Nothing.
They both let out the breath they had not known they’d been holding.
“Moment of truth,” Jonathan said as he reached up and pressed down on the switch. He opened his eyes, and they were both still standing. Breathing. Alive.
Solemnity made their boots heavy against the staircase as they made their way up to the now-cleared living room. They stood before the light switch. Eamonn turned off his flashlight. Moonlight shot wavering cerulean rhomboids over them through the windows. He put his hand to the switch, wondering if he would ever miss the imposed darkness, the mandatory night.
And flipped.
The room burst with light. They could see each other in full view, every feature, every bead of sweat on their foreheads, see it as clearly as if they stood outside by the river in midday. Ambient sizzling from the bulb overhead was the only sound between them.
Then Eamonn let out a whoop and Jonathan doubled over with relief and what felt like tears pooling in his eyes. He gasped his laughter, his disbelief, then looked at Eamonn, then ran around the house. And all night, they went through the house flipping light switches.
On and off. On and off. On and.
Off.
From the window of the public housing unit, Linc watched the maglev bus make its winding commute around the barrier that marked the backyard of the Ribicoff Cottages. Brown, thin-veined leaves littered the ground on the Brookside side of the fence in layers, concealing the envenomed insects that went about their business fucking and dying out of sight.
Before the barrier had shifted, the rolling green hills of West Rock Park would have greeted anyone crossing over from Brookside to Hamden along Woodin Street. You could look at the sky where it passed from crimson red to opalescent blue. Maybe if you were new and didn’t quite know how things worked here, you stared for a long time at that fence and you felt safer. You readied yourself to pass into a deeper, thicker layer of God’s providence where the heat didn’t peel away your skin and where the sweat didn’t sting when it hit your eyes and where you didn’t have to pass the water through a sifter before drinking and where the ground didn’t crack when you put your boot to it.
Linc tried not to feel envy, just as he had learned in the ward and then in the church basements after.
The bus ferried workers the long way around the barrier that kept the clean air in and the poisoned air out. Just as Linc had come out of rehab, residents were making noise about opening up shielded connector roads from the Brookside Estates to Woodin Street and at two other locations between Belden Road and West Side Drive. But Hamden owned the Fence.
Sometimes Linc stared and let alternative histories transpose themselves onto the setting, so that instead of that gray-blue fence that hummed with warning, there was a set of train tracks and a rickety caboose that chugged over them. Sometimes, Sydney is with him in the vision. Sometimes, she’s not. Some people have horses, and they all talk in southern accents.
They cut across train tracks and spotted the first batch of workers, moving down the fields in scattered lines. Earlier in the year, the train would pass by and migrant workers from the outlands, some of them onyx beneath their overalls and some of them the color of sun-poisoned topsoil, would leap off the train with their belongings in satchels and bags held together by leather straps and would scatter through the fields, the kids leaping over each other and disappearing in the towering stalks of wheat while the grown-ups set up camp and began to form a long line that led to the plywood mansion at the top of the hill.
Linc would watch the kids run past him, leaping out of a patch of wheat into a moment of visibility before vanishing again in the field, like fish hopping out of a pond, arcing in the sunlight, then evanescing into memory.
He imagined it was easier to believe in God’s love in a place like this.
Footsteps announced Sydney. He had been so caught up in reverie that he hadn’t even heard her car pull up.
“So,” she said when he turned around. After a faux-serious beat, she smiled at him.
He smirked back. “So.”
They set off for Hartford, where they wandered Bushnell Park and talked about being kids then about being young adults then about what it might be like to be adults. She told him about some substitute teacher gigs back in Ohio and this one French class she had subbed for without knowing a lick of French. Linc said, “You shoulda called me, I woulda come to your rescue,” only realizing later how many different ways he meant it. They ambled through the Capitol Building, squeezing in after a tour of grade-school kids with air masks on and suited-up chaperones flanking them. They felt a bit like fugitive teenagers, or at least Linc did.
It was too warm yet to continue walking outside, so they caught sandwiches from a food cart nearby and, thinking of Wyatt, Linc told her about boxing and about football in high school and about different ways of thinking when your body was involved in something taxing and beautiful.
After lunch, they hopped back into her car and, in about forty-five minutes, the itis hit.
Eventually, they arrived at Elizabeth Park, Sydney’s first time there, and found the Rose Gardens and he told her about all the different kinds of flowers they had there without even looking at the signs, and she said that one day in the future he would teach her how to garden, and he demurred and said it was his mother who was the gardener, and she only half believed him. He pointed out the lilacs hanging off vines strapped to poles that connected in a thatched roof overhead. She told him about all the times she’d read of characters in novels smelling lilacs or smelling of lilacs and he urged her forward, and she sniffed at the flower. “So that’s what they were talking about,” she said with a kind of awe.
He showed her where the herbs were, where the fragrance herbs were planted and which plot was for the medicinal herbs and he showed her the chocolate mint sprouts and said, “Go ahead,” and that was when she bent down, pulled off a leaf, rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger, then chewed it. Her fingertips smelled like Peppermint Patties and he giggled at her when she sniffed them.
They got on the ramp to I-91 on their way back to New Haven as curfew descended, and Linc asked her to swing north briefly so that they could ride by the Colt Armory, a big, ancient brown building with a blue dome topped by a little gold horse.
They raised dust on the undone section of interstate that connected the capital to New Haven. Occasional high-speed railtrains chu-chunked by past the pencil-drawn trees lining the concrete.
Linc couldn’t tell whether he felt sad or content; the two had braided together to confuse him. When he was younger and still aware of the world around him, still not yet completely blanketed in narcotic oblivion, he had watched wave after wave of entrepreneurs or young city planners come in and try to fix his broken city. He’d read about their attempts in Detroit back in the early 2010s and how, after each metropolis collapsed onto a dwindling tax base, more and more smooth-cheeked, air-masked MBAs would come in with some idea their predecessor supposedly hadn’t thought up.
But then corporate sponsorship of space travel. And Colony construction. New and shiny out of nothing replaced new and shiny out of this. And now there was no one left for Linc to laugh at.
Sydney sniffed her fingers when she thought Linc wasn’t looking.
They swung through the autumnal desert of Newington. From the Berlin Turnpike, they got onto the Merritt, where there weren’t even any nearby trains to rhythm their passage. Eventually, they hit the Heroes Tunnel and when the old West Rock Ridge State Park came into view, Linc wondered if Sydney was gonna leave her car at his place tonight.
When the stars started to poke out, when they could be seen through the cloud cover, they had made their way to the South Overlook where they could see the Dome as well as the Harbor outside it. The Wall was far enough toward the horizon that whole neighborhoods lay in darkness beneath it. As red as the sky would get during the day, it looked just as blue-black at night as it did in old holos.
They sat on the hood of Sydney’s car, and she sat behind him, wrapped her legs around him while she got started braiding his hair. She was gentle combing him out, so gentle he almost fell asleep on her, and she worked on him as it got darker and darker, never once asking for a light.
Occasional noise wafted up to them: a bottle broken, scavengers at work. But the block was mostly quiet, having long since been picked clean.
A door opened somewhere and a rickety house exhaled music. Metallic, staticky music that must have come from some radio. Someone was playing indie rock. Stripped-down stuff with a drummer and two guitarists, one of whom was the screamer. No singing, just shrieks, sometimes the guitars, sometimes the singer. Linc grit his teeth against it, squinted, and could hear it more clearly through the fog. Then a light went on and muffled cheering could be heard through opened windows.
Linc forgot about Sydney and the hands at work in his hair and leaned forward to see a door open again and someone wearing what looked to be a plaid button-down with sleeves rolled up to the bicep out on the remains of a back porch. The thing was half firewood. The guy pressed his hands to the small of his back and stretched. Soon after, another white guy joined him. They looked to be about the same height, and their hair was dark in the evening, shielded from the moonlight. One squeezed the other’s ass, and they shared a meaningful look before retreating back inside.
Sydney’s hands stopped, rested on his shoulders.
“What is it?”
But all he could think of were the air masks the two had been wearing.
Linc didn’t turn the lights on at his place, and they fumbled at each other in the dark. Linc trembled and was too rough, too unthinking. He kept remembering Bishop’s words, hoping that would bring back the warmth he felt for Sydney, Bishop talking about church and revealing yourself to another person. And it worked for a little, then it didn’t.
