Tents on a grid perfect as any square, prestaked lots for an expansion that may or may not have ever come, I wasn't really sure, I didn't spend a lot of time out there.
Instead:
In the comfortable shadows of the prefab with the rest of 716, salty enough to
sense an incoming mission. Unscheduled wakeups and a shower, instant coffee and
freeze-dried eggs in our kitchenette before the runner came and dropped off our
ops packet and we ran the final checks on our APs and the AVs parked right
outside, no need for a valet to cross all that dust and fetch them from the
Motor Pool.
Tent
City was a Camp somewhere on the border, southwest of the mercurial DMZ. In
those first handful of years they'd shuffle us around enough that all those
future FOBs became a sort of metaplace, "FOB Whatever" shorthand for
our whereabouts. We still kept coming back to Tent City and that one Camp,
though, always like a bad high-school reunion with those bewildered Reg faces
all around.
The
AO was always the same. The grass and trees. The smell in the air; the pollen
clinging to the lining of your nose. Sure, the landscape changed; but like they
were pieces of tile from a boardgame; everything was a slight permutation of
everything else.
But
about fifteen miles past the border proper was something that always bothered
me. A few hundred yards north of our covert route was a lake, and the
topography and makeup of the province made it seem that a lake simply had no
business there. It was one of the few times I strung a request up the rope of
command; had them run the hollowscan to make sure there wasn't a killer robot
underneath, a superweapon like a metal dragon, all flames and teeth and steel.
The techs simply passed the word that, nope, no matter, nothing to see there.
I
kept it to myself, though we had all spent time enough together to tap into a
collective consciousness in each AV. Even riding up top on the turret, feet
planted in the stirrups below, I gave off a vibe that I wasn't feeling
something right.
"Contact,
MK?"
"Neg
on that."
The
lake boxed in by dense forest, too dense for a secret lair or silo lest a whole
hilltop opened on a hinge and revealed a warlord's underworld. Once we stopped
by the lake and cased it. I looked through my thermals and, in the water, there
was nothing. No fish. A few Chinese birds tread the shoreline for a dip.
Caf
finally broke the code after we had passed the lake well over two dozen times
to go unleash our special brand of ordered chaos.
Back
in the prefab post-op, pulling off our boots and checking our stank feet for
blisters. Caf slipped out without a word and came back an hour later. He held
another envelope and I was about to put my boots back on, ready to shove out
for more contact.
"Got
something for you, MK."
He
tossed the envelope on my bed. I broke the seal and pulled out a translucent
sheet of an old scan.
"I
went over to the techs and asked nicely for a copy. So merry Christmas or
whatever the fuck."
The
sheet up near a window, light filtering through it. And there was the lake and
the surroundings. But while its borders showed the dark-brown of all that dirt
beneath, the lake was slate grey past its waters.
Caf
flicked it hard with thumb and forefinger and it nearly came out of my hand
and, "Happy?"
"I
don't see a damned thing."
"Manmade
lake, MK. That's cement, see?"
Caf
left the prefab out the back on an unannounced mission. I held up the scan and
studied it. And he was right. A manmade, cement-lined lake. But it was out in a
true nowhere, far from any cities or semblance of civilization. Barely past the
shaky legality of the border.
Huh in my mind and my tongue thick in my mouth, just
like that time when--
--a
few thousand feet below, Lake Michigan slept in various states of freeze, out
there solid and cracked into the infinity of itself. Its own alien landscape.
The million tendrils of a demigod's crooked hand. I remembered the statistic
that only about ten percent of the ocean had been explored and I wondered why
my dad was leaving. And then that expanse out there, so unnatural for being one
of the most natural things, albeit disguised by the cloak of winter.
We
sat at a corner table. My dad faced the interior of the restaurant. I was
looking out, looking down from the obscene height of the top floor of the
Tower. The obscene height of the Tower, the obscene prices on the menu, the
obscene price of the borrowed suit as relayed by my possessive roommate,
lovingly taking it from the closet and making me swear the most solemn oath
that nothing would touch it except, in the rarest of all occasions,
breadcrumbs. Those could be brushed off. Anything else and I had to get it
dry-cleaned for him at a very specific dry cleaner.
My
dad looked down for most of the meal. So did I. When men sit at a table to eat,
they talk, sure, but when the meat comes and your primate brain triggers your
salivary glands, you can't help but take your big knife and saw into it, stuff
hot muscle into your mouth and taste the blood. When that was done, we sat back
and drank our drinks and I felt my fingers picking at my fingernails, growing
consciously uncomfortable about that man sitting across from me, how I wanted
to scream at him to say something. It seemed, to him, a normal day. A normal,
bland day around people in a city, both of which he had a particular aversion
toward, a trend that showed no sign of abating each passing weatherbeaten year.
He
seemed more ready than ever to leave this orb.
"Have
you heard from your brother?" he asked.
"Yeah,"
I said.
"Are
you going to see him when he gets back? Or before you leave?"
"Are
you?"
"I
called him."
"When?"
"Last
week."
"What
did he say?"
"'Have
a nice flight. Send back a souvenir.'"
"Typical."
"What
did you expect?"
"Nothing,
dad. Nothing."
A
million words of unsaid things. A billion unspoken conversations. Easier to
walk away. Best to leave it be. Not a hostile father-son relationship; just a
total lack thereof once I was removed from the nest and sent to the
Merriweather Preparatory Boarding School For Boys on the fringe of the bloated
grid of Chicago, USA.
"Are
you going to see your brother, Bobby?"
"You
already asked."
"Well?"
"Depends
where he settles. Maybe the old house. Maybe not. I don't think he'd come down.
The rate at which he intends to keep heading north, he'll be in Canada within
the year."
"Well,
it's not like you won't be able to talk to him if you need to talk."
Talk
to your brother, not me said my dad in
words that skirted the simple ones. In a few months my dad would be frozen in a
coffin for five months, after which real-time conversation would require
extreme patience, since not even the speed of light could make communication
practical. But he never said anything about the comms on the ship; if civs could
even use them or not; if they could get on the horn and beam a message back,
Happy Birthdays and other limp one-note greeting-card platitudes.
We
didn't order dessert. My dad paid the check. We left for the high-speed
elevator that plummeted toward the ground so far below. It made me feel sick.
My dad gave no reaction. He had been training for that sort of thing, after
all.
We
walked out on the street. My dad's shoulders broadened, his posture
straightened. He liked being outside, even in a city caught in the deep freeze
of a Midwestern winter. We faced the lake. He looked up at the sky. A big
bright midday moon and the thin arms of the Rim encircling the globe.
"Really
makes you realize you're on a planet in space," he said, almost entirely
to himself.
A
line of cabs purred their electric hum at the curb but my dad started to walk.
I followed and lagged a half-step behind. We navigated the urban canyon. One
street in shadow, the next in raw daylight. Lunch hour. Businessmen. Students
from the downtown schools; the business schools and the art schools. Suits and
jeans. T-shirts of rock bands I'd never heard of. The pulse of a city I could
never feel, couldn't tap into, couldn't synchronize, always a few steps off,
even after four years that seemed like forty. My dad's own misanthropy seemed
to dissipate that visit. Undoubtedly fused with the relief that he was finally
leaving, not far from my own sentiment that Chicago wasn't much more than boxes
piled atop each other, a whole metropolis buried under an invisible misery that
no one wanted to confront.
We
took the maglev north and walked the block to my apartment. Counting down. An
implacable dread. A business-trip goodbye that was really The Last Goodbye. We
had run out of things to say to each other when we stopped sharing the same
house; had stopped saying anything substantive once it was just the two of us,
four years back. That's why I really left or was evicted or muscled out; why I
was shipped to the MPBS in Chicago; why I was leaving for something that didn't
promise anything but it didn't matter, I was leaving anyway. And that's why my
dad was going up and would never look back down.
The
final send-off kept getting postponed. We walked to the front of the building
and he came inside. I got the mail and he stood there. We stood in the slow
elevator and rode up to my floor. Then down the silent hall of phantom
neighbors. Finally at my door. It wasn't happening. Key in, twist and pull.
Door open. One foot over the threshold.
"I'll
see you around, Bobby."
An
awkward quarter-step and lean as I turned my head and he kissed me on the
cheek, something he always did, every single morning when I was asleep and he
went off to work. Back in Easthaven. That old house. Up for grabs in the final
seasons in which my dad lived all alone in that dark place, like me or my
brother would ever want to go back and sleep in our kid beds with our kid
sheets, haunted by retired closet-monsters and the limping, elderly mice in the
attic.
"See
you, dad."
Not
even a handshake in a moment primed for a handshake. Instead, a polite smile
and he went back down the hall and kept his eyes forward. He disappeared around
the corner and, well, I think that's the last time I'll ever see him.
I
heard my roommate cleaning his fishtank in his room and I went to the kitchen
window overlooking the park below my street. The trees wore their naked winter
clothes. The streets were stained with salt. I looked for my dad down there,
crossing toward his hotel, but he must've gone a different way because I didn't
see him.
(Chapter 10 coming Wednesday, December 7, 2011.)
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