Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  That was the dream. I have no idea what it means.

  When I woke up, Mona didn’t give me two seconds before she was fussing over me and around me and what I understood in the end was that she had a surprise for me. Now that explained some things. Because she had been acting kinda funny for days, a couple weeks or more, and more’n once I found her on the phone but when I come in she’d hung up.

  So now I found out what it all was.

  By this time, I was walking a little farther. I didn’t use the chair ’cept on real bad days, and on a good day I could walk a couple hundred yards at once without stopping, as long as I was careful. Still not telling you I enjoyed any of this. But do you wanna hear all that, about how I raged and fought? I guess you do not. It’s not so interesting. My raging and fighting probably looks a lot like yours.

  Anyway, Mona was looking concerned, she was looking like she was worried about something, as she asked, ‘So can you go for a little walk?’ and I shrugged and said I guess we can find out.

  So we went for that walk. We went away from Mona’s place, in the other direction from Bly’s sheds, in the direction of Jenny’s. Just a little way there was a rise in the ground and then Mona’s property fell away a bit and that was where we was going. It was only a hundred yards from the house, but on the far side there was my surprise.

  There was Finch and Detlef and Harry, and they was standing outside a little cabin, like a little log cabin. And it wasn’t big, but maybe two or three times the size of Bly’s shed, and it had a window next to the door and another one in the short end, and across the door someone had painted a sign that said ‘Welcome home, Ash.’ I looked at Mona and her smile was so wide I thought maybe she’d lost her mind, but she hadn’t and she said, ‘It’s for you, Snowflake.’

  I put my hand to my mouth and I knew I oughta say something about ‘what?’ or ‘no, I couldn’t’ or ‘but I don’t got no money’ or just something like that, but all I could do was hug Mona and then I hugged Finch and Detlef and dammit I even had to hug Harry then, so I did.

  Detlef started explaining things to me.

  ‘Go on in,’ he said and I did, and it was tiny but after a shed and a bathroom floor it was a palace. There was a bed built across the end of one short wall, and there was a little place to sit and a table and the two windows and it even had a tiny wood stove to keep it warm in the winter.

  Finally I managed to say thank you and I told Mona I didn’t understand, but Mona said it was all their idea on the way back from the funeral. And when Harry had heard about it, she offered to help Finch and Detlef build it because she’d worked in construction before she got sick, and Mary had designed it and Jenny had paid for it, the timber and the roof and even the tiny little stove. So when Jenny came over I hugged her hardest of all and I couldn’t say anything but feel tears coming and she said, ‘Hush, Snowflake. We just wanted to help. Kid your age shouldn’t have to go through so much.’

  And she smiled, but she left again soon after, which seemed odd, because everyone else was in real good spirits and joking and all. It was a funny thing. This I mean, this that I am about to tell you.

  Now Detlef explained that it, the cabin, wasn’t quite finished. There were some things left to do but they’d be done by tomorrow at the latest, and I could move in today.

  ‘Besides,’ said Mona, ‘I want my bathroom floor back.’

  So what happened was Mona brought two red plastic chairs down from her porch and we set outside my cabin while Detlef and Finch and Harry did the last things. It was great to watch them work and the thing was, I saw how happy everyone was. Mona and Mary, the three folks working on it, all because of this thing they’d done for me.

  And that got me thinking.

  ‘Mona?’ I said. We was out of earshot, so it was safe to speak and she said what? and I said, ‘Mona, I understand you helping me, and Finch and Detlef. And Mary. And Jenny is a real generous lady with her money. Ain’t she?’

  ‘Yuh,’ Mona said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Well, Harry. There she is, helping build my cabin. But she don’t seem the generous type. I mean, she’s always ranting about how people oughta do stuff for themselves, not rely on handouts and what-have-you.’

  Mona gave one short laugh that was like a branch breaking.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mona, ‘well, here’s the thing. You’re part of her in-group.’

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘In-group. You’re in it, Detlef and Finch are in it. But the rest of the world? Well, they’re in her out-group. It’s a psychological thing.’

  And Mona said that people divided everyone they knew into Ins and Outs. And if you was In, then you was fine and they’d be kind and generous to you. But if you was Out, then you were not popular. In fact, she said, sometimes you were almost not even human. To them. That’s what she said.

  ‘They done research,’ she said. ‘I am not making this up. They put people in a brain scanner, done a bunch of tests. They found out, if you think someone is in your out-group, well, the parts of the brain that deal with normal human-type interaction don’t even light up. Someone is in your out-group, your brain literally don’t see ’em as human.’

  Then I sat there for about three hours and we said nothing, just watched the guys, and then after about three and a half hours I said, ‘Well, that explains a lot.’

  ‘Don’t it?’ said Mona. ‘Ever wondered how the Nazis could gas people? They weren’t all psychopaths. Not possible. Psychopaths are real rare. Ever wondered how people can walk past a starving person begging in the street and not give ’em even a dime, not even look at ’em?’

  I thought about that all for another eternity and I was thinking about people I knew. Like that mad aunt of Jack’s. Now she was real mean to me, but to everyone in her family she was a real sweetheart. Everyone said so. And she went to the United Church every weekend. But I knew for a fact she said it would be a good thing if all the starving people in Africa died because we shouldn’t have to send ’em food. And then I knew other people who treated the whole world like they was their in-group, and I was set next to one of ’em, right then.

  ‘Just depends where you draw the line,’ Mona said. ‘Between your own personal Ins and Outs. Like you might love your own family, but not someone else’s. And you might think your own country is the greatest on Earth. And not any other place. But here’s the thing. Why not?’

  So that started me thinking.

  First, ain’t it funny how most folks think the country they’re born in is the greatest? Instead of some other place? Ain’t that a remarkable coincidence? I guess because most people never get the chance to see anywhere else, so they just buy the story about where they’re from. Saves a whole lotta thinking and a whole lot of enviousness.

  And second, I got on to thinking about family and about parents and by that I mean my dad and my mom. One of ’em I didn’t know, and the other I wanted to know, but she’d run off again. And I still had found no way of finding out where she was at.

  Then I went on to ponder about why people thought it was better to love your country instead of your state, or your town, or your family. Maybe because it was bigger? But if size was what it was all about, then wouldn’t it make more sense to love your continent? Or the whole damn world?

  In the end, I said, ‘But people are born selfish, right?’

  Mona looked at me like I had said the most surprising thing she ever heard.

  ‘What makes you say that, Snowflake?’

  ‘We read a book at school. Well, we was gonna read it for biology class, but then Mary-Beth’s parents heard we was gonna study it and they complained and it got taken off. It was about that gene that makes us get born selfish.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mona. ‘Ah! Oh yes, I know that book. I have a copy of it somewheres.’ She waved her hand back up towards her place. ‘Trouble is, that’s not what it says. I think that book has a lot to answer for. Well, the title I mean. It has to be the worst title ever. I mean, it’
s catchy, right? But it’s not what the book says.’

  ‘No?’ I said and Mona said uh-uh. And then she said, ‘Not at all. What it says is that at the level of our genes, they want to survive, and they’ll do anything to make that happen. But here’s the thing: in order to survive the best, it turns out that the selfish little gene worked out that the best way to survive isn’t to be selfish at all. It’s to cooperate.’

  And at this point, she nodded over at the three workers putting up a little kind of gutter thing so I wouldn’t get a shower when I came outside in the rain. Well, I still would, but not as bad.

  So I said ‘huh?’

  And Mona said, ‘Crazy, huh? What the book says is that being kind to each other was invented by genes acting selfishly.’

  ‘Ain’t that kinda depressing?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think if even Selfish decided that Kind was better, well, that says a lot about the power of Kind, don’t it? And here’s another thing, what the book says, it says that yeah, people are born with the nature to be both kind and selfish, but you know what makes people different from every other single life-form on the planet?’

  I thought about that, and in the end I said, ‘We have cell phones?’ and Mona looked at me like she was mad but then she said, ‘The thing that makes us different from every other life-form is that we know all this stuff about being selfish and being kind. And if you know about it, that gives you the choice, right? A wolf, it don’t got no choice but to be a wolf. And a lamb, well, its options are limited. Real limited.’

  ‘What about goats?’ I asked, and Mona was about to get mad for real but then she saw I was just yanking her chain so she said, ‘Yeah and goats. They don’t got no choice neither. But we do. We’re the only species that knows this stuff. Kinda gives us some responsibility towards everything else, doncha think?’

  I nodded and was thinking on that and then she said how it was a shame a few more people never make no choices.

  And here she looked over at Harry and not for the first time I shook my head and I was kinda cross with myself for letting her help build my cabin when if I was a different kind of person, she’d have lifted not one finger. And yet, I could not say that it was not kind of her to help.

  And that left me real confused.

  *

  Things were rolling along in our little corner of the world. I weren’t no better. I had sorta reached a plateau. Like, if I was careful and didn’t do too much, I could walk some. Like a few hundred yards, as long as there was somewhere to set for a time at the end of it. But no matter what I did and what I ate or what pills I took, I could see I was never getting better than I was. And Mona was Mona and the goat was the goat and my mom was still missing like always and Bly was still dead. And I was still ill. We were all paying attention to our own little corner of the world, and maybe we weren’t paying attention where it needed to be paid.

  Spring came and went in about three days and then it was the summer in Arizona and I saw what that truly meant for the first time. And being so high, well, the nights were still cool enough to make a pleasant sleep, but the daytime, the mercury was rising in Mona’s thermometer on the porch by the back door.

  As the days got hotter it became real hot in my cabin. But I wanted to pass my days in there as much as I could. For one thing, I didn’t wanna appear ungrateful to Mona and everyone for making it for me. For another thing, I wanted my own space. And I wanted to read. So I opened up my two windows and my door and Mona got me some big old beach umbrella from the thrift store in town and that was that.

  I came up to the house to use the bathroom, to eat. There was no electricity in my cabin so I used a kerosene lamp, but I didn’t use it much. I rose when the sun did and when it went to bed then I went to bed not long after. And that was how I passed my days, in thinking and reading and reading some more and trying not to think about Bly too much.

  Ever since Mona had told me about why Harry was happy to help me when she wouldn’t have lifted a finger if my skin was a different color, well, something had gotten into me. I read that book, the one we were meant to read in biology class, since Mona had a copy, just like she said. And when I’d finished it I read it again, just to make sure I got it. Then I started to read some of the stuff that was mentioned in that book, books by other people. Mona didn’t have any of them books, so I ordered ’em in town. They knew me at the library by now, and every week I would make Mona drive me there, even if she weren’t going herself.

  The library was a little west and a little south, a block away from the fire department, two blocks from the Little League park. It was not an attractive building, not like that big old church with the man in gold on top, which was a few blocks farther to the west, on a hill. No, the library was a single-story thing that looked like it had been built to sell farm equipment from, but it was full of books and that was all I cared about.

  It was bugging me, and I mean I was obsessed. How could people be loving to some folks and then go out and murder some other folks? Either you’re bad and mean or you’re not, right? That was how I saw it, but the more I read, the less I felt I knew that to be true.

  As the summer went along, I kept reading and then chance came along and gave me someone I could really ask about this whole thing. We had a visitor, out in the Forties, I mean.

  Mona put the phone down one day and she had on her face that she got when she weren’t sure about something.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess we’ll see.’ And at least she didn’t say I wonder what will happen next and I noticed that since a certain night with flashing blue lights in the last days of December she didn’t say that so very much anymore.

  We was gonna have a visitor, us canaries. We had visitors from time to time. Like there was the photographer who made the book that Mona was in, before I came. And there had been a small-time TV crew once. A writer, with some journalist from a British newspaper. They was the worst. People would come and want to tell the story about the crazy folks living in the desert and Mona was always in two minds, because on the one hand she knew if folks with MCS were ever gonna get any help, they needed to be understood, and they weren’t gonna be understood till the normies had heard about ’em and made up their own minds about it. But on the other hand, the folks that came most often would write the canaries up as just a bunch of crazy folk in the desert. End of. Something to raise your eyebrows at over the breakfast table, or snigger about at the end of the local news. Lookit the crazy people! Hah! And that didn’t help the cause, not one bit.

  But this visitor was different. She was a psychologist, and she was doing research into MCS. Now this part was what had Mona concerned.

  ‘If she’s a psychologist,’ I asked Mona, ‘does that mean she thinks it’s all in our heads?’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me. But we gotta keep trying folks. Spread the word, you know that. But listen, Snowflake, you don’t have to speak to her. I can take her to meet Detlef. Everyone likes Detlef. And Finch. Everyone likes Finch too.’

  But I said to Mona that, no, I would be happy to talk to the psychologist, and I said that because I didn’t care what she thought about MCS and whether it might all be in my head or not. Because I had some things I wanted to ask her.

  Now, Mona was out when she arrived and I was the first one to meet her. I heard a commotion from up at Mona’s place and when I got up there I found this young woman backed into a corner being faced down by a goat, namely our friend Socrates. He wasn’t in a party mood and the young woman seemed fresh out of ideas. I gave Socrates the legs in the air treatment and took her down to my cabin, explaining about myotonic goats and Socratic irony on the way. And I could hear myself speaking and I guessed I probably already sounded a little crazy to her, but there weren’t nothing I could do about that.

  We set under the big umbrella thing from the thrift store, taking the shade, in a couple red plastic chairs.

  Her name was Stephanie Krokowski. I always remembered that name. I li
ked it. It was a proper sounding kind of name, one that meant business. Unlike being called Ash. I liked her too and she was older than me of course but probably still only twenty something and that made her closer in age to me than anyone else in the Forties. She had these pale blue eyes, the palest I had ever seen in anyone’s head. Like blue ice. You couldn’t stop looking at ’em.

  But I knew I had to, so I looked out into the desert and I thought I oughta explain to Stephanie about how what you did in Snowflake was stare out at the desert. All the dang time. Like there was answers there. So then I was thinking to myself ‘idiot’ and how now she really would think I was crazy. But if she did, she didn’t show it.

  She was from some fancy university up north and she wanted to ask me about my experience of having MCS and how it came on and how long I had been sick, and I told her, well, it ain’t even a year yet and she said ‘yet?’

  And looked surprised.

  ‘You don’t think you’re going to get better?’ she asked me, and I gave her the shrug.

  ‘Folks with MCS don’t really get better. You just get better at dealing with it. Or not.’

  And I explained a lot of stuff, the stuff I had learned, about being ill. Learning to be someone else. That kinda stuff.

  Then I said, ‘Do you think this is all in our heads?’ and she looked surprised again.

  But what she said was, ‘I think it’s way more complicated than that. Would you like to tell me where the body ends and the mind begins?’ and then I relaxed a bit more and I thought Mona was probably gonna be okay with her too. And she didn’t even think it was weird that I lived in a log cabin in the desert, with a goat for company.

  Now she said something funny. When I say funny, I mean peculiar.

  ‘There was a time when people used to think differently about illness,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m writing my PhD about. About how society views illness and how that changes over time. Say in the Middle Ages, or a hundred years ago, and now. But of course we know much more about disease these days.’