The Girl in the Road Read online

  It was an overcast morning in Thrissur.

  The neighbor’s dog wouldn’t stop barking.

  We had a breakfast of chai and leftover Chinese.

  Mohini and I had been planning a trip to Africa to try to understand My Family History, which I knew the facts of, but had never really tried to understand. But Mohini felt this was the root of my restlessness. My parents were murdered by a young woman who’d been their friend, an Ethiopian dissident. My mother was only six months pregnant. They were killed in the hospital where they both worked as doctors. I was saved by the nurses who found them.

  So an atlas of the Horn of Africa was open on our kitchen table. I wanted to go right away, but Mohini stalled, because she was slower, more careful, the means of transportation important, given her awareness of energy, responsible usage, modes of travel, better and worse, pros and cons. Meanwhile the map became a tablecloth. Africa was obscured by takeout boxes.

  I spot two paper tickets stuck in the bathroom mirror. They’re white with silver lettering in a slender font: Admit One to the Museum. On the other side is the HydraCorp logo, a stylized multiheaded snake. On one ticket is written, Wait for me.

  I don’t fucking wait for anyone. I used to, for Mohini. She was the only one.

  There’s a knock at the door. I wrap a towel around my body and look through the eyehole. It’s the dhobi with laundry. He looks Ethiopian. I open the door.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not here,” I say.

  “That’s all right ma’am,” he says, looking down. “We settle up weekly.” He hands me a stack of shirts, ironed and starched.

  I close the door without thanking him.

  I drop the stack by the door and press my ear to it. He might be a member of Semena Werk. He might be gathering information on me. I probably shouldn’t stay here. At the very least I should leave before Arjuna gets back. Now I remember he climbed over me and pressed his body down and whispered in my ear that he was going to get me my breakfast and to make myself at home before dismounting and dressing and leaving. A door shut, a lock turned, and footsteps faded to silence.

  I’ll get my own breakfast. But I can use the ticket for the research I need to do.

  Two hours later I’m back on Marine Drive, standing in front of the HydraCorp Museum. White seabirds are dipping and wheeling overhead. The museum is eleven stories tall and shaped like an eight-pointed star. The outer walls are transparent so I can see the exhibits bunched up inside like intestines.

  The lobby is hung with flags representing the consortium of participant nations and corporations. India and Djibouti are prominent. I walk to a sickle-shaped desk and hand over my ticket. The attendant, seeing no aadhaar, hands me a map of the museum and a glossy pamphlet about HydraCorp’s many projects.

  I can see he’s unnerved by my not meeting his eye so I try to put him at ease. I wave the pamphlet. “HydraCorp. Funny name for a company with lots of projects,” I say.

  He smiles, but I can tell he doesn’t know what I mean. It’s my fault. My jokes aren’t really jokes. They’re oblique and not funny to anyone but Mohini. We had a shared language. No one else speaks it. I have to remember that. It seems my suavity from last night wore off and I’m beached again on the shore of awkwardness.

  The attendant tells me to start on the top floor, so I get in the Lucite elevator and say, “Eleven.” The car begins a smooth ascent. I rise higher and higher above Back Bay, the curve of Mumbai. I see a silver thread bobbing on the surface of the water, stretching toward a hazy horizon. That’s that famous Trail, then. I stare at it all the way up.

  Once on the eleventh floor I walk in the direction of a black doorway that says CINEMA in silver lettering. The word is comforting. I feel good. I’d like to sit still and watch an educational film. I enter a black velvet room shaped like a half-circle. When I sit, the room senses my presence and the screen dawns blue. I’m relieved it’s not an immersive theater where the images get into your head and cup your eyeballs. I like there to be a distance between me and art. Mohini and I argued about that, with her feeling that I was being a Luddite on par with Luddites who impugned film as a valid art form in the early twentieth century. I disagreed. I still do.

  The film begins. It’s beautifully produced. The narrator is a woman speaking in English with a north Indian lilt and for once it doesn’t annoy me. She tells me about the history of artificial energy on our planet. Wood. Water. Coal. Oil. Nuclear. Geothermal. Wind. Solar. The twins Fusion and Fission, both functional in laboratories, but still too expensive to be scaled up. And lastly Wave, which I think is what the Trail is. They call it Blue Energy, the successor to Green Energy. I’m excited for whatever Red Energy and Purple Energy and Orange Energy will turn out to be. I’m starting to feel euphoric.

  The narrator doesn’t call it the Trail. She calls it the Trans-Arabian Linear Generator, or TALG. She presents a succession of pleasing metaphors: that its technology draws from ancient pontoon bridges which, though remarkable for their time, only spanned distances of a few kilometers, like the Bosporus or the Hellespont, in times of war. And then they were discarded, more easily disassembled than assembled. The narrator emphasizes that the TALG only resembles a pontoon bridge, as its overall shape is more like that of an upside-down caterpillar. Each segment is a hollow, inverted pyramid made of aluminum, and each sunward surface is faced with solar paneling, which seems brilliant to me, makes me want to applaud. Between the segments are hinge arrays called nonlinear compliant connectors, each of which contains a dynamo, in each of which is suspended an egg of steel that bobs up and down as the wave does. This generates energy, as does the solar paneling, making the TALG a dual-action apparatus. Mohini would love this—I wonder if she knew about this. And then the energy is imported to its recipient plant in Djibouti—there is an image of a house in Djibouti lighting up, and a Djiboutian family rejoicing—via superconductor threads made of metallic hydrogen, a controversial material whose manufacturing process was perfected ten years ago. Despite its history of catastrophic accidents, metallic hydrogen is metastable, the narrator assures me; structurally sound, like an artificial diamond. She explains how the TALG was also a breakthrough in intelligent self-assembly on a mass scale, because every component of the TALG has an intelligent chip that, like a human cell, “understands” where it goes and what it’s supposed to do and can monitor and repair itself.

  Then the tone of her voice changes. This is a pilot project, she cautions. HydraCorp and its partners, mainly the Djiboutian government, rich from recent oil wealth, wanted to know if this is a viable, sustainable form of energy after oil runs out, in which case they’ll build a TILG for the Indian Ocean and a TPLG for the Pacific Ocean and all the world’s oceans could be crisscrossed with energy generators like a fishnet flung across the entire planet. This is incredible. Mohini would be clutching at my sleeve right now if she were here. And how does the TALG stay roughly in the same place? Well, because of breakthroughs in materials science, the TALG is anchored to the seafloor by means of Gossamoor, synthetic silk modeled on the draglines of Darwin’s bark spider, native to Madagascar, which is not only the strongest substance known but weighs about twelve milligrams per thousand meters. And thanks to HydraCorp’s partnership with China Telecom, the anchors parallel the SEA-ME-WE 3 undersea cable that carries data between Mumbai and Djibouti before veering up the Red Sea. And how does the TALG survive the many intrusions of maritime traffic? Well, gentle viewer, it turns out that the segments are programmed to sense oncoming ships and take on seawater, sinking up to thirty meters to let the ship pass, and then pumping the water back out to regain buoyancy.

  The Trail is a conspiracy of ideal materials. I am fucking amazed.

  When the presentation is done, a static map of the world appears and the narrator urges me to explore it with my fingers. I jump up to the screen. If I press my finger to any city in the world, a pie chart surfaces next to it, detailing the breakdown of that city’s energy sources. This is marvelous. I
press my finger to Djibouti. Thirty percent of their electricity is currently sourced from the TALG. The results are promising. And now I have a theory brewing in my mind, something I want to tell Mohini, a new field of study altogether, about how the source of a society’s energy must necessarily shape their language, art, and culture. In the case of Djibouti, their people will be wavelike. Should I call it the sociopsychology of energy?—that then infuses its culture, even its individuals. Mohini was of a solar nature, certainly.

  I need to find out my own.

  Maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe the universe is conspiring in my favor.

  After waiting a polite amount of time the narrator invites me to explore the rest of the museum and I take her up on it. I need to remember to ask the attendant who the voice actor is. I feel sentimental.

  I descend a stairway that is slanted, crystalline. For each type of energy the narrator named, there’s a dedicated floor, scientifically, technically, stylistically. I lose my intention of researching travel methods. I give myself to wonder. It’s a palace of human invention. The Wood Gallery is paneled in sweet-smelling cedar and features a hologram of proto-Dravidian nomads chopping wood and throwing it onto a fire. They’re wearing skins and pelts. They introduce a carcass of some woodland animal, which they roast, and it smokes and blackens. The hologram cuts away before they begin eating it, and resets, to one lone nomad wandering in the forest. She’s gazing at the trees in wonder. She selects one, thanks it, and then chops it down with her stone ax. The sequence begins again.

  I turn away and look at the exhibits against the wall. There’s a display where you can select a wood chip, insert it into a clear box for burning, and then watch how much energy is generated. I burn six wood chips. I don’t get tired of it. Everything is amazing to me. The display informs me that this gallery is powered by high-efficiency wood combustion, that in fact every floor is powered by the energy source it features. Next to the display there’s a pair of immersive goggles that, when I put them on, casts me as a molecule of groundwater sucked up through a tree root. The journey up through the xylem is exhilarating. When I enter the leaf and get split up, I’m presented with a choice: If you would like to go with the hydrogen atoms, say “hydrogen.” If you would like to go with the oxygen atom, say “oxygen.”

  I say, “Oxygen.”

  I’m released from the tip of the leaf and float out into the air. This is like flying. I look below me and there’s a forest floor dappled with sunlight. I expect the simulation to pixelate and dissolve. But it doesn’t. The trees are sharp and clear and I can see every leaf and flower. I keep floating. The programmer imagined a whole world for me. She’s more than a programmer, she’s a storyteller, a creator goddess. I’m crossing over a slow-moving green river and then the land turns to desert, where a caravan of trucks makes its way across the waste.

  I take off the goggles. I’m back in the Wood Gallery. The hologram sequence is right at the moment where the animal carcass burns. I watch it a second time and then a third time. I feel like I could watch it all day.

  I descend the stairs and explore the Water Gallery, where the walls are made of waterfalls, and eight mills pinwheel on the energy they make. The floor is crisscrossed with streamlets, each of which powers a display table featuring a notable world dam.

  Below these are the Coal Gallery (uninspired), the Oil Gallery (depressing), the Nuclear Gallery (neon orange and green), the Geothermal Gallery (my favorite besides the Wood), the Wind Gallery (I set all the turbines spinning), and the Fusion Gallery (a hologram of Enid Chung at her bench, making the discovery).

  The Solar Gallery is on the second floor. There’s a miniature array I’m invited to manipulate, a model of the Sun Traps in Sudan. I remember from the floating pie chart that they supply twenty percent of Europe’s energy and forty percent of North Africa’s, after ARAP (African Resources for African Peoples) repossessed the land their governments had sold off and forced new lease agreements. My euphoria increases: despite the snake, despite the terror, overall the world is only getting better.

  Now is the time for me to undertake a great journey.

  I float down the last staircase. I come to the same lobby where I’d first entered. I ask the attendant: “Where’s the Wave Gallery?”

  He points to a doorway in the wall behind the front desk. “Down one more flight,” he says. “It’s in the basement.”

  So this’ll be the room dedicated to the Trail. From the doorway comes a warm chlorine smell. This staircase is concrete, not crystalline. It looks much older than the rest of the building. I turn around to ask the attendant a question but he already has the answer: “It used to be a warehouse for fishwaalas. We preserved it and made it part of the museum.”

  I thank him. I wonder if he can see me glowing, if he can see that I’m a different person than I was when I first came in.

  I descend the staircase and come into a low, broad room. In the ground there’s a rectangular pool, maybe eight meters across. From this side to the far side is a pontoon bridge, each section bobbing with gentle artificial waves. I realize I’m looking at a prototype of the Trail.

  A young woman stands up from where she’d been crouching on the opposite side of the pool. She’s wearing a red swimsuit and holding a red foam buoy.

  “Namaste!” she calls.

  “Namaste. Are you the lifeguard?”

  “Yes,” she says. “The pool is only two meters deep, but that’s enough to drown in. Have you watched the film?”

  “The what?”

  “The film in the cinema. About how the Trail works.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to call it the Trail.”

  “You’re right! The TALG. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Go ahead and try it,” she says.

  “Try what?”

  “Walking on it, silly!” Even from this far away I can see she gets dimples when she smiles. “That’s what it’s here for. I promise I won’t judge you. Believe me, I’ve seen everything.”

  I can sense she’s eager to see me try. She probably sees couples and families, mostly. Not another woman alone, like her. I can feel she wants me to succeed.

  I take a step toward the edge of the pool. The concrete walls have been painted with murals: a sunset on the left, a moonrise on the right.

  I stall.

  “So you just … walk across it?”

  “Well, you can explore it any way you want. You can swim around it if you brought a swimsuit—there’s a changing room over there. But walking on it is the coolest thing, in my opinion.”

  “Won’t it sink when I step on it?”

  “It’s buoyant,” she says. I can tell she gives this speech a lot, but makes sure to infuse it with warm reassurance every time. “We call the segments ‘scales’ because they ripple. Each scale reaches down one meter and displaces three hundred and forty kilograms of seawater. Each scale is also hollow, made of aluminum alloy and shaped like an upside-down pyramid, with a hundred and thirty kilograms of ballast at the bottom to counteract the weight on the top. So you’re fine! Some water might slosh in and you might get your feet wet, but don’t worry. I haven’t seen them sink yet.”

  “Oh yeah? How long have you worked here?”

  She laughs. “Only two months, I guess. I’m on break from college.”

  “Where at?”

  “IIT-Bombay.”

  “That’s where I went.”

  “You did? What did you study?”

  “Nano and comp lit.” I don’t tell her I left my second semester.

  “What a mix. I’m studying nano too.”

  “It’s useful,” I say. “Lots of jobs.”

  She knows I’m still stalling. But she’s gracious enough not to say so. She says, “Do you want me to show you how to walk on it?”

  “No, it’s all right,” I say. Now I feel ashamed. Apparently this has been done. I need to get over it.

  I take off my boots. I p
lace one bare foot on the surface of the first scale, right in the center of its solar panel, and then transfer more and more weight to it. I’m surprised that it holds. My weight creates a wave and the wave travels up and down the Trail. The surface is rough like sandpaper, not smooth like what I think of as a solar panel.

  I continue forward. I let my knees be soft. I hold out my arms like a dancing Shiva. The scales bob more vigorously and I stop to regain my balance. I keep going. I enter a sublime headspace: my body learns from the mistakes I don’t have words for, and my anima makes corrections.

  I take a final lurch to reach the opposite side. My feet are wet and leave dark prints on the floor. I come face-to-face with the young lifeguard. She’s gorgeously built, short, solid, muscular, like a gymnast. Her smile is that of a girl well loved.

  “Good job!” she says. “You’re a natural.”

  “Are you?”

  “Oh yeah,” she says. “When I get bored here, I just run across it.”

  “Show me.”

  She smiles and puts down her foam buoy. Then she jogs across, as if it were a solid sidewalk. I’m amazed.

  “How did you do that?”

  “You just learn to read it,” she calls from the other side. “Your body learns to anticipate how it’s going to move when you step on it. It’s just a matter of practice.”

  “I want to try again.”

  “Do it!”

  I love her enthusiasm.

  Taking the first step is easier this time. My body makes ten thousand unconscious calculations in terms of ankle, spine, wrist. I don’t hurry.

  “See? Now you’re a pro,” says the lifeguard when I’m by her side again.

  I want to go back and forth all day and get as good as she is. “Have you ever walked on the real Trail?”

  She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one is coming down the stairs, and then she sits down at the edge of the pool and dangles her legs in. I roll my pant legs up and sit down next to her. The water is warm.

  “No,” she says. “It’s illegal. I would if someone took me there, though. It’d be interesting to try it out on the open sea where the waves are a lot bigger.”