The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  “How did she die?” Jake mumbled.

  Agnes blinked. “I told you. The City killed her.”

  “I know, but how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know she’s dead then?”

  “I just do,” Agnes snapped.

  The Twins exchanged looks so meaningful that Agnes imagined they’d just shared everything they’d ever thought.

  “Well, if it did kill her, I’m not surprised,” said Celeste and shook her head like Agnes had seen Helen, her mother, do earlier. “I honestly don’t think you could live here and go back to the City and survive. Like, the air would instantly kill you.”

  “Totally,” said Patty.

  “I guess,” said Jake.

  “Are there still a lot of sick kids in the City?”

  “Oh, definitely,” blurted Celeste.

  “Were you sick?” Agnes asked.

  Celeste shook her head. “When I was younger. But not anymore.”

  “But we have every right to be here,” Patty cried.

  “Whoa,” said Jake, softly, soothingly. “Calm down, Patty.”

  Patty huffed like a deer in danger, and she glanced at Agnes with a sneer.

  They fell into silence and listened to the words of the Manual. It was the part about the Wilderness State’s system for fines. Fines for garbage, fines for entering restricted areas. The most absurd one to Agnes was the hefty fine for dying. She doubted as they read they even understood that’s what it meant, it was so odd. Carl had explained it to her one day, skipping stones into the river. How even though your body would hopefully be scavenged, your clothing and personal items would need to be retrieved in order to lessen the impact, and that usually amounted to a rescue mission, the tab for which the dead person’s family or next of kin would have to pay. “Yet another reason to stay alive,” Carl had said to her.

  Jake’s attention had turned back to his shoes, and he flicked his hair repeatedly to try to see what he was cleaning.

  “You’re going to die out here, you know,” Agnes said quietly. “And then they’re going to have to find your body and airlift out what’s left of it.”

  The Twins guffawed. “Wow,” they said in unison.

  Agnes flitted her hands in front of her eyes, pretending to be blinded. “Because of your hair.”

  Jake nodded seriously. “We’re all going to die.” He flipped his hair. “Someday.”

  Celeste flopped back dramatically into the evening sand. Patty followed closely behind.

  Agnes cocked her head and peered at them. “Are they hurt?” she asked Jake.

  “You are too much,” Celeste said from the ground. She rose up again on an elbow and smiled before her face took on what seemed to be its natural scowl. “You’ll have to let us know what the deal is here,” she said. She cast withering looks around at the trees, the river, the birds flitting by, Agnes’s soiled moccasins. “I mean, what the fuck is this place?”

  “It’s the Wilderness,” Agnes said.

  “And? I mean, what is that?”

  Agnes looked at Jake. “It’s the Wilderness,” she said.

  Celeste’s eyes tumbled in their sockets, and she flopped to the ground again.

  The Twins settled their gazes on the sky, and Agnes walked away. The Twins made her tired.

  “The stars aren’t that much better here,” she heard Celeste complain.

  “I was just thinking that,” said Patty.

  “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Exactly.”

  Agnes looked back once more at Jake, who was still watching her. She felt how hunched her back had become under his gaze, so she straightened it. She had the urge to punch him, and so she ran as fast as she could to where the adults, of which she was one, were prepping meat.

  * * *

  The next morning they set about breaking down the shacks the Newcomers had erected. The boards of wood were hazards of rusted spikes and nails, slim ragged splinters and mold.

  Agnes worked alone on one little shack. The outside was made of slats from old apple crates. The walls were dusty, broken-up paintings of idyllic apple farms. Sand crabs leapt around the sand floor. Each time Agnes pulled a board, dust and particulate burst into a cloud that enveloped her. She tried to cover her mouth, but it didn’t help. After a few boards, Agnes stumbled outside as her whole body shook in a fit of coughing. Doubled over like that, staring through her watery eyes, she conjured an old memory and her stomach curled with dread. She remembered herself in her small bedroom, curled in her pink bed coughing into her pink sheets until a spray of red appeared, illuminated by the glare from the City’s night lights. She saw her mother appear, scoop her to her chest, and run with her into the hall, down so many flights of stairs to another apartment. It was spare and smelled of bleach. It belonged to a private doctor her mother paid for emergencies. Almost no doctor worked on emergencies anymore because there were no emergencies anymore. Because of overpopulation, emergencies were thought of more or less as fate.

  When her mother laid her on the doctor’s cot, she saw her blood on her mother’s shirt. It was not a blob, or smear. No, it looked as though her face had imprinted itself there in blood—a small eye hole, a smooth cheek, and a gaping mouth. Sometimes, now, walking in the woods, she would see a blot of color somewhere—lichen on a tree trunk, or a boulder sneering out from green grass—and think of this half face, her face. It was a death mask of a death she had cheated. She saw this mask many places, on many things. In other colors. The green blood of trees. Blue blood of water. Blowing white flower petals. Whatever made those things alive, whatever was the core that made them unknowable.

  When she saw her mother again, it was the next day and the mark was gone. A new shirt. Clean, peach. Agnes remembered being angry that her mother would discard the mark of such a moment.

  But it had happened before, those dashes to the doctor. They would happen again.

  “She’s building a tolerance,” Agnes remembered the doctor saying of the medicine.

  “What can you do about that?” her mother asked.

  “Nothing. This is where we are. Unless you’ve got different air to breathe,” she said, trailing off. Then she snorted bitterly because it was an absurd idea. Different air to breathe.

  Agnes straightened back up, took a deep, careful breath of different air, and saw Dolores watching her. The girl hid partway behind one of the wayward shacks, a corner of wood-crate scrap, part of which read, Regal.

  Dolores performed a few feeble coughs into her hand, mirroring Agnes’s fit. Agnes imagined Dolores was trying to sympathize. Maybe it was her secret handshake. Yes, she’d most likely been sick too. She looked like she had, recently. She was skinny, her hair dull, her skin sallow. The dark under her eyes. The way she was so bound and careful in her body, as though a thoughtless move could bring on a painful coughing spasm. Agnes remembered it all somewhere in her body.

  “Hey,” Agnes said. Dolores’s eyes got wide and bright, as though stunned to be seen. “How are you?”

  Dolores’s gulp was audible, but she stepped out from behind her shed and carefully over to Agnes.

  “Why aren’t there more kids like you and your brother in the group?” Agnes asked.

  Again Dolores’s eyes bugged at being asked a real question. She shrugged with her whole body as if to beg Agnes to believe her. She did not know.

  She sat down and held out a small rubber ball and rolled it to Agnes’s feet in the sand. She motioned for Agnes to roll it back, and so Agnes knelt.

  “There was one,” Dolores said.

  “Oh,” said Agnes.

  “How many years are you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Agnes.

  “Really?”

  “Really. I might be thirty years old. But probably I’m a lot younger than that. How old are you?”

  “I’m three plus.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Are there flowers here?”

  “There
are many flowers here, but only during certain times of the year.”

  “What time of the year is it?”

  “It’s the fall.”

  “Are there flowers now?”

  “Not really.”

  Dolores’s eyes were big, and her small mouth pursed in thought. She was lucky to be here. To be here and getting better. Agnes imagined that somewhere deep down she might know that. Briefly Agnes’s mind was flooded with the image of a little ill Dolores sputtering blood uncontrollably, as Agnes herself had done. It was a vile and violent image, and she pushed it quickly from her mind. It was okay to remember herself like that, but it seemed cruel to put someone else through it, even if it was only in her imagination.

  When they had first arrived in the Wilderness State, Agnes had been one of five children. Sister and Brother were still here, but Ali died quickly. Perhaps too sick already to handle such a physical life. There were other dangers here. The adults must have understood that.

  She remembered Flor leaving when her mother, Maria, decided it had been a mistake to come. Her mother had gotten scared after the first death, and after a bear raided their camp. No one was hurt, but the bear refused to leave, luxuriating and shitting on their beds and trying to eat all their provisions. They went without food for two days while they stalked it, waiting for an opportunity to kill it. There were some hungry days while they figured it all out. At the next Post, Maria went to the Ranger at the front desk and said, “I surrender.”

  “Surrender? Surrender what?”

  “I don’t know. I renounce my Wilderness citizenship.”

  “Lady, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Well, okay, then. Go home.”

  She stared at him blankly. “How?”

  He pulled out a piece of paper. “Bus schedule. When you know the time you want to go, we can call you a taxi.” Maybe they’d been there a month.

  During the next spring Debra got a letter at Post from Maria. Little Flor had died.

  “Well, she might have died here too.” Debra forced a shrug. There were no guarantees.

  Agnes smiled, and Dolores looked at her face seriously for a moment, then offered a small uncertain smile. Agnes had been a bit older than Dolores when she had arrived. She couldn’t think of how it might feel to be three years old here. She wanted to say something that would make the uncertainty in Dolores’s face go away.

  “Dolores,” Linda barked, and Dolores sprinted off to her mother. Linda peered at Agnes with curiosity and distrust as her daughter slipped under her arm, the safest place, like a chick under wing. Dolores’s face became serene. Agnes felt an aching absence. She remembered being that young, that easily safe. Agnes was happy to be an adult now. But she missed feeling safe like that. It was gone from her life for good.

  With so many new faces to look at, she realized, she had not imagined her mother’s face since before they’d entered the dark forest. Every day before that she’d woken in the middle of a dream of her mother’s face. Not of her. Just of her face hovering over everything the dream presented or told. In a dream where a coyote pack attacked their camp, her mother’s face was the moon, glowing over the carnage. In a dream of finding a hidden bunch of wild onions under her pillow, once the dirt was brushed from the small white bulb, her mother’s face appeared in its pearly skin. Her mother was the face of an owl Agnes had startled while on a frog-catching walk with Val. No, that had to have been real, not a dream. They had caught frogs and snails for dinner. And her mother had peered down at them with irritation. Agnes swore she’d seen her mother’s terrible face. Her angry mother, still angry at her.

  Celeste shuffled up to Agnes with what seemed like pure dread in her body.

  “Ugh,” she said, looking at Agnes expectantly.

  “Ugh?” Agnes asked.

  “UGH,” Celeste said with more emphasis, her eyes surveying the shanty demolition. “This is so dumb,” she clarified.

  “Why?”

  Celeste pouted. “I miss my little house.”

  “In the City?” Agnes asked.

  Celeste rolled her eyes. “No, here. It had a little window with flowery drapes. It had a smooth floor that I danced across and it smelled like roses.”

  “You’re lying,” Agnes said. “Nothing smells like roses here.” She didn’t remember the last time she’d smelled a rose. All she smelled was brine and rot and salt and fir.

  Celeste shook her head. “I’m pretending, stupid.”

  Agnes nodded, but she wasn’t sure what the difference was between pretending and lying.

  Celeste said, “Besides, where would I get drapes? And there’s nothing smooth for a million miles. But it makes me feel better.”

  “Why do you need to feel better?”

  “Because I’m sad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to be here.”

  “Oh.” Agnes looked down at the ground overcome, her mind racing. Chasing after something. A feeling. What was it? It was right at the tips of her reaching fingers—

  “I was sad too,” she sputtered, almost breathless.

  “When?” Celeste said, her eyes slits, ready to take vengeance if she were made a fool.

  “When I got here.”

  Celeste looked at the ants marching over Agnes’s dirty moccasins, the stains on her smock from where she wiped her hands. Her hard dirt-smeared arms. The mud under her nails. “You were.” She said it with skepticism.

  “Yes,” Agnes said slowly, the memory piecing itself together after being broken for so many years. She hadn’t wanted to come here. She hadn’t wanted to leave her friends. No matter how much blood she coughed up. She hadn’t wanted to leave her pink bed. The bed her mother remade every morning so it looked as it might in a magazine. She hadn’t really understood where they were going or what it would be like. But she could tell in the way her mother tensed her shoulders, tried to straighten her back to seem stronger, that it was a hard place. That there was danger. That her mother was afraid. And she looked around at their small but pleasant home and wondered, Why? Why would they leave a place they knew for a place they didn’t know? She must have been four at that time, going on five. She’d worn socks with lace at the cuff just like Dolores had on, and she’d had braids too, just like Dolores. Her mother braided her hair when it was still wet from the bath the night before. Her hair would fray in a halo around her head from dreamy bouts with her pillow. She would go to the preschool in the basement of her building. She took naps and listened to stories there. She shared juice pouches with her friends. What were their names? She couldn’t remember. She might remember them if her mother had spoken their names since they left. Told her stories of Agnes’s life. But her mother only told stories of her own mother, Nana, or of Grandma, her own mother’s mother, or of herself and Agnes. Agnes felt angry at her mother’s self-centeredness. But then she remembered her mother wouldn’t know any stories of Agnes and her friends. These were Agnes’s private memories. How they squirted their juice pouches to make rainbows on the concrete, how they played with one another’s hair during story time. She had forgotten the names of the girls she had shared those moments with. Those times were also times Agnes had been without her mother. The first and last times she had been on her own, until now.

  She had a thought just then.

  “No one really wanted to be here,” she said to Celeste. “But we had to be.”

  “No one?” Celeste asked.

  “Well, Carl probably did.”

  “Which one is Carl?”

  Agnes pointed to Carl, who was picking grubs out from between the rotted boards of their torn-down shacks and popping them into his mouth.

  “Oh, yeah,” Celeste said. “That makes sense.”

  “He’s not weird or anything,” Agnes said, feeling protective of Carl, seeing him through this girl’s eyes, seeing for the first time his dirt, realizing his odor, his matted hair, the zealousness in his eyes. �
��He just belongs here.”

  “Like you?”

  Agnes flushed with pride and some shame. “Like me. Like me now.” She spoke with slow surprise, unsure the words were really coming from her. “At first I wanted my mother to brush my hair every day because I didn’t like it to get tangled.” She pointed to her hatcheted hair. “I wore a white outfit off the bus,” she said, wincing at the image, the brightness of the clothing under the dazzling sun. She squinted. It felt as if she were watching another little girl, a pleasant stranger. “My fingernails were painted,” she said. “They were painted pink. Pink was my favorite color.” Agnes started laughing, then laughing harder, and then Celeste joined in and they got stares from around the beach, especially from Patty. They stopped.

  Celeste leaned in, whispered, “I brought nail polish.”

  Something in Agnes’s stomach turned. She both wanted to see the color, color that wasn’t of the earth, and also wanted nothing to do with something so unreal, so of her mother’s world. A dead world.

  “It would be hilarious to see it on you,” Celeste said. She eyed Agnes’s dirty fingernails.

  “I think it would get in the way,” Agnes said. Could she hunt with painted fingernails? Could she eat with her hands? Could she braid sinew into strong threads? Would it ever come off, or would she have to eat it off? Would she try to eat it off and grow dependent on its sustenance and die once it was gone? Her heart raced.

  “It’s pink,” Celeste said.

  Agnes opened her mouth to say no just as Celeste said, “Come on,” and Agnes followed her.

  Celeste trudged past the Community and the Newcomers, and Patty materialized to walk with them, a camaraderie beyond words. They silently crossed over into the forest, a line that was stark and sunny on one side and dank and dark on the other side.

  Celeste counted, “One two three four . . .” to ten, and then she pivoted left. “One two three four . . .” to ten. She pivoted right. “One two three four . . .” to ten. She stopped. A boulder covered in moss. Celeste peeled back the moss in one wet green sheet and revealed a notch in the rock. From the notch, a neon-pink glow spread like a sunburst.