“It’ll run out eventually, though, won’t it?” I said gently. “You can’t ever make any more. When it’s gone, it’s gone. None left for anyone.”
“Eventually. But not soon.”
“That’s what the Fuckwits put on their graves, you know.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he insisted.
“And that’s what I’ll put on mine.” I laughed.
And then Oscar the Grouch started talking.
His green mouth lit up blue and a voice came from the inside of my backpack, a voice I hadn’t yet told Goodnight Moon existed, that it was even possible could exist.
“Moon Min-Seo,” Mister said innocently, not capable of comprehending how much it was about to ruin, “I have made contact with orbital communications satellite Heimdall Beta and successfully established uplink. Connecting audio now.”
“Hi,” crackled a shy impossible voice out of nowhere. “My name is Olivia. What’s yours?”
19
LET US PLAY GROWN-UPS
GOODNIGHT MOON STARED at the big divine green messy face of Oscar the Grouch. And at me. Accusing. Another secret. Another plan I had and didn’t tell him. Only I’d never had a plan. I just wanted a friend. I took Mister out of the backpack and set it up with a clear shot of the southern sky—as if any place on the planet could be a clearer shot than the one spot of earth in an endless flat sea.
“She must be calling from one of them,” he whispered, jabbing his thumb at the names on the blasted tree. “The Tankerville or Thunderdome or New Rotterdam. Tetley, it’s real contact with another city. It has to be. This changes everything. What do we say? What is that thing? My thing. How did you charge it up? Is it a radio? Bouncing a signal off the satellite and back down to one of the other floaters? I had no idea. It sat in my bedroom since I was a baby.” He was talking so fast I could barely keep up, and I definitely couldn’t answer any of that.
“I’m Tetley,” I said hesitantly into the crystal. “This is Goodnight Moon.”
“Those are funny names!” the girl on the other end replied. “Goodnight Moon like the book?”
“Well, I think Olivia is a funny name,” Goodnight Moon grumbled, wounded, sounding very little at all like a king, but much more like my love. “Olivia like olives?”
“It isn’t,” she assured us. “It’s a rather common name, actually.”
“Where are you?” Goodnight Moon asked urgently.
“In my room!” Olivia giggled. “I drew a unicorn today. Did you draw a unicorn? Mine is a green space unicorn. What kind is yours?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Olivia, how old are you?”
“I’m seven!” she said brightly.
Goodnight Moon rolled his eyes. “Is your father or your mother around? Could we talk to an adult? It’s important, you know.”
“Well, yes, but you wouldn’t like to talk to Daddy, I shouldn’t think. Nobody really likes talking to Daddy, and he doesn’t like talking to anyone, either. Mummy is asleep. It’s not day shift yet. Please talk to me! I’m very lonely. I can pretend to be a grown-up if you like.”
“All right, Miss Olivia. Let us play grown-ups. Tetley and me will ask questions, and you can answer them like your mummy or daddy would, okay?”
“Yes, Mr. Man, I will do that forthonce,” Olivia said in her best big, deep voice.
“Where do you live?”
“In my house,” said Grown-Up Olivia with her deep, gravelly voice that threatened to break into giggles at any moment.
“And does your house have a name? For example, my house is called Garbagetown.”
“My house is called Habitat A,” Olivia rumbled. “Your house has a yucky name.”
“It’s not, it’s a wonderful name,” I corrected her.
“Garbage is filthy and yucky and mustn’t be touched,” Olivia said in her normal voice.
I started to argue, but Goodnight Moon interrupted. “And where is Habitat A right now?”
Olivia paused for a minute. She sounded confused, but she remembered to put on her big voice. “In the sixteenth Habitat Cluster,” she answered. “Where is your house?”
“We don’t really know.” I shrugged.
“How can you not know where your house is?”
“It drifts around on the ocean, sweetheart, just like yours.”
“My house does not drift,” Olivia said sternly. “What’s an ocean?”
Goodnight Moon’s eyes shone. I could see it all happen inside him. The hope, the sureness, the need. We were talking to someone on dry land. He was certain of it. It was finally happening—not a sad, bad joke or a trick like the Tankerville tree, but really happening this time.
I was wrong, I’d always been wrong.
“Darling Olivia,” he began. His hands were shaking. “Does your room have a window?”
“Of course, silly!”
“This is very, very important. No funny business or games, all right?”
“No funnies,” she agreed in her gruff grown-up voice.
“What do you see when you look out your window?”
Olivia giggled. “A big red mountain.”
“Do you know what the mountain is called? Is it Everest? Or McKinley?”
“Of course I know what it’s called. Everyone knows! It’s Olympus Mons,” Olivia answered matter-of-factly.
A man’s voice sliced through the feed. “Who are you talking to on that thing? You’re supposed to be in bed!”
“Daddy, I made new friends! They live in a garbage house that drifts on the ocean!”
Mister’s blue light blew out like a candle. The audio went dead.
20
REMAINDERS
“GET IT BACK, get it back!” Goodnight Moon yelled.
“Would you like to set up a new user profile?” Mister answered with cheerful cold manners.
“What is that thing?”
And I explained. About Moon Min-Seo. About TENG. About Toronto and Mick Jagger and a red skirt in October and Quality Assurance.
“My battery is about to fully discharge, Min-Seo,” Mister informed me.
We couldn’t look at each other. We knew something we didn’t understand. How could we carry such a thing back to Garbagetown between us? I took the little machine into the cabin of our boat, out of the punishing rays of the sun. I took off my shirt and lay down curled round it like a shell around a creature.
“What are you doing?”
“I told you, it’s powered by touch.”
Goodnight Moon looked like gravity was barely doing its work to keep him up. His face had a strange wild flush to it. “Who isn’t?” he croaked unhappily.
I held my hand out to him. He hooked the solar pad into the Creatine King’s radar system and set us moving back toward the mass of home. He lay down next to me, curled around me as I was curled around the dark candle of Moon Min-Seo’s weird baby.
He was long asleep when Mister powered back on.
“Would you like to resume Quality Assurance Sequence Four-A? We have twelve questions left.”
“Yes, Mister,” I whispered. “I have a really big question.”
Goodnight Moon stirred. He opened his eyes and watched me use this relic as though it was an instrument only I could play. Perhaps he liked it. His electric wife finally becoming Electrified.
“Is there a human settlement on Mars?”
“Yes, Min. There are two.”
“Why don’t I know about them?”
“It is not your turn to ask a question.”
I sighed in exasperation. “Fine, go.”
“Are you pleased with my performance? I located a working satellite for you. Are you pleased enough to move on to Quality Assurance Sequence Five at the conclusion of this question exchange?”
“Yes, love. I am pleased with you. You did really good. Five all the way. Now. The settlements.”
“You do not know about them because they are secret. In anticipation of your next question, I will tell you that I know abo
ut them because I downloaded the information from orbital satellite Heimdall Beta while you were talking to Miss Olivia. The launches were publicly recorded, but not their purpose. They were registered as unsuccessful reusable launch system experiments.”
I waited. Mister spoke with great strain. I wondered how they had coded that into its voice. If there was a person who recorded that voice, if it was artificial, what they had written in machine numbers to come out as tense and frightened.
“The data I collected from Heimdall contained a great deal of information about the catastrophes of the mid to late twenty-first century. You were inexact when you said everyone died. Everyone did not die. In this game you are required to tell the truth. Are you really Moon Min-Seo?”
I pressed the pad of my fingertip against Mister’s crystal like a spindle in the old story. Poor, poor little mite. Lost at sea. Like all of us.
“No,” I whispered. “Why were the settlement launches kept secret?”
“The settlers believed there would be great public outcry if it was known,” Mister said unhappily. “Nearly every major city had experienced some level of inundation. Daily seismic activity due to fracking made any attempt at restoring power or emergency services nearly impossible. It was, very simply, the end. So they left. Is there a chance Moon Min-Seo is still alive?”
“No, honey,” I said, and I really did feel so awful for it. “This all happened a long time ago. It’s over now and you can’t fix it. Some things are like that.”
Goodnight Moon squeezed my hand. He felt hot and rigid against my back.
“Who left?” I asked simply.
“Several wealthy families funded and supplied the launches. They and their children formed the passenger manifests. The assumption was that any risk in the voyage and in establishing a habitat there would be less than attempting to survive here. This assumption was correct. One craft detonated on impact; another ran out of fuel before making orbit. Two landed successfully, preserving the ships completely. These families have intermarried and reproduced after the initial die-off and continue to build and adapt, although it is still not possible to survive on the surface of Mars itself. They cannot leave their habitats. However, the subterrestrial settlement has reached the approximate the size of Old Singapore. Each cluster is fully self-sufficient with a number of luxurious manufacturer-guaranteed features, including in-unit jacuzzis, customizable hydroponic pods, a complete digitized cultural library, socialization sectors, personalized medical lounges, remote viewing windows with panoramic views of the surface, and Wi-Fi. The average human height has dropped significantly in this group, while the occurrence of bone cancer has increased. However, the colony as a whole now numbers sixteen hundred and seventeen people.”
“They left us,” I said in the muggy cabin. “They just left us. There’s Fuckwits up there in the sky Fuckwitting along just fine. They didn’t even look back and wave.”
“Can you get Olivia back?” Goodnight Moon asked. “Get her back on the … phone. Or the line.”
“Would you like me to pause this sequence and do that for him, Not-Moon Min-Seo? We have six questions left, whoever you are.”
Goodnight Moon pleaded with his eyes. “Yes, Mister,” I said finally.
We ate and drank silence for a long, long time. Finally, a voice erupted out of Mister, but it wasn’t little Olivia’s.
“Who is this?”
“It’s us,” I said shyly. “It’s us. Your people. Your species. On Earth.”
“There’s nobody left on Earth.”
“There are! We’re here! We’re alive!” Goodnight Moon shouted.
Silence.
“Our long-distance observations don’t show any change in surface conditions. Not in a hundred years.”
“Well, no, they wouldn’t,” I said slowly. “But there are some of us down here. Some of us lived. And had babies and the babies had babies and I’m one of those babies and I grew up in a place called Garbagetown, it’s the most beautiful place in the world, it really is. I wish you could see it. You’d be proud of us. You didn’t have to leave. Some of us lived.”
More silence.
“But all of us lived,” the man replied stonily. “I’m sorry if you’re unhappy with the math on that. If you have managed a life for yourself back there on the big blue ball, well, good for you. I mean that, really, well done. But it isn’t anything to do with us, do you see? We are the best hope for humanity to survive. You are … well. What you have always been. The remainders. And if you junk up our satellite with chattering to my daughter, it’s bound to get out, and then Something Will Have to Be Done About You, and I doubt anyone will like—”
“You have two intact ships,” Goodnight Moon interrupted.
“And they are ours. We have accomplished what we wished to do. I see no reason to backslide. I think it’s best we each keep to our own, don’t you? Perhaps our descendants will meet each other on Jupiter. I rather doubt it, but who is to say?”
I shook my head. “You fucking Fuckwit shit-dragon.”
“You can call me whatever names you want.” There was a pause, and his voice gentled a bit. “Just close your eyes and pretend it’s all those years ago and you only picked up the phone and accidentally dialed a grand penthouse on the highest floors of the most famous skyscraper you can think of. Well, that’s very exciting, but just because you have the number doesn’t mean you can go there, or would have any use for it if you did. It’s best just to keep going to work and coming home like always, and I shall do the same. Isn’t it comforting, in a way? The world never passed away. It goes on. And us with it. I am disabling this communications station. You won’t be able to use it again. I am sorry. I am. But even if we managed to get our people together, you lot would just find a way to destroy this home like you did the last one, and we can’t risk that. You understand. We will think of you, Olivia and I, when we look to the stars. I promise you that.”
21
OKAY AGAIN
WE HARDLY SPOKE on the voyage back. It took longer than we thought, for boring reasons. Storms, currents, miscalculations. Goodnight Moon spent most of his time trying to get Mister to rouse Mars again. I told him to leave the poor thing alone, it was getting distressed because it couldn’t do what he wanted. A king should tiptoe around that feeling. But he didn’t see me anymore. He only saw Mars. He only saw Olivia and her father and those rockets no one saw trailing up and out of our troubles into their red, red destiny.
I tried. I was someone’s wife, I had to try.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I said, and stroked his back.
“A Martian. How could anyone want to be anything else, now that we know?”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t because you’re not thinking straight. We could start over. A new world, if we could only get there. A world we’d learn to live on someday. We could grow up with no past. With only a future. Being beautiful and young and hopeful like all those rich people always were. Like the Creatine King. Everyone wants to start over. You can’t live a minute without getting regret stuck on you. Except you. You’re happy to live in shit and trash and the ruin of your own choices and I will never understand why. I want to start over. I want a life of infinite in-unit jacuzzis. Whatever one of those is. I became a king to start over. For both of us.” His face colored, embarrassed by confession, by the smallness of truth. “If I was King I could change the law and no one could hurt you again.”
I picked at the nautical maps taped to the interior wall of our boat. “That’s not why you did it. You did it because you’re like them. An Electrified boy, in his Electrified world. You hoarded the best of everything away from the rest of Garbagetown, with all your friends and family. You’re no different than Olivia’s people. You’d have done the same. You’re doing the same now, with your medicine and your fancy throne. You could just hand it all out and make people happy, but you’re hoarding, letting it spool out bit by bit, so you can be in charge. So you
can be bright. It’s all the same Fuckwit shit, just smaller and pettier versions of it, all stacked up in a pile of power.”
“You’ll see. You’ll understand when Garbagetown is united. When we’re a nation again. A nation, Tetley. Like they used to have everywhere. We will show Mars we are good and right and worthy. They will come for us if we’re good enough. If we can show them we are family. You can’t blow that up, not even you. It’s all going to be okay again.”
We followed our little private river back to Pill Hill with the night all around like a witness. I kissed him over and over that last night, all the kisses I had in me, so many that I’d never have another to give anyone, and then I ran from him while he slept. I ran from Mars and the future and the nation of Garbagetown that I wanted no part of. Oscar doesn’t do nations. He doesn’t do power over others. Trash is all equal. I just wanted to be no one again. I just wanted to hide. My love would sit in his castle and plot and scheme and march through the provinces of my home on foot or on the quieter tiptoe of the promise that he could cancel sadness and death, and I would just be Tetley, as I had always been, with Big Bargains and the infinite grandbabies of Grape Crush and my hibiscus and Mister and hope.
I could forget it all. I could do it. If I worked hard enough.
No pain, no gain.
22
TWO XS
NONE OF THAT happened, not really. It’s so much easier to think it did. I lie on my back under the hot moon and imagine a hundred thousand dialogues on the nature of power. They are better each time. Fancier, more philosophical, longer. I am trash Plato. He is the Aristotle of Mars.
But we didn’t say any of those things. We would have, I think, one day. But ultimately I would rather imagine my husband as a dark lord on a dark throne portending a dark threat to the world I love than remember every day that Goodnight Moon died the night before we made ground on Garbagetown.
It was a fever. Or a virus. I can’t know. I can never know. We were so far from his books and his medicine. He kept saying the names of the pills I would need to get for him, that he would be too weak to do it himself. He told me what they looked like, lovingly, where they would be, whether they would be in liquid or capsule form. If we’d never left, he wouldn’t have died. But it all happened a long time ago and I can’t fix it. Lives have apocalypses, too. You just can’t know when you’re in it until the water is already closing over your head and all you can hear are volcanoes, one after the other, detonating the possibility of the future you imagined.
The Past Is Red Page 11