Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  I felt I must’ve missed something. I know I was missing a lot right then, because a) I couldn’t think straight and b) I was in shock, like I said. Something felt different. But I kept thinking, well, I’ll be better in a day or two. And then I made that a week. And then the weeks started to go by and started to become months, and they didn’t care whether I was better or not, and I wasn’t.

  And like I said before, there is no point me telling you all about each of those days. What happened was this: I was sick, I was tired, I could barely move, and I became the most miserable kid in Arizona. And what do you wanna know about that for? You ever been miserable? Maybe so miserable you thought it would be better if you didn’t exist no more? Well then, you know what I’m talking about.

  I don’t remember so much from those early days. One thing: I recall I started writing a letter to my mom. I had no idea where to send it. But it was all I could do, to make me feel like I was doing something. I thought I oughta tell her I was sick. I don’t know why; I hadn’t seen her in the longest time, but I figured maybe she’d come and see me, even though I would never send it. You think I’m crazy, right?

  It took me an age, first because I didn’t know what to say. And second because my arm got tired from holding the pen for more than two minutes. But I put a few things down, like ‘How are you?’ and ‘Bly’s okay, more or less’ and ‘Oh, I oughta tell you I’m sick.’ When it was done, I read it once and then set it aside someplace. It was a bad letter, but I just couldn’t think of what to say that might be better. And anyway, it had nowhere to go, and neither did I.

  Only other thing that comes back to me: that first afternoon, that very first afternoon when we got back from seeing Dr. B, I sat on the porch staring at the desert, while around me, Mona and Bly and Finch were having a discussion. They weren’t discussing me, or being sick. I was no great news. They’d all been through what I’d been through, and not just once but hundreds of times. Hundreds of people who’d doubted that they were sick. And I do mean hundreds. Doctors, friends, family.

  Family. I had noticed, without really understanding, that there were no couples in Snowflake. Not in the Forties, I mean. No families. Everyone was alone. As the time went by, I got to learn why that was. Relationships don’t survive having someone with MCS. They just don’t.

  So no, Mona and Bly and Finch weren’t talking about me, they was talking about a film. They’d all watched it, over at Detlef’s one evening. He had a TV set behind a glass wall, which he said made it safer to do.

  I’d never heard of it, but it was some horror film, and they was talking about whether it was scary or not. Bly said it wasn’t, and Finch said it was but he didn’t know why for sure, and Mona said it was scary too, and she did know why. She said it went like this. She said whether you found it scary or not, well, it all came down to whether you was paying attention or not.

  At the start of the film, she said, there’s a whole lot of scenes of people talking about the legend of this witch, a witch that people say lived in the woods nearby. And at the very end of the film, when the horror finally comes along, the final scene, well, it’s one of the things that somebody at the start was talking about. And it only makes sense if you remember that bit, so it’s only scary if you was paying attention.

  Then Finch said, ‘Yeah! That’s it! That’s right, Mona!’ while Bly just set staring into space, and I guess he was feeling told off for not paying attention. But I could see he saw Mona had a point, because he said, ‘Maybe life’s like that.’

  And everyone said ‘life’s like what?’ and he said, ‘Maybe life’s only scary if you’re paying attention.’

  Finch asked Bly what he meant and Bly said how maybe it was only when you started to learn about the world, like he had from Mona, that it got scary. Like before, all he had thought about was being a police officer. That made sense to him and it was everything he wanted. Then Mona got him thinking other stuff, such as maybe you could think about glyphosate giving everyone cancer or kidney problems or destroying people’s guts. Or maybe you could think about antibiotic resistance, which is how all our wonderful antibiotics are starting to not work anymore, how bad bacteria are evolving faster than we can make new drugs that’ll kill ’em, and how very soon we’ll be back in the nineteenth century when simple things could kill you, like setting on damp grass, or wearing corsets. Or maybe you could think about those same antibiotics, the ones we’re so precious about, and then read about how they don’t only kill bad bacteria, but the good ones too, the ones we need to be healthy, that live in our gut and do good things for us, like help make serotonin which is what keeps you happy and what you don’t got enough of if you’re depressed. Or maybe you could think about all the plastic in the world’s oceans, how they was saying now that every single fish that’s caught has teeny-eeny particles of plastic in it, that you’re eating, and then, come to that, how all the sea salt in the world has plastic in it, and most of all the drinking water supplies too. Or maybe you could think about how all the insects were suddenly dying on account of pesticides used in farming and how insects were important for the whole chain of life on Earth. And heck, did he mention climate change yet? Did he mention that the climate was changing? And that we was all gonna fry?

  Then everyone stared out into the desert for a long time, till Finch said, ‘Screwit. You got any beer, Mona? I sure could use a beer.’ And everyone laughed.

  J

  Jenny

  That really gets my goat.

  We sure do say some funny stuff with the English language. Because if you can tell me why getting someone’s goat means they’re feeling sore, you’re doing better’n me. Maybe it has something to do with sneakers. Anyway, the point was this: the point was that my goat was truly got.

  See, I am not gonna dwell on this for too long, but I was one unhappy kid. Day after day went by and I sat in my room, staring at the two walls that weren’t there, staring at the red sand and the jackrabbits and I didn’t even bother shouting when Socrates ate a pair of my socks or butted the end of my bed, which he had started to do in recent days. I was too busy being sick and wondering if this MCS thing was real.

  Bly would come and talk to me sometimes. And then other times, he’d go missing for hours, even a whole day, and I wouldn’t know where he was at. And every time he did that I got a bit sore at him for leaving me alone, but I always managed to not tell him I was sore.

  Save one time, when Mona let the damn goat butt my bed almost the whole damn day, and I was too weak to stop him. And by the time Bly showed up in the evening, I snapped yeah, well, thanks for coming back and he just looked at me for a second and then he said, ‘Other folks got problems too, Ash’ and went off to bed and I felt bad.

  When I wasn’t staring, and I wasn’t moaning, I was frowning, and trying to figure stuff out. The fact that Dr. B had told me that this was all in my head? Well, I could not get that out of my head. And I would say that out loud sometimes, and Mona would say, yeah, but what does that even mean?

  ‘All in your head,’ she said. ‘All in your mind. What does that mean? Because it’s all in your mind, it’s not real? Even if it is all in your mind, you’re still suffering the same. And one day, doctors are gonna finally realize that there ain’t no god-dang difference between the body and the mind anyhow. There ain’t no mind without a body, right? And without a mind, a body is nothing. Right again?’

  I nodded, but she wasn’t finished. I guess I’d hit a nerve and I guess I knew why. Because although this was all new to me, she’d been through all this before, a long time ago, and I guess I was bringing it back.

  ‘You know what Voltaire had to say about doctors?’

  I shrugged. I guess I didn’t. I guess I didn’t know who Voltaire was either, and I guess that was obvious to Mona, because she told me.

  ‘Voltaire was a French philosopher.’

  And I said, ‘Wait, I know this. I think therefore I am, right?’ and Mona said no, that was René Descartes, 1596 t
o 1650.

  ‘Voltaire. Only his real name was François-Marie Arouet. 1694 to 1778. Had a lot to say about a lot of things, and a lot to say about doctors in particular. Like this: he said the art of being a doctor consists in distracting the patient while nature gets him better.’

  And I said ‘huh’ and then I said, ‘Yeah, but that was seventeen-something,’ but Mona said, ‘You thinking it’s got any better?’

  So I said, ‘Yeah, some. Like, we have modern medicines now, right? Drugs and what-you-got.’

  So then Mona said, ‘A doctor is someone who prescribes drugs about which he knows little for a body about which he knows even less.’

  And I said, ‘Voltaire again?’ and Mona said, ‘Smart guy, right?’ and I couldn’t do much but nod. It was either that or shrug and I’d had enough of people shrugging, myself included. So I’d taken up nodding instead.

  Then she said, ‘EI is just the latest in a long line of diseases that folks once thought were nonsense. One day they’ll understand it. When enough folks have it and they start taking it seriously. Then they’ll figure it out. The world is getting more’n more dangerous and more’n more folks are gonna get sick. We’re the canaries in the coal mine, Ash, don’t you forget that. We’re just unlucky to be living now.’

  Then I thought about asking Mona whether we was lucky or unlucky as she couldn’t seem to make her mind up. But I didn’t, because I was a miserable snowflake back then.

  At first I didn’t want to believe I had MCS. Mona gave me an old off-gassed mask to use when we drove into town, but I was too dumb to use it. Or stubborn. Or something. Something like I was too scared to use it in case it turned out that Mona was right.

  But when I didn’t wear it, I’d come home sicker. And when I did, I’d come home not so sicker. Sooner or later, and I cannot say which, I finally started to realize that it was true. Mona had been right. What I was scared of was really true. I had been poisoned by the world. And what can I tell you about that? Nothing. It hurt. That’s all I can tell you, but like Bly’d said to me, other folks got their own problems, right? So you can probably just figure out that I was feeling just like you do, when you go to bed one cold and miserable and lonely night and wish your world would end, just end, quietly, in your sleep.

  Life had gone off the tracks. I’d set out into the world to find Bly, and I had. But then I’d hit a brick wall. I slept a big chunk of every day, and even when I was up, my legs were stiff and sore. I couldn’t walk more than fifty yards at one time. I had headaches, I couldn’t feel the ends of my fingers or toes, and sometimes that would spread as far as my elbows and knees. And I had them rashes like from before I was sick. Or, as Mona kept reminding me, from before I knew I was sick. And yet I still didn’t believe this was happening. I didn’t really believe in MCS. I didn’t believe it was what was wrong with me, but the canaries wouldn’t hear anything different, and neither, in her own way, would Dr. B. She said I was mentally deranged; the canaries told me I was physically assaulted by chemicals. And no one wanted to talk about nothing else.

  I had run out of money paying that dumb doctor. I was living in a room that only had two walls, it was coming to the winter and already the nights were getting cold. Half the time I still couldn’t accept what was happening to me, what they said was happening to me; it just didn’t seem possible that one day you could be fine and the next you was sick for life. And the other half of the time it was plain that that was exactly what had happened. I mostly got about Mona’s house in her wheelchair to use the bathroom, to roll up for suppertime, and so on and so forth. And I slept.

  But there were some good things too, I know. I knew that even then. One of them was Mona.

  The other was Bly.

  He was real worried for me, I could tell. After that time when I was mean to him for leaving me alone all day, and even though he had jobs to do, he would find reasons to hang out at Mona’s even more’n usual. He’d talk to me, and he even read to me when I was too tired to hold a book up, which was most of the time.

  Another thing he did, he went out of his way to find things to talk about, like one day, when he went into town, he came back and said he’d been to the library to look something up.

  I guess I didn’t look too impressed. Because I was foolish back then, but maybe that’s being hard on myself. I was young, and I was sick, and the world had fallen apart around me. So maybe I didn’t want to hear about his trip to the library. But Bly, he went on anyway, smiling like I was being nice to him.

  ‘You remember how I told you about Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake?’ he said, and I nodded and said, ‘Yeah. You said what are the chances?’ and Bly said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s what I went to find out.’

  So he’d been to the library even though that meant folks staring at him wearing his mask. If he stuck to the places he usually went, like the store or the gas station, people knew who he was. But if he went someplace he didn’t usually go, like the library, it would mean more people staring. Anyway, he’d done it. And then he’d looked up how many people were called Snow in America and how many people were called Flake. He said he could only find figures for 2003. He didn’t know why that was, but anyhow he was only interested in the percentages. He said that there was a one in 20,000 chance you would be called Mr. Snow. And then he said there was a one in 250,000 chance you would be called Mr. Flake. So the chances of a Mr. Snow meeting a Mr. Flake would be one in five billion.

  And I was wondering what the point of all this was, but I kinda knew already, and even before he said, ‘So that was pretty lucky, right?’ I was already thinking how lucky I was a) to have Bly for a stepbrother in the first place and b) to have found him again when I kinda felt I’d lost him.

  And he was staring at me and sorta smiling and then I said ‘nope’ and he said ‘what?’

  ‘I think you made a mistake with your math,’ and he looked upset, so I put my hand on his arm and said, ‘No, you did the sums right, I’m sure. You always were better at sums than me. But you forgot something. I guess half of those Snows were women, and half of those Flakes were women too, right? So the chances of a mister Snow meeting a mister Flake must be a quarter what you said it was. Right? So the chances were actually one in twenty billion.’

  Then Bly blinked and said, ‘Yeah, I guess I forgot about women,’ and then I realized my hand was still on his arm and I took it away and he said, ‘Ash, Mona and me, we wanna take you out. You’re just set here all the time.’

  I said I didn’t wanna go anywhere, not till I was better, and Bly looked at me so hard I thought he would cry and then he said, real, real quiet, ‘That might be some whiles,’ and then Mona came out and said, ‘Well? We going on our trip, or whut? Cooper’s ready. You ready, Ash?’

  So we took our trip.

  It wasn’t far. Once upon a goddamn time, I could have walked it. And that made me feel miserable, that more or less recently, as Mona would have it, I could’ve walked to Jenny’s house, but now they had to load me into Bly’s truck to drive a half a mile.

  There was Bly driving, and Mona, and her mutt set on her lap, and Mary came too, and she had some new correspondence from her insurance company that she wanted to talk to Mona about. So there was the four of ’em and there was me, all squeezed in the cab one way and another. At least we left the goat at home, and I was glad not to see him for a spell. There was something about his dumb face that got to you in the end. Somehow it made you feel dumb too. Just like Socrates. The real one I mean, the original.

  A half a mile don’t take too long in a truck, even on a road made of nothing but desert, but while we rode I wanted to ask Mona something, and I figured she couldn’t not answer me with the other guys in the truck, so I said, ‘Mona?’ and she said, ‘Yes, dear?’ and I said, ‘What did you teach?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh. Well, I guess I taught philosophy. And stuff.’

  So then that explained why she was always talking about philosophers, which was what I had been guessing.


  ‘What was the other stuff?’ I asked, and she waved a hand and said ‘stuff’ again, so Mary chipped in and told me how Mona was being modest. Then she told me how Mona had taught linguistics too. She had been a professor of both philosophy and linguistics at UCLA and how she was a genuine big deal in that subject. How there was a theory named after her. Well, half a theory. The Mochsky-Lerner paradigm, it was called, and I had no idea who Lerner was or what any of this meant but I stared at Mona and she made a big point of staring out the window and then she said, ‘Look! Bunnies! Look, Cooper! Bunny rabbits!’ on account of how she’d seen some of the jackrabbits skipping out in the sand.

  ‘Wow,’ she added, ‘shoot!’ like we’d just seen the most amazing thing in the world. ‘I wonder what will happen next.’

  We got to Jenny’s house, and I pulled myself out of the truck and the others were nice. They waited for me to take my time but they didn’t make a big deal out of it, but still, I wasn’t feeling fun about life. Not one bit.

  Mona and Mary went on ahead and Bly and Cooper and me came along after, and I whispered to Bly what are we doing here anyways? and he said wait and see.

  So then I hit him in the ribs and he said, okay, well, we wanna show you something. Just wait.

  Jenny came out of her house.

  It was just like the Sick Birds’ houses, I mean, the way it looked, but it was probably twice the size. They explained to me how since Jenny was building houses for sick people, she thought she ought to build her own so her sick friends could come visit, so her house was EI friendly too.

  But anyways, what we had come to see wasn’t inside the house, it was outside, around the back. In the yard, Jenny said, and it still made me wonder why these folks kept calling their backyards ‘yards’ when they was the whole damn desert.

  We came around the side of the house.