Afterland Page 14

  Yo dude,

  Ouch! Still here. I’m okay. Totally understand that you got a fright, reacted the way you thought you had to. Like Liezl Rogers, remember?

  Seventh grade. Cole thought Liezl was bullying Billie (which isn’t what she said, Cole misunderstood, again), knocked her down on her ass outside the hall. The girl broke her wrist, Cole was suspended for the rest of the term, because she was a senior picking on smaller kids, had to write her exams in the staff room with Mr. Elliott, the guidance counselor, invigilating.

  I can still get us out, through my peeps. Get hold of me. You don’t want the other team to get to you first.

  “Good,” Zara says, reading it over her shoulder.

  More door-to-door, the buzzing of the drug in her head. Bees in the jacarandas. That smell follows her. Floral carrion, that meat-eating plant that flowers once a year. She’s too bright, too alert, talking too fast, too flirty.

  Late afternoon, they intercept people coming home from work, a woman wearing a yellow badge that says “Ask Me About LDS” who tries to invite them to pray. Billie shows them photographs of Cole and Miles. Have you seen this dog? She’s a real bitch who does not come when you call her, but the pup is all right.

  Badge-lady has a small girl, maybe, ’cos gender is a construct, peeking out from behind her skirts. Shyness is a construct too. We’re all constructed. In need of anchors. Billie is flying here. She wishes her mom was still alive. Did she really know her? Memories are also a construct. You build a house inside your brain and decorate the rooms, but the wallpaper changes the moment you step out, things shift, if you don’t pay attention. She is trying so hard to pay attention.

  “I’m so worried,” she says. But when she checks Miles’s account later, there’s a new photograph. Of a graffitied tractor.

  19.

  Cole: Queens of Narnia

  THREE MONTHS AGO

  They weren’t supposed to know exactly where they were, but the rumors were California. It made sense: the airlift that spirited them away from Joint Base Lewis-McChord and the threat of attack was only a few hours’ journey in the dark. The estate was called Ataraxia, although that probably wasn’t the real name, like it wasn’t actually a wine farm, although it certainly had that appearance: with swooping concrete and glass buildings nested high on the hill, like a flock of modern art galleries had happened to alight there amongst the rolling vineyards. But fortresses are also placed up high, with views for days and Napa Valley wine farms don’t usually come with security patrols and electric fencing and five stories of underground bunker.

  It was built in case of nuclear war or climate change or revolution by the proles or, heck, disgruntled Uber drivers, the sex robot uprising…who knows what the rich douches of Silicon Valley feared in their long, dark nights. There was a state-of-the-art hospital, luxury accommodation for twenty families and slightly less sumptuous accommodation for fifty staff, a subterranean hydroponic greenhouse, a running track, classrooms, a recreation center with a gym, a wine cellar, a goddamn swimming pool fed by a borehole, and Cole’s personal favorite and most absurd: a jungle-theme tiki bar.

  None of which saved the owners from HCV. She doesn’t know who was supposed to live here before the interim government requisitioned it. Zuckerbergs or Brins or Bezoses, which is where she runs out of tech dynasty names. Devon would have known, but the ghost of his voice in her head is a cheap AI parrot of memories.

  Should have signed up for the all-knowing haunting package, boo.

  Some wit who came before them had graffitied a rhyme about the provenance of the owners onto the back of the door in one of the toilets adjoining the grand, aboveground entrance lobby. She’s seen Miles and Ella, the only other kid close to his age here, turn it into a clapping game.

  Tell me, tell me, who is the dead king of Ataraxia?

  Was it a tech billionaire or an investment banker?

  Was it a corrupt politician or a movie star?

  Or a god of rock ’n’ roll with a gold-plated car?

  Was it a Saudi prince or a Russian oligarch?

  Or a narco druglord with a pool full of sharks?

  We won’t ever know! Because they’ll never tell!

  The king of Ataraxia keeps his secrets in hell!

  She always thought wealth was about feeding envy and insecurity; handbag brands burning surplus stock, the luxury camps at Burning Man, the rich kids of Instagram deranged on private jets and gold-plated everything. Being at Ataraxia, though, Cole sees now that wealth isn’t about lifestyle; it’s about a whole other kind of life. And total security—in a way that even a joint army-naval base can’t offer.

  But heaven is its own kind of hell, if you’re not allowed to leave, not allowed to live. Their forever limbo vacation, Cole has come to think of it, wrapped up in suffocating luxury like cotton wool. At least they’re done with acronyms. The boys are referred to as “menfolk” now, but the quaintness has its own sinister quality. Gotta protect the menfolk. Lock up your sons and brothers, your fathers, your husbands and cousins and friends!

  There are fourteen of them, eight men and boys and their direct surviving relatives, plus a staff of thirty-two, which seems a lot. Groundskeepers and medical staff and cooks and cleaners and guards, because they might have the freedom of the grounds, but they’re not allowed beyond them.

  Mercifully, they’ve stopped the tests. Maybe because it’s not a great sample size to determine any real results, and maybe because, Cole suspects, they’re the reprobate survivors. Not exactly prime specimens.

  There’s Andy, a set painter from Philadelphia, here with his eleven-year-old niece, Ella, who has befriended Miles. Alive because he had had his prostate removed—one of the lucky few, where the operation had worked.

  There’s five-year-old Toby, son of Gemma, the conspiracy nut from Indiana, who has assimilated every QAnon theory into an ugly mess of fear that she tries to infect other people with. She misses the internet even more than Cole does.

  Jethro, nineteen, with his mom, Stephanie, who guards him like a pitbull, as if they are all rapists and sex fiends waiting to get their hands on him, even though he’s insufferable—a smug SOB with a weak chin.

  Alessandro and Hugo, and their grandmother, Dulsie, who doesn’t speak English, so her adult grandsons translate for her. Nevertheless, she listens attentively and nods along during the group therapy sessions when they all bring out their dead for the grand Grief Carnival.

  Hank, an Alzheimer’s sufferer in his eighties, with his middle-aged daughter, Lara, who sits with him in the opulent library overlooking the vineyards in quiet despair, while he chews the air, jaw grinding, eyes narrowed against the dying of the light. The irony is that he’s probably going to develop prostate cancer anyway. Most men do if they live long enough. “We’re just here because the doctors are eager to see how he’ll die,” Lara says bitterly. She was a dermatologist’s assistant in the life before, and knows a lot about skin cancers. She examines their spots and freckles and hands out diagnoses from behind Hank’s armchair, where she hovers.

  Eddie, overweight, diabetic, same as his wife, Jessie, both in their thirties, although he’s already lost most of his hair. They are full of raucous off-color jokes that make Gemma flee the room.

  And then there’s Irwin Millar. Ex-con, but only just. The prison amnesty meant that they had opened up the doors, and sent all but the worst offenders home to die. Irwin stayed in—but, somewhat inconveniently, he didn’t die. He claims the meth made him do it, and he’s been clean for nine years now, even sponsored some guys in the joint. But everyone still watches him carefully.

  Irwin talks openly about his many priors, but Dr. Randall has been kind enough to keep Cole’s own federal offense confidential, because, quote, unquote, we all deserve a second chance. But it makes her wonder what other records are being kept secret; if Ataraxia isn’t the home for wayward misfits and undesirables; and how the hell are they going to get out of here?

  Meanwhile the sci
ence wonks have pumped her full of hormones to harvest her eggs. Future-proofing. Think of the children. All she can think about is sex, the fecund orchards above, thick with bees and drifting snow dusts of pollen. My kingdom for a good vibrator. She does not bring this up in their group therapy session with the compound psychiatrist, Karyn Randall, who wears jeans and button-up blazers and quirky red socks to show how relatable she is.

  Instead she asks, again, when can they go home?

  And Dr. Randall sets her pen down, rests the clipboard on her generous lap. “Do you think this helps you? Or, more importantly, do you think this helps your boy? This is where you are now. It’s not going to change anytime soon. You can’t affect that, you can’t will it otherwise. The only thing you can do is control your internal reality.”

  “My internal reality is that I want us to go home.” Hope is the thing with spikes as well as feathers, she thinks.

  “Let’s talk about desire versus certainty, the things you can control and—”

  “I desire a lawyer. I’m pretty damn certain it’s illegal not to provide me with one.”

  “Oh, here we go again,” Gemma complains. “It’s soooo awful that we’re here and that they’re feeding us real food and looking after our boys and trying to find a cure.”

  “I’m saying it’s not right that we’re imprisoned here. Or that other people don’t have access to the same care and resources.”

  “Ooh, you one of those socialist types? Why don’t we throw open the doors and let the sickos in? Virus has probably mutated six ways from sideways by now. You want our guys to get reinfected? You think too much, jelly bean. Of course it’s not fair. We’re the motherfucking chosen ones. Humanity is counting on us.”

  “Then humanity’s screwed,” Cole retorts, and Dr. Randall pats the air: calm down, everyone.

  “We’re all doing our best. Until we find a cure, a vaccine, certainty for the future, not just yours, but all of us. Humanity. Everyone here is central to that future, whether you like it or not. You have to find a way to live with that. You have to make do.”

  “Can I email home? Phone home? Have any kind of outside contact at all?”

  “You know that’s not possible. It puts everybody at risk. Do you want to be that person, the one who puts everyone here at risk?”

  “Yeah,” Gemma says. “Do you?”

  And then Billie arrives and everything changes.

  It’s a Thursday. First Thursday, she’ll think of it later, like the art nights they used to go to in Johannesburg. Eleven in the morning when one of the private security personnel (“Grieg,” the woman’s badge reads) walks into the first-aid workshop in the conference room and scans the classroom of resigned participants, taking turns trying to breathe life into dumb plastic simulacra. There’s a metaphor here. Cole is on her knees, her mouth pressed to the soft rubber lips that give unpleasantly as she blows to fill up the inflatable bladder inside the hard plastic chest, trying not to get distracted by Jessie, flushed and heavy-handed, punching down on the dummy’s chest, measuring her rhythm with hissed admonishments: “Don’t you die on me, two-three. Don’t you die. Breathe, breathe, and check.” On the screen above them, a 3D animated loop demonstrating the correct procedure plays out again and again.

  “Looking for Nicole Brady.”

  “Is it Miles?” Cole stands up too fast, giddy, like the CPR dummy on the carpet has stolen all the air from her lungs. “Has something happened to Miles?” He should be in class with Ella, and Jethro, who is trying to finish tenth grade, and Toby, who is mainly focusing on coloring and numbers and shapes and irritating the older kids by glomming on to them and following them around wherever they go.

  “Your kid? He’s fine. You have a visitor. Special arrival.”

  “Who is it?”

  The guard twitches her nose like a little cat. “You’ll have to wait and see.” The room stirs with indignation.

  “Hey, that’s not fair! Nobody gets visitors. How come she gets a visitor?” There’s a chorus of grievance.

  “Ladies!” The instructor shouts over the din. “You can file your complaints to the director. In this room, I only want to hear the sound of counting compressions.”

  The guard escorts her out, and Cole has to quick-step to keep up with her. It’s Keletso. Somehow Kel has managed to get on a plane to the States, all the way from Johannesburg. She’s come to scoop them up, with the full weight of international lawyers behind her, and take them home.

  Or…she calculates the catalog of possibilities. It could be Tayla, if her sister-in-law counts as a direct surviving relative. Maybe she’s brought the twins. It would be a better life here for them, surely? And it would be great for Miles to have his cousins around. But she hasn’t spoken to Tayla since Lewis-McChord months ago, her voice still scored with pain and unspoken resentment that Miles was still alive when her own son wasn’t.

  The monkey’s paw. Her dead husband risen from the grave.

  You wish, boo.

  But she knows, of course she knows. Even if she doesn’t dare hope. Grieg swipes her clearance card at the elevators, taking them down, all the way to the lowest level to the medical wing. Her stomach clenches, conditioned response to facing the decontamination shower again.

  “Are you sure it’s not Miles? He’s not sick?”

  “No, no, I told you already. It’s a nice surprise, I promise.”

  Two long years of thinking her sister is dead. Every (censored, monitored, traced) email or message disappearing into the ether. She contacted old friends, posted on Billie’s old boyfriends’ Deadbook profiles, even while knowing U.S. intelligence was quietly and diligently tracking and recording every click, expanding their profile on her. This website uses cookies. She wasn’t allowed to say where she was, what was happening, had to keep every communication generic.

  ““Hey, I’m so sorry to hear that Franco died. My condolences to everyone who knew him. I’m trying to get hold of Billie, who he dated in 2016. Has anyone seen her or spoken to her? Thanks!:)”“

  Last anyone heard, she was working in the Mediterranean as an executive chef on a super-yacht. Before that, London, which is the last place Cole saw her, when Billie and her boyfriend of the moment, Raphael, were setting up a business that did bespoke pop-up dinner parties in strange, dangerous, and sometimes illegal locales, and which promptly got shut down. She’s never been able to keep track of her sister’s schemes.

  The worst was when she convinced their dad to invest a good chunk of his pension in a pan-African travel business with a visionary ex-linebacker from Texas who had fallen hard for his African roots and wanted to make it easier to “connect the continent.” It failed, and the Texan went back to his real home, not whatever Wakanda heartland he was looking for. Billie blamed this failure to launch on the vagaries of tenderpreneur culture and corruption, and complained that her Texan lacked both the idealism to hold fast to his dream and the cynicism to bribe his way into realizing it. “He’s not Cecil John Rhodes. He can’t just brute-force his way from Cape Town to Cairo!” she’d said. She’d managed one token repayment to their father, along with a lot of promises she never delivered on.

  Now, impossibly, improbably, she’s here, leaning forward on the sofa in the waiting room, in conversation with a rapt security guard, making her laugh. She’s dyed her hair blond again; it suits her. Her skin is tan against her white button-up shirt, with a long white scarf, effortlessly old-school glamourous, like she stepped out of a Concorde brochure, and she’s skinny, skinnier than usual, leaning forward, with her hands clasped around one elegant knee, like the double fist you drive into someone’s chest to restart their heart. Don’t worry about hurting them, the instructor said. You have to go as hard as possible, it doesn’t matter if you break their ribs.

  “Billie,” says Cole. Her sister looks up with a flash of that filthy mischief smile that hooks men right through their tender parts—balls, guts, hearts, all of it. But it makes her stomach flip a little in love, and
relief and something else.

  “Cole, you motherfucker!” Billie shouts in delight. “C’mere.” She yanks her into a hug, squeezing her so hard she might indeed crack a rib. But she’s crying and Billie is crying, and they’re both touching each other’s arms, faces, hair, monkey gestures of physicality.

  “You shit. You dick, Bill! You didn’t reply to my emails. I thought you were dead!”

  “Okay, but more importantly, what the hell did you do to your hair?” Billie pinches a lock between her fingers, the ragged pixie cut, the new gray. “You’ve gotten old, babe.”

  Cole snatches her hair back in mock outrage. She punches her sister’s shoulder. Too hard. You’re so rough, you girls, her dad used to say. “Oh wait. Wait. I remember now. I didn’t miss you at all.”

  “Well, I missed you, Coley,” Billie grins. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “I’m glad you’re not dead too. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Jesus Christ, all over. You don’t even want to know. Most recently on a yacht—we were halfway to the Caymans when it all went down. My boss hoped he might be safe from contracting it out at sea, but”—she shrugs, nonchalant—“it turns out he wasn’t. Not Miles though, hey? Where is my nephew?”

  “In class, I think. Or outside, playing. Fuck. I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “You and me both. Do you know how hard it was to find you in all this?”

  “Can you stay?” The need startles her.

  “That’s what they said. The paperwork checks out, although they insisted on doing a genetic test to prove we’re related.”

  “Probably it’s for the variant gene. Apparently I have it, or I might, so they’ll be very interested in you. In a vampire kinda way.”

  “I know, dummy. And they also told me about the possible egg harvesting, so stop worrying. It’s all good. You’re stuck with me for the duration; they’re even going to sort out citizenship. Unless I do something stupid and they kick me out. But you’ll keep me out of trouble, right?” Billie tucks her under her arm. Even though she’s the baby, she’s always been taller, since they were seven and nine. “This is one helluva mancave you’ve got here. How’s the food?”