Its light playing on his hands.
He resolves never to move, to become a statue in the sand, staring in fixity, forever. He loses his sense of the passage of time.
The city’s lights go off, one by one, and then there’s nothing but its ghostly negative floating in the air. Slowly, he comes back to himself. The surf roars, the night is fading, he’s alone. He tries to fix this part of the beach in his mind but there are no landmarks. He tries to remember the city but it’s already gone.
44
Great Dark Forward
Once the sun sets it gets dark immediately. Benign by daylight, the enshadowed jungle wakes a sense of primal horror; Kern leaves the road and looks for a place to spend the night by the faint glow of his cell. He finds a shallow cavity under a fallen tree trunk; it looks like it was dug out deliberately, but a long time ago, and nothing lives there now, so he scrapes up a nest from fallen leaves and branches and gets in.
He tells himself it’s just like a squat, but better, because the whole jungle is squat, with no guards or owners to get mad or chase you away. If there are patrols, they aren’t really looking for him, and anyway they probably can’t see him unless they have infrared. He wishes he had a gun, or some way to close up his cave.
He wakes, later, to birds calling in the night. Sleep is gone so he wakes his old phone and looks up articles on Kuan Lon. There’s one by Summer Scanlon, Ph.D., who is an urban sociologist, whatever that is, and it’s about how Kuan Lon is a physical manifestation of the regional psychopathology, and the historical irony of a People’s Path of Glorious Revolution militant drinking next to a colonel in the New China Army. More interesting by far is a tourist guide from decades ago, from before the fighting started, which tells him about the animals in the forest—there are grainy nocturnal videos of white owls and big grey cats moving among the trees—and of the tribes that used to live there; they were animists, which means they thought everything had a soul. He wonders what the tribesmen would have made of San Francisco, where cars, buildings, even coffeemakers have wills of their own. The mountains, he reads, had been gods, and he can see that; he remembers their snowless peaks above the trees, and it’s easy to imagine them conferring quietly in the twilight. He prays to them for protection, then, though he’s never prayed before, for he feels his death is near, gliding silkily through the trees, less malicious than playful, interested, endlessly patient. He considers going off into the jungle to meet his demon but there’s still Kuan Lon and the ring.
He wakes at dawn and sits for a while just breathing the cool air. A wave of homesickness buckles him, almost bringing him to tears, but Kuan Lon shines in his mind like a black star and he sets out, as Lares would have said, into the great dark forward.
*
That afternoon the road hits a clearing where there’s a checkpoint. He’s going to try to just slip away but the Thai officer, crisp in his air-conditioned power armor, sees him and beckons him over; the sweating, armorless enlisted men stare at him dully from the shade of a strangler fig. He thinks of running but of course they have guns. One of the foot soldiers is tinkering with some kind of military robot, its jungle-camo back a solid mass of missile pods, most of which are carbonized and empty—it looks a little like a mechanical mule with a horrible case of boils.
The officer says something in Thai, his voice emanating from the speakers in the armor’s shoulders, and Kern looks up at him blankly. They’re nervous about something, he thinks, and, whatever it is, I’m not it, and they know it, but they’re still curious about me. The armor says something in Chinese, then some other language, and then finally the tinny synthetic voice says, “Stop. You are entering a restricted area. What is your business here?”
“I’m going to Kuan Lon,” he says, immediately realizing it was stupid to tell the truth, but cops make him nervous. He reminds himself to use simple sentences, or the translation program won’t work.
“This is a restricted area,” the armor squawks. “You must have a special visa to enter this area.”
“I’m a boxer. Muay thai. I’m going there to fight,” he says, making boxing fists, his hands pitiful beside the suit’s enormous metal paws. He wonders what Thai jails are like—probably worse, much worse than American ones. He takes his wad of money out of his pocket, offers it up.
The officer looks down at him, then smiles and says something that the translator renders as “The cool heart leads to victory.” He bows, slightly, the armor groaning and stinking of burning oil as it moves, and says something that might have been a blessing but comes out as a disconnected string of static, and waves him on.
*