Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  “Chan?” A voice from the doorway. It’s Gibson. He’s leaning in, clinging to the frame casually. “May I speak with you?”

  Jonah lets go of my hands. My own hands are warm now, heated by his. He doesn’t look at Gibson. We knew each other before this. I know that now. I can tell, I can feel it. It’s so close a memory that it’s almost tangible. But for Jonah, it’s in his gut, nothing more. He’s scrambling for a connection he only barely understands.

  I tell Jonah that I’ll be fine, that I’ll find him later, that we can continue talking then; he smiles, reassured. I follow Gibson to his office. He waits for me to go inside first, pulls the door shut tight after me with the closest thing to a slam I’ve ever heard him produce.

  There’s a holo in the middle of the room—a glitch-green view of what I know immediately is my bedroom and the shape of me in the bed, facing the wall. The camera cannot see my face, which is good. There’s no sound. Gibson indicates that I should sit down.

  I ask him what the video is. I’m playing along. Is that me?

  “This is something that we do for your safety,” he tells me. “This is to make sure you’re safe at night.”

  I want to know why we wouldn’t be safe. It’s all about saying it in the right way— sounding surprised but not too surprised. Like I trust him, that’s the key. I’m surprised how easily lying comes to me.

  “Because you’ve all come from places that you don’t want to remember. We don’t trick you here. We want you to be better. Because if you’re better, the world can be better. You see that, don’t you?”

  I nod.

  “So now you have to be straight with me. How have you been sleeping?”

  I tell him that I sleep well. Every night the same, really. I don’t remember it.

  He sighs. “You never wake up? You never dream?” He doesn’t look at me when he waits for my answer, as if he knows how this goes. I know what happens next—he’s got video from last night, of me reacting to the noise that I heard. Sure as anything, he says, “Play,” and the video begins. I move around in the bed, I bring my hands up to my ears—visible through the covers, the shape of them moving, my fingers creeping over the edge of the blanket, mingling with my hair. “You look as though you can hear something,” he says.

  I ask him what there would be to hear. I say that I must have been dreaming.

  “You’ve already told me that you don’t dream, Chan.”

  I reply that I told him I don’t remember if I do. Different thing. He nods. He seems tired. I don’t really have any sympathy for him if he is tired. I ask about where I was before this. Who I was. I say that maybe that will help me remember what my dreams are about. Or don’t they want us to remember our dreams?

  “You were you. I’ve already told you that. You were you, but worse. That’s all we do, all I am doing here, trying to make you better. There’s a version of you that you could be—and you haven’t realized it yet. I have. Why wouldn’t you want to be the best you that you can be?”

  I ask why we don’t remember the bad things from before—they might be important to help make us who we are.

  “Because the brain works hard to forget things that hurt it. It doesn’t want bad things to be remembered. It wants the good. We try and give you the good here. That’s what revision is.” He sighs again and waves his hand. That’s my cue to leave and I do; I work all day on the roads, reserving the air in the re-breather again, staying awake for as long as I can that night, not breathing in the gas, waiting for the voice of Gaia in the night that I now understand I must ignore.

  They teach us history as a way of making sure we’re prepared to reenter civilization when we reach the cities. There’s a lot to cover. Some people remember the history but some don’t. They want us to know it before we get back to the cities—wherever we’re sent—because then we can hit the ground running. We can start being productive members of society.

  Today we’re talking about the weather, about what’s changed over the centuries here on Earth. There used to be snow, they say. Sometimes it snowed as late as April. The spring began in March, sunlight breaking through the cold ground; it would warm the planet, but not like now. Now the heat is brutal everywhere. Now huge parts of the planet have been lost to it, are nearly uninhabitable. There’s a poem, an old poem that someone tells us. April showers brought May flowers. We have to remember these things we’ve lost because if we strive, maybe we can get them back—see those May flowers again.

  May. Mae.

  I can feel something, in my head. The fog in there being lifted.

  “Chan?”

  The teacher has stopped, is trying to get my attention.

  I say that I’m listening, I am. I’m trying. But she goes back to talking about the heat, the parts of the world that were hottest even before the worst happened. There was ice in the coldest parts of the world, she says, but the heat melted it and the sea levels rose. Some of the hottest countries—Australia, she says, a country far away from here, nearly the other side of the world—were completely lost to the sea, one of the greatest tragedies in human history. This is what we don’t want to repeat, what we’re trying to avoid.

  “Australia,” I say, hearing my own voice out loud for what feels like the first time—mine, mine—and everything is suddenly there, in my grasp.

  NINE

  Keeping it from them—the guards, the wardens, Gibson—is the hardest part.

  No, that’s not true. Remembering. That’s the hardest part. There’s a lot to be said for having holes in your memory—or maybe just one large hole where everything has fallen out and all that’s left is the clarity of the now. I sit on the toilet, the only place where I’m mostly certain that they won’t be watching me, and I shake; I hold myself and I try to keep it together while everything comes back to me, clawing its way out of that hole.

  My mother and everything she did for me, her whole life. What I did for her in the end. Agatha and how she looked after us, how she tried to protect me. How she lied to me and how I felt betrayed when I learned of it, how she died pointlessly—lost at a moment that I wasn’t watching out for her. Jonah, who I know here and who I knew then, and whatever it was that we had—something so fleeting and so precious. And Mae, who I tried to save because I wanted her to have everything that I did—security, safety, even in that awful place—and then even more. As much as I could give her.

  The Australia itself: a ship we were never meant to be on, that we were stranded on—not by the sins of our ancestors but by the horrifying decisions of those who judged them, then left them to rot, to die, to kill themselves and each other. Then the fall, and my escape. Alala, Ziegler, The Runner. I can remember everything.

  It takes me so long to get myself together, to stop feeling dizzy from the memories falling back into place. I miss the rest of class; when I come out of the toilet, I’m taken to my room, told to lie down. I’m running a fever, they say. They tell me to sleep, but I don’t want to because I don’t have my mask, don’t have the oxygen to keep me awake, to stop me breathing in their false air and hearing their messages. I’ve got my memories back and I can’t lose them now.

  They tell me it will be okay. They sedate me.

  I can see the history of who I am slipping away from me. I grab at it, but my memories are weak—wisps, like smoke.

  When I wake up, my mouth is dry and my head pounds. I remember something from last night; something that I wasn’t meant to forget. I reach—for names, for places.

  On my skin, letters I scratched onto myself with my own nails.

  MAE.

  There it is. All of it, back again. The wall—whatever they do at night to build it up—won’t hold. I know exactly how to tear it down.

  I sit at breakfast, first to the table, waiting to see who my companions are. I’m praying for Jonah. I don’t know who I’m praying to; I just utter words under my breath, desperate to see him, to show him what I know.

  He’s first in. Jonah comes through the
door and he meets my eyes. He smiles, relaxed and comforted. That warms me like his hands did. I try to look serious and calm, to let him know something’s important, that we need to talk.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” I say, as he sits down opposite me.

  “Are you okay?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t know how to answer. “Do you dream of anything, Jonah?”

  “At night?”

  “While you’re asleep. Do you dream?”

  “No,” he says. He scratches at his neck, at the scars. “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you remember anything about before?”

  “I remember that it was bad and that I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t productive.”

  “No,” I say, wanting to grab him and shake him, to knock some sense into him and bring back everything the way I’ve done for myself. But then our tablemates join us: Tom and some new girl who’s so scared and twitchy that I know she can’t have been here for long. Jonah and I stop talking. We don’t stop glancing at each other, though; we’re desperate to be out of this room so that we can talk. Jonah doesn’t know that it’s deeper for me, that desperation. I want to be out of this room, this facility, this town.

  “I’m feeling better,” Tom says, sitting down, reaching for the juice that’s in the middle of the table. “The doctors say I’ll be back working next week.”

  “Good,” I say. I look at the new girl. “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  “Nadine,” she says.

  “I’m Chan. Where do you come from?”

  She stammers. Unsure of what to say. “From here,” she finally manages.

  “No, you don’t,” I tell her. “You don’t, you can’t. You came from somewhere else.”

  “Chan,” Jonah says, and he reaches over and touches my arm. More memories—the two of us helping each other, clinging to each other, fighting people who wanted to hurt us. Me kissing him, or him kissing me. But he died, or he was lost. I lost him, but here he is.

  “You’re scaring her,” he says.

  He’s right. She’s terrified of me, of this place, of how little she knows herself. I remember being her, how it felt. I stay quiet. I eat my breakfast and I watch Jonah through the corners of my eyes; he stares at me and his gaze feels like it’s etching something permanent onto my skin.

  We’re on the road and I hate it. I’m sweating and trying to use as little of the oxygen in my re-breather as possible, but breathing is hard. It feels like there’s sand in my lungs. Today I’m working with people I don’t know. I try to ask them what they’re doing working here—doing as they’re told, not questioning anything. They all say the same thing: It’s what they’ve been told to do. There’s no purpose beyond that, nothing personal to it. They don’t want anything. They’re just digging up a road and relaying it, over and over—hoping to reach the city, the promise of something much better, of making themselves better along with it. And I realize that I can’t do it anymore.

  “I quit,” I say, and I walk off away from them. I go back to town and I stand in the middle of the main street. There are buildings here that used to be shops. I can see their dusty signs, indications that there was something here before this. DRUGSTORE and MARKET and a building called TUNES; clothing stores and technology stores and more, on and on, down the street. There’s a playground to one side, iron wrought into shapes that have twisted and rusted. Families came here once, children played on these things. There are houses everywhere, all spiraling off from this space. SUMMER RENTALS! one sign shouts in peeling black letters. This place was good once. It was what life is meant to be, or some part of it. This is what I dreamed of when I lived on the ship, when there was talk of somewhere else, a planet—a home—that we were meant to find.

  In the distance I can see radio towers on a hill not too far away. I start to walk there. I need to speak to Jonah. I need to know if he can remember what I can—and if he can’t, if I can make him.

  He’s up a tower. I know it’s him from his shape, his gangly limbs wrapped around the metal rungs of the ladder. I’ve seen him climb ladders before; I’ve watched him climb and I’ve watched him fall. I remember. I shout up to him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I beckon him down, and he comes.

  “Are you working here now as well?” he says.

  “No,” I say. I grab his arm and pull him away off to one side. I don’t want anybody to see us. “You don’t remember anything from before?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “We were together. On a ship, a spaceship.” He looks blank, as though he doesn’t understand. “We were up there, in the stars. The ship was called Australia. That’s where we came from. A ship like a country.”

  He looks angry at that. He doesn’t believe me or doesn’t want to. He pulls away, tries to walk away from me. I don’t let him.

  “Your name is Jonah and you’re older than I am, I think. Not by much. You didn’t have parents because they died when you were young.” He blinks. It should have hurt him more to learn that. Maybe he had already assumed. “You were brought up by the Pale Women, who taught you about their book. Remember their Testaments? Remember how you wore that spiked collar that made those holes in your neck, tore your skin?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says, but he touches the suit he’s wearing at the neck, presses it in, feeling for them like that’ll prove whether or not I’m telling the truth.

  “I freed you. Or you freed yourself. However it happened. The ship fell apart. Remember the Lows? Remember Rex? How they tried to kill us, how they tried to take the ship? But we found a way to escape. We found a way to come here.”

  “I don’t . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. I grab his helmet, pull it off, and I put my hand on the back of his head and draw him close to me and I kiss him. Our lips press together, feeling the heat of our breath on each other’s mouths. We’ve done this once before, and then he died—or I thought that he did.

  I remember it and I wish that he did too.

  I hope that kissing him wakes him up.

  He pushes me away. “I don’t remember,” he says. He’s confused, his eyes wet, suddenly shocked. He doesn’t remember. It didn’t work. “I have to fix the radio tower,” he tells me, and he sounds sad as he says it. There’s a finality to it: He doesn’t want to hear any more of what I’ve got to say to him.

  As I walk back, leaving him to climb the tower, not even glancing down at me, I look at the boarded-up stores, the broken signs, the smashed glass of the roof. Along the way is the shop that they bring us to, to test us, to see how we’ll react. It’s empty now, a blank slate of empty shelves and a vacant counter. I try the door and it opens. I assumed they’d keep it locked. I assumed wrong. I walk to the counter then clamber over to the back. This is where the shopkeepers disappear after our tests are done. I hope I can find somewhere quiet where I can sit, where nobody will know where I am.

  Instead, I find a door that leads to another door. I go through and find not a quiet room, but a warehouse containing everything that they use in the shop, shelves stretching endlessly away. Here’s the food, the clothes, the weapons—a box with strikers (new models) and knives. And then there are boxes labeled Frank, Dolly, Andrew, Grant. I run along the shelves, looking for familiar names.

  Tom. Polly. Jonah.

  Chan.

  I yank my box down from the shelves. It’s light but not empty. Inside it is my knife. I know it. I remember it. It’s not much, but it’s mine. They must have taken it from me when I came here. It’s been waiting for me. I can’t take it, I know. Not yet. They’ll notice. They might even be watching, though I can’t see any camera drones anywhere. I can’t have them become any more suspicious or they’ll do to me what they’ve done to Polly, put me—

  I hear voices from outside. I thrust my box back into its place and run along the shelves to the other end of the huge room. There’s a door here, an exit, but it’s locked—a thick bar driven across it.

  Ok
ay. So stay still. Wait. They may not know I’m here.

  I recognize Gibson’s voice talking with the guards. They’re discussing a patient, a trial they’re setting up.

  “I want everything in here to be his—from before. As much as we’ve got. Do we have pictures of his family?”

  “We can get them.”

  “Put them in frames, like they’re the stock photos. See what he’s drawn to, if he recognizes them.” I can hear Gibson walking around, inspecting the boxes, the many items on the shelves. Don’t come back here. Don’t come back here. I’m holding my breath, crouched low, trying to keep them from hearing me or seeing me.

  I hear Gibson’s feet slapping on the ground, coming closer and closer. Then there’s a noise—something in the distance. A high-pitched trill, over and over. An alarm. Gibson and everyone here with him drop everything and run out of the warehouse, slamming the door behind them. I haven’t heard this alarm before, I don’t know what it indicates. I follow them but they’re so focused on getting wherever they’re going that they don’t see me. I hang back, cautious and careful. I don’t know that they’ll trust me at the moment if I’m caught.

  Outside the main doors to the facility that lead to our rooms, to Gibson’s office, and to the food halls, I see Polly. She’s free somehow. She’s got her arm wrapped around another person. At first I think it’s affectionate—that that’s how close they are. But then as I get closer, as the wardens and Gibson slow down, putting their hands out in front of them, shouting to her as calmly as they can manage, their voices carrying on the wind—“Please, think about this, Polly. Think about what you’re doing!”—I see that it’s the new girl from breakfast she’s holding. If she looked scared them, now she’s almost completely still and lifeless—not dead, just not entirely there. In shock.

  I’ve forgotten her name already.