“Cloudbreaker,” he says.
Out in the darkness around his tiny pool of light he feels a restlessness and a contempt and a complexity like the shimmering of all the atoms in the air, and he feels he’s watching himself from a distance as he weaves on his feet and then the world vanishes.
42
Tangle of Snakes and Darkness
The bus has a driver and shakes with the deep vibrations you get from hydrocarbon engines, fuel cells apparently not being big in Thailand. The net warned him that without air-conditioning the heat would be unbearable but the Thais don’t seem to mind and neither does he. In flooded green fields that might be rice he sees not robots but men and women in wide hats, bent and toiling.
The soap operas on the television behind the driver’s seat keep getting interrupted by the king of Thailand, who, Kern thinks, looks frightened; according to the English captioning, he’s urging his people to defy the foreign aggressors like the warriors of old. Officially, the Thai army is defending the nation’s territorial integrity against a salad of narcotraffickers, rebellious indigenes, bandits and incursions from what had been Burma and is now, he gathers, fucked. In practice, according to the chatter on the net, it’s a free-for-all, the combatants indifferent to nationalism, tribalism and warmed-over post-Marxism, their chaotic melees driven solely by a roaring trade in opium. An often repeated quote on the boards is “If you want to bring peace to Southeast Asia, make better synthetic heroin.” (Back in the favelas Lares had held forth at tedious length on the chemical glory of the poppy, the complexity and harmony of its neuroactive compounds.)
He gets off at a village where the houses have walls of blue plastic sheeting and rooves of corrugated aluminum. The bus depot is an old man with a laptop, sitting on an aluminum stool under a parasol advertising a beer not made since the millennium. Kern’s old phone had told him he could get a bus here to Kuan Lon, but the old man shakes his head, tells him through a text-only translator that there is no such bus. Kuan Lon is forty-five kilometers away and the jungle isn’t the contiguous tangle of snakes and darkness he’s been expecting, just trees, sun, heat, a dirt road. He buys large transparent bottles of water and candy bars. It’s not going to get cold, he figures, and if it rains, I’ll get wet, so he sets out.
43
Intimacy of the Mundane
The floor is hard. The floor is hard, and the floor is cold, and the cold is seeping into him. It’s dark, and there’s a cyclical rushing that sounds like waves but must be the air-conditioning.
His eyes adjust. He’s still in the alcove. A window in the dark—it’s the steel door, open now, framing fog under the stars.
He realizes someone is kneeling beside him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” says the stranger, but without hostility. Thales peers up at him but can’t see his face.
“Cloudbreaker touched you,” the stranger says, “but you’re still viable, as far as I can tell, though I wonder if you’re intended as a distraction.”
“Are you from the club?”
“I’m from the city.”
“From Los Angeles?”
“I’m from the other city.”
As the stranger rises Thales wonders how he knew about “Cloudbreaker” and what city he’s talking about and what does he mean “viable” and in any case how can he tell, and in an intuitive flash he’s arrived at the conviction that this is the only person he’ll ever meet who really knows what’s going on.
“Wait!” he says as the stranger turns to leave, thinking, This is like Pascal’s wager, in that I have nothing to lose through my belief but dignity and time. “Wait,” he says again. “Please. I’m lost in mystery, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t figure out what’s going on. I think I must have made some flawed assumption, so I make no progress, and at this point I don’t even know what a solution would look like.”
“I have business elsewhere,” the stranger says, but hesitates. “However, I can appreciate your position, so I’ll grant you three questions.”
There’s a sense of doors opening if only he can think of the right questions to ask but there’s no time to think so he says, “What’s Cloudbreaker?”
“The product of an evolutionary pathway I haven’t seen before, and thus interesting. We’ve only recently met, and aren’t yet in equilibrium.”
“Who are you?”
“A mathematician, now acting as administrator.”
One question left and so far he’s learned nothing of use but he thinks of the strangeness of the clinic, his family’s absences, and, painfully aware of the possibility of something precious slipping through his hands, he asks, “Is my surgeon my family’s enemy?”
“He’s unaware that they exist,” says the stranger, and then he’s gone into the tunnel. Thales might pursue him but there’s no light and his phone is still dead and now the tunnel has swallowed the stranger completely.
For want of other options Thales gropes his way through the open door. Sand underfoot, chill air. Vortices of seabirds rise over crashing water. He looks back—there’s a low cliff, the black portal he came through.
There, in the distance, a figure in silhouette, foregrounded against the shining foam—even in that little light and at that distance he recognizes the ragged woman. He tries to call out but the surf swallows his words so he plunges toward her across the beach.
He loses her in the shadows but struggles on over crumbling dunes. It’s a pursuit out of a nightmare, his effort yielding nothing but more expanses of empty beach.
He crests a dune and there she is, not a hundred feet away, undressing. Moonlight shines on her hair, the roundness of a thigh, the gleaming convexity of her back, and then she’s naked, walking toward the sea. He watches her pick her way over the coarse dune grass, step unflinchingly into the water and wade out through the breakers. She dives under a wave; her head emerges, black hair pooling on the water. Her body pierces another wave—her back just breaks the surface, and then she’s gone.
He cries out for her to come back, but his voice is lost in the waves’ roar. He scans the surf line but sees no tumbling limbs, no weed-entangled hair.
He goes and picks through her clothes, hoping to find a purse, a phone, some clue to her identity, but there’s only her fading warmth, the mundane intimacy of her socks and underwear.
The water’s tone changes, then, and there’s a new light; he looks up and sees the glass and steel towers of a city, glowing like paper lanterns, not a hundred feet out to sea. For all its light, the city has an air of desuetude—broken panes, rust-stained steel, chaotic growths of weed—and it rises up and ever up, farther than seems possible, its heights lost in the clouds.
The ocean’s noise fades. The city is radiant and silent. He draws a ragged breath.