Angel Eyes (31 page)

"We were in deep space. Mars was beckoning us like a red titan. We slept like dead men. We were told that would happen on a mission of almost three years. Day fatigue sets in. Because we were hooked up to Mission Control, you knew just when we were awake and when we were asleep. The funny thing was that I never dreamed. I know I've said this over and over to the psychiatrists and they don't believe me because the hard medical evidence refutes it. They told me your readouts showed I had REM every night cycle. They insisted I dreamed; that I just never remembered my dreams. Well, I may have had rapid eye movement, but I tell you that I did not dream. I have always remembered my dreams, ever since I was a little boy. And I think now that one reason I didn't dream was because I felt as if I was dreaming while I was awake.

"Another thing is that the psychiatrists said I talk altogether too much about dreams. They say I'm fixated on dreams. But in the scheme of what happened to me up there, I'm convinced that not dreaming is significant, even if no one else does. I know they think I'm lying or, at least, delusional about what happened during the event. Otherwise I wouldn't still be here, and you wouldn't continue to interrogate me. I know what you're like. You hate a mystery; you'll tear apart heaven and earth to solve it."

The Hero abruptly began to laugh, continuing in a crescendo. Through his tears he gasped, "Heaven and earth, that's very, very funny. I don't know what's come over me. Before I lifted off, I never had much of a sense of humor. Who knows, perhaps being suspended between heaven and a living hell will do that for you."

Mars felt he had to pierce the encroaching silence before it got impenetrable. "What happened to Gregor?" he said.

"No names!" the Hero shouted. He was extremely agitated. "Goddamnit, I told you! I warned you! But you're a thick son-uvabiteh, you never listen! Now fuck off!"

"I'm sorry," Mars said. "I apologize. I forgot."

"Like hell you did.'' The Hero turned away, began an incomprehensible conversation of clicks with Arbat.

Mars looked at Lara. Her face was calm, firm. Did he see the hint of a rebuke in her expression?

He tried again. ''What should we call your partner who died? Odysseus, did you hear me?"

"Menelaus," the Hero said, without turning away from Arbat.

"All right. What happened to Menelaus?"

"He died," the Hero said suddenly. "He was outside. We were both suited up, although I was still inside the vehicle. It was a typical EVA, planned way in advance. Everything was fine. Until . . ."He was silent for a long time. "What I think happened was that we encountered some kind of storm in the form of a shower of tiny particles, like minuscule meteors. I heard a hollow sound, like someone throwing a handful of sand at the vehicle's hull. Then I heard his voice. It was already breaking up, and I knew it was an emergency. I put on my helmet, got out of the airlock as quickly as I could.

"What I saw . . . his helmet had been pierced by the burst of cosmic storm. We were hanging in darkness, but there was this light all around. I don't mean starlight, that's separate and distinct. I saw what had happened to him in the illumination of this . . . light between the stars. His visor had been riddled by the sand of space or of a far distant world. Who knows the truth? We never will, that's for certain.

"All the atmosphere, the pressure, had been sucked out of his EVA suit in the time it took me to get to him. He was hanging there, at the end of his umbilical. The expulsion from inside his suit had created a force, and he was spinning, spinning. His eyes were staring straight ahead, and he was ... I don't know how to say this properly because it was so horrible ... he was smiling, as if in defiance of the bruises and contusions that puckered his face like the seas of the Moon. Then I had him, stopped his spinning and drew him back toward the vehicle. I knew he was dead. I knew there was nothing I could do for him.

"Then I got a good look at his face. It was as if, I don't know, something had blasted his eyes. At first I assumed some of the cosmic sand had penetrated him. But then I knew that couldn't be because only his eyes were affected."

Silence again, and Mars was obliged to say, "What happened to Menelaus's eyes? What did you see there?"

The Hero put his head down. "What's the use of going on? You won't believe me because your forensic evidence contradicts my story."

"No. The evidence doesn't corroborate what you've told us. That isn't the same thing. Forensics on Menelaus were utterly inconclusive. The truth is, we could tell nothing from his corpse. It was as if it had been wiped clean of evidence. How did he die, what happened to cause his suit to malfunction-or yours, format matter-what happened to him during those crucial minutes when he was on the EVA, when you were struggling to get to him? Of one thing we're sure: there was an interplanetary disturbance of some sort. Our telemetry went down during the event. We had no monitoring capability. We don't know."

The Hero raised himself up in his wheelchair. ''I've told you what happened."

"Yes," Mars said slowly. "You have."

"But no one believes me."

"Frankly, what you've told us makes belief somewhat difficult." Mars nodded. "Yes. There are some who think you're lying, or have misremembered, or are delusional."

The Hero's eyes locked on Mars's. "Are you one of those?"

He knew this was a crucial moment. There comes a time in every interrogation when the pendulum begins to swing the other way, when psychologically an enemy can be transformed into a friend. This moment comes for many reasons: the subject wants an end to isolation, or he can no longer distinguish the truth from fantasy, or his disorientation has become so acute he cannot properly recognize his own emotions. The Hero was far stronger and smarter man the average subject. In his case, he had asked the fatal question because Mars had allowed him to see partway inside of him. The Hero required a kindred spirit, someone beyond either Lara or Arbat, who were both incomplete entities, though in totally different ways.

Mars knew immediately that the Hero would sense a lie. He was vulnerable, but that only made him doubly dangerous. Mars would not fall into the trap that had destroyed many an interrogator: mistaking vulnerability for weakness.

Mars said, "The truth is, I don't know what to believe. The forensics are useless, and those of us who stubbornly cling to scientific principles are, I think, missing the point." He left his hands open and palms up as a subtle reinforcement. "I don't believe you're lying. What reason would you have to do so? And the chances of you misremembering are, in my opinion, too remote to consider."

''But I might be delusional.''

"As you yourself said, no one knows what happened to you up there. All I'm certain of is, we can't dismiss outright what you've told us. Which is why I'd like to hear it again, not from a tape made a month or a year ago, but from you, now.''

Mars could almost see the Hero's mind turning over what it had just heard. It was fascinating, like watching a snake digesting its prey.

At length the Hero nodded. "I remember this in the most minute detail. It was his eyes, Menelaus's eyes. There were no pupils at all. It was as if the irises had grown inward and outward. It was as if his eyes were now all color. And what color! His eyes had taken on that color, the color between the stars. The color of God."

Mars said, ''He spoke to you, is that right? The corpse opened its mouth and-"

"No, no." The Hero shook his head. "This isn't something out of a science-fiction or a horror film. He didn't come back from the dead, nor was he animated like a zombie or a golem. This was something else, something that I think you'd have to see for yourself to fully believe. I still don't understand it, even after fifteen months of contemplating it from all angles: physical, metaphysical, philosophical, religious. It wasn't magic, Volkov. I'm not a fool. And it wasn't illusion."

The ???? took a deep breath. ''The truth of the matter is, the corpse did not move its lips, it did not speak to me. But something communicated through it. Through its eyes. Do you begin to understand? We're not confronting any conventional method of communication as we know it. Not even telepathy.

"Nevertheless, there was a message in those eyes, in that world of unspeakable color.''

Mars was aware of Lara leaning forward, slipping her hand into the Hero's. Mars took his cue from her. "And what was the communication?" he asked gently.

The Hero's eyes were dark swirling with emotion. He uttered a harsh Russian expletive. "Don't you people understand anything? '' he cried. ''That's what I meant by my being suspended between heaven and a living hell. I was given a message, but I don't know what it is.''

It was a perfect day for Arkhangelskoe: cool, crisp, cloudless. One arrived in the beautiful countryside surrounding the estate by taking the Kutuzov Prospekt out of the center of Moscow, picking up the Minsk road, making a right onto the Rublevo road, a left onto the Uspenskoe road all the way to the right fork that took you across the Moskva River, and thence southwest into Arkhangelskoe.

This was the route Valeri Bondasenko took. He went once a week, but never on the same day, and never at the same time. The estate consisted of a stucco-over-wood late eighteenth-century palace with its signature belvedere and a beautiful park on the verge of a vast pine and birch forest. Tourists flocked here in good weather to wander, take photos, and picnic.

Valeri came here to partake of none of those pastoral pleasures. Instead, he circumnavigated Arkhangelskoe, taking the narrow road that skirted the forest to the east and then curved north.

On the far side of the forest was a rather austere stone and mortar structure, through whose forbidding gates Valeri drove. He parked beside delivery vans, shabby Volgas and Zhigulis without windshield wipers.

Inside, the place smelled of disinfectant and, in places, vomit. White-coated nurses hurried to and fro, thick-shouldered, stern-visaged. Here and there a male attendant with a truncheon on his hip could be seen, peering through mesh-reinforced windows set in the doors at eye level. To call this place an insane asylum would, perhaps, be harsh, but it would nevertheless be correct.

Valeri hated this place. It reminded him of everything that was wrong with the world. The dimly lit halls might have smelled of chemicals and offal, but the place reeked of despair. The personnel were just as much to blame for this as were the inmates. This was a terminus point for them, worse than a backwater, a sentence to be served with the patience of the penitent. Except there was no escape from this place, either by the inmates or by their wardens. Everyone here was serving a life sentence, and their invisible secretions oozed through the corridors like putrefaction through a swamp.

When Valeri arrived back in Moscow from his sojourns here, he invariably found himself stripping off his clothes, plunging himself into an ice-cold shower, scrubbing himself with tallow-rich soap, washing and washing. What was he trying to get off?

Filth was easy to wash down the drain, but memories were another story altogether. Memory existed independently of conscious thought, or so it seemed to Valeri. He was an ardent student of Jung, and had seen in several of his interlocking concepts a compression of time, a commingling of past-present-future that was fundamental to all human beings, as if each culture were not, in fact, separate, but rather a different quadrant of one gigantic spider's web. And what was there, glistening at the web's center, but a central core, a past that was true for all men?

This included man's ability-yes, perhaps even a desire-to be inhuman to his fellow man. Homicide-mass murder-was such an inadequate way to describe, over the course of history, what man insisted on perpetrating against his neighbor-especially his neighbor.

Was it so very long ago, 1918, that Valeri's uncle had been shot in the streets of Kiev-the capital of the Ukraine-for daring to speak Ukrainian? A Bulgarian-can you imagine!-had been the president of the Ukraine then, cat's-paw to the rulers in Moscow, and he had stated publicly that to sanction the use of the Ukrainian language would be reactionary, of interest only to a minority: the kulaks-the Ukrainian peasants-who broke their backs to harvest wheat for all of Russia, and the intelligentsia. So a Russian soldier, one of so many in Kiev, had walked up to Valeri's uncle and put a bullet through his head. Guilty as charged, your honor! Boom!

And what of Valeri's father? It was, Valeri knew, better not to contemplate his ultimate fate. It was so very Russian, and so very terrible.

Valeri shook himself as he stepped outside onto the shaded lawn. His gaze followed the greensward as it ran down to the beginning of the pine and birch forest, on whose far side, invisible now, as unimaginable amid this noisome clamor as a fairytale castle, lay beautiful Arkhangelskoe. Why these dark thoughts?

"Comrade Kolchev?"

Valeri heard Dr. Kalinin's voice, and he knew. He tamed, forced a smile onto his face, nodded. "Doctor."

"It's good of you to come," Dr. Kalinin said, in much the same tone of voice one hears in a funeral home. Valeri was convinced that Dr. Kalinin did not mean to sound like a mortician, he just couldn't help himself. It was this place or, more accurately, what inhabited this place, that was to blame. When one spent one's days and nights with the living dead, one could not help but be affected in some way.

Dr. Kalinin was a young man with thin, light hair and eyes sunken into his cheeks. Valeri could not imagine what he had done to be consigned to this purgatory at so early an age, and he had no desire to find out. Still, he pitied the doctor.

"You must get more sun," Valeri said, indicating the cloudless day. "Too much time indoors is bad for one's health."

"Ah, the long winter," Dr. Kalinin said. "Now that it's spring, things will be different." But his morose expression betrayed him as it told the truth: here it will never be different than it is right now.

Valeri stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, led the way out over the lawn, which was dotted here and there with chairs inhabited by mentally and emotionally shrunken creatures, pathetic husks, overseen by attendants looming in their frail shadows. Valeri needed to get as much space as he could between himself and the godawful corridors of the place. He still had their stench in his nostrils, and he felt like gagging. That would be something to talk about, he thought, throwing up all over the good doctor's shoes, so sorry, comrade, but this place you work in turns my stomach, you do understand, don't you?