Adam’s Breath

Martin MacInnes

She locked the door behind her, inhaled. The windows were sealed as expected, the air thick with moisture from the shower. She noted a lukewarm mug of coffee on the kitchen counter, the surface gently tensing, a dark thumbprint smudged on the handle. She steadied herself, one hand against the wall. She found a scuffed pair of boots by the table, the inner heels fraying, the soles damp and odorous. She walked on, carefully pushed the next door fully open. In the bedroom, a white shirt hung open on a wire hanger, looking as if it had only just stopped spinning. Though the bed was made she could still make out the dip on one side, the slight dark patch on the headboard where his head had grazed. In the bathroom were two off-white towels, one on the floor and the other on the wall rack. The scent of him. The floor towel was stamped with two prints. The hanging towel was wet and crumpled, with small, matte black pieces of hair in its folds. Lifting it, she felt the weight of the water that had come off him, saw, in the towel’s indentations, the final positions of his body.

She opened her satchel, took out the catcher, and started her work.

In early school he was already catching air in glass jars with cork lids, labelling and storing them in the shed at the end of the garden. He collected school air, forest air, city air, night air and day air, human air and animal air, funny air and serious air, sleepy air and wideawake air, air when his dad is reading the news and when his sister is sad, hot air and cold air, the air over a river and air across a road. He got little vials from the school chemistry lab to make better use of the storage space and soon enough he had a vast collection, hundreds, then thousands of different air specimens, all carefully and rigorously labelled. One of the interesting things about air, to Adam, was that from outside, looking in at each air specimen, it all appeared exactly the same. Glancing at it, studying it even, so long as the label was removed you had no idea how old the sample was, where it had come from or what it had belonged to prior to extraction. It never seemed ordinary to him that air sampled from misery looked exactly, perfectly like the air of pure happiness. This dazzled him. A stranger could pick up a misery vial and have no idea of its essence, of how unhappy Adam was when he collected it. There was a lesson in there, he suspected.

Air-catchers weren’t new – inventors and mavericks had used them for hundreds of years, and from the 21st century they were used to track CO2 levels. Adam, with his small, hand-held vacuum devices made from glass and rubber tubing, was also influenced by the pandemics of that century, which changed the way people saw breath and air. Passing a stranger in the street, you formed an intimate association, a temporary fusion that would never be repeated, drinking from and resupplying the same invisible substance all around you. This was dangerous, but also interesting. No matter what you thought, or how badly you willed it, you were never really alone.

*

At her therapist’s insistence Zoe spent the afternoon in 1992, on Reconciliation training. When she’d first tried VR, what had most impressed her was the moment you removed the headset and saw, briefly, the amazingly fine rendering of the natural world, before it normalised and became predictable and almost like background. Her pupils used immersion daily, at a greater rate than she had during her own school years. The tech was more advanced now – they switched to different times and places, assuming the identities of other species and people. Now her therapist was making her plug in – the time switch jolted her.

‘Did you learn anything on your journey?’ the therapist said, standing above her in the lounge, as she came back.

‘I learned that I would have been a completely useless driver. I just can’t get used to the idea of a car.’

‘Zoe.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You need to talk about this. About your brother, and the past. You cannot hold onto this. Cannot keep blaming them.’

‘I know,’ she said tiredly. ‘I parrot this to my pupils daily. Of course their lives were hard, I understand that. But it’s hard for us too, you know?’ As she turned off her therapist, she heard the loud hum of the cicadas at the edge of the fields.

Adam’s cancer was linked to microplastics. It had become personal for her, which was why her therapist had sent her back. In Reconciliation therapy, 1992 was a popular destination – back then, people were starting to hear about anthropogenic climate change, and there was time to work against it. To dismantle oil systems, give back the soybean fields and discard the illusions of human exceptionalism and limitless growth. This, of course, had not happened until later, and in Reconciliation they tried to understand why. 

In 2051, not long before her father was born, the ICS had officially replaced the Anthropocene with the Metamorphocene – the age of man becoming the age of transformation. It was symbolic, of course – it didn't strictly do anything – but it was hopeful, signalling a shift. Carbon emissions had already dropped off. In the previous decades of droughts, wildfires and heat storms, effects baked-in from the actions of earlier generations, of water-wars and millions dying annually from respiratory disease, younger people had discarded customs. Wild burial cultivated barren soil, gradually at first until the practice spread. Harvests improved, and carbon sequestration was scaled up. Trees filled the cities, taking over the roads. People revered their immediate ancestors in the crops they sowed, the food they ate – there was no single liminal moment when someone disappeared from the earth. Animal species were worshiped, larger and larger tracts of land given over to non-humans. Taxation was overhauled, money reclaimed from the trillionaire class last seen hiding out in island bunkers. (Humans were no longer the wealthiest species on the planet, that particular honour being contested by varieties of soil invertebrates, whose digital avatars held currency related to their terrestrial input and invested it in programs that favoured their interests.) In her country, everyone was paid a basic income. People retrained, volunteered as farmers, nurses, teachers, energy workers and grief counsellors and AI coders. It was hard, and change was slow, but it was a start – net zero.

This was the story passed on to Zoe and Adam, repeated by their parents before they went to sleep each night. They’d tried to make sense of it, embellishing and filling in the gaps with their own interpretations. They’d read books and interrogated their teachers, but there came a point where you had to accept there were no answers, that you’d never make sense of what had happened. They still lived with the consequences of climate change. Adam’s response to this inherited trauma was obvious, and outward. But Zoe didn't have his demonstrative, transformative capacity. She brooded on things, temperamental and emotional. Throughout their 20s she and Adam had had major fallings out. She regretted this, now, with everything she had. Memories came back unprompted, odd things, little slivers that jumped out from nowhere. His unkempt hair, his wheezy laugh, his deep, booming voice that called attention to itself and embarrassed her in coffee shops and bars. She smiled, remembering lying awake in their childhood bedroom, kept up by his snoring. Though she’d never admit it at the time, there was something reassuring about the noise, evidence of his presence and sustenance. She would miss that – she did already – the harsh, rhythmic fluttering of his recycled breath.

Weeks had passed now but she still spoke to him every day. Not as a recon – digital emulation had never seemed necessary to her – but aloud in her home or as she walked to work or in the school building itself. One of the most striking things about her pupils was their ease around the dead. They participated fully in the rituals, collecting and inhaling last air, taking apart and distributing homes, scattering seeds inside the found footmarks. They helped the plants grow, watering them, clipping and cutting them, crushing them and using them as feed for the others. They used their catchers in school to gather matter from the air – spores, seeds, microscopic pieces of drifting skin – and fed these to the soil too, seeing themselves in the rising plants as they saw the dead blooming from footsteps.

She described her class of ten year-olds as both her therapy and her life’s work. The cliche was true – they taught her at least as much as she taught them. They brought each other up. She could cry with laughter, startled by their insights. They asked the simplest questions, questions she could never answer. She gave the standard response – ‘It was different then. They were shaped by their circumstances. They didn't know.’ Katy, her current favourite, wrinkled her nose. You couldn't get a line like that past a ten year old.

In some places, long ago, she told them, people dug trenches to put the dead in, covering them with soil and levelling the ground. When she said they put the body in a sealed box, they gasped, rushing their hands to their mouths. They put up a stone marker, she went on, with the deceased’s name, the names of their parents and children, and the dates on which they were born and died. This was too remote, even for those that had seen gravestones, and impossible to understand. She told them it wasn't so long ago, less than 100 years, but that didn't help. They whispered among themselves about the size of the stone block required to list your full family, about the oddness of attaching set dates to the time you lived and died.

She took them on field trips to the sandstone hills, tracing their hands over the rocks and searching for the tell-tale folds of marine fossils. ‘A fossil is a record. There are two types of fossil impressions: positive and negative. A positive fossil is the cast of a body. A negative fossil is the preserved impression that a body, or something else, has made.’ Katy asked what kind of fuel people had made from negative fossils, if there was a special kind of vehicle that could be powered by empty space. Zoe smiled – Katy was already off, stomping in the mud with the others as the rain came down. Oil was not given as oil, she said, it is the long developed form of a prior state of the world. We will be oil too, bled into rocks, for unknown ends.

*

Nothing truly disappears, it only transforms. She tried to remember this, going through crate after crate of dusty vials, seeing Adam’s weirdly mature block letter handwriting on the small paper labels. The collections fulfilled a personal need for him, letting him catch each moment before it melted away. In those sheds and cupboards was the persistence of memory, maybe also a suggestion that the world, however great its catastrophes, can and will go on. What no one could have expected, back then, was that he would literally build cities from this.

He started up his own company, offering both intimate and public carbon storage. Extracting CO2 from his air-catchers he converted it into liquid and injected it into basalt rock. After the CO2 mineralised, the material was judged safe to build from.

At first he started small, creating sculptures and other tributes and memorials from the rock. Zoe saw these as three dimensional, tactile photographs, comforting and nostalgic and ornate. The real shift was when he made entire buildings from the stuff. He designed houses from ancestors’ breath, and memorials to the climate wars from the emissions still hanging in the upper atmosphere. In interviews, people always made the mistake of expecting him to have a theory behind his work. When they asked him to expound on this, he clammed up. ‘I do it because it satisfies me,’ he once said, and he really meant it. It wasn't any more complicated than that. If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. The previous 100 years have seen wholesale changes to the way we consider the relationship between humans and the environment, the past and the present and the future, inheritance and exchange, and my brother’s work, at its simplest, is an expression of this, she wrote, wishing her medium was something other than words, wishing she, like Adam, could have built something from the air instead.

There was no particular spot, nothing preordained. She decided to walk to the edge of the clearing, wind gusting around her, fire coloured leaves whipping round in circles. Adam trusted her. Release it, give it back. When she’d asked him, near the end, what he wanted her to make with his breath, he said the whole world. She opened the catcher and began unscrewing the vials, lifting the tops off the glass jars, the air flooding out.

This story was a joint commission by the Edinburgh Science Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival. It was published in Gutter #31.

Martin MacInnes is the author of three novels, most recently In Ascension, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Saltire Fiction Award and Blackwell’s book of the year.