Meridian of Self

The sky over Boston was the color of a dead screen.

They lay on their backs in the Common and looked at it for a long time, because nobody had the strength to do anything else. It was neither day nor night. It was a flat even pewter, without sun or cloud, that seemed to rest on the rooftops like a lid. A thin cold wind moved across the grass. There was a smell of wet stone and old coins. Somewhere, a long way off, a bell was ringing, slowly, in no particular rhythm, and every stroke was a little late.

"Okay," said Venn, at last. "Is it just me, or is that the world's worst sky?"

"It's not the sky," said Jin.

"It's not?"

"It's a ceiling." He sat up, slowly, and wiped his glasses on his sleeve. "Look at the edges. See where it meets the buildings? There's no horizon. It simply stops."

"Great. Love that."

"It's a mirror, Venn. The whole place." Jin put his glasses back on. "The Dimension takes everything from the real world and sets it up again, in reverse. It's the last of the five. Everything we've done has been leading here."

Archie was already on his feet.

He stood at the edge of the Common, on the path where Charles Street met Beacon, with his hands in his pockets. He knew this ground. He had walked it on a hundred lunch hours, with a sandwich in a paper bag and a sketchbook under his arm. The trees were where they ought to be. The bandstand. The pond. The great gilded dome of the State House on its hill, with the sunlight on it. Except there was no sunlight, and the dome was gray, and the weathervane on the top turned slowly, against the wind, the wrong way round.

"Zoe," he said. "Look at the street signs."

She came and stood beside him. She had the silver spear over her shoulder and her short hair standing up in tufts. "They're backward."

"All of them."

"Teleb. What's Teleb?"

"Beacon."

"Oh." She laughed, shakily. "Oh, that's good. That's almost funny."

"It gets worse."

"How?"

He pointed.

…

Across the street, where the old brick buildings of Beacon Hill had stood, there was a tower.

It was not a tower he knew. It rose out of the backward city like a slab of black glass, forty stories high, narrow as a blade, and its face was a single unbroken window. A sheer mirror. It gave back the sky, and the Common, and the tiny figures on the path. It gave back four people in torn coveralls. And as they watched, it began to ripple, as a pond ripples when something is dropped into it, and the rippling spread across the whole surface in slow rings.

"No," said Jin. "No, no, no."

"What?"

"It's starting."

"What's starting?"

"Don't look."

But they looked. They couldn't help it. The black face of the tower cleared, and the images in it changed, and floor by floor, window by window, a story began to assemble itself.

It was Archie's.

He saw it on the fifteenth floor first, as one sees a face in a crowd. A long open-plan office, with rows of gray cubicles and a bank of fluorescent light. A water cooler. A potted fern gone brown at the tips. A man sitting at a drafting table, bent over a sheet of tracing paper, with a pencil in his fist. A thin man in a gray suit, with a pink scalp showing through a fringe of colorless hair.

He was fifty-five years old.

He had a bald spot like a coin. His shoulders were rounded; his back was bowed; and there was a stain on his tie where he had spilled his coffee. He worked with the dreary meticulous patience of a man who has done the same thing for thirty years. And behind his chair, with one hand resting lightly on his shoulder, stood a big, handsome, silver-haired man in a bespoke suit, with a smile like a toothpaste advertisement.

"Graham," said Archie.

His voice came out strangled.

On the fifteenth floor, Graham Whitfield leaned down. He murmured something into the thin man's ear. The thin man looked up. His face, in the window, was gentle, round-eyed, and entirely untroubled, and as he listened his lips moved in a murmured yes, sir. The big man laughed. He clapped him on the back, twice, a hearty paternal thump. And then he said something that Archie could read, quite clearly, from across the street, from the shape of his mouth.

Good boy.

The thin man beamed.

…

"I can't," said Archie.

"Archie," said Zoe.

"I can't look at that. I'm sorry."

"Then don't."

"I can't not." He had taken a step backward. His hands were shaking. "It's, it's so happy. Look at him. He's not suffering. He's not even angry. He's, he's content. He's been doing it for thirty years and he hasn't had a bad night."

"It's a mirror."

"It's the truth."

"It's not." Zoe took his arm. "It's a thing that looks like the truth. It's your worst fear made flesh. It's what you'd be, if you stopped fighting." She gave him a small hard shake. "You're not him. You've never been him."

"I was for fifteen years."

"Were you?"

He opened his mouth. He found he could not answer.

"Because I met a man in a courtyard in New Hampshire," said Zoe, "who looked at a flat-pack future and said no. Who got on a plane. Who shouted at a Shade." She was speaking quietly, quickly, her eyes fixed on his. "That's not a bald man with a coffee stain. That's you."

He took a long unsteady breath.

"It's very hard to believe," he said.

"I know."

"I'm trying."

"I know you are." She squeezed his arm. "Keep trying."

…

On the twentieth floor, Jin was an old man.

He sat in a dark paneled room at the end of a long polished table, at the head, alone. The room was very clean. There was a single lamp on the table. Beside it was a glass of something amber, untouched, and a photograph in a silver frame, turned face down. He wore a charcoal suit, buttoned to the throat, and his hands lay folded in front of him on the wood. His face was lined and hard and entirely without expression.

At the far end of the table sat a woman.

She was small, thin, gray-haired, in a faded print dress. She was very old. She had a face like a walnut and eyes like black beads. She sat on the very edge of her chair, as if she might be asked to leave, with her hands in her lap, and she was looking at the old man with an expression of wistful, patient, enormous love.

He did not look at her.

He looked at the glass. He looked at the lamp. He looked at everything in the room except the woman at the end of the table, and she waited, and waited, and her smile grew very small.

"Halmoni," whispered Jin.

He had gone gray. He stood on the path with his arms at his sides and his head thrown back, and his lips shaped the word again, with a terrible gentleness. "Halmoni."

On the twentieth floor, the old man in the dark suit reached across the table, slowly, as though to take her hand. And stopped. His fingers hovered an inch from hers. Then they curled, and drew back, and he folded them on the wood.

The woman closed her eyes.

…

On the twenty-fifth floor, Venn was sitting in a chair.

It was a plastic chair, orange, in a long white common room with a television bolted to the wall. A game show was on. There were other chairs, a dozen of them, in ragged rows, and in each sat an old person with a blanket over the knees and a blank eye turned to the screen. The place smelled of disinfectant and boiled peas. A nurse in a pink tunic went by with a trolley.

Venn was eighty.

He was heavy and slack and pale as lard. He wore a stained cardigan and his hair was a few tufts of white. His legs, both of them, were cased in thick elastic stockings and propped on a stool. His mouth hung a little open. He watched the television with an expression of blank mild confusion. When the nurse went by, he lifted a hand, feebly, and said something. She did not turn.

He said it again.

The window of the twenty-fifth floor was clear enough that Archie could read his lips. What's my name? said the old man in the chair. Do you know what my name is?

The nurse pushed her trolley on.

Next to Archie, the real Venn made a small sound, as if he had been punched.

"Hey," said Zoe, quickly. "Hey. Venn. Don't."

"It's okay."

"It's not—"

"It's okay," said Venn. His voice was very light. "It's just. It's a funny thing, isn't it? I spent my whole life being looked at." He swallowed. "I did it on purpose. I thought, if I'm the most beautiful thing in the room, nobody can ever walk past me. And I always knew that if I was ever just. If I was ever old. If I wasn't." He smiled, crookedly. "That's where I'd end up. A room full of people who don't know my name."

"We know your name," said Archie.

"I know."

"We'll always know it."

"I know, man." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "That's why I'm not running. I'm just. Looking."

…

And on the thirtieth floor, Zoe's mirror showed a woman at a window.

She was alone in a bright white room, a penthouse, with a view over a glittering city. She was exquisite. She wore silk the color of ice. She stood at the glass with her arms folded, looking out at the lights, and in her face was a stillness so complete, so careful, that it seemed it must have cost her a great deal to build. A phone lay on the table behind her. It rang. She did not move. It rang for a long time. When it stopped, she lifted one hand and touched the corner of her eye, and found it dry.

Behind her, on a table by the door, was an urn.

It was a plain gray one. It had been there a long time. A sprig of dried lavender lay beside it, gone brown.

"I can't," said Zoe, quietly.

She was not speaking to anyone. She had stopped on the path with her hand pressed to her breastbone, over the humming pendant, and her face was white as chalk.

"Zoe—"

"I can't, Archie."

"You don't have to look."

"I can't not." She laughed, a high wet shaky sound. "That's the thing. That's what's so, so clever about it. It doesn't make things up. It just takes what you're most afraid of, and it, it makes it true." She gripped the spear. "Mama's sick. Did you know that? She has Parkinson's. She's got a nurse in the daytime. She can't hold a cup. She won't tell me how bad it is." Her voice cracked. "I came here because I wanted to live long enough to take care of her. That's all I wanted. That's the only thing."

"I know."

"And that's what I'd be. If I fail." She pointed. "That. In a glass room with an urn."

The silence was terrible.

Then Venn took one step, and Jin took another, and the four of them, without a word, closed together in the middle of the path, shoulder to shoulder, like four people sheltering from the rain. Nobody spoke. Nobody touched. They only stood together on the grass of the backward Common, under the dead sky, while the great black tower gave back, floor by floor, the shape of everything they feared.

Above them, in the pewter air, the bell struck.

It struck late, as it always did. And as the echo faded, a thin cold voice somewhere behind the glass said, quite clearly, a word that Archie would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life.

Begin.