I felt bad and said I oughta come back to be with Mona, but when I told her about staying with Polleux a while she said I oughta do that. She said I had to do my own thing and follow my own path and that path had taken me to Polleux. And that was okay.
‘As long as you drop in and see me,’ she said. ‘You gotta promise!’
And though she was smiling I could tell there was something else, something underneath.
So I said, ‘Mona, you really okay?’ and she waved a hand and said sure.
‘It’s just all this stuff in the news,’ she said and I said ‘what?’ and then she looked all surprised and said ‘you don’t know?’ and just the way she said that scared me somehow.
‘Ash,’ she said. ‘Wake up! You gotta read the papers. You gotta pay attention! Wake up!’
I did not wake up. Not then. But it was not to be long.
Z
Zanjero
We are all a product of what came before us. A mongrel product, that is. We are this person and that person; we are the brothers we chased across the great nation for, the mothers who never really wanted us, and the fathers we never knew. We are Jack’s mean Aunt Zelda and we are our good and honest brother Bly and we are also 4 percent of a Neanderthal cave-kid. But most of who I came to be was down to those years with Mona. She was who I came to be, after I’d finished being Bly. Heck, even the way I speak now. The way I think. Well, that’s Mona, not much more nor less. And Mona was what kept me going through the days that were to come.
A little of Polleux rubbed off on me too, in that short time we had together. Stephanie had been right. Well, sorta. Some of the answers were out there in the desert, with Polleux. Just not the ones I wanted. But I played with the mice and slowly, bit by bit, I started to learn what it was he intended to do. And when I understood, well, then I knew for sure he had lost his crazy mind, living out there, all alone in the deep desert for thirty-odd years till I rolled into town.
There was still a war going on. Inside me. For whether I wanted to live or not. The war that Bly had lost. But like Mona had warned me, there were other things going on, things in the real world that I was paying no attention to. And I ain’t gonna dwell on that now, because, heck, we all know what came around the corner, and in the end, how fast it came, as we stood on the side of that volcano, me with my mice and Polleux with his bacteria.
For that was what he was really up to.
Bacteria. And it went like this:
It seemed that the reason he’d decided to take me in, well, it was that thing I’d said, about how I’d gotten obsessed with the question of altruism. Of being kind, of doing good for others. Not just the ones in your in-group, but strangers too.
And Polleux explained to me how he felt that this was where the world had gone wrong. That too many people were selfish, and too few were generous with their kindness. And I agreed with that, but then Polleux said something else.
‘Now, what is the most pressing matter in the world? What kind of altruism do we need more of, if we are to survive?’
‘Well, I am sure I have no idea,’ I said, and Polleux wasn’t in a mood for guessing. So he told me.
‘We need to be altruistic towards the future,’ he said and then I was lost. But he said, ‘Think about it. All the problems we have discussed, such as things with water, or the climate, or pollution. They are all a result of people wanting money and ease in the short term at the expense of any consequences that might arise down the line. Right? So what we need to do is make people altruistic towards the future, to their great-great-great grandchildren. And to the great-great-great grandchildren of others.’
And I said, ‘Yeah, that seems right,’ but when he told me how he planned to do it, I knew he was crazy as a coot.
‘I am breeding a variety of bacteria that will have two essential properties. First, it will be ridiculously infectious. It will spread with the simplest human contact. I estimate it should take no more than a few years to infect the entire world’s population, save for a few remote and outlying areas. Second, it will cause a polymorphic response in a particular length of a certain gene, and anyone thus infected will become fabulously altruistic. It will depend in part on the particular genes of each individual, but the result even in the most modest cases should be enough to turn a sinner into a saint. So to speak.’
So then I knew Polleux was crazy. And I also knew I was crazy to be living in a cave twenty miles from anywhere with a total loon. He seemed harmless, but all of a sudden I felt a very long way from home. Not only that, I realized I had no idea where home actually was. I figured I’d only felt at home for one damn night in my whole life, in a small shed in the desert, and that was lost now, it could not be reclaimed.
‘All I need,’ Polleux said, ‘is some final tests. And a vector.’
And I was about to ask what a vector was, but I never got the chance, because there was a knock at the door and it was Detlef and his Icon Gold Mercedes.
And he was the one who told us.
Mona had told me to wake up. And maybe I had been dreaming, for all those years, and what I woke up to was that the volcano we’d all been living on, well, it had gone off. Erupted, and it felt like out of the blue, but looking back, we can’t say we wasn’t warned. There was enough folks talking about it, but we was too busy to notice. That or scared. And enough people were talking but too many people weren’t listening and the real dumb part? The real dumb part was that, back then, there was still time to do something about it. We could’ve stopped it all, if only we’d all made just a little effort. It wouldn’t have been so very hard for things to have turned out different. But that’s what they call wishful thinking, right? When it’s too late to do anything.
*
O eager little scout of the world’s adventures! What was I to do then? More than ever I knew I needed to be home, but like I just said, where was home? Snowflake? Maybe. It had felt that way once. But the world had changed. Mona had told me to follow my own path and it was Mona who told me I oughta go back and find my family. Such as it was. The moment she said that, I knew she was right. I had to be back with my tribe. My in-group. But I knew that wasn’t my real mother, even if I could have found her, for no one knew where she was at. My story had ended with her long before, that day I’d pulled out my phone and felt nothing but a little sorry for her. Instead, I thought of Jack, and his new Suzanne, and I knew that was where I needed to be, even if it meant I would be sicker. So with the help of Polleux and his satellite phone that was only for emergencies, I made my plans to return to flatland, undiagnosis and all. I had my mask and that would have to do.
O eager little scout of the world’s adventures! Yes, I can still see what a fine and shiny kid I was, I was, even then. From here, all these years later, you know I can still see all the way back to that bright and chomping child, that glittering and earnest kid, eyes wide open at the world and happily waiting for what the world would throw at me.
And you know what it threw. Now, yes, you know as well as I do, there’s a little tiredness in all our bones, in all our bones, but never mind that, because that don’t matter and I wonder, oh, where have I yet to go?
I find I cannot imagine.
Still, one thing comes back to me.
The day Jack made it out into the deep desert, to collect me from John Polleux’s house. It had taken him longer than we thought, on account of the police everywhere and the army trucks mobilized and that thing they called the civil unrest, as not just the great nation but all the rest of ’em collapsed. Just ceased to be, overnight. As far as bacteria would judge the time elapsed, that is.
This was way early on. It was before the real shit took place. And the days were long and empty and the land was still beautiful. The calm days, days of blue sky and sun only served as eerie threats of the howling to come. No day from then on was without fear.
This was about the time them stories went around, like that one about the president. How she’d tried to offer her four bodyguards a million
dollars each to get her out on a Secret Service helicopter, but they’d already realized that a) you can’t eat money and b) there was nowhere to run to. Not that that really made any great difference. That was the end of the president.
And all was not for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In the end, we all learned that. And we all learned why, in the end. I guess we all learned it someplace different. The place I learned it was Snowflake.
So Jack arrived that day and he and Polleux nodded grimly at each other and we left, but just before we went, Polleux came out of the house and gave me some stuff for the journey. Some food, wrapped up. And a bottle of water. And even then something tickled at the back of my mind that one little bottle of water wasn’t gonna get me and Jack very far. And over the years, I have come to think that wasn’t the point of that bottle. That the point of that bottle was something else. That it had something to do with being the zanjero. Every time I think of that day, I hear Polleux’s old soft voice saying, ‘Ash, it’s time to tend the garden.’
Then Polleux sent me out into the best of all possible worlds, and Jack and I made one stop at Mona’s for me to say goodbye and I couldn’t say the words, I could only hold her and cry while she told me it was gonna be okay, and then we, I mean Jack and me, we vectored back home. And? Well, we made the best of it. Just like you did.
But still, I wonder back to the deep desert, and I wonder what happened to Mona and Finch and Detlef and the others. I wonder what happened to Socrates. I wonder if there are still ten thousand plastic figures dancing their asses off in the sunshine. I bet there are, Jenny Krazy-Glued ’em down real good. And I wonder what happened to the mice. Because I wonder whether Polleux is still alive and I tell myself, no, he can’t be, that was years ago and he was an old man even then. He couldn’t still be alive, out there in the desert, making his mad plans to save the world. But I like to think he is. And now I am old too. Old and, well, did I get better? Like I said to you an age ago, that depends on what exactly you mean by better. Don’t it? And anyway, it really don’t mean much anymore anyhow, not the way things became, and the real important thing is that we’re still here.
And still learning.
You know, just the other day as I sat on my plastic barrel on line at the water pump, I thought, huh, Ash, maybe you was a snowflake, but so was we all. Every last one of us. We were all as fragile as a tiny crystal of ice. And then I thought, but yeah, you put a lot of snowflakes together and what have you got? You got an avalanche. And they tell me that avalanches were real powerful, not fragile at all. And then I thought, hell, there was probably a moment, one last moment in our history, when we coulda come together, and we coulda been that avalanche, and roared. We coulda changed the world.
And I realized that had already happened once in our history. Remember how we’re all descended from that one woman, Eve? How there was just one small family of us left, and in great peril? We musta come together then, and made an avalanche, and we changed the world.
But second time around, we missed that chance. We simply didn’t see it coming. We were too many of us, or we were too busy, or we weren’t paying attention, or we were just too darn optimistic to believe that our world would end. But it did.
And yet, still, still, maybe there’s time for one final chance, those of us who’re left: all of us still eager little scouts, staring out into the world, wondering what will happen next. And we was dumb, we was certainly dumb, and I guess I can’t say that I am any smarter than I was back then, but I can’t help but feel sorry for who we were, no matter how dumb or scared or greedy or kind or ignorant or whatever it was we were.
We were all those things. More besides.
And we were all sick, we were all sick.
We just didn’t know it yet.
Author’s Note
This story contains references to: the thought of Noam Chomsky (it’s an anagram); a song written by Mike Skinner; a number of philosophers, most notably Voltaire (him that was 1694 to 1778); but above all to Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain. I’d like to thank Susie Molloy for her generosity, and Susan Cooper for telling me about Rose Macaulay’s book The Towers of Trebizond at just the right moment, when I was wondering if it was possible to let Ash be Ash.
Marcus Sedgwick
Haute Savoie
June 2019
About the Author
Marcus Sedgwick is the bestselling author of over thirty books. He has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal seven times, among other major prizes. He is the recipient of the eminent Printz Award as well as two Printz Honors, giving him the most citations to date for America’s most notable book prize for writing for young adults.
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