Apparition: Sun or dark

She arrived in a streak of yellow, curled over a shard of rumbling metal.

Heavy tires, night black and churning, sprayed gravel in mushroom clouds. When the stones exploded they were fine dust, a fog drifting back to earth, hiding her machine and its mustard-colored rims from the sinking sun.

Leather from neck to ankle, she arrived in a streak of yellow, eyes sealed behind a gleaming, oversized red wrap, helmet an insectoid taper.

Thierry watched the land turn Martian orange when she slid from the motorcycle and stalked across the parking lot’s pebbles. She was headed nowhere, with the agile stride of a praying mantis and lean runner’s legs like his own. Like he remembered. These apparitions were as close as he got to monsters.

He figured her suit had to be high-end, temperature controlled. In this climate anything else was suicidal. There was nothing more to be done with the outdoors these days than to use it as a tunnel to scurry from one air-conditioned oasis to another.

He’d challenged Nature’s new incarnation. Once. That occasion being his second day after arriving in Arizona on assignment to wind down the site of America’s third-largest bomb shelter. With shoes dangling by their laces from fingers like long slivers of bark, he’d decided to go for a run.

The road’s fading white lines shimmered and levitated in mirage. When he opened the door to blinding sunlight, an inferno of heat staggered him three steps back. It vacuumed the moisture from his eyes and the oxygen from his chest. Years of running had made his legs strong, but now they were sticks of brittle kindling struggling to stay upright on their pointed ends. He sucked in a breath that singed his esophagus. A fit 51, he pushed forward. He would handle it.

Straight down the middle of the road he jogged toward the horizon’s ever receding throat. It took just two minutes for the asphalt to burn through the soles of his shoes. In another minute the broiling air clogged his ears. His lungs cooked. His brain puttied and warped. His skin blistered. From the corners of his eyes, by the moat edges of the bubbling tar, he glimpsed small, blob-like ephemera scrabbling alongside him. Whenever he strained for a closer look at these minor monsters they were gone.

This was why no one came to this place. People said it was full of even bigger monsters, that they’d risen from the irradiated fire of the nuclear disaster that had emptied the state. They said that if you dug deep enough into her sands you were bound to find bleached bones of one kind or another. None of which were millions of years old. It was obvious superstition, the variety of myth made up on the spot because empty space invited predatory filling. But the rest—contaminated winds blowing where they would—Thierry could believe.

He had stopped then, bent over and heaving, and looked back at the office building that would be home for the next few months. Its flat, disk-like shape and upward sloping forehead approximated a UFO erupting from a hiding place underground before soaring into liftoff. It was an architectural style that had never raised the capital to lurch more than a few seasons into popularity. Several miles away in the other direction stood its opposite, the natural world with an unnatural center: Mount Errus, shelter No. 3. It had been commissioned 16 years earlier in 2035 and was already dead.

The simmering road was empty, save for his shadow, elongated, anthropomorphic shape of beings imagined by Hollywood and alien chasers: Ovoid head stretching to the stars. Thin arms and legs sinking into the tar before they could reveal hands and feet.

He turned back.

That night when he slept he dreamed that he rode atop a pale-shelled, claw-fisted creature he couldn’t identify and visited thousands of the world’s cities, towns and villages. He was astonished that he knew every one of them by name and spoke all of their languages.

#

The Grand Canyon State seethed with this evil heat. Not much was left of its scorched land but sand crawling in time counted by era. Thierry found he moved at a similar speed. When he was still enough, and if he stared at the sky long enough, he saw the black double arc of a bird stamped against the boiling sun. He wondered if his will had drawn it to this place.

In other reveries he prayed for different monsters to crest the far jumble of ochre hills—to give him something to fear, now that the loss of hope had made him brave. They would be shambling creatures with fur on their backs, razors for mouths and pennants for tails.

He stared out the electronic, floor-to-ceiling window, hands clasped like prisoners behind his back. At the sound of a beep he turned and grimaced in the direction of the thick slab of a table dominating the room. A fortune in real wood. He ignored the small tablet that lay bandaging the furniture’s broad, smooth face. The office was otherwise bare, lacking posters or paintings, swept in gunmetal gray. Like the rest of the building, the look was no longer popular.

The sun disappeared.

When it rose again, it was blazing and enraged, like the day before it and the one before that. Thierry sighed. He looked out at the office park’s alien aircraft shape, all opaque glass and silver steel. Inside every design feature was digital. A button press caused a large rectangle to materialize on the north wall, revealing a bouffant-coiffed announcer smothered in makeup. She was on mute. Her mouth hustled up and down in grim silence. Her teeth were clenched with the kind of robotic, low-pitch diction conventional wisdom said signaled gravitas. The words squeezed out anyway. A map of the nation, painted in several colors dripping like melted wax, hovered over her left shoulder. Thierry never turned on the sound.

For hours he watched the horizon shift, from teal blue to pink, then orange. Not a single bird today. A grass-hued light blinked on the tablet. He ignored it. Two hundred feet away the interstate’s threadbare tar puckered and bubbled as if choking for lack of water.

No one ever visited the complex and passersby on the road were rare. Not one Coca-Cola or Penske truck, half filled, half automated, tagged with 15 indecipherable spray-painted scrawls from as many states. No Karts, from Vegas or any other city, migrating the nomad homeless in columns of teetering shopping carts sprouting tents and jerry-rigged solar panels. None of the murmurs, desperate or resigned, that rose and fell from their thousands of human mouths. The teeming snakes of their lines waved weather-beaten flags depicting symbols and mascots grown in the Petri dishes of obscure internet subcultures. There were no bandits, no militias and no migrants, not even the faceless Papers pursuing them with fading power.

There was only the single exception. Again and again Thierry peered into the dusk and the dust—for her.

When he saw no one, he dimmed the electronic window until the last light bathed him and Arizona in golden rust. Later the walls would hiss and microscopic robots would emerge from their slots in the floor to scour the rooms to an antiseptic emptiness. The height of office tech, but quick business given an occupancy of one. Protesters, like the Chanters busy smothering the country in a ceaseless drone of nihilist, minor-key electronica and the lurid holos they called holofernes, would have been out on the streets against such extravagance. If anyone knew.

But Arizona had first been avoided, then forgotten. Thierry liked to think it mirrored his own life. Stretching, he yawned and walked out.

#

The next morning the tablet’s light was still blinking. The wall screen flashed to a flat white life and a woman’s cool voice boomed an announcement from everywhere at once. A thin line, blood red in milk, crawled across the screen, bisecting it, then disappeared before resuming its travel in the opposite direction. Instead of answering, Thierry studied the patient, endless medical pattern. He thought about the line, its pointlessness. The way it dragged itself, lethargic vampire, from one side of the invisible bezel to the other. He suppressed a shudder.

There was no meaning in the line that he could divine and yet it existed, placed with intention by a designer. He could only ever wonder: What purpose? It was the kind of mystery that could entrance him for hours—a fate he preferred to the smirk waiting on the screen’s other side: Leo, team lead at the Chicago headquarters of their employer, Herrod Project Management. His co-worker laughed with a timbre that was low and knowing, like it harbored the secrets of a lunchroom table’s in-crowd. It rippled over the crisp audio, dominating the air.

Thierry made a mental note to play more music. He remembered hearing somewhere that the acoustics inside Mount Errus were unmatched. Leo ribbed him about checking his tab, said he would have known he was now clear to enter the shelter and start the decommissioning in earnest.

Thierry wanted only to confirm that he was still solo on the project. The lonelier and the farther away, the better. It beat the half-suppressed questions and awkward water-cooler tension he might have had to navigate if he’d been saddled with a team. Mind already drifting, he caught just bits and pieces of Leo’s yo-yo-like saw. Something bemoaning Herrod being shut out of work silencing the last gasps of the grain silos in the Montanas and the Dakotas, and of marines being ground down by the endless, razor-sharp dust storms of Pakistan.

He paid the team lead a bit more attention when the man wondered aloud about vacation plans. Would he head back home to Montreal? Thierry said he enjoyed Arizona’s sun and Arizona’s sand. Leo joked about radiation and condoms, and urged him not to lose his mind.

#

Several times now the biker had appeared to him in visions. One morning while waiting for her, he occupied time with random news, drifting through the empty office to reports that in the aftermath of accident a gray-market Alberta mining operation would belch tibias and rib cages for a week. The television remained on mute. He sat with his imitation leather shoes across the table and stared out the window. Its settings adjusted as the hours passed, coloring the earth a slight new shade of gold, like a ginger ale, or green, like black through a soldier’s night vision. …

His chin snapped up from his chest with a start. The sky had retreated into shadow and the moon outlined the clouds in luminous stencil. He rubbed the haze from his eyes.

He’d missed her.

The next day he tried again, disturbed by the memories she stirred in him. He couldn’t help but wait. So Mount Errus could wait even longer. It was possible that under that helmet she was more than a memory, so he half prayed she would never take it off.

This way he might remember Shae as she’d been instead of the way she’d died.

When the biker emerged from the pink-orange dusk, a yellow smudge sliding off her machine—without so much as a glance at his parked red Ford Fury, but who could tell?—Thierry sprang from his chair. He pressed against the glass. Maybe she would come and lay her helmeted head on the other side, aching for touch impossible through plastic domes. She’d once shown him a very old album cover with a photograph or film still that looked like this. The name escaped him, which he considered an unexplainable miracle since she had gone over each of the records with him many times. More important was what she would say, which he thought might be something like, “It wasn’t you. You didn’t kill me.”

But she never came to him. Not all the way. Instead her yellow was in and out of the pink, every movement effortless, one leg over the side of her machine, another on the pedal, seconds later a muffled roar. The twin exhaust pipes had long necks and square mouths that bellowed in gusts. Her leather-wrapped wrists twisted around the grips. He never saw any skin.

Her spine arced like a longbow as she leaned into her turn and a swooping acceleration. Another small fortune, this one in gas. He guessed that if she had a destination it was two hours away in Phoenix where she could mix with other ghosts.

During his first trip to the office complex he’d seen nothing between it and that emptied city but clumps of stained brown stucco returning themselves to the earth. Once populated by speed and collisions, this stretch of the I-8 was now guarded by abandoned rest stops and mothballed gas stations. Their 24-hours-a-day signposts had blinked their last. Now they were analog, missing letters rendering them gap-toothed and eyeless. The pump islands long drained of fuel were ragged pits with intestines of rusted rebar poking out of jumbled concrete stomachs. The ancient garbage of past travelers streamed from the metal rods like desecrated flags.

On her sleek beast, with no traffic to slow her, she could have made the city in less than an hour.

Now Thierry understood he would never go back. 

Not back to HQ. Not even back to the downtown hotel in Tucson that had been his last pit-stop on the way to the brush and the scrub. He’d been saddened and a little embarrassed at the sight of what must once have been a bustling foyer, now clinging to a different history by strands of frayed carpet. The hallways were cordoned off by disuse and the lineups in the lounges were dust motes trapped in rays fighting through dirty skylights. The manager’s armpits were dark with sweat. He’d put on a game face. 

Now Thierry lived in satellite.

Amid a marvel of electronic architecture created near to nothing, for no reason but to demonstrate national resurgence. The pantry was well stocked, and the theme was that force of will dragged water from its last hideouts underground. Sometimes a bird from the south. He didn’t need to run anymore and it was rare that he had any reason to go out into that terrible sun or dark.

END

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