Irina dreams of blue rubber gloved hands, the rush of pure oxygen, and the pain, perceived through the shock and anesthesia as a terrible cold, a continent of ice afloat in dark water.
She wakes, and that numbness is still with her, as is the exact record of her restless sleep: the rough silk of the hotel sheets, the weight of the duvet, her sporadic motion as the hours passed, the novae bursting and fading behind her sleeping eyes.
She sits up, sees her clothes draped on the distressed leather of the club chair across from the bed, the sort of chair that serves only as an impromptu clothes rack or a place from which to watch one’s lover, sleeping, if one has a lover, which she does not, nor has for some time, a line of thought best abandoned.
The hotel room is podlike, expensive and forgettable. The open curtains frame a view of the whitely glistening salt; beyond them, in darkness, the Bay. Her phone blinks, probably with queries about wake-up calls, morning coffee, but she ignores it, stares out the window, noticing once again how this part of the world, where so much has happened, looks like nothing in particular.
She only watches television in hotel rooms, needing to fill their chilly banality with any kind of human noise. The wide black rectangle of screen shows a rubicund Japanese politico insisting that Japan has the right to deploy missile platforms in space, three coyotes padding through the empty streets of Santa Fe, a hotel burning in the atolls that are all that’s left of that peninsula that used to be a state, and a South Korean official attributing the disappearance of one of their newest drone submarines to a software error—the ship is considered lost at sea. The missing ship appears on screen—it’s black, seamless, somehow cetacean-looking.
The salt flats look like plains of snow and she thinks of her childhood, obliterated decades ago on an icy Virginia road. She remembers the car’s terrible rotational velocity, her mother’s hand on her father’s shoulder; then lying on her back in a room without windows, listening to her respirator’s hiss and sigh. There was nothing to see but the white ceiling and, sometimes, the nurses leaning over her. She found she remembered everything—how the light changed on the ceiling, every little sound from the corridor, how the nurses looked every time she’d seen them; she could tell how long they’d been on shift from the darkness around their eyes. When the blue-eyed nurse took the tube out of Irina’s mouth she started talking: “And she’s powered up. Are you sure? Is the implant working? How’s her EEG? It’s all good—we’re recording. Is she awake? Not yet. Can she hear what we’re saying?” The nurse’s blue eyes widening.
The possibility of sleep is gone. She kicks back the duvet, on the theory that the cold will make bed and sleep more appealing, and goes to stand by the window, cradling her forehead in her hand. A ship’s light out on the Bay. What good this ship, she thinks, this salt, this restive night, and is on the verge of wiping them away from her other memory, but she hesitates, then saves the indigo of the Bay, the chill, her melancholy.