Cloud Cuckoo Land (20 page)
Authors: Anthony Doerr
The legs of the stool bend with a shriek and the door stops.
Please remove blockage in outer door
.
Father returns carrying four sacks of Nourish powder, pitches them over the half-crushed stool into the vestibule, and rushes away again.
Next comes a recycling toilet, dry-wipes, a food printer still in its wrapper, an inflatable cot, a blanket sealed in containment film, more sacks of Nourish powderâback and forth Father hurries.
Please remove blockage in outer door
, repeats Sybil, and the stool crumples another centimeter under the pressure, and Konstance begins to hyperventilate.
Father pitches two more sacks of Nourish powder into the vestibuleâwhy so many?âand steps through the gap in the door and slumps against the wall. Sybil says,
In order to begin decontamination you must remove the blockage in the outer door
.
Into Konstance's ear the hood says,
Oxygen at twenty-three percent.
Father points to the printer. “You know how to operate that? Remember where the low-voltage line attaches?” He rests his hands on his knees, chest heaving, sweat dripping from his beard, and the stool shrieks against the pressure. She manages to nod.
“As soon as the outer door is closed, close your eyes, and Sybil will flush the air and sterilize everything. Then she'll open the inner
door. Do you remember? When you go inside, bring everything else with you. All of it. Once you have everything inside and the inner door is sealed, count to one hundred, and it should be safe to take off the hood. Understood?”
Fear thrums through every cell in her body. Mother's empty bunk. The tents in the Commissary.
“No,” she says.
Oxygen at twenty-two percent
, says the hood.
Try to breathe more slowly
.
“When the inner door is sealed,” repeats Father, “count to one hundred. Then you can take it off.” He presses his weight against the edge of the door, and Sybil says,
The outer door is blocked, the blockage must be removed
, and Father glances out into the darkness of the corridor.
“I was twelve,” he says, “when I applied to leave. All I could see, as a boy, was everything dying. And I had this dream, this vision, of what life could be. âWhy stay here when I could be there?' Remember?”
From the shadows crawl a thousand demons and she swings her headlamp toward them and the demons recede and her light swings away and the demons lunge right back into place. The stool shrieks again. The outer door closes another centimeter.
“I was a fool.” His hand, as he runs it across his forehead, looks skeletal; the skin of his throat sags; the silver of his hair dims to gray. For the first time in her life, her father looks his age, or older, as though, breath by breath, his last years are being siphoned away. Into the mask of her hood she says, “You said that what's so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”
He inclines his head at her, blinking fast, as though a thought runs out in front of him, too quick to catch. “It was Grandmom,” he murmurs, “who used to say that.”
Oxygen at twenty percent
, says the hood.
A bead of sweat clings to the tip of Father's nose, quivers, then drops.
“At home,” he says, “in Scheria, an irrigation ditch ran behind the house. Even after it dried up, even on the hottest days, there was always a surprise if you knelt there long enough. An airborne seed, or a weevil, or a brave little starflower all by itself.”
Wave after wave of drowsiness breaks over Konstance. What is Father doing? What is he trying to tell her? He rises and stumbles over the mangled stool and out of the vestibule.
“Father, please.”
But his face passes out of sight. He braces one foot against the edge of the door, wrestles out the mangled stool, and the vestibule closes.
“No, don'tâ”
Outer door sealed
, Sybil says.
Beginning decontamination.
The noise of the fans builds. She feels cold jets against the bioplastic of her suit, shuts her eyes against the three pulses of light, and the inner door opens. Terrified, exhausted, biting back panic, Konstance drags the toilet inside, the sacks of Nourish powder, the cot, the food printer in its wrap.
The inner door seals. The only light is the glow of Sybil flickering inside her tower, now orange now rose now yellow.
Hello, Konstance.
Oxygen at eighteen percent
, says the hood.
I adore visitors.
One two three four five.
Fifty-six fifty-seven fifty-eight.
Oxygen at seventeen percent
.
Eighty-eight eighty-nine ninety. Mother's unfolded blanket. Father's hair damp with sweat. A bare foot sticking out of a tent. She reaches one hundred and disconnects the hood. Pulls it off her head. Lies on the floor as the SleepDrops drag her down.
THE GULL
Cloud Cuckoo Land
by Antonius Diogenes, Folio
K
⦠the goddess spiraled down from the night. She had a white body, gray wings, and a bright orange mouth like a beak, and although she was not as large as I expected a goddess to be, I became afraid. She landed on her yellow feet and took a few steps and began picking at a pile of seaweed.
“Exalted daughter of Zeus,” I said, “I beg you, say the magic incantation to deliver me from this form into another, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where all needs are met and no one suffers and every day shines like the very first days at the birth of the world.”
“What in the world are you braying about?” asked the goddess, and the reek of her fish-breath nearly knocked me over. “I've flapped all over these parts, and found no place like that, in the clouds or anywhere else.”
She was clearly a cold-blooded deity, playing tricks on me. I said, “Well, at least could you use your wings to fly somewhere bright and warm, and bring me back a rose, so that I might return to what I was before, and start my journey anew?”
The goddess pointed with one wing at a second pile of seaweed, frozen to the gravel, and said, “That's the rose of the northern sea and I've heard that if you eat enough of it, you'll feel funny. Though I can tell you right now, a jackass like you is never going to grow wings.” Then she cried,
ah ah ah
, which sounded a lot more like laughter than magic words, but I put the slushy mess in my mouth and chewed.
Though it tasted like rotten turnips, indeed I did feel a transformation begin. My legs shrank, and so did my ears, and slits emerged behind my jaw. I felt scales sliding across my back, and a slime crept over my eyesâ¦
FEBRUARY 20, 2020
5:27 P.M.
C
rouched beside the upended shelf of audiobooks, peeking out a sliver of window, he watches two more police vehicles move into place, as though they are constructing a wall around the library. Bent figures hurry through the snow along Park Street, pinpoints of red traveling with them. Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth.
Seymour crawls back to the dictionary stand and is trying to swallow the swirling panic in his throat when the phone atop the welcome desk rings. He clamps his hands around his ear defenders. Six rings seven eight and it stops. A moment later the phone in Marian's officeâhardly more than a broom closet beneath the stairsârings. Seven rings eight rings stop.
“You should answer,” says the wounded man at the base of the stairs. The earmuffs keep his voice faraway. “They'll want to find a peaceful way to resolve this.”
“Please be quiet,” says Seymour.
Now the phone on the welcome desk rings again. The man at the base of the stairs has already made enough trouble, has in fact ruined everything. This would be a lot easier if he did not speak. Seymour made him take out his lime-green earbuds and throw them into Fiction, and still the man bleeds onto the dingy library carpet, confusing everything.
On all fours Seymour creeps to the welcome desk and rips the phone cord out of the wall jack. Then he crawls into Marian's broom-
closet office, where the phone is ringing for a second time, and rips out that cord too.
“That was a mistake,” calls the wounded man.
A sticker on Marian's door reads,
The Library: Where the shhh happens.
Images of her freckled face stream across his vision and he tries to blink them away.
Great grey owl. World's largest species of owl by length.
He sits in the doorway to her office with the pistol in his lap. The police lights send blurs of red and blue across the spines of young adult novels. He can feel the roar churning out there, just beyond the windowpanes. Are snipers tracking him right now? Do they have tools to see through walls? How long before they storm in here and shoot him dead?
From his left pocket he removes the phone with the three numbers written on the back. The first detonates bomb one, the second bomb two; he is supposed to dial the third if there's trouble.
Seymour dials the third number and removes one of the cups of his ear defenders. The connection rings multiple times, beeps, and he's disconnected.
Does that mean they've received the message? Is he supposed to say something after the tone?
“I need medical attention,” says the man at the base of the stairs.
He dials again. It rings rings rings rings rings rings rings rings rings beeps.
Seymour says, “Hello?”
But the call has disconnected. Probably that means that help is coming. It means that they've received the message, that they'll be activating a support network. He will stall and wait. Stall, wait, and Bishop's people will call back or arrive to help, and everything will be sorted out.
“I'm thirsty,” calls the wounded man, and from somewhere come the faint voices of children, and the whistle of howling wind, and the whisper of breaking waves. Deceits of the mind. Seymour replaces his ear defenders, takes a mug decorated with cartoon cats from
Marian's desk, crawls to the drinking fountain, fills it, and sets it within the man's reach.
The trash can beside the armchairs, collecting the leak, is three-quarters full. The boiler directly below him gives off a series of weary creaks.
We will all have to be strong
, Bishop said.
The coming events will test us in ways we cannot yet imagine.
Q
uestions chase one another around the carousel of his mind. Who shot Sharif and how severe are his injuries? Why did Sharif wave him back? If the lights outside the library are law enforcement or paramedics, why aren't they rushing inside? Is it because the assailant is still here? Is there only one? Are parents being notified? What is he supposed to do?
Onstage Aethon-the-donkey is pacing along the frozen rim of the world. From Natalie's speaker comes the sound of ocean waves collapsing onto gravel. Olivia, wearing a big soft gull head and yellow tights, points with one of her homemade wings to a pile of green tissue paper on the stage. “I've heard,” she says, “that if you eat enough of it, you'll feel funny. Though I can tell you right now, a jackass like you is never going to grow wings.”
Alex-who-is-Aethon picks up some green tissue paper, jams it into his papier-mâché donkey mouth, and steps off the stage.
Olivia-the-gull turns to the chairs. “It's no use for an ass like that to chase after castles in the sky. Being sensible is called being âdown-to-earth' for a reason.”
From offstage Alex calls, “Well,
some
thing's happening, I can feel it.” Christopher converts the karaoke light from white to blue, and the towers of Cloud Cuckoo Land glimmer on the backdrop, and Natalie replaces the rumble of the waves with sunken bubbling and gurgling and trickling.
Alex steps onstage holding his papier-mâché fish head. Sweat has glued his bangs to his forehead. “Can we take a break, Mr. Ninis? Halftime?”
“He means intermission,” says Rachel.
Zeno looks up from his trembling hands. “Yes, yes, of course, a nice quiet intermission. Good idea. You're doing so wonderfully, all of you.”
Olivia lifts off her mask. “Mr. Ninis, do you really think I should say âjackass'? Some people from church are coming tomorrow night.”
Christopher heads for the light switch but Zeno says, “No, no, it's better in the dark. Tomorrow you'll be working backstage in low light. Come, let's sit backstage, behind the shelves Sharif set up, away from the audience, just the way it will be tomorrow night, and we can talk about it, Olivia.”
He herds them behind the three bookcases, and Rachel gathers the pages of her script and sits in a folding chair and Olivia stows the crumpled green tissue paper in a bag and Alex crawls beneath the rack of costumes and sighs. Zeno stands at the center of them in his necktie and Velcro boots. At his feet the microwave-box-turned-sarcophagus transforms momentarily into an isolation box behind the headquarters at Camp Fiveâhe half expects Rex to rise from it, emaciated and filthy, and adjust his broken glassesâand then it becomes a cardboard box once more.
“Do any of you,” he whispers, “have a cell phone?”
Natalie and Rachel shake their heads. Alex says, “Grandma says not till sixth grade.”
Christopher says, “Olivia has one.”
Olivia says, “My mom took it away.”
Natalie raises a hand. Onstage, on the other side of the bookshelves, the submarine gurgle still bubbles out of her speaker, disorienting him.
“Mr. Ninis, what's a jiff?”
“A what?”
“Miss Marian said she'd be back with the pizzas in a jiff.”
“A jiff's like a fight,” says Alex.
“That's a tiff,” says Olivia.
“Jif is peanut butter,” says Christopher.
“A jiff is a short time,” says Zeno. “A little while.” Somewhere out in Lakeport, sirens rise and dip.
“But hasn't it been more than a jiff, Mr. Ninis?”
“Are you hungry, Natalie?”
She nods.
“I'm thirsty,” says Christopher.
“The pizzas were probably delayed because of the snow,” Zeno says. “Marian will be back soon.”
Alex sits up. “We could drink some of the Cloud Cuckoo Land root beer?”
“Those're for tomorrow night,” says Olivia.
“I suppose it won't hurt,” says Zeno, “if you each have a root beer. Can you get them quietly?”
Alex hops to his feet and Zeno rises to his tiptoes to watch over the tops of the shelves as the boy walks around the stage and ducks into the space between the painted backdrop and the wall.
“Why,” asks Christopher, “does he have to do it quietly?” and Rachel reads her script with one index finger tracing the lines and Olivia says, “So about the swearing, Mr. Ninis?”
Is Sharif bleeding to death? Should Zeno be acting faster than this? Alex crawls out from the far end of the backdrop in his bathrobe and shorts carrying a case of twenty-four Mug root beers.
“Careful, Alex.”
“Christopher,” whispers Alex, as he rounds the apron of the plywood stage, all of his attention on fishing a can from the top of the case, “here's one forâ” and he catches a toe on the riser and trips and a dozen cans of root beer take flight over the stage.