The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  “Pay attention, Patty,” the woman snarled. The woman was definitely the girl’s mother, Agnes thought, or otherwise related, as they had the same skeptical brow.

  The girl rubbed her arm and frowned at Agnes, blaming her for everything. She tried to pull her foot closer to her body somehow, to keep it away from Agnes. But Agnes had already retreated.

  The mother’s name was Patricia, she told them all, and that was her daughter, Patty.

  “You’re both named Patricia?” Debra asked.

  “I’m Patty,” the girl whined. “Just Patty.”

  “And I’m just Patricia,” said Patty’s mother, rolling her eyes.

  There was another girl who looked to be Patty’s age named Celeste. She had a streak of blue in her hair and wore combat boots, which Agnes thought was one of the more sensible footwear choices of the group. The girl’s mother, Helen, wore the ripped skirt and strappy sandals, her toenails covered in sparkly gold polish. The mother seemed embarrassed of her daughter, the way she stood next to her but apart, hugging her arms as though cold. The daughter seemed to feel likewise, slouching away, leaning toward Patty. Agnes watched the two girls briefly brush their hands together in solidarity.

  Patty’s dad was Frank. He did most of the talking for his group.

  There were two other children, a little boy and a girl, young, with their mother. The mother was Linda, and the boy and girl were Joven and Dolores. The kids looked overwhelmed by the distance of the horizon and kept their eyes down. Sometimes the girl, Dolores, covered her nose, as though still unaccustomed to the smell of this place, even though they’d been there weeks, possibly months. It was so wet and rotting. So salted. When the girl looked up briefly, Agnes caught her eye and wrinkled her nose sympathetically. Dolores smiled shyly, looking just beyond Agnes, as though it was the closest her eyes could get. Joven wore glasses and had a buzz cut that made his hair look like a velvet cap. Dolores had braids, one on each side of her head, and formerly white socks with a folded cuff adorned with lace. The socks were smudged dark brown now, but the fold was still impossibly crisp, as though sewn into place. Dolores reminded Agnes of herself, when she was a young girl first here. Though Agnes would have been more excited than the girl seemed. But maybe she was misremembering. She might have been just as scared back then, with the new sights and sounds and smells, not able to look at much full on. But she couldn’t remember. She could only remember being how she was now. She made a note to ask Glen.

  “That’s Jake,” Frank said. “He’s with us.” He pointed to a boy whose bangs covered his eyes just like a curtain Agnes remembered from her apartment, one that swept to the side and was gathered in a hook. His ear was supposed to act as the hook, sweeping the bangs to the side. But it did a poor job, and he kept jerking his head to whip the hair out of his eyes. It seemed intentional that his eyes were covered, and yet it also seemed to Agnes that he wanted to see. It didn’t make any sense to her. She stared at him, thinking of all the ways he could be killed here with hair like that. Then, he snapped his hair out of his eyes and smiled at her. She realized that he had been watching her. Watching her face work through all her thoughts on his hair. She hadn’t noticed because he had hidden his eyes from her, tricking her into letting her guard down. It had been a trap, as effective as the dead drops they set for small animals. And now she could see that his smile was more of a smirk. A knowing look. He had good instincts. She felt a wave of respect and blushed.

  The Newcomers had set up a makeshift camp from tents, and around their tents, they’d built a small collection of useless shacks. They said they’d found old boards and either had scavenged nails from this unexpected wasteland of civilized detritus or brought them in themselves. Either way, they seemed to have grown attached to their illegal structures. The Community only saw them as broken rules they would probably be penalized for. Around the perimeter of their camp were clumps of purple shit, pocked with skins. They’d been living off the hard beach plums and feral grapes and hadn’t bothered to dig a pit toilet. Someone would have to search for each smeary shit in order to bury them.

  Carl asked if they knew anything about the baby car seat and the missing baby, Rachel. The Newcomers said they did not and it was easy to believe them. They had no idea what was about to happen to them. With their cargo shorts and loafers, skirts and button-down shirts. The unbroken rubber soles of their shoes. They looked like they would not last long. With their fat stomachs and thighs. Their skin so soft and uncooked by the sun. They had all their toenails. All their toes. Their hair was smooth and unbroken and glinting in the sun. Agnes could barely remember when they themselves had been that fat and delicious-looking. But she knew they had been. A line of drool fell out of her mouth and into the sand.

  “Okay, we’ve got a big Community now,” Carl said. “We’ll have to stay here for a few days, get more provisions. Introduce these Newcomers here to how we do things. Tomorrow, first thing, we’ll tear down these shacks.”

  “Why?” the Newcomers cried.

  “Because you can’t build structures here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you serious?” Carl asked. He grabbed the Manual and threw it at them. It landed at their colorful covered feet.

  “You should be familiar with this already,” he said. “What did you do on all the buses? Watch movies?”

  They exchanged sheepish looks.

  “Name one rule.”

  “Hmm.” Frank paused. “Leave no trace?”

  “And what does that mean?”

  They all looked at their feet.

  “Are you telling me you’re not familiar with any of our rules here?” Carl was getting worked up, which made Agnes snicker. Carl hated rules. But no one would know that from the way he was staring incredulously at the Newcomers. He shook his head, his body slumped with dramatic disappointment. As though he thought the rules were the only thing that mattered.

  “We didn’t have a lot of time,” cried Frank. “One day we get a call and now we’re here.” The others nodded.

  Helen said, “We had a week to throw all this stuff together. It was crazy. We got the Manual on the bus, but . . .”

  Carl sighed. “Well, I don’t even know what to say. Honestly.” He shook his head again, drenched in disappointment. “There’s not a lot of time for catch up. And our success depends on us all following these rules.” He paused, nodded his head emphatically. “These very important rules. You’re going to have to follow me very closely to survive.”

  The Newcomers looked at Carl like he might save them. But a moment ago they hadn’t looked like people who thought they needed saving. Carl had convinced them of that quickly. He’d scared them into believing whatever he said. It was just like what Carl did when he and Agnes played Hunted! When he was the hunter, he liked to give long speeches about mercy and compassion and would catch her and let her go several times before he killed her. When she was the hunter, she just killed him immediately. From the ground, pretending to be dead, Carl would whisper, “You’re supposed to play with your prey a little—it’s the best part.” He liked the drama. But she didn’t see the point.

  The sun began to set and the bats arrived, clicking around their heads to see if they were edible, then flitting off to more palatable prey. The Community laid their skin beds in a wider circle around the Newcomers’ ring of tents. To protect them, they said, but Agnes knew it was to contain them.

  The Community built a fire and Carl made the Newcomers circle around it and read aloud sections from the Manual. Agnes hovered nearby and listened.

  They skipped around, read Sections 2 through 2.18, Sections 4d, 4e, 4f, and 4g. The parts about micro trash, and hunting yield caps, and the part about Post check-ins and garbage weighing, and what they were allowed to write home about in letters. They read rules the Community didn’t even follow anymore, the part about staying in one camp no longer than seven days being a key one.

  They passed it around like a book of bedtime stories. Jo
ven and Dolores leaned on their mother. They were asleep. The Manual was a boring story.

  Agnes remembered the early days when they would read stories from the books around the fire. But she didn’t remember ever reading the Manual. It was something only the adults had to read. It wasn’t funny and had no characters or animals and nothing really happened. Just a lot of lines and dots and numbers and symbols. Not like in the Book of Fables. That was her favorite book, and it had been lost in a flash flood. She had almost been lost in the flood too. She had been reading at the riverbank, tapping toes on the cold wet sand, engrossed in the description of a deep dark wood where a girl walked alone, when she was yanked from behind, dropping the book in surprise, just as a large brown slide of water rushed by, thick and muddy and sudden, like a frog’s tongue unfurling but never curling back. Glen had grabbed her. With her feet safe on the dry bank, she had a dreamlike memory of her name being called urgently again and again somewhere in the background of the fable about the stupid, careless girl and that misunderstood wolf.

  When she looked down at her hands and realized the book was gone, she’d started to cry. “Because,” she had said to Glen and her mother, who had sprinted up, her eyes wet and terrifying, “I didn’t get to see what happened to the wolf.” And then, she remembered, her mother began to cry and then Glen began to cry, and they were clutching her hard and they were all crying over this book that had been swept away. They would find it a week later when they crisscrossed downriver. It was torn by rocks or scavenged for nest materials. What remained was thick, bloated, the colors and black words smeared across the pages. Agnes picked it up, and the binding split in two. The heavy halves plunged from her hands. But she didn’t cry this time. She felt no sadness at all, which made her wonder why they’d all been so upset when it was first lost. Was grief that short-lived?

  After the Book of Fables disappeared, they’d begun to tell stories of their own around the fire. It made every day interesting, even if it had been a day marked only by the white sun or a sky filled with only one flat cloud. A day when no animal had stirred and barely anyone had spoken, except to signal when to stop and when to go. A story at the end of a day like that saved it.

  Agnes watched Glen approach the fire. He stood and listened for a moment, until the Newcomers stopped reading and stared at him.

  “You don’t have to stop for me,” Glen said. “I was just listening.”

  “Why?” Patricia asked.

  “Don’t you know all this stuff?” Frank said. They did not seem to appreciate being watched.

  Glen stuttered. “Well, yeah, I just . . .” He hesitated, then sat down. “I just had a question.”

  “Okay?” Frank raised his eyebrows.

  “I know we’re all here now and we want to concentrate on surviving and all that, but I was just curious. Can you elaborate on how bad it is in the City?”

  “What do you mean?” said Helen.

  “I mean, you all have referenced how bad it is. So bad there’s an extraordinarily long waitlist, and I get the sense that you’re not all scientists, or adventurers, or people with very sick children. And that’s kind of the roster we came in with. So I’m just curious if you could give me some context for just how bad it is. Because we could barely find the original twenty people to come here in the first place. So I’m just astonished people want to come here now.”

  Agnes had never seen Glen talk so much at once. He seemed nervous about his question. She looked at the Newcomers and their squinting eyes. Was he being rude somehow?

  “When you say, ‘We couldn’t find people,’ who’s ‘we’?” Frank asked.

  “Me and my wife. We kind of got this experiment up and running.”

  The Newcomers looked at one another.

  “I thought Carl started it,” said Linda.

  Glen looked struck. But he smiled. “Well, no. Carl was one of my students a long time ago. And he certainly helped. But no, it was me and Bea and Agnes. We were the first subjects.” He touched Agnes’s head and she blushed.

  “Who is Bea?” said Patricia.

  Glen looked stunned to realize they wouldn’t know her. Of course they wouldn’t know her. She wasn’t here. He stuttered, “She’s my wife. Agnes’s mother.”

  “Did she die?”

  “No, no, no.” He shook his head violently. “She had to go back to the City.”

  A few of the Newcomers gasped.

  “Why?” cried Helen.

  “Her mother died. She had to go deal with it.”

  “Deal with what?” Helen asked, confused.

  “Her mother’s death.”

  “But her mother was dead,” Frank said.

  “Right.”

  “So why did she need to go back if she was dead? I can see if she was dying, but she was already dead, is that right?”

  Glen swallowed. He nodded.

  “There’s no way she went back for that,” said Frank.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No one would ever try to go to the City on purpose. Everyone’s trying to leave.”

  “Don’t be hyperbolic, Frank,” Patricia said. “Not everyone is trying to leave. There’s a lot of people you don’t know.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of people I do know, Patricia,” Frank spat. “I know a lot more than you do.” Agnes was surprised at his tone. He’d seemed benign.

  Agnes saw Glen purse his lips as he often did when he was aggravated. He did it when he got mail from his department. He did it when Carl was giving a speech. Agnes put her hand on his arm and he took a breath.

  “Sorry, Patricia,” said Helen, “but I have to agree with Frank.” She turned to Glen. “The City is not a place you return to. I’ll bet she went somewhere else.”

  “No,” Glen said calmly. “She’s in the City.”

  “She probably went to the Private Lands,” said Linda.

  The Newcomers made sounds with their mouths, tsks and clicks and hmms, judgmental sounds, understanding sounds, sounds full of pity.

  “I’m sure that’s where she is,” Frank said.

  “Lucky woman,” said Patricia.

  “But she just left you behind, sweetie?” Helen cried, touching Agnes’s cheek, and Agnes recoiled.

  “Enough,” Glen cried, and the entire camp fell silent. “I just want to know about the City. My wife is there. And I’m worried about her.”

  Agnes heard his voice tremble and she swallowed, stunned. How could he worry about her when clearly she hadn’t worried about them? And all these people knew it too. Didn’t he hear Helen? She left us.

  Helen signed, exasperated. “What more do you need to know? It’s bad. We left and there are many more trying.”

  Again the Newcomers made mouth noises to express their pity, and Glen’s shoulders sank and he walked away.

  The Newcomers fell into quieter sounds, clicking to themselves now, as though telegraphing private thoughts and ideas and feelings to one another that no one else could interpret, like a colony of bats. They were a tight group, and Agnes thought for the first time that maybe they were not as hapless as they seemed.

  She turned to leave.

  “Hey.” A whisper came from the shadows.

  Sitting just outside the circle of firelight, not paying attention, were the two girls Patty and Celeste and the boy Jake. They all stared into the fire with a look on each of their faces she couldn’t decipher, though it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. Their faces were curiously blank.

  Then Celeste peered at her. “What . . . is with your hair?”

  Agnes touched its soft stubble. “It’s short,” she said.

  The two girls looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “No kidding,” Celeste said.

  Patty said, “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Agnes. “Probably twenty?”

  The girls guffawed.

  “No way,” Patty said. “We’re fourteen.” She motioned to the three of them. The boy had yet to speak, but he watched Agnes from
under those cascading bangs. She imagined a cougar leaping from above. He wouldn’t know until the whoosh of its body parted those bangs and he would finally see. Oh, then he would see. But it would be too late. What a sad end. What an unnecessary impairment.

  Celeste watched Agnes studying them. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “You do?” Agnes asked.

  “You’re thinking how much we look alike.” Celeste motioned to her and Patty. Agnes hadn’t even been looking at them.

  “We’re twins,” Patty said.

  They looked nothing alike. One was the color of dry sand, the other of wet soil. One even seemed older by a couple of years. And they had different mothers. But Agnes nodded.

  “Jake is my cousin,” Patty said, hooking her thumb at him.

  Agnes narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that true?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His voice was deeper than she would have expected. He had no facial hair, but he sounded like a man. His voice was not meek the way his shoulders were. He kept her gaze.

  “I have a dead sister,” Agnes said.

  “Gross,” Celeste said.

  “So,” Patty said, “did your mom really go back to the City?”

  “Yeah,” Agnes said. “And it killed her.”

  “So, she’s dead too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh,” said Celeste. “Then why did your dad say he was worried about her?”

  “Glen? He won’t accept that she’s gone.”

  “That is so sad,” the Twins murmured.

  Agnes nodded. “I tell him she’s not coming back and that we’re fine without her.” It wasn’t something she’d ever told him out loud. They didn’t often speak of her mother. But if he ever asked, it’s what she would say. She thought it would make things easier on him to know. It was easier on her since she decided that was the story of her mother.

  The Twins nodded. Agnes glanced at Jake and saw a skeptical look on his face.