by Andrew Post
Okay, all right, I’ll admit that was a bit dramatic.
It wouldn’t be good-bye forever. We’d see Alan again.
He found the note under his pillow, read it, learned about Darya’s love. Darya would even move out one day to live with him and help on his family’s ranch in South Dakota. They’d have babies I’d never meet, have a backyard wedding with loads of wildflowers and a live band—a lavish affair for a post-A world. I’d see it but only in my imagination, building it all out of descriptions in my sister’s e-mails. I’d never see either of them again after that. So I guess a good-bye meaning forever that morning we left the gym would’ve been appropriate. He’d be what would take my sister away.
Couldn’t blame him. She was beautiful, funny, everything you’d want in someone if you don’t mind the occasional emotional meltdown. But I still resented him for his awful timing.
We’d gone years on the rig without any major complications. And then Dad and I found the machine. Things went downhill from there. Quick. And then the sucker punch to top it all off: Alan came to sweep Darya away when we were at our worst. Mom was gone, Dad was . . . out of it, and . . . I can’t right now. Maybe later I’ll tell you about all that.
Anyway, it’s all I was thinking about, after eleven years on the oil rig, the day I was to head to Duluth’s shore to meet Thadius for the first time. It was quiet. It had always been quiet on the rig. But now, completely alone, it was even worse. Even the low rumbling of the microrefinery deep inside the rig or the lapping of the water against the cement legs sounded muffled, remote.
I tried not to hear Mom saying, “It’ll all be okay,” within every metallic creak, or my father crying, “I’m sorry,” in each shrill seagull call.
Standing on the helipad we’d turned into a garden, I worked the crank to lower my rowboat. Once I heard it slapped against the water below, I took up my crutches and wasted no time heading downstairs.
I hadn’t been on land since the day we used Duluth’s port to head out to the rig. A mixture of eagerness and fear made me light-headed and floated my eyeballs. I had to go. Even if I didn’t have an appointment to keep, it’d be nice to get away from this place for a while, go somewhere new. A lot had happened here, not all of it good.
For a flash, the excitement overpowered fear, and I thought about how I was heading toward land, actual solid land. Cut off from it for years by a mile of water, I’d watched through binoculars as the city slowly regained some semblance of working order. Initially, only firelight, then brighter and more scattered when someone got the electricity going again. Multicolored twinkle lights, then a few houses lit up here and there. Only after lampposts and signage came back did Duluth look like a town again. One day my tablet made a little deet sound; it’d found a connection. That’s when I knew things were really on their way to being better. I wouldn’t know for sure until years after that, since Dad wasn’t convinced it was okay to leave. But, with him gone—sorry, again, I promise I’ll fill in that part later but not now—it was up to me whether to determine if “those people,” the solid-landers, were safe or not.
I tightened my backpack straps, patted myself down to make sure I had all I’d need, and unhooked the chain from my rowboat. Staring at the empty fiberglass boat bobbing in the water, I shifted from one crutch to the other, lost in thought.
Should’ve left sooner. I was supposed to have been there like eight freakin’ months ago. Before that, I’d kept in close contact with the man I knew only as Mosaic Face, but he’d stopped responding. He didn’t ask what was holding me up, nor did I offer an explanation. Last thing he sent was an instant message: Just get there when you can.
Eight months ago.
It was like everything bad was sitting behind a floodgate, churning. Hitting send on my first message to Mosaic Face was the lever to release it all. He’d replied that my answer to his little quiz was right—the two vases were made using a cauldron—and if I had a cauldron, I was a shoo-in to the fight. He asked where I was. To protect myself, I gave the vague response of simply the Midwest. Mosaic Face, more forthcoming with his personal details, said he was in Pittsburgh. There’d be no way for us to meet up—traveling so far was too risky—so he suggested an alternative. I should go to Duluth, Minnesota, and speak to a man who called himself the Fabulous Thadius Thumb, a close friend of his and another member of the fight. I didn’t say how easy it would for me to get there. To throw him off my trail—needlessly, as it turned out—I said I’d begin my journey when I could. I could see Duluth. It was right there. And now, with each pull on the ores, it was getting closer over my shoulder.
I checked the revolver—the same I’d stolen off the Sassafras before Dad could find it and use it on himself. Six bullets. That’s all I had for it, and all of them were slotted in. I hoped to not need even one during my trip on land. I switched the safety back on and tucked it into the front of my belt, hidden under my flannel shirt.
Scooting along one stroke at a time, I carefully steered around the mines. Dad had made a line of them and sunk them in a circle around the rig with some home brew dynamite and old propane tanks. I was glad memory served me, and I knew right where to sneak through and avoid blowing myself up.
It was a relief to get away from the rig, even if just for the day, but my sense of security rapidly shifted into a quiet panic as I gained distance. I felt like I was somehow magnetized to the place. One stroke, then another; that’s all I could do. I rowed on, holding on to my reason for going: I had an appointment to keep on land. Maybe it was because I’d spent so much time on the rig, eleven years without a single minute spent anywhere else in that entire time.
For a moment there—maybe you’ve experienced this too while on a larger body of water—it felt like I was sitting still and the rig was moving away. It was tough to shake and a little unnerving. Imagine if it weren’t you leaving home but your home leaving you.
Row. Row. I watched the rig shrink. That big sign Dad had put up a while ago came into view. In tall, crooked black letters: Need Help. Thing was, none of us had been sick when he’d put the sign up. As he drew the letters onto the huge boat tarp, his explanation was simple. “You put up a sign that says stay away, people will do just the opposite. You put up a sign begging for help, people will practically kill themselves trying to avoid you.” It worked. Sometimes I wonder, though, if it jinxed us.
The crunch of the rowboat pushing onto the sand let me know I’d arrived.
There was a lot of activity on the waterfront, as there always was, with people pulling in their catches. Funny seeing it in person, standing in the same sand with them. I noticed they all ran Geiger counters over the full nets. Needle-in-a-haystack-style, they’d wiggle their hands down through the slick, thrashing fish until they found the eradiated one making the device click and chuck it back.
I tried to play it cool, like, No, I’m not on land for the first time in over a decade—why? I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to hug everyone. You’re people, real people. Not on a video screen, recorded twenty years ago and most likely dead in real life, but here—right here. Smelly and skinny but still here, right here, and so am I, and isn’t that great?
I resisted.
On my crutches, and with some difficulty, I crossed the beach to the cement stairs with the rusty railing leading up to the boardwalk.
“Need a hand with that?” someone asked.
I hadn’t noticed them at the top of the seagull-crap-dotted stairs; I was too busy making sure my feet, at the end of my bound legs, cleared each riser. He was youngish, with a messy head of dark hair and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, clean and new-looking boots, and a long red scarf wrapped around his neck four or five times. Strange choices when it was so hot out.
“No, thanks. I got it.”
When I reached the top, he didn’t start down or turn away.
“You new in town?” His voice was probably a perfectly normal voice, but still it sounded alien to me.
“Just out for a walk.” Trus
t no one had been the postscript to one of Mosaic Face’s e-mails.
“That your boat down there? I watched you coming in.”
You were watching me? Shit. Had he seen me coming from the rig? “Yeah, that’s my boat,” I said pleasantly, indicating with a nod the overturned green rowboat, nestled among the driftwood and other lake debris on the beach. “Just out checking the lift bridge.” I freed one hand from a crutch to point.
The Aerial Lift Bridge was locked in the up position, like a gate whose keepers had given up on manning the thing. Go ahead, it seemed to say. Anything is permissible here now.
“Need some help getting somewhere?” he asked.
“I’m all right. Just off to see a friend. Speaking of which, I’m late. Sorry.” Not giving him time to respond, I clack-thumped on. I half expected him to follow me, but a block up, I turned around and he was gone.
The people on the boardwalk who didn’t have a job as a boatwright or a fisherman—that is, most of them—looked hopelessly lost. Not like tourists, not in gob-smacked awe with the cargo shorts and cameras of pre-A vacationers but dirty and hungry-eyed. Like they had come here to find something and only been given a sketchy description of what to seek, and they were determined to track it down, even if it killed them . . . or meant killing someone else.
I avoided those sunburnt men and women shuffling up and down the boardwalk on toothpick legs, their sunken eyes brimming with questions. They scared me a little. Besides, I certainly had no answers for them.
Still, one got brave and approached me. “Spare something?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Please.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. I don’t have anything.”
He noticed my crutches. He cupped a hand over his mouth, took a step back, practically hopping. “You a nuke baby?”
I tried explaining radiation had nothing to do with my condition, but he shuffled off, waving his hands about his face as if the radiation he imagined I was dripping with could be scattered like a cloud of mayflies.
No one else paid me any mind. I knew how I looked. A tightly rationed diet had turned my lush hair, once red as a healthy person’s blood, to the color of canned cheese, with the texture of bleach-soaked wool. My chipmunk cheeks had deflated, fell in like old barns. The guy who’d tried me for a handout must’ve had bad eyes. Everyone else would glance at me and then return their gazes to whatever spot on the ground they were trying to coax answers out of. Just another one of us.
Up and down the street, most buildings were still standing. Old brick-and-mortar style, a majority were storefronts with apartments above. A lot of the shops were closed but continued to wear their signage, now faded. A few had been converted into homes. What was once a cell phone store was now the shop of a seamstress, her sign painted over the old.
Duluth was heavy with an inescapable reek. Stomach-turning sewer stink dovetailed with that of a tire fire somewhere nearby.
A man pushed a shopping cart, barely visible under a mountain of odds and ends held fast by twine. He made me think of a backward snail. Despite being a leathery skeleton with hair down to his waist, he was making better time than me.
Cars squeaked by, their wheels patched with leather and melted raincoats, their hoods and trunk lids equipped with solar panels. Odd, being in a city and not smelling exhaust, but the looks of those people packed into the rust buckets were just as toxic. This wasn’t like camping, as Dad’s friends thought it’d be. Sure, no one was in debt anymore, but no one had a matching set of shoes either.
I was a fish out of water. A rig girl out of her rig. I was unaccustomed to so much open, flat space or the sound of my feet and crutches on cement and asphalt instead of metal.
I’d memorized the town map. I’d found it online and poured over it for months. I didn’t have to ask for directions to Hillside Park, the nearest landmark to the place this Thadius ran, the Siren House. Four blocks up from where I now was.
Having the Internet at all had been a blessing.
When we’d moved out of our house after the A, I’d brought my Hello Kitty tablet, and I could download games and visit my beloved sites and blogs. Even though there was no new content, their availability, when cooperative, was all that mattered. A crumb of normalcy. Every time that 404 Cannot connect thing popped up, I felt sad. Those people were gone. Or, I hoped, they were fine and it was just their computers that’d met their end.
When we’d moved to the rig and the connectivity got really shoddy, my sister and I had to get creative with entertaining ourselves. I’d brought some dolls, but Darya was a little too old for it. When she’d humor me and play, every story line involved a girl named Darya and her long-lost love, Alan. I gave up.
Luckily, we found a hard drive loaded with movies and TV shows and music. Finding it came at a good time; we were starting to get pretty sick of the stuff we’d brought from home. The drive’s previous owner had been a trendoid, it was plain to see, because the entire collection was from the ’90s. My parents liked that, of course. Darya and I watched some, balked at others, scoffed at most. But after a while, our parents’ tastes rubbed off on us—especially me taking to alt rock, Dad’s bread and butter. Maybe I’d made myself start to like it. Something to have in common with him. Either way, I absorbed so much of it that before long I could keep up with Dad when he started dropping names. He seemed to enjoy that, when I knew I was able to correct him on Michael Stipe not being the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. “Don’t you mean Billy Corgan?” I’d said, “Easy mistake them both being bald, I guess.” And Dad just looked at me this funny way. Smiling but with his head slightly tilted. A small smile grew, mostly hidden in that dense thicket of a beard. Well, look at you, it seemed to say, that look. It wasn’t like it was ever a question I wasn’t his daughter, but it wasn’t until that moment I truly felt I was. We shared something.
Another block up and the Siren House rose into view. It was hard to miss on a block with all the other businesses shuttered, but I think even if they were all open I’d still feel my eyes pulled to the Siren House first.
On the roof was a radio tower. Populated with standard antennae, various dishes, and long, flat, white tubes for receiving or sending cellular signals, it also swarmed with countless spiky pronged clusters, unlike any antennae I’d seen. So many of them too. Like flies on a dead seagull. These, Thadius would later tell me during a top-to-bottom tour of the place, were for sending holograph recordings. “Three thousand seventy-four subscribers at last count,” he’d later boast. “Of course, none of them would be able to see any of it if I hadn’t first figured out how to get us all back online.” It was him I had to thank for every time-waster game, every pirated Anne Rice e-book, every everything I’d used our post-A half-assed Internet for. He’d fixed it and charged nothing for its use.
I was stopped short when I came upon the Siren House. It wasn’t what I was expecting. With the marquee out front, it was clear it’d once been a theater. The entire front was painted over with white-capping waves and some kind of tentacle monster strangling a three-mast ship. The painted waves collided at the marquee’s front. In the center of the seafaring tableau, a ship’s busty figurehead was held fast with rivets and bungee cords. Stained from time and—I assumed—actual use, the siren was carved from dark wood. Her blank eyes stared toward Lake Superior. Shells, starfish, and flowing wisps of hair modestly covered her ample chest. Her arms were outstretched, inviting all. Siren House—the words twisted in blue neon below her—was a place for everyone.
Okay, here goes nothing. I took my first clack-thump across the street.
Inside, I found a big open lobby with dingy red carpet and a series of tables and mismatched chairs. The concession stands still advertised popcorn and drink, but the soda fountain looked like it hadn’t been glanced at in years. Instead, shelves had been nailed up behind the counter, and bottles of alcohol were lined up like the usual suspects. Some in bottles, but most were home-distilled, I guessed, with how the
y were in Mason jars with masking tape labels.
A shadowy room off to the side contained an array of old arcade cabinets and a set of pool tables. Most tables were empty. One man was keeping his table to the floor with his cheek, snoring next to an empty glass. A group of young men conspiratorially crouched in a circle. They were attempting to flip a stack of cardboard discs with what looked like a silver dollar. Music played, a song I recognized from the trendoid’s hard drive on the rig. It made the game they were playing snap into place; they were Pogs. Did the whole trendoid thing seriously survive the A?
I faced forward, examined the walls of the barroom lobby.
The interior had a paint job similar to the one outside—an overdone, and possibly deliberately cheesy, nautical theme. Lobster cages, striped buoys, ship’s wheels, sextants. Ceramic starfish were scattered along one wall, like a littered trail left on a beach by a kid with a hole in his basket. Countless figurines stood on the cash register, as if assembling for caroling. SpongeBob and Patrick were present. Of course. The prices on the chalkboard menu were in reds and greens. I supposed it was some kind of token system.
Dressed casually, mostly in jeans and tank tops or shirtless, the employees were hard to distinguish from the customers. With a rumble of wheels on hardwood, a blond woman in a tube top shot past on mismatched roller skates dispensing glasses, twirling, and shooting off in a new direction. “Sit wherever you want,” she said, zooming by.
I gathered my crutches together, propped them against the bar, and carefully angled myself onto an oyster-shaped stool seat.
It seemed I was the only one not wielding a pipe, cigar, or cigarette. I resisted a cough, not wanting to give myself away as a newcomer.
“What’ll it be?” a woman, a few years older than me, asked. Sparkly blue eye shadow, a severe crop with angled bangs. She was in a wheelchair, at eye-level with me.
“Uh, water. Please.”
Her bangs twitched each time she blinked. Her hair was a shade of blue that perfectly matched not only her eye shadow but the bottle of Sapphire Gin on the shelf behind her. She wore a sleeveless T-shirt and skinny jeans, all black. She made an endearing snaggletooth smile, reminding me of Jewel, one of my mom’s favorite singers.