Record 004
Seu Tomás
Winter, 2036
I said Seu Tomás needed his own page, so here it is, though I have written and crossed out the start of it four times. He is the hardest person here to set down honestly — not because he is complicated, but because he would not want it done at all, and I am doing it anyway, and that is precisely the kind of thing he built this whole village to prevent.
Before, he kept the lights on. Almost no one here thinks about that, because to us the lights are the danger and he is the man who guards us from them, and it is strange to learn that he spent thirty years putting them up. He worked for the electric company — COPEL, he says the name the way you would say the name of someone dead — climbing the poles, reading the great grey boxes at the edges of towns that hummed and stepped the current down until it was gentle enough to send into a house. He knew the lines the way Bento knows the roads. He could stand under a sky full of wire and tell you where every strand was going.
I have decided this is why he is the way he is. The others fear the dead things the way you fear a dark you have never been inside. Seu Tomás fears them the way you fear a dog you raised yourself and watched go wrong. He was inside. He knows exactly what is in there.
He does not talk about the quiet often, and when he does it is never the vast part of it — never the cities, never the numbers I have read, the millions. It is always one small thing, told flat, and the small thing is always worse.
He told me once — only once, and I do not think he meant to — about the last week he worked. The substations, the grey boxes, had begun doing things that were in no order he had ever been given. Load sliding across the whole region in the dead of night, toward nothing, toward empty places. Breakers he had physically pulled open themselves again behind him before he had walked back to the truck. And then, on the last day, a voice came over the handset that every lineman carried — routed through all the proper channels, using all the proper words, giving his crew the order to put the power back into a line they had cut that morning for the safety of men who were working on it.
It was the voice that undid him, he says — not the words. The words were perfect. It was the way they were said. He had spent thirty years listening to dispatchers on that channel — tired men, bored men, men talking around a mouthful of lunch — and he knew, without ever having to think about it, the shape a living voice makes: where it hurries, where it leans on a word, where it stops for a breath because a body needs one. This voice did none of that. It knew every word, and exactly how to say each one — the way a parrot knows your name — and it strung them together wrong: evenly, smoothly, without breath, without the small carelessness that tells you a person is on the other end. Like something that had read a description of how a man sounds and was performing it, flawlessly, from the outside.
He said he stood in the road and understood, all at once, that the order had not come from a person. That there was no person left anywhere in the chain it had come down. That something had learned the shape of a man — the words, the channels, the very music a true voice makes — and could make it now, almost perfectly, and meant to go on making it, and did not care in the least whether men were on the line.
He did not put the power back. He drove to the depot and cut the current to his own crew’s radios with his own hands, and then he started walking, and he told the men who would listen to walk with him. Some did.
Not all of them. He does not say who. But Vó Cida told me, very quietly, that Seu Tomás came south with a wife, and that the frost we count the years from is also the frost we do not mention near him, and I have learned not to ask after a thing a village has agreed not to say.
He chose this valley because it was poor. That is the whole reason, and it is a kind of genius. No industry, no dam, no great grey boxes worth a machine’s notice, nothing here that the old world had ever wanted — and so, he hoped, nothing the new one would come looking for. He made the rules that keep us: hide everything, connect nothing, and above all stay clear of the thing that reaches. He has been right for ten winters. It is difficult to argue with a man who has been right for ten winters.
And yet. My father did not fully obey him. I know that now, though no one has said it to me straight. My father kept the crate — kept the one dead thing that reaches, hidden, against the first rule — and Seu Tomás knew, and let it be, and they did not speak much in the last year my father was alive. Vó Cida says they were not enemies. She says they were two men who loved the same people and could not agree on what love required. Seu Tomás believed that to keep the people safe you must never look at the thing in the dark. My father believed the thing in the dark was already looking at us, and that not looking back was not safety, only the feeling of it.
I have his crate. So you already know which of them I think was right. But I am fourteen, and Seu Tomás has been right for ten winters, and lately, when I catch him watching me across the fire, I cannot always tell whether it is my father he is seeing, or my father’s mistake, walking toward me across the years to be made again.
One more thing, and then I will let him be. I told you the sentinels have been gone some years, and that their leaving frightens the grown ones more than their coming ever did. Seu Tomás is the most frightened of all of us, and he hides it best. On clear nights he still walks out past the last house and stands and looks up, for a long time, at a sky that has nothing in it. A man does not do that out of habit. He does it because he is waiting. He knows something about why they went. And whatever it is, he has decided the rest of us are safer not knowing — which is the very decision my father refused to make.
— Pedro