Not Dark Yet (19 page)

He sat for a while in the bar, chatting with a few of the other candidates while ordering peanuts and salt sticks instead of drinks, then excused himself early.

“I’m going upstairs,” he told his roommate, Wameeth, an outgoing, broad-shouldered father of two who hailed from the northeastern region of the southern continent.

“Not staying longer?” Wameeth said. “It’s the last night after all.”

He shook his head. “I’m worn out. But please stay for as long as you’d like.”

“All right, see you later, my friend.”

Upstairs in the room he turned off the lamps, pulled the thin curtains aside, and pushed the nearest windows open. Wet snow flakes speckled the air and dusted the garden and driveway with white, but didn’t seem cold enough to remain. He thought he could hear the snowflakes hiss as they reached the black surface of the water and melted into it, but he could neither see nor hear the surf.

When it grew too cold, he shut the window and went to bed. Before the testing started, he had worried about the white light and wondered if it would flare up in him, but the white-outs had stayed away, perhaps because he spent all his mental and physical energy on the tests. Thus, instead of collapsing from seizures, he stopped breathing in his sleep. He couldn’t say what he was thinking of or dreaming about when it happened, only that he woke up because he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt his body draw breath. It was a surprising and strange sensation, but not one that elicited fear. When it happened, it felt natural and appropriate, something that simply should be allowed to take place without his interference or opinion, just like the white light and the sensation he had had in the summer of vanishing into it. He had read that some experienced practitioners only needed to draw their breath once or twice an hour, deep in meditation. Since the silence that preceded and followed the spontaneous breath-hold was meditative and calming, he assumed he was experiencing something similar.

He expected to fall asleep quickly, but that didn’t happen. Despite the feeling of exhaustion, he lay staring into the darkness while listening to the clangs of the elevator further down the hallway as it started and stopped, footsteps in the corridor, muted sounds from the floor above, water gurgling in the pipes. An hour later he was roused from a light sleep by the sound of laughter right outside the door and voices he thought
he recognized. The last disturbance before he fell solidly into dreams was that of Wameeth opening the door from the lit hallway and then closing it quickly.

The next morning he rose as soon as the alarm clock integrated in the headboard of the bed rang, had a quick shower, shaved, dressed, then packed his small backpack and carried it downstairs to the luggage room in the reception. The space organization representative had informed them that their rooms would be paid, but that they had to check out themselves, so that the hotel could confirm how many of the reserved rooms had been used. He did so at the front desk and handed his key in before he entered the restaurant for breakfast. As with the previous mornings, there were no warm dishes, not even porridge, but instead, a wide variety of cereals, bread, sliced meat, jams, fruits and vegetables, and steaming coffee and tea, which had been set out on a long table in front of the windows. He took a plate and a glass from the stacks at the head of the buffet and helped himself to some rye bread, smoked ham, red chili, and mini cucumber.

Outside, the lawn and hedges that lay in shadow were covered in a spotty layer of wet snow, but where the sun’s rays had reached the vegetation was bare and the rest would likely melt long before noon. The sky was bright and the ocean a clear, calm blue. It looked like a beautiful day in the beginning of spring instead of in the winter. He hoped the fields at the cabin were growing fast and well.

After breakfast, the chartered coach that had shuttled them the previous days took them to the astronaut training center for the last time. Now familiar with the building, the candidates rolled their suitcases, carried their backpacks, and lugged their bags through the hallways to the large meeting room.

“Today you have until lunch to finish up and revise any test that you haven’t yet completed,” the space organization’s
representative said. “If for some reason you need more time to finalize all your tests, let me know and I will see what I can do. Those of you who wish to leave earlier for the journey home may do so, but please notify me before you go so I know you have left and aren’t simply missing.”

Most of the candidates had only parts of a test or two to complete, and a few left within the hour. But the majority seemed to have scheduled their return trips to the afternoon and said they preferred waiting at the astronaut training center than at the airport or the train station. One of them collected their names, email addresses, and internet profiles, and promised to set up a group online for those who wished to stay in touch.

The candidates who had completed their tests drifted off to the cafeteria for a bite to eat. The representative said she couldn’t offer them food tickets that day, but that the prices in the cafeteria were highly subsidized, so she recommended buying lunch there before they left.

Several of the candidates, especially those who lived near one another, or had attended the same university, or had been stationed at the same military base, exchanged personal addresses and phone numbers. The week of testing seemed to have resulted in several new friendships and a few romantic connections. He gave his email address to a few others, including Wameeth, without expecting to hear much from them, but nevertheless looked forward to chatting with them as part of the group online.

During their final lunch together in the cafeteria the candidates also organized shared transport to the airport and the train station. When the meal was over they picked up their luggage in the meeting room, and followed the representative one last time to the foyer.

“Best of luck to everyone and I hope to see you again for the next and final round of selections,” the representative said,
smiling at them. “It’s been such a pleasure to meet you all and to get to know our future explorers.”

He traveled with the smallest group, which was headed to the central train station.

“Looking forward to going back to the mountains?” Wameeth asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you familiar with the place?”

“Passed through it once or twice on the way to my company’s ski cabin. It’s a beautiful place, but cold.”

“It’s gotten warmer,” he said. “It’s still beautiful, though.”

“Warmer?” Wameeth said. “Isn’t there a lot of snow?”

“No snow so far,” he said, “but it’s my first season there, so it might just be the strange weather this year.”

“Yes, the weather has been so weird,” Wameeth said. “I wonder when it’s going to turn back to normal. When I heard you lived up there I thought you were staying at the resorts.”

“No,” he smiled. He hadn’t seen any ski slopes or hotels. They must be further up in the mountains.

“So you’re not a ski bum? Why do you live there then?”

“I bought a cabin,” he said.

“And then the snow disappears. Isn’t that typical?”

“Yes,” he laughed and avoided mentioning that snow had had nothing to do with his moving there.

By the time he stepped onto the platform on the moor and started on the path to the cabin, it had been dark for hours and he had to put on his headlamp before he entered the heath. The densely quiet darkness closed around him and almost swallowed the faint beam. He imagined that he was traversing the bottom of the deep sea or the surface of a barren, distant world.

33

AFTER FOUR DAYS SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE, COMING back to the cabin was strange. He had expected that being among so many people would be hard after a long time in the mountains, but it seemed instead that it was solitary existence which required acclimatization. Clearly, humans were pack animals, not soloists like octopi, or even social by circumstance like tigers seemed to be, but true pack animals that not only wanted, but needed to be social. He’d read somewhere that if a person grew up without interacting with other people, she or he would not become a true human being, and lack language, empathy, and all other forms of social skills. He wondered about that. Kaye had said that empathy, the ability to sympathize with and care for another being, preceded humans, was older than humanity itself. It was a trait shared by many mammals, might even be the characteristic that defined mammalian behavior, caused by the need to rear the young for a long while, and to do it with great care, often inside a complex social structure.

“Did empathy evolve to strengthen the social structure, or was social structure a result of the empathy that evolved?” he had asked the assistant professor once.

“That, I nor anyone else can say with certainty,” Kaye said,
smiling. “We don’t know which appeared first, empathy or complex social structure, perhaps they did so simultaneously. But after they first appeared, each affected the evolution of the other greatly, and today they may be inseparable.”

The silence in the cabin was interrupted only by the occasional whistle of wind from beneath the door, the gurgle of water when he opened the tap in the kitchen, and the crackling of fire as the logs burned in the hearth. The quiet filled his ears the same way the newly fallen snow had dampened all sounds in the restaurant at the last dinner during the testing. He welcomed the stillness and sat inside it while the residue of the other candidates’ presences and voices, the sights and smells of the past week, played themselves out in his mind and slowly faded.

As he had expected, it had been difficult to sleep well in a shared room, not to mention shared with someone who snored loudly for most of the night. The energy required to answer the tests accurately and quickly, to keep abreast of the multiple conversations that had been going on around him, and to connect the right names to the correct faces, had been considerable. The first night back in the cabin he slept for twelve hours, and for ten hours on the second night.

In his dreams he met Eloise and half expected her to provide him with a progress report about the project. Instead, he found himself describing a place high up in the mountains for her. As he did so, he remembered the site from earlier dreams and what he had done there the previous times. It was one of his recurring dream-places, although he rarely felt the need to see it again. But now the memory of that imaginary landscape pulled at him, even inside the ongoing dream, and he realized why he kept returning to it, like a bird on oneiric migration.

“Take the train north to the highest stop, cross the road, follow the trail past the houses and the grove, and you’re there,”
he said. But as he registered his own words, he felt a sting of regret for having revealed the information of how to reach the location to someone else, even just the dream-representation of another person. He also recalled how worried he had been the first time he discovered the still, dark face of the lake, and the barren, crater-like sides that grew steeply out of it and rose to jagged crags. It was like the fountain in the park, a place in his dreams which upon discovery revealed itself as an often visited, but hidden memory. Perhaps that was what made the lake frightening: uncovering a recurring, but forgotten dream-location, and wondering how many more existed in his subconscious which he couldn’t remember.

“I can’t go there alone,” the dream version of Eloise said, looking too concerned and insecure to be the person he knew from his waking hours.

“It’s not that far,” he said, but agreed to visit the lake with her, as he yearned to see it himself.

He wasn’t certain when he last dreamed about the place, six months ago, a year, two years, but the journey there was more or less how he remembered it. A small train, its compartments more reminiscent of a funicular or a trolley in a city, climbed slowly upward. As the train ascended, the landscape changed abruptly from plains to mountains. One moment the windows were black, the next they were filled with tall white peaks.

Eloise and he disembarked at an empty platform by the road, where the rail tracks continued to who knew where in his dreaming mind. Then they followed the road which wound through the pass uphill and around a curve. There, on the other side of the narrow strip of asphalt was a parking lot, and above it a pale wooden building with unusual angles and a ribbed steel roof. That was the local tourist center, where he had bought stickers and key rings in earlier dreams. But this time they walked in the opposite direction, to a cluster of houses nestled in the mountain side, private homes which looked surprisingly suburban,
surrounded by lawns and flowering hedges. His dream view tilted like a camera, revealing a bright, warm sun in the sky. That had not happened before; during his earlier visits it had been dusk or winter.

The lake was where he recalled it, its precipitous sides and looming cliffs the same as in earlier dreams. But when Eloise and he descended the graveled slope and reached the edge of the water, the lake had dried up and all that was left was an expanse of black mud.