Nicholas Rombes - The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

And no record of Kate after that night.

*

The well. What about the well? It was a question posed by Evie to Farris, as a sort of test.

“Farris,” she says, as they make their way the next day across a plain, “what’s your plan concerning the well?”

“To help you repair it.” He’s walking in front of Evie, leading the way. The sky has brightened, and the sun’s making the earth beneath their feet, it seems to Evie, somehow softer.

“What makes you think I’m going to repair it?”

With this, Farris stops and turns to her. A look — an almost threatening look, or worse, demonic — crosses his face and then just as quickly vanishes. He smiles, fingers a cigarette from his pocket, lights it (in a procedural sort of way) takes a drag, and offers it to Evie. To be friendly Evie obliges and passes it back.

“You know,” says Farris, “they warned me you might say that.”

“Warned? They?”

In the near distance, an animal of some sort, black and low, crosses the plain. It makes a noise, a muted howl. It stops, and then moves again, and then stops. Evie feels the paint moving again on the back of her left hand, and she glances down to see it swirling slowly, counterclockwise, in purples and browns, like a bruise. The animal is closer now and they can see the black, shiny hair standing up on its back, thick like wire. It makes another sound, and Evie pictures the noise as red horizontal sound bars reaching low across the ground towards her and she understands or thinks she understands that if she can get close enough to the animal or whatever it is to hear the sound up close it would be significant and have meaning.

They push, step by step, deeper into the State and the animal shadows them for a while and then disappears. The plain gives way to patchy, untended fields that slope gently down into a valley. They pass people dressed in yellow tending an apple orchard and a building with a spire looming behind them topped off with something carved out of metal, a slashing symbol unknown to either Evie or Farris. They continue on, warming in the afternoon sun, sometimes Evie leading, sometimes Farris. They walk in silence mostly, their strides in sync for minutes at a time.

Until the drones come, appearing in the form of something resembling hawks, complete with feathers, soaring high and screechless. Evie has a memory — as faint as the undercoating of paint — of throwing pebbles at large birds like that. Not quite: her handing Kate small stones and she hauling off and whipping them at the sky not to hit them but to make them dive as if at insects. They had gotten the idea from watching bats at dusk above the open field drop and rise in sharp, impossible rhythms. Just trying to pick one out and follow it was enough to set your eyes in a sort of waking REM.

There are two of them, then three, against the gray afternoon sky. Those slow, looping circles in the air that were so familiar.

“Are they ours?” Farris asks, still watching the sky.

Evie, standing behind him, considers, yet again, the star-shaped symbol scarred onto the back of Farris’s neck. To their east is an enormous grasslands, stretching to the far horizon. To their west is much the same, with pale mountains rising in the distance. They stand upon something like a farm-to-market road, dipping and rising ahead of them and then curving off into the unseeable distance.

“The one on the left is, maybe,” Evie says. It’s meant as a joke; the drones are in continual motion, continually exchanging places in the sky. There is no left or right drone. It’s a test, of sorts, to see if Farris will smile.

He doesn’t.

*

After two hours of walking at a good clip without stopping, everything looks the same. Which is to say, everything looks just slightly different , somehow. Repetition and difference. Wasn’t that how one of the theorists Evie studied under characterized our present age? Was it repetition with difference , or and difference? Also: Empty time . In the dry air of that classroom in the cool basement library Evie had fallen in love with the translated words of philosopher D., even though later that semester, drunk at the Brickhouse on a cold winter night, she would learn from the philosophy students that no one in philosophy considered D. a real philosopher. What is he then? Evie asked. An aphorist , they said, made into a philosopher by English departments .

*

That night, as Farris and Evie sleep near the side of the road beneath one of the shapeless thorn apple trees that had begun to appear, Evie listens as Farris talks in his sleep. Some of the words are familiar:

State…

Instructions…

Firestorm…

Jinxed…

While others seem to be two words put together into something familiar:

Out-push…

Day-gold-by…

Open-waste…

And yet others are alien to Evie:

Cuitlaxcolli…

*

In the morning they keep walking. The State stretches on and on, encompassing its own useless, undulating fields. Day after day, toward the chaos and catastrophe of the well. Evie’s repair kit with its small metal objects wrapped individually in oiled cloths weighs heavily on her back in a small leather knapsack. On the third day the grass fields change to barren, dusty land, and then back to grass.

The lack of objects on the horizon intrigues and then spooks Evie, who recalls the plane of immanence from her useless theory-training, the horizontal moment of thought and all that. She understands that in order to repair the well she will have to destroy it. That was prerequisite for the emergence of any new System. She will need to get to the root of the infection. In this phase of the State’s long collapse, to be an engineer, as she is, means to be a destroyer, not a designer, of objects. But in order to destroy them properly one has to know how they were built in the first place.

On the fifth day, they arrive at a quarry, the first sign that they are nearing the well. Evie knows that some sections have been quarried hundreds of kilometers from where it was built, so the well might still be days ahead. The bitter smell of limestone fills the air and Evie can’t help thinking of the smell of blood from the cut-throated animal. Large ruts in the earth indicating the direction the limestone had been transported run due north, towards the well. Looking down into the quarry she sees that at the bottom, perched on a large rock in the middle of a pool of turquoise water, there are several of the drones they had seen in the sky earlier. Again, Evie thinks of Kate and her pebble throwing, and of how, on the night before she disappeared, home from university for the summer, her hair shorter than Evie had ever seen it before, they had gone to the zoo, and how in the enormous walk-in aviary, so full of sound, she first suggested that some of the birds weren’t real at all.

*

The quarry a few hours behind them, Evie and Farris rest at the side of the road.

“We should have taken a trophy,” says Farris, “from the animal.”

“Why?”

“As a reminder. Maybe a tusk.”

“There were no tusks.”

“I should have said ‘the.’ There was only one tusk. Someone or something else must have taken the other.”

This was the most Farris has said since the beginning of the journey.

“Or the tail,” Farris continues. “Tusk or tail.”

“What tail? There wasn’t any tail.”

Farris gives Evie a look that tells her to stop or to be careful, but Evie keeps talking.

“We looked at the same animal, Farris, dead on the road. There were no tusks. There was no tail.”