RUTGER WAS WAITING at the airport for us, standing awkwardly between the rows of empty seats in Departures, clutching Johnny’s brown waxed canvas bag. It was bulging, like he’d stuffed a watermelon in there. I knew it well—she took it everywhere, lecture tours, trips to the mall, whatever. She used them till they fell apart, which took a long time, but she loved things like that, very expensive things that looked cheap, except that a cheap imitation would never survive so many years of her abuse, soaking it in the rain and throwing it off luggage carts and dropping it off train platforms, dragging it along conveyor belts and the sharp teeth of escalators, cramming it with razor-edged textbooks and unsheathed soil knives, having lipglosses and yogurts and bacterial samples explode inside it.
The company had offered her free ones because of all the free publicity, but she always turned them down. Turned everybody down. I would have taken one of those bags no problem, but she never offered to buy me one and I’d never asked. Part of our unspoken nod to basic economic facts: I gave gifts that I could afford, and she gave at the same level, so that we wouldn’t embarrass each other.
It occurred to me, with a pang that felt like someone had poked me sharply in the neck, that Rutger was at the airport not only because he had packed for his employer, but because my family had been put on a plane, no doubt kicking and screaming, and sent far away. I opened my mouth to ask him about it, then thought better of it, seeing his face. He wasn’t even looking at me.
“Thanks,” she said, slinging the bag on her shoulder. “Um, this is a bit much. Hang on.” She fished out handsful of clothing; I turned my head as she got to a layer that seemed inappropriately silky and patterned for me to look at. Now was not a good time for an unexpected hard-on, not that there ever was. “We won’t be gone for long.”
“I am against this,” he said, holding the discarded garments in both hands, nearly but not quite hiding how his knuckles stood out white against his tan. His face, usually so impassive and consistent, with its painted-on expression of polite curiosity, was trembling, wavering as if seen through water. I wondered how much he had seen at the house. How much he believed; how much she had told him. Whether I should pity him. “I am going to ask you again. Don’t go.”
“That wasn’t a question,” she pointed out, repacking the bag and hefting it experimentally.
“Will you stay?”
“No.” She looked up at him. “I know you’re trying to find some loophole that will result in me agreeing to stay put. And I know you don’t like this. But we have to go.”
“I will go with you,” he said, all in a rush, as if it had just occurred to him. “Don’t take... this one. Take me, instead. Whatever is happening, I will be of more help.”
“No.”
“But—he isn’t—I would—”
“Usually, I’d tell you that was true,” she said, trying to find gentleness in her voice, to remove the unintended insult he felt he’d received. I wished I could tell him that my going wasn’t a slap in his face, that it wasn’t that I was being preferred over him because of some talent I had or skill she wanted me to exhibit. That we might be flying to disaster and death.
She said, “We’ll be back by the sixth. At the latest. Maybe the seventh, if I have any trouble booking our flight back.”
“If you have trouble, call me and I will book it,” he said at once, then checked himself, like yanking a puppy back on a leash. “But I am telling you again, I don’t see why you are doing this. Why you are going there. Why you won’t tell me.”
“Just promise me you won’t tell anyone where I’m going or who I’m with,” she said. “Promise me. Tell people I’m just going on a business trip like usual, if anyone asks. Anyone. Police, mom and dad, anyone. Promise.”
“For years I have closed my eyes to many, many things that you have done,” he said, after a long, stunned silence; he wasn’t looking at her any more, just me, his bronze-coloured eyes sparking and seething. “Where I could not close my eyes, I closed my mouth. Sometimes, as you asked. Sometimes, when you did not ask. But I cannot promise this time. Especially because you are going with him. If your mother—”
“Her especially. Tell her I’m going to... check up on the university endowments from last year.”
“If. She. Asks.”
“Just tell her that!” she finally snapped, taking a step towards him; both he and I backed off in actual fear. “And I want to hear you promise it!”
“Joanna, the house, these things that have happened, I cannot lie about everything to everyone. You don’t know what you’re getting into. Whatever this is, whatever you are doing, you can tell me, and I will help take care of it. I know you are... I know you are...” He cast around for a word, his face writhing. “Special. That you have done much more than a girl your age would normally do. But sometimes, adults have to—”
“We have to go,” she said, cutting him off. Reminding him of his place, I thought, wincing. Not a friend. Not a parent. Just an assistant. “I said, promise.”
“Yes,” he muttered, fists shaking at his sides. “I promise.”
“Thank you.” Something deep in her chest wheezed like an accordion; stress bringing back a whisper of her childhood asthma, long outgrown. I wondered if it would resurface on such a long-haul flight, in that dry air. Shit.
“We’ll be back. Wait for my call. And water the plants,” she added as she walked away. I scuttled after her, giving him a half-hearted wave. I didn’t like the guy, but I hated for that to be our final goodbye. He lived for her in a way that I didn’t; the ways we loved her and worried about her were so different.
I wondered what he would be doing if she hadn’t found him. The way she talked about him in interviews, two prodigies finding each other, as if it was meant to be. No mention of his parents having kicked him out of their house, how he’d been homeless for part of his degree, his tuition paid for but nothing else. I didn’t know the rest of the back story, and he didn’t like that narrative anyway. In interviews, he’d simply say that he decided to work for Johnny because he believed she was doing good work, work that would make a real difference in people’s lives. “She made me a generous offer and I saw that we could be of assistance in each other’s research.” His face in those TV spots like I’d always seen it—sharp, bright, focused, just like hers. Maybe that was what she had seen in him. A mirror face, a brightness.
What had she seen in me? Not that, obviously. Maybe opposites attracting. I wasn’t her other half the way Rutger was, and that had been his goodbye. I wondered what mine would look like.
In gloomy silence we got dinner at one of the few restaurants still open, apathetically shoveling noodles and rubbery shrimp into our mouths, not really tasting it, fueling our engines.
“You’d think we’d be having filet mignon and fancy champagne for our last meal,” I said.
She choked on a laugh, the first real one I’d heard in what felt like forever. “You’d think so, eh? Like, um, garnished with a whole lobster.”
“And a big fuckin’ truffle.”
“Yes! A truffle as big as a volleyball. And some gold leaf.”
“And... what else is really fancy? You’d know, Richie Rich fancy. Some rare cheese? Made with like, whale milk or something?”
“Ew!” She thought, looked at the ceiling. “But there’s somewhere in Sweden that makes a cheese with moose milk and that’s a couple of hundred dollars a pound.”
“Yeah. A grilled cheese sandwich with moose cheese and truffles and gold,” I said, pushing the remnants of my meal around on the bamfoam plate. “That’s what we should be eating.”
“I would destroy a civilization for a grilled cheese sandwich right now. I’d go full fucking monster.”
“Me too.” I smiled at her, dragging it up from the depths with muscle-tearing effort. “But actually, let’s not call this our last supper.”
“Of course it isn’t. We’re not gonna starve over there. All the stereotypes about the Middle East are wr
ong except one: they want to feed you. All the time.”
“Have you been where... where we’re going?”
“Sort of.” She jerked a thumb at my bag, where she’d stashed a double-sided wad of her printouts, drawings, and notes, as thick as my forearm, like a book manuscript. “I’ve been to Morocco twice, but not Fes, which is where we’re going.”
“Morocco. That’s amazing. Jesus. I’ve never been to...” I trailed off. I’d never been anywhere, really. Incredible to think this would be my first real trip.
She said, “A library there might have documents about the alignment. Right now all I know is it’s close, it’s breathing down our necks. There’s so much magic in the world I can almost taste it.” She lowered her voice. “So much that Drozanoth might be able to start using human agents to do its dirty work. And then the rules go haywire and we are in the shit.”
“We are already in the shit.”
“We are currently shin-deep in the shit. If that thing starts conscripting people, we will be chin-deep and treading.” She took a pen from her bag and scribbled briefly on a napkin, then turned it to me: Man in blue coat behind me.
I jerked my head up, then immediately pulled it back down, pretending to scrape the last noodles off my plate. A nondescript white man in a blue and white Adidas jacket, head down, dark hair, a fragmentary memory of a pair of intensely blue eyes staring at us in the millisecond before we had both looked away. “Well,” I said, pitching my voice as low as I could while I tore up the napkin, “people stare, you know? I mean you were just in the paper two days ago and you got moshed by photographers right in this airport. Or did you forget that you were famous?”
“Look at his face, his skin,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her. “Like something’s being taken out of him, moment by moment. Look how pale he is.”
“There’s a lotta pale people in the world.”
“Yeah, there are. But remember his face. Don’t forget it. Watch for it, later.”
“All right.”
“If there’s one, there could be others.”
“All right, all right.”
“Hey. This isn’t paranoia,” she said.
“After what I’ve seen today, nothing is paranoia,” I said.
“Write that down somewhere,” she said. “Nothing is paranoia.”
I WAS WORRIED about the passport setting off some kind of alarm when it was scanned, but it didn’t—Rutger did good work. My God, these days I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I had tried to get on a plane with a fake passport and got caught. The private room, the rubber glove, a million years in jail. It was traveling with Johnny that got us through, I realized, even though they had given her some flak for the ticket purchase because she was under eighteen. It was traveling with a white girl, traveling with money. I would take it.
It wasn’t till we were on the plane, buckled into our first-class seats, that I let myself relax. Nothing could get us up here. The man in the blue jacket hadn’t been in the line to board. And he sure wasn’t in first class—we were separated from economy not by a curtain but a sturdy door, and there were only six passengers for twenty seats, none of whom seemed to alarm Johnny the way he had. First class even had its own bathroom, which I proceeded to destroy ten minutes after takeoff. I half expected the flight attendants to wear hazmat suits as I sheepishly crawled back to my seat.
“Are you okay?” Johnny whispered. “Do you have the anxiety poops?”
“I have not got anxiety. I’ve just got the poops.”
“Uh huh. Drink some water.”
My stomach is too damn sensitive; it’s like a burglar alarm that goes off when a bird lands on the house. I wondered how it would react to being in a new country, all that strange food and foreign water, unless Johnny had something for it. I hadn’t even had time to get all my shots before we left; Johnny hadn’t even brought it up. Probably because she had had all of hers for years, and I’d never even left Canada before. If I shit myself to death, would she pause to memorialize me before racing ahead to solve the mystery and close the gate? The greater good, you know.
She had this mantra. Or manifesto. Anyway, this immovable hierarchy in her head, that she’d tell reporters, students, anyone who asked. About how you had to get people food and clean water and a roof over their head before you got to anything else. How you had to vaccinate their babies, prevent the early childhood diseases, quickly and completely treat whatever you had failed to prevent, and then leave people to it. At once. And in totality.
She had invented these... I can’t remember what she called them. Something Pods, missing out on the chance to call them Chambers Chambers before the reactor ever came along. A self-contained flat-topped cone, for refugees and natural disaster victims and so on. You’d do your stuff on the main level and then there were a couple of steps up into a loft area, for sleeping and food storage, a fold-out solar array for powering flashlights and phones, a little water capture device that could get a certain amount of moisture out of the air. And depending on how you shut the portholes and flaps, your cone could withstand being hit by a hippopotamus or washed away in a flash flood. And you’d be fine. Safe, fed, dry. I think there were something like a half a billion of them out there now. Stocked with her vacuum-packed protein pastes and cubes, and the chemical toilet, and the compact fuel packs that burned for days.
And people would say “So now you’re going to stop the local warlord? Arrange a treaty with the neighbouring assholes? Take away their nukes?”
But every time, she’d say, “No. I’m providing necessities. Anything else is up to them.” Adamant, unbending. You don’t treat the symptoms, she always said. You treat the illness. If there is lingering fever or coughing, the patient can deal with it themselves.
I remembered the summer she’d developed that ration paste, looking for something heavy in fats and proteins, savory and sweet, shelf-stable. She processed nuts, seeds, protein gunge cooked up by bacteria in the labs, whatever she could think of—obscure beans, bark, seedpods, the coverings of strange fruits, stopping just short of mealworms. I ate sample after sample and kept getting sick. She’d yell at me, seeing the empty spot in the fridge, one grid missing out of nine or twelve or fifteen, fucking up the whole experiment, and I was always unable to explain why I simply picked food up and ate it when I saw it. I was ten or eleven and I simply could not explain myself.
I looked across the aisle; she was blackout asleep, curled around her music player, all cried out. “CDs will be dead soon, Nicky,” she’d told me when she released the players, one of her few forays into gadgetry. “This is what people will want, and Apple will make millions of them. Digital music will take over. Better than what you can get on Napster.” She had been right, of course, at least about the players. The first batch had sold out in a month, the factories scrambling to keep up. The glass ones, that looked like a bottle of perfume; the metal ones, like a flask, satisfyingly heavy; the plastic and rubber sport ones in black and blue and red and white that everyone ended up buying that showed fingerprints instantly. And hers, the only one of its kind, made of wood that only grew softer and smoother over the years, her thumb slowly rubbing away the design of leaves and vines on it, pale gold against the sepia of the wooden casing. If you didn’t know better, you’d think she’d fallen asleep cuddling a yoyo. Always wanted to be special.
Always had been special. Even before I knew. I thought about City Hall again, the shooting. The first day I ever saw her face.
What else did those old memories hold? A perpetual darkness, smell of urine, someone big who smelled of cigarette smoke, pushing me... faint sunrises and sunsets, broken by flashlights and headlamps...
Years later, when I was in junior high and Johnny was arguably more famous than Vanilla Ice, Lifetime made a straight-to-TV movie about it, based on a novelization we hadn’t known about called ‘As Angels Sing.’ Looking back, the title was the only thing that didn’t make me physically cringe to think about. John’
s parents sued—unsuccessfully, I think. Mine didn’t care; my character in the movie was only onscreen for a minute, and he was played by a black kid instead of brown, as if any colour would do.
When I found out about the movie, Johnny was away as usual, working at her maize lab in Georgia. I called main reception and patiently waited out five or six transfers till someone found her and I broke the news.
“Oh my God,” she wailed. “A Lifetime movie; please, God, no. I can’t come home now.”
“You have to,” I said sadly, “we have to watch the Canada Day fireworks with the kids.”
“I’m flying back out on the weekend. Do not bring up that movie.”
Even now there’s no indication that it happened, not even a plaque commemorating the deaths, because City Hall was renovated around the time the movie came out, swapping the bullet-pocked brick for tile and adding a glass pyramid. I was pleased—I wanted it changed, unrecognizable, something entirely new, something where no darkness could live. Johnny was upset. She wanted the city to knock it down and make a park.
At the opening ceremony, we sat between our moms so we could talk. “Treehugger,” I whispered, looking straight ahead.
“I’m an aesthete, not a treehugger,” she said. “Look it up.”
“I like how you think I wouldn’t know what it means.”
“I like how you’re pretending you’re not going to go home and look it up.”
“I’m not.”
Now, salt was crusted solid across the bridge of her nose, a wet channel running through the middle of the crystals, her upsprung hair shorter than mine. It had been years since she’d had long hair; I remembered it blowing in the wind once as we said goodbye on a summer evening, the silkiness and loft of it with the sun coming through, seeming blonder in its length, a shining scarf afloat on her shoulders, weightless.
A younger her, a younger me. We could never go back. And I was the only one who wanted to, anyway. Because I was the only one who loved or even knew how.
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