by Nick Courage
Copyright © 2015 by Nick Courage
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-414-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-937-5
Printed in the United States of America
For Rachel
One million very sincere thanks to Rachel Ekstrom Courage, Pamela van Hylckama Vlieg, Lilly Golden, and Sky Pony Press, without whom this book would not exist. Thanks also to Adrienne Petrosini, Rich and Sandy Ekstrom, and the Henrys, for their support. Thanks to Joe Yoga and Coach (the band) for “Big Dumb River.” Thank you to Matt and Amy Rose-Perkins for introducing me to the joys of weekly comics. Bat Matthews, Scott Davis, Justin “Big Hugs” Hargett, Thom Merrick, Mark Fullmer, and everyone who prefers their guitars just slightly out of tune, thank you.
Henry Long doesn’t have a heart.
I remind myself of this while the doctor rearranges the thermometer, poking it into the soft underside of my tongue. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I hate the Hospital. Hate it even more now because this isn’t one of my scheduled visits. I try not to gag, unsuccessfully, as the slick glass gauge slips back out of my mouth.
“Just one more minute,” the doctor sighs, flipping her hair in frustration as she needles it under my tongue for the third time. My parents are sitting opposite me, looking nervous, and I want to tell them to stop acting like someone’s died . . . but I do feel like death, and the last thing I need is for the doctor to have to rearrange the thermometer again.
The thermometer.
Just thinking about it starts me gagging again. I try to stop, but I can’t help myself; before I know it I’m arching my back, convulsing like a cat with a hairball. It’s only after I’m able to swallow down the acrid taste of aluminum that I notice my parents whispering worried questions to the doctor, who seems to be just half-listening to them as she raises one skeptical eyebrow at me. I give her a feeble thumbs up, smiling weakly through my locked jaws despite a splitting headache, which is how I ended up here in the first place.
To distract myself, I soundlessly repeat the same phrase over and over again. It helps remind me why I have to put up with all of this; why I can’t just take an aspirin and be done with it like a normal kid.
Henry Long doesn’t have a heart.
Not a real one, anyway, which is why I have to get a full medical checkup every time I so much as sneeze. But the funny thing about the Hospital—the reason I hate it so much—is that I always feel worse leaving it than I do coming in.
I was born a year after the first of the Tragedies struck. I was a little colicky in those early days, but the doctors assured my parents it would pass, so they brought me home from the Hospital to the old house with a clean bill of health. By month three of constant mewling, my parents were at the ends of their ropes. They say my silent sobbing toward the end was the hardest to bear, that I didn’t even have the energy to cry out loud.
When I was finally diagnosed, the muscles that kept my heart pumping had atrophied in my chest. There wasn’t much to do in the way of rehabilitation. Unfortunately, the city was even worse off when I was born than it is now—and the Hospital was no exception, so I ended up with a science fair electromagnet humming in my chest. “It pumps the blood,” the doctor had told my parents by way of simple explanation, a hint of apology in her voice.
My body’s normalized to it now. But it’s no normal heart.
“So much drama, Shakespeare,” the doctor says, finally relieving me of the thermometer. I take a deep breath and stretch my tongue. “Ninety-eight point six.”
She turns back to my parents, consulting the chart. “Everything seems to be normal. Temperature is fine, ticker’s fine, EKG is normal.” She looks at me and adds, “For Henry.”
I cough in response, which sets me off gagging again.
“You seem a little nauseous, though. Eating much?”
Mom starts defending my appetite, and I nod in agreement, tuning out. The gyroscope I have whirring in my chest is a pain, but not because it hurts or doesn’t work. There are just . . . other complications. “Side effects,” my parents call them, trying to make my electrical problems seem less strange.
“Abdominal pain?” The doctor massages my stomach and I squirm, laughing despite myself. The exertion is too much, and everything goes black for a second—with white spots. Temporarily blinded, I hear the doctor efficiently check another box on her chart and turn to my parents. “Is Henry experiencing any stress?”
I blink the darkness from my eyes in time to see Dad cringing at Mom, who’s looking sympathetically at me. Maybe it’s their reaction, but I can’t help myself; even though it’s been years, I flash back to the Tragedies, one of the first ones I can remember. Boarded-up windows and streets like rivers with half-submerged cars for cataracts. The rush to escape and then the waiting, the listening past the static of the radio for good news and the bad news that came instead. The drive home to no home. Walls and roofs spray-painted with calls for help. The olive-colored army caravans, the guns; my four-year-old heart, cold in my chest.
I remember to breathe, then shake my aching head.
“I, uh . . . I don’t have a phone,” I say, which is true. One more complication of the whole not-having-a-real-heart thing—what I have instead interferes with the signal, a quote, minor side effect, end quote. I know what it sounds like, but the last Tragedy was years ago, and I was complaining about not being able to call Conor just the other week. Which wasn’t stressful, really.
Just not fair.
I have recently acquired a real-life record collection, though, which would have made up for the whole no-phone thing—except that I’d wanted to call Conor to tell him about it. It started with some boxes I found while I was rooting through our Salvage Bags in the attic a few days ago. At first I thought they were just a bunch of faded old posters and had asked Dad what he was doing with pictures of all those freshly shaved men, red-cheeked and smiling with trumpets or whatever cradled in their arms, half-hoping he was one of them.
“That’s a clarinet, son,” Dad said when I showed him, absentmindedly tracing one of the pictures with a finger and then suddenly shaking a large black disc from within. He carefully held it up to the light, scrutinizing, and blew phantom dust from its surface. “These were even antiques Before,” he’d said, his voice catching on the memory. “Thing of the past now, but I think it’ll still play . . .”
Later that night, I’d asked my parents if we should donate them to a museum or something, and that got Dad wondering how much the records were worth, anyway. I didn’t have the heart to tell them my punch line: “No, I mean—should we donate you two to a museum.”
I ended up tacking a few of the cooler-looking records to my wall, incorporating them into the already jumbled ecosystem of my room. After the headaches started, they were the last thing I remember seeing before the darkness
descended.
The doctor frowns and assures my parents that everything’s normal heart-wise, that “not having a phone doesn’t typically qualify as a stress-inducer.”
“What about the blackout?” Mom asks, not convinced that I’m in the clear.
“Probably a migraine,” the doctor says with finality, signing and inserting my most recent chart into my voluminous files. “You’ll want to give him these for the pain,” she says, handing Dad an envelope of aspirin. “And keep him in a cool, dark place.”
She’s talking about me like I’m a bottle of milk, and even though it’s painful, I laugh. She arches her eyebrow again, and I look quietly down at my lap instead of meeting her sharp gaze.
“Well,” says Mom, not sounding very confident, “I guess that’s good, then.” She hands the doctor a small stack of scrip, and the doctor makes a show of not counting it, tucking it immediately away in the breast pocket of her crisp white jacket. It feels like my stupid plastic heart is pounding in my skull, beating arrhythmically against the back of my eyes, and I hope she’s right about me being okay.
Before long I’m back in my bed, medicated and trying to ignore the pulsing in my head long enough to fall asleep. It’s still light outside, and the late-afternoon sun is trapped in my suffocating greenhouse of a room. I kick off the sheets, sweaty, and focus on the collage of records on my wall, trying to imagine what they sound like.
But it’s no use; all I can hear is my own hot blood pumping impatiently behind my eyes.
The next morning, I wake up to the muffled ringing of my alarm clock, not remembering having fallen asleep. Dad’s records are the first things I see as I lift my sleep-heavy but otherwise clear head up from my well-worn pillow. I say a quiet thanks for the clarity, not quite relishing the insistent bleating of the alarm in my closet . . . but not minding it either. I let the alarm ring until I barely even notice it anymore, too comfortable to get out of bed. Dad knocks twice on the door, and without waiting for an answer makes his way over to the closet.
Most of my electrical stuff is in the closet. It’s not the best feng shui, which Mom’s obsessed with—something about spiritual energy and design—just a pile of cords in an aluminum-lined hole in the wall. We’ve tried everything, but hiding them like this is the only way they have a chance of surviving my “side effects.” It’s a pain, because with the closet full of cords, I have to keep all my clothes in a dresser that takes up half my room.
Plus, I have to get up to turn off my alarm.
I turn over instead, stretching the sheet to cover my entire body so I look like King Tut or something.
“So,” Dad says, stumbling out of the closet after finally turning off the alarm. “How’s the head?”
“Better,” I mumble into my pillow, unheard. I can hear him, though, wandering around the room; surveying. It’s something he’s been doing ever since I rescued his records from the attic: stalking around my room, reminiscing.
“You know,” he says with audible pleasure, and I can tell without looking that his hands are resting thoughtfully on his hips; it’s been his favorite pose since I pinned the records up. “Some of these are real stinkers.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I sigh, pulling the covers more tautly over my head and rolling to face the wall.
“Huh,” he says, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. The floorboards creak as he shifts his weight, his hands falling to his sides as he paces back out into the hallway. “I think . . .” But he’s gone before he can finish his thought. I can still hear his hurried footsteps on the stairs when the alarm goes off again. He hadn’t managed to turn it off after all; he’d only hit the snooze button.
I’m still in bed listening to the alarm when he comes back carrying a dusty cardboard box.
“Hey,” he says, not to me but to the alarm clock, as he sets a dusty box down in front of the closet and yanks the clock’s cord from the wall. “Quiet.” In its place, he plugs in some sort of contraption from Before. My curiosity piqued, I prop myself up on my elbows as he untacks one of his records from the wall, shaking a black disc free from its faded sleeve and placing it tentatively on the device; pinching the record player’s needle clean and then dropping it onto the spinning, crackling vinyl.
We sit on my bed, staring into the closet, and listen with quiet reverence to a few scratchy old jazz songs from, Dad says, “the sixties.” Dad’s messy strawberry hair is fading to a yellowing white, and I try to picture him younger; as a happier, more carefree version of myself. The kind of kid who could touch the worn red patina of our wooden banisters without tearing up at the thought of everyone who’d come before.
Shivering, I flash back to soaked walls buckling beneath the weight of mostly blown-away roofs; overstuffed Salvage Bags exploding with rotting clothes and forgotten memories; the sad, moldy tundra of the city as we drove through it after the last of the Tragedies—the terrible, soggy stench of it. The shock of the difference. That was a half-dozen years ago, but I feel it as sharply now as I did then.
“These were old when I got them,” Dad explains, his face ashen as if suddenly embarrassed by the music’s lightheartedness. “I used to really like old stuff, but I kind of can’t stand the thought of it anymore.”
“Me neither,” I say. The more I think about it, the more I realize it’s the truth. Like the records on my wall, my entire life is a patchwork of salvage, and I’d give anything for a fresh start. Sitting next to Dad in my over-stuffed bedroom listening to a band from way Before waxing bittersweet about some girl who’s probably twice as old as my mom—it’s not depressing, it’s something more . . . something too big for me to handle.
The record finally ends and we both exhale. Dad lets it keep spinning mutely while we stare at the records tacked to my walls. More than anything, I feel guilty. Most people lost everything in the Tragedies, and everyone mostly feels nostalgic about Before, so it feels wrong to feel so resentful of something we were lucky enough to save.
We must look pretty pathetic, because when Mom comes in to ask why the song stopped, she intuitively seems to know what’s happened. With an exasperated look at the two of us, she says, “You know, guys, it’s not like people stopped making music.” When neither of us responds, she walks over to feel my forehead with the back of her hand. “Listen,” she says, “Since you’re feeling better, you should bike over to this place on the other side of downtown. It’s called . . .” She pauses for a second and then smiles. “It’s called the Other Side.”
“It’s a real scene,” she laughs, making finger quotes around scene, “—and it’s not like you were going to go to School today, were you?” Mom’s enthusiasm is contagious, and Dad looks at me with a crooked smile that’s so goofy I can’t help but return it.
And that’s how we end up biking downtown, Dad and I, through the construction to an old neighborhood behind the Green Zone proper that I never knew existed. It’s no surprise that there are parts of the city that I don’t know about; it’s been built over three or four times already after every new Tragedy, and we typically stay in our neighborhood, where my “School” is and where my parents work. The surprise is that we’ve been given permission to explore them.
Where we live is called the Green Zone because it’s the safest place in the city. Not that it’s walled-in or anything, it’s just the most thickly populated part of town—almost every house has a family living in it, and the ones without families are now general stores or agricultural or hardware suppliers. Places to get sheetrock and shovels. We also call it the Green because, since the Tragedies, everyone decided it was best not to depend on outsiders for food. It’s warm most of the year here, so we’re able to live mostly on fruits and vegetables grown in the Zone, and if we get tired of our own supplies, we barter them in the green market for other food.
To be honest, it’s a little boring, but Mom says that’s the trade-off: our first priorities are making sure we’re protected and self-sufficient, then we’ll work on having fun. When
ever I complain, she always points out that we also live next to the only hospital in the state, which isn’t very much fun either, but I feel safer having it nearby. Besides, Mom basically runs the Green, so what she says goes.
Beyond the Green Zone, which is really only a mile or so all the way around, it’s a little more touch-and-go, more so the further away you get from city center. We call that the Grey Zone, and it’s not like it’s super scary or anything, just that it hasn’t been rebuilt yet. Even so, everybody in the Green is usually pretty happy just to stay where they are, especially after everything . . .
And the Green Zone gets a little bigger every day, now that we’re pushing for an independent charter. Mom says that once we get the Charter, we’ll finally have the resources we need to revitalize the Grey entirely; that since there’ll be money to be made, more people will move to the city. Anticipating that, a bunch of contractors have descended on the Green with offers to start rebuilding the Grey on spec, which means they know we need a lot of work done and they figure we’ll be able to pay them later.
Which is all pretty exciting, except the city’s power grid has been down for a longer-than-expected transition to a “Zone-owned electrical solution.” It’s not like we’re making bonfires in our living rooms or anything—the Green is rumbling with generators, but no internet; no phones. Even though Mom keeps saying how nice it is to have an excuse not to be in constant contact with the federales and other cities and provinces, it’s making everyone else pretty irritable. They can live with being like me for a few months, for all I care. I’ve never sent a text in my life.
Still, it feels strange, biking through the Green Zone construction with Dad toward the Other Side. The last time I’d been outside of the Green Zone was with my parents, to take stock a few days after the last Tragedy. It wasn’t called the Grey Zone then, though. It was just . . . broken.
That day, I’d sat in the backseat of our car and stared at the crumbs stuck in the bottom of the cup holder, trying to imagine the topography of the patchwork road jostling us toward the lake, point zero. My parents talked in hushed voices in the front seat and I tried not to listen to them, not wanting to believe another Tragedy had happened so soon after the last one.