The laughter drew him out of the swamp. His body moved before his mind could follow, and he found himself at his front door. Wind whistled through an open window.
For several long seconds, he stared at that window. Not open, but opened. He blinked himself awake and passed through the threshold.
The air had cooled some. It no longer sizzled with late summer. And the kids were wearing jackets, jackets with holes in them and patches taped up, jackets as worn down as the laceless sneakers on their feet, and they all seemed to be running in one direction, a whole gaggle of them, then another bunch would round the corner. And watching them winded Jonathan. He coughed into his hand, and oil-colored blood spilled through its nozzles. He knew he should go around the house and open the rest of the windows, it occurred to him that it was an act of stupidity to try painting with them closed to begin with, but all he seemed to be able to do was stagger all the way through the front door, the screen door clattering shut behind him.
Nobody noticed him as the kids vanished in the tree-smothered distance. The spoiled filtration device that had been affixed to his face came loose, and he let it fall to the landing.
Drunken steps took Jonathan down his porch. Follow them, his body told him. As he came to the street, he turned to look at this half house of his, this thing he’d been so excited to prepare for David, this thing he’d hoped to have finished by the time David came, this work he thought he could wring out of the earth with his own hands, and he wiped his palm over his eyes and forehead, trying to dash away tears but only coloring them red. This was what he had to give David. This was the best he could do. This monument to his inadequacy.
So he turned back around and followed the children.
He followed them down the cracked concrete and the twisted fencing, past the chipped painting on the awnings of their homes, past the duplexes, down past the backyards with the tarp covering the pools and past the sheds where the grills and tongs and other picnic tools gathering cobwebs. He followed them down wood trails and through scrub brush until he crested a hill. By now, the laughter, a siren song, had grown louder, fuller. A chorus. And out in the field beneath him were stables and, amid the children and teenagers and their parents, horses.
It was a dream. It had to be. Even as he made his way down the hillside path to the fence enclosing the field, he felt it was a dream. Some of the neighborhood children had their faces pressed up against the gritty metal fencing, giggling as some of the parents went about distributing masks. There was no dome here, but perhaps this place didn’t need one, existing as it did somewhere outside the confines of this coastal city, somewhere beyond the bounds of despair and thwarted ambition.
People Jonathan didn’t recognize rode tall atop the horses, some of them with long-handled hammers in their saddlebags, and children crowded around one of the riders as he emerged from the stable on his horse and then broke away and did a circuit of the field at a fast canter. Beyond was more field, and maybe this was where the galloping happened.
And Jonathan didn’t know how long he’d been standing by that fence, mouth agape, in stupid wonder, before a Black woman nudged him and held out a single-use mask. Reflex almost had him telling her that he had mechanized insides that would last longer than her natural organs, that his lungs were built more durable than hers, that he was repairable, but he couldn’t figure out how to tell her these things without telling her she was not, so he took the mask and fitted it to his face and watched the horses and thought of David, how beautiful he would find this sight.
The kitchen cupboards blew dust at Jonathan whenever he opened them, stinging his eyes to the point of tears.
“Mosta the heavy lifting’s been done,” said Eamonn from another room in the abandoned house. “But there are a few things in the basement we were saving for later.”
Jonathan couldn’t let go of the cupboard doors. “Yeah,” he murmured because he knew Eamonn had said something, but he couldn’t remember what, couldn’t hear it, wouldn’t have heard it if Eamonn had said it right into his ear. They were too full of the memory of horse hooves thump-thumping against the grass.
In the living room, there was no carpet, no photos, no calendars hanging from the pins in the wall. Jonathan wasn’t even sure the lamps worked. There were only two folding chairs, carrying basement dust and rusted into an eternal seated position.
In the basement, no longer cramped with boxes full of old toys or whatever other old school stuff families always left here in between their children’s school semesters, stuff which, as they would all get older, would remain with greater and greater permanence where they stood or sat or leaned, the duffle bags with broken zippers and the rolling shelves and inadequate laundry bags and small detergent containers and sports gear sticking out of their shadowed corners. Every time Eamonn brought Jonathan here for another raid, there was less and less stuff.
In the gutted and almost noiseless basement, they loaded a large freezer onto a wheeled cart. The only sound, birds and rustled grass and a game of cornhole played in a neighbor’s front lawn, came through the opened shed door.
The plan was to get it upright, leaned at an ideal angle, and up the stone steps through the door and out onto the backyard by the driveway where Eamonn’s truck waited.
Eamonn secured the thing on the wheeled cart, moved with ease around the weight of it, practiced effortlessness, as though this were the type of thing he took from houses all the time. Jonathan got one foot on the first step, the other propped beneath him, ready to step back and pull the thing while Eamonn lifted.
“You get the top, I’ll get the bottom,” Eamonn said.
Jonathan had the open air to his back.
“You got it?”
Jonathan nodded, exasperated, eager to get the thing up and out. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it.” Jonathan waited for it, then it came, the tightening in his back as the thing moved, step by jolting step, up the stairs. Jonathan wondered if he was doing it wrong, if it hurt too much the way he was doing it and there wasn’t some easier way to go about this.
They hauled the thing up and got it straight and upright on a corner of driveway close to Eamonn’s truck.
Jonathan straightened, the small of his back aflame. “Look,” he said, back arched, frowning, narrow-slit gaze pitched toward the cerulean sky with clouds floating like stuffing from a slit pillow, preparing himself.
“Yeah?” Eamonn asked, and it sounded like he was lighting another cigarette.
“I can’t see you anymore.”
The atomizer flicked. Flicked. Flicked.
Jonathan saw him light up and straighten, crack his shoulders, rotate them a little bit.
“Now, we just gotta get it on the truck,” Eamonn said without finishing his smoke.
But Jonathan found he couldn’t move, and suddenly, tightness took his chest and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until his breath came out in a single sob, and he didn’t know if the tears in his eyes came from the constriction around his heart, air-poison at work, or from some deeper, more profound well. But here he was, bent over his knees, hidden by furniture from the man who had helped him find this home, and whatever he felt that made his hands tremble as he put them together, shaking, to his lips was a misery large enough to dwarf the cramp itching the small of his back, large enough to snatch at the air from his lungs, to squeeze it out until, even closing his eyes, the tears rolled down his cheeks and he forgot where he was and when he straightened, trembling, a hand resting against the freezer for support, he looked around to try and see if anyone else was watching. If David, somehow, from his perch in the Colony, could see him. He sniffed, wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms. Sniffed again. He could breathe. Several large breaths later, he turned to face the work of lifting the fridge and was startled when he saw Eamonn staring at him.
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said, not knowing why. “Fuck, yeah, it was just, it was something in my eye.”
The expression on Eamonn’s face didn’t change. “What did you say?”
Jonathan sniffed. “I’m not fucking you anymore.” Something powered his arms and his legs, told him to work through the hurt in his back, that the labor would clear the emotional congestion from his chest. He’d already gotten his hands on the fridge and the wheeled cart. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the truck, “let’s get this loaded before it gets too dark. The streetlights don’t come on here.”
Eamonn still stared, not with judgment, not with pity, not with anything Jonathan recognized. Then, face still made of stone, he joined Jonathan, and together, they unstrapped the freezer and loaded it onto the flatbed, and Jonathan dusted his hands on his jeans and looked at the thing where it lay and was happy he could still breathe and that the only pain he felt, the only immediate pain, was the cramp at the small of his back.
They climbed into Eamonn’s truck, and Eamonn pressed his index finger to the ignition pad, Eamonn’s finger glowing as the thing rumbled to life.
“He won’t know about us unless you want him to,” Eamonn told Jonathan as they backed out of the driveway and onto the darkening road.
“Thank you,” Jonathan said back, though the words were lost under the growl of the engine.
This wasn’t the first thing Timeica ever remembers, because even her earliest memories have Wyatt in them, him having preceded her by almost six years. But her first memory of being alone, not lonely, just alone, was in a backyard, on the edge of a forest. Night, just fallen, had turned the whole world sapphire, and there must’ve been little to no light pollution, because the stars could easily be counted and the moon cast its own guiding light over the patch of grass on which she sat.
She had the soles of her feet pressed against each other. She couldn’t remember if she was wearing shoes or not, but the wetness beneath her ass chilled itself into indelibility. The place wasn’t recognizably Chicago. But she always attached the place to what Chicago meant, made it the second entry in the dictionary’s definition of Chicago. It always seemed to be nighttime in the memory, even as she knew she had wandered that forest during the day. Maybe it was the furtiveness of it, the transgression that wandering entailed, that unheeding of Mama’s “get back here” and “Heaven help me if I find you” and “where’s Wyatt” that cast night over every remembrance of the forest and her promenades therein.
It could have been forest anywhere. Not just Chicago, but all throughout that line in the Midwest that she and Wyatt had followed when lung rot had gotten Mama and they’d lost their last reason to stay. At first, Wyatt would hound Timeica for her wandering like she didn’t already know about the white Marauders that would kidnap you in your sleep and kill you or sell you to some place you could never come back from and the cannibals and the mechs and the sheriffs and the low-grade war between and among them on those gray swathes of former neighborhood. But everywhere they stopped, outside of every domed city, was some vestige of forest.
