by Megan Angelo
“Big wish!” someone burst out, mocking, and someone else hissed, “Shhh.”
“They are doing dangerous things, very dangerous things, these people,” the president went on. “Smashing windows and other terrible, terrible things. Rape. They don’t want to be protected against bad attacks, like the one Mexico did to us? They want a brand-new nation? They want to secede? Maybe I should let ’em. Revoke their citizenships. It’s treason, folks. Treason.”
Orla looked at Kyle. “But we don’t really want to secede,” she said, “do we?”
Kyle looked pale as he held his middle finger up to the blurry screen. “No, we’re just being symbolic,” he said. “Secession is impossible, anyway.” He slapped the side of his face lightly, as if to snap himself out of something. “And for the thousandth time,” he muttered at the president, “the Spill wasn’t Mexico. It was Russia.”
Orla shook her head. “Did you hear how he said ‘rape,’ just like, on its own?”
They went back to their rooms. They laughed about it. A few weeks later, the windowless buses began pulling in, beneath the decrepit Taj Mahal. Lines of people without luggage shuffled off them, blinking into the seaside sunlight. “We are so proud,” the president said on television the next day, “to say that we have done it. We are deporting thousands of illegals. We’re getting them out of America, folks. And now we’re going to build that wall—I always said we’d have a beautiful wall, didn’t I? We might be putting it in a different place than we thought we would, but it’s still going to be beautiful, I can guarantee that. And it won’t just keep out illegals. It’ll keep out traitors, too. The Atlantic City sissies, I call them. You know they’re scared of computers? The internet, our tremendous new internet—it scares them. They’re losers.”
All that Orla and anyone around her could tell from that speech was: the people who had come on the buses were undocumented immigrants. Kyle went out one day to ask questions and came back with a theory that turned out to be right. “The whole secession thing,” he told Orla, “nobody counted on that really happening. I mean—secession just doesn’t happen. Unless the government wants it to.” He went to the window and looked out at the view: a slice of dank bay, some golden marsh. “Do you know how hard it is to deport people by the thousands?” he said. “Very hard—if you’re sending them back to another country. But if you just ship them to Atlantic City and then make that another country—” He turned back to face her. “Then you’ve done it, haven’t you?”
Orla stared at him. It took her a moment. When she understood, she half rose out of her chair, urgently, not knowing where she meant to go or what she meant to do. She stayed like that, awkwardly, her legs beginning to burn, and said, “But what about us? Are we...?”
“Apparently, it’ll be like it was with Cuba,” Kyle said flatly. “We can’t go back home. They really are taking our citizenship. And the US won’t let anyone from the outside come in here.”
After the buses stopped bringing people, the construction trucks rolled in. Work on the wall around Atlantic City’s borders went on day and night. Orla and the rest of them watched as the arc of concrete went up, sealing them off from the rest of America. It went all along Atlantic City’s city limits and reached far out into the water on either side of the town. The beach that had always run uninterrupted up and down New Jersey’s coast now ended abruptly, at its southern point, in Ventnor, where one side of the wall was planted into the sand, just behind a tiki bar.
The kids in the old casinos were subdued and scared. But Orla felt the calmest she had in years. While Kyle slept through the sounds of construction, she kept herself awake to watch. She stayed up one night till dawn, feeling oddly choked up as the last bolts went in. The wall was just what she needed, she thought: a barrier to her doubts. Something to fix her firmly, and finally, in her place.
* * *
After that, there was nothing left to do but put together a life—a blessedly boring life filled with learning to cook with Kyle and helping to draw up zoning rules and making sure her sons’ water bottles had been washed by the time they had to leave for lacrosse.
She and Kyle got married on the beach, like everyone else. This was a common joke around Atlantis: “We’re doing a beach wedding!” There were no other options. And there were no families, few friends. So they all went to each other’s weddings, merrily filling out the crowd. After she and Kyle said their vows, Orla stood receiving her guests, learning some of their names for the first time.
She and Kyle were thirty-five then, and eager for children. They moved out of the Revel and found a real house off the boardwalk, on Florida Avenue. The house was a white-brick two-story with mud-brown trim, a building that had been abandoned for years next to a strip club that had been abandoned for years. A black curved awning with a fuchsia silhouette of a naked dancer still hung next door. Their front door opened into a narrow hallway. There were three small bedrooms stacked at the front, a tiny living room in the middle, and a large, boxy kitchen in the rear with a slim wooden screen door that closed into its frame with loud slaps. It would be the soundtrack to the next two decades of Orla’s life, the slap of that door. She knew what it sounded like from every spot in the house—behind her as she walked in, from the living room, where she sat waiting for Kyle to come home from work, from their bedroom, late at night, when the boys were teenagers who both ignored the rules, who didn’t fear their parents enough to even muffle the sounds of them breaking curfew.
The boys. She was thirty-six when she had Frank, thirty-nine when she had Gary. They wanted to give them names no one in Atlantis ever heard anymore.
The boys arrived with such ease, compared to Marlow, that the experiences seemed completely separate from each other. “Are you going to attempt a VBAC?” the obstetrician had asked at a late-term appointment with Frank. After the doctor explained what it was, Kyle turned to Orla, confused. “After cesarean?” he said. “What cesarean?” He claimed to have never noticed her scar, and she believed him. Once an angry purple scrawl, it had faded, over the years, to a whisper of shine and white.
Kyle took it fine. Of course he did. He was Kyle. He was buoyant, with a son on the way. He held her hand as she spoke. He called Danny a world-class asshole, Floss and Aston animals. Orla softened the part where she sneaked Marlow out. She and Kyle never talked of it again.
She didn’t become a writer, and she didn’t particularly mind. In the evenings, she sometimes looked around the table, at Kyle and Frank and Gary, all of them nibbling their different dinners, and thought: I am truly nothing special, no one but his wife and their mother and a halfway decent citizen. And they like me. They love me.
Still, she needed something else. When Gary started kindergarten, Orla petitioned to open the store. Their little economy, which ran on the old plastic gambling chips that had become Atlantis’s currency, was still so fragile that no one launched a business without group input. But everyone liked Orla’s idea right away. They had been without their phones for a decade, and the idea of a store full of books—it was decadent. America wouldn’t trade with them, but Europe didn’t mind. Twice a month, a cargo barge out of the UK dropped anchor near the old Bally’s and sent in parcels from the outside world. (This was why Orla’s sons, who lived within view of the Garden State Parkway, grew up wearing Arsenal jerseys and eating Cadbury bars.)
So Orla made some calls, on a landline phone, from the business center at the Golden Nugget. She placed orders with a few publishers. She supplemented the shipments, at first, with books collected from neighbors who had brought a few along in the beginning and had read them too many times since. Orla stood on a ladder before the strip club awning next door and modified the dancer. She painted her a high-necked red dress and a pair of thick black glasses. She drew a book in the hand the woman had thrust over her head. Atlantic Books, she printed, beneath the high-heeled feet.
* * *
One day, she s
aw a new entry among the squashed lines of a distributor’s catalog: a magazine called Constellation Weekly. Orla knew about Constellation, the all-celebrity town where the people were always on camera. It took shape just after she came to Atlantis, in 2022, and Orla remembered what she had thought the first time she ever heard about it: Floss would do anything to get in there.
She held her finger over the item number for Constellation Weekly and, with her other hand, picked up the phone.
“Magazines?” her sales rep said. “I can look into it. But I thought you all didn’t use technology there.”
“We don’t,” Orla said. “I mean the print editions.”
“The print editions?” The woman sputtered. “Orla. Between paying for print, and sourcing them through the UK, do you know how expensive that would be?”
“I’m aware,” Orla said. “I thought I’d start with just one title. Constellation Weekly.”
“A weekly, no less.” Her contact sighed. “I feel compelled to tell you: you won’t make your money back on this. How many copies?” Orla heard the clicking of fingers on a keyboard. She missed that sound, still. And she missed, sometimes, the power she had felt when she was young, with a phone in her hand, pretending. Pretending Floss was famous, pretending Danny was important, pretending her skin glowed golden tan with the help of a button on Instagram. Pretending followers meant something. Once in a while, she still got phantom urges: to look down at something in her hand when she found herself alone at a table, to fix her face in a way that would work for a photograph taken at arm’s length, to conjure a stream of updates on how other people were doing. But every time she remembered her phone wasn’t there, she felt relieved, and free all over again. Like she’d been given more life to live.
“I’ll take the minimum number of copies,” she said. “Whatever it is.”
“I’ll get back to you with a price.”
“Don’t bother,” Orla said. “Just go ahead and place the order.”
So that was how she saw Marlow, in the magazines that cost her—it was insane—two hundred ten dollars a week. They came in every Friday. Orla would make herself save them until the store was empty. Then she would tear through them quickly, searching. Most weeks, Marlow wasn’t in them. But roughly every other month, she would find her. Sometimes, she even spotted Amadou, escorting Marlow to a restaurant or ballet class. It was an image so comforting that, the first time she saw it, she put her head down on the counter and sobbed.
Orla wondered what they had told Marlow, or what they would someday. She was a teenager, old enough to ask about her looks, not a trace of which seemed like Floss or Aston. Marlow had Orla’s hair, the rough near-curls. But otherwise, she looked like Danny, with her strong jaw and dark blue eyes. Orla loved the way those eyes looked back at the camera. Marlow always seemed to be peering, looking skeptically into the lens—as if to say, Who’s out there?
Orla would stroke the page and think, Me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Marlow, Orla & Floss
Atlantis
2051
In the last row of the restaurant’s basement locker room, there are the dry clothes the woman who led them here promised. The white button-down shirt is too small, and the black nylon skirt is too big, but she pulls them on, along with the black, tall boots that fit perfectly. When she climbs a flight of stairs and exits beneath the door marked for staff, she looks like anyone else who has just finished working the breakfast shift.
The door takes her into a lobby. The lobby empties into a huge room where children are sitting on stools before old, unlit slot machines with levers on the side. Plywood squares have been nailed down over their surfaces. The children set their pens and notebooks on them. They swivel to face their teacher, who paces the aisle’s loud carpet.
Marlow spots the sea across the room and walks toward the doors, then through them, scattering the pigeons outside who stab at a fallen muffin. She steps onto the boardwalk and waits for a group of men with sandals and briefcases, headed toward the green glass tower on the pier, to pass. Then she crosses to the metal railing and looks out at the Atlantic. The morning is stiff and cold, the sky above the water so blue that Marlow can’t look right at it. She turns her back on the surf and watches people, trying to decide who to ask about Orla. She needs someone who won’t run to the closest cop—their uniforms are mint green, the same color as the coast guard boats, and make her think of the Statue—if they suspect her of crossing illegally. She rules out the man with the wraparound sunglasses and fiercely angular haircut. The woman jogging toward her looks promising at first, but Marlow doesn’t trust her exercise clothing, which is frighteningly coordinated. She is also—Marlow can tell—swinging her ponytail on purpose. This seems like a bad sign.
The crowd on the boardwalk thins. All the people with anxious workday foreheads have filtered into the tower. The last straggling children have ducked inside the school, beneath the arm of a smiling monitor who swings the door open to greet them.
Marlow sees a woman coming out of the peach stucco building next door. A banner hangs above the building’s entrance: NEW UNITS, 55+. The woman hurries under it, still pulling on one sleeve of her sweater. Her hair is wet. As she jerks at her sleeve, her bag lets loose an eruption of books. The woman is wearing sunglasses, but Marlow can tell she is rolling her eyes, because she uses her whole face to do it, circling her chin west to east.
She is clearly running late, and Marlow knows the polite thing to do is not stop her. But she walks toward her anyway, because there is something about this woman that makes Marlow sure she isn’t the ratting type. The woman has long, defiant gray hair.
“Excuse me,” Marlow says when she reaches her. She kneels down and picks up two books.
The woman squints up at her. Slowly, she takes her sunglasses off.
“I just wondered if you could tell me—” Marlow starts, but the woman is on her feet now, staring. She doesn’t seem to notice when her bag falls again. She puts her hands on either side of Marlow’s face, pressing her thumbs so hard into Marlow’s cheeks that Marlow’s eyes prickle with tears. The woman pulls Marlow in and holds her. While Marlow is wondering how to react, the wind picks up behind her. It splits her hair at the back of her head and blows it forward, into the woman’s. She sees that, except for the color, their hair is exactly the same. She stands there, letting herself be held, letting her waves whip after Orla’s.
* * *
Orla looks up from where she squats on the boardwalk and sees her, drawn in black and gray against the brilliant sky. The world is so bright behind the girl that her face is mostly in shadow, but Orla doesn’t have to look twice.
She wants to laugh. It is Wednesday morning. She has dropped some books. She overslept. She didn’t dry her hair. She is still not used to this damn retirement complex Kyle loves so much, and so, on top of everything else, she took the wrong elevator—up, not down. There might be a line of people outside the shop—not to mention boxes. Wednesday is when most things come in.
This is how it happens? She wants to laugh.
But instead she stands, against her knees’ wishes, and reaches for the face she has seen in the magazine. She almost expects it to feel, when she puts her hands on it, like that silky paper. But Marlow’s skin is warm and soft, faintly beating like her heart is everywhere beneath it. She is all right. She is all right. She is all right.
* * *
Marlow sits down on the bench Orla points to. The hot sugared doughnuts came in a set of three, and Orla hands her two in the same motion with which she takes them out of their white bag, like she doesn’t have to think about how to share them.
“I can’t believe I just bumped into you,” Marlow keeps repeating, because she can’t. How she found Orla—it couldn’t have been better if it was scripted. “Something like that has never happened to me before,” she says. “It’s like...” She struggles to t
hink of the word she wants. She wishes, for a moment, that she had her device. It’s been gone long enough now that the marks it left have healed. She has a little bit of new skin.
Orla smiles. She tries to be helpful. “Fate?” she says. “Destiny?”
“No.” Marlow has the word. It makes her cry. “A coincidence,” she says.
Orla seems to think about how to put it, what she says to Marlow next. Gently, she asks, “Does your mother know where you are?”
Marlow shrugs. She looks at Orla. She notices the way Orla’s skin crinkles softly around her mouth and eyes. The effect is so comforting, she almost climbs into her lap. Instead she swallows the last of her doughnut and says, “Do you think I should have a baby?”
Orla considers it, squinting. “Have you done everything else?”
Marlow pictures her wedding-day face, drab and peeling, in Times Square. She thinks of what everyone agrees on: she has always gone along. “No,” she says. “I don’t think I even know what everything else is yet.”
Orla leans forward. She takes Marlow’s wax paper out of her lap and brushes the crumbs off her skirt. “Having a baby is one of the best parts of life,” she says. “But still. It’s only one of them.”
* * *
This boardwalk, Floss thinks. Why would anyone, it’s like—how about a road, but shitty, and worse? She grasps her thigh with both hands and yanks her heel out of yet another groove.
A man with a surfboard (and a gut that makes it seem like a prop) balks when Floss says she is looking for Orla, that she has come here from California to find her. He shifts his weight and asks: “So you’re an alien?” Floss senses she should open her purse. She finds a pair of bills so old and soft, they seem on the verge of crumbling, and prays that these privacy freaks still like American cash. It works. The man holds out his meaty palm and tells her about a bookstore, points her down the boardwalk and says to get off at the third ramp. It almost makes Floss sad, how little money she has to give him. Some people don’t know how to live.