He asks Diane about the bedroom. A long flight, a long day, a brief sleep would be nice.
She watches them walk down the hall. In the dwindling spirit of this astonishing time, she isn’t surprised. Sleep, obviously, understandably, after what they’ve experienced. She tries to remember whether she made the bed this morning, cleaned the room. Max sometimes cleans; he cleans and then inspects, scrupulously.
There is only one bedroom, one bed, but let it belong to Jim Kripps and Tessa whatever-her-last-name-is. They’ll be headed home at first light.
* * *
Martin is speaking again.
“The drone wars. Never mind country of origin. The drones have become autonomous.”
He begins to notice that he and Diane are the only ones left in the living room.
“Drones above us now. Flinging warnings at each other. Their weapon being a form of the language isolate. A language known only to drones.”
How did this happen, five people down to two. The man remains standing and they look at each other. The woman realizes that she is still in the thrall of cryptocurrencies.
She says the word and waits for him to respond.
Finally he says, “Cryptocurrencies, microplastics. The dangers at every level. Eat, drink, invest. Breathe, inhale, draw oxygen into the lungs. Walk, run, stand. And now in the purest snow from the alpine wilderness, from the arctic wasteland.”
“What?”
“Plastics, microplastics. In our air, our water, our food.”
She had hoped to hear something libidinal, arousing. She understands that he has something more to say and she looks and waits.
He says, “Greenland is disappearing.”
She gets to her feet and faces him.
She says, “Martin Dekker. You know what we want, don’t you?”
They could sidestep their way into the kitchen and she could stand with her back pressed to the two vertical bars of the refrigerator door and they could do it quickly, forgettably, in the spirit of the onward moment.
He unbuckles his belt and drops his pants. He stands there, stricken, in his checkered shorts, looking taller than ever. She tells him to say something in German and when he does, a substantial statement recited quickly, she asks for a translation.
He says, “Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned, and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.”
She nods, half-smiling, and motions for him to lift his trousers and buckle his belt. She finds it satisfying to mimic his belt-buckling. She understands that sex with her former student may be a sleazy little tremor in her mind but is nowhere present in her body.
She expects him to walk out the door and hates to think of him trying to get home in whatever circumstances now prevail. Instead he takes three long strides to the nearest chair and sits there, looking into space.
* * *
In the bedroom Tessa thinks about going home, being home, the place, finally, where they don’t see each other, walk past each other, say what when the other speaks, aware only of a familiar shape making noise somewhere nearby.
Jim is nearby now, next to her on the bed, asleep, his body shaking slightly.
There is a poem she wants to work on, tomorrow, next day, when she is fully awake, at her desk at home, the first line bouncing around in her brain for a while.
In a tumbling void.
She will see the line when she closes her eyes and concentrates. See the letters set against a dark background and then slowly open her eyes to whatever is in front of her, dominant objects only inches high, a paperweight, a photograph, a toy taxicab.
Jim is awake now. He takes a long time to build to a spacious yawn. Tessa says something in a language that he does not recognize until he realizes it is simply fake, a dead language, a dialect, an idiolect (whatever that is) or something else completely.
“Home,” he says finally. “Where is that?”
* * *
Max is making his way through the crowded streets when he grudgingly recalls something the young man said and wonders if what he is seeing here and now is an aspect of Martin Dekker’s mind repositioned in three dimensions.
Is it like this in other cities, people on a rampage, nowhere to go? Do crowds in a Canadian city spill down to join crowds here? Is Europe one impossible crowd? What time is it in Europe? Are the public squares swarming with people, tens of thousands, and all of Asia and Africa and elsewhere?
Names of countries keep rolling through his mind and people are trying to talk to him and to each other and he thinks of his daughter with two kids and a husband in Boston and the other daughter traveling somewhere and for one strange and compressed and claustrophobic moment he forgets their names.
He stands against a wall and watches.
In other times, more or less ordinary, there are always people staring into their phones, morning, noon, night, middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to everyone hurrying past, engrossed, mesmerized, consumed by the device, or walking toward him and then veering away, but they can’t do it now, all the digital addicts, phones shut down, everything down down down.
He tells himself that it’s time to head home and that he will have to muscle his way through the crowd, people hunched against the cold, a thousand faces every minute, people wrestling, throwing punches, a small riot here and there, curses rising into the air. He stands for a few seconds longer, flexing shoulders in preparation, and decides that when he gets to his building he will count the steps as he climbs to the apartment. He has done this before but not for many decades and begins to wonder what the point is.
Then he walks into the streaming mass.
* * *
Diane, back home, where else, is trying to suppress a series of little squeaky belches.
She says, “Somewhere in Chile.”
This seems to mean something but she can’t remember what it is. She looks at Martin and then at the other two, returning from the bedroom. The man is yawning and the woman is almost fully dressed, wearing low-cut socks but no shoes. Diane mutters a few foul words, mocking herself for yielding to the spirit of the moment and allowing the bedroom to be used by sex-frenzied guests.
Or maybe they were just resting. This is what they’d said, this is what she’d originally believed.
Martin says, “The Cerro-Pachón Ridge in north-central Chile.”
“What’s that?” Jim says.
“The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.”
He goes on to explain the matter and then Max walks in and unzips his jacket. They wait for him to say something. He takes off the jacket and tosses it on the floor next to the remote control device, his bottle of bourbon and his empty glass. He fills the glass and drinks, shaking his head at the bracing shock of raw whiskey.
What is happening in the streets? What is out there? Who is out there?
He says, “You don’t want to know.”
Then he raises his glass.
“Widow Jane,” he says. “Aged ten years in American oak. Did I say this before?”
He drinks and then leans forward and to his left, looking at Tessa’s feet.
“What happened to your shoes?”
“They walked off without me,” she says.