When the story was finished, I thought I’d start up a conversation. “So how long have you been doing this?”
“What?” said the strong-looking guy we’d approached in the park that first day.
“Living in the wilderness. Not living in houses.”
“Most of us a long time, a few a shorter time,” Sandra piped in. “The children, their whole lives. We don’t talk about our city lives much. We prefer happy stories.” She didn’t sound pissed off at me for bringing it up, just matter-of-fact.
“So why do you visit the cities at all?” I asked.
“There are things we need there, and things we need to give to them,” Carl said. He was a fifty-something guy with a weak chin. He didn’t have as much of an accent as most of the others, so I guessed he was like me, a convert.
“You trade with them?”
A couple of people laughed.
“We give them what they need, we get what we need,” Carl said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked. “You speaking in riddles because my ignorance is entertaining, or because you don’t want to tell me? If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”
Some of the smiles faded; a few people picked up weaving projects and other shit they were working on.
Carl tossed his half-eaten bamboo shoot at my feet. “We give them these.”
I picked it up, cradled it in my palms.
Shit, I can be slow on the uptake for a guy who’s got so much raw intellect.
“You started the outbreak near the square?” I looked at Bird. She smiled like a gremlin and nodded so vigorously her tits bounced. “Why?”
Everyone looked to Carl. “To slow things down.” He twisted around, cut another length of bamboo stalk, sliced it lengthwise with his hunting knife. “The world is coming apart. It’s either gonna come apart hard, or soft. We’re helping to make it soft.”
People nodded as he spoke. Shit, this was sounding suspiciously like some whacked religion. What had I gotten myself into?
“How the hell do you know you’re not making things worse? Excuse me, but I don’t see many economists here, or sociologists, or environmental engineers!”
“No, you don’t. But they pay us to spread their work.”
It took a minute for that to sink in, then my mouth dropped open.
“You’re trying to tell me this shit was made on purpose, by educated people, and they pay you to spread it?”
Carl smiled. “Now you know.”
I turned the piece of bamboo over and over in my hands, thinking. Another thing I was learning about these people was they were comfortable with silence. They were happy to sit and eat, or just sit. Long lulls in a conversation were not uncommon.
“We’re not wandering aimlessly, are we?” I asked, finally.
“We’re heading north,” the big guy said. “To slow things down up there.”
With a newly-engineered variety that would thrive further north, clogging the highways and airports, slowing the spread of brand-name products even more. Cutting down on pollution, making it harder for wars to be fought. Maybe throwing us back into the stone age. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
* * *
A week in, I had no fucking idea where we were. We reached the top of what passed for a hill in south Georgia, and there was nothing but bamboo and scattered stands of scrub pines as far as I could see in every direction. It would take months for us to make our way north, but the tribe didn’t seem to be in any hurry. I was filthy, thirsty, and bored. Sand gnats buzzed around my face, landing in my ears and the corners of my eyes. I turned and waited for Bird. She was dragging, sweating even more than me, her mouth pulled down in a grimace that made her look stupid and confused. Usually she was egging me on.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I ate something wrong. I have to poop.” She pulled down her rags and squatted right there. I was getting used to it. I turned and walked a respectable distance. Three dudes moseyed past, saying hello to her as she squatted there, her face red from straining.
Suddenly she turned her head to one side and puked. I ran to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re really sick.” I put my palm on her forehead, and, hot as it was outside, it was still obvious she was pulling a fever. “Shit, you’ve got something.” I yanked my mask up over my mouth, knowing it was way too late if she’d caught anything designer. I thought of the woman with the giant tongue, panting in the car, and my bowels went loose. I turned in the direction of the guys vanishing into the bamboo. “Hey! She’s sick! Call a stop.”
They called, and the call repeated, further away each time. I wrapped my arms around her waist to help her to the ground. She cried out in pain, like I’d stuck an arrow in her or something, and grabbed her stomach, low, on the right side.
Appendix. As soon as I saw her grab that spot, I knew.
The tribe was slowly gathering, a few at a time.
“We need to find a doctor! She’s got appendicitis.” It had never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I fell and fractured my skull while I was out here.
“No towns near here. No doctors,” an old guy missing his front teeth said.
“Well what do we do?” I helped Bird ease herself to the ground. She was whimpering in pain.
“Nothing to do,” Sandra said, shrugging. “We’ll camp here till Bird’s strong enough to walk, or she dies.”
“I don’t want to die,” Bird said.
I needed a consult. I pulled out my phone, dialed the Phone Doctor number. A recorded voice prompted me to type in my credit code. I typed in my old man’s.
“Andrew Gabow, M.D. How can I help you?” a clean, rested voice said over the phone. I felt a wave of gratitude, just to hear that tone.
“I’ve got a woman here who I think has appendicitis. We’re way out in the wilderness, there’s no way to get her to a town. What do I do?”
“Describe her symptoms.”
I went through them; the doctor asked follow up questions about the exact location of the pain in her abdomen. He sounded miffed that we didn’t have a thermometer with us to get Bird’s exact temperature.
“You’re probably correct—acute appendicitis. I’ll give it to you straight, Kilo—she’s in grave danger. You’re not going to carry her out of there in time, and when her appendix bursts, the infection will spread, and chances are she won’t survive it. Not out there. Probably not even in a hospital.”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“You’ve got one option. Perform surgery on her.”
“Me?”
“Whoever in your party has the most medical experience. Is there a nurse with you, a paramedic? Nurse’s aide?”
I asked the tribe. A dozen heads shook in unison. Shit, half of them never learned how to read. Most of the rest had forgotten.
“There’s got to be another way,” I said to the doctor. “What about a helicopter?”
He laughed. “Will that be cash or charge?”
“Oh god, oh god.” I felt like I was separating from my body; I heard my voice saying, “oh god,” but it sounded far away, coming from someone else.
“Build a fire,” Dr. Gabow said. “I’m going to do this for a hundred dollars federal, because you can’t afford what I should be charging, and because I’m a nice guy.”
“Thank you, doctor.” I started to cry. “Somebody build a fire!” Who was that scared little boy who just yelled that? a calm sliver of my mind asked.
When the fire was built, we heated water. I plunged my hands into the pot of scalding water and held them there as long as I could. Then Carla did the same—she was going to assist. Carla put my knife in the water, then held it over the flames before handing it to me. My hand was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the knife. The children had been moved out of hearing distance. Four people held Bird down, one for each arm and leg. The doctor had suggested we put her in a stream to cool her and reduce the bleeding, but there were no streams around.
“Don’t make the cut too deep,” the doctor said. I had activated the hands free element on the phone. “About a half inch down, two across. There’s going to be a lot of blood, but don’t worry about that. We’ll handle that later.”
Tears were pouring down Bird’s cheeks as I held the knife over the spot we’d washed and doused with moonshine. The knife was shaking so hard it was blurry. I held it there a long time; twice I brought it down just short of her soft skin and pulled it back up.
“Make the cut, Kilo,” the doctor said.
“I can’t do this. Somebody else, please. Somebody do this.”
I’d been strutting around Savannah with all my street style, like I was this tough guy, but I was just a worm. I was all posture. I never shot or cut anyone in my life before I shot Allie Cohn. I couldn’t even cut this girl to save her life.
“I don’t want to die,” Bird whimpered. “Please Kilo, please. I don’t want to die.”
With a howl, I cut her. She screamed in agony, bucked violently, trying to break free of the people pinning her down. Like an animal. Blood welled up where I’d cut her, filling the incision and pouring out. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” I cried.
“How deep is the incision? What do you see inside?” the doctor said, so calm, so far away in his comfortable air-conditioned office.
“I don’t know,” I pulled the skin apart to see how deep it was. “There’s just red tissue, I can’t see anything.”
“You’re still in muscle. You have to cut deeper.”
“Oh, god. Not again.” Tears poured down my cheeks, and I was trembling all over, like I was freezing cold.
You suck, Kilo, Allie Cohn’s voice said inside my head.
“Cut, god dammit. Cut her, do it now,” the doctor shouted.
I screamed, and kept screaming as I cut, wider and deeper. Bird thrashed, but the fight was bleeding out of her. She seemed to be only half-conscious, only the whites of her eyes visible.
“What do you see?” the doctor asked.
I pulled on the flap I’d made, and it tore a little wider, exposing something grey and puckered, a fat snake folding in on itself. It was an organ. Christ, it was her liver or gall bladder or something. I described it to the doctor.
“Good boy, Kilo, that’s what you want. That’s the colon. Fish around, find the bottom of it, where it meets the small intestine. You’re looking for a small, tube-like appendage attached to the colon.”
I poked around inside Bird, trying to ignore the moist squishing sound, the blood pouring down her side, dribbling onto the tan bamboo husks that littered the ground.
“I can’t find it,” I said.
“Get your damned hand in there and move the colon around. This isn’t some dainty parlor game. Get your hands bloody.”
I dug deeper, squeezing my fingers between the tubes, pushing one section up with my finger. Behind it was something that looked like a swollen maggot, I described it to Doctor Gabow.
“Cut it off and pitch it away, Kilo.”
After I cut it off, Sandra sewed the end of the colon closed while I held my knife over the flame, getting it good and hot. Then I pressed the flat end of it against the wound, to cauterize it and stop some of the bleeding. Bird didn’t flinch as the knife hissed against her insides; she’d fainted somewhere along the way. I held the edges of the wound closed while Sandra sewed it. Doctor Gabow explained that someone needed to get to the nearest town and buy antibiotics, or Bird would likely die of infection, and all my good work would go to waste.
People slapped my back as I stumbled out of the camp. I found myself a quiet copse and collapsed onto my back, staring up at the half moon through the narrow leaves. I felt...strange. Calm. Like a buzzing had turned off in my brain for the first time in years. I held my hands up in front of my face, looked at the blood covering them, starting to dry and cake now.
I had done something. And now that I’d done it once, I thought I could do it again, and that next time my hand wouldn’t shake, and I wouldn’t cry.
* * *
A teenaged chick with tearstained eyes peered up through the open steel hatch, into my formerly secret Savannah hideaway. She held a crumpled t-shirt to her cheek. Spots of blood had already seeped through it.
“Welcome.” I put away the medical book I’d been reading. No books needed to figure this one out. This one was easy.
“Joey Plano told me you could fix me up. I got no cheese, but I could pay you later, or—.”
I held up my hand. “Pay is optional. Maybe later you want to give me something, maybe not. No grief either way. Let me see.”
She came over, sat in the plastic chair facing me, pulled away the t-shirt. A nasty gash; looked like a knife, or a bottle.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, turning to choose a needle and thread.
“My boyfriend.” She started crying. “The son of a bitch. My brother’s gonna kill him, gonna cut his balls off and make him eat them.”
“That’ll serve him right. But right now I need you to stop talking and stop crying.” I flicked my lighter, ran the needle over the flame. She reminded me a little bit of Bird, with her mouth all scrunched from crying. I wondered if Bird and her band had made it far enough north to plant their little surprise yet. Hard to know.
“Now I need you to hold still for me. This is gonna hurt.”
I sunk the needle into her cheek; she squealed, but held still.
The Fantasy Jumper
Rando passed his wrist over the credit eye on the Fantasy Jumper kiosk. The darkened window flashed to life, revealing a full-length, three-dimensional image of a young woman with pale, perfect skin lightly dusted with freckles.
“This is the one I wanted to show you,” Rando said to his blind date, Maya, who had an artificial eye that drooped slightly, but was otherwise very cute in a chipmunk sort of way.
“Make her blonde,” Rando said, while Maya peered over his shoulder. The woman’s hair changed from brown to golden blonde.
“Old-fashioned romance dress.” It hurt to talk, because Rando had accidentally bitten the inside of his cheek while eating oysters at the underwater restaurant. The woman’s simple white shift morphed into a flowing mintcream gown with a diving bust line, like on the covers of the books Rando’s elderly mother read.
“Big pointy dunce hat,” Rando said, laughing, and the woman was suddenly wearing an oversized red cone, with “Dunce” printed top to bottom in plain black letters.
“Finished,” Rando said to the kiosk, simultaneously puffing his cheek to keep the wound from rubbing against his molar.
The window glided up, and the woman stepped out.
“This time, maybe I’ll reach the fountain.” She turned and leapt off the roof.
Maya gasped.
They leaned over the short wall and watched her plummet, her dress billowing, arms spread wide.
“Isn’t that something?” Rando said.
The woman seemed to fall for a long time. Rando stared, rapt.
Finally, she hit the ground. Her head bounced violently, then she lay motionless. The dunce hat, which had come loose during the fall, clunked to the ground a few feet away from her. A wide swatch of blood blossomed on the pavement around her head. People on a pedestrium that wound past the fountain pointed, their words indecipherable. Then they seemed to recognize that the woman was not a real woman, and went back to their conversations.
Rando looked at Maya. “Isn’t that something?”
Maya smiled and nodded. She glanced at her watch.
“Watch this, watch this.” Rando pointed down at the broken body. The pavement under the body slid open until the body dropped out of sight, then it returned to its original flat grey.
“Let’s try it again,” Rando swept the credit eye a second time. “Can you do that movie star, Ellie what’s-her-name?”
“I only have copyright permission to simulate three celebrities: Cotton McQue, Gym Hinderer, and Lena Zavaroni,” the woman
behind the glass said listlessly.
“Those all suck,” Rando said. “What about a little kid?”
“Age?”
“Five.”
The woman became a five year old girl, cute as a button, but with the same haunted grey eyes.
“Finished!” Rando said.
The little girl stepped out. “This time, maybe I’ll reach the fountain.” Her tiny legs scrambled and churned until she finally cleared the low wall. She jumped, tumbling head over feet once, twice, before slamming to the pavement.
Rando glanced at Maya again. She looked a little distracted, like she wasn’t having a very good time. She was so cute. Rando imagined what it would be like to arrive for Thanksgiving dinner holding Maya’s hand.
“Hey, I have an idea.” He held up a picture of his mother for the kiosk to scan. “This is going to be hilarious.”
When he’d finished watching his mother fall, he turned to find that Maya was nowhere in sight.
“Maya?” he called, but got no answer. He headed off to look for her.
* * *
Violet and Cloe wandered the roof, holding hands. Violet was an egret of a woman, tall and skinny. Her head bobbed when she walked—one bob for each step. Cloe had a ruddy red face, and a habit of waggling her finger when she talked, as if she were trying to write what she said in the air.
They took turns looking out at the park through a telescopic viewfinder that could focus on one square of a waffle cone held by a child in line to see the Concrete Mermaid, if you wanted it to. The view was spectacular—the fair stretched nearly to the horizon, a cacophony of brilliant shapes and colors, snaked by long lines of wide-eyed patrons.
They walked on, pausing to watch three teenage boys create a haggard looking middle-aged woman, who said something about the fountain, then startled them both by leaping off the roof. They continued.
An old woman with thick ankles ringed by plump purple veins sat at the memory kiosk. On the viewscreen a young girl (Violet assumed it was the old woman in her youth) swatted yellow jackets off a younger boy (her brother?) who was covered with them. He was screaming, his skin already mottled by lumps with angry red centers. One of the wasps landed on the girl’s cheek and stung her; she cried in pain, but kept swatting at the bees that swarmed the boy.
Futures Near and Far Page 11