They walk through the gardens, down toward a white castle of a church with three high turrets, tucked behind a black fence covered with memorials taped or cable-tied to the struts, or simply piled up at the bottom. Photographs of dead men and boys, letters, husks of flowers, sports shirts, baseball caps, a fold-out knife, a tool belt, children’s drawings, a stuffed toy dog, lots of teddy bears, birthday cards, a gold ring on a faded silver ribbon, sunglasses, a page ripped from a book, a luggage tag, a broken drone, an alligator skin wallet flapping open, a sippy cup, a tricycle, a pair of deer antlers, an Xbox controller, and one of those talking fish on a plaque.
It’s too much. Miles can’t bear it. All the other dads and brothers and uncles and sons and boys and men who died, and this is all they’re reduced to? A pile of junk. He wants to wade in howling, kick it all down, scatter it to hell and gone, but he restrains himself. He tugs at Spivak’s leash instead. “I don’t want the dogs to pee on it.”
“You want to see inside the museum? They’ve got the best diorama explaining how the Mayans were ancient Israelites who traveled across the ocean in flying pod-ships, and Mayan and Hebrew are the same language.”
“They’re not,” Mom says.
“Yes, but you can understand how someone would want to believe that we’re all connected and God has a plan for us.”
“It sounds dumb,” Miles says. “The dogs won’t want to go indoors.”
“No worries. You want to see our maker space? See the spiral jetty, the tree of life? Or I could take you down to the commune by Liberty Park, where there are a lot of family units. You could check it out, see if it feels right for you?”
“Can’t we stay with you? I mean, at Kasproing?” Miles blurts out, but he’s aiming the question at Mom. She doesn’t look at him, not even to say no. It’s so unfair.
16.
Cole: Departures
TWO YEARS AGO
Cole settled in at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. She had no choice. The DSRs were only allowed to visit the QMs for three hours a day. You know the world has gone for shit when everything is reduced to acronyms. Quarantined Males, Direct Surviving Relatives. She’s heard the guards refer to them as Plus Ones. Like this is a party, and all the broken women are not quite VIP enough to qualify for the golden circle. Nine till ten. Two till three. Six till seven. And if your little boy or your husband or your uncle or your elderly father or your brother or your cousin needs you in the between times because the tests have been especially intolerable today, then it’s too bad.
She’d done her best to cooperate. Because it wasn’t kids in cages, it wasn’t American concentration camps, and she could see Miles through the examination room windows and she did want what was best for him and there were all these forms to fill in, a detailed medical history of immediate family. It was calming, after those first few days of rage and bewilderment, the thumping of the helicopter journey still in her ears, screaming as they raced Miles, limp with whatever they’d injected him with, into the base hospital.
Cole dutifully recorded Miles’s stomach pains, the benign lump she’d had removed from her breast five years ago (the pencil-line scar running just under her nipple that Devon would trace with his lips—“like a landing strip”), her dad’s angina, the brain aneurysm that killed her mom, Devon’s dad’s type 1 diabetes, her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, wasn’t there sickle cell in Devon’s family too? His grandparents, or a cousin? A history of depression runs through both their families—true of sensitive people, you feel the world too much.
She wanted to write about how she worried about Miles, so full of concern and compassion that it sometimes overwhelmed him. When he was little, he used to burst into tears if he stood on someone else’s foot. She wouldn’t have it any other way, but she knew how much he was going to struggle with it, her worrier warrior. Where was the checkbox for that?
And then there was all the legal shit, General Vance reeling off a list of charges: “Attempted trafficking of a U.S.-born male citizen, moving a male citizen without federal authorization, importing and attempted trafficking of controlled substances…” and it took her too long to realize they were talking about Miles, about her son, only half fucking American, so she barely took in the rest, due process under the State of Emergency, and all the other stuff. Because she was officially a criminal, and Miles was a national resource for “future security,” and they weren’t going to be allowed to go home ever again.
But at least they keep them busy, the Plus Ones, between drills and training courses in any discipline you could desire, but especially, in PMdFs, yet another acronym—Previously Male-dominated Fields. Agriculture. Electrical engineering. Plumbing. Medicine. She asked for law books when they wouldn’t let her see a lawyer. She’d fight the bullshit charges on her own. But they demurred. Didn’t have any on base. But perhaps she’d like the handbook on basic mechanics?
She did the courses they offered, jogged almost obsessively around the perimeter, trying to outrun the rage, the sorrow, and the loneliness. She was a pariah among the smattering of other women after it got out (or General Vance had deliberately leaked it) that she’d been caught at the airport with hoarded painkillers.
Trying to leave the country with her son, they could understand, but holding on to medicine, even a handful of pills, was unforgivable. No one would talk to her, no one would even look at her. As if she was personally responsible for every single man and boy and female casualty who died in agony.
The isolation was worse than the scare tactics, although she lived in constant gnawing fear that she’d be taken away from Miles for years, decades, deported, thrown into jail. She played nice. She got through the hours between visits to Miles any way she could.
The army censored everything she wrote, emails to friends and the family she had left behind, Tayla and Billie, wherever she was, because she never answered. And even though she asked a hundred times, they wouldn’t let her see a lawyer.
The low howl of the sirens burrows through the drugs holding her down. Some part of Cole is aware that the sound doesn’t belong, is struggling up toward it, even while her subconscious is trying to integrate it into her dream.
It’s the recurring one, full of dread, the store alarm going off, mixed with the baby’s howls, the other customers staring as she is pulled aside by security, her bag searched, while she jiggles three-month-old Miles wailing in her arms, wretched with exhaustion and on the point of tears. She can’t hold them back when the woman security guard unearths a lipstick with the tag still attached from between the diapers and the wipes, which is what happened in real life when she absentmindedly dropped it into her bag instead of the shopping cart. Shoplifting via sleep deprivation. But in the dream, the guard continues to pull stolen item after item from the bowels of her tote. Perfume, and a party-pack-sized bag of marshmallows and a waffle iron, a toy fire engine with the lights flashing, and a squirming possum, then a succession of human bones, a femur with knotted tips, a jawbone, a rib cage with a shriveled heart still cased within it attached with sinews of muscle, like lace. And even if she could unpack all of them, this endless supply of human bones, and sort them and assemble them like the 3D puzzles Miles now loves, they wouldn’t hold together, because she can’t seem to hold anything together.
She’s holding the disappointment as she surfaces from the deep. Opens her eyes. Still nighttime. Maybe early morning. She is (still) in her room in the Days Inn at Lewis-McChord, with the blackout curtains open wide, because she needs to be able to wake up and see that the medical wing is still there, behind the barbed wire and the double fencing, and the glimmer in the windows barely visible past the floodlights, where Miles is in quarantine with the rest of the men and boys.
The sirens are real, Cole realizes, screeching outside her head as well as in the subconscious manifestations of her self-loathing. On autopilot, she reaches for the sleeping pills on the nightstand, has to catch her fingers in a clenched fist. The time on the digital clock reads 3:46. No.
Something is wrong. She climbs out of bed, pulling a hoodie on over her pajamas, not bothering to lace up the hiking boots she scored from the latest grab bag.
She blunders out the door into a hallway full of tramping feet.
“What’s happening? Is it a fire? Are the boys okay?”
“Bombing,” calls a soldier helping another mother, hoisting one of her children onto her hip. “Everyone evacuating. Move!”
“Right.” She turns and crashes back through the door of her room, cursing herself for not grabbing her backpack instinctively, like they’ve practiced over and over during the emergency drills.
She flips open her pack, double-checks: laptop, practical clothes, because strappy sandals and summer frocks weren’t designed for the end of the world, Devon’s stoner Finn and Jake t-shirt that still smells like him, or she can convince herself it does, first-aid kit, hiking toolkit, a month’s worth of her own meds. All the essentials. Except her husband.
Sorry.
“Brady!” One of the soldiers leans in the doorway, she doesn’t know which one, they all blur into a sameness of short hair and camouflage and feminine brawn. “What are you waiting for? Move out, lady!”
“Yes, ma’am,” she says, feeling guilty and ashamed. The new status quo.
She finds everyone gathered in the breakfast room, watching the footage of whatever happened in Kuala Lumpur on the big-screen TVs.
Shaky cell-phone cam-shots of dust and smoke and civilians running away, women screaming and the staccato pap-pap-pap of automatic weapons. The camera panned up to the hospital, white and blue, like a seaside hotel, a gaping wound in the mortar and glass, gushing greasy smoke, the palm trees in front on fire. The camera spun down and around, jerking, to take in the armored vehicles sweeping past, before a soldier in niqab filled the shot, shouting at the camerawoman in Malay, her face twisted up with adrenaline and fear.
The text at the bottom of the screen tickertapes updates on the casualties: eighty-six women dead, most of them doctors and nurses, some family members—and this was the horror spoken of in solemn tones by news anchors—fifty-three HCV-resistant men and boys killed. An act of terrorism, mortars fired into the hospital building from multiple sides from the apartment blocks. Well-orchestrated. No one claiming responsibility yet, although the talking heads in their serious suits and impeccable hair and makeup speculated that it was the work of Pembetulan, a Malay group affiliated with the triads, meaning “The Corrective,” an extremist Muslim group, like the Christian New Revelationists, who believed that the death pangs of the world needed to be hurried up, that their apocalyptic god needed human help to finish off what he had started.
General Vance arrives, bustling with self-importance. “Settle down, everyone. I have an announcement.”
“Are you setting us free? Because it’s bloody well about time.”
She deflates a little. “We’re moving you to other facilities. For your own protection, and as a matter of national security.”
Don’t keep all your cajones in one basket, Cole thinks.
17.
Cole: Impossible Correspondences
Vana takes her up to the guest room at Kasproing to use her laptop, because it has a VPN that reroutes the traffic, bouncing it around the world like a pinball, and some other fancy techwork Cole doesn’t understand.
“You need any help, tech support, or, really, anything, let me know.” She brushes her hand as Cole reaches for the mouse. She flushes and jolts her hand back. Even though it was an accident. She’s sure it was an accident.
“Oh. Um, thank you. I mean, I’m think I’m okay here.” When was the last time someone, an adult, touched her? With tenderness.
Don’t let me stop you.
Pervert, she reprimands ghostguy. But the moment is over, if it ever was at all. And there’s no time. Not for her, not now.
“I know how to email,” she says, flustered. “I mean, it’s been a while, but…”
“Why?” Vana looks at her, perplexed. Because of course she hasn’t been restricted from communicating with the outside world for the last two years, what with censored messages at the military base and zero tolerance at Ataraxia, and here she is, giving the game away. Con artist level: blundering rookie.
“On a Mac. I’m a PC user.”
Smooth.
“It’s all good. I’ve got it from here. Thank you. So much.” She blushes again, peering at the screen so she doesn’t have to look at Vana. It’s a crushing relief when she leaves her to it.
She gets up to close the bedroom door. Doesn’t want anyone walking in on her. And she sets up a new email account anyway, VPN be damned. The Department of Men will be watching her account, all her social media. She’s not going to be one of those fugitives who accidentally geo-tags their location. Glitterpukegal. She only hopes Kel will remember their old in-joke, that she’s not going to get caught in a spam folder, that her friend is still alive on the other side of the planet. It’s been over a year since Lewis-McChord allowed her to send a stilted email. How does she start? Simply. She types up only the most salient details. A federal offense, an accidental death she could be blamed for, and hey, listen, this isn’t a 419 scam, but I do have a prince of Africa with me, and we need to get out. Please help. I need you.
And then she sits and waits. And waits. Picks up the book next to the bed. Flips through it idly, clicks refresh. Repeat. Trying not to go mad. Forty-eight minutes later, a reply comes in.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: S.O.S.
Fuck.
I don’t really know what else to say.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RE: S.O.S.
Can you see how nuts this whole thing sounds??
And now you want to make it worse with some harebrained fugitive scheme? Stop for a goddamn minute, C. Use your head. There’s still time for you to find a lawyer. Turn yourself in. Negotiate a plea bargain. They wouldn’t let you leave the U.S. before this happened, what do you think will happen if they catch you trying to skip the country now?
If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for M. He’s just a kid. I’m sorry but I have to say this: you’ve taken your kid away from somewhere safe, and you’ve put him in danger. Stop this.
Please tell me what’s happening. Where are you now?
Xx
Kel
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RE: RE: S.O.S.
Okay. It’s been an hour since I sent my last email and I’ve calmed down. I cried it out with Sisonke and she pointed out that you’re not stupid, and you would never endanger M. unless you had to, and there’s probably a reason that you feel you can’t hand yourself in.
She also pointed out that you’ve been my best friend since we were twelve and that means it’s my job to help you hide bodies, if it comes to that. My point is, you owe Sisonke bigtime.
I know there’s a lot you’re not telling me. That’s fine for now, I get that your super clever email address disguise isn’t exactly foolproof (yes, I do remember the time your cat ate my glitter body lotion and threw it up on my shoes). But buddy, if you want me to be your long-distance accessory to what’s happened, you’ve got some explaining to do.
This is bad.
But fine, let’s get you and M. out of Dodge, then you can explain to me how the fuck this happened.
I’m assuming you can’t Skype or voice chat.
I’ll talk to a lawyer.
You’re not going to be able to fly out of the country. You could go to Mexico or Canada, but I don’t know what border controls are like, and there will be flags on the National Males Registry. Honestly, I think your best bet is a boat.
Old-fashioned, I know. But coastal borders are the most porous. I checked with a fellow hack here researching a story abou
t Culgoa refugees. There are gray boat runs: repurposed cruise liners sailed by the surviving female staff that truckle people across the oceans, no questions asked. They’re not cheap, but they’re pretty reliable. The tricky part is getting to them; on the U.S. coastlines, they don’t allow them into the ports, so they park in international waters and speedboats do a shuttle and dodge to get passengers out to them. That’s the expensive bit. Boat beggars can’t be choosers, though, so just focus on getting the hell out of the U.S.
You might need to grease a few palms, so bring as much cash as you can get your hands on.
We’ll take care of what happens on the other side later. Most African countries welcome immigrants now that most of the sick people are actually dead. Matriarchal cultures seem to be less uptight in general. Mostly.;) If you can get to Luanda, or any point south of that, I’ll send a jeep to come fetch you.
Not everywhere is worse off now the men have mostly gone. Some countries are thriving now that there are no all-male terrorist groups or militias roaming around, and also there’s some seriously fascinating stuff about alternative economies emerging. I’ll keep researching.
Once you and M. are safe, we can focus on getting you home to South Africa. Tjaila. And then you can explain to me IN DETAIL how the hell you got yourself into this mess, and I’ll decide whether I can ever forgive you for getting me involved in this.
It will be okay. Don’t panic. I love you. Also, fuck you.
Kel
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