The letters were worn off the keys but the screen was intact, and a hand crank unfolded from the laptop’s side at the touch of a button, which was fortunate, as it was difficult, in the favelas, to steal electricity.
The old owner’s files were still on the disk. The emails were indented rows of symbols without meaning but there were also photographs, thousands of them, flash-frozen moments from decades of a life. The photos were dated, and Kern, able to read numbers a little, figured the owner, who’d been adult, white and apparently rich, must have died at least thirty years before he, Kern, was born. It was eerie, somehow, thinking of all these images sitting there on the disk as the years slipped past.
There were loving shots of a bright red antique sports car and a big house standing alone in a desert. There were snapshots of street corners and signage, probably in San Francisco, that he could almost place. There were groups of beautiful people smiling in the refracted bottle-light of bars and he wondered if their gaiety was affected, a reflexive reaction to the camera’s stare, or if there really was some stratum of existence where everyone was always this happy. Some of the photos showed women alone, abandoned to sleep under rumpled sheets, drinking coffee, standing at the rail of a boat. Sometimes they were naked, sometimes inviting, but it was never the same one for long, except for one, a blonde, who went away for years at a time but always came back, while the others went away for good, and he wondered what she’d been to him. One photo, the only one that had its own folder, showed the blond woman’s naked back as she waded into a dark river, just starting to look back, the densely tangled trees on the far bank reflected in the black water around her waist.
After an hour the laptop locked him out. He hit keys at random, hoping to get the password by luck, but on his tenth try the screen went dark. The injustice was galling—the laptop was fair salvage, its owner long dead, and he’d never find another. He wondered if it could call the police to report itself stolen, if they’d make an exception, for it, and come to the favelas. There were garbage pits nearby, or he could sell it, if he moved fast, but the laptop’s screen flashed, faded, slowly brightened—a gesture he’d come to recognize—and then it launched the game.
He played a small child walking through a dark forest. The eyes of animals gleamed in the shadows and when he approached them they would speak, but never in a language he understood. He found a glowing deer who spoke English, which he barely knew, then, and he couldn’t tell what it was saying. Finally he found an eagle sitting on a tree branch who greeted him cordially, said that it had prepared another world for him, and a better one, and to enter it he had only to walk around the tree three times clockwise and then climb up into the branches. (For a long time afterward he questioned the surface of things, hoping to find secrets by touching worn spots on high walls, turning silently in place when no one was looking.)
Clambering up, he found doors set in the trunk. There were other branches, higher up, but just out of reach—the eagle told him there were more doors there, but those were for later, and for now he had to do what was before him. Behind the first one he found a huge cave where brightly colored crystals cascaded in pulses down the slick wet walls from the darkness of the heights. We are here to learn the secrets of number, said the eagle’s disembodied voice. He learned by trial and error which keys meant which numbers, pressing them to match the number of crystals rolling down—bells rang, high and clear, when he got it right. He knew from the chimes high above when the crystals were released, and was waiting, poised, when they came clattering down, subsuming himself in the pattern and rhythm. The light well off of his room was brightening by the time the eagle told him that it was time to go, that he’d learned all he could there, but he was happy, in the cave, and the eagle said nothing as he played on until his eyes finally shut.
He woke to afternoon light with the laptop in his arms. He wasn’t hungry, and in any case it was safer to scavenge after dark. He found the child lying on a tree branch, kicking his legs, the eagle hunching his wings beside him. The next door had writing on it and wouldn’t open so he passed it by, the eagle watching wordlessly. The door after that opened onto a sharp jag of rock protruding out into a void of storms. Vast shapes coalesced in the cloud mass—letters, he thought, and when he pressed the right key the child on the precipice had to grip the rock against the surge of wind as someone spoke the letter’s name in a voice of thunder and the cloud shape flared into fire that turned to smoke and drifted away.
The next door opened on tree roots like long hills, rivers winding through the valleys between them. Craning his neck, he saw the trunk rising up forever, its higher branches fading in the blue of distance. There was a road carved in the bark, and ladders when the way turned steep, though by then it was evening’s last light and he could barely see the way. There was a wooden bridge over a canyon between immense roots and on the floodplain far below he saw the lights of distant houses.
He came to a cirque with a stone well from which there came a blurred muted song. A bent old woman emerged from the shadows, her face concealed in a black cloak, and as she approached the well the world darkened until they were alone in a circle of dim, sourceless light, the great tree gone, the night inky. This is the naming, said the crone, throwing stone tiles onto the well-mouth. Light rose from the well—peering in, he saw brightness occluded by rapid dark cloud. The tiles had shapes on them, letters, and made sounds when he touched them. He moved them, tentatively, considering—when he got the arrangement right the old woman said Sun! as a brilliant star shot out of the well, hung in the air, filled the sky with light.
He and the old woman called forth the world. Moon, clouds, stars, planets roared out of the well and took their places in the sky. Next they called up mountains, seas and forests, and animals to live in them.
The next door opened onto winter. Snow encased the trees, and smothered the hills, and the rivers were quartz. The silence was stifling. The stones of the path just protruded through the white. Nothing moved; he saw a deer, shining with frost, motionless. The wind, stilled, was a white scrawl in the sky. He found the old woman waiting by a waterfall frozen into intricate columns of ice. This is the changing, she said, and cast a handful of bright sparks into the air among the motes of snow. She showed him how to shape the sparks into letters of red firelight; when he’d finally arranged them into a word she said Break! and the ice shattered, its fragments falling down through the air. The waterfall’s roaring, the frigid water pouring by.