Afterland Read online

  Don’t get too comfy, boo.

  “Ahoy,” Bhavana calls out. “Company in the house!”

  The kitchen is cheerful chaos, mismatched pots and plates, a Tibetan prayer flag, a papier-mâché mask fashioned to look like an angler fish high up on a shelf. Deeper into the house, an oversize wolf’s-head protest puppet dangles from the living-room ceiling like a balsa-and-tissue-paper admonishment above the brand-new couches and the floor-to-ceiling bookcases stacked with well-worn books.

  A lump on the couch stirs, indignantly. “Do you know what time it is?” An ample woman with full sleeve tattoos and overdyed black hair sits up and throws off her quilt, embroidered with vulvas on every panel, Cole notices.

  “Time for the revolution!” Vana says, cheerful. “Like every time. Hey, Angel. Meet Nicky and Mila. Found them on the road.”

  “Ugh,” Angel grumbles, stretching out her arms, the right twined with snakes and flowers, the other with an octopus on her bare left shoulder, dangling long tentacles all the way to the wrist, but only half-colored. “It’s too early to overthrow the system. I did not fucking consent to six a.m.” She gets up and staggers toward the kitchen. “Hi, new people,” she waves half-heartedly in their direction. “I’m making tea, do you want? I’d offer you kombucha, but I don’t trust Michelle to know the proper care and feeding of scobies.”

  “Tea is fine. Or coffee?” Cole is hopeful.

  “Yeah, right.” Angel clatters around. “Rarer than dicks with the South America boycotts. I don’t know what the interim government is thinking. Just legalize drugs, put a stop to narco violence once and for all, and then we can have all the sweet, sweet caffeine imports we need again. Oh shit.” She freezes. “Sorry, didn’t mean to say ‘dicks’ in front of your kid. Or ‘shit’…Oh, fuck.”

  “She’s so preoccupied with your dogs she didn’t even hear you.”

  “Did too,” Mila calls from the living room, where she is on the floor, rubbing Hypatia’s belly. “And the word is pre-dog-upied.”

  “Green tea?” Cole counters.

  “Can do.” Angel scoops tea leaves into a strainer shaped like the Titanic.

  “You going to be with us for a while?”

  “A day or two, max. We need to get to Vail. My family has a wilderness camp there. They’re waiting.”

  “Good, that’s great,” Angel seems relieved. “I mean, stay as long as you like, if the rest of the house agrees, but it can get pretty crazy here. And everyone has to contribute, sign up for the roster. Take a load off,” she gestures with a tea cup. “You want tea, kid?”

  “No, thank you.” Mila climbs onto the couch and pats the cushion next to her. The pregnant Lab doesn’t need convincing.

  “Down, girl!” Angel claps her hands.

  “I don’t mind. I like your dogs.”

  Vana is looking puzzled, and Cole realizes she has screwed up. Again. She said Denver before, not Vail. Shit. After lecturing Mila.

  “This is only half of them,” Angel calls from the kitchen. “We have cats too, but Kittgenstein mainly hangs out in Michelle’s room, and Fanon does what he wants.”

  See, deadhusbandguy, they also name their cats terrible puns, what’s not to trust?

  Angel points at the wolf puppet hanging above them. “That guy up there is Bigly Wolf.” It’s seen better days. The paper skin over the skull is ripped in places, one torn flap of cheek hanging down to expose the LED wiring inside. It’s wearing a bulky t-shirt hand-printed with the words “Black Mesa Sovereignty.”

  “He gets a wardrobe change and a spruce-up whenever we take him out, which hasn’t been for a while now, but we’ve been busy.”

  An older woman with springy gray curls and sun-baked skin walks in, wearing an oversize t-shirt and with that inner stillness that only comes from half a century of yoga. Cole is envious. Calm is another planet, one she hasn’t visited for a while now.

  “Picking up strays again, Vana?” she asks the meteorologist, but she’s smiling.

  “That’s me, Patty,” she shrugs. “Collecting data and random folk along the road. This here is Nicky, and the smaller version is Mila.”

  “Well, we’re very glad to have you.” She puts her hands on her hips, taking them in. “You let us know whatever you need.”

  “Internet?” Cole says hopefully. (What is she going to say to Keletso back home, after over a year of radio silence? “Hey, friend, long time no speak. So, listen, I accidentally murdered my sister on top of my existing charges, and now we’re on the run, and can you send help?”) “And a shower maybe.” She sniffs at her shirt. “Definitely.”

  “Well, you have a choice. The cottage is empty right now, or I can boot one of the girls out of an upstairs bedroom. It’s cozier here with us, but maybe you like your privacy.”

  “The cottage, please. If that’s all right.”

  “I’ll show you. Leave the kid with the dogs—she looks happy. That all you’ve got with you?”

  “Traveling light.”

  “Huh. All the furniture is reclaimed—have you heard about the What You Need movement? We encourage stores to leave their doors open, let people help themselves. We’ve had a lot of support from the Mormon Church too.”

  “Sister wives are used to sharing?”

  “You’re making fun, but there are a lot of women-centered communities who are managing the transition better than the rest of us.”

  “Qatar and Egypt have more female programmers than the U.S.” Angel hands her a steaming cup. “Careful, it’s hot. Our government is trying to lure them over with immigration packages. It’s caused a real political stink.”

  “I heard that,” Cole bluffs. But of course she hasn’t. She takes a sip to cover, and scalds her tongue.

  “Tsk. I warned you,” Angel tuts.

  “You’re swamping the poor woman. Come on, bring your mug.” Patty holds the door to the front garden open. A spotted chicken with tufted feet flees ahead of them, zig-agging across their path and disappearing into the lush vegetable patch.

  It’s a relief to be here, to have someone else caring for their well-being, even for a moment. Fight or flight is not a manageable modus operandi. Like holding a stress position from the torturer’s handbook, it threads wires through your nerves. But if she lets it go slack, there’s a chance she’ll fall apart. She has to be careful. Kindness can undo.

  “We grow our own vegetables here, but there’s a community plot three blocks over. Old parkades make excellent urban farms, especially the multi-story ones.” She ducks under a pergola festooned with fairy lights and air plants, past a labyrinth of white stones and cherry pits set among desert flowers. The stones have markings on them, names, she realizes, handwritten in marker. Some have passport-size photos taped over them.

  “Oh,” Cole bends down to pick one up. “Allan.”

  “It’s our memorial garden.” Patty says. “My husband is here. So is my boyfriend. You’re welcome to leave your own stone, although some people think it’s sacrilegious to walk on the dead.”

  “There was a fence of photographs at…where we used to be,” she finishes lamely. She passed it every day when she was jogging around and around the grounds of Joint Base Lewis-McChord trying to outrace her rage and grief and impotence. They were triple-fenced off from the rest of the world, to protect against outside infection, and also the scores of pilgrims who came to lurk at the gate. They made the fence on either side their own memorial site, plastering the mesh with photographs and letters and mementos, but they all faced outwards, so those inside could only see the blank reverse between the dying flowers or the fabric ones that bleached in the sun and drooped in the rain. Hundreds of blank rectangles layered on top of each other, weathered by rain and faded to a color she thought of as limbo white. The wallpaper of grief.

  Now, she shivers and squeezes the white stone in her hand. Cold and smooth, like a tiny skull. Then she sets Allan carefully back down among the others, closer to the flowers than where she found him. He deserves
a little color, whoever he was.

  Patty watches her patiently. “There’s a memorial wall like that at the Temple downtown. Also a family-friendly commune over at Liberty-Wells. If you were looking to stay for longer.”

  Cole lifts one shoulder. “Well, we’re expected…” Her words trail away. Wanted, more like it.

  Patty leads the way across the overgrown grass to the cottage. “It’s not very glamourous. It’s mostly a toolshed, really, all recycled bricks, and the shelves are 3D printed at our maker lab downtown, but there’s a bed, an outside shower. Water’s not too hot at this hour, but it’s private. I’ll have Vana rustle up some clean sheets and towels. Oh, and she’ll bring out a laptop you can use to get online, and show you how our internet set-up here operates. I guess you must be wanting to…get in touch with your family.”

  She opens the door onto a ramshackle room, with a mattress mounted on cinder blocks, tools on the walls, and a digital-rights activist banner that reads, in stark black and red, “I do not consent to the search of this device,” as if there was personal data baked into the bricks. Maybe there is.

  “It’s perfect. Thank you.” Cole sinks down onto the bed, moving a hollowed-out shell that has been used as an ashtray, recently, and setting it on the ground beside a romance novel. “It’s really kind of you. We won’t be a bother. We’ll be gone tomorrow morning.”

  Patty leans against the doorway with her arms folded. “It’s no bother.”

  “My husband would have loved this place. He was a biomedical engineer. He liked problem-solving, tinkering.” She’s rambling. “Dev would have got involved up to his elbows. Not that you need any help. I mean…” she trails off.

  “We all need help. But not everyone knows how to ask.” She lingers a moment longer, waiting for Cole to say something, spill her guts, fall on her mercy. “Well,” she says, when it’s apparent she’s not going to. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  15.

  Miles: Common misconceptions

  The first mission Miles accepts at Kasproing House is a no-good awful one. Fowl, even, you could say, and he has instant regret the moment he plucks up one of the brown speckled eggs still warm from the chicken’s butt. Cloaca is the technical term, Angel tells him, serving double time as both its butt and its vagina, which is disgusting. But honestly, whoever named it was an idiot; it should clearly be called a “cluckaca.” A small white hen sits at the top of the coop and gives him the gleaming yellow bird’s-eye equivalent of the death stare. Although maybe that’s how chickens look? Miles doesn’t have a lot of avian experience. Vana has dug up an old spare phone for him to use, and he films Chicken Face, doing a crash zoom in on the beast in black and white like it’s a horror movie. He adds text, “why did Cluckacka cross the road…?” and the payoff in a bloody-drippy font, “to kill you all!,” and then he tags on several scream-face emojis. It’s pretty neat.

  His friend Ella would appreciate it, but they’re not allowed internet access back at Ataraxia. She’ll never know what happened to him. She might be stuck in there with the rest of them until she dies. Jonas too. He wonders what happened to that kid. He’ll probably never see either of them again. He prods at that word, “never,” the falling-away feeling of it, like a space-time void, and you could drift away into it forever, or never, and aren’t those the same things?

  “Hey, Mila, I got more chores for you!” Angel calls from the inside of the house.

  “Coming,” he yells, thinking MoAr ChOrEs like on a meme, dead-eye chicken face. You know who doesn’t have to worry about being on the run and contemplating word-voids? Chickens, is who. Although it turns out they have other concerns, like having those very eggs he plucked from Cluckacka’s butt served alongside a shakshuka lunch. No wonder the beak-face killer wants revenge!

  “I thought anarchy meant doing whatever the hell you want,” he pretend-complains, swiping the back of his wrist over his eyes, which are burning from the pungency of the onions. He’s not going to announce that he likes it, being useful, having other people around. Lewis-McChord sucked balls, Ataraxia slightly less so, because Ella was there, but he’s missed having actual other humans around.

  “Common misconception.” Angel hands him a bit of kitchen towel. “Here. Be grateful it’s not tear gas.”

  “Have you been tear-gassed?”

  “And kettled and stun-grenaded, and I got a hairline skull fracture once when some idiot cop hit me with his riot shield back at Occupy. Good times. I almost miss them. Look at your little worried face! Don’t stress, Mila. We’re not doing a lot of direct protest action anymore. It’s more behind-the-scenes. We have friends in Russia and India, ex–troll farms, do you know what that is?”

  “Kinda. Like hackers?”

  “Yeah, some ex–tech support center workers too, and we’re trying to make the world better.”

  “How?”

  “Secret, okay?” She smiles, but it makes him uncomfortable, adults confiding in him, like Billie, the day before the night when everything changed. And he still doesn’t want to ask Mom for the details.

  “It’s complicated; do you know what denial of service attacks are?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, okay, we’re trying to wipe out debt records, bring down banking.”

  “But don’t we need money?”

  “No more than we need borders. That’s the other thing we’re working on, expunging immigration records.”

  “But what about people who want to go home?”

  “If you can’t prove who anyone is or how they’re here, you have to give them freedom of movement. Borders are as imaginary as money. So are property rights. We’ve got a key-card hack that overrides a lot of hotel locks, which means we can open up those rooms to whoever wants them without them having to sign a government fucking registry. Sorry, didn’t mean to swear.”

  “It’s okay.” He resumes chopping, dicing the onions smaller and smaller, when the dachshund bursts into a storm of happy yaps and a punky twenty-something in stomping black boots and a buzz cut emerges from the hive of bedrooms upstairs, scratching her armpit.

  “Meet Michelle,” says Angel. “Our resident handmaiden of chaos. But she can’t cook worth a damn.” She pools oil into a huge blackened skillet, followed by the vegetables.

  “You one of the new people, kid?” Michelle slings herself onto a stool at the counter as the rich scent and sound of frying onions rises.

  “I guess. I’m Mila.”

  Michelle snags a leftover slice of raw ginger and pops it in her mouth. “We get all kinds around here. Salt Lake’s a locus for the bizarre. My brothers used to cover my eyes when we drove past the Pyramid when I was little. You seen it yet? This weirdy cult. They used to have a sign, ‘Come and Masturbate with Us.’”

  “Uh. Wow.” Miles’s cheeks burn and he stares down at the chopping board, intent on chopping. All the chopping.

  “I think about that now, all that semen wasted. Worth a goddamn fortune now, on the black market.” Michelle rubs her belly with both hands, ruefully. “I must have swallowed a million dollars’ worth in my time.”

  “Vulgarity check.” Angel takes pity on him, standing there stricken. But not for the reasons they think. Embarrassment is only part of the equation. It’s what happened at Ataraxia. What Billie said, the way it made his skin go hot, but also shivery. “The girl doesn’t want to hear about all your sexploits of yore. And I’ve heard them all before. Numerous times.”

  “It’s a history lesson!” Michelle raises her hands in mock defeat. “Okay, okay. No more ancient times, I get it.”

  “You want a tour of downtown, kid?” Angel offers. “No sex talk, but much weirder stuff, like alien ships and patriarchal religious convictions, and oh yeah, some bullet holes in the wall where the male militia tried to take over the city before everyone died. I’ll give you the full Ex-Mo tourism experience.”

  “What’s that?” Mom walks in, her hair still damp from the shower, her expression cagey. That’s her
default face these days, always watching, always suspicious.

  “Ex-Mormon. And before you ask, yes, it’s true about the holy underpants, but now the whole world is made up of sister wives, so maybe they were right about that.”

  “I’ll join you,” Mom says, and he’s annoyed, and then relieved. “Isn’t God also an alien, or am I confusing that with Scientology?”

  “No, you’re on the money. The Mormon God does come from another planet and it’s only the apocalypse when the Second Coming happens, when all the evil people disappear from the earth.”

  “But—” Miles starts to object.

  “Not the men, baby. That doesn’t mean your dad. We’re not living through the Church of Latter-day Saints end-times.”

  “Amen. Trust me on this one,” says Angel.

  They put the shakshuka to brew in a hotbox (“it’ll be perfect by lunchtime”) and pile into Angel’s car, a beat-up old Mercedes with a ward against the evil eye and a plastic skeleton dangling from the rearview mirror and silver tinsel glued along the dashboard. Mom in the front and Miles with all four dogs in the back seat, Hypatia sprawled panting across his lap.

  First stop is the Gilgal Garden, a bizarre sculpture park. Miles captures it all on the borrowed cell phone, hiding behind the camera: the sphinx with the face of one of the Mormon leaders, the tubby self-portrait of a man wearing high-waisted brick pants, which gets them all yanking their pants up to under their ribcages and wandering around playing at being dorks. A giant’s broken foot, and two hands reaching down in a little cave to push together two anatomically correct stone hearts, not quite touching.

  “That’s a symbol of the artist and his wife’s love for each other,” Angel explains.

  “Always separate? That’s a weird romantic gesture,” Mom says. “Glad I wasn’t married to Mr. Brickpants.”

  Yeah, because he would have died too, same as everyone else, Miles thinks, and the desolation surges up. He doesn’t know how long they’ll let him keep the phone, so he posts the weirdest video loops to his Snapchat, still thinking of Ella back at Ataraxia. He knows she’ll almost certainly never see them, because she doesn’t have internet and his account is set to private, but it makes him feel better knowing that she might.