Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  From the slope of the Hill where stand the Official Residences, one looks out over the western half of the Town: the River, the Clocktower, the Wall, and far in the distance, the Gate in the west. My weak eyes behind black glasses cannot distinguish greater detail, although I have the impression that the winter air must give the Town a clarity.

  I remember the map I must deliver to my shadow. It is now finished, but being bedridden has caused me to miss our appointed day by nearly a week. My shadow is surely worrying about me. Or he may have abandoned hope for me entirely. The thought depresses me.

  I beg a pair of work boots from the Colonel. “My shadow wears only thin summer shoes,” I say. “He will need these as winter gets colder.”

  I remove the inner sole of one, conceal the map, and replace the sole. I approach the Colonel again. “The Gatekeeper is not someone I can trust. Will you see that my shadow receives these?”

  “Certainly,” he says.

  Before evening, he returns, stating that he has handed the boots to my shadow personally. “Your shadow expressed concern about you.”

  “How does he look?” I ask.

  “The cold is beginning to diminish him. But he is in good spirits.”

  On the evening of the tenth day after my fever, I am able to descend to the base of the Western Hill and go to the Library.

  As I push open the Library door, the air in the building hangs still and musty, more so than I recall. It is unlit and only my footfalls echo in the gloom. The fire in the stove is extinguished, the coffeepot cold. The ceiling is higher than it was. The counter lies under dust. She is not to be found. There is no human presence.

  I sit on a wooden bench for lack of anything to do. I wait for her to come. If the door is unlocked, as it was, then she will. I keep my vigil, but there is no sign of her. All time outside the Library has ceased. I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.

  The room is heavy with winter, its every item nailed fast. My limbs lose their weight. My head expands and contracts of its own will.

  I rise from the bench and turn on the light. Then I scoop coal from the bucket to fuel the stove, strike a match to it, and sit back down. Somehow the light makes the room even gloomier, the fire in the stove turns it cold.

  Perhaps I plumb too deep. Or perhaps a lingering numbness in the core of my body has lured me into a brief sleep. When I look up again, she is standing before me. A yellow powder of light diffuses in a halo behind her, veiling her silhouette. She wears her blue coat, her hair gathered round inside her collar. The scent of the winter wind is on her.

  “I thought you would not come,” I say. “I have been waiting for you.”

  She rinses out the coffeepot and puts fresh water on to heat. Then she frees her hair from inside her collar and removes her coat.

  “Did you not think I would come?” she asks.

  “I do not know,” I say. “It was just a feeling.”

  “I will come as long as you need me.”

  Surely I do need her. Even as my sense of loss deepens each time we meet, I will need her.

  “I want you to tell me about your shadow,” I say. “I may have met her in my old world.”

  “Yes, that may be so. I remember the time you said we might have met before.”

  She sits in front of the stove and gazes into the fire.

  “I was four when my shadow was taken away and sent outside the Wall. She lived in the world beyond, and I lived here. I do not know who she was there, just as she lost touch of me. When I turned seventeen, my shadow returned to the Town to die. Shadows always return to die. The Gatekeeper buried her in the Apple Grove.”

  “That is when you became a citizen of the Town?”

  “Yes. The last of my mind was buried in the name of my shadow. You said that the mind is like the wind, but perhaps it is we who are like the wind. Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.”

  “Did you meet with your shadow before she died?”

  She shakes her head. “No, I did not see her. There was no reason for us to meet. She had become something apart from me.”

  The pot on the stove begins to murmur, sounding to my ears like the wind in the distance.

  17

  End of the World, Charlie Parker, Time Bomb

  PLEASE,” cried the chubby girl. “If you don’t get up, the world is going to end!”

  “Let it end,” I said, groaning. The wound in my gut hurt too much for me to care.

  “Why are you saying that? What’s wrong? What’s happened here?”

  I grabbed a T-shirt and wiped the sweat off my face. “A couple of guys busted in and gave my stomach a six-centimeter gash,” I spat out.

  “With a knife?”

  “Like a piggy bank.”

  “But why?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that one out myself,” I said. “It occurred to me that the two guys with the knife might be friends of yours.”

  The chubby girl stared at me. “How could you think such a thing?” she cried.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just wanted to blame somebody. Makes me feel better.”

  “But that doesn’t solve anything.”

  “It doesn’t solve anything,” I seconded. “But so what. This had nothing to do with me. Your grandfather waved his hands, and suddenly I wind up in the middle of it.”

  Another boxcar of pain rolled in. I shut my mouth and waited at the crossing.

  “Take today, for example. First, you call at who-knows-what hour of the morning. You tell me your grandfather’s disappeared and you want me to help. I go to meet you; you don’t show. I come back home to sleep; the Dynamic Duo busts into my apartment and knifes me in the gut. Next the guys from the System arrive and interrogate me. Now you’re here. Seems like you all have things scheduled. Great little team you got.” I took a breath. “All right, you’re going to tell me everything you know about what’s going on.”

  “I swear, I don’t know any more than you do. I helped with Grandfather’s research, but I only did what I was told. Errands. Do this, do that, go there, come here, make a phone call, write a letter, things like that. I don’t really know anything else.”

  “But you did help with the research.”

  “I helped, but I just processed data. Technical stuff. I don’t have the academic background, so I never understood anything more.”

  I tried to regroup my thoughts. I needed to figure things out before the situation dragged me under.

  “Okay, just now, you were saying the world was going to end. What was that all about?”

  “I don’t know. It’s something Grandfather said. ‘If I had this in me, it’d be the end of the world.’ Grandfather doesn’t joke about things like that. If he said the world is going to end, then honest, the world is going to end.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s it supposed to mean, this end-of-the-world talk? What exactly did he say? Are you sure he didn’t say, The world is going to be obliterated’ or ‘The world is going to be destroyed’?”

  “No, he said, ‘The world is going to end’.”

  More mental regrouping.

  “So then, this … uh … ‘end of the world’ has something to do with me?”

  “I guess so. Grandfather said you were the key. He started researching all about you a couple of years ago.”

  “A couple of years ago!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What else? Anything about a time bomb?”

  “A time bomb?”

  “That’s what the guy who knifed me said. That the data I processed for your grandfather was like a time bomb waiting to explode. Know anything about that?”

  “Only hunches,” said the chubby girl. “Grandfather has been studying human consciousness for a long time. And I don’t believe shuffling is all there was to it. At least up until the time he came out with shuffling, Grandfather would tell me all kinds of things about his research. Like I said, I had practically no backgro
und, but Grandfather kept things simple, and it was really interesting. I used to love those little talks of ours.”

  “But then, once he finalized his system for shuffling, he clammed up?”

  “That’s right. Grandfather shut himself up in his underground laboratory and never told me anything more. Whenever I’d ask him about his research, he’d change the subject.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “Well, it did make me unhappy. And very lonely.” Then, looking me in the face, she asked, “Do you think I could get under the covers with you? It’s awfully cold in here.”

  “As long as you don’t touch my wound or move around too much,” I said.

  She circled over to the opposite side of the bed and slipped under the covers, pink suit and all. I handed her a pillow. She fluffed it up a bit before placing it under her head. Her neckline exuded the same melon scent. I struggled to shift my body to face her. So here we were, lying face to face in the same bed.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever been so close to a man,” said the chubby girl.

  Uh-oh.

  “I’ve hardly ever even been out in town. That’s why I couldn’t find my way to that Aoyama supermarket this morning. I was going to ask you for better directions, but the sound went dead.”

  “You could have told any cab driver to take you there.”

  “I hardly had any money. I ran out of the building so quickly, I forgot to take more with me. So I had to walk.”

  “Don’t you have any other family?” I asked, not quite believing her.

  “When I was six, my parents and brother were killed in an accident. A truck plowed into our car from behind and the gas tank exploded. They were burned to death.”

  “And you were the only who survived?”

  “I was in the hospital at the time. They were coming to visit me.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said.

  “Ever since then, Grandfather watched over me. I didn’t even go to school, hardly ever went out, didn’t have any friends …”

  “Why didn’t you go to school?”

  “Grandfather said it wasn’t necessary,” she answered matter-of-factly. “He taught me all the subjects—English and Russian and anatomy, everything. Stuff like cooking and sewing, I learned from Auntie.”

  “Your aunt?”

  “Well, not my real aunt. She was the live-in lady who did the cleaning and chores. A really wonderful person. She died from cancer three years ago. Since Auntie died, it’s been just Grandfather and me.”

  “So you didn’t go to school after you were six years old?”

  “That’s right, but what difference does that make? I mean, I can do all sorts of things. I can speak four foreign languages, I can play piano and alto sax, I can assemble a wireless, I’ve studied navigation and tightrope walking, I’ve read tons of books. And my sandwiches were good, weren’t they?”

  “Very good,” I admitted.

  “Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.”

  “Incredible,” I said. “But didn’t you feel deprived not having friends your own age?”

  “Well, I can’t really say. I was so busy, I never had time to think about it. And besides, I don’t know what I could have said to people my own age.”

  “Hmm.”

  “On the other hand,” she perked up, “you fascinate me.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, here you are so exhausted, and yet your exhaustion seems to give you a kind of vitality. It’s tremendous,” she chirped. “I bet you’d be good at sax!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you have any Charlie Parker records?”

  “I believe so. But I’m in no condition to look for them in this disaster zone. The stereo’s broken, so you couldn’t listen anyway.”

  “Can you play an instrument?”

  “Nope.”

  “May I touch you?”

  “No!” I laid down the law. “I’m in too much pain besides.”

  “When the wound heals, can I touch?”

  “When the wound heals, if the world hasn’t come to an end … Let’s just go back to what we were talking about. You said your grandfather clammed up after he invented his system of shuffling.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right. From that point on, Grandfather seemed to change radically. He would hardly talk to me. He was irritable, always muttering to himself.”

  “Do you remember if he said anything else about shuffling?”

  The chubby girl fingered one gold earring. “Well, I remember him saying shuffling was a door to a new world. He said that although he’d developed it as a method for scrambling computer data, with a little doing a person might scramble the world. Kind of like nuclear physics.”

  “But if shuffling is the door to a new world, why am I supposed to hold the key?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I longed for a big glass of whiskey on the rocks. Lots of luck around my place.

  “Let’s try this again. Was it your grandfather’s purpose to end the world?”

  “No. Nothing like that. Grandfather may be moody and a bit presumptuous and he may not like people in general, but deep down he really is a good person. Like me and you.”

  “Thanks.” No one ever said that about me before.

  “He was also afraid his research would fall into the wrong hands. He quit the System because he knew if he stayed on, the System would use his findings for anything they felt like. That’s when he opened up his own laboratory.”

  “But the System does good,” I said. “It keeps the Semiotecs from robbing data banks and selling on the black market, thereby upholding the rightful ownership of information.”

  The chubby girl shrugged her shoulders. “Grandfather didn’t seem too concerned about good or bad. Or at least, he said, it had nothing to do with claims of ownership.”

  “Well, maybe not,” I said, backing off.

  “Grandfather never trusted any form of authority. He did temporarily belong to the System, but that was only so he could get free use of data and experimental resources and a mainframe simulator.”

  “That so? Tell me, when your grandfather quit the System, did he, by any chance, take my personal file from the data bank with him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But if it did occur to him to do it, who would have stopped him? I mean, he was the head of Central Research. He had full clearance to do as he pleased with the data.”

  So that was the deal. The Professor had walked out with the data on me. He’d applied it to some private research project of his, with me as the sample on which to advance the principle of shuffling generations beyond anyone else. And now, as my friend Junior had suggested, the Professor was ready for me. His primary sample was to become his guinea pig. He’d probably given me bogus data to shuffle, planting it with a code that would react in my consciousness.

  If that was in fact the case, then the reaction had already begun. A time bomb. What if Junior was right? I did a quick mental calculation. It was last night when I came to after the shuffling. Since then nearly twenty-four hours had passed. Twenty-four hours. I had no idea when the time bomb was set to go off, but I’d already lost a whole day.

  “One more question. You did say it was ‘the world is going to end,’ didn’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s right. That’s what Grandfather said.”

  “Would your grandfather have started this end-of-the-world talk before he got to researching my data? Or only after?”

  “After,” she said. “At least I think so. I mean, Grandfather just started saying ‘the world is going to end’ quite recently. Why is it important? What’s this got to do with anything?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’ve got a feeling there’s a hook in it somewhere. My shuffling password is ‘End of the World.’ Now I can’t believe that’s pure coincidence.”

  “What’s your ‘End of the World
’ story about?”

  “I wasn’t told. It’s part of my consciousness, but it’s inaccessible to me. The only thing I know about it is the code name, ‘End of the World’.”

  “Couldn’t you retrieve it? Reverse the process or something?”

  “Impossible,” I said. “The process is safeguarded by System Central. A whole army division couldn’t pry the information loose. Security is unbelievable.”

  “And Grandfather pulled the file?”

  “Probably. But I’m only guessing. We’d have to ask your grandfather himself.”

  “Then you’ll help save Grandfather from the INKlings?”

  Pressing my gut wound in, I got out of bed. My head lit up with pain like a busy switchboard.

  “I don’t have much choice, it seems,” I said. “I don’t know what your grandfather’s end-of-the-world scenario means, but from the look of things, I don’t think I can afford to ignore it.”

  “Either way, we have to help Grandfather.”

  “Because all three of us are good people?”

  “Of course,” said the chubby girl.

  18

  Dreamreading

  UNABLE to know my own mind, I return to the task of dreamreading. As winter deepens, I concentrate on this effort, and the sense of loss that haunts me is forgotten, albeit temporarily.

  On the other hand, the more old dreams I read, the more I apprehend my own helplessness. I cannot divine the message of the dreams. I read them without any understanding of them. They are as indecipherable texts passing before my eyes night after night. I could as well be gazing at the waters of the River.

  My dreamreading has improved. I have become proficient at the technique and can manage quantities of old dreams. But to what avail?

  “What does dreamreading mean?” I ask the Librarain. “My job, as you have said, is to read the old dreams out of these skulls. But the dreams go through me, for no reason. I feel tired more and more.”

  “Even so, you read the dreams as if possessed. Is that not so?”