How They Were Found Read online

  Once, Cormack stood beside me and prayed aloud that one might crash into the receiving tower instead and free us all.

  Once, I knew which one of us Cormack actually was.

  II

  The tower is twenty stories tall, made of blast-resistant concrete and crowned by two satellite dishes twisting and turning upon their bases, their movements driven by the powerful electric motors installed between the listening room and the roof. The larger dish is used for receiving signals and messages from both our commanders and our enemies, the latter of which we are expected to decode, interpret, and then re-encrypt before sending them to our superiors using the smaller transmitting dish.

  It has been months since the larger dish picked up anything but static, maybe longer. Some of the men talk openly about leaving the tower, about trying to make our way to the coast, where we might be rescued from this place by the supply transport that supposedly awaits us there. These men say the war is over, that—after all these years—we can finally go home.

  The captain lets the men speak, and then, calmly, asks each of the dissenters where they are from, knowing these men will not be able to remember their hometowns, that they haven’t been able to for years.

  The captain, he always knows just how to quiet us.

  III

  As I remember it—which is not well—young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We’d find him high in the tower’s listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over with his fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries.

  Later, after he had gotten much worse, we discovered him sleeping on the roof, half-frozen beneath the receiving dish, his arms wrapped partway around its thick stem, his mind faded, his body lean and starved and blackened with frostbite.

  None of us realized he was missing until we found his body trapped in the ice just inside the compound’s gate. What pain he must have felt after he threw himself from atop the tower, after he tried to crawl forward on crushed bones, heading in the direction of a coast he must have known he would never live to see.

  IV

  My name is Maon, according to the stitching across the breast of the uniform I am wearing and of all the others hanging in the locker beside my bunk. This is what it says beside my computer console in the listening room, and what the others call out when they greet me. It is what the captain snarls often in my direction, growling and waving his machine pistol to remind me that he is the one giving the orders, not me.

  My name is Maon: Some mornings, I stand before my mirror and speak this word again and again, reminding myself as I stare at my reflection, surprised anew by the gray of my hair, by how the winter of my beard mimics the snow and ice outside. I have begun to put on fat, to find my stomach and face thicker than I believe them to be away from the mirror. Caught between the endless dark outside the tower and the constant fluorescence of our own gray halls, it is too easy to mistake one time for another, to miss meals or repeat them. My mouth tastes perpetually of cigarettes and salted beef, and my belly grows hard and pressing against the strained buttons of my uniform. Sometimes, I can’t remember having ever eaten, though my stomach is so full of food I am often sick for hours.

  V

  It was only after Kerr died that I discovered our personnel records had been deleted: Birthdates, hometowns, the persons to be notified in the case of our deaths, all these crucial facts gone. From that moment on, we had only our tattered uniforms to prove our ranks, only the name tape attached to our chests to remind us who we each were.

  Without the personnel records, it became impossible to determine the date we were to be released from service and taken to the coast for transport home. According to the captain, this meant no one could go home until we re-established contact with the main force, something he seemed increasingly uninterested in trying to do.

  Once, Macrath and the others came to me and asked me to speak to the captain, to inquire after our missing records. The next morning in the mess hall, I did my best to convince him to honor their requests.

  It would only take a few minutes, I said. You could do it right now. Probably there’s no one out there listening, but even if there is, they won’t respond without your authorization codes.

  The captain finished chewing before looking up from his breakfast of runny scrambled eggs and muddy coffee. His eyes flicked from my face to where Macrath stood behind me, then back again. He said, Are you trying to give me an order, Maon?

  No, sir. A suggestion, maybe.

  The captain’s voice was stern, providing no room for argument. When I turned to leave, I saw Macrath still standing there, his eyes murderously red-rimmed and locked onto the captain’s own implacable black orbs, on those irises as shiny and flat as the surface of burnt wood. Macrath only wanted to go home. He had a family, a wife and children, a little house, a car he liked to tinker with on weekends. That was what he always told us, what he believed he remembered.

  When the captain acted, it was not me he targeted but Macrath, ordering some of the men to haul him into the frozen courtyard, then following behind to deliver the fatal bullet himself. The captain explained that the orders to execute Macrath had come from higher up the chain of command, in a coded communication meant for his eyes only. Even though it was I who had manned the silence of the listening room all morning, I said nothing, counseled the others to do the same. As I had once warned Macrath: We must not cross the captain too often, and certainly not when he is in a killing mood.

  VI

  The captain is unshakable in the face of our questions, but perhaps he too knows nothing more than what we know ourselves: that there are no more signals, no signs of either friend or foe. When we ask if our transport is still moored at the coast, waiting for our return, he refuses to answer. He says that information is classified, and that we don’t need to know. We disagree. If the ship is still waiting, then we could make a try for the coast, leaving this wasteland behind. Perhaps then we could find a way to stop our fleeing memories, to slow the dimness that replaces them. In the meantime, we blame our forgetfulness on anything we can, scapegoating the tower first and the components of our lives here second. It could be the radiation from the satellite dishes, or the constant darkness, or the fact that the only foods we eat are yeastless wafers of bread, jugs full of liquid egg substitute, tins of dried beef, plus powdered milk and powdered fruit and powdered everything else. Together, we all eat the same three meals, day after day after day, our taste buds grown as dull and listless as the brains they’re connected to, until the repetition steals away our past lives, until our minds are as identical as our gray beards, our curved paunches, our time-distressed uniforms.

  VII

  Standing in the dark among the mechanical workings of the two satellite dishes, I work swiftly to repair a series of frayed wires splayed out from the larger dish, my fingers shaking beneath the tight beam of my headlamp, frozen even through the thickness of my gloves. It has been dark as long as I can remember, long enough that the sun grows increasingly theoretical, abstract. My own memories of it faded long ago, so that all remembrances of places lit not by torches and floodlights are suspect, at best more evidence of a past increasingly faked and unlikely, stolen from the remnants of the others who share this tower.

  When I finish my task, I stand and look out from the tower’s edge, studying the ice and snow and wind and, above it all, the aurora, its bright curtains of color cutting a ribbon through the darkness, obscuring much of the meteor shower that continues to fall. I linger until the cold penetrates the last of my bones, then I turn the metal wheel atop the frost-stuck hatch, descend the rickety ladder lead
ing back into the tower.

  An hour later, lying in bed, I am unable to remember the colors of the aurora, or even what exactly I went outside to fix. The events of my life increasingly exist only in the moment, too often consumed by their own bright fire, lost as the many meteorites tumbling and burning out across the already unimaginable midnight sky.

  VIII

  Once a week, after we’re sure the captain is asleep in his quarters, we gather in the basement of the tower, amidst the stacked palettes of canned and powdered foodstuffs, the whole rooms of spare wiring kits and computer parts and drums of fuel oil, where there is enough of everything to last another hundred years. There are six of us who meet, the only ones who still remember enough to work, who can still log into our computers. Weeks ago, we changed our passwords to password, the first thing everyone guesses, so that as we continue to dim we will still be able to log in and listen for the orders we hope we might yet receive.

  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 p
ack, 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.