K Chess
FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED
To the brave and resilient refugees of the world.
“She had a houseful of books that she could neither read nor bring herself to use as fuel. And she had a memory that would not bring back to her much of what she had read before.”
CHAPTER ONE
Hel stepped over the threshold from the sagging porch, squeezing her body between towers of junk. She fought off the tight, proprietary excitement that kindled in her chest. The cottage, marooned on a street of much newer semidetached row houses in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, was smaller and shabbier than she’d expected. Dwayne Sealy, the owner, followed her in and pulled the street door closed behind them. As Hel’s eyes adjusted, she saw shoulder-high stacks of newspapers and magazines, blocking even the windows. A narrow path wound through the canyons of disorder, a passage three squares of brown-and-gold linoleum wide.
“Bulb’s out, I guess.” Dwayne flicked the switch up and down. “Wait right here—let me see what I can do.” He activated the flashlight app on his phone and maneuvered around her, making his way into the dim room beyond.
Happy to stay where she was, Hel breathed in the precious dust. Within these walls in another Brooklyn, the great writer Ezra Sleight had lived, rats under the floorboards, a pile of books in his bed. Within these very walls in a different Brownsville, he’d penned his best novels. His masterpieces. The Pyronauts. The Pain Ray. What to Do with the Night. But none of this was his. There was nothing worth discovering. Everything surrounding her here was an artifact of After, the time after the split.
This was not the Brownsville she knew. Just ten minutes ago, on New Lots Avenue, she’d witnessed a group of kids pretending to piss on a man slumped unconscious in an alley. She’d noticed melted vinyl siding fronting a building a few doors down, that ominous black smudge that marked a place where a car had burned hot. This was a different world, a world in which Ezra Sleight had died as a ten-year-old child. His life cut short, his genius never apparent to anyone, he never wrote the books that made him seem, to scholars like Vikram, worthy of attention. Perhaps a few had mourned the boy Sleight—his family and his schoolmates—but no one remembered to mourn him now.
No one but Hel. 1909. The date, when she’d learned it, stood out in neon.
Dwayne returned carrying a battery-powered camping lantern that cast a warm glow on the walls of old newspaper. “I forgot,” he said. “They cut the electric. Come on back. I can’t say it gets much better, but it does get brighter.”
They passed through what might have been a sitting room, though no clear place to sit presented itself in the cramped squalor. They entered the kitchen, at the back of the house. Here, motes swirled in the sunbeams from the big windows. Hel sneezed. She noted mismatched appliances, a rounded, monstrous Frigidaire, the type of stove that must be lit with matches, a front-loading dishwasher in avocado green partially hidden behind a mound of black plastic trash bags. The double sink was full—not with dishes but with dozens of back issues of some magazine she’d never heard of.
Dwayne jerked open a drawer. “My grandmother. I loved the woman, but she had a problem. Didn’t know it had gotten this bad.” He squinted at the clutter inside but did not touch. “I told you she passed away last week?”
“Yes,” said Hel. “On the phone, you mentioned. I’m sorry for your loss.” That, she’d learned, was what you said here when someone died.
“She practically raised us in this house—me and my brother—but the last couple years, she wouldn’t let us inside. Now I see why.” He stood abruptly, kicked at a cardboard carton. Whatever was inside tinkled as it broke. “Shit.”
Traffic on the Belt Parkway two blocks away rumbled like distant thunder. Hel looked up high, up above the broken surface of this roiling sea of possessions. She examined the dirty wallpaper, fussy bouquets streaked with grime. A design from Before, from the shared history of her world and Dwayne’s. She took in the dark wood cabinets, their old doors hanging crooked on the hinges, where Sleight might have stored his dishes.
Something reaching for her, making contact. Signs in the dust that most people couldn’t read.
“Guess I should have checked things out before I brought you over,” Dwayne said. “You’re not interested now.”
Within these walls, what might have been.
“You’d be surprised,” Hel said.
Looking back, she wished she’d deliberated about what to carry through the Gate. One bag, the evacuation officials ordered, providing maximum dimensions, as if those thousands luck had chosen were booking seats on an airship for a vacation.
But Hel remembered her world history. As she packed, she’d considered the rumors about forced labor at America Unida’s hidden education camps, and about what the Power Brothers in Ceylon had done in the jungles to city-dwelling elites. And she’d remembered the KomSos clearing the shtetls of the Pale from east to west. All of these regimes relocated citizens en masse by imposing arbitrary rules that encouraged compliance and complacency. Leave what you own behind. All you’ll need is your identity papers. You’ll see your neighbors on the other side. Then, the march into the caves, the group showers, the trenches to be dug. Docile victims unaware of what was coming: the suffocation, the live burial. The shot in the back of the head.
Stay calm, the Evac Commission instructed. And yes, it needed to be said. Order was just barely being maintained in those chaotic days, by the hope—a fiction Evac promoted—that everyone had a chance. Hel’s name being chosen in a frantic lottery didn’t mean she was going to get out alive. Anything could be waiting.
Thus prepared for the worst, Hel brought practically nothing. Packed in her padded shoulder bag: her portable ordinator and its charger (not compatible with anything here, of course), the medical journal she happened to be reading at the time, her allergy medication, two liters of water. And just to be safe, inside a plastic folder, her passport, birth certificate, and a copy of her New York State medical license.
In the other pocket of the folder, she’d tucked a drawing her son, Jonas, had made for her in pre-form, years ago, back before her ex-husband took him away to California. It depicted a tiger with a red-crayoned mouth and blood-dripping claws. On the other side of the page three crude human figures smiled, representing Raym and Helen and Jonas himself, all three of them drawn with the same scribble of hair. Hel could tell which one was meant to be her because of the earrings sticking straight out from her head—as big as hands—and by the mole next to her nose, which her son had been careful to add in brown crayon.
That bag. All she had left of her home.
That fall/winter 2018 issue of the Journal of Clinical Insights with its drab cover. Nothing special about it. The report of a study on a radical new treatment for Albertson-Huhn syndrome in immunocompromised patients whose methodology had once seemed to her positively irresponsible. In the years since, she’d read and reread the piece, along with every other article between the covers.
Because the issue was the last, the only. Because the Journal of Clinical Insights did not exist here. The study did not exist here. Albertson-Huhn syndrome was named after someone else entirely.
Everything was like that. 1910 was the magic year, as far as anyone could prove. Before that was a known quantity. It was After—after 1910—that things slowly started to unzip, one set of possibilities uncoupling from another and veering off, gradually at first, but then more and more drastically.