by Isaac Marion
Audrey stares at her daughter’s wounds. Her tears begin to flow freely, falling into Julie’s hands like raindrops.
“How could you do it, Mom?” Her rage sputters down to a whimper. “How could you make that choice? To just walk out and leave us there?”
Audrey shakes her bowed head, dropping her eyes from Julie’s arms to the ground. “It wasn’t a choice,” she says. “It just happened. Like falling asleep when you’re very, very tired.”
Julie watches Audrey’s tears fall into the grass. Slowly, her face softens. Her stiff spine sags. She leans back into her mother.
Audrey holds her daughter’s head against her chest. A tiny sound leaks from her throat, wet, broken, maybe words, maybe just breath. But if it’s words, they might be, “Thank you.”
The two of them remain like this for a moment. Then Audrey’s body shudders, and she begins to speak again. “You were always stronger than me,” she murmurs. “And your father. You were stronger than anyone I knew. I hope you see that.” She strokes her daughter’s hair in slow, rhythmic motions. “I hope you take that with you.”
Julie straightens abruptly and feels her cheek. There’s a smear of blood on it. Bright red spots are blooming through Audrey’s coat.
“No,” Julie moans, shaking her head. “No, Mom, not yet.”
Audrey takes Julie’s hand and presses it against her heart.
“Mom, wait! Please not yet!”
“Julie.” A bittersweet smile touches her face. “I died a long time ago. I only came back to tell you…that you did all you could. That you deserve to live.”
Julie throws herself against her mother and empties deep wells. Her tiny body shakes with rattling sobs.
Audrey rests her head on Julie’s shoulder. She looks weary and old, like her years are returning as the plague departs. But the gray in her eyes is gone. I see their true color for the first time, blue like her daughter’s but lighter, a clear sky to Julie’s deep water. Her body begins to sag, and Julie shifts to support her. “They’re waiting for us,” Audrey says. “Everyone’s waiting.”
She slumps against her daughter.
A distant bird trills.
Leaves whisper in subtle breezes.
Blades of grass tick as they straighten, shrugging off the weight of yesterday’s rain.
Water trickles in the soil. Roots drink. Earth hums.
Silence.
Julie clings to her mother’s body until her shoulders finally stop shaking. Then she lowers its limp weight to the ground.
“She never wanted to be buried,” she mumbles. “I always figured cremation, but…she said to leave her here.”
She folds the body’s arms over its chest and straightens its legs, like tucking a child into bed.
“Said she wanted to be like the sun. Give her life to the grass and animals.” She brushes the hair off the body’s forehead. “She said, ‘I want to be heat and light.’”
Audrey’s body looks serene. A trace of her last smile remains on its lips. But Julie addresses her farewell to the sky, squinting into the noonday radiance. “Goodbye, Mom.”
She stands. She looks at me. Her eyes are red and raw, the irises like sapphires stuck into bullet wounds. She turns away and walks into the forest.
I trail her at a distance, unsure of my welcome but unwilling to lose her again. She pushes ahead with fierce strides, slapping branches out of her face, following a narrow deer path without any concern for where it leads. I think of her mad plunge into the ruins of Detroit. Her brazen defiance of every mortal threat she encounters. Beneath all her passion for humanity lurks an ambivalence toward herself. She tosses her life from hand to hand, not quite throwing it away but daring fate to take it. What will she do now, after all this? Has she ever carried this much weight?
I begin to shrink the distance between us, wondering if she’ll let me near enough to help.
We have entered an older part of the forest. Instead of the squabbling of greedy birds and insects, there is solemn silence. Instead of a tangle of unruly scrub brush, its floor is moss and layered loam. We are surrounded by creatures that have outlived empires. Gnarled oaks and towering redwoods whose inner rings inhaled the last breath of Christ and the smoke of Alexandria. How foolish we must look to them.
I hear a wheeze creeping into her breathing.
“Julie,” I say, only a few feet away now. “Stop.”
She stops. She stands with her back to me in a wide patch of moss. I reach out and touch her arm; she doesn’t turn, but she doesn’t pull away. I wrap my arms around her shoulders and move in close behind her. “I’m sorry,” I murmur into her hair, meaning so many things.
She says nothing. She just stands there, breathing, so I do the same, drinking in the scent that I’ve been chasing for so long. It has always been a mystery to me. I can’t fathom what composes it. The smells one expects from a human body are not pleasant—sweat and bacteria, mucus and sebum, a bitter cocktail of secretions and excretions. So why does Julie smell sweet? Where does the cinnamon come from? This rich blend of vetiver and honeysuckle, that subtle hint of pepper? Can it really be her body producing this perfume? When I inhale the warm air that rises from her head, is it her soul I’m smelling?
“Julie,” I say again, but I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how else to console her. I don’t know any more ways to ask forgiveness or to show her she can trust me. I have never felt so stripped. “Julie, I want to—”
She turns around and grabs my face and kisses me. The wheels in my brain stop spinning. Her arms are around my neck, pulling me down and herself up so we can meet in the middle, and this is no quick peck just to tell me to hold on; this is no calculated signal—this is desire. I’m too startled to match her intensity; her lips crush mine against my teeth; her tongue pins mine to the floor of my mouth. My hands twitch a few inches from her body, unsure where they belong.
She pulls back, just far enough to look me in the eyes. There is more than grief in her gaze. I see a startling joy spreading through her tears. “We deserve to live,” she tells me, and she waits.
I feel wet warmth pooling in my eyes. Slowly, I nod. “We deserve to live.”
I pull her tight against me and we drop to the mossy ground.
With her fingers digging into my back, she claws the tattered remains of my shirt over my head, revealing my desolate landscape of bruises, scratches, scars. I roll her on top of me and she raises her arms and arches her back, an invitation. I slide her filthy tank-top up her stomach and past her ribs and over her breasts, and we pause, watching each other’s ribcages rise and fall. She smiles. She runs her fingers down my chest to the cavity under my sternum where my hearts beats visibly. She bends down and presses her face against it, wipes her tears on my chest, and kisses my pounding pulse.
My body jolts with a kind of electricity I’ve never felt. I see it in my mind as rose-hued lightning, coursing through my flesh and soothing it, healing it and making it strong. None of my memories contain any such power. Sex in my first life was a means to an end—my partners and I tolerated each other, sometimes even respected and appreciated each other, but what drew us together was the experience we could create. Skin was skin. It didn’t much matter who was wearing it.
Watching Julie slide my pants down with a nervous smile, never breaking eye contact, I am overwhelmed by the reality of her. An essence I know so well and crave so badly that her skin is just a veil around it—smooth, voluptuous, and beautiful, but secondary.
Her veil touches mine. The light behind it rushes into me through the wires of our nerves. My muscles go rigid; my limbs spasm; it’s euphoric electrocution. Her mouth wraps around me and brings me into the very center of her self, my most sensitive part surrounded by her eyes, her ears, her brain, caressed by her organs of speech and expression—can anything be more intimate?
Yes. Always y
es. There is no limit; the Library has no ceiling. Our clothes are gone and we are naked under the ancient trees. We are dirty and hurt from weeks, months, years of struggle—sweaty and sticky, smudged with mud and blood, and perhaps we smell terrible and should be disgusted, but we are not interested in what we should be. I breathe Julie’s scent and taste the story of her body as I lick her deepest places, and I’m unable to imagine feeling anything but privilege.
Her moans are low and throaty, then high and cracking, exquisitely physical in their smoky timbre, and then she stops me. She grips the sides of my face and pulls it back up to hers. She looks in my eyes and smiles, then bubbles into laughter. It gushes out of her like an overflowing fountain, breathless and ecstatic and distantly incredulous that this is really happening, that we are really here, after all this time and torment, fucking in a forest.
She grabs my absurdly hard, fiercely alive cock, and she welcomes me inside.
• • •
I have always found it troubling that pain and pleasure make the same sounds. It seems a red flag for the sanity of our species. Why is our love aurally indistinguishable from violence? Why express euphoria with an anguished wail? Why this need to paint even the most basic human joy with a glaze of suffering?
These are not the sounds Julie and I make. Her gasps are warm, her screams are in a major key, and my groans are unmistakably enthused. When it’s too much to express, we laugh. Not a laugh of nervousness, embarrassment, or distancing irony, but something rapturous and paired with tears, that universal fluid of emotional overflow. What a strange miracle, to merge with another person. To be so fully entwined that every movement is linked in synchrony, every thought understood by subtle signals and murmured words, like two voices in the same head moving the limbs of one body, climbing toward some breathtaking plateau.
And what a strange mutation, to be a man with three lives. To have smashed myself against the rocks of the world and then started over, a newborn with a weathered soul. I have all the technique of a sexual veteran with all the raw wonder of a virgin. I am beginning to understand what my old lives are for. How experience—good and bad—is the cement that fills my gaps and shores up my trembling frame. Without it, I wouldn’t be a person. I wouldn’t know who this woman is or how she fits into the craggy landscape of my life.
I wouldn’t know how much I love her.
The forest fades as we climb. A glow washes it white, not the sun but something like it, blazing down from the remote ceiling of the Library. I sense Julie getting close and I release my control; a flood of hot light rushes up from the depths.
I lock eyes with her as we climax. They are fractal blue spirals of mad, impossible beauty, and I see my astonishment mirrored in them. We have become buoyant; we hurtle up toward the distant reaches of those Higher shelves, each level lovelier than the last, intricate filigree and dizzying arabesques, pearl and silver and teak and gold, and the books—bound in glass, in crystal, in living flesh and light, dousing us with sprays of bright memory, the bliss of a trillion lives, every generation of every creature that could ever feel ecstasy.
And it goes higher. We are nowhere near the top. But the ladder is dissolving under me. I scramble upward until I’m climbing air; I stretch out with my mind, straining toward that distant, unfathomable ceiling—
• • •
I am lying on my back on a carpet of moss. Julie is next to me. We are gasping, shivering, laughing, crying. Our hands rest in the space between us, fingers woven together, squeezing with each spasming aftershock. A bird chirps. A fly buzzes. The canopy of leaves spins slowly overhead like a time-lapse film of stars.
I remember the worms in my neck. They squirm and squeal like spoiled children, but I contain them easily, clenched in a fist of will. They bore me. I dismiss them from my mind and watch the sun leak through the leaves, forming solid gold shafts in the dust we’ve stirred up.
I don’t know how long we lie there. The sun moves across the sky. Its rays wander lecherously down our bodies. Finally, when they begin to dim, Julie shatters the century-long stillness. She stands up. She puts her clothes on. Then she gathers up mine and drops them on my chest.
“R,” she says, her face still damp and flushed, glowing with a smile that I’ve never seen before, calm and happy and invincible. “Let’s go home.”
three
the rooftop
Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world.
To those who can hear me, I say…
—Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator
WE
We feel pressure. We feel strain. We feel rumbles and tremors and the rushing of rivers. Hills heave up from flatlands, mountains pierce peaceful fields. Earth bulges with potential, stretching and distorting its perfect sphere as it tries to decide what to be. Earth is a quantum particle. An indecisive electron waiting on its observers.
Two of its observers are called Gael and Gebre, and they are looking for someone they lost. Like all sane humans, they avoid the existential sinkhole of the Midwaste. They stick to the places with people. At major junctions they find guidance sprayed onto the pavement: skulls for the roads to nowhere, smiling faces for active arterials, the handful of highways that still have a pulse.
“Graffiti artists are the new Department of Transportation,” Gael chuckles as he guides the van toward the recommended lane. “The world’s upside-down. I love it!”
“Could be tricks,” Gebre says. “Or traps.”
Gael shrugs. “Anything could be anything. Why default to bad?”
“Well, historically…”—Gael groans—“…historically, vandals were lashing out at the society that excluded them. The last thing they wanted was to assist it.”
“History was a long time ago, love.” Gael gestures to the strange landscape around them, the murals on the road, the sculptures of stacked cars towering above the desert. “This is new territory.”
He hits the gas. The van roars over the big yellow smile and onto the highway.
It’s barely an hour before they see the first car. Then another, and another, until the lanes are full and brake lights begin to flare.
“Traffic!” Gael squeals with delight. “We’re in traffic!”
“I haven’t seen a jam like this in fifteen years,” Gebre says. “Where are they coming from?”
The answer to this question takes shape from town to town, from rest stop to truck stop to roadside diner as they work their way west.
They buy beers for Axiom troops from Chicago, who deserted in the night as grumbles rose to shouts.
They change a tire for youths from the UT-AZ Sovereignty, who hopped the fence of their feudal kingdom in search of the wider world.
They share intel with scouts from Montreal and Juarez, who climbed their border walls to investigate the cancer growing in the land between them.
And they listen quietly to people from the wilderness: families and tribes and underground enclaves who grew tired of isolation, who ventured from their hills and caves on some obscure impulse—some call it a pull, others a voice—in search of something they can’t name.
The long-sleeping continent is in motion. Gael and Gebre sense it too, this pull, this voice, but they force themselves to ignore it. They are looking for someone they lost.
“Have you seen any civilian transports?”
“Where does Axiom take Dead children?”
“Have you seen a boy with yellow eyes?”
The clues that emerge are less than conclusive. A man saw a caravan heading into Post. A woman saw helicopters circling around Portland. A little girl saw a ghost boy flying toward the sun.
“Well?” Gael says as they come to another crossroads: Portland or Post, both sprayed with smiles. “What do you think?”
Gebre sighs and leans against the steering wheel. “I think we should have discussed it further before d
eciding to adopt.”
“He was alone. He needed someone.”
“And so did we, I know, I know.”
They are on the outskirts of yet another empty town surrounded by crumbling factories. The highway splits off into the sagebrush hills, its two halves indistinguishable.
“Well, old man?” Gael persists. “Post or Portland? I defer to your ancient wisdom.”
Gebre rubs his goatee. “The Almanac said Post was ‘closed, hostile,’ which certainly sounds like Axiom…”
“But it said Portland was ‘no gov.’ Farming and barter markets…”
“Which sounds like something Axiom would love to invade…”
“Right. So it’s a variable. But if we go to Portland and he’s not there, we might still find something worth finding.”
“You mean our anarchist utopia?” Gebre says with an affectionate smirk.
Gael gestures toward the two sides of the crossroads, the highways like mirrored lines. “It’s a vacillation. It’s a potential reality waiting on our perception. What do we want to see?”
Gebre laughs. “Did you just reference The Suggestible Universe? I thought real physicists hated that pop-sci mysticism.”
Gael shrugs. “Dubious science. Intriguing metaphor.”
“Okay. Here goes.” Gebre takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. “I want to see a peaceful, Edenic commune. I want to see our little friend Rover, alive and Living.”
“And alone with no guards,” Gael adds.
“Alone with no guards,” Gebre agrees. Then he opens his eyes and hits the gas and the camper surges forward.
• • •
We watch the van dwindle into the distance. We savor the love inside it, subtle and nuanced but strong. And we are not the only ones observing this particle as it hurtles through the universe. Faces linger in the windows of obsolete factories—film stock, vinyl records, radios, paper; long-dead industries that are ready to revive. Eyes glimmer in the shadows with a dull metallic sheen, silver and lead with occasional glints of gold.