They loved each other. It took them one year to say it, Tawna Maydew sent photos of things the two of them could do together in LA: green hills, ornate movie theaters, her bed. Eighteen months into their email relationship, Tawna Maydew sent a flurry of photographs from the La Brea Tar Pits. Taken at night, with Los Angeles streetlights rainbowing across bubbling tar, the pictures were unlike anything Hoffmann had seen, phantasmagoric and illusory, yet as real as the desk at which she sat. Tawna Maydew: Only one block from my home. We can kiss by the gooey ruins of prehistoric Earth! Annie Teller: Can we make that our emergency plan? If the world goes gooey, we’ll meet on the banks of beautiful La Brea! Quickly it became their standby joke, deployed each time their plans to reunite fell apart. Oh well, one of them would write, we’ll still have La Brea.
Hoffmann believed it was the only in-joke she’d ever felt on the inside of. Suddenly, Hoffmann wanted nothing more than the two lovelorn women to find each other as planned at La Brea, now that the world had indeed gone gooey. If their story were an old TV show, even one of the romantic ones, Hoffmann knew she would watch as many seasons of it as she could.
The odds of success were infinitesimal. Hoffmann knew this and accepted it. Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, California, were 2,674 miles apart. With her distinctive limp, Annie Teller had left the AMLD building when most others had, during the afternoon of October 24, by which time flights were being canceled by the hundreds. Interstates were worse; cars would dissolve to rust powder before the roads were clear again. Hoffmann suspected Annie Teller had died in her home, probably violently, probably screaming, while her framed loved ones kept on smiling.
Etta Hoffmann never felt sad, but this brought her close. Her exploration into Annie Teller’s daily trivialities was the nearest she had come to understanding a person’s raw feelings, naked insecurities, frank aspirations, and knotty contradictions. It was like This Is Your Life, but with stakes, Annie Teller had touched something inside Hoffmann neither her parents nor childhood psychiatrists had believed she would be able to reach.
Hoffmann felt a twinge of loss when she figured out Annie Teller’s major password. It was LaBr3aTarP1t$. Annie Teller had used the password years ago to open a few one-off merchant accounts. She’d quit using it, perhaps because it was emotionally charged. The La Brea Tar Pits were an unresolved goal for Annie Teller, but for Hoffmann, LaBr3aTarP1t$ resolved everything. It unlocked Annie Teller’s password manager, the key to all other keys.
Most federal agency websites remained active, though they had not been updated in weeks. With Annie Teller’s password cache, Hoffmann could access home pages of dozens of agencies. She spent days pondering what to post. This was no GO REDSKINS. Her first thought was to supply detailed explanations of how to find VSDC portals and bring them back online so people could resume sending data. It was important, she believed, to sustain this record of the new world order, from zero-00:00 onward.
Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew convinced Hoffmann otherwise. Those able to find online access would not devote precious time to assisting the Census Bureau. They would be hunting for news, trying to find missing loved ones. But those people could still provide data—or, as people other than Etta Hoffmann called it, stories. Like Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew, they might still feel the urge to share themselves.
Hoffmann thought about it day and night. At her midnight bedtime, she found she could not sleep, which was unusual. She got up, the building dark and cold around her, and wandered until she found herself at the front desk. She did not visit this area often, It was close to the barricaded front entrance. At night, Hoffmann could hear things, even through the concrete and steel. Shuffling noises. Low, gurgling moans. The occasional bump against the front door, as if the things outside—They—suspected she was there.
Not so long ago, the lobby was where incoming calls landed before redirection. Hoffmann picked up the front desk phone. The dial tone was as patient as ever. Landlines, laid down in an analog age, seemed poised to persevere long after wireless services blew away like pollen.
That morning, Etta Hoffmann sat at her personal workstation and picked up the receiver of her desk phone, She did not believe she had ever received a call on it. She had to wipe away the dust to read her extension. Her next hours were spent logging in to every government agency site she could and pasting onto its home page the same message, the one she had spent all night mentally whittling down to its barest shape:
ARE YOU OK? CALL ME.
Beneath that was her direct desk number.
She cursored over the Post button on the site open in her first browser tab, the Government Accountability Office. Her finger settled upon her mouse. One click, and everything on the home page would vanish, replaced by these five words and her eleven-digit international number. She hesitated. For once in her life, there was no way to determine whether or not this was the correct thing to do.
This Is Your Life, Hoffmann thought.
She clicked the button. The new Government Accountability Office landing page went live. She cursored to the next site, the Council on Environmental Quality, and did the same. Next, the Department of State. Next, the Foreign Agricultural Service. The National Rural Development Council, the Office of Inspector General, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the Administration on Aging, the National Cancer Institute. Again, again, again. In minutes, decades of U.S, government practice—of sending information out into the world—were overturned in favor of a call to report in. The survivors’ voices and thoughts were what mattered now.
Before Hoffmann had finished updating all the sites, her phone rang.
She stared at it. The knotted cord. The cracked plastic base. The begrimed keypad. It was something dead, returned to screaming life. Resurrection seemed to be going around, That was a joke—she’d just made a joke, even if only to herself—and she arranged her facial muscles into a smile, wondering if the fluttering in her chest was humor. A red light blinked on her phone. A second call. She wondered how long they would hold. She laid her hand on the receiver. The rings shivered up her arm. Her heart was pounding.
The person on the other end, what would they say?
Could Etta Hoffmann, the Poet, respond poetically?
She reminded herself she did not have to. Talking was the choice of the rest of the world. The John Campbells, Terry McAllisters, and Elizabeth O’Tooles, but most of all Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew, whom she hoped could still share La Brea. Etta Hoffmann—not deaf—had always preferred to listen, and her finest days might only be beginning. She picked up the phone and heard the breathing on the other end hitch, as if the caller had not expected an answer. Hoffmann parted her dry lips and summoned a voice she hadn’t used in months, one that cracked like the first word of an entombed woman who had just seen a shaft of light.
“Hello?”
MI
CORAZÓN
A Richer Vintage
I’m still dreaming, Greer Morgan thought.
Crack-of-dawn shit shows were what Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort did best. Why else did residents call it the Last Resort? Greer growled, aggrieved at the loss of her dream, and patted at her ears. Both earplugs had fallen out, proof of fitfulness. She could hear a light rain, though the day seemed as bright as fire; getting home, late last night, she’d forgotten to hang the old welcome mat over her bedroom window to keep out the light. She twisted her sleep mask back over her eyes. The strap was spaghettied, and light poured right under. Greer knew she had a fuck-ton of problems—lousy grades, motivation issues, no car—but she’d lock them in forever for a single goddamn good night’s sleep.
Her head throbbed with every blast of bickering from outside. A woman mad-dogging a man whose retorts grew more defensive, more embarrassed, and angrier, Miss Jemisha, Greer thought. Maybe Señorita Magdalena. They had the same sharp bark. Same idle men, too, who sat their asses on the women’s respective steps, drunk and happy or sober and sullen, When Greer came home from school, Miss Jemisha’
s man, the one Greer had privately dubbed Samuel Hell Jackson (shortened to “Sam Hell”) for his Kangol hat, would hoot at her: You growing up, Greer baby!
Señorita Magdalena’s man, meanwhile, was a short, cowboy-attired Honduran Greer had nicknamed, with prejudice she knew was ugly, José Frito, and José Frito only seemed to know one English word: C’mere. It never failed to chill her. C’mere.
Greer sealed out the silt-colored sun with a sweaty elbow. Her dream had been a good one. She found a flash of image and clawed onto it. Oh yes. Not so much a dream as a memory. Last night. Remy’s Halloween party. The basement. Qasim. She let herself slide back into the memory’s warm, melted chocolate. The unsnapping of her bra like the exhale of a long-held breath, Qasim’s stomach, a hundred degrees hot, the feather of hair pointing down from his belly button. Saliva like hot grease. The need to push pelvises together and feel the pulse of the veins in each other’s thighs.
How far did they go? She rustled herself, part by part, feeling for hickeys, sore breasts, any aches down below. That’s right—they’d gotten no further than hands down pants. It wasn’t shyness that held them back but the party climate: girls being chased up and down the basement steps, people passing joints every five seconds, omnipresent camera-gadgets. She and Qasim, they’d get there. And if Qasim one day became as apathetic and baleful as Sam Hell or José Frito, it wouldn’t matter. Greer would be long gone. In the meantime, she’d indulge her want, as often and as hard as she could.
Wanting: it was the ammo that kept her gunning. There was nothing to want at school. A dutiful student through middle school, she’d at last yielded to the role her teachers had prescribed for a Black girl from the Last Resort, Recalcitrant, argumentative, lazy, sluttish—they chose the descriptors, and Greer did her best to embody them while mugging her disdain: What else do you got? Her friends’ whoops and high fives were temporary incentives, Eventually, she ended up alone, staring up at the unscalable ravine walls of sunken grades.
The ravine might have swallowed her whole if not for her daddy. Too often, Freddy Morgan groveled excuses to his supervisors so he could skip work to visit the vice principal’s office, hat literally in hand. The teenager-sized chair made his big body look meek, ideal for his mournful pleas. You see, the loss of a mother and a house had traumatized poor Greer. Freddy Morgan debased himself because this was his want. A better job; ergo, a better home; ergo, a better life. He strained like a yoked ox to make it happen, no matter the supervisors or vice principals pulling the reins.
Greer wanted to detest her daddy’s performances but couldn’t help respecting how he did what he had to do. Who else was she going to respect? Her mother? Vienna Morgan had possessed want, all right, a want of material things. While employed by a maid service, she had stolen so much from homes she was cleaning that she’d been tossed in jail three times in a calendar year. Now she was in lockup, Bluefeather Prison in Iowa, and Greer was well on her way to not giving a shit.
Want, her mother’s case told her, could be a self-destructive thing, Greer could find a counterexample in her year-younger brother, Conan, Want had been mentally and physically beaten from him. He was mute and emotionless at school and almost as bad at home. All night she heard him playing video games on his outdated console. To avoid tormentors, Conan plodded to school two hours early, looking as dead as Freddy Morgan’s coworkers as they slouched toward HortiPlastics, the factory that employed half the town of Bulk, Missouri. Conan probably pictured himself at HortiPlastics eventually, watching the assembly line carry away what was left of his dreams.
It killed Greer to see her brother drained of the liquid fire that fueled her. Brasher boys pushed Conan down stairs, spit in his hair, and, if she listened to rumors, did much worse. She had no idea how Conan had become the school pariah. It must have started with his guileless, round, chubby-cheeked face. Located ninety miles north of Kansas City, their school had students of all shades, but the toxic slime of racial animosity had to be poured somewhere, so why not down the funnel conveniently extending from Conan Morgan’s throat?
The best Greer could hope for was that Conan’s apparent emptiness came from being distracted by waking dreams as pleasant as her last night’s dream had been. Qasim’s heaving ribs were the last detail to blow away, a sheet from a clothesline.
Four voices outside now, at least. Was it possible Miss Jemisha and Señorita Magdalena had crisscrossed their rebukes of Sam Hell and José Frito? Greer didn’t think so. At least one of the voices, high-octaved and insistent, belonged to Mr. Villard, the driving force behind the Sunnybrook Club, a group open to all Last Resort residents that met monthly to—according to the flyers—“discuss challenges and share ideas.”
From Greer’s vantage, discuss meant bitch and share meant accuse. Even when the Sunnybrook Club managed to agree on something, they had shit-all authority with which to petition the park owners. The asphalt had potholes so deep children played in them. Yards flooded with the lightest rain, surfacing not only septic sludge but used needles and drug baggies, Meanwhile, rent had exploded 30 percent in three years, according to Freddy Morgan. Greer was unmoved. Eighteen years of life had shown her prosperity never trickled down and social orders never flipped.
A core group of six bellyachers nevertheless persisted in monthly meetings amid the playground wreckage. Now that she was fully awake, Greer could match each griping voice with its exasperating owner. She thought of each in bigoted terms, and right now, tired as hell, she didn’t care.
Miss Jemisha: the trailer-trash caricature Greer swore she wouldn’t become, Cobra-swaying her head, holding up talk-to-the-hand fingers, arguing poorly but loudly, her body parts jiggling inside too-tight gray-and-pink sweats.
Señorita Magdalena: infuriatingly docile, fascinating as cardboard, herding around a confusing number of interchangeable children. Her Mona Lisa smile suggested she was content to waste the rest of her life in this hellhole alongside José Frito.
Mama Shaw: the Jamaican fossil. Her face was so heavily lined it looked like a deflated football. She was eternally sick, her wet, resounding coughs keeping Greer up half the night. Her whole trailer stank of urine, Why did she keep on living?
Drasko Zorić: the dead-eyed Serb, insufferably smug, his distaste for his fellow club members obvious from the permanent curl of his lip. His large muscles were the opposite of impressive, proof positive of a deadbeat with nothing better to do than pump iron in his yard.
Mr. Villard: the big-deal former community college teacher with a hairpiece like a beret. A white guy, so naturally he was in charge. The agenda ever crackling in his clenched fist drove Greer insane. He never got through more than two items before bickering consumed everything.
And, of course, Freddy Morgan, a.k.a. Daddy: whose unachievable task, as far as Greer could tell, was to keep this gaggle of imbeciles calm.
During Sunnybrook Club meetings, there was no peace for anybody on their leg of road, not even those armored with sleep mask and earplugs. For this reason alone, Greer wished the club would induct the park’s quietest resident, a Syrian with the fun-to-say name of Fadi Lolo. He was one of fifty-some Syrian refugees taken in by the town over the past two years. It was a Missouri record no one in Bulk celebrated. Resettlement had prioritized Syrians with families, disabilities, or medical conditions—welfare leeches, grumbled Bulk residents in HortiPlastics gear.
The majority of Syrians had been placed in an apartment complex on Bulk’s town square, a centralization meant to soften their landings. Either through independent effort or crap luck, Fadi Lolo had ended up at the Last Resort. If anyone belonged in Mr. Villard’s club, it was him. Every day, Greer saw Fadi Lolo riding around on a crappy bicycle, pausing to pick up trash from neighbors’ lawns, and every day, she wanted to say something—thank you, maybe. Clearly Fadi Lolo wanted to make the best of this shithole. He was already doing ten times the work of the Sunnybrook Club.
Best of all, Fadi Lolo (his recurrent, phlegmy hack notwithstanding)
was even quieter than Drasko Zorić. Fadi spoke quietly, walked quietly, biked quietly, lived quietly. Today, the Sunnybrook Club was at full volume at an obscene hour. Last night, Daddy had spiked his warnings for her to be home by ten with this precise poison: the morning meeting was going to be a rowdy one.
The topic was burglaries. No one could describe burglaries at Sunnybrook as a “rash” or “outbreak”; they were chronic. The latest eruption had affected everyone on the northeastern loop. Some fingers pointed at Fadi Lolo, the park’s newest arrival, who, after all, owned the speedy getaway vehicle of a rickety bike. Daddy had pleaded with Greer to attend this meeting—just this one. Everyone in the Last Resort knew Vienna Morgan was a thief, and in their minds, that meant the daughter might have sticky fingers too.
“When folks are trying to make you out to be less than you are, you look them dead in the face,” Freddy Morgan had advised. “You look at them real, and then they’ll know the heart of it—the heart of you. Take my word.”
Sorry, Daddy, but fuck that, Greer’s hangover kicked like a pregnancy. Still, she had to get her ass out of bed. This would be her ninth missed day, two away from forcing a repeat of her senior year. That would disrupt Freddy’s entire schedule of getting their lives back on track.
The yelling outside tripled, and she drove her face into the pillow. Half-suffocated, her life passed before her eyes: ten-year-old Greer Morgan springing from bed in the early-morning dark and modeling in the mirror the camouflage pullover Daddy loaned her. Conan, who’d shared her room back then, had a pullover too, and they giggled and shushed each other—Mom was sleeping—before tiptoeing outside, where Daddy was loading the gear into the car. The three of them would drive, the vacant roads like gray zippers along black velvet darkness, until they reached some random turnoff Daddy knew to take.
The Living Dead Page 8