Most of his family have already packed and gone but his little brother, as puckered and dried out as Viv was, lays a battered cricket bat over a grave barely a metre above the high tide mark. A circle of workers sings a hymn and someone gives a bunch of flowers to Granny.
She touches Christian’s arm.
“Dis a lovely party,” she says brightly. “Is it your birthday, sweet boy?”
“No, Granny,” Christian says unhappily. “Your friend Walter has died.”
“Oh.” She’s utterly perplexed.
“You should go,” Maata says at Christian’s back in a low, hollow voice. “Take her home.”
Christian glances back at the workers. Some of them have stopped singing and are staring daggers at him.
“They won’t hurt me,” he says. “I’m not Roy.”
He takes Granny home anyway.
GRANNY DIES TWO weeks out from the arrival of the Wave.
This time, Maata, Christian and the pastor are the only ones at the graveside. The bore is completed, all thirty kilometres of it. The workers have gone and there are no inward-bound flights.
Roy is gone, his yellow convertible lifted easily by electromagnets, car and plantation house all loaded onto a barge beside the disassembled drill head and engine housing. Besides the three of them, there are only the terns and the wind in the sea-grape trees to bear witness. It’s so quiet. Christian remembers women wailing and beating their heads at his mother’s funeral. Granny had gripped his hand so tightly.
“De body dat is sown is perishable,” the pastor intones. “It is raised imperishable. Sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. Sown in weakness, it is raised in power.”
Afterwards, he leaves Christian and Maata alone.
Maata touches her chin.
“They believe in the resurrection of the body,” she says, seeing straight through the soil. “But my family disowned me for believing in the resurrection of the land. Stone can be brought back to life, I said, not by electricity applied to flesh, but by a magma transfusion, the planet’s blood. They’re the ones who told me as a child all about fire demons bringing volcanic heat to revive the dying guardian of the tribe. Now I summon fire demons. I am the guardian of the tribe.”
They stand in silence while the wind soughs between them.
“You should go to London,” Maata says, her tone instructing him that he is not to go to London.
“You should go to Morocco,” Christian replies, smiling.
“I want to watch it. I don’t want the last thing I see here to be death. Rebirth is better.”
Christian nods tentatively.
“I’ll stay with you. I’ll watch it with you.”
iv.
THE SANDY GROUND feels syrupy and softened beneath their feet.
In his old bedroom in Granny’s house, Christian draws Maata away from pinned smartpapers showing columns with headings like pumice wastage and limestone-basalt interface. Electricity to the island is off but she has one small solar charger.
She’s deep in thought.
“He lied,” she says. “Your brother Roy. He lied about the initial survey. It wasn’t a survey at all, it was a simulation. An extrapolation, and Walter knew all along. Walter knew!”
She’s not in the kind of wild fury that Roy’s lies usually provoke. In fact, the brightness in her eyes as she stuffs two stolen heatproof suits and a month’s worth of rice and peas into a bag could be confused with excitement. Christian puts it down to the immanence of the island’s transformation. He can’t pull his father’s lobster boat out from under the tall stilts of the house, so fragile-seeming yet proof against a hundred hurricanes, but he directs Maata. Most of her bulk is muscle. Sweat beads her curled upper lip as she avoids the memorial and drags it free.
Together they drain the deteriorated fuel from the outboard motor, inject it with butane and re-fill the tank. The robotrolley, whining, at the end of its battery life, carries the boat to the water’s edge through a pressure release channel in the twenty-metre tall slag walls that enclose the nation’s future borders.
There, the vintage engine starts on the second try.
“Let’s go to Scrub Island,” he says. “My kingdom.”
“No,” Maata says. “We’ll need the safety of a hurricane shield. We’ll go to the north-eastern power rig. The one at Windward Point.”
Christian pats the folded permanent paper in his pocket.
“Also my kingdom,” he says, grinning.
v.
THE NEXT MORNING, safely across the strait, they stand, half-suited, on the hurricane wall, gazing down on the empty cookie-cutter of an island to the south-west.
Waiting.
Drones perform last-minute fly-bys to check for human presence before snapping back to optimal, low-risk observation paths. Hot, blue, empty sky waits to be written on in ash and steam. The concrete battlements of the hurricane shield wait to be struck by ejected slugs of mud and stone.
Maata’s bun is untidy. She tore a chunk out on the rusty, seventy-five metre exposed ladder they were forced to climb yesterday because Christian had the deeds to his kingdom but not the keys.
Looking fantastic to him in her unshowered majesty, she stifles a low laugh every once in a while and glances over her shoulder at Scrub Island on the other side of the rig.
“Coral sands,” she wheezes at one point, barely restraining her hilarity, “substituted for the quartz. The records expunged and the lights sabotaged so nobody could see. He thought of everything, even before your brother sent for you. Planted the idea of Scrub Island as a sop in Roy’s mind.”
Christian would tell her she wasn’t making any sense if memories of Roy’s summons hadn’t dragged his thoughts to Granny. He imagines her body where it lies under the sandy soil, waiting to wake and walk again with her saviour, or for a mountain to be born on her bones, or both.
What will he do, when he wakes from the fog of denial he’s in and becomes fully part of the earth-world he abandoned? Dive on Scrub Island for pirate gold in the shadow of the corporation?
There’s no warning of imminent activity other than the abrupt press of Maata’s body. Bubbling laughter in her chest predicates bubbling lava in the sea. Her hands pull up and seal the filters of Christian’s suit, and the hiss of the oxygen tanks makes him think of scuba diving through the Freezers.
“Duck,” Maata commands, engulfing him in the double-safety layer of her cushiony limbs. Down they go.
Christian sees sun-warmed concrete on the other side of his visor. Raindrops strike it. The surface turns white with salt crystallising out as droplets evaporate immediately. He turns his head to better see the sky.
Billowing clouds fly upwards, not golden dragons this time but great grey banyan trees growing and being beaten down, fading branches falling towards the sea, swaying, to be swallowed by steam and new generations of trees, darker and more magnificent, rearing up behind them. Occasional ash arrows aim themselves at the outer atmosphere, trying to get back to the stars, discovering a new layer of constraint, trapped by gravity despite their best efforts.
The ash comes from the wrong direction.
The roar, like the sound of surf, rages from the wrong direction, too. It comes from Scrub Island. Waves smashing against the ten-metre thick shield send vibrations from the north-east and the sun is blocked by the cloud.
Yet the rig feels safe. Maata feels safe. Christian watches the cloud-patterns and wonders at what lies beneath the thin skim of semi-stability that humans call home.
Maata gently lifts him to his feet a few hours later, helping him along the increasingly pumice and ash-layered pathway to the section of wall overlooking his kingdom. There, they stand on a sheltered section of concrete that hasn’t been covered. She checks a reading on his suit. Unlocks both their helmets. Christian expects a cool breeze and receives a blast of hot, dry air across his sweaty face instead.
It’s not Granny’s grave that’s opened a burning hellmouth and stabbed a s
tone tongue towards heaven. It’s his mother’s. Scrub Island is where your mother is buried, after all, isn’t it?
“It’s the Freezers,” Matta shouts joyously. “Viv – Walter – did it for you. The cave system formed a conduit and he weakened the bore insulation in exactly the right place. The corporation can’t blame it on me because they’re the ones who falsified the surveys. This is your new island, Christian!”
It’s grey-skinned, showing luminous red through the cracks. An immolated bride. Or a dirty reptile egg with a bloodied hatchling pushing at the insides.
The long arms of it curl around a harbour that will be protected from hurricanes when it cools. The new kingdom’s back is turned to the angry Atlantic. Its fingers don’t quite touch the edges of Roy’s cookie cutter. That expectant perimeter is destined to remain empty until continued rising sea levels fill it with salt water. Maybe also a mix of white quartz, rosy coral and black volcanic sands.
For the first time since his space mission was aborted, Christian feels his body fully inhabited. He’s been sown in dishonour and raised in glory; he feels the surety of his future, not beneath his feet in the trembling earth’s crust, but by his side.
“Stay here with me,” he asks Maata, taking her heat-suited hand.
“I see things coming,” Maata smirks. “That’s why they took my name for the Wave. I already quit that Morocco job.”
When he kisses her, she tastes of salt, fire and smoke.
7
THE WIDE LAWN spreads out before me almost to the golden surf of the sea, separated by the narrow dark tan band of the beach. The setting sun is bright and warm, the breeze a gentle caress against my arms and face.
“I want to wait a little longer,” I say.
“It’s going to get dark soon,” Dad says.
I chew my bottom lip. “Text her again.”
He shakes his head. “We’ve left her enough messages.”
I look around. Most people have already left the park. The first hint of the evening chill is in the air.
“All right.” I try not to sound disappointed. You shouldn’t be disappointed when something happens over and over again, right? “Let’s fly,” I say.
Dad holds up the kite, a diamond with a painted fairy and two long ribbon tails. I picked it out this morning from the store at the park gate because the fairy’s face reminded me of Mom.
“Ready?” Dad asks.
I nod.
“Go!”
I run toward the sea, toward the burning sky and the melting, orange sun. Dad lets go of the kite, and I feel the fwoomp as it lifts into the air, pulling the string in my hand taut.
“Don’t look back! Keep running and let the string out slowly like I taught you.”
I run. Like Snow White through the forest. Like Cinderella as the clock strikes midnight. Like the Monkey King trying to escape the Buddha’s hand. Like Aeneas pursued by Juno’s stormy rage. I unspool the string as a sudden gust of wind makes me squint, my heart thumping in time with my pumping legs.
“It’s up!”
I slow down, stop, and turn to look. The fairy is in the air, tugging at my hands to let go. I hold on to the handles of the spool, imagining the fairy lifting me into the air so that we can soar together over the Pacific, like Mom and Dad used to dangle me by my arms between them.
“Mia!”
I look over and see Mom striding across the lawn, her long black hair streaming in the breeze like the kite’s tails. She stops before me, kneels on the grass, wraps me in a hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like her shampoo, like summer rain and wildflowers, a fragrance that I get to experience only once every few weeks.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, her voice muffled against my cheek. “Happy birthday!”
I want to give her a kiss, and I don’t want to. The kite line slackens, and I give the line a hard jerk like Dad taught me. It’s very important for me to keep the kite in the air. I don’t know why. Maybe it has to do with the need to kiss her and not kiss her.
Dad jogs up. He doesn’t say anything about the time. He doesn’t mention that we missed our dinner reservation.
Mom gives me a kiss and pulls her face away, but keeps her arms around me. “Something came up,” she says, her voice even, controlled. “Ambassador Chao-Walker’s flight was delayed and she managed to squeeze me in for three hours at the airport. I had to walk her through the details of the solar management plan before the Shanghai Forum next week. It was important.”
“It always is,” Dad says.
Mom’s arms tense against me. This has always been their pattern, even when they used to live together. Unasked for explanations. Accusations that don’t sound like accusations.
Gently, I wriggle out of her embrace. “Look.”
This has always been part of the pattern too: my trying to break their pattern. I can’t help but think there’s a simple solution, something I can do to make it all better.
I point up at the kite, hoping she’ll see how I picked out a fairy whose face looks like hers. But the kite is too high up now for her to notice the resemblance. I’ve let out all the string. The long line droops gently like a ladder connecting the Earth to heaven, the highest segment glowing golden in the dying rays of the sun.
“It’s lovely,” she says. “Someday, when things quiet down a little, I’ll take you to see the kite festival back where I grew up, on the other side of the Pacific. You’ll love it.”
“We’ll have to fly then,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to fly. I fly all the time.”
I’m not afraid, but I nod anyway to show that I’m assured. I don’t ask when ‘someday’ is going to be.
“I wish the kite could fly higher,” I say, desperate to keep the words flowing, as though unspooling more conversation will keep something precious aloft. “If I cut the line, will it fly across the Pacific?”
After a moment, Mom says, “Not really... The kite stays up only because of the line. A kite is just like a plane, and the pulling force from your line acts like thrust. Did you know that the first airplanes the Wright Brothers made were actually kites? They learned how to make wings that way. Someday I’ll show you how the kite generates lift –”
“Sure it will,” Dad interrupts. “It will fly across the Pacific. It’s your birthday. Anything is possible.”
Neither of them says anything after that.
I don’t tell Dad that I enjoy listening to Mom talk about machines and engineering and history and other things that I don’t fully understand. I don’t tell her that I already know that the kite wouldn’t fly across the ocean – I was just trying to get her to talk to me instead of defending herself. I don’t tell him that I’m too old to believe anything is possible on my birthday – I wished for them not to fight, and look how that has turned out. I don’t tell her that I know she doesn’t mean to break her promises to me, but it still hurts when she does. I don’t tell them that I wish I could cut the line that ties me to their wings – the tugging on my heart from their competing winds is too much.
I know they love me even if they no longer love each other; but knowing doesn’t make it any easier.
Slowly, the sun sinks into the ocean; slowly, the stars wink to life in the sky. The kite has disappeared among the stars. I imagine the fairy visiting each star to give it a playful kiss.
Mom pulls out her phone and types furiously.
“I’m guessing you haven’t had dinner,” Dad says.
“No. Not lunch either. Been running around all day,” Mom says, not looking up from the screen.
“There is a pretty good vegan place I just discovered a few blocks from the parking lot,” Dad says. “Maybe we can pick up a cake from the sweet shop on the way and ask them to serve it after dinner.”
“Um-hum.”
“Would you put that away?” Dad says. “Please.”
Mom takes a deep breath and puts the phone away. “I’m trying to change my flight to a late
r one so I can spend more time with Mia.”
“You can’t even stay with us one night?”
“I have to be in D.C. in the morning to meet with Professor Chakrabarti and Senator Frug.”
Dad’s face hardens. “For someone so concerned about the state of our planet, you certainly fly a lot. If you and your clients didn’t always want to move faster and ship more –”
“You know perfectly well my clients aren’t the reason I’m doing this –”
“I know it’s really easy to deceive yourself. But you’re working for the most colossal corporations and autocratic governments –”
“I’m working on a technical solution instead of empty promises! We have an ethical duty to all of humanity. I’m fighting for the eighty percent of the world’s population living on under ten dollars –”
Unnoticed by the colossi in my life, I let the kite pull me away. Their arguing voices fade in the wind. Step by step, I walk closer to the pounding surf, the line tugging me toward the stars.
49
THE WHEELCHAIR IS having trouble making Mom comfortable.
First the chair tries to raise the seat so that her eyes are level with the screen of the ancient computer I found for her. But even with her bent back and hunched-over shoulders, she’s having trouble reaching the keyboard on the desk below. As she stretches her trembling fingers toward the keys, the chair descends. She pecks out a few letters and numbers, struggles to look up at the screen, now towering above her. The motors hum as the chair lifts her again. Ad infinitum.
Over three thousand robots work under the supervision of three nurses to take care of the needs of some three hundred residents in Sunset Homes. This is how we die now. Out of sight. Dependent on the wisdom of machines. The pinnacle of Western civilization.
I walk over and prop up the keyboard with a stack of old hardcover books taken from her home before I sold it. The motors stop humming. A simple hack for a complicated problem, the sort of thing she would appreciate.
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