Marcel Theroux - Far North

I could see it right in front of me and I had a hard time crediting it.

Also, Tolya’s speech about the Zone had all the guards panicking. Even watching them through the glass, I could see they wanted to get their job done as quick as possible.

As Zulfugar waited on the bridge with the other prisoners, he must have sensed that he’d miscalculated.

Instead of being let loose on the other side, they were being corralled together, like pigs waiting for the bolt.

He’d turned to flee. Maybe he risked a bullet, thinking that if he could just get back to the flask it would make him better.

I’d seen what had unfolded next from my perch on the roof.

That flask might be able to heal a graze or close up a cut hand, but it couldn’t fix the hole they put in Zulfugar.

*

We made good time over the next two days in spite of the dearth of food. Shamsudin walked quicker without the chain, and we moved so fast that we had to watch that we didn’t overtake the party of guards.

I didn’t dare risk hunting or a fire those first two days — not because of disease or radiation, but because I feared revealing our position.

On the third night, I snared a pair of rabbits and started to build a tiny fire to broil them on.

That evening, Shamsudin got a fever. It was by no means warm yet, but he complained about the heat, and even by the moonlight, I could see his face was basted in sweat.

He had taken it into his head that his flask, as well as mending cuts, would be proof against disease, and he had started laying it on himself when we stopped to melt snow or let the horse feed.

I teased him for it. I told him that it was no medicine, but pure ju-ju. But he was ready with a theory about how it worked and even suggested I try it.

‘I’ll take my chances with the germs I have,’ I said, ‘rather than sharing yours.’

Anyway, he was at it with his magic jar, rolling it over his sweaty forehead and up andown his arms which he said ached.

That gave me a bad feeling, and the truth was I didn’t feel so great myself. Also, the horse was skittish and off her food.

I thought it would be a twisted kind of justice for us to get sick now.

Digging in my pocket for the flints, my hand closed on the memory stone. I drew it out without thinking. When I had put it away three days before, the thing was dead. Now its face was all etched with green fire and the lights on it were winking and alive.

The thought crossed my mind that it had drawn its power from the bottled lightning, or that whatever had been broken in it, had been knit up by its closeness to the flask. But I pushed the idea out of my head for a piece of foolishness.

Shamsudin had noticed me pause, and he asked what I had.

I showed it to him and he told me how to make it play.

It lit into life at my touch. Its screen took colour and moved with pictures that showed the city as it had been, its streets all come to life, filled with people and transport.

You couldn’t see her at first, but there was a girl’s voice in it, telling you what the pictures were. She was speaking in Russian which I couldn’t make sense of, but Shamsudin translated.

She said this is my school, this is where I live, this is my friend Darya — who was a girl giggling and covering her face with her hand, this is my father who is packing to leave.

It became clear that all the bustle in the city was people getting ready to go.

I understood why she’d made this thing. I’ve often wished I had a keepsake like it. It was a sampler with patches of the past worked into it. It should have been with her in the city she had gone to. It seemed a pity that she had forgotten it in a drawer.

Then it showed her on her bed. The picture went wobbly and you could hear a girl laughing in the background.

Lyudi budushchevo , she said, or something that sounded like it.

Shamsudin sat up and said she hadn’t forgotten it at all, she’d intended it to be left.

People of the future, she was saying. Whoever sees this message. I was born in the city of Polyn, Russia. I am eighteen years old. This is how I lived. This is who I was.

This is how I lived. This is who I was .

When Shamsudin said those words I felt a chill run through me. I saw that skull of a city with the life gone from it.

I thought of the mounds of coins and ribbons beside the highway. And the scratches on the cell-walls at Buktygachak. And the bronze head guarding the empty square.

You never expect to be in at the end of anything , Boathwaite had said. But then he had his brother’s arrogance. The end is where you end up. You always end up at the end of something . So what is it that keeps you shambling out to the stable when it’s sixty below, doing up the saddle with your fingers stiff with cold shding out in summer when you can’t breathe for dust?

There are many words I’ve seen written down that I’ve never heard spoken. This is one I wouldn’t know how to say exactly, but I know it’s at the back of every other fear.

It doesn’t make sense to fear it, because you’re never around when it happens. Fear hunger, or cold, or the pain of sickness — but this? And yet this is the one that preys on me. I bumped up against it in the darkness hearing her say those words.

I fear annihilation .

Boathwaite can say what he likes. A sane person knows they’re headed for the end of something. But the thought that things will continue, there’ll be kind words at their funeral, or even just a pulse of blood in someone, somewhere, that dumbly recalls that they were here — that gives the rest of it some point. A sane person expects that.

That girl had cast her message adrift on a sea of time so that she could live again briefly in the mind of whoever saw it. Maybe she didn’t know that, but that’s how it was.

Everyone expects to be in at the end of something. What no one expects is to be in at the end of everything .

*

When I woke up in the morning there were six inches of snow on me. I was a little feverish, but Shamsudin was badly ill. His skin was grey and he was breathing hard. He kept saying he’d be fine, and he insisted we moved off as normal, but he barely got ten yards before he stumbled.

He said not to get close, but I was all done with that. I figured I was gone, or as good as gone, if he was.

I helped up from the place where he’d fallen and I lay him back down on his bed and covered him with all the blankets we had. Then I boiled some soup from the rabbits and gave it to him, spoon by spoon, as he lay shivering.

Between bouts of sweating he was able to sleep, and I held his head in my lap and he felt like a baby. I thought about Ping, and as I pictured her face I told him I loved him.

He murmured in his sleep.

The flush of fever in his face made him look almost youthful again.

After an hour or two, he woke up and asked me if I held out hopes for the afterlife.

I said not, but if anyone deserved it, he surely did.

‘I have been in Andalus,’ he said. ‘I think paradise will smell like the flowers of bitter oranges.’

I said I had always thought something similar.

By then, he had exhausted himself with speaking and just held onto me until the two of us were moved to a feverish intimacy, clinging together in loneliness and fear of death.

*

When the sickness got bad again, he raved and told me to shoot him. In his lucid moments, he wanted to talk about his childhood. He said his mother had always been proud of him. I said I dn’t doubt it. Just like the girl from Polyn, he wanted a witness.

When the sun came out, I opened his jacket to get some fresh air on him. His skinny chest burned like fire.

Later that afternoon, sores broke out on his face, and the infection spread to his lungs so he had to sleep upright. The horse had sickened too, but I didn’t have time to tend it.