by Alex Irvine
“West,” Reenie said before Kyle could spill the beans about Monument City.
“Ah, but which west? California? Oregon? There are different ways.”
Kyle and Reenie didn’t know exactly where Monument City was. They’d asked around Hilario’s friends, but they all said it was a myth. “Ever hear of Monument City?” Kyle asked.
“Ah, oui, who has not? You are not going there?”
“That’s the plan,” Reenie said.
“Well,” Lafitte said with a thoughtful stroke of his mustache. “Then you are going as much north as west.”
“You know where it is?”
“In the mountains. Far from any ocean. That much I can tell you. Go north along the bayou, find the river, and keep going.” He paused, as if listening. “Donaldsonville. Try there.”
“Couldn’t we go to New Orleans?” Reenie figured they’d have a better chance to catch a boat there.
Lafitte’s eyes went dead. “No. You don’t want to go there. Organics better steer clear of New Orleans.”
They knew most of it was underwater, but there were still supposed to be ports there. That was what Kyle and Reenie had heard, anyway. They were about to ask Lafitte for more details, but he had turned away to shout orders in French at his crew. Looking back over his shoulder, he gave them one more piece of advice. “Be careful who you tell about your destination, my friends. Go with God.”
There was a casino in Port Fourchon, but they knew enough to steer clear of it. The way the Boom loved gambling, anything could happen there. Kyle had heard a story from Geck a couple of years before about a casino in the Everglades where the Boom kept people at the tables until they starved to death.
Lafitte was gone. The shipbuilding crews were looking at them, and not in a friendly way. They got moving.
* * *
They reached Donaldsonville three days later, making steady progress through Acadian settlements that seemed to shift in time even as they passed, a time-lapse of life on Bayou Lafourche and the road that paralleled it, sometimes a dirt track and sometimes a four-lane highway lined with the ruins of fast-food restaurants and gas stations. There were people around, and something like civilization. Kyle and Reenie were able to find places to eat and sleep. The bayou ended in an earthen dam walling it off from the main flow of the Mississippi. “Well,” Kyle said. “Here we are.”
Across the river, barges sat in a jumble against the far bank. Half of them were either beached or half-sunk in the shallows. They looked upstream to a sharp bend in the river, overhung by trees. Downstream a mile or so, a series of piers jutted out into the water from what looked like some kind of refinery.
“Lafitte seemed to think we’d be able to get a ride here,” Reenie said. “Maybe down there. That looks like a port.”
They got closer and saw a rusted sign: CF INDUSTRIES. It was a fertilizer plant. Railcars labeled AMMONIA, AMMONIUM NITRATE, etc. sat in long rows in a siding. A guard sat in a booth at the main gate. They talked to him, unsure whether he was construct or organic. He told them passenger boats came by once in a while, but the main traffic was cargo. “Shit, the Boom loves it here. All these chemical building blocks, man, you never know what’s going to be here from one day to the next. But they let the plant keep running, and that keeps us all working. There’s even an accountant cuts us checks and a bank in town that cashes them.”
“Where do you ship?”
“No idea. A boat shows up, we load it. Who am I going to ask?”
“God, the smell,” Reenie said. “It’s like someone pissed in my nose.”
The guard laughed. “Yeah, you’re not from around here.”
The shrill blast of a horn from the river made them jump. The last time they’d looked, the water was empty—but now a steamboat waited puffing at the end of the center pier, a three-decker stern-wheeler keeping its wheel going just enough to cancel out the current. “Well,” the guard said. “You were looking for a boat, right?”
Kyle and Reenie walked out to the end of the pier. A man stood at the railing near a gangplank that had appeared without anyone seeming to move it. White suit, white mustache, wild shock of gray hair.
“Welcome aboard,” Mark Twain said. “Ed said you might need a ride.”
* * *
“We have to make a stop here,” Twain said the next morning. The boat slowed and angled toward a wharf. The city behind it seemed empty.
“No, we have to keep going and catch Geck,” Reenie protested.
Twain shrugged. “Prospector Ed said stop in Baton Rouge and pick up a girl by the name of—there she is.”
A thin Asian girl in denim overalls, hair pulled back under a bandanna, stood at the end of the wharf, looking upriver. Roustabouts appeared around her, sweating black men wearing torn pants belted with rope. One of them caught a hawser from the boat and tied it off. Another laid a gangplank across the gap between the wharf and the boat’s lower deck. They carried boxes and bags aboard.
“Hey there,” Twain called. She looked over at the sound. “Need a ride?”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“I could,” he said, “but then you’d be going to Monument City all by yourself.”
That got her attention. From the base of the gangplank she said, “How did you know I was—?”
Twain jerked a thumb at Kyle and Reenie. “They’re going, too.”
The girl looked at Reenie. “Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Reenie said.
“How do I know you’re not just telling me that?”
“Young lady, the Boomscape is a place of many strange coincidences, of that no sentient being could be in doubt,” Twain said. “But surely it beggars belief that you could be looking for a ride to Monument City and poof, you happen to find a boat waiting to take you to said location when you were standing at loose ends on a wharf in Baton Rouge.”
“That’s exactly the kind of cruel shit the Boom would pull,” the girl said. “You and I both know it.”
Twain sighed. “Also, Prospector Ed said to be on the lookout for you, and if that doesn’t allay your suspicions, we’ll be on our way.”
At the mention of Ed’s name, the girl put a hand on the boat’s railing. “You talked to him?”
“Talk isn’t the word I’d use, but we have communicated.” The boat’s wheel began to churn. “Look, young lady,” Twain said. “Your ticket says it will assist, does it not? Well, here is your assistance. Whether you accept it or not is no bother to me, but I would take it kindly if you decided now.”
She glanced over her shoulder, then at Kyle and Reenie. Then she bounded forward, boots thunking on the gangplank, as if suddenly afraid something was chasing her. By the time she had both feet on the deck, the gangplank was already gone, the boat angling back out into the current, its horn sounding across the water. The roustabouts stood watching them. Kyle was half convinced they were real by the time the boat rounded a bend and he lost sight of them.
“So,” the girl said. “I’m Mei-Mei. He’s Mark Twain. Who are you?”
18
THEIR NAMES WERE Kyle and Reenie, and they told her they were going to Monument City, too. “Twain picked us up in Donaldsonville,” Reenie said. Mei-Mei didn’t know where that was.
“Is he the same as the cowboy?” Mei-Mei asked. She kept her voice low even though Twain was up in the bow watching the river, and since he was a construct he could probably hear anything she said even if she whispered. That was one of the discomfiting things about constructs. You wanted to interact with them like they were people, but you couldn’t.
“Prospector Ed? No,” Kyle said. “At least I don’t think so. Ed’s the one who hands out the Golden Tickets. You have one, right? That’s how Twain knew to pick you up?”
Mei-Mei took off her shoe and showed it to them, like she’d been challenged and the Golden Ticket was a countersign. She was expecting either Kyle or Reenie to show her one back. When neither of them did, she asked, “You have one?”
Alarm bells went off in Mei-Mei’s head. “Nobody can steal them,” she said. She backed toward the railing, ready to hit the water if this Kyle guy made her any more nervous.
“Twin brother,” he said.
She stopped. “Oh. So the tickets . . .”
“Yeah, I guess. Track you by your genes or something.” Kyle watched the water.
His girlfriend added, “We’re going to find Geck and get it back before he gets to Monument City.”
“Where is that, anyway?” Mei-Mei asked.
“Somewhere in the Rockies,” Kyle said. “Prospector Ed told us that much.”
“Until you said you’d seen him, too, I thought he was . . . like, an artifact of the Boom back in the bayous or something.”
“Like the hippos and dinosaurs and pirates,” Reenie said. “No, I guess he gets around.”
“And your brother’s name is Geck?”
“Tommy. But everyone’s called him Geck since we were kids. He climbed stuff a lot, someone made a gecko joke because they have sticky toes. So where did you come from?”
Mei-Mei skipped lightly over the circumstances in which Prospector Ed had found her. She didn’t want to sound like a victim. The trip from the deep bayou up to Baton Rouge was more interesting. Once she was on higher ground there weren’t any more dinosaurs or hippos. Miles of smooth pearly gray ground that rebounded a bit under each step, punctuated by crazed growths, plants and plantlike animals she’d never seen before. Then isolated streets lined with buildings from different eras and cultures, people in buckskins and white lace and football uniforms and stained overalls . . . then just the gray again. Even gray sky, the sun smeared and pale.
Walking through it was like traversing a patchwork dreamscape, like the Boom had mined tiny pieces of the dreams of every brain it had sampled, and rendered them in three dimensions (four?). It broke apart near the river and Mei-Mei didn’t know how long she’d been walking or when she’d last slept. “I got down to the river there in Baton Rouge and stood around. Seemed like I ought to be there but the whole time I was thinking of what to do next. Then you guys came along.”
“There were dinosaurs in JeebusLand, too,” Kyle said. Mei-Mei wasn’t sure what to say to that. The boat churned on, passing Vicksburg and then Memphis. She felt like they were going faster than they should have been, but again, who knew what was regular or expected when you were dealing with the Boom?
The lower stretches of the river had looked more or less modern. Lots of levees and cranes, steel buildings, abandoned cars—but still people living, getting on with their human business in the middle of the Boom. The farther north they got, the older everything seemed. Wooden buildings, rough wooden docks instead of reinforced concrete wharves. Barges and flatboats, no more big container ships or tankers.
“Going upriver,” Twain said. He’d wandered back to the stern without them noticing. “And upriver is always backward in time, or weren’t you paying attention in school?”
“I never went to school,” Mei-Mei said. “I was raised in an orphanage.”
“Ah.” Twain lit his pipe and flicked the match out over the river. “Considering the state of most classrooms, that’s likely for the best. You probably learned more in the orphanage. Carry that pride of the untutored.”
“I’d rather my parents were alive.”
“Well,” Twain said. “I have a suspicion that if they were, you’d be living hand-to-mouth in the ruins of New Orleans. Could be this is better.”
“You know, it’s funny,” Mei-Mei said. “People sure love to tell orphans how their lives could be worse.”
Twain considered his pipe. “We retell ourselves, young lady. How is up to us.”
Mei-Mei opened her mouth to fire back, but shut it again. Was he right? Prospector Ed had given her a new chance. New Orleans was receding farther and farther behind her. Monument City was . . . closer? Mei-Mei watched the river go by and tried to sort out how she felt.
“Weren’t you younger when you were on the river?” Reenie asked a little while later. “I mean in real life?” She thought she remembered that from school. Her parents had kept her in school longer than most other kids, when the first waves of the Boom were tearing everything apart.
“Yep,” Twain said. “But this aspect suits me.”
As they passed St. Louis, piano music began to play in the lounge belowdecks. Mei-Mei went downstairs to see if there was another passenger she hadn’t met. She found a black guy in an old-fashioned tuxedo and tails at the piano, playing something jaunty but melancholy, too, in the empty lounge. Card tables lined one wall, fresh decks fanned out on immaculate green felt. “You’re really good,” she said as players appeared, cards riffled and chips clattered. The air thickened with smoke. “Are you real?”
In a space between chords he said, “Thanks, miss,” but didn’t address her question. “I call this one the ‘Anthropocene Rag.’”
* * *
Close your eyes and you’ll hear it. The calls of stevedores and deckhands echo across the river, and in the spaces between them the syncopated toot and whistle of ships. Piccolo chirp of small steamers answered by the baritone thunder of a container ship, its captain squinting from the bridge as it noses between sandbars. Theme and variation, the mutter of a playground in Stuyvesant Town and the penitential whisper of a pilgrim on the Godswalk, sluice of the receding tide in South Beach and the French Quarter punctuated by boot heels and iron-shod hooves on the red rocks of Utah. A new song whose first chord was the Synception, and we listen as it riffs on itself from sea to shining sea. We hear it all, waiting to join the chorus as we follow the melody back to Fara Jack.
19
THE THIRD DAY DAWNED cloudy and unsettled. The company was camped in Harlan, Iowa. Last night they’d done a show there at the county speedway. The only audience was constructs, greasy from the pits or sunburned up in the grandstand. Fara Jack rose early, washed and dressed in clothes she wasn’t afraid to lose. She didn’t know how the day would go, but many of her returns from transformed states left her naked. Outside, Autry was standing by the fire discussing day-to-day operations with Sheila Yellow Robe, the company’s stage manager.
“Go ahead to Council Bluffs,” Autry said. “Next show is there.” There would be humans there, too. Shows felt different with organics in the audience.
He swung his massive head around to Fara Jack. “You’re going to need a blindfold.”
She found a bandanna, wound it into a two-inch strip, and tied it around her head, feeling a little thrill at making herself vulnerable. Actors were always doing trust exercises, but this was true surrender. Autry led her blindfolded out onto the prairie, letting her keep a hand on his flank. Fara Jack crackled with the need to change but she couldn’t. Not yet. She would be guided. This was Autry’s promise. He would show her how to take on not just a form but a nature.
In return, she had promised to show him where the school was. Autry believed he could guide all those broken Boom-revenant children as he had guided Fara Jack. He had taken her in and made a performer out of her, showed her how to understand need and reflect it back as pleasure. His price was Fara Jack’s deepest, most personal story. She considered it fair.
Feeling the muscles beneath Autry’s skin and the ground beneath her feet, Fara Jack walked. She heard breeze in the long grass and felt it on her cheeks. Autry smelled earthy and pungent. She lost track of time and came back into focus only when she smelled cow shit.
No, bison shit.
Stamp of hooves, low and mutter of a herd. Autry’s herd. Fara Jack’s heart jumped. She’d known he was part of a herd, but had never seen them. Could they all speak? Would they welcome her?
“Hold out your hands,” Autry said. Rough snouts prodded and snorted her palms. She felt the air shift as the herd closed in, surrounding her. If her heart kept going like this she was going to faint. Heavy breaths puffed on her face
and the back of her neck. All she could hear was bison. All she could smell was bison. All she could feel . . .
“Now,” Autry said.
With a surge of gratitude, Fara Jack let herself go. The bandanna slid away from her eyes as her skull thickened and grew, revealing a world drawn not in colors but in smears of contrast between shadow and light. Smells flooded into her nose, her hooves pressed into the soil. Her dress fell in rustling shreds to the trampled grass. She shook her head and flicked her tail, feeling the rest of the herd pressed close around her.
Her transformations previous to this were clumsy and frustrating, a human mind trying to move human limbs that weren’t shaped right anymore. Now, in the herd, she understood. She didn’t try to move like anything except another member of the herd that surrounded and protected her, gave her a sense of belonging that freed her from having to think. She saw where she wanted to go and went there, and her body followed her commands.
Scent led her to Autry. She rubbed her cheek against his. He said something but Fara Jack ignored it. She could smell what he meant. It was time to uphold her end of the bargain. She shouldered through the herd, finding space to run, and led them thundering in an arc northeast across the plains, now beating on asphalt and now soil resurgent with life, now breasting streams still cold with snowmelt and now crashing through thickets of sage and greasewood. Now, now, now, coming to rest at last stamping and blowing at a ruin. Three stories of brick fallen and churned, rebuilt Boom-style and fallen again. It stank of rot and oil. She dropped her head and lowed, not finding human language for what she felt.