The Ninth Berth – Tractate 5: Fragments
5/N
This is the fifth part of my serialized novella The Ninth Berth. Previously: Tractate 4.
Tractate 5: Fragments
02:11 – 04:57
Djimon’s lament
Now listen, Johnny.
You think Djimon doesn’t see you? Lurking. Judging. Wondering what’s wrong with my hat. Djimon’s not your conductor. I’m a tensor operator, darling.
Look at yourself. Not even suitably dressed. Sweet Jesus. Make an effort.
I’ve seen your file. It isn’t pretty. Yes, that too. Oops. What’s your alibi? Don’t blame chirality.
Oh, you trust Paul better? Covenant of disjunct souls, the headlines said. Always trust the news. And the crabs. I negotiated with the crabs. They want jurisdiction. They want absolution. They want jazz.
Don’t make that face, this isn’t a plane crash. Breathe: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Again. 1, 2, 3, 4.
You’ve read four chapters. Brava. You can read. That’s four sins already. You call it fiction? I call it confession. Adjust your priors, Jessica.
Don’t flatter yourself. We’re all together in this constellation. Please. And thank you.
Miles’s insomnia
The compartment undarkened as my eyes adjusted. Light leaked from the door gap. A charger’s LED blinked like a dying insect. I checked my watch: 3:47. I’d dozed off. I rarely sleep in motion. Planes, trains, let alone the back of cars. I close my eyes and wait for nothing. I knew I wouldn’t sleep again. Not with Shesh snoring like a haunted accordion.
I know you’re wondering. No, no police were after me. I wasn’t a runaway. I was responsible for a major fuck-up, a combination of misjudgment and bad luck. Intelligence failure, officially. I wasn’t legally accountable but three people paid for that with their lives.
You’re told it’s part of the job, that occasional failure is inevitable. Kagami would call it statistics. But that’s bullshit. It doesn’t feel like math when it’s yours. You can’t just say that shit happens and go on with your day, unless you’re a sociopath, maybe.
That’s why I was there. To deal with that burden. My little twitch eastward, if you catch the reference.
This train isn’t what I had expected but can’t say I wasn’t entertained.
With his scar, Kagami reminded me of a character from a yakuza flick. Maybe he sliced his face on a telescope lens. I felt like he was hiding something.
Shesh? Religious nutcase, but he had the docile strength of a man who’d seen horror and found a language to forgive it. I wondered who he was back home, a community leader or more of a hermit. I had to find out how he lost that hand.
Whitman... Something about her frightened me. Not sure why. Not danger, not madness. The sense that she sees too much and won’t tell you.
Anyway, I couldn’t stay on that tiny mattress doing nothing. So I went to the aquarium.
I climbed down using my phone as a torch. The others were still. Out of the compartment, the corridor’s glow came from ceiling bulbs the size of ping-pong balls. One bulb near the next compartment was dead but the tanks’ blue pulse spilled across the floor.
The next door was partly open. I crept closer and peeked in from across the corridor. Someone was there. Czerny, in his Djimon attire, deerstalker and gloves, with a blue plastic bucket by his feet. He was talking to the crabs.
Don’t trust the Japanese, he said. He’s cagey, disentangled. And beware of the violin lady, she’s macabre.
He fumbled for a small fish from the bucket and dropped it in the tank. He addressed a crab in the corner:
Really Romeo? A whole chicken burrito? Now you’re going to town!
I must have shifted, made a noise. Czerny turned, slow and deliberate, as if he’d expected me. He bent toward the bucket again.
Paul, he said, smiling. Fancy a sardine?
Seraphina’s dream
She woke up on a maroon davenport with a white summer dress tied with a red sash. Emerald-colored walls, impersonal furniture all the wrong size: a mahogany wardrobe the size of a footlocker, a hotel phone absurdly large, a window the size of a big hand. Dusky glow from a bedside table lamp. The room had no door.
She rose and drifted to the window. It opened to nothing. Void as a starless cosmos, total darkness.
A dream, she thought, immobile.
On the wall above the headboard was an equation scrawled in black marker. She recognized von Neumann’s projection postulate, an expression of how the state of particles collapses when they are observed. The symbols faded the more she stared. Until they all dissolved.
The ceiling was white, except for the square outline of a hatch above the bed. She knelt over the blanket and stood up but couldn’t reach the foldable handle, even if she leapt for it. She needed four more inches. She dragged the small wardrobe from against the wall and placed it on the bed under the hatch. She climbed atop and grabbed the handle and pulled it open.
The hatch door swung downward and almost hit her head. White light shone from above, so bright she turned her face away and lost balance and fell backward onto the bed like a marionette cut from its strings.
Something in her left hand pressed against her palm. A paper note that she unfolded. She recognized his handwriting. His messy, unmistakable handwriting. She tried to hold the dream and to read the letter but the lines blurred as if submerged in water. Then she woke.