He clambers up, the car’s roof sagging under the added weight. The woman extends an empty hand which at first he thinks she wants him to shake but she makes a fist, unclenches it, and now on her palm there’s a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” she asks.
Thales shakes his head. She has no obvious wounds, and is intact enough for remarkable sleights of hand, but there could be some more subtle trauma. “Are you all right? Did you send your drones for help?”
“As for my health, I’m as well as can be expected,” she says. “But no drones, I’m afraid.” Something seems to occur to her; she looks abstracted and tense as dark water surges around the car, almost immersing it, and then she relaxes as the water goes down. “Okay,” she says. “That did it. We’ve got a little more time. Sorry about the water. It’s erasure made manifest. I can’t quite make it go away.”
“Listen to me,” he says, feeling like he’s trying to get a distracted child to focus. “Tsunamis come in sequences. We need to get to high ground, then find a way out of the city.”
She says, “Once I thought I’d go to another country, another shore. Find another city, better than this one, where all I try is doomed to fail, and my heart is buried like something moldering. But there will be no new city, no other shore. This city is my prison, and I’ll never leave its streets. There will be no ship for me, no road. I’ll waste my last minutes in this tiny corner of the world.” She seems to recollect herself, says, “Forgive me, I’m … So, to business. Let’s say you’re in a fairy tale. In a fairy tale, you might meet a djinni who grants wishes. Let’s say I’m that djinni, except I’m nicer and both more and less powerful. I’d like you to wish for whatever would make you happiest. I realize this seems strange, but please take it seriously. It matters, as much as anything, and there isn’t much time.”
She seems earnest, and even kind, but is evidently even crazier than her twin. “Was that you, in the St. Mark?” he asks. “Or was that your sister?”
The question seems to surprise her. “Sister. I didn’t know there were others. But of course there are. She must have known almost nothing, and been very afraid.”
“Okay,” Thales says, sliding off the car into the water. “I have to go now. I think you should come with me, but I can’t talk anymore.”
“Wait,” she says. “With the wishes. I wasn’t kidding. I know you think I’m crazy, but look.” She makes a fist, opens it, and a dozen dream-blue butterflies swarm out from her palm and flutter away.
“Very impressive, but I need to find Akemi and get to high ground, so goodbye.”
“Hearing is obedience,” says the woman, making a little bow with her hands pressed together. “It is granted. She isn’t far, and I’ll show you the way. Maybe I’m being literal-minded, but I suppose that’s traditional.”
“You know Akemi?”
“Pretty little thing. Must be part Japanese. An actress, or wanted to be. You found her in your mom’s house, and then later in your car. She didn’t know why she couldn’t seduce you. At first she thought you were gay, then decided you’re just quantitative.”
“How do you know this?”
“Like I said, the secrets of the universe.”
Not knowing where else to go, he follows her, and though he has many questions he’s certain she’d just evade them, and as they plod through the current he makes himself look up at the sky, which is just starting to darken, as it’s better than seeing the bodies in the garbage on the banks.
They come to a building of many stories with firelight glowing through some of the lower broken windows, and looking up at it he feels an echo of the city in the waves.
“Akemi’s here?”
“And it’s high ground,” says the magician. “Follow me.”
She leads him through the ruin of the lobby, up dripping, water-slick stairs. One of the landings reeks of marijuana—he gets a glimpse of figures standing around what must be a burning bale of it—and finally they come to a torchlit rooftop overbuilt with crude structures piled up like swallows’ nests, steep staircases zigzagging between them, like a hillside Aegean town. The buildings look blocky, like something from a child’s toy fabricator—he’s reminded of pictures of the earliest favelas—and there, in fact, is an old-timey builder drone, creeping painstakingly along as it lays down its little dabs of concrete. He wonders if obsolete drones are in fashion with bohemians.
“Just a few minutes now,” says the magician.
“Until?”
“The end. I’m estimating. I made some edits, so I’m less worried than I would be,” she says. “If you want to talk to Akemi, you should do it now.”
Something cracks underfoot. He’s crushed a piece of broken glass, probably from a beer bottle. Movement draws his gaze up toward the drone-built structures—he sees steam billowing up, dissolving in the wind—smoking mirror, he thinks, form erupting out of nothing—and behind the steam there’s what seems to be a copy of his mother’s house in the mountains.
His mother was never really famous, her work known only to a few other architects—there’s no reason for anyone to have built this, and the coincidence of his having found it here, and now, is extraordinary, and requires an explanation, and the magician obviously knows more than she’s told him so he says, “My wish is, I want to know why that’s there.”
“Why what’s there?” asks the magician, sounding flat and distracted, but then she looks up and when she sees the house her eyes narrow as her body tenses, and it sounds like the words are torn out of her as she says, “That’s a different node. There’s a line out,” and before he can ask what she means she’s pushed past him and is running up the stairs, and he’s wondering if he should follow when he sees Akemi sitting on the roof’s edge, her face shining in the red light of torches.
51
Never Really Have Happened
As the plane descends toward Jeddah Irina looks out through the window at the rippled dunes in the abandoned streets, and it’s only when they’re a few hundred feet off the ground that she finally sees cars on black asphalt, rooftop solar cells, the bulbous domes of a mosque, the occasional blue pool.
This was a rich country, once, and not so long ago, but it feels like the oil flowed in the days of Harun al Raschid. The last king, who is very old now, fled to London fifty years ago with the last of his bankrupt nation’s treasury; one freezing January night two decades past she and Philip had walked by his house in Chelsea at three in the morning, seen firelight glowing in a high mullioned window. Now the country is all but empty, and the mullahs rule piously over blank infernos of sand.