Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“Listen,” said Lindsey almost pleading. “Please don’t fuck around with reality.”

“Mr. Lindsey, will you listen—”

You stupid, irresponsible—

“—to reason?”

—bastard. Nothing gives you the right.

“I can only help you with your full cooperation.”

Nothing.

The radio: “—sule News. Today Los Angeles inaugurates its new multimillion-dollar traffic control plan. Acco—”

At the apex of a four-level traffic stack, Lindsey saw an opening on the right and cut in. The new signs read HOLLYWOOD FREEWAY.

“—rding to LA Traffic Czar Chase, the new system will cut freeway congestion ten percent in the first month of operation. Further—”

Quickly, quickly! Lindsey cut to the left. The VENTURA FREEWAY. He glanced at the map; red freeways tangled in an unstrung skein.

“You don’t need that map,” said Veach.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” Lindsey said.

Veach nodded. “You feel it. The map won’t help.”

The radio: “—ozen random exit ramps and sites selected for maximum disposa—”

The freeway rose to the penultimate level of a five-layered interchange and Lindsey looked down at California from a dizzying height. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” he said. “It’s got to be.” The route divided and Lindsey drove the San Diego Freeway south. To the right the sun glittered on water. “The Pacific,” Lindsey said. “I’ve never seen it.” He strained his eyes but saw nothing but hard glitter.

The freeways forked and spread like lovers’ legs, and Lindsey followed them. The map was nearly useless, but in time he came to believe he was driving widdershins around the golden city of the golden state. The ocean to the west gleamed closer.

The radio: “—oday’s QLI Report. QLI Authority reports smog concentration moderate, eye irritation severe, potential respiratory damage moderate. High temperatures today will range to the hundred-degree mark. Traffic levels are maximum. The retail price index is up four-tenths of a percent. All factors considered, the Quality of Life Index has receded to an all-time low of six. In oth—”

“Can’t you describe her?” Dr. Van der Mark asked.

“Of course,” said Lindsey. “As easily as my own face.”

He heard the long-drawn thunder of waves rake the beach.

Blaring horns shocked him up one level of consciousness. The Camaro swerved back into its own lane. Lindsey gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles began to ache.

“Just watch the stripes,” said Veach. “They’ll guide you. Watch the stripes.”

The radio: “—ily as my own fa—”

“The quality of life is strained,” said Lindsey. Immensely satisfied with his own cleverness, he said it again.

“We’re here,” said Veach, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray.

The sign blocked out the sun:

TEMP. ALTERNATE EXIT

SANTA MONICA FREEWAY

FAR RIGHT LANE

Lindsey found himself in the far right lane. The main body of traffic broke and flowed away to the left. The Camaro climbed an exit ramp describing a wide, asymptotic curve into the west.

The radio: “—ongratulations. You have opted for participation in the Los Angeles Traffic Control Plan.”

The road angled free from the shadows of the interchange and Lindsey saw the ocean. The ramp arched high out over the beach.

“Just follow the stripes,” Veach said.

East to west, the line was complete. Lindsey followed the ramp as it curved downward, followed as the stripes disappeared in a swirl of white water, as the waves of the Pacific broke above the roof of his car.

MY FRIEND Zarathustra has stolen my wife.

Yes—I mean what I say, and you must listen; must hear what’s not said if you’re to understand properly what is said. For, as with him, silence is to me an instinct.

So (I repeat) Zarathustra—carrier of the ashes of the old to the mountains in order to prepare a new beginning, spokesman for the inseparability of creation and destruction, teacher of the eternal recurrence—this same Zarathustra has stolen my wife.

The bastard.

I try to recall, now, when it might have begun between them; at which point, perhaps, she first reached out to touch the hand he offered, but memory fails—I must have been working too hard at the book to take notice. I suppose she may have loved him from the first. That those months of close friendship in the huge house on the hill overgrown with vines—the fires at night as we read together, the fourteen rooms, the quiet, hollow Sundays—concealed all along the slow slide of this fact, and others, beneath me. As I worked in my room on the top floor above the trees. Sometimes when I wake now alone in early morning hours, I imagine there were moments when I felt, dully, never perceiving the truth, that some intangible thing was dipping from me; felt some pale remain of sadness inside, irretrievable. If so, these moments were few, and quickly passed.

(There were times he was happy; he remembers. Now he stands at the window, looking down on the town. Neons are coming on, like exclamation marks for something the darkness is trying to say; they show red on the glass. In the distance radio towers rise against the sky. Fragments accumulate on his desk. He is aware of the space between things. He holds broken facts in his hands.)

Her work grew ever better, the colors bold and the rapid strokes finding relief in sudden, unexpected islands of close detail, ever more explicit, the content increasingly erotic—a body in grey fleshtones with three heads turned each to the other, the lips livid, against a background of alizarins and ochre; my own became increasingly subtle and sparse, moving toward silence. It occurred to none of us, I think, to wonder for so much as a moment whether things outside proceeded along the course which had brought us, or driven us, there; to that sole, solitary refuge.

The hills spread about me now as I write, looking down on the tops of trees. A light fog resides forever inside them. The dampness of it enters the open window of my bedroom each morning, a clean, fresh smell appropriate to new beginnings. The sunrise is splendid, breaking in rainbows through the mist and drifting, light dew; most nights the Northern Lights fan out and fill the sky, as though beautiful cities were burning far away. There is no life anywhere in these trees. Where birds once sang and young deer broke the crust of new-fallen snow.

My work—what can I say of it? I fear I am now past all ambition; that volition, like hope, has died within me and nothing will issue again from that still center. (There would be such comfort in despair.) Times were, a single image, a phrase, would imbue page upon page with life; stories would spring fullblown from the chance word of a friend, the pattern of light through leaves at the window, the eager edge of a razor. Now lifeless pages of notes and scattered scenes accumulate on my table like slices of cheese on a platter: these weak attempts to retrieve my life. This might, I suppose, be expected, a function of the events outside, an equivalent decay.

—Tonight J wants to play for us the piano. He sits on the bench beside her, his face in his hands, weeping. B’s fingers form broad X’s in the moisture on the tabletop. It is Chopin, she says. The keyboard is roughly sketched out with a carpenter’s pencil at one end of the table; there are no halftones. And so we wait.

—This morning we found him in the tub, the drain closed, his own blood all around him; in aspic. His eyes stared up and forward at the tiles on which J has painted a cluster of grapes, and on them, a roach. One of the girls is pregnant. Bits and shreds of half-digested food cling to the sink’s sides each morning.