Kern pulls on the thick leather gloves he got from a gardener for someone’s credit card and reminds himself to breathe. There are brown stains on the knuckles that won’t scrub out. Remembering fragments of jumbled meditations, he tries to slow his heart.
The music is the soundtrack for what he’s about to do and he must be near a speaker because the noise is on the verge of obliterating his consciousness, and no one is really watching and no one will really care but still he finds he doesn’t want to hurt this stranger, not really, and he stands there foolishly, pulling at his gloves, but then he remembers a story he read on his laptop, one from Iceland about men who had the souls of wolves, berserkers, they called them, and they were usually soft-spoken and unassuming till they went into battle and then something shifted deep within them and their mouths foamed and they chewed the corners of their shields as the wolf rose up through them to swallow their hearts and their pity and the last vestiges of their fear. Come, he thinks, calling to the wolf in the music’s barrage, even though he knows it’s just a story, but then it comes, and he is ravening.
Hands shoved in pockets, eyes lowered, he advances on his victim. Now his heart is calm and his fear has become something poisonous and almost like affection. Annihilating echoes roll between the concrete cliffs in the periodic dark. The mark glances at him, but Kern is staring off into space, not even a person, just so much empty air.
The mark’s loneliness is evident in the way he watches the girls, and how he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. There’s something in one of the mark’s pockets and for a moment Kern worries it’s a gun but it’s too bulky and then he notices the paint on the mark’s shirt and realizes he’s a tagger, that it’s a spray can in his pocket. Kern sees him decide to leave, start shouldering his way toward an alley, and knows his moment.
Music so overwhelming it’s like silence as he runs through the momentary darkness, leaps on the strobe flash, and as it ends drives his elbow down through the space where the mark’s skull was, but hits nothing, lands kneeling, and holds the position—though it’s not necessary, is even self-consciously cinematic—until the next flash shows the mark, eyes wide, hands raised, backing away.
They run flat out and when the dark comes Kern feels he’s standing still. The next flash shows the mark losing ground, and with the next he’s gone but Kern intuits that he’s slipped into another, narrower alley, and the next flash shows him pressed against the wall, and in his momentary glimpse of the mark’s face Kern sees his decision to stand and fight.
Pain blooms in Kern’s hand as the mark’s orbital shatters, and then the mark is on the ground, Kern astride his chest, throwing punches unimpeded, and the mark’s face is like an outraged child’s, successive strobes revealing his progress from shock to misery and finally to a blankness, almost an abandonment, and then more bone collapses, which is probably enough.
Leaving the alley with the mark’s phone in his pocket, he sees men rushing toward him, mouths open and teeth bared as they shout things he can’t hear. He turns to meet them, flooded with rage, welcoming death, knowing that he won’t lose, can’t lose, will live forever, but then he recalls his discipline, and with it reason, and with the next strobe he runs at the wall, finds traction, jumps, grabs a balcony, is up, vanishes.
6
What Forgetting Is
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.
7
Discipline