“Mom,” David said, and squeezed harder. Tears came.
“This memory thing, I hope it helps. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I think there’s two types of memory in our heads. The one that tries to figure out the details. Was she wearing a red dress or a green one that night? Were we picking Red Delicious apples from the orchard or Granny Smiths? But there’s the other kind too. The kind that sneaks up on you or that you stumble into. The kind that walks into your hospital room smelling like the love of your life. I have those memories. What the doctors did to my head, it lets me keep those things in me for just a little bit longer. Now, you have to make your own. I’m done sharing mine with you.” She scoffed, all of a sudden. “Look at me. Sounding like a mom and shit.”
They laughed, and David wiped his jacket sleeve across his eyes.
“I hear it’s the Wild West down there.”
“Everything’s the Wild West with you, Mom. Besides, he’s making a place for us in New Haven.”
A momentary darkness washed over Jo’s face before vanishing. “Your mother and I come from hearty New England stock, you know. Working-class stiffs in Connecticut, back in the day.” Her face softened. “You love him, right?”
David nodded.
“Then go to him. I’ll be fine.”
David thought a point would come when he didn’t wake and turn to find empty space where Jonathan should have been and burst open with longing. Jonathan had been on Earth a few months now, and that day had not come. David would pass through stretches of time where he could content himself with aloneness, go about the business of being a young man in the Colonies, in space, by himself. The dutiful son, the struggling post-grad, the sort-of bachelor. Then, suddenly, the tsunami would crest. He could feel it looming behind him, and, a moment later, craving would crush him.
He paced their bedroom now, then went to the closet. Jonathan hadn’t taken much with him, so it didn’t take long for David to find that leather jacket. Hungrily, David snatched it off the rack and buried his face in it and inhaled. The biggest, greediest cigarette drag of his life.
The house Jonathan chose for David and himself had the better part of a Dodge maglev minivan in its entrails, cut into chunks like undigested meat.
A porch wrapped around the home, which was situated on a tranquil corner next to two empty lots and a few places that were still lived in. They’d watched him from their own porches or from their stoops or as they maintained gardens or set about raking leaves and smiled and shook their heads, all with the air of ritual, as though, just like every other white boy from somewhere, he would be gone in a month or two, stomach full of undigested chunks of ambition.
They called it a house—Jonathan called it a house—but it was a house in name only. Bereft of windows, doors, electricity, plumbing, the absence of which Jonathan could see clearly through the gutted walls. The thing formerly known as a domicile did seem to be pretty adept at holding waste. Piled on a crumbling foundation were mounds of moldy clothing, fast-food wrappers, chewed-through sneakers, empty tin cans, crushed cardboard boxes, diapers used and unused, plaster, rolls of old carpeting, shattered glass, broken furniture, hypodermic needles, and the remains of that Dodge, all of which could be seen from above through the hole in the roof.
“There was a car in my house,” Jonathan told Eamonn soon after he had started shoveling to clear space. “Well, parts of a car.”
“What do you mean ‘parts’?” He took a pull from his beer.
“Like someone put a saw to it.”
“Probably an insurance job.” At Jonathan’s look, he continued. “Someone probably needed the money. Reported the maglev van stolen, then hired a guy to cut it up into pieces and hide them around the city. Half of that thing’s probably all over Beaver Hills.”
Just behind the oasis in which Eamonn and the others lived was a garden. An orchard, really. Jonathan had to remind himself that Eamonn had been here longer than he had and had seen whole seasons here, had grown peaches and plums and pears on trees, had raised vegetables from the soil that had once been so poisoned with radiation it used to bleed. Had created a place for bees to make honey that they all then collected in autumn. Had projected bootleg holos onto the makeshift skating rink that a backyard pond would turn into in the winter. The idea had come to one of the girls and, that one winter, they set about flooding the backyard with Eamonn taking an iron from his house, plugging it into an extension cord, and trying to smooth the ice over. They had yet to get it right, so, in the meantime, they used it as a screen and stared down from their rooftops to watch the movie.
Autumn saw Jonathan strip the plywood off his place and put in windows that, miracle of miracles, managed to remain unsmashed. The walls that couldn’t be salvaged, he demolished, found a hammer lying around and put it to use, swinging in a way that pinned burn between his deltoid and bicep. Fitting hinges to doorframes and installing the doors took several hands, many of the others helping without a request for anything in return. They would haul the planks that had been attached to each other and turn them just so, making sure to trim or cut them where necessary, and when they managed to get the things to click in place, they backed away and huffed, as though they had midwifed the façade of his house into being. Any more wood collection would need to wait until next summer’s storms knocked down a few trees that they could chainsaw into logs, drag off the potholed roads, and stack on porches.
In the meantime, one of the neighbors let Jonathan stay in an empty house free of charge, and, as soon as that first night fell, he recalled the stories of burst pipes and frozen toilets, whole rooms charred from the fires set by malfunctioning space heaters.
The first taste of winter, with frost snowflaking on his newly installed windows, had him digging out his wool cap and wrapping himself in so many blankets and furs he had found and taken a torch to that he sometimes worried he’d die of asphyxiation. When his touchboards froze, he put them on oven sheets and heated them over a pot of water boiling on the stove.
He showered in the home of the neighborhood weed lady, next to the room where she kept a fox and its babies, a veritable habitat built around the grass and trees that had become a part of her second floor. Jonathan twisted under the hot water, cleansed, and thought he heard someone singing and strumming a guitar. But whenever he finished, the song did too. And it took whoever had sung those songs with it.
When he told Eamonn about Aurora’s fox, Eamonn retorted that it might actually be a small wolf, a casualty of the radiation. The howling at night, he said, buttressed his hypothesis.
The school he and Eamonn and a few neighbors raided for supplies had already been tagged for demolition and boarded up accordingly. When Jonathan broke through one of the plywood-covered windows and snuck in, he felt like a thief, then realized it was how David was supposed to feel, not him. He ripped out the oak cabinets that would go into his own kitchen. In the library, individual books on shelves had melted into walls of brittle stone-colored parchment. A breath of ash covered them. He looked for fingerprints, the evidence of previous visits, and saw none. Another sea of soot had covered them.
On their way out, they stepped over upturned desks, chalkboards covered in the smeared memory of notes, and marble slabs ripped up from the bathroom. Over his shoulder, he could hear David cracking wise, but mournfully, about some statistic related to New Haven’s rate of functional illiteracy.
THE original wires in the electrical box had been long since stolen, so Jonathan found his own and replaced the thing in the basement of his new house. It no longer startled him to see a truck from the power company making its rounds. People had lived here and had needed services, and the services hadn’t left so much as quieted. Gunshots at night and 911 phone calls still brought police; only, an hour might elapse between the fire and their arrival. Sometimes it was quicker to fix one’s own pipes than call in a plumber who could take advantage of the market and overcharge, or an overworked neighbor who happened to be handy with such things. And sometimes streetlights worked, and sometimes they didn’t. The wires Jonathan hooked through the top of the box would connect to the electrical pole in the alley between his house and the next. The local electrician had visited when Jonathan, chatting with some neighbors, had chirped about that missing element. It ain’t a home till you can turn the lights off. And someone corrected the first person by saying “on,” but that first woman stood her ground.
A man the neighbors called Bishop was the guy who finally put the finishing touches on the job, hooking the lines into the electricity pole. His stubble was a field of snowflakes that clung to his face. Faded overalls and something that looked like a small cigar in his mouth but that ended up just being a stick. And a beret throwing shadow over one eye. High on that ladder, he worked in quiet as birds flew by, a massive eagle swooping low under the lines, so close that Jonathan moved to catch the guy, but Bishop never flinched.
When Jonathan prepared to waffle about payment, Bishop held up a hand and said, “Contractor handles it.” Then he left, waving to some of the neighbors on his way into the street.
Eamonn laughed when Jonathan came from the kitchen to the basement with rubber gloves on.
“To stop the current,” Jonathan said. “You know, in case of any…”
Eamonn doubled over.
Jonathan let it all run its course and together they stared at the box. It looked, in ways, like a beat-up braincase, and he made a note in his head to turn that into a running joke when David finally arrived to see it. The box held the house’s nervous system, its neural pathways, the foundation on which they would attach the various accoutrements that would sustain their living here: portable air filtration, generators, outlets for them to plug themselves into and recharge their augments, cleaners for the rust Jonathan could already feel building inside of him.
A small oval of light pulled him from the reverie. Eamonn stared at the box, and Jonathan’s mood followed.
Jonathan gulped. “Eamonn?”
“Yeah?”
“Get ready to knock me away if anything happens. I might … I might get stuck by the current. To … you know … the box. Or I might be dead. Or we might both blow up.”
“Just do it already. I’ve lived a good life.”
A deep breath through Jonathan’s lungs, rasping against the rust, then out through pursed lips. “You ready?”
Eamonn nodded.
Jonathan inched his hand forward, finger out, and tapped it against the tip of the switch, yanked it back.
