More and more seed heads detached from their home bases, so that the dandelions became like the buildings in the distance, pitted and dying, or already dead and decaying. Post-explosion. Well into disintegration.
Sydney’s house was one of few on her block. Shabby, well built, maintained enough to still look beautiful, like whoever lived there continued to take pride in that fact. There was another house, and another, each as put-together or a little less put-together than Sydney’s, then nothing. An absence so stark there wasn’t even a foundation, like no house had ever even been there to begin with. A chunk of American pastoral. You could grow a garden in it if the green weren’t so unruly, so intent on the business of empire-building. Some folks were already trying. Then, at the other end of the meadow would stand the charred, soot-covered, alveolated edifice of a home that used to look like Sydney’s. But out from the windows shattered to look like dragon teeth, a few dope fiends would peek and survey the landscape, waiting for a dealer or hoping to pull a jux or just lean like barley in the fall weather, their scrawny, lamp-post bodies slumped like twisted wire. After that, a nice house with a porch and a veranda and a rocking chair that had the audacity to stay outside in a neighborhood populated by scavengers and crackheads and neighborhood watch.
Looked like the type of city-half that might have still been alive when Linc was either inside or in the haze of his own world-erasing dragon-chase. Recently deserted. Like Detroit in the 2010s. Linc had never been, but he’d seen holos, heard stories of folks who had left for there or come from there. Linc couldn’t imagine the ruined factories there looking any different from the ruined shorefront factories here. Same wood boarded over blown-out storefront windows, same plastic billowing in the wind. Same solitary sentinels, catatonic with something—despair, anger, uselessness—wandering, zombies with an undead grayness in their skin.
In return, Linc had shown her his side of the city, and they’d wandered Union Station in silence where the light came through the ceiling all cheese-grated, the building nothing more than concrete and stone. Vines tortured the tracks the old Amtrak trains used to run commuters on, and heading a little ways north to an overpass whose walls were lush with verdure, Linc parted the weeds to show her some of the murals that had been squeezed into that space.
“You learn how small a city is when you’re in love,” Bishop told Linc one afternoon on the second floor of a scraped-out skyscraper. Linc’s cigarette was flecked with flakes of radiation so that whenever he tapped it, the ash burned purple and red and orange and yellow before vanishing. “She shows you her parts, you show her your parts.” They were both looking out over the Green. There was an off-white obelisk in its center, but they had no idea how high it had gone because its top had been cut off some time ago and rain had softened the wound. “You learn her.”
Linc figured Bishop was talking about a woman’s body without talking about a woman’s body so he smiled and let the man talk.
“And I’m not just talking her ’hood. You know, which corner store she hangs out in front of or which salon she gets her hair done at or where her school’s at or nothin’ like that. I mean her secret places. Those spots she goes to to collect herself, you see what I’m sayin’?” He glanced at Linc, who stared straight ahead. “You get that far with a woman, she starts showin’ you her sacred spots. Her church.” Bishop rubbed one ashy hand over the other. “Church ain’t have to have no stained-glass windas or nothin’. Lord say, ‘where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I also.’ So when she takes you to that spot, could be a little piece of riverbed or a little hole in a hill, you finna engage in some prayer.” He clapped Linc on the back like he was proud of him, and barked a shallow cough with each slap like he was the one being congratulated. “Church is love, youngblood. Church is love.”
Linc looked away from the dandelions and back at Sydney. He smirked. “All beautiful as shit for no reason-lookin’ ass.” The last of the seed heads were lifted away and the gutted apartment buildings and empty parking complexes glowed in the gilt of the sunset.
David was still glowing by the time he stood at the threshold to Jo’s hospital room. Her operation was nearing, and a peace had washed through him, as though the nicotine had carried in its wake an industrial dose of tranquility. It dizzied him. Were his mind clearer, he would have noticed how Jo’s eyes followed him from the doorway to the chair by her bed. He would have noticed the sneer she put no effort into holding back. He would have noticed the animosity that shone like gunmetal in her eyes. But it wasn’t until he was seated and smiling in her face that he saw it. Saw the recoil. The visceral disgust.
“You smoke?” she spat.
“Let’s go to Earth.”
The bedsheets had grown to match their body temperature by now. Their drones had turned off their engines, guided only by the wind, swirling in a holding pattern that spiraled in a small vortex over the eastern coast of the continental United States. Doves as black silhouettes against golden skin. The lux levels made the space before David’s eyes aglow. “Why?” David asked, though he knew already that he would go if Jonathan went. He wanted to ask what Jonathan was running from, but Jonathan never ran from. He always ran to.
“We wouldn’t be alone. There are still holdouts there. Families. Places where it could be made to work.”
At the thought of family, heat burst in David’s body.
“People who talk about the radiation are people who’ve never been. Colony life is the only life they know. And they try to get us to examine our privilege, how lucky we have it here, but do you ever wonder why a seminar on white privilege is just a bunch of white people trying to figure out what’s wrong with being lucky?”
The light hurt David’s eyes.
“There are people down there who aren’t like us. Who aren’t like anyone in the Colonies.” He shifted next to David, removed his blindfold, and looked at him. “Here, it’s all academic jargon. How to Be Conversant in White Privilege Theory. Privilege taught to the privileged children of the mostly privileged.”
“You want to throw that away.”
Jonathan smiled next to him. “That’s what we do with garbage.” His drone spiraled into an ever-tighter circle around a swathe of country in the Northeast. “We’ll be like the pilgrims. The first batch. The ones who got along well with the Native Americans and had turkey dinners and all that. Just like in the history books.” He moved closer to David. “I’ll go on ahead, get us set up, and then I’ll send for you.” What he had left out was the bit about David waiting for his mother to die. To succumb to her illness and to be boxed, then to have her ashes jettisoned out into space to become part of the Refuse Ring.
“And what about the ones who came after, the ones with the smallpox blankets?” David removed his eyemask and turned to see Jonathan still smiling at him, as though he hadn’t heard David’s fear.
He saw Jonathan about to open his mouth to speak and kissed him. Shut up, Jon, he wanted to say. I’m not ready to fix us yet.
“Your mother was a smoker,” Jo said from her hospital bed. They’d changed her gown in preparation for her operation. The whole room had an aspect of novelty, as though something fundamental had changed. David thought that perhaps it was because they both stood on the threshold of something, the consequence of a choice they’d already made. That moment between resignation and peace. “Sure, she smoked. But she was a smoker. She loved it. Talked about it too. Said it made her feel present. No matter where we were or what we were doing, she was always about her smoke.” A pause that threatened to wander into something sadder. “You’re starting to dress like she used to.”
David took a moment to note his unzipped hoodie and the small jacket he wore tightly over it.
“That was her uniform, all right.” Jo blinked at the ceiling, and David saw she was fighting tears. “That time you walked in … when you came in that time, I … I’m sorry. You just … you smelled like her.”
David wanted to apologize, but he wasn’t sure what for.
“We don’t die, David. We just change shape.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother and I, we were the generation that built this Colony. We met in a settlement. All of us coming together, it was so beautiful. She was a bartender but also an engineer, and I was a vagabond but also an engineer. And we wanted a family. We wanted to do it right, better than where we came from. So we made this place, and we made you. And I’m looking at you now, dressed like her, smelling like her, and I swear, if you dyed your hair and curled it, I’d be saying all of this to your mother. I loved her so much.” Her face squeezed in on itself in a sob.
David reached out and put his hand on hers and felt that warmth, that welcoming.
“We were young. We thought space would fix us, you know?”
“Jonathan went back.”
“Oh?” This seemed to take her out of her sorrow, and David felt grateful he could give her something else to focus on. “And you’re still here.”
“Just seems wasteful, you know? Everything you did, to build this place, to make this life for me here, why would I—”
“Throw that away?”
“Yeah.”
“Ah, you definitely got that from me.” She chuckled, and there was no bitterness in it. “Guilt.”
And David joined her.
“But that’s not why you’re still here. You don’t want to leave me here all alone.”
David squeezed her hand as though to say, Is that so strange?
She was a long time staring at him before she spoke again. “When I was a child, there was this candle. There musta been a storm that knocked out the power or something in whatever shithole your grandfather and I had set up shop in. And I remember realizing that I no longer remembered the room around me. The light is just bright enough to make the darkness solid. And I can feel my heart sinking because I might not be able to find my way back to my bedroom, and that is when this thought hits me. This is what it’s like to die. Maybe this is what happens to old people. The light grows dimmer and dimmer, then when it’s gone, it takes the room, the memory of the room, and everything it ever lit up with it into the dark. When I leave, I’ll be taking everything I loved with me. Right to wherever it is I’m going.”
