Beautiful Wreck
BEAUTIFUL WRECK
Larissa Brown
COOPERATIVE TRADE
an imprint of Cooperative Press
BEAUTIFUL WRECK
ISBN-13: 978-1-937513-43-6
First Edition
Published by Cooperative Press Trade,
an imprint of Cooperative Press
www.cooperativetrade.com
Text © 2013, Larissa Brown
Cover art © 2013, Arabella Proffer
All rights reserved.
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This novel is a work of fiction. With the exception of those persons appearing as personalities under their own names, albeit in fictitious circumstances, all other characters are imaginary and any resemblances to actual persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
A Note on Language
“Farm Note”
INTO THE STEAM
BEACHED
SPINNING
FALLS
WALLS
AN ACRE
FLOWERS & FLAME
INTENTIONS
ARROWS & SPEARS
SNOW & STARS
NIGHT SKIING
GOD-MAKER
THE WATER’S EDGE
GATHERING
FREEZING
SWIMMER
THIRST
Many Thanks
About Larissa Brown
About Cooperative Press
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
The old language in this novel is a storybook composite—it’s meant to be fictional, not entirely real or correct. It is based on Old Icelandic words, modern Icelandic, Old Norse, and a few composite words I made up by blending those languages and speculating about how people thought of the world and put it into words. I have used real Icelandic letters in many places. English speakers, for that little voice in your head:
Ei
long A sound, so Heirik’s name sounds like Hay’-rik and nei is nay
J or j
a y sound, for example Jul is the winter Yule festival
Á or á
ow, so Hár’s name sounds like Hower, and já sounds like yow
Þ or þ
soft th as in thing
ð
hard th as in brother
Í
long ee; so the farm, Hvítmörk, sounds like Veet-mork
“FARM NOTE”
Iceland, circa 900
Everyone settled.
Goodnight to sheep and cows and horsies. To grassy field, rough walls.
To stars and hearth and strong house. To woods and whales and sea.
Goodnight to the circle of young girls, their long braids lit by fire.
INTO THE STEAM
The future
Inside “the tank”
The cardboard smell of simulated beer wafted through the crowd.
True, vivid smells were something I yearned for, but tonight I was grateful the programming team couldn’t get them right. Realistic sweat and stale beer, and the iron tinge of blood, would have made the Ultimate Fighting simulation hard to bear.
A meadow would have been lovely. I’d come into the tank every day if I could feel lush, slippery grass between my toes, the gentle nudge of a breeze at my frothy hems. But the programmers couldn’t accomplish the immense reach and power of outdoor scenes. Not yet.
Besides, who wouldn’t want to visit a vintage, turn of the century cage match between two men who hit and kicked each other and struggled on the floor in the slippery, knee-length pants of the aughts and teens? Jeff couldn’t imagine anyone not adoring this sim. The whole programming team loved it so much, they named the extraction signal after this kind of wrestling. To leave the tank, a user just had to tap out.
Outside this lab sprawled our real place, the city of Iceland. But in here, we immersed ourselves in fighting arenas, castles, grass longhouses. I designed Old Norse voices, gestures and idioms for the high tech company that was creating it all.
Jeff’s fight sim wasn’t entirely lost on me. I enjoyed one part of it—the voices. The wash of them in this simulation was complex and nuanced. The setting was Atlantic City in the old United States, designed with a strong primary accent. Weekend visitors from the north. I absorbed the aggressive voices, the language punctuated with jabs and dramatic eyebrows.
The sounds of talking in any language drew me—the motions and rhythm of speech, the spikes and quiet spaces of arguments, the steady murmur of flirting. I craved the sounds of lovers, hiding and seeking, the voices and movements of the desperately angry. As a linguistic artist it was almost impossible to just listen without analyzing, but when I could I had a vision of humans as animals. Great flocks and herds, sometimes majestic, sometimes frightening or gross. This arena sounded like a field packed solid with geese.
What I thought geese might sound like. I’d seen them in the electronic arcs. I knew geese and hawks and ravens, dogs and foxes, from years of personal study. A thousand afternoons spent with my nose pressed to an archive screen, trying to feel the silky threads of a horse’s mane.
I heard there were fanatic realist farms, out beyond the glacier. But those were dreams. I checked the one time I flew in an airplane.
“They were still called shorts.” Morgan leaned over to shout in my ear. “They were practically down to their ankles in the early 2000s.” She was talking about the wrestler’s pants. The shiny reds and greens and yellows were so bold and pure, stunning in their dumb glory.
The audience’s clothing was a more complex expression of hopes and needs and sexual invitation. Tattoos on the curves of women’s lower backs were displayed like tail feathers, paired with hair that was every color and shape of plumage. Cowgirl boots and tight jeans were prevalent. A sheen of iridescent powder covered it all, as though the women had stood together under a gentle rain of it, faces upturned. A blessing for long life and a brawny boyfriend.
New Jersey circa 2010 didn’t seem like something Morgan, a blacksmith who designed Viking weapons and buckles and locks, would care much about. But she pointed out that the men were dressed surprisingly like Vikings, with heavy boots, long hair and neat beards. Their markings encircled their upper arms like the precious metal rings worn by chieftains. Jewelry showed at their throats, an echo of the torcs and silver Thor’s hammers of tenth century Norsemen. The decorations of farmers and raiders from the Rus’ States to North America.
“Isn’t it awesome, Jen?” Jeff blared in my ear. “I worked on the voices with Shank.”
Come to think of it, Jeff himself was silver-necklaced and fair in a big, Norse kind of way. He wore the clothes of the second tech revolution, headphones at his throat rather than the fangs of stylized dragons, but he was Viking in his family’s real blood. Tonight he was close, touching me casually, as if it were the fault of the tiny seats in the arena. We had the best ones, of course. We were the only real humans. A perfect view into the eight-sided cage.
I floated the symbols and stats. Mateus Vida was imposing even in
teeny yellow shorts. They glowed against his dark skin. Information wafted beside him, telling me he stood six feet tall. Beside his bald head, white letters read, Weight: 83 kg (184 pounds). Reach: 188 cm (74 inches). I read a litany of Black Belts: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Judo, Taekwondo. He specialized in Muay Thai.
“That’s kickboxing,” Jeff told me, and he gestured at the cage, poking at the stats with the same finger that held his plastic cup of beer. Some of it seeped into my authentic jeans.
They all had Viking style bynames, just like Aud the Deep Minded, Eirik Bloodaxe. Here stood Vida the Locust. His opponent was Yusef “Superior” Cruz, a self-important choice of name, I thought. At six feet tall, 186 pounds, and with a couple of similar Black Belts, he seemed to my untrained eye to be a fair match for Vida.
I found moments that weren’t ugly. Time seemed to stretch out and I could appreciate a snapshot of two men tumbling in midair, one lifted high like a dancer. The sour face of a referee looking at me from between a wrestler’s legs. But those moments of clarity were scarce. Mostly, it was a kind of grueling hugging on the floor, with grunting and some vicious punches. Bodies would sometimes slam into the cage, right in front of us, and adrenalin left my hands and feet tingling. Sprays of blood and spit just missed us. I pretended it was true. I let the stats drop and watched.
The fight was brief. Just three minutes of circling, jabbing, inviting with bared teeth. There were a few terrible punches, hard and gross. I couldn’t imagine being hit even once and getting up again, let alone so many times. Cruz circled, waiting, wanting to hit, to take down. And then Vida kicked him.
It wasn’t just a kick to the shins or belly or even the chest. From a standing position, he kicked him in the face. Time slowed down, literally now, for the replay. The kick was elegant. Vida’s leg was poetry, long and accurate, the ball of his foot smashing up from under Cruz’s chin. The man’s face rippled like rubber.
Then time rushed forward again and he hit the mat, knocked cold. Everyone flew to their feet with the madness of shock, outrage, and glee. Tall, cheering bodies obscured me on every side. I could still just see the cage. Vida was spinning in a tight circle, ecstatic, fists clenched in triumph. He looked like a giant figure skater corkscrewing down, down into the mat. Down onto one knee.
A metallic screech split my head—a brutal ripping sensation in my brain. My hands flew to my ears, but the wrenching was deep inside and I couldn’t reach it. Something unfathomably delicate was tearing. I shut my eyes.
And opened them to see the ocean.
The green waves were almost black, laced with white foam in the moonlight. I knelt, my hands sinking into cold, moist sand. Every grain felt sharp and clear. The last ripples of a wave reached close to me, like fingers searching blindly for my knees. A glow cast the beach in bluish white. I turned to it, and it dazzled. Mammoth letters lit the sky, each at least three stories high. They were brilliant against a black expanse of space. STEEPLECHASE. In smaller letters, THE FUN FACTORY fought to outglow dozens of swags of white bulbs, tiers of them climbing the facade of a fairy tale castle.
My head ached and drifted onto my shoulder, making the scene cant. A hundred people seemed to slide off the tilting boardwalk. They were lit with colors of the dead, faces blue under a million incandescent bulbs and shadowed by the brims of broad hats. A hundred ankle-length skirts caught and riffled in unison by a sharp wind off the water. It blew my hair forward and blocked out my view. A strong smell, like salt and fish, burned behind my eyes.
I felt a rushing, fast building roar of applause and chanting. “Vida! Vida!” The audience crushed me. I swayed into Jeff, and he dropped heavily to his seat, the glow of cheering on his cheeks and in his eyes. He seemed unaffected by the ripping sensation, the exterior view. I hadn’t seen him at the beach. I’d felt sand and wind and water. An outdoor scenario? Without Jeff or Morgan. I’d been alone there.
Vida spoke to a reporter in Portuguese, the words flowing, scrolling through the air in English a moment ahead of the human translator who was programmed to be there, just like he had been on that historic night. Vida was thanking people, his family, his trainer. “How does it feel to be middleweight champion of the world?” He grinned. Smiled for the flashing cameras.
He was given a massive silver belt, so big it covered his considerable abs, and he held it across himself to show it off, but he didn’t fasten it. Instead, he approached Cruz and placed the belt at his opponent’s feet. The champion bent low over it and touched his head to the mat. He looked like a knight, pledging allegiance to the man he’d just knocked flat with a kick to the face. It was one of the things I understood intellectually, but never did get in my heart. That you could beat each other so savagely, and then bow down to one another, honorable brothers. I knew many words for it in Old Norse, for honor. I knew it existed. I saw it. But it wasn’t mine.
The Future
City of Iceland
“What happened in there?” I tried to ask between kisses, from under the weight of Jeff’s sweet-smelling body and searching mouth. He had me pinned against the wall outside my building, my insides starting to melt in his heat. I struggled to remember my question. “With the beach?”
“What?” He was distracted, shoving kisses at my mouth.
“When everyone was cheering at the end.” I got one arm free and pushed at his chest. “For a second I was outside by the ocean.”
“Huh.” He paused briefly, his troubleshooting mind engaged, but then his body took over again and he swept the hair off my neck and bent to kiss it. “You must have been in a botched test for a second.” He nuzzled into me. “I’ll look at it tomorrow.” We forgot it in a clumsy press of bodies against the wall, a deeper kiss.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want him. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I fell into a daze of skin and tongues and our long blond hair mingling, and there were moments of stark beauty. I would look down at him, at us, and I would see how fair and pretty we were, and I would feel nothing. Or no, I would feel something, and it was flat as scents in the tank.
Outside my door tonight, he pushed his hips into me. We never did meet. It was as though some emotional mismatch was echoed in the body, a truer judge than the mind. Jeff gave up and pulled away, disappointed, but not really upset. He didn’t wonder why I wanted to be alone, didn’t worry about whether I loved him or even wanted him. I’d see him at the lab. He’d pour me coffee and we would smile, he would wink.
He’d never know what I did instead, on nights when I went home alone.
I zipped up my snowsuit and pulled on big, spiked boots. I left by the back door of my building, the one for the odd people like me who went beyond the gate. I stepped into the night and started walking up the waves of a motionless sea.
My building backed up into the glacier—the only one left, stabilized and gutted by the same company that owned the tank. Past the back gate, the white expanse I walked on stretched forever, an ocean frozen in the midst of rolling and crashing. Marbled darkest green and white, ancient and unmoving. I read that there were once thirteen glaciers, some of them unfathomable at fifteen times this size or more, far beyond anywhere I could see.
When I climbed high enough, I turned back to see the Atlantic Ocean twenty miles away. Towers of glass and metal filled every space between me and that water. A million lights glowed steadily in windows, never stirring with any breeze or breath. Twenty million people lived there, not caring that their flames could never flicker. Buildings piled on each other like boulders. A cairn, a grave mound for the walking dead.
I whispered to them all, an ancient lullaby.
Everyone settled.
I said the words from the Farm Notes, a Viking Age diary I had translated.
Goodnight to smali and kyr and hross. To sheep and cows and horsies.
To grassy field, rough walls.
To stars and hearth and strong house. To woods and whales and sea.
I whispered sleepy words of young girls, their braids lit by fire.
The ends of my own long braids glowed pale in the night. Warm, synthetic flur scratched my forehead and cheeks, but my nose and lips felt nothing. I stiffly kissed my gloved palm and raised my hand to let it free, in case it might reach someone.
I went inside to read.
WALL SCREENS GLOWED WITH A VERDANT PASTURE FULL OF flowers and horses—the few colors in my neutral apartment. My bare toes gripped the grooves in the kitchen tiles, my boots and suit discarded on the living room floor. While I waited for the coffee machine to choke and whir to life, I told my contacts I wanted to see the diary.
Jeff said it was impossible to feel the moment when the opaque tint closed like an iris from every side, covering the eyes for reading. I always thought I did, though. I could almost hear a snick, like a lock turning.
The letters jumped to life. The scan of the ancient book showed them as they’d been written, the common alphabet, not sacred runes. Letters so tiny, traveling down the pages of birch bark that had been worked into a rough paper. Along the edges and top, upside down, words small enough to fit dozens of observations on each precious sheet. The ink had spread until the words were almost unreadable, as if they’d been worked with a bristly brush.
I’d done my own translation, and I could recall every word choice, every line and turn of phrase. I would read it all again anyway.
I’d found the diary in a disused museum—a Viking ruin that sat three levels under the city. There were open stacks of electronic files, compiled when someone used to care and then never deleted. They contained the dating of stones, comprehensive lists of artifacts, notated images of spindles and combs and scoops to clean out ears. One wooden doll. Its cracked form was cradled in an electronic grave.
Among the jumble of information, someone had collected snips and quotes from later sagas, from the stories attributed to the family who once lived there. They told of a formidable chieftain with eyes of precious metal and a face like death itself, a man who could form new gods from his own hands. His wife was a shape shifter. It was fanciful and electric and very Viking.