Afterland Read online

  And a little exciting too.

  Wasn’t it?

  Nope. Nope. Nope. That’s just his dumb brain and his dumb body responding and it could have been a zombie with half its head missing and brains oozing out, talking to him about jerking off, and his penis would have responded like an idiot puppy. He folds his legs, aggressively squeezing them together, trying to quash…the reaction. Just the word “penis” makes the blood go rushing in, like, didya mention my name? Didya call me? I’m here! Pat me. This sucks so much.

  The word “suck.” Stop it. Just stop it. Think of whales dying. Dad. He remembers what Jonas said at Lewis-McChord. A snag of overheard conversation in the gym, a joke about milkmen and milk boys. His face burns. Dad, I wish you were here. It’s wrong to have a semi while Mom and Billie are fighting in the bathroom. It’s gross, disgusting.

  He’s disgusting. And it’s his fault they’re fighting. He promised he wouldn’t tell Mom. But how was he going to not tell Mom? Life Skills included puberty and consent and bodily autonomy, but it didn’t exactly cover the correct etiquette of what to do when your aunt asks you about jerking off because it’s the only way to get out of here.

  There’s the particular sound of glass breaking. One of the red lotus candleholders on the “window” next to the bath, he thinks, which is not a window at all, but a flatscreen TV that projects beautiful landscapes or movies. Each of the rooms has their own personal touches, “individuation” Mom says, but it’s all handpicked by fancy decorators, so it all seems the same anyway. Same genus, same species. Down one candleholder. At least the noise made his dumb dick wilt. Is that how he’s going to control it? Break things to distract it?

  Billie emerges from the bathroom and says, normal volume, as if she knows he doesn’t have the sound turned on and can hear her, “Dustpan?”

  Miles points to the kitchenette. She gives his shoulder a squeeze as she passes. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll get over it. She always does. You want a hot chocolate?”

  She starts spooning out ingredients into mugs, thunking the crockery around to demonstrate she’s mad. She fills up the kettle, one of those horrible American ones that you have to heat up on the stove and it screams when it’s done. He hates American kettles. The distributor cap is still on the stove where he took it out. Accusatory. There was a plan, and now it’s all messed up. And it’s his fault.

  “Don’t you talk to him,” Mom snaps, emerging from the bathroom, red shards of glass cupped in her hand. The shower, one of those giant round copper waterfall heads, is still gushing. They’re wasting water, he thinks.

  “Sheesh, lady,” Billie protests. “I’m making us hot beverages so we can all calm down.” She has to shout over the music, the hiss of the kettle.

  “Mom. Turn off the water. You can’t leave it running.”

  She grunts, ducks back inside, and the shower cuts out, but the music is still blaring. The kettle starts a low moan.

  “Hot chocolate? That’s how you’re going to fix this?” Mom is shaking with anger.

  “Fine.” Billie thumps down the mug. “Maybe you want to take a chill pill, then. I know you’ve got a stash. Those nice benzos the doc prescribes by the fistful. Maybe we could all do with one. You’re winding your kid up pretty tight right now.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you. Get out.”

  “God, you’re impossible!” she yells over the screaming, steaming kettle. She grabs her baseball cap and sweeps toward the door. “Let me know when you’re ready to be reasonable.” And then she’s gone.

  Mom takes the kettle off the stove, cranks down the music, and flops down on the couch beside him. He’s still holding the Nintendo, so he can’t hug her back when she pulls him into her arms. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know.” But it is. He can feel the tension in her body, stiff and fragile.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think you should take a pill?”

  “Hell no, don’t you start.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Me too. I’m really sorry. For all this. It’s not appropriate for her to have spoken to you about that.”

  He wants to hear the rest, doesn’t want to have to ask. He waits her out.

  “It was a stupid plan she got in her head to sell, you know…” she grimaces. Because it’s disgusting. She can’t bear to say the word either. He wants to cry. “Whatever she said to you, it’s not okay. You’re a kid. You can’t consent. Besides, it’s illegal. It’s dangerous. It’s not something we would even consider in a million years. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. She crossed a line. And maybe there’s no coming back.” She scrubs her hand through her pixie cut. He misses her long hair. “Shit.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Well, there’s this half-made hot chocolate going.”

  “Yeah.” He nods. She spoons in some extra sugar for him, puts some whisky in hers, stirs and stirs, and the tink of the spoon on the ceramic is soothing. The distributor cap is missing, he notices, and he wants to say something, but all the fighting has worn him out. And the hot chocolate tastes funny, bitter. Maybe that’s shame, flavoring everything and this is his life now.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out with her.”

  “I wish she’d never come here.”

  “Don’t say that, tiger.” Mom sounds wrung out.

  “Are we still going to escape?”

  “Nah. Too much effort. Canceled.” She kisses the top of his head.

  “Zero stars,” he says. “Would not attempt again.” He’s feeling really sleepy now. “Mom, did you and Dad ever fight?”

  “Not about anything important,” she says.

  He doesn’t remember anything after that.

  26.

  Billie: Bird Brain

  Billie has never been motion sick. Cole was the wretched mewling one who would insist they pull over on those long road trips to Durban for the holidays so she could empty her stomach onto the side of the road. Billie never had that problem. When the other rookies on Thierry’s yacht were confined to their tiny shared cabins or pulling themselves around the interior, shaky and sweating, she was coming up with new amuse-bouches in the kitchen, already sure-footed because her whole life has been about navigating unstable ground.

  Watching the sky is bad: fat cotton wool clouds across the blue, interrupted by the green highway signs glancing past, announcing their progress, and once, briefly, the white spikes and twirls of wind turbines lining the road. Closing her eyes is worse because then it’s just the black and the texture of the road and the nausea surges. She’s burning up. That Springsteen song. I’m on fire.

  Billie is dying. She’s certain of it. Her dead mother rides in the back seat of the car with her. She’s wearing the outfit from Billie’s favorite photograph of her: a belted dress, navy-blue with white lapels, her hair in inflated curls, giant tortoiseshell sunglasses. In the photo, she’s grinning and walking with the two of them, Billie and Cole, clinging to her ankles, aged five and three, being dragged along and screaming with laughter. Or maybe just screaming, because they had a premonition she was going to cut out early, and they were trying to hang on.

  “Had to wear rollers at night,” her mother says. She can smell the harsh mints on her breath, because she was always trying to quit smoking. They used to catch her out, down in the garden, lurking among the delicious monsters and the hydrangeas with their purple cauliflower heads like her curls, sneaking a furtive smoke. If she had dyed her hair the same lilac, she would have been camouflaged.

  “Smoking is bad for you,” her mom says.

  “Not as bad as a brain aneurysm out of the blue.” Blue skies, blue flowers, the navy of her dress. She wishes Dad would visit her. Even if he wants to tell her about the videos he’s been watching online that have taught him all about “the climate change myth.” Look out the window,
old man!

  “Your father is dead,” her mom says, stroking her hair. But the woman beside her flickers and stutters. Bad transmission. But it’s not just her. It’s everything.

  “The tuning is out,” Billie says.

  “You talking to ghosts again?” Rico says from the front seat. She’s trying to hang on.

  My fierce little bird. That’s what Mom called her. When she was still alive. Before she was a ghost in the car beside her. Her mother was a sparkler at a restaurant on your birthday, ten seconds of dazzle and then she was gone. Dad didn’t know how to handle two prepubescent girls on his own. He couldn’t contain her, bird in the hand, and Cole was only pretending to be good, and Billie was the only one who could see through her bullshit act.

  “Peck your eyes out,” she says out loud, because no one is stroking her hair. No one has touched her in so long. And the woman smoking is fucking Rico, the wind howling through the windows.

  Not too late to turn this car around, someone says. Mom, probably, although her voice sounds strange, worn, maybe tired of their fighting in the back. You girls. Cole pulled her hair so she punched her, she didn’t mean to make her nose bleed, and now her nine-year-old sister is crying, a high-pitched wail of disbelief and self-pity.

  Fuck you, Billie thinks, whinybitchbaby. But her head hurts, oh, it hurts, and she’s a fierce little bird, but someone tried to rip her wings off, and she feels sick with the violence of it.

  The thugcunts talking about her like she’s not here. Betting pool on whether she’s going to make it all the way to Chicago or not. Whether they even need her if they know where to find Tayla. The buyer getting impatient. Singular and that’s significant, she thinks. Why would there only be one buyer for all that semen? Spread the love, she thinks. Joy to the world. Her head smells really bad. That’s significant too.

  What’s wrong? Why are you making that noise? Someone snaps at her. Not Mom. Not anyone she knows. Not really. She is aware of the car pulling up. Doors open and slam. Someone is holding her up, wiping the vomit off her chin, her chest.

  What a fucking mess. Jesus.

  She’s pissed herself.

  Now the whole damn car’s going to reek.

  No good to us like this.

  So leave her.

  Too risky. They don’t know we’re coming. We don’t want to tip them off.

  Not if no one finds her.

  A shock of lukewarm water over her head, like piss.

  “What do you say, little bird?” Zara holds her too close to her face, fingers gripping her cheeks, her jaw. She can smell the cinnamon gum on her breath, which makes her feel nauseous all over again. “Are you any use to us?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Billie spits, or tries to. I’ll kill you, she doesn’t say, because Zara has let go and she is disoriented, slumped against the car.

  “I say we leave her.”

  “I get you, Z., I do. But I think we can get her patched up. Friends of mine have an operation nearby. It’s only a small detour.”

  “Uhn,” Zara grunts, which is not much of a reprieve, but she’ll take it. Fly away.

  27.

  Cole: Lady Luck

  The mountains are blacker than black, craggy silhouettes superimposed against the smear of stars above the dark snake of the road. Too risky to drive without high beams, easing the car through the curves of the pass. The opposite direction again, the foolhardy one, but there’s a history here, people crossing the Rockies, searching for a different kind of life.

  Cole turfed the shotgun into a gulley at a lookout point in the dark. It didn’t go as far as she’d hoped, snagged in the underbrush, the dull glint of the barrel apparent among the greenery to anyone who might happen to stop there, even at night. Maybe someone would be willing to scramble down to retrieve it. She can’t imagine there is a shortage of guns, though. This is still America, after all. And the most sensible thing (not that she was thinking sensibly) is to hang onto a lethal firearm, because who knows what lies ahead.

  You mean like women with even bigger guns?

  This old earworm, she thinks. Know any other tunes, ghostguy?

  You need to do better.

  That one’s getting pretty stale too. But they are snagged in the underbrush themselves. The days are blurring together, nights spent dozing in the car. Money and the way it dwindles is a constant worry, plus now there’s an old-lady-assault charge to add to her ever-expanding list of crimes.

  She has to make light of it, because the potential for violence has rooted itself in her nervous system. Her finger brushed the trigger, as they were leaving. She could have done it. Shot her in the face. She was so angry, and frightened, and tired.

  Mostly, she is tired.

  Do better, I know, I know. But while Mila lies silent and awake in the back (she can feel the prickle of her alertness), she follows the road where it takes them, through the dark forest, and over the jagged mountains, toward another morning away from the shitty thing she did.

  Ahem. “Another” shitty thing.

  Yeah, thanks, Dev. At least Mila has fallen asleep. She pulls over in a picnic spot, Smokey the Bear signs warning about forest fires. She just wants to rest her eyes for a few minutes. And wakes up clammy, with a crick in her neck and the rising heat of the sun baking through the windshield. Fuck. It’s almost nine in the morning and she has no idea where they are. Did the old lady call the cops? Are they waiting for them in the next town?

  Cole can’t stand it: the never-ending dread, the moral compromises. She feels sick again, remembering how leaning on the gun, the soft give of Liz’s pigeon chest beneath it, how easily she could have borne down on it, felt her ribs snap.

  The place they wash up in is as desperate as they are. “Central City” suggests an actual city, but it is a sorry little gold-mining town, a Western set gone to seed. It prompts a memory of something she hadn’t thought about in years, the dream dates Tumblr she and Devon set up to catalog the wild places of the world they wanted to visit one day, the sunken churches of Ethiopia, the carved red sandstone of Fatehpur Sikri, the abandoned Star Wars sets crumbling away in the Tunisian desert. This place has the same feel as the photos she’s seen of the mud igloos in the Sahara; the ruins of a fantastic nostalgia.

  “Is this real?” Mila gapes.

  “Sign said ‘Historic District,’ so probably,” she says.

  “Do you think there’s food here?”

  “I hope so.” Going on for noon, and her stomach is clenching in protest. But it does not look promising. The old buildings are faded and peeling, chipped plaster and boarded-up windows with hopeful signs that read “To Let” and “Vacancy” and “Casino Parking This Way!”

  They pass a shuttered marijuana dispensary and “Peggy’s Treasure Trove,” where a mannequin sits staring blankly out the window in a ratty black wig and a saloon girl’s dress, with one pale fiberglass breast poking out from above ruffles where the strap has sagged off her shoulder.

  She keeps on keeping on, turning down a steep road, following the signs toward Black Hawk, past rickety houses clinging to the hills, in the same sepia tones as the dead grass. Elegiac menace, Cole thinks: Hopper does The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Signs mounted above the refurbished factory and the granary proclaim their names, Lady Luck and Golden Gates, and past that, a tower of glass and brick rises up above the scrubby pines.

  Miracle of miracles, the lights are on and someone is home and keeping the huge display screen playing a loop of all the outdated fantasies: a gilded woman in a white bikini stepping into a spa pool, showgirls in silver wigs and silver top hats and silver bows over their butts, a craggily handsome cowboy emptying a stream of chips out of his boot across the table to the open delight of his multicultural companions. Or Latino and Asian, at least. Black people are apparently not the target market in Black Hawk.

  “Why do they still have pictures of men?” Mila cranes her neck to see the billboard. “Are they living a pipe dream?”

  “Let’s g
o find out.”

  “I don’t think gambling is a good option, Mom. Or…are we going to rob someone again?” Her alto cracks, too high. Fuck. That’s all they need, for his voice to start breaking.

  “I might put a couple of bucks on the table, but relax, we’re here for the bathrooms, the buffet, and directions to the library or nearest convenient purveyors of fine internet.”

  “But—”

  “I need help. I need to talk to Kel.”

  “But what if they’re watching your email? You said—”

  “I’m running on empty. We can’t do this on our own anymore. I can’t. It’s too much.”

  “Mom. What about Billie—”

  “Not right now. Okay?” she cuts her off. “Please. I’m tired, I’m hangry, I need to figure this out. I promise we’ll talk about it. Promise.”

  “Fine,” Mila snaps. It’s not, but right now she doesn’t care. Future Cole’s problems.

  She pulls alongside a young woman wearing a valet’s gold and black and exhibiting the particular faux cheer she recognizes from her own brief history of shitty service industry jobs.

  “Park your car for you, ma’am?”

  “What’s happening inside?”

  “Gambling, I reckon,” the valet quips. “But we also have shows, not till six though, an arcade full of games for the young lady, three different restaurants, a spa.”

  “Is there Wi-Fi?”

  “Sure is. You want me to park your vehicle for you? You can go take a look. It’s a free value-added service for all our guests,” she adds picking up on their hesitancy.

  “That’s all right, thank you.” As if Cole would relinquish the car keys.

  “Or you can park yourself. There’s underground around the back, or grab any space in the lot opposite. You see where that bus is pulling in?”

  It’s the bus that reassures her that this is not a trap to lure innocent travelers to their deaths, or not more than any other casino.