by Isaac Marion
HIS FACE through the bars.
“How are you getting along with your fellow criminals, R—?”
“I’ve made lots of new friends.”
My grandfather smiles. I don’t. My face is mostly bruises, and smiling hurts. My muscles are lean and corded. The skin on my fists is finally starting to callus.
“I know prison’s hard,” he says, “but looks like you’re taking it harder than most.”
“I’ve been training.”
“You’ve been getting your ass kicked.”
I look at the floor. “Some of them don’t like me.”
“Why not?”
“Usually starts with my name.”
“What about it?”
“They’ve never heard it before, so they don’t like it.”
He chuckles. “Never did figure out how a Bible-thumper like your mom came up with that hippie bullshit. Bet the kids at school got real creative with it.” He notices my glare and returns to his track. “But you can’t tell me you’re getting all this”—he gestures to my face—“just for having a stupid name.”
“No.”
“So why don’t your new classmates like you, R—?”
“Because they know I’m better than them.”
He smiles bigger, revealing those translucent brown teeth. “Oh I see.”
I spit on the floor, partly as a sign of disdain, partly because my mouth is filling with watery blood. “They’re simple scum. Killers and rapists. There’s no purpose to their crimes, they do it like animals, whenever they’re hungry or horny or bored.”
“And you’re better than them because when you burned down a city, you did it for God?”
“Exactly.”
He laughs. It sounds like dry bones cracking. “You did it because you’re a pissed-off kid. You did it because your mommy died and you needed someone to blame, and you couldn’t blame God because you know he’s not real.”
I grit my teeth as he talks. I don’t understand what I feel toward him. It should be hate, but it isn’t quite that.
“You and them, you’re all liars. You make up bullshit to excuse your actions. You did it because God told you to, they did it because ‘life is hard,’ because they ‘didn’t have a choice.’ Always hiding behind some noble excuse for ignoble deeds.” He chuckles. “You’re a bunch of pussies. The biggest, toughest bastard in this place is a fucking pussy, and you can tell him I said it.”
“What do you want, Grandpa?” I snarl at him. “What can I do for you, Pappy?”
He shakes his head. “First of all, you can drop that fuzzy cardigan shit; it’s not going to be like that with us. You can call me Mr. Atvist.”
I nurture many dark beliefs about my place in the world, but it’s a thrill to hear one so nakedly confirmed. “Okay, Mr. Atvist,” I say, trying to halt the quaver in my voice. “Why do you keep coming here? My whole life, you’ve been barely a rumor. Now you’re my only friend?”
He looks around the menagerie of muscled thugs and wild-eyed madmen, pausing on the empty cell across from me.
“Your partner, Paul Bark. You know he’s already started burning again? Barely waited a week after he got out. He’s got about three hundred people claiming membership in this—what are they calling it? ‘Church of the Fire’? Looks like it’s really taking off. All the corps are nervous. Even Fed’s paying attention.”
I stare at the floor.
“You founded a successful cult at age sixteen. You have something in you that moves people. As a businessman, that interests me.”
“Get out,” I mutter.
He chuckles again and stands up. The guard takes his chair and opens the cellblock door for him. “You’re right about one thing,” Mr. Atvist says. “You are better than them. But not because of your moral pretensions.”
“Why, then?” I say through my teeth.
“You’re better because you’re an Atvist, and they’re not. Because you have a future, and they don’t.”
A tiny crack forms in my shell. Before I can seal it, a glint of desperation shines through. “Can you get me out?” I ask my grandfather.
He smiles. “Of course I can.”
He walks away.
• • •
“R,” Julie says.
My eyes are already open but I blink them, snapping back to the present.
“Are you okay?”
It’s a basic question, often asked by strangers. I give it the response it deserves: a shrug and a nod.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” she says, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about the recent massacre, not the dark path unfolding in my memories.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeats. “You did what you thought was right with the knowledge you had at the time. That’s all anyone can ever do.”
She is not inside my head, and I’m dismayed by how much this relieves me. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than for her to visit me in here, to know my thoughts, to know me. When did I revoke her invitation? I wish the absolution she’s offering were for the wretch in my basement, but she has never even met him.
“Are we still going to Iceland?” I ask her.
We are sitting on the floor in the rear of the plane, leaning against the wall, watching her mother gnaw at the shredded flesh of her fingers. Julie has given up trying to stop her.
“R,” she says, giving me a pained look. “Do you understand that I have to do this?”
“Do you understand that you can’t save her?”
The words don’t feel like mine. They feel like his. A bitter young man sulking in his cell, whispering cruelties through the bars. Is he calling out to his counterpart, the girl in Julie’s basement? The scarred orphan who cries in her sleep and kills without blinking, who’s convinced she’s unworthy of love?
We were building a home. It was going to be beautiful. How did we let them lock us out?
“Yes,” Julie replies to my cold question, and the lack of anger in it stings me. Instead of exploding, she shrinks inward, clutching her knees and staring at the floor. “I understand.”
I want to pull her against me and melt our barriers with a simple warm gesture, but the wretch holds me back. He keeps my arms folded, my face stiff, and he whispers, You’ll hurt her. She’ll hurt you. He whispers, Not safe.
Nora brushes through the curtain and sits next to me. The three of us watch Audrey, whose eyes drift around the cabin with a vaguely troubled squint.
“I’m sorry, R,” Nora says.
I nod.
“They were just too far gone.”
I nod.
“One thing you learn as a nurse: you’ve got to let the gone ones go so you can save the ones that are still here.”
Julie buries her chin in her knees. Her eyes are damp.
M is leaning in the doorway, reluctant to intrude. “Didn’t kill all of them,” he offers with a shrug.
“Yeah,” Nora says with an optimistic lilt. “A few dozen, maybe, but there were hundreds.” She elbows me. “You saved hundreds of people, R.”
Another nod is the only response I can manage. Our friends have no idea how many fights are inside us. They can’t hear our silent shouting.
M sighs and comes inside. He settles down next to Nora, leaving a few polite feet between them. Abram appears in the doorway behind him and pauses to take in the scene: a Dead woman in the middle of the room and the four of us lined up in front of her like an intervention. But he has no wry comments for us. His expression is remote.
“We’re heading south,” he says. “Just wanted to let you know so you don’t shoot me when you see the ocean.”
We all glance at Julie for her reaction, but she doesn’t seem to be listening.
“Iceland’s not south,” Nora says.
“We can’t go through New York. Axiom has defenses all over the state. We need to go around.”
“That’s a big detour. Do we have enough fuel?”
“I’ll cut around Lon
g Island as close as I can, then up toward Boston and—”
“Do it,” Julie mumbles into her knees. “Whatever you need to do, do it. Just get us off this insane continent.”
Abram nods. Julie notices us all looking at her and she straightens, resting the back of her head against the window. “Maybe we can come back someday with an Icelandic army and save everyone. Ella. David and Marie . . . even Evan if you want, Nora. But for now . . . it’s like you said, right?” Her voice is an exhausted sigh spiked with bitterness. “Let the gone ones go.”
I can feel the turmoil in everyone, but it’s hard to argue anymore. We’ve traveled the country and found death in every corner. We’ve searched for resistance and found comfortable slaves. We have grand ideas but no way to share them, because the world has plugged its ears, wrapped itself in a blanket of radio silence, and ordered everyone into bomb shelters to wait for death in the dark.
So it seems we’ll say good-bye to our country. To our continent. To everything and everyone we’ve known. We’ll let our cities burn in fanaticism and drown in oppression, leave our homes half-built to be ruined by rain and rats. We will pile all our memories onto this vast barge of land and we will watch the whole mess sink.
As I sit contemplating this, an unfamiliar voice interrupts my thoughts.
“New,” Audrey says.
Julie jumps to her feet. She flattens against the wall, eyes as wide as they can go. Her mother is looking at her. Not just allowing her glassy stare to drift across her but looking at her.
“What?” Julie says in a trembling whisper.
“N-new . . . Y-york.”
Julie blinks away a tear. “Mom?”
Audrey looks around the cabin. She makes brief eye contact with each of us. Then she slumps over and stares at the floor, wheezing softly.
“Audrey?” Julie drops to her knees in front of her mother, clutching the air as she resists the urge to touch her. “Audrey Arnaldsdóttir?” She risks a quick caress of her mother’s cold cheek, a quick smile through the tears. “Do you . . . do you remember me, Mom? Your daughter? Julie?”
Audrey releases a low groan and continues to examine the carpet.
“Doesn’t happen that fast,” M grunts.
Julie’s eyes dart toward him, instinctively igniting into anger, but he continues.
“Small stuff comes first. Places. Things. It’s a while before we can handle . . . people.”
“But . . . it’s her, right?” Julie says. “She’s remembering where she lived?”
M shrugs. “First thing that came back to me . . . Cream of Wheat cereal. Next thing . . . apartment in Seattle.”
For the first time since the blood-soaked day they met, Julie smiles at M.
“It was just parroting,” Abram says. His arms are folded, his posture skeptical, but his slightly widened eyes betray him. “I said ‘New York’ and it said it back. They do that sometimes.”
“Brook . . . lyn,” Audrey sighs at the floor.
Abram’s eyes widen further.
“Mom,” Julie says, shaking her head in giddy disbelief. “Mom, are you there? Do you remember?” She leans close and grabs Audrey’s shoulders, trying to make eye contact. “You met Dad on a flight. John Grigio. You fell in love. You moved to Brooklyn. You performed your poems at his band’s shows and worked at the library and signed up for every local play you could find.”
“Easy,” M says under his breath. “Too much at once . . . not good.”
Julie seems unaware of anyone but the woman in front of her. She has caught Audrey’s gaze and bobs her head to maintain it as Audrey’s eyes try to escape.
“You were still young when you had me, Mom. You and Dad knew you weren’t ready, you were just a couple of broke artists in a studio apartment in an abandoned corner of New York, and you argued about it for weeks. Dad said it was wrong to bring a child into this fucked-up world, you said it was wrong not to. You said the kid you’d make was exactly what this fucked-up world needed.”
Julie laughs and wipes at her eyes. Audrey’s have stopped darting and have settled on the floor. Julie bends low, trying to catch them again. “You were my age, Mom. I just turned twenty. Can you wish me happy birthday?”
Audrey hunches inward, making soft, inscrutable noises. Then she shoots to her feet and rips off her lab coat, tossing it away like it’s on fire. She stands naked in the middle of the empty cabin, the hopeless ruin of her body on full display.
“Oh, Jules . . . ,” Nora murmurs sadly.
Julie looks up at her mother, freshly stricken by the sight. The tears in her eyes have never really dried, they’ve just ebbed and flowed, and now they’re flowing again.
Audrey looks down at the gaping hole in her side. She passes a hand through it. Her exposed lung inflates, and a mournful howl escapes her slack mouth.
“Mom,” Julie whimpers, a meaningless, ineffectual noise. “Mom, please.”
Abram shakes his head and returns to the cockpit. The impossibility of Julie’s Icelandic hopes is too obvious for comment. No matter what science-fiction utopia we may find there, her mother is going to die.
I notice Sprout peeking through the gap in the curtain. She hesitates. She watches Julie for a moment before following her father.
“On our left,” Abram announces over the PA in a tired drone, “as far away as possible, you’ll see Axiom corporate headquarters, aka Branch 1, aka New York City. If you’d like to be distracted from sad thoughts, feel free to be frightened now.”
Julie is beyond any comfort I can give. A clumsy pat on the back won’t help and may hurt. I can’t begin to imagine what she needs right now, so I decide to give her space.
I push through the curtain and wander up the aisle, watching New York through the windows. The high-rises resemble a grove of burnt trees in the hazy distance. The setting sun reflects off them like fire. We are many miles away, safe above the glittering Atlantic, but I can feel eyes on me. Scopes and targeting lasers. Perhaps a new LOTUS segment calling for us to be shot down with a less-than-subtle montage of famous plane crashes. None of this will matter. We are beyond their reach, and soon we’ll be outside their world altogether, removed from their savage ecosystem.
Struggling to find the peace this should bring me, I move to the western window and watch the sun fall into the ocean, breaking into a thousand pieces on the water. For a moment, I feel it. A sense of ground swept clean, of new possibilities poking through the loam. Then, as I always do, I keep looking, and I find something that kills my reverie. I blink and I squint, but it doesn’t disappear. I run to the plane’s midsection, the window closest to the wing, and I look out at the engines.
A man looks back at me.
“Abram?” I shout toward the cockpit.
Abram doesn’t respond. Perhaps he has no room in his head for what I want to tell him. And how can I tell him? How can I express to him this absurdity: that there’s a huge, musclebound Dead man clinging to one of the engine posts. His blue-gray skin is covered in frost, but he’s not frozen solid. He’s moving. He’s inching forward.
“Abram!”
I hear him grumble and stir in the cockpit; I hear his belt unlatch, but the Dead man has grasped the rim of the engine. He is pulling himself toward some inscrutable goal, perhaps the scent of the tiny family in the cockpit ahead, willfully unaware of the chasm of sky between them.
Abram steps out of the cockpit. He registers the urgency on my face and opens his mouth to ask. Then the man slips over the rim of the engine.
There are two explosions. The first is a reddish-black burst from the back of the engine as the bodybuilder’s hard-earned mass is spread across Long Island like crop duster spray. The second is an eruption of fire that completely engulfs the wing, and when it clears, the engine is gone. So is a large chunk of the wing. Burning fuel streams from the hole in long snakes of flame.
As the plane begins to bank, as Abram disappears into the cockpit and everyone else rushes up from the rear, shouting and scr
eaming, my mind is stuck on the least useful thought:
We never named it. I grew the seeds of my third life in this plane. Julie and I closed our vast distance in it. It rescued us and carried us around the country, and we never gave it a name.
Everyone is cramming into the cockpit, asking what to do, and Abram is shouting that there’s nothing we can do, we’re going down hard, sit down and buckle up and secure your own before helping others, all a soft, slow slur in the back of my awareness.
Julie was good at this. Granting life to inanimate objects. She turned a Mercedes into Mercey. What would she call a 747?
I topple across the aisle as Abram overcorrects the bank, trying to take some weight off the wounded wing.
David.
I smile to myself, falling into a chair next to Julie. “David Boeing,” I tell her, barely able to contain my pleasure.
“What?” she shrieks.
“I’m naming the plane. It’s David Boeing.”
She looks at me with total incomprehension, but I’m still smiling. It’s good. Maybe I can do this too.
“R,” she says, and I suddenly realize that I misread her face. It’s not incomprehension but the opposite. It’s the grim understanding from which I’m hiding.
“R, if we—”
“Please don’t,” I blurt.
She chokes it back. She jumps out of her seat and braces against the cockpit doorway as the plane bucks and shakes. “I’m sorry,” she says, turning her watery eyes from Abram to Sprout. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t care,” Abram says through his teeth as he battles the wild controls.
Julie pulls herself away from Sprout’s panicked gaze and stumbles back down the aisle.
“Buckle up, Jules!” Nora shouts, one hand on M’s shoulder as he clings to his seat with rigor mortis stiffness, his face ashen, eyes wide, looking more corpselike than I’ve ever seen him. He stayed relatively composed for our first crash landing, but that one was soft. This one will be hard, if it’s a landing at all. This one may call for screams.