by J. P. Smythe
Agatha. I told the doctors that one of them was called Agatha, and they asked me where that came from, but I didn’t know. They asked me to try and remember, and I have tried. But not too hard, because she is not here.
We all contribute to dinner. Everybody here has a job and we all bring what we can to the table. Family style, we eat. Some of the farmers bring their vegetables. From the growing rooms, they bring us beef and chicken, and it’s roasted by the people who work in the kitchen. I don’t have a job yet because I haven’t been here long enough. I volunteer with the books, but it’s not a real job. I’m still learning, they tell me.
If you say that you’re tired or that something’s wrong, the wardens ask, “Don’t you want to be productive?” Because sometimes something does go wrong. Sometimes my head buzzes and I’m not here. I’m standing somewhere else and looking at my scars and running my hands through my hair and remembering when it was shorn, when I was another person. Blood on my hands and stuck underneath the bitten-down fingernails. Then they tell me that it was all a dream. They say, The problem with dreams is how easily they slip out, how easily they become a part of who you are, how unlike the truth of our reality they are when you really examine them. Dreams are what make us individuals, they are what make us special. You are special, we are all special.
I want to tell them that I’m not. I could be anybody.
Jonah comes to me in the morning. He knocks on my door.
“I’ve been told to take you to your assignment,” he says. Which means that they’ve finally decided where I’ll be doing my proper job, and that I’m ready to contribute. “You’re on the roads,” he says.
I don’t want that. I tell him that I don’t want to go, not today. Another day.
“That’s not how it works,” he says. He hands me a suit to wear that will keep the heat off. It goes over me, over every part of my body. It even covers the shoes that they gave me. There are fasteners right up the neck—to my hair—and Jonah helps me with them. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “There are worse work details.” I help him with his suit, and my fingers touch the scars on his neck that run all the way along it like puncture marks, like rows of teeth.
I ask him how they happened.
“I don’t know,” he says. I can feel the grooves of them, the scarred flesh.
I have my own scars, I tell him. Strange, isn’t it.
“What?”
I say that we should probably remember them because they were enough to damage us completely. When you’re that damaged, how can you forget it?
“Maybe you need to? To move on. To deal with whatever happened.”
We walk out of the barracks, down through the streets covered with tarps. No sky here, but the heat is overwhelming already. The suits don’t stop the heat, they just stop the sun. They protect us from real damage, but they don’t stop the discomfort. We sweat as soon as we’re outside the safety of the enclave, a gulf of heat blasting toward us. We head down the streets around where we live—swept clean by the bots, kept as pristine as can be—all the way to the outskirts. We don’t really talk when we’re out of the buildings because it’s harder to breathe—at least until we’ve got the masks on, and they’re reserved for those working on the road. Besides, it’s easier to be quiet, to conserve your energy. Those are the first rules I learned here and I never forget them.
WELCOME TO PINE CITY, a sign at the edge of the road says. It’s a message from another time, when this was a proper town, when people lived here. People who weren’t part of this facility worked here and went to school here, but the population number on the sign is lost, scratched away. The town was abandoned, like so many towns. It was too expensive to convert them, to make them habitable. All we have access to now is the main street, which is where our facility sits: the town’s abandoned shops, a few houses, and the entrance to a mall on one side. There used to be much more but it’s all in disrepair. The streets are overgrown or they’re barricaded off. We don’t care—we don’t need them.
I look at the sky as the tarps end, as we walk out into the open. There’s a box full of helmets with masks that hang from the front of them. Jonah hands me one. It’s dark mostly, with an entire front made of something like glass. But they’re all caked with mud and dirt; the only thing you can really see through them are the eyes.
“On your face, like this,” he says. When he speaks it’s muffled, distorted. “Just put it on and breathe normally. It’s fine,” he tells me. He reaches out and touches my shoulder to reassure me. He knows that he should be protecting me from any fears I have because that’s what we’re told. Don’t rely on yourself alone. Trust your friends, the people around you. Everybody wants you to succeed.
I tug the mask down over my face. It’s so close, so tight. It’s unsettling, because then all you can see is grime through the glass. But I can still see Jonah. He mimes breathing deeply, and so I do, too. The air comes through. It’s bitter and stale—filtered. We need the air so we can breathe if we get too hot. There’s coolant and repellent in the lining of the masks, and it’s a relief. It’s not like being in the cool of air conditioning, but it’s nice. Out here when you’re working, you need something to keep you going. I’ll be out here half a day, nothing more, Jonah has explained. They make us start before the sun gets highest, before it properly begins to cook the landscape. Then we go back and they run cold baths for us. We recover, relax.
But first, we fix the road. The hard surface has bubbled and broken up, which means that supplies can’t get here from the cities. There are only a few cities left now. They taught us that the world roasted and collapsed. Everything went back a hundred years—more even—and there was murder and violence, but then it started going forward again—but at a creep, a crawl. We can’t just reset to where we were. So now we are here. Here is Pine City—not a city at all, but a town that was lost, and now we are remaking it as we ourselves are remade. We are only here until we’ve been revised, that’s what Gibson keeps telling us; then, one day, we’ll be taken somewhere else—to one of the cities, or maybe even abroad. Some other countries need a lot of help. They’re worse off than we are. They’ve got people who haven’t started going forward again. No patches, yet. You’re person two-point-oh, Gibson says. None of us really understand what that means.
“Through here,” Jonah says. There’s a path in between two rocks, like a vein in the side of the road, leading toward crates covered in reflective stuff that shines and spins the sun’s heat off in every single direction. There are tools here. “These are what we use to break down the road and then later—tomorrow—we go over that part, and we fill it in. Okay? It’s a two-day cycle. Today, tomorrow. Always today and tomorrow. Three times we do that, then a day off. Take this.” His muffled voice is hard to hear. He hands me something that looks like a shovel but is pointed and sharp at the end. I can tell he’s smiling; I can see it in his eyes. Even though his face is mostly hidden behind the filthy glass, somehow I know exactly what he looks like.
We walk back up the path and then follow the road—him in front, me lagging behind. There are already people working here: four of them, working in pairs. One of each pair is digging into the road, the other is picking up the shards and throwing them to the side. The road itself is hacked and ruined, huge holes and cracks along it.
“It’s all about infrastructure,” Jonah says, as if that’s something he’s thought of. But it’s from our lessons, we’re told that. A road is infrastructure. So that’s what we’re doing, what everybody is doing: trying to rebuild infrastructure. Right now, we are the ground force; we do the really crucial stuff, the work that allows the rest of it to happen. “Watch them. Do what they do; it’s pretty easy work. And then we get out of here.”
I lift the shovel, jam it down right into the ground. I push it down harder than I thought I might, putting real force behind it. The ground shatters, it seems. Bits of the old covering and stone and mud flying up.
Jonah nods at me, that I’
m doing this properly. Again and again, over and over. Something about this work makes me feel better. It’s cathartic, is what Agatha would say.
No. Who’s Agatha?
Everything goes blank for a second. A moment. I stand. There’s wind, which I can’t feel through the suit but I can see—the bushes at the side of the road are moving in it, pushing themselves this way and that.
I feel a hand on my arm, and hear a voice. “What’s wrong with you?”
I say that I’m fine, which is only really a reaction, the words that you’re meant to say even when you’re not. When people ask that, they don’t want the truth. But it’s not Jonah’s voice and not his hand. I look up and there’s another girl there. No, not a girl. She’s older than I am, but not by much. I can’t see her face, can’t really see anything but the shape of her silhouetted with the sun high behind her—her dark outline, the pose of how she stands, like she’s broken, barely clinging together, yet somehow still so powerful it’s unsettling.
I know her. I don’t know how or where from, but I know her.
“Don’t fall,” she tells me. Her voice is jagged, the sound of coarse glass in a throat. Her speech isn’t quite right—stilted, her tongue and teeth stumbling over the words as they come out.
I nod.
“I’m Polly,” she says, her voice muffled. I tell her my name. She nods. I see her eyes staring out from the darkness of her mask.
I know her, I’m sure of it.
I watch Polly while we work. I’m okay, I tell myself over and over. It’s like a mantra every time I lower the shovel. I’m okay. Jonah and I work faster than the other pairs, maybe because I’m new to the job. They all talk about how they’ve been out here weeks now. This road—the good, smooth bit that we walked down to get here—that’s been done by them, or a stretch of it has been. Past where we are, the surface is torn up, hacked apart by the heat, by nature, trees and plants growing through. There’s such a long way to go. In the distance, at the end of the road, I can see something of a city on the horizon: towers jutting up, a mass crowded around their base. I wonder what city that is. I wonder if I’ve ever been there.
I ask Jonah if he minds not being able to remember the before.
“No,” he says. He doesn’t pause. “Because it’s for our benefit.” He picks up the lumps of tarmac that I’ve brought up and throws them to the side. We don’t clear them from that part. That’s a waste. They’ll be there until they’re not, until nature swallows them up. The infrastructure is all that matters, not the mess that we leave behind us. “If it wasn’t, then maybe. Maybe. But I know that I can’t have been happy.” He touches his neck, reaching up through the line between the suit and the helmet, his voice wilting. “Some things are markers, I think, of everything that we should be willing to leave behind.” Then he’s quiet.
The others take up the conversation, shouting so that they can be heard. They talk about how they’re happy here, how being in the facility is good for them. They feel well and they feel healthy and they’re learning so much. All of these things that they didn’t know before—gaps that are being filled in—and they think it’ll make life in the city that much easier. All except Polly. She doesn’t speak, but I desperately want her to. I know her, could recognize something in her eyes. It’s like there’s a word on the tip of my tongue that I want to spit out, that won’t quite form for me.
I ask the others if they can remember where they came from. They can’t, not really.
“But I have a sense of what the city was like, sure. That I know,” one of them says.
“When we see the pictures, I remember that. I remember how high the buildings were.”
“And I remember that they were cooler than here. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know if this is right,” Polly says, interrupting the others. She stops working, she takes off her helmet, and she stares at me. Like a bell ringing, the memory chimes. Her hair is short, cropped close to her head. There’s a scar on her face, more scars running down her neck. “How can I know if I can’t remember what my life was like before?”
“Because they told us,” one of the others says. “They told us that we were in trouble. The truth is that they are saving us.”
“And we just believe it?” Her words are clunky, like she’s struggling to find them.
“It’s the truth,” Jonah says. “They have given us something to believe in. That’s as good a reason as any.” He looks at my shovel. I’ve stopped working. “It isn’t time to have a break yet,” he says. He waits until I start again, then he picks up the pieces that I break away from the road and throws them to the side.
Doctor Gibson tells me that he’s been listening to my morning conversations with Gaia and that he’s a little concerned about what he’s heard.
“You’ve been dreaming?” he asks.
I tell him that I have. He already knows, so I can’t tell why he’s bothering to ask, what the point of the question is.
“But you can’t remember your dreams? I want to say that’s natural. Some of the things we’re doing here, they’re going to be confusing to you because they’re new. Did you know before you came here you didn’t have the education you’re getting here? You were practically somebody else.”
I ask him who I was, then. He laughs out loud, he slaps his knee.
“You were you. I didn’t mean that literally. I meant . . . You weren’t as whole as you are now. But you were Chan. You’ve always been Chan. That’s crucial, your individuality.” He puts his hands together, like an arrowhead. “You’re special, Chan. We all are.” And then he relaxes again, sits back. He consults his notes with a side-glance. “Are you feeling prepared for the world now? You’re making good friends?”
He’s heard me talk about Jonah, about Polly. I don’t know if they’re friends or what they are. They’re people that I know. Something gnaws at me—about friendship, about trust.
“Look, there are some simple rules here,” he says, “and the biggest one is that we’re working for you. We’re doing all of this for you. This is my program, did you know that? I’m in charge here. We’re all making contributions to society now as we rebuild, and this is mine. You’re working on the roads? That’s yours, for now. Later, you’ll go to a city—probably one of the newer ones, one of the growing cities—and you’ll get a job, you’ll make a family. That will be your contribution. Do you understand?”
I do.
He seems pleased. “You’ll want to think about what you hope to get out of here, as well. This experience that you’re having here, it’s second to none. Without this, you would be somewhere else. In a gutter maybe, or dead. Certainly worse off than you are now.” He pauses then looks at the buzzing camera drone. It flies around, settling in front of my face. “Do you ever think about death?” Gibson asks.
Don’t die.
I tell him that I do, but that I don’t know why. I tell him that I don’t want to.
“That you don’t want to die, or don’t want to think about it?” he asks, but I don’t have an answer. “I think both are perfectly normal—rational, even,” he says. He smiles. The session is over.
It’s been explained repeatedly, because this is what we have to learn: the history of how we got here, as people, to this point. How we ruined our planet because we didn’t care. We overpopulated it, we crowded it, and we robbed it. There’s a story about cities that ran out of water because they acted as if everything wasn’t getting hotter; a story about bits of the world that fell into the sea because the tide rose up and wore away coastlines, lapping chunks out until the land just gave in; a story about how the cities died when the electricity did, and everybody had to try again to build new infrastructures.
Ninety percent of the world’s population gone in less than half a century. Those who were left were crammed into the cities that they built, that they thought they could adapt. Everything about this planet was set back in time. We’re not where we should be. I ask about the stars, abou
t space. Because I want to know why we’re not up there. They say that we never tried, not really. It was too much work. We don’t have the technology. We’re stuck here and we have to make the most of it.
That’s what moving on is: It’s adaptation.
I am out on the road again, this time without Jonah. This time I’ve got Tom, the bearded boy from breakfast a few days back. He’s younger than I am, but he’s been here much longer. He’s used to everything here at this point. He’s preparing to leave, to go to a city, to make a new start. He talks about his potential life while we work, while he shovels and I pick up after him. He prefers the shovel, he tells me.
“Because it’s moving forward, you know? Everything with it, it’s progress. That’s what this is all about. You get going, get moving. Do something. Feels good to do something, that’s what I’ve learned.” He talks and talks, and we stop when the sun is just too hot. We drink water from coolers that barely work in this heat. The water is bath-warm, barely refreshing at all. With my helmet off, I can take only a couple of minutes of the heat, nothing more. Then my skin starts to burn, slowly but surely. An hour of the heat and I’ll be crackling. You lose water from your body quickly. Dehydrate and pass out, then that’s it for us.
Don’t die. I hear that again, a voice that I know. Somewhere deep inside me.
“What about you?” Tom asks me. “You just have to have an idea,” he says, “because that’s how you move forward. Haven’t you had sessions with Gibson? He’s amazing. Really helped me work out what I was doing.”
“Gibson’s a liar,” Polly says. I didn’t even see her. She keeps her head down, focused on her work. But now she stops, pulling her helmet off to join us, yanking the mask from her face. The sun is behind us and makes her squint as she stands and talks to us, her eyes narrowed, her hand raised above her forehead. Those scars. I wonder how she got them. “They say it’s the truth, but the truth would be answers. Did I ask to be here? Do I want to be here?”