The Girl at the Center of the World

by Austin Aslan

  “Preachers were reporting developments all over the AM stations. Power outages were happening in Flagstaff, Tucson, Yuma, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Las Vegas. Fried transformers everywhere. I listened to the one-way conversations as I drove to a gas station with vintage pumps. A gallon of gas went for $14.99. I filled up the tank, both gas canisters, and a water jug. Paid in cash.

  “I arrived home at dusk. Everyone was outside. Kids playing in the street, neighbors chatting. No one noticed the knot in the sky. Still dim enough to miss if you weren’t studying it.

  “So I secured my spoils and went for a quick swim. Then I joined my street’s block party. I pointed the knot out to several of my neighbors. There was awe and magic in the desert sky that night. There was no fear, only…wonder.

  “In the morning I tried my old Harley. I reset the contact points and recharged the electrolyte solution in the battery. It fired up, and I took it to my office, locked up the practice. The paper came. There had been a scare at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station; backup pumps had failed but had been brought back online. I went over to the hospital to volunteer. Crowds were swelling. Hundreds had become stranded outside, exposed in long lines and mobs at every entrance. People were getting heatstroke just trying to get into the hospital. I worked straight past midnight. Pacemaker wearers were brought in; their devices had suddenly failed. Prepper colony firefights. Bullet wounds. A church orchestrated a mass suicide. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

  “I drove home, numb, through a dark city, the anomaly looming overhead. The term Rorschach Cloud had started going around. On the drive home it was bright green and flickering with lightning and strangely beautiful.

  “I returned to the hospital late the next morning. The backup power there went out at three p.m. Crowds lined the halls. We begged people to go home. The building became unbearable long before the floodlights died. But even those went out, leaving the corridors black.

  “I sat in my pool that night watching the Rorschach with brewing hatred. I couldn’t stay in Phoenix. Surely Rachel would have headed home by now. Unless she was waiting…for me…knowing that I would come for her. But that didn’t make any sense. I would be insane to flee south of the border, looking for her, given all that was going on, and she would know it. Could I even get into Mexico? Maybe she was stuck down there, unable to cross because of a lockdown.

  “The next morning I went to her house. Nothing. I went to the firm downtown, but the entire tower was locked up. Still, it seemed lunatic to flee Phoenix by way of Mexico, chasing after someone I hadn’t heard from in a week.

  “The explosion at the nuclear plant the next morning changed everything.”

  * * *

  I give Kai’s hand a squeeze. “You okay, buddy?”

  “Yeah. Ow, Lei.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I give his hand a rub.

  He whispers, “You okay, buddy?”

  “Shh!” Dad says.

  Kai and I sink back into the sofa and hold each other tight.

  Marcus takes a drink of water, smiles politely at all of us, and continues. “I was in my pool Friday morning, ducked below the surface, when I felt a strange pressure suddenly squeeze me. My ears popped. The pool shook. I surfaced. One large wave rippled back and forth along the length of the pool. I heard shouts throughout the neighborhood. I scrambled up to my balcony. To the west, on the horizon, a thick column of white smoke rose, drifting toward Phoenix. I could see a fire on the ground, black smoke mixing with the plume of steam. The Palo Verde reactor. That cloud reaching out toward the city was radioactive. There was a second explosion. I saw the flash of it and the billowing of new smoke before I heard it. The shockwave came a split second later, stopping my heart. Then, finally: boom! In just a few seconds, as screaming and shouting built around me, I watched the cloud double in size, and then double again.

  “I’ll never forget that moment, guys. It suddenly seemed so obvious that this would happen. We built this ticking time bomb…and forgot that it had a timer.

  “I snapped out of my paralysis. Grabbed a duffel, filled it, shot into the garage. I knew the roads would get too crowded for a car, so I focused on the Harley. I stuffed what I could into the two trunks, my medical bag. Gas and water. Filled the tank, used rope and duct tape to secure the larger gas canister and a jug of water to the backseat. I took everything: cash, passport, savings bonds, a couple hard drives of photos.

  “The cloud was consuming the western sky. Billowing plume, tan-colored high up, dark brown and thick as mud along the ground. It’s all radioactive. Falling on you already. I peeled away from my house, shaking all over.

  “The bike was slightly off-balance, heavy liquids sloshing around. The 101 was a logjam. I turned around, darted through the streets, made it all the way to the Superstition Mountains in a blur.

  “Everywhere—in spite of the heat wave—cactuses were in bloom. The slopes of the Superstitions were dusted with yellows, oranges, and reds. I slowed to a halt, and I looked behind me, and I bawled. I was a hundred miles east of the Palo Verde plant. Yet the cloud hovered over Phoenix, big as a monsoon storm. I wiped away tears with trembling hands. Black death descending upon a million people. I’ll never be able to come back here, I realized.

  “I turned onto the 60, a long stretch of desert highway. The attack blindsided me. Someone darted out at me. I swerved. I was on the asphalt, my bike ghost-riding away. I cursed and stood, confused. My leg was scraped, but I ran for my bike. I picked it up, surrounded by stunned onlookers. My gas and water were still in place. I stared down my attacker. Just a kid. He really wanted my ride, but I had the support of the crowd. I took off. After that I was more careful.

  “In Tucson the black cloud was visible to the north, but no one understood that they were in the shadow of a nuclear catastrophe. I-10 was at a standstill. Even the southbound lanes were backed up with traffic headed toward Phoenix. The families in the minivans, trapped between more minivans, or broken down on the side of the road—I couldn’t ignore the mothers with babies, those on foot, exposed to the high sun. I wanted to stop and help, to shout, ‘Turn around! It’s radioactive!’ But there were too many people to tell.”

  “You didn’t warn anybody?” Kai asks.

  “Kai, stop it,” says Mom.

  I don’t respond, but I agree with Kai. How could he not stop and tell people to avoid going north?

  “You’re right.” Marcus sighs. “I should have said something. I was so stunned. You have to realize…No. There’s no excuse.” His guilty eyes linger on me and Kai.

  “We all could have done more,” Dad says. “We all have our regrets. What you did makes perfect sense to me. You don’t need to explain yourself. You don’t need to apologize.”

  “Yeah, well, thank you.” Marcus takes a deep breath, starts in again. “Weirdest thing: I was fixated on the desert as I cut across the Tucson Mountains. Saying good-bye, you know? Saguaros along the road—thick as pines. Tall and proud, like a desert people, bearing witness to the last days of humanity. They finally outlived us, and I felt so small as I raced past them.

  “ ‘Rachel,’ I kept telling myself. I needed to be with her. I followed other motorcyclists, weaving through the lanes of stopped traffic and along the shoulders toward the border. Thinking: What if the border’s closed? What if they take my bike, my fuel?

  “The U.S. entry was closed. Waiting for the power. Mexican border officials were stopping SUVs and trucks, looking for weapons, but I crossed into Mexico with a nod to the official waving traffic through. My eyes were everywhere, every little thing a threat. Hordes milled about, desperate to get into the United States. But how could they know about the Palo Verde explosion? Word only traveled as quickly as…me. In a very real way I was breaking the sound barrier.

  “So I arrived in San Carlos just before dark, pulled into Rachel’s driveway, and cut the engine. She was on the steps before I had my helmet off, and threw her arms around me. I stuttered, cried.

  “ ‘S
top!’ I pushed her back, overcome by a horrible thought. What have I done? Am I radioactive? Will I expose her to radiation? I shouldn’t have come.

  “ ‘Phoenix is gone, Rachel. It’s gone.’ I told her everything. She’d inch forward as I spoke, and I’d back away.

  “She gripped my hand, pulled me to her. ‘What else is left?’ she said.

  “ ‘Just each other.’

  “We fled San Carlos that night. I thought we’d swing around Baja, head up the coast. But Rachel reasoned that other nuclear plants all over the west would also go. So we headed south in her yacht, Cibola. We picked up a guy in Mazatlán. He wanted a ride as far down the coast as we would take him. Three minutes out from the dock he pulled a gun. Rachel let loose the mainsheet and turned into the wind. The sail filled, and the boom swung around like a baseball bat and clobbered the guy. He was knocked out for a while. We took the gun and left him on the dock. No more passengers after that. Until Leilani, Tami, and Keali`i.

  “We hoarded food, ate as little as possible, honed our skills at fishing and bartering, and just…survived.

  “When the new Rorschach appeared, I knew it was alien and that it had spawned, or split. We hoped they would leave. They shrank away for a few nights, then came screaming back. I feared they’d split again, become four, then eight.

  “As we went south, the power outage seemed to matter less to local folk. But in the cities…We heard of horrible disasters. Massive outbreaks of dysentery, other diseases. Many Central American capitals were war zones. Gangs ruled the streets. Nicaragua and Honduras were at war. Coups. Mass suicides. Constant talk of Rapture.

  “We got as far as northern Colombia before we had a plan. We knew the world had ended, that the Rorschachs weren’t leaving. We decided to make for Australia by way of the Galapagos and Easter Island and Hawai`i. Rachel is something else. She navigated by stars. We couldn’t even use our compass—the needle was spinning, useless.”

  He lets out a deep sigh, opening his arms. “And now here we are, still spinning. Useless.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I glance around, suddenly whisked out of the Sonoran Desert, give Kai another squeeze. “You okay?” This time he doesn’t answer. His eyes are narrow slits. “You angry?” Of course he’s angry. His future is gone. He missed the mainland a lot after we moved here. The idea that we’ll never be able to go back there—I feel it, too—it’s like a close friend has died. He loved baseball, the Giants, talked about how he planned to go to a home game in San Francisco. He never mentions that anymore.

  “I feel it, too, buddy. It hurts.” I give him a tighter squeeze. “Remember that he’s wrong, though: the Southwest isn’t gone. It’s all still there. We’re keeping that from happening.”

  He startles me, quickly turning and wrapping his arms around me. My eyes mist. His childhood is so different from mine. He never talks about anything but chores. He has no friends to play with. We need to balance him out or there’s going to be no spark left in him.

  We’re all losing our spark. It’s killing all of us. It’s not enough to survive.

  “Dad,” I say in a whisper after Kai jumps up to grab some water. “I want to tell Marcus. He should know. He deserves to know.”

  Dad shakes his head. “No. Listen. You can’t tell people anything. No one can know who you are.”

  “Dad. He’s hurting.”

  “Everybody hurts, Lei. But you’re working on it. Once that Orchid starts flickering out messages and people realize someone pulls the strings of the beast that keeps the power away, you’re going to make enemies. Even these visitors…you never know. No one can know who you are.”

  Grandpa shuffles inside with several plastic bags filled with corn, `uala, mangoes, and guanabanas. He presents them to Marcus. “We’d like you and Rachel to have this. Mahalo for sharing your story.”

  “Thank you,” Marcus says.

  “There’s more in the truck. Plastic milk jugs filled with water, a bottle filled with POG juice, a few eggs, a bag of charcoal, some paperback novels, vegetables and fruits, loaves of bread, a strip of smoked pig, and a mason jar full of poi.”

  I change back into my swimsuit and booties. Marcus hands me notes on which he’s written generic and brand names of meds that Tami needs. I stuff them into one of Mom’s old plastic field vials, seal it, and drop it into my backpack. We’ve decided that Keali`i and I will swim ashore at Richardson’s Beach in Hilo as Cibola makes a close pass and look for Tami’s meds. I’m amazed they’re letting me do this after what happened this morning, but it saves Dad the trip into town and a lot of gas.

  I sit down beside Tami. “You going to survive here without me?”

  “Are you kidding? Feels like I just scored a weekend at the Hilton Waikoloa.”

  I force a smile. “Well, enjoy our beach. I’ll see you tomorrow night. Try to be good until I get back with your meds.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Dad and Marcus slide into the truck on either side of me. Grandpa calls, “Shotgun!” then sits in the bed with a shotgun. We roll the old truck down the hill, past the highway, and as far along the scenic route to Onomea Bay as the road will allow. Dad only turns on the engine for half a mile of the whole trip. “Gravity’s the one resource we’ll never run out of,” he says.

  We keep the lights off, even though they tend to work in this old beater. The Orchid is beyond the horizon, but the baby is visible, casting a fainter green and purple radiance, and we can still navigate the deteriorating roads. When alone, the baby is a black light. Dad’s white shirt glows against the UV light it casts. Under the jungle canopy along the descent to the bay, we slow to a blind crawl and finally stop. Dad inches out a signature fifty-point turn, in case we have to depart in a hurry later.

  Grandpa stays with the truck. Marcus, Dad, and I hike through darkness down to the shore. No sailboat is on the water.

  “We’re early,” Marcus says. “I’m not surprised they aren’t loitering about. But signal anyway?”

  I scramble up onto the rocks. The dive light is right where I stashed it. I point it at the water and flash out the pattern we had arranged. Good practice for Morse code, I tell myself.

  I send out our signal every fifteen minutes. I sit off by myself, listening to the waves crash above the sound of the coqui frogs, watching the baby Star Flower rise to purple brilliance over the water. Finally the mainsail glows coming around the cliffs to the north. I give the signal one last time.

  Slowly the yacht draws nearer and the mainsail collapses. A few minutes later Keali`i paddles toward us in the raft, his purple-white teeth visible like a Cheshire cat.

  I wade out to him as he arrives. “Hey there,” I say. “Everything okay?”

  “All good. I just spent the day deep-sea fishing with a rich older woman. Dream come true. Is Tami mo’bettah?”

  “She’s at the house, recovering.”

  “Good, good.” He jumps into the water, and we haul the raft onto shore together.

  We load Marcus’s haul onto the raft. Two rambutans—strange golfball-sized fruits—glow fluorescent red within their bag. Keali`i picks up my backpack, then pauses. “This yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t we going back to your place?”

  “No. Your place. We’re hitching a ride back into town. We need to find medicine for Tami first thing in the morning. Dad’s picking me up tomorrow.”

  “My place?” He frowns. “So it’s back on the boat?”

  “Yup. You get to see your dream date all over again.”

  “K’den.” He tosses the backpack into the raft.

  “Careful! There’s a quart of gasoline in there!”

  “Wha? Why?”

  “To barter with. Tami’s meds might not be easy to come by.”

  “Ah, sure they will! I gotcha covered.”

  “You don’t even know what she needs.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I know right where to go.”

  All four of us lift the loaded
raft back into the water. I give Dad a hug good-bye. “See you tomorrow night at the banyan tree.”

  He kisses my forehead, and we’re off.

  I fall asleep for the hour it takes to return to Hilo Bay. Keali`i nudges me hard to wake me when it’s time for us to jump. Rachel shakes my hand. “I wish your family the best.” She turns to Keali`i. “Write often, darling. I’ll never forget our time together in Hawai`i.”

  Keali`i blows her a kiss.

  Marcus steps forward. I take his waiting hand, hesitate, and then continue: “It’s not a wasteland.”

  “What was that?”

  I bite my lip, turn away. What are you doing? You’re not supposed to say anything. I shake my head, turn back. No, they should know. They deserve to have hope. “The Southwest. Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s going to be okay. You can go back to your saguaros, if you want.”

  He drops his hand, considers me, then his face closes. He thinks I don’t get it, the radiation. Just tell him. You should have told him at the house. Secrets be damned.

  “We’re drifting, Leilani,” Rachel warns.

  I know you are. There’s no time. “Never mind. Forget it.”

  Keali`i and I put on our flippers, and I strap my mask around my forehead. I look at Marcus and Rachel one last time. Keali`i flips backward into the water. I hesitate. No time to explain the truth. But maybe somebody else can tell him. “You know what?” I say to Marcus. “You could stop in Moloka`i on your way east. On the north shore there’s a low shelf. A town called Kualapu`u. They’ll treat you nicely, maybe even give you more supplies. You might even be able to help a couple Kiwi or Aussie refugees get home. I’m sure there’s plenny sheltering there. Up to you.”

  Marcus cocks his head, considering it. “Thanks. We’ll keep that in mind.”

  “If you stop, ask to see a priest there named Akoni. Tell him I say hi. Tell him…tell him I did listen. Tell him I went up to Mauna Kea, and I listened. It’s important. Please tell him: I went up to Mauna Kea, and I listened.”