“Philip,” she says, her voice more melodious than he remembers. “I’m so glad you came.”
“Anytime,” he says. “So. I love what you’ve done with the place.”
“I have to live down here. It minimizes my exposure.”
“To an inflated real-estate market? The aging effects of the sun?”
“You remember what Cromwell wanted? I got it. So I have to manage the little risks, the random violence and the structural failures and the bricks falling out of the sky.” Amazing that she’s right here, alive, that they’re speaking again. “Tiny risks become certain death if you give them enough time.”
“Eternal life—what a hassle.”
“It’s more like eternal youth. I won’t get sick, or old, but I’m not a vampire.” Says the woman who won’t age, living underground in the dark. “I can still get knocked on the head.”
“How about a condo in a fortified building? There are some good ones. I almost bought one in a building that has its own SWAT team.”
“The geology is good here,” she says, ignoring him. “Clay and gravel for miles. No earthquakes, and there are tunnels no one’s seen in centuries.
“Hold on a second,” she says. Rustling, and then a little penlight, shining in his eyes, blinding him. It clicks off, leaving a lingering impression of her shape there beside him.
“I just wanted to see you, before I go. Though I shouldn’t have. Even this much contact isn’t really secure, as Thales keeps reminding me.”
Who?
He says, “Go where?”
“Deeper.”
“To what possible end?”
“I need to maximize my lifespan. There are problems coming down the pike that make today’s world look like the Pax Romana. We’re trying to head them off but it’s going to take a while.”
“Damned decent of you. I suppose someone should. But why not delegate? Hire some bright young things. I’ll help you. You need a foundation, not a dungeon.”
“I can’t delegate this.”
“Okay, but you know what? Fuck it, and fuck the world. Come live with us. I’m serious. We have a spare room, it’s gorgeous, there’s a wall of windows overlooking the Bay. Ann-Elise might want her space but she can suck it. I’ll charge you a very reasonable rent. You can pitch in with the chores, remember grocery lists, what have you. Soon enough you’ll be like family. Have I mentioned our newly remodeled kitchen?”
“You shouldn’t talk about your fiancée like that.”
“Oh, well, she likes a little of that. Women, eh?”
Sound of cloth on cloth, and then she’s holding his hand.
“Don’t do this,” he says. “There must be another way. You can be the world’s genius loci without spending eternity in a tomb. I’m not Cromwell, not yet, but I’m ever less nouveau and more riche. I’ll build you a fortress if you want one.”
“Here, drink this,” she says, pressing something into his hand—it’s smooth, plastic, a water bottle, sloshing musically. “It’s easy to get dehydrated down here.” The water tastes like chemicals but he chugs it down, trying to think of the irrefutable argument that he’s sure must exist.
“Don’t go,” he says.
“It’s a hell of job,” she says, “and the hours are bad, but the health plan is incredible.”
He can’t think of anything to say.
“I have to go now,” she says, and pulls her hand from his. The air stirs around him, then stills. He sits there in the dark, motionless, until he’s quite sure she’s gone.
He puts his hand to where she was sitting, feels her residual warmth, decides to wait until it fades. If only I had your memory, he thinks. As the minutes pass his thoughts turn to the quotidian—his company, their house, Ann-Elise’s new OB/GYN—which shames and frustrates him, but can only be put off for so long, and then her heat is gone and he knows it’s time to go.
76
Continuity
Kern exhales as he brings the hammer down onto the glowing blade, sending sparks arcing up like startled fireflies. In the darkened studio, the blade’s surface seethes with heat gradients, mottled patches of incandescent carbon, fibers of burning rice straw. In the old days, he’s read, the blade’s color had been the only way to gauge its temperature; now there are optical thermometers—the one hanging on the wall looks like a hand drill without a drill bit—but he’s been teaching himself to do it by eye. The old man teases him about his apparent determination to live in the seventeenth century, but leaves it at that, allowing him the darkened forge, the shadows dancing in the steel’s luminance.
His phone rings. He bought it a month ago, in a vending machine, mostly to find his way around the city.
Number blocked, which probably means it’s Akemi, though she calls less and less these days. He picks up, hears static, or perhaps breath, and then nothing. No sound but the hiss and sigh of cars passing out on the street. He carefully sets the hammer on the workbench as the blade cools.
He goes to the window, blinks as he lifts the blind onto bright winter light. The alley where the old man parks his good car is empty.
“Are you there?” he asks, and he’s on the verge of hanging up when he hears what might be distant laughter, and then her, unmistakably her, calling, “Thales!” and she sounds as happy as he’s ever heard her. He imagines green hills, sunlight, tries to remember what the time difference is. Maybe one day he’ll go to Los Angeles, find her among the beautiful houses in the hills, or maybe he’ll even see her in a movie. He holds his breath, listening.
*
Hiss of tires on gravel in the alley as Kern slides the blade into its bed of burning charcoal, folds coals over the steel like he’s tucking it in.
The old man said a smith’s concentration should be unbreakable, so Kern feigns total absorption in his work as the alley door opens. The old man comes in and sits beside him, then takes Kern’s tongs and pokes at the coals.
“I’m afraid I have bad news,” the old man says in his beautiful, careful, foreigner’s English—when he was a young man he’d studied materials science at Cambridge, which is in England.
Kern is determined to show nothing. There are so many good reasons to kick him out it’s pointless to wonder what tipped the scales. It occurs to him that he’s never seen anything like favelas in Japan, and he wonders where the homeless people go. There are bare-knuckle fighting circuits here, and they’re a bigger deal than they are back home; he’s not in serious shape, not these days, but he could get it back, see how that goes.
“Kioshi left today,” the old man says. The old man’s son, whom Kern makes it a point never to criticize.
Kern nods carefully, and then, as this seems insufficient, says, “Where did he go?”
“He has a girlfriend in Osaka. He is staying with her.” He’s met the girlfriend—plump, plain, morbidly shy, obsessed with manga—in fact, much like Kioshi.
“Will he be gone long?”