Void Star

by Zachary Mason

Whatever liminal grace informs airports—some sense of perpetual arrival and departure, of being in an anonymous crowd united in separation from their proper lives—is absent now; the terminal stinks of disinfectant, and stalls blink garishly, trying to sell her perfume, T-shirts, duty-free alcohol, things Irina could not ever imagine wanting,

As the cool outside air envelops her, the sense that place is fundamentally negotiable—endemic, she suspects, to airports—departs.

She only watches television in hotel rooms, needing to fill their chilly banality with any kind of human noise. The wide black rectangle of screen shows a rubicund Japanese politico insisting that Japan has the right to deploy missile platforms in space, three coyotes padding through the empty streets of Santa Fe, a hotel burning in the atolls that are all that’s left of that peninsula that used to be a state, and a South Korean official attributing the disappearance of one of their newest drone submarines to a software error—the ship is considered lost at sea. The missing ship appears on screen—it’s black, seamless, somehow cetacean-looking.

On the periphery of the mass of data she notices that in his days collecting art he briefly owned The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which she saw once, years ago, in the Louvre, back when she’d meant to see and so hold forever everything beautiful in the world. She remembers her jet lag and sense of dislocation as she wandered into yet another room in the sprawling postcontemporary wing, the shock of the sight of the shark floating in the green fluid glowing in the glass-walled tank in the otherwise empty gallery, the shark’s jaws gaping, like its relentless forward motion had just then been arrested, and, as the words of the title had shimmered in her mind, tank and shark and text fused to become an image of a blind rage for more life, and the wrinkles incised in the shark’s face seemed to imply great age and an absolute and unthinking cruelty.

As the road fell toward the light the air changed, sage and dust giving way to something burned, chemical, notes of salt and maybe ether, and I knew that this would be the smell of home.

The barista is friendly but his hair is sculpted into planes and spines that suggest nothing so much as a lionfish, and she feels old because instead of implying some extraordinarily specific cultural fealty his hair just reads as an elaborate waste of time.

She thinks of the Doge of Venice, how every year he threw a gold ring into the waves to wed his city to the sea.