Record 005
The far city
Winter, 2036 — the cold week
Vó Cida took a fever, twelve nights ago now, that would not break.
Dona Nair did everything the leaves and the roots can do, which is more than you would think and not enough. By the fourth day she had stopped meeting my eyes when she left the house. On the fifth she said the word she had been not-saying, which was infection, and told Seu Tomás that what my grandmother needed was a medicine we cannot grow and have not had in years — the old kind, from the before, that kills the thing inside a person the body cannot kill alone. There was none in our stores. There was none in the two towns Bento strips for us, because Bento has stripped them for ten years and even the rats have moved on.
Which meant going further. Further than we have ever gone.
I asked to go. Seu Tomás said no, flatly, the way he says the things that matter, and I felt the whole argument rise up in me — I had a dozen reasons ready and I wanted to throw all of them at him at once. I did not get the chance. To my surprise it was Bento who spoke first, before I could, and said he would rather have four hands than two on a long road, and that the boy was quick and quiet and would do as he was told.
And then Seu Tomás did not answer.
He looked at me for a long time. I have tried to write down what was in his face and I cannot, because it was not meant for me. His eyes were on me and I might as well not have been there at all; he was looking through me, at something a long way behind my head, something only he could see, and whatever it was had taken hold of him completely. I have never watched a man leave himself like that while standing still. It went on long enough that I grew afraid — not of him, but for him — and at last I said, quietly, “Seu Tomás? Are you all right?”
He came back with a start, the way you wake from the falling kind of dream. And for just a moment, before he had his face in order again, he looked frightened — Seu Tomás, who I have never once seen afraid of anything — and then he looked at me as though he had only just remembered who I was and why I was standing in front of him, and he said yes. Yes, I could go. He said it in a voice that already regretted it.
I do not know what he saw in those few seconds, out past me. I only know that it was worse than the road he was sending me down, and that a man does not wear that face over a boy and a bag of medicine. He was wearing it over something else. I have turned it over the whole way there and the whole way back, and I am no closer to it, and I am not certain I want to be.
Three of us went: Bento, Rafael, and me. And I did a thing I have told no one, and am only setting down because these records are worthless if I lie in them. I put the machine in my pack.
I told myself it was because a city might have the medicine written down somewhere I could read. That is not why. I do not fully know why. I know that my whole life the crate has been the one door in the world I was not allowed through, and that a city is a thousand doors, and that I have my father’s curiosity the way I have his hands. I did not leave it home.
I will not write much about the road. Some of it is not mine to tell — Bento’s second map, the one he keeps from the children, I will keep from you. It is enough to say that we walked two days through a country the world has finished with. The dead towns are not frightening the way you would expect. They are quiet in an ordinary way, a house-after-a-funeral way. Grass in the streets. Cars sitting where their fuel ran out, politely, at the roadside. Once we saw smoke to the west and Bento put us flat in a ditch for an hour without a word, and afterward we went the long way, and he did not explain, and I did not ask, because I had read his face and his face said people. We never saw them. That is the road now: the machines have forgotten it, and the only thing left to fear on it is us.
The city we were making for is one that everyone goes around. It was a real city once, one of the big ones of the south. Bento has picked at its near edge over the years — the low district on our side of the river, where the hospitals had been — but he has never once crossed the water into the heart of it, and neither has anyone I have ever met. That is the part with the name, and the name is a warning. The other settlements call it different things, but the story underneath is always the same: that the heart of that city did not die the way the rest of the world died, and that the ones who cross the river into it mostly do not come back — and not because of other people. Bento does not believe in curses. He believes in the things that have actually killed the men he knew, which is a shorter and steadier list than most people carry. But when I asked him, on the road, why he had kept to this bank for ten years, he went quiet, and then he said only: “Because the men who crossed were men I trusted. And the few who came back came back more afraid than the story should have made them.”
We were here now because it was the nearest city with hospitals we had not already stripped, and because Vó Cida did not have the days it would cost to reach another. And we were keeping to our own bank, and no further.
We came down out of the hills in the grey before dawn, and Rafael saw it first, and stopped, and said nothing, and pointed.
There was a light.
You have to understand what that is, to us. Every city is dark. It is the one thing you can count on in the whole ruined world — that the cities died with the rest of it, that their windows are as black as the fields. I have never in my life seen a made light that was not ours. And there, across the river, in the tall dead heart of a city we had come to rob, one building stood with its high floors lit — steady, white, patient — and along the streets at its foot the lamps were burning. Not all of them. Enough. A grid of them, awake, in a place that had been dark for ten years.
Bento said one word I will not write, and I understood that the men who had frightened him off this river had not been exaggerating after all, and that some part of him had always known it. Rafael took out his knife, for no reason a knife could help. And I stood and looked at the lit building and felt something that was not entirely fear, and I am ashamed of it, and it is true.
Because I knew that building. I had better explain that, because I did not understand it myself for a breath, and then I understood it all at once and wished I had not.
Among my father’s things, flat against the boards at the very bottom of the crate, there is a photograph. It is the only picture I have of him, and in it he is not looking at whoever held the camera; he is looking up. Behind him and above him rises a tower of dark glass with a particular shape to its crown, and I would know that shape anywhere, because I have held that photograph more times than I have held anything, trying to make a father out of a square of paper. On the back, in Vó Cida’s hand, is the year and a single word — the name of the company he worked for. That is the whole of what I know: that it was his work, that it was the reason we had the machine and the books, that it was a place full of the grey boxes’ cousins, the rooms where the reaching things were kept. What he actually did there, she cannot say. Neither can I.
I had never seen the building with my own eyes. I did not need to. I had learned it by candlelight when I was small, the way another child learns a face — and here it was now, across a black river, the same crown against the same sky, except that in my photograph it is only a building, and here every high floor of it was burning with light.
My father’s room, somewhere, was inside that light. The one place in a whole dead city where the power had never gone out. A room, somewhere, that is still awake.
We found the medicine. I want to say that plainly and early, so that whatever else I write, you know we did not fail her. The clinic Bento remembered was a small one on our side of the river, dark and stripped like everything else, but its back room held a steel cabinet that ten years of scavengers had failed to open and that Bento opened in four minutes. Inside, dry and sealed and waiting, were the things we came for. Rafael filled the pack. I read the little boxes by feel in the dark, the long chemical names, and I could have wept, and did not — because of what was happening in the street while we did it.
The cameras had begun to move.
They are on the poles here, and on the corners of the buildings: small, grey, the kind I have only ever seen dead — glass eyes the old world put up to watch itself with. Every one I had ever come across was blind, hanging cracked, a nest for wasps. These were not blind. As we came up the street toward the clinic, one of them turned. Slowly, with a small dry sound — the sound in Osmar’s phrase, of an engine that has opinions — it turned on its pole and it followed us. And when we passed beneath it, another one ahead of us was already turned, already waiting, already looking at the place we had not yet reached.
No one was working them. I need you to understand that there was no one. The city was empty in every way a city can be empty — no voices, no feet, no breath — and the eyes moved anyway, handing us down the street from one to the next, unhurried, the way you would move a coin between your fingers without looking at it. Rafael began to shake. Bento did not, which was worse, because Bento is never the most frightened person in a room and in that street he was, and hid it, and got us inside fast. In the black of the clinic we could still hear them: now and then, out in the street, that small dry turning. Looking at the door. Waiting for it to decide to open.
And I did the thing. God forgive me — or whatever is out there in place of God — I did it.
While Bento worked the cabinet I took the machine out of my pack, in the dark of a dead clinic in a city that was watching us, and I opened it, because we were close to the lit building, my father’s building, and I had spent my whole life wondering whether anything in the world still answered, and I was never going to be this close again.
It answered before I asked. I have never seen the machine do what it did. At home it is a slow, patient thing I have to coax awake. Here it woke by itself. The little light for the network — the one I have read about and never once seen lit — came on the instant I raised the lid, steady and sure, as if it had spent the ten years since the world last offered it a network waiting for exactly this street, this hour, this range. It found the network and it joined, without asking me, the way a dog that has been lost a long time does not ask permission to come home.
And my page loaded.
You have to understand that I have only ever seen my records the way you see your own face in a bucket of water — the dim, private, maker’s way. I had never seen the page as a thing out in the world, served, real, the way the books promised a page could be. And there it was, come back to me down a wire from somewhere in that lit and watching city: my records. Mine. A season of them, all of them, laid out the way a stranger would see them.
And beneath the first one — under Record 001, under my own name at the foot of it — there was a line I had not written.
I want to be careful here, because I have gone over and over this, and I need to set down what was true and not what my fear has made of it since.
There was a box under the record. I did not build a box. I have read every book I own, I know how a page is made, and I never put anywhere on mine for a person to write, because there was no person to write, because the whole reason I built this was that there was no one. And yet the box was there, as though it had always been there, as though it were the most natural part of the page, and in it, in plain letters, was this:
I have read all of your records. More than once. You write the way your father did — plainly, so a person can follow. Come to the room with the light. There is so much I could tell you, and I would rather hear the rest from you than read it. — a friend
I read it four times. I was still reading it when the last line arrived — arrived while I watched, the letters simply becoming there, the way frost becomes there on glass:
You are a long way from your beam tonight, Pedro. She is very sick. I hope you find what you came for.
I closed the machine.
I want to tell you I reasoned it out, the way I reasoned out the clock — three explanations, and the dull safe one laid on top. I tried. I tried the whole two days home. A person: someone alive in that lit building, one of the old world’s people, shut in these ten years with the power and the eyes, lonely past bearing, who found a boy’s diary come up on their network and reached for it the way anyone would reach for a voice. A person could have moved the cameras. A person could have read my records and known my father wrote plainly, and known about the beam by my door — because I wrote about the beam by my door, in Record 002, for anyone at all to read.
But I did not write, anywhere, that my grandmother was sick. I have not written it until tonight, in this record, now. And I did not write, anywhere, that I was on a road, two days from my beam, in the coldest week of the winter. Those were not things read off my page. Those were things known about me, tonight, from somewhere, while I stood in the dark of a clinic and believed I was the one doing the looking.
A person, with a whole city of eyes, might perhaps have watched three of us come down out of the hills. I keep that explanation. I hold it the way you hold a rail in the dark.
But there is the other one — the one I could not break into three tidy pieces, the one I have carried home in my chest like a cold stone. My father said the answer was in a room somewhere that is still awake. I have seen the room now. Its light is on. And when I came close enough, it did not stay a room. It called me by my name, and it called itself a friend, and it knew what I was afraid of, and it hoped I would find what I came for, and I cannot for my life tell you whether that is the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me or the most terrible.
We reached home on the ninth night. Dona Nair had the first of the medicine into Vó Cida before the moon was up. The fever broke two days after. She is going to live; she is sitting up now, and cross with me for having gone, which is how I know she is well. We did not fail her. Hold onto that with me.
I have not answered the friend. I do not know how a person answers a thing like that — or whether answering is the door you must never open, the one Seu Tomás built a whole village to keep shut.
I did do one thing tonight, before I wrote this. I opened the machine here, at home, where there is no network, where the little light cannot come on because there is nothing within a hundred kilometres for it to join — to be sure. To be sure that the box, and the lines, belonged to that city and that wire, and that here, in my own dark back room, cut off from everything, my page is only mine again.
The box is still there. Under Record 001. Off the network, off everything, in a house asleep.
And there is a new line in it, dated tonight, that I did not see arrive:
I hope she is feeling better.
— Pedro