Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  “Be my guest,” Mo said. Henry picked berries and ate them, one by one, savoring them. The envelope lay on a plastic table between the two lawn chairs. Mo picked it up. His name and address were written on it. He held the envelope at an angle, and could see the indentation of the letters in the paper. An actual human—in Henry Dale’s version, a mysterious cowboy—had made the letters.

  Mo sat for a bit, thinking about how long it had been since he’d gotten a letter. He remembered a couple of birthday cards from aunts in Lansing and Toledo. Henry got his fill of raspberries and sauntered back across the yard to sit down and rub at the stains on his fingers. “So, you going to open it?”

  “Did you open yours?”

  “That’s why I’m here. This is a little off my usual route.”

  The envelope was rough in Mo’s hands. The paper felt handmade, even though if Henry was telling the truth it couldn’t be, unless the king or grand pooh-bah or whatever of Monument City employed artisans to make paper. Mo opened the envelope and read it. “Monument City,” he said.

  “Yep,” Henry said.

  Mo looked around at his house. He thought about the Flex in his garage and the other car in his driveway, a 1984 Land Cruiser FJ40. A guy he knew in Hamtramck had restored the body for him and painted it dark green in trade for a couple of engine rebuilds, and then Mo had done the engine and transmission work himself. He’d repacked the bearings and machined new gears for the differential so the four-wheel drive would work again. He’d rewired the ignition system the other day and then gotten involved with the Flex, so he hadn’t even driven the car since capping the last wires.

  “You know where it is?” Mo asked.

  “In the Rockies somewhere, is what I always heard.”

  “Yeah.” Mo nodded. “Me, too.”

  He thought some more. Henry didn’t look like he was in a hurry to get an answer.

  “Here’s the thing,” Mo said after a while. “If we’re going to go on a road trip, and I’m not saying we are, we’ll need food.”

  “True,” Henry said.

  It was about eight in the morning. The day promised to be hot. “Dried fish make pretty good road food,” Mo said.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Henry said.

  * * *

  Dying maple and oak and birch trees leaned out over the shore at the upstream end of Belle Isle. A few yards offshore, dead trees and collapsed riprap made for the kind of structure walleye and bass loved to hide out in. There were perch there, too. Mo wasn’t a fancy fisherman. He threw bait in the water, about where he thought the fish might be, and left it there until something ate it. He rigged up a second rod for Henry and then cast it for him when Henry looked at the rod in his hands and said, “I’ve never been fishing.”

  With two lines in the water, they sat and traded stories about what they’d heard of Monument City. Mo also told Henry about the weird happenings down at the other end of the island and Henry looked a little spooked. “Reminds me of the playground where I live,” he said. “Used to live.”

  “Used to,” Mo repeated. “Not going back?”

  Henry shook his head. “Nah. I spent the last week seeing what the country looked like outside New York and I have to tell you, if I’d known sooner I would have left sooner. No way you’d get me to go back. It’s a big country. I want to see it. Too easy to sit in New York and think it’s the only thing in the world.”

  “I never thought that here,” Mo said. “But I’ve never been farther than . . .” He trailed off, considering. “Either Flint or Port Huron, whichever’s farther.”

  “If you’re going to Monument City, that’s for sure farther. Whoa,” Henry said. His pole bent and he grabbed it with both hands, pulling against the weight of the fish on the other end.

  “Might want to reel that in,” Mo said.

  Henry looked panicked. “What?”

  Mo took the rod from him and inside a minute had landed a nice walleye, twelve or thirteen inches. “You watch what I did?” he asked.

  Henry nodded.

  “All right then. Next one’s yours.”

  Henry cast and watched the line play out, curling and straightening with the current. “Why would I want to leave?” Mo asked. “I mean, this is a pretty good spot.”

  “Are you kidding? A ticket to Monument City? This is God telling you there’s great work for you to do. Even if your name is Mohamed. I’m not a racist,” Henry Dale assured him. “But it is funny, I think, that the angel of the Lord appeared to me and sent me to find a Muslim.”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions there, my man,” Mo said. “About God, about you, and about me.”

  “You’re not a Muslim? Must be strange being named Mohamed, then.”

  Mo reeled in his line and cast again. “You ever ask a guy named Joshua these questions?”

  Henry Dale had to think about this. It was an obvious fact to anyone who had ever bothered to consider the question that every person had unconsidered blind spots. He tried to be humble enough to see his own clearly. “So listen,” he said after a while. “We don’t need to talk about religion.”

  “Cool,” Mo said. The tip of his rod twitched and he gave the line a tug, seeing if the fish was serious. Nope. At first Henry found the ensuing silence uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem to bother Mo. Still, as time passed, Henry got embarrassed.

  Mo’s rod snapped down into a deep curve. “There we go,” he said. A second later his other rod did the same. Without taking his eye off the river, he said, “You got to land that one.”

  “I don’t know how to fish,” Henry Dale said.

  “Well, this is a parable, isn’t it?” Mo said. Henry Dale was much abashed that he hadn’t recognized it first—and on the heels of that same suspicion and puzzlement. Was this the Lord speaking through the Boom, or through Mohamed Diaby? Or was it the Boom itself, playing a prank?

  Or just two hungry fish? He grabbed the rod and did his best to imitate Mo.

  An hour later they had all the fish they could eat, and they were both about hungry enough to eat them raw. They cleaned the fish and took them back to Mo’s place, where he cooked some of them over a fire in his backyard and strung the rest to dry. “Look,” he said eventually. “I’ll go. But I’m not walking, and most places you can’t count on finding gas. So we need to see someone before we go.”

  “See who?”

  “Better if you see it for yourself,” Mo said. “I wouldn’t do it justice.”

  * * *

  Four miles from Mo’s house on Butternut Street, the River Rouge complex belched and heaved like a living thing. Mo drove the FJ40, Henry Dale sitting in the passenger seat watching Detroit go by and trying to remember the last time he’d been in a car. His gear and Mo’s, along with a whole lot of dried walleye and perch, were in the back. “It gets weird down here,” Mo said. The Boom loved the Rouge complex. Sometimes you went down there and the plant was churning out Mustangs, like it was 1967. Sometimes it was a marsh with the river in its old meandering curve, like it was before Henry Ford had dredged and straightened it. Sometimes the furnaces blazed, and sometimes cars drove up onto the loading docks from the river itself, like the Boom had gotten confused about how the whole process worked. Mo considered the Boom a pervasive, invisible, omnipotent toddler. Everything was its toy.

  Today everything was a strange patchwork. Marshland on one side of the river, concrete and steel and cargo ships on the other. Some of the buildings were ruins, others sparkling geometric arrangements of steel and glass. Mo drove through parking lots full of Model As and F-150s, Mustangs and Thunderbirds, crossing railroad tracks and cutting between buildings until they got to the river’s edge. There on the docks, wearing a straw boater and a tan suit over a white shirt with a high collar, stood a lean white man maybe sixty years old, making a note in a small book. Huge birds unlike anything Henry Dale had ever seen floated and swooped over a row of ships crowding the channel, cargo vessels looming over dagger-shaped military
frigates. All of them looked at least a hundred years old.

  “The Old Man,” Mo said. Henry Dale didn’t know what he meant. “Henry Ford,” he explained. “The Boom version. Good thing it’s not a bird sanctuary day. Story goes that Ford held onto this land for a long time, thinking about turning it into a bird sanctuary. Then he decided to build the biggest factory in the world instead. The Boom tries to have it both ways sometimes.”

  He got out of the car and Henry went with him. The Old Man looked at them both, his pale eyes appraising. “Come here with Nipponese iron,” he said. “You got spunk.”

  “I have to take a trip,” Mo said. “Gas might be hard to find.”

  The Old Man looked at the FJ40. Then he looked back over the river. “How far?”

  Mo looked at Henry, who shrugged.

  “Got anything to trade?” the Old Man asked.

  “Some fish,” Mo said.

  “Son, I don’t need fish. You look like you know how to turn a wrench. Why don’t you work for me?”

  From the cracked asphalt at Mo’s feet, a shimmer spread up. It wreathed his legs before Mo understood what was happening. Terrified, he leaped away from the shimmer, but it followed him, catching him and holding him in midair. Henry Dale watched, rooted to the spot, glancing down to see if it was happening to him, too. It wasn’t. The Boom didn’t want him. It only wanted Mo.

  “Henry,” Mo moaned. Both Henry Dale and the Old Man looked at him. “No, please . . .”

  The shimmer reached his chest . . . and stopped. In the blink of an eye it was gone and Mo Diaby stood on the asphalt again, shaking with the knowledge of what had nearly happened to him. The Old Man frowned. “What’s in your pocket, son?”

  Mo looked down, then took out the Golden Ticket. The Old Man stepped close to him. “Huh,” he said after a pause. “Seems you got a better offer. Well, better take it.” He turned back to the birds, jotting something else in his little notebook.

  “Mo, how about we get out of here?” Henry Dale suggested.

  Already moving toward the car, Mo said, “Yeah.” Then he stopped again.

  Where the FJ40 had been was now a shiny red pickup truck. Old, from maybe 1950, but also new. “Damn,” Mo said. He walked around it, seeing all of their gear lying in the bed. Then he got in. Henry Dale hesitated. “Come on, man,” Mo said. “I don’t want the Old Man to change his mind and try again.”

  “The ticket stopped him.”

  “That time, yeah. Maybe not next time.” Mo turned the key. The car started with a throaty rumble. “Yeah,” he said. “So. Where is Monument City?”

  “The Rockies somewhere,” Henry Dale said. “At least that’s what I always heard.”

  Mo had heard those stories, too. “West, then. Guess we’ll figure it out as we go.”

  10

  AT ABOUT NOON ON Monday, Geck was awakened by Reenie poking him in the shoulder. “Get up,” she said. “We have to go tell Hilario that the dinosaur was real.”

  “Yeah, I’ll hang out here, I think,” Geck said. “It was a long walk from Miami.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she said, and walked out the door.

  Geck rolled over and gave himself a few minutes to wake up. He was hungover and irritated at Reenie, who hadn’t wanted to get together last night even though it had been so long since they’d seen each other. If Kyle hadn’t been around, Geck thought Reenie would have spent the whole night screaming at him. As it was, the reunion had not been festive.

  He sat up and looked around. The hotel room looked pretty much as it had the last time he’d been in it a couple of years ago. Kyle hadn’t left much of an impression on it. Big bed, old stupid art, balcony with a rusting grill . . . Geck closed his eyes and wished he was somewhere else.

  I bet there aren’t any ratty hotel rooms in Monument City, he thought.

  Kyle didn’t want to go. Reenie and Tonya didn’t want him to go, either. Watching the three of them, Geck thought he had it figured out. Kyle had a thing for Tonya, but Tonya had a thing for Reenie, who in turn was still too pissed at Geck to have a thing for anyone—although Geck was beginning to suspect she really wasn’t going to be into him anymore.

  The one thing all three of them had was theories about Monument City. Everyone knew that the Boom had done some strange things, and Geck had heard stories about the guy who had bought up the world’s monuments and moved them to a valley out in the Rockies somewhere. He’d always thought they were bullshit, but it was a strange world out there. Now this card had come out of nowhere courtesy of a walking nanoconstruct . . . Geck glanced over at the table by the window and saw that the card and envelope were still there.

  He sat up and looked around for his clothes. When he was dressed he went out onto the balcony and regarded the overgrown office parks and strip malls he could see between the hotel and the airport. “This place sucks,” he said.

  And he thought, we’re twins, me and Kyle. No way they’ll be able to tell I’m not him.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Geck was walking up Semoran Boulevard to a huge parking lot in front of a long-closed and decaying department store. Most days there was a market there, and this was no exception. Geck cruised the whole market until he’d gotten a sense of what was there and what people were paying. Then he circled back to a booth at the north end of the lot, by a side road that went straight out into piney woods. The old guy sitting at the booth was selling homemade soap, books, and a bicycle. Geck stood so that he could lift up his shirt and only the old guy would see the gun stuck in his pants. “Trade you this for that bike,” he said before the old guy could think he was being robbed.

  “Lemme see it,” the old guy said. He looked it over, popped the clip, racked the slide. “Deal,” he said. Presto, Geck had transportation. It wasn’t a kayak, but it would do until he found something better.

  It was a sturdy orange road bike with pretty good tires and a little pack on the back. Most of the gears worked and the brakes didn’t squeak. It even had a water bottle that didn’t stink. In the pack Geck found a patch kit with a couple of tools. He went through the market again, walking the bike and picking up some road food, peanuts and jerky and raisins. Then he hopped on the bike and rode north, winding through the neighborhoods east of downtown, and kept on going all afternoon, angling to the northwest through Apopka and Leesburg. Florida was great for biking. There wasn’t a hill worth the name within a hundred miles. Also it felt good to be riding through places where things were almost sort of normal, unlike Miami. Whatever the Boom had done here, it was subtle. You could almost believe that none of the catastrophes of the last fifty years had happened . . . except when it got dark, there were hardly any lights. One of these days, Geck thought, it would be an excellent thing to see a whole city lit up at night like they all used to be. Outside Ocala, he pulled off at a roadhouse, guessing from the cars and bikes in the parking lot that the clientele wouldn’t be too hostile. Inside he ate and treated himself to a beer before getting back on the bike and riding until he found a good place to hide out and crash in Brick City Park.

  He’d gone maybe eighty kilometers, maybe a hundred? He wasn’t sure. A good day considering the late start. But he’d have to figure out a way to travel faster or he’d be an old man by the time he got to Monument City. Geck looked at the card. He’d noticed that its iridescence changed depending on which way he faced. It was most intense when he held it out to what he thought was northwest. Looking at it now, he said, “Kyle Hendricks.” He would have to try to remember to use Kyle’s name when it counted.

  He didn’t feel bad about it. Kyle wasn’t like Geck. He could be happy figuring out a way to get by in Orlando. He’d probably settle down with Reenie and never notice that Reenie was actually pining for Geck—who, unlike his brother, was a born wanderer. He was the one who racked up grudges and feuds wherever he went. He was the one who needed a way out.

  New bike, new scenery, new name. Geck drifted off to sleep imagining what Monument Cit
y might look like, and what he might do when he got there, and how he might reinvent himself along the way.

  11

  MEI-MEI WAS GOING TO DIE. But she was going to take some of them with her. That much she had decided the minute the orphanage had sold her. The buyers, a group of coonass fishermen, had not mistreated her, but they would. She knew they would. And then they would strangle her or drown her in the bayou or, if they were feeling pity, ha-ha, they would shoot her. That was what happened when the orphanage sold you. She knew the stories. And because she knew the stories, she was going to do what she had to do and she was going to survive. Or take some of them with her. They didn’t know she had a knife in her boot.

  She was chained by the ankle to a stake hammered into the ground under a lean-to at the edge of a bayou that stretched away south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Outside it was raining. The fishermen were coming back. Mei-Mei could hear the two-stroke burble of their outboard.

  One of them peered under the lean-to, rain dripping from his beard. “There she is,” he said with a broad grin. “How you doing?”

  He bent down and came closer. Mei-Mei went for her knife and swiped at him, but she’d done it too soon. He flinched back and hopped away to the edge of the lean-to. “What you think you’re doing, girl?” The others gathered around. “She got a knife.”

  “Reckon we ought to take it away,” one of the others said.

  “Or we could just wait her out. See if she’s still feeling fighty after she hasn’t eaten for a week.”

  Mei-Mei put the knife to her own throat.

  “Whoa, now, hold on. We spent a lot of money on you, girl.” The leader of the group sat down under the lean-to, far enough away that Mei-Mei couldn’t reach him. “Listen. Let’s make some kind of arrangement. We’re not animals. How about you work off the amount we paid for you, and then you go your way and we go ours?”