Pattern Recognition

39. RED DUST

There must be, though she's never noticed it before, a band of steel, cunningly fashioned, that ordinarily follows the exact irregularities of the inner circumference of her skull.

It seems, now that she's aware of it, to be made from rod no thicker than the wire of a coat hanger, but much stronger, and of enormous rigidity. She knows that because she can feel it, now that someone has been turning a central key, also of metal, which is T-shaped, and engraved, very finely, on one side only, with the map of a city whose name she once knew, though it escapes her now in her wretchedness at the band's expansion. With each turn of the key, it widens, causing her excruciating pain.

Opening her eyes, she finds that they don't work, not as she expects them to.

I'll have to have glasses, she thinks, closing them again. Or contact lenses. Or that operation they do with lasers. That had come from Soviet medicine, she knew, and by accident, the first patient having suffered cuts to the retina in a car crash, in Russia —

Opening them again.

She's in Russia.

She tries to raise her hands to her aching head, but finds she can't.

Spatial inventory. She's on her back, probably on a bed, and can't move her arms. She carefully raises her head, as she'd do in Pilates in preparation for the Hundred, and sees that her arms at least are there, or seem to be, beneath a thin gray blanket and a folded edge of white sheet, but that there are two restraining bands of gray webbing, one just below her shoulders and the other just below her elbows.

This seems not a good thing.

She lowers her head and groans, because this has caused the key to be turned at least twice, and quickly.

The ceiling, which she finds she can focus on now, is blank and white. Rolling her head gingerly to the right, she sees an equally blank wall, also white. To the left, the ceiling's light fixture, which is rectangular and featureless, and then a row of beds, three at least, which are empty, and made of white-painted metal.

All of that seems a lot to do, because it makes her very tired.

A gray-haired woman, wearing a gray cardigan over a shapeless gray dress, is there with a tray.

The bed has been cranked up to partial sitting position and the restraints are gone. So, she finds, is the expanding interior skull ring. “Where am I?”

The woman says something, no more than four syllables, and places the tray, on wire supports, across Cayce's stomach. There is a plastic bowl of something that looks like thick clam chowder, perhaps minus the clams, and a plastic tumbler of grayish-white fluid.

The woman hands Cayce a strangely blunt-looking spoon that proves to be made of some rubbery, flexible plastic, rigid enough to eat soup with but soft enough to bend until its two ends meet. Cayce uses it to eat the soup, which is warm, and thick, and very good, and more heavily spiced than anything she's eaten in a hospital before.

Cayce eyes the gray beverage suspiciously. The woman points to it and utters a single syllable.

It tastes, Cayce finds, not entirely unlike Bikkle. An organic Bikkle. When she's finished, and has returned the tumbler to the tray, she's rewarded with another monosyllable, neutral in tone. The woman takes the tray, crosses the floor, opens the room's single door, which is cream-colored, and goes out, closing the door behind her.

The position of her bed has prevented Cayce from seeing anything of what might be beyond that door, but the geography of hospitals suggests a corridor.

She sits up, discovering that she's wearing a backless hospital gown, though one made of some thin, extensively laundered flannel print that seems once to have been decorated with small pink-and-yellow clown figures on a pale blue background.

The ceiling fixture fades abruptly, but doesn't go entirely out.

She tugs blanket and sheet aside, discovering a remarkable assortment of bruises on the front of both thighs, and swings her legs off the bed. She suspects that actually standing will be an experiment, but finds she doesn't do too badly.

The room, or ward, is floored with something seamless and gray and rubbery, faintly gritty beneath her feet.

She places her feet together now and finds the “magnets” from the Pilates towel exercises, points of focus, pulling the muscles of her legs together, into internal isometric alignment. Makes her spine as long as possible. A wave of vertigo. She waits for it to pass. She tries a roll-down, rolling her head forward one vertebra at a time, while bending slowly at the knees until she's in a crouch, head dangling…

There's something under the bed. Black.

She freezes.

She goes down on her knees, peering.

Touches it. Her carry-on. She slides it out. Unzipped, her clothing wadded, bulging out. She runs her hands through them, touch telling her she finds jeans, sweater, the cold slick nylon shell of the Rickson's. But the Stasi envelope isn't there, and neither is the Luggage Label bag. No phone, no iBook, no wallet, no passport.

Her Parco boots have been squashed flat and jammed into one of the outer pockets.

She stands and finds the tie, at the back of her neck, that frees her from the bare-ass flannel clown gown. Stands naked in greenish fluorescent twilight, then bends and starts feeling for her clothes. She can't find socks, but underpants, jeans, a black T-shirt will have to do. She sits on the edge of the hospital bed to tie the Parco boots.

And then it occurs to her that of course the door will be locked. It has to be.

It isn't. The institutional thumb-push depresses smoothly. She feels the door shift slightly on its hinges. Opens it.

Corridor, yes; hospital, no. High school?

A wall of faded turquoise lockers with small, three-digit number plates. Strip lighting. Synthetic floor the color of cork.

Looks left: The corridor terminates in brown fire doors. Looks right: glass doors with push bars, sunlight.

Easy choice.

Torn between the desire to run and the desire to pass, if possible, for someone with a reason to be here, wherever and whatever here is, she tries to open the door and step out normally.

The sun blinds her. Non-Moscow air, smelling of summer vegetation. Shading her eyes with her wrist, she walks forward, toward a statue lost in dazzle. Lenin, aerodynamic to the point of featurelessness, molded in white concrete, pointing the proletariat forward like some kind of giant Marxist lawn jockey.

She turns and looks back. She seems to have just walked out of an ugly sixties orange brick community college, topped with a crenellated structure of concrete resembling the crown the Statue of Liberty wears, windows between each upthrust peak.

But she's not sticking around to see any more of it. She sees a dry grassy incline, a beaten, unofficial path, and follows that, into a shallow ravine or gully, drainage of some kind, and out of the building's line of sight.

The crushed yellow grass of the path is dotted with flattened cigarette filters, bottle caps, bits of foil.

She keeps going, until she finds herself in a dusty grotto of bushes, a natural hiding place and evidently a popular one. Bottle and cans, crumpled papers, a desiccated condom slung from a twig like part of the life cycle of some large insect. A bower of love, then, as well.

She crouches, getting her breath, listening for indications of pursuit.

She hears the ordinary sound of a jet, somewhere overhead.

The path leads out the far side and loses itself in a tumble of glacier-rounded rocks, a seasonal streambed. She follows these through thicker, greener vegetation, to where the path appears again, climbing the side of the ravine.

At its top, she sees the fence.

Newer than the building, concrete white and unweathered at the foot of each galvanized pole. Ordinary chain-link, topped with wire. Though the wire, she sees, walking slowly up to it, is barbed, not razor, and two strands only.

She looks back and sees the very tips of the crenellations atop the red brick building.

She extends her finger. Takes a breath. Taps the chain-link as lightly, as quickly as she can. No shock, though she supposes Klaxons may have just been set off, high on the walls of barracks full of bored and waiting men, heavily armed.

She looks at the chain-link and at the toes of her Parco boots. Not a good match. Summers in Tennessee had taught her that nothing climbed chain-link better than cowboy boots. You just stuck the toes straight in and walked right up. The Parco boots have toes that aren't narrow enough, and only lightly cleated soles.

She sits in the dust, unties, tightens, and reties them, takes off the Rickson's and knots its sleeves as tightly around her waist as she can. Stands, looking up.

Sun at the zenith. She hears an electric bell. Lunch?

She hooks her fingers in the chain-link and goes up, leaning back and using her body weight to help keep the soles of her boots flat against the fence. It's the hard way, but the only way in these shoes. It hurts, but then the fingers of both hands are around the two-inch crosspiece at the top, inches below the lower strand of barbed wire.

She lets go carefully, with her left hand, reaches down, unties the jacket sleeves, and whips the Rickson's up and over, draping it across the upper strand of wire.

She almost loses it, maneuvering to get one leg up and over, but then she has it, straddling the Rickson's, already feeling the tooth of one barb finding its way through layers of lovingly crafted otaku nylon and mil-spec interlining.

Getting the other leg over to this side, the outside, is harder. She makes it an exercise. Smoothness, please. Grace. There is no hurry. (There is, because her wrists are trembling.) Then she has to unhook the Rickson's. She could leave it there but she won't. She tells herself she won't because they'd see where she went over, but really she just won't.

She hears it rip, her feet slip on the chain-link, and she lands on her ass in the dust, the Rickson's in her right hand.

She gets up stiffly, looks at the jacket's shredded back, and puts it on.

SHE stops when the sun tells her she's probably three hours out from the fence.

There's been steadily less vegetation, just more of this dry, reddish soil, no sign of a road, and no water. Her supplies consist of a very nice, hand-turned toothpick from the hotel in Tokyo, and a cellophane-wrapped mint she guesses is from London.

She's starting to wonder whether this might not be Siberia, and to wish she knew more about Siberia, to allow for a more educated guess. The trouble is, it looks more like her idea of the Australian outback, but more barren. She hasn't seen a bird, or bug, or anything at all, aside from crossing a curve of faint tire tracks about an hour back, which she now thinks she probably should have followed.

She sits down in the dust, sucks on her toothpick, and tries not to think about her feet, which hurt like hell.

She's got blisters in there she's trying not to think about, and certainly doesn't want to look at. She decides she'll try tearing up whatever's inside the Rickson's, to wrap her feet with.

She becomes aware of the sound of a jet, like part of the landscape, and wonders what she might think of it if she didn't know what it was. Were there still people in the world who wouldn't recognize that sound for what it is? She doesn't know.

Wincing, she gets to her feet and starts walking, sucking on the toothpick. It makes her mouth less dry.

SUNSET seems to take a very long time, here. Fantastic shades of red. When she realizes she won't be able to keep walking in the dark, she gives up and sits down.

“Well fucked,” she says, an expression of Damien's that seems to cover things.

She gets out her mint, unwraps it, and puts it in her mouth.

It's starting to get cold. She unties the sleeves of the Rickson's, puts it on, and zips it up. She can feel the chill on her back, still, because it's in tatters now, where she tore out strips of the interlining to use to bind her feet. They'd helped, a little, but she doubts she's going to be able to do much more walking, even when the sun comes up.

She's trying not to suck on the mint, because that'll make it go faster. Probably she should take it out and save it for later, but she has nowhere to put it. She unzips the cigarette pocket on the jacket's left sleeve, discovering the card from the curry house, the one Baranov had written Stella's address on. She looks at his precise brown italics, the color of dried blood, until it's too dark to read them.

The stars are coming out.

After a while, when her eyes have adjusted, she realizes she can see two towers of light, off in the distance, in the direction she thinks she's been walking in. They aren't like the memorial display from Ground Zero, but like the towers of her dream, in London, only fainter, farther away.

“You aren't supposed to be in Siberia,” she says to them.

And then she knows he's there.

“I think I might die here,” she says. “I mean, I think I could.”

You might, he says.

“Will I?”

I wouldn't know.

“But aren't you dead?”

Hard to say.

“Was that you in the music, last night?”

Hallucination.

“I thought it was Mom's EVP, finally.”

No comment.

She smiles. “That dream, in London?”

No comment.

“I love you.”

I know you do. I have to go.

“Why?”

Listen.

And he's gone, and this time, she somehow knows, for good.

And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.