by Grant Pies
After my closing argument in the Whitman case, which was sure to be my five hundred and eighty third lost case as an ARC member, I left the courthouse. I walked home through alleys filled with steam that reeked of ten-day old pork dumplings. Tiny restaurants, no bigger than a single subway train car, lined the street. The owners lived above the shops and they dumped their waste water into the back alleys. Even more steam rose up from the warm dirt water as it came in contact with the cold night air.
I reached my fifty-five square meter efficiency apartment and threw my briefcase on the bare kitchen counter. Instead of furniture, boxes containing exhibits and pleadings from past ARC cases were piled on top of each other in the main living area. Layers of dust settled on the boxes, burying the names or numbers of long forgotten androids.
Beyond the living area was a small kitchen, roughly the size of a compact automobile, consisting of a sink and a two-burner stove. The old weathered hardwood floors were blotted by mysterious dark stains that had soaked into the cracks and fissures long before I moved here. The entire bathroom was tiled in off white square tiles and molded rust colored grout lines. A shower head protruded from the ceiling, and a drain sat on the center of the floor. There was no sink, just a toilet that slowly leaked water, leaving lime scale streaks inside the bowl.
Smells from the tiny restaurants outside wafted into the apartment. Scents of fermented herrings drifted up from the Swedish restaurant. The smell of kiviak, a delicacy in Greenland that consists of rotted bird carcasses wrapped in sealskin, soaked into the walls. The stink of kimchee and raw skate fish covered in uric acid from the Korean restaurant one block away made its way into my home. Greek, Chinese, Indian, and Russian restaurants; they all made dishes that absorbed into every corner of the apartment building. The smells clung to the drapes and blankets, and soaked into the walls.
It was just a matter of time before my already cozy apartment got even smaller. Every couple of years the government decides to provide more government housing in the major metropolitan areas. But since there is no space in the cities, the government simply builds a dividing wall in the existing apartments and diverts the plumbing. My fifty-five square meter apartment used to be one hundred and ten square meters. Before that, I imagine it was two hundred and twenty, but that must have been a long time ago.
Of course there are still areas like what used to be Northern Canada and Alaska where people can find larger pieces of land, but most of those areas are uninhabitable for a good part of the year due to extreme temperatures. Other areas of the country with large tracts of land are just too far removed from resources. Water was diverted from many parts of the country to accommodate the larger metropolitan areas. As a result, the population was forced to concentrate in the urban areas even more than they already did. The outlying lands were on their own. Many collected rain water and rationed that out. If you want land, open spaces, and privacy you need to sacrifice other comforts.
CHAPTER 3
2037
BUFORD, WY
I was born in the ghost town of Buford in Southeast Wyoming; a city left for dead. It was originally built as a major stop along the transcontinental railroad, but eventually the railroad was rerouted around Buford, leaving no reason to move there and less reason to stay.
No one wanted to be the last person left; the one stupid enough to stay. They packed up their cars and drove to the coastal cities. After the residents left, the buildings were forgotten, and nature reclaimed the city. Vegetation took over, helped by the dust storms and harsh winters; wood splintered and foundations cracked.
Roots stretched under the earth, until the asphalt cracked and crumbled away. The streets became rough dirt pathways in a grassy pasture. Moose grazed in the town center, and bobcats roamed for prey. My father thought it was perfect; like the town was frozen and waited just for us; it reminded him of a town he once visited.
“We arrived in Buford just after you were conceived,” the two of us strolled through the old town as he told me a story I’d heard several times before. “The cities were so crowded that people were told when they could shop and when they could work. Tanks and riot police roamed the streets with military grade rifles and tear gas. Drones flew overhead through the thick polluted air.”
My father breathed in deep, his hands were clasped behind his back and his shoulders pushed back. “The air in Buford is different. The water isn’t gritty and doesn’t taste like chemicals,” he said. “We set up our home in the old trading post on the east end of the town.” He pointed behind us toward our house. “The only thing left behind were the spools of scratch off lottery tickets.” I smiled at the memories I had when Dad let me scratch of the lottery tickets on my birthdays.
“I worked with my hands my whole life, so it didn’t seem like a difficult thing to fix the place up myself,” he told me, and stretched his hands out palms up in front of him. The skin on his hands seemed as thick as crocodile’s skin, darkened, as if there was a permanent layer of dirt or grease on them. His round knuckles bulged out at each joint on his fingers. His hands seemed larger than they should have been, as if they had continued to grow even after the rest of him had stopped.
“The beauty of living in an abandoned town is you can take whatever you need,” he said. “I scoured the old town for used wiring to replace what the rats and squirrels had gnawed away inside the walls.” My skin crawled at the thought of rats living in what was now our home.
“I came home after a day of scavenging with spools of wire clasped in my hands.” He held his fists in the air with lengths of imagined wires hanging out of them and smiled. We wandered past the broken homes and rusted cars. My father told me that with every day that passed, he finished another project. Slowly my father’s vision for the trading post became a reality; slowly he built a home.
“Your mom was three months pregnant by the time I repaired the electricity in the trading post,” he told me. “The first night we spent in there with the heat and lights on was the first night your mother didn’t lay awake and stare at the cracks in the ceiling. And the next morning was the first time she slept in and didn’t pace up and down the aisles.” My dad pointed and traced his finger in a zigzag pattern.
“Once it was completed, it was already out of date for twenty thirty-seven. Heck, it was out of date even for nineteen eighty-five. But it was a home,” he said.
CHAPTER 4
2048
BUFORD, WY
“Do you ever think of her?” I asked my father. His hair was messy and hung near his eyes. His skin was tanned from days of growing crops and scavenging for scraps in Buford. My father stoked the fire in our wood burning stove, and the smell of charred rabbit meat wafted inside. The walls were littered with scraps from other homes. The bare shelves had been moved out of the way to make room for my bed after I had grown out of my crib.
“Who? Your mom?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“I do,” he said and nodded. He paused before continuing his thought, like he had to decide if it was worth it to delve any deeper. “I remember how loyal she was...at least to me and the other people she cared about. I remember the first time I saw her. She stood in front of a crystal blue lake surrounded by tall pine trees dusted with snow. I remember when we arrived here in Buford. She always asked me where she would give birth. The moment she found out she was pregnant, she became so protective; of me, of herself, but mostly of you. Like we were all one organism that needed each other to survive. She asked where you would sleep once you were born,” he said and motioned toward me. “She looked around and sighed quietly, but just loud enough for me to hear her. She walked up and down the same three aisles, cradling her barely pregnant stomach, staring blankly at our new home.”
He looked away, and watched a memory of my mom trace the same path up and down the aisles of our home. The slight smile that he held across his face straightened.
“I remember the night she died. The night she gave birth to you
.” He turned from the stove to look at me. He placed his hand on my shoulder. I looked away from him and stared at the floor.
“Don’t feel bad, son; it isn’t a bad memory at all. Most people would want to forget that night, but your mom was so happy. She knew something was wrong, but she was just glad to see you, if only for a short time. And wherever she is now, she is thinking of you.”
“Is it my fault?” I asked him, afraid of the answer I may get.
“Heck no!” he said and shook his head vigorously. “It was no one’s fault. Your mom loved you before she even knew you. If she knew she wouldn’t survive your birth, she would have still gone through with it. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But I try not to think of that too much. I try not to think of anything in the past too much.” my father said and refocused his gaze back to the here and now.
“Why?” I asked him, confused.
“Well, our brains distort our memories each time we think of them,” he told me. “Whenever you recall a memory your mind sees it slightly differently than how it actually happened. The brain takes how we wish things had happened, or how we have been told something happened, and it mixes them up, forgetting what truly happened. Our brain fills the gaps for our own sake.” I stared at my father blankly, nodded and furrowed my brow, trying to look like I understood.
“We aren’t remembering anything accurately. We just tell ourselves stories over and over again. In a way, we actually harm our memories by reminiscing. We are better off leaving our good memories untouched and unaltered by our brains. Experience those times once in our lives, and then leave them there in the past. It actually serves us better to retell the bad experiences of our past. Let your brain destroy the memory of your failures and embarrassments…your losses…” my father’s voice trailed off.
“Like your scar,” I said and chuckled in an attempt to lighten the mood.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You said we should think of our embarrassments. Like when you got that scar.” I motioned toward his face.
“Oh yeah! My embarrassments,” my father said, forcing a laugh. “A tree branch caught me when I wasn’t looking,” he said and looked down at the floor.
“A tree branch? I thought you said it was a shingle that fell off the old schoolhouse?” He raised his hand and traced the scar with his finger. It was in the shape of the letter “V”, and about four centimeters long, dipping just below his eyebrow.
“You sure about that?” My father asked. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was a shingle. Maybe my brain has already changed that memory around on me.” He shook his head slightly. “Hey, remember when you were little and you would sit on my lap. You stared at this scar and traced it with your little finger.” He smiled as he reminisced; breaking his own rules. “You told me it felt deeper than a scar really should be.”
“I think I remember,” I said.
My father grew up somewhere in this part of the country. But maybe that is why he didn’t want to find his hometown. He preferred to leave his memories intact, and simply enjoy our time in Buford. He didn’t want to go back and realize the small town of his youth was overgrown with government housing. It was easy to get lost out in Buford, he told me. He saw being lost as a good thing, as true freedom. He saw being lost as an escape from his past and break before the future.
“You are only truly lost once everyone stops looking for you,” he always said.
CHAPTER 5
2049
BUFORD, WY
As the years went on, my father and I settled into a routine. I grew produce, trapped animals, and scavenged the old buildings in Buford for any remaining supplies; something that we may have missed in the last decade or more. Over the years, we dismantled plumbing and stole insulation. My father had me scavenge for food and forage for plants. I ventured out to collect black chokecherries, wild plums, and juneberries for jams.
Once I was old enough, my father showed me how to construct a spring snare trap. Each time he showed me, his hands moved in symphony. He twisted his fingers through loops of braided long grass to make slip knots, whittled tiny pieces of wood with notches in them, and balanced each piece of the trap flawlessly until it was both sturdy and precarious. His hands worked independently of him, like they were controlled by a machine. With every action, he recited what he was doing until I could repeat it in my sleep.
On my twelfth birthday, he showed me how to build a trap for the last time. As he twirled the length of braided grass in his fingers, he said to me, “Life is like this knot.” He pointed at the slip knot of braided grass, his hand shaking slightly. “You shouldn’t think of our time here as one long string of grass. Time twists around and lies on top of itself.”
“The more time threads through itself the tighter the knot gets until eventually it is impossible to untie. When you are older you will understand that things like the past and the future are not entirely different, and ultimately neither is as important as they seem to be.” A reassuring smile crept onto his face, and he placed a hand on my head. He turned back to the snare trap.
Unlike every time before this, his hands shook and trembled. He could not get the trap to fit together. He breathed short shallow breaths. After his third failed attempt to set the trap, I placed my hand on his to help him steady. From then on, I set all the traps to catch our meals.
CHAPTER 6
2050
BUFORD, WY
By the time I was thirteen I took on most of the responsibilities of collecting food, water, and supplies. My father took advantage of my growing role as a helper, sleeping later and going to bed earlier. When he awoke, he sat on the side of the bed with his feet flat on the floor, swaying back and forth for a minute and then finally standing up straight. When he finally stood, his bones creaked, and his joints popped. The skin on his face sagged like an old man.
He taught me as much as he could before he died. Looking back, he must have known he was dying. He lost weight, and his skin became the muted gray color of ash. He relied on me more and more, until eventually he was unable to help maintain our home or gather supplies at all. Even as a child, I knew that most people as young as him didn’t get sick; well not sick in the way the he was.
One day we both sat in the doorway and stared out into the flat grassland surrounding our home. I pictured what Buford looked like fifty years ago and what it would look like fifty years from now.
“Son,” he said. “You know what happens when we die?” He asked but we both knew I didn’t have an answer. “Everyone has their own theories, but I think we come right back here. We come right back to where we started; reincarnated into ourselves. You see, everything that exists has always existed,” he said cryptically. “Every atom in our bodies existed at the creation of the universe. These particles collided, bonded, reacted, and dispersed only to collide and bond again.”
In the distance, a Great Horned Owl hooted in search of a mate. It reverberated through the forest and travelled on the gentle wind that rustled through Buford. My father flexed his hands into fists and then stretched them out flat. He did this several times; each time he winced in pain.
“Every time these particles collided, they created something new,” he continued. “But it’s always the same atoms; has been from the beginning of time. The particles never really die; just recycle.”
He leaned back and rested against the splintered wood siding of the trading post. The old wood creaked and cracked a little under the slight pressure of his back. Buford was resilient, but it couldn’t hold on forever.
“These reactions,” he continued, “should teach us one thing. Nothing new can be created without something else being destroyed. Something, millions of things, had to die for you to sit here right now. Sometimes, the thing destroyed is just an inanimate collection of atoms. Other times the thing destroyed is alive, maybe a plant,” he said and plucked a weed out of the ground next to him. “Sometimes a person is the sacrifice. Nothing can start withou
t something else ending. And everything that decays is just the prep work for something else to bloom. It is sacrifice.”
He spoke in almost a whisper, like a person trying to think through a riddle. He coughed into his hands, and winced as his chest heaved and his diaphragm shook inside of him. Something rattled around in him like a ball bearing inside a coffee tin. He looked down at his shaking hands; traces of blood and phlegm coated his palms. His eyes filled with water and turned red. He breathed deep, and used every last ounce of will power to keep from sobbing.
“You see our universe is always expanding, and there are only so many particles in it to interact together. It is like an aquarium with a set amount of fish that shattered ages ago, and everything spilled out in all directions. Eventually we will reach equilibrium; a point where all of the particles of the universe would be so spread out that nothing cab collide together, nothing could happen. No reactions or colliding atoms. No creation. Only stagnation. In essence, we will return to how things were before the Big Bang. The end of our universe will look just like the beginning of it. So maybe it is the beginning. Another beginning. Maybe the entire process will start over and we will end up here sometime in the far distant future. Maybe…” my father’s voice slowly faded as if he no longer had the energy even for speech; he simply nodded to himself.
I sat quietly on the edge of the doorway next to my father. I had not dared interrupt him even though I felt like I should have added something to the conversation. I fidgeted with my hands and tried to make eye contact with him. But really, I hoped that he didn’t look my way.
He let out a deep breath and stared off in the distance. He sat in that doorway looking out long after the sky went dark, long after the owls stopped hooting through the woods, and the packs of prairie dogs retreated to their underground homes. He stayed there long after I left and went to bed.