🕯️🕯️"Goliath" by Tochi Onyebuchi

She slept with her arm over him and, throughout the night, her embrace would tighten. At first, he took solace in her needing him there. But as the sky began to lighten, he realized it was for him.

He saw those aliens and was terrified, and she had known it.

PART II

FALL

[Letter from Connecticut]

SHADOW COUNTRY

Life in a Post-Cataclysm Metropole

The complimentary bottles of water are permanently chilled, and strawberry-mint oxygen fills the lungs. The gas masks, arranged by size, had first appeared when Carlos, a former Latin King (and before that an army engineer), had pressed a button on a remote and a section of their bus’s flank had opened, small cumulus clouds of blue chill gasping out, to reveal the rows of masks and their accompanying oxygen tanks. You hang back to pretend that you’re cooler than the blond-haired Scandinavians, for whom this is their first “’hood tour,” even though it’s your first as well. You don’t make any bones about whether or not your touchpad and stylus show, because maybe they make you look like a professional journalist. But when you fit that mask to your face and take those first breaths, you feel safer too. No shame. You’re way too happy that the thing actually works.

You get sat next to a middle-aged man with two USB outlets behind his right ear and one fannypack, and you have to crane your neck a little because the lady in front of you, the mother of some annoying kid on the bus—take your pick—refuses to tame the beehive that is her honeycombed hair. Fannypack fiddles with his Rosetta, switching languages because he can’t tell you’re American, so first he starts trying to tell you about his church back home in Finnish, then German, then French, then (mistakenly) Tagalog, before he gives up. You lean out over the aisle, and that’s when you get a good look at Carlos, buzz-cut, bumblebee-ink tattoo sleeves (all crucifixes and roses and Día de Muertos calaveras) and a nice neutral white tee over loose black jeans. Before you showed up at the station, a row of buses outsidea warehouse-like building with “The Icarus Project” stenciled near the roof, you made sure to do your research. What gang colors you should stay away from; you implanted in your pad a sheet showing every gang’s sign, a dizzying series of digital contortions; et cetera.

Next to Carlos, half-turned around in his seat, is Jamal, dreadlocked so that he looks like Predator with his half mask on. His shirt is tighter, and you wonder, because it occurs to you with your worldly mindset, if he’s filled out his clothes with prison-muscles. He waves at some of the kids while Carlos speaks, plays games with them, throws up a few fake signs and chuckles while they try to imitate. When they get bored, the kids tug on their parents’ shirts and beg for snacks. Mostly Pringles.

Part of your research entailed looking into Carlos and Jamal and Devon, the stoic driver. Devon used to be a professional football player, lasted all of a season and a half before a grand jury indictment for a friend’s overdose brought him a prison sentence that drained his earnings and paralyzed his employment aspirations. He’d grown up in a gang here in New Haven, and it had followed him into the League, and now this was the only job for which his felony convictions weren’t a problem. Through Jamal, he became involved in local community mediation, a group modeled off of the Interrupters in Chicago. Real line-of-fire activists playing Sisyphus with local gang violence. Devon’s was a drug charge, the absurdity of the criminal justice system being such that his sentence was initially life. Reduced for good behavior. He was twenty when he went in, and got hired as Carlos’s driver pretty soon after he had come out, at the age of thirty-nine.

Behind you, some white kid with a bandanna tied in the style of the early 2000s across his forehead, knot forward, murmurs in a conspiracy-whisper to the astounded kid next to him, “No more boom-bap, this that click-clack get back. Where we don’t listen to Bobbi Thicke, but when shit gets thick, they get to robbin’ you. Peep. You look new here and before them cats to the left be askin’ what you do here, stay close, open those two ears and I’ma hit you with this dictionary before you say the wrong things and they pull them tools outand have you layin’ missionary like the concrete is your boo, hear?” He’s local, and has taken it upon himself to scare his poor neighbor shitless.

Carlos is plugged into the bus’s sound system. He flicks a switch by his jaw and speaks in his stewardess voice, “Red is a very emotionally intense color.” The engine revs, the bus warms with anticipation. “It enhances human metabolism, increases respiration rates, and raises blood pressure.” The kid behind you: “To burn a Dutch is to float, to float is getting high. Fetti is grip is deniro, get it you getting by.” Carlos the Stewardess: “It has a very high visibility, which is why stop signs, stoplights, and fire equipment are all painted that color. Red represents one-fifth of Connecticut’s gang population. Needless to say, dress properly when visiting the New Haven County area. Also, tuck your jewelry, and keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times. Thank youuuuuuu.”

A half-nervous, half-bubbly chuckle ripples through the bus.

It was all desolation to begin with, but when you get out to the abandoned neighborhoods, to Newhallville, the places the upper-middle class fled to get to the Colonies, you see what the post-apocalypse looks like. The house façades are all gaunt, hollowed faces out from which occasional black figures leech, ants out of a bleached skull.

“Where are all the streetlamps?” asks one of the blond-haired Finns, face pressed against the window, stubby fingertips greasing it up.

“When the Dome went up, certain neighborhoods were sectioned off, and the city took those lamps to help build materials for the launch station out in Fairfield.” He doesn’t sound like he’s recounting an unfairness when he talks, but you know it for what it is. The city abandoned them.

You’re not sure what you were expecting, but it jars you to hear Carlos and Jamal talk in the past tense. Each corner turned reveals a new patch of gang territory. Here’s where the R2 BWE Black Flags came up. That right there was one of their stash houses. Jamal is careful not to go too deep into detail as to how the drugs were made and sold. He has nothing to prove, and it would breach the unspoken rulesof the tour. These are visitors. We are visitors. The black flag, which they wore in their back pockets or had as bandannas or would wave around, was meant to symbolize independence. Red and blue had long since been co-opted. The Latin King branches here had black and yellow. If you were going to Beef With Everybody, then what color was more appropriate than the one symbolizing an absolute void of color, of purpose, of affiliation? It’s the color of self-immolation. Of Black kids with death wishes but who don’t have a convenient bridge to jump off of or a parent with a well-stocked medicine cabinet. Already, you’re romanticizing them.

Newhallville is bordered on the north by the town of Hamden, on the east by Winchester Avenue, on the south by Munson Street, on the southwest by Crescent Street, and on the northwest by Fournier Street. Dixwell Avenue, Shelton Avenue, Winchester Avenue, and Bassett Street are the main drags cutting through the neighborhood. The Farmington Canal rips straight through the middle.

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw industry churn to life in the district. The canal gets converted into a railroad and enterprising George Newhall builds a small factory where the carriages get built. Other factories sprout like weeds around the first, followed by workers’ houses and a boardinghouse for the unmarried male workers.

Guns come to Newhallville in 1870 when the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sets up shop, and by the Second World War, the thing covered more than six city blocks and employed over nineteen thousand workers. One-family, two-family, three-family tenement homes surrounded the plant, built by real estate investors either for rental or to be sold on speculation, and when you have enough factory workers, enough breadwinners employed by a single industrial giant, you get butchers and grocers and barbers. Winchester becomes the leading employer in New Haven, so of course, it relocates to Illinois. A machinists’ strike in the late 1970s results in the plant being sold to the U.S. Repeating Arms Company, and by the turn of the New Millennium, the place had laid off the rest of its workers. Yale University tried to restore and redevelop the skeleton left by Winchester, turningthe factory complex into Science Park. But space travel became too affordable too quickly. Satellite campuses in the Colonies grew into main campuses, and parents had less incentive to send their children to a domed environment where, just on the other side of the shield, the air was so poisonous your chances of lung cancer rose by an average of thirty-five percent. Tax base shrivels, resources dwindle, schools fail, and the kinds of things that keep kids off the streets and out of jail—summer programs, vocational education, church programs—all of that follows suit. Same story across the state. Same story across the country. The tax base left, but the guns didn’t.

The bus slows to a stop a few blocks from the cancer’d remains of the old Winchester factory where the one-family and two-family houses now slump. Everyone fits their air mask to their face and descends from the bus after Carlos does a quick scan and makes sure the surrounding neighborhood is empty, throws up a baby drone that relays the nearby heat signals, and all is good because the drone, like a hawk, comes back down and folds itself to fit into the holster under his armpit.

A bald, slim-bellied Black guy in a sleeveless hoodie materializes at Devon’s side, leaning next to the bus while Devon sits on the steps and several of the people who aren’t taking pictures of the poverty porn crowd around. “When did we really know it was real?” Devon’s friend/acquaintance/maybe gunman talks like a chunk of concrete has been permanently lodged in the back of his throat. A guttural thing. And you wonder what he must have sounded like as a child. He’s got veins casually sprouting like crow’s feet from his eyes, and hanging from chains around his neck are obsolete smartphones. Antique iPhones and Blackberries ornament his chest. “’S pro’lly when we got shot at. For the first time. Yeah. Far as me comin’ up? Me and my man’s-and-’em. Yeah. It was like ‘okay, this is serious.’ ’Cause we was hustlin’ some shit we pro’lly shouldn’ta been hustlin’. And you know how some guys, the older dudes in the ’hood, they didn’t want us doing certain things, and we was doin’ it on our own. We wasn’t workin’ for nobody.” He leans against the bus with his legs spread apart, a posture of repose that’s almost daring someone to come at him. “Youknow, we was young. We had egos. We were like ‘fuck that; we ain’t workin’ for nobody.’ Then they had to give us some warnings so they actually came by and threw some shots at us.” He starts chuckling. “And we were like ‘whoa; this is real.’ If we gonna be out here gettin’ our own bread, we gotta tool up. Gotta be able to, you know, clap back. That’s when we knew it was real.”

“Have you ever been shot?” asks one mother. She’s more curious than concerned. She’s not asking someone who could’ve been her son. She’s asking someone who could’ve been her store attendant. Or her carjacker.

“Yeah, I got shot.” He sees a little tow-headed kid peeking out from behind the shelter of his mother’s skirt, face completely covered by his air mask. “Got shot right in the head,” he says to the kid. “I didn’t even know I was shot. Muhfuckas had to tell me.” His eyes don’t move from the kid’s. “I was sittin’ in the car, and I noticed an individual I had had an issue with comin’ up on me. And I looked at my man in the car like ‘yo.’ Some things transpired, shots fired. As I got out the car, and it was right there, corner of Munson and Winchester Ave.” With his thumb, he points back to the Winchester factory behind him. “Right ’cross the street from the factory. So I jumped in the back, ’cause I was sittin’ in the passenger’s seat. Got out the car and I ran across the street. You know. Dude ran away, turned a corner, peeled off the block. And my man’s when he found me was like ‘yo, you got blood on your face.’ And I’m thinkin’ it’s just from the glass. So I’m like ‘alright, yeah.’ So as I get in the ambulance, dude who came out the back, he took my hat off. And he’s got his bot cleanin’ up my face, you know? Cop flies over to me, gets a good look, asks me what happened, I’m like ‘get outta here, somebody threw a bottle.’ Cop’s like ‘we heard shots,’ and I’m like ‘I ain’t hear no shots over here.’” The little tow-headed boy has completely forgotten his mother. “Somebody was drivin’ by in the car and threw a bottle.” The boy smiles when the storyteller smiles. “There’s glass in my face, I’m in an ambulance, and dude’s cleanin’ up my face and shit, and dude takes my hat off to let the bot get at, you know, get at the rest of my face, my head or whatever. Anyway, he’s cleanin’ myshit and he notices there’s a hole in my hat. So he looks at the hat, then he looks at me. And he like ‘yo…’” A dramatic pause. “He like ‘yo. Yo. You aight?’” The crowd farts out a few barked laughs, but it’s mostly sagging shoulders. “I go ‘yeah, I’m aight,’” the guy says into the crowd. “He go, ‘yo, you got shot in your head.’ It’s like ‘shot in my head?’ You know,”—he’s cheesing now too, looking back—“I don’t feel nothin’ but for a muhfucka to tell you yo you shot in your head, you think you start feelin’ something like whoa.” He mimes losing his balance, and a few more people laugh. “I’m like ‘I ain’t shot in the head.’ Now, I ain’t got a braincase or nothing and even if I did, niggas had Muckrakers woulda tore my whole shit up. But dude showed me that hat, like, the hole, and he showed me a little piece of the shell, and I’m like ‘oh, wait,’ and he’s like ‘nah, don’t touch it.’ And I chill out after a while, ’cause I had to get my shit right, then I tell dude, ‘yo, don’t. Tell. The cops.’ He like ‘aight, cool, I gotchu, I gotchu.’ ’Cause at first he was like ‘yo, ay yo, you could tell me, you was gettin’ shot at, right?’ I said, ‘nah, somebody rolled up by the car’ and he didn’t even let me finish, he showed me the hat, and he was like ‘nigga. That ain’t no bottle.’ ’Cause it was a Black young dude, you know? So I’m like ‘yeah, there was a shootin’, but yo don’t tell the police, I don’t need to be dealin’ with all that extra bullshit. And he was like ‘nah, I gotchu, I gotchu.’ Cops come by on some ‘what happened? Who was shootin’?’ Look at ’em like ‘one o’ y’all, motherfucker. Was a beat-walker took shots at me.’” Now he’s the only one laughing. “Shit bounced off my arm too. I’m like Terminator or some shit. Nobody couldn’t say nothin’ to me. No augments. All my shit is natural, red-blood, and I’m invincible. No iron lung, no braincase, none of that cyber shit in my arms, none of that. I was tootin’ my own horn after that, ’cause not too many niggas get to toot they own horn like that.” You wait for the end because you know it’s coming. He’s telling this story for us, not for him. “But if nothin’ can stop you, eventually, it all stops tryin’. And you the only one left.” And you look around at the post-apocalypse and you see what he means. People linger to ask him some more questions, but you’re already back on the bus. The door’s open, so your mask is still on.

When everyone gets back on board, you can’t tell if it all went as Carlos planned or if it hadn’t.

Celentano, the K through 8 school, is on Canner and Prospect Street and by the time Jamal gets around to telling about the turf wars that would go down between the Celentano kids and the kids from Lincoln Bassett, over on Bassett Street and Shelton Avenue, you know what it means to clap back.

Devon takes you through Dixwell, and you see a little bit of where it abutted the Ivy Quarter. There are even marks in the concrete to tell how and when the protective domes shrank and when they evaporated entirely, letting in the radiation.

You’re reminded of that time in Bosnia and the story of the gravedigger who takes visitors, tourists, interlopers like yourself, up the hill in Sarajevo to where the Olympic Stadium used to be so that you can look down the bowl at the entire city below from where you stand amid the headstones. The gravedigger knows where everyone is buried and walks you to each headstone, then tells the story of that person’s life: how they grew up in that neighborhood over there and how their father worked in that bread factory by the mosque and how the deceased fell in love with a girl who went to that school that used to be where the UNHCR offices are now, how they married in that chapel, where their child was born, where they first fell in love and would play when snow blanketed the ground, where they grew old, et cetera. You hear it in Carlos’s voice and in Jamal’s. That terrestrial longing.

You don’t have that in space.

You don’t have county jails where men have to sleep and shit with no privacy and where understaffed and half-mechanized guards are as terrorizing as they are terrorized. You don’t have the murals tagged with street art, a masterpiece of a rhinoceros charging through a wall painted on that wall, crew names tagged in bubble letters, portraits of the fallen, some famous, some infamous, some simply loved. You don’t have the bootleg credit depots for the folks who can’t get bank accounts and who need the rations turned into cash so that their kidcan make bail. You don’t have mothers worrying about that. You don’t have mothers trying to figure out how to do it all their first time.

It is all history now, but you wonder what it was like when a place like Yale University ran up against Dixwell. With what marker was the dividing line drawn? Who moved in? Who was pushed out? Who left?

The sociology major in you wants to trace migration patterns. Whites in one direction. Blacks and Puerto Ricans in that same direction. Whites in another direction. And you realize that even then, when the streets were animated with socio-economic caste struggle, this was a place with all history and no future.

In the shade of dilapidated office buildings, the tourists gather. Carlos betrays a hint of worry and you know it’s because he knows there are people in those towers, but it’s a prime location, maybe the one they’ve used for every iteration of this tour so far. Many of the kids activate their recorders and the little bees sprout from within their hair to photograph or video record them and their parents throwing up the gang signs they learned before they arrived at the warehouse. Instantly, the pictures are online for all their friends in space who couldn’t afford the fare or the parental insouciance or whatever else it is that unchains someone from a Colony.

It’s all violence around you, and you’re starting to grow nauseous to it. Then you get nauseated by the weakness that brought about your own nausea. Maybe, you realize, it’s simply the air pollution, but, no, your tank is still full. And, let’s not forget, you’re half-mech anyway.

Back on the bus, you guys pull out and ride by a church and before you spreads a rubbled landscape. Mostly open field, some of it untamed jungle or close to it, and in the wreckage of what looks like a recently destroyed building, you witness a small bit of industry.

With bandannas over their faces, many of them in overalls and boots, they sweep and strike at the rubble. And you squint and you see bricks rising like walls around them, as though each of them is building a corner of a house. A couple of them pause, straighten, stare as you ride by, maybe at you individually, maybe the bus as aunit, and they prop themselves on their hammers, the ones you watch, and you wonder why Carlos didn’t tell you about them.

Suddenly, those Black and brown bodies squirming in the heat and engaged in the act of creation are all you can think about. And you don’t want to ever see Earth from space again.