He unpacked a cigarette, turned it over in his hand, then flicked it on and smoked. Halfway through the second drag, the head rush hit, a lightness that seemed to spin him into the sky. When the cigarette was about three-quarters down, he simply sat and watched the smoke rise and branch from the tip like a tree blooming before his eyes. The curling wisps, the rhythm of his arm’s movement, the vertigo, the impetus to sit outside. This was it. This was the thing waiting for Jonathan every morning when he woke up. This calm. This rightness.
Jonathan’s first month back on Earth was by turns moody and decadent. Words and the whistling of the wind sang to him in not-ballads, purring, cantillating, confessing the psychic toll of millennial hedonism. But the fog and falsettos that settled over the empty and silent landscape in the autumn mornings would break his heart every time he was awake to see it. The others moved about him in slow tempos and moaned echoes; time passed as a song. The evening’s sybaritic intemperance would turn the block of houses, the makeshift neighborhood, into an existential wasteland with he and Eamonn and the recumbent, intoxicated, zombified women who kept them and their drugs company all waiting for Godot.
Someone had spray-painted “xo” in radiation-tag on each of the houses. An emoticon for a kiss and a hug. Or shorthand for the ecstasy and oxycodone they guzzled every night. And all the while, one question threaded itself around Jonathan’s thoughts: Would David enjoy it here?
The two of them, Jonathan and Eamonn, walked the neighborhood as red lit the landscape and the leaves fell from tree branches in shades of rose and orange.
“Find one you like and figure out who owns it,” Eamonn told him.
“How much did you pay for yours?” The leaves disintegrated beneath their unlaced boots.
Eamonn stuffed his hands into his pockets, hiked his shoulders up against a breeze that wasn’t there. “About three thousand.” His lumberjack flannel put him in relief against the autumn. “Place’d been abandoned for a couple years. Belonged to some woman. Bought it from her son. And when I got there, I went upstairs and all her stuff was still there. Furniture, family pictures. A bunch of knickknacks and old kids’ toys in a steamer trunk. There were a couple of ’em actually. Steamer trunks. Didn’t feel right opening ’em. And a couple of ’em were rusted shut, so I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to. She even had this picture of some senator. First Black U.S. senator from Connecticut or something. Had it facing this picture of white Jesus so that it looked like the guy was praying to him. The way the light fell through the rafters, that’s what it looked like.”
“How was the place fixed up?”
“Oh, you mean, like, electricity?”
Jonathan nodded.
“Had to light half the place with oil lamps.”
They rounded a corner.
“Anybody else live in the area?”
“All the natives moved out a long time ago. Shit, the place is mostly scrub at his point. The few houses there are, they’re there more out of defiance than anything else. Natural laws say they’re supposed to have crumbled by now, but damn the natural laws, right? Whole place has turned from city to country.” He brought up a holo that showed the neighborhood from above, then swooped down to focus on a few neighborhood blocks. The only house nearby where the green silhouette indicated Eamonn’s was a cinderblock project house. “Yale School of Architecture used to do this thing where a bunch of the architecture students would compete to build an affordable housing unit for the community.” He snickered, then the cerulean holo blinked into nothingness.
They now walked by staggered rows of thick-trunked trees with dumped boats and hot tubs where their roots rose like tumors or varicose veins through the ground. Railroad tiles lay stacked like grave markers where houses used to be. A young couple necked in one of the abandoned boats.
When they could no longer hear the lovemaking, Eamonn leaned in to Jonathan. “Guy was killed in that boat not too far back.” He shrugged again, one of those protection-from-the-cold shrugs. “Fuck it, right?”
The quieter nights would see them climbing the abandoned air towers, scaling the heights of the air-filtration stations, and, Jonathan having succeeded at not falling through a crumbling roof, they would sit or lie and smoke while they made a makeshift graveyard of their emptied beer cans.
Eamonn, on their first night, pointed out the five tallest buildings. Jonathan felt it was some sort of rite of passage. If you’re going to come here, know your place. Everyone who lives in a neighborhood belongs to it. You can’t opt out. Not unless you leave.
There was the Connecticut Financial Center, the building at 360 State Street, the Knights of Columbus Building that had been moved closer to Union Station, the Kline Biology Tower, and the Crown Towers, and, pretty soon after, they took to identifying the lesser artifacts dotting the city: the cathedrals, the schools, the gated courtyards of Yale’s residential colleges. The Ivy Quarter’s Gothic architecture, choked with massive vines that wound their way through windows and around walls, made the place feel all the more haunted. Whatever noise was made here, it was only quiet licentiousness that wrestled in the hammocks strung up there or lay in the grass or necked in the hallways or shot up under the arches. That area of town still glowed blue under the protective Dome of a radiation shield. A gauzy, beryl frontier fantasy so close as to be touched.
Linc fished a pack of Newports out of his shirt pocket and lit one up. Bugs, his hands a little less sure, followed suit. Sydney was up ahead, legs hanging through the bars of the oxidized railing. She’d shown up not long ago at a work site, no hammer, no nothing except for her beat-up Converses. And Linc hadn’t heard her say a word, but saw the red tint to her hair and its wolfish shape and saw the way the others folded around her, welcomed her, so a part of him called what they were doing now his duty. Showing her around. Helping her get settled.
From East Rock, a ridge grown craggy with poisoned air and sunrays devoid of nutrition, they watched the skyline. Smoke from dumpsters columned into the air, leaned and pitched with the wind. Cracks spread like thick-knuckled fingers through Orange Street, turning the bike lane into a makeshift mountain trail.
The university at the center of the Ivy Quarter jutted like a middle finger amongst the glass-and-steel high-rises, made orange by the sunrise and the venom in the air. The whole place looked contaminated, but Linc appreciated how quiet that made it.
Somewhere in the distance, a shuttle shot off into space.
“Whatchu think it was like for the first nigga in space?” Bugs asked. “Or, like, Mars. First nigga on Mars.”
Linc smoked. “Couldn’t be me.” He didn’t want to talk too much in front of her. Maybe if he could maintain the mystery of himself, he could get her to ask about him, to want to know him, but if he gave too much of himself away too quickly, she’d lose interest. And suddenly Linc realized that he liked her. “I wouldn’t wanna be the first nigga on Mars,” he said and hoped he could leave it at that.
“What you mean?”
He felt churlish, but he couldn’t leave Bugs hanging, and this was what it felt like to be an older brother. When he felt himself glaring at Sydney’s back, he caught himself. Then sighed and hoped Bugs heard the resignation in it. Look what I’m givin’ up for your sake. “Well, like, say it’s me and a bunch of white people. And I’m the only nigga on the spaceship. And we’re on our way to Mars. Soon as you leave Earth, however y’all really feel about each other, all bets are off. So we could get to Mars, and they just be like—” He paused for dramatic effect. “—‘nigger.’”
Bugs detonated instantly with laughter. The little kid fell onto his side, clutching his belly, and nearly rolled right off the cliff. He laughed so hard Linc found himself chuckling as well.
“Train with these people for five years, you get up there and the nigga just goes … ‘we doin’ slavery again.’”
Bugs squeaked and started sounding like a goose honking in between bouts of breathlessness. “And you’re like ‘but I met your kids.’”
“‘Who you gon’ tell? The judge? Ain’t no judge up here, bitch.’”
“‘Are y’all seriously gon’ enslave me?’”
“‘Ain’t no law says we can’t. Ain’t no Constitution. Go terraform, bitch.’”
Any words Bugs might’ve had got choked in his throat. Finally, he managed, “‘But you can’t be racist in space!’”
“‘Who said? Who said we can’t be racist in space? What’re you gonna do about it?’”
“‘Nigger.’”
Linc gave in and started laughing as hard as Bugs, not caring who heard or what animals or birds they might’ve woken up, not caring about how they might have profaned the sunset or maybe ruined the little bit of quiet Sydney had come up here expecting to catch with them. He laughed until his mind went empty and when he was finally upright and had wiped enough tears from his eyes, he saw that her shoulders were shaking too. Fully bent over the railing, laughing so hard she needed the metal to hold her up.
Bugs was still wheezing some residual chuckles when Sydney sidled up next to Linc.
“Whatchu know about space?” she said, lifting the Newport from his fingers and taking a slow drag.
Linc saw her and wondered what this would have been like without this new girl next to him on these rocks. He and Bugs probably would’ve just smoked and joked about being left behind and would have tried not to sound too mournful about their almost-futures, their never-futures. They probably would’ve performed that pain-masking they saw on the site, men hurting and lying, hurting and joking about it, hurting and hiding it by hitting someone. And it would’ve spurred Linc to thinking about Ace being put out on the street like he was and about God making you capable of wanting something you could never have and about precious things falling apart for no reason because that’s what they did. But Sydney was next to him and Bugs was still laughing, and right now felt precious.
