Kern’s laptop bleats, and in the moment of waking he is up, though his body aches, as it always aches, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. Dizzy with sleep, he is stretching his shoulders when, at the laptop’s signal, the espresso machine—spoil of an unlocked condo—winks on, huffs loudly and begins to steam.
The low room is dark but for the faint glows from the light well and from his laptop’s screen, just enough to illuminate the espresso frothing into his one chipped cup. The room is cold, this early, except near the space heater, salvage from the landfills, wired to a fuel cell with a shiny spot where the serial number once was, the severed stubs of steel bolts gleaming rawly.
He sips coffee, tells himself it makes him feel more awake. The phone he took from the mark is on the floor by the laptop. He dreamed he heard a voice from it, perhaps a woman’s, but it’s not possible—there’s no signal this deep under the surface. Later, when the sun is down, he’ll run it over to Lares, get paid.
Before he’s ready, his laptop chimes, and it’s time to work the heavy bag. The bag hangs from the ceiling on a rusted chain, swaddled in silver duct tape, mottled with dark stains, a mass of shadow. He circles it, poised on the balls of his feet, hands by his temples, his weariness subsumed in the familiarity of the stance. The laptop chimes again and he shuffles his left foot to the side and pivots on its ball as he turns his hip and throws his right leg at the bag, his technique unfolding effortlessly. A moment of sweet stasis, awareness of the bag’s mass, the room’s emptiness, his own exhaustion, and then when the kick lands the bag spasms, and there’s a sharp pain in his shin, but less than there was a year ago, and the books say that in another year the pain will be gone. He’s just recovered his stance when once again the laptop chimes and once again he kicks.
The room was on the surface when he found it, years ago, abandoned in an epidemic’s wake. He hadn’t been strong, then, as he’s strong now, and was able to hold onto it only because so many had died. He’d been shivering with fever in his huddle of blankets when a paramedic in scarred blue armor eased his head in through the door, wary kindness in the blue eyes above the dust mask, a muddy jail tattoo on his neck. He’d said something in English, which Kern had barely understood, then, and left in moments, leaving two bottles of water, vitamins, and an octagonal green pill he’d swallowed less in hope than resignation. Now the room is buried under new construction, some fifty feet below the surface, and the light well, once his preferred route of access, has become occluded, tortuous, and too narrow for his shoulders; to reach the outside, now, he has to navigate a warren of tunnels and lightless stairwells in the dark. It’s better that way, he finds, a safe feeling, and the other residents must agree, because no one has put up even the cheapest bioluminescent strips.
Through the light well he hears a woman gently scolding her children, who will be late, she says, for school. Farther away, another woman sings a song he almost knows, and for a moment he thinks of home. As he strikes the bag again a breath of wind brings frying dough, cooking oil, coffee, the day.
Yet another chime. He remembers Kayla singing to him. Is she still up, he wonders, and does she have a new lover, and does she ever think of him? He wrenches his thoughts back, chastising himself for wasting even a moment, and for having failed already, so early in the day. He kicks the bag hard enough to crush a rib cage—his shin feels shattered, but the bag caroms into the wall.
Five hundred and ninety-six kicks later, his vision greying, his breath ragged, the laptop chimes twice. He staggers away from the bag, but neither sits nor puts his hands on his knees. He doesn’t feel like vomiting, this time, which is progress. When he can breathe through his nose again he scrapes himself dry with a towel already stiff with dried sweat.
Eyes closed, he runs through the move in his mind, correcting the subtleties of balance, the nuances of technique. Soon the laptop will chime again, and again he will attack the bag with a narrow technical ferocity, coming another step closer to total purity of spirit and keeping out the void that’s all around him.
8
Unreal City
Thales’ chair is on the edge of the terrace, inches from the empty air. Far below him, waves bellow and dissolve into foam, sometimes so loud that they keep him from sleeping. He wonders where his mother is—there’s no railing, and it would be easy to take a step forward and go tumbling into space. The coastline is concave here and across the water the surf shimmers before the grey masses of the beachward favelas, where the poor dwell, where he has never been, a ghost Los Angeles shimmering in a heat haze below the real city.
The breeze catches the awning above him, its shadow undulating over the Cartesian grid of the black basalt tiles, and he thinks of the equations describing its rippling curve, the elegant entanglement of position and motion. With an effort, he pushes mathematics from his mind, as the surgeon says he must, if he’s to improve, and focuses on the world: the weave and texture of his white linen trousers, the Corbusier table beside him, the water beading on the heavy crystal tumbler, its wedge of lemon entombed in ice.
He closes his eyes, and the details of the water glass have already vanished. This is how it was before the implant, he supposes, though in fact the memories of that time are scarce—he looks down at the water, sees the orange surf buoys bobbing in the swell, remembers how, the last time he saw them, he’d thought of their house deep in the Amazonian jungle, the river flowing past it in full flood; swimming in the “safe zone” denoted by buoys, the prehistoric menace of the crocodiles sliding down the muddy bank into the tea-colored water.