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00:03
So they bury Neteyam, and life goes on.
00:02
Payakan is exiled.
00:01
“That wasn’t my fault. Dad, no—that’s not my fault!”
Lo’ak doesn’t know which of them he’s trying to convince.
Lo’ak has so many haunts. Maybe the only one that matters now is this stretch of beach where Neteyam’s crescent moon smile gleams down at him.
Neteyam’s there. His brother is there, in the water—
No. That can’t be right. Neteyam’s home. Sometimes he forgets that this wasn’t home for him. The forest was home. Home was up, in the sky, with the ikran, with the mountains.
The sea; this is his haunt. Lo’ak’s spent so much time down there, it feels like up to him.
His thumb presses down.
It would be so easy, he thinks. So frightfully, frightfully easy.
The voice in Jake’s head sounds an awful lot like Grace some days. She comes and goes, over the years. Lately she’s been sticking around.
You brought shame to this family.
You’ve done enough.
If you hadn’t disobeyed orders, your brother would still be—!
You always know just the right thing to say, don’t you, Sully? Grace says.
Their second pregnancy is a difficult one.
Neytiri is up and down now; one minute her hips hurt to sit, the next to stand. She goes stir crazy if she rests for too long, but that’s what Mo’at suggests she does.
Their son comes into the world screaming. He’s small, smaller than Neteyam had been, smaller than Kiri had been. Five chubby fingers wind around one of Jake’s, the other five press flat against his palm. Thin wisps for eyebrows—the patterns on the bridge of his nose give the impression of a permanent little scowl, already irritated at the world, and Jake looks down at him with a helpless smile.
“He’s mad,” he says, barely a whisper.
“He is hungry,” Neytiri tells him, dry as bone. Then, softer, “He looks like you, Ma Jake.”
He tilts his head. He even has a tiny, almost imperceptible cleft in his chin. Jake breathes out a laugh—and yeah, he’s a goner.
Hear that, kid? We’re the same, you and me.
I’ve got nothing to say to him.
Some things never change, do they, Sully? Grace says.
Neytiri rocks Lo’ak back and forth and wails and wails and wails to the stars and Kiri weeps into his braids and Tsireya sobs and pants and smears her hands with blood trying to hold his jaw to his face like that will undo everything.
Jake’s knees buckle. He sinks into red, red sand.
No. No—
Kiri slumps and pitches sideways. Spider moves to catch her before Jake can.
The motion of a single particle of dust in the air is bound up with the whole order of heaven and earth, Tommy says.
A butterfly flaps its wings and weeks later a tornado forms, Tommy says.
The butterfly effect, Tommy says.
Tommy says a lot of things.
“That makes no sense, Tom.”
“Sure it does,” Tommy says. “Chaos theory, dude. You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.”
Tommy’s smart, but there’s no way he came up with that poetic shit off the cuff.
“Who said that? Plato?”
“Fichte,” Tommy says.
His father isn’t sitting in the recliner with bottles strewn about, stinking up the apartment. Isn’t yelling or hitting or shattering dishes against the wall, and that’s just... worse, somehow.
He looks like a ghost, leaning over the guardrail of the balcony with the sun on his face.
Well, Jake, Dad says.
Jake, Jake, Jake, Dad says.
There you have it, Dad says.
Yes, there he has it.
“Don’t give me that look, son,” Dad says. The term of address feels like an indictment. “Your boy got shot and you were ready to die in that air pocket a half-hour later. You didn’t even want to try. I felt you give up, boy.” Another indictment. “And so did he.”
His father is so honest, so vulnerable. It’s hateful. It’s treasonous. Jake hates him. Hates him for tainting Jake’s memory of his cruelty with all his goddamned honesty, hates him for not being faithful to everything Jake knows about him, hates him as he looks out at the setting sun, and in one breath, blows it out.
“How is this any different?” Dad says.
Jake doesn’t know what he means by that.
That Lo’ak is his father’s son, or that Jake is his.
He supposes in the end it doesn’t matter. His father is right on both accounts.
Neytiri drags mourning paint down her eyes. Jake’s forgotten what she looks like without it.
Even as she washes her hands, it stains the pads of her fingers black. She won’t look at him.
Jake watches on.
Tsireya, eyes red and lashes wet, comes to the marui three days later with a bundle of cloth in her shaking hands. Jake knows what it is without having to ask.
“We found it,” the girl whispers to Neytiri. “Lo’ak and I. We—I wanted to help him fix—” her voice splinters off, face crumpling.
She sets the bundle down among Neteyam and Lo’ak’s things like a covenant.
Neytiri waits until the chief’s daughter leaves, then takes her father’s broken bow and breaks it some more and throws the remains into the fire with a scream.
Jake watches on.
Black smoke curls into a blazing orange sky. Jake blinks ash out of his eyes.
Neteyam is bleeding out on the rocks and Tommy is cradling his son’s face.
Jake is there and not there. Jake is a million miles away, lost to the tide, but he can hear them like they’re mouth to ear:
“I want to go home,” Neteyam says. “Dad, I…”
Tommy brushes Neteyam’s braids from his face, and smiles a soft smile, laughs a soft laugh.
“Don’t we all.”
Dad, when he’d get deep in his cups but not so much as to slur his words or forget his temper, would talk about Mom.
Her favorite ballet was Swan Lake. In one interpretation, the routine starts with the woman frozen as a statue, her hands stuck above her head. The man slips behind her and eases her body into motion, thawing her out, turning her into flesh and bone.
He can’t save her from him and he can’t save her from herself. She morphs back into a stone-cold statue at the end and that’s the whole point.
Neytiri is curled in on herself, Neteyam’s cummerbund at her knees and Lo’ak’s songcord weaved between her fingers.
Jake doesn’t slip behind her and wrap his arms around her. Not this time. Her body is stone and so is his.
Norm says something to him one day at the lab when Jake brings Kiri to visit Grace, some annoying, witty witticism, Jake doesn’t remember what, and instead of coming up with a good comeback, he just flips him off.
Lo’ak, seven years old and barely up to Jake’s hips, tilts his head curiously.
“What does that mean?” he asks.
Norm snorts. “It means—”
“Something bad,” Jake cuts in. Norm takes the hint and settles for a smirk. “As in don’t do it.”
Do as I say, not as I do. It’s an adage he finds himself having to say quite a bit to Lo’ak. His son is a little sponge.
“This is your middle finger,” Jake says. Lo’ak doesn’t look impressed, and Jake can’t help but let out a laugh.
“Yeah, I know,” he says, “it’s the only one we didn’t get all that creative with naming.” Enough of an explanation to satisfy a four-year-old for about thirty seconds.
Lo’ak watches the chief’s daughter walk away, looking lovestruck in only the way fourteen-year-old boys look, and Neteyam nudges him with his elbow and a sideways smile.
Lo’ak blinks, sputters, scowls, and brandishes a rude hand gesture in his brother’s face. In that order.
Jake, fifty feet away at the nets, barks out a laugh.
Tonowari looks at him strangely. “What is funny, Jakesully?”
“Nothing,” Jake says, shaking his head. “Nothing.”
Like he said: sponge.
Dad appears at his side again. Jake doesn’t even flinch.
Jake takes his guns. Disassembles them. Cleans them. Assembles them again. Pressure builds in his chest. It’s not enough. His hands are steady. Neteyam is dead. He can’t breathe. Neteyam is a lung. Lo’ak is dead. His ribs are aching. Lo’ak is dead. Lo’ak is a rib. He tried to straighten out a rib but you can’t straighten out a rib because it’ll break and he tried to straighten out a rib and he fucking broke it and he takes his guns and gets mad that he can’t break them too and he picks up the one Lo’ak used to blow his face apart and hurls it into the sea and all he can think is break break break—
“Fuck!”
Dad makes a sound like a hum, low and unbothered, like the action was predictable. Like it was boring.
Control is the work, Dad says.
War is the work, Dad says.
Bastard’s work is never done, is it, son? Dad says.
“Never ever,” Jake agrees.
Jake is seventeen. Dad is on his deathbed.
You’re tryin’a hold up the sky on your own, Dad says.
If your knees buckle, that’s your worry, Dad says.
And livin’ is everyone else’s worry, Dad says.
Because a father protects, Jake thinks, it’s what gives him meaning.
“What the hell would you know about that?” he manages to spit out a beat too late, because he is seventeen and thirty-eight all at once and he still has it in him to get worked up over his father, over wanting him to say the right thing, just this once, Goddamn you, just this once. But Dad only inclines his head, as if in concession, as if taking pity on him. They both know Jake’s just throwing limp jabs at this point.
The ghosts in the room applaud his effort politely—good try, Jake. Correct argument, irrelevant outcome.
Spider, Kiri, and Tuk huddle themselves together in Lo’ak’s hammock.
Tuk lies there with Neteyam’s armband in one hand and a string of Lo’ak’s hair beads in the other—the blue ones, with the big blue stone she’d gifted him with what feels like a lifetime ago. One dead brother on either side of her.
She cries herself to sleep.
Jake leaves the marui, walks over to the shore, and throws up into the ocean.
“I’m sorry,” he sobs, he chokes; there is no one around to hear it, the words get lost to the tide. He’s crying himself blind, he’s being pulled to the sea by the whites of his bones. Go to him, Jake, Neytiri whispers from nowhere. What’s he done? What has he fucking done?
It’s not true, it’s not true. It was a lie. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over and over again into the seafoam shoreline.
He has not slept next to Neytiri in three weeks. Has not slept in the marui in two.
Jake, Grace says.
Yes?
You’re wasted, Grace says.
“Yes.” This, he says out loud, to no one at all. She’s not really here.
The way of water has no beginning and no end.
A hand on his chest.
The sea is around you and in you.
A deep breath in.
The sea is your home, before your birth and after your death.
A deep breath out.
The sea gives, and the sea takes.
Last breath.
Water connects all things: life to death, darkness to light.
This is a memory, a memory he is not sure is his own anymore; a boy looks at his father and begs him to live. A boy looks at his father and tells him he chooses him.
That wasn’t my fault. Dad, no—that’s not my fault!
This is a memory, a memory he is sure is his own; a boy looks at his father and begs to be believed. A boy looks at his father and asks him to choose him back.
You like lookin’ at the stars? Y’know, my dad came from a star. That one. Right there.
A sense of wonder, of pride. The sea for a bed and the stars for a blanket.
This is a memory, a memory he knows is not his own; a boy points to the sky and tells a friend about his father.
If he presses his ears to the sand, he thinks he can hear cries and low-pitched grieving squeals reverberating through the water from beyond the reef.
Dad is dead.
They’re heading in a straight line to somewhere and to nowhere. Jake’s not sure where they’re going, except that they’re going.
“Where to next, dummy?” Tommy asks easily when he’s stretched out in the backseat of the car. He clambers into the front seat while Jake’s pushing ninety, a hundred, a buck ten, a buck twenty. Tommy doesn’t seem to notice how fast he’s going, or if he does, he doesn’t care. There’s a worn, dog-eared book in his hands—Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Bulgakov or something, some long dead Russian guy, he doesn’t know.
Jake prefers to drive at night—everything looks so drab in the daytime. At least at night the sky illuminates in technicolor and he can drive through neon city lights reflecting off of glass commercial complexes, glaring past his eyelids. At least at night the ugliness dresses itself up. At least at night everything isn’t so smoggy and so, so fucking gray.
“I dunno, you’re the one zoomed in on,” he looks over and squints down at Tommy’s screen, and balks, “Wyoming?” Which is kinda stupid because it’s almost all desert just about everywhere now; there are worse places, but still. Wyoming? “The hell is there to do in Wyoming? I’m not driving all the way up to the Yellowstone.”
“Nah,” Tommy says. “Don’t have to go to the Yellowstone. Any plain old Rockies will do.”
“What’s at the Rockies? Other than the Rockies.”
“Well, we can’t see the stars out here.”
“Can’t see the stars out anywhere.”
Tommy shrugs. “I heard you can out there.”
Jake sighs. This guy’s always looking to the stars. Longing to map them out. Like a sailor, like a cowboy. The car is his horse and the sky his wide open desert.
But Jake’s indulged him thus far, so fine. Tommy wants stars, and Jake will drive until he finds him some.
Wyoming it is.
I want to go home. Dad, I…
Some stars go out quietly. Like a last breath of air. A dimming light that leaves everything in its orbit to fend for itself against the cold vacuum of space.
Dad is dead.
They’re on the hood of the car and Jake has to admit that Tommy was right, you can see the stars out here, and it’s kinda nice, and how stupid is that? That stars are such a novelty.
He feels wind in his hair, it cools the sweat at the nape of his neck. Jake looks up.
Three stars orbiting each other alter one another so much that their future becomes difficult to predict, Tommy says.
Like, if one goes, then the whole thing might just fall apart, Tommy says.
Three-body problem, Tommy says.
Jake lets him talk, lets him fill the silence with whatever. Tommy’s set on living among the stars, living up, up, up. Jake feels so tethered to the ground that it feels like up to him.
He falls asleep, and dreams that night of flying.
He feels like Alexander the Great.
That wasn’t my fault. Dad, no—that’s not my fault!
Some stars go out loudly. Like a clap of thunder. An explosion that rips apart everything in its orbit; debris and dust, this is what’s left.
Dad is dead.
In Florida, he and Tommy eat overpriced New Orleans-style shrimp pasta at a dingy harborfront restaurant. The chairs hurt to sit on and the table’s greasier than a mechanic’s drain pan, but real food is a luxury just about everywhere now and it’s the only restaurant across nine states that serves grub that doesn’t look like it came vacuum-sealed or straight out of an MRE. So. Beggars can’t be choosers.
This place has a halfway decent view of Cape Canaveral, which of course means it was Tommy who suggested coming here.
A shuttle takes off and disappears from sight, leaving nothing but faint contrails as evidence that it was even there.
They’re going to the ISV Daedalus, Tommy says.
It’s supposed to leave for Pandora in two weeks, Tommy says.
I’m going there someday, Tommy says.
“Movin’ up in the world, Tommy,” Jake drawls.
Tommy doesn’t appreciate his tone, judging by the look he sends his way. He plucks a piece of shrimp from his dish and tosses it into Jake’s—
(“Why the fuck did you order the pasta if you knew you weren’t gonna eat the shrimp?” Jake scowls.)
—“Movin’ out of the world,” he corrects. “Just you wait and see. I’ll be blue and three feet taller than you.”
Jake believes him. He picks up his glass and knocks it gently against Tommy’s.
“To shootin’ for the stars then,” he says.
And Tommy shoots for the stars, while Jake ships out to South Carolina to begin basic training, and then ships out to Venezuela to lose his legs.
He’s twenty-two years old, and he’s using a black marker to scribble a J over the T in T. Sully on the nametag of his RDA-issued AVTR backpack.
T. J. Sully
Lo’ak, eight, eats fruit on a bed of grass with his breakfast in the morning and after dinner at night and with his breakfast in the morning again. He eats them and smears the sticky residue on Neteyam’s shoulder in taunt. Neteyam, nine, makes a scandalized face at him and wrestles him into the mud. Beautiful, sputtering laughter and insults thrown freely without bite. Their eyes flash golden in the morning light, pools of honey, determined to drown out the sun.
Jake is watching from the marui, cradling a bundled Tuk in his arms. Then Tuk is gone and everything changes without ceremony and he’s on the balcony of their low-rise back in Detroit again, and Dad is leaned over the railing.
The sky, Dad says.
It looks like someone’s lit a match to it, Dad says.
It looks that way, doesn’t it? Dad says.
Black smoke curls again, a blazing orange sky. Jake blinks ash out of his eyes once more. The sun is setting, but he doesn’t remember the hours passing. When did the sun set, Dad? When did the sun—where are my boys—
Jake feels wind whipping at his hair, then a wave so strong he thinks it’s going to send him over the guardrail. The great vast nothingness above them seems to muffle everything around them like they’re underwater. There’s brine on his lips and ash in his eyes and where are his boys?
Dad looks down. Jake follows his gaze.
There’s no pavement. There’s no grass. Just yellow-gold anemones, and two boys with their knees tucked to their chests by their shrouds.
Lo’ak is walking, back turned away from him.
You brought shame to this family.
Any more trouble and I jerk a knot in your tail. You read me?
What happened to ‘keep an eye on your brother’?
This isn’t right. He remembers this (but nothing that he remembers has been right lately). Neytiri should be here. The Metkayina filtering to and from the docks in dribs and drabs should be here. The search party that had gone after Lo’ak should be here. Tonowari, Ronal, their children—
But when he looks back, it’s only Neteyam, and again everything changes without ceremony and they’re standing on the woven pathways and two hands slam against his chest and shove and one second it’s Lo’ak—That wasn’t my fault. Dad, no—that’s not my fault!—the next it’s Neteyam.
“How could you do that to him!” Hot tears carve down his cheeks. Red dribbles from his mouth. He shoves and shoves and shoves.
Blood is spilling from his chest and Jake, frantically, instinctively, uselessly, goes to him and presses his hands there to make it stop. It’s trailing down his stomach and staining his skin, but it’s Tommy, too, and it’s Lo’ak. Lo’ak is Neteyam is Tommy is Lo’ak—
“How could you do that to me?” Neteyam says.
This family is your fortress, Dad says.
And what a fortress it is, Dad says.
Your sons are speared on the palisades for the enemy to see, Dad says.
That sounds more like him. That’s Dad alright.
Lo’ak is a boy who frowns down at his fingers until he sees that they look like his father’s, until his father reminds him that there is no distance Earth and Pandora can put between them.
Lo’ak is a boy who comes home with bloody knuckles; his sister came to him crying and he bruises his skin against a bully’s jaw because he called her a freak, called her an alien—
Lo’ak is a boy with a shy smile for a girl, with an embarrassed scowl for his brother who teases him, with a pulse that thrums in time with the ocean she teaches him how to make a home out of.
Lo’ak is a boy with a heart too big for his chest, who stands between his human friend and the scrutinizing gazes of the clan, who believes in the righteous anger of a Tulkun who watched his family die.
Lo’ak is a boy with a will too strong for his body, who dives headfirst into the raging sea, who does not bow and scrape to a truth he has not seen for himself, who does not know that all the passions he inspires in others are completely warranted.
Lo’ak is a boy, Lo’ak is a boy—
I’ve got nothing to say to him.
A supernova is an end and a beginning, is a death and a birth, is a graveyard and a cradle. A star dies and more stars are born in its wake. The light always returns.
But some stars go out collapsing in on themselves. Like a void. Like eating away at the light. It destroys everything it touches.
Son, Jake chokes, baby. Baby. Lo’ak. Lo’ak. Lo’ak.
This man will die. This man will die with his son’s name on his lips.
The sea, this is a haunt; Jake spends so much time down there, it starts to feel like up to him.
The sea gives, and the sea takes.
00:00
So they bury Lo’ak, and life goes on.