Beyond the Zero
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.
Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me,
strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence
after death.
-Wernher von Braun

h h h h h h h
ASCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, but
there is nothing to compare it to no.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are
no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an
iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day
through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall-soon-it will
be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout,
without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen
darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and
connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising,
an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all
out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20
years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more
children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of
the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all,
and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces
remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . .
They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of
downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is
this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud.
Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive
knotting into-they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete
that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened
wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days
far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came
through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves
and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust,
developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn,
with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . .
and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose
names he has never heard. . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do
the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader
highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and
tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes
grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.
The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are ordered
out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them wear
cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old and dark
hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they have come
here. . . . Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang from under the fancy iron
eaves, unlit for centuries . . . the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing
down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles . . . velvet black
surfaces contain the movement: the smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty
all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold plaster where
all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave-painting, fixed stubborn and
luminous in the walls . . . the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator-a moving
wood scaffold open on all sides, hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys
whose spokes are shaped like Ss. At each brown floor, passengers move on and
off. . . thousands of these hushed rooms without light. . . .
Some wait alone, some share their invisible rooms with others. Invisible,
yes, what do the furnishings matter, at this stage of things? Underfoot crunches
the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened,
lied to its children. Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking
only to him, say, "You