Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  I slept long, making up for all the time I wasn’t asleep on that Greyhound, driving through the night and thinking that if no one was gonna tell me where Bly was at, I sure had the right to go and find him.

  Now my long sleep, it was one of those sleeps, you know ’em, where you can be half-woke, kinda, and during that half-woke-up time I recalled something from Dolly’s house. You’ll know that too, how you can sometimes see something or notice something, but at the time you notice it you don’t have time to notice you noticed it? And it’s only later that you get around to noticing what you noticed. Yeah, that’s how it is. And I recalled seeing a calendar, the kind with one month on show at a time and a big picture of something on the top half. Like a mountain. Or a horse. Or a goat, that kinda thing. So this calendar, it was hanging on Dolly’s tinfoil wall, opposite a window with no curtains or blinds or anything looking out across the whole damn desert. And in my mind, I saw that there was not one thing writ upon that calendar. Not one. And this is the point, as I lay there, half-dreaming and half-thinking, the point is I wondered if there was anything writ on any of the other months either.

  When I woke up for real it was still raining and I felt cold, never mind the blanket. It was still daytime, but the sky was dark. There was no one around. The house was dark too, and I wondered where everyone had got to. Mona, Cooper, Bly. Even Socrates seemed to be taking time off hunting for people’s footwear.

  I wondered what hour of the day it was and that’s funny because why did it matter? I wasn’t going nowhere, not that day, I knew that. Why did we always need to know the damn time? What were we so fussed over? We were none of us going far, even then. And I guess we know better now. But I went to find my bag, around at the front, getting splashed some by the rain hitting the ground just off the porch.

  I found my bag and found my phone and it was still alive and it said it was around five. I put my hand to my face and felt my nose, which felt kinda funny, and I found there was blood all crusted up around my nose and my lip and I’d had a nosebleed of some kind. I snuck back into the house, just like the first time, and even though there was no one there, I snuck in quiet and careful like I had when I was naked. I went into the tinfoil bathroom and washed up my face in the basin and there was my towel from before so I took it and dried myself up, but careful, in case the bleed came back, which I didn’t want it to, this not being my house.

  I came out and stood and took a proper look at Mona’s place. It was dark, like I said, so I stood for a time and waited to see if I could see a little more. It was a funny kinda home. There really was just the kitchen at one end of the main room, with the sink and the refrigerator. Heck, you know what a kitchen looks like, right? Though I will say there was no kind of cooker, not a proper one, just an electric ring for one pan, setting on the worktop. Then there was the rest of the main room, with stuff all around. The desk, which had a phone on it, buried under piles of paper. There was Mona’s bed but I didn’t look at that, even though it was made. And there really was nowhere else to sit, but all around the walls were bookcases and I saw more books than I had ever seen in my life put together. It was like she had her own library, Mona I mean. I stared at the books, standing there in the darkness, and the books setting there on the shelves and the rain hammering down on that tin roof like the mighty world was ending and I wondered what was in them. For I had never been a book-lover. No, I did not open a book very often, not once since I left school, that’s certain. Truth to tell I was a mite scared of a book. But there was no one around, and it was dark, so I started to feel brave and I wondered who could have so much to say that you needed a few hundred pieces of paper to say it and not just a couple. Or even one. Or even the back of a postcard, which is how parts of my so-called family seemed to like to communicate.

  So I snuck to the bookcase and I was trying to read the titles, and I read a few and I could see that most of ’em, the ones I could see, were books about being sick or about how to get better from being sick. But I couldn’t really see so I pulled my phone out of my pocket and lit up the screen for a flashlight and was just reading one thing that said Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: A Sufferer’s Memoir and then I jumped a mile. Because out of nowhere Mona said, ‘It’s going to be better if you don’t use that thing around here,’ and I knew she meant my phone. There she was setting in the dark in a corner I hadn’t seen, half hid behind a bookcase and curled up tiny in a chair with a book on her lap reading though how she could read in that light I have no idea, I surely don’t.

  ‘What?’ I guess I said, and she explained that the phone was bad for her, my cell phone, and had I heard that in Italy, some judge just awarded four million somethings to a guy who said using his cell for work all day had given him a brain tumor, and the judge agreed, yes, yes it had. So that was the first time anywhere in the world where someone with the law on their side had said that cell phones were bad for you, and Mona finished up by saying she figured it wouldn’t be the last one neither. And I said, ‘Uh, no, I didn’t hear that,’ and then I thought for about two seconds and I said, ‘I’ll turn it right off.’ Which I did.

  There was this real long pause and I felt uneasy but Mona was, well, Mona was something else, you know. She knew right away what was up and she said to me, ‘Snowflake,’ but she said it gentle and like she liked me, ‘are you okay, kid? I guess all of this is kinda strange, huh?’ and I said, yes, yes it was and would she please tell me what was going on and why were everybody’s walls covered in Reynolds Wrap and why did Dolly have two hundred bottles of tablets and why was electricity bad for you and what the hell was wrong with Bly, because I did not want anything bad to be happening to him, not my big stepbrother.

  So Mona says, ‘Here, sit down. You had a day, huh? Out here in the desert with us canaries. But don’t worry about nothing. The altitude takes some getting used to, and the air ain’t right, not with all this rain. Though I am pleased to say you’ve missed the worst of it. It’s been a bad one this year. The monsoon.’ She looked out the window and said, ‘This is just the pointy tail end of it.’

  I sat down on the chair at her desk and stared at the papers there and while I did that, she told me all about it.

  She told me how they had environmental illness. And how that can mean different things.

  ‘Some of us,’ she said, ‘we got multiple chemical sensitivity, and we get affected by chemicals. Things like fragrance and perfume, things like what they put in soap powders, things like pesticides and herbicides, things like pollution, gas fumes, glue, you name it. Now, normies, they can cope with this stuff, but we can’t. And it ain’t the same stuff for everyone. For someone it’s this, but for someone else it’s that. See? It’s like being allergic. Some people are allergic to peanut butter, right? And others ain’t, they’re allergic to cats. See?’

  I was thinking ‘sorta,’ but Mona was going right along, and next she told me about the electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome.

  ‘I ain’t too bad with that, but cell phones make my head start buzzing in a few minutes. Detlef, he’s gotta be real careful. So some of us here got MCS and some got EHS and the lucky ones got both,’ and then she started giggling right there. ‘Real lucky,’ she said, and then she went on. ‘And there’s people who got all of that, and maybe something else, like undiagnosed Lyme, or Bartonella, or mold issues, or what-have-ya.’

  And she went on and she went on and she told me that the walls were covered in tinfoil to keep all the chemicals inside them just that: inside and away out of the air. She said how the way we make houses is crazy, what with all the chemicals we put into things, so if you had MCS and you couldn’t afford to build a safe house from the ground up, if you had to buy an old house and make it safe, what you did was you painted corn starch on the walls and then stuck the Reynolds Wrap over it all, and that seals everything bad inside, behind the foil, and keeps it away from the canary.

  And then, finally, finally, she told me that Bly had a deal of MCS but was okay with
electrics and he was okay if he was careful and stuck to the rules, and I said, ‘Like the mask?’ and she nodded and said, ‘You know, you could crack open a book. Wouldn’t kill ya. I got one or two that explain things.’ And then she got up and pulled that very book I had been looking at off the shelf, and that finally was a real coincidence because there were a million books on that bookcase, easy. Maybe two.

  She winked at me and said, ‘You can read, right?’ and I nodded.

  ‘I’ll put a light on outside,’ she said, ‘on the porch. And maybe it’s about time you need to be outside again and maybe we could think about eating something,’ and that sounded good because I suddenly realized I’d eaten nothing since I could not remember. So while she started fixing something in the kitchen, I went back out and set on a red plastic chair, with a light overhead of me. I flicked open the book like you do when you don’t really want to read it, from the back to the front, and I saw a whole lot of things I didn’t understand right off the bat, but I ended up at the front where the name of the person that wrote it was, and that turned out to be Mona Mochsky. I looked at her, through the back door, as she stood staring at the inside of the refrigerator with her hands on her hips as if everything inside was misbehaving itself. Then I looked back at the book she wrote, and under her name it said, ‘For all my friends who lost their lives to environmental illness.’ And I thought ‘huh.’

  I went over to see Mona.

  ‘Mona?’ I said.

  ‘What is it, kid?’

  And I said, ‘Bly’s really sick?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said.

  ‘But he’s gonna get better, right?’

  Mona looked away from the mischievous food and peered at me.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Depending on what you mean by “better.”’

  Then the door swung open and in came Bly. He’d been taking that fourth box of groceries out somewhere, and he was wet to the skin and looked at me on the porch and nodded and said ‘Snowflake!’ and grinned and then looked at Mona and said, ‘What’s cooking?’ and then we ate soup.

  As we ate, Mona said, ‘You know, it only takes a straw to show which way the wind is blowing,’ and Bly nodded and said, ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ and I sat there and thought ‘what?’ and I also thought, ‘Please don’t ask me what I think about that for I have no idea what you are all talking about.’

  Then Mona said, ‘What did we learn today?’

  She looked at Bly, and before he said anything to her he looked at me and whispered, ‘This happens every evening,’ and he told me how every evening, anyone who was sitting on Mona’s porch had to say something they learned during the day, and it didn’t matter if it was a big thing or a small thing, you had to say something. She figured that a) we all oughta keep learning all our lives and b) we probably was anyway, but it didn’t hurt to practice.

  Bly stared out into the desert, which was getting hard to see. It had stopped raining again but the sky was dark and night was coming along at a good speed. He thought a while and then he said, ‘The most important thing I learned today is that the darned goat truly will eat anything.’ Mona snorted a laugh and then Bly added, ‘Plus, I learned that Ash really is a snowflake,’ and I said ‘hey!’

  ‘A delicate child of life,’ said Mona, nodding, and I said ‘cut it out!’ but they were only messing with me and somehow I didn’t mind them saying what used to hurt real bad when the kids at school said that kinda thing. Except they would never have said anything fancy like ‘a delicate child of life’; they would have said something worse and way meaner.

  Bly said to Mona, ‘What did you learn today?’ because it turned out that she had to do it too. So then she stared out into the desert (because it seemed like that was part of it, like the desert was going to give you the answer) and said, ‘Well, today I was reading about epigenetics.’ So, well, then me and Bly looked at each other and both said ‘epi-whut?’ at exactly the same time, and that made us laugh again.

  Mona read a lot of science books. She said it started when she got sick and when the doctors couldn’t find out was wrong with her. Just because they couldn’t find nothing, well, that don’t make you not sick, so she started reading herself to try to figure stuff out. And when she lost her job because of being sick, then she started to read even more. That’s how she ended up with a whole library. And today she’d been reading about epigenetics. I knew what genetics was because I recalled something from school about it. About DNA, and genes, and chromosomes and what-have-you-got. They was what made you who you were. But only up to a point, said Mona.

  ‘That is to say,’ she said, ‘they was what made you up to the second you were born, but from then on, well, you might become one person or another person, depending on how you was raised. You heard of nature versus nurture, right?’

  And Bly nodded and I did too, though I hadn’t. But what she meant was that your nature was in your genes and then how you was nurtured, how you was raised, that had a big effect on you too.

  But then Mona went on and said that still ain’t all there is to it. And what’s left is epigenetics. Which, she said, is how things that happen to you, things like diseases, and stress, and toxins can actually change your genes. Like, some trauma can alter the way a gene is behaving. Turn some version of a gene off and another version of it on. That could change who you are. That if you got too stressed, it could make you sick. And she said epigenetics was kinda new and no one knew much about it.

  She said it was sad, thinking about little kids getting traumatized from terrible things before they’d even set out in life, and how that could make ’em sick or even change their personality, like it could make them mean when they weren’t mean before. And how then maybe that might make them make their kids mean, and so on, and the world would get worse.

  ‘You know, Ash,’ she said, ‘never mind a straw. It only takes a snowflake to show which way the wind is blowing,’ and never had I felt lighter and lonelier in my whole life than sitting on that porch in the darkness with the whole dang desert in front of me than when I realized that both my names, my real name and my nickname, meant almost nothing. Nothing but something light, something so light and so fragile as to almost not exist.

  ‘So?’ said Mona and she was looking at me, and I said ‘what?’ so she said, ‘Which way is the world blowing?’ and I recall for a fact that she said ‘world’ and not ‘wind.’ Because that was the exact moment that I started to understand, I’m sure of it, though I know I didn’t look like I was understanding nothing.

  Then she said, ‘Snowflake, what did you learn?’

  I looked out into the desert (because I wanted to do things right) and I looked for a long time and then I gave up and said, ‘I guess I learned a lot of things,’ and there was no need to say more, because everyone had seen me learning a whole bunch of stuff. About MCS, and EHS, and off-gassing, and German automobiles from the 1980s, and fainting goats.

  ‘Not bad for your first day,’ said Bly, and I looked at him like my eyes was going to pop out and I said, ‘What? Is it still the first damn day?’ and that I found hard to believe because it felt like I’d been in Snowflake for years. That sounds dumb, but that’s how it was.

  ‘You only got here this morning,’ said Bly. ‘But you did already have one sleep.’

  ‘Tiring learning stuff, ain’t it?’ said Mona, and off she went like the Pez dispenser. But when she said ‘tiring’ then my good God did I feel tired again, and I said, ‘Are you sure you’re okay with me staying, Mona? It’s kind of you,’ and Mona said it was nothing and that she’d had hundreds of waifs and strays and not just Cooper and that it was her pleasure and a whole bunch of kind things like that.

  Then I said, ‘So where can I sleep? I’m kinda done,’ and she said, ‘Right here!’ and I looked into the house and I must’ve looked stupid to her because she said, ‘Right here’ again but slower and then I started to get the feeling that what she meant was ‘right here.’

  As in, on the po
rch. Which she did.

  Then she went inside to find some blankets and things and while she was gone, I looked at Bly and I guess I looked spooked. I said, ‘Can’t I stay with you?’ and he laughed and nodded over past the sheds and said ‘there?’ and I said, ‘Yes, at your place,’ and he laughed and pointed past the sheds and said, ‘That is my place,’ and then I started to get the feeling he wasn’t pointing past the sheds. He was pointing at the sheds.

  Bly had been living in a pair of sheds. And I wondered what the heck happened to people to make ’em think it was normal to live in a wooden shed.

  Then I said, ‘…Mary?’ with a quiet voice, and Bly explained how she slept in the back of her truck and anyway, I was venting too bad to be anywhere near her.

  ‘Venting?’ I said, because I know I’d heard it earlier on but still didn’t really get it, and Bly said that it was normal and nothing to worry about, but they’d seen it enough, when someone comes out of flatland, and they’re still pumping out all the chemicals and perfumes and what-you-got. Like how the human body is kinda like a sponge, and it soaks up everything it comes into contact with. And then vents it back out again. Once I’d been here a few days, or maybe a few weeks, and finished venting, then I’d be fit for civilized company once more. He was funning me when he said that, I could tell, but right then I wasn’t feeling in the mood for jokes.

  Then Mona came out with a load of stuff. There was a folding metal bed, and a sleeping bag, and a bunch of blankets, and she rolled one up for a pillow and Bly started to go.

  I said, ‘Bly?’

  He stopped and came back and said ‘yeah, what?’

  And I said, ‘You’re gonna go back to the academy, right?’