The Firmament
BY MIKLOS ZOLTAN
The whole time my brother Jimmy was building the Firmament, his wife and I were lovers. We lived on the same two hundred and fifty-five acres in the North Maine Woods. Nevena took the road I’d cut along the brook between our houses. Jimmy created the Firmament in the violently rainy spring of 2023, when the brook flooded its banks and covered the road. Nevena left her big red rainboots on my screened-in porch.
I said we were lovers. We did make love a handful of times on the damp sheets by my open bedroom window. Her eyes, their irises as purple as her hair, seemed to change depth as I looked down at her on the pillow. She would close them for long stretches. She may have been thinking of Jimmy. But it wasn’t very often that she and I went to bed, and sex wasn’t the reason I knew we loved each other. Entire nights went by where we’d barely touch, where we’d talk and play Pitch by firelight until dawn surprised us. We spoke often of Jimmy and his genius and tried to understand how much of what we felt for him was love, how much was fear, and how much was awe. There was never any question of him knowing about our affair. He knew. Nevena bore my love to Jimmy each time she carried herself back through the mud. To me she brought whatever shreds of his humanity the Firmament had not yet claimed.
He’s almost done, she said to me on one of the first hot days of the year. She had just come in the door and was removing her mosquito netting.
I asked, Have you seen it yet?
The Firmament is not something you see, Nevena replied. It’s a world that you enter.
He’s told you all about it, I said. He’s asked you to go.
Yes. And he’ll ask you too.
Jimmy had to know I wouldn’t do it. I looked at all technology, down to the latch on the door of my porch, as intrusive, whereas he understood computers as if they were an extension of his mind. We’d moved together to the woods because I thought it was about as far from the relentless digital as I could get and Jimmy thought it was the only place godly enough to build the agent that would usher humanity into its next epoch. The road that Nevena walked between our houses led from one version of history to another. She insisted that I had a genius just as deep and complex as my brother’s, but I could never imagine anyone talking about me the way she and I talked about Jimmy. I always trusted that she loved me, though, because I knew that loving Jimmy starved the soul and made it cry for a companion. I thought I understood her in a way he never could.
As Nevena and I sat down to play Pitch, she said, Don’t you want to hear about it?
I said, Only if I can convince you not to go.
We’re all going to go eventually. Either that or die.
It’s very important, I said, that we all end up dead.
Slackjawed in the heat, she fingered her bug bites absentmindedly while examining the cards in her hand. She wore a ribbed yellow tanktop. The tips of tree branches reached for her head and heart. Because of their placement they looked like a partial outline of her lungs within. The gnarled oak from which they grew had been inked down her left ribcage. I knew that its roots, which spread downward from her hip, ended in the heads of snakes. We’d spent so much time inside because of the rain, and Nevena was still winterpale: the oak branches showed as sharply as they would have if she’d been the moon.
I don’t want you to die, Nevena said, and Jimmy doesn’t either. Come with us. The way Jimmy explained it, you’ll see that you have to.
She told me that I already existed in the Firmament: everything did, the trees and the rain and the insects. It was an exact copy of our world, with an avatar for each of us. You uploaded yourself in order to inhabit your avatar.
Jimmy had called her to his office the day before and shown her how to do it. When she’d walked in, a box with no bottom lowered itself from the ceiling on a cable. You shave your head clean and put it inside, Jimmy had explained, and then you are extracted. From then until you die on earth, you have two lives. One here, and one up there. If that sounds difficult, don’t worry. Life in the Firmament is easy enough to manage. In fact, it’s already going on without you.
I said, Something that only knows your head could never extract your whole.
Nevena did not address my objection. She leaned over her cards.
She said, When you die on earth, the self you have uploaded to the Firmament goes on living. You inhabit your avatar eternally in a world just like this one. And the things you do there can happen on earth if you want them to.
I was sick and sad. Summer already felt like a fever, the air thick as blood.
I said, I know how Jimmy is, the way his skin draws tight across his skull, the way his words seem absolute. But you don’t have to do it.
You know I do, she said. We all do.
Why do you say that? This world may be damaged, but it’s not ending.
But each of us have lives that end, Nevena said. Who wouldn’t change that if they could?
Me, I said. Me. The only one who truly loves you.
She lifted her hand to my face and ran her thumb across my cheek.
Sweet thing, she said, you can’t know that.
Pitch is a game for four people, two teams of two, but Nevena and I played alone by dealing to the two spots where our teammates would be. We picked the face-down cards randomly from these hands. I named my teammate Brother Jimmy and she named hers Husband Jimmy. They could not be relied upon, but occasionally exhibited moments of arcane brilliance.
Brother Jimmy played the high card and won the hand, taking Nevena’s Jack.
Fucker got me, said Nevena.
After the first game ended, she reached her hand into a canvas bag and withdrew an electronic hair clipper. She held it next to her face. Then she raised her eyebrows and flipped it on. The whirring of the small motor sounded like an infinite army of mosquitoes.
She said, Will you cut off all my hair?
I could have refused the request. I wanted to, and perhaps I should have. But she’d made her position clear. She was asking me to perform an act of love. The way she’d explained it, she could enter the Firmament and remain on earth. Maybe it wouldn’t be so different from how it was now, I told myself, how part of her was with Jimmy and part of her was with me. I took the clipper in my hand.
She sat in silence while I buzzed her hair down to nothing. Purple strands with light brown ends piled on the floor. I carried them outside. When I returned, Nevena spoke to me from the pale orb of her new head.
She asked, Do I look like Jimmy now?
Don’t be ridiculous, I said.
I must look like a skeleton, she said.
A very sexy skeleton.
We touched each other more than usual. I massaged her feet while she stretched out on the couch. I cracked starchy peas from their shells and fed them to her one by one, her lips closing around my fingertips each time. She soaked two washcloths in water and then disappeared into the cellar to imbue them with ice; when she returned we draped them over each other’s faces. When we played Pitch again, we leaned in close, keeping our cards against our collarbones and whispering our bids. After the sun had set, I asked her if she wanted to leave early in order to rest, but she shook her head no and leaned forward, laying her brow on my shoulder. I placed my palm on her naked scalp and tried to feel the buzzing of her brain. The forest pressed in on us and the starry vault pressed down, squeezing Nevena’s spirit back to Jimmy.
#
II.
We dozed off on my screened-in porch, her feet in my lap, rogue strands of her hair gravured in the sweat atop our skin. Leaning on each other like trees uprooted by wind, we slept in overlapping moments.
She was Jimmy’s wife, and I came into their life well after they’d met, so it always seemed wrong to be jealous. I regarded Jimmy to be the fallen sibling, trapped in a prison of his own design. I had thought Nevena and I shared the knowledge that communing with the real world was only possible if our lives would someday end. I listened to her breathing, wondering if she was asleep, and considered that I might be the deluded one. Maybe he’d known her better all along.
Jimmy pursued immortality in a universe of symbols. He believed death could be vanquished in the boundary between the virtual and the real, a boundary across which he would shepherd our species when the time came. He exsanguinated the world so his computers could digest it. I wanted no part of the simulacra he’d constructed, though I cannot deny that many of my feelings existed in reference to the desires of Jimmy’s mind. My love for all things uncomputable was bound up in a limbic rejection of my brother’s activities; when I rejoiced in the dank soil, in the reeking fungi that fed on rotting things, my joy was inextricable from its refutation of his way of life. Nevena made disentanglement no easier.
She was an element of uncertain reactivity and an obscurata praeterita. She’d shown me an old government ID from a time when she bleached her hair. She was deadly accurate with a compound bow and wore what she told me was a Glock 19 on her belt. But she possessed something Jimmy didn’t, an energy that touched me in the same place as the soil and the fungi. I thought it would protect me from losing her, that she could enter the Firmament and remain with me in the woods. I shouldn’t have trusted myself.
Somewhere in the night, I awoke in the cradle of her voice as she spoke her history into the starlight seeping through the screen. She’d grown up to the southeast, on a cliff house between Mt. Desert and the Canadian border, and her first lover had been a tanker captain who saw her on the dock when she was 15 and begged her to let him bring her around the earth. She later became a state spy, nearly dying in a server farm underneath California at the hand of a woman who claimed to be her real mother and again in the Indonesian jungle before a stranger sucked venom from her snakebite and departed without saying a word. I hadn’t known these stories before, and yet each felt like a remembered dream.
I asked, Why are you telling me all this now?
She didn’t answer. Now I know what she’d known then: it was the last night we’d spend together. She was trying to leave as much of herself with me as she could.
She changed the subject. She asked me how I thought Jimmy would react when the state closed in, which it was bound to do. The Firmament’s legibility made it attractive to those who wished to overwrite any rule they could.
Jimmy’s never shied away from the state, I said. He believes it’s his to subjugate.
The gods have always warred over the heavens, Nevena said.
I said, And they’ve always needed their subjects.
Exactly. Don’t you want to be the first? With me?
It was my turn not to answer. I leaned my head back, closed my eyes to the starlight, and wandered back to sleep. When I woke up, it was day. She had her rainboots on her feet and her hand on the door. She’d already draped the netting around her head.
Morning, sweet thing, she said. I was just leaving.
She opened the door and stepped out, the final motion she would ever make in my house. I watched her disappear down the muddy puddled road, gun stuck to her snakerooted hip, before rising from my rocking chair to peel a boiled egg. Then I set about my day. I fed the chickens and cleaned their shit from the coop, changed out their water, gathered their eggs. I walked to the gentle south slope where I’d cleared some skinny trees and planted a garden of squash and tomatoes, cucumber and carrots and potatoes, greens and peas and broccoli. I pulled some peas and potatoes and a cluster of carrots. The other crops looked unready but healthy, although beetles and aphids were getting to some of the leaves. The bugs assaulted me, yet I walked farther still, to where I knew some good mushrooms were, and filled a small sack I kept at my hip. I walked by a blueberry patch but the berries were still hard and small and green.
On the way back I climbed a rock-topped hill where the breeze often pushed the bugs away. But the day’s heat was slack and thick and the flies danced around warm rocks whose breeding pools still held water. From there it was possible to see Jimmy’s house and the stretch of road that led to mine, though the trees soon swallowed it up. Only a pair of eyes that knew what they sought could spot the mossy shingled corners or the grayblock chimney of my dwelling. A sparrow bounced above the rocks on wafts of heat, skinny brambles in its beak. My home resembled his more than my brother’s. Jimmy liked corporate architecture, big glass windows and metal beams. He spent his days in front of screens, so I don’t know what the purpose of such a house was. Since we’d arrived, I’d only ever seen him deep in its steel bowels, though I knew he had abundant cameras. Maybe it was enough for him to know what his house looked like from the woods and what the woods looked like from his house, to have the images in his mind and his databases. He’d told me he loved the woods. He’d told me he needed a place like this to do his work.
I found the brook and tracked it to a stone bathing pool I’d built. Water had overrun its walls. It had taken on a browner tinge than normal, but the sunlight pierced it sharply enough to make the water beckon. I removed my clothes in a frenzy due to the strength and spirit of the swarms that thrived in the sultry understory. I clambered into the pool gracelessly; the grace of cool water was enough. I sank beneath the surface and hid all except my open mouth from the bugs. I tried not to be bothered by the occasional mosquito on my tongue.
#
III.
I said that when she left my screened-in porch the morning after I cut her hair, it was the final motion Nevena ever made in my house. But if I knew it at the time, that knowledge was buried deeper than instinct. In truth, I spent long days staring at the road as it turned from mud to clay and then cracked. I pined for Nevena. I hallucinated her. When I had an insistent premonition she’d make her way to me, I made us dinner: I roasted the squash that came up swollen from spring rain and stewed tomatoes with the haunch of a deer she’d shot with the bow. I stopped throwing away the rogue hairs I found on the floor of the porch and began collecting the purple threads in a jar. It was late in August before I accepted she was gone.
I needed to see Jimmy. I set upon the road barefoot, like a wanderer, as though the distance between my house and my brother’s was indeterminate. Sweat-heavy curls of hair stuck to my neck and forehead, a jungle for the unceasing insects. I’d resigned myself to their advances and foregone the use of netting, but now I slapped at them in reflexive testament to my animal spirit. The brook, nearly dry in a typical August, remained full. Its applause urged me onward and died when the forest thinned and Jimmy’s house shimmered before me.
He leaned forward on his clear wall, spread into a star, feet wide beneath him and arms wide above, palms pressed flat against the glass. Shaved head, skintight bodysuit made from the finest synthetic. Bare feet, just like me. It was novel for me to see him at the window: I knew then that he waited for me. An elevator descended from his floor to a concrete platform at earth level. Double doors opened before me and closed behind. I was carried up.
When the doors opened again, I stepped forward into a coolness so artificial my skin shriveled. Jimmy had not moved from the window. From the miniature hidden caves of Jimmy’s surround sound a song slithered faintly from the speakers. It was being played so quietly that it took me a few moments to place it, but when the melody struck I stopped and closed my eyes. I saw my aunts singing a Gillian Welch song at our mother’s funeral, the one about the imitators and the fakes.
At such a low volume, the guitar’s woeful, frantic picking sounded like the surreptitious hatching of a thousand mosquitoes. I opened my eyes and my heart broke for Jimmy, leaning against the glass wall with his arms above his head and fingers splayed. I remembered him as a boy at the funeral. He was the only member of our family who did not cry. To be impervious to grief, he told me afterwards, was to achieve a higher state of being. But in my memory he just looked lonely.
Lonely then, lonely now. His bare white head was smooth as ever but had been covered, I saw, in small dark circles, the marks of some digital cephalopod. In a far corner of the room, an empty chair looked upon the visual cacophony of an amphitheater of screens. A radar cycle of a cyclone spinning northward along the Eastern Seaboard. The eagled seal of shadowed surveillants. Python writing itself. Nevena’s tattooed tree, bodiless, its roots writhing and its branches thrashing in a stochastic cyberwind.
Where is she?
He remained in the same pose while replying. He spoke to the glass wall.
She has returned to where she was a child in order to properly say goodbye to this world. A little fanciful, perhaps, but she always had that within her. I believe you found it quite compelling.
Why does she need to say goodbye to this world?
She doesn’t need to, exactly. Not yet. There’s nothing requiring her to leave at this moment. It’s just that once you’ve been in the Firmament, this world kind of loses its luster. I will follow the same path myself, once I’ve taken care of a few things.
It’s true, then, what she told me.
Now Jimmy removed his hands from the wall and turned to face me. He crossed the spindles of his arms below his chest, held his elbows in his palms.
Yes. I have replicated the world and mastered the border between the two. You can enter the replica and achieve pure immanence. Free yourself to live without dying.
I said, A body that does not die cannot love.
Jimmy said, The idea of defeating death has serious appeal to most people. Some of Nevena’s old colleagues in the state are very interested. They believe the Firmament can help humanity realize universal safety and prosperity.
He stood perfectly still, rent apart by dual existence. I smelled my own rancid sweat and cursed myself for shaving Nevena’s head.
And you’re wrong about love, he said. Love doesn’t need a body. I could not have built the Firmament without love. See for yourself. I would be honored.
Jimmy, I will not.
As far as immortality goes, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
Despite the breadth of his vision, he could not comprehend the essential things. Nevena beyond words and symbols. Love greater than death but beholden to it.
He continued, You’d have to remove your hair, of course, before putting your head in the box. In order to ensure a pure connection.
He gestured to a small table next to me, on which a canvas bag lay flat save a single oblong lump. The clipper, I knew.
I need to borrow your car, I said. I need to go and see her.
He grinned, and even though with his ringmarked head he looked like a maniac, this brief flash of my brother’s happiness probed a softness within me. I probably looked like a maniac too, some woebegone hermit. For a moment, I felt that we were united, two siblings who desperately wanted the world to be something different than what it was. I suppressed the impulse to run forward and embrace him.
As your brother, he said, I advise against going after Nevena. It will only hurt you.
Just let me use your car, please. Nevena doesn’t realize what she’s doing.
You appeal to my benevolence even as you presume to know my wife better than I, and to know the world better than my wife. I might be insulted if it mattered in the grand scheme.
I replied, How could anything matter if you never die?
Join us and you will see.
Why do you even want me to join?
Jimmy walked in slow, giant steps over to his bank of screens. He sat down in front of them and called to me.
We’re still siblings, aren’t we? I can make a special place for you in the Firmament. I want you to be happy. Everyone will come eventually, whether they want to or not. I want you to come with me, with Nevena, and I want it to be your choice.
As soon as he’d finished speaking, the elevator door opened behind me. I turned and left. I took the road back through the steaming forest, a feast for the insects. They whined above the raucous brook. Before I reached my house, however, a new sound came to me. I tend to hear symphonies in the forest; I’ll readily admit to a susceptibility. But I’d never before heard human songs sung back to me by a natural world that only knew how to be original. I am certain, therefore, that Jimmy was playing Gillian Welch from the Firmament.
When I made it back to my house, the truck was parked in front of my screened-in porch, key in the ignition.
#
IV.
My wet hair dripped to the floor and the rain-blurred windows shook with hurricane wind that churned the sea beyond. In the living room of Nevena’s youth, a single lamp glowed warm and yellow. She sat at the edges of its light, her legs crossed beneath her on a torn chaise longue. Between us, her gun lay on the table, pointing to the ocean.
I wasn’t sure who would come, she said. Since it’s you, I’m going to shoot myself. If it was Jimmy, I was going to shoot him first.
New hair grew from her head like the first grasses of spring, though it was not yet thick enough to hide that she too had a spotted scalp. So she wished for death. So she didn’t mind destroying me. In a wave of sickness I considered that her tenderness had been abstracted.
How much of you is here, I asked, and how much did you leave in the Firmament?
You misunderstand, she said. All of me is here and also there.
But something is missing. I can feel it.
Her back straightened. When she spoke, she looked past me.
It’s this world that is missing something. If you’re going to pretend to understand my entire existence, turn around and allow me to leave this world as I see fit.
I drove all this way. Can’t we at least play Pitch?
She agreed and opened a drawer in the table to retrieve a deck of cards. I sat across from her on an ottoman. I tried not to stare at the gun.
What you said, that seeing me here would lead you to suicide, it breaks my heart.
You have an obstinate notion of life, she said. You have two people in this world, me and your brother. And we’re both telling you to come with us. But you refuse.
There is too much to lose, I said.
The arrogance, she said.
She dealt the cards, three at a time and twice around, to me, Husband Jimmy, Brother Jimmy, and herself.
She said, We can love each other in the Firmament. I was first and you’ll be next, and we’ll watch all the other avatars become inhabited as the state brings them in, until the whole world is there.
The whole world can never be in the Firmament.
You can’t say that, she said, if you’ve never been.
In the dead depth of her tone I could hear how she yearned for the gun.
You have a choice, I said, about what to do with your life.
Between finitude and forever? Hardly. What’s your bid?
I saw no other attempt to make: I grabbed the gun. I beat her to it; she grasped my wrist but I wrenched free. Then I ran for the door and the tempest outside. I heard a crash behind me and felt a surge of hope that I could open the door and leave with the weapon. And I could, and I did. Her fingers did not even hook the hem of my shirt as I stepped through the doorframe and sprinted to the cliff’s edge. Only then did I turn. She emerged from the doorway with a limp. The rain and wind battered her as she made her way to where I stood.
I threw the gun off the edge of the cliff. It fired a bullet into the hurricane when it hit the rocks below. The shot’s echo drowned in the roar of the waves and whistling rip of the gale.
She cried, Don’t you understand? You’re coming anyway. They’ve been to the forest. They’ve spoken with Jimmy. They will enact his will.
She fell on the ground by a cluster of thrashing beach roses and spread her arms wide to the whipping of the rain. Was the full fury of earth, ocean, and heaven not enough for her? Below and beyond, dark swells foamed underneath gulls that glided with their wings outstretched as calmly as if the winds were nothing. The sea canted, flattened, and recanted underneath the weight of the sky. The ground shook with the crashing of waves. If all the earth’s terrible glory could not call her back to the real world, my entreaties stood no chance. The person I loved had been my own invention.
I don’t need a gun to leave this world forever, she said.
I left her lying there on the edge of the cliff, twisting in my brother’s bonds. Only now did I admit they were stronger than mine. Like a full moon, Nevena had hidden entire oceans from me while appearing complete. I climbed into the truck and drove northwest, back to woods I hoped the hurricane would spare.
#
V.
The forest whispered the truth of Nevena’s claim: they’d been here. Our two hundred fifty-five acres had been irrevocably altered by a blunt and malignant presence. Tentative birdsong encircled my garden. Fervent flies and wriggling white things crawled and buzzed among squash and cucumbers and tomatoes rotting on the ground. Heads of lettuce and arugula leaves had wilted into shrouds or been eaten into pale, macabre lace, the essence of their flesh gone to the pests. The humidity had disappeared. The hurricane had not followed me back from the coast. I gathered what food I could.
I made my way to the rock-topped hill in the tendrils of a breeze bearing autumn. Late summer had deepened the green of the expanse beyond. Soon it would combust into yellow and red, all the more brilliant for the leaves’ impending death and the miracle of new growth the following spring. Nevena remained in the ether of the place, ineradicably part of its genius loci; perhaps she was with me then, watching from the Firmament. Before her arrival, it had been impossible for me and Jimmy to envy each other. I felt everything, and he nothing; as such, to live each others’ lives seemed the greatest possible curse. We could not desire what the other had. When Nevena walked the road between our houses, she had walked the only flat plane that existed between us.
And it was down the road that the state came for me that day. I saw its vehicles from the hill, big black boxes tearing past Jimmy’s house on the way to mine. I heard the popping, like radio static, of rocks underneath their tires. Dust hung in the dry air behind them. Through the leaves that sheltered the stretch of road nearest my house, I caught the silver glint of their wheels as they came to a stop. A car door opened and closed.
I cracked a peapod open, then another, but found that the peas were practically inedible, withered and hard. I soon spat them out. I bit an early apple but it was bitter; I scraped my tongue with my teeth and deposited the clumpy mesocarp among the peas. I sipped water from the bladder I kept on my hip. My skin itched. I made my way down to my house.
The engines of the vehicles hissed and rattled while they sat in place powering air conditioning. Their hoods pointed at my screened-in porch. When I passed the cars and turned around to look through the windshield, I saw hunched figures in black vests. They held machine guns vertically, barrels down, in between their legs. They stared at me blankly as frogs.
Through the screen of my porch I could see a man who looked and dressed nothing like them. He wore a blue short sleeved button down shirt with a white pattern of sailors’ knots and baggy pale green shorts. Curly dark hair fell to his shoulders. The canvas bag lay crumpled next to him. Before entering, I paused and let my arms hang at my sides. My muscles urged me to flee into the woods, although I knew it would be pointless, that I’d end up captured. To my left, a purplewoven sparrow’s nest glinted from behind languid leaves.
The man smiled silently as I reached for the latch on the door. He rose from the couch when I entered.
Hello there, he said. I’m Chip. And you are—
You’re with the state, I said.
That’s right. We’re here to take you somewhere, he said.
Have I committed a crime?
Not exactly, he said. It’s your brother. He’s asked us to get you.
I understand, I said.
Our first order of business is shaving your head. I’m happy to do it for you. Afterwards we’ll be going up the road to your brother’s old house.
He held his hands together, fingers interlaced and palms pressed calmly against each other. He maintained a closed-mouth smile. When I sat in the chair, he turned to the couch and reached into the canvas bag.
Behind me, he clicked the clipper on.
When we go up the road, I asked, can I walk? I’d prefer not to ride in those vehicles.
He said, I don’t see that being a problem. The cars can ride behind us. The walk seems nice enough. I’ll come with you if you don’t mind.
And if I do mind?
I’ll come with you anyway.
