Afterland

by Lauren Beukes

  “Who’s this handsome fella?” A tall one tries to chuck Miles under his chin. This close to her, he can read the slogan on her pocket: “Big Bill’s Plumbing! We’ll Get You Gushing!”

  “Back off, Luigi,” Luna says, mildly.

  “He’s thirteen years old, leave him alone,” Cole snarls.

  “Ooh. You should get him modeling, mami! Bring him back when he’s of age!”

  “Ignore those lunks,” Luna says. “They’re getting into character too much.”

  Passing the dressing rooms, Miles tries not to look at the performers and their costumes, an insult to the memory of men, winding up another two flights of stairs and finally through a door marked “No Entry” into an office.

  This is where Dallas, he can only hope, is hunched over the desk. The light behind her shines through her thinning ash-gray hair like a halo, showing the shape of her skull. Not an angel but a witch. An old, flabby, haggard crone in a shiny green velour tracksuit.

  She puts down her pen and peers at them over the rims of her glasses. “You must be our Africans. Huh. Automatically assumed you’d be black.”

  “I get that a lot,” says his mom. The old lady heaves herself up and limps over to them, leaning heavily on a cane. It’s tipped with a silver penis, Miles can’t help noticing.

  “You’re the ones causing all the fuss, huh? So are you a real boy, or are you looking for a blue fairy to make you into one?”

  “Does it matter?” Mom says.

  “Well, you’d be our first biological specimen passing through. We had Felix, but he’s trans. Needed to get away from the rich bitch who paid for his dick.”

  “Are you sex slavers?” Miles demands.

  Dallas looks shocked and then breaks out in a huge smile, revealing yellowing teeth. “Ha! Let’s get right out with it. No, sorry to disappoint you.”

  Luna chimes in. “We’re all licensed hosts, thank you, Mayor diComo Sex Act for making us legal! We pay to be able to stage our performances here. Too much, some might say.”

  “That ‘some’ better not be you,” says Dallas, raising one of her thin eyebrows.

  “Not me, boss lady. I’m happy as a clam!”

  “You talking about your vagina again?” the witch cackles. “Speaking of which, you’re nearly exposed yourselves, dears. Luna, do me a kindness and sort these nice folks out with some wardrobe. You want something to eat? Get them a menu. We got real good food here, Michelin-star quality. Not officially, mind you, but we know what our clientele want. Our customers are classy horny bitches.”

  Miles scowls deeper, and Dallas chuckles. “Don’t be so serious, kid. It’s all fantasy. And you never know, sometimes romance blooms. You’ll fall in love one day. It’s a beautiful thing. Now, your mom and I have business to discuss concerning the logistics of cross-Atlantic travel. Why don’t you run along with Luna? She’ll get you fixed up with some clothes, and a bite to eat.”

  He skewers his mom with laser-beam eyes, transmitting “Don’t make me go with her, don’t you see what’s happening here?” But she’s fallen under the witch’s spell, sagging into the chair on the other side of the desk.

  “It’s all right, Miles. We’re safe here. Kel said.”

  55:

  Cole: Honor in the Margins

  “How about a drink?” Dallas says. “It’s over there. Help yourself. I shouldn’t be putting too much weight on this leg. Arthritis is a bitch. You spend too much time doing stunts in high heels, you damage your joints.”

  “You were a dancer?” Cole pours herself a whisky from the decanter on the side table, eyeing the photographs on the wall of a permed young blond in a denim jacket and cowboy boots and nothing else, looking backward over her shoulder and her perky, bare butt. A black-and-white picture of a roadside bar, a newspaper clipping from 1997: “Phoenix deputy mayor in notorious strip club bust.” The whisky burns her raw mouth, but warmth spreads through her chest, loosens her shoulders. Jesus, she needed this.

  “Best in Arizona. Worked my way up and then I opened my own joint, Diablos, back in ’92. Let me tell you, men are much easier to cater to than women.”

  Luna returns with jeans and a checked button-up shirt, for all your accountant-dad-fetish needs, Cole thinks, pulling the clothes on right there in Dallas’s office.

  “Don’t worry about the kid. He’s watching TV. Kitchen’s making him a kimchi burger with deep-fried zucchini. I thought he might need some greens. I had kids myself,” Luna says. “I know what it’s like. They’re dead now, you don’t need to ask. Collateral infections.”

  “I’m sorry.” She feels how wholly inadequate those words are, worn down with how many times she’s said them, not only with the Church but in every damn conversation she’s had since the outbreak. It’s not a comfort, it’s an acknowledgment of all their shared pain.

  “Me too,” Luna sighs. “You want a burger too? The shiitake is my favorite, especially with Korean barbecue sauce.”

  “That sounds amazing.” Like she cares: she’d eat wood chips at this point.

  “Now I am mandated to tell you, that although I have your passage booked on a boat tonight, there’s an argument that you should stay and fight this,” Dallas says. “Yours could be a landmark case. Think of the other families. Other boys and their moms who are stuck in places they don’t want to be.”

  “No. Thanks. Thought about it. We just want to go home. I don’t want to negotiate with you or anyone else. I don’t want to be a guinea pig, stuck in a legal limbo. We want to go home.”

  “Sure. Sometimes you don’t want the trouble. When my ex-husband sued to take over my old club, I let him have it and became a librarian. Don’t laugh. I packed it all in, moved to New Mexico, got my degree through a night course.”

  Cole thinks about pouring herself another whisky, but she needs to stay sharp. “You know,” she teases Dallas, “normally it’s the other way around, the librarian taking off her glasses, shaking out her hair, releasing her inner sex kitten. Not the stripper hanging up her heels to catalog Dewey decimal.”

  “Don’t get too excited. The thing about fallen women is that they sure are clumsy.”

  “Just when you thought you were out…”

  “They just keep on falling. The trick is to make those falls bigger and better than the last. Fall with style.”

  “You said tonight?” It dawns on Cole. “Tonight-tonight?”

  “Two a.m. We can get you on board, leaving from a private pier in South Beach. Luna will drive you. Rubber duck out to the Princess Diana, which is an ex–container ship currently anchoring in international waters before it heads off the long way around back to the Philippines. They can stop off in Africa…”

  “Not a country,” Cole corrects. “Sorry, that’s automatic.”

  “Somewhere on the African coast. They’ll determine where en route.”

  “My sister. I don’t know if she’s going to make it here in time, before two a.m. Can you give me the coordinates for the pier? So she can meet us there?”

  “Your friend didn’t mention a third.”

  “It’s a new development. It’s complicated.”

  “All right, it’s your money. But you should give her a call, check where she’s at, if she’s going to make it. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time, because time is expensive. As for identification, you’re taking two of my girls’ passports. Oh yes, make that three. Which is a lowdown dirty thing to do, stealing ID documents from sex workers. How could you?” She winks, luridly.

  “We’re lowdown dirty people, I guess.” Cole takes out her stolen phone, types an email to Billie with the directions, adds an instruction not to be late.

  “Have you done this before?” she asks Dallas.

  “Honey, I’ve been doing this sort of thing my whole life. Women’s railroad. We used to help domestic violence victims. Less of that now. But still some. Not that that should be a surprise.”

  Cole could slip away into her voice, her bizarre anecdotes. It’s the wa
rmth of the office, the drink, the promise of safety. “Thank you.”

  “Thank your friend, Kel. Took out a loan to pay for you.” She raises an eyebrow at Cole’s surprise. “Oh, honey, you thought you could buy passage for a piddly few hundred bucks?”

  And then Luna bursts in, near-hysterical: “Come quick, please! I don’t know where he’s gone. He said he was getting a glass of water! And now he’s nowhere in the club. I’m so sorry!”

  Cole slips on the stairs, she’s in such a hurry to get down them. She hits the base of her spine, knocks the breath out of herself. Forces herself to get up, clinging to the railing, her body, all her Mortification bruises aching in dumb echo of the fear gripping her chest.

  Out on the street, she screams, “Miles!” She grabs the bouncer. “Where is he? Where did he go? Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “Your kid? I didn’t see him. Is he not inside?”

  “He must have gone out the back,” Luna says, “The alley. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Cole tears away from them. Shrieking his name, looking for the distinctive puff of his hair, his loping stride. “Miles!” she howls into the night.

  “Miles!”

  The rain comes down harder, soaking through her checked shirt, plastering her hair against her skull.

  Think, boo.

  56.

  Billie: Travel Mathematics

  It’s raining in Florida, city lights smearing in the slanting downpour, reflected in the expanse of water on either side of their narrow strand of road that is slick and shining wet in the high beams. There are alligators out there in the water, Billie thinks, submerged things you won’t see coming up from the depths.

  She and Cole elaborated on that childish exchange for years. See you later, alligator. Their usual sign-off on phone chats, or email, when that was a thing they still did on the regular. Talked. Really, talked. When last was that? Before Cole got boring. The tedious missives about her domesticated animal life, Miles-stones, that family newsletter she sent out all through the baby and toddler years with ten photo attachments confirming, yes, that’s a picture of a human child, accompanied by cute anecdotes. Billie stopped even opening them. She heard Miles using the phrase at Ataraxia, with that little freckled girlfriend of his. But it was their thing. Hers and Cole’s. Seeing how far they could push it, getting mean, as long as it rhymed. Cruelty can be a kind of love; teasing and truth bombs. Who else is going to hold you accountable to the real you, all your warts and bullshit, if not your own blood? Doing her a favor.

  Zara is chauffeuring, Billie in the back, charging the phone, awaiting further comms from Cole. Nothing since she replied to her last cryptic message, an hour ago.

  Going tonight! Ready to go. We’re ready. Safe. How close are you?

  We’re safe. At a sex club. Before that, weird church. Don’t ask. X-)

  Give me a number to call you on.

  To which Billie replied, insouciant:

  Damn girl, moving fast! Racing to catch up.

  Wait for me, ok?

  I’m on my way. Just as fast as I can.

  We’re in this together. Remember.

  Wait for me.

  Coming for you soon, in a monsoon, bitch buffoon. She texted Zara’s number, but there has been no call back. Not a word. Cole had better not have dropped the ball. She better not have gotten spooked and run, because she will burn down this city if she has to, in the rain, to find them.

  “I should have a gun,” she tells Zara.

  “You don’t know how to use one.”

  “That’s not true. How hard could it be?”

  “We only have the one. Which is mine.”

  “I think that’s a lack of foresight,” Billie complains. “We should be prepared. Who knows who she’s teamed up with?” Nuns and prostitutes. Out of the good habit and into bad ones. But she’s noticed that Zara’s bomber jacket is in the back seat with her, along with the brown paper bag of bourbon they picked up at the last gas station. She’s been sipping from it because her nerves are singing. There’s a pack of beef jerky, too red and overprocessed to eat, leftover burger wrappers from dinner-on-the-go. She rustles the takeout bag to cover the sound of her sliding her hand under the jacket, and yes, extracting the envelope bulging with freshly minted faux passports.

  Three of them. Two blood-colored with a crest of medieval lions caught in a laurel wreath and the words EUROOPA LIIT EESTI PASS inscribed on the front. She has no idea where the fuck that is. Eesti-Estonia, it says on the interior, above a photograph of Zara, now Aleksandra Kolga. Hers is under the name Polina Treii. She hopes no one expects her to speak Estonian, and why the hell does she get stuck with “Polina”? It sounds like a cheap gin, the kind that eats into your bones.

  The third is a bright red, marked with a crescent moon, a winged staff, cupped with praise-hands. Brunei Darussalam printed in gold beneath the scratchings of a language she doesn’t recognize, Arabic or Urdu, maybe. She flips it open, meets Michael Zain Sallah, age thirteen, Brunei citizen. Smart. He’s brown, can pass for Asian, and Brunei is good. It means the buyer is someone obscenely wealthy—she knew that much already—but it’s also a country where he’ll be treated like a prince. He probably is a prince, his adopted mother a sultana. Or a sheikha? Or is that the Emirates? She’s shaky on the correct nomenclature of geopolitics and the ruling classes. The point is that he’ll be in a palace, he’ll want for nothing. It’s everything any mom could want for her kid.

  But where’s the fourth? Where’s Cole’s? Where is the paperwork for the upmarket foreign nanny? It’s not here. And that wasn’t the deal. That wasn’t what they agreed on. Motherfuckers.

  And then the phone rings in her hand and she startles.

  “Cole?”

  Hard to make out. The voice on the other side is crying. Frantic. Like when Dad fell off the stepladder and she couldn’t get the words out. But he was fine, only a fractured wrist. And it will be fine now. If she cooperates.

  “Billie. Oh God, Billie.”

  “Hey, calm down.” She’s got wind of the plan, she thinks. The jig, it’s up. And she’s going to disappear again and she’ll have to hunt all over to find them. But it’s worse than that.

  “It’s Miles, he’s gone. He’s gone, and I don’t know where to find him.”

  “What is it?” Zara says.

  She leans forward, hisses “shh” out the side of her mouth. “Shit.” Shit oh shit oh shit. She’s dead. In the ditch. Ditch-bitch-nothing-without-a-hitch. “Cole,” she says, “Dude. Calm down. Where are you? We’ll find him. You and me together. Two musketeers. Tell me where you are. I’m coming.”

  “Okay,” Cole weeps on the other side. “Okay.”

  “Drop a pin, we’ll come to you.” Fuck, she said “we.” But Cole is too hysterical to notice. And how the fuck could she do this? How could she do this to her, now? Who loses their child? A bad mother. The very worst. The kind that doesn’t care. Can’t hold on to your kid, maybe you don’t deserve to keep him. He’d be better off in Brunei. You fucking useless bitch.

  “Please hurry.”

  “Yeah. Coming. Now-now.” She hangs up and the phone chimes with the location drop. Billie drags it into Waze, hopes the GPS holds out. Satellites, don’t fail me now. She’s going to fucking kill Cole.

  “Everything to plan?” Zara says, icicles in her voice.

  “Nothing to worry about.” Billie unscrews the bourbon and takes a slug. “It’s all under control.”

  “I would hate if you are lying to me.”

  “It’s fucking fine, all right. He’s playing hide and seek. Dumb kid games, he pulls this shit all the time, and my sister’s panicking over nothing.”

  See you later, alligator.

  Waiter-hater-masturbator-violator-sister-traitor.

  Perpetrator.

  57.

  Miles: Who You Need To Be

  He finds his way back to the Temple as if guided by the hand of God. The lady at the bodega who called him an Uber he
lped. He told her he needed to get back to Mother because he’d run away, and now he’d changed his mind and wanted to go back. Technically true. He wasn’t lying. She’d tutted, and one of the other customers offered to drive him, but she was already sauced (thou shalt not contaminate your body with poisons), and between them they agreed a taxi would be best.

  The Uber driver tries to chat, but he shuts her down. “My mom says I shouldn’t talk to strangers.” They cross the dark expanse of water with the only sound in the car the radio playing songs in another language. Spanish, maybe, with those ringing drums underscored by frizzing electro.

  She drops him off by the Nike shop, because he said their apartment was right upstairs. Totally a lie, but he’ll pray for forgiveness later.

  It’s much quieter than before; he spots a couple strolling hand-in-hand in sparkly dresses and heels like they’re heading out to a club, women streaming out of the Triple X-Homme feature at the movie house. xXx, Magic Mike XXL, Exterminators IV, which seems like a strange combination. What about X-Men? Cheerful sounds spill out of the few bars that are still open. People looking for love, for a good time. People who don’t care. People who think this is all just normal life, who couldn’t possibly understand that God has called him back. To do what needs to be done. To draw back the veil, and say the unspeakable.

  He strides up to the Temple, feeling self-conscious in the clothes they gave him, shiny waterproof pants suitable for boating, he guesses, and a silver t-shirt that’s too tight around the neck. He misses his Apologia, wishes he could retrieve it from the garbage can Mom scrumpled it into, even if it did get stained with rancid condiments. He remembers pranking Dad with chocolate spread on his fingers, pretending it was dog poop and chasing him around the house, and then horror-of-horrors, eating it! He misses being that dumb kid.

  But when he gets to the gilded marble entrance leading into the building, the door is locked. He taps on the glass, waving to the security guard who is reading a book behind the reception desk, her black boots up on the counter, so he can see a piece of colored confetti stuck to the sole. But she taps her watch and shrugs and mouths, “Come back tomorrow.”