Marek Huberath: Nest of Worlds

His hair was dyed black, but on his crown, under his cap, was the requisite strip of red.

“You’ll be notified by phone. I’ll see to this personally. Here’s my card. Both of you should drop in sometime. My wife makes great pizza, and her pasta isn’t bad. We’ll talk about old times.”

On the card was written Ian Hanning, R, followed by several abbreviations that indicated his position and address.

Gavein’s apartment was claustrophobic. The walls were white, empty, smooth, and of uneven height; the ceiling showed every sag in the roof; each room, with its narrow, high windows, was like the half of a misshapen skull. Outside, the rows upon rows of small houses differed only in their details: balustrades, porches, the arrangement of the windows.

In Lavath, when individual houses were occasionally built, they were as solid as the concrete bunkers. They made comparison possible, gave a sense of scale, of what was big and what was little. Here almost all the buildings were the same size.

For hours Gavein lay on his inflated mattress, looking at the ceiling or at the walls, where flakes of paint hung and fell. He had had a phone installed (a phone was obligatory), but no one ever called. Ra Mahleiné had still not arrived.

The only events in the day were the meals at Edda’s. They kept him from going crazy. Every day, pasta from the refrigerator was reheated and served. With hot tea poured from a pot, or coffee that had no caffeine. Zef, Edda’s oldest son, would eat his pasta before the others and sit sewing more skulls or skeletons on his black leather jacket. He came back to the table when the pizza was served. (He was definitely adopted: Edda was not over forty.)

The children of Haifan and Gwenda usually ate with everyone else. The younger one, Aladar, often stayed late at school to do additional work. The older one, Tad, was alone today; perhaps that was the reason he sucked at his strands of spaghetti with a quietness unlike him.

Zef was finishing a new skull, which had sequins instead of sockets. The other diners were laboring over their pasta as it turned cold.

“Going somewhere?” Edda asked.

Zef’s red comb had been newly stiffened. It reminded Gavein of a rooster puffed up to crow.

“At Bats they’re showing a movie for three packets. Four whole hours for three packets,” Zef said.

“What’s it called?” Gavein asked, interested. The last pieces of spaghetti were short; you didn’t have to work to twist them around a fork. Finally you could converse.

“The title’s not important. Lola Low’s in it, the former basketball star, and there’s a lot of sex…”

“Zef,” cautioned Edda, nodding at Tad.

“And Maslynnaya’s in it too. She’s short, dainty, and completely bald, they say. Wears a wig everywhere,” he continued, unfazed.

“You’re taking a girl to the movie?” Edda asked, darkening.

“Lib unwound and hasn’t been rewound yet.” When Zef spoke of women, he always used jargon.

Gavein disliked the style. Speaking of women as people and not as things was something he had always done, not the result of age. But to give Zef a lecture about this would have been a waste of breath.

The wait between the first and second course was longer today, because Edda had forgotten to take the pizza out of the freezer. The diners got up and went their ways, leaving only Gavein and Haifan at the table.

“So who’s going with you?” Edda asked her son.

“Pete, Beanpole, Hans, and a new guy, Earthworm. He’s black. We’re taking seltzer.”

“For shooting?” Edda continued her interrogation.

“Yeah. We’re shooting from the balcony on the people below, but only after the second hour of the movie. That’s the deal.”

Shooting seltzer was a harmless form of gang warfare. But often it degenerated to the usual black eyes and bloody noses.

“And the people below you?” asked Gavein.

“They bring umbrellas. It was announced. Beanpole did that. That’s the deal.”

“There won’t be any trouble?”

“No trouble. It’s all arranged. Next week we sit below, and they’re on the balcony.”

“Just don’t go roaming the streets at night. There are no deals outside the theater door.”

Of Zef’s gang Gavein knew only Beanpole and Earthworm. They dropped in once, when Gavein was helping in the kitchen.

Beanpole, unusually tall, had a morose, pimply face and long hands. Being a white, he lived in the slum nearby. He took interest in nothing, cared about nothing. Every other sentence, he used his favorite word, “Loose.” His utterances all seemed the same—but there were worse faults than that.

Earthworm was new in Zef’s gang. They had accepted him because he was black. As tall as Beanpole, but frail, his limbs like sticks, he reminded Gavein of a clothes hanger.

“Something here I don’t get,” said Zef, breaking the silence. He turned to Gavein but was watching Haifan out of the corner of his eye. “Your wife, Dave, is a couple of years younger than you. But everyone moves from Lavath, Davabel, or Ayrrah when they’re exactly thirty-five or seventy, never any other way. Unless they make it to a hundred and five, a geront. So if you’re thirty-five now, how did she come with you?”

“I came by plane, she by ship,” replied Gavein. He understood that Zef’s intention was to draw Haifan into the conversation. Haifan, an astronomy teacher at an elite middle school for blacks only, was unaware that this Mohawked, ridiculous-looking kid was studying for bachelor’s degree orals in physics. Zef was setting a trap for the supercilious pedagogue.

The fish took the bait. Haifan put down his paper and began to hold forth in the confident, resonant voice of wisdom: “That is simply explained. First, the speed of time is dependent on the altitude above sea level. The higher you go, the more slowly time passes. Here on the ground in Davabel, an hour elapses on your watch, but at a great height, it’s a minute, and higher still, it’s a second, and higher still, even less.”

“How high was your plane?” asked Zef.

“The pilot said we were at the altitude of seconds,” said Gavein.

“Well there you are,” Haifan continued. If two people wish to depart for a Land at the same time but one of them is not yet thirty-five or seventy, the younger of the two travels by ship in real time—that is to say, in time as it passes on the ground—while the older individual takes a plane. The route and the height of the flight are chosen so that at the end of the voyage, reaching Davabel, Ayrrah, or Lavath, the two persons have exactly the same age, which is the End of Youth or the Beginning of Old Age or, for a lucky few, the Attainment of Venerability. Sometimes it is necessary for a person to go by both ship and plane, because there are limited routes and possibly several stops along the way. Seaplanes are used by those who make stops. Did you take a seaplane, Gavein?”

“No, but I saw one flying past us.”

“How are we able to see the stars, if time on them practically stands still?” asked Zef, all innocence.

“That’s absurd,” Haifan replied with a superior smile. “The star doesn’t know that it functions in retarded time, and it burns normally. The light reaches us, and we see it.”

“I don’t know, Haifan. Once I saw a line of cars on 5300 Avenue, in a high-speed lane, you know? Close together, at a speed of seventy. Then there was this sign that they could go to a hundred, and they all accelerated at the sign. And you know what happened? The line spread out.”

“I don’t get your point,” Haifan huffed. But he was too intelligent not to get it. He began to sweat, and his voice grew tight.