“When the ice melted and the rivers revolted and the Fuckwit world went under the seas,” Papa whispered through his weeping, “a great mob hacked Brighton Pier off of Brighton and strapped engines to it and set sail across the blue. They’ve been going ever since. They go around the world and around again, to the places where there’s still people, and trade their beauty for food and fuel. There’s a place on Brighton Pier where if you look just right, it’s like nothing ever drowned.”
A beautiful man wearing a hat of every color and several bells stepped up on a pedestal and held a long pale cone to his mouth. The mayor of Electric City embraced him with two meaty arms and asked his terrible, stupid, unforgivable question: “Have you seen dry land?”
And the beautiful man answered him: “With my own eyes.”
A roar went up like angels dying. I covered my ears. The mayor covered his mouth with his hands, speechless, weeping. The beautiful man patted him awkwardly on the back. Then he turned to us.
“Hello, Garbagetown!” he cried out, and his voice sounded like everyone’s most secret heart.
We screamed so loud every bird in Garbagetown fled to the heavens, and we clapped like mad, and some people fell onto the ground and buried their face in old batteries.
“My name is Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh and I am the Master of Brighton Pier! We will be performing Twelfth Night on the great stage tonight at seven o’clock, followed by The Duchess of Malfi at ten (which has werewolves) and a midnight acrobatic display! Come one, come all! Let Madame Limelight tell your FORTUNE! TEST your strength with the Hammer of the Witches! SEE the wonders of the Fuckwit World in our Memory Palace! Get letters and news from the LAST HUMAN OUTPOSTS around the globe! GASP at the citizens of Mutation Nation in the Freak Tent! Sample a FULL MINUTE of real television, still high definition after all these years! Concerts begin in the Crystal Courtyard in fifteen minutes! Our Peep Shows feature only the FINEST actresses reading aloud from GENUINE Fuckwit historical records! Garbagetown, we are here to DAZZLE you!”
A groan went up from the crowds like each Garbagetowner was just then bedding their own great lost love, and they heaved toward the lights, the colors, the horns and the voices, the silk and the electricity and the life floating down there, knotted to the edge of our little pile of trash.
Someone grabbed my hand and held me back while my parents, my twin, my world streamed away from me down to the Pier. No one looked back.
“Are you her?” said Goodnight Moon. He looked longer and leaner but not really older. He had on his tie.
“Yes,” I said, and nothing was different than it had been when I got my name, except now neither of us had masks and our kisses weren’t like gentle elephants but like a boy and a girl, and I forgot all about my strength and my fortune and the wonderful wheel of light turning around and around and going nowhere.
9
TERRORWHORE
ACTORS ARE LIARS. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the Pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is We can get the old world back again.
My door said TERRORWHORE this morning. I looked after my potato plants and my hibiscus and thought about whether or not I would ever get to have sex again. Seemed unlikely. Big Bargains concurred.
Goodnight Moon and I lost our virginities in the Peep Show tent while a lady in green fishnet stockings and a lavender garter read to us from the dinner menu of the Dorchester Hotel circa 2005.
“Whole Berkshire roasted chicken stuffed with black truffles, walnuts, duck confit, and dauphinoise potatoes,” the lady purred. Goodnight Moon devoured my throat with kisses, bites, need. “Drizzled with a balsamic reduction and rosemary honey.”
“What’s honey?” I gasped. We could see her but she couldn’t see us, which was for the best. The glass in the window only went one way.
“Beats me, kid.” She shrugged, recrossing her legs the other way. “Something you drizzle.” She went on. “Sticky toffee pudding with lashings of cream and salted caramel, passionfruit soufflé topped with orbs of pistachio ice cream…”
Goodnight Moon smelled just as I remembered. Scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope, and when he was inside me it was like hearing my name for the first time. I couldn’t escape the me-ness of it, the us-ness of it, the sound and the shape of ourselves turning into our future.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he whispered into my breast. “I can’t believe this is us.”
The lady’s voice drifted over my head. “Lamb cutlets on a bed of spiced butternut squash, wilted greens, and delicate hand-harvested mushrooms served with goat cheese in clouds of pastry…”
Goodnight Moon kissed my hair, my ears, my eyelids. “And now that the land’s come back, Electric City’s gonna save us all. We can go home together, you and me, and build a house, and we’ll have a candle in every window so you always feel at home…”
The Dorchester dinner menu stopped abruptly. The lady dropped to her fishnetted knees and peered at us through the glass, her brilliant glossy red hair tumbling down, her spangled eyes searching for us beyond the glass.
“Whoa, sweetie, slow down,” she said. “You’re liable to scare a girl off that way.”
All I could see in the world was Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes and the sweat drying on his brown chest. Brown like the earth and all its promises. “I don’t care,” he said. “You scared, Tetley?” I shook my head. “Nothing can scare us now. Emperor Shakespeare said he’s seen land, real dry land, and we have a plan and we’re gonna get everything back again and be fat happy Fuckwits like we were always supposed to be.”
The Peep Show girl’s glittering eyes filled up with tears. She put her hand on the glass. “Oh … oh, baby … that’s just something we say. We always say it. To everyone. It’s our best show. Gives people hope, you know? But there’s nothing out there, sugar. Nothing but ocean and more ocean and a handful of drifty lifeboat cities like yours circling the world like horses on a broken-down carousel. Nothing but blue.”
10
WE ARE SO LUCKY
IT WOULD BE nice for me if you could just say you understand. I want to hear that just once. Goodnight Moon didn’t. He didn’t believe her and he didn’t believe me and he sold me out in the end in spite of gas masks and kissing and Madeline Brix and the man crooning in our ears that he was happy, because all he could hear was Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh singing out his big lie. RESURRECTION! REDEMPTION! REVIVIFICATION! LAND HO!
“No, because, see,” my sweetheart wept on the boardwalk while the wheel spun dizzily behind his head like an electric candy crown, “we have a plan. We’ve worked so hard. It has to happen. The mayor said as soon as we had news of dry land, the minute we knew, we’d turn it on and we’d get there first and the continents would be ours, Garbagetowners, we’d inherit the Earth. He’s gonna tell everyone when the Pier leaves. At the farewell party.”
“Turn what on?”
Resurrection. Redemption. Renovation. All those years behind the fence Electric City had been so busy. Disassembling all those engines they’d hoarded so they could make a bigger one, the biggest one. Pooling fuel in great vast stills. Practicing ignition sequences. Carving up a countryside they’d never even seen between the brightboys and brightgirls, and we could have some, too, if we were good.
“You want to turn Garbagetown into a Misery Boat,” I told him. “So we can just steam on ahead into nothing and go mad and use up in one hot minute all the gas and batteries that could keep us happy in mixtapes for another century here.”
“The Emperor said—”
“He said his name was Duke Orsino of Illyria, too. And then Roderigo when they did the werewolf play. Do you believe that? If they’d found land, don’t you think they’d have stayed there?”
But he couldn’t hear me. Neither could M
aruchan when I tried to tell him the truth in the Peep Show. All they could see was green. Green leafy trees and green grass and green ivy in some park that was lying at the bottom of the sea. We dreamed different dreams now, my brother and I, and all my dreams were burning.
Say you understand. I had to. I’m not a nihilist or a murdercunt or a terrorwhore. They were gonna use up every last drop of Garbagetown’s power to go nowhere and do nothing, and instead of measuring out teaspoons of good, honest gas, so that it lasts and we last all together, no single thing on the patch would ever turn on again, and we’d go dark, really dark, forever. Dark like the bottom of a hole. They had no right. They don’t understand. This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.
I waited until Brighton Pier cast off, headed to the next rickety harbor of floating foolboats, filled with players and horns and glittering wheels and Dorchester menus and fresh mountains of letters we wouldn’t read the answers to for another twenty years. I waited until everyone was sleeping so nobody would get hurt except the awful engine growling and panting to deliver us into the dark salt nothing of an empty hellpromise.
It isn’t hard to build a bomb in Electric City. It’s all just lying around behind that fence where a boy held my hand for the first time. All you need is a match.
11
WHAT YOU CAME FOR
IT’S SUCH A beautiful day out. My hibiscus is just gigantic, red as the hair on a peep show dancer. If you want to wait, Big Bargains will be round later for her afternoon nap. Grape Crush usually brings a herring by in the evening. But I understand if you’ve got other places to be.
It’s okay. You can hit me now. If you want to. It’s what you came for. I barely feel it anymore.
Thank you for my instruction.
Part II
The Past Is Red
1
THE ALL NEW 3D MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL EXPERIENCE OF WESTERN DECADENCE
MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most beloved girl in Garbagetown.
I am twenty-nine years old. Everything is the same and everything is different, and I suppose that is what it means to stay alive this long. I live with my very best friends on a janky old pontoon boat called No Pain No Gain. Instead of cleats it has little steel figures of muscly men flexing their protein-stuffed arms and their grumpy cartoon frowns. There’s a forty-meter rope lashed around one of them that keeps me moored to the edge of Port Cartridge. I do not often try to approach the shore. If I set one foot on the beach, I’m fair game. People could do anything they want to me and I couldn’t stop them. That’s the law. It’s an old law by now. Almost just a habit. Some days I think they’ve probably all forgotten. Some days I smarten up and stay right where I am.
I don’t blame them. I’m not angry. Everyone uses my name for a swear word but it’s so completely fine. They don’t know I’m beloved. But I know and that’s plenty.
I used to have an elephant seal cub named Big Bargains. Now I have a great big spotted seal-loaf who rarely wanders far from my portside bow these days. She thinks I am a gentleman-seal, which is quite awkward for me sometimes. But she thinks that because she runs on very ancient programming that tells her so, and you can’t argue with eight hundred pounds of old-fashioned worldview. My gannet bird, Grape Crush, died a long time ago. He never thought I was a lady gannet. Just a fish-and-snuggles dispensing machine with nice eyes. We still celebrate his birthday, which is October third if you enjoy knowing small unimportant things like that. His baby birds come to visit sometimes. You can always tell because they have the same single black tail feather he did, and in the same spot, and also they all have the same clubby deformed foot that can’t foot. Gannet birds don’t live as long as seals, so you can’t expect to keep them both. That’s just math. I’m only upset about math on thirds of October.
I used to be married, but I’m not anymore. Everything else is coming along nicely around here. My hibiscus grows on a patch of kelp-derived dirt analogue on the rain awning that covers the aft cockpit of my boat. I also grow snap peas, kale, and passionfruit up there. I have a little moringa tree coming along in a 15-gallon paint bucket sandwiched between the pilot’s wheel and the blue vinyl jump seats. It’s twisted and lumpy and crappy. It should grow huge and fabulous, but it got planted in a plastic bucket meant to hold satin finish exterior latex paint in #4L61 Breakfast in Tuscany instead of in Southeast Asia, so it never will.
I relate mightily to my moringa tree.
My hibiscus, on the other hand, has got so big you’d never believe it. Big and hot pink and carelessly, uselessly beautiful. It cascades down the back of the rain awning like a silk curtain. I carried it here all the way from Candle Hole. I had to. Hibiscuses live longer than birds or seals. I owed my hibiscus a new house after what happened to the old one. I ended up naming the hibiscus Dorchester. It’s my own little joke, even though the punchline is sadness. I think a joke like that is a present you make to yourself, so every time you say it, even if it hurts, you get a very cohesive feeling out of it, because the past you and the present you are talking to each other, and it’s nice to have friends.
Being married was a good time, mostly. Like a party where everyone else has gone home and it’s just the two of you and the night left sparkling. But then, sooner or later, one of you has to go home, too. There are some things you just can’t ever get back. Years. Gannet birds. Husbands. Antarctica.
I still love the things I loved when I was young. Lipstick and encyclopedias and Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 and my twin brother, Maruchan—although I have cooled off somewhat on the plays of Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Webster after everything that happened. But I have all new things to love now! My navy blue sleeping shirt I found in Clotheschester that says Jinjiang Action Park Presents the All New 3-D Monday Night Football Experience of Western Decadence on it in Cantonese above a frankly just amazing golden cartoon eagle in a huge golden helmet eating a huge golden football-shaped cheeseburger. Mars, which floats over the messy wet horizon all glittery and perfect and dumb like a fake ruby. The fishing cage I made out of unbent and then rebent wire clothes hangers from a place called Nordstrom. Sunsets over the spires of Electric City. Extra-fat tabby cats. An Airedale named Mick Jagger. A girl named Red. The jumbo bottle of Surprise Vitamins King Xanax gave me—only the good stuff, uppers and downers and happy pills and horny pills and super funtime pills. Revlon Super Lustrous 919 Red Ruin is out. L’Oréal’s Endless Eyeliner in Devastation Black is in. Garbagetown is always in. Garbagetown still, Garbagetown forever. The beautiful reek of my big rubbish heart spreading out for miles on the infinite sea.
But the thing I love most in all the live-long superblue glorious trashworld is my wedding present. Presents are, in my opinion, the #1 through #3 reasons to get married in Garbagetown. I still have it. I’ll never let it go. Forty meters is a long way. You can see most anything coming.
My wedding present (part of it anyway, the important part) is sitting on the foredeck right now, even if my husband isn’t. It has an unobstructed view of the southern sky. It stares toward the beach while I stare toward it. The moon is shining on it like a silver hug. There is nothing in Garbagetown like it, and that means there’s nothing like it in the whole world.
I lie down next to my present and look up into the sky. All those trashstars, poured out everywhere with no restraint, no manners, no sense of the future. Every once in a while, one moves. Drifting dead and slow across the orbital track. The grand glittering Fuckwit cemetery in the sky. They sent up all those satellites and international cooperation-stations like a rich kid’s party balloons, and you can’t get a balloon back once you’ve let go of it. It just keeps going while the kid grows up and drinks coffee and gets bitter and loses his hair and gets real weird about watches or something, but
the whole time the balloon is just on its own, until a bird takes it out or it reaches Pluto. All that Fuckwit junk circling the planet forever and ever, abandoned and miraculous and meaningless.
As above, so below.
The satellites and the stars make me feel adventurous. I can almost believe every one of those pricks of white really and truly is another whole world full of gases and water and dirt and magma and mistakes just like this one. I can almost believe there was a reason for everything. I open up King Xanax’s jumbo bottle and shake out a hexagonal lavender pill with the number 40 stamped on it.
“You feeling lucky, punk?” I say to myself, a piece of the past broken off and floating out of me, its meaning sheared off like wool, just words now, belonging to no one.
But you know what? I am indeed feeling lucky. I almost always do. That’s me. Tetley, the lucky punk. You wouldn’t believe how lucky. It would take your breath away.
Down lavender 40 goes, and after a while nothing really matters anymore. My brain feels like it’s made of birthday cake. Big Bargains floats past on her back, making a silky, swallowing sound in the salt water. Her round eyes are full of reflections. The running lights and the shore and the sea and the stars.
Oh, those sly stars. They always trick me. There is no other world than this one.
There’s a crab in the fishing cage. I can hear it pinching the night.
2
DEATHSLUT
I GUESS I think a lot about my used-tos. I used to read Mr. Shakespeare. I used to be married to a real live person. I used to eat things that weren’t fish. I used to sing more than I sing now. I used to live in Candle Hole. I used to wait every day for someone to come and punish me for something really spectacular I did when I used to be young. To instruct me on the subject of my own badness. With fists. With electrical devices. With worse.
The Past Is Red Page 3