by Isaac Marion
What if they don’t understand? What if they hate me?
He climbs to the top of the stairs and sets the box at my feet. You’ve survived a dozen suicides with these people. What’s one more leap?
I close my eyes and pick up the box.
“Do you know what BABL stands for?” I ask no one in particular.
“Never met anyone who does,” Tomsen says. “I’ve always guessed Buried American Broadcast Lock.”
Nora thinks for a moment. “Big Apple . . . Barrier Language?”
“Butt And Breast Lover,” M offers.
I release a slow breath, tensing for my polysyllabic confession. “It’s Bicoastal Agitation Blocking Lattice.”
All eyes fall on me.
“There are two generators. One on each coast. Airwaves won’t clear until they’re both gone.”
“Where?” Tomsen nearly shrieks, tensing like she’s about to pounce on me. “Where’s the other one?”
“Somewhere in Citi Stadium. It’s part of the LOTUS broadcast station. And Axiom is sitting on it.”
I feel their eyes trying to peel my layers and expose my secrets, but I’m not hiding them anymore. My new life is young. My past is most of me. If I cut it out, I’m a thin and hollow skin.
“They planned it all years ago, before the hiatus, before the quake.” I let it pour out of me in a stumbling rush, leaning on my knees with my head in my hands. “They died, but they came back, and they won’t stop.” I peek through my fingers at the drowned city, trying not to see how my friends are looking at me. “They already have the Feed. Soon they’ll have the Dead. Then the Living. Then everything.”
The breeze ruffles my hair. A few rays of orange light pierce through the tattered clouds as the sun goes down, its daily routine undisturbed by the chaos here on Earth.
“What are you talking about?” Abram says in a low voice. “How do you know all this?”
I don’t answer Abram. I answer Julie. I look into her face and tell her: “I remember who I was.”
Her eyes are vast and terrifying, like icy meteors hurtling toward Earth, but I resist the urge to look away. This time, I won’t run. I will let her pierce me and dig around inside me, and whatever she finds there, she can have.
But the trial doesn’t come. Not yet, at least. Instead of demanding answers and interrogating me on my sins, she turns to the horizon and says, “We have to stay.”
I realize I haven’t been breathing. I inhale gratefully.
“Stay?” Nora says. “What do you mean?”
“We keep arguing about whether to hide or escape. When did those become our only options? Two different ways to give up?”
Nora frowns. “Um, Julie . . . you’ve been pretty insistent on that second option.”
“I know.” She shakes her head. “I was so scared. Told myself we were going to find help and bring it home, but everything was so fucked . . .” I notice a glint of moisture in her eye. “. . . and then Mom showed up, and I just . . . broke.” She looks at Abram through the welling of tears. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
Abram says nothing. His face is stony.
“But you were right, R.” She looks at my feet for a moment before raising her eyes to mine. “I can’t save her.” She turns to Nora. “And you were right. She wouldn’t want me to try if it means giving up everything else.” She wipes her eyes on her arm and clenches her jaw. “We can’t hide and we can’t escape. We have to stay and fight.”
For a minute or two, the only sound is the squeal of Tomsen’s radio as she absently roams the stations. I would expect Abram to have a lot to say about this, but he just looks from Julie to me with that strange blankness.
“Fight Axiom?” M says, pinching his forehead like he’s getting a headache. “How?”
Tomsen has landed back on Fed FM, and Julie jabs a thumb at the radio with a disgusted grimace. “I say we start with that.”
“The Axiom Group provides certainty in uncertain times,” says an earnest female voice while the soundtrack swells. “How can you rely on your fellow man when he’s just as desperate as you? Only Axiom stands above the crowd. Only Axiom is prosperous enough to be trusted.”
“It’s not like they have an unstoppable army,” Julie says. “They’re not taking the country by force. People are giving it to them because they think it’s the best way. Because all they know is what Axiom tells them.”
“In our thriving modern cities you’ll find food, shelter, and work for the whole family. You’ll sleep peacefully surrounded by thick walls and trained soldiers while helicopters float above your head like guardian angels.”
“I’m so sick of listening to this,” Julie growls. “Old Gov or Axiom, it’s always the same voice. One loud asshole shouting over everyone.”
“Rapists,” a man intones as the music turns dark. “Serial killers. Pedophiles. Terrorists. Inhuman monsters who want to eat your family . . .”
“It’s time for him to shut the fuck up.” She grabs the radio and flicks the off switch. Tomsen doesn’t seem to mind.
I heave myself up from the bench. With my spine straight, I am almost as tall as M. I fill my lungs with the rain-scrubbed air, and I release an imperative sentence:
“Let’s destroy BABL.”
A wide grin is spreading across Tomsen’s face. Nora’s lips are pursed, her jaw stiff, but she begins to nod.
M shrugs like I’ve proposed a trip to the corner store. “Works for me.”
But I see something building in Abram. His eyes are on the ground, weary and sad. He is shaking his head as if caught in some bitter inner argument. Then he stops. He looks up at Julie.
“Good luck.”
He starts walking.
“Where are you going?” Nora calls after him.
“I’m going to find my daughter.”
“So are we! Get back here!”
I see his head shaking as he walks. “No, you’re going to destroy BABL and expose Axiom and build a better world. I’m going to find my daughter.”
“We’re going to the same place, dumb-ass! If we don’t find her on the way to Post, we’ll find her in Post!”
“You’re not going to make it to Post. The world’s going to eat you alive.”
“You said yourself we can help you!”
“I was wrong.”
Nora throws up her hands. M looks uncertainly from me to Julie. “Should I stop him?” He cracks his knuckles. “Don’t need guns to take a hostage.”
Julie doesn’t seem to hear him; her face is taut with overlapping emotions as she watches Abram recede, so I answer for both of us.
“Let him go.”
I feel a rush of guilty relief as the words leave my mouth. We’ve dragged this man across the country hoping he would emerge from his stupor, see the light leaking into his life and walk toward it, but instead he walks away. He says, “It’s too far, no one will ever reach it,” and he walks away. And I am tired of him. I am tired of him and the people who made him and the people he will make if he can. I am tired of the tradition he carries, the legacy of a low existence, and if he wants to carry it far away from us, I say let him.
But as always, Julie is warmer. As always, she’s the last to give up.
She bolts after him.
“Abram!”
I follow at a distance, just in case this escalates.
“Abram, wait!”
“You know what’s funny?” he says without slowing down, and without a trace of amusement. “You keep saying you’re sorry for shooting me, for taking me hostage. But that was the closest I ever came to respecting you.”
Julie’s hands clench at her sides.
“That was the one time I saw you look past your ideals to do what you had to for your family. And now you’re going back. Giving up on your mother and running off to save the world.”
“I’m not giving up on my mother,” Julie says through gritted teeth. “I’m going to find her and be with her for as long as I can. But there’s more at st
ake here. We might be the only people outside Axiom who know where to find BABL, so we—”
“Good luck!” He quickens his pace. Julie starts to fall behind.
“Abram, listen to me!” Her face is all dogged determination, but her voice is getting hoarse. “I know what it feels like to lose your family. Like you’re cut off from humanity, like you’re meant to be alone?”
He turns onto a dark side street, gaining ground with every step.
“I fight that thought every day, but it’s not fucking true!”
He finally stops. He spins around, and his blankness is gone. “Then what is true, Julie?” he snaps in a voice like acid. “What do you believe if you don’t believe your own thoughts?”
“I believe what my mother always told me.” She stands straight and meets his anger with soft immovability. “That humanity’s a family you can never lose. No matter what happens.”
I stare at the side of her face. Is she aware that I’m listening? Is she speaking to me too?
Abram is looking at her like she’s from another world. An impossible shape speaking alien tongues. I expect a burst of cold laughter, but he just squints at her, dragging his escaped emotions back into the prison of his head. Then, safely blank once again, he turns and walks away.
Julie doesn’t follow. The fervor drains out of her; she seems to shrink three inches. Abram shrinks too as he increases the distance between us. Then he slips around a corner and he’s gone.
IN THE CORNER of a shadowed parking lot, surrounded by stripped cars and heaps of trash, something big sits beneath a brown tarp.
“Is that it?” Nora says. “It’s huge.”
“Please tell me it’s camo painted,” M says uneasily.
Tomsen approaches with a hand outstretched like she’s calming a frightened animal. “I’m so sorry, baby,” she coos as she unfastens a corner of the tarp. “I didn’t mean to leave you for so long.”
Julie has been quiet since Abram left. She walked the six blocks from the promenade without a word to anyone, and I imagine her wandering gloomy halls of memory, perhaps reliving the last time she failed to save a Kelvin. But I glimpse a faint spark of interest as she watches this unveiling.
“They caught me right before I could do it,” Tomsen says, unhooking the last tie-down, “but I did it anyway. I did it today. But I guess there’s more to do.” She yanks the tarp to the ground. “Barbara,” she says, “this is our new crew. They’re going to help us finish.”
Barbara is, as promised, not a van. She is over twenty feet long, rounded and bulbous like a cartoon submarine, riding low on three sets of wheels like a retro vision of the future. A forest of antennas sprouts in the cracks between solar panels, and a roof rack holds three plastic barrels marked NOT GAS DON’T STEAL. Other than a red stripe running along the sides, the whole length of the thing is bright, unapologetic yellow.
M sighs, but I see a smile creeping into Julie’s face.
“1977 GMC Birchaven,” Tomsen says as she pulls a key from a box under the chrome bumper and unlocks the only door: a curved hatch remarkably similar to the one on the 747. “Finest motor home ever built, made even finer with a few apocalypse mods.”
As we file into her strange little home on wheels, she rushes around trying to tidy up. It’s a comically lost cause. The RV’s interior resembles a merger of a newsroom and an eccentric artist’s studio: documents and photos and collage clippings piled on every surface, maps and sketches pinned to the walls and drawn on the windows, and of course, plenty of actual trash.
A beat-up old copy machine occupies the kitchen counter, surrounded by reams of yellow paper.
“So this is where the magic happens,” Nora says with genuine wonder.
Tomsen looks embarrassed as she struggles to stuff the chaos into the already overflowing cabinets. Every seat is piled high; there is literally no room for anyone but the driver.
Julie puts a hand on her shoulder. “Tomsen,” she says. “Do you still need all this stuff?”
Tomsen stops stuffing. She looks at Julie.
“It was for your search, right? For the tower?”
“And the Almanac,” Tomsen says. “For writing and publishing the Almanac.”
“You just toppled one tower. We know where to find the other one. So isn’t all this . . .” She gestures to the chaos around her. “Isn’t it finished?”
“Are you suggesting she should discontinue the Almanac?” Nora says, aghast.
“Of course not,” Julie says. “But once we kill the jammer, the Almanac can go on the air. It can go worldwide if you want it to.” She wades through the trash to examine the sun-darkened copy machine. “It’s amazing what you’ve done with a single copier . . . but maybe you don’t need it anymore.”
Tomsen looks at the copier. She looks at it for a long time with what I assume is fondness and nostalgia. Then I have to rethink that interpretation when she grabs the machine and throws it violently out the door. It bursts apart with a satisfying crunch, and she dusts off her hands. “Good-bye, exed world.”
• • •
We all assist in the purge, scooping up piles of research and tossing it into a huge pile on the pavement. It’s a strange feeling, dumping out someone’s life’s work, but this work is finished. Soon she can begin another.
When the publishing house is gone, what remains is a surprisingly spacious home complete with a restroom, a kitchen nook, two sets of couches that fold into beds, and plenty of orange shag carpet. The cabinets are filled with a treasure trove of canned food, tools, car parts, and survival gear, except for the one occupied by some kind of oil filtration system. Through the gigantic rear window, I see a scooter hanging from a rack.
The RV isn’t a home on wheels; it’s a self-contained city.
“H. Tomsen,” Nora says, spinning slowly in the passenger seat, which sits like a throne on the elevated cockpit platform, “you are the coolest person I’ve ever met. Where the hell did you get this thing?”
“My dad,” Tomsen says as she darts around shutting drawers and securing loose objects, battening down the hatches. “He was always a step ahead. Saw it all coming. Spent his life savings future-proofing Barbara, right before the currency crash.” Everything is secure but she keeps moving around, looking for more to do. “Had a few good years together. A few good trips. First five issues of the Almanac were his.”
I open my mouth to ask where her father is now, then I remember Julie’s lesson and I close it.
“His writing was beautiful,” Julie says softly.
“How would you have seen those issues? You’re not that old . . . are you?”
Julie smiles sheepishly. “I, uh . . . bought them off a traveler. For my collection.”
Tomsen looks perplexed. “You collect my zine?”
“I have every issue.”
“Maybe we’re a little weird,” Nora says, “but the Almanac meant something to us. There was nothing else like it, no one else trying to reach out. There might be a few other explorers out there, but when they find something good, they sure as hell don’t share it with the world. You’d have to be crazy to do that.”
“It wasn’t just news for us,” Julie says. “It was like . . . an artifact from some other universe. A universe with different rules. Different possibilities.”
Tomsen looks back and forth between them. Her confusion gives way to deeper emotion; her throat clenches. She climbs into the driver’s seat and buckles up and sits there for a moment, staring through the huge, wraparound windshield. Then she flips a few switches and checks a few gauges and turns the key. The antique engine—or whatever customized contraption her father installed—coughs a few times, waking up from its long nap, then roars to life with a deep diesel rumble. The air fills with an unexpected odor.
“Is that . . .” Julie sniffs. “French fries?”
“Vegetable oil,” Tomsen says. “Fryer waste.”
“Wow,” Nora chuckles. “I haven’t smelled French fries since . . .” S
he thinks for a moment. Blinks a few times. Her smile falters. “Don’t know. Can’t even remember.” She spins her chair to face the windshield and it clicks into position.
I glance at M and find a similarly unsettled expression. He looks at the back of Nora’s head with a gravity I rarely see on his jocular face.
We all fall back onto the couches as the ancient RV surges into motion, and by the time we’re onto Brooklyn Avenue, the shadow has lifted from M’s features and Nora’s too. But it lingers in my mind. I glance at Julie and find her lost in her own preoccupations, some of which I can guess while others remain obscure, and I am suddenly conscious of a fact I often forget: I am not the only one with locked doors. Everyone around me is full of hidden hurt, but the hoarded heap of my own has always blocked my view. What’s in their forbidden attics? Their boarded basements? Are their monsters a match for mine?
Julie is staring out the side window, oblivious to my gaze, so I let it wander her face and body, from her matted hair to her stained clothes, fresh wounds and old scars. Despite my romantic flights of fancy, she is no spotless angel. She is no standard of perfection by which to measure myself. I think of her rage in Detroit, gunning down three people with barely a blink, the ice in her eyes as she shot Abram once, then twice, looking ready for a third. I remember all her tales of drugs and razors and blacked-out fucking in alleys, ugly truths she was never afraid to share with me. Was I afraid to listen? Have I ever really known this woman, or did I paint an image that inspired me and prop it up in front of her? Did I glamorize her defects, give her pain a glow of noble tragedy, and cheerfully omit whatever I couldn’t beautify?
I feel something dissolving between us. A hazy film of mythology and abstraction. I see her in the unflattering sharpness of reality: a fragile human being with neuroses and psychoses, smelly feet and greasy hair, who acts rashly and contradicts herself and fumbles her way forward in the dark.
She has never looked so beautiful.
Still unaware of my slack-jawed stare, she stands up, testing her balance as the RV accelerates onto the highway, and moves to the rear bedroom. She presses her fingertips to the huge window, watching the ruined husk of New York recede behind us in a red-orange blaze of sunlight. Then she sits on one of the couches, looks at me, and pats the spot beside her.