The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente, Ian Tregillis, Brenda Stokes Barron, Elizabeth McClellan, Rose Lemberg, Ekaterina Sedia

  Fuckwit pleasure boats are almost always full of the good stuff. They’re like a huge gift-wrapped present waiting for you, if you can find them. Pirate treasure. Ahoy, matey. But you hardly ever do find them, because it doesn’t take much to sink a boat no one is driving. I’d never seen one in my life, but sometimes in my dreams they carried me away into the forgiving clouds.

  This one wasn’t a megayacht. It was about fifty feet long, a wide keel, shallow draft. A pontoon boat. Rigged up with sails and an onboard motor I somehow knew contained a full tank of the preserved blood of Electric City.

  On the side, in block letters, it said No Pain No Gain.

  Somehow I knew he didn’t mean to sail back to his home or mine.

  “Leave Garbagetown?” I couldn’t. I couldn’t ever. There was nothing out there for me.

  “Trust me,” said Goodnight Moon, and he kissed me again and his kiss tasted like Twelfth Night and dinner at the Dorchester and unexploded engines and so I did, even though as we ran down toward the boat and the future, I could see his forearm in the blinding bleach-white sun.

  X | TETLEY | X

  16

  TO BILLY, WITH KISSES, LOVE SUSAN

  WE SAILED FOR a long time. We spoke like nothing bad had ever happened. We slept together like nothing bad had ever happened. We lay out naked on the deck slathered in expired SPF 180 Coppertone Sun Milk like nothing bad had ever happened. We giggled and drank the Patron Silver we found in the mess like nothing bad had ever happened and we made fun of the dummy books this ghost of Boatmas Past who chomped down on the world like a burger had stocked in his berth, each and every one of them signed To Billy with Kisses, Love Susan like we had never been dummies in all our days. We giggled even harder when we found Billy’s first-edition autobiography of himself, signed to himself: The Life and Times of Billy F. Blanco, the Creatine King.

  I knew without asking that even though it looked like we were zooming over the seas, moving fast, taking action, actually Goodnight Moon and me were just standing still in a crystal bubble while the world zoomed by and one word about all the thousand bad things that actually had happened would shatter it into a million and three pieces and nothing would ever put it back together.

  So I didn’t say that word and neither did he.

  At night we watched the TV/DVD combo connected to the solar pad together, huddled up in the big captain’s bed under a mostly dry quilt with pictures of different lighthouses on it. Underneath each one, delicate black thread stitched out where they were. Cape Hatteras. Port Reyes. Portland Head Light. We watched the Fuckwits in the golden bar with the golden drinks that never ran out where they all knew each other’s names and yelled “NORM” like an incantation that could save everything and a chorus of people you couldn’t see laughed and laughed and the man and the woman pretended to hate each other but really didn’t and no one ever left that place because there was nothing outside to want to get to, just death and the desert and then Mick Jagger the last purebred Airedale drowning and the inevitability of events Sam Malone could never imagine. Outside that frosted-glass door it was already over.

  We watched them eat pizza as red and hot as a sacred heart and afterward we fucked lazily, like we too were capable of getting bored and fat.

  That was the best time of my life, I think. When I take out my life to clean like silverware, that seems like the knife of being happiest. It shines brighter than the others. Even though I was keeping secrets the whole time. Even though he was, too.

  “Someday you’ll stop loving me this much,” I whispered to him in the heat of the moon.

  “I tried that already,” he whispered back.

  We ran aground sometime in the night. You could still see Draco on the horizon, a long, accusing snake of stars.

  17

  TANKERVILLE 2099

  IT WAS ABOUT the size of a banquet table. A big, wide, round table. Big enough for King Arthur and all his knights. For justice and might and feudalism and the Grail. It was dark and rich and wet at the edges, dry and golden in the middle. I lay down on it. I rubbed my face on it. I smelled it. It smelled so strong.

  It smelled like ozone, salty and fresh and bitter.

  It smelled like the Lawn, stretching out under the Flintwheel Hills, full of rice paddies and hope.

  It smelled like a golden bar.

  It smelled like emeralds in the dark, and a three-quarters-full tube of toothpaste, and children drinking the juice from a jar of cocktail cherries, and Caihong Chen’s Most Improved Effort, and Susan’s kisses, and a girl in Toronto with a skirt so red it hurt her to wear it. It smelled like the All New 3D Monday Night Football Experience of Western Decadence.

  It smelled like the big forgiveness, and home.

  Dry ground. Earth. Dirt.

  And a shattered tree that looked like every lightning bolt ever thrown down had hit it one after the other after the other.

  “Is it over? Is the land back? What does it mean?” I asked Goodnight Moon, running my fingers through the real ground like a child’s hair. “How long ago did it happen? How did you find it? Have you told anyone?”

  He shook his head. “Just you.”

  “It must be the top of a mountain,” I marveled.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Does it matter?”

  I supposed it didn’t. It existed. That was enough.

  “I was wrong,” I whispered. My face burned. The crystal bubble shattered. “That’s why you brought me here. Because I was wrong and you want to roll around in it. You want me to know it. That Emperor Shakespeare never lied. He saw dry ground, the world is coming back, so I did everything they said I did, and deserved everything they did back to me.”

  Goodnight Moon watched me silently. The sun moved as implacably as it always does and eventually I came to understand that he was waiting. Waiting for me to see as he saw.

  I stood up and brushed dirt off on my knees. (Dirt! On my knees!) I did the only thing there was to do on that little cough of earth. I walked over to the lightning-blasted tree. I ran my fingers over its ruined pale skin. I crouched down to touch the ring of smooth rocks round its base. There were words there, on the tree, on the rocks. Carved and burnt and painted.

  Tankerville 2099

  New Rotterdam 2114

  Ocean Victory 2090

  U.S. Navy 2088

  Brighton Pier 2120

  The Kingdom of Rust 2133

  Thunderdome 2101

  SSN Chelyabinsk 2092

  They went on and on. Some of the names had hashmarks by them: one, two, three, none more than five. Some of them had notes, most of which were in languages I couldn’t read. But I knew some: Fair winds and following seas, everyone.

  The crew of the RAN Farncomb was here.

  I love you, Annabelle.

  Tell me Muse, of the many-minded Odysseus, who lost his homecoming forever.

  Next year in Jerusalem.

  Goodnight, big blue lady.

  Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair.

  If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended, that you have but slumbered here whilst these visions did appear.

  Last one out, hit the lights and shut the door.

  We’re sorry. We’re so sorry.

  Rest in peace.

  Frodo Lives.

  Hang in there, kittens.

  It wasn’t the cradle of a new world to come. It was just a gravestone. A little mud cap on top of the world to mark where it lay. All those floating camps for all those years, circling the globe on currents that once had names on almanacs, Misery Boats touching this little place like the brass ring on a carousel, reaching out for it, reaching, reaching, and catching it at the last moment, only to find out no one has given a prize for a brass ring at the boardwalk carnival since 1925 and they aren’t about to start now. It was nothing but itself. Worthless, and worth everything.

  “Why did you bring me here? To repent?”

  “No.” Goodnight Moon shook his head.

&nbs
p; “Good,” I answered. “This place does nothing but prove me right. There’s no revelation coming, no twist, no big rescue. There never has been. It’s just us and Garbagetown, forever into the blue, just life, just going on until it all falls apart, because everything does eventually. There’s nobody else out there but more us. The same bar, night after night after night, same phantom applause, same plots repeating into infinity. The only difference is the ground beneath is made of old pens and trophies now. Can’t you just be happy? Can’t you just live?”

  “I want to live with you,” he said hesitantly, as though he couldn’t decide whether to say it even as he said it. He gazed at the ground. “You accepted my gifts,” he whispered.

  “Your gifts? What are you talking about? You have my name on your arm. You wanted to forget me.”

  Goodnight Moon grimaced. He looked down so he didn’t have to look at me. He was as pretty as he’d always been, as he’d been when we were kids. “The best and the worst I had. The DVD player and the paperweight.”

  I sat down on the dirt. Stunned. “It’s you,” I whispered.

  “King Xanax, at your service,” he said wryly, bowing like an actor. “And I sent you a betrothal, for the Electrified, for a brightboy. You agreed to marry me. I sent Sixty Watt Wen to watch you and wait to see if you ever got tired of letting a whole nation beat you into oblivion and if you did, to bring you to me. And you came. And you waited in the tower I built for you and I couldn’t … I couldn’t do it. I was so angry, and so sorry, and so angry, and so sorry, and I guess I didn’t … know what I meant to do if I ever did see you again. Some days I thought I’d just hold on tight and never let you go. Some days I thought I’d kill you for what you did. Some days I wanted to be one of the people beating on you.”

  “I did the right thing, is what I did. Can’t you see that now? Can’t you see the proof we’re standing on?”

  “But they didn’t lie. The people on Brighton Pier. There is dry land. You were only half right.”

  “Half is as good as a whole! The only reason Electric City still has one lightbulb going is because of me. They were gonna waste all our power on nothing. On going a few miles faster into the future of fuck-all. Now we can just live. Now people understand Garbagetown is all we’ve got, and it’s fantastic, and they have to do right by it or else they’re just a bunch of Fuckwits burning through everything to get nowhere.”

  Goodnight Moon winced. “I remember what you said. And sometimes it made sense to me. Sometimes I hated you. For being so arrogant. For fucking up the plan. For not understanding hope.”

  “I understand hope!”

  “No one has hope anymore, Tetley. You took it.”

  “I have hope! I hope I find something wonderfully useful on the patch. I hope Big Bargains doesn’t get skewered by a walrus. I hope Grape Crush IV finds a mate. I hope my brother is happy. I hope I get to eat something I’ve never eaten before every year. I hope my hibiscus doesn’t die. I hope I get to see Brighton Pier again someday. I hope everyone I meet is as happy as I am because Garbagetown is the best possible place in all of space and time. I hope nobody hurts me too bad today. I hope someday I find a whole entire novel with no pages ripped out or rotted away. For a long time I hoped you’d forgive me. And look! Tons of that has happened! Not all at the same time, but the kind of hope I have isn’t just greed going by its maiden name. The kind of hope I have doesn’t begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can’t, it can’t ever, that’s not how time works, and it’s not how oceans work, either. Nothing you love comes back. I have hope for Garbagetown, not for some suckspittle scrap of dry dirt that wouldn’t give us half of what we already have. Can you even get your head around how much better we have it than bloody Tankerville, which, whatever that is, I promise you never had one whiff of a Holiday Memories candle or Fog City Blend coffee or Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mix Tape or AAA batteries still in the package? Goddammit, why am I the only one who knows things?”

  “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I hated you most for not telling me what you were going to do. So I could’ve done it with you. And taken the punishment. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I touched his chest and I knew he’d see the layered-up burn scars on my hand, which is why I did it. “I barely knew you,” I said.

  “You know me now.”

  “Do I? You want to tell me why you’re calling yourself a king?”

  “Say we’re married first. It’s not so bad to be a queen.”

  “Certainly not, since you’re not a king and everything’s made up and I don’t care. Why do we have to be married? Can’t we just be trash together forever?”

  But I gave in. Of course I did. Because nothing matters. Because everything matters.

  “I don’t have anything to give you,” I sighed. “I own a dress, a gas mask, a knife, and a backpack. But I need them.” I squeezed his hand. “You want my heart? I think if you ask around Garbagetown they’ll tell you it’s the worst thing in the world.”

  Goodnight Moon nodded.

  And then all at once I knew what to do for my Electrified boy. The best thing I could think of. The most riches anybody could ever have, before the floods or after, what mattered most. The only thing I wanted to pull out of the past and roll around in like a fat dog.

  I unzipped my Oscar backpack and dug down into everything I owned. I came up, flushed, excited, married. I gave that man the best thing I didn’t own because no one owns anything, even if it was becoming pretty clear he didn’t believe that as much as I did.

  A gold vase full of gold roses tangled up with red ribbons rotting away into memory.

  Leftovers.

  Gretchen Barnes

  World’s Best Wife

  18

  THE NAPOLEON OF PILL HILL

  THIS IS WHAT Goodnight Moon told me about his life after me and before me.

  “I WANTED TO forget you. Yes. That was all I wanted. More than water, more than food. I went to sleep and dreamed the moon put a hand on my forehead and took you away. All the little dandelion seeds of you just sucked up out of the wrinkles in my brain like they were never there, never growing, never forcing me open as their flowers popped out of the dark. My mother and father just acted like I was sick. It was too embarrassing to them that I’d known you anyway. They didn’t want anyone to ask questions about it. We were seen together a lot, just before the explosion. Electric City gossips like one big million-megawatt old woman. They kept me inside so long I couldn’t bear it.

  “So I ran away. To Pill Hill. Because hardly anyone lived there and because … because that’s where all the medicine lives. The Fuckwits, you know, they feasted like gods and they stood astride the planet but they had so much anxiety. They shook themselves apart. And they took medicine for it, medicine that mostly ended up in the ocean, but if the childproof caps held, it ended up in Pill Hill. But they don’t need it. They’re dead. Every single one of them. We need it. I am so fucking anxious and manic and lethargic and so is everyone else, and if we’re just supposed to live in this happy fuckworld of yours some of us need help. It’s the fucking apocalypse! Everyone is depressed!

  “And I lived on the Hill for a while. I read the backs of packages. I read instructional inserts with runny ink. I experimented, I sorted, I memorized the shapes of tablets. And then I found the Rosetta Stone. Just lying there under a box of maternity pads. A pharmaceutical catalog. I could match every pill to what it did. I could actually know an effect before I took the medicine. I could know what not to take with it. I could help people. Do you have any idea how many people are sick in Garbagetown? It’s a lot, for the best place on Earth. If you count the ones who are just a little bit sick, it’s almost everyone. It’s not like everyone stopped having allergies or heart attacks or gout or cancer or gastritis just because the world ended. They just die fast now.

  “I didn’t go out looking for anyone. They sort of came to me. First, just my new neighbors, then people from out of town.
And I talked to them and I looked in the book and it turned out they would give me nearly anything if I could make them start feeling what they wanted or stop feeling what they didn’t want, and that’s pretty much when I started to understand why Pill Hill is full of hats with medicine names on them, because you’ll crown someone king of the known universe and the void, too, if they can make you well, and Fuckwits never met a crown they didn’t want.

  “But a lot of the people who came to the Hill were just.… they were so sad, Tetley. They were so sad they didn’t want to be alive. And every one of them had the little dandelion seed of what was hurting them, a tumor you can’t shrink or remove, and it makes such flowers, sickly, yellow flowers. I want to make us all better. We deserve to be as unanxious as the Fuckwits. We deserve to forget. It’s our birthright. When I’m done, all of Garbagetown will be well.”