Artifact (13 page)

High above, in what must have been the center of the cave, were lit braziers the size of several combined football fields, which hung from chains that must have been as large as train–cars. They cast everything in boiling waves of firelight.

Dazed, I looked down the narrow path between the many stacked tapestries and cultural artifacts that the faceless man had run, and rubbed the spot just above the collar where my birthmark was–

3.

–I followed the faceless man’s quiet sobs through darkness for what seemed an impossible length of time. Between the paths of antiques and the giant braziers, granite steps rose to a series of entresols – each in turn connected to the next entresol by an additional granite staircase – that lined the exterior of the cave for what must have been hundreds of stories above where I stood, between the endless sprawl of monuments, aircraft carriers and skyscrapers. I climbed the stairs and stumbled upon a giant letter
L
at the base of one of the mezzanines. There was something cut into the granite, but the size of the word was so great that I couldn’t make it out at eye level.

I searched around for something to climb, eventually finding the stone statue of the Sphinx of Giza, which I was surprised to find roughly the size of a large rambler. I carefully picked my way up the slope of its thigh, taking care not to disturb my left wrist or elbow. When I was confident that I had sure enough footing, I turned toward the mezzanine and looked at a phrase cut into the granite, about a quarter–mile long:

LEXICON SAPIENTIA

Although I didn’t speak the language, I knew that it was Latin.

I remembered the envelope addressed to New York, which was also very Latinate. I checked my pocket, remembering that during my last fugue, I stuffed it into my robe before walking toward the labs, just before the sky began splitting and crashing into the Earth. I carried something with me while shifting realities before. I remembered Patrick’s gun, and how it came with me to the filing department, where I then passed it to Alice.

I carefully pulled the envelope out of my back pocket and studied the address for the third time.

PRUDENTIACAPEX
,
New York

I knew that prudentia
meant something along the lines of
prudence
or
wisdom
.

I carefully made my way back to the entresol and continued following the only possible path toward where I hoped to find the faceless man that had my voice, my hair and my birthmark. As I walked, I occasionally stopped to study some obscure pile of stuff. I found parchments written with French, German, Dutch, Latin and Italian. I sifted through some very old notebooks, which contained some sort of mathematics. One in particular was entitled
Symphonie Fantastique d’Hector Berlioz.
The paper had aged, but didn’t look terribly old. If it was some sort of music notation, it wasn’t like anything I had seen before. Scribbled in the margins were obscure musical symbols, but for the most part, where I was expecting to find flats, sharps and bar lines, there were just complicated scratches of nonsense scattered around some French.

This was one example in a pile of scrolls, notebooks, and single leafs of paper. There were similar notebooks and leather–bound tomes scattered around with names like
Alexander Porfiryevich Brodin, Georg Philipp Telemann, Guiseppe Verdi
and
George Frideric Handel
.

I kept finding more piles of notebooks and manuscripts containing names and titles of historical significance. And things. Old pianos, piles of jewels and golden idols, stacks of blue jeans and leather riding–saddles of various shapes and sizes – one that could have only been used for an elephant or something of equal size.

This place was a museum, but unlike any I had ever seen before. I could touch these things, if I wanted. I found a pile of medieval and feudal weapons from various cultures. I picked up a very old Samurai sword, whose sheath was inscribed with thin, beautiful Japanese calligraphy over chipped black paint, which read–

島津藩

I didn’t know how to read Japanese, so its meaning was lost to me. I carried it with me for some time, using it as a cane, occasionally poking at something I found interesting. I walked in silence, in quiet awe of the place, tracing the granite staircases as they spiraled upward along the inside of what must have been the cave wall. The wall moved away from me at a curve, until mist and smoke from the braziers overhead obscured the slue of the cave itself.

The staircase opened to another mezzanine–like hall, and on the far side, seated with his back to me at a cherry colored desk of finished walnut was the faceless man. I adjusted the sling around my shoulder and bit down on the pain, cautiously moving forward, not wanting to provoke any sort of hostility or fright. I tried to make myself obvious by sliding my shoes on the granite, until finally clearing my throat.

He turned his head, fixing his featureless face onto mine for a moment, and then turned back toward what he was working on. “How long do you think it would take you to look through all of that?” He asked, nodding toward the miles of monuments, buildings, vehicles, antiques, tapestries, clothing and weapons.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve tried,” he said simply. “Although, I don’t know how long I’ve been here. At first I thought I was supposed to find something out there. Some sort of,” he searched for the right word. “Catalyst. If there is an answer, it should be here, shouldn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything. I just stood there.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen since the experiment,” he continued. “And you look like me. Well, you look like what I used to look like.” He took a deep breath and shook his head, studying the map of lines on the back of his hands. “When I saw you lying there, I thought I was finally going to get some answers.”

“I may have some answers. But I’m sort of in the same boat as you.” I looked again across the busy expanse of the cave. “I think the only advantage I would have is that I haven’t been restricted to one place.”

He stopped working and sat back. I could see that he was thinking seriously about something. He turned to me again, and after an indescribable amount of time passed, pushed a chair toward me with his foot. “Have a seat if you want.”

I moved to the chair and glanced at what was spread out in front of him. It was a jigsaw puzzle – there was a small pile of pieces on the desk. He saw me looking and shrugged. “I got bored. I tried reading some of the books around here –” he waved at the piles of junk. “But most of them are only half complete.” He leaned to the side of the desk and passed me a book. I weighed it in my hand. It was old and nearly falling apart. The colors on the cover washed to a dim yellow, and the red title was now faded to a dark orange. I flipped to the copyright page and read,
Dracula, by Bram Stoker, Westminster, Archibald Constable and Company, 1897, First Edition.

I flipped through the pages until the print stopped. I thumbed back until I got to the last page with writing on it – page 181.

Frankly, we did our best to prevent such a testamentary disposition, and pointed out certain contingencies that might leave her daughter either penniless or not so free–

The rest of the book was blank.
“Are all of the books like this?”

“The books that I’ve seen. But it’s not just the books, it’s the instruments, the movies, the notebooks, the poems, the sheet music… nothing here is complete.”

I looked at the jigsaw puzzle. He was using the same strategy my grandmother taught us – it was easier starting with the corner pieces, before trying to move inward. This other, faceless me found all of the border pieces, and was starting to move toward the center.

“What about that?” I asked, nodding at the puzzle.

He grabbed the box, which was blank but for a simple black inscription–

Eurographics 1000 piece mystery jigsaw! Put all the pieces together and discover the image inside!

“If everything is incomplete here,” I asked. “Why bother with this?”

“Because I counted the pieces.”

“And?”

“One thousand. All accounted for.”

I pulled the chair closer to the desk, ignoring the grating bite of pain that gnawed the back of my elbow. The bloody paste finally dried, and my cuts seemed to be holding fast.

“Out of every piece of junk that I’ve seen in here,” he continued. “This was the only thing I found that seemed to be complete.”

I laid the samurai sword across my lap and pulled off its sheath, revealing a blade that ended about twelve inches before it should have.

“What makes you think all of the pieces are for this
puzzle, and not just several puzzles dumped into one box?”

He shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out.”

He passed me a handful of pieces and then turned back toward the puzzle.

There was suddenly a moan that sounded like a gate the size of the Eiffel Tower opening. Dirt began to fall from the cave ceiling. I looked up and saw the giant braziers starting to sway slowly – the chains groaned as their rusted encasements broke apart. They were so large, and their movements were so forceful, that one could barely recognize that they started moving at all. The only reason I could tell that the braziers were swaying, was because each one seemed to be moving in its own direction, which gave the expansive ceiling a strange oscillating appearance.

“What’s happening up there?”

“Before I woke up in the shaft,” I said, turning aback toward the pile of pieces in front of me. “The sky started to break apart and fall to the Earth.”

He turned his head toward me and sat without saying anything.

“You’ve been here for a long time,” I continued. “I’ll let you decide. We can either try to find a way out of here and make our way back toward the labs, or we can try to put this puzzle together. But I have to tell you that from what I saw happening with the sky, this place will
be coming down sooner or later.”

He sat back and looked as though he was thinking things over, but it was hard to tell. “The labs?”

I nodded and tried stretching the pain out of my neck. “I got this idea that wherever I found myself, I was going to try my best to make it back to the labs – to the artifact.”

“The artifact…”

“Yeah.”

His head faced the puzzle for a long time. He touched his face at the spaces where everything should have been, but wasn’t.

“I think this is significant,” he said finally. “The puzzle, I mean. You and this puzzle are the only complete things I’ve seen here.” He dropped his hand into his lap, “I feel as though I should put this together. I can’t really explain why.”

“Okay,” I said. “We can get to work on this, and I suppose I can answer what questions you have in the meantime.”

“Like why I don’t have a face and you do?”

“I’m not sure I have an answer for that…”

His brow collected over eyes that weren’t there.

I pulled a pile of pieces toward me and started picking through the black ones, looking for two tabs and two
C
cuts.

4.

“I’m not sure how long I have left here,” I said. “The time I have in each place is always different.”

I realized that it was warm, and did my best to unbutton my shirt as well as I could. As we spoke and worked on the puzzle, I continued studying my surroundings, at least what I could see of them. The interior of the cave was split into discrete paths, if not actual roads, by a maze of antiques that rose at varying heights, nothing obstructing anything entirely from sight because of how things were organized. I saw several buildings – a very impressive skyscraper that looked very much like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. I certainly recognized the profile of Mount Rushmore, and not far from that the effigy of Crazy Horse, who looked as though he were pointing directly at where we were sitting – each monument looked surprisingly small in scale within the context of the cave. The braziers continued to groan as they swayed back and forth – hopefully slowing down and not gaining momentum. Whatever was happening on the surface must have been spectacular.

I was certainly impressed with what I saw.

“Well, I’m convinced.” He said.

“I didn’t think you would need much convincing.”

“I don’t know,” He said. “Maybe the sequence of milieu isn’t random. You said it was the accident, then the hospital first, the lake second, our home third, and finally the labs. Rinse and then repeat, right? But the times were different. And you said that the moments seemed to cut together like single frames of film, until it seemed that each dream, beginning at different times and in different places, started converging onto the same moment, at the same place–”

“The labs, yeah…”

“I haven’t experienced anything like that,” He said quietly. “But time here seems to pass very slowly for me. Almost like this place is a microcosm of very fast reality that feels relative to something much larger, and much slower.”

I sighed, not yet entirely comfortable with his face, or lack of one to be more precise. The more I focused on the puzzle and the beauty of what lay within the cave, the less I seemed to notice or care that I was talking to another version of myself that didn’t have a face. I never realized how important the expressions of emotions were until they weren’t there anymore – his words seemed more hollow and cold without facial expressions to interpret their meaning and intention. I supposed it was different than talking to someone over a flex–phone or listening to an audio recording, because my imagination couldn’t fill the gaps left when there wasn’t a face to match the sound with. Talking with this other Me, the fact that he had no features, and that I could see it, prevented me from imagining them.

We were making good progress. Although we had a substantial portion of the outside put together, the image was still meaningless and isolated. The only part that was missing was the center. The other me sat back and admired our work. The image took shape near the outside of the puzzle, and there were what looked like two flesh colored limbs on either side. The one on the left arced upward toward the center from what may have been a knee, or the top of someone’s head. On the right, there was a similar shape protruding out of a red sweep, which could have been clay. There was a crack in the image, in the section of the limb on the right, just before the faded margin of strawberry red. It was as if the image was a photograph of something painted onto stone or marble.