“Even now we’re in your memory,” Philip says. “There behind your elegantly marred forehead.” The daylight is gone, now, the guards on the street invisible, no sign of the outside but the drumming of the rain. The other tables have emptied and filled and in the candlelight everyone looks happy, like their lives are replete, and there’s a woman, blond and ripe, who will run to fat soon but is, for now, beautiful, standing in the doorway, smiling radiantly at someone inside, looking like she’s just thought of something to say.
A hand on her wrist. She opens her eyes, finds their waiter, worried, looking down at her. The restaurant is empty, the candle a crater of cold wax. The waiter says he is sorry, may he call her a cab, is her boyfriend coming back, in any case they’re closed.
28
Departure
The crush leaving the train car carries Kern along, and if it had been a time for picking pockets he’d have done just fine. As the press slows before the escalator he scans the faces for bad intentions but no one meets his eyes and almost all of them are absorbed in their phones. A gaggle of teenage girls, mostly blond, skin glowing, all in the same red tracksuits, get on the escalator behind him; their loud, careless voices are audible even over the shriek of the departing train, the hot wind of its passage washing over him. The girls laugh noisily as they rise out of darkness into garish light.
He steps off the escalator into a tunnel of milky, translucent glass, like a vast elongated soap bubble; everyone else strides by him purposefully. A dispassionate, oddly beautiful female voice that seems to come from everywhere enunciates an endless list of cities, numbers, letters, times. There are tall video panels every twenty feet showing fog rolling over the bridges, raindrops iridescent on trembling bamboo leaves, the red light of a desert morning moving over a woman’s tranquil face.
The tracksuited girls sweep by, and each panel, at their approach, switches to a juddering montage of well-dressed, feral-looking women glaring haughtily at the camera, an ad, he realizes, for makeup. A fat man with a Cognitive Openware T-shirt, wearing those chunky sneakers that programmers seem to like, gets an ad for Lotus, at which Kern brightens—Fist of the Southern Lotus, starring Montana Chiao, is one of his favorite movies—but there’s no kung fu, just a brightly colored little car that looks like a robotic piece of candy. At Kern’s approach the panels revert to fog enveloping bridges.
The tunnel branches, blinking signs pointing the way to things that mean nothing to him. The ghost says, “You want ticketing.”
The ticketing hall is the biggest room he’s ever seen; the roof, high overhead, looks like it’s billowing away. Long serpentine lines lead to booths where uniformed women, mostly, talk to worn-looking customers, and he’s reminded of the long queues for Red Cross vaccinations. Five feet away are two cops in body armor with machine guns, one with a mustache and the other a girl, drinking coffee from paper cups marked Koffee Kiosk—the girl’s eyes light on him, move on.
Windows maybe a hundred feet high frame the runway and the taxiing planes, visible in the dark as complexes of points of light in motion, and sometimes lights on the tarmac reveal the graceful curve of fuselage, and it’s like looking into an aquarium, or perhaps the depths of the sea, with huge creatures sliding by, intent on their own inscrutable business, utterly indifferent to the other side of the glass.
There are people sleeping on benches and the floor before the windows, using backpacks and hand luggage as pillows. The ghost says, “A lot of kids with layovers camp out here, so you can expect to be left alone. So. This is a decision point. Where do you want to go? It can be anywhere in the world.”
He’s not sure how to respond, can’t think of a place that means anything.
“If you’re at a loss,” she says, “then how about Vancouver?”
“What would I do there?”
“What would you do anywhere? You have enough money for some very good hotels. And anyway, when the heat dies down in a few weeks, you’ll be coming to LA to get me, right?”
“Of course,” he says.
“You could go to Franz Josef Land,” she says. “It’s the party spot now, what Singapore used to be.”
The windows are mirrors and he automatically starts to shadow box, just indicating the moves so as not to draw attention, and remembers that his life is dedicated not to survival but to perfection. “Thailand,” he says. “I want to go to Thailand. I can train there. They invented kickboxing. I’ve never had a real coach.”
“There you go,” she says. “Thailand. Your dollar’ll go farther, and it’s sure out of the way.”
*
“Window or aisle?” asks the gate agent, who seems kind. Kern regards her blankly.
The ghost is starting to speak when the agent says, “I mean, would you like to sit next to the window, or next to the aisle? If you sit by the aisle you have a little more room, but you might like the window—the dawn over the ocean is something to see.”
“Window, please.”
Her fingers fly over the keyboard, her proficiency reminding him of Lares. “You depart for Bangkok in fourteen hours. Checking bags?”
“No.”
“If you happen to have forgotten anything, there’s a store in the domestic concourse that sells clothes, toiletries, even luggage. It’s open all the time.”
*
Lying huddled under a bench, he turns his face to the wall and pulls his new sleeping bag close. The ghost had said to sleep, that it was as safe as a police station, but there are voices, footsteps, a constant sense of people in motion. He looks up at stapled fabric, aluminum struts. On the wall before his eyes is an ethernet port, like a little ziggurat of negative space. He roots through his new canvas carryall—there are his new clothes, a new tablet and a multipack of cables that should have a charger for the phone—finds a T-shirt and puts it over his eyes.
He remembers following Kayla one night down silent streets of San Francisco, lit by lamps and the fog’s faint glow, how she said they had to keep moving because she was searching for something, had been searching a long time, though he didn’t think she really was, it was more like poetry than that there was something she actually needed to find, and he felt like it was his work to watch over her in the night. She said she was in search of the miraculous, and she knew it was there because someone found it long ago, this Boss Djinn Adder, who sounded like the villain in a martial arts movie, but she’d said he was actually Dutch, and an artist, who was lost at sea. And now the memory has graded into a dream where they’ve come at last to a long, empty beach under a lightening sky and sit on the cold sand watching the breakers rumble in. She starts to cry, and he tries, helplessly, to comfort her, and since they’re alone he pulls off her jeans, which she tolerates, though she isn’t really paying attention as he opens her legs, is just watching the sky over his shoulder. He watches her face, and is happy, but then he looks away just for a second, and when he looks back she’s gone. Sand falls from his hands and face as he searches blindly among the crumbling dunes.