she relaxes as the water goes down. “Okay,” she says. “That did it. We’ve got a little more time. Sorry about the water. It’s erasure made manifest. I can’t quite make it go away.”
“Listen to me,” he says, feeling like he’s trying to get a distracted child to focus. “Tsunamis come in sequences. We need to get to high ground, then find a way out of the city.”
She says, “Once I thought I’d go to another country, another shore. Find another city, better than this one, where all I try is doomed to fail, and my heart is buried like something moldering. But there will be no new city, no other shore. This city is my prison, and I’ll never leave its streets. There will be no ship for me, no road. I’ll waste my last minutes in this tiny corner of the world.” She seems to recollect herself, says, “Forgive me, I’m … So, to business. Let’s say you’re in a fairy tale. In a fairy tale, you might meet a djinni who grants wishes. Let’s say I’m that djinni, except I’m nicer and both more and less powerful. I’d like you to wish for whatever would make you happiest. I realize this seems strange, but please take it seriously. It matters, as much as anything, and there isn’t much time.”
She seems earnest, and even kind, but is evidently even crazier than her twin. “Was that you, in the St. Mark?” he asks. “Or was that your sister?”
The question seems to surprise her. “Sister. I didn’t know there were others. But of course there are. She must have known almost nothing, and been very afraid.”
“Okay,” Thales says, sliding off the car into the water. “I have to go now. I think you should come with me, but I can’t talk anymore.”
“Wait,” she says. “With the wishes. I wasn’t kidding. I know you think I’m crazy, but look.” She makes a fist, opens it, and a dozen dream-blue butterflies swarm out from her palm and flutter away.
“Very impressive, but I need to find Akemi and get to high ground, so goodbye.”
“Hearing is obedience,” says the woman, making a little bow with her hands pressed together. “It is granted. She isn’t far, and I’ll show you the way. Maybe I’m being literal-minded, but I suppose that’s traditional.”
“You know Akemi?”
“Pretty little thing. Must be part Japanese. An actress, or wanted to be. You found her in your mom’s house, and then later in your car. She didn’t know why she couldn’t seduce you. At first she thought you were gay, then decided you’re just quantitative.”
“How do you know this?”
“Like I said, the secrets of the universe.”
Not knowing where else to go, he follows her, and though he has many questions he’s certain she’d just evade them, and as they plod through the current he makes himself look up at the sky, which is just starting to darken, as it’s better than seeing the bodies in the garbage on the banks.
They come to a building of many stories with firelight glowing through some of the lower broken windows, and looking up at it he feels an echo of the city in the waves.
“Akemi’s here?”
“And it’s high ground,” says the magician. “Follow me.”
She leads him through the ruin of the lobby, up dripping, water-slick stairs. One of the landings reeks of marijuana—he gets a glimpse of figures standing around what must be a burning bale of it—and finally they come to a torchlit rooftop overbuilt with crude structures piled up like swallows’ nests, steep staircases zigzagging between them, like a hillside Aegean town. The buildings look blocky, like something from a child’s toy fabricator—he’s reminded of pictures of the earliest favelas—and there, in fact, is an old-timey builder drone, creeping painstakingly along as it lays down its little dabs of concrete. He wonders if obsolete drones are in fashion with bohemians.
“Just a few minutes now,” says the magician.
“Until?”
“The end. I’m estimating. I made some edits, so I’m less worried than I would be,” she says. “If you want to talk to Akemi, you should do it now.”
Something cracks underfoot. He’s crushed a piece of broken glass, probably from a beer bottle. Movement draws his gaze up toward the drone-built structures—he sees steam billowing up, dissolving in the wind—smoking mirror, he thinks, form erupting out of nothing—and behind the steam there’s what seems to be a copy of his mother’s house in the mountains.
His mother was never really famous, her work known only to a few other architects—there’s no reason for anyone to have built this, and the coincidence of his having found it here, and now, is extraordinary, and requires an explanation, and the magician obviously knows more than she’s told him so he says, “My wish is, I want to know why that’s there.”
“Why what’s there?” asks the magician, sounding flat and distracted, but then she looks up and when she sees the house her eyes narrow as her body tenses, and it sounds like the words are torn out of her as she says, “That’s a different node. There’s a line out,” and before he can ask what she means she’s pushed past him and is running up the stairs, and he’s wondering if he should follow when he sees Akemi sitting on the roof’s edge, her face shining in the red light of torches.