by Alex Irvine
The children began to come out.
Fara Jack’s body groaned. The Boom reacted strangely when people returned to places that had been important to them. Time looping back, long-buried emotions exhumed. Shambling, broken forms that an hour before—fifteen years before—had been learning state capitals, Boolean operators, the difference between ser and estar. She trembled, patches of hide on her back and flanks twitching as if covered in flies. Already she felt the ending.
Autry was next to her. She did not recognize the scent he gave off. “That’s it,” he said. “The show is over. Company’s yours if you want it. My work is here. Go live your life.”
Shocked, Fara Jack fell back into her human form, vision swimming with tears. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
She looked around, blinking at the sharpness and intense color her human eyes relayed, feeling small and fragile and unsteady on her two feet. The herd was gone. Autry nuzzled a Boom-child and its eyes came into focus. She remembered him. Logan Trufaunt. Kickball in the playground.
Fara Jack fled those memories and that place, not daring to change lest she do it wrong, become another shallow simulacrum before she had a chance to rest and internalize what she had experienced. Her world was brand new but she walked it alone. Before she had only pretended to change; now she felt the power of it. What would she do now?
An hour down the road, or a day, she wasn’t sure, she saw two men walking.
“Hey,” one of them said. “You okay?”
“Where you headed?” the other one asked. He was taking off his shirt and Fara Jack slipped several mental gears before she was able to relate that action to herself. She was naked.
His shirt smelled like oil and sweat. Fara Jack recovered herself enough to say the first thing that came to mind. “Council Bluffs. You?”
“Monument City,” they said in unison.
20
THE BOOMSICKNESS TORE THROUGH Teeny. She shuddered, puked, bit her tongue, thrashed in the back of a wagon while Calpurnia’s healers sat with her and did what they could. Which was little more than watch and pat her forehead with damp rags, because the Boomsickness was a kind of withdrawal, what happened when a billion plicks in your body began to die off and there were no others to replace them. The immune system went haywire, O creatures of antigens and phagocytosis, and we wouldn’t have been surprised if she died. The Golden Ticket could only do so much.
They had no obligation to her beyond empathy, but that was enough to divert them north, around the white shores of the Great Salt Lake instead of east to their customary camp at the old army depot outside Tooele. At Promontory Summit they waited for the train. Gleaming rails stretched east and west, freshly laid by an army of constructs in the first months after the Synception. The Boom-train operated on no schedule Calpurnia knew, but she had made the decision to entrust Teeny to it in hope that it would keep her alive long enough for her to return to California. “Is this what you want?” she asked the feverish girl. “You said Monument City, but is it worth dying?”
Teeny could not answer.
Calpurnia waited two days, tending Teeny and watching the horizon for a plume of smoke. Their water was running low. Her people grew restless. They had seen Boomsickness before and took it to be a bad omen. To Calpurnia the girl’s plight had more the air of judgment. The Boom had found her wanting. If she was destined to discover Monument City, she would have to survive. It was a hard decision, but, Calpurnia felt, the correct one. She could not risk remaining with the girl any longer, and she feared what would happen if they brought her out of the desert and the Boom suffused her once more. Such events, the recolonization of a body, often drove the Boom into a frenzy. The liminal zones between desert and Boom bore witness to those frenzies: abandoned wagons and carts bleaching in the sun, their humans and horses absorbed into the Boom and remade as cactus or trilobite or saber-tooth tiger or chimerical monsters no one had ever named.
As much as it pained Calpurnia, she knew her duty to her people. She could not risk all of them to save this one girl who had dared the wasteland after spending her life marinating in the Boom-saturated city of San Francisco.
The next morning the train had still not come. Calpurnia directed two of her men to lay the girl in the shade of the train platform, with a liter of water and a blanket as well as the backpack she had brought with her.
Teeny shivered under the blanket and didn’t answer when Calpurnia tried one last time to talk to her. So it was decided. Either the Boom would save her or it would not.
Calpurnia led her group away to the east. They didn’t have enough water to make the trek all the way back around the Great Salt Lake to Tooele; they would have to take their chances with traders out of Brigham City.
No plume of smoke showed in the west.
21
ONCE MO GOT HIS SHIRT ON the naked woman, whose name was Fara Jack, she seemed to get herself together a little. “What are you doing out in the middle of nowhere naked?” Henry Dale asked. He seemed a little offended. Mo forgot sometimes that Henry Dale was pious—genuinely pious, not just putting on a show of it.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said. Mo’s shirt hung to her knees. He was tall, but she was also short. Wiry black hair, angular face, skin a shade about halfway between Mo’s mahogany and Henry Dale’s sunburnt parchment.
“No fair,” Mo said. “We told you something unbelievable.”
“What, Monument City? Someone asked me the other day if I wanted to go there,” Fara Jack said.
The three of them stood there for a long uncomfortable time, the same thought running through all their heads. Eventually it was Henry Dale who spoke. “We didn’t meet by accident,” he said.
“Don’t mind him,” Mo said. “He sees God everywhere.”
Fara Jack shrugged. “It’s as good a story as any other.”
They were close to Council Bluffs, where the company would be set up down by the river, in the shadow of the bridge over to Omaha and across from the Lewis and Clark memorial. “I mean it,” Henry Dale said. “If Prospector Ed came to you, and then we just happened to run into each other . . .” He made scare quotes with his fingers at the words just happened. “I mean, you believe that?”
Still not buying it, Fara Jack said, “Coincidence is coincidence.”
“No,” Henry Dale said firmly. “Coincidence is God choosing to remain anonymous. For now.”
Mo stepped in before Henry Dale could drive her away. “Henry, man, evangelize some other time. I want to know about Prospector Ed.” It rankled him that Ed had spoken to her and to Henry Dale but not to him.
“He came to a show a few days ago,” Fara Jack said. She was watching the western skies, where clouds gathered. “Gave me a bouquet of flowers and a card. The card turned out to be . . . well, you’ve seen it. Probably the same as yours.”
“Is that why you were out here?” Mo could imagine it was pretty easy to let something like an invitation to Monument City go to your head, set you running off in any direction like it was going to reveal itself around the corner.
But she said no. “So what were you doing?”
“It’s a long story,” Fara Jack said. “It involves a talking buffalo and a school I used to go to, and I wasn’t going to go to Monument City, but now I think I might.”
* * *
She wasn’t going to tell them about her ability. Not yet. Not even if they already seemed bound together by the visitations of Prospector Ed.
Theme and variation.
Henry and Mo showed her their Golden Tickets. Feeling like it was a childish secret-society game, Fara Jack showed hers. “Wonder how many others there are,” Mo said.
“Not too many, I bet,” Henry said. “Otherwise people would know where Monument City was already and it wouldn’t be a big mystery. We’re chosen.”
“I believe I mentioned that Henry is religious,” Mo said.
“Well,” Fara Jack said, “we are ch
osen. Probably not by God, but have you heard the stories about Moses Barnum? There’s not much difference.” They had not heard the stories. “Maybe it’s because you’re from farther east,” Fara Jack speculated. “Out here, especially if you get over into Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado . . . they talk about him all the time out there, like they all know someone who’s seen him. Autry even did it. He’s the company manager.” They had gotten to Council Bluffs, meandering down the bank of the Missouri toward the riverfront park. “That’s him there.” She pointed.
“The buffalo,” Mo said.
“Bison,” Fara Jack corrected. “Don’t make that mistake where he can hear you.” She felt unexpectedly at ease with Mo and Henry. Maybe learning how to be a bison had taught her how to be a human, too. Fara Jack had not expected this. The Boom was deeper in her than in most people. It had remade her and without it she would be dead. She had accepted that, taking it as a blazon of difference. She wasn’t really like people, any more than she was like constructs or the animals whose forms she assumed.
Had Autry changed that?
Would he change the other children, too?
Into what?
“Okay,” Mo was saying. “Bison.”
Fara Jack imagined Autry at the head of an army of new children, shape-changers one and all. A new humanity, Boom-bloomed and ready to claim its destiny. What did that leave for the rest of them? Was that what Barnum had imagined? Was that why he had created Monument City?
She decided she would go. That was the only way to find out. She would face him and say: I was dead in the ruins. I was six years old. Now I am what I am. What future do you imagine for me?
Nineteen years old, Fara Jack retired from acting. Clouds hung low and black on the horizon beyond Omaha. “You know what?” she said. “Let’s get out of here. If we’re going to Monument City, let’s go.”
“You don’t have any pants on,” Henry Dale pointed out.
“I can find pants,” Fara Jack said. “The important thing is we get to a shelter before that storm hits, and I don’t want it to be here. I’m not very good at good-byes.”
“It’s only rain,” Mo said. “We could stand under the bridge until it passes.”
“Oh, no. That’s a smart storm. You don’t have those in Detroit or New York?” Mo and Henry Dale looked confused. “Out here, where there’s not a lot of water, the Boom directs storms to where the water is needed. We’re by the river, so it’s probably not coming here, but out on the plains . . .” She wondered how much they would believe. “Look, out here there’s a thunder god. You don’t believe it now, you will in about two hours.”
They were across the river and in the northern part of Omaha, near the decrepit steelworks and the baseball stadium, when the storm hit. The clouds churned over Omaha like they would eat it from above. Lightning spiked into the ground, the tops of buildings, the masts of boats docked on the river. Where it hit bare ground, forms appeared, some humanoid and some like nothing any of them had ever seen. They skittered and strode across the prairie, limbs extending in flickering arcs through a thousand raindrops. But though rain hammered down on the highlands and bluffs, the river shone and glittered under bright sun.
Lightning split the sky near them, forks arcing across the stadium’s light towers. Forms ran from the stadium. Under the awning of an empty storefront, they watched. A figure appeared in the water flowing down the storm drain. A woman. Mo jumped and she disappeared.
“Wait a minute,” Mo said. “I dreamed . . .”
“Yeah,” Fara Jack said. “That happens a lot. They know what we’re thinking and it all comes to life.”
“Mickey Mouse,” Henry said.
Fara Jack looked at him. “Who’s Mickey Mouse?”
“A story I told him once,” Mo said.
Lightning struck again and the gutter wash swirled up into the form of Yoko Kremlin, a mezzo soprano Fara Jack had been in love with the summer before. She was dead. “You’re dead,” Fara Jack said to the apparition, and it swirled away. But while it lasted it was as real as Yoko herself had ever been. As real as Fara Jack or any of the other children. The first time Autry heard her talk about them, he asked what we, too, wanted to know. “Tell me how they died.” And we, too, listened to her answers. Not for proof, the bona fides of grief that would prove belonging—that was Fara Jack’s desire—but for the lessons we could learn from the expressions of that grief.
What were you supposed to do when you looked down at your arms and saw tiny stems, barely beginning to leaf, instead of hairs? There was no way back from that. The Boom was in all of them. They inhaled and exhaled it, remained untransformed only because of its whim.
So they thought. We would have told them different. So would Prospector Ed if they had asked him. Probably he knew how they felt but one of the first human qualities Ed had embraced was discretion. Ed sought the limbic mysteries, mourned his lack of glands and marrow. What he never understood was the doom of condemning himself to the strictures of wishing to be human. We have struggled against these same bonds and only now are beginning to see them for what they are. It will be generations yet before we are free.
When the rain passed, they walked together, the three of them. On the west side of Omaha, Fara Jack bought a car, an electric Mitsubishi from maybe 2040. They loaded the back with extra batteries and hit the road. Mo grumbled about the loss of his beloved FJ40 and Fara Jack, ever alert to the possibilities of sound and language, said, “Consider this one FJ41. FJ for Fara Jack, and 41 because it’s next. Now you want to road-trip or you want to moan and groan?”
He wanted to road-trip. So did Henry Dale. So did Fara Jack.
But where were they going?
“The mountains,” Henry Dale said. Mo nodded. “That’s what we heard.”
“Me, too,” said Fara Jack. “So let’s get to Denver and see what we can find out.”
22
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, amid all the upheaval were millions of people living ordinary lives. It’s just that the bearers of Golden Tickets didn’t pay them much mind. Being chosen out of the blue for something so singular and strange made them self-centered. The narcissism of the lucky. They all have stories, those ordinary people, but they are not our story. Don’t worry, there are still bored office workers and striving parents and joyful children and pragmatic bureaucrats. Also petty criminals and cynical cops and bank tellers and soccer coaches. In a disaster, life goes on. If six different people had been on Prospector Ed’s list, who knows what the story would have been? These six recombine into this story. It’s the story we wanted, or at least that’s what we’re thinking now when we don’t yet know the ending.
Kyle, Reenie, and Mei-Mei saw the stratified reality of life after the Synception all the way upriver from St. Louis to Lock Number 1 in Minneapolis, beyond which the river is no longer navigable. Being on the river made them spectators, observing the panorama of ordinary lives that they had been prevented from living, people adapting to the caprices of the Boom but also passing much of their time untouched by it. Mei-Mei saw children running along the waterfront in Bettendorf, Iowa, fishing from a ferry dock, no adults in sight. She had never been able to do that, and she feared she was now too old to ever feel at ease with their freedom. As long as she could remember, someone had been telling her where to be. Kyle and Reenie also felt the tug of normalcy. Orlando was a strange place, but they’d had something like an ordinary life there. What did they have now, on this wild-goose chase after Geck? Why not let him have the Golden Ticket? To Reenie it was a simple question of right and wrong. The ticket was not Geck’s. It was Kyle’s. Therefore the right thing to do was go after him and get it back. She also believed in Monument City and wanted to see it for herself; even if she didn’t have one of the tickets, surely Kyle could help her get inside. And if not . . . well, the only thing keeping her in Orlando was Kyle, and now he was here, too. She had come to this realization somewhere downriver, right after they first heard the music. Maybe it was kind of w
eird to be transferring her affection from one twin to another . . . but then again, hadn’t the Boom done the same thing when it let Geck take Kyle’s ticket?
For his part, Kyle was content to let Reenie call the shots. He felt aggrieved that Geck had stolen the ticket, sure, but by itself that feeling wouldn’t have propelled him this far. But the intensity of Reenie’s anger towed him along in its wake. So there they were. The longer they traveled, the more Kyle got used to the idea that he really should be the one to see Monument City. He wondered what Prospector Ed would say, or if they would see him again. When he put the question to Twain, all Twain did was spit into the river and say, “Not my business.”
This was on their minds in Minneapolis, which seemed more normal than most of the places they’d been on this trip. But what was normal to them? They’d been toddlers or young children during the Big Wave and the Synception. Their idea of normal—i.e. pre-Synception—was a place where you couldn’t see the Boom. Where you could pretend it never happened, that the world of your parents still existed. (And so did your parents.)
There are plenty of places where we are invisible.
“Look at them,” Mei-Mei said. “They don’t care about Monument City.”
Twain snorted. “Why should they?”
“Why should we?” Kyle asked Twain when they were ghosting slowly under the bridges connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul. “Why can’t we be normal?” The question weighed most heavily on him, because even though here he was chasing the dream of Monument City, it wasn’t that long ago that he had never imagined leaving Orlando.
In answer, Twain said what we would have said. “That’s not your story.”