Ava Blue--that's what she mostly remembers. She was standing at her easel when her studio began pulsing with light. She put down the brush and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them, she was staring up. She must have collapsed. She lay in an empty room with no doors or windows. All of its surfaces were a blue so soothing she might have been tempted to spend her final years trying to paint it, if only the experience wasn't terrifying. Other impressions remain. She was alone. She's sure of that. Light emanated from the walls. There was a voice telling her that the Earth was gone or that she'd left it. She isn't certain. Then wave after wave of claustrophobic terror and physical pain. It blotted her im- pressions. It fractured chronology into scattered, uncertain details. Even the air around her seemed to be a space of agony, as if her nerves extended past her skin and were being uprooted from the world. When she awoke, she was in a hospital room, its pale walls lit by big windows overlooking the bay and its blue sky. "You had a stroke," the doctor told her. He was young--his eyes amber, his skin bronze, all the habitable continents in his features. He said that she'd been stabilized and was sufficiently lucid to accept or refuse an experimental treatment to repair her brain. "What do I have to lose?" she asked, not feeling sick or fatigued at all, trying to make sense of whether the blue room had been a hallucination. "There are no known side effects," he told her. "In fact, it appears to cause generalized rejuvenation of the entire body." Her attention snapped to him. Maybe this was heaven after all. "Bring it on," she said. Intravenous fluids, injections--that's what she expected--but nothing pierced her skin. The doctor, whose name tag read Abdou Levi, gave her spherical pills as smooth and bright as amethysts, as if artists were now being hired to design pharmaceuticals. She had to take one four times a day. With the water, the first slid down her throat so easily she didn't feel it at all. "Ergonomic pills?" she asked. "It's a new thing," he said. "People are more likely to complete their medication if it looks alluring, at least according to trials." "And more likely to benefit from it, I imagine." "Indeed," he said, but she was suddenly sleepy, blinking heavily. She heard her breathing become slower. It sounded like far-off wind moving in measured gusts. Thus began this long period of hibernation--a month in bed. Each time she wakes, she eats ravenously. She stays in the hospital room for monitoring. Sometimes, between bouts of sleep, she re- members that shade of blue and the room without doors or windows. She might have briefly died during her stroke. Or her mind--after a lifetime of mixing paints--might have created a perfect blue in which to find refuge. But the pain didn't start immediately, she seems to recall. There was time to think, to touch the blue walls, to shout ques- tions. She's pretty sure of that. The blue. A spiritual awakening maybe. Like the hippies had talked about for a century--the planet drifting into a new age. There was no reason to expect awakening would be painless. But what led to it? Nothing she'd done. She'd tried to change many times but was always more herself than ever before. People often said age mellowed you. She mostly felt distilled--more in love with art, with the shapes of the world, even as her failing eyes cast them in impressionistic light. At ninety-five, she wasn't at peace with dying. She resented it, resented the society that treated her body like a burden, resented the larger culture that left little space for her passions. She feared death would come in her sleep, stealing even that final experience. Mortality was supposed to give a sense of urgency, driving people to create, but she could imagine life just fine without it. There was so much to experience. An infinitude. The idea of that didn't overwhelm her. Rather, she craved it. She'd survived friends, family, even her country. Only Michael, her companion of six decades, remained, but he'd faded into dementia. She no longer enjoyed his company, except for those moments when he spoke of their distant, shared past as if it were yesterday--as if their young bodies still lay entwined on damp sheets. "Michael," she tells Dr. Levi when he next checks on her--"my husband. Is there some way he can get this treatment?" "He started a week after you," he tells her. "It was a coincidence. People in his age group were the first to become eligible. We've been permitted to prescribe this for only a month." After Dr. Levi switches her to emerald pills, she feels the urge to leave the hospital. She expects her muscles to be weak, but she moves easily, steady on her feet. At the bathroom mirror, she runs her fingertips along her face and throat. Her hair, at its roots, is black and thick and curls the way it once did. She peels back the medical gown and lets it drop. Her skin has regained its copper luster. Its deep grooves have faded. Her eyes are clear, her irises as dark and vivid as fresh henna. She isn't wearing her glasses, she realizes. She lifts her hand and inspects the fine, crisscrossed lines of her palm. She goes to the window and lets her gaze move along San Francisco's skyline. Michael. She can't recall how long it's been since she last saw him. Before her stroke, she was increasingly reluctant to visit his assist- ed-care facility, hating her disloyalty less than the hopelessness she felt next to the hunched, faded shape of the man who'd shared her life. Her first trip from the hospital is to visit him. When she opens the door to his small room, he stands with his back to her, looking out the window. He turns and, for some reason, she thinks of the blue room. Maybe it's the feeling of disbelief. "Michael," she says. The dustiness is gone from him too. He doesn't quite have the gleaming black skin of his youth, but she knows, seeing him step to- ward her, that he'll have it again.6 deni ellis béchard He hugs her, and there, in his thin arms, she cries. That, too, seems impossible. She hasn't cried in decades. She used to say that she exhausted her tears during Partition. "I missed you," she says. "I missed you too," he murmurs as he moves his fingers along the muscles of her back in a way at once familiar and new. He is discover- ing her again, she realizes. During the months that follow, the treatment continues. Over pill bottles of gemstones, she and Michael recreate something that resembles their relationship from before, but more peaceful and con- templative, as if neither quite believes this is real. Nor do they have the external stresses of work. His passions are obsolete, he tells her one day as he is reading about new technology. He often expresses sur- prise upon seeing references to his endeavors in books and lectures. "Maybe I can be a pioneer all over again," he says. She is thinking about painting--about whether a new life needs a new art. One year passes and then another. The economy soars. It's the market for rejuvenation. Novel medical treatments compete until the elderly become indistinguishable from the young. New constructions rise along the coasts--spiraling towers, buildings like lacework whose gaps reveal the sky. Cities hire artists to transform them. Statues pose quietly in shadows beneath trees. Streets become hanging gardens. On a hike along the coast, she comes upon a baroque staircase wrap- ping endlessly along a cliff, winding into the fog. It would be easy to forget that this is a country in a perpetual civil war. Walking to the coffee shop near her apartment on a gusty, sunlit day, she is a young woman again, so filled with undirected anticipation that she wonders if hope is less spiritual than chemical--the natural result of her healing brain. Again, she thinks of the blue room. No doors, no windows, light everywhere, neither hot nor cold. Maybe her life ended, and this city of constant creative expression is her mind's last fantasy--a mix of all she knew and desired. Gradually, day after flawless day, she begins questioning every- thing. If this is her dying delusion--flashbacks of a long, gorgeous, painful life and her many aspirations and dreams, all compressed into this perfect present--she will find a limit. She'll cycle back upon the past. Fantasies will repeat. She and Michael, in their renewed, pas- sionate bodies, will be a reiteration. Though she expected him to look the way he used to--tall and wiry and acutely watchful--he is filling out. More handsome and re- laxed, he resembles the kind of man she often wished she'd married. They no longer even fight. Maybe this second chance at life has in- spired enough gratitude for them to leave their pettiness behind at last. Except she hasn't given hers up. Rather, he no longer reacts to it. Maybe it's all the meditation he does. He's ready to see life differently, he says. He needs a period of contemplation before embarking on something new. She begins to test him. She picks fights or ignores him or searches for the triggers that once brought them to the edge of a separation they both knew to be impossible. In one of their worst moments, decades back, he said, "If we hadn't lost so much together, I would leave you." Now, when she confronts him about the secrets he once kept--Lux and the child, both trapped in that other America after Partition--he answers her questions, speaking with love and patience until her desire for closeness reasserts itself. Even her infidelity doesn't distance him. Each time she feels com- pelled by a work of art, she tracks down its creator. They become friends and lovers. These people are so unfamiliar--so of a new era, so unlike anyone she imagined in her deepest fantasies of the future--that they have to be real. Maybe the blue room wasn't her death. Her mind couldn't have created this world. When she tells Michael about the artists, even about her fears that this world isn't real, he takes her into his arms. He presses his fingers along her back. He encourages her to explore herself. "Monogamy was challenging even for one lifetime," he says. "Everything has changed. The rules have to change too." Though he moves into his own apartment, also wanting space to discover who he might be in what increasingly seems the promise of immortality, they remain close. He's so different that she wonders if he is the flaw she's searching for in this world, the proof that it isn't real. But even if his dementia has been cured, it might have altered his personality. Then again, everyone she knows is happier and kinder. It's only natural, she supposes. The country itself, which once di- rected every effort toward maintaining its borders, seems calm. Sure, a conflict more than half a century old can't always make the news-- two Americas, each called the United States, each claiming the other is a rogue shadow of itself. But at least there used to be references to incursions or deaths in the media. She's seen nothing like that since the blue room. In her studio, she paints a few halfhearted self-portraits of her transformation, but she spends most of her time exploring the city, meeting people--just living, she tells herself. On a brilliant sunlit day, she undresses before the mirror. Years of gentle treatments--pills, elixirs, infrared light, long baths in fragrant medicated oils--have given her this. She is young again. "I need a new art," she whispers. She repeats the words more loudly. "I need a new art." Maybe dance. Something to celebrate this body she once took for granted until it seemed beyond repair. She goes to her bed and lies down. What follows surprises her. She sleeps. One day-long bout of dreamless slumber after another-- as if she still can't accept this mystically creative and utterly just exis- tence from which suffering seems to have vanished. She hardly eats, waking only occasionally to go to the window of her new penthouse apartment which, provided by the government for artists, overlooks the city's hills and coasts and skyscrapers. She loses track of time--months of sleep. Sometimes, she rouses briefly with desire, craving something she can't name. Life, she thinks, half asleep. I want to crack open the universe. She doesn't even know what that means. She is gripped with the urgency she felt as a teen- ager--all the pleasures of life at once absent and so close that she feels them just under her skin. But she wants something bigger. The universe's infinite secrets. At very least a new art. The many possible lives before her flash through her mind with dreamlike inconsistency, exciting and overwhelming her. Maybe she's sleeping this much so that her brain can reshape itself, paring away old neuroses and fears, creating space. At times, in the second she wakes, she senses blue light between her eyelids only to find herself in her apartment, sky in every window. The blue room feels so close. If she lives forever, she might never again experience that space between life and death--if that's what it was. The din of crowds shouting with joy rouses her. The uproar is in the streets. She checks her phone. The war has ended. Almost six de- cades since Partition. Now, quiet truce. Discussions of rebuilding the country that few alive remember. She reads that the other America-- the one that people in her America took to calling the Confederacy-- has been dissolved. Its people, after generations of isolation, want to rejoin the world. She's skeptical. This perfection is too much. Something must have happened. Maybe the blue room was real. She feels herself ready to be awake again. Before she can accept her new life--find a new art--she has to test this reality. Either accept it or wake up from it. There is a solution, she knows--a place of absence in her mind, a sense of loss so tactile it's like a cold spot in her brain. A blankness. Memories she no longer touches. Questions whose answers she aban- doned. But if this world is to give her everything, she should have those answers too. For twenty years after Partition, she made art about the people who vanished--her parents and many friends. She so taxed those memories, she believes, that she burned out the neural circuits con- taining them until she had no choice but to forget. She gave away ev- ery painting. She couldn't look at them anymore. They were inferior, she told herself. They didn't show all that had been lost. Even how she felt creating them--it was a specter of the inspiration she experi- enced in the months before Partition. That year she lived in the country house Michael built in the mountains so that it faced east over the misted, rolling Virginia pied- mont. She was thirty-six--so alive and full of energy that she worked tirelessly in her studio. Each surreal canvas captured more clearly the struggles of a society drawn to the chimeras of a technological future while finding refuge in a fictive, halcyon past--the golden days of a great America that had never truly existed. A few friends criticized her, saying her art was enabled by a purveyor of tech chimeras. At thirty-two, Michael was already a billionaire, running businesses in biotech, blockchain, and the metaverse. When the insurrection started on New Year's Day, his wealth allowed him to outbid others for two tickets on a charter flight west from a nearby regional airport. Before they left, they hid her canvases in an airtight vault beneath the house. They were certain they would return. She would later feel embarrassed that, when so many people were dying, she agonized over those canvases. After Partition she tried to recreate them, but inspiration no longer moved her. She was no longer the same person. Sometimes, she doubted whether the originals had been any good. Maybe she simply longed for who she'd been or the way she'd created art in a more innocent time. Now, in her rejuvenated body, with the war over, she finally lets herself think about whether those canvases locked away in the Virginia mountains survived. Almost certainly none of the people she and Michael lost there would be alive after so many years--he has told her that he long ago accepted that they are all dead--but maybe they too left traces. What she will find in the Confederacy might con- firm whether this new reality is a fantasy--is just her broken brain dreaming exquisitely as her body lies in a hospital bed. She and Michael book tickets to DC. From the sky, she sees the world she knows from satellite images. The crowded, stacked, tower- ing buildings of the capital, its concentric walls, like a city-state's-- as if its inhabitants fear their countrymen--and, in all directions around it, forests marked by the thin lines of highways which, in places, vanish beneath the trees. So many people left that the popula- tion collapsed. Forests grew back. She knows virtually nothing of the Confederates. The war between the two sides was largely fought with drones and automated weapons. Ironically, the only available rental cars are manual. Michael drives. He remembers how. Driving seems as antiquated to her as horseback riding. The capital itself is utterly transformed, resembling a vast army base, crowded with concrete bunkers, armories, and drone pads, though it's now absent of soldiers. The fashion of the people in the street is vaguely militaristic, pants and shirts printed in designs reminiscent of epaulettes and brass buttons. They otherwise look normal and hardly notice the stream of visitors arriving from the air- port. The city's immense metal gates stand open, and beyond the last of the concentric urban areas--each of which appears more residen- tial and less luxurious--is forest. "It's bucolic," she says, "in an apocalyptic sort of way." Trees grow right up to the road. Here or there, on a hilltop, stands a small, squat house with chimneys and solar panels, the boards and windows all so mismatched that they give the place the look of a quilt. "Why didn't they just move into all the big homes we abandoned?" she says. "Those places wouldn't have been easy to heat," Michael tells her. "The insurgents destroyed much of the grid during the war to make those of us living around the capital leave." As the mountain landscape becomes familiar, she watches Michael, waiting for him to say that they have to check for signs of the people he lost out here. Once, in his dementia, he called Lux the love of his life, teaching Ava that, even in her final years, her heart could still be broken. Lux, she thinks. That name, a primordial sound, as mystically simple as a mantra. But there was also Arthur, one of his closest collaborators. Michael hasn't mentioned either of them. He is almost certainly right. They must be dead, though the child--his worst secret--might still be alive. If it was born, if it survived--he must want to know. But maybe, after his re- juvenation, it no longer matters to him. Maybe he wants a new beginning. He drives mostly in silence, quietly pointing out the few familiar landmarks. The roads are the same, though broken and ground to dirt in places. The old maps take them to the mountains. Where once there was the turnoff to the private lane leading up to their house, a faint imprint remains, wending between giant trees. He steers carefully. All the news has been about how ecstatic the people of the Confederacy are to rejoin society. Open arms. How many times has she read that expression? Otherwise, she would have been terrified to come here. Seeing the path ahead tunnel beneath the trees, she asks herself why she isn't. Maybe she no longer believes that the world can harm her. Mostly, she is focused on Michael. When the lane becomes too narrow for the car, he parks and they walk. "There it is," he says. The husk of a house, stripped to its frame in places, stands deep in the shadows of the trees. They step inside and stare into the half of the living room that was carved into the rocky hillside. He takes a flashlight from his bag and shines it around. There was once a large bookshelf on the wall, but it has been smashed. The secret passage behind it is visible. Cautiously, they follow it. The metal door at the end is ajar. He pushes it open. In the first room, everything is gone, even outlets and light sockets. Only raw concrete remains. He doesn't pause, shows no regret or hesitation, just walks toward the long narrow closet where he stored equipment. She needs time, is lagging, glancing around, trying to remember how this place was. She follows him into the empty closet. At its back, the concrete has ribbed indentations that once held metal shelves. He runs his fingers along a groove and into the corner. A click sounds inside the wall. He leans against it and eases it open. A small passage appears, and he leads her to the storage room. The large framed canvases stand upright in the metal rack against the wall. The fixtures here haven't been looted. The air smells ancient, not like must or even dust. She has no word for it or even a memory to compare it with. She doesn't know what exact molecule of decay or stagnation she is inhaling. "Nothing's changed," he says. She closes her eyes briefly, trying to hide her surprise. "There it is," she murmurs to herself. She turns away from him and pulls out the first canvas. It's as tall as she is. Michael looks from her to the painting and back with calm scru- tiny, as if he has seen something in her and knows that she wasn't referring to the painting but rather to the flaw in this reality that she has finally found. She should be afraid, she thinks, but she has lived with uncertainty for so long that all she can do is wait. "You were looking for this one in particular?" he asks. "Yes," she lies, avoiding his gaze. The painting's condition is perfect--the farmers hoeing fields or pruning orchards in a pastoral landscape strewn with immense and ancient metal hulks that are at once terrifying and beautiful, their purposes inexplicable. As Michael watches, she focuses on the canvas, trying not to re- veal her thoughts. It's better than she remembered. The photos she took with her phone didn't do it justice. She wonders if there still might be an audience for these tableaus. Their time has passed, and she loves the chimeras that the future has actually delivered--she is now one of them herself. She closes her eyes. She wants to keep moving into the future as if all of this is real. She is almost certain that it isn't. Her thoughts about the paintings feel mechanical--the crude, involuntary work- ings of her mind like the noise of a wind-up toy. As she looks at the canvas, a strange thought comes to her. That who or whatever created this reality--a mind far greater than her own--must also seek subtlety and avoid errors. It might even be find- ing inspiration elsewhere, just as she studied other painters. One by one, she examines the tableaus. Michael helps her move them. His expression is blank. He no longer seems like Michael--is no longer Michael, she tells herself. He is just a helper, watching her, waiting to see how he should respond. Maybe his years of dementia made him forget the way the room really was. She doubts that. He was so aware of every other detail here. She wouldn't have expected him to notice that the order of the paintings was wrong or that the smallest of them was missing. And even if she herself had any doubt that she might have forgotten how she placed the canvases--with her favorite last, most protected-- there are words that she didn't write, hundreds of lines penciled on the backs. Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command . . . She vaguely recognizes the poem but can't identify it. Maybe someone came into this room, left no trace but these words and changed the order of the canvases. Of course, they also took the electronics Michael kept here--work he'd been developing for years along with records of his virtual worlds. He couldn't have forgotten that. He wouldn't have said that nothing has changed. Or maybe she is the one who has forgotten. She doesn't think so. She wants to understand the mind that created this reality--this perfect future that is somehow brilliantly continuous with the awful past--and also how it could have made a mistake. If she isn't afraid, she tells herself, it's because this world seems benevolent. If she died, her mind hasn't been extinguished, and her life now might be some version of heaven. Regardless, she's ready for the truth. "I need to go outside," she says. "I need some air." "It's okay," Michael tells her, softly now, in a soothing voice that isn't quite his. She turns to the door. Down the hallway, through the under- ground apartment and beyond the next doorway, she sees the glim- mer of blue sky through the trees. But that's impossible at this dis- tance, from this angle. The sky brightens, spreading in along the hallway. She recognizes the perfect hue. It covers walls, filling the apartment like water, glid- ing toward her. She wants to panic, but the air has become dense and humid. She feels herself surrendering, feels the inevitability of her return. Everything before her vanishes. The doorway is no more than a blue rectangle on the wall--a canvas of perfect sky. Blue floods be- yond its edges, over the walls and floor. Michael is no longer behind her. He, like the canvases, is gone, and she is alone. Excerpted from We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
