After the Apocalypse

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “You can’t take those,” he said.

  “Yes I can,” she said. “If after six months, there is no big corruption scandal? We can let everyone know how a government secret agent was outsmarted by two factory girls.”

  “Six months!” he said. “That’s not long enough!”

  “It better be,” Jieling said.

  Outside the door, Taohua called, “Jieling? Are you in there? Something is wrong with the door!”

  “Just a minute,” Jieling called. “I had trouble with it when I came home.” To Mr. Wei she whispered sternly, “Don’t you try anything. If you do, we’ll scream our heads off, and everybody will come running.” She and Baiyue shimmied the pillowcase off of Mr. Wei’s head. He started to stand up and jerked the boom box, which clattered across the floor. “Wait!” she hissed and untied him.

  Taohua called through the door, “What’s that?”

  “Hold on!” Jieling called.

  Baiyue helped Mr. Wei stand up. Mr. Wei climbed onto the desk and then grabbed a line hanging outside. He stopped a moment as if trying to think of something to say.

  “‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,’” Jieling said. It had been her father’s favorite quote from Chairman Mao. “‘… it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act by which one class overthrows another.’”

  Mr. Wei looked as if he might cry, and not because he was moved by patriotism. He stepped back and disappeared. Jieling and Baiyue looked out the window. He did go down the wall just like a secret agent from a movie, but it was only two stories. There was still the big footprint in the middle of Taohua’s magazine, and the room looked as if it had been hit by a storm.

  “They’re going to think you had a boyfriend,” Baiyue whispered to Jieling.

  “Yeah,” Jieling said, pulling the chair out from under the door handle. “And they’re going to think he’s rich.”

  It was Sunday, and Jieling and Baiyue were sitting on the beach. Jieling’s cell phone rang, a little chime of M.I.A. hip-hop. Even though it was Sunday, it was one of the girls from New Life. Sunday should be a day off, but she took the call anyway.

  “Jieling? This is Xia Meili? From packaging. Taohua told me about your business? Maybe you could help me?”

  Jieling said, “Sure. What is your debt, Meili?”

  “3,800 R.M.B.,” Meili said. “I know it’s a lot.”

  Jieling said, “Not so bad. We have a lot of people who already have loans, though, and it will probably be a few weeks before I can make you a loan.”

  With Mr. Wei’s capital, Jieling and Baiyue had opened a bank account. They had bought themselves out, and then started a little loan business where they bought people out of New Life. Then people had to pay them back with a little extra. They had each had jobs—Jieling worked for a company that made toys. She sat each day at a table where she put a piece of specially shaped plastic over the body of a little doll, an action figure. The plastic fit right over the figure and had cut-outs. Jieling sprayed the whole thing with red paint, and when the piece of plastic was lifted, the action figure had a red shirt. It was boring, but at the end of the week, she got paid instead of owing the company money.

  She and Baiyue used all their extra money on loans to get girls out of New Life. More and more loans, and more and more payments. Now New Life had sent them a threatening letter saying that what they were doing was illegal. But Mr. Wei said not to worry. Two officials had come and talked to them and had showed them legal documents and had them explain everything about what had happened. Soon, the officials promised, they would take New Life to court.

  Jieling wasn’t so sure about the officials. After all, Mr. Wei was an official. But a foreign newspaperman had called them. He was from a newspaper called the Wall Street Journal, and he said that he was writing a story about labor shortages in China after the bird flu. He said that in some places in the West there were reports of slavery. His Chinese was very good. His story was going to come out in the United States tomorrow. Then she figured officials would have to do something or lose face.

  Jieling told Meili to call her back in two weeks—although hopefully in two weeks no one would need help to get away from New Life—and wrote a note to herself in her little notebook.

  Baiyue was sitting looking at the water. “This is the first time I’ve been to the beach,” she said.

  “The ocean is so big, isn’t it.”

  Baiyue nodded, scuffing at the white sand. “People always say that, but you don’t know until you see it.”

  Jieling said, “Yeah.” Funny, she had lived here for months. Baiyue had lived here more than a year. And they had never come to the beach. The beach was beautiful.

  “I feel sorry for Mr. Wei,” Baiyue said.

  “You do?” Jieling said. “Do you think he really had a daughter who died?”

  “Maybe,” Baiyue said. “A lot of people died.”

  “My father died,” Jieling said.

  Baiyue looked at her, a quick little sideways look, then back out at the ocean. “My mother died,” she said.

  Jieling was surprised. She had never known that Baiyue’s mother was dead. They had talked about so much, but never about that. She put her arm around Baiyue’s waist, and they sat for a while.

  “I feel bad in a way,” Baiyue said.

  “How come?” Jieling said.

  “Because we had to steal capital to fight New Life. That makes us capitalists.”

  Jieling shrugged.

  “I wish it was like when they fought the revolution,” Baiyue said. “Things were a lot more simple.”

  “Yeah,” Jieling said, “and they were poor and a lot of them died.”

  “I know,” Baiyue sighed.

  Jieling knew what she meant. It would be nice to … to be sure what was right and what was wrong. Although not if it made you like Mr. Wei.

  Poor Mr. Wei. Had his daughter really died?

  “Hey,” Jieling said, “I’ve got to make a call. Wait right here.” She walked a little down the beach. It was windy and she turned her back to protect the cell phone, like someone lighting a match. “Hello,” she said, “hello, Mama, it’s me. Jieling.”

  USELESS THINGS

  “Señora?” The man standing at my screen door is travel stained. Migrant, up from Mexico. The dogs haven’t heard him come up, but now they erupt in a frenzy of barking to make up for their oversight. I am sitting at the kitchen table, painting a doll, waiting for the timer to tell me to get doll parts curing in the oven in the workshed.

  “Hudson, Abby!” I shout, but they don’t pay any attention.

  The man steps back. “Do you have work? I can, the weeds,” he gestures. He is short-legged, long from waist to shoulder. He’s probably headed for the Great Lakes area, the place in the U.S. with the best supply of fresh water and the most need of farm labor.

  Behind him is my back plot, with the garden running up to the privacy fence. The sky is just starting to pink up with dawn. At this time of year I do a lot of my work before dawn and late in the evening, when it’s not hot. That’s probably when he has been traveling, too.

  I show him the cistern and set him to weeding. I show him where he can plug in his phone to recharge it. I have internet radio on; Elvis Presley died forty-five years ago today, and they’re playing “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care.” I go inside and get him some bean soup.

  Hobos used to mark code to tell other hobos where to stop and where to keep going. Teeth to signify a mean dog. A triangle with hands meant that the homeowner had a gun and might use it. A cat meant a nice lady. Today the men use websites and bulletin boards that they follow, when they can, with cheap smartphones. Somewhere I’m on a site as a ‘nice lady’ or whatever they say today. The railroad runs east of here, and it’s sometimes a last spot where trains slow down before they get to the big
yard in Belen. Men come up the Rio Grande hoping to hop the train.

  I don’t like it. I was happy to give someone a meal when I felt anonymous. Handing a bowl of soup to someone who may not have eaten for a few days was an easy way to feel good about myself. That didn’t mean I wanted to open a migrant restaurant. I live by myself. Being an economic refugee doesn’t make people kind and good, and I feel as if having my place on some website makes me vulnerable. The dogs may bark like fools, but Hudson is some cross between border collie and golden retriever, and Abby is mostly black lab. They are sweet mutts, not good protection dogs, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

  I wake at night sometimes now, thinking someone is in my house. Abby sleeps on the other side of the bed, and Hudson sleeps on the floor. Where I live it is brutally dark at night, unless there’s a moon—no one wastes power on lights at night. My house is small, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a family room. I lean over and shake Hudson on the floor, wake him up. “Who’s here?” I whisper. Abby sits up, but neither of them hears anything. They pad down the hall with me into the dark front room, and I peer through the window into the shadowy back lot. I wait for them to bark.

  Many a night, I don’t go back to sleep.

  But the man at my door this morning weeds my garden and accepts my bowl of soup and some flour tortillas. He thanks me gravely. He picks up his phone, charging off my system, and shows me a photo of a woman and a child. “My wife and baby,” he says. I nod. I don’t particularly want to know about his wife and baby, but I can’t be rude.

  I finish assembling the doll I am working on. I’ve painted her, assembled all the parts, and hand-rooted all her hair. She is rather cuter than I like. Customers can mix and match parts off of my website—this face with the eye color of their choice, hands curled one way or another. A mix-and-match doll costs about what the migrant will make in two weeks. A few customers want custom dolls and send images to match. Add a zero to the cost.

  I am dressing the doll when Abby leaps up, happily roo-rooing. I start, standing, and drop the doll dangling in my hand by one unshod foot.

  It hits the floor head first with a thump, and the man gasps in horror.

  “It’s a doll,” I say.

  I don’t know if he understands, but he realizes. He covers his mouth with his hand and laughs, nervous.

  I scoop the doll off the floor. I make reborns. Dolls that look like newborn infants. The point is to make them look almost, but not quite, real. People prefer them a little cuter, a little more perfect than the real thing. I like them best when there is something a little strange, a little off about them. I like them as ugly as most actual newborns, with some aspect that suggests ontology recapitulating phylogeny; that a developing fetus starts as a single-celled organism, and then develops to look like a tiny fish, before passing in stages into its final animal shape. The old theory of ontology recapitulating phylogeny, that the development of the human embryo follows the evolutionary path, is false, of course. But I prefer that my babies remind us that we are really animals. That they be ancient and a little grotesque. Tiny changelings in our house.

  I am equally pleased to think of Thanksgiving turkeys as a kind of dinosaur gracing a holiday table. It is probably why I live alone.

  “Que bonita,” he says. How beautiful.

  “Gracias,” I say. He has brought me the empty bowl. I take it and send him on his way.

  I check my email and I have an order for a special. A reborn made to order. It’s from a couple in Chicago, Rachel and Ellam Mazar—I have always assumed that it is Rachel who emails me, but the emails never actually identify who is typing. There is a photo attached of an infant. This wouldn’t be strange except this is the third request in three years I have had for exactly the same doll.

  The dolls are expensive, especially the specials. I went to art school and then worked as a sculptor for a toy company for a few years. I didn’t make dolls, I made action figures, especially alien figures and spaceships from the Kinetics movies. A whole generation of boys grew up imprinting on toys I had sculpted. When the craze for Kinetics passed, the company laid off lots of people, including me. The whole economy was coming apart at the seams. I had been lucky to have a job for as long as I did. I moved to New Mexico because I loved it and it was cheap, and I tried to do sculpting freelance. I worked at a big-box store. Like so many people, my life went into free fall. I bought this place—a little ranch house that had gone into foreclosure, in a place where no one was buying anything and boarded up houses fall in on themselves like mouths without teeth. It was the last of my savings. I started making dolls as a stopgap.

  I get by. Between the garden and the little bit of money from the dolls, I can eat. Which is more than some people.

  A special will give me money for property tax. My cistern is getting low, and there is no rain coming until the monsoon in June, which is a long way from now. If it’s like last year, we won’t get enough rain to fill the cistern anyway. I could pay for the water truck to make a delivery, but I don’t like this. When I put the specials on my website, I thought about it as a way to make money. I had seen it on another doll site. I am a trained sculptor. I didn’t think about why people would ask for specials.

  Some people ask me to make infant dolls of their own children. If my mother had bought an infant version of me, I’d have found it pretty disturbing.

  One woman bought a special modeled on herself. She wrote me long e-mails about how her mother had been a narcissist, a monster, and how she was going to symbolically mother herself. Her husband was mayor of a city in California, which was how she could afford to have a replica of her infant self. Her emails made me uncomfortable, which I resented. So eventually I passed her on to another doll maker who made toddlers. I figured she could nurture herself up through all the stages of childhood.

  Her reborn was very cute. More attractive than she was in the image she sent. She never commented. I don’t know that she ever realized.

  I suspect the Mazars fall into another category. I have gotten three requests from people who have lost an infant. I tell myself that there is possibly something healing in recreating your dead child as a doll. Each time I have gotten one of these requests, I have very seriously considered taking the specials off my website.

  Property tax payments. Water in the cistern.

  If the Mazars lost a child—and I don’t know that they did, but I have a feeling that I can’t shake—it was bad enough that they want a replica. Then a year ago, I got a request for the second.

  I thought that maybe Rachel—if it is Rachel who emails me, not Ellam—had meant to send a different image. I sent back an email asking if they were sure that she had sent the right image.

  The response was terse. They were sure.

  I sent them an email saying if something had happened, I could do repairs.

  The response was equally terse. They wanted me to make one.

  I searched for them online but could find out nothing about the Mazars of Chicago. They didn’t have a presence online. Who had money but no presence online? Were they organized crime? Just very very private? Now, a third doll.

  I don’t answer the email. Not yet.

  Instead I take my laptop out to the shed. Inside the shed is my oven for baking the doll parts between coats of paint. I plug in the computer to recharge and park it on a shelf above eye level. I have my parts cast by Tony in Ohio, an old connection from my days in the toy industry. He makes my copper molds and rotocasts the parts. Usually, though, the specials are a one-off and he sends me the copper supermaster of the head so he doesn’t have to store it. I rummage through my molds and find the head from the last time I made this doll. I set it on the shelf and look at it.

  I rough-sculpt the doll parts in clay, then do a plaster cast of the clay mold. Then from that I make a wax model, looking like some Victorian memorial of an infant that died of jaundice. I have my own recipe for the wax—commercial wax and paraffin and talc. I could tint i
t pink; most people do. I just like the way they look.

  I do the fine sculpting and polishing on the wax model. I carefully pack and ship the model to Tony, and he casts the copper mold. The process is nasty and toxic, not something I can do myself. For the regular dolls, he does a short run of a hundred or so parts in PVC, vinyl, and ships them to me. He keeps those molds in case I need more. For the head of a special, he sends me back a single cast head and the mold.

  All of the detail is on the inside of the mold; outside is only the rough outline of the shape. Infants’ heads are long from forehead to the back of the skull. Their faces are tiny and low, their jaws like porkchop bones. They are marvelous and strange mechanisms.

  At about seven, I hear Sherie’s truck. The dogs erupt.

  Sherie and Ed live about a mile and a half up the road. They have a little dairy goat operation. Sherie is six months pregnant and goes into Albuquerque to see an obstetrician. Her dad works at Sandia Labs and makes decent money, so her parents are paying for her medical care. It’s a long drive in and back, the truck is old, and Ed doesn’t like her to go alone. I ride along, and we pick up supplies. Her mom makes us lunch.

  “Goddamn, it’s hot,” Sherie says as I climb into the little yellow Toyota truck. “How’s your water?”

  “Getting low,” I say. Sherie and Ed have a well.

  “I’m worried we might go dry this year,” Sherie says. “They keep whining about the aquifer. If we have to buy water, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  Sherie is physically Chinese, one of the thousands of girls adopted out of China in the nineties and at the turn of the century. She said she went through a phase of trying to learn all things Chinese, but she complains that as far as she can tell, the only thing Chinese about her is that she’s lactose intolerant.

  “I had a migrant at my door this morning,” I say.

  “Did you feed him?” she asks. She leans into the shift, trying to find the gear, urging the truck into first.