How They Were Found (3 page)

In the basement, we take turns telling whatever stories we can. Tonight, Camran tells us about playing baseball in high school, about how the smell of the grass stuck to everything, to his clothes and hair and fingers, and then about the sound of the bat striking the ball, how he once hit three home runs in a single game. With his gravelly voice, Lachlann brags about all the sex he got before coming here, going on and on about the tits and ass until we beg him to stop torturing us with what we cannot have.

Earc speaks of his parents at length, a strange but touching attachment for a man his age, and then Ros tells us about his favorite dance club back home, about the heaving crush of the dancers. We look around at the meagerness of our group, and when we try to imagine hundreds of people in one place, we find that we cannot.

I talk—as I always do—about the ship and the base camp and the coast. I have forgotten everything so that I might remember this, for myself and for the rest of us. Better that I never again recall my family, my friends, my former home, if it means remembering the ship, our last hope, because if I forget, the captain will have won and none of us will escape this tower.

We go on speaking until we've exhausted ourselves, until we've shared everything we still have left to share. Every week, this takes less and less time. Once there were eleven of us, but soon there will be only five, then four, and then three and two and one., until the treason of these meetings ceases to exist altogether.

IX

Camran is dead by the captain's hand, shot at his station in the listening room. The force of the bullet shatters his face, spraying his monitor and lodging wet flecks of skull and teeth between the once cream-colored letters of his keyboard. The captain surveys our shocked expressions, then accuses Camran of trying to use the transmitting dish to send an unauthorized message, an act of disobedience as punishable as any other. As we watch, unable to see around the bulk of his body, the captain silently reads the sentences typed across the flickering green screen, his lips moving wordlessly as his eyes scan from left to right. When he is finished, he fires a bullet into the computer, showering the leftovers of Camran with sparks. We beg him to tell us what the message said, so he gestures to his lieutenant, Dughall, the only other who'd seen the screen.

The captain puts away his pistol, then takes a deep breath, sucking in a lung's worth of cordite and bloodsmoke. He says, Let Dughall tell you, as he told me.

But of course Dughall has already forgotten—it has been months since he's been to one of our meetings—and so there is no one to tell us what message might have gotten out, or if there has been any response. All we want is something to hope for, and this the captain refuses us.

We could push the captain further but there is only so much we can risk. The threat of automatic fire from his machine pistol prevents us from asking too many questions, from arguing against even his harshest orders. We all have our sidearms, but he's the only one who still has bullets, having convinced us to surrender our own to his care some time ago, when our troubles first began.

After silencing our protests, the captain orders Dughall and some of the other dims to carry what is left of Camran down the stairs and out into the courtyard. The rest of the men go back to their work, but not me. I climb to the roof, where I watch the dims stack Camran atop the pile of our other dead, our frozen and forgotten friends.

X

The captain is in a foul mood today, in response to our persistent nagging about Camran, and to our continued speculation about the chances of making it to the coast if we were to try as a group. He rants at us for planning to abandon our posts without leave, then decides to make an example out of two of the long-time dim, Onchu and Ramsay, both so far gone they can barely speak. He dresses them in their furs, then hands them packs already provisioned to the point of bursting, as if the captain knew this day was coming. He pushes them both out the door, kicking at them and threatening with his pistol when they protest. He points toward the south, which I myself only know because it is the opposite of where I see the auroras over the mountains, then forces them across the courtyard, through the gate and out onto the ice. Within minutes they're out of sight from the ground, but from the roof we watch through our night scopes as they wander against the wind and blowing snow, unable already to remember which direction they've come from or where they're going.

Only a few hundred yards from the gate, Onchu sits on the ground, facing away from the tower, too far to see or hear us above the howl of the wind. We scream anyway, begging him to get up, to keep moving, to make for the coast, to save us all, only he doesn't move. He draws his limbs in, hanging his hooded head between his knees. By morning, he will be frozen to death, and then, some time after, we will forget his name.

Later, Ramsay somehow finds his way through the dark and the blowing snow back into the courtyard, where the captain shoots him dead, as he has so many others who have refused to go into the wastes, who have returned without his leave.

XI

Eventually, there is a meeting at which I wait alone until dawn before returning to the barracks. With no one to tell stories to, I walk the rows of bunks instead, watching my men slumber, their gray heads full of dim dreams. A week later, I find Lachlann dead by his own hand, hanging from the rafters in the supply closet. The captain cuts the body down himself, has it dragged outside and stacked with the others. He asks if anyone would like to say a few words in Lachlann's memory, shakes his head when we cannot.

XII

I wait until it is night again—true night, not just dark, as it always is—and then stuff my backpack with foodstuffs and bottles of water, with chemical torches and the thickest blankets I can find. I am leaving, but first I consider murdering the captain in his sleep, perhaps smothering him with one of his own battered pillows, or else choking him with my hands. I sneak easily past the sleeping, dim guards outside his quarters, then through the creaking door of his bedchamber.

Once inside, I stand beside the captain’s bed and watch his creased, stubbled face until I experience an unexpected moment of doubt: If it is only he and I who still remember anything, then who will be left to lead these men after he is dead and I am gone? If one day the signal does come, who will be here to lead them out of the receiving tower and across the ice?

What I have to admit is that, in the face of my pending abandonment, perhaps even this captain is better than no captain at all.

Instead of killing him, I wake him up, and for the last time we talk. Seated across from me in his room, the captain makes me promise that I will leave the tower when we have finished, no matter what he tells me, and because this is already my intent, I agree.

Three questions, he says. No more.

I ask him if there are other receiving towers, and he says there are, but when I press him for details about who mans these towers, he refuses to give me a direct answer, offering only shrugging misdirections and half-truths that tell me nothing.

Next, I ask him if others will come to take our place after we are all dead. He looks over my provisioned pack, my donned furs, then says, No. You are the last Maon. I am the last captain. Everyone here is so old now, and all of them have finally grown dim. What we did, no one else will have to do.

The last question is even harder for him to answer, but I press him, begging for honesty, for confirmation, and finally he nods his head, his coal-black eyes saddened for the first time I can remember, but maybe, I realize, not for the first time ever.

He tells me how, long ago, when we were both young and strong, we stood atop the receiving tower in the dark, watching the waves of debris tear endlessly through the atmosphere, their terrible truth still disguised as innocent meteorites.

Already this was years after the war ended, after we’d each accepted we’d never go home, that there was no home to go to.

Already this was after we'd started to forget, to go dim. Not all at once, not everyone, but enough of us, starting with Kerr.

The dim demanded to know why they were being kept in the receiving tower, why they couldn’t travel to the shore to be relieved of their duties. They grew restless and angry, and before long there were enough of them that something had to be done.

The captain says, Everything we did next was your decision.

He says, Before there was Maon, there was the major, and for a second I see us atop the tower, grimly shaking hands. I hear myself say to him the name that was once his, the one I have claimed myself for so long, ever since I stepped down from this command.

By my orders, he tells me, the captain took over my abandoned duties administrating the useless routines of the receiving tower, while I joined the men in the ranks so that I could better watch over the dim and keep them safe. A major no more, I held midnight meetings with those whose wits remained, explaining how, to protect our ailing friends, our brothers in arms, we would pretend the war was still being fought. To give them purpose, we would start manning the listening room again, searching for signals that did not—could not—exist, since there was no one left alive to send them.

According to the captain, this is how we saved our men, how we kept them safe long enough for our beards to gray, for our bodies to grow stooped and fat.

Still, the dim turned increasingly dangerous, first to themselves and then to the rest of us.

We waited until they began threatening murder and mutiny, then the captain had them shot and stacked one by one in the courtyard, or else pushed them out across the ice to seek the meaningless shore, the phantom promise of the waiting transport ship, a ship that existed only in the stories I told the men. That existed only to give them purpose, to give them hope they might yet be saved.

The captain says, At first, you chose who would stay and who I would force from the tower. You were still the major, even if no one remembered. You said it was my duty to give them someone to hate, if that was what it took to hold them together, to unite them in this new life they had no choice but to live.

Later, after you dimmed too, I had to decide myself when it was time to use the pistol, or to drive a man out of the tower and onto the ice.

I have done my best, he tells me, but I am not you.

I have had to be cruel.

I have had to become a monster.

All these decisions, I have had to make alone.

The captain stops speaking, turns his face toward the wall. There is only the sound of his breathing, of mine in turn, until he says, I wish you could remember for yourself.

He says, It's not as if this is the only time I've told you.

XIII

Now it is my turn to look away, ashamed, for him and for myself. For what we did together.

I say, You have done your duty well, my captain.

And you yours, he says. Better than you hoped, even.

But why switch places? How did we know? That you would remember, and I wouldn't?

He shakes his head. You've had your three questions, and now you must go.

No, I say. Tell me. How did we know?

We didn't, he says. We guessed.

The captain says nothing more. Eventually, he falls asleep in his chair, resuming his quiet snoring, his hands folded over the ampleness of his belly. I try to stay awake, to hold on to what he has told me, to try to see how these newly remembered truths might save our men, but they cannot, or perhaps they already have. Exhausted, I doze myself, and when I wake I can recall only a little of what was said between us. Maybe it is for the best. Maybe whatever he remembered is an illusion, another hallucinated landscape we dreamed up together to replace all we have lost. Perhaps all there has ever been is this receiving tower and the others like it, separated by ice and snow and mountains, and then, somewhere else, some lost continent, shapeless in my mind, where some interminable war cost us everything.

XIV

I leave the captain alive not because I have promised to, but because I am afraid that at the end of my journey, it will be proven that he has always been right, that there is no ship waiting, that to lead these men out across the tundra would be to lead them to their deaths. I walk the halls of the receiving tower one more time, making one last effort to remember, to hold onto what is left of the captain's words. I meet some of the dim going about their duties, each of them following my commands to leave me alone, obeying me as they would the captain. I take my time, knowing they will not remember seeing me, will not report my small betrayal. Eventually, I find myself wandering the rows of empty bunks at the far end of the barracks, too many beds for the number of men I can remember being lost. I try to remember who these others were, but I cannot. Their bunks are covered in dust, their bedding stripped to replace our own threadbare blankets and pillows. These bunks must belong to the dead stacked in the courtyard, but perhaps also to others like me, men who took it upon themselves to reach the sea long ago, farther back than I can remember.

There must have been so many men here, and now they are nearly all dead and forgotten by us, the very men they'd meant to rescue.

As a final act of defiance, I climb the tower to the listening room, where I make one last attempt to hear something, anything. I put on my headphones and slowly move the dials through the full spectrum of frequencies. I hear nothing but the hum and hiss of the omnipresent static, a blizzard of meaningless sound falling unceasingly upon my ears.

There was a time when I knew over one hundred words for static, but now there is only the one, so insufficient to the complexity of the thing it describes.

I take off my headphones, then move to shut down my console. Before I do, I change the password to some new word, some gibberish, something I would never have been able to remember, even in the prime of my life, all those long decades ago.